God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World (6 page)

The four pillars supporting the corners of this building are
salat
(prayer),
zakat
(charity),
sawm
(fasting), and
hajj
(pilgrimage). Muslims interrupt both work and play to pray five times daily in the direction of Mecca. They stop to remember Allah in the mosque, at home, and in the workplace. But Muslims can also be seen putting down prayer rugs at taxi stands at London’s Heathrow Airport and inside office buildings in Dubai.

Muslims are also required to give charity to the poor. Unlike tithing, the Christian practice of giving 10 percent of your income to the church, zakat is based on assets and goes to the poor. Typically, Muslims are obliged to give 2.5 percent of most of their assets (personal possessions such as homes, cars, and clothing are excluded) above a subsistence level known as the
nisab
.

Muslims observe sawm during the month of Ramadan, abstaining from eating, drinking, smoking, and sex from dawn until sunset, and reciting and listening to the Quran instead. Ramadan, which commemorates the coming of revelation to Muhammad, falls in the ninth month of the Islamic year, but because Muslims observe a lunar rather than a solar calendar, its dates migrate across the Gregorian calendar observed in the West. Ramadan concludes with Id al-Fitr, a fast-breaking festival that brings families together to eat, pray, and exchange gifts. The Clinton White House hosted an Id al-Fitr celebration in 1996, and the first U.S. postage stamp with an Islamic theme—issued just days before 9/11/2001—commemorated both this festival and Id al-Adha, the feast celebrating the willingness of Ibrahim (Abraham to Jews and Christians) to sacrifice his son Ismail (Isaac in the Jewish and Christian scriptures).

Finally, assuming they are physically and financially able, all Muslims are obliged to go once in a lifetime on pilgrimage to Mecca. The hajj, which occurs every year during the last ten days of the twelfth lunar month, is open only to Muslims, who may add to their names the honorific “al Hajj” after fulfilling this duty. The hajj both celebrates and reinforces the unity of all Muslims, a unity symbolized by the fact that men on this pilgrimage wear similar white garments. The most celebrated and photographed activity of the hajj is praying at the Kabah shrine, the most sacred place in the Muslim world. All mosques contain a marker called the
mihrab
pointing worshippers in the direction of Mecca. But in Mecca itself each
mihrab
points in the direction of the Kabah shrine. According to Muslims, this most sacred of places, which includes a black stone believed to be a meteor, was built by Adam and rebuilt by Abraham. It was desecrated by polytheists who ruled Mecca during Muhammad’s youth but was reconsecrated to the one true God after Muhammad and his followers took Mecca in 630
C.E
.
¹¹

Jihad

Of all the terms used in the world’s religions, none is as controversial as
jihad
. Jihad literally means “struggle,” and Muslims have traditionally understood it to point to two kinds of struggles: the spiritual struggle against pride and self-sufficiency; and the physical struggle against the “house of war,” namely, enemies of Islam. The second of these struggles calls for a variety of tactics, including preaching, teaching, and working for social justice. It may also include war.

Some apologists for Islam have tried to minimize the importance of jihad, and to insulate Islam from its extremists, by arguing that, of these two struggles, the spiritual struggle is higher. A Muslim merchant I met in Jerusalem took this argument further, contending that jihad has nothing whatsoever to do with war because jihad is nothing more than the personal struggle to be good. “Treating me with respect is jihad,” he said. “Not ripping me off is jihad.” The Quran, he added, never even mentions war.

But the Quran does mention war, and it does so repeatedly. One Quranic passage commands Muslims to “fight,” “slay,” and “expel” in the course of just two sentences (2:190–91), while another says that fighting is “prescribed . . . though it be hateful to you” (2:216). Whether it is better for a religion’s scriptures to largely ignore war (as the Christian New Testament does) or to carefully regulate war (as does the Quran) is an open question, but there is no debating the importance of the themes of fighting and killing in both the Quran and Islamic law. So while it is incorrect to translate
jihad
as “holy war,” the plain sense of this struggle in both the Quran and contemporary Islamic practice is both spiritual and military.

