Islam NOT a Religion?
One aspect of our local controversy regarding the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro has been the accusation, made both in court and the media, that Islam is NOT a religion. Why is this important? Because religious people, and those who value freedom, should never want the state involved in defining what religion is.
Of course, there are reasons that this charge is made, and while there is some substance to these ideas, they are in the end not adequate to support the accusation and not helpful to any side of the ongoing multisided debate.
The first of these reasons is the well-known linkage to what's informally called Shariah, the Islamic system of jurisprudence. At the foundation of Islam are laws promulgated by Mohammed and his successors. As Islam developed, Shariah followed as a form of binding interpretation of those laws and subsequent authoritative traditions (the sunna).
The public face of Islam in pluralistic countries of more than one prominent religion (France, UK, Nigeria) tends to be at the intersection of Muslims’ attempting to follow both Shariah law and the jurisprudence of the country they live in, such as conflicts with having Drivers License photos made with veiled faces for women (the niqab). What are perceived as essential Islamic practices appear to be at odds with the law of the land, giving rise to the notion that the totalizing tendencies of Islam disqualify it from being called a religion.
If anything, however, these collisions are more a measure of the short amount of time that Islam has been constrained to interact with modern secular states, which tolerate a dizzying variety of religious belief, while at the same time observing carefully codified restrictions on certain religious practices (think polygamy).
The other main reason for the charge that Islam is not a religion is the development and spread of Islamism, or “radical Islam” in the last 40 years. Since we in the west began really paying attention to Islam in the last decade or so, many have commented on the absence of any notion of the separation of “church and state” in majority Islam countries. There are many reasons for this, none of them simple, which is apparently a problem for the way we're accustomed to dealing with political controversies.
By analogy with Moses, the lawgiver of Israel, Mohammed was both the political leader of his followers and their religious leader at the same time. Israel, however, was called as a specific ethnos, a people linked by ancestry and given a promised land. Israel did not begin with an outward oriented mission to bring the world into “submission” (Islam). It was more centripetal than centrifugal.
Islam, by contrast, exploded outward in political/military conquest into the power vacuum of the “burnt-over” district between the exhausted empires of Sassanid Persia (greater Iran) and the Byzantine Roman Empire (Greece, the Balkans, Turkey, the Caucasus, Syria, North Africa and the Levant). Very soon after Mohammed's hegira(migration with followers) to Medina in 622 AD (Year One in the Islamic calendar) he was the leader of a united Medina, having militarily defeated the Jews of Medina and conquered the remaining pagan Arabs of the city.
Because it arose as a unitary ideology, there was never a significant time in those early centuries during which Islam was practiced as a minority religion in conflict with the ruling government. In fairness, we need to remember that this was the universal experience in antiquity before the rise of Christianity. Religion was always coterminous with a people and its national identity. Islam expanded outward, first to Mecca, and then up the Arabian peninsula, defeating Byzantine and Persian armies in major battles, both within the first ten years after Mohammed's death.
Contrast this with the first followers of Jesus of Nazareth, who were Jews. Jews had been accustomed to living under Roman domination for the previous 150 years, and under Greek, Persian and Babylonian rule for the 500 years before that. The subsequent Jewish/Roman relationship was not a happy one, and in 70 AD and 135 AD there were uprisings followed by swift and efficient Roman suppressions. Early Christians, small in number, were powerless politically and oriented in a different direction than Mohammed's first followers. Jesus had already rejected the political/military route that many had expected him to follow and this set the tone for at least the next 250 years of church history, during which time Christianity doctrinally became what it is today.
There was much mixing of government, religion, church and state after the time of Emperor Theodosius (381 AD) but the foundational documents (e.g., the New Testament) came from the earlier period of minority status, and seeded Jesus' ideas regarding the role of faith and worldly power (“my kingdom is not of this world” ; “give to Caesar that which is Caesar’s”) into modern, Western thinking about religion and politics. At the time of the rise of Islam, however, Christianity was entirely identified with the ruling government of Rome, now based in Constantinople. This close knit arrangement gradually dissolved as a result of the Reformation of the 16th century, the religious conflicts of the 17th century and the American founding of the 18th century.
