Teaching Humanity: An Alternative Introduction to Islam 3031223616, 9783031223617

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Teaching Humanity An Alternative Introduction to Islam

Vernon James Schubel

Teaching Humanity

Vernon James Schubel

Teaching Humanity An Alternative Introduction to Islam

Vernon James Schubel Kenyon College Gambier, OH, USA

ISBN 978-3-031-22361-7    ISBN 978-3-031-22362-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22362-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To Nurten and Mehmet Ali, For their love and splendid humanity and for sharing their lives with me.

Acknowledgements

Aspects of this project have been supported by numerous research and teaching grants and fellowships over the years. These have included several grants and stipends from Kenyon College, including an NEH Professorship at Kenyon College on Islam and the Humanities, a Global Partners Grant, an ARIT-NEH Research Grant, an American Academy of Religion Individual Grant, an IREX Individual Research Grant, a Social Science Research Council Retraining Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship for Studies in Islamic Civilization, a Social Science Research Council Postdoctoral Retraining Fellowship, and American Institute of Pakistan Studies Junior Fellowship for Dissertation Research. I am extremely thankful for the generous support I have received from these institutions. Projects of this sort are by their nature collaborative endeavors. First and foremost, I need to thank Nurten Kilic-Schubel, my wife, colleague, and intellectual partner, for her endless support, input, insight, and advice. This book is as much hers as it is mine. I would also like to add my appreciation to her mother, Hüsniye Kılıc, one of the most extraordinary people I have ever known, for her kindness and all of the ways she has helped me in my work over the years. I, of course, need to thank all of my teachers over the years who have been inspirations and role models for me as a teacher and scholar. I especially need to thank my undergraduate professors, Azim Nanji and the late Hyla Converse, who started me on the intellectual journey that resulted in this book and played such a major role in my decision to become a scholar of Islam and religion. Of course, I reserve special thanks for Abdulaziz Sachedina, my advisor in graduate school, who taught me to see Islam with new eyes by introducing me to the usul al-din, and most importantly the humanity of the Prophet, the Shiʿi Imams, especially Imam Husayn, and the awliya’. I am forever grateful to him for his knowledge, his wisdom, and his patience with me as a student. I owe him more than I could ever repay. I also wish to thank Benjamin Ray, for helping me to become a far more disciplined scholar of religion than would have otherwise been possible, and Victor Turner, to my mind the most humanistic anthropologist of the last century, who showed me how to teach and write about my fellow human beings with empathy and humanity.

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Acknowledgements

I need to thank Prof. Royal Rhodes of the Kenyon College Religious Studies Department, an amazing scholar, an extraordinarily creative intellect and the finest teacher I have ever known, for decades of conversations that have helped to shape my thinking, and for being the best departmental colleague one could ever ask for. I especially need to thank the immensely talented scholar, teacher, and novelist Laury Silvers for offering me her remarkable support and guidance without which I would never have competed this project. Of course, I also wish to thank my former students. Especially Edward Curtis, one of the finest scholars of Islam and African-American religion of his generation. I am immensely grateful for his support and assistance at crucial moments. Without his encouragement this book would never have been completed. I particularly wish to thank Kate Blanchard, Max Dugan, Holly Donahue, and Tess Waggoner for their support and for becoming the remarkable teachers, scholars, and people that they are. A special word of appreciation to Sahar Shatat for her help in editing and transliteration. Thanks to Amy Invernizzi for all her help and support along the way. Thanks as well to Sa’diyya Shaikh, Michael Muhammad Knight, Qussay Al-Attabi, Nicole Corerri, Kecia Ali, and Sophia Arjana for discussions, e-mails, comments, encouragement, and input at crucial moments. Thanks to Victoria Rowe Hollbrook for introducing me to Turkish Sufi texts and how to read them. Thanks to my son Mehmet Ali for being such a remarkably effective sounding board at such a young age. Also, thanks to Abbas Husain of Karachi, Pakistan, for all of his insights over the years and Professor Karrar Hussein for all that I learned from him. Thanks to everyone in my family in Ankara, who helped me in so many ways with this project over the years. I would especially like to thank everyone in the Alevi community who took the time to talk with me and teach me about your tradition. Finally, special thanks to Murat Coskun Baba from whom I have learned so much in the last few years about Islam and humanity. I would like to say thank you to the kind people at the Happy Bean Coffee Shop in Mount Vernon, Ohio, who let me treat their establishment as my office away from home and school for the years in which I have been working on this project. It was a great atmosphere in which to write and think. Thank you to everyone over the years with whom I have had the pleasure to work and from whom I have had the privilege to learn. My apologies to anyone I have either neglected, omitted, or forgotten to mention.

Notes on Transliteration

Questions of transliteration are always difficult in a book of this kind that uses sources from a number of different languages. For most of the technical terms used in this text, which are originally in Arabic but have over time been incorporated into other Islamicate languages, I am using a modified and simplified version of the Arabic transliteration system used by the International Journal of Middle East Studies (IJMES). This means that I have usually omitted the “t” or “h” at the end of words that would represent the ta marbuta in Arabic with a few exception such as salat and zakat. I have, in most cases, marked the hamza and the ‘ayn. Most diacritics have been avoided because, as many other scholars have pointed out, they are not really necessary for specialists and often confusing to non-specialists, especially college students being introduced to these terms for the first time. For the same reason I tend, in most cases, to simply add the letter “s” to create plural nouns rather than use the Arabic plurals with a few exceptions for terms that are commonly used in the plural like ‘ulama, awliya’ and usul. For Urdu or Persian terms that are spelled the same as the Arabic in their original script I have usually used the aforementioned Arabic transliteration for the sake of consistency. When referring to Turkish texts, however, I generally use the modern Turkish spelling, but have sometimes followed it with the Arabic term and transliteration when necessary for example—(tevhit, Arabic, tawhid)—especially if the term occurs for the first time in the text or the chapter.

Thoughts on Referring to God Throughout the text I have generally referred to the God in whom Muslims believe with the English word “God,” as opposed to “Allah” or the Persian word “Khoda” to avoid sending an erroneous message to readers, especially those unfamiliar with Islam, that Muslims believe that the God they worship and love is a different deity than the one worshipped by Jews and Christians. Depending on the context, I also

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Notes on Transliteration

sometimes refer to God as the Creator, or the Law Giver, or the Beloved for what I hope readers will see are fairly obvious reasons. One the difficulties in writing about Islam is the question of how to gender God and God’s pronouns. I refer readers to Sa’diyya Shaikh’s brilliant discussion about this in her introduction to her book on Ibn ‘Arabi. See, Sa’diyya Shaikh, Sufi Narratives of Intimacy: Ibn ‘Arabī, Gender, and Sexuality (Islamic Civilization and Muslim Networks. The University of North Carolina Press, pp.  29–31). Like Professor Shaikh, I believe that the Muslim God “is not simply beyond gender but also beyond all anthropocentric imagery and similitudes.” For that reason, unless it seemed particularly clumsy to do so, I have tried to avoid referring to God with pronouns of any kind whenever possible. Sometimes, however the use of pronouns seems necessary. Arabic, the language of the Qur’an, requires the use of grammatically gendered pronouns and uses the masculine third person pronoun to refer to God. To make things more complicated Urdu, Persian and Turkish do not have gendered pronouns, and the last two languages do not even mark gender in the verb. While one might think it makes this issue easier, in fact, it does not, as it sometimes forces one writing in English to gender God in ways that are not grammatically indicated in the sources one is using. Particularly when writing about Sufism, where God is “the Beloved,” the use of the pronoun “It” feels inappropriate as it can make “the Beloved” seem to be a thing or an object. Furthermore, within the Sufi tradition the ubiquity of the Arabic pronoun “Hu,” meaning “He,” to refer to God, even in Turkic and Farsi, makes it feel somehow artificial to instead refer to God as “She” or “It” without violating the intent of the original sources. Therefore, there are a few places where I refer to God as “He/Him/His” not to imply that God is male but rather to reflect the conventions of the tradition with all of their inherent contradictions and difficulties.

Qur’anic Verses All of the translations of the Qurʾanic verses are taken from Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Caner K.  Dağli, Maria Massi Dakake, Joseph E.  B. Lumbard, and Mohammed Rustom, The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary published by Harper Collins in 2015. For stylistic reasons I have occasionally made some minor changes such as replacing archaic pronouns like “thee” and “thou” with the more colloquial English “you.” In most cases, for the sake of consistency and maintaining their eloquence and the translators’ intentions, I have maintained the gendered language of the original translations.

Contents

1

Introduction: Teaching Humanity—Islam as a Humanistic Tradition ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    1 Islam as a Humanistic Tradition��������������������������������������������������������������     2 Defining Humanism and the Humanities������������������������������������������������     3 Orientalism and the Study of Islam ��������������������������������������������������������     8 Islam as a Legalistic Tradition ����������������������������������������������������������������    10 Three Men and an Elephant: Describing Islam����������������������������������������    12 Islam: The Straight Path, or Is It?������������������������������������������������������������    16 Islam or Islam(s)?: Accounting for Islamic Diversity������������������������������    18 Talal Asad: Islam as a Discursive Tradition��������������������������������������������    19 Shahab Ahmed and the Critique of Asad ������������������������������������������������    20 The “Pre-Text” ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    21 The “Con-Text”: The Product of Engagement����������������������������������������    22 Islam as an Affective Tradition����������������������������������������������������������������    23 Challenging Textual Essentialism������������������������������������������������������������    25 Moving Beyond the Text: There Is a Reason They Call It Folk Wisdom   26 Teaching Humanity: An Alternative Introduction to Islam����������������������    28 Questions for Discussion ������������������������������������������������������������������������    30

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 Islam’s Diverse Paths, Part One: Patterns of Belief�����������������������������   39 Defining Islam������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    39 Islam’s Diverse Paths ������������������������������������������������������������������������������    42 Islam: A Man and A Book ����������������������������������������������������������������������    44 Islam: Unity in Diversity��������������������������������������������������������������������������    47 Usul al-Din: The Roots of Religion��������������������������������������������������������    49 Tawhid: The Unity of God ����������������������������������������������������������������������    50 Mansur Al-Hallaj: The Secret of Ana al-Haqq����������������������������������������    53 Nubuwwa: Belief in Prophets������������������������������������������������������������������    55 A Brief Outline of the Life of the Historical Muhammad ����������������������    57 Following Muhammad: The Prophet as a Model for Later Generations    63

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Qiyama: Belief in the Day of Judgment��������������������������������������������������    67 Conclusion ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    70 Questions for Discussion ������������������������������������������������������������������������    72 3

Islam’s Diverse Paths, Part Two: Patterns of Practice and Identity��������������������������������������������������������������������������������   77 The Path of “Law”: The Shariʿa��������������������������������������������������������������    77 ʿIbadat and Muʿamalat: Shariʿa as Ritual and Social Practice����������������    80 Muʿamalat: Shariʿa as Social Practice ����������������������������������������������������    81 Shariʿa: Islamic Law?������������������������������������������������������������������������������    81 The Path of Morality and Etiquette: Akhlaq and Adab����������������������������    83 Paths of Love: Mahabba and ʿIshq����������������������������������������������������������    84 Walking the Path of Love: The Story of Layla and Majnun��������������������    85 Islam’s Diverse Communities: Shiʿa, Sunni, and Sufi ����������������������������    87 The Force of History: From Saqifa to Karbala����������������������������������������    88 A Man and a Book: Accounting for Sunni and Shiʿi Islam ��������������������    93 Shiʿi Islam: The Path of Devotional Allegiance��������������������������������������    94 Shiʿi Islam’s Diverse Paths����������������������������������������������������������������������   101 Sunni Islam: The Islam of the Sunna and the Community����������������������   103 Belief in the Awliyaʾ Allah: The Sufi Tradition����������������������������������������   106 Wahdat al-Wujud and the Sufi Tradition��������������������������������������������������   110 Conclusion: Islam as a Humanistic Tradition������������������������������������������   114 Questions for Discussion ������������������������������������������������������������������������   115

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Teaching Humanity: The Human Being as the Object and Means of Revelation in Islamic Piety ����������������������������������������������������  121 Approaching the Qurʾan��������������������������������������������������������������������������   123 The Qurʾan as Sacred Presence����������������������������������������������������������������   124 The Form and Content of the Qurʾan ������������������������������������������������������   126 Qurʾanic Verses: Affirmations of Tawhid and Qiyama����������������������������   127 Qurʾanic Verses: Practice and Ethics��������������������������������������������������������   129 Qurʾanic Verses: Narratives����������������������������������������������������������������������   130 Interpreting the Qurʾan����������������������������������������������������������������������������   131 Muhkamat and Mutashabihat Verses ������������������������������������������������������   133 Teachers of Humanity: Prophets, Imams, and Awliyaʾ����������������������������   135 Adam in the Qurʾan����������������������������������������������������������������������������������   137 Iblis and Adam in the Qurʾan ������������������������������������������������������������������   139 Mansur al-Hallaj and the Creation of Adam��������������������������������������������   142 The Alevi Understanding of the Adam and Iblis Story����������������������������   143 The Narrative of Khidr and Musa������������������������������������������������������������   146 Conclusion: Humanity in the Qurʾan ������������������������������������������������������   155 Questions for Discussion ������������������������������������������������������������������������   156

Contents

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Patterns of Devotional Allegiance: God’s Friends (Awliyaʾ Allah) and Perfected Persons (al-Insan al-Kamil)��������������������������������������������  159 Devotional Allegiance to the Prophet Muhammad����������������������������������   162 Love and Devotional Allegiance to the Prophet Muhammad������������������   164 Love and Devotion for ʿAli b. Abu Talib��������������������������������������������������   165 Karbala: Shiʿi Islam’s Spiritual Fulcrum ������������������������������������������������   168 Karbala as a Meme ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������   169 Karbala as a Root Paradigm��������������������������������������������������������������������   171 Victor Turner on Human Nature: Communitas and Structure ����������������   174 Etic and Emic������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   176 Devotional Allegiance in the Sufi Tradition��������������������������������������������   177 The Story of Baba Farid Shakr Ganj and Mullah Sahab�������������������������   180 Interpretation��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   182 Ahmet Yesevi in the Vilayetname������������������������������������������������������������   186 The Proclamation of the Praiseworthy Qualities of Hoca Ahmet Yesevi Hezretleri��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   186 Analysis����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   188 Conclusion ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   189 Questions for Discussion ������������������������������������������������������������������������   190

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My Qibla Is a Man: Islam Beyond the Shariʿa��������������������������������������  195 Defining Alevilik��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   197 The Nature of Alevi Religion������������������������������������������������������������������   198 Alevilik as Shiʿi Piety������������������������������������������������������������������������������   199 Alevilik as a Sufi Tradition����������������������������������������������������������������������   201 The Cem ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   202 The Origin of the Cem in the Miraç of the Prophet ��������������������������������   202 Contemporary Alevilik����������������������������������������������������������������������������   204 Urban Cems and Cem Evis����������������������������������������������������������������������   205 Alevi Music and Performance������������������������������������������������������������������   205 The Saz and the Minaret��������������������������������������������������������������������������   207 Contemporary Alevi Literature����������������������������������������������������������������   209 Narratives from the Vilayetname��������������������������������������������������������������   209 The Narrative of the Lineage and Birth of Hacı Bektaş in the Vilayetname����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   211 The Vilayetname as an Islamic Text��������������������������������������������������������   217 The Narrative of Güvenç Abdal ��������������������������������������������������������������   218 My Qibla is a Man: Islam Beyond the Law��������������������������������������������   223 Questions for Discussion ������������������������������������������������������������������������   226

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Conclusion: Not an Excess of Religion, But a Lack of Humanity—In Search of “Mainstream Islam” ������������������������������������  231 Radical Muslims and Muslim Extremists������������������������������������������������   233 How to Write About Muslims������������������������������������������������������������������   236

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Islam and Humanity��������������������������������������������������������������������������������   237 The “Reformers” and Their Legacy��������������������������������������������������������   239 In Search of “Mainstream” Islam������������������������������������������������������������   242 “I Created Everything for You and You for Me:” An Alternative View of Islam ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   244 Creating Insan al-Kamil: The End of Humanity��������������������������������������   247 “Mainstream Islam” and Shari‘a ������������������������������������������������������������   249 “Mainstream Islam” and Modernity��������������������������������������������������������   251 Conclusion ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   253 Questions for Discussion ������������������������������������������������������������������������   255 Glossary������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  257 Bibliography ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  265 Index������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  271

About the Author

Vernon James Schubel  is Professor of Religious Studies at Kenyon College where he has been teaching for more than three decades. He helped to establish and develop Kenyon’s Asian and Middle East Studies Program and its Islamic Civilization and Cultures concentration. He has a doctorate in Religious Studies from the University of Virginia. He has published numerous articles, as well as a monograph on the remembrance of Imam Husayn’s martyrdom in Pakistan entitled Religious Performance in Contemporary Islam. He has traveled widely in the Islamicate world and conducted research in Pakistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkey.

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List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Entrance to the tomb of Maulana Jalal al-Din Rumi, universally regarded as one of the history’s greatest poets, not only among Muslims, but all of humanity, in Konya, Turkey������������������������������������� 7 Fig. 1.2 Statue of renowned Alevi musician Mahzuni Şerif at his memorial near the tomb of Hacı Bektaş Veli in Turkey���������������������������������������� 15 Fig. 2.1 Calligraphic representation of Allah on the wall of fifteenth-century Eski Cami (Old Mosque) in Edirne, Turkey�������������� 51 Fig. 2.2 Calligraphic representation of Muhammad at Eski Cami in Edirne����� 63 Fig. 3.1 Calligraphic representation of ʿAli at Edirne’s the Eski Cami. Note that it is flanked on the rear walls by similar representations of Muhammad and Allah��������������������������������������������� 95 Fig. 3.2 Pilgrims paying repects to the pir Shahidullah Faridi during ziyara in Karachi. Pakistan������������������������������������������������������ 107 Fig. 4.1 Students studying Qur’an at Mosque in Turkish Cyprus�������������������� 124 Fig. 5.1 Images and souvenirs evocative of Ali ibn Abu Talib and the ahl al-bayt for sale at shop near the tomb of Hacı Bektaş Veli in Central Anatolia����������������������������������������������������������������������� 166 Fig 5.2 Bektaşı callıgraphy showing human face composed of the names Ali ibn Abu Talib, Muhammad, and Allah������������������������������������������ 167 Fig. 5.3 Tomb of Hoca Ahmet Yesevi in Kazakhstan in the town of Yasa near the border with Uzbekistan (under reconstruction in the 1990s)���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 187 Fig. 6.1 Shrine of Abdal Musa in Southwestern Anatolia�������������������������������� 208

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Fig. 6.2 Poem by Guvenç Abdal hanging near his tomb in the Hacı Bektaş shrine complex in Turkey. It reads: Oh Genç Abdal (Güvenç Abdal), If you want to reach the Truth, If you want to give your life and your head to the Path of Reality, If you want to see the beauty of Reality, conceal what you have seen, and don’t talk about what you haven’t���� 219 Fig. 7.1 Langar pot at the tomb of Moinuddin Chishti in India used for cooking food to distribute to pilgrims during his ‘urs������������������������ 234 Fig. 7.2 Tomb of Bahauddin Naqshband, the pir for whom the successful and popular modern transnational Naqshbandi Order is named, outside of Bukhara, Uzbekistan���������������������������������������������������������� 252

Chapter 1

Introduction: Teaching Humanity—Islam as a Humanistic Tradition

The title of this book, Teaching Humanity, comes from Chapter 96 of the Qurʾan, which Muslims traditionally consider the first revelation received by the Prophet Muhammad. Sura 96 opens with these words: In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful. Recite! In the name of your Lord, who created humanity (insan), from a blood clot. Recite! Your Lord is most noble, He who taught by the knowledge of the pen, taught humanity (insan) that which it knew not. (Sura 96:1–5)1

In these verses, the Qurʾan elegantly and powerfully asserts that God is not only humanity’s creator but also its teacher. The Qurʾan, from its very first revelation, thus makes clear its central purpose—to further the Creator’s ongoing project of “teaching humanity.” One can interpret this book’s title, Teaching Humanity, in several ways, all of which are consistent with longstanding Muslim understandings of humanity and human nature. First, and foremost, “teaching humanity” means “to teach human beings.” This is the most obvious and straightforward meaning expressed in the Arabic of the Qurʾanic sura quoted above, which clearly states that the Lord taught humanity (insan) “that which it knew not,” explicitly identifying God as humanity’s teacher and humanity as the special object of God’s attention and revelation. One can also read the English phrase “teaching humanity” to mean, “teaching the virtues of humanity.” This reading of “teaching humanity” also coincides with traditional understandings of Islam. The Arabic noun, insaniyya, which shares a common etymological root with the word insan, which means “humanity” in the sense of “human beings,” can be translated as “humanity,” meaning “idealized human nature.” Insaniyya expresses the concept of “human virtue,” especially the capacity of human beings to show kindness and empathy for others. The word “insaniyya,” like the cognate word “humanity” in English, communicates the idea that there is something unique and inherently positive about human nature. This understanding of humanity (insaniyya) as a virtue to be cultivated and perfected has long been a crucial concept within the Islamic religious tradition. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 V. J. Schubel, Teaching Humanity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22362-4_1

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1  Introduction: Teaching Humanity—Islam as a Humanistic Tradition

In fact, Muslims have generally understood the religion of Islam as a vehicle for teaching humanity (insan) the virtues of humanity (insaniyya), or to put it another way, to provide the necessary guidance necessary in order to become a fully realized and perfected human being (al-insan al-kamil). Finally, the English phrase “teaching humanity” can be also be read as referring to “human beings who teach,” or more simply “teachers.” The civilization associated with Islam has always put a high value on teachers. On the one hand, this category of “teaching humanity” has included religious scholars, the ʿulamaʾ, who because they have mastered specific textual knowledge are able to instruct their community didactically in matters of law and theology. It has also included spiritual and mystical teachers, who not only teach through words, but also because of their holiness and sacrality, are able to impart knowledge to others through their very presence. Because of the excellence of their own humanity (insaniyya), these paradigmatic human beings are worthy of both imitation and devotion. In fact, the religion of Islam asserts that there have always been such teachers among us whose purpose has been to show humanity how to become perfected as human beings. The list of such persons includes not only the Prophet Muhammad and the earlier prophets who preceded him—including Jesus, Moses, Abraham and the other prophets mentioned in the Qurʾan—but for many Muslims, also the great masters and teachers of the Sufi tradition or the Shiʿi Imams of the Twelver or Ismaʿili traditions. The centrality of devotional allegiance to these inspired and inspiring teachers of humanity speaks to the importance of human beings (insan) and humanity (insaniyya) within the religion of Islam. Devotion to these holy persons, far from being some marginal manifestation of Muslim piety, has been an extremely popular and nearly ubiquitous feature of Islam. One finds expressions of devotion and allegiance to such venerated “teachers of humanity” in nearly every period of Islamic history and every corner of the Muslim world. The lives of “God’s friends,” awliyaʾ Allah, as they are commonly known, are the subjects of a rich literature both in Arabic and vernacular Islamicate2 languages. Muslims use the narratives of their lives to teach piety, ethics and proper behavior. The awliyaʾ have both written and inspired mystical poetry of the highest caliber. In life, the most famous of these awliyaʾ have attracted devoted followers, who have built and maintained social and religious institutions for passing their teachings on from generation to generation. In death, their tombs have become places of veneration and remembrance, and sites of pilgrimage.

Islam as a Humanistic Tradition The central argument of this book is that Islam is at its core a deeply humanistic religious tradition. The concept of humanity—both in the sense of human beings (insan) and in the virtue of humanity (insaniyya)—has permeated the religious thought and practice of Islam throughout its long and complex history. Islam as a religion is rooted in an implicit understanding that there is unique and intimate relationship between God and human beings. Indeed, one might ask, would there be any

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need of a revelation at all without an audience of human beings to hear it? It is significant that the Qurʾan, the sacred text revealed to humanity by God through the agency of the Prophet Muhammad, more frequently addresses its audience simply as “humanity,” rather than speaking to a community of believers identified specifically as muslim (those who submit) or muʾmin (those who believe).3 Understanding the importance of the concept of humanity, as Muslims have understood it is thus crucial to any comprehensive understanding of either Islam as a religious tradition or the civilization and cultures associated with it. Of course, for many people—Muslim and non-Muslim alike—the argument that “humanism” is a central facet of Islam may seem incongruous. Indeed, there are those who contend that the religion of Islam is deeply theocentric and legalistic, so much so that that the notion of “Muslim humanism” is an oxymoron. Islam, they would argue is primarily about God, not humanity, and submission to God is best understood as obedience to God’s commands as codified in Islamic law, the shariʿa, and not a set of abstract and universal human virtues. This book provides a corrective to that attitude. Even though a minority of Muslims may argue otherwise, for the great majority of Muslims Islam is indeed a humanistic tradition, a system for facilitating the virtues of humanity (insaniyya) that depends for its success on human agency.

Defining Humanism and the Humanities The word “humanism” derives from the Latin “studia humanitas,” a phrase that refers to the development of human virtue. It encompasses a variety of beliefs, methods, and philosophies rooted in the assumption that there is something inherently “human” that exists universally and cross-culturally. In general, a humanistic worldview is one that affirms the universal value and worth of human beings, both as individuals and members of collectivities. A central aspect of any humanistic perspective is the idea that ethical values, rather than being culturally bound, are instead rooted in our humanity itself. People who identify themselves as humanists have generally included among these values such positive virtues as tolerance, mercy, compassion, altruism and self-sacrifice. While the concept of humanism is often associated with radical secularism and a corollary rejection of any transcendent or religious authority,4 the majority of the adherents of the world’s religions, including adherents to the religion of Islam, also embrace this list of human virtues. In general, humanism is considered a positive appellation, especially in academic circles, where it is seldom used as a derogatory term. Few college and university professors would take offense at someone labelling them as humanists. The related concept of “the humanities,” which also derives from the Latin, humanitas, and is commonly used to refer to non-scientific scholarly disciplines including language, literature, rhetoric, philosophy, art and history, further affirms this positive view of humanism in the academy.5 Most institutions of higher education embrace the humanities and include them prominently in their curricula. There is a

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consensus among academicians that a truly educated person must have at least some exposure to “the humanities.” Colleges and universities generally expect their students, even those training for highly specialized careers as doctors, engineers and scientists, to study the humanities. It is assumed that an educated person should know something about how people throughout human history have thought about their lives, and even more importantly the meaning of their lives—in fact, the meaning of life in general—in works of literature, philosophy, music, painting and sculpture. Furthermore, one should study the humanities not just to learn about them in some narrow and factual way but also in order to learn from them in ways that will enrich our individual and collective lives. That is to say, we do not read Plato and Aristotle only to learn about fifth century B.C.E Athenians and their world— although that is certainly one important reason to do so—but also to discover something meaningful about our own lives. Neither do we read Shakespeare and Marlowe solely to learn about Elizabethan thought and culture. We experience the works of these writers and thinkers to learn from them not just about them and, in so doing, to help us to learn about ourselves. We read them to be edified and challenged. We read them to become more fully “human.” There are those who contend that humanism is something unique to “Western Civilization.” They argue that it is the consequence of a uniquely humanistic tradition represented by the Greek philosophers and their intellectual descendants in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. They further contend that, as a result of that legacy, “the West,” alone among the world’s civilizations, was able to overthrow the narrow religious worldview of its Middle Ages and replace it with a spirit of rational inquiry, which, they argue, has been the sole generator of what is commonly thought of as a humanistic worldview. While other civilizations may now embrace these “universal values” of humanism, they unquestionably originate in the civilization of Europeans. As Arthur Schlesinger put it: Whatever the particular crimes of Europe, that continent is also the source—the unique source—of those liberating ideas of individual liberty, political democracy, equality before the law, freedom of worship, human rights and cultural freedom that constitute our most precious legacy and to which most of the world today aspires. These are European ideas, not Asian, nor African, nor Middle Eastern ideas except by adoption.6

This is the well-known argument for “Western exceptionalism,” whose proponents contend that the emergence of “the West” as the dominant global civilization, and the corollary political and cultural hegemony of Europe and North America, is the inevitable result of an inherent civilizational superiority. Proponents of this position argue that with the rise of modernity, which they believe is itself a product of “Western Civilization,” the “humanistic” ideals of the West have now become dominant throughout the globe. The rest of the world must now either accept these ideals, or inevitably fail and fall onto the proverbial “scrapheap of history.” Some proponents of Western exceptionalism have identified Islam as the least humanistic of all the world’s religious traditions. For them, while the entirety of the non-Western world has struggled, to some degree or another, to adapt to modernity and the rise of “the West” with varying degrees of success, the civilization associated with Islam, because of its uncompromisingly theocentric view of the cosmos,

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has rendered itself irredeemably alienated from the humanistic worldview associated with “the West.”7 There are some who go so far as to postulate that one cannot simultaneously be both a Muslim and humanist, and that, therefore today’s Muslims must inevitably choose between Islam and “the West.” Viewed from this perspective, the task of “teaching humanity” in the contemporary world clearly falls to “the West.” “The West,” and especially the United States, has a unique responsibility to bring the universal values of modern humanism to the rest of the world, and especially the Muslim world. At the same time, the idea that “We”—“the West”—might have something to learn about human nature and the human condition from the civilization of Islam is inconceivable.8 It should be obvious that this belief that Europeans and their descendants, who have some unique claim to the values of humanism and a responsibility to civilize the rest of the world, constructed the modern world almost entirely on their own is not only wrong, but also deeply offensive to billions of people. As a contemporary restatement of Kipling’s largely repudiated notion of “white man’s burden” or T.  B. Macaulay’s infamous 1835 British colonial document in which he argued, “that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia,”9 it is no less untrue or distasteful now than it was in the nineteenth century. Only those with a decidedly limited knowledge of history outside of “the West” can possibly defend the notion that the ideals and virtues associated with humanism are unique to any one particular civilization.10 Moreover, the singling out of Muslims as in some way particularly unable to accept either modernity or humanism is especially disturbing. Only a deliberately selective reading of Islamic thought and history can support such an attitude. Not only is the Western exclusivists’ view of history and culture untrue; it is also uncharitable and “inhumane.” It should be clear to anyone with even a passing knowledge of world history and literature that one cannot locate all important and valuable human knowledge, as some do, in a textual dialogue with the ancient Greeks. (Even if that were the case, some of the greatest readers of and commentators upon the Greek classical tradition have been Muslims, e.g. Ibn Rushd and Ibn Sina, better known to Europeans as Averroes and Avicenna). It should be self-­ evident that one can find knowledge worth knowing everywhere.11 To believe that it resides in a finite canon of a few “great books” written by a small group of people, largely excluding the voices of women and the economically disenfranchised, from one small part of the continent of Eurasia, borders on the delusional. Human knowledge, if it is truly human, must by definition be global in scope. As a corollary, it should be equally obvious that the humanities, as the basis of a liberal education, should be global in its scope as well. Furthermore, it should be self-evident in the twenty-first century that knowledge of Islam, and the civilization and cultures associated with it, is a necessary and essential element of a global liberal arts education, of the global humanities. All of us who live on planet Earth are the product of a complex and interconnected shared global human heritage. For all of us—both Muslim and non-Muslim—the civilization associated with Islam is most certainly a crucial part of that heritage. Can any of us really imagine what the world would look like if the religion of Islam and the

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civilization that emerged around it had never emerged? That civilization, like all civilizations, has nurtured its share of great writers, thinkers, scientists, architects and artists—Ibn Sina, Ibn Rushd, al-Farabi, Sinan, Farid al-Din ʿAttar, and Jalal al-­ Din Rumi, to name only a handful—whose impact and influence has extended far beyond the confines of the Muslim majority world, which produced them, to impact every corner of the globe. It benefits all of us to understand the ways Muslims have attempted to address the complex issues of the human condition—issues of love, justice, morality, and the meaning of life—in Islamicate languages, such as Arabic, Farsi, Turkish, Urdu, Uzbek and Swahili just as much as the ways people have thought about them in Greek, Latin, German, French and English (Fig. 1.1).12 Western exclusivists, on the other hand, tend to distinguish between the study of Islam and the study of the humanities. Recognizing the existence of more than a billion Muslims in the contemporary world, most of them, of course, understand that “we” need to study “them.” However, too often they suggest that “we” should study them as “the Other.” “We”—for there is an inherent and too often unquestioned assumption that in the context of the academy that “we” implies only non-­Muslims— need to study Islam in order to learn about another civilization that is inherently different from “our” own, in part to learn just how different it is. We should study Muslims in order to learn how to live with them in an ever-shrinking world as best we can; or, if necessary, to be prepared to confront them in a struggle for global dominance. In fact, there are those who explicitly argue that we need to study Islam precisely in order to know our “enemies.” For them, the study of Islam and Muslims within the academy is necessary primarily as part of a strategy for national defense. Accordingly, colleges and universities should include Arabic, Persian and other Islamicate languages in the curriculum. However, they should do so not to ensure that students might gain access to valuable insights about the human condition from a rich and profound body of literature written by Muslims. Instead, we should teach those languages so that students can learn to monitor television and radio broadcasts and read newspapers to understand the mood of potential adversaries on “the Muslim street,” so they can listen to phone calls and examine e-mails in search of terrorist “chatter,” or interrogate “suspects” in order to prevent acts of terrorism.13 This attitude reinforces an unnecessarily binary approach to the humanities. It affirms the compelling argument that we should read Plato, Aristotle, and Shakespeare and Goethe, Machiavelli and Montaigne in order to gain important insights into the human condition; to learn about humanity. We should read these European writers as part of the enlightened and enlightening agenda of the liberal arts; as a process of cultural enrichment from which we will ultimately emerge as more fully educated human beings. Despite the fact that these men—and they are overwhelmingly men—wrote in places and times often far removed from our own, there is a general agreement that they have a special connection with “us” as their cultural descendants. We can, and should, read them to learn about ourselves, to become more human and humane. On the other hand, we should read the writings of Muslims, if at all, to learn about them; to discover how “they” are different from “us,” but certainly not to learn from them in a meaningful and human way. This difference in approach is rooted in the unfounded assumption that Muslims are “the Other;” they are not part of “us.”

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Fig. 1.1  Entrance to the tomb of Maulana Jalal al-Din Rumi, universally regarded as one of the history’s greatest poets, not only among Muslims, but all of humanity, in Konya, Turkey

The bipolar and dichotomous vision of Western exclusivism, which sees a perpetual chasm between “the West” and Islam, persists as a powerful and intellectual paradigm both in the scholarly world and popular media. However, for the last forty years, numerous voices within the academy have vigorously challenged this paradigm, especially within the field of religious studies

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Orientalism and the Study of Islam The publication of Edward Said’s groundbreaking monograph, Orientalism, in 1978 was one of the truly pivotal moments in the transformation of the study of Islam in the Western academy.14 In Orientalism, Said argued that much of the Western writing about the Muslim world, produced in the context of colonialism and neo-colonialism, presents a distorted view of Islam and Muslims. That writing tends to define the “West” as rational, adult, masculine, historical and “normal” in opposition to a Muslim “Orient” depicted as irrational, childish, feminine, ahistorical and exotic. Said referred to that body of literature as “Orientalism” and argued that it almost invariably depicted the Muslim world as “the Other.” The” Orientalist” vision presents Muslims as people culturally bound by religion, tradition and language and thus unable to change and react effectively to new challenges; they have for centuries been tied tightly and narrowly into a dialogue with the primary sources of their religious tradition in ways that have largely been concerned with matters of law and ritual. This has made it difficult for them, or their religion, to adapt to historical change. “Orientalist” writing presents Muslims as people locked into a narrowly constrictive theocentric worldview that makes it impossible for them to embrace the humanistic values of egalitarianism, religious tolerance, and democracy necessary to exist in the contemporary world.15 Whatever one may think of specific aspects of Said’s arguments in Orientalism, his central argument is difficult to dismiss. Orientalism makes a remarkably persuasive argument about the power of writing, especially academic writing, to construct Western attitudes about Muslims and Islam. Who can deny that there exists a body of literature written by “experts” on Islam and Muslims that claims to provide an accurate and authentic representation of the Muslim world? Furthermore, who can deny that most people in “the West” know far more about Islam and Muslims from that body of literature than from any actual encounter with Muslim people or cultures? Of course, as his critics have argued, the body of literature about Islam in “the West” is actually more complex and multivocal than the examples provided in Orientalism might seem to suggest. In fact, there is no single and thoroughly unified scholarly representation of the Muslim world within the academy. While it is true that “Orientalist” scholars have composed their work in a world pervaded and defined by colonialism and neo-colonialism, nonetheless, there have been fine examples of scholarship created by well-meaning scholars who have made honest and fair-minded attempts to write about the Muslim world in an empathetic and objective manner. In so doing, they have provided their readers access to aspects of the Muslim experience from which they might otherwise remain forever ignorant.16 Furthermore, Professor Said did not reject, as many of his critics suggest, the entirety of European and American scholarship about the Muslim world as irredeemably tainted. He clearly acknowledges this in the conclusion to Orientalism when he writes:

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Today there are many individual scholars working in such fields as Islamic history, religion, civilization, sociology, and anthropology whose production is deeply valuable as scholarship.17

For Said what distinguished this scholarship from the works he critiqued as “Orientalism” was the fact that these scholars were grounded in and made use of the same pallet of theoretical and methodological tools used by scholars writing about any other part of the world. They thus avoided writing about Muslims as “the Other” and instead wrote about Muslims as they would write about any other human beings. Ultimately, for Said the failure of the Orientalist scholarship he so vehemently criticized was its lack of humanity. He states: I consider Orientalism’s failure to have been a human as much as an intellectual one; for in having taken up a position of irreducible opposition to a region of the world it considered alien to its own, Orientalism failed to identify with human experience, failed also to see it as human experience.18

At the conclusion of Orientalism, Edward Said challenged a new generation of scholars to reject the dichotomous view of the world that divided humanity into “Us” and “Them” that he saw at the heart of “Orientalist” writing. He called for the emergence of a new body of scholarly writing on the Islamic world; a body of literature, which while remaining aware of the ongoing sociological and political power of that dichotomous perspective, would take a more humanistic approach to the study of Islam and Muslims. In the years since the publication of Orientalism, many scholars and teachers within the academy have taken Said’s challenge seriously. As a result, the scholarly study of Islam has changed dramatically. Said’s challenge to re-examine the ways in which we in the academy write and teach about Islam and Muslims has had a major impact. Today there is a greater diversity of approaches to the study of Islam in the global academy than ever before. For one thing, many more Muslims scholars, from a variety of religious and cultural backgrounds, are participating in the production of this scholarship within the context of the common global academy. This has resulted in a far more open discussion and dialogue between Muslim and non-­ Muslims scholars.19 As a result, the vision of Islam presented by scholars, especially in the discipline of religious studies is much more diverse, much more global and thus much more “human” than it has ever been.20 Yet, although “Orientalist” scholarship has been deeply challenged in the years since the publication of Said’s book, “Orientalism” has far from disappeared. While many scholars of Islam and the Muslim world in some academic disciplines, especially the fields of religious studies, anthropology and history, have been deeply engaged in a critical examination of the nature of their work, that process is far from universal.21 There remain many, whom we might call “neo-Orientalists,” who are openly hostile to Said’s critique.22 This is particularly true outside of the academy where there has been a veritable explosion of non-scholarly books, articles, and websites written by quasi-academics, journalists, and others “critics” that seek to warn non-Muslims about what they perceive to be the inherent danger of Islam.

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Islam as a Legalistic Tradition One of the major ways in which “Orientalism” continues to assert itself is the tendency to present Islam as an intrinsically legalistic tradition. Many Orientalists and neo-Orientalists continue to read the classical sources of Islam, especially the Qurʾan and the hadith literature, as if they are primarily legal sources whose principal purpose is to provide guidance for the construction of the shariʿa, usually mischaracterized as “Islamic law.” There is tendency, even among scholars, to equate the religion of Islam with its legal textual traditions, or at the very least, to treat shariʿa as its essential core. While shariʿa is certainly one important element of Islam—and one that many Muslims themselves consider to be a crucial expression of piety—it is nevertheless only one aspect of the tradition, and it is certainly not identical with the religion itself. The assertion that the religion of Islam is primarily concerned with external or legal practice is both inaccurate and dangerous. Unlike “the West” which is usually portrayed as drawing on its religious sources to formulate abstract ethical guidelines allowing it to adapt over time to changing circumstances, the civilization associated with Islam is pictured as irredeemably bound by a rigid set of divinely sanctioned laws. It is analogous to the similar, but now largely unacceptable and discredited, anti-Semitic depiction of Judaism as a legalistic religious tradition, as if somehow the negative portrayal of the Pharisees in the Gospels or the legal prescriptions listed in Leviticus represents the essential character of the Jewish religion. Historically this depiction of Judaism allowed Christians erroneously to define their own faith as a “religion of love” in opposition to the earlier Jewish “religion of law.” Such a reading of Judaism is, of course, a dangerously pernicious caricature, made possible only through a selective and distorted reading of the Hebrew Bible and a dismissal of huge portions of the Jewish tradition. For many Orientalists and neo-Orientalists, it is law and ritual, rather than morality, which defines the piety of Muslims. Like the Pharisees, caricatured in the New Testament, they are, thus, inherently prone to violent and intolerant acts including the stoning of sinners. As one particularly strident neo-Orientalist outside the academy puts it: In Islam, there is no “natural” sense of morality or justice that transcends the specific examples and injunctions outlined in the Quran and the Sunnah. Because Muhammad is considered Allah’s final prophet and the Quran the eternal, unalterable words of Allah himself, there is also no evolving morality that permits the modification or integration of Islamic morality with that from other sources. The entire Islamic moral universe devolves solely from the life and teachings of Muhammad.23

Of course, this caricature is grossly unfair to Muslims, just as it has been to Jews. Both Islam and Judaism have nurtured voices who celebrate the concept of a universal humanity and the supremacy of love over law. In spite of this, the stereotype of Islam as inherently legalistic unfortunately continues both inside and outside of the academy.

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One danger of this overemphasis on law is the corollary belief that Islam is primarily a political movement rather than a religion. While the Prophet Muhammad was indeed a political as well as a religious leader, for the majority of his prophetic mission this was decidedly not the case. The earliest converts to Islam accepted his prophethood and his message of the unity of God, long before he ever served as the leader of a polity. Despite the arguments of some anti-Muslim neo-Orientalists that because of the political nature of Islam, Muslims must live in an Islamic state, millions of Muslims live happily and successfully outside of Muslim majority countries. In fact, in the contemporary world Muslim immigrants to countries like the United States and Canada often speak positively about their ability to practice their religion freely and openly without interference from the state in those countries and, in fact, see it as one of the things they most value about their adopted homelands. All of this points to one of the primary dangers in focusing on shariʿa when discussing Islam—the unfortunate tendency to translate the word shariʿa as “law.” While the word “shariʿa,” which literally means “the way,” is commonly translated as Islamic law by Muslims and non-Muslims alike, one needs to be very careful about identifying shariʿa as law in the modern sense of “the law of the state.” Despite the romantic notions of some contemporary Islamists who wish to return to “rule by the shariʿa” it was never the governing legal system of law of any Islamic state. First, much of shariʿa is concerned with personal ritual practice, which, except in rare cases, governments never attempted to enforce. The discourse of the shariʿa may consider daily ritual prayer (in Arabic, salat, in Persian, Turkish and Urdu, namaz) mandatory, but despite some recent attempts to enforce the practice of prayer in modern states like Saudi Arabia, historically there has only rarely been an earthly punishment for neglecting it. Whatever punishment may exist for those who neglect ritual prayer is generally understood as a matter for God, not the state. Secondly, even in terms of social practice, shariʿa was only one of several ways that society was organized. Despite the dystopian neo-Orientalist depictions of “shariʿa law,” the great majority of Muslims never understood it as the basis for a totalitarian way of life, and they never attempted to institute it as such. Rather than a body of law, shariʿa is instead a body of scholarly discourse related to personal and ritual practice. Historically, shariʿa has been in fact a relatively informal and flexible system whose closest analogue is, perhaps, Jewish halakha. Muslims may indeed consult specialists in Islamic law on issues of marriage, divorce, inheritance, and business. However, Muslim rulers rarely governed according to shariʿa, precisely because the shariʿa is not a legal system designed for governing a state. The actual ways in which Muslim rulers governed their states generally had more to do with issues of personal power, custom, and lineage than with religion. As such, the rulers of Muslim majority states regularly established all manner of regulations that were extra-shariʿa. Certainly, rulers often demonstrated their support for religion, including shariʿa, as one aspect of political legitimation, and often that support was heart-felt rather than simply cynical. They would certainly approach Muslim scholars (ʿulamaʾ) to seek validation and legitimation for their actions. Sometimes they received that validation and sometimes they did not. Moreover, when they did not receive the answers from the ʿulamaʾ that they

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requested, they would often ignore their advice and do what they wanted anyway. Suffice it to say, the relationship between pre-modern Muslim states and communities and the shariʿa was seldom straightforward. One thing we can say with assurance is that we cannot use the words shariʿa and Islam interchangeably.24 For example, there are religious communities and movements within Islam that do not consider shariʿa essential to their faith. For instance, the Turkish Alevi tradition, which we shall discuss in greater detail later in this volume, is one important example of a religious community that has replaced specific ritual components of Islam associated with the shariʿa with their own vernacular forms of individual and collective religious practice.25 Yet, despite their rejection of the shariʿa, most members of this community fully identify themselves as followers of Islam. The popular vision of a pre-Modern Islamic world governed by a routinized and all-embracing body of Islamic law is, ironically, one shared by both anti-Muslim neo-Orientalists and modern Islamists. Both neo-Orientalists and some contemporary Salafi Muslims are largely committed to the proposition that one can find the true face of Islam in the sphere of shariʿa, often in its most puritanical form. This is a position, however, with little basis in fact. Not only is this depiction of Islam as a legalistic and puritanical religion inaccurate; it also facilitates that notion that Islam is neither a humane, nor a humanistic tradition. The following book serves as an alternative introduction to Islam that challenges this legalistic portrayal of Islam by emphasizing the humanism that lies at its core.

Three Men and an Elephant: Describing Islam Over the course of my career, colleagues and friends have frequently asked me to recommend a good short one-volume introduction to Islam. I always find this a difficult question to answer. First, the idea that any single volume can serve as an adequate introduction to anything as complex as a world religion with more than a millennium of history strikes me as deeply problematic. Attempting to introduce a religious tradition to people unfamiliar with it, especially one as diverse and complex as Islam, is a daunting task. One thinks of the well-known story associated with the Persian poet Jalal al-Din Rumi about the three blind men in a room with an elephant who each describe it according to the part that they have had the opportunity to touch. The one who touched the trunk described it as like a snake; the one who touched its side described it as like a wall; yet another who had touched its leg described it as not unlike the trunk of a tree. All of us who teach and write about Islam, and I include here both Muslim and non-Muslim scholars and teachers, tend to view it through the lens of our own experience of the tradition. I am certainly no different. My understanding of Islam, of necessity, reflects my own personal encounters with the tradition. Although I now identify as a Muslim, I initially came to Islam as a total outsider to the tradition. I was not born into a Muslim family, nor did I grow up in a Muslim majority environment. Born in the early 1950s, I grew up as a stereotypical “white kid” in middle-class America, first

Three Men and an Elephant: Describing Islam

13

in suburban Long Island and then, from the time I was ten years old, in Oklahoma. For most of my formative years, to the best of my knowledge, I had no Muslim friends or acquaintances. Suffice it to say Islam was for me something initially alien and “Other.” Like many young people of my generation, I first developed an interest in the great religious traditions of Asia through their impact on the 1960s counterculture. Like other Americans coming of age in the 1960s, the relative intellectual freedom of the postwar period allowed me opportunities to explore a wide range of cultural and religious alternatives to what I was then experiencing as the rather narrow and restrictive monotheism of American Protestant Christianity. As a teenager, I developed a fascination with India and Hinduism, which arose in no small part from an obsession with the Beatles, something I shared with most young people of my generation, who referenced Indian religion and culture in their music and themselves traveled to South Asia in search of “wisdom and enlightenment.” This mirrored an interest in Buddhism, which was similarly facilitated by the Beat poets, who some years earlier had made Zen a critical part of the counter-cultural landscape of America. Initially, however, Islam held little attraction for me, particularly when compared to the more “exotic” polytheistic, monistic and non-theistic traditions of “the East.” Within the American counterculture of the time, Buddhism and Hinduism had a certain aura of hipness and cool. It was a time when Herrmann Hesse’s Siddhartha was mandatory reading and popular tomes such as Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance were best sellers. Islam, on the other hand, outside of certain circles within African-American culture, which young white people seldom understood or appreciated, did not hold the same kind of allure. If I thought about Islam at all, I imagined it as another manifestation of the puritanical, patriarchal and authoritarian religion that I, and many others of my generation, were in rebellion against. Islam seemed to me a religion that focused on laws and restrictions at a time when many of us in the counter-culture were in search of love and freedom. The one exception to this was the Sufi tradition, which I encountered in the admittedly idiosyncratic writings of Idries Shah and Hazrat Inayat Khan and various translations and rewritings of the works of Mawlana Jalal al-Din Rumi and other Sufi poets. Sufism seemed something simultaneously elite, intriguing and exotic. Moreover, like many Western “seekers’ I thought of Sufism as something only tenuously connected to Islam. Suffice it to say, I saw little in the religion of Islam that attracted me, either intellectually or personally.26 I eventually went on to study religion in a university setting, at Oklahoma State University, where my teachers deeply challenged most of my presuppositions and biases about both religion, in general, and Islam, in particular. The inaccurate and Orientalist binaries that I took for granted about the inherent natures of “the East” and “the West” gradually broke down. Among other things, I realized over time that not all forms of Christianity were puritanical and authoritarian—I especially grew to deeply appreciate the Quaker tradition and liberation theology—and, furthermore, that it was quite possible for Hindus and Buddhists to be every bit as closed-­minded, intolerant and patriarchal as the most exclusivist Christian fundamentalists.

