Book Review: No god but God

No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam, by Reza Aslan (New York: Random House, 2006), 342 pages.

This book is a very lucid and engaging overview of the history of Islam, written by a young Iranian-American scholar of religions. I picked up this book a couple years ago, but was spurred on to reading it by the current uprising in Iran, hoping to get a better understanding of the cultural forces undergirding some of the most momentous events of the age.

Aslan does a great job revealing the cultural milieu in which Islam was born, beginning with a chapter on pre-Islamic Arabia before moving on to the life of Muhammad, the founding of the first Muslim community in Medina, the rapid expansion of Islam after the Prophet’s death, and the rise of the Muslim Caliphates. He devotes special attention to clarifying some of the most-misunderstood aspects of Islam, including a chapter on the meaning of jihad. Aslan shows how Islamic theology and law developed as the power of interpreting the Qur’an became centralized in the hands of the Ulama, the clerical establishment. The story becomes more complicated as various power-struggles and differing interpretations of Islam lead to fractures and the various camps that exist today, including Sunni (orthodox), Shi‘ite, and Sufi Muslims, as well as smaller, more radical sects and interpretations, such as Khomeinism, Wahhabism, and the Taliban.

Aslan’s major theme is the refutation of the idea that Islam is fundamentally opposed to democracy, pluralism, and human rights. He presents Muhammad’s Medina as a radical experiment in egalitarianism and pluralism in its Arab tribal social context, and his presentation of the history makes the case that in the ensuing centuries Islamic leaders often interpreted Muhammad’s message far differently than it was originally envisioned. This leads to the culmination of the book, where Aslan argues that Islam is headed for a “reformation” to parallel the Protestant Reformation, in which the original vision for the faith will be reinterpreted or regained. The violence of groups like Al-Qaeda, he argues, points to the rumblings of this coming Reformation, because they primarily represent a struggle within Islam for the future of the faith.

Aslan’s book is grippingly well-written and fascinating in both its broad coverage and interesting detail. He doesn’t come across as completely objective, however, because he clearly aims to promote his vision of an enlightened Islam and his hope for an Islamic Reformation. It seems like he glosses over some of the questions that have been raised about Muhammad’s integrity and especially the brutality of Islam’s military expansion, saying in effect, “The Christians and Zoroastrians did it too!” Because of this at least apparent lack of objectivity I will probably want to read another perspective on Islam’s history. However, all things considered, I found this book fascinating reading and highly recommend it to anyone who wants to get an overview of the history of Islam.

You can check out more of Reza Aslan's stuff here.

The Clock Ticks Down to Doom: A Frightening Story

While perusing some old files on my computer this evening, I ran across an old story I wrote for a high school English class when I was fifteen. It's a fictional, tongue-in-cheek story based on some of my experiences growing up as a nerdy kid who loved to read books from the library. I just have to get it out here for the rest of the world. I hope you enjoy it.

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The Clock Ticks Down to Doom: A Frightening Story
by Jordan Buckley
1/21/02

One day in my youth, I was happily at work building my army of Legos. Outside, you could see through the trees to the Kennebec River flowing sluggishly by. Mosquitoes, black flies, and other kinds of flies buzzed around, waiting for someone to venture outside and be eaten. That time of the year was called bug season by the local Maine inhabitants.

My array of Lego soldiers was about halfway completed when I heard the garage door and knew my dad was home. Soon afterward my mom began calling me upstairs for dinner. Disappointed that my army was still not in order, I nonetheless hurried upstairs. As we sat down at the table, my dad picked up a nearby book that I had recently borrowed from the public library. It was a book about dinosaurs, and I had long since read it through. He asked me a little about it, and then turned to the back flap. Suddenly the blood began to drain from his face, and I asked him what was wrong. Wordlessly, he handed me the book, open to the back inside cover.

It felt as if an icy chill had enveloped my whole body. There, under the Date Due heading, stamped sloppily in bluish-black ink, was a single date: Feb. 23. Today’s date!

We lived two hours away from the library, and it closed at 7:00 pm. My eyes darted to the wall clock; 6:52 pm. I felt as though a huge ice-cold stone was on top of my chest, crushing the life of my soul. My doom was sealed; we would have to pay the late fee!

