I’m presently reading Reza Alsan’s “No god but God”,subtitled “The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam”. Here is my preliminary report, from about half-way through.

First off, Aslan is a good writer. I’ve tried to read Islamic history before, but it always bores me to death. There’s a huge volume of detail about Muhammad himself. With Moses all you get is a little clip of his childhood and then the big march from Egypt; similarly with Jesus, there’s a birth story then a year or three of preaching adventures. Even the resurrection is cut short to but a few months. But with Muhammad it goes on and on; there’s this revelation and then that one, there’s this wife and later that one (or two or three), there’s this battle and then the next one. And forget about the night journey to Jerusalem, I get that all confused. Then Muhammad dies and there are lots of Caliphs and battles and a hidden Imam or two. The Sunni and the Shia split and then keep on colliding. You get to Spain for a time, and then there’s an Inquisition. The Crusaders arrive in the East, and the battles go on and on. The Turks come in and gloriously expand things, as the Byzantines finally fall and the Hagia Sophia becomes a mosque. But eventually even the Ottomans fall apart and the west muscles its way in to get at the oil. I never get much traction with the grand sweep. But Aslan does a pretty good job of keeping your attention. I must give him credit for that.

Aslan is also good at developing interesting meta-concepts regarding Islam. Ah! Finally some Islamic meta-concepts; every western writer (except the hide-bound conservatives) is afraid to present any meta-concepts on Islam. One of Aslan’s meta-concepts is that Islam is currently undergoing something akin to the Christian “Reformation”. But that reformation is still in process, it’s a fluid thing, no one is sure where it will lead. OK, that one seems important.

Another Aslanian concept is that certain of the Prophet’s teachings were over-interpreted and mis-interpreted by some of the scholars after his death through a long series of “hadith”, so that women are given less respect than Muhammad intended. Well, that tries to appease the feminists, and at least opens the door to the popular western passtime of questioning the originality of various segments of the Christian Bible (although I doubt if such a view, along with feminism, has gotten very far yet in the world of Islam). Aslan also considers the traditional willingness of Muslims to accept centralized leadership (e.g., the Grand Ayatollah for Iranians) as being rooted in Arab notions of tribal society, the social context from which Islam emerged. (Just as Catholic Christianity co-opted the political context of the Roman Empire in which it was incubated; an all-powerful Pope makes sense if you came from a place and time where the Emperor was the “Maximus Pontiff”.)

That’s all interesting. But at some point Aslan’s intended “clarifications for westerners confused about Islam” start sounding a little bit too good, a little bit contrived. Regarding the historical tensions and sometimes hatred between Islam and the Jews, Aslan attempts to establish Muhammad as having originally considering himself a Jew, or nearly so (certainly a co-son of Abraham). Per Aslan, Muhammad considered himself and his followers to constitute a Jewish reformation movement (perhaps like early Christianity).

It makes some sense, but then there’s the matter of Muhammad’s own dealing with Jewish tribes in Mecca and Medina. In some of his early battles, the local Jews joined with the foes of Muhammad, but after victory Muhammad avoided the slaughter option (so frequently exercised in ancient world) and let the Jews go into exile. But eventually it was “no more mister nice guy”; there was a group called the “Banu Qurayza” who were going to get involved with the anti-Muhammad forces at the Battle of the Trench, but in the end decided not to show up. Muhammad won that one, and after going through the motions of a trial proceeding, he decided to slaughter about 500 or so Jewish tribesmen. Aslan puts a good face on it, and says that it doesn’t reflect an anti-Jewish attitude within the Quran and Islam. But you can still find a lot of arguments out there that the slaughter wasn’t justified and does represent the start of an anti-Semitic attitude within the heart of Islam. I’ll tiptoe away from that one, simply pointing out that not everyone buys what Aslan tries to do in this book.

With regard to Christianity, Aslan takes a somewhat amusing tact. He says that Muhammad and Islam were never anti-Christian; they were just offended by the moral hypocrisy and laxity of many Christians in Muhammad’s Arabia. Aslan also takes pains to point out that Muhammad really liked and respected Jesus, and Islam still gives Jesus a big spot in its teachings. (However, it appears that they have ignored Jesus’s words regarding casting the first stone.) Aslan says that Muhammad was convinced that Jesus was a prophet, but not the theological “Son of God” or Christ. Well OK, that would fit in with Aslan’s discussion of Muhammad as semi- or quasi-Jewish. But it gets comical when Aslan explains that the Quran never condemns Christianity, but only goes after those who believe in the Doctrine of the Trinity, i.e. God as Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Those who do so cannot even be considered “People of the Book”, i.e. the “second prize” that the Quran allows to those who don’t follow Islam but still believe in God and the prophets of Biblical Judaism.

