How to Understand Islam - The New York Review of Books

I have no settled ideas about Islam except one: we of the West know too little about the nuances of the religion. I know the differences between Sunni and Shia are far different than between Pentecostal and Greek Orthodox. I have a sneaking suspicion that Islam lacks what Christianity learned between the Reformation and the Enlightenment for living in the modern world.

The following excerpts from The New York Review of Books's How to Understand Islam have given something more to think about.

"For example, in a recent open letter to 'Brother Osama,' the prominent Saudi cleric Sheikh Salman al-Oadah makes a scathing attack on bin Laden for the excessive violence and damage to Islam inflicted by his campaign—including the 'destruction of entire nations' and the 'nightmare of civil war' in Afghanistan and Iraq, with their impact on the surrounding countries. But the sheikh's quarrel with bin Laden is essentially about means rather than ends. The burden of his attack is that al-Qaeda's methods—and the political fallout they engender—are counter-productive. Even if the radicals take power somewhere in the world, the sheikh writes, they will not have the experience or competence to govern in accordance with Islamic law."

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The core of this consensus—shared by traditionally trained scholars and more populist leaders such as al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, and Maududi, his South Asian counterpart, is the belief that the abolition of the caliphate by Kemal Atatürk in Turkey in 1924 must not mean the end of Islamic government. In this vision, which is also shared by Shia jurists such as the late Ayatollah Khomeini, parliaments and elections are only acceptable within the frame of Islamic supremacy. They "cannot compromise on Muslim leadership," Kelsay writes. Full-blown democracy, where the Muslim voice might simply be one among many, implying a degree of moral equivalence between Islam and other perspectives, would be "dangerous, not only for the standing of the Muslim community, but for the moral life of humankind."

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The argument from manifest success is consonant with the theological doctrine according to which Islam supersedes the previous revelations of Judaism and Christianity. Jews and Christians are in error because they deviated from the straight path revealed to Abraham, ancestral patriarch of all three faiths. Islam "restores" the true religion of Abraham while superseding Judeo-Christianity as the "final" revelation. The past and the future belong to Islam even if the present makes for difficulties. "In the history of religions," asks Küng,

did any religion pursue a victorious course as rapid, far-reaching, tenacious and permanent as that of Islam? Scarcely one. So is it any wonder that to the present day Muslim pride is rooted in the experience of the early period...?

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In clearing a path through this highly charged intellectual undergrowth Bonner adopts a thematic approach aimed at uncovering "the inner logic" or "structural" sense underlying the Koranic teachings, even when "they sometimes appear to be in contradiction with one another." He concludes that "where the Quran treats of war, we usually find a rhetoric of requital and recompense." God grants the Muslims permission to fight "those against whom war has been made, because they have been wronged." The law of reciprocity applies to goods as well as to warfare: whatever the faithful spend in the "path of God" will be amply repaid. After the Arab conquests of the Middle East and North Africa shortly after Muhammad's death in 632, the law of recompense was institutionalized: the fighters received a fixed stipend from a treasury staffed by clerks who inscribed the recipients' names in a special register.