No God But God

Islam is the youngest, the fastest growing, and in many ways the least complicated of the world's great monotheistic faiths. It is a unique religion based on its own holy book, but it is also a direct descendant of Judaism and Christianity, incorporating some of the teachings of those religions—modifying some and rejecting others.

The core belief of Islam is the absolute oneness of God, or Allah in Arabic. Muslims say the God they worship is the same God worshiped by Christians and Jews, but they do not think about the deity in the same way. The God of Islam has no human attributes or dimensions in time or space; he would not, for instance, rest on the seventh day. Nor does the God of Islam have multiple forms: Islam specifically repudiates the Holy Trinity—saying it is equivalent to worshiping three deities—and the divinity of Jesus. "Those who say, 'The Lord of Mercy has begotten a son,' preach a monstrous falsehood," says the Koran, the holy book of Islam, "at which the very heavens might crack, the Earth break asunder, and the mountains crumble to dust" (Sura 19, v. 88-90).

Islam teaches that God cannot be visualized, which is why there can be no portrait or statue of him, but he is not an abstraction either. He is present everywhere and always in human life, and on the last day, he will sit in judgment of every person. Each human being is free to choose whether to follow God's commands or not. Those who do will enter paradise; those who do not face eternal damnation.

God's commands were made known to humankind, according to Islam, by Muhammad ibn Abdullah, an Arabian merchant and trader, through whom God transmitted the revelations compiled in the Koran. In Islamic belief, Muhammad did not write the Koran. Rather, he followed the instructions of the angel Gabriel, who appeared before him one night in A.D. 610 and told him to "proclaim" or "recite" the words of God.

Muhammad was not divine; Muslims admire but do not worship him. In Muslim tradition, he was a virtuous and honorable man whose life is worthy of emulation, but he was a human being, the last prophet in a line extending back to Abraham, the universal patriarch of monotheism. After Abraham, God from time to time sent other prophets and messengers to reveal his will, including Jesus, but Muslims believe that Jews and Christians alike distorted, misinterpreted, or spurned the truths that they heard over the centuries. Only with Muhammad was the final truth revealed; through him, God has spoken for all time.

Islam is an Arabic word meaning submission—submission to the will of God. Its participial form is Muslim, one who submits. Both words derive from the same root as salaam, which in Arabic means peace.

The vast majority of the world's 1.2 billion Muslims are not Arabs, but Arabic is the language of the faith because it is the language of the Koran. Unlike the Bible, the Koran, Muslims believe, was revealed in its entirety to one man in one language; it is the immutable word of God, not subject to amendment or, strictly speaking, to translation. "We have revealed the Koran in the Arabic tongue that you may grasp its meaning," the text says. "It is a transcript of our eternal book, sublime, and full of wisdom" (Sura 43, v. 3).

A CHURCH WITHOUT CLERGY

Islam holds itself out as a universal faith, appli-cable to all peoples everywhere, but it is not an organized church; there is no central doctrinal authority. Membership in the umma, or community of Muslims, is not conferred by man; there is no baptism. Indeed, there are no sacraments at all, and, strictly speaking, there is no clergy. Those turban-wearing men giving sermons in Muslim countries who are referred to in western news-papers as "clergy" are schooled in theology and Islamic law, but they are not ordained, and they carry only so much moral authority as their congregations choose to accord them.

The absence of clergy and hierarchy is at once a strength and a weakness of Islam: Individuals find it appealing because they are responsible only to God, but the absence of a central source of doctrine results in disagreements and arguments that often produce conflict. The religious authorities in Muslim countries sometimes issue decrees or rulings called fatwas, which purport to tell the faithful what they should think about some point of faith or politics, but individual Muslims are not obliged to follow them. Two well-known examples in recent times were the fatwa from Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini condemning to death the author Salman Rushdie and the fatwa from the senior religious figures of Saudi Arabia authorizing the deployment of American troops in the kingdom for Operation Desert Storm. Neither decree was universally accepted by Muslims.

To become a Muslim all that is required is to make the profession of faith—"There is no god but God, and Muhammad is the messenger of God"—sincerely and in the presence of other Muslims who will witness it. No baptism is required because in Islam there is no original sin to be ritually washed away. For an adult who converts to Islam, making the profession of faith is an act of volition by the individual, who makes the free choice to submit to the will of God as revealed in the Koran.

Because no other person stands between the individual believer and God, Islam is not generally spread by people westerners would describe as missionaries; becoming a Muslim does not require the presence of any authority figure in a turned collar, only the willingness to accept the faith as learned from neighbors or fellow workers.

Free Will or Fate?

