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Executive Times |
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2005 Book Reviews |
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No God
But God by Reza Aslan |
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Rating:
••• (Recommended) |
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Click on
title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Primer Readers looking for a primer on Islam
will discover much to appreciate in Reza Aslan’s new book, No God
But God. In addition to offering a brief history of Islam, Aslan ventures
to describe contemporary Islam and its place in today’s world. Here’s an
excerpt, from the end of Chapter 3, “The City of the Prophet: The First
Muslims,” pp. 66-74: The era immediately
following Muhammad’s death was, as will become evident, a tumultuous time for
the Muslim community. The Ummah was growing and expanding in wealth and power
at an astounding rate. A mere fifty years after his death, the tiny community
that Muhammad had founded in Yathrib burst out of the Arabian Peninsula and
swallowed whole the massive Sasanian Empire of Iran. Fifty years after that,
it had secured most of northwest India, absorbed all of North Africa, and
reduced the Christian Byzantine Empire to little more than a deteriorating
regional power. Fifty years after that, Islam had pushed its way deep into
Europe through As Muhammad’s small community
of Arab followers swelled into the largest empire in the world, 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 Hijazi tribesmen. At first, the Ummah
naturally turned to the early Companions for guidance and leadership. As the
first generation of Muslims—the people who had walked and talked with the
Prophet—the Companions had the authority to make legal and spiritual
decisions by virtue of their direct knowledge of Muhammad’s life and
teachings. They were the living repositories of the hadith: oral
anecdotes recalling the words and deeds of Muhammad. The hadith, insofar as
they addressed issues not dealt with in the Quran, would become an
indispensable tool in the formation of Islamic law. However, in their
earliest stages, the hadith were muddled and totally unregulated, making
their authentication almost impossible. Worse, as the first generation of
Companions passed on, the community had to rely increasingly on the reports
that the second generation of Muslims (known as the Tabiun) had
received from the first; when the second generation died, the community was
yet another step removed from the actual words and deeds of the Prophet. Thus, with each successive
generation, the “chain of transmission,” or isnad, that was supposed
to authenticate the hadith grew longer and more convoluted, so that in less
than two centuries after Muhammad’s death, there were already some seven
hundred thousand hadith being circulated throughout the Muslim lands, 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. After a few generations, almost anything could be
given the status of hadith if one simply claimed to trace its transmission
back to Muhammad. In fact, the Hungarian scholar Ignaz Goldziher has
documented numerous hadith the transmitters of which claimed were derived
from Muhammad but which were in reality verses from the Torah and Gospels,
bits of rabbinic sayings, ancient Persian maxims, passages of Greek
philosophy, Indian proverbs, and even an almost word-for-word reproduction of
the Lord’s Prayer. By the ninth century, when Islamic law was being
fashioned, there were so many false hadith circulating through the community
that Muslim legal scholars somewhat whimsically classified them into two categories:
lies told for material gain and lies told for ideological advantage. In the ninth and tenth centuries, a
concerted effort was made to sift through the massive accumulation of hadith
in order to separate the reliable from the rest. Nevertheless, for hundreds
of years, anyone who had the power and wealth necessary to influence public
opinion on a particular issue—and who wanted to justify his own ideas about,
say, the role of women in society—had only to refer to a hadith which he had
heard from someone, who had heard it from
someone else, who had heard it from
a Companion, who had heard it from
the Prophet. 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. As Fatima Mernissi notes, one must always remember that
behind every hadith lies the entrenched power struggles and conflicting
interests that one would expect in a society “in which social mobility [and]
geographical expansion [were] the order of the day.” Thus, when the Quran warned believers
not to “pass on your wealth and property to the feeble-minded (sufaha),” the
early Quranic commentators—all of them male—declared, despite the Quran’s
warnings on the subject, that “the sufaha are women and children... and
both of them must be excluded from inheritance” (emphasis added). When a wealthy and notable merchant
from Basra named Abu Bakra (not to be confused with Abu Bakr) claimed,
twenty-five years after Muhammad’s death, that he once heard the Prophet say
“Those who entrust their affairs to a woman will never know prosperity,” his
authority as a Companion was unquestioned. When Ibn Maja reported in
his collection of hadith that the Prophet, in answer to a question about the
rights a wife has over her husband, replied rather incredibly that her only
right was to be given food “when you [yourself] have taken your food,” and
clothed “when you have clothed yourself,” his opinion, though thoroughly
against the demands of the Quran, went uncontested. When Abu Said al-Khudri
swore he had heard the Prophet tell a group of women, “I have not seen anyone
more deficient in intelligence and religion than you,” his memory was
unchallenged, despite the fact that Muhammad’s biographers present him as
repeatedly asking for and following the advice of his wives, even in
military matters. And finally, when the
celebrated Quranic commentator Fakhr ad-Din ar-Razi (1149—1209) interpreted
the verse “[God] created spouses for you of your own kind so that you may
have peace of mind through them” (3:21) as “proof that women were created
like animals and plants and other useful things [and not for] worship and
