No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam Paperback – 30 Aug. 2011

Having read various works on both the history of Islam, and Islam's current issues over it's own identity, this work in particular, stands out.The book has many strengths, but perhaps what stands out is the insight given into the life of Mohammad, and how he was a genuinely universal social reformer. From the early chapters, a portrait of Mohammad as a genuinely tolerant man with universal and all inclusive aspirations, is unveiled, in stark contrast to the intolerant vision of Islam such contemporaries present in the world today.The chapters about the prophets succession, and the Sunni-Shi'a divide are of particular strength, and a notable feature of Aslan's style is how he juxtaposes the work with examples from the present, or recent history.The last chapter is a work on Islam's current identity issues, and how there are many Islam's out there. For a work examining Islam's identity and current issues, it is best to read Ali A Alawi's Crisis of Islamic Civilization, however the strength of Reza Aslan's work is an overall history of Islam.The current edition has been updated and rewritten very well, and it shows that Aslan takes great care in keeping his work up to date.On the whole, this book can be recommended to both those who are familiar with Islam, or those who are just curious, as this book sheds much more light on the history that most contemporary scholarship, and is both readable, accessible, and highly informative. In short, a masterwork!

Reza Aslan is a good writer and a good historian of religion. His 2013 book Zealot on Jesus was excellent, so I had high hopes for this 2011 book on Islam. Many hopes were indeed fulfilled: the historical timeline is clear, the known facts are in place, the conjectures are properly flagged, the context for contemporaries and believers is sketched credibly, and the final result is easy and pleasant to read.Any historian of Islam will be confronted with controversy and compelled to take sides. Aslan takes the side of the Sufis, a relatively gentle and reflective tradition in Islam with mystic leanings, which grew up in the shade of the Shia branch of the Mohammedan faith in lands that had rich and deep traditions of belief and philosophy. In doing so, he distances himself from the Sunni branch and those of its variants such as Wahhabism that have attracted Western anger in recent years.What Aslan does not do, and what diminishes his book for me, is stand back far enough from the entire tradition of veneration for the revelations of the Prophet, and their expression in the series of texts that form the Quran, to see the wood for the trees. Even today, no pious Muslim would dare regard the revelations or their canonical expression as anything but holy, but for a modern Westerner with some respect for science and rational thinking the leap of imagination required to take such affirmed holiness at face value is just too great. This reader at least is driven to taking a remote anthropological stance on the Arab and related societies of a thousand plus or minus a few hundred years ago and regarding their strange belief system as shot through with hardly less nonsense than any other ancient myth or curious narrative.Despite his Muslim roots, Aslan is a modern Western writer, so he must must see the need to keep such rational readers on board, even if in the end he parts company with them in continuing to venerate his holy relics. There may be a learning curve here, for he does a fine job in standing back from Christian or other pieties in discussing Jesus in his later book Zealot; perhaps it is easier to stand back from a faith one feels no residual need to defend or believe in. Modern societies with Christian or Muslim roots are surely robust enough to rise above superstitious awe in face of alleged revelations and the purportedly holy texts that spring from them, or at any rate we can only hope so, if we are to avoid a new clash of civilizations.Like Aslan, I have some sympathy for the Sufi thread in the story of Islam, and feel some distaste for the hardened institutional forms of the Muslim faith, which like their Christian equivalents have led to serial disasters in the societies swayed by them. Unlike him, however, I see little hope for a revival of Sufism in the Muslim world and indeed little hope of sufficient reform within Islam to accommodate it to the constraints of life in an age of global connectivity, robots, and nuclear weapons. Only a clean separation of secular life, including politics, from the inner life of religion can enable us to regulate the modern world, it seems to me, and even a revived Sufism would be of no obvious help in doing so.In summary, then, a modern history of Islam, especially one that like this volume takes us up to contemporary political issues surrounding the ongoing wars in Muslim majority societies, can only work for Western readers if it rises above a partisan perspective. As it is, Aslan seems to feel sympathy for the victim narrative that Western imperialists have cruelly exploited the Muslim world, which must therefore rise up and restore its fortunes by defeating the infidels. This cuts no ice with me, even in the context of a volume of history that otherwise deserves some praise.

