“ENCOUNTERING ISLAM: 1) A BRIEF HISTORY OF ISLAM”

A sermon by the Rev. Roger Bertschausen

Fox Valley Unitarian Universalist Fellowship

2600 E. Philip Ln.

P.O. Box 1791

Appleton, WI 54912-1791

(920) 731-0849

Website: www.fvuuf.org

January 25-26, 2003

Call to Gather: from M.A.C. Warren

Our first task in approaching another people, another culture, another religion, is to take off our shoes, for the place we are approaching is holy.¹

Reading: from Diana Eck, Encountering God: A Spiritual Journey from Bozeman to Banaras

The meeting of Banaras and Bozeman, “East and West,” can be duplicated in a hundred keys and a hundred languages. The encounter of worlds and world-views is the shared experience of our time. We see in the great movements of modern history, in colonialism and the rejection of colonialism, in the late-twentieth century “politics of identity”—ethnic, racial and religious. We experience our own personal versions of this encounter, all of us, whether Christian, Hindu, Jewish, or Muslim; whether Buddhist, Apache, or Kikuyu; whether religious, secular, or atheist. What do we make of the encounter with a different world, a different worldview? How will we think about the heterogeneity of our immediate world and our wider world? This is our question, the human question, at the end of the twentieth century.

My own versions of these questions are How can those of us who are Christians articulate our own faith fully aware of the depth and breadth of the faith of others? How do we affirm our own holy ground even as we sojourn in the holy lands of other faith traditions, even as we find ourselves to be more than sojourners, to be at home there? How is Christian faith, or a “Christian worldview,” challenged and changed when we take seriously the fact that we are not alone as religious people, when we recognize as truly religious the traditions, the lives, and the pilgrimages of our neighbors of other faiths.

Not everyone has encountered the gods of India, but in the 1990s most people have encountered something of a religion not their own and have found questions welling up, expressed or unexpressed, about the meaning of this encounter for their own faith. For Christians, it might be a Passover seder or a Sabbath meal shared with Jewish friends; it might be the Ramadan fasting of a Muslim colleague here in North America, or time spent living or traveling in an Islamic society, where prayer is so visible and natural a part of daily life. Many Christians have taken up Buddhist or Hindu meditation practices, and have wondered about the relations of these disciplines of meditation to their own faith. Many have seen the film Gandhi or have read Gandhi’s autobiography and felt the religious challenge of the Sermon on the Mount presented more clearly in the life of this twentieth-century Hindu than in the that of any contemporary Christian. Many have sensed the holiness of the Dalai Lama and asked what such holiness has to do with the things they call holy in their own tradition. Many have read the scriptures of other traditions of faith, like the Bhagavad Gita, and have wondered what the insights they have gained might have to do with their own faith.

The questions that arise from experience to challenge the real meaning of our faith are basic theological questions. They are theological because they have to do with ultimate meaning…, with articulating our faith in a way that makes sense both of our tradition and the world in which we live.²

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I hope that our exploration of Islam over these next four weeks will truly be a spiritual encounter in the sense of the reading from Diana Eck. The point of this series is not just to learn about Islam. Of course there’s nothing wrong with learning about other faiths; this is an endeavor we Unitarian Universalists greatly value. But simply learning is not enough. Hopefully, too, this series will be a real interaction of Islam with our UU faith and our own individual spiritual understandings. Whenever we truly encounter another religion with a spirit of openness and welcoming, our own beliefs will be impacted. The questions and insights and achievements and failures of another faith can challenge and even change our own beliefs.

I suspect that most of us Unitarian Universalists can rather easily affirm the positive impact on our own faith when we encounter Buddhism and earth-centered spiritualities, for example. But I think many of us balk at the thought of finding insights in Islam that could impact our own beliefs. I would venture to say that other than Christianity—which for many UUs presents a lot of baggage because of personal religious pasts—Islam is the most difficult religion for us to encounter with open eyes and ears and hearts.

This is partly because there is such a barrage of negative stereotypes, prejudices and misinformation about Islam floating around in our culture today. It is also because one of these stereotypes—that Islam is deeply fundamentalist and reactionary— causes us to conclude that no religion could be further from our liberal Unitarian Universalist faith than Islam. Sure, let’s learn about Islam—hey, we’re all tolerant here and we know that understanding others is important in our pluralistic world—but open ourselves to be challenged and changed by Islam? You’ve got to be kidding!

And yet this is exactly the spirit with which I want to approach this encounter with Islam. Dig beneath the stereotypes and the misinformation, peal back the veil of ignorance and prejudice, and we will find a rich, dynamic faith tradition that will challenge and change and enrich our own faith—if we have eyes to see and ears to hear.

