It’s eighty degrees in Silicon Valley and the sun feels hot enough to melt the pavement. Inside the headquarters of the Muslim Community Association, though, it’s cool, and I am sitting in a nondescript, fluorescent-lit, windowless room with three men of devastating professional credentials. Laid out on a table, buffet style, is a lavish spread: chicken kebabs, vegetable soup, hummus, pastries, sweetened fruit salad. There’s a pot of tea and a pot of coffee, signs designating their contents dangling like necklaces. The three men are listening respectfully as I explain my project, though they all have better things to do. Razi Mohiuddin, nearly fifty and born in India, is president and CEO of a small software company called Ironspeed. Hisham Abdallah, in his fifties, emigrated to the United States from Egypt twenty-five years ago; now he’s a clinical researcher at the European pharmaceutical giant Roche. Mohammed Nadeem teaches e-business courses at National University in San Jose. What draws them all here is that they don’t want to be lumped together with terrorists and fundamentalists. They want to set the record straight.
Except for the occasional uplifting or quirky feature piece (a profile of a halal butcher, for example), most Americans don’t know enough about Islam to temper their news-watching with the awareness that, as a tiny fraction of the world’s billion Muslims sets fire to the globe, the rest are going to work, coming home, and praying to God—leading lives not so unlike those of Christians and Jews. By various counts, there are anywhere from two to eight million Muslims in America, most of them immigrants or children of immigrants from South Asia, Africa, Central Europe, and the Middle East—but also a substantial number of converts, especially among African Americans and a growing number of Hispanics. Before 9/11, religion was something most American Muslims didn’t talk much about, in part because they knew it could create tension between them and their employers, teachers, and neighbors. But since the word Islamic has become linked to the word terrorist, a generation of moderate American Muslims is “coming out of the closet,” says Razi. “There’s a new reason for my existence, if you will, which is to bridge the gap of understanding that exists today. Our kids are going through an identity crisis. Are they American? Are they Muslim? We have a job as parents to make sure that their identity is not one of conflict or contradiction.”
Thanks to a handwritten note—part motivational screed, part polemic—that Mohammed Atta left in his rental car on the morning he flew American Airlines flight 11 into the Twin Towers, our cultural misunderstandings now include our ideas of heaven. Convinced he would die a martyr’s death, Atta wrote about the rewards he would find in another world, dwelling especially on the companionship of ravishing women. After reminding himself to “strike [the enemy] above the neck,” he writes: “Know that the gardens of paradise are waiting for you in all their beauty, and the women of paradise are waiting, calling out, ‘Come hither, friend of God.’ They have dressed in their most beautiful clothing.” Naturally, the American media latched on to Islamic conceptions of heaven, focusing on the aspect of sexual companionship. The subtext of this discussion was usually: “Can you believe this stuff?”
The Qur’an does in fact promise to the male residents of heaven the company of beautiful maidens. The critical verses describe couches for lounging, young attendants bringing around cups of spring water and goblets of wine that don’t intoxicate—and the company of houris, “eyes large and dark, like pearls in their shells, as a reward for past deeds.” Few scholars believe that houri means anything but “virgin” or “maiden,” in spite of a much-talked-about 2002 New York Times article by Alexander Stille, which quoted a Qur’anic scholar’s theory that houri might mean, simply, “white,” or even “white raisin.” Some later Islamic texts, accounts of the sayings of Muhammad called “hadiths,” promise a specific number of virgins to Muslim martyrs—sometimes seventy, sometimes seventy-two—but that is not a widely held belief. The seventy-two virgins were popularized in the Islamic world in the 1980s during the Iran-Iraq war; in recruiting tracts distributed to young Iranian men who would almost certainly meet their death in war, the highly sexualized virgins played a starring role. Moderates interpret the idea of heavenly virgins as a metaphor for sublime satisfactions unimaginable on earth—the way moderate Christians view gates of pearl and streets of gold. Such nuances were largely lost in the prurient editorializing. Even Playboy weighed in—“When will sex be delivered from the clutches of religion?”
Consequently, all three of my lunch companions are defensive as well as welcoming—understandably, since their sacred beliefs have been poked, prodded, and laughed at in public. They’re thoughtful members of an affluent religious and social community—a sort of Islamic mega-church. There’s a proper mosque down the road, but here—in buildings that formerly belonged to Hewlett-Packard—the Muslim Community Association offers a wider range of services. There are rooms for worship (separate blue-carpeted chambers for men and women), and a large hall that can seat six hundred people for dinner, as it does every year at the end of the holy month of Ramadan. As in Christian mega-churches, the community cares for its members’ social, physical, and practical needs as well as addressing its spiritual concerns. It offers Qur’an study and Arabic classes, kickboxing and aerobics, free legal advice and a weekend health clinic. Four hundred children attend its elementary school, wearing uniforms exactly like those you’d see in a Catholic school—plaid pinafores over jeans and sneakers—except that in the older grades, many girls wear traditional hijab, or head covering.
