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Writing biography is a strange thing to do.

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It's a journey into the foreign territory

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of somebody else's life,

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a journey, an exploration that can take you places

0:00:14.768,0:00:17.039
you never dreamed of going

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and still can't quite believe you've been,

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especially if, like me, you're an agnostic Jew

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and the life you've been exploring

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is that of Muhammad.

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Five years ago, for instance,

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I found myself waking each morning in misty Seattle

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to what I knew was an impossible question:

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What actually happened

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one desert night,

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half the world and almost half of history away?

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What happened, that is,

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on the night in the year 610

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when Muhammad received the first revelation of the Koran

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on a mountain just outside Mecca?

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This is the core mystical moment of Islam,

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and as such, of course,

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it defies empirical analysis.

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Yet the question wouldn't let go of me.

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I was fully aware that for someone as secular as I am,

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just asking it could be seen

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as pure chutzpah.

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(Laughter)

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And I plead guilty as charged,

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because all exploration, physical or intellectual,

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is inevitably in some sense an act of transgression,

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of crossing boundaries.

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Still, some boundaries are larger than others.

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So a human encountering the divine,

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as Muslims believe Muhammad did,

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to the rationalist, this is a matter not of fact

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but of wishful fiction,

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and like all of us, I like to think of myself as rational.

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Which might be why when I looked at the earliest accounts

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we have of that night,

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what struck me even more than what happened

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was what did not happen.

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Muhammad did not come floating off the mountain

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as though walking on air.

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He did not run down shouting, "Hallelujah!"

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and "Bless the Lord!"

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He did not radiate light and joy.

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There were no choirs of angels,

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no music of the spheres, no elation, no ecstasy,

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no golden aura surrounding him,

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no sense of an absolute, fore-ordained role

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as the messenger of God.

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That is, he did none of the things

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that might make it easy to cry foul,

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to put down the whole story as a pious fable.

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Quite the contrary.

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In his own reported words,

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he was convinced at first

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that what had happened couldn't have been real.

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At best, he thought, it had to have been a hallucination --

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a trick of the eye or the ear, perhaps,

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or his own mind working against him.

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At worst, possession --

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that he'd been seized by an evil jinn,

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a spirit out to deceive him,

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even to crush the life out of him.

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In fact, he was so sure that he could only be majnun,

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possessed by a jinn,

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that when he found himself still alive,

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his first impulse was to finish the job himself,

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to leap off the highest cliff

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and escape the terror of what he'd experienced

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by putting an end to all experience.

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So the man who fled down the mountain that night

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trembled not with joy

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but with a stark, primordial fear.

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He was overwhelmed not with conviction, but by doubt.

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And that panicked disorientation,

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that sundering of everything familiar,

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that daunting awareness of something

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beyond human comprehension,

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can only be called a terrible awe.

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This might be somewhat difficult to grasp

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now that we use the word "awesome"

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to describe a new app or a viral video.

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With the exception perhaps of a massive earthquake,

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we're protected from real awe.

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We close the doors and hunker down,

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convinced that we're in control,

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or, at least, hoping for control.

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We do our best to ignore the fact that

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we don't always have it,

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and that not everything can be explained.

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Yet whether you're a rationalist or a mystic,

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whether you think the words Muhammad heard that night

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came from inside himself or from outside,

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what's clear is that he did experience them,

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and that he did so with a force that would shatter

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his sense of himself and his world

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and transform this otherwise modest man

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into a radical advocate for social and economic justice.

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Fear was the only sane response,

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the only human response.

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Too human for some,

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like conservative Muslim theologians who maintain that

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the account of his wanting to kill himself

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shouldn't even be mentioned, despite the fact

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that it's in the earliest Islamic biographies.

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They insist that he never doubted

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for even a single moment, let alone despaired.

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Demanding perfection, they refuse to tolerate

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human imperfection.

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Yet what, exactly, is imperfect about doubt?

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As I read those early accounts, I realized it was

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precisely Muhammad's doubt that brought him alive for me,

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that allowed me to begin to see him in full,

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to accord him the integrity of reality.

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And the more I thought about it,

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the more it made sense that he doubted,

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because doubt is essential to faith.

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If this seems a startling idea at first,

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consider that doubt, as Graham Greene once put it,

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is the heart of the matter.

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Abolish all doubt, and what's left is not faith,

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but absolute, heartless conviction.

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You're certain that you possess the Truth --

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inevitably offered with an implied uppercase T --

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and this certainty quickly devolves

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into dogmatism and righteousness,

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by which I mean a demonstrative, overweening pride

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in being so very right,

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in short, the arrogance of fundamentalism.

