Donner notes that a small number of Quranic passages speak of believers from among the People of the Book, i.e., Jews and/or Christians. Thus sura 3:199, one of the two examples given, says that “There are among the People of the Book those who believe in God and what he has sent down to you and was sent down to them.” Since the Quran as a whole is addressed to believers, this suggests to him that Muhammad’s followers did not form a separate confessional community, but rather included monotheists from any community who believed in God and the last day and were prepared to live piously. He also notes that Abraham is singled out as neither a Jew nor a Christian; that Jews are mentioned, in a document Muhammad drew up in Medina, as forming a community of or along with believers; and that every monotheist could agree to the first part of the Muslim profession of faith, “there is no God but God”: It is this phrase alone that appears on coins, papyri, and inscriptions down to about 685. Donner believes fear of imminent judgment drew the believers together, and by the end of Muhammad’s life they had turned militant in their desire to establish the kingdom of God on earth. Even so, the “violent conquest” model does not make sociological sense in Donner’s view, and there is little sign of destruction in the archaeological record. All monotheists will have found a place in the new community, without needing to convert, he suggests. It was not until the reign of Abd al-Malik (685-705) that Islam began to emerge as a separate confessional community of its own.

Donner’s book has already been hailed in a manner showing that its thesis appeals deeply to American liberals: Here they find the nice, tolerant, and open Islam that they hanker for. If the book attains a wide readership and succeeds in persuading the broad American public that Muslims are not the ogres they tend to imagine, it will have done a useful job. As a contribution to scholarship, however, it leaves something to be desired.

The main problem is that the only direct evidence for Donner’s central thesis is the Quranic verses on the believing People of the Book; all the rest is conjecture. The verses in question tell us nothing about events after the death of the Prophet, and it has to be said that the Medinese suras of which they form a part are not suggestive of ecumenicalism. They are full of bitterly hostile polemics against Jews and Christians, both of whom are charged with polytheism, deification of their own leaders, deification of themselves, and more besides. The Jews are faulted for rejecting Jesus, the Christians for deifying him. If there were believers among the People of the Book in Medina, an obvious explanation would be that they were Jewish Christians, a well-known hypothesis that Donner does not consider. The Jacobite, Nestorian, and Melkite Christians that the Muslims encountered in Syria, Egypt, and Iraq were unquestionably polytheists by Quranic standards, and with all due respect to Donner, the fact that they disagreed about Christology does not help, given that their disputes were premised on Christ’s divinity.

Donner is quite right that the first part of the Muslim confession of faith would have been acceptable to all monotheists. “It is not unreasonable to propose, then, that many Christians and Jews of Syria, Iraq, and other areas, as monotheists, could have found a place in the expanding community of Believers,” he writes. Maybe they could have, but did they? People do not usually get together merely because their slogans sound compatible. Was the Muslim confession of faith actually formulated to appeal to the Jews and Christians? Sebeos, writing not long after the 660s, did not think so. According to him, Mu’awiya sent a letter to the Byzantine ruler Constans (641-68) telling him to “abandon that vain cult which you learned from childhood. Deny that Jesus and turn to the great God whom I worship, the God of our father Abraham.” Sebeos was obviously not aware that Islam was an ecumenical movement: From what he had heard, the Muslims regarded worship of the one God as incompatible with belief in the Christian Jesus. Donner nonetheless holds that Sebeos, Isho’yahb (c. 647), and Bar Penkaye (c. 690) all offer evidence that “some Christians and Jews may have been fully integrated, as such, into the early community of Believers.” His evidence is that Sebeos identifies the first governor appointed by the Muslims to Jerusalem as a Jew, that Isho’yahb tells us that the Muslim conquerors of Iraq honored Christianity and gave gifts to monasteries and churches, and that Bar Penkaye says that there were not a few Christians among the Arab conquerors of Iraq. But evidence for warm attitudes and collaborators is not evidence for full integration without conversion.

The Christian secretaries that Donner also adduces are not evidence either, since they were a permanent feature of the medieval Muslim world, and besides the Muslims also used Zoroastrian secretaries, though they were well aware that Zoroastrians were not monotheists. Isho’yahb, moreover, says of the Christians of Oman that they only had to part with half their property in order to remain Christians, while Bar Penkaye says that “of each person they required only tribute, allowing him to remain in whatever faith he wished.” In other words, both sources confirm the conventional view that non-Muslims had to pay taxes in order to retain their faith. Indeed, Donner himself later speaks of cities peacefully absorbed in exchange for a tax. If it was by incorporating monotheist communities as tributaries into their domains that the Believers worked toward their goal of establishing the hegemony of God’s law, Donner’s seemingly revisionist view is simply the conventional one. On the other hand, if he means that some Jews and Christians became full members of the community in the sense of not having to pay the taxes imposed on “protected people,” he has not produced any evidence.

