From Piety to Politics

In the months following 9/11, I was struck by stories in the press that more and more Americans were going to bookstores to buy copies of the Koran, hoping to find a clue as to the motivation of the suicide bombers. When the fall semester at Columbia ended and I went home to Kampala, Uganda, the invasion of Afghanistan had begun, the Iraq War was in the air and anxiety about the "war on terror" was growing by the day. But there was no queue at the local bookstore in Kampala of people looking for a copy of the Bible to understand the rapidly deteriorating international situation--even though there was no shortage of Bible-talk among promoters, executors and supporters of the "war on terror."

Islam watchers at universities and think tanks in the West have pored over the Koran, marker in hand, looking for suras and ayas that either hinder or promote coexistence between Muslims and others. Few Islam watchers have considered how passages from the Koran translate into concrete acts. That is what makes the three books under review here so refreshing. They draw the obvious but all too rarely made distinction between Islam as faith and Islam as ideology.

Reza Aslan's brilliantly readable introduction to the historical faith, No god but God, provides a suitable bridge between the two. A central question informs Aslan's endeavor: Does the legacy of the Prophet of Medina lie in his revolutionary message or in the autocratic powers that the Constitution of Medina granted him? Aslan's book tells the story of how Muhammad's revolutionary message was gradually reinterpreted, and subverted, by his successors into an orthodoxy and how a narrow coterie of religious scholars were able to establish themselves as its custodians, in the process transforming the Koran from the source of a moral message to the repository of a comprehensive legislation, the Sharia.

Subscriber Login

User Name

Password

Subscribe Now!

The only way to read this article and the full contents of each week's issue of The Nation online is by subscribing to the magazine. Subscribe now and read this article -- and every article published since for the past five years -- right now.

There's no obligation -- try The Nation for four weeks free.

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 68 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.
• Reprint this article. Click here for rights and information.