One in every five human beings is a Muslim. The rest of us cannot afford to remain ignorant about their beliefs. In the first of a two-part series, Kathy Sheridan traces the evolution of the world's fastest growing faith.
Before September 11th, 2001, who in the West thought much about Islam? After it, one thing was for sure: Islam would never be ignored again. Within weeks of the Twin Towers atrocity, seven of the 15 paperbacks on the New York Times bestsellers list were books devoted to Islam.
This was Osama bin Laden's triumph. Within one cataclysmic hour, he turned the West into a vast workshop for Islam, flailing around for answers to a murderous alienation. The Koran, the Muslim equivalent of the Christian Bible and the Jewish Torah, became a runaway bestseller. Christians and Jews poured into the mosques, asking Muslims to explain the teachings of Islam.
"Not even a billion dollars to support da'wa [ propagation] would have made it possible to reach as many Americans with the message of Islam," one leader is reported to have said. Others, awed by the numbers being exposed to the teachings of their faith, saw it as an assurance that God moves in mysterious ways.
Nor did it end there, according to Yvonne Haddad, professor of the history of Islam and Christian-Muslim relations at Georgetown University, Washington DC. Despite the overwhelmingly negative publicity focused on Islam in the aftermath of 9/11, the process of conversion in the US accelerated. One report estimates it at 30,000 people a year. The largest number of these continues to be African American males, many of them descendants of Muslims who had been forcibly converted to Christianity.
The second largest, interestingly, consists of white women, says Haddad, who has done extensive research on the subject.
Suddenly, westerners began to notice the number of Muslims living quietly around them: six million in the US; five million in France; 3.2 million in Germany, two million in the UK; and, according to the last census, 20,000 in the Republic - impressive but almost puny compared to a worldwide total of 1.2 billion, making Islam the second largest faith on the planet.
One in every five human beings finds meaning in a religion of which many of us know little or nothing. It is the fastest-growing religion on earth; demographers reckon that in about 20 years, one in every four will be Muslim.
The quest for understanding continues. The Chester Beatty Library in Dublin, the only permanent exhibition in the western hemisphere devoted to the beliefs of Islam, has attracted unprecedented crowds in recent years. Visitors are increasing at around 15 to 20 per cent a year, according to the museum director, Dr Michael Ryan. Attendance figures have doubtless been boosted by the museum's move to Dublin Castle from its former Ballsbridge home and by the fact that the Muslim community in Ireland has more than quadrupled in 10 years. Whatever the cause, the museum expects 170,000 visitors this year, compared to five or six thousand a few years ago. This increasing interest was behind Ryan's idea to hold a three-day conference, entitled Understanding Islam, which will take place in Dublin next week.
Meanwhile, in Britain, the theme of Islam Awareness Week all this week is "Your Muslim Neighbour". Muslims are throwing open their homes and community centres to give non-Muslims an insight into Islamic culture. Around Britain, schoolchildren have created a so-called "tent of peace", made up of "handkerchiefs of peace", displaying Islamic designs and messages of peace.
But these are the voices that rarely make it into the media which favour voluble cartoon characters spitting vitriol and violence. They are the voices that don't sell newspapers, says Haddad, wryly. The pressure comes from all sides. Haddad - scheduled to speak at the Chester Beatty conference - talks of "a lot of effort to repress free speech on campuses" in the US.
"But then you find that the press tends to quote only the most radical Muslims. They are not looking at traditional teachings or at new interpretations," she says.
Her point is as valid in Europe as in the US. In the row over the banning of headscarves in French schools, who remembers the response of Sheikh Tantawi, of Cairo's al-Azhar mosque? Advising French Islamic women to comply with the French law (which he thought reasonable), he said that just as westerners should respect Islamic mores when in Islamic countries, so the Islamic community had to respect western mores when in the West.
PART OF THE problem is that, for newcomers, it is next to impossible to dip into Islamic texts and draw one's own conclusions, unaided. Unlike Roman Catholicism, for example, which has a central authority to define and rule on the great issues (and woe betide those who stray from it), Islam has none.
Ian Edge, a practising barrister and visiting lecturer in law at the School of Oriental and African Studies in the University of London - and also among the speakers scheduled at the Chester Beatty conference - remarks that while there are about 6,000 verses in the Koran, as few as 100 of those are what westerners would recognise as legal principles.
"The majority of it is a religious history, including most of the stories we would know from the Bible, with, for example, Jesus, Mary - who has a whole chapter - and Joseph," he says.
A second written source is Sunna, a collection of stories called Hadith relating to the life and sayings of the prophet Mohammed. In these, God acts through the prophet and the stories describe the decisions the prophet makes.
Then there are the "indirect Hadith", which describe how the prophet acted, ate and lived his life, as reported by friends. After these (and most confusingly) come the religious scholars, who add to the store of laws and rules by interpretation and by analogy. This is where the fatwas (rulings) are handed down by the muftis.
As Karen Armstrong, author of several works on Islam and the prophet, points out, none of the major world faiths has been good to women but, like Christianity, Islam began with a fairly positive message. It was only later that the religion was hijacked by old patriarchal attitudes. Many educated women in the Islamic world are acutely aware of this. One writer, Dalia Mogahed, believes that this oppression is "just one symptom of a widespread decay of Islamic ideals and the subsequent regression to pre-Islamic tribal culture".
According to Armstrong, there is nothing in the Koran about obligatory veiling for all women or their seclusion in harems. This only came into Islam about three generations after the prophet's death, under the Greeks of Christian Byzantium, who had long veiled and secluded their women.
