Materials Presented at CARA Sessions

Islam: A Historical, Practical and Doctrinal Overview
Adnan A. Husain, Department of Middle Eastern Studies and History, NYU

Islam: A Historical, Practical and Doctrinal Overview Adnan A. Husain, Department of Middle Eastern Studies and History, NYU From the perspective of modern scholarship in the western academy, the religion of Islam began around 610 C.E., when Muhammad received the first, startling revelations of the Qur'an from the angel Gabriel (in Arabic, Jibreel) on Mount Hira: "Recite: In the Name of thy Lord who created, created Man of a blood-clot. Recite: And thy Lord is the Most Generous, who taught by the Pen, taught Man that which he knew not." Although Muslims recognize the first revelation of the Qur'an as marking the advent of a new religious dispensation in human history, they would suggest that Islam, which means submission or surrender, remains a primordial condition of a spiritual attitude towards God, named Allah, and a corresponding social ethic. For Muslims, this message has been expressed in the Creator's communication with humanity since the time of Adam to the present. In this way, Islam appeared as a fulfillment and completion of the recognized, earlier monotheistic religions of the Near East, Judaism and Christianity. While introducing Islam as a historically occurring religious tradition, it is nonetheless important and useful to acknowledge this perspective in the self-understanding of its adherents.

Before that fateful moment on Mount Hira that initiated the continuing revelation of the Qur'an to Muhammad over the next twenty three years and the resulting social and religious transformations of the early Muslim community's establishment, the Arabian Peninsula had been a marginal pagan enclave on the southern periphery of two empires of ancient tradition and monotheistic religion, the Christian Byzantine and Zoroastrian Sassanian empires. The Arabs of the Hijaz, the peninsula, had varying levels of contact with each through trade and as military clients particularly on the borders and frontiers. Some had converted to versions of Christianity in the North, and Arabic speaking Jewish communities survived, scattered in agricultural settlements but concentrated in the Yemen in the South. A few, known as hanif, subscribed to a native, but vaguely undefined monotheism, not as an organized religion but as an expression of an emerging individual conscience. Most were nomadic or semi-nomadic bedouin tribes dependent on the husbandry of camels or other pastoral flocks in the harsh landscape of the great central desert, dotted infrequently with small oases. Their patterns of transhumence (seasonal migrations) and nomadic itinerations through the desert coincided with their polytheistic and, occasionally, animistic religious practices and rituals. Certain seasons were reserved for pilgrimage to sacred shrines housing idols, representing gods associated variously with natural forces and fertility. The bedouin also were wary of unseen and unpredictable spirits, known as jinn, amoral forces existing alongside human society. While propitiating these gods with sacrifices and seeking their protection from natural and social danger, tribal bedouin and settled Arabs enjoyed safe haven in the sanctuaries of their shrines and a suspension of the blood-feud between hostile tribes competing for scarce resources. Consequently, the season of pilgrimage in the vicinity of shrines provided the peaceful occasion for market fairs, trade and commerce.

One such shrine, the Ka'bah, was located in Mecca and managed by a noble tribe called the Quraysh. The Quraysh had used their position as keepers of the Ka'bah, which had been filled with idols worshiped widely, to form a powerful tribal confederation and lucrative commercial network, stretching throughout the central Hijaz and involving long-distance caravan trade along the western edge of the peninsula between the Yemen and Byzantine Syria. By the time of Muhammad's youth, the leaders of the Quraysh had greatly enriched themselves and begun to challenge traditional tribal virtues of generosity and social solidarity through their avaricious accumulation of wealth and individualistic disregard for their responsibilities to less privileged and weaker members of their clans.

It was in this environment that the future prophet of Islam began his life. Orphaned at an early age and a member of a lesser clan, the Banu Hashim, he engaged early in Meccan trade, enabled by his marriage to a wealthy widow, Khadija, and built a reputation as an upright, honest man, earning the honorific al-Amin or the Trustworthy. However, he gradually grew disillusioned with both pagan polytheism and the social inequities and oppression of Meccan society. He began to withdraw for periods of retreat to neighboring hills outside Mecca to fast and reflect, seeking answers to fundamental questions. Visions appeared to him on his meditative walks. They culminated with the dramatic appearance of Gabriel exhorting him to recite and be guided by the higher truths of Allah's existence, the creator of mankind, the one true God whose essence was unique and transcendent, having no partnership with lesser, false deities.

