This program was offered in September and October, 2024. Please apply to indicate your interest in a future offering.
“Why don’t you accept Muhammad as Prophet?” is a frequent and challenging question posed to Christians in conversation with Muslims. This study program explores why many Christians have difficulty with this question, why Muslims often misunderstand Christian responses, and what is at stake when we think carefully about this topic. The core text for this study program will be Kenneth Cragg’s ground-breaking Muhammad and the Christian: A Question of Response. Each week we will also hear from contemporary theologians who have written and thought about this critical topic in Muslim-Christian relations.
Sessions will last 2 hours, and we will end promptly at 7pm Istanbul time. Session recordings will be available to participants following our sessions, but your participation in live Zoom sessions is essential to the success of the program. We will not meet on October 16, but you are welcome to register for our online workshop on “Muslim Exegesis of the Bible” scheduled for Monday, October 14 at 5pm Istanbul time.
This program is a natural fit with our course on “Jesus in Muslim Perspective.” That program looks at how Jesus is viewed from within Islam; this program tries to do something similar, exploring the most careful and thoughtful Christian responses to Muhammad. Our approach will be primarily theological as we ask what resources within Christian scripture, tradition and theology are available to help Christians to think clearly about Muhammad from a Christian perspective. Muslim participants and perspectives will be most welcome, but for Muslims coming to the program, it will be important for you to know that you will be listening in on a conversation that is mostly internal to Christian theology. In this way the program is parallel to our course on Jesus, which similarly asked Christians to listen in on Muslim views of Jesus.
A brief word about what this program is not. This is not a course in history. We will not be able to avoid some historical questions about Muhammad and the origins of Islam, but those are the focus of a very different study program and will not be our primary interest here. Nor will we focus on the troubling historical record of polemical Christian writing about Muhammad, though we cannot completely ignore it. This is also not a program in apologetics, whether Muslim or Christian. You can find more than enough of that on YouTube!
In contrast to all of these possible goals, this course will aim to explore the best and most thoughtful Christian theological responses to Muhammad and his prophetic claims. In the course of this exploration, I expect we will learn a great deal about the parallels and contrasts between Christian and Islamic views of prophets and prophecy, the nature of revelation, and the purposes of God in history, and I hope we will come away better able to talk constructively about these important topics.