Ian Edge also finds little in Islamic law that oppresses women. In fact, the West was about a thousand years behind Islam in recognising women's spiritual and intellectual equality with men. It was Islam in the seventh century that, virtually overnight, granted Muslim women the right to vote, to own property, to inherit, to receive a higher education and even run a business in which men were subordinates.
The prophet's wife, Khadijah, was one of the most successful businesswomen in Mecca, employing many men, including at one stage, the prophet himself. Aisha, whom the prophet married some years after Khadijah's death, became a scholar of Islam.
Centuries ago Islam gave women rights that are largely denied to them now. For example, a Muslim woman is - in theory - a totally separate entity from her husband, not only keeping her family name as well as all property she owned before marriage, but also ownership of money or property she acquires after marriage. In one school of Islamic thought, women don't have to cook or clean for their husbands unless they get paid for it. The Koran even allows for something akin to a pre-nuptial contract, which can cover anything from housework to the frequency of sex.
CLEARLY THE PROPHET was something of a New Man. Haddad notes that he used to mend his own clothes and sweep out the house when he wasn't praying. The Hadith extol his sexual virility (he had 12 wives after the death of Khadija and, despite his own injunctions, indisputably had a favourite, Aisha), and he was adamant that a husband must sexually satisfy his wife, going so far as to recommend foreplay. He was also a stickler for honouring your mother.
But there is no getting around the fact that one of the most contentious issues in Islamic law - the exclusively male right to unilateral divorce - is in the Koran. According to Ian Edge, Tunisia is the only Islamic country that has managed to abolish it. The effort now, he says, is focused on altering it, limiting the circumstances in which it can apply.
For example, in some areas, the man must register his application before a court, which will try to persuade him either to withdraw or to enter into reconciliation and at least attempt to find a consensual decision.
"And so, what is perceived to be a very discriminating condition has been blunted by amends and reforms - and not without controversy", says Edge.
Another contentious issue in Islam is polygamy. And yes, the Koran does permit men to take four wives - but this was not a matter of pandering to male lust, rather one of social welfare, says Armstrong. The provision enabled widows and orphans to find a protector, without whom it would have been impossible for them to survive in seventh-century Arabia. With the advent of the welfare state, however, even some Muslim women admit that this argument is hard to sustain.
It is also hard to ignore the question of why, if Islam offers such a rich bill of rights to women, has it not liberated more women? This is only one of the imponderables for anyone who thinks that Islam can be absorbed in a couple of sittings.
For example, the word "jihad" has become inextricably linked with some of the most horrific deeds of Muslims, which by their nature and visibility tend to attract more coverage than, say, an aerial bombing. Again, Haddad merely notes that when Palestinians are asked about the barbarism of the suicide bombers, the reply is that if they had F16s (like the Israelis), they wouldn't need suicide bombers.
BUT DOES JIHAD mean holy war and does it encourage attacks on "infidels"? According to one website, it can mean a believer's "internal struggle to live out the Muslim faith as well as possible; the struggle to build a good Muslim society; holy war: the struggle to defend Islam, with force if necessary".
According to literature supplied by the Islamic Cultural Centre in Clonskeagh, Dublin, "holy war does not exist in Islam, nor will Islam allow its followers to be involved in a holy war. The latter refers to the holy war of the Crusaders". It goes on to quote "an explicit verse" in the Koran, which says: "There is no compulsion in religion".
Clearly, many lines have been crossed not just by radical Islamists but by corrupt Islamic governments willing to abuse clear Koranic principles which point in a democratic direction or, at the very least, aim to prevent despotic rule: shura (consultation), ijma' (consensus), al-hurriya (freedom), al-huqquq al-shar'iyya (legitimate rights).
Ahmad Moussalli, professor of political science at the American University of Beirut and author of Progressive Muslims, writes that "shura", for example, "a doctrine that demands the participation of society in running the affairs of its government, became in reality a doctrine that was manipulated by political and religious elites to secure their economic, social and political interests at the expense of other segments of society".
But the blame for alienation and violence is also shunted outward. The word "humiliation" crops up repeatedly, in history lessons that go back to the Crusaders' conquest of Jerusalem and the slaughter of 40,000 Muslims and Jews in two days. Haddad, herself a Syrian-born Christian married to an Episcopal minister, points out that much of the recent upheaval is a response to western colonialism.
"Except for Saudi Arabia, parts of Iran and part of Turkey, every Muslim nation has known the colonial boot," she says. "And when the Europeans had finished with them, three empires were fragmented into what are 57 Muslim nations, in a policy of divide and rule. And still one-third of the Muslim population lives outside of these 57 nations".
The issue of Israel, she contends, "is extremely important in hyping up fear on both sides. It goes very deep . . . It occupies the same area as the Crusaders".
Other commentators, east and west, believe that Muslims should start to look inwards for the roots of Islamic fanaticism.
Irshad Manji, the bestselling author of The Trouble with Islam: A Muslim's Call for Reform in her Faith, has called above all, for the rediscovery of ijtihad, or independent thinking, among Muslims.
Manji, described by the New York Times as "Osama bin Laden's worst nightmare", asks some pertinent questions: "Who is the real coloniser of Muslims, America or Arabia? Why are we all being held hostage by what's happening between the Palestinians and the Israelis? Why are we squandering the talents of women, fully half of God's creation? What's our excuse for reading the Koran literally when it's so contradictory and ambiguous? Is that a heart attack you're having? Make it fast. Because if more of us don't speak out against the imperialists within Islam, these guys will walk away with the show."
Monday: Living the Islamic faith in Ireland