But how can the individual exercise free will if, as the Koran says, God knows everything in advance? How can Muslims reconcile the belief that everything occurs in accordance with a divine plan with the instructions of the Koran and the Prophet to live virtuously and do good works? This question of free will versus predetermination is as old as the faith. Muslims say that even if the fate of a person's soul is predetermined, he or she has no way of knowing what that fate is, and therefore it is incumbent upon people to strive for Allah's favor. "Each soul is the hostage of its own deeds," says the Koran (Sura 74, v. 38).

ON JUDGMENT DAY

Islam imposes a set of duties and requirements that must be fulfilled if one is to be in favor with God on Judgment Day. The Koran is eloquent and relentless in describing the inevitability and finality of that day, on which the believers in good standing will meet God and the unbelievers will be cast down forever. No last-minute repentance or pleas for mercy will avert their grim fate. Fear of God's inexorable judgment, rather than love of the deity, is the most powerful motivator in Islam. "When the sky is rent asunder; when the stars scatter and the oceans roll together; when the graves are hurled about; each soul shall know what it has done and what it has failed to do," the holy book says (Sura 82, v. 1). "The righteous shall surely dwell in bliss. But the wicked shall burn in hellfire upon the Judgment Day: They shall not escape." The Koran is graphic about the eternal torments that will be inflicted upon the condemned: no drink save boiling water and molten metal, no food but decaying filth, and when their skins have burned away they will grow new ones so their suffering can continue.

By contrast, as might be expected in a religion that originated in the barren Arabian Peninsula, the Koran describes paradise as a place of lush, well-watered gardens and fruit trees. Allah will reward the saved with "robes of silk and the delights of paradise. Reclining there upon soft couches, they shall feel neither the scorching heat nor the biting cold. Trees will spread their shade around them, and fruits will hang in clusters over them," the Koran promises. They will be attended by handsome boys and "bashful virgins . . . as fair as corals and rubies," who will bring cold drinks in silver goblets (Sura 76, v. 13-14; Sura 55, v. 48-58).

In sorting out those who will enter paradise from those eternally condemned, Islam makes no distinction between men and women; they are equal before God. "Those who surrender themselves to Allah and accept the true faith; who are devout, sincere, patient, humble, charitable, and chaste; who fast and are ever mindful of Allah, on these, both men and women, Allah will be-stow forgiveness and a rich reward," says the Koran in Sura 33.

THE STATUS OF WOMEN

The Koran makes clear that men are the leaders in family and community, and it permits polygamy. But it also requires that men treat women kindly and lays out in elaborate detail the rights of women to own and inherit property. By comparison with the pagan society into which Muhammad was born, the Islamic community that he created elevated the status of women by giving them specific protections and guaranteed rights. The Prophet forbade female infanticide, then a common practice. It is ironic that many modern Muslim countries sanction cruel and discriminatory treatment of women, for that was surely not the Prophet's intent. His wife Khadija, a successful businesswoman, and the other women he married after Khadija's death played important roles in his life and work.

Yet it is disingenuous to argue, as many contemporary Muslims do, that Islam is beneficial to women because it guarantees them social dignity and a protected legal status. On the contrary, the Koran repeatedly belittles women. "Men have authority over women because Allah has made the one superior to the others, and because they spend their wealth to maintain them. Good women are obedient. They guard their unseen parts because Allah guarded them. As for those from whom you fear disobedience, admonish them and send them to beds apart and beat them," the holy book says (Sura 4, v. 34). Even today, magazines can be found in some Arab libraries that contain instructions for the "gentle" beating of difficult wives. And as for sex, the Koran tells men they can have it when they want it: "Women are your fields. Go, then, into your fields as you please" (Sura 2, v. 223).

CHURCH AND STATE

After the Koran, the most important secondary source of doctrine is the Sunna, the life and example of the Prophet, often recorded in the hadith, his authenticated sayings, compiled after his death by Muslim scholars who laboriously recorded the chain of sources who had heard Muhammad speak. Collectively, these require Muslims to live peaceably among themselves, be honest in commerce, be charitable to the orphan and the wayfarer, refrain from alcohol and gambling, divide inherited property and the spoils of war according to specific rules, and conduct the affairs of their community in accordance with God's law. Because these requirements apply to everyone, and because God is always watching, it has often been said that Islam is not just a religion, it is a way of life; there is no distinction between the religious and the secular. Says Middle East specialist Bernard Lewis: "Such pairs of words as church and state, spiritual and temporal, ecclesiastical and lay had no real equivalent in Arabic until modern times, when they were created to translate modern ideas."

