About the Book
About the Author
Also by Reza Aslan
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Preface to the Updated Edition
Prologue: The Clash of Monotheisms
Author’s Note
Chronology of Key Events
Maps
1. The Sanctuary in the Desert
PRE-ISLAMIC ARABIA
2. The Keeper of the Keys
MUHAMMAD IN MECCA
3. The City of the Prophet
THE FIRST MUSLIMS
4. Fight in the Way of God
THE MEANING OF JIHAD
5. The Rightly Guided Ones
THE SUCCESSORS TO MUHAMMAD
6. This Religion Is a Science
THE DEVELOPMENT OF ISLAMIC THEOLOGY AND LAW
7. In the Footsteps of Martyrs
FROM SHI‘ISM TO KHOMEINISM
8. Stain Your Prayer Rug with Wine
THE SUFI WAY
9. An Awakening in the East
THE RESPONSE TO COLONIALISM
10. Slouching Toward Medina
THE QUEST FOR ISLAMIC DEMOCRACY
11. Welcome to the Islamic Reformation
THE FUTURE OF ISLAM
Glossary
Notes
Works Consulted
Index
Copyright
Though it is the fastest growing religion in the world, Islam remains shrouded in ignorance and fear. What is the essence of this ancient faith? Is it a religion of peace or of war? How does Allah differ from the God of Jews and Christians? Can an Islamic state be founded on democratic values such as pluralism and human rights?
In No god but God, challenging the ‘clash of civilisations’ mentality that has distorted our view of Islam, Aslan explains this faith in all its complexity, beauty and compassion.
DR. REZA ASLAN is an internationally acclaimed writer and scholar of religions. His first book, No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam, was an international bestseller. Shortlisted for the Guadian First Book Award, it has been translated into thirteen languages and was named by Blackwells as one of the hundred most important books of the last decade. He is also the author of How to Win a Cosmic War: Confronting Radical Religion, as well as the editor of Tablet & Pen: Literary Landscapes from the Modern Middle East. Born in Iran, he now lives in Los Angeles, where he is associate professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside.
How to Win a Cosmic War:
Confronting Radical Religion
For my mother, Soheyla,
and my father, Hassan
Thank you, Mom and Dad, for never doubting me; Catherine Bell, for getting me started; Frank Conroy, for giving me a shot; Elyse Cheney, for finding me; Daniel Menaker, for trusting me; Amanda Fortini, for fixing me; my teachers, for challenging me; and Ian Werrett, for absolutely everything else.
In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful
TEN YEARS AFTER the attacks of 9/11, anti-Muslim sentiment is at an all-time high throughout Europe and North America, far higher than it was in the immediate aftermath of that tragic day in 2001. Polls show that nearly half the populations in the United States and Canada hold unfavorable views toward Islam. In Europe, the passage of laws curtailing the rights and freedoms of Muslims and the success of avowedly anti-Muslim politicians and political parties have led to an even greater sense of marginalization and disenfranchisement among Muslim communities.
Many reasons have been given to explain this sudden surge in anti-Muslim hysteria. Certainly the global financial crisis has played a role. In times of economic distress, it is only natural for people to look for a scapegoat upon whom to thrust their fears and anxieties. In many parts of Europe and North America, fear of Islam goes hand in hand with larger concerns over immigration and the increasingly borderless, increasingly heterogeneous world in which we live.
It is also true that, a decade after the start of the so-called war on terror, a sense of war weariness has descended upon the United States and its Western allies. Now that the patriotic fervor with which the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq were launched has dissipated and the architect of the 9/11 attacks—Osama bin Laden—killed, many are wondering what exactly has been achieved with the trillions of dollars spent and the thousands of lives lost fighting the so-called “war on terror.” At the same time, a spate of “homegrown” terror attacks in Europe and North America has created a heightened sense of concern, even in the United States, where the economically prosperous, socially integrated, and upwardly mobile Muslim community is no longer thought to be immune to the kind of militant ideology that has found a foothold among some young Muslims in Europe.
But while these are all important determinants in explaining the tide of anti-Muslim sentiment that has washed over Europe and North America in recent years, there is another, more fundamental factor that must be addressed. It involves a 2010 poll showing that nearly a quarter of Americans continue to believe that President Barack Obama is himself a Muslim, a 10 percent jump from a similar survey taken in 2008. Among registered Republicans, the number is nearly 40 percent; among self-described Tea Party members, it is upward of 60 percent. In fact, polls consistently show that the more one disagrees with President Obama’s policies on, say, healthcare or financial regulation, the more likely one is to consider him a Muslim.
Simply put, Islam in the United States has become otherized. It has become a receptacle into which can be tossed all the angst and apprehension people feel about the faltering economy, about the new and unfamiliar political order, about the shifting cultural, racial, and religious landscapes that have fundamentally altered the world. Across Europe and North America, whatever is fearful, whatever is foreign, whatever is alien and unsafe is being tagged with the label “Islam.”
This is not an unexpected development, certainly not in the United States. Indeed, everything that is currently being said about America’s diverse Muslim population—that they are foreign and exotic and un-American—was said about Catholic and Jewish immigrants nearly a century ago. Neither is the otherizing of Islam a new phenomenon in the Western world. On the contrary, from the Crusades to the clash of civilizations, Islam has always played a significant role as the West’s quintessential other. Still, it is dispiriting to note that even in a country founded on the principle of religious freedom, a large swath of the population firmly believes that such freedoms do not apply to Muslims, that Muslims are somehow different.
