Tell Me About Islam

So the next thing to understand is how Islam is identified in terms of believing in the Prophet Muhammad: how a Muslim is a Muslim, not as somebody in submission to God, but as somebody following the teaching of Islam, as a word that describes the religion of about one-fifth of the world's population. The best thing to do, again, is to go to the tradition; and in the book of the Forty Hadith there is the second hadith, which is a very famous hadith. It is a hadith in which the Prophet, according to the tradition, is asked by Jibrīl, or Gabriel — and they do not know it is Gabriel yet — and he asks him: tell me about Islam. And the Messenger of Allah (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) said: Islam is to testify that there is no god but Allah and that Muhammad is His messenger. So the first one is what is called the shahādah. The second, he says, is that you perform the prayers — what is called ṣalāh; the third, zakāh; the fourth, fasting; and the fifth, ḥajj. So this is how Islam is defined by the Prophet Muhammad in this hadith, and that therefore would be the best description in terms of a normative understanding of the tradition.

The first one, again, is not gone into here, but it can briefly be mentioned that the word shahādah means witnessing, and it usually means witnessing with the eye. Ashhadu means "I witnessed": I saw with my eye. It also means a testimony; in other words, a person can bear witness. It is interesting, because in Islam one has to have eyewitnesses: there cannot be a testimony that is not an eyewitness testimony in any of the ḥadd punishments. One has to have somebody who saw the act, who saw the person stealing. Circumstantial evidence is really hard to hold up in traditional Islamic courts. So the idea of shahādah is something that a person sees for himself: that there is no god but Allah. That is something which, from the Muslim point of view, they witness and see for themselves; and that Muhammad is His messenger is something that they witness — that they believe based on witnessing.

Now obviously many Muslims in the world are Muslim, again, because they heard this from their parents. Their parents told them lā ilāha illā Allāh, Muḥammad rasūl Allāh, and that is why they believe it, which gets into circular reasoning — or really regressive reasoning. Why do you believe that Islam is true? My father told me. Why did he believe it? His father told him. Why did he believe it? His father told him. Or: why do you believe in Islam? Because the Qurʾān says it is true. Well, how do you know that the Qurʾān says it is true? Well, because the Qurʾān says it is true. This type of reasoning is, in the end, actually quite flimsy; and again we get into this idea of unreflective, undifferentiated people — people who have not given a lot of thought to their traditions. The Muslims are as much a victim of that phenomenon as any other people, really; and in many cases it can actually be more exacerbated, because the tradition in this culture now, with the breakdown — we are in a kind of post-Christian period; there is a breakdown — and it has enabled people to look at and examine their own traditions. There is a lot of critical awareness in this culture. In the Muslim world there really is not a critical examination of their beliefs. Why do we believe? Very few people will ask it, and it is actually very difficult, in a lot of Muslim countries, for people to do that. But a belief that is not rooted in self-examination is ultimately very limiting. Abū al-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī, who is considered something of a heretic in the Muslim tradition — that was one of his complaints about religion: he simply felt that religion was something that people did not reflect on at all.