Of all the world religions, Islam is one most resembling what a religion would look like if it were factually true, in the existential, metaphysical sense. Judaism evolved and consolidated over millennia from the pagan religions of the ancient Hebrews. Christianity started off as an apocalyptic sect of Judaism and became a religion of its own almost by accident. The Hindu religions, taken collectively, present no singular, coherent vision of the universe. Islam alone seems to have come into the world fully formed and intent on being the one true religion, with a sacred text not cobbled together from other sources and then recopied and retranslated to the point of profoundly dubious reliability, but written by a single author, preserved in its original language and form, and presumably dictated by God. It is also a religion that is understood by many Westerners, if it can be said to be understood by them at all, in the most shallow and stereotypical terms. If for no other reason, this makes me want to delve into it and try to understand it for what it really is, and being that its claims to veracity seem (at least on their face) so much stronger than those of other religions, it seems the best trial for my own Satanic faith. I want to know as well why Islam has been so successful, seemingly more so than any other modern religion, in convincing people to abandon this world for some other world and to construct what remains of them in this life around what awaits them in the next. I would know, is this truly what Muhammad intended? As much as I have fallen in love with the mystical Sufi poetry of Rumi and Hafez, and as much as I respect Islam’s singularity of vision, I see this religion as one of the greatest fonts of nihilism in the modern world. Is this nihilism reflected in the religion’s sacred texts? Are these texts misunderstood and misrepresented in Islam as Christian and Jewish texts are in their respective religions?

In studying Islam and the Qur’an, I’ve been relying primarily on three sources. The first is a Great Courses lecture series on Islam conducted by John Louis Esposito, Professor of Islamic Studies at Professor of Religion & International Affairs and Islamic Studies at Georgetown University, which has been indispensable in getting a survey of the religion. Next is the brilliant book Reading the Qur’an (2011) by the Pakistani-British scholar Ziauddin Sardar. Sardar’s book has rapidly become one of my favorite secondary sources on religion. In some ways, his approach to religion mirrors my own, as he is committed to reading and interpreting the Qur’an for himself rather than accepting the doctrine of those who would control its message, and he is strictly committed to an Islam for this life and this world. And finally, the 2008 English translation of the Qur’an itself by the Egyptian-British scholar Muhammad A. S. Abdel Haleem. As Sardar describes, translation of the Qur’an is a contentious issue, and getting a proper translation is paramount to understanding this often-confounding text. Haleem’s translation is clear and straightforward, with parenthetical references that help to clarify the often confusing matter of figuring out to whom different verses of the Recitation are being addressed, as well as helpful footnotes. Reading Sardar has made me want to pick up a second translation by Tarif Khalidi, which Sardar says is less clear but better at capturing the Qur’an’s poetic qualities.

First, a bit of history. Jews trace their lineage to Abraham through Isaac, Arabs through Isaac’s half-brother Ishmael. As the story goes, before the birth of either, Abraham’s wife Sarah was old, well beyond childbearing age. She convinced Abraham to have a son with his handmaid, Hagar. The child thus conceived was Ishmael (Genesis 16). But then, miraculously, Sarah bore Abraham a son: Isaac. Sarah feared that Ishmael, being first born, would become Abraham’s heir, and so convinced Abraham to cast them out (Genesis 21). As the story goes, they settled in what is now the Arabian peninsula, and Ishmael’s progeny became the ancestors of the Arab people.

The Arabs mostly practiced a polytheistic pagan religion up through the 7th century of the common era, when, in the year 610, Muhammad, a merchant in the city of Mecca, claimed to have received a revelation from the God of the Jews and Christians. He claimed further revelations over the next 22 years. These revelations, collectively, are القرآن‎, al-Qur’an, “the Recitation”, dictated by God to Muhammad through the archangel Gabriel. Every person to whom I have spoken who has read a copy of the Qur’an in the original Arabic (or, better yet, heard it recited, which is its proper form), regardless of their own religion, has been entirely effusive in speaking about its beauty. Sadly, I have to take them at their word, at least for now. I’ll die regretting that I spent over a year of my life living among Arabic speakers (and Kurdish as well) without learning anything of their language beyond a few utility phrases.

