The God of Islam

In about the year 610 an Arab merchant of the thriving city of Mecca in the Hijaz, who had never read the Bible and probably never heard of Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel, had an experience that was uncannily similar to theirs. Every year Muhammad ibn Abdallah, a member of the Meccan tribe of Quraysh, used to take his family to Mount Hira just outside the city to make a spiritual retreat during the month of Ramadan. This was quite a common practice among the Arabs of the peninsula. Muhammad would have spent the time praying to the High God of the Arabs and distributing food and alms to the poor who came to visit him during this sacred period. He probably also spent much time in anxious thought. We know from his later career that Muhammad was acutely aware of a worrying malaise in Mecca, despite its recent spectacular success. Only two generations earlier, the Quraysh had lived a harsh nomadic life in the Arabian steppes, like the other Bedouin tribes: each day had required a grim struggle for survival. During the last years of the sixth century, however, they had become extremely successful in trade and made Mecca the most important settlement in Arabia. They were now rich beyond their wildest dreams. Yet their drastically altered lifestyle meant that the old tribal values had been superseded by a rampant and ruthless capitalism. People felt obscurely disoriented and lost. Muhammad knew that the Quraysh were on a dangerous course and needed to find an ideology that would help them to adjust to their new conditions.

At this time, any political solution tended to be of a religious nature. Muhammad was aware that the Quraysh were malting a new religion out of money. This was hardly surprising, because they must have felt that their new wealth had 'saved' them from the perils of the nomadic life, cushioning them from the malnutrition and tribal violence that were endemic to the steppes of Arabia where each Bedouin tribe daily faced the possibility of extinction. They now had almost enough to eat and were making Mecca an international centre of trade and high finance. They felt that they had become the masters of their own fate and some even seem to have believed that their wealth would give them a certain immortality. But Muhammad believed that this new cult of self-sufficiency (istaqa) would mean the disintegration of the tribe. In the old nomadic days the tribe had had to come first and the individual second: each one of its members knew that they all depended upon one another for survival. Consequently they had a duty to take care of the poor and vulnerable people of their ethnic group. Now individualism had replaced the communal ideal and competition had become the norm. Individuals were starting to build personal fortunes and took no heed of the weaker Qurayshis. Each of the clans, or smaller family groups of the tribe, fought one another for a share of the wealth of Mecca and some of the least successful clans (like Muhammad's own clan of Hashim) felt that their very survival was in jeopardy. Muhammad was convinced that unless the Quraysh learned to put another transcendent value at the centre of their lives and overcome their egotism and greed, his tribe would tear itself apart morally and politically in internecine strife.
In the rest of Arabia the situation was also bleak. For centuries the Bedouin tribes of the regions of the Hijaz and Najd had lived in fierce competition with one another for the basic necessities of life. To help the people cultivate the communal spirit that was essential for survival, the Arabs had evolved an ideology called murwvah, which fulfilled many of the functions of religion. In the conventional sense, the Arabs had little time for religion. There was a pagan pantheon of deities and the Arabs worshipped at their shrines, but they had not developed a mythology that explained the relevance of these gods and holy places to the life of the spirit. They had no notion of an afterlife but believed instead that dark, which can be translated as time or fate, was supreme - an attitude that was probably essential in a society where the mortality rate was so high. Western scholars often translate muruwah as 'manliness' but it had a far wider range of significance: it meant courage in battle, patience and endurance in suffering and absolute dedication to the tribe. The virtues ofmuruwafi required an Arab to obey his sayyidor chief at a second's notice, regardless of his personal safety; he had to dedicate himself to the chivalrous duties of avenging any wrong committed against the tribe and protecting its more vulnerable members. To ensure the survival of die tribe, die sayyid shared its wealth and possessions equally and avenged die death of a single one of his people by killing a member of die murderer's tribe. It is here that we see die communal ediic most clearly: there was no duty to punish die killer himself because an individual could vanish without trace in a society like pre-Islamic Arabia. Instead one member of die enemy tribe was equivalent to anodier for such purposes. The vendetta or blood-feud was the only wey of ensuring a modicum of social security in a region where there was no central authority, where every tribal group was a law unto itself and where there was nothing comparable to a modern police force. If a chief failed to retaliate, nobody would respect his tribe and would feel free to kill its members with impunity. The vendetta was thus a rough and ready form of justice which meant diat no one tribe could easily gain ascendancy over any of die others. It also meant that the various tribes could easily become involved in an unstoppable cycle of violence, in which one vendetta would lead to another if people felt that die revenge taken was disproportionate to the original offence.

Brutal as it undoubtedly was, however, murwvah had many strengths. It encouraged a deep and strong egalitarianism and encouraged an indifference to material goods which, again, was probably essential in a region where there were not enough of the essentials to go round: die cult of largesse and generosity were important virtues and taught the Arabs to take no heed for die morrow. These qualities would become very important in Islam, as we shall see. Muruvah had served die Arabs well for centuries, but by die sixdi century it was no longer able to answer die conditions of modernity. During die last phase of die pre-Islamic period, which Muslims call the jahiliyyah (the time of ignorance) diere seems to have been widespread dissatisfaction and spiritual resdessness. The Arabs were surrounded on all sides by the two mighty empires of Sassanid Persia and Byzantium. Modern ideas were beginning to penetrate Arabia from the settled lands; merchants who travelled into Syria or the Iraq brought back stories of the wonders of civilisation. Yet it seemed that the Arabs were doomed to perpetual barbarism. The tribes were involved in constant warfare which made it impossible for them to pool their meagre resources and become the united Arab people that they were dimly aware of being. They could not take their destiny into their own hands and found a civilisation of their own. Instead they were constantly open to exploitation by the great powers: indeed, the more fertile and sophisticated region of Southern Arabia in what is now the Yemen (which had the benefit of the monsoon rains) had become a mere province of Persia. At the same time, the new ideas that were infiltrating the region brought intimations of individualism that undermined the old communal ethos. The Christian doctrine of the afterlife, for example, made the eternal fate of each individual a sacred value: how could that be squared with the tribal ideal which subordinated the individual to the group and insisted that a man or woman's sole immortality lay in the survival of the tribe?
Muhammad was a man of exceptional genius. When he died in 632, he had managed to bring nearly all the tribes of Arabia into a new united community or ummah. He had brought the Arabs a spirituality that was uniquely suited to their own traditions and which unlocked such reserves of power that within a hundred years they had established their own great empire which stretched from the Himalayas to the Pyrenees and founded a unique civilisation. Yet as Muhammad sat in prayer in the tiny cave at the summit of Mount Hira during his Ramadan retreat of 610, he could not have envisaged such phenomenal success. Like many of the Arabs, Muhammad had come to believe that al-Lah, the High God of the ancient Arabian pantheon whose name simply meant 'the God', was identical to the God worshipped by the Jews and the Christians. He also believed that only a prophet of this God could solve the problems of his people, but he never believed for one moment that he was going to be that prophet. Indeed, the Arabs were unhappily aware that al-Lah had never sent them a prophet or a scripture of their own, even though they had had his shrine in their midst from time immemorial. By the seventh century, most Arabs had come to believe that the Kabah, the massive cube-shaped shrine in the heart of Mecca, which was clearly of great antiquity, had originally been dedicated to al-Lah, even though at present the Nabatean deity Hubal presided there. All Meccans were fiercely proud of the Kabah, which was the most important holy place in Arabia. Each year Arabs from all over the peninsula made the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, performing the traditional rites over a period of several days. All violence was forbidden in the sanctuary, the sacred area around the Kabah, so that in Mecca the Arabs could trade with one another peacefully, knowing that old tribal hostilities were temporarily in abeyance. The Quraysh knew that without the sanctuary they could never have achieved their mercantile success and that a great deal of their prestige among the other tribes depended upon their guardianship of the Kabah and upon their preservation of its ancient sanctities. Yet though al-Lah had clearly singled the Quraysh out for his special favour, he had never sent them a messenger like Abraham, Moses or Jesus and the Arabs had no scripture in their own language.

There was, therefore, a widespread feeling of spiritual inferiority. Those Jews and Christians with whom the Arabs came in contact used to taunt them for being a barbarous people who had received no revelation from God. The Arabs felt a mingled resentment and respect for these people who had knowledge that they had not. Judaism and Christianity had made little headway in the region, even though the Arabs acknowledged that this progressive form of religion was superior to their own traditional paganism. There were some Jewish tribes of doubtful provenance in the settlements of Yathrib (later Medina) and Fadak, to the north of Mecca, and some of the northern tribes on the borderland between the Persian and Byzantine empires had convened to Monophysite or Nestorian Christianity. Yet the Bedouin were fiercely independent, were determined not to come under the rule of the great powers like their brethren in the Yemen and were acutely aware that both the Persians and the Byzantines had used the religions of Judaism and Christianity to promote their imperial designs in the region. They were probably also instinctively aware that they had suffered enough cultural dislocation, as their own traditions eroded. The last thing they needed was a foreign ideology, couched in alien languages and traditions.

