the Internet has become such a handy way to communicate and advertise, naturally Muslims are finding ways to use it to good advantage. A cursory flip through the pages of almost any popular magazine published for a Muslim readership turns up dozens of interesting items. As expected, publishers and bookstores specializing in Islamic materials are among the most numerous advertisers. A close second are vendors of miscellaneous supplies of interest to Muslims, including clothing and jewelry with religious calligraphy; devotional materials such as prayer rugs, pictures of Mecca, and wall plaques with Quranic calligraphy; educational tools such as a “Pilgrimage to Mecca” board game; recorded versions of Quran recitation; and a growing array of software items to aid in the traditional religious sciences. Next come ads for special services such as arrangement of travel for pilgrimage, both the Hajj and the Umra (minor pilgrimage outside the formal season of Hajj) to Saudi Arabia, and programs in Islamic Studies at Islamic colleges. Muslim social service agencies seeking to raise funds for the care of orphans and the indigent are increasingly visible on the Internet as well. A type of advertising that seems to be generating increasing interest in this category of special services for Muslims consists of listings of financial options and banking and investment services that take into account the ethical concerns of those who believe Muslims ought to avoid the established institutions of mainstream capitalism if at all possible.
Are there any Quranic teachings that relate to contemporary understandings of the material world?
Beginning with the Quran, important Islamic texts and thinkers have addressed themselves to environmental issues. Take this text from the Quran for example: “Do they not see how each thing God has created, down to the very least, most humbly prostrates itself to God as its shadow revolves from the right and the left? To God all in heaven and on earth prostrates itself; from beasts to angels none withholds haughtily. In reverent fear of their transcendent Lord they do what they are bidden” (Quran 16:48–50). Unlike the Bible, the Quran contains no integrated narrative of creation, suggests that God would surely need no rest after his “work,” and hints that a “day” might actually be a very long time. In both sources Adam is the first human being, but the Quran’s descriptions of the material vary from dust to semen to water to a clot of blood. Though the Quran’s Adam also knows the names of all creatures, the emphasis is on God’s knowledge rather than Adam’s. In the Quranic stories, human beings are not created in God’s image, for that would compromise the divine transcendence.
A view of the Old City of Jerusalem, Israel. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is at the top, right. Jerusalem is considered a holy city by Christians, Jews, and Muslims alike.
How do the Bible and Quran differ with respect to the creation myth?
In general the Quran seems to place greater emphasis on God’s sovereignty and power than does the biblical account. Whereas the Bible describes creation as a single original action, the Quran suggests that God is involved in creation as an ongoing activity, reasserting His creative prerogative with the emergence of each new living being. In the Bible, God seems to commission the first people unreservedly to take charge of the earth. Islamic tradition also regards the creation as given to humans to use, but God seems to hesitate a bit in turning the operation over to Adam and Eve. God offered to Heaven, Earth, and the Mountains the “trust” of watching over creation. They declined out of fear, so God offered the Trust to humankind. Adam accepted, unjust and foolish as he was—and ungrateful in addition. When God informed his angels he was preparing to entrust creation to Adam as his representative (literally, caliph, vice regent), they warned the Creator that human beings would surely act wickedly. God assured the angels that the risk was worth taking. God reckoned it was a gamble worth taking for He had called forth from Adam’s loins and assembled all of his yet unborn descendants and asked them, “Am I not your Lord?” They had responded as one and without hesitation, “Yes, we are witnesses to that!” (Quran 33:72, 2:30, 7:10, 172).
Can Muslims and Christians come together on matters of environmental stewardship?
Any discussion of religious attitudes toward the care and keeping of the planet is bound to run head-on into the unpleasant fact that virtually no major religious community can boast a very impressive record in implementing its stated values. Unfortunately, greed quickly swamps lofty but fragile ideals in its wake. However unrealistic it may seem to speak of a tradition’s ideals without taking a hard look at how human beings have actually behaved, ideals do need to be restated. Muslims and Christians as communities need to get serious about understanding their own traditions’ mandates about environmental concerns. Then there may be more solid ground on which to discuss shared responsibilities about confronting the global tendency to sacrifice the earth on the altar of the great god Profit.
ISLAM AND CONFLICT IN THE MIDDLE EAST
What is the role of “sacred place/space” in contemporary international affairs, especially in the Middle East?
Islamic tradition has expressed the most expansive sense of sacred place and has retained the strongest sense of traditional orientation to a sacred center. To the Arabian cities of Mecca and Medina come pilgrims from all over the world to commemorate the central events in the prophetic missions of Abraham and Muhammad. When religionists decry the presence of non-Muslim military personnel on Arabian soil, they raise the unacceptable, if rather unlikely, prospect of an infidel invasion of the Holy Cities. To the Iraqi towns of Najaf and Karbala, Shi’ite pilgrims have come over the centuries to commemorate the deaths of Ali and his martyr-son Husayn. It was in part to liberate these two holy sites from Saddam Hussein that Khomeini persisted in the war with Iraq. Somewhere in Iraq even now, some Shi’ite mullah is surely exhorting his people to defend these sanctuaries of the martyrs from defilement by outsiders.
Western Wall of the Jewish Temple, popularly known as the “Wailing Wall” because of its association with annual lamentation of the fast observed on the Ninth of Av over the destruction of the Temple. The lower courses of masonry are from King Herod’s time, identifiable as Herodian by the trimmed outer margin of each stone. (Photo courtesy David Oughton).
Why is the holy city of Jerusalem such a bone of contention in Middle Eastern politics?
Each of the three Abrahamic faiths revolves around a sacred story, a distinctive interpretation of history. At the center of every sacred story is at least one sacred place, which in turn carves out of the cosmos a space held to be inviolable and safe for believers, a sanctuary. For Jews, Jerusalem clearly focuses that sense of sacred place, and within Jerusalem it is the Western Wall (or Wailing Wall) that symbolizes Jewish identity above all. Here one can see and touch all that remains of the Solomonic and Herodian temples. Here one can lament the destruction of both temples and long for the raising of a new one. Unfortunately, time has made the situation agonizingly complex for Jews. The merest mention of rebuilding the temple evokes cries of outrage from the Muslim community, for on top of the temple mount there now stand the seventh-century shrine called the Dome of the Rock and the early eighth-century al-Aqsa mosque.
What do Muslims think is especially important and “Islamic” about Jerusalem?
For Muslims the place recalls the importance of Abraham and Solomon as prophets and adds a new layer of sacrality in the belief that this place was a way station in Muhammad’s chief mystical experience, the Night Journey and Ascension. The Muslim holy places on the temple mount also bear an important historic relationship to Christianity. Inscriptions on the Dome of the Rock, as well as the Dome’s axial relationship to the al-Aqsa’s basilical hall (which, it appears, was laid out to parallel and outdo that of the Sepulcher with its dome and basilical hall), clearly suggest a statement of Muslim superiority
