7

Electrum Faiths

THIS PICTURE I DID FIND. Or, rather, I happened on it while I was unsuccessfully looking for the one of me and the pearl diver. It’s the neighborhood Halloween parade. My daughter Eleanor, then seven years old, is dressed as a panda. (She’s always loved pandas.) To her right is my wife Diane, dressed as a witch. To her left is Ursina, the teenaged daughter of a Swiss friend who was living with us for a few months to work on her English, dressed as a peasant woman. I’m dressed as a wizard, but I’m out of the picture holding the camera, except for my wizard’s staff, which Diane is carrying at the moment. And just as I snap the photo, another father in the parade, wearing an exceptionally compelling vampire costume with fangs and bloody lips, leans into the frame with a frightening gape to his mouth, as if to bite, sweeping back his high-collared black cloak, lined in red velvet to go with his red shoes. His timing was perfect. We laughed hysterically, and we had another good chuckle when we later looked at the picture at home.

It was all pretty pagan stuff. My daughter dressed like an animal. Ursina dressed as a peasant. My wife and I dressed as beings capable of working magic. The interloping father dressed as a blood-sucking spirit of evil. The couple of hundred other folks from the neighborhood dressed in all manner of the out-of-the-ordinary for bourgeois souls from a bourgeois neighborhood, led by the neighborhood brass band, in costume, playing “Have You Seen the Ghost of John?,” the theme from The Addams Family, and other spooky music.

A wonderfully fun and family way to celebrate a Christian holiday. Yes, Christian. Although rarely acknowledged nowadays, Halloween actually marks the celebration of All Hallows Eve, the evening before All Saints Day, which is the day before All Souls Day. Together, they make up the three-day Christian holiday of Allhallowtide. The practice of traveling door to door in costumes, asking for treats, derives from “souling”—a Medieval custom in which the poor visited the houses of the rich, with candles lit inside carved out turnips, demanding food in return for offering prayers to the family’s dead.1 Historically, Halloween was also a harvest festival, landing almost exactly between the fall equinox and the winter solstice, and lining up with the ancient Celtic harvest festival of Samhain.² (The pumpkin is pretty clearly a harvest symbol, if you think about it for half a second.) And not only in Europe. The end of the growing season powerfully symbolizes a time to honor the dead in Mexico, too. The wildly popular Day of the Dead festival is a three-day Mexican holiday (despite the singular “day” in its name) that corresponds exactly with Allhallowtide. It began as an Aztec harvest festival. Today, celebrants in Mexico embrace the Day of the Dead as a jointly Christian and traditional event, a time for remembrance as we thankfully store away food from dead plants.

We’re not used to thinking about Christianity as having pagan elements, of course, and these associations can make some Christians feel uncomfortable. But they’re not accidental. Christian leaders have long been interested in building the flock of followers, of course, and having Christian holidays correspond with what people are already celebrating makes a lot of sense for getting people to join up. All Saints Day was originally celebrated on May 13 in the fourth century CE. But by the ninth century, the church had shifted it to November 1, where it could resonate better with older pagan traditions.³

Or take Jesus’s birthday. The New Testament never says when he was born, and initially Christians celebrated Christmas on January 6. Eastern Orthodox Christianity still celebrates Christmas close to this date. (Because of how it syncs its calendar with the calendar the Romans used, the Eastern Orthodox church now celebrates Christmas on January 7.) Roman church leaders later switched Christmas to December 25, the date of the solstice on the Julian calendar, which was the calendar then in use. The solstice, of course, has long been a deeply meaningful occasion in pagan thought. It was also the birthday of Sol Invictus, the “invincible sun,” a solar god of Persian origin who had a strong following in Rome at the time, especially among soldiers. As well, it was the birthday of Mithras, a Jesus-like divinity also of Persian origin, also widely venerated by Roman soldiers. (We don’t understand the relationship between Sol Invictus and Mithras, although it seems probable that there was one.) The solstice later moved to December 21 when authorities readjusted and recalibrated the calendar to better handle the fact that the year is actually a few minutes shorter than 365 and a quarter days: 365.2425 days, to be precise.

This is all very controversial, especially the question of which religious tradition first venerated December 25.4 Nonetheless, the controversy tells us something important about Christianity: it remains uncomfortable with paganism, despite some quiet accommodation of it. Judaism isn’t exactly wild about pagan traditions either, although it does give more opportunity for expressing pagan sentiments as legitimate aspects of faith than Christianity typically does. For example, although it is a rare Jew who appreciates the agrarian origin of Passover as a springtime celebration of the re-leavening of the world, all practicing Jews understand Sukkot as a harvest festival. But Sukkot is a minor holiday, and only recently has there been much effort to welcome the many other pagan possibilities of the Old Testament into the Jewish traditions of today.⁵ The pumpkin isn’t any more of a Jewish symbol than a Christian one.

Buddhism can be pretty shy about its pagan elements as well, especially in what some scholars call “Buddhist modernism,” the dominant form of Buddhism in the West and among the educated urbanites of Asia.⁶ But alongside bourgeois worries about desire and how it prevents one from following dharma, Buddhism in much of Asia flourishes in part by discretely welcoming pagan concerns, and even by incorporating some worship of a region’s traditional pagan divinities.⁷ Thus many in Japan, for example, follow both Buddhism and Shinto, venerating ancestors and ecological spirits in all their wildness as well as the Buddha in all his calmness. The Dalai Lama doesn’t talk about this much when he visits the West, though, nor when he speaks with the middle and upper classes in the East. Many major English-language sources on Buddhist history and practice barely mention Buddhism’s pagan facets either, if at all.⁸

My point is this. Traditions in Christianity, Judaism, and Buddhism are heavily weighted toward bourgeois concerns.⁹ Their focus has long been on the establishment of a supernatural basis for a natural conscience, and on the freedom from the moral pollution of politics and desire that such a conscience promises. But some faiths have sought more of a balance between the pagan and the bourgeois, developing compound traditions. Ancient jewelers liked to combine gold and silver together into a light yellow melding called electrum. So we might call these traditions electrum faiths: faiths that have forged alloys of bourgeois gold with varying admixtures of pagan silver. Such faiths emerged in contexts that experienced a less complete bourgeois revolution of increased urbanism, wealth concentration, and expansion of state and empire. I’ll consider two in this chapter: Hinduism and Islam.¹⁰

Turn, go not farther on your way: visit us, O ye Wealthy Ones.

Agni and Soma, ye who bring riches again, secure us wealth.

Make these return to us again, bring them beside us once again …

I offer you on every side butter and milk and strengthening food.

May all the Holy Deities pour down on us a flood of wealth….11

Then was not non-existent nor existent: there was no realm of air, no sky beyond it …

All that existed then was void and formless:

by the great power of Warmth was born that Unit.

Thereafter rose Desire in the beginning, Desire, the primal seed and germ of Spirit.¹²

These lines of scripture reach out from some of the most ancient religious texts we have. They come down to us from the traditions of Hinduism, what is sometimes called the “oldest religion.”¹³ Hindu scripture includes both very ancient writings and writings that are, well, merely ancient—pre-1000 BCE through to writings from the first centuries of the Common Era—as well as writings from more recent centuries that many Hindus deeply prize. The Vedas, the “works of knowledge,” are the very earliest. These particular verses come from the oldest of the Vedas, the Rig Veda, or “verses of knowledge,” which likely dates from around 1500 to 1200 BCE, drawing on traditions that are far older (as does all human knowledge).

Researchers think the Vedas reflect the combined wisdoms of two peoples who came together over hundreds of years. One group was the Indus Valley Civilization who had developed a substantial society of riverside agrarian cities. These cities mysteriously began to fade away beginning around 1900 BCE.¹⁴ Speculation has roamed through a wide variety of causes, from climate change to shifting rivers to disease to mismanaged agriculture to overextended trade economies to some kind of combination of these.¹⁵ For many years, the most popular explanation for the decline was depredations from the second group: a flood of people from the Eurasian steppes, warriors on horseback, known as the Aryans. The trouble is, no one has found any archaeological evidence that there was a military takeover: no signs of battle or of an uptick in violence, as far as archaeologists can detect.¹⁶ Archaeologists agree that the Aryans appear in the region at this time, and maybe even earlier.¹⁷ Yet despite the war-like reputation of the Aryans, it seems they steadily blended with the indigenous Indus Valley peoples over hundreds of years. Together they came to constitute the Vedic Civilization, a largely agrarian people.

We can immediately hear in these passages orientations to the world that would feel familiar to any nature before nature folk. The first passage speaks clearly to an agrarian concern for sustenance and ecological abundance. “I offer you on every side butter and milk and strengthening food,” it reads. It also shows no doubt about the value of securing wealth and riches. The prayer asks for the “wealthy ones” to “bring riches again, secure us wealth.” One of those wealthy ones is Agni, the god of fire and of wisdom, and the chief terrestrial deity in the Rig Veda. The other wealthy one is Soma—a god who takes the form of an intoxicating ritual drink often mentioned in the Rig Veda, made from the juice of plant stalks. (Alas, it is no longer known what plant.) The praise of intoxication as a divine source of riches and success is hardly a bourgeois religious sentiment.

The second passage shows no doubt about desire either. Indeed, it even praises desire as the creative force behind the whole world, calling desire “the primal seed and germ of Spirit.” This is far from Laozi’s vision of the dao, and its path of acting without intention. Nor does it sound like the Buddha’s vision of Nirvana as a blowing out of desire and attachment, nor Plato’s concept of a primal good that has no cause, nor the biblical vision of an impartial divine, nor the Gnostic faith in the goodness of the Single Principle. There is no effort in the Rig Veda to escape politics and discover a natural conscience.

But a thousand years later, the peoples of the Indian subcontinent were increasingly having quite different concerns than those that the Rig Veda addresses. The insights of Vardhama and Siddhartha Gautama in the fifth century BCE spoke to the new issues faced by the people who would come to call themselves Jains and Buddhists—the issues of a bourgeois life and its politics of status. Many then and now have found great comfort in the beauty of their teachings.