One of the challenges for practitioners of any religion is wrestling with elements in their tradition that have been used to justify evil and then bending those elements back toward the good. Many Christians ignore New Testament passages that blame Jews for the death of Jesus. But because some Christians have used these passages to justify hatred, persecution, and murder of Jews, the challenge is to attend to these words with care and then to drain them of anti-Semitic connotations. Similarly, the challenge for Muslims is to attend to passages in the Quran that extremists have used to justify unjust killing. Many Muslims are meeting this challenge. To suicide bombers, they point out that the Quran condemns suicide unequivocally—“Do not kill yourselves” (4:29)—and promises hell for those who do so. To those who kill women or children or civilians, they point out that the Quran condemns mass murder (5:32) and insists on proportionality (2:194). Since the seventh century, Islamic law has been committed to vigorously defending the rights of noncombatants.
¹²

According to a recent survey, most Muslims in Nigeria, Lebanon, and Turkey refuse to accept the legitimacy of suicide bombings even in defense of Islam. Unfortunately, in each of these countries significant minorities (42 percent in Nigeria, 34 percent in Lebanon, and 16 percent in Turkey) believe that suicide bombing is justifiable. In the Palestinian territories, 70 percent of Muslims say that suicide bombings meet their criteria for justice.
¹³

For all the emphasis on jihad among Islamic extremists and Western neoconservatives, you would think that this is one of Islam’s central concepts. It is not. As the Shahadah intimates, the three keywords in the Islamic tradition are Allah, Muhammad, and the Quran. To see the world as Muslims see it, you need to look through these lenses.

Allah

Allah
is the Arabic word for God, so Arab-speaking Muslims and Christians alike refer to God as Allah, which literally means “the God” (
al-ilah
). As the article
the
implies, this God is singular, and the word Muslims employ to underscore this singularity is
tawhid
, or divine oneness. Christians, of course, are monotheists, but theirs is a soft monotheism in which the one God appears as a Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Islamic monotheism is harder. Like Jews, Muslims reject the Christian and Hindu notion that God can incarnate in a human body. Muslims also join Jews in rejecting visual images of God on the ground that such images, which cannot possibly capture the reality of the divine, tempt us toward idolatry. God is, for Muslims, absolutely and totally transcendent—far beyond all human conceptions of Him. So while Western art has until modern times been preoccupied with the Christ figure, Islamic art has centered on calligraphy, and particularly on the Arabic letters of the Quran.

God’s names are legion in the Quran. In the Bismillah, the oft-repeated phrase that introduces all but one Quranic sura (chapter 9), Allah is referred to as All Compassionate and All Merciful. Elsewhere in the Quran, Allah is called Forgiving, Generous, Loving, Powerful, Eternal, Knowing, Wrathful, and Just. In one passage He is called “the Sovereign Lord, the Holy One, Peace, the Keeper of Faith, the Guardian, the Majestic, the Compeller, and the Superb” (59:23). Muhammad reportedly said that Allah has ninety-nine names. Some Muslim thinkers divide this list into feminine
jalal
names (of beauty) and masculine
jamal
names (of majesty). But unlike many Christians who think of God as male, Muslims worship a deity who is beyond gender—neither male nor female.

Given this emphasis on tawhid, it should not be surprising that the gravest mistake from a Muslim perspective is
shirk
. Often translated as “idolatry,”
shirk
refers to any practice or belief that ignores the unity and uniqueness of God. Polytheism is shirk, but so is likening God to anything that is not God. It is shirk to take money, power, or nation as your ultimate concern. Muslims disagree about whether belief in the Christian Trinity is shirk or the lesser offense of
kafir
(unbelief), but by either name it must be avoided. Jesus is revered as a prophet in Islam; the calligraphy of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem includes every Quranic passage mentioning Jesus. Muslims insist, however, that Jesus was neither Savior nor Son of God. In fact, the purpose of the Dome of the Rock’s inscriptions is to assert the truth of tawhid over against the falsehood of the Trinity. “There is no god but God. He is One. He has no associate,” these inscriptions insist, adding that since Allah has neither partners nor children, we should “say not ‘Three’.” Or, as the Quran puts it, “Say: ‘He is God, One, God, the Everlasting Refuge, who has not begotten, and has not been begotten, and equal to Him is not any one’ ” (112:1–4).

