Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly . INTERVIEW . Prof. Michael Sells . August 23, 2002

Read more of RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY'S interview with Haverford College religion professor Michael Sells, who edited APPROACHING THE QUR'AN: THE EARLY REVELATIONS:

How did you choose the section of the Qur'an to write about?

The section that I write about and that is recorded on the book's CD is a section that Muslims learn first when they're learning the Qur'an. They are short hymnic suras [chapters]. People have compared them to the Psalms in the way they're set up. They're the ones people memorize most often and hear most often throughout their lives.

They're also the ones that speak most directly to people, regardless of their historical situation or how much they know about the history of Arabia, because they are not filled with all the complex, political issues that come in the other periods of the Qur'an. These are usually at the end of the written Qur'an. For historical reasons, the order of the written Qur'an is very, very unusual. Most people who pick up the written Qur'an and start to read it never get to them. So, that's why I started with them.

They also contain the basic theological ideas of the Qur'an. They don't contain the social politics that come in later, but there's only so much you can do in one book, and I thought this issue -- what is the basic theological claim in the Qur'an? -- needed to be addressed. I think those passages address it mostly clearly. They address the main theological points of Islam without all the historical detail and complexity that the later, more social history sections focus on.

These passages, called the "early Meccan passages," address basic theological issues -- the creation of the world, the meaning of life, the relationship of the human being to God -- in a way that's not bound up with the social politics of seventh-century Arabia. Therefore, they are much more accessible to someone who hasn't studied the history and politics of Arabia, which is the audience that this book would be read by, primarily -- those who are not experts in Arabian history.

Did you consciously leave out the violent sections?

Well, no. William Buckley has said that this was an expurgated Qur'an that "slyly" leaves out the violent sections. What I did is what's done very commonly in the biblical readers that are often required reading in American universities in Western civilization and humanities courses: choose those passages that are the most accessible in literary and theological terms. These biblical readers almost always leave out the really gruesome passages of the Book of Joshua, or the descriptions in the Apocalypse of what's going to happen to the unbeliever. And they have never been criticized for "slyly" or deceptively giving an overly peaceful version of Judaism and Christianity.

The point is not to make any claim whatsoever about the Qur'an as a whole or Islam as a whole. The whole notion that you can generalize and say, "Religion X is peaceful" or not peaceful is, in my view, an unhealthful simplification, anyway.

All the major sacred texts have images, passages, themes that can be used under certain interpretations to motivate and justify violence and persecution of others. Sometimes they're direct, where a violent sacred text will lead to a violent interpretation. Sometimes they're very indirect. Jesus never said anything about killing Jews, but the way the Jews are presented in the crucifixion scene has lead to a thousand years of persecution of Jews by Christians.

If you look at history, you'll find that every religion is both a religion of peace and a religion of violence, depending on who is interpreting it, which passages they foreground, and how they interpret those passages. To say that any religion is either peaceful or violent is a useless simplification, really.

The Family Policy Network asserted that the book was deliberately written to show the peaceful side of Muslims in order to proselytize. Was that your intent?

Well, the criticisms from that group have been twofold. They have sometimes seemed to imply proselytization. I actually had a student from UNC write me and say he was a Baptist, and he really appreciated getting to know some of the basic ideas of the Qur'an and the way it's put together. Appreciating that did not threaten his faith, but he felt it deepened his own Baptist faith by getting to know other religions.

That's what I call a non-conflictual idea of religion. The notion that any portrayal of a religion that shows anything positive is going to proselytize is a conflictual notion of religion based on the idea that to support your own religion, you have to negate the religion of the other.

The other charge is it's indoctrination into the idea that Islam is a religion of peace. That's a generalization this book never makes, and I would never make about any religion.

In my debates with Joe Glover [president of the Family Policy Network], whom I respect and have gotten to like, he's made some statements that I think are inflammatory -- statements implying that, according to the Qur'an, Muslims are required to kill non-Muslims. Now, according to some interpretations, that is true. That's the interpretation of Osama bin Laden, because he thinks that the West now is in the same position as the people who attacked Muhammad. And so he cites those passages not historically, but as if they applied to the present day.

But the vast majority of Muslims don't interpret those passages that way, and to imply that Muslims -- no matter how nice they are, no matter how well you know them, no matter how kind they've been to you -- have in the back of their mind some religious obligation that they have to kill you is very dangerous. It's the kind of generalization that was made before the conflict in Bosnia, and it helped convince people to turn on their defenseless neighbors and kill them or put them in concentration camps.

How have you seen your book used elsewhere?

The book has been used in more than 70 university and college settings -- never in a situation where all incoming students are required to read it, but, usually, in introduction to religion courses or introduction to Islamic civilization courses.

