54 pages • 1 hour read
Reza AslanNo God but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam
Reza AslanNonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2005A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Prologue-Chapter 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Prologue Summary
Reza Aslan opens his book recounting an incident in which he awoke on a train in Morocco to the sound of an argument between a conductor and a married American couple. He stepped in as a translator. The conductor claimed to have caught the Americans acting inappropriately in public, while they claimed to just be sleeping. Both parties in Aslan’s telling had little patience or understanding for the other’s perspective. The conductor kept repeating he was a good Muslim and spat the word “Christian” out with disdain, while the couple—Christian evangelists to the Muslim world—tried to offer an insulting bribe and failed to realize how disturbing their evangelism was in Muslim eyes.
Aslan offers this encounter as evidence of the growing clash between American Christians, especially evangelicals, and many in the Muslim world after the terrorist attacks of September 11. He also gives examples of prominent Americans speaking of Islam with hatred or arguing that Muslims need to be converted to Christianity to create a better, more democratic, or more peaceful world. This rhetoric builds on the “clash of civilizations” thesis proposed by Harvard professor Samuel Huntington in 1996 that argues that Muslim culture is antithetical to Western culture and incompatible with modern liberal democracy. Aslan argues that much of this tension predates liberal democracy and actually represents a “clash of monotheisms” that goes back at least to the medieval crusades.
Aslan rejects the necessity of a clash of civilizations or religions. Such a clash relies on a distorted view of Islam and a false view of religion. Religion, in his definition, is an allegorical system created to talk about faith: “Religion is the story of faith. It is the institutionalized system of symbols and metaphors (read rituals and myths) that provides a common language with which a community of faith can share with each other their numinous encounter with the Divine Presence” (xvii). Faith is an experience—not a community, institution, or set of beliefs—based on an encounter with something transcendent (the “numinous”). Religion then gives a group a way to talk about their experience but makes no factual truth claims (even though it may legitimately talk about “truths” of human experience). Understanding religion in this way eliminates the need to see irreconcilable divisions between Christianity and Islam. Aslan then sets out to tell the “story” of Islam—that is, the stories and beliefs Muslims tell themselves—rather than trying to present some historical truth. In doing so, he hopes to both disprove the “clash of civilizations” thesis and simultaneously offer his fellow Muslims a path toward reforming their faith for the modern world.
Chapter 1 Summary
The physical center of Islam is the Ka’ba, a cube-shaped shrine in the center of the Arabian city of Mecca. According to Islamic tradition, Abraham founded it at the site where he almost sacrificed his concubine’s son, Ismail (“Ishmael” in the Christian and Hebrew Bible; according to the Christian and Jewish traditions, this incident involved Isaac, the son of Abraham’s wife). Arabs had made pilgrimage there for centuries before the time of the Prophet Muhammad, but during this “time of ignorance” (the Jahiliyyah), they worshipped idols representing 360 gods.
Historically, the Ka’ba existed before Muhammad, but it is hard to know its actual origin or the details of the earlier Arab religion. They had many gods. They were “pagan,” which Aslan considers a pejorative term for a spiritual attitude of openness to a multitude of influences. They may have believed in a supreme god called al-ilah (“the god”) or Allah but saw him as unapproachable. Instead, they focused their worship on a collection of more minor gods and spirits (jinn). This system has loose parallels in Aslan’s view of henotheism, a theory proposed by Max Müller that early Judaism believed in many gods even though they chose to worship only one. The pre-Islamic Arabs had no priests or scriptures, but some poets called Kahins had a religious qualities and predicted the future.
Monotheism (belief in one god) also had a strong presence in the Arabian Peninsula. Jews had lived and traded there since Roman times or earlier. The legends about Arabs having a statue of Abraham in the Ka’ba suggests that Jews had an influence on the area. Christian missionaries also preached there and converted the Ghassinid tribe, although they followed a branch of Christianity popular in Roman Egypt but condemned by the Roman emperors. Persian Zoroastrians also had a presence with, in Aslan’s view, a dualistic system that preached a conflict between the God of Light and the God of Darkness (similar to Satan). Finally, a native Arab monotheistic movement called Hanifism originated shortly before Muhammad under the leadership of the poet Zayd ibn Amr.
