Muhammad ibn ‘Abdullah
Rev. Matthew Johnson-Doyle
Sunday, February 28, 2010

Readings

Sura 96 from the Qur’an

(Rendered from a variety of translations by Matthew J-D)

Recite! In the name of your lord who created,
Created you from a blot clot.
Recite! Your lord is most generous
He teaches with the pen
Teaches what you did not know.
But yet, man is out of bounds
When he thinks he is needs no help.
Without doubt, the lord is the return.
Have you seen one who forbids
Others from praying?
Is he on the right path?
Is he righteous?
Have you seen one who turns away from the path?
Does not he know that God sees?
If he does not stop, we will take him by the forelock.
His lying and sinful forelock.
Then let him call for his friends!
We will call on the guards of hell.
Do not obey this one, but, instead, kneel and draw close to God.

Zero Circle by Rumi

Be helpless, dumbfounded
Unable to say yes or no.
Then a stretcher will come from grace
to gather us up.

We are too dull-eyed to see that beauty.
If we say we can, we're lying.
If we say No, we don't see it,
that No will behead us
And shut tight our window onto spirit.

So let us rather not be sure of anything,
Beside ourselves, and only that, so
Miraculous beings come running to help.
Crazed, lying in a zero circle, mute,
We shall be saying finally,
With tremendous eloquence, Lead us.
When we have totally surrendered to that beauty,
We shall be a mighty kindness.

Message: Muhammad ibn ‘Abdullah

Note: The sermon is an oral event. This manuscript may not reflect the exact spoken words. If you want to hear what was actually said, you can listen to sermon visit our website at www.uurockford.org. © Matthew Johnson-Doyle, 2010.

Muhammad Rasula. Rasula, the messenger.
The prophet.
There’s an old tradition about Muhammad;
a tradition about the 99 names:
messenger, prophet, witness, mild, friend, lamp,
and so on.
But, unlike Jesus Christ,
whose real name is Joshua Ben Joseph,
we don’t have to work so hard to figure out Muhammad’s real name.

He is name is Muhammad Ibn’ Abdullah.
His father was a man named Abdullah ibn Abdul Muttalib,
his mother Amina binte Wahab.
In Muhammad’s time,
naming worked the way it worked in much of the world.
A son was named with a given name,
then “son of”— which is ibn — and his father’s name.
A daughter, her own name,
“daughter of” and then her mother’s name.
You can figure out your own name this way:
mine would be Matthew ibn Michael.


Muhammad was a human being.
He was born this month, 1440 years ago.
His parents died when we was an infant,
he was raised and educated by his uncle,
who was a powerful local leader,
he took up a profession, married,
and was living a normal life.
He had a vision,
shared it with others,
became the leader of a religious community,
gathered supporters,
fought and one a few battles,
and then, at age 62, he died.
He was buried in the sand outside of Medina,
and if you are a Muslim,
you can visit that grave still today.

Muhammad was a human being.
He thought of himself as a messenger –
God’s word came through him.

It was important to him that he was seen as human,
that no one but God was God –
indeed, this is the central claim of Islam:
there is no God but God,
and Muhammad is not God.
Muhammad, in other words,
was a lower-case u unitarian
and he was a lower-case h humanist.

Of course, people like their gods.
They like to make idols and symbols.
And so a few centuries later,
people started thinking of Muhammad as a God.
But the leaders of the new faith
said, o no you don’t.
And they made a rule:
you could not make an image of Muhammad.
The point of the rule was not to revere Muhammad,
but to prevent his worship.
So, here today, we’ll follow that rule.
We’ll be respectful,
and remember that this is a human being.
Just like you and me.
And everybody else.

Enough with the preliminary:
how did a traveling salesman become the prophet?

The Arabs have always been traders.
On one side, Europe, on another, Africa, on the third, Asia.
They traded from one party to the other and collected the fees.
Muhammad would lead caravans from Mecca,
his hometown and the central town in the whole region,
up and down the red sea.
Being a caravan leader was not then
and is not now
just about delivering the goods, though:
you had to fight off caravan raiders
who would steal those goods.
And Muhammad,
like all others in his profession,
sometimes was a caravan raider.
This was not considered something wrong;
it was simply part of doing business.

Muhammad had learned trading from his uncle,
and was good at it,
and worked his way up the chain.
Eventually he found himself working for a widow who had inherited, and was being quite successful at running, the business.
Her name was Khadijah,
and she found him to be such a good employee
that she offered herself in marriage to him,
and he accepted.
They were married in 595,
when Muhammad was 25 and she was about 40.
Bet you didn’t know that.

Muhammad was one of those people we might call
“spiritual but not religious.”
He did not regularly pray
to any of the hundreds of local deities and demigods,
whose idols where kept in a large building at the center of town
called the Ka’ba.
People from all over Arabia
would come to Mecca each year
for a festival to honor all these gods.

