As anyone who has read this blog will readily admit, I am no fan of religion… at least, religion as it seems to be practiced today. As a set of mythologies (in the original sense of the word), religion can be used to inspire individuals to great acts of courage and enforce the values of a given (and by necessity rather monolithic) society. It is only the desire of people to move their various “faiths” beyond this realm that really bothers me - especially when that intrusion hampers the progress of science and rational thought. Among the world’s current religions, those coming out of the turbulent middle-east seem the most determined to account for explanations of the natural world, moving well beyond the aforementioned “realm” of inspiration.
… they are failing miserably…
Having said this, of all the religions most maligned, least understood and most feared - not entirely without reason, I might add - is Islam. Not being a fan of this sort of hysteria, I decided to educate myself about Islam in the interest of seeing it with as clear an eye as I could muster, i.e., its triumphs and its failures. I found a lucid, highly enjoyable introduction in Reza Aslan’s No God But God.

Aslan begins with an analysis of the pre-Islamic societies that existed in the Arabian peninsula during the Jahiliyyah or “Time of Ignorance” and continues to modern times. His assertion is that we in the West are witnessing an “Islamic Reformation” between the forces of modern progressiveness and the forces of medieval thought (both of those are my terms).
This idea of a Reformation is intriguing - Aslan’s account of the development of Muslim thought clearly shows that as religions go, Islam had a strong “rationalist” tradition. This tradition was squelched by the Ulama, the so-called “learned ones,” in the centuries following the first Caliphs. Ironically, it was the separation of secular and religious authority adhered to by the Rashidun (the first four Caliphs following the death of Muhammed) that enabled them to rise in power. To paraphrase Aslan: caliphs came and went, dynasties rose and fell, but the Ulama were always there. Obviously, this was only “separation” in the sense that in the 7th and 8th centuries, most of the rival empires (Zoroastrian and Byzantine) were explicit theocracies - we would consider them all to be theocracies by today’s standards.
I’d encourage anyone with an interest in world affairs and The Middle East to give this book a read. Whether you love Islam or hate it, there is no doubting that it is having a major impact on today’s world. To be sure, I’m mostly amazed at how far away (in the wrong direction) from its origins Islam seems to be and how much the forces of groups like al-Qaeda, the modern-day Kharijites, seem to be exacerbating that phenomenon. I don’t believe this to be an opinion held only by the “infidel” who wrote this.
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atheism, islam