Islam’s Radical Take on Jesus

According to a recent report titled, “Jesus the Palestinian terrorist and his 72 dark-eyed virgins,”

The report goes on to offer copious examples validating this charge.

What to make of all this?

First, it must be remembered that for Palestinians and Muslims in general, those who sacrifice their lives for the cause of Allah — and Allah is very much interested in things like land and territorial disputes — are the apple of that deity’s eye, deserving of the highest paradisiacal rewards. As the Koran declares:

It follows that Jesus Christ, whom Muslims have appropriated and transformed into “Isa the prophet,” is a great martyr — not because he was crucified for the sins of mankind (Islam teaches someone else was crucified in Christ’s place at the last minute), but because he gives his life to fight infidels and uphold Allah’s law, sharia.

That’s right: the “Jesus” that we are regularly assured “Muslims love too” has little bearing with the biblical Christ.

Consider what some of the most canonical hadiths say about him (the following translations are from Muslim Sources of the Crusader Period by professors James E. Lindsay and Suleiman Mourad)

In one, Jesus approvingly quotes Muhammad saying that whoever makes him, Muhammad, Christ’s equal — and thereby contradicts the oldest Christian Creed (1 Cor. 15:3-7) — will go to heaven: “Whoever testifies that there is no god but God, alone with no partner, and that Muhammad is His servant and messenger, and that Jesus is His servant and messenger ... Allah will admit him to paradise for saying that.”

In another hadith, a woman says to Jesus, “Blessed is the womb that bore you and the breast that suckled you.” To this, a shocked Jesus replies: “No, but blessed is he who reads the Qur’an and follows what is in it!”

But it is only when he returns in Islam’s version of the “end times” that the Muslim Jesus truly shines. According to Islamic teaching, he will return to “break the crosses, slaughter the pigs, end the jizya tax on non-Muslims, making warfare against the People of the Book (e.g. Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, etc.) and others licit.”

In other words, he will usher in an end of “tolerance” to long held but “mistaken” Christian beliefs — chief among them that he was crucified, killed, and resurrected for the salvation of mankind.

In the midst of the final showdown between the forces of Allah and the forces of Antichrist (al-Dajjal), Jesus will first appear “praying behind” an Islamic leader. Then, “after Jesus finishes his prayer, he will take his lance, go toward the Antichrist and kill him. Then Jesus will die and the Muslims will wash him and bury him.”

In such a manner is he a “martyr” — no different, for many Muslims, than his supposed Palestinian kinsmen who blow themselves up in the service of Islam.

Nor is it surprising that the Muslim Jesus receives Islam’s highest paradisiacal rewards for martyrs: the houris, supernatural concubines — “big-bosomed” and “wide-eyed” says the Koran (56:22, 78:33) — created for the express purpose of pleasuring Allah’s favorites in perpetuity.

As Islam’s prophet, Muhammad, said of everyone who martyrs himself for Allah’s cause, in an oft cited and canonical hadith:

That the Muslim Jesus is engaged in a libidinous afterlife should not be surprising. After all, Jesus’s mother, Mary, is also, according to the Muslim imagination, engaged in a carnal afterlife — as wife (one of several, of course) to Muhammad.

Here, then, is yet another stark reminder that Islam’s appropriation and subsequent mutilation of biblical figures is not, contrary to “ecumenical” claims, a source of “commonalities” and “bridges” between Islam on the one hand and Judaism and Christianity on the other.

Rather, it is Islam’s way of manipulating the figures of Judaism and Christianity for its own agenda and precisely to use them against Jews and Christians.