If learning all we could about Islam were our sole goal, we would undoubtedly be better off bringing in four different Muslim speakers to share about their faith than having me talk about Islam for four weeks. That would be a rich endeavor, and it has its place in spiritual exploration. This series focuses on seeing Islam through our eyes, and then shifting our gaze internally to see what encountering Islam might mean for our own faith.

In order for this to work, we must remain open. And we must be fair. In my encounter with Islam over the next month, I hope that I will be guided by a commitment to fairness and accuracy. Gandhi wrote that the “sympathetic study” of world religions is a “sacred duty.” This doesn’t mean we avoid hard questions of one another’s religions. It means, in Diana Ecks words, that we try our best “not to tell lies, not to spread hatred, not to purvey a sensational or distorted image of one another.”³

This is part of what each of us must do if we are to live with any hope of peace in such a diverse yet inter-related and interdependent world. No doubt some of my interpretation of Islam might be wrong; much of it will certainly be questionable—Muslims, like Christians and Unitarian Universalists, can’t even all agree on some basic facts about their faith. But I will do my best to avoid being unfair or inaccurate. I will do my best to approach Islam with my shoes off, acknowledging that I am treading on sacred ground.

Encountering another religion—especially one so seemingly different from our own faith—inevitably yields surprises. The first surprising realization I had in encountering Islam is that Islam is not as radically different from Unitarian Universalism as I assumed. This shouldn’t have been that surprising: whenever I am a guest panelist on my Muslim friend Salman Aziz’s cable TV show “Understanding Islam,” I always find myself agreeing far more than disagreeing with Salman. But it still was a surprise.

In many ways, Muslims are close spiritual cousins of our UU ancestors. Muslims and our Unitarian ancestors in Europe and the United States had a strikingly similar view of Jesus: Jesus was a great teacher and a great prophet, but was not the Son of God. Both Muslims and early Unitarians rejected the divinity of Jesus. Both religious groups affirmed that Jesus’ teachings—not his person—are what’s important.

The contemporary American Muslim writer Michael Wolfe asserts that the Trinity was “a late footnote to Jesus’ teachings, an unnecessary ‘mystery’ introduced by the North African theologian Tertullian two centuries after Jesus’ death.”⁴ This was exactly the view of our Unitarian spiritual ancestors. And Wolfe observes that many of Christianity’s most bloody disputes have centered on the Trinity. Early Muslims noticed this, too, and these divisive disputes were a “root cause for early Islam’s firmly unitarian outlook.”⁵ Ditto for early Unitarians.

Like early Unitarians as well as Universalists, Muslims also reject the concept of original sin. Muslim author Hassan Hathout notes that Muslims believe that Adam and Eve did commit a sin in the Garden of Eden, but then quickly repented. Their merciful God promptly forgave them. That was the end of original sin in Islam.⁶ And if there’s no original sin, then there’s no need for Jesus to be crucified and raised from the dead in order to atone for original sin. Muslims don’t believe that Jesus was crucified or resurrected.⁷ These views correspond rather strikingly with early Unitarian and Universalist beliefs.

Another similarity to Unitarianism and Universalism is Islam’s view that religion is far more about practice and deeds than about theology and creeds.⁸ Islam is a religion primarily of action and works—just like Unitarian Universalism. How we live in the world is the crux of both UU and Muslim spirituality.

The heart of Islam is action. This action is embodied in the Five Pillars: the declaration of faith, saying prayers five times a day, supporting the poor through giving away 2.5 percent of one’s total wealth and assets each year (not just income), the annual month-long Ramadan fast, and making the pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in one’s life if it’s at all possible.⁹

So take the Trinity and the divinity of Jesus out of Christianity, get rid of belief in original sin and the resurrection of Jesus, focus on practice and deeds rather than theology and creeds, and you have not just Islam, but Unitarian Universalism. Ours are truly kindred faiths.

Of course, most Unitarians and Universalists don’t recognize Muhammad as a prophet. Here is a fundamental difference. Muhammad, according to Muslims, was the last and greatest of all prophets. Born in 570, the sixty-two years of his life were marked by tremendous upheaval in the Arab world. Members of Muhammad’s tribe were becoming wealthy through extensive trading, but their pursuit of wealth began to erode their ancient value of caring for the weaker members of the tribe. Inequity was rapidly replacing the egalitarianism that had earlier governed tribal interactions.

