by Reza Aslan, 2005, published by Random House, ISBN 0-8129-7189-2.

The first thing to do when reading a book is to consider the nature of the author and the time and place that the book was written. This is aided considerably when the author obliges you with a website. From his, we see that Mr Aslan is a rising star in the world of Theological Studies and at the same time a serious writer of fiction (a Truman Capote Fellow in Fiction at the Iowa Writers?Workshop is no slouch). We also see that Mr Aslan is a native of Iran, which should give him some clout when it comes to Islam and the Arabic language.

The book begins in the Arabian desert in the sixth century CE at the Ka`ba. I had not known that the Ka`ba predated Islam. Apparently, it was a sort of super-shrine where three hundred and sixty idols representing every god recognized in the Arabian Peninusla were housed. I was also unaware that a sort of primitive Arab monotheistic movement predated the Prophet called Hanifism. One of practitioners of this sect, Zayd ibn Amr, had an influence on Muhammad in his youth. Aslan quotes a little-known tradition recorded by Yunus ibn Bukayr that notes a meeting between Muhammad and Amr where Amr denounces the worship of idols and the sacrificing of animals to them:

"I never eat of these sacrifices and I want nothing to do with them," he cried. "I am not one to eat anything slaughtered for a divinity other than God."

So struck was Muhammad by Zayd's rebuke that many years later, when recounting the story, he claimed never again to have "stroked an idol of theirs nor ... sacrifcie[d] to them until God honored me with his Apostleship."

Another incident in Muhammad's youth foretold his greatness. A Christian monk, Bahira, stopped a caravan because a book of prophecy used by his order said that a new prophet was coming. He invited everyone from the caravan to come an eat. They came, but he detected no prophet. He asked if everyone was present, and they said no, they had left someone to watch the baggage. When Muhammad was brought in, the monk said that this was, "the Messenger of the Lord of the Worlds."

Of course, there is no way to verify these tales and prophets always seem to have these miraculous portents when they are young (think of Jesus or Moses), but Aslan shows that the truth is less important than what the tales tell us about the relationship between these prophets and their people:

Again, the hisoricity of these topoi is irrelevant. It is not important whether the stories describing the childhood of Muhammad, Jesus or David are true. What is important is what these stories say about our prophets, our messiahs, our kings: that theirs is a holy and eternal vocation, established by God from the moment of creation.

Aslan gives us a nice feeling for the moral climate of the Arab society of the time. Remember, these people had no formal law and no law giver, such as Moses, to fall back on. Each tribe had its leader, whose main job it was to see to the survival of the tribe. Individual morals were mostly subordinated to the well-being of the tribe. If a person injured another in the tribe, they paid in the style of "an eye for an eye". This limited the violence and led to a certain amount of fairness. If a person injured someone from another tribe, it was the job of the leader to negotiate with the other tribe to bring about the most favorable outcome. In times of simple tribal life, this sort of informal justice worked quite well.

Times were changing, however. Mecca had grown up into a major city. As the location of the Ka`ba, it was a required stop on the caravan route and the merchants of Mecca, the Quraysh, made great fortunes from this trade. This great concentration of wealth upset the system of morals that had worked so well in the past. If a man's life was worth, say, a hundred camels, what to do when a merchant could easily afford that price? This disruption in the society caused Mecca to be awash in social injustice. The rich were unchecked and the poor were at their mercy.

Muhammad grew up under these conditions and saw the abuses every day. He was lucky, however, to be under the care of his uncle, Abu Talib, the Shaykh of the Banu Hashim. The Banu Hashim was a small, yet prestigious clan within the Quraysh. He gave Muhammad a job working for his caravans and Muhammad apparently excelled. Still, this didn't mean that Muhammad was sitting on the top of the world.

Muhammad was also, it seems, a striking man. He is described as broad-chested, with a full beard and a hooked nose that gave him a stately appearance. Numerous accounts speak of his wide black eyes and the long thick hair he kept tied behind his ears in plaits. And yet, as honest or skilled as he may have been, by the turn of the seventh century, Muhammad was a twenty-five-year-old man, still unmarried, with no capital and no business of his own, who relied entirely on his uncle's generosity for his employment and his housing. In fact, his prospects were so depressingly low that when he asked for the hand of his uncle's daughter, Umm Hani, she rejected him outright for a more prosperous suitor.

