Karen Armstrong's Muhammad

Karen Armstrong delivers a wonderfully balanced and insightful portrayal of the life of one of the world's most well known iconoclasts, the Prophet Muhammad. We go over her message and its relevance in our ever-changing modern world.

Copyright 2023 by Letters to the Sky

Transcript

Stephan Downes:
Hi, I'm Stephan Downes.

Adam Rizvi:
And I'm Adam Rizvi.

Stephan Downes:
And this is Letters to the Sky, a podcast about the metaphysical iconoclasts, philosophical visionaries, and religious leaders of the world.

Adam Rizvi:
Whether you consider yourself religious, spiritual, neither, or something in between, we invite you to take a deep dive with us down metaphysical rabbit holes and learn to see your life from a new perspective.

Stephan Downes:
As-Salaam-Alaikum, Adam.

Adam Rizvi:
Wa-Alaikum-Salaam, Stephan.

Stephan Downes:
How are you doing?

Adam Rizvi:
I'm doing great. I must say I'm very proud of you. You nailed that. That's pretty good.

Stephan Downes:
Thank you.

Adam Rizvi:
It sounded almost native.

Stephan Downes:
Wow. Oh, man. I'm so flattered. That's all I know though. So, please don't speak anymore Arabic in front of me if you want a response in Arabic. How are you doing? It's been a long time.

Adam Rizvi:
It has been a little bit longer than usual, but super stoked to be back.

Stephan Downes:
Yeah, we have a really, really cool episode today talking about Karen Armstrong's book, Muhammad: A Prophet for Our Time. I think we'll just dive right in. Karen Armstrong, in the Order of the British Empire, she's a really famous contemplative religions author specifically dealing with the Abrahamic religions. She's written a lot on Islam and Christianity. And she herself was a former Roman Catholic nun, a sister. She found herself being pulled more towards the mystic aspects of that religion. And eventually, she decided to dive into writing about Islam and Muhammad as well. So, she wrote a book that we're going to talk about today about Muhammad. And I'll let Adam jump in here in a second, but this was a really interesting book, because I'm used to reading books that are really about religion and like religious books. It felt like a very secular presentation, not in a scholarly way as in nitpicking the accuracy of who said what and things like that, but really just a presentation of Muhammad as a human being that existed in a particular time as opposed to a hagiography or a religious biography of someone.

Adam Rizvi:
Yeah, one of my first direct experiences with Karen, she actually came to our family's mosque in Maryland many years ago, and made a very positive impression on the congregation. She's one of the first White, meaning Caucasian, Western woman who can relate to Muslims and have many Muslims feel like they are heard. She doesn't patronize. She's not someone who will pretend to sympathize. I mean, you genuinely feel like this is someone who's engaged with the material. And she's not trying to pass herself off as a Muslim either. That's never her MO. But it's very clear that she's deeply respectful to the tradition. And I think, as fellow pluralists, there's something to be said about being able to respect religion, glean from its wisdom traditions, while not necessarily identifying with it. And Karen does such a good job of that. I actually read some of her earlier books when I was in college, I think, where she talks about the golden truths and the access traditions and really spoke about, as you said, the Abrahamic traditions and what drew them all together.

Stephan Downes:
Wonderful. I'm excited because as we dive more and more, we talked about Christianity a little bit in Misquoting Jesus and now we're diving into Islam. And for me, I'm in my 30s now, but it's really interesting to re-explore these Abrahamic Christian religions, because I'm actually the least familiar with them. Not that I'm an expert...I don't have expert familiarity with any of the Eastern religions, so to speak, but I'm really looking forward to this. So, do you want to talk about the context of the book itself?

Adam Rizvi:
Yeah, I'd love to. Let me read from Karen Armstrong's intro here. And if you have the book, again, this is Karen Armstrong's Muhammad: A Prophet for Our Time. That's what Stephan and I are diving into. On page six, she says, "But I realized that many Western people had no opportunity to revise their impression of Muhammad. So, I decided to write a popular accessible account of his life to challenge this entrenched view. The result was Muhammad, a biography of the prophet, which was published in 1991. But in the wake of September 11th, we need to focus on other aspects of Muhammad's life. So, this is a completely new and entirely different book, which I hope will speak more directly to the terrifying realities of our post September 11th world." That, to me, speaks to her acute awareness of the fact that the Western world largely had an entrenched view of Islam and Muhammad to begin with. And my assumption is that that view, a polarizing one, only got deeper entrenched in the minds of many after September 11th. And in part, to a large part I think, was worsened by the media's portrayal of Islam and how many commentators would either consciously or unconsciously make assumptions about what Islam is and isn't.

