Re-discovering the Covenants

Dr Steve Young

Dr. Stephen B. Young is the Global Executive Director of the Caux Round Table, an international network of experienced business leaders who advocate a principled approach to global capitalism.

I remember when we had a Caux Round Table [an international network] meeting in London in 2001 on the very day that there was the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers in New York City. We were all shocked. I was shocked and I did not see how this fit within the image I had of Islam. So, I went out and I bought a copy of the Quran (Qurʾān), this one here, and read it.

A journey towards the Covenants

I’ve now read it many times. And I remember being struck in the first sura [chapter] of the Quran, which talks about Allāh [God] the Merciful and the Compassionate, and I began a journey of my own to get to know more about Islam, about the Quran, and the Prophet Muhammadﷺ.

Through the Caux Round Table, I got to know some very distinguished and very thoughtful scholars at the International Islamic University in Malaysia. And in the small compass of the world, the nephew of one of these scholars, Professor Abdullah Assad was an imam here in Minnesota and in 2018, he had been involved with our work.

I began a journey of my own to get to know more about Islam, about the Quran and the Prophet Muhammadﷺ.

Alongside Professor Abdullah, I wrote two books on Quranic guidance for good governance. And we were doing workshops here in Minnesota for Muslim Americans on the harmony between Islamic guidance and American democracy. And in one meeting, Imam Abdullah Assad said, this sounds very much like the Covenants of the Prophetﷺ.

I and my colleague, Professor Doran Hunter, were startled because as Christians, we had never heard of the Covenants of the Prophetﷺ. I said, what are the Covenants of the Prophetﷺ? And the imam said that the Prophetﷺ made these Covenants with Christian communities to respect them and protect them.

Discovering an untold story

They give me a different insight into the Prophetﷺ himself and into Islam.

We didn’t quite know what to make of it. This began a journey of inquiry and study. I looked at one or two of the Covenants, and I was immediately impressed and struck and said, this is very, very important. And I did not understand why myself and most Christians have never heard of these Covenants. They give me a different insight into the Prophetﷺ himself and into Islam.

My chair was Lord Brennan of the United Kingdom and we had been doing work around values with, as I mentioned earlier, the Caux Round Table, between our ethical principles for business and Catholic traditions, Islamic traditions, Buddhist traditions and Confucian traditions.

So, I asked Doran and another friend of ours, Archbishop Tomasi, who was now a Cardinal in the Roman Catholic Church, if they had ever heard of the Covenants and they said they didn’t know about the Covenants. So, I sent them copies of the text and they too were very impressed. And Doran and Archbishop Tomasi agreed that a study of these Covenants would be important.

We needed to learn, particularly as Christians, under what circumstances were they given by the Prophetﷺ? What was the historical context? Are they genuine? Because we learned from some Christians in the Middle East that they were skeptical of these Covenants. They thought maybe they really weren’t acts of the Prophetﷺ.

So I reached out to my Muslim colleagues on one side and reached out to various friends in the Vatican to suggest we pull together a small group of Christians and Muslims to learn about the Covenants of the Prophetﷺ and study them. We had our first meeting in the Vatican in January 2019, and we had a number of other meetings by Zoom and in person, one in Istanbul Şehir university.

And then we drafted a report which we presented to Pope Francis and many senior people. And I received a very nice thank you letter from Pope Francis for making this journey to learn more about the Covenants of the Prophetﷺ.

The Covenants with the Christians

As I understand from our study, we focused principally on two of the Covenants, two very important ones which seem to have the greatest credibility as real, true historic events. One was a Covenant that the Prophetﷺ gave to the monastery of St. Catherine which was in Sinai, which you can still visit today in Sinai.

The second was a Covenant that the Prophetﷺ gave to the Christians of Najran. I’m sure many people in the Middle East know that Najran was a community in what is now Yemen. And one of the reasons we chose it, is that it’s a very complete Covenant. It’s very thorough. It covers lots of points on the relationship between Islam, Muslims, Allah and Christians. Secondly, I believe there’s a reference in the Quran to a delegation of the Christians from Najran who met with the Prophetﷺ. And so we have textual confirmation in the Quran that there really was a meeting between the Prophetﷺ and Christians from Najran, which allows an inference that a Covenant could probably have been made.

Now, the Covenants were dictated by the Prophetﷺ to scribes. Ali was the scribe to some Covenants, Mu’āwiya was a scribe on others and then there were witnesses, most of whom have been identified as Companions of the Prophetﷺ.

In total, I think texts have come down to us of at least six Covenants with different Christian communities. Now, as far as I’m aware in our discussions, no original Covenant has survived. What survives are copies, or they were copies of a Covenant which were given to Christians, like the Armenian Christians, and they were preserved in Christian monasteries over the centuries.

A young scholar at Hamad Bin Khalifa University has gone to these monasteries, particularly Greek Orthodox monasteries on Mount Athos and has found copies which have been preserved by the Christians. There’s also evidence in historical records, important evidence by Christians in the 600s writing about the generous attitude of the Prophet Muhammadﷺ towards Christians.

The purpose of the Covenants

The Prophetﷺ, in these Covenants, is promising Christians that they will be respected. They will be protected. Their churches will not be destroyed.

My sense, as a modern person, is that the purpose of the Covenants was to work out a relationship between two parties who were separate. It was to create some kind of community relationship. You had this new movement, a political movement of the Prophetﷺ in Medina at first. And then you had these different Christian communities. How were they going to relate? The Covenants, which I believe are made by the Prophetﷺ, and most importantly to me, in the name of Allah, he is acting on what he believes are the goals and purposes of Allah – of God. And what I felt when I read the Covenants for the first time is that they do resonate with the first sura of the Quran, which is talking about mercy and compassion.

