Alhassanain(p) Network for Heritage and Islamic Thought

Introduction

To talk about Islam we need to define some terms.Islam is an Arabic word that means "submission to God's will." More specifically, it designates the religion established by the Koran and the Prophet Muhammad. AMuslim is one who has submitted to God's will, or one who follows the religion of Islam. The Koran is a book that God revealed to Muhammad by means of the angel Gabriel. This is the basic story in its most simplified outline. Now we need to fill in some details.

The Koran

Islam today is the religion of about one billion people. It is far from correct to think that all Muslims are familiar with the story of how their religion became established. History as such has never held much interest for most Muslims. What is important about historical events is simply that God works through them. The significant events of the past are those that have a direct impact on people's present situation and their situation in the next world. From this point of view, the one event of overwhelming significance is God's revelation of the Koran. The actual historical and social circumstances in which it was revealed relate to an extremely specialized field of learning that few scholars ever bothered with. The fact that Western historians have devoted a

great deal of attention to this issue says something about modern perceptions of what is real and important, but it tells us nothing about Muslim perceptions of the Koran's significance.

Most of this book will be dedicated to bringing out some of the more obvious implications of the Koran's teachings, including what the Koran has to say about itself. At this point, however, it may be useful to say something about the form of the Koran, since most of our readers have probably never seen the book itself, though some may have seen a translation.

Notice that we make a distinction between the Koran and a translation of the Koran. This is normal procedure in the Muslim view of things, in marked contrast with the Christian view, according to which the Bible is the Bible, no matter what language it may be written in. For Muslims, the divine Word assumed a specific, Arabic form, and that form is as essential as the meaning that the words convey. Hence only the Arabic Koran is the Koran, and translations are simply interpretations. Translations into the local languages of the Islamic world, particularly Persian, were made at a very early date. However, these were not independent books, but rather interlinear commentaries on the meaning of the text and aids to understanding.

The Arabic form of the Koran is in many ways more important than the text's meaning. After all, Muslims have disagreed over the exact interpretation of Koranic verses as much as followers of other religions have disagreed over their own scriptures. One of the sources of the richness of Islamic intellectual history is the variety of interpretations provided for the same verses. Muslim thinkers often quote the Prophet to the effect that every verse of the Koran has seven meanings, beginning with the literal sense, and as for the seventh and deepest meaning, God alone knows that. (The Prophet's point is obvious to anyone who has studied the text carefully.) The language of the Koran is synthetic and imagistic--each word has a richness having to do with the special genius of the Arabic language. People naturally understand different meanings from the same verses.

The richness of Koranic language and its receptivity toward different interpretations help explain how this single book could have given shape to one of the world's great civilizations. If everyone had understood exactly the same thing from the text, the religion would never have spread as widely as it has. The Book had to address both the simple and the sophisticated, the shepherd and the philosopher, the scientist and the artist.

The Koran says that God never sends a message except in the language of the people to whom it is addressed: Revelation conforms to the needs of its recipients. The Koran also tells us that Muhammad was sent to all the world's inhabitants. In order to present a message understandable to everyone in the world, the Koran had to speak a language that everyone could understand. And Islam did in fact spread very

quickly to most of the civilizations of the world, from China and Southeast Asia to Africa and Europe. These people spoke a great diversity of languages--and we mean not only languages of the tongue, but also languages of the heart and mind. The Koran has been able to speak to all of them because of the peculiarities of its own mode of discourse.

Far from being a hindrance to the spread of Islam, as some have imagined, the Arabic language has been an aid. Although the form of the text was fixed, the meaning was left with fluidity and adaptability. People who did not know Arabic were forced to learn the Arabic text and then understand it in terms of their own cultural and linguistic heritage. But no one's interpretation could be final. The next generation could not depend exclusively upon the previous generation's translation and commentary any more than it could ignore the understanding of the text established by the tradition. Each Muslim needs to establish his or her own connection with the scripture. All serious Muslims were forced to enter into this Arabic universe of discourse--a universe, indeed, which they considered divine.

If, on the one hand, the Arabic Koran encouraged diversity of understanding, on the other, it encouraged unity of form. All Muslims recite the same scripture in the same language. They recite their daily required prayers more or less identically. Indeed, given the basic importance of God's revealed Word, recitation is the major way of participating in the Word. Understanding is secondary, because no one can fathom the meaning of God's Word completely. The most important task is to receive and preserve the divine Word. Its Arabic form is allimportant. What one does with the form that one receives follows after receiving it.

A translation of the Koran is not the Koran, but an interpretation of its meaning. The Koran has been translated dozens of times into English. Each translation represents one person's understanding of the text, each is significantly different from the others, and none is the Koran itself. There is but one Word, but there are as many interpretations of that Word as there are readers.

This is not to say that Islam is a cacophony of divergent interpretations--far from it. By and large there is much less diversity of opinion on the fundamentals of faith and practice than, for example, in Christianity. Those who try their hand at interpretation have to undergo a great deal of training to enter into the Koran's world of discourse. Moreover, this training is accompanied by the embodiment of the Koran through recitation and ritual. The Koran possesses an obvious power to transform those who try to approach it on its own terms. This is precisely what Islam is all about--submission to the will of God as revealed in the Koran--but this is not simply a voluntary submission. The Koran establishes an existential submission in people so that they come to express its fundamental message through their mode of being, no matter how "original" their interpretations may be.

Of course, we are speaking of Koranic interpretation in the context of Islamic faith and practice. Many Westerners who have not been sympathetic toward Islam have offered their interpretations of the Koranic text. There is no reason to suppose that such interpretations will help non-Muslims understand the text that reveals itself to Muslims.

The Arabic book that goes by the nameKoran is about as long as the New Testament. In most editions it is between 200 and 400 pages in length. In contrast to the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, the Koran issued from the mouth of a single person, who recited what he heard from the angel Gabriel. Both the Jewish and the Christian scriptures are collections of many books that were written down by a large number of human beings, and opinions differ as to their status as revelation. Even if we say that the books of the Bible were all revealed, they were revealed to different people who did not live at the same time or in the same place.

The Koran is divided into chapters of unequal length, each of which is called asura , a word that means literally "a fence, enclosure, or any part of a structure." The shortest of the suras has ten words, and the longest sura, which is placed second in the text, has 6,100 words. The first sura, the Fatihah ("The Opening"), is relatively short (twenty-five words). From the second sura onward, the suras gradually decrease in length, although this is not a hard and fast rule. The last sixty suras take up about as much space as the second.

The suras are divided into short passages, each of which is called anaya . Some of the longer ayas are much longer than the shortest suras. The word aya is often translated as "verse," but literally it means "sign." This is an extremely significant word, and we will discuss it in some detail.