The territorial spread of Islam was, from that point, exponential. Fully half of the Arabian peninsula had been conquered within Muhammad’s own lifetime, and entirety of it within ten years of his death. Then came the era of strife and the great schism. Conflicts over succession after the death of Muhammad resulted in the bifurcation of the religion into the Sunni, who follow the succession of the caliphate through Muhammad’s father in law, Abu Bakr, and the Shi’a, who follow the succession of the caliphate through Muhammad’s closest relative, his first cousin ‘Ali.

Only 100 years after the death of the Prophet, the extent of the Muslim empire was larger than the Roman Empire at its zenith. Over the next thousand years, Islam spread to India, North Africa, Asia, and southern Europe, and over the next 1500, it became the religion of 1.2 billion people, the second-largest and fastest-growing religion in the world, and the official religion of 30 countries.

Muslims do not believe that Islam was a new religion that was founded when Muhammad received the Qur’an, but rather the original religion of the one true God, promoted by earlier prophets such as Abraham, Moses, and Jesus, which became corrupted over time but which was corrected (for the final time) by the Qur’an. In contrast to the somewhat complex creeds of Christianity (see my story on the Nicene Creed), that which makes one a Muslim is a very simple and straightforward matter, largely concerned with how one acts rather than what one believes. A Muslim is one who keeps the Five Pillars of Islam: the Shahadah (the declaration of faith: “There is no god but God and Muhammad is the messenger of God”), Salat (praying five times a day), Zakat (tithe and almsgiving of 2.5% of one’s wealth), Sawm (fasting during the holy month of Ramadan), and the Hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca once in one’s lifetime).

Though it seems, as I mentioned, that Islam came into the world fully-formed, closer examination reveals that it was very much a product of its time and a reaction to the social and geopolitical situation in Mecca in the early 7th century. Mecca was already the terminus of a pilgrimage that brought wealth and prestige to the city, as is true in Islam today. “Allah” was already the word used to describe the chief god (“Allah” in Arabic is literally “the God”) of a pantheon of gods, and this remains the word used (consistent with Jewish and Christian usage) to refer to God in Islam today. Tribes and families were the center of life, and so orphans like Muhammad were effectively outcasts from Meccan social life. Muhammad married a widow, whose position, combined with the already diminished social status of women, was even worse. The Qur’an broke with tradition in many ways by insisting on care for and social recognition of orphans, the poor, widows, and women. Those aware of the regressively conservative politics of many Muslim-majority nations might be surprised to learn that, for its time, the Qur’an was incredibly progressive. So progressive, in fact, that conservative reaction to the Qur’an by the Meccan elite lead to Muhammad abandoning the city for the one which would be come to be known as Medina, the city of the Prophet, where lived a group who had come to Mecca in the pilgrimage and who had come to accept the Qur’an. Muhammad and those who followed him would have to re-conquer his home city. That was accomplished in 630, two years before the Prophet’s death.

The Qur’an is a challenging text to interpret, even provided that one has a good, clear translation. There are numerous references to historical events that occurred both prior to and contemporaneously with the text’s authorship, and the pronoun references are especially difficult to disentangle. The text is written in the first person as the speech of God to Muhammad. In this process, God will often instruct Muhammad to say certain things to certain groups of people, or will predict what these groups of people will say to Muhammad and his followers. To take an example:

[Prophet], when your Lord told the angels, ‘I am putting a successor on earth,’ they said, ‘How can You put someone there who will cause damage and bloodshed, when we celebrate Your praise and proclaim Your holiness?’ but He said, ‘I know things you do not.’ 2:30

God, speaking to Muhammad (the bracketed reference to this at the beginning of the citation is Haleem’s helpful insertion), refers to Themselves in the third person as “your [meaning Muhammad’s] Lord,” and then in the first person as They addressed the angels, and then in the second person as the angels address Them in reply, and then with a third person pronoun in attributing his reply to the angels, and finally in the first person again in the reply itself. Four different ways of referring to the same entity in a single sentence (and four different ways of referring to the other party, the angels, in the same sentence), and a few verses later God adds to the mix by referring to Themselves using the pluralis maiestatis, the royal “We.” This deeply-nested syntactical structure and complex pronoun usage is the rule throughout the Qur’an rather than the exception.

