29
Irfan Ahmad Khawaja (Pakistan)
I was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, in 1969 to Sunni Muslim parents who had come to the United States from Lahore, Pakistan, a few years earlier. My parents initially came to the United States intending merely to get their medical training here and go back, but circumstances conspired to keep them here, despite a few half-hearted attempts at return. They were (and are) certainly devout believers in Islam, but had had little religious education apart from the obligatory Islamiat required of students in Pakistan at the time. My mother is the more religious of the two, keeping most of the prayers and most of the fasts; she eventually performed umra (the lesser pilgrimage) in Mecca in 1996. My father is less overtly religious than my mother, and even toyed for a while with agnosticism, but is ultimately as devoted to Islam as she is. They were both great aficionados of the standard Islamic (or perhaps "Islamicate") prohibitions-against alcohol, pork, pre-marital sex, mingling of the sexes, intermarriage-and I'd go so far as to say that Islam's prohibitions constituted the core of its meaning for them.
I received my religious education from both my mother and my maternal grandmother. My grandmother played the role of "good cop" in this enterprise, filling my head at an early age with vivid stories of the lives of the prophets and the saints, along with apocalyptic tales of qiyamat (the day of judgment), jahannum (hell), and the grim fate of sinners (Firawn being her favorite example). My mother, in "bad cop" mode, managed to teach me Koranic Arabic as well as Urdu, also buying me some historical and religious books in English from the Islamic Center of New York. And so, every day the Arabic drill would commence, followed by Urdu drill, followed by recitation of kalimas,1 and (as a reward for all that) an hour or so of Islamiat in English.
After some initial irritation at having to spend valuable playtime on all this, I actually came to enjoy the routine. In fact, I became something of a religious fanatic. I certainly believed all of what I had been taught literally and to the letter from early childhood until my teenage years. From ages nine to twelve, I voluntarily devoted at least half an hour every day to reading the Koran; I must have read it dozens of times in both English and Arabic by age eighteen. I finished my first Arabic reading of the Koran at age nine, and ended up memorizing at least half of its thirtieth section (sipara) by age twelve. (I still remember a good part of it.) At age ten, I made an abortive attempt to prepare my own translation of the Koran from Urdu into English from an Arabic-Urdu version that was floating around the house. That effort unfortunately failed after the first few sentences, when I discovered to my dismay that neither my Arabic nor my Urdu were nearly good enough to get me very far-a problem exacerbated by the fact that, according to my father, any error of translation on my part would spell instant damnation for falsifying the word of God.
I doubt I ever managed to say all five daily prayers on a regular basis, but I do remember regularly saying three or four, usually skipping asr, the most inconvenient of the bunch, because it interfered with track practice. I often took my prayer rug to high school with me, spreading it out in a secluded area to say zuhr prayers, sometimes reciting maghrib prayers' to myself on the late bus home after track practice. I fasted with great joy (I hesitate to say "relish") every Ramadan from ages nine until eighteen, and I'm sure that if I'd had any money after spending it on AC/DC records, I would have sent it away as zakat (alms) to the Afghan or Palestinian mujahidin (holy warriors). By age fourteen, I was pestering my parents to take us on hajj, and I was deeply puzzled and angered by their refusal to do so on the rather un-Islamic grounds that "it was inconvenient and unsafe" (which, of course, it is). "Someday we'll go on umra," my father assured me, which struck me a bit like his saying, "Don't worry, God will forgive us for aiming at second-best."
My steadfast belief in Islam began to unravel in high school, starting with a few sporadic crises of faith around age twelve, and eventuating in the irrevocable rejection of Islam at age sixteen or seventeen. (I practiced the rituals for a year or two after I left the faith.) I was fortunate to be sent to an expensive prep school and was also fortunate to have gotten an excellent education there, not only through my teachers, but through a group of bright and intellectually active friends, most of whom are now academics, physicians, or attorneys. A group of us-some Jews, a few Christians, and a Buddhist-would get together at lunchtime or during breaks in the day to discuss religious and philosophical issues. Those lunchtime conversations, along with prolonged bouts of agonized and solitary thought, gave rise to the questions that led me from faith to reason and eventually to apostasy.