Reza Aslan is brilliant. The book is clear, engaging, beautifully written and very readable. It's a great reference on Islam, works well as a one-stop introductory volume or as a nuanced, thought-provoking overview to combine with other texts. It's arranged in such a way that you can easily pick out chapters on particular issues, such as jihad, Islamic law, Sufism, and women. I particularly enjoyed his discussions of Muslim feminism and the 'Islamic Renaissance'. He is great at dismantling the common misconceptions in a matter-of-fact way while openly and honestly exploring some of the challenges faced by contemporary Muslim communities. This is the level of discussion that we don't see often enough in the press, and which Western societies desperately need if we are going to be able to build healthy relationships with Muslims in our own countries as well as abroad. After reading this I immediately ordered three more copies for my parents and friends.

This book gives the history of Islam and its interplay with politics which marks events to this day. It is comprehensive and gives a very necessary background to people wishing to have an overview of what Islam is about and its various factions.If you are looking for a single volume which will give you the above insights this is an excellent choice.

Easy to read, but very educational and provides a different view point on Islam. For anyone wanting to find out more about the religion and a view on we are where we are now, a very good read.

The book is unquestionably good. It gives you a great account of the origin of the faith and its belief. It is not however, flawless. First of all, the writer is a strong believer himself and sometimes doesn't seems to be completely unbiased. Per se, this can be understood and forgiven, but sometimes it seems quite clear that the writer is "forgetting" to explain important bits, leaving the reader feel some degree of contradiction (i.e. I failed to understand how a "by no means wealthy man" that is just a Sheik of a "tiny oasis", like Ibn Saud could have been chosen by Wahhab as his ally and so be important in the astonishing successful conquer of the arabian peninsula).Small grievances aside, it is a good book which I strongly recommend.

Esse autor é perfeito, leitura maravilhosa, já estou buscando outro do mesmo autor. Para quem quer iniciar os estudos sobre islamismo, vai desde o início..

I love the book. Very very delivery service. Recommended to other potential buyers.

Es interesante saber él origen y evolución a través del tiempo del Islam. Un pasado caótico lleno de violencia,sangre y mal interpretación y también ver su cambio ahora con las redes sociales.

It is not prophets who create religions. Prophet are, above all, reformers who redefine and reinterpret the existing beliefs and practiced of their communities, providing fresh sets of symbols and metaphors with which succeeding generations can describe the nature of reality. Indeed, it is most often the prophet's successors who take upon themselves the responsibility of fashioning their Master's word and deeds into unified easily comprehensible religious systems.- Reza Aslan-------------------------------------------------Hello there! I hope you are doing good. That's my views about this wonderfully written book on Islam. This book is multidimensional. It covers nearly all the aspects of Islam. * Like from its origins, and how it evolved and spread throughout the world. *The message which Prophet Muhammad(PBUH) preached throughout his Life i.e compassion, social and economic justice, egalitarianism. *And how this message is hijacked by the ulemas ( self proclaimed religious scholars ) and the best example of this is the 1979 Iranian revolution. *The difference between Shia's and Sunnis. *About the most mystic part of islam i.e Sufism. *And the various conflicts within islam. And the author rightly mentioned that whatever problems the Muslims are facing worldwide has to be resolved by themselves and the best way to reform is to reinterpret the Holy Qur'an again in the present context. After reading this book I can surely say that this book deserves to be read by every rational human irrespective of his/her religion. I hope you like this, Thanks for Reading, Jai Hind. With Regards, Yash SharmaFor more information You can visit -Dontbignorant.inMy Ratings : 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 ( 5/5 )Table of contents :----------------------1. The sanctuary in the desert(pre-islamic Arabia )2. The keeper of the keys(Muhammad in Medina )3. The city of the prophet(the first Muslims )4. Fight in the way of God(the meaning of jihad )5. The rightly guided ones(the successors to Muhammad )6. This religion is a science(the development of islamic theology and law )7. In the footsteps of martyrs( from shi'ism to khomeinism )8. Stain your prayer rug with wine(the sufi way )9. An Awakening in the East(the response to colonialism )10. Slouching towards Medina( the quest for islamic democracy)11. Welcome to the Islamic Reformation ( the future of islam )