The content of the Koran is reminiscent of parts of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. The Koran tells stories about many of the same persons and draws conclusions for its listeners' edification. The Koran calls the great human exemplars of the pastprophets and mentions as the most important of these Adam, Abraham, Moses, and Jesus. Moses is mentioned by name more than any other person, followed by Pharaoh, his great enemy, who is the Koranic archetype of human evil.

The Koran elaborates on the ways in which the followers of the prophets, specifically the Jews and the Christians, have or have not lived up to the prophetic messages. It issues instructions on how to live a life pleasing to God. It tells people that they should pray, fast, and take care of the needy. It goes into great detail concerning human interrelationships -- such as laws of inheritance and marriage -- in a manner reminiscent of parts of the Hebrew Bible but foreign to the New Testament. It tells people that they should observe God's instructions purely for God's sake, not for any worldly aims. It warns those who deny God's messages that they will be thrown into the fire of hell,

and it promises those who accept the messages that they will be given the bliss of paradise. Much more than the Judeo-Christian Bible, the Koran talks specifically about God. No matter what the topic may be, it finds occasion to refer the discussion back to God, if only by the device of attaching clauses mentioning God by one or more of his names, such as "And God is the Mighty, the Knowing."

For Westerners, the Koran is an extremely difficult text to appreciate, especially in translation. Even for those who have spent enough years studying the Arabic language to read the original, the Koran may appear as disorderly, inaccurate, and illogical. However, there is enough evidence provided by Islamic civilization itself, and by the great philosophers, theologians, and poets who have commented on the text, to be sure that the problem lies on the side of the reader, not the book. The text is undoubtedly one of the most extraordinary ever put down on paper. Precisely because it is extraordinary, it does not follow people's expectations as to what a book should be.

At the height of the imperialist era, when social Darwinism had convinced a large number of Westerners that they were situated at the peak of human perfection, many scholars looked upon Muslims with disdain for thinking that the Koran was worthy of respect. From that high point of human progress, the Koran appeared as a badly written mishmash of old sayings and superstitions.

Most Western scholarship of a more recent vintage has dropped the assumption of cultural superiority and looked at the Koran as a book that has its own unique genius. Positive evaluations are much easier to find than they were fifty years ago. Nevertheless, major barriers remain that prevent an appreciation of the Koran by non-Muslims or by those who do not have a thorough training in the Arabic language and the Islamic sciences. Even such training does not guarantee access to the book.

Many Muslims, especially those who are native Arabic speakers, feel a proprietary relationship to the Koran. However, it is not uncommon to meet people who know a great deal of the text by heart but have not the slightest understanding of the world view that permeates it. This does not necessarily hinder them from absorbing the Koran's transforming influence. But it does mean that they are unable to express the Koran's meaning in a way that harmonizes with their own tradition.

The nature of the Koranic world view presents a fundamental barrier to understanding the book. It is true that the Koran's view of things has a deep kinship with both the Jewish and the Christian world views, but most people in the modern world have little understanding of those world views either. Simply attending synagogue, church, or mosque does not mean that one sees things any differently from contemporary atheists. Our culture's dominant ways of thinking are taught to us not in our places of worship, but in our media and educational institutions. We may like to think that our education is scientific and unbiased, but

this is a highly biased judgment, as many contemporary thinkers and social critics have told us.1

As a rule, it seems, when people with no grounding in the Islamic world view pick up a translation of the Koran, they have their prejudices confirmed, whatever these may be. No real entrance into the Koranic view of things is possible without some idea of the type of thinking that infuses the text. And that thinking is foreign to the way that we are taught to think in our own culture and in modern education in general.

We do not mean to suggest that people with a modern mindset-which includes practically all English-speaking or modern educated Muslims -- will not be able to understand anything of the Koran, or that they should not bother reading the available translations. First of all, the very fact that the Koran has been translated means that the translator has accomplished the task of bringing it into the range of modern ways of thinking -- and, of course, by that very fact may have severely distorted the meaning. In any case, everyone curious about Islam who cannot read Arabic should certainly read the book in translation. As a rule, it is much more useful to open it at random and read a few pages than to try to go through it systematically.

The Koranic world view is closely tied to the Arabic language, which, like Hebrew and Aramaic (the language spoken by Jesus), belongs to the Semitic family. The internal logic of Semitic languages is very different from that of Indo-European languages such as English, Latin, Sanskrit, and Persian. To begin with, each word derives from a root that is typically made up of three letters. From the three letter root, many hundreds of derived forms can be constructed, though usually only a few score of these are actually used. We will often discuss Arabic words in explaining the meaning of concepts. Without such discussion it would be impossible to suggest the richness of the associated meanings, the difficulty of translating words into English, and the interrelationships among Arabic words that are obvious in the original.

The Messenger of God

The story of Muhammad's life has often been told.2 Few Muslims know all the details available to Western readers. For people who come from a Christian background, where the Gospel accounts of the life of Jesus play a major role in faith, it is well to keep in mind that Muhammad plays second fiddle to the Koran. He is enormously important for Islamic religiosity, but his importance stems from his relationship to the Koran. As F. E. Peters reminds us, repeating a point that has been made by many observers:

The Christian cannot but study the "Good News of Jesus Christ," since the sacred work of Jesus is revealed therein; the Muslim

reads the "Life of the Prophet of God" simply as an act of piety: revelation lies elsewhere .3

Muhammad was born in about 570 C.E. into a respected family in the city of Mecca in Arabia. The Meccans were connected to various Arab tribes, some of whose members still lived as nomads. The city had a certain importance as a trading center. More significantly, it marked the location of the Kaaba, an ancient temple that, tradition said, had been built by Adam and rebuilt by Abraham. In Muhammad's time, the Kaaba was home for a large number of idols representing the gods of the Arab tribes. Four months of the year were designated as sacred months, when tribes were forbidden to war among themselves.

Ancient Arab warfare had no resemblance to modern warfare, although on occasion people were killed. Mainly, it was the means whereby the culture stayed virile and periodically redistributed wealth. It also encouraged attention to each tribe's distinctive characteristics and heritage. The real heroes of battles were sometimes poets rather than swordsmen. Tales exist of tribal warriors drawn up for battle who turned away in despair after a great poet put them to shame.

Muhammad's father died before Muhammad was born, and his mother died when he was six years old. He was raised by relatives. Like many of the city people, he was placed for a time with a nomadic tribe so that he could learn pure language and unspoiled habits. He grew into a respected member of the community. He was known for his honesty, integrity, and trustworthiness. He engaged in trading, and occasionally accompanied caravans to Syira. When he was about twenty-five years of age, his relatively wealthy employer, a widow of about forty years old by the name of Khadijah, proposed marriage. He accepted, and lived happily with her until her death twenty-five years later.