Muhammad

In a book called
The 100
:
A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History
, the top spot went to Muhammad (570–632
C.E.
).
¹⁴
This was a controversial choice. Christianity has almost twice as many adherents as Islam, yet Muhammad was ranked ahead of Jesus (who came in second). How could this be?

First, Muhammad did more for Islam than Jesus did for Christianity. Jesus was a great religious teacher, but he left it to Paul (who is ranked sixth) to establish Christianity and spread Jesus’s teachings. If Jesus wrote anything, nothing of His writing survives, while Paul is credited as the author of nearly half of the New Testament’s books. In purely religious terms, Muhammad did the work of Jesus and Paul combined. He was both a charismatic and a bureaucratic leader. He founded Islam and, though Muslims insist he did not write the Quran, he was the prophet through whom this revelation came into the world. Today Muslims look to Muhammad as a model for their own lives. The Hadith, a scriptural collection of his sayings and actions second in authority only to the Quran, has long provided a basis for Islamic law. Whereas Christians ask, “What would Jesus do?” Muslims ask, “What would Muhammad do?”

Second, Muhammad was also a great political and military man—a legislator, diplomat, and general. Unlike Jesus, who never married, and the Buddha, who abandoned his wife, Muhammad accomplished all this while maintaining an extended family network that, upon his death, included nine wives. Muhammad was the only person ever to achieve this combination of spiritual and secular success. “He was,” a Muslim admirer writes, “a religious teacher, a social reformer, a moral guide, a political thinker, a military genius, an administrative colossus, a faithful friend, a wonderful companion, a devoted husband, a loving father—all in one.”
¹⁵
Obviously this is faith talking, but even outsiders can see that Muhammad was the vehicle for both a new religion and a new political and economic order. While Jesus refused the sword, Muhammad led armies. While Jesus eschewed politics, Muhammad ruled over a vast empire that extended at his death over most of the Arabian Peninsula. Moreover, the scripture Muhammad brought into the world attends to more topics than the Christ-inspired New Testament. As much about society as it is about spirituality, the Quran speaks of prayer and providence, marriage and divorce, breastfeeding and menstruation, lending and law.

Given Muhammad’s unprecedented accomplishments, it should not be surprising that some Muslims used to call their religion Mohammedanism. But this is going too far. While Christians worship Jesus as God, Muslims have always insisted that Muhammad was only a human being. There is one and only one Allah in Islam, and He does not take human form.

As scholar of religion Wilfred Cantwell Smith has observed, the closest parallel to Jesus in the Islamic world is not Muhammad but the Quran. For Christians, the gift God sent to the world is Jesus, who came in the form of a human body. For Muslims that gift is the Quran, which came in the form of the Arabic language. So Muhammad, who is traditionally said to be illiterate, is more like the Virgin Mary than like her son. Whereas the Word of God that is Jesus came into the world through the pure vessel of a woman who had never had sex, the Word of God that is the Quran came into the world through the pure vessel of a man who could neither read nor write. Reciting the Quran, therefore, is like partaking of the Christian Eucharist. It is how you incorporate the divine into your body.
¹⁶

Born in Mecca and orphaned as a child, Muhammad was a forty-year-old merchant married to an older woman named Khadijah when God first came to him in a cave on Mount Hira outside of Mecca. In this place, where Muhammad was known to withdraw for prayer and contemplation, the angel Gabriel interrupted his idylls with a command to “Recite.” Muhammad was terrified. But recite he did, from 610 until these revelations came to an end shortly before his death in 632.

Islam dates its origins, however, not from these recitations but from the formation of the Muslim community in 622. In this year, Muhammad and his earliest followers fled from Mecca, where his criticisms of local polytheistic traditions were met with scorn, to Yathrib, now known as Medina. There they established the Muslim community, or
ummah
. Today this event, known as the
hijra
(emigration), marks the beginning of the Islamic calendar, which is itself marked by the letters
A.H.
, meaning “in the year of the hijra.”