A History Of God Part 3

The Quraysh loved to make the ritual circ.u.mambulations 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 G.o.d's goodness and power in the natural world. If they failed to reproduce G.o.d'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, Islam 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 G.o.d. There were no obligatory doctrines about G.o.d: indeed, the Koran is highly suspicious of theological speculation, dismissing it as zanna, self-indulgent guess-work about things that n.o.body 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, G.o.d 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 pa.s.sion of the biblical G.o.d. We can only glimpse something of G.o.d in the 'signs' of nature and so transcendent is he that we can only talk about him in 'parables'. {15} 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 att.i.tude: 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 G.o.d 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.' {6} {6} The Koran constantly stresses the need for intelligence in deciphering the 'signs' or 'messages' of G.o.d. Muslims are not to abdicate their reason but to look at the world attentively and with curiosity. It was this att.i.tude 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 the greatest sign of all was the Koran itself: indeed its individual verses are called ayat. Western people find the Koran a difficult book and this is largely a problem of translation. Arabic is particularly difficult to translate: even ordinary literature and the mundane utterances of politicians frequently sound stilted and alien when translated into English, for example, and this is doubly true of the Koran, which is written in dense and highly allusive, elliptical speech. The early suras in particular give the impression of human language crushed and splintered under the divine impact. Muslims often say that when they read the Koran in a translation, they feel that they are reading a different book because nothing of the beauty of the Arabic has been conveyed. As its name suggests, it is meant to be recited aloud and the sound of the language is an essential part of its effect. Muslims say that when they hear the Koran chanted in the mosque they feel enveloped in a divine dimension of sound, rather as Muhammad was enveloped in the embrace of Gabriel on Mount Hira or when he saw the angel on the 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] G.o.d 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!" {17} {17} By 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 G.o.d and there is nothing holy about the New Testament Greek. Jews, however, have a similar att.i.tude 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 G.o.d 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 who 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 time. Many were converted on the spot, believing that G.o.d 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 Quraysh! Umar ibn al-Khattab had been a virulent opponent of Muhammad; he had been devoted to the old paganism and ready to a.s.sa.s.sinate 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 secretly 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 ma.n.u.script, 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 the language, but he had never come across anything like the Koran. 'How fine and n.o.ble is this speech!' he said wonderingly, and was instantly converted to the new religion of al-Lah. {l8} 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 the other version of Umar's conversion, he encountered Muhammad one night at the Kabah, reciting the Koran quietly to himself before the shrine. Thinking that he would like to listen to the words, Umar crept under the damask cloth that covered the 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 the cover of the Kabah' - all his defences but one were down. Then the magic of the Arabic did its work: 'When I heard the Koran, my heart was softened and I wept and Islam entered into me.' {19} It was the Koran which prevented G.o.d from being a mighty reality 'out there' and brought him into the mind, heart and being of each believer.

The experience of Umar and the other Muslims who were converted by the Koran can perhaps be compared to the experience of art described by George Steiner in his book Real Presences: Is there any thing in what we say? He speaks of what he calls 'the indiscretion of serious art, literature and music' which 'queries the 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 G.o.ds. 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 G.o.d, as they always had. But when he condemned these ancient cults as idolatrous, he lost most of his followers overnight and Islam became a despised and persecuted minority. We have seen that the belief in only one G.o.d demands a painful change of consciousness. Like the early Christians, the first Muslims were accused of an 'atheism' which was deeply threatening to society. In Mecca where urban civilisation was so novel and must have seemed a fragile achievement for all the proud self-sufficiency of the Quraysh, many seem to have felt the same sinking dread and dismay as those citizens of Rome who had clamoured for Christian blood.

The Quraysh seem to have found a rupture with the ancestral G.o.ds profoundly threatening and it would not be long before Muhammad's own life was imperiled. Western scholars have usually dated this rupture with the Quraysh to the possibly apocryphal incident of the Satanic Verses, which has become notorious since the tragic Salman Rushdie affair. Three of the Arabian deities were particularly dear to the Arabs of the Hijaz: al-Lat (whose name simply meant 'the G.o.ddess') and al-Uzza (the Mighty One), who had shrines at Taif and Nakhlah respectively, to the south-east of Mecca, and Manat, the Fateful One, who had her shrine at Qudayd on the Red Sea coast. These deities were not fully personalised like Juno or Pallas Athene. They were often called the banat al-Lah, the Daughters of G.o.d, but this does not necessarily imply a fully-developed pantheon. The Arabs used such kinship terms to denote an abstract relationship: thus banat al-dahr (literally, 'daughters of fate') simply meant misfortunes or vicissitudes. The term banat al-Lah may simply have signified 'divine beings'. These deities were not represented by realistic statues in their shrines but by large standing stones, similar to those in use among the ancient Canaanites, which the Arabs worshipped not in any crudely simplistic way but as a focus of divinity. Like Mecca with its Kabah, the shrines at Taif, Nakhlah and Qudayd had become essential spiritual landmarks in the emotional landscape of the Arabs. Their forefathers had worshipped there from time immemorial and this gave a healing sense of continuity.

