Muhammad (PBUH) was born into this rich religio-cultural mix in the 7th century CE. Paul in his struggle against the inequities of the Roman Empire His narrative of the Prophet of Allah’s striving against the inequities of contemporary life in Mecca, for example, is parallel to that of St.
However, Christian communities in this era were deeply divided over theological issues. Jews were more integrated religiously and politically and had a strong nexus with non- Jewish Arabs because of their belief in common descent from Abraham (Jews through Isaac and Arabs through Ismail). He describes the pre-Islamic period as “jahiliyyah”, based on polytheism, and idol-worshiping. But as time passed its original message was lost by legalistic and sectarian institutionalization and later by the deep destruction of nineteenth-century colonialism which necessitated intellectual, philosophical, and other kinds of reforms, which were the only ways to bring it back to its original glory. The author states that the original message of Islam was one of individual moral accountability and social egalitarianism. This book extensively deals with the origin, evolution and future of Islam in all its beauty and complexity, by also analyzing how the important happenings of the last two decades have influenced Islam’s culture in modern life. The author Reza Aslan is an Iranian-American who left Iran after Imam Khomeini’s revolution and had settled in America.
I did so on finding some reviews of this book by some known detractors of Islam who too had glowingly praised the book because it had objectively answered with credible historical evidence some of the prickly objections raised by Western intellectuals. Some time back, on a suggestion of a friend of mine I did the daunting task of reading this voluminous book in close print and found it extremely interesting. This book has the distinction of earning universal acclaim from reviewers of the New York Time, Financial Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and Guardian etc. Reza Aslan’s No god but God published some years ago and revised and updated recently, has shaken the hostile sections of the western world from their deep prejudices against Islam, by giving them the correct insights into the true image and perspective of the Prophet of Islam, un-sullied by what the Clerics have made out of this great religion over the following centuries. To pull the West out of their ingrained prejudice against Islam was almost impossible, and all attempts made so far had miserably failed, with just one exception. After 9/11 and the rising wave of “Islamophobia” in the West, writing or reading about Islam is regarded as a taboo.
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