God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World by Stephen Prothero Read Free Book Online Page A

The hajj both celebrates and reinforces the unity of all Muslims, a unity symbolized by the fact that men on this pilgrimage wear similar white garments. The most celebrated and photographed activity of the hajj is praying at the Kabah shrine, the most sacred place in the Muslim world. All mosques contain a marker called the mihrab pointing worshippers in the direction of Mecca. But in Mecca itself each mihrab points in the direction of the Kabah shrine. According to Muslims, this most sacred of places, which includes a black stone believed to be a meteor, was built by Adam and rebuilt by Abraham. It was desecrated by polytheists who ruled Mecca during Muhammad’s youth but was reconsecrated to the one true God after Muhammad and his followers took Mecca in 630 C.E . 11
    Jihad
    Of all the terms used in the world’s religions, none is as controversial as jihad . Jihad literally means “struggle,” and Muslims have traditionally understood it to point to two kinds of struggles: the spiritual struggle against pride and self-sufficiency; and the physical struggle against the “house of war,” namely, enemies of Islam. The second of these struggles calls for a variety of tactics, including preaching, teaching, and working for social justice. It may also include war.
    Some apologists for Islam have tried to minimize the importance of jihad, and to insulate Islam from its extremists, by arguing that, of these two struggles, the spiritual struggle is higher. A Muslim merchant I met in Jerusalem took this argument further, contending that jihad has nothing whatsoever to do with war because jihad is nothing more than the personal struggle to be good. “Treating me with respect is jihad,” he said. “Not ripping me off is jihad.” The Quran, he added, never even mentions war.
    But the Quran does mention war, and it does so repeatedly. One Quranic passage commands Muslims to “fight,” “slay,” and “expel” in the course of just two sentences (2:190–91), while another says that fighting is “prescribed . . . though it be hateful to you” (2:216). Whether it is better for a religion’s scriptures to largely ignore war (as the Christian New Testament does) or to carefully regulate war (as does the Quran) is an open question, but there is no debating the importance of the themes of fighting and killing in both the Quran and Islamic law. So while it is incorrect to translate jihad as “holy war,” the plain sense of this struggle in both the Quran and contemporary Islamic practice is both spiritual and military.
    One of the challenges for practitioners of any religion is wrestling with elements in their tradition that have been used to justify evil and then bending those elements back toward the good. Many Christians ignore New Testament passages that blame Jews for the death of Jesus. But because some Christians have used these passages to justify hatred, persecution, and murder of Jews, the challenge is to attend to these words with care and then to drain them of anti-Semitic connotations. Similarly, the challenge for Muslims is to attend to passages in the Quran that extremists have used to justify unjust killing. Many Muslims are meeting this challenge. To suicide bombers, they point out that the Quran condemns suicide unequivocally—“Do not kill yourselves” (4:29)—and promises hell for those who do so. To those who kill women or children or civilians, they point out that the Quran condemns mass murder (5:32) and insists on proportionality (2:194). Since the seventh century, Islamic law has been committed to vigorously defending the rights of noncombatants. 12
    According to a recent survey, most Muslims in Nigeria, Lebanon, and Turkey refuse to accept the legitimacy of suicide bombings even in defense of Islam. Unfortunately, in each of these countries significant minorities (42 percent in Nigeria, 34 percent in Lebanon, and 16 percent in Turkey) believe that suicide bombing is justifiable. In the