The crucial turning point came in the summer of 1985, when I read Maxime Rodinson's Muhammad and Muhammad Haykal's Life of Muhammad in sequence, along with Thomas Carlyle's famous essay on the greatness of Muhammad.; I had previously only been acquainted with what I'd read about Muhammad from the Koran, and what I had read about him in the children's hagiographies my mother had bought for me from the Islamic Center. Rodinson's biography, then, came as a terrifying shock-hardly ameliorated by Haykal's inept apologetics or Carlyle's effusions.
The picture of Muhammad that Rodinson painted was not a flattering or admirable one, and it naturally provoked a series of uncomfortable questions about Muhammad and Islam. Could Rodinson conceivably be right about Muhammad? Could Muhammad have been as mercenary and hedonistic an individual as Rodinson had depicted? Could he really have sanctioned outright military conquest, summary execution, concubinage, and polygamy? Perhaps (I wondered) Rodinson was wrong, motivated by the desire to shame and humiliate Muslims and smear the Prophet. He was, after all, an orientalist and (worse) a Marxist-hardly trustworthy. More charitably, perhaps he was just honestly mistaken. He was a Judaized atheist-and so could hardly be expected to understand the deeper mysteries of our faith. But still, why was his biography so much better than Haykal's? Why did Haykal sound like such a fool? Why was he so defensive? Why was he utterly unable to answer any of the standard orientalist arguments despite spending pages and pages on the effort? For that matter, why was even Carlyle so unconvincing in his praise of Muhammad? These questions led me to wonder what was supposed to have been so admirable about Muhammad in the first place. Three problems seemed insuperable.
The first set concerned Muhammad's attitude toward violence-a live issue in the mid-1980s, when each day brought fresh news of another terrorist atrocity committed in the name of Islam. Muhammad was by common acclaim a "military genius." But how was that admirable? He was, we were told, a political genius as well-but it wasn't clear why that was admirable either; he was supposed to be a prophet, not a politician. Worse, nothing in his politics resonated with the tenets of my specifically American convictions: the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, the Gettysburg Address. It was unclear how one could admire Muhammad's accomplishments while simultaneously admiring those of the American republic.
The second problem was anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism was a ubiquitous and shameful fact of life in the Pakistani-American community in which I'd grown up. (In fairness, the bigotry ran in both directions.) Because I had Jewish playmates, I found my elders' anti-Semitism deeply mortifying, but dismissed it as a deviation from Islam rather than an expression of it. Of course, there were those problematic passages in the Koran about the special wickedness of the Jews. Before I read Rodinson, those passages had been easy enough to ignore, but now the question haunted me like the return of the repressed: Why was there an undercurrent of anti-Jewish hostility in the Koran? The standard explanation was that the anti-Jewish verses, when "read in context," referred specifically to the "treachery" of the Jews of Medina. But what exactly had they done to merit that description? No adequate answer was forthcoming. More to the point, whatever the original "context" of the verses, why would an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent God have made them part of his revelation? Couldn't he have foreseen what anti-Semitism would become in the future-and foreseen that his own words would come to abet it?
Islamic anti-Semitism would come back to haunt me later in life. I'll never forget a trip to Pakistan a few years ago during which a young cousin informed me of his great admiration for Adolf Hitler. Nor can I forget the conversation I had with another group of Pakistani cousins who quoted the Koran to me as indubitable "evidence" of the diabolical evil of Judaism and the Jews. One of them, my cousin Khawaja Saad Rafiq, went on to become special assistant to Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in the late 1990s, and remains a prominent figure in the so-called Nawaz faction of the Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N). Apart from its penchant for corruption, the PML-N is notorious for its open support for the Taliban, for Kashmiri terrorism, and for its an on-again, off-again relationship with the fundamentalist Jamaat Islami. To add insult to injury, most of my immediate family has explicitly disavowed the legitimacy of my relationship with a Jewish woman-and disowned me as well. The legacy of the "treacherous Jews of Medina" dies hard.
Last but not least, there were the protofeminist problems. Why was the Koran obviously addressed to men rather than women? If God is genderless, why is he described in obviously androcentric terms? If God is just, why does he so obviously demote the status of women in his book? Actually, the question that had most perplexed me since the birth of my brother in 1975 was a rather specific one: Why did God make childbirth so painful and arduous? The question arose naturally from my mother's harping on the theme to make us feel guilty for our various transgressions against parental discipline. Little did she know where the harping would lead, and how unsatisfied I would be with the lame answer that women must suffer for Eve's sinful disobedience to God.
