Part 2

Part 2 as I promised.

No God but God by Reza Aslan (excerpts)

Religions become institutions when the myths and rituals that once shaped their sacred histories are transformed into authoritative models of orthodoxy (the correct interpretations of myths) and orthopraxy (the correct interpretation of rituals), though one is often emphasized over the other. Christianity may be the supreme example of an "orthodoxic" religion; it is principally one's beliefs - expressed through creed - that make one a faithful Christian. On the opposite spectrum is Judaism, a quintessentially "orthopraxic" religion, where it is principally one's actions- expressed through the Law - that make one an observant Jew. It is not that beliefs are irrelevant in Judaism, or actions unimportant in Christiniaty. Rather, it is that of the two religions, Judaism places far greater emphasis on orthopraxic behaviour than does Christianity.

Like Judaism, Islam is primarily an orthopraxic religion, so much so that Wilfred Cantwell Smith has suggested translating the word Sunni as "orthoprax" rather than "orthodox". However, because the Ulama have tended to regard Islamic practice as informing Islamic theology, orthopraxy and orthodoxy are intimately bound together in Islam, meaning questions of theology, or kalam, are impossible to separate from questions of law, or fiqh.

For this reason, the Ulama often dismissed the practice of pure speculative theology as insignificant babble (kalam means "talking" or "speech," and Muslim theologians were often pejoratively referred to as ahl-kalam, the "People of Talking"). What most concerned the Ulama from the first days of the Islamic expansion, especially as the Ummah became ever more widely dispersed and varied with regard to language and culture, was not so much theological arguments about the attributes of God (though, as we shall see, this would eventually become vigorously debated among scholars), but rather the formalization of specific ways to express faith through ritual. Their ultimate objective was to form strict guidelines that would establish exactly who was and who was not a Muslim. The result of their labors became what is now commonly known as the Five Pillars of Islam.

The Five Pillars constitute the principal ritual activities of the Muslim faith. Yet, as John Renard remarks, the Pillars are not meant to "reduce the spirit and life of a complex global community to a cluster of religious practices." More than anything, the Five Pillars are meant as a metaphor for Islam; they are a summary not just of what it required to be a member of the Ummah, but also of what it means to be a Muslim.

Contrary to perception, the Pillars are not oppressive obligations - quite the opposite. These are highly pragmatic rituals, in that the believer is responsible only for those tasks that he or she is able to perform. Nor are the Pillars mere perfunctory actions. The single most important factor in the performance of any Muslim ritual is the believer's intention, which must be consciously proclaimed before the ritual can begin. Ultimately, the Pillars are intended to be "a totality of actions," which, according to Mohamed A. Abu Ridah, are not merely "verbal and bodily, but, above all, mental and moral, performed according to certain conditions of conscious intention, of exernal and internal purity, presence of mind, humility and submissiveness of the heart, creating within the soul of the believer a real life of religous devotion and spirituality."

With the exception of the main Pillar, the shahadah, or profession of faith (which will be discussed last), these are all fundamentally communal activities. In fact, the primary purpose of the Five Pillars is to assist the believer in articulating, thorugh actions, his or her membership in the Muslim community........

Put simply, the community is the Church in Islam: the "bearer of values," to use Montgomery Watt's oft quoted phrase. The Ummah confers meaning and purpose on the believer, whose national, ethnic, racial, and sexual identity are and always will be subordinate to his or her membership in the worldwide community of Muslims: a community not bound by any borders, geographic or temporal. Thus when one fasts during the month of Ramadan or joins the Friday prayers, one does with the knowledge that all Muslims- from the first days of Muhammad's preaching until today, and in every part of the world - fast and pray in the precisely same way, at precisely the same time.

The first Pillar, and the first distinctly Muslim practice enacted by Muhammad in Mecca, is salat, or ritual prayer. There are two kinds of prayer in Islam: du'a, which refers to individual, informal communication between believer and God; and salat, whichis the ritualized obligatory prayer performed five times a day: sunrise, noon, afternoon, sunset, and evening. Salat, which means "to bow, bend, or stretch," is composed of a series of yogic movements that include standing, boweing, rising, sitting, turning east and west, and falling prostrate, all repeated cycles, and accompanied by specific verses from the Quran.....

