THE HEART OF ISLAM

Enduring Values for Humanity

Seyyed Hossein Nasr

Harper San Francisco

Hardcover, 338 pages

ISBN 0-06-009924-0

$22.95

Cutting through the thicket of misunderstanding between Islam and the West often leads to denser thickets. On occasion, a ray of light might shine through. Seyyed Hossein Nasr provides much needed light. Author of 18 other books on Islam, he set out after 9/11 to outline the general elements of Islam to a Western audience, to explode myths about Islamic culture, and to portray what he perceives as a true view of Islam not the one he asserts has been hijacked by terrorists. He begins by first showing us our common ground.

Islam, like Judaism and Christianity, is monotheistic, with a moral creed to promote acts of kindness, compassion, charity, humility, tolerance, and love. Similar to Christianity, but unlike Judaism, Islam fosters a belief in an afterlife in heaven for those who lead a good life. Unlike Judaism or Christianity, its fundamental principles do not attempt to exclude other religions, subvert them, or eradicate them, something quite contrary to the viewpoint expressed by Islamic terrorists. Instead, according to Nasr, mainstream Muslims see their religion as the culmination and natural growth of first Judaism and then Christianity. Islam claims and respects, as its prophets, not only Adam, Abraham, and Moses, but also Jesus, and meshes their teachings with those of Muhammad. Muslims also venerate the Virgin Mary, accept the virgin birth of Jesus, and keep faith in the second coming of Jesus.

Unlike Christianity, Islam does not consider Jesus to be the son of God. Nor does it consider Muhammad to be the son of God. Instead, Muhammad is considered a messenger who delivered God s word. Also unlike Christianity, Islam has no official central authority as Catholics do the Pope and Vatican, and it has no official priesthood.

However, just as Christianity has differences among its followers, such as Catholics and Protestants, there are also differences among the followers of Islam. About 87% of Muslims are Sunni, and 13% are Shiite. The split between these two groups occurred after Muhammad s death, when one group chose a successor to Muhammad, and another favored Muhammad s son-in-law Ali. Although Ali worked to avoid differences between the two groups, after his death the division became complete.

The major difference is that Sunnis believe they can choose their leader, and that his main function should be administrative to protect the borders, keep security, appoint judges, and the like. In contrast, Shiites contend the leader cannot be elected but must be divinely chosen, and that he must have the deepest knowledge of Islam. It is strikingly ironic that America would attempt to forcibly install a democracy in Iraq where the Shiite majority, whom we hope to be the foundation of a elected government, has a tradition of not electing leaders. In this regard, maybe the Neocons should have kept in mind the Shiites in Iran, whose old religious guard has the right to block any candidate deemed unfit for office. All of which simply demonstrates the need for the West and East to better understand one another and not meddle in each other s internal affairs.

This lack of understanding probably finds few better examples than the Western perception that all Muslims view us as infidels. Surprisingly, however, there are parts of the Muslim world that do not automatically distinguish between Muslims and others as believers and infidels. Instead, all those who believe in one God, whether Muslim or not, can be considered a believer, not an infidel. There is no parallel for this type of tolerance in Christianity, which is far more exclusive, and far more intent in imposing its tenets on others.

There is a another distinct irony here while the secular West claims to promote diversity, its Christian roots are largely intolerant, while Islam, often considered backward and Medieval in the West, has more often tolerated diversity. While Nasr takes pains to distance Islam from the secular West, there is potentially more common ground here than even he might admit. Specifically, the diversity of Islam, and the diversity of other religions, are considered by Muslims as the richness of Divine Nature. In other words, if God had intended one community, he would have made only one. But instead he made many, all of which must be respected. Despite principles advocating diversity in both Islam and the secular West, Nasr points to Western examination of Islam as a flashpoint between the two cultures:

The rationalist and agnostic methods of higher criticism applied by certain Western scholars to the text of the Quran . . . is as painful and as much a blasphemy to Muslims as it would be to believing Christians if some Muslim archeologists claimed to have discovered some physical remain of Christ and were using DNA analysis to determine whether he was born miraculously or was the son of Joseph.

