Comparative Religion

The famous English author Karen Armstrong, while discussing IIIT’s recent publication “The Concept of God in the Judaic, Christian and Islamic Traditions”, remarked that calling Jesus God is heresy. She noticed that the early Greeks tried their best to make a sense of the ineffable God by reflecting upon multiple aspects of His existence. The Trinitarian understanding of God was just one interpretation among many of the divine majesty, not meant to cause division of persons in the godhead but to make the transcendent God more imminent and accessible to humanity.

George Bethune English, a friend of the Secretary of State and then President James Madison, was a Muslim. George English (1787–1828) was an American adventurer, diplomat, soldier, and convert to Islam. He was born in Cambridge (Boston) and received his Masters in divinity/Christian theology from the Harvard University. He was an ordained minister. English began to have doubts about central Christian dogmas while studying divinity at Harvard.

Title : Anthropomorphic Depictions of God: The Concept of God in Judaic, Christian, and Islamic Traditions: Representing the Unrepresentable

Author : Zulfiqar Ali Shah

Paperback : ISBN 978-1-56564-575-2 $29.95

Hardback : ISBN 978-1-56564-576-9 $39.95

Size/pages : (6x9) / 764 p. / 2012

Book can be purchased from IIIT.org

I. INTRODUCTION

In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful. All praises are due to Allah, the Creator, sustainer and cherisher of the universe and may His peace and blessings be upon His final Prophet Muhammad, upon all His prophets and messengers who preceded him and upon all who follow their righteous path until the Day of Judgment.

I. INTRODUCTION

From the practically universal perspective of the nearly 1.6 billion Muslim people, the Qur’an is regarded as “the word of Allah; God” 1. The predominant views among Western writers are that the Qur’an is not a divinely revealed scripture. Some hold that view because they do not accept the notion of divine revelation and some do not believe in the existence of God altogether. Some writers who believe in God, Prophets and divinely revealed scriptures hold that the Qur’an does not fall in this category of sacred books.

By Dr. Ahmed Afzaal
I f asked this question, Muslims
would immediately and emphatically
respond in the affirmative. Of course
he was a Muslim, they would say, since
he was a noble prophet and a messenger
of Allah (SWT). Indeed, they
would see this question as a typical “nobrainer,”
for even a Muslim child could
answer it correctly without too much
thinking. But what if this question
was aimed not at Muslims but at Christians?
How would contemporary
American Christians respond to the

The book is an extensive exposition of the issues of anthropomorphism and corporealism (the description of God in physical human terms, categories or forms inappropriate to His Majesty) in the three Abrahamic Faiths, as viewed through the texts of the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament and the Qur’an. It is in addition, a detailed examination of later developments in theological thought, scriptural interpretation, and exegetical criticism with regards to anthropomorphism, and how these have significantly influenced perceptions of God by followers of all three Traditions.