Mistic Power

The word “Islam” comes from the Arabic root slm, meaning “to be whole and at peace”. A Muslim is a person who surrenders to the order and peace that is the law of Allah as described in the holy book, the Qur'an (Koran). Islam was founded in Arabia by the Prophet Muhammad, the “Messenger of Allah,” in the seventh century c.e. In 630 c.e. (a.h. 8), Muhammad and his followers took control of Mecca, the holy city of the Ka'bah (“cube”) or “House of Allah,” in the eastern corner of which is located the Black Stone. In theory, the Muslim does not pray to the stone as an idol but to God (Allah) at the stone. The Ka'bah, however, was considered a sacred place by Arabs even before the rise of Islam and probably was worshipped as a place holy to various deities of Arabian mythology.
In the Holy Book we are told of five aspects of the Muslim faith: belief in Allah, angels, the Qur'an, the messengers of God (prophets), and the Day of Judgment. Based on these five beliefs are the “Five Pillars of Islam”: the public expression that “there is no god by Allah and Muhammad is his prophet,” the obligation of prayer five times a day while facing Mecca, almsgiving, fasting during Ramadan (the ninth month of the Islamic lunar calendar), and the hajj, or once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage to the Ka'bah at Mecca. Islam is a religion that is more concerned with social order than with religious ritual or myths.
There are, however, Islamic myths: myths of creation, myths of the afterlife, and myths of the end of the world, as in the other Abrahamic religions, Christianity and Judaism. And there are myths surrounding the Prophet Muhammad's life. But the primary concern has always been practical and rational Islamic Law in this world. Its very simplicity and directness has always made Islam a religion with great appeal. The religion has traveled easily, in Africa, for example, and, with special success, in Asia.
From the time of Muhammad's death in 632, however, Islam's history has been marked by a great schism and resulting wars. After the Prophet's death, a committee of prominent Muslim figures named Muhammad's longtime friend and father-in-law, Abu Bakr, as his successor and leader (Caliph) of the Muslims. This decision was challenged by members of Muhammad's family and their supporters. These people, the Shi'a'Ali (“Followers of Ali,” and later simply the Shi'a Muslims, as opposed to the Sunni Muslims), believed that the Prophet had named his cousin and son-in- law Ali, who was married to his daughter Fatima, as his successor. Much violence followed, and after the murder of the Caliph Uthman in 656, Ali (for the Shi'a, the “Lion of Allah”) did, in fact, become Caliph. After more wars, Ali was apparently murdered by a poison weapon. Ali's successors among the Shi'a were given the title Imam. The most important of these Imams was Ali's son Husayn, who was killed by rivals in Karbala (in Iraq) and who became, with Ali, a significant Shi'a “martyr” and focus of religious zeal. Today Shi'a Muslims and the much more numerous Sunni Muslims exist in sometimes uneasy proximity in the Muslim world.
At first, Muslims maintained good relations with the older Abrahamic Monotheists, fellow people “of the Book,” but struggles with Christians and Jews, who shared the Islamic sense of exclusivity, were inevitable. Like that of the Jews, especially, the nationalism of the Arabs was a tribal and religious nationalism for which certain compromises were impossible. Before long, in spite of internal struggles between factions such as the Ummayids and the Abbasids, led by different Caliphs, Muslim armies, now no longer exclusively Arab, advanced in all directions, forming a great empire that would take in all of the Middle East, including Egypt and Persia. Muslim traders and settlers came to the Indian subcontinent within a generation of the Prophet's death. By the end of the seventh century c.e., Muslims had conquered parts of Afghanistan. In the early eighth century they had crossed the Straits of Gibraltar into Spain and in 732 they crossed the Pyrenees into France. By the middle of the eighth century c.e. Islam dominated Turkistan, and under the Samanids in the ninth and tenth centuries Islam made inroads into the domains of the Shamanistic and Christian peoples of the steppes of Central Asia. From the tenth century, Muslims began to conquer parts of the North Indian plain.
