A Primordial e pluribus unum? Exegeses on Q. 2:213 and Contemporary Muslim Discourses on Religious Pluralism*

Abstract

Students of natural theology have for centuries debated the religious progress of humankind. In the idyll of the Garden of Eden and in our earliest generations, they ask, did we believe in God? Or even gods? Has humankind evolved from pagan precursors to rational monotheism? Or did primordial monotheism lapse into paganism thus requiring the divine light of revelation to guide humanity back to the one true God? This paper focuses on three contemporary Muslim perspectives on religious pluralism that draw upon a key verse from Sūrat al-Baqara, which begins with the declaration that ‘Humankind was a single nation’ (or ‘is a single nation’, the tense seems rather significant) to tease out a central ethical question of religious pluralism and the moral relativism that, for some, it entails. How can all religions claim to be true when their truth claims are so incommensurable? Does the Qur'an articulate an exclusivist or universalist discourse (or perhaps more intriguingly both simultaneously) with respect to other faiths?

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 4 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.