God Is Not One

Stephen Prothero

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780061991202
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

In God is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World, New York Times bestselling author of Religious Literacy and religion scholar Stephen Prothero argues that persistent attempts to portray all religions as different paths to the same God overlook the distinct problem that each tradition seeks to solve. Delving into the different problems and solutions that Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, Confucianism, Yoruba Religion, Daoism and Atheism strive to combat, God is Not One is an indispensable guide to the questions human beings have asked for millennia—and to the disparate paths we are taking to answer them today. Readers of Huston Smith and Karen Armstrong will find much to ponder in God is Not One.

Chapter One

Islam

The Way of Submission

Most Europeans and North Americans have never met a Muslim, so for them Islam begins in the imagination, more specifically in that corner of the imagination colonized by fear. They see Islam through a veil hung over their eyes centuries ago by Christian Crusaders intent on denouncing Islam as a religion of violence, its founder, Muhammad, as a man of the sword, and its holy book, the Quran, as a text of wrath. Buddhism conjures up the Dalai Lama and his Nobel Peace Prize, but Islam conjures up Osama bin Laden and his assault rifle. So Islam is women imprisoned in black burkas in Pakistan, Taliban rulers in Afghanistan blowing up ancient statues of the Buddha, and Saudi hijackers armed with airplanes, annihilating thousands of innocents for God and for virgins.

Islam has been an on-again, off-again obsession of Westerners for centuries, and not only in the imagination. Muslims took Jerusalem from Christians in 637 C.E., Crusaders took it back in 1099, Saladin seized it on behalf of Islam in 1187, and the British recaptured it on behalf of Christianity in 1917. But Islam first burst into modern Western consciousness with the rise of the Ayatollah Khomeini during the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the capture in Tehran of fifty-two U.S. diplomats who were held hostage for 444 days before being released in 1981. Since 9/11, Islam has been hotly debated worldwide. What role did Islamic piety play in motivating terrorists to hijack four jets and kill close to three thousand people? Is Islam a religion of terror? Are Christianity and Islam now engaged in a clash of civilizations? Or do Muslims stand peaceably alongside Jews and Christians as siblings in one tripartite family of religions?

Unfortunately, this crucial conversation rarely advances beyond a ping-pong match of clichés in which some claim that Islam is a religion of peace while others claim that Islam is a religion of war. One side ignores Quranic passages and Islamic traditions that have been used to justify war on unbelievers, while the other ignores Islam’s just-war injunctions against killing women, children, civilians, and fellow Muslims (hundreds of whom died in the Twin Towers on 9/11). The reason for all this ignoring is our collective ignorance. We are incapable of reckoning with Islam because we know almost nothing about it. Still, when Americans are asked for one word that sums up Islam, “fanatical,” “radical,” “strict,” “violent,” and “terrorism” all spill from their collective imagination.1 In Germany, Spain, and Great Britain, majorities believe there is a fundamental conflict between being a devout Muslim and living in a modern society.2

After 9/11 there was a rush to reconceive of the Judeo-Christian tradition as the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition. And Islam does share much with its predecessors. Jews, Christians, and Muslims are all “people of the book” who believe in one God who speaks to His people through prophets. In fact, the phrase “people of the book” is Islamic (Ahl al-Kitab), used to describe Jews and Christians as brothers and sisters in Allah. The scriptures of these three great religions also share many key concepts. Islam’s most frequently cited articles of faith—belief in one God, angels, scriptures, prophets, Judgment Day, and destiny—can be found in Judaism and Christianity too. The Hebrew Bible, Christian Bible, and Quran also share the patriarch Abraham, who according to all three traditions is the progenitor of monotheism.

Yet sibling relations in this Abrahamic family are dysfunctional at best. In one of the iconic incidents of his life, his “night journey” from Mecca to Jerusalem, Muhammad is said to have prayed with Abraham, Moses, and Jesus. But can Jews, Christians, and Muslims learn to get along in a similar fashion? Or are they destined to face off as bitter enemies in an internecine clash of civilizations? After 9/11, U.S. president George W. Bush and U.K. prime minister Tony Blair spoke repeatedly of Islam as a religion of peace, but revivalist Franklin Graham called Islam “a very evil and wicked religion,” and televangelist Jerry Falwell denounced Muhammad as a “terrorist.”3 Muslim groups worldwide responded to 9/11 by denouncing its crimes as anti-Islamic and emphasizing Muslims’ commonalities with Jews and Christians, even as Islamic jihadists proclaimed that Jews and Christians were unbelievers deserving of death in this life and eternal torment in the next.