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I eventually re-encountered both Islam and the Sufi tradition in an undergraduate course on South Asian religions at Oklahoma State University in the 1970s. The section on Islam in that course came late in the semester after we had already covered the Hindu, Jain and Buddhist traditions—religious traditions to which I had been automatically attracted because of their striking visual imagery and intriguing ritual and meditative practices. I had no expectation that I would find anything of similar interest within Islam. I had fully bought into the notion that Islam, unlike other Asian religions, was an unbending and intellectually arid monotheistic tradition, typified by a legalistic and puritanical attitude towards social relations, especially when it came to issues of gender. I therefore expected the upcoming section on Islam in South Asia was going to be both boring and alienating. I could not have been more wrong. My professor in that class, a remarkable woman who had grown up in the city of Lahore in pre-partition India, enthralled our class with descriptions of Islam as a religion with a deeply aesthetic dimension.27 She began our discussion with a slide lecture that introduced the class to the architectural beauty of the Taj Mahal as an inherently Islamic building rooted in Qurʾanic images of paradise. Most importantly, she also introduced us to the Sufi tradition, not only as a textual tradition, but also as an integral part of the religious lives and identities of ordinary Muslims. In particular, she shared with us her amazing photographs of the annual ʿurs festival for the great Sufi pir Muʾinuddin Chishti at his tomb in Ajmeer in Rajasthan. I saw images of qawwali musicians, wandering dervishes and malangs, as well as throngs of ordinary people joyfully encountering the divine in the presence of someone they thought of as one of “God’s Friends.” My mind was blown wide open as she made it clear that the Sufi tradition, which I had originally seen as some elite phenomenon on the periphery of Islam, was in fact something both deeply Muslim and immensely popular. I began to understand that Islam was just as vibrant and full of imagery, music, and ecstatic human responses to the divine as the other religious traditions of South Asia that had initially attracted me. From that moment on, I began to see Islam as a religion characterized by intense diversity, beauty and humanity. By the time I graduated college, I had decided that I wanted to dedicate my academic life to teaching and writing about Islam. When I proceeded on to graduate school at the University of Virginia in the fall of 1978, significantly the year of Orientalism’s publication, I did so with a burning desire to learn everything I could about the religion of Islam as a living and popular tradition. Perhaps for that reason as a graduate student I was particularly attracted to academic methodologies associated with the discipline of anthropology. I wanted to understand religion not only as a set of ideas and concepts, but also as something embedded in cultural and social practice. Of course, as a scholar of Islam I was also interested in its classical textual tradition of Islam as it is represented by shariʿa and theology (kalam) which are certainly critical aspects of the Islamic tradition. However, it was Islam’s more popular and performative aspects that most powerfully captured my imagination. Furthermore, as a working musician, I found myself particularly impressed by musical expressions of piety within Islam—qawwali in Pakistan through its great practitioners, such as Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and the Sabri

Three Men and an Elephant: Describing Islam

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Fig. 1.2  Statue of renowned Alevi musician Mahzuni Şerif at his memorial near the tomb of Hacı Bektaş Veli in Turkey

Brothers, and, later on in my career, the remarkable türkü and nefes traditions associated with the Alevis of Turkey through artists like Arıf Sağ, Sabahat Akkiraz, and Mahzuni Şerif (Fig. 1.2). However, my initial academic exposure to Islam came largely through books. It was not until I was thirty years old and traveled to Pakistan, to study Urdu in Lahore, that I finally had an opportunity to encounter Islam as a lived and living tradition in a Muslim majority environment. From that time forward, my personal encounters with Muslims, have deeply transformed my understanding of Islam. Through those encounters I discovered that Islam was for most people not primarily a tradition about law, but rather a tradition rooted in love—both love for God and humanity.

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Both as an undergraduate and as a graduate student my primary teachers and mentors were scholars of the Shiʿi tradition, who were themselves from Shiʿi communities.28 It was therefore not surprising that when the time came for me to choose a topic for my dissertation research that I decided to work on the Shiʿi tradition. However, rather than the admittedly remarkable textual traditions of theology and law within Shiʿism, I chose instead to focus my research on Shiʿi Muslims’ emotional expressions of love for the Prophet Muhammad and his family, especially their evocative public commemorations of the martyrdom of Imam Husayn at Karbala during the month of Muharram. This ultimately became the topic of my dissertation, and later book, Ritual Performance in Contemporary Islam.29 As I continued my career as a scholar and teacher, I turned my attention to the Sufi tradition. As was the case with my research on Shiʿism, I found myself more interested in the popular manifestations of Sufi devotion, such as descriptions of the lives of holy persons in vernacular hagiography and pilgrimage (ziyara) to shrines, rather than in the systematic analysis of Sufi mystical theology. Over the next decades, I have had the opportunity to study popular expressions of Sufi piety in South and Central Asia, as well as, Anatolia. Looking back, I have come to realize that my approach to the study of Islam, which is rooted in my own unique experiences, has been very different from that of most of my colleagues from the same generation. I never studied with anyone who automatically privileged Sunni Islam as the “real Islam” or treated the Shiʿi or Sufi traditions as somehow peripheral. Perhaps as a result, I have felt an obligation to let the diverse voices within Islam, especially minority voices, speak for themselves rather than compare them to a presumed or imagined “orthodoxy.” I have been committed to finding approaches to the study of Islam that “decenter” the tradition. I have tried always to keep in mind the old anarchist maxim: “Let the margins be the center.” Rather than solely, or even primarily, looking back to the largely Arabicspeaking past of the first generation of Muslims to locate some kind of imagined or romanticized “pure Islam,” my work has remained focused on more vernacular expressions of love for God and those whom God loves, His Prophet and His friends, the awliyaʾ Allah. Instead of focusing on the textual traditions of Islamic law and theology, I have turned my attention to “popular traditions” of devotional allegiance, where I discovered deep repositories of the Islam’s humanistic core.

Islam: The Straight Path, or Is It? The following book represents an alternative introduction to Islam that mirrors my own experience of Islam as a lived and popular tradition. It is rooted in a nearly forty-­year-­long career of teaching and research about Islam. While there is no shortage of introductory books on Islam available, most of them, in my opinion, lack a sufficient appreciation of the powerful and vibrant diversity that, in my opinion, has always been at the heart of Islam. Many of them express a kind of unconscious “Arabo-Sunni-fiqh-kalam-centric” understanding of Islam that by its very nature

Islam: The Straight Path, or Is It?

17

treats the traditions of Shiʿi and Sufi Islam as somehow peripheral. None of them presents a vision of Islam that foregrounds vernacular popular manifestations of Islamic piety.30 Many introductory books follow a model pioneered in John Esposito’s landmark textbook, Islam: The Straight Path, which was first published in 1988.31 Islam: The Straight Path has never gone out of print and Oxford University Press has recently republished it in a fifth edition.32 Many colleges and university classes use it as a textbook. At the time of its publication, Islam: The Straight Path made a major contribution to the study of Islam by providing within a single introductory volume a coherent account of one of the world’s great religions. Since then, it has introduced countless college and university students to Islam, and for that, we are all in Professor Esposito’s debt. However, as the title of his book suggests, Esposito presents Islam as a religion characterized by a “straight path,” and in so doing, downplays Muslim diversity and instead emphasizes what he sees as the tremendous unity within Islam. As I read Esposito, he finds that unity primarily in terms of Islamic law (shariʿa), and more specifically, shared ritual practice. Esposito tends to foreground the Sunni tradition, or even more narrowly the legal and theological textual traditions within Sunni Islam, as Islam’s “orthodoxy,” and consequently presents the Shiʿi and Sufi traditions as additions or opposition to the “mainstream” of Islam. Furthermore, his approach is decidedly “Arabo-centric” emphasizing the formative period of Islam when Arab Muslims were the dominant force in the political and cultural life of Islam. Similarly, he tends to downplay Islam’s crucial middle period, from the Mongol conquest of Baghdad in 1258 until the rise of modernity and European political dominance in the eighteenth century, when Turkic and Persian speakers brought their own cultural vitality into the community of Islam. This later medieval period is, in fact, one of the most important within all of Islamic history. It saw a veritable explosion of vernacular Islamic literatures. In politics, it witnessed the rise of great Eurasian empires like the Safavids, the Mughals, and the Ottomans. In terms of religion, this was the period when, because of the rise of the great Sufi orders (tariqas), the emerging Sufi tradition became an integral component of Islamic thought and practice. These tariqas, in many ways, served as the defining institutions of the medieval Islamic world. Esposito includes only a handful of pages on this period of history and as a result, Islam: The Straight Path provides only minimal coverage of the Islamic mystical tradition. There are of course, numerous other introductory volumes on Islam. While many of these avoid the overt essentializing of the classical textual legal and theological tradition that lies at the heart of Esposito’s work, most of them follow a similar pattern to Islam: The Straight Path. They begin with a brief description of pre-Islamic Arabia and its environs, followed by a discussion of the life of the Prophet Muhammad and the Qurʾan, and then a discussion of Islamic law, and perhaps theology, which they usually treat as the central core of Islam. They typically provide a brief description of Islamic “sectarianism” often expressed in terms of how Shiʿi groups differ from “orthodoxy,” followed by one or two chapters on Sufism. Some include a final section on modern and contemporary Islam that inevitably emphasizes the rise of conservative and puritanical, and largely anti-Sufi, reform

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movements like those associated with Jamal al-Din Afghani, Hasan al-Banna, Sayyid Qutb, and Maulana Maududi, often defining them as responses to “the West.” To be fair, the majority of these books do a more than adequate job within the paradigm they follow of presenting the crucial facts necessary for imparting cultural literacy about Islam. I have myself used several of them over the years in teaching my own courses. However, there are obvious problems that arise from this model. It does nothing to correct Esposito’s tendency to treat shariʿa-oriented Sunni piety as the “real Islam.” It distorts the role of Sufi thought and practice within Islam, by implying that Sufism is somehow a later peripheral addition to the more essential core of Islam that is shariʿa law, which is, of course, not the position held by adherents to the Sufi tradition. Moreover, the way in which these books discuss modern Islam by emphasizing “conservative reformers” gives the false and almost teleological impression that somehow “fundamentalism” or “Islamism” is the dominant manifestation of the Islamic tradition in the contemporary world. Equally disturbing, this model portrays Islam in ways that imply it is an inherently static system, which reacts to change only when forced to do so by external circumstances. It creates the illusion that Islam remained largely unchanged from the Mongol conquest of Baghdad up until the rise of Western dominance in the forms of colonialism and neo-colonialism, which finally forced Muslims to respond to modernity. This ignores the way that Muslims have continuously adapted their religion to changing circumstances, a process that began long before Europe and America came to dominate the global economic and political system.

Islam or Islam(s)?: Accounting for Islamic Diversity The main problem with this approach is that in its search for the unity underlying Islam it fails to deal effectively with the issue of Islamic diversity. It assumes that there is a “straight path,” an “orthodoxy to which all other version of Islam can be compared. In reality, Islam, like any complex historical religious tradition, is far too large and diverse to be defined or confined by any one particular notion of “orthodoxy.” Despite numerous attempts by powerful voices within the umma to reduce Islam to a single orthodoxy Muslims have continuously disagreed—often vigorously—about what Islam is. As Michael Muhammed Knight has eloquently put it: Wherever there’s a story of control, there’s a story of resistance; wherever there’s narrative, there’s counter-narrative. Find the Caliph and you find the Anti-Caliph. Find the ground, and you find the underground. Neither the ground nor the underground are stable. What we call “Islam” works the same way. Islam has no existence outside our language…Islam is there because we have all agreed that it is there, even if we don’t agree on what exactly it means…Islam also has an underground, a counter-narrative to the Islam(s) of power…the Islamic story of power will say, “Love it or leave it,” as though the Islamic story of power is the only Islam, and anyone wanting to wear the title of “Muslim” has to step through its gate….Beneath or beyond the absolutism, Islam has always been home to misfits, freaks, rebels, and queers…Islam has a “counter-Islamic” legacy that’s fully Islamic.33

Talal Asad: Islam as a Discursive Tradition

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Islam is not an easily defined univocal religious tradition, but instead a complex historical phenomenon characterized by its diversity; a diversity that is the inevitable result of the processual nature of Islam as a historical reality. All Muslims maintain a connection to what Kenneth Cragg has called “the event of the Qurʾan,” and with it, a shared acceptance of the authority of the Prophet Muhammad and the revelations he delivered over the course of his career that over time were collected in the Qurʾan.34 However, the ways in which Muslims have interpreted and responded to that authority over time, and the institutions that they have constructed in the process of doing so, have been conditioned by historical and communal circumstances, as well as the personal abilities and experiences of individual believers. As a result, Muslim communities and individuals have understood and expressed their Islam in a wide variety of ways that are sometimes contradictory. These range from relatively puritanical shariʿa -minded communities, who emphasize adherence to “legal” or ritual prescriptions as the essence of faith, to mystical groups, who downplay the shariʿa and instead emphasize love and devotion to God and spiritually significant human beings as the central facet of religious piety. In the face of Islam’s obvious diversity, I believe we must consciously decenter the tradition of Islam by refusing to privilege any particular Muslim community or worldview as the “real Islam.” To consider any one particular form of Muslim thought or practice to be somehow more or less “Islamic” than another is both inappropriate and inaccurate. To do so is inherently unfair to the numerous minority voices within the umma. If we enshrine shariʿa -minded Sunni Islam as the Muslim orthodoxy, we will inevitably treat minority Shiʿi and Sufi pieties, and shariʿa non-­ compliant forms of Islam as peripheral or, even worse, “heterodox” manifestations of Islam. Therefore, in this book, I am taking a different approach. Instead of emphasizing Islam’s unity, I have chosen instead to focus on its remarkable diversity as one of its defining characteristics. In fact, when I first thought about writing this book, I initially considered entitling, Islam: Diverse Paths, in contrast to Islam: The Straight Path, precisely because of its focus on Islam’s remarkable diversity. Of course, this foregrounding of the obvious and undeniable diversity within the historical phenomenon of Islam leads to some obvious questions: Is there any discernible unity or coherence that underlies that diversity? Is there any meaningful way to define the religion of Islam? Or, as the late Shahab Ahmed poses the query, “Is Islam whatever Muslims say it is?” If so, should we stop talking about Islam and instead speak only about “Islams?”35

Talal Asad: Islam as a Discursive Tradition In recent years, many scholars of Islam have championed the anthropologist Talal Asad’s definition of Islam36 as “a discursive tradition that includes and relates to itself the Qurʾan and hadith”37 In many ways, Asad’s definition is compelling. Qurʾan and hadith are certainly central to the Islamic tradition and Muslims have

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certainly engaged in an ongoing dialogue with them in their quest to determine how best to live. Most importantly, by framing Islam in this way, Asad presents Islam as a processual tradition capable of development and change in way that helps to explain its remarkable diversity.38 However, as the aforementioned Shahab Ahmed observes in his posthumous volume, What is Islam?: The Importance of Being Islamic, Asad’s conclusions rest upon a somewhat narrow and conservative notion of tradition. For Asad, tradition consists “essentially of discourses that seek to instruct practitioners regarding the correct form and purpose of a given practice.” This leads him to conclude that the “discursive tradition” of Islam is largely focused on issues of “prescriptive authority.” To put it more simply, for Asad the discursive tradition of Islam is primarily oriented towards the creation of “orthodoxy.”39 For Asad, this quest for orthodoxy is the crux of the Islamic tradition. While he fully recognizes tremendous diversity within Islam, all of its different manifestations share in common this search for orthodoxy and prescriptive authority.40 Of course, Asad is not arguing that there is a single orthodox Islam. Rather, he recognizes a multiplicity of competing traditions that have emerged as a result of the ongoing quest to find and implement it. Nevertheless, by defining Islam as a “discursive tradition” limited primarily to a dialogue with its core texts, and identifying the construction of orthodoxy as the center of that process, he tends to drown out other equally important processes. By limiting the concept of Islamic discourse specifically to a dialogue with Qurʾan and hadith, Asad reinforces the notion that Islam is a textually bound tradition, the creation of literary elites consciously involved in the rational process of constructing a prescriptive Islamic orthodoxy.41

Shahab Ahmed and the Critique of Asad Perhaps the most powerful critique of Asad’s approach to Islam has come from the aforementioned Shahab Ahmed. For Ahmed, rather than a prescriptive tradition in search of an orthodoxy, Islam is an exploratory tradition. For Ahmed, Islam’s discourse: is not governed by an authoritative urge to fix the limitations of correct practice—rather it is informed by the urge to explore and expand the dimensions of the meaningful…”42

Tellingly, Ahmed begins his book with a series of questions about aspects of Islam that seem to challenge the commonly accepted understandings of Islam as a prescriptive legal tradition. What are we to make of the arguments of Islamic philosophers that there exists a truth higher than that achieved by the prophets? How should we understand the assertion of some Sufis that those “Friends of God” who have achieved unity with ultimate Reality are no longer bound by the shariʿa? How are the seemingly monistic claims of divine unity associated with important mystical thinkers like Suhrawardi and Ibn ʿArabi compatible with the Islamic

The “Pre-Text”

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monotheism? How can we account for the immense popularity of the poetry of Hafiz and other medieval poets, which seems to glorify acts of drinking and eroticism that are forbidden within the confines of the shariʿa? Given the explicit shariʿa prohibitions against making images of living beings, how are we to make sense of the rich tradition of Islamic religious art? Perhaps most strikingly, what are we to make of the popularity of wine and wine-drinking within the civilization created by Muslims? We. of course, could answer these questions by noting that Muslims, like everyone else, do not always follow their religion as rigorously as they could; that is to say, Muslims believe and do these things in spite of being Muslims. However, as Ahmed points out, the Muslims who accept these beliefs and engage in these activities generally do not do so in spite of Islam but because of it. That is to say, they understand their behaviors and beliefs to be Islamic. For Ahmed, Islam is not merely diverse; it both includes and embraces contradiction. As Ahmed puts it, “How does one pin down a phenomenon that appears so diffuse and dispersed, so complex and multi-form, so various and contradictory?”43 Furthermore, unlike Asad, Ahmed contends that Islam is much more than its primary texts, or even a discourse about them.44 For Ahmed, Islam is not only a discursive tradition that engages its “Texts,” it is a hermeneutical tradition that also engages what he calls its “Pre-Text” and a “Context.” All three—“Text,” “Pre-Text” and “Context”—are essential to the religion of Islam.

The “Pre-Text” Ahmed’s argues that one of the central assumptions of Islamic belief is that there is a Reality that underlies what he calls the “Text of the Revelation.” As he puts it: The Text of the Revelation requires as its premise an Unseen Reality or Truth that lies beyond and behind the Text of the Revelation-in-the-Seen and upon which the act, Text and truth of Revelation are contingent.”45

Ahmed calls this Unseen Reality “the Pre-Text.” While Muslims understand the Text—in the form of Qurʾan and hadith—as repositories of Truth, even more importantly they understand them as evidence of this Pre-text, which is: the phenomenon of Revelation-in the-cosmos that lies behind and beyond the Revelatory event to Muhammad—a phenomenon that renders the whole cosmos (including the world beyond the Text) a source for Revealed Truth.”46

The Pre-Text exists prior to the Text and is “that upon which the Truth of the Text is contingent.” The Qurʾan does not, nor does it even claim to, “possess all the Truth of the Unseen made available in the Seen.” The Pre-Text is the truth that lies beyond and behind the Qurʾan, without which the Text could never have existed. The Text

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of the Revelation, the Qurʾan, and by extension the hadith, is only “an expression in the here-and-now of this world of the Truth of the Pre-Text of the Revelation.”47 Ahmed argues that the diversity within Islam originates not in a search for orthodoxy, but instead in a historical disagreement among Muslims over how one may access this Pre-Text, which is implied by the Revelation. Some Muslims have insisted that the Pretext of Islam, can only be found in the Text itself. Others have held that it can only be accessed and known through the Text; that is to say, the text may not contain all Truth, but it is the only reliable gateway into the larger Truth to which it points. Still others, such as Muslim philosophers and some Sufi thinkers, have argued that one can access the Pre-Text without reference to the Text at all. They have argued that it is available through human reason or through the experience of the beauty of creation, or of intense and overpowering love. To put it another way, Muslims have been engaged in an ongoing argument about whether the Truth-­ in-­the-Pre-Text can “be accessed and known without the Text, or via the Text, or only in the Text.” Islam as a historical and human phenomenon has included all of these positions.48 As such, Ahmed defines Islam as “the hermeneutical engagement with Revelation in all its dimensions and loci” both as Text and Pre-Text.”49

The “Con-Text”: The Product of Engagement To the twin notions of Text and Pretext, Ahmed adds yet one more critical element to the historical process of hermeneutic engagement. He calls this the “Con-Text of Revelation,” which he describes as the body of meaning that is the product and outcome of previous hermeneutical engagement with Revelation. It consists of the entire field or “vocabulary of meanings” produced in the course of hermeneutical engagement with both Text and Pre-Text.50 For Ahmed, Con-Text includes not only textual discourse but, in fact, extends to include the entirety of individual and collective practices that Muslims actors find meaningful in terms of Islam. It thus includes: prayer, fasting, visitation of saint-tombs, dhikr and samāʿ,… alms-giving, celebration of Feast days and saint days, pilgrimage to Mecca (or other sacred cities), marriage ceremonies, circumcision… funeral rites, animal slaughter, sartoriality, gestures of comportment such as modes of greeting, acts of hospitality, demonstrations of trust and solidarity, modes of domesticity and publicity, etcetera.51

What Ahmed calls the Con-Text constitutes the entire “human and historical bag-­ and-­baggage of Islam.”52 It is the full historical vocabulary of Islam at any given moment.53 In describing the Con-text, Ahmed uses the metaphor of Islam as a city; an environment of meaning built by the hermeneutical engagement with Islam of every previous generation of Muslims, into which every Muslim is born. He writes: Con-Text is the centuries-old city of Islam, a great and sprawling city consisting of edifices erected…by Muslims of bygone and present times, made in different forms and out of

Islam as an Affective Tradition

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different materials, in various states of preservation, renovation and disrepair, of wideranging functions with different degrees of use and dis-use, with quarters and neighbourhoods inhabited by diverse peoples doing different things—all of which are nonetheless component elements in a part of what is ultimately, for all its citizens, the same shared environment and ecosystem of living and identification. The citizen is the one who lives in a city with which he identifies and affiliates himself—even if the specific constitution of his particular identification with the city may differ from that of another fellow-citizen, and even as what he thinks is good or bad about the city (what he thinks should be knocked down or restored, what should serve as a model for further construction, and what he thinks should be abandoned) might differ from that of a fellow-citizen. As the citizen moves about the city, its diverse component elements invoke and provoke in him different responses of orientation, narration and attachment; yet, he recognizes these edifices—even the ones he does not like—as edifices of this city. And, even if some edifices are at some point destroyed, they remain in the memory (until such time as they are forgotten) as edifices of this city, as a part and parcel of its history and of the meanings that its name evokes.54

I find Ahmed’s mode of Text, Pre-Text and Context extremely useful for understanding the immense historical complexity and diversity within the religion of Islam.

Islam as an Affective Tradition Like Ahmed I see no reason that we should privilege the process of seeking orthodoxy that Asad argues is at the heart of Islam’s textual and intellectual traditions over other manifestations of Islamic piety. While what Ahmed calls the “Con-Text” of Islam certainly includes the formal and largely rational “discursive tradition” of the ʿulamaʾ and other learned elites, who have sought to uncover or construct Islamic “orthodoxy” by referring specifically to the texts of hadith and the Qurʾan, perhaps more crucially it includes an affective tradition rooted in supra-rational ties of emotion and feeling. This affective tradition is especially evident in the numerous vernacular and popular expressions of love and devotion to holy persons including the Shiʿi Imams and Sufi “saints,” that many Muslims see as essential to their religious lives. Many of these may at first glance seem only tangentially connected to those texts, but, as we shall argue, are nonetheless fully Islamic in that they are ultimately rooted in love for God and the Prophet Muhammad even if they may make no specific reference to textual statements at all.55 One comes away from most introductory books on Islam with a solid sense of the Muslim religion as a “discursive tradition,” built upon a largely rational process of continuous consultation with the Qurʾan and hadith. One learns much less about Islam as an “affective tradition” and often comes away particularly uninformed about those aspects of Islamic piety that are connected with devotional allegiance to holy persons. It is this aspect of Islamic piety, a piety expressed in terms of love and devotion to paradigmatic human beings, which I believe introductory writings about Islam have mostly ignored. It is also the aspect of Islam that needs to be made much more

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accessible to a larger audience. Islam, for most Muslims is rooted in love; love not only for God, but also for humanity. Furthermore, it is within this affective tradition, where we most clearly see the outlines of Islam as a humanistic religious tradition. Of course, the affective dimension of Islam, especially as expressed in the Sufi tradition, has of course received a good deal of attention from scholars. However, much of that scholarship approaches the Sufi tradition as distinct from the mainstream of Islamic piety. Interestingly some of the finest scholarly writing on Sufism has come from women scholars. Anne Marie Schimmel’s magisterial Mystical Dimensions of Islam comes immediately to mind as a work that has been deeply influential.56 Sa’diyya Shaikh’s Sufi Narratives of Intimacy: Ibn ʿArabi, Gender, and Sex brilliantly explores the affective dimension of Islam as manifest in the writings of Ibn ʿArabi.57 Rkia Elaroui Cornell has published important work on Rabi’a and early Sufi women.58 Laury Silvers has also made important contributions to this topic both in her academic work 59and in her historical fiction.60 If the discursive tradition of Islam built on a rational dialogue with Qurʾan and hadith is rooted in the realm of what the great twentieth-century anthropologist Victor Turner identified, as “society as ‘structure’,” its affective tradition is largely an expression of “society as ‘anti-structure.’”61 As we shall explore in more detail later in this volume, for Turner all societies contain a tension between structure and anti-structure. Hierarchy and status define “structure,” which expresses itself in “us and them” relationships. On the other hand, anti-structure is defined by bonds of communitas which are inherently anti-structural. Turner describes relationships of communitas as undifferentiated, equalitarian, direct, non-rational and existential. They reflect Buber’s “I-Thou” and “We” relationships. According to Turner: Communitas is spontaneous, immediate, concrete-it is not shaped by norms, it is not institutionalized, it is not abstract….It tends to ignore, reverse, cut across, or occur outside of structural relationships.62

Structure, on the other hand, is inherently different. Turner writes: Structure, or all that which holds people apart, defines their differences, and constrains their actions, is one pole of a charged field, for which the opposite pole is communitas, or anti-­ structure, the egalitarian “sentiment of humanity”…63

In terms of Islam, the realm of structure is that of fiqh and shariʿa, of the “prescriptive orthodoxy” of Asad’s discursive tradition. As for the realm of communitas and antistructure is can be found in Islam’s affective traditions of devotional allegiance and love mysticism. It is the locus of love, humility and empathy; the realm of humanity. It is this anti-structural formulation of Islam as a humanistic tradition rooted in love rather than law that I believe needs to be brought more fully into the public discourse. This is particularly imperative in the current religio-political climate, where puritanical and exclusivist versions of Islam that downplay this humanistic formulation of Islamic piety in favor of prescriptive orthodoxy—movements like Salafism, Wahhabism, and organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood, ISIL, and Jamati Islami—have effectively dominated the attention not only of the media but much of the scholarly discourse on Islam as well.

Challenging Textual Essentialism

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Challenging Textual Essentialism Interestingly the radical puritanical and exclusivist version of Islam rests on an approach that shares a great deal in common with Orientalism. Both present “essentialist” visions of Islam. Both seek to locate the “real Islam” in an “orthodoxy” based upon the rational interpretation of its primary sources, the Qurʾan and hadith, and the practice of the first generations of Muslims. Both argue that their interpretation represents the most credible version of Islam available. Both depict Islam as a static, unchanging, and legalistic tradition. Both ultimately can seem to depict Islam as an inhumane tradition. Both as a Muslim and as a scholar of Islam, I believe that this essentialist view needs to be challenged. As a scholar, I believe it must be challenged because it is historically inaccurate. As a Muslim, I want the opportunity to defend the diverse religious tradition I call my spiritual home from those who would reduce it to something inherently narrow, intolerant, legalistic and inhumane. One way to confront Islamic essentialism is to challenge the univocal interpretations of the primary sources of Islam upon which it rests. To that end, there are many talented scholars of Islam, particularly Muslim scholars, who are engaged in the project of re-evaluating and re-interpreting the Qurʾan and hadith in ways that demonstrate the possibility of an alternative more humane Islam—an Islam that is, for example, feminist, pro-LGBTQ, or liberationist in its perspective. This is the enterprise of many who identify themselves as “progressive Muslims.”64 The project of progressive Muslims, at least as some of them present it, is to produce a more humane alternative interpretation of the texts that define Islam. Much of this scholarship has been of a very high caliber and has produced some extremely convincing arguments. By pointing out alternative ways Muslims can (and do) interpret their primary sources, this approach undoubtedly helps to defuse the notion of a single univocal puritanical and legalistic Islam. However, it is not without its critics, including those who argue that progressive Muslims maintain an essentially “Protestant approach” to Islam, a call for Muslims to go back to the original sources and seek their real meaning; an approach that ironically mirrors the interpretive projects of the Salafis and other conservative nineteenth- and twentieth-century reformers it sets out to challenge. While this aspect of the project of progressive Muslims is one necessary facet in countering both neo-Orientalism and Salafi depictions of Islam, unfortunately, it tends to reaffirm the idea that Islam is defined by a prescribed set of classical and authoritative texts, especially Arabic texts. As long as the discussion focuses entirely on these texts and their interpretation, it risks becoming a series of arguments between competing expert witnesses. While the study of the textual sources of any religious tradition is undoubtedly an important aspect of the academic study of religion, and this is especially true with a tradition like Islam, which claims a revealed book as a primary source for the tradition, no religion—and this certainly includes Islam—can be reduced to its primary classical textual sources. Perhaps we should instead change the terms of the discussion.

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1  Introduction: Teaching Humanity—Islam as a Humanistic Tradition

 oving Beyond the Text: There Is a Reason They Call It M Folk Wisdom I believe it is crucial that the field of religious studies move beyond the study of primary textual sources. For far too many scholars, religion is the study of what people’s religious texts assert and, beyond that, what authority figures within the tradition have to say about the interpretation of those texts. Any religious tradition is certainly much broader than its texts. It consists of the entire complex of ideas, practices, objects, places, emotions that believers within those traditions experience. In his book, Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them, Robert Orsi said this about studying religion: The study of religions ….is the description and examination of the varied media in which men, women and children who were formed by inherited, found, made and improvised religious idioms within particular historical cultural and political contexts engage shared human dilemmas and situations. These ways of taking hold of the world—prayer, acts of the imagination, visions, petitions to the spirits, theologies of grief and suffering…—represent diverse ways of being in the world that are moreover, not always at home in the present. They reach back into the past, although they are always made in the present, and as the world that comes is engaged by people in religious practice, reality itself is in play and the outcomes are not predictable. Crafted and recrafted by many hands, in many different places, and in contrary circumstances, religious media constitute the way that living people experience and construe events in their social world…and…perennial social problems.65

Thus, Orsi understands diversity within a religious tradition as the inevitable result of the input and experiences of the countless believers who encounter it in ever changing historical, social and cultural contexts; not only its elites, but all of its believers and practitioners. While Orsi developed his understanding of religion in his groundbreaking research on popular Catholicism, his insights resonate deeply with my own experience in the study of Islam. As scholars of religion, we need to expand our gaze and engagement beyond texts and authority figures and see how people encounter the world through the diverse and varied media of their religious traditions.66 This is particularly true in the case of Islam. In order to gain a fuller appreciation Islam, we need to take a serious look at the realm of religious thought and practice that too many scholars dismiss as “popular religion,” especially vernacular expressions of piety and religiosity. In particular, the study of Islam needs to pay far more attention to the so-called “popular Sufi” tradition and the way in which it permeates the religious environment. Of course, the study of Sufism has a long history in “the West.” In fact, the Sufi tradition, in its high culture expressions of poetry and theosophical writings, has always been prominent part of the scholarly Islamic studies tradition. Persian poetry in particular has drawn the attention of sympathetic scholars like Browne, Nicholson and Arberry. Scholars like William Chittick, Syed Hossein Nasr, and Anne Marie Schimmel have written wonderful accounts of the intellectual and theosophical dimensions of the Sufi tradition. However, the scholarly literature on Sufism has largely engaged it as a textual and intellectual tradition. There has been comparatively little written about the so-called “popular” Sufi

Moving Beyond the Text: There Is a Reason They Call It Folk Wisdom

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tradition—belief in the efficacy of devotion to Sufi “saints” (awliyaʾ), the rituals of tomb and shrine visitation, the telling of popular vernacular Sufi stories. Nevertheless, for most of Islamic history, belief in the existence of Sufi masters, whether hidden in the spiritual realm (ghayb) or walking physically amongst us, has been major part of Muslim thought and practice. Some of the most popular vernacular literature in the Muslim world is Sufi poetry, often sung to musical accompaniment and maintained as an ongoing musical tradition. There has been a tendency to dismiss these phenomena as “mere” popular culture. However, the countless Muslims who go to shrines, tell vernacular stories and listen to Sufi music do not devalue these practices as “popular religion.” They are, in fact, well aware of the profound theological and religious implications of their activities. Unfortunately, there is still a tendency among scholars of Islam to be dismissive of popular and vernacular religion. Early on religious studies—like other fields of inquiry—accepted a binary opposition between textual and popular religion, and that is particularly true in the case of Islam. The tendency has been to treat what “the people” do as a “small tradition,” different from the “great tradition” defined textually—to see the popular manifestations of religion as Frazerian remnants, as examples of decay or syncretism. A line still exists separating the religion of the non-literate from the religion of those who immediately engage the classical sources of the tradition. Thus, there are those who argue that to understand the reality of a faith one should consult authority figures—go to India and read the Upanishads with a pandit, go to Al-Azhar and read hadith with an ʿalim, read the Lotus Sutra with a Buddhist monk. These are, of course, all acceptable forms of scholarly inquiry but we should not assume that authority figures are always the best source for understanding the entirety of a religion.67 We should always remember that almost every religion also has its “folklore” which purposefully criticizes authority figures of the tradition be they haughty priests or arrogant ʿulamaʾ. In many of these folktales, the highly schooled religious experts find themselves bested by simple faithful villagers or peasants. After all, there are very good reasons that we speak of “folk wisdom.” In my experience, the “folk” know a lot, if we would only take the time to listen to them. This is especially true in the case of Islam. We are often led to expect that ordinary Muslims are somehow more simple-minded and naïve in their faith than the ʿulamaʾ. My experience in Pakistan, and later in Central Asia and Turkey, studying “the religion of the people”—which is, after all, the literal definition of “popular religion”—has shown me that the religious worlds of ordinary people are often remarkably profound. Rather than being at odds with the “classical tradition” the so–called popular tradition more often resonates with it—elaborating and commenting upon it—with tremendous insight and aesthetic power. The religious experience of “the folk” is, in fact, a complex phenomenon that demands our attention precisely because it challenges and edifies us as human beings. It deserves to be considered part of “the humanities” every bit as much as those elements of religion captured within the pages of texts.

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1  Introduction: Teaching Humanity—Islam as a Humanistic Tradition

Teaching Humanity: An Alternative Introduction to Islam In the chapters that follow, we will present an alternative introduction to Islam as a humanistic tradition, which places human beings, defined as morally responsible creatures uniquely capable of love and knowledge, at the very center of creation. We will challenge the all too common notion of Islam as a legalistic tradition. Despite the importance of the shariʿa for many Muslims, is not primarily concerned with law. Just as in Christianity and Judaism, morality (akhlaq) and justice (‘adala) are central concepts in Islam. Furthermore, the discussion of these issues has been just as vibrant and contested as it has been in “the West. Particularly through the Sufi tradition, notions of ethics (akhlaq) and the corollary concept of adab or proper etiquette, which were crucial for defining social relations in the medieval Muslim world, continue into the present day. Even more significantly, this book stresses the important role that love (mahabba and ʿishq) plays in Islam, especially in the mystical process of the transformation and perfection of human beings. Throughout we will stress the remarkable diversity of Islam, especially its so-­ called “popular traditions.” Rather than seeing a dichotomy between “the textual” and “the popular” we will take seriously the diverse beliefs of Muslims as they express them in different cultural and historical contexts. Throughout, we reject the idea that Islamic piety is only real when expressed in Arabic and that the multiple vernacular traditions of Islam are not worthy of the same attention as the classical Arabic tradition. These traditions are profound and irrefutable evidence of the inherent pluralism in Islam. Once, we look at Islam from the perspective of its diverse and varied popular traditions one of the central pillars of the neo-Orientalist position, the notion of Islam as a univocal and legalistic tradition falls away. Instead, Islam emerges as a profoundly pluralistic and multivalent tradition in which Muslims, like other religious peoples, use their religion to make sense of and creatively adapt to the reality of the human condition. That is the root of Islamic pluralism as it is of pluralism in any tradition. This book, the result of three decades of teaching about Islam in the context of a liberal arts College as part of the humanities, draws on many years of research and travel in South and Central Asia, Anatolia and “the Middle East.” It is designed as an introduction to Islam as a humanistic tradition which attempts to present an essential but often ignored element of the Islamic tradition, its inherent humanism—it emphasis on the centrality of the human being. Islam is a religion in which human beings are both the focus of God’s attention and revelation and the means by which that revelation is delivered; a religion that sees as its primary goal the perfection of human beings.68 Chapter 2, “Islam’s Diverse Paths, Part One: Patterns of Belief” provides a brief introduction to the study of Islam that takes as its starting point its inherent pluralism and diversity. This chapter challenges the assertion that Islam is resistant both to change and pluralism by instead presenting it as a complex matrix of interrelated and sometimes competing responses to a set of multivocal principles known as the

Teaching Humanity: An Alternative Introduction to Islam

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(usul al-­din)—belief in the unity of God (tawhid), belief in prophets (nubuwwa), and belief in a day of judgment (qiyama). The inherent multivalence of these principles has allowed for a tremendous diversity of belief and practice ranging from literalist puritanical pietisms to mystical theologies of love rooted in allegory and symbol. Chapter 3, “Islam’s Diverse Paths, Part Two: Patterns of Submission” addresses the emergence of diverse Muslims responses to Islam’s message of tawhid, nubuwwa and qiyama. This chapter explores both the discursive tradition of Islam as it is represented in the shariʿa, and the affective traditions of Shiʿa and Sufi devotionalism, as they have emerged in the context of the development of distinct Sunni and Shiʿi religious communities. Chapter 4, “Teaching Humanity: The Human Being as the Object and Means of Revelation in the Qur’an” explores the concept of the human being (insan) and humanity (insanyya) as they are encountered in the Qurʾan, focusing on the way the Qurʾan provides a specialized universal vocabulary of human virtues that are ultimately incorporated into most of the languages and cultures of the Islamicate world. It discusses the power of the Qur’an as sacred presence, as well as its form and content. The chapter focuses on two crucial narratives in the Qurʾan. The first is the story of the creation of Adam, simultaneously the first human being and the first Prophet, which provides a template for the ongoing discourse about the nature of humanity within the Islamic tradition. The second is the story of the encounter between Moses and the mysterious figure of Khidr, which provides an important touchstone for the Sufi tradition. Chapter 5, “Patterns of Devotional Allegiance in Islam: God’s Friends (awliyaʾ Allah) and Perfected Persons (al-Insan al-Kamil)” discusses the centrality of allegiance to holy persons as an expression of Muslim piety especially as it is manifested in ritual and narrative traditions related to Sufism and Shiʿism. This chapter argues that the Sufi tradition, defined as the belief in the existence of persons known collectively as the awliyaʾ Allah or “Friends of God,” far from being a peripheral aspect of Islam, has, for centuries, been the central component of Islam as an affective tradition. Focusing on hagiographical narratives from the Chishti and Bektaşi traditions, it explores how this affective dimension of Islam has been at the center of a powerful discourse about love—both human and divine—that permeates nearly every part of the Islamic world. Chapter 6, “My Qibla is a Man: Expressions of Islam Beyond the Law” focuses on concepts of insaniyya as they are articulated in the Alevi-Bektaşi tradition an important minority Muslim tradition which rejects the primacy of shariʿa. There is no better way to challenge the clichéd equation of Islam and shariʿa than shining a light on a form of Islam, which, while rejecting the rituals of Islamic daily prayer or the Ramadan fast, clearly adheres to the main Islamic principles of tawhid, nubuwwa and qiyama. The chapter discusses Alevi religion as a tradition that reflects important aspects of both Shiʿi and Sufi piety while maintaining its own unique identity. The book’s conclusion, Chap. 7, is entitled “Religious Extremism: Not an Excess of Religion, but a Lack of Humanity.” It provides both a recap of its major themes

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1  Introduction: Teaching Humanity—Islam as a Humanistic Tradition

and a discussion of the question of “religious extremism” in Islam. The use of the term “radical Islam” to refer to puritanical, violent, and exclusivist interpretations of Islam such as al-Qaeda and ISIL implies that Islam at its root is essentially a puritanical, violent and intolerant tradition. Similarly, the use of the term “Muslim extremism” to describe such organizations implies that Islam taken to its logical extreme must inevitably transform into some kind of terrorist movement. In this chapter, I argue that “religious extremism” in Islam is not the inevitable result of something essential in its DNA, but rather a denial of the ubiquitous memes and concepts of humanism and humanity that are clearly present in the tradition. The chapter contains a critique of the way that many scholars seem to have accepted the perspective of certain modern “reformers” and Salafis as the normative face of contemporary Islam. The book ends with a call to rethink and redefine the idea of “mainstream” Islam, not as a legalistic religious tradition rooted in obedience but instead as a tradition that emphasizes the importance of humanity and universal human virtues which focuses on the centrality of love and surrender.

Questions for Discussion 1. What is humanism? What are “the humanities?” How are they connected? Do you think that the virtues commonly associated with humanism such as egalitarianism, compassion, fairness, courage, humility, and generosity are unique to particular cultures or civilizations or are they, in some sense, universal? If they are universal how might we account for the fact that the definition of what constitutes a good human being seems so similar worldwide? 2. Should the academic study of Islam and Islamicate civilization, and other non-­ Western civilizations and cultures, be included in the humanities or should the humanities focus on Europe and “the West”? Why or why not? 3. What is Edward Said’s main argument in Orientalism? Do you find it convincing? 4. Islam is often described as a legalistic tradition. What does that mean? What are some of possible repercussions of defining a religion as legalistic? 5. There is both a tremendous diversity within Islam and an underlying unity? How might we account for this “unity in diversity?” How does Talal Asad’s definition of Islam address this issue? How does Shahab Ahmed critique Asad’s definition? What does Ahmed mean by the terms “Pre-text,” “Text” and “Con-text?” Do you find these categories useful for thinking about Islam? Might they be useful for thinking about other religious traditions? 6. Victor Turner argued that societies (and religions), on the one hand, contain elements of structure and hierarchy and, on the other, communitas and anti-­structure. Do you find these useful categories for thinking about religion?

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7. Can the study of a religion be reduced to the study of its textual sources? Are the voices of “the folk” as important as those of religious authority figures in the study of religion?

Notes 1. All of the Qurʾanic verses in this book are based on the translations in Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Caner K.  Dağli, Maria Massi Dakake, Joseph E.  B. Lumbard, and Mohammed Rustom, The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary published by Harper Collins in 2015. For stylistic reasons I have occasionally made some minor changes such as replacing archaic pronouns like “thee” and “thou” with the more colloquial English “you.” In the case of this sura, I have chosen to translate the word insan as “humanity” rather than using the term “man” that is used in the original translation. 2. Marshall Hodgson coined the term Islamicate to refer to aspects of the overall civilization in which Muslims and the religion of Islam played a major role but were not specifically related to spirituality and religion. This is an important distinction as it reminds us that not everything Muslims do or did is directly related to their religious identity. For example, a mosque is an Islamic building, while an aqueduct is Islamicate. See, Marshall G.S.  Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, Volume 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 57–60. 3. Fazlur Rahman, Major Themes in the Qurʾan, (Minneapolis and Chicago: Bibliotheca Islamica, 1971), 1. 4. Encyclopedia Britannica, “Humanism,” https://www.britannica.com/topic/humanism. 5. Encyclopedia Britannica, “Humanities”, https://www.britannica.com/topic/humanities. 6. Arthur J.  Schlesinger, Jr., The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society, (New York: W.H. Norton Co., 1992), 133. 7. This worldview is perhaps most famously presented in the model now known as the “Clash of Civilizations” a term first coined by Bernard Lewis to explain the Iranian revolution, but later developed into a full-fledged political paradigm by Samuel Huntington. Lewis, a frequent advisor to U.S. policy makers explicitly presented his thesis that “Muslim rage” has its roots in an inability of Muslims to accept the dominance of the West and this is the root cause of Islamic fundamentalism in his article “The Roots of Muslim Rage” originally published in the September 1990 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. See, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1990/09/the-­r oots-­o f-­m uslim­rage/304643/ 8. This kind of rhetoric was, of course, used to defend the U.S. invasion of Iraq—the idea that “the West” would bring democracy to the Muslim world. It was undoubtedly the thinking behind the Bush administration sending the Straussian political philosopher, John Agresto, to rebuild the Iraqi system of higher educational system. Agresto was President of St. John’s College in Santa Fe New Mexico, a college whose entire curriculum consists of reading the so-called “Great Books,” and the former head of the NEH under Ronald Reagan. However, he did not know Arabic and had no real knowledge of Islam, the Muslim world, or Islamic history. So why was he was chosen to restructure Iraqi higher education? I would argue that he was chosen precisely because the neo-conservative advisors to the Bush administration believed firmly that the West had something crucial to teach the Muslim world. What Iraq needed was a specialist in the European humanities. It should be noted that Agresto failed in his mission. To his credit on his return he was a famously quoted in a Washington Post editorial by Rajiv Chandrasekaran entitled

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1  Introduction: Teaching Humanity—Islam as a Humanistic Tradition “An Educator Learns the Hard Way” published on June 21, 2004 that he was “a neoConservative mugged by reality.” I believe this attitude also explains why in the wake of the invasion the United States guarded the oil fields—because as Richard Armitage said in the run up to war the oil was “the legacy of the Iraqi people”—but did not similarly guard the libraries and museums. “We” simply did not see the content of those institutions as truly valuable. “We” had come to Iraq to teach, not to learn, because we believed that “our books” had all the knowledge we might need. See http://www1.udel.edu/globalagenda/2005/student/readings/rajivseries.html 9. http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00generallinks/macaulay/txt_minute_education_1835.html 10. For a thorough argument of this point, see Marshall Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, 34–39. Hodgson argues persuasively that there are, in fact, no “seminal traits” in civilization. All civilizations he argues contain their rationalists and their mystics, their authoritarians and their antinomians, their tyrants and their saints. To argue teleologically that any civilization is destined to a particular historical outcome by virtue of its seminal cultural traits is an act of intellectual arrogance. He gives the example of how prior to Mao’s victory in China most “China specialists” argued that China would not go Communist because of its Confucian heritage. After the rise of Communism, the same scholars argued that China clearly was destined to become Communist because the Confucian bureaucracy provided a perfect fit with bureaucratic Leninist democratic centralism. 11. This idea is represented in Islam by the hadith in which the Prophet Muhammad is reported to have said: “Seek knowledge everywhere, even as far as China.” 12. To take this line of argument even further we should, of course, also explore how they have been addressed in Sanskrit, Chinese, Japanese, and, in fact, in all human languages. 13. This proposed is the position of Martin Kramer and Daniel Pipes, who argued that we should stop Title VI funding of Middle East Studies centers that have in their mind been taken over by anti-American pro-Islamists and instead fund the study of the languages of the Muslim world through the Defense Department. See Martin Kramer, Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America, (Washington D.C.: The Washington Institute for Policy Studies, 2001). 14. Edward Said, Orientalism, (New York: Vintage, 1979). I entered graduate school at the University of Virginia in 1978, the year Orientalism was first published. Not surprisingly, discussions about that book and the ideas within it among students and faculty were a central aspect of my graduate education. Professor Said’s book, and the arguments surrounding it, had a tremendous impact on the course and direction of my intellectual and scholarly development, as well as that of many scholars of my generation. 15. The arguments surrounding Orientalism have now become so thoroughly politicized— especially when viewed, as they inevitably have been, through the lens of the ongoing and seemingly intractable Arab-Israeli conflict—that many scholars find them no longer productive. There are those who reject Orientalism out of hand arguing that he overstates his case or omits writers or books that might challenge his argument. Others reject the critique of colonialism and imperialism that lies at the heart of Orientalism. At this point, few minds will be changed one way or the other as to the ultimate accuracy or importance of Said’s critique. Some, quite unfairly, object to his tone, which they dismiss as either arrogant or belligerent. But it is hard to overestimate the impact his work has had not only the study of Islam but in writing about non-European civilizations and peoples in general. 16. The work of Marshall G.S. Hodgson springs immediately to mind. In terms of literary work, I think specifically of Dick Davis’ and Afkham Darbandi’s translation of Attar’s Conference of the Birds and Jawed Mojadeddi’s translation of the Masnavi. In fact, there is long list of also remarkably sympathetic and objective commentators on Muslim culture and history including much of the work by Ignaz Goldziher and A.J, Arberry. 17. Said, Orientalism, 317. 18. Said, Orientalism, 319.

