Religion of Peace?: Islam, without the comforting cliches

Western societies -- when faced with immigrants who adhere to traditional faiths and customs, and who maintain a suspicion-laden distance between themselves and the surrounding civil order -- tend to respond with overtures of friendship. The message relayed to the new communities that have sought protection in the West is one of tolerance and understanding. By showing that we are no threat to them, we hope to ensure that they will be no threat to us. This strategy has worked with Hindus and Jews and the many sects of migrating Christians. But will it work with Muslims? When from the pulpits of the mosques that have been built in our major cities there sounds the call to jihad against the infidel, along with exultant cries of triumph over the recent terrorist atrocities, we might reasonably wonder whether our attempts to live side by side with Islam are doomed to failure.

Its official advocates insist that Islam is a religion of peace -- after all, that is the meaning of the word (or, at least, one of its meanings). But the peculiar thing about Islam is that its official advocates have no authority to speak for it. Although each sect has its mosques, there is no such institution as "The Mosque," to set beside the various Christian churches. Nor is there any human institution whose role is to confer "holy orders" on its members. Muslims who have religious authority -- the 'ulama ("those with knowledge") -- possess it directly from God. And those who take on the function of the imam ("the one who stands in front"), so leading the congregation in prayer, are often self-appointed to this role. Islam lacks the chain of human accountability that stems from the corporate personality of an organized church. Thus the only way to settle the question whether Islam is or is not a religion of peace is to study the actions of individual Muslims, and the text from which their religion derives.

The Koran is considered the final authority on all matters it touches upon -- and that means just about all matters that impinge on the lives of ordinary mortals. Its style is exhortatory, and its mood imperative. It resounds with threats and imprecations and, for all its many passages of lyrical beauty, it is the biggest joke-free zone in literature. It occupies the space reserved in the human psyche for obedience, and leaves no room for any merely human jurisdiction. The Koranic conception of law as holy law, pointing the unique way to salvation and applying to every area of human life, therefore involves a confiscation of the political. Those matters which, in Western societies, are resolved by negotiation, compromise, and the laborious work of offices and committees are the object of immovable and eternal decrees. The rules are either laid down explicitly in the holy book or discerned there by some religious figurehead -- whose authority, however, can always be questioned by some rival imam or jurist, since the shari'a (holy law) recognizes no office or institution as endowed with any independent lawmaking power. The shari'a, moreover, is addressed to the faithful, wherever and with whomsoever they find themselves; it does not merely bind Muslims but isolates them from the secular society by which they are surrounded. In any crisis secular law will count for nothing, since the law of God eclipses it.

The contrast with Christianity is instructive. St. Paul, who turned the ascetic and self-denying religion of Christ into an organized form of worship, was a Roman citizen, versed in the law, who shaped the early Church through the legal idea of the universitas or corporation. The Pauline Church was designed not as a sovereign body, but as a universal citizen, entitled to the protection of the secular and imperial powers but with no claim to displace those powers as the source of legal order. This corresponds to Christ's own vision in the parable of the tribute money: "Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's." The Church has therefore tended to recognize the business of governing human society as a human business, and the Christian as both a servant of God and a citizen of the secular order. It is a distinctive Christian achievement to propose secular government as a religious duty, and religious toleration as an avenue to God. The Enlightenment conception of the citizen, as joined in a free social contract with his neighbors under a tolerant and secular rule of law, derives directly from the Christian legacy.

This contrasts radically with the vision set before us in the Koran, according to which sovereignty rests with God and his Prophet, and legal order is founded in divine command. True law is holy law, whose precepts derive from the four sources of Islamic legal thought: the Koran, the Sunna (customs authorized by the Prophet), qiyas ("analogy"), and ijma' ("consensus"). These are the sources to which the classical jurists referred when giving judgment, and they none of them acknowledge any law-making institution of merely human provenance. They are the means for discerning God's will, and so attaining the posture of submission (the literal meaning of islam).