The War Within Islam

Reza Aslan On How The U.S. Fails To Understand The Muslim World

On a recent Saturday morning at the 18th Street Coffee House in Santa Monica, California, I shared a table with author Reza Aslan. A strikingly handsome thirty-four-year-old dressed in a T-shirt emblazoned with Chinese characters, jeans, and sandals and sporting a couple of days’ stubble, he did not fit the stereotype of an Islamic scholar. But then, he’d contemplated the Koran at Harvard University, where he’d earned a master’s degree in theological studies. We spoke two days shy of the fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, which Aslan believes were carried out “to goad the United States into an exaggerated retaliation against the Islamic world so as to mobilize Muslims to, in the words of George W. Bush, ‘choose sides.’

Aslan’s first book, No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam (Random House), proposes that Islam is nearing the end of a century-long period of reformation. An argument is taking place within the Muslim world, he says, over who has the authority to define the faith: the institution or the individual. In this conflict, he writes, “the West is merely a bystander — an unwary yet complicit casualty.”

Aslan grew up in Iran, and he and his family were among the many middle-class Iranians who escaped to the West before Ayatollah Khomeini installed an Islamic government in 1980. Seven years old at the time, Aslan watched as the bullying customs officials at the Tehran airport confiscated his father’s watch and his mother’s jewelry. After a brief stay in London, the family settled in Enid, Oklahoma. Aslan’s father had done a semester abroad at Oklahoma State University. (“I think he thought that Oklahoma was America,” Aslan says, “and he was probably right.”) They spent the next six months holed up in a motel room, where Aslan and his four-year-old sister watched television and learned about American culture from Bugs Bunny, The Flintstones, and CHiPS, a police drama about the California Highway Patrol. (“For a long while I was scared to death of driving on American highways because I assumed that cars just exploded and flipped over all the time.”) Eventually the family drove west to California.

Because of his father’s hatred for anything Islamic, Aslan was denied much awareness of his Muslim heritage, but the boy had a thirst for knowledge about religion and God. In high school he attended a Christian camp with some friends, and afterward he converted to Evangelical Christianity. Aslan sought to learn everything he could about his new faith, and ended up learning too much for the liking of his church mentors: when he pointed out that the Bible says nothing about premarital sex being a sin, they laid their hands on him and prayed for his salvation.

Disillusioned, Aslan pursued his interest in writing fiction at Santa Clara University, a Jesuit school that requires students to take religion classes. The Jesuits’ willingness to debate Scripture renewed Aslan’s curiosity about Christianity, and he threw himself into Catholicism, getting his undergraduate degree in religion. He was about to embark on a doctoral program in biblical studies at Harvard when his advisor encouraged him to study Islam instead, saying, “No one’s going to give a damn about the 112th person this year who graduates with a PhD in biblical studies.” Aslan considers the advice the best he’s ever been given. He spent the next two years constructing his own course of study, as there was no Islamic program at Harvard’s divinity school at the time. All the fervor he’d had for Christian traditions came out again, only now it wasn’t a conversion experience; it was, he says, a “reconversion experience.” Aslan applied Christian methods of biblical analysis to Koranic studies, and he now believes this has helped him explain Islam to non-Muslims. “I talk about Islam and the Koran the way most Americans think about Christianity and the Bible.”

Aslan never abandoned his interest in fiction, and in 1999 he attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and also served as visiting professor of Islamic studies at the University of Iowa. After September 11, 2001, enrollment in the class he taught went from 37 to 289. As Iowa’s leading expert on Islam, he began touring the state and caught the attention of the national media. He was inspired to work on a book to help Westerners understand Islam. No god but God became a bestseller and led to appearances on NPR’s All Things Considered, NBC’s Meet the Press, and ABC’s Nightline.

Aslan has written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and the Nation. Samples of his writing can be found at www.rezaaslan.com. He is currently a doctoral candidate at the University of California, but has set aside his studies to focus on his next two books: a historical novel that follows a caravan from the Arabian Peninsula to India, and another nonfiction book outlining his theories about the Islamic reformation.

Fueling Aslan’s success, no doubt, is his ability to speak extemporaneously about the complexities of Islamic faith — all with charm and a sense of humor. As Islam struggles to define itself in the twenty-first century, who better to chronicle the outcome?

Cooper: You say we’re witnessing an Islamic reformation. What are the signs of this?

Aslan: When we hear the word reformation in this country, we tend to think of the Christian Reformation, which led to the creation of the Protestant denominations in the sixteenth century. But all the great religions have undergone reformations at some point in their history. Ultimately any reformation is about who has the authority to define the faith: the institution or the individual. When this debate reaches a boiling point, the institutions begin to break down into different sects.

This is taking place right now within the Muslim world, and has been for about a century. It began with the geopolitical fragmentation of the Muslim world due to colonialism. In the United States we think of colonialism as ancient history, but we’re talking about an era that came to an end a little more than fifty years ago and that at one point engulfed 90 percent of the world’s Muslims. It continues to have a profound effect on the Muslim psyche.

One of the results of colonialism was that Muslims were forced to regard themselves less as members of a worldwide community of faith and more as individual citizens of nationstates whose borders had often been drawn up by outside forces. The false sense of nationality this created caused an identity crisis for many Muslims. Individualism began to take over what had once been the quintessential communal faith, with both good and bad results. Toward the end of the twentieth century came the rise of globalization and a corresponding rise in literacy and education in the Muslim world. The Internet brought widespread access to new theories, ideas, and sources of knowledge. (During the Christian Reformation, the printing press had played the same role.)

Now we’re at a point where the traditional institutions of Islam have become marginalized — and I say “institutions,” plural, because Islam has never had a single, Vatican-like authority. For fourteen centuries these traditional institutions and schools of law maintained a total monopoly over the meaning and message of Islam. No one could interpret Islamic law or make any authoritative judgments on the Koran except them. Now people are reading the Koran in their own languages; women are reading and interpreting the Koran for the first time. Twenty years ago if you wanted a fatwa — a legal opinion on a particular Islamic law — you had no choice but to ask your local imam, whose word was final. Now you can go to fatwaonline.com, islamonline.net, or sistani.org and access an archive of rulings on every imaginable subject, with half a dozen different opinions on each. Because Islam does not have a single, centralized institution that says which fatwa is right and which is wrong, it’s up to you. This has created a real crisis, because the old way of doing things ensured stability. Now it’s all up for grabs, and the extremists want as much authority as they can get.

We have this idea in the U.S. that we're the primary target of the jihadists, but we're not. They call us the "far enemy." The primary target is the older Islamic institutions. If you want proof, all you have to do is read Osama bin Laden's writings, which have been translated into English in a wonderful book by Bruce Lawrence called Messages to the World.

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