Part 1

In the spirit of Ramadhan, I would like to share a book that I thoroughly enjoyed reading. There are so many parts that I would like to share. These are some excerpts. Do bear in mind they are not in continuation. This is not for the weak-hearted. More is yet to come. If you find yourself not wanting to read further, leave it. If you find yourself intrigued, read on. May peace be upon you always.

No God But God: The Origins, Evolution and Future of Islam

By Reza Aslan

A.S. Byatt "Just the history of Islam that I needed, judicious and truly illuminating'.

On the Ka'ba

"It is here, inside the cramped interior of the sanctuary, that the gods of pre-Islamic Arabia reside: Hubal, the Syrian god of the moon; al-Uzza, the powerful goddess the Eqyptions knew as Isis and the Greeks called Aphrodite; al-Kutba, the Nabataen god of writing and divination; Jesus, the incarnate god of the Christians, and his holy mother, Mary."

"The truth is that no one knows who built the Ka'ba, or how long it has been there. It is likely that the sanctuary was not even the original reason for the sanctity of this place."

"Alas, with so many things about the Ka'ba, its origins are mere speculation. The only thing scholars can say with any certainty is that by the sixth century C.E., this small sanctuary made of mud and stone had become the centre of religious life in pre-Islamic Arabia: that intriguing yet ill-defined era of paganism that Muslims refer to as the Jahiliyyah - "The Time of Ignorance"."

On polygyny

"On the other hand, Muhammad clearly accepted polygyny (within limits) as necessary for the survival of the Ummah, especially after war with the Quraysh resulted in hundreds of widows and orphans who had to be provided for and protected by the community. "Marry those women who are lawful for you, up to two, three, or four, " the Quran states "but only if you can treat them equally"(4:3, emphasis added). On the other hand, the Quran makes it clear that monogamy is the preferred model of marriage when it asserts that "no matter how you try, you will never be able to treat your wives equally" (4:129; again, emphasis added). This seeming contradiction offers some insight into a dilemma that plagued the community during its early development. Essentially, while the individual believer was to strive for monogamy, the community that Muhammad was trying to build in Yathrib would have been doomed without polygyny."

"Like the great Jewish patriarchs Abraham and Jacob; like the prophets Moses and Hosea; like the Israelite kings Saul, David, and Solomon; and like nearly all of the Christian/Byzantine and Zoroastrian/Sasanian monarchs, all Shayks in Arabia - Muhammad included- had either multiple wives, multiple concubines, or both....And while Muhammad's union with a nine year old girl may be shocking to our modern sensibilities, his betrothal to Aisha was just that: a betrothal. Aisha did not consummate her marriage to Muhammad until after reaching puberty, which is when every girl in Arabia without exception became eligible for marriage. The most shocking aspect of Muhammad's marriages is not his ten years of polygamy in Yathrib, but his twenty-five years of monogamy in Mecca, something practically unheard of at the time. Indeed, if there is anything at all interesting or unusual about Muhammad's marriages, it is not how many wives he had, but rather the regulations that were imposed on them, specifically with regard to the veil."

On the veil

"The tradition of veiling and seclusion (known together as hijab) was introduced into Arabia long before Muhammad, primarily through Arab contacts with Syrian and Iran, where the hijab was a sign of social status. After all, only a woman who need not work in the fileds could afford to remain secluded and veiled."

"In the Ummah, there was no tradition of veiling until around 627 C.E., when the so-called "verse of hijab" suddenly descended upon the community. That verse, however, was addressed not to women in general, but exclusively to Muhammad's wives: "Believers, do not enter the Prophet's house...unless asked. And if you are invited....do not linger. And when you ask something from the Prophet's wives, do so from behind a hijab. This will assure the purity of your hearts as well as theirs" (33:53)."

"This restriction makes perfect sense when one recalls that Muhammad's house was also the community's mosque...People were constantly coming in and out of this compound at all hours of the day."

"That the veil applied solely to Muhammad's wives is further demonstrated by the fact that the term for donning the veil, darabat al-hijab, was used synonymously and interchangeably with "becoming Muhammad's wife." For this reason, during the Prophet's lifetime, no other women in the Ummah observed hijab."

"..But the veil was neither compulsory nor, for that matter, widely adopted until generations after Muhammad's death, when a large body of male scriptural and legal scholars began using their religious and political authority to regain the dominance they had lost in society as a result of the Prophet's egalitarian reforms."

