The Pope Kisses the Koran
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Huston Smith is internationally known and revered as the premier teacher of world religions and for his bestselling books The World's Religions and Why Religion Matters. He was the focus of a five-part PBS television series with Bill Moyers, and has taught at Washington University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Syracuse University, and the University of California, Berkeley.

Drawn from his masterful presentation of Islam in the bestselling book The World's Religions (over two million copies sold), Huston Smith offers a revealing look into the heart of a tradition with more than one billion adherents worldwide.

Dispelling narrow and distorted notions about the nature of Islam and featuring a new introduction by the author, this book compellingly conveys the profound appeal of Islam, while addressing such timely issues as the true meaning of jihad, the role of women in Islamic societies, and the remarkable growth of Islam in America.

The popular Western image of Islam is of a religion of violence, the most violent in the world today if not in all history. That is utterly untrue. There are violent passages in the Koran, but they are no more violent than some passages in the Bible, and (a point often overlooked by reporters who quote them out of context) they relate specifically to occasions when Muhammad was struggling desperately to keep the revelation that was entrusted to him from being wiped off the face of the earth.

Muslims have also fought, as have the adherents of every known faith-wars of religion have scarred Europe's history from the beginning. But I shall leave assessing the record to Norman Daniel, whose Islam and the West: The Making of an Image is the most serious attempt that has been made to compare the use of force in Islam and Christianity. His conclusion is that what can be safely said is that Islam has resorted to violence no more than has Christianity, while adding that that is probably a con­servative statement. He points out, as an example, that Spain and Anatolia changed hands about the same time. Every Jew and Muslim in Spain was killed, expelled from the country, or forced to convert to Christianity, whereas the seat of Orthodox Chris­tianity remains in Constantinople to this very day.

To start at the beginning, with semantics, the word islam means explicitly "surrender," but it is related to the Arabic word salam meaning "peace" as in the standard Islamic saluta tion, assalamu 'alaykum, "peace be upon you. " And when a vir­tuous Muslim enters heaven, it is said, the only word he will be able to utter for three days, over and over, is peace, the virtue he has been longing for his entire life and that now overwhelms him with its total presence. Between the bookends of the religion's name and its total realization in heaven stands history, and it is instructive.

When the Prophet Muhammad brought the Koranic reve­lation to seventh-century Arabia, a major part of his mission was devoted precisely to bringing an end the inter-tribal war fare that was wreaking havoc in the region. Pre-Islamic Arabia was caught up in a vicious cycle of warfare in which tribe fought tribe in an unending pattern of vendetta and counter­vendetta. At the start the Prophet and his cohorts had to fight too in order to survive, but once their foothold was secure, he turned his attention to building peaceful coalitions between tribes, so successfully that when he died he left as his politi­cal legacy a solidly united Arabia. And into warfare itself Muhammad introduced chivalry. No holds were barred in pre­Koranic warfare, but Muhammad introduced many traditions of forbearance. Agreements are to be honored and treachery avoided. The wounded are not to be mutilated or the dead dis­figured.

Women, children and the old are to be spared, as are orchards, crops, and sacred objects-no scorched earth policy or leveling of Hindu temples or destruction of Buddhist statues in authentic Islam.

The key-and inflammatory-issue, though, is jihad. Literally the word means only "effort, exertion, or struggle," but it has taken on the meaning of a Holy War. No full-fledged religion has been able to manage without a doctrine something like this-complete pacifism remains for smallish sects such as the Mennonites and Quakers. Egregious aggression must be halted, and murder, rape, and pillage defended against. So far, alas, so good. What is not good is that jihad has been turned by outsiders into a rallying cry for hatred against Islam-mention the word and up come images of screaming mobs streaming through streets while brandishing swords and destroying everyone and everything in sight, all at the beck of some Ayatollah or bin Laden. The truth of the matter is that Islam's concept of a Holy War is virtually identical with the just War concept in Christian canon law, right down to the notion that martyrs in both are assured of entering heaven.

In both cases the war must be defensive or fought to right a manifest wrong. Chivalry must be observed and the least possible damaged inflicted to secure the end in question. And hostilities must cease when the objective is accomplished. Retaliation is disal­lowed.

So, to face the hard question, were the destructive acts of September 2001 jihad? If the perpetrators saw those acts as responses to, first, continuing Israeli settlement of the West Bank and, second, the boycott cordon around Iraq and daily unmanned bombing of its territory, both regarded as acts of aggression against the dar al-salam, the House of Islam-to repeat, if the perpetrators of the damage saw their acts as responses to what they see as aggression, they doubtless saw themselves as waging jihad. Otherwise not.

Finally, fundamentalism. Islamic fundamentalism is very different from Christian. Both share as their root cause the sense of being threatened, but by different things. Christian fundamentalism took shape in the 1920s as a reaction against the threat (as seen by conservative Christians) of, first, Darwinian evolution which seemed to challenge the biblical teaching that human beings were created directly by God, and, second, the threat of "the higher criticism," which applies the tools of literary criticism to analyzing the Bible as if it were any other book.

Islamic fundamentalism is largely a regional phenomenon that centers in the Middle East-it causes few ripples in Indonesia and Africa. The reason it is powerful in Middle Eastern Islam is that 80 percent of the Muslims there are tradi­tional in their outlook and way of life, while the 20 percent who rule them have been educated in the West and are modern in outlook and lifestyle. It takes no great feat of imagination to sense the threat the traditional majority feel from the ruling minority, and it causes them to dig in their heels. Two worlds, the old and the new, are in sharp collision.

The permutations on this basic theme vary from region to region and are far too complex to enter into here. Moreover, to enter that domain would run counter to the intent of this introduction. I have used it to say a few words about issues that are bound to be in the reader's mind since the September atrocities, but nothing has happened to alter the foundation of this faith. Those foundations must provide the background, at least, for anything else one says about Islam, and to my knowledge they are presented accurately in the pages that follow.