Explaining Islam Rev. Dr. George Mason with

Explaining Islam: Rev. Dr. George Mason with Imam Omar Suleiman

Introduction

Welcome to Good God, conversations that matter about faith and public life. I'm your host George Mason and I'm delighted to welcome to the program today my friend Imam Omar Suleiman. Omar, so happy for you to be here.

He is the president and actually founder of the Yaqeen Institute which is a really an educational organization to help people deepen their understanding of Islam and you are the resident teacher, I guess. Is that right? Yes, I am. So it's been a blessing.

We're almost three years old now and it's been a blessing, you know, it really covers issues that are deep with Islam and Muslim identity formation and how that interacts with the modern world. Well, one of the things I love about you is that you not only care about the formation of your own community around its beliefs and deepening its understanding, which is part of what the Institute does, but you also interact more broadly in the community and that means also helping people understand better your own faith tradition.

Addressing Misconceptions About Islam

And so in this particular episode I'd love for us to do some things, Omar, that I think would help people. As you know, you run up against this every day of your life that Islam in the West is a strange sort of religion to people. There's a kind of eccentricity to it because it didn't originate in the West and so I think it's really important, not that our faith did, right? This is something I think we need to realize. All of these faiths come out of the Middle East, but I think it would be really helpful if we went through some just really basic things and help dispel some misconceptions and gain some clarity and those sorts of things.

So, would you mind just like, let's just hit a few things quickly. So, the Prophet Muhammad and the year was when he received his revelation and what were the circumstances of the birth of Islam? So, I'm actually glad you frame it that way and first of all just thank you for your friendship. Thank you for the incredible human being that you are and what you've done for the city of Dallas and how you've made it such a place for me and my family to settle. So, thank you.

Your friendship, it's just, thank you, I think, for everything that you do for us. You're welcome. I do want to kind of get that out of the way. You're welcome. It's an honor. It really is.

The Demographics of Islam

I'd like to also, I think, I think sort of the framing is very appropriate because Islam is sort of looked at as foreign whereas Christianity and you know Judaism is also, anti-semitism of course is on the rise again and Judaism is, of course, also somehow looked at as foreign but less so than Islam, right? Because Islam has a very Arab look to it even though less than 20% of Muslims around the world are Arab. So, it's, okay say that one more time. It's very important to hear this.

Yes, less than 20% of Muslims, it's actually around 15% of Muslims are Arab worldwide, globally. The largest, the largest group of Muslims in the United States are African-American. So, the foreignness of Islam and the casting of Muslims as a foreign community is sort of part of an Orientalist project and it's, we're not the only victims of that as a faith community to be otherized, right? And so, any Hollywood iteration of Islam is typically going to be a guy with a turban in the deserts of Yemen or in a movie that glorifies a war on Iraq and a guy running around as a terrorist screaming (الله أكبر - Allahu Akbar)," right? You know, doing something horrible and awful.

So, it's the otherizing is definitely malicious. Yes. Now, the framing is important from a historical perspective as well because Islam is an Abrahamic faith both in creed and in ritual.

The Meaning of Islam

Yes. And I think it's important to sort of take it from there. The word Islam means peace attained through submission.

So, it means submission and peace and so particularly peace on an individual level that is attained through submitting to God and submitting as a community to God and attaining peace in the collective sense. Okay. And in our conception of creed, all of the prophets that are mentioned in the Old Testament would be considered Muslim because they submitted to God and they attained peace, not necessarily adherence of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, but they certainly upheld a creed of monotheism and submitted to God's will.

I think we could all agree on that part. Yes. So, the way that Islam comes about in the world is the Prophet Muhammad was born in the year 570.

The Historical Context of Islam's Birth

He receives revelation in the year 610 from the angel Gabriel with a new revelation. Now, Christianity and Judaism as faith communities, Christians and Jews, are not far from where that's happening in Mecca. There was no Saudi Arabia in the year 610.

Right. Saudi Arabia is a new nation state. Yes. That's named after a family and named after a tribe. So, it didn't exist at that time. It was just the Gulf, the Arabian Gulf.