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It has to be one of the multiple ironies of history

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that a favorite expletive of Muslim fundamentalists

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is the same one once used by the Christian fundamentalists

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known as Crusaders:

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"infidel," from the Latin for "faithless."

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Doubly ironic, in this case, because their absolutism

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is in fact the opposite of faith.

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In effect, they are the infidels.

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Like fundamentalists of all religious stripes,

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they have no questions, only answers.

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They found the perfect antidote to thought

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and the ideal refuge of the hard demands of real faith.

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They don't have to struggle for it like Jacob

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wrestling through the night with the angel,

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or like Jesus in his 40 days and nights in the wilderness,

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or like Muhammad, not only that night on the mountain,

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but throughout his years as a prophet,

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with the Koran constantly urging him not to despair,

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and condemning those who most loudly proclaim

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that they know everything there is to know

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and that they and they alone are right.

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And yet we, the vast and still far too silent majority,

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have ceded the public arena to this extremist minority.

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We've allowed Judaism to be claimed

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by violently messianic West Bank settlers,

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Christianity by homophobic hypocrites

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and misogynistic bigots,

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Islam by suicide bombers.

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And we've allowed ourselves to be blinded to the fact that

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no matter whether they claim to be Christians,

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Jews or Muslims,

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militant extremists are none of the above.

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They're a cult all their own, blood brothers

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steeped in other people's blood.

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This isn't faith.

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It's fanaticism, and we have to stop confusing the two.

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We have to recognize that real faith has no easy answers.

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It's difficult and stubborn.

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It involves an ongoing struggle,

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a continual questioning of what we think we know,

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a wrestling with issues and ideas.

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It goes hand in hand with doubt,

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in a never-ending conversation with it,

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and sometimes in conscious defiance of it.

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And this conscious defiance is why I, as an agnostic,

0:10:19.687,0:10:23.828
can still have faith.

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I have faith, for instance, that peace in the Middle East

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is possible despite the ever-accumulating mass of evidence

0:10:31.126,0:10:34.287
to the contrary.

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I'm not convinced of this.

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I can hardly say I believe it.

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I can only have faith in it,

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commit myself, that is, to the idea of it,

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and I do this precisely because of the temptation

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to throw up my hands in resignation

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and retreat into silence.

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Because despair is self-fulfilling.

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If we call something impossible,

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we act in such a way that we make it so.

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And I, for one, refuse to live that way.

0:11:09.967,0:11:12.266
In fact, most of us do,

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whether we're atheist or theist

0:11:15.842,0:11:19.782
or anywhere in between or beyond, for that matter,

0:11:19.782,0:11:24.098
what drives us is that, despite our doubts

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and even because of our doubts,

0:11:26.426,0:11:30.898
we reject the nihilism of despair.

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We insist on faith in the future

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and in each other.

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Call this naive if you like.

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Call it impossibly idealistic if you must.

0:11:45.467,0:11:47.895
But one thing is sure:

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Call it human.

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Could Muhammad have so radically changed his world

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without such faith, without the refusal

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to cede to the arrogance of closed-minded certainty?

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I think not.

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After keeping company with him as a writer

0:12:07.273,0:12:10.573
for the past five years, I can't see

0:12:10.573,0:12:15.676
that he'd be anything but utterly outraged

0:12:15.676,0:12:18.823
at the militant fundamentalists who claim to speak

0:12:18.823,0:12:24.292
and act in his name in the Middle East and elsewhere today.

0:12:24.292,0:12:28.582
He'd be appalled at the repression of half the population

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because of their gender.

0:12:31.580,0:12:39.561
He'd be torn apart by the bitter divisiveness of sectarianism.

0:12:39.561,0:12:42.267
He'd call out terrorism for what it is,

0:12:42.267,0:12:47.011
not only criminal but an obscene travesty

0:12:47.011,0:12:51.916
of everything he believed in and struggled for.

0:12:51.916,0:12:57.185
He'd say what the Koran says: Anyone who takes a life

0:12:57.185,0:13:00.386
takes the life of all humanity.

0:13:00.386,0:13:07.582
Anyone who saves a life, saves the life of all humanity.

0:13:07.582,0:13:10.652
And he'd commit himself fully

0:13:10.652,0:13:17.672
to the hard and thorny process of making peace.

0:13:17.672,0:13:19.107
Thank you.

0:13:19.107,0:13:23.506
(Applause)

0:13:23.506,0:13:27.506
Thank you. (Applause)