Books of The Times | 'No god but God'
The Jihad Is a Civil War, the West Only a Bystander
By WILLIAM GRIMES
Published: May 4, 2005
For many in the West, the 9/11 attacks on the World
Trade Center turned a page in world history. They
signaled the onset of a monumental struggle between
fundamentalist Islam and modern, secular democracy,
what the Harvard scholar Samuel P. Huntington has
called a "clash of civilizations."
NO GOD BUT GOD
The Origins, Evolution and Future of Islam
By Reza Aslan
310 pages. Random House. $25.95.
Forum: Book News and Reviews
Stephen Townley/Random House
Reza Aslan
Not so, Reza Aslan argues in "No god but God." "What
is taking place now in the Muslim world is an internal
conflict between Muslims, not an external battle
between Islam and the West," he writes. "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."
That history, grippingly narrated and thoughtfully
examined, takes up nearly all of "No god but God." Mr.
Aslan, an Iranian by birth and a doctoral student in
history and religion at the University of California
at Santa Barbara, has written a literate, accessible
introduction to Islam (or, more accurately Islams),
carefully placing its message and rituals in
historical context. Complete with a glossary and an
annotated bibliography, it could easily serve as a
college textbook.
Mr. Aslan is, in a certain sense, a fundamentalist.
The Christian sense of the word is meaningless in
Islam, of course, because Muslims believe that the
Koran was dictated by God and, therefore, that its
words are literally true. But like the puritanical
Wahhabists of Saudi Arabia, whom he reviles, Mr. Aslan
looks to the first Muslim community in Medina,
established by Muhammad 1,400 years ago, as a model
for reform today. His Medina, though, is a communal,
egalitarian society dedicated to pluralism and
tolerance. The problem with Islam, Mr. Aslan argues,
is the clerical establishment that gained control over
the interpretation of the Koran and the hadith: the
anecdotes describing the words and deeds of Muhammad,
passed on by his followers and their descendants. Less
than two centuries after Muhammad's death in 632,
there were some 700,000 hadith circulating throughout
the Muslim world, "the great majority of which were
unquestionably fabricated by individuals who sought to
legitimize their own particular beliefs and practices
by connecting them with the Prophet." The stoning of
adulterous women, to take a notorious example,
originated not in the Koran, but in the virulent
misogyny of Umar, one of Muhammad's first converts and
later the ruler of the caliphate, who simply claimed
that this form of punishment had accidentally been
left out of the Koran. Although women in the Medina
community were given the right to inherit the property
of their husbands and to keep their dowries as their
own personal property, later scholars decided that the
Koran, when instructing believers "not to pass on your
wealth and property to the feeble-minded," had women
and children in mind.
One of Mr. Aslan's most important chapters deals with
the centuries-long struggle between traditionalists
and rationalists over the proper interpretation of the
Koran. The outcome weighs heavy on the world today.
The rationalists saw the Koran as both the word of God
and a historical document whose meanings change
through time. For the traditionalists, the Koran is
fixed and eternal. Therefore, "what was appropriate
for Muhammad's community in the seventh century C.E.
must be appropriate for all Muslim communities to
come, regardless of the circumstances."
The traditionalists won. The power to interpret the
Koran came under the control of religious scholars,
collectively known as the ulama, who ended the era of
consensus and free reasoning that, up to the 10th
century, had defined Koranic inquiry.
If this sounds like a remote quarrel, it is not. Mr.
Aslan says it is now being played out again throughout
the Muslim world. This, he argues, is the real jihad,
not holy war against the West, but the internal
struggle for Islam's soul, with reformers pitted
against reactionaries in Tehran, Cairo, Damascus and
Jakarta, as well as in Muslim communities in the West.
"Like the reformations of the past, this will be a
terrifying event," he writes. "However, out of the
ashes of cataclysm, a new chapter in the story of
Islam will emerge."
This has a heroic ring to it, but Mr. Aslan
acknowledges that the outcome is in doubt. He places
his hopes in the like-minded liberals who, he
suggests, constitute Islam's silent majority. "The
fact is that the vast majority of the more than one
billion Muslims in the world readily accept the
fundamental principals of democracy," he writes. Like
the reformers in Iran, they are committed to "genuine
Islamic values like pluralism, freedom, justice, human
rights, and above all, democracy."
This may be, but Mr. Aslan, in his polemical
conclusion, tends to assert rather than present
evidence. His impassioned plea for an Islamic form of
democracy, although moving, sounds sophistical.
Religion and the state, in his view, cannot be
separate. The very concept is alien to Islam. "At its
most basic level, the Islamic state is a state run by
Muslims for Muslims, in which the determination of
values, the norms of behavior, and the formation of
laws are influenced by Islamic morality," he writes.
Yet somehow pluralism, human rights, equality of the
sexes and religious tolerance would prevail, because,
ultimately, these values already exist in Islam.
As Mr. Aslan acknowledges, Iran's halting steps toward
a synthesis of Islam and democracy have been
discouraging. The example of the Taliban casts a very
dark shadow over the idea of an Islamic state. But the
tide of history, Mr. Aslan insists, is moving in the
right direction, sweeping Islam back, after 1,400
years, toward Medina.
Order an Online Edition of The NY Times & Read at Your
Leisure
Mario Gagho
Agra University
www.ppi-india.org
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