Every Friday afternoon, three thousand men and women park in MCA’s vast lot, pausing from their jobs as programmers, engineers, marketing executives, chemists, and CEOs to pray, in unison, the same prayers Muslims say all over the world: “There is no God but God.” Afflicted by this economic downturn—house values have dropped by a quarter, and layoffs have hit the high-tech sector as everywhere else—MCA still represents one of America’s most successful communities. MCA members earn, on average, about $100,000. They work at Yahoo! and Sun Microsystems, both just across the 101 freeway, and at dozens of other high-tech firms. They are first-and second-generation immigrants from at least forty different countries, including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, Laos, Cameroon, and Bosnia. Many in the older generation have spent their lives working at hard, unglamorous jobs—they’ve run hotels and convenience stores—in order to send their sons and daughters to Harvard and Columbia. This community is the new American dream.
When I met him, Razi Mohiuddin was in his second term as the community’s president. This is not a spiritual post but a leadership role, and Razi has a California-style grace and ease of manner that makes clear why he’s a popular choice. He’s tall, with an athletic build, a wide smile, thick black hair and mustache. Razi has lived in the United States since he was eighteen, when he arrived in Chicago from India, alone, to start a degree program in computer science at the University of Illinois. Middle age and prosperity have made Razi more, not less, religious. He prays five times a day, as mandated by the Qur’an, and sends his children to the school at the mosque. Because the Qur’an forbids borrowing money with interest, Razi paid cash for his house. It’s easier to be a practicing Muslim, he notes, when you’re the boss: he schedules meetings around his prayers. But his two identities—practicing Muslim and successful software entrepreneur—are sometimes at odds. He agonizes when he has to throw a party for his sales force: the guys want beer and wine, but how can he justify such an expenditure when the Qur’an explicitly forbids the consumption of alcohol? He’ll do it, but not easily. “I take you out to dinner, I buy you a glass of beer—there’s something in my heart that has a hard time being happy about that.”
For Razi the idea of heaven is always present—he cannot imagine his life without it. Like most faithful Muslims, he believes that God watches him constantly, and that his every action—from washing his hands in the morning to his final prayer at night—is being recorded in a big book by God’s angels. According to the Qur’an, each one of a person’s deeds is inscribed in heaven. “All they do is noted in the Book of Deeds. Every matter, small and great, is on record.” The hadiths flesh out the details, describing a book, or a scroll, that gets fastened to your neck as your soul departs your body. On Judgment Day, Allah hands down verdicts: the righteous receive their book in the right hand, the doomed in the left.
The Qur’an also speaks of an enormous balance, or mizan, that weighs a person’s good and bad deeds on the Day of Judgment. “They whose scales are weighed down—these shall prevail,” the Qur’an says. “They whose scales are light—these have lost their souls, and in hell shall abide for ever.” Those who come up short, in other words, will go to hell, a place of “scorching wind and boiling water / And a shade of black smoke, / Neither cold nor kindly.” Those with a positive balance sheet will go to heaven.
Razi accepts the Qur’an’s descriptions of the pleasures offered in Paradise as true—the maidens, as well as the upholstered couches, the ripe fruit, the flowing fountains and running rivers—but beside the point. The promise of heaven is a constant reminder: Do right by God by saying your prayers; do right by others by treating them with kindness and respect. According to Islamic tradition, Razi says, you can ask a person whom you’ve wronged for forgiveness at the end of time—and if forgiveness is granted, both the seeker and the granter go to heaven. The problem, Razi explains, half laughing, is that you have to find that person among all the souls who ever lived on earth, all huddled together waiting to be judged. It’s simply easier to treat people well—and to ask their forgiveness when you don’t—here and now. To emphasize his point he e-mails me, several days after our meeting, a local news story. A Los Angeles cab driver, a Muslim, found $350,000 worth of diamonds in the backseat of his taxi. He tracked down the passenger who had left them there and gave them back. “God is up there,” the driver said by way of explanation. “He always watches.”
