The Holy Spirit as seen through the prism of Islam

Abstract

The phrase “the Holy Spirit” or “the Spirit of the Holy” is mentioned four times in the Quran. The first three cases associate it with Issa the Son of Maryam (Jesus Christ). As the Quran says, Allah strengthened Issa by the Spirit of the Holy. In the fourth case, the Holy Spirit is seen immediately related to the process of divine revelation. The Quranic text, taken separately from the commentaries (tafāsīr), does not provide any specific indications of how “the Spirit of the Holy” should be understood. The Tafsīr of aṭ-Ṭabarī, which is the closest to the time of the Quran, gives three versions of its meaning: the angel Jibril, the Gospel (al-Injīl) and the word by which Issa raised the dead. Later on, the first version became dominant in the Sunni tradition. The Shias ignored the Quranic association of the Holy Spirit with Issa and proclaimed it the highest of the created spirits, even superior than the angels Jibril and Mikail. This spirit at first settled itself into Muhammad, removed after his death into Imam Ali, and then consecutively lived in all Infallible Imams until finally being settled in Imam al-Mahdi, concealed by Allah from the humankind. The Spirit of the Holy, according to Shias, granted Imams with the full knowledge of everything. The erroneous Quranic conception of the Trinity as “the father, the son and the spouse” took the notion of the Holy Spirit out of the Christian context of the Holy Trinity. Meanwhile, the obvious association of the Holy Spirit with Christ in the Quran serves as evidence of the Christian origin of this notion, hung in the air in Sunni Islam and surprisingly developed into something principally new in the Shia mystic doctrine of Imamate.