Paul Cochrane
Special to The Daily Star

With Ramadan under way, Tarif Khalidi, Sheikh Zayid bin Sultan professor of Arabic and Islamic studies at the American University of Beirut (AUB), gave a timely lecture on Jesus, Islam and World Dialogue at AUB’s archaeology museum Wednesday night.
Khalidi’s lecture, a post-modernist talk with “no structure, no visible thread, no battle plan” as he referred to it, resembled more his description of  “a fireside chat with a Palestinian village elder” than the usual academic discourse on such a topic.
This lack of structure perhaps diminished the impact of the content, but as always with “the foremost Islamic scholar of our time,” as the late Edward Said referred to Khalidi, his uniquely wry and expressive linguistic capabilities retained the interest of his audience.
Using an anecdote to kick off the lecture, Khalidi cited the Muslim Qadi of Jerusalem’s stand against the 1860-61 “sectarian earthquake, about 7.5 or so on the Near Eastern history scale,” that targeted Christians in Greater Syria.
The moral of this story, Khalidi stated, is “that the historical record of Arabic-Islamic civilization in the field of cultural pluralism and sectarian coexistence is, quite simply, the jewel in its crown,” worthy of nomination for the “Nobel Peace Prize of the Medieval period.”
This cultural pluralism in history is exemplified in “the fascination that the figure of Jesus has exercised over the imagination of Muslims,” Khalidi said, adding that “as the Americans would phrase it: Islam and Jesus go back a long, long way.”
Khalidi’s hypothesis is that the Koran “found itself constrained to reject one dominant Jesus image of its day and, in rejecting him, found itself constrained to reinvent him.”
This reinvention is divided into two narratives, the first a widely discussed and researched field, the Jesus of Muslim scripture in the Koran and Hadith, the “theological and prophetic argument.” The second narrative, the lecture’s focus, is that of Jesus in Muslim literature and myth, the “flesh and blood and stories.”
“In both images of Jesus, however, this cleansing, purification, or reinvention of Jesus betrays a particular Muslim fascination with Jesus, a fascination that is not apparent with any other prophet or prophetic figure.”
Khalidi initially used modern Arabic-Islamic poetry to provide images of Jesus, citing Iraqi poet Badr Shakir al-Sayyab’s evocative and mythical “gospel in miniature,” Christ After the Crucifixion.
It is the myth of Jesus that attracts the attention of modern poets ­ the Sudanese Muhammad al-Fayturi, the Palestinian Mahmud Darwish, and al-Sayyab. Jesus is a “figure more in tune with nature and the seasons than the explicitly and sternly anti-mythical figure of Muhammad.”
These modern poets’ images of Jesus reflect a challenge to the Koranic renunciation of the divinity and crucifixion of Christ, that these aspects, central to Christianity, “are too precious to poetry to be abandoned for the sake of religious dogma.” The Passion of Jesus is “essential to modern regenerative poets who wished to breathe new life into both language and society.”
Khalidi selectively used 20 sayings and stories of Jesus from the “300 hundred or so to be found in classical Arabic Islamic literature,” a corpus he calls the “Muslim Gospel,” spanning a thousand years from the 8th century A.D. to the 18th century.
For example, a saying attributed to Jesus, “the world is a bridge: Cross this bridge but do not build upon it,” is found as far apart as an inscription on a north Indian mosque and in 12th century Andalusian literature.
Tellingly, “this Gospel contains the largest collection of materials concerning Jesus in any classical culture,” and a corpus that has no parallels, “either in the Koran and Hadith or in the New Testament.”
In answering his self-raised question, “how and why did this ‘Gospel’ come into existence in the Muslim environment?” Khalidi interpreted Koranic narrative. As the Koran “unfolds in a grammatical tense which one might call the ‘Eternal Present’ tense,” a meta-narrative voice rather than narrative, the scripture proclaims, “this is how the narrative should be told, or perhaps, this is the eternal standard against which these narratives must henceforth be told.”
As the culture of religion does not abide by scripture alone, “the Koranic meta-narratives left much room for, indeed invited, amplification, elaboration, narrative.”
These writings came to the fore in the Abbasid period, in a genre called Tales of the Prophets. Of all the tales, “Jesus stands out for the quantity and above all, the quality of his sayings and stories,” being “inducted into Muslim polemic where he is made to play an ideological role inside the polemic itself.”
But Jesus does not remain in the guise of a Muslim prophet, as the image of Jesus surpasses that of his Muslim creators, taking on a life of his own as human, yet enlightened being.
Utilizing the medium of pictorial image, Khalidi presented several depictions of Jesus in Safavid, Mughal and Ottoman art, with some striking examples of racial, and cultural, reinterpretations of Jesus. These images reflected a snippet of Khalidi’s research on images of Jesus in Islamic art, soon to be published in “a form of coffee table book.”
In his conclusion, Khalidi likened the long tradition to a “love affair between Islam and Jesus,” which is “unusual in the history of comparative religion,” with Jesus seeming to “rise above the two religious environments, the one that nurtured and the other that adopted him.”
Drawing in contemporary religious tensions, Khalidi reminded us “of another age and another narrative when Christianity and Islam were more open to each other, more aware and reliant on each other’s wishes.”

Tarif Khalidi can be found at the American University of Beirut where he teaches Islamic History