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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Reza Aslan
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April 11 - May 12, 2019
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.
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.
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.
There are striking similarities between the Christian and Quranic descriptions of the Apocalypse, the Last Judgment, and the paradise awaiting those who have been saved. These similarities do not necessarily contradict the Muslim belief that the Quran was divinely revealed, but they do indicate that the Quranic vision of the Last Days may have been revealed to the pagan Arabs through a set of symbols and metaphors with which they were already familiar, thanks in some part to the wide spread of Christianity in the region.
The story of the pregnant Amina is remarkably similar to the Christian story of Mary, who, when pregnant with Jesus, heard the angel of the Lord declare, “You will be with child and will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High” (Luke 1:31–32). The story of Bahira resembles the Jewish story of Samuel, who, when told by God that one of Jesse’s sons would be the next king of Israel, invited the entire family to a feast in which the youngest son, David, was left behind to tend the sheep. “Send for him,” Samuel
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In the strongest terms, Muhammad decried the mistreatment and exploitation of the weak and unprotected. He called for an end to false contracts and the practice of usury that had made slaves of the poor. He spoke of the rights of the underprivileged and the oppressed, and made the astonishing claim that it was the duty of the rich and powerful to take care of them.
Muhammad was not yet establishing a new religion; he was calling for sweeping social reform. He was not yet preaching monotheism; he was demanding economic justice. And for this revolutionary and profoundly innovative message, he was more or less ignored.
Muhammad understood what the Hanifs could not: the only way to bring about radical social and economic reform in Mecca was to overturn the religio-economic system on which the city was built; and the only way to do that was to attack the very source of the Quraysh’s wealth and prestige—the Ka‘ba.
And while this might not have been the first time a preacher had condemned the Quraysh and their practices, it was certainly the first time such condemnation was coming from a successful and well-known Qurayshi businessman—that is, “one of their own.”
Piety, the Quran reminds believers, lies “not in turning your face East or West in prayer … but in distributing your wealth out of love for God to your needy kin; to the orphans, to the vagrants, and to the mendicants; it lies in freeing the slaves, in observing your devotions, and in giving alms to the poor” (2:177).
women in the Ummah were, for the first time, given the right both to inherit the property of their husbands and to keep their dowries as their own personal property throughout their marriage.
“Marry those women who are lawful for you, up to two, three, or four,” the Quran states, “but only if you can treat them all equally” (4:3; emphasis added). On the other hand, the Quran makes it clear just a few verses later that monogamy is the preferred model of marriage when it asserts that “no matter how you try, you will never be able to treat your wives equally”
The most shocking aspect of Muhammad’s marriages is not his ten years of polygamy in Yathrib, but his twenty-five years of monogamy in Mecca, something practically unheard of at the time.
Although long seen as the most distinctive emblem of Islam, the veil is, surprisingly, not enjoined upon Muslim women anywhere in the Quran.
the year 627, when he had become the supremely powerful leader of an increasingly expanding community, some kind of segregation had to be enforced to maintain the inviolability of his wives. Thus the tradition, borrowed from the upper classes of Iranian and Syrian women, of veiling and secluding the most important women in society from the peering eyes of everyone else.
nowhere in the whole of the Quran is the term hijab applied to any woman other than the wives of Muhammad.
Muslim women probably began wearing the veil as a way to emulate the Prophet’s wives, who were revered as “the Mothers of the Ummah.” But the veil was neither compulsory nor, for that matter, widely adopted until generations after Muhammad’s death, when a large body of male scriptural and legal scholars began using their religious and political authority to regain the dominance they had lost in society as a result of the Prophet’s egalitarian reforms.
in less than two centuries after Muhammad’s death, there were already some seven hundred thousand hadith being circulated throughout the Muslim lands, the great majority of which were unquestionably fabricated
one must always remember that behind every hadith lies the entrenched power struggles and conflicting interests that one would expect in a society “in which social mobility [and] geographical expansion [were] the order of the day.”
for fourteen centuries, the science of Quranic commentary has been the exclusive domain of Muslim men.
If religion is indeed interpretation, then which meaning one chooses to accept and follow depends on what one is trying to extract from the text: if one views the Quran as empowering women, then Ali’s; if one looks to the Quran to justify violence against women, then Fakhry’s.
Chief among these was the stoning to death of adulterers, a punishment which has absolutely no foundation whatsoever in the Quran but which Umar justified by claiming it had originally been part of the Revelation and had somehow been left out of the authorized text.
it is not the moral teachings of Islam but the social conditions of seventh-century Arabia and the rampant misogyny of many male Quranic exegetes that have been responsible for women’s historically inferior status in Muslim society, these scholars are approaching the Quran free from the confines of traditional gender boundaries.
Over the last few years, the Islamic world has produced more female presidents and prime ministers than both Europe and North America combined.