Also painful for Muslims are Christian attacks on Muhammad, known simply as the Prophet. Born in 580 CE in Mecca in an aristocratic family, his father died before Muhammad s birth, and his mother died while he was quite young, leaving him an orphan. Even so, he became a successful merchant, known for his honesty and sincerity, with the title the Trusted One. He also had a strong contemplative tendency causing him to retreat often to the desert for prayer. At age 40, while praying, he was visited by the angel Gabriel, who provided him with the first verses of a revelation that began his prophetic mission to establish monotheism in Mecca, the center of Arab idol worship. It was also the center of trade, from which the city derived its power and wealth. Like Jesus before him, Muhammad s message struck at the heart of his own established culture, including his own family. After several attempts on his life, he migrated to Medina, established the first Islamic society, and when attacked by Meccans, prevailed in battle against great odds to establish the new religion in Mecca. But he did not take revenge. He forgave those who had done harm to him and his followers.

If this ability to forgive and accept sounds similar to the principles of Jesus and the Buddha, it s because it is little different from their basic teachings. Yet while Jesus and the Buddha preached detachment from the world, as well as a spiritual life not entangled in the ambiguities and complexities of ordinary affairs, Muhammad as a merchant and man of the world had to deal with the affairs of men and women, with all their frailties and shortcomings. He also had to rule over a whole society and to sit as a judge in cases of one party s complaint against another. He therefore sought equilibrium in life. His sayings, not part of the Quran but an illuminating supplement to it, deal not only with spiritual matters but also how to fairly handle commercial transactions and how to justly deal with one s family. Charity was his main principle:

Charity is a duty for every Muslim. He who has not the means thereto, let him do a good act or abstain from an evil one. That is his charity.

Nasr contrasts this charitable spirit with Christian missionary activity in poor parts of the Muslim world in which material aid such as rice and medicine is dispensed in the name of charity but with the motive of conversion. He asserts that some of the most virulent anti-Western Arab leaders have been graduates of missionary schools.

To understand current Islamic reactions to Christian missionary activity in many countries, one should ask how the people of Texas and Oklahoma, where many American evangelists come from, would respond to the following scenario. Suppose that, with vast oil money from the Islamic world, Islamic schools were to be established in those states. Because of their prestige, these schools attracted the children of the most powerful and well-to-do families, and these future leaders, in attending these schools, underwent a systematic process of cultural Arabization . . .

As with most cultures threatened by outsiders, there is often a return to more fundamental roots, based on a belief that the culture has grown soft, weak, and decadent, and must be strengthened by a return to a more disciplined past. Wahhabism, dominant in Saudi Arabia, arose as a reform movement in the 18^th century in southern Arabia. Ironically, Ottoman Muslims considered the Wahhabis as infidels due to their strict interpretation of Sharia, Islamic law, and sent an army to crush it. Through an alliance with the House of Saud, the Wahhabi movement survived, then consolidated power after the fall of the Ottoman Empire in World War I, and assisted the Saudis in creating their kingdom. Thus the marriage of a more extreme, more severe, and more fundamental form of Islam with a political family which has become unfathomably wealthy through the sale of oil to the West, enabling Wahhabi schools to be established outside of Saudi Arabia. It is no accident that most of the 9/11 terrorists were young Saudis.

Nasr discounts this as an extreme form of Islam that has little to do with what he perceives to be its more moderate nature. While not directly criticizing the Wahhabi sect, he does state the Taliban represented another example of an extremist minority group. Through this approach, Nasr often seems engaged in an apologia for Islam extremists on the basis that throughout history there have always been those who react violently to defend themselves, including Americans in their rebellion against the British. But defense is one thing. Rebellion against tyranny to gain basic rights and freedoms is another. Neither have anything to do with hijacking passenger jets and flying them filled with civilians into skyscrapers filled with yet more civilians with the intent to kill them all. Ultimately, Nasr acknowledges this.

But to act Islamically is to act in defense. Those who inflict harm upon the innocent, no matter how just their cause might be, are going against the clear teachings of the Quran . . .

As Nasr says, it is necessary to place the evil actions carried out in the name of Islam in context just as the events in Jonestown and Waco do not speak for Christianity, nor do the terrorist bombs of the IRA, nor the ethnic cleansing by Serbs.