But the hierarchies of varna, of caste, meant that only about 15 to 20 percent of caste members experienced the social rhythms of the urban and bourgeois. The Brahmin priests and teachers, the Kshatriya rulers and soldiers, and the Vaishya merchants and landowners all found much in Jainism and Buddhism that spoke to them. Yet the Shudra still lived mainly agrarian lives, as did the Panchama, now called the Dalits, the fifth group not even considered a part of the caste system. Vardhama’s and Siddhartha’s advice that one ought to give up on material desire and gain a deeper peace really didn’t have a lot to offer to those who had nearly nothing to begin with—the lower castes and out-castes—and the questions that daily confronted them. The questions of those with little were not more materialist than those of the upper castes. But they sprang from a different material situation: a materialism of overcoming lack more than a materialism of justifying excess. Nor were they less idealist.18 Rather, their ideals formed in response to different conceptions and motivations of other, self, and us: the pleasures and obligations of kinship more than the aspirations and satisfactions of class and caste.

Plus, a sharp conflict among the upper castes shouts out from the annals of the period. It seems pretty plain that the Brahmins and the Kshatriyas, the two topmost castes, were not very happy with each other. Why should the priests be more important than the rulers, the Kshatriya seemed to have been asking? Why should they control religion and the income from sacrifices? Besides, the state and the increase in commerce associated with coined money, empire building, and better record keeping was leading to new bases of wealth largely controlled by the Kshatriyas and Vaishyas. The power of the Brahmins was growing increasingly shaky.

At least, it is hard to account any other way for the fact that both Vardhama and Siddhartha were Kshatriyas, and that their teachings directly confront Brahmin power. They advocate against sacrifices. They deemphasize the worship of the traditional Vedic divinities. They speak strongly against caste privilege. Which opens up another potential reading of Ashoka’s astonishingly forceful embrace of the sanctity of Buddhist dharma: Ashoka, too, was not a Brahmin, for he was an emperor, not a priest.¹⁹ Advocating for Buddhism (or at least his own vision of Buddhism) would have helped him centralize authority by stripping the Brahmins of their religious privilege, and a major source of their income.

Brahmins of the time certainly must have noticed that, in the minds of some, they were, well, on notice.

Whether or not he had these politics in mind, a thinker who seems to have lived in the third century BCE—one century after Ashoka, and two centuries after Vardhama and Siddhartha—had some religious insights that spoke strongly to the concerns of Brahmins, while not neglecting the concerns of the other upper castes as well as those of the great mass of people still living agrarian lives.²⁰ Vyasa was his name. He was more of a traditionalist than Vardhamma and Siddhartha, and he sought a way to reframe Vedic ideas to respond to the new concerns that many people were increasingly worried about, without losing touch with the concerns of the agrarian majority. The result was one of the central texts of the exuberant religious tradition we have come to call Hinduism: the Mahabharata, an epic epic—a poem with over two hundred thousand verses, about four times as long as the Bible. Vyasa appears to have begun it in about 300 BCE, and others developed and refined it through to about 300 CE.21

The historicity of Vyasa is pretty uncertain. The Mahabharata itself is the main source we have on him. We have no independent records. Vyasa shows up as a character in the epic, the grandfather of two of the main protagonists. The Mahabharata also attributes its composition to him. But the Mahabharata says he isn’t the one who wrote it down. Rather, Vyasa dictated it to the god Ganesha.²² It may seem odd that a god would serve as Vyasa’s scribe, but the Mahabharata also describes Vyasa as an incarnation of the god Krishna. Here we encounter a prominent characteristic of Hindu traditions: delight in a highly fluid and interactive conception of the relationship between the human and the divine.

As a result, Vyasa comes down to us shrouded in some mystery. It is generally difficult to divine a historical figure from religious accounts, as with the Buddha and with Jesus, due to a lack of much in the way of independent sources. But most observers have felt that the Mahabharata does describe a main author who actually lived, at about the time linguistic and historical evidence suggests the Mahabharata began to be composed.

And what a life. Take the Mahabharata’s wild account of Vyasa’s birth—an account that resonates well with the theological content of the epic, and its social circumstances. Vyasa’s father, we are told, is Parasara, a great Brahmin sage to whom is attributed a work of astrology that remains part of the Hindu canon today.²³ But his mother, we are also told, is Satyavati, the daughter of a fisherman and therefore a Shudra, the lowest caste. Except she wasn’t. And she was a virgin mother. Except she wasn’t. The Mahabharata is like that.

Here’s the story. A king goes out hunting one day at the command of the spirits of his ancestors. He is annoyed by this command, as his wife has just finished her menstrual course and so is “now in her season.”²⁴ But he goes anyway, for one should not disobey the ancestors. He sees a beautiful tree in the forest and it reminds him of his beautiful wife. He masturbates and asks a hawk to carry his semen back to his wife. But the hawk drops some of the semen into a river where a female demon, who had been transformed into a fish, swallows it. A fisherman, who is also the local chief, catches the fish demon, cuts her open, and finds Satyavati—Vyasa’s mother—and her twin brother inside. He brings them both to the king, who adopts the boy (who is actually the king’s son) and gives Satyavati (who is actually the king’s daughter) to the fisherman to adopt. The fisherman raises her, and Satyavati grows up into a beautiful woman—although she smells badly of fish.

Then one day, the sage Parasara travels through the area, sees Satyavati, and is instantly consumed with lust for her. Satyavati is interested in having sex with Parasara, but she worries about the consequences for her reputation. So she agrees only if no one sees and only if Parasara uses his special powers as a rishi to restore her virginity—and to cure her fishy smell. Parasara assents to these requirements. Satyavati instantly becomes sweet smelling, and they go out to an island in the river, which Parasara obscures with a great fog. They have sex, Parasara restores Satyavati’s virginity, and later that day, while still out on the island, she gives birth to Vyasa.25

This is a story with many sides, to say the least—and with many crossings. Male and female cross. Lust and chastity cross. People and animals cross. Animals and demons cross. Humans and divinities cross. Upper caste and lower caste cross, each sanctifying the other. Plus, as if to drive the point metaphorically home, Vyasa is conceived and born on an island, a place in the middle of this constantly flowing story with its many shores and borders, a nexus between them all.²⁶

The messy entanglement of nature, faith, and the human. A frank accounting of sexual desire and its own messy entanglements. Equal honoring of the lofty and the lowly, with no evident concern for the problems of wealth inequality. In short, we are not yet in a bourgeois zone of faith.

Many, many more crossings follow. Vyasa’s birth is only one small, early episode in his monumental saga: just forty-seven verses in the first of eighteen books. The full sweep of the Mahabharata recounts the story of the war between two groups of cousins, the Kauravas and Pandavas. Both vied for the leadership of the ancient Vedic kingdom of Kuru, a major political power around 1000 BCE. Some historians regard Kuru as the first true state in the Indian sub-continent—the first true mahajanapada—and not just a city-state like the power centers of the Indus Valley Civilization. Its territory lay in the north-central zone of the Indo-Gangetic Plain, with its capital near present-day Delhi.

By the time Vyasa wrote, Kuru had declined considerably in importance. But tales of this epic conflict persisted in part because similar politics persisted. Although Kuru itself had diminished, the development of city-states into genuine states into massive empires continued on, driven by militarism and accumulation. Coined money had reached the Indian subcontinent by the 5th century BCE. The fortunes of fortunes rose and fell, as they do, but on the whole steadily rose. The conflicts of wealth, caste, kin, and sex that troubled Siddhartha and Mahavira burned hotter and hotter. But rather than seeking a wholesale revamp of the moral vocabulary of tradition, as the Buddhists and Jains were attempting, Vyasa apparently saw the continuing currency of these old tales as a potentially more popular way to speak to the big questions of his day, most compellingly in a seven-hundred-verse section of the Mahabharata called the Bhagavad Gita, the “Song of the Lord,” that occurs just as the war between the Kauravas and Pandavas begins.

A game of dice gone bad sets the war into motion. There’s a lurid backstory, though, that carries on from Vyasa’s birth. Vyasa’s mother Satyavati never tells anyone about him, and, her virginity restored, she later marries the king of Kuru after he visits the region on a hunting trip and is overcome by her newly sweet scent. The king dies and their son (that would be Vyasa’s half-brother) becomes king. But the son quickly dies too, without an heir, although he did have two wives. So Satyavati calls on her secret son Vyasa to perform niyoga—designated sex with a woman whose husband has died without a child, or can’t conceive—with her other son’s two wives. Vyasa complies. Then he uses his special powers as a yogi to transfer the paternity of the two resulting sons to his dead half-brother, making them the legitimate heirs to the kingdom of Kuru. The older son is Dhritarashtra, progenitor of the Kauravas, and the younger is Pandu, from whom descend the Pandavas.

Still with me? We’re getting closer to the dice game that started the war.

The trouble is, Dhritarashtra is blind, so he agrees that his younger brother Pandu ought to become king, the better to lead the armies of Kuru. But one day, the new King Pandu is out hunting in the forest and he accidently shoots a rishi and his wife while they are having sex, mistaking them for deer. The dying rishi curses Pandu, declaring that he will die if he ever tries to have sex. Pandu is full of remorse, so he gives up his crown to Dhritarashtra, despite his blindness. Pandu lives in exile as a traveling ascetic—along with his two wives, Kunti and Madri, swearing off sex because of the curse, even though he does not yet have any children.

A sage grants Kunti a boon, however. She asks to have it fulfilled by giving birth to three sons, without an act of sex. She also extends her boon to Madri, who has two more sons, also without sex. Together, the five immaculately conceived sons are the Pandava princes. Pandu then dies when he forgets himself and tries to have sex with Madri.

The dice game? Coming right up now.

So then the five Pandava brothers decide they’ve had enough of exile and come back to Kuru to reclaim their royal rights from their uncle, the blind King Dhritarashtra. Tensions are high. King Dhritarashtra decides to divide the kingdom in two, giving one half to the eldest Pandava brother, Yudhishthira, to rule. Yudhishthira has a fondness for gambling, though, so Dhritarashtra challenges him to a game of dice in which each bets their half of the kingdom. Yudhishthira loses, and the Pandava princes are left with nothing.

