9781422281109

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I SLAM : C ORE B ELIEFS AND P RACTICES

Islam is many things to many people, and while violent radi- cals occupy the headlines, what a Muslim is in the 21st century is practically indefinable. Islam is present on every continent; the religion of billionaires and of the poorest people in the world, the religion of kings and revolutionaries, of illiterate pastoralists and nuclear scientists, of fundamentalist theologians and avant-garde artists. Arabic is the language of Islam, the language of the Qur’an, but most Muslims only speak other tongues. Many Muslims indulge in moderate consumption of alcohol without feeling that they have renounced their faith. Boiled down to its simplest expression, being Muslim in the 21st century is an appre- ciation for one’s origins and a reluctance to eating pork. It is not only non-Muslims who have a partial view of Islam. Muslims, too, have a point of view limited by their own experi- ence. This tunnel vision is often blamed for the radicalization that takes place at the margins of Islam. It is because they do not fully apprehend the diversity and complexity of their faith that some follow the extremist views of preachers of doom and violence. Among those, many are converts, or secularized Muslims who knew and cared little about religion until they embraced radical- ism. Conversely, the foundation of deradicalization programs is education: teaching former militants about the complexity of the Islamic tradition, in particular the respect for the law and toler- ance of diversity that Prophet Muhammad showed when he was the ruler of Medinah. Islam in the 21st century is a political religion. There are four Islamic republics, and other states that have made Islam their offi- cial religion, bringing Islamic law (Shari’a) in varying degrees into their legal systems. Wherever multiparty elections are held, from Morocco to Indonesia, there are parties representing political Islam. Some blame Islam’s political claims for the relative decline of the Muslim world. Once a center of wealth and power and knowledge, it now lags behind its European and East Asian neigh- bors, still struggling to transition from a rural, agrarian way of life to the urban, now post-industrial age. But for others, only Islam