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Reza AslanNo God but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2005A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 7-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary
The Shi’atu Ali (the “party of Ali”) continued to offer a minority alternative to the increasingly dynastic Umayyads under the leadership of Ali’s son Hasan and later his younger brother Husayn, after Hasan’s death (by poison, according to rumor). After an initial peace, war broke out and the far superior Umayyad force killed Husayn at the Battle of Karbala. Within a few years, supporters who had not been in battle came together at Karbala in public acts of penance for their failure to save Husayn. Their shared rituals of mourning and remembrance continue today in Shi’ism, a distinct new branch of Islam that emphasized martyrdom and self-sacrifice for the sake of justice.
Shi’a Muslims believe that this public, communal shedding of tears for Husayn brings salvation. Shi’a Muslims honor Muhammad, Ali, Hasan, Husayn, and their legitimate successors as Imams through whose intercession they can face the last judgment. Sunni Islam has imams who lead prayer services at the mosque; Shi’a Imams are a fixed series of leaders who have religious authority to preserve and creatively apply God’s revelation. Imams translate the prophetic message through a special divine gift of insight. They can discern and teach secret allegorical meanings of the Quran. This openness to new insights into revelation is also found in Shi’a jurisprudence, which values ijtihad (arguments based solely on human reason). The legal scholars who specialize in ijtihad are called mujtahid, and the most exalted of these have been honored as ayatollahs whose decisions have absolute authority over their disciples.
Shi’a Muslims are divided among themselves over who inherited the mantle of Imam after the death of Husayn’s son Ali. “Ismailis” or “Seveners” believe a man named Ismail was the legitimate seventh Imam, and his apparent death before the sixth Imam died conceals a mystery according to which he has gone into hiding in a spiritual realm and will return as the Madhi to deliver the faithful on the Day of Judgment. “Twelvers” have a similar belief about their 12th Imam. Until the hidden Imam returns as the messianic Madhi, many Shi’a believe they have to live quiet lives and perhaps even keep their faith hidden from the majority.
Some Shi’a did, however, form states including Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic Republic following the Iranian Revolution of 1979. This revolution came in response to the CIA-sponsored defeat of Iran’s Nationalist Revolution in 1953 and popular frustration at the autocratic rule of the corrupt shah (or king) that the US had restored. Khomeini realized that only the language and symbols of shared religion had the power to unite Iranians. Khomeini reinforced his authority and ability to unite people by casting himself as a new Imam who represented the hidden Imam and has absolute authority. His innovations—creating an earthly prelude to the future Madhi’s state and concentrating all infallible authority in a single cleric rather than in the Shi’a Ulama as a whole—marked a sharp break with previous practice. Shi’a ayatollahs outside Iran rejected many of Khomeini’s claims.
Chapter 8 Summary
Aslan begins the chapter with the legend of Layla and Majnun, two young people who lived in constant suffering, separated by their families and burning with passionate love for one another. This love is at the heart of Sufi Islam. Sufis are named for their simple wool garments (suf) and are also called darvishes (beggars) or faqirs (poor). Perhaps drawing on a diversity of other religious traditions, these Muslims sought to experience a mystical union with God through a stripping away of the ego achieved through a life of wandering asceticism (self-denial and self-discipline). Gradually, Sufis coalesced into orders following the teachings of spiritual masters called shaykhs or pirs.
While not physically leaving the wider Ummah or forsaking the familial ties of marriage, Sufis saw the strictures of Shariah and the concerns of the world as a mere starting place for beginning true interior religion. In this way, they spiritually rebelled against institutional Islam and the dynastic state. Even the Quran is lesser for them than direct mystical knowledge of God. As Aslan paraphrases one Sufi master, “why spend time reading a love letter (by which he means the Quran) in the presence of the Beloved who wrote it?” (201). Sufism’s greater freedom toward scripture, doctrine, and rules allowed it to absorb ideas from other cultures and so have greater missionary success. However, other Muslims (who value exterior orthopraxy) have sometimes regarded Sufism with suspicion, finding it to be contrary to Islam’s true teaching.