When I published No god but God in 2005, my aim was to challenge this assumption. I wanted to demonstrate that there is nothing exceptional or extraordinary about Islam, that the same historical, cultural, and geographic considerations that have influenced the development of every religion in every part of the world have similarly influenced the development of Islam, transforming it into one of the most eclectic, most diverse faiths in the history of religions. And while that message is as important today as it was back then—perhaps even more so—we must recognize that greater knowledge about Islam is not enough to alter people’s perceptions of Muslims. Minds are not changed merely through acquiring data or information (if that were the case it would take no effort to convince Americans that Obama is, in fact, a Christian). Rather, it is solely through the slow and steady building of personal relationships that one discovers the fundamental truth that all people everywhere have the same dreams and aspirations, that all people struggle with the same fears and anxieties.
Of course, such a process takes time. It may take another generation or so for this era of anti-Muslim frenzy to be looked back upon with the same shame and derision with which the current generation views the anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish hysterics of the past. But that day will no doubt come. Perhaps then we will recognize the intimate connections that bind us all together beyond any cultural, ethnic, or religious affiliations.
Inshallah. God willing.
MIDNIGHT, AND FIVE hours to Marrakech. I have always had trouble sleeping on trains. There is something about the unrelenting rhythm and hum of the wheels as they roll over the tracks that always keeps me awake. It is like a distant melody that’s too loud to ignore. Not even the darkness that inundates the compartments at night seems to help. It is worse at night, when the stars are the only lights visible in the vast, muted desert whizzing by my window.
This is an unfortunate quirk, because the best way to travel by train through Morocco is asleep. The trains are flooded with illegal faux guides, who shift from cabin to cabin searching for tourists with whom to share their recommendations for the best restaurants, the cheapest hotels, the cleanest women. The faux guides in Morocco speak half a dozen languages, which makes them difficult to ignore. Usually, my olive skin, thick brows, and black hair keep them at bay. But the only way to avoid them completely is to be asleep, so that they have no choice but to move on to the next beleaguered traveler.
That is precisely what I thought was taking place in the compartment next to mine when I heard raised voices. It was an argument between what I assumed was a faux guide and a reluctant tourist. I could hear an inexorable cackle of Arabic spoken too quickly for me to understand, interrupted by the occasional piqued responses of an American.
I had witnessed this type of exchange before: in grands-taxis, at the bazaar, too often on the trains. In my few months in Morocco, I’d become accustomed to the abrupt fury of the locals, which can burst into a conversation like a clap of thunder, then—as you brace for the storm—dissolve just as quickly into a grumble and a friendly pat on the back.
The voices next door grew louder, and now I thought I grasped the matter. It wasn’t a faux guide at all. Someone was being chastised. It was difficult to tell, but I recognized the garbled Berber dialect the authorities sometimes use when they want to intimidate foreigners. The American kept saying “Wait a minute,” then, “Parlez-vous anglais? Parlez-vous français?” The Moroccan, I could tell, was demanding their passports.
Curious, I stood and stepped quietly over the knees of the snoring businessman slumped next to me. I slid open the door just enough to squeeze through and walked into the corridor. As my eyes adjusted to the light, I glimpsed the familiar red-and-black conductor’s uniform flashing across the glass door of the adjoining compartment. I knocked lightly and entered without waiting for a response.
“Salaam alay-kum,” I said. Peace be with you.
The conductor halted his diatribe and turned to me with the customary “Walay-kum salaam.” And to you, peace. His face was flushed and his eyes red, though not, it seemed, from anger. His uncombed hair and the heavy creases in his uniform indicated he had only just awakened. There was an indolent quality to his speech that made him difficult to understand. He was emboldened by my presence.
“Dear sir,” he said in clear and comprehensible Arabic, “this is not a nightclub. There are children here. This is not a nightclub.”
I had no idea what he meant.
The American gripped my shoulders and turned me toward him. “Will you please tell this man we were sleeping?” He was young and remarkably tall, with large green eyes and a shock of blond hair that hung down over his face and that he kept combing back with his fingers. “We were only sleeping,” he repeated, mouthing the words as though I were reading his lips. “Comprendez-vous?”
I turned back to the conductor and translated: “He says he was sleeping.”
The conductor was livid and, in his excitement, dropped once more into an incomprehensible Berber dialect. He began gesticulating wildly, his movements meant to indicate his sincerity. I was to understand that he would not be in such a fit over a sleeping couple. He had children, he kept saying. He was a father; he was a Muslim. There was more, but I stopped listening. My attention had fallen completely on the other person in the cabin.
She was sitting directly behind the man, purposely obscured by him: legs crossed casually, hands folded on her lap. Her hair was disheveled and her cheeks radiated heat. She wasn’t looking directly at us, but rather observing the scene through the bowed reflection we cast on the window.
“Did you tell him we were sleeping?” the American asked me.
“I don’t think he believes you,” I replied.
Though taken aback by my English, he was too shocked by the accusation to pursue it. “He doesn’t believe me? Great. What’s he going to do, stone us to death?”