Muhammad's life changed for the better, however, when he managed to marry Khadija, a wealthy and respected merchant. Khadija is something of an enigma. How was she able to achieve this position in a society that treated women and property and didn't allow them to inherit from their husbands? Apparently, we'll never know. She brought him two benefits. First, they were successful together and this caused Muhammad to be accepted into the highest circles of Meccan society. Secondly, she was by all accounts a loving and steadfast wife who nurtured Muhammad through the tough times to come.

Muhammad liked to take time to himself and meditate in a quiet cave. On one of his retreats, a voice came to him and commanded, "Recite!" He had no idea what to say, but words suddenly came to him and his revelation began. Being an instrument of God is no easy task, however and the pressure began to mount. As he attracted followers to his prophecy, some of his revelations were in conflict with the Quraysh. They began to mock him and question his sanity. Eventually, he questioned his sanity as well. At one point, he was driven right to the brink of suicide, only to be saved by the loving attentions of Khadija.

Before Aslan's book, I wasn't aware of the nature of Muhammad's revelations. I didn't know that they came over a period of many years and that most weren't written down right away and that they were only collected into a book some years after his death. It's sad to think that the tolerance for this sort of prophet has vanished today. No one claiming to be any sort of prophet of God would be tolerated in any way today.

I also wasn't aware of the incredible flexibility of Arabic. Well, "flexibility" probably isn't the right word. Aslan uses the word "variability", but that seems inadequate as well. I think I would go with "imprecision". Apparently, Arabic is so imprecise as to make it possible to translate the same paragraph into two totally opposite meanings. Consider the two translations given by Aslan (first by Ahmed Ali of Princeton, secondly by Majid Fakhry of New York University) of the same verse (4:34):

Men are the support of women as God gives some more means than others, and because they spend of their wealth (to provide for them)... As for women you fell are averse, talk to them suasively; then leave the alone in bed (without molesting them) and go to bed with them (when they are willing).

Men are in charge of women, because Allah has made some of them excel of others, and because they spend some of their wealth.... And for those [women] that you fear might rebel, admonish them and abandon them in their beds and beat them.

So, it's easy to see how Muslims can disagree about so many teachings. If the language is that "variable", communication itself seems to be in danger. This seems to me to be a major problem. It's not limited to Arabic, of course. There are lots of arguments over the exact translation of the Bible, for example. But I've never seen any of those arguments rage over a disagreement this wide in the actual translation of the source text. By comparison, most Biblical translation squabbles seem to be of the how many angels can dance on the head of a pin variety. All of this is additionally exacerbated by the fact that the Koran wasn't actually written down in book form until much later (the same is true of the Bible, of course). As the writing was done by fallible humans, and not the Prophet, there is good reason to believe that its message was more suited to the social nuances of the time than to the exact intent of the Prophet.

Muhammad's initial message was one of social justice. He preached (and practiced) that all men should be considered equal and that women were the equals of men (equal, but also different). Only over time, as he became more comfortable in his role as prophet and as he gathered more followers, did his message turn overtly religious. As it conflicted more and more with the Quraysh, Muhammad's position became more and more tenuous, until he was force out of Mecca to the small village of Yathrib (which would eventually become the city of Medina).

The book covers this phase of Islam in detail and there is no need to repeat it here. Muhammad won converts and they won battles and Muhammad eventually returned victorious to Mecca. In his lifetime, Muhammad lived to see Islam expand into the beginnings of empire. The flesh is mortal, however, and even the Messenger of God must die.

Muhammad never arranged for a successor. At first this seems absurd. But I think you have to see it from his point of view. He saw himself as a prophet, yes, but not necessarily the last prophet. I think it's possible that he saw himself as dispensable. Whatever service he rendered could be provided by new prophets, as necessary by the situation. God would provide. At least, that's my take on it; we'll never know. Muhammad died and the nascent community of Islam was thrown into turmoil.

Alsan spends a good deal of time in this period because it's incredibly important to what happened later. Abu Bakr, Muhammad's dearest friend, ascended to the post of Caliph. Many in the community wanted Ali, Muhammad's cousin, son-in-law and beloved companion to take the post. In a way, the deal was fixed. Only a small number of people were in on the decision making and there certainly was no hint of democracy in choosing Abu Bakr. The point — of which would have been a better leader — is moot now.

The early years of Islam after the prophet were full of intrigue and back-stabbing. The most important point is that many never lost faith in Ali as the true standard bearer for Islam and when he was martyred Islam was split. I'm not going to go into the details, they are too intricate to cover in a place like this, but Aslan does a good job of explaining this split into the Sunni and Shi'ite sects of Islam. He goes a step further and explains the mystical sect of Islam — the Sufis — in good detail as well.