The events of September 11, 2001, yanked conversations about Islam around to questions of war and terror. But any conversation about Islam must reckon with the word Islam, which is related to the term salaam, which means peace. Muslims greet one another with “Salaam alaykum” (“Peace be upon you”) and respond to this greeting with “Wa alaykum as salaam” (“And upon you be peace”). The word Islam means “submission” or “surrender,” however. So Islam is the path of submission, and Muslims are “submitters” who seek peace in this life and the next by surrendering themselves to the one true God. They do this first and foremost by prostrating themselves in prayer. “Are you prostrate or are you proud?” this tradition asks. Masjid, the Arabic term for mosque, literally means “place of prostration.” And some who surrender to this practice develop a mark on their foreheads that the Quran refers to as a “trace of prostration” (48:29).4

Prayer

Five times a day, 365 days a year, for more than a millennium, Muslims have heeded the call to prayer going out from mosques and minarets in cities and towns scattered across the globe. This invitation, the adhan, is almost always done in Arabic, because according to Muslims it was in Arabic that God delivered His final revelation, the Quran, to his final prophet, Muhammad. It varies a bit across the Muslim world and over the course of the day. Before dawn, for example, there is the reminder that “prayer is better than sleep.” But this is the most common formulation:

God is great

God is great

God is great

God is great

I bear witness that there is no god but God

I bear witness that there is no god but God

I bear witness that Muhammad is the messenger of God

I bear witness that Muhammad is the messenger of God

Make haste toward prayer

Make haste toward prayer

Make haste toward success

Make haste toward success

God is great

God is great

There is no god but God

Over one billion people—roughly one-fifth of the world’s population—self-identify as Muslims, placing Islam second only to Christianity in terms of adherents. Like Christianity, Islam is typically classified as a Western religion, and Islam predominates in such Middle Eastern countries as Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan. But most of the world’s Muslims live in Asia. Indonesia has more Muslims (roughly 178 million) than any other country—three times as many as in Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and Iraq combined—and it is followed by three more Asian nations: India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Of the ten countries with the largest Muslim populations, only two (Egypt and Iran) are plainly in the Middle East. Three (Nigeria, Algeria, and Morocco) are in Africa (as is Egypt, of course). The remaining country (Turkey) straddles Asia, the Middle East, and Europe.5 The Central Asian states of Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan all have Muslim majorities. In Europe, Muslims form majorities in Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Kosovo, and there are small but rapidly growing populations across Europe and North America.

By some estimations, close to 20 percent of those who came to the United States as slaves were Muslims, but Islam first became visible there through the Nation of Islam (NOI), which recruited both activist Malcolm X and heavyweight boxer Muhammad Ali to its heterodox combination of black nationalism and Islam. After the death in 1975 of Elijah Muhammad, who had led the NOI since the mysterious disappearance of founder Wallace D. Fard in 1934, this organization moved under the leadership of his son W. D. Muhammad in the direction of mainstream Sunni Islam. After W. D. Muhammad disbanded the NOI, Louis Farrakhan revived it, but today the overwhelming majority of African-American Muslims in the United States are mainstream Sunnis rather than NOI members.

Islam’s rapid growth in Europe has set off a series of controversies about free speech and the head covering for Muslim women known as the hijab. While France prohibits the hijab in public schools for reasons of church/state separation, Sweden allows it in the name of religious liberty. Meanwhile, relations between Muslims and non-Muslims are tense in many European countries. A recent survey found that a majority of adults in the Netherlands have an unfavorable view of Islam. Another survey found that most Muslims in Germany believe that Europeans are hostile to Muslims. Meanwhile, sizeable majorities of Muslims and non-Muslims alike report that relations between Westerners and Muslims are “generally bad.”6

Islam also has a presence in American and European popular culture. While Buddhists are typically portrayed at the movies in a positive light—think Kundun and Seven Years in Tibet—Muslims almost always play the bad guys. There are some favorable portrayals—Omar Sharif’s Sherif Ali in Lawrence of Arabia and Morgan Freeman’s Azeem in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves—but action films especially tend to depict Muslims as people who do little more than pray and kill, and not necessarily in that order.7

