Five weeks to go to release of the agnostic manifesto!  Last week I posted the first couple of pages, so now here’s a taste of how the first chapter ends:

It’s time to get beyond either/or, yes-or-no answers, because while such a digital way of thinking may be excellent for computers, it is downright dangerous for human beings.  The grim joylessness of fundamentalism is testament to that.

I want to bring color the table — to explore the richly textured terrain in which we really live instead of the narrow black-and-white one in which preachers and pundits have tried to confine us….  And to approach this whole complex, often crazed subject of faith-belief-meaning-mystery-existence not as something to be ‘solved,’ but as an ongoing, open-ended adventure of the mind…

What impels me is a desire to rise above the plethora of things-taken-for-granted, to shrug off the multiple tyrannies of the definite article (the truth, the soul, the universe, the meaning of life), and to find more honest ways — both intellectual and emotional — to talk about such intangibles as God, infinity, and consciousness.

To those looking for certainty, such a stance will be nothing short of a nightmare.  It embraces both possibility and its correlate, uncertainty.  It suspects all absolutes, all simplifications… It takes delight in the play of ideas, and resists all attempts to shoehorn them into the narrow constraints of conviction.

No ‘answers’ here, then.  I make no claim to truth, let alone ‘the Truth,’ buttressed with that capital letter to give it a kind of unassailable grandeur.  There are already far too many people convinced that they possess such presumptuous truth, and I do not intend to add to their number.

Neither do I have any desire to preach, or to convert anyone to agnosticism.  In fact I’d take the ‘ism’ out of that word if I could, since the last thing needed is yet another pompously ‘complete’ system of thought demanding adherence to some sort of party line.

So while I offer this book as an agnostic manifesto, I recognize that it’s a strange kind of manifesto indeed — one that offers no certainties, and eschews brashly confident answers to grand existential questions.  And if this makes it a peculiarly paradoxical creature, that is exactly what it needs to be, because to be agnostic is to cherish both paradox and conundrum.  It is to acknowledge the unknowable and yet explore it at the same time — and to do so with zest, in a celebration not only of the life of the mind, but of life itself.

(I’ll be posting later in the week about the pre-order thing, and why I have the gall to keep asking you to do it.  Meanwhile… here!)

• What inspired you to write The First Muslim?Basically, frustration! I’d read several biographies of Muhammad as background for my previous book, After the Prophet, but though they seemed to tell me a lot about him, they left me with little real sense of the man himself. There was a certain dutiful aspect to them, and this made them kind of… soporific. Which seemed to me a terrible thing to do to such a remarkable life.

  There was a terrific story to be told here: the journey from neglected orphan to acclaimed leader—from marginalized outsider to the ultimate insider—made all the more dramatic by the tension between idealism and pragmatism, faith, and politics. I wanted to be able to see Muhammad as a complex, multidimensional human being, instead of the two-dimensional figure created by reverence on the one hand and prejudice on the other. I wanted the vibrancy and vitality of a real life lived.

  But of course I was also impelled by a certain dismay at how little most of us in the West know about Muhammad, especially when Islam is so often in the headlines and there are so many competing claims to “the truth about Islam.” This one man radically changed his world—indeed he’s still changing ours—so it seemed to me vitally important that we be able to get beyond stereotypes and see who he really was.

  What are some of the biggest misconceptions about Muhammad?

  Let’s take just the two most obvious stereotypes: the lecherous polygamist, and the sword-wielding warmonger. In fact Muhammad’s first marriage, to Khadija, was a loving, monogamous relationship that lasted 24 years, until her death. The nine late-life marriages were mainly diplomatic ones—means of sealing alliances, as was standard for any leader at the time. And it’s striking that while he had five children with Khadija—four daughters and a son who died in infancy—he had none with any of the late-life wives.

  As for the warmonger image, Muhammad maintained a downright Gandhian stance of passive, nonviolent resistance to both verbal and physical assaults for 12 years, until he was driven into exile from his home in Mecca. The psychology of exile thus played a large role in the armed conflict over the subsequent eight years, until Mecca finally accepted his leadership in a negotiated surrender, with strong emphasis on avoiding bloodshed.

  Is there anything you had to leave out?

  I know there’s a tendency to elide certain issues of Muhammad’s life, not least among them the rapid deterioration of his relations with the Jews of Medina, which was especially hard for me, as a Jew, to write about. But to evade such issues seems to me to demonstrate a certain lack of respect for your subject. A biographer’s task is surely to create as full a portrait as possible. If you truly respect your subject, you need to do him justice by according him the integrity of reality.

  What alternative title would you give the book?

  Perhaps “Seeing Muhammad Whole.” Or “A Man in Full.” But since Muhammad is told three times in the Qur’an to call himself the first Muslim, I knew early on that this would be the title.

  Did you have a specific audience in mind?

  It kind of hurts to think of intelligent, open-minded readers as a specific audience…

  Are you hoping to just inform readers? Give them pleasure? Piss them off?

  Far more than inform! The pleasure for me lies in the “aha!” of understanding, of grasping the richness of reality, with all its uncertainties and dilemmas. It’s in the practice of empathy—not sympathy, but empathy, which is the good-faith attempt to understand someone else’s experience. Those who nurture images of Muhammad as the epitome of either all evil or all good may well be disconcerted, but then that’s the point: empathy trumps stereotype any time.

  What’s the most important take-home message for readers?

  The First Muslim isn’t a “message” book. If anything, since I’m agnostic, you might call it an agnostic biography. But I think many readers may be surprised at Muhammad’s deep commitment to social justice, his radical protest against greed and corruption, and his impassioned engagement with the idea of unity, both human and divine—major factors that help explain the appeal of Islam.

  How do you feel about the cover?

  I loved it the minute I saw it. Riverhead brilliantly avoided all the usual obvious images—domes, minarets, crescent moons, camels, and so on—and opted instead for the understated elegance of this classic “knot” tile design.

  Is there a book out there you wish you’d written?

  On Muhammad? No, and that’s exactly why I wrote The First Muslim. The book I wish someone else had written didn’t exist—one that brought psychological and political context to the historical and religious record, and one I actually wanted to read instead of feeling that I should.

  What’s your next book?

  I’m thinking it’s time to explore exactly what I mean by being an agnostic, and how this informs my ongoing fascination with the vast and volatile arena in which religion and politics intersect.

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