“Malcolm!” the woman cried out, louder than it seemed she’d meant to. She reached up and pulled him down next to her.
“Fine,” Malcolm said with a sigh. “Just ask him how much he wants to go away.” He fumbled in his shirt pockets and took out a wad of tattered multicolored bills. Before he could fan them out, I stepped in front of him and put my arms out to the conductor.
“The American says he is sorry,” I said. “He is very, very sorry.”
Taking the conductor’s arm, I led him gently to the door, but he would not accept the apology. He again demanded their passports. I pretended not to understand. It all seemed a bit histrionic to me. Perhaps he had caught the couple acting inappropriately, but that would have warranted little more than a sharp rebuke. They were young; they were foreigners; they did not understand the complexities of social decorum in the Muslim world. Surely the conductor understood that. And yet he seemed genuinely disturbed and personally offended by this seemingly inoffensive couple. Again he insisted he was a father and a Muslim and a virtuous man. I agreed, and promised I would stay with the couple until we reached Marrakech.
“May God increase your kindness,” I said, and slid open the door.
The conductor touched his chest reluctantly and thanked me. Then, just as he was about to step into the corridor, he turned back into the compartment and pointed a trembling finger at the seated couple. “Christian!” he spat in English, his voice brimming with contempt. He slid the doors closed and we heard him make his way noisily down the corridor.
For a moment, no one spoke. I remained standing by the door, gripping the luggage rack as the train tilted through a wide turn. “That was an odd thing to say,” I said with a laugh.
“I’m Jennifer,” the girl said. “This is my husband, Malcolm. Thanks for helping us. Things could have gotten out of hand.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I’m sure he’s already forgotten all about it.”
“Well, there was nothing to forget,” Malcolm said.
“Of course.”
Suddenly, Malcolm was furious. “The truth is that man has been hovering over us ever since we boarded this train.”
“Malcolm,” Jennifer whispered, squeezing his hand. I tried to catch her eye but she would not look at me. Malcolm was shaking with anger.
“Why would he do that?” I asked.
“You heard him,” Malcolm said, his voice rising. “Because we’re Christians.”
I flinched. It was an involuntary reaction—a mere twitch of the eyebrows—but Jennifer caught it and said, almost in apology, “We’re missionaries. We’re on our way to the Western Sahara to preach the gospel.”
All at once, I understood why the conductor had been shadowing the couple; why he was so rancorous and unforgiving about having caught them in a compromising position. For the first time since entering the compartment I noticed a small, open cardboard box perched between two knapsacks on the luggage rack. The box was filled with green, pocket-sized New Testaments in Arabic translation. There were three or four missing.
“Would you like one?” Jennifer asked. “We’re passing them out.”
EVER SINCE THE ATTACKS of September 11, 2001, pundits, politicians, and preachers throughout the United States and Europe have argued that the world is embroiled in a “clash of civilizations,” to use Samuel Huntington’s now ubiquitous term, between the modern, enlightened, democratic societies of the West and the archaic, barbarous, autocratic societies of the Middle East. A few well-respected academics have carried this argument further by suggesting that the failure of democracy to emerge in the Muslim world is due in large part to Muslim culture, which they claim is intrinsically incompatible with Enlightenment values such as liberalism, pluralism, individualism, and human rights. It was therefore simply a matter of time before these two great civilizations, which have such conflicting ideologies, clashed with each other in some catastrophic way. And what better example do we need of this inevitability than the so-called war on terror?
But just beneath the surface of this misguided and divisive rhetoric is a more subtle, though far more detrimental, sentiment: that this is not so much a cultural conflict as a religious one; that we are not in the midst of a “clash of civilizations,” but rather a “clash of monotheisms.”
The clash-of-monotheisms mentality could be heard in the religiously polarizing, “good versus evil” rhetoric with which the United States launched the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It could be seen in the rising anti-Muslim vehemence that has become so much a part of the mainstream media’s discourse about the Middle East. It could be read in the opinion columns of right-wing ideologues who insist that Islam represents a backward and violent religion and culture totally at odds with “Western” values.
Of course, there is no shortage of anti-Christian and anti-Jewish propaganda in Islam. In fact, it sometimes seems that not even the most moderate preacher or politician in the Muslim world can resist advancing the occasional conspiracy theory regarding “the Crusaders and Jews,” by which most simply mean them: that faceless, colonialist, Zionist, imperialist “other” who is not us. So the clash of monotheisms is by no means a new phenomenon. Indeed, from the earliest days of the Islamic expansion to the bloody wars and inquisitions of the Crusades to the tragic consequences of colonialism and the cycle of violence in Israel/Palestine, the hostility, mistrust, and often violent intolerance that has marked relations among Jews, Christians, and Muslims has been one of Western history’s most enduring themes.
Over the last few years, however, as international conflicts have increasingly been framed in apocalyptic terms and political agendas on all sides couched in theological language, it has become impossible to ignore the startling similarities between the antagonistic and uninformed rhetoric that fueled the destructive religious wars of the past, and that which drives the current conflicts of the Middle East. When the Reverend Jerry Vines, past president of the Southern Baptist Convention, calls the Prophet Muhammad “a demon-possessed pedophile,” he sounds eerily like the medieval papal propagandists for whom Muhammad was the Antichrist and the Islamic expansion a sign of the Apocalypse. When the Republican senator from Oklahoma, James Inhofe, stands before the U.S. Congress and insists that the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East are not political or territorial battles but “a contest over whether or not the word of God is true,” he speaks, knowingly or not, the language of the Crusades.