Initially, Muhammad shared his revelations and the message given to him only with his wife and select friends and associates, creating a private religious circle dedicated to ritual prayer, eschatological piety, and ethical nobility. After a period of a couple years, he received a verse commanding him to "rise and warn" his society of the dangers of neglecting worship of Allah exclusively, of ignoring the day of reckoning for one's deeds, of oppressing the weak, and of pursuing excessive, prideful individual gain. The message, now publicly preached as a challenge to the social and religious order of Mecca, was not well received initially. Muhammad labored for 12 years, recruiting only about a hundred adherents to the new faith, mostly disadvantaged and marginal members of society. He endured social ostracism, censure, and threats, as well as the boycott of his own clan from the economic activities of the Quraysh. During this period, his social support disappeared with the deaths of Khadija and his uncle Abu Talib, his patron and protector as head of the Banu Hashim clan. The weakest Muslims who did not enjoy the protection of powerful patrons or clans suffered oppression and torture.

Under these desperate circumstances, the invitation to Medina, an agricultural town a few days' journey to the North, proved salvific for the fledgling Meccan Muslim community. The two major tribes of Medina, the Aws and Khazraj, had recently been embroiled in a disastrous blood-feud. Seeking a just arbitrator to help mediate the disruptive dispute, representatives of the Medinan tribes had contacted Muhammad. Impressed with him and his message, several accepted Islam and arranged to invite him and his followers to Medina. The migration (often erroneously termed the "flight" and known in Muslim history as the Hijrah) saved the Prophet, stripped of protection, from a murder plot organized by the hostile Quraysh and marked the establishment of the Muslim community on a new footing. It has since become the moment from which the Muslim calendar begins dating. The Meccan refugees and the Medinese natives, the Muhajirun ("Emigrants") and Ansar ("Helpers") respectively, formed a strong social base upon which to build a collective, developing Muslim life, only inchoately articulated and expressed under the difficult circumstances in Mecca. Correspondingly, the Qur'anic revelations adopted themes more suited to problems of communal life, public ritual practice, and more detailed regulations regarding social relations. Muhammad's prophetic role developed from spiritual guide of a small following and moral, eschatological preacher to leader of a growing community oriented around enacting the social and religious vision and practice of Islam.

Hostilities with the Quraysh of Mecca and their tribal allies did not cease, however. But over the course of ten years in Medina, the Prophet, as religious leader and statesman, recruited a tribal confederation and alliance bound by the new moral codes and belief system of Islam and recognition of his status as messenger of Allah. This expanding ummah, the community of Muslim faithful as a social and religious entity, overcame the Meccan confederacy after a series of conflicts that culminated with Muhammad's peaceful entrance into Mecca with a large Muslim force. The Meccans, realizing defeat, surrendered to their former outcast, converted to Islam and were absorbed into the ummah. The Ka'bah, the cube shaped shrine, was purged of idols and venerated as the "House of Allah" and became object of a yearly Muslim pilgrimage, called the Hajj. By the end of Muhammad's life, the tribes of Arabia were united for the first time under a pax Islamica that reoriented tribal loyalties and conflict toward the social solidarity of a relatively egalitarian community of believers embracing monotheistic worship of Allah and practicing new moral and ethical paradigms informing individual conscience and responsibility for deeds and actions in the Hereafter.

After the Prophet's death in 632 C.E., a series of 4 representatives from among his closest and earliest associates or "Companions" assumed leadership as "Caliphs" of the Muslim community and proto-state. During this period, border conflicts with the Byzantine and Sassanian empires triggered full-scale conflict as the Arabs, united under Islam, overwhelmed the provincial imperial armies and swiftly moved out of the Peninsula into the settled areas of the Fertile Crescent region. The empires, which had pursued a mutually exhausting series of wars in the preceding generation, were unprepared for the conflict. The Sassanian empire collapsed wholesale and the Byzantine empire permanently lost its Egyptian and Levantine provinces, managing to maintain a hostile frontier at the edge of Anatolia until the 11th century.

Although a more detailed and thorough survey of the Muslim conquests and expansion remains outside the focus of this treatment, a few features are worth brief consideration. The Muslim ummah transformed very quickly from an Arab mini-state at the periphery of the established centers of Near Eastern civilization by the end of the 7th century into an Arab Muslim military class over a vast imperium containing diverse ethnic, religious, and linguistic communities. Desert bedouins had become rulers of a cosmopolitan empire. However, Islam spread gradually in the region through a historical process of conversion, not as is commonly suggested "by the sword." Initially, the Arab Muslims refrained from proselytization and were restrained by the Prophetic dictum, "There is no compulsion in matters of religion." It took several generations before Islam became the majority religion of the region, and Jews and Christians remained protected religious communities as recognized "People of the Book." Also, Islam, though elaborated initially in the context of tribal Arabia, crystallized as a world religion during this period in the process of systematizing and adapting the message of the Prophet and the injunctions and guidance of the Qur'an in the new historical circumstances in which the expanding Muslim ummah found itself.

