God Is Not One

by Prothero, Stephen

  And then there is the controversial practice of veiling. The hijab has been outlawed in some Muslim countries and is required in others. Most French citizens and a large minority of Americans believe that Islamic head coverings should be banned in their countries, and both countries have seen lawsuits over such matters as whether Muslim women have the right to wear head coverings when working at McDonald’s or posing for a driver’s license photograph. Although many Muslim women have taken off the veil as an expression of women’s rights, many Muslim feminists choose to wear the veil as an expression of those same rights. The hijab has also become a symbol of Islamic identity, not unlike the kippah (head covering) for Jewish men.

  Between fundamentalists and progressives there are hundreds of millions of moderate Muslims. Among Indonesia’s 178 million Muslims, fundamentalism is fringe. Islamist parties have failed at the polls, and most Muslims there self-identify as moderate or progressive. Both of these groups favor democracy and the separation of mosque and state. Progressives there distinguish themselves from moderates by speaking out more forcefully for religious pluralism and women’s rights and by drawing more generously on the thinking of intellectuals from Europe, Latin America, and the United States.

  The Muslims I spoke with during a visit to Yogyakarta, a cultural and intellectual center of this vast island archipelago, were moderates and progressives. All were openly adapting Islam to local circumstances, mixing its ancient traditions with their own. And all scoffed at any notion of a clash of civilizations between Islam and the Christian West. Any clash that exists, they said, is between fundamentalists of all faiths and their progressive and moderate coreligionists. While in Indonesia, I didn’t see a single woman covered from head to foot as is common in Iran and Afghanistan, and in the rural areas none of the women wore any head coverings at all. When I asked Zuli Qodir, a leader of a popular moderate group called Muhammadiyah, what Islam was all about, he waxed Jeffersonian. “Islam is justice,” he said. “And equality. And democracy.” Another Muslim leader told me that “the essence of Islam” is “caring for the poor.”

  Religious pluralism is particularly prized in Indonesia, where the influences of Buddhism, Hinduism, and Christianity have wafted across its 17,000-plus islands for centuries. Why did God create the world? According to the principal of an Islamic school I spoke with, because God prefers multiplicity to unity—because “difference is good.” Repeatedly, I was reminded that Muslims reject religious coercion—“There is no compulsion in religion” (2:256, Pickthal)—and that their “people of the book” category includes not only Jews and Christians but also Hindus and Buddhists.

  Sufism, Drunk and Sober

  It is tempting to imagine that the world’s religions are what they teach or what they do—that Christianity is its creeds, and Judaism its law. But just as we humans are more than the sum of our thoughts or work, religious traditions cannot be reduced to their creeds and rituals. Inside each of the world’s religions there are people who take it as their task to look beneath the surface of the Nicene Creed or the Five Pillars to something that is, as the English poet William Wordsworth put it, “far more deeply interfused.” In Islam these people call themselves Sufis.

  During a visit to Jerusalem, I spoke with a shopkeeper who turned out to be not only an expert salesman but also a lifelong Sufi. When I asked him about the importance of the Five Pillars of Islam, he shook his head “NO!” and, pointing an index finger uncomfortably close to my nose, insisted that Islam could stand up perfectly straight without any of the Five Pillars. Real Islam, he said, has nothing to do with law and everything to do with experience. It is about a heart-and-soul connection between the individual believer and God—the sort of crazy love that sets your whole being into dance. It needs no rituals, no rules, he said. In fact, rituals and rules only take us away from what is Really Real.

  A similar point was made by the eleventh-century Sufi Ansari of Herat (in present-day Afghanistan), who in this short poem subordinated the Five Pillars to a higher calling:

  Fasting is a way to save on food.

  Vigil and prayer is a labor for old folks.

  Pilgrimage is an occasion for tourism.

  To distribute bread in alms is something for philanthropists.