It all goes downhill from there. Not even the peacemaking efforts of Lord Krishna, the avatar of Vishnu, god of preservation, can bring the two sides together. War is inevitable. Krishna offers to help both sides, saying they can choose either his personal help or the help of his army. The Kauravas choose Krishna’s army, while the Pandavas choose Krishna himself. Then the war—and the Bhagavad Gita, the most famous section of the Mahabharata, its bourgeois core—begins.

And then the war almost immediately stops. On the first day of fighting, the Bhagavad Gita creates a moment of considerable moral power when the Kauravas and Pandavas approach each other on the field of battle. As the two sides grow near enough to recognize each other’s faces, one of the Pandava princes feels a pang of doubt. Arjuna is his name, and he is a great and famous archer. One of the main tactics of fighting at the time was to put your best archers in a chariot where they could stand several feet above the opposition and shoot down into their advancing infantry. Arjuna is so good that he has the privilege of riding in the bright white chariot of Lord Krishna himself, with all his protective powers.

So the pang of doubt that Arjuna feels is not about winning or not. His doubt is his recognition that the men are the other side are men just like him. He sees that they are “teachers, fathers, and grandfathers, sons and grandsons, uncles, fathers-in-law, brothers-in-law, and other relatives.”27 They are even his cousins. He feels he cannot fight them and asks Lord Krishna to stop the battle before it begins:

Ah, my Lord! I crave not for victory, nor for kingdom, nor for pleasure. What were a kingdom or happiness or life to me, when those for whose sake I desire these things stand here about to sacrifice their property and their lives…. We are worthy of a nobler feat than to slaughter our relatives…. Lord! how can we be happy if we kill our kinsmen? Although these men, blinded by greed, see no guilt in destroying their kin or fighting against their friends, should not we, whose eyes are open, who consider it to be wrong to annihilate our house, turn away from so great a crime?²⁸

So Krishna moves his white chariot between the armies to stop the fighting. Arjuna drops his bow and a high bourgeois moment begins. As the armies wait, Krishna and Arjuna discuss the nature of the good. Krishna explains to Arjuna about the dangers of desire:

He attains peace who, giving up desire, moves through the world without aspiration, possessing nothing which he can call his own, and free from pride.29

In place of the attachments of desire that come from our senses and the material world, Krishna explains that Arjuna should practice attachments of a very different sort. He should “yoke” himself to right action, to devotion, to knowledge, and to meditation, four forms of the disciplining of the self known as yoga, which means “yoking.” Yoking to right action is karma yoga:

All honor to him whose mind controls his senses; for he is thereby beginning to practice Karma Yoga, the Path of Right Action, keeping himself always unattached [to the world of senses].³⁰

Plus there is bhakti yoga, the yoga of devotion; jnana yoga, the yoga of knowledge; and raja yoga, the yoga of meditation. In this way, Arjuna can discover the righteous order and law that it is his duty to follow: dharma. If he practices it well enough, the measure of his intentions and actions—his karma—might be good enough to escape samsara, the cycle of reincarnation. Arjuna will then finally be able to unite his soul, his atman, with brahman—the all-pervading reality that lies behind material nature, prakrti, which we experience through the desires of our senses. He might thereby escape prakrti’s third nature hold on his ambitions, the source of politics, and experience only the pure, egoless consciousness the Bhagavad Gita calls purusha.

What is Arjuna’s duty to dharma? He is an archer, a soldier. So his duty is to fight—not for personal gain or glory, but because of his yoking to his position in society. Yet, importantly, this yoking is not to his position within his lines of kinship. Indeed, Krishna’s whole explanation of karma and dharma comes in response to Arjuna’s doubt about whether he should fight against his relatives. Rather, it is his skill and his training as a Kshatriya—his skill and position in relationship to caste, class, state, and empire—that it is his duty to follow. But most especially his duty is to his skill and position in relationship to caste, which leads to his duty to class, state, and empire. As Lord Krishna says in the Bhagavad Gita’s most controversial passage, caste is a divine injunction. It is not an injunction made up by human society and all its politics, he maintains.

The system of four castes was created by Me,

According to the distribution of the qualities and their acts.

Although I am the creator of this,

Know Me to be the eternal non-doer.31

Caste, then, is not political, Lord Krishna relates. Is it not political because Krishna is not political. He does not do things. He is eternal, and he has no desires, no intentions, no taint of action. Thus neither will Arjuna, if he follows what Krishna says.

Actions do not taint Me;

I have no desire for the fruit of action;

Thus he who comprehends Me

Is not bound by actions.³²

The essential thing, Krishna explains, is for Arjuna to give up desire and thereby learn to act without politics, reaching perfection: a natural conscience of other, self, and community—of thee, me, and we.

Relinquishing egotism, force, arrogance,

Danger, anger, and possession of property;

Unselfish, tranquil,

He is fit for oneness with Brahman.³³

And Arjuna replies,

My delusion is destroyed and I have gained wisdom

Through Your grace, Krishna.

My doubts are gone.

I shall do as You command.³⁴

The Bhagavad Gita ends. Arjuna rejoins the war. The battle restarts.

The bourgeois vision of the Bhagavad Gita, then, is broadly similar to Buddhism, especially its focus on dharma and karma; on release from the cycle of samara through disciplined practice, thereby escaping the third nature pain of our ambitions; and on overcoming the commitments of kin ties. For both Buddhism and Hinduism, release from samsara is release from politics into the innocence of a natural conscience, finding the natural other in dharma, the natural me in karma, and the natural we in the social duties of disciplined practice. All one’s politics thereby become nonpolitical, for they are guided by that which is beyond politics.

They have important differences too, of course. Hinduism weights the political rightness of dharma more in terms of one’s moral and social duty, meaning what constitutes the right action of karma depends more heavily on one’s social position. Buddhism tends to see karma as being the same for everyone. In Hinduism, the sufferings of our position in life are mainly a matter of punishment for misdeeds in our past lives, which also prevent us from release from samsara. In Buddhism, the suffering we face in this life is more a matter of the enlightenment we have not yet achieved concerning release from desire, keeping us in the cycle of samsara. At the risk of oversimplification, we could say that samsara is more a stick in Hinduism and more a carrot in Buddhism—punishment to be avoided versus enlightenment to be gained. Still, this is all comfortably bourgeois, claiming the absolute good of the nonpolitical.

There is a lot more to Hinduism than the Bhagavad Gita, though. Its many traditions contain many surprises—what we might call bourgeois surprises, for they are only surprising from a bourgeois point of view. Hinduism’s many crossings of people, animals, spirits, gods, genders, emotions, and social statuses; its pleasure in stories that astonish with their complex plots and messy outcomes; and its frank and welcoming attitude toward sexual pleasure: these rhythms of the sacred jostle and ruffle against the more settled accounts of, say, Christianity or Buddhism. Hinduism is also famously polytheistic and poly-divine, while at same time finding a unity through all this diversity in the notion of brahman, the holistic spirit of the universe that runs within and behind everything, including the gods themselves. And as is typical of pagan, nature-before-nature traditions, there is a vibrant pluralism of the divine and semidivine that clangs and jangles with the difficulties of kin ties—even as Krishna recommends a non-kin-based path of karma and dharma for Arjuna. The Hindu gods are not isolated entities, with separate origins, unrelated to each other and to humans. They have families, with all the contentments and troubles that families give.

Take Ganesha, one of the most popular divinities in Hinduism today. Hindus turn to Ganesha for his special powers in helping people remove obstacles and make good beginnings, for his patronage of science and the arts, and for his role as god of wisdom and intellect. His life has had its share of tragedy, including death and resurrection. He is also the son of the supreme god Shiva, according to many Hindus, as well as also being born through an immaculate conception with no act of sex. To this extent, Ganesha fits within a broadly bourgeois religious imagination, resonating with the life stories of Jesus and the Buddha—albeit a polytheistic and poly-divine bourgeois imagination.

But there are plenty of surprises, too. Most obviously for anyone who knows his famous image, Ganesha has the head of an elephant, immediately attesting to a religious vision that crosses the natural and supernatural. He gets it shortly after his birth.35 The goddess Parvati takes a bath and asks her husband’s bull to make sure no one disturbs her. Yet when her husband Shiva comes home, the bull fails to stop him from intruding. So Parvati wipes some turmeric paste from her body, which she had been using to clean herself, and breathes life into it, creating Ganesha, so she can have someone more loyal guard her bath. Shiva is furious when he comes home during her next bath and Ganesha doesn’t let him pass. They fight and Shiva slices off Ganesha’s head, killing him. It is Parvati’s turn to be furious, and she begins to destroy all of creation in her anger. At this, Shiva relents and asks the god Brahma (not to be confused with brahman) to go get a replacement head. Brahma comes back with the head of the first being he happens to encounter: an elephant. Shiva puts it on Ganesha’s body, restores him to life, and declares him to be officially his son. Her son restored, Parvati stops destroying creation.

In addition to the crossing of nature and supernature, Ganesha’s birth story illustrates other nature-before-nature sensibilities in Hindu traditions. The gods are emotional and often caught up in the conflicts of domestic and sexual politics. And the gods are both male and female. Hindus generally revere a divine trinity, again somewhat like Christianity, known as the trimurti, the “three forms.” But most Hindus understand the three forms to be manifested by three male-female pairs of divinities: Brahma and Saraswati, the creators; Vishnu and Lakshmi, the preservers; and Shiva and Parvati, the destroyers and transformers. Some Hindu traditions emphasize the male manifestations more, as in Vaishnavism’s celebration of the power of Vishnu or as in Shaivism’s central worship of Shiva. But Shaktism, one of the largest branches of Hinduism, focuses most of all on the female manifestations, seeing them all as different forms of Devi, the great mother goddess. Smartism, the fourth major branch of Hinduism, more or less worships them all equally, while also elevating Ganesha and the sun god Surya to the same highest level of the divine, expanding the trimurti into five forms of the divine known as the panchayatana puja.³⁶

Hindu gods are often imperfect, another bourgeois surprise. Ganesha has a broken tusk, for example. He broke it off to serve as a pen when he wrote down the Mahabharata for Vyasa. Ganesha is also fat and jolly and loves to dance. Plus he’s funny looking—and there is nothing irreverent in saying so. Hindu tradition has no trouble laughing at, and with, the gods. A little laughter helps Hindus deal with what they see as an evident observation about the world: The gods are not necessarily good. Although the gods are often heroic and helpful—and some gods particularly so, like Vishnu, especially his avatars Krishna and Rama—many of them are as flawed and political as we humans are. The gods are just massively more powerful.