Notes

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19. An examination of the content and participation of panels in the Islam section of the American Academy of Religion, the major professional organization for academics who teach and write about Islam, in recent years reveals a far wider range of topics and greater participation by scholars of different ethnic and religious backgrounds and theoretical and methodological perspectives than one could have ever imagined in the period before the publication of Orientalism. This has led to a much greater recognition of the diversity of the Islamic world and a growing rejection of the essentialism that was a key feature of much Orientalist scholarship. Just as books about the inherent racial and ethnic characteristics of Jews and Africans that were once commonplace are no longer acceptable within the academy, scholarship about Islam and Muslims is similarly far less essentialist in its outlook than it once was. It has become increasingly unacceptable among scholars in the field of Islamic studies to write about Muslims as an objectified “Other.” 20. Perhaps most importantly, fewer and fewer of us who are employed as scholars of the Muslim world see ourselves in the role of “experts” explaining the “exotic” world of Islam to non-Muslims. For far too long, Islamic studies has been the domain of “experts” who would travel to the Muslim world, where they would spend much of their time abroad in archives and libraries seldom interacting with Muslims, and then return from “the field,” to teach “people” about “Muslims;” to teach “us” about “them.” Thankfully, unlike scholars of previous generations who could write about a community and return home never to consider what members of that community might themselves think about their writings, those of us writing today have no choice but to take seriously the reality that the people we write about will inevitably read what we say. They are no longer simply “our informants” but rather participants in an ongoing dialogue. They are subjects, not objects. In many cases, they are also our friends and teachers. While, it would be naïve to argue that there are not still “Orientalists” among us, it is also true that for many scholars trained after the publication of Orientalism the idea that we are “authoritative experts” charged with constructing the identity of the Muslim world has increasingly become a morally unacceptable and indefensible position. In my own case my decision as a scholar to focus on expressions of Islam in vernacular languages—including Turkish, Urdu, and Uzbek—rather than Arabic- and to conduct research on Islam as a living practice in places like Pakistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkey rather than focusing on the classical textual tradition, was a least, in part, a response to the impact of Said’s critique of the Orientalist tradition. My scholarly work has always focused on Islam as a lived experience. Rather than focusing on the exegesis of textual sources, my primary interest in Islam has been in the ways that Muslims from different communities within the umma express their piety. I have been interested not only in what Islamic texts say, but more importantly how actual Muslims have interpreted and responded to those texts, as well a non-textual institutions and manifestations of Islam. I have been particularly interested in popular manifestations of Islam—the ways that ordinary Muslims understand and express their belief in God, the Prophet Muhammad and those whom they claim as his legitimate successors. For me the study of Islam is the study of human beings working out the meaning of what it is to be both Muslim and human within specific historical and cultural contexts, and I approach that study no different methodologically than I would the study of the ways Christians or Jews or Buddhists or Hindus have engaged in similar processes. Thus, I seldom i­ dentify myself as a scholar in Islamic studies but instead as a historian of religion whose research focuses on Islam. 21. It must be acknowledged that the debate about the nature of Islam extends far beyond the confines of academic scholarship on the Islamic world. In that larger world a wave of neoOrientalists pseudo-scholars has been remarkably successful in convincing a sizeable por-

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1  Introduction: Teaching Humanity—Islam as a Humanistic Tradition tion of the population that scholars in field of Islamic studies are not to be trusted, discrediting them as “politically correct.” There is a wide array of best-selling books by conservative pundits calling for the West to wake up to the Islamic threat. More disturbingly, there is an emerging alliance between neo-Orientalists and a certain wing of conservative evangelicals who have begun to see Islam as part of the fulfillment of end-time prophecy and Muslim and Arab hostility towards the Palestinian occupation as evidence of the inherent evil of Islam. The neo-Orientalist view of Islam has, sadly, made deep inroads. 22. For example, there are some have argued that the proper role of scholars in Islam within the discipline of Religious Studies is to act as “critics” of the tradition, rather than “caretakers.” They feel it is a matter of academic integrity for scholars to point out the ways, in which they believe Islam, based on its primary sources, is at odds with the values of modernity. They have been particularly suspicious of Muslim scholars within the academy who have engaged in feminist or liberationist readings of the Qurʾan or hadith by arguing that such normative scholarship moves them away from their proper role as “critics” of Islam into a new inappropriate role as “caretakers” of the tradition. While on the one hand they are critical of progressive Muslim academics for normatively seeking to construct or find “the real Islam,” they almost invariably end up constructing their own version of the “real Islam” that seems designed to demonstrate that Islam is incompatible with humanistic values like egalitarianism, diversity and gender justice. For a prime example of this kind of scholarship one should look at the works of Aaron Hughes which I have commented on in my article “Thoughts on Dissecting an Octopus: Aaron Hughes, Marshall Hodgson and Navigating the Normative/Descriptive Divide in the Study of Islam” published in the Bulletin of Religion, December 2014. 23. Gregory Davis, Islam Religion of Peace? Islam’s War Against the World (Los Angeles: World Ahead Publishing, 2006.), 44. I first came across this quotation comes from the Islamophobic website Jihad Watch associated with popular writer, Robert Spencer. (See, http://www.jihadwatch.org/islam101.pdf.) It is no longer up on-­line. It points to the obsession the neo-Orientalists have with the so-called “closing of the “gates of ijtihad” in the twelfth century C.E. after which, according to some legal scholars, changes in Islamic law based on reason alone became impossible. From that point on, Islam became fossilized and stuck, in a medieval mindset and governed by a legal system that remained unchanged until the rise of the Western colonialism shook Islam from its “backwardness and complacency.” Not surprisingly many of the neo-Orientalists who hold this view of Islam are particularly drawn to the work of those modern and contemporary Muslim reformers— Syed Qutb, Maulana Maududi, Hasan al-Banna—who focused their reform efforts on rethinking the boundaries of Islamic law as if that is the center of Islamic identity and practice. 24. Kecia Ali has written brilliantly on this. In her germinal article, “Progressive Muslims and Islam Jurisprudence: The Necessity of for Critical Engagement with Marriage and Divorce Law” in Omid Safi, ed., Progressive Muslims: Islam in the Twenty-First Century. (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2003) she notes the danger of equating Islam with shariaʿah saying: When I state that Islamic jurisprudence grants husbands a type of ownership over their wives, I do not mean that ‘Islam’ sanctions this, that God intends it, that the Qurʾan requires it, or that the Prophet approved it. Rather, I intend to characterize the system of gendered rights and obligations developed by the jurists whose works I am discussing. (167) 25. See Ahmet KaraMustafa, “Islam: A Civilizational Project in Progress” in Omid Safi, Progressive Muslims: Islam in the Twenty-First Century, (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2003) 26. This tendency to see “the East” as a marketplace for mystical ideas, of course continues into the present day, see Sophia Rose Arjana, “Enchantment, Orientalism, and Modern

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Mysticism,” Maydan August 6, 2020. and her recent book Buying Buddha, Selling Rumi: Orientalism and the Mystical Marketplace, (Oxford: One World, 2020). 27. I am forever indebted to Professor Hyla Converse of Oklahoma State University whose exceptional teaching literally changed my life. 28. I had the extraordinary good fortune to study with Azim Nanji as an undergraduate and Abdulaziz Sachedina as a graduate student. I can never repay them for the tremendous insights into Islam that they passed on to me. 29. Vernon Schubel, Religious Performance in Contemporary Islam: Shi-i Devotional Rituals in South Asia. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993). 30. I should note that I have been teaching an introductory course on Islam for the last three decades. I have used a number of texts in that class but have relied most heavily on Marshal G.S. Hodgson The Venture of Islam, which I am convinced remains the single best introduction to Islamic history some forty years after its original publication. I have also used this in conjunction text written by his student Fred Denny, Islam: An Introduction, which is written at a level more accessible to most undergraduates, but has the advantage of being rooted in the worldview of Hodgson’s earlier work. Both are excellent resources. 31. John Esposito, Islam: The Straight Path, (Oxford: Oxford University Press; First Edition, 1988). 32. John Esposito, Islam: The Straight Path, (Oxford: Oxford University Press; 5th edition, 2016). 33. Michael Muhammed Knight, Tripping with Allah, (Berkeley, Soft Skull, 2013), 21. 34. Kenneth Cragg, The Event of the Qurʾan: Islam in its Scriptures, (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 1994). 35. Shahab Ahmed, What Is Islam?: The Importance of Being Islamic. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016) 36. Many recent works have made brilliant and effective use of Asad’s approach. Zareena Grewal, Islam is a Foreign Country: American Muslims and the Global Crisis of Authority, (New York: New York University Press, 2013) and Saba Mahmood, The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, (Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2005) provide two excellent examples. 37. Talal Asad in Shahab Ahmed, What Is Islam?: The Importance of Being Islamic). p.  271–272. Much of my analysis and critique of Asad’s notion of Islam as a discursive tradition in this book borrows from Ahmed’s arguments in his remarkable book. See also, Talal Asad,” The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam,” in Occasional Paper Series, by the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, 1–23. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University, 1986. 38. This is, in my opinion, the great strength of Asad’s approach; that it understands Islam as something processual rather than a static phenomenon resistant to change. Islam is diverse precisely because it is not a static phenomenon. As Muslims have encountered new historical situations, they have found ways to adapt and transform their religion to changing circumstances resulting in the remarkable diversity of thought and practice that one finds throughout the world of Islam. However, there are many, especially among conservative reformist Muslims, who argue that the whole idea of Islam as a changing adaptive religious tradition is problematic, if not blasphemous. They argue that there is indeed a “real Islam,” a religion firmly rooted in Qurʾan and hadith. It can be found in its perfect form in the pristine Medina of the Prophet Muhammad and the first generations of Muslims. For these Muslims avoiding bidʿa, or innovation, in matters of religion has become a central preoccupation as they attempt to reclaim the Islam of what they believe is the “pristine Medina.” This perspective invariably leads to a tendency to dismiss later historical expression of piety, especially vernacular traditions, as inherently non-Islamic. 39. Ahmed, What is Islam?, 281. 40. Ahmed quotes Asad who writes: Orthodoxy is crucial to all Muslim traditions…Wherever Muslims have power to regulate, uphold, require or adjust correct practices, and to condemn, exclude, undermine, or

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1  Introduction: Teaching Humanity—Islam as a Humanistic Tradition replace incorrect ones, there is the domain of orthodoxy. Although Islamic traditions are not homogenous, they aspire to coherence, in the way all discursive traditions do … An anthropology of Islam will therefore seek to understand the historical conditions that enable the production and maintenance of specific discursive traditions, or their transformation—and the efforts of practitioners to achieve coherence. Talal Asad, “The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam,” pp. 14–17, nn Ahmed, p. 271. 41. Ahmed, 82. 42. Ahmed, 286. 43. Ahmed writes that “the source-object of the hermeneutical engagement that is Islam is not as is commonly and narrowly assumed, squarely and delimitedly the text of the Qur’ān (and the Hadith)—that is to say: it is not scripture alone, or scripture in and of itself. “ Ibid., 343. 44. Ibid., 346. 45. Ibid., 346. 46. Ibid., 355–56. 47. Ibid., 346. 48. Ibid., 347–48. 49. Ibid., 356. 50. Ahmed defines the Con-Text as: the full encyclopaedia of epistemologies, interpretations, identities, persons and places, structures of authority, textualities and intertexualities, motifs, symbols, values, meaningful questions and meaningful answers, agreements and disagreements, emotions and affinities and affects, aesthetics, modes of saying, doing and being, and other truthclaims and components of existential exploration and meaning-making in terms of Islam that Muslims acting as Muslims have produced, and attached themselves to during the process of hermeneutical engagement with Revelation, See Ahmed, 356–357. 51. Ibid., 357. 52. Ibid., 357. 53. In thinking about Ahmed’s notion of Con-text I am reminded of Geertz’ notion of religion as a system of symbols. It exists outside of the believers as a tangible reality acting on them in ways that produce powerful moods and motivations by formulating a general order of existence. 54. Ahmed, 358. 55. I remain grateful to my colleague in the Religious Studies department at Kenyon College, Professor Joy Brennan, who suggested the use of the term “affective tradition” in this context while we were having a conversation about the writings of Talal Asad. I find this a useful term for encapsulating and describing my ideas about Islam in contrast with those of Professor Asad. 56. Anne Marie Schmimmel, Mytical Dimensions of Islam, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979). This remains one of the best introductions to the Sufi tradition currently in print. 57. Sa’diyya Shaikh, Sufi Narratives of Intimacy: Ibn Arabi, Gender, and Sexuality, (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 2012). 58. Rkia Elasroui Cornell, Rabi’a From Narrative to Myth: The Many Faces of Islam’s Most Famous Woman Saint, Rabi’a al-‘Adawiyya, (Oxford: Oneworld, 2019). 59. Laury Silvers, A Soariing Minaret: Abu Bakr al-Wasiti and the Rise of Baghdadi Sufism, (Albany State University: State University of New York, 2010). 60. Laury Silvers, The Lover: A Sufi Mystery, 2019 and The Jealous: A Sufi Mystery, 2020. 61. Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society, (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1974), 272. 62. Turner, 274. 63. Turner, 274.

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64. See for example, amina wadud, Inside the Gender Jihad, Women’s Reform in Islam, (Oxford: Oneworld, 2006), and Scott Siraj al-Haqq Kugle, Homosexuality in Islam: Critical Reflection on Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Muslims, (Oxford: One World, 2010). It is an endeavor I find both fascinating and illuminating and, as a Muslim, one with which I have real sympathy. 65. Robert Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006) p. 101. It is interesting how much this view of religion mirrors Shahab Ahmed’s notion of “Con-Text,” which is discussed earlier in this introduction. 66. My own scholarship has focused on religious practices that are not explicitly related to “Islamic law.” My dissertation research focused on the ways that Shiʿi Muslims in Pakistan commemorated the martyrdom the Imam Husayn—the beloved grandson of the Prophet Muhammad and the third Imam of the Shiʿi Muslims. Through this research I was led beyond the realm of classical sources into the world of vernacular expression of Islam— Urdu poetry and songs, miracle stories of the family of the Prophet. Instead of seeking out manuscripts in the archives, I purchased popular books and pamphlets in the local bookstalls. Rather than solely seeing out religious authority figures—ʿalims, zakirs and muftis—I also talked to ordinary people about their beliefs and their worldview. 67. This is, in my opinion, a problem with a lot of present-day interfaith dialogue, which usually has religious authority figures in dialogue with each other—priest, ‘alim, monk, rabbi, etc. 68. My thinking about this book has gone through a series of revisions and re-imaginings since I first began working on it over a decade ago. At one point, I actively considered crafting it as a much more intensely scholarly work on the concept of humanity (insaniyya) within Islam and, more particularly, the way it is manifested in devotional allegiance to holy persons. That would have been a book designed to be read primarily by other specialists in the field, or perhaps by graduate students and advanced undergraduates. However, over time I kept coming back instead to the idea of writing an alternative introduction to Islam that would reach a much broader audience; a book designed to be read by anyone seeking a better understanding of Islam and would also be suitable for use in undergraduate classrooms. As I proceeded in working on this project it became more and more clear that because of its emphasis on humanity and human beings such a book would of necessity have to approach Islam as an embodied and historical religion practiced by human beings who live in particular social and cultural contexts. This would require a historical approach, that is to say, an approach fully rooted in the discipline of history. To that end have frequently sought input from my wife and colleague, Professor Nurten Kilic-Schubel, a historian of Central Asia and the larger Islamic world who has decades of experience teaching courses on Islamic history. This book has been greatly improved by her input and participation of a trained historian. She graciously offered consistently helpful suggestions on this project in the hopes of producing the kind of text that might also be used not only in religious studies courses, but also in undergraduate history classes as a way introducing Islam as a religion in courses primarily focused on issues of history. It is our hope that this alternative introduction to Islam will not only be of service in the classroom but will be the kind of book that we can without reservation direct people to who ask us, “Can you recommend a a good introduction to Islam?”

Chapter 2

Islam’s Diverse Paths, Part One: Patterns of Belief

Defining Islam What is Islam? Who are Muslims? These may at first glance appear to be rather obvious questions, but upon reflection, they are remarkably difficult to answer. One commonplace answer begins by noting that the word Islam translates literally as “submission” and refers specifically to “submission to the will of God.” Thus, a Muslim is one who makes the decision to submit to God’s will, thereby becoming God’s servant. Fair enough. However, who precisely is this God to whom one should submit? How should this God to be known and understood? How does this God relate to human beings? And perhaps most importantly, according to this definition, how should Muslims best serve God? It should be no surprise that these questions, far from having straightforward and universally agreed-upon answers within the community of people who call themselves Muslims, have long been catalysts for discussion, and often, deep disagreement fiercely debated within the Islamic tradition. These disagreements have fueled the continuing development of Islam as a religion and have resulted in the rise of numerous communities of interpretations including the sometimes distinct, sometimes interrelated religious movements and institutions associated with Sunni, Shiʿi and Sufi piety. The complicating reality is that Islam is a diverse tradition consisting of numerous religious and spiritual communities. It encompasses an extensive variety of perspectives and opinions about crucial issues such as the nature of God, the nature of humanity, the role and nature of religious leadership, the relationship of religion to the state, the existence and role of holy persons, the nature and importance of religious law, and the possibility of mystical experience. This religious diversity is complicated by the fact that in the history of Islam, as in the history of Christianity and other religious traditions, discussions about religion that may seem on the surface to be about abstract questions of theology and ritual practice are often intimately connected to issues of politics and social organization. Just as the Protestant © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 V. J. Schubel, Teaching Humanity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22362-4_2

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Reformation had not only theological but also political consequences for the history of Europe, theological debates within the world of Islam about such apparently arcane issues as the “created-ness” or “uncreated-ness” of its sacred text, the Qurʾan, or whether the first Caliph was “the most excellent” of the Prophet’s companions were often intimately tied to political issues and movements. These connections between diverse religious positions and political movements continue right up to the present day.1 The diversity of Islam is an obvious historical reality that cannot be ignored, but how should one deal with it? As one might expect, Muslims and non-Muslims often perceive the issue of Islamic diversity quite differently. Not surprisingly, many Muslims address this issue normatively. That is to say, for many Muslims the most important way to address the reality of Islamic diversity is to ask the following question: “Which is the ‘real Islam’—the Islam intended by God and the Prophet Muhammad?” From a normative faith-based perspective the answer to this question is of paramount importance as it has serious repercussions not only for one’s religious identity but also for one’s salvation. A prospective servant of God should of necessity choose the “right path.” For many believers, Islamic diversity is not simply an academic question; it is a crucial spiritual problem that demands a solution as one’s salvation might depend upon it. This is, of course, an issue inherent in the discussion of any religion. Religions by their very nature engage the most difficult and perplexing problems of truth and reality. They claim to provide answers to crucial questions about the nature of ultimate reality and the human condition. They purport to tell us how we should live in the world and what happens to us when we die. Thus, it is not surprising that when discussing matters of religion many people are immediately drawn to the question of whether or not the claims made by a given religion are or are not “true.” There are, however, many important questions one can raise about a religious tradition beyond whether or not it is “True.” What do its adherents believe? How do its rituals and ceremonies function in the lives of believers? What does it have to say about issues of social justice? How does it influence the construction of gender? What impact has it had on human history? None of these questions require a direct assessment of the truth claims of a tradition. In fact, this bracketing out of the question of “truth claims” has long been part of the bedrock of the non-normative academic study of the religion. Even for believers with a vested interest in addressing the truth claims of their own religious traditions, there are many good reasons for studying religion, even one’s own religion, outside of a normative standpoint rooted in concerns of faith. For one thing there is a clear benefit to be found in striving to understand both one’s own religious tradition and those of other people, not necessarily to determine their “Truth,” but simply as an essential component of cultural literacy. Given its importance as a historical phenomenon, understanding religion in this way is clearly necessary for anyone attempting to comprehend the human condition. As a crucial part of our shared human heritage, religion demands our attention in the same way as literature, art, music, philosophy, or politics. How can we understand the history of

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Europe without understanding the notion of the “Divine Right of Kings,” the role of the papacy or the central issues of the Reformation? How can we understand the history of China without exploring Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism and their complex relationships with the Chinese people and the Imperial state? How do we make sense of the complexity of South Asian history without at least a basic understanding of the impact of Vedic religion, Jainism, Buddhism, bhakti and Islam on culture, society and politics? And surely, we need not become Christians, Confucians, Daoists, Buddhists, or Hindus in order to do so. Neither do we need to decide which of these traditions is the most “True.” Such an approach may seem obvious. After all, few teachers of “religious studies” in a contemporary secular academic institution would construct a course on the history of Christianity by first defining one particular school of thought and practice within the Christian tradition as the “true” version and then proceed by comparing other Christian communities to that “true faith,” perhaps even going so far as to describe those other traditions as heretical offshoots. Heterodoxy is, after all, a concept fraught with difficulty as an analytical category, as very few participants in any religious tradition characterize themselves as heretics. Within Christianity, the great majority of Catholics see Catholicism as the true faith passed on through apostolic succession, not, in the biased manner of its harshest Protestant critics, as an over-­ritualized distortion of the original teachings of Jesus. Similarly, Protestants do not see themselves as a heretical deviation from the Catholic tradition but rather as the rediscovery of the original teachings of the first-century Church that had been lost within, what was from their perspective, an overly hierarchical and ritualized form of the Christian faith. The issue of which of these two communities, if either, represents the correct form of Christianity in the eyes of God may admittedly be one that is crucial for Christians to answer from a normative perspective. However, from the standpoint of the non-normative academic study of Christianity the question of the truth of either tradition is perhaps best treated as fundamentally unanswerable, as it is ultimately a question of faith. Similarly, Mahayana and Theravada Buddhists may each see themselves as following the most accurate version of the teachings of the historical Shakyamuni Buddha. However, outside of a normative debate within Buddhism, is it either appropriate or possible for scholars to try to answer the question of which Buddhism is, in fact, the most “true?” Within the confines of the modern secular academy how could we ever hope to answer such a question? Similarly, it seems obvious that the best way to approach the diversity within Islam from a non-normative academic perspective is to set aside questions of ultimate truth claims and begin with a set of more manageable enquiries. How have the various communities within Islam understood their own traditions? Are there any basic beliefs and practices shared by all Muslims? How have those beliefs manifested themselves in practice? How have these communities interacted with each other? Such questions do not require an assessment of the veracity of the truth claims of any of the diverse paths within Islam. They do, however, require us to fully acknowledge and understand the nature of the claims made by the followers of those various paths.

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Islam’s Diverse Paths The concept of “paths” or “ways” provides an apt metaphor for interpreting the diversity within Islam. This concept of “the path” is an intrinsic element within the Islamic tradition that finds expression in a variety of different contexts. This notion is powerfully expressed in the opening sura of the Qurʾan, Surat Al-Fatiha (The Opening). When Muslims recite Surat Al-Fatiha they ask God to lead them “on the straight path (al-sirat al-mustaqim)-the path of those you have blessed, not of those who incur wrath, nor of those who are astray.” (Sura 1:3–4) Accordingly, for many Muslims submission to God means identifying and following the right path; the correct way. There are numerous terms associated with Islam which can be translated as “path.” For example, shariʿa, which is usually misleadingly translated as religious “law,” is an Arabic word originally used to denote the path to a watering hole. In the context of the seventh century C.E. Arabic-­ speaking desert nomads who were the original audience for the Qurʾan and whose very survival depended on access to water, it is easy to see the power of this metaphor. Another word for path in Islam is sunna, the term which is used to describe the body of religious literature compiling the actions and speech of the Prophet Muhammad and his companions, itself an important source of shariʿa, which literally translates from the Arabic as “trodden path.” The concept of sunna is rooted in the notion that Muslims should follow “the way” or “the path” walked by one’s spiritual ancestors. Similarly, in Islamic mysticism, a Sufi order or “brotherhood” is referred to as a tariqa, which is also frequently translated as “way” or “path,” as a tariqa’s practices, its spiritual path, are modeled on those of its founders.2 It is thus clear that Muslims use and understand the concept of “path” in multiple ways. A Muslim may, of course, concurrently engage more than one path. For example, an individual Muslim may find value in the shariʿa as an external religious path guiding certain aspects of his or her ritual and social life, while simultaneously following an interior mystical spiritual path, perhaps within the formalized social context of a Sufi tariqa. Such a person would see no obvious or necessary contradiction in the existence of more than one religious path within Islam. As might be expected, not all Muslims agree about which paths are complementary, or even acceptable. The history of Islam has witnessed the emergence of various communities of interpretation which have defined their own particular paths, or complex of paths. Some of these communities have constructed themselves in ways that render them necessarily exclusive and incompatible with the paths of others. For example, contemporary Wahhabis,3 and other Salafis,4 adhere to a narrowly exclusivist view of Islam and understand their version of “the true path” as the only acceptable way to submit to God. They focus on obedience to shariʿa as the primary expression of an Islamic piety rooted in a rigorous monotheistic propriety that rejects religious love or devotion expressed towards anyone other than God as a form of idolatry, or shirk. From this perspective, while Muslims should study the life of the Prophet and his companions to learn their practices so that they can model

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their ritual and social behavior upon it, overt acts of spiritual devotion to any human being—even the Prophet Muhammad—are considered unseemly, even blasphemous. As a result, they have sought to discourage highly popular acts of devotional allegiance that the overwhelming majority of Muslims embrace, such as visitation to the Prophet’s tomb. To the horror of the larger Muslim community this attitude led the Wahhabi movement in the eighteenth century to attempt to raze the Prophet’s tomb to the ground. In Wahhabi dominated contemporary Saudi Arabia, even though the Prophet’s tomb still stands as place of pilgrimage in the holy city of Medina, officially sanctioned “religion police” stand watch to make sure that no one among the multitudes of pilgrims to the Prophet Muhammad’s tomb offend the official religion’s narrow notions of spiritual propriety. Expressions of spiritual ecstasy in the presence of the Prophet are strictly forbidden. Nearby tombs of the Prophet’s family members and close companions have been demolished and left to lie in ruins and rubble. On the other hand, the great majority of Muslims, especially those who associate themselves in some way with Shiʿi and Sufi traditions, consider love for the Prophet Muhammad to be an obvious corollary of one’s love for God and, thus, an essential component of Islamic piety. Many Muslims believe that this love should extend to all those who have a special closeness or intimacy with God or Muhammad. For example, the largest Shiʿi groups, the Twelvers and Ismaʿilis, assert that in order to be fully Muslim, one must recognize the true “Imam of the Age,” a divinely ordained leader from the family of the Prophet Muhammad. Followers of various Sufi tariqas similarly understand devotion to their own particular spiritual master, or pir, as a Friend of God (wali) with a chain of authority linking him or her to the Prophet Muhammad to be a crucial element of their own personal piety, although they do not necessarily believe that all Muslims need to share that the devotion. And while many groups and individuals within Sufi and Shiʿi communities see adherence to shariʿa as an absolutely necessary element of Islam, others downplay it as a less essential aspect of external religion stressing instead the importance of one’s interior mystical path. For example, members of the Alevi community in Turkey consider themselves followers of the same Twelve Imams, descendants of the Prophet Muhammad who were divinely chosen as spiritual leaders of the Muslim community, as the larger exoteric Ithna‘ashari, or Twelver, Shiʿa community, which constitutes a majority of the Muslim population in Iran and Iraq. The overwhelming majority of Turkish Alevis do not participate in the daily ritual Arabic language prayers of their Sunni neighbors, and some of them even refuse to enter mosques, in part because the first Imam, ʿAli ibn Abu Talib, was assassinated while in prayer in a mosque. On the other hand, the great majority of Twelver Shiʿi Muslims who live in Iran, Iraq and South Asia believe that such prayers are required of believers and many are, in fact, especially scrupulous about their daily prayers precisely because they believe that their Imams performed these prayers even in times of great oppression and difficulty. For them, daily ritual prayer is a way to show their devotion to God by following the “path” of the Prophet and his family, which, they firmly believe, involved the daily practice of ritual prayer. It is clear that both of these attitudes towards ritual prayer are, in a very real sense, Islamic, in that they are rooted

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in love for God, the Prophet and his family, despite the fact that that love has led members of these two communities to very different, even apparently contradictory patterns of practice. From the standpoint of the non-normative academic study of religions, the central issue is not to identify “Islam’s straight path” by uncovering “the real Islam,” but rather to comprehend Islam as a religion consisting of diverse paths. From such a perspective, the problem is not to decide which of these paths constitutes the “true Islam”—an admittedly crucial concern from a normative theological perspective— but rather to find an approach to Islam that will help us to make sense of these diverse paths on their own terms, so that we can recognize the crucial differences between them without privileging any one of them over another.

Islam: A Man and A Book Islam is most effectively understood not a static and unchanging phenomenon, but rather, as a continually evolving historical process. One way to do this is to visualize Islam as a complex set of responses to “a Man” and “a Book.”5 “The Man” is, of course, the Prophet Muhammad, the founder of the historical Muslim community in the seventh century C.E. on the Arabian Peninsula. “The Book” is the Qurʾan, which Muslims believe God revealed to Muhammad over the course of his lifetime and which his followers compiled into the text Muslims have revered until this very day. All Muslims recognize the authority of the Prophet and the Qurʾan and show allegiance to both, but as we shall see they do so in remarkably diverse and varied ways. In fact, one way in which we can distinguish the various Muslim religious communities from each other is precisely by examining the different emphasis and interpretations that they place on one or the other of these two primary allegiances. However, the Prophet and the Qurʾan need to be understood not as clearly bounded and fixed entities but rather as part of a larger historical process, which the scholar, Kenneth Cragg, has called” the event of the Qurʾan.”6 Cragg points out that the Qurʾan does not exist only a transcendent text. It emerged in a particular historical moment to a specific audience of embodied human beings. Furthermore, the event of the Qurʾan is intimately connected to the person and the personality of the Prophet Muhammad, who was both the agent of its revelation and the leader of the community who accepted its message and his authority. Thus, the Qurʾanic event refers not only to the text of the Qurʾan itself, but rather to the entire complex of events that occurred during the period in which the Prophet Muhammad received the revelations which eventually became the Qurʾan, while he was simultaneously organizing and guiding the nascent Muslim community, as the later community has remembered those events. For Muslims this complex of events, along with the Qurʾan itself, represents the single most important set of occurrences in all of human history. Muslims continue to look to the events of that time, and the historical process that emerges out of them—a process that continues up through the present day—for ethical and spiritual guidance. The narrative of those events is their

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narrative in the same way that the Passover narrative belongs to the Jews and the Passion of Jesus belongs to Christians. It defines who they are as a community and provides guidance about how to live both individually and collectively. While it is true that Muslims accept the authority of biblical figures, such as Abraham, Moses and Jesus, and the texts associated with them, they do not generally turn to the Torah or the Gospels for solace and specific guidance in times of personal and communal crisis or for help in determining guidelines for ritual practice. What most vividly distinguishes Islam from Judaism and Christianity, with which it shares a common symbolic universe and spiritual history, is that its adherents look specifically to the Qurʾan and the Prophet Muhammad, and persons whose authority emerges from him, in order to both understand and construct the world in which they live. In this way, the Muslim community is a specifically “Muhammadan” community, not because Muslims somehow worship Muhammad, but because he plays a crucial role in instigating the evolution of the various paths that make up the diversity of Islam. Thus, the shahada, the ritual declaration that a Muslim recites in order to join the community of Islam consists of two interrelated statements. The first—“I bear witness that there is no God but God, (Ashhadu anna La ilaha illa Allah)”—asserts a belief in the oneness of God that Muslims share with Jews, Christians and other monotheistic traditions. It is the second declaration—“I bear witness that Muhammad is the Messenger of God (Ashhadu anna Muhammadan Rasulu Allah)”—that distinguishes Islam from other religions and establishes its identity as a distinct community by pointing to a particular human being to whom they feel a unique connection. From the standpoint of the academic non-normative study of religion, I choose to define Islam in the following manner: Islam is the cumulative tradition consisting of the entirety of diverse beliefs, practices, institutions, communities and religious media emerging from the event of the revelation of the Qurʾan, an event which includes both the Qurʾan itself and the life, teachings and person of the Prophet Muhammad, as well as the ongoing chain of historical events which arose in response to it. The community of Muslims includes all of those persons that have shaped and been shaped by that cumulative tradition, which they look to as their primary source of spiritual, moral and ritual allegiance and guidance and opportunity for the exploration of meaning. Islam comprises both ‘a discursive tradition, continually engaged in an ongoing dialogue with its primary texts, especially the Qurʾan and Sunna; and, just as importantly, an affective tradition to which Muslims are connected through personal and communal ties of love and devotion, both to the Prophet Muhammad and to those persons linked to him through ties of love and knowledge. Islam includes all of those institutions, practices, and media by which Muslims seek to engage the spiritual reality which they believe the event of the Qurʾan presupposes, whether or not they make explicit reference to Qurʾan or hadith.7

Seen from this perspective, Islam should not be understood as a static entity, but instead as a process emerging from the continuing struggle of countless Muslim believers over numerous generations to respond to the Qurʾanic event and the challenge it has presented to them from its very beginnings on the Arabian Peninsula in the seventh century C.E. up until the present moment. As we shall discuss in greater detail in the pages which follow, the man, Muhammad, and the book, the Qurʾan, presented a powerful challenge to their initial audience calling them to submit to a monotheistic God, identified as the God of Abraham, Moses and Jesus, and in so

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doing seek to seek to perfect themselves as morally responsible human beings. As the great historian Marshall Hodgson eloquently put it: Muhammad, with the Qurʾan, presented a potent challenge to everyone at Mecca; a challenge to rise to a level of personal moral purity such as it had occurred to few to dream of. He presented it as real possibility for human beings, indeed a necessity if they were not to risk offending the very structure of the cosmos in which they found themselves. And he presented it in a concrete tangible form in which, by an act of will they could adopt the new ideal practically.8

Muhammad and the Qurʾan presented Islam as means for perfecting human nature. They challenged their audience to submit to God in order to perfect their humanity. That challenge has continued to speak to each new generation of Muslims as the message of Islam spread beyond the specific cultural world of the sedentarized Bedouin Arabs, who first encountered it in the seventh century C.E., into nearly every cultural region of the planet, with each new audience responding to it in its own creative ways, bringing diversity and vitality into Islam as a continuously developing tradition. As a result, diversity has emerged as one of Islam’s chief characteristics and, arguably, greatest strengths. Both the Qurʾan and the larger Qurʾanic event are by their very natures deeply multivocal and continuously re-interpretable. From its very onset, those who heard the challenge of Islam and sought to submit to the God revealed in this Qurʾanic event did not come to a single univocal conclusion about its meaning or what the proper responses to it should be. The aforementioned definition of Islam emphasizes not only the teachings of the Qurʾan and the Prophet in the first generation of the Muslim community but also includes the entire chain of historical events emerging out of the initial event of the Qurʾan While there indeed have been Muslim reformers who have wished to strip away accumulated Islamic tradition in order to get back to what they believe to be the pure Islam of the Qurʾan and the Prophet as practiced by its earliest generations, it is also the case that most Muslims have related to Islam not only through ideas found explicitly in the Qurʾan and Sunna but also through vernacular expressions of spirituality, such as the teachings of Sufi “saints,” more properly “God’s Friends (awliyaʾ Allah),” expressed in narrative, poetry and songs. These are clearly a vital part of Islam. Nevertheless, it must be noted that the spiritual authority of these “saints” and sages is almost invariably linked, in some way or other, to the spiritual power and authority of the Qurʾan and the Prophet Muhammad. They are ultimately connected to the Qurʾanic event and provide opportunities for others to connect to it as well. This constant and continual interaction of new expressions of Islamic piety with the initial challenge of the event of the Qurʾan is the primary source of Islam’s rich multivocality and diversity. This might lead us to  the conclusion that there is no single phenomenon we can call Islam,” only a diverse set of Muslim responses; to the assumption that we can locate no “Islam,” only various “Islams.” Perhaps it does. However, even if this is the case, it in no way renders the concept meaningless. Clearly, the word “Islam” has meaning. It is neither a vacant cipher nor an indiscriminate cauldron of spiritual cacophony. Despite its diversity, Islam also possesses significant unifying characteristics. As clichéd as it may sound, there is indeed a “unity within the diversity” of Islam that allows us to talk about and understand it in coherent and meaningful ways.

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Islam: Unity in Diversity Muslims use the term “umma” to refer to the global community consisting of all Muslims. The umma is remarkably diverse. Its members live on nearly every continent, and speak hundreds of dialects and languages. They belong to numerous different cultures, each maintaining its own unique local customs and practices. However, the diversity of the umma is not only cultural. The Islamic umma encompasses numerous distinctive religious communities—Sunni, Twelver Shiʿa, Ismaʿilis, Alevis, a myriad of Sufi tariqats, and a wide variety of legal and philosophical schools of thought, to name but a few. Within the umma there are more than a billion persons, who bring not only their particular communal allegiances but also their own individual thoughts and practices into the mix. And yet, despite this remarkable diversity most Muslims would still agree that one can meaningfully speak of a single community of Islam, one umma. Where are we to locate the unity underlying the oftentimes contradictory beliefs and practices of the Muslim umma? There are many who have argued that this unity can be most easily located in the sphere of religious practice, especially ritual practice. Most particularly, some point to “the five pillars of Islam”—the shahada or “Confession of Faith” by which one becomes a Muslim: daily ritual prayer, the fast during the lunar month of Ramadan, the giving of alms (zakat) and the pilgrimage to Mecca, or Hajj. In fact, there is a remarkable consistency to the ritual lives of many Muslims, especially with regard to the performance of daily ritual prayers, called salat in Arabic and namaz in Turkish, Persian and Urdu. Muslims around the world share a common Arabic call to prayer (adhan). Those who participate in salat recite their prayers in Arabic, regardless of their mother tongue, and perform similar—although not necessarily identical—prescribed physical movements. Similarly, the fast during the hours of daylight during the lunar month of Ramadan and the Hajj pilgrimage are also largely unifying rituals, differing only in details even between Sunni and Shiʿa Muslims. For this reason, many introductory books and essays on Islam begin with a discussion of “the five pillars of Islam” which they present as the unifying center of the religion of Islam While there is a degree of validity to this perspective, it is not entirely accurate. First, there are important differences in ritual practices among various Muslim communities. Sunni Muslims pray five times a day. Twelver Shiʿi Muslims say the same number of actual units of prayer, called rakʿas, but they group them together differently, so that the Shiʿa effectively pray three times a day rather than five. Some Muslim schools of thought teach that when standing for prayer, Muslims should place their arms at their sides. Others argue one should stand with them folded in front of one’s chest. While such differences may seem slight to outsiders, they assume much greater significance among insiders, as they can effectively mark visible and physical differences between one religious community and another. However, Islam is much more than its ritual practices. In fact, many Muslims neither engage in ritual prayer nor keep the Ramadan fast. While most Muslims believe that prayer and fasting are indeed required elements of their faith, many of them nonetheless ignore them. Some simply neglect to perform these rituals. Many

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feel a sense of regret for doing so. There are many Muslims, like people of other faiths, who become more ritually observant later in life. Then there are others who, while still fully identifying themselves as Muslims, have consciously chosen to reject ritual as an essential aspect of their personal religious identity, instead emphasizing ethical and moral concerns. Still other Muslims belong to specific communities that have collectively denied the necessity of these practices on religious grounds, substituting their own vernacular rituals and traditions for the daily Arabic salat of the shariʿa. I am thinking here specifically of groups like the Ahl al-Haqq of Iran and the aforementioned Anatolian Alevis who have substituted their own distinctive non- shariʿa practices for “the five pillars.” For example, the Turkish and Kurdish Alevis consider the shariʿa only one door into Islam—a door that one can close and leave behind once one has proceeded to a higher level of religious practice and understanding through the mystical path of the tariqa. Of course, no one can deny that the shariʿa plays an important role within Islam. In fact, many Muslims consider shariʿa—and especially prayer—to be the essential expression of Islamic piety. The historian Marshall Hodgson coined the apt phrase shariʿa -mindedness to refer to this religious attitude.9 However, as the contemporary scholar of Islam, Ahmet Karamustafa, has persuasively argued, there is only one of “the five pillars” that all Muslims agree upon, and that is the shahada, the assertion that there is only one God and that Muhammad is God’s messenger, which one says in order to become a Muslim.10 For all of the others—ritual prayer, fasting during the month of Ramadan, the giving of alms to the poor, the pilgrimage of the Hajj—one can point to examples of significant Muslim communities who rather than perform them instead substitute alternative ritual and social practices. And while those engaged in normative religious scholarship might be willing to simply exclude these communities from the umma, because they believe that they are too far removed from some agreed-upon version of “orthodox” Islam, those of us who are engaged in the non-normative academic study of Islam do not really have such an option. There are too many Muslims who do not place shariʿa at the center of their religious identity for us to ignore; to exclude them from the umma would seriously limit our understanding of Islam as a human phenomenon. Of course, we should not ignore the fact that Islamic practice as presented in the shariʿa, especially ritual practice, is one of the primary ways that millions of Muslims express their devotion and submission to God. However, while shariʿa is one of the most significant ways that Muslims respond to the Qurʾan and the Prophet Muhammad, it is certainly not the only way. While the shariʿa may represent the clearest element of what the anthropologist Talal Asad has identified as the “discursive tradition” of Islam, a rational process rooted in the consultation with the Qurʾan and Sunna, we need to be aware that Islam also encompasses an “affective tradition” that rests upon supra-rational ties of emotion and feeling. Although there are certainly significant portions of the Qurʾan, which deal with legal and ritual practice, Muslims do not read the Qurʾan, solely or even primarily, as a source of law. It is much more than that. Even more than a source of law, Muslims have always treated it as a spiritual and mystical presence, which by its very existence orients Muslims towards God. In terms of its content, the Qurʾan is

Usul al-Din: The Roots of Religion

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only rarely didactic and legalistic. More often, it points ambiguously and ineffably to truths language cannot fully express, providing clues to the mystery of the Divine. As one Pakistani Muslim intellectual explained to me, we should think of the Qurʾan as a love letter from God, to be read and re-read as a lover in a long-distance relationship anxiously examines and re-examines letters from his or her earthly beloved.11 Similarly, for Muslims, the Prophet Muhammad is much more than just a “law giver.” The fact that the life of the Prophet Muhammad is arranged synchronically according to theme in collections of hadith (reports of things the Prophet said or did), at least in part for the purpose of constructing the shariʿa, should not diminish the importance of the diachronic linear narrative of the Prophet’s life expressed as a dramatic tale, whose telling evokes his presence. The story of Muhammad’s life, which reveals the content of his character—his voluntary poverty, his trustworthy nature, his love for his family and community, his courage in times of crisis, his grace under pressure, his forbearance and restraint towards his enemies, his kindness to the poor and downtrodden. The narrative of his life provides a continual touchstone and model for Muslim ethical conduct. Even more importantly, for most Muslims Muhammad is also “the Beloved of God (Habibu Allah),” whose light (nur) was the first thing created by God. As such, he is not only a model for human behavior but also a focus for devotion and love—for how better to show love to God than to show love to the one whom God loves best of all. Because of his immediate and intimate knowledge of God, Muhammad is also a primary exemplar for the practice of Islamic mysticism and the ultimate model for all later pirs and shaykhs, the spiritual masters of the Sufi tradition. In sum, if we identify shariʿa as the unifying aspect within Islam, we risk unfairly dismissing those Muslim communities and individuals who have either downplayed the shariʿa or, in some cases, over time even gone so far as to have replaced it with other forms of religious practice. Even more importantly, we risk overlooking the numerous profound ways that Muslims encounter and respond to the Prophet and the Qurʾan that have nothing at all to do with either social or ritual “law.” We should seek elsewhere for the unity that underlies the diverse paths of Islam.

Usul al-Din: The Roots of Religion While Muslims may not all agree about the role or content of the shariʿa in Islam, there are nevertheless certain key concepts which all Muslims agree are central to their tradition. While there may not be a body of common practice that unites the entire community of Islam, Muslims share a common conceptual universe of powerful sacred symbols. Across linguistic, historical and cultural boundaries, Muslims have been able to communicate with each other through a shared body of concepts which emerge from that symbolic universe. And among the most fundamental of these concepts are three basic beliefs shared by all Muslims that are part of what is collectively known the usul al-din (roots of religion). These are tawhid (belief in the

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unity of God), nubuwwa (belief in prophets), and qiyama (belief in the Day of Judgment). These concepts provide a conceptual unity to the umma, the global community of Islam. Simultaneously, the differing interpretations of these concepts tend to define the diverse and competing interpretive communities within that umma.12 One traditional way of explaining these concepts within the Islamic tradition is to imagine Islam allegorically as a tree.13 A tree consists of both roots and branches. The main branches of the tree of Islam, known in Arabic as the furu‘ al-din (branches of religion), are jurisprudence (fiqh) and theology (kalam). Fiqh and kalam are complicated and difficult fields of intellectual enquiry that require specialized training and a comprehensive knowledge of specific primary textual sources. For this reason, it is widely understood that laypersons uneducated in the intricacies of these fields can, and should, turn to specialists whose guidance can be followed in such matters. However, these branches of the tree of religion, like those of any tree, are a secondary and dependent phenomenon; they rely for their very existence on the roots of that tree which are referred to in Arabic as the usul al-din (roots of religion). It is generally held in the Islamic tradition that in matters of furuʿ al-din, on issues of theology and law, one can follow someone else. However, one must personally accept and understand the usul al-din, as they constitute the irreducible essence of Islam).

Tawhid: The Unity of God The first of these usul al-din is tawhid—the unity of God. Tawhid is universally acknowledged as the most fundamental belief of Islam. A belief shared by all Muslims, it is generally considered to be Islam’s deepest essence. As followers of tawhid, Muslims believe there is one and only one God. Tawhid was the central message of the Prophet Muhammad to the polytheistic Arabs of the Arabian Peninsula, who became the first generation of Muslims in the seventh century C.E. The Prophet and the Qurʾan together challenged the Arabs to reject all other gods and follow instead the one and only God who created and sustains the universe and will ultimately judge all of humanity. The unity of God is the central premise of the first declaration of the confession of faith, or shahada, the initial ritual act by which one formally embraces Islam. According to shariʿa, in order to become a Muslim one must declare publicly, using the Arabic of the Prophet Muhammad and the Qurʾan, “I bear witness that there is no God but God (Ashhadu anna la ilaha illa Allah).” An acceptance of tawhid is, thus, the first requirement for assuming a Muslim identity and taking one’s place within the Muslim community. (Fig. 2.1) Tawhid is, without a doubt, the central message of the Qurʾan, the book that Muslims believe was revealed by God to Muhammad over the course of his prophetic mission and the primary source of theology within Islam. Within the Qurʾan, God is most frequently referred to as Allah, perhaps best translated simply as “God.” The late Professor Fazlur Rahman notes that the term Allah occurs some 2,500 times in the Qurʾan.14 God is also referred to by many other names including the

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Fig. 2.1  Calligraphic representation of Allah on the wall of the fifteenth-century Eski Cami (Old Mosque) in Edirne, Turkey

Lord (al-Rabb), the Merciful (al-Rahman), and the Compassionate (al-Rahim). According to popular Islamic tradition, God has ninety-nine such wonderful names. These names do not imply multiplicity; rather, they refer to God’s enumerated characteristics and virtues. Despite God’s many names, God is one. And who is this God? Muslims have traditionally understood Allah to be identical with the God of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Greek Testament. In the Qurʾan, Allah is revealed as the God of Abraham, Moses, and Jesus. As in the Torah and the Gospels, God is understood as both transcendent and immanent. God is the creator, the maker of the universe, the sovereign Lord who is the bestower of all things. Whereas, everything in creation is dependent upon something else for its existence and sustenance, God alone is “self-become” and fully independent. Thus, among Muslims one of the most common words for God is the Persian word Khoda—“the self-become One.” This is perhaps most fully expressed in Sura 2:255 of the Qurʾan, the Throne Verse, which describes God’s transcendence in explicit and powerful terms: God, there is no God but He, the Living, the Self-Subsisting. Neither slumber overtakes Him, nor sleep. To Him belongs whatever is in the heavens and the earth. Who is there who can intercede with Him, save by his leave? He knows what is before them, and behind them. And they encompass nothing of his knowledge, save what He wills. (Sura 2:255)

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To associate anything else with God constitutes the sin of shirk, commonly translated as “idolatry,” the greatest sin within Islam. While transcendent, omnipotent and omniscient, God is also immanent. The Qurʾan states that “God is nearer to you than your jugular vein.” (Sura 50:16). God is always present and available to all of humanity. In the mystical traditions of Sufism, God is thought to be especially present in the hearts of his “friends,” the awliyaʾ Allah. Among the Alevis and Bektaşis of Turkey, one of the most common names for God is simply Dost, meaning “Friend.” Tawhid is a deeply multivocal concept capable of multiple interpretations. There is no single universally agreed-upon understanding of tawhid within Islam. Some Muslims understand tawhid as an austere and clearly defined monotheism. For them God is the Creator of the universe and remains eternally and utterly distinct from it. According to this understanding of tawhid, Christians commit a particularly grave error when they worship Jesus as part of a Holy Trinity. Accordingly, Muslims must take great care not to fall into similar patterns of devotion towards Muhammad or Sufi “saints,” which might be mistaken for worship. For them, a strict sense of monotheistic propriety dictates a wall between the Creator and creation that can never be fully traversed. For many Muslims, however, tawhid implies something far more nuanced and complex than this kind of simple and straightforward monotheism. Particularly within the vibrant mystical traditions of Islam, tawhid extends beyond the basic monotheistic notion that there is only one God, to include the belief that there is a vital unity between God and creation. From this perspective, tawhid, implies something more akin to union. For many Muslims. this union is tied to a notion of overpowering divine love, the mystery of God’s love for creation, and especially humanity, as the pivotal element of that creation, and humanity’s instinctive reciprocal love for God. In Islamic mystical poetry this is often expressed through metaphors of human romantic and erotic love. Just as human lovers merge together in their overpowering desire for each other, becoming one in their shared ecstasy, so too the mystery of love binds together the Creator and creation, God and humanity. From this perspective, tawhid is not a simple didactic doctrine easily explained and understood; instead like romantic love, it is an ineffable mystery to be continually experienced and explored. This mystical vision of tawhid is extremely widespread in Islam and takes a variety of forms. Theologically, this mystical understanding of tawhid has been described as wahdat al-wujud, the unity of being, a term associated with the famed twelfth- and thirteenth-century Andalusian theosophical Sufi, Muhammad Ibn ʿArabi (d. 1204 C.E.), although the concept certainly precedes him.15 This idea of wahdat al-wujud provides the theological underpinning for the vision of divine unity in Persian Sufi poets like Mawlana Jalal al-Din Rumi (d. 1273 C.E.) and, especially, Farid al-Din Attar (d. 1221 C.E.), whose magnificent poem the The Conference of the Birds (Mantiq Uttair) is perhaps the most brilliant literary exposition of mystical tawhid in any language.16 Attar’s poem tells the story of a group of birds who set out to seek their lost king, the Simurgh. In the end, only thirty birds, in Farsi “seh murgh,”

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survive to complete this perilous journey and see themselves reflected in the mirror of the King’s throne. Thus, the “seh murgh” encounter the vision of the “Simurgh” in their own reflection.17 Mystical unity also underlies the Turkish poetry of Yunus Emre and the other great poets of the Alevi-Bektaşi tradition, which embraces the tawhid (Turkish, tevhit), of divine union as the essential hidden secret (sirr) both within Islam and creation itself. But this concept is perhaps nowhere better or more popularly expressed than in the numerous accounts of the life and death of the influential Sufi figure, Mansur al-Hallaj, who lived in Baghdad in the tenth-century C.E.

Mansur Al-Hallaj: The Secret of Ana al-Haqq18 The life, teachings and execution of Mansur al-Hallaj (d. 922 C.E.) have long been sources of religious passion and controversy within Islam. Whatever the actual historical reality, the narrative of the “passion of Mansur” has assumed a mythic status. It has been retold many times in multiple languages in the centuries since and has provided a root paradigm of devotion and sacrifice for many Muslims.19 The city of Baghdad, the capital of the Abbasid empire, in the tenth century was home to numerous religious movements and communities including a wide variety of Sunni and Shiʿi Muslims and Sufi communities. That religious diversity sometimes erupted into discord and conflict. Mansur al-Hallaj was a controversial, for some almost notorious, figure in the Baghdad of his day. Some saw him as a “saint,” others as a dangerous charlatan. He was thought by some to be tied to radical Shiʿi movements, which were feared and hated by the Abbasid government. He was well-­ known for making provocative statements that some interpreted as blasphemy. For example, he once told a man about to go on the Hajj to instead circle around his house seven times and give the money he would have spent on the pilgrimage to the poor. Not surprisingly, he inspired both many admirers and many enemies. As the narrative is usually recounted, one day in a moment of religious ecstasy, Hallaj uttered a mysterious and, for some, blasphemous statement that to the present day continues to resonate throughout the Muslim world. While in his ecstatic state, Mansur Hallaj publicly exclaimed, “Ana al-Haqq (I am the Truth”).” As “Al-Haqq”— The Truth—is one of the traditional ninety-nine names of God, it seemed to his detractors that Hallaj was in fact saying “I am God,” thus clearly violating the monotheistic propriety that many Muslims see as inherent in the doctrine of tawhid and committing the ultimate sin of shirk, literally “association,” meaning to associate anything else with the divinity of God, and frequently translated as polytheism and idolatry. He was arrested and charged with blasphemy and spent many years in jail awaiting the final determination of his case. Hallaj’s defense was rooted in his mystical understanding of tawhid. Hallaj argued that he had no choice in the matter of his speech, as, in the presence of his beloved, a true lover must of necessity disappear. True love must, of necessity, lead to annihilation within one’s beloved. He argued that if in the presence of his beloved he had instead said, “You are the Truth”

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that would have meant that in the presence of God, his Beloved, rather than expressing the true and necessary unity between those bound by love he would instead have maintained a duality, a distinction between “Lover” and “Beloved” that would have, in fact, made a mockery of love. In the presence of God, there can be no distinction between subject and object, because in the presence of the Beloved a true Lover is annihilated and only God remains. Such a distinction, he argued, would violate the very nature of tawhid, for how can true unity tolerate duality? For Hallaj, that would have been the real blasphemy. Ultimately, it is reported that Mansur al-Hallaj was executed for this transgression but the decision to do so was not reached easily. It is commonly believed that among those who signed his death warrant were some of the most prominent Sufi mystics of his time. Some argued that he deserved execution not because he was wrong in what he said—they fully understood and, on some level, agreed with his argument—but because what he had experienced was a secret (sirr) between lovers and thus not to be revealed. His speech was an unacceptable violation of decorum and, in that sense, indeed a crime. According to differing accounts, Mansur al-Hallaj died a particularly brutal death. It is variously reported that he was humiliated, hung, and beheaded. One aspect of the story that has become particularly popular in poetry is that as he marched to the gallows his enemies pelted him with stones. When these stones fell upon him, he merely laughed. However, his disciple Shibli (d. 946 C.E.), himself a famous Sufi, instead of a stone threw a rose at his master, an incident that has become a popular trope in Sufi poetry. Struck by this rose Hallaj let out an anguished shout of pain revealing the truth that a “rose from a friend” hurts far more than a stone from an enemy. It is reported, and widely believed, that when Mansur was ultimately decapitated his blood spilled out on the ground spelling the words “Ana al-Haqq.” Following Mansur’s execution, the authorities destroyed his body in hopes of also annihilating his “blasphemous” doctrine. As a result, he has no tomb for his admirers to visit. However, this attempt to annihilate him from Muslim history and memory ended in utter failure. Mansur’s name is remembered far more than those of the men who condemned him. In fact, poetry about Hallaj has been composed in nearly every language spoken by Muslims and is ubiquitous throughout the Islamic world. While it might simplify our understanding of Islam if we could dismiss Hallaj as a peripheral and solely counter-cultural figure, nothing could be further from the truth. He is both well-known and widely loved. Mansur al-Hallaj lives in the hearts of countless Muslims as the paradigmatic martyr to the mystery of divine love and union. Within the Sufi tradition, he has become an archetypal figure. The description of Hallaj’s passion has become a common theme in the poetry of numerous Islamicate languages—Arabic, Persian, Turkic, Urdu. In mystical poetry, to be “like Mansur” is always a positive attribute. It means one has become a true lover of God. The tawhid of Hallaj remains a pervasive idea throughout the Muslim world particularly in the traditions of vernacular poetry and music. Hallaj, the martyr of divine unity, lives on in the hearts and minds of Muslims all over the world even in the hearts of many

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who in their external religious lives are rigorous about their ritual practice, praying all five of their daily prayers every day and scrupulously keeping the Ramadan fast. For some Muslims, however, this whole notion of Hallajian tawhid is a step too far—an unacceptable and blasphemous violation of the unity of God. For them, tawhid is something far more clear and straightforward. It refers to a pristine and uncompromising monotheism—a monotheism in which there is one and only one all powerful and totally unique God, who created the entirety of Creation but, and this is the critical point, remains eternally distinct from it. We can never become fully intimate with God, who must of necessity remain totally “the Other.” Only the prophets can approach anything like intimacy with God and even they must remain fully distinct from their Creator. This is the position of the influential medieval Muslim theologian Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328 C.E.) who argues that the stance of some Sufis that tawhid is found in the ecstatic and intimate experience of God is, in actuality, a blasphemous violation of monotheistic propriety. Ibn Taymiyya argued that there must always remain a distinction between Creator and creation. While we should, of course love God, we should do so through obedience to the prescriptive commands embodied in the shariʿa and not through a quest for inappropriate intimacy. This is the essence of the position of contemporary puritanical and exclusivist movements, such as those commonly referred to as Salafis and the Wahhabis, who see themselves as his spiritual descendants. For them the ecstatic “ravings” of Hallaj, as they would classify them, are not only a sin against propriety; they are a violation of the monotheism that is the very heart of Islam.20 Within the conceptual world of Islam, the interpretive poles of tawhid range from the mystical tawhid of Mansur al-Hallaj and Ibn ʿArabi to the pristine monotheism of Ibn Taymiyya.21 Of course, between these two poles there lies a wide spectrum of interpretive possibilities. While all Muslims accept tawhid as the essence of Islam, there is no universal consensus or agreement about its meaning or interpretation. However, one might argue that the intensity of the debates about its meaning are themselves evidence of the absolute centrality of tawhid within the Islamic tradition. While all Muslims believe that “God is one,” the interpretations and implications of that belief are diverse and, at times, even contradictory.

