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.
Themes
The Compatibility of Islam and Liberal Democratic Ideals
Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis has been extended to argue that Islam is a social, cultural, and religious civilization founded upon values and worldviews intrinsically opposed to democracy, pluralism, individual freedom, and human rights. Reza Aslan considers this “misguided and divisive rhetoric” (xv). He believes firmly in the possibility and necessity of an Islamic democracy. In fact, he argues that core democratic ideas such as social equality and religious pluralism can be found in Muhammad’s preaching. He does agree, however, that American secular democracy cannot be grafted unaltered onto a predominately Muslim society and must instead be reinterpreted in light of Islamic civilization.
Aslan’s core vision is of “a state run by Muslims for Muslims, in which the determination of values, the norms of behavior, and the formation of laws are influenced by Islamic morality” (257). Many aspects of this morality that would be the basis of an Islamic democracy would be familiar to the Western world: juridical equality for all (Muhammad’s original critique of the Quraysh tribe), respect for both genders (as seen in Muhammad’s insistence on women’s inheritance rights), and religious pluralism (as seen in the creation of protected dhimmi status for Christians and Jews). These human rights are, Aslan argues, intrinsic to Islam: “[A]cknowledging human rights in Islam is not simply a means of protecting civil liberties, it is a fundamental religious duty” (264).
A state based on Islamic values will differ in some respects from a western democracy. Islam, for example, has a more communitarian ethos that, when balancing the rights of the community with that of the individual, would lean toward the former. This comes from the original Ummah of Muhammad in Medina, which Aslan (and most other Muslims) still hold up as the norm with which to measure a just society. Aslan argues that this makes democracy an even better fit for Islam. If community is the preeminent value in the society Muhammad created, then letting the community of Muslims make decisions together about how to apply their spiritual experience to modern problems honors that value. Democracy is a government derived from that communal discernment. A supposedly Islamic state that imposes an inflexible code of rules determined by a handful of fundamentalists or even by the elite Ulama betrays the true spirit of Islam. That is why Aslan links the prospect of democracy with the need for an “Islamic Reformation” that would wrest control of Islam away from self-appointed, reactionary experts and return it to the average Muslim believer.
The Diversity of Islamic Thought and Practice
In his final chapter, Aslan condemns fundamentalist attempts to return Islam to an “imaginary ideal of original purity […] Islam is and has always been a religion of diversity. The notion that there was once an original, unadulterated Islam that was shattered into heretical sects and schisms is a historical fiction” (263). One of Aslan’s core goals is to show that multiple valid interpretations of Islam exist and have always existed. In doing so, he can demonstrate to the Western world that the radical and violent al-Qaeda ideology is not the sole (or even main) form of Islam, and he can simultaneously demonstrate to other Muslims the possibility of creating a new interpretation of Islam in an “Islamic Reformation.”
Aslan traces this theme throughout the book. Even before Islam, diversity characterized all earlier religions in Arabia including Christianity. He discusses disagreements among early Muslims about various beliefs including the role of women and the caliph. His most extended discussion of difference comes with his chapters on Shi’a and Sufi variants of Islam. In each case, he emphasizes the beauty of these traditions and the way they are rooted in the Quran, albeit using different techniques of interpretation than in Sunni Islam. He uses a number of techniques to build sympathy. Chapter 6 on the development of Sunni orthodoxy, immediately before the one on Shi’a belief, opens with the story of scholars being executed by the orthodox authorities for teaching the doctrine of an “uncreated Quran.” He points out the irony of that doctrine being later accepted by the new orthodox authorities; the disjunction discredits the claim of the Sunni Ulama to a continuous and exclusive guardianship of true belief. In contrast to this negative opening to mainstream orthodoxy, he begins Chapter 7 with a heroic account of Caliph Husayn, a central Shi’a figure, courageously fighting by himself against hopeless odds, striking down enemies left and right, before finally being overwhelmed by sheer numbers and dying with a prayer for forgiveness of the Muslim community that had let him down on his lips. While acknowledging some issues in both Shi’a history and some Sufi practice, Aslan adopts an almost relentlessly positive tone in justifying them.
This diversity is equally important for Aslan in discussing the variety of modern Islamic responses to contact with the Western world. Despite being among the earliest movements chronologically, Wahhabi fundamentalism only appears at the end of Chapter 9 when Aslan has outlined the crimes of Western colonialism against Muslim countries and has shown the tremendous range of Muslim proposals—political, social, and educational from very secular to very religious in orientation—for meeting the challenge of modernity. This emphasizes that the ideology that spawned the terrorist groups feared by the West is only one of many responses to modernity. It has no more legitimacy than liberal Muslim democratic movements.
In short, Aslan states that diversity exists now just as it always has in Islam. Muslims can and should continue to explore new ways of living their faith in the modern world. This means they can reform Islam, reject the Traditionalist Ulama, and embrace an Islam based on Muhammad’s communal and egalitarian ideals.
The Historical Development of Islam
Aslan arranges his book more or less chronologically: pre-Islamic Arabia (Chapter 1), stages in Muhammad’s life (Chapters 2-4), the formation of the major strands of Islam in the centuries after Muhammad (Chapters 5-8), and the encounter of Islam with modernity from the 19th century to the present (Chapters 9-10). He makes a conscious choice to organize his explanation of Islam through a historical narrative instead of, for example, as an exposition of beliefs and practices. This organization highlights one of his central claims—namely, that the efforts of the Traditionalist Ulama or Wahhabi fundamentalists to portray a single, unchanging core set of correct beliefs and practices is false. This false picture needs to be discarded and replaced with a more accurate vision of a dynamic Islam in which Muslims can creatively address the issues in their contemporary communities.
In Aslan’s retelling of the story of Islam, he emphasizes the idea of gradual development from the beginning—dramatically, even in the case of Muhammad himself. Even in his first chapter on pre-Islamic Arabia, Aslan recounts an obscure story of a Muhammad being confronted by the leader of the Hanif monotheist movement. In this very first story he tells of Muhammad, Aslan explicitly challenges traditional Islamic views of an unchanging faith:
The notion that a young pagan Muhammad could have been scolded for his idolatry by a Hanif flies in the face of traditional Muslim views regarding the Prophet’s perpetual monotheistic integrity […] But this view, which is reminiscent of the Catholic belief in Mary’s perpetual virginity, has little basis in either history or scripture (16).
Aslan on multiple occasions questions when Muhammad moved from polytheism to monotheism—perhaps with an intermediate step of henotheism—and suggests that Muhammad never saw himself as founding a new religion. Aslan explains that the trope of a perpetually enlightened and perfect prophet is simply a language or story used by later Muslims to indicate allegorically their belief in God’s power and providence. Similarly, many Islamic beliefs and practices, especially those in the hadith, that supposedly go back to Muhammad were in fact made up and told by later Muslims to assert the legitimacy of their contemporary ideas. Some of them include misogynistic and violent strictures that contradict Muhammad’s message, while others are simply a natural response to navigating new situations. Aslan often makes this case in general terms but is able to trace some specific examples and even demonstrate occasions when there has been a reversal of positions (such as on whether the Quran existed uncreated in God from eternity).
Development of the religion, Aslan explains, is an integral part of Islam. Even the example of the Prophet supports the gradual realization of new ideas and new ways of applying them. If this is the case, then a reformation of belief is needed in the contemporary Muslim world to challenge the Ulama’s attempt to freeze Islam in an unhealthy, static state.
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