Once upon a time long, long ago Abraham traveled to Meccah and built an altar to Allah. He was well received by the Meccan citizenry for the unusual structure he constructed. It was made of stone and fashioned into the shape of a huge cube. When Abraham returned to Canaan members of the Qais tribe argued vehemently with the Quraish tribe that Abraham had appointed them as the sole guardians of the sacred shrine. A civil war of sorts ensued and the battle left the city in great disarray. Traveling merchants exploited the city's weaknesses and plundered its remaining riches by deceit and trickery. Soon, a dreaded plague struck the city. The people were desperate and pressure from neighboring tribes convinced many that Allah had forsaken them, so they resorted to sacrificing to the old gods. But the plague took its devastating toll on the city. It was years later that the surviving generations furthered the idol worship by erecting 365 images to create a pantheon of gods. Allah wasn't entirely forgotten however, for there was also an image erected for him as well and of course, the Kaaba shrine remained. Such was life in the Era of Ignorance (Jahiliyat).

This made-up story serves a purpose to show how real histories can get confused by not-so-real stories. The Abrahamic journey to Meccah stands or falls on a much more fundamental premise: Was it Ishmael or Isaac that became the child of promise? If Ishmael was the child, then that journey became a necessary link to connect the true faith to the lineage of Ishmael. If the child was Isaac, then the Hebrew Scriptures are right to essentially dismiss Ishmael (and his descendants) from the line of God's choosing with the departure of Ishmael from Abraham. The journey to Meccah is completely absent from the Genesis account, instead the focus is on Isaac in the land of Canaan. From Isaac follows the lengthy story of Jacob, moving on to the twelve tribes of Israel. The Bible connects Abraham with Isaac, Isaac with Jacob, and Jacob with the people of Israel in one continuous genealogical and historical line.

The Abraham connection is more than just a family tree, or a genealogical table. It is also a connection of faith, of promise, of hope, of godly-inheritance, and of God's blessing to all the families of the earth. The child of promise received all of this.

In an attempt to establish a link for Ishmael as the child of promise the Kaaba, the cubical shrine in Meccah, is often cited as evidence. But some accounting must be made for the Beit Ha Miqdash, which was the ancient Jewish temple that stood on Mount Moriah in Jerusalem. Mount Moriah played an important role in establishing Isaac as the child of promise in the Hebrew Scriptures. For in Genesis 22 there is a description of the account of the binding of Isaac that took place there.

The "Jerusalem vs. Meccah" question is not considered much of an issue in the view of the West. Westerners want the answer to be both Meccah and Jerusalem in hopes for peace in the Middle East. They can simultaneously hold that the Quran and the Bible are both true, because they don't regard either story as absolutely true. These books simply contain "culturally defined" truths. The canons of logic are ignored because the contradictory differences are considered to be on the level of a local legend. Postmodern "truth" holds the authority of reasoning as used in logic in doubt. It also decrees that no particular "truth" such as is expressed in the doctrines of Islam, Judaism, or Christianity can be exalted to the status of absolute or universal truth.

A driving factor in this Western belief-system is the popular notion that any absolute-truth claim tends toward intolerance, wars, and other oppressive behavior by adherents of such a claim. Cultural diversity becomes of greater importance than the establishment of unifying truth. Absolute truth becomes a moral issue and is guilty, instead of being amoral. Dysfunctioning truth for the sake of peace may end up like electric shocks in the history of psychology. Electric shocks disrupted brain impulses, which then attenuated mental disturbances, but that price was too high as normal brain function suffered in the process.

Postmodernism borrows from the ideals and success of American tolerance for religious expression. But the original basis for the American experiment of religious freedom contradicts the notion of no absolutes. Religious tolerance came about because refugees fled religious persecution in Europe for freedom in the New World. Christianity was assumed to be the unifying truth, but no one denomination was to have absolute political control. To block absolute control by any human institution, the notion of the separation of powers was placed into the American system of governance.

The model for religious liberty was built in part on the constitution of the Five Indian Nations. This pact stated that each of the five nations agreed on the truth of the Great Spirit, but permitted diversity of ceremony. No nation could impose its ceremony on another member nation. Now, it might be tempting to construe the difference of the Ishmael/Isaac issue to be one of mere ceremony. However, there is a difference between a religious practice and a fundamental belief. If the Ishmael position and the Isaac position are both untrue, then the consequent position of either Allah or Adonay (the sacred tetragramaton for "LORD") is dislodged as absolute truth. This shatters the unity of either religious position. Somebody must be right, otherwise what's the point of it all?