For Hindus, the divine also embodies and intervenes in nature and our ecological relations. The sun is the god Surya, riding across the sky in a chariot pulled by seven celestial horses, one for each color in the rainbow. Indra is the bellicose god of rain and thunder, and his bow is said to be the rainbow itself. Most Hindu gods have a vahana, or mount, that transports them wherever they need to go, and that they have special powers to control. Ganesha rides a rat, which he keeps in control with a snake. Shiva and Parvati ride Shiva’s bull. Lakshmi rides an elephant, and sometimes an owl. Ushas, the goddess of the dawn, rides a chariot pulled by seven red cows. It is not hard to see here a divine agroecology, controlling the forces of sustenance with which every farmer must daily contend.

Controversially, many Hindus maintain another tradition familiar to pagan, nature-before-nature religions: animal sacrifice, especially agricultural animals. Siddhartha, Mahavira, and Jesus banned animal sacrifice among their followers, and it disappeared from Judaism after the diaspora. But animal sacrifice continues today in some branches of Hinduism, especially in Nepal and Bali. Hindu worshippers typically sacrifice farm livestock such as buffalo, bulls, goats, and chickens. At Nepal’s vast festival for Gadhimai, the goddess of power, which takes place every five years, devotees slaughter thousands of animals—reputedly some quarter million or so at the 2009 festival, including about ten thousand water buffalo, which are widely domesticated in Asia.37 Many Hindus disagree with these practices, and animal rights activists campaign strongly against them. Most devout Hindus also engage in uncontroversial forms of sacrifice as part of their daily rituals: the practice of giving tarpana, a small offering to the gods and to one’s ancestors. Typical forms of tarpana include cow’s milk mixed with spices, a spoonful of sesame seeds, or even just a bit of water.

Hinduism, then, is a complex and varied religious tradition. Some have even argued that we would do better to speak of Hinduisms in the plural, rather than in the singular. Despite this complexity and variety, Hindus have long maintained a strong sense of unified identity across their many traditions, and their many manners of living, from agrarian to urban, pagan to bourgeois.38 Consider India, which has the largest population of Hindus. Some four hundred million people live in India’s cities. By no means do they all lead middle-class lives, but twenty-two million of them own cars, as of 2013, and several times more than that live in households that own cars. That’s a lot of people with access to private cars, roughly as many as in France. Meanwhile, some eight hundred million people in India continue to live agrarian lives, living mainly from subsistence agriculture. A notable achievement of Vyasa and other Hindu sages has been to divine a religious tradition that speaks across this variety, forging an alloy of the pagan and bourgeois.

By contrast, the Buddha himself and the initial forms that Buddhism took had little to say about this broader sweep of the human condition, contributing to its eventual decline in India. As Buddhism developed, it did find some ways—often, as I put it earlier, rather “shy” ways—to connect with pagan concerns and lives. Buddhism in some parts of Asia includes significant elements of polytheism, poly-divinity, and sustenance rituals, and also embraces side-by-side practice with more pagan and agrarian traditions, such as Shinto in Japan, as I mentioned.³⁹ But this broader connection came a bit late, and remains not as strong as in Hinduism. Pagan practices like ancestor veneration and animal sacrifice do not easily fit in a purely Buddhist frame.

Meanwhile, Hinduism “shyly” took on some elements of Buddhism, even coming to regard the Buddha as another incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu.⁴⁰ Consequently, notes Peter Harvey, there was “a dilution of the distinctiveness of Buddhism relative to the rising power of Hinduism.”⁴¹ Plus the implications of Hinduism’s greater comfort with caste hierarchy cannot have been missed by those in a position to be advantaged by it—and who were also those in a better position to shape its canon. Combined with the vagaries of elite politics over the millennia and Buddhist regions being more in the path of the twelfth-century Muslim invasions, Hinduism’s earlier and greater electrum appeal steadily edged Buddhism out in India.⁴²

Hinduism is indeed a complex and varied tradition. It is a complex and varied tradition for a complex and varied people.

“What the heck is this, Daddy?” Eleanor asked.

We were riding side by side on a plane from Chicago to Paris, a bourgeois moment (as all air travel is) amplified in this case by the privilege of Delta’s “economy comfort” seats. But although we had sprung an extra hundred bucks or so per seat for a bit of additional legroom, that privilege apparently didn’t apply to having an actual working video screen for Eleanor. No matter what she did, it persisted in showing the same movie.

“I don’t know, but it looks like fun.”

It was, even without sound. By comparing with my screen (which did work) we eventually figured out that we were watching Bajrangi Bhaijaana, a 2015 Bollywood movie with Bollywood’s biggest star, Salman Khan, in the lead role. The color and excitement of all the dance scenes was enough to hold our attention, despite the lack of music and dialogue. And it had English subtitles, so we were able to follow the plot.

A devout Brahmin man played by Khan gets unwillingly befriended by a six-year-old girl who cannot speak. Although he initially tries to avoid the girl, he eventually takes a shine to her, in part because he suspects she must also be a Brahmin, given her lighter brown skin tone. Khan’s character semi-adopts the girl while he tries to figure out who her parents are, despite the fact that she cannot speak and has no identity papers. Along the way, the movie finds occasion for one amazing scene after another of crowds dancing in the street to the Hindu gods, impelled by what we imagined were the catchy tunes and rhythms of Bollywood music. But eventually it emerges that the girl must be a Muslim from Pakistan. The characters watch a televised sports match between Pakistan and India, and the girl starts cheering for Pakistan. And she happily wanders off into nearby Muslim homes a couple of times, leading Khan’s character to panic until he finds her. All this is a shock to Khan and his friends. Undaunted, he decides to try to take her back to Pakistan to find her mother, which in the end he does, despite many misadventures. Eventually he comes to be seen as a hero to both Pakistan and India.

In real life, Khan himself has a Muslim father and a Hindu mother, and often describes himself as both Hindu and Muslim. Pretty much everyone in South Asia knows this, and it helps the film ask its viewers to reflect on some important basic facts of social life. There may be almost no Buddhists in India today, but there are a huge number of Muslims—enough that India ranks as the third largest Muslim country in the world. India’s neighbors to the east and west, Bangladesh and Pakistan, are dominantly Muslim but have two of the world’s largest populations of Hindus. Bangladesh has the third largest, and Pakistan has the fifth largest. There have been long-standing tensions between and within these three countries over this. Let’s overcome it all, is the movie’s point.

For sure.

Besides, for all their differences, Islam and Hinduism have a similarly electrum sheen. Islam’s alloy, though, was forged in a remarkably short period of time in the midst of a striking social and political opening.

The early seventh century CE was not a calm time to be living in the Arabian Peninsula. The Sasanian Empire to the east clashed its ambitions against the Byzantine Empire to the west, with Arabia caught in between. It was an old fight. The Sasanians were the descendants of the Persian Empire and the Byzantines the Roman, and they had been at each other’s throats on and off for hundreds of years. The period between 602 and 628 was particularly bloody, both on the battlefield and in the golden halls of the elite. Murders. Executions. Breakaway factions. Armies and navies sweeping this way and that. Finally, in 628, both sides collapsed in mutual exhaustion, destruction, and impoverishment.

The peoples of the Arabian Peninsula didn’t know which way to turn. They enjoyed a measure of independence from both Byzantium and the Sasanians, but only by means of careful diplomacy, aided by their protective shield of sand and water on most sides. The various Arabian tribes were guessing differently about the constantly changing best bets as to whom to side with, and often guessing wrong. They weren’t getting along very well with each other, either. There was no central authority over the Arabian Peninsula’s roughly one million square miles. Plus the tribes were constantly on the move, hunting water and forage for their sheep and their camels. Misunderstandings and conflicts were common. It didn’t help that the tribes also made it a point of pride and wealth to raid each other’s livestock.43

Another source of conflict was also on the rise: social class. It takes special skills to navigate the sands of the Mideast deserts. One could move the increasing flow of commerce between east and west through the oceans, but the boats of the time were small, slow, and hard to control. One could attempt a northern land route, but Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran are really quite staggeringly mountainous. And one could use the old solution of countless armies and follow the Euphrates to where it nearly meets with the Mediterranean, but that took a long time and meant having to pass right through the zone of Byzantine and Sasanian conflict, presenting a dicey challenge to the merchant eager to avoid local taxes, bandits, and half-starved armies. Another common means, then, was to draw on those special desert skills and sell through the Arabians, with their caravans of camels. The result was that Arabia’s few urban centers were flush and flourishing, especially Mecca, the center of the caravan trade. Inequality was rising dramatically. The carefully crafted ties of kin and tribe, always at issue, were fraying even more.

One Meccan man was particularly troubled by the consequences for Arabian society. He was a well-regarded merchant himself. He had been orphaned at a young age and so didn’t get much starter capital from his own family. But people admired his trustworthy character, rather rare for the caravan trade. He became particularly established in the trade route to the Mediterranean Sea, where he came into closer contact with the cultures of that region. A wealthy widow named Khadija learned of his reputation and hired him to run her caravan business.44 He turned out to be very good at it. They also turned out to be very good for each other, and after a short time they married. Most sources say she proposed to him, rather than the other way around.⁴⁵ After all he was just twenty-five at the time and she was forty, in addition to her being his boss. Plus this was her third marriage. Khadija already had three children, and the two of them went on to have six more together. All the sources agree that Khadija and her new husband, who was named Muhammad, loved each other very dearly.

