Islam: A Concise Introduction Paperback – December 1, 2001
by Huston Smith (Author)
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The world's premier authority on religious traditions presents a concise and timely guide to the history, teachings, and practice of Islam.
Drawn from his masterful presentation of Islam in the bestselling book The World's Religions (over two million copies sold), Huston Smith offers a revealing look into the heart of a tradition with more than one billion adherents worldwide.
Dispelling narrow and distorted notions about the nature of Islam and featuring a new introduction by the author, this book compellingly conveys the profound appeal of Islam, while addressing such timely issues as the true meaning of jihad, the role of women in Islamic societies, and the remarkable growth of Islam in America.
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Print length
112 pages
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About the Author
Huston Smith is internationally known and revered as the premier teacher of world religions. He is the focus of a five-part PBS television series with Bill Moyers and has taught at Washington University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Syracuse University, and the University of California at Berkeley. The recipient of twelve honorary degrees, Smith's fifteen books include his bestselling The World's Religions, Why Religion Matters, and his autobiography, Tales of Wonder.
Product details
Publisher : HarperOne; 1st edition (December 1, 2001)
Language : English
Paperback : 112 pages
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Huston Smith
Huston Cummings Smith (born May 31, 1919) is among the preeminent religious studies scholars in the United States. His work, The Religions of Man (later revised and retitled The World's Religions), is a classic in the field, with over two million copies sold, and it remains a common introduction to comparative religion.
Smith was born in Soochow, China, to Methodist missionaries and spent his first 17 years there. He taught at the Universities of Colorado and Denver from 1944 to 1947, moved to Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, for the next 10 years, and then served as professor of Philosophy at MIT from 1958 to 1973. While at MIT, he participated in some of the experiments with entheogens that professor Timothy Leary conducted at Harvard University. Smith then moved to Syracuse University, where he was Thomas J. Watson Professor of Religion and Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Philosophy until his retirement in 1983 and current emeritus status. He now lives in the Berkeley, California, area where he is Visiting Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
During his career, Smith not only studied but also practiced Vedanta Hinduism, Zen Buddhism (under Goto Zuigan), and Sufism for over 10 years each. He is a notable autodidact.
As a young man, of his own volition after suddenly turning to mysticism, Smith set out to meet with then-famous author Gerald Heard. Heard responded to Smith's letter, invited him to Trabuco College (later donated as the Ramakrishna Monastery) in Southern California, and then sent him off to meet the legendary Aldous Huxley. So began Smith's experimentation with meditation and his association with the Vedanta Society in Saint Louis under the auspices of Swami Satprakashananda of the Ramakrishna order.
Via the connection with Heard and Huxley, Smith eventually experimented with Timothy Leary and others at the Center for Personality Research, of which Leary was research professor. The experience and history of that era are captured somewhat in Smith's book Cleansing the Doors of Perception. In this period, Smith joined in on the Harvard Project as well, in an attempt to raise spiritual awareness through entheogenic plants.
He has been a friend of the XIVth Dalai Lama for more than 40 years, and has met and talked to some of the great figures of the century, from Eleanor Roosevelt to Thomas Merton.
Smith developed an interest in the Traditionalist School formulated by Rene Guenon and Ananda Coomaraswamy. This interest has become a continuing thread in all his writings.
In 1996 Bill Moyers devoted a five-part PBS special to Smith's life and work: The Wisdom of Faith with Huston Smith. Smith has also produced three series for public television: The Religions of Man, The Search for America, and (with Arthur Compton) Science and Human Responsibility.
His films on Hinduism, Tibetan Buddhism, and Sufism have all won awards at international film festivals. His latest DVD release is The Roots of Fundamentalism—A Conversation with Huston Smith and Phil Cousineau.
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Top reviews from the United States
Cove Reader
3.0 out of 5 stars Who cannot like Huston Smith ... but
Reviewed in the United States on January 28, 2014
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this is a section of one of his books pulled out and slapped a cover around to make it a mini novel. I am always a little annoyed when this happens and feel a bit ripped off. It is barely a chapter and not a particularly long and detailed chapter at that.
