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

by Reza Aslan

RELIGIONS BECOME INSTITUTIONS when the myths and rituals that once shaped their sacred histories are transformed into authoritative models of orthodoxy (the correct interpretation of myths) and orthopraxy (the correct interpretation of rituals), though one is often emphasized over the other. Christianity may be the supreme example of an “orthodoxic” religion; it is principally one’s beliefs—expressed through creed—that make one a faithful Christian. On the opposite end of the spectrum is Judaism, a quintessentially “orthopraxic” religion, where it is principally one’s actions—expressed through the Law—that make one an observant Jew. It is not that beliefs are irrelevant in Judaism, or actions unimportant in Christianity. Rather, it is that of the two religions, Judaism places far greater emphasis on orthopraxic behavior than does Christianity.

The Spanish philosopher and physician Ibn Rushd (1126–98), better known as Averroës in the West, pushed al-Jabbar’s conception of truth to its limit by proposing a “two truths” theory of knowledge in which religion and philosophy are placed in opposition to each other. According to Ibn Rushd, religion simplifies the truth for the masses by resorting to easily recognizable signs and symbols, regardless of the doctrinal contradictions and rational incongruities that inevitably result from the formation and rigid interpretation of dogma. Philosophy, however, is itself truth; its purpose is merely to express reality through the faculty of human reason. It is this commitment to what Binyamin Abrahamov calls “the overwhelming power of reason over revelation” that has led modern scholars to label the Mu’tazilah the first speculative theologians in Islam. And it was precisely this emphasis on the primacy of human reason that the Traditionalist Ulama of the Ash‘arite school so strenuously opposed.

God has a face, argued Abu’l Hasan al-Ash‘ari (873–935), founder of the Ash‘arite school, because the Quran says so (“the face of your Lord will endure forever”; 55:27), and it is not our place to ask how or why. Indeed, the Ash‘ari often responded to the rational incongruities and internal contradictions that resulted from their rigid interpretation of religious doctrine by cultivating a formula of bila kayfa, loosely translated as “Don’t ask why.”

In purely literary terms, the Quran is God’s dramatic monologue. It does not recount God’s communion with humanity; it is God’s communion with humanity. It does not reveal God’s will; it reveals God’s self. And if the doctrine of tawhid forbids any division in the Divine Unity, then the Quran is not just the Speech of God, it is God. This was precisely what the Traditionalist Ulama argued. If God is eternal, then so are the divine attributes, which cannot be separated from God’s self. This would make the Quran, as God’s Speech, an eternal and uncreated thing.

For the Rationalists, who rejected the notion of an uncreated Quran, the only reasonable method of exegesis was one that accounted for the temporal nature of the Revelation. For this reason, the Rationalists stressed the primacy of human reason in determining not just the essence of the Quran, but also its meaning and, most importantly, its historical context. To the Traditionalists, the eternal and uncreated nature of the Quran made it pointless to talk of historical context or original intent when interpreting it. The Quran has never changed and will never change; neither should its interpretation.

The moral provisions of the Shariah are made concrete through the discipline of fiqh, or Islamic jurisprudence, of which the Quran is its first and most important source. The problem, however, is that the Quran is not a book of laws. While there are some eighty or so verses that deal directly with legal issues—matters like inheritance and the status of women, in addition to a handful of penal prescriptions—the Quran makes no attempt whatsoever to establish a system of laws regulating the external behavior of the community, as the Torah does for the Jews. Thus, when dealing with the countless legal issues on which the Quran is silent, the Ulama turn to the traditions, or Sunna, of the Prophet. The Sunna is composed of thousands upon thousands of stories, or hadith, that claim to recount Muhammad’s words and deeds, as well as those of the earliest Companions. As discussed in Chapter 3, as these hadith were passed down from generation to generation, they became increasingly convoluted and inauthentic, so that after a while, nearly every legal or religious opinion—no matter how radical or eccentric—could be legitimated by the Prophet’s authority. By the ninth century, the situation had gotten so out of hand that a group of legal scholars, working independently of one another, attempted to catalogue the most reliable hadith into authoritative collections, the most respected of which are the canons of Muhammad al-Bukhari (d. 870) and Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj (d. 875).

