central truth of revealed religion: that access to the unknowable
Reality that creates and sustains existence is possible only through
awakening to the illumination shed from that Realm. One of the most
cherished of the Qur'an's surihs takes up the metaphor: "God is the Light
of the heavens and the earth.... Light upon Light! God doth guide whom He
will to His Light."(39) In the case of the Hebrew prophets, the Divine
intermediary that was later to appear in Christianity in the person of the
Son of Man and in Islam as the Book of God assumed the form of a binding
Covenant established by the Creator with Abraham, Patriarch and Prophet:
"And I will establish my covenant between me and thee and thy seed after
thee in their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be a God unto
thee, and to thy seed after thee."(40)

The succession of revelations of the Divine also appears as an
implicit--and usually explicit--feature of all the major faiths. One of its
earliest and clearest expressions occurs in the Bhagavad-Gita: "I come,
and go, and come. When Righteousness declines, O Bharata! When Wickedness
is strong, I rise, from age to age, and take visible shape, and move a man
with men, succouring the good, thrusting the evil back, and setting Virtue
on her seat again."(41) This ongoing drama constitutes the basic structure
of the Bible, whose sequence of books recounts the missions not only of
Abraham and of Moses--"whom the Lord knew face to face"(42)--but of the line
of lesser prophets who developed and consolidated the work that these
primary Authors of the process had set in motion. Similarly, no amount of
contentious and fantastical speculation about the precise nature of Jesus
could succeed in separating His mission from the transformative influence
exerted on the course of civilization by the work of Abraham and Moses. He
Himself warns that it is not He Who will condemn those who reject the
message He bears, but Moses "in whom ye trust. For had ye believed Moses,
ye would have believed me: for he wrote of me. But if ye believe not his
writings, how shall ye believe my words?"(43) With the revelation of the
Qur'an, the theme of the succession of the Messengers of God becomes
central: "We believe in God, and the revelation given to us, and to
Abraham, Isma'il, Isaac, Jacob ... and that given to Moses and Jesus, and
that given to (all) Prophets from their Lord...."(44)

For a sympathetic and objective reader of such passage