So though it must be acknowledged that the kind of thinking about religion and politics that's been normative in Islamic writings for centuries is foreign to what we're now familiar with, just because a religion is very different from what we're accustomed to does not mean it's not a religion. Many Christians are very familiar, after all, with preachers opining that Christianity is “not a religion at all, but a relationship.” In such cases religion is often denigrated by Christian thinkers as what humanity does to try to reach God on its own, which would fit the way I, and many Christians, think about Islam and other religions.
In Japan, for example, the vast majority of people who take part in Shinto rituals also practice Buddhist ancestor worship. In our world, a Southern Baptist would never ask a Catholic priest to come perform an infant baptism. We don’t “get” Japanese religious practices, just like we don’t “get” Islamic political/religious attitudes. This is just another example of how unfamiliar religions don’t always fit the default pattern of American ideas of religion.
Believe me, the last thing Americans want is somebody “defining” what a religion is, because the court of last appeal is always the government and it is not in the interest of any religious people to have the government involved in that. Shintoism and Japanese Buddhism are of course religions, just as Islam, with its complicated political/military history and, for some, distasteful, ideology is a religion, and therefore covered under our constitution's First Amendment protections.
The secular nation-state, economically liberal, religiously tolerant, democratically governed, was designed from its beginning to tame competing religious ideologies (Catholic/Protestant and Protestant/Protestant) with freedom, expansion of personal property rights, property ownership and access to political power. If given the chance, the modern secular state will do the same with Islam of whatever form or forms. If Islam cannot adapt to that, it will probably meet the same unhappy fate bar-Kochba's Jewish followers met in 135 AD, when they decided that God would fight for them against the Roman legions of the Emperor Hadrian. He did not.
Steve Odom is the pastor of Central Christian Church in Murfreesboro and a former community member of The DNJ's Editorial Board. He blogs at borodisciples.org.
Of course, there are reasons that this charge is made, and while there is some substance to these ideas, they are in the end not adequate to support the accusation and not helpful to any side of the ongoing multisided debate.
The first of these reasons is the well-known linkage to what's informally called Shariah, the Islamic system of jurisprudence. At the foundation of Islam are laws promulgated by Mohammed and his successors. As Islam developed, Shariah followed as a form of binding interpretation of those laws and subsequent authoritative traditions (the sunna).
The public face of Islam in pluralistic countries of more than one prominent religion (France, UK, Nigeria) tends to be at the intersection of Muslims’ attempting to follow both Shariah law and the jurisprudence of the country they live in, such as conflicts with having Drivers License photos made with veiled faces for women (the niqab). What are perceived as essential Islamic practices appear to be at odds with the law of the land, giving rise to the notion that the totalizing tendencies of Islam disqualify it from being called a religion.
If anything, however, these collisions are more a measure of the short amount of time that Islam has been constrained to interact with modern secular states, which tolerate a dizzying variety of religious belief, while at the same time observing carefully codified restrictions on certain religious practices (think polygamy).
The other main reason for the charge that Islam is not a religion is the development and spread of Islamism, or “radical Islam” in the last 40 years. Since we in the west began really paying attention to Islam in the last decade or so, many have commented on the absence of any notion of the separation of “church and state” in majority Islam countries. There are many reasons for this, none of them simple, which is apparently a problem for the way we're accustomed to dealing with political controversies.
By analogy with Moses, the lawgiver of Israel, Mohammed was both the political leader of his followers and their religious leader at the same time. Israel, however, was called as a specific ethnos, a people linked by ancestry and given a promised land. Israel did not begin with an outward oriented mission to bring the world into “submission” (Islam). It was more centripetal than centrifugal.