Stephan Downes:
Gosh, I guess I have to disagree. I thought the American news media's portrayal of Islam after 9/11 was fair and balanced. That was a joke. Sorry, everybody. That was a joke. Adam, I'd love for you just tell a little bit more about your relationship to this material before I jump in.

Adam Rizvi:
Yeah, thank you. As listeners might know, I was raised in a Muslim household. My mother was raised as a Catholic and my father as a Muslim, interesting combination there. And maybe at some point, I'll get to share what it was like growing up in that household. But my parents and in particular, my father, made it very clear that he wanted myself and my sister to be fully aware of the Muslim tradition and to be exposed to its teachings, its values. In large part, my childhood was mostly surrounded by Muslim values. We didn't eat pork growing up. We went to Friday prayers. Thursday nights, we would pray for our ancestors. And then I actually did go to Mecca once with my dad and I went on pilgrimage. So, I really had a...I was really exposed. At the same time, I've had my own exposure to Catholicism and Christianity. I did go to mass and attend mass when I was younger. And so I had that exposure too, but the Islamic side of me has stayed ever since. And I do think I see the world in a particular way as a result of that. And one of the things being half-French, half-Pakistani, American born, I've seen how people see Islam. I can see it from outside, and I can see it from within. And I was particularly excited to do this episode and hopefully, a series of episodes on Islam.

Stephan Downes:
Oh yeah, definitely.

Adam Rizvi:
Yeah, because there's a paucity of conversations around this. And in particular, there's a burgeoning progressive movement within Islam that needs more voice. It needs more expression. I know several young Muslims that know that there's something that doesn't work in the dogmatic structures of the Islamic tradition that needs to adapt to modern life. And it's more than that. It's more than just modern life. It's what we've been talking about since the beginning of this podcast, spirituality devoid of dogmatic constraints. There is a necessity to recognize the spirit of religion, the spirit that drives one to want to understand oneself, the famous Oracle at Delphi, know thyself. That is a truism in all religious traditions, and even more so for young Muslims in today's society. What is the spirit of Islam that we can give voice to? I'll get off my soapbox now.

Stephan Downes:
So, I did not grow up in a Muslim household. And for me, a large part of our listeners will also relate to, I grew up not really knowing much about Islam. I knew that it was considered a Judeo-Christian religion, in that it kind of had the same forefathers, so to speak, an Abrahamic religion. However, I took for granted how different it is culturally, not in a sort of like dogmatic or any sort of like value judgments about it, but just Arabian culture, which is where it was founded, it's just a very different one and not in the ways that we would expect. I think it has its differences for sure in that Islam kind of puts itself in the same line with Christianity and Judaism. Karen Armstrong talks at length in the book about Islam's founding in peace with the Jewish settlements as well as Christians. But I don't know, I guess, I wasn't expecting to be so different in some ways. And then in other ways, I found that there were some aspects of it that really related to me in terms of kind of like surrendering and not really having dogma, which were part of the originally, you know the Muslims relationship to Allah. So, I was pleasantly surprised. There was a lot of feelings when I read this book and was learning about it. And I'm somebody who definitely, you know growing up, I mean, 9/11 was certainly my major exposure to Islam. And I never really, I certainly never had a chip on my shoulder, because I kind of realized that there's extremists in every religion. The Crusades are a thing. And the Crusades were perpetrated by Christians as well. And, that's true today. There are lots of Christian extremists today. So, I never really had a chip on my shoulder, but I did always have a sense of like camaraderie with the idea of surrender in Islam and like unconditionally, not like a conditional surrender as long as it feels good. We talked about this last time in Trungpa's episode, like "What is surrender?" I feel like there's a very, very similar idea between surrender in Islam and surrender in parts of Buddhism.

Adam Rizvi:
So, as we are want to do, we have three questions that we distilled from the book that gives us the opportunity to really talk about some of the key ideas in Karen Armstrong's book. The questions are as follows. And hopefully, we get a chance to dive into all three in detail. The first one is, "Why was Muhammad so iconoclastic?" This is a podcast about iconoclastic religious and spiritual leaders and figures. So, we absolutely recognize that he was iconoclastic. The second question is, "Muhammad: religious, purist, or opportunist?"

Stephan Downes:
I wrote that question.

Adam Rizvi:
Very spicy. And then the final question is, "What is Islam? And what does the term mean?" That's a great way for us to wrap up our episode. So, without further ado, why was Muhammad so iconoclastic? So, the importance of understanding context can't be overstated here. Muhammad was an iconoclast, because he was born inside of a culture that was very unique. And in order to understand that, we need to understand a little bit about the Bedouin culture. The Bedouin culture... Well, why don't I read it? We love quoting, don't we?

Stephan Downes:
Quote off number one.