The questions kept piling up without end-and were not exactly mollified by the Koran's mind-negating announcement in Surah Al Baqara that "this is a book whereof there can be no doubt." As it turned out, there was more to doubt in the book than to believe. And before long, I was gripped by the thought that perhaps I had been duped into believing something that was not merely false, but so utterly irrational that the real question was not why I had come to have doubts about it, but why I had persisted so long in believing it. And yet I resolved to believe in it anyway, assuming that my mind had been polluted by Western culture and my own deficiencies of character, and that a just God would show me the route back to belief if only I used my mind properly and purged myself of sin. "God helps those who help themselves," I thought. And so I resolved to help myself.
The obvious way to do so was to go on a pilgrimage-and the obvious place to go was the public library. Searching the card catalog, and jotting down the names of prominent people who were writing about Islam in prominent publications (the New York Times, the New Republic, the Nation, New York Review of Books, etc.), I resolved to read Edward Said's Orientalism,4 followed by the works of the arch-orientalist Bernard Lewis. Surely if the problem was that my mind had been polluted by Western culture, Said would help me see how that had happened, and Lewis's writings would acquaint me with the ways of the enemy.
I didn't understand all of Said's book at that age (seventeen), but I understood enough of it to see how useless it was for the enterprise I had in mind. It was true that Said scored a few polemical points against some of his opponents. But he said nothing at all in Orientalism or elsewhere (e.g., in his later book, Covering Islam') to vindicate Islam from the obvious charges against it-charges that any thinking Muslim would have to acknowledge and take seriously. In fact, his work was an impediment to clear thought about Islam; it contained all the rationalizations one would need to retain one's prejudices about its benign role in the modern world. Said's modus operandi was as simple as it was predictable: He began by denying on nominalist and historicist grounds that there was any such thing as "Islam"; he then denied that "it" could possibly give comfort to terrorism, theocracy, anti-Semitism, or misogyny because after all, "it" didn't exist; he then let loose with a torrent of ad hominem abuse against anyone who had a dissenting view (especially Lewis, whom he consistently defames); and finally, he would switch grounds in the middle of the argument to insist that all of the bad things that ostensibly proceeded from Islam were really "distortions" of "it." (A classic example of every one of these moves is his recent essay "The Clash of Ignorance," in the Nation.) This seemed to me to be an incoherent and disingenuous mode of argument, even when I was still a believing Muslim earnestly looking for a way to vindicate Islam in the face of Western criticism; my assessment of argument and author have not improved in the years since.
Contrary to my initial expectations, I found Bernard Lewis to be a much better guide to Islam than Said. Lewis was, above all, a clearer and more straightforward writer than Said, that it was always easier to filter out his prejudices and extract what was useful and informative in his prose. Amusingly, I matriculated at Princeton in 1987 with the intention of studying with Lewis, not realizing that as an "emeritus" professor-not an "eminent" one-he had long since retired! The dismaying truth was revealed to me on my first day at Princeton by a Turkish graduate student I met in the Near East Studies section of the library. After letting the cat out of the bag about Lewis's retirement, she told me not to fret too much at my mistake, since the fundamental mistake was to have wanted to study with Lewis in the first place.
By the end of the summer of 1985, my commitment to Islam had wavered, but not my commitment to theism. Surely it was possible, I thought, to reject Islam but believe in God? By year's end, that possibility had evaporated as well. I remember the circumstances exactly: It was on a plane ride back from Pakistan in January 1986, just a few days after visiting the Shah Faisal Masjid in Islamabad. The mosque, I believe, had just been built, and my proud Pakistani relatives were showing it off to me to inspire in me a deeper love of Islam and of Pakistan. For some reason, however, the tour had exactly the opposite effect: not only did the mosque not inspire me, but managed (in its similarity to the Kennedy Space Center sans rockets) to depress and alienate me. Saddened both by my reaction to the mosque and my alienation from those who took such pride in it, I settled down on the plane home to read the most depressing book I had at my disposal, namely William Barrett's Irrational Man.7 In retrospect, the book strikes me as a fairly unconvincing piece of philosophy, but at the time, it had the genuine merit of keeping my mind focused directly on the issue of God's existence. With the book in hand, and the issue directly in mind, I decided for the first time in my life to confront the issue of God's existence in an honest, sustained, and objective way, suspending belief in him or against him, and simply resolving to go wherever my mind took me on the subject. By the end of a long and sleepless plane ride, I was more or less an atheist.