Some Arabs seem to have attempted to discover a more neutral form of monotheism, which was not tainted by imperialistic associations. As early as the fifth century, the Palestinian Christian historian Sozomenus tells us that some of the Arabs in Syria had rediscovered what they called the authentic religion of Abraham, who had lived before God had sent either the Torah or the Gospel and who was, therefore, neither a Jew nor a Christian. Shortly before Muhammad received his own prophetic call, his first biographer Muhammad ibn Ishaq (d.7&7) tells us that four of the Quraysh of Mecca had decided to seek the hanifiyyah, the true religion of Abraham. Some Western scholars have argued that this little hanifiyyah sect is a pious fiction, symbolising the spiritual restlessness ofthejahiliyyah but it must have some factual basis. Three of the four hanifs were well-known to the first Muslims: Ubaydallah ibn Jahsh was Muhammad's cousin, Waraqa ibn Nawfal, who eventually became a Christian, was one of his earliest spiritual advisers, and Zayd ibn Amr was the uncle of Umar ibn al-Khattab, one of Muhammad's closest companions and the second Caliph of the Islamic empire. There is a story that one day, before he had left Mecca to search in Syria and the Iraq for the religion of Abraham, Zayd had been standing by the Kabah, leaning against the shrine and telling the Quraysh who were making the ritual cir-cumambulations around it in the time-honoured way: 'O Quraysh, by him in whose hand is the soul of Zayd, not one of you follows the religion of Abraham but I.' Then he added sadly, 'O God, if I knew how you wish to be worshipped I would so worship you; but I do not know."

Zayd's longing for a divine revelation was fulfilled on Mount Hira in 610 on the seventeenth night of Ramadan, when Muhammad was torn from sleep and felt himself enveloped by a devastating divine presence. Later he explained this ineffable experience in distinctively Arabian terms. He said that an angel had appeared to him and given him a curt command: 'Recite!' (iqra!) Like the Hebrew prophets who were often reluctant to utter the Word of God, Muhammad refused, protesting' I am not a reciter!' He was no kahin, one of the ecstatic soothsayers of Arabia who claimed to recite inspired oracles. But, Muhammad said, the angel simply enveloped him in an overpowering embrace, so that he felt as if all the breath was being squeezed from his body. Just as he felt that he could bear it no longer, the angel released him and again commanded him to 'Recite!' (iqraf). Again Muhammad refused and again the angel embraced him until he felt that he had reached the limits of his endurance. Finally, at the end of a third terrifying embrace, Muhammad found the first words of a new scripture pouring from his moudi: Recite in the name of thy Sustainer, who has created - created man out of a germ-cell! Recite - for thy Sustainer is the Most Bountiful, One who has taught [man] the use of the pen - taught him what he did not know!

The word of God had been spoken for the first time in the Arabic language and this scripture would ultimately be called die qur'an: die Recitation.
Muhammad came to himself in terror and revulsion, horrified to think mat he might have become a mere disreputable kahin whom people consulted if one of their camels went missing. A kahin was supposedly possessed by ajinni, one of die sprites that were thought to haunt the landscape and who could be capricious and lead people into error. Poets also believed that they were possessed by their personal jinni. Thus Hassan ibn Thabit, a poet of Yathrib who later became a Muslim, says dial when he received his poetic vocation his jinni had appeared to him, thrown him to die ground and forced die inspired words from his mouth. This was the only form of inspiration that was familiar to Muhammad and die thought diat he might have become majnunjinni-possessed, filled him with such despair mat he no longer wished to live. He dioroughly despised die kahins, whose oracles were usually unintelligible mumbo-jumbo and was always very careful to distinguish die Koran from conventional Arabic poetry. Now, rushing from die cave, he resolved to fling himself from die summit to his death. But on die mountainside he had another vision of a being which, later, he identified with die angel Gabriel:

When I was midway on the mountain, I heard a voice from heaven saying, 'O Muhammad! thou art the apostle of God and I am Gabriel.' I raised my head towards heaven to see who was speaking, and lo, Gabriel in the form of a man with feet astride the horizon... I stood gazing at him, moving neither backward or forward; then I began to turn my face away from him, but towards whatever region of the sky I looked, I saw him as before.³

In Islam Gabriel is often identified with the Holy Spirit of revelation, the means by which God communicates with men. This was no pretty naturalistic angel but an overwhelming ubiquitous presence from which escape was impossible. Muhammad had had that overpowering apprehension of numinous reality, which the Hebrew prophets had called kaddosh, holiness, the terrifying otherness of God. They too had felt near to death and at a physical and psychological extremity when they experienced it. But unlike Isaiah or Jeremiah, Muhammad had none of the consolations of an established tradition to support him. The terrifying experience seemed to have fallen upon him out of the blue and left him in a state of profound shock. In his anguish, he turned instinctively to his wife, Khadija.Crawling on his hands and knees, trembling violently, Muhammad flung himself into her lap. 'Cover me! cover me!' he cried, begging her to shield him from the divine presence. When the fear had abated somewhat, Muhammad asked her whether he really had become majnun and Khadija hastened to reassure him: 'You are kind and considerate towards your kin. You help the poor and forlorn and bear their burdens. You are striving to restore the high moral qualities that your people have lost. You honour the guest and go to the assistance of those in distress. This cannot be, my dear!'⁴ God did not act in such an arbitrary way. Khadija suggested that they consult her cousin Waraqa ibn Nawfal, now a Christian and learned in the scriptures. Waraqa had no doubts at all: Muhammad had received a revelation from the God of Moses and the prophets and had become the divine envoy to the Arabs. Eventually, after a period of several years, Muhammad was convinced that this was indeed the case and began to preach to the Quraysh, bringing them a scripture in their own language.

Unlike the Torah, however, which according to the biblical account was revealed to Moses in one session on Mount Sinai, the Koran was revealed to Muhammad bit by bit, line by line and verse by verse over a period of twenty-three years. The revelations continued to be a painful experience. 'Never once did I receive a revelation without feeling that my soul was being torn away from me,' Muhammad said in later years.⁵ He had to listen to the divine words intently, struggling to make sense of a vision and significance that did not always come to him in a clear, verbal form. Sometimes, he said, the content of the divine message was clear: he seemed to see Gabriel and heard what he was saying. But at other times the revelation was distressingly inarticulate: 'Sometimes it comes unto me like the reverberations of a bell, and that is the hardest upon me; the reverberations abate when I am aware of their message.'⁶ The early biographers of the classical period often show him listening intently to what we should perhaps call the unconscious, rather as a poet describes the process of'listening' to a poem that is gradually surfacing from the hidden recesses of his mind, declaring itself with an authority and integrity that seems mysteriously separate from him. In the Koran, God tells Muhammad to listen to the incoherent meaning carefully and with what Wordsworth would call 'a wise passiveness'.⁷ He must not rush to force words or a particular conceptual significance upon it until the true meaning revealed itself in its own good time:
Move not thy tongue in haste, [repeating the words of the revelation]; for, behold, it is for Us to gather it [in thy heart], and cause it to be recited [as it ought to be recited].
Thus when We recite it, follow thou its wordings [with all thy mind]: and then, behold, it will be for Us to make its meaning clear.⁸

Like all creativity, it was a difficult process. Muhammad used to enter a tranced state and sometimes seemed to lose consciousness; he used to sweat profusely, even on a cold day, and often felt an interior heaviness like grief that impelled him to lower his head between his knees, a position adopted by some contemporary Jewish mystics when they entered an alternative state of consciousness - though Muhammad could not have known this. It is not surprising that Muhammad found the revelations such an immense strain: not only was he working through to an entirely new political solution for his people but he was composing one of the great spiritual and literary classics of all time. He believed that he was putting the ineffable Word of God into Arabic, for the Koran is as central to the spirituality of Islam as Jesus, the Logos, is to Christianity. We know more about Muhammad than about the founder of any other major religion and in the Koran, whose various suras or chapters can be dated with reasonable accuracy, we can see how his vision gradually evolved and developed, becoming ever more universal in scope. He did not see at the outset all that he had to accomplish, but this was revealed to him little by little, as he responded to the inner logic of events. In the Koran we have, as it were, a contemporaneous commentary on the beginnings of Islam that is unique in the history of religion. In this sacred book, God seems to comment on the developing situation: he answers some of Muhammad's critics, explains the signficance of a battle or a conflict within the early Muslim community and points to the divine dimension of human life. It did not come to Muhammad in the order we read today but in a more random manner, as events dictated and as he listened to their deeper meaning. As each new segment was revealed, Muhammad, who could neither read nor write, recited it aloud, the Muslims learned it by heart and those few who were literate wrote it down. Some twenty years after Muhammad's death, the first official compilation of the revelations was made. The editors put the longest suras at the beginning and the shortest at the end. This arrangement is not as arbitrary as it might appear, because the Koran is neither a narrative nor an argument that needs a sequential order. Instead, it reflects on various themes: God's presence in the natural world, the lives of the prophets or the Last Judgement. To a Westerner, who cannot appreciate the extraordinary beauty of the Arabic, the Koran seems boring and repetitive. It seems to go over the same ground again and again. But the Koran was not meant for private perusal but for liturgical recitation. When Muslims hear a sura chanted in the mosque, they are reminded of all the central tenets of their faith.
When Muhammad began to preach in Mecca, he had only a modest conception of his role. He did not believe that he was founding a new universal religion but saw himself bringing the old religion of the one God to the Quraysh. At first he did not even think that he should preach to the other Arab tribes but only to the people of Mecca and its environs.⁹ He had no dreams of founding a theocracy and would probably not have known what a theocracy was: he himself should have no political function in the city but was simply its nadhir, the Warner.^I0Al-Lah had sent him to warn the Quraysh of the perils of their situation. His early message was not doom-laden, however. It was a joyful message of hope. Muhammad did not have to prove the existence of God to the Quraysh. They all believed implicitly in al-Lah, who was the creator of heaven and earth, and most believed him to be the God worshipped by the Jews and Christians. His existence was taken for granted. As God says to Muhammad in an early sura of the Koran:
And thus it is [with most people]: if thou ask them, 'Who is it that has created the heavens and the earth and made the sun and moon subservient [to his laws]? - they will surely answer al-Lah.
And thus it is, if thou ask them, 'Who is it that sends down water from the skies, giving life thereby to the earth after it had been lifeless?' they will surely answer 'al-Lah'."

