The True, Peaceful Face Of Islam By Karen Armstrong

[Guest guest]

The True, Peaceful Face Of Islam

By Karen Armstrong Sunday, Sep. 23, 2001

TIME

 

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.

 

The True, Peaceful Face Of Islam

 

Karen Armstrong has written many books on religion, including Islam:

A Short History, published last year by Modern Library