Islamic Wallpapers Biography
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The peoples of Arabia were predominately polytheistic, and Mecca was the place of their most important sanctuary, the Ka’ba (see below). Its ancient origins are unknown but, since all accessible deities were represented there, it was a place of annual pilgrimage for all tribes. At one time there were said to have been as many as three hundred and sixty idols in and around the Ka’ba. This, too, was under the control of the Quraysh, who wisely established a non-violent zone that was Haram (sacred, forbidden), radiating for twenty miles around the sanctuary, and made Mecca a place where any tribe could enter without fear and where they were free to practice both religion and commerce.
The Ka’ba in 1910
The Ka’ba was the most important holy place in Arabia even in pre-Islamic times; it contained hundreds of idols representing Arabian tribal gods and other religious figures, including Abraham, Jesus and Mary. It is a massive cube believed to have been built by the Prophet Abraham and dedicated to al-Lah (The God who was the same God worshipped by the Jews and Christians); it stands in the centre of the Sanctuary in the heart of Mecca. Embedded in the Ka’ba’s granite matrix is the famous Black Stone, which tradition says was originally cast down from Heaven as a sign for Adam.
The Zam-Zam holy well is nearby and is believed to have quenched the thirst of Hagar and her child in the wilderness. (Genesis 21:19). Arabs from all over the peninsula made an annual pilgrimage to Mecca, performing traditional rites over a period of several days. Mohammad eventually destroyed all the idols in and around the Ka’ba, and re-dedicated it to the One God, Allah, and the annual pilgrimage became the Hajj, the rite and duty of all Believers.
The historian Ibn Ishaq tells of a reconstruction of the Ka’ba when Mohammad was a boy. A quarrel broke out between the Meccan clans as to which clan should set the Black Stone in place. The solution was to ask the first person who entered the Sanctuary from outside to be the judge. The young Mohammad was the first to do so. He put the stone on to a heavy cloth and had all the clan elders take part of the cloth to raise it and thus share in the task equally.
Mohammad at the Ka’ba from an Ottoman
(Turkish) epic about the life of Mohammad,
completed around 1388, Illustration
by Nakkaş Osman.
Like other pre-Axial societies, pre-Islamic Arab beliefs involved a pantheon of accessible deities with whom people could communicate. They also believed in darh or fate which probably helped them adapt to the high mortality rate. Above all of the lesser Gods was the one remote God, al-Lah –the God who was the same God worshipped by the Jews and Christians. He was beyond the reach of ordinary people. Lesser deities were represented in the Ka’ba and in shrines to their individual honor scattered throughout the peninsula. These gods would be prayed to for rain, children, health and the like and would intercede on their behalf to Allah – the God in times of dire need.
This pre-Islamic attitude towards religion provided a framework that was open to ideas and interpretations. The Sasanian presence in the Arabian Peninsula had brought with it the influence of Zoroastrianism, in which Ahura Mazda and Ahriman, the Gods of Light and Darkness, were in constant battle for the souls of humanity. Jewish presence in the area dates possibly from as early as the Babylonian Exile in 597 BCE and certainly from the time of the Great Revolt in AD 70, almost six centuries before Mohammad. Scholars note that a symbiotic relationship existed between the two peoples: Jews were Arabized and Arabic speaking and over the centuries Arabs had absorbed Jewish beliefs and practices. There were Jewish merchants and Jewish Bedouin, farmers, poets and warriors. What today is the center of Islam, the Ka’ba in Mecca, has ancient Semitic roots: Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses and others were associated with it long before the rise of Islam. Both Jews and Arabs were believed to be descendants of Abraham, an idol of whom could be viewed inside the pre-Islamic Ka’ba.
Since their earliest times Christian groups were established in Syria and Mesopotamia. In AD 313, the Emperor Constantine made Christianity legal and it became accepted as the imperial religion by Rome. The First Council of Nicaea in AD 325, declared Christ to be both fully God and fully man and established belief in the Trinity which represented God as three in one: the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Those who disagreed with this new orthodox position, Nestorians, Gnostics, and Arians for example, were excommunicated and declared heretics. Many fled from persecution, beyond the reach of the Byzantine Empire into the Persian and Arab worlds. Theirs was a proselytizing faith and as they spread throughout the Peninsula a number of tribes were converted. The Ghassanids, who wintered on the border of Byzantium, became the largest early Christian tribal community, the Nabateans another, and by the sixth century the Yemenite city of Najran was a center of Arab Christianity.