But although his own life was good, Muhammad found the times disturbing. He had been having a lot of perplexing dreams and had taken to climbing a mountain just outside of Mecca, praying alone in a small cave about a third of the way up, hoping to clear his mind and gain perspective on the many tensions of life in Mecca. One night in 610 CE, he reported having a remarkable experience. The angel Gabriel suddenly appeared in the cave and said to him, “Recite!”⁴⁶ The startled Muhammad replied that he didn’t know what to recite. The angel repeated the command two more times, until finally Muhammad found himself speaking the lines now included as Sura 96—the 96th chapter—in the Qur’an, Islam’s holiest scripture (also sometimes rendered in English as the Koran or the Quran). Indeed, the name Qur’an means “the recitation.”

At first Muhammad thought he must be going crazy, or that he was possessed by a demon. The angel Gabriel reappeared and told him, no, he had been chosen to be God’s messenger in these troubled times. Muhammad talked to Khadija about it. She reassured him that he really had been visited by the angel Gabriel. Tradition therefore considers her the first convert to the religion that Muhammad found himself articulating, the religion of Islam, those who “submit” to the will of God. They then went to see Khadija’s cousin Waraqa—a Christian, in fact. He agreed that Muhammad’s recitations really were divinely inspired.⁴⁷ Slowly at first, others came to agree as well. Now a billion and a half do, making Islam the second largest religion in the world, after Christianity.

Muhammad’s religious vision differed dramatically from that of most Arabs of the time, although we don’t know many details of those older customs. Early adherents to Islam thoroughly destroyed most of the evidence, from texts to temples. Scholars have sorted through a few hints and stories in the Qur’an and other sources, especially The Book of the Idols, a manuscript by the early Arabian historian Hisham Ibn Al-Kalbi, written about 800 CE. The Book of Idols barely survived. A century ago, a collector picked up the only known full copy at an auction in Damascus. It’s treasure for the historian, but tarnished treasure, for its standards of history aren’t exactly those of today. So there’s plenty of disagreement about the finer points of what people believed and practiced during the period Muslims call Jahiliyah, meaning the “days of ignorance.” Still, we have a rough idea.

Not surprisingly, given their manner of life, the Arabian tribes mainly followed a range of nature-before-nature traditions. I say “mainly followed” because several of the tribes were Jewish, and Judaism by that time had already changed greatly from the pagan monotheism of the Hebrew Bible. Muhammad even had a Jewish wife, Safiyya—daughter of the chief of the Banu Nadir, one of the three known Jewish Arabian tribes—who converted to Islam. I’m getting ahead of the story a bit, but after Khadija died at about age sixty-five, concluding her twenty-five-year monogamous marriage to Muhammad, he married many other women, polygyny being customary for male leaders of the time. Accounts of the number of Muhammad’s wives vary from eleven all the way up to nineteen.48 (Part of the disagreement is what constituted a wife versus a concubine, and how that distinction relates to contemporary understandings of marriage.) Another of Muhammad’s wives or concubines (depending on your point of view) was Maria, an Egyptian Christian, who also converted to Islam.

But although some were Jews and Christians, most of the Arab tribes had a polytheistic, poly-divine vision of a spirited world, moved by many gods, both male and female, as well as genies and ancestors, immanent in specific places and objects, and manifesting the uncertain and vital powers of ecological sustenance and what we now typically call nature. The tribes often diverged on the specifics, though. They were neither a politically nor religiously unified people. Given the mere shards of history that have come down to us, much of the scholarly confusion about pre-Islamic religious practices among the Arabs reflects this variation. Indeed, the notion of a unified and unchanging faith is anachronistic. It’s something we bourgeois moderns often search for among pagan peoples and peoples of the past, feeling that a religious mentality always strives for systematic coherence, because ours does.

One point of confusion is over who was the lead god for most of the pre-Islamic Arab tribes: Allah or Hubal. In Muhammad’s time, Hubal had pride of place inside the Masjid al-Haram, the Great Mosque of Mecca, where worshippers would cast his seven divination arrows to make difficult and important decisions.49 At the center of the Great Mosque is a small cubic building, roughly forty feet on a side, built of dark granite blocks, and covered with a rich dark cloth. Muslims call it the Kaaba, and it is reputed to have been built by Abraham and his son Ishmael on the precise spot where Adam and Eve themselves had built the very first shrine to God. Some believe the Gates of Heaven lie in the sky directly above the Kaaba. Ishmael and his mother Hagar are said to be buried there. It’s the holiest spot in Islam. But the Kaaba, which had been built several centuries before Muhammad’s day, was then the shrine to Hubal. His idol stood inside, carved of red agate with a gold right hand. The Quraysh, the wealthiest Arab tribe, had placed the statue there.⁵⁰ Outside the Kaaba stood idols to many other divinities, apparently less powerful ones—as many as 360.⁵¹ One of those idols was for the divinity called Allah, whose name simply means “the God.”⁵²

But some sources describe Allah as head of the pantheon, and more important than Hubal, even though Hubal’s idol was inside the Kaaba. Certainly, the name “the God” seems rather maximally grand. As well, The Book of Idols and other records describe Allah as having three daughters during the Jahiliyah days, all of whom had idols at the Kaaba, and all of whom had popular shrines of their own: Manah, Allat, and Al-’Uzza. Manah seems to have been some kind of sea goddess, and her shrine at the coastline was a popular pilgrimage site.⁵³ Allat’s shrine, on the other hand, was at Ta’if, a city in the mountains east of Mecca, where she was worshipped in the form of a cubic rock, tended by a Jewish priest who used to make a barley porridge in her honor.⁵⁴ (Some Arab Jews evidently did not observe a sharp line between monotheistic and polytheistic practice.) Perhaps Allat was an agricultural goddess, given the ritual of barley porridge. We don’t really know. Her name, however, means simply “the Goddess,” suggesting that that she may have originally been Allah’s consort—or maybe the sources have confused Allah’s consort for a daughter.⁵⁵ The importance of her cult seems to have declined, however.⁵⁶ By the time of Muhammad, the most powerful goddess was Al-’Uzza, goddess of love and chastity.⁵⁷ Her shrine was also to the east of Mecca, on the way to Ta’if. She inhabited three sacred trees there, and her shrine was also the site of an oracle. The Arab tribes would offer Al-’Uzza gifts and sacrifices, and ask her to intercede on their behalf with her father, Allah.⁵⁸

Whether Hubal or Allah was the head god, one thing is sure: the name Allah definitely predates Muhammad. In fact, Muhammad’s father was Abdullah, meaning “worshipper of Allah” or “servant of Allah.” Perhaps what we are seeing dimly through the dust was actually in part a tribal dispute over whether Hubal or Allah was the head god. There’s a powerful story that suggests social conflicts that aligned with these two gods. Muhammad’s grandfather needed to fulfill a vow by sacrificing one of his own children to Hubal, and went to the Kaaba to cast Hubal’s divination arrows.59 When the arrows pointed at Abdullah, Muhammad’s grandfather refused to comply, and reportedly sacrificed a hundred camels instead—a huge expense. Hubal and his cult could not have been a family favorite after that, and quite possibly already wasn’t, but nonetheless associated with social factions that were hard to contest. Thus, it may have been a pointed choice that Muhammad’s father had been named “worshipper of Allah.”

Whatever the backstory—all human lives have backstories—Muhammad himself was clear that there was only one true God, and that the proper Arabic name to use to refer to him was Allah, not Hubal. He kept experiencing revelations from God for twenty-two years, reciting them to others, who memorized them and also wrote them down.⁶⁰ Within a very few years of Muhammad’s death in 632, scholars assembled complete versions of the Qur’an, and agreed on a standardized version in 650.

The result is widely regarded as a literary masterpiece, aside from its theological significance. The language is often quite memorable and beautiful, and perhaps even more so in the original Arabic, which I cannot read. (Many Muslims contend that the Qur’an can truly be comprehended only in the original Arabic.) But rather than focusing on telling grand stories about notable personages and events, the Qur’an primarily rallies the believers, gives accounts of God’s majesty, and sets down strictures on what one should do and should not do. Most of it reads more like Leviticus and Psalms than Genesis and Chronicles, more like the Letters of Paul than the Four Gospels, more like the Bhagavad Gita than the rest of the Mahabharata. Any stories are usually pretty short.

Muslims also gain counsel and instruction from the second great foundation of Islamic thought: the Sunnah—the customary practices of the Muslim community, based largely on how the Prophet lived his life. Most important are hadith: short sayings and descriptions of Muhammad that people remembered after his death, which have been gathered together into different collections by the various branches of Islam. The term Sunnah derives from the Arabic for “path” or “practice.” It’s a very appropriate metaphor. A helping hand on either side, the Sunnah and the Qur’an guide Muslims along what the Qur’an calls the “straight path” to a life of virtue—to a natural me cleansed of the micro- and macro-politics of personal ambition.61

More than anything else, those helping hands on that straight path lead the Muslim through the troublesome concerns of an increasingly urban and bourgeois life. Most of Islam’s main “pillars,” as Muslims like to call their faith’s central principles, resonate with the themes of bourgeois faith—not surprisingly, perhaps, given that the Qur’an positions itself within the Abrahamic tradition.⁶² Indeed, in Islam’s own view, it is as old as any other Abrahamic faith. It sees itself as the unifier of the Abrahamic tradition, not a new division of it. A constant theme of the Qur’an is the connection of its revelations with those of both the Old Testament and the New Testament, from Adam and Eve to Abraham to Moses to Jesus—as well as Noah, Lot, Isaac, Jacob, Ishmael, and Mary, all of whom often appear in the Qur’an.⁶³ Jesus gets 25 mentions. Adam gets 26. Abraham gets 71. Moses gets 171.⁶⁴ And many Bible stories get a mention in the Qur’an, albeit often with significant differences and generally in considerably shortened form. As the Qur’an says of believers in Islam,

We believe in God and that which has been revealed to us; in what was revealed to Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob, and the tribes; to Moses and Jesus and the other prophets by their Lord. We make no distinction among any of them, and to Him we submit.⁶⁵

To this ancient tradition the Qur’an adds the revelations of an additional prophet, Muhammad. One of the constant themes of his revelations are the bourgeois troubles of excess and material desire that divert people from fitra, the purity of our natural constitution at birth—the innocence and harmony with God we have at the moment of our creation. (Fitra literally means “creation,” similar to the Greek and Latin for nature, physis and natura, which derive from the root words for being “born.”)⁶⁶ But social life, combined with how Iblis—also known as Shaytan, the Arabic term for Satan—plays on our free will, easily leads us away from God and into selfish material desires, the Qur’an contends.

