God Is Not One

by Prothero, Stephen

  God is great

  God is great

  God is great

  God is great

  I bear witness that there is no god but God

  I bear witness that there is no god but God

  I bear witness that Muhammad is the messenger of God

  I bear witness that Muhammad is the messenger of God

  Make haste toward prayer

  Make haste toward prayer

  Make haste toward success

  Make haste toward success

  God is great

  God is great

  There is no god but God

  Over one billion people—roughly one-fifth of the world’s population—self-identify as Muslims, placing Islam second only to Christianity in terms of adherents. Like Christianity, Islam is typically classified as a Western religion, and Islam predominates in such Middle Eastern countries as Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan. But most of the world’s Muslims live in Asia. Indonesia has more Muslims (roughly 178 million) than any other country—three times as many as in Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and Iraq combined—and it is followed by three more Asian nations: India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Of the ten countries with the largest Muslim populations, only two (Egypt and Iran) are plainly in the Middle East. Three (Nigeria, Algeria, and Morocco) are in Africa (as is Egypt, of course). The remaining country (Turkey) straddles Asia, the Middle East, and Europe.5 The Central Asian states of Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan all have Muslim majorities. In Europe, Muslims form majorities in Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Kosovo, and there are small but rapidly growing populations across Europe and North America.

  By some estimations, close to 20 percent of those who came to the United States as slaves were Muslims, but Islam first became visible there through the Nation of Islam (NOI), which recruited both activist Malcolm X and heavyweight boxer Muhammad Ali to its heterodox combination of black nationalism and Islam. After the death in 1975 of Elijah Muhammad, who had led the NOI since the mysterious disappearance of founder Wallace D. Fard in 1934, this organization moved under the leadership of his son W. D. Muhammad in the direction of mainstream Sunni Islam. After W. D. Muhammad disbanded the NOI, Louis Farrakhan revived it, but today the overwhelming majority of African-American Muslims in the United States are mainstream Sunnis rather than NOI members.

  Islam’s rapid growth in Europe has set off a series of controversies about free speech and the head covering for Muslim women known as the hijab. While France prohibits the hijab in public schools for reasons of church/state separation, Sweden allows it in the name of religious liberty. Meanwhile, relations between Muslims and non-Muslims are tense in many European countries. A recent survey found that a majority of adults in the Netherlands have an unfavorable view of Islam. Another survey found that most Muslims in Germany believe that Europeans are hostile to Muslims. Meanwhile, sizeable majorities of Muslims and non-Muslims alike report that relations between Westerners and Muslims are “generally bad.”6

  Islam also has a presence in American and European popular culture. While Buddhists are typically portrayed at the movies in a positive light—think Kundun and Seven Years in Tibet—Muslims almost always play the bad guys. There are some favorable portrayals—Omar Sharif’s Sherif Ali in Lawrence of Arabia and Morgan Freeman’s Azeem in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves—but action films especially tend to depict Muslims as people who do little more than pray and kill, and not necessarily in that order.7

  I have never heard the adhan at the movies, but I have heard it ring out on four continents. Nowhere was it more striking than in Jerusalem, where it seemed to follow me wherever I went. I heard it while standing at the Western Wall. I heard it while sitting inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. I heard as I was walking through the Damascus Gate into the Old City’s Muslim Quarter. In each case I was reminded of how intimate the Western monotheisms are in this most contested of cities—never out of earshot of one another—and of how Islam is a recited religion, spread throughout the centuries by speech and sound.

  Muslims respond to this call (which nowadays is broadcast on television and online) in all sorts of ways. Some ignore it. Others heed it when the mood strikes. But the observant stop cooking and driving and working to step into sacred time at dawn, noon, midafternoon, sunset, and night. In preparation, they wash themselves of life’s impurities; they turn to face Mecca, Islam’s holiest city; they bow their heads; they say, “Prayer has arrived, prayer has arrived”; and they promise to pray “for the sake of Allah and Allah alone.” Then they begin to saturate the air with sacred sound.

  Muslims perform the ancient choreography of this prayer with their whole bodies—standing, bowing, prostrating, and sitting. Their hands move from behind their ears to their torsos. They bow forward at the waist, hands on knees, back flat. They stand up straight again. They prostrate themselves into a posture of total and absolute submission to Allah, planting their knees, hands, foreheads, and noses on the ground. They then rise to a sitting position and ticktock back and forth between sitting and prostration as their prayer proceeds.

