No god but God is the story of Islam, from its infancy to its infamous stature in the United States in the early 2000s. The story is told by Reza Aslan, an Iranian-American and religious scholar, and really there’s no better person to address an American audience on the virtues and shortcomings of Islam.
I had previously read Aslan’s book Zealot about the historical life of Jesus Christ, which I thought he did very well. His writing reads like a good fantasy novel, albeit with frequent historical asides and academic debate. Aslan converted from Islam to Christianity and back to Islam, so his perspective of Christianity was one that I wasn’t familiar with as someone whose religious upbringing was completely in all-white church (excepting that one Mexican church that I went to a couple times).
Reza Aslan has been a large part of my thinking about my interaction with my Christianity since I began to doubt. Zealot was the nail in the coffin that caused me to not believe the historicity of the Bible. Since then, I listened to him debate with Sam Harris on the place of religion in society. Interestingly enough, he argued that religion should continue to play a large role in society, though it should be a more liberal version of religion focused on civil rights and democracy. Although I think he won his debate with Harris by a landslide, I wasn’t totally convinced of his point, so I decided to read his book No god but God.
While No god but God is structured as a history of Islam to a Western audience, the heart of the book is Aslan’s argument that a reformed Islam is the only viable basis for healthy democracy in the Middle East. Religion to Aslan is a set of myths that we tell ourselves as communities that encode our values and hold society together. Aslan does not think that the words of the Quran are literally and totally true, even if it does come from God. Rather he thinks that they are a product of their time period and have to be interpreted by modern readers to be applicable to society. All religion is interpretation according to Aslan.
Aslan supports his argument of relativism by taking the reader through the history of Islam and showing all the different ways that the Quran has been interpreted. The words “no god but God” mean something a little bit different to Sunnis and Shi’ites and Sufis and all the diverse groups that make up Islam. Then Aslan presents his vision of a liberal Islam through his depiction of the historical Medina. He argues that the Prophet Muhammad created a religiously tolerant, pseudo-democracy in Medina, that we should take to the next level with our own governments.
Reading Aslan’s arguments have lead me to two conclusions. The first is that he is totally wrong about religion. He has a line in the book in which he says that sovereignty “is a power that God rarely chooses to wield on this earth” (page 265). If the Quran isn’t literally or totally true and God is functionally useless, then what is the difference between Islam and a secular moral philosophy told through myths? Harris would argue that the only difference is that you’re allowed to question a moral philosophy without being branded a heretic, though he would probably phrase his objection in a way that almost sounds Islamophobic. The more of Aslan’s commentary on the role of Islam in society, the more I found myself agreeing with Harris.
I would love to see a world in which we are allowed to challenge the shared myths that we tell ourselves. In such a world, religion would be replaced by a combination of science and moral philosophy, perhaps humanism. Science provides a shared understanding of the world that allows us to find common ground across any culture. Moral philosophy would take the place of the judgmental philosophy that seems to be imbedded in Abrahamic religions. Instead of not committing murder to avoid going to hell, why don’t we not commit murder out of a love for our fellow man or at least a love of a functional society?
At first this image of society looks bleak and uniform, as the world’s diverse and beautiful religious traditions are replaced with academia and debate. This is where I think art should come in. The beauty of the Sufi tradition as described by Aslan is not their beliefs God, but their tradition of poetry and art of various forms. While science is fairly black and white, perhaps with a little bit of gray, cultures all over the world would have the opportunity and the work of translating it into full color. An interpretation of quantum physics and its emotional ramifications would, and should, look different in India than in Russia. Cultural practices would then be connected to and bolstered by something real and something that can be shared across the world, instead of the rigid visions of “Truth” that most religions have.
The second conclusion that I came to from reading No god but God is that the vision of the world that I just described can not become true. Aslan bleakly describes fundamentalism and its resistance to change in Saudi Arabia. The more that the government fought it, the further it spread, until it was a large problem all over the Middle East and violence spilled out into the West. Fundamentalism is so engrained in the minds of so many Muslims (and so many Christians here in the United States too) that my view of a secular society can never be realized because there are too many people that can not be convinced. Instead, I think Aslan’s approach of reforming Islam is the only thing that will work. If the words of God cannot be challenged, at least they can be interpreted.
Aslan’s depiction of Islam is beautiful and educational. As a Western Christian, I had a very vague idea of what Islam is and how it behaves. Aslan’s book is a good entry point, if a little bit academic for my liking. My only criticism of the book is that Aslan is sometimes a little bit too sympathetic to Islam and the Middle East. Aslan doesn’t examine critically enough the role of Islam in violent responses to societal problems that he blames on the legacy of colonialism. In his eyes, the Prophet and his followers can almost do no wrong and he offers up no criticism of the Quran. From a Muslim, this is to be expected, and his bias does little to impede the reader from drawing their own conclusions, but it is worth mentioning.
I would recommend this book to western Christians and atheists, to give them an appreciation for the beauty and diversity of Islam. It certainly gave me an appreciation of the artistic and poetic accomplishments of the Middle East throughout the centuries.