Islam: Seeking Understanding

"ISLAM: SEEKING UNDERSTANDING"

A Sermon by the Rev. Bruce Clear

Sunday, March 15, 2009

All Souls Unitarian Church

Indianapolis, Indiana

Over the last year, I have had several requests to revisit earlier sermons on world religions. Over the next month or so, I will address the various Eastern religions, but today I wish to begin with Islam. Islam can present somewhat more of a challenge than others. While there is a denominational organization called UU Buddhist Fellowship, and UUs for Jewish Awareness, there is no crossover organization tying Unitarian Universalists to the Muslim religion.

There is probably no world religion more stereotyped in Western eyes than Islam. Part of that stereotype is due to current events, stemming in part from stories related to the events of September 11, 2001. For many people, the politics of the Arabic region became inseparable in our minds with the religion of Islam. It only adds to our confusion that the politics of war has pitted Muslim against Muslim, and therefore no stereotype was warranted. Yet the stereotypes persist.

It seems to me the primary task of dealing with Islam is understanding it. The primary task of understanding Islam is getting past the many stereotypes that confuse our understanding. Much of this sermon will be an attempt to do that.

To understand Islam, one of the most challenging tasks is to understand the aspects which they and we have in common. I begin by sharing the following excerpt taken from one of the most famous history books ever written, H.G. Wells' classic 1920 two volume study entitled, "An Outline of History." In this section, Wells discusses religious wars in the Middle East which took place in the 11th century:

"The first forces...were great crowds of undisciplined people rather than armies. Never before in the whole history of the world had there been such a spectacle as these masses of practically leaderless people moved by an idea. It was a very crude idea. When they got among foreigners, they do not seem to have realized that they were not already among the infidel.

"They looted and committed outrages as they came.... The slaughter was terrible; the blood of the conquered ran down the streets, until men splashed in blood as they rode."

What is described here could easily be that of the military expansion of Islam in the 7th to 10th centuries. Such a description would fit our Western stereotype of this religion that is so often presented as fanatical. But, in fact, this is not a description of Moslem conquest, it is a description of the Crusades of the Christian church against the Moslems.

I begin my discussion of the story of Islam with this story from the history of our own Western culture in order to emphasize the fact that our story and their story are not necessarily all that different from one another.

I approach the topic of Islam this morning with some hesitation and disclaimer. First of all, I do not pretend to be an expert on this topic. And I know that since 2001 there has been more writing in the West about Islam than there probably has been in a thousand years. I am aware that there are some here who know a great deal more about it than I do.

Second, I approach Islam as an outsider, and a non-believer. As a consequence, I feel my responsibility is to try to understand far more than to judge it. As I’ll remind you again when I speak of Eastern religions, I am a product of this culture, and I cannot thoroughly know what it is like to be born and raised in a different culture.

So I approach Islam this morning with these very substantial deficiencies. And yet approach it I feel I must, for our fate is increasingly tied up with the fate of every other culture on earth, including the huge section of humanity that follows Islam.

I begin with what seem to me to be very common misperceptions about the religion of Islam. To some of you, these comments may be elementary, but I expect they will be new to many.

The first common misperception about Islam is the very fundamental observation that it is in origin a Western religion and not a Far Eastern religion. This seemingly trivial observation has tremendously significant implications. Islam has much more in common as a religion with Christianity and Judaism than it does with Buddhism or Hinduism or Taoism. Most people in this West just lump them all together, and when they think of Islam, they categorize it as one of those Eastern religions. It is a mistake, I think, to do so.

Islam is a first cousin of our own religious culture. Christianity and Judaism and Islam were all born in the same land, and all claim the same ancestors, and honor the same prophets. The tradition is that Abraham had two sons, one of whom was Isaac who developed the Jewish tradition, and the other was Ishmael, who was an ancestor of Muhammad, the founder of Islam.

Islam is related to Judaism in much the same way Christianity is related to Judaism. Both Christianity and Islam claim the Jewish prophets -- Abraham, Moses, Noah, and so forth -- as their prophets, too. Islam considers Jesus as a great prophet as well, and Jesus makes a prominent appearance in the Koran. When it is said that Islam considers Jesus as a prophet, many people, no doubt, imagine that means that the Moslems give a nod to Jesus, and simply recognize his greatness. That misses the point. What it means, rather, is that Jesus was a prophet of Islam. Or, put differently, Jesus was a Moslem, a prophet of Allah. The same can be said for Abraham and the other prophets of Islam.