The legend held that the Ka’ba had been built by Abraham himself, with his son Ishmael,
more than fifteen hundred years prior to Muhammad;
Jews and Christians were around in Mecca
and Muhammad knew them and of their religions.
He seemed interested in their ideas,
the unity of their devotions,
the notion of a book that laid down the world of their God.

As Muhammad grew older,
he began to take spiritual retreats.
He would leave the city
and travel up into the mountains around Mecca.
He’d find a good cave,
and just be alone for a few days.
Not that different from the spiritual retreats
taken by religious people everywhere.
In 610, when Muhammad was forty years old,
on one of those retreats,
he had a vision that has changed the course of the world.

Let me tell you that story, as Muslims believe it.

At night, with the moon,
the white moon which rose over us,
the crescent moon that became the symbol of the religion,
high in the sky,
an angel appeared before Muhammand and said, “recite.” Muhammand, of course, responded, “recite what?”
The angel,
who later identifies himself as Gabriel,
pushes down on Muhammad,
and shouts again, “recite!”
But Muhammad still does not know what he is supposed to recite,
so he asks one more time,
“recite what?”
And the angel tells him,

Recite, in the name of your lord who created,
Created man from a blood clot . . .

The first Sura, or recitation, of the Qur’an.
It is number ninty-six,
not number one,
because the Sura’s are in order of length,
not chronology.

But these are the first words that God,
through Gabriel, speaks to Muhammad.
Over the night, Muhammad,
who may or may not have been able to read himself,
memorizes these lines.
When returns home from his spiritual retreat,
he tells his wife, Khadijah, about this.
She believes him,
and becomes the first convert to Islam
and its early financial backer.

Over years, Muhammad will receive more portions of the Qur’an from Gabriel, and will begin to tell others about them.
The number of people in the movement grows.
For a long time, this is no problem.
There are lots of religions in Mecca,
lots of idols, what’s one more?
But Muhammad keeps getting verses that made it very clear:
the whole bit about
“do not follow the others but kneel before God”
was important.
The most important part, actually.

So Muhammad begins to tell people this,
to preach about it, to call out the other idols as false.
If his uncle, who had raised him,
had not been such a powerful local leader,
Muhammad probably would have been banished
or even killed
for such anti-social behavior.
But in his uncle,
he had safety,
and in his wife,
he had money.

The community grew,
and Muhammad grew more strident.
Some of his followers lacked protection,
and a few did die for their beliefs.
Others fled, mostly to what is today Ethiopia,
across the Red Sea.
Then Muhammad’s wife,
and then his uncle,
both died of old age.

Now the situation was quite desperate –
Muhammad, and his band of followers,
had no more protection from the authorities,
who found his message disruptive and dangerous.
To make matters worse,
Muhammad had another powerful vision,
what is called “The Night Journey.”
While sleeping,
he dreamed that a magical creature,
part horse and part camel,
but with wings,
took him from Mecca up to Jerusalem,
where they landed on a large rock.
From this Rock,
Muhammad ascended into heaven,
passing, on his way up the various levels, other prophets,
like Noah and Joseph and Jonah
and then Moses and Jesus and even Abraham and Adam,
to ascend to the throne room of God himself.
There he was told by God the rules his followers must obey,
including the five-times daily prayer
that is one of the distinctive practices of Islam.

The rock, by the way,
that Muhammad had landed on
was a rock on top of ruins of the temple of Solomon,
the ancient temple of the Jews.
When the Muslims took control of Jerusalem,
they built a large mosque over that rock.
We know it as the “Dome of the Rock”,
and it is the primary flashpoint
in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.
The rock is the third most holy site in Islam
after the Ka’ba in Mecca and Muhammad’s grave in Media.

Well after this vision,
the authorities in Mecca
simply could not tolerate Muhammad’s presence –
he was too disruptive.
They sent two killers to assassinate him,
but he fled in the night
and made his way to a small village north of Mecca,
a place to which is followers would come to join him,
and which eventually became known as Medina,
or “the place where the prophet lives.”

It is this event that starts the beginning of the Muslim era –
when they first established a community.
This event – when Muhammad lets his camel wander –
this is year zero for Islam.
Not Muhammad’s birth,
not his first vision.
It is when the community begins that you start the year.

To make the rest of a long story shorter,
that community grew in size and prestige.
The Meccan authorities decided to attack,
but Muhammad’s army met them in the desert
and defeated a force 10 times their size.
The victory convinced many that Muhammad was right about God, and God was on Muhammad’s side.
When, after eight years in Medina,
Muhammad mustered an army of ten thousand
and marched to Mecca in 630,
his old hometown surrendered.
Muhammed conquered without spilling a drop of blood
and the Muslims took control of Mecca,
and with it, the whole of Arabia.