Adam Rizvi:
Quote off. So, Karen Armstrong says, "The Bedouins were not very interested in conventional religion. They had no hope of an afterlife and little confidence in their gods who seemed unable to make any impact on their difficult environment. The tribe, not a deity, was the supreme value." That, I think, speaks volumes. The Bedouin culture really was about the tribe. And the tribe needed to survive. In order to survive, they needed to move around. They were very nomadic. The powerful shift that occurred at around the time of Prophet Muhammad's birth was what the Quraysh tribe did. Okay, I'm going to back up a little bit. So, geographically, as listeners, if you don't know where Arabia is, pull up a map right now. It's really important to visually see what's going on.

Stephan Downes:
Spoiler alert, it's a desert.

Adam Rizvi:
It's like a big rectangle tilted on one of its lower left corners to the left, okay? It's angled to the left. The whole thing is yeah, it's largely a desert, a lot of sand. In particular, in one of the left sides of this rectangle was an area called the Hejaz. The Hejaz was basically a lot of flat, mountainous rock, but the rock was just solid rock. There was nothing underneath. And so, it was extremely inhospitable and you absolutely could not plant. So, there's no agriculture there. There's no possibility of agriculture. And if there is no possibility of agriculture, why would anyone want to live there? And yet the Quraysh found or rediscovered, I should say, this well. It's sort of a miraculous well that actually has a very long history dating back to Abraham. And that well was called the Zamzam. It's a water source that the Quraysh tribe decided to take control of. Now, what that did is it offered a hub. And it was a hub for a caravan at that time, which over the course of one year, a series of caravans would loop around starting from the upper East part of Arabia moving down to Bahrain, Oman, Yemen, and then up along the Western border of Arabia into the Hejaz or where Mecca is. And then from there, moving forward North to Damascus and Syria and the Byzantine Empire. So, just imagine this sort of loop, right, going along the Eastern border of Arabia down the South and up the West. These tribes were doing this on a yearly basis. And one of my biggest aha moments as a Muslim was realizing that pilgrimage, which we called Hajj, or which we call Hajj, is actually part of a loop of caravans that existed way before Muhammad. And these caravans would stop in Mecca and rest a while and get some water and refreshments, and they would trade. And that whole area, Mecca, became sort of a merchant's haven. And since I've been talking for a while, I think, Stephan, if you could share a little bit about this sort of cosmopolitan hub, like what made it so cosmopolitan?

Stephan Downes:
Yeah. So, what made it so cosmopolitan is the fact that basically to entice everybody, to trade the leading tribe there, the tribe who kind of controlled the Mecca, they kind of created a space so that people's like individual religions, like the tribes' religions, the tribes' deities would be welcomed there and have a place to worship. They created a place for everybody to worship, and eventually over time, it would come to be Arabia's equivalent of postmodern late capitalist society, right? Where nothing means everything and money is everything. And if you don't have the protection of money, you are F-ed. It's 2020, but a long time ago.

Adam Rizvi:
A long time ago. It's really, I mean, these were really the first pluralists in that area. It was pretty striking, if you think about it, a huge shift in the cultural ethos of the Arabian mind at that time.

Stephan Downes:
Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so we've set up the scene. We set up the scene, and now, into the prophet.

Adam Rizvi:
Okay, okay. So, basically, there is a culture where all sorts of tribes have their own deities. And the Quraysh tribe, who now oversees Mecca and sort of owns the water source over there, they say, "Hey, you got some deities, bring them on over here. Everyone can worship whoever they want to worship." It's like a free marketplace of deities. And they ended up putting all these gods, that clay and stone statues that represented the various deities of the nomadic tribes in a building, this structure, a granite structure called the Kaaba. Which actually is from the time of Abraham, but you go inside the structure and then there's like these shelves. And they put all these structures there. And then people would come, tribes would arrive. They would agree not to fight, no warfare. So, keep in mind, the need for peace in Mecca was largely a business need, right? Because it's bad for business if people are fighting with each other. So, they say, "You got to put down your weapons when you enter through the gates or what have you, but you can worship whoever you want. Everyone's welcome." So, that's the context. And that actually, I don't think we can overstate this enough. The religious pluralism allowed for business to flourish. Now comes a man who is receiving divine guidance, right? What he believes to be from a divine source, stating that everyone should only worship one god and that god is literally the God, that's what the word Allah means...Al, The...Ilah, God, the God. Now, Allah incidentally was actually one of the many gods that were worshipped in the Kaaba at the time, except he was the highest God among the Pantheon and also the most least known, the least relatable, the formless. Right, like everyone else had-

Stephan Downes:
Kind of far off in the distance, you know.