He spends a good bit of time telling the Western reader has their perspective of Islam all wrong and while I appreciate him hearing that, I would rather make up my own mind based on the material he presents. I am reading it for a book club and class as part of an array of books so perhaps I will moderate my view after I converse with others.
One person found this helpful
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Albert L. Smith
5.0 out of 5 stars GREAT BOOK!
Reviewed in the United States on March 14, 2013
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HUSTON SMITH IS ARGUABLY THE GREATEST SCHOLAR ALIVE THAT MILLIONS OF PEOPLE WHO ARE DOUBTERS OF RELIGION OR WHO ARE ATHEISTS SHOULD READ. HIS MIND WILL PERSUADE SECULARISTS AS TO THE TRUTH AND VIRTUES OF RELIGION IN AN AGE OF "SCIENTISTIC" BELIEF.
2 people found this helpful
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Pegasus
4.0 out of 5 stars A good read for a good ovetview
Reviewed in the United States on June 8, 2018
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Concise. A good read for a good overview.
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SailorOon
5.0 out of 5 stars Fantastic Introduction
Reviewed in the United States on January 29, 2017
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Informative, and very concise. Gives a great overview, and you can finish it in a few hours!
One person found this helpful
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United States on May 4, 2016
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A fantastic summary, superbly written.
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Iyad T. Alashqar
5.0 out of 5 stars Islam 101: A course in Islamic Studies.
Reviewed in the United States on April 21, 2002
This book, although short in terms of number of pages, is nevertheless extremely rich and amazingly eloquent in its presentation and explanations of Islam, from the life of Muhammad, to the Quran, to Islamic teachings and philosophy, and ending with a brief introduction to Sufism (Mysticism).
This book highly builds on the chapter that was dedicated to Islam in Huston Smith's The World's Religions. But Mr. Smith, after extracting that chapter and making a separate book out of it,
adds to its contents discussions that relate to current world events such as the New York and Washington events in September 2001. He also adds many useful discussions regarding misconceptions about Islamic teachings like the issue of Women, Jihad, Polygamy, and many other issues that should highly interest any reader who seeks basic - but strong - foundations in Islamic Theology and Philosophy.
The bibliography and the "suggestions for further reading" part at the end of book is extremely helpful for anyone who persues an academic background in Islamic Studies.
This book will no doubt start to appear in college courses that cover the issue of Islam as a required reading assignment.
All in all, an excellent and a highly recommended book that is considered a masterpiece in the field of Comparative Religion Scholarship.
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14 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries
Athayyil
5.0 out of 5 stars A great book on Islam
Reviewed in India on May 20, 2015
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A great book on Islam. A thought provoking insight in to the major religions and can answer the problems of the current world. Huston Smith has done enough research to prove that it is not religions that provoke hatred rather it is man made stuff which is the cause of all problems.
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Abhishek Ojha
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Sufism
We have been treating Islam as if it were monolithic, which of course it is not. Like every religious tradition it divides. Its main historical
division is between the mainstream Sunnis (“Traditionalists” [from sunnah, tradition] who comprise 87 percent of all Muslims) and the
Shi’ites (literally “partisans” of Ali, Muhammad’s son-in-law, whom Shi’ites believe should have directly succeeded Muhammad but
who was thrice passed over and who, when he was finally appointed leader of the Muslims, was assassinated). Geographically, the
Shi’ites cluster in and around Iraq and Iran, while the Sunnis flank them to the West (the Middle East, Turkey, and Africa) and to the
East (through the Indian subcontinent, which includes Pakistan and Bangladesh, on through Malaysia, and into Indonesia, where alone
there are more Muslims than in the entire Arab world). We shall pass over this historical split, which turns on an in-house dispute, and
take up instead a division that has universal overtones.
It is the vertical division between the mystics of Islam, called Sufis, and the re
maining majority of the faith, who are equally good Muslims but are not mystics.
