A world Without Islam pdfdrive com

PART ONE

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HERESY AND POWER

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CHAPTER ONE
Islam and the Abrahamic Faiths
God neither begets, nor is He begotten.
—Qur’an 112:3
There was a time, of course, when there really was no Islam—up until the early
seventh century CE, when the Prophet Muhammad received his revelations from
God and announced them to the world. But in one sense, it would be erroneous
to view the establishment of Islam as a momentous turning point in the Middle
East. In political terms, it may indeed have been a watershed, but in religious or
cultural terms, it is also easy to view the emergence of Islam as yet one more
strand, one more turn on the path of what is a continuum—the ongoing evolution
of Middle Eastern monotheistic thought. We hear the term “Abrahamic faiths”
used more frequently today to reflect an awareness of this triple monotheistic
heritage that includes the prophet Abraham and embraces three religions:
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These religions are all closely linked, whatever
political differences may have arisen among them over time. This is indeed the
point: politics and power struggles have often magnified theological differences
for political ends, rather than stressing common heritage. Politics rule; enduring
points of geopolitical tension in the region that precede Islam tend to persist
even after Islam. We’re looking for continuities. It would be quite off the mark to
view Islam as something alien to the religious tradition of the Middle East. Islam
absorbed, represents, and perpetuates many of the region’s deeper drives and
cultures.
A map of religions of the Middle East before Islam reveals a world
dominated by Christianity in its Eastern Orthodox forms; it shares some space
with basically monotheistic Zoroastrianism in Persia (under the Sassanid
Empire), with small pockets of Jews in a few urban areas, while Buddhism and
Hinduism dominated the Indian subcontinent. Europe itself was of course part
Christian, part pagan. In religious terms, then, Islam was a latecomer and in fact

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the last new religion in history ever able to hold sway over state structures. But
Islam would make up for lost time in spreading quickly to assume dominant
position over the huge areas formerly under Christian and Zoroastrian control in
the Middle East. Without Islam, Eastern Orthodox Christianity would likely have
remained the dominant faith of the Middle East down to today, with the possible
exception of Zoroastrianism in Iran.
While the expansion of Islam and its ongoing conquest of large parts of the
known world had huge political impact like any conquest does, in theological
terms it exerted far less impact upon local populations in its early decades. Islam
actually grew out of the existing religious environment of the Middle East in a
relatively natural and organic way. In fact, what is surprising is how, in
theological terms, Islam fitted in quite comfortably with the existing religious
milieu.
Nor is the birth of Islam some remote event off in a distant and isolated
desert, an exotic cultural plant alien to the roots of Western culture. The ideas of
Islam flow directly out of a broader Eastern Mediterranean and Middle Eastern
cultural milieu that had long witnessed intense religious interchange, cross-
pollination, and debate. Probably no other region of the world has seen as many
diverse religions and sects trek across its landscapes as has the Middle East. As
Islam emerges, we witness a reprise of many of the same old themes and
concerns that were part of the earlier evolution of Judaism and Christianity. After
witnessing the religious and doctrinal strife of the first six centuries of
Christianity (which we’ll look at shortly), our encounter with Islam does not
surprise us; the arguments and beliefs propagated by Islam weighed in on quite
familiar debates: What is the nature of the One God? Who was the message of
Judaism for—the Jews as the Chosen People, or for all peoples? Was Jesus
literally the Son of God, or simply a divinely inspired human being? We will
shortly examine the fascinating nature of many of these debates and note how
some religious doctrines triumphed with the backing of political power, while
others with less political backing came to be denounced as heresies.
Above all, we will see how intimately linked all these doctrinal struggles
were to the politics of the great empires. Power invariably attracts religion, and
religion attracts power. Theology is secondary. Furthermore, the enduring forces
of culture, time, tradition, history, and beliefs are powerful; they possess great
ability to bend new events into well-trodden channels. Islam, for all its new and
incredible civilizational brilliance, was very much a product of its larger
environment.