I can't quite reproduce the exact reasons by which I came to atheism all those years ago-I don't remember them, and I'm sure they were quite crude. But the basic reasons for rejecting theism remain the same for me now as then.
For one thing, it quickly became clear to me that God's attributes make no sense. Consider omnipotence. If God is omnipotent, he's capable of doing anything. But that proposition leads to obvious paradoxes-as cliched as they are unanswerable. Can he make a rock that even he can't lift? Can he create something out of nothing? Can he make water water freeze at its boiling point? Can He make water molecules from a ratio of eighty-five hydrogen ions to thirteen hydroxide ions? Can he repeal the Law of Noncontradiction? To answer "yes" to any of these questions is to utter what is senseless. To answer "no" is to concede that the structure of the world puts limits on God's power. In neither case is omnipotence possible.
Nor does omniscience fare much better. If God is omniscient, he can foretell the future. But if he can foretell the future, the future must exist in a determinate way. If so, the future is already written, and we lack free will. But if we lack free will, we lack responsibility, and God contradicts himself when he holds us morally responsible for our actions by judging, rewarding, and punishing us. Since an omniscient being cannot be guilty of self-contradiction, this option seems impossible. On the other hand, if we have free will, God can't predict the future with certainty. Lacking a certain knowledge of the future, it follows that he lacks omniscience. Whether we have free will or not, then, omniscience fails.
Omnibenevolence fails even more miserably than the other two attributes. If God created the world, he is ultimately responsible for everything in it. Being omnibenevolent, he must be just, and being just, he must order the world so as to conforms to his own (Islamic) principle of justice-that every atom's weight of good is rewarded, and every atom's weight of evil is punished. And yet it is obvious that good goes unrewarded, and evil goes unpunished throughout history and throughout the world, thereby flagrantly contravening God's own principles in front of his face, indeed with his apparent sanction and, indirectly, by his own actions. Lacking any excuses of ignorance or incapacity, God merely watches mutely as justice is trampled and both injustice and misfortune take their toll. Since no agent of goodness can be indifferent to injustice and misfortune for which he is ultimately responsible, God cannot be omnibenevolent. In fact, He seems quite the reverse.
As a child, I had believed in God's existence on the strength of what has come to be called the kalam cosmological argument, which asserts that God's existence is necessary as the first cause of the universe. The argument says, in effect, that since time and causation cannot go backward infinitely, they must both have had a beginning-and that beginning is God. (I formulated a crude version of the argument for myself at age ten.) It's instructive to note that this impressive monument to Islamic philosophy has recently been developed in a sophisticated form by a non-Muslim philosopher (William Lane Craig); I have yet to encounter an ordinary Muslim who has heard of it, much less one who knows of its Islamic provenance.
Fascinating as it is, however, the kalam argument is unsound. For one thing, though there is a good justification for applying the concept of "cause" within the universe, there is no comparable justification for applying it to the universe as a whole. Second, the argument depends on the supposed impossibility of an infinite regress of times and causes, but I don't think its proponents have successfully established that such a regress is impossible. Finally, even if there was a beginning of time, there is no good reason to believe that that beginning is a deity worthy of worship, much less that it has the divine attributes of omnipotence, omniscience, or omnibenevolence. So the argument fails.
I had also believed in God because I was painfully aware of the fact that in this world, vice was too often rewarded, and virtue too often unrewarded. So I held out hope for another world in which the moral balances would finally be evened out. As the Koran says of the hereafter, "Whoever does an atom's weight of good shall see it, and whoever does an atom's weight of evil shall see it" (XCIX.7-8). It seemed inconceivable to me that the relationship between virtue and reward, and vice and punishment, could somehow rest on mere chance. And so, I reasoned, there must be a God to make everything work out in the end.
This was the most damaging and lasting falsehood I acquired from Islam. For one thing, the argument encourages passivity and resignation to misfortune and injustice on the grounds that "God will make everything work out." Worse still, the argument subordinates reason to hope in an insidious way, giving one a moral stake in the idea that fervent (and moralistic) wishes can override reality. Above all, it demotes the value of the world we actually live in, exaggerating the role of chance, depreciating the role of choice, and then maintaining the pretense that all chance contingencies can somehow be abolished in another, superior, chanceless realm. This was the hardest set of falsehoods to leave behind; its rejection brought the hardest set of truths to accept.