Right. And there's a lot of debate happening with the person of Jesus, peace be upon him, as well. Right? You know, the Council of Nicaea is in the 4th century. Yes. The first Bibles, there was in fact no Arabic Bible at the time. Right. That existed in the early 7th century or in the late 6th century. And so, there's a lot that's happening in that region at the time. Right? There's the Jewish community and, of course, Christianity as a faith community coming into its own.

The Council of Nicaea, the Eastern and Western Christian split. And now you have this new faith community. Now, geographically speaking, everything that was taking place in that region was framed in the Roman and Persian conflict.

And the Romans identify with Christianity. In the broad sense, they're monotheists. Right? And in the specific sense, they're a Christian faith community. Yes. In the political sense, they're Roman. Yes. The Persians identify with Zoroastrianism. Yes. And they are politically, of course, you know, an empire that is up against the Roman Empire.

And the Arabs were kind of observers in this whole thing. Okay. So, they're watching the Romans. They're watching the Persians. And everyone is either a client state, a client kingdom, or is an observer of this. Now, the Arabs were, at that time, they worshiped multiple idols.

So, they had idols that they would set up for different tribes. And, in fact, that the Holy Kaaba, which we believe was built by Abraham, peace be upon him, as a place of monotheism, was surrounded by idols. And it was turned into a place of many idols.

The Prophet's Call to Monotheism

The Arabs allied themselves both politically and religiously with the Persians. So, I'm giving you this history because it gets really interesting here. Because then, when the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, makes his call, he calls as an extension of the Abrahamic way.

So, he's calling to the original way of Abraham, peace be upon him. So, they said, this house was built by Abraham for the worship of one God. Yes. He's calling as an extension of the message of Jesus Christ, peace be upon him. So, of course, Islam looks at Jesus, peace be upon him, as a prophet and a messenger of God. But within more, you know, from a creedal sense, Islam and Judaism are very similar.

Yes. And so. More strict monotheists. Correct. Than you would say Christians are. Yes. Because of our notion of the Trinity. Yes. Right.

But here's where it gets interesting now. So, the Prophet, peace be upon him, calls to monotheism. He calls to the return to the Abrahamic way. Christianity was not as known to the Arabs in Mecca as it was, as Judaism was. Because there was a Jewish community in the nearby town of Yathrib. There were Jewish tribes that settled there.

Now, when he makes this call for the oneness of God, he also calls for a lot of the things that made Jesus, peace be upon him, unpopular in the political and social realm. So, he calls for an end to corruption. He calls for an end to, at that time, the Arabs specifically practiced female infanticide.

They practiced all sorts of horrific tribal corruption. And the religion that was accommodating, it was a very loose way of thinking that accommodated the idols, was really used to entrench certain tribes with their superiority over others. So, we have this idol because we belong here. We get this proximity to the house of God. Yes. So, a lot of the social equity and the political equity that Jesus, peace be upon him, called for, along with his divine call, was similar in what the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, called for.

So, that made him very unpopular. Immediately faced persecution. I think that's the case for all of these people of God that when they initially come with their call, they're not just talking about a challenge to the theology, but they're talking about really a challenge to the entire way of life, as it exists in that society.

Early Muslim-Christian Relations

So, what do the Muslims do, the early Muslims do? They ally themselves with the Christians. The very first, the very first migration of Muslims fleeing persecution was to Abyssinia, to a Christian king, modern-day Ethiopia. Ethiopia, right.

And the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, sends, including his daughter, I mean, his closest companions, his daughter, and he says, there's a just Christian king there, named Najashi. In Arabic, it's Najashi. In English, the Negus.

And his name is Ashaman in Arabic, and the Ashama king. He said, he's a just king. He didn't know him personally, but he said, he's a just man, and he will not turn you away.

Wow. So, he sends his followers to Abyssinia, and Abyssinia was known as an island of monotheism in a sea of polytheism, because it's surrounded by Persian territory, but it's a small Christian kingdom. And Najashi accepts these Muslims, and then you have the second migration, which is to Yathrib, which becomes now Medina, the city of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him.

The Charter of Medina

And the Muslims and Jews form what is known to many historians as the first constitution in the world. They formed the Charter of Medina, where the faith communities come together, and they form an agreement amongst themselves about how they will protect one another, how they will embrace the pluralism that now exists in the city of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him.