These three religions, then, share the same ancient history, share the same prophets and, most importantly, share the same God. The Jewish Yahweh, the Christian God, and the Islamic Allah are essentially the same Divine Being, even if each feels misunderstood by the others.

The major historical difference for Islam is simply this: that there was one more prophet to appear, Muhammad, who became, in fact, the final prophet of God. Muhammad, the founder of Islam, was familiar with both Christians and Jews who lived in his region.

Christians consider their religion to be an advance beyond Judaism, and therefore consider the Hebrew Bible as an "Old" Testament and the Christian Bible as a "New" Testament. But Islam, which was founded 600 years after Jesus, considers itself an advance beyond Christianity, and its Koran, therefore, is something like a "new and improved" Testament.

It is not just the common history that ties Islam to the Western traditions of Christianity and Judaism. There are, in fact, at least three important religious qualities that these religions share which separates them from the rest of the world's major religions.

First, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are all monotheistic, believing in "One God" only, and they are the only major world religions that insist on this as a fundamental requirement of belief. Hindus can believe in one God or three million Gods or anything in between. (Anyone who can believe in three million Gods is much more pious than I can ever dream of being). Buddhists can believe in many Gods or one God or no Gods. But these three Western religious traditions are unique in the world in their insistence on monotheism.

It is not insignificant to note that Islam is "unitarian" in the classical meaning of that term. Historically, unitarians (with a small "u") were those who believed in God as a unity rather than a trinity. Islam considers Christianity to have abandoned its commitment to monotheism by prescribing a trinitarian "god-head." Muhammad, unlike a trinitarian Jesus, was not divine. He was human.

A second characteristic of all three major Western religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) is that they are unique in the world as having holy scriptures considered to be God's writings. These three are what in religious circles are called "people of The Book." Yes, it is true, other religions have their scriptures, such as the Hindu Vedas or the Tao te Ching, but these are not considered to be written by God. They are not revered as divine writings, but simply as wisdom passed down through the ages. Of the major religions, only these three are "people of the book."

Thirdly, these three Western traditions -- Christianity, Islam, and Judaism -- are religions of law. The laws are written codes of behavior that are often indistinguishable from the society's legal codes. The laws of the religion are written down, and for the Jews it is in the Torah, for the Christians it is in the New Testament, and for the Moslems it is in the Koran. All three use the Ten Commandments as the beginning of their ethical laws.

It is the legalism inherent in these religions that leads, it seems to me, to the phenomenon of "fundamentalism." Fundamentalists in any of these religions are those who require a legal standard of behavior and belief, and they judge the virtue, righteousness and worth of everyone according to that standard.

Again, legalism and fundamentalism are not very characteristic of other major world religions. In Buddhism, for example, there is recognition of many different "paths" to enlightenment, and it would never occur to Buddhists to criticize someone for following a different path than the one's own. The notion of a Buddhist fundamentalist is nonsense, because Buddhism is not a religion of law, not a legalistic religion.

This is not to say, of course, that Jews, Christians, and Moslems are all fundamentalists. Of course, we know that is not the case. But the legalistic roots of these three give rise to fundamentalist thinking. This has helped to shape a stereotype of Islam that applies as well to our own culture.

I have spent a good deal of time so far documenting that Islam is, in fact, a religion closely related to the religions of our own culture. It should go without saying, of course, that there are vitally important differences between Islam and our religious culture (and I'll discuss that in a moment); but the fact of similarities is worth emphasizing at the outset for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that the excesses of Islam tend to look a lot like the excesses found in our own religious culture and history.

Let me move on to another common misconception about Islam: that it is an Arab religion. Its origins are in Arabia, and its sacred center, Mecca, is in Saudi Arabia. There is some truth, therefore, in conceiving of it as Arabic, but that is at the same time grossly misleading.

There are between 600 million and 800 million Moslems in the world. Only 70 million or so, or about 10%, are Arabic. Ninety percent are not Arab. As mentioned in the reading from Joseph Kitagawa, the vast majority of them are in East Asia, east of Pakistan. There are another 200 million or so in Africa. Islam is the dominant religion of countries on a line stretching from the Atlantic coast of Africa (Morocco is 99% Muslim) to the Indonesian islands (which are 90% Muslim) in the South China Sea. Add to this list of Islamic cultures a strong Moslem tradition with African American communities here, and one can see that the Islamic religion is far from a monolithic Arabian culture that many perceive it to be.

To think of a Muslim in Singapore as practicing an Arab religion is a little like saying that a Philippine Catholic is practicing an Italian religion.