The trouble was that the Quraysh were not thinking through the implications of this belief. God had created each one of them from a drop of semen, as the very first revelation had made clear; they depended upon God for their food and sustenance and yet they still regarded themselves as the centre of the universe in an unrealistic presumption (yalqa) and self-sufficiency (istaqa)¹¹ that took no account of their responsibilities as members of a decent Arab society. Consequently the early verses of the Koran all encourage the Quraysh to become aware of God's benevolence, which they can see wherever they look. They will then realise how many things they still owe to him, despite their new success and appreciate their utter dependency upon the Creator of the natural order:
[Only too often] man destroys himself: how stubbornly does he deny the truth!
[Does man ever consider] out of what substance [God] creates him?
Out of a drop of sperm he creates him, and then determines his nature and then makes it easy for him to go through life; and in the end he causes him to die and brings him to the grave; and then, if it be his will, he shall raise him again to life.
Nay but [man] has never yet fulfilled what he has enjoined upon him.
Let man, then, consider [the sources of] his food: [how it is] that we pour down waters, pouring it down abundandy; and then we cleave the earth [with new growth] cleaving it asunder, and thereupon we cause grain to grow out of it, and vines and edible plants, and olive trees and date palms, and gardens dense with foliage, and fruits and herbage, for you and for your animals to enjoy.'³The existence of God is not in question, therefore. In the Koran an 'unbeliever' (kafirbi na'mal al-Lah) is not an atheist in our sense of the word, somebody who does not believe in God, but one who is ungrateful to him, who can see quite clearly what is owing to God but refuses to honor him in a spirit of perverse ingratitude.
The Koran was not teaching the Quraysh anything new. Indeed, it constantly claims to be 'a reminder' of things known already, which it throws into more lucid relief. Frequently the Koran introduces a topic with a phrase like: 'Have you not seen ... ?' or 'Have you not considered ... ?' The Word of God was not issuing arbitrary commands from on high but was entering into a dialogue with the Quraysh. It reminds them, for example, that the Kabah, the House of al-Lah, accounted in large measure for their success, which was really in some sense owing to God. The Quraysh loved to make the ritual circumambulations around the shrine but when they put themselves and their own material success into the centre of their lives they had forgotten the meaning of these ancient rites of orientation. They should look at the 'signs' (ayat) of God's goodness and power in the natural world. If they failed to reproduce God's benevolence in their own society, they would be out of touch with the true nature of things. Consequently, Muhammad made his converts bow down in ritual prayer (salat) twice a day. This external gesture would help Muslims to cultivate the internal posture and re-orient their lives. Eventually Muhammad's religion would be known as islam, the act of existential surrender that each convert was expected to make to al-Lah: a muslim was a man or woman who has surrendered his or her whole being to the Creator. The Quraysh were horrified when they saw these first Muslims making the salat: they found it unacceptable that a member of the haughty clan of Quraysh with centuries of proud Bedouin independence behind him should be prepared to grovel on the ground like a slave and the Muslims had to retire to the glens around the city to make their prayer in secret. The reaction of the Quraysh showed that Muhammad had diagnosed their spirit with unerring accuracy.
In practical terms, is Idm meant that Muslims had a duty to create a just, equitable society where the poor and vulnerable are treated decently. The early moral message of the Koran is simple: it is wrong to stockpile wealth and to build a private fortune and good to share the wealth of society fairly by giving a regular proportion of one's wealth to the poor.¹⁴ Alms-giving (zakat) accompanied by prayer (salat) were two of the five essential 'pillars' (rukn) or practices of Islam. Like the Hebrew prophets, Muhammad preached an ethic that we might call socialist as a consequence of his worship of the one God. There were no obligatory doctrines about God: indeed, the Koran is highly suspicious of theological speculation, dismissing it as zanna, self-indulgent guess-work about things that nobody can possibly know or prove. The Christian doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity seemed prime examples of zanna and, not surprisingly, the Muslims found these notions blasphemous. Instead, as in Judaism, God was experienced as a moral imperative. Having practically no contact with either Jews or Christians and their scriptures, Muhammad had cut straight into the essence of historical monotheism.
In the Koran, however, al-Lah is more impersonal than YHWH. He lacks the pathos and passion of the biblical God. We can only glimpse something of God in the 'signs' of nature and so transcendent is he that we can only talk about him in 'parables'.'⁵ Constantly, therefore, the Koran urges Muslims to see the world as an epiphany; they must make the imaginative effort to see through the fragmentary world to the full power of original being, to the transcendent reality that infuses all things. Muslims were to cultivate a sacramental or symbolic attitude:
Verily, in the creation of the heavens and of the earth and the succession of night and day and in the ships that speed through the sea with what is useful to man: and in the waters which God sends down from the sky, giving life thereby to the earth after it had been lifeless, and causing all manner of living creatures to multiply thereon: and in the change of the winds, and the clouds that run their appointed courses between sky and earth: [in all this] there are messages (ayat) indeed for a people who use their reason.'⁶The Koran constantly stresses the need for intelligence in deciphering the 'signs' or 'messages' of God. Muslims are not to abdicate their reason but to look at the world attentively and with curiosity. It was this attitude that later enabled Muslims to build a fine tradition of natural science, which has never been seen as such a danger to religion as in Christianity. A study of the workings of the natural world showed that it had a transcendent dimension and source, whom we can only talk about in signs and symbols: even the stories of the prophets, the accounts of the Last Judgement and the joys of paradise should not be interpreted literally but as parables of a higher, ineffable reality.
But die greatest sign of all was die Koran itself: indeed its individual verses are called ay at. Western people find die Koran a difficult book and this is largely a problem of translation. Arabic is particularly difficult to translate: even ordinary literature and die mundane utterances of politicians frequently sound stilted and alien when translated into English, for example, and this is doubly true of die Koran, which is written in dense and highly allusive, elliptical speech. The early suras in particular give die impression of human language crushed and splintered under die divine impact. Muslims often say that when they read die Koran in a translation, they feel that diey are reading a different book because nodiing of die beauty of die Arabic has been conveyed. As its name suggests, it is meant to be recited aloud and die sound of die language is an essential pan of its effect. Muslims say diat when diey hear die Koran chanted in die mosque diey feel enveloped in a divine dimension of sound, radier as Muhammad was enveloped in die embrace of Gabriel on Mount Hira or when he saw die angel on die horizon no matter where he looked. It is not a book to be read simply to acquire information. It is meant to yield a sense of the divine, and must not be read in haste:
And thus have We bestowed from on high this [divine writ] as a discourse in the Arabic tongue, and have given therein many facets to all manner of warnings, so that men might remain conscious of Us, or that it give rise to a new awareness in them.
[Know] then, [that] God is sublimely exalted, the Ultimate Sovereign (al-Malik), the Ultimate Truth (al-Haqq): and [knowing this], do not approach the Koran in haste, ere it has been revealed unto thee in full, but [always] say: 'O my Sustainer, cause me to grow in knowledge!"⁷By approaching the Koran in the right way, Muslims claim that they do experience a sense of transcendence, of an ultimate reality and power that lies behind the transient and fleeting phenomena of the mundane world. Reading the Koran is therefore a spiritual discipline, which Christians may find difficult to understand because they do not have a sacred language, in the way that Hebrew, Sanscrit and Arabic are sacred to Jews, Hindus and Muslims. It is Jesus who is the Word of God and there is nothing holy about the New Testament Greek. Jews, however, have a similar attitude towards the Torah. When they study the first five books of the Bible, they do not simply run their eyes over the page. Frequently they recite the words aloud, savouring the words that God himself is supposed to have used when he revealed himself to Moses on Sinai. Sometimes they sway backwards and forwards, like a flame before the breath of the Spirit. Obviously Jews who read their Bible in this way are experiencing a very different book from Christians whj find most of the Pentateuch extremely dull and obscure.
The early biographers of Muhammad constantly describe the wonder and shock felt by the Arabs when they heard the Koran for the first ume. Many were converted on the spot, believing that God alone could account for the extraordinary beauty of the language. Frequently a convert would describe the experience as a divine invasion that tapped buried yearnings and released a flood of feelings. Thus the young Qurayshi Umar ibn al-Khattab had been a virulent opponent of Muhammad; he had been devoted to the old paganism and ready toassassinate the Prophet. But this Muslim Saul of Tarsus was converted not by a vision of Jesus the Word but by the Koran. There are two versions of his conversion story, which are both worthy of note. The first has Umar discovering his sister, who had secretely become a Muslim, listening to a recitation of a new sura. 'What was that balderdash?' he had roared angrily as he strode into the house, knocking poor Fatimah to the ground. But when he saw that she was bleeding, he probably felt ashamed because his face changed. He picked up the manuscript, which the visiting Koran-reciter had dropped in the commotion, and, being one of the few Qurayshis who were literate, he started to read. Umar was an acknowledged authority on Arabic oral poetry and was consulted by poets as to the precise significance of die language, but he had never come across anything like the Koran. 'How fine and noble is this speech!' he said wonderingly, and was instandy converted to die new religion of al-Lah.'⁸ The beauty of the words had reached through his reserves of hatred and prejudice to a core of receptivity that he had not been conscious of. We have all had a similar experience, when a poem touches a chord of recognition that lies at a level deeper than the rational. In die odier version of Umar's conversion, he encountered Muhammad one night at die Kabah, reciting the Koran quietly to himself before die shrine. Thinking that he would like to listen to the words, Umar crept under die damask cloth that covered die huge granite cube and edged his way round until he was standing directly in front of the Prophet. As he said, 'There was nothing between us but die cover of die Kabah'—all his defences but one were down. Then die magic of die Arabic did its work: 'When I heard die Koran, my heart was softened and I wept and Islam entered into me." ⁹ It was die Koran which prevented God from being a mighty reality 'out there' and brought him into die mind, heart and being of each believer.
The experience of Umar and die odier Muslims who were converted by die Koran can perhaps be compared to die experience of art described by George Steiner in his book Real Presences: h there anything in what we say} He speaks of what he calls 'die indiscretion of serious art, literature and music' which 'queries die last privacies of our existence'. It is an invasion or an annunciation, which breaks into the small house of our cautionary being' and commands us imperatively: 'change your life!' After such a summons, the house 'is no longer habitable in quite the same way as it was before'.²⁰ Muslims like Umar seem to have experienced a similar unsettling of sensibility, an awakening and a disturbing sense of significance which enabled them to make the painful break with the traditional past. Even those Qurayshis who refused to accept Islam were disturbed by the Koran and found that it lay outside all their familiar categories: it was nothing like the inspiration of the kahin or the poet; nor was it like the incantations of a magician. Some stories show powerful Qurayshis who remained steadfastly with the opposition being visibly shaken when they listened to a sura. It is as though Muhammad had created an entirely new literary form that some people were not ready for but which thrilled others. Without this experience of the Koran, it is extremely unlikely that Islam would have taken root. We have seen that it took the ancient Israelites some seven hundred years to break with their old religious allegiances and accept monotheism but Muhammad managed to help the Arabs achieve this difficult transition in a mere twenty-three years. Muhammad as poet and prophet and the Koran as text and theophany is surely an unusually striking instance of the deep congruence that exists between art and religion.
During the first years of his mission, Muhammad attracted many converts from the younger generation, who were becoming disillusioned with the capitalistic ethos of Mecca, as well as from underprivileged and marginalised groups, which included women, slaves and members of the weaker clans. At one point, the early sources tell us, it seemed as though the whole of Mecca would accept Muhammad's reformed religion of al-Lah. The richer establishment, who were more than happy with the status quo, understandably held aloof but there was no formal rupture with the leading Qurayshis until Muhammad forbade the Muslims to worship the pagan gods. For the first three years of his mission it seems that Muhammad did not emphasise the monotheistic content of his message and people probably imagined that they could go on worshipping the traditional deities of Arabia alongside al-Lah, the High God, as they always had. But when he condemned these ancient cults as idolatrous, he lost most of his (d.Q23). He tells us that Muhammad was distressed by the rift that had developed between him and most of his tribe after he had forbidden the cult of the goddesses and so, inspired by 'Satan', he uttered some rogue verses which allowed the banal al-Lah to be venerated as intercessors, like the angels. In these so-called 'Satanic' verses, the three goddesses were not on a par with al-Lah but were lesser spiritual beings who could intercede with him on behalf of mankind. Later, however, Tabari says that Gabriel told the Prophet that these verses were of 'Satanic' origin and should be excised from the Koran to be replaced by these lines which declared that the banal al-Lah were mere projections and figments of the imagination:
Have you, then, ever considered [what you are worshipping in] al-Lat, al-Uzza, as well as [in] Manat, the third and last [of this triad]?....
These [alllegedly divine beings] are nothing but empty names which you have invented - you and your forefathers - [and] for which God has bestowed no warrant from on high. They [who worship them] follow nothing but surmise and their own wishful thinking -although right guidance has now indeed come unto them from their Sustainer.
This was the most radical of all the Koranic condemnations of the ancestral pagan gods and after these verses had been included in the Koran there was no chance of a reconciliation with the Quraysh. From this point, Muhammad became a jealous monotheist and shirk (idolatry; literally, associating other beings with al-Lah) became the greatest sin of Islam.

