.....The principle at work here is familiar. The interpretation of God’s will is obedient to facts on the ground and how they’re perceived. The live-and-let-live philosophy flourishes when there seems nothing to be gained by fighting. That had been Paul’s situation, Christians were a minority, hopelessly outgunned by polytheistic Romans, so no wonder he told his followers, “Bless those who persecute you” and “Do not repay anyone evil for evil.” And no wonder Muhammad, in roughly the same situation, said, “Turn away evil by what is better, and lo! he between whom and thyself was enmity, shall be as though he were a warm friend.”°
And likewise, as we’ve seen, in the Hebrew Bible. The Israelites, after suffering a setback at the hands of the Ammonites, waxed theologically tolerant in making a peace overture to their next-door neighbors: “Should you not possess what your god Chemosh gives you to possess? And should we not be the ones to possess everything that our god Yahweh has conquered for our benefit?” When, on the other hand, fighting seemed to offer easy gains, religious tolerance faded. Thus are the Israelites told in the book of Deuteronomy to “annihilate” the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, and so on, “so that they may not teach you to do all the abhorrent things that they do for their gods, and you thus sin against the Lord your God.”?!
After moving to Medina and mobilizing its resources, Muhammad would, like the Israelites of Deuteronomy, find war a more auspicious prospect. And, as we’ll see, God’s views on fighting infidels would change accordingly, as they did in the Bible. But so long as Muhammad remained in Mecca, fighting was unappealing and religious tolerance expansive. Indeed, at moments when collaboration with the pagans seemed attractive, Muhammad’s tolerance grew so large that he was willing to give up monotheiem iteelf. This, at least, js the apparent upshot of the “satanic verses”
The Satanic Verses
What Muslims call the satanic verses aren't in the Koran, At least, they aren't anymore, According to Muslim tradition, they were uttered by the Prophei and thus entered scripture, but were expunged when he realized they had been inspired by Satan.
The verses involve three goddesses—Al-Lat, A-‘Uzsa, and Manat — who had a big following in Arabia and whom some pagans considered daughters of Allah. Acknowledging their existence and power would have made it easier for Muhammad to do business with their adherents, and some of their adherents were influentral. A nearby town where some Meccan elites owned property featured a shrine to Al-Lat.*
Apparently Muhammad succumbed to the temptation. In the now expunged utterance, he said of the three goddesses that they are “exalted,” adding: “And truly their intercession may be expected.”
This concession seems to have proved in one sense or another ill advised. Maybe the pagans rebuffed Muhammad’s overture, and maybe his followers rebelled at his apostasy. (According to Muslim tradition, pagans applauded the initiative but then Muhammad got negative feedback from the angel Gabriel.) In any event, the sura was amended. Today if calls these goddesses not “exalted” but “mere names,” and there’s no mention of them having the power to intercede in anything.”
The idea of Muhammad turning suddenly pobytheistic doean't fit easily into Muslim tradition, and if is precisely this “theological inconvenience” the label we put on comparable Christian and Jewish anomalies in chapter 10-~that gives the story credibility. As the seminal twentieth-century scholar of Islam Montgomery Watt put it, the story is “so strange that # must be true in essentials.”*
And certainly the moral of the story makes sense: when people see the prospect of non-zero-sum interaction across religious bounds, tolerance grows. Hopes of fruitful alliance tempted Muhammad to forsake monotheism.
Even in Meccan suras that didn’t get expunged, there are signs of Muhammad trying to build interfaith coalitions. He seems, for starters, to be reaching out to Jews. The evidence for this doesn’t lie in his extensive reference to Jewish scripture. (It is natural that he’d cite the Judeo-Christian Bible as authority for his otherwise radical pronouncements, given its connection to the august and cosmopolitan Byzantine Empire.) Rather, the evidence lies in the fact that while in Mecca he says nothing bad about the Jews and says some flattering things about their ancestors. God, in his “prescience,” chose “the children of Israel... above all peoples.” *5
And in a sura normally dated late in the Meccan period, Muhammad seems eager to reach an accommodation with both Jews and Christians. The sura explains how to relate to recipients of “earlier revelations.’?° Muslims are not to argue with them “unless in the mildest manner” (though if the Christian or Jew in question has behaved “injuriously toward you” no such reserve is in order). Instead, they should emphasize common ground: “We believe in what hath been sent down to us and hath been sent down to you. Our God and your God is one.’”??
