By Reza Aslan
A attention-grabbing, obtainable creation to Islam from the writer of the number one New York instances bestseller Zealot
Though it's the fastest-growing faith on this planet, Islam is still shrouded in lack of know-how and worry for a lot of the West. In No god yet God, Reza Aslan, an the world over acclaimed student of religions, explains this religion in all its good looks and complexity. starting with a bright account of the social and spiritual milieu during which the Prophet Muhammad solid his message, Aslan paints a portrait of the 1st Muslim neighborhood as a thorough scan in spiritual pluralism and social egalitarianism. He demonstrates how, after the Prophet’s loss of life, his successors tried to interpret his message for destiny generations–an overwhelming job that fractured the Muslim neighborhood into competing sects. ultimately, Aslan examines how, within the shadow of eu colonialism, Muslims built conflicting techniques to reconcile conventional Islamic values with the realities of the trendy international, hence launching what Aslan phrases the Islamic Reformation. well timed and persuasive, No god yet God is an elegantly written account of an impressive but misunderstood religion.
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Additional info for No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam
3:84) after all, Muslims think that the Quran is the ultimate revelation during this series of scriptures, simply as they think Muhammad to be “the Seal of the Prophets. ” however the Quran by no means claims to annul the former scriptures, merely to accomplish them. And whereas the suggestion of 1 scripture giving authenticity to others is, to claim the least, a awesome occasion within the historical past of religions, the idea that of the Umm al-Kitab may possibly point out an excellent extra profound precept. because the Quran indicates again and again, and because the structure of Medina explicitly affirms, Muhammad could have understood the concept that of the Umm al-Kitab to intend not just that the Jews, Christians, and Muslims shared a unmarried divine scripture but additionally that they constituted a unmarried divine Ummah. so far as Muhammad was once involved, the Jews and the Christians have been “People of the booklet” (ahl al-Kitab), non secular cousins who, in place of the pagans and polytheists of Arabia, worshipped a similar God, learn an identical scriptures, and shared a similar ethical values as his Muslim group. even supposing every one religion comprised its personal targeted spiritual group (its personal person Ummah), jointly they shaped one united Ummah, a rare concept that Mohammed Bamyeh calls “monotheistic pluralism. ” hence, the Quran gives you that “all those that believe—the Jews, the Sabians, the Christians—anyone who believes in God and the final Days, and who does stable deeds, can have not anything to worry or remorse” (5:69; emphasis added). It used to be this conviction of the life of a unified, monotheistic Ummah that led Muhammad to attach his group to the Jews, now not that he felt the necessity to emulate the Jewish clans, nor that he desired to facilitate their reputation of him as a prophet. Muhammad aligned his group with the Jews in Medina simply because he thought of them, in addition to the Christians, to be a part of his Ummah. therefore, while he got here to Medina, he made Jerusalem—the web site of the Temple (long considering that destroyed) and the path within which the Diaspora Jews grew to become in the course of worship—the course of prayer, or qiblah, for all Muslims. He imposed a compulsory speedy upon his group, which was once to occur each year at the 10th day (Ashura) of the 1st month of the Jewish calendar, the day most likely referred to as Yom Kippur. He purposely set the day of Muslim congregation at midday on Friday in order that it should coincide with, yet now not disrupt, Jewish arrangements for the Sabbath. He followed a number of the Jewish nutritional legislation and purity necessities, and inspired his fans to marry Jews, as he himself did (5:5–7). And whereas it's precise that when many years, Muhammad either replaced the qiblah from Jerusalem to Mecca, and set the yearly quick at Ramadan (the month within which the Quran used to be first published) rather than Yom Kippur, those judgements shouldn't be interpreted as “a holiday with the Jews,” yet because the maturing of Islam into its personal self sufficient faith. regardless of the alterations, Muhammad persisted to motivate his fans to quick on Yom Kippur, and he by no means ceased to venerate Jerusalem as a holy urban; certainly, after Mecca and Medina, Jerusalem is the main sacred urban within the complete of the Muslim international.