Muhammad had not made any concession to polytheism in the incident of the Satanic Verses - if, that is, it ever happened. It is also incorrect to imagine that the role of'Satan' meant that the Koran was momentarily tainted by evil: in Islam Satan is a much more manageable character than he became in Christianity. The Koran tells us that he will be forgiven on the Last Day and Arabs frequently used the word 'Shaitan' to allude to a purely human tempter or a natural temptation." The incident may indicate the difficulty Muhammad certainly experienced when he tried to incarnate the ineffable divine message in human speech: it is associated with canonical Koranic verses which suggest that most of the other prophets had made similar 'Satanic' slips when they conveyed the divine message but that God always rectified their mistakes and sent down a new and superior revelation in their stead. An alternative and more secular way of looking at this is to see Muhammad revising his work in the light of new insights like any other creative artist. The sources show that Muhammad absolutely refused to compromise with the Quraysh on the matter of idolatry. He was a pragmatic man and would readily make a concession on what he deemed to be inessential, but whenever the Quraysh asked him to adopt a monolatrous solution, allowing them to worship their ancestral gods while he and his Muslims worshipped al-Lah alone, Muhammad vehemently rejected the proposal. As the Koran has it: 'I do not worship that which you worship, and neither do you worship that which I worship ... Unto you your moral law, and, unto me, mine!'²³ The Muslims would surrender to God alone and would not succumb to the false objects of worship - be they deities or values - espoused by the Quraysh.

The perception of God's uniqueness was the basis of the morality of the Koran. To give allegiance to material goods or to put trust in lesser beings was shirk (idolatry), the greatest sin of Islam. The Koran pours scorn on the pagan deities in almost exactly the same way as the Jewish scriptures: they are totally ineffective. These gods cannot give food or sustenance; it is no good putting them at the centre of one's life because they are powerless. Instead the Muslim must realise that al-Lah is the ultimate and unique reality:

Say: 'He is the One God;

God, the Eternal, the Uncaused Cause of all being.
He begets not, and neither is he begotten and there is nothing that could be compared to him'⁴

Christians like Athanasius had also insisted that only the Creator, the Source of Being, had the power to redeem. They had expressed this insight in the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation. The Koran returns to a Semitic idea of the divine unity and refuses to imagine that God can 'beget' a son. There is no deity but al-Lah the Creator of heaven and earth who alone can save man and send him the spiritual and physical sustenance that he needs. Only by acknowledging him as as-Samad, 'the Uncaused Cause of all being' will Muslims address a dimension of reality beyond time and history and which would take them beyond the tribal divisions that were tearing their society apart. Muhammad knew that monotheism was inimical to tribalism: a single deity who was the focus of all worship would integrate society as well as the individual.

There is no simplistic notion of God, however. This single deity is not a being like ourselves whom we can know and understand. The phrase 'Allahu AkhbahV (God is greater!) that summons Muslims to salal distinguishes between God and the rest of reality, as well as between God as he is in himself (al-Dhat) and anything that we can say about him. Yet this incomprehensible and inaccessible God had wanted to make himself known. An early tradition (hadith) has God say to Muhammad: 'I was a hidden treasure; I wanted to be known. Hence, I created the world so that I might be known.'²⁵ By contemplating the signs (ayai) of nature and the verses of the Koran, Muslims could glimpse that aspect of divinity which has turned towards the world, which the Koran calls the Face of God (majh al-Lah). Like the two older religions, Islam makes it clear that we only see God in his activities, which adapt his ineffable being to our limited understanding. The Koran urges Muslims to cultivate a perpetual consciousness (taqwa) of the Face or the Self of God that surrounds them on all sides: 'Wheresoever you turn, there is the Face of al-Lah.'²⁶ Like the Christian Fathers, the Koran sees God as the Absolute, who alone has true existence: 'All that lives on earth or in the heavens is bound to pass away: but forever will abide thy Sustainer's Self, full of majesty and glory.'²⁷ In the Koran, God is given ninety-nine names or attributes. These emphasise that he is 'greater', the source of all positive qualities that we find in the universe. Thus the world only exists because he is al-Ghani (rich and infinite); he is the giver of life (al-Muhyt), the knower of all things (al-Alim), the producer of speech (al-Kalimah): without him, therefore, there would not be life, knowledge or speech. It is an assertion that only God has true existence and positive value. Yet frequently the divine names seem to cancel one another out. Thus God is al-Qahtar, he who dominates and who breaks the back of his enemies, and al-Halim, the utterly forbearing one; he is al-Qabid, he who takes away, and al-Basit, he who gives abundantly; al-Khqfid, he who brings low, and ar-Rafic, he who exalts. The Names of God play a central role in Muslim piety: they are recited, counted on rosary beads and chanted as a mantra. All this has reminded Muslims that the God they worship cannot be contained by human categories and refuses simplistic definition.