Muhammad was not content with the rituals of the local tribes and preferred a monotheistic current of ancient Arabian religion, whose scattered followers were known ashanifs . He used to go to a cave in the mountains to be alone and meditate, and it was in this cave that an event occurred that was to have enormous repercussions for world history. He is said to have been forty years old, the age at which, in the words of the Koran, "a man reaches full maturity" (46:15).4 While he was meditating, an angel appeared to him, told him that God had chosen him as his messenger, and revealed to him the first few words of the Koran.

Muhammad underwent a period of self-doubt after this, especially when the angel did not return. Khadijah, however, supported him, being convinced that her husband was too stable to have lost his mental balance. Some accounts report that in the absence of the angel, Muhammad reached the point of considering suicide. Finally, the angel returned and confirmed that he was God's messenger, and thereafter

came regularly. Reluctant at first, Muhammad submitted to God's will and began to proclaim his mission.

Little by little, people began to acknowledge the truth of Muhammad's message. What he told them was simple: God had chosen him to warn the people of the last judgment; people must accept God's sovereignty over them and mend their ways. This meant that they had to give God the worship that was his due and to adhere to certain ritual and moral instructions in both their individual and social lives.

Nowadays, many people find it difficult to imagine why such a message would be taken seriously. But Muhammad presented a supporting argument that many of his contemporaries found overwhelming: the language of the divine message; that is, the Koran itself, whose verses kept on arriving piecemeal until shortly before Muhammad's death.

In a society where poetry could be more powerful than swords, the awesome language of the Koran could be very convincing indeed. Not that the Koran was considered poetry, though many of its passages are highly poetical. But practically everyone who heard it had to acknowledge that its language was extraordinarily powerful. This was especially true of the verses that were revealed during the earlier period of the Prophet's career. The Koran was Muhammad's grand argument because it was, in effect, a living miracle.

Muhammad, after all, was a man whom everyone knew. He was recognized as a good man, but there was nothing very special about him. He was, if anything, rather ordinary, even if his honesty and reliability had earned him the title al-Amin, "the trustworthy." Like many of his fellow townspeople, he spoke the pure language of the tribes. But suddenly, this ordinary man began reciting a text of extraordinary power and beauty. Not only did the language surpass anything the Arabs knew -- and remember, this is a society where language and power are intimately intertwined -- but it confirmed something that they had heard before.

The Arab tribes considered themselves descendants of Ishmael, the son of Abraham. They counted Abraham as a prophet of old (though few people had clear ideas of what he had said). Moreover, there were Christians and Jews in the local environment. What Muhammad was saying was not unfamiliar to any of these three groups. The Koran often refers to the objections of the locals to the new message -- they called it "fairy tales of the ancients," or "myths of those who came first." In other words, they reacted by saying that they had heard all this before, and it was nonsense:

The unbelievers say, "This is nothing but the fairy tales of the ancients."(6:25)

"We have been promised this, and our fathers before. This is nothing but the fairy tales of the ancients."(27:68)

What was convincing to the earliest Muslims was a combination of things: The sudden transformation of Muhammad, the incredible eloquence of his language, and the recognition that his message was something they had always known but somehow had stopped taking seriously. Or perhaps all of these remarks represent unwarranted psychologizing on the part of us moderns who have no way to appreciate what really happened in the minds of people living fourteen hundred years ago. After all, we hardly know what our next-door neighbors think. It may be that the best way to understand what happened is to cite, in good Muslim fashion, God's guidance and the resultant human faith. "Faith," as Muslim scholars have often said, "is a light that God casts into the heart of whomsoever He will." It is fundamentally inexplicable.

At first, the powers that be in Mecca simply thought that Muhammad had gone mad. But gradually, as their own friends and relatives started joining his small group, they took notice, and before too long they felt threatened. They did what they could to make life difficult for the converts, and Muhammad and his followers went through persecutions and trials.

The turning point came in the year 622 C.E. A delegation had come to Muhammad from the town of Yathrib, some two hundred miles to the north of Mecca. They were looking for a peacemaker to stop their internal quarrels, and they had heard good things about Muhammads wisdom. They were willing to accept him as a prophet if he would come and rule their town. In the meantime, the Meccan oligarchy had decided that Muhammad had to be killed, because his teachings were becoming more and more of a threat to the status quo. A few hours before they put their plot into effect, Muhammad slipped out of the city with Abu Bakr, a close companion who was destined to take over Muhammad's political role after his death. After about ten days of following a circuitous route to avoid pursuers, the two of them reached Yathrib. Before long, it was called Madinat al-Nabi, "the city of the Prophet," or simply al-Madina ( Medina), "the city."

The Prophet's move to Medina, calledal-hijra (the emigration), was the grand turning point of his career. From then on, with some minor setbacks, the religion flourished. Islam was now established; a new civilization had been born. Hence the hijra is taken as the first year of the Islamic calendar. We will indicate dates both according to the hijra year (A.H.,anno hegirae ) and the Common Era (C.E.). Thus Muhammad died in the year 10/632, Constantinople (soon to be called Istanbul) fell to the Turks in 857/1453, and Napoleon invaded Egypt, marking the beginning of the colonial era in northern Africa, in 1213/ 1798.

The ten years in which the Prophet lived in Medina was a period of consolidation. By the time of his death, Mecca had surrendered to the Muslims without bloodshed --"poetry" had won another battle -- and all of Arabia had embraced the new religion.

The consolidation of Islam that took place during the Medinan period meant that the focus of the Koranic verses that were being revealed shifted from threats of doom and promises of salvation to concrete instructions on how life should be lived in keeping with God's wisdom. Muhammad acted as prophet, king, judge, and spiritual counselor to the whole community. Hence he was the recipient of the divine message, he issued commands concerning political and social goals, he decided disputes and handed out punishment or pardon for transgressions of God's law, and he advised people in their personal attempts to gain nearness to God.

In short, the Muslims of Medina lived their lives in keeping with God's instructions as detailed by Muhammad. In later times, this period was looked back upon as Islam's golden age. God's messenger was present, and hence the truth was near at hand. There could be no differences of opinion, because Muhammad himself explained the Koran's meaning.

Just as people memorized and wrote down the text of the Koran, so did they memorize and record what Muhammad said and did. The records of his words and the reports about his activities (and the activities that he sanctioned) came to be calledhadiths . We will refer to the whole body of this literature as the Hadith, and to each individual saying or report as a hadith. Both the sayings of Muhammad recorded in the Hadith and the verses of the Koran are words that issued originally from Muhammad's mouth. However, Muhammad himself always distinguished carefully between his words and God's words, and all Muslims have preserved this distinction, whose importance can hardly be overemphasized.