ORIGINS
The desert where Islam was born is 750 miles from Saint Anthony’s Egyptian desert and much more brutal. This is the Hijaz, a stretch of sand on the western coast of Saudi Arabia, relentlessly hot—in summer, daytime temperatures average 113 degrees—and by outsiders’ standards uninhabitable. At the end of the nineteenth century, the British explorer Charles Montagu Doughty described this desert thus: “The sun, entering as a tyrant up on the waste landscape, darts upon us a torment of fiery beams, not to be remitted till the far-off evening.” In the sixth century, this desert was inhabited by Bedouins, nomads who raised animals, traded skins and meat for produce and weapons, and broke camp constantly in search of new land for grazing. We know—because the Qur’an condemns the practice—that parents sometimes buried newborn girls alive in the sand so as not to have one more person to feed. In this desert, the only thing that mattered was survival, and the trick to survival was holding on to your land as long as you needed it and relying on your kin to help you protect it. There was no comfort here.
Ancient Bedouin religious practices were loose; religion was not an organizing or motivating force in Bedouins’ lives. The idea of paradise as a reward for the righteous would have been laughable. Still, they did have religious traditions, inherited from their ancestors and practiced out of habit and pragmatism. They believed in a variety of gods, but not in any organized pantheon or hierarchy. There were gods of places and gods of weather—of rain and sky. There were gods in trees, in animals, and especially in stones. Like the ancient Hebrews, the Arabs sacrificed animals to those gods on stone altars and ate the flesh. Like Hindus, they sometimes gave an animal—usually a beloved camel—to the gods, consecrating it without killing it. In a society where camels literally gave people life—meat, milk, transportation, and shelter—it is not surprising that they would regard certain of those animals as holy, separating a chosen one from the herd and bestowing upon it a retirement of rest and ease.
The Bedouins did have a sense, if an inchoate one, that the dead “went” somewhere—or why else would they lame a camel, tie it up next to the grave of someone recently deceased (a heroic warrior, for example), and leave it there to starve? The camel must have been thought to provide transport to another world. But, in general, life was life and death was death: inevitable, lamentable, often unfair. Illiterate and unschooled, these nomads left behind heart-stopping oral poetry, passed down from generation to generation. When the subject was death, as it often was, the poet sang of revenge, of grief, of finality—but never of heaven. “I will cry for you with unsheathed swords,” one poet sang, “with sharpened saber, and with lances. These are the arms of he who must avenge your blood.” Another poet—one can almost imagine it was someone’s grieving mother—keens, “Why does death persecute us so? Every day, she takes a noble man from our tribe. / She has a preference for the best of our sons. She chooses the most virtuous and most illustrious.” These are not the words of a person who hoped for anything better at the end of her own life.
Situated in the middle of this desert, at the bottom of intersecting gullies, was the only slightly more habitable town of Mecca—a place of “suffocating heat, deadly winds, clouds of flies,” according to Maqdisi, a tenth-century Arab geographer. In the summer, the town grew so hot that people spoke of the city as “burning.” Clusters of mud-and-straw houses huddled together in the center of town atop what was essentially a drainage ditch. During the season of torrential rains and flash floods, these houses were regularly washed away. Mecca’s biggest—some contemporary scholars say its only—attraction was the Ka’aba: a plain, ancient building in the center of a large square near a big market. A large black stone, probably a meteorite, was set into its eastern corner. For the nomads—as well as for the residents of Mecca and for the merchants and traders who passed through on routes north to Palestine, south to Yemen, or west across the Red Sea to Egypt—that stone had long had religious importance. According to tradition, Abraham, the Old Testament Hebrew patriarch, had stopped in Mecca to visit Ishmael, the son he had with his mistress Hagar, and he himself built the first rough temple around the stone. Mecca became known both as a holy place and as neutral territory—a place where feuding tribes could lay down their arms, a place where everyone made sacrifices to the god of the Ka’aba. That god was called “Allah”: not the only god the people who worshipped there knew, but certainly the most important. For centuries, pilgrims had traveled there to pray, in a ritual they called the hajj.
Western scholars are in the midst of radically revising their views on the social and historical circumstances that gave rise to Islam. For the last half of the twentieth century, this field was ruled by the great British scholar W. Montgomery Watt. His position, considered the mainstream view, is that by the end of the sixth century, Mecca had become a prosperous and populous city. It was home to merchants, but also to moneylenders and creditors, and to the organizers of great caravans that took leather, spices, gold, silver, grain, arms, fabrics, oil, and perfume north to the Mediterranean and south to Yemen. A wealthy elite emerged: people with the means to send their infants into the cooler areas of the desert to be nursed by Bedouin maids and their families there for summer vacations. This sudden wealth, Watt and his camp say, changed the nature of Arab society. The tribal code of blood gave way to a mean-spirited individualism. The tribal loyalty demanded by conditions of scarcity was replaced by a less equitable system, in which the haves gave and received preferential treatment while the have-nots suffered unfairly.