The distance from both empires enabled beliefs in the Arab Peninsula to evolve and flourish independently, especially in Mecca. According to Fred M. Donner, Professor of Near Eastern History at the University of Chicago, by the sixth century paganism was receding
in S
ome might characterize the faith-inspired murder of satirical cartoonists as shocking. But the prospect of violent reprisal for religious criticism was hardly inconceivable to the now-deceased artists of Charlie Hebdo. In 2011, for example the magazine’s same Parisian offices were firebombed for publishing an issue purportedly guest-edited by the Prophet Muhammad.
Nor was last week’s three-day massacre of 17 people a colossal surprise to me. It might have been, I suppose, if such attacks typically derived merely from the dysfunctional minds of irreligious psychopaths or the maniacal excesses of religious “extremists,” as most commentators tend to describe them.
But, as the perpetrators themselves all-too proudly confess, these are acts firmly grounded in religious text and tradition. Of course, it can be difficult to determine whether a violent act occurs because of religious belief. It is insufficient to simply note, as some critics of religion often do, that the Bible prescribes death for a variety of objectively mundane offenses, including adultery (Leviticus 20:10) and taking the Lord’s name in vain (Leviticus 24:16). And to merely remind, for example, that Deuteronomy 13:7–11 commands the devoted to stone to death all who attempt to “divert you from Yahweh your God,” or that Qur’an 9:73 instructs prophets of Islam to “make war” on unbelievers, provides precious little evidence upon which to base an indictment of religious conviction.
Sam Harris’s vague declaration, “As man believes, so will he act,” seems entirely plausible, of course, but also highly presumptive given the fact that people are known to frequently hold two or more conflicting beliefs at once.1Nor can we casually assume that every suicide bomber or terrorist has taken inspiration from holy authority—even if he or she is religious.
But there is substantial merit in Harris’s criticism of religionists who, regardless of the circumstances, “tend to argue that it is not faith itself but man’s baser nature that inspires such violence.” First, there can exist more than one sine qua non, or cause-in-fact for any outcome, especially in the psychologically knotty context of human aggression. Furthermore, when aggressors declare religious inspiration, as the Charlie Hebdo murderers did, we should accept them at their word.
A More Methodical Approach
But to more astutely characterize the relationship between religion and violence, and to distinguish between differentially aggressive traditions, we should apply a more disciplined method. Cultural anthropologist David Eller proposes a comprehensive model of violence consisting of five contributing dimensions or conditions that, together, predict the source’s propensity to expand both the scope and scale of hostility.2 These dimensions include group integration, identity, institutions, interests, and ideology.
Eller applies his model to religion as follows: First, religion is clearly a group venture featuring “exclusionary membership,” “collective ideas,” and “the leadership principle, with attendant expectations of conformity if not strict obedience”—often to superhuman authorities deserving of special deference. Second, sacred traditions offer both personal and collective identities to their adherents that stimulate moods, motivations, and “most critically, actions.”
Next, most faiths provide institutions, perhaps involving creeds, codes of conduct, rituals, and hierarchical offices which at some point, according to Eller, can render the religion indistinguishable from government. Fourth, all religions aspire to fulfill certain interests. Most crucially, they seek to preserve and perpetuate the group along with its doctrines and behavioral norms. The attainment of ultimate good or evil (heaven or hell, for example), the discouragement or punishment of “dissent or deviance,” proselytization and conversion, and opposition to non-believers might be included as well.
Finally, “religion may be the ultimate ideology,” the author avers, “since its framework is so totally external (i.e., supernaturally ordained or given), its rules and standards so obligatory, its bonds so unbreakable, and its legitimation so absolute.” For Eller, the “supernatural premise” is critical:
This provides the most effective possible legitimation for what we are ordered or ordained to do: it makes the group, its identity, its institutions, its interests, and its particular ideology good and right … by definition. Therefore, if it is in the identity or the institutions or the interests or the ideology of a religion to be violent, that too is good and right, even righteous.
Arguably, Eller concludes, “no other social force observed in history can meet those conditions as well as religion.” And when a given tradition satisfies multiple conditions, “violence becomes not only likely but comparatively minor in the light of greater religious truths.”
Confronting the question at hand, then, I propose a somewhat familiar, though perhaps distinctively limited two-part hypothesis describing potential relationships between religion and aggression. First, I do not contend that religion is ever the sole, original, or even primary cause of bellicosity. Such might be the case in any given instance, but for the purpose of determining generally whether faith plays a meaningful role in violence, we need only ask whether the religion is a sine qua non of the conflict.