The reason this misconception is worth mentioning is that we tend to misunderstand the grand sweep and breadth of Islam if we limit our thinking by equating it to the Middle Eastern Arabs, which the media most frequently associates with Islam. The fact is that there is a great cultural diversity within Islam that most Westerners fail to acknowledge or appreciate.

Another common misconception worth mentioning, along similar lines, is the belief that Islam is a single monolithic religion. Like any major religion, of course, it can be broken down into a variety of different and competing sects, (or, as they say in Christendom, denominations). To take any single Moslem as representative of the Islamic religion is as risky as taking any single Christian -- say, a Jehovah's Witness or a Greek Orthodox -- and presume that they represent all of Christianity.

It is true that the five pillars of faith, which I'll mention in a minute, are shared around the Islamic world. And it is also true that Arabic is the official language of the Koran throughout the world (just as Latin used to be the Language of the Roman Catholic Church until a generation ago).

It might be true that Islam is not quite as diverse as Christianity, but it is certainly not monolithic. Most of us have become just a bit educated in recent years, and to varying degrees, concerning the competing factions of Sunni’s and Shiites. This division is so serious, in fact, that there was, some years back, a violent take-over of the holy city of Mecca by the Shiites, only to be recaptured, militarily, by the Sunnis. Each of these two major divisions can be divided many times over again, as well.

In addition to sects, there is also a variety of religious traditions. The one most popular to Western religious thought is the mystical tradition of the Sufis. The Sufis play a major role in the Islamic tradition, but it is also fair to say a controversial one, for many Moslems reject the Sufi tradition as heretical.

The further away one goes from the Arabic center, the more diverse Islam becomes, taking on the cloak of local cultural traditions. In India, for example, Moslems have adopted a number of Hindu practices, and in fact an entirely new religion -- the Sikh religion -- was created in the 15th century, as I understand it, as somewhat of a synthesis of Islam with Hinduism. The Bahai faith, which has some popularity in this country, is another intentional attempt at combining Islam with other world faiths.

As world religions go, I suppose, Islam may be less diverse than many, but that isn't saying a great deal. What we should understand, though, is that it is not the single monolithic religion it is often portrayed to be.

I speak this morning about our understanding of, and relationship to, Islam, and I notice, at this point, that I still haven't precisely described what the Islamic religion is all about. My calculations show that I am well over half way through my sermon, heading toward the homestretch, and I'm still dealing with what I perceive to be Western misperceptions of this religion. I suppose that says a great deal in itself.

There is one more misperception I still wish to consider. It is a common stereotype, I think, that Islam is a primitive religion, practiced primarily by the uneducated and uncultured. Well, uneducated, perhaps, but only in the sense that most of the world is uneducated, and that all major world religions, including Christianity, are practiced mostly by uneducated people.

But uncultured or primitive? Certainly not. Let us not forget that Islam was born in the region our textbooks refer to as the "cradle of civilization," the Tigris and Euphrates valley, where the first human societies began.

More to the point, the first centuries of the Islamic religion coincided with the era which in Europe was called the "Dark Ages." While Christian Europe was in a state of cultural and intellectual stagnation, Islamic civilization was flowering. While the rest of Europe slumbered, Islam flourished. For example, the European capital of Islamic culture was Cordoba, Spain, and it was at that time Europe's richest city.

It was the Arabic culture that discovered the Greeks during this period, and developed philosophy far beyond European standards. Thomas Aquinas is typically credited with discovering Plato, but what he actually discovered was Arabic translations of Plato; by the time it got to Aquinas, Plato was old news to the Arabs. The Arabs introduced Arabic numerals to Europe, as well as the decimal system and algebra (which is an Arabic term). Europe's major medical textbook on human anatomy was written by a Muslim physician, Avicenna, and was used throughout Europe for 500 years. One great contribution of Islamic culture was architecture, from the Taj Mahal in India to the Alhambra castle in Spain.

But perhaps the zenith of Islamic culture was with the Arabic language, and it is worth saying a few words about that, especially in the context of their use of the Koran.

Muhammad is believed to be the author of the Koran, but we know that he was illiterate. He would utter inspired words while in ecstatic states, and his followers would memorize those words and write them down. They were later compiled into the Koran, and the Muslims today firmly believe that Muhammad dictated these words from God. It is a religious discipline of all Moslems to memorize passages from the Koran in its original Arabic language, much, as I say, Latin was used by the Catholic Church until a generation ago. The Arabic language is highly alliterative, and it is the sounds, more perhaps than the meaning itself, that seems to enchant the one who recites it.

