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A fascinating, accessible introduction to Islam from the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Zealot
INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • A finalist for the Guardian First Book Award
In No god but God, internationally acclaimed scholar Reza Aslan explains Islam—the origins and evolution of the faith—in all its beauty and complexity. This updated edition addresses the events of the past decade, analyzing how they have influenced Islam’s position in modern culture. Aslan explores what the popular demonstrations pushing for democracy in the Middle East mean for the future of Islam in the region, how the Internet and social media have affected Islam’s evolution, and how the war on terror has altered the geopolitical balance of power in the Middle East. He also provides an update on the contemporary Muslim women’s movement, a discussion of the controversy over veiling in Europe, an in-depth history of Jihadism, and a look at how Muslims living in North America and Europe are changing the face of Islam. Timely and persuasive, No god but God is an elegantly written account that explains this magnificent yet misunderstood faith.
- Sales Rank: #10890 in Books
- Brand: Random House Trade Paperbacks
- Published on: 2011-08-30
- Released on: 2011-08-30
- Ingredients: Example Ingredients
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.99" h x .82" w x 5.16" l, .65 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 384 pages
- Great product!
Review
“Grippingly narrated and thoughtfully examined . . . a literate, accessible introduction to Islam.”—The New York Times
“[Reza] Aslan offers an invaluable introduction to the forces that have shaped Islam [in this] eloquent, erudite paean to Islam in all of its complicated glory.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Wise and passionate . . . an incisive, scholarly primer in Muslim history and an engaging personal exploration.”—The New York Times Book Review
“Acutely perceptive . . . For many troubled Muslims, this book will feel like a revelation, an opening up of knowledge too long buried.”—The Independent (U.K.)
“Thoroughly engaging and excellently written . . . While [Aslan] might claim to be a mere scholar of the Islamic Reformation, he is also one of its most articulate advocates.”—The Oregonian
About the Author
REZA ASLAN has studied religions at Santa Clara University, Harvard University, and the University of California, Santa Barbara. He holds an MFA in fiction from the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, where he was also visiting assistant professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies. His work has appeared in USA Today, U.S. News & World Report, and The Chronicle of Higher Education as well as a number of academic journals. Born in Iran, he lives in Santa Barbara and New Orleans.
From the Hardcover edition.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1. The Sanctuary in the Desert
PRE-ISLAMIC ARABIA
Arabia. The Sixth Century C.E.
IN THE ARID, desolate basin of Mecca, surrounded on all sides by the bare mountains of the Arabian desert, stands a small, nondescript sanctuary that the ancient Arabs refer to as the Kaaba: the Cube. The Kaaba is a squat, roofless edifice made of unmortared stones and sunk into a valley of sand. Its four walls--so low it is said a young goat can leap over them--are swathed in strips of heavy cloth. At its base, two small doors are chiseled into the gray stone, allowing entry into the inner sanctum. It is here, inside the cramped interior of the sanctuary, that the gods of pre-Islamic Arabia reside: Hubal, the Syrian god of the moon; al-Uzza, the powerful goddess the Egyptians knew as Isis and the Greeks called Aphrodite; al-Kutba, the Nabataean god of writing and divination; Jesus, the incarnate god of the Christians, and his holy mother, Mary.
In all, there are said to be three hundred sixty idols housed in and around the Kaaba, representing every god recognized in the Arabian Peninsula. During the holy months, when the desert fairs and the great markets envelop the city of Mecca, pilgrims from all over the Peninsula make their way to this barren land to visit their tribal deities. They sing songs of worship and dance in front of the gods; they make sacrifices and pray for health. Then, in a remarkable ritual--the origins of which are a mystery--the pilgrims gather as a group and rotate around the Kaaba seven times, some pausing to kiss each corner of the sanctuary before being captured and swept away again by the current of bodies.
