No God but God: The Origins, Evolution and Future of Islam

by Reza Aslan

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Ever since the first Council at Nicaea in 325 C.E.—which declared Jesus to be “fully God”—and the Council at Chalcedon in 451 C.E.—which entrenched the doctrine of the Trinity into Christian theology—Roman Orthodoxy had transformed a large portion of the Christian Near East into heretics.

More than a thousand years before Christ, Zarathustra preached the existence of a heaven and a hell, the idea of a bodily resurrection, the promise of a universal savior who would one day be miraculously born to a young maiden, and the expectation of a final cosmic battle that would take place at the end of time between the angelic forces of good and the demonic forces of evil.

It is a common belief in Islam that even before being called by God, Muhammad never took part in the pagan rituals of his community. In his history of the Prophet, al-Tabari states that God kept Muhammad from ever participating in any pagan rituals, lest he be defiled by them. But this view, which is reminiscent of the Catholic belief in Mary’s perpetual virginity, has little basis in either history or scripture.

All religions are inextricably bound to the social, spiritual, and cultural milieux from which they arose and in which they developed. It is not prophets who create religions. Prophets are, above all, reformers who redefine and reinterpret the existing beliefs and practices of their communities, providing fresh sets of symbols and metaphors with which succeeding generations can describe the nature of reality. Indeed, it is most often the prophet’s successors who take upon themselves the responsibility of fashioning their master’s words and deeds into unified, easily comprehensible religious systems.

By his own admission, Muhammad’s message was an attempt to reform the existing religious beliefs and cultural practices of pre-Islamic Arabia so as to bring the God of the Jews and Christians to the Arab peoples. “[God] has established for you [the Arabs] the same religion enjoined on Noah, on Abraham, on Moses, and on Jesus,” the Quran says (42:13).

As unique and divinely inspired as the Islamic movement may have been, its origins are undoubtedly linked to the multiethnic, multireligious society that fed Muhammad’s imagination as a young man and allowed him to craft his revolutionary message in a language that would have been easily recognizable to the pagan Arabs he was so desperately trying to reach. Because whatever else Muhammad may have been, he was without question a man of his time, even if one chooses to call that a “Time of Ignorance.”

If the childhood stories about Muhammad seem familiar, it is because they function as a prophetic topos: a conventional literary theme that can be found in most mythologies. Like the infancy narratives in the Gospels, these stories are not intended to relate historical events, but to elucidate the mystery of the prophetic experience. They answer the questions: What does it mean to be a prophet? Does one suddenly become a prophet, or is prophethood a state of existence established before birth, indeed before the beginning of time? If the latter, then there must have been signs foretelling the prophet’s arrival: a miraculous conception, perhaps, or some prediction of the prophet’s identity and mission.

The strictures of Bedouin life naturally prevented the social and economic hierarchies that were so prevalent in sedentary societies like Mecca. The only way to survive in a community in which movement was the norm and material accumulation impractical was to maintain a strong sense of tribal solidarity by evenly sharing all available resources.

In a society with no concept of an absolute morality as dictated by a divine code of ethics—a Ten Commandments, if you will—the Shaykh had only one legal recourse for maintaining order in his tribe: the Law of Retribution. Lex talionis in Latin, the Law of Retribution is more popularly known as the somewhat crude concept of “an eye for an eye.” Yet far from being a barbaric legal system, the Law of Retribution was actually meant to limit barbarism. Accordingly, an injury to a neighbor’s eye confined retaliation to only an eye and nothing more; the theft of a neighbor’s camel required payment of exactly one camel; killing a neighbor’s son meant the execution of one’s own son.

As the Hakam’s arbitrations accumulated over time, they became the foundation of a normative legal tradition, or Sunna, that served as the tribe’s legal code.

Islam preaches the continual self-revelation of God from Adam down to all the prophets who have ever existed in all religions. These prophets are called nabis in Arabic, and they have been chosen to relay God’s divine message to all humanity. But sometimes a nabi is given the extra burden of handing down sacred texts: Moses, who revealed the Torah; David, who composed the Psalms; Jesus, whose words inspired the Gospels. Such an individual is more than a mere prophet; he is God’s messenger—a rasul.

There are, however, two very important factors that distinguished Muhammad from the rest of his contemporaries, factors that would have enraged the Quraysh far more than his monotheistic beliefs. First, unlike Luqman and the Hanifs, Muhammad did not speak from his own authority. Nor were his recitations mediated by the Jinn, as was the case with the Kahins. On the contrary, what made Muhammad unique was his claim to be “the Messenger of God.”

But as a businessman and a merchant himself, 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.