Nubuwwa: Belief in Prophets The second of the usul al-din refers to the necessity of belief in prophets (singular, nabi, Arabic plural, anbiyaʾ). While tawhid is the heart of Islam, nubuwwa, or belief in nabis (prophets) and rasuls (messengers), is its essential corollary; for according to Islamic tradition, it is through the guidance of prophets that humanity has been continuously “reminded” of the necessity of belief in the unity of God. To put it succinctly, a central premise of the religion of Islam shared by all Muslims is that God uses human beings to guide human beings to the truth of tawhid. If the first declaration of the shahada necessitates that a Muslim publicly bear witness to the unity of God, the second requires that one also publicly declare, “I bear witness that

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Muhammad is the Messenger of God (Ashahadu anna Muhammadan Rasulu Allah).” The community of Islam is united, and Muslim identity is defined, not only by belief in one God but also by acceptance of Muhammad as the ultimate Prophet and messenger of God and the paradigmatic exemplar of human nature and virtue. Nabi, the word for prophet in Arabic, like its cognate in Hebrew, refers not to one who predicts the future, but rather to one chosen to reveal God’s existence and will. Prophets speak to human beings as human beings, using the languages of particular human communities in order to reveal the Divine Will to them. As such, Muhammad is both a Prophet to the Arabs bringing a revelation that spoke to them in their own language, as well as a universal messenger to all of humanity. Muhammad is understood as the culmination of a long history of prophets. The Qurʾan itself lists the names of numerous previous prophets. These include major figures of the Hebrew Bible such as Adam-significantly both the first human being and first prophet, Nuh (Noah), Ibrahim (Abraham), Musa (Moses), Yusuf (Joseph), Ishaq (Isaac), Ismaʿil (Ishmael), Sulayman (Solomon) and Dawud (David). The Qurʾan also includes ‘Isa (Jesus) as a prophet, describing his virgin birth while simultaneously denying that he was “begotten” by God. God is not the biological father of Jesus, instead the Qurʾan reveals that God simply said, “Be,” and he was. According to Islamic tradition, some nabis are also messengers (rasuls) as they have both a book (kitab) and a particular community associated with them. Thus, Moses who revealed the Torah and brought a covenant to the Jews is a rasul, as is Jesus who is associated with the Gospels (Injil) and the community of Christians. For this reason, both Jews and Christians are seen in the Qurʾan as “people of the Book (ahl al-kitab)” alongside Muslims. Along with these figures, the Qurʾan assumes that there have been other messengers, unnamed within its verses, sent to other peoples over the course of human history. Thus, as Muslims encountered other faith traditions debates ensued as to which traditions had been delivered by “real” Prophets. Was the Persian sage Zoroaster a Prophet? Despite Hinduism’s apparent polytheism, did the monism of the Upanishads serve as evidence that it origins were in some true sense divine, or were Hindus idolaters like the pagan Arabs of the first century of Islam? Not surprisingly different Muslims came to different conclusions on these questions. Of course, what defines Islam as a particular historical religious community is not its general belief in the existence of prophets, but rather its specific acceptance of Muhammad, as the bringer of a culminating revelation that completes and fulfills all the previous revelations of the previous prophets. That revelation is the Qurʾan, a text revealed to the Prophet over a period of twenty-two years, compiled over the course of his lifetime, and codified into its final form within living memory of his life and mission by the authority of his companion ʿUthman ibn ‘Affan, who by then had become the third Caliph of the first Islamic state. One of the difficulties involved in any discussion of the Prophet Muhammad is that Muslims understand him both as an embodied historical person and as a transcendent spiritual reality. There is undoubtedly a historical Muhammad who founded and led the Muslim community, established the basic guidelines of Islamic ritual and social practice and played a pivotal role in not only Islamic, but also world

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history. There is also a spiritual Muhammad of piety who lives in the hearts of believers. This Muhammad is the beloved of God (Habibu Allah) whose light (nur) was the first thing God created and, according to some hadith, for whom God created the world so that he would have a place in which to be born and live. These two roles are deeply intertwined making it difficult to easily distinguish the spiritual Muhammad from the Muhammad of history.

A Brief Outline of the Life of the Historical Muhammad22 It goes without saying that Muslims believe that the Prophet Muhammad was, indeed, an actual historical person. While it is impossible to vouch for the precise historical accuracy of every account in the earliest biographical sources for the life of Muhammad, there is little reason to doubt the basic outlines of his life as they are presented in early historical sources such as Ibn Ishaq’s (d. 761 or 767 C.E.) massive biography of the Prophet or the great historian al-Tabari’s (d. 923 C.E.) later comprehensive history. Whether or not the Prophet Muhammad presented in these primary Islamic sources coincides precisely with the “historical Muhammad,” there is a general consensus among Muslims about the major events in his life. According to both Muslim tradition and the mainstream of academic scholarly opinion, Muhammad ibn Abdullah (d. 632 C.E.) was born in the city of Mecca on the Arabian Peninsula in 570 C.E. An orphan from his earliest childhood, he was raised by his uncle Abu Talib, the leader of a prestigious and influential, but relatively poor, clan within the powerful tribe of the Quraysh, which controlled the city of Mecca and its religious shrine, the kaʿba, a large cubical structure which housed the various tribal deities of the Arabs. The pre-Islamic Arab society of Muhammad’s time was rooted in cultural values associated with tribal nomadism. Nomadic Arab Bedouins had traditionally lived in small tightly knit and highly integrated groups or clans that were further organized into larger groups called tribes. Within these groups, elders commanded the respect and obedience of juniors, but, as in most nomadic societies, there was relative lack of economic stratification. As nomads, the Bedouin Arabs were frequently on the move and as a result, one’s wealth was not measured in terms of accumulation but rather by the dissemination of goods and hospitality. Individual prestige was linked both to lineage and to the manifestation of virtuous character or muruwa (manliness), which stressed the virtues of personal courage, restraint, the forgiveness of defeated enemies, hospitality, and trustworthiness (amana). Interestingly, despite the fact that these were virtues associated with the jahiliyya, the time of ignorance before Islam, they were virtues possessed by Muhammad that helped to account for his ability to attract followers to his movement. Furthermore, they continued under Islam and serve as the core values of Islamic humanism. Although there were Jews and Christians among them, the majority of the Arabs accepted a polytheistic worldview that involved, among other practices, the worship of various gods and goddesses related to nature or one’s tribe. The “idols” which

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represented the various tribal deities were maintained in the aforementioned shrine called the Kaʿba in Mecca which was the object of a yearly pilgrimage, called the Hajj, which brought together tribal Arabs from all over the region. This pilgrimage by its very nature facilitated trade and brought great wealth to the city of Mecca and its major tribe, the Quraysh. Arab nomadic society was relatively egalitarian. Tribal leaders, while at times relatively powerful, were treated as first among equals, rather than kings or rulers. Bedouin society lacked centralized authoritarian structures. There were no police, no prisons and no written codes of law. Conflict was generally controlled through social pressure and the authority of tribal elders over their juniors. When inter-tribal or inter-clan conflict arose, as it invariably did, it often took the form of blood-wit, a type of intertribal feuding in which members of one tribe attacked and killed members of another that they believed had wronged them. Such conflicts could easily escalate out of control. When this occurred, their ultimate resolution was usually brought about by mediation conducted by a person who had the trust (amana) of all parties. From his youth, Muhammad ibn Abdullah was known as a person of high character with a reputation for fairness and honesty and had earned the title of al-­ Amin—“the trustworthy one”—because of his role as a mediator in diffusing the frequent tribal disputes that plagued his city.23 According to the earliest Islamic sources, in the decades before the emergence of Islam, Arab society had grown increasingly complex and hierarchical. Many Arabs had long since ceased living as nomads, instead adopting lifestyles related to sedentary agriculture or trade. Having domesticated the camel, the Bedouin Arabs had successfully adapted it for use in caravan trade. Given this crucial technological development, coupled with their strategic location between two hostile superpowers-­ the Christian Roman Empire to their west and the Zoroastrian Sassanian Empire to their east-the Meccans had begun to play a decisive role in trade between the territories of these two empires. As a result, tremendous wealth began to flood into Mecca, especially to members of the city’s dominant tribe, the Quraysh. In Mecca, this influx of riches, which was the result of Arab participation in global and regional trade, had resulted in growing urbanization and an increasingly hierarchical society still governed by institutions of tribal nomadism that no longer functioned effectively in this new more complex economic and social environment. This led inevitably to increasing economic hierarchy, growing social injustice and escalating tribal violence. Muhammad was clearly troubled by the problems that this influx of wealth and its resultant economic inequality had produced within his society. And equally importantly, he was convinced that the solution to his community’s problems could be found somehow in religion, more specifically in monotheism. Like others in Mecca, he was clearly aware of monotheistic religion as the Arabian Peninsula was home to communities of both Jews and Christians. It became his custom to go alone into the craggy mountains surrounding Mecca to pray and meditate throughout the night. One such night, when he was forty years of age, he heard a voice commanding him to recite (iqraʾ). At first he refused, saying: “I cannot.” But the voice continued saying:

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Recite (iqraʾ)! In the name of your Lord, who created humanity (insan), from a blood clot. Recite! Your Lord is most noble, Who taught by the pen, taught humanity (insan) that which it knew not. (Sura 96:2–5)

These verses, which establish God as both the Creator and teacher of humanity, was the first of the numerous revelations, which would continue throughout the next two decades of his life and were compiled into the Qurʾan. Muhammad returned to Mecca following this experience and found immediate support for his message first from his wife Khadija (d. 620 C.E.), and then from his young cousin ʿAli b. Abu Talib (d. 661 C.E.). Thus began his lifelong mission as a prophet, preaching a message of the unity of God and the coming judgment that ultimately challenged the nature of Arab life in Mecca and its surrounding territories. The social crisis in Arab society that had resulted from the rapid influence of wealth into Mecca had been apparent to many of Muhammad’s generation. The shared recognition that some kind of change was necessary no doubt facilitated the ultimate acceptance of the Prophet’s message, which in the midst of growing tribal violence and injustice, preached unity to a common authority and offered the possibility of universal allegiance to a single community. But the ultimate success of Islam in changing the religious and social culture of the Arabs should not be seen solely as a response to material conditions. The success of Islam was largely dependent upon the charismatic authority of the two interconnected sources which served as the bedrock and constant touchstone for the community both at the time of its origins and as it continued to evolve over time—the Man and the Book, the Prophet Muhammad and the Qurʾan. The message of the Qurʾan, delivered over time through the person of Muhammad, clearly offered the possibility of unity to a society torn by division and conflict by providing elements of a framework for social order that transcended clan and tribal loyalty. But it was not the content of the teachings of the Qurʾan alone that drew people to it. The linguistic excellence of the Qurʾan also played an important role in attracting many Arabs to the nascent message of Islam. Like most nomadic societies, the Arabs placed a high value on language and specifically poetry, the most portable of art forms. The sheer beauty of the Qurʾan, which is still seen by Arabic speakers as a model of linguistic perfection, was an important factor in convincing people to accept the new religion. According to one popular account, the Prophet’s companion ʿUmar ibn al-­ Khattab (d. 644 C.E.), who would later become the second Caliph of Islam, was initially a fierce opponent of the new faith and a determined enemy of Muhammad. Hearing that his sister had converted to Islam, he burst into her room intending to punish her. However, at the moment ʿUmar came upon her she was reciting the Qurʾan. He was so moved by the beauty of its language that he converted to Islam and presented himself to the Prophet Muhammad to offer his services to him and the new community. To this day, Arabic speakers hold up the Qurʾan as the undisputed archetype of the Arabic language. Early on, the Qurʾan itself challenged those who refused to accept that it was, in fact, a message from God to produce “a single verse

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like it. “(Sura 17:88) Muslims assert that no one has been able to do so up until the present day. It was not, however, the Qurʾan alone that motivated Arabs to accept Islam. The personal charisma of Muhammad also played a crucial role in the Islamization of Bedouin Arab society. Muhammad’s personal background and character made him an extremely compelling messenger. By the standards of the tribal nomadic society, which he was attempting to reform, he was a person of high status and prestige, even before he received the first revelations of the Qurʾan. He held a position of respect in his society partly because of his lineage, but even more so because of his character. In terms of his personality, Muhammad was considered an exemplar of many important Arab tribal virtues including generosity, courage, forbearance, and most importantly, trustworthiness (amana)—all virtues that Islam would also incorporate into its conception of ideal human character. Muhammad was, therefore, a person who commanded trust and authority both in the context of tribalism and the new worldview of Islam. Although he was an orphan and did not come from a wealthy family, he was nonetheless a member of the leading Meccan tribe, the Quraysh. His uncle Abu Talib ((d. 619 C.E.), who had raised him after the death of this parents, was the leader of the respected clan of Banu Hashim, who held the important responsibility of maintaining the shrine of the Kaʿba. Until his death, Muhammad was under the protection of Abu Talib, who at crucial moments throughout his career provided him with personal support and security. There is perhaps a profound irony in the fact that Muhammad found protection and support within the very tribal system he was ultimately attempting to subvert and replace with a new order. We see this perhaps most clearly in the fact that his enemies were often hesitant to attack him for fear of incurring tribal retribution in the form of blood-wit. The importance of the actual person of the Prophet in the creation of the first generation of Muslims is clear when we remember that at the time many of his most important allies accepted Islam the Qurʾan was far from a complete text. In fact, when his wife, Khadijah, accepted Islam, becoming the first convert to the new religious community, only a few verses of the holy book had been revealed. Years before there was a complete Qurʾan, the essential act of joining the community of Islam was to accept the authority of the Prophet of Islam by giving an oath of allegiance (bayʿa) to him. This oath meant that loyalty to the Prophet and his community was to become one’s new primary loyalty overriding any allegiance to clan or tribe.24 In the end, the message of the Qurʾanic event-with its call for loyalty to a single God, a single community, and the Prophet Muhammad—was a visceral and direct challenge to the common sense of the tribal worldview that was at the base of Arab social and cultural identity. From the standpoint of the worldview of Arab tribalism, which valued tribal and family allegiance over all other loyalties, the call to Islam as presented by the Prophet and the Qurʾan was the equivalent of a call to treason. Islam was correctly perceived by the leaders of Muhammad’s own tribe, the Quraysh, as an immediate and direct challenge to the ideology of tribalism that was both the basic worldview of Arab society and a primary source of their power.

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It is not inaccurate to say that the message of Islam presented by the Prophet Muhammad and the Qurʾan was, from its inception, at war with the ideology and worldview of tribalism. This struggle between Islam and tribalism, in fact, continued well beyond the death of the Prophet and cast a deep shadow on much of later Islamic history. The Prophet was asking the Arabs to deny basic aspects of their cultural reality and replace them with a new set of allegiances and identities. In terms of religion, the Prophet argued that the tribal gods of the Arabs, symbols of the very tribal identities upon which Arab society was based, were false and should be rejected and replaced with the God of the Jews and Christians. This not only undercut the value system of the Arabs, it also undermined the yearly pilgrimage of tribes to the Kaʿba which brought both wealth and prestige to the Quraysh. But much more threatening to the old tribal system was the fact that the Prophet argued that one’s ultimate social loyalty was no longer to one’s clan or tribe but rather to the community of Muslims-those who submitted to the one true God and to that God’s Prophet. From the standpoint of the tribal leaders of the Quraysh, Muhammad’s message, especially as it gained more and more adherents, was intolerable. Despite the radical nature of the Prophet’s message, over time he attracted numerous converts. Not only, as one might expect, from among those who had the most to gain from the transformation of the system, the relatively powerless such as those from weak clans and tribes, and the enslaved, but also from among important tribal figures from the dominant Quraysh. Of course, as in all revolutionary situations, there were people drawn to Islam’s message of justice and social change, despite the fact that it worked against their own personal material interests. His earliest converts included his wife Khadija, who accepted him as a prophet immediately after his first revelations, and his cousin ʿAli, who would later marry his daughter Fatima (d. 632 C.E.) and become the father of his two grandsons, Hasan (d. 670 C.E.) and Husayn (d. 680 C.E.). They also included the men who became the first three Caliphs of the Islamic Empire, the powerful elder Abu Bakr (d. 634 C.E.), whose daughter ʿAisha (d. 678 C.E.) later became the Prophet’s wife and an important figure in her own right in early Islamic history; the aforementioned ʿUmar, who brought his sizeable military and administrative talents to the early community; and the wealthy ʿUthman ibn ʿAffan (d. 656 C.E.) from the clan of Bani Umayya, which dominated the Quraysh and was the clan of the Prophet’s greatest adversary during his lifetime, Abu Sufyan (d. 650 C.E.). Of course, we cannot assume that everyone who converted to Islam in this formative period did so out of a sense of great personal commitment. Some simply followed their clan elders into the new religion. And there were others, particularly some in the city of Medina following the crucial event of the Hijra, or emigration from Mecca, who were labeled by later writers as “hypocrites” (munafiq) because they aligned themselves with the new movement in the hopes of manipulating it to their own ends. In any event, against seemingly overwhelming odds, over the first ten years of the Prophet’s mission the Islamic umma grew steadily, gradually emerging as a visible threat to the power and authority of the Quraysh. Eventually, the tribal elders of the Quraysh, under the leadership of aforementioned Abu Sufyan from the powerful clan of Bani Umayya, decided that the Prophet

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had to be stopped once and for all. Muhammad’s followers, especially those from weaker clans, became targets of persecution. At one point, an economic boycott was brought against the nascent Muslim community and Muhammad’s clan, Banu Hashim, in order to punish him and his movement. As a result, some of his followers fled into exile in Christian Ethiopia, where their leader, the Negus, provided them with protection. Finally, in the year 622 C.E., under threat of assassination the Prophet Muhammad emigrated with his followers to the city of Medina, then known as Yathrib, where two Arab tribes, the Aws and the Khazraj, later known collectively as the Ansar, or “Helpers,” having been continually racked by constant inter-tribal warfare had invited Muhammad to come and facilitate peace between them and converted to Islam. This led to the Meccan Muslims leaving their homes and moving to Yathrib. This event is known as the Hijra or migration, an event of such significance that Muslims begin the dating of their religious calendar from it, noting successive years as A. H., or After Hijra. Over the next decade, a series of battles and negotiations took place between the Muslims of Medina and the polytheists in Mecca. Sometimes, as at the early Battle of Badr, where a small band of Muslims confronted an overwhelming larger force, they were victorious. Sometimes, as at the Battle of Uhud where the Prophet himself was wounded, the Muslims were defeated. At other times, such as the Battle of the Trench, events played out to a draw. Significantly, in 630 C.E. a truce between the Muslims and the Meccans was negotiated at a place called Hudaybiyya, where the Muslims were stopped and prevented from making the Hajj to Mecca by forces of the Quraysh. The Treaty of Hudaybiyya provided a period of peace which allowed the Prophet to freely preach the message of Islam to the non-Meccan Arabs tribes for two years without fear of retaliation allowing him to greatly expand Islam throughout the Arabian Peninsula. Following a breach of that treaty by the Meccans in the year 632 C.E., the Muslims and their allies marched toward Mecca in overwhelming numbers. They took up positions in the mountains surrounding Mecca and lit campfires. Seeing the multitude of fires burning in the mountains and realizing that they were completely outnumbered the leader of the Meccan Quraysh, Abu Sufyan, approached the Prophet under a flag of truce and accepted Islam. With Abu Sufyan’s conversion the decade-long conflict that had been initiated by the rise of Islam was over. Remarkably in the context of medieval warfare, in the wake of the conquest of Mecca there was little bloodshed or retribution. According to Muslim sources, there was no vengeance of any kind taken against anyone who accepted Islam. Following the surrender and conversion of Abu Sufyan, the Prophet entered Mecca and destroyed the idols that were within the Kaʿba. From that time forward the pre-Islamic ceremony of the Hajj would continue, although now thoroughly transformed into an Islamic ritual. Mecca became an Islamic city. For the next two years, the Prophet continued to guide his community, until his death in 632 C.E. at the age of 63. The Islamic polity he established would expand after his death to encompass much of Eurasia and North Africa. For centuries, until the rise of global European dominance in the eighteenth century the Islamic civilization he initiated was arguably the locus of some of the most advanced political

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Fig. 2.2  Calligraphic representation of Muhammad at the Eski Cami in Edirne

and cultural entities in all of Eurasia and North Africa. Overtime, the religion he established would grow to a community of more than a billion people (Fig. 2.2).

 ollowing Muhammad: The Prophet as a Model F for Later Generations In his role as founder of one of the great world religions and civilization, his impact on the history of the world has been immeasurable. But beyond his role in history, for Muslims the person of the Prophet Muhammad provides something more personal and profound. The Prophet is a focus of deep respect, emulation, love and devotion. Muslims refer to him as Hazrat Muhammad, the Noble Muhammad. In accordance with tradition many pious Muslims will not say his name without immediately following it with a blessing such as “Salla Allahu ʿalayhi wa-sallam (peace be upon him)” or “Salla Allahu ʿalayhi wa-ʿala aalihi wa-sallam (peace be upon him and his family).” One indication of the affection in which the Prophet is held in Islam is that Muhammad is not only the most common male name given to Muslims, it is also the single most popular name in world, period. For Muslims, the Prophet Muhammad is not only the deliverer of revelation. He also provides a paradigmatic model of human perfection to be emulated. Reports

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about his life, arranged synchronically by theme and topic, became a primary source for the construction of shariʿa. In the centuries following his death, Muslims meticulously compiled and evaluated every account they could find about what the Prophet had said or done or even actions to which he had given his unspoken approval. These accounts, called hadith, were compiled into collections that together constitute the Sunna, “the trodden path,” not only a primary source for developing the shariʿa, but also an essential source for Islamic scholarship and historiography. Even more importantly, the diachronic linear narrative of his life story provides a model for ethical behavior to which pious Muslims aspire. By looking back to the life of the Prophet in both its narrative and synchronic dimensions, later generations of pious Muslims have attempted not only to follow his example, both in terms of ethics and morality, but also in such seemingly mundane matters as how he brushed his teeth, the style-of his beard or the length of his trousers. While all Muslims believe in the necessity of accepting Muhammad’s status as a prophet and honoring him as such, nevertheless, important issues about his life and mission including his spiritual nature, his relationship to the Qurʾan and how one should best demonstrate allegiance to him have been critical points of debate and disagreement within the community of Islam. These differences in understanding concerning the life of the Prophet, in fact, lie at the heart of many of the disagreements within the umma about theology, practice and religious identity that have resulted in the emergence of different religious communities. For many Muslims, especially those that hold to the austere and uncompromising vision of tawhid associated with Ibn Taymiyya , the Prophet Muhammad’s primary role is that of transmitter of the Qurʾan. For these Muslims, despite his crucial role in human and spiritual history, he remains a human being like any other, whose sole miracle is the Qurʾan itself, a work held by generations of Muslims to be inimitable, possessing an iʿjaz, an inherent miraculous nature that is its own proof of its divine origin. For them the Prophet is to be respected as the Messenger (rasul), the bringer of the book, whose behavior and words provide a foundation for a corpus of legal precedents, but other than that, Muslims need to take great care not to raise or exaggerate his status in a way that might somehow challenge or diminish the absolute sovereignty of God. For a great many Muslims, however, this narrow view seems to demean the Prophet Muhammad, reducing him to a kind of spiritual telephone receiver rather than exalting him as the Beloved of God.25 For them, while the Prophet is most certainly a human being, he is in no sense an ordinary human being. Accordingly, most Muslims believe that there are many more miracles associated with the Prophet than just the Qurʾan. For example, some Muslims believe that Muhammad left footprints when walking on stone while leaving none when he walked in sand, that he was continually shaded by a cloud as evidence of God’s love for him, or that he cast no shadow even in bright sunlight. Evidence of the unique quality of the Prophet is perhaps most explicitly expressed in accounts of his miʿraj, or night journey. During the miʿraj, Muhammad is said to have miraculously ascended from the site of the dome of the rock in Jerusalem to the highest heavens where he came within “two bows length” of the very throne of

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God—closer to God than any other human being had ever come, closer even than any other previous prophets. In the Sufi tradition, Muhammad is known as “the city of knowledge” on the basis of a famous hadith in which the Prophet states, “I am the city of knowledge and ʿAli is its gate.” According to the general Sufi worldview, the Prophet Muhammad experiences a level of consciousness different from that of other human beings, perceiving a world the rest of humanity can only partially comprehend. He sees beneath the zahir, or outward appearance of things, to the batin, or hidden reality, which underlies that appearance. In this connection, there are multiple accounts of the Prophet having conversations with persons who were in actuality angels, although their status as such was invisible to everyone but him. Through devotional exercises, Sufis seek to eventually reach the state of annihilation in the Prophet (fana fi-rasul) as part of a process which then leads inevitably to fana fi-Allah, or annihilation in God, Muhammad’s Beloved. An important focus of controversy among Muslims is the question of the nature of the Prophet following his corporeal passing. While all Muslims accept the fact that the Prophet Muhammad died a physical death, like all other mortal human beings, there is significant disagreement over the nature of his existence following his death and his current relationship with his community. For some, following the Prophet’s death he is no longer available except in the form of the knowledge about him which has been gathered in the hadith. In particular, the followers of the eighteenth-­century theologian Abd al-Wahhab, who are among the most vociferous adherents of this position, have gone so far as to argue that the phrase “Ya Muhammad”’ (Oh Muhammad) frequently written in mosques on one side of the minbar, with the phrase “Ya Allah” (Oh God) on the other, is a form of shirk, a violation of tawhid, which must be condemned because the Arabic vocative particle “Ya” can only be used in addressing a living being. And Muhammad, they argue, like all human beings has died and is no longer among us.26 For the great majority of Muslims however, especially those who affiliate themselves with various Shiʿi and Sufi traditions, despite his physical death the Prophet Muhammad remains available to his community as a living spiritual presence. For them Muhammad is not a mere transmitter of revelation: he is a spiritual reality whose very existence provides conclusive evidence for the existence of God. The nature of the Prophet is, thus, contested within Islam. As with tawhid, views about the Prophet extend from the austere vision of Muslims associated with modernist reformers and Salafism to the more devotional views associated with Shiʿism and Sufism. These are not mere academic disagreements. These are passionately held positions that have sometimes unfortunately led to violent schisms within the community of Islam. Closely connected to these issues about the nature of the Prophet Muhammad are issues related to his succession. If nubuwwa demands that a Muslim should follow the authority of the Prophet what happens to that authority in his absence? This became a crucial question for later generations of Muslims which over time have come to define the most important communities of interpretation within Islam. Did the Prophet designate an immediate successor? And, if so, what are the nature and limits of that successor’s authority? During the Prophet’s

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lifetime, despite occasional opposition to some of his decisions by some of those in the community who had accepted Islam, there was little question that he was the ultimate human authority for the umma. The Prophet had been the rasul, a fact that was uncontested. After his death the community quickly decided that with the death of Muhammad prophecy (risala) was indeed over. The Qurʾan had, after all, called Muhammad “the Seal of the Prophets” (Khatam al-Nabiyyin), which quickly became interpreted to mean that he would be the final prophet. It was generally, although not universally, agreed that there would be no new revelations and no new prophets. However, the Prophet’s authority was not limited to his role as a giver of revelation. He served numerous other functions within the Muslim community as well. He was a spiritual guide, a legislator, a teacher and a general. Could someone succeed him at these levels of authority? Did the fact that there was no longer to be a rasul mean that explicit spiritual guidance would disappear from the world, as well? If not, who were his legitimate spiritual successors to be? What powers and abilities should they possess? What kinds of authority would they maintain? At the very least, who would assume the kind of political leadership that the Prophet had held in Mecca and Medina? As we shall explore in the next chapter, the answers to these questions have consumed and divided the Muslim community up until our present day. Notions of authority in Islam—whether in the form of the political power of the Caliphate, or the spiritual authority of the Shiʿi Imams or Sufi masters—are all in some ways linked to the concept of nubuwwa. For Shiʿi Muslims, the Imams are both the biological and spiritual descendants of the Prophet Muhammad. Sufi masters base their authority on their silsila, or chains of transmission, which lead back to the Prophet Muhammad. We see this idea presented allegorically in Attar’s The Conference of the Birds where the hoopoe, who leads the birds on their pilgrimage to find the Simurgh, their missing king, and serves as a metaphor for the Sufi pir, or spiritual master, achieves his abilities because he served the Prophet Sulayman, whose gaze had fallen upon him.27 The authority of the awliyaʾ is ultimately rooted in their connection to the Prophet, the beloved of God and the ultimate paradigm of perfect human virtue. Belief in prophets (nubuwwa), and especially belief in the Prophet Muhammad, is a foundational concept accepted by all Muslims, one of the usul al-din. Of course, the way in which the Prophet and prophets are understood, interpreted and responded to varies dramatically from community to community; but all Muslims agree that without belief in both the unity of God and the prophets one cannot be a Muslim. Prophets are clear evidence of the importance of humanity (insan) and humanity (insaniyya) within Islam, a religion that holds as one of its core principles the idea that God teaches human beings through the agency of human beings. Foremost among them is Muhammad, whose own perfect humanity provides evidence for the existence of his ultimate Beloved, God, as well a model for Muslims to follow in their struggle to serve that God and thereby improve and perfect their own humanity.

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Qiyama: Belief in the Day of Judgment The third of the usul al-din shared across Islam is qiyama, or belief in a “Day of Judgment.” Muslims believe that human beings are morally responsible agents who are to be held accountable for their actions. Individual human beings are responsible before God for their actions in this life. Most Muslims believe each of us will either be rewarded in paradise or punished in Hell for all of eternity according to our actions in this world in our own lifetimes. The Muslim notion of qiyama is intimately connected to both tawhid and nubuwwa. As we have already seen, according to the doctrine of tawhid, God is one. This is the central message delivered by both the Qurʾan and the Prophet Muhammad. However, it is not only through revelation that human beings become aware of tawhid. God’s unity is also apparent in the very order and structure of the universe. The universe is not mere chaos and cacophony; instead it operates according to fixed and reliable laws. For example, an object dropped from a high place invariably falls to earth. The results of physical actions are foreseeable because there is a visible and predictable order to the material universe. Similarly, God’s unity implies the existence of a congruently consistent and reliable moral order to the universe. Just as physical actions have inevitable and predictable consequences, moral actions. good or bad, should have similarly predictable results. According to the Qurʾan, as in the creation myths of the Hebrew Bible, humanity occupies a critical position in the moral order of the universe. The Qurʾan places tremendous emphasis on the centrality of humanity (al-insan) in the cosmos, because human beings have free will and thus alone among all of creation are morally responsible agents, who must therefore struggle to comply with God’s moral order. As the Qurʾan expresses it in Sura 33:72, God offered the world as a trust, an amana, to anything in creation which would accept that awesome responsibility. The entire universe—poetically including the heavens and the earth and the mountains—declined this offer; no one accepted this responsibility, except humanity. Humanity alone accepted the responsibility of taking the world as a trust and through this bold decision assumed a critical position in the cosmos higher than even that of the angels. The centrality of humanity in the Qurʾan is clearly demonstrated by the fact that no less than seven times the Qurʾan recounts the story of how God formed Adam from clay and, after placing his own spirit (ruh) within him, asked the angels to bow down before him. Initially the angels hesitated, refusing to do so until God demonstrated that Adam knew the names of all things.28 Only human beings can know the names of things and, by implication, the divine ordering of things. We thus have a special relationship with God and, just as crucially, we have a special responsibility. Only human beings are capable of making real moral choices. The rest of creation automatically submits to the will of God; it cannot do otherwise. Only human beings have to make the decision to embrace Islam and submit to God’s will as a conscious choice. Thus, only human beings must face judgment. If human beings violate the moral order of the universe they will be forced to suffer the consequences of such actions, just as certainly as they

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will fall to their deaths if they step off the top of a tall building or burn themselves if they stick their hands into a raging fire. It is therefore essential that we know and understand God’s will, as the nature of our existence in eternity depends upon conforming to it. Fortunately, God, who significantly is described at the beginning of all but one chapter of the Qurʾan as the Merciful and the Compassionate (al-Rahman al-­Rahim), has not left humanity in the dark about the existence and nature of this moral order. As a compassionate act, God has continuously communicated to us through the agency of prophets, who have been called upon to remind us of God’s existence and unity, to warn us of our moral responsibility and to teach us the nature of God’s commands so that we can live accordingly, thereby avoiding the inevitable consequences of evil actions and similarly enjoying the positive results of submission and surrender to God’s will. Thus, the intersection of tawhid, nubuwwa and qiyama provides the matrix along which all of Islam operates, calling human beings to submit to the will of God before their inevitable judgment. The one God, who created the universe and established the physical rules by which that universe is ordered, similarly established an ethical and ritual order incumbent upon humanity as responsible moral agents. Unlike the rest of creation, human beings will in the end be held accountable for their behavior. There will inevitably be a “Day of Judgment” when we shall each reap the consequences of our actions. Both the Qurʾan and hadith, provide striking and powerful images of the qiyama. The qiyama literally means “the standing” because, as it is described in the Qurʾan, the Day of Judgment will be a day of physical resurrection when all of humanity will “stand” next to their graves and be called upon to account for their actions in life. At that time, we will neither be able to avoid this encounter nor dissemble. Our own body parts will speak out against us naming our sins-our hands admitting to theft, our eyes to lustful glances, etc. Our deeds—both good and evil—will be weighed on scales of justice. The blessed will go forth to enter a paradise (janna), described as a place full of lush and beautiful gardens. Those who enter this paradise will have access to intense pleasures, including the presence of beautiful companions called huris. The damned will however go forth to an eternity of pain in Hell (jahannam), which is described in the Qur’an, for example in Surat al-Nisa in verses 55 and 56, as a raging fire. For many Muslims these Qurʾanic descriptions constitute a literal vision of the coming qiyama providing a powerful incentive to turn way from evil and perform good deeds. According to Islamic tradition this awareness of and expectation of the qiyama should lead to a sense of taqwa, or sober alertness. Taqwa emerges from a sense that this world is not the end; the next one is our true home. Through taqwa, we learn to delay gratification, avoid sin and perform good deeds in hopes of an eternity in paradise. Awareness of the qiyama leads humanity to remember God and obey the paths God has established for us, worshipping God and living justly with our fellow human beings. Constant remembrance (dhikr) of God, through prayer and fasting, focuses the mind and spirit and encourages us to embrace submission before God.

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While the descriptions of the judgment and the afterlife in the Qurʾan provide powerful inducements to taqwa, for a great many Muslims the concrete descriptions of the qiyama provided in the Qurʾan and hadith are not literal depictions, but rather powerful metaphors for equally real spiritual states. The tangible joys of paradise pictured in the text are intimations of the endless bliss of eternal proximity with God. Similarly, the tortures of hell are presented as palpable representations of the unimaginable horror of an endless eternity cut off from the presence of God, the source of our existence.29 Understanding the literal language of the Qurʾan as metaphor, as many Muslims do, in no way implies a denial of human moral responsibility before God. On the contrary, for many who see these descriptions as metaphors, the sense of taqwa is just as strong as it is for those who hold a more literalist perspective. For certain mystical strains within Islam the qiyama is not a future state at all but rather an ongoing eternal presence and reality. For example, according to the Alevi-­ Bektaşi tradition of Anatolia and the Balkans, we already live in the qiyama, which is present in the eternity of each moment. Heaven and hell are always here among us. For those who achieve true insanlık, Turkish for insaniyya or humanity, this world is a paradise where God’s presence is always apparent. However, for those who live at the level of animal reality (hayvanlık) unaware of the gnosis of God, this present reality is, in fact, already hell (cehennem) whether we are aware of it or not. Through the guidance of our spiritual masters, the Shiʿi Imams and the pirs who continue their authority in the present day, we should all strive to become truly human, thus escaping hell and achieving paradise within this lifetime. From this perspective, salvation literally means becoming truly human. No matter whether one sees the Qurʾanic images of the afterlife literally or as metaphors, the God of Islam remains a God of judgment and we will all be held accountable for our actions. Muslims are united in the belief that human beings must be serious about their actions in this world. Human moral responsibility lies at the heart of every worldview associated with Islam. Despite Islam’s insistence on moral responsibility and justice, the Muslim God is also understood as a God of mercy as the Qurʾan makes abundantly clear by beginning each of its chapters with its declaration that God is al-Rahman al-Rahim, the Merciful and the Compassionate. The inherent tension between God’s justice and God’s mercy is one that is constantly being navigated within the tradition. The Qurʾan itself points out that God is forgiving and, if one does good deeds, will forgive one’s sins. There are hadith that explicitly state that God rewards each good deed 700 times more intensely than he punishes a single sin.30 The clearest evidence of God’s mercy is the presence of nabis and rasuls within human history. While the creator of the universe has established a moral order against which human beings as responsible agents must be judged, that same God has not neglected to remind us of our responsibilities and to provide us with guidance. The Creator of the universe has repeatedly sent prophets whose mission has been to remind humanity that God is one and sovereign and that we, as human beings, are moral agents required to live in submission to God’s commands. In addition, the prophets have a mission to teach

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humanity the specific nature of those commands and provide examples of how to live in accordance with them Through nubuwwa, humanity is mercifully reminded of tawhid and qiyama. As with tawhid, and nubuwwa, qiyama is a complex and multivocal concept. Muslim understandings of the qiyama and the afterlife run a gamut from belief in a literal “garden” or “fire,” to a mystical existentialism where heaven is the continuous knowledge of tawhid in the eternity of the present moment. What all of these visions of qiyama have in common is an understanding that as human beings we are responsible for our actions before God and that our existence as morally responsible beings demands engagement with the Divine. The essence of qiyama, no matter how it is interpreted, is that all human beings are responsible actors before God. In submitting to God’s will, some Muslims emphasize ritual, others love and devotion. Most combine elements of each. But no matter how Muslims understand the nature of the qiyama or the ways we should respond to its challenge, they are unanimous in their recognition of the reality that we are all responsible to try as best as we can to uncover the will of God and to attempt to live accordingly, as we all live in expectation of judgment.

Conclusion In this chapter, we have chosen to avoid the tendency of many introductory books on Islam to locate the unity underlying the diversity of the Muslim tradition by foregrounding the shariʿa, particularly the ritual dimension of shariʿa, as the central manifestation of Islamic piety. Stressing “the five pillars of Islam” as the unifying center of the Muslim tradition over-emphasizes the importance of shariʿa and potentially excludes those communities that engage in vernacular forms of ritual practice that are not explicitly part of the shariʿa discourse. Instead, we have chosen to chosen to focus on the three usul al-din (the roots of religion) shared in common by all Muslims as fundamental concepts. While these three usul al-din—belief in the unity of God (tawhid), belief in prophets (nubuwwa), and belief in a day of reckoning (qiyama)—are indeed shared by all Muslims, they are inherently multivalent and have over time been interpreted in widely varying, sometimes even contradictory ways. For example, interpretations of tawhid range from the radically austere monotheism of so-called Wahhabi Muslims in Saudi Arabia, who are uncomfortable with devotion to anything other than God even the Prophet Muhammad, to the mystical notions of the unity of being (wahdat al-wujud) associated with the Sufi tradition which are rooted in the radical understanding of a Divine Love that blurs the boundaries between Creator and creation. In our discussion of the usul al-din, we have given special attention to nubuwwa and qiyama, as interrelated concepts that are of particular significance in the context of this volume’s overarching theme, because together they express they importance of humanity within Islam. The notion of qiyama points to the uniqueness of human beings as morally responsible agents in the universe. For some Muslims, that sense

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of moral responsibility rests upon a literal reading of the descriptions of the final judgment, heaven and hell found in the Qurʾan and hadith. For others, it is rooted in a more mystical and allegorical understanding of the omnipresence of human judgment in the eternity of each moment. Nonetheless, the moral seriousness of the human condition is fundamental to Islam across its diverse manifestations. The concept of nubuwwa not only insists that God “teaches humanity,” as Sura 96 of the Qurʾan so eloquently states, but also affirms that the teaching of humanity takes place through the agency of human beings. Human beings are, thus, both the teachers and the taught. While the prophets are most certainly “ordinary” human beings, who experience the full impact of the human condition including mortality, as “friends of God,” they are simultaneously extraordinary. While they live within the realm of ordinary reality like all human beings, they also have access to a hidden realm of spiritual knowledge the rest of us do not. The idea of the prophet, or nabi, as the ultimate human teacher within Islam is complex and multivalent. Muhammad as the culmination and seal of prophecy is the ultimate personification of nubuwwa. Some Muslims, see him primarily as the human revealer of the Qurʾan with no other miracle to his name. However, others venerate him as the perfection of humanity, the manifestation of a pre-eternal prophetic light and, perhaps most crucially, the Beloved of God (Habibu Allah). The Prophet Muhammad and the Qurʾan, are both sources of prescriptive authority, from whom Muslims are able to learn the proper forms of ritual and social behavior necessary for their salvation—not only in terms of what is explicitly revealed to us in the Qurʾan but also through his behavior which serves as a model for all Muslims. However, it is not only through adherence to prescriptive commands arising through the didactic instruction of the Prophet and the teachings of the Qurʾan that humanity is prepared for judgment. As we shall see in the following chapters, most Muslims would argue that love also plays a crucial role in preparing human beings for their inevitable encounter with God. The Islamic tradition considers love—both love for God and love for other human beings—a powerful transformative force that can ultimately perfect our nature. In fact, human beings are unique in all of creation because of their ability to love. For many Muslims, love for the Prophet is especially important, for how can one better show one’s love for God than by loving the human being affirmed as God’s beloved (Habibu Allah). By extension, many Muslims believe one should also love those whom the Prophet loves—his family, the Shiʿi Imams, even the Sufi awliyaʾ, who have themselves been transformed by their love for God and the Prophet into models of human perfection. In particular, the Sufi tradition has emphasized the transformation of disciples through the experience of passionate and overwhelming love and devotion for their pirs. In the following chapter, we will examine various ways that Muslims have responded to the usul al-din. As they have done so they have created powerful traditions, both discursive and affective, of submission that have resulted in the emergence of diverse institutions and communities that claim the allegiance of countless Muslims.

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Questions for Discussion 1. What does it mean to refer to a religion as “cumulative tradition?” What are the advantages and disadvantages in defining Islam as a cumulative tradition responding to the event of the revelation of the Qur’an and the person of the Prophet Muhammad? How does this definition help account for the “unity in diversity” within Islam? 2. Some scholars account for the aforementioned “unity in diversity’ by pointing to the shariʿa? Do you find this useful and accurate? What might this imply about the nature of Islam as a religious tradition? 3. How does the multivalence inherent in the concepts of tawhid, nubuwwa, and qiyama help account for Islam’s “unity in diversity?” 4. Why do you think the story of Mansur al-Hallaj’s martyrdom remains so persistently popular in the Islamic world? What does it tell us about the religion of Islam? 5. Pre-Islamic Arabia in the seventh century C.E. was experiencing a social and economic crisis related to tribal conflicts, rapid urbanization and wealth inequality. How did Islam offer solutions to these problems? What aspects and elements of pre-Islamic culture and society continued under Islam? Which were rejected or critiqued? 6. The Prophet Muhammad is seen by Muslims an exemplary human being. How would you describe the Prophet’s moral and ethical character? Are the virtues that Muslims associate with Muhammad uniquely Islamic or more universally human? 7. Muslims consider the Prophet Muhammad to be a spiritual exemplar. At the same time, the historical Muhammad also functioned in the material world in multiple roles. He was a husband, a father, a general, and a head of state. Does this complicate our understanding him as a “holy” or “saintly” person? 8. In what ways have later generations of Muslims understood the Prophet both as a historical person and spiritual presence and reality? 9. What are some of the different ways that the qiyama has been interpreted by later generations? Should we read the descriptions of the afterlife in the Qur’an literally or as metaphors? How is the concept of the qiyama connected to the notion of human beings as responsible moral agents?

