God Is Not One

by Prothero, Stephen

  In short, the Quran reads like a fire-and-brimstone sermon from start to finish. The Arabic term for torment/punishment/chastisement appears hundreds of times. In fact, it is one of the Quran’s most frequently used words. So any reader will be warned over and over again of “a painful chastisement” (7:73), “a humbling chastisement” (22:57), “a mighty chastisement” (8:68), the “chastisement of the Fire” (7:38), and the “chastisement of boiling water” (44:48).

  Given how much fear has driven Islamophobia in the modern West, it is troubling to keep bumping into fear mongering here. Yet as Jewish philosopher Abraham Heschel once wrote of the wrath and rage of the Hebrew Bible prophets, “Every prediction of disaster is in itself an exhortation to repentance.”18 Great reciters of the Quran are able to convey to their listeners how their warnings really are warnings, intended to guide us toward submission. Some Muslim thinkers have even suggested that hell may not be eternal—that eventually those who find their way there will be punished enough and be taken up into Paradise.

  Of course, the Quran is not unique in telling us to fear God. There is a long history of fire-and-brimstone sermons in Christendom, and the Quranic term for hell, Jahannam, is itself derived from the biblical term Gehenna. What Bible scholar Phyllis Trible refers to as “texts of terror” abound in Judaism and Christianity too. “Do not I hate them, O Lord, that hate thee? And am I not grieved with those that rise up against thee?” reads Psalm 139:21. Elsewhere, the Bible commands the annihilation of entire peoples (Deuteronomy 20:16–18) and insists on gruesome executions for disobedient children (Deuteronomy 21:18–21), for relatives who entice you into worshipping other gods (Deuteronomy 13:6–10), for adulterers (Deuteronomy 22:22), for prostitutes (Leviticus 21:9), and for anyone who works on the Sabbath (Numbers 15:32–36).

  Still, I found myself reeling as I read, gagging as it were on the plates of pus and draughts of boiling water promised to the unrepentant. Part of my distress was doubtless rooted in my upbringing on the Christian scriptures. I have been conditioned to turn down the volume when Jesus speaks of casting whole cities into hell (Matthew 11:23), and I no longer see (or feel) the “lake of fire” (Revelation 20:15) as vividly as did Michelangelo in The Last Judgment or Dante in The Divine Comedy. Still, I was discouraged to read so much of liars, evildoers, hypocrites, unbelievers, and idolaters. I must admit, though, that something in me found all this God-fearing refreshing. In the modern West there is so much cheap chatter about befriending God that the prospect of fearing God seems almost illicit. What German theologian Rudolf Otto once referred to as the mysterium tremendum has been squeezed out of divinity and with it the prophetic possibility of punishment for those who glory in injustice.

  Given centuries of Christian criticisms of Islamic views of women, many will be surprised to come across passages that treat men and women equally: “Men and women who have surrendered, believing men and believing women, obedient men and obedient women, … for them God has prepared forgiveness and a mighty wage” (33:35). But there is no sidestepping the notorious passage from the “Woman” sura that permits husbands to beat their wives (4:34). Almost as discouraging are a series of verses that assume a male reader, as if this scripture were addressed not to all humanity but to men only:

  If you fear that you will not act justly toward the orphans, marry such women as seem good to you, two, three, four; but if you fear you will not be equitable, then only one. (4:3)

  Your women are a tillage for you; so come unto your tillage as you wish. (2:223)

  Readers committed to interfaith dialogue may be particularly upset by a series of verses that tell Muslims to forgo non-Muslim friends. One of my Muslim friends interprets passages such as “O believers, take not Jews and Christians as friends” (5:51) historically, arguing that, when these recitations were revealed, Jews and Christians were often allied with tribes opposed to Muhammad, so befriending them was tantamount to treason. Things are different now, he says, and friendships between Muslims and non-Muslims are not only permitted but imperative. Another Muslim friend says that these passages do not refer to modern-day friendships at all but to patron/client relationships of mutual protection. What these verses mean, she says, is “Don’t take Jews and Christians for your protectors … don’t expect them to have your back.”19

  Shariah

  Of Ninian Smart’s seven dimensions of religion, the most important in Islam is the legal dimension. In fact one way Islam tilts toward Judaism and away from Christianity is in its emphasis on law over theology. Shariah, which literally means the “right path,” is the term Muslims use for law, and Shariah law, as it is referred to (redundantly) in the West, has been adopted in some measure in recent years in Iran, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, and other Islamic countries, including Afghanistan under the Taliban.