God's words are eternal and uncreated, while the words of his messenger are inspired by God, no doubt, but they must not be confused with God's own words. The Koran always takes pride of place. Muslims say and write, "God says," when referring to the Koran, but "the Prophet said," when referring to the Hadith. There is also a special category of Hadith in which Muhammad quotes the words of God. Then the formula reads, "Muhammad said that God says." These are often called hadith qudsi (holy sayings). They are totally distinct from the Koran, since they are Muhammad's sayings as contrasted with God's eternal Word. Often, however, they are given special respect -- as indicated by the term"holy sayings" -- because Muhammad possessed inspired knowledge about God's words.5

Medinan Islam was a way of life that did not exclude any human affair from God's domain. It may be that some affairs were considered indifferent, but this needed to be established by God and his prophet. Its indifference was itself a divine ruling. In later periods, the sense that everything had to be brought within the guidelines of the religion never left the Muslim consciousness. During most periods, governments pursued their own business with the usual worldly goals in view. Muslims accepted this as a fact of life, but they did not approve of it. In modern

times, many political movements in Islamic countries have appealed to this time-honored sense that government should be run with God's guidance. Whether or not those in charge of the modern Islamic goverments have really wanted to establish Islamic norms, and whether or not they have succeeded in doing so, are different issues altogether.

After the death of the Prophet, Islam underwent many growing pains and internal conflicts. The most significant of these was probably the split between the majority of Muslims and a minority over the issue of the Prophet's successor. The two groups came to be called the Sunnis and the Shi'ites.

When Muhammad died, a small group that centered around Ali and his wife, the Prophet's daughter Fatima, held that the Prophet had chosen Ali to lead the community after his death. But the majority took no notice, and the elders of the community met together and chose Abu Bakr as the Prophet's successor. His duty would be to rule over the community and act as its judge on the basis of God's law. The small circle around Ali at first refused to accept Abu Bakr as legitimate, but eventually Ali himself swore allegiance to him, and his partisans (shi'a, the source of the term Shi'ite) followed suit. Nevertheless, Ali did not give up his claim. In the Shi'ite view, the right order was only restored when the community selected Ali as the fourth successor of the Prophet in the year 35/656. But in 40/661 he was murdered by political opponents, and this marked the beginning of the period of the great hereditary caliphates, first the Umayyads and then the Abbasids.

Ali is recognized by Shiites as the first legitimate Imam (leader) of the community, while the Sunnis consider him the fourth of the four "rightly guided" caliphs (khalifa , "successor"). After him, political considerations took the dominant role in the dynasties that ruled the Islamic world. Islamic teachings had a say in determining a ruler's legitimacy, but goverment policy had no necessary connection with Islamic ideals.

Within one hundred years of the Prophet's death, Muslims had become a ruling elite throughout a good portion of the civilized world, from southern Spain to India. Political rule did not mean that all the subject peoples accepted Islam; far from it. The Koranic principle, "There is no compulsion in religion"( 2:256), meant that no pressure was brought on local people to convert to the new religion. Outside the Arabian peninsula, most people were Christians, Jews, or Zoroastrians. Hence they were recognized as recipients of revealed books with the right to their own religious institutions. Moreover, the Muslim ruling elite did not encourage the subject peoples to convert, since it diluted their own privileges as Muslims.

Within three or four hundred years, Islam had become not only the dominant political power, but also the dominant popular religion in a region extending from Spain and North Africa into the Indian subcontinent. This, in any case, is another story, which should be sought in any of the many books that have been devoted to the history of Islam.

The Hadith of Gabriel

Any explanation of the beliefs, practices, and institutions that make Islam a major religion can benefit from a model that makes sense in terms of modern scholarship and has a basis in traditional Islamic learning. When we began teaching introductory courses on Islam several years ago, we chose as our model a famous and authentic hadith that Muslim thinkers have often employed for similar purposes in classical texts.6 Typically, we ask our students to memorize the hadith, in the fashion of traditional Islamic learning. Even if they do not memorize it, by the end of the course they will find it hard to forget, since it contains in capsule form everything that they have learned in the semester. It also outlines everything that is written in this book. This is the text:

'Umar ibn al-Khattab said: One day when we were with God's messenger, a man with wry white clothing and very black hair came up to us. No mark of travel was visible on him, and none of us recognized him. Sitting down before the Prophet, leaning his knees against his, and placing his hands on his thighs, he said, "Tell me, Muhammad, about submission."

He replied, "Submission means that you should bear witness that there is no god but God and that Muhammad is God's messenger, that you should perform the ritual prayer, pay the alms tax, fast during Ramadan, and make the pilgrimage to the House if you, are able to go there."

The man said, "You have spoken the truth." We were surprised at his questioning him and then declaring that he had spoken the truth. He said, "Now tell me about faith."

He replied, "Faith means that you haw faith in God, His angels, His books, His messengers, and the Last Day, and that you haw faith in the measuring out, both its good and its evil."

Remarking that he had spoken the truth, he then said, "Now tell me about doing what is beautiful."

He replied, "Doing what is beautiful means that you should worship God as if you see Him, for even if you do not see Him, He sees you."

Then the man said, "Tell me about the Hour." The Prophet replied, "About that he who is questioned knows no more than the questioner." The man said, "Then tell me about its marks." He said, "The slave girl will give birth to her mistress, and you will see the barefoot, the naked, the destitute, and the shepherds vying with each other in building." Then the man went away. After I had waited for a long time, the Prophet said to me, "Do you know who the questioner was,

'Umar?" I replied, "God and His messenger know best." He said, "He was Gabriel. He came to teach you your religion." 7

To begin explaining the meaning of this hadith -- a task that will occupy us until the end of this book -- let us flesh it out by adding some background information that would be obvious to the original listeners but not to a reader situated many centuries and miles away.

Try to imagine the situation. The Messenger of God, at the time the greatest human being on the face of the earth (as far as his companions were concerned -- and the historical record bears them out), is sitting at the edge of an oasis in Medina with a group of his companions, that is, people who have accepted that he is the mouthpiece of God. Suddenly a man appears whom no one recognizes.

Medina, at the time, is a tiny community in the midst of the desert (with a population of several hundred or perhaps a few thousand). Everyone knows everyone. If a traveler arrives, it is no small event, given the difficulty of travel and the small population. Everyone learns about new arrivals within hours. The system of personal relationships established by familial, tribal, and other bonds ensures that news is spread around much more efficiently than can ever be accomplished by today's six o'clock news. A man appears whom no one knows, but no one has arrived in town for several days, except the uncle of so and so, whom several of them have already seen.

