God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World (9 page)

Ultraconservative intellectual movements such as Salafism share much with Islamism but are distinguishable from and often antagonistic to it. Salafists seek to redirect their religious tradition back to the pure, primitive Islam of the earliest Muslims, who are known as
salaf
, or “pious predecessors.” Their sneer word is
bidah
, which means innovation.

One form of Salafism, Saudi Arabia’s official theology of Wahhabism, spread globally in the early twenty-first century as Saudi money flowed into new mosques worldwide. Wahhabism is based on the strict teachings of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703–92), an eighteenth-century thinker who also opposed innovation but was obsessed with the problem of shirk. According to Ibn Abd al-Wahhab’s uncompromising theology, both Christianity and Judaism are shirk, as are Shi’ism and Islam’s mystical tradition of Sufism. Ibn Abd al-Wahhab opposed the Shia practice of visiting the graves of Muhammad and his companions. He even destroyed some of those sacred sites. Like Salafism, Wahhabism is often referred to as puritanical, because of its strict legal code, its desire to purify its religious tradition from various pollutants, and its goal of returning to the purity of the earliest form of the faith. Like New England Puritans, who did not celebrate Christmas, Wahhabis do not celebrate Muhammad’s birthday.

Islamists have latched onto the notion that we are witnessing a clash of civilizations between Islam and the Christian West, but what their activities really demonstrate is an intra-Islamic culture war—a clash between Muslims who believe that the Islamic tradition means what it says when it comes to not killing women and children, and Muslims who do not.

Progressive and Moderate Muslims

At the other end of the political spectrum is Progressive Islam, a new movement particularly strong in Europe and the United States. Progressive Muslims are staunch opponents of Salafism, Wahhabism, and Islamism, but they also criticize colonialism and imperialism. “Their task,” writes Omid Safi, author of
Progressive Muslims
(2003), “is to give voice to the voiceless and power to the powerless.”
²⁵
Pluralists to the core, Progressive Muslims welcome multiple voices not only from within Islam itself but also from other religious traditions. Although they base their thought and action on traditional Islamic sources such as the Quran and the Hadith, they also draw on Latin American liberation theology, the nonviolent resistance of Martin Luther King Jr., and the critique of Orientalism by the secular humanist Edward Said.

Progressive Muslims believe that the struggle for justice lies at the heart of the Islamic tradition. They also believe that the better angels of Islam have always been on the side of the poor and the weak, and that their tradition’s ancient mandate to defend the defenseless compels them to struggle for gender equality and human rights. “At the heart of a progressive Muslim interpretation,” writes Safi, “is a simple yet radical idea: every human life, female or male, Muslim or non-Muslim, rich or poor, ‘northern’ or ‘southern,’ has exactly the same intrinsic worth.”
²⁶

One of the most controversial chapters in the short history of Progressive Islam came in New York City on March 18, 2005, when Amina Wadud, a professor of Islamic Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, led a mixed-gender Friday prayer service of over one hundred worshippers. This was not the first breach of the tradition of male prayer leaders, but it was the first to set off a firestorm of international controversy. Muslim leaders worldwide denounced this action as a violation of Islamic law, but women imams have subsequently led Friday salat services and/or delivered the traditional Friday sermon in the United States, Canada, Spain, and South Africa.

Of all the Western criticisms of Islam, one of the most persistent has been that it is hostile to women. Muslims from Muhammad forward
have
historically seen gender as an essential rather than an accidental characteristic of human beings. (“The male is not like the female,” reads the Quran [3:36]). So in mosques in which women are allowed (some forbid their entrance) men and women are typically separated. Sons usually receive inheritances twice as large as those of daughters, and in Islamic courts it usually takes two female witnesses to equal one male witness. Finally, although Muslim theologians describe God as beyond gender, the Quran refers to God exclusively as “He” when a third-person pronoun is needed.

Muslim feminism is not an oxymoron, however. Muslim feminists argue that the Quran and the Hadith, while patriarchal in many respects, represented at the time a quantum leap for women in terms of property rights, inheritance, divorce, and education. They also note that women have become heads of state in at least seven Muslim-majority countries.