The root meaning of the word Sufi is wool, suf.
A century or two after Muhammad’s death, those within the Islamic community who bore the inner message of Islam came to be known as Sufis.
Many of them donned coarse woolen garments to protest the silks and
satins of sultans and califs.
Alarmed by the worldliness they saw overtaking Islam, they sought to purify and spiritualize it from within.
They wanted
to recover its liberty and love, andto restore to it its deeper, mystical tone.
- Externals should yield to internals,
- matter to meaning,
- outward symbol to inner reality.
- “Love the pitcher less,” they cried, “and the water more.”
Sufis saw
- this distinction between the inner and the outer,
- the pitcher and what it contains,
as deriving from the Koran itself, where Allah presents himself as
- both “the Outward [al-zahir] and the Inward [al-batin]” (57:3).
Exoteric Muslims—we shall call them such because they were satisfied with the explicit meanings of the Koran’s teachings—passed over this distinction,
but the Sufis (esoteric Muslims) found it important.
Contemplation of God occupies a significant place in every Muslim’s life, but for most it must compete, pretty much on a par, with life’s other demands. When we add to this that life is demanding—people tend to be busy—it stands to reason that not many Muslims will have the time, if the inclination, to do more than keep up with the Divine Law that orders their lives.
Their fidelity is not in vain; in the end their reward will be as great as the Sufis’. But the Sufis were impatient for their reward, if we may put the matter
thus.
- They wanted to encounter God directly in this very lifetime. Now.
This called for special methods, and to develop and practice them the Sufis gathered around spiritual masters (shaikhs), forming circles that, from the twelfth century onward, crystallized into Sufi orders (tariqahs).
The word for the members of these orders is fakir—pronounced fakir; literally poor, but with the connotation of one who is “poor in spirit.” [?]
In some ways, however, they constituted a spiritual elite, aspiring higher than other Muslims, and willing to assume the heavier disciplines their extravagant goals required.
We can liken their tariqahs to the contemplative orders of Roman Catholicism, with the difference that Sufis generally marry and are not cloistered.
They engage in normal occupations and repair to their gathering places (zawiyahs, Arabic; khanaqahs, Persian) to sing, dance, pray, recite their rosaries in concert, and listen to the discourses of their Master, all to the end of reaching God directly. Someone who was ignorant of fire, they observe, could come to know it by degrees: first by hearing of it, then by seeing it, and finally by being
burned by its heat.
- The Sufis wanted to be “burned” by God.
This required drawing close to him, and they developed three overlapping but distinguishable routes. We can call these
the mysticisms
- of love,
- of ecstasy, and
- of intuition.
To begin with the first of these, Sufi love poetry is world famous.
A remarkable eighth-century woman saint, Rabi’a, discovered in her
solitary vigils, often lasting all night, that God’s love was at the core of the universe; not to steep oneself in that love and reflect it to others was to forfeit life’s supreme beatitude. Because love is never more evident than when its object is absent, that being the time when the beloved’s importance cannot be overlooked, Persian poets in particular dwelt on the pangs of separation to deepen their love of God and thereby draw close to him. Jalal ad-Din Rumi used the plaintive sound of the reed flute to typify this theme.
Listen to the story told by the reed, of being separated.
“Since I was cut from the reedbed,
I have made this crying sound.
Anyone separated from someone he loves understands what I say,
anyone pulled from a source longs to go back.”
The lament of the flute, torn from its riverbank and symbol therefore for the soul’s severance from the divine, threw the Sufis into states of agitation and bewilderment. Nothing created could assuage those states; but its beloved, Allah, is so sublime, so dissimilar, that human love for him is like the nightingale’s for the rose, or the moth’s for the flame. Even so, Rumi assures us, that human love is re
turned:
Never does the lover seek without being sought by his beloved.
When the lightning of love has shot into this heart, know that there is love in that heart.…
Mark well the text: “He loves them and they love Him.” (Koran, 5:59).
But the full truth has still not been grasped, for Allah loves his creatures more than they love him.