Not only do the companions fail to recognize the man, but he also shows no signs of travel, which is very strange. If they do not know him, then he must be a newly arrived traveler. Someone would not be able to freshen up that quickly after several days of travel in the desert, even if he had traveled only by night on the back of a camel. (You think you feel bad after six hours in a car -- think of six days in the hottest and dustiest environment you can imagine, with no air conditioned rest stops for coffee or soda.)

As soon as the man arrives, everyone is all ears. Who can this person be, and how did he get here without our knowing about it? Next strange fact: The man is obviously on familiar terms with the Prophet of God. He comes right up to him and kneels down in front of him, his knees against the Prophet's knees. Notice that the Prophet himself is kneeling, not in prayer as modern Westerners might kneel, but simply because kneeling is, for most Orientals, the simplest and at the same time the most respectful way to sit. Remember that, even in houses, chairs were unheard of. People sat on the ground, as they still do in much of the world -- and this includes some of the richest and most sophisticated parts of the world, such as Japan. For most of the ancient world, chairs were the prerogative of kings.

You would not go right up to a person and kneel with your knees touching his unless he were, for example, your brother or a very close friend. The normal procedure, even if the person sitting there was just

an ordinary person, would be to greet him from a respectful distance and keep the distance. But the stranger from the desert obviously knows Muhammad very well. He even places his hands upon Muhammad's thighs, which would be an unheard of piece of effrontery if the man were a stranger. Then the man addresses Muhammad by his name, whereas people always address him by his title, Messenger of God. The man begins talking without introduction as if he had been part of the conversation all along.

Once Muhammad answers the man's first question, the man says, "You have spoken the truth." 'Umar remarks, "We were surprised at his questioning him and then declaring that he had spoken the truth." This is an enormous understatement. More likely, the companions were flabbergasted. What kind of insolence is this? To come up to God's own messenger and begin to grill him, and then to pat him on the head as if he were a school boy! This is inconceivable. But then again, the companions took their clues from Muhammad. He was acting as if all this were perfectly normal and natural. What could they do but follow his example?

After the man leaves, Muhammad waits awhile, allowing his companions to think about this strange event. Finally, he tells them what had happened. They would not soon forget, and you can be sure that by that night, everyone in Medina had heard about Gabriel's appearance. No one was supposed to forget about this visit, for the Prophet had just presented them with their religion in a nutshell. If they ever wanted to know what was essential in Islam, all they had to do was remember the strange events of this day.

Religion

The hadith of Gabriel provides us with a picture of the religion of the followers of Muhammad. The first three questions and their answers suggest that in the Islamic view, religion comprises three main elements. We will be referring to these elements as dimensions. The fourth question raises another issue that also needs to be taken into account, and we will also deal with that. But let us first establish a picture of Islam as a three-dimensional reality. The issue raised by the fourth question can be set aside for the moment.

The first dimension of Islam is submission, and it comprises a series of activities, such as bearing witness, praying, and fasting. The word for submission is islam, the same word that is used to refer to the religion as a whole. We will see later that islam has other meanings as well. In this context, it refers to the activities that a Muslim must perform.

The second dimension is faith. The Prophet does not tell his listeners what faith itself is, no doubt because he assumes that they already know. Rather, he tells that what the objects of their faith should be.

What is it that they must have faithin ? The answer is God, the angels, the scriptures, the messengers (i.e., the prophets), and so on.

The third dimension is doing what is beautiful. The Prophet does not look at the activity itself, but the motivation for the activity. An act cannot be beautiful if it is done without the awareness of God. God is the criterion for the beautiful, the good, and the right.

We will discuss the Prophet's answers in detail, and we will find out why it had to be Gabriel, among all the angels, who appeared. But first, we will look at a single word in this hadith, one that deserves special attention because it is employed to describe the whole. Muhammad, having just answered four questions, calls the four answers "your religion." The Arabic word he uses isdin , and the translation as "religion" is more or less standard. However, it may not be the most appropriate translation in the context. The English wordreligion itself is notoriously vague, especially among people who make it their business to study religion. We cannot enter into the problems on the English side, but we can try to understand what, in this context, this worddin would have meant to the Prophet and his listeners.

Our primary resource for understanding the Arabic language employed by Muhammad is the Koran and the various learned commentaries that have been written upon it. When Muhammad employed a word that is found in the Koran, he always had the Koranic meaning in mind. We will first took at dictionary definitions, then at the Koranic usage.

The root meaning of the worddin is to obey, to be submissive, to serve. A closely related word, written the same way in Arabic script, isdayn , which means "debt." The connection between obedience and debt is not too hard to understand. If you lend someone some money and the person owes it to you, he is obliged to submit the money to you. We are dealing here with a society where personal relationships are everything. We are not talking about owing money to an impersonal entity like a bank. Rather, the person who lends the money is a fellow member of your community, and everyone knows that you are now indebted to him. Moreover, in this kind of community, a person's word is the person's honor, and to live without honor is to be less than human. Hence, when you owe someone something in the context of close personal relationships and the preservation of the honor, not only of the individual, but also of the family and the tribe, you are forced to be deferential toward that person. In effect, to be indebted to someone is, to some extent, to submit to that person's wishes. And, conversely, to submit to someone is to acknowledge that you owe something to that person.

The Arabic dictionaries provide us with a number of possible English synonyms fordin , words that suggest the range of its meanings: obedience, abasement, submission; religion, that is, the means whereby one serves God; belief in the unity of God; the religion of Islam; a particular law, statute, or ordinance; a system of usages, rites, ceremonies, etc., inherited from the past; custom, habit; way, course, mode of activity; management of affairs.Din also has meanings that bring it close to the sense ofdayn . Hence it can signify repayment, requital, recompense; retaliation; a reckoning; and the Day of Reckoning, the final judgment in the next world.

The worddin has other meanings as well, but these few give us an idea of the problems that arise as soon as we translatedin as religion. When Muhammad said, "He came to teach you your din," what exactly did he mean? The above definitions are helpful. He certainly meant "your religion" is "Islam," understood as the designation for the path set down by the Koran.

Muhammad also certainly had in the back of his mind -- since it is demanded by the choice of this specific word -- the connection withdayn . This connection suggests some of the moral weight that he wanted to give to what he was explaining to his companions. Muslims look at Islam as a debt that they owe to God. A debt is something that they are morally obliged to pay back. They are indebted to God first because he gave them existence and second because he offered them eternal happiness. There is a tremendous sense of "oughtness" carried in the worddin when it is applied to Islam. It is the only moral thing to do, or rather, the only human and humane thing to do. Just as a person who borrows something and then runs out on the debt has no honor and is not even worthy of being called a human being, so also someone who shirks the religion is less than human and beneath contempt. If the hadith of Gabriel describes "your religion," so also it describes what you owe to God, and God is reality itself. We will see shortly that several of the other definitions that the dictionary offers fordin easily fit into the category of what Muslims understand by the religion of Islam, but let us first try to gain a rough idea of what the Koran itself says aboutdin , a word that it uses in ninety instances.