How are we to envisage Christians and Jews “fully integrated, as such, into the early community of Believers”? The Believers, according to Donner, were all those who accepted belief in God and the last day, and who were prepared to live piously; and pious living meant following Quranic law: engaging in regular prayer, paying alms, fasting during the daytime hours of Ramadan, and going on pilgrimage to Mecca. But how could a community endowed with its own law and pilgrimage center be lacking in confessional identity? And how could Christians and Jews who followed Quranic law remain Jews and Christians? Donner has no answer to the first question and two contradictory answers, both implicit, to the second. The first implicit answer is that Jews and Christians who joined the movement did not actually have to follow Quranic law: The ecumenical quality of the Believers’ movement allowed it “to accommodate within itself, in addition to those Arabians who followed Qur’anic law, many Jews and especially (it seems) Christians who shared a commitment to righteous living.” One takes it that Arabians followed Quranic law while Jews and Christians practiced righteous living in other ways, presumably by following their own law. In line with this, Donner says that the terms “Muslim” and “Believer” eventually came to mean those who lived by Quranic law as opposed to Jews and Christians: Previously, one infers, the terms had included both those who practiced Quranic law and those who lived piously without doing so. But if Jews and Christians did not follow Quranic law, in what sense were they fully integrated as members of the community of Believers? Are we to imagine a community in which salvation was possible by three different laws (and indeed three different theologies)? The conception may not be impossible, but it is not exactly effortless either, least of all in a situation in which one party has established its supremacy over the other two by conquest.

The other implicit solution is that all the Believers did follow identical laws, just not Quranic ones, or this at least is what the Arabian Believers and the Christians did in connection with prayer. The early tradition describes a qibla musharriqa, an east-facing prayer-orientation, Donner says, suggesting that we may have here the memory of a stage when the Muslims faced eastward in prayer like the Christians. Indeed, he adds, the “vague” reports of how Muhammad himself changed the direction of prayer to Mecca should perhaps be seen as a retouched, vestigial memory of the later change whereby the Muslims began to differentiate themselves from their erstwhile Christian co-believers. This can hardly be right, given that it is the Jewish prayer-orientation to Jerusalem, not the Christian orientation to the east, that Muhammad is said to have abandoned in favor of Mecca. But even if we let that pass, what are we to do with the Jews who prayed in a different direction from the other two? And quite apart from that, if Muhammad did not himself institute the qibla to Mecca, how can the pilgrimage prescribed in the Quran have been to Mecca? Nothing quite seems to fit. If all Donner wants to say is that the Muslim conquerors were happy to extend favors to Jewish and Christian collaborators, he is perfectly right, but this is neither new nor connected with monotheism, since they were happy to collaborate with Zoroastrians too.

Is he really being revisionist or just perfectly conventional? One is never quite sure. The claim that the “violent conquest” model should be discarded is ultra-revisionist: It goes against the testimony of both contemporary sources (as Donner acknowledges) and the later tradition, about which he himself has written a well-known book. Now he speaks of the “conquerors” and “conquered” people in quotation marks. But at the same time he still grants that there were campaigns and battles; he even gives us a summary based on his 1981 book, The Early Islamic Conquests. He also admits that there was some pillaging and taking of captives, though (once more going against the contemporary sources) he does his best to belittle both activities. But if you occupy a country by means of battles, in what sense have you not engaged in “violent conquest”? The expression is surely a tautology. What Donner turns out to mean is simply the well-known fact that the Muslims did not engage in systematic destruction of towns, churches, and other religious buildings, and that they were not out to impose their religion by force. The “violent conquest” model is wrong, he tells us, because it is predicated on the mistaken notion that the “conquerors” (his quotation marks) came with the intention of imposing a new religion by force on local populations. How seriously is one meant to take this? No scholar believes that the Muslim conquerors were out to impose their religion by force; even going back a century or more I cannot think of any who has espoused this view. Yet all scholars apart from Donner and (in a different vein) Yehuda D. Nevo and Judith Koren accept that the Muslims engaged in “violent conquest.” Laymen may still need to be reminded that the Muslims were not out to impose their beliefs by force, but to present lay misconceptions as the basis of a scholarly consensus is not playing it straight.