  You don’t make this prayer up as you go along, chatting informally and familiarly with God as evangelical Protestants do. Muslims can, of course, call upon Allah for their own reasons, in their own words, and in their own languages. But the five daily prayers of salat (said aloud at dawn, sunset, and night, and in silence at noon and in the afternoon) are repeated in Arabic precisely as they have been for centuries, starting with Allahu Akbar: “God is great.” Worshippers then bless and exalt Allah above all pretenders. They call Muhammad His prophet and messenger. They ask for peace upon “the righteous servants of Allah.” They offer blessings to angels. They ask Allah to bless “Muhammad and the people of Muhammad,” just as God has blessed “Abraham and the people of Abraham.”

  They then recite the most common of Muslim prayers—the Lord’s Prayer of Islam—which comes from the first and most popular sura, or chapter, of the Quran, known as the Fatiha:

  In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate.

  Praise belongs to God, Lord of all Being

  the All-merciful, the All-compassionate

  the Master of the Day of Doom.

  Thee only we serve; to Thee alone we pray for succour.

  Guide us in the straight path,

  the path of those whom Thou hast blessed;

  not of those against whom Thou art wrathful, nor of those who are stray. (1:1–7)

  The Five Pillars

  In sixteenth-century Geneva, Protestant theologian John Calvin spun a complex theological web around two simple threads: the absolute sovereignty of God and the total depravity of human beings. Like Calvinists, Muslims go to great lengths not to confuse Creator and created. Glorying in the servility of human beings before Allah, they refer to themselves in many cases as “slaves” of the Almighty. But unlike Calvin, Muslims do not believe in original sin. Every human being is born with an inclination toward both God and the good. So sin is not the problem Islam addresses. Neither is there any need for salvation from sin. In Islam, the problem is self-sufficiency, the hubris of acting as if you can get along without God, who alone is self-sufficient. “The idol of your self,” writes the Sufi mystic Rumi, “is the mother of (all) idols.”8 Replace this idol with submission to Allah, and what you have is the goal of Islam: a “soul at peace” (89:27) in this life and the next: Paradise.

  The Quran repeatedly states that the path to Paradise is paved with both faith and works—“those who believe, and do righteous deeds, for them await[s] … the great triumph” (85:11)—but Islam inclines toward Judaism and away from Christianity by emphasizing orthopraxy (right action) over orthodoxy (right doctrine). Here the technique that will take you from self-sufficiency to Paradise is to “perform the religion” (42:13). Over and over the Quran refers to “believers” and “unbelievers,” as if belief were the master key to Paradise, yet it is action that divides these two groups: “Those who perfor
m the prayer, and expend of what We have provided them, those in truth are the believers” (8:3–4). To be sure, Islam is a “way of knowledge”—a topic mentioned dozens of times in the Quran.9 And there are Quranic passages that seem to champion belief over practice. “It is not piety, that you turn your faces to the East and to the West,” reads one. “True piety is this: to believe in God, and the Last Day, the Angels, the Book, and the Prophets… .” But after this brief segue into orthodoxy, even this passage returns immediately to practice: “… to give of one’s substance, however cherished, to kinsmen, and orphans, the needy, the traveller, beggars, and to ransom the slave, to perform the prayer, to pay the alms” (2:177). In short, the response that Allah demands from humanity is not so much belief as obedience. Yes, there is one God, but believing that is the easy part, since heaven and earth sing of Him unceasingly. The hard part is submitting to God. “The desert Arabs said, ‘We believe,’ ” the Quran reads. “Say not, ‘You have believed,’ but rather say, ‘We have submitted’ ” (49:14).

  In Europe and North America, spiritual seekers expend much time and energy searching for practices tailor-made for their unique personalities. Some gravitate to yoga or meditation, others to Taiji (Tai Chi) or chanting. In Islam, however, the core practices are prescribed in the so-called Five Pillars.10 The metaphor here is architectural, and the image being conjured up is of a building with supports on four corners and at the center.

  The central pillar supporting this building is the Shahadah: “I testify that there is no god but God, and Muhammad is the messenger of God.” This profession of faith is repeated in the call to prayer and in the five daily prayers themselves. To become a Muslim, all you need to do is testify to this creed, proclaiming its two truths out loud, with understanding and intent, ideally in the presence of witnesses.

  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).