  Fall in love:

  That is doing something!27

  The ninth-century Persian Sufi Bayazid Bistami was equally skeptical of the ability of religion to take you to God. “The thickest veils between man and Allah,” he wrote, “are the wise man’s wisdom, the worshiper’s worship, and the devotion of the devout.”28

  One of the distinguishing marks of Islam is its unequivocal rejection of the Christian traditions of celibacy, asceticism, and monasticism. Muslims often scratch their heads over why Jesus remained single, and marriage is enjoined in both the Quran (“Ye that are unmarried shall marry,” 24:32) and the Hadith (“Marriage is my sunnah [exemplary practice]”).29 So monks who have withdrawn from the world usually come in for derision. Early Sufis, however, bucked this trend. The term Sufi comes from the term suf, which means wool. So Sufi means “wool wearer,” which is to say someone who has opted for a simple life of contemplation and pious poverty along the lines of Christian monastics and their scratchy wool garments.

  Sufism, which emerged in the eighth century, is a mystical tradition. Like other mystics, Sufis stress the experiential dimension of religion. Less patient than other Muslims, they don’t want to wait until they die to experience the divine. Like Muhammad (the first Sufi, they say) in the caves of Mount Hira, they seek to “taste the here and the now of God.” Or, as one Sufi poet puts it:

  When the ocean surges,

  don’t let me just hear it.

  Let it splash inside my chest!”30

  Under the guidance of gurulike figures known as sheiks or pirs, and through institutions known as orders or brotherhoods, Sufis have experimented over the centuries with a variety of spiritual practices designed to crack the heart open to ecstatic experience of the divine. In keeping with the broader Muslim notion that the problem of self-sufficiency originates in forgetfulness, Sufis seek to keep God forever on their hearts, either by chanting His “beautiful names” or by sitting with these names in silence. Another Sufi practice is a Muslim analog to what Daoists call “free and easy wandering,” and wandering Sufis played a major role in the spread of Islam to climes as far flung as Africa, India, and Southeast Asia.

  Inside the Muslim world, Sufis are notorious for flirting with idolatry by imagining their spiritual quest as culminating in an annihilation of the self that is also a mystical union with God. While Muslim theologians and jurists tend to emphasize God’s transcendence and distance, Sufis emphasize God’s immanence and nearness, drifting along the way toward pantheism (“everything is God”) and monism (“everything is One.”). While other Muslims emphasize the radical qualitative distinction between God and human beings, Sufis emphasize the ways in which human beings resemble God, who is as near to them, as the Quran puts it, “as the jugular vein” (50:16). If Reality is one, then multiplicity is an illusion, and there is no real distinction between Creator and created. Because every place is equally sacred, you don’t need to go to Mecca or a mosque to find God. In fact you don’t need to travel beyond your own heart. Like modern-day evangelicals who have a friend in Jesus, Sufis call themselves friends of God.

  To many Muslims, there has always been something deeply unsettling and even dangerous about the esoteric precepts and practices of the Sufis, since from the Sufi perspective so much of what other Muslims see as desirable and even required is unnecessary at best and harmful at worst. While most Sufis claim to follow both the outer, legal path of Shariah and the inner, mystical path called Tariqah, critics claim they sacrifice the former at the altar of the latter. Wahhabis, for example, see Sufism as an invitation to both shirk and immorality. The great Persian Sufi Mansur al-Hallaj was executed as a heretic in Baghdad in 922 for saying “I am the Truth”—a line al-Hallaj understood t
o be articulating his union with God but his accusers took to be blasphemy (since Truth is one of the ninety-nine names of God).

  In order to make some semblance of sense of this mystical path, insiders and outsiders alike have divided Sufis into two types: the sober and the drunk. If the medium for the sober Sufi is prose and the métier reason, the medium for drunken Sufi writers is poetry and the métier emotion. Sober Sufis include the Persian philosopher al-Ghazali (1058–1111) who, by conceding the importance of Shariah, brokered a peace between Sufis and those who accused them of heresy and immorality. Approaching the divine with awe, sober Sufis are ever aware of God’s power and wrath—an awareness that keeps them closer to the straight and narrow than their more intoxicated kin. Drunken Sufis, by contrast, emphasize the mercy and beauty of God, approaching Him in love and ecstasy more than awe and fear. As a result, they worry less about their tradition’s legal and ritual requirements. For some drunken Sufis, at least, the Five Pillars are incidental—the plastic bag you take home from the grocery store, and quite different from the real nourishment inside.