The language of this verse is quite striking, but I also find the story that it’s telling rather amusing. God tells the angels that They will create humankind and give them the earth. The angels respond, “We’ve done nothing but praise and worship, and you’re going to give the world to people who are going to wreck up the place?” To which God responds, “Look, I know what I’m doing.” I enjoy this verse as well because it’s asking questions that the Bible never bothers with: why would God have given stewardship of the earth to humankind when they’re clearly so ill-suited for it? The answer is arbitrary and dismissive, but that the question is being asked at all seems to me to be a step up.

To return to one of the questions I posed at the beginning of this story, is the Qur’an misunderstood and misrepresented in Islam as Christian and Jewish texts are in their respective religions?

Take the matter of translating the Qur’an. As I’ve already pointed out, it’s a contentious issue. As Sardar explains, the best-selling translation of the Qur’an into English, by N.J. Dawood, is a mess of misrenderings and has been widely disavowed by Muslims. It is also the translation that most strongly emphasizes the warlike aspects of the religion (this is the translation that Sam Harris used when he spent several pages of The End of Faith, from 2004, presenting especially violent-seeming quotes from the Qur’an, entirely absent historical or textual context or references to other means of translation or interpretation, by way of condemning the entire book, the entire religion, and the entire Muslim population, without exception). Other translations, such as Yusuf Ali’s (which Sardar recommends), have been revised and reissued by organizations with agendas regarding the public perception of Islam.

But what of the legendarily warlike nature of the Qur’an? Given the remarkability of such a beautiful and original text originating from such an unlikely source, as well as possible historical references to witnesses to Muhammad’s receiving of the Qur’an (according to Haleem’s introduction, which states that witnesses observed Muhammad falling into something resembling a seizure), I think that Muhammad was indeed experiencing these revelations. I don’t think that they truly came from God, except in that God could be described as the ground of being that manifests in all phenomena. I think that, more likely, it was a kind of frontal lobe epilepsy that allowed Muhammad access to a profound literary genius, which he perceived as a revelation from God. Such things are not at all unheard of (Wikipedia’s list of religious figures who have been retroactively, though speculatively, diagnosed with epilepsy, is quite extensive and thoroughly cited, and includes such luminaries as Joan of Arc and Saint Teresa of Ávila). Historically, it seems that Muhammad and his followers, in the wake of these revelations, wanted only to worship their God and improve the lives of the marginalized of Meccan society. When that was not permitted, they went to war, and the nature of the revelations received at that time reflected this. And as well, after the Hijra (the emigration of the Muslim community from Mecca to Medina), Muhammad and his followers had to deal with political leaders like Abd-Allah ibn Ubayy who were believed to have converted to Islam only out of political convenience. The revelations surrounding those periods concern these Munafiqun (hypocrites) specifically as well.

Despite the convoluted nature of the language in the Qur’an, it’s entirely clear, given a second’s thought and a few quick google searches, when it is that God is addressing Muhammad’s immediate circumstances and when They are speaking to the treatment of non-Muslims in all places and for all times. Returning to Sam Harris’s list of quotes in The End of Faith, a substantial block are taken from the second sura (chapter) of the Qur’an, Al-Baqara (“The Cow”), revealed in Medina after the Hijra, in which it is clear that God is addressing the present state of war and hypocrisy. To take an example, Harris quotes 2:174: “Theirs shall be a woeful punishment” (Dawood’s translation). He doesn’t even bother quoting the entire verse (and his numbers are off as well, having listed this one as 175, but I’m not sure whether there may be an actual, valid difference in the numbering system in Dawood’s translation). To give the full context:

As for those who conceal the Scripture that God sent down and sell it for a small price, they only fill their bellies with Fire. God will not speak to them on the Day of Resurrection, nor will He purify them: an agonizing torment awaits them. These are the ones who exchange guidance for error, and forgiveness for torment. What can make them patient in the face of Fire? This is because God has sent the Scripture with the Truth; those who pursue differences in the Scripture are deeply entrenched in opposition.

Harris begins his list of quotes by saying, “To convey the relentlessness with which unbelievers are vilified in the text of the Koran, I provide a long compilation of quotations below, in order of their appearance in the text.” But given historical context, it is obvious that this verse does not concern non-Muslims at all but rather the Munafiqun. And to interpret it in a contemporary context, this verse would seem to apply more to those who have restricted the Qur’an to Arabic or radically edited it so that access to its message can be restricted and controlled by a scholarly, Arabic-speaking elite. The Qur’an seems to both predict and condemn the Hegemon.

