As part of the survey that I am doing now on the Islamic faith, I’ve started on No god but God, by Reza Aslan, an internationally acclaimed scholar of religions.  The author has an interesting, I suppose post-modern (I am not sure if this is the right term), perspective of religion, believing that religion is not grounded in fact, but is about faith in an interpretation of fact (however flawed).  And so he writes in his prologue that

Religion, if it must be understood, is not faith.  Religion is the story of faith.  It is an institutionalised system of symbols and metaphors (read rituals and myths) that provides a common language with which a community of faith can share with each other their numinous encounter with the Divine Presence.  Religion is concerned not with genuine history, but with sacred history, which does not course through time like a river.  Rather, sacred history is like a hallowed tree whose roots dig deep into primordial time and whose branches weave in and out of genuine history with little concern for the boundaries of space and time.

…

The fact is that no evangelist in any of the world’s great religions would have been at all concerned with recording his or her objective observations of historical events.  They would not have been recording observations at all !  Rather, they were interpreting those events in order to give structure and meaning to the myths and rituals of their community, providing future generations with a common identity, a common aspiration, a common story.  After all, religion is, by definition, interpretation; and by definition, all interpretations are valid.  However, some interpretations are more reasonable than others …

This is of course a very attractive view of religion, because if all religions are mere interpretations of history (however flawed), all interpretations would be valid, and no single interpreation can claim to be absolutely correct.  It then follows that the believers of different religions should no longer clash over the differences in their beliefs, because no one is absolutely wrong or right.

Attractive as this perspective may be, I do not think it is correct.  The objective of any religion is to proclaim truth (I may be wrong, but I would like to know which religion admits that it is proclaiming a lie).  That being the case, the purported events which a religion’s teachings are based on cannot be a lie; it must be based on fact.  In my opinion, once the purported events are a lie, the teachings are not entirely trustworthy, so why believe in that religion ?  That religion might make an interesting study, but it is certainly not one I would commit my life to, as its dubious accuracy would offer little assurance of entering heaven in the afterlife. 

With regard to the (Christian) Bible, I agree with the author that parts of it are about the interpretation of events from a spiritual (as opposed to a non-spiritual) perspective.  Therefore, the Bible attributes David’s victory over Goliath and in other battles to his faith in and obedience to God, rather than good luck or clever strategy.  But as far as I can see, these events are real.  They might not be recorded with the precision demanded of a historian today, but they actually took place.  That is why the Bible, and Christianity, is not inherently unbelievable.

Turning to the subject of the book, it was interesting to learn from the author that some cherished beliefs in Islam are based very loosely (if at all) on fact.  Here are some excerpts from chapter 1 and 2 :

The notion that a young pagan Muhammad could have been scolded for his idolatry by a Hanif flies in the face of traditional Muslim views regarding the prophet’s perpetual monotheistic integrity.  It is a common belief in Islam that even before being called by God, Muhammad never took part in the pagan rituals of his community.  In his history of the prophet, al-Tabari states that God kept Muhammad from ever participating in any pagan rituals, lest he be defiled by them.  But this view, which is reminiscent of the Catholic belief in Mary’s perpetual virginity, has little basis in either history or scripture.  Not only does the Quran admit that God found Muhammad "erring" and gave him guidance (93:7), but the ancient traditions clearly show Muhammad deeply involved in the religious customs of Mecca : circumambulating the Ka’ba, making sacrifices, and going on pagan devotional retreats ….  Indeed, when the pagan sanctuary was torn down and rebuilt (it was enlarged and finally roofed), Muhammad took an active part in its reconstruction.

All the same, the doctrine of Muhammad’s monothistic integrity is an important facet of the Muslim faith because it appears to support the belief that the Revelation he received came from a divine source.  Admitting that Muhammad might have been influenced by someone like Zayd [ a pagan ] is, for some Muslims, tantamount to denying the heavenly inspiration of Muhammad’s message.  But such beliefs are based on the common yet errorneous assumption that religions are born in some sort of cultural vacuum; they most certainly are not.

…

Like so many prophets before him, Muhammad never claimed to have invented a new religion.  By his own admission, Muhammad’s message was an attempt to reform the existing religious beliefs and cultural practices of pre-Islamic Arabia so as to bring the God of the Jews and Christians to the Arab peoples. … As uniquely and divinely inspired as the Islamic movement may have been, its origins are undoubtedly linked to the multi-ethnic, multi-religious society that fed Muhammad’s imagination as a young man and allowed him to craft his revolutionary message in a language that would have been easily recognisable to the pagan Arabs he was so desparately trying to reach …

…

If the childhood stories about Muhammad seem familiar, it is because they function as a prophetic typos : a conventional literary theme that can be found in most mythologies.  Like the infancy narratives in the Gospels, these stories are not intended to relate historical events, but to elucidate the mystery of the prophetic experience. … The historicity of these topoi is irrelevant … What is important is what these stories say about our prophets, our messiahs, our kings : that theirs is a holy and eternal vocation, established by God from the moment of creation.

[ Blog author's comment : Here I would point out that while the infancy narratives in the Gospel do function, as Aslan notes, as a prophetic typos, they have no parallel in other religions existing at that time.  In other words, the Bible did not have to "borrow" the story of a miraculous birth from some other religion to legitimise Jesus Christ's messiahship.  In this connection, I would add that much of the miraculous (eg. virgin birth) and not-so-miraculous (eg. born in Bethleham) events surrounding the birth of Jesus were a fulfillment of many prophecies in the Jewish scriptures, and Judaism was of course the religion that Jesus was born into. ]

…

Muslim tradition has tended to focus on al-Tabari’s definition of iqra ("recite"), mostly to emphasise the notion that the prophet was illiterate, which some say is validated by the Quran’s epithet for Muhammad : an-nabi al-ummi, traditionally understood as meaning "the unlettered prophet".  But while Muhammad’s illiteracy may enhance the miracle of the Quran, there is no historical justification for it. … The fact is that it would be highly unlikely that a successful merchant like Muhammad would have been unable to read and write the receipts of his own business …