Muhammad went to the Ka’ba,
home to so many idols,
and like Jesus and the moneychangers in Solomon’s Temble
six hundred years before,
Muhammad cleaned out the Ka’ba
and rededicated it for the worship of “The God,”
in Arabic, “Al-Lah”, or simply, Allah.

Muhammad’s followers stayed in Mecca,
but his home,
and his wives and children,
were in Medina, so he returned home,
and died two years later, in 632, at the age of 62.

That’s the life,
in a nutshell,
of this human being.
It is an interesting life,
and it helps us know more about the world we live
and the more than a billion folks who follow this prophet.


But what of spiritual value,
we might ask,
can we religious liberals,
who are not ourselves Muslims,
learn from this life,
from this human person?

Two things come to mind.

First, I think we can learn something important about community. Perhaps it is because it comes out of the desert –
Islam is the most communal of all the world’s religions.
Muhammad cares a great deal about community.
Think about that story about the camel.
He protect community, keeps folks together.

Religion, fundamentally, is a communal exercise.
Yes, people have their own individual journey’s.
But it is the gathering of people together,
despite their differences,
to worship, to celebrate and to mourn,
to hope and to conquer their fears,
it is this gathering that makes us religious creatures.

In community, we are supported when we need support
and challenged when we would grow complacent.
Muhammad was not a very strict community leader –
he built consensus,
he convinced others to change rather than demanding it.
He was wise in the ways of people
and knew that people had to embrace the new religion
in their heart,
and practice it together as a community,
for it have real power.

Liberal religion sometimes forgets this lesson.
We focus so much on each person’s journey,
each person’s truth,
that we loose the power of community
to help make us better people,
wiser souls,
and more powerful lovers of justice.
We could learn something about community from Muhammad.

Second, I think we can learn something
about surrendering to the mystery and to the mystical.

This is what all three of our case studies have in common:
a mystical experience.
Muhammad’s is in a cave,
Joshua’s is in the River Jordon,
and Siddhartha’s is under a bodi tree.
But they all experience transcendence,
a vision, a feeling of connection.
And this is not a completely pleasant experience.
Muhammad feels that Gabriel will crush him to death.
Because the vision means that from now on,
everything is different.
From now on, your life has more meaning.
From now on, you can’t just do as you were doing.
From now on, you know that there is something more
than the everyday drudgery of work-eat-sleep-play.
Something matters, and that something includes you.

My mystical experience –
it’s little strange for a religious rationalist like myself
to use such words, but they are the words –
my mystical experience happened in the summer of 1999,
at a worship service in the woods of Southwestern Washington.

We were signing,
and had put our hands on the backs of each other,
in concentric circles,
as part of a service of healing.
And I felt – and others there that night did too –
I felt the presence of a love that was larger than us gathered,
that was infinite and wondrous and life-giving.
And people felt more whole.
They felt healed in their soul.

Rumi, the Islamic Sufi poet,
says in our second reading:
“Be helpless, dumbfounded /
unable to say yes or no.”
The word Islam means “surrender”
and Muslim means “one who surrenders.”
Sometimes we try to categorize everything,
to control everything,
to place everything in a box.
We don’t want to be overwhelmed by our feelings,
feelings for other people,
for ourselves,
and for what is holy.

But if we respond to every transcendental experience this way,
then we won’t get healed,
we won’t get knocked out of our rut
and into something new and wonderful.

Be open to mystery –
it might put everything you know at risk,
but be open anyway.
Because it might put everything you know at risk.
It is through this openness that we might,
in Rumi’s words, become a “mighty kindness.”

I don’t need to tell you all that we live in challenging times.
And part of that challenge is the both real and perceived conflict, too often deadly conflict,
between the west and some Islamic traditions and nations.
And yes, Muhammad fought battles,
and he mustered an army.
But if we,
and by we I mean all of us here and there
and everywhere in between,
if we remember the other lessons,
to care about community and to be open to mystery,
and if we remember that Muhammad was a human being,
with hopes and dreams and fears
just like you and me and everyone else,
then we might make a choice to build a better world.
A world of peace for us all,
and for our children and for theirs.
We have a long way to go on that journey,
but I believe we can do it.
We must.

When Muslims speak the name of Muhammad ibn’ Abdullah,
they always say,
in Arabic, words that mean,
“may peace be upon him.”
The word for peace,
which also is the Arabic equivalent of Amen,
is Salam (so similar to the Hebrew Shalom).
Muhammad ibn’ Abdullah, may peace,
Salam, be upon him.

How about this:
when ever we speak the name of anyone –
a friend or an enemy, a stranger or a neighbor,
let us say,
or at least think,
“may peace be upon them.”
Let us make it our prayer and our practice.
Let us begin today.

Salam, Shalom, Amen, and Blessed Be.