Lit 2301: World Literature, Section 02

The Quran and The Hebrew Bible

Pr. Conell Monette

Rehab Nabil

071bk325167

May, 10th, Spring 2010

Since centuries until today, religions have been at the center of heated debates that often led people to engage into great wars. History is the major witness that saw men shedding tremendous volumes of blood for the sake of the three Abrahamic monotheistic faiths: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Although the tree religions have the same roots and were created to serve the same god, their respective followers have always paid more attention to what differentiates them rather than to what relates them. In Surat the Table (al Maida), God, speaking to all those who worship him, promises they will get the same treatment when he says: “Believers, Jews, Sabaeans, or Christians _ whoever believes in God and the last day and does what is right _ shall have nothing to fear or to regret” (P-1437).

Nevertheless, since the crusades until the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, violence seems to be the lot of those who were described as the “people of the book” in several verses from the Quran. If we think about how our current time is described in the media, we may think that both Jews and Muslims carry huge hatred towards one another. Surprisingly, the followers of those two religions happen to belong to the same ethnicity, and their respective languages and traditions appear to be highly correlated. As far as the books are concerned, we find in the bible numerous themes that were reintroduced in the Quran, sometimes with no or slight differences and some other times, they are entirely changed.

Since it is said that “Literature is power”, the aim of this paper is to bring together two groups of people who always disagree in the negotiations’ tables and to make them agree, at least for ten