Less than 300 reviews on Amazon, compared to more than 2,600 for his book Zealot, the Historical Jesus!! One would have hoped for just the opposite statistic, considering the timeliness of the topic is Islam, and the necessity to understand a non-Western culture and tradition. Perhaps the length of this review is this reviewer’s attempt to correct the lackNo god but God, written 10 years before Zealot, includes a rather definitive discussion of the definition of “religion” as the story of faith. This definition is informative of the author’s perspective and will continue into his later work about the historical Jesus. Religion “…is an institutionalized 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.”Aslan dismisses the “clash of culture” arguments and focuses on the “clash of monotheisms” (much the same as the clash between Christians and Jews is a clash of monotheisms).The book seems to be three monographs, woven together, very effectively. First Aslan discusses Arabia in the Period of Innocence, from which Mohammad emerges and develops the Islamic traditions.(Chapters 1-2) Second, Aslan takes the reader through the trials, tribulations and triumphs of his tribe and his followers. (Chapters 3-5) as Islam is developed into its own unique set of symbols and myths. These chapters carry stories of the Islamic traditions through Mohammad’s death and for centuries to today (chapters 6-7), including a wonderful chapter on Sufism. (Chapter 8). And the third “monograph” brings the reader to about 2010, the story of Islam in these latter centuries (Chapters 9-11), perhaps more rightly focused on the colonialized period of Arabia. In this “monograph”, Aslan seems to be caught up in his own dream for the future, and that dream is highly influenced by his being born in Tehran and then (my words), in exile for some 24 years before his return for a visit. His hopes anddream does not change the wisdom of his scholarship, however.Aslan develops clearly and historically the roles of Mecca and Medina within the both the Arabic and the Muslim traditions.Regardless of the Arabic traditions of retaliation and restitution, Aslan perceives Islam as focused on community, inclusiveness (equality) and love. Mohammad, as Aslan describes, extended the Arab concept of tribe as the fundamental organizing unit of society, to be a “neo-tribe” that “because neither ethnicity or culture nor race nor kinship had any significance to Muhammad, the Ummah (tribe), unlike a traditional tribe, had an almost unlimited capacity for growth through conversion.” With regard to traditional tribal concepts of retribution, Mohammad’s revelation of the Word of God as written in the Qur’an states, “The retribution for an injury is an equal injury, but those who forgive the injury and make reconciliation will be rewarded by God.” The community of Islam was being created on the basis of moral and egalitarian ideals.These positive attributes are overshadowed in the past several hundred years by colonialism, Western evangelization (of culture and religion and faith), which does not recognize the combination of Arabic tribes and Muslim community perspectives. Western installed and supported tribal leaders have only force by which to maintain legitimacy.BUT, Aslan does not provide a one-sided argument. He clearly states the failure of Islam to evolve into the Modern world is the result of its theology being controlled by a small group of clerics, who position themselves as the only credible interpreters of the Qur’an. They are responsible for making the body politic subservient to the religion of Islam. This is not consistent with Mohammad’s teachings, or the Qur’an. While Aslan perceives Islam to be in a prolonged period of reformation, today, he notes the conflict between the role of a Caliphate as defined by Mohammad being limited to secular functions, and the role of clerics being limited to religious functions.Until this internal conflict is resolved, globally, there will be splinter groups who claim power in the name of Islam.A very valuable perspective on the world today.