No God but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam

Certain moments define a generation’s memory. Ask most Americans who were adults at the time where they were when they learned the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor or that JFK had been shot, and they will be able to tell you. The 2001 terrorist attacks on 9/11 that destroyed New York City’s World Trade Center are one of those moments. When Reza Aslan published No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam in 2005, he had no need to explain the historical context that led him to write: Contemporary culture was saturated with it. Aslan only directly mentions those attacks and Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network five times (xv-xvii, 86-87, 247-8, 259-60, and 266), each time assuming the reader has prior knowledge. In a deliberate rhetorical move, the brevity of his treatment of 9/11 structurally makes bin Laden’s radicalism peripheral to mainstream Islam. Aslan nonetheless is clear that this event and the subsequent anti-Islamic American reaction are what prompted and shaped this book: “Considering how effortlessly religious dogma has become intertwined with political ideology since September 11, how can we overcome the clash-of-monotheisms mentality that has so deeply entrenched itself in the modern world?” (xvii). While Aslan could assume widespread understanding of this background and simply highlight the more extreme Islamophobic speech, two decades on, this context needs more explication.

The 9/11 terrorist attacks came as a shock to the American psyche and shook the country from a period of unusual prosperity and security. After the Cold War ended in 1991, the US was the de facto global superpower. Both China and the new Russia seemed to be rapidly turning into friendly democracies; even as late as 2012, pundits mocked presidential candidate Mitt Romney for identifying Russia as a major threat. As the US cut Cold War spending, the government ran a surplus. Business boomed on the strength of Silicon Valley technological innovation and new markets in formerly Communist countries. America’s largest post-Cold War military operation—the 1991 Gulf War that liberated Kuwait from its Iraqi invaders—ended in victory a mere hundred hours after ground troops entered the fight. While terrorist attacks occurred—such as Timothy McVeigh’s domestic terrorist bombing in Oklahoma City and an al-Qaeda car bomb in the World Trade Center’s parking garage—most Americans neither worried about terrorism nor associated it particularly with Muslim radicals.

When terrorists struck in the heart of America’s largest city, toppling the two tallest office buildings in the country and killing American citizens in the midst of their workday, they shattered this sense of security. The culprits were members of al-Qaeda, an organization founded by Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden, coming from a wealthy Saudi family, adopted a fundamentalist Wahhabi interpretation of Islam. Believing he had a duty to fight for fellow Muslims, he traveled to Afghanistan in the 1980s to join local insurgents fighting the Soviet army occupying the country. Ironically, the US supported these insurgents against its Cold War foe. After the insurgency succeeded, bin Laden developed an ideology of defending Islam in the Middle East against the influence of Western countries and secularized Muslim governments. Lacking the strength to fight America’s military directly and arguing that America’s “attack” on Islam was primarily cultural and economic, bin Laden turned to terrorism against both military and civilian targets. Civilians, in his view, could no longer be considered noncombatants if they staffed the businesses or produced the media that subtly corrupted and impoverished Muslims. Bin Laden also criticized the presence of “infidel” American military bases in the holy Arabian Peninsula after the Gulf War and American support for Israel versus Palestinians.

While Aslan does not specifically mention the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he indirectly addresses this modern flashpoint through his extended defense of Muhammad against anti-Judaism. Beginning in the late 1800s, some European Jews despaired of being accepted in their current countries and created the Zionist movement that sought a national Jewish homeland in Israel—the land ruled at least in part by their Biblical ancestors. Israel at the time was a mainly Muslim province of Palestine in the Ottoman Empire, which welcomed a certain number of Jewish immigrants. After the two World Wars, a period of British occupation, and an influx of refugees from the Holocaust, the area gained independence. War broke out immediately between the Jewish and the Palestinian populations. Despite the support of neighboring Muslim countries, the Palestinians lost, and so the Jewish population founded the state of Israel. Many Palestinians were driven from their homes and forbidden to return. In 1967, after another war between Israel and its neighbors, the Israelis occupied the remaining Palestinian territories (the West Bank and Gaza). Despite numerous attempts at peace, the two sides have remained in a state of antagonism, especially since the Second Intifada (“Uprising”) from 2000 to 2005. Palestinians accuse Israel of oppression, apartheid, and continuing to illegally steal their ancestral land. Israel points both to terrorist attacks against civilians and extremist calls for Israel’s complete destruction as proof that it is defending against a dangerous enemy unwilling to compromise. Bin Laden adopted the Palestinian view of neo-colonial oppression and saw US involvement with the state of Israel as further Western encroachment in a historically Muslim region.

In 1996, bin Laden found a sanctuary in Afghanistan, then ruled by the Taliban—a group of Muslim fundamentalists formed to impose order on a fractured, chaotic country after the defeat of the Communists. Bin Laden recruited like-minded men and built a formidable logistical system to supply and train them. This group, which he named al-Qaeda, sent 20 men to the US to train as pilots. On September 11, 2001, 19 of them split into groups and boarded four planes. When the planes were in the air, they pulled out knives to attack the crews and take over the planes. Previous hijackings had simply taken the passengers as hostages, but bin Laden’s advisors had developed a new plan. They turned the planes into kamikaze missiles, crashing them into the two towers of the World Trade Center and into the Pentagon. Blocks of New York City were devastated and almost three thousand American civilians died. Passengers in the fourth plane learned of the fate of the other flights via cell phone and fought back; their plane crashed in an empty field in Pennsylvania without reaching its target.

In the aftermath of 9/11, the US invaded Afghanistan to destroy al-Qaeda and the Taliban government harboring them. In a surprising move that prompted suspicions of wider American aggression, the US also invaded the secular military dictatorship of Iraq. Within the US, the “War on Terrorism” began with heightened scrutiny of anyone who might engage in terrorism. For many Americans, that meant Muslims. Politicians and preachers denounced Islam as a religion of violence, while undercover FBI agents surveilled mosques. Al-Qaeda and other radicalized Muslims continued to attempt to carry out more attacks. The period in which Aslan wrote his book is therefore one of fear, uncertainty, and misunderstanding, where radical terrorists were seen as representative of an entire religion.