Not Stopping Believing

I’m currently reading What’s Right with Islam: A New Vision for Muslims and the West, by Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the religious leader of a downtown Manhattan mosque, twelve blocks from the World Trade Center site. He was there for 9/11, and has spent much of his subsequent career trying to bridge the widening gap between Muslims and the rest of America.

So far it’s great, but right off the bat he hit me with the classic religious stumbling block: being way, way too literal.

This is a problem in many religions, but I think Islam has a particular weakness for it. You might say it’s kind of built into their premise. Consider the following footnotes to Imam Rauf’s text. Here’s footnote 4 from Chapter One:

An important note to the non-Muslim reader: when a Muslim says, “The Quran states,” it is taken to be equal to “God states” and is therefore part of a Muslim’s belief.

Imam Rauf is saying that according to Islam, the Quran is the Word of God. To not believe in what the Quran says is equivalent to not believing what God says. Great, I have no problem that at all. It’s good to have clear definitions. That is, until I hit footnote 7, also from Chapter One:

The jinn (from which the word genie comes) are beings created, according to the Quran, from smokeless fire, as humans are from clay and angels from light. They are capable of salvation or punishment like humans.

Uh oh. We just headed straight into a Harry Potter story. The author of this book is a Columbia-educated adult that believes in genies created from smokeless fire. And because of the previous Quran = God equation, if you don’t believe in genies, you think God is a liar. This does not bode well for the rest of his book.