booklogging

This is a substantial book, written by someone who formerly professed Islam and now writing under a pseudonym [for reasons of safety, presumably -if you don't know why, then read the book and work it out for your self] having become disillusioned by the Rushdie affair. It takes its cue from Bertrand Russel's 'Why I am not a Christian'. I would say that this book needs to be on a reading list for Christians who are encountering Islam and truing to make sense. Certainly for me it would have been useful about 10 years or more ago as I was tyring to find out about and weigh up Muslim claims. Of course it is polemical, it would be hard for it not to be in the circumstances but it contains things that need to be heard whatever the fianl verdict on some of it.

It is a bit of a rag-bag of objections to Islam and somewhat promiscuous in its sources for critique. On the whole it seems well documented and draws on a wide range of sources and it appears to be pretty thourough. There are chapters on historical origins, the Qur'an, the hadith and sunna. the character and biography of Muhammed, political and social issues, histories of Islam in relation to conquest and science and of dissent within Islam. There are also sections dealing with the apologetic claims for eras of Muslim tolerance and equality.

The arguments about origins do not seem to be held consistently; various theories of documentary origins for Qur'an and Hadith are advanced but none of them seems to be settled upon with the result that a demolition job is done but with incompatible 'tools' and alternative [to Muslim orthodoxy] hypotheses. I felt that this undermines his argument somewhat although it is good to be introduced to some plausible ideas about origins. So while questions are raised by this about the likelihood of the normal Muslim account of origins, we don't get a consistent alternative. Admittedly it may be too early to do so. Be that as it may, it is certainly a challenge to Muslim scholarship which cannot really be ducked, especially as Muslim apologists like to use similar historical-critical tools to attempt to undermine Christian claims; it would be only fair that they subject their own traditions and documents to similar scrutiny; of course this they are unwilling to do. I have myself stopped a Muslim short in his attempt to convert me when he started to talk about the literary history of one of the gospels in an attempt to evade its challenge. The way I did so was to say simply: "If you are going to approach Christian scriptures in that kind of way then what will happen if I do the same with the Qur'an?"

The main challenges that I think this book presents to Muslims are: to deal with the inconsistencies in their accounts of Muslim origins; to meet the challenge of literary, redaction and historical criticism with regard to Qur'an, hadith and sunna; to meet the theological and philosphical difficulties with maintining the idea of the Qur'an as the eternal and unchanging word of God; to step back from the doctrine of Muhammed's perfection -it really can't be sustained; to look again at the issues of un/fair treatment of non-muslims in history, the Qur'an and worldwide today; to address the human rights of women, slaves, dhimmis.

After reading this book it does seem hard to see how Islam as currently configured can meet these challenges fairly an head-on. Its history has bequeathed, apparently, a fairly inflexible belief system where the inhumanity of latter-day extremists does actually apprear to be securely founded in the Qur'an, hadith and the Sunna. The only hope that I can see for a humane Islam based on its traditional sources, is to find a way to marginalise the Medinan suras and to see the Meccan 'revelations' as the most authoritative [which pretty much reverses the doctrine of abrogation], or to find ways to relativise the inhumanities [sanctioning genocidal violence, rapine, deceit and lust] by some kind of historical contextual method [though this then requires, I would have thought, some kind of alteration in how the Qur'an could be understood to be the word of God].

It certainly altered my approach to Muhammed. Previously I have tried to answer the question "What do you make of Muhammed?" by trying to recognise that he may have had some genuine encounter with God and message from God but I wasn't sure how to tie that in with Christian slavation history. I couldn't beleive the Qur'an to be God's word, not least because it quite clearly errs [for example in declaring that the Christian doctrine of the Trinity is of Father, Son and Virgin Mary and in its misreporting of Biblical incidents; an elementary mistake confusing Miriam sister of Moses with Mary mother of Jesus, for further example]. Nevertheless I want to keep faith with the possibility that there is something of God in it all. Now I am more firmly convinced that the Qur'an inthe form we now have it has much in it that was added long after the time it was putatively written [ditto the hadith] and that Muhammed may have started with something genuine [the call to monotheism and a compassionate view of God] but was later corrupted by power and may even have made up a 'revelations' to suit political exediencies. A sinning prophet is not a problem for me: David and Moses both were presneted as having their weaknesses. Muhammed's weakness may have been fatal to his credibility though ... but then, is it that those verses/sections and hadith attributed to himwhich are inhumane and lacking in compassion are actually the interpolations of later 'muslim' rulers and interest groups [as documented and hypothesised earlier in the Ibn Warraq book]? Can we really know the real Muhammed. Certainly the one presented by tradition, once you dig deeper than the initial gloss, seems a cruel and venial figure. Is this him or is this the image that later 'followers' wanted to bolster their power and justify their tactics?

The Ibn Warraq book seems to want it both ways: both to claim that much Muslim tradition was made up later, and to see [the later] Muhammed as a venial and mandacious bandit. I'm not sure we can have it both ways, though either is deeply challenging to Islam, and the questions can't be unasked.
Why I Am Not a Muslim. Paperback 428 pages (March 1, 2003) Publisher: Prometheus Books
ISBN: 1591020115