If all Donner means to affirm is that the Muslim conquests were relatively swift and surgical operations that left urban life, religious communities, and complex organization intact, then he is simply affirming the conventional view. But what has that got to do with ecumenicalism? The Muslims did not engage in systematic destruction of towns or religious buildings, regardless of whether they were monotheist, Zoroastrian, or (in Harran) pagan. Later he tones down the revisionist claim to the innocuous point that the sources’ emphasis on the military dimension of the expansion has obscured its nature as a monotheistic reform movement that many local communities “may have seen little reason to oppose.” At another point he seems implicitly to abandon his thesis, for he tells us that the early Kharijites “represented the survival in its purest form of the original pietistic impetus of the Believers’ movement.” Are we to see the Kharijites as the bearers of ecumenicalism, then? In the contemporary Middle East, militant fundamentalists are often dubbed “Kharijites,” with considerable justice. But it is hard to get one’s mind around Osama bin Laden or Abu Musab al-Zarqawi as representatives of ecumenicalism.

Donner says so many strange things in this book that one wonders what is going on. In the preface he tells us that in his view Islam began as a religious movement, not as a social, economic, or “national” one, and affirms that all his predecessors from Hubert Grimme (1892) until today, including Montgomery Watt, myself, and my classicist colleague Glen Bowersock, have argued that the movement was “really” a kind of nationalist or nativist political adventure to which religion was secondary and, by implication, a mere pretext for the real objectives. This is bizarre. Is Donner really saying that a movement has to be either religious or political, economic or social? Does he really think that Osama bin Laden and his like are using Islam as a mere pretext, or alternatively that we are all mistaken in seeing their aim as political? Was religion mere eyewash when Moses used it to organize a revolt in Egypt? Was Vittorio Lanternari implying the same when he wrote his book on nativism in the Americas, India, Africa, and Asia under the title The Religions of the Oppressed? Surely Donner has lived long enough to know that religion can articulate concerns of any kind and that the nature of the concern has no bearing on the sincerity of the conviction. Many people have sincerely believed in God and the last day without taking to arms in order to establish the kingdom of God on earth. The early Christians were among them. Muhammad’s followers in Arabia sincerely believed the same, yet set out to conquer. Why this difference? Presumably, it has something to do with Arabia. Yet Donner speaks of the historical accident that Islam arose in Arabia. He cannot possibly mean that there was nothing in Arabia that made the rise of Islam more likely there than in Siberia or India, or that if it had not arisen in Arabia, it would have done so somewhere else. Or can he? He seems to think of religion as individual convictions regarding matters spiritual and moral that are formed independently of external circumstances (“God-given,” as the believers themselves experience it) and that cannot articulate political aims without being a mere pretext. And yet at the same time he seems to think that religion can indeed cause sincere believers to form a state and take to arms against those who hold opposing convictions. It is hard to avoid the sense that he is arguing for incompatible positions.

Patricia Crone is a professor of Islamic history at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.

Creating God in One’s Own Image [Not Exactly Rocket Science]

At 7, Josie has a more complex image of God. “I believe in God except for when I’m angry,” She recently told me. Then she reconsidered. “Well, actually I do believe in God when I’m angry, but I want to be all, ‘I’m ignoring you!’” She’s interested in the idea of the yetzer hatov and the yetzer harah, the good and evil impulses that duel within us. “I think God is a force that tries to persuade us to do something good and tells us not to do something bad, but sometimes we don’t listen,” she said.

I thought about my kids’ different views about God when I read about research into the correlation between spirituality and happiness in children. The study, conducted by Mark Holder and his colleagues at the University of British Columbia, looked at 320 children aged 8 to12 in both public and parochial schools. It used a standard measure called the Spiritual Well-Being Questionnaire to assess kids’ spirituality in four components: Personal (finding meaning and value in one’s life); communal (the quality of interpersonal relationships); environmental (the sense of awe in nature); and transcendental (the relationship one has with something beyond the human level).

The researchers found that children who felt that their lives had meaning and value and who had strong relationships with others (the personal and communal aspects of spirituality) were happier than children who did not feel that way or have those connections.