The pagan Arabs gathered around the Kaaba believe their sanctuary to have been founded by Adam, the first man. They believe that Adam's original edifice was destroyed by the Great Flood, then rebuilt by Noah. They believe that after Noah, the Kaaba was forgotten for centuries until Abraham rediscovered it while visiting his firstborn son, Ismail, and his concubine, Hagar, both of whom had been banished to this wilderness at the behest of Abraham's wife, Sarah. And they believe it was at this very spot that Abraham nearly sacrificed Ismail before being stopped by the promise that, like his younger brother, Isaac, Ismail would also sire a great nation, the descendants of whom now spin over the sandy Meccan valley like a desert whirlwind.
Of course, these are just stories intended to convey what the Kaaba means, not where it came from. The truth is that no one knows who built the Kaaba, or how long it has been here. It is likely that the sanctuary was not even the original reason for the sanctity of this place. Near the Kaaba is a well called Zamzam, fed by a bountiful underground spring, which tradition claims had been placed there to nourish Hagar and Ismail. It requires no stretch of the imagination to recognize how a spring situated in the middle of the desert could become a sacred place for the wandering Bedouin tribes of Arabia. The Kaaba itself may have been erected many years later, not as some sort of Arab pantheon, but as a secure place to store the consecrated objects used in the rituals that had evolved around Zamzam. Indeed, the earliest traditions concerning the Kaaba claim that inside its walls was a pit, dug into the sand, which contained "treasures" magically guarded by a snake.
It is also possible that the original sanctuary held some cosmological significance for the ancient Arabs. Not only were many of the idols in the Kaaba associated with the planets and stars, but the legend that they totaled three hundred sixty in number suggests astral connotations. The seven circumambulations of the Kaaba--called tawaf in Arabic and still the primary ritual of the annual Hajj pilgrimage--may have been intended to mimic the motion of the heavenly bodies. It was, after all, a common belief among ancient peoples that their temples and sanctuaries were terrestrial replicas of the cosmic mountain from which creation sprang. The Kaaba, like the Pyramids in Egypt or the Temple in Jerusalem, may have been constructed as an axis mundi, sometimes called a "navel spot": a sacred space around which the universe revolves, the link between the earth and the solid dome of heaven. That would explain why there was once a nail driven into the floor of the Kaaba that the ancient Arabs referred to as "the navel of the world." As G. R. Hawting has shown, the ancient pilgrims would sometimes enter the sanctuary, tear off their clothes, and place their own navels over the nail, thereby merging with the cosmos.
Alas, as with so many things about the Kaaba, its origins are mere speculation. The only thing scholars can say with any certainty is that by the sixth century C.E., this small sanctuary made of mud and stone had become the center of religious life in pre-Islamic Arabia: that intriguing yet ill-defined era of paganism that Muslims refer to as the Jahiliyyah--"the Time of Ignorance."
TRADITIONALLY, THE JAHILIYYAH has been defined by Muslims as an era of moral depravity and religious discord: a time when the sons of Ismail had obscured belief in the one true God and plunged the Arabian Peninsula into the darkness of idolatry. But then, like the rising of the dawn, the Prophet Muhammad emerged in Mecca at the beginning of the seventh century, preaching a message of absolute monotheism and uncompromising morality. Through the miraculous revelations he received from God, Muhammad put an end to the paganism of the Arabs and replaced the "Time of Ignorance" with the universal religion of Islam.
In actuality, the religious experience of the pre-Islamic Arabs was far more complex than this tradition suggests. It is true that before the rise of Islam the Arabian Peninsula was dominated by paganism. But, like "Hinduism," "paganism" is a meaningless and somewhat derogatory catchall term created by those outside the tradition to categorize what is in reality an almost unlimited variety of beliefs and practices. The word paganus means "a rustic villager" or "a boor," and was originally used by Christians as a term of abuse to describe those who followed any religion but theirs. In some ways, this is an appropriate designation. Unlike Christianity, paganism is not so much a unified system of beliefs and practices as it is a religious perspective, one that is receptive to a multitude of influences and interpretations. Often, though not always, polytheistic, paganism strives for neither universalism nor moral absolutism. There is no such thing as a pagan creed or a pagan canon. Nothing exists that could properly be termed "pagan orthodoxy" or "pagan heterodoxy."
