Free God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World by Stephen Prothero Page B

seeks to oppose. The greatest intellectual influence on al-Qaeda itself is likely the Egyptian theologian Sayyid Qutb (1906–66), who urged his followers to fight a holy war against secularism, democracy, and the West. Islamism’s heroes are so-called martyrs who, in violation of a clear Quranic prescription against suicide, blow themselves up for, among other things, promise of instant transport to Paradise. The villains are Israel and the “Great Satan,” the United States, but Islamists also denounce as evildoers (and apostates) fellow Muslims who interpret Islam in a more mainstream manner.
    Ultraconservative intellectual movements such as Salafism share much with Islamism but are distinguishable from and often antagonistic to it. Salafists seek to redirect their religious tradition back to the pure, primitive Islam of the earliest Muslims, who are known as salaf , or “pious predecessors.” Their sneer word is bidah , which means innovation.
    One form of Salafism, Saudi Arabia’s official theology of Wahhabism, spread globally in the early twenty-first century as Saudi money flowed into new mosques worldwide. Wahhabism is based on the strict teachings of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703–92), an eighteenth-century thinker who also opposed innovation but was obsessed with the problem of shirk. According to Ibn Abd al-Wahhab’s uncompromising theology, both Christianity and Judaism are shirk, as are Shi’ism and Islam’s mystical tradition of Sufism. Ibn Abd al-Wahhab opposed the Shia practice of visiting the graves of Muhammad and his companions. He even destroyed some of those sacred sites. Like Salafism, Wahhabism is often referred to as puritanical, because of its strict legal code, its desire to purify its religious tradition from various pollutants, and its goal of returning to the purity of the earliest form of the faith. Like New England Puritans, who did not celebrate Christmas, Wahhabis do not celebrate Muhammad’s birthday.
    Islamists have latched onto the notion that we are witnessing a clash of civilizations between Islam and the Christian West, but what their activities really demonstrate is an intra-Islamic culture war—a clash between Muslims who believe that the Islamic tradition means what it says when it comes to not killing women and children, and Muslims who do not.
    Progressive and Moderate Muslims
    At the other end of the political spectrum is Progressive Islam, a new movement particularly strong in Europe and the United States. Progressive Muslims are staunch opponents of Salafism, Wahhabism, and Islamism, but they also criticize colonialism and imperialism. “Their task,” writes Omid Safi, author of Progressive Muslims (2003), “is to give voice to the voiceless and power to the powerless.” 25 Pluralists to the core, Progressive Muslims welcome multiple voices not only from within Islam itself but also from other religious traditions. Although they base their thought and action on traditional Islamic sources such as the Quran and the Hadith, they also draw on Latin American liberation theology, the nonviolent resistance of Martin Luther King Jr., and the critique of Orientalism by the secular humanist Edward Said.
    Progressive Muslims believe that the struggle for justice lies at the heart of the Islamic tradition. They also believe that the better angels of Islam have always been on the side of the poor and the weak, and that their tradition’s ancient mandate to defend the defenseless compels them to struggle for gender equality and human rights. “At the heart of a progressive Muslim interpretation,” writes Safi, “is a simple yet radical idea: every human life, female or male, Muslim or non-Muslim, rich or poor, ‘northern’ or ‘southern,’ has exactly the same intrinsic worth.” 26
    One of the most controversial chapters in the short history of Progressive Islam came in New York City on March 18, 2005, when Amina Wadud, a professor of Islamic Studies at Virginia