Despite the fact that veiling is a custom among both men and women in countless cultures and across thousands of years, in the eyes of many in the West, the veil has long been viewed as the quintessential emblem of Islam’s “otherness.”
The truth is that the traditional image of the veiled Muslim woman as the sheltered and docile sexual property of her husband is just as misleading and simpleminded as the postmodernist image of the veil as the emblem of female freedom and empowerment from Western cultural hegemony. The veil may be neither or both of these things, but that is solely up to Muslim women to decide for themselves.
it is male-dominated society, not Islam, which has been responsible for the suppression of women’s rights in so many Muslim-majority states.
The feminist’s Medina is a society in which Muhammad designated women like Umm Waraqa as spiritual guides for the Ummah; in which the Prophet himself was sometimes publicly rebuked by his wives; in which women prayed and fought alongside men;
Your religion was your ethnicity, your culture, and your social identity; it defined your politics, your economics, and your ethics. More than anything else, your religion was your citizenship.
At the heart of the doctrine of jihad was the heretofore unrecognized distinction between combatant and noncombatant. Thus, the killing of women, children, monks, rabbis, the elderly, or any other noncombatant was absolutely forbidden under any circumstances.
the most important innovation in the doctrine of jihad was its outright prohibition of all but strictly defensive wars.
“there can be no compulsion in religion” (2:256). Indeed, on this point the Quran is adamant. “The truth is from your Lord,” it says; “believe it if you like, or do not” (18:29). The Quran also asks rhetorically, “Can you compel people to believe against their will?” (10:100). Obviously not; the Quran therefore commands believers to say to those who do not believe, “To you your religion; to me mine” (109:6).
between 2004 and 2006, Muslims accounted for 85 percent of the casualties from al-Qaeda attacks
Newby writes in A History of the Jews of Arabia, Islam and Judaism in seventh-century Arabia operated within “the same sphere of religious discourse,” in that both shared the same religious characters, stories, and anecdotes, both discussed the same fundamental questions from similar perspectives, and both had nearly identical moral and ethical values.
It would be simplistic to argue that no polemical conflict existed between Muhammad and the Jews of his time. But this conflict had far more to do with political alliances and economic ties than with a theological debate over scripture.
as far as Muhammad understood, the Torah, the Gospels, and the Quran must be read as a single, cohesive narrative about humanity’s relationship to God, in which the prophetic consciousness of one prophet is passed spiritually to the next: from Adam to Muhammad.
“Do not argue with the People of the Book—apart from those individuals who act unjustly toward you—unless it is in a fair way” (29:46).
throughout the first two centuries of Islam, Muslims regularly read the Torah alongside the Quran.
the ideological differences among the Peoples of the Book is explained by the Quran as indicating God’s desire to give each people its own “law and path and way of life” (5:42–48).
Muhammad’s complaints in the Quran were not directed against the religions of Judaism and Christianity, which he considered to be nearly identical to Islam: “We believe in what has been revealed to us, just as we believe in what has been revealed to you [ Jews and Christians],” the Quran says. “Our God and your God are the same; and it is to Him we submit” (29:46).
On the contrary, to those Jews who say “the Christians are wrong!” and to those Christians who say “the Jews are wrong!” (2:113), and to both groups who claim that “no one will go to heaven except the Jews and Christians” (2:111), Muhammad offered a compromise. “Let us come to an agreement on the things we hold in common,” the Quran suggests: “that we worship none but God; that we make none God’s equal; and that we take no other as lord except God” (3:64).
Part of the reason for the community’s anxiety over Muhammad’s death was that he had done so little to prepare them for it.
greatest challenge facing the Muslim community after Muhammad’s death was neither rebellious tribes nor false prophets, but rather the question of how to build a cohesive religious system out of the Prophet’s words and deeds, the majority of which existed solely in the memories of the Companions.
there can be no doubt that Islam was still in the process of defining itself when Muhammad died.
Abu Bakr would replace the Prophet as leader of the Ummah, but he would have no prophetic authority. Muhammad was dead; his status as Messenger died with him.
because the restriction of his authority to the secular realm kept him from defining exactly how one was to worship God, the door was opened for a new class of scholars called the Ulama, or “learned ones,” who would take upon themselves the responsibility of guiding the Ummah
As Caliph, Abu Bakr united the community under a single banner and initiated a time of military triumph and social concord that would become known in the Muslim world as the Golden Era of Islam.
as is the case with all great religions, it was precisely the arguments, the discord, and the sometimes bloody conflicts that resulted from trying to discern God’s will in the absence of God’s prophet that gave birth to the varied and wonderfully diverse institutions of the Muslim faith.
In Muhammad’s lifetime, the Quran was never collected in a single volume; in fact, it was never collected at all.
there were no significant religious differences between the Shi‘ah and the rest of the Muslim community, later called the Sunni, or “orthodox.”