Notes 1. Often the connection between religion and politics becomes the driving force fueling our desire to learn about religious movements. This is as true for Christianity as it is for Islam. One wonders if anyone outside of specific normative Christian circles would pay much attention to the “pre-millennial dispensationalist” theology and eschatology of contemporary Christian fundamentalists, if the people who held these positions had not become a significant and divisive force in American politics. Similarly, it is only in the wake of the events of 9-11-2001 and the Iraq war that many non-Muslims have become interested in

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the terminology of Muslim diversity as the television news has made terms like “Shiʿa,” “Sunni,” and “Wahhabi” part of its political discourse. 2. It is interesting that mystical groups in Turkey generally substitute the analogous Turkish word “yol” or road, for the Arabic loan word “tarikat.” The concept of path remains operative in either language. 3. The term “Wahhabi,” which is frequently used to refer to the officially sanctioned form of Islam practiced in Saudi Arabia linked to the teachings and religious movement associated with the eighteenth-century reformer Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab (1703–1792), has, in recent years, become controversial. ‘Abd al-­Wahhab wished to cleanse Islam of popular practices such as the veneration of the awliyaʾ and tomb visitation, which he considered to be shirk. He was deeply hostile to both Sufi and Shiʿi expressions of piety and formed a political alliance with the “House of Sa‘ud” in order to institute his exclusivist vision of Islam. Many followers of this form of Islam consider it a derogatory term and prefer to be called muwahhidun, or monotheists, which is itself problematic in that it implies other Muslims, who interpret tawhid differently, are not also monotheistic. Some prefer the more general term Salafi, because they see themselves as following the tradition of the first generation Muslims, but, of course, not all Salafis associate themselves with Abd Al-Wahhab’s movement. Whatever term one uses to describe their movement, the refusal of the followers of Abd al-Wahhab’s to accept the legitimacy of other Muslims who do not conform to their radical view of monotheistic propriety has made them extremely controversial within the larger umma. In the context of this book I will use the term Wahhabi when referring specifically to the type of religion officially sanctioned by the Saudi state and not as a code for all forms of Salafi or Hanbali Islam. 4. Like Wahhabi, the term Salafi is contested and difficult to define. In general, Salafis are Muslims who wish to return to the original practice of the first generation of Muslims. For an excellent discussion of the nuances of Salafism see Michael Muhammad Knight, Why I am a Salafi. (Soft Skull Press, 2015). 5. Vernon Schubel, Religious Performance in Contemporary Islam: Shiʿi Devotional Rituals in South Asia, (Columbia: University of South Carolina, 1993) pp. 15–17. I am forever grateful to the late Professor Karrar Hussein of Karachi, Pakistan for providing me with this model when I was conducting dissertation research in 1983. His guidance at the earliest stages of my career was crucial in my development as a scholar and a teacher. 6. Kenneth Cragg, The Event of the Qur’an: Islam in its Scriptures, (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 1994). 7. This definition draws heavily on the thought of Robert Orsi, as well as the work of both Talal Asad and Shahab Ahmed. See my discussion of their work in the introduction to this volume. 8. Marshall Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, Volume 1, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 167. 9. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, Vol. 1, 238. 10. Ahmet Karamustafa, “Islam: A Civilizational Project in Process” in Omid Safi, editor, Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender and Pluralism,(Oxford: Oneworld, 2003), 107. 11. I am deeply indebted to my colleague and friend Professor Abbas Husain of Karachi, Pakistan who gave me this metaphor in conversation in 1983. 12. I am aware that the concept of usul al-din is particularly associated with Shiʿi Islam, who use this term to refer to five usul al-din including not only tawhid, nubuwwa and qiyama but also imama and ‘adala (justice). Nevertheless, it is clear that Sunni Muslims, like their Shiʿi co-religionists, accept the necessity of belief in tawhid. nubuwwa and qiyama as essential to Islam. These three terms, whether referred to specifically by the term usul aldin or not, are common to all Muslims and shared by Sunni and Shiʿa alike. 13. I remain deeply grateful to my teacher Professor Abdulaziz Sachedina who introduced me to this image of Islam as a tree and the importance of usul al-din in Islam in the very first seminar I took with him at the University of Virginia in 1978. I have continued to use the

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2  Islam’s Diverse Paths, Part One: Patterns of Belief usul al-din as a lens for interpreting Islam throughout my career. I am forever indebted to Professor Sachedina for this and countless other insights about Islam over the years. This book would be impossible without him. For a particularly striking image from the web on Islam as a tree rooted in the usul al-din from the Isma’ili tradition see, https://ismailignosis.com/2012/09/30/the-­seven-­pillars-­of-­islam-­the-­esoterics-­of-­walayah/ 14. Fazlur Rahman, Major Themes of the Qur’an, (Minneapolis and Chicago: Bibliotheca Islamica, 1971). 17–36. 15. See, Sa’diyya Shaikh, Sufi Narratives of Intimacy: Ibn ‘Arabī, Gender, and Sexuality,(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012). I find this remarkable book to be the single most readable and understandable introduction to the thought of Ibn ‘Arabi. 16. Farid ud-din Attar, translated by Afkham Darbandi and Dick Davis, The Conference of the Birds, (London and New York: Penguin Books, 1984) 17. Attar, Conference, 57–75. 18. The best general source on Hallaj remains Louis Massignon, Hallaj: Mystic and Martyr, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). For a more concise discussion see Annmarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of  Islam, (Chapel Hill: University of  Carolina Press, 1978), 62–77. Also, see Farid al-Din Attar, translated by A.J.  Arberry, Muslim Saints and Mystics: Episodes from the Tadhkirat al- awliyaʾ (Memorial of the Saints) (London. Boston and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), 264–271. 19. I use the term “root paradigm” in the sense of Victor Turner in Dramas, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society, (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1974), p.64–68. I will discuss this concept in greater depth in Chap. 4. 20. Ibn Taymiyya is one of the most contested thinkers in Islamic intellectual history. A relatively peripheral figure in his own time, in part because of his criticism of popular Sufi practices, he has become extremely popular among modern reformers, especially Salafis and the so-called Wahhabis. For a fascinating discussion of Ibn Taymiyya’s thoughts on love between God and human beings, see Joseph Norman Bell, Love Theory in Later Hanbalite Islam (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1979), 74–91. While it is clear that her does not entirely reject love between human beings and God, he completely rejects it in the form of ‘ishq, or passionate love analogous to romantic love, a term and concept that had been fully incorporated into Islam by the time he was writing. For further discussion of how ‘ishq became a critical term in Islam, see Joseph E. Liumbard “From Hubb to ‘Ishq: The Development of Love in Early Islam” in The Journal of Islamic Studies, 18:3 (2007), pp. 345–385. For those interested in further explorations into this fascinating and divisive figure see Yossef Rapoport and Shahab Ahmed, eds., Ibn Taymiyyah and His Times, (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2010). 21. The tombs of both Ibn ‘Arabi and Ibn Taymiyyah, who represent radically different interpretations of tawhid, are located in the city of Damascus. For a wonderful description of these two places, see Michael Muhammed Knight, Journey to the End of Islam, (Berkeley, CA.: Soft Skull Press, 2009), 130–134. 22. Sources on the life of the Prophet Muhammad are plentiful. The best and most complete single primary source is ‘Abd al-Malik, Ibn Hishām, trans. A.  Guillaume, The Life of Muhammad: A Translation of Isḥāq’s Sīrat Rasūl Allāh, (Karachi, New York: Oxford University Press, 2001) which is the  earliest biography of  the  Prophet. The  discussion of  the  life and  career of  Muhammad in  volume one of  Marshall G.S. Hodgson’s The Venture of  Islam does an  excellent job of  placing the  Qur’anic event in  the  context of the historical period in which it takes place. In my opinion, more than forty years after its initial publication it remains the best introductory text on the history of Islam in print. I also recommend Tariq Ramadan, In the Footsteps of the Prophet: Lessons from the Life of the Prophet (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). Despite his self-identification as  a  “Salafi reformist,” and  charges of  sexual misconduct, his biography of the Prophet, based on the classical sources, paints an image that is very much in line with popular Sufi and Shiʿi understandings of Muhammad as a humane and compassionate guide for  his community. Omid Safi, Memories of  the  Prophet: Why the  Prophet Matters (New York: Harper One, 2009) is excellent for understanding the multiple dimen-

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sions of the Prophet. For information on Muhammad in popular piety I would suggest, Anne Marie Schimmel, And Muhammad is his Prophet: The Veneration of the Prophet in Islamic Piety (Chapel Hill and London: the University of North Carolina Press, 1985). 23. I remain convinced that the issues of tribal relations are at the center of the historical sources for the life of the Prophet and the first generation of Muslims. Ibn Ishaq makes a point of letting his readers know the tribal identities of the characters in his narrative and the issues of tribal and clan politics that affected and influenced decisions made by the Prophet, his companions and his enemies. I am, again, indebted to Professor Sachedina, who pointed out to me the importance of these issues within these primary sources. 24. I am again deeply indebted to Professor Karrar Husein of Karachi, Pakistan who communicated this insight to me in conversation in Pakistan in 1983. His insights into Islam have left on deep impact on my own thinking. 25. I am borrowing this image of the Prophet as a telephone receiver in the thought of “conservative Muslims,” from Professor Azim Nanji, in a lecture he gave in a class on Islam when I was an undergraduate at Oklahoma State University. 26. For a discussion of this controversy online see, http://www.alsunna.org/The-­Permissibility-­ of-­calling-­Ya-­Muhammad-­Ya-­Rasulallah.html#gsc.tab=0 27. Attar, Conference. 79. 28. We will discuss this in far greater detail in Chap. 3. 29. Allamah Sayyid Muhammad Husayn Tabataba’i, trans. Seyyed Hossein Nasr Shi’ite Islam, (London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd. 1975), 167–170. 30. https://sunnah.com/bukhari/81/80 The Prophet (‫ )ﷺ‬narrating about his Lord said, “Allah ordered (the appointed angels over you) that the good and the bad deeds be written, and He then showed (the way) how (to write). If somebody intends to do a good deed and he does not do it, then Allah will write for him a full good deed (in his account with Him); and if he intends to do a good deed and actually did it, then Allah will write for him (in his account) with Him (its reward equal) from ten to seven hundred times to many more times: and if somebody intended to do a bad deed and he does not do it, then Allah will write a full good deed (in his account) with Him, and if he intended to do it (a bad deed) and actually did it, then Allah will write one bad deed (in his account). ” Sahih alBukhari 6491

Chapter 3

Islam’s Diverse Paths, Part Two: Patterns of Practice and Identity

The essential message of the Qurʾanic event, which consists of tawhid, nubuwwa, and qiyama, challenges human beings to learn and submit to the Divine Will. The challenge of the Qurʾanic event demands both personal and communal responses. Over time, the religion of Islam emerges both as a “discursive tradition” rooted in a rational enquiry into the textual sources of the Qurʾan and the Sunna, which manifests itself in the form of the shariʿa, and as an “affective tradition” which speaks to the hearts of Muslims in terms of love and devotion. Both traditions are rooted in the Qurʾanic paradigm of a just and merciful God who “teaches humanity.” That process of education is partially the result of “teaching by the pen,” in terms of knowledge through words, and partially teaching though the more existential path of love, reflecting the two attributes of human nature that set humanity apart from the rest of creation—the ability to know and the ability to love.

The Path of “Law”: The Shariʿʿa1 Nowhere is the discursive tradition of Islam more evident than in the shariʿa. As Muslims believe that human beings shall be judged at the qiyama based on their actions in the world, it is not surprising that they have spent a great deal of time and energy in seeking to determine which actions are pleasing to God, which are part of the “straight path,” as it were, and which are not. This is the process of fiqh, what is often referred to as “Islamic jurisprudence,” the process for uncovering the path of practice, or the shariʿa. Given the importance of one’s behavior in determining one’s ultimate judgment, the process of uncovering the shariʿa became one of the primary concerns of learned elites in the Islamic world. It is, perhaps, the central preoccupation of Islam’s discursive tradition. Over time, scholars came to believe that it should be theoretically possible to determine if any particular human action were acceptable or © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 V. J. Schubel, Teaching Humanity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22362-4_3

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unacceptable according to the shariʿa; and furthermore, that these actions could be arranged along a continuum ranging from required (wajib), to recommended (mandub), to neutral (jaʾiz), to reprehensible (makruh) to forbidden (haram) not only for the purpose of facilitating personal salvation, but also for the purpose of constructing what they believed was a just social order in conformity with God’s will. A relatively small list of actions was ultimately classified as required or wajib. It was argued that these actions were incumbent upon believers. These required actions included, for example, daily ritual prayer and fasting during the lunar month of Ramadan. Another narrow list of actions, such as murder, were deemed completely forbidden or haram. Still other actions—like performing supererogatory prayers beyond the ones which according to shariʿa are wajib—were classified as sunna or mandub meaning that, although God finds them pleasing, humans were not required to perform them. Other actions, like divorce, were classified as makruh, or “reprehensible,” meaning that God does not find them pleasing but, nevertheless, does not completely forbid them. The great majority of actions can be identified simply as “ jaʾiz” or acceptable. These are morally neutral actions to which God attaches no moral weight one way or the other. The process of the uncovering the shariʿa was a complex and rigorous intellectual endeavor. First, the appropriate sources for determining Islamic law had to be determined. It was immediately clear that the Qurʾan must be a primary source for the shariʿa, but as we shall discuss in the next chapter the Qurʾan actually spends very little time discussing the kinds of ritual or social legal issues covered by shariʿa. If something was not mentioned in the Qurʾan where could one look to learn if a particular action or behavior was acceptable or not? Early on it was decided that the sunna of the Prophet—his behavior, including both his speech and his actions— would play a major role in the task of creating the shariʿa. After all, as the Prophet Muhammad was the divinely chosen leader of his community his teaching should be trustworthy and his actions acceptable as a model for proper behavior. The important role of the Prophet’s sunna in fiqh was a major impetus for the collection of hadith, reports of the things the Prophet Muhammad had done or said or given his unspoken approval to during his lifetime, gathered from people who remembered things they had been told about him by others. The collection of hadith was a rigorous and painstaking process. One had to locate reliable people, who had heard of events in the Prophet’s life from other reliable persons, and so on and so on, back to original eyewitnesses of those events, and then write them down and compile them. Even more difficult than collecting the hadith was the task of testing these reports to see which could be deemed trustworthy and which could not. Central to this endeavor was the examination of the chain of transmitters, the isnad, by which an individual hadith was reported. Which transmitters of hadith were of sufficient moral stature to be considered reliable? Did the persons in the isnad actually have an opportunity to meet with each other? Sifting through these reports required compiling relevant sources of biography and history. While the sunna, which was eventually expanded to include the practices of the Prophet’s companions as well, became universally accepted as an essential source

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of shariʿa, aspects of it were always contested. Which reports were acceptable and which were not was always a matter of debate. Over time, various collections of hadith were gathered together and some gained a reputation for their reliability, including the two massive collections of sahih, or “sound,” hadith known as Sahih Muslim and Sahih Bukhari. However, as voluminous and comprehensive as the sunna ultimately grew to be, there were still are many issues left unaddressed. For example, how could the sunna of the Prophet Muhammad, a man who lived in the seventh-century C.E., address modern ethical questions such as organ transplantation, in vitro fertilization or gender confirmation surgeries? It was clear from the beginning of the process of developing the shariʿa that one must also apply human reason to the process. Different schools of thought within the fiqh tradition emphasize different forms of reasoning including raʾi, or learned opinion, qiyas, or analogical reasoning, and ijtihad, or independent reasoning. This resulted in the development of a sophisticated discourse about the nature of reason, argument and syllogism in the Islamic world. Finally, Muslim scholars identified a fourth source of shariʿa called ijmaʿ, or consensus. They argued that if it could be demonstrated that there was consensus among the learned about a point of shariʿa then that could be accepted as a form of legitimation. This argument, in part, rested upon a popular hadith where the Prophet Muhammad reportedly said, “My community will never agree upon an error.” As one can easily see, determining whether or not a given action is part of the shariʿa requires considerable knowledge and expertise. One must know Arabic well enough to navigate the Qurʾan and hadith. One must have in-depth knowledge of history and biography in order to know which persons who had reported a hadith could be trusted. One must have a sophisticated understanding of the process of analogical reasoning. Ordinary people simply could not be expected to have the scholarly skills necessary to uncover the shariʿa, especially in pre-modern societies where most people lacked even basic skills in literacy. The construction of the shariʿa became the job of people who had knowledge or the ʿulamaʾ. The ʿulamaʾ were tasked with uncovering the shariʿa and the rest of the community could then follow their teachings. Over time, different schools of fiqh developed each with its own understanding of the shariʿa based on the traditions of the ʿulamaʾ within that school. Among the Sunni Muslims, these schools were named for founding jurists— the Hanbali school named for Ahmad ibn Hanbal (780–855 C.E.), the Maliki school named for Malik b. Anas (711–795 C.E.), the Hanafi school named for Abu Hanifa (699–767 C.E.), and the Shafiʿi school named for Imam Shafiʿi (767–820 C.E.). Among Sunni Muslims, all four schools became accepted as legitimate approaches to the shariʿa. Accordingly, it was not necessary for each new generation of ʿulamaʾ to re-invent the wheel. They could instead follow and incorporate the legal understandings of the previous jurists within their tradition. Ordinary persons could choose which school to follow, but in practice most people simply followed the school of law that was most prominent in the region in which they lived. Shiʿi Muslims, of course, developed their own legal traditions, which incorporated the hadiths of their Imams.

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From the standpoint of shariʿa, there are two broad categories of actions— ʿibadat, or ritual actions, and muʿamalat, or social actions. The path of the shariʿa includes required ritual actions (ʿibadat) that serve simultaneously to remind us of God’s existence and unity, act as evidence of our submission and help transform us into more ethical and spiritual individuals. Central among these for the great majority of Muslims are the famous “five pillars of Islam” which include the public confession of faith, or shahada, by which one becomes a Muslim, the five daily ritual prayers (salat), the fast (sawm) in the month of Ramadan, the giving of prescribed charity (zakat) and the performance of the pilgrimage to Mecca, the Hajj.

ʿIbadat and Muʿʿamalat: Shariʿʿa as Ritual and Social Practice The public recitation of the shahada affirming the unity of God and Muhammad’s role and authority as the rasul is the action by which one enters the umma. Anyone who says the shahada with proper intention (niyya) becomes a Muslim and a full-­ fledged member of the community of Islam. Salat is a form of prayer that involves the physical act of submission before God. It is not petitionary prayer, in the sense of asking for something from God conversationally, although such prayers, called duʿaʾ, exist within Islam as well; rather, it is an act of unconditional worship. It can be performed either individually or communally at fixed times during the day from dawn through the evening, each of which is announced by an Arabic call to prayer, called the adhan. For the purpose of salat, one faces the qibla, the direction of the Kaʿba in Mecca. The act of prayer involves a series of recitations of Arabic phrases including short chapters (suras) from the Qurʾan, in a series of cycles called rakʿas. Each rakʿa culminates in a complete prostration (sajda) in which the worshipper places his or her head on the ground. For this reason, the word for a mosque is masjid, or “place of prostration”. For many Muslims salat is the ritual heart of Islam that reminds believers of tawhid multiple times over the course of a day. The Ramadan fast involves communally abstaining from food, drink or sexual activity from the hours of sun-up until sundown for the entire lunar month of Ramadan. Even more importantly, one must abstain from angry or hostile actions towards others as well. Like salat, the fast is an embodied physical action that reminds those who perform it of their reliance upon God for their existence. It teaches patience and self-control, as well as empathy for the poor and hungry. The fast ends with the festival of Eid al-Fitr, a celebratory communal holiday. Zakat is the mandatory annual giving of a set percentage of one’s wealth, by those who can afford it, as alms to the poor and the needy. The term zakat literally means purification. The giving of zakat purifies our wealth by reminding us that all that we own is, in actuality, only a trust (amana) from God. Finally, the Hajj is the pilgrimage to Mecca, the birthplace of the Prophet and the home of the Kaʿba, which serves as the qibla, which marks the direction one faces

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during prayers, throughout one’s lifetime. If one can afford it, one should travel to the Mecca, at least once in one’s lifetime, during the lunar month of Dhu al-Hijjah for a series of prescribed rituals, which culminate in the “Standing on Mt. ʿArafat.” On this day, the entire group of pilgrims, wearing simple white cloth similar to the shrouds in which they will be buried stand together before God, in a pre-­configuration of the Day of Judgment. The Feast of Eid al-Adha, which commemorates the prophet Ibrahim’s offering of his son in sacrifice, takes place during this month and Muslims throughout the world offer a sacrifice and share food together. Over the centuries, the Hajj has brought Muslims from all over the world to Mecca where they could encounter and learn from each other. It is interesting to note that the word in Arabic for these prescribed ritual actions, ʿibadat meaning service, comes from the same root as the word ʿabd, meaning servant or slave. By performing these rituals, human beings serve God. For many Muslims these “five pillars” constitute the core requisites for Islamic piety. For some, they all but define the Islamic faith. However, as we have already noted, there have been significant Muslim groups who have downplayed or ignored these prescriptions as preliminary stages or even barriers to “true” devotion, which they argue should manifest itself not primarily in external ritual but instead in constant interior prayer and remembrance of God and service to humanity.

Muʿʿamalat: Shariʿʿa as Social Practice God, of course, does not only call Muslims to ritual obedience. Islam requires Muslims to be socially responsible as well as ritually observant. Human beings, as a matter of course, live socially within communities and Muslims are called to live fairly and properly in relation to each other and, in fact, to all of humanity. Thus, within the Qurʾan there are a number of commands from God dealing with muʿamalat (social interaction). Within the larger context of shariʿa, there are specific Muslim prescriptions regarding marriage, business, adoption, in fact the entire range of social activities developed through the science of fiqh. These actions can be arranged along the aforementioned continuum ranging from required (wajib), to forbidden (haram) not only for the purpose of leading individuals to personal salvation but also for constructing a just and Islamic social order.

Shariʿʿa: Islamic Law? One of the primary dangers in focusing on shariʿa when discussing Islam is the unfortunate tendency to translate the word shariʿa as “law.” While the word “shariʿa,” which literally means “the way,” is commonly translated as Islamic law by Muslims and non-Muslims alike, one needs to be very careful about identifying shariʿa as law in the modern sense of “the law of the state.” Despite the romantic

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notions of some contemporary Islamists who want to return to some form of pre-­ colonial “rule by the shariʿa,” it was never the governing legal system of law of any Islamic state. First, much of shariʿa is concerned with personal ritual practice, which, except in rare cases, states never attempted to enforce. The discourse of the shariʿa may consider the performance of daily ritual prayer (in Arabic, salat, in Persian, Turkish and Urdu, namaz) mandatory, but despite some recent attempts to enforce the practice of prayer in modern states like Saudi Arabia, there has historically usually been no earthly punishment for neglecting it. Whatever punishment may exist for those who neglect ritual prayer is in the hands of God not earthly governments. Secondly, even in terms of social practice, shariʿa was only one of several ways that society was organized. Despite neo-Orientalist depictions of “shariʿa law” as all encompassing, the great majority of Muslims never understood it as the basis for a totalitarian way of life, and never attempted to institute it as such. Rather than a body of law, shariʿa is better understood as a body of scholarly discourse related to personal and ritual practice. Historically, shariʿa has been in fact a relatively informal and flexible system whose closest analogue is, perhaps, Jewish halakha. Muslims may indeed consult specialists in Islamic law on issues of marriage, divorce, inheritance, and business. However, Muslim rulers rarely governed according to shariʿa, precisely because the shariʿa is not a legal system designed for governing a state. The actual ways in which Muslim rulers governed their states generally had more to do with issues of personal power, custom, and lineage than with religion. As such, the rulers of Muslim majority states regularly established all manner of regulations that were extra-shariʿa. Certainly, rulers often demonstrated their support for religion, including shariʿa, as one aspect of political legitimation, and often that support was actually heart-felt rather than simply cynical. They would certainly approach Muslim scholars (ʿulamaʾ) to seek validation and legitimation for their actions. Sometimes they received that validation and sometimes they did not. Moreover, when they did not receive the answers from the ʿulamaʾ that they requested, they would often ignore their advice and do what they wanted anyway. Suffice it to say, the relationship between pre-modern Muslim states and communities and the shariʿa was seldom simple or straightforward. There is a popular vision of a pre-Modern Islamic world governed by a routinized and all-embracing body of Islamic law. Ironically, this is a view shared by both anti-Muslim neo-Orientalists and modern Islamists. Both neo-Orientalists and many contemporary Salafi Muslims are committed to the proposition that one can find the true face of Islam in the sphere of shariʿa, often in its most puritanical form. This is a position, however, with little basis in fact. Not only is this depiction of Islam as a legalistic and puritanical religion inaccurate; it also dangerously facilitates that notion that Islam is neither a humane, nor a humanistic tradition. One thing we can say with assurance is that we cannot use the words shariʿa and Islam interchangeably. For one thing, there are religious communities and movements within Islam that do not considered shariʿa essential to their faith. For example, as we shall explore in more detail in this volume, the Turkish Alevi tradition provides an important example of a religious community that has replaced specific ritual components of Islam associated with the shariʿa with their own vernacular

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forms of individual and collective religious practices. Yet, despite their rejection of the shariʿa, most members of this community fully identify themselves as followers of Islam. Despite the importance of the shariʿa for many Muslims, it would be a mistake to see Islam as a religion based only, or even primarily, upon external behavior. In fact, there have always been influential voices among the umma that have explicitly warned believers against becoming obsessed with rules and ritual behavior in ways that override other more immediate and interior understandings of religion. In particular, the Sufi tradition has used a variety of metaphors for the shariʿa to demonstrate the dangers of overvaluing it. For example, the shariʿa has been compared to the human body which, when animated by love for God is indeed alive and vital, but without that animating breath becomes a corpse, or a finely crafted wine goblet, that exists for the purpose of holding the wine of Divine Love, without which it is simply an empty container, no matter how beautifully constructed.

The Path of Morality and Etiquette: Akhlaq and Adab In fact, despite the importance of the shariʿa within Islam, most Muslims have never understood their religion in legalistic terms. Many Muslims believe that the point of following the path of shariʿa is not simply to obey the law, but by so doing to be transformed internally so that one can become a more fully realized person whose life is rooted in morality and ethics (akhlaq) and whose behavior naturally manifests politeness towards others (adab). This is affirmed by a famous hadith in which the Prophet is reported to have said, “The greatest in my community are the most excellent in akhlaq.” Many Muslims have argued that the final goal of Islam is not simply to practice specific proper actions but to develop intrinsic virtues which include repentance (tawba), patience (sabr), and contentment (rida) that will lead one to act correctly in changing circumstances. These virtues are part of Islam’s overarching emphasis on humanity (insaniyya). It should be noted that the virtues associated with akhlaq and adab are almost invariably ones shared with other religions. The ethical markers of a good human being in Islam are the same as those in Judaism and Christianity (or for that matter Hinduism and Buddhism). Islam calls human beings to be self-sacrificing, kind, tolerant, humble and generous. These are not exclusively Islamic but frankly universally shared values. Most of the decisions that human beings have to make in their lives, especially in times of crisis, do not have black and white legal answers. To this end, Muslims look to the life of the Prophet Muhammad, a man who throughout his life was faced with difficult moral and ethical decisions, to see how he behaved in the various aspects of his life—as a father, a husband, a political leader, a teacher—in order to learn the kind of man he was and, hopefully, to gain insight into the kind of person they themselves should strive to be.

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Thus, the Prophet is not primarily a legal example for Muslims. Rather, he is, far more importantly, a moral exemplar. He was a man of courage and humility who lived a life of voluntary poverty in service to others even when he could easily have used his position and authority to benefit himself. He left after him a legacy of persons, both companions and close family members, who were transformed by their experience of living and struggling alongside of him. Thus, to learn and benefit from the Prophet Muhammad’s example, one should actively engage not only the narrative of his life, but also the lives of those who were touched by his presence and his example—his companions and his successors. Shiʿi Muslims pay special attention to the Prophet’s family, especially his son-in-­ law and cousin ʿAli b. Talib and the other Shiʿi Imams. The Prophet’s daughter Fatima, who is also the wife of ʿAli and the mother of the Shiʿi Imams Hasan and Husayn, is also a paradigm of human virtue, especially for Shiʿi Muslims, as is her daughter Zaynab.2 Within the Sufi tradition, the great pirs and shaykhs who trace their teachings and spiritual authority back through a chain of mystical teachers to the Prophet himself are models of akhlaq and adab. Many Muslims believe that by following their example, we can strive to perfect our humanity and thereby become the kinds of persons who will be found pleasing in the sight of God.

Paths of Love: Mahabba and ʿʿIshq In fact, most Muslims would argue that one should not only follow the example of such people. One should also love them. Love for the Prophet Muhammad, his family and the awliyaʾ Allah, or “Friends of God,” is for many Muslims an essential part of their spiritual path, one that assists and comforts them in their struggle to transform into more complete and virtuous human beings. For most, Muslims, Islam is, in fact, less a path of law than it is a path of love. For those who think of Islam as primarily a religion of rules and laws, it is surprising to see how often the Islamic tradition speaks not of law but instead of love (mahabba or ʿishq). Stories of love—the love between God and his Prophet, the love between the Prophet and his household, known as the ahl al-bayt, love for humanity, the love between Sufi masters and their disciples, even romantic love— permeate the religion of Islam, especially the Sufi tradition, which as we have already seen in our discussion of Mansur al-Hallaj, is rooted in the mystery of Divine Love. The Muslim God is not only a God of justice, but also a God of love, who loves humanity and calls on them to reciprocate that love. The best possible preparation for the qiyama is to become a true lover (ʿashiq) of God, for who more willingly submits to the requests and desires of another than a lover to his or her beloved? Love leads us to act in accordance with the directives of God in this world and prepares earthly lovers for the ultimate meeting with God which is at the heart of the concept of the qiyama. For most Muslims, love is a crucial element both in helping us to live as fully realized human beings in this life and in preparing us for the next.

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Walking the Path of Love: The Story of Layla and Majnun3 Within the Sufi tradition, one way the importance of love within Islam has been communicated is through the narrative of the star-crossed lovers Layla and Majnun. The story of Layla and Majnun is originally an Arab folk-tale, but it has spread widely throughout the Muslim world, where it has been told and retold in a variety of different versions not only in Arabic, but also in Persian, Turkic, Urdu, and numerous other languages. Its two protagonists are the subject of countless songs and poems. It would be hard to find a Muslim anywhere who has not heard the tale of Layla and Majnun. Although the details of the narrative vary from version to version, the basic outline of the story, recounting the passion of Majnun for his forbidden beloved Layla, always remains the same. The story concerns a young prince, who falls passionately in love with a peasant girl, named Layla, who is far beneath his station. Some versions also depict her as homely and unattractive. His father, the king, forbids his son to see her, but his son is so deeply in love that he can think of no one else. Separated from Layla, the prince goes mad with love. In fact, the Arabic word majnun literally means “insane.” Having become her lover (ʿashiq), he pines for her constantly. In the pangs of separation from his beloved Layla, his appearance grows disheveled and his behavior erratic. As a result, he becomes an embarrassment to his father and the kingdom. In one version of the story, his father, the king, devised a plan to cure his son. He decided to throw a great party. He would hire the greatest chefs to make the most delicious meals. He would invite the kingdom’s finest musicians to perform. He would hire the most skilled artisans from as far away as Samarqand and Bukhara to fashion cutlery and serving vessels from the highest quality gold and silver. These same artisans would construct exquisite wine goblets from gold, engraved with the most elegant calligraphy, and embellished with beautiful gems—diamonds, emeralds, and rubies. Most importantly, he would invite all of the most beautiful royal princesses from the neighboring kingdoms. The king believed that once his son saw all of this beauty gathered in one place he would forget his obsession with the peasant girl Layla and return to his senses. When his father told his son about his plans for the party, the prince responded that he would attend the party on only one condition—that he would also invite his beloved Layla. Although his exasperated father was at first upset by his son’s request, he ultimately agreed. After all, he thought, once his son experiences all of this earthly beauty—the food, the music, the creations of the artisans of Samarqand and Bukhara—and, especially, once he meets the beautiful daughters from the neighboring kingdoms and compares them to the dowdy Layla he  would  forget all about her. On the night of the party, however, Majnun ignored the food, the music, the creations of the artisans and the beautiful women. Instead, he stood alone in a corner staring at Layla. Watching his son’s behavior the king erupted in anger exclaiming, “What is wrong with you? All of this beauty and all you can do is gaze upon Layla!”

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Majnun looked at his father, briefly, and then walked over to a table where there were goblets filled with wine. He lifted a golden goblet in one hand, a vessel of particular beauty replete with splendid calligraphic engravings and fine jewels. With the fingers of his other hand, he tapped it three times and said, “Father, your problem is that you are in love with the goblet, whereas I am in love with the wine.” He then drank down the wine in a single gulp and went back to gazing at his beloved Layla. As the meaning of this story has been explained to me, it is not simply a fable whose moral is “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” although, one could, of course, read it that way. It has another, more explicitly religious, meaning. The goblet represents the shariʿa, the great intellectual achievement of Islam, created by the ʿulamaʾ, the finest artisans of the learning and scholarship, who used the “jewels” of Qurʾan, hadith, ijmaʿ and ijtihad to create it. Beautiful as “the goblet” is, however, it has only one real purpose—to hold the wine of Divine Love. The goblet is indeed important, for without a proper container we would have no access to the wine. However, it is not an end in itself. The point of the story is that love is far more essential than the law. This is a familiar message, and one that is, of course, not unique to Islam. It is, in fact, a deeply human message that one finds in stories told in numerous cultures and religions. As a species, we seem to be hard-wired to prefer love and kindness to rules and regulations. Still, for those who are used to thinking of Islam as a legalistic religion defined by “shariʿa law,” it might be surprising to know that both this story and the meaning behind it are familiar to the great majority of Muslims; and that furthermore, that they would agree with it. The fact is, most Muslims consider love to be an essential characteristic of their faith. How and for whom that love is best expressed and experienced varies from religious community to religious community within Islam, but the belief in the centrality of love remains nearly ubiquitous throughout the umma. For many Muslims, the impact of this emphasis on love extends beyond the personal level; it has communal implications as well. As we shall explore throughout this volume, important Islamic social groups and movements, especially the various Shiʿi and Sufi communities have emerged as networks of love and devotion centered around particular persons. The emergence of these groups is part of another expression of submission to God within the religion of Islam, the tendency for Muslims to express allegiance to distinct schools of thought that serve as a focus of communal identity. That is to say, one submits to God not simply as a Muslim, but also, more specifically as a Sunni Muslim, or a Shiʿi Muslim, or, perhaps, a follower of a particular Sufi tariqa. The umma encompasses numerous diverse and distinct communities. In fact, one of the ways in which followers of Islam express their Muslim identity is through participation in these various Muslim communities.

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Islam’s Diverse Communities: Shiʿʿa, Sunni, and Sufi The aforementioned three usul al-din—tawhid, nubuwwa and qiyama—are indeed shared by all Muslims but, as we have seen, the interpretation of these conceptual categories allows for a variety of normative positions ranging from austere and legalistic ‘fundamentalisms,” to shariʿa-compliant sober forms of mystical practice to ecstatic expressions of devotion to holy persons and existential encounters with God. After all, Islam contains figures as different from each other as Mansur alHallaj and Ibn Taymiyya. The inherent multivocality of the usul al-din allows for the existence of numerous communities of practice and interpretation within Islam rather than one univocal Muslim tradition. When discussing Islamic diversity, it is usual to speak in terms of Sunni, Shiʿi and Sufi Muslims. However, the nature of the distinctions and relationships between these communities, which themselves contain numerous distinctive paths and communities, can be difficult to describe in ways that accurately reflect the complexity of Muslim diversity. It is has unfortunately become commonplace to speak of “sectarianism” within Islam and to refer to Sunni and Shiʿi Islam as Muslim “sects,” borrowing language from the history of Christianity that is arguably not particularly useful for describing Islam. Even the Sufi tradition, which is itself remarkably diverse in terms of beliefs and practices, is sometimes discussed as if it were a collection of “sects,” even though most people who participate in Sufism might also identify themselves as members of either the Sunni or Shiʿa “sect” of Islam. Even more problematic there are many scholars who tend to speak of the Sunni tradition as “orthodox Islam,” thereby treating the Shiʿi and Sufi traditions as somehow “heterodox.” This is particularly troubling as the participants in those Shiʿi and Sufi traditions firmly reject the notion that they are engaged in expressions of Islam that are either heterodox or peripheral. Any discussion of Islam’s diverse communities must begin by taking seriously the ways in which those Muslim communities understand themselves. We should be constantly mindful not to privilege any one community, and its particular interpretation of Islam, over any other. For example, the distinction between Sunni and Shiʿa is often presented erroneously as being rooted in the struggle over the Caliphate, that took place among the first generation of Muslims following the death of the Prophet Muhammad. According to this explanation, the majority Sunni Muslims are those who accepted Abu Bakr, as his successor and as the legitimate Caliph (khalifa) and ruler of the Muslim state. The Shiʿa on the other hand are those who rejected Abu Bakr as Caliph and instead supported ʿAli b. Abu Talib thereby breaking off from the mainstream of Islam. Not only does this explanation assume that we can somehow define Sunni Islam as the mainstream of the Islamic tradition, it also presents the rise of “sectarianism” in Islam as if it is rooted in politics. While there may be some in the Sunni community who understand these events in this way, few if any Shiʿi Muslims would see their origins as emerging primarily from the political struggle

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over the Caliphate. As we shall elaborate below, for them these events are crucial not primarily because of their political impact but rather for their spiritual implications.4 No matter what interpretations later generations give to these events, there is no doubt that they had an indelible impact on the history of the umma. As the historian, Marshall Hodgson, has eloquently argued: In launching the venture of Islam, the events of the first generation after Muhammad were almost as formative as those of Muhammad’s own time. It is not accidental that later Muslims have identified themselves in terms of these events and of the factions that grew out of them. They have interpreted the whole of history in symbolism derived from them, and have made the interpretation of those events and of the leading personalities in them the very test of religious allegiance.5

The Force of History: From Saqifa to Karbala6 It is undeniable that the events following the death of the Prophet Muhammad, in 632 C.E., are crucial to the history of Islam. Moreover, the ways in which later generations of Muslims have interpreted these events in many ways have been determinative of their religious identities. The death of the Prophet left the nascent Muslim community with immediate and important decisions. Who should succeed the Prophet Muhammad as leader of the community? And equally important, which aspects of the Prophet’s leadership would that successor continue? The question before the community was not simply who should become the Caliph (khalifa), or vice-regent, of the Prophet, after his death, but which aspects of the Prophet’s authority that Caliph would continue in his absence. The Prophet Muhammad’s authority was complex and consisted of many layers. He was first of all, as identified in the shahada, “the Messenger,” the rasul. In that capacity, he delivered the revelations that became the Qurʾan. Would his risala, his role as a prophet and messenger, continue following his death? Might there be another prophet after Muhammad who would bring new messages from God? Very soon after his death the Muslim community overwhelmingly decided that there was to be no other rasul after Muhammad. The Qurʾan had, after all, referred to Muhammad as the “Seal of the Prophets” and this was interpreted almost universally to mean that there were to be no more Prophets. Risala had ended. The Caliph, whoever he might be, would not be a rasul. However, the spiritual leadership of the Prophet Muhammad had not been limited simply to delivering the revelations of the Qurʾan. Not only was he the primary interpreter of that revelation, a critical function, as the Qurʾan often spoke in ambiguous and allegorical language, he also provided religious guidance that was not directly related to the Qurʾan, but was instead rooted in his own personal spiritual authority. Moreover, while certainly not a divine being, he was in many ways a sacred and spiritual presence within his community. He was the cherished and beloved Friend of God, even more so than the prophet Ibrahim before him, who held

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the title of khalil, or intimate friend. Even when he was not explicitly providing revelations, his followers understood that he had a special relationship with God, as well as a unique knowledge and personal understanding of the spiritual world. The earliest biographies of the Prophet point to his ability to see beyond the outward appearance of things and recognize hidden realities. For example, as mentioned in the previous chapter, when angels appeared to his community in the form of human beings, he alone was able to recognize them for what they truly were.7 To what extent, if any, could the Caliph function similarly as a spiritual guide to the ever-­ expanding Muslim community? Moreover, Muhammad was not only a spiritual guide; he was also, significantly, a political and military leader. Islam, unlike Christianity and Buddhism before it, during the lifetime of its founder became the official religion of a powerful polity. By the time of the death of the Prophet Islam had become a faith associated with a substantial regional state. Furthermore, it was clear that this new state was in the inevitable process of expansion. It seemed obvious that the Prophet’s role as the leader of that state would have to be continued in some way or another for that state to thrive, and that whoever became the Caliph would have to serve in that role. Soon after the death of the Prophet the leaders of the Meccan Quraysh, together with the two leading Muslim tribes of Medina, the ‘Aws and the Khazraj, known collectively as the Ansar, or “Helpers,” met at a place called Saqifa to decide who would assume the leadership of the Muslim community and what the nature of the leadership would be. The Quraysh argued that there should be a single Caliph (khalifa), or vice-regent, for the entire Muslim community who would carry on the political and military leadership of the community. The Caliph would, of course, make decisions about religious practice when necessary, but these would be based upon the Qurʾan and the previous practice of the Prophet, as the Caliph was not thought to have any special inherent spiritual authority. The Quraysh further argued that the Caliph should be chosen from among their own tribe, as they were the first to accept Islam; but also, interestingly, they also argued he should not be from Muhammad’s own clan of Banu Hashim. In the end, the Prophet’s companion ʿUmar put forth the name of the Muhammad’s father-in-law, Abu Bakr, as his candidate for Caliph and swore allegiance to him.8 Abu Bakr was an early convert to Islam with a reputation for strong personal piety. He had a particularly close relationship with the Prophet. He had personally accompanied him on his journey to Medina during the hijra when they were being pursued by the Quraysh. Also, when the Prophet was ill near the end of his life, he personally chose Abu Bakr to lead the communal prayers at the central mosque in Medina, in his place. Furthermore, he was the father of ʿAisha, one of the Prophet’s most beloved wives. ʿUmar’s action was supported by the majority of those present and Abu Bakr was selected as the first Caliph of the Muslim state. The appointment of Abu Bakr as the first Muslim Caliph, while accepted by many, was disappointing and unsettling to many others in the community. There were those among the Ansar, who, as members of the recently converted Muslim tribes in Medina, who had invited the Prophet to make the hijra and protected and supported him in those critically dangerous days of his movement, felt that the

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Quraysh were acting arrogantly in demanding that one of their own must be chosen as Caliph. After all, without their supportive actions the early Muslim movement might have never survived. Moreover, there was a substantial group of Muslims, including many among the Ansar, who supported the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law ʿAli, and were thus known as the “shiʿat ʿAli” or “party of ʿAli.” It is from this designation that the later Shiʿa groups take their name. ʿAli had an extremely close relationship with the Prophet. He was the Prophet’s cousin, the son of Abu Talib who had essentially raised the young boy Muhammad following the death of his parents. Muhammad was, thus, very much an elder brother to him. Furthermore, ʿAli had married the Prophet’s daughter Fatima. Their two sons, Hasan and Husayn, were the only direct male descendants of Muhammad who grew to adulthood. ʿAli also had a renowned reputation as a warrior. He was a hero in the early battles of Islam respected for his bravery and valor and well known for his skill with his famous dual-bladed sword Zulfikar. At the crucial early Battle of Badr, he showed great courage, standing up to the pagan Quraysh against seemingly impossible odds. Furthermore, early Islamic histories report that after the battle with the renegade Jewish fortress of Khaybar, angels were heard to say, “There is no hero but ʿAli, and no sword but Zulfikar.”9 Even more compellingly, on the evening of the hijra, when the Prophet finally left Mecca for Medina, ʿAli had slept in Muhammad’s bed disguising the fact that the Prophet had already left the city, thereby risking his own assassination. There were also many in the umma who remembered the recent incident at the well of Ghadir Khumm, following the Prophet’s farewell pilgrimage, when Muhammad called the people together and announced, “There is one among you here who is closer to me than I am to myself. For whoever I am his mawla (meaning “friend” or “master”), ʿAli is also his mawla, and whoever is his enemy is my enemy.” Many Muslims interpreted the Prophet’s words on this occasion as a declaration of his support for ʿAli to become his successor.10 For all of these reasons, and many others, ʿAli had a great many passionate supporters within the umma. They clearly would have preferred ʿAli, who significantly was not present at Saqifa because, as Muhammad’s closest living male relative, he was busy preparing the Prophet’s body for burial, to have been chosen Caliph. His supporters felt that making such a decision in his absence was an unacceptable breach of respect towards him and the family of the Prophet. The decision at Saqifa set into motion a series of events and conflicts that revealed deep and unresolved tensions within the Muslim community. Abu Bakr immediately had to deal with the so-called Ridda, or “Apostasy Wars,” in which several Muslim tribes rejected elements of the political authority of the Caliphate over them by arguing that in the absence of the Prophet Muhammad they owed no particular allegiance to the Muslim polity ruled by the Caliph. Abu Bakr was ultimately victorious against these tribes. His victory in this conflict established a connection between the religious unity of the Muslim umma and the political unity of the nascent Muslim state that continued for several centuries. Abu Bakr died of natural causes in 634 C.E., after serving only two years as Caliph. Before his death, he selected ʿUmar as his successor, once again

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disappointing the supporters of ʿAli. ʿUmar’s Caliphate saw a major expansion of the Muslim empire and the conversion of large numbers of conquered peoples to Islam. ʿUmar is known for his political and military acumen and many scholars have argued that his skill as a leader helped facilitate the future success of the Islamic empire as a state. After a lengthy and successful reign as Caliph, he was eventually murdered by a disgruntled servant in 644 C.E. Following his death, a council of notable leaders chose another of the Prophet’s companions, the elderly ʿUthman ibn Affan, from the powerful Qurayshi clan of Bani Umayya as the next Caliph, from a slate of candidates that had also included ʿAli b. Abu Talib, once again disappointing his supporters. ʿUthman is best remembered as the Caliph who ordered the compilation of the final canonical version of the Qurʾan, the same Qurʾan that Muslims use to this very day. ʿUthman’s reign, however, had its share of critics. In particular, he was the target of complaints concerning his economic policies and troubling accusations of nepotism. In the end, ʿUthman was murdered by mutineers from Egypt. The murder of the Caliph ʿUthman sent shock waves throughout the Muslim community. The Caliph, the political leader of the first Islamic polity and a companion of the Prophet Muhammad, had been murdered by fellow Muslims initiating a period of terrible crisis within Islam. Following the death of ʿUthman, ʿAli was appointed as the next Caliph and while his supporters were pleased to finally see their candidate get what they believed was his due there were other Muslims who refused to accept him. Members of ʿUthman’s clan of Bani Umayya criticized ʿAli and his sons Hasan and Husayn for not doing enough to find and punish the mutineers who murdered the Caliph. When time passed and no one was brought to justice for ʿUthman’s murder, some Muslims began to hold him personally responsible, especially members of ʿUthman’s clan, Bani Umayya. One of the foremost critics of ʿAli at this time was the Prophet Muhammad’s widow ‘Aisha. ʿAisha ultimately raised an army against ʿAli. The two fought each other at the Battle of the Camel, so named because ‘Aisha directed her troops from a palanquin atop of her camel. Ultimately, ʿAli was victorious and ‘Aisha, who survived the battle, left politics and lived out her life in seclusion in Medina outside of the realm of politics, but the symbolic damage to Muslim unity had been immense. Within living memory of the Prophet Muhammad, his cousin and son-in-law, had entered into potentially mortal combat with his widow. Muslim unanimity was clearly shattered. Similarly, the governor of the wealthy province of Syria, Muʿawiya, the son of the Prophet’s former bitter enemy, Abu Sufyan, who had led the pagan Meccan Quraysh in their long war against Muhammad and a relative of ʿUthman, took up arms against ʿAli demanding justice for his murdered kinsman. Things came to a head at the Battle of Siffin on the banks of the Euphrates, near what is now Raqqa, Syria in 657 C.E. After a period of intense fighting, Muʿawiya’s troops came forward with pages of the Qurʾan tied to their spears demanding arbitration. ʿAli agreed to this demand, which led a group of his most fervent supporters to lose faith in him.

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From their perspective, how could ʿAli—the father of the Prophet’s grandsons, the hero of the Battle of Badr, known as “the Lion of God”—agree to negotiate over the issue of justice for ʿUthman with a mere politician like Muʿawiya? They left the field of conflict in disgust and henceforth became known as the Kharijites (khawarij), “those who left.” The Kharijites ultimately rejected both Muʿawiyah and ʿAli establishing their own exclusivist Islamic community. Following the events at Siffin, Muʿawiya declared himself Caliph in Jerusalem in 660 C.E., setting himself up as a rival to the Caliphate of ʿAli, who had established his capital in the Iraqi city of Kufa. The Kharijites made plans to assassinate both claimants to the Caliphate. While their plan to kill Muʿawiya was unsuccessful, an assassin from among the Kharijites murdered ʿAli during the month of Ramadan while he was prostrate in prayer, at the great mosque in Kufa in 661 C.E. His death was devastating not only to his supporters, but also to the larger Muslim community. How could a Muslim murder ʿAli, who was not only a prominent companion of the Prophet Muhammad but also the husband of his daughter Fatima and the father of his grandsons? Violent dissension, in Arabic it was called fitna, was clearly tearing at the fabric of the Islamic community. With ʿAli out of the picture, Muʿawiya declared himself the sole Caliph, but he feared that ʿAli’s supporters might decide to back his elder son Hasan against him. Muʿawiya thus negotiated a pact with Hasan promising that he would not attack him or his followers if he agreed to abdicate his claims to the Caliphate and not challenge him. Hasan agreed on the condition that Muʿawiya would pledge that his son, Yazid (d. 683 C.E.), would not succeed him as Caliph. Muʿawiya accepted this condition, but ultimately broke his word. Nine years into their agreement, in 670 C.E., Muʿawiya bribed one of Hasan’s wives to poison him. Near the end of his life, Muʿawiya then appointed his son Yazid to succeed him as Caliph following his death. When Yazid took power in 680 C.E., he immediately demanded that Imam Husayn, the younger son of ʿAli and the only remaining grandson of Muhammad, offer him an oath of allegiance (bayʿa) affirming him as the legitimate Caliph of Islam. Husayn refused and together with his family and closest followers left Medina for the city of Kufa in Iraq. They were intercepted on the way in the Iraqi desert by troops under the command of the general Ibn Ziyad, who had been sent by Yazid, at a place called Karbala. Despite the presence of numerous women and children in their camp, they were besieged and cruelly denied access to water in an attempt to force Husayn to submit to Yazid. Husayn refused Ibn Ziyad’s demand that he make an oath of allegiance to the Caliph Yazid, and, according to some accounts, offered instead to either return to Medina or go into exile in Hindustan, in both cases offering to turn his back on politics.11 However, he steadfastly refused to legitimize Yazid’s rule by giving him an oath of fealty. Finally, on the tenth day of the lunar month of Muharram, known as ‘Ashura,’ the last remaining grandson of the Prophet having first watched his close family members die one by one at the hands of the troops sent by a man who claimed to be the rightful Caliph of Islam was himself brutally cut down. At Karbala, Imam Husayn, who as a child had climbed and

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played upon the back of his grandfather the Prophet Muhammad while he prayed, was decapitated, his body trampled by horses and left on the desert floor. The women and children of his family, the surviving witnesses to the slaughter, were marched in shackles to Yazid’s court in Damascus along with Husayn’s sole remaining son Zayn al-‘Abidin, who had survived the attack only because he had been too ill to engage in combat at Karbala. Husayn’s head was carried to Damascus atop a spike. For most Muslims this event evokes deep horror and grief. For many, it marks an irrevocable turning point in the history of Islam.