The modern Sunni world has four main schools. The Shafii School, which now dominates Southeast Asia, was founded on the principles of Muhammad ash-Shafii (d. 820), who held the Sunna to be the most important source of law. The Maliki School, which is primarily observed in West Africa, was founded by Malik ibn Anas (d. 795), who relied almost exclusively on the traditions of Medina in forming his opinions. The Hanafi School of Abu Hanifah (d. 767), which prevails across most of Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent, is by far the largest and most diverse legal tradition with regard to breadth of interpretation. And finally, the Hanbali School of Ahmad ibn Hanbal (d. 855), the most traditionalist of the legal schools, can be found in pockets throughout the Middle East, but tends to dominate ultraconservative countries like Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan.

As will become apparent, the debate over the nature and function of the Quran and the Shariah has in no way ended. Indeed, contemporary Muslim scholars such as Abdolkarim Soroush, Tariq Ramadan, Abdullahi An-Na’im, Amina Wadoud, Khaled Abou El Fadl, and many others have been vigorously pushing the Muslim community to reopen the gates of ijtihad and revive the rational exegesis of the Quran. Nevertheless, the dominance of the Traditionalist position continues to have devastating consequences for the development and progress of law and society in modern Islam.

The problem is that it is practically impossible to reconcile the Traditionalist view of the Shariah as a sacred and divinely revealed set of laws requiring no human interpretation or historical context with the requirements of a modern constitutional state, let alone the most minimum standards of democracy and human rights.

Certainly, it contains the moral framework for living a holy and righteous life as a Muslim. But it was never meant to function as a legal code, which is precisely why scholars had to rely so heavily on extra-Quranic sources like ijma (consensus), qiyas (analogy), istislah (which refers to the common good of the people), and ijtihad (independent juristic reasoning)—all of them, by definition, reliant on human judgment and historical context—in order to construct the Shariah in the first place.

Of course, Iran is a special case. The Iranian Islamic ideal is a patently Shi‘ite one, and from their inception as a political movement with the aim of restoring the Caliphate to the family of the Prophet to their rise as a separate religious sect in Islam with its own distinct beliefs and practices, the Shi‘ah have always done things differently.

WHAT SETS THE actions of the Penitents at Karbala apart in the history of religions is that they offer a glimpse into the ways in which ritual, rather than myth, can fashion a faith. This is a crucial point to bear in mind when discussing the development of Shi‘ism. As Heinz Halm has noted, the Shi‘ah are a community born not “by the profession of belief in dogma” but rather “through the process of performing the rituals” that sprang up around the Karbala myth. Only after these rituals had become formalized hundreds of years later did Shi‘ite theologians reexamine and reinterpret them in order to lay the theological foundation for what was already a new religious movement.

The Shi‘ah believe that salvation requires the intercession of Muhammad, his son-in-law Ali, his grandsons Hasan and Husayn, and the rest of the Prophet’s legitimate successors, the Imams, who not only serve as humanity’s intercessors on the Last Days, but who further function as the eternal executors (wali) of the divine Revelation.

Thus the Shi‘ite profession of faith: “There is no god but God, Muhammad is God’s Messenger, and Ali is God’s Executor (wali).”

The primacy of ta’wil in Shi‘ism had great advantages for the early Shi‘ah, who were eager to link themselves with Muhammad by uncovering scriptural references that would justify their distinctive beliefs and practices. Of course, this is a common tactic used by all sectarian movements that wish to connect themselves to their parent religion.

The Jafari school, as it is known, differentiates itself from Sunni schools of law, first by recognizing a different set of hadith, which include stories of the Imams as well as of Muhammad, and second by vigorously employing ijtihad, or independent juristic reasoning, as one of the primary sources of Shi‘ite jurisprudence.

The followers of Ismail—called the Ismailis, or “Seveners,” because they accept the existence of only seven Imams before the Mahdi—were not the first to promulgate the notion of a “Muslim messiah.”