“God saith:
Whoso seeketh to approach Me one span,
I approach him one cubit; and
whoso seeketh to approach Me one cubit,
I approach him two fathoms; and
whoever walks towards Me,
I run towards him.”³⁸
Rabi’a celebrates the eventual meeting of the two souls, one finite, the other Infinite, in her famous night prayer:
My God and my Lord:
eyes are at rest, the stars are setting,
hushed are the movements of birds in their nests, of monsters in the deep.
And
you are the Just who knows no change,
the Equity that does not swerve, the Everlasting that never passes away.
The doors of kings are locked
and guarded by their henchmen,
but your door is open to those who call upon you.
My Lord, each lover is now alone with his beloved.
And I am alone with you.
b]
We are calling the second Sufi approach to the divine presence ecstatic (literally, “to stand outside oneself”) because it turns on experiences that differ, not just in degree but in kind, from usual ones.
The presiding metaphor for ecstatic Sufis was
the Prophet’s Night Journey through the seven heavens into the Divine Presence.
What he perceived in those heavens no one can say, but we can be sure the visions were extraordinary—increasingly so with each level of ascent.
Ecstatic Sufis do not claim that they come to see what Muhammad saw that night, but they move in his direction.
At times the content of what they are experiencing engrosses them so com-
pletely that their states become trancelike because of their total abstraction from self. No attention remains for who they are, where they
are, or what is happening to them. In psychological parlance they are “dissociated” from themselves, losing consciousness of the world
as it is normally perceived.
Journeying to meet such adepts, pilgrims reported finding themselves ignored—not out of discourtesy, but because literally they were not seen.
Deliberate inducement of such states required practice; a pilgrim who sought out a revered ecstatic named Nuri reported finding him in such an intense state of concentration that not a hair of his body moved.
“When I later asked him,
‘From whom did you learn this deep concentration?’
he replied, ‘From a cat watching by a mouse hole. But its concentration is much
more intense than mine.’”³⁹
Nevertheless, when the altered state arrives, it feels like a gift rather than an acquisition. The phrase that mystical theology uses, “infused grace,” feels right here; for Sufis report that as their consciousness begins to change, it feels as if their wills were placed in abeyance and a superior will takes over.
Sufis honor their ecstatics, but in calling them “drunken” they serve notice that they must bring the substance of their visions back with them when they find themselves “sober” again.
In plain language, transcendence must be made immanent; the God who is encountered apart from the world must also be encountered within it. This latter does not require ecstasy as its preliminary, and the direct route to cultivating it carries us to the third Sufi approach: the way of intuitive discernment.
c]
Like the other two methods this one brings knowledge, but of a distinct sort.
- Love mysticism yields “heart knowledge,” and
- ecstasy “visual or visionary knowledge,” because extraterrestrial realities are seen;
- but intuitive mysticism brings “mental knowledge,”
which Sufis call ma’rifah, obtained through an organ of discernment called “the eye of the heart.”⁴⁰
Because the realities attained through ma’rifah are immaterial, the eye of the heart is immaterial as well. It does not compete with the physical eye whose objects, the world’s normal objects, remain fully in view.
What it does is clothe those objects in celestial light.
Or to reverse the metaphor: It recognizes the world’s objects as garments that God dons to create a world. These garments become progressively more transparent as the eye of the heart gains strength.
It would be false to say that the world is God—that would be pantheism. But to the eye of the heart, the world is God-in-disguise, God veiled.
The principal method the Sufis employed for penetrating the disguise is symbolism. In using visible objects to speak of invisible things, symbolism is the language of religion generally; it is to religion what numbers are to science.
Mystics, however, employ it to exceptional degree; for instead of stopping with the first spiritual object a symbol points to, they use it as stepping stone to a more exalted object.
This led al-Ghazali to define symbolism as “the science of the relation between multiple levels of reality.”
Every verse of the Koran, the Sufis say, conceals a minimum of seven hidden significations, and the number can sometimes reach to seventy.
