A faith with many faces: Islam is monotheistic, but as a religion it never has been monolithic. Theological, ethnic, historical and political divisions have divided Muslims for centuries

David R. Sands

President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair repeatedly stress that the military campaign against global terrorism is not a "war on Islam." But military planners and policymakers acknowledge that understanding Islam's internal dynamics--the ideas that unite and the controversies that divide the world's 1.2 billion Muslims -- will be critical to solidify a coalition to contain and defeat Islamic militants.

"There are core things that every Muslim believes, but beyond those things you can find an exception to virtually every generalization you hear," says Ali Reza Abootalebi, a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire who specializes in social development in the Middle East.

No short survey can do justice to the vast diversity of modern Islam, a 1,400-year-old faith that stretches from sub-Saharan Africa to Indonesia. Muslim culture claims figures as diverse as Saudi militant Osama bin Laden and Indian-born novelist Salman Rushdie to U.S. boxing great Muhammad Ali and Libyan strongman Muammar Qaddafi. Theological disputes as old as the faith itself are compounded by ethnic divisions, historical variations and accommodations to local political realities.

Despite the identifcation of Islam with its Middle Eastern roots, less than one-quarter of all Muslims are Arabs. India, among the most vocal critics of extremist Islamic militancy, boasts the world's second-largest Muslim population, trailing only Indonesia, yet Muslims make up just 14 percent of its population. An estimated 6 million followers of Islam reside in the United States.

"Islam is by no means a monolith" says Thomas Lippman, author of Understanding Islam. "The differences in social practices, political thought, the feel of everyday life can be vast. Fly from Tripoli, Libya, to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates -- two prominent Muslim capitals -- and you get a totally different impression."

But Islamic scholars say a grasp of the basic divisions within the faith is critical to an understanding of the larger challenge facing the Muslim world and the United States in the months and years ahead. It matters, they say, that Shiite (pronounced "she-ite") Muslims are vastly outnumbered by Sunni Muslims but that Shiites are the dominant faith in Iran, Iraq, Lebanon and among some of the rebels fighting Afghanistan's ruling Taliban militia. It matters that Saudi Arabia, a longtime U.S. ally and home to Islam's two most sacred cities, Mecca and Medina, practices a strict offshoot of the Sunni faith -- Wahhabism -- that strongly influenced Osama bin Laden, suspected mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, and his followers in Afghanistan and Pakistan (see sidebar). It matters that Central Asian states such as Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, potentially critical allies in the military strikes against neighboring Afghanistan, are themselves moderate Islamic regimes confronting the same kind of radical Islamic elements that dominate the Taliban.

Complicating matters for a Westerner trying to understand Islam's various strains is the fact that "Islam has no Vatican," adds Lippman. While all Muslims read Islam's holy book, the Koran, "there's no one central authority Muslims can look to. There are theologians, but no sacraments and, strictly speaking, no clergy."

The most basic division in the Islamic world is between the Sunni majority and the Shia minority, a split as profound and enduring as the schisms among the Roman Catholics, Protestants and Eastern Orthodox faiths in Christianity. Sunni, or "traditionalist" Muslims make up the vast majority of the Islamic faithful, with estimates as high as 90 percent. Most Muslim nations feature a majority Sunni population and a significant Shiite minority. (In the United States, Sunnis make up more than 72 percent of the Muslim population, and Shiites account for 11 percent, with the remainder from other branches.)

Sunnis trace their faith to the tradition established by the first successors to the prophet Mohammed after his death in 632, in particular the line of caliphs beginning with his father-in-law, Abu Bakr, and ending with the prophet's son-in-law, Ali. Sunni adherents see their faith as a straightforward continuation of the revelations given by Allah to Mohammed. While broadly seen as the "establishment" religion in most Muslim-majority countries, Sunni Islam also contains fundamentalist elements that resist Western cultural and economic models and seek a return to a purer understanding of Islam and the Koran.

Notable among these strains is the Wahhabi movement that was born in and still dominates heavily Sunni Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden himself was raised in the Wahhabi tradition. Based on the teachings of 18th-century Islamic scholar Mohammed ibn Abd Wahhab, the movement was a reaction to what its founder considered polytheistic corruptions of Muslim theology and lax observance of Islamic law. Allied with the powerful southern Arabian Saud clan, Wahhabism eventually became the reigning theology and political philosophy of modern Saudi Arabia, whose constitution includes the Koran. Wahhabism inspired similar reform movements from India to the Sudan and, crucially, it dominates the Saudi-funded religious schools in Pakistan where many of Afghanistan's Taliban rulers were educated.

