54 pages • 1 hour read
No God but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam
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Chapters 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary
The Hijra (Muhammad and his Companions’ migration to Yathrib—better known by the new name of Medina) marks the beginning of the Muslim calendar. A small number of the farmers who lived in the little town had accepted Muhammad’s message and become his Ansa (Helpers). They donated land for the first masjid or mosque where the faithful could gather. Stories of the society that Muhammad created there—often written centuries later under the patronage of vast Islamic empires—continue to shape Muslim debates about the ideal society and the relationship between religious and secular authority.
The “Constitution of Medina,” as recorded in these later sources, gave Muhammad sole authority to mediate disputes among all the clans in Medina and made him the war leader from the beginning. More likely, he came solely as a neutral arbitrator for disputes between the two major tribes and gradually gained more power. His small, immediate community of believers (the Ummah), however, saw him as the ultimate lawgiver. They would not have a stable religious identity as Muslims until the end of Muhammad’s life.
Muhammad’s absolute authority and the ability of any person to enter his community regardless of parentage, race, or social status made it unique in the tribal system. All who entered enjoyed the same legal protections and cared for each other through the collection of zakat (a tax given as alms to those in need). He preached the equality of men and women in God’s eyes, while distinguishing their social roles. He granted women some property and inheritance rights. Traditional Bedouin society had few restrictions on multiple spouses and divorce for either men or women; later Arab societies like in Mecca restricted that freedom to men. Muhammad’s exact innovations have been the subject of much debate. He certainly allowed divorce with some restrictions. The Quran says a man may have multiple wives if he can keep them happy but also states it is hard to keep more than one wife happy. Many interpret this as allowing polygamy, but Aslan and other modern Muslims prefer to see this pair of verses as praising monogamy. Muhammad was monogamous until Khadija’s death, but then married multiple women, usually for political reasons. The veiling of women came into the community only gradually and was initially limited to Muhammad’s wives as a mark of respect.
Muhammad as lawgiver could offer authoritative interpretation of God’s law. After his death, Muslims sought a similar understanding through hadith—stories or sayings of the Prophet told by his surviving Companions. While Muslims demanded that the transmission (isnad) of the hadith from the original Companion be known for the hadith to be accepted, many dubious hadith gained wide circulation that seem to contradict the Quran or can be traced instead to Biblical or rabbinical sources. Aslan argues that the numerous hadith that give women a subordinate role or limit their rights were made up by male Muslims after Muhammad’s death. Now that Muslim women are engaged in interpreting the Quran and hadith, they can challenge old stereotypes and offer new interpretations that, for example, see the veil as empowering women rather than subordinating them.
Chapter 4 Summary
After recounting how Muhammad led his outnumbered community in battle at Uhud in 625 CE only to be defeated, Aslan critiques the notion of Islam as a “warrior religion.” He says that all religions at the time were also political states or ethnic identities and, as such, engaged in warfare, and Islam was no exception. The idea of jihad developed mostly after Muhammad’s death and really means “struggle,” not “holy war.” The “greater jihad” refers to an internal spiritual struggle, while violent struggle against oppression is “lesser jihad.” And, even if jihad has been frequently used to refer to warfare, the correct Quranic context is about whether fighting was justified as the early community faced its Quraysh antagonists.
Muhammad’s idea of jihad differed from earlier Arab rules of war in two crucial respects. First, only a defensive war could be just. Second, noncombatants had to be left alone. Admittedly, while some Quranic verses support this notion (2:190, 22:39), others seem to encourage aggressive warfare aimed at converting the unbeliever (9:5, 9:29, 9:73). These aggressive verses, Aslan argues, were meant only to apply to attacking the Quraysh. The “classical doctrine of jihad” that divided the world into a “House of Islam” and a “House of War” (infidel lands where warfare would bring Islam) were a later perversion of Muhammad’s intentions (especially the interpretations given by terrorist groups). Aslan argues this idea of jihad came partly in response to the crusades and to modern Western imperialism, and he notes dissenting Muslim voices from the 13th century to the present that critiqued more aggressive ideas of jihad.
After Muhammad’s initial success in Yathrib, he decided to spread his message and directly challenge the Quraysh of Mecca. He declared Yathrib a rival sanctuary city and began raiding caravans bound for Mecca. In 624 CE, the Quraysh confronted Muhammad’s raiders at the Battle of Badr but dramatically lost despite superior numbers. Arab tribes began to pick sides. Muhammad drove one Jewish clan out of Yathrib, believing they had betrayed him, but he refrained from executing them. A year later, Muhammad suffered the disastrous defeat at Uhud. Again, he exiled a Jewish clan for treason. The Quraysh failed to press their victory, and, when they returned two years later, Muhammad had dug a defensive trench around the city from which he held off their siege. Once again, he believed the Banu Qurayza, a Jewish clan that remained in Yathrib, had betrayed him. This time, the men were executed and the women and children were enslaved. Muhammad next negotiated a treaty to peacefully go to Mecca as a pilgrim and impressed the inhabitants with his piety. The following year (630 CE), when he accused the Quraysh of breaking the treaty and he returned at the head of a massive army, the people of Mecca welcomed him and peacefully submitted.
