In reading these two accounts for today, I was certainly exposed to a deeper dialogue about Islam’s grappling with the Christian position of monotheism, despite understanding it and seeing it as polytheism. However, this is not what stood out to me. My attention was captured by one paragraph in the dialogue between Timothy and Mahdi, (paragraph AA).
Mahdi asks, “Who is your head and leader?” to which Timothy replies, “Our Lord Jesus Christ.” Mahdi’s line of questioning then proceeds about the explicit imitation of Jesus in specifics, such as circumcision. Timothy responds, “I do not follow the Law as Christ followed the Law; I follow the Gospel.” Note that neither of Timothy’s answers are people (the way Mahdi addressed his question) but rather are much larger–the Law and the Gospel are both gifts from God. I believe this misunderstanding exhibits significant confusion between Christians and Muslims. Jesus is not Christianity’s Muhammad, nor vice versa.
The end of this paragraph concludes with Timothy stating, “I leave the image and cleave to reality.” There seems to be a different understanding on the topic of transcendence and how God’s presence is something made manifest in the “now.” While Jesus’ presence was a historical event, and most of the dialogues follow from that and Jesus’ role in the Trinity, it seems that God is left in the past or, at the very least, out of touch with the reality of how things are. I’m left wondering how this conversation would shift if God’s transcendent nature were the topic.
Islam & Christian-Muslim Relations, Hamaty 
Thanks Andrew – good observation! This point is complicated in the Muslim-Christian debate since the Islamic notion of sunna implies that you should imitate a prophet. Christians don’t think of themselves as imitating Christ in his religious practice (though they aspire to do this in terms of his ethics) because of the notion of the New Covenant that he institutes during and through his mission.
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