To illustrate this point: For all Muslims removing one’s shoes before stepping into a mosque is a mark of reverence; it signifies
- checking the clamoring world at the door and not admitting it into sacred precincts.
The Sufi accepts this symbolism fully, but goes on to see in the act the additional meaning of
- removing everything that separates the soul from God.
- Or the act of asking forgiveness.
All Muslims pray to be forgiven for specific transgressions, but when the Sufi pronounces the formula astaghfiru’llah,
- I ask forgiveness of God,
he or she reads into the petition an added request:
- to be forgiven for his or her separate existence.
This sounds strange, and indeed, exoteric Muslims find it incomprehensible.
But the Sufis see it as an extension of Rabi’a’s teaching that “Your existence is a sin with which no other can be compared.”
Because ex-istence is a standing out from something, which in this case is God, existence involves separation.
To avoid it Sufis developed their doctrine of fana—extinction—as the logical term of their quest.
Not that their consciousness was to be extinguished.
It was their self-consciousness—their consciousness of themselves as separate selves replete with their private personal agendas—that was to be ended.
If the ending was complete, they argued, when they looked inside the dry shells of their now-emptied selves they would find nothing but God.
A Christian mystic put this point by writing:
God, whose boundless love and joyAre present everywhere;He cannot come to visit youUnless you are not there.
(Angelus Silesius)
Al-Hallaj’s version was:
“I saw my Lord with the eye of the Heart.I said: ‘Who are you?’He answered: ‘You.’”
As a final example of the Sufis’ extravagant use of symbolism, we can note the way they tightened
the creedal assertion “There is no god but God”
to read, “There is nothing but God.”
To exoteric Muslims this again sounded silly, if not blasphemous: silly because there are obviously lots of things—tables and chairs—that are not God; blasphemous because the mystic reading seemed to deny God as Creator.
But the Sufis’ intent was to challenge the independence that people normally ascribe to things.
Monotheism to them meant more than the theoretical point that there are not two Gods; that they considered obvious.
Picking up on the existential meaning of the-ism—God is that to which we give (or should give) ourselves—they agreed that the initial meaning of “no god but God” is that we should give ourselves to nothing but God.
But we do not catch the full significance of the phrase, they argued,
until we see that we do give ourselves to other things when we let them occupy us as objects in their own right;
objects that have the power to interest or repel us by being simply what they are.
To think of light as caused by electricity—by electricity only and sufficiently, without asking where electricity comes from—is in principle to commit shirk;
for because only God is self-sufficient, to consider other things as such is to
liken them to God and thereby ascribe to him rivals.
Symbolism, though powerful, works somewhat abstractly, so the Sufis supplement it with dhikr (to remember), the practice of remembering Allah through repeating his Name.
“There is a means of polishing all things whereby rust may be removed,”
a hadith asserts, adding:
“That which polishes the heart is the invocation of Allah.”
Remembrance of God is at the same time a forgetting of self,
so Sufis consider the repetition of Allah’s Name the best way of directing their attention Godward.
Whether they utter God’s Name alone or with others, silently or aloud, accenting its first syllable sharply or prolonging its second syllable as long as breath allows, they try to fill every free moment of the day with its music.
Eventually, this practice kneads the syllables into the subconscious mind, from
which it bubbles up with the spontaneity of a birdsong.
The foregoing paragraphs sketch what Sufism is at heart,
but they do not explain why this section opened by associating it with a
division within Islam.
The answer is that Muslims are of two minds about Sufism.
This is partly because Sufism is itself a mixed bag.
By the principle that the higher attracts the lower, Sufi orders have at times attracted riffraff who are Sufis in little more than name.
For example, certain mendicant orders of Sufism have used poverty as a discipline, but it is only a step from authentic Sufis of this stripe to
beggars who do no more than claim to be Sufis.
Politics too has at times intruded. Most recently, groups have arisen in the West that call themselves Sufis, while professing no allegiance whatsoever to Islamic orthodoxy.
It is not surprising that these aberrations raise eyebrows, but even authentic Sufism (as we have tried to describe it) is controversial.
