Let me begin by stating my biases up front. I am an atheist. I believe, metaphysically, religion is simply a mistake, a misanalysis of the world and a clinging to traditional stories that scientific progress has made inappropriate. Religion offers comfort and consolation to billions of people. That is good. But I view this as simply wishful thinking. The ethical argument for religion is that it makes people behave. I have felt the force of this enough to feel anxiety at raising my children without religion. After all, I was raised in a religion, and I think of myself as a good person. As it happens, I was raised in the Presbyterian religion, which, however stringent it may have been in sixteenth century Scotland, by the time it reached the middle class Midwest in the mid 20th century, rested very lightly on one's shoulders and was easy to cast off--nothing like the Southern Baptist religion which a college friend of mine had to have a nervous breakdown to shuck. Ultimately I decided that all you can do is let your children know what it is to be loved, and hope for the best. Fortunately, they turned out well. I now believe what I think Steven Weinberg, in his essay ``A Designer Universe?", said best: ``With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil--that takes religion."
Osama bin Laden is as far from a good person as you can get, but without religion he would have been an ordinary sleazy businessman and a danger only to the people who did business with him.
You have often heard it said since September 11 that Islam is ``a religion of peace". I don't know what that means. Buddhism is a religion of peace. Or maybe I say this only because I don't know enough of the history of southeast Asia, where Buddhism has been a factor in politics. But Judaism? Christianity? Islam? Of course most Jews, Christians, and Muslims want peace; most people want peace. But what can it mean to call the religions ``religions of peace"?
Judaism has the best record in this regard. As we saw in the book of Joshua, it was born in war, and the Old Testament is one war after another, in the name of the Lord. But for most of their subsequent history, the Jews have been a very small minority living in the midst of a hostile majority, and that situation is not conducive to starting wars. Jews were victims rather than victimizers. Not until the Jewish terrorists of the 1930s who later became prime ministers of Israel, and the current Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza do we see Jews making war in the name of religion.
Jesus, from the little information we have about him, was a man of peace, and Christianity was a religion of peace for its first three hundred years. Or rather, it was a religion lacking in power and frequently victimized. For the last seventeen hundred years, however, untold millions have been slaughtered in the name of that man of peace. I grew up singing ``Onward Christian Soldiers" and ``Battle Hymn of the Republic". In church.
Muhammad was not a man of peace. He was a man who raided passing caravans. He was a general who led his army of believers in battle, and a very good general he was. To be sure, he used peaceful means as well, but they were in the service of his conquests. His followers did not go out and proselytize as did the followers of Jesus. They went out and conquered. Within the space of a generation, they had conquered an empire stretching from Spain to China. But once in charge, they were not especially heavy-handed in spreading their religion. People were converted less by the sword than by tax breaks, right from the beginning and on until the last days of the Ottoman Empire. Nevertheless, zealots arose and people died for what they believed. In the early 1000s, Hakim, the Fatimid ruler of Egypt, young, cruel, and capricious, imposed draconian Islamic laws against beer, wine, honey, women's shoes, and women going outdoors; he persecuted Christians and Jews in order to convert them and in 1020 destroyed the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, an act that eventually precipitated the Crusades.
It would be a formidable calculation indeed to determine whether more people have been murdered in the name of Christianity or in the name of Islam.
Intolerance is part and parcel of religions such as Christianity and Islam. If you believe believers go to heaven and nonbelievers go to hell, it is intolerable that your fellow human beings believe other than you do. It is a short step from there to believing that those who lead others into error ought to be killed, and to rationalizing executions as saving the victim's soul.
When I was traveling in Libya in my youth, I met a man who said that the reason he believed in Islam was that the Qur'an was the most beautiful Arabic he had ever heard. It must be, literally, the word of God, as it is believed, literally, to be.
This does not come across in the English translation I read. There are a few poetic passages, but for the most part the English is very pedestrian. It is repetitious in the extreme. I believe that if you removed all the passages that appear elsewhere in the Qur'an, you would reduce its length to one fifth what it is now. There are ``historical" passages about Jesus and Old Testament prophets like Noah, Abraham, Moses, and Jonah, but the story always seems to be the same: he preached the word of God, but people ignored him, and they were punished by God.
Normally, when Faraj played the few tapes he had brought with him, Arabic or American, they were loud and raucous, and I tried to turn it off in my head. But the morning we left Tarim in Wadi Hadramawt at 5 a.m. and drove for an hour to Shibam in the early light, he was playing a tape that had almost the most hauntingly beautiful music I had ever heard. It was a peaceful music that put you at one with the world, seemingly a strange blend of traditional Arabic and New Age music. I asked the name of this singer. I imagined a Yemeni woman.
``As-Sudays," Faraj said, ``reciting the Qur'an."
When I got back to Sanaa I wanted to buy a CD. A lot of shops sold tapes, but finding one that sold CDs was a challenge. I was directed to a neighborhood several miles away, took a service taxi there, and asked and asked and finally found a store. They sold CDs, but not that one. But I learned more. The other customer there was a young man who spoke excellent English and in fact was leaving for London the next day. He told me As-Sudays is not a singer, but the imam of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, and is not singing, but ``reading". He said As-Sudays's recordings of the Qur'an are well known and easily available all over the Islamic world. I would have no trouble finding them when I returned to Damascus, or I could order them on the Internet.
The clerk seemed delighted that an American wanted to buy As-Sudays's recordings of the Qur'an. He called the one other store he knew that sold CDs, as the English-speaking young man offered to have his driver take me there since it was a long way away. But the other store was out. I bought an As-Sudays tape, in case I couldn't find a CD in Beirut or Amman.
In Petra on the way back after dinner from a restaurant to my hotel, I stopped in a music store. They had very few CDs but among the ones they had were a stack by As-Sudays. I asked the clerk to recommend one for me, and he picked one out. He played a little for me, and it was utterly beautiful. He said that when they play it, sometimes they cry. You are not supposed to talk while it is playing. He asked if I was a Muslim. I said no. He said that Christians and Jews are not allowed to buy it, and I think he was only half joking. In any case, he sold it to me.
On my way into the hotel, three men were in the lobby watching Al-Jazeera. One spotted my CD and, I think knowing what it was, asked me what it was. I think they were surprised and impressed that I had bought this. I said I had heard it, loved it, and immediately knew I had to have it.
Two days later as I drove south from Petra to Wadi Rum, through flat desert amid high buttes, I popped the tape I bought in Sanaa into the tape deck of the car and listened to As-Sudays recite the Qur'an. He has a high smooth voice with enough range to keep you engaged, not enough to throw you off balance. Not knowing the language I heard syllables, with a narrow range of vowels, a wide range of consonants. The recitation echoed, and I imagined it happening within the high dome of a pure white marble mosque. The music created a deep peaceful calm. It is the music of the desert with broad expanses on a pleasantly warm afternoon. It is not music you can march to war to.