It should be evident from even this compressed, summary account of Muhammad's career and life and the early history of the Muslim community, that Islam developed from an active engagement with social circumstances and that one of its organic features is a determinate social vision and ethic. In fact, Islam informs the whole range of the personal and public lives of its conscientious adherents as a comprehensive social and spiritual program. Muslims, ideally, derive guidance in all matters of personal conduct, ethics and belief; ritual practices and worship; and social, political, economic and legal affairs from Islam, which expands the notion of religion to a whole mode of existence. In Arabic, the word is deen, which can only be partially translated as "religion." Modern, western impressions of Islam as a "legalistic" religion (comparable to Judaism) in part derive from a definition of religion influenced by Christian categories of the distinction between the legal "letter" and the spirit, in which religion is a personal and/ or spiritual experience, somewhat exclusively, particularly in Protestantism. In fact, Islam resembles both Judaism and Christianity, since it participates, consciously, in the same Judeo-Christian tradition, which could more accurately perhaps be termed the "Judeo-Christian-Muslim tradition." However, the relationships between belief, practice and social community differs somewhat from these two religious traditions both in its historical development and in its dogma.

Such characterizations are, of course, dangerously general, and it must be emphasized that just as there exists great diversity formally and informally in the beliefs and practices within Jewish and Christian religious traditions, so too does Islam contain diverse orientations, sects, practices, beliefs, and cultural expressions. Indeed, because Islam has been embraced as the mode of life for almost 1,500 years and in contexts as diverse as the Phillipines, Indonesia, China, India, Sub-Saharan Africa, and more recently in Europe and the United States, in addition to the Middle East and North Africa, great variety must necessarily characterize it. Moreover, Islam has never accommodated an organized ecclesiastical structure or involved sacramental rites that would have created a priesthood to mediate human relations with the divine. Muslim societies have not fostered organized means for enforcing unity of doctrine and practice. In the absence of a church or similar religious organizations to promote a definition of "orthodoxy", disagreement on religious matters among religious scholars and specialists particularly has flourished often in Muslim societies to the extent that four major legal schools mutually recognize one another as valid.

However, the fundamental values and vision of Islam in all its varieties exhibits a meaningful unity and coherence. The common core practices and shared tradition that constitutes Islam most basically are helpfully thought of as "the five pillars": shahadah or the profession of faith; salaat or ritual prayer; sawm or fasting during the month of Ramadan; zakat or the charitable "tithe"; and Hajj or annual pilgrimage to Mecca.

The testament of faith or shahadah is the most basic of statements, made in Arabic, declaring one's recognition of Allah and identity as a Muslim. In translation it reads: "There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is his messenger." Alternatively, the believer can more personally announce, "I bear witness that there is no god except Allah, and I bear witness that Muhammad is the messenger of Allah." Upon uttering this statement with truthful intention, the speaker is minimally considered a member of the Muslim community.

Salaat is the organized ritual prayer performed either individually or collectively five times during different periods throughout the day, morning, noon or early afternoon, late afternoon, sunset and at night. It can be performed anywhere but is often done in a masjid or mosque, the Muslim houses of worship that characteristically, though not necessarily, have a domed hall and minaret or narrow tower, from which the call to prayer, adhaan, is recited. The prayers consist of series of recitations from the Qur'an, credal formulations, statements invoking divine attributes, and praises to the Prophets Abraham and Muhammad in Arabic, which are coordinated with various repeated postures oriented toward the Ka'bah in Mecca: standing with arms crossed, bowing with one's back flat and hands on the knees, and prostrating on the prayer mat or rug. When performed collectively, participants stand in ranks behind a prayer leader, called an imam. One a week, a communal prayer on Friday, called the prayer of jum'ah or "gathering", takes place in a central mosque and includes a sermon preceding the collective prayer. Friday, however, is not a sabbath in the sense of a day of rest in the Jewish or Christian traditions.