Why? It is because Sufis take certain liberties that exoteric Muslims cannot in conscience condone. Having seen the sky through the
skylight of Islamic orthodoxy, Sufis become persuaded that there is more sky than the aperture allows.
When Rumi asserted,
- “I am neither Muslim nor Christian, Jew nor Zoroastrian; I am neither of the earth nor of the heavens, I am neither body nor soul,”
we can understand the exoterics’ fear that orthodoxy was being strained beyond permissible limits.
Ibn ‘Arabi’s declaration was even more unsettling:
My heart has opened unto every form.
It is a pasture for gazelles, a cloister for Christian monks,
a temple for idols, the Ka’ba of the pilgrim,
the tablets of the Torah and the book of the Koran.
I practice the religion of Love;
in whatsoever directions its caravans advance,
the religion of Love shall be my religion and my faith.
As for Al-Hallaj’s assertion that he was God,⁴¹ no explanation from the Sufis to the effect that he was referring to the divine Essence
that was within him could keep exoterics from hearing this as outright blasphemy.
Mysticism breaks through the boundaries that protect the faith of the typical believer.
In doing so it moves into an unconfined region that, fulfilling though it is for some, carries dangers for those who are unqualified for its teachings.
Without their literal meaning being denied, dogmas and prescriptions that the ordinary believer sees as absolute are interpreted allegorically, or used as points of reference that may eventually be transcended.
Particularly shocking to some is the fact that the Sufi often claims, if only by implication, an authority derived directly from God and a knowledge given from above rather than learned in the schools.
Sufis have their rights, but—if we may venture the verdict of Islam as a whole—so have ordinary believers whose faith in unambiguous principles, fully adequate for salvation, could be undermined by teachings that seem to tamper with them.
For this reason many spiritual Masters have been discreet in their teachings, reserving parts of their doctrine for those who are suited to receive them.
This is also why the exoteric authorities have regarded Sufism with understandable suspicion.
Control has been exercised, partly by public opinion and partly by means of a kind of dynamic tension, maintained through the centuries, between the exoteric religious authorities on the one hand and Sufi shaikhs on the other.
An undercurrent of opposition to Sufism within sections of the Islamic community has served as a necessary curb on the mystics, without this undercurrent having been strong enough to prevent those who have had a genuine vocation for a Sufi path from following their destiny.
On the whole, esoterism and exoterism have achieved a healthy balance in Islam, but in this section we shall let the exoterics have the last word.
One of the teaching devices for which they are famous has not yet been mentioned; it is the Sufi tale. This one, “The Tale of the Sands,”
relates to their doctrine of fana, the transcending, in God, of the finite self.
A stream, from its source in far-off mountains, passing through every kind and description of countryside, at last reached the sands of the desert. Just as it had crossed every other barrier, the stream tried to cross this one, but it found that as fast as it ran into the sand, its waters disappeared.
It was convinced, however, that its destiny was to cross this desert, and yet there was no way. Now a hidden voice, coming from the desert itself, whispered: “The Wind crosses the desert, and so can the stream.”
The stream objected that it was dashing itself against the sand, and only getting absorbed: that the wind could fly, and this was why it could cross a desert.
“By hurtling in your own accustomed way you cannot get across. You will either disappear or become a marsh. You must allow the wind to carry you over, to your destination.”
But how could this happen? “By allowing yourself to be absorbed in the wind.”
This idea was not acceptable to the stream. After all, it had never been absorbed before. It did not want to lose its individuality. And, once having lost it, how was one to know that it could ever be regained?
“The wind,” said the sand, “performs this function. It takes up water, carries it over the desert, and then lets it fall again. Falling as rain, the water again becomes a river.”
“How can I know that this is true?” “It is so, and if you do not believe it, you cannot become more than a quagmire, and even that could take many, many years. And it certainly is not the same as a stream.”
“But can I not remain the same stream that I am today?”