By the charging steeds that pant and strike sparks with their hooves, who make dawn raids, raising a cloud of dust, and plunging into the midst of the enemy, man is ungrateful to his Lord—and He is witness to this—he is truly excessive in his love of wealth.⁶⁷

The Qur’an sternly warns its readers about the consequences of this excess.

Woe to every fault-finding backbiter who amasses riches, counting them over, thinking they will make him live forever. No indeed! He will be thrust into the Crusher! What will explain to you what the Crusher is? It is God’s Fire, made to blaze, which rises over people’s hearts. It closes in on them in towering columns.68

Rather, the Qur’an commands the believer to give alms.

Believers, do not let your wealth and your children distract you from remembering God: those who do so will be the ones who lose. Give out of what We have provided for you, before death comes to one of you.⁶⁹

In this way one can be saved from the fires of Hell.

The most pious one will be spared this [Hellfire]—who gives his wealth away as self-purification, not to return a favour to anyone but for the sake of his Lord the Most High—and he will be well pleased.⁷⁰

Another of the Qur’an’s strongly bourgeois themes is tawhid, the Islamic conviction that God is one, indivisible and universal. The Qur’an sees tawhid as a point of difference with Christianity. “Do not speak of a ‘Trinity,’ ” the Qur’an reads. “God is only one God, He is far above having a son, everything in the heavens and earth belongs to Him.”⁷¹ The Qur’an also does not use the image of God as a “father,” and most Muslims argue that God has no gender.⁷² Arabic requires a gender assignment, though; there is no neutral pronoun form. One might inquire why, if a choice has to be made, the Qur’an goes with masculine pronouns for God. But so, too, do Judaism and Christianity. And by not carrying a masculine image of God into a conceptualization of god as father, Muslims contend Islam is the more monotheistic, for a father implies children, which implies that the divine is not only one. I’ll let the Muslim and Christian theologians argue out (if they desire) whether this is a difference in degree or form of monotheism. But I will note that Islam embraces the notion of angels and devils, including Shaytan. It does accept the existence of other spirits, some of which, like the angel Gabriel, are accorded at least semidivine status. But again, so do the other Abrahamic faiths.

Tawhid helps enable another of Islam’s constant refrains: the unity of believers. One god, one people; one people, one god. Here again, Islam resonates with the other Abrahamic and bourgeois religions in the development of what I earlier called quasi-kinship, a sense of kin-like ties that people feel cut across actual traceable blood relations—but a divinely sanctioned quasi-kinship, a natural we rooted in the goodness of the grace of God, yielding a community of the good. “You are all part of the same family,” the Qur’an suggests, so

[h]old fast to God’s rope all together; do not split into factions. Remember God’s favour to you: you were enemies and then He brought your hearts together and you became brothers by His grace.73

This feeling of family and brotherhood even among those who are not blood relations the Qur’an calls the ummah, the community of believers. At times, the Qur’an includes Judaism and Christianity—those it calls the “people of the book”—in the ummah, in line with Islam’s vision of itself as the unifier of the Abrahamic tradition. But generally in the later sections of the Qur’an, the ummah is only the community of Muslims. As well, the Qur’an places considerable emphasis on the difference between “believers” and “disbelievers,” and the need for believers to hold together.

The Qur’an encourages that holding together through a sharply bivalent conception of God’s attitude toward the doings of people. God is merciful, the Qur’an frequently reassures, but often warns as well that “God is strong and severe in His punishment.”⁷⁴ Similarly, the Qur’an cautions, “Who could be more wrong than someone who rejects God’s revelations and turns away from them? We shall repay those who turn away with a painful punishment.”⁷⁵ And it also puts the two points together, writing that “your Lord is swift in punishment, yet He is most forgiving and merciful.”⁷⁶ Punishment and mercy are two of the most common words in the Qur’an.⁷⁷ Yet this too is familiarly bourgeois. Both the Old and New Testaments show plenty of the same ambivalence, and the concept of karma’s effects on samsara plays a similar moral role in the Brahmanic traditions.

This tough love incentive to follow a straight path affords considerable power to whoever articulates the rules. In the case of Christianity and Buddhism, it is Jesus and the Buddha. In the case of Islam, it is the Prophet Muhammad, God’s messenger. “Whoever obeys the Messenger obeys God,” the Qur’an counsels.⁷⁸ “Obey God and His Messenger if you are true believers,” it later reminds its readers.⁷⁹ Quite obviously, Muhammad was, and is, accorded huge authority and honor by his followers. As with Jesus and the Buddha, followers retain enormous interest in even the smallest detail of how Muhammad led his life—his habits, his beliefs, his history—seeking guidance and giving obeisance.

There is more than a whiff of hierarchy here. It’s the smell of the political in the natural conscience. In the case of Muhammad and his followers, those politics led to the establishment of the first Arabian state, with Muhammad as leader of both the faith and the government. He was also the military leader—apparently, quite a brilliant one—during the struggle of the Muslims with the disbelievers, who were mainly led by the Quraysh tribal authorities in Mecca, home of the Great Mosque and the Kaaba. Simultaneously head of the faith, government, and military, he was pretty much as powerful as a person can be.

This power and authority did not come easily. A few years after Muhammad’s revelations began, he started to preach openly about the form of faith his recitations described. The Quraysh authorities were not amused and persecuted many of the early converts to Islam, including killing a slave woman owned by a Quraysh leader. (Not surprisingly, given its bourgeois concerns about wealth and power, many slaves were early on attracted to Islam.) Initially, Muhammad was protected by his clan ties and his wife Khadija’s wealth and status. But Khadija died in 619, and so too did Muhammad’s uncle, the leader of Muhammad’s sub-clan of the Quraysh, the Banu Hashim. The next leader of the Banu Hashim was no friend of Muhammad and Islam, and withdrew the clan’s protection. In 622, having heard about an assassination plot, Muhammad made his famous Hijrah, his migration north two hundred miles to the city then called Yathrib, and soon renamed Madinat an-Nabi, the “city of the Prophet,” or Medina for short, as it is still called to this day. Many of his followers soon followed.

Muhammad seems to have realized at this time, if not earlier, that he could not establish a religion on its own. Islam would not survive without political protection. But there was no state he could turn to for support, for there was no Arabian state, and the neighboring Byzantine and the Sasanian empires were imploding. So he decided to establish one.

Muhammad went about state building in a remarkable way. One of his first acts was to establish the Ṣahifat al-Madinah, the Charter of Medina, what is often regarded as the first written constitution anywhere. The charter commits the nine Arab tribes then in Medina to act as one ummah—together with local Jews, who were quite numerous in Medina. The Jews had to follow the political lead of the Muslims, but were otherwise free to practice their own faith in their own way given that, as the charter put it, the Jews “have their religion and the Muslims have theirs.”80 The agreement with the Jews soon fell apart, though, and they switched to supporting the Quraysh in Mecca. The ummah of the Muslims persisted nonetheless, and they battled the Quraysh, the other pagan Arab tribes, and the Jews for the next eight years, with Muhammad as their general. Usually they won, including surviving a siege of Medina in which they were greatly outnumbered. Finally, in 630, Muhammad led about ten thousand Muslims into Mecca and took the city, promptly destroying all the idols in the Great Mosque and elsewhere, and rededicating the Kaaba solely to the worship of Allah. Within two years, the entire rest of the Arabian Peninsula had surrendered to Muhammad’s authority, and most had professed conversion to Islam. A new religious tradition and a new state had been established, both headed by Muhammad.81

These were commanding politics. But the Qur’an had an answer for those who grumbled that this was all a power play on the part of Muhammad—essentially the same answer that Christianity gave for Jesus’s assumption of a leadership position, and that Buddhism gave for the Buddha’s. Although there were clear political implications in Muhammad’s mission, it was not driven by politics, the Qur’an contends, for the origin of that mission lay outside the human. Rather, it sprang from the absolute goodness—the natural conscience—of the will of God. Muhammad was the messenger, the Prophet, not the author of Islam and the words of the Qur’an. He only recited the Qur’an, articulating what was revealed to him. He didn’t write it. People used to ask Muhammad to “Bring [us] a different Qur’an, or change it,” the Qur’an reports. Here’s Muhammad’s reply:

It is not for me to change it of my own accord; I only follow what is revealed to me, for I fear the torment of an awesome Day, if I were to disobey my Lord.… If God had so willed, I would not have recited it to you, nor would He have made it known to you.⁸²

Besides, there is nothing special about me, he would say. “I am only a human being, like you, to whom it has been revealed that your God is One.”⁸³ And he would point out the parallels of his own situation with that of prophets who had come before him, from Abraham and Moses to Jesus. “Alas for human beings! Whenever a messenger comes to them they ridicule him.”⁸⁴ He was just doing his duty, “so obey God and the Messenger. If you turn away, remember that Our Messenger’s duty is only to make plain his message.”⁸⁵

His duty done and the natural we of the ummah set well into motion, on June 8, 632, he rested his head on the lap of his wife Aisha, and died.

