Why I am Not a Muslim

Few books about religion deserve the attribution "courageous." This book, I am
pleased to report, does. It is courageous because it is (as the term originally denoted)
full of heart (coeur) and courageous because it is an act of intellectual honesty
and bravery, an act of faith rather than of faithlessness. It will undoubtedly be
a controversial book because it deals personally and forthrightly with a subject
widely misunderstood by fheists and nontheists of various stripes. That subject is
the Islamic faith.
New religions depend for their sustenance on the energy of converts. Thus
Christianity in the first century of the common era and Islam in the sixth depended
on the enthusiasm of the newly persuaded. Each had its prophet, each its network
of zealous missionary-evangelists and later organization-minded hierarchs and
caliphs to drive and sustain the structures that faith invented. Christianity and

Islam (like rabbinic Judaism before them) arose as monotheistic reform movements
with strong legalistic and dogmatic tendencies. Both idealized, if only the
former idolized, the work, teaching, and revelations of their prophets in the form
of sacred scripture. Both proclaimed the true God, the importance of charity toward
the dispossessed, the quality of mercy. Yet both were inclined, as circumstances
required and need dictated, to propagate their ideals and to enlarge the
kingdom of God by force when persuasion failed. The dar-al-Islam and the
kingdom of Christ, once called Christendom, were in many respects evolutionary
twins for the better part of twelve centuries. The unlikely symbol of this relationship
is the fraternal feud over proprietorship of the religious womb of the book religions—
the wars known as the Crusades. It is Jacob's legacy that his progeny
would learn to hate each other and fight religious wars in the name of his God.
For all their likeness, the historical course of Christianity has differed remarkably
from that of Islam since the late Middle Ages. The cliche that Islam
somehow got intellectually stalled in the European feudal era overlooks too much
that is undeniably rich, new, and momentous about "the Arab mind," as a standard
title describes the culture of Islam. Most Westerners who are not simply islamaphobes
are willing to acknowledge where our system of numerical notation comes
from; where algebra got started; how Aristotle was saved from puritan schoolmen
in the Middle Ages; indeed, where scientific thinking in a number of disciplines
originated. The culture of Islam, ranging in its missionary extent from Baghdad
to Malaysia, is humanistically rich and potent. And yet. The Middle Eastern
culture which spurred humanistic learning and scientific thinking remains a religious
culture in a way that befuddles liberal Christians and secularists, and in
a way that has not existed in the West since the decline and fall of Christendom
in the Reformation. At least a part of our befuddlement stems from the fact
that the Reformation is often seen by historians, not as a fall or a falling apart
but as a rejuvenation of Christian culture. The persistence of misperceptions about
what "happened" with the advent of humanistic thinking in the late Middle Ages
stems from the view that the Christian reform was a "back to basics" movement—
an attempt to restore biblical teaching and practice to the church rather than
(as it was at its roots) a radical challenge to systems of religious authority, a
challenge that would eventually erode even the biblical pillars of authority upon
which the Reformation itself was based. Islam underwent no such change and
entertained no such challenge to Koranic teaching; its pillars remained strong
while those of Christianity, unknown even to those who advocated the reform
of the church "in head and members," were crumbling.
To misunderstand the disjoining of Islam and Christianity as religious twins
is, I would argue, the key to Western misunderstanding of the Islamic faith. The
Christian reformation in the West (there was nothing remotely like it in the Eastern
church, which, not coincidentally, provides a much closer analogy to Islamic
conservatism) proceeded on the false assumption that knowlege of Scripture was
ultimately compatible with human knowledge—discovery of the original meanings
of texts, linguistic and philological study, historical investigation, and so on. Without
tracing the way in which this assumption developed, the fragmented churches
that exited the process of cultural, geographical, and denominational warfare
between the sixteenth and the twentieth centuries proved the assumption false.
Europe would never again be Christendom, and the New World would emerge
as an archetype of the bifurcations, rivalries, and half-way compromises that the
failure of religious authority had made necessary in the Old. By the end of the
nineteenth century, liberal Christian scholarship, with its inherent historical
skepticism, which did not spare even the divinity of the founder nor the sacredness
of sacred scripture, was verdict enough on the marriage between humanistic learning
and divine knowledge, as it was promoted energetically by the early Christian
reformers. From the end of the eighteenth century to the present day, Christianity
was a recipient religion, which found itself either at war with humanistic learning
(as among the evangelicals from Paley's day onward) or, to use Berger's term,
an accommodationist faith, whose role in the world seemed to be to accept the
truths that culture provided and to express them, whenever possible, in a Christian
idiom. Islam scarcely represented a "fundamentalist" reaction to contemporary
culture, since the humanistic renaissance it sponsored was not implicitly a rejection
of the structures of religious authority. Nor was the "accommodationist" option
available to Muslims, since what constituted "secular" truth could not be equated
with the prophetic truths of sacred scripture. Islam could only look at what Niebuhr
once called the "Christ and Culture" debate with astonishment and as a debate
that Christianity sooner or later must lose. To Western ears, Islamic talk of
"decadence" seems offensive. In fact, it is an expression of the Islamic view that
Christianity has lost the moral contest between secular culture and religious truth,
Islam as a religious culture has not confused humanistic learning with the
revealed word; accordingly, it has been spared—or in any event has avoided—
the historical acids that have eroded biblical faith and Christian "culture" since
the sixteenth century. Its methods of exegesis, legal reasoning, and political
argumentation look peculiar and retrograde to the Westerner precisely because
the Westerner—whether a liberal Anglican or an evangelical Christian—stands
on the other shore of a sea that Islam has not chosen to cross. It is small consolation
to those who yearn for a restoration of Christian values or biblical religion that
Christianity did not mean to cross the sea of faith either, or at least had expected,
in embarking on its intellectual journey during the Renaissance, to find God on
the other side.
And so to the present work. This book is all about a journey: a journey
from the certainties of childhood in a Muslim family (but they could be any
childhood certainties) through a process of doubt and, finally, negation, as a result
of exposure to what some might dismiss as a "Western" way of thinking about
revealed religion. There must be many Muslims who have undertaken such a
journey—who have, so to speak, crossed the sea of faith and who have in their
personal lives traveled through the intellectual, equivalent of a protestant
reformation, which their religious culture, as a whole, did not travel through.
A l l such odysseys must be very lonely ones. (For that matter, Odysseus himself
was lonely.) The religious pilgrim—and I consider the author of this work to
be one—is bound to feel isolated. He does not have the benefit of a convert
"to" a new religion, that is to say, a made-to-order group to support and sustain
him in hours of crisis and doubt, to assuage his fears and prevent his wavering.
In writing a book like this, the religious pilgrim reaches out to an unseen audience
for hearing and understanding, in the hope that what he says will ring true for
some (certainly not for all) who have shared his faith and who may now share
his rejection of it.
It is my privilege to recommend this book as one rich in reflection and
intelligence. It is a helpful and in some respects a ground-breaking effort to provide
a critical perspective on a faith that is too often—and usually for all the wrong
reasons—regarded as uncritical, bellicose, and regressive. What we have is surely
no more than one former Muslim's view of his "former" life; but we are mistaken
to read this as a coming-out saga. It is part-for-whole a late twentieth-century
account of the shrinkage of religious culture, the universality of knowledge, and
the inescapability of the humanistic culture, which will survive all particular forms
of religion in the twenty-first century. Whether that process, inevitable as it seems,
will be marked by violence or accepted with enlightened resignation by defenders
of old religious orders and regimes will depend, it seems to me, on how books
such as this one are read and received.

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