God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World (5 page)

Yet sibling relations in this Abrahamic family are dysfunctional at best. In one of the iconic incidents of his life, his “night journey” from Mecca to Jerusalem, Muhammad is said to have prayed with Abraham, Moses, and Jesus. But can Jews, Christians, and Muslims learn to get along in a similar fashion? Or are they destined to face off as bitter enemies in an internecine clash of civilizations? After 9/11, U.S. president George W. Bush and U.K. prime minister Tony Blair spoke repeatedly of Islam as a religion of peace, but revivalist Franklin Graham called Islam “a very evil and wicked religion,” and televangelist Jerry Falwell denounced Muhammad as a “terrorist.”
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Muslim groups worldwide responded to 9/11 by denouncing its crimes as anti-Islamic and emphasizing Muslims’ commonalities with Jews and Christians, even as Islamic jihadists proclaimed that Jews and Christians were unbelievers deserving of death in this life and eternal torment in the next.

The events of September 11, 2001, yanked conversations about Islam around to questions of war and terror. But any conversation about Islam must reckon with the word
Islam
, which is related to the term
salaam
, which means peace. Muslims greet one another with
“Salaam alaykum”
(“Peace be upon you”) and respond to this greeting with
“Wa alaykum as salaam”
(“And upon you be peace”). The word
Islam
means “submission” or “surrender,” however. So Islam is the path of submission, and Muslims are “submitters” who seek peace in this life and the next by surrendering themselves to the one true God. They do this first and foremost by prostrating themselves in prayer. “Are you prostrate or are you proud?” this tradition asks.
Masjid
, the Arabic term for mosque, literally means “place of prostration.” And some who surrender to this practice develop a mark on their foreheads that the Quran refers to as a “trace of prostration” (48:29).
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Prayer

Five times a day, 365 days a year, for more than a millennium, Muslims have heeded the call to prayer going out from mosques and minarets in cities and towns scattered across the globe. This invitation, the
adhan
, is almost always done in Arabic, because according to Muslims it was in Arabic that God delivered His final revelation, the Quran, to his final prophet, Muhammad. It varies a bit across the Muslim world and over the course of the day. Before dawn, for example, there is the reminder that “prayer is better than sleep.” But this is the most common formulation:

God is great

God is great

God is great

God is great

I bear witness that there is no god but God

I bear witness that there is no god but God

I bear witness that Muhammad is the messenger of God

I bear witness that Muhammad is the messenger of God

Make haste toward prayer

Make haste toward prayer

Make haste toward success

Make haste toward success

God is great

God is great

There is no god but God

Over one billion people—roughly one-fifth of the world’s population—self-identify as Muslims, placing Islam second only to Christianity in terms of adherents. Like Christianity, Islam is typically classified as a Western religion, and Islam predominates in such Middle Eastern countries as Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan. But most of the world’s Muslims live in Asia. Indonesia has more Muslims (roughly 178 million) than any other country—three times as many as in Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and Iraq combined—and it is followed by three more Asian nations: India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Of the ten countries with the largest Muslim populations, only two (Egypt and Iran) are plainly in the Middle East. Three (Nigeria, Algeria, and Morocco) are in Africa (as is Egypt, of course). The remaining country (Turkey) straddles Asia, the Middle East, and Europe.
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The Central Asian states of Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan all have Muslim majorities. In Europe, Muslims form majorities in Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Kosovo, and there are small but rapidly growing populations across Europe and North America.

By some estimations, close to 20 percent of those who came to the United States as slaves were Muslims, but Islam first became visible there through the Nation of Islam (NOI), which recruited both activist Malcolm X and heavyweight boxer Muhammad Ali to its heterodox combination of black nationalism and Islam. After the death in 1975 of Elijah Muhammad, who had led the NOI since the mysterious disappearance of founder Wallace D. Fard in 1934, this organization moved under the leadership of his son W. D. Muhammad in the direction of mainstream Sunni Islam. After W. D. Muhammad disbanded the NOI, Louis Farrakhan revived it, but today the overwhelming majority of African-American Muslims in the United States are mainstream Sunnis rather than NOI members.

Islam’s rapid growth in Europe has set off a series of controversies about free speech and the head covering for Muslim women known as the
hijab
. While France prohibits the hijab in public schools for reasons of church/state separation, Sweden allows it in the name of religious liberty. Meanwhile, relations between Muslims and non-Muslims are tense in many European countries. A recent survey found that a majority of adults in the Netherlands have an unfavorable view of Islam. Another survey found that most Muslims in Germany believe that Europeans are hostile to Muslims. Meanwhile, sizeable majorities of Muslims and non-Muslims alike report that relations between Westerners and Muslims are “generally bad.”
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Islam also has a presence in American and European popular culture. While Buddhists are typically portrayed at the movies in a positive light—think
Kundun
and
Seven Years in Tibet—
Muslims almost always play the bad guys. There are some favorable portrayals—Omar Sharif’s Sherif Ali in
Lawrence of Arabia
and Morgan Freeman’s Azeem in
Robin Hood
:
Prince of Thieves
—but action films especially tend to depict Muslims as people who do little more than pray and kill, and not necessarily in that order.
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I have never heard the
adhan
at the movies, but I have heard it ring out on four continents. Nowhere was it more striking than in Jerusalem, where it seemed to follow me wherever I went. I heard it while standing at the Western Wall. I heard it while sitting inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. I heard as I was walking through the Damascus Gate into the Old City’s Muslim Quarter. In each case I was reminded of how intimate the Western monotheisms are in this most contested of cities—never out of earshot of one another—and of how Islam is a recited religion, spread throughout the centuries by speech and sound.

