"Al-salamu alaykum!" That's the voicemail greeting you get when Scott Alexander is out of the office. Alexander, the director of the Catholic-Muslim Studies Program at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, speaks Arabic fluently. So don't be surprised if he throws an Arabic phrase or two into the conversation just to keep you on your toes.

 

But you may be surprised to learn that Jesus was a muslim—Moses, too. That's muslim with a small "m." To be a muslim simply means "one who submits to God." Are you a muslim, too?

How did you get involved in the stud of Islam?
I like to say the three most important influences in my life have been God, my wife, and Ayatollah Khomeini. My interest in Islam unfolded almost as soon as I got to college, because I started in the fall of 1979 and in November of that same year the hostages were taken in Iran.

How did that affect you?
People in the United States knew next to nothing about Islam or the Muslim world until the hostage crisis. So all of a sudden there was a rush to try to understand Islam, and as is so often the case in the initial phases of that rush, there was a lot of misunderstanding. Longstanding stereotypes made their way into the coverage in the attempt to explain what was happening in the world.

I was taking some courses in Islam, and I was very intrigued by the disconnect between what was in the texts I read for the course and what I saw in the media. In a plethora of crude sound bites, they tried to explain a revolution in one of the principal, most influential, and wealthiest nation-states in the Middle East as a result of the "Shiite Muslim mentality." If that isn't a racist explanation, I don't know what is. I was fascinated by this, and I eventually decided to go to graduate school and study Islam full time.

Do you think that since 1979, and especially since 9/11, we've come any further along in the under-standing of Islam?
Certainly. It's not that we have widespread literacy today, but the difference is that in 1979 we had no literacy. In 1979, few universities and colleges had positions in Islamic studies. By 2001, there was a significant increase, and we've seen another increase since 9/11. Still, we're nowhere near where we need to be. And in some ways I think the coverage of events since 9/11 has set us back a great deal.

What are some of the most important things that Catholics should know about Islam?
The five pillars of Islam are a good place to start. The first is the testimony of faith: "I testify there is no God but God" and "I testify that Muhammad is the messenger of God." It's the confession of a faith that has sometimes been described as "radical monotheism."

The uniqueness and oneness of the divine is unquestionably the linchpin of Muslim theology. And the confession that Muhammad is the messenger of God connects this theological statement to a distinct historical reality.

Can you back up and tell us who Muhammad was?
He was an Arabian merchant, born around 570 C.E. and orphaned pretty early in his life. He was troubled by some of the oppressive features of the society and culture in which he lived—like the fact that orphans, widows, and poor people didn't get the care and support they deserved—and he was also intrigued with the faith traditions of Christians and Jews, whom he undoubtedly met in the earlier parts of his life.

Then, according to the story, one day he had a profound experience in a cave on a small mountain outside of his hometown of Mecca. While he was fasting and praying in the cave, a figure appeared to him with an object that had writing on it. The figure said, "Iqra," that is, "recite" or "read." And Muhammad said, "I can't read." He was illiterate. But the being wouldn't take no for an answer. "Iqra," it said. And again, a third time, the being pressed this object against his breast such that he felt as if his very life would be squeezed out of him.

And then the words came through his heart; he didn't have to read them. He intuited them. "Recite in the name of your Lord who created, created the human being from a blood clot." And that was the first recitation, or qur'an.

Muhammad eventually understood his prophetic mission to be intimately bound to those who had been called by God in the past to communicate the divine message and will to humanity. They include people like Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, Solomon, Zechariah, John the Baptist, and Jesus—among many others whose names would be very familiar to Christians and Jews.

The theological and historical components of the testimony of faith have tremendous impact on how Muslims see themselves vis-à-vis Jews and Christians. Muslims see Moses to have been a muslim and Jesus to be a muslim.