But religious practices—defined as attending services, praying and meditating—didn’t have a statistically significant impact on the happiness levels.

I’m not so sure you can tease apart spirituality and religion. To Jews, at least, religious practices aren’t limited to prayer and being droned at in shul. A lot of what we do is home-based, tied to food (challah back!), costumes (Purim, anyone?), even camping (building and hanging out in a sukkah). For us, and for people of other faiths, religion is social. Through day schools, synagogue schools, and camps, we build connections and support systems. Holder and his colleagues view such social networks as spirituality-building, not religion-enhancing, but that clean division doesn’t work for me. Judaism emphasizes tikkun olam, healing the world— wouldn’t that fall under the researchers’ definition of the personal and communal aspects of spirituality?

Furthermore, I’m not convinced that spirituality without religion is good for happiness. I used to live in San Francisco, surrounded by nebulous woo-woo performance-art spirituality, which frequently existed in the absence of real community (other than Burning Man) and without any social-justice aspect. Spirituality, for a lot of folks I used to know, consisted of trying to “manifest” what they personally wanted, a la The Secret, a book that makes me want to hurl. (Not that I’m judgy.) And when you’re manifesting doesn’t work, don’t you then feel powerless as well as unmoored to something bigger than yourself?

I’m no researcher, and I’m no rabbi. But one thing is clear to me: Maxine’s view of religion isn’t very nuanced. (Most things are not when you’re a preschooler.) If she were an adult, I could see how her version of God—the celestial big meanie— would have zero correlation with happiness. (And it could drive anyone to God-free no-pressure Bay Area hippie spirituality.) Indeed, in The How of Happiness, an overview of positive psychology and happiness research by Sonja Lyubomirsky, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Riverside, the downside of seeing God as a punitive, controlling force seems clear: several studies have found that people who believe that negative events are God’s punishment for their sins have more depression and poorer health than those without such beliefs.

I hope Maxie will grow into a sense of faith, spirituality, and religion that’s more like her big sister’s. Last year on the Fourth of July, Josie watched the fireworks over the East River while alternately screaming with joy and watching silently with her mouth hanging open. “Your mind is bigger than your head, because your mind can go anywhere,” she told me afterward. Transcendental. And Josie, like all self-righteous seven-year-olds, loves the notion of assisting the downtrodden and saving the planet. That’s communal, environmental, and personal. In short, she gets, and I hope Maxine is starting to get, the notion that helping other people and searching for meaning are both essential parts of our religious tradition.

There’s a project called The Happiness Study, funded by the Steinhardt foundation, that explores how Jewish institutions contribute to four “quality of life outcomes.” These are connectedness to others, having problem-solving skills, having social and emotional competence, and having a sense of meaning and purpose. The theory is that these qualities are malleable in childhood and can increase one’s happiness as an adult. The hope, of course, is that they will make Jews feel more connected to the Jewish community.

Jeffrey Kress, a member of the project team for The Happiness Study and a professor of education at the Jewish Theological Seminary, agrees that religion as well as spirituality can contribute to happiness. “When you have a sense of connection and feelings of belonging, and a sense of purpose and meaning in your life, you have both social support and perhaps the strength to persevere when there are bumps in the road of life,” he says.

In the future, Kress says, he and his colleagues hope to offer insight into the very different takes on spirituality and meaning that people find within Judaism. Is spirituality something that’s really self-directed? Is it more externally related, like tikkun olam? Is it a peak experience—a sort of religious runner’s high we experience only rarely—or a habit, part of the daily fabric of our lives? To me, these are more interesting questions than wondering whether it’s spirituality or religion that makes children—and adults—happy.

Since childhood, writer Nelly Reifler has fixated on questions of mortality, morality, and the existence of God. Now, as a Nextbook columnist she gets to plumb the minds of those around her—from the neighborhood barista to the rabbi who married her—for their answers to these questions.

Nextbook decided it was time to turn the tables. We talk to her about where her belief, or disbelief, comes from, and where it seems to be heading.

Earlier this month, my pseudonym, Fiona Rosenbloom, came out with her first young-adult novel. (Mazel Tov, Fiona!) The novel centers on Jewish themes and is called You Are SO Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah! Here’s how that happened: A month before the release of my own decidedly R-rated first novel, I was approached by a book packager who pitched me the bat mitzvah project. To be honest, I wasn’t interested in young-adult fiction, but to be fair, I needed a job. I had questions: Could I manage to work on my second novel while writing Fiona’s first? Was it wise to make this departure when I hadn’t yet established myself as a literary novelist? Did these packager people know what a bad seed I was? An advance was offered, and I accepted in greedy haste, signing on under one condition: that I be fitted with the Jewish pseudonym of my choice.