One could argue that the clash of monotheisms is the inevitable result of monotheism itself. Whereas a religion of many gods posits many myths to describe the human condition, a religion of one god tends to be monomythic; it not only rejects all other gods, it rejects all other explanations for God. If there is only one God, then there may be only one truth, and that can easily lead to bloody conflicts of irreconcilable absolutisms. Missionary activity, while commendable for providing health and education to the impoverished throughout the world, is nonetheless predicated on the belief that there is but one path to God, and that all other paths lead toward sin and damnation.
Malcolm and Jennifer, as I discovered on our way to Marrakech, were part of a rapidly growing movement of Christian missionaries who have increasingly begun to focus on the Muslim world. Because Christian evangelism is often bitterly reproached in Muslim countries—thanks in large part to the lingering memory of the colonial endeavor, when Europe’s disastrous “civilizing mission” went hand in hand with a fervently anti-Islamic “Christianizing mission”—some evangelical institutions now teach their missionaries to “go undercover” in the Muslim world by taking on Muslim identities, wearing Muslim clothing (including the veil), even fasting and praying as Muslims. At the same time, the United States government has encouraged large numbers of Christian aid organizations to take an active role in rebuilding the infrastructures of Iraq and Afghanistan in the wake of the two wars, giving ammunition to those who seek to portray the occupation of those countries as another Crusade of Christians against Muslims. Add to this the perception, held by many in the Muslim world, that there is collusion between the United States and Israel against Muslim interests in general and Palestinian rights in particular, and one can understand how Muslims’ resentment and suspicion of the West has only increased, and with disastrous consequences.
Considering how effortlessly religious dogma has become intertwined with political ideology, how can we overcome the clash-of-monotheisms mentality that has so deeply entrenched itself in the modern world? Clearly, education and tolerance are essential. But what is most desperately needed is not so much a better appreciation of our neighbor’s religion as a broader, more complete understanding of religion itself.
Religion, it must be understood, is not faith. Religion is the story of faith. It is an institutionalized system of symbols and metaphors (read rituals and myths) that provides a common language with which a community of faith can share with each other their numinous encounter with the Divine Presence. Religion is concerned not with genuine history, but with sacred history, which does not course through time like a river. Rather, sacred history is like a hallowed tree whose roots dig deep into primordial time and whose branches weave in and out of genuine history with little concern for the boundaries of space and time. Indeed, it is precisely at those moments when sacred and genuine history collide that religions are born. The clash of monotheisms occurs when faith, which is mysterious and ineffable and which eschews all categorizations, becomes entangled in the gnarled branches of religion.
THIS, THEN, IS the story of Islam. It is a story anchored in the memories of the first generation of Muslims and catalogued by the Prophet Muhammad’s earliest biographers, Ibn Ishaq (d. 768), Ibn Hisham (d. 833), al-Baladhuri (d. 892), and al-Tabari (d. 922). At the heart of the story is the Glorious Quran—the divine revelations Muhammad received during a span of some twenty-three years in Mecca and Medina. While the Quran, for reasons that will become clear, tells us very little about Muhammad’s life (indeed, Muhammad is rarely mentioned in it), it is invaluable in revealing the ideology of the Muslim faith in its infancy: that is, before the faith became a religion, before the religion became an institution.
Still, we must never forget that as indispensable and historically valuable as the Quran and the traditions of the Prophet may be, they are nevertheless grounded in mythology. It is a shame that this word, myth, which originally signified nothing more than stories of the supernatural, has come to be regarded as synonymous with falsehood, when in fact myths are always true. By their very nature, myths inhere both legitimacy and credibility. Whatever truths they convey have little to do with historical fact. To ask whether Moses actually parted the Red Sea, or whether Jesus truly raised Lazarus from the dead, or whether the word of God indeed poured through the lips of Muhammad, is to ask irrelevant questions. The only question that matters with regard to a religion and its mythology is “What do these stories mean?”
The fact is that no evangelist in any of the world’s great religions would have been at all concerned with recording his or her objective observations of historical events. They would not have been recording observations at all! Rather, they were interpreting those events in order to give structure and meaning to the myths and rituals of their community, providing future generations with a common identity, a common aspiration, a common story. After all, religion is, by definition, interpretation; and by definition, all interpretations are valid. However, some interpretations are more reasonable than others. And as the Jewish philosopher and mystic Moses Maimonides noted so many years ago, it is reason, not imagination, which determines what is probable and what is not.
The way scholars form a reasonable interpretation of a particular religious tradition is by merging that religion’s myths with what can be known about the spiritual and political landscape in which those myths arose. By relying on the Quran and the traditions of the Prophet, along with our understanding of the cultural milieu in which Muhammad was born and in which his message was formed, we can more reasonably reconstruct the origins and evolution of Islam. This is no easy task, though it is made somewhat easier by the fact that Muhammad appears to have lived “in the full view of history,” to quote Ernest Renan, and died an enormously successful prophet (something for which his Christian and Jewish detractors have never forgiven him).