Muslims respond to this call (which nowadays is broadcast on television and online) in all sorts of ways. Some ignore it. Others heed it when the mood strikes. But the observant stop cooking and driving and working to step into sacred time at dawn, noon, midafternoon, sunset, and night. In preparation, they wash themselves of life’s impurities; they turn to face Mecca, Islam’s holiest city; they bow their heads; they say, “Prayer has arrived, prayer has arrived”; and they promise to pray “for the sake of Allah and Allah alone.” Then they begin to saturate the air with sacred sound.

Muslims perform the ancient choreography of this prayer with their whole bodies—standing, bowing, prostrating, and sitting. Their hands move from behind their ears to their torsos. They bow forward at the waist, hands on knees, back flat. They stand up straight again. They prostrate themselves into a posture of total and absolute submission to Allah, planting their knees, hands, foreheads, and noses on the ground. They then rise to a sitting position and ticktock back and forth between sitting and prostration as their prayer proceeds.

You don’t make this prayer up as you go along, chatting informally and familiarly with God as evangelical Protestants do. Muslims can, of course, call upon Allah for their own reasons, in their own words, and in their own languages. But the five daily prayers of
salat
(said aloud at dawn, sunset, and night, and in silence at noon and in the afternoon) are repeated in Arabic precisely as they have been for centuries, starting with
Allahu Akbar
: “God is great.” Worshippers then bless and exalt Allah above all pretenders. They call Muhammad His prophet and messenger. They ask for peace upon “the righteous servants of Allah.” They offer blessings to angels. They ask Allah to bless “Muhammad and the people of Muhammad,” just as God has blessed “Abraham and the people of Abraham.”

They then recite the most common of Muslim prayers—the Lord’s Prayer of Islam—which comes from the first and most popular
sura
, or chapter, of the Quran, known as the Fatiha:

In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate.

Praise belongs to God, Lord of all Being

the All-merciful, the All-compassionate

the Master of the Day of Doom.

Thee only we serve; to Thee alone we pray for succour.

Guide us in the straight path,

the path of those whom Thou hast blessed;

not of those against whom Thou art wrathful, nor of those who are stray. (1:1–7)

The Five Pillars

In sixteenth-century Geneva, Protestant theologian John Calvin spun a complex theological web around two simple threads: the absolute sovereignty of God and the total depravity of human beings. Like Calvinists, Muslims go to great lengths not to confuse Creator and created. Glorying in the servility of human beings before Allah, they refer to themselves in many cases as “slaves” of the Almighty. But unlike Calvin, Muslims do not believe in original sin. Every human being is born with an inclination toward both God and the good. So sin is not the problem Islam addresses. Neither is there any need for salvation from sin. In Islam, the problem is self-sufficiency, the hubris of acting as if you can get along without God, who alone is self-sufficient. “The idol of your self,” writes the Sufi mystic Rumi, “is the mother of (all) idols.”
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Replace this idol with submission to Allah, and what you have is the goal of Islam: a “soul at peace” (89:27) in this life and the next: Paradise.

The Quran repeatedly states that the path to Paradise is paved with both faith and works—“those who believe, and do righteous deeds, for them await[s] . . . the great triumph” (85:11)—but Islam inclines toward Judaism and away from Christianity by emphasizing orthopraxy (right action) over orthodoxy (right doctrine). Here the technique that will take you from self-sufficiency to Paradise is to “perform the religion” (42:13). Over and over the Quran refers to “believers” and “unbelievers,” as if belief were the master key to Paradise, yet it is
action
that divides these two groups: “Those who perform the prayer, and expend of what We have provided them, those in truth are the believers” (8:3–4). To be sure, Islam is a “way of knowledge”—a topic mentioned dozens of times in the Quran.
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And there are Quranic passages that seem to champion belief over practice. “It is not piety, that you turn your faces to the East and to the West,” reads one. “True piety is this: to believe in God, and the Last Day, the Angels, the Book, and the Prophets. . . .” But after this brief segue into orthodoxy, even this passage returns immediately to practice: “. . . to give of one’s substance, however cherished, to kinsmen, and orphans, the needy, the traveller, beggars, and to ransom the slave, to perform the prayer, to pay the alms” (2:177). In short, the response that Allah demands from humanity is not so much belief as obedience. Yes, there is one God, but believing that is the easy part, since heaven and earth sing of Him unceasingly. The hard part is submitting to God. “The desert Arabs said, ‘We believe,’ ” the Quran reads. “Say not, ‘You have believed,’ but rather say, ‘We have submitted’ ” (49:14).

In Europe and North America, spiritual seekers expend much time and energy searching for practices tailor-made for their unique personalities. Some gravitate to yoga or meditation, others to Taiji (Tai Chi) or chanting. In Islam, however, the core practices are prescribed in the so-called Five Pillars.
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The metaphor here is architectural, and the image being conjured up is of a building with supports on four corners and at the center.

The central pillar supporting this building is the Shahadah: “I testify that there is no god but God, and Muhammad is the messenger of God.” This profession of faith is repeated in the call to prayer and in the five daily prayers themselves. To become a Muslim, all you need to do is testify to this creed, proclaiming its two truths out loud, with understanding and intent, ideally in the presence of witnesses.