After the success reaped by the US at the summit last April in the Israeli desert of the Negev, which was attended by several old Arab enemies of the Hebrew State, the Biden Administration is trying to join other governments, in particular the Saudi, to the great regional peace initiative. The so-called Abraham Accords were signed in 2020 under the Trump presidency, and Biden – in one of the few diplomatic decisions in line with his predecessor – has endorsed them and is trying to promote them. The pact, which begins with the establishment of relations with Israel, was signed by the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan.
Saudi Arabia refuses for the time being to join the Agreements, arguing the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories, but the White House hopes to achieve it before the end of the year.
The pact is, among other things, an alliance against Iran by Israel and the Sunni Muslim world, which fears that Tehran’s plans to develop the atomic bomb will come to fruition.
The name of the pact – the Abraham Accords – is a happy term, as well as politically correct, and refers to the supposed ‘common trunk’ that starts from the biblical patriarch in the three great monotheistic religions: the Christian, the Muslim and the Jewish.
Despite the good intentions of some promoters of interreligious dialogue, and the opportunism of diplomats, most Islamologists reject the existence of that common trunk. After centuries of doubt, Islamic tradition established in the twelfth century that the key passage of the sacrifice of Abraham (Ibrahim in Arabic) did not have Isaac as its protagonist, but his half-brother Ishmael, the son that the patriarch of the Bible had with the servant Hagar. In addition, Islam affirms that the place of sacrifice was not Mount Moriah, as the book of Genesis affirms, but Mecca, the birthplace of Muhammad, where Abraham would have traveled to visit Ishmael and rebuild the Muslim sanctuary of the Kaaba.
The Koran does not speak of any alliance of God with Abraham and his descendants, a key aspect of the figure of the patriarch for Jews and Christians. For Islam, Abraham is not the father of believers: the ‘first Muslim’ was Adam.
Those who affirm that the three great religions have great similarities in having Abraham as their ‘common father’ also allude to the term ‘People of the Book’, with which Mohammed refers to Jews and Christians in the Koran. All three have a revealed book, the Hebrews the Pentateuch, the Jews the Gospels, and the Muslims the Koran. However, in numerous passages in the book of Muhammad, Christians and Jews are rebuked for having “falsified” their sacred texts.
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