Islam: A Primer

October 14, 2001

The West has failed us, the East has failed us, so now we are returning to our roots, to the true faith. -- Hassan El Turabi

“There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is the Apostle of God.” Thus states the Islamic shahada, the “witness” or “testimony” which it is the most basic duty of every Muslim to recite. The shahada is the closest thing to an Islamic creed. Islam, which means, “to submit, to surrender to God,” is one of the world’s greatest, and perhaps least understood, religious traditions. Approximately one-seventh of the population of the world, in countries as diverse as Morocco and Pakistan, Indonesia and Afghanistan, is Muslim, which means, simply, “one who submits.”

Like all great religious traditions, Islam contains great diversity. Within that diversity, however, there are certain elements which are common to all Muslims. These are the so-called “five pillars of Islam.” These actions are performed directly by the individual believer without mediation of an institutional hierarchy, such as we find within Christianity. The five pillars of Islam are 1)the shahada (The Arabic word “Allah” means “God.”); 2)Salat, or ritual worship, which involves five daily prayers with orientation toward the Arabian city of Mecca, the symbolic center of the Islamic universe; 3)Zakat, or purification by giving alms or tithing for the poor; 4)Sawm, or fasting during the daylight hours of the month of the year known as Ramadan; and 5)Hajj, the ritual pilgrimage to Mecca which every Muslim is encouraged to make at least once in a lifetime. There is also popular pilgrimage to the sites of local “saints,” which attracts even more people than the annual visit to Mecca.

Islam is a religion of uncompromising monotheism. God is one, unique, and all powerful. To outside eyes, Islam can seem a harsh religion: God is the cosmic judge who desires perfect obedience; but, paradoxically, the same God who punishes transgression is also the God whom the Islamic holy book, the Koran, always refers to as “the Compassionate, the Merciful.” Humanity is the servant of God. As scholar of Islam H. A. R. Gibb wrote, “That God is the omnipotent master and man His creature who is ever in danger of incurring his wrath--this is the basis of all Muslim theology and ethics.” (For an introduction to the rich theological heritage of Islam, I encourage you to read Karen Armstrong’s A History of God.)

The core of Islam is the belief that God has sent guidance in a series of prophets, including many of the same figures familiar to Jews and Christians: Adam, Abraham, Moses, and even Jesus of Nazareth, are considered to be forerunners of the last and greatest of the prophets, Mohammed, who was born in the commercial city of Mecca in about 570 AD. Abraham, in particular, is seen as a prototype of Mohammed, as the “first Muslim,” or true submitter to “faith.” Muslims do not worship Mohammed: the old designation of Islam as “Mohammedanism” is a serious misunderstanding. Muslims consider it an insult to be called “Mohammedans.” In fact, Islam early in its history repudiated the Christian doctrine of the divine sonship of Jesus, considering it to be blasphemous.

Like Jews and Christians, Muslims are a “people of the book.” Mohammed’s greatest contribution to Islam was the Islamic Koran, which means, simply, “recitation.” This collection of revelations is considered to contain the literal word of God, which Muslims are meant to recite day and night in every circumstance of life, but especially in regular worship of God. God’s authorship of the Koran is a point on which Muslims agree fundamentally. Mohammed’s other great contribution was the consolidation of Islam in the face of the cruel political and economic realities of his day. Islam was, and is, a call to a more just and equitable system of government, indeed, of God’s government in the world. One can see how this call directly relates to contemporary Muslim complaints about repressive governments within the Islamic world.

Islam’s history is considered to begin with the Hijra, the removal of Mohammed by his followers from Mecca to Medina to teach the “true” faith. Within eight years of this move, he had extended the community of the faithful not only to most Medinans, but also had conquered Mecca for Islam. As scholar William Graham has written, “Even before the death of the Prophet in 632, the tremendous impulse was becoming evident that would spread Islam almost from one end of the known world to the other within a mere one hundred years.” The spread of Islam was to change the world.