The Quranic Chapter of Rome

And there is a chapter in the Quran called Rome, and the chapter of Rome talks about the Romans and the Persians, and the Arab polytheists were taunting the Arab Muslims and saying that just as the Persian polytheists are destroying the Roman monotheists, we too will destroy you.

And so there's a turn in the same year that the Muslims flee persecution from Mecca to Yathrib, where they're welcomed, and it becomes the city of the Prophet Medina. That same year, where the Muslims attain their victory, the Roman Empire sort of rebounds against the Persian Empire. Now that's not to say the Roman Empire was great, it's not great.

The Abrahamic Reformation Pattern

That's to say that there was a natural inclination, the Muslims sort of connected themselves naturally to the monotheists that they knew, and the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, framed his call as an extension of the Abrahamic call. So let's just pause there for a moment and reflect upon the idea that we have three major religions that trace their lineage to Abraham. Yes.

We call them the Abrahamic religions, but in each case, the birth of these religions springs forth from a sense of moral and cultural and political crisis of some sort. Correct. So in every case, what we have is a kind of sense of inbreaking of God.

The world is not as God has intended it to be. There is oppression of one people over another, one culture over another. There is a kind of spiritual misplaced values with multiple gods, and an enfranchising of one tribe over another, and these sorts of things.

And so each of these inbreakings is a kind of a reformation, of kind of a purification, an anti-corruption movement. Each of these cases is a kind of democratizing of faith, if you will, too, because it creates a kind of equality among people. So before we sort of indict Christianity or Islam as creating more oppression, we should recognize that, initially at least, the actual point of the birth of these religions was to address that very problem and to correct it.

The Tradition of Saying "Peace Be Upon Him"

So it's really interesting, you know, as you were saying that the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, when I say any name of any prophet, as a Muslim, it's tradition to say peace be upon him. So if I say Jesus' name, we say peace be upon him. If I say Abraham's name, we say peace be upon him.

It's required for us to say it the first time, and it's liked for us to say it every other time in a conversation, so that's sort of our jurisprudence. Thank you for clarifying. Yes, sometimes people are like, I gotta tell you a funny story, but I don't want to lose my point on that.

The Prophet's Mission and God's Displeasure

You know, he said, the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, said that God looked at the world before he sent him, and he was displeased with the state of the world, the Arabs and the non-Arabs, except for a small portion of the people of the book. The people of the book are the Jews and the Christians in Islamic tradition. That's actually the name given to Jews and Christians in the Quran, is the people of the book.

So God was displeased with what he saw in the world, except for what a small group of Jews and Christians were practicing, of pure monotheism with its implications of a pure society or pure practice. And so the idea of removing the other, you know, Islam is a monotheistic faith, right, and it's definitely, the idea is that all of these prophets called to the oneness of God, but the implications of the oneness of God had major ramifications, and that naturally made them prone to being persecuted, because that threatened the elite class's hold on society and what they were able to do with the idols. Right.

The Ruling Tribes' Compromise Attempts

And so when the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, started this call, what the ruling tribes said to him is, they said, listen, they said, we'll come to a compromise. They said, how about, you know, you worship your God one day, we'll all worship your God one day, and you worship our idols one day. And he said, no.

And he was in a state of weakness. They said, well, you know, we'll worship your God, the one God, for six days. You worship our idols for one.

And he said, no. And then they finally got to, we'll worship your God the whole year, but you just got to worship the idols for one day. Their idea was not, they didn't really have a care for the idols themselves.

It was what the idols gave them access to do and the power that it gave them to take advantage of people and to oppress. Right. And my funny story, I just have to share it.

I was in a... Hold that point. We're going to come back from the break and we'll let you tell it. And I also want us to, I also want us to move into some understanding of scripture and tradition and how it's interpreted within Islam as well.

Break and Program Information

So just take a break. Okay. Thank you for continuing to tune in to Good God. These conversations are part of a larger program that is called Faith Commons, the umbrella organization, you might say, of Good God. Good God is the first project of Faith Commons, which is a non-profit organization that is intended to do public theology, you might say. It's multi-faith, not just Christian, Jewish, Muslim, other faiths, but all of them becoming involved in the question of how do we promote the common good together.