Second, although all religions can and often do stimulate a variety of both positive and negative behaviors, clearly not all faiths are identical in their inherent inclination toward hostility. Indeed, there should be little question that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam satisfied each of Eller’s conditions. Accordingly, I suggest that the Abrahamic monotheisms are either uniquely adapted to the task or otherwise especially capable of inspiring violencefrom both their followers and non-followers.
The Ka’ba in 1910
The Ka’ba was the most important holy place in Arabia even in pre-Islamic times; it contained hundreds of idols representing Arabian tribal gods and other religious figures, including Abraham, Jesus and Mary. It is a massive cube believed to have been built by the Prophet Abraham and dedicated to al-Lah (The God who was the same God worshipped by the Jews and Christians); it stands in the centre of the Sanctuary in the heart of Mecca. Embedded in the Ka’ba’s granite matrix is the famous Black Stone, which tradition says was originally cast down from Heaven as a sign for Adam.
The Zam-Zam holy well is nearby and is believed to have quenched the thirst of Hagar and her child in the wilderness. (Genesis 21:19). Arabs from all over the peninsula made an annual pilgrimage to Mecca, performing traditional rites over a period of several days. Mohammad eventually destroyed all the idols in and around the Ka’ba, and re-dedicated it to the One God, Allah, and the annual pilgrimage became the Hajj, the rite and duty of all Believers.
The historian Ibn Ishaq tells of a reconstruction of the Ka’ba when Mohammad was a boy. A quarrel broke out between the Meccan clans as to which clan should set the Black Stone in place. The solution was to ask the first person who entered the Sanctuary from outside to be the judge. The young Mohammad was the first to do so. He put the stone on to a heavy cloth and had all the clan elders take part of the cloth to raise it and thus share in the task equally.
Mohammad at the Ka’ba from an Ottoman
(Turkish) epic about the life of Mohammad,
completed around 1388, Illustration
by Nakkaş Osman.
Like other pre-Axial societies, pre-Islamic Arab beliefs involved a pantheon of accessible deities with whom people could communicate. They also believed in darh or fate which probably helped them adapt to the high mortality rate. Above all of the lesser Gods was the one remote God, al-Lah –the God who was the same God worshipped by the Jews and Christians. He was beyond the reach of ordinary people. Lesser deities were represented in the Ka’ba and in shrines to their individual honor scattered throughout the peninsula. These gods would be prayed to for rain, children, health and the like and would intercede on their behalf to Allah – the God in times of dire need.
This pre-Islamic attitude towards religion provided a framework that was open to ideas and interpretations. The Sasanian presence in the Arabian Peninsula had brought with it the influence of Zoroastrianism, in which Ahura Mazda and Ahriman, the Gods of Light and Darkness, were in constant battle for the souls of humanity. Jewish presence in the area dates possibly from as early as the Babylonian Exile in 597 BCE and certainly from the time of the Great Revolt in AD 70, almost six centuries before Mohammad. Scholars note that a symbiotic relationship existed between the two peoples: Jews were Arabized and Arabic speaking and over the centuries Arabs had absorbed Jewish beliefs and practices. There were Jewish merchants and Jewish Bedouin, farmers, poets and warriors. What today is the center of Islam, the Ka’ba in Mecca, has ancient Semitic roots: Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses and others were associated with it long before the rise of Islam. Both Jews and Arabs were believed to be descendants of Abraham, an idol of whom could be viewed inside the pre-Islamic Ka’ba.
Since their earliest times Christian groups were established in Syria and Mesopotamia. In AD 313, the Emperor Constantine made Christianity legal and it became accepted as the imperial religion by Rome. The First Council of Nicaea in AD 325, declared Christ to be both fully God and fully man and established belief in the Trinity which represented God as three in one: the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Those who disagreed with this new orthodox position, Nestorians, Gnostics, and Arians for example, were excommunicated and declared heretics. Many fled from persecution, beyond the reach of the Byzantine Empire into the Persian and Arab worlds. Theirs was a proselytizing faith and as they spread throughout the Peninsula a number of tribes were converted. The Ghassanids, who wintered on the border of Byzantium, became the largest early Christian tribal community, the Nabateans another, and by the sixth century the Yemenite city of Najran was a center of Arab Christianity.
The distance from both empires enabled beliefs in the Arab Peninsula to evolve and flourish independently, especially in Mecca. According to Fred M. Donner, Professor of Near Eastern History at the University of Chicago, by the sixth century paganism was receding
in S
ome might characterize the faith-inspired murder of satirical cartoonists as shocking. But the prospect of violent reprisal for religious criticism was hardly inconceivable to the now-deceased artists of Charlie Hebdo. In 2011, for example the magazine’s same Parisian offices were firebombed for publishing an issue purportedly guest-edited by the Prophet Muhammad.