Most scholars agree that the most important distinguishing feature of Islam is the Shari’a, or Law, which has been called “the epitome of the true Islamic spirit, the most decisive expression of Islamic thought, the essential kernel of Islam.” [Gibb]. Islamic law is the master science of the Muslim world. It is authoritarian to the last degree, for it is considered to be the will of God. One hoping to understand the revival in Islam in recent years must look at the role which has been played by a return to strict Islamic law in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. For the Muslim, there is no distinction between the legal and the religious, the religious and the political. There are no distinctions between private, civil, penal, and other kinds of law. Islamic law is a means of bringing the government of God, or Allah, down to earth.

Islam’s single most important and visible ritual is the annual pilgrimage to the sacred city of Mecca during the Hajj. The Hajj is the most massive pilgrimage mechanism in any religious tradition, attracting millions annually. Mecca is not only the birthplace of Mohammed, it is also the location of the sacred Kaaba, or cube, the most sacred place in Islam. It is supposed to have been built by Abraham. The Kaaba is the center of the universe--that is why Muslims always pray toward Mecca. Interestingly, the Kaaba predates Islam, showing that Islam, like Christianity, was not averse to absorbing older religious elements in order to consolidate its hold over the people.

A visit to the Kaaba is one of the fundamental duties which all Muslims hope to accomplish before their deaths, although it is not required for salvation. The pilgrimage to Mecca during Hajj is a return to the symbolic center of the world, to the very roots of Islam, and to God. It expresses the strong sense of unity which exists within Islam’s great diversity of peoples and cultures, the unity of God, and the unity of the true worshippers of God. In the words of Ahmad Kamal,

The Hajj is an immense congress of the Faithful from all corners of this earth, that Muslims of every race and complexion may worship in unison and come to know the power which springs from unified belief and concerted action. In our being called to gather in holy places, we have been granted an unparalleled opportunity to discover our potential might, spiritual and physical. Nowhere else is there such a yearly congress. No other people are privileged to know such oneness of being, such singleness of purpose.

Within Islam, there are two major groups, or competing orthodoxies. These two groups are the Sunnis and the Shiites.

Sunnis constitute the largest group within Islam. The word Sunna means custom, and, indeed, the Sunnis are Islam’s traditionalists. Ironically, until recently, they have also been its liberals. A Sunni is a “follower of the way,” that is, a follower of the correct or traditional way as laid down by Muhammad and the earliest community of Islam. Of the Sunnis, H. A. R. Gibb wrote, “the Sunni principle has been to extend the limits of toleration as widely as possible. No great religious community has ever possessed more fully the catholic spirit or been more ready to allow the widest freedom to its members provided only that they accepted . . . the minimum obligations of the faith.”

While Islam generally takes an unyielding, hostile attitude to all without itself, it has shown a surprisingly broad tolerance of diversity within,--though this tolerance has been severely tested in recent times. Still, Islam is amazing for its integration of cultures; until the 19th century it contained the widest variety of races of any religious tradition. And traditionally, Sunni Islam totally “rejected the doctrine of fanaticism.”

The other major, but smaller group within Islam, known as the Shiites, have a separate and competing notion of what the Great Tradition ought to be. The Shiites are most prevalent in Iran and Lebanon. (Afghanistan, which early broke away from Persia--now Iran--is primarily a Sunni country.) It was among the Shiites of Iran that the phenomenon of Islamic fundamentalism first became apparent to westerners.

The Shii are “partisans” of Ali, who was Mohammed’s son-in-law, and who is considered in Shiism to be the first “Imam” after Mohammed’s death. In Islamic practice, the Imam is a “leader” of the ritual worship or ritual prayer; but in the Shiite tradition, the Imam is also believed to be the divinely inspired leader of the Muslim community.

It is this issue of authority which has traditionally separated the Shiites from the Sunnis. The Shiites claim to possess a body of secret knowledge which is controlled by the Imams, who are considered the “only authoritative source of doctrine.” The Imam is considered to possess a superhuman character, to be sinless and infallible.