There are so many areas of need and concern in our community and Faith Commons is trying to help bridge the gaps between religions and peoples in our community so that we can have a more just and peaceful society. Thanks for continuing to support us. We're back with Omar Suleiman and he was just about to tell something funny.

A Funny Story About PBUH

So my funny story is that I wrote a paper on Jesus, peace be upon him, and Islam and Christianity in high school. Which was in New Orleans, by the way. Yes.

I think we should all stop and say for a moment that you are an American born in this country and Palestinian parents, but they had immigrated to the U.S. and so you're born in New Orleans and this is a paper in high school. Absolutely. So I'm in Louisiana.

At that time, actually, I was in Baton Rouge at that point now, still in Louisiana, and I was writing this paper on Jesus, peace be upon him, and Islam and Christianity. Now Muslims will typically put PBUH behind the name of any prophet. Right.

Peace be upon him. Peace be upon him. I made the assumption that my teacher would know what that means.

So I wrote Jesus and Christianity and Islam and I kind of just compared and contrasted and I wrote PBUH and she came up to me with her face extremely red and she said, you can't do that. I said, what? She said, you can't say Jesus. Oh no.

As if you were scorning Jesus. She read the first line and she said, you can't do that. But this is exactly to the point of why we need these conversations, right? Why we need the interaction.

Because misunderstandings come from ignorance and ignorance is not always willful. Correct. So there are many people who really do want to understand.

Oh yeah. So that's what we're after here. So if you follow me on Facebook though now or on social media and you say you write PBUH, you know I'm not scorning, I'm just saying peace be upon Jesus.

Thank you. Yes, well we also know you and we know you wouldn't be scorning. So very good.

Islamic Scripture and the Six Pillars of Faith

Well let's talk about scripture because obviously Jews have the Hebrew Bible and Christians have the New Testament scriptures and the Hebrew Bible that we call the Old Testament and so that's, those are our scriptures. Islam actually respects those scriptures as well but the Quran is your holy text. Correct.

So kind of give you the underlying, so there are, the easiest way to know Islam in like, if I could give Islam in a minute, it's there are six pillars of faith. Belief in God, belief in the angels, Gabriel, Michael and some of the other angels that are very familiar. Belief in the prophets and messengers.

Belief in the messages, so the divine scriptures that came to those prophets and messengers. So pretty much any prophet you mention from the Old Testament. Moses, peace be upon him, is actually the most spoken about prophet in the Quran.

Okay. Abraham, peace be upon him, is looked at as the father, if you will. Noah, peace be upon him.

All of them are mentioned and Jesus, peace be upon him, is mentioned by name even more than Muhammad, peace be upon him, in the Quran. Interesting. He's mentioned 25 times.

The prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, name is mentioned five times in the Quran. Yes. And then so you got God, the angels, the messengers, the messages they received, the day of judgment and you know paradise and hellfire and the divine decree, the predestination divine decree.

Okay. As a six, so those are six pillars, kind of underlines the Creed. So these prophets and messengers all received divine scripture, divine revelation.

The Nature of Scripture in Islam

Yes. Now obviously there are historical changes, there are versions, there are languages, there are translations. So the idea is that the originals were entirely from God and then over time what exists in all divine scripture.

In the Islamic conception is partly there could be parts and there are parts that are from God. So there's the respect that should be given to religious tradition in general. So even if there is a community, a faith community, or religious scripture that we don't acknowledge within the Abrahamic framework at all, we would still treat it with respect and treat the people with respect because they should be respected and they're people of faith and their books should be respected and treated that way.

What makes the Bible very interesting is that we do believe that there is some of God's Word that exists in it and so as Muslims it's upheld to that standard, right? Now the Quran, there's a hyper sense of preservation. So the Quran is God's Word. It's not inspired by God.

It's not written by someone else and those people were inspired by God. It is God's Word. It's God's direct revelation to the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, through the angel Gabriel.

The Preservation of the Quran

So God's speaking in the Quran, right? And so there's this hyper, I say hyper, you know, and hyper could obviously give a negative connotation, but it's actually quite beautiful that there's a due diligence or

added level of preservation, the idea of preserving the Quran. Yes. In both recitation and meaning because it's got to be exactly the same.