  A classic example of the intoxicated type, the great Persian poet Rumi (1207–73) is beloved today by Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Thanks to popular English translations by Coleman Barks, he is now one of the bestselling poets in the West, and his work has been performed by celebrities such as Madonna and Philip Glass. Rumi’s poetry is endlessly intriguing, and his admonition to “gamble everything for love” is a challenge of the highest order.31

  Part of the attraction is the backstory: Rumi was a bookworm and a scholar when he was visited by a wandering Sufi named Shams, who, depending on the storyteller, either burned Rumi’s books or threw them into a pond. (“A donkey with a load of holy books,” Sufis now say, “is still a donkey.”32) Either way, Shams turned Rumi’s life upside down, and for years the two were inseparable. Then Shams mysteriously disappeared, most likely the victim of murder. This tragic turn remade Rumi into one of the world’s most prolific and beloved poets.

  Another name for Sufism is ihsan, or “doing what is beautiful,” and Rumi’s poetry does just that. His poems overflow with longing for his friend Shams. “There is no salvation for the soul,” he writes, “But to fall in Love.”33 Rumi insists, however, that the love between Romeo and Juliet, or Nicole Kidman and her latest leading man, is also love for and from the divine. When he writes, “In the house of water and clay this heart is desolate without thee; / O Beloved, enter the house, or I will leave it,” he is longing for God and Shams.34 Or, to be more faithful to Rumi’s faith, he is speaking of a God and a man who only seem to be different beings.

  From a vantage point where only God is Really Real, it makes no sense to distinguish Sunni from Shia or Muslim from Jew. So Sufis generally affirm that all religions are paths to the divine. But they are only paths, clumsy gestures toward what is unspeakable. Of course, Sufis acknowledge differences between Islam and other religions. But such is outer, inessential knowledge. From the perspective of inner, essential knowledge, all such distinctions fall away. “There was a time, when I blamed my companion if his religion did not resemble mine,” wrote the Spanish philosopher Ibn Arabi (1165–1240). “Now, however, my heart accepts every form… . Love alone is my religion.”35

  As Rumi once explained, intelligence comes in two forms. There is the secondhand intelligence of a child’s memorizing facts delivered through books and teachers—the sort of intelligence that will get you a job as a civil engineer or help you distinguish between the Five Pillars of Islam and the seven sacraments of Roman Catholicism. Wordsworth called this “our meddling intellect.”36 But there is another kind of intelligence, a “second knowing,” which springs from direct, personal experience of God—“a fountainhead / from within you, moving out.”37 This kind of knowing lies beyond the limits of everyday language and ordinary thought. So Sufis attempt to express it in other ways—in music and dance and in the elliptical language of mystical poetry, whose very words urge the reader to look beyond them to The Beyond.

  One of the temptations of any religion is to mistake it for the Ultimate To Which It Points—to start to worship Christianity rather than Christ, for example. Sufis resist this temptation. What they crave is not Islam but Allah, not Paradise in the by-and-by but the presence of the divine here and now, not the secondhand report but the firsthand experience. When asked whether she even cared about Paradise, the Sufi poet Rabia of Basra famously said, “First the neighbor, then the house.”38

  So what does it mean to be religiously literate when it comes to Islam? Is it about external forms or inner experience? Does Islamic literacy mean knowing the Five Pillars and the Quran? Or being conversant in the distinctions between Sunnis and Shia? Surely it is all of these things. To understand the role of Islam in the world today, you need to understand its view of the problem of self-sufficiency and the solution of submission. You need to make sense of the goal of Paradise, and how that goal motivates human behavior. But as the Sufis remind us, there is a fluency beyond this basic literacy, and perhaps beyond even language itself. Perhaps, as Rumi and his Sufi kin seem to say, what matters is not knowing Islam but knowing Allah. Or is knowing beside the point? Perhaps to understand Islam is not to know but to feel—to feel God moving inside you like the energy that animates a dance.