I get a lot of feedback from people saying that this book really helped them understand Islamic tradition, because the Qur'an as it is written is not the way Muslims encounter the Qur'an, for the most part. They encounter it in Arabic recitation, orally. They learn it orally and, for Muslims, this is their encounter with the word of God -- the oral recitation of the Qur'an in Arabic. That's just as important for them as the Eucharist or Communion is for Christianity, where Jesus Christ is considered the Word of God. In Islam, the Qur'an is considered the Word of God, and by reciting that, there's a ritual dimension of intimacy between the believer and the divine.

All of that is bound up with the problem that in the Qur'an the meaning and the sound are so closely intertwined they can't easily be separated, or separated at all, really.

Has there been an increase in the study of Islam? What do people hope to get from it?

After the tragedy of Sept. 11, there were two different reactions to the attack. Among some Americans, there was the reaction that Osama bin Laden actually stated that he wanted -- a backlash against Islam, an angry declaration of war against Islam that would lead to a World War III in which he could be the leader of one side.

But what he probably didn't expect, and what runs counter to his aim, is that a lot of Americans decided they wanted to know what this tradition was -- not to find out whether it's simply peaceful or simply violent, because most Americans understand that religions are more complex than that.

When I give a public lecture to a church, or an anti-defamation league group, or another community group, the audience that would normally be 20 is often a hundred, or the audience of normally 40 is often 200. I found that throughout the year, the interest was enormously increased, and the seriousness, the depth of the interest is increased, especially among adult audiences. They're doing a lot of reading. They're following up on it. They want to come back for more sessions.

With student enrollments, it's a little bit different, because students often are more influenced by what their dorm mate has taken, or what the rest of the baseball team is taking than by some of these wider geopolitical issues. But you do see, definitely, an increase in the enrollments as well.

You've called UNC's decision to assign the book "gutsy."

I really think that the most important issue is not church and state. The court case established that pretty definitively; this didn't violate that boundary. Nor is it the issue of whether this was a good idea or an appropriate assignment. People of good will can disagree on that.

But by making a controversial assignment and sticking with it, UNC allowed a controversy to develop that has been very important. There's a seething feeling among many that, in fact, Islam is the enemy. If, when President Bush or the Congress says, "Islam is not the enemy; we're just fighting terrorists," you have millions of Americans who do not share that belief, you have a society divided about who the enemy is.

The Chinese classic, THE ART OF WAR, says if you're going to pursue a war, know yourself and know your enemy. To go into a very dangerous period of history with a mixed message about who the enemy is could be extremely dangerous. It could lead to anti-Islamic demonstrations in the United States, or statements by influential officials that are broadcast around the Islamic world and used by radicals to say, "See? We told you so. We told you that you'll never be accepted by the West." And it could further alienate and marginalize the moderates within the Islamic world.

So, to have this important discussion would be as if in 1941 UNC or any college had assigned a book called APPROACHING JAPANESE RELIGION. There would have been denunciations for treason and for trying to show the enemy as peaceful, and that would've gotten onto the airwaves, into the newspapers. And then when someone came up with the idea of putting Japanese-Americans in internment camps, people would have been prepared for it, because we would have thought it through a little bit in public debate. That's the public debate UNC has allowed to happen, and I think they're very courageous, especially given the threats by legislators to punish UNC financially in the future for this.

What has changed since 9-11 about how you teach Islam?

I teach two kinds of courses about religions. One is an introduction to religion -- what is it, what are the ideas that are meaningful for people who adhere to that religion, and what are all the different ways they interpret those ideas within their tradition.

The second is a more socially oriented study of religion and its role in peace and violence. I teach a course on religion and violence in which I study the way sacred texts are used to generate violence in some interpretations, and also the increase in what I would call "globalized fundamentalism" after the end of the Cold War, when people used to channel their conflicts through the geopolitical rivalry between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. Now, if you want a revolution against your government, you can't go to the Soviet Union or the United States. You have to go some other ideology, and people are turning to violent fundamentalisms.

Islamic fundamentalism attacked us last year. Hindu fundamentalism carried out a horrific campaign of murder and burning Muslims alive in India last year. And Christian fundamentalism -- again, internationalized -- led to Christian militias killing up to a hundred thousand Muslims in Bosnia and carrying out atrocities that are have now been labeled "genocide" by the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague.

This is going to be a problem that I think is going to be with us for a long time, so that the study of religion has now also become a security study.

Some Muslims have criticized the book for not including the five pillars of Islam.

Many introductions to religion would present Islam by showing the five pillars of Islam -- the five rituals that every Muslim is obliged to engage in. This is what I would call a catechism approach to religion. It gives you some very simple points, and it gives you a sense of, "Okay, this is what that religion is."

My goal in writing a book like this is not to give people the catechism of a tradition or some basic, simplified points. They can get those in any book on the history of religions or any introduction to religions, and there are hundreds of good books of that kind.

