Islam teaches that thousands of Prophets were inspired by the one and only God; and sent to the whole of mankind in different lands and at different times. One popular version in a hadith puts the number of prophets sent to mankind as 124,000 (Ibn Hanbal, Musnad, 5, 169).

What was essential was that no land, people or period was neglected by God. Prophets were sent to every human language group since the age of Adam. The Qur’an says: “There never was a people without a Warner (Prophet) having lived among them’ (35:24) and “We would never visit our wrath (chastise any community) until We had sent a Messenger to give warning” (17:15)

Since there are over 7.000 languages now spoken in the world, and another 10-20,000 that were spoken over the previous 12,000 years and then died out, all human societies have have been taught the way God wants each of them to conduct their Divine worship (Qur’an 21:25), and the moral behavioral rules they should observe (Qur’an 16:90-92). Even today when hundreds of languages are dying out, the African continent is home to some of the most multilingual countries in the world. For example Cameroon has a population of around 27 million people; and over 250 different languages are spoken as first languages.

As a non-Orthodox Reform Rabbi who first became interested in Islam when I studied Islam at a university (UCLA) over 67 years ago, I have continued my study of Islam off and on since that time. In many ways Ahadith relating Muhammad’s comments about Orthodox Judaism, and religion in general, prefigure the thinking of most Reform Rabbis some 12-13 centuries later.

This is why I think of myself as an Islamic Hebrew, i.e. a Jew who firmly believes in the one and only God, and who remains faithful to the covenant the God made with the Jewish People at Mount Sinai. If the Orthodox Jews in the generation of Prophet Muhammad has followed his teaching that “religion is easy”, Reform Judaism would have developed 14 centuries ago.

The term ivri (the Hebrew) first appears in the Torah, when Prophet Abraham is called “the Hebrew’.“And it was told to Abram the Hebrew” (Genesis 14:13) And Prophet Joseph uses the name as both a geographical and an socio-ethnic term: “I was kidnapped from the land of the ivrim” (Genesis 40:15), and a “Hebrew youth’ (41:120, and “The Egyptians could not eat with the ivrim,........

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