What is more, when referring to the paganism of the pre-Islamic Arabs, it is important to make a distinction between the nomadic Bedouin religious experience and the experience of those sedentary tribes that had settled in major population centers like Mecca. Bedouin paganism in sixth-century Arabia may have encompassed a range of beliefs and practices--from fetishism to totemism to manism (ancestor cults)--but it was not as concerned with the more metaphysical questions that were cultivated in the larger sedentary societies of Arabia, particularly with regard to issues like the afterlife. This is not to say that the Bedouin practiced nothing more than a primitive idolatry. On the contrary, there is every reason to believe that the Bedouin of pre-Islamic Arabia enjoyed a rich and diverse religious tradition. However, the nomadic lifestyle is one that requires a religion to address immediate concerns: Which god can lead us to water? Which god can heal our illnesses?
In contrast, paganism among the sedentary societies of Arabia had developed from its earlier and simpler manifestations into a complex form of neo-animism, providing a host of divine and semi-divine intermediaries who stood between the creator god and his creation. This creator god was called Allah, which is not a proper name but a contraction of the word al-ilah, meaning simply "the god." Like his Greek counterpart, Zeus, Allah was originally an ancient rain/sky deity who had been elevated into the role of the supreme god of the pre-Islamic Arabs. Though a powerful deity to swear by, Allah's eminent status in the Arab pantheon rendered him, like most High Gods, beyond the supplications of ordinary people. Only in times of great peril would anyone bother consulting him. Otherwise, it was far more expedient to turn to the lesser, more accessible gods who acted as Allah's intercessors, the most powerful of whom were his three daughters, Allat ("the goddess"), al-Uzza ("the mighty"), and Manat (the goddess of fate, whose name is probably derived from the Hebrew word mana, meaning "portion" or "share"). These divine mediators were not only represented in the Kaaba, they had their own individual shrines throughout the Arabian Peninsula: Allat in the city of Ta'if;
al-Uzza in Nakhlah; and Manat in Qudayd. It was to them that the Arabs prayed when they needed rain, when their children were ill, when they entered into battle or embarked on a journey deep into the treacherous desert abodes of the Jinn--those intelligent, imperceptible, and salvable beings made of smokeless flame who are called "genies" in the West and who function as the nymphs and fairies of Arabian mythology.
There were no priests and no pagan scriptures in pre-Islamic Arabia, but that does not mean the gods remained silent. They regularly revealed themselves through the ecstatic utterances of a group of cultic officials known as the Kahins. The Kahins were poets who functioned primarily as soothsayers and who, for a fee, would fall into a trance in which they would reveal divine messages through rhyming couplets. Poets already had an important role in pre-Islamic society as bards, tribal historians, social commentators, dispensers of moral philosophy, and, on occasion, administrators of justice. But the Kahins represented a more spiritual function of the poet. Emerging from every social and economic stratum, and including a number of women, the Kahins interpreted dreams, cleared up crimes, found lost animals, settled disputes, and expounded upon ethics. As with their Pythian counterparts at Delphi, however, the Kahins' oracles were vague and deliberately imprecise; it was the supplicant's responsibility to figure out what the gods actually meant.
Although considered the link between humanity and the divine, the Kahins did not communicate directly with the gods but rather accessed them through the Jinn and other spirits who were such an integral part of the Jahiliyyah religious experience. Even so, neither the Kahins, nor anyone else for that matter, had access to Allah. In fact, the god who had created the heavens and the earth, who had fashioned human beings in his own image, was the only god in the whole of the Hijaz not represented by an idol in the Kaaba. Although called "the King of the Gods" and "the Lord of the House," Allah was not the central deity in the Kaaba. That honor belonged to Hubal, the Syrian god who had been brought to Mecca centuries before the rise of Islam.