Once a reasonable interpretation of the rise of Islam in sixth- and seventh-century Arabia has been formed, it is possible to trace how Muhammad’s revolutionary message of moral accountability and social egalitarianism was gradually reinterpreted by his successors into competing ideologies of rigid legalism and uncompromising orthodoxy, which fractured the Muslim community and widened the gap between mainstream, or Sunni, Islam and its two major branches, Shi‘ism and Sufism. Although sharing a common sacred history, each group strove to develop its own interpretation of scripture, its own ideas on theology and the law, and its own community of faith. And each had different responses to the experience of colonialism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Indeed, that experience forced the entire Muslim community to reconsider the role of faith in modern society. While some Muslims pushed for the creation of an indigenous Islamic Enlightenment by eagerly developing Islamic alternatives to Western secular notions of democracy, others advocated separation from Western cultural ideals in favor of the complete “Islamization” of society. With the end of colonialism and the birth of the Islamic state in the twentieth century, these two groups have refined their arguments against the backdrop of the ongoing debate in the Muslim world over the prospect of forming a genuine Islamic democracy. But as we shall see, at the center of the debate over Islam and democracy is a far more significant internal struggle over who gets to define the Islamic Reformation that is already under way in most of the Muslim world.
The reformation of Christianity was a terrifying process, but it was not, as it has so often been presented, a collision between Protestant reform and Catholic intransigence. Rather, the Christian Reformation was an argument over the future of the faith—a violent, bloody argument that engulfed Europe in devastation and war for more than a century.
Thus far, the Islamic Reformation has proved no different. For most of the Western world, September 11, 2001, signaled the commencement of a worldwide struggle between Islam and the West—the ultimate manifestation of the clash of civilizations. From the Islamic perspective, however, the attacks on New York and Washington were part of an ongoing clash between those Muslims who strive to reconcile their religious values with the realities of the modern world, and those who react to modernism and reform by reverting—sometimes fanatically—to the “fundamentals” of their faith.
This book is not just a critical reexamination of the origins and evolution of Islam, nor is it merely an account of the current struggle among Muslims to define the future of this magnificent yet misunderstood faith. This book is, above all else, an argument for reform. There are those who will call it apostasy, but that is not troubling. No one speaks for God—not even the prophets (who speak about God). There are those who will call it apology, but that is hardly a bad thing. An apology is a defense, and there is no higher calling than to defend one’s faith, especially from ignorance and hate, and thus to help shape the story of that faith, a story which, in this case, began fourteen centuries ago, at the end of the sixth century C.E., in the sacred city of Mecca, the land that gave birth to Muhammad ibn Abdallah ibn Abdal-Muttalib: the Prophet and Messenger of God. May peace and blessings be upon him.
While there is a widely recognized system for the transliteration of Arabic into English, along with specific diacritical markings to indicate long and short vowels, I have endeavored, for the sake of clarity and ease, to present all Arabic words in their simplest and most recognizable English rendering. The Arabic letter hamza, which is rarely vocalized, will occasionally be marked with an apostrophe. The letter ain—best pronounced as a glottal stop—will be marked with a reverse apostrophe, as in the word bay‘ah, meaning “oath.” Further, rather than pluralizing Arabic nouns according to their proper grammatical rules, I will simply add an s: thus, Kahins, instead of Kuhhan.
Unless otherwise indicated, all translations of the Quran are my own.
570 |
Birth of the Prophet Muhammad |
610 |
Muhammad receives first Revelation at Mt. Hira |
622 |
Muslim emigration (Hijra) to Yathrib (later called Medina) |
624 |
Battle of Badr against Mecca and the Quraysh |
625 |
Battle of Uhud |
627 |
Battle of the Trench |
628 |
Treaty of Hudaybiyyah between Medina and Mecca |
630 |
Muhammad’s victory over the Quraysh and the Muslim occupation of Mecca |
632 |
Muhammad dies |
632–634 |
Caliphate of Abu Bakr |
634–644 |
Caliphate of Umar ibn al-Khattab |
644–656 |
Caliphate of Uthman ibn Affan |
656–661 |
Caliphate of Ali ibn Abi Talib, considered the first Imam of Shi‘ism |
661–750 |
The Umayyad Dynasty |
680 |
Husayn ibn Ali, grandson of the Prophet, killed at Karbala |
750–850 |
The Abbasid Dynasty |
756 |
Last Umayyad prince, Abd al-Rahman, establishes rival Caliphate in Spain |
874 |
The occultation of the Twelfth Imam, or the Mahdi |
934–1062 |
Buyid Dynasty rules western Iran, Iraq, and Mesopotamia |
969–1171 |
Fatimid Dynasty rules North Africa, Egypt, and Syria |
977–1186 |
Ghaznavid Dynasty rules Khurasan, Afghanistan, and northern India |
1095 |
Christian Crusades launched by Pope Urban II |
1250–1517 |
Mamluk Dynasty rules Egypt and Syria |
1281–1924 |
The Ottoman Empire |
1501–1725 |
Safavid Dynasty rules Iran |
1526–1858 |
Mughal Dynasty rules India |
1857 |
The Indian Revolt against the British |
1924 |
Creation of secular Turkish republic and the end of the Ottoman Caliphate |
1925 |
Beginning of Pahlavi Dynasty in Iran |
1928 |
The Society of Muslim Brothers founded by Hasan al-Banna in Egypt |
1932 |
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia established |
1947 |
Pakistan founded as first Islamic state |
1948 |
State of Israel established |
1952 |
Free Officers revolt in Egypt, led by Gamal Abd al-Nasser |
1979 |
Soviets invade Afghanistan |
1980 |
Iran Hostage Crisis |
1987 |
First Intifada, or Palestinian Uprising |
1988 |
Hamas founded |
1989 |
Soviet army pulls out of Afghanistan |
1991 |
The Persian Gulf War; al-Qaeda formed |
1992 |
Algerian Civil War |
2000 |
Second Intifada in Israel/Palestine |
2001 |
Al-Qaeda attack on New York and Washington |
2003 |
U.S.-led invasion of Iraq |
2006 |
Hamas wins elections in Palestine |
2008 |
Israeli invasion of Gaza |
2009 |
Green Movement protests in Iran |
2010 |
U.S. combat mission in Iraq officially ends |
2011 |
Democratic protests erupt across North Africa |
2011 |
Osama bin Laden killed in Pakistan |
Arabia. The Sixth Century C.E.