Traditionally, the massacre of the Banu Qurayza has been seen as the beginning of Jewish-Muslim conflict. Aslan argues, however, that Muhammad targeted this clan for treason, not religion, and the punishment fit the traditional tribal ethic. Other Jews lived under Muslim rule, and, in any case, Christians treated Jews worse than Muslims did. In later Muslim states, Christians and Jews had a protected status as dhimmi. They could practice their faith so long as they paid extra taxes, did not convert Muslims, did not stop coreligionists from converting to Islam, and generally kept their religion out of public view. The Jews of Yathrib arguably also had little knowledge of their faith and perhaps should not even be considered Jewish: There was really very little separating their amorphous religion from Muhammad’s. While Muhammad believed that he continued the line of prophets that God had sent from Abraham to Moses to Jesus, these Jews’ lack of knowledge about their own tradition makes it ludicrous to believe Muhammad found their rejection of him disappointing. The anti-Jewish sentiments reported by Muhammad’s biographers are later fabrications, as are Muslim views of Jews and Christians as unbelievers. His critiques of Christians only concerned their core belief that Jesus is God. Muhammad wanted Jews and Christians also to be part of God’s Ummah as fellow recipients of God’s revelation (“People of the Book”). Aslan critiques several scholars who disagree with his reinterpretation of Muhammad’s attitude toward Judaism.
Chapters 3-4 Analysis
As he stated in his Prologue, Aslan aims not to simply give a neutral history of Islam but rather to offer a spirited defense or “apology” of its faith and of The Compatibility of Islam with Liberal Democratic Ideals. Apology (or apologia) in classical rhetoric means defending a position rather than saying sorry for it. Chapters 3 and 4 offer good examples of his rhetorical technique. He gives a narrative account of Muhammad’s life interspersed with discussions of common accusations leveled against Muhammad and Islam in modern society. He defends the religion against the charge of misogyny in Chapter 3 and against the charge of being inherently violent and anti-Judaic in Chapter 4 (since the Arabs are also a Semitic people and Muslims’ supposed prejudice is more religious than racial, “anti-Judaism” is a more accurate term in this context than “anti-Semitism”).
The genre of apologia commonly employs four techniques: denial, bolstering, differentiation, and transcendence. Aslan uses each. He denies that Islam embraces misogyny and unrestricted religious violence. Sometimes he argues that basic facts have been misinterpreted, as when he says the Banu Qurayza were not really Jewish. More often, he goes back to the Qur’an and selected hadith to find liberal ideas. Since the Quran “goes to great lengths to emphasize the equality of the sexes in the eyes of God” and Muhammad introduced female inheritance (60), Aslan argues that Muhammad did not preach the subordination of women. Based on this reconstruction of Muhammad’s message, he reinterprets other Quranic passages that seem to limit women (or promote violence) in a more benign way. His most essential strategy for denying these accusations is to argue that hadith and historical customs contrary to this message of tolerance are later inventions and therefore should not be used to reconstruct “true” Islam. Even if one can trace a hadith back to one of Muhammad’s close companions, these companions could have injected their own views and prejudices into stories of Muhammad. Aslan particularly notes the negative influence of Umar, one of Muhammad’s converts, who was “infamous” for his “misogynist attitude” and put restrictions on how women prayed and learned “in direct violation of the Prophet’s example” (71).
Aslan uses this kind of historical reasoning to reconstruct a lost original Islam and to deny that later abuses are part of Muhammad’s message. He makes lesser use of the other three major strategies of apologia. He bolsters (or praises) Muhammad, emphasizing characteristics that are widely admired today, such as his dedication to social justice and his devotion to his first wife, Khadija. Aslan looks for the best possible interpretation of events, as when he asserts that the Meccan people surrendered to Muhammad because they admired his piety rather out of fear for the 10,000-man army riding behind him. In the technique of differentiation, he argues that other religions and ideologies are equally and in fact more violent and oppressive than Islam, as when he explains how medieval Jews generally fared better in Muslim lands than Christian. He also contextualizes Muhammad’s actions for contemporary Arab society rather than having him judged by modern standards (the technique of “transcendence”). While acknowledging that Muhammad ordered the Jewish Banu Qurayza clan executed, Aslan stresses that this was the normal Arab tribal punishment for a traitorous clan and that Muhammad had shocked the people of Yathrib by resisting that custom to show mercy to the two previous traitorous Jewish clans.
Aslan piles on multiple arguments for his defense of Islam on each point. In this way, if one argument should be unconvincing, there are others that may prove persuasive. This has the occasional danger of self-contradiction, as when Aslan first asserts that jihad “was not fully developed as an ideological expression until long after Muhammad’s death” but then claims the opposite (79): It was “a theory born out of necessity and developed in the midst of a bloody and often chaotic war that erupted in 624 CE between Muhammad’s small but growing community and the all-powerful, ever-present Quraysh” (81). Aslan’s frequent insistence that later Muslim ideas on jihad and women contradict Muhammad’s actual teaching also implicitly raises the question of who speaks for the “real” Islam: Is it the community of Muslims throughout the centuries or a handful of modern scholars like Aslan? Aslan anticipates this criticism and addresses it by finding other Muslim voices critiquing violence. He doesn’t claim that these dissenting voices are the majority; still, establishing this Diversity of Islamic Thought and Practice helps legitimize the possibility that a traditional view held by many need not be authoritative.
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