A Man and a Book: Accounting for Sunni and Shiʿʿi Islam These events that began at Saqifa and culminated in Karbala have had a profound and enduring impact on the development of Islam as a religion and a community. What could possibly account for so much conflict and violence among people who all called themselves Muslims, many of whom had been companions, and even family members, of the Prophet Muhammad? How does one make sense of the killing of the Prophet’s grandson by the Caliph of Islam, who was himself the son of one of the Prophet’s companions? For generations Muslims have reflected upon these events and tried to make sense of them. As mentioned above, many people explain the rise of Sunni and Shiʿa Islam as emerging directly out of the political struggle over the Caliphate that emerged out of the events at Saqifa. Accordingly, they define the Sunnis as the community that accepts all four of the first Muslim khalifas, Abu Bakr, ʿUmar and ʿUthman, and ʿAli, as legitimate. Similarly, they define the Shiʿa as the community that recognizes only ʿAli as the only legitimate Caliph among them. While there is a kernel of truth to this explanation, it is a vast oversimplification. First of all, we have to remember that the Sunni and Shiʿi communities, in the ways that they now understand themselves, did not emerge fully formed directly after these events. They evolved only gradually over time, coalescing around particular interpretations of these and future events. We cannot talk about Sunni and Shiʿa in the modern senses of those terms until centuries after the events at Saqifa and Karbala. It is also crucial to remember that in many ways divisions between Sunni and Shiʿa are far from clear cut and obvious. For example, love and devotion for ʿAli and his children is an important aspect of Islamic piety not only for the Shiʿa, but also for the great majority of Muslims, including those who identify themselves as Sunni. Husayn is the hero of Karbala, and Yazid is its villain, for the overwhelming majority of Muslims, Shiʿi and Sunni alike. Perhaps most importantly, many Shiʿi Muslims find the notion that their community emerged out of a political struggle over the Caliphate to be both inaccurate and offensive. While many Sunni Muslims may believe that the division of Islam into Sunni and Shiʿi communities has its roots in a political struggle, few if any Shiʿi Muslims would agree with that assessment. While the Shiʿa believe that it undeniably would have been better for the Muslim community if they had chosen ʿAli as

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their Caliph, his rejection was indicative of a larger problem that was far more grievous—a failure to recognize him as their spiritual leader, their Imam.12 A more accurate way of describing the differences between Sunni and Shiʿa can be found in the model provided by the influential twentieth-century Pakistani Shiʿi intellectual, Professor Karrar Hussain, who argued that Islam is a tradition with two primary sources of authority—a Man and a Book.13 The Man is, of course, the Prophet Muhammad and the Book is the Qurʾan. As he explains, both Sunni and the Shiʿi Muslims consider the Prophet Muhammad and the Qurʾan authoritative touchstones of their religious lives. While all Muslims accept the authority of both, members of the two communities understand the relationship between the Prophet Muhammad and the Qurʾan in subtly but significantly different ways. For the Shiʿa, the Qurʾan is the Book of God because the Prophet Muhammad says that it is. Muhammad is God’s Beloved (Habibu Allah) and al-Amin (the Trustworthy one). As such he can never lie. Therefore, when he tells us that the Qurʾan is the Word of God, we can trust him. As Professor Karrar Hussain said in a series of public lectures in Karachi in 1983, “I have no way of knowing that the Qurʾan is the book of God, except that the Man has told me that it is and he has never lied to me.”14 On the other hand, the Sunnis generally believe that Muhammad is the Prophet of God because the Qurʾan, which is its own proof and has its own miraculous character (iʿjaz), says that he is. To put it another way, for Shiʿi Muslims, the proof of the Qurʾan is the Prophet Muhammad, whereas for Sunni Muslims the proof of Muhammad’s status as a prophet is the Qurʾan. Thus, while the Sunni tradition, which fully accepts the authority of the Muhammad as the Prophet of God has tended to emphasize obedience to the Qurʾan as the core indicator of Islam, the Shiʿa, who similarly fully accept the authority of the Qurʾan, treat obedience to the Prophet as the very essence of Islam. For the Shiʿa, devotional allegiance to the Prophet Muhammad, and by extension a similar allegiance to those whom they understood to be his legitimate successors, beginning with ʿAli, is thus an essential and necessary element of Muslim piety (Fig. 3.1).15

Shiʿʿi Islam: The Path of Devotional Allegiance I use the term devotional allegiance to describe Shiʿi fidelity and faithfulness to the Prophet Muhammad and his family, the ahl al-bayt (the People of the House), because their allegiance is not simple political loyalty or obedience. It is an allegiance rooted in love, specifically the love between God and the Prophet Muhammad. For Shiʿi Muslims, the relationship between God and Muhammad is one that is full of profound spiritual mystery. While both Sunni and Shiʿi Muslims refer to Muhammad as Habibu Allah, or “the Beloved of God,” the Shiʿa emphasize this relationship of love between God and the Prophet as a crucial and fundamental aspect of Islam. The Shiʿi traditions give special emphasis to those hadith that claim that the very first thing that God created was the light (nur) of Muhammad. From

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Fig. 3.1  Calligraphic representation of ʿAli at Edirne’s the Eski Cami. Note that it is flanked on the rear walls by similar representations of Muhammad and Allah

their perspective, God created the world in order for his beloved, Muhammad, to have a place in which to come into physical existence.16 By extension the Shiʿa believe that in order to truly love God, one must of necessity also love the Prophet Muhammad. For how can one claim to love God if one does not love the person whom God loves most in all of creation? Furthermore, how can one best demonstrate one’s love for the Prophet? The Shiʿa contend that if one truly loves Prophet then one must also love those whom the Prophet loved. How can one claim to love God and his Prophet if one does not love those whom the Prophet loved more than anyone else? First of all, that love should extend to include those closest to the Prophet in his own lifetime—his daughter Fatima, her husband ʿAli b. Abu Talib, and their sons Hasan and Husayn, the grandsons of the Prophet that tradition describes as playfully climbing upon his back and kissing him when he was saying his prayers. That love is wonderfully expressed in a Turkish Alevi story which describes the birth of ʿAli b. Abu Talib in the Kaʿba. At the moment of his birth the newborn ʿAli grabbed the blanket from the midwife and covered his face. He refused to allow either the mid-­ wife, or even his mother, to remove the blanket so that they could see his face. Astonished at this behavior the women sent for Muhammad to seek his advice. According to the narrative, as soon as Muhammad entered the Kaʿba, the infant ʿAli immediately dropped the blanket, looked upon his face of and smiled. ʿAli was born

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with such a deep and overwhelming love for Muhammad that he wanted the first face he would see in this world to be his.17 This charming and deeply mystical story assumes a spiritual relationship between Muhammad and ʿAli that transcends space and time. In fact, it implies that Muhammad was God’s Prophet, and ʿAli was his friend and companion, well before the first revelation of the Qurʾan came to him. Shiʿi Islam teaches that Muhammad was, in fact, the Prophet from the very beginning of time, a perspective shared by many in the Sufi tradition as well. Interestingly this leads to a significant difference in how the Sunni and Shiʿi tradition read Sura 96:1–5, the first revealed verses of the Qurʾan. In that sura, a voice commands Muhammad “to read” using the Arabic imperative form “ iqraʾ .” “ Iqraʾ” may mean either “read” or “recite.” Within Sunni Islam, it is generally understood that Muhammad was commanded to “read.” According to shared Muslim tradition, Muhammad initially responded to this command by saying, “I cannot.” The Sunni tradition generally understands this statement as the Prophet communicating the fact that he could not read because he was illiterate or “ummi.” The Shiʿi tradition however, understands the word “ummi,” in this context, to mean “unlearned” rather than “illiterate.” They argue that the Prophet, while not a scholar, could indeed read and write; after all, he signed his name to treaties and other documents. For them, to refer to Muhammad as ummi is simply to point out that he was not formally educated. Therefore, the Shiʿi tradition often interprets “iqraʾ” not as a command to “read,” but rather to “recite.” According to many among the Shiʿa, when the Prophet responds by saying that he cannot “recite,” he is not claiming an inability to read due to illiteracy. Instead, he is acknowledging a need for divine permission before he can recite the Qurʾan and reveal his true spiritual station as the rasul. The Prophet needed to make certain that he had God’s permission to reveal the Qurʾan before he could actually do so.18 From the perspective of many Shiʿi Muslims, both the Prophet and ʿAli were always fully aware of their spiritual stations and respective roles in the transmission of Islam. From the beginning of time, the Prophet and ʿAli were always, respectively, the rasul and the imam. Even before the creation of the universe, there was a mysterious bond between them, a bond of love that they recognized even when others did not. This explains the hidden spiritual meaning of the aforementioned events that occurred at Ghadir Khumm, where the Prophet publicly declared that if anyone took him as his mawla, ʿAli was their Mawla as well. The use of the word mawla is especially significant. In many parts of the Muslim world, this becomes one of ʿAli’s numerous titles and his devotees affectionately call him “Mawla ʿAli” because of the significance of Ghadir Khumm. Mawla, is etymologically related to the word wali, which is often translated as “friend,’ but which also contains several other possible readings including “client” and “protector.” Mawla can also mean both “master” and “servant”, in the same way that spouse refers to both “husband” and “wife.” While the exoteric Sunni tradition understands the incident at Ghadir Khumm simply as evidence of the intimate friendship between ʿAli and Muhammad, for the Shiʿa this event has far greater significance. They see it as Muhammad’s public affirmation of ʿAli as his designated successor so that after he is gone there could be

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no doubt about his intentions. For the Shiʿa, if one follows Muhammad, one must also follow ʿAli and similarly if one considers ʿAli an enemy, one becomes an enemy of Muhammad. As mentioned above, from the earliest days of Islam, ʿAli inspired numerous devoted followers and supporters, in large part because of his intimate relationship with Muhammad. After all, he was the first, and in many ways, the closest male follower of the Prophet, having grown up with him in the household of Abu Talib. Not only was he married to the Prophet’s daughter Fatima, but he was also the father of Muhammad’s grandsons Hasan and Husayn. All five lived together communally in Medina. Moreover, it was, of course, ʿAli, who secretly slept in Muhammad’s bed on the eve of the Hijra, taking his place and thereby risking his own life to protect the Prophet from assassination. For many Muslims the relationship between ʿAli and Muhammad transcends the exoteric and visible. There were many Muslims over time who became convinced that ʿAli and Muhammad shared a mystical and spiritual connection. There are multiple hadith that assert that Muhammad and ʿAli were created from the same pre-­ existent light made by God before the creation of the universe. There is also the famous hadith shared by Sunni and Shiʿa alike where the Prophet asserts: “I am the ity of Knowledge (madinat al-ʿilm) and ʿAli is its Gate (bab).” There are many who believe that when God spoke to Muhammad on the night of his ascension he used ʿAli’s voice so that he would feel comforted on his journey. In the Sufi tradition ʿAli is presented as the master of esoteric batini knowledge and, in fact, most Sufi orders trace their lineage back to Muhammad through ʿAli. Like Muhammad, he can see beneath the surface (zahir) of things to their hidden spiritual reality. While this special status of ʿAli is recognized most strongly by Shiʿi Muslims, many Sunni Muslims also share a similarly exalted view of the son-in-law of the Prophet. In many parts of the Islamic world it is not uncommon for both Sunni and Shiʿi Muslims people to exclaim “Ya ʿAli Madad” (Oh ʿAli, Help!) when they find themselves in trouble or have a difficult task to undertake. Especially for Shiʿi Muslims, love for ʿAli naturally extends beyond him to include the other members of the family of the Prophet, the “People of the House” or ahl al-bayt. In some versions of the hadith of Ghadir Khumm the Prophet, after affirming ʿAli as his mawla, continues by saying that when he dies he will leave his community two things, which if they hold fast to them they shall be always be protected. According to a report, which is well known among the Shiʿa as the hadith of two weighty things (hadith al-thaqqalin), these “two weighty things” are the book of God, the Qurʾan, and the ahl al-bayt.19 This idea is strikingly and beautifully expressed in the famous hadith of the cloak, a hadith accepted by Sunni and Shiʿa alike. According to this hadith one day Fatima was cold and went to her father whom she found huddled under his cloak. He invited her to come inside in order to warm her. When ʿAli came looking for his wife the Prophet called him inside his cloak as well. Eventually Hasan and Husayn also came looking for their parents and they too came under the cloak of Muhammad. At that point, the angel Jibraʾil descended from the heavens and appeared to them

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and when the Prophet asked the angel why he had come he replied that he had been in the highest heavens and looked down upon the Earth where he saw a brilliant confluence of shining light such as he had never before seen. Jibraʾil had come to earth to discover the source of that light only to learn that it was coming from the cloak of the Prophet, where all the five members of the ahl al-bayt were gathered together beneath it. These five people—Muhammad. ʿAli, Fatima, Hasan and Husayn—are not simply a holy family. These five—the original ahl al-bayt—constitute the presence of the original spiritual light of Muhammad in the world. In South Asia they are known collectively as the “Five Pure Ones,” the “Panajatan Pak.” Throughout the Muslim world the five-fingered “hand of Fatima” is an important spiritual symbol. In fact, some people believe that the reason human beings have five fingers on each hand is as a sign of the ahl al-bayt.20 For the Shiʿa, narratives of the lives of the ahl al-bayt are an essential element of Muslim piety. When one narrates stories about these persons one evokes their presence. The perennial telling of their stories brings them alive for each new generation who hears them. For many Muslims, especially the Shiʿa, sharing in their joys and their grief becomes a crucial element of one’s identity as a Muslim. The significant events of their lives—which include the aforementioned naming of ʿAli as Mawla at Ghadir Khumm, at which time the Shiʿa believe ʿAli was designated an Imam by the Prophet, the meeting of the Prophet with the Christians of Najaran, at which time Muslims believe the superiority of Islam over Christianity was established, the confrontation of Fatima with Abu Bakr over her inheritance of the garden at Faydak and especially the martyrdom of Imam Husayn at Karbala—carry with them a reality and a meaning which both transcends and encompasses all of human and spiritual history. The commemoration of these events is a central characteristic of Shiʿi piety. Shiʿi Islam is a historically oriented form of spirituality, in that it seeks to understand the Divine Will through the interpretation of certain crucial historical events and the personalities who participated in them, especially the Prophet Muhammad and his ahl al-bayt. While this attitude is not unique to Shiʿi Muslims, they place a much greater emphasis on this aspect of piety than their Sunni co-religionists. While many of the early founders of what eventually became Sunni Islam tended to emphasize acceptance of the authority to the Qurʾan as the core indicator of one’s Islam, the Shiʿa, while fully accepting the Qurʾan’s authority, emphasized the necessity of devotional allegiance to a legitimate Imam. For them, not only does the Qurʾan demand proper interpretation, but also the community is in need of continuing guidance from one “protected from error.” This guidance can only be provided by Muhammad and his legitimate successors, the ahl al-bayt, particularly the Shiʿi Imams, beginning with ʿAli b. Abu Talib. This Shiʿi emphasis on devotional allegiance means that they pay particular attention to critical events in the lives of these holy people. The Shiʿi ritual calendar makes special note of these occasions as days of remembrance. The Sunni calendar contains only a few important religious celebrations—sharing with the Shiʿi calendar the sacred month of Ramadan, the two major Eids, both the one at the end of the Ramadan fast and the one commemorating the Prophet Ibrahim’s willingness to

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sacrifice his son Ismaʿil, which falls during the month of the Hajj. For some Muslims, it may also include the birthday of the Prophet. On the other hand, the Shiʿi calendar is replete with numerous occasions for remembrance including the day of Ghadir Khumm, the day marking the occultation of the 12th Imam, the birth and death anniversaries not only of the original ahl al-bayt but also of all of the Imams. All of these events provide opportunities to remember  those linked by love to the Prophet Muhammad. They carry with them a reality and a transcendent spiritual meaning that is crucial to Shiʿi piety. From the Shiʿi perspective, the previously discussed events that occurred following the death of the Prophet Muhammad are not merely political. They are the visible manifestation of a spiritual struggle which, at Karbala, culminated in a deep spiritual catastrophe. In these events the Shiʿa see the Prophet betrayed by those who claimed to be his closest companions. It is reported in hadiths accepted by both Shiʿi and Sunni Muslims that when the Prophet was on his deathbed he asked for pen and paper, presumably to leave his will and name his successor. In a controversial action, ʿUmar refused saying that the Prophet was delirious and adding, “For us the Book of God is sufficient.”21 Here we can see one reason why the Sunni tradition emphasizes the Prophet’s illiteracy, as his inability to read and write might seem to justify ʿUmar’s claim that the Prophet was delirious. For the Shiʿa, however, ʿUmar’s statement verges on the blasphemous. For them, the Prophet is always the Prophet. As such, he can never be delirious as he must always present and aware as the guide for his community. In that role he is maʿsum—protected from error. Even more importantly, for the Shiʿa the Book is not sufficient. The Qurʾan itself, they argue, assumes that there will always be a divinely protected leader, an Imam, to interpret the book and provide the community with the guidance it needs. According to the Shiʿa, during his lifetime, the Prophet Muhammad was both the messenger (rasul) and the Imam. When he died, his role as prophet, his risala, ended. Muhammad is the final rasul and there will never be another. But while his risala must end, his role as the community’s Imam, its spiritual guide and leader, does not. His imama, of necessity, must continue as long as humanity is in need of guidance. Thus, the majority of the Shiʿa contend that there must always be an Imam in the world. From the Shiʿi perspective, God has never left his community without guidance, for to do so would violate God’s inherent justice (ʿadala). How could a just God leave his community without guidance? There must, therefore, always be an Imam in the world.22 The institution that ultimately defines Shiʿi Islam is the imama. The majority of Shiʿa believe that there must always be an Imam from the lineage of ʿAli present in the world who will serve as a guide to humanity both as a teacher and a model to be followed. The presence of the Imam is proof of God’s justice (ʿadala). Although, the Imams are guides to the community, the institution of imama is not solely concerned with didactic guidance on issues related to external aspects of religion like the shariʿa. The Imams are linked to the Prophet and to God not only by bonds of knowledge but, more importantly, by bonds of love. As such, the Shiʿi community not only strives to follow them, they strive to love them as well.

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For the Shiʿa, devotional allegiance to the Imam of the age is an essential element of proper Islam. While many Muslims love ʿAli and the ahl al-bayt and may even venerate the Twelve Imams of the Ithnaʿashari tradition as part of the awliyaʾ Allah, only the Shiʿa hold that belief in their imama is necessary for salvation. In fact, Shiʿi Muslims have concluded that belief in the authority of the Imams (imama), and the corollary belief in the justice of God (ʿadala)—as the presence of the Imams is evidence of God’s justice, as a just God cannot leave humanity without guidance—are so essential that they have included them among them the usul al-din. Thus, the Shiʿa enumerate five usul al-din, including imama and ʿadala as essential roots of religion alongside of tawhid, nubuwwa and qiyama. While imama has historically been a patriarchal institution, as all of the Imams in the two main branches of Shiʿi Islam, the Ismaʿili and Twelver traditions, have been men, the women of the ahl al bayt also play a critical role within this paradigm of devotional allegiance within Shiʿism. The Shiʿi tradition displays strong elements of feminine piety that have emerged as the result of the presence of powerful and exemplary women. For example, the Prophet’s daughter Fatima is important not only because she is the mother of the Imams but also as an example of human perfection, tied to the Prophet Muhammad by close ties of love and knowledge, and therefore a model for emulation by men and women alike. The Shiʿi tradition portrays her as the personification of courage and bravery who, for example, stood up to the Caliph ʿUmar when he denied her the garden of Faydak as her rightful inheritance. Not only does she possess intimate knowledge passed directly to her from her father, Muhammad, but she is also remembered as a powerful partner to her husband ʿAli, to whom she spoke as an equal. Moreover, Fatima is not the only influential woman among the ahl al-bayt. One thinks immediately of Fatima’s daughter, Zaynab bint ʿAli, who plays a crucial role at in the story of Karbala, as the surviving witness to the events of the tragedy. It is Zaynab who bravely confronted Yazid ibn Muʿawiya at his court in Damascus after Karbala, accusing him of tyranny and injustice. In so doing, she reminds future generations of the necessity of responding to the eternal and transcendent spiritual conflict represented by Karbala.23 It should be clear from all of this that while many people, both Muslims and non-­ Muslims, trace the origin of the split between the Sunni and the Shiʿa to the struggle over the Caliphate, for the Shiʿa the dispute over who should be Caliph is in many ways only tangential. For them, the great tragedy of Islam was not that the Quraysh, including close companions of the Prophet like ʿUmar and Abu Bakr, rejected ʿAli as Caliph. They, of course, believe it would have been better for Islam had he assumed that position, but the khilafa is a political position that is decided by human beings. The real tragedy was that the Quraysh refused to accept the imama of ʿAli. Human beings cannot elect an Imam. ʿAli’s imama is an intrinsic station. It is part of his nature. The Shiʿa believe that in rejecting ʿAli and his descendants, in reality, they turned away from God.24 The Shiʿa argue that it is clear from their actions that the Quraysh did not love ʿAli and his descendants, and, consequently, neither did they actually love Muhammad. Nowhere is this more visible than in the tragedy of Karbala where

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people who claimed to be Muslims and follow the path of Muhammad, not only murdered his last remaining grandson but desecrated his body and humiliated his surviving kinfolk. According to some accounts, they kicked his severed head like a soccer ball on the field of battle before sticking it atop a pole. For this reason, some pious Alevis in Turkey will not eat fruit during Muharram because the round shape reminds them of the murder and humiliation of the Prophet’s grandson. The Shiʿa argue that, in killing Husayn, his murderers lost their humanity and descended to a level of debased and degraded animal behavior. Their descent into barbarism at Karbala was perhaps most clearly visible in the murder of the infant ʿAli Ashgar, shot by an arrow while held in the arms of Imam Husayn as he begged the army of Yazid’s general, Abu Ziyad, for water for the thirsty child. Their lack of love for the family of the Prophet manifested itself as a total lack of humanity. For all these reasons, the Shiʿa argue that Karbala must not be understood primarily as a political struggle over the Caliphate. As mentioned above, Husayn did not actually demand the Caliphate; he was in fact, according to some accounts, willing to walk away and either go back to Medina or leave for the frontier of Hindustan. What he would not do—what he could never do, according to the Shiʿa—was offer an oath of allegiance to an unjust ruler, and thus be seen by others in his or future generations, to legitimate his rule. For the Shiʿa, Karbala was not about politics; it was a cosmic event representative of a larger continuous struggle between Islam and unbelief, good and evil, humanity and inhumanity. It resonates throughout time as a transcendent meta-historical event. As his great grandson, Imam Jaʿfar al-Sadiq, reportedly said, “Every day is ʿAshuraʾ, Every land is Karbala.” Every day human beings must choose between the path of Yazid, and the path of Imam Husayn, the path of humanity.

Shiʿʿi Islam’s Diverse Paths While all the groups who identify as Shiʿa share a belief in the necessity of devotion to the ahl al-bayt there is, in fact, great diversity among the Shiʿa, who have formed into several distinctive communities. The Zaydis, who are located primarily in Yemen, believe that while it would be best if Muslims were guided by an Imam from the lineage of the Prophet this is not always possible. For much of history there has, in fact, been no Imam present in the world although there have at times been learned and just descendants of ʿAli who have risen up and seized the imamate. In fact, the proof of a potential Imam’s claim can be seen in his success at claiming the imama. On the other hand, the umma’s two largest Shiʿi communities, the Ithnaʿashari or Twelvers and the Ismaʿilis, hold that it is a spiritual necessity that at all times these must be a living Imam present in the world. The Twelvers and Ismaʿilis both believe that there has been an unbroken chain of Imams beginning with Imam ʿAli. The Ismaʿilis, who are the minority community, follow a line of Imams descended from sixth Imam Jaʿfar al-Sadiq’s (d. 765 C.E.) eldest son, Ismaʿil. They believe that

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although the identity of the rightful Imam has sometimes been kept hidden from the public, there has always been an Imam living among us. Each Imam has been born into the world, one after the other, influencing history and guiding the Muslim community and dying a natural death after designating his successor. The current Imam of the largest Ismaʿili community, the Nizaris, is Prince Kareem Agha Khan, a famed Muslim philanthropist who was educated at Harvard and currently lives in Paris. He has been a major patron of Islamic architecture and education, among other things, establishing educational institutions including a major university in Central Asia. The smaller Musta‘li, or Bohri, Ismaʿili communities believe that the current Imam is hidden and operates through a visible representative called the Da’i al-Mutlaq, who is the only person to know the actual identity of the present-­ day Imam. The largest Shiʿi community, the Twelvers, or Ithnaʿasharis, believe that there are only Twelve Imams, beginning with ʿAli and including Imam Jaʿfar al-Sadiq’s younger son, Imam Musa al-Kazim, rather than Ismaʿil. Each of the first eleven Imams was martyred. The Twelfth and final Imam, Muhammad al-Mahdi, was born in secret and for the first part of his life kept contact with his community through a series of representatives, called vakils, until finally in the year 945 C.E. he entered into what is called “the Greater Occultation.” He has been in hiding ever since. He is still alive. He does not age. The Twelver Shiʿa believe that he sometimes appears to people in order to help them in times of trouble, but when he does he does not explicitly reveal his identity. He will decisively reappear sometime in the future when the time is finally right to bring about a just social order. Besides a belief in the necessity of devotional allegiance to the Imam, all Shiʿa share a sense of Islam having in many ways failed in its mission. For the Shiʿa, the answer to the question of “when was Islam at its best?” can only be answered, “Not yet.” It certainly was not, as many Sunnis argue, in the first generation of Islam in an imagined “pristine Medina,” which, according to Muslim sources, despite the presence of the Prophet Muhammad was home to numerous persons that the early histories refer to as “the Hypocrites (al-munafiq),” who sought to undermine his authority. After all, from the Shiʿi perspective, the dominant Quraysh, having first accepted Islam, nevertheless went on to reject ʿAli, the true Imam of the age, the “Son of the Moment (Ibn al-waqt).” Viewed from the narrow standpoint of politics, the Quraysh, while professing Islam, simultaneously reasserted the same tribal worldview that Muhammad had dedicated himself to overturning. At Saqifa, the Quraysh by demanding the Caliph had to be appointed from among their own tribe established their authority over Islam just as they had previously established their hegemony over the religious life of polytheistic tribal Mecca. In the end, ʿAli found himself at war with Muʿawiya, the son of Abu Sufyan who had gone to war to protect the authority of his tribe, the Quraysh, and his clan, Bani Umayya, from what he perceived as the threat of the Prophet’s family. That conflict consistently escalated ultimately resulting in the murder of Hasan and culminating in the struggle between Yazid, the son of Muʿawiya, and Husayn, the son of ʿAli. For the Shiʿa, the tribal perspective of Yazid b. Muʿawiya is revealed by reports that upon hearing of the death of Husayn, he responded by saying, “Today we have our revenge for

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Badr.”25 For Yazid, the pivotal Battle of Badr was remembered primarily not as a crucial early victory for the Muslims over an overwhelmingly larger pagan army, but instead as a tribal conflict between the clan of ʿAli and Muhammad, Bani Hashim, and the clan of his father, Muʿawiya, and grandfather Abu Sufyan; a battle in which ʿAli took the lives of prominent members of his clan in combat. He understood the Battle of Badr not as part of a larger conflict between Muslims and their oppressors, but instead as a tribal battle requiring blood-wit, which was repaid at Karbala. In fact, the ahl al-bayt continued to be persecuted for decades after this event by later rulers precisely because contenders for power frequently saw them as a potential threat to their legitimacy. And it was indeed the case that in times of crisis and injustice people frequently looked to the ahl al-bayt in search of a possible deliverer who might arise from among them.26 However, as noted above, for the Shiʿa this political struggle was only a sideshow, the epiphenomenon of something far more important, a spiritual struggle between light and darkness, knowledge and ignorance, love and power. For them, to be a Muslim one must of necessity love the ahl al-bayt and recognize the authority of the Imam. They thus see themselves as the primary vessel for the continuation of a devotional allegiance to the Prophet and his true successors that they believe is essential to Islam.27

Sunni Islam: The Islam of the Sunna and the Community Chronologically, it was the Shiʿa who, as the minority within the umma, first emerged as consciously self-identified religious communities. Early on there were communities of Muslims, who believed that ʿAli had a special status among the companions of the Prophet and supported him or his descendants as their leader. As time went by, different Shiʿi groups emerged supporting the claims of specific descendants of ʿAli to be the Imam. For example, there was a significant constituency of Muslims who looked to Imam Jaʿfar al-Sadiq, the great grandson of Imam Husayn as their leader and guide. In fact, both the Twelvers and Ismaʿilis, the two largest Shiʿi communities trace their lineage of Imams back through Imam Jaʿfar al-Sadiq. But all through the early period of Islam different movements coalescing around different leaders came and went. The current Twelvers and Ismaʿilis are simply the two largest groups that have survived. As important as these communities have been in the history of Islam they have, however, always constituted a minority. By their very nature as oppositional minority communities, they were forced to actively define themselves and as a result the various Shiʿi communities developed clear-cut and self-conscious identities. The majority of Muslims, who did not actively follow a leader from the ahl al-bayt and willingly accepted the authority of the Caliph, did not initially feel the need to develop such an explicit ideological identity. They simply identified themselves as Muslims. When they ultimately did define themselves as the ahl al-sunna

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wal-­jamaʿa, the “people of the sunna and the community,” in many ways they did so in order to distinguish themselves from the more clearly defined minority Shiʿi communities, by arguing that one need not follow an Imam to be a part of the Muslim umma. The people who ultimately emerged as Sunni Muslims saw themselves as the people of the community (jamaʿa). Their main argument was that Islam did not require special allegiance to anyone, including someone from the family of the Prophet. The Prophet Muhammad was, of course, to be respected, even revered, as the messenger who brought the Qurʾan, but Islam was at its core a religion of submission to God and thus allegiance to an Imam was unnecessary, either for personal salvation or for the construction of a just social order. Most had no problem accepting ʿUmar’s statement at the deathbed of the Prophet, “For us the Book of God is sufficient.” Of course, the book could be best understood if one were to look to the practice of the Prophet for guidance and for that reason the collection and interpretation of hadith became a major enterprise among Muslim intellectuals, who began the intensive process of constructing the shariʿa as an autonomous body of practice. However, Islam did not require devotional allegiance to a living Imam. According to this perspective a Muslim need only believe in God and follow the shariʿa. Over time, Sunni Muslims came to accept the notion that the community itself—as flawed and imperfect as it might be—was somehow divinely protected from grievous error, a position affirmed in a popular hadith which read, “My community will never agree upon error.” The community should strive to uncover “the way,” the shariʿa that God wanted humanity to follow. Devotional allegiance to persons was not only seen as unnecessary, but for many Muslims, the very concept became suspect, as it seemed to privilege allegiance to persons over an unmediated relationship between human beings and God, in what could be interpreted as a violation of tawhid. Submission to God through adherence to shariʿa was sufficient. The emphasis on an unmediated tawhid in exoteric Sunni Islam led its foundational thinkers to emphasize the absolute power and sovereignty of God. For example, the Qurʾan clearly condemns murder. One might ask, did God condemn murder because it is unjust? Or is murder unjust because God declares that it is? The first position, which is the one generally held by the Shiʿa, who emphasize the inherent justice of God, might seem to limit power of the Creator by arguing that God could not have created a universe in which murder was a not a sin. It seemed to question the omnipotence of God. Similarly, while the Shiʿi insistence on God’s justice led them to argue for the necessity of human free will, the mainstream of Sunni thought, wanted to avoid any argument that might limit the power of God and emphasize predestination. For the formative thinkers of the Sunni tradition, like Ahmad ibn Hanbal, nothing can limit God’s power, not even God’s justice. Similarly, if God is omniscient, does that imply foreknowledge of everything that will happen in the future? If so, does God know from the beginning of creation who will be saved and who will be damned? The formative thinkers of the Sunni tradition tended to come down on the side of protecting God’s omniscience. This position had implications for arguments about the nature of the Qurʾan. For example, the

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Qurʾan mentions that one of the Prophet’s enemies, his paternal uncle Abu Lahab, will be damned to Hell. This led the Shiʿa to argue that the Qurʾan could not be uncreated and co-eternal with God, because if it was that would mean that Abu Lahab had been condemned to Hell before he was born, even before the creation itself. From the Shiʿa perspective for God to have condemned Abu Lahab, or any human being, in this fashion would be unjust, thus the Qurʾan must have been created as it is was being revealed, condemning Abu Lahab only after he had sinned. Ultimately, the Sunni tradition, which tends to privilege the authority of “the Book,” decided that the Qurʾan, as God’s word, was “uncreated.” As the word of God, it is eternal. Furthermore, as the Qurʾan is God’s word, mere human beings cannot hope through their limited capacity of reason to fully interpret or explain it. Thus, while the Shiʿa might explain the Qurʾan’s discussion of God’s eyes, foot or hand, or even its depiction of heaven and hell as physical environments, as allegories and metaphors, the Sunni tradition was uncomfortable with limiting the Qurʾan in this way just as they were uncomfortable in limiting God. As such the great Sunni thinker Abu al-Hasan al-Ashʿari (ca. 873–936), argued that such possible logical problems and contradiction should be addressed by simply accepting the text for what it says bi-la kayf (without asking how), protecting the power and majesty of the Qurʾan from any unwarranted human limitations. In contrast to the Shiʿa, Sunni Muslims tend to have a much more positive view of Islamic history. Unlike their Shiʿi co-religionists, many contemporary Sunni Muslims accept the concept of a “pristine Medina.” If asked when Islam was at its best, they will often say that it was most perfect in Medina at the time of the Prophet and began to decline after his death. While the first four Caliphs were men of undeniable integrity and virtue, and thus true companions of the Prophet, referred to as the Rashidun, or Rightly Guided, Caliphs, after them things declined precipitously. Thus, Muʿawiya, unlike them, was simply a ruler. He behaved like a politician rather than a spiritual leader. His son, Yazid, is almost universally despised among today’s Sunni Muslims, just as he is by the Shiʿa, as an unjust ruler and the murderer of Imam Husayn. Nevertheless, for Sunni Muslims there is a tendency to look back with pride to the success of the early Islamic community. After all, by the time the Twelfth Imam went into occultation, Islam had become the religion of a major world civilization. The Abbasid Empire established in 750 C.E., which followed the fall of the Umayyad empire established by Muʿawiya, continued until the Mongol Conquest in 1258 C.E.  Its capital in Baghdad was a global center of the arts, culture and learning, which at its height was  perhaps the most sophisticated urban environment on the planet. For centuries, Islam grew and spread to come a major world religion. There is much, they would argue, to be proud of in the early history of Islam. If the glass is half empty for the Shiʿa, for the Sunni it is much more clearly half full. The religious worldview of Sunni Islam might seem in some ways more straightforward than that of Shiʿi Islam, with its emphasis on complex historical narratives and devotional allegiance to persons. However, just as there is something exquisite and compelling in the Shiʿi emphasis on devotion and love for the Prophet and his family, there is also a profound beauty to the elegant simplicity of the Sunni

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emphasis on the unmediated relationship between God and believers, both as individuals and as members of a community. It may take less time and space on the page to explain the basic principles of Sunni Islam, compared to Shiʿi Islam, but it is no less sophisticated or powerful. While shariʿa -mindedness is an important aspect of Islamic piety for both Shiʿi and Sunni Muslims it perhaps is even more so for Sunni Muslims. In the absence of a belief in the necessity of devotional allegiance to holy persons, the role of obedience to God’s commands as evidence of one belief in God and the Prophet became all the more crucial. Of course, as we shall see, devotional allegiance to persons and adherence to shariʿa are not mutually exclusive. Within Shiʿi Islam, one could follow both shariʿa and the Imams. In fact, while Twelver Shiʿi Islam is clearly rooted in devotional allegiance to the person of Muhammad and the Twelve Imams, the great majority of Ithnaʿashari Muslims have accepted both the necessity of obedience to shariʿa and the authority of the Qurʾan. The Twelver Shiʿa produced their own traditions of jurisprudence that have been remarkably rigorous and nuanced. In particular, the dominant Twelver Shiʿi usuli school of jurisprudence is noteworthy in that it has maintained the tradition of ijtihad into the contemporary world and established important sophisticated institutions of Islamic learning, such as its famous seminary in Qum. After all, they argue, the Prophet and the ahl al-bayt had followed the shariʿa; thus, to be rigorous in one’s ritual practice as a Muslim can be understood to demonstrate both submission to God and love for them. However, the discursive tradition of the shariʿa was seldom the only way that Muslims, either Shiʿa or Sunni, expressed their Islam. The affective tradition of love and devotion took root not only in the fertile spiritual soil of Shiʿi devotional allegiance but also through the Sufi tradition in majority Sunni Islam as well.

Belief in the Awliyaʾ Allah: The Sufi Tradition While the affective tradition of devotional allegiance is perhaps strongest among Shiʿi Muslims because of their emphasis on belief in the Imams, it is also an important aspect of piety among the ahl al-sunna wal-jamaʿa. The great majority of Sunni Muslims, like their Shiʿa co-religionists, understand the Prophet to be much more than just the revealer of the Qurʾan and a giver of laws. The Prophet exists as a powerful spiritual reality for all but the most exclusivist of Muslim groups, like the socalled Salafis and Wahhabis. Similarly, love for ʿAli and the ahl al-bayt has always been a visible element of popular piety among Sunni Muslims. Sunni and Shiʿa alike invoked ʿAli for help in times of trouble with the phrase “Ya ʿAli Madad (Oh ʿAli, Help!)” Both Sunni and Shiʿi Muslims compose poetry about ʿAli. All but a tiny minority of Sunni Muslims, revere Imam Husayn as the hero of Karbala, and similarly revile Yazid as a profligate and murderer.  Ultimately, devotional allegiance became an integral part of the religious life of Sunni also Muslims, through the Sufi tradition, which for most of Islam’s history,

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Fig. 3.2  Pilgrims paying repects to the pir Shahidullah Faridi during ziyara in Karachi. Pakistan

has been accepted by the majority of Muslims. Like Islam itself, Sufism (tassawuf), or Islamic mysticism, is a difficult phenomenon to define. The origin of the term “Sufi” is unclear. Many scholars think it derives from the word “suf,” meaning wool, because early Muslim ascetics wore coarse wool garments. Sufism (tasawwuf) describes an incredibly wide range of beliefs and practices ranging from the highly intellectual theosophical writings of intellectuals, like Ibn ʿArabi, to popular pious actions such as visitation of the tombs of Sufi pirs in search of physical blessing, or baraka, or festivals celebrating the death anniversary, or ʿurs, of major awliyaʾ.28 Given this wide range of thought and practice that are subsumed under the title, it is perhaps best to define Sufism simply and succinctly as “belief in the awliyaʾ;” because it is belief in the “Friends of God” that is the underlying factor that connects all of these beliefs and practices into a diverse yet coherent and integrated worldview (Fig. 3.2). Despite the protestations of the many vocal critics of the Sufi tradition within Islam, the notion of the existence of the awliyaʾ, as persons who have special knowledge and abilities because of their closeness to God, is neither an alien nor peripheral element of Islam. As we shall explore in more detail later in this volume, it is a core Islamic belief, whose origins, according to its adherents, are located in the Qurʾan and the life of the Prophet Muhammad. Belief in the awliyaʾ builds upon the idea that the Prophet Muhammad came not only to provide zahiri, or exoteric, teachings about law and ritual, but also to impart secret batini, or esoteric, knowledge; knowledge that one could not teach didactically, but instead could only be communicated experientially and existentially. The Prophet Muhammad passed this knowledge on to his closest and most loved disciples, who in turn passed it on to

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their disciples through a chain of authority, devotion and love that has continued from generation to generation up until the present day. This ultimately became the basis of the institution of the master-disciple relationship (pir-murid) as the core of spiritual practice. The pir is the Sufi master and the murid, the disciple. The disciple presents him or herself to the pir and gives an oath of allegiance (bayʿa) just as the first generation of Muslims gave an oath of allegiance to the Prophet Muhammad. Through love for one’s pir, the disciple enters the mystical path (tariqa) that ultimately leads to haqiqa, the mystical reality of God. The Sufi path is a process fueled by love, whose ultimate goal is the annihilation (fanaʾ) of the disciple in God. Loving submission to the discipline of one’s spiritual master helps to facilitate this process. Over time, the disciple proceeds through a process fueled by love, which begins with annihilation in love for his or her pir (fana fi-pir). The pir, of course, has already been annihilated in the love for his (or her) pir before him (or her), as did his (or her) pir before him (or her) in an unbroken chain (silsila) of initiation and transmission tracing all the way back to the Prophet Muhammad, himself Habibu Allah, the Beloved of God. Thus, at the end of this process the murid like his master before him is annihilated in love for the Prophet Muhammad (fana fi-rasul); until finally, just as the Prophet, is annihilated in love for God, his true Beloved, the ultimate end of the process is the annihilation of the murid in God (fana fi-Allah). It is significant that most of these chains of initiation and transmission in the Sufi tradition lead back to Muhammad through ʿAli b. Abu Talib, Mawla ʿAli, also popularly known as the King of the Friends (Shah-i awliyaʾ). For many who believe in the awliyaʾ the aforementioned incident at Ghadir Khumm where ʿAli was named as the mawla of Muhammad, is especially significant. Also critical is the well-known hadith that relates how Muhammad revealed to his community that ʿAli is the bab, or gate, to the city of knowledge which implies that he is the door into the hidden mysteries of love, the ultimate Sufi pir. The end of the process results in the perfection of the murid’s humanity. The annihilated traveler on the “path of love” ultimately emerges as al-insan al-kamil (the perfected human being). Nothing remains of the murid accept the positive virtues associated with God and Muhammad such as love (mahabba), patience (sabr), trust (amana), contentment (rida), spiritual poverty (faqr). True humanity. In fact, nowhere is the idea of Islam as a process for “teaching humanity” more evident than in the Sufi tradition. Another way in which the classical Sufi tradition describes the process of perfecting humanity is as a method for balancing of the three components of the human personality. All human beings possess a concupiscent or animal self, called the (nafs), a spiritual self, called the ruh, and an intelligent and discriminating self, called the qalb. The nafs is the base and selfish part of the human personality that causes us to feel powerful cravings such as hunger, thirst and sexual desire. The nafs is also the part of our nature that, by extension, causes us to desire wealth, comfort, and power. It is not wholly evil, because, we need the nafs in order to survive in the material world. However, we also possess a spiritual self, called the ruh that is, in many ways, the antithesis of the nafs. The ruh is the part of the human personality

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that instinctively turns towards God. It is the part of humanity that is naturally attracted to beauty and light. It is the source of positive human qualities like selflessness, sincerity and generosity. The qalb, on the other hand, is the  repository of human responsibility. It is site of memory, identity, reason and imagination.29 As the prominent twentieth-century Sufi, Shahidullah Faridi, describes it, the qalb is like a ruler with two advisors. To his left sits the nafs, a cunning and devious minister who advises him to keep well-armed, in order to defend himself against potential enemies, to protect the kingdom and to continually acquire new territory. To the right, sits the ruh, a “saintly” ascetic advisor who reminds the ruler to serve God, and be just and merciful. The goal of the Sufi path, the goal of Islam, is to achieve a proper balance in which the qalb, under the influence of the ruh learns to control the nafs so that one can live a life of dignity and humanity.30 Some have noted how this tripartite model of nafs, qalb and ruh resembles the Freudian triad of id, ego and super ego. However, there are some clear differences. For Freud, the superego is a construction within the human mind, built upon the blaming and criticizing voice of one’s parents. In the Sufi framework the ruh, which is less a source of guilt and restraint and more an actual font of virtue, is a very real part of our humanity. That is to say, in the Sufi framework the human tendency to manifest positive virtues like selflessness, generosity, and empathy is an inherent part of human nature. Through the pir-murid relationship, the components of the personality of the murid are brought into proper balance. The influence of the nafs over the qalb is put into check. Instead, the qalb, under the influence of the ruh, learns to bring the nafs under its control. A wonderful image of this can be seen in the popular depiction of the South Asian mystic Shah Yusef Gardezi riding into the city of Multan seated upon a tiger, using a serpent for reigns, as doves circle over his head. The tiger represents his nafs, powerful but perfectly under the control of the cunning serpent in the hands of the “saint” which represents his qalb, as he travels under the influence of the ruh that is always flying above him. Over time, the pir-murid relationship has become institutionalized in numerous ways. Sufi organizations, each one called a tariqa, or way, developed around the spiritual lineages of important pirs. Eventually, some of these evolved into important transnational organizations that brought people together and connected them across the length and breadth of the Muslim world. Through these tariqas, people could take initiation from living pirs and embark on the discipline of an intensive spiritual path. Of course, not everyone who believes in the awliyaʾ takes the formal step of becoming a member of tariqa, just as not everyone who joins a tariqa necessarily becomes a serious and dedicated practitioner of a spiritual discipline. In fact, people come to the awliyaʾ for a wide variety of reasons. Many people come to a pir simply to obtain his, or her, blessing (baraka). They may indeed come to seek help with spiritual practices but more often, they may come for assistance with the more mundane problems of this world. It is commonly believed that pirs can work miracles and as a result people seek them out for help with all kinds of personal problems—marital issues, unemployment, infertility. Moreover, it is not only living pirs from whom people seek help and guidance. The tombs of the awliyaʾ have also

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become places of visitation (ziyara) as it is widely believed that the departed awliyaʾ can be contacted at their tombs and, as “Friends of God,” that they can intercede on behalf of ordinary Muslims. Over time, the tombs of major awliyaʾ such as Bahauddin Naqshband in Uzbekistan, or Abdul Qadir Jilani in Iraq or Hacı Bektaş in Turkey became major centers of regional, and even international, pilgrimage. Despite the protestations of certain Salafis and other exclusivist Muslim groups, who consider Sufism to be a violation of their own narrow understanding of tawhid, such beliefs have never been peripheral to Islam. Belief in the awliyaʾ has always been a thoroughly mainstream Muslim belief—perhaps the mainstream Muslim belief. Belief in the awliyaʾ, and in their ability to help people in their spiritual and material struggles, has long been a belief shared by the great majority of Muslims. Of course, most Muslims cannot aspire to become great Sufis, by walking away from their households and families and embracing poverty as wandering faqirs or dervishes, as some of the most famous awliyaʾ had done. Relatively few ever take on the rigorous spiritual practices associated with serious participation as a member of a tariqa. However, most Muslims can—and do—love the awliyaʾ and give devotional allegiance to them in whatever ways they can. In this way, devotional allegiance has become an integral part of the Muslim worldview of the great majority of Muslims, including the ahl al-sunna wal-jamaʿa. Of course, devotional allegiance to the awliyaʾ does not necessarily contradict the idea of allegiance to the community and shariʿa. In fact, most Sufi tariqats have also been, to a greater or lesser degree, shariʿa -minded and many great Sufis were formidable legal and textual scholars. For many Sunni Muslims, the belief in holy persons in the form of the awliyaʾ Allah (the Friends of God) exists quite comfortably next to a belief in the need to perform the ritual requirements of the ‘ibadat. Nevertheless, through the Sufi tradition, the concept of devotional allegiance to the “teachers of humanity” became an essential part of the piety of countless Sunni Muslims and Sufism the primary transmitter of the idea that the perfection of humanity is the central goal of Islam.

Wahdat al-Wujud and the Sufi Tradition The Sufi tradition not only facilitated the proliferation of devotional allegiance as an expression of Muslim piety among Sunni Muslims, but also the popularity of the vision of tawhid expressed as the unity of being (wahdat al-wujud) based in radical love. In fact, this notion of radical love and unity between the Creator and creation was a powerful proselytizing tool for Sufi Muslims, as it often coincided with similar popular conceptions of divine reality in other traditions. By using imagery and symbolism from local cultures to express their understanding of divine love and unity, they were able to establish common ground with people of other religious traditions that facilitated a sophisticated inter-religious dialogue.

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The Philadelphia based indie rock band, mewithoutyou, based the lyrics for one of their best-known songs on a parable from the twentieth-century Sri Lankan Sufi, Bawa Muhaiyaddeen called “The King Beetle on a Coconut Estate.”31 The lyrics tell the story of a beetle king who watches the smoke rising from a pile of raked leaves that were burning on the coconut estate on which he and his subjects lived. The King asked for volunteers to solve “the Great Mystery” of the burning fire. The first volunteer was as beetle professor, who proudly declared that the burning blaze was in fact not a mystery at all and vowed to return to the King with an explanation of the fire. When the professor finally returned to the King, he had to crawl back on his six legs as the heat of the fire had burned off his wings. He described in detail everything he learned, but the King was dissatisfied as his words possessed neither “light” nor “heat.” The King then asked for another volunteer, this time offering a reward of a silver ring to whomever could solve the mystery of the fire. This time a beetle lieutenant, believing that by accomplishing this task he might gain the favor of the King and ultimately inherit his wealth and power, volunteered. However, the conceited lieutenant also returned burned and defeated. He declared to the King that because of its overwhelming heat and light, which he compared to the sun, he had no other choice but to retreat from the fire. He proceeded to describe in detail the sights and sounds of the fire and the ashen cloud of smoke that rose from it, which resembled a flock of birds. The King grew angry and told the lieutenant that his description of the fire, full of metaphors and allusions, was no better than that of the professor. He dismissed his account of the fire complaining that he had not asked what it seemed like, but rather what it was. Finally, the King decided that he had no choice but to travel into the fire himself. In preparation for his journey, he first gathered his children around him and informed them that although their physical forms had been conceived when he lay with their mother, he was not, in fact, their “True Dad.” In actuality, their real father was the mysterious life within everything; the one who provides the water necessary for their existence; the one who grants them food and sustenance in in the form of cow dung and coconuts; the one who mercifully sends death to thin their numbers and maintain balance in the world. The beetle king describes the mysterious union between their “True Dad” as being akin to the unity between a flower and its fragrance and notes that all of them must ultimately experience that union. Finally, after commanding his children to distribute all of his wealth, including his scepter, crown and throne, to the poor, the beetle king flew into the fire to be annihilated. As he rose into the air, now transformed into a pillar of smoke his troops cried out that their king was not, in fact, dead but instead had been transformed into fire. The song ends with a question and a challenge to the listener, Why not be like the King and be “utterly changed into fire?” The main metaphor in this tale mirrors one in that is ubiquitous in Sufi poetry throughout the Muslim world: the moth and flame. A moth, in many ways, provides a perfect metaphor for the “lover” on the spiritual path, because it will embrace its “beloved,” the flame, even though it inevitably means its own extinction. A moth

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cannot help but fly into a flame because it is its nature to do so. It will willingly fly into the fire, even though, by doing so it must be annihilated. In one of the poems in ʿAttar’s Conference of the Birds, which has a great many similarities with this narrative, three moths discuss which one of them most loves the flame. One claimed to be a true lover because he flew so close flame that he felt the heat of the fire. Another said that he was a truer lover because he flew so close that his wings were singed. It was the third moth, however, who won the argument and proved himself the only true lover of the flame by flying into the fire and being completely burned away.32 True love demands total submission, the annihilation of “the self.” That is the meaning behind Mansur al-Hallaj’s expression of radical tawhid in his exclamation of “Ana al-Haqq.” In the presence of the beloved, there can be only one “I.” To understand the fire of love, we must to be willing to walk into it and be burned away. As a Tamil speaking Sri Lankan, Guru Bawa, in the story upon which this song is based used specific imagery from his homeland to make the same point. Rather than a moth and a flame, he spins a tale of beetles on a coconut plantation, for whom the fires burned by human beings are as mysterious for them as the fire of God’s Divine Love is for us. The King initially seeks volunteers from among his subjects to help him understand the Great Mystery of the fire. Of course, that approach to understanding the fire is doomed from the onset, as the mystery of the fire must be experienced first-hand The first volunteer, the beetle professor, is a metaphorical ʿalim. His discursive knowledge, and more importantly his pride in his learning, in fact, makes it difficult for him to do the one thing that the fire actually requires of him, to become a “true lover” and find annihilation within it. Similarly, the lieutenant volunteers but does so for the wrong reason. He does not seek the fire out of love for the fire itself; instead, he is seeking the favor of the King and worldly prosperity. His motives are insincere and so, like the professor before him, he can only approach, but not enter, the fire. He uses beautiful metaphors to describe it, but, in reality, he cannot understand it because he has not truly submitted and entered the flame. One cannot understand the flame of love by simply approaching it. It is not enough to know “what it seems like;” in order to understand it, one must truly know “what it is” by experiencing it. Its secret cannot be communicated didactically or discursively. It is not knowledge that can be taught through words. It is knowledge reserved only for those who have actually been annihilated in love, for those who have been transformed into fire. Thus, the Beetle King realizes that he cannot send others to learn the truth for him. He finally decides to learn the truth about the Great Mystery the only way possible—existentially and experientially. The King before flying into the fire explains to his children that there is only one ultimate source for everything in creation. Everything is a gift from the creator—water, cow’s waste, coconuts, our children, our life itself. Even death is a part of creation and, thus, a gift from the Creator. We exist in a mysterious union with our Creator, like the unity between a flower and its fragrance. The beetle king gives away all of his worldly possessions and decides to become one with flame, to be transformed into fire.

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One of the interesting aspects of this song is that despite its origins as Sufi story using imagery from Sri Lanka, the band, mewithoutyou, is often seen as a “Christian rock” band. The band spent a portion of their career as part of the “indie” Christian rock music scene, although their message has never been dogmatic nor fundamentalist. The parents of lead singer, Aaron Weiss, and guitarist, Michael Weiss, were followers of Bawa Muhaiyaddeen, who had settled in their hometown of Philadelphia where he established a still thriving religious community. On their album, It’s All Crazy! It’s All False! It’s All a Dream! It’s Alright, whose title comes from one of Bawa’s sayings, the band make numerous allusions to Sufi and Islamic ideas, so much so that some of their evangelical fans were upset by their use of Muslim imagery. In “The King Beetle on a Coconut Estate,” an ostensibly Christian American rock band uses a folk-tale from a Sri Lankan Sufi to talk about Divine Love and Unity in ways that would communicate equally well with either a Christian or Muslim audience. To complicate things further, the song’s last line, “Why not be utterly turned into fire?,” comes from a Christian story associated with the traditions of the Desert Fathers. According to this story, a younger monk, Abba Lot, came to his elder, Abba Joseph, and told him that he tried as best he could to be a good monk. He explained to him, “I keep my little rule, and my little fast, my prayer, meditation and contemplative silence.” He asked the elder what more he could do. The elder “stretched out his hands to heaven, and his fingers became like ten lamps of fire.” He told the younger monk, “Why not become fire?” Once again, the point of this story is fully congruent with that of numerous Sufi stories. The point of practice—the keeping of rules, the fasting, the prayers—is not the rituals themselves. The practitioner should do these things with a larger purpose in mind, to transform him or herself in the fire of love.33 “The King Beetle on a Coconut Estate” brings together Christian and Sufi traditions to make a point that is comprehensible to both traditions. There is knowledge that is didactic and discursive, that one can communicate through words; but there is also a deeper kind of knowledge that one can only be communicated experientially. That is the knowledge that is rooted in the experience of love. Not only is this a popular idea in Christianity and Islam; we also find examples of stories that confirm this in numerous other religions, including Buddhism, Judaism and Hinduism. What the traditions of devotional allegiance and wahdat al-wujud share in common is an emphasis on the importance of love. Wahdat al-wujud teaches us to submit to God out of love in the way that lovers naturally submit to each other, rather than simply by following God’s commands out of a desire for paradise or a fear of Hell. Wahdat al-wujud presents a vision of creation, and especially humanity, connected to God by mysterious bonds of love. This idea is personalized in God’s creation of the light (nur) of Muhammad, the beloved of God, and ʿAli, his mawla. Their mysterious primordial love for each other penetrates and extends into all of Creation. Through love and allegiance to Muhammad and ʿAli, we also love God by loving those whom God loves. Furthermore, our attention to the bonds of love

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between exemplary people like Muhammad and ʿAli, ʿAli and Fatima, Zaynab and Husayn shows us how each of us might better love each other. In the Sufi tradition, the loving relationship between pir and murid, when successful, facilitates the emergence of the disciple as a perfected human being on the path of love. As we shall see in the following chapters, two primary characteristics set humanity apart from the rest of creation: our ability to learn and our ability to love. Both provide humanity with guidance in the process of submitting to God. The path of didactic knowledge leads to the shariʿa, which teaches us through directives and commands what we should do in order to submit to God. As morally responsible human beings, we can choose to follow the commands of the shariʿa and thus live in accordance with God’s will. That can be a difficult road to walk. However, the path of love seeks to transform human beings through experience and personal encounter, so that their actions might seamlessly and naturally accord with the Divine Will. The path of love “teaches humanity” by facilitating the emergence of the deepest essence of our humanity, which by its very nature serves God.