  Historically, Muslims have not separated the sacred and the secular, so Shariah extends into all aspects of life—family, society, economics, and politics. It covers ritual and ethics, as well as criminal law, taxation, and public policy. This robust concept tilts toward the afterlife too, instructing Muslims not only how to live on Earth but also how to get to Paradise.

  Fiqh, or interpretation of Shariah, is based on both the Quran and the Hadith, a secondary body of scripture comprising thousands of accounts of the words and deeds of Muhammad. These Hadith, which were gathered in the eighth and ninth centuries into six respected Sunni collections, cover both law in the secular sense of that term and ritual obligations. They extend to such seemingly mundane matters as the cut of Muhammad’s beard and the foods he liked (honey and mutton) and disliked (garlic and melons). The Shia have their own Hadith literature, which also includes accounts of the lives of their Imams (leaders).

  Not all Hadith are equally authoritative, however. Each comes with both a chain of transmission, known as the isnad, and content, known as the matn, and the authenticity of any given Hadith can be challenged on either basis. If the chain of oral transmission from Muhammad to whomever recorded the Hadith is dubious—if one of the transmitters is unreliable, for example—it can be rejected. If its content contradicts the Quran, it can be rejected too. So Muslims disagree routinely over whether a given Hadith is authentic.20

  Outsiders often imagine that Islamic law is unchanging and immutable, but Sunnis and Shias differ significantly on all sorts of legal matters, and Sunnis themselves recognize four major legal schools.21 Like Roman Catholics, the Shia centralize religious authority, in their case in the Imam. Sunnis decentralize religious authority, placing it in the Muslim community as a whole. So it should not be surprising that Sunni legal views vary widely.

  There has been much talk in the West of the fatwa, or legal opinion, since the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa against the novelist Salman Rushdie in 1990 and Osama bin Laden issued fatwas in 1996 and 1998 protesting the presence of U.S. military troops in Saudi Arabian holy lands. Beginning with the Quranic recitation to “slay the pagans wherever you find them,” bin Laden referred in the latter fatwa to U.S. military activity on the Arabian Peninsula as “clear declaration of war on God, his messenger, and Muslims” and called the killing of Americans and their allies “an individual duty for every Muslim.”22 Few Muslims heeded that call. That is because a fatwa carries the force of law only to those who recognize the authority of the jurist who issues it, and traditionally fatwas have been issued by jurists, not by laypeople such as bin Laden. In 2005 Muslim clerics in Spain issued a fatwa condemning “the terrorist acts of Osama bin Laden and his organization al-Qaeda” as “against Islam.”23 Bin Laden, they found, is an apostate who follows not the Quran but a law of his own devising.

  Sunni and Shia

  As this fatwa slinging shows, there are many interpretations of Islam. There is no Muslim pope to issue infallible encyclicals, so Islam is a big tent theologically. There are fundamentalists and feminists, legalists and mystics, progressives and moderates. But the most basic division in the Muslim world pits Sunnis, who constitute roughly 85 perc
ent of the world’s Muslims, against Shias, who account for the remaining 15 percent.

  Surviving a founder’s death is a challenge for every new religious movement. Mormonism splintered in 1844 over the question of Joseph Smith’s successor, and the Hare Krishna movement was thrown into chaos after the death of Swami Prabhupada in 1977. Following Muhammad’s death, Muslims split over this key question of authority. A majority backed Muhammad’s father-in-law Abu Bakr as his successor. But a minority, insisting that Islam’s next leader share Muhammad’s bloodline, backed the Prophet’s son-in-law Ali.

