No god but God

By David Shasha - The American Muslim - Bridgeton, MO, USA
Saturday, January 5, 2007

At the time of the first Gulf War in 1991 the legendary Arab historian Albert Hourani had completed his magnum opus A History of the Arab Peoples.

It gripped the public imagination and filled a pressing need for information on an Arab world that was a closed book to many in the West.

It was a conflation of that need for information into a wonderfully clear book by an expert that made the book a bestseller.

Hourani provided a nuanced and sympathetic view of the Arab world for the Western reader who was clueless about the history of the Middle East.

After 9/11 the book that climbed the bestseller lists was Bernard Lewis’ execrable What Went Wrong?, a book that painted the Arab-Muslim world as a hotbed of degenerate anarchy.

A year prior to the 9/11 attacks, the great theologian and religious historian Karen Armstrong wrote a brilliant precis of Islam for the Modern Library Chronicles series that gave the educated reader a clear picture of the complex history and inner workings of Islam in a studious and measured way which reflected more the measured approach of Albert Hourani than the racist ethnocentrism of Bernard Lewis.

But it was Bernard Lewis who won the day.

Americans were in no mood to “understand” their new enemy and a sub-industry of “Islam as terror” books were churned out by American publishers.

Two books that were more reflective and intelligent assessments of our post-9/11 world were Paul Berman’s Terror and Liberalism, a sort of Liberal mea culpa for the excesses of the 1960s radicals that also served as a very insistent critique of the way in which religion had co-opted Third World liberation movements, and Abdelwahab Meddeb’s sadly-neglected masterpiece The Malady of Islam, a book that cut to the very heart of Arab civilization from within its own parameters.

Both of these books addressed the issue of Islamic fundamentalism from the perspective of Western Liberal Modernity and were both successful in affirming the need for a Liberal Humanist perspective in the Arab world.

Unlike Bernard Lewis, both Berman and Meddeb were of the Liberal spirit and saw the emergence of fundamentalism and terror as a problem that could be resolved from within Islam itself.

But Islam continued to remain a closed book to many Westerners. After receiving their information on Islam and Modernity from a source like Bernard Lewis, US readers remained ignorant of the complex and tortuous history of Islam.

This lacuna has now been effectively filled by the brilliantly written study of the Iranian-born and US-educated Reza Aslan in his No god but God.

His book is exceedingly transparent as it chooses a number of critical issues that form the basis of each of the book’s chapters. In the book we learn of the ancient world of Arabia prior to Islam; the life and movement of Muhammad; the start of the Muslim society; the ways in which Jihad played a pivotal role in the formation of Islamic civilization as it conquered vast swathes of the Middle East and parts of Europe; the politicization of the faith; the emergence of a lettered class of religious leaders known as Ulama; extensive chapters on Shi’ism and Sufism; the book ends with two chapters on Colonialism and the emerging Islamic Reform movement.

Aslan takes a different tack than Karen Armstrong did in her survey of Islam. In no god but God each chapter is self-contained and is based on a single theme that is analyzed historically, theologically and contextualized within the current situation that Islam finds itself in.

For example, in the chapter on Jihad which discusses the ways in which the first Muslims took back the Middle East in the name of the new faith, Aslan enters into a fairly detailed analysis of the question of Jews in the newly emerging Islamic world.

Using the tools of historical analysis from both Islamic and Jewish sources, Aslan sets the Islamic strictures towards Jews and other minorities in a precise setting.

The basic idea that guides Aslan in his analytical digressions is to not merely lay out the historical context of Islam, but to make the facts relevant to the questions that many are concerned about at present.

The relation of Muhammad and the Jews of Arabia was one that was fraught with misunderstanding and confusion.

Many of the statements about Jews in the Qur’an reflect the passions that existed at the time of Muhammad’s battles with the Meccans and his struggles to create his revolutionary movement in what came to be known as Medina.

The theological residue of anti-Jewish sentiment was an outgrowth of an anachronistic Islam that did not follow the actual proscriptions of the faith as laid out by Muhammad.
Aslan defines the correct theological view towards the Dhimmi, or protected minority, as follows:
Muslim persecution of the dhimmi was not only forbidden by Islamic law, it was in direct defiance of Muhammad’s orders to his expanding armies never to trouble Jews in their practice of Judaism, and always to preserve the Christian institutions they encountered.

Thus, when Umar ordered the demolition of a mosque in Damascus that had been illegally constructed by forcibly expropriating the house of a Jew, he was merely following the Prophet’s warning that “he who wrongs a Jew or a Christian will have me as his accuser on the Day of Judgment.”

Such clarity is a welcome and refreshing antidote to the endless obfuscations that emanate from partisans on both sides of the issue.

Aslan clearly understands the threat that has been created by anachronistic and ahistorical readings of the Qur’an and Hadith in the modern Muslim world.

By returning his readers to the actual texts and history of the Muslim community, Aslan makes even more precise the insights of Karen Armstrong in her Islam for the American reader in the wake of 9/11, Suicide Bombs and the current Iraq War.

(...)

At the book’s end Aslan finds that the current problems stem not merely from Islam itself, as argued by the school of Bernard Lewis, but that the internal mechanisms of Islam have been jammed by the interference of the West.

As Islamic scholars and political leaders worked to transform their societies, the Western powers often meddled in the process. Aslan cites the example of the British in India and the ways in which Imperialism led to the internal breakdown of society into polarized and warring elements:

In many ways, the partition of India was the inevitable result of three centuries of Britain’s divide-and-rule policy. As the events of the Indian revolt demonstrated, the British believed that the best way to curb nationalist sentiment was to classify the indigenous population not as Indians, but as Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Christians, etc.

The categorization and separation of native peoples was a common tactic for maintaining colonial control over territories whose national boundaries had been arbitrarily drawn with little consideration for the ethnic, cultural, or religious makeup of the local inhabitants…

No wonder, then, that when the colonialists were finally expelled from these manufactured states, they left behind not only economic and political turmoil, but deeply divided populations with little common ground on which to construct a national identity.

(...)

No god but God is a work that must be read by anyone who is interested in what is happening in our world today, and not just in the Middle East.

The story of Islam is one that reflects the emergence of religious obscurantism world-wide. Aslan's clear writing style makes the most complex ideas and facts eminently understandable for the average reader.

As we continue to live through the mutual incoherence of what has falsely been called a “Clash of Civilizations” - which may not be that at all, but might actually be the birth pangs of an Arab Muslim modernity that it took many centuries for Christianity to resolve - the need for Reza Aslan’s brilliantly modulated study of Islam has become a matter of vital significance for the Western and the Muslim reader.

Synthesizing a vast amount of historical and theological material and presenting it in an easy to read format that speaks directly to many of the questions in people’s minds these days, No god but God is that rare work which is a formally accurate but eminently readable book that never sacrifices its intelligence at the same time that it simplifies things for the reader.

The excellence of its presentation is matched by the great and profound insights that it brings to its of its pages. It forms a fitting companion to Maria Rosa Menocal’s masterpiece The Ornament of the World; both books expertly treating the complex and enlightened history of the Muslim world from within a humanist perspective.

Reza Aslan
No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam
Random House Trade Paperbacks (January 10, 2006)
ISBN-10: 0812971892
ISBN-13: 978-0812971897