Adam Rizvi:
Super far off. Yeah, but he's like, "Wait, no, that's the one that you should worship. And everything else, you need to forget." That is, if you really take a moment to consider the implications of that, the need for religious pluralism is what allowed the marketplace that was Mecca to thrive. And now, you have this one man upending their way of life. So, he was deeply, deeply threatening not only to the religious ethos, but the mercantile, the capitalistic mindset of the people at that time. And obviously, the peace existed in Mecca because of the religious pluralism and then you throw that away. Now, what does that mean for the ground on which that piece was based on?

Stephan Downes:
It's so interesting, because we're talking about this time in Mecca's history when it's very pluralist. And yet, the relationships with these deities are not so present in people's lives. And, one of Muhammad's like main takeaways was that this connection to Allah was such a deep and personal one, an intimate one, that it put that relationship as a central to someone's life, to a Muslim's life. As you know they weren't necessarily Muslims yet, but to Muslim life. They put that relationship front and center. And Allah, as it turned out, had very specific instructions. And a lot of Muhammad's experiences, as we read about them, they bear a striking resemblance to all sorts of testimonies and descriptions of spiritual experiences across traditions. The kind of, the thinking you're going to die was a part of it. You know for him, he had very visceral physical experiences where he would shake and sweat and thought he was going crazy. And when he first had his first like revelation, he thought he was possessed by a jinn, kind of the malevolent spirits of the area. I can't tell you how many times I've heard something like that, where someone has like some spiritual awakening and they think something's wrong with them. He is somebody who begins to have a following, and the book kind of goes through his life. And we'll probably get into that, but really, essentially, is he is asking this, and he's a part of this tribe, the tribe that controls Mecca. He's asked them to reprioritize their life in service and in worship of God as opposed to worship of... Maybe he didn't say it out loud, but money.

Adam Rizvi:
Yeah, yeah, I think that's spot on.

Stephan Downes:
Which is iconoclastic. I just want to get back to the question we're trying to answer, is why is he? You can see this kind of today, people who are on the fringes of society and have these ideas that nobody really listens to, just like Jesus was, right? Jesus had the same similar kind of views, an iconoclast, because of his relationship with a society at large. And even at one point, one of Muhammad's contemporaries tells him that a prophet is never understood in his own age, and in his own place. So, right from the beginning, he understands that his role in this revelation of this new relationship with God is an iconoclastic one. And he knows it going into it.

Adam Rizvi:
It's so interesting that you just shared that piece about how a prophet is not recognized in his or her own town. I was just reading a piece on the Gospel of Thomas. And there's a piece in there that there's a specific line and I can't recall exactly which of the lines it is, but that says, "A prophet cannot be recognized in his or her own town. And a physician cannot heal someone that he knows," something similar, something to that effect, which is really interesting that that idea is found again, in a culture, in a world far removed from the time of Jesus. Also, cool thing about Muhammad, is that he's iconoclastic in the literal and figurative sense.

Stephan Downes:
And oh, yeah, yeah yeah.

Adam Rizvi:
So, we talked a little bit about the figurative aspect of his iconoclasm. The word 'iconoclastic' is eikōn, or image, and klastos, or klas, which means to break, right? So, you're breaking images. There's a wonderful story that I was told when I was younger at one of the mosque gatherings. Actually, we have a word for that. It's called mejlis or majlis, which basically means, I guess, gathering, sermon, conversation, all of those meanings wrapped into one. Where one of his family members, very close family members, and one of the subsequent Caliphs of the young Islamic tradition at the time, the burgeoning religion, Ali, Imam Ali you could say, which is a respectful term for him. He would stand on his shoulders. At one point, he was standing on Imam Ali's shoulders, and reaching up to these shelves in the Kaaba, grabbing the various deities, the stone and clay deities, and throwing them on the ground, breaking them. And it's a very powerful image. I remember as a kid, seeing that, like two men, one standing on the other and like grabbing these images and destroying them. It's like, I can't even imagine going into a temple, right, like a place of sacred worship and doing this to someone else's religious idols. It is super, super risky, dangerous. I mean, this was also at a time where people would kill each other at the slightest provocation. I mean, you didn't really go to trial for murder. It's just like, "Yeah, he killed the other guy. And that's it."

Stephan Downes:
Yeah, yeah, and I can do it because I can.

Adam Rizvi:
Yeah.

Stephan Downes:
This is, I think, really important for the listeners who aren't familiar with Islam, and maybe those who are. I'm not quite sure. I didn't grow up in that. But there's so much about modern Islam that Westerners see, the lack of iconography like not depicting images of the prophet, Islam's relationship with women, historical problematic relationships with women, its problematic relationship with Jews and with the clash, those were not present in the founding of Islam. In fact, Muhammad specifically protected women compared to the culture at large that was present. The original idea of polygamy was actually to, instead of widows simply being discarded and becoming completely destitute and having no one to rely on, marriage was the form of protection for women in that time. And so, Muhammad, he instilled the practice of polygamy for the followers of his religion as a way to protect women, who at that time had no other hope. In the Quran, it's talked about how the Jews and Christians are doing the same. They're following the same truth, essentially the same path. There's no reason to fight with them. There's no reason to like disagree, to like forcibly convert one another, or anything like that. All these problems that we see today, so many of them are not present at the time of the founding of the religion. I was surprised how different it looked, how much has changed since then. Obviously, it's been a while. It was really surprising.