The Quraysh knew that Muhammad intended to stand at the Ka‘ba and deliver his message personally to the pilgrims gathering from all over the peninsula. 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.”

It is a wonder—some would say a miracle—that this same man, who had been forced to sneak out of his home under cover of night to join the seventy or so followers anxiously awaiting him in a foreign land hundreds of miles away, would, in a few short years, return to the city of his birth, not covertly or in darkness, but in the full light of day, with ten thousand men trailing peacefully behind him; and the same people who once tried to murder him in his sleep would instead offer up to him both the sacred city and the keys to the Ka‘ba—unconditionally and without a fight, like a consecrated sacrifice.

Yet regardless of whether one is labeled a Modernist or a Traditionalist, a reformist or a fundamentalist, a feminist or a chauvinist, all Muslims regard Medina as the model of Islamic perfection. Simply put, Medina is what Islam was meant to be.

Despite its ingenuity, Muhammad’s community was still an Arab institution based on Arab notions of tribal society. There was simply no alternative model of social organization in seventh-century Arabia, save for monarchy. Indeed, there are so many parallels between the early Muslim community and traditional tribal society that one is left with the distinct impression that, at least in Muhammad’s mind, the Ummah was indeed a tribe, though a new and radically innovative one.

Public rituals like communal prayer, almsgiving, and collective fasting—the first three activities mandated by Islam—when combined with shared dietary regulations and purity requirements, functioned in the Ummah in much the same way that the activities of the tribal cult did in pagan societies: by providing a common social and religious identity that allowed one group to distinguish itself from another.

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).

Beginning with the unbiblical conviction that men and women were created together and simultaneously from a single cell (4:1; 7:189), the Quran goes to great lengths to emphasize the equality of the sexes in the eyes of God:

Because paternity was unimportant in Bedouin societies (lineage was passed primarily through the mother), it made no difference how many husbands a woman had or who fathered her children. However, in sedentary societies like Mecca, where the accumulation of wealth made inheritance and, therefore, paternity much more important, matrilineal society had gradually given way to a patrilineal one. As a result of this trend toward patriliny, women in sedentary societies were gradually stripped of both their right to divorce and their access to polyandry (the practice of having more than one husband).

“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” (4:129; again, emphasis added). This seeming contradiction offers some insight into a dilemma that plagued the community during its early development. Essentially, while the individual believer was to strive for monogamy, the community that Muhammad was trying to build in Yathrib would have been doomed without polygyny.

After having lived a monogamous life with Khadija for more than twenty-five years, Muhammad, in the course of ten years in Yathrib, married nine different women. With very few exceptions, these marriages were not sexual unions but political ones.

That the veil applied solely to Muhammad’s wives is further demonstrated by the fact that the term for donning the veil, darabat al-hijab, was used synonymously and interchangeably with “becoming Muhammad’s wife.” For this reason, during the Prophet’s lifetime, no other women in the Ummah observed hijab.

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.

As Muhammad’s small community of Arab followers swelled into one of the largest empires the world has ever seen, it faced a growing number of legal and religious challenges that were not explicitly dealt with in the Quran. While Muhammad was still in their midst, these questions could simply be brought to him. But without the Prophet, it became progressively more difficult to ascertain God’s will on issues that far exceeded the knowledge and experiences of a group of Arab tribesmen.

It would be no exaggeration, therefore, to say that quite soon after Muhammad’s death, those men who took upon themselves the task of interpreting God’s will in the Quran and Muhammad’s will in the hadith—men who were, coincidentally, among the most powerful and wealthy members of the Ummah—were not nearly as concerned with the accuracy of their reports or the objectivity of their exegesis as they were with regaining the financial and social dominance that the Prophet’s reforms had taken from them.

There is no question that the Quran, like all holy scriptures, was deeply affected by the cultural norms of the society in which it was revealed—a society that, as we have seen, did not consider women to be equal members of the tribe. As a result, there are numerous verses in the Quran that, along with the Jewish and Christian scriptures, clearly reflect the subordinate position of women in the male-dominated societies of the ancient world. But that is precisely the point which the burgeoning Muslim feminist movement has been making over the last century. These women argue that the religious message of the Quran—a message of revolutionary social egalitarianism—must be separated from the cultural prejudices of seventh-century Arabia. And for the first time in history, they are incorporating their views into the male-dominated world of Quranic exegesis.