Conclusion: Islam as a Humanistic Tradition One of Islam’s primary characteristics is its remarkable diversity. Over time various communities and individuals within Islam, living in different historical and cultural circumstances, while all sharing a belief in the same usul al-din of tawhid, nubuwwa, and qiyama, have come to different conclusions about how best to be a Muslim, how to most effectively submit to the Divine Will. In the face of these diverse patterns of submission, it is tempting to look for some unifying sense of orthodoxy, a default position against which we might define other traditions in comparison. Many introductory texts or chapters on Islam present the Sunni tradition, or even more narrowly the legal and theological textual traditions within the Sunni Islam, as that orthodoxy. In this way, shariʿa -minded Sunni Islam, by default, often becomes enshrined as Muslim orthodoxy, as Islam’s “straight path.” As a result, Shiʿi and Sufi pieties, which emphasis the necessity of love and devotion, often end up marginalized as peripheral or, even worse, “heterodox” manifestations of Islam. We have chosen instead to decenter the tradition of Islam by refusing to privilege any particular Muslim community or worldview as the “real Islam” and instead sought to describe the various communities of interpretation and practice within Islam on their own terms presenting them in ways that members of those communities might choose to describe themselves. Furthermore, we have consciously chosen to foreground those traditions, which emphasize the importance of love and devotion for the Prophet Muhammad and other holy persons within Islam. Perhaps, because of the importance of tawhid within Islam, there has been a tendency to treat those forms of Islam that stress the most rigid form of monotheistic propriety, such as Salafism, as somehow more truly Islamic. While it is true that there is a significant minority Muslims who fear that

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devotion to any person, even the Prophet Muhammad, is inherently suspect, even dangerous, as a potential violation of God’s unity, the reality is that traditions of devotional allegiance not only to the Prophet Muhammad, but his family members, including ʿAli and the other Shiʿi Imams and the pirs of the Sufi tradition have always been a vibrant and mainstream part of Islamic piety. These traditions of devotional allegiance provide powerful evidence of the importance of the human being (insan) and humanity (insaniyya) in Islam. Not only does the first revealed verse of the Qurʾan note that the revelation comes to teach humanity (insan), throughout the Qurʾan the centrality of humanity within creation is continually stressed. In fact, as we shall explore in detail in the next chapter, the Qurʾan asserts that the first human being, and significantly the first prophet, Adam, is also the very first qibla, in the sense that the angels were commanded to bow before him when he was created. Adam is also God’s first khalifa, a vessel for God’s trust (amana). God not only directs revelation to humanity, but significantly and critically uses human beings in the form of nabis and rasuls to deliver that revelation. God’s friends are chosen from among the ranks humanity. It is no accident that believers in the Sufi tradition understand their distinctive paths within Islam as means to facilitate the perfection of humanity, as vehicles for creating a perfected human being, al-insan al-kamil, who manifests perfect human virtues that mirror the Divine. Love and devotion to perfected human beings, has long been a crucial way of demonstrating ones love for and devotion to God within Islam. Suffice it to say humanity (insaniyya) is at the center of Islam. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the countless narratives of holy persons one finds throughout Islam. Stories about the prophets, the Imams, and the awliyaʾ Allah are ubiquitous in the Muslim world both in classical Arabic and in vernacular languages. These stories have many functions. Within the Muslim tradition stories about exemplary human beings are one of the most important ways that a notion of humanity is created and transmitted, a vision of human perfection that is not uniquely Islamic but instead speaks to cross-culturally shared virtues like patience, generosity, compassion and love. They are crucial vehicles for teaching ethics, mysticism, and even for imparting religious identity. They are a primary mechanism for “teaching humanity.” In the remaining chapters of this volume, we will explore some of the specific ways that the concept of humanity is addressed within the Muslim tradition, beginning with the question of the Qurʾanic conception of the human being.

Questions for Discussion 1. What is the shari‘a? Should we think of it as “Islamic law?” Why or why not? What is the connection between fiqh and shari‘a? How does the shari‘a divide human ritual and social actions into different categories? 2. What are the virtues associated with akhlaq and adab? Are they unique to Islam or more universally human?

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3. What does the persistence and popularity of the narrative of Layla and Majnun say about the importance of love within Islam? Does it tell us anything about Muslim understandings of romantic love? Many non-Muslims have also found this story powerful and meaningful. Why do you think that is? 4. Marshal Hodgson says that the “events of the first generation of Muslims were almost as formative as those of Muhammad’s own time.” What does he mean by this? How did the events that took place between the death of the Prophet Muhammad and the martyrdom of Imam Husayn help facilitate the creation of Sunni and Shiʿi Islam? 5. Many historians view the martyrdom of Imam Husayn Karbala through the lens of the political struggle over the Caliphate. Is that how most Shiʿa understand it? If not, why not? How do Sunni Muslims understand Karbala differently than the Shiʿa? What does that tell us about the difference in how the Shiʿa and the Sunnis understand allegiance to Husayn? 6. What distinguishes the Twelver, Isma‘ili, and Zaydi communities from each other? 7. How did Sunni Islam define itself differently than Shiʿa Islam? What aspects of Islam that the Shiʿa consider essential do Sunnis reject? What do the two communities share in common? 8. How does the Sufi tradition allow for the incorporation of devotional allegiance, especially devotion to ʿAli and the ahl al-bayt, into Sunni Islam? 9. What role does belief in the awliya’ play in the Sufi tradition? What role do the awliya’ the play in the process of teaching humanity? How does belief in the awliya’ either reinforce or challenge the notion of Islamic as a humanistic tradition? 10. How does the narrative of “The King Beetle on a Coconut Estate” speak to the way that Sufi ideas like wahdat al-wujud make their way into popular culture and consciousness?

Notes 1. There are numerous good introductions to the shariʿa available. Marshall Hodgson’s discussion in volume one of The Venture of Islam, remains one of the very best introductions to the subject. See, Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, Volume 1: The Classical Age of Islam, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 315–358. For a more detailed study, see Muhammad Hashim Kamali. Shariʿa Law an Introduction, (Oxford: Oneworld, 2008). Another fascinating source is Ahmed Al-Shamsy, The Canonization of Islamic Law: A Social and intellectual History, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) as is Wael B.  Hallaq, Sharī’a: Theory, Practice, Transformation, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). I consider the work of Kecia Ali on gender and shariʿa to be germinal. See Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), Sexual Ethics and Islam: Feminist Reflections on Qur’an, Hadith, and Jurisprudence, (Oxford: Oneworld, 2016), and her book on Imam Shafi’i Imam Shafi’i: Scholar and Saint (Makers of the Muslim World), (Oxford: Oneworld, 2011).

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2. See Karen G. Ruffle, Gender, Sainthood, and Everyday Practice in South Asian Shi’ism, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011) for examples of this in the South Asian context. See also, Diane D’Souza, Partners of Zaynab,: A Gendered Perspective of Muslim Faith, (Columbia: University of South Carolina), 2014. 3. The core of this version of the story is taken from Rumi’s Masnavi; see The Mathnawi of Jalalu’ddin Rumi, Vol.6. ed. and trans. Reynold A.  Nicholson, (London: E.J.W.  Gibb Memorial Trust). I first heard this version of narrative, which builds around Rumi’s account, in a lecture by Professor Azim Nanji when I was an undergraduate at Oklahoma State University in 1976. Professor Nanji’s version of the story and his explanation of it have remained indelibly etched in memory. I have used this version in lectures every year that I have been teaching undergraduate students about Islam. I have found it to be a remarkably effective teaching tool. 4. Vernon James Schubel, Religious Performance in Contemporary Islam: Shiʿi Devotional Rituals in Islam, (Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1993), 17–18. 5. Hodgson, Venture, Vol. 1, 217. 6. Once again, Marshall Hodgson does a masterful job of chronicling this critical period in the history of Islam. See, Marshall Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, Vol. 1,187–230. Perhaps the best single volume on the period of the first four Caliphs is Wilfred Madelung, The Succession to Muhammad: A Study of the early Caliphate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Another important source is Syed Husayn Muhammad Ja’fari, The Origins and Early Development of Shia Islam (London: Longman, 1979)., which does a masterful job of showing the connections between the Shiʿi version of history and the primary historical sources. It is available online at https://www.al-­islam.org/the-­ origins-­and-­early-­development-­of-­shia-­islam-­sayyid-­jafari. See also Hassan Abbas, The Prophet’s Heir. (Hartford: Yale University Press, 2021.) For a really excellent popular account of this period see Lesley Hazleton, After the Prophet. (New York: Anchor, 2010). 7. For example, he recognizes that the person who asks him about the meanings of the words Muslim, mumin, and muhsin is in reality the angel Jibra’il in the famous hadith discussed in Chap. 5 of this book. 8. Syed Husayn Muhammad Ja’fari, The Origins and Early Development of Shia Islam (London: Longman, 1979), 27–55. 9. Shaykh al-Mufid, Kitab al-Irshad: The Book of Guidance into the Lives of the Twelve Imams, trans. I.K.A. Howard (Qom: Ansariyan, n.d.), 125. 10. Schubel, Religious Performance, 25–29. 11. For example, Dr. Umme Fatimah Naqvi, The Ultimate Sacrifice for Allah: Karbala (Karachi: Nashriyat-e-Walayat-e Elahia, 2012), 54, 91. This is a controversial position but one that is commonly held by South Asian Muslims. 12. Schubel, Religious Performance, 18. 13. Ibid., 13–17. As I stated in Chap. 1, I am forever indebted to my teacher Professor Karrar Hussain who communicated this to me orally when I was beginning to conduct my research on Muharram in South Asia in Karachi in 1983. 14. Ibid., 16. 15. Ibid., 16–20. 16. Allamah Muhammad Baqir al-Majlisi, The Life and Religion of Muhammad, Hayat alQulub (Vol. 2), (Cambridge: Zahra Trust, 1982), 4–6. 17. I came across this narrative several years ago in a Turkish source that unfortunately I no longer have in my possession. It resonates clearly with exoteric Twelver Shiʿi narratives, which note that the first thing that ʿAli saw when he opened his eyes in the Ka’aba was the face of the Prophet Muhammad. For a good modern example see, Anita Rai, Muhammad: Uncovering the True Story, (London: Starsighter, Ltd., 2006), 55–57, who claims to base her account on several classical sources including Masoodi and Allamah Majlisi. Another version that matches hers is available on line athttps://www.imamreza.net/eng/imamreza. php?id=245: It reads

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3  Islam’s Diverse Paths, Part Two: Patterns of Practice and Identity On the third day of this happening, with awe the wonder-struck crowds surrounding the Kaaba witnessed the lock falling of its own accord, and to their surprise Fatima emerged radiant from the sacred premises, cheerfully holding her new-born babe in her arms. Muhammad(S.A.W.) was waiting to receive her and her new-born and the first face that little ʿAli(A.S.) saw in this world was the smiling face of the Apostle of Allah, Muhammad(S.A.W.), whom he greeted thus: “Assalatmo alaika ya Rasoolallah (Peace be upon thee O Prophet of Allah). 18. See for example Majlisi, The Life and Religion of Muhammad, 182–83. The Shiʿi tafsir of Sura 96 in The Holy Qur’an, edited with English Translation and Commentary by S.V. Mir Ahmed ʿAli reads: In the fortieth year of his life…when the Prophet was in meditation and prayers in the cave of Mt. Hira….he beheld a human form approaching. It was the messenger Gabriel who…held a silken scroll before him and asked him to read what was written thereon. When he had finished his recitation the angel announced, “O Mohammad! Verily you are the messenger of God and I am his angel Gabriel. The address with the designation was the signal to start his ministry. (Italics mine). The story of the Prophet getting fright stricken, returning home trembling…are all mere stories…fabricated with dramatic art, that even many among the Muslims, to themselves relate them…The Holy Prophet, since his birth, was fully alive to the task of the ministry which awaited him…In short, he was in know of the Book of God. He was just ordered to repeat it. See, The Holy Quran, ed. and trans. S.V. Mir Ahmed ʿAli, (Karachi: Peermahomed Ebrahim Trust, 1977), 947–949. For a contemporary pious example of this understanding of Muhammad, comes from the popular writer Anita Rai, who writes: Muhammad was well aware of his Reality, Identity, and his Purpose on earth even before this so-called first visit by Gabriel. Muhammad who existed in the form of holy light, light-year as before creation was manifested, could never have needed an angel or for that matter anyone to teach him to read, write and think…Muhammad had existed since the moment of his conception in the form of complete consciousness, awareness, innocence and knowledge, i.e. perfection of cause, nature and being. He existed as a luminous expression of p­ rimordial purity and highest wisdom. See, Anita Rai, Muhammad: Uncovering the True Story, (London” Starsighter, Ltd., 2006), 64–65. 19. Shaykh al-Mufid, Kitab al-Irshad, 125. 20. Schubel, Religious Performance, 19. 21. Al-Mufid, Kitab al-Irshad, 127–38. 22. Schubel. Religious Performance, 166. 23. For further exposition see D’Souza, Partners of Zaynab and Ruffle, Gender, Sainthood, and Everyday Practice. 24. Schubel. Religious Performance, 18. 25. Ibn Shahr Ashub, Al-Manaqib, Vol. 2, p. 226. Quoted in Yasin T. al-Jibouri, Kerbala and Beyond (Newington, VA: Yasin Publishers, 2015) 26. Much of the material in this paragraph derives from lectures and discussions with Professor Abdulaziz Sachedina when I was at the University of Virginia. 27. Schubel, Religious Performance, 18. 28. See Sophia Rose Arjana, Pilgrimage in Islam: Traditional and Modern Practices, (Oxford: Oneworld, 2017). 29. Shahidullah Faridi, Inner Aspects of Faith (Karachi: Mahfil-e Zauqia, 1986), 79–98. 30. Faridi, Inner Aspects, 85–87

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31. “The King Beetle on a Coconut Estate” by mewithoutyou from the cd album, It’s All Crazy! It’s all False! It’s all a Dream! It’s Alright! (Tooth and Nail Records, 2009). For the original story see M.R.  Bawa Muhaiyadeen, The Divine Luminous Wisdom that Dispels the Darkness, (Philadelphia: Fellowship Press, 2004), 39–40. 32. Farid ud-din Attar, translated by Afkham Darbandi and Dick Davis, The Conference of the Birds, (London and New York: Penguin Books, 1984), 206. 33. https://abbeyofthearts.com/blog/2006/07/31/becoming-­fire/

Chapter 4

Teaching Humanity: The Human Being as the Object and Means of Revelation in Islamic Piety

A crucial component of the unity underlying the diversity of Islam is its shared understanding of humanity (insaniyya). Muslim understandings of humanity—in the sense of what constitutes a “good” human being—have been remarkably uniform across geographic, linguistic, and even theological boundaries. Members of the umma have universally praised virtues of humility, courage, honesty, compassion, forbearance, voluntary poverty and hospitality, regardless of whether or not they identify as a Shiʿa or Sunni, or accept or reject the validity of the Sufi tradition. This vocabulary for discussing human character evokes a common Islamic tradition rooted in Qurʾanic terms, as the vocabulary that Muslims use for describing these human virtues across the vast cultural and linguistic diversity of the umma, in Islamicate languages as diverse as Farsi, Turkish, Urdu and Swahili generally comes from the Arabic of the Qurʾan. These words have so deeply penetrated into the languages of people who live in the Islamicate world that they no longer feel like loan words. For example, sabr is not only the Arabic or Qurʾanic word for “patience,” it has seamlessly become the Persian, Turkish and Urdu word for “patience” as well. The same is true for the words for trust (amana), love (mahabba) and trust in God (tawakkul); even the word for humanity (insaniyya) itself. Significantly, the Qurʾan does not present these virtues as somehow unique to Islam but instead understands them as universal and inherently human. In fact, one of the most striking characteristics of the Qurʾan is the fact that it is profoundly aware of the existence of universal human values that transcend any particular religious community. Within the Qurʾan, and especially within Qurʾanic narratives, the characteristics of a perfected human being and the terminology used to describe him, or her, are universal. So much so, that, in the end, there is no fundamental distinction between a perfected human being and a perfected Muslim.1 The concept of humanity lies at the very core of the Qurʾan, a fact that that can be easy to miss because so much of the Qurʾan seems focused on issues of God’s oneness (tawhid). However, the Qurʾan presents its central message of tawhid within the context of its emphasis on human responsibility and the inevitability of © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 V. J. Schubel, Teaching Humanity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22362-4_4

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judgment (qiyama) and prophecy (nubuwwa), the notion that God speaks to humanity through the agency of human beings. Thus, within the context of the Qurʾan these three concepts are intimately connected. As Sura Yunus eloquently begins: These are the signs of the Wise Book. It is a marvel for humanity that We have sent revelation to a man from among themselves saying, “Warn humanity and give glad tidings to those who believe that they shall have a station of sincerity with their Lord.” (Sura 10: 1–2)

The Qurʾan, which significantly God reveals to humanity through the agency of “a man from among themselves,” is a book that addresses human beings as human beings, physical and mortal creatures who participate fully in the material world and yet simultaneously have an intimate connection to the spiritual reality of God. Humanity is both the object and means of the Qurʾanic revelation, whose stated objective is the education of human beings. As stated earlier, in the first verses of Sura 96, The Blood Clot, which Muslims believe is the very first revelation given to the Prophet Muhammad and through him the entire human race, the Qurʾan states that the point of the revelation is to “teach humanity what it knew not.” It is thus not surprising that many Muslims, especially those within the Sufi tradition, have argued that the ultimate purpose of Islam is the perfection of humanity through the cultivation of moral characteristics that are inherently human and, thus, universal. While one can read the Qurʾan as a book whose audience is primarily Muslim, the Qurʾan addresses its message to humanity at large. One should remember that its first audience, the people who eventually became the first generation of Muslims, consisted almost entirely of non-believers. Thus, it is not surprising, that particularly in its earliest chapters, the Qurʾan addresses itself not to Muslims, but instead to humanity in general. When identifying its audience the Qurʾan far more frequently uses some word related to the non-gendered noun insan, meaning “human being,” for example addressing its listeners as “Ya ayyuha al-nas” (Oh, Humanity),” rather than specifically as either Muslims (muslimun) or to “the faithful” (muʾminin). 2 While the Qurʾan, especially in its later chapters, does provide a limited number of rules of ritual and social behavior that are specific to the Muslim community, it is much more concerned with general and universally applicable issues of moral guidance about how to be fully and truly human. This is particularly true of its numerous narrative sections, which focus on the lives of prophets and other exemplary models of human excellence. Furthermore, the Muslim tradition considers the Prophet Muhammad, the human agent of the Qurʾanic revelation, not only the transmitter of this guidance but also an exemplary, in fact the exemplary, model of humanity. Thus if we want to understand how Muslims have come to understand humanity it behooves us to examine the book that the Prophet revealed, the Holy Qurʾan.

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Approaching the Qurʾʾan The Qurʾan is a remarkable document. Its impact on human history has been extraordinary. First, it is the primary sacred scripture of Islam, providing guidance and inspiration to more than a billion Muslims. Everyday countless Muslims recite memorized portions of the Qurʾan its original Arabic in acts of prayer and remembrance, recreating at each of those instances, the cosmogonic moment when those same words came forth from the mouth of the Prophet Muhammad and entered the world for the first time. However, the influence and importance of the Qurʾan extends far beyond the specifically religious. While for Muslims, it is a transcendent text that speaks anew to each succeeding generation of believers; it is, simultaneously, an invaluable historical source, which provides a window into the historical moment of its revelation. From a literary standpoint, it is work of unparalleled power and beauty, considered by many native speakers to be the model par excellence of Arabic grammar, syntax and usage. It has provided both a common alphabet and a rich shared vocabulary to languages on multiple continents including Urdu, Farsi, Swahili, Turkic, and Indonesian. The vernacular languages of the Islamicate world have fully integrated many of the lexical items of the Qurʾan, especially technical terms connected with the religion of Islam. Muslims know the Qurʾanic words for book (kitab), remembrance (dhikr), heaven (janna), hell (jahannam), and Friends of God (awliyaʾ Allah), whether they are Arabic speakers or not, because these words have become essential elements of their mother tongues as well. As mentioned above, the same is also true for numerous words related to human character and virtue. As a result, when non-Arabic speaking Muslims hear or recite the Qurʾan many words are not only recognizable but also deeply familiar. Because these words have come into the Persian, Turkish, Urdu, and other Islamicate languages through the agency of the Qurʾan, it is perhaps better to treat these words as Qurʾanic, rather than primarily Arabic, loan words. Over the course of Islamic history, the presence of these Qurʾanic loan words, coupled with a common script, has greatly facilitated multilingualism among literate Muslims. During the Prophet’s lifetime, Muslims not only committed the Qurʾan to memory, as memorization was an important and valued skill in the oral culture of the Bedouin Arabs, but believers also wrote down the revelations. Fearing that the Qurʾan over time might become distorted, the third Caliph, ʿUthman, ordered the compilation of an official version of the sacred text and the destruction of any alternate versions. Thus, within living memory of the Prophet Muhammad there was a codification of the Qurʾan into its current form. Although this official version of the Qurʾan was originally written down without vowel markers or punctuation, allowing for differences of opinion about certain words and phrases within the text, the overwhelming majority of Muslims—Sunni, Shiʿa and Sufis from both those traditions—all rely upon the same Arabic text that was codified by ʿUthman nearly a millennium and a half ago.

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While it is not inaccurate to call the Qurʾan a book—and, as mentioned above, the Qurʾanic word for “book,” kitab, has become the noun for “book” in almost every Islamicate language—one should remember that it came into existence first as an oral transmission. In fact, the word Qurʾan literally translates as “the recitation.” As such, it is meant to be recited and heard as much as it is to be read. However, whether read, recited or heard the Qurʾan is not merely a vehicle for the transmission of knowledge. It is also a sacred presence, whose authority is rooted in its inherent sacrality (Fig. 4.1).

The Qurʾʾan as Sacred Presence For Muslims, the Qurʾan in its original Arabic is a sacred presence. Like the Torah in its original Hebrew, the Qurʾan in its original Arabic, is revered and respected, not only for its content, but also as a sacred object. It is, after all, the physical presence of God’s word in the world. As such, most Muslims believe that one should not touch it if not in a state of ritual purity. Many pious Muslims take care to store it as the highest object in any room. Out of respect for its sacred character, they will not place any other book on top of it. Furthermore, when recited in its original Arabic it is also sacred as an auditory presence. Many devout Muslims will briefly pause

Fig. 4.1  Students studying Qur’an at Mosque in Turkish Cyprus

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from their worldly activities when they hear the call prayer because it contains Arabic phrases from the Qurʾan. The sacredness of the Qurʾan is so pronounced that over time, the dominant scholarly opinion in the Sunni theological tradition came to consider it “uncreated” and eternally co-existent with God. For all Muslims, it is a divine presence in the world and incontrovertible evidence of the existence of God. Unlike the Bible, the Qurʾan speaks with a single voice. Of course, Muslims believe that is because it has a single author, God. Muslims insist that the words of the Qurʾan are not those of the Prophet Muhammad, but rather the words of God. This does not mean that Muslims think of the Prophet as simply a consecrated telephone receiver or fax machine. While there is an important debate among Muslims about the exact nature of the mysterious connection between the unique personality of Muhammad and the book he revealed, it is clear that there is an intimate relationship between the book and the human being through whom it is revealed. Nevertheless, at the same time, there is no debate that the ultimate author of the Qurʾan is God.3 The sacred nature of the Qurʾan is fully present only in its original Arabic. A translation of the Qurʾan into another language lacks the immediate sacred quality of the Arabic Qurʾan. As a corollary, the experience of its sacredness is not dependent upon understanding its meaning. In fact, recordings of Qurʾan recitation are popular even among non-Arabic speakers who will listen to them in their cars or homes because they believe there are spiritual benefits that arise from hearing God’s words whether or not one can understand them. The words of the Qurʾan are, after all, the words of God and every time one reads them or hears them read in the original Arabic, they in some way recreate that moment when God’s words first entered into the world at the very moment that the Prophet Muhammad spoke them. This emphasis on the sacred presence of the Qurʾan in no way implies that Muslims do not consider the content of the text to be of extreme importance. However, it underscores the way that the authority of that content is tied inextricably to its existence as a transcendent sacred presence, as the word of God revealed through the Prophet Muhammad in the Arabic language. Thus, Muslims do not consider any translation of the Qur’an into a language other than Arabic to actually be “the Qur’an.” It is merely a translation or interpretation of the sacred original. Not only is a translation of the text lacking the original’s sacrality, but no translation of the Qurʾan can preserve the inherent multivocality of the original Arabic. The words of the Arabic text contain multiple possible meanings; the moment a translator chooses one of those possibilities in another language to represent the original Arabic he, or she, of necessity limits the possibilities inherent in the original. For example, the word wali, and its plural awliyaʾ, which appears frequently in the Qurʾan, has numerous meanings including “friend,” “ally,” “client”, or “protector.” Sura 5:51 of the Qurʾan says, “Oh you who Believe! Take not Jews and Christians as awliyaʾ.” Clearly, the single word one chooses to use in translating this term can radically transform the meaning and sensibility of this verse. Does the Qurʾan mean to argue that “believers” should avoid friendships with Jews and Christians, a meaning most Muslims would clearly reject? Alternatively, should this verse be read as more specifically advising the first generation of

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Muslims to avoid political and military alliances with Jews and Christians in the context of the ongoing struggle with the Meccan Quraysh? 4The multivocal character of Arabic means that nearly any reading of the Qurʾan forces the reader to engage in the act of interpretation. The Arabic Qurʾan serves a wide variety of purposes in the lives of Muslims. Not only do Muslims recite portions of the Qurʾan in Arabic during the daily prayers of salat, but it is also the source of numerous Arabic phrases frequently used by Muslims, which permeate their daily lives. For example, the phrase “As-salamu ʿalaykum (Peace be upon you),” is the recommended form of greeting among many pious Muslims to be answered by “Wa-ʿalaykum as-salam (And upon you peace).” Other frequently used phrases include al-hamdu l-illah, which means praise be to God), ma shaʾ Allah, an expression of thanks towards God traditionally used to ward off jealousy or “the evil-eye,” and in shaʾ Allah, which means “God willing” and is uttered whenever speaking of actions in the future as a recognition that only God can actually speak with certainty about coming events. Some Muslims place Qurʾanic verses into amulets worn for protection as talismans. Similarly, Sura 2:255 also known as ayat al-kursi (the throne verse) is frequently hung over doorways as a form of protection against earthquakes. Memorization of the Qurʾan is a highly valued accomplishment among Muslims. Given that the Qurʾan is a relatively short book, about the length of the New Testament, and that it is written in a unique form of rhymed prose, it is possible to memorize the entire text. A person who accomplishes this task is known as a “hafiz” or “protector” of the Qurʾan and such people are greatly respected in the Muslim community.

The Form and Content of the Qurʾʾan While the authority of the Qurʾan ultimately resides in its role as the sacred presence of God’s words in the world, its content and form as a book are, of course, also of crucial importance to Muslims. As a book, it has been a source of both guidance and information for Muslims for the entirety of Islam’s history. While some of its critics have argued that its arrangement is confusing and at times contradictory, Muslims have generally seen it as an infinite reservoir of wisdom and inspiration and incontrovertible evidence for the existence of God. The Qurʾan consists of 114 Chapters called suras. Each sura consists of a number of verses called ayas. Each sura and aya has been assigned a specific number by which it is easily identifiable. For example, there is a particularly crucial aya, which notes that the Qurʾan contains both straightforward (muhkamat) and allegorical (mutashabihat) verses. As this is stated in the seventh verse in the third chapter of the Qurʾan it is numbered Sura 3:7. Similarly, each sura also has a traditional name taken from a prominent word or phrase at the beginning of the sura. The aforementioned verse can also be referred to as the seventh verse of Surat Al-ʿImran or “The House of ʿImran,” the name by which the third sura is traditionally known. Each

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sura, with one exception, begins with the basmala—the phrase bism illah al-­rahman al-rahim (In the name of God the Merciful and the Compassionate)—an affirmation of God’s merciful nature, which acts as a counterbalance to the powerful emphasis on justice and judgement that runs throughout the entirety of the revelation. Significantly, the suras of the Qurʾan are not arranged chronologically, but instead from longest to shortest. The second sura, Surat al-Baqara, or “The Cow.” is 286 verses long. The final sura, Surat al-Nas, or “Humankind,” is only six verses long. The one exception to this pattern is the opening sura, Surat al-Fatiha, or “The Opening,” which is only seven verses long, containing only twenty-nine words. Traditionally, Surat al-Fatiha is considered a kind of mystical key for unlocking the entire Qurʾan. There is a tradition associated with ʿAli b. Abu Talib that states that the entire Qurʾan is contained in Surat al-Fatiha, and that all of Surat al-Fatiha is contained in its initial basmalaah, and furthermore that all of the basmalaah is found in the single nuqta, or dot, that rests at the bottom of the opening Arabic letter ba. Easily memorized, Muslims recite Surat al-Fatiha on numerous ritual and spiritual occasions. When one reads the Qurʾan for its content, one of the first thing one notices is its non-linear character. Its arrangement is neither chronological nor thematic. Statements affirming the unity and majesty of God, descriptions of the Day of Judgement and the afterlife, narratives about the lives of the prophets, and instructions about correct ritual and social behavior are interspersed throughout the text. While some Western commentators see this as a deficiency, this arrangement insures that no matter where one looks within it one comes across affirmations of tawhid (the unity of God), nubuwwa (prophets) and qiyama (the Day of Judgement) just as in a glass of salt water everywhere one looks one will find atoms of hydrogen, oxygen, sodium and chlorine.

Qurʾʾanic Verses: Affirmations of Tawhid and Qiyama There are three general thematic categories of aya within the Qurʾan. The first of these, which comprise the majority of the Qurʾan, consists of verses affirming tawhid and qiyama. These two topics are, of course, interconnected. In fact, the Qurʾan frequently places verses proclaiming the unity of God (tawhid) and exalting God’s power and majesty in close proximity to verses that deliver a warning of the Day of Judgment. In this way, the Qurʾan consistently reminds humanity of the oneness and sovereignty of God, who will inevitably hold them accountable for their actions as morally responsible beings. Significantly, the Qurʾan sees the moral dilemma of human beings as rooted not so much in issues of will, but rather in forgetfulness.5 From the perspective of the Qurʾan, when human beings behave badly they do so largely because they forget that God is omnipresent and all-powerful. How would we be able to engage in sinful or evil acts if we were truly conscious of the presence of God? This tendency towards forgetfulness is a danger even for believers. When they behave immorally,

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it is largely because they have forgotten that God is present with them. The omnipresence and close proximity of God is a major theme within the Qurʾan. According to Surat al-Qaf: We did indeed create man (al-insan), and We know what his soul whispers to him; and We are nearer to him than his jugular vein. When the two receivers receive, seated on the right and on the left, no word does he utter without a ready watcher beside him. (Sura 50: 16–18)

God is always with us, as near to us as our own jugular vein, and aware of all of our actions. We are never ever alone. Despite the fact that we may know intellectually that the one God, who created the universe, is always present, we inevitably forget, just as in the course of our daily lives we forget that one day we will die and be judged. From the perspective of the Qurʾan, human disobedience is largely the result of this forgetfulness, which is a fact of the human condition. In fact, the Qurʾan lays the blame for Adam’s initial act of human disobedience, when he eats fruit from a tree that God had forbidden to him, on his forgetfulness. In Surat al-­ Taha, the Qurʾan states: And We indeed made a pact with Adam aforetime, but he forgot. And We found no resoluteness in him. (Sura 20:115)

The Qurʾan powerfully argues that not only is forgetfulness the cause of both misery in this present life and negative consequences on the Day of Judgement, but that forgetfulness of God will be reciprocated. If we forget God, God will forget us. Sura al- Taha also states: But whosoever turns away from the remembrance of Me, truly his shall be a miserable life, and We shall raise him blind on the Day of Resurrection.” He will say, “My Lord! Why have You raised me blind, when I used to see?” He will say, “Thus it is. Our signs came unto you, but you forgot them. Even so, this Day shall you be forgotten!” (Sura 20:126)

The Qurʾan not only argues that our forgetfulness is the cause of our disobedience, but reminds us that we will all be held accountable for the actions we take, good or bad, in the absence of that remembrance. The Qurʾan states: And when they forgot that whereof they had been reminded, We saved those who forbade evil, and We seized those who did wrong with a dreadful punishment for their having committed iniquity. (Sura 7:165)

Thus, one of the most important words in the Qurʾan is dhikr or remembrance. Surat al-Ankabut, The Spider, reads: Recite that which has been revealed to you of the Book, and perform the prayer. Truly, prayer prevents against indecency and abomination, but the remembrance of God is surely greater. And God knows whatsoever you do. (Sura 29:45)

Islamic ritual is designed to help humanity by facilitating the essential process of remembrance. God commands ritual prayer multiple times a day so that we will not forget the presence of God and the inevitability of judgement. The Ramadan fast makes us recognize our physical fragility and dependence upon the world that God created. The key moment of the Hajj pilgrimage is the “Standing on ʿArafat,” in which all of the pilgrims gather and stand together on Mount ʿArafat, as they will

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stand by their graves at the qiyama, dressed in simple white cloth that foreshadows the shroud in which they will be buried. This ritual is clearly intended to remind the umma of the inevitability of the Day of Judgement. As important as these practices are, the Qurʾan implies that human beings should strive to move beyond the minimal ritual practices required by the Shariʿa, which “protect us from indecency and abomination” and eventually learn to continually remember God’s presence. According to the Qurʾan, remembrance of God is the greatest protection against divine punishment. Not surprisingly, verses reminding people of the unity of God and the coming Day of Judgment constitute the vast majority of the Qurʾan. In fact, one can hardly open the Qurʾan to any page and not come across these kinds of verses. Through these verses, the Qurʾan consistently calls on human beings to reflect upon the central themes of tawhid and qiyama that so that they might never forget them. Having made humanity aware of God’s oneness and the human responsibility the Qurʾan also then provides guidance on how to respond to them,

Qurʾʾanic Verses: Practice and Ethics The second important category of Qurʾanic verses consists of those ayas that serve as sources for Islamic practice and ethics, especially those verses that serve as a source for shariʿa. While verses relevant to the development of ritual and social practice constitute a significant part of the Qurʾan, they are not its core. Interestingly, the Qurʾan describes crucial ritual practices like prayer and fasting only incompletely. If one wished to learn all of the details necessary for ritual prayer, for example, one could not do so from the Qurʾan alone; for that, one would also have to look to the Sunna of the Prophet. Similarly, while the Qurʾan provides a degree of guidance about social behavior including issues of gender relations, marriage, inheritance, and the conduct of war, it in no way lays out a detailed plan for social behavior. While the Qurʾan is clearly one source of the shariʿa, it is not the only one. One cannot derive the shariʿa from the Qurʾan alone. In fact, in many ways the hadith literature plays a much more important role in constructing the shariʿa than the Qurʾan. Aside from specific information on ritual and social practice, there are also general teachings about ethics. The ethical worldview of the Qurʾan is rooted in its overarching sense of egalitarianism. Those who have wealth and status are constantly reminded that the things they possess are ultimately not their own but God’s. This explains why the term used for required almsgiving in Islam is zakat, which literally means “purification”. The things we think of as our own are simply a trust (amana) from God, and so we must purify our wealth by first giving a share to the poor before we can use it ourselves. The Qurʾan consistently reminds the wealthy and powerful that they must deal justly with the less fortunate. It frequently calls upon the more fortunate to give to the poor and to orphans.

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The Qurʾan’s egalitarianism, of course, informs issues of shariʿa. Islam does not present one set of laws and rules for elites and another for the masses. Islam’s egalitarian nature is part of the reason it proved so attractive as a missionary movement, as it spoke directly to those who were oppressed—the poor and orphans—by claiming that their dignity was no less than that of those who were wealthy and powerful. Islam’s success in speaking to many people of African descent in North America is largely rooted in the radical egalitarianism of the Qurʾan, which for many African-­ Americans has provided a clarion call against white supremacy. On issues of gender, it is true that in places the Qurʾan does speak of different sets of rules for men and women in certain situations. For example, the Qurʾan allows men the possibility of multiple wives, while women may have only one spouse. There is also a passage in the Qurʾan, Sura 2:282, that states that in certain kinds of legal disputes the testimony of two women is required to equal that of one man. Moreover, according to the Qurʾan, daughters inherit less than sons do, although unlike in many other pre-modern religious systems, it is obligatory on parents to leave a specific portion to their daughters. Some Muslims believe that these differences reflect real inherent differences between men and women. They argue that because men and women are essentially different from each other, it would, in fact, be unjust to treat them identically. Nevertheless, there are also Muslim scholars who convincingly argue that such specific rulings were tailored specifically to the times and culture of the Qurʾanic revelation. They argue that we should look to the dominant sense of egalitarianism that permeates the text as overriding these specific injunctions and ultimately pointing towards a social ethic in which men and women should treated as equals. To make their case they point to numerous verses in the Qurʾan that strongly affirm the spiritual equality of men and women. In so doing, they make a powerful case for the legitimacy of a feminist reading of the Qurʾan.6

Qurʾʾanic Verses: Narratives A third category of ayas within the Qurʾan, and one that unfortunately is often given far less attention than it deserves, consists of narratives, especially narratives concerning the lives of the prophets. One frequently comes across the argument that there is relatively little sustained narrative in the Qurʾan; but such a perspective is misleading. While there are indeed only a few extended narratives—the story of the Prophet Yusuf, or Joseph, who was sold into slavery by his brothers and went on to became an advisor to the Pharaoh is a notable exception—the numerous shorter narrative portions of the Qurʾan are, in fact, tremendously important to its message. As they primarily deal with the lives of prophets, who are by definition models for human behavior, these narratives allow the Qurʾan to speak eloquently about the nature of humanity (insaniyya). These Qurʾanic narratives are full of terms describing the virtues of the prophets, virtues presented as goals to which all humans should

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aspire. In fact, narrative is one of the primary ways in which the Qurʾan communicates its vision of ideal humanity. Despite its importance, narrative remains one of the least studied aspects of Islam or, for that matter, of religion in general. Narrative deserves our attention because people’s stories in many ways define the boundaries of their religious communities. For example, we might meaningfully describe the Jews as the people who tell and retell the Passover story not just as a story but rather as their story. In the same way, we can describe Christians as the people who tell and retell the story of Jesus—from his birth in a manger to his passion and resurrection—as their story. Similarly, we can view the Islamic umma as a community of people telling shared stories. Stories about the prophets, the Shiʿi Imams and the awliyaʾ Allah both in Arabic and in vernacular languages, are important ways that Muslims define themselves and their values and pass those values on from generation to generation. Some of the most important of these stories are contained in the Qurʾan itself, which is a rich source of narratives, especially stories about the earlier Prophets. For example, later Muslim writers recurrently draw upon the story of the Prophet Yusuf, the biblical Joseph, which is by far the longest narrative in the Qurʾan (Sura 12: 1–111), for symbols and metaphors, especially for images of ideal beauty and the intoxication of spiritual love. Lovers in Sufi poetry frequently find themselves lost in the beauty of the dimple in their beloved’s chin, just as Yusuf, or Joseph, found himself trapped in the well in which his treacherous brothers imprisoned him. The image of the women in Pharaoh’s kitchen accidentally cutting off their fingers while chopping vegetables because they became fixated on the beauty of Yusuf”s visage becomes a metaphor for the Sufi lover ecstatically lost in the beauty of his or her beloved. The Qurʾan is full of narratives related to biblical characters. There are stories of Musa (Moses), Nuh (Noah) and Ibrahim (Abraham), as well as stories of ʿIsa, or Jesus. Moreover, crucially it also contains narratives about women including Hagar, the mother of Ibrahim’s elder son Ismaʿil, although it does not explicitly mention her by name, and Jesus’ mother, Maryam. These lay the groundwork for a vibrant feminine piety within Islam.

Interpreting the Qurʾʾan Because of its multivalent language, allegorical content and non-linear arrangement, reading the Qurʾan demands interpretation. The Qurʾan forces its readers to engage and interpret it as they read or hear it if they wish to comprehend its meaning. It is quite clear there can be no reading of the Qurʾan without exegesis. Thus, the science of Qurʾanic interpretation, or tafsir, arose early in the history of Islam. Well before there were translations of the Qurʾan, there were detailed volumes of tafsir, which allowed literate non-Arabic speaking people to investigate the meaning of the text as they read it.

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Qurʾanic interpretation can take place at numerous levels. Some issues of interpretation are relatively straightforward. For example, a tafsir may note the context and circumstance in which God revealed specific verses of the Qurʾan. Knowledge of the circumstances in which a particular aya was revealed can be crucial for determining its meaning or intention. For example, Surat al-Nisaʾ, the Women, contains a verse, which reads: If you fear that you will not deal fairly with the orphans, then marry such women as seem good to you, two, three, or four; but if you fear that you will not deal justly, then only one, or those whom your right hands possess. (Sura 4:3)

Muslim scholars have traditionally read this aya as justifying polygamous marriages by allowing men to marry up to four wives. However, as some contemporary Muslim feminists point out, it is important to realize that this verse was revealed in the aftermath of the Battle of Uhud in which many Muslim women were widowed and orphaned, when their husbands and fathers fell in battle against the pagan Quraysh. They therefore argue that we might better understand this verse as speaking specifically to the permissibility of men marrying widows and orphans in order to offer them protection and support in the aftermath of war in a particular cultural context, where women had few economic opportunities outside of marriage, rather than to plural marriage in general.7 Another aspect of interpretation involves the question of abrogation. Abrogation refers to those instances when the Qurʾan seemingly changes its position over time. One of the most famous examples of abrogation concerns those verses dealing with the consumption of alcohol. Surat al-Nisaʾ reads: O you who believe! Draw not near unto prayer when you are drunken until you know what you are uttering, nor in a state of ritual impurity—unless you are passing through—until you have washed. But if you are ill, or on a journey, or one of you has come from satisfying a call of nature, or you have touched women, and you find no water, then resort to clean earth, and wipe your faces and your hands. Truly, God is Pardoning, Forgiving. (Sura 4:43)

This verse seems to treat wine drinking primarily as a form of ritual pollution and, rather than prohibit it outright, allows drinking as long as one is sober by the time one is once again supposed to engage in ritual prayer. On the other hand, verse 219 of Surat al-Baqara which appears earlier in the text than the Sura 4:43, but was, in fact, revealed later, goes further. It states: They ask you about wine and gambling. Say, “In them there is both great sin and some benefits for humanity, but their sin is greater than their benefit.” They ask you what they should spend. Say, “What can be spared.” Thus does God make clear to you the signs, so that you may reflect upon this world and the Hereafter. (Sura 2:219)

This sura argues that, while it can be argued that there is both profit and sin in intoxicants and gambling, both activities are indeed sinful as their sinfulness outweighs their profit. Finally, verse 90 and 91 of Surat al-Maʾida, the Table, which is the latest of the three revelations dealing with alcohol consumption chronologically, firmly and unequivocally forbids the drinking of wine. It states:

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O you who believe! Wine, and gambling, and idols, and divining arrows are but a means of defilement, of Satan’s doing. So avoid it, that happily you may prosper. Satan desires only to sow enmity and hatred among you through wine and gambling, and to turn you away from the remembrance of God, and from prayer. Will you, then, refrain? (Sura 5: 90–91)

The overwhelming consensus among Muslims jurists is that according to this sura, chronologically the last of the three revelations, the Qurʾan absolutely forbids drinking wine. This is because of the principle of abrogation that assumes that later verses abrogate earlier ones. Accordingly, the great majority of Muslim scholars have declared wine drinking to be haram or forbidden. However, as the text’s arrangement is not chronological, this would not be clear to a casual reader picking up the Qurʾan and reading it on his or her own. In order to know which verse abrogates which, one must have knowledge of the history of each verse’s revelation. It is thus clear that when reading the Qurʾan for its content and meaning a commentary (tafsir) to provide context and chronology is, in many ways, crucial. Of course, in order to write a tafsir one would need to be a person of considerable learning. One would need sufficient knowledge of the classical Arabic language to be able to explicate the different possible meanings of technical terms in the text. One would have to be educated in the Sunna and the biography of the Prophet in order to know the specific contexts surrounding particular revelations as well as the chronological sequence in which individual verses were revealed. It is not surprising that over time Muslim scholars developed a thoroughgoing science of tafsir, which allowed for the construction of such Qurʾanic commentaries by providing the context of verses and guidance in interpreting them. This was a tremendous impetus for the development of the larger Islamic scholarly tradition. Furthermore, as noted above, because of the existence of a highly sophisticated tafsir tradition, the translation of the Qurʾan into languages other than Arabic was in many ways unnecessary, because one could learn the meaning of the text from an accompanying commentary written in one’s vernacular language without reducing the text to a translation.

Muhkamat and Mutashabihat Verses Another difficulty involved in reading the Qurʾan is that it contains not only relatively clear didactic revelations but also more obscure allegorical ones. As noted above the Qurʾan itself says, in Sura 3:7, that it contains both straightforward (muhkamat) and allegorical or symbolic (mutashabihat) verses. This calls for the possibility of not only exoteric (zahiri) interpretations of the Qurʾan but also esoteric (batini) ones. One of the most famous of these allegorical verses is aya 35 of Surat al-Nur, commonly referred to as “the Light verse.” It is one of the most beautiful verses of the Qurʾan but also one of its most enigmatic. It reads: God is the Light (nur) of the heavens and the earth. The parable of His Light is a niche, wherein is a lamp. The lamp is in a glass. The glass is as a shining star kindled from a blessed olive tree, neither of the East nor of the West. Its oil would well-nigh shine forth,

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even if no fire had touched it. Light upon light. God guides unto His Light whomsoever He will, and God sets forth parables for humanity and God is Knower of all things. (Sura 24: 35)

The meaning of this passage is in no way obvious. It demands interpretation. For some interpreters it about the reality of the Prophet Muhammad. The niche is the Prophet’s breast, the glass his heart and the lamp is the faith within it. The “blessed olive tree” refers to his ancestor Ibrahim. For some among the Shiʿa commentators, the niche is Fatima and the lamp is her two children Hasan and Husayn. “Light upon light” refers to the line of Imams, who continue after them. The medieval Sufi thinker Abu Hamid al-Ghazali wrote a lengthy treatise on the hidden meanings in this verse and it forms the basis of the influential Illuminationist philosophical school of Mulla Sadra. The enigmatic character of this verse has allowed generations of Muslims to uncover multiple possible meanings of this verse.8 All of this raises a crucial question: Who exactly has the authority to interpret the esoteric dimension of the text? Verse 7 of Surat Al ʿImran, the House of ʿImran, itself raises this issue in its the final words, which interestingly reads differently depending on where one wishes to put the punctuation, which is omitted in the ʿUthman codex. One reading, the one most common in English translations of the Qurʾan, says: And none know its interpretation (taʾwil) except for God. And those firmly rooted in knowledge say, “We believe in it; all of it is from our Lord.” (Sura 3:7)

According to this reading, only God knows the proper interpretations of the Qurʾan. Interestingly the word in the aya translated as “interpretation” is “taʾwil,” a word that implies getting back to the origins and carries the sense of “hidden” or “esoteric” interpretations or meanings. Some Muslims, especially those connected to the Sufi and Shiʿi traditions, argue that the aforementioned reading is actually logically incoherent. Why would God reveal a text to human beings, a text revealed to them for their guidance and benefit, that they are incapable of understanding? Why would God include verses in that sacred text that require esoteric interpretations if no one among the human community would be able to supply those interpretations? An equally plausible reading of this passage comes from “placing a period” in the aya in a different place so that it reads. And no one knows the interpretation (taʾwil) except for God and those who are firmly grounded in knowledge. They say: “We believe in it; the whole of it is from our Lord. (Italics mine)

This reading takes for granted the existence of “those who are firmly grounded in knowledge” and that such persons are able to interpret the hidden meanings of the text. Of course, during the Prophet’s own lifetime his companions assumed that he was “firmly grounded in knowledge.” Within the Shiʿi tradition, this category clearly also includes their Imams. In the Sufi tradition, the pirs and shaykhs who are among the “Friends of God” (awliyaʾ Allah),” itself a category of humanity mentioned in the Qurʾan, have access to the hidden meaning of the text and are capable of taʾwil.

