Nonetheless, Islam is the Muhammad Ali of the world’s religions. Statistically, it is second to Christianity, but its numbers are growing far more rapidly. Over the last century, the Christian portion of the world’s population has declined slightly—from 35 percent in 1900 to 33 percent today. And in Europe many of these Christians are nominal practitioners at best. Over this same period, Islam’s numbers have skyrocketed—from 12 percent of the world’s population in 1900 to 22 percent today.17 According to the World Religion Database, Islam is growing 33 percent faster than is Christianity, largely thanks to high birth rates in Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Egypt, Iran, and other countries where Islam predominates.18 So while Christianity’s market share has stalled, Islam’s is racing ahead at a breakneck pace.
Numbers aside, Islam is the leader of the pack in terms of contemporary impact. Many Christians render to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s, restricting their faith to the private realm. Muslims, by contrast, have never accepted this public/private distinction. Most see Islam as both a religion and a way of life. This way of life affects how they dress, what they eat, and how they invest, spend, and lend money. So the religious commitments of Muslims have a huge impact on the world around them.
Islam and Christianity are both missionary religions that have been competing for converts since the birth of Islam in the seventh century. As the modern age opened, Islam was ascendant, taking Constantinople in 1453 and rapidly expanding over the next few centuries across Europe and the Middle East into North Africa, India, and Southeast Asia. Over the last few centuries, however, and especially since the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, Christianity has been ascendant, thanks to the economic, technological, and military might of the colonial powers of Europe and the United States. In today’s postcolonial era, Muslims are again on the march, and in the news. In a world in which oil runs our cars, power plants, and (increasingly) our lives, the sheikhs of Saudi Arabia and other oil-rich Islamic nations hold extraordinary influence. Almost all of the world’s political hot spots involve Muslims in some way. Finally, the impact that Islamic extremists in al-Qaeda and other jihadist organizations have had on contemporary life is incalculable. Their actions have redirected trillions of dollars in government budgets and transformed not only how we travel and wage war but also how we imagine the future of the planet. Islam, in short, is the globe’s most-talked-about religion. It is no accident that journalist Christopher Hitchens has aimed his poison pen first and foremost at Islam. “Allahu Akbar,” say the Muslim faithful: “God is great.” “God is not great,” says Hitchens. “Religion poisons everything.”19
Muslims are now engaged in a historic conversation about the course they should chart into the modern world, not least about the proper relationship between mosque and state. This conversation is by no means restricted to extremists, or to the Middle East. It is vibrant in Indonesia, whose Muslim population (the world’s largest) has shown little interest in extremism. It is also lively in the West, where “Progressive Islam” is strong. There are over a thousand mosques in the United States, and politicians there are taking note of the political power of Muslims in swing states such as Michigan and throughout the Tri-State Region of Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York. In the United Kingdom, Muhammad (or Mohammed) is now the third most popular boy’s name (just ahead of Thomas and Harry, and just behind Jack and Oliver).20 Islam is also the fastest growing religion in Europe, which has seen the number of Muslims triple over the last thirty years.21
Sports and Salvation
In choosing the religions for this book and in ordering these rivals in terms of contemporary impact, I have obviously been influenced by my own biases. I have tried, however, to be fair. While in Jerusalem researching this book, I struck up a conversation with an elderly Muslim. When I told him I was writing a book on the world’s religions, he looked at me sternly, pointed a finger in my direction, and instructed me to be honest. “Do not write false things about the religions,” he said. Religious Studies scholars are rarely honest enough to admit this in person, much less in print, but we all know there are things that each of the world’s religions do well, and things they do poorly. If you want to help the homeless, you will likely find the Christian Social Gospel more useful than Hindu notions of caste. If you want to find techniques for quieting the mind through bodily exercises, you will likely find Hindu yogis more useful than Christian saints.
