The Faith Instinct (28 page)

The next sentence conveys ‘Abd al-Malik’s anti-Trinitarian message: “So believe in God and his messengers, and do not say ‘three.’ Stop that better for you. For God is one, unique—may he be praised! How could he then have had a child?”

The Dome of the Rock’s inscriptions include the phrase
muhammadun ‘abdu llāhi wa-rasūluhū,
traditionally translated as “Muhammad is the servant of God and his messenger.” But in the view of the revisionist who writes under the pseudonym of Christoph Luxenberg, the intended meaning is “The servant of God, his messenger, is to be praised,” the subject being Jesus.
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The inscriptions also contain the first known use of the word
Islam,
traditionally understood to mean submission to God. But in Luxenberg’s view it means simply conformity or agreement, in this case to the “book” mentioned in the inscription. This book is traditionally taken to be the Qur’an but, given what Luxenberg sees as the entirely Christian context of the inscriptions, it must in his view refer to the Gospel.

The revisionists thus assert a radical and, if true, astonishing reconstruction of the genesis of Islam. The religion, in their view, began as the faith of an Arab Christian empire, rooted in the Syriac Christian tradition. At least the first two rulers of the new empire, and maybe others, were Christians, and its principal edifice, the Dome of the Rock, was a Christian place of worship, asserting the Syriac Christian view that God is one against the Byzantine concept of the Trinity. In place of the Byzantine empire’s system of dating years from the birth of Christ, the new Arab rulers constructed their own, starting from the year of their independence from their Byzantine and Sassanid overlords. “Long before the idea of a Hijra,” writes Karl-Heinz Ohlig, “there was an Arabian-Christian reckoning of time which began with the year 622 and which was only later ‘converted’ to a Muslim meaning. Until approximately the end of the eighth century, so it seems, Arabian-Christian tribal leaders governed the regio
ns of the Near East and of North Africa; indeed, the Umayyad leaders and even the ea
rly Abbasids were Christians.”
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How then did Islam begin? Its genesis, in the revisionists’ view, lay in a change of dynasty. The Umayyad dynasty to which Mu‘awiyah and Abd al-Malik belonged was overthrown around 750 by the Abbasids, who had little respect for their predecessors’ accomplishments, including their religion. The Abbasids desecrated the Umayyads’ tombs and made Mecca the holy city in preference to Jerusalem or Damascus. God remained one but at some time under the Abbasids, perhaps during the rule of the caliph Al-Ma’mun (813—833), even the Umayyads’ prophet was Arabized: Jesus and the gospels receded and in their place an Arabian prophet and his own revelation were emphasized.

The framers of Islam, in the revisionists’ reconstruction, simply appropriated the early history of Arab Christianity to their own purposes. They, just like the editors of the Pentateuch, “retrojected their religion into a ‘canonical’ time of beginnings, in which they then grounded and legitimated it,” writes Ohlig. Mu’awiyah’s era of the Arabs was switched to years after the Hegira, which had to start at the same time, the year 622. Abd al-Malik’s unifying formula “Praise the messenger of God” was reinterpreted as “Muhammad is the messenger of God.” The Dome of the Rock was declared to be an Islamic building, and the Abbasid caliph Al-Ma‘mun substituted his name as the builder in place of ‘Abd al-Malik’s.

The architecture of the Dome of the Rock and many other mosques is drawn from a kind of Byzantine church called a martyrium, designed for the display of sacred relics. “If you take a Middle Byzantine martyrium, and take out the icons and images—which is roughly what the iconoclasts did during the eighth century—what you are left with looks un
cannily like a mosque,” writes the historian Philip Jenkins.
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The origin of the Qur‘an, in the revisionists’ view, is obscure, but it is probably derived from a Syriac Christian liturgical work. “Qur’an” itself is in origin a Syriac word
(qeryan)
meaning lectionary, a selection of holy texts. According to Luxenberg, some of the many obscure passages in the Qur‘an become clear if the Arabic text is transliterated back into Syriac with correction of likely copying errors. The original version of the Qur’an “was put together entirely in the Syriac script,” he declares.
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Most of the Qur’an’s statements about Jesus and Mary seem to be derived from gospels that were popular in the Near East but were excluded from the New Testament, such as the story found in the Infancy Gospel of Thomas about the infant Jesus breathing life into a clay bird.