The falsehood of the view was most fully driven home to me while visiting Ground Zero a few months after the September 11 attacks. It was not until I saw the twisted remnants of the towers that I fully realized that nothing could compensate for the injustice and horror of what was lost that day-not even an identical and eternal replica of the World Trade Center in another realm and the resurrection of all the souls lost in it. Even if God were to create a replica of the place and bring all of its victims back to life, the brutal fact remains that the real World Trade Center was not a replica of anything, but a specific place in space and time, and loved precisely for its specificity. More to the point, the people who died there were specific individuals who were destroyed in a particularly awful and painful way. Nothing can ever undo the rupture in moral reality caused by their deaths; Nothing in the future can undo their suffering, or erase the evil that came into the world with the act. The only way to "replace" the buildings or "compensate" for the personal loss would be to undo what happened at 8:46 A.M. on September 11, 2001, so that the event never took place at all. And not even God in all of his supposed power claims that ability; possessing it would be an absurdity of its own.
In this light, I have been depressed not only by the Muslim reaction to September 11, but by the intellectually feeble reactions to it of Christians and Jews, who have managed to a fabricate a plethora of excuses for God despite his obvious absence that day at the crucial hour. Where, I feel like asking such people, was God on the morning of September l l? Did he not know what was on Muhammad Atta's mind? Were the airplanes too fast for him to intercept? Was his radar not on? Was he not nimble enough to catch the people jumping out of windows`? Couldn't so "compassionate and merciful" a deity at least have given the firefighters some advance warning that the towers were going to collapse-or did even the good Lord have trouble that day with his Verizon Wireless service?
I don't think there are any other plausible arguments for God's existence, and since there aren't, and the plausible ones fail, I inferred (and infer) that God doesn't exist. What exists is just nature-and our place in it. I eventually found the guidance I was looking for from Islam in so-called Western philosophy, and especially in the works of Aristotle, John Locke, Benedict Spinoza, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Ayn Rand. It was Rand, in particular, who put things together for me into a coherent and integrated framework; Leonard Peikoff's Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand,' is perhaps the best single-volume introduction to her thought.
Having rejected Islam, however, I don't bear any fundamental animosity toward it as such. My memories of life as a Muslim are mostly fond ones, and I learned many positive things from Islam. The Koran is neither inimitable, nor indubitable, nor consistent; nor is it the word of God. But it is a great work of literature, on par with Homer, Virgil, Milton, or Goethe, and I still read it from time to time in that spirit. Muhammad was not the Prophet of God, and is no moral hero. But he certainly was an important and in some ways admirable historical figure on par with Alexander or Napoleon, and should be ranked among them. The Muslim rituals are not exactly rational in their current form, much less commandments from God. But I have found some of them beneficial, at least in a secularized form. There is something to be said for the idea behind salat-of stopping in one's daily routine during the day to purify one's consciousness and reconnect with the world. So, in moderation, is there something to be said for the benefits of sawm (fasting) and zakat (charity); I try to practice both. Even jihad refers to certain spiritual, psychological, and political realities: Much of life is struggle against oneself and one's adversaries, and we need a word to capture this fact. Finally, while I don't think Islam deserves the credit for the achievements of the "Islamicate" world, I do cherish certain accomplishments of that world and wish they were more widely known. There is great value in the poetry of Rumi, Ghalib, and Iqbal, in the qawwalis of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, and the ghazals of Tahira Syed, in the novels of Neguib Mahfouz, and the architecture of the Alhambra, Cairo, Istanbul, Lahore, Delhi, and Agra. I've even come to make my peace with the Shah Faisal Masjid in Islamabad; on a clear day, its luminous white marble makes a striking contrast against the verdant green of the Himalayan foothills.
It is hard not to feel animosity, however, for what Islam has become in the last hundred years-and for what Muslims and their apologists have become in the process. The events and aftermath of September 11 are perhaps the most poignant reminder of this fact. Though I don't think that September I I can be blamed on Islam as such, it certainly can be blamed on a certain form of Islam, and "a certain form of Islam" obviously bears some determinate relation to Islam itself. Even a perversion of Islam is, after all, a perversion of Islam, and given this, Muslims bear a special responsibility not only to repudiate the perversion, but to seek out its adherents within their midst and deal accordingly with them. At a minimum, that means refusing to make excuses for them; optimally, it calls for ruthless and unstinting criticism, and support for legal measures against them consistent with due process. (It should go without saying that I do not mean to be endorsing vigilante violence, or the spreading of false rumors, or anything of the sort.)