And then there is the controversial practice of veiling. The hijab has been outlawed in some Muslim countries and is required in others. Most French citizens and a large minority of Americans believe that Islamic head coverings should be banned in their countries, and both countries have seen lawsuits over such matters as whether Muslim women have the right to wear head coverings when working at McDonald’s or posing for a driver’s license photograph. Although many Muslim women have taken off the veil as an expression of women’s rights, many Muslim feminists choose to wear the veil as an expression of those same rights. The hijab has also become a symbol of Islamic identity, not unlike the
kippah
(head covering) for Jewish men.

Between fundamentalists and progressives there are hundreds of millions of moderate Muslims. Among Indonesia’s 178 million Muslims, fundamentalism is fringe. Islamist parties have failed at the polls, and most Muslims there self-identify as moderate or progressive. Both of these groups favor democracy and the separation of mosque and state. Progressives there distinguish themselves from moderates by speaking out more forcefully for religious pluralism and women’s rights and by drawing more generously on the thinking of intellectuals from Europe, Latin America, and the United States.

The Muslims I spoke with during a visit to Yogyakarta, a cultural and intellectual center of this vast island archipelago, were moderates and progressives. All were openly adapting Islam to local circumstances, mixing its ancient traditions with their own. And all scoffed at any notion of a clash of civilizations between Islam and the Christian West. Any clash that exists, they said, is between fundamentalists of all faiths and their progressive and moderate coreligionists. While in Indonesia, I didn’t see a single woman covered from head to foot as is common in Iran and Afghanistan, and in the rural areas none of the women wore any head coverings at all. When I asked Zuli Qodir, a leader of a popular moderate group called Muhammadiyah, what Islam was all about, he waxed Jeffersonian. “Islam is justice,” he said. “And equality. And democracy.” Another Muslim leader told me that “the essence of Islam” is “caring for the poor.”

Religious pluralism is particularly prized in Indonesia, where the influences of Buddhism, Hinduism, and Christianity have wafted across its 17,000-plus islands for centuries. Why did God create the world? According to the principal of an Islamic school I spoke with, because God prefers multiplicity to unity—because “difference is good.” Repeatedly, I was reminded that Muslims reject religious coercion—“There is no compulsion in religion” (2:256, Pickthal)—and that their “people of the book” category includes not only Jews and Christians but also Hindus and Buddhists.

Sufism, Drunk and Sober

It is tempting to imagine that the world’s religions are what they teach or what they do—that Christianity is its creeds, and Judaism its law. But just as we humans are more than the sum of our thoughts or work, religious traditions cannot be reduced to their creeds and rituals. Inside each of the world’s religions there are people who take it as their task to look beneath the surface of the Nicene Creed or the Five Pillars to something that is, as the English poet William Wordsworth put it, “far more deeply interfused.” In Islam these people call themselves Sufis.

During a visit to Jerusalem, I spoke with a shopkeeper who turned out to be not only an expert salesman but also a lifelong Sufi. When I asked him about the importance of the Five Pillars of Islam, he shook his head “NO!” and, pointing an index finger uncomfortably close to my nose, insisted that Islam could stand up perfectly straight without any of the Five Pillars. Real Islam, he said, has nothing to do with law and everything to do with experience. It is about a heart-and-soul connection between the individual believer and God—the sort of crazy love that sets your whole being into dance. It needs no rituals, no rules, he said. In fact, rituals and rules only take us away from what is Really Real.

A similar point was made by the eleventh-century Sufi Ansari of Herat (in present-day Afghanistan), who in this short poem subordinated the Five Pillars to a higher calling:

Fasting is a way to save on food.

Vigil and prayer is a labor for old folks.

Pilgrimage is an occasion for tourism.

To distribute bread in alms is something for philanthropists.