But being honest also requires being true to these religious traditions themselves—by writing chapters to which adherents can say “Amen” and otherwise wrestling with the fact that in writing about any religion, one is treading on dreams. While researching this book, I repeatedly came across respected scholars of Hinduism and Buddhism referring to “sin” and “salvation” as if these were Hindu and Buddhist concepts.22 But these are Christian ideas, so when writing about Hinduism and Buddhism, I will not use them. For similar reasons, I will not refer to the Muslims’ Paradise or the Buddhists’ nirvana as heaven. Similarly, I do not assume here that scripture is as important to Hindus as it is to Protestants, or that it is used in a similar way. The Vedas are the Hindus’ most sacred scriptures, but hardly any Hindu gives a fig about their content; as almost any Hindu can tell you, what matters are their sounds, and the sacred power these sounds convey. Neither do I assume, as many Protestants do, that religions are about faith and belief. Religions cannot be reduced to “belief systems” any more than they can be reduced to “ritual systems.” Belief is a part of most religions, but only a part, and in most cases not the most important part. (You can be a Jew without believing in God, for example.) So while I will refer to Protestants as “believers” and to their religion as a “faith,” I do not refer to religious people in general as “believers” or to their traditions as “faith-based.”
There is a long tradition of Christian thinkers assuming that salvation is the goal of all religions and then arguing that only Christians can achieve this goal. Huston Smith, who grew up in China as a child of Methodist missionaries, rejected this argument but not its guiding assumption. “To claim salvation as the monopoly of any one religion,” he wrote, “is like claiming that God can be found in this room and not the next.”23 It might seem to be an admirable act of empathy to assert that Confucians and Buddhists can be saved. But this statement is confused to the core, since salvation is not something that either Confucians or Buddhists seek. Salvation is a Christian goal, and when Christians speak of it, they are speaking of being saved from sin. But Confucians and Buddhists do not believe in sin, so it makes no sense for them to try to be saved from it. And while Muslims and Jews do speak of sin of a sort, neither Islam nor Judaism describes salvation from sin as its aim. When a jailer asks the apostle Paul, “What must I do to be saved?” (Acts 16:30), he is asking not a generic human question but a specifically Christian one. So while it may seem to be an act of generosity to state that Confucians and Buddhists and Muslims and Jews can also be saved, this statement is actually an act of obfuscation. Only Christians seek salvation.
A sports analogy may be in order here. Which of the following—baseball, basketball, tennis, or golf—is best at scoring runs? The answer of course is baseball, because runs is a term foreign to basketball, tennis, and golf alike. Different sports have different goals: basketball players shoot baskets; tennis players win points; golfers sink puts. So if you ask which sport is best at scoring runs, you have privileged baseball from the start. To criticize a basketball team for failing to score runs is not to besmirch them. It is simply to misunderstand the game of basketball. So here is another problem with the pretend pluralism of the perennial philosophy sort: just as hitting home runs is the monopoly of one sport, salvation is the monopoly of one religion. If you see sin as the human predicament and salvation as the solution, then it makes sense to come to Christ. But that will not settle as much as you might think, because the real question is not which religion is best at carrying us into the end zone of salvation
but which of the many religious goals on offer we should be seeking. Should we be trudging toward the end zone of salvation, or trying to reach the finish line of social harmony? Should our goal be reincarnation? Or escape from the vicious cycle of life, death, and rebirth?
Big Questions
Every year I tell my BU undergraduates that there are two worthy pursuits for college students. One is preprofessional—preparing for a career that will put food on the table and a roof overhead. The other is more personal—finding big questions worth asking, which is to say questions that cannot be answered in a semester, or even a lifetime (or more). How do things come into being? How do they cease to be? How does change happen? How does anything stay the same? What is the self? Who (or what) is God? What happens when we die? As predictably as fall follows summer, incoming college students bring into classrooms big questions of this sort. Just as predictably, many professors try to steer them toward smaller things—questions that can be covered in an hour-long lecture, and asked and answered on a final exam. But the students have it right. At least in this case, bigger is better.