Despite Allah's minimal role in the religious cult of pre-Islamic Arabia, his eminent position in the Arab pantheon is a clear indication of just how far paganism in the Arabian Peninsula had evolved from its simple animistic roots. Perhaps the most striking example of this development can be seen in the processional chant that tradition claims the pilgrims sang as they approached the Kaaba:
Here I am, O Allah, here I am.
You have no partner,
Except such a partner as you have.
You possess him and all that is his.
This remarkable proclamation, with its obvious resemblance to the Muslim profession of faith--"There is no god but God"--may reveal the earliest traces in pre-Islamic Arabia of what the German philologist Max Muller termed henotheism: the belief in a single High God, without necessarily rejecting the existence of other, subordinate gods. The earliest evidence of henotheism in Arabia can be traced back to a tribe called the Amir, who lived near modern-day Yemen in the second century B.C.E., and who worshipped a High God they called dhu-Samawi, "The Lord of the Heavens." While the details of the Amirs' religion have been lost to history, most scholars are convinced that by the sixth century C.E., henotheism had become the standard belief of the vast majority of sedentary Arabs, who not only accepted Allah as their High God, but insisted that he was the same god as Yahweh, the god of the Jews.
The Jewish presence in the Arabian Peninsula can, in theory, be traced to the Babylonian Exile a thousand years earlier, though subsequent migrations may have taken place in 70 C.E., after Rome's sacking of the Temple in Jerusalem, and again in 132 C.E., after the messianic uprising of Simon Bar Kochba. For the most part, the Jews were a thriving and highly influential diaspora whose culture and traditions had been thoroughly integrated into the social and religious milieu of pre-Islamic Arabia. Whether Arab converts or immigrants from Palestine, the Jews participated in every level of Arab society. According to Gordon Newby, throughout the Peninsula there were Jewish merchants, Jewish Bedouin, Jewish farmers, Jewish poets, and Jewish warriors. Jewish men took Arab names and Jewish women wore Arab headdresses. And while some of these Jews may have spoken Aramaic (or at least a corrupted version of it), their primary language was Arabic.
Although in contact with major Jewish centers throughout the Near East, Judaism in Arabia had developed its own variations on traditional Jewish beliefs and practices. The Jews shared many of the same religious ideals as their pagan Arab counterparts, especially with regard to what is sometimes referred to as "popular religion": belief in magic, the use of talismans and divination, and the like. For example, while there is evidence of a small yet formal rabbinical presence in some regions of the Arabian Peninsula, there also existed a group of Jewish soothsayers called the Kohens who, while maintaining a far more priestly function in their communities, nevertheless resembled the pagan Kahins in that they too dealt in divinely inspired oracles.
The relationship between the Jews and pagan Arabs was symbiotic in that not only were the Jews heavily Arabized, but the Arabs were also significantly influenced by Jewish beliefs and practices. One need look no further for evidence of this influence than to the Kaaba itself, whose origin myths indicate that it was a Semitic sanctuary (haram in Arabic) with its roots dug deeply in Jewish tradition. Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, and Aaron were all in one way or another associated with the Kaaba long before the rise of Islam, and the mysterious Black Stone that to this day is fixed to the southeast corner of the sanctuary seems to have been originally associated with the same stone upon which Jacob rested his head during his famous dream of the ladder.
Most helpful customer reviews
298 of 325 people found the following review helpful.
A good history of the Muslim religion from a moderate voice - quiet optimism in a world of shouting
By Phred
Iranian born Dr. Reza Aslan was seven years old when his family fled the Iranian revolution and arrived in America. He would grow up a Persian Muslim in a relatively open America. Here he would earn a Master's degree from Harvard Divinity School and his doctorate in the Sociology of Religion from the University of California, Santa Barbara. In other words Dr. Asan grew up in a world where he was very separate and distinct from his surroundings and reacted to the situation by seriously studying the history and meanings behind these distinctions.