carrying the Divine commands.. . because
the woman is weak, silly, and in one sense like a child,” his commentary
became (and still is) one of the most widely respected in the Muslim world. This last point bears
repeating. The fact is that for fifteen centuries, the science of Quranic
commentary has been the exclusive domain of Muslim men. And because each one
of these exegetes inevitably brings to the Quran his own ideology and his own
preconceived notions, it should
not be surprising to learn that certain verses have most often been read in
their most misogynist interpretation. Consider, for example, how the
following verse (4:34) regarding the obligations of men toward women has been
rendered into English by two different but widely read contemporary
translators of the Quran. The first is from the Princeton edition, translated
by Ahmed Au; the second is from Majid Fakhry’s translation, published by New
York University: Men are the support of
women [qawwamuna ‘ala an-nisa] as God gives some more means than
others, and because they spend of their wealth (to provide for them). . . . As for women you feel are averse, talk
to them suasively; then leave them alone in bed (without molesting them) and
go to bed with them (when they are willing). Men are in charge of women, because
Allah has made some of them excel the others, and because they spend some of
their wealth. And for those [women] that you fear
might rebel, admonish them and abandon them in their beds and beat them [adribuhunna]. Because of the variability
of the Arabic language, both of these translations are grammatically,
syntactically, and definitionally correct. The phrase qawwamuna ‘ala
an-nisa can be understood as “watch over,” “protect,” “support,” “attend
to,” “look after,” or “be in charge of” women. The final word in the verse, adribuhunna,
which Fakhry has rendered as “beat them,” can equally mean “turn away
from them,” “go along with them,” and, remarkably, even “have consensual
intercourse with them.” If religion is indeed interpretation, then which
meaning one chooses to accept and follow depends on what one is trying to
extract from the text: if one views the Quran as empowering women, then
Ali’s; if one looks to the Quran to justify violence against women, then
Fakhry’s. Throughout Islamic
history, there have been a number of women who have struggled to maintain
their authority as both preservers of the hadith and interpreters of the
Quran. Karima bintAhmad (d. 1069) and Fatima bint Au (d. 1087), for example,
are regarded as two of the most important transmitters of the Prophet’s
traditions, while Zaynab bint al-Sha’ri (d. 1220) and Daqiqa bint Murshid (d.
1345), both textual scholars, occupied an eminent place in early Islamic
scholarship. And it is hard to
ignore the fact that nearly one sixth of all “reliable” hadith can be traced
back to Muhammad’s wife Aisha. However, these women,
celebrated as they are, were no match for the indisputable authority of early
Companions like Umar, the young, brash member of the Quraysh elite whose
conversion to Islam had always been a particular source of pride to Muhammad.
The Prophet had always admired Umar, not just for his physical prowess as a
warrior, but for his impeccable moral virtue and the zeal with which he
approached his devotion to God. In many ways, Umar was a simple, dignified,
and devout man. But he also had a fiery temper and was prone to anger and
violence, especially toward women. So infamous was he for his misogynist
attitude that when he asked for the hand of Aisha’s sister, he was flatly
rebuffed because of his rough behavior toward women. Umar’s misogynist
tendencies were apparent from the moment he ascended to the leadership of the
Muslim community. He tried (unsuccessfully) to confine women to their homes
and wanted to prevent them from attending worship at the mosque. He
instituted segregated prayers and, in direct violation of the Prophet’s
example, forced women to be taught by male religious leaders. Incredibly, he
forbade Muhammad’s widows to perform the pilgrimage rites and instituted a
series of severe penal ordinances aimed primarily at women. Chief among these
was the stoning to death of adulterers, a punishment which has absolutely no
foundation whatsoever in the Quran but which Umar justified by claiming it had originally been part of the
Revelation and had somehow been left out of the authorized text. Of course,
Umar never explained how it was
possible for a verse such as this “accidentally” to have been left out of the
Divine Revelation of God, but then again, he didn’t have to. It was enough
that he spoke with the authority of the Prophet. 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 seventhcentury Arabia. And for
the first time in history, they are being given the international audience necessary
to incorporate their views into the male-dominated world of Quranic exegesis. On International Women’s
Day in 1998, many in the Western world were stunned to hear Masoumeh Ebtekar,
at the time Iran’s vice president of environmental affairs and the
highest-ranking woman in the Iranian government, present an opening address
in which she lashed out against Afghanistan’s Taliban régime and their
horrific human rights violations against women. Although this was some years
before the Taliban became a household name in the West, what most shocked the
international audience was that Ms. Ebtekar delivered her vehement
condemnation of the Tliiliban—a fundamentalist régime that forced its women
into veiling and seclusion—while she herself was fully clad in a traditional
black chador that covered every inch of her body save for the flushed
features of her impassioned face. Around the same time that
Ms. Ebtekar was censuring the religiously inspired misogyny of the Taliban,
the Turkish parliament was in an uproar over the decision of a newly elected
representative, Merve Kavakci, to take the oath of office while wearing a
headscarf. Ms. Kavakci was angrily denounced by her fellow members, some of
whom shouted obscenities at her from the floor of parliament. Although she
had made no political or religious statements whatsoever, Turkey’s president
at the time, Suleyman Demirel, accused her of being a foreign spy and an agent