The Taliban's destruction of ancient Buddhist statues earlier this year -- a move that brought global condemnation on the regime -- was a direct historical echo of the idol-smashing early days of Wahhabism, when ancient shrines, tombs and minarets deemed incompatible with Islam were razed. "There is a great affinity between the Taliban and Wahhabism," says the University of Wisconsin's Abootalebi. "They supported the Taliban ideologically and financially"

The connection is of vital importance to many of the Central Asian front-line states critical to the U.S.-led military campaign now under way against Afghanistan. With heavily Muslim populations, leaders in states such as Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan are anxious to keep the stricter Taliban interpretation of Islam from undermining their rule. Alexei Malashenko, a scholar at the Institute of Oriental Studies in Moscow, has noted that both Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan deported Iranian and Saudi Muslim clerics in the mid-1990s. "The growing influence of Islamic views from abroad is causing concern both to the local elites and to the clergy in Central Asia," Malashenko wrote in a selection from a new collection of essays on Central Asian security, published before the Sept. 11 attacks.

Shiites constitute the second-largest branch of Islam, with an estimated 10 to 15 percent of the world's Muslims. The name comes from the Arabic shiat Ali (the party of Ali) and points to the key doctrinal difference between Sunni and Shia Islam. Shiites reject the legitimacy of the first three caliphs in the line after the prophet. They place primary authority instead in a line of spiritual leaders (imams) who followed Ali, the fourth caliph and husband of Mohammed's only surviving daughter, Fatima.

Shiites have their own interpretation of Koranic law and their own books and texts explaining Koranic tradition. Imams tend to have more power and authority in Shiite communities than their Sunni equivalents, although the focus on a single leader has produced some bitter divisions and power struggles within the Shia tradition.

The central political fact of modern Shiite Islam is its dominance in Iran and the tensions that it has created with neighboring Arab/Sunni states. Iran's Shiite leadership had bitter disputes with the Wahhabi-influenced Taliban long before the terrorist attacks, for example, culminating in the 1998 murder of 10 Iranian diplomats in the provincial Afghan city of Mazar-e-Sharif. In fact, Tehran has been internally divided by its distaste for both Washington and the regime in Kabul, loudly criticizing the U.S. military campaign against the Taliban but stopping far short of actively working to prevent it from going ahead.

But Iran's tense relations with the Taliban have as much to do with Afghanistan's booming drug trade, the press of Afghan refugees and the fear of rising influence by regional rival Pakistan as with theological disputes. In Malaysia, Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad is seen as a big political winner because of the terrorist attacks. He has made political gains at the expense of the opposition Islamic Party of Malaysia by linking his rivals to international Islamic extremist elements.

As in other religious traditions, Islamic fundamentalism covers a broad, even mutually incompatible range of movements and ideas that claim to be returning the faith to its original, uncorrupted form. Bin Laden, for instance, sees the strictly Sunni regime in Saudi Arabia as a betrayal of the true faith. His biggest complaint is that the government allows "infidel" U.S. troops to be stationed in what he considers inviolable Muslim holy lands.

In postwar times, the first eruption of Islamic fundamentalism originated in Shia Iran with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's successful drive to overthrow the U.S.-allied shah of Iran in the late 1970s. Iranian-sponsored Middle Eastern terror groups, including Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas on the West Bank, strengthened the image, both in the West and in the region, of the dangers of Shiite fundamentalism. But several scholars, including Georgetown University's John Esposito, say the Taliban-bin Laden nexus could mean the next phase of Islamic militancy will come out of the majority Sunni tradition. Afghanistan serves as the logistical base and political symbol for Sunni fundamentalism worldwide.

Still, Islam experts caution that religion can't be used to explain everything, even a faith as all-embracing as Islam. As Abootalebi notes, the regime of Wahhabi-dominated Saudi Arabia has been a source of political stability in the region, while the secular regime of Saddam Hussein's Iraq has warred continually with fellow Muslim states as well as with the West.

Many Muslims say they are frustrated that fundamentalists -- Sunni or Shia -- have become the public face of their religion in the West. But the lack of political diversity and freedom of expression in leading Islamic states only has compounded the problem.

There is one unifying force across the Muslim world: an attempt to come to terms with the cultural, material and political achievements of the secular, non-Muslim West, embodied, perhaps, in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. With powerful memories of a medieval Islamic civilization that far surpassed Europe in arts and learning, Muslims virtually since the Industrial Revolution have struggled to understand how they became, in the blunt words of Middle East scholar Milton Viorst, "something of an underclass among the civilizations of the world."

Says Viorst, "For whatever reason, we benefited from the Golden Age of Islam and Muslims by and large have failed to do so. It is that frustration that the bin Ladens tap into."

RELATED ARTICLE: Wine, women and other worldly pleasures.

A sensuous heaven, replete with all manner of delights, is a little-known but important part of the mentality that seems to inspire Muslim terrorists. Passages from the Koran and attendant commentaries, known as the Hadith, describe a paradise with rivers, trees and cool breezes, perfect for a religion originating in the desert. Only Arabic will be spoken there, and the blessed will be clothed in green and gold robes, showered with jewels and imbibe and consume copious food and drink.

"It's where the payoff comes," says Barbara Stowasser, an Islamics professor at Georgetown University. "Every deed, good or bad, will come out in a balance sheet in the end and that balance sheet will decide on whether one is admitted to the garden or thrown into the fire. It's a cool and green and delightful place. What makes it so dear is that believers know they are in the presence of God."