The story of the Satanic Verses is not mentioned in either the Koran or in any of the early oral or written sources. It is not included in Ibn Ishaq's Sira, the most authoritative biography of the Prophet, but only in the work of the tenth-century historian Abu Jafar at-Tabari (d.923). 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 G.o.ddesses and so, inspired by 'Satan', he uttered some rogue verses which allowed the banat al-Lah to be venerated as intercessors, like the angels. In these so-called 'Satanic' verses, the three G.o.ddesses 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 banat 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 [allegedly divine beings] are nothing but empty names which you have invented - you and your forefathers - [and] for which G.o.d 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. {21} {21} This was the most radical of all the Koranic condemnations of the ancestral pagan G.o.ds 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, a.s.sociating 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. {22} The incident may indicate the difficulty Muhammad certainly experienced when he tried to incarnate the ineffable divine message in human speech: it is a.s.sociated 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.ds 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 G.o.d alone and would not succ.u.mb to the false objects of worship - be they deities or values - espoused by the Quraysh.

The perception of G.o.d'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 G.o.ds 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 G.o.d; G.o.d, 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 {24} {24} 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d, however. This single deity is not a being like ourselves whom we can know and understand. The phrase 'Allahu Akhbah!' (G.o.d is greater!) that summons Muslims to salat distinguishes between G.o.d and the rest of reality, as well as between G.o.d as he is in himself (al-Dhat) and anything that we can say about him. Yet this incomprehensible and inaccessible G.o.d had wanted to make himself known. An early tradition (hadith) has G.o.d 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 (ayat) 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 G.o.d (wajh al-Lah). Like the two older religions, Islam makes it clear that we only see G.o.d 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 G.o.d that surrounds them on all sides: 'Wheresoever you turn, there is the Face of al-Lah.' {26} Like the Christian Fathers, the Koran sees G.o.d as the Absolute, who alone has true existence: 'All that lives on earth or in the heavens is bound to pa.s.s away: but forever will abide thy Sustainer's Self, full of majesty and glory.' {27} In the Koran, G.o.d 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-Muhyi), 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 a.s.sertion that only G.o.d has true existence and positive value. Yet frequently the divine names seem to cancel one another out. Thus G.o.d 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-Khafid, he who brings low, and ar-Rafic, he who exalts. The Names of G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d but al-Lah and that Muhammad is his Messenger.' This was not simply an affirmation of G.o.d'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 partic.i.p.ate in this essential being. To make this a.s.sertion demands that Muslims integrate their lives by making G.o.d their focus and sole priority.

The a.s.sertion of the unity of G.o.d was not simply a denial that deities like the banat al-Lah were worthy of worship. To say that G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d, 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, G.o.d is the source of all knowledge as well as the means whereby men catch a glimpse of transcendence: G.o.d 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 gla.s.s, the gla.s.s [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. {28} {28} The participle ka is a reminder of the essentially symbolic nature of the Koranic discourse about G.o.d. An-Nur, the Light, is not G.o.d 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 s.p.a.ce. 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d and your G.o.d is one and the same, and it is unto him that we [all] surrender ourselves.' {30} {30} The Koran naturally singles out apostles who were familiar to the Arabs - like Abraham, Noah, Moses and Jesus who 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 the 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 the Quraysh by the denigration of the Arabian deities. Accordingly during the summer of 622, about seventy Muslims and their families set off for Yathrib.

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. .h.i.therto. 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 a.s.semble in the mosque 'to listen to the stories of the Muslims and laugh and scoff at their religion'. {31} 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' {32} 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, G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d. 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 in 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 G.o.d alone. They were not joining a sect that impiously divided the religion of the one G.o.d into warring groups. Instead they were returning to the primordial religion of Abraham, who had been the first Muslim to surrender to G.o.d 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 G.o.d.'Say: 'We believe in G.o.d 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 dial 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.' {33} {33} It was, surely, idolatry to prefer a merely human interpretation of the truth to G.o.d 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 migration 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 Islam 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 circ.u.mstances 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 a.s.semble 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 cla.s.s, 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 circ.u.mambulations around the shrine. The essential meaning of this rite is brought out well by the late Iranian philosopher Ali Shariati: As you circ.u.mambulate 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...o...b..t. You have become part of this universal system. Circ.u.mambulating 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} {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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d: 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 compa.s.sionate 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 s.e.xes. 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 att.i.tudes 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 emanc.i.p.ation 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 G.o.d. The result was a revelation that addressed women as well as men and emphasised the absolute moral and spiritual equality of the s.e.xes. {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 Oik.u.mene which relegated women to second cla.s.s 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 men folk 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 Ali 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 G.o.d. The Shiah-i-AH (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.

n.o.body 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 G.o.d's will. The ummah has sacramental importance, as a 'sign' that G.o.d 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 pa.s.sion for abstruse theological debate seems equally bizarre to Jews and Muslims.