The first of the 'pillars' of Islam would be the Shahadah, the Muslim profession of faith: 'I bear witness that there is no god but al-Lah and that Muhammad is his Messenger.' This was not simply an affirmation of God's existence but an acknowledgement that al-Lah was the only true reality, the only true form of existence. He was the only true reality, beauty or perfection: all the beings that seem to exist and possess these qualities have them only in so far as they participate in this essential being. To make this assertion demands that Muslims integrate their lives by making God their focus and sole priority. The assertion of the unity of God was not simply a denial that deities like the banal al-Lah were worthy of worship. To say that God was One was not a mere numerical definition: it was a call to make that unity the driving factor of one's life and society. The unity of God could be glimpsed in the truly integrated self. But the divine unity also required Muslims to recognise the religious aspirations of others. Because there was only one God, all rightly guided religions must derive from him alone. Belief in the supreme and sole Reality would be culturally conditioned and would be expressed by different societies in different ways but the focus of all true worship must have been inspired by and directed towards the being whom the Arabs had always called al-Lah. One of the divine names of the Koran is an-Nur, the Light. In these famous verses of the Koran, God is the source of all knowledge as well as the means whereby men catch a glimpse of transcendence:

God is the light of the heavens and the earth. The parable of his light is, as it were (ka), that of a niche containing a lamp; the lamp is [enclosed] in glass, the glass [shining] like a radiant star: [a lamp] lit from a blessed tree - an olive tree that is neither of the east nor of the west - the oil whereof [is so bright that it] would well-nigh give light [of itself] even though fire had not touched it: light upon light.²¹⁸

The participle ka is a reminder of the essentially symbolic nature of the Koranic discourse about God. An-Nur, the Light, is not God himself, therefore, but refers to the enlightenment which he bestows on a particular revelation [the lamp] which shines in the heart of an individual [the niche]. The light itself cannot be identified wholly with any one of its bearers but is common to them all. As Muslim commentators pointed out from the very earliest days, light is a particularly good symbol for the divine Reality, which transcends time and space. The image of the olive tree in these verses has been interpreted as an allusion to the continuity of revelation, which springs from one 'root' and branches into a multifarious variety of religious experience that cannot be identified with or confined by any one particular tradition or locality: it is neither of the East nor the West. When the Christian Waraqa ibn Nawfal had acknowledged Muhammad as a true prophet, neither he nor Muhammad expected him to convert to Islam. Muhammad never asked Jews or Christians to convert to his religion of al-Lah unless they particularly wished to do so, because they had received authentic revelations of their own. The Koran did not see revelation as cancelling out the messages and insights of previous prophets but instead it stressed the continuity of the religious experience of mankind. It is important to stress this point because tolerance is not a virtue that many Western people today would feel inclined to attribute to Islam. Yet from the start, Muslims saw revelation in less exclusive terms than either Jews or Christians. The intolerance that many people condemn in Islam today does not always spring from a rival vision of God but from quite another source:²⁹ Muslims are intolerant of injustice, whether this is committed by rulers of their own - like Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi of Iran - or by the powerful Western countries.. The Koran does not condemn other religious traditions as false or incomplete but shows each new prophet as confirming and continuing the insights of his predecessors. The Koran teaches that God had sent messengers to every people on the face of the earth: Islamic tradition says that there had been 124,000 such prophets, a symbolic number suggesting infinitude. Thus the Koran repeatedly points out that it is not bringing a message that is essentially new and that Muslims must emphasise their kinship with the older religions:
Do not argue with the followers of earlier revelation otherwise than in the most kindly manner - unless it be such of them as are set on evil doing - and say: 'We believe in that which has been bestowed upon us, as well as that which has been bestowed upon you: for our God and your God is one and the same, and it is unto him that we [all] surrender ourselves.'³⁰

The Koran naturally singles out apostles who were familiar to the Arabs - like Abraham, Noah, Moses and Jesus wwho were the prophets of the Jews and Christians. It also mentions Hud and Salih, who had been sent to the ancient Arab peoples of Midian and Thamood. Today Muslims insist that if Muhammad had known about Hindus and Buddhists, he would have included their religious sages: after his death they were allowed full religious liberty in the Islamic empire, like the Jews and Christians. On the same principle, Muslims argue, the Koran would also have honoured the shamans and holy men of the American Indians or the Australian Aborigines.

Muhammad's belief in the continuity of the religious experience was soon put to the test. After the rift with die Quraysh life became impossible for the Muslims in Mecca. The slaves and freedmen who had no tribal protection were persecuted so severely that some died under the treatment and Muhammad's own clan of Hashim were boycotted in an attempt to starve them into submission: the privation probably caused the death of his beloved wife Khadija. Eventually Muhammad's own life would be in danger. The pagan Arabs of the northern settlement of Yathrib had invited the Muslims to abandon their clan and to emigrate there. This was an absolutely unprecedented step for an Arab: the tribe had been the sacred value of Arabia and such a defection violated essential principles. Yathrib had been torn by apparently incurable warfare between its various tribal groups and many of the pagans were ready to accept Islam as a spiritual and political solution to the problems of the oasis. There were three large Jewish tribes in the settlement and they had prepared the minds of the pagans for monotheism. This meant that they were not as offended as die Quraysh by the denigration of the Arabian deities. Accordingly during the summer of 622, about seventy Muslims and their families setoffforYathrib.

In the year before the hijra or migration to Yathrib (or Medina, the City, as the Muslims would call it), Muhammad had adapted his religion to bring it closer to Judaism as he understood it. After so many years of working in isolation he must have been looking forward to living with members of an older, more established tradition. Thus he prescribed a fast for Muslims on the Jewish Day of Atonement and commanded Muslims to pray three times a day like the Jews, instead of only twice as hitherto. Muslims could marry Jewish women and should observe some of the dietary laws. Above all Muslims must now pray facing Jerusalem like the Jews and Christians. The Jews of Medina were at first prepared to give Muhammad a chance: life had become intolerable in the oasis and like many of the committed pagans of Medina they were ready to give him the benefit of the doubt, especially since he seemed so positively inclined towards their faith. Eventually, however, they turned against Muhammad and joined those pagans who were hostile to the newcomers from Mecca. The Jews had sound religious reasons for their rejection: they believed that the era of prophecy was over. They were expecting a Messiah but no Jew or Christian at this stage would have believed that they were prophets. Yet they were also motivated by political considerations: in the old days, they had gained power in the oasis by throwing in their lot with one or the other warring Arab tribes. Muhammad, however, had joined both these tribes with the Quraysh in the new Muslim ummah, a kind of super-tribe of which the Jews were also members. As they saw their position in Medina decline, the Jews became antagonistic. They used to assemble in the mosque 'to listen to the stories of the Muslims and laugh and scoff at their religion'.³' It was very easy for them, with their superior knowledge of scripture, to pick holes in the stories of the Koran - some of which differed markedly from the biblical version. They also jeered at Muhammad's pretensions, saying that it was very odd that a man who claimed to be a prophet could not even find his camel when it went missing.

Muhammad's rejection by the Jews was probably the greatest disappointment in his life and it called his whole religious position into question. But some of the Jews were friendly and seem to have joined the Muslims in an honorary capacity. They discussed the Bible with him and showed him how to rebuff the criticisms of the Jews and this new knowledge of scripture also helped Muhammad to develop his own insights. For the first time Muhammad learned the exact chronology of the prophets, about which he had previously been somewhat hazy. He could now see that it was very important that Abraham had lived before either Moses or Jesus. Hitherto Muhammad probably thought that Jews and Christians both belonged to one religion but now he learned that they had serious disagreements with one another. To outsiders like the Arabs there seemed little to choose between the two positions and it seemed logical to imagine that the followers of the Torah and the Gospel had introduced inauthentic elements into the hanifiyyah, the pure religion of Abraham, such as the Oral Law elaborated by the Rabbis and the blasphemous doctrine of the Trinity. Muhammad also learned that in their own scriptures the Jews were called a faithless people, who had turned to idolatry to worship the Golden Calf. The polemic against the Jews in the Koran is well-developed and shows how threatened the Muslims must have felt by the Jewish rejection, even though the Koran still insists that not all 'the people of earlier revelation''² have fallen into error and that essentially all religions are one.

From the friendly Jews of Medina, Muhammad also learned the story of Ishmael, Abraham's elder son. In the Bible, Abraham had had a son by his concubine Hagar but when Sarah had borne Isaac she had become jealous and demanded that he get rid of Hagar and Ishmael. To comfort Abraham, God promised that Ishmael would also be the father of a great nation. The Arabian Jews had added some local legends of their own, saying that Abraham had left Hagar and Ishmael in the valley of Mecca, where God had taken care of them, revealing the sacred spring of Zamzam when the child was dying of thirst. Later Abraham had visited Ishmael and together father and son had built the Kabah, the first temple of the one God. Ishmael had become the father of the Arabs, so, like the Jews, they too were sons of Abraham. This must have been music to Muhammad's ears: he was bringing the Arabs their own scripture and now he could root their faith hi the piety of their ancestors. In January 624, when it was clear that the hostility of the Medinan Jews was permanent, the new religion of al-Lah declared its independence. Muhammad commanded the Muslims to pray facing Mecca instead of Jerusalem. This changing of the direction of prayer (qibla) has been called Muhammad's most creative religious gesture. By prostrating themselves in the direction of the Kabah, which was independent of the two older revelations, Muslims were tacitly declaring that they belonged to no established religion but were surrendering themselves to God alone. They were not joining a sect that impiously divided the religion of the one God into warring groups. Instead they were returning to the primordial religion of Abraham, who had been die first muslfm to surrender to God and who had built his holy house:
And they say, 'Be Jews' - or 'Christians' - 'and you shall be on the right path'. Say: 'nay, but [ours is] the creed of Abraham, who turned away from all that is false and was not of those who ascribe divinity to aught beside God.'

Say: 'We believe in God and in that which had been bestowed from on high upon us, and in that which has been bestowed upon Abraham and Ishmael and Isaac and Jacob and their descendants, and that which has been vouchsafed to Moses and Jesus, and that which has been vouchsafed to all the [other] prophets by their Sustainer: we make no distinction between any of them. And it is unto him that we surrender ourselves.'³³It was, surely, idolatry to prefer a merely human interpretation of tile truth to God himself.