Before I came to describe myself as religiously confused, I thought I had the answers to the big questions. I now know I didn’t even have the questions right. If, as Muhammad once said, “Asking good questions is half of learning,” I was at best a half wit.24 Today I try to follow the advice of the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke to “love the questions themselves,” not least this one from the American mystic Walt Whitman:
… what saw you to tell us?
What stays with you latest and deepest? of curious panics
Of hard-fought engagements or sieges tremendous what deepest remains?25
There are all sorts of reasons to try to become more religiously literate. One is civic. It is impossible to make sense of town or nation or world without reckoning with religion’s extraordinary influence, for good and for ill. There are also personal reasons to cultivate religious literacy, including the fact that learning about the world’s religions empowers you to enter into a fascinating, multimillennial conversation about birth and death, faith and doubt, meaning and confusion. American philosopher Richard Rorty has called religion a conversation stopper, and who hasn’t had the experience of a knock on the door and a conversation run aground on the rocks of dogma?26 But religion also serves as a conversation starter. We human beings ask questions. We want to know why. Our happiness depends upon it (and, of course, our misery). To explore the great religions is to stand alongside Jesus and the Buddha, Muhammad and Moses, Confucius and Laozi; it is to look out at a whole universe of questions with curiosity and awe; it is to meander, as all good conversations do, from topic to topic, question to question. Why are we here? Where are we going? How are we to live? Does God exist? Does evil? Do we?
When people ask me how I became a Religious Studies professor (it is an odd profession), I usually say that I discovered the study of religion just as I was losing the Christian faith of my youth, and that this discipline gave me a way to hang in with religious questions (which continued to fascinate me) without the presumption that any answers were close at hand. When, to paraphrase Saint Augustine, I became “a question to myself,” even bigger questions called out to me, and my ongoing conversation with the great religions began.27
One of the most common misconceptions about the world’s religions is that they plumb the same depths, ask the same questions. They do not. Only religions that see God as all good ask how a good God can allow millions to die in tsunamis. Only religions that believe in souls ask whether your soul exists before you are born and what happens to it after you die. And only religions that think we have one soul ask after “the soul” in the singular. Every religion, however, asks after the human condition. Here we are in these human bodies. What now? What next? What are we to become?
This book explores the different answers each of the great religions has offered to the different questions they have asked. It aims to demonstrate how practitioners have lived the biggest of the big questions and to suggest ways that each of us today might also live these questions, not least the deceptively simple yet complex question of how to become a human being.
Chapter One
Islam
The Way of Submission
Most Europeans and North Americans have never met a Muslim, so for them Islam begins in the imagination, more specifically in that corner of the imagination colonized by fear. They see Islam through a veil hung over their eyes centuries ago by Christian Crusaders intent on denouncing Islam as a religion of violence, its founder, Muhammad, as a man of the sword, and its holy book, the Quran, as a text of wrath. Buddhism conjures up the Dalai Lama and his Nobel Peace Prize, but Islam conjures up Osama bin Laden and his assault rifle. So Islam is women imprisoned in black burkas in Pakistan, Taliban rulers in Afghanistan blowing up ancient statues of the Buddha, and Saudi hijackers armed with airplanes, annihilating thousands of innocents for God and for virgins.
Islam has been an on-again, off-again obsession of Westerners for centuries, and not only in the imagination. Muslims took Jerusalem from Christians in 637 C.E., Crusaders took it back in 1099, Saladin seized it on behalf of Islam in 1187, and the British recaptured it on behalf of Christianity in 1917. But Islam first burst into modern Western consciousness with the rise of the Ayatollah Khomeini during the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the capture in Tehran of fifty-two U.S. diplomats who were held hostage for 444 days before being released in 1981. Since 9/11, Islam has been hotly debated worldwide. What role did Islamic piety play in motivating terrorists to hijack four jets and kill close to three thousand people? Is Islam a religion of terror? Are Christianity and Islam now engaged in a clash of civilizations? Or do Muslims stand peaceably alongside Jews and Christians as siblings in one tripartite family of religions?
