It might be said that the best starting point for any dialogue between faiths is at the beginning, returning to the fundamentals of a religion and, therefore, to its earliest history. A definition of fundamentalism that implies a study of history should be viewed in a positive light, recognising the origins and primal teachings of our beliefs. On Christmas Eve, 2002, I listened to an Anglican Bishop on the radio explain that the historical figure of Jesus was not really important; what mattered, he argued, was what Jesus meant to Christians today. This view is in fact illogical for if as Muslims contend Jesus was actually a Prophet calling his people to the worship of one God, to then worship him as God would be to go against his teaching. Similarly, if as Christians hold he may be taken as an object of worship then to deny his divinity would also be of consequence. In other words, the historical person of Jesus is of great importance. It is peculiar then that the view that the figure of Jesus in faith is more important than the historic reality is widely held amongst contemporary Christian theologians:

During the past thirty years theologians have come increasingly to admit that it is no longer possible to write a biography of Jesus, since documents earlier than the gospels tell us next to nothing of his life, while the gospels present the "Kerygma" or proclamation of faith, not the Jesus of history.

At one extreme, the peripheral writings of John Hick in The Metaphor of God Incarnate seem to make a mockery of the notion that there is a religious Truth. If faith becomes merely what we make it, how does that help us? If Jesus himself did not teach that he was God incarnate dying for the sins of the world, as Hick argued, is the idea that divine incarnation should be understood merely as a metaphor not simply another way of saying, "It doesn't matter what he taught; I wish to believe this"? While many theologians reject Hick's thesis, their writings nevertheless follow a similar pattern. Against this backdrop, a definition of fundamentalism as being the conviction that the authentic version of a faith is most likely to be found in earliest period makes perfect sense. To follow our teachers, be it Jesus in the case of Christianity or Muhammad in the case of Islam, it is obvious that we should know what they themselves taught.

Unfortunately this task is not necessarily easy. Christian fundamentalism is often frowned upon precisely because the paucity of source material makes constructing a picture of the historical reality so difficult. Traditionally the image of Jesus has been based almost wholly on the narrations contained within the four Gospels, with two references to his life in the writings of Josephus now considered later Christian interpolations. Today the apocryphal writings of the Church, and the Dead Sea Scrolls and Nag Hamadi Library are viewed by some as a secondary source; indeed The Guardian reported on 11 September 2001:

Vatican scholars are preparing to rewrite the Bible by incorporating revelations contained in ancient scrolls discovered beside the Dead Sea in Palestine, it emerged yesterday ... Martyn Percy, a canon doctor at Sheffield University, welcomed the initiative but suggested the results may be less than dramatic. "There has never been a settled, definitive version of the Bible; it has been an evolving book which has gone through many translations. Only fundamentalists think it came in a fax from heaven."

The contemporary view that each gospel was written to present a different face of Christ highlights the problem we have. If the primary sources themselves were written with the intention of converting non-Christians and strengthening the faith of believers, the biographer of Jesus' life must face the possibility that material considered unimportant in conveying a particular message has been omitted by the original authors. It is well known that if we collect all the words actually spoken by Jesus in the four Gospels, removing those passages duplicated across the different books, they fit on no more than two sides of a sheet of A4 paper. Given the impact Jesus is said to have had on the life of countless generations of Christians, this is a woefully small amount of information. In the introduction to his book The Parables of Jesus, Robert Funk writes:

So far as I have been able to discover, no one had ever compiled a list of all the words attributed to Jesus in the first three hundred years following his death ... Among the many scholarly books written on Jesus in the last century and more ... I could find no critical list of his sayings and deeds.

The gospels do not tell us what language he spoke, with Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek, Syriac and a Galilaean dialect of Chaldic all having been suggested as possibilities by scholars of Christianity. The gospels fail to teach us any of the doctrines later adopted by the Church, although we note that the Nicene Creed is forty-one lines longer than the earliest Creed known to us. Nor do the gospels help us to understand that Palestine at the time was under Roman occupation. More importantly, the gospels do not tell us anything about the authors of the books; we are merely provided with first names and are then left to guess their relationship to Jesus, whether they were eyewitnesses to the events of his life, whether they were known for their honesty and what their role in the early Church was. The seasoned argument that the four gospels prove to be reliable witnesses by virtue of the fact that they agree on the main points but differ on a few of the details, pointing to the fact that the authors did not collude in their accounts is unsurprisingly not supported by many biblical scholars. Evidence of copying from Mark is brought out by some, whilst others argue for the existence of an earlier primal document which they label Q.

It is perhaps unsurprising therefore that many Christians are cynical about fundamentalism and its claim to seek the authentic version of a faith in the earliest period. Yet this concern is not necessarily universal. By contrast, the earliest Muslims took the preservation of the Islamic message extremely seriously, providing us with a rich source of information about Muhammad's appearance, conduct, manners and tastes. We know what he looked like, the colour of his hair, how he dressed and the speed of his walk, which is why the famous controversy about cartoons said to depict the Prophet passed many practising Muslims by: the illustrations bore no resemblance to Muhammad, but reminded us of early twentieth-century caricatures of the great scheming hook-nosed Jew instead.

In terms of substance, the collected sayings and deeds of Muhammad-- known as the hadith--would be equated with the gospels, since the Qur'an is considered a book of revelation brought down by the Angel Gabriel. If we consider that the earliest gospels are thought to have been written during the latter part of the first century, it is notable that the Muslim community was concerned with documenting and committing to memory every verse of the Qur'an during the lifetime of Muhammad himself. In their midst, he dictated, explained and arranged every verse of the Qur'an and following his death his community took it upon itself to continue to preserve it meticulously. It was precisely because the Qur'an states that the previous scriptures had been corrupted from within that the Muslim community considered it crucial to put in place mechanisms that would preserve the final revelation.

In order to safeguard both the Qur'an and the narrations concerning the details of the Muhammad's life his community established an elaborate structure based on the law of witness to diminish the risks usually encountered when passing information on from one person to another. During his lifetime his companions would relate his words and actions to one another by saying, "The Prophet said/did such and such." When such a report was mentioned to a further person the source would be related along with what was said or done: "Aisha said the Prophet said such and such." [Islam is marked out amongst the world religions by the fact that huge numbers of its teachings were related through women.] As time passed by, the scholars of Islam insisted on carefully examining the source of all information which they received so that by the end of the first century of the Muslim calendar the practice had become a science in its own right. For a report to be accepted scholars demanded that four conditions be met: that it was accurate, that all narrators in the chain of narration were trustworthy, that the chain of transmission was unbroken and that there was positive support for the statement from all other available evidence.

During the second half of the first century of the Muslim calendar, the sayings of Muhammad began to be categorised by subject in booklets. Again the scholars considered it necessary to establish a means of protecting the content of these books from possible adulteration. They therefore required any scholar involved in passing on his sayings to be in direct contact with the person to whom they were being passed. So insistent were they on the role of witness, that they considered the use of a book without hearing it from the author tantamount to giving false evidence. One could not contemplate adaptations such as those being considered by Vatican scholars in respect to the gospels in 2001 or the ninth century addition of the story of the adulteress in John's gospel. A personal commentary added to a book had to be signed, or else it would be considered to invalidate the text. Rigorous controls were instated even when it came to using books of the sayings of Muhammad where reading certificates which amounted to licences were mandatory. When transmitting such books, a detailed record of the attendance at the gathering was taken and added to the reading certificate, which then became an exclusive authorization for those listed in it to read, teach, copy or quote from that book. Other checks were also employed to ensure that sacred knowledge was preserved in a suitably respectful manner.