Reading: From Reza Aslan’s No God but God
The tragic events of September 11, 2001, may have fueled the clash-of-monotheisms mentality among those Muslims, Christians, and Jews who seem so often to mistake religion for faith and scripture for God. But it also initiated a vibrant discourse among Muslims about the meaning and message of Islam in the twenty-first century. What has occurred since that fateful day amounts to nothing short of another Muslim civil war…which, like the contest to define Islam after the Prophet’s death, is tearing the Muslim community into opposing factions.
It may be too early to know who will write the next chapter of Islam’s story, but it is not too early to recognize who will ultimately win the war between reform and counterreform. When fourteen centuries ago Muhammad launched a revolution in Mecca to replace the archaic, rigid, and inequitable strictures of tribal society with a radically new vision of divine morality and social egalitarianism, he tore apart the fabric of traditional Arab society. It took many years of violence and devastation to cleanse the Hijaz of its “false idols.” It will take many more to cleanse Islam of its new false idols—bigotry and fanaticism—worshipped by those who have replaced Muhammad’s original vision of tolerance and unity with their own ideals of hatred and discord. But the cleansing is inevitable, and the tide of reform cannot be stopped. The Islamic Reformation is already here. We are all living in it.
Sermon
What comes immediately to mind when you hear the word “Islam”? It probably isn’t anything good. We are likely to recall scenes, repeated thousands of times, of planes flying into the World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001. There are more recent images of the aftermath of a car bomb in Baghdad or photos of carnage somewhere in Israel after a suicide bomber blows himself up and murders a dozen bystanders in the process. If we do a word association with “Islam,” the first words are probably “terrorist” or perhaps “suicide bomber” or maybe even “radical fundamentalist.”
Now, most of us, being good, tolerant progressives, don’t really want to believe these images. Yet, what are we to make of Islam? Is Islam truly an inherently violent and repressive religion? Are we in some sort of culture war of historic importance, a war between modern liberal values like freedom and tolerance on the one hand and reactionary values like authority, male dominance and rigid conformity on the other?
What in the world are we to make of Islam? One out of every five people on the planet is a Muslim. That’s around a billion people! Even here in the United States there are now more Muslims than Presbyterians. Should we be afraid? How do people like us who value tolerance tolerate the insanity of flying airplanes into buildings in New York, bombing subways in London and commuter trains in Madrid?
Our situation is made worse by the fact that most of us, myself included, have been profoundly ignorant about Islam. Historically, we religious liberals come out of the progressive, rationalist wing of the Christian tradition. We are the historical children of the most radical faction of the Reformation in Europe. As time has passed, we have become open to the teachings of science, anthropology, and history. We have become open to the teachings of eastern religions. Others are drawn to earth based traditions and Native American spirituality. Yet Islam remains foreign and, frankly, suspect.
Today I would have us become a bit less ignorant about Islam. And then I would have us reflect what upon what how we might relate to the Islamic tradition.
Perhaps we should start at the beginning. Let’s begin with a look at the origins of Islam, with the prophet Muhammad and his teachings. Then, though it must necessarily be too brief, let us look at key features of Islamic history that have shaped the present. We will then look at Islam today and consider where it might be headed. Then I will reflect on what all of this might mean for you and me.
It all started in Mecca in the sixth century of the common era. Mecca was already the religious center of the Arabian peninsula. In Mecca was a small sanctuary known as the Ka‘ba, which literally means the “Cube.” Here resided every god worshipped by the peoples of the peninsula. It is believed that there were some 360 gods in and around the Ka‘ba. Every year pilgrims came to worship and to trade in Mecca. There were many tribes, and each tribe had its god or gods. The tribe who dominated Mecca and, therefore, was the keeper of the Ka‘ba, became quite wealthy. It was, indeed, a time of growing social inequality, a time when the ancient desert tribal ethic of everyone taking care of everyone else was giving way to a more modern and urban social stratification. Muslims look back on that time as a “Time of Ignorance.”
The Prophet Muhammad was born around the year 570. There was no fixed calendar in Arab society and birthdays were not considered significant, so no one knows for sure (just as we do not know when Jesus was born). His father died before he was born, and his mother died when he was six. The boy Muhammad was sent to live with his grandfather, Abd al-Muttalib. However, his grandfather died two years later and Muhammad, now a boy of eight, was sent to live with a powerful uncle, Abu Talib. This proved to be momentous, for it opened a new world for the boy.