In the broadest sense, the Koran uses the term for a set of rules and regulations, or a collection of norms for correct activity. In this broad sense, we do not know if the religion in question is right or wrong, true or false, until we look at the context. For example, Joseph employs a ruse to keep his brother Benjamin with him in Egypt, because "he could not have taken his brother according to the king's religion" (12:76). Translators usually render the termdin in this verse as "law," thereby suggesting the modern distinction between sacred and profane. But -given what we know about ancient world views in general and the Egyptian world view in particular, there is no reason to suggest that the king's law was outside his religion, or that his religion was any different from his law.

In another example of the general use of the term, the Koran employs it to refer to the ways followed by the people of Pharaoh, and Pharaoh is the Koran's most important human villain. Pharaoh says to his council:

Let me slay Moses, and let him call to his Lord. I fear that he may change your religion, or that he may cause corruption to appear in the land (40:26)

In other words, if you listen to what Moses says, you will leave the religion that we all follow, and thereby our social fabric -- the rules and regulations that we follow in order to maintain harmony and stability -- will be ruined.

In a slightly more specific sense, the worddin refers to the message brought by all the prophets, including Muhammad. Thus the Koran addresses Muhammad and his adherents with the words that appear below. Notice the distinction between "you" (plural) and "thou" (singular) in the verse. Throughout this book, we will usually preserve the Koranic distinction between second person singular and plural, because it often adds an important nuance to the verse, as in the following. Notice also the switch between first and third person references to God, a peculiarity of the Koranic style: 8

God has laid down for you as religion that with which He charged Noah, and what We have revealed to thee, and that with which We charged Abraham, Moses, and Jesus: "Perform the religion, and scatter not regarding it."(42:13)

What is this religion that God has set down as a duty for Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad? In the Islamic view, these prophets share the declaration, "There is no god but God," along with the worship of the one God who is designated by this declaration. This declaration and worship are calledtawhid , which means literally "the assertion of God's unity." Tawhid is a major topic of this book. The Koran says specifically that all God's messengers were charged with tawhid :

And We never sent a messenger before thee save that We revealed to him, saying, "There is no god but I, so worship Me. "(21:25)

In the Koranic account of the prophet Joseph's imprisonment, Joseph gives the following advice to his fellow prisoners. In effect, he defines right religion astawhid :

Judgment belongs only to God He has commanded that you worship none but Him. That is the right religion, but most people do not know. (12:40)

The wordislam , likedin , has a wide range of meanings, as we will see later. In a broad sense, it designates the submission of every prophet to

God. Abraham in particular is looked upon as having been perfect in his submission:

When [ Abrahams] Lord said to him, "Submit," he said, "I have submitted myself to the Lord of the worlds." And Abraham charged his sons with this, as did Jacob: "My sons, God has chosen the religion for you, so do not die unless you haw submitted "(2:132)

In this and other passages of the Koran, "the religion" refers totawhid and submission to God in the most general sense. It includes both Islam and pre-Islamic religions. What is especially important in such verses is that this religion has been established by God and that it functions for God's purposes. This suggests the sense of several Koranic verses that insist that religion must belong to God. In other words, any religion -- such as that of the Koranic Pharaoh -- that was not established by God is not a true religion. Likewise, any religion that people do not live up to in God's terms (not their own terms) cannot function as a true religion:

What, do they desire another religion than God's, while to Him has submitted [islam] whoso is in the heavens and the earth, willingly or unwillingly? (3:83)

God says: "Take not two gods. He is only one God So fear Me!" To Him belongs all that is in the heavens and the earth. His is the religion forever (16:51-52)

Worship God, making thy religion pure for Him. Does not pure religion belong to God? (39:2-3)

Still more specifically, "religion" refers to that form of religion that God revealed through Muhammad:

Today I have perfected your religion for you, and I have completed My blessings upon you, and I have approved for you Islam as a religion. (5:3)

It is in this sense that the word is employed in the hadith of Gabriel. "Religion," or more properly, "the religion" (al-din ), is a set of teachings, includingtawhid and submission to God, that God perfected for Muhammad and his followers. In other words, their religion has been given a seal of completion and approval by God himself.

The Koran also uses the worddin to refer to specific prescriptions or regulations of Islam. Thus, for example, verse 24:2 refers to the punishment specified for those who engage in fornication as "God's religion."

In conclusion, we can suggest that when the Prophet said to his companions, " Gabriel . came to teach you your religion," he was defining, first of all the Islamic idea of Islam itself. By implication, however, he was also telling us how Islam understands religion in general. Certainly, any authentic religion will have to have the three dimensions that the Prophet mentioned. Hence, while we will be discussing Islam's vision of itself, we will also be discussing -- sometimes explicitly but more often only implicitly -- Islam's vision of a more universal reality, called religion," of which Islam is but a single instance.

Three Dimensions of Islam

We said that religion in the Islamic view has three dimensions. These areislam (submission),iman (faith), andihsan (doing what is beautiful). The translations of the three terms are problematic, and we will need to discuss these terms in more detail. For the moment, however, we want to look at the metaphor that is implicit in the use of the worddimension .

When we say that Islam has three dimensions, we are implying that it is helpful to think of Islam in geometric imagery. The spatial reality with which we have contact has three dimensions (leaving aside the fourth dimension for the moment). It is possible to study physical reality in one-, or two-, or three-dimensional terms, and it is possible to study the first dimension independent of the second, or the first and the second independent of the third. In other words, we can study reality purely in terms of lines, or we can study it in terms of surfaces and area, or we can study it taking depth into account as well.

Each of Islam's three dimensions can be studied independently. For the purposes of our research, we might ignore the fact that a given dimension does not offer a complete view of reality. The "mathematical operations" are simplest this way, so it is the route that most people are tempted to follow. If we pay attention to too many things at once, it becomes impossible to draw a picture that makes any sense.

We will deal with Islam's three dimensions separately, but we will suggest all along that this is simply a heuristic device. The point is that Islam's self-understanding is complex, and that in order to gain the whole picture, we need to develop it a little at a time. We separate out the dimensions only to suggest that they fit together as a whole. In the same way, we talk about height, breadth, and depth only to suggest that space needs to be considered in terms of all three before we can have a proper picture.

We have arranged the three dimensions in the order in which they are found in the specific text of the hadith of Gabriel that we have cited, though other arrangements would also have been possible.9 We think that this arrangement is particularly appropriate, because it begins

with what is most obvious and easy of access. Here, however, the spatial metaphor becomes less and less helpful, and one could more profitably think in terms of dimensions of human existence.