You could argue, then, that the social conditions that produced the Qur’an and Islam were not so unlike those that produced the book of Daniel in the first place—and the Gospels two hundred years later: dramatic social upheaval created a yearning for a new kind of justice. But this argument is, in practice, nearly impossible to make. Watt’s view cannot be confirmed because almost no one in sixth-century Arabia could write. There were no record keepers, no diarists. Historians can only rely on the Qur’an and other early Islamic texts, which—as we surmise by analogy from contemporary New Testament scholarship—probably contain some truth but are biased in favor of the new dominant religion. Even to study such biases is problematic, though, because of the Qur’an’s special place in Islam. The traditionally faithful believe that the Qur’an exists exactly as it is, in heaven, and was given to Muhammad by God in smallish doses, over a period of two decades. There were no editors, no translators, no interpreters, no process of canonization, no mutations over time—and to discuss the possibility of alternate truths amounts not just to scholarly disagreement but to blasphemy. Unlike the Bible, the Qur’an is not a narrative. It contains few psychologically complex characters, and even fewer stories. It is a divine revelation that came straight from God. It is in itself holy. Generations of scholars have observed that the proper analogy for the Qur’an is not the New Testament but Jesus himself. But a new group of scholars, especially in the West, has begun to take a colder look at the Qur’an, trying to separate fact from myth, fully aware that their efforts may create extreme discomfort, if not outright anger, among even the more moderate of the faithful.
This newer view has less narrative drama than Watt’s, although the conclusion—that a destructive stratification of society took place—is the same. Mecca rose to prominence, the new thinking goes, because the dominant tribe there, the Quraysh, had the political savvy to figure out how to capitalize on the Ka’aba, to draw merchants and traders away from the trade routes and into the town. Mecca, in this view, was not a bustling center in itself, but a must-make detour off the highway.
Islamic scholars have long argued that Mecca was home to “pagans and idolaters,” and that Islam brought the revelation of monotheism to the ungodly, but that perspective is also under renovation. As we have seen, Allah, the god of the Ka’aba, was growing ever more powerful. And although Meccans had not taken up Judaism or Christianity, representatives of those religions must have been passing through the city with increasing regularity to visit the holy site. According to the traditions, hundreds of idols and icons surrounded the Ka’aba, including paintings or statues of Mary and Jesus. Some traditions say that images of Mary and Jesus had been painted directly onto the interior walls of the Ka’aba. (According to certain of these accounts, Muhammad placed his hands over these images when he conquered Mecca and ordered his followers to erase everything else; Jesus, in the Islamic tradition, is a holy man.) Certainly, there were well-established Christian and Jewish communities within a camel ride of any intrepid Meccan. Christians had settled to the south of the Hijaz, in Yemen and Ethiopia, as well as to the north in Syria. In the Hijaz itself, there were powerful Jewish tribes just two hundred miles away, in Medina. One of them, the Qaynuqa, could field an army of seven hundred men, about half in full armor. And in Mecca itself, an indigenous monotheism was flowering. The hunafa were local intellectuals who found Judaism and Christianity insufficiently monotheistic—they were especially suspicious of the Christian Trinity—and who secretly practiced what they called “din Ibrahim,” the faith of Abraham. This, they said, was a pure faith; the others were corruptions. In other words, Mecca may have been pagan in a narrow sense, but the seeds of monotheism were circling in the hot desert air, looking for a fertile place to land.
Into this world Muhammad was born, near Mecca, probably around 570. He was the son of a merchant family, and an orphan. He was raised by an uncle, and was, according to the hadith, a sensitive, introspective, and spiritual child. When he was about twelve, he went with his uncle to Syria, where he spent several days in deep conversation with the ascetic Christian monk Bahira—apparently a formative experience. As a young man, he spent considerable time away from Mecca, in the mountainous regions of the desert, praying, thinking, reflecting in solitude. At twenty-five, he married a wealthy widow named Kadijah, who was, as legend has it, old enough to be his mother—but since they had at least six children together, she was probably only in her thirties at the time of the marriage. Watt surmises that Kadijah, an independent businesswoman with her own means, could afford to marry Muhammad for his spiritual, rather than his material, prospects.
Accounts of divine revelation appear again and again in the Western world’s holy literature. Moses, John of Patmos, Anthony—all were humble men, alone with their thoughts, with no expectation of being singled out. In the year 610, Muhammad had gone on retreat to a desert cave and was sleeping when a voice came to him. It is one of the most gripping moments in sacred scripture, telegraphed in the Qur’an and elaborated upon in the hadiths. Gabriel, God’s angel, woke him up, gave him a document, and commanded him, “Recite!” Startled and confused, Muhammad asked, “What shall I recite?” (His words have also been interpreted as “But I cannot read,” emphasizing the miraculous origins of the Qur’an.) In response, the angel physically squeezed him so hard that Muhammad felt he could not breathe, then commanded again: “Recite!” And again Muhammad asked, “What shall I recite?” And the angel said, “Recite, in the name of your Lord! / He Who created! / He created man from a blood clot. / Recite! Your Lord is most bountiful. / He taught with the pen. / He taught man what he knew not.” Muhammad recited.