According to Muslims, for twenty-one years beginning in 610, God revealed the words of the Quran to Muhammad verse by verse. These sacred words called Arabs back to the ancient tribal values. Muhammad and his followers did not see themselves as creators of a new faith; rather, they believed they were reviving the strict monotheism that characterized pristine Judaism and Christianity. Islam was in the beginning much more of a reform movement than a new faith. The name “islam” means surrender to this one god, called Allah (“the God”); a Muslim is one who has surrendered to Allah and is striving for justice in his or her daily living. Muslims believe surrendering to God and striving for justice were both essential elements of Judaism and Christianity.¹⁰

As Islam developed it became separate from, though still related to, Judaism and Christianity. Symbolically at least, the decisive internal shift to viewing Islam as a new religion happened in January 624, when Muhammad told his followers to face Mecca rather than Jerusalem when they prayed five times a day.¹¹

Who was Muhammad? Who is he today for Muslims? Though saturated with the divine, Muhammad was not himself divine. Only Allah is divine. But Muhammad was the perfect person, and his life and actions forever provide a guide to Muslims. The sacred law of the Shariah (which literally means “The path to the watering hole”) helps Muslims emulate Muhammad in their lives. Emulating Muhammad—particularly by totally surrendering to Allah—is the path to the watering hole that is salvation.

Muhammad is not a Lord like Jesus or Krishna. He is not a living presence to whom prayers can be addressed or veneration given. He is more like the orthodox Buddhist view of the Buddha than the Trinitarian Christian view of Jesus. Muhammad is to be emulated, not worshipped.¹² The words announcing his death in 632 summed this up well: “Muslims! If any of you has worshipped Muhammad, let me tell you that Muhammad is dead. But if you worship God, then know that God is living and will never die!”¹³

Now I want to discuss three important themes in the history of Islam to which I shall return in the coming weeks. First, Muslims believe that Allah acts in history. As historian Karen Armstrong points out, the primary mission of Islam is to redeem history. The chief duty of Muslims therefore is striving to create a just community in which the most vulnerable are treated well.¹⁴

If history is the realm God operates in, and the spiritual life focuses on equity in human relations, then the view that politics and government are and ought to be religious spheres is a logical position. This is exactly what most Muslims believe. They recognize no dichotomies in the world: no sacred/profane split, no religion/politics split. The goal of the spiritual life is to make everything spiritual, to make everything one. As Armstrong suggests, this unity gives Muslims “intimations of the Unity which is God.”¹⁵

Muhammad embodied this unity: he was both a political and a religious leader. How different from Jesus, who saw the state as radically separate from the spiritual life, or the Buddha, who totally renounced his princely life. For Muhammad and for Muslims, the law guides all interactions between God and humanity, and between humans. Most Muslims look to politics and the state to embody and reinforce these sacred laws.¹⁶

This, of course, is a position very different from the Western ideal of separation between church and state. It is a particularly problematic position in countries like the United States, where the Muslim population, though growing, will likely never become the majority. How does Islam function in a religiously diverse country where it represents a small population and where there is a long tradition of church/state separation? Should Muslims in the United States seek to unify the state and their religion?

I remember an educational session at the Islamic Society in Neenah after September 11 in which this was one of the more contentious questions. The lead presenter acknowledged that the United States would never become Muslim, but nevertheless did not renounce the ideal that government and religion should be united. It is this same principle that causes my friend Salman and me to disagree on school prayer. Even though he knows the prayer in his kids’ school would most likely be subtly or overtly Christian, he supports school prayer because he believes public institutions should reinforce religious values.

The second theme I want to lift up is that although Islam’s central beliefs and understandings are exceptionally strongly articulated, the religion is not monolithic. The Quran—like any sacred scripture—and the tradition itself can be interpreted in widely different ways. And Islam—like any religious tradition—has had its share of splits, most notably between Sunnis and Shiis.¹⁷ When you’re on the outside of something looking in, it’s easy to see it as monolithic. The truth is that beneath the surface always lies a whole lot of complexity and a plethora of different interpretations and beliefs.

A final theme is that Islam—again like any faith tradition including our own—is dynamic and evolving. A religion, Diane Eck, is not like a stone that is passed on unchanged from one generation to the next. It is more like a river, flowing and ever-changing.¹⁸ Some Muslim fundamentalists today will insist that their religion is unchanging and unchangeable, but history suggests otherwise. While the core beliefs and the Five Pillars have remained the same, the way Islam is viewed and articulated by Muslims has changed. And Islam has changed every time it’s entered into a new culture.

Five hundred years ago, Islamic empires based in Turkey, Iran and India were the most powerful in the world. By 1800, all of these were in serious decline. World prominence gave way to a succession of military and economic defeats at the hands of European powers. As we Americans will sooner or later learn, being on top of the world historically speaking is a very fleeting thing. Just ask the Romans, the Muslims, or the British.

Falling from the heights with the onslaught of colonialism and modernity has changed Islam. This will be the focus of the sermon next week. It is important to lift up, though, that Islam is a resilient faith. This is why, even with the great challenges of the modern era, Islam has become the second largest religion in the world, and will soon be the second largest in the United States. Karen Armstrong notes that “frequently in their history, Muslims (have) responded positively to disaster, and used it constructively to gain fresh religious insights.”¹⁹ I believe this will happen once again.

Copyright 2003 by Roger B. Bertschausen. All rights reserved.