Compare and contrast

I've been reading the fifth volume of this outstanding series, and can't help but notice the many ways in which the rise of the Christian faith and the rise of Islam are polar opposites. There are many instances, but I think this passage summarizes well the root difference:

As their ministries gained support, both Jesus and Muhammad faced dangerous hostility from their respective governments, but their response was profoundly different. Jesus surrendered himself and was crucified. This is foreshadowed in the third of three temptations he undergoes at the outset of his ministry, as portrayed in the Gospel of Matthew. He is shown the kingdoms of the earth spread before him. Evil beckons him. All this can be his, if only he will submit to the prince of this world--that is, adopt the world's ways, head up a political movement, and conquer by the power of the sword.
Jesus rejects the offer. Satan, he says, is an impostor--the world is not his to give. It belongs to Jesus' Father. He thus becomes the suffering servant envisioned in the fifty-third chapter of the prophet Isaiah...
As events in Muhammed's life unfold, however, he will take the other path, in effect yielding to the third temptation. The idea of a theocratic state, with all this implies, becomes increasingly attractive to him, until he unreservedly embraces it. As though to underline this distinction, Muslims accept Jesus as both a prophet and as the Jewish Messiah--but indignantly deny that he was crucified.

This but scratches the surface, of course. No one who reads the Bible and the Koran, and compares the history of the two faiths can claim, as so many try, that they are somehow equivalent. Their roots lie in very different ground, and thus all that grows out of them produces very different fruit.