According to one obscure tradition, a young Muhammad met Zayd, who rebuked Muhammad for sacrificing to idols. Muslims normally reject this story, believing that Muhammad never worshipped idols even before receiving God’s revelation. Aslan sees this story as plausible and representative of how Muhammad would have built upon Arab’s earlier familiarity with monotheism. Tradition, however, sees Muhammad as marked for his prophetic career from birth. It says he was born the same year Mecca miraculously weathered an attack by a Christian king. Signs marked the unborn child as a prophet. Orphaned at the age of six, he went to live in the desert with his grandfather and then his uncle. A Christian monk named Bahira saw the boy in his uncle’s caravan with a mystic cloud shading him from the sun and proclaimed him God’s Messenger. These stories “are not intended to relate historical events but to elucidate the mystery of the prophetic experience” (21). Aslan accepts the basic facts of Muhammad’s birth in Mecca and his experience traveling with his uncle after being orphaned. The rest, he argues, is a way for Muslims to say that they believe God chose Muhammad from the beginning of time to carry out the divine plan.
Chapter 2 Summary
Before Muhammad, Mecca was an important economic and religious center, although probably only regionally. An Arab clan leader named Qusayy had united the other clans in Mecca into the Quraysh tribe, known as “the Tribe of God” whose leader served as “the Keeper of the Keys” to the shrine. Qusayy’s genius lay in recognizing the potential of the Ka’ba; he gained control of it and brought in idols from all the surrounding tribes to give it a universal appeal. He charged a fee for entrance to the shrine, gained a monopoly supplying water to pilgrims, and taxed the merchants that he lured in with the promise of religious sanctuary from violence.
The wealth accumulated by the Quraysh tribe and the resultant growing inequality contrasted with the ethos of the nomadic Bedouin Arabs. In traditional Bedouin society, constant movement through the desert limited the ability to accumulate possessions and made tribal solidarity essential to success. The leaders of tribes (called “shaykhs”) had a responsibility to enforce a loose system of justice called the “Law of Retribution”—if someone harmed another tribal member, then they suffered an equal punishment or paid a standard fine to the victims. Harming those outside the tribe was not considered morally wrong. A shaykh who failed to protect all tribal members, even the weakest, would be abandoned in favor of another leader. This no longer happened in Mecca.
Muhammad felt the inequality of Meccan society keenly. He had married a wealthy widow and business owner named Khadija but remembered the precarious experience of being an orphan. He frequently would go in the desert to pray. One night, around 610 CE, he had a terrifying experience of an overwhelming presence and heard a voice telling him to “recite!” The words he recited became the earliest part of the Qur’an and he became Rasul Allah, the Messenger of God. According to the most prominent tradition, Muhammad was illiterate, but Aslan and other scholars reject this as a misunderstanding, subscribing to another equally valid tradition. The sources for Muhammad’s initial revelation were written later and contain several minor discrepancies. Aslan suggests that attempts to condense a more gradual evolution of prophetic consciousness led to confusion.
Muhammad began hesitantly, even initially fearing that he was going mad. He preached the goodness of a merciful God and warned that God would punish those who exploited the poor. At this stage, “Muhammad was not yet establishing a new religion; he was calling for sweeping social reform” (41). He did not yet preach Islam’s hallmark monotheism. He focused on talking to his clan and was largely ignored outside a small circle of 30 or 40 “Companions” (family and friends) including Khadija and his cousin Ali. Three years later, however, Muhammad publicly challenged Mecca’s polytheistic economy by proclaiming the shahadah, the central profession of faith in Islam: “There is no god but God, and Muhammad is God’s Messenger” (or His Prophet) (43). Mecca’s leaders paid attention to this direct challenge to Mecca’s prosperity as a polytheistic shrine and to the exalted role Muhammad claimed for himself as a “new Abraham.” Aslan suggests that Muhammad realized that the only way to destroy inequality in Mecca was to destroy the whole political, economic, and religious system: The shahadah was therefore a “conscious and deliberate attack” on this system (44). The Quraysh leaders responded with a failed attempt at bribery and then a social and economic boycott of Muhammad’s Banu Hashim clan. After the death of key allies, including Khadija, Muhammad decided he could no longer stay. Barely escaping assassination, he secretly fled with his Companions to the distant town of Yathrib.
Prologue-Chapter 2 Analysis
Aslan begins the Prologue with a story—as he does in most chapters—that establishes the problem he will solve: the suspicion and misunderstanding between Westerners and Muslims. This suspicion has led to an inaccurate “clash of civilizations” mentality that Aslan believes is evolving into a dangerous Christian-Muslim “clash of monotheisms” mindset. His book aims then to diffuse this tension by building understanding of what Islam actually teaches so as to show both its inherent beauty and The Compatibility of Islam and Liberal Democratic Ideals. While this message is aimed in part at a Western Christian audience, this book is equally or perhaps predominately aimed at a Muslim audience. Aslan writes, “This book is, above all else, an argument for reform” (11)—for supporting what he calls an Islamic Reformation parallel to the Protestant Reformation. Aslan takes for granted that the Protestant Reformation was a good and essential step on the road to modernity, and he assumes the same goes for Islam. Whether Christians or secular Westerners support a reform of Islam hardly matters; reform, as Aslan makes clear, needs to come from Muslims themselves. Therefore, Aslan’s arguments and analysis in the book understandably focus on the possibility of change within a story of Islam that appeals to Muslims. Aslan still makes the book accessible to non-Muslims, and his invitation for them to witness this internal debate within Islam serves an important purpose in undermining the “clash of civilizations” thesis: By showing the presence of debate within Islam, he teaches outsiders by example the reality of The Diversity of Islamic Thought and Practice.
