Islam Through Western Eyes by Jonathan Lyons

Author:Jonathan Lyons [Lyons, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History/Middle East/General
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2011-12-16T00:00:00+00:00

I will surely cast him into the Fire. Would that you knew what the Fire is like! It leaves nothing, it spares no one; it burns the skins of men. It is guarded by nineteen keepers.

We have appointed none but the angels to guard the Fire, and made their number a subject for dispute among the unbelievers, so that those to whom the Scriptures were given may be convinced and the true believers strengthened in their faith. (quoted in Benjamin and Simon 2002:33)5

This imagery was, perhaps, simply too much to resist, given the fiery end of the Twin Towers in new York and the deadly blaze at the Pentagon. What else might have motivated the selection of lines from this famous sura, generally known as “The Cloaked one,” as an epigraph to murderous terrorist attacks? The language at work here—condemning unbelievers to hellfire—would not at all be out of place in the Christian tradition. To cite just one well-known example, Dante’s Divine Comedy (canto 28:30–31) recounts in detail the hideous torments of Muhammad in hell, his body split asunder so that his entrails hang out—an image that may reflect the Western discourse that casts Muhammad not as a prophet, but as a Christian schismatic. Nor would it be wholly unfamiliar to the followers of other religious traditions that offer true redemption only to those who accept and follow a specific creed and describe torments for those who fail to do so.

But Benjamin and Simon’s reliance on “The Cloaked one” is problematic in other ways as well. Sura 74 is among the earliest revelations6 and calls on a terrified Muhammad, who has been covered in a cloak by his loving wife Khadija after his shock encounter with the Angel Gabriel, to toss aside his protective wrap and preach the Word of God to his fellow man: “o thou enveloped in the cloak, Arise and warn” (74:1–2). We have here the very outset of Muhammad’s sacred vocation, one that places him within the general pre-Islamic Arabian tradition of spiritual “warners” and in the specific line of the Abrahamic prophets recorded in earlier Jewish and Christian scriptures.

God then assures Muhammad that only those who fail to heed the holy teachings need worry at the End of Time: “For when the trumpet shall sound, surely that day will be a day of anguish, not of ease, for disbelievers” (74:8–10). Subsequent lines make it clear that “those to whom the Scriptures have been given and believers” (74:31)—that is, the pious People of the Book—will be spared such a fate in the afterlife. These lines are in keeping with Muhammad’s own understanding of his prophetic mission, which is to restore for good the true essence of past revelation that had been corrupted or neglected by Jewish and Christian practice.

Impelled by the discourse of violence in Islam, Benjamin and Simon present the spiritual warning conveyed in “The Cloaked one” as a fitting introduction to mass murder. Likewise, this logic induces them to see the al-Qaeda attacks strictly

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