God in the Qur’an

“Jack Miles, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of God: A Biography, now gives us a deeply probing, revelatory portrait of the God of Islam, the world’s second largest, fastest-growing, and perhaps most tragically misunderstood religion. Who is Allah? What does He ask of those who submit to His teachings? In the spirit of his two earlier books, God, a trailblazing ‘biography’ of the protagonist of the Old Testament, and Christ, a brilliant portrait of the biblical Jesus, Miles undertakes to answer these questions with his characteristic sensitivity, perspicacity, and prodigious command of the subject. Miles introduces us to a figure less mercurial than Yahweh, less contrarian than Christ, and yet emphatically of a piece with their tradition. The God of the Qur’an revises and perfects: His purpose is to make whole what had been corrupted or lost from the practices and scriptures of the earlier Abrahamic religions. Miles sets passages from the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Qur’an side by side, including such touchstones as the stories of creation, of Cain and Abel, of Abraham and Isaac, of Moses and the exodus from Egypt, and of the birth of Jesus. In doing so, he illuminates what is unique about Allah, His teachings, and His resolutely merciful temperament, and he thereby reveals that which is false, distorted, or simply absent from the popular conception of the heart of Islam. So, too, do we discover the spiritual and scriptural continuity of the Islamic tradition with those of Judaism and Christianity, and the deep affinities among the three. ‘I hope, ‘ Miles writes, that by reading this book ‘you may find it a little easier to trust the Muslim next door as a man or woman whose religion, after all, may not be so wildly unreasonable that someone holding to it could not be a trusted friend.’”–Dust jacket.