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

“Rather, sacred history is like a hallowed tree whose roots dig deep into primordial time and whose branches weave in and out of genuine history with little concern for the boundaries of space and time. Indeed, it is precisely at those moments when sacred and genuine history collide that religions are born. The clash of monotheisms occurs when faith, which is mysterious and ineffable and eschews all categorizations, becomes entangled in the gnarled branches of religion.”

Aslan here presents his rationale for retelling the stories of Muhammad that are passed down by the Muslim community without always worrying if they are historically accurate: The story itself is important. However, those stories are not always actual history. Monotheistic religions like Christianity and Islam contradict each other only when one believes they are making objective claims—a mistake, in Aslan’s view, since religious experience can never be captured in words.

“After all, religion is by definition, interpretation; and, by definition, all interpretations are valid.”

This statement encapsulates both Aslan’s religious relativism and foreshadows his commitment to pluralism in Islam and beyond. If all interpretations are valid, then fundamentalists and traditionalist Muslims trying to impose a single interpretation are wrong and oppressive against other Muslims.

“This book is, above all else, an argument for reform. There are those who will call it apostasy, but that is not troubling. No one speaks for God—not even the prophets (who speak about God).”

Here Aslan directly confronts the problem that many members of his Muslim audience will not share his religious views. He doubles down on his willingness to buck long-held beliefs and in turn challenges potential critics to explain why they believe they have the authority to speak for God.

“The doctrine of Muhammad’s monotheistic integrity is an important facet of the Muslim faith because it appears to support the belief that the Revelation he received came from a divine source. Admitting that Muhammad might have been influenced by someone like Zayd is, for some Muslims, tantamount to denying the heavenly inspiration of Muhammad’s message.”

This is a key example of Aslan applying his methodology of approaching “mythic” stories of Muhammad as theological allegories or parables more than as statements of historical fact. In doing so, he can make the argument that, contrary to tradition, Muhammad’s faith developed over time (and implicitly that Islam can as well).

“‘Recite!’ the voice commanded.

‘What shall I recite?’ Muhammad gasped.

The invisible presence tightened its embrace. ‘Recite!’”

This conversation is Aslan’s retelling of the foundational moment of Muhammad’s first vision when he becomes God’s Messenger. This is the traditional story. The command to recite emphasizes that the message he will give (the future Quran) is not his own message or even God’s message in Muhammad’s own words; rather, Muhammad recites God’s direct words.

“Perhaps the reason the traditions are so vague and conflicting is that there was no single momentous revelatory event that initiated Muhammad’s prophethood, but rather a series of smaller, indescribable supernatural experiences that climaxed in a final, violent encounter with the Divine.”

Aslan speculates that the traditions of Muhammad’s prophetic call can be reinterpreted with the idea of development. He, however, never doubts that Muhammad had a genuine religious experience and that the Quran expresses something divine. Islam therefore has a valid base on which modern Muslims can continue to build.

“Muhammad was not yet establishing a new religion; he was calling for sweeping social reform.”

Here, as in other places, Aslan uses the Prologue’s distinction between faith and religion to reject the idea that Muhammad put new beliefs at the core of his preaching. Traditional accounts of Islam see uncompromising monotheism at its heart (expressed regularly by Muslims in the titular phrase “There is no god but God”). Aslan instead places social reform (egalitarian ideals and the protection of the poor and oppressed) at the center of Muhammad’s preaching and suggests that this should be the basis for a modern Islamic Reformation.

“Today, Medina is simultaneously the archetype of Islamic democracy and the impetus for Islamic militancy.”

Medina is where the first Muslim community grew and where Muhammad achieved the political and legal authority to impose new norms. Therefore, Muslims of all stripes look to Medina for guidance on creating an ideal Islamic society. Aslan notes the irony of radically different interpretations claiming to authentically apply the same evidence.

“Perhaps nowhere was Muhammad’s struggle for economic redistribution and social egalitarianism more evident than in the rights and privileges he bestowed upon the women in his community.”

Many of the Western attacks on Islam accuse Islam of being inherently oppressive toward women. Aslan counters this attack by pointing out actions Muhammad took that contradict this simplistic view.

“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 it 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.”

Aslan insists that contemporary Islam is diverse and resists simplistic depictions, including on the contentious issue of women and the custom of Muslim women wearing veils or head coverings. In accord with his idea of Islamic Reformation, he argues that the solution is to acknowledge the right of Muslim women to interpret Islam for themselves.

“War, according to the Quran, is either just or unjust; it is never ‘holy.’”

English writers have traditionally translated the term “jihad” as “holy war.” With the advent of terrorists who use the term to describe their actions, the term and its centrality to Islam have become a contentious issue. Aslan argues that this traditional Western understanding is actually a deep misunderstanding and that Muhammad’s teaching on warfare focuses instead on identifying the limited circumstances in which it is justified.

“Certainly, Muhammad understood that there were distinct theological differences between Islam and the other Peoples of the Book. But he saw these differences as part of the divine plan of God, who could have created a single Ummah if he had wanted to but instead preferred that ‘every Ummah have its own Messenger’ (10:47).”

“People of the Book” refers to Christians and Jews. In discussing Muhammad’s community in Medina and his relation to the Jewish community there, Aslan affirms his views of religious relativism and pluralism. Aslan argues that God intended for different religions to exist to express different encounters with him. Aslan’s evidence is a verse from the Quran, his main source for building his reinterpretation of Muhammad’s message.