In the most famous and extreme instance of this suspicion, the caliph executed the Sufi master Husayn ibn Mansur al-Hallaj after he shouted in a market, “I am the Truth” (“Truth” being a Name of God). He had also earlier alienated the authorities by focusing on the teachings of Jesus as “hidden Sufism” and by insisting one could perform the hajj interiorly without going to Mecca. Later Sufis critiqued al-Hallaj not for what he said but rather for speaking publicly in a way that the average Muslim would misunderstand. His statement would have been fine in private because other Sufi masters understood the core intuition behind his exclamation—the experience of total union with God and the belief that ultimately God is the sole reality that contains all else. Only by slow progress through a series of “abodes and stations” can one experience and understand the truth of the Sufi Way as illustrated in Farid al-Din’s parable, A Conference of the Birds. Those who reach the final stage become the shaykhs or pirs who guide disciples and gain miraculous powers. Even their tombs are said to heal. As they progress, most Sufis practice the ritual of dhikr (remembrance of God) in which they repeat a religious phrase or engage in repetitive movement like the dance of the “Whirling Dervishes.”
As in the parable of Layla and Majnun, unfulfilled love is the center of the Sufi Way because it is the essence of God. The Sufi’s complete surrender of his own ego happens as a response to the divine Beloved. Sufi poetry from masters including Rabia (a woman and former slave) and Rumi uses a sexual language of love and union—to the scandal of more conservative Muslims. In the end, the mystic drowns in God’s love. Aslan briefly suggests Sufism has parallels to early Christian Gnosticism (a movement that existed mainly in the first two centuries after Jesus’s death and whose followers believed salvation came through secret knowledge of God) as well as some strands of Buddhism.
Chapters 7-8 Analysis
Chapters 7 and 8 focus on illustrating The Diversity of Islamic Thought and Practice. They respectively describe the Shi’a branch of Islam in which Aslan was raised and the Sufi spirituality that he discovered later. The existence of these strands from the early days of Islam undermines the claims made by fundamentalists and Traditionalists that they are the exclusive guardians of the sole correct interpretation of Islam. The fact that each has been persecuted by other Muslims in the past implicitly also puts Muslims—like Aslan—who offer unpopular or anti-fundamentalist positions in good historical company.
While Aslan values diversity in itself, specific aspects of Shi’a and Sufism prepare the way for his later arguments for an Islamic Reformation and The Compatibility of Islam and Liberal Democratic Ideals. For Shi’a Islam, Aslan discusses at great length the greater emphasis on individual reason (ijtihad) over authority. Even though the authority of someone like Ayatollah Khomeini as Supreme Leader in Iran may make Shi’a seem even more an oppressive authoritative regime than the Sunni Ulama, Aslan carefully explains how the respect given ayatollahs has its roots in this practice of ijtihad. He emphasizes the importance of community both for Ali and in the penitential rituals that led to Shi’a Islam. The mourning and self-flagellation might look like individualistic or world-denying, but they form a public commitment to work with others performing the same rituals to fight injustice no matter what it costs oneself.
Sufism, as Aslan describes it, teaches that the strictures of Shariah are an outer shell that don’t matter to the true spiritual life and identity of the Sufi Muslim. It is the inner life that matters, not the exterior rules. The implication is that rules modern fundamentalist governments impose are not essential to Islam and the proof is the centuries-old Sufi spirituality. Sufism thus shows an alternative.
Aslan implicitly identifies Sufism with a kind of religious relativism that makes conflict among religions pointless. He recounts a Sufi parable in which a Persian, Turk, Arab, and Greek all ask for a sweet food in their own language—and, after argument, discover they’ve all asked for the same thing (grapes). This signifies a common human search for an ineffable spiritual truth, presumably across religions. Aslan asserts that Sufism seems to blend religious traditions
as though it were an empty caldron into which have been poured the principles of Christian monasticism and Hindu asceticism, along with a sprinkling of Buddhist and Tantric thought, a touch of Islam Gnosticism and Neoplatonism, and finally, a few elements of Shi’ism, Manichaeism, and Central Asian shamanism thrown in for good measure (199).
His phrase “as though” is important; Aslan does not quite assert that Sufism derived its ideas from these traditions and never attempts to trace concrete historical influences or even elucidate specific similarities. Rather the key point for him is that Sufi beliefs and practices suggest that wildly different religions have at their core a common spiritual experience; differences between religions are therefore only skin deep. Specific doctrines and rules that divide people do not actually matter much; they can be modified by new needs without harming one’s core faith. Sufis are the original religious pluralists, the characteristic Aslan identifies in Chapter 10 as a prerequisite for democracy.