I have never heard the adhan at the movies, but I have heard it ring out on four continents. Nowhere was it more striking than in Jerusalem, where it seemed to follow me wherever I went. I heard it while standing at the Western Wall. I heard it while sitting inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. I heard as I was walking through the Damascus Gate into the Old City’s Muslim Quarter. In each case I was reminded of how intimate the Western monotheisms are in this most contested of cities—never out of earshot of one another—and of how Islam is a recited religion, spread throughout the centuries by speech and sound.

Muslims respond to this call (which nowadays is broadcast on television and online) in all sorts of ways. Some ignore it. Others heed it when the mood strikes. But the observant stop cooking and driving and working to step into sacred time at dawn, noon, midafternoon, sunset, and night. In preparation, they wash themselves of life’s impurities; they turn to face Mecca, Islam’s holiest city; they bow their heads; they say, “Prayer has arrived, prayer has arrived”; and they promise to pray “for the sake of Allah and Allah alone.” Then they begin to saturate the air with sacred sound.

Muslims perform the ancient choreography of this prayer with their whole bodies—standing, bowing, prostrating, and sitting. Their hands move from behind their ears to their torsos. They bow forward at the waist, hands on knees, back flat. They stand up straight again. They prostrate themselves into a posture of total and absolute submission to Allah, planting their knees, hands, foreheads, and noses on the ground. They then rise to a sitting position and ticktock back and forth between sitting and prostration as their prayer proceeds.

You don’t make this prayer up as you go along, chatting informally and familiarly with God as evangelical Protestants do. Muslims can, of course, call upon Allah for their own reasons, in their own words, and in their own languages. But the five daily prayers of salat (said aloud at dawn, sunset, and night, and in silence at noon and in the afternoon) are repeated in Arabic precisely as they have been for centuries, starting with Allahu Akbar: “God is great.” Worshippers then bless and exalt Allah above all pretenders. They call Muhammad His prophet and messenger. They ask for peace upon “the righteous servants of Allah.” They offer blessings to angels. They ask Allah to bless “Muhammad and the people of Muhammad,” just as God has blessed “Abraham and the people of Abraham.”

They then recite the most common of Muslim prayers—the Lord’s Prayer of Islam—which comes from the first and most popular sura, or chapter, of the Quran, known as the Fatiha:

In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate.

Praise belongs to God, Lord of all Being

the All-merciful, the All-compassionate

the Master of the Day of Doom.

Thee only we serve; to Thee alone we pray for succour.

Guide us in the straight path,

the path of those whom Thou hast blessed;

not of those against whom Thou art wrathful, nor of those who are stray. (1:1–7)

The Five Pillars

In sixteenth-century Geneva, Protestant theologian John Calvin spun a complex theological web around two simple threads: the absolute sovereignty of God and the total depravity of human beings. Like Calvinists, Muslims go to great lengths not to confuse Creator and created. Glorying in the servility of human beings before Allah, they refer to themselves in many cases as “slaves” of the Almighty. But unlike Calvin, Muslims do not believe in original sin. Every human being is born with an inclination toward both God and the good. So sin is not the problem Islam addresses. Neither is there any need for salvation from sin. In Islam, the problem is self-sufficiency, the hubris of acting as if you can get along without God, who alone is self-sufficient. “The idol of your self,” writes the Sufi mystic Rumi, “is the mother of (all) idols.”8 Replace this idol with submission to Allah, and what you have is the goal of Islam: a “soul at peace” (89:27) in this life and the next: Paradise.

The Quran repeatedly states that the path to Paradise is paved with both faith and works—“those who believe, and do righteous deeds, for them await[s] . . . the great triumph” (85:11)—but Islam inclines toward Judaism and away from Christianity by emphasizing orthopraxy (right action) over orthodoxy (right doctrine). Here the technique that will take you from self-sufficiency to Paradise is to “perform the religion” (42:13). Over and over the Quran refers to “believers” and “unbelievers,” as if belief were the master key to Paradise, yet it is action that divides these two groups: “Those who perform the prayer, and expend of what We have provided them, those in truth are the believers” (...