"Say not as to Allah but the truth!"

A message in Jerusalem's Dome of the Rock, built on the Temple Mount after the Arab Conquest of the region, continues to animate Muslim-nonMuslim relations

One of the subjects about Islam that has somehow received much less writing than it deserves is the message that Muslims ‘posted’ in Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock in 691 A.D. Amazing how that ancient post keeps on getting ‘likes’ up to today.

If you wonder, “What message?” it may support my impression about the dearth of writing on the subject. I became aware of the message early in my PhD studies and especially through learning to read Classical Arabic. Later, when I was given the opportunity to write the essay on “Jesus” in The Wiley Blackwell Companion to the Qur’ān, I began my article with a description of the Dome inscriptions.

Some scholars describe the Dome inscriptions as the earliest dated and attested Islamic religious writings — the date of the earliest Quran manuscripts still being in dispute among scholars. In the 240-meter line of Kufic Arabic script along the top of the circular ambulatories in the interior of the Dome, some 175 out of a total of 370 Arabic words are about the identity of Jesus, here named ‘Īsā. The inscriptions specify the divine Sonship of Jesus and the doctrine of the Trinity as matters of contention.

Muslim armies had emerged out of the Arabian peninsula in the 630s, besieged Jerusalem in 636 and conquered the city in 637 or 638. Just over 50 years later the Umayyad caliph ‘Abd al-Malik ordered the construction of the Dome of the Rock in 691 on top of the site of the Second Jewish Temple. When the caliph ‘Umar had arrived in 637, Jerusalem was “the Christian city par excellence” according to Oleg Grabar. The message in the Dome was therefore mainly addressed to Christians.

It has now been six weeks since October 7, and with many others I believe that the events of this period have been cataclysmic and perhaps even world-changing. I hope to get back to writing on some of the key issues soon. In the meantime, however, life goes on and it’s my turn to preach at our little nearby country church. Two younger preachers and I have been working through the Gospel according to Luke and we are now up to Jesus’ parable of the landowner who planted a vineyard and rented it out to some farmer tenants (Luke 20:9-19).

The parable tells of “servants” whom the vineyard owner sent to the tenants “so they would give him some of the fruit of the vineyard.” But the tenants beat the servants, treat them shamefully, and throw them out of the vineyard. The reasonable interpretation here is that Jesus is referring to the prophets sent by God in the past, a theme that Islam shares with Judaism and Christianity (though with a different pattern of the treatment of prophets).

Then the owner of the vineyard says, “What shall I do? I will send my son, whom I love; perhaps they will respect him.” The tenants, Jesus tells, “talk the matter over” and decide, “This is the heir. Let’s kill him, and the inheritance will be ours” — an intention that the tenants then carry out.

The expression, “I will send my son, whom I love,” reasonably connects to the Gospel teaching that God the Father sent his Son, Jesus, into the world; that God loved the world so much “that he gave his one and only Son” (John 3:16). And so to do justice to that theme in preaching, I need to refer to a whole set of passages throughout the Bible that declare Son of God and explain what Son of God means. The confession that Jesus is the Son of God is absolutely foundational to Christian faith.

Six centuries after this teaching circulated in the Middle East in written form and found the acceptance of a large part of the population, the Dome of the Rock posted its own message: “People of the Book, go not beyond the bounds of your religion, and say not as to Allah but the truth. The Messiah, ‘Īsā son of Mary, was only the messenger of Allah, and his word that he committed to Mary, and a spirit from him. So believe in Allah and his messengers, and say not, ‘Three.’ Refrain; better is it for you. Allah is only one god. Glory be to him — that he should have a son! To him belongs all that is in the heavens and the earth; Allah suffices for a guardian.”

The detail I am highlighting here is the statement about a son. The meaning of the statement is something like, “Horrors! Far be it from him that he should have a son.” The Dome message actually includes four passages warning the readers against believing that God has a Son. That makes it a major and emphatic theme in the message. These four expressions are also found in the Quran at 4.171 (the quotation above), 17.111, 19.35, and 112.3. In addition to these, the Quran denies son of God in at least ten locations.

In my Commentary on the Quran I explained all these passages very carefully with the verses themselves readable in context in a good translation above (see my commentary introduction here). I also wrote a short thematic piece in the commentary on “The Son of God in the Quran.” And in a separate apologetic response to the Muslim accusation that the Bible is corrupted, I composed a chapter explaining the biblical teaching on Son of God for the Muslim reader who has the quranic denials in mind.

If you are still with me at this point you might ask, What did you mean by the ‘likes?’ Well, for one thing, in more than 1330 years the Dome’s ‘post’ has never been deleted, nor have I ever heard of a Muslim intention to do so. Second, the Dome and the other Muslim buildings on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount have increasingly become a global focus of Muslim-nonMuslim relationships. And third, the denial of Son of God has remained a central component of attacks on Christianity by western Muslim polemicists such as Muhammad Hijab, who just this past week appeared on Piers Morgan in an interview that has garnered close to three million views in two days (I hope to write soon about Hijab’s interviews with Jordan Peterson).

As for writing on the Dome and its message, there are indeed some good general books and articles. The writing that we still lack, however, includes thorough analyses of the Muslim denial of Son of God in the context of the seventh-century Middle Eastern “sectarian milieu”; a comprehensive explanation of the meaning of Son of God in the Bible in its own historical and religious contexts and according to its original languages; and ways of meaningful communication of the biblical content on Son of God with the Dome’s ancient denial in view.