A Little History of Religion (Little Histories) by Richard Holloway

Author:Richard Holloway [Holloway, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2016-08-23T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 22

The Last Prophet

Three religions claim Abraham as their fore-father. And there are two ways to understand the claim. It can be taken as a form of spiritual descent. Abraham passed his monotheism to the Jews and through them to the Christians. Then in the seventh century Islam reclaimed it from what it perceived to be its dilution by both these religions. But the descent from Abraham can also be understood in a physical sense. Abraham’s son Isaac was the father of Israel, through whom Jews and Christians trace their paternity. But Abraham had another son. And thereby hangs a tale.

Abraham had two wives, Sarah and her Egyptian handmaid Hagar. Sarah was jealous of Hagar. She was afraid Abraham would appoint Hagar’s son Ishmael as his heir. So she persuaded her husband to banish them both. Hagar took her young son and wandered with him into the desert not far from the Red Sea, where she sat down on a rock and wept, because she was so sad and unhappy. But Ishmael was not sad and unhappy. He was angry, very angry. In his fury, according to Islamic tradition, he started kicking the sand. He kicked it so hard he uncovered a spring of water of the sort that is found in green spots in the desert called oases. When Abraham heard about the oasis Ishmael had created, he visited the wife and son he had discarded and built a temple near the spring that had saved their lives. In the temple he installed a sacred black stone. On which hangs another tale.

Genesis, the book that opens the Jewish Bible, tells us that the first man was called Adam and his wife was called Eve. Adam and Eve lived in a wonderful garden called Eden where they lacked for nothing. Of all the fruit trees in the garden, only one was forbidden to them. This was the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Adam and Eve lived a life of unchanging childlikeness, their every need met by God. Parents sometimes think they’d like to keep their children young for ever. But the children can’t wait to grow up and discover the knowledge of good and evil for themselves. That was the urge that prompted Adam and Eve to eat of the forbidden fruit. And their minds were immediately flooded with the knowledge that life was no longer simple.

Now that Adam and Eve had lost their innocence, God sent them out into the world to live life in all its adult complexity. But, in Islam’s account of the story, he allowed them to take something from the garden as a memento. It was to serve as a reminder both of what they had left behind forever and of what would be with them forever. They had lost Eden but they had not lost God. God would still be with them when the gates of Eden closed behind them. What they took with them was a black stone said to have come down from heaven.

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