In short, Muhammad was a savvy politician, eager to build coalitions, mindful of muting differences that would impede that project. Some Muslims might reject this use of the word “politician,” along with its implication that Islamic scripture can be seen as mere rhetoric. And some critics of Islam might welcome the word as support for the claim that Muhammad’s “revelation” was just an elaborate ploy, part of the Prophet’s scheme to amass power.
Both of these reactions are modern reactions. They come from a world in which the realms of religion and politics are often clearly distinct. In earlier times, as we’ve seen again and again, religion and politics were flip sides of the same coin. No doubt Muhammad’s special access to God’s word gave him mundane authority in the eyes of believers. No doubt the same was true of Jesus and of Moses. But that doesn’t mean that any of these men considered their
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ANY Merger OF religions he may have envisioned Wasi t a merger of equals.
The Abrahamic Inversion
The terms of the merger can be seen in the question of Abraham. Muhammad accepted the biblical claim that God had seminally revealed himself to Abraham as the one true god. And he accepted the biblical claim that the Israelites had descended from Abraham. This would seem to place the Israelites, hence Judaism, at the root of the Abrahamic family tree. But Muhammad told the Abraham story in a way that invited a different interpretation, one that put Islam, and indeed Arabs, at the center of things.
Hidden within the biblical story of Abraham, there had always been a commentary on the relative status of Israelites and Arabs. The nomadic Bedouin tribes that inhabited the part of Arabia near Israel were known as Ishmaelites, because they were thought to be descendants of Ishmael. So the Bible’s depiction of Ishmael is, implicitly, a depiction of Ishmaelites, of Arabs as they were known the ancient Israelites.
And how is Ishmael viewed through Israelite eyes? The gogoonews for Ishmael is that he was an offspring of Abraham’s. The bad news is that he was the child of Abraham’s slave Hagar. He thus ranked below Abraham’s son Isaac, who was born of Abraham’s wife Sarah and from whom the Israelites descended.
As if this didn’t bode sufficiently ill for the social status of Arabs, consider the circumstances of Ishmael’s birth. According to Genesis, Sarah drives the pregnant Hagar into the desert to bear her child alone. And later Sarah abandons her child in the desert. An angel prophesies his fate in a way that doesn’t bespeak a favorable Israelite view of Arabs: “He will be a wild ass of a man, his fist against all, and everyone’s fist against him.’ ?8
Naturally, Muhammad was inclined to cast Ishmael, father of the Arabs, in a more flattering light. And here he didn’t have to break radically new ground. For there was a second biblical view of Ishmael, a more flattering view, subtly woven into the Hebrew Bible alongside the first one. It was put there by P—the “Priestly source,” the author (or authors) who, as we’ve seen, seems to have reflected the aims of the Persian Empire at the end of the Babylonian exile. Judging by P’s depiction of Ishmael, Cyrus the Great must have wanted his Israelite subjects to live in peace with their Arab neighbors, on terms of mutual respect. (This would make sense. His great enemy in that area was Egypt, and the last thing he needed was for the Bedouins of Arabia to ally with their Egyptian neighbors against his empire.)
The difference between the Bible’s pre-exilic view of Ishmael and its postexilic view as presented by P is so stark that the biblical narrative, read closely, borders on the incoherent. In a pre-exilic verse Sarah, unable to bear children, encourages Abraham to take the Egyptian Hagar as a convenient concubine. “Go in to my slavegirl; it may be that I shall obtain children by her.” But in the subsequent verse, written after the exile by P, Hagar is no mere concubine; she is Abraham’s “wife,” and the polygamous marriage has Sarah’s blessing. And, whereas the pre-exilic verse has Hagar giving birth alone in the desert, a Priestly verse suggests that Abraham 1s present, for itis Abraham who names the newborn child Ishmael.?9
And as for the pre-exilic angelic prophecy that Ishmael will be a “wild ass of a man” — according to the Priestly source, God himself has higher hopes. Abraham asks God to look after Ishmael and God replies: “I will bless him and make him fruitful and exceedingly numerous; he shall be the father of twelve princes, and I will make him a great nation.” »
Even in the eyes of P, Arabs don’t quite rank up there with Israel. ites. Immediately after shedding kind words on Ishmael, God says, “But my covenant I will establish with Isaac, whom Sarah shall bear to you at this season next year.” So it is Isaac, progenitor of the Israel. ites, not Ishmael, father of the Arabs, who mediates the contract with God. Still, if the Arabs aren’t quite Israelites, they’re close. The one thing this covenant demands is that Abraham’s offspring —God’s people—should be circumcised if they’re males. And Ishmael, according to the Priestly source, gets circumcised—on the same day as Abraham, no less.3!