Fall in love:

That is doing something!
²⁷

The ninth-century Persian Sufi Bayazid Bistami was equally skeptical of the ability of religion to take you to God. “The thickest veils between man and Allah,” he wrote, “are the wise man’s wisdom, the worshiper’s worship, and the devotion of the devout.”
²⁸

One of the distinguishing marks of Islam is its unequivocal rejection of the Christian traditions of celibacy, asceticism, and monasticism. Muslims often scratch their heads over why Jesus remained single, and marriage is enjoined in both the Quran (“Ye that are unmarried shall marry,” 24:32) and the Hadith (“Marriage is my
sunnah
[exemplary practice]”).
²⁹
So monks who have withdrawn from the world usually come in for derision. Early Sufis, however, bucked this trend. The term
Sufi
comes from the term
suf
, which means wool. So Sufi means “wool wearer,” which is to say someone who has opted for a simple life of contemplation and pious poverty along the lines of Christian monastics and their scratchy wool garments.

Sufism, which emerged in the eighth century, is a mystical tradition. Like other mystics, Sufis stress the experiential dimension of religion. Less patient than other Muslims, they don’t want to wait until they die to experience the divine. Like Muhammad (the first Sufi, they say) in the caves of Mount Hira, they seek to “taste the
here
and the
now
of God.” Or, as one Sufi poet puts it:

When the ocean surges,

don’t let me just hear it.

Let it splash inside my chest!”
³⁰

Under the guidance of gurulike figures known as sheiks or
pirs
, and through institutions known as orders or brotherhoods, Sufis have experimented over the centuries with a variety of spiritual practices designed to crack the heart open to ecstatic experience of the divine. In keeping with the broader Muslim notion that the problem of self-sufficiency originates in forgetfulness, Sufis seek to keep God forever on their hearts, either by chanting His “beautiful names” or by sitting with these names in silence. Another Sufi practice is a Muslim analog to what Daoists call “free and easy wandering,” and wandering Sufis played a major role in the spread of Islam to climes as far flung as Africa, India, and Southeast Asia.

Inside the Muslim world, Sufis are notorious for flirting with idolatry by imagining their spiritual quest as culminating in an annihilation of the self that is also a mystical union with God. While Muslim theologians and jurists tend to emphasize God’s transcendence and distance, Sufis emphasize God’s immanence and nearness, drifting along the way toward pantheism (“everything is God”) and monism (“everything is One.”). While other Muslims emphasize the radical qualitative distinction between God and human beings, Sufis emphasize the ways in which human beings resemble God, who is as near to them, as the Quran puts it, “as the jugular vein” (50:16). If Reality is one, then multiplicity is an illusion, and there is no real distinction between Creator and created. Because every place is equally sacred, you don’t need to go to Mecca or a mosque to find God. In fact you don’t need to travel beyond your own heart. Like modern-day evangelicals who have a friend in Jesus, Sufis call themselves friends of God.

To many Muslims, there has always been something deeply unsettling and even dangerous about the esoteric precepts and practices of the Sufis, since from the Sufi perspective so much of what other Muslims see as desirable and even required is unnecessary at best and harmful at worst. While most Sufis claim to follow both the outer, legal path of Shariah and the inner, mystical path called
Tariqah
, critics claim they sacrifice the former at the altar of the latter. Wahhabis, for example, see Sufism as an invitation to both shirk and immorality. The great Persian Sufi Mansur al-Hallaj was executed as a heretic in Baghdad in 922 for saying “I am the Truth”—a line al-Hallaj understood to be articulating his union with God but his accusers took to be blasphemy (since Truth is one of the ninety-nine names of God).

In order to make some semblance of sense of this mystical path, insiders and outsiders alike have divided Sufis into two types: the sober and the drunk. If the medium for the sober Sufi is prose and the métier reason, the medium for drunken Sufi writers is poetry and the métier emotion. Sober Sufis include the Persian philosopher al-Ghazali (1058–1111) who, by conceding the importance of Shariah, brokered a peace between Sufis and those who accused them of heresy and immorality. Approaching the divine with awe, sober Sufis are ever aware of God’s power and wrath—an awareness that keeps them closer to the straight and narrow than their more intoxicated kin. Drunken Sufis, by contrast, emphasize the mercy and beauty of God, approaching Him in love and ecstasy more than awe and fear. As a result, they worry less about their tradition’s legal and ritual requirements. For some drunken Sufis, at least, the Five Pillars are incidental—the plastic bag you take home from the grocery store, and quite different from the real nourishment inside.