The concept of divine election – the theological claim that God has singled out a particular community for covenant, mission, and metaphysical favor – has been so thoroughly associated with Judaism that most people assume it begins and ends at Sinai. And historically, there is reason for this association. The Hebrew Bible, particularly Deuteronomy 7:6, declares Israel an am segulah, a treasured people, set apart not for numerical greatness but for an inexplicable divine love.
Yet the concept metastasized. Christianity built an entire supersessionist theology on the claim that the Church had replaced Israel as Verus Israel, the true people of God, inheriting the covenant the Jews had supposedly forfeited. Mormonism located chosenness in the lineage of Ephraim. Rastafari re-localized it in Ethiopia. The Maasai believed Ngai granted them custodianship over all cattle on earth. Christian Identity movements in America constructed an elaborate racial theology in which Anglo-Saxon and Nordic peoples were the real descendants of Abraham and Jews were the cursed seed of Cain. Chosenness, it turns out, is the most contagious idea in the history of religion. Anthropologists rightly note that chosenness almost always functions as a legitimizing narrative: it explains why “we” possess truth, authority, or destiny while others do not.
Now here is what almost no one discusses with sufficient seriousness: Islam did not reject the concept of chosenness. It absorbed it, universalized it, and in many ways intensified it to a degree that would make the most triumphalist reading of Deuteronomy seem modest by comparison. The Quran does not whisper its claims. It declares, with the force of unmediated divine speech, inna al-dina ‘ind Allahi al-Islam – the only religion acceptable to God is Islam (3:19). Not one religion among many. Not a path among paths. The singular, exclusive, final dispensation.
And yet Muslims have developed a peculiar amnesia about this. They will criticize Jewish chosenness as ethnic supremacism while reciting, five times daily in their liturgical consciousness, a worldview that positions Islam not merely as true but as the only truth, and its adherents not merely as faithful but as the finest community in human history. The concept of kufr – disbelief – is not a neutral theological category; it is a moral verdict.