Every year during the holy month of Ramadan, Muslims engage in a religious fast. Ramadan, during which the Qur'an was first revealed, is a month in the Muslim religious calendar, which is based on a lunar calculation. The lunar month is 29 or 30 days and, consequently, the religious year is 9-11 days shorter than the solar year. The month of Ramadan, thus, moves earlier approximately 10 days each year and slowly migrates through all seasons. When it begins, Muslims fast the entire month from all food, drink, and sexual intercourse during the day from an hour before sunrise to sunset, when the fast is traditionally broken collectively with dates and a meal following the sunset prayer. Muslims imagine the fast as more than a physical, ascetic exercise; those fasting also attempt to discipline their thoughts and conduct to avoid any morally questionable acts that would nullify the validity of their fast just as much as would eating or drinking. The fast is a time of purification, expiation, charitable alms giving, and reflection. It is also a festive holiday in Muslim countries and a period of great social activity. Individuals often take the opportunity of the fast during Ramadan to redouble religious and spiritual activity and prayer. The Qur'an is publicly and privately recited more often, and special additional prayers are held collectively at night in mosques. The end of the month is commemorated with a special communal prayer, celebration and public festival called Eid al-Fitr.

While charitable offerings are strongly encouraged in Islam for a variety of purposes from supporting the needy, providing dowries for marriage, the establishment of mosques, creating facilities for travelers, and supporting students, for example, Muslims are required to make a minimum payment of two and a half percent of their savings annually for the provision of poorer members of the society.

Finally, the fifth pillar or Hajj consists of an annual pilgrimage to the Ka'bah in Mecca and involves various ritual activities and prayers. The Hajj is required of able-bodied Muslims with sufficient financial resources once in a lifetime, though it may be performed more often. Pilgrims circumambulate the Ka'bah, the "House of Allah", believed to have been built by Abraham (Ibraheem) and his son Ishmael (Ismaeel), father of the Arabs in Muslim tradition. In fact, the Hajj is an intense spiritual commemoration and ritual enactment of aspects of the Abraham narrative. The Hajj culminates with the second major religious festival, Eid al-Adha or festival of the sacrifice, which is celebrated throughout the Muslim world. Muslims sacrifice a flock animal in remembrance of Abraham's substitution of an animal for the sacrifice of his son (believed to be Ishmael in Muslim tradition rather than the biblical Isaac). The meat is then charitably distributed to neighbors and the poor.

These five pillars constitute the fundamental religious activities of pious, observant Muslims, whose number as a community more generally near one billion today. Though distinctive, these practices share many features common to other religious traditions and, in particular, Judaism and Christianity. Muslim beliefs, doctrines, and theology likewise resonates closely with those of "the People of the Book," but with significant differences. Although sophisticated theological controversy and debate complicates any outline of Muslim beliefs, the doctrines of Islam can be usefully reduced to the fundamental credal formulas the Qur'an itself concisely provides:

To Allah belongs all that is in the heavens and the earth; and whether you reveal what is in your heart or conceal it, you will have to account for it to Allah who will pardon whom He please and punish whom He will, for Allah has power over all things. The Prophet believes in what has been revealed to him by his Lord, as do the believers. Each one believes in Allah, His angels, His Books and the Prophets, and We make no distinction between the Apostles. For they say, "We hear and obey, and we seek Your forgiveness, O Lord, for to You we shall journey in the end." (2:284-5)

These two verses of the Qur'an encapsulate and exemplify central, defining doctrines of Muslim faith. The simple litany of the creed in the heart of the passage illustrates the content of what constitutes belief, while the statements surrounding it reveal Allah's nature more fully and move to the attitude faithful Muslims should take in recognizing Allah and surrendering (recalling the meaning of Islam) to his instructive will.

The passage can initially be read reflexively. "The Prophet believes in what has been revealed to him by his Lord, as do the believers." This refers not only to the formula that follows but also to the fact of revelation, that is that the Qur'an, the sacred scripture of Islam and literally meaning the "recitation" (recalling the first verse-"Recite in the name of your Lord who created…"), is the word and speech of Allah conveyed by Gabriel to his appointed Prophet.