But what people have never been able to do before, if they didn't know Arabic, was to get a grasp of what the Qur'an is like. Some of the pillars that come out of those early passages are talked about at length -- the ritual prayer, the obligation to give to the poor, the obligation to affirm the oneness of God. The other pillars -- fasting at Ramadan and the Hajj or pilgrimage to Mecca -- come out in later passages.

So, the book is controversial among Muslims as well as non-Muslims. There's no way that a book written on religion is going to avoid controversy. No book can cover everything, and if people can just get a sense of what the sacred text is for a tradition, that's enough from one book.

Another way of approaching the criticisms of the book from some observant Muslims is that it is not promoting the observance of Islam by giving the ritual obligations and beliefs as they're often taught in catechisms to schoolchildren. I think there's an expectation that when people are dealing with religions, they're going to present the religions as if they were an imam in the tradition, or a rabbi. But the approach we take in liberal arts colleges is different, and it's not meant to actually give people rules for how to live by these religions; you might get that in a different approach.

This book often surprises people, because they expect a book about a religious tradition to be a book on devotional practice -- to say what people are obliged to do and how they're obliged to do it and what they believe.

I often get students who want me to tell them what Muslims believe. In fact, what I show is that there's wide diversity of interpretation, and the study of religions is really involved in seeing the richness of interpretation among these different traditions.

When a scholar writes about a religion, adherents of the religion and others who just want to know the beliefs of this religion in a clear-cut way expect a manual of devotional practice and beliefs. That's not in this book. It's not the kind of thing that, as a scholar, I'm trying to do. That's the kind of thing that an imam or rabbi or priest might do in educating people in the basics of their faith.

This kind of book is not meant to proselytize Islam. In fact, Joe Glover of the Family Policy Network compared it to assigning a book by Jerry Falwell on Christianity. But Jerry Falwell is a preacher of Christianity who preaches an evangelical message that Christianity is the truth.

This book is attempting to allow people to understand what the Qur'an is as one of the most influential documents in history, and to get some sense of what it means to Muslims. That's a very, very different purpose. If I were attempting to convert people to any religion, I would write the kind of book that Jerry Falwell might write about Christianity.

I believe that the study of religions is something new in this country. It's new in the world, really. The study of religions used to be almost always theological -- people studying their own religion -- or apologetic: "How can we refute the other religions?" The idea that you would study religions to understand them and their dynamics and what they mean for the people who believe in them and the disagreements they have about the meaning, without an agenda, is very new. I think it will take several more decades for people to understand that's what we do in liberal arts colleges when we work with religions.

Some have said you're an apologist for Islam.

Sometimes I even find friends or neighbors who say, "I heard you on TV defending Islam." And I say, "What? How did you hear me defending Islam?" I make no statements whatsoever about Islam as a generalization. I believe that every religion has a violent side. I teach about that side in the appropriate context. I believe you can understand the violent side of a religion better if you start out first understanding the basics of the religion, and why people believe in the tradition, and what the constructive values for them are; then you'll understand not only the violent side better, and the interpretations that can lead to it, but also why it is so dangerous when religion gets involved with violence.

A secular ideology that doesn't have as deep a resonance with the human psychology cannot be as powerful, when used for the interpretation of violence, as a religious ideology can be. That's why I think religious violence among the traditions is so dangerous.

In my current book on Islam and the West after 9-11, I discuss with, I think, unusual frankness the sources of Islamic fundamentalism in the contemporary period, the threat they pose, and why I thought even before September 11th -- and publicly said so -- that the Taliban was an extremely dangerous regime, and that Saudi support for them was dangerous, and that they should be criminalized internationally, just like Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia was.

As someone who has looked at fundamentalism, violence and religion more closely than most people prior to 9-11, did you have a sense that things could become violent?

Some of the writers who have taken very anti-Islamic stances in the past have been hailed as vindicated prophets after Sept. 11, because they've been critical of Islam in a very general way. But you'll find in their writings no specific warning of where the danger in Islam might be. They had no clue that the Taliban were as dangerous as they were, because if you look at a tradition in generalized terms, you can't tell one interpretation from another.

By understanding the tradition in its wider range, it was apparent to me in the mid-1990s that the Wahabi ideology of Saudi Arabia, and the way it had been radicalized in Afghanistan with the Taliban, and the relationship of Osama bin Laden to the Taliban, were leading to an extreme ideology of absolute, massive violence.

I wrote about that especially after the statues of the Buddhas were dynamited. Understanding Islamic theology about idolatry and the Taliban's justification for saying they were blowing up an idol, I realized that this had never been done by any group in Afghanistan before. It had nothing to do with going back to the Middle Ages or classical Islam; but it was a radical, new ideology that could engage in the most fundamental brutality and violence.

The same thing happened in Bosnia, when you saw people burning the national library. I tried to explain that when people do something like that, it's a symbolic statement, and you can understand more about violent trends in religion by looking at the way people use symbols than you can from their actual statements in discursive language.

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