Peace Be Upon You (2 page)

But while anti-Western prejudice was part of the culture of the Middle East, it was only one part. The Islam I encountered barely resembled the images I grew up with and that continue to surround us today. The Islam of a cabdriver who helped me navigate Cairo, who stopped to pray and then played his bootleg Madonna cassette, who wanted to know about New York and looked at me as a good way to get a week’s worth of pay to feed his family, didn’t fit the narrow images that surround us in the West. The Islam of village mosques in Egypt or of a Saudi truck driver who gave me a lift in Jordan and then took an hour-long detour just so I could gaze over the Sea of Galilee; the Islam of Ahmed the hairdresser on a bus to Syria, who did his best to convince a twenty-something me to go to his salon in Damascus; and the Islam of the Kurdish family that sold me a kilim near Lake Van, in eastern Turkey—none of that was familiar.

But what was perhaps most unexpected was how infrequently I encountered Islam in the Muslim world. We have heard so often that there is no separation of church and state in Islam, and that religion is at the heart of everyday life. It is for some, but it shares space with the ebb and flow of daily existence. A man might pray at a mosque, spend a quiet moment submitting to God, and then be plunged into his workaday world, squabbling with neighbors, speaking with friends, watching the soccer game on television, going home to his children. The uneventful reality of everyday life should be obvious, so obvious that it shouldn’t even bear mentioning. But what is so startling is that it isn’t obvious to us, nor is the prosaic quality of our daily lives obvious to them.

That is true not just for our present but for the past. Today more than ever, bringing the panoply of the past into sharper focus is vital. That means clearing away the cobwebs and paying attention to the long periods where coexistence was more prominent, and also examining the reasons for war and violence that had little to do with religion, even when it was Muslims fighting Christians or Muslims fighting Jews.

Like any prejudice, the mutual animosity between Islam and the West is fueled by ignorance and selective memory. If we emphasize hate, scorn, war, and conquest, we are unlikely to perceive that any other path is viable. If we assume that religion is the primary source of conflict, we are unlikely to address factors that have nothing to do with religion. Unaware of the history of coexistence between Islam and the West, Americans tend to believe, though perhaps not say, that until the Muslim world becomes less Muslim and more Western, terrorism, nuclear proliferation, and war are inevitable. The same myopia about the past inclines Muslims from Rabat to Jakarta to dismiss talk of democracy and freedom as simply the latest Western, not to mention Christian and Jewish, assault on their independence and dignity.

Reclaiming the legacy of coexistence may not make the world whole, but it does show that Islam and the West need not be locked in a death dance. To the degree that each creed holds that it alone has the key to truth and salvation, there will always be a degree of tension. But rivalry and competition do not lead inexorably to war and violence. Christians, Jews, and Muslims have lived constructively with one another. They have taught one another and they have learned from one another. Judaism was central to the formation of Islam, and for a millennium and a half, until the end of World War II, Jews under Muslim rule enjoyed more safety, freedom, and autonomy than they ever did under Christian rule. Muslim states over the course of fourteen centuries have allowed for religious diversity and not insisted on trying to convert those who follow a different creed. From the beginning of Islam, Christian and Muslim states traded with one another. For fourteen centuries, Christians fought as soldiers in Muslim armies, and in the twentieth century, Arab Christians were instrumental in creating the states of the modern Middle East.

Focusing only on conflict is like skipping every other page while reading a book. It isn’t just incomplete; it is misleading to the point of incoherence. At the same time, it is important to avoid the opposite temptation and not replace one distorted reading of the past with another. Too often, those who attempt to rectify the imbalance provide the missing pages but delete the others. The result is just as skewed. The tolerance of Muslim society is praised and moments of concord are highlighted, but the violence and animosity are downplayed. Coexistence is treated as the norm and conflict as the anomaly, when in truth, both are threaded through the past and our present. Also overlooked is the fact that not all cooperation is good cooperation. Alliances between Muslim and Christian states were often the result of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” concluded for the purposes of war, not peace. That should temper any optimism that we can all just get along.

So as not to substitute one skewed version of the past with another, the pages that follow present stories of both conflict and cooperation. This book is not meant to be a comprehensive history of the past fourteen hundred years, and most of the stories have been told elsewhere by others in more depth. However, because the periods of concord are less known to most people, the lesson for the present and the future naturally seems optimistic: there is a possibility of peace and constructive coexistence between Muslims, Christians, and Jews—and more to the point, between believing Muslims, Christians, and Jews who, in their heart of hearts, think that their creed and their creed alone reflects God’s will. Given today’s realities, that is a hopeful message.

This book is, of course, framed by the events of the early twenty-first century. Muslim societies have been their most tolerant when they have been secure. That is hardly unusual in human affairs, but for most of the past century, few Muslim communities have felt secure. One of the results of September 11 is that Western societies have also become insecure, rationally or not. The result is a rise of intolerance on all sides. Increasingly, more people throughout the world believe that Muslim and Western societies are destined to clash and that they will always clash until one or the other triumphs. That belief is poisonous, and one antidote is the rich historical tradition that says other paths are not only possible but have been taken time and again.

