What Is “Islam”?

After every new Islamist terrorist activity, there comes the same tired debate, endlessly rehearsed, as we know all so well: are groups like ISIS/Al Qaeda/Hamas/… authentic expressions of Islam, or not?

Everybody is ready with an answer. The answer is always meaningless because it is almost always a form of social positioning: your answer mostly serves as a way to position yourself as one of the Good People, over and against the Bad People. And the answer is always meaningless because nobody ever defines what they mean by “Islam.”

What is “Islam”?

This is not me being pedantic. Lazy thinking always starts with using ill-defined terms. (See: most anything involving “consumerism”, “neoliberalism”, “neoconservatism”…)

So, I genuinely ask: what is “Islam”?

Because when I read people weigh in on what “Islam” does and does not condone, I read between the lines that often a different thing is meant each time the word is used.

For example, “Islam” means any of the following things depending on the context: “What majorities of current, self-identified Muslims believe, according to opinion polls”; “What majorities of current, self-identified Arab Muslims believe, according to opinion polls”; “What the plain text reading of some verses of the Quran says”; “What the plain text reading of other verses of the Quran says”; “What majorities of those recognized historically as great teachers of the Islamic faith have said”; “What [some] Wahhabi clerics say”; “What [some] Sufi clerics say”; “What [some] Shia clerics say”; and probably more.

If you interchangeably mean any number of these things when you talk about what “Islam” condones, you will get many and often mutually contradictory answers.

Of course, as a Roman Catholic Christian, I have sometimes been on the receiving end of similar confusion. Take, for example, the common notion that Christians don’t believe what the Bible says and/or shouldn’t talk about homosexuality because they wear clothes made out of different threads and don’t observe the Sabbath. On the one hand this is deeply silly, because historically Christian hermeneutics have declared that under the New Covenant the moral law of Leviticus is retained while the ritual law is not. But if it weren’t so easy to look up the answer, it would be an honest question: after all, those verses really are in there in the Bible. Or, to take another common misunderstanding: when someone says that Catholicism rejects X, to respond that according to opinion polls vast majorities of Catholics disagree. Of course, in the self-understanding of Catholicism, divine law is not decided by opinion poll. But maybe sometimes “Catholicism” refers to the social phenomenon rather than the body of doctrine.

I know that there are some shocking verses in the Quran. But I also know that there are shocking verses in the Bible, and that there are hermeneutical traditions that most Christians adhere to that “nullify” those verses. Is that the case in “Islam”? Yes/no/to what extent? I don’t know. And I wish someone would answer the question.

After a fracas with Bill Maher, the often-embarrassing writer Reza Aslan has penned an op-ed in the New York Times arguing for the “You can’t blame ‘Islam’ for terrorism” camp. His argument is, essentially, that what current fanatics believe is due to their cultural and social circumstances and not due to “Islam.”

Here’s what Aslan writes:

People of faith insert their values into their Scriptures, reading them through the lens of their own cultural, ethnic, nationalistic and even political perspectives.

After all, scripture is meaningless without interpretation. Scripture requires a person to confront and interpret it in order for it to have any meaning. And the very act of interpreting a scripture necessarily involves bringing to it one’s own perspectives and prejudices.

Over at the Federalist, Peter Burfeind blows a gasket.

Well, here’s the thing: on this score, Aslan is absolutely correct. It is literally true that any piece of writing does not have a meaning apart from the person reading it.

This is why, in his abiding wisdom, Jesus Christ founded a Church, which is His Body, endowed with the Holy Spirit and guided by it into all truth, to act as “the pillar and foundation of truth”; to be, in the words of John Henry Newman, an authoritative “living voice”, since, after all, the Biblical God is “the God of the living.”

I mean, let’s get real: are all beliefs totally socially-determined, as Aslan seems to be saying? Of course not. But are a great many of them, a lot of the time? Of course. Is it quite frequent for religious and other authorities to read into sacred scripture what’s most convenient for them at a particular point? (Especially when they don’t have a sacred magisterium?) Of course.

Might Bill Maher have a point, when he says that Islam’s doctrines are fundamentally more violent than Christianity’s? Maybe. Certainly, the fact that it’s politically incorrect to ask shouldn’t tell us anything about the answer. But I don’t know. And I don’t know because I still don’t know what ‘Islam’ is.

What are the prevailing hermeneutics in Islam? Prevailing today, prevailing historically in the recognized great teachers? Prevailing in various traditions/regions/schools? How are those Bad Verses read in various traditions? I don’t know the answers of these questions. I would be curious to see someone seriously tackle them.

Because, after all, there is a prevailing counter-narrative, which would explain the violence of many strains of Islam mostly under the lens of nationalistic and ethnic Arab revanchism; of the feeling of humiliation left by the colonial and post-colonial era in the Arab world; of the rise of “robust”, pious forms of Islam being the logical consequence of corrupt, socialist-secularist Arab Nationalist dictatorships; of the historical accident of Wahhabi clerics sitting on the world’s biggest oil reserves and thereby being able to influence what is being taught in Islamic circles much more than their historical or numerical prevalence might allow; and so on. After all, if “Islam” is a sola scriptura religion (at least in the Sunni tradition; I think the concept of the Marja’ makes Shia Islam different) then certainly most of its content on a day-to-day basis would be driven by social factors reading whatever is desired into the scriptures in question. So that seems like a more compelling explanation for violent and/or illiberal beliefs among many Muslims than “Islam”.

But, again, I don’t know. Unlike many people rushing in with pre-packaged answers, I genuinely ask.