Which is also why to really read the Quran you need to learn Arabic. Yes. Because that's how it was delivered.

Yes. And there's quite a tradition of people learning to recite the Quran by heart. Yes.

Which is really quite a challenge. It is a great challenge. So the Quran, so 1,400 years, it's only one version of it.

There are no versions of it. It's recited in Arabic everywhere around the world. Yes.

The beauty of that is if you walk into a mosque in Dallas, Texas, the Imam, the person leading, who memorized the entire Quran, about 600 pages by heart, could be from Somalia and be corrected in his recitation by someone from China. And we see it happen all the time. Really?

It's just beautiful to see people from all over the world, okay, all reciting it in the exact same way.

And they could correct every ooh and ah sound. Yes. Not just the word if it's missed.

But it's a difficult, it's one, I had the blessing of memorizing it myself. And it was an incredible task. I mean it's not easy to memorize it.

Most people memorize it as children. And then to practice that and to continuously recite it so that you don't lose any of it is really something else.

Differences in Understanding Scripture

So let's talk about the, there's obviously a difference between Islam, Judaism, and Christianity in this respect. Yes. Because you hold that the Quran is the actual words of God. And whereas both Judaism and Christianity, somewhat different ways, but nonetheless speak of these as inspired but human words.

Yes. So when we say the Bible is the word of God, it is understood differently from the way the Quran is the word of God. Yet my guess is that we have a similar challenge.

And that is, it's very easy to say something about the authority of our scripture. It's another thing to realize that when you are reading and interpreting it, you are trying not to get caught in the letter of it, but to find the spirit of it, the meaning of it, so that it lives today. Because here it's delivered 1,400 years ago, or in our case 2,000 or 3,000 years ago, whatever.

And so it still needs to have relevance today. And therefore there have to be interpreters of this who are finding the spirit of this text. Correct.

Islamic Interpretation and Context

So how does that work similarly or differently because of the difference in understanding? So you know, to your point, Islam was very much so about guarding not just the text itself, but the context as much as possible. Because if you take text without context, you could turn Harry Potter into a violent book. You could do all sorts of horrific things, and then do it in the name of God.

Right. Which we've seen from all of our faiths. Correct.

We've seen people have not, you know, unfortunately been restricted by those original contexts, and will happily take verses out of context and do what they do. And of course this idea of, you know I should say from the onset, this idea of an association with the Qur'an with violence or Islam with violence. Statistically speaking, the verses about violence.

Now we would say that the Qur'an, the New Testament, and the Old Testament, you know, framed in context. They should be understood in a certain way. But statistically speaking, the Qur'an has the least mentions of violence of any holy book.

But the idea, the association is very strong. Of course. And so there's this verse, for example, which is in response to the persecution of those Muslims when they fled to Yathrib, which became Medina, the city of the Prophet Muhammad peace be upon him.

The Context of Fighting in Islam

Where they did not take up the sword, they did not fight. For 13 years under persecution, they asked, they said, listen, we'll go out at night, we'll take these people by surprise. And the Prophet Muhammad peace be upon him said in Arabic, he said, مَا أُرْسِلْتُ لِأَقْتُلَ النَّاسَ - "I was not sent to kill people." مَا أُرْسِلْتُ لِأُؤْذِيَ النَّاسَ - "I was not sent to hurt people." Yes. He said, وَلَكِنْ أُرْسِلْتُ رَحْمَةً - but I was sent as a mercy."

Yes. That was his response. They get to Medina, they're chased, they're killed, even in travel. And their things are taken, their belongings are taken in Mecca. And then even in Medina, the Muslims are saying, can we fight back now? Is there a concept of defense? Do we fight back?

And that's where the verse came down. The very first verses about fighting was giving permission.

God has given you permission to fight while it is disliked to you." (Quran 22:39) So it actually starts that way. Then it says فَاقْتُلُوهُمْ حَيْتُ ثَقِفْتُمُوهُم - "so kill them wherever you find them." (Quran 2:191)

Now, the way that an Islamophobe would take that is they take that verse and they say, the Quran says, kill them wherever you find them, i.e. in parentheses, Jews, Christians, infidels, just throw everything in