The assertion of a Syriac Christian background for the Qur‘an would, if verified, provide a historical context for the emergence of Islam, more plausible to some than the traditional Islamic view that the sacred text was dictated by an angel. But a weakness in the revisionists’ case is that they lack evidence about the wholesale appropriation process they allege. In their defense they cite the traditional Islamic account that t
he caliph ‘Uthman, in producing a standard edition of the Qur‘an, ordered all earlier manuscripts to be destroyed; this destruction, they suggest, would have included the Syriac antecedents of the Qur’an and all available evidence of Umayyad Christianity. The Dome of the Rock and its inscriptions survived only because they were misunderstood, Luxenberg writes.

If the Umayyad inscriptions refer to Jesus, as the revisionists contend, then what is the historical basis for the life of Muhammad? In Luxenberg’s view, scholars must in future distinguish between two Muhammads, the first of whom is Jesus. He writes: “The inscription on the Dome of the Rock cannot be used to defend the position that ‘Muhammad II’ lived from 570—632 CE, as the ‘Muhammad’ named there was entirely referring to Jesus, the son of Mary, that is, ‘Muhammad 1.’ It is the task of historians to discover whether ‘Muhammad II,’ about whom the ‘Sira’ has so much to report, actually lived shortly before the appearance of the biography of the prophet (ca. mid-eighth century), or whether he should be seen merely as a symbolic figure.”
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Whatever the eventual outcome of the differences between the revisionist and traditional historians as to the origins of Islam, the new Arab religion served its purpose with striking success. It provided the emerging Arab rulers with an effective religious identity to uphold against that of the Byzantines. The new religion inspired fervent loyalty. It was evidently well suited to the needs of the early Arab empire, enabling the Umayyads and then the Abbasids to unite many different peoples in an empire that stretched from Spain to the borders of India.

Religious behavior evolved to knit a tribe together. As such it reinforced other affiliative behaviors, such as those based on kinship, ethnicity or language. There is perhaps a natural tendency for each of these binding behaviors to maximize its overlap with the others, producing the most cohesive possible society.

In language, for instance, dialects form very fast because people in each region or village tend to develop their own special variations on a parent tongue. Before travel became common, these minor variants would have served instantly to identify strangers who might be spies. Kinship was also adjustable, at least among hunter gatherers and primitive farmers. When groups grew larger than 150 or so people, quarrels tended to break out and the group would split, usually along kinship lines, with the result that the average degree of relatedness in the two new groups was higher than before. “There appears to be an upper limit to the size of a group that can be cooperatively organized by the principles of kinship, descent and marriage, the integrating mechanisms characteristically at the disposal of primit
ive peoples,” writes Napoleon Chagnon, a social anthropol
ogist who has worked for many years with the Yanomamo of South America.
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Until the advent of archaic states and empires, religions too may have been mostly congruent with tribal and linguistic boundaries. Within larger empires, however, a single religion may split along political lines into rival sects if it proves too weak to unite the empire’s many regional interests and cultural differences. The Roman empire imposed an undemanding state religion on all its subject peoples, while generally allowing them to practice their own religions as well. But the old Greek and Roman rituals had been shaped for smaller societies. They were challenged by ecstatic religions from the eastern provinces before yielding to Christianity. But even the new faith could not bind the vast empire that now circled the shores of its private sea, the Mediterranean.

Fissures erupted in Christianity, along the fault lines that separated people by language, ethnicity and politics. The Bishop of Rome and the Patriarch of Constantinople had different binding problems, not least of which were the political forces that divided their congregations. The doctrinal dispute over the word
filioque—
an addition to the Trinitarian Nicene Creed implying that Jesus enjoyed the same level of divinity as God—was perhaps a convenient excuse for the western and eastern branches of Christianity to shape versions of their common faith that would define their mutual antagonism. A second major schism, Protestantism, also took place along fault lines of language and ethnicity, dividing the Germanic language countries (Germany, Holland, Scandinavia, England and Scotland) from Romance language powers (Italy, France and Spain).