We can think of human beings in terms of three basic dimensions or domains or levels of selfhood. The most external dimension is connected to what appears. People do things, and these actions can be analyzed and discussed without reference to the people themselves. We may look simply at the activity: Someone hits a home run that decides the World Series; someone wins the lottery; someone collects his pay check. What is important in the first place is the act or event -- we can study personalities and motivations later, if we care to at all.

We may also wish to take into account the inner dimensions of a person. There are basically two questions that we can ask, one having to do more with knowledge, and the other having to do with intention and will. When we look at an activity, we might be interested in what sort of understanding lies behind the activity. How many times have we heard it said -- parents in particular are fond of this line -- "How could you have been so stupid?" Someone does something, and it is clear that only ignorance of the actual situation could have led to the act. However, a major problem arises as soon as we ask, "How does one gain knowledge of the actual situation?" How can the "actual situation" be defined? Should we define it in terms of the person and the act, the social or cultural context, the biological determinants, the historical moment? What about the structure of the cosmos, the structure of the human psyche? What about God, angels, devils? Knowledge of which of these, if any, will provide us with an understanding of the actual situation? This then is a dimension of human experience having to do with knowledge, understanding, and world view. Islam approaches these issues from the vantage point of faith, for reasons that will become clear.

We can also ask a very different set of questions about the inner dimension of human beings and their activity: What was the motivation? What choices were involved? What was the intention behind the act? People may well have all the requisite knowledge, but then do things that others consider unacceptable. Moreover, they may perform these acts precisely because they know that they are unacceptable. The question of motivation frequently arises in courts of law. If someone meant to do what was done, it is a crime. However, if the person did not intend to commit a crime, then the whole issue has to be examined more carefully.

Religion is a right or correct way. The hadith of Gabriel suggests that in the Islamic understanding, religion embraces right ways of doing things, right ways of thinking and understanding, and right ways of forming the intentions that lie behind the activity. In this hadith, the Prophet gives each of the three right ways a name. Thus one could say that "submission" is religion as it pertains to acts, "faith" is religion as it

pertains to thoughts, and "doing the beautiful" is religion as it pertains to intentions. These three dimensions of religion coalesce into a single reality known as Islam.

In the living actuality of a person, we differentiate acts, understanding, and intentions only for our own purposes. We are dealing with a single human personality for which this differentiation does not necessarily have any meaning. People simply live out their lives. Then we, as external observers, may divide what we observe or fail to observe into different categories.

In the same way, Muslims or followers of other religions live out their religions. Theologians, philosophers, historians, psychologists, and other scholars may categorize. In doing so, they distort the whole. Nevertheless, by dividing things up, they may give us what we need in order to put things back together again and come to a fuller understanding.

Islamic Learning

In discussing how religion is defined in the Islamic context, we left out institutions, such as a priesthood or a church. Nowadays, many people identify religion with everything that the church does, or with everything that keeps priests busy. Islam has neither churches nor priests.

In place of churches, Islam has mosques. These are locally established places of worship without any central authorities that might allow us to talk about "the Mosque" as people talk about "the Church."

In place of priests, Islam hasulama . Priests, in a religion like Christianity, perform a function that ordinary people cannot perform. In the case of Islam, there are no religious functions that cannot be performed by every adult member of the community. At the same time, certain Muslims have a specifically religious vocation. Everyone has heard ofayatollahs andmullahs . Without trying to sort out the different names that are used, let us just say that the generic term for individuals who play a special religious role isulama (Arabic 'ulama ' plural of 'alim ). The word simply means "the learned." Those who devote their lives to Islamic learning come to play a special role because they preserve and maintain the knowledge that the tradition needs in order to survive. Fundamentally, their function is to be -- as contemporary jargon has it--"resource people." They have gained specialized knowledge about Islam and are willing to employ it for the good of the community. They are much more like rabbis than priests or ministers.

No ordination is involved in becoming one of the ulama. Anyone who studies may become learned, and, to the extent that people make their knowledge available to others, they will become known as learned people, that is, ulama. Women rarely become ulama, but there are enough examples of famous women ulama to show that there have been

no theoretical barriers to their gaining the requisite knowledge. There have always been certain social barriers, but those were not necessarily supported by the basic religious teachings.

To be a person of learning is a relative affair. As the Koran puts it, "Above everyone who is learned [or, has knowledge] is someone who knows [more]" (12:76). In a small village, someone may have gone off to the big city for a year or two and come back with a smattering of Koran and Hadith. That would make him a learned person in the eyes of the villagers, and they would be happy to have him lead their prayers and provide them with instructions on how to do things in keeping with God's commandments as provided by the Koran.

In Islamic cities that were great centers of learning, such as Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad, Istanbul, Najaf, and Delhi, there were many classes of ulama, and each class was ranked in degrees. Not that there was necessarily anything formal about this ranking, but it was not difficult to find out who was a good scholar and who was not.

The great centers of learning were supported by pious donations. In many-of them, anyone could become a student, and anyone could teach. It would be impossible in the Islamic context to discourage learning, given that the Prophet said, "The search for knowledge is incumbent upon every Muslim." A student was typically called "a searcher (for knowledge)." To become a student, you found out when and where a class was being taught and you went. Often classes were held at a certain pillar in a large mosque. Once you started attending, no one would pay any attention to you unless you showed yourself. You were free to join the discussion, but if you did not know what you were talking about, you would be laughed out of court, or simply told by the other students to shut up. There were no degrees offered. However, if you spent a few months or years with a given teacher and mastered the book he was teaching, he would write out a certificate giving you formal permission to teach it. One of the questions that is asked about ulama when people want to find out how much they know is what certificates of permission they have, and from whom. The source of the permission was extremely important, since some scholars handed out certificates easily, while others were much stricter.

Many students were sent to a largemadrasah (Arabicmadrasa , "place of study! in the city by their teachers in the towns or villages, and they were not sent if they did not have the qualifications. Simply to have an introduction from known teachers was often enough to secure room and board--there was no tuition. But someone who came in off the street could also receive financial help. Teachers were always happy to have a talented student and, once he showed himself to be capable, would arrange support for him.

Not only could anyone be a student, but also anyone could teach. This does not mean that everyone would have a stipend from the madrasah. It simply means that you could go into a mosque and sit down by a pillar

with a book, and tell anyone who would listen that you were there to teach. A good teacher could quickly gain a gathering and before too long--politics permitting, of course--be given a stipend. But to be a good teacher, you had to be learned, and this was a place where learning was put to the test. A person who was simply making claims to learning would quickly be found out, and then he would have no students.