After this encounter, he ran home to his wife in terror, told her his story, and said he was afraid he was losing his mind. But Kadijah believed in him. She was his first convert, and slowly the other members of his household, and then many residents of Mecca, began to accept Muhammad’s message—that Allah was the One God, the beneficent, the merciful. In 622, Muhammad moved with his small band of followers to Medina, where conditions were slightly more hospitable. (For one thing, there were more Jews in Medina, and they were more accepting of Muhammad’s monotheism.) From 610 until Muhammad’s death in 632, God spoke regularly to His Prophet, and Muhammad preached God’s word to the Arabs of the Hijaz—in some of the most eloquent, lyrical poetry in history. Those verses comprise the Qur’an, and to the more than one billion believing Muslims in the world, they are truly the word of God.
The Qur’an establishes Islam’s “five pillars”—the five things every Muslim must do to please God. The first pillar is similar to the Bible’s First Commandment. The Islamic version says, “There is no God but God” and establishes Muhammad as God’s true messenger. The other pillars are: praying five times daily, giving alms to the poor, fasting during the month of Ramadan and, if possible, making the hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca. If the Qur’an can be said to have a single message, it is that to please God, people must behave rightly and responsibly, both as individuals and within their communities. As Karen Armstrong puts it in her best-selling synthesis Islam, “The old religion…was simply not working…. The way forward lay in a single god and a unified [community] which was governed by justice and equity.”
PARADISE
Islam’s merciful, beneficent God would reward his faithful with paradise, and the paradise described in the Qur’an must have been a vision beyond any desert dweller’s imagining. For one thing, it was temperate. Verses refer to “green, green pastures,” “cool pavilions,” and “fountains of gushing water.” The food and drink in Mecca and its surrounding desert must have frequently spoiled, for the Qur’an promises a heaven where everything tastes fresh: “In it are rivers of water, not brackish, and rivers of milk, unchanging in taste, and rivers of wine, delicious to them who drink it, and rivers of honey, pure and limpid. Therein they shall enjoy all kinds of fruits, and forgiveness from their Lord.” Residents of paradise will feast on a variety of fruits—pomegranates are specifically mentioned—and “flesh of fowl, whatever they desire.” In paradise, men who had spent their lives toiling beneath a burning sun and fighting over small patches of sand will wear gold bracelets and green robes and recline upon upholstered couches, while servants pass around goblets of cool water and wine. In paradise, people greet each other with the word salaam, or “peace.”
(Tradition says that Arabic is the language of heaven. Ten years ago, the Penn State scholar of Islam Jonathan Brockopp was browsing in a Cairo bookstore when an old sheikh with a long white beard befriended Brockopp’s wife, Paula, who was waiting in the street. “Do you speak Arabic?” the sheikh asked. “A little,” said Paula, whose father is a Lutheran minister. “That’s good,” said the sheikh, half teasing, “because when you get to heaven, you’ll want to know what’s going on.”)
But first, the world must end. According to the Qur’an, a day will come when the stars will fall from the sky, the sun will stop shining, the ocean will boil (reminiscent of the language of Revelation). At that hour, the Qur’an says, paradise is near.
Allah himself resurrects the dead—first Abraham, Moses, and Muhammad, then everyone else—and all crowd before Him, standing shoulder to shoulder, awaiting His Judgment. How long is a matter of some debate. Some traditions say a thousand years, others say fifty thousand. Naked, terrified, sweltering, the resurrected and soon-to-be-judged have ample time to contemplate their sins. According to some traditions, they can become so anxious that they wind up standing up to their necks in sweat.
Finally, the Judgment is handed down. The Qur’an talks about a scale in which God literally weighs a person’s good deeds against the bad and metes out sentences accordingly. Those bound for heaven receive their “book,” the record of their life, in their right hand; those bound for hell receive it in their left. Then everyone turns to walk over a bridge as thin as a razor’s edge—an adaptation perhaps from Zoroastrianism. The just ones breeze over it, guided by God, into the gardens beyond. The damned fall off into the stinking pit, where “garments of fire have been tailored / and over their heads is poured scalding water / melting therewith their innards and their skins.”