The second Pillar was also established in the early years of Muhammads's movement in Mecca. This is the paying of alms, or zakat. As previosuly explained, zakat is alms given as a tax to the community, which is then distributed to the poor to ensure their care and protection. It is not a voluntary tithe; it is a religious obligation. Zakat literally means "purification," and it is a reminder to all Muslims of their social and economic responsibilities to the Ummah.....

The third Pillar, the month-long Muslim fast (sawm in Arabic) which takes place during Ramadan, was not firmly instituted as a Muslim ritual until after the emigration to Medina. Considering that the concept of fasting was thoroughly foreign to the Bedouin experience - it would have been absurd to go voluntarily without food or water in a desert climate- there can be no doubt that Muhammad adopted this ritual from Arabia's Jews. The Quran admits as much when it states "Fasting is prescribed for you, just as it was prescribed for those before you," (2:183; emphasis added). And al-Tabari notes that the first Muslim fast coincided with Yom Kippur; Muhammad specifically ordered his followers to fast with the Jews in commemoration of their flight from Egypt. Only later was the fast changed to Ramadan, the month in which Muslims believe the Quran was first revealed to Muhammad.

...And while an entire month of fasting may sound like a grim experience, Ramadan is in actuality a time for both spiritual introspection and festive celebration. Friends, families, entire neighbourhoods spend the long nights of the month breaking fast together, while the final night of Ramadan, Eid al-Fitr, is the most widely celebrated holiday in the whole of the Islamic world.

The fourth, and perhaps the most famous pillar is the annual Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca. All Muslims must, if possible, journey to Mecca at least once in their lives to take part in the sacred rites of the Ka'ba. Technically, the rites at the Ka'ba can be performed anytime in what is known as the "lesser pilgrimage," or umra.......The Hajj is the supreme communal event in Islam. It is the only major Muslim ritual in which men and women participate with no division between them. In the sanctified state, when every pilgrim is identically dressed, there is no longer any rank, or class, or status; there is no gender and no ethnic or racial identity: there is no identiy whatsoever, save as Muslims. It was precisely this communal spirit that Malcolm X referred to when he wrote during his own pilgrimage, "I have never before seen sincere and true brotherhood practiced by all colors together."

These four rituals- communal prayer, the paying of alms, the fast of Ramadan, and the Hajj pilgrimage- provide meaning to the Muslim faith and unity to the Muslim community. Yet one could argue that the primary function of these four is to express the fifth and most important Pillar (and the only one requiring belief rather than action): the shahadah, or profession of faith, which initiates every convert into the Muslim faith.

"There is no god but God, and Muhammad is God's Messenger."

This deceptively simple statement is not only the basis for all articles of faith is Islam, it is in some ways the sum and total of Islamic theology. This is because the shahadah signifies recognition of an exceedingly complex theological doctrine known as tawhid........But tawhid, which literally means "making one," implies more than just monotheism. True, there is only one God, but that is just the beginning. Tawhid means that God is Oneness. God is Unity: wholly indivisible, entirely unique, and utterly indefinable. God resembles nothing in either essence or attributes.

"Nothing is like Him," the mystic and scholar Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (1058-1111) wrote in his Revival of the Religious Sciences, "and He is not like anything." God is, as the Quran repetedly reminds believers, "elevated"; God is "eminent." When Muslims cry Allahu Akbar! (literally, "God is greater!"), what they mean is not that God is greater than this or that, but that God is simply greater.

Obviously, human beings have no choice but to speak of God in human language, through human symbols and metaphors. Therefore one can refer to God's attribues as embodying "Goodness" or "Being", in the classical philosophical sense, but only with the recognition that these are meaningless terms when applied to God, who is neither substance nor accident. Indeed tawhid suggests that God is beyond any description, beyond any human knowledge.

If tawhid is the foundation of Islam, then its opposite, shirk, is Islam's greatest sin, for which some Muslims claim there can be no forgiveness. In its simplest definition, shirk means associating anything with God.....Any attempt to anthromorphize God by endowing the Divine with human attributes, thereby limiting or restricting God's dominion, could be shirk. But shirk can also be defined as placing obstacles in the way of God, whether greed, or drink, or pride, or false piety, or any other grave sin that keeps the believer apart from God.

Ultimately, tawhid implies recognising creation as a "universal unity," to quote Ali Shariati, without divisions into "this world and the hereafter, the natural and the supernatural, substance and meaning, spirit and body." In other words, the relationship between God and creation is like that between "light and the lamp that emits it." One God; one creation. One God. One God.