Abruptly, like a ray of hope piercing the darkness, my mother’s voice came. “Maybe you can call and renew it in time.” There was still a glimmer of hope. I ran to the phone directory and began fumbling through the pages, hindered by my panic, every now and again glancing at the clock as my end ticked nearer. Finally I located the number with only seconds to spare. In a mad race against time, I dialed the digits, hoping against hope that I could survive this ordeal. Time seemed to crawl as the phone rang, fear welling up inside me that the secretary might have gone home and left me to this horrible fate. To my wondrous joy, she finally answered. Trembling, I asked her to renew my books. Like warm, beautiful sunlight her words came, forever engrained on my heart: “Alright sir, you have an additional two weeks before the books are due.”

Book Review: Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue

Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English, by John McWhorter (Gotham Books, 2008), 256 pages.

This is a very engaging and accessible book by a linguist on certain aspects of the history and grammar of English. I was a little disappointed at the narrow scope of this book: I was looking for a broad history of English, and based on the title that's what I was expecting. However, the book is really focused on making some very specific arguments, namely that English has been deeply affected by Celtic and Old Norse (in a way that has made English uniquely simplified among Germanic languages), and that this is true in spite of the fact that most scholars of English downplay or reject it. He goes on to stress that the history of English should lay to rest fears of the decline of 'good' grammar ("much of what constitutes ordinary Modern English today began as random novelties that floated in, despised as mistakes by the elite"), as well as the myth that language determines worldview (the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis). The book is surprisingly academic in its arguments, in that it interacts with and critiques current scholarship; but it is written in a very popular and entertaining style. I come away with a little more knowledge about the history of English and a respect for John McWhorter as a writer.

I also think it's interesting that McWhorter is not only a linguist, but also a commentator on race in America and a fellow at a conservative think-tank, the Manhattan Institute.

mewithoutYou - it's all crazy! it's all false! it's all a dream! it's alright

A Kingdom View of Redemption

Russell Moore on Carl Henry's call for evangelical social engagement rooted in the Kingdom of Christ and God's purpose to redeem the entire cosmos:

Salvation must be articulated in terms of the broader category of the Kingdom, since personal regeneration is about Kingdom advance—since, in the reign of Christ, God "has already impinged upon history in a supreme and decisive way through the incarnation and Christ's conquest over Satan," thereby pointing the cosmos "to a future superlative climax applying the consequences to the whole human race." Evangelicals cannot fall into the crypto-gnostic trap of seeing the material world as intrinsically evil, a very real danger when fundamentalists combine an otherworldly soteriology with a rigidly legalistic personal morality. This means that evangelicals must understand redemption to include a restoration to the creational imperatives of the cultural mandate of Genesis 1:27-28, a mandate that does not allow for a flight from public responsibilities. It further means that Christianity is concerned that social structures conform to objective standards of justice, even as Christians seek the conversion of individuals.

—Russell Moore, The Kingdom of Christ: The New Evangelical Perspective (Crossway, 2004), 85.

Book Review: The Language Instinct

The Language Instinct, by Steven Pinker (Harper, 2007; first published in 1994), 576 pages.

Quite an interesting scientific look at how language works, written by one of the world's top linguists. Pinker has an engaging style, making technicalities interesting with lots of stories and examples. His main arguments are that (1) language is an astoundingly complex ability that we all take for granted because (2) we are born with a language instinct that provides the framework for us to learn whatever language we grow up around. So language is a special instinct we have, not just something we've invented and learned with our general intelligence. There's also a Universal Grammar which unifies all human grammars, so that deep down all languages are built on a common set of rules (nouns, verbs, phrases, etc.).

Pinker silences the prophets of doom who claim that our language is decaying, when all they focus on are extraneous rules of prescriptive grammar; the foundational, instinctual rules of grammar are in no danger of being lost. Languages have been evolving since Babel, losing old forms and gaining new content through slang and borrowing. The English we speak today is a completely different language than it was 600 years ago, and there's nothing wrong with that.

He also lays to rest the idea that as language "decays" (changes), it can take away our ability to think certain thoughts or express certain concepts. We don't think in English; we think in a language of thought (he calls it "Mentalese") and we use our language to express it. If there's not a word for our idea, we just describe it with other words or else coin a new word. Even though I'm a fan of Orwell, I have to admit these linguists have convinced me he was wrong about the dangers of Newspeak, in which ideas like "freedom" and "rebellion" could be stamped out because there are no words for them. That just isn't the way our minds and our languages work.