Nor was last week’s three-day massacre of 17 people a colossal surprise to me. It might have been, I suppose, if such attacks typically derived merely from the dysfunctional minds of irreligious psychopaths or the maniacal excesses of religious “extremists,” as most commentators tend to describe them.
But, as the perpetrators themselves all-too proudly confess, these are acts firmly grounded in religious text and tradition. Of course, it can be difficult to determine whether a violent act occurs because of religious belief. It is insufficient to simply note, as some critics of religion often do, that the Bible prescribes death for a variety of objectively mundane offenses, including adultery (Leviticus 20:10) and taking the Lord’s name in vain (Leviticus 24:16). And to merely remind, for example, that Deuteronomy 13:7–11 commands the devoted to stone to death all who attempt to “divert you from Yahweh your God,” or that Qur’an 9:73 instructs prophets of Islam to “make war” on unbelievers, provides precious little evidence upon which to base an indictment of religious conviction.
Sam Harris’s vague declaration, “As man believes, so will he act,” seems entirely plausible, of course, but also highly presumptive given the fact that people are known to frequently hold two or more conflicting beliefs at once.1Nor can we casually assume that every suicide bomber or terrorist has taken inspiration from holy authority—even if he or she is religious.
But there is substantial merit in Harris’s criticism of religionists who, regardless of the circumstances, “tend to argue that it is not faith itself but man’s baser nature that inspires such violence.” First, there can exist more than one sine qua non, or cause-in-fact for any outcome, especially in the psychologically knotty context of human aggression. Furthermore, when aggressors declare religious inspiration, as the Charlie Hebdo murderers did, we should accept them at their word.
A More Methodical Approach
But to more astutely characterize the relationship between religion and violence, and to distinguish between differentially aggressive traditions, we should apply a more disciplined method. Cultural anthropologist David Eller proposes a comprehensive model of violence consisting of five contributing dimensions or conditions that, together, predict the source’s propensity to expand both the scope and scale of hostility.2 These dimensions include group integration, identity, institutions, interests, and ideology.
Eller applies his model to religion as follows: First, religion is clearly a group venture featuring “exclusionary membership,” “collective ideas,” and “the leadership principle, with attendant expectations of conformity if not strict obedience”—often to superhuman authorities deserving of special deference. Second, sacred traditions offer both personal and collective identities to their adherents that stimulate moods, motivations, and “most critically, actions.”
Next, most faiths provide institutions, perhaps involving creeds, codes of conduct, rituals, and hierarchical offices which at some point, according to Eller, can render the religion indistinguishable from government. Fourth, all religions aspire to fulfill certain interests. Most crucially, they seek to preserve and perpetuate the group along with its doctrines and behavioral norms. The attainment of ultimate good or evil (heaven or hell, for example), the discouragement or punishment of “dissent or deviance,” proselytization and conversion, and opposition to non-believers might be included as well.
Finally, “religion may be the ultimate ideology,” the author avers, “since its framework is so totally external (i.e., supernaturally ordained or given), its rules and standards so obligatory, its bonds so unbreakable, and its legitimation so absolute.” For Eller, the “supernatural premise” is critical:
This provides the most effective possible legitimation for what we are ordered or ordained to do: it makes the group, its identity, its institutions, its interests, and its particular ideology good and right … by definition. Therefore, if it is in the identity or the institutions or the interests or the ideology of a religion to be violent, that too is good and right, even righteous.
Arguably, Eller concludes, “no other social force observed in history can meet those conditions as well as religion.” And when a given tradition satisfies multiple conditions, “violence becomes not only likely but comparatively minor in the light of greater religious truths.”
Confronting the question at hand, then, I propose a somewhat familiar, though perhaps distinctively limited two-part hypothesis describing potential relationships between religion and aggression. First, I do not contend that religion is ever the sole, original, or even primary cause of bellicosity. Such might be the case in any given instance, but for the purpose of determining generally whether faith plays a meaningful role in violence, we need only ask whether the religion is a sine qua non of the conflict.
Second, although all religions can and often do stimulate a variety of both positive and negative behaviors, clearly not all faiths are identical in their inherent inclination toward hostility. Indeed, there should be little question that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam satisfied each of Eller’s conditions. Accordingly, I suggest that the Abrahamic monotheisms are either uniquely adapted to the task or otherwise especially capable of inspiring violencefrom both their followers and non-followers.
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