Take, for example, the central confession of faith, "There is no God but Allah." The transliteration of the Arabic is this: "La ilaha illa Allah."

In Arabic, the Koran is written in rhyming poetry, something that does not translate into English. One English Islamic scholar, Sir Hamilton Gibb, says it this way:

"The Koran is essentially untranslatable, in the same way that great poetry is untranslatable. The seer can never communicate a vision in ordinary language. He can express himself only in broken images, every inflection of which, every nuance and subtlety, has to be long and earnestly studied before their significance breaks upon the reader -- images too, in which the music of the sounds plays an indefinable part in attuning the mind of the hearer to receive the message."

In his classic study of comparative religions, Huston Smith puts it this way:

"We cannot hope to bridge the discrepancy between a Muslim's feeling for the Koran and that of an outsider, but the difference stems in part from language as an aspect of racial psychology. 'No people of the world," writes Philip Hittie "are so moved by the word, spoken or written, as the Arabs.' Even today, crowds in Cairo, Damascus, or Baghdad can be stirred to the highest emotional pitch by statements which when translated seem banal. The music, the rhyme, the rhythm produce a powerfully hypnotic effect."

I have, in fact, read some substantial passages of the Koran in English, and for my own taste I confess not to find it highly inspiring. But yet, that may partly be because of my grounding in Western culture, and partly because it is missing the linguistic cadence of Arabic that these passages hail as crucial to its inspiring impact on others.

Whatever the effect of the language may be, I find a great deal of understanding this religion in learning of its fascinating historical context.

If we seek to understand Islam today, it is important to understand why this religion became so immensely popular when it began. The world Muhammad was born into (at about 600 C.E.) was a wildly uncivilized and disorganized society. The various tribes had diverse beliefs, but most were polytheistic, worshiping many different gods. Not just religion, but the society itself was without roots, and there were few moral groundings. Marriage and family, for example, were casual matters. There was not just polygamy, but (to coin a word) omnigamy -- where men and women mated with whomever they wished and the children that resulted were unguided or ignored.

Into this chaos, in the early part of the seventh century, Muhammad brought order, vision, and direction: rules that made sense. His reform of society's practice was profound and fundamental. Like the Christian Bible, the Koran does not forbid slavery, but does insist, for the first time, that slaves be treated humanely. Women, for the first time, are given property rights and inheritance rights, even though they are fewer than for men. Polygamy, which had no limits before, was now limited to four wives. More significantly, the prophet said that if a husband could not adequately care for more than one wife, he should limit himself to one. Alcohol and gambling were both outlawed, as was pork, as in the Jewish tradition.

In today's time, nearly 1400 years later, these may not sound like very significant reforms; yet they did represent drastic changes and improvements for his culture. And they begin to point to what is the central meaning of Islam, not only for Muhammad, but also for Islamic history: Islam is a religion of community, in which the community is joined together in the common purpose of obedience to God. The very word "Islam" itself means, "submission to God." The common purpose of the Islamic community can be expressed in the religious practices which are called the "five pillars of faith."

There are five religious practices required in the Islamic community: 1) the confession of faith that "There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his Prophet," 2) To pray five times a day, by bowing toward the holy city of Mecca, 3) To observe fasting during the holy month of Ramadan, 4) To gives alms or donations to the poor within the Islamic community, and 5) To make a pilgrimage, if you can afford it, to Mecca, sometime during your life.

These five requirements make up the central obligations of religious practice in Islamic communities around the world. That these reforms were attractive to a world in spiritual chaos can be attested to by the spectacular spread of Islam. Within 100 years of Muhammad's death, Islam established the world's greatest empire, from Spain to India. Though some of this was, it is true, military conquest, most of these lands adopted Islam willingly. And the attraction, it seems, was the offer of a united community, which did not exist before. Unlike some Christian conquests, the Islamic conquerors did not require local communities to convert to Islam. Christians and Jews did not normally convert, but the vast majority, who were without a solid religion, did.

It is also important to recognize that Islam builds into its five pillars an ethical obligation to care for the needs of the community by requiring a 2 2 % alms or donation to the needy. This is one way in which ethics is central to Islam; and the ethical obligation is to the health of the community. Muhammad the prophet put it this way:

"None of you is a believer until you love for your brother what you love for yourself."

Above all, Islam offers a community of common purpose, and that purpose is obedience to the one God. Because of this, the heart of Islam recognizes no difference between political and religious community. With only a few exceptions, to be an Islamic country is both a political description and a religious description, and recognizing no distinction between the two. This, as we know, is gradually but definitely changing.