The Islamic empire faced similar issues. Iran, a major part of its eastern conquests, was an ancient nation that had vied with the Greeks, the Romans and the Byzantines. Its people were not Arab and spoke an Indo-European language. After the Sunni-Shi‘a split developed in Islam, Iran in 1501 adopted a Shi’a identity that differentiated it from the mostly Sunni populations to its east and west. Its religion, ethnicity and language were thus brought into congruence, probably a necessary step for a large polity with many different ethnic minorities to maintain its overall cohesion.

Though new religions are derived from old ones and seek, as it were, to steal their clothes, the promoters of a new religion are often at pains to differentiate it from its predecessor. An obvious instance is that Christianity and Islam, both derived from Judaism, have separated themselves from it liturgically. Both religions accept the week (borrowed by Judaism from the Babylonians) as the unit of religious time but choose Sunday and Friday respectively as their principal holy days, in distinction to the Jews’ Saturday. Since the Last Supper before the crucifixion was a Passover meal, the date of Easter should be linked to that of Passover, but the early Christians severed the link, at least in part to distance themselves from Jewish practice.

 

 

LOOKING BACK AT THE emergence of the three monotheisms, a striking process is evident: throughout history, religion has been repeatedly reshaped to serve new needs as the nature of society changed. And this reshaping, brought about by daring cultural innovations, has taken place within a superbly flexible genetic framework, a set of propensities for religious behavior.

Hunter gatherer religion is based on implicit negotiation with supernatural agents whose requirements make members of a community behave in socially cohesive ways. The principal form of interaction with the supernatural world was sustained communal dances and the trances through which the agents of the other world could be encountered.

Then came settled societies, grappling with the uncertainties of early agriculture. They recentered their religions on the cycle of the seasons and the demands of planting and harvesting. The dances were entrained into agricultural festivals like the early Canaanite predecessors of Passover and Rosh Ha-Shanah.

As human populations expanded in the Neolithic age that began 10,000 years ago, social hierarchies replaced the egalitarianism of the hunter gatherer bands. Priests took over the organization of religious activities and enhanced their power by monopolizing access to the supernatural. Much larger numbers of people could now be brought under the sway of the sacred.

With the invention of writing 5,000 years ago, ideas about the supernatural were put into written form and a sacred text became a standard component of urban religions. In around the seventh century B.C., Judaism, an amalgam of ritual, history and an irredentist political agenda, became the first modern religion, replacing the usual miscellany of special purpose deities with a single divine being, and making direct interactions with the supernatural a matter of past history, not present experience.

This new religion was just as effective as its hunter gatherer predecessors in binding a community together, even though the community in this case was not a hunting band but a small nation. Inspired by their religion, Jews rebelled repeatedly against their Roman occupiers. Thereafter, during 19 centuries without a homeland, Jewish communities depended for survival on the cohesion provided by their faith.

For all its strengths, Judaism had a severe limitation. It was a religion of the tribe, tied to a single ethnicity by circumcision and its dietary laws. With Christianity and later Islam, religious behavior proved adaptable to a much larger role, that of uniting people who had few other bonds.

The Hellenistic Jews who shaped a more permissive version of their faith created in Christianity the first universal religion, one that came to bind the many different nations of the Roman empire and its Christian successors.

Islam achieved a similar success. Mu’awiyah and ‘Abd al-Malik needed a universal religion to bind together all the disputatious Christian sects within the new Arab empire and to hold its own against the faith of their adversary, the Byzantines.

With the emergence of the three monotheisms, the tree of religion took what has been close to its final shape, at least in the West, for the last, 1500 years. The powerful civilizations of Christianity and Islam dominated the Mediterranean world and the Near East, tolerating Judaism but allowing no new rival to appear. The tree’s principal new growth has been in sects emerging within Christianity and Islam including, most recently, the exotic flower of Mormonism. But human societies have changed vastly in the last 1,500 years. Because religion has not changed as fast, it has found itself in increasing conflict with modernity. Early peoples used religion as an explanatory framework for understanding physical and biological phenomena, like weather or disease, that are now better explained by science. Religions have not always ceded this ground gracefully. New religions that might have been more compatible with the rise of scientific knowledge have not been allowed to emerge because established faiths have blocked the process of religious innovation in which they themselves were created.