After giving us this detailed account of the origins of Islam and its sects, Aslan rightly skips over most of the glory days, because they aren't important to an understanding of where Islam is today. Instead, he skips forward to the colonial period. It was a nasty interval. In both India and Egypt, British Imperialism made a mockery of western liberalism. While the French and others would later get in on the action, it was the British who did the most damage.

Oppression naturally leads to unrest and revolt and leaders naturally bubble to the top. Aslan shows the events that led a series of Muslim thinkers from repression and revolt in India to repression in Egypt to an idea of a pan-Arab identity to the formation of the Muslim Brotherhood. This same Muslim Brotherhood gave us Sayyid Qutb, who formed the core intellectual roots of Islamic Totalitarianism from his jail cell in the 1960's (much more about Qtub and the evolution of his ideas here). Qutb preached that Muslims must live under Sharia law if they were to be true Muslims. The only legitimate law was God's law and no secular government could be legitimate. After he was hanged for treason, Qutb's followers and disciples relocated to a more favorable climate: Saudi Arabia, where they fit in perfectly with the growing sect of Wahhabism. There they would teach such persons as Osama bin Laden the joys of Sharia and Jihad.

But wait, there is a little more to the story. Aslan moves back a step to explain how Wahhabism and the House of Saud first become connected around the beginning of the eighteenth century. A small clan led by Muhammad ibn Saud sheltered a fanatic fundamentalist named Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab. The two men struck a deal: they would join forces, one taking absolute control of political matters and the other taking control of religious matters. Their deal clicked and by 1802 they had taken Mecca and slaughtered two thousand Shi`ite worshipers at the Karbala. In 1818, they were in turn put down by a larger and better-equipped Egyptian army. But they didn't go away, they melted into the desert.

In 1915, Great Britain was seeking to control the Persian Gulf and what better partner to exploit than the Saudis? With British guns and money, the Saudis were able to retake Mecca and Medina and control the entire Arab Peninsula (slaughtering another 40,000 people, just to make it official). Then, they found that the Wahhabis were impossible to get rid of. As oil attracted more western influences into their land, the Wahhabis had more and more luck preaching fundamentalism and revolt against western influences.

So, there you have it. The Middle East is a big mess mostly because of the British (although, as mentioned before, other nations contributed their little bits of hell as well). As unlikely as it seems, the United States had precious little to do with it. Yes, the US supported Israel after 1968, but, as you've seen, all the important stuff happened long before then.

Aslan believes that all of the modern conflict around the Middle East — even events such as 9/11 — are really about a struggle within Islam between moderate and fundamentalist forces. I think he's right (for what little my opinion is worth). Some events don't make sense unless you think of them in those terms. Take, for example, the Cartoon Jihad now swirling around the world. If you look at it through the prism of Muslim fundamentalists versus the United States and Europe, the events don't make sense. There is simply no point in Muslims making fools of themselves on the international stage over such a silly thing as some cartoons that went unnoticed when they appeared. On the other hand, if you think of it through the prism of a conflict within Islam, it suddenly makes sense. It doesn't matter how the west reacts to the flap, it matters that the fundamentalists can whip citizens into a fury and use the excuse of the cartoons to manufacture revolt and riots. These serve to bring converts over from the moderate side and to make any moderate who might think of speaking out think twice. It's in the best interests of the fundamentalists to make it seem that all of Islam is under attack from the secular west. This means that any event, no matter how trivial, has to be trumped up into an outrage.

Alsan's book couldn't be more clear or well-written. The history of Islam is actually rich and interesting (no matter how poorly I've conveyed it here) and well worth the read. With this book in your hip pocket, you can actually make sense out of many current events.

One last thing before I'm done. As an atheist and lifelong cynic, I don't usually think of "holy men" in very nice terms. I usually consider them to be regular people who have found a way to exploit religion to gain power (think Pat Robertson here). But Aslan changed my mind about Muhammad. While I still don't believe in religon or any of that, I now think that Muhammad acted in good faith — whatever the truth, he certainly believed he was the Prophet of God. Why my change of heart? Several things about his life and the decency he showed others and the basic goodness of his message were part of it, but the main thing was the fact that he didn't pick a successor. He knew his age was catching up with him, but he didn't attempt to start a dynasty. It wasn't about his earthly power. It wasn't about him at all. He had played his part as the Messinger of God and that's all he thought he was supposed to do. That was enough for him.

It's nice to think that religon isn't always, everywhere about power and money and it's pleasant to find this counter-example in the roots of Islam.