Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [394]
The dualist structure of these early Muslim ideas of the resurrection, its “two-way theology,” its description of true, calm, peaceful life existing in the Islamic community, while death and suffering characterize all outside of it, served to further the mission of early Islam. The Fatiha, which functions like a creed for Islam, sums up the two-way theology: “Show us the straight path: the path of those whom You have favored; not [the path] of those who earn your anger nor of those who go astray” (Q 1:6-7). There is every reason to suppose that Muḥammad learned the value of missionary work from Jews and especially Christians active in the Arabian peninsula in his day. But his prophecy allowed him to hone it to new heights of effectiveness for his Arab audience. Islam downplayed the elaborate temple rituals of Arabia’s polytheistic past, substituted simple daily devotions, and emphasized oral sermons (an art-form in the Hejaz), which both convinced hearers to convert, while continuously fostering and confirming the faith of those who had already entered the community.
So while the Quran is revelatory writing, it also reflects the traditions in use in the days of its composition and the use to which these utterances were put in the early days of Islam. One of the most obvious literary qualities of the Quran, besides its Arabic poetic couplet format, is its exhortatory tone. The surahs (chapters) and ayyas (verses) are mostly sermons, lectures, and exhortations, not narrative like the Hebrew and Christian Bible. The longest and most sustained narrative is the famous story of Yusuf (Joseph) in Surat Yusuf, Sura 12 of the Quran, which is used as a story illustrating the rewards of avoiding temptation, among other things. This only emphasizes the exhortatory core of the Quran’s message.
Other than the obvious missionary zeal of early Islam, the social context and nature of the earliest community are hard to reconstruct. The difficulty may be partly due to the fact that, unlike Jesus, Muḥammad lived into his sixties and had ample chance to translate his visions into a social program. The relatively long life of the founder is itself an argument against seeing Muḥammad’s mature view of Islam as a millennialist cult and raises the question of what Christianity would have become had its founder avoided martyrdom to missionize more.
We would like to understand the historical development of Muḥammad’s message, but that is not easy to demonstrate. We may suspect that in the course of his relatively long life of sixty-two years, the emphasis of his message subtly changed, reformulating what had previously been tried and abandoned, perfecting what had been received and proven successful. We have but hints of what might have happened. One might hypothesize that the notion of the coming end, so important for conversion, was more and more supplemented by institution building. By the time of the Prophet’s death, the Muslim community (the Umma) was firmly fixed and the principles of its piety were firmly in place.
The Prophet’s message, even if it had a millennialist tone at the beginning, certainly became the basis of a movement more of purification and repentance, as it grew more successful. It demanded repentance and submission (’Islam) and joining the community of fellow believers. Jews, Christians, Sabeans (and eventually Zoroastrians) were allowed to remain in their own community, as “people of the book” (’ahl al-Kitab), though they were subjected to taxation and social discrimination.
But it is arguable that, at its inception, the word ’islam sometimes did not refer just to the explicit Arab community of the faithful (ummah), but “surrender to God” in general, as the word “God-fearer” could refer to anyone who accepted the One God in the Hellenistic world. Islam could tolerate Jews and Christians as actual believers: “Whoso desires to behave in any other way than surrendering [to God], it shall not be accepted of him [by God],