Indeed, Sardar points out several places in which the Qur’an seems to indicate a tolerance or even an embrace of pluralism. “This emphasis on plurality,” he says, “especially in the sense that human diversity is an intentional and purposeful part of God’s creation, is central to the message of the Qur’an (49:13).” The verse that he cites reads, in Haleem’s translation, as follows:

People, We created you all from a single man and a single woman, and made you into races and tribes so that you should get to know one another. In God’s eyes, the most honoured of you are the ones most mindful of Him: God is all knowing, all aware.

Harris’s list of quotes appears to have been derived from reading the suras in order, from cover to cover. Could there be a sampling error in Harris’s method, especially given that this is not how the book is read and understood by Muslims? Had he read further, Harris would likely have come to understand that the Qur’an is a nest of contradictions. Understanding of textual and historical contexts clear up some of these contradictions, but others remain. What is to be done with these? Are the war verses meant to be taken as general proclamations for behavior, or for historical descriptions of how the early Muslims approached oppression? Harris makes no indication that he has appreciated these contradictions (which may well have helped his case, given his position that contradictions are a failure of the text rather than a way to portray an understanding that is more complex than what can be rendered discursively), nor that he has understood that there are necessities and conflicts regarding the matter of interpreting them.

Sardar describes at length the degree to which the misinterpretation of the Qur’an — or the failure to interpret it at all — are widespread within the Islamic community itself:

As my career developed, I attended innumerable conferences of Muslim scholars, visited many Muslim countries, and met many people who argued about the meanings of the Sacred Text. The more I learned of Muslims’ intellectual history and thought about the differences and distinctions, as well as similarities, between classical and modern scholars, the more I had to struggle with what Muslims throughout their history have made of the Qur’an. In Saudi Arabia, where I lived for almost five years, I spent some time at Mecca University and visited the university in Medina. You could hardly move a few yards without someone quoting the Qur’an at you. But the quotations were not meant to be discussed or explored: they were used explicitly to force you to behave in a certain way or accept certain unjust laws or unreasonable positions, or to shut you up. The Qur’an had become a stick frequently used for ensuring conformity and suppressing dissenting views. It was all so far removed from the Qur’an I had known during my childhood.

Sardar describes many more examples of the Qur’an being used in this fashion. This seems a particularly unjust and hypocritical way to treat what is believed to be the very Word of God, and one which conflicts with the ways that, according to Sardar, the Qur’an itself suggests that it be interpreted:

I think the Qur’an should be approached through questions and arguments. That’s what the text itself demands. The Qur’an is full of questions: ‘How can you worship something other than God?’, ‘How did this happen?’, ‘Have you considered?’, ‘Have you heard?’, ‘What are they asking about?’ And it is jam-packed with debate — particularly in the longer suras. Clearly, God loves a good argument.

If one is indoctrinated from childhood with such a view of a text that is promoted as the Word of God (as Sardar describes extensively), and if the authorities behind this indoctrination remove the historical context that allows for a proper interpretation of the war verses, then the present state of violent Islamic nihilism would be an entirely obvious result.

I have other questions and thoughts concerning Islam and the Qur’an that I have not been able to cover here for want of keeping this story at a reasonable length. In what I’ve covered so far, it seems very much that the modern state of Islam is not what Muhammad would have intended. Any sensible, informed, and personal interpretation of the Qur’an cannot be reconciled with the rigidly doctrinal, oppressive, and often violent interpretations that seem to have become tragically ubiquitous in the modern world, and as well, what I’ve seen of criticism of the Qur’an from outside Islam has been clumsy, reductionist, and uninformed. But there are many more questions about Islam and the Qur’an and many more verses in the Qur’an for me to cover.

Thanks much for reading. I hope you’ve found this piece interesting and informative. If you enjoyed it, I encourage you to look at some of my other essays. And if you find my approach to philosophy and religion at all valuable, I hope that you’ll stop in at my Patreon page, which features bonus content for patrons, and that you’ll stop back by to check on my new content. I’ll be publishing new work every Friday evening. I also have a reading list, which contains links to the books I used to research this and all of my other stories. Clicking through and buying books is a great, easy way to support my work.