Muslims date their era not from the birth of Muhammad nor from the year of the first revelations — there was, after all, nothing new about these - but from the year of the hijra (the mmigration to Medina) when Muslims began to implement the divine plan in history by making Islam a political reality. We have seen that the Koran teaches that all religious people have a duty to work for a just and equal society and Muslims have taken their political vocation very seriously indeed.

Muhammad had not intended to become a political leader at the outset but events that he could not have foreseen had pushed him towards an entirely new political solution for the Arabs. During the ten years between the hijra and his death in 632 Muhammad and his first Muslims were engaged in a desperate struggle for survival against his opponents in Medina and the Quraysh of Mecca, all of whom were ready to exterminate the ummah. In the West, Muhammad has often been presented as a warlord, who forced Islam on a reluctant world by force of arms. The reality was quite different. Muhammad was fighting for his life, was evolving a theology of the just war in the Koran with which most Christians would agree, and never forced anybody to convert to his religion. Indeed the Koran is clear that there is to be 'no compulsion in religion'. In the Koran war is held to be abhorrent; the only just war is a war of self-defence. Sometimes it is necessary to fight in order to preserve decent values, as Christians believed it necessary to fight against Hitler. Muhammad had political gifts of a very high order. By the end of his life most of the Arabian tribes had joined the ummah, even though, as Muhammad well knew, their isldm was either nominal or superficial for the most part. In 630 the city of Mecca opened its gates to Muhammad who was able to take it without bloodshed. In 632 shortly before his death, he made what has been called the Farewell Pilgrimage in which he Islamised the old Arabian pagan rites of the hajj and made this pilgrimage, which was so dear to the Arabs, the fifth 'pillar' of his religion.

All Muslims have a duty to make the hajj at least once in a lifetime if their circumstances permit. Naturally the pilgrims remember Muhammad, but the rites have been interpreted to remind them of Abraham, Hagar and Ishmael rather than their prophet. These rites look bizarre to an outsider - as do any alien social or religious rituals -but they are able to unleash an intense religious experience and perfectly express the communal and personal aspects of Islamic spirituality. Today many of the thousands of pilgrims who assemble at the appointed time in Mecca are not Arabs but they have been able to make the ancient Arabic ceremonies their own. As they converge on the Kabah, clad in the traditional pilgrim dress that obliterates all distinctions of race or class, they feel that they have been liberated from the egotistic preoccupations of their daily lives and been caught up into a community that has one focus and orientation. They cry in unison; 'Here I am at your service, O al-Lah' before they begin the circumambulations around the shrine. The essential meaning of this rite is brought out well by the late Iranian philosopher Ali Shariati:
As you circumambulate and move closer to the Kabah, you feel like a small stream merging with a big river. Carried by a wave you lose touch with the ground. Suddenly, you are floating, carried on by the flood. As you approach the centre, the pressure of the crowd squeezes you so hard that you are given a new life. You are now part of the People; you are now a Man, alive and eternal... The Kabah is the world's sun whose face attracts you into its orbit. You have become part of this universal system. Circumambulating around Allah, you will soon forget yourself... You have been transformed into a particle that is gradually melting and disappearing. This is absolute love at its peak.³⁴

Jews and Christians have also emphasised the spirituality of community. The hajj offers each individual Muslim the experience of a personal integration in the context of the ummah, with God at its centre. As in most religions, peace and harmony are important pilgrimage themes and once the pilgrims have entered the sanctuary all violence of any kind is forbidden. Pilgrims may not even kill an insect or speak a harsh word. Hence the outrage throughout the Muslim world during the hajj of 1987, when Iranian pilgrims instigated a riot in which 402 people were killed and 649 injured.

Muhammad died unexpectedly after a short illness in June 632. After his death, some of the Bedouin tried to break away from the ummah but the political unity of Arabia held firm. Eventually the recalcitrant tribes also accepted the religion of the one God: Muhammad's astonishing success had shown the Arabs that the paganism which had served them well for centuries no longer worked in the modern world. The religion of al-Lah introduced the compassionate ethos which was the hallmark of the more advanced religions: brotherhood and social justice were its crucial virtues. A strong egalitarianism would continue to characterise the Islamic ideal.

During Muhammad's lifetime, this had included the equality of the sexes. Today it is common in the West to depict Islam as an inherently misogynistic religion but, like Christianity, the religion of al-Lah was originally positive for women. During the jahiliyyah, the pre-Islamic period, Arabia had preserved the attitudes towards women which had prevailed before the Axial Age. Polygamy, for example, was common and wives remained in their father's households. Elite women enjoyed considerable power and prestige - Muhammad's first wife Khadija, for example, was a successful merchant - but the majority were on a par with slaves; they had no political or human rights and female infanticide was common. Women had been among Muhammad's earliest converts and their emancipation was a project that was dear to his heart. The Koran strictly forbade the killing of female children and rebuked the Arabs for their dismay when a girl was born. It also gave women legal rights of inheritance and divorce: most Western women had nothing comparable until the nineteenth century. Muhammad encouraged women to play an active role in the affairs of the ummah and they expressed their views forthrightly, confident that they would be heard. On one occasion, for example, the women of Medina had complained to the Prophet that the men were outstripping them in the study of the Koran and asked him to help them catch up. This Muhammad did. One of their most important questions was why the Koran addressed men only when women had also made their surrender to God. The result was a revelation that addressed women as well as men and emphasised the absolute moral and spiritual equality of the sexes.³⁵ Thereafter the Koran quite frequently addressed women explicitly, something that rarely happens in either the Jewish or Christian scriptures.

Unfortunately, as in Christianity, the religion was later hijacked by the men, who interpreted texts in a way that was negative for Muslim women. The Koran does not prescribe the veil for all women but only for Muhammad's wives, as a mark of their status. Once Islam had taken its place in the civilised world, however, Muslims adopted those customs of the Oikumene which relegated women to second class status. They adopted the customs of veiling women and secluding them in harems from Persia and Christian Byzantium, where women had long been marginalised in this way. By the time of the Abbasid caliphate (750-1258), the position of Muslim women was as bad as that of their sisters in Jewish and Christian society. Today Muslim feminists urge their menfolk to return to the original spirit of the Koran.

This reminds us that, like any other faith, Islam could be interpreted in a number of different ways; consequently it evolved its own sects and divisions. The first of these - that between the Sunnah and Shiah - was prefigured in the struggle for the leadership after Muhammad's sudden death. Abu Bakr, Muhammad's close friend, was elected by the majority but some believed that he would have wanted AH ibn Abi Talib, his cousin and son-in-law, to be his successor (kalipha). Ali himself accepted Abu Bakr's leadership but during the next few years he seems to have been the focus of the loyalty of dissidents who disapproved of the policies of the first three caliphs: Abu Bakr, Umar ibn al-Khattab and Uthman ibn Affan. Finally Ali became the fourth Caliph in 656: the Shiah would eventually call him the first Imam or Leader of the ummah. Concerned with the leadership, the split between Sunnis and Shiis was political rather than doctrinal and this heralded the importance of politics in Muslim religion, including its conception of God. The Shiah-i-Ali (the Partisans of Ali) remained a minority and would develop a piety of protest, typified by the tragic figure of Muhammad's grandson Husayn ibn Ali who refused to accept the Ummayads (who had seized the caliphate after the death of his father Ali) and was killed with his small band of supporters by the Ummayad Caliph Yazid in 680 on the plain of Karbala, near Kufa in modern Iraq. All Muslims regard the immoral slaughter of Husayn with horror but he has become a particular hero of the Shiah, a reminder that it is sometimes necessary to fight tyranny to the death. By this time, the Muslims had begun to establish their empire. The first four caliphs had been concerned only to spread Islam among the Arabs of the Byzantine and Persian empires, which were both in a state of decline. Under the Ummayads, however, the expansion continued into Asia and North Africa, inspired not by religion so much as by Arab imperialism.

Nobody in the new empire was forced to accept the Islamic faith; indeed, for a century after Muhammad's death, conversion was not encouraged and, in about 700, was actually forbidden by law: Muslims believed that Islam was for the Arabs as Judaism was for the sons of Jacob. As the 'people of the book' (ahl al-kitab), Jews and Christians were granted religious liberty as dhimmis, protected minority groups. When the Abbasid caliphs began to encourage conversion, many of the Semitic and Aryan peoples in their empire were eager to accept the new religion. The success of Islam was as formative as the failure and humiliation of Jesus have been in Christianity. Politics is not extrinsic to a Muslim's personal religious life, as in Christianity which mistrusts mundane success. Muslims regard themselves as committed to implementing a just society in accord with God's will. The ummah has sacramental importance, as a 'sign' that God has blessed this endeavour to redeem humanity from oppression and injustice; its political health holds much the same place in a Muslim's spirituality as a particular theological option (Catholic, Protestant, Methodist, Baptist) in the life of a Christian. If Christians find the Muslims' regard for politics strange, they should reflect that their passion for abstruse theological debate seems equally bizarre to Jews and Muslims.

In the early years of Islamic history, therefore, speculation about the nature of God often sprang from a political concern about the state of the caliphate and the establishment. Learned debates about who and what manner of man should lead the ummah proved to be as formative in Islam as debates about the person and nature of Jesus in Christianity. After the period of the rashidun (the first four 'rightly-guided' caliphs), Muslims found that they were living in a world very different from the small, embattled society of Medina. They were now masters of an expanding empire and their leaders seemed motivated by worldliness and greed. There was a luxury and corruption among the aristocracy and in the court that was very different from the austere lives led by the Prophet and his Companions. The most pious Muslims challenged the establishment with the socialist message of the Koran and tried to make Islam relevant to the new conditions. A number of different solutions and sects emerged.