  Those who supported Ali came to be called Shiat Ali (“partisans of Ali”), or Shia for short. Those who supported Abu Bakr came to be called Sunni (from sunna, which means tradition). The broader and deeper disagreement concerned how the Islamic community was to be led. The Sunni invested social and political authority in a series of caliphs, reserving all-important religious authority for the broader community. The Shia invested social, political, and religious authority in their leader, whom they called the Imam. The word imam means leader in Arabic, and among the Sunni this term refers simply to the person who leads weekly congregational worship services on Fridays. But among the Shia, the Imam (who must be descended directly from Muhammad) leads not just a congregation but the entire Shia community and, according to the Shia, is both sinless and infallible.

  The Shia minority has split into various branches, most notably Twelver Shi’ism, which predominates in Iran and southern Iraq, and Ishmaili Shi’ism, which has a strong presence in India and East Africa. Twelvers are the largest Shia group. They believe there were twelve Imams, that the twelfth went into hiding (“occultation”) in 873 C.E., and that this “hidden” Imam will return at the end of times as a messiah figure of sorts, leading an apocalyptic battle between the forces of good and evil. The smaller Ishmaili branch split off in 765 C.E. over who would succeed the sixth Imam. While many supported the sixth Imam’s son Musa, those who became the Ishmailis supported his son Ismail. Unlike the Twelvers, Ishmailis follow a line of Imams that extends to the present day.

  Every religion is a “chain of memory,” and a key link in this chain for the Shia is the martyrdom of Muhammad’s grandson Husain at Karbala in Iraq in 680 C.E.24 This time-turning event is remembered each year during the Muslim month of Muharram. On Ashura, the Muharram’s tenth day, the faithful stage dramatic performances of Husain’s death after the manner of Christian Passion Plays. In a practice reminiscent of the self-flagellation of Catholic Penitentes in the American Southwest, some men flagellate themselves to relive Husain’s suffering. Although versions of this holiday are celebrated among the Sunni, and among non-Muslims on the islands of Trinidad and Jamaica, it is of particular import to the Shia, many of whom do their daily prayers with their foreheads pressed to a piece of clay from Karbala. During the Iranian Revolution in Shia-majority Iran, rebels chanted, “Every day is Ashura and every place is Karbala.”

  Islamism

  Among recent developments in Islam, the scariest to Muslims and non-Muslims alike is the rise of Islamism, a radical form of politicized Islam that took the martyr tradition developed by Jews and adapted by Christians in a deadly new direction.

  Islamism means different things to different people, but as the “ism” implies, it refers most widely to an ideology—an anti-Western and anti-American ideology applied to political ends by groups such as the Taliban in Afghanistan, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in the Palestinian territories, and, of course, al-Qaeda. Ideologically, the goal of Islamists is to purify Islam from the pollutions of modernity, not least the presence of U.S. military forces in Saudi Arabia and the presence of the State of Israel in the Middle East. Politically, Islamists aim to create Islamic states (or a transnational caliphate) following their idiosyncratic version of Islamic law. The tactics used to achieve these goals vary but for some Islamists they include violence and even acts of terror such as suicide bombings.

  If Islam is a religion, Islamism is a political project, revolutionary in aim, utopian in spirit, and radical in all senses of the term. Like other revitalization movements, Islamism seeks to move forward by going back—in this case to the example of early Islam, which the Taliban, for example, interpret as forbidding female education and employment. Although Islamists typically trace their views to the Quran and the beginnings of Islam, Islamism, like other forms of fundamentalism, is actually a modern invention, deeply influenced by the Western ideologies it seeks to oppose. The greatest intellectual influence on al-Qaeda itself is likely the Egyptian theologian Sayyid Qutb (1906–66), who urged his followers to fight a holy war against secularism, democracy, and the West. Islamism’s heroes are so-called martyrs who, in violation of a clear Quranic prescription against suicide, blow themselves up for, among other things, promise of instant transport to Paradise. The villains are Israel and the “Great Satan,” the United States, but Islamists also denounce as evildoers (and apostates) fellow Muslims who interpret Islam in a more mainstream manner.

