Voices of Islam (66 page)

•

Vincent J. Cornell

Frithjof Schuon, whose Muslim name was Nur al-Din ‘Isa and who is one of the contributors to this set in Volume 4,
Voices of Art, Beauty, and Science,
ends his book
Spiritual Perspectives and Human Facts
with the following reflection on prayer:

Man prays and prayer fashions man. The saint has himself become prayer, the meeting-place of earth and Heaven; and thereby he contains the universe and the universe prays with him. He is everywhere where nature prays and he prays with her and in her: in the peaks which touch the void and eternity, in a flower which scatters its scent or in the carefree song of a bird.

He who lives in prayer has not lived in vain.
1

I was strongly drawn to Schuon’s words from the first time I read them. However, they initially expressed to me a sentiment that was honored more in the breach than in practice. Schuon’s view of prayer expresses a spirituality that is rare in today’s Western religions. Whether in Judaism, Christianity, or even in much of contemporary Islam, the materialistic tenor of the times has crept into religious observance. The evangelism that pervades Sunday morn- ing television in the United States is often materialistic, and expresses its worldliness both in its association with partisan politics and in its equation of religious virtue with worldly success. In the early 1970s, when I was a stu- dent at the University of California, Berkeley, a preacher from Oakland, Cal- ifornia, named Reverend Ike preached a gospel of wealth that bore the motto, ‘‘You can’t lose with the stuff I use.’’ Today’s gospel of prosperity in the United States may come in a more appealing package, but its message has changed very little. The equation of virtue with material success in evan- gelicalism has roots that go far back into the history of American Protestant- ism. The Catholic and Orthodox traditions of Christianity may be less overtly materialistic than Evangelical Protestantism, but they too have not emerged unscathed from the effects of materialism. In Judaism, to escape the influence of materialism, many believers approach God’s commandments through an esoteric tradition such as Hasidism or Kabbalah. When more secularized

xviii
Introduction

Americans seek the type of spirituality expressed in Schuon’s statement, they often follow the example of the Trappist monk Thomas Merton and look not to the West but to the East—to the Dalai Lama, a Zen master, or a Hindu sage.

In the present age of late capitalism and high materiality, it often seems enough for the seeker just to find a religious message that gives practical advice on how to attain a sense of balance and harmony in one’s life. This is a major reason for the popularity of preachers such as Houston Evangelist Joel Osteen, whose practical and commonsense approach to what might be called the ‘‘gospel of wellness’’ deals with universal principles of faith and works that are as acceptable to a Muslim or a Jew as they are to a Christian. It is also a reason why much of the religious revival in the West is moralistic and legalistic in nature, including the revival of Islam. In a complex world, the Law of God provides the most visible and easily graspable thread that can lead lost souls out of the labyrinth of modern life.

At the end of the fifteenth century
CE
, ‘Ali Salih al-Andalusi (d. ca. 1508), a Sufi from Granada, noted that adherence to religious law is necessary for maintaining both the theological and the ethical boundaries of religion.
2
The law counteracts the weakness or inadequacy of the human being by applying basic principles of spiritual training and discipline. For this reason, many religious reform movements stress the importance of sincerity and eth- ical virtues and require strict obedience to God’s Law. By comparison, spir- ituality receives less attention. According to Andalusi, religious reformers who see God’s Law as the ultimate path to salvation take as their motto the phrase, ‘‘We hear and obey.’’ It is sometimes said by such reformers in Islam that the root of
insan,
the Arabic word for ‘‘human being,’’ is
nasiya,
‘‘to for- get.’’ Because human beings are forgetful, they need to be reminded of God through revelation and redirected toward salvation by the Law (
Shari‘a
) that God has mandated.
3

However, there is another possible root for
insan,
which is
anisa
, ‘‘to come close.’’ According to this understanding, human beings are close to God by nature because they are created in God’s image. This view of human nature, which is common to the Sufi perspective in Islam, gives greater atten- tion to the transcendental potential of the human spirit than does the legalis- tic path to religious reform. As outlined by Andalusi, a model of reform based on the Sufi view of human potential starts from the assumption that human beings are fully prepared to fulfill their role as God’s representatives on Earth. The development of a greater sense of the sacred thus becomes a matter of spiritual pedagogy and character building, which supplements, rather than replaces, outward conformity to religious law. Because their view of the human being is more optimistic, such theologies of human potential often combine pedagogies of love and nurturance with disciplinary training and concentrate on the inward assimilation of divine commands without rejecting their outward practice. According to Andalusi, whereas the exoteric religious

Introduction
xix

reformer follows the dictate, ‘‘We hear and obey,’’ the Sufi reformer responds, ‘‘We have witnessed and understand.’’

