Tuesday, July 14, 2009

St. Augustine on Islam

One of the fun things about having a blog is being able to see what kind of internet searches land people on your site. I've had several Google referrals that have resulted from people trying to find out what St. Augustine had to say about Islam. Let me make this simple. St. Augustine of Hippo died in the year 430. Muhammad, the founder of Islam, lived from ca. 570 until 632. St. Augustine never wrote anything about Islam, because Islam didn't exist when St. Augustine was alive.

I note this as a public service to those who use internet search engines.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I got here doing the search "St. Augustine Islam". I was lucky enough to know about the relevant chronology. Though, I was trying to reach, if any, discussions or writings that compare or relate Augustinian understanding and Islamic theology.

Thanks for this useful remark, though.

Anonymous said...

Prophet Mohammed (pbuh) was not the founder of Islam... Isalm existed way before that...He was the last messenger of Allah....

Anonymous said...

i landed here because i read that st. augustine thought that islam was a christian heresy. i was pretty sure that he died before the evil of islam arose, and confirmed that for myself, but i was curious to know why that statement was out there, since the pirate cult of islam is nothing like christianity. muhammed and the first muslims left *no* evidence behind (no manuscripts of any kind in any language, no coins, no monuments, no buildings); there is no archaeological evidence whatsoever of islam until the reign of the ummayad caliph muawiya. i have read that the ebionite heresy was similar in many respects to islam, and that it is possible that most of the arabs who called themselves christian in the 7th century were of this heretical sect. an interesting proposition is that muhammed, which means "honored one" or "chosen one" in both syriac and arabic, was a title originally applied to Christ by ebionites, and that arab mercenaries, who were employed by the sassanian empire in the same fashion that the roman empire employed outsiders as mercenaries, and might have been mostly ebionites, successfully revolted against the persian sassanids and used the resources of their newly-seized empire to tweak ebionism into islam, with the addition of an arab prophet named muhammed so as to seal the preeminence of arabs in the new religion, rather than persians. i am poking around trying to learn about ebionism, but the sect died out many centuries ago, and apparently almost all of their documents died with them, although there are church documents arguing against and condemning their heresy.

b.a. freeman