"Wheresoever ye turn, there is the face of Allah."
A statement like that is enough to induce a shudder in most Americans these days. It conjures visions of the worst kind of religious zeal. America's increased awareness of Muslim culture has come via televised images of veiled women and glowering men, dark shapes crudely cast against a sandstone background.
The term islam, however, means 'surrender.' A muslim is someone who has given "his entire being to Allah and his demand that human beings behave to one another with justice, equity and compassion."
There must be somewhere to look - outside of popular media - to learn about the nature of Islam.
Karen Armstrong's "Islam: A Short History," published before the attacks of Sept. 11, neatly reconciles the dichotomy between the fearful visage of Islam and its more peaceful, if complex, reality. The historian and former nun carefully wraps the history of Islam in a tight package that even a busy college student can afford to read.
Armstrong begins her story with Muhammad and ends it with Islam in a desperate position. In between, empires rise and fall within a paragraph as Armstrong dispatches the information with admirable brevity.
But perhaps the marrow of the book is what frames those turbulent and eventful middle years; the story then and now is of the attempt to recapture the revolutionary ideals of the Quran, the Islamic holy book, which have become muffled by time and myth.
Muhammad ibn Abdallah was a pious businessman before he began hearing the first Arab scripture coming from his own mouth in 610 A.D. The words that would form the Quran were not meant to found a new religion. The Prophet instead was bringing monotheism to the pagan Arabs, joining them with the Christians and the Jews.
Armstrong point out that from the beginning, however, Islam contained a social duty that has been eviscerated from its now apolitical cousins, especially Christianity in the West. "Social justice," Armstrong writes, is "the critical virtue of Islam." A wholly Muslim life requires looking after the welfare of the ummah, or Muslim community. Islam pervades every aspect of the lives of its followers, who hope to achieve tawhid, the divine unity of personal and social life by recognizing the sovereignty of God.
Skip ahead 1400 years. Islam has splintered into a variety of sects including Sunni and Shii Muslims and suffered the inevitable occasional bad leadership, but that's not the worst of its problems.
Islamic empires may have ruled the known world for the majority of the Middle Ages, but European colonization has reduced the Islamic world to destitution by forcing the agrarian society to modernize at an impossibly rapid rate.
Armstrong's goal is not to vilify the English and French colonists or glorify the Islamic heyday, but even in her objective prose it's obvious that outside influences have contributed to the devastation of the ummah.
Armstrong interprets the situation this way: What Muslims perceive as an aggressive secularism on the part of the West has encouraged a violent religiosity that is "a travesty of true faith." The minority of Muslims that practices vicious anti-Americanism "offends every central tenant of Islam."
But while violence is condemned by the Quran, the outrage of Muslim fundamentalists springs from a potent source that affects all members of the ummah, Armstrong stresses. Since its beginning, Islam has been part religion, part social movement. Increasingly, "Muslims want their governments to conform more closely to the Islamic norm," as they did in the past.
Separation of church and state, however, is a cornerstone of American government. So when the pressure builds to become a modernized, capitalistic society like the United States, Muslims cringe - because when they look at America, "they see no light, no heart and no spirituality."
Karen Armstrong has done an important duty with "Islam: A Short History." With journalistic economy and commendable impartiality, she has created a textbook that should be required reading. But despite the index, glossary and alphabetical list of key figures that follow the text of "Islam: A Short History," the book has more soul than your average encyclopedic tome.
"Western people must become aware that it is in their interests too that Islam remain healthy and strong," Armstrong wrote before Sept. 11, and time has only proven her point.
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