However early Muslims may have conceived their motives, Islam stands out in having a close relationship with state and empire almost from the start. Christianity, New Judaism, Gnosticism, Buddhism, and Jainism all begin as reactions against state and empire. Christianity and Buddhism—through later politics that might well have surprised and upset their founders—eventually became embraced by the very empires they contested, gaining a mighty boost. New Judaism, Gnosticism, and Jainism never gained such support, and remain far smaller traditions today. Hinduism seems to have had a more ambivalent political birth, being neither anti-empire nor immediately embraced by empire, although in time it was, leading to its own governmental boost.86

At the time of Muhammad’s death, Islam had the support of only a state, not an empire. But that was shortly to change. Arabian power swept across an astonishingly large territory at astounding speed. The Sasanian-Byzantine War had just ended in 628, and neither side could muster up much resistance, their armies and treasuries depleted by decades of fighting. By 637, led by some of Muhammad’s former comrades in arms, Arab armies had taken Syria from the Byzantines and Iraq from the Sasanians. By 642, they had conquered Palestine and Egypt and broken the back of the entire Sasanian Empire, although it took another ten years before the Arabs had complete control of it. Over the next hundred years, they worked their way north into Anatolia, west over all of North Africa and up into Spain, and east into Afghanistan and Pakistan. At fifteen million square kilometers, the Arabian Empire had become the largest empire yet—topping even the Roman Empire and the Alexandrian Empire.⁸⁷

Although the Arabian Empire spread rapidly, its Islamic core shortly underwent a major schism, a schism that is very much with us still today: Shia versus Sunni. Despite any religious allegiances, empires are all about ambition and bring conflict along with attempts to impose unity. In the Arabian Empire, the divisiveness of unity manifested in a dispute over who was the rightful successor of Muhammad, and thus also a debate over the rightful way for the successor to be chosen. One faction supported Abu Bakr, the father of Aisha, Muhammad’s favorite wife among those he married after the death of Khadija. Another faction supported Ali Ibn Abi Talib, Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law, married to Fatimah, Muhammad’s only surviving child and daughter of Khadija. The idea that a woman would succeed Muhammad was not socially tenable at the time. Neither Aisha nor Fatimah was championed to take over, but rather a man closely connected to them. Yet neither of those men had a claim that commanded a clear consensus. Which was better, being Muhammad’s father-in-law or being his cousin and son-in-law? Abu Bakr and Ali were both from Muhammad’s tribe, the Quraysh. But they were from different clans, which didn’t help with consensus building. In the turmoil that followed, the supporters of Ali came to call themselves the Shia, an abbreviation of Shiatu Ali, meaning the “followers of Ali.” Those who regard Abu Bakr as the rightful successor of Muhammad came to call themselves the Sunni, the followers of the Sunnah, the “path” that leads from Muhammad’s teachings.

Things got bloody fast. Abu Bakr won out initially and became widely regarded as what the Sunni call the kalifat Allah, the caliph, meaning “deputy of God.” Abu Bakr even died a natural death. But he ruled for only two years. The next two men to control the caliphate, Umar and Uthman, were both assassinated. Ali finally was elected to serve in 656, making him the fourth caliph in the reckoning of the Sunni and the first true successor of Muhammad in the reckoning of the Shia, who use the term “imam” (which simply means “leader”) instead of “caliph.” But then, five years later, he too was assassinated. Much blood continues to flow from this gash in the natural we of the ummah.

Despite the contentiousness at the top, huge numbers of people in the conquered regions converted to Islam, many willingly. And not surprisingly: the direction of the new tide of power was clear enough, even if there was some significant oscillation at its gravitational center. Jews and Christians were not required to convert. As “People of the Book,” they enjoyed a somewhat protected status, as long as they paid their taxes and did not dispute Arab political control. Still, those were big caveats. The political incentive to convert was strong. Islam gained great social advantage through its association with a vast empire, as had Christianity, Buddhism, and Hinduism.

Conversion to Islam was not only a matter of advantage, though. (Nor was it for other traditions that gained imperial support.) Islam also spread because a great many people both learned about it and found it spiritually appealing. Most of those who took up Islam, however, could hardly be described as following bourgeois rhythms of life. Few areas conquered by the Arabian Empire were highly urbanized. These were mainly rural peoples. Rather, Islam’s appeal rested as well on its electrum alloy with the pagan concerns of the agrarian majority. Yes, Islam offers a powerful vision of a supernatural basis for a natural conscience. But like Hinduism, Islam is packed with bourgeois surprises.

One such surprise is Muhammad’s muted concern for the problem of desire, in comparison with the problem of disloyalty. The Qur’an and many hadith greatly emphasize the instillation of loyalty to the God of the people and to the people of the God, especially his messenger. Asabiya or “group feeling” is what Ibn Khaldun called it. Sociologists still read his 1377 book, the Muqaddimah, and assign it to their students.88 (Me too.) Khaldun argued that asabiya is especially important for a dominantly nomadic people, such as the Arab tribes of the time, as opposed to more urban peoples who can come together on other bases of interaction, such as economic ties.89 The challenge of binding together a rapidly growing and far-flung empire gave even more impetus to a great emphasis on loyalty, as well as helping overcome the conflict Ibn Khaldun saw between the mounting wealth of the few in the cities in comparison to the continued poverty of the agrarian majority. Of course, Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, and other bourgeois traditions also emphasize loyalty, but in closer balance with concerns about the troubles of desire, as their teachings focused more on the moral needs of urban folk. To put it another way, the social organizational problem of Islam and the Arabian Empire was more horizontal, less vertical.

Desire concerned Muhammad too, as I noted earlier. But his concerns centered on excess and selfishness rather than desire itself. The Qur’an does not denounce wealth in the manner of Jesus’s saying that it is harder for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich person to enter heaven.⁹⁰ Rather, the Qur’an condemns those who do not share their wealth with the broader community, supporting those in need through giving alms, as in the quotes I gave above. The Qur’an also speaks out against usury, while favoring trade and the amassing of wealth, even arguing that God will reward the almsgiver with good economic fortune. One is to give charity to the poor, not loans with interest. It’s worth hearing from the Qur’an at length on the subject, as it is such a strikingly different take from common practices elsewhere:

God has allowed trade and forbidden usury. God blights usury, but blesses charitable deeds with multiple increase: He does not love the ungrateful sinner. Those who believe, do good deeds, keep up the prayer, and pay the prescribed alms will have their reward with their Lord: no fear for them, nor will they grieve. You who believe, beware of God: give up any outstanding dues from usury, if you are true believers. If you do not, then be warned of war from God and His Messenger. You shall have your capital if you repent, and without suffering loss or causing others to suffer loss.⁹¹

Many Muslims still take the injunctions to give alms and forbid usury quite seriously. For example, Islamic banks often operate on the notion of joint responsibility with the debtor for the repayment of loans, encouraging economic mutualism, what is sometimes called “Islamic banking.” And it seems to work. To this day, most dominantly Islamic countries have considerably lower levels of economic inequality than most dominantly Christian, Hindu, or Buddhist countries, as well as than Israel, the only dominantly Jewish country.92

Let’s turn to sexual desire and its relations of gender and power. Islam is widely regarded to be anti-sex—as well as anti-women, given the misogynist notion among some Muslims that women are at fault for instilling lust in men, as well as all the charged debate about the hijab, burqa, and niqab. And true enough, one does not find a lot to cheer the feminist in the Qur’an—at least as feminism is usually understood in the West, including by me.⁹³ But, once again, nor does one in the Bible or the Buddhist canon. Christians today often pass quickly over passages that don’t fit their lives (as they should) such as Paul’s injunctions that women need to veil themselves while praying, that wives “be subject to your husbands as you are to the Lord” because “the husband is the head of the wife,” and that “women should be silent in the churches” because they “should be subordinate.”⁹⁴ Buddhists similarly move fast over lines like the Buddha’s phallocentic advice that one should “[g]uard against looking on a woman. If ye see a woman, let it be as though ye saw her not, and have no conversation with her.” For a woman is manipulative and “desires to captivate with the charms of her beauty, and thus to rob men of their steadfast heart.” Therefore, a Buddhist man had best protect himself “by regarding her tears and her smiles as enemies.”⁹⁵

One should not confuse current laws and customs with those of an earlier day, as described in the Qur’an, the Bible, the sayings of the Buddha, or any other ancient religious document. Indeed, sometimes our religious traditions were more liberal in ancient times than many of our current laws and customs.

Take how many of the hadith describe the sexuality of Muhammad. Jesus, the Buddha, and Mahavira do not engage in sex, say the scriptures of their traditions, and each of these great religious figures rejects family life. But many hadith plainly describe Muhammad as experiencing sexual desire, and as frequently acting on it. Not only is he married, eventually to a large number of wives, many hadith also describe his sexual practices in some intimate detail. We learn in one hadith collection, the Kitab Al-Taharah of Sahih Muslim, that “[o]ne day the Prophet (peace be upon him) had intercourse with all his wives,” and that “[h]e took a bath after each intercourse.”⁹⁶ In another, we even learn the details of precisely how he bathed himself after intercourse.⁹⁷

During early Islamic times, Arabian culture exhibited a frankness in sexual and bodily matters would later shock the sensibilities of the Victorians. The tales collected in 1001 Arabian Nights were notorious for their frequently bawdy storylines. Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad al-Nafzawi’s The Perfumed Garden is a twelfth-century work that is pretty much an Arabian sex manual, complete with extensive advice on sexual technique for the mutual pleasure of the parties involved, including both heterosexual and homosexual gratification.98 Sir Richard Burton’s English translations of both were so offensive that, initially, they could be released only to the members of a private club.