Because there is no mention of the Mahdi in the Quran, Muslims looked to the hadith for insight into the second coming of the “Hidden Imam.” As one would expect, these traditions differed greatly depending on geographical location and political affiliation. For instance, in Syria, where Umayyad loyalty dominated both religious and civil concerns, the hadith claimed that the Mahdi would be a member of the Quraysh, while in Kufa, the seat of Shi‘ite aspirations, the hadith insisted that the Mahdi would be a direct descendant of Muhammad through his son-in-law, Ali; his first duty upon returning to earth would naturally be to avenge the massacre at Karbala.

Angry young men gathered throughout the city to burn American flags and chant anti-imperialist slogans against the superpower that had, a little more than two decades earlier, extinguished Iran’s first attempt at democratic revolution. That revolution took place in 1953, when the same improbable coalition of intelligentsia, clerics, and bazaari merchants managed to topple Iran’s monarchy, only to have it forcibly restored by the CIA a few months later.

The 2002 U.S.–led war to depose Saddam Hussein had the somewhat unexpected effect of liberating the other major Shi‘ite school of law, in the holy Iraqi city of Najaf. Led by the Iranian-born Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, a man many consider to be the most senior ayatollah in the world, the Najaf school promulgates a more traditional, apolitical interpretation of Shi‘ah Islam.

For Sufis, Islam is neither law nor theology, neither creed nor ritual. Islam, according to Sufism, is merely the means through which the believer can destroy his ego so as to become one with the creator of the heavens and the earth.

But one cannot keep the baying hound away from the new moon.

Kais was mad, it is true. But what is madness? Is it to be consumed by the flames of love? Is the moth mad to immolate itself in the fires of its desire? If so, then yes, Kais was mad. Kais was Majnun.

But while the Shi‘ah and Sufis existed in the same spiritual dimension and most certainly influenced each other, Sufism represents a rare anti-intellectual strain within Islam dedicated solely to esotericism and devotionalism. Also, unlike the Shi‘ah, the Sufis were not interested in political power.

That said, Sufis consider all orthodoxy, all traditional teachings, the law, theology, and the Five Pillars inadequate for attaining true knowledge of God. Even the Quran, which Sufis respect as the direct speech of God, lacks the capacity to shed light upon God’s essence. As one Sufi master has argued, why spend time reading a love letter (by which he means the Quran) in the presence of the Beloved who wrote it?

The Sufi knows no dualities, only unity. There is no good and evil, no light and dark; there is only God.

As will become apparent, throughout the colonized lands of the Middle East and North Africa, the voice of modernism and integration with the Enlightenment ideals of the European colonialists was consistently drowned out by the far louder and more aggressive voice of traditionalism and resistance to the insufferable yoke of imperialism. Thus, a new generation of Indian Muslims, born into a country that had become the exclusive financial property of the British Empire, no longer shared the popular Sufi sentiment that “if the world does not agree with you, you agree with the world.” They instead preferred the version offered by the great mystical poet and philosopher Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938)—a disciple of the Qadiri Order and a devotee of Wali Allah—who exclaimed, “If the world does not agree with you, arise against it!”

In 1877, Sayyid Ahmed Khan founded the Aligarh School, the primary goal of which was the revitalization of Islamic glory through modern European education. Sir Sayyid was convinced that if he could shine the light of European rationalism and scientific thought upon traditional Muslim beliefs and customs, the result would be an indigenous Islamic Enlightenment that would propel the Muslim world into the twentieth century. The Aligarh taught its students to throw off the shackles of the Ulama and their blind imitation (taqlid) of Islamic doctrine, for none of the problems facing Muslims in the modern world could be solved through their antiquated theology. The only hope for Islamic revival was the modernization of the Shariah; and the only way to achieve this was to take it out of the hands of the incompetent and irrelevant Ulama.

Islam was for al-Afghani far more than law and theology; it was civilization. Indeed, it was a superior civilization because, as he argued, the intellectual foundations upon which the West was built had in fact been borrowed from Islam. Ideals such as social egalitarianism, popular sovereignty, and the pursuit and preservation of knowledge had their origins not in Christian Europe, but in the Ummah. It was Muhammad’s revolutionary community that had introduced the concept of popular sanction over the ruling government while dissolving all ethnic boundaries between individuals and giving women and children unprecedented rights and privileges.