This Sufi theology of human potential lies behind Frithjof Schuon’s notion of prayer in the selection reproduced above. The person who lives in prayer does not live in vain because she understands that prayer is more than a mere act of obedience. It is above all a means of communication between the wor- shipper and the Absolute, an act of communion for which every person is pre- disposed. According to a Holy Tradition (
hadith qudsi
) that can be found in Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore’s chapter on the remembrance of God (
dhikr
), ‘‘Allah Almighty says, ‘I am whatever My slave thinks of Me and I am with Him when He remembers Me. When he remembers Me in himself, I remem- ber him in Myself. If he mentions Me in an assembly, I mention him in a bet- ter assembly. If he comes near to Me by a hand-span, I come near to him by a cubit. If he comes near to Me by a cubit, I come near to him by a league. If he comes to Me walking, I come to him running.’’ Commenting on this tradi- tion, Moore’s spiritual teacher, the Moroccan Sufi Muhammad ibn al- Habib, states in his collection of poems: ‘‘If the breath of God’s remem- brance were to fill the west and there were/A sick man in the east, that man would be cured of his affl In other words, and especially in today’s global Islam, what the Spanish Sufi Ibn ‘Arabi (d. 1240
CE
) called the ‘‘Breath of the All-Merciful’’ (
nafas al-Rahman
) blows everywhere: when it blows in the east, it can heal the west; when it blows in the west, it can heal the east.

This volume of
Voices of Islam
is dedicated to
Voices of the Spirit
because, outside of Sufism, no aspect of Islamic thought and practice has been more overlooked in recent studies of Islam than spirituality. For most observers in Western countries, Islam embodies three traits that are antithetical to liberal views of religious expression: traditionalism, legalism, and authoritari- anism. The spiritual dimension of Islam is seldom mentioned except with respect to Sufi To a certain extent, this blindness to the spiritual side of Islam is the result of a prejudice that has existed for more than two centuries in the West. According to this view, ‘‘real’’ Islam (somewhat like ‘‘real’’ Ju- daism) is traditionalistic and legalistic but not deeply spiritual. When Sufi spirituality is brought up, it is usually not as a religious perspective within Islam but rather as an importation of spirituality from the outside, such as from Christian monasticism or from the Indian philosophies of Hinduism or Buddhism. Since Sufi spirituality is not seen as ‘‘real’’ Islam, Sufi is often treated as a separate sect or even as a de facto alternative religion. This is why some New Age practitioners of Sufi in the West feel comfortable calling themselves Sufis but refuse to identify themselves as Muslims.

More than twenty-five years ago, Edward W. Said noted in his book
Orien- talism
that the European and American view of the Middle East and the Islamic world is premised on the notion of exteriority, which allows complex cultural phenomena to be simplifi into discrete representations of an

xx
Introduction

artificially constructed ‘‘essence.’’
4
The traditions, laws, and politics of Islam are easily visible, exteriorized phenomena. As such, they can be observed and studied by the outsider and turned into symbolic representations of a ‘‘real’’ Islam that has been reduced to its predetermined ‘‘essential’’ characteristics. Spirituality, however, is premised on the notion of interiority. What is on the inside is hard to see, and what is hard to see cannot easily be observed, measured, and subjected to regimes of control and domination. If ‘‘real’’ Islam is exteriorized as a set of rules that determine right behavior and right belief instead of a deeper orientation toward God, it becomes easy to separate the interior aspects of Islam, such as theology and spirituality, out of Islam’s supposed essence. Such an Islam would be an Islam with neither a mind (the- ology) nor a soul (spirituality) and hence would pose no challenge either to Western religions or to secular notions of ultimate truth.