Adam Rizvi:
Yeah, actually, Stephan, you bring up a really good point. So, in law, and you know this better than I do, there's this idea of understanding a particular law by understanding its spirit, right? The spirit of the law. You can interpret something literally, but I think the more appropriate way of looking at a particular law is, "What was the spirit with which it was created?" And then you can apply that more readily to other situations, because you understand where it came from and the context it was created. Similarly, if you look at Islam's relationship to women and other things, there's a whole bunch of very practical legal traditions that came out of Islam, that someone can write their whole life's work on, that comes from a place of genuine care, kindness, and respect for one another as it pertains to women. As you pointed out, it was common practice where if a woman's husband died in war, she then had no property. She didn't have any place to live. And of course, I'm simplifying this picture, but she really had no recourse to live a successful life. She was dependent on her extended family members, maybe her father, her uncle or something to give her what she needed to stay alive. But for someone who perhaps loses their husband at a young age, I mean, what a way to live right?

Stephan Downes:
As well as I believe, correct me if I'm wrong, that at the time, women also weren't allowed to inherit.

Adam Rizvi:
That's right. Yes, yes, exactly. They would often be treated as property, sold off. And of course, if someone's already married, the worth of that "property" is significantly less, right? So, what he did is he said, "Men can remarry a woman who's been widowed by, let's say, war or some disease or something like that. But in order to do that, you would have to allow for polygamy." Now, it's totally misinterpreted now as giving into the lasciviousness, the lustfulness of men who want to have more than one woman and women can't have more than one man. But like I said, you go back to the spirit of the law, the spirit of where that came from, it was in honor, respect, and protection of the women at that time. I think it's important for many Muslims, if you're a Muslim and you're listening to this, read about the history of Prophet Muhammad, why and how things were created and the context, the specific events that lead to a particular Quranic phrase being revealed, then you'll understand the spirit with which that was given.

Stephan Downes:
Yeah, I think it's important too that we can also talk about this today, right? So, this stance in general would be considered very extreme today and not at all in our modern understanding of social justice and equality. At the time, it was actually a huge step forward. And Muhammad's life, if you read this book, is full of those moments. This book did such a good job of making him who's someone who had extremely deep connections to religion, to his religion, to Allah and his interpretations and his revelations, but also the same time, when he kind of came out with this new way of relating, he was essentially cast out of Mecca. And so, he brought his like fledgling community to Medina. Neighboring is a strong word. It's quite a ways away, at least in those times. For now, it's a short flight, but he brought his community there. And a lot of his revelations had to do with his community, with the community and not only their religious connections to Allah, but also how they would be with each other. And this I felt had a lot of relationship to the way the Buddha taught. The depth of realization that one could come to with Buddhism is profound. It's extremely subtle, and the Buddha didn't really compromise with what truth was in the same way that Muhammad did. At the same time, the Buddha created rules for the monastic community called the Vinaya. And those rules came about by things going wrong, by things needing to find solutions for the community to live successfully. And very similar, very similar, where Muhammad would proclaim things that would be for the benefit of community, the same time while advocating for this deep religious connection with Allah. I think at this point, we've kind of covered why Muhammad's really iconoclastic.

Adam Rizvi:
Yeah. And I'd say we're very much into our next question, which is "Muhammad: religious purist, or opportunist?" Talk a little bit about that question, Stephan.

Stephan Downes:
Yeah. So, I think I wrote this question, because... Well, it's not even I don't think it's either. I think it's the wrong way to look at it. I think as someone who was a leader, as someone who had an extraordinarily deep connection to the divine, they often talked about how Muhammad never saw a lot himself, that he saw signs and symbols. And so, he never really seen that actual divine, but seeing signs and symbols. This has a lot of similarities to non-dual descriptions of God or of the Divine or whatever. I think Muhammad was very pure in the way he interpreted his religion in his own life and the way he expected his followers to have a deep, deep, deep personal relationship with Allah first and foremost. And at the same time, he was a leader in charge of a community. And there are always those two considerations. There's the considerations of the mundane and the considerations of the spiritual, and Muhammad was doing his best to do both.