“You cannot in either case remain so,” the whisper said. “Your essential part is carried away and forms a stream again. You are called what you are even today because you do not know which part of you is the essential one.”
When it heard this, certain echoes began to arise in the thoughts of the stream. Dimly it remembered a state in which it—or some part of it?—had been held in the arms of a wind. It also remembered—or did it?—that this was the real thing, not necessarily the obvious thing, to do.
And the stream raised its vapor into the welcoming arms of the wind, which gently and easily bore it upwards and along, letting it fall softly as soon as they reached the roof of a mountain, many, many, miles away. And because it had its doubts, the stream was able to remember and record more strongly in its mind the details of the experience. It reflected, “Yes, now I have learned my true identity.”
The stream was learning. But the sands whispered: “We know, because we see it happen day after day: and because we, the sands, extend from the riverside all the way to the mountain.”
And that is why it is said that the way in which the stream of Life is to continue on its journey is written in the Sands.⁵
— 9 —
WHITHER ISLAM?
For long periods since Muhammad called his people to God’s oneness, Muslims have wandered from the spirit of the Prophet. Their
leaders are the first to admit that practice has often been replaced by mere profession, and that fervor has waned.
Viewed as a whole, however, Islam unrolls before us one of the most remarkable panoramas in all history. We have spoken of its
early greatness. Had we pursued its history there would have been chapters on the Muslim empire, which, a century after Muhammad’s
death, stretched from the bay of Biscay to the Indus and the frontiers of China, from the Aral Sea to the upper Nile. More important
would have been the chapters describing the spread of Muslim ideas: the development of a fabulous culture, the rise of literature, sci-
ence, medicine, art, and architecture; the glory of Damascus, Baghdad, and Egypt, and the splendor of Spain under the Moors. There
would have been the story of how, during Europe’s Dark Ages, Muslim philosophers and scientists kept the lamp of learning bright,
ready to spark the Western mind when it roused from its long sleep.
Nor would the story have been entirely confined to the past, for there are indications that Islam is emerging from several centuries of
stagnation, which colonization no doubt exacerbated. It faces enormous problems: how to distinguish industrial modernization (which
on balance it welcomes), from Westernization (which on balance it doesn’t); how to realize the unity that is latent in Islam when the
forces of nationalism work powerfully against it; how to hold on to Truth in a pluralistic, relativizing age. But having thrown off the colo-
nial yoke, Islam is stirring with some of the vigor of its former youth. From Morocco across from Gibraltar on the Atlantic, eastward
across North Africa, through the Indian subcontinent (which includes Pakistan and Bangladesh), on to the near-tip of Indonesia, Islam
is a vital force in the contemporary world. It numbers in the order of 1.2 billion, of which the vast majority are moderates and not radical
fundamentalists. Read these words at any hour of day or night and somewhere from a minaret (or now by radio) a muezzin will be call-
ing the faithful to prayer, announcing:
God is most great.
God is most great.
I testify that there is no god but God.
I testify that Muhammad is the Prophet of God.
Arise and pray;
God is most great.
God is most great.
There is no god but God.
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Granting the Muslim’s contention that the Koran suffers incomparably in translation,
- Mohammed Pickthall’s The Meaning of the Glorious Koran (New York: New American Library, 1953)
may be recommended as being as serviceable as any.
- Kenneth Cragg’s The House of Islam (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1988) and
- Victor Danner’s The Islamic Tradition (Amity, NY: Amity House, 1988)
- offer admirable overviews of this tradition, as do
- Seyyed Hossein Nasr’s Ideals and Realities of Islam (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1989) and
- Abdel Halim Mahmud’s The Creed of Islam (London: World of Islam Festival Trust, 1978; distributed by Thorsons Publishers, Denington Estate, Wellingborough, Northants, England).
Sufism Part
The best metaphysical discussion of Sufi doctrines is to be found in
- Frithjof Schuon’s Understanding Islam (New York: Penguin Books, 1972),
- https://archive.org/details/understandingisl0000schu
which a leading Muslim scholar has hailed as “the best work in English on the meaning of Islam and why Muslims believe in it.” It is a demanding book, however.