As Hamid Algar has pointed out, had it not been for the extraordinary circumstances under which Wahhabism emerged, it would undoubtedly have “passed into history as a marginal and short-lived sectarian movement.” Not only was this a spiritually and intellectually insignificant movement in a religion founded principally upon spiritualism and intellectualism, it was not even considered true orthodoxy by the majority of Sunni Muslims. Yet Wahhabism had two distinct advantages that would guarantee its place as the most important sectarian movement in Islam since the Penitents first gathered at Karbala a thousand years earlier. First, it had the good fortune to emerge in the sacred lands of the Arabian Peninsula, where it could lay claim to a powerful legacy of religious revivalism. Second, it benefited from a willing and eager patron who saw in its simple ideals the means of gaining unprecedented control over the entire Arabian Peninsula. That patron was Muhammad ibn Saud.

In 1818, the Egyptian khedive, Muhammad Ali (1769–1849), at the behest of the Ottoman Caliph, sent a massive contingent of heavily armed soldiers into the peninsula. The Egyptian army easily overwhelmed the ill-equipped and poorly trained Wahhabis. Mecca and Medina were once again placed under the care of the Sharif and the Wahhabists forcefully sent back into the Najd. By the time the Egyptian troops withdrew, the Saudis had learned a valuable lesson: they could not take on the Ottoman Empire on their own. They needed a far stronger alliance than the one they had with the Wahhabis. The opportunity to form just such an alliance presented itself with the Anglo-Saudi Treaty in 1915. The British, who were eager to control the Persian Gulf, encouraged the Saudis to recapture the Arabian Peninsula from Ottoman control. To assist them in their rebellion, the British provided regular shipments of weapons and money. Under the command of Ibn Saud’s heir Abd al-Aziz (1880–1953), the plan worked. At the close of the First World War, when the Ottoman Empire had been dismantled and the Caliphate abolished, ibn Saud reconquered Mecca and Medina and once again expelled the Sharif. After publicly executing forty thousand men and reimposing Wahhabism over the entire population, Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud renamed the Arabian Peninsula “the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.” The primitive tribe of the Najd and their puritanical allies had become the Wardens of the Sanctuary, the Keepers of the Keys. Almost...

Since the creation of the Muslim World League, the simplicity, certainty, and unconditional morality of Wahhabism have infiltrated every corner of the Muslim world. Thanks to Saudi evangelism, Wahhabi doctrine has dramatically affected the religio-political ideologies of the Muslim Brothers, Mawdudi’s Islamic Association, the Palestinian Hamas, and Islamic Jihad, to name only a few groups. The Saudis have become the patrons of a new kind of Pan-Islamism: one based on the austere, uncompromising, and extremist ideology of “Islamic fundamentalism,” which has become a powerful voice in deciding the future of the Islamic state.

And yet, as great a failure as the promotion of democracy in the Middle East has been thus far, the fact remains that only through genuine democratic reform can the appeal of Jihadism be undermined and the tide of Muslim militancy stemmed. As has been demonstrated by the wave of prodemocracy demonstrations that has swept across the Middle East and North Africa, the hope for peace and prosperity in the region lies in the creation of genuine, homegrown, and indigenous democratic societies.

Iran’s previous attempts at democracy were thwarted by foreigners—the British and Russians in 1905–1911; the United States in 1953—whose interests were served by suppressing all democratic aspirations in the region. The revolution of 1979 was hijacked by the country’s own clerical establishment, which used its moral authority to gain absolute power over the nascent state. The reform movement of the 1990s was quashed by a government deathly afraid of its own people and desperate to preserve its political power. The Green Movement’s demand for greater human rights was overpowered by an increasingly militarized régime that has elevated its own survival over all other considerations. Yet the hundred-year quest in Iran to construct a truly indigenous democratic system that provides a place for religion in the public realm without subverting the will of the people continues to this day.