Pinker's book makes one revel in the amazing complexity of the machinery we've been given to use language, so much so that it's really incredible when he states that the only possible source of all this glorious complexity is natural selection. It's saddening to see an intelligent man refusing to recognize glory.

Inconsequential Decorations

One of the world's top linguists, and a skilled writer, discusses the value of prescriptive rules of grammar (e.g., "Never begin a sentence with a conjunction").

What would it take to build a device that could duplicate human language? Obviously, you need to build in some kind of rules, but what kind? Prescriptive rules? Imagine trying to build a talking machine by designing it to obey rules like "Don't split infinitives" or "Never begin a sentence with because." It would just sit there. In fact, we already have machines that don't split infinitives; they're called screwdrivers, bathtubs, cappuccino-makers, and so on. Prescriptive rules are useless without the much more fundamental rules that create the sentences and define the infinitives and list the word because to begin with . . . These rules are never mentioned in style manuals or school grammars because the authors correctly assume that anyone capable of reading the manuals must already have the rules. . . . So when a scientist considers all the high-tech mental machinery needed to arrange words into ordinary sentences, prescriptive rules are, at best, inconsequential little decorations. The very fact that they have to be drilled shows that they are alien to the natural workings of the language system. One can choose to obsess over prescriptive rules, but they have no more to do with human language than the criteria for judging cats at a cat show have to do with mammalian biology.

—Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct, 384.

Patterns of Thought

Probably the most difficult “patterns” of thought to identify as things to which we should not be “conformed” are those in any culture that the overwhelming majority in the culture think are pretty obvious, but which stand either tangentially skewed with respect to, or totally opposed to, the gospel. Most of us look back on the temptations toward ascetic and gnostic movements in the second and third centuries and marvel that so many people who called themselves Christians were taken in. But the most dangerous movements in any age are those that are so widely assumed that it is very hard to see them. It is easy to discern and denounce yesteryear’s blind spots, and even feel vaguely superior because we are able to do so; it is far more difficult to discern our own.

-D. A. Carson, editorial in Themelios 33.3 (2008): 1.

Fallout and Judgment

Reading in Jeremiah the other morning, I was struck by the similarities between Jeremiah's portrayal of Israel as a wasteland and the post-apocalyptic world in a game I've been playing, Fallout 3. Jeremiah prophesies about what God is going to do to Israel if they don't turn from their sins: He will make Israel into a deserted wasteland with ruined cities, poisoned water, and dangerous beasts roaming the land (Jeremiah 8). Fallout 3 is set in a world destroyed by nuclear war. The cities are destroyed, the water is poisoned, and the landscape is infested with dangerous creatures spawned by the radiation. The similarities between the game's wasteland (the result of a nuclear holocaust) and the wasteland portrayed in Jeremiah (the result of God's wrath) are striking.

I think this hints at the fact that even today, when most people in the West have abandoned the biblical worldview, we are still preoccupied with sin and judgment. Fallout 3 reflects the fears of the Cold War era: our sin was the accumulation of nuclear weaponry, and judgment would come in the form of a nuclear holocaust. Today the most prevalent doomsday scenarios are environmental. Now the national sins are CO2 emissions, pollution, and deforestation. The prophets of global warming proclaim that judgment will come in the form of storms, rising sea levels, and UV radiation pouring through a depleted ozone layer. The only way we can avoid this judgment is by repenting of our wicked ways and going green. It's the new religion of our time. Like every other fad, it'll go out of style and be replaced by something else eventually. But the human heart won't change. That gnawing awareness of sin and a coming judgment will remain, because as Paul shows in Romans 1, every person alive knows deep down that he owes allegiance to the Creator. I'm praying that the Lord will open the eyes of many people to recognize the true coming judgment and the true salvation of Jesus.

Judging Video Games

Al Mohler blogged today about the just-released Grand Theft Auto IV, warning us of the moral problems that arise. From what I've seen of the franchise, I agree with one of the game's designers (whom Mohler quotes), who says: "If you let your child play this game, you're a bad parent." However, I'm interested in this question: In what ways is a video game with "blood," "intense violence," "partial nudity," "strong language," "strong sexual content," and "use of drugs and alcohol" different from a movie, novel, or play with these elements? Do we judge these forms of art and entertainment differently? Thoughts are welcome.