To make his argument convincing, Aslan adopts two main approaches. First, he situates his claims within the context of The Historical Development of Islam. Beyond the educational value of this for non-Muslims, doing so allows Aslan to prove that Islam has changed in the past and therefore can continue to change in the future. He argues that “it is possible to trace how Muhammad’s revolutionary message of moral accountability and social egalitarianism was gradually reinterpreted by his successors into competing ideologies of rigid legalism” (xix). Implicitly subscribing to the common academic model of the development of religion from charismatic individual to institutionalization, Aslan argues that attempts to codify Muhammad’s prophetic message inevitably transformed it. Therefore, the truest adherence to the revelation given by Muhammad requires one to discard the later communal consensus and freshly reinterpret a historical reconstruction of Muhammad’s teaching.
The assumption that the contemporary community can legitimately reinterpret the tradition of Islam rests in Aslan’s second, more subtle strategy: namely, to adopt a religious relativism that prioritizes the ability of a community to interpret truth for itself. Aslan sees religion as an “a common language with which a community of faith can share with each other their numinous encounter with the Divine Presence” (xvii). He denies that factual claims (such that Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead) matter in religion or even that statements of belief and doctrine have objective truth value. These are instead relatively true in that they describe a person’s subjective experience. In this theory, “religion is, by definition, interpretation; and by definition, all interpretations are valid” (xix). After the Prologue, Aslan does not explicitly reference this theory, knowing that it alienates many believers who think their statements of faith do have objective truth value and that it rather matters whether Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, whether Buddhist Nirvana exists, and whether the Quran is God’s direct word given through Muhammad.
Where his relativism matters, however, is in its corollaries. First, if religion is language without an objective truth used to by a community to unite themselves, then it is a subjective matter whose only truth is its utility in letting the community share their experiences. Therefore, the contemporary community can and ought to modify it if it no longer serves that unifying function. Second, reconstructing the historical reality of what happened in the past does not necessarily matter. What is true in religion, Aslan argues, is the story that the community of believers choose to tell. If that mythic story accurately captures their religious values, then it is subjectively true: “[W]hatever truths they convey have little to do with historical fact” (xviii).
This principle leads to interesting dichotomy in the first half of Aslan’s book when combined with his interest in The Historical Development of Islam. Sometimes Aslan’s narrative focuses on the stories handed down about Muhammad without worrying about whether they really happened. Other times, he engages in careful historical criticism in which he worries about the reliability of sources. When arguing against later developments in Islam, he explicitly addresses the issue of what historically happened. At other times, he leaves unclear the relationship between his narrative and actual events. Either way, he works to create a new story of Muhammad and the early Ummah that can be a basis for contemporary Muslims to adopt a true myth that supports a useful, reformed Islam.
Aslan’s casual approach to history does carry the danger of introducing careless errors, as happens in Chapter 1. While Aslan’s assertion of diversity in early Christianity and Christian Arabia is correct according to the current scholarly consensus, he gets many details factually wrong. For example, he asserts that the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE proclaimed Jesus both human and divine and that the Council of Chalcedon in 451 CE defined the Trinity as doctrine, which “transformed a large portion of the Christian Near East into heretics” (11). In fact, Nicaea defined the Trinity (against the Arians, who believed the Son of God was created at the beginning of time), and Chalcedon defined Jesus as both human and divine. The belief that Jesus was both God and human was, however, accepted by all major fifth-century Christian movements, even those (like the Nestorians and Monophysites) that opposed Chalcedon’s philosophical analysis of this belief. While disagreeing on Chalcedon, all three groups accepted Nicaea’s Trinity. Many of the sects Aslan discusses in the context of the early days of Islam had disappeared long before Muhammad. These factual errors muddle some of Aslan’s attempts to downplay the distinctions between seventh-century Arab Christian beliefs and Muhammad’s reinterpretation of Jesus as a purely human prophet. Similarly, most scholars would reject his portrayal of Zoroastrianism as “dualistic” with equal gods of light and darkness rather than as a true monotheism.
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