The Prophetﷺ, in these Covenants, is promising Christians that they will be respected. They will be protected. Their churches will not be destroyed. If their churches fall down or there’s an earthquake, the Muslims are supposed to help rebuild the churches. Christians on pilgrimages to the holy lands and other places will not be disturbed, they will not be molested. They’ll be protected by Muslims.

Christians do not have to fight Muslim wars. But Christians, if they help the enemies of the Muslims, will break the Covenant. This is a normal diplomatic, political kind of arrangement between allies. And secondly, Christians will not necessarily have to pay for Muslim wars, but they must pay something to support the cost of administration and for their protection, giving rise to what is known as the dhimmi status [non-Muslims living under protected Muslim rule].

I found these Covenants to be the substance of good community relationships on matters of practice of religion, of marriage, of safety. In general, I would say that’s what the Prophetﷺ was promising and intending: to provide a dignified role for Christians in the growing community, which was actually more than Muslims. Because he’s recognizing Christians as not necessarily part of the umma of Islam, but in some way, yes, they were part of the umma of Islam. They’re living with Muslims. They were interdependent with Muslims.

A lost legacy

About a hundred years after the life of the Prophetﷺ, things changed. And they changed on both sides.

When we first began to talk about the Covenants with various people, senior people and the Vatican, the question that came back was why haven’t we heard of them.

It was the same reaction that I and my colleague, Doran Hunter had, that these look very important so why haven’t we heard of them? And we looked into that a little bit, but it was not the primary focus of our study. And I came away with two impressions. While I’m not a historian or a religious scholar, it seems to me that on both sides – the side of Islam and the side of Christianity – about a hundred years after the life of the Prophetﷺ, things changed. And they changed on both sides.

On the Christian side, there was a text which has a name called the pseudo Methodius – the false Methodius. I’ve read this document and it was written apparently in the 700s by a very angry Christian who didn’t like Muslims or the founder of the Muslim religion. And this text was not authored by the genuine Methodius, who was apparently a well-respected Christian priest. But this was somebody else, an unknown person writing out of spite.

It’s very similar to the Book of Revelations in the New Testament of the Christian Bible, which is about the end of time. And it is very Manichaean and Zoroastrian in posing a great struggle at the end of history, between the good people and the bad people, the forces of dark and the forces of light. And there’s going to be a huge battle, and the good people are going to win and they’re going to have to kill all the bad people. I’m very uncomfortable with this kind of thinking personally. But in any case in these pseudo Methodius texts, who do you think is at the center of the bad people? It’s the Muslims. And their leader. This text was translated into Latin and apparently circulated in western Europe by the Latin church in Rome in the 700s, which created prejudice. It then apparently was resurrected at the time of the First Crusade and it was again circulated in Europe to build a sense of mission that European Christians had to go and fight to rid the holy land of these infidels.

So historically speaking, they are developing a prejudice where Christians would not want to respect or feel obligated to the Prophetﷺ. There’s something that came in which broke the bonds that the Prophetﷺ had set up. So that’s on the Christian side. And then after the crusades, my feeling is, things got worse between Christians and Muslims.

A model for the modern world

The faithful on both sides need to see exactly what the Prophetﷺ said and promised. So they have a personal connection with the Prophetﷺ himself.

If the Covenants of the Prophetﷺ are as important as I think they are, then as they are now, how can we make sure that they are appreciated, but also become a model for the way Christians and Muslims, and everybody, should behave towards other people? In this respect it is protection, it’s the spirit of the Covenants, and the spirit of the Prophetﷺ.

And we talked about that in our small group, both officially and offline, and our feelings are twofold. First, people have to read the Covenants. They have to be made available to churches and mosques, and the faithful on both sides need to see exactly what the Prophetﷺ said and promised. So, they have a personal connection with the Prophetﷺ himself.

Secondly, we think that the leadership, starting with the Vatican and the holy father himself on the Catholic side, as well as senior Protestants, should come in. We’ve called on the Patriarch Bartholomew of the Greek Orthodox Church who was intrigued by the possibilities of bringing the Covenants back to our minds and into our hearts. On the Muslim side, both the Sunni side and the Shia side, the great scholars and great minds and respected imams should talk about this.

Building a personal connection

And I’d like to say personally, that reading the Covenants was very important to me because I felt for the first time I had some personal sense for the Prophetﷺ. Previously the Prophetﷺ was a distant figure. I could read the Quran. I read the book of Forty Hadith [sayings and deeds of the Prophetﷺ]. Those are texts. Yet when I read the Covenants, I realized that these were the words and the actions of the Prophetﷺ himself. And I felt I had come to know him in a more personal way, and I gained respect, admiration and appreciation for what we Christians would call his ministry, for what he did as God’s prophet for all of humanity.

So, I think the first point is the texts have to be made available widely to churches and mosques as some kind of background material or a study guide. And then secondly, I think senior clerics, Christian and Muslim, need to emphasize to their faithful that the Prophetﷺ has given us an example of how human beings should behave to one another.

One of the things that has surprised me and impressed me was the reaction of both my Muslim and Christian friends and colleagues as they read the Covenants. As we talk about them, I find them personally changed. I find each of the Christians are more open and interested in relationships with Muslims and the same for Muslims, who become more open and more interested. There’s more dialogue.

If one person from one religion mentions something about their text, the other side is interested. And then that means that the first side feels that they are respected and you actually see people come together in a fellowship, to borrow an English term, as part of a larger community, a community maybe which is more respectful to the ultimate purposes of God, instead of looking upon ourselves narrowly as belonging to this sect or that sect.