By historical standards, today’s fissure between Islam and the West is not exceptional, but because of the technologies of death and because of weapons of mass destruction, that fissure has the potential to undo us. That is reason enough to take a look back and recognize that while the relationship between Islam and the West can be fratricidal, it can also be fraternal. Retrieving the forgotten history of relations between Islam and the West isn’t a panacea, but it is a vital ingredient to a more stable, secure world. The story begins in the seventh century, on the western coast of the Arabian Peninsula, in the city of Mecca, where a man named Muhammad, born of the tribe of Quraysh, heard the voice of God. “Recite!” he was told, and he did. And the world changed forever.

S
OMETIME AROUND
the year 570 in the Western calendar, Muhammad ibn Abdullah was born in the oasis town of Mecca, just off the western coast of the Arabian Peninsula. The town was separated from the Red Sea by a narrow, steep mountain range, and it sat at the edge of the vast desert that defined the Arabian Peninsula. The oasis was dominated by the Quraysh tribe, who controlled the camel trade that passed through Mecca. The trade route linked Yemen, in the south, to the settled agrarian regions hundreds of miles north, which were then divided between the Byzantine emperor and the Sasanian monarch of Persia.

Though Muhammad was a member of the ruling tribe, his clan was not particularly prominent. His father died when Muhammad was a boy, and his uncle Abu Talib became his protector. For most of the next forty years, Muhammad lived an anonymous life like that of many others in Mecca; he established himself as a merchant and married an older widow named Khadija. Had he died before the age of forty, his would have been one of the countless lives invisible to history, and Mecca itself would have remained a small provincial town no more important than thousands of others throughout the world. But around the year 610, Muhammad began to hear the voice of God, and for the first time, God spoke in Arabic.

Muhammad did not share these revelations with anyone other than his wife. Prophets were rarely welcome, and Muhammad did not have sufficient standing in the community to defend himself against adversaries who might not welcome the message he was being given. While the experience of receiving the revelations was physically wrenching for
Muhammad, the substance was socially wrenching for the Meccans. Rather than a system anchored by tribe, clan, and family, Muhammad announced a new order, anchored by God’s will and human submission to it—hence the words
islam
, the Arabic word for “submit,” and
muslim
, the Arabic word for one who does.

Muhammad began to share the content of what he was being told with a small circle of friends and family, and slowly the message spread. At first, the more powerful members of the Quraysh dismissed the sermons as irrelevant, but as more people started to listen, the Quraysh became concerned. From what they could glean, Muhammad’s call represented a challenge to the social order that they dominated.

They were right to be concerned. In their Mecca of tribe and clan, they were supreme. Obeisance was given to the various gods and spirits known as jinn (the kindred English word is “genie”), but one’s tribe was more consequential than any god. At the time, there was a nascent sense of monotheism, though not much more developed than a vague notion that there was one god more powerful than the others. But the Quraysh of Mecca were not prepared to embrace Him alone, because that would have upended the status quo. In their world, the tribe, not any god, determined social standing and marriage, and it was up to the tribe and the clan to avenge wrongs committed by others. Tribal authority was absolute—until Muhammad announced that it was not.

The core message was simple: there is one God, one messenger, and a choice. The God is Allah, who is the same as the God of Abraham, the God of the Hebrew prophets, the God of Jesus, and the God of the Christians. The messenger is Muhammad, a man like any other until he was chosen to convey God’s word in Arabic. And the choice is to surrender to God’s will and to the truth of Muhammad’s recitations and thus be saved for eternity.

The initial revelations emphasized the extent of God’s power and the degree of human powerlessness in the face of it. Later assembled in the Quran, these verses paint a vivid picture of a world destined to end in a final judgment, and they warn that only those who embrace the message conveyed by Muhammad will be blessed. Because the revelations unfolded over the course of many years, it took some time before they congealed into a coherent belief system. Within a decade, however, Muhammad began to challenge the system of the Quraysh directly.

The most prominent symbol of that confrontation involved the so-called Satanic Verses, which were an earlier version of a portion of the Quran that seemed to allow for the dual worship of Allah and of three of the gods of the Quraysh: al-Lat, al-Uzza, and Manat. The Satanic Verses may have been an attempt to strike a compromise with the increasingly hostile Quraysh, but the Quraysh were not placated. Instructed by the archangel Gabriel, Muhammad recanted the verses. He claimed that they had been a trick of the devil and issued an unequivocal condemnation of al-Lat, al-Uzza, and Manat. They were not gods, he declared, only mere names.

This assault on the prevailing religious system marked a dramatic turn away from conciliation with the rulers of Mecca. Initially, Muhammad had emphasized social justice, the mystery of life, and Allah’s supreme power, and had hoped that the Quraysh would accept him. When it became clear that they would not, he indicted not just the religion of the Meccans but the Quraysh who upheld it.

As long as his uncle Abu Talib was alive, Muhammad could be criticized and marginalized but he could not be silenced or physically harmed. When Abu Talib died, in 619, however, Muhammad was placed in a precarious position. Faced with an antagonistic tribe and few options, he was responsible for the security and well-being of a community of followers, most of whom occupied the fringes of Meccan society, and he was beginning to attract adherents beyond the city.

As the position of the Muslims in Mecca deteriorated, it was not simply a problem of discrimination and intimidation. Without the protection that his uncle provided, Muhammad and his followers were in physical danger, and he began looking for a new home. He could not, however, simply pick up and leave. He had to find a tribe in another town willing to offer him protection and acceptance. In a world where resources were scarce and water, date palms, and trade were tightly controlled, there was no such thing as moving to another town to start a new life, and certainly not with eighty followers in tow.