However, the exteriorization of Islam is not just the result of a Western Orientalism that refuses to die out. Part of the blame for this situation also lies with Muslims themselves. Much of Muslim discourse today consists of an anti-Western, ‘‘clash of civilizations’’ type rhetoric that conceives of Islam not as a spiritual approach to the Absolute, but as an ideological system that is opposed to the hegemonic culture of Western modernity. This perspective is embodied in the title of one of the key chapters of the Muslim Brotherhood ideologue Sayyid Qutb’s (d. 1966) manifesto
Ma‘alim fi al-Tariq
(Signs Along the Road). Chapter 8 of Qutb’s work is titled, ‘‘The Islamic Concept and Culture’’ (
al-Tasawwur al-Islami wa al-Thaqafa
). Qutb’s
Signs Along the Road
has arguably been the most influential political manifesto since
The Communist Manifesto
of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. It has provided inspiration for a vast array of Islamic activists from Morocco to Malaysia, and Usama Bin Laden is perhaps its most loyal reader. The chapter ‘‘The Islamic Concept and Culture’’ was the inspiration for an intellectual move- ment known as the ‘‘Islamization of Knowledge,’’ which is still followed in many parts of the Muslim world.
5
In this chapter, Qutb warns Muslim youths to avoid the Western sciences of sociology, cosmology, and anthropology, saying, ‘‘It is not permissible for a Muslim to learn them from anyone other than a God-fearing and pious Muslim, who knows that guidance in these matters comes from God.’’
6
For Qutb, the touchstone of Islamic piety is less the spiritual awareness of God as it is a means of inoculation against ideologi- cal and intellectual viruses from the West.

Lest one dismiss the exteriority of Qutb’s view of Islam as the ideology of a political extremist and hence unrepresentative of Islamic reformism in gen- eral, one may also bring forward the statement of Farid Esack, a South Afri- can Muslim activist and intellectual living in the United States, who champions human rights, social and political pluralism, and intellectual free- dom. In his book
Qur’an, Liberation, and Pluralism
he states, ‘‘Despite the regular reminders of the inevitable return to God, the spiritualizing of human existence, which regards earthly life as incidental, is unfounded in the

Introduction
xxi

qur’anic [
sic
] view of humankind.’’
7
One must ask in response to this asser- tion: If Islam cannot transcend the material world, then why is it called a reli- gion and not just an ideology? The views of Qutb and Esack refl a common tendency among Muslim reformists to reduce the religion of Islam to a system, to reduce Islamic theology to ideology, and to reduce the cul- tural diversity of Islam to a monoculture. In this perspective, piety is not denied per se but rather is transformed from an integral part of religion into an instrumental means of social and political liberation.

Although Muslims have long fought for social justice, modern Islamic Lib- eration Theologies such as those of Qutb and Esack—like the Marxist- oriented Liberation Theology that was popular in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s—are fundamentally materialistic. This is because they seek a state of political and worldly perfection that is far more un-Qur’anic than the spiritualism that Esack decries. While the Qur’an calls on believers to strive to better their condition, nowhere does it predict the return of an earthly paradise. Quite the opposite: Islamic tradition is unanimous that things will get worse as humanity approaches the End Times. Despite this fact, the quest for a social and political utopia has become a dominant theme in Islamic reformism virtually everywhere in the world. This constitutes a cri- sis of faith because the purpose of Islam, like that of Christianity, Judaism, and other salvation religions, is to prepare individual souls to meet God. To- day, however, politically minded Islamic reformers routinely criticize Mus- lims who stress piety for being socially irresponsible. For the despairing Muslim pietist, it seems that Islam has not just failed to change the world but that the world has taken over Islam in the name of Islam itself. Has the notion that the believer is his brother’s keeper caused Muslims to forget that the traditional legal view of Islamic society was not of a corporate entity but rather of a collection of individuals? Have Muslims forgotten the admonition of the Qur’an that ‘‘Each soul is the hostage of its own deeds’’ (Qur’an 74:38) and not of the deeds of the collectivity? The fate of the individual soul in Islam is not dependent on the fate of the community. The righteous per- son can still expect God’s mercy, even if one’s entire society lives in sin. And even if the whole world were to embrace Islam, it would not help a sin- gle Muslim attain salvation.