  Those of us who are not Sufis must be content with knowing that Islam is the greatest of the great religions. In terms of adherents, this tradition of mercy and justice and forgiveness and submission is growing far faster than Christianity. In terms of influence, it is controlling the worldwide conversation about the virtues and vices of religion. Islam is a key player in the Middle East and Asia and a rapidly growing presence in Europe and North America. Assets in Islamic banks (which do not charge or pay interest) are, according to the International Monetary Fund, “developing at a remarkable pace.”39 Given the rapid development of Brazil, Russia, India, and China (BRIC), our oil-guzzling world seems destined, at least in the short term, only to be guzzling more, which means that the influence of the Islam-rich OPEC nations will only continue to rise. Meanwhile, Iraq and Iran and Afghanistan remain enigmas to anyone unable to reckon with the ancient division inside Islam between Sunnis and Shia. To presume that the conversation about the great religions starts with Christianity is to show your parochialism, and your age. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries may have belonged to Christianity. The twenty-first belongs to Islam.

  Chapter Two

  Christianity

  The Way of Salvation

  Every Christmas Eve when I was a boy, my family would gather around the fire to hear my father read The Christ Child (1931). This children’s book borrows its voice from the stories of Jesus’s birth and youth in the New Testament gospels of Matthew and Luke. It borrows its images from the husband-and-wife team of Maud and Mishka Petersham, illustrators whose watercolors seem to spring off the page with the power and poignancy of miracle. The cover depicts Jesus in a manger in Bethlehem just after His birth. Oddly, both His mother, Mary, and her husband, Joseph, have gone missing, so the baby’s only company is a drove of sheep and donkeys that seem to be hanging on His every breath with the sort of obsessive attention usually reserved for new parents (though apparently not these ones). This image is commanded by a bright yellow halo, which recalls an astronaut’s helmet from the 1960s (John Glenn style), or so I thought as a boy. Out of this bubble, which fits snugly over Jesus’s head, springs a series of bigger halos, bursting into the night sky with light like the sun.

  Clearly there is something special about this kid, who doesn’t seem to object when the wise men come bearing gifts no child has ever heard of (except, of course, for the gold). Eventually He will learn to feed and dress himself, to swing a hammer and pound a nail. He will ride on a donkey into Jerusalem, eat one last meal with His disciples, pray in the Garden of Gethsemane, be betrayed by a friend, endure a show trial, and be scourged, mocked, and crucified. But this is a children’s book, so the scariest it gets
here is talk of animals sacrificed at the Jerusalem Temple and an image of Mary, Joseph, and their baby fleeing King Herod into Egypt and a jet-black night. Otherwise Jesus seems to have a pretty cushy childhood. He waxes strong in Joseph’s carpenter’s shop and manages to shake loose from his parents for a few days in the Big City, where he hangs with rabbis in the temple, both listening to them and asking them questions. But this good Jewish boy cannot shake His halo, which sets Him apart, marks Him as chosen wherever He goes—an intangible reminder of the tangible Incarnation.

  One of the lies of the so-called New Atheists is that the religions are one and the same, but the diversity inside Christianity alone is staggering. In the days before orthodoxy had the power to cast out heterodoxy, the early Christian movement was a willy-nilly affair with a laundry list of soon-to-be heretics that stretched from Montanists and Manicheans to Gnostics and Ebionites, Donatists and Docetics, Arians and Nestorians. If Christians today have largely forgotten the creeds and catechisms, Christians in the first few centuries had not yet written them. Then as now, writes theologian Harvey Cox, there was “no central hierarchy, no commonly accepted creed, and no standard ritual practice.”1 Christianity was up for grabs.

  For the most part, early Christians defined themselves theologically, depending on how they viewed relations with the Jews, the mix of divine and human natures inside Jesus, and family relations among the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Early Christians also gravitated toward competing styles of monastic withdrawal—from peripatetic and solitary desert monks (the term monk comes from monos, Greek for “alone”) to the more settled and less ascetic monastic communities of the Benedictines. Among the many ways of being an ancient Christian was the extreme asceticism of Simeon the Stylite (390–459), the David Blaine of his time, who climbed atop a pillar in his twenties and stayed there for the rest of his life.