Adam Rizvi:
Yeah, I would say so. You know, I gave this question some thought. It's one thing to look at events and say, "Wow, he took advantage of certain opportunities that arose for his own gain." But rarely in life, do we know what's going to happen. I think the more accurate understanding of Muhammad's life is he literally was, I mean, there were times where he did not know what was going to happen the very next day. His life was at risk. The integrity of this young new tradition was completely at risk, right? It could have been squashed in many, many ways, not only with his life, but also, if his followers did not have means to sustain themselves, if they were completely ostracized by people who kept them alive, so to speak, it wouldn't have been sustainable. And that happens so many times throughout his life and the life of the young religion. And what he did is that every moment that that was at risk, my impression is he went within. And often, it would be an intuitive guidance or it would be a more direct revelation from the source of the Quran that would come through him. He would speak these words and then what came through him then would often guide him or direct him to take action. And I think if you apply this to our lives, right, each of us here living our modern lives, we don't know what's going to happen in our life. We don't know the crazy stuff that's going to come at our doorstep. And yet, when something bizarre, crazy, unexpected arrives, how do we make the decision to go through it? How do we know what to do? And oftentimes, we'll lean on our past experience, we'll lean on habits and traditions, we'll ask friends for advice, family for advice. Other times, it's not clear what to do, and so we go within. We listen to that still small voice, that intuition within. Maybe there's a gut feeling as to how one should act in a particular moment. So, in many ways, Muhammad, not so much as an opportunist, but as someone who faced the unexpected challenges of his life and went within. I think that is a more accurate portrayal of how he went through the various "opportunities" of his life.

Stephan Downes:
We're not really being specific here as to moments in Muhammad's life, because I mean, the book is full of them. But one of the things that I really loved that Karen Armstrong mentioned that really, I think portrayed for me the depth of the teachings of the Quran in a way that I relate to, I'll just read it, it says, "Deeds that seemed unimportant at the time would prove to have been momentous. A tiny act of selfishness and then kindness or conversely an unconsidered act of generosity would become the measure of a human life." And we're talking here about, this is on page 40, and we are talking about the importance of living a righteously, moral life in Islam. And this is something that, in Buddhism for example, there are several vows that one takes or one doesn't have to, but one can take when one kind of becomes a Buddhist. And one of them is, for example, not to tell lies. That's the gist of it. And you can really spend a lifetime considering, "What is a lie, right? Is a lie silence? Is a lie not really knowing who you really are and then speaking from a place of ignorance? Or is a lie just straight out telling someone the wrong thing on purpose?" Islam has that depth of consideration, that contemplative nature of it really built in. And it was something where we talk about... This is a little early in the book. Karen writes, "The Quran was not imparting factual information that could be conveyed instantaneously. Like Muhammad, listeners had to absorb its teaching slowly." And I'm curious, Adam, if you can talk a little bit about that in your experience going to mosque and having the Quran read? I would just love to hear it, because I'm reading about it, and I have my own relationship to it from my own background, but how do you relate to that?

Adam Rizvi:
It's interesting. It depends on at what time in my childhood you asked me that question. I think like many young adults, there is a period of rebellion, where anything from the Quran was just like, "Nope, not interested." And as I became more mature and I recognized that there was in fact, wisdom in these words, I was able to appreciate that. I think one of the things that goes missed by American or I should say Western-born Muslims or also to be more specific, non-Arabic speaking Muslims, is the poetic aspect of the Quran. There is a lot of alliteration. There's a lot of rhyming. There's a beautiful cadence in many, many verses of the Quran. And that was actually one of the things that was highlighted by one of the first few followers of Prophet Muhammad was this almost superhuman divine quality to the spoken word of the Quran. In fact, it's worth mentioning that Arabia, the culture of Arabia at the time was not so much based on the written word. It really was an oral tradition. The way news would be conveyed and the way stories of the battles of war and the various raids that were done, because raiding was a big part of the culture at that time, was told in poetic form. You would have these bards that would go from town to town or village to village, and they would almost sing a poem that they wrote. And people would praise the bard or the storyteller by how poetic their expressions or their stories of war would be. And so people's ears, and Karen Armstrong talks about this. People's ears at the time were tuned for these subtleties in language, cadence, meter, rhythm, rhyme, prosody. Like all these ideas, people intuitively in that culture could pick up on. And so, when Muhammad would recite verses of the Quran, it's said multiple times. And it's actually common in the traditions that I grew up with that people would listen to the Quran and they would say, "Oh, my God. That's so, it's so beautiful. It's so poetic. Where's that from?" And you would think like the greatest poet wrote it. It's quite astounding. I didn't think I would do this but let me just share a short prayer from the Quran here. And I want you all to sort of listen where things rhyme. And I'll probably emphasize it and how I say it. It gives you a little bit of a taste of that. I'm not a Quranic reader. There's people who dedicate their lives to saying this properly. So, for those Muslims out there, please, please forgive me. There are more beautiful versions of this online.

Stephan Downes:
He doesn't deserve it. Don't forgive him, but please continue.

