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

Palestinian territories, 70 percent of Muslims say that suicide bombings meet their criteria for justice. 13
    For all the emphasis on jihad among Islamic extremists and Western neoconservatives, you would think that this is one of Islam’s central concepts. It is not. As the Shahadah intimates, the three keywords in the Islamic tradition are Allah, Muhammad, and the Quran. To see the world as Muslims see it, you need to look through these lenses.
    Allah
    Allah is the Arabic word for God, so Arab-speaking Muslims and Christians alike refer to God as Allah, which literally means “the God” ( al-ilah ). As the article the implies, this God is singular, and the word Muslims employ to underscore this singularity is tawhid , or divine oneness. Christians, of course, are monotheists, but theirs is a soft monotheism in which the one God appears as a Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Islamic monotheism is harder. Like Jews, Muslims reject the Christian and Hindu notion that God can incarnate in a human body. Muslims also join Jews in rejecting visual images of God on the ground that such images, which cannot possibly capture the reality of the divine, tempt us toward idolatry. God is, for Muslims, absolutely and totally transcendent—far beyond all human conceptions of Him. So while Western art has until modern times been preoccupied with the Christ figure, Islamic art has centered on calligraphy, and particularly on the Arabic letters of the Quran.
    God’s names are legion in the Quran. In the Bismillah, the oft-repeated phrase that introduces all but one Quranic sura (chapter 9), Allah is referred to as All Compassionate and All Merciful. Elsewhere in the Quran, Allah is called Forgiving, Generous, Loving, Powerful, Eternal, Knowing, Wrathful, and Just. In one passage He is called “the Sovereign Lord, the Holy One, Peace, the Keeper of Faith, the Guardian, the Majestic, the Compeller, and the Superb” (59:23). Muhammad reportedly said that Allah has ninety-nine names. Some Muslim thinkers divide this list into feminine jalal names (of beauty) and masculine jamal names (of majesty). But unlike many Christians who think of God as male, Muslims worship a deity who is beyond gender—neither male nor female.
    Given this emphasis on tawhid, it should not be surprising that the gravest mistake from a Muslim perspective is shirk . Often translated as “idolatry,” shirk refers to any practice or belief that ignores the unity and uniqueness of God. Polytheism is shirk, but so is likening God to anything that is not God. It is shirk to take money, power, or nation as your ultimate concern. Muslims disagree about whether belief in the Christian Trinity is shirk or the lesser offense of kafir (unbelief), but by either name it must be avoided. Jesus is revered as a prophet in Islam; the calligraphy of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem includes every Quranic passage mentioning Jesus. Muslims insist, however, that Jesus was neither Savior nor Son of God. In fact, the purpose of the Dome of the Rock’s inscriptions is to assert the truth of tawhid over against the falsehood of the Trinity. “There is no god but God. He is One. He has no associate,” these inscriptions insist, adding that since Allah has neither partners nor children, we should “say not ‘Three’.” Or, as the Quran puts it, “Say: ‘He is God, One, God, the Everlasting Refuge, who has not begotten, and has not been begotten, and equal to Him is not any one’ ” (112:1–4).
    Muhammad
    In a book called The 100 : A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History , the top spot went to Muhammad (570–632 C.E. ). 14 This was a controversial choice. Christianity has almost twice as many adherents as Islam, yet Muhammad was ranked ahead of Jesus (who came in second). How could this be?
    First, Muhammad did more for Islam than Jesus did for Christianity. Jesus was a great religious teacher, but he left it to Paul (who is ranked sixth) to establish