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Arabia
Even Arabia itself was not an isolated place but rather linked to the grand
regional swirl of religious thought and ferment. Yemen, in the southwest corner
of the Arabian peninsula, was the center of one of the oldest civilizations in the
Middle East and perhaps the original home of all Semitic peoples. Semitic tribes
migrated from there in the earliest of times up into Mesopotamia, conquering
Sumeria in BCE and transforming it into a Semitic culture. A rich spice and
textile trade ran all along the Red Sea coast to Egypt, the Levant, and the
Mediterranean, where Yemenis were in regular contact with the Phoenicians in
the earliest days. The Queen of Sheba purportedly resided in Yemen and was in
contact with the Christian kingdom of Axum in Ethiopia. Christians and Jews
had large communities in Yemen. The Persians even moved in for a period.
Farther north, up along the Red Sea coast (Hijaz), lay the city of Mecca, one
of the most important cities of Arabia, with a history going back some four
thousand years. There is little historical mention of Mecca in ancient histories up
to the time of the Prophet Muhammad, at least in external sources. Yet it had
become a major commercial entrepôt along the Red Sea trade route to Syria.
Major Jewish communities existed in several key cities of the Hijaz, especially
Medina. The Christian lands of the Byzantine Empire lay just to the north, with
major centers in what is today’s Syria and Jordan.
Arabia had long nourished its own traditional religions consisting of local or
tribal gods similar to those known to other Semitic peoples, including earlier
Jews. Much worship was centered in the Ka’ba in Mecca, which was a
repository for some 360 gods, reportedly including statues of Jesus and Mary.
The shrines lent Mecca considerable economic and political power: it had
managed to establish control over a huge tribal confederation with the aim of
overseeing the complex intertribal politics of the peninsula and limiting
disruptive tribal warfare. As a result, the city maintained a treaty relationship
with Byzantium to facilitate trade through the region. Mecca’s prosperity was the
direct source of new political and social tensions as well, since the old tribal
structures and kinship support systems were breaking down under the growth of
a rising capitalist market economy; old social values were fading, creating a
vacuum for new ones.
Such was the lay of the land in geopolitical and theological terms, when in
610 CE the revelations received by the young Meccan merchant Muhammad
added a new chapter to the ongoing development of monotheistic ideas.
Muhammad had been orphaned as a boy and had been working for his uncle. At

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the age of forty, at a time when he had been suffering from periods of
psychological restlessness, Muhammad reported a remarkable experience during
a sojourn in the mountains: he had been visited on several occasions by the angel
Gabriel, who instructed him to recite words brought from God. He was told to
preach the message that God is One and to carry it to the regional tribes and to
the corrupt society of pagan and polytheistic Mecca. Muhammad proceeded to
promote that message and to inveigh against the harsh and unjust social order
and the idolatrous presence of these idols of polytheism in the Ka’ba—the very
symbol of Meccan authority and trade. Jesus and the moneylenders come
immediately to mind, but Muhammad had a political vision as well.
More important, Muhammad early on identified himself as standing in the
same line of prophets as others of the Old Testament, going back to the first
Prophets, Adam (in Islam) and Abraham. Indeed, the Qur’an, the book
containing these accumulated revelations, identified these figures as the “first
Muslims”—even though they had not, of course, designated themselves as
Muslims at the time—simply because they were the first humans known to
experience and acknowledge the Oneness and power of God. Muhammad
insisted that he, too, was nothing more than the messenger (Rasul) or prophet
(Nabi) of God, and had no divine nature. Indeed, to those in the region, his
message was hardly dramatically new, but simply a sharpened reaffirmation of
the eternal message of the Oneness of God, in new form. Muhammad also
propounded a clear and direct theology, stripped of the abstruse and conflicting
theories about the nature of Jesus that had fractured theological centers across
the lands of Eastern Christianity for six centuries. He emphasized the need to
return to God’s prescriptions for a moral community.
The prescriptions for embracing Islam are simple: the new recruit needs only
to profess with pure heart the shahada, or statement of witness: L ilaha illa al-L