IN THE ARID, desolate basin of Mecca, surrounded on all sides by the bare mountains of the Arabian desert, stands a small, nondescript sanctuary that the pagan Arabs refer to as the Ka‘ba: the Cube. The Ka‘ba is a squat, roofless edifice made of unmortared stones and sunk into a valley of sand. Its four walls—so low it is said a young goat can leap over them—are swathed in strips of heavy cloth dyed purple and red. At its base, two small doors are chiseled into the gray stone, allowing entry into the inner sanctum. It is here, inside the cramped interior of the sanctuary, that the gods of pre-Islamic Arabia reside: Hubal, the Syrian god of the moon; al-Uzza, the powerful goddess the Egyptians knew as Isis and the Greeks called Aphrodite; al-Kutba, the Nabataean god of writing and divination; Jesus, the incarnate god of the Christians, and his holy mother, Mary.
In all, there are said to be three hundred sixty idols housed in and around the Ka‘ba, representing every god recognized in the Arabian Peninsula. During the holy months, when the desert fairs and the great markets envelop the city of Mecca, pilgrims from all over the Peninsula make their way to this barren land to visit their tribal deities. They sing songs of worship and dance in front of the gods; they make sacrifices and pray for health. Then, in a remarkable ritual—the origins of which are a mystery—the pilgrims gather as a group and rotate around the Ka‘ba seven times, some pausing momentarily to kiss each corner of the sanctuary before being captured and swept away once more by the current of bodies.
The pagan Arabs gathered around the Ka‘ba believe this sanctuary to have been founded by Adam, the first man. They believe that Adam’s original edifice was destroyed by the Great Flood, then rebuilt by Noah. They believe that after Noah, the Ka‘ba was forgotten for generations until Abraham rediscovered it while visiting his firstborn son, Ismail, and his concubine, Hagar, both of whom had been banished to this wilderness at the behest of Abraham’s wife, Sarah. And they believe it was at this very spot that Abraham nearly sacrificed Ismail before being stopped by the promise that, like his younger brother, Isaac, Ismail would also sire a great nation, the descendants of whom now spin over the sandy Meccan valley like a desert whirlwind.
Of course, these are just stories intended to convey what the Ka‘ba means, not where it came from. The truth is that no one knows who built the Ka‘ba, or how long it has been here. It is likely that the sanctuary was not even the original reason for the sanctity of this place. Near the Ka‘ba is a well called Zamzam, fed by a bountiful underground spring, which tradition claims had been placed there to nourish Hagar and Ismail. It requires no stretch of the imagination to recognize how a spring situated in the middle of the desert could become a sacred place for the wandering Bedouin tribes of Arabia. The Ka‘ba itself may have been erected many years later, not as some sort of Arab pantheon, but as a secure place to store the consecrated objects used in the rituals that had evolved around Zamzam. Indeed, the earliest traditions concerning the Ka‘ba claim that inside its walls was a pit, dug into the sand, which contained “treasures” (ritual objects) magically guarded by a snake.
It is also possible that the original sanctuary held some cosmological significance for the ancient Arabs. Not only were many of the idols in the Ka‘ba associated with the planets and stars, but the legend that they totaled three hundred sixty in number suggests astral connotations. The seven circumambulations of the Ka‘ba—called tawaf in Arabic and still the primary ritual of the annual Hajj pilgrimage—may have been intended to mimic the motion of the heavenly bodies. It was, after all, a common belief among ancient peoples that their temples and sanctuaries were terrestrial replicas of the cosmic mountain from which creation sprang. The Ka‘ba, like the Pyramids in Egypt or the Temple in Jerusalem, may have been constructed as an axis mundi, sometimes called a “navel spot”: a sacred space around which the whole of the universe revolves, the link between the earth and the solid dome of heaven. That would explain why there was once a nail driven into the floor of the Ka‘ba that the ancient Arabs referred to as “the navel of the world.” According to the traditions, the ancient pilgrims would sometimes enter the sanctuary, tear off their clothes, and place their own navels over the nail, thereby merging with the cosmos.