By depicting Ishmael as Abraham’s beloved son, P had given Muhammad a theme he could amplify. In Muhammad’s account Abraham and Ishmael somehow wind up in Mecca together, where they build and purify the Ka’ba so that the God of Abraham can be worshipped there. What’s more, this was part of a “covenant” God had made with Ishmael and Abraham.;?
Talk about a grand unifying narrative! By making Abraham cobuilder of the Ka’ba, Muhammad had taken the most ancient sacred figure in Jewish and Christian tradition and linked him to the most sacred shrine for Arab polytheists. Just about every religious tradition represented in Muhammad’s vicinity could find a touchstone in the religion he was creating. It was an ingenious way to try to bring all the peoples in the area under a single roof.
Still, they were all being asked to sacrifice a part of their herttage in order to stay there. Yes, polytheists could keep their shrine, but they’d have to let go of all their gods except one. Yes, Christians and Jews could stay in the Abrahamic lineage, but they’d have to concede that they had strayed from the pure Abrahamic tradition as laid down in the days of Isaac and Ishmael..The Koran describes the appropriate response to people who “say, ‘Be Jews or Christians and you shall be guided’ ”: “Say thou: ‘Nay, rather the creed of Abraham, a man of pure faith.’ ”35
And what is the name for this “pure faith”? The Koran has Abraham saying, “O my sons, God has chosen this as the faith for you. Do not die except as those who have submitted to God.” And the
word that means “submitted” is the same word from which “Islam” and “Muslim” are derived. Indeed, some translators have this verse as: Do not die “except in the faith of Islam” or “except as Muslims.”
So, too, with this Koranic verse: “Abraham was not a Jew, nor yet a Christian; but he was an upright man who had surrendered (to God).” Some translators have this as “Abraham was not a Jew nor a Christian but he was upright, a Muslim.’
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The Modernity of Muhammad
Of course, the moral dimension isn’t the only dimension along which religions are compared. A common complaint about the Koran is that it lacks the sweep and depth of the Holy Bible. There isn’t, for example, the sometimes profound reflection on human existence found in Proverbs, Job, and other examples of the “wisdom literacure.” There aren’t the arcane philosophical allusionsnotably John’s riffing on the Logos — found in the New Testament.
Then again, the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament are repositories of an intellectual heritage that went well beyond the Hebrew and Christian worlds. Composed by legions of urban elites, they captured ideas of great civilizations, from Mesopotamia to Egypt to Christianity’s Hellenistic milieu. The Koran took shape in two desert towns on the margin of empires, uttered by a man who was more a doer than a thinker and was probably illiterate.
It’s ironic, then, that in important senses the Koran was a more modern work than the Bible, and Muhammad a more modern figure than Moses or Jesus.
For one thing, Muhammad, in contrast to the key figures in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, has no special powers. He can’t turn a rod into a snake or water into wine. Yes, later Muslims would depict him as a miracle worker, and they would claim that an opaque Koranic verse or two (most famously one about “splitting the moon”) demonstrates such powers. But the Koranic Muhammad, unlike the biblical Jesus and Moses, doesn’t depend on miracle-working for proof of proximity to God.
The contrast is especially clear when both Muhammad and Jesus face skeptics who ask: if you really have a special link to God, prove it by producing wondrous “signs.” Muhammad doesn’t respond by trying to do anything supernatural.4 He doesn’t raise people from the dead or feed a big crowd on a tight budget. Of course, the historical Jesus—as opposed to the biblical Jesusprobably didn’t do those things, either. But Jesus may well have engaged in faith healing and exorcism; certainly these would have been normal for a wandering Palestinian preacher circa 30 CE. In any event, the historical Jesus probably was asked to show signs. And even when, in the earliest gospel, we see him fail to deliver, his explanation rests on the premise that he could produce signs if his audience deserved them. (“Truly I tell you, no sign will be given to this generation.”)'5
Here lies the second sense in which the Koran is paradoxically modern—#in its style of theological argumentation. The style is set by the way Muhammad handles the challenge to show “signs.” He defines the word “signs” in a way that gives him an empirical riposte, shifting attention from supernatural wonders to the wonders of nature.'® If you want signs of God’s greatness, he says, just examine the everyday evidence. Look at the world. Note how it seems to have been built for the benefit of humans. Doesn’t a god who would create such a world deserve devotion?