It is very important to recognize that most Muslims are opposed to the violence and fanaticism of Islamic fundamentalists. As Ellen Goodman pointed out in a recent column in the Boston Globe, Islam is not the only religion bedeviled by fundamentalism. One frightening effect of the renewed emphasis within Islamic fundamentalism upon the Koran and the Sunna, or tradition, has been the revival of the idea of Jihad or “Holy War.” Most Muslims do not accept the inevitability or literality of the Jihad, though one can understand its attractiveness among the poor and dispossessed peoples of the Muslim world.

In Islam, faith and works are closely related, and a Muslim is generally understood to be a “doer.” Islam lacks the ascetic, monastic communities of Christianity. Yet within Islam there is a tradition which permeates all the other traditions, known as the Sufi tradition.

The word Sufi comes from an early Sufi practice of wearing undyed garments of wool. Sufism has a mystical, universalistic orientation, which goes beyond the strong Islamic emphasis on law. A major goal of Sufism, as of all mystical traditions in all religions, is the creation of a community without walls. It emphasizes the internal religious life, the need for an inner devotional life of love for God. Indeed, “love” is the mainspring of Sufi mysticism. Sufism proclaims, in ideas reminiscent of our own mystic, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the immanance of God in the human spirit. It proclaims direct, personal experience of God: “firsthand” experience, if you will. The Sufi is a wayfarer on the path to God, and as you might imagine, performance of the Hajj is very important to the Sufi. Yet Sufism proclaims that the real Kaaba is the Kaaba of the heart.

Sufism is also a storytelling tradition. A typical Sufi story is “Mahmud and the Seeker after Gold.”

One night Mahmud, a sultan, riding alone, saw a man sifting earth for gold; his head was bent and he had piled up here and there heaps of sifted dust. The sultan looked at him and then threw his bracelet among the heaps and rode off like the wind. The following night Mahmud returned and found the man still sifting. “What you found yesterday,” said the Sultan, “should be enough to pay the tribute of the whole world, and yet you continue to sift!” The man said, “I found the bracelet you threw down, and it is because I have found such a treasure that I must continue the search for as long as I have life.”

The story concludes, “Be like this man and search until the door is opened to you. Your eyes will not always be shut; seek the door.”

As in all of the great world religious traditions, there are within Islam two opposed but complimentary tendencies. These are the traditional tendency, which resists change and innovation as being destructive of the faith; and a catholic, universalizing tendency, which is constantly seeking to encompass variety and to assimilate the new and the different.

At present, the traditional tendency appears to have gained ascendancy in Islam, in reaction to the modernism and secularism of the West, represented most threateningly by the United States of America. As Bernard Lewis wrote back in 1990, “More than ever before it is Western capitalism and democracy that provide an authentic and attractive alternative to traditional ways of thought and life.” Lewis called this “no less than a clash of civilizations.”

Additionally, our support for repressive regimes (in order to protect the westward flow of oil), has helped to fuel Islamic resentment and hatred toward our country. Until we begin to redress some of the political and human realities, including the foreign domination and encroachment which we represent in the Muslim world, I personally see little prospect of a lasting peace.

We must not underestimate the forces which are motivating the renewal in Islam. As a Kuwaiti professor put it before the Gulf War, “Islamic fundamentalism is an expression of despair, bewilderment, and above all disillusionment.” The common cry of Islamic fundamentalism seems to be, “We are turning to Islam because everything else has failed.” Unless we recognize the reality and depth of despair behind it, we will fail completely to understand the violent impetus of modern Islamic extremism. We have already given terrible witness to this impetus in the acts of September 11.

As the late Harvard professor of comparative religion, Wilfred Cantwell Smith once said, “The fundamental problem of modern [Muslims] is how to rehabilitate their history; to set it going again in full vigor so Islamic society may once again flourish as a divinely guided society should and must.” I would like to think that the United States could play a constructive role in that endeavor, and not just a destructive one.

To try to understand any religion from the outside is a dangerous activity, and everything I have said is a vast oversimplification of a rich and complex tradition. I apologize for any misrepresentations I may have made, but will consider it worthwhile if I have helped to increase or deepen your understanding of this great world religious tradition, its role in the evolution of current world events, and indeed, its role in our own lives. May we keep our minds open to new light, even that which may seem at first unwelcome. So be it. Amen.

The Rev. Harold E. Babcock