![]() ![]() And it quite clearly informed his own spiritual identity. This was just this religious melting pot that Muhammad grew up in and had access to. And most importantly, this was a city that was surrounded by a host of different religious groups, Jews and Christians and Zoroastrians from Iran, and a whole variety of various pagan groups. I mean, this was about the closest thing to an Arab cosmopolitan city that the ancient world had seen. REZA ASLAN (Author, "No god But God"): Well, the Mecca that Muhammad was born into was, at that time, the financial, cultural, social and religious capital of the Arabian Peninsula. Aslan argues that Muhammad's seventh-century teachings were actually closer to those modern ideas. The real struggle is between Islam and Islam, a rivalry between a rigid, dogmatic brand of Islam and one that embraces modern notions of pluralism and tolerance. The West, he writes, is merely a bystander, a complicit casualty. In his book, "No god But God," Reza Aslan offers an intriguing premise. Reza Aslan is a scholar of Islam who takes a different view. That's the theory that the world is engaged in a battle between the forces of fundamentalist Islam and secular democracy. Since the September 11 attacks, we've heard a lot of warnings about a clash of civilizations. ![]()
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