The Great Rift

IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF THE PROPHET

Lessons From the Life of Muhammad

By Tariq Ramadan

Oxford Univ. 242 pp. $23

THE HEIRS OF MUHAMMAD

Islam's First Century and the Origins of the Sunni-Shia Split

By Barnaby Rogerson

Overlook. 415 pp. $27.95

Every debate about Islam these days, whether in Western tomes or on Arabic Web sites, seems to end up in Islam's early years. It has become accepted wisdom that Islam's experiences at its infancy -- the era when the Prophet Muhammad and his immediate successors forged the Islamic community -- will, more than any other factor, set the course that the religion takes. Even the latest struggles over power and turf between Sunnis and Shiites, in both Iraq and the wider Muslim world, hark back to sectarian debates that divided Islam at the outset, when the faith was split between those who believed the Islamic community should be led by the early caliphs and those who believed that the leadership should have flowed to the Prophet Muhammad's descendants.

For many Western observers, however, there is something disconcerting about the seeming atavism of the Muslim imagination. The rift between Islam's Sunni majority and Shiite minority conjures up a system of belief and practice that's shackled to 7th-century Arabia, doggedly resisting change and bucking moves toward secular modernism. If the West is to come to terms with the Muslim world, Westerners must learn to understand history's firm hold on Islamic piety and identity.

To this day, what defines a Muslim is less adherence to articles of faith than the proper performance of regular religious duties, and the standard here is the example set by Muhammad and the society he created. The newborn Muslim community was ruled over by the four Rashidun (rightly guided) caliphs: Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman and Ali, who ruled during the 30 years after the prophet's death in 632. That brief period has since been idealized as the golden age, a time when Islam's spiritual promise blossomed and its writ spread spectacularly across the Arabian peninsula and beyond. Today, Muslims facing modern challenges often seek to deal with them through intensified engagement with their own past.

For Muslims, the early years of Islam do more than provide a model for godly living. They also stand in magnificent contrast to the chaos and frustration that have beset Islamic life and thought in more recent centuries. While many Westerners see this nostalgia for Islam's glory days as fuel for Muslim stagnation, frustration and radicalism (as epitomized by Osama bin Laden), many Muslims see it as a source of spiritual succor and moral guidance.