Alas, as with so many things about the Ka‘ba, its origins are mere speculation. The only thing scholars can say with any certainty is that by the sixth century C.E., this small sanctuary made of mud and stone had become the center of religious life in pre-Islamic Arabia: that intriguing yet ill-defined era of paganism that Muslims refer to as the Jahiliyyah—“the Time of Ignorance.”
TRADITIONALLY, THE JAHILIYYAH has been defined by Muslims as an era of moral depravity and religious discord: a time when the sons of Ismail had obscured belief in the one true God and plunged the Arabian Peninsula into the darkness of idolatry. But then, like the rising of the dawn, the Prophet Muhammad emerged in Mecca at the beginning of the seventh century, preaching a message of absolute monotheism and uncompromising morality. Through the miraculous revelations he received from God, Muhammad put an end to the paganism of the Arabs and replaced the “Time of Ignorance” with the universal religion of Islam.
In actuality, the religious experience of the pre-Islamic Arabs was far more complex than this tradition suggests. It is true that before the rise of Islam the Arabian Peninsula was dominated by paganism. But “paganism” is a somewhat meaningless and derogatory catchall term created by those outside the tradition to categorize what is in reality an almost unlimited variety of beliefs and practices. The word paganus means “a rustic villager” or “a boor,” and was originally used by Christians as a term of abuse to describe those who followed any religion but theirs. In some ways, this is an appropriate designation. For unlike Christianity, paganism is not so much a unified system of beliefs and practices as it is a religious perspective, one that is receptive to a multitude of influences and interpretations. Often, though not always, polytheistic, paganism strives for neither universalism nor moral absolutism. There is no such thing as a pagan creed or a pagan canon. Nothing exists that could properly be termed “pagan orthodoxy” or “pagan heterodoxy.”
What is more, when referring to the religious experience of the pre-Islamic Arabs, it is important to make a distinction between the nomadic Bedouin who wandered through the Arabian deserts and the sedentary tribes that had settled in major population centers like Mecca. Bedouin paganism in sixth-century Arabia may have encompassed a range of beliefs and practices—from fetishism to totemism to manism (ancestor cults)—but it was not as concerned with the more metaphysical questions that were cultivated in the larger sedentary societies of Arabia, particularly with regard to issues like the afterlife. This is not to say that the Bedouin practiced nothing more than a primitive idolatry. On the contrary, there is every reason to believe that the Bedouin of pre-Islamic Arabia enjoyed a rich and diverse religious tradition. However, the nomadic lifestyle is one that requires a religion to address immediate concerns: Which god can lead us to water? Which god can heal our illnesses?
In contrast, paganism among the sedentary societies of Arabia had developed from its earlier and simpler manifestations into a complex form of neo-animism, providing a host of divine and semi-divine intermediaries who stood between the creator god and his creation. This creator god was called Allah, which is not a proper name but a contraction of the word al-ilah, meaning simply “the god.” Like his Greek counterpart, Zeus, Allah was originally an ancient rain/sky deity who had been elevated into the role of the supreme god of the pre-Islamic Arabs. Though a powerful deity to swear by, Allah’s eminent status in the Arab pantheon rendered him, like most High Gods, beyond the supplications of ordinary people. Only in times of great peril would anyone bother consulting him. Otherwise, it was far more expedient to turn to the lesser, more accessible gods who acted as Allah’s intercessors, the most powerful of whom were his three daughters, Allat (“the goddess”), al-Uzza (“the mighty”), and Manat (the goddess of fate, whose name is probably derived from the Hebrew word mana, meaning “portion” or “share”). These divine mediators were not only represented in the Ka‘ba, they had their own individual shrines throughout the Arabian Peninsula: Allat in the city of Ta’if; al-Uzza in Nakhlah; and Manat in Qudayd. It was to them that the Arabs prayed when they needed rain, when their children were ill, when they entered into battle or embarked on a journey deep into the treacherous desert abodes of the Jinn—those intelligent, imperceptible, and salvable beings made of smokeless flame who are called “genies” in the West and who function as the nymphs and fairies of Arabian mythology.
There were no priests and no pagan scriptures in pre-Islamic Arabia, but that does not mean the gods remained silent. They regularly revealed themselves through the ecstatic utterances of a group of cultic officials known as the Kahins. The Kahins were poets who functioned primarily as soothsayers and who, for a fee, would fall into a trance in which they would reveal divine messages through rhyming couplets. Poets already had an important role in pre-Islamic society as bards, tribal historians, social commentators, dispensers of moral philosophy, and, on occasion, administrators of justice. But the Kahins represented a more spiritual function of the poet. Emerging from every social and economic stratum, and including a number of women, the Kahins interpreted dreams, cleared up crimes, found lost animals, settled disputes, and expounded upon ethics. As with their Pythian counterparts at Delphi, however, the Kahins’ oracles were vague and deliberately imprecise; it was the supplicant’s responsibility to figure out what the gods actually meant.