Suffice it to say that with a few rare and noble exceptions-I think of Fareed Zakariya (Newsweek), Fouad Ajami (U.S. News & World Report), Salman Rushdie, Neguib Mahfouz, Kanan Makiya, Irfan Husain (of the Pakistani newspaper Dawn), Wahiduddin Khan (the Indian Muslim thinker)-Muslims have been exceedingly slow to face reality and act accordingly. The Muslim communities of North America and the U.K. are perhaps the most remiss in this regard, consisting as they do of people who ought to know better but evidently don't. In my experience, the Muslim-American community is a hotbed of anti-Semitism, misogyny, chauvinism, and explicit apologetics for theocracy and terrorism. In Britain and Canada, I suspect, things are even worse than they are here. Despite this, you will rarely find prominent Muslim intellectuals-what to speak of such blatant fifth columnists as Shamim Siddiqi, Siraj Wahaj, or Hamza Yousaf- engaging in anything like the sustained, unremitting critique that Muslim-Americans or the broader Islamic ummah richly deserves.
The question I would want to pose to any thinking Muslim is this. Let's put aside my admittedly kafir objections to the existence of God, and focus on a specifically Islamic question, a question that any Muslim must face even from a strictly Islamic perspective. This is the question of Muhammad lqbal's epic poem Shikva and Javab-i-Shikva (Complaint and Answer to the Complaint), written 1909-1913. Why is it, Iqbal asks, that
Islam was supposed to be a faith that guided and rewarded its followers in this world and the hereafter: fi'dunia w'al akhira. But it seems obvious that it has failed in this world: the Muslim world from Indonesia to the Maghrib is a veritable disaster area. It is easy, then, to agree with Igbal's complaint but difficult to take seriously the answer to it that he puts in God's mouth: kuch bi paygham-i-Muhammad kay thujhay pas nahin! ("Of Muhammad's message, nothing is left among you!") I can't help wondering what wisdom the Prophet Muhammad could have imparted to contemporary Muslims that would give them their rights and freedom, jumpstart their bankrupt economies, and give them the capacity to deal justly and reasonably with themselves and others. I don't pretend to know the answer, but then again, as a non-Muslim, it's not my responsibility to know. What I do know is that the answer is not to be found in the writings of Sayyid Qutb, Abul Ala Mawdudi, Ruhollah Khomeini, Ali Shariati, or even Muhammad Iqbal. What I also know is that by and large, Muslims have defaulted on the task of looking for it. Whether the relevant answer can be found, I leave an open question.
For much of my adult life, I've endured the criticisms and pleas of Muslims who, deprecating my atheism, have made the impertinent demand that I return to the Islamic fold and redeem myself before their ummah. (It could be worse: There are those who believe that apostasy like mine is grounds for assassination.) Be that as it may, I now have a demand of my own that ought to become the demand of every non-Muslim: Is it too much to ask of Muslims that they return to the human fold? Humanity has endured enough at the hands of Muslims, and enough in the name of Islam. Even as an atheist, I'm willing to concede that there are better and worse forms of Islam, and that there is something inspiring and noble about the better aspects of its better forms. Surely even Islam deserves better than the indignities that contemporary Muslims have inflicted on it, and contemporary Muslims deserve better than what Islam has now become. The question is: Do we have to wait until yawm al qiyamat (the day of resurrection) before they manage to get things right?
NOTES
1. The Creed of the Muslim: "There is no Deity but God; Muhammad is the Apostle of God."
2. Zuhr prayers: When the sun has begun to decline; maghrib prayers: a few mimnutes after sunset; asr prayers: midway between zuhr and maghrib.
3. Maxime Rodinson, Muhammad (New York: Pantheon, 1971); Muhammad Haykal, Life of Muhammad (Delhi: Islamic Book Service, 1995); Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus: On Heroes and Hero Worship (London: Everyman's Library, 1971).
4. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1979).
5. Edward Said, Covering Islam (New York: Vintage, 1997).
6. Bernard Lewis, "The Clash of Ignorance," Nation, October 22, 2001.
7. William Barrett, Irrational Man (New York: Anchor, 1962).
8. Leonard Peikoff, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (New York: Dutton, 1991).