At the first plot meeting, my then-editor, Judy, started using Hebrew words to describe character traits, and I started using some words of my own: Secular Jew in over her head. I never went to Hebrew school. The closest I’ve come to God was on Essex Street leaning over an open barrel eating sour pickles. I don’t know from aleph and, though I love the bitter herbs at Passover, I don’t know why we eat them. Our Haggadah is a Diaspora of articles stapled together from Elle and Vogue, mixed with quotes from Bartlett’s, Primo Levi, and Martin Luther King. Sure, there are always people there who know the prayers; that’s why my mother invites them. But I took the job unable to tell the difference between the Torah and the Haftorah, a rabbi from a rebbe, a bar from a bas. Folks, I don’t even know my Hebrew name. In short: I SO did not have a bat mitzvah.

Yet somehow, between online research and heavy dependence on Judy, I managed to write a fairly believable book about a girl who does have one. Then I wrote a fairly believable bio for my pseudonym. Not only did I give Fiona a religious upbringing, but I referenced her bat mitzvah. I wasn’t thinking about book tours, or about middle-school kids who would want to know how much of the novel was autobiographical. Only after the book was bound with the bio on the back page did I realize what I’d done.

It’s one thing to apply Jergens Natural Glow moisturizer and claim you’ve been in the sun, and another to pretend that, as a teenager, you were called to the bema. When girls want to know how protagonist Stacy Friedman’s bat mitzvah compares with my own—that is, Fiona’s—I need to be armed with answers. I need to dredge up details, because Fiona rocked the dais.

Sketching in Fiona’s life is like creating a character for another novel. I pulled details from my own past, and some from my peers’. Like Aiden Black in the ninth grade, Fiona got the asymmetrical hair cut. Like me, she wore army pants and white T-shirts to school most days—until Alexis Biederman asked if we owned anything else. Unlike me, Fiona got into the college of her choice, Hampshire, where she studied sculpture and philosophy. We both taught ourselves to play guitar, but late one night after a bitter breakup, alone with her tacos and tears, Fiona discovered that she could sing.

How can a person like me—someone who attended an urban girls’ school where Christian prayers were mandatory; someone whose family celebrated Christmas not because we believe in the resurrection but because we are addicts and believe in instant gratification—be expected to pass herself off as a bat mitzvah? I created Fiona; I can play her. (Fiona and I dress alike, but I should mention that I will be wearing a wig.) My conundrum lies in the lying: Being Fiona means being a bat mitzvah, regaling girls with stories that never happened at a ritual I never experienced. I’ve already had mothers wanting to connect and bond, wanting me to provide some solace or advice concerning their Shira’s upcoming ceremony. This feels very awkward. Can I go to hell for this?

I’ll admit to wishing I didn’t have to fake it, that I was raised with a practice in place, one that I could choose to defy, like I do with yoga every single day. Could I possibly be yearning for what I lacked: a more traditional upbringing? And here is the spot where I could insert the cliché: that writing this book was my own bat mitzvah. Which is not entirely true.

But it’s not exactly untrue, either. In my daily life, I learn lessons through experience, but as a fiction writer I’m not interested in moral education. My first novel was about a couple doomed to repeat their mistakes. But in the world of young-adult fiction, morality prevails. Stacy had to learn something. While many Reform Jewish girls get through their bat mitzvahs unscathed by actual learning or heightened understanding or deep meaning, Stacy actually understood her Torah portion, she actually grew from the experience. In other words, Stacy gets it while I’m just faking it.

But on tour, I won’t be able to fake it any longer. I will be on the proverbial bema in front of a congregation of pubescent girls who will eat me alive if they intuit a crumb of inauthenticity. I’ve heard you can practice Judaism without believing in it and through the routine, the hope goes, comes belief. This was a lesson I learned with writing, with guitar, with cooking, and perhaps I’m about to learn it about my religion. So maybe by putting on the wig, sitting with preteen girls, answering the same questions and reading to them from the same book, I can develop my own routine, and through routine comes belief. Perhaps it’s fitting, then, that my rite of passage will take place back in middle schools, in front of developing and confused 13-year olds.