Conclusion: Salam (Peace) - Part 13

[Guest guest]

Salam (Peace) - Part 13

 

(p.210) Muhammad had been as controversial in his dying as in his living. Very

few of his followers had comprehended the full significance of his prophetic

career. These fissures within the community had surfaced at Hudaybiyyah, when

most of the pilgrims seem to have expected something miraculous to occur. People

came to Islam for very different reasons. Many were devoted to the ideal of

social justice, but not to Muhammad's ideal of nonviolence and reconciliation.

The rebellious young highwaymen, who followed Abu Basir, had an entirely

different agenda from the Prophet. The Bedouin tribesmen, who had not

volunteered for the pilgrimage in 628, had a political rather than a religious

commitment to Islam. From the very beginning, Islam was never a monolithic

entity.

 

There is nothing surprising about this lack of unity. In the gospels, Jesus's

disciples are often presented as obtuse and blind to the deeper aspect of his

mission. Paradigmatic figures are usually so far ahead of their time that their

contemporaries fail to understand them, and, after their deaths, the movement

splinters--as Buddhism divided into Hinayana and Mahayana schools not long after

the death of Siddhatta Gotama. In Islam, too, the divisions that had split the

ummah during the Prophet's lifetime became even clearer after his death. Many of

the Bedouin, who had never fully comprehended the religious message of the

Qur'an, believed that Islam had died with Muhammad and felt free to secede from

the ummah in the same way as they would renege on any treaty with a deceased

chieftain. After the Prophet's death, the community was lead by his 'kalifa',

his " successor. " The first four caliphs were elected by the people: Abu Bakr,

'Umar, 'Uthman and 'Ali, known as the " rightly guided " ('rashidun') caliphs.

They led wars of conquest outside Arabia, but at the time these had no religious

significance. Like any statesmen or generals, the rashidun were responding to a

political opportunity--the disintegration of the Persian and Byzantine

empires--rather than a Qur'anic imperative. The terrible civil wars that

resulted in the assassinations of 'Umar, 'Uthman, 'Ali and Husayn, the Prophet's

grandson, were later given a religious significance but were simply a by-product

of an extraordinarily accelerated transition from a peripheral, primitive polity

to the status of a major world power.

 

Far more surprising than this political turbulence was the Muslims' response.

Their understanding of the Qur'an matured when they considered these disastrous

events. Nearly every single major religious and literary development in Islam

has had its origin in a desire to return to the original vision of the Prophet.

Many were appalled by the lavish lifestyle of later caliphs, and tried to return

to the austere vision of the early ummah. Mystics, theologians, historians, and

jurists asked important questions. How could a society that killed its devout

leaders claim to be guided by God? What kind of man should lead the ummah? Could

rulers who lived in such luxury and condoned the poverty of the vast majority of

the people be true Muslims?

 

(p.212) These intense debates about the political leadership of the ummah played

a role in Islam that was similar to the great Christological debates of the

fourth and fifth centuries in Christianity. The ascetic spirituality of Sufism

had its roots in this discontent. Sufis turned their back on the luxury of the

court, and tried to live as austerely as the Prophet; they developed a mysticism

modelled on his night journey and ascension to heaven. The Shi'ah, the

self-styled " party of 'Ali " , Muhammad's closest male relative, believed that the

ummah must be led by one of 'Ali's direct descendants, since they alone had

inherited the Prophet's charisma. Shiis developed a piety of protest against the

injustice of mainstream Muslim society and tried to return to the egalitarian

spirit of the Qur'an. Yet while these and many other movements looked back to

the towering figure of Muhammad, they all took the Qur'anic visions into

entirely new directions, and showed that the original revelations had the

flexibility to respond to unprecedented circumstances that is essential to any

great world movement. From the very start, Muslims used their Prophet as a

yardstick by which to challenge their politicians and to measure the spiritual

health of the ummah.

 

This critical spirit is needed today. Some Muslim thinkers regard the jihad

against Mecca as the climax of Muhammad's career and fail to note that he

eventually abjured warfare and adopted a nonviolent policy. Western critics also

persist in viewing the Prophet of Islam as a man of war, and fail to see that

from the very first he was opposed to the jahili arrogance and egotism that not

only fuelled the aggression of his time but is much in evidence in some leaders,

Western and Muslim alike, today. (p.213) The Prophet, whose aim was peace and

practical compassion, is becoming a symbol of division and strife--a development

that is not only tragic but also dangerous to the stability on which the future

of our species depends.

 

At the end of my first attempt to write a biography of Muhammad, I quoted the

prescient words of the Canadian scholar Wilfred Cantwell Smith. Writing in the

mid-twentieth century shortly before the Suez Crisis, he observed that a

healthy, functioning Islam had for centuries helped Muslims cultivate decent

values which we in the West share, because they spring from a common tradition.

Some Muslims have problems with Western modernity. They have turned against the

cultures of the People of the Book, and have even begun to Islamize their new

hatred of these sister faiths, which were so powerfully endorsed by the Qur'an.

Cantwell Smith argued that if they are to meet the challenge of the day, Muslims

must learn to understand our Western traditions and institutions, because they

are not going to disappear. If Islamic societies did not do this, he maintained,

they would fail the test of the twentieth century. But he pointed out that

Western people also have a problem: " an inability to recognize that they share

the planet not with inferiors but with equals. "

 

Unless Western civilization intellectually and socially, politically and

economically, and the Christian church theologically, can learn to treat other

men with fundamental respect, these two in their turn will have failed to come

to terms with the actualities of the twentieth century. The problems raised in

this are, of course, as profound as anything that we have touched on for Islam.

[52]

 

(p.214) The brief history of the twenty-first century shows that neither side

has mastered these lessons. If we are to avoid catastrophe, the Muslim and

Western worlds must learn not merely to tolerate but to appreciate one another.

A good place to start is with the figure of Muhammad: a complex man, who resists

facile, ideologically-driven categorization, who sometimes did things that were

difficult or impossible for us to accept, but who had profound genius and

founded a religion and cultural tradition that was not based on the sword but

whose name-- " Islam " --signified peace and reconciliation.

 

Muhammad (Prophet For Our Time)

Chapter 5, 'Salam', p. 210-214

Karen Armstrong

Harper Perennial - London, New York, Toronto and Sydney

ISBN-13 978-0-00-723248-2

ISBN-10 0-00-723248-9

 

Notes:

 

[52] Wilfred Cantwell Smith, 'Islam in Modern History' (Princeton and London,

1957), 305.

[Guest guest]

http://adishakti.org/_/conclusion_salam_peace.htm