In his book No God but God the reader is given the benefit of this thoughtful man's years of study. The majority of this book is a readable and systematic description of the theology and history of the Muslim religion. One of my favorite old Bible stories is that of the "Still Small Voice". The lesson from this story is to ignore the storms and bombast the world can give us and listened to the quiet internal logic of real inspiration. Dr. Aslan would never claim to be the still voice of God, but the tone of his book is that of a calm, confident, and knowledgeable instructor.
In reading the biography of Mohammed we meet a man whose divine inspiration may be a matter of debate in the West; but who lived a life remarkable for his ability to succeed in building one of the world's great religions. Along the way he would negotiate alliances and conduct warfare with and without the advantages that would normally guarantee diplomatic or military victory. The collections of his sayings that would be later assembled into the Koran appear to reflect the co-mixture of the words needed to inspire an Army, promote cooperation from allies and to inspire fear in enemies. What undergirds all of these practical problems is a fundamental belief in promoting a system based on social justice and relief from an existing system that had promoted family good over, community good.
As one who has read the Koran, Dr. Aslan's explanation of how it came to be written allowed me the context to understand the apparent contradictions, which are typical of many sacred texts, and to appreciate why this text is so radically different from others. The Koran is not intended to be read as a history or as a collection of stories. It is a collection of speeches, revelations and instructions to be applied not merely in one's religious life but in one's daily life and the institutional life we would call government.
In trying to interpret the violent extremes present in the modern House of Islam, Dr. Aslan proposes the following hypothesis: The Christian West would undergo a Reformation lasting 100 or more years. During the Reformation conflicting ideas in the pressure to modernize thinking drove people to extreme acts of violence not only against each other but across continents where Christianity was either unknown or not wanted. It is Dr. Aslan's belief that part of what is going on in the contemporary House of Islam is a Muslim version of the Reformation. He believes that the Muslim world long withdrawn from modern influences is increasingly dealing with complexities and issues not found in the writings of Mohammed. This produces all manner of societal stresses. Some of these stresses will be fought out as religious violence. A second manifestation of this process is and will be violence directed at the non-Muslim world. How long this process will take and how severely it will manifest itself is unknown.
I very much hope that Dr. Aslan is correct. My read of Muslim history is that it has gone through cycles of adaptation and modernization followed by periods of repression including violent repression in efforts to restore the presumptive purity of an older time. The non-Muslim world however is under no obligation to tolerate or remain passive in any portion of that Reformation that expresses itself as violence in our house. If No God of but God is correct the events in the House of Islam will eventually burn themselves out with the more moderate face of Islam strengthened with a greater ability to function in a larger modern non-Muslim world. If this interpretation is too optimistic the rest of us must rightly concern ourselves with yet more militant efforts to draw more of this planet into a repressive and backward looking House of Islam.
No God but God has much to teach the Western reader. My recommendation is enthusiastic but conditional. Too much of Western discussion of the Muslim religion is based on shouting, ignorance, and fear. Too many who would make and are making policy decisions seem to believe that any actual knowledge of the "other" is almost a moral failing. The real moral failing is to not take advantage of books like No God but God as part of the process that real morality dictates. It is never enough to let doctrine drive policy. Both must be informed. Dr. Aslan makes a legitimate effort to provide this information.
102 of 112 people found the following review helpful.
Idealized Islam
By bmbower
This book doesn't simply recount facts, it places you in the desert and gives you a sense of what it might have been like to take sides with the Prophet during the war between Medina and Mecca. A master storyteller, Aslan turns the origin and evolution of the Sunni-Shia divide into an intriguing political yarn filled with all the knots of a modern thriller. I liked how he clearly connected the success of the ultra conservative Wahhabists to the development of the Saudi oil empire. And I loved learning that Sufism is as cool as I always suspected it was (though a great deal more diverse as well).
