WI: Christianity/Islam Merge?

Is there any point in history, any twists we could possibly take to make this possible? The religion would have to regard Jesus Christ as the Son of God and Messiah, while simultaneously regarding Mohammed as a prophet. Maybe the Arabs decide to push East instead of West, putting off animosity?
Any POD short of ASB will be accepted.
 
Make Mohammad a Christian who gets a vision from God declaring a bunch of new laws. Have the patriarchs declare him to be non-heretical, and Mohammad is revered as having spoken to God. There.
 

wormyguy

Banned
As late as the 1400s, Muhammad was considered by Christians to merely be a schismatic heretic, not the progenitor of a separate religion. I guess it's possible - it's most likely under some kind of Islam-wank that conquers most of Europe, or vice versa (assimilating to the culture of the conquered people).
 
Saint Mohamet, the man who brought Christianity to the heathen Arabs? (I mean, aside from the Maronites, Syrian Orthodox, Greek Orthodox, Coptic Orthodox...:D)
 
I read an article once by a former Muslim who is now a Christian who claims Mohammed was really a Christian. He seized on some Koranic passages referring to Jesus as "Messiah" to prove it.

If one can persuade the majority of the world's Muslims to believe that, you get Jesus as the Son of God and Mohammed as Apostle to the Arabs.

Problem is, there are also Koranic passages in which Christians are castigated for worshipping Jesus and the Virgin Mary alongside God the Father. Unless one wants to indulge in conspiracy theories about Abu Bakr altering the Koran (which also calls into question the "Messiah" passages too), it's not going to work.
 

wormyguy

Banned
I read an article once by a former Muslim who is now a Christian who claims Mohammed was really a Christian. He seized on some Koranic passages referring to Jesus as "Messiah" to prove it.

If one can persuade the majority of the world's Muslims to believe that, you get Jesus as the Son of God and Mohammed as Apostle to the Arabs.

Problem is, there are also Koranic passages in which Christians are castigated for worshipping Jesus and the Virgin Mary alongside God the Father. Unless one wants to indulge in conspiracy theories about Abu Bakr altering the Koran (which also calls into question the "Messiah" passages too), it's not going to work.
The thing is, the same passages that explicitly say that Jesus was the Messiah also explicitly say that he's not the son of God (although Mary's still a virgin).
 
The thing is, the same passages that explicitly say that Jesus was the Messiah also explicitly say that he's not the son of God (although Mary's still a virgin).
There have been (and are) crazier things believed. (Mormons, anyone?)
 
I think the main problem is not the theology - people of much stranger beliefs have considered themselves Christian - but the political setting. Islam to a large extent defined itself against Christianity from the word go, and Christianity's hierarchical, orthodox incarnation (the one that survived) has an inbuilt defense mechanism against any doctrinal deviation. As was pointed out, Islam was long regarded as a heresy, not because that's plausible but because that's the category the church thinks in. To change that, you would have to shift the political scene majorly (note that it was actually tried in India, by emperor Akbar, under very different political circumstances. Not different enough - it failed)
 

Ibn Warraq

Banned
I read an article once by a former Muslim who is now a Christian who claims Mohammed was really a Christian. He seized on some Koranic passages referring to Jesus as "Messiah" to prove it.

That's because Muslims think Jesus was the Messiah. In fact throughout the Quran he's almost always referred to as the Messiah(al masiah) not as Jesus(Issa).
 
Exclusivist monotheisms don't merge, they split.

Or, provide raw materials for someone to rework into a new montheism. (See, Islam or Mormonism).

One published AH example that comes to mind is the "Castaways in Time" series http://www.uchronia.net/bib.cgi/label.html?id=adamcastaw by Robert Adams in which greater success of Nestorianism narrows the gap between Islam and Christianity a little and later a pagan Mongol Empire provides a common enemy for them to unite against...

(For the soldiers of the West to unite against, I should say. :D http://www.historykb.com/Uwe/Forum....-21-So-If-You-ve-a-Date-In-Constantinople-Two )

Bruce
 

Leo Caesius

Banned
That's because Muslims think Jesus was the Messiah. In fact throughout the Quran he's almost always referred to as the Messiah(al masiah) not as Jesus(Issa).
Al-Masī7 (there shouldn't be an a, but it sometimes creeps in when you're not looking). Fun fact: the Arabic root of this word is the origin of the English word massage and masseur.

PKD had a combined Christian-Islamic Church (C.I.C.) in The Divine Invasion (in the book, it doesn't exactly come off very good). Also, there was of course the former Reverend Ann Holmes Redding, the Episcopalian priest who was defrocked earlier this year for converting Islam despite her claims that she identifies with both Christianity and Islam 100%.
 
Maybe Mohammed's life goes as per OTL, but the Muslim invaders don't do as well in the West as in OTL, and they are never in control of historically Christian Egypt or Anatolia, or of the Holy Land. But they do about as well in the East as in OTL. This makes it so that Christians and Muslims are never at odds with each other after the very beginning, making warmer relations easier to come by. Eventually, there is a major marriage between the royalties of a Christian and Muslim kingdom for political reasons. The family begins practicing both Christian and Muslim traditions and beliefs, and eventually the trend begins to catch on.
OR
Maybe the Crusades are a massive success, with Arabia being occupied due to the zeal of the Crusaders, and then eventually the whole of the Islamic World. The ongoing holy war keeps Christian Europe united, but eventually the sheer difficulty of keeping the occupation going proves too much. Trying to keep the empire while making the population easier to control, Mohammed is made a Saint in the Christian religion and other concessions are made, amking the population less unclined to revolt. This has the unintended consequence of European Christians adopting some Muslim practices in worship, and after hundreds and hundreds of years, Islam and Christianity become indistinguishable.

Don't know how likely either of those scenarios are, though.
 
OR
Maybe the Crusades are a massive success, with Arabia being occupied due to the zeal of the Crusaders, and then eventually the whole of the Islamic World. The ongoing holy war keeps Christian Europe united, but eventually the sheer difficulty of keeping the occupation going proves too much. Trying to keep the empire while making the population easier to control, Mohammed is made a Saint in the Christian religion and other concessions are made, amking the population less unclined to revolt. This has the unintended consequence of European Christians adopting some Muslim practices in worship, and after hundreds and hundreds of years, Islam and Christianity become indistinguishable.

Don't know how likely either of those scenarios are, though.

The problem with this scenario is that at the time of the crusades
1099 most of bilad al sham i.e (Syria, palestine,isreal,jordan and lebanon)
where heavily christian most likely 3/4 of the population christian but heavily arabized and a single arab culture existed .

since the muslim population of Jersusalem was minority albiet a large minority, it would not be surprising that those the crusaders really massacred were christian arabs and arab speaking jews as well as muslims.


by the time of the mamlukes and the sultans Baybars and Qutuz
the christian population is greatly reduced.(1200's)
since there is no sign of massacres or ethnic cleansing, its more likely that
the disruptions caused by the crusaders must have led to mass conversations.
 

Valdemar II

Banned
We have one precedence for this the Sarmatians, at Jesus time they was seen as non Jewish, but because modern Jews want to include as many as possible, and because modern Sarmatians only number a few hundred souls, they're seen as Jewish. So we need to make one of two fate almost dissappear.
 
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