At first Muhammad’s message of heaven and hell fell on disbelieving ears. In verse after verse, the Qur’an depicts the locals doubting, ridiculing, and dismissing ideas of resurrection and the afterlife. “We shall not be resurrected,” they say. The God of the Qur’an deals squarely with these doubters: “O mankind, if you are in doubt about the resurrection / We created you from dust, then from a sperm, then from a blood clot, then from a morsel, formed and unformed, to make it plain to you…. And you will see the earth lifeless / But when We send down the rain upon it, it vibrates, and doubles its yield / And comes out in plants, of every kind, a joy to behold. This is so because God is the Truth. / It is He Who revives the dead, and has power over all things.” When this message did finally take hold—and with it a message of personal responsibility to God and community, writes Jane I. Smith, a scholar of Islam at Harvard University, in her book with Yvonne Haddad, The Islamic Understanding of Death and Resurrection, it helped the Arabs value their role, both individually and collectively, in history as it unfolded according to God’s will. This evolution, from indifferent plural gods to a beneficent and caring Allah, gave the nascent Muslims an appetite for making improvements to their own world and the world around them.
Conventional wisdom teaches that the Islamic heaven is more material and vivid than Jewish or Christian versions. Its pleasures are more physical and its attributes—the landscape, the garb, the society, the pastimes—less disputed. “For Muslims, the body isn’t a problem,” the Islamic religion professor Kevin Reinhart told me when I visited him one slushy winter day at Dartmouth. “The things of this world are anticipations of the world to come: good conversation, the pleasure of sitting around with your friends, good textiles, and wine that doesn’t give you a headache.” Like all simplifications, Reinhart’s assertion is both true and not true.
Professor Khaled Abou El Fadl has made it his mission—or you could say vocation—to disabuse the world of the notion that a billion Muslims can believe any one thing. Born in Kuwait, he was educated at Yale University and now works as a professor of law at UCLA. Emulating the great Muslim intellectuals of the Middle Ages—the eighth-century orthodox theologian Hasan al-Basri and the twelfth-century classical philosopher Ibn Rushd—Abou El Fadl has created what amounts to an influential progressive Muslim think tank. He surrounds himself with graduate students—Muslim and non-Muslim, American and foreign born—who are committed to the classical Islamic values of rigorous argument, diversity of opinion, and prolific publication. He has written scholarly books on such topics as the Islamic view of beauty and the role of women in the Muslim world. His wife, Grace Song, is a convert from Catholicism and the daughter of Taiwanese immigrants, who has devoted herself to being her husband’s scribe and amanuensis. Abou El Fadl himself is the great man at the center of it all: he is chronically ill, he doesn’t drive, he rarely knows the time—or even the day of the week. His commitment is solely to discovering truths and disseminating them.
What Americans don’t understand about Muslim heaven, he told me one afternoon in a long phone conversation, is a lot. Too many people retain the image “of someone killing themselves so they can go have a sexual orgy with a bunch of virgins.” Far more troublesome to him, though, is the literalism with which so many Muslims, both worldwide and in America, read the Qur’an. Over the last hundred years, and especially in the last thirty, what Abou El Fadl calls an Islamic “Puritanism” has become the dominant form of the religion worldwide—thanks in large part to well-funded evangelism efforts coming out of Saudi Arabia. This Wahhabism, as it’s called, emphasizes strict (Abou El Fadl would say uncritical) adherence to religious and lifestyle rules and a belief in the Qur’an as divine that makes it impervious to historical or cultural contextualizing, let alone critique. Such a worldview has created a global community of Muslims opposed to enlightenment or progress, he says. “The laity knows Islam through media and public schools—and of course from the Wahhabis themselves. A lot of the representatives of Islam in the United States know practically nothing about the Islamic tradition…. We’re living through the dark ages of Islam.” The Muslims at what Abou El Fadl calls this “ABC level” connect their rewards in paradise with their actions on earth the way children behave at their grandmother’s house because they’ll get ice cream later—because, as the scholar puts it, “I want to be able to eat sweet apples in the hereafter.”
By not engaging with Islam’s history and its classical tradition, Abou El Fadl believes, American Muslims bear some responsibility for global terrorism, and he said as much in an editorial in the Los Angeles Times the week after 9/11. The inward-looking nature of Puritan Islam as it is taught throughout the world “produced a culture that eschews self-critical and introspective insight and embraces projection of blame and a fantasy-like level of confidence and arrogance.” For such statements as this, he has received death threats from fellow Muslims. Former friends no longer speak to him. He is not welcome at many of the country’s Islamic centers. (While researching Abou El Fadl one day at the NYU library, I discovered a Facebook group campaigning to invite him to that campus. The Facebook petition called him “the most important and influential Islamic thinker in the modern age,” and lauded his insistence on open dialogue among Muslims. One Facebook member was critical. “La hawla wala qowata illa billah,” he wrote. “There is no power or strength but Allah.”)