“From our privileged position, the succession to Muhammad may seem a chaotic affair full of intimidation and disorder: a rigged process, to say the least. But it was a process, nonetheless; and from the Nile to the Oxus and beyond, nowhere else had such an experiment in popular sovereignty even been imagined, let alone attempted.”

Aslan asserts that democratic ideas such as popular sovereignty (meaning rule by the people) can be in found in Islam from the beginning, contrary to the “clash of civilizations” thesis. He uses hyperbole to make the point (Greeks had experimented with popular sovereignty 1,000 years earlier). Rhetorically, this is an interesting moment in which Aslan tries to balance his sympathy for Ali’s initially failed caliphal candidacy with an assertion of the democratic value of this more Sunni expression of the Ummah.

“The notion that historical context should play no role in the interpretation of the Quran—that what applied to Muhammad’s community applies to all Muslim communities for all time—is simply an untenable position in every sense. Nevertheless, the heirs of Traditionalism have managed to silence most critics of reform, even when that criticism has come from their own ranks.”

In this passage, Aslan takes his narrative of the development of Shariah and the Ulama’s authority and applies it polemically to the modern situation. If his reconstruction of history is right, then the fundamentalist and clerical ideologies in modern Islam contradict historical fact.

“What sets the actions of the Penitents at Karbala apart in the history of religions is that they offer a glimpse into the ways in which ritual, rather than myth, can fashion a faith.”

At several points in the book, Aslan distinguishes between religion based on shared belief and religion based on correct practice. He generally avoids seeing one as bad and the other as good. Here he paints a sympathetic portrait of the origins of Shi’a Islam as part of a shared ritual experience mourning the death of Husayn and their failure to have helped him.

“To this day, Shi’ite law maintains the conviction that ‘whatever is ordered by reason, is also ordered by religion,’ to quote the contemporary Shi’ite legal scholar Hossein Modarressi.”

For Aslan, this contemporary scholar’s assertion about Shi’a jurisprudence is the key reason he admires this branch of Islam. If this is the core of Shi’a thought and if Shi’a is an authentic, equal, and ancient branch in the diversity of Islam, then Muslims like Aslan can validly assert today the superiority to reason over obedience to tradition or clerical authority.

“According to the Sufis, God’s very essence—God’s substance—is love. Love is the agent of creation.”

Sufism is often the most attractive version of Islam to those looking at the religion from the outside. In this passage, Aslan identifies why. Its central value, one admired by many, is love.

“Only by breaking the veil of traditional dualities, which human beings have constructed in order to categorize proper moral and religious behavior, can one achieve fana. The Sufi knows no dualities, only unity. There is no good and evil, no light and dark; there is only God.”

This passage on Sufi mysticism shows how radically it moves in directions other strains of Islam might deem heretical. If God is the ultimate reality, everything else disappears into relative insignificance, including the rules and strictures so beloved by Islamic fundamentalists. Fana means the union with God in self-annihilation.

“By discarding his own qualities and attributes through a radical act of self-annihilation, the Sufi enters fully into the qualities and attributes of God. He does not become God, as fana is so often misunderstood by Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims; rather, the Sufi is drowned in God, so that Creator and creation become one.”

In this passage, Aslan attempts to poetically describe a mystical experience that he admits is ineffable—the sense of union with God. By talking about the Sufi drowning in God, he offers a defense of some Sufis’ apparently heretical statements about becoming God. In traditional Muslim theology, God is totally other and transcendent.

“That is because the fight for Islamic democracy in Iran is merely one front in a worldwide battle taking place in the Muslim world—a jihad, if you will—to strip the Traditionalist Ulama of their monopoly over the meaning and message of Islam and pave the way for the realization of the long-awaited and hard-fought Islamic Reformation.”

In this passionate statement, Aslan sums up the vision to which his reinterpretations of Islamic history have been leading: a holy struggle (jihad) for democracy and against clerical authority. This is what he means by Islamic Reformation. In making this claim, he connects Iranian democratic Muslims with a broader trend of reinterpreting Islam.

“But if one were truly to rely on the Medinan ideal to define the nature and function of the Islamic state, it would have to characterized as nothing more than the nationalist manifestation of the Ummah. At its most basic level, the Islamic state is a state run by Muslims for Muslims, in which the determination of values, the norms of behavior, and the formation of laws are influenced by Islamic morality.”

Aslan argues that the correct interpretation of an Islamic state be rooted in the original idea of egalitarian community, which is what he means by the Ummah. He argues implicitly against both fundamentalists (who interpret Medina differently) and those Westerners who see a state based on Islam as fundamentally oppressive rather than community- and value-based.

“It is pluralism, not secularism, that defines democracy.”

Aslan argues that a society’s shared beliefs (whether religious or not) are the values on which democratic governments are always built, whether this is American Protestantism, European Enlightenment secularism, or Islam. What allows human rights to develop and democracy to evolve is respect for variants of that belief system and for minority belief systems. Therefore, Westerners should not be frightened when they see Middle Eastern countries create constitutions that identify Islam as the founding source of values.

“Yet one need simply recall the Prophet’s warning to those who questioned his egalitarian measures in Medina—‘[They] will be thrown into Hell, where they will dwell forever, suffering from the most shameful punishment’ (4:14)—to recognize that acknowledging human rights in Islam is not simply a means of protecting civil liberties, it is a fundamental religious duty.”

In the Prologue, Aslan promised to address those with a “clash of civilizations” mentality that believe Islam cannot coexist with democracy and human rights. Here he makes his strongest statement that Islam can and must coexist. In quoting the Quran, he also tries to refute Muslims who see democracy and the language of human rights as insidious Western colonialism that has no place in Islamic society.