Stephen,
As a philology student of many years, your argument is on the same level as me saying that because the singer Madonna calls herself the same name as the historical mother of Jesus, they share the same attributes. I don’t care about the name, I care about the attributes. While Islam and Judaism agree on some of the attributes of god (creator not created, eternal), they disagree on some that are much more fundamental to human life on earth (Is god a slave-master (Islam) or a loving father and fair judge (Judaism))? Does god have one moral code for all time (Islamic sharia) or does the moral code evolve through time (the Biblical prophecies)? These are the “day-to-day” religious issues that can’t be resolved by some appeal to a theological unity between Judaism and Islam. At that level, the unity is so abstract as to be utterly useless, even as a basis for the precious “dialogue” that appeasers always try to initiate with Muslims.
Also, those Jewish theologians were wrong in “confirming” that Islam is “of a piece” with the Judaic revelation, in my opinion. What would “confirming” even look like in a theological context? Muhammed just stole from other religions and then added in his own egoistic tenets. How is that a “revelation”, much less one that can be “confirmed” as the same as “the same” as the Judaic revelation? If Jews sincerely believe this, they are not half as intelligent as I have thought. People used to believe that vacuums couldn’t exist in nature, too, and that turned out to be wrong, so just because a belief has been around since the 9th century doesn’t make it correct. I’m not a Christian or a Jew, but I think both those groups have every right to tell Muslims to stick it where the sun don’t shine when Muslims say they are part of the “Abrahamic brotherhood” of religions.