More accessible to the general reader are
- William Stoddart’s Sufism (New York: Paragon Press, 1986) and
- https://archive.org/details/sufismmysticaldo0000stod/page/n95/mode/2up
- Martin Lings’s What Is Sufism? (London: Unwin Hyman, 1975, 1988).
For the writings of the greatest Sufi poet, Rumi,
- Coleman Barks’s The Essential Rumi (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1995) and
- The Soul of Rumi (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001)
are especially recommended.
My thirty-minute video cassette on
- “Islamic Mysticism: The Sufi Way”
is available from Hartley Film Foundation, Cat Rock Road,
Cos Cob, CT 06807.
The pleasures of Sufi tales can be sampled through
- Idries Shah’s collection, Tales of the Dervishes (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1970).
NOTES
PROLOGUE
1. Meg Greenfield, Newsweek (March 26, 1979): 116.
2. Norman Daniel, Islam and the West: The Making of an Image, 1960. Rev. ed. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1966) details
the emergence of the distorted picture of Islam that has dominated the West for over a thousand years.
ISLAMIC BACKGROUND
1. Philip Hitti, History of the Arabs, 1937. Rev. ed. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1970), 3–4.
THE SEAL OF THE PROPHETS
1. Thomas Carlyle’s description in “The Hero as Prophet,” in Heroes and Hero-Worship, 1840. Reprint. (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1974.)
2. Arabic has no neuter gender. As its nouns are invariably masculine or feminine, its pronouns are as well. In fidelity to the gram-
mar of the Koran, therefore, I shall, when referring to Allah who possesses a masculine proper name, use the masculine pronoun.
3. See Charles Le Gai Eaton, Islam and the Destiny of Man (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985), 103.
4. The literal meaning of the word iqra’ is “recite,” but here, where Muhammad was given his commission, I have followed the trajec-
tory of Victor Danner’s “preach” (The Islamic Tradition [Amity, New York: Amity House, 1988], 35), but changed his word to “proclaim.”
5. As rendered by Ameer Ali in The Spirit of Islam, 1902. Rev. ed. (London: Christophers, 1923), 18.
6. Ali, Spirit of Islam, 32.
7. Sir William Muir, quoted in Ali, Spirit of Islam, 32.
THE MIGRATION THAT LED TO VICTORY
1. Quoted without source in Ali, Spirit of Islam, 52.
2. Ali, Spirit of Islam, 52.
3. Philip Hitti, The Arabs: A Short History, 1949. Rev. ed. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1968), 32.
4. Michael H. Hart, The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History (New York: Citadel Press, 1989), 40.
THE STANDING MIRACLE
1. Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 1845. Reprint. (New York: Modern Library, 1977), vol. 2, 162.
2. Today the language of Islam is a matter of sharp controversy. While all orthodox Muslims agree that the ritual use of the Koran in
canonical prayers, and so on, must be in Arabic, there are many, including some among the ulama (religious scholars), who believe
that on other occasions those who do not know Arabic should read the Koran in translation.
3. Kenneth Cragg, trans., Readings in the Qur’an (London: Collins, 1988), 18.
4. Frithjof Schuon, Understanding Islam (New York: Penguin Books, 1972), 44–45.
BASIC THEOLOGICAL CONCEPTS
1. ”She [Mary] said: My Lord! How can I have a child when no mortal hath touched me? He [the angel] said: So. Allah createth what
He will. If He decreeth a thing, He saith unto it only: Be! and it is” (3:47).
2. Tabari relates traditions on this episode that have God flattening the mountain with just his little finger.
3. Ali, Spirit of Islam, 150.
4. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Macmillan, 1961), 57.
5. Sir Muhammad Iqbal, The Secrets of the Self, 1920. Reprint. (Lahore: Muhammad Ashraf, 1979), xxi.
6. Quoted in Ali, Spirit of Islam, 199.
THE FIVE PILLARS
1. Ali, Spirit of Islam, 170.