Jesus was a muslim?
In the context of the Qur'an, the words muslim and islam are used in a generic sense as existential categories. They are not used in an institutional or historical or demographic sense. Muslim, translated into English, means "one who submits." Islam means "submission" to God. Certainly, Moses and Jesus submitted to God, and are therefore "muslims."

Muslims believe that everything that was authentic about the preaching and teaching of Moses and Jesus simply appears again in the final and clearest form in the preaching and teaching of Muham-mad. So therefore you have to have some honor and respect for Judaism and Christianity, but, at the end of the day—if you want authentic understanding of those two traditions—you read them through the lens of the Qur'an.

What are the other pillars?
The other pillars are ways of taking the first pillar—the confession of faith in the one God and in God's prophet—and figuring out a way to translate that into action and a structure for your life.

The second pillar is that you offer a very deeply embodied ritual prayer to God five times a day—at dawn, midday, afternoon, sunset, and night—ideally together with other Muslims. But you can do it by yourself, too, with the exception that if you are male you are required to attend congregational midday prayer on Friday.

The third pillar of Islam is almsgiving, and the fourth pillar is fasting.

So you'll notice we've got prayer, almsgiving, and fasting—which are also the three pillars of the Catholic Lenten observance.

And the fifth pillar?
The fifth pillar is the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca and its environs, which Muslims are enjoined to do at least once in their lives. The hajj can only be performed in the first 10 days of the last month of the Muslim year. The ritual involves going to the sacred mosque at Mecca, circumambulating the cubic structure called the Ka'ba, which is believed to be the one shrine erected to the worship of the one true God by Abra-ham and Ishmael. Whenever Muslims pray, they offer their prayer in the direction of the Ka'ba.

What is the difference between Sunni and Shiite?
The Shiite-Sunni difference originates with a very early dispute over who should lead the community after the death of Muhammad in 632 C.E.

Shiite comes from the Arabic word shi'a, which means "the party" and is short for "the party of Ali," Muhammad's cousin and son-in-law. They make up roughly 15 to 18 percent of Muslims worldwide. Sunnis are basically everyone who is not a Shiite. Sunni means the people who follow the ideal example of the prophet Muhammad. So, writ small, every Muslim is a sunni.

But Shiites believe that the ideal example is authentically preserved only through Ali and other key descendants. They maintain that Muhammad explicitly designated Ali to be his successor.

The most populous Shiite community—of Iraq and Iran—is the "Twelvers," the Ithna Ashariyya. They identify the historical existence of 12 Imams, who are regarded as the divinely inspired and infallible descendants of the prophet, the legitimate rulers of the Muslim community. The Twelvers identify these as starting with Ali and ending with a figure who as a young boy went into what's called occultation, or hiding, around the year 875.

Twelvers believe that the 12th Imam still exists in a state of occultation, guiding the community the way the sun illuminates the world from behind the clouds. He is a messianic figure who will return at an appointed time and place known to God alone and fill the world with justice and equity.

Could you define some of the other terms used to classify Muslims, like Salafi, Wahhabi, and Sufi?
Salafi means, "We practice the religion of the pious ancestors, the companions of the prophet." They're commonly called Wahhabis, after one of the leaders of an 18th-century movement who played a significant role in establishing the current Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. But most people who are called Wahhabi now prefer to be called Salafi. Osama bin Laden would consider himself Salafi.

Sufism refers to what one author has described as the mystical dimensions of Islamic belief and practice. It describes a number of different traditions of Muslim piety that are rooted in the premise that the basic requirements of being a Muslim, like the five pillars, are just the beginning of one's journey to God and not the sum total.

What is very confusing to many people is that these terms can overlap. For instance, Sufis can be either Sunni or Shiite. But Salafis would consider themselves Sunnis, not Shiite.

Also, like Christianity, Islam is very diverse. You have Muslims from Bosnia, sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, Palestine, Indonesia, and more, as well as African American Muslims. And all of them represent quite different manifestations of Islam according to their culture.