The only downside is that Aslan's skill as a writer allows him to overemphasize the positive. Somehow in the midst of massacres, assassinations, rivalries, oppression of women, modern extremism, and the dogmatic and even wicked Ulama, Aslan manages to present an idealized Islam that seems downright liberal, like it was born from the European Enlightenment rather than pagan tribalism.
A beautiful vision of what the faith could be.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Perspectives on today's global conflict
By arthur v neis
Less than 300 reviews on Amazon, compared to more than 2,600 for his book Zealot, the Historical Jesus!! One would have hoped for just the opposite statistic, considering the timeliness of the topic is Islam, and the necessity to understand a non-Western culture and tradition. Perhaps the length of this review is this reviewer’s attempt to correct the lack
No god but God, written 10 years before Zealot, includes a rather definitive discussion of the definition of “religion” as the story of faith. This definition is informative of the author’s perspective and will continue into his later work about the historical Jesus. Religion “…is an 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. Religion is concerned not with genuine history, but with sacred history, which does not course through time like a river.”
Aslan dismisses the “clash of culture” arguments and focuses on the “clash of monotheisms” (much the same as the clash between Christians and Jews is a clash of monotheisms).
The book seems to be three monographs, woven together, very effectively.
First Aslan discusses Arabia in the Period of Innocence, from which Mohammad emerges and develops the Islamic traditions.(Chapters 1-2) Second, Aslan takes the reader through the trials, tribulations and triumphs of his tribe and his followers. (Chapters 3-5) as Islam is developed into its own unique set of symbols and myths. These chapters carry stories of the Islamic traditions through Mohammad’s death and for centuries to today (chapters 6-7), including a wonderful chapter on Sufism. (Chapter 8). And the third “monograph” brings the reader to about 2010, the story of Islam in these latter centuries (Chapters 9-11), perhaps more rightly focused on the colonialized period of Arabia. In this “monograph”, Aslan seems to be caught up in his own dream for the future, and that dream is highly influenced by his being born in Tehran and then (my words), in exile for some 24 years before his return for a visit. His hopes anddream does not change the wisdom of his scholarship, however.
Aslan develops clearly and historically the roles of Mecca and Medina within the both the Arabic and the Muslim traditions.
Regardless of the Arabic traditions of retaliation and restitution, Aslan perceives Islam as focused on community, inclusiveness (equality) and love. Mohammad, as Aslan describes, extended the Arab concept of tribe as the fundamental organizing unit of society, to be a “neo-tribe” that “because neither ethnicity or culture nor race nor kinship had any significance to Muhammad, the Ummah (tribe), unlike a traditional tribe, had an almost unlimited capacity for growth through conversion.” With regard to traditional tribal concepts of retribution, Mohammad’s revelation of the Word of God as written in the Qur’an states, “The retribution for an injury is an equal injury, but those who forgive the injury and make reconciliation will be rewarded by God.” The community of Islam was being created on the basis of moral and egalitarian ideals.
These positive attributes are overshadowed in the past several hundred years by colonialism, Western evangelization (of culture and religion and faith), which does not recognize the combination of Arabic tribes and Muslim community perspectives. Western installed and supported tribal leaders have only force by which to maintain legitimacy.
BUT, Aslan does not provide a one-sided argument. He clearly states the failure of Islam to evolve into the Modern world is the result of its theology being controlled by a small group of clerics, who position themselves as the only credible interpreters of the Qur’an. They are responsible for making the body politic subservient to the religion of Islam. This is not consistent with Mohammad’s teachings, or the Qur’an. While Aslan perceives Islam to be in a prolonged period of reformation, today, he notes the conflict between the role of a Caliphate as defined by Mohammad being limited to secular functions, and the role of clerics being limited to religious functions.
Until this internal conflict is resolved, globally, there will be splinter groups who claim power in the name of Islam.
A very valuable perspective on the world today.
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