European Christians had long seen the march of Islam as both a territorial and religious threat. Holy wars against Muslims took place almost from the earliest period of Muslim expansion—in Spain, in Sicily, and in the Byzantine struggle for survival against the Turks. The fall of Jerusalem to the Selcuk Turks in 1077 set off waves of horror among Christians. Armed crusaders set out in waves to liberate Jerusalem and the “Holy Land” as a whole from the “Infidel” during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Several crusades led to varying degrees of success, but failure usually followed. In 1229, for instance, Frederick II of Hohenstaufen won a victory and had himself crowned King of Jerusalem, but the city was retaken in 1244. Muslims ruled essentially all of the Middle East for several centuries after that. Parts of Bengal, Assam, and Orissa were taken early in the thirteenth century, and parts of Kashmir in the fourteenth. With the invasions of the Mongols and their tolerant attitude toward Muslims in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Muslims became part of the ruling class in China.
In the early sixteenth century, the Muslim Mughal dynasty was established on the ruins of the Muslim sultanate of Delhi by Babur, a descendant of Tamerlane and Ghengis Khan. The dynasty would rule northern India and eventually control most of the south as well until the last Mughal emperor was expelled by the British in 1858. Perhaps the greatest of the Mughals was Akbar, who reigned from 1556 to 1605 and was able, through tolerance and generosity, to win over his Hindu subjects. It was Akbar's grandson, Shah Janan, who built the Taj Mahal. Muslim armies would later move east and west, conquering much of the world, including parts of Christian Europe, where the Ottoman army was finally stopped at the gates of Vienna in 1683.
After the defeat of the Ottomans at Vienna, Muslim power was diminished. The advent of European colonialism occurred in the eighteenth century and continued in various degrees until the years following World War II, when a still deeper rift developed between the Muslim Middle East and the West. With the formation of the state of Israel in what Arabs saw as their land, the rift became more profound and more specifically oriented. In 1967 Jews once again took power in all of Jerusalem, and today the struggle between Semitic peoples for the city that is holy to the three Abrahamic religions and for the land that was once Canaan is still running its course.
Islam remains the dominant religion of the Middle East, Central Asia, Pakistan and Afghanistan, Indonesia and Malaysia, as well as much of Africa, and Muslims are a significant minority in India.
Islam is dominated by the person of Muhammad. Muhammad's biography is historically fairly clear, and Islam depends less on mythology than do Judaism and Christianity. Mythological tales of the Prophet did emerge from folklore, however, and two essential myths, that is, extraordinary or supernatural events, do mark his canonical life. These are the passing to him by Allah of the Qur'an, the holy book of Islam, making him literally God's messenger; and his Night Journey, the journey to Jerusalem (Isra) and the Ascension (Mi'raj) from there to the Seventh Heaven.
Of course, the concept of Allah, the god of Ibrahim (Abraham), worshipped also by Christians and Jews, is central to Islam. An important Islamic myth concerns the “House of Allah,” the old Ka'bah of Mecca, taken over by Muhammad and his followers from the old pre-Islamic Arabian religions as the focal point of Islamic worship. The Ka'bah is represented by every mosque, as synagogues everywhere represent the ancient Temple of Judaism and churches represent the place of Crucifixion for Christians. The Ka'bah is said to have been originally built by Ibrahim and left under the guardianship of his son Ismail (Ishmael), the founder of the Arabs. The Ka'bah remained for a time a holy place to Jews and Christians and people of other religions, too. But when the Prophet took control of Mecca, he destroyed all of the idols that surrounded the sanctuary and it became primarily a goal of the Islamic pilgrimage, the hajj, and the focus of the spiritual hajj that is the act of prayer.
At first, under the influence of Judaism and Christianity, and especially later, due to the teachings of Muhammad, the Arabs moved from a Polytheistic mythology to what the outsider might call a hero-based Monotheistic one. As in the case of the development of Judaism, there is an early struggle before and during Muhammad's career between a monolatry in which a High god presides as the most important god among many others, including important goddesses, and monotheism, which saw the high god as the only god.
It is possible that for some time before Muhammad the Meccans had associated the term al-Lah with the supreme divinity behind the old tribal gods of Arabia. These Meccans apparently believed that the Ka'bah had in the beginning been dedicated to this deity. In fact, Muhammad's first biographer, Muhammad ibn Ishaq, records the possibly apocryphal story of several of Muhammad's tribe, the Quarysh, traveling north to discover the ancient pre- Jewish, pre-Christian religion of Ibrahim. Ibrahim was considered a prophet and the first Muslim, because in his willingness to sacrifice his own son he demonstrated islam, total obedience to God.