God “hath sent down rain from Heaven, and by it we bring forth the kinds of various herbs: ‘Eat ye, and feed your cattle.’ Of a truth in this are signs unto men endued with understanding.” And: “Among fruits ye have the palm and the vine, from which ye get wine and healthful nutriment: in this, verily, are signs for those who reflect.” And, of course, the ecosystem includes the human species itself: “And one of His signs it is, that He hath created wives for you of your own species, that ye may dwell with them, and hath put love and tenderness between you. Herein truly are signs for those who reflect.” And consider the splendor of the whole human species: “Among His signs are... your variety of tongues and colour. Herein truly are signs for all men.”
This amassing of evidence of God’s goodness and grandeur makes the Koran come much closer than the Bible to fitting the description Darwin gave to his book The Origin of Species: “one long argument.” That’s not the only thing the two books have in common. Both arguments purport to explain the exquisite fit between humans and their natural surroundings. Muhammad notes how conducive the ecosystem is to human flourishing and explains it via God’s design of the ecosystem. Darwin notes the same close match between humans and their ecosystem and posits a different explanation: humans were shaped to fit their ecosystem — not the other way around.
The “signs” Muhammad saw weren’t confined to the organic. Note how nicely God had adapted the inanimate world to human needs: “He causeth the dawn to appear, and hath ordained the night for rest, and the sun and the moon for computing time! The ordinance of the Mighty, the Wise! And it is He who hath ordained the stars for you that ye may be guided thereby in the darknesses of the land and of the sea! Clear have we made our signs to men of knowledge.” ®
Here again, a modern thinker would invoke evolution: both the biological evolution that adapted our sleep patterns to cycles of the sun, and the cultural evolution by which humans came to quantify time with sundials and calendars, turning the sun and moon into tools for “computing time.” Muhammad, in contrast, sees God as the ultimate explanation of all such synchronous goodness, and the Koran dwells on this goodness at length. The Koran is in no small part a book about gratitude: look around you; count your blessings. The pre-Islamic meaning of one of several Arabic words that the Koran uses to denote “unbelievers” seems to have been “‘those who are ungrateful.” 9
In defining a blessing, Muhammad could be creative. Thunder and lightning are scary, and sometimes lightning is fatal. But are these really bad things? Thunder brings “awe of Him.” Lightning brings “fear and hope,” and has the added virtue of occasionally eliminating people who spend too much time arguing about theol
ogy and not enough time buying into it: ““He sendeth His bolts and smiteth with them whom He will while they are wrangling about God!’’°
From a modern vantage point, it is natural to read Muhammad’s litany of “signs” and think that the “argument” he’s making is for the existence of God. It’s not. The existence of God wasn’t something he needed to argue for. His skeptics came in several varieties, but atheists weren’t among them. Indeed, his skeptics accepted not just the existence of one or more gods, but the existence of Allah, who had earned his way into the pantheon of Meccan polytheists. Further, Meccans seem to have agreed that Allah was a creator god. The question was how much of a worshipper’s devotion should go to that creator god. If Muhammad could argue that the creationAllah’s handiwork — showed Allah to be a god of tremendous power and goodness, then the answer would be: a whole lot of the devotion, like all of it. Allah was God.
The modern world is said to suffer from “disenchantment.” As science explains more of the workings of nature, there seems less mystery, and so less room for a god that accounts for the otherwise mysterious. But in Muhammad’s scheme nature’s obedience to laws is tribute to the god who designed them so adeptly that he could then remove himself from the the day-to-day drudgery of running a universe: “It is God who hath reared the Heavens without pillars thou canst behold; then mounted His throne, and imposed laws on the sun and moon: each travelleth to its appointed goal. He ordereth all things. He maketh His signs clear.” And: “He created the sun and the moon and the stars, subjected to laws by His behest: Is not all creation and its empire His?” And if nature exactingly complies with God’s laws, what is the point of worshipping nature deities? “Bend not in adoration to the sun or the moon, but bend in adoration before God who created them both.””!
All told, it sounds like an effective rhetorical strategy: Take something Meccans already agree on—Allah is the creator god—and leverage this consensus logically, leading people to conclude that Muhammad’s entire theology is on target.
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