On mysogynists

"It would be no exaggeration, therefore, to say that quite soon after Muhammad's death, those men who took upon themselves the task of interpreting God's will in the Quran and Muhammad's will in the hadith - men who were, coincidentally, among the most powerful and wealthy members of the Ummah - were not nearly as concerned with the accuracy of their reports or the objectivity of their exegesis as they were with regaining the financial and social dominance that the Prophet's reforms had taken from them. As Fatimah Mernissi notes, one must always remember that behind every hadith lies the entrenched power struggles and conflicting interests that one would expect in a society "in which social mobility [and] geographical expansion [were] the order of the day.""

"...And finally, when the celebrated Quranic commentator Fakhr ad-Din ar-Razi (1149-1209) interpreted the verse "[God] created spouses for you of your own kind so that you may have peace of mind through them" (3:21) as "proof that women were created like animals and plants and other useful things [and not for] worship and carrying Divine commands.....because the women is weak, silly and in one sense like a child," his commentary became (and still is) one of the most widely respected in the Muslim world."

"....This last point bears repeating. The fact is that for fourteen centuries, the science of Quranic commentary has been the exclusive domain of Muslim men......Consider for example, how the following verse (4:34) regarding the obligations of men toward women has been rendered into English by two different but widely read contemporary translators of the Quran. The first is from The Princeton edition, translated by Ahmed Ali; the second is from Majid Fakhry's translation, published by New York University:

Men are the support of women (qawwamuna 'ala an-nisa) as God gives some means than others, and because they spend of their wealth (to provide for them).....As for women you feel are averse, talk to them suasively,; then leave them alone in bed (without molesting them) and go to bed with them (when they are willing).

Men are in charge of women, because Allah has made some of them excel the others, and because they spend some of their wealth....And for those (women) that you fear might rebel, admonish them and abandon them in their beds and beat them [adribuhunna].

Because of the variability of the Arabic language, both of these translations are grammatically, syntactically, and definitionally correct. The phrase qawwamuna 'ala an-nisa can be understood as "watch over," "protect," "support, "attend to," "look after," or "be in charge of" women. The final word adribuhunna, which Fakhry has rendered as "beat them," can equally mean "turn away from them," "go along with them," and, remarkably, even "have consensual intercourse with them." If religion is indeed interpretation, then which meaning one chooses to accept and follow depends on what one is trying to extract from the text: if one views the Quran as empowering women, then Ali's; if one looks to the Quran to justify violence against women, then Fakhry's."

"...But that is precisely the point which the burgeoning Muslim feminist movement has been making over the last century. These women argue that the religious message of the Quran - a message of revolutionary social egalitarianism - must be separated from the cultural prejudices of seventh century Arabia. And for the first time in history, they are being given the international audience necessary to incorporate their views into the male-dominated world of Quranic exegesis."

"On International Women's Day in 1998, many in the Western world were stunned to hear Masoumeh Ebtekar, at the time Iran's vice president of environmental affairs and the highest ranking woman in Iranian government, present an opening address in which she lashed out against Afghanistan's Taliban regime and their horrific human rights violations against women. Although this was some years before the Taliban became a household name in the West, what most shocked the international audience was that Ms. Ebtekar delivered her vehement condemnation of the Taliban - a fundamentalist regime that forced its women into veiling and seclusion -while she herself was fully clad in a traditional black chador that covered every inch of her body save for the flushed features of her impassioned face."

"For European colonialists like Alfred, Lord Cromer, the British Consul General to Eqypt at the end of the nineteenth century, the veil was a symbol of the "degradation of women" and definitive proof that "Islam as a social system has been a complete failure." Never mind that Cromer was the founder of the Men's League for Opposing Women's Suffrage in Englad. As the quintessential colonialist, Cromer had no interest in the plight of Muslim women; the veil was, for him, an icon of the "backwardness of Islam," and the most visible justification for Europe's "civilising mission" in the Middle East.

For liberal Muslim reformists such as the distinguished Iranian political philosopher Ali Shariati (1933-77), the veil was the symbol of female chastity, piety, and, most of all, empowered defiance against the Western image of womanhood......Yet, enlightened as his approach may have been, it was still tragically flawed by the fact that, like Cromer, Shariati was describing something of which he had no experience.

The fact is that the traditional colonial image of the veiled Muslim woman as the sheltered, docile sexual property of her husband is just as misleading and simpleminded as the postmodernist image of the veil as the emblem of female freedom and empowerment from Western cultural hegemony. The veil may be neither or both of these things, but that is up to Muslim women to decide for themselves. This they are finally doing by taking part in something that has been denied them for centuries: their own Quranic exegesis."

More to come: the assassination of the Uthman and Ali, Shi'ism, just war theory, Khomeinism, Sufism, Wahhabism, rationalists vs traditionalists, the 5 pillars, Shariah law, secular state vs secularism, Islamic pluralism, Islamic reformation