Allah is identifiable as the god of Abraham and the creator god of Christians and Jews, but as he reveals himself to his messenger Muhammad— for Muslims the “Seal of the Prophets,” the interpreter with the last word, as it were—he projects different emphases than the god of Moses or Jesus. Like Jews and Christians, Muslims see this god as, above all, unique: “It has been revealed to me that your god is one god” (Qur'an 41:6). But the Qur'an (2:267, 4:171) specifically rejects the kind of theology that involves a divine intermediary between God and humans (e.g., a divine Jesus or “Son of God”) or a God of more than one aspect (e.g., the Christian doctrine of the Trinity). Allah is less personal than in his Judeo-Christian aspect, a more mysterious power that is nevertheless behind all aspects of the universe. He is knowable only through his creation, through the signs of nature, through the metaphorical stories of the prophets, and especially through the Qur'an, his great gift to humankind. And though he is al-'Azim (the “inaccessible”), he is al-Rahman (the “compassionate” and the “merciful”). For the Islamic mystics or Sufis, especially, he is al-Haqq (the “real” and the “true”) and al-Hayy (the “living”), in some sense the god within.
Goddesses played an important role in pre-Islamic Arabian religion and mythology. Together these goddesses were the banat al- Lah (the “Daughters of God”) and were much revered by the Meccans. When Muhammad forbade the worship of the banat al-Lah, many of the first Muslims revolted. The historian Abu Jafar al-Tabari, in the tenth century, wrote that Muhammad was so upset by the split in his followers over the goddesses that he gave in and created some false or “Satanic verses,” verses inspired by Satan, that allowed the banat al-Lah to be thought of as intercessors, like angels. Many Islamic scholars doubt that the incident of the Satanic verses ever occurred, but according to al-Tabari, the angel Gabriel instructed Muhammad to do away with the lines and to replace them with a condemnation of the worship of these “empty names” (Qur'an 16: 57–59, 22:52, 52:39, 53:19–26).
As for the story of creation, Muhammad essentially accepted the Genesis version of creation, with some alterations. In the hadith of Islam, the collection of traditional sayings, acts, and stories of Muhammad, Allah says, “I was a hidden treasure; I wanted to be known. Hence, I created the world so that I might be known”. In short, humans, through an experiencing of the natural “signs” of Allah's creation, the most important of which is the Qur'an, would know Allah.
The Qur'an does not present the creation in a single unit the way it is presented in Genesis. Rather, the story comes in bits and pieces in various sura (“chapters”). As in Genesis, Allah created the world himself (36:81, 43:9– 87, 65:12). What was once a solid mass he tore apart, and he made living things from water (21:30, 24:45). As for the creation process itself, it is said to have taken six days (7:54, 10:3, 25:59, 32:4). Allah created the dark and the light, the heavens and the earth, the astral bodies (7:54, 6:1, 21:33, 39:5). He said “Be” and it was (6:73). He created the beasts of burden and those that could be used for meat (6:142), animals and plants of all kinds (31:10– 11). He created Adam in his image out of dust or clay or by a small seed (semen) and said “Be” and he was (3:59, 6:2, 15:26, 16:4, 22:5, 32:7, 35:11, 40:67). He created woman (traditionally Haiwa = Eve) out of the same material (4:1, 39:6). He also created Hell for evil spirits (jinns) and bad humans (7:179). Allah ordered the angels themselves to bow down to his human creation, and all did except for Iblis (the Devil), who claimed to be better than humans because he had been created from fire rather than dust (7:11–12, 15:27, 17:61, 38:75–76). For his disobedience, Iblis was banned from Paradise (7:13–18) but had permission to tempt humans (15:36–37, 17:62–63) until Doomsday, when he and his followers— that is, unbelievers, who are also shaitans (devils, satans)—would be sent to Hell (7:27, 26:95).
Allah made a Garden—a paradise—for the man and his wife but ordered them not to eat from a particular Tree (2:35). But the Shaitan (Satan, Iblis, the father of all shaitans) convinced them that the fruit of the tree contained the power that made angels and gods (7:19–22, 20:120), and the couple ate the fruit. It is noteworthy that it was the couple, not the woman first and the then the man, who committed this sin. After eating the fruit, the man and the woman became conscious of their nakedness and sexual feelings and covered their Genitals (7:27). Allah scolded them for listening to his enemy, and their life became hard (20:115– 121). Later, as in Genesis, God sent a great flood, during which the prophet Nuh (Noah) and his family, representing believers, were saved in an ark (11).