To the true believer, no human endeavor is exempt from religious input, which is why Muslim communities are often locked in strenuous arguments about matters that would be entirely secular elsewhere, such as insurance (Is life insurance permissible?) or medical practice (May females treat male patients?) or home buying (How can we have mortgages when Islam forbids the charging of interest?). When Muslim agitators demand that communities or countries be governed according to sharia, or Islamic law, this is what the argument is about: Should public matters such as inheritance law, taxation, education, and criminal justice be determined by religion? If so, how can rules and doctrines that predated the industrial era be applied to modern life? If not, how can the community fulfill the ideals of the faith?

Because neither the Koran nor the Prophet specified what form of government was to be established, Muslims have been arguing for centuries about the proper balance between religious and secular law. Some societies have forged a compromise in which religious courts, guided by sharia, adjudicate family matters such as divorce and child custody, while leaving commercial matters to civil tribunals.

a HARSH JUSTICE

The balance has proved especially difficult to achieve in criminal law because sharia prescribes some punishments that may have been appropriate in the seventh century but are abhorrent today, such as cutting off of hands for theft and public stoning for adultery. According to the Pakistani religious scholar Maulana Muhammad Ali, the state or government punishes only crimes in which there are victims—that is, the state does not punish a failure to pray or a failure to keep the Ramadan fast. In all cases, Ali said, "the punishment of evil should be proportionate thereto," but that does not resolve the question of who has the power to determine proportionality.

In addition to the general requirement to live in preparation for Judgment Day, Islam imposes five specific duties, known as the pillars of the faith, of which acceptance of God and the Prophet through the profession of faith is the first. The second is to pray five times a day. The third is to pay the zakat, or charity tax. The fourth is to fast during daylight hours in Ramadan, the ninth month of the Islamic lunar calendar. And the fifth, the only spiritual force more powerful than Ramadan, is the pilgrimage to Mecca. Every Muslim who is physically able is required to make at least one pilgrimage to the birthplace of Muhammad, of Islam, and—in Muslim belief—of monotheism itself.

THE MEANING OF jIHAD

From time to time, Muslim scholars and political activists have asserted that there is, or should be, a sixth pillar of the faith: jihad, the so-called neglected duty. The word means "striving" or "struggle" on behalf of the faith. It does not necessarily or even usually mean armed conflict; when it does, those who fight are known as mujahideen, or jihad fighters. In the news media, the word jihad is usually translated as "holy war," but it is a much more complicated concept. The word has taken on a note of menace because nowadays every bomb-throwing extremist and two-bit dissident in the Muslim world issues a call to jihad as a way to foment violence. Traditionally, however, jihad meant simply a great effort by an individual or a group to spread or promote the faith. The Koran calls for armed conflict against unbelievers only if Islam is under attack: "Fight for the sake of Allah those that fight against you, but do not attack them first. Allah does not love the aggressors" (Sura 2, v. 190). In modern times, the best-known example of armed jihad against unbelievers was the war against the Soviet occupiers of Afghanistan in the 1980s.

The most extreme advocates of jihad have urged that Muslims take up arms against non-Muslims and force them to convert, but such a position has never been in the mainstream of the faith. It is at odds with history because the vast majority of those who have accepted Islam have done so willingly. At the time of Muhammad's death in A.D. 632, there was no unitary state on the Arabian Peninsula; there were only fractious tribes. The Byzantine and Persian empires to the north and east were exhausted relics of themselves, waiting to collapse. Arabia was a society looking for political definition, and Muhammad's new community of believers provided it. "Arabia was a political vacuum," Maxime Rodinson wrote in his biography of the Prophet. "Aspirations to peace among the tribes, to a strong state which should guarantee the safety of persons and property and allow free and profitable trading—these aspirations...had no alternative goal on which to set their sights than an Arab state with an Arab ideology." The new community of Muslims provided that state and ideology—despite internal disputes that divided the allegiance of the faithful and persist today in the split between Sunni and Shiite Muslims—and soon spread across Arabia as one tribe after another gave its allegiance.

Within a century after Muhammad's death, Arab armies were masters of a vast territory from southern France to the Indus River, and the people of those new territories were rapidly embracing the new religion learned from their conquerors—not because they were forced to do so but because they chose to do so. Those who came under Arab dominion but elected to remain Christians or Jews were generally tolerated as "people of the book," second-class citizens required to pay a special tax but not persecuted.

With the Prophet's death came a leadership vacuum. Muhammad left no male heir, and no one could claim his moral authority over the believers; some tribal leaders who had signed pacts with him declared those pacts void upon his death; and a power struggle developed among his closest followers, who took up arms against one another. Never again would the world's Muslims achieve the ideal of brotherhood that the Prophet envisioned, not even at the apogee of Ottoman Turkish power in the 16th century. Unhappily for Islam, the solidarity that enwraps the white-clad pilgrims of each year's pilgrimage dissipates when they return to their home communities, which are often in conflict with each other. Islam aspires to peace but has historically failed to achieve it.