I’ve got a hot newsflash for Mr. Aslan. Every Christian faith or sect that I’ve ever heard of since Emperor Constantine helped squeeze out the Nestorians and their like has the Trinity at the core of its teachings. I feel that Aslan needs to be a little bit less politically-correct himself; Islam and Christianity have a really fundamental disagreement that exists today. That disagreement can’t be stepped around. What can be stopped is the idea that either side has the right to use force against the other, be it physical or economic or academic hubris, in the pursuit of its doctrine. And even better: perhaps both sides might consider the notion of dialectic, that “I could possibly be wrong, and we both could be wrong, even though we both still believe ourselves to be right; and someday, the better idea will emerge”.

Well, my second idea is probably a bridge too far for both Christianity and Islam. But if there could at least be a cease-fire declared, if the Christian soldiers and Islamic jihadists would all stand-down, together with the Israeli army and settlers, we might have a better world. I’d like to see Aslan say something along those lines in the rest of the book. I hope to finish his book before too long; but I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for him to say that. Aslan is still a good read, but you can see in his writing that Islam is still much too timid in applying the medicine of critical self-analysis; although Christianity still has a long way to go in that too, admittedly.

I watched the recent NOVA science show on PBS about the Bible (The Bible’s Buried Secrets), regarding what archeology tells us about the Hebrew Testament and the formative era of Judaism. To put it bluntly, what archeology tell us is that a lot of what is said in the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament isn’t true. Especially in Genesis, the first book. OK, so we’ve know for a long time that the Earth and heavens weren’t made in a week, and that Adam wasn’t formed out of the mud with Eve being pulled from his ribs. But most of the great stories about Abraham and Jacob and Moses also turn out to be fabrications and retrojections from later events, events such as the Babylonian exile, events which do have historic foundation. Even David, although confirmed as an historic figure, was taken down a few notches from the powerful and glorious king that he is made out to be in scripture.

According to NOVA, the “nation of Israel” most likely gained its identity between 1200 BCE and 1000 BCE as a mix of refugees from southern Canaanite cities that were in turmoil (as Egyptian dominance subsided), and local nomads in the high country around Jerusalem (where the urban refugees were settling). There may well have been former Canaanite slaves in the group who had managed to run off from central Egypt, and perhaps there were charismatic leaders amidst them who inspired the Moses character. And those groups may well have wandered in the desert country between the Nile and the Canaan highlands for many years. So there were folk-tales available from which a narrative of a great past could be weaved, a past that was fabricated to deal with problems of the day (such as the crisis of conquest by Assyria and Babylon).

Interestingly, one of the biggest retrojections onto the days of Moses was the idea of monotheism; archeology shows that the early Jews continued worshiping a variety of gods, including the Canaanite fertility goddess, for many centuries after King David and Solomon. They finally decided that it was best to stick with one god, YHWH, in order to deal with the foreign invaders. That was the god which the Egyptian refugees encountered in their wanderings (being worshiped by villages in southern Sinai, perhaps the Biblical “Midian”), and was thus remembered by them as their protector.

(It would be interesting to research whether the memory of Asherah, the Canaanite fertility goddess whom the early Jews sometimes referred to as the “wife of YHWH”, lasted into New Testament times and contributed to the formation of the Virgin Mary myth in Matthew and Luke’s Gospels.)

The interesting thing is that many of the people who were contributing to this research and offering this interpretation were either from Israel or otherwise had typical Jewish surnames. I’d say that it is a good bet that many of the people who were debunking the great myths of the Jewish nation were and are Jewish. And that impressed me. These people seemed very relaxed about what they were doing and saying. No one was threatening their well being for saying that the great stories of the Bible aren’t literally true. Now compare that with the situation in Islam. Not too many years ago, a very early manuscript of the Quran was found in an obscure mosque in Yemen. Since then, only a handful of western scholars have been allowed to see it. Those who suggest that it may have been an ‘evolving work’ (such as Dr. Gerd Puin) have encountered hostility. You can find strong refutations by Islamic thinkers of the idea that the Yemen verses might show the “official version” of the Quran to have significant differences from what Mohammad or his immediate associates wrote during their lifetimes. E.g.

So, it might be a while until you see a NOVA episode regarding the “buried secrets of the Quran”. And that’s a shame. It is said that Islam is a relatively “young” religion; the NOVA special would indicate that the “Israel nation” identity was formed over 1600 years before the life of Mohammad. Well, the Jews are certainly acting quite admirably and maturely about what science is saying about their most sacred foundational myths and stories. Let’s hope that Islam will learn to live up to this example.

MORE IMMATURITY: I was listening to NPR yesterday and the announcer said that the “liberal blogosphere” (e.g. Daily Kos, Huffington Post) is somewhat upset with President-elect Obama for showing some centrist tendencies, e.g. considering Hillary Clinton for Secretary of State, meeting with Senator McCain, and not committing to the prosecution of Bush Administration officials for torture. Plenty of immaturity out there; and perhaps Barack Obama has aged decades over the past two years. Perhaps.