There is a clash between the universalism of the three major religions and the anti-universalism of Postmodernism. The greatest example of this is seen in how the West's insistence on no absolutes is perceived as a threat to the unity of the house of Islam. All the materialism, progress, and tolerance of the West is not an equal trade for the brotherhood, unity, and relative peace offered in Islam. It is doubtful that most of the Islamic world is going to convert to the scepticism of the West. Instead the materialism, and the unspoken but real anti-absolutism is perceived as an attack to destroy Islam.

For Jews and Christians in the West the change was not akin to conversion. It was rather a steady process of demythologizing their respective traditions to attenuate the notion of absolute truth. This took several centuries. In those centuries, Modernism replaced theism as the absolute and universal truth, then the scepticism of Postmodernism replaced any notion of absolute truth.

How did the contradictory Ishmael vs. Isaac situation come about? According to the popular perception among Muslims, the Scriptures were corrupted because Jews and Christians departed from the truth. They coluded together in a massive campaign of deception so as to alter their writings and traditions to transfer the original testimony of Ishmael as being the child of promise to Isaac. The primary documents to alter are the T'nach (Old Testament) for the Jewish tradition and the Brit Chadashah(New Testament) for the Christian tradition.

These are the major writings but not the only ones. There are also Talmuds, Targums, Dead Sea Scrolls, Apocryphal books, translations (Greek, Coptic, Latin, Syriac, and later Cyrillic), and historical writings to name a few. If this scenario was true, then there is the question: What happened to the faithful? Where were the purists, who kept the truth of Ishmael among the Jews and among the Christians? Where is the transmission of documents, which contained the real account of Ishmael? But such writings or such groups are conspicuous by their absence. Sometimes, the Gospel of Thomas is offered as a document to prove an Islamic view, but it contains nothing about Ishmael. There are cryptic references to Isaac in some of the historically unrelated Thomas documents,¹ but these references follow the Isaac position of the Bible. These documents were rejected by the church, yet retained the testimony to Isaac and serve as an independent witness for Isaac.

In Judaism, there is a great discussion throughout Jewish history about the binding of Isaac which is called Ha Aqedah (the binding) or is also sometimes called Aqidat Yitzak (the binding of Isaac). There is no holiday commemorating this event, but it is prominent in commentaries, in poetry, and in the collective psyche of the Jewish people. Why did G-d test Abraham this way? A debated question, yet in the sufferings of Israel there is a related question: Why is G-d allowing this to happen?

Eid-al-Adha, is an Islamic holiday that commemorates Abraham's sacrifice of Ishmael. Rams are slaughtered and eaten to symbolize the ram that Allah provided as Ishmael's substitute. It might appear that nearly a billion celebrants of such a holiday is proof of its veracity. An argumentum ad populum² doesn't establish the historical facticity of the Ishmael position. Contrast this with one sample from Second-Temple era Judaism:

And they came to the place of which the Lord had told him. And Abraham builded there the altar which Adam had built, which had been destroyed by the waters of the deluge, which Noah has again builded, and which had been destroyed in the age of divisions; and he set the wood in order upon it, and bound Izhak his son, and laid him on the altar upon the wood. And Abraham stretched out his hand, and took the knife to slay his son.³

That same day some Sadducees stepped forward-- a group of Jews who say there is no resurrection after death. They posed this question: "Teacher, Moses said, 'If a man dies without children, his brother should marry the widow and have a child who will be the brother's heir.' Well, there were seven brothers. The oldest married and then died without children, so the second brother married the widow. This brother also died without children, and the wife was married to the next brother, and so on until she had been the wife of each of them. And then she also died. So tell us, whose wife will she be in the resurrection? For she was the wife of all seven of them!" Jesus replied, "Your problem is that you don't know the Scriptures, and you don't know the power of God. For when the dead rise, they won't be married. They will be like the angels in heaven. But now, as to whether there will be a resurrection of the dead-- haven't you ever read about this in the Scriptures? Long after Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had died, God said, 'I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.' So he is the God of the living, not the dead." (Matthew 22:23-32 NLT)

It was by faith that Abraham obeyed when God called him to leave home and go to another land that God would give him as his inheritance. He went without knowing where he was going. And even when he reached the land God promised him, he lived there by faith-- for he was like a foreigner, living in a tent. And so did Isaac and Jacob, to whom God gave the same promise. Abraham did this because he was confidently looking forward to a city with eternal foundations, a city designed and built by God.(Hebrews 11:8-10 NLT)