Western scientists to cosign for the Qur’
n reflects the values of a
culture; more importantly, it reflects cultural
change, a shift from the arguments and evidence that would have been fruitful in another setting.
Muammad shows up briefly in the Guide, and he is of course a particular Muammad to serve the argument that the Guide wants to make. There are several tens of thousands of reports that depict what Muammad said and did, and these reports fill endless volumes. With a few pages to spare in a pamphlet, which ones get to matter? The Guide author chooses to highlight Muammad’s praises of charity, mercy, community, fair wages, and kindness to animals. None of this is necessarily inaccurate or a fabrication; it all comes from canonical volumes that Sunn Muslims tend to regard as trustworthy. The point is that from a vast corpus of material, the author had to extract what he decided were the essential themes of Muammad’s message and reproduce these themes in a handful of short quotes. Other themes could have been chosen, some possibly in contradiction to the author’s choices.
The other subjects to get attention in A Brief Illustrated Guide do not simply represent the “core” of Islam, but rather the questions that get thrown at Muslims in a particular time and place. The Guide tells us about Jesus, along with modern concepts such as “terrorism,” “human rights,” “racism,” and of course “the status of women in Islam”; as an introduction to the eternal message of Islam, these themes would not have had the same relevance two hundred years ago. Even the specific literary genre in which this Guide is crafted, its style, aesthetic, and organization, and the nature of the institutions and networks that produced and disseminate it—everything between its initial conception in the author’s mind to its appearing on a table at a state university’s “Islam 101” event, hosted by that university’s Muslim Students’ Association—represent much more than “Islam.” This is an Islam whose priorities are determined from outside, from what its advocates have marked as the values of non-Islam. Even when this pamphlet’s vision of Islam disagrees with non-Islam, it does so within the logic of a world that it shares with non-Islam.
Where in A Brief Illustrated Guide to Understanding Islam can I find the Big Real? We could resort to the familiar metaphor of “old wine in a new bottle,” which assumes that while a vessel might change the apparent shape and color of the liquid that it contains, what’s inside remains unchanged in its eternal essence. But personally, I don’t buy the wine-bottle thing. I don’t know how to distinguish what’s inside the bottle from its exterior appearance, and the oldest bottles that we can examine are still just the oldest bottles; we never get to see the liquid without a container. The “Basic Islamic Beliefs” section lists six doctrinal concerns that have been widely held to be crucial deal breakers. This checklist goes way back—in fact, it’s represented in our textual tradition as coming out of Muammad’s own mouth—but it also became the definitive checklist as a response to a specific historical context that emerged generations after Muammad’s death. In the ninth century CE, these six beliefs comprised an oral pamphlet to reduce the message to clear, easily digestible bullet points that could draw a line between acceptable and unacceptable.
Dar-us-Salam offers a more explicitly Salaf pamphlet in A Summary of the Creed of As-Salaf As-Saalih. The pamphlet begins by explaining that our world’s present religious diversity emerged as the product of distortion and corruption: The Creator sent numerous prophets to the various nations of the world, each offering the same “simple and straightforward religion,” but the followers of these prophets have “changed their beliefs, thus deviating from the original religion.” This even includes the case of Allh’s final prophet, Muammad, whose community has also suffered what A Summary calls the “divisions and disunity” of different groups that assert the supremacy of their own methods and interpretations. “So it is our duty now to guard against deviation from the fundamental beliefs and principles of the only one religion, Islam,” A Summary tells me.
The difference between Muammad’s umma and other communities, according to A Summary, is that amid all these departures and mutations, one group has successfully preserved the original and authentic Islam. With the double-vowel transliteration now popularly associated with Salaf literature, A Summary identifies this privileged group as al-Firqatun-Naajiyyah, the “Saved Sect”: Ahlus-Sunnah wal-Jamaa’ah, the followers of the pious predecessors.
It is by statements of creed, says A Summary, that a religion or sect establishes its “fundamental beliefs and guiding principles” and thus distinguishes itself from other religions or sects.11 A Summary defines the source of its creed as what “Allh said, and the Messenger of Allh said,” as opposed to the “desires and the interference of the limited intelligence of man.”12
The first point of A Summary’s ten “fundamentals” includes several points of faith: belief in Allh, his angels, his books, his messengers, the last day, and al-qadar (Allh’s decree). The Salaf, I am told, knew All