When Abou El Fadl speaks of his own belief in heaven, he speaks not of fruits, or sex, or “green, green pastures.” He points to other passages in the Qur’an and the hadiths—those more inscrutable and demanding. Abou El Fadl likes to contemplate what the Qur’an means when it says that God’s “throne was upon the waters,” a phrase that shows God at once in and beyond the world. He likes the verse in which God asserts that He is so close to the people under his dominion that He is “nearer to him than his jugular vein.” He especially likes the famous verse 24:35: “God is the light of the heavens and the earth / His light is like a niche in which is a lantern / The lantern in a glass / The glass like a shimmering star…Light upon light! / God guides to his light whomever He wills / And strikes parables for mankind / God has knowledge of all things.” Light upon light is a beautiful phrase. “We don’t know what that means, but it’s worth exploring,” he tells me.
“Like all humans, I’ve struggled with paradise. The thing I am at peace with: there is accountability. There is a Creator. There is consciousness and memory. I’ve long abandoned any attachments to any notions that are bounded by space and time because they philosophically don’t make any sense. Even the texts of the Qur’an don’t make any sense. God keeps sending us these prophets who keep telling us there is more than material existence—and then after material existence there’s more material existence. That makes no sense. I do believe in a world of souls. It must have tranquility, repose. But all that physical stuff stopped being convincing a long time ago.” I cannot forget the image from Paul Barrett’s 2007 book American Islam. Barrett, a journalist, visits Abou El Fadl at his small suburban home lined with floor-to-ceiling books in every room but the bathrooms. At prayer time, Abou El Fadl, his teenaged son from a previous marriage, and Song stand shoulder to shoulder on small prayer rugs—no separation of the sexes here—and rise and fall, prostrating themselves: the woman, the man, the child, all born in different corners of the earth, chanting quietly in Arabic, the language of heaven.
VIRGINS: A FEMINIST PERSPECTIVE
Muslims—especially those born abroad like Abou El Fadl—cannot understand the American obsession with the houris, with the idea that Muslim heaven must be something like a sex party for boys. They laugh at our insistent questioning, and with laughter imply that this whole orgy-in-heaven thing is our hang-up, not theirs. Our questioning is not wholly unenlightened, however. “Muslims who dismiss the significance of the belief in the houris of paradise are perhaps oblivious to feminist concerns,” the Vanderbilt University historian of Islam Leor Halevi wrote to me in an e-mail. “They haven’t really thought about the lack of a comparable sexual reward for heterosexual women. Alternatively, they interpret the material delights of paradise in a highly metaphorical way, as symbolic indications of spiritual rewards applicable equally to women and men.” As proof that questions about houris, sex, and women’s entitlement in the next world are not merely twenty-first-century American obsessions, Halevi—with help from Dartmouth’s Reinhart—points me to a fourteenth-century Persian poem, which clearly reflects the same concerns:
A preacher was saying one day
“The houris of fair Paradise
Provide a delightful surprise:
Each man will have twenty, they say.”
An old woman rose from her place,
“And are there men houris as well?”
“If you show your face there,” he said,
“You’ll not escape when they give chase!”
Both sexes, in other words, can avail themselves of heaven’s sensual delights.
Laleh Bakhtiar doesn’t think heaven has anything at all to do with sex, as we humans know it. She was born in Iran and raised in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., by a single mother who was a Christian. She went to Catholic school and was confirmed in the Roman Catholic Church. She did not begin her investigation of her own Muslim roots until she went to Iran to visit her father’s family when she was in her twenties. Now seventy, she has been a Muslim for more than four decades. She raised three children in the Muslim tradition and for five years taught the Islam section of a comparative religion class at the University of Chicago’s Luther Seminary. She has written numerous books on Islam and specializes in the Sufi tradition.
Bakhtiar was toiling in relative obscurity when she gained the attention of the world with her 2007 translation of the Holy Qur’an. In it, she used gender-neutral language, and she softened some of the Qur’an’s most egregiously sexist passages—notably the controversial Sura 4:34, which most scholars agree condones wife beating. (That sura, according to a more conventional translation, says, “Banish them to their couches, and beat them.” Bakhtiar makes it: “Abandon them in their sleeping places; and go away from them.”) In her introduction to The Sublime Quran, Bakhtiar writes that she hopes this translation will be of use especially to American women who have been stuck, as it were, using conservative or traditional translations their whole lives—and so have internalized language that in effect made women into second-class citizens. The Qur’an has been translated and interpreted exclusively by men for fourteen hundred years. “If women start interpreting the Qur’an you get a completely different picture.”