Islam, in its purest theoretical form, was basically democratic. There was no official priesthood (though the Shiites would later develop one), and every believer was considered to be equal before God. Furthermore, the practice of Islam (which is to say, how laws are applied to society) was to be decided by the consensus of the community, and not by a religious hierarchy. This democratic tradition was Islamic theory, but as you can imagine did not always happen in practice.

There is one other distinction between theory and practice that is of interest to many of us today. That has to do with Islamic attitude toward and tolerance for other religions, or "infidels."

In spite of this blending of religious and secular realms, Islam is far more accepting of other religions than our stereotypes allow. In theory, and in much historic practice, Islam has been highly tolerant of other religions. The Koran tells us,

"Let there be no compulsion in religion... Unto you your religion, and unto me my religion." (ii:257 and cix:6)

Legend tells of Muhammad inviting a Christian into his mosque to conduct a Christian service, and Muhammad said, "It is a place consecrated to God." As mentioned earlier, Christians and Jews fared well in most of the history of the Islamic empire. It is well known, for example, that the Jews in Moorish Spain were far better off than they were later in Catholic Spain. And in 16th century Transylvania, the Unitarians, who were persecuted under Catholic control, found greater religious freedom when the Islamic Ottoman empire briefly ruled the area.

In practice today, the goal of a united Islamic religious and political community varies greatly. At one extreme is Saudi Arabia, where the religious laws of its Islamic sect, Wahhabism, are also the secular laws of the state, and no other religion is permitted. In Lebanon, though, Christians and Moslems exist in almost equal number, and there is forever a delicate balancing act in the government. Another model is Turkey, with 90% Moslem population, and a thoroughly secular government. For the religion, however, there is no distinction between community as a religious unit and community as a political unit.

And yet, Islam is also fairly firm about its limits. It is certainly not a pacifist religion. If the central meaning of Islam is the community joined together in submission to God, then Islam will not, and does not, tolerate any threat to that community. If the community of Islam is threatened, Allah himself is threatened.

A very frank explanation of this was offered in by Seyyed Hossein Nasr, a Sufi proponent and Islamic Scholar, and Chair of Islamic Studies at the American University of Beirut:

"People think that the role of religion is only in preserving some kind of precarious peace. This, of course, is true, but not in the superficial sense that is usually meant. If religion is to be an integral part of life, it must try to establish equilibrium between all the existing forces that surround people, and to overcome all the forces that tend to destroy this equilibrium. No religion has sought to establish peace in this sense more than Islam. It is precisely in such a context that war can have a positive meaning as the activity to establish harmony both inwardly and outwardly, and it is in this sense that Islam has stressed the positive aspect of combativeness.

"Peace belongs to the one who is inwardly at peace with the Will of Heaven and outwardly at war with the forces of disruption and disequilibrium."

"The forces of disruption and disequilibrium": This is an appropriate point at which to conclude and summarize this Western exploration of Islam. One common perception of modern Islam that is not a misperception is that Islam is facing an identity crisis when it faces the fact of modern life. "Modern Life" here means the influence of the modernized West.

We cannot understand the situation of Islam today without understanding the situation of Islam at the time of its founding. Islam was established to bring spiritual and moral stability to a society that was spiritually and morally anarchistic. And it succeeded far beyond its founder’s dreams. Perhaps the most peculiar fact of Islam is that it has changed so little over the centuries. Christianity also resisted change, and did so violently and brutally. But change came.

When the Muslim world views our Western world, what it sees is the same spiritual and moral chaos that existed in Arabia before the founding of Islam. It is the instinct of this otherwise stable religion to resist the changes that would return that moral decadence. The dilemma of Islam, like the dilemma of Christian fundamentalism in this country, is that it preaches an unchanging faith in a world that is changing anyway. To agree to adapt to a modern world by loosening its standards, feels to a strict faith like admitting defeat.

Part of our difficulty in understanding Islam, I think, is our persistence in thinking of it as an utterly foreign religion, when it is, in fact, a first cousin to our Western religious culture. Islam was founded about some 600 years after the Christian church was founded. The crisis with modern identity for the Christian church happened about 600 years ago today. During those centuries, the church responded to modernization with repressive violence. Now, in about the same stage in its history, Islam is facing very much the same issues, and in some ways, especially in the Middle East, the reaction is very similar.

If we are to live in this world together, then it is necessary that we try to understand each other's religion. This task is especially challenging between the modern Western cultures and Islamic traditions. The stereotypes and prejudices are too strong and too many to allow understanding to come easily. This morning I have tried to take a small step in that direction.