Considering the history of the recent past, it is hardly surprising that such extremist illicit and morally reprehensible actions by a few using the name of Islam should take place, especially when injustices and suppressions within Islamic societies are added to external ones. Nor does asking why despicable actions take place in the name of Islam by the few and coming to understand the background of those actions in any way condone or excuse them.

What Nasr points out is that extremists are extremists because they differ from centrally held views, and that the center belongs to traditional Islam, not the terrorists. Unfortunately, we in the West see little of moderate Islam. What we see are Sunnis and Shiites murdering each other in a relentless cycle of revenge in Iraq, the Taliban blowing up Buddhist statues, the Australian cleric comparing women without a scarf to red meat, and blaming women, not men, for rapes.

For all its similarities to many of our basic principles, certain central views of Islam are quite different from the way the West looks at the world. While our secularized society elects representatives to make and abrogate laws, Islamic law is not something determined by society but is considered the will of God, imposed not by self-determination by the people, but imposed by God to regulate the people, something that is permanent. Although its basic principles may be extended and applied by analogy through quiya to new circumstances, not unlike our common law derived from stare decisis, the concept of elected representatives making law, as opposed to law made by God, is alien to Islamic culture.

To compare this to our culture, consider the Ten Commandments, handed down by God to Moses and forming a permanent part of our moral code. Nasr correctly concludes that these principles are as relevant now as they were thousands of years ago. So too, he asserts, is Islamic law. What we must therefore remember is that the concept of law, imposed by God, not by a body of elected representatives, may well conflict with any goal of establishing a Western-style democracy in the Muslim world, although Nasr does not specifically address this issue. What he does address is the failure of the forced implementation of European legal codes during the not too distant colonial period, resulting in part in today s backlash against Western secularism.

Still, both American and Islamic roots of law are not so different. Where Thomas Jefferson asserted an inalienable right of the governed to overthrow a tyrant and declare independence, so too does Islam recognize the right of rebellion and re-establishment of order when moral authority is destroyed and religious norms flaunted. What sounds like Jefferson s all men are created equal can be found in Nasr s statement that All Muslims are in principle equal before the law, whether they are kings or beggars, women or men, black or white, rich or poor. Our own right to freedom of religion appears in the Islamic principle that the personal and communal affairs of religious minorities should be left to them.

Aside from law, consider that the Islamic ritual of washing with clean water is little different from the Christian adage that cleanliness is next to godliness. The requirement of charity also shares a similar principle with Christianity. But unlike the destructive tendency of our Judeo-Christian heritage, by which the West has justified mankind s dominion over the earth, using resources as we see fit, the Quran teaches that these rights are accompanied by a greater responsibility that our power over nature must be combined with responsibility for its protection and sustenance.

As for trees, he emphasized the significance of creating what is today called green space; He said, It is a blessed act to plant a tree even if it be a day before the end of the world. The Shari ah promulgates certain general principles concerning the environment, such as balance (mizan) between all parts of God s creation, the prohibition of waste, and respect for all life forms, and specific injunctions, such as the creation of protected areas for wildlife.

The same concern for the planet is expressed in commercial transactions. As a successful merchant, Muhammad recognized wealth could be a ladder to heaven or hell. He opposed greed, emphasized the importance of honesty in economic transactions, and recognized the inviolability of private property as well as limits on private property due to the public right to those things meant for everyone, such as mountains, forests, and rivers. He knew a commercial promise created a responsibility to keep the promise, and that the manner in which a transaction would be carried out would affect the souls of the parties as well as their relationship with God. Significantly, he advocated the duty of an employer to be fair and kind to an employee a concept often alien to our capitalistic world of corporate feudalism.

In contrast to the Christian West, where mercantile activity was looked down upon up until the renaissance, in the Islamic world from the beginning trade and economic transactions were seen in a positive light from the religious point of view. The Prophet himself had originally been a merchant, as had his wife Khadijah, and throughout Islamic history the merchant class associated with the bazaar has been among the most pious in Islamic urban areas, as have been farmers living in the countryside and villages.

These concepts would be quite radical and revolutionary in our country as revolutionary and radical as the equal treatment of women in most Islamic countries. But it appears to be the tradition of culture, not the basic principles of Islam itself, by which women are oppressed, and Nasr argues that this problem existed long before the advent of Islam and has yet to be resolved. While he states that in principle there is nothing in the Quran or Muhammad s teachings to bar the equality of women, he says nothing about honor killings, he fails to mention what happened to women in Iran after the fall of the Shah where those who failed to cover their hair had acid thrown in their faces, disfiguring them horribly, and he does not discuss the prohibition by the Taliban which prevented women from going to school, holding a job, or appearing outside the home without being completely covered head-to-toe by a burqa and accompanied by a male family member. Nor is there any discussion of Saudi women who cannot even drive or sit in the front seat of a car.

What he does acknowledge is that Muslim society, like Christian society, is far from perfect, and that if all the principles of Islam were followed, as with all the principles of Christianity, there would be no evil in this world. While Nasr concedes that women s issues are one of the major challenges facing the Islam world today, he constructs more of a justification for the status quo than any remedy.

He does, however, outline Muhammad s life experience with women and Muhammad s own view. Consider, for instance, that Muhammad s first wife, Khadijah, was a wealthy businesswoman, fifteen years his senior, who proposed marriage to him. If she was not an independent woman, then no woman has ever been. The marriage was long, happy, and monogamous until she died when he was 50 years old. They had no sons but four daughters (pp.29-30), and Muhammad believed women should be treated gently.

While Nasr asserts that men and women are equal in Islam and before God, he concedes that in this world, they are not always equal. From our viewpoint, this may seem like the slightest of acknowledgments. But what Nasr argues is that some cultures claim the primacy of individual rights while others claim the primacy of society. In other words, while we may consider the Muslim world to have completely devalued individual rights, Nasr contends Islam has created more of a balance between individuals and society, and he correctly observes:

There is no society without the individual; nor can the individual survive without society.

Nasr explains that the traditional structure of Islamic society is for the roles of men and women to complement one another, for men to provide and protect, for women to nurture and raise children, and that the importance of women in the family was emphasized when he said, Heaven lies under the feet of mothers.

Islamic society has never thought that working in an office is of a higher order of importance for society than bringing up one s children.

Said another way:

From the Islamic point of view, the right of a child to a full-time mother rather than a nanny or day-care provider is more essential than many rights held dear today.

While Westerners might rightly argue that a Muslim woman has few rights, a Muslim might respond than many Western children have been deprived of the most basic of rights to have two parents who love one another and them, and to have a full-time mother who is not exhausted when coming home from work to now start her second job at home, so fatigued she can t engage in any quality time with her children. Of course, we can amply argue that here a woman often has a choice whether to work or stay at home, while a Muslim woman does not, but it was not so long ago that Western law essentially regarded a wife as a man s chattel, the right to vote was won less than 100 years ago, and many women today still look up through a glass ceiling they can t break through.

Nasr does acknowledge that wife-abuse is a problem in Islamic society but contends it is also a problem in America, which of course it is. What he asks is that we move beyond the reprehensible acts of a few which are universal to all societies, and to further move beyond the acts of extremists whom he views as having hijacked a religion that, at its core, emphasizes love, compassion, peace, and tolerance. To this end, he deconstructs the word jihad the root of which originally meant to strive or to exert effort, and which essentially came to mean any effort considered worthy, such as the internal spiritual struggle to purify the soul of imperfection. It also might mean the effort to build houses for the poor, little different than Jimmy Carter s Habitat for Humanity. It also could mean a war fought in defense, not for aggression. This does not mean that any terrorist group might justify its violence in the name of defending Islam.

Those who carry out terror in the West or elsewhere in the name of jihad are vilifying an originally sacred term, and their efforts have not been accepted by established and mainstream religious authorities as jihad in the juridical and theological sense of the term. The declarations of Shaykh al-Azhar, the most authoritative religious voice in Sunni Islam, condemning in no uncertain terms the terrorist acts of September 11, 2001, in America is a clear example.

And what of suicide bombers? Nasr states that Islam forbids suicide, and that those who take their own lives are condemned to the infernal states because they have made a decision for themselves that belongs to God. And their victims, non-combatant bystanders? The Quran prohibits attacking women, children, and noncombatants. But despite these principles, Nasr does not cite any edict from any Muslim cleric who has denounced suicide bombing, and at times he seems almost ambivalent, almost sympathetic, to suicide bombers. He argues that:

suicide as a desperate act to overcome oppression or to defend oneself has manifested itself on the margin of human existence everywhere.

As examples, he cites American soldiers who have thrown themselves on grenades to save fellow soldiers, or Japanese kamikaze pilots who inn desperation flew themselves into warships. But saving a fellow soldier or even flying your plane into an enemy warship is hardly the moral equivalent of walking onto an Israeli bus or into a Baghdad restaurant and blowing civilians to kingdom come. We might also shudder at our murder of the women and children at Wounded Knee, the fire bombing of civilians in Dresden and Tokyo, the atomic incineration of families in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the machine gunning of villagers at My Lai. We like to think we have distanced ourselves from these acts, that they do not reflect our true national character or, in the devastation wrought by atomic bombs, that we saved a million deaths from the inevitable invasion of Japan. Maybe so, maybe not. But we still regard Sampson as a hero of the Old Testament for pulling down the pillars of the temple, killing both himself and innocent others.

For Nasr, the morality or immorality of suicide bombing is whether the victims are combatants or noncombatants.

For Muslims, the difficult question on both moral and religious grounds concerns those who live under appalling oppression and in a state of despair and have no other means of defense except their bodies. Even in such cases the Islamic injunction that one cannot kill innocent people even in war must of necessity hold.

As for suicide bombings against enemy soldiers, he takes no real stand, saying only that:

As for using one s body as a weapon against combatants, this is an issue that is being hotly debated among experts on Islamic Law in the Islamic world today. Most believe that an act that is certain suicide must be avoided, while some believe that it is permissible as self-defense or for the protection of one s people if it does not involve innocent victims.

Even if we reject this as an impermissible ambivalence that might encourage suicide bombing in a limited form, thus leading to its acceptance as a weapon to be used whenever and wherever, at least we should agree with Nasr s observation that:

The great tragedy is the existence of a situation in which young people fall into such a state of desperation that the question of suicide even arises.

This is the heart of the matter people so desperate, so disaffected, they rally under the only banner they know Islam and are willing to blow themselves and others to pieces to strike a blow against their perceived enemy. That enemy is clearly us, although Nasr prefers to speak generally of modernism.

it is forgotten that modernism is itself one of the most fanatical, dogmatic, and extremist ideologies that history has ever seen. It seeks to destroy every other point of view and is completely intolerant toward any Weltanshauung that opposes it, whether it is that of the Native Americans, whose whole world was forcibly crushed by it, or Hinduism, Buddhism, or Islam, or for that matter traditional Christianity or Judaism.

In other words, our culture of technological advances, consumerism, and individual rights in a potentially godless society might crush traditional Islamic values. But as Nasr asks, Can we have human rights without human responsibilities? Must a culture of individual rights result in our never-ending passions generating unending waves of unreal wants and desires, which are then turned into needs?

As Nasr states, and as we must learn to recognize, not all worldviews are the same. For a very large part of the world, Islam provides a balance in life, a balance by which one might achieve the goal of a Sufi prince, who said, I want not to want.

Beyond tolerance, compassion, and understanding, Nasr also seeks self-determination for the Muslim world the freedom to confront its own problems and find its own solutions, the freedom to deal with the world based on the dynamics of Islam, and the freedom to play a crucial role in the world by emphasizing the primacy of human responsibility over individual rights. Some might say this freedom was lost when the Arabs grew rich from our money for their oil, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and massed his troops on the border of Saudi Arabia to threaten the supply of oil the rest of the world needs, and when the Taliban harbored Osama bin Laden after 9/11. But does this mean we should invade Islamic countries to forcibly install democracy?

Now that we have, we must recognize that in free elections most Muslims will not want a separation of church and state, will not want our materialistic world with an emphasis on consumerism and individual rights, and will resist assaults on their heritage. If they truly have freedom of self-determination which we say they should have then we must accept that any form of democracy they might adopt will likely be significantly different from ours and will likely include within it a substantial if not controlling element of Islam. That s called diversity, something else often advocated in this country.