The conception of an Islamic heaven is part of the popular culture of the East. When Sheik Ismail Aal Ghadwan recently spoke about a martyr's reward on Palestinian TV, he described a widely perceived belief. "The martyr, if he meets Allah, is forgiven with the first drop of blood," he said. "He is saved from the torments of the grave; he sees his place in paradise; he is saved from the great horror [of the day of judgment], he is given 72 black-eyed women, he vouches for 70 of his family to be accepted to paradise; he is crowned with the crown of glory, whose precious stone is better than all of this world and what is in it."

The Koran teaches paradise automatically awaits someone who dies defending Islam. While suicide is wrong, the bombers are considered martyrs, not suicides. In a well-publicized terrorist-training-camp video aired by several news organizations, Osama bin Laden speaks of the benefits of an early death. "The love of this world is wrong," he says. "You should love the other world; you should not be afraid to die, because to die in the right cause and go to the other world, that's praiseworthy."

The "other world," according to the Koran, has the virtuous reclining on thrones, green cushions or carpets, attended by "companions" with "beautiful, big and lustrous eyes," according to Sura (Chapter) 52. These buxom companions do not sleep, get pregnant, menstruate, spit, blow their noses or defecate. Seventy of them are promised as a reward to the faithful Muslim, who also gets to keep all of his earthly wives.

Stowasser questions whether the Koran promises unlimited sex, noting theologians debate the matter, as "there is an emphasis on families being reunited." Women will get their due too, she adds, as Sura 52 mentions "youths handsome as pearls," who will serve the righteous.

Muslims have not specifically addressed what happens to women and children after they die, although the women apparently are promised a place in paradise with their husbands, according to Yvonne Haddad and Jane Smith, coauthors of the 1981 book The Islamic Understanding of Death and Resurrection. However, when the prophet Mohammed received a vision of hell, most of the inhabitants were women. The chief reason: ungratefulness to their husbands.

Taha Jaber Alalwani, president of the Graduate School of Islamic and Social Sciences in Leesburg, Va., says carnal delights are more appealing to Muslims than a Christian heaven, where Jesus specifically said believers would not marry. "The concept of the hereafter is very different," explains Alalwani. "We will stay human beings. You will never lose anything from what you have now. You will find everything you like there, and everything you want, you'll have immediately.

Christian doctrine holds believers will receive a glorified physical body in heaven. But the hereafter is used in all religions to motivate the individual to deeds of self-sacrifice, says Carol Zaleski, a Smith College professor who coauthored The Book of Heaven. "Sensual language is used when more abstract terms fall dead," she says. "The latter does not reach the imagination and inspire hope."

JULIA DUIN WRITES FOR Insight's SISTER PUBLICATION, THE WASHINGTON TIMES.

RELATED ARTICLE: What about Wahhabism?

Wahhabism, a strict form of Muslim orthodoxy backed by Saudi Arabia's wealth and its members' missionary zeal, may be overshadowing alternative strands of Islam in the United States. Said to be the strictest of four legal schools of Islam, it is more likely to claim itself as "true Islam" and expect other Muslims to conform.

The strand was revived by a religious leader named Muhammad Abd al-Wahhab, who joined forces with the military founder of the Saudi dynasty. "The royals, in alliance with the United States, used Wahhabism in the Middle East to drum up support against secular socialism," says Sulayman Nyang, a professor of Islam at Howard University, who notes that the sect was backed by the Saudi royal family during the Cold War. "What we see today is some leaders demanding a rigidity that is really not Islamic. They want to show off as being more pious.

Muslims abroad use the Wahhabi term negatively "to mean fundamentalist, fascist," says Nyang. In Western countries, its adherents can be divisive in their missionary zeal. But Azizah al-Hibri, a law professor at the University of Richmond, thinks Wahhabism is merely part of religious diversity working itself out in America, not a major split among the faithful.

"The problem is that some ideas have more funding than others," says al-Hibri, referring to Saudi funding of Wahhabi schools, literature and religious teachers. But its influence in the United States, imported with immigration, has softened over the years. "It has a strong presence, and that makes it an issue for people who are not Wahhabi," she says. "But it's not a split in Islam. It is part of the marketplace of ideas."

Wahhabism also has been characterized as an ardent political critic of Muslim regimes that secularize. It hopes to enforce a more literal interpretation of the Koran, Islam's holy book, in social custom and criminal law, says Khalid Duran, a Muslim scholar who is of the Sufi, or more mystical, persuasion.

One Sufi leader, Sheik Hisham Kabbani, who founded the Islamic Supreme Council of America as an alternative to Wahhabi influence, stirred an explosive debate on the issue in 1999. In a State Department hearing, he said that 80 percent of the nation's mosques had been taken over by imams with Wahhabilike loyalties. Estimates of the number of mosques, or prayer centers, in the United States range from 1,200 to 3,000.

LARRY WITHAM WRITES FOR Insight's SISTER PUBLICATION, THE WASHINGTON TIMES.

DAVID R. SANDS WRITES FOR Insight's SISTER PUBLICATION, THE WASHINGTON TIMES.

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