I came back to this Christian-Muslim exchange after thinking about it for a while and reflecting on some of the responses I received from earlier discussions here about Abraham, religious identity, and competing traditions.

The short clip attached here captures something I keep noticing in interfaith discussions.

A Christian-Muslim exchange on Ishmael, Mecca, and competing scriptural accounts

The conversation turns to Ishmael.

The Christian participant argues from Genesis that Ishmael was not taken to Mecca as an infant and did not grow up there in the way later Islamic tradition remembers him. When the Muslim participant asks, essentially, “based on what?”, the answer is the Bible.

That exchange made me stop and think.

Not because Christians should stop appealing to the Bible. If someone claims that Muhammad is predicted in the Bible, then obviously the biblical texts have to be examined. That is a perfectly reasonable burden of proof.

But I think something changes when the argument moves from:

“Does the Bible support this claim?”

to:

“The Bible preserves this version of the event, therefore another tradition preserving a different version must be historically false.”

Those are not quite the same proposition.

At that point, one textual tradition has become the controlling historical authority against which every other witness is being judged.

And I do not think this problem belongs only to Christians.

I am Muslim, and I have heard the reverse argument plenty of times:

“The Qur’an is the final authority, so put the Bible down.”

Theologically, I understand what is being asserted.

Methodologically, though, that creates the same problem in reverse.

If I begin by saying the Qur’an gets final jurisdiction over every historical question, then I have not really compared the Qur’an with the Torah. I have simply announced beforehand which witness wins.

Likewise, if someone begins by granting Genesis final jurisdiction over every memory concerning Abraham, Hagar, or Ishmael, then the Qur’an and later Islamic traditions never really enter the inquiry as witnesses. They can only agree with Genesis or fail.

That is what I have increasingly become uncomfortable with.

What happens if we let the traditions speak before deciding which one controls the others?

Genesis 21 preserves one memory of Hagar and Ishmael.

The Qur’an preserves material concerning Abraham, Ishmael, the Sacred House, covenant, and prayer in another textual setting.

Later Islamic traditions preserve still more details.

Those sources are not identical, and pretending they are would not help anyone.

But disagreement between witnesses does not, by itself, tell us which witness is historically correct.

It tells us there is something to investigate.

This question is part of what pushed me toward the method I use in my book, We Were Not Looking: Reconstructing the Patriarchal World Through Ancient Near Eastern Context.

Rather than beginning by asking which religious tradition gets to control the others, I became interested in asking what exists outside the argument between the texts.

The land.

The water.

The roads.

Migration corridors.

Settlement patterns.

Distances.

Political boundaries.

Kinship structures.

Environmental pressures.

In other words:

If two textual traditions remember the same ancient figures differently, what can the physical world they are describing contribute to the comparison?

That is where I think historical geography becomes useful.

Neither Christians nor Muslims own the terrain.

A watershed does not change depending on which scripture we open.

A migration distance does not become shorter because one tradition needs it to.

A road, mountain pass, well system, settlement pattern, or political boundary can sometimes give us another body of evidence against which competing textual memories can be examined.

So I have increasingly come to think of the land almost as a third witness.

The texts may be contested. The land is shared.

And I think this cuts both ways.

A Muslim should not dismiss the Torah simply because the Qur’an is authoritative to Muslims.

A Christian should not assume that a conflicting Qur’anic or Islamic memory has already been disproved merely because it does not conform to Genesis.

The theological question of which revelation one ultimately accepts is real.

But that is different from the historical question of how we compare competing memories of the ancient world.

So this is the question I came away with:

When two religious traditions preserve different memories of the same figures or events, how should we compare them without simply making our own scripture the referee?