alt=""/>n as a divine revelation. Whether or not these claims to reason are satisfying isn’t the question; what’s interesting here is that reason itself gets treated as valuable. The “scientific rationality” pitch occupies the first chapter and over half of the pamphlet’s content; by the end of it, the author has exhausted his energy and just slugs through the rest. The four-page “Benefits of Islam” chapter restates more or less the same benefit in four different ways: (1) Islam gets you into paradise; (2) Islam gets you out of hellfire; (3) Islam gets you happiness and peace; (4) Islam gets your sins forgiven. This approach once meshed with my own religiosity. If my experience of Islam is no longer compatible with something as straightforward as A Brief Illustrated Guide to Understanding Islam, have I moved from Islam to something else?
The “General Information” section names Islam’s priorities. The pamphlet points out that “Muslims”—a categorization taken for granted as historically consistent, coherent, and full of descriptive power—produced “great advances” in a variety of sciences, because “Islam instructs man to use his powers of intelligence and observation.”10 It then tells me that in Islam, Jesus is really important, born of a virgin and performer of miracles; that Islam, “a religion of mercy,” forbids terrorism; that an Islamic state protects the rights and property of all citizens, Muslims and non-Muslims alike; that Islam opposes all forms of racism; and that Islam gives women the right to own and manage their money and bestows special honor upon mothers.
The woman pushing these pamphlets promised that there was a clear difference between “religion” and “culture,” but the Islam produced in A Brief Illustrated Guide could have been coherent only in a particular cultural moment. The cultureless, timeless, and pure Islam of this pamphlet necessarily created itself as a response to something outside it. So while the Guide’s claims of scientific proof for the Qur’
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The other subjects to get attention in A Brief Illustrated Guide do not simply represent the “core” of Islam, but rather the questions that get thrown at Muslims in a particular time and place. The Guide tells us about Jesus, along with modern concepts such as “terrorism,” “human rights,” “racism,” and of course “the status of women in Islam”; as an introduction to the eternal message of Islam, these themes would not have had the same relevance two hundred years ago. Even the specific literary genre in which this Guide is crafted, its style, aesthetic, and organization, and the nature of the institutions and networks that produced and disseminate it—everything between its initial conception in the author’s mind to its appearing on a table at a state university’s “Islam 101” event, hosted by that university’s Muslim Students’ Association—represent much more than “Islam.” This is an Islam whose priorities are determined from outside, from what its advocates have marked as the values of non-Islam. Even when this pamphlet’s vision of Islam disagrees with non-Islam, it does so within the logic of a world that it shares with non-Islam.
Where in A Brief Illustrated Guide to Understanding Islam can I find the Big Real? We could resort to the familiar metaphor of “old wine in a new bottle,” which assumes that while a vessel might change the apparent shape and color of the liquid that it contains, what’s inside remains unchanged in its eternal essence. But personally, I don’t buy the wine-bottle thing. I don’t know how to distinguish what’s inside the bottle from its exterior appearance, and the oldest bottles that we can examine are still just the oldest bottles; we never get to see the liquid without a container. The “Basic Islamic Beliefs” section lists six doctrinal concerns that have been widely held to be crucial deal breakers. This checklist goes way back—in fact, it’s represented in our textual tradition as coming out of Mu
Dar-us-Salam offers a more explicitly Salaf
