This Arab chauvinism – with its obsession with a particular type of dress, tribal customs and arid, archaic outlook – has to be transcended.Kissing Cousins is not a particularly original book. They need to see that the Arab identity of their faith now outweighs its embrace of other cultures and languages. It is the verses revealed to the Prophet Mohamed in Mecca, which have a considerable connection with the Bible, to which Muslims must now pay attention. Obsession with an unchanging law and the Islamist vision of a single Islamic state for all Muslims – indeed, the entire globe – have transformed Islam from faith to a dangerous ideology.Muslims need to return to faith as described in the early part of the Koran.

It is evident in gender relations, how Islam looks at the world and in the position of religious scholars in Muslim society. How theologies develop and find expression, he rightly suggests, is as much about the realities of power, clan loyalty or cultural difference as about knowledge of God.Power has played an important part in shaping Islamic theology. Musk argues that Muslims have a great deal to learn from Christian understanding of Jesus. In this sense, Islam existed long before the arrival of Prophet Mohamed.Mohamed himself is a prophet in the Biblical sense and should be recognised as part of the same tradition.

Western, Christian understanding of Islam has no basis in the Koran or in Mohamed’s self-awareness. Both the Koran and Mohamed’s concern is with Islam rather than the law-based religion that has come to be known as “Islam”. It is this realisation that will move the two sides closer to each other.Conventional Islam, as organised religion, is too obsessed with the “oughts” of its system and leaves no space for seeing beyond the list of dos and don’ts. But Islam as a faith expressed in terms of active belief and ongoing trust in God is quite akin to Christian faith. The appropriate comparison is not between Jesus and Mohamed, but Jesus and the Koran.

It is this comparison that shows us close parallels between the two faiths: both see God as omnipotent, who creates, is one, rules, reveals, loves, judges and forgives. Both offer weekly communal prayers and venerate Jerusalem.Migration has played an important role in both faiths. Both have struggled with, and manifested, truth and power in their respective histories in similar ways. In short, Muslims have been trying to answer the call of Jesus But it takes two to kiss. The concept of Islam in the Koran is one of personal, active faith expressed through obedience to God.