Although considered the link between humanity and the divine, the Kahins did not communicate directly with the gods but rather accessed them through the Jinn and other spirits who were such an integral part of the Jahiliyyah religious experience. Even so, neither the Kahins nor anyone else, for that matter, had access to Allah. In fact, the god who had created the heavens and the earth, who had fashioned human beings in his own image, was the only god not represented by an idol in the Ka‘ba. Although called “the King of the Gods” and “the Lord of the House,” Allah was not the central deity in the Ka‘ba. That honor belonged to Hubal, the Syrian god who had been brought to Mecca centuries before the rise of Islam.
Despite Allah’s minimal role in the religious cult of pre-Islamic Arabia, his eminent position in the Arab pantheon is a clear indication of just how far paganism in the Arabian Peninsula had evolved from its simple animistic roots. Perhaps the most striking example of this development can be seen in the processional chant that tradition claims the pagan pilgrims sang as they approached the Ka‘ba:
Here I am, O Allah, here I am.
You have no partner,
Except such a partner as you have.
You possess him and all that is his.
This remarkable proclamation, with its obvious resemblance to the Muslim profession of faith—“There is no god but God”—may reveal the earliest traces in pre-Islamic Arabia of what the German philologist Max Müller termed henotheism: the belief in a single High God, without necessarily rejecting the existence of other, subordinate gods. The earliest evidence of henotheism in Arabia can be traced back to a tribe called the Amir, who lived near modern-day Yemen in the second century B.C.E., and who worshipped a High God they called dhu-Samawi, “The Lord of the Heavens.” While the details of the Amirs’ religion have been lost to history, most scholars are convinced that by the sixth century C.E., henotheism had become the standard belief of the vast majority of sedentary Arabs, who not only accepted Allah as their High God, but insisted that he was the same god as Yahweh, the god of the Jews.
The Jewish presence in the Arabian Peninsula can, in theory, be traced to the Babylonian Exile a thousand years earlier, though subsequent migrations may have taken place in 70 C.E., after Rome’s sacking of the Temple in Jerusalem, and again in 132 C.E., after the messianic uprising of Simon Bar Kochba. For the most part, the Jews were a thriving and highly influential diaspora whose culture and traditions had been thoroughly integrated into the social and religious milieu of pre-Islamic Arabia. Whether Arab converts or immigrants from Palestine, the Jews participated in every level of Arab society. There were Jewish merchants, Jewish Bedouin, Jewish farmers, Jewish poets, and Jewish warriors throughout the peninsula. Jewish men took Arab names; Jewish women wore Arab headdresses. And while some of these Jews may have spoken Aramaic (or at least a corrupted version of it), their primary language was Arabic.
Although in contact with major Jewish centers throughout the Near East, Judaism in Arabia had developed its own variations on traditional Jewish beliefs and practices. The Jews shared many of the same religious ideals as their pagan Arab counterparts, especially with regard to what is sometimes referred to as “popular religion”: belief in magic, the use of talismans and divination, and the like. For example, while there is evidence of a small yet formal rabbinical presence in some regions of the Arabian Peninsula, there also existed a group of Jewish soothsayers called the Kohens who, while maintaining a far more priestly function in their communities, nevertheless resembled the pagan Kahins in that they too dealt in divinely inspired oracles.
The relationship between the Jews and pagan Arabs was symbiotic in that not only were the Jews heavily Arabized, but the Arabs were also significantly influenced by Jewish beliefs and practices. One need look no further for evidence of this influence than to the Ka‘ba itself, whose origin myths indicate that it was a Semitic sanctuary (haram in Arabic) with its roots dug deeply in Jewish tradition. Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, and Aaron were all in one way or another associated with the Ka‘ba long before the rise of Islam, and the mysterious Black Stone that to this day is fixed to the southeast corner of the sanctuary seems to have been originally associated with the same stone upon which Jacob rested his head during his famous dream of the ladder (Genesis 28:11–19).
The pagan Arab connection to Judaism makes perfect sense when one recalls that, like the Jews, the Arabs considered themselves descendants of Abraham, whom they credited not only with rediscovering the Ka‘ba, but also with creating the pilgrimage rites that took place there. So revered was Abraham in Arabia that he was given his own idol inside the Ka‘ba, where he was depicted in traditional pagan fashion as a shaman casting divining rods. That Abraham was neither a god nor a pagan was as inconsequential to the Arabs as the association of their god, Allah, with the Jewish god, Yahweh. In sixth-century Arabia, Jewish monotheism was in no way anathema to Arab paganism, which, as mentioned, could easily absorb a cornucopia of disparate religious ideologies. The pagan Arabs would likely have perceived Judaism as just another way of expressing what they considered to be similar religious sentiments.
The same could be said with regard to Arab perceptions of Christianity, which, like Judaism, had an influential presence in the Arabian Peninsula. The Arab tribes were surrounded by Christians: from the Syrians in the northwest, to the Mesopotamian Christians in the northeast, to the Abyssinians in the south. By the sixth century C.E., Yemen had become the seat of Christian aspirations in Arabia; the city of Najran was widely considered to be the hub of Arab Christianity, while in Sana‘, a massive church had been constructed that, for a time, vied with Mecca as the primary pilgrimage site in the region.
As a proselytizing faith, Christianity was not content to remain at the borders of the Arab lands. Thanks to a concerted effort to spread the gospel throughout the peninsula, a number of Arab tribes had converted en masse