Unfortunately, this crucial conversation rarely advances beyond a ping-pong match of clichés in which some claim that Islam is a religion of peace while others claim that Islam is a religion of war. One side ignores Quranic passages and Islamic traditions that have been used to justify war on unbelievers, while the other ignores Islam’s just-war injunctions against killing women, children, civilians, and fellow Muslims (hundreds of whom died in the Twin Towers on 9/11). The reason for all this ignoring is our collective ignorance. We are incapable of reckoning with Islam because we know almost nothing about it. Still, when Americans are asked for one word that sums up Islam, “fanatical,” “radical,” “strict,” “violent,” and “terrorism” all spill from their collective imagination.1 In Germany, Spain, and Great Britain, majorities believe there is a fundamental conflict between being a devout Muslim and living in a modern society.2
After 9/11 there was a rush to reconceive of the Judeo-Christian tradition as the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition. And Islam does share much with its predecessors. Jews, Christians, and Muslims are all “people of the book” who believe in one God who speaks to His people through prophets. In fact, the phrase “people of the book” is Islamic (Ahl al-Kitab), used to describe Jews and Christians as brothers and sisters in Allah. The scriptures of these three great religions also share many key concepts. Islam’s most frequently cited articles of faith—belief in one God, angels, scriptures, prophets, Judgment Day, and destiny—can be found in Judaism and Christianity too. The Hebrew Bible, Christian Bible, and Quran also share the patriarch Abraham, who according to all three traditions is the progenitor of monotheism.
Yet sibling relations in this Abrahamic family are dysfunctional at best. In one of the iconic incidents of his life, his “night journey” from Mecca to Jerusalem, Muhammad is said to have prayed with Abraham, Moses, and Jesus. But can Jews, Christians, and Muslims learn to get along in a similar fashion? Or are they destined to face off as bitter enemies in an internecine clash of civilizations? After 9/11, U.S. president George W. Bush and U.K. prime minister Tony Blair spoke repeatedly of Islam as a religion of peace, but revivalist Franklin Graham called Islam “a very evil and wick
ed religion,” and televangelist Jerry Falwell denounced Muhammad as a “terrorist.”3 Muslim groups worldwide responded to 9/11 by denouncing its crimes as anti-Islamic and emphasizing Muslims’ commonalities with Jews and Christians, even as Islamic jihadists proclaimed that Jews and Christians were unbelievers deserving of death in this life and eternal torment in the next.
The events of September 11, 2001, yanked conversations about Islam around to questions of war and terror. But any conversation about Islam must reckon with the word Islam, which is related to the term salaam, which means peace. Muslims greet one another with “Salaam alaykum” (“Peace be upon you”) and respond to this greeting with “Wa alaykum as salaam” (“And upon you be peace”). The word Islam means “submission” or “surrender,” however. So Islam is the path of submission, and Muslims are “submitters” who seek peace in this life and the next by surrendering themselves to the one true God. They do this first and foremost by prostrating themselves in prayer. “Are you prostrate or are you proud?” this tradition asks. Masjid, the Arabic term for mosque, literally means “place of prostration.” And some who surrender to this practice develop a mark on their foreheads that the Quran refers to as a “trace of prostration” (48:29).4
Prayer
Five times a day, 365 days a year, for more than a millennium, Muslims have heeded the call to prayer going out from mosques and minarets in cities and towns scattered across the globe. This invitation, the adhan, is almost always done in Arabic, because according to Muslims it was in Arabic that God delivered His final revelation, the Quran, to his final prophet, Muhammad. It varies a bit across the Muslim world and over the course of the day. Before dawn, for example, there is the reminder that “prayer is better than sleep.” But this is the most common formulation:
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