The most popular solution was found by legists and traditionists who attempted to return to the ideals of Muhammad and the rashidun.

This resulted in the formation of the Shariah law, a code similar to the Torah which was based on the Koran and the life and maxims of the Prophet. A bewildering number of oral traditions were in circulation about the words (hadith) and practice (sunnah) of Muhammad and his early companions and these were collected during the eighth and ninth centuries by a number of editors, the most famous of whom were Muhammad ibn Ismail al-Bukhari and Muslim ibn al-Hijjaj al-Qushayri. Because Muhammad was believed to have surrendered perfectly to God, Muslims were to imitate him in their daily lives. Thus by imitating the way Muhammad spoke, loved, ate, washed and worshipped, the Islamic Holy Law helped Muslims to live a life that was open to the divine. By modelling themselves on the Prophet, they hoped to acquire his interior receptivity to God. Thus when Muslims follow a sunnah by greeting one another with the words 'Salaam alaykum' (Peace be with you) as Muhammad used to do, when they are kind to animals, to orphans and the poor as he was and are generous and reliable in their dealings with others, they are reminded of God. The external gestures are not to be regarded as ends in themselves but as a means of acquiring taqwa, the 'God-consciousness' prescribed by the Koran and practised by the Prophet, which consists of a constant remembrance of God (dhikr). There has been much debate about the validity of the sunnah and hadith: some are regarded as more authentic than others. But ultimately the question of the historical validity of these traditions is less important than the fact that they have worked: they have proved able to bring a sacramental sense of the divine into the life of millions of Muslims over the centuries.

The hadith or collected maxims of the Prophet are mostly concerned with everyday matters but also with metaphysics, cosmology and theology. A number of these sayings are believed to have been spoken by God himself to Muhammad. These hadith qudsi (sacred traditions) emphasise God's immanence and presence in the believer: one famous hadith, for example, lists the stages whereby a Muslim apprehends a divine presence which seems almost incarnate in the believer: you begin by observing the commandments of the Koran and Shariah and then progress to voluntary acts of piety:
My servant draws near to me by means of nothing dearer to me than that which I have established as a duty to him. And my servant continues drawing nearer to me through supererogatory acts until I love him: and when I love him, I become his ear through which he hears, his eye with which he sees, his hand with which he grasps and his foot whereon he walks.³⁶

As in Judaism and Christianity, the transcendent God is also an immanent presence encountered here below. The Muslims could cultivate a sense of this divine presence by very similar methods to those discovered by the two older religions.
The Muslims who promoted this type of piety based on the imitation of Muhammad are generally known as the ahl al-hadith, the Traditionists. They appealed to the ordinary people, because theirs was a fiercely egalitarian ethic. They opposed the luxury of the Ummayad and Abbasid courts but were not in favour of the revolutionary tactics of the Shiah. They did not believe that the caliph need have exceptional spiritual qualities: he was simply an administrator. Yet by stressing the divine nature of the Koran and the sunnah, they provided each Muslim with the means of direct contact with God that was potentially subversive and highly critical of absolute power. There was no need for a caste of priests to act as mediators. Each Muslim was responsible before God for his or her own fate.
Above all, the Traditionists taught that the Koran was an eternal reality which, like the Torah or the Logos, was somehow of God himself; it had dwelt in his mind from before the beginning of time, Their doctrine of the uncreated Koran meant that when it was recited, Muslims could hear the invisible God directly. The Koran represented the presence of God in their very midst. His speech was or their lips when they recited its sacred words and when they held tfu holy book it was as though they had touched the divine itself. The earl] Christians had thought of Jesus the man in a similar way:

Something which has existed since the beginning,
that we have heard,
and we have seen with our own eyes;
that we have watched
and touched with our hands;
the Word, who is life -this is our subject.³⁷

The exact status of Jesus, the Word, had greatly exercised Christians. Now Muslims would begin to debate the nature of the Koran: in what sense was the Arabic text really the Word of God? Some Muslims found this elevation of the Koran as blasphemous as those Christians who had been scandalised by the idea that Jesus had been the incarnate Logos.

The Shiah, however, gradually evolved ideas that seemed even closer to Christian incarnation. After the tragic death of Husayn, Shiis became convinced that only the descendants of his father AH ibn Abi Talib should lead the ummah and they became a distinctive sect within Islam. As his cousin and son-in-law, AH had a double blood-tie with Muhammad. Since none of the Prophet's sons had survived infancy, he was his chief male relative. In the Koran, prophets often ask God to bless their descendants. The Shiis extended this notion of divine blessing and came to believe that only members of Muhammad's family through the house of Ali had true knowledge (Urn) of God. They alone could provide the ummah with divine guidance. If a descendant of AH came to power, Muslims could look forward to a Golden Age of justice and the ummah would be led according to God's will.

The enthusiasm for the person of Ali would develop in some surprising ways. Some of the more radical Shii groups would elevate Ali and his descendants to a position above that of Muhammad himself and give them near-divine status. They were drawing on ancient Persian tradition of a chosen god-begotten family which transmitted the divine glory from one generation to another. By the end of the Ummayad period, some Shiis had come to believe that the authoritative tint was retained in one particular line of Ali's descendants. Muslims would only find the person designated by God as the true Imam (leader) of the ummah in this family. Whether he was in power or not, his guidance was absolutely necessary, so every Muslim had a duty to look for him and accept his leadership. Since these Imams were seen as a focus of disaffection, the caliphs regarded them as enemies of state: according to Shii tradition, several of the Imams were poisoned and some had to go into hiding. When each Imam died, he would choose one of his relatives to inherit the Urn. Gradually the Imams were revered as avatars of the divine: each one had been a 'proof (hujiah) of God's presence on earth and, in some mysterious sense, made the divine incarnate in a human being. His words, decisions and commands were God's. As Christians had seen Jesus as the Way, the Truth and the Light that would lead men to God, Shiis revered their Imams as the gateway (bob) to God, the road (sabit) and the guide of each generation.

The various branches of the Shiah traced the divine succession differently. 'Twelver Shiis', for example, venerated twelve descendants of Ali through Husayn, until in 939 the last Imam went into hiding and disappeared from human society; since he had no descendants, the line died out. The Ismailis, known as the Seveners, believed that the seventh of these Imams had been the last. A messianic strain appeared among the Twelvers, who believed that the Twelfth or Hidden Imam would return to inaugurate a Golden Age. These were obviously dangerous ideas. Not only were they politically subversive but they could easily be interpreted in a crude, simplistic way. The more extreme Shiis developed an esoteric tradition, therefore, based on a symbolic interpretation of the Koran, as we shall see in the next chapter. Their piety was too abstruse for most Muslims, who regarded this incarnational idea as blasphemous, so Shiis were usually found among the more aristocratic classes and the intellectuals. Since the Iranian revolution, we have tended in the West to depict Shiism as an inherently fundamentalist sect of Islam but that is an inaccurate assessment. Shiism became a sophisticated tradition. In fact, Shiis had much in common with those Muslims who attempted to apply rational arguments systematically to the Koran. These rationalists, known as Mutazilis, formed their own distinctive group; they also had a firm political commitment: like the Shiis, Mutazilis were highly critical of the luxury of the court and were frequently politically active against the establishment.

The political question inspired a theological debate about God's government of human affairs. Supporters of the Ummayads had rather disingenuously claimed that their unislamic behaviour was not their fault because they had been predestined by God to be the kind of people they were. The Koran has a very strong conception of God's absolute omnipotence and omniscience and many texts could be used to support this view of predestination. But the Koran is equally emphatic about human responsibility: 'Verily, God does not change men's condition unless they change their inner selves.' Consequently the critics of the establishment stressed free will and moral responsibility. The Mutazilis took a middle road and withdrew (i'tazahu, to stand aloof) from an extreme position. They defended free will in order to safeguard the ethical nature of humanity. Muslims who believed that God was above mere human notions of right and wrong were decrying his justice. A God who violated all decent principles and got away with it simply because he was God would be a monster, no better than a tyrannical caliph. Like the Shiis, the Mutazilis declared that justice was of the essence of God: he could not wrong anybody; he could not enjoin anything contrary to reason.

Here they came into conflict with the Traditionists, who argued that by making man the author and creator of his own fate, the Mutazilis were insulting the omnipotence of God. They complained that the Mutazilis were making God too rational and too like a man. They adopted the doctrine of predestination in order to emphasise God's essential incomprehensibility: if we claimed to understand him, he could not be God but was a mere human projection. God transcended mere human notions of good and evil and could not be tied down to our standards and expectations: an act was evil or unjust because God had decreed it to be so, not because these human values had a transcendent dimension binding upon God himself. The Mutazilis were wrong to say that justice, a purely human ideal, was of the essence of God. The problem of predestination and free will, which has also exercised Christians, indicates a central difficulty in the idea of a personal God. An impersonal God, such as Brahman, can more easily be said to exist beyond 'good' and 'evil', which are regarded as masks of the inscrutable divinity. But a God who is in some mysterious way a person and who takes an active part in human history lays himself open to criticism. It is all too easy to make this 'God' a larger-than-life tyrant or judge and make 'him' fulfil our expectations. We can turn 'God' into a Tory or a Socialist, a racist or a revolutionary according to our personal views. The danger of this has led some to see a personal God as an unreligious idea, because it simply embeds us in our own prejudice and makes our human ideas absolute.