This deep-rooted stereotype of Islam as a warrior religion has its origins in the papal propaganda of the Crusades, when Muslims were depicted as the soldiers of the Antichrist in blasphemous occupation of the Holy Lands (and, far more importantly, of the silk route to China). In the Middle Ages, while Muslim philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians were preserving the knowledge of the past and determining the scholarship of the future, a belligerent and deeply fractured Holy Roman Empire tried to distinguish itself from the Turks who were strangling it from all sides by labeling Islam “the religion of the sword,” as though there were in that era an alternative means of territorial expansion besides war.

Throughout every one of these regions, but especially in the Near East, where religion explicitly sanctioned the state, territorial expansion was identical to religious proselytization. Thus, every religion was a “religion of the sword.”

As the Quran suggests over and over again, and as the Constitution of Medina explicitly affirms, Muhammad may have understood the concept of the Umm al-Kitab to mean not only that the Jews, Christians, and Muslims shared a single divine scripture but also that they constituted a single divine Ummah.

When this business was complete, the Prophet made his way to the Ka‘ba. With the help of his cousin and son-in-law, Ali, he lifted the heavy veil covering the sanctuary door and entered the sacred interior. One by one, he carried the idols out before the assembled crowd and, raising them over his head, smashed them to the ground. The various depictions of gods and prophets, such as that of Abraham holding divining rods, were all washed away with Zamzam water; all, that is, except for the one of Jesus and his mother, Mary. This image the Prophet put his hands over reverently, saying, “Wash out all except what is beneath my hands.”

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. He had made no formal statement about who should replace him as leader of the Ummah, or even what kind of leader that person should be. Perhaps he was awaiting a Revelation that never came; perhaps he wanted the Ummah to decide for themselves who should succeed him. Or perhaps, as some were whispering, the Prophet had appointed a successor, someone whose rightful place at the head of the community was being obscured by the internecine power struggles already beginning to take place among the Muslim leadership.

By 632, the Quran had neither been written down nor collected, let alone canonized. The religious ideals that would become the foundation of Islamic theology existed only in the most rudimentary form. The questions of proper ritual activity or correct legal and moral behavior were, at this point, barely regulated; they did not have to be. Whatever questions one had—whatever issue was raised either through internal conflict or as a result of foreign contact—any confusion whatsoever could simply be brought before the Prophet for a solution. But without Muhammad around to elucidate the will of God, the Ummah was left with the nearly impossible task of figuring out what the Prophet would have said about an issue or a problem.

By the end of his rule, Uthman had made so many reckless decisions that not even his most significant accomplishment—the collection and canonization of the Quran—could enable him to escape the ire of the Muslim community.

Most scholars, however, agree that it was Uthman who, in his capacity as the Successor to God, authorized a single universally binding text of the Quran in about 650 C.E. But in doing so, Uthman once again managed to alienate important members of the community when he decided to round up the variant collections of the Quran, bring them to Medina, and set fire to them.

However, there was a small faction within Ali’s party who held the more extreme view that the Ummah was a divinely founded institution that could be run only by the most pious person in the community, irrespective of his tribe, lineage, or ancestry. Eventually called the Kharijites, this faction has already been cited for their justification of Uthman’s murder on the grounds that he had broken the commands of God and rejected the example of the Prophet, making him no longer worthy of the Caliphate. Because the Kharijites stressed the need for a religious authority as Caliph, they are often credited with being the first Muslim theocrats. But this was a tiny, fractious group whose radically theocratic position was rejected by nearly every other faction vying for control of the Muslim community.

Thus, while the Shi‘atu Ali, the Shi‘atu Uthman, the Shi‘atu Mu‘awiyah, and the Kharijites were above all else political factions, all four of these groups were also described in more religiously oriented terms through the use of the word din, or “religion” (as in din Ali, din Uthman, etc.).

For millions of Shi‘ah throughout the world, Ali remains the model of Muslim piety: the light that illuminates the straight path to God. He is, in the words of Ali Shariati, “the best in speech … the best in worship … the best in faith.” It is this heroic vision of Ali that has been firmly planted in the hearts of those who refer to the person they believe to have been the sole successor to Muhammad not as the fourth Caliph, but as something else, something more. Ali, the Shi‘ah claim, was the first Imam: the Proof of God on Earth.

Ever since Mu‘awiyah had transformed the Caliphate into a monarchy, the question of the Caliph’s religious authority had been more or less settled: the Caliph ran the civil affairs of the community, while the Ulama guided the believers on the straight path to God. Certainly there were Caliphs who exercised religious influence over the Ummah. But none had ever dared to set themselves up as some sort of “Muslim Pope,” demanding absolute religious obedience from the community. And yet, that is exactly what al-Ma’mun, who had always thought of himself as a religious scholar first and a political leader second, was seeking to do.