Adam Rizvi:
So, okay, it goes like this. You start every prayer with, "In the Name of Allah, the Beneficent and the Merciful." [foreign language 00:40:20]. And one thing I'll point out here is notice this -een ending. [foreign language 00:40:45]. It's almost like a stanza, you know, call and response. And then a bit of a prolonged delay, which in my mind as someone who appreciates music, you have a cadence that gets prolonged towards the end where it builds tension. And then you have the resolution by landing on that same sort of syllable. There's all sorts of phrases like that that have a poetic aspect to it. And when you have someone who's trained at intonation and recitation, it is so, so beautiful. And that's true in many ancient traditions. I know there are reciters of the Torah, who sound just as beautiful. Hebrew is so beautiful. There are similar reciters for prayers and hymns in the Sanskrit tradition. And that's just as beautiful.

Stephan Downes:
Yeah, I was relating to Sanskrit. I mean, although not that I know what the words are in either language, Sanskrit or Arabic, but that was so beautiful. In Sanskrit, it's like muscle memory. I like to listen to the Vedas being chanted. And there are these pauses of the same kind of things that happen sound-wise, like in your ears, right? The same tones, the same rhythms that just become like almost mesmerizing. They really take you into that space of pointing inward. It's so amazing how that happened to language, because I don't think of English as a language that does that.

Adam Rizvi:
That's true. Well, it's a bit of a combination language, right? It's a mishmash. Let me take a moment here. Since we're talking about the Quran, I found it particularly striking, there's a deep mystical aspect to how the Quran came about. I wanted to share for those of you who aren't aware of the very first instance, there's two major instances that I think highlight this very mystical aspect of how the Quran came to being. The first is in the year 610. Muhammad, not the prophet, but the man, Muhammad, the merchant and the honest man, I think, at the age of 40 roughly, he would make a yearly retreat into the mountains, in particular a mountain named Hira, Mount Hira. And in this particular instance, as you mentioned, you had this really dramatic experience of feeling like he was possessed. And in particular, he gets this commandment to write and to recite. And I'll just read here Karen's words. "It was while he was making his annual retreat on Mount Hira in about the year 610 that he experienced the astonishing and dramatic attack. The words that were squeezed, as if from the depths of his being, went to the root of the problem in Mecca. Recite in the name of your Lord who created from an embryo created the human. Recite your Lord is all giving, who taught by the pen, taught the human what he did not know before. The human being is a tyrant. He thinks his possessions make him secure. To your Lord is the return of everything." When I first read that, it really captured the moment. He was being squeezed. And it's almost like the words came out of him from the intensity of that pressure. And I think when you read about Muhammad, similar to many, many saints, there is like this... We've talked about this. ... ineffable other, this unspeakable presence that cannot be described, but it's generally felt as almost oppressive. It's the gravitas of divinity taking over the small mind of the human and then something bigger, larger, massive moves through you. And certainly you get the impression with Muhammad's various experiences with the divine, who he later believes to be the Archangel Gabriel coming through him and telling him to recite. I thought that was a particular powerful phrase.

Stephan Downes:
I'm not someone who typically thinks that a relationship to spirituality is a necessity for like a good or fulfilling life. I guess we could talk about mundanely fulfilling, if I'm going to get all Buddhist. But, you know, people can have lives that they enjoy without religion. Absolutely. I'm never someone who said like, "Oh, that's like a necessary part of life." I don't believe that. I believe if you're called to it, you're called to it and go as deep as you want. But that being said, there's so many similarities here with not having a focus, of really just having life be meaningless. It could be religion, it could be something else that really drives the one to move forward and move into whatever it happens to be with great depth and find some sort of meaning there. I think that is important to our everyday lives. And, I think that that kind of focus was really timely in Mecca at the time. There's some people that it really, really, really, really resonated with them, and they were lifelong followers of the Prophet. And there were others who were like, "That's a bunch of shit. And you're a crazy person, and I'm not going to listen to you," which we have the same conversations today.

Adam Rizvi:
Oh, yeah. I mean, can you imagine there's like people have been doing their thing for ages in the Arabian Peninsula? And then here comes this guy, who, by the way, everyone knows is like the honest trader, the kind, humble, unassuming man, who all of a sudden, starts saying, "I am the messenger of God."

Stephan Downes:
And you're wrong.

Adam Rizvi:
And you're wrong. And I'm going to destroy everything that you hold dear. I was about to say, "Hold my beer," like the meme hold my beer. Yeah, except no beer. But yeah, like this guy comes up and he's like, "You're all doing it wrong. Let me show you where it's at." WTF. Who is this guy? Right?

Stephan Downes:
Yeah, yeah. Well, okay, Adam. Let's get on to the last question. What is Islam and what does the term mean? You got to do this one.

