Communities of Disagreement

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In this episode we are joined by a very special guest, historian of Islam Yusuf Tayara, to talk about how the Abraham story spun off into all kinds of intriguing directions in the centuries following the bible.

We start off with a mysterious prophecy from Isaiah in the Old Testament, which seems to rebuke the Arabs for lacking hospitality towards some unspecified wanderers in the desert. We then proceed to a Jewish interpretation of this prophecy in the Talmud, which puts us square into BAD COUSINS territory by specifying that the spurned guests of the Arabs were Jewish priests. Being inhospitable is always bad, but treating cousins this way, of course, is particularly heinous!

Our next stop is deeper in Arabia, with the rise of Islam and the place of Abraham in its holiest text, the Qur’an. Through Ishmael and his descendant, the Prophet Muhammad, Abraham is the genealogical father of Arabs/Muslims, but here we once again see him also playing another role: as a universal symbol of monotheism. 

From here, the plot thickens with a really strange medieval Jewish legend, in which Abraham meddles in Ishmael’s marital life in a way that seems to also be a commentary on the growing rifts between Shiites and Sunnis within Islam! 

We love all our podcast children, but this was an especially fun one. It gets dark at times, as usual for us, but we also really bonded with Yusuf over the political possibilities of turning the “community of disagreement” over Abraham’s legacy into a force for solidarity, justice and peace. In these dark times, we need stuff like that.

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