Imams around the world renounced Bakhtiar’s translation, banning it from use in their mosques and congregations; in response, other scholars drafted statements supporting it. The Islamic Society of North America—whose president is also a woman and a convert—upheld Bakhtiar’s translation and noted that Bakhtiar was neither the first nor the only Muslim commentator to conclude that wife beating was not Qur’anic.
In any case, even Bakhtiar—whose feminist orientation might lead one to suspect a cynical view of the delights of heaven—laughed at the suggestion that those pleasures might be exclusively for oversexed men. Paradise, she says, “is for everybody. The Qur’an does describe a place with pillows and cushions and grapes, but it is certainly not a sex place.” But what, I ask, about the houris, so universally accepted as maidens or virgins, comely and available? Bakhtiar circumvents the fundamental sexism of Muslim heaven by asserting that the word houri has no gender. In her translation she calls them “lovely eyed ones, black-eyed.” “People may have thought of them as female, but they’re not necessarily,” she says. Besides, she adds—as almost all Muslims do when confronted with questions about physical descriptions of paradise—“your body is not there. We’re in a completely different form. We’re not going to feel the same things there. I’m not thinking about what kind of orgy we’re going to have in paradise.” She prefers a metaphorical interpretation, in other words: her vision of her life after death is not so different from Abou El Fadl’s. “It would be my hope,” she says, “that I would be part of the light that would shine in the world or the universe.” Sex is not part of her picture.
Back in that dim room in the Silicon Valley office park, Hisham Abdallah, the Roche pharmacist, is telling me how Muslims get to heaven. There may be nearly as many interpretations of the Islamic heaven as there are Muslims, but on the general outline of the journey from grave to garden, nearly everyone agrees, because, as he says, “the Qur’an is like a road map or a manual.” Abdallah is self-taught as a Qur’anic scholar. He is a lively narrator; at one point he compares the razor-thin bridge that spans the fires of hell to the narrow bridge of Khazad-dûm from which the wizard Gandalf falls in The Lord of the Rings. He walks a fine line himself, acknowledging that while the Qur’an depicts heaven in fantastical, cinematic detail—no ineffable or inscrutable abstractions here—only simple people interpret the accounts of those bounties literally. To fixate on the pleasures of heaven—the girls, the couches, the wine—is “not wrong,” he says, “but it’s incomplete…. Those things are promised, and they are there, but all we know are their names. Companions or fruits or meats or houses—anything you hear about in the hereafter, you will never be able to comprehend the nature of it. It’s important to appreciate heaven for the deeper meanings, not just a depiction of the pleasures.” Thus the wine in heaven won’t have anything to do with what we know as “wine.” It will be wonderful, Abdallah explains; it will enhance your sense of fun, but you won’t necessarily have to uncork the bottle or drink it from a glass. “Heaven is a new form of existence which we cannot explain, but it’s a fuller existence than what we have now. The hereafter is the real existence,” he says.
Abdallah says he thinks about heaven every day, especially in the morning, when he first awakes. In Islamic literature, death is often compared to sleep, and the afterlife to a reawakening. Every morning, he says, he recommits himself to God. “If you do everything with the intention of pleasing God, then this whole thing we call life is about the hereafter.”
Razi Mohiuddin, the software entrepreneur, is much more straightforward. He believes wholeheartedly in paradise as a place of unrestricted abundance, and every heavenly symbol in the Qur’an—the couches, the girls, the wine, the fruit, the flowers, the fountains—reminds him of that plenitude. The economic woes of recent years make him even more eager for the rewards of paradise: Today, “I may have sufficient money to go to a restaurant, but I’ll hold back because there’s a rainy day I may have to plan for…. Over there, one will hopefully not have these restrictions at all. There won’t be any rainy days to worry about.”
Every time Razi sees heads of state posing for a photo op, with a bowl of fruit on the table between them, he thinks about heaven. Every time he goes to a wedding and sees a bridal bouquet, he thinks about heaven. These small tokens, he says, are constant reminders of the world beyond, of the rewards bestowed upon those who pray, give to charity, and do right by others. “Gardens and rivers and fruits are the best of what we have in this world. Does that mean heaven will be exactly like [it says in the Qur’an]? I don’t think so. It’s a place where I can do effectively whatever my desire wants, without getting penalized for it in any shape or form. Everything is acceptable. There is an abundance of everything. There is harmony with people, with things, with nature. There is the ultimate peace of mind.” And then he puts the keys to the community center back in his pocket, glances at his cell phone, and heads back to the office.