Adam Rizvi:
Okay. So, to put it straitly, Islam means surrender, Islam. There are so many ways that that shows up. The immediate question is, "Surrender to what? Just surrender to whom?" And if you just look at the way Prophet Muhammad lived his life, there were so many moments where he was facing the end, either the end of his physical life due to threat of assassination and whatnot, or the end of this young movement. And yet, he surrendered into what he was being guided to do. There's a great story. Actually, the Islamic calendar incidentally, which is a lunar based calendar, it uses as a benchmark the Hegira. A Hegira is a term used to describe the decision that Muhammad was guided to make to move him and his followers to the City of Medina, which at the time was called Yathrib. To paint the picture here, everyone, all these followers, these young followers of various ages, but yeah, followers. All the people they knew in Mecca were their kinsfolk, their family members. Even friends were somehow related by familial bonds. It was a deep, deeply ingrained family network spread out throughout the City of Mecca. And he's asked them to now move to Medina largely because the lives of his followers were being threatened and so was his, but he also was divinely guided to move. That did a couple of things. It not only asked of him to surrender, because who knows how they were going to be treated in Medina and whether they were fully welcome there, or not? And the other thing that it did, which I think people underestimate this in the history books, the sense of identity, at that time, was who your tribe was. Your tribe was key. Your tribe was everything. That was you. Your sense of identity was your tribe. And now, you're taking members from various tribes and uniting them under a broader sense of identity, which is the belief and devotion to Allah and moving them all to Medina. That not only required a deeper sense of surrender, but a surrender at the level of identity, surrendering to a new way of looking at yourself and understanding yourself. Surrender is a huge topic. We did talk about it in our last episode. And we could probably spend ages on this particular topic, because there are levels at which it happens both psychologically, emotionally, mentally, and physically, and practically. There are things that you give up, objects that you give up, wealth that you own that you give up. And all of which was required of Muhammad and his followers at the time. One final piece about surrender, Muslims pray five times a day. I mean, there are different sects and there are different ways that that is done. But if you look at the actual physical movements of prayer, you're on a mat, a prayer mat, standing, and then you bow down with your hands on your knees, sort of bending at the hips. Stand up once again and then you bow down fully, like a full genuflection, where your knees are touching the ground. Your palms are on the ground and your forehead touches the ground. In any culture, in any time of the world, when you're in that position, you are extremely vulnerable. You're exposing the back of your neck. This is a bodily position that speaks volumes to where you must be psychologically to be in that place.

Stephan Downes:
Yeah. And if you doubt this, go ask some random person, ask a friend who doesn't have a relationship with a religious institution, ask them to bow down like that to something. It doesn't matter what it is. See what happens. It's hilarious. People hate it. People hate it.

Adam Rizvi:
People hate it. Yeah, and it's like I don't know, there are few things in life where the mind and the body are so intrinsically connected.

Stephan Downes:
That's true. Okay. Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt with a joke, but I did interrupt.

Adam Rizvi:
Yeah, no. That was basically the key idea, which is that, and I say this also to any Muslim listening, the importance of mindfulness in the form of prayer. And actually, no matter what your tradition is or even if you have a tradition, bring mindfulness to the moments of stillness. And for Muslims, when you bow down, when you go through these physical movements, feel what it does to the psyche, to the psychology. People look at Islam and they see it as a, potentially, if you're not educated, they see it as a religion of arrogance, and where you feel yourself to be better than others. And in fact, your intention is destroy others who don't believe. Prophet Muhammad's life and the early life of Islam was a world of pluralism and tolerance and understanding. The movements of the prayers speak to that humbling quality of oneself to something greater.

Stephan Downes:
Very well said. Thank you.

Adam Rizvi:
Yeah.

Stephan Downes:
Well, let's wrap it up then. I know I was left wanting to know so much more, in particular so much more about the development of Islamic thought throughout history, and how Islam has so many facets of contemplation and philosophy. I really can't wait to dive into more episodes about topics on Islam. I was totally inspired.

Adam Rizvi:
A good way to close this, I think, is the word 'salaam', which by the way, a lot of cities in America are named after Salem. The word 'Salem' comes from Salaam. The word 'salaam' means peace. It's etymologically related to Islam, which is surrender. So, I find that super interesting how out of surrender comes peace. In that respect and in that context, we say to one another, As-Salaam-Alaikum. May peace be upon you. And then you would respond, Wa-Alaikum-Salaam.

Stephan Downes:
Wa-Alaikum-Salaam

Adam Rizvi:
Wonderful. Peace be to everyone listening, and to you, Stephan. It's such a joy to do these with you.

Stephan Downes:
Absolutely. We will talk again soon.

Adam Rizvi:
Bye.

Stephan Downes:
Bye.