Islam, of course, has its heroes or prophets who existed before Muhammad. Traditionally, Ibrahim (Abraham) was thought to be the father of Islam in the sense that he “knew” the true God—al-Lah, the God later revealed as such to Muhammad—before there were Jews or Christians. The Qur'an and Islamic tradition contain many myths of this Khalilu'llah or “Friend of God”. One story says that Ibrahim cut up a crow, a vulture, and a peacock and then revived them simply by calling to them (2:262). It is believed that Ibrahim threw stones at the devil at Mina, near Mecca, where to this day pilgrims on the hajj commemorate the act by throwing stones at a pillar of stone. Islamic tradition holds that Hajar (Hagar) was the first wife of Ibrahim and the mother of his first son, Ismail (Ishmael). Hajar and Ismail were sent away by the jealous second wife, Sarah, mother of Ibrahim's second son, Ishak (Isaac), also a prophet (4:163). While Hajar and Ismail were wandering in the desert, the angel Jibril (Gabriel) opened the well of Zamzam for them so that they could survive. This well is in the place now called Mecca, and pilgrims still drink from it. Pilgrims also run between two hills representing Hajar's search for water. The story says that later Ibrahim, feeling guilty about having expelled Hagar and Ismail, found his wife and child at the well and with Ismail built the Ka'bah (2:124–140) according to Allah's specifications, as revealed by Jibril.
In the Qur'an, it is Ismail who would have been Sacrificed by Ibrahim had Allah not substituted a ram. When Ibrahim, his face drenched in tears, pressed the knife against his willing son's throat, it would not penetrate the flesh. In fact, the knife spoke to the distraught father, telling him that the Lord had forbidden it from cutting Ismail (37:102–107). Ismail is the symbol of the perfect Muslim child, one fully obedient to God. Not surprisingly, Muhammad was said to be a descendant of Ismail.
Another important prophet for Muslims was Musa (Moses). It is recognized that God called Musa and that he revealed the Tawrat (Torah) to him (19:52, 20:9–23, 27:7–12, 28:29–35, 79:15–16). The Quaranic stories of Musa are essentially the same as those of Moses in the Bible.
Isa (Jesus) was the penultimate prophet of Islam. He is believed to be Al-Maih (the Messiah) and kalima-t-allah, “the Word of God,” but not the Son of God (3:40, 4:169, 4:171). Capable of miracles, Isa was especially successful at curing the sick (3:49, 5:30). In some sense, Isa was “raised up by God” (3:55), and many believe that he will come back.
Isa's birth was miraculous. Maryam (Mariam, Mary), for whom Sura 19 of the Qur'an is named, was visited by the angel Jibril (Gabriel), who lifted her dress and blew on her body, making her pregnant with the breath— the word—of God's spirit. Maryam gave birth to Isa next to a withered date palm and washed the child in a well placed there by Allah. The date palm tree suddenly flourished, and Jibril came back and advised Maryam not to make excuses for her mysterious pregnancy and birth-giving but to allow the young prophet to speak for her. Miraculously, Isa, although a newborn baby, could speak; he announced himself as a prophet, and people accepted his mother and him (3:45–46, 4:171, 19:16–27, 21:91, 23:50, 66:12).
The Islamic equivalent of Exodus, the story of the journey from lowliness to power of a people chosen of God, is the story of Muhammad. In the hadith and in folklore Muhammad became much more than a discontented merchant of Mecca, much more than a religious reformer; he became the world hero to whom God spoke directly and who could break the barriers of space and time in a journey to God's heaven. Muhammad is the great hero of Islam, the Prophet, the Messenger of Allah, the perfect man (insan al-kamil), the founder of the ummah, the Muslim community. This was a community that was to transcend barriers of race and ethnicity. Islam was to become, like Christianity before it, a universal religion. The ummah would replace the older Arabic community ideal of the muruwab that stressed utter and complete obedience to the clan chief and the validity of the blood feud. Muhammad replaced the loyalty of muruwab with the ideal of islam, total obedience to Allah. Not surprisingly, however, since both muruwab and islam stress the importance of the group over the individual, elements of the old muruwab way sometimes surface in Islam even today.