Jesus in Islamic Eyes

Some Christians may be amazed to learn that Jesus is an important figure in the Koran, and up until the eighteenth century, CE, he was an important Islamic saint in popular tradition. The Muslim Arabic form of Jesus' name is "Isa", a name still given to male Muslim children. The Prophet Muhammad was in deep religious conversation and debate with Christians and Jews before he founded the Islamic faith, and learned much about their traditions. Muhammad saw Jesus as the penultimate prophet of the Abrahamic Tradition, an important and necessary precursor to his own mission as a prophet. Before Muhammad, the Arab peoples could be found in two religious camps: one was "pagan" and practiced a native religious tradition that dated back to Ancient times, wherein the principle deity worshiped was a mother goddess; the other was Christian, often followers of sects deemed heretical by the Orthodox Church, such as the Nestorians (by the way, Christian Arabs called Jesus, "Yasu"). So, while the pagan traditions were thoroughly rejected by Muhammad and his Islamic followers, they had a comfortable familiarity with Christianity, and incorporated some of Christianity's traditions and principles into the texts and practices of their new monotheistic faith of Islam. Jesus in the Koran is presented as a beloved saint (along with his mother Mary), and it designates Jesus as one of the Prophets who will accompany God (Allah) to Earth to serve Him during the Apocalypse. In short, Muslims do not see Jesus as God, but view him with much the same veneration as the Jews extend toward the Prophet Elijah. From the Koran and the residual oral traditions of Christian Arabs from Pre-Islamic times, Jesus was embraced by Arab, Persian and Turkish Muslims as an important figure of religious folklore. Above all Muslim sects, the Sufis venerated Jesus the most, writing down apocryphal anecdotes of the wandering healer and teacher, Jesus, for purposes of moral instruction. For them, Jesus was envisioned as a Pre-Islamic Sufi saint, because, after all, Jesus prescribed many of the things for himself and his disciples valued by Sufism: self-imposed poverty and rebellion against social exclusivity. The Sufi tales of Jesus continued to be recorded in their moral treatises through the 1600s, CE, and then suddenly they stopped. It was around this time that European Colonialism began to seriously penetrate the Islamic World, and with the mercantile imperialists came Christian missionaries. It would seem that the version of Jesus the missionaries tried to impose on Muslims spoiled their own venerable tradition about him. Most fundamentally for Muslims, a man (or woman) simply cannot be God, however saintly that person may be. Allah transcends all fleshly being, just as Yahweh does also for the Jews. In this respect at least, Jews and Muslims have more in common with each other than they do with their third partner in the Abrahamic Tradition: the Christians (for whom God can be a man).