  Ultraconservative intellectual movements such as Salafism share much with Islamism but are distinguishable from and often antagonistic to it. Salafists seek to redirect their religious tradition back to the pure, primitive Islam of the earliest Muslims, who are known as salaf, or “pious predecessors.” Their sneer word is bidah, which means innovation.

  One form of Salafism, Saudi Arabia’s official theology of Wahhabism, spread globally in the early twenty-first century as Saudi money flowed into new mosques worldwide. Wahhabism is based on the strict teachings of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703–92), an eighteenth-century thinker who also opposed innovation but was obsessed with the problem of shirk. According to Ibn Abd al-Wahhab’s uncompromising theology, both Christianity and Judaism are shirk, as are Shi’ism and Islam’s mystical tradition of Sufism. Ibn Abd al-Wahhab opposed the Shia practice of visiting the graves of Muhammad and his companions. He even destroyed some of those sacred sites. Like Salafism, Wahhabism is often referred to as puritanical, because of its strict legal code, its desire to purify its religious tradition from various pollutants, and its goal of returning to the purity of the earliest form of the faith. Like New England Puritans, who did not celebrate Christmas, Wahhabis do not celebrate Muhammad’s birthday.

  Islamists have latched onto the notion that we are witnessing a clash of civilizations between Islam and the Christian West, but what their activities really demonstrate is an intra-Islamic culture war—a clash between Muslims who believe that the Islamic tradition means what it says when it comes to not killing women and children, and Muslims who do not.

  Progressive and Moderate Muslims

  At the other end of the political spectrum is Progressive Islam, a new movement particularly strong in Europe and the United States. Progressive Muslims are staunch opponents of Salafism, Wahhabism, and Islamism, but they also criticize colonialism and imperialism. “Their task,” writes Omid Safi, author of Progressive Muslims (2003), “is to give voice to the voiceless and power to the powerless.”25 Pluralists to the core, Progressive Muslims welcome multiple voices not only from within Islam itself but also from other religious traditions. Although they base their thought and action on traditional Islamic sources such as the Quran and the Hadith, they also draw on Latin American liberation theology, the nonviolent resistance of Martin Luther King Jr., and the critique of Orientalism by the secular humanist Edward Said.

  Progressive Muslims believe that the struggle for justice lies at the heart of the Islamic tradition. They also believe that the better angels of Islam have always been on the side of the poor and the weak, and that their tradition’s ancient mandate to defend the defenseless compels them to struggle for gender equality and human rights. “At the heart of a progressive Muslim interpretation,” writes Safi, “is a simple yet radical idea: every human life, female or male, Muslim or non-Muslim, rich or poor, ‘northern’ or ‘southern,’ has exactly the same intrinsic worth.”26

  One of the most controversial chapters i
n the short history of Progressive Islam came in New York City on March 18, 2005, when Amina Wadud, a professor of Islamic Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, led a mixed-gender Friday prayer service of over one hundred worshippers. This was not the first breach of the tradition of male prayer leaders, but it was the first to set off a firestorm of international controversy. Muslim leaders worldwide denounced this action as a violation of Islamic law, but women imams have subsequently led Friday salat services and/or delivered the traditional Friday sermon in the United States, Canada, Spain, and South Africa.

  Of all the Western criticisms of Islam, one of the most persistent has been that it is hostile to women. Muslims from Muhammad forward have historically seen gender as an essential rather than an accidental characteristic of human beings. (“The male is not like the female,” reads the Quran [3:36]). So in mosques in which women are allowed (some forbid their entrance) men and women are typically separated. Sons usually receive inheritances twice as large as those of daughters, and in Islamic courts it usually takes two female witnesses to equal one male witness. Finally, although Muslim theologians describe God as beyond gender, the Quran refers to God exclusively as “He” when a third-person pronoun is needed.

  Muslim feminism is not an oxymoron, however. Muslim feminists argue that the Quran and the Hadith, while patriarchal in many respects, represented at the time a quantum leap for women in terms of property rights, inheritance, divorce, and education. They also note that women have become heads of state in at least seven Muslim-majority countries.