The litany begins with belief in Allah, described in the earlier verse not only as creator of the celestial and terrestrial worlds but as disposer of them, as omniscient and omnipotent, transcendent yet having power over creation. Elsewhere the Qur'an describes Allah as unique, singular and without progeny or origin. Islam adheres to a strict monotheistic view of the Deity, rejecting association or partnership in divinity or the idea of the Trinity. The creed continues, mentioning the angels who signify more generally the world of the unseen. It also mentions "His Books and the Prophets." Muhammad is regarded as the "seal of the Prophets," that is the final messenger. However, Islam recognizes previous religious dispensations as expression of the divine will and guidance in human history. Muslims understand "His Books and Prophets" as previously revealed scriptures of earlier religions, notably the Torah of Judaism and the Gospels of Christianity, brought by the prophets, including the Old Testament patriarchs and Jesus, all equally prophets of Allah. In Muslim belief, however, the corruption over time in human hands of previous scripture and the heedless straying from divine commandments and guidance has necessitated the completion of sacred history to remind humanity of their relationship to Allah with the appearance of the final messenger, Muhammad, and the culminating scripture, the Qur'an.

The end of the verses describes the believer, just as the first of the verses describes Allah. After recognizing the Qur'an as the word of Allah, Muhammad as His faithful messenger, Allah as his omniscient Lord and omnipotent Creator, the unseen angels as agents of Allah, and the revealed tradition of previous religions, the believing Muslim should obey the commandments articulated in the Qur'an and the Prophet's example, seek forgiveness for his/her sins as a responsible possessor of free will and rely upon the mercy of Allah on the day or reckoning in the life Hereafter.

A Muslim believer possesses clear ritual obligations and a set of basic beliefs, but, in facing the prospect of judgement for his/her earthly deeds and ethical responsibility to build a just social order in Islamic terms, he or she must turn to sources of religious authority for guidance for a number of questions. The primary source is, of course, the Qur'an, Muslim sacred scripture. The text of the Qur'an is, however, comparatively short, compressed, and not a straightforward narrative or legal code. It requires substantial interpretation. The second major canonical source of guidance for Muslims derives, then, from the directives and example of the Prophet Muhammad himself, since his life illustrated in human history and community the will of Allah. Early on, companions of the Prophet modeled their behavior after that of the Prophet and under his instruction. The normative practice of the Prophet that could be taken as a model was known as his sunnah. They began to report their experiences to later generations of Muslims in the form of oral reports called hadith that contain the words of the Prophet or an anecdotal description of his deeds, introduced by a chain of oral transmission: "so and so reported from so and so that he approached the Prophet with a question…" These oral reports circulated in the next several generations before being compiled into standard, written canonical collections by specialists in their study. Using these two sources, the Qur'an and its interpretation and the model of the Prophet's life and instruction (sunnah), early pious Muslims began to develop, refine, and elaborate Muslim religious law, the shari'ah, and define the Muslim life more fully in the new historical contexts into which Islam had spread after the conquests.

The major sectarian divide between Shi'i and Sunni Muslims emerged more clearly during this period. It began with a difference over political and religious leadership over the Muslim community after the Prophet's death and continued through history to define different attitudes toward the sources of religious guidance and authority in the Muslim community. The shi'i, literally "the faction" or "party", favored 'Ali, the Prophet's son-in-law and cousin, and did not accept the first three Caliphs as legitimate successors of the Prophet and ultimately suggested that continuing divine guidance must come through the appointed descendents of the Prophet. The sunnis on the other hand, later proving to be the majority, accepted a more restricted religious role for leaders of the Muslim community, counting instead on the consensus of the community's interpretation of revealed texts and the Prophet's example as sufficiently authoritative to define Muslim life. In matters of doctrine, therefore, significant differences remain between Sunni and Shi' i Muslims, but only minor differences characterize common religious practice and the content of religious law.

The religious sciences of interpretation of the Qur'an, transmission and criticism of hadith, and elaboration of the religious law required enormous study, and gradually a scholarly class of religious specialists emerged to reconcile its complexities and guide Muslims in applying it to their lives and in Muslim society. Islam, however, does not neglect the spiritual and devotional dimensions of human consciousness. By even the first several generations, pious Muslims attempted to infuse their ritual obligations with spiritual meaning and develop a more personal relationship with their transcendent God. Muslim mysticism, Sufism, paralleled developments in the religious sciences and later organized into orders or brotherhoods with special, additional practices designed to enhance self-examination of the soul, purify it, and prepare it for spiritual, mystical experience. These activities included asceticism, bodily mortification, fasting, meditative prayer, and above all individual and collective recitation and chanting of Allah's name. Many Sufis, Muslim mystics, engaged in ecstatic spiritual experience, while others preferred a more sober and reflective spiritual life. Sufism accommodated a variety of spiritual orientations and practices. It also inspired the production of some of Muslim civilizations greatest allegorical literature and poetry.