provocateur. For the simple act of displaying her faith, Ms. Kavakci was
not only dismissed from her position as a democratically elected member of
parliament, but, in an act of profound symbolism, she was stripped of her
Turkish citizenship. It may seem incongruous
that a conservative Muslim country like Iran—in which some manner of veiling
is mandatory for all adult women—boasts one of the most robust and
politically active women’s movements in the Muslim world, while at the same
time a secular democracy like Turkey—in which the veil is expressly outlawed
in much of the public sector—routinely deprives veiled women of their rights
to government employment and higher education. But to understand what is
behind this seeming incongruity, one must consider the conflicting ways in
which the veil has been defined throughout history by those who have never
worn it. For European colonialists
like Alfred, Lord Cromer, the British consul general to Egypt at the end of
the nineteenth century, the veil was a symbol of the “degradation of women”
and definitive proof that “Islam as a social system has been a complete
failure.” Never mind that Cromer was the founder of the Men’s League for
Opposing Women’s Suffrage in England. As the quintessential colonialist,
Cromer had no interest in the plight of Muslim women; the veil was, for him,
an icon of the “backwardness of Islam,” and the most visible justification
for Europe’s “civilizing mission” in the Middle East. For liberal Muslim
reformists such as the distinguished Iranian political philosopher Au
Shariati (193 3—77), the veil was the symbol of female chastity, piety, and,
most of all, empowered defiance against the Western image of womanhood. In
his celebrated book Fatima Is Fatima, Shariati held up the Prophet
Muhammad’s virtuous daughter as an example for Muslim women to “reach towards
the glory and beauty of humanity and to put aside [the] old and new feelings
of inferiority, humility and baseness.” Yet, enlightened as his approach may
have been, it was still tragically flawed by the fact that, like Cromer,
Shariati was describing something of which he had no experience. The fact is that the
traditional colonial image of the veiled Muslim woman as the sheltered,
docile sexual property of her husband is just as misleading and simpleminded
as the postmodernist image of the veil as the emblem of female freedom and
empowerment from Western cultural hegemony. The veil may be neither or both
of these things, but that is up to Muslim women to decide for themselves.
This they are finally doing by taking part in something that has been denied
them for centuries: their own Quranic exegesis. Today, throughout the
Muslim world, a whole new generation of contemporary female textual scholars
is reengaging the Quran from a perspective that has been sorely lacking in
Islamic scholarship. Beginning with the notion that it is not the moral
teachings of Islam but the social conditions of seventh-century Arabia and
the rampant misogyny of male Quranic exegetes that has been responsible for
their inferior status in Muslim society, these women are approaching the
Quran free from the confines of traditional gender boundaries. Amina Wadud’s
instructive book Quran and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman c
Perspective provides the template for this movement, though Wadud is
by no means alone in her endeavor. Muslim feminists throughout the world have
been laboring toward a more gender-neutral interpretation of the Quran and a
more balanced application of Islamic law while at the same time struggling to
inject their political and religious views into the male-dominated, conservative
societies in which they live. Muslim feminists do not perceive their cause as
a mere social reform movement; they consider it a religious obligation. As
Shirin Ebadi proudly declared while accepting the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize for
her tireless work in defending the rights of women in Iran, “God created us
all as equals. . . . By fighting
for equal status, we are doing what God wants us to do.” The so-called Muslim women’s movement
is predicated on the idea that Muslim men, not Islam, have been responsible
for the suppression of women’s rights. For this reason, Muslim feminists
throughout the world are advocating a return to the society Muhammad
originally envisioned for his followers. Despite differences in culture,
nationalities, and beliefs, these women believe that the lesson to be learned
from Muhammad in Medina is that Islam is above all an egalitarian religion.
Their Medina is a society in which Muhammad designated women like Umm Waraqa
as spiritual guides for the Ummah; in which the Prophet himself was sometimes
publicly rebuked by his wives; in which women prayed and fought alongside the
men; in which women like Aisha and Umm Salamah acted not only as religious
but also as political—and on at least one occasion military—leaders; and in
which the call to gather for prayer, bellowed from the rooftop of Muhammad’s
house, brought men and women together to kneel side by side and be blessed as
a single undivided community. Indeed, so successful was this
revolutionary experiment in social egalitarianism that from 622 to 624 G.E.
the Ummah multiplied rapidly, both from the addition of new Ansar and from
the influx of new Emigrants eager to join in what was taking place in the
City of the Prophet. Though, in truth, this was still only Yathrib. It could
not properly be called Medina until after Muhammad turned his attention away
from his egalitarian reforms and back toward the sacred city of Mecca and the
powerful tribe that held the Hijaz in its grip. Aslan’s fine
writing keeps readers turning the pages of No God
But God, while accumulating a richer sense of the evolution of Islam. Steve Hopkins,
September 25, 2005 |
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ã 2005 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the October 2005
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/No
God But God.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • 723 North Kenilworth Avenue • Oak Park,
IL 60302 E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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