Islam, by contrast, exploded outward in political/military conquest into the power vacuum of the “burnt-over” district between the exhausted empires of Sassanid Persia (greater Iran) and the Byzantine Roman Empire (Greece, the Balkans, Turkey, the Caucasus, Syria, North Africa and the Levant). Very soon after Mohammed's hegira(migration with followers) to Medina in 622 AD (Year One in the Islamic calendar) he was the leader of a united Medina, having militarily defeated the Jews of Medina and conquered the remaining pagan Arabs of the city.
Because it arose as a unitary ideology, there was never a significant time in those early centuries during which Islam was practiced as a minority religion in conflict with the ruling government. In fairness, we need to remember that this was the universal experience in antiquity before the rise of Christianity. Religion was always coterminous with a people and its national identity. Islam expanded outward, first to Mecca, and then up the Arabian peninsula, defeating Byzantine and Persian armies in major battles, both within the first ten years after Mohammed's death.
Contrast this with the first followers of Jesus of Nazareth, who were Jews. Jews had been accustomed to living under Roman domination for the previous 150 years, and under Greek, Persian and Babylonian rule for the 500 years before that. The subsequent Jewish/Roman relationship was not a happy one, and in 70 AD and 135 AD there were uprisings followed by swift and efficient Roman suppressions. Early Christians, small in number, were powerless politically and oriented in a different direction than Mohammed's first followers. Jesus had already rejected the political/military route that many had expected him to follow and this set the tone for at least the next 250 years of church history, during which time Christianity doctrinally became what it is today.
There was much mixing of government, religion, church and state after the time of Emperor Theodosius (381 AD) but the foundational documents (e.g., the New Testament) came from the earlier period of minority status, and seeded Jesus' ideas regarding the role of faith and worldly power (“my kingdom is not of this world” ; “give to Caesar that which is Caesar’s”) into modern, Western thinking about religion and politics. At the time of the rise of Islam, however, Christianity was entirely identified with the ruling government of Rome, now based in Constantinople. This close knit arrangement gradually dissolved as a result of the Reformation of the 16th century, the religious conflicts of the 17th century and the American founding of the 18th century.
So though it must be acknowledged that the kind of thinking about religion and politics that's been normative in Islamic writings for centuries is foreign to what we're now familiar with, just because a religion is very different from what we're accustomed to does not mean it's not a religion. Many Christians are very familiar, after all, with preachers opining that Christianity is “not a religion at all, but a relationship.” In such cases religion is often denigrated by Christian thinkers as what humanity does to try to reach God on its own, which would fit the way I, and many Christians, think about Islam and other religions.
In Japan, for example, the vast majority of people who take part in Shinto rituals also practice Buddhist ancestor worship. In our world, a Southern Baptist would never ask a Catholic priest to come perform an infant baptism. We don’t “get” Japanese religious practices, just like we don’t “get” Islamic political/religious attitudes. This is just another example of how unfamiliar religions don’t always fit the default pattern of American ideas of religion.
Believe me, the last thing Americans want is somebody “defining” what a religion is, because the court of last appeal is always the government and it is not in the interest of any religious people to have the government involved in that. Shintoism and Japanese Buddhism are of course religions, just as Islam, with its complicated political/military history and, for some, distasteful, ideology is a religion, and therefore covered under our constitution's First Amendment protections.
The secular nation-state, economically liberal, religiously tolerant, democratically governed, was designed from its beginning to tame competing religious ideologies (Catholic/Protestant and Protestant/Protestant) with freedom, expansion of personal property rights, property ownership and access to political power. If given the chance, the modern secular state will do the same with Islam of whatever form or forms. If Islam cannot adapt to that, it will probably meet the same unhappy fate bar-Kochba's Jewish followers met in 135 AD, when they decided that God would fight for them against the Roman legions of the Emperor Hadrian. He did not.
Steve Odom is the pastor of Central Christian Church in Murfreesboro and a former community member of The DNJ's Editorial Board. He blogs at borodisciples.org.
posted by Jacob of Mabbug at 12:43 PM
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