Many hadith are also quite frank about excreta, a topic that scarcely appears in more dominantly bourgeois traditions like Christianity and Buddhism. We learn that when Muhammad “went (outside) to relieve himself, he went to a far-off place.”⁹⁹ And we learn of Muhammad’s view that “[w]hen any of you goes to the privy, he should not face or turn his back towards the qiblah [the direction for prayer]. [And] he should not cleanse with his right hand.”¹⁰⁰ These are topics bourgeois culture has often found too rude even to mention, however real they are to all our lives.¹⁰¹

Menstruation, a topic that is quite real to the lives of women, also gets considerable discussion in many hadith, with two entire books of hadith devoted to the matter.¹⁰² The Bible does at times mention the menses, but usually with a phallocentric horror and disdain. The hadith collections are still quite phallocentric on this subject, as on many others. It too is a male-dominated work written in a male-dominated time. But they report Muhammad as basically believing that, rather than isolating and seeing a woman as polluted during menstruation, a man ought, well, to give her a hug. One hadith puts it this way, according to the authority of Muhammad’s wife Aisha: “When anyone amongst us (amongst the wives of the Holy Prophet) menstruated, the Messenger of Allah (may peace be upon him) asked her to tie a waist-wrapper over her (body) and then embraced her.”¹⁰³

Early Islam was also a time of some impressively strong women, even as female deities like Allat and Al-’Uzza were being discarded. Khadija perhaps is the most notable, given that she hired and proposed to Muhammad, that she was a successful and wealthy merchant in her own right, and that she was Islam’s first convert—perhaps even before Muhammad himself, as she is the one who convinces him his visions are real.

Muhammad’s youngest wife, Aisha, has an equally powerful narrative. She was none too fond of Ali, her father’s rival as Muhammad’s successor. And when Ali finally gained the caliphate, she led an army against him, launching a civil war known as the First Fitna. She won the opening battle, capturing the city of Basra. When Ali’s army fought to retake Basra, Aisha led her army again, directing them from the back of a camel. This time she lost, but was ultimately spared by Ali. She went on to become one of the principal sources for hadith. A rough parallel would be if the Gnostic “Gospel of Mary” was regarded as canonical in Christianity, instead of only male-authored gospels.104

Aisha was not the only woman warrior of the time. Nusayba bint Ka’b al-Ansariyya fought along the men during the Muslims’ battles against the Meccans, and is credited with saving Muhammad’s life during the disastrous Battle of Uhud when she shielded him, sustaining numerous lance and arrow wounds herself. Khawlah bint al-Azwar was a prominent soldier during the Arabian conquests, fighting in Syria, Jordan, and Palestine. The early records of the Arabian Empire also celebrate many prominent female scholars, including the mathematician Lubna of Cordoba and the legal theorists Faṭima bint Abi al-Qasim and Zaynab bint Ahmad. Plus a number of women became heads of state during early Islamic times, albeit never caliph or imam.

Nonetheless, the social stature of women in Islam weakened as the centuries unfolded, similar to other faiths closely associated with the spread of empires and their militarism, monetarization, improved record keeping, and centralization, all of which advantaged men over women. Although women are quite capable of physical violence, and there are records of women soldiers in ancient times, in Arabia and elsewhere, men are on the whole advantaged over women in physical combat, and thus in the social power that comes with it. Coined money and improved transport technologies facilitated trade at a distance, tending to promote male economic transcendence and female economic immanence, concentrating financial power in male hands while women’s labor remained relatively local and outside of coined value. Techniques of better record keeping helped ensure that taxes, loans, and bills were paid and money differentially accumulated, as I’ve discussed. But better record keeping also provided a ready opportunity for gender hierarchy by the simple expedient of denying most women the opportunity to become literate. Better record keeping combined with militarism and coinage to promote the centralization of the state, consolidating male power. The social conditions of electrum faiths perhaps provided more scope for women’s power than more dominantly bourgeois faiths, but not enough to prevent electrum men from eventually extracting almost all the gold from the alloy.

In addition to Islam’s significantly more accommodating takes (at least initially) on both material and sexual desire, it articulates two more areas of bourgeois surprise: a more immanent conception of the divine, and a considerable emphasis on issues of agriculture and ecology.

Despite an unusually abstract conception of God—or maybe in part because of it and a corresponding need for some balance with immanence—the Islamic divine is also quite personal. The Qur’an repeatedly describes God as aware of every thought and action of every person. You cannot hide anything from God. Don’t even try. God is a witness to everything anyone does, both bad and good, and weighs out the appropriate rewards and punishments—all of which portrays God as quite attentive and involved in people’s personal lives. Plus Islam makes as big a deal about Muhammad and his life on the Earth, and each and everything he ever did, as Christianity does about Jesus and Buddhism does about the Buddha, as I noted above. The Qur’an repeatedly emphasizes that Muhammad was a person and not a god, which is a huge part of his emotional role in Islam: he was here, immanent in the concrete of the everyday, an example for everyone of how to live a virtuous life. Nonetheless, although Islamic doctrine may often say otherwise, from a sociological point of view Muhammad is at least semidivine, given the holiness that Islam ascribes to every detail of his life. This conceptual borderline gives a sacredness to his immanence.

Islam also gives its adherents a powerful experience of divine immanence through its strong focus on place. For all its universalism, Islam considers one spot on the planet, the Kaaba with its Black Stone, the center of its worship. For all its universalism, Islam expects that all Muslims, at least once in their lives, will make the pilgrimage, the hajj, to Mecca and circle the Kaaba seven times. For all its universalism, Islam expects its followers to face the direction of the Kaaba—from wherever on the planet they happen at that moment to be—during each of the five daily prayers of an observant Muslim (often combined into three prayers by the Shia). Such practices bring transcendent notions of quasi-kinship, of asabiya, from the then and there into the immanence of the here and now.

Judaism may nearly be a match for Islam in its focus on place, leading to much conflict, of course. Lashanah haba’ah biy’rushalaim—“next year in Jerusalem”—is the Zionist concluding line of the Passover service. Christians and Buddhists also encounter the divine in the concreteness of place. Christians are passionate about Jerusalem too, as Buddhists are about Lumbini, the site of Buddha’s birth. Yet Christianity and Buddhism demand no equivalent of the hajj. They do not ask all their faithful to face the same direction many times a day as they kneel in prayer, wherever they are. Nor does Judaism, although Jews generally lay out synagogues so they face Jerusalem, and Christians often plan churches so they face east, toward the rising sun.

We’re talking matters of degree here, though. The sociologist must note that all the bourgeois faiths, however transcendent their philosophies, find need to provide ways to experience meaning immanently as well. The political scientist might note the same of empires.

Islam stands out more in the attention it gives to agricultural and ecological concerns. Consider the striking difference in Islam’s conception of Heaven. The virtuous Christian looks to be admitted in the afterlife into what St. Augustine called the “Heavenly City,” a place where there is no desire, unlike the “Earthly City.” Instead of a heavenly city, the virtuous Muslim looks to be admitted into a heavenly garden, where food and water abounds. Consider this promise in the Qur’an: “As for those who believe and do good deeds, We shall admit them into Gardens graced with flowing streams and there they will remain forever.”105 They will be “given sustenance from the fruits of these Gardens” and will have “pure spouses” there.¹⁰⁶ In the Qur’an’s vision, then, Heaven is not a place where we do not need to eat and do not have sexual desire. It is where our hungers are forever and easily satisfied.

Along with its more positive take on desire, the Qur’an has a more positive take on our fitra, our human nature, and on nature more generally. The problem is the shayateen, the devils, and the chief shaytan, Iblis, who tempt humans away from their fitra. The problem is not fitra itself. There is no original sin in Islam. Although the Qur’an does tell the story of Adam and Eve being seduced by Iblis into eating from the forbidden tree, God later forgives them.¹⁰⁷ Islamic legends do sometimes offer a third nature construction of the shayateen as taking the form of insects, snakes, hot desert wind, and other aspects of ecology that humans often find unpleasant, indirectly rooting our politics in a vision of nature as the source of evil. But Iblis and the other shayateen are not described as having material form in the Qur’an. Rather, they are creatures of light.

The Qur’an also repeatedly emphasizes God as the source of the sustenance we gain from the Earth. Take this passage from Sura 6, “Livestock”:

It is He who sends down water from the sky. With it We produce the shoots of each plant, then bring greenery from it, and from that We bring out grains, one riding on the other in close-packed rows. From the date palm come clusters of low-hanging dates, and there are gardens of vines, olives, and pomegranates, alike yet different. Watch their fruits as they grow and ripen! In all this there are signs for those who would believe.¹⁰⁸

The farmer and camel herder can find here much of relevance to their daily lives—to the questions that are forever before them concerning the unreliability of sustenance. While passages like these can be found in the earlier literature of their traditions, these are questions that Jesus, Mahavira, and the Buddha themselves barely addressed—or at least questions whose answers those who wrote down the newer scriptures felt were not particularly important to their main audiences, and did not record.

And like Hinduism, Islam retains a very ancient and powerful agrarian faith practice: sacrifice of agricultural animals. The Old Testament is full of laws that require the sacrifice of a chicken, dove, lamb, goat, or cow. But these practices are virtually unheard of for Jews and Christians today. In Islam, on the other hand, Eid Al-Adha—the “Festival of the Sacrifice”—remains one of the most central and sacred rites, for it concludes the annual hajj. Muslims all around the world celebrate Eid Al-Adha, giving them a chance to experience the meaning of the hajj, even if they are not performing the pilgrimage themselves. The festival also celebrates Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his own son to show his fealty to God—a story that appears in both the Old Testament and the Qur’an, albeit with significant differences—before God converts the test to an animal sacrifice at the last moment. If a family can afford it, they sacrifice a lamb, a goat, a cow, or even a camel, often in the yards of their own homes. People give much of the meat away to the poor as a form of zakat.

The Qur’an also describes God as the designer, creator, and motivating power behind ecological relations more generally, and repeatedly emphasizes this point, as in this passage:

It is God who splits open the seed and the fruit stone: He brings out the living from the dead and the dead from the living—that is God—so how can you turn away from the truth? He makes the dawn break; He makes the night for rest; and He made the sun and the moon to a precise measure. That is the design of the Almighty, the All Knowing.109

Again, these themes can be found in the older literatures of Christianity, New Judaism, Buddhism, and Jainism. But they are not the themes that these great departures themselves addressed, nor are they the themes that they emphasize today. Look within and, yes, one will find that these traditions, too, are alloys. All culture is. But the parts they typically burnish and shine bring out considerably more glint of gold than of silver.