October 1, 2001 Times Vol. 158 No. 15
The True, Peaceful Face Of Islam
BY KAREN ARMSTRONG
There are 1.2 billion Muslims in the world, and Islam is the world's
fastest-growing religion. If the evil carnage we witnessed on Sept. 11 were
typical of the faith, and Islam truly inspired and justified such violence, its
growth and the increasing presence of Muslims in both Europe and the U.S. would
be a terrifying prospect. Fortunately, this is not the case.
The very word Islam, which means "surrender," is related to the
Arabic salam, or peace. When the Prophet Muhammad brought the inspired scripture
known as the Koran to the Arabs in the early 7th century A.D., a major part of
his mission was devoted precisely to bringing an end to the kind of mass
slaughter we witnessed in New York City and Washington. Pre-Islamic Arabia was
caught up in a vicious cycle of warfare, in which tribe fought tribe in a
pattern of vendetta and countervendetta. Muhammad himself survived several
assassination attempts, and the early Muslim community narrowly escaped
extermination by the powerful city of Mecca. The Prophet had to fight a deadly
war in order to survive, but as soon as he felt his people were probably safe,
he devoted his attention to building up a peaceful coalition of tribes and
achieved victory by an ingenious and inspiring campaign of nonviolence. When he
died in 632, he had almost single-handedly brought peace to war-torn Arabia.
Because the Koran was revealed in the context of an all-out war, several
passages deal with the conduct of armed struggle. Warfare was a desperate
business on the Arabian Peninsula. A chieftain was not expected to spare
survivors after a battle, and some of the Koranic injunctions seem to share this
spirit. Muslims are ordered by God to "slay [enemies] wherever you find
them!" (4: 89). Extremists such as Osama bin Laden like to quote such
verses but do so selectively. They do not include the exhortations to peace,
which in almost every case follow these more ferocious passages: "Thus, if
they let you be, and do not make war on you, and offer you peace, God does not
allow you to harm them" (4: 90).
In the Koran, therefore, the only permissible war is one of self-defense.
Muslims may not begin hostilities (2: 190). Warfare is always evil, but
sometimes you have to fight in order to avoid the kind of persecution that Mecca
inflicted on the Muslims (2: 191; 2: 217) or to preserve decent values (4: 75;
22: 40). The Koran quotes the Torah, the Jewish scriptures, which permits people
to retaliate eye for eye, tooth for tooth, but like the Gospels, the Koran
suggests that it is meritorious to forgo revenge in a spirit of charity (5: 45).
Hostilities must be brought to an end as quickly as possible and must cease the
minute the enemy sues for peace (2: 192-3).
Islam is not addicted to war, and jihad is not one of its
"pillars," or essential practices. The primary meaning of the word
jihad is not "holy war" but "struggle." It refers to the
difficult effort that is needed to put God's will into practice at every
level--personal and social as well as political. A very important and much
quoted tradition has Muhammad telling his companions as they go home after a
battle, "We are returning from the lesser jihad [the battle] to the greater
jihad," the far more urgent and momentous task of extirpating wrongdoing
from one's own society and one's own heart.
Islam did not impose itself by the sword. In a statement in which the
Arabic is extremely emphatic, the Koran insists, "There must be no coercion
in matters of faith!" (2: 256). Constantly Muslims are enjoined to respect
Jews and Christians, the "People of the Book," who worship the same
God (29: 46). In words quoted by Muhammad in one of his last public sermons, God
tells all human beings, "O people! We have formed you into nations and
tribes so that you may know one another" (49: 13)--not to conquer, convert,
subjugate, revile or slaughter but to reach out toward others with intelligence
and understanding.
So why the suicide bombing, the hijacking and the massacre of innocent
civilians? Far from being endorsed by the Koran, this killing violates some of
its most sacred precepts. But during the 20th century, the militant form of
piety often known as fundamentalism erupted in every major religion as a
rebellion against modernity. Every fundamentalist movement I have studied in
Judaism, Christianity and Islam is convinced that liberal, secular society is
determined to wipe out religion. Fighting, as they imagine, a battle for
survival, fundamentalists often feel justified in ignoring the more
compassionate principles of their faith. But in amplifying the more aggressive
passages that exist in all our scriptures, they distort the tradition.
It would be as grave a mistake to see Osama bin Laden as an authentic
representative of Islam as to consider James Kopp, the alleged killer of an
abortion provider in Buffalo, N.Y., a typical Christian or Baruch Goldstein, who
shot 29 worshipers in the Hebron mosque in 1994 and died in the attack, a true
martyr of Israel. The vast majority of Muslims, who are horrified by the
atrocity of Sept. 11, must reclaim their faith from those who have so violently
hijacked it.
Karen Armstrong has written many books on religion, including Islam: A
Short History, published last year by Modern Library