In the half century since the end of colonialism and the founding of the Islamic state, Islam has been invoked to legitimize and to overturn governments, to promote republicanism and defend authoritarianism, to justify monarchies, autocracies, oligarchies, and theocracies, and to foster terrorism, factionalism, and hostility. The question remains: Can Islam now be used to establish a genuinely liberal democracy in the Middle East and beyond? Can a modern Islamic state reconcile reason and Revelation to create a democratic society based on the ethical ideals established by the Prophet Muhammad in Medina fourteen centuries ago?

In short, Islam is not just a faith; Islam is an identity. That is true of all religions. In the United States, polls show that some 70 percent of the population identifies itself as Christian. That does not mean that seven out of ten Americans go to church on Sundays, that seven out of ten Americans read the New Testament, that, in fact, seven out of ten Americans know anything at all about Christianity save that Jesus was born in a manger and died on a cross. No, the overwhelming majority of Americans who describe themselves as Christian are making a statement of identity, not a statement of belief. The same holds true for the overwhelming majority of Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, Jains, etc. Religion has always been more than a matter of beliefs and practices. It is, above all, a perspective, a mode of being. Religion encompasses one’s culture, one’s politics, one’s very view of the world. This is particularly true of Islam, which, like all great religions, has been shaped not only by metaphysical concerns but also by the social, cultural, spiritual, and political milieu in which it finds itself.

Turkey is a secular country in which outward signs of religiosity such as the hijab were, until quite recently, forcibly suppressed. With regard to ideological resolve, one could argue that little separates a secular country like Turkey from a religious country like Iran; both ideologize society. The United States, however, is a secularizing country, unapologetically founded on a Judeo-Christian—and more precisely Protestant—moral framework. As recognized nearly two hundred years ago by Alexis de Tocqueville, religion is the foundation of America’s political system. It not only reflects American social values, it very often dictates them. One need only regard the language with which political issues like abortion rights and gay marriage are debated in Congress to recognize that religion is to this day an integral part of the American national identity and patently the moral foundation for its Constitution, its laws, and its national customs. Despite what schoolchildren read in their history books, the reality is that the separation of “church and state” is not so much the foundation of American government as it is the result of a two-hundred-forty-year secularization process based not upon secularism, but upon pluralism.

It is pluralism, not secularism, that defines democracy. A democratic state can be established upon any normative moral framework as long as pluralism remains the source of its legitimacy.

The foundation of Islamic pluralism can be summed up in one indisputable verse: “There can be no compulsion in religion” (2:256). This means that the antiquated partitioning of the world into spheres of belief (dar al-Islam) and unbelief (dar al-Harb), which was first developed during the Crusades but which still maintains its grasp on the imaginations of Traditionalist theologians, is utterly unjustifiable. It also means that the ideology of those Islamic puritans like the Wahhabists who wish to return Islam to some imaginary ideal of original purity must be once and for all abandoned. Islam is and has always been a religion of diversity. The notion that there was once an original, unadulterated Islam that was shattered into heretical sects and schisms is a historical fiction. Both Shi‘ism and Sufism in all their wonderful manifestations represent trends of thought that have existed from the very beginning of Islam, and both find their inspiration in the words and deeds of the Prophet. God may be One, but Islam most definitely is not.

Those who argue that a state cannot be considered Islamic unless sovereignty rests in the hands of God are in effect arguing that sovereignty should rest in the hands of the clergy. Because religion is, by definition, interpretation, sovereignty in a religious state would belong to those with the power to interpret religion. Yet for this very reason an Islamic democracy cannot be a religious state. Otherwise it would be an oligarchy, not a democracy.

What is taking place now in Islam is an internal conflict between Muslims, not an external battle between Islam and the West. The West is merely a bystander—an unwary yet complicit casualty of a rivalry that is raging in Islam over who will write the next chapter in its story.

But one thing is certain: the past, and the idealized, perfected, and totally imaginary view of it wrought by those puritans and fundamentalists who strive to re-create it, is over. The next chapter in the story of Islam will be written solely by those willing to look forward, to confront whatever lies ahead, confident in the knowledge that the revolution launched by the Prophet Muhammad fourteen centuries ago to replace the archaic, rigid, and inequitable strictures of tribal society with a radically new vision of divine morality and social egalitarianism still continues to this day.