In the early years of Islamic history, therefore, speculation about the nature of G.o.d 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d. Thus when Muslims follow a sunnah by greeting one another with the words 'Salaam alayk.u.m' (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 G.o.d. The external gestures are not to be regarded as ends in themselves but as a means of acquiring taqwa, the 'G.o.d-consciousness' prescribed by the Koran and practised by the Prophet, which consists of a constant remembrance of G.o.d (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 G.o.d himself to Muhammad. These hadith qudsi (sacred traditions) emphasise G.o.d'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} {36} As in Judaism and Christianity, the transcendent G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d directly. The Koran represented the presence of G.o.d in their very midst. His speech was on their lips when they recited its sacred words and when they held the holy book it was as though they had touched the divine itself. The early 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} {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 G.o.d? 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 Ali ibn Abi Talib should lead the ummah and they became a distinctive sect within Islam. As his cousin and son-in-law, Ali 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d. They alone could provide the ummah with divine guidance. If a descendant of Ali came to power, Muslims could look forward to a Golden Age of justice and the ummah would be led according to G.o.d'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 G.o.d-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 Urn was retained in one particular line of Ali's descendants. Muslims would only find the person designated by G.o.d 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 (hujjah) of G.o.d's presence on earth and, in some mysterious sense, made the divine incarnate in a human being. His words, decisions and commands were G.o.d's. As Christians had seen Jesus as the Way, the Truth and the Light that would lead men to G.o.d, Shiis revered their Imams as the gateway (bab) to G.o.d, the road (sabil) 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 cla.s.ses 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 a.s.sessment. 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 G.o.d'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 G.o.d to be the kind of people they were. The Koran has a very strong conception of G.o.d'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, G.o.d 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 G.o.d was above mere human notions of right and wrong were decrying his justice. A G.o.d who violated all decent principles and got away with it simply because he was G.o.d would be a monster, no better than a tyrannical caliph. Like the Shiis, the Mutazilis declared that justice was of the essence of G.o.d: 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 G.o.d. They complained that the Mutazilis were making G.o.d too rational and too like a man. They adopted the doctrine of predestination in order to emphasise G.o.d's essential incomprehensibility: if we claimed to understand him, he could not be G.o.d but was a mere human projection. G.o.d 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 G.o.d had decreed it to be so, not because these human values had a transcendent dimension binding upon G.o.d himself. The Mutazilis were wrong to say that justice, a purely human ideal, was of the essence of G.o.d. The problem of predestination and free will, which has also exercised Christians, indicates a central difficulty in the idea of a personal G.o.d. An impersonal G.o.d, 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 G.o.d 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 'G.o.d' a larger-than-life tyrant or judge and make 'him' fulfil our expectations. We can turn 'G.o.d' 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d's essence and his activities. They claimed that some of those attributes which enabled the transcendent G.o.d 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 G.o.d's unknowable essence, which would always elude our understanding. Just as Jews had imagined that G.o.d's Wisdom or the Torah had existed with G.o.d from before the beginning of time, Muslims were now developing a similar idea to account for the personality of G.o.d 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 unIslamic behaviour. Ahmad ibn Hanbal (780-855), a leading Traditionist who narrowly escaped death in al-Mamun's inquisition, became a popular hero. His sanct.i.ty 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 G.o.d. Thus when the moderate Mutazili al-Huayan al-Karabisi (d.859) put forward a compromise solution - that the Koran considered as G.o.d'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 G.o.d'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 G.o.d. He accused the Mutazilis of draining G.o.d of all mystery and making him an abstract formula that had no religious value. When the Koran used anthropomorphic terms to describe G.o.d's activity in the world or when it said that G.o.d 'speaks' and 'sees' and 'sits upon his throne', Ibn Hanbal insisted that it be interpreted literally but 'without asking how' (bila kayf). 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 a.n.a.lysis.

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 hadith. 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? {38} Henceforth al-Ashari used the rationalist techniques of the Mutazilah to promote the agnostic spirit of Ibn Hanbal. Where the Mutazilis claimed that G.o.d's revelation could not be unreasonable, al-Ashari used reason and logic to show that G.o.d was beyond our understanding. The Mutazilis had been in danger of reducing G.o.d to a coherent but arid concept; al-Ashari wanted to return to the full-blooded G.o.d of the Koran, despite its inconsistency. Indeed, like Denys the Areopagite, he believed that paradox would enhance our appreciation of G.o.d. He refused to reduce G.o.d to a concept that could be discussed and a.n.a.lysed like any other human idea. The divine attributes of knowledge, power, life and so on were real; they had belonged to G.o.d from all eternity. But they were distinct from G.o.d's essence, because G.o.d was essentially one, simple and unique. He could not be regarded as a complex being because he was simplicity itself; we could not a.n.a.lyse him by donning 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 G.o.d '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' G.o.d 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 with colour, taste, smell and touch. {39} {39} Some 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 G.o.d's 'hands', for example, this must be interpreted allegorically to refer to his generosity and munificence. Al-Ashari opposed the literalists by pointing out t