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Teachers of Humanity: Prophets, Imams, and Awliyaʾ On one level, the message of the Qurʾan is deeply egalitarian. It assumes that all human beings are servants of God in need of guidance and revelation. However, the Qurʾan does not assume that all of humanity has equal knowledge of and intimacy with God. Despite its overarching sense of egalitarianism in terms of law and social justice, the Qurʾan takes as a given that not all human beings have equal access to the highest levels of spiritual understanding. It is assumed that within the human community there are those who possess special knowledge and an ability to guide others—prophets, Imams and the awliyaʾ. First among these “teachers of humanity” are prophets. The Qurʾan mentions both nabis and rasuls, who have the status of prophethood and are somehow closer to God than the rest of us. According to the worldview of the Qurʾan, human beings are not only the intended audience of revelation; they are the agents who deliver that revelation. The Qurʾan contains numerous narratives concerning biblical figures, whom it designates as prophets. Significantly, the Qurʾan gives special attention to Ibrahim, whom it depicts as an ancestor of Muhammad, and provides a common connection between the Jewish, Christian and Muslim traditions. Of course, the Qurʾan depicts the missions of these prophets as ultimately culminating in the prophetic ministry and career of Muhammad, identified in the Qurʾan as the Seal of the Prophets (khatam al-nabiyin) in Sura 33:40, which the Muslim tradition has interpreted as identifying him as the final prophet. The prophets, as human guides and messengers who communicate the necessity of remembrance of and submission to God, have a special relationship with the Creator. Thus, the Qurʾan identifies the Prophet Ibrahim, al-Khalil, or God’s “intimate friend.” Muhammad’s even greater closeness to God is affirmed by his night journey in which he came within “two bows length or nearer” of God (sura 53:9), closer than any previous Prophet. Although the Qurʾan never comes close to arguing that Muhammad is an object of worship for Muslims, it does point out the intimacy between Muhammad and God and the ways in which tawhid and nubuwwa are deeply entwined. The closeness between tawhid and nubuwwa is perhaps no more clearly drawn than in verse 30 of Al ʿImran, which reads: Say, “If you love God follow me, and God will love you and forgive your sins. And God is Forgiving, Merciful. (Sura 3:30)

This is perhaps the most succinct possible definition of Islam possible. To be a Muslim is to love God and, as a necessary corollary, follow the Prophet Muhammad. However, prophets are not the only teachers of humanity mentioned within the Qurʾan. The concept of imama is also present for example in aya 24 of Surat al-­ Sajda, the Prostration, which reads: And we appointed imams from among them who guided by Our command, when they were patient and were certain of Our signs. (Sura 32:24)

In aya 124 of Surat al-Baqara, the Qurʾan affirms that the Prophet Ibrahim was not only a nabi, and al-Khalil, but also an Imam when it says:

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And remember when his Lord tested Abraham with certain words, and he fulfilled them. He said, ‘I am making you an Imam of mankind.’ Said he, ‘And from among my progeny?’ He said, ‘My covenant does not include the wrongdoers. (Sura 2: 124)

For some Shiʿi interpreters this verse not only affirms that the category of imama is rooted in the Qurʾan , it also implies that imama is in some ways a higher category than nubuwwa, for Ibrahim was already a nabi when God rewarded him with this new status of Imam. Certainly, as least some of the Shiʿa argue, it could not be a lesser status. If that was the case, how could it be a reward? Does this mean that for the Shiʿa the Imams are greater than Muhammad? No, they would argue, because Muhammad was both a rasul and an imam. While his risala, his rasul-ness, ends with his death after which God will send no new prophets, his imama of necessity continues through his cousin and son-in-law ʿAli ibn Abi Talib, considered by Muslims to be, like Muhammad, a descendant of Ibrahim, and, after him, through the other Imams.9 Along with prophets and Imams, the Qurʾan also speaks of the awliyaʾ Allah or “the Friends of God.” Sura 10:62 reads, “Behold! The friends of God, no fear shall come upon them, nor shall they grieve.” The actual identity of the awliyaʾ Allah and their role within Islam is a matter of dispute. The Salafis, and other critics of the Sufi tradition, are quick to point out that there are several ayas within the Qurʾan that warn against taking anyone as a wali—that is to say, as a friend, client or protector—except for God. Their criticism of the Sufi and Shiʿi traditions rests, at least in part, on these verses. Furthermore, the Qurʾan also speaks of people who are the awliyaʾ of the Shaytan, or Satan. Nevertheless, the Sufi tradition understands the awliyaʾ, specifically the “Friends of God,” as persons of special virtue and character whose power and authority is intimately tied to their relationship with God. According to Sufi teachings, the awliyaʾ can lead their disciples to the true wali, who is God. While the author of the Qurʾan is God, its intended audience is humanity and the agent of its revelation is also human, someone who comes from among us. Human beings therefore have a crucial relationship with the Qurʾan. If the point of the Qurʾan is to lead humanity to remember and submit to God, a significant part of its message is concerned with affirming the existence of a special class of humanity whose purpose is to guide us on our spiritual path. The Qurʾan’s message of tawhid and qiyama is interspersed with narratives about those remarkable human beings, whom God has chosen to deliver and facilitate that message and provide models of human behavior for the rest of humanity. Thus, narratives about them are a crucial part of the Qurʾan. The remainder of this chapter will focus on two crucial sets of Qurʾanic narratives. The first is the series of narratives connected with the Prophet Adam, who is simultaneously the first man and the first prophet. The second is the remarkable and multivalent story of the prophets Khidr and Musa, which provides one of the most frequently cited justifications and models for the Sufi tradition. These two narratives speak volumes about the concept of humanity within the Qurʾan and Islam.

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Adam in the Qurʾʾan As he is both the first prophet and the first human being, it is perhaps not surprising that the narratives concerning the creation of Adam play a particularly significant role within the Qurʾan and are especially important for our understanding of the Qurʾanic notion of humanity. The Qurʾan identifies humanity as a uniquely important part of creation. We are God’s vice-regent or “khalifa” in the world, and alone among all of creation we have accepted the trust (amana) of God. Amana is a complicated word. An amana is a “trust”—something one person leaves with another under the condition that when that person returns and asks for it, it will be returned in the same condition it was in when he or she left. The word amana appears in verse 58 of Surat al-Nisaʾ, which reads: God commands you to return trusts (amana) to their rightful owners and, if you judge between people, to do so with justice. Excellent indeed is the instruction God gives you. Truly, God is Hearing, Seeing. (Sura 4:58)

To accept an amana means one is willing to keep a trust faithfully, returning it without any change or alteration whenever demanded by the person who gave it to you. This is a great responsibility. At the time of the Qurʾanic event, trustworthiness was neither a new nor a specifically Islamic virtue. It was clearly valued within the moral code of the pre-­Islamic Arabs as well. There is a tendency when looking back at the emergence of Islam to see a complete break between the values of the pre-Islamic period, which after all Muslims traditionally call the jahiliyya, or time of ignorance, and the new world initiated by the coming of Islam. However, Islam incorporated and continued many of the same understandings of human virtue and values that had existed in the preIslamic period, and trustworthiness was one of the most important of these values. In fact, the Prophet Muhammad’s excellence as a human being from the standpoint of the earlier pre-Islamic tribal worldview was part of the reason he was able to attract followers to his movement. The Meccan Arabs understood the Prophet to be exceptionally virtuous according to many of their pre-Islamic values, especially with regard to amana. Amana is a virtue closely associated with the Prophet Muhammad, who even before he began to receive the revelations of the Qurʾan, was well known among the pre-Islamic Arabs as “Al-Sadiq al-Amin (The Truthful and Trustworthy).” He was a model of trustworthiness, which was part of the reason that clans and tribes looked to him to act as a mediator in times of conflict. According to hadith, he was so trustworthy that even his enemies would leave their valuables with him as an amana. Following the Hijra, his cousin and son-in-law, ʿAli bin Abu Talib, stayed behind with instructions to return all those things left with him as an amana to their rightful owners before he himself left for Medina.10 The Qurʾan assumes that trustworthiness is one of the defining characteristics of a good human being. It is not something unique to Muslims and, in fact, Muslims are required to be trustworthy even with non-Muslims, precisely because this is a shared human virtue. In fact, according to the Qurʾan, humankind’s primordial

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acceptance of the universe as an amana defines our humanity. Aya 72 of Surat al-­ Ahzab, the Parties, reads: Truly, we offered the Trust (amana) to the heavens and the earth and the mountains, but they refused to bear it, and were wary of it—yet man bore it; truly, he has proved himself an ignorant and a wrongdoer. God punishes the hypocrites and the idolaters, because they have broken the Trust that man bore; yet God relents to the believers who keep the Trust and forgives their sins. (Sura 33:72)

It is significant that Adam, the first human being, alone among all of creation accepts God’s amana. In this verse, the Qurʾan speaks poetically about how God first offered his amana to “the heavens and the earth and the mountains” and they refused.11 Only human beings accepted this great honor, which is significantly also a great burden. Taking on the amana of God makes us morally responsible beings, the only such beings in the universe. We might interpret the part of the aya which reads, “truly, he has proved himself ignorant and a wrongdoer,” to mean that humanity has been unable to keep the amana, and in so doing have become part of the ignorant and zalimun, or those who engages in injustice or oppression (zulm). However a more interesting reading is that by accepting the burden of trustworthiness, Adam somehow oppressed himself, and by extension all of humanity, because he was ignorant of the enormity of the burden he was accepting. This verse implies that human beings, in accepting the world as a trust (amana), are a uniquely important part of creation, as we alone have entered into a pact of trust with God, and yet we have oppressed ourselves because in the end we alone among all of creation will be held responsible for how we deal with that trust. As morally responsible beings, we have brought upon ourselves the judgment of the qiyama. The next aya, which is the final verse of Sura 33, equates “idolatry and hypocrisy” with the breaking of God’s primordial trust and “believing” with keeping it and links these characteristics to the qiyama by affirming that hypocrisy and idolatry lead to punishment, while belief will lead God to relent. To be a Muslim is to be trustworthy. The aya concludes by affirming in the midst of stating the great responsibility that falls upon humanity that God is forgiving and merciful; as if to reassure us that despite the enormity of the responsibility that falls upon us as morally responsible agents we can trust in God’s mercy, as we struggle to live up to our human responsibilities.12 Especially within the Sufi tradition the amana of God is identified with the socalled “Day of Alast” described in Surat al-Aʿraf, the Heights, which reads: When your Lord took from the Children of Adam, from their loins, their progeny and made them bear witness concerning themselves, “Am I not your Lord (Ana alastu bi-Rabbikum)?” They said, ‘Yes! We bear witness lest you should say on the Day of Resurrection, truly of this we were heedless’ or lest you should say “It is only that our fathers ascribed partners to Go beforehand, and we were progeny after them. Will you destroy us for that which the falsifiers have done? (Sura 7: 172–173)

This aya is especially important in uncovering the Qurʾanic notion of the human being. It implies that there was a primordial moment when all human beings became aware of the existence of God and recognized God’s dominion over them. This is

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known in Sufi parlance as the “Day of Alast” because, in the Arabic of the Qurʾan, God asks all the future generations of humanity “Ana alastu bi-Rabbikum? (Am I not your Lord)” and humanity responded in the affirmative. Thus, the Qurʾan affirms God’s justice, as none of us, Muslim or non-Muslim can claim that we are entirely ignorant of the existence and dominion of God, as it is inscribed on our primordial nature, or fitra. This mirrors the well-known hadith in which the Prophet Muhammad says, “No babe is born but upon fitra (as a Muslim). It is his parents who make him a Jew or a Christian or a polytheist.”13 This is the reason that some contemporary Muslims refer to converts to Islam as “reverts,” as they wish to affirm this idea that in our natural state, we are all Muslim and “conversion” is, in reality, a reversion to our original nature. It is intrinsic to our nature to submit to God as we did on the Day of Alast. This aya brings us back to the Qurʾanic theme of dhikr. Human beings need to be repeately reminded of who we really are and our primordial amana with God. The revelation of the Qurʾan, through the agency of the Prophet Muhammad, serves to trigger that memory and bring us back to our primordial nature.

Iblis and Adam in the Qurʾʾan Some of the most striking narratives in the entire Qurʾan are those describing the creation of Adam and the corollary story of how the angel, or perhaps he is a jinn, Iblis refused God’s command to bow down before Adam and became the Shaytan (Satan). The importance of this narrative to the underlying worldview of the Qurʾan is made clear by the fact that it appears no less than seven times in the Qurʾan (suras 2:30–34,7:11–18, 15:26–44,17:61–64,18:50,20:116–123,38:71–85.) In Surat al-Baqara the Qurʾan reads: And when your Lord said to the angels, “I am placing a vicegerent (khalifa) upon the earth,” they said, “Will You place therein one who will work corruption therein, and shed blood, while we hymn your praise and call you holy?” He said, “Truly I know what you know not.” And He taught Adam the names, all of them. Then He laid them before the angels and said, “Tell me the names of these, if you are truthful.” They said, “Glory be to You! We have no knowledge save what You have taught us. Truly You are the Knower, the Wise.” He said, “Adam, tell them their names.” And when he had told them their names He said, “Did I not say to you that I know the unseen of the heavens and the earth, and that I know what you disclose and what you used to conceal?” And when We said to the angels, “Prostrate unto Adam,” they prostrated, except Iblīs. He refused and waxed arrogant, and was among the disbelievers. (Sura 2: 30–34)

While this passage is a mere four verses in length, it is deeply multivalent and capable of multiple interpretations. It begins with God announcing the intention to create a khalifa, a vice-regent, someone of special status. In response, the angels object to God’s decision to create Adam as his khalifa on moral grounds, arguing that while they are obedient servants who praise and sanctify God, human beings will instead spread corruption and bloodshed. Ironically, while on the one hand the

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angels argue that they are superior to humanity precisely because they are more obedient to God, they nevertheless, contradictorily, question God’s decision. God’s response to them argues not in terms of morality, but instead knowledge. The angels are rebuked for speaking when they lack the knowledge to understand God’s actions. In an interesting echo of God’s response to Job in the Bible, God tells the angels, “I know what you know not.” In aya 31 of this sura, the theme of knowledge continues as God first teaches Adam the names of things, and then challenges the angels by asking them if they can tell him the names. They reply that they are unable to do so as they have no knowledge, except that “which you have taught us.” God then asks Adam to tell them the names, which he does. God then rebukes the angels with a similar warning to those frequently given to humanity throughout the Qurʾan—“that God knows what you disclose and what you hide.” Thus, the Qurʾan puts forth Adam’s knowledge of the names not only as evidence of humanity’s superiority to the angels, but perhaps even more importantly, as proof of God’s power and omniscience. God knows hidden things. The Qurʾan portrays Adam as superior to the angels. Like God, Adam’s superiority is also rooted in his knowledge. God taught Adam “the names” of things, sharing with his khalifa specific knowledge (ʿilm) that was not shared with the angels. The Qurʾan thus implies that it is humanity’s very ability to learn things, in this case “the names,” that marks its unique excellence. The Qurʾanic narrative clearly establishes God as a teacher of humanity. Significantly, Adam then becomes a teacher to the angels, teaching them the names of things, of which they were ignorant until he revealed them. In this way, humanity becomes not only the recipient of revelation but also its bearer, although in this case not to other human beings but to the angels of God. Humanity is portrayed both as being able to learn that which is concealed, and able to teach it to others. In this way, humanity truly becomes God’s khalifa. The Qurʾan suggests that humanity’s excellence is rooted in its special relationship with God. Clearly, the special relationship between God and humanity is rooted in shared knowledge (ʿilm). At the heart of the religious worldview of the Qurʾan is the fact that God knows all things, both that which is apparent (zahir) and that which is hidden (batin). God’s servants and friends also participate in this ability, although to a lesser degree. One of the distinguishing characteristics of both prophets and the awliyaʾ Allah is their ability to see beyond the zahir to the batin. While not all of humanity may share in this ability, one important aspect of human nature is the potential to develop it. Having chastised the angels for their arrogance by pointing out the superior ʿilm of humanity, God then demands that they prostrate themselves before Adam. Adam now becomes the qibla, or direction of prayer for the angels, as the Kaʿba is the qibla for Muslims. Thus, the Qurʾan identifies Adam as the first qibla. This may seem contradictory to the message of tawhid, as God formed Adam from clay and a basic tenet of Islam is that one is not to bow down before idols made of clay. One should only offer prostration (sajda) to God. It might seem in this verse that God is demanding something of the angels that is forbidden to humanity, to bow down to something created, in this case humanity itself. There is no more powerful indicator

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of the centrality of humanity in the Qurʾan, or in Islam, than the image of the angelic host bowing down prostrate before the first human being. In the final verse of this narrative, one of the angels, named Iblis, refuses to obey God’s command to bow down before Adam. Because of this disobedience, God curses Iblis, to become the Shaytan, the Qurʾanic Satan figure, whom the Qurʾan identifies as one who is arrogant and among the disbelievers. Thus, the Qurʾan identifies the refusal to bow down before humanity with disbelief itself. In the verses that immediately follow this narrative, we see Iblis begin his role as the deceiver of humanity in a brief retelling of the story of the Garden of Eden. We said, “O Adam, dwell you and your wife in the Garden and eat freely thereof, wheresoever you will. But approach not this tree, lest you be among the wrongdoers. Then Satan made them stumble therefrom, and expelled them from that wherein they were, and We said, “Get you down, each of you an enemy to the other. On the earth a dwelling place shall be yours, and enjoyment for a while.” Then Adam received words from his Lord, and He relented unto him. Indeed, He is the Relenting, the Merciful. (Sura 2:35–38)

As one can see, compared to the Biblical account this version of the Qurʾanic story of the Garden of Eden is only rudimentarily drawn. In this narrative, the Qurʾan only tells us that Iblis appears to Adam and his wife, who are dwelling in the garden, with a command not to approach “a certain tree” and “caused them to stumble.” As a result, God dislodges them from their idyllic state. Elsewhere in the Qurʾan, we learn that Iblis tempts them by telling them that the tree in question is the “Tree of Eternal Life” (Sura 7: 19, Sura 2:120–121) which is why God does not want them to eat from it. However, when they eat from it they do not gain eternal life but instead acquire knowledge of their nakedness, implying that the tree was, in fact, the “Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil” and not the “Tree of Eternal Life.” Significantly Adam’s wife is not named anywhere in the Qurʾan, nor is there any intimation that she is to blame for Adam’s disobedience. God forces all three of them from the garden with “enmity between each other,” but eventually Adam received “certain words from his Lord,” who treated him with clemency and mercy. The story thus ends with Adam’s forgiveness; it is, thus, ultimately an affirmation of God’s mercy. Sura 2:38–39 continues this theme of forgiveness: We said, ‘Get down from it, all of you. If guidance should come to you from Me, Then whoever follows My Guidance, no fear shall come upon them, nor shall they grieve. But those who disbelieve and deny Our signs, it is they who are the inhabitants of the fire, abiding therein.’ (2:38–39)

As with Adam, who was forgiven his transgression by a compassionate God, the Qurʾan assures us that God will continue to send us guidance and that we need not be afraid unless we reject faith. The Qurʾan depicts human beings as fallible creatures, capable of failure but also able to learn from their mistakes and find forgiveness. Alone in all of creation humanity must freely chose to submit to God’s will. Despite our special relationship to God, we are more than capable of forgetfulness and disobedience. Thus, we need continual reminding. Yet the Qurʾan repeatedly

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assures us that God will forgive us and shows us clemency even when we disobey. What is perhaps most evident from this narrative is that human beings play a crucial role in God’s plan. We are God’s vice-regents, the ones who have chosen the amana and taken upon ourselves the burden of judgment. Nonetheless, the Qurʾan assures us that God will continue to offer us guidance and forgiveness as we struggle to deal with the consequences of our status.

Mansur al-Hallaj and the Creation of Adam It clear that one cannot read these narratives without interpreting them. Numerous questions abound. If Adam is indeed a prophet of God, why does he sin in the garden? What does it mean for Adam to be God’s khalifa? What is the nature of the amana that humanity has accepted? Why did the angels, who are supposed to be spiritually perfect, initially reject Adam? Why do these same angels ultimately prostrate before him? Who is Iblis? Why does he refuse God’s command to bow down before Adam? Questions concerning the Shaytan and his role within Islam are particularly perplexing. Given the importance of tawhid in Islam and its corollary emphasis on the omnipotence of God, it is not surprising that the Qurʾan presents the Shaytan as a relatively weak, if nevertheless dangerous force, who whispers in our ears and causes us to forget our special relationship with God. Certainly, for the great majority of Muslims the Shaytan is a figure of evil to be shunned and avoided. Therefore, it is surprising that the great Muslim mystic Mansur al-Hallaj, the martyr of Divine Love who was executed for, among other things, his enigmatic utterance “I am the Truth (Ana al-Haqq),” wrote an important work, the Tawasin, in which he seems to defend Iblis. In the Tawasin, Hallaj seems to justify this refusal to bow down before Adam by treating it not as a sin of pride, but rather a consequence of love. Hallaj seems to admire Iblis. He portrays him as the perfect monotheist who refuses to violate tawhid by bowing down to Adam, a thing made of clay, because to do so would have been a violation of his love for God. In the end, he accepts his punishment, to become forever the accursed Shaytan, because it comes from God, his Beloved, and as such, he cannot but lovingly submit. God’s curse is for him a badge of honor for it makes him wahid (unique). According to Hallaj, Iblis accepts his punishment willingly saying, “All choices, including my own, are yours.” For Hallaj, Iblis is like him a shahid—a witness and a martyr to Divine Love. Comparing him to the angels who bowed before Adam, Hallaj says that Iblis “was more perfected than they in the position of prayer” and “more loyal to the master than they.”14 In one of the most compelling portions of the Tawasin, Musa confronts Iblis on Mount Sinai and asks him why he refused to bow down before Adam. Musa accuses him of abandoning God’s command, but Iblis replies that God’s command to bow before Adam was, in fact, a test—a test which he passed. Despite his punishment

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and humiliation, Iblis sees himself as closer than ever to God. When Musa asks him, “Do you remember him now?” Iblis replies: O Musa…. remembrance does not remember. I am the remembered and he is the remembered. His remembrance is my remembrance, my remembrance, his. Can the two rememberers be anything but together? My serviced is now purer, my moment freer, my remembrance greater. Formerly I served him out of concern for my own lot; now I serve out of concern for his. 15

Iblis concludes: Even if he torments me with his fire forever and beyond, I will not bow before any other than him, abase myself before a figure and a body, or recognize a rival or offspring. My proclamation is the proclamation of those who are sincere, and in love. I am triumphant. How not? 16

Iblis argues that as a true monotheist and intimate of God he could do nothing other than refuse to prostrate before that which was made of clay, thus becoming an idolater, even though God explicitly commanded him to do so. It is clear that Hallaj puts him forward as a tragic and heroic figure driven to his actions by love and his commitment to monotheism.

The Alevi Understanding of the Adam and Iblis Story The narrative of Adam’s creation also plays a central role in the Anatolian Alevi tradition. On numerous occasions both in conversation and in the context of the ayn-i cem ceremony, I have heard people raise and interpret this narrative. At first glance, it may seem counterintuitive to people with a passing familiarity with Alevilik that the tradition would give so much attention to a Qurʾanic narrative. After all, the Alevi tradition is unique within Islam in that its rituals (which Alevis refer to with the Qurʾanic term ʿibadat, in Turkish ibadet, are conducted almost entirely in the local vernacular of Turkish. The primary texts of the ayn-i cem are the nefes–devotional songs by a variety of poets including especially the Turkic speaking Sufi shaykh and founder of the Safavid Empire, Shah Ismaʿil Hatayi. These are almost always recited in Turkish, As a result, a number of scholars–as well as a significant minority of Alevis—have gone so far as to deny any substantial connection between the Alevi tradition and Islam, instead treating it as mere Islamic window dressing over an indigenous Anatolian tradition.17 Nevertheless, the Qurʾan–especially Qurʾanic narrative—plays a crucial role in the tradition. On numerous occasions, I have heard the Qurʾan recited in Arabic as part of their ritual performances. Moreover, reference to Qurʾan and hadith is not uncommon in Alevi textual sources. I became particularly aware of this on a visit to the offices of the Alevi organization, the Cem Wakf, in Ankara where I discussed this story with group of Alevi lay persons and religious specialists, or dedes. I noted that I had encountered people, who agreed with Hallaj’s claim that Iblis was correct in refusing to bow down before Adam, as to do so would be a violation of tawhid (Turkish, tevhit). I raised this in

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part because the Alevi tradition in many ways respects Mansur al-Hallaj and his views on tevhit and I wished to know their opinion on the topic. They responded by asking me what I thought Iblis should have done. I responded that I was inclined to believe that Iblis had sinned in not obeying the God’s direct command to prostrate before Adam, although I was uncertain as to why this was the case. They agreed that Iblis had sinned; giving an explanation that was firmly rooted in a close reading of the Qurʾan. Disregarding the Hallajian controversy over whether it was a command or a test, or whether Iblis was demonstrating a pure monotheism by refusing the command of God to perform prostration, (sajda, secde in Turkish) to something formed of clay and thus violate a basic injunction against idolatry, the Alevi dedes I asked about this unreservedly rejected the piety of Iblis. They did so by placing their emphasis on the particular versions of the narrative found in two different suras of the Qurʾan. Surat al-Hijr, reads: And remember when your Lord said to the angels, ‘Behold.’ I am going to create a human being from dried clay, made of molded mud, so when I have proportioned him and breathed into him of My spirit, then fall down before him prostrating.’ Then the angels prostrated, all of them together, but not Iblis: he refused to be with those who prostrated. He said, ‘O Iblis! What ails you that you are not with those who prostrate? He Said, ‘I am not one to prostrate before a human being whom You have created from dried clay made from molded mud.’ He said, ‘Go away! Surely, you are an outcast, and surely the curse shall be upon on you until the Day of Judgment. He said, ‘My Lord! Grant me respite me until the Day they are resurrected.’ He said, ‘You are among those granted respite until the Day of the Moment Known.’ He said, ‘My Lord! As You have caused me to err, I will surely make things seem fair to them on earth, and I shall cause them to err all together, except Your sincere servants among them.’ (Sura 15:29–40)

They also referred to a second account in Sura 38, which reads: [Remember] when your Lord said to the angels, ‘Behold! I am creating a human being out of clay. When I have proportioned him and breathed into him of My spirit, fall down prostrating before him.’ Then the angels prostrated, all of them together, Not so Iblis; he waxed arrogant and he was among the disbelievers. [God] said, ‘O Iblis! What has prevented you from prostrating before that which I have created with My two hands? Are you arrogant, or are you among the exalted ones?’ He said, ‘I am better than him, You created me from fire and while You created him from clay.’ He said, ‘Go away! You are surely an outcast, and indeed My curse will be upon you till the Day of Judgement.’ He said, ‘My Lord! Grant me respite me till the Day they are resurrected.’ He said, ‘You are indeed among those granted respite until the Day of the Moment Known.’ He said, ‘Then by Your might, I will surely cause them to err all together, except Your sincere servants among them.’ (Sura 38: 71–83)

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In both these versions, God clearly condemns the Shaytan for his disobedience, calling him arrogant and faithless. While God gives respite to the Shaytan until the Day of Judgement, even though he promises to pervert humankind except for God’s “sincere servants,” it is clear that God is punishing Iblis for his failure to bow down before Adam. However, something else is going on within these suras that points not only to Iblis’ arrogance, but also to his ignorance of the true nature of humanity. In both of these suras, the refusal of Iblis to bow down before humanity is preceded by the statement that after forming him from clay God “breathed his spirit (ruh)” into Adam. Thus, Adam is not merely a thing made from clay. He is more importantly a living receptacle of God’s spirit (ruh). As result, the dedes argued, the angels were not being asked to bow down to the clay from which Adam was formed—“that which was formed with My two hands”—but rather the spirit (ruh) of God for which that clay was the receptacle. Thus, from the Alevi perspective, Iblis’ act of refusal is not an act of devotion; rather it is an act of hubris rooted in Iblis’ inability to recognize the spirit of God within humanity. As the Alevis interpret these suras, Adam is thus not only the first man and the first prophet, but also the first qibla, or direction of prayer. Here we see one of the primary meanings of the famous Turkish Alevi-Bektaşi aphorism, “My qibla is a man (Benim kabem ınsandır).” On one level, this statement affirms the Qurʾanic understanding of Adam, who becomes the qibla for the angels, because humankind is the receptacle for the divine spirit. Adam, as the first khalifa, actually contains the spirit of God. Thus, we can and should seek God in humanity. In fact, according to the Alevi tradition our goal as human beings should be to achieve true humanity (insaniyya, Turkish, insanlık) precisely because humanity participates in the Divine. It is this attitude that is reflected in another common Alevi saying (ata söze)–“A life without marifet (Arabic, ma‘rifa), or spiritual gnosis, is the life of an animal.” To achieve true humanity is to attain true gnosis (maʿrifa). As one dede in Bursa explained it to me, when we observe Muslims in prayer at the Hajj we see that they all face in a circle around the Kaʿba as the qibla. However, if we remove the Kaʿba we see that they in fact are all facing each other. Like the angels, worshippers in prayer in reality bow down facing humanity, for it is in humanity (insan) that we find the presence of the ruh of God.18 Of course, “my qibla is a man” is a saying with multiple connotations. For the Alevis, the fact that ʿAli was born in the Kaʿba, the qibla of exoteric prayer takes on special significance. For them, the real qibla is not the structure in which ʿAli was born but ʿAli himself, or rather the ruh of ʿAli, who is a perfected human being (insan al-kamil). The ruh of ʿAli is, of course, identical with the ruh of Adam and Muhammad. This explains why, for the Alevis, ʿAli, Muhammad and God are all inherently “the Friend” or Dost. They share a common ruh. The way to God, the spiritual road, the yol or tariqa (in Turkish, tarikat) runs first through Muhammad and ʿAli and then through the rest of the Twelve Imams, and finally through the awliyaʾ, or in Turkish. evliya, the Friends of God, who are the pirs of the tradition In Hallaj’s interpretation within the Tawasin, Iblis would rather be God’s intimate enemy than an alienated distant worshipper. However, in the Alevi worldview

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God creates humanity as his friend (dost) not his enemy. God shares knowledge (ʿilm) with Adam. God breathes his ruh into humanity. The Qurʾan portrays the Shaytan as the friend of neither humanity nor God. He is the enemy of humanity, God’s mawla, and thus truly cursed. His only respite is to draw evildoers away from the proximity of God, which is their rightful destiny as human beings. Ironically, we might say that in terms of theology Iblis seems much more like Ibn Taymiyya, than he is like Mansur al- Hallaj. He obeyed God’s law–that one should not bow down to idols of clay—rather than obey his direct command, his actual immediate and intimate speech, which called on him to prostrate before humanity. Which should a lover obey, his beloved’s voice or a static rulebook? Significantly, despite his defense of Iblis in the Tawasin, Hallaj, on his own spiritual journey, did not behave like Iblis. In the end, he obeyed what he experienced as the living voice of his Friend and Beloved, even unto death. In a sense, one can read the narrative of Iblis and Adam as an argument that true gnosis, maʿrifa, must take precedence over shariʿa. The rules provide a way, a path, to get to the Truth; they are, however, not the Truth itself.19

The Narrative of Khidr and Musa These Qurʾanic narratives about Adam are fascinating from the standpoint of understanding Islam as a humanistic tradition. Part of the power of these short, but multivalent narratives, is their ability to inspire different but compelling interpretations—each one representing a very different understanding of human nature and the human condition. In fact, these narratives have inspired writings by Muslim intellectuals as diverse as Ibn Kathir, Allamah Tabatabai, Syed Qutb and Ibn ʿArabi.20 They do not so much explicitly tell us what human nature is, as force us to explore its possibilities. In so doing, they inspire a vital discourse that continues up until this very day. The same can be said about the next narrative that we shall explore, the story of the Prophet Musa, or Moses, and Khidr. The Qurʾanic narrative describing the encounter between the Prophet Musa and Khidr, one of the most enigmatic stories in the Qurʾan, is one of the most compelling and controversial in all of Islam. In this narrative, the Prophet Musa, the ultimate man of shariʿa, encounters a stranger who has “knowledge direct from Our Presence (‘ilm ladunni).” Although the Qurʾan does not explicitly name him the Muslim tradition has identified him as the Prophet Khidr, the mysterious undying “Green Prophet” who has been alive for centuries and wanders the earth giving spiritual guidance and instruction to those in need. Khidr is an important figure not only in the textual Islamic tradition but also in the popular worldview and practice of ordinary people. For example, many Muslims believe that one should always be certain to give alms to beggars, especially during the month of Ramadan, because you never know if the poor person before you asking for help and hospitality is really Khidr in disguise. Throughout the Islamic world, there are places of pilgrimage that are considered sacred because people

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believe that Khidr appeared there. In the Sufi tradition, there is a widely held belief that Khidr serves as a spiritual master (pir) for those who are otherwise unable to find one. Khidr, as one of the “Friends of God (awliyaʾ Allah),” can assess one’s interior state and provide necessary guidance, an essential skill for one who would serve as a spiritual master. The Qurʾanic Khidr, described in this sura as one who has knowledge direct from God, provides an analogue and template for the spiritual master in the Sufi tradition. In fact, defenders of the Sufi tradition frequently point to this narrative when defending their beliefs and practices to their critics. Like the story of Adam and Iblis, this narrative demands multiple interpretations. The narrative, which begins in the 60th verse of Surat al-Kahf, “The Cave,” begins by describing a journey of the prophet Musa and a young man traveling with him as a companion, who is sometimes identified as the Prophet Joshua. The narrative begins: And when Musa said to his servant, “I shall continue on until I reach the junction of the two seas, even if I journey for a long time.” Then when they reached the junction of the two, they forgot their fish, and it made its way to the sea, burrowing away. Then when they had passed beyond, he said to his servant, “Bring us our meal. We have certainly met with weariness on this journey of ours.” He said, “Did you see? When we took refuge at the rock, indeed I forgot the fish—and naught made me neglect to mention it, save Satan—and it made its way to the sea in a wondrous manner!” He said, “That is what we were seeking!” So they turned back, retracing their steps. There they found a servant from among Our servants whom We had granted a mercy from Us and whom We had taught knowledge from Our Presence (‘ilm ladunni). (Sura 18: 60–65)

Musa is a familiar figure in the Qurʾan, which contains numerous stories about him, including his being set adrift on the Nile as an infant, his contentious relationship with the Pharaoh, his confrontation with sorcerers, the parting of the Red Sea and the Exodus to Canaan. In the context of this particular narrative, Musa appears in the classical Islamic role of the traveler, thus emphasizing the Qurʾanic theme of religion as a path. The narrative presents Musa as traveling with a companion on a journey. The first line of the story confronts the reader with a puzzling image that forces him or her to wrestle with the text. Musa and his companion are traveling to reach the “confluence of the two seas.” What exactly does the Qurʾan mean by this phrase? Are they perhaps literal seas, for instance the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, or perhaps they refer to metaphorical seas, such as the “sea of knowledge” and the “sea of faith,” or the “sea of law” and the “sea of mysticism?” Alternatively, perhaps, like any good metaphor they refer to both simultaneously. This verse, like much of the Qurʾan, forces the reader, or the listener, to struggle with its meaning. Whatever the reason for their journey, over the course of time Musa and his companion eventually reach their destination. Hungry from their travels Musa asks his companion about the fish they had brought along with them for sustenance and they suddenly realize that somehow they have lost it along the way. His companion suggests that perhaps the Shaytan had caused him to forget about the fish while they were seated upon a rock earlier in their travels and it had escaped into the sea. At this point, the story begins its focus on the concept of remembrance, or dhikr. Their immediate material difficulty, the loss of their meal, comes about through

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forgetfulness and a lack of awareness. In this case, it is forgetfulness of something tangible and material, their fish, but it foreshadows a different kind of forgetfulness later in the narrative when Musa falls short as Khidr’s potential disciple because he cannot remember his promise to be patient with his new traveling companion. Musa seems to believe that there must be something of significance about their forgetfulness, proclaiming that “the confluence of the two seas,” which they had been seeking must be located at the place where the fish had escaped. As a result, they retraced their steps. Arriving back at the place where the fish escaped, they encountered the stranger whom the Qurʾan identifies only as “one of our servants who had received blessings and “knowledge from Our Presence” (ʿilm ladunni.) In a metaphorical way, the story really does become a tale of the confluence of two seas—one of them Musa, the rasul who brings the law to his community, and the other a Friend of God with a different kind of knowledge, knowledge from “Our Presence.” Musa’s encounter with the Khidr raises a number of interesting issues about the nature of the spiritual quest. In losing their fish along the way Musa and his companion had forgotten to take care of something necessary for survival in this world. This was a serious and dangerous lapse. In fact, Musa’s servant goes so far as to hold the Shaytan responsible for this lapse of dhikr. However, had they not forgotten they would never have met this stranger with special knowledge direct from God. Was it really the Shaytan at work here? If it was, does this mean the Shaytan ultimately serve the purposes of God? What does this say about how God guides those who are traveling on the path? This verse appears to affirm simultaneously the need for the virtues of taqwa, or sober alertness, by emphasizing the need for the traveler to keep his or her mind focused on the path, and tawakkul, complete trust and reliance in and upon God. Traditionally the concept of tawakkul is an important station on the Sufi path. At a certain point in his or her spiritual progress the murid must learn to trust in whatever comes from God taking no thought for his or her own protection trusting only in God for protection. There are tales of great awliyaʾ, who set out on pilgrimage with no provisions at all, knowing that God would provide for them. Both the Prophet Muhammad and ʿAli, who lived lives of voluntary poverty, are seen as perfect exemplars of tawakkul. Both were men who fully engaged in the world (dunya), having families, and participating in commerce and politics. Yet they were always simultaneously engaged in the spiritual world, trusting in God for their sustenance. They were conscious of the world and lived fully in it, although never controlled by it. The Qurʾanic narrative argues that the spiritual traveler needs to have faith and follow wherever God might lead, even if one commits errors along the way. In the narrative of Musa and Khidr what at first glance appears to be a misfortune in actuality turns out to be an opportunity for knowledge. Had they not forgotten they would never have met Khidr. As the narrative continues, Musa recognizes the stranger’s exceptional knowledge and asks if he will teach him.

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Musa said to him, “Shall I follow you, that you might teach me some of that which you have been taught of sound judgment?” He said, “Truly you will not be able to bear patiently with me. And how can you bear patiently that which you do not encompass in awareness?” He said, “You will find me patient, if God wills, and I shall not disobey you in any matter.” He said, “If you would follow me, then question me not about anything, till I make mention of it to you.” (Sura 18: 66–70)

It is surprising that Musa, who is both a nabi and a rasul and thus already among those who have achieved the highest level of human perfection, asks someone else to teach him. The verse challenges the reader by putting forth the notion that there might be those among us who have knowledge that even a rasul does not automatically possess. To be certain, the Qurʾan affirms Musa’s exalted status by pointing out the fact that he is able to recognize the stranger as one who has special knowledge from God and that he should follow him. Clearly, it is his special knowledge as a rasul that allows him to recognize the exemplary status of the stranger. However, what kind of knowledge might this stranger possess that a rasul would seek to become his disciple? Khidr’s reply to Musa is striking. He tells Musa emphatically that he will not be able to have patience (sabr) “for how can you remain patient with that of which you don’t have complete information.” Sabr is one of the most highly praised virtues in Islam, especially within the Sufi tradition. It has been incorporated into exoteric Islam as a critical part of akhlaq (ethics) and adab (etiquette) and is also one of the essential stations on the Sufi path, closely connected to tawakkul. One who truly trusts in God is of necessity patient, because such a person is willing to take whatever comes from God, rather than living a life full of undue worry and anxiety. Significantly, patience is not only a Muslim virtue. I can think of no religion or philosophical system that does not counsel people to cultivate patience. In that sense, while the Qurʾanic emphasis on patience speaks to Muslims, reminding them that they should develop this virtue, it simultaneously resonates with those who have not accepted the faith by affirming that the core values of Islam are ones that they are likely to already share. Given the fact that Musa is a prophet, it is especially striking that Khidr initially refuses to accept Musa as a student by telling him that he lacks patience (sabr). How could Musa, a rasul and a nabi, be deficient in an essential human virtue? In the later Sufi tradition, the initial rejection of a prospective disciple (murid) by his or her spiritual master becomes a common theme in hagiographical accounts. There are numerous stories of a potential murid approaching a pir and asking to become a disciple only to be rejected. The supplicant often has to come back several times to prove his or her sincerity before he or she can take on the burden and weight of the spiritual path. I once met a murid in Pakistan who told me how a friend of his had approached a particular pir on numerous occasions asking to become his disciple and each time he was refused. Finally, the pir said that if he wished to become his murid he would have to prove his sincerity. He pointed to an irrigation ditch filled with rushing water because of the ongoing monsoon and told the young man to jump into it to prove his sincerity. He did as instructed and, to his surprise, when he emerged both he and his

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clothing were miraculously bone dry. At that point, the pir told him that he was not destined to become his murid, but rather the murid of another shaykh. He then gave the young man the other pir’s name and sent him off to study with him instead. Within the Alevi tradition in Anatolia, one of the best known hagiographical stories concerns Pir Sultan Abdal, the great Alevi pir and poet and his ironically named disciple, Khidr Pasha, or, in Turkish, Hızır Paşa. Hızır Paşa was an ambitious young man. When he came to Pir Sultan Abdal requesting that he might become his disciple, the pir kept refusing him telling him that one day he would betray him. Finally, Pir Sultan Abdal relented and accepted the young man as his murid, in Turkish, mürit. In the end, Hızır Paşa went off to the court in Istanbul and ultimately came back to their home city of Sivas as an oppressive governor with instructions to subdue the charismatic and rebellious Pir Sultan Abdal. As predicted, Hızır Paşa turned on his former spiritual master and sentenced him to hang. In Turkish poetry and folk songs, Hızır Paşa becomes emblematic of those persons, who claim to desire the spiritual path, but ultimately are seduced by worldly power. Despite Khidr’s objection, Musa promises that if God so wills, he will, in fact, demonstrate patience and obey all of his commands. Khidr agrees on the condition that he promise not to question any of his actions. There then follows a series of three bewildering incidents, each of which tests the patience of Musa. In the first incident, the three travelers embark upon a ship and Khidr, for reasons that seem inexplicable, makes a hole in it. The Qurʾan reads: So they went on until, when they had embarked upon a ship, he made a hole therein. He said, “Did you make a hole in it in order to drown its people? You have done a monstrous thing!” He said, “Did I not say to you that you would not be able to bear patiently with me?” He said, “Take me not to task for having forgotten, nor make me suffer much hardship on account of what I have done.” (Sura 18: 71–73)

Their new companion’s strange and “monstrous” behavior clearly upsets Musa, who voices his disapproval. Khidr interestingly says nothing to justify his actions or respond directly to Musa’ criticism of his behavior. He instead reminds Musa of his earlier promise not to question him and points out his lack of patience. Musa, confronted with his lack of dhikr (remembrance) and sabr (patience), asks forgiveness for his violation of his oath. The three travelers continue on their journey until they meet a boy on the road and Khidr inexplicably kills him. The Qurʾan reads: So, they went on until they met a young boy, and he killed him. He said, “Did you slay a pure soul who had slain no other soul? You have certainly done a terrible thing!” He said, “Did I not say to you that you would not be able to bear patiently with me?” He said, “If I question you concerning anything after this, then keep my company no more. You have attained sufficient excuse from me.” (Sura 18: 74–76)

This incident is certainly the most troubling and disturbing of the three, especially for modern readers. The Qurʾan, in a matter of fact manner, describes the killing of the boy unemotionally in straightforward language, simply stating, “They met a young boy, and he killed him.” Musa is clearly horrified by this action, accusing Khidr of slaying a “pure soul who had slain no other soul.” How could he murder an innocent? Once again, Khidr ignores the actual incident and instead rebukes

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Musa for forgetting his promise not to question him, and his lack of dhikr and sabr. Musa again apologizes, telling Khidr that if he fails one more time than he should indeed abandon him. They then come upon a town where, as strangers and travelers, they requested hospitality. The Qurʾan says: So, they went on until they came upon the people of a town and sought food from them. But, they refused to show them any hospitality. Then they found therein a wall that was about to fall down; so he set it up straight. He said, “Had you willed, you could have taken a wage for it. (Sura 18: 77–78)

This incident would certainly have had special resonance among the Bedouin Arabs of the Prophet Muhammad’s generation, who were the first to hear the Qurʾanic revelation. The refusal of hospitality, a crucial virtue for both Muslims and the pre-Islamic Arabs, to the three travelers would have seemed an especially terrible lapse in moral behavior. Then, even after the townspeople have denied them hospitality, Khidr seems to reward their selfishness by repairing a wall surrounding the town that was falling down and asking nothing in return. Rather than silently and patiently accept this behavior, Musa once more confronts Khidr, asking why he did not demand recompense for his labor on behalf of the town, as would be his right. In so doing, he for the third and final time violated his pledge to remain silent and not question their new traveling companion. Immediately, Khidr told Musa that they now must part company. He then explained why he had done all those things with which Musa had not had patience. The Qurʾan reads: He said, “This is the parting between you and me. I shall inform you of the meaning (taʾwil) of that which you could not bear patiently: As for the ship, it belonged to indigent people who worked the sea. I desired to damage it, for just beyond them was a king who was seizing every ship by force. And as for the young boy, his parents were believers and we feared that he would make them suffer much through rebellion and disbelief. So we desired that their Lord give them in exchange one who is better than him in purity, and nearer to mercy. And as for the wall, it belonged to two orphan boys in the city, and beneath it was a treasure belonging to them. Their father was righteous, and your Lord desired that they should reach their maturity and extract their treasure, as a mercy from your Lord. And I did not do this upon my own command. This is the meaning of that which you could not bear patiently.” (Sura 18: 79–83)

Khidr’s explanation of these events reveals that his apparently bizarre behavior was rooted in special knowledge of unseen circumstances that was unavailable to Musa. It is significant that the Qurʾan uses the word taʾwil to describe Khidr’s interpretation of these events, a word that the later Sufi and Shiʿi traditions would specifically use to refer to the esoteric interpretation of the Qurʾan.21 Khidr has batini knowledge, knowledge of the unseen. Based on this knowledge he knew that the boat belonged to poor people who needed it to earn their living. In order to prevent a nearby king from seizing their valuable property, he protected their boat by damaging it and temporarily rendering it useless. In this way, he kept it from being confiscated. The boy killed was the son of faithful parents. Khidr knew with absolute certainty that their son was going to grow up and commit acts of evil. He killed the son destined to commit these evil acts, knowing that God was going to send a

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virtuous child to take his place. Finally, the wall belonged to two orphans who were the sons of a righteous man. There was a treasure buried under the wall that God wished to keep safe and hidden until the orphans reached their maturity. Khidr rebuilt the wall in order to protect the treasure until the orphans could claim it. Musa, as a prophet, is an expert in zahiri or exoteric knowledge. He is not an ignorant man. After all he is a rasul, and, as such, a great teacher of didactic knowledge and a bringer of law. This story implies that there are times when, as the result of special knowledge, one’s behavior should transcend the obvious strictures of law. Khidr explicitly breaks the law by damaging other people’s property, refusing legitimate recompense for his labor, and even killing a boy because he knows things that Musa does not. His apparently extra-legal actions, however, fulfill the intention of the law. Of course, he can only do this because he has special knowledge of that which is unknown to others. Obviously one must be careful not to draw potentially dangerous lessons from this story. For example, do we have the right to destroy private property if we believe we are doing so for a larger or longer-term moral good? While it might seem that repairing the wall without asking for payment in return is, unlike the damaging of the boat or the killing of the boy, a benign action, it might not seem that way to stonemasons, who might be deprived of necessary income by this act of charity. More strikingly, are we to assume from this story that murder is acceptable if it is God’s voice, or the voice of one of God’s friends, that directs us to commit it? It is certainly the most troubling part of the narrative. In the years, that I have been teaching this narrative to college and university students I have had particular difficulty in dealing with Khidr’s killing of the boy. Does the Qurʾan condone murder in the pursuit of a long-term good? Of course, the Qurʾan is not the only sacred text that presents its readers with such troubling stories. There are similar narratives in the Bible that are equally violent and disturbing. In an event commemorated each year up to the present day in the celebration of Passover, God kills the first-born of the Egyptians in order to free the Israelites from bondage. In a story that clearly resonates with aspects of Khidr’s killing of the pious family’s son, God kills Job’s family and then later replaces them with what the text describes as an even better one. However, these are stories where it is God, and not a human being, who commits the acts of violence. Perhaps a better analogy from the Hebrew Bible is the story of “the binding of Isaac” in which God tests Abraham by asking him to sacrifice his son. Of course, in the biblical telling of this story, or the similar rendition in the Qurʾan, the narrative’s moral coherence largely depends upon whether or not we believe Abraham has accurate and reliable knowledge from God. If you or I heard a voice, telling us to kill a child, our first reaction would likely be to question whether the voice was really that of God. In the context of both the Bible and the Qurʾan there is no doubt in Abraham’s mind that it is definitely God commanding him.22 As God’s intimate friend, or khalil, Abraham has a long-standing and close relation with God. He has no doubt about the authenticity of the voice that is commanding him. Furthermore, in the Islamic account Abraham’s son, who is old enough to understand what is happening to him, agrees to go along with command from God. The Qurʾan similarly

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portrays Khidr as someone who can be certain that he has accurate and reliable knowledge from God. Nevertheless, it is troubling to think that the Qurʾan is telling us that his awliyaʾ have the right to go around killing those they know will grow up to be evil. One of the reasons this feels so appalling to us is that over the course of history we have seen too many religious leaders full of certitude who have committed acts of violence in the name of God. Of course, we should be reassured by the fact that the neither the Prophet Muhammad, nor the first four Caliphs, including the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law Imam ʿAli, behaved in such a way which should offer some assurance about the practical impact of the Qurʾanic teaching on this issue. Furthermore, the Qurʾan does not present Khidr as a model for human legal behavior. It is Musa who plays that role in the story. Unless we are among God’s special friends, we will never find ourselves facing this sort of moral conundrum. Nevertheless, the story remains troubling. Perhaps it useful to think of this according to the classic science fiction example: If we could go back in time and kill Hitler as a child, should we do so? Of course, the Hitler example may be over the top in this instance. After all, the Qurʾan does not claim the boy will grow up to commit horrendous acts of genocide and trigger a massive world war. However, what if you knew with a one hundred percent certainty that a child would grow up to be Jeffrey Dahmer or Ted Bundy? Would it be immoral to kill him as a child? Thankfully, the question is moot, because none of us will ever know anything about the future with a hundred percent certainty. However, what if we did? The story assumes that Khidr knows what he knows with absolute certainty and thus explains his action as purely rooted in a desire for justice. I would argue that this entire mode of enquiry probably misses the point. The problem of the morality of killing the boy is only relevant if we take this story literally, instead of treating it as a metaphor. Rather than read this story as the depiction of an actual historical event, it perhaps makes more sense to read this as an allegory about the relationship between exoteric and esoteric ways of knowing. The first time I came across this story many years ago I was on a train in Sindh, Pakistan on my way to visit the tomb of the great Sufi mystic Shah Lalbaz Qalandar with a Muslim friend who was well acquainted with both the Qurʾan and the Sufi tradition. As we drew near the outskirts of town, he proceeded to tell me the story of Khidr and Musa as evidence of the Qurʾanic roots of the Sufi tradition. As he explained it to me, Musa represents the man of shariʿa. As a rasul, he brings the law, which is incumbent on all believers. He provides the necessary external rules of religion. Khidr, on the other hand, represents the man of tariqa who sees beyond the surface of things to their reality and who teaches not didactically but instead by creating transformative experiences for his disciples. Each of Khidr’s actions, from Musa’s perspective, seems unacceptable because they represent clear violations of shariʿa. In the case of the boat, no one has the right to damage another’s property. In the case of the boy, one cannot take an innocent life and more particularly one cannot take a life because of a crime that one believes might be committed. As for of the wall, the shariʿa is quite clear that people deserve to be compensated for their labor. Musa had every right to expect payment for their labor, especially as the inhabitants

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of the town, which the wall protected, had unjustly denied them hospitality. From the perspective of the law, Khidr’s actions seem inexplicable. However, from a broader perspective, these apparent violations of the law might be seen to serve a noble and protective purpose. Like Adam, who reveals the names of things to the angels, Khidr reveals special knowledge that he has received directly from God. In fact, the parallels with the Qurʾanic story of the creation of Adam are striking. In that narrative, God informs the angels of his intention to create Adam and, at first, they respond critically, arguing that humanity will behave violently and disobediently. God responds by pointing out to the angels, that they do not have enough knowledge to criticize his actions. Yes, humanity will sin and commit violence but obedience is not the only issue involved in the creation of Adam. Despite his tendency towards disobedience and forgetfulness, Adam is destined to accept God’s amana. God knows that Adam is capable of learning. The angels relent only when they discover that Adam has knowledge that he has learned directly from God. The angels cannot see beyond the issue of Adam’s obedience. They were so fixated on the issue of humanity’s propensity to break rules that they could not see the larger picture of the special relationship between God and humanity rooted in knowledge shared between them. Similarly, Khidr, who possesses knowledge directly from God, points out to Musa that he will not be able to “bear patiently” that which he does not “encompass in awareness?” Musa, like Iblis, who must choose whether to obey the law to prostrate before none but God or instead obey God’s immediate command to do precisely that, finds himself torn between following the law or his promise to his teacher and companion to be patient and not question his actions. Even though Musa is a prophet, he is still human. He lacks sabr and is forgetful. It is precisely for that reason that he needs the guidance of Khidr, not to learn new rules and facts, but rather, to develop as a person. Sufi interpreters have gone further in unraveling possible metaphorical readings of this narrative. For example, the Sufi commentator, al-Kashani, interprets the ship which Khidr destroys as the human body, whose hold on the soul can be broken through asceticism and spiritual exercise. Similarly, he interprets the slaying of the boy as representing the killing of the soul that inclines towards evