More to the point, how can we even begin to evaluate a religion stretching across some fourteen centuries that, starting just twenty-five years after Mohammed's death, has suffered violent split after split between Kharijites and Umayyads, Sunnis and Shiites, and so on? Rather than an abstraction known as "Islam," Edward Said argued, we should only talk about the many local "Islams" that have taken shape from Morocco to Indonesia and the Philippines. If so, what are we to make of such variants as Saudi Wahhabism, which, even though rooted in a specific time and place, reject particularism and insist on Islam as a single, undifferentiated whole? Are they right or wrong--and if we are forbidden to talk about Islam as a whole, how are we to know?

Although Islam's origins are unclear--scholars increasingly reject the tale of a desert prophet propounding the Koran to a small circle of followers--one thing stands out: Islamic history is different. Unlike the Jews, whose efforts at establishing a theocracy in the tiny province of Judea met with repeated disaster, or the Christians, who spent nearly three centuries as a despised and persecuted sect, Islam is a product of almost dizzying political success. Within a century of Mohammed's reputed death in AD 632, Muslims had not only unified the Arabian Peninsula but had conquered the Persian Empire, humbled the Byzantines, made short work of the Visigothic kingdom in Spain and were directly threatening the Franks in the heart of the Christian West. Whereas today it is Islam that feels besieged, 1,200 years ago it was the Latin Church.

Thus, where Christianity went from defeat to victory, Islam went from victory to defeat, which multiple schisms have only compounded. The question now is whether this distinctive evolution has left Islam with an irrepressible longing to return to the battles of yesteryear, to right the old wrongs and to resume its march of conquest. As one expert noted, "In the Muslim community, the holy war is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the Muslim mission and (the obligation to) convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force"--which, if true, would make peaceful coexistence an impossibility from the start. As much as one would like to dismiss such sentiments as typical of the bigoted Orientalism that Said denounced so vigorously, the expert in question happens to be the fourteenth-century Arab thinker Ibn Khaldun, whose opinions on this topic, needless to say, are not so easily dismissed. Yet in the years since, Islam has passed through periods of dormancy in which jihad seemed to be the farthest thing from anyone's mind, which suggests that Ibn Khaldun is as irrelevant to contemporary events as the Book of Joshua is to Israeli policy in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

The questions go on and on, as they invariably do when faith, ecumenical or otherwise, is shaken. But now comes Feisal Abdul Rauf, the imam of the Masjid al-Farah mosque in New York and a leading Muslim liberal, to assure us that fears of Islamic expansionism are exaggerated and that Islam's attitude to political power is more ambiguous than most people realize. One problem, he writes in his new book What's Right With Islam, is that few Jews and Christians understand how much all three religions have in common. Although non-Muslims see Islam as a comparatively new religion, Muslims see it as an old one, a return to the plain desert faith of the patriarch Abraham and his followers. Where Christianity created a new and complicated theological edifice, Islam's aim has been to strip away such accretions and "reestablish the Abrahamic ethic" that is, according to Abdul Rauf, at the core of Western monotheism.

• « Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• 6
• 7
• Next »

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 75 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.