Abu Talib was involved in the caravan business, and business seems to have been very good. Abu Talib brought the boy along. At a very young age Muhammad was exposed to different people and cultures as he traveled through what is now Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq and into Syria.
As he grew into a young man, his prospects were not great. He was an orphan who depended on his uncle. Things changed dramatically when, at the age of 25, he married Khadija, an extraordinary wealthy widow. He was now accepted into the elite of society. Yet he was profoundly uneasy with his position, a position built upon the exploitation of others. Being an orphan himself, Muhammad understood the insecurity of the poor and powerless.
Muhammad started going on solitary retreats. At the age of 40, while meditating on Mt. Hira, he had a profound religious experience. A voice told him to “recite.” This was the beginning of a process of revelation over many years that would lead to the Quran—which is, literally, “the recitation.” And, as befits an oral culture, the revelations of the Quran are in the form of poetry.
Some wit once observed that no prophet ever applied for the job. This was certainly true of Muhammad. He returned from his first vision trembling and afraid. He feared he had gone mad. He considered killing himself rather than follow the call. And the last thing on his mind was starting a new religion.
His initial message had two central themes. The first theme is the goodness of God. The second theme, and the one that constituted the bulk of his message, is about morality and ethics. He descried the exploitation of the weak. He made the extraordinary claim (especially extraordinary for a rich man in Mecca) that it was the duty of the rich and powerful to care for the poor and powerless. He demanded economic justice. He preached that a day of judgment was coming when those who did not free the slave or feed others in time of famine would burn in hell.
Three years later his message underwent a transformation. A radical monotheism became the core of his message. Muhammad proclaimed that there is only one God. This is captured in the Muslim profession of faith: “There is no god but God, and Muhammad is God’s Messenger.” He was, in essence, claiming supreme religious authority. This was a revolutionary act. It was a revolutionary act on another level. We must understand that in Mecca, as in most societies of the ancient world, there was no separation of the religious, economic, social and political realms. His statement that there is “no god but God” was an attack on the whole religious and economic system centered on the Ka‘ba. It was also an attack on tribalism. If there is one God, we are all the same. Our allegiance must be to God, not to our tribal gods.
Like Jesus, Muhammad’s message of compassion and equality was an attack on the established order. Predictably, the privileged and the powerful reacted. Jesus was executed; Muhammad very nearly was. Muhammad eventually had to flee Mecca and narrowly escaped being killed. He and a small band of followers came to settle in Yathrib, which would later come to be called Medina, or the “city of the prophet.”
The followers who gathered at Medina created what we might call a kind of religious commune. It was far more egalitarian than Arabian society. Women, who had been considered merely property, were given new rights such as the right to inherit their husband’s property, to keep their dowries and to divorce their husbands. Nowhere in the Quran is there a mention of women wearing veils. Everyone had to pay a tithe according to their wealth, and the proceeds were distributed among the poorest.
Also notable was the religious tolerance that existed in Medina. Muhammad saw himself as a prophet in the line of Abraham, Moses and Jesus. He explicitly forbade coercion in religious matters. The anti-semitism we see today in Islam did not exist for the Prophet. Indeed, there were Arab Jews in Medina. In Muslim Spain Jews, Christians and Muslims lived together in relative peace for centuries. I recall walking in the ancient part of Toledo, Spain, and wandering among what were contiguous Jewish, Muslim and Christian parts of the city. Certainly, the Jews of Spain fared far, far better under Islam that they did under the Christian Inquisition.
Clearly, Muhammad himself saw the revelations of the Quran as being an addition to, not a substitute for, the Jewish and Christian scriptures. I must add, as a Unitarian Universalist aside, that the one great problem that Muhammad had with Christianity was its doctrine of the Trinity. He, like Michael Servetus and early Unitarians, saw that doctrine as a kind of polytheism and a great error. Muhammad saw Jesus, just as did most early Unitarians, not as a god but as a teacher in the prophetic tradition.
In a story that is filled with high adventure, plenty of violence, narrow escapes, and intrigue, the movement grew in size and power. Eventually, in the year 630, just eight years after being forced to flee Mecca, Muhammad returned to Mecca in triumph. Two years later Muhammad died.