To avoid this danger, the Traditionists came up with the time-honoured distinction, used by both Jews and Christians, between God's essence and his activities. They claimed that some of those attributes which enabled the transcendent God to relate to the world -such as power, knowledge, will, hearing, sight and speech, which are all attributed to al-Lah in the Koran - had existed with him from all eternity in much the same way as the uncreated Koran. They were distinct from God's unknowable essence, which would always elude our understanding. Just as Jews had imagined that God's Wisdom or the Torah had existed with God from before the beginning of time, Muslims were now developing a similar idea to account for the personality of God and to remind Muslims that he could not be wholly contained by the human mind. Had not the Caliph al-Mamun (813-832) sided with the Mutazilis and attempted to make their ideas official Muslim doctrine, this abstruse argument would probably have affected a mere handful of people. But when the Caliph began to torture the Traditionists in order to impose the Mutazili belief, the ordinary folk were horrified by this unlslamic behaviour. Ahmad ibn Hanbal (780-855), a leading Traditionist who narrowly escaped death in al-Mamun's inquisition, became a popular hero. His sanctity and charisma - he had prayed for his torturers - challenged the caliphate and his belief in the uncreated Koran became the watchword of a populist revolt against the rationalism of the Mutazilah.

Ibn Hanbal refused to countenance any kind of rational discussion about God. Thus when the moderate Mutazili al-Huayan al-Karabisi (d.859) put forward a compromise solution - that the Koran considered as God's speech was indeed uncreated but that when it was put into human words it became a created thing - Ibn Hanbal condemned the doctrine. Al-Karabisi was quite ready to modify his view again, and declared that the written and spoken Arabic of the Koran was uncreated in so far as it partook of God's eternal speech. Ibn Hanbal, however, declared that this was unlawful too because it was useless and dangerous to speculate about the origin of the Koran in this rationalistic way. Reason was not an appropriate tool for exploring the unutterable God. He accused the Mutazilis of draining God of all mystery and making him an abstract formula that had no religious value. When the Koran used anthropomorphic terms to describe God's activity in the world or when it said that God 'speaks' and 'sees' and 'sits upon his throne', Ibn Hanbal insisted that it be interpreted literally but 'without asking how' (bila kayj}. He can perhaps be compared to radical Christians like Athanasius, who insisted on an extreme interpretation of the doctrine of incarnation against the more rational heretics. Ibn Hanbal was stressing the essential inefFability of the divine, which lay beyond the reach of all logic and conceptual analysis.

Yet the Koran constantly emphasises the importance of intelligence and understanding and Ibn Hanbal's position was somewhat simple-minded. Many Muslims found it perverse and obscurantist. A compromise was found by Abu al-Hasan ibn Ismail al-Ashari (878-941). He had been a Mutazili but was converted to Traditionism by a dream in which the Prophet had appeared to him and urged him to study hadtth. Al-Ashari then went to the other extreme, became an ardent Traditionist and preached against the Mutzilah as the scourge of Islam. Then he had another dream, where Muhammad looked rather irritated and said: 'I did not tell you to give up rational arguments but to support the true hadiths\^n& Henceforth al-Ashari used the rationalist techniques of the Mutazilah to promote the agnostic spirit of Ibn Hanbal. Where the Mutazilis claimed that God's revelation could not be unreasonable, al-Ashari used reason and logic to show that God was beyond our understanding. The Mutazilis had been in danger of reducing God to a coherent but arid concept; al-Ashari wanted to return to the full-blooded God of the Koran, despite its inconsistency. Indeed, like Denys the Areopagite, he believed that paradox would enhance our appreciation of God. He refused to reduce God to a concept that could be discussed and analysed like any other human idea. The divine attributes of knowledge, power, life and so on were real; they had belonged to God from all eternity. But they were distinct from God's essence, because God was essentially one, simple and unique. He could not be regarded as a complex being because he was simplicity itself; we could not analyse him by denning his various characteristics or splitting him up into smaller parts. Al-Ashari refused any attempt to resolve the paradox: thus he insisted that when the Koran says that God 'sits on his throne', we must accept that this is a fact even though it is beyond our understanding to conceive of a pure spirit 'sitting'.

Al-Ashari was trying to find a middle course between deliberate obscurantism and extreme rationalism. Some literalists claimed that if the blessed were going to 'see' God in heaven, as the Koran said, he must have a physical appearance. Hisham ibn Hakim went so far as to say that: Allah has a body, defined, broad, high and long, of equal dimensions, radiating with light, of a broad measure in its three dimensions, in a place beyond place, like a bar of pure metal, shining as a round pearl on all sides, provided widi colour, taste, smell and touch.³⁹Some Shiis accepted such views, because of their belief that the Imams were incarnations of the divine. The Mutazilis insisted that when the Koran speaks of God's 'hands', for example, this must be interpreted allegorically to refer to his generosity and munificence. Al-Ashari opposed the literalists by pointing out that the Koran insisted that we could only talk about God in symbolic language. But he also opposed the Traditionist wholesale rejection of reason. He argued that Muhammad had not encountered these problems or he would have given the Muslims guidance; as it was, all Muslims had a duty to use such interpretive tools as analogy (qiyas) to retain a truly religious concept of God.

Constandy al-Ashari opted for a compromise position. Thus he argued that die Koran was the eternal and uncreated Word of God but that the ink, paper and the Arabic words of the sacred text were created. He condemned the Mutazili doctrine of free will, because God alone could be die 'creator' of man's deeds but he also opposed the Traditionist view that men did not contribute at all to their salvation. His solution was somewhat tortuous: God creates the deeds but allows men to acquire merit or discredit for them. Unlike Ibn Hanbal, however, al-Ashari was prepared to ask questions and to explore these metaphysical problems, even though ultimately he concluded that it was wrong to try to contain the mysterious and ineffable reality that we call God in a tidy, rationalistic system. Al-Ashari had founded the Muslim tradition ofKalam (literally, word or discourse), which is usually translated 'theology*. His successors in the tenth and eleventh centuries refined the methodology of Kalam and developed his ideas. The early Asharites wanted to set up a metaphysical framework for a valid discussion of God's sovereignty. The first major theologian of the Asharite school was Abu Bakr al-Baqillani (d.ioi3). In his treatise al-Tamhid (Unity), he agreed with the Mutazilah that men could prove the existence of God logically with rational arguments: indeed the Koran itself shows Abraham discovering the eternal Creator by meditating systematically on the natural world. But al-Baqillani denied that we could distinguish between good and evil without a revelation, since these are not natural categories but have been decreed by God: al-Lah is not bound by human notions of what is right or wrong.

Al-Baqillani developed a theory known as 'atomism' or 'occasionalism' which attempted to find a metaphysical rationale for the Muslim profession of faith: that there was no god, no reality or certainty but al-Lah. He claimed that everything in the world is absolutely dependent upon God's direct attention. The whole universe was reduced to innumerable, individual atoms: time and space were discontinuous and nothing had a specific identity of its own. The phenomenal universe was reduced to nothingness by al-Baqillani as radically as it had been by Athanasius. God alone had reality and only he could redeem us from nothingness. He sustained the universe and summoned his creation into existence at every second. There were no natural laws that explained the survival of the cosmos. Although other Muslims were applying themselves to science with great success, Asharism was fundamentally antagonistic to the natural sciences yet it had a religious relevance. It was a metaphysical attempt to explain the presence of God in every detail of daily life and a reminder that faith did not depend upon ordinary logic. If used as a discipline rather than a factual account of reality it could help Muslims to develop that God-consciousness prescribed by die Koran. Its weakness lay in die exclusion of the scientific evidence to die contrary and its over-literal interpretation of an essentially elusive religious attitude. It could effect a dislocation between the way a Muslim viewed God and the way he regarded other matters. Both die Mutazilis and die Asharites had attempted, in different ways, to connect die religious experience of God with ordinary rational thought. This was important. Muslims were trying to find out whether it was possible to talk about God as we discuss odier matters. We have seen dial die Greeks had decided on balance diat it was not and diat silence was die only appropriate form of theology. Ultimately most Muslims would come to die same conclusion.

Muhammad and his companions had belonged to a far more primitive society than diat of al-Baqillani. The Islamic empire had spread to die civilised world and die Muslims had to confront more intellectually sophisticated ways of regarding God and die world. Muhammad had instinctively re-lived much in die old Hebrew encounter with the divine and later generations also had to live through some of die problems encountered by die Christian churches. Some had even resorted to an incarnational dieology, despite die Koran's condemnation of die Christian deification of Christ. The Islamic venture shows diat die notion of a transcendent yet personal God tends to bring up die same kind of problems and lead to die same type of solutions.

The experiment of Kalam showed diat though it was possible to use rational mediods to show diat 'God' was rationally incomprehensible, diis would make some Muslims uneasy. Kalam never became as important as dieology in Western Christianity. The Abbasid caliphs who had supported die Mutazilah found diat diey could not impose its doctrines on die faidiful because diey did not 'take'. Rationalism continued to influence future thinkers throughout die medieval period but it remained a minority pursuit and most Muslims came to distrust die whole enterprise. Like Christianity and Judaism, Islam had emerged from a Semitic experience but had collided with the Greek rationalism in the Hellenic centres of the Middle East. Other Muslims were attempting an even more radical Hellenisation of the Islamic God and introduced a new philosophical element into the three monotheistic religions. The three faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam would come to different but highly significant conclusions about the validity of philosophy and its relevance to the mystery of God.

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