Although what we have said might suggest that Islamic learning was localized in madrasahs and mosques, in fact it was an informal affair that could be carried on anyplace. No degrees were offered, so the motivation was the learning itself (contrast this with the situation in the modern university--if no degrees were offered, most students would quickly disappear). Learning was looked upon as a religious activity, and all people in society were expected to participate to the extent of their abilities. Since there were no formal institutions, the opportunity to study the religion was available in one form or another to everyone. Jonathan Berkey has described how this worked in his fascinating study of the transmission of knowledge in medieval Cairo. As he writes in his conclusion:

Education in the medieval period was never framed in any system of institutional degrees Despite the proliferation of schools devoted to the religious sciences, instruction was never limited to particular institutions: it could go on wherever a scholar sat down, and could be shared by all those to whom he chose to speak. It was its personal and oral character that, in some form, made education accessible to all. 10

Islamic learning can be divided into three major categories, represented by Islam's three dimensions, and into numerous subcategories, especially in the case of the second dimension. The majority of the ulama hardly get past right activity (the first dimension), which itself is an enormously complex and detailed field of learning. If you feel like dedicating your life to it, you can easily do so. Moreover, the ulama who specialize in the first dimension are those who usually become most closely involved with the affairs of this world, because they tell people about right and wrong activity. In a traditional Islamic society, they are the legal experts and the judges. They are typically referred to as jurists (fuqaha' ). Just as lawyers have a great deal of power and influence in Western society, so also did the jurists in Islamic society, often functioning as advisors to kings on legal matters. In fact, the jurists played such an important role in Islamic society that, in the minds of most Muslims, to say "ulama" is to say "jurists," even though the termulama has a much broader meaning.

The foundation of all Islamic learning is the Koran. The wordtafsir , meaning Koran commentary or exegesis, is itself a specialized field of

learning. Typically, a Koran commentary provides a verse by verse explanation of the whole book, but often scholars wrote commentaries on single suras or on selected portions of the Koran. Scholars wrote all sorts of commentaries, depending upon their own interests. Some commentaries simply explained the literal meaning of the text by expanding upon it in detail either in Arabic, or in one of the other Islamic languages such as Persian or Turkish. There were commentaries that focused on grammar, historical background, juridical implications, theological teachings, moral edification, allegorical meanings, and so on. Any scholar could write a Koran commentary from the perspective of his own specialty and explain his own understanding of the text. But everyone recognized that the meanings of the Koran were inexhaustible.11

If, from one point of view, investigation of the meaning of the Muslim scripture is calledtafsir , from another point of view, all Islamic learning represents Koran commentary. However, jurisprudence, for example, focuses on the systematic elaboration of Koranic teachings on activity. Hence the Koran becomes the primary source or "root" (asl) of jurisprudence. Building on the Koranic teachings and adding to them the Hadith and certain other sources, the jurists established a major branch of Islamic learning. A similar thing was done in other fields, such as theology and ethics. Some fields of learning, such as philosophy, have a less obvious relationship to the Koran, but even there, one can make a case for saying that the Koran is the primary inspiration.

In the modern West, most people think of scripture as something one reads for edification, for learning about God and right living. In the Islamic context, the Koran was much more than that. Learning the Koran was the primary goal of traditional education, and it normally began early in life. No one thought it important for children to understand the meaning of the Koran--after all, even adults, even great theologians, understand only snippets of its total significance. What was important in education was memorization of the Word of God. The actual, spoken words should be learned by rote such that their recitation becomes second nature.

Note that we say "recitation." The text was recited, not simply read out loud. The Koran should always be pronounced carefully, according to the rules of beautiful enunciation and expression. Many children can be found in the Islamic world who can recite--sing, it might seem to us--dozens of chapters of the Koran if not the whole book, without understanding a single word. No one thinks this strange or unfortunate. Education begins by setting up a foundation upon which a structure can be erected. The foundation has to be built slowly but firmly. Children have their whole lives ahead of them to understand the book. And if they had ten lifetimes ahead of them, that still would not be enough, because this is the infinite and eternal Word of God.

In the modern West, most people seem to think that children should be allowed to learn at their own pace and their own level. The material

that they are taught is--in one word--infantile. In traditional Islamic education, it was recognized that the enormous capacity of children for rote learning is a divine gift that should not be wasted through teaching them trivia. In any case, life is full of trivia, and children will absorb enough of that on their own. The relatively small amount of time that they can devote to formal education should be expended on what is most important and most essential in life, the divine guidance that makes ultimate happiness possible.

Rote learning was not such a difficult activity, because a good teacher made it fun. Children learned to recite the Koran beautifully, often in unison. In other words, as far as they were concerned, they were learning some nice songs or chants, and frequently they had a good time singing them together. Children do the same thing everywhere. But in this case, the children were taught to have special respect for these chants. For theological reasons, these were not thought of as songs but rather as recitations, and they were never accompanied by instruments of any sort, not even clapping. But such recitations are music nonetheless, and there is no instrument that plays more beautifully than the human voice.

The Koran provides a firm basis for subsequent learning. The traditional curriculum gradually added other elements, based on the Koranic text. In order to understand the meaning of the text, children had to know the stories of the prophets, for example. Elaborate versions of the Koranic narratives, with a great deal of material interpolated from all sorts of other sources, are very much part of popular culture. All Muslims have heard stories about Abraham, Joseph, Moses, Solomon, David, Jesus, Muhammad, and other prophets.

On a more formal level of education, one important prerequisite for understanding the Koran was Arabic grammar. Once students had memorized part or all of the text, they had examples of every grammatical rule in their heads. Then it was relatively easy to learn the intricacies of this complex topic. Other subjects were gradually added in keeping with the student's aptitude. But it was always recognized that the most essential formal learning was memorization of the divine Word, whether or not its meaning was understood. And the most essential parts of the divine Word were those parts that have to be known in order to perform the basic rituals. The stress was always on bodily activity, the body being the indispensable support for everything human, not least the mind and heart.

A Fourth Dimension

We left out the last section of the hadith of Gabriel. There, as we saw, the Prophet provides a rather cryptic description of the signs that will occur at the end of time, such as the slave girl giving birth to her mistress. The tone is typical for many hadiths and a few Koranic verses.

The implication is that religion includes knowledge of the way in which time will unfold and come to an end. Hence there is an allusion to an Islamic view of history. Given the geometrical metaphor of dimensions, where time is a fourth dimension, it is appropriate to think of the Islamic conception of time and history as a dimension of the religion. And time also has something to do with the dimensionality of human beings, since everyone has a beginning and an end.

If the main body of this book explains Islam in terms ofislam (submission), iman (faith), and ihsan (doing what is beautiful), the final section looks at some of the implications of the Islamic view of history. However, this will not be the history one reads about in modern history books, where the underlying world views are of rationalistic types that have only recently come into existence. Rather, we will be dealing with a view that sees history full of divine meaning and that makes definite statements about beginnings and, especially, ends.