The movement spread rapidly throughout Arab lands and beyond. The sayings of the Prophet, which had never been written down before Muhammad’s death, were collected and became what we know as the Quran.
When I read about the Prophet’s early teachings and the implementation of them in Medina, it all seems so very different from what I have come to think of as Islam. When I think of modern Islam I think of the intolerance of the Taliban, of women being denied basic human rights, of wanton terrorist violence directed at innocent people. Indeed, when I hear about the teaching that God is good, that we are to forgive, that we are our brother’s keeper, that we are to share, that we are to care for the powerless, I hear echoes of what is best in the Judeo-Christian tradition and, indeed, in all the world’s great religious traditions.
What happened? How did a message that was liberating and unifying and tolerant of other religious traditions become associated with repression, violence and narrow-mindedness? It happened the same way the message of Jesus became twisted into justification for murderous crusades and the Inquisition. Think of the way John Calvin justified burning Michael Servetus alive for an esoteric theological disagreement, the way the Ferdinand and Isabela expelled Jews and Muslims from Spain in the name of Jesus. Think of the oppression and enslavement of indigenous peoples in Africa and the Americas under the justification that their souls were being saved.
What happened was, alas, is that the followers of Muhammad, just like the followers of Jesus, behaved like human beings. Greed happened. The hunger for power happened. Religious leaders were used to give legitimacy to political power. And, tragically, our human capacity to completely miss the point happened.
After the death of the prophet Muslims soon found themselves with a vast empire that extended across northern Africa all the way to what is now Iran. Alas, it did not take long for conflict to arise over succession. One of those conflicts, which we do not have time to explore today, led to the split that grew into what are now the Sunni and Shiite branches.
And, sadly, just as with Christianity under the popes, the clergy interpreted the teachings in ways that led to rigidity and in ways that served the interests of the powerful. It is a sad and all too familiar story.
One of the most reactionary movements in modern Islam has been the rise of Wahhabism. This movement, which has it origins in what is now Saudi Arabia, has had disastrous consequences. With the sudden oil wealth of the Saudis, they have funded Wahhabi institutions. This is the origin of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban. The fact that western economic interests and colonialism have bred a lot of resentment of the west does not help.
However, just as in Christianity, there is an entire spectrum of thought and belief in Islam. Most Christians are not rabid fundamentalists. Most Muslims are not terrorists or radical fundamentalists.
Reza Aslan, an American Muslim scholar and the author of No god but God, argues we are living in a time of great crisis and conflict in the Muslim world. Our reading this morning is the last two paragraphs of his book. I believe Aslan makes a powerful and persuasive argument. The great conflict of our time is not between the east and west. It is not between a Judeo-Christian perspective and an Islamic world view.
There is indeed a kind of culture war going on. It goes on within Islam and within Christianity and within all traditions. On one side of the struggle are those who would take what is precious and eternal in the teachings of their tradition and, using reason and conscience, apply those principles to a new world. On the other hand are those who reject the modern world and want to recreate a mythic golden age in which knowledge is fixed and everyone knows his and her place in the order of things. On the one hand are people who teach compassion and embrace justice (as did Muhammad and Jesus and Moses and Buddha). On the other side are those who fear change, who seek to return to a narrow tribalism.
Our religious challenge, our religious calling, is not to allow ourselves to be trapped by fear. We must let hope and love guide us, not fear and hatred. We must not allow fear drive us into a new tribalism. What Muhammad sought to teach more than anything else was that unity is the ultimate reality. That is what he meant by saying that “There is no god but God.” He saw how all the separate gods created divisions among people. What unites us is greater than what divides us.
Progressive Muslims are not our enemy. They are our natural allies in the great struggle—the great jihad—of our time. They, like us, want peace and understanding. Islam is not the enemy. Our common enemies are fear and hate and ignorance and violence and intolerance.
Our weapons in this great struggle are love, hope, openness and peace. Let us join with people from all traditions and all nations—whether Muslim, Jew, Christian, Hindu—in turning away from the false gods of tribalism. We are one. Let us join together to build the world that Jesus envisioned in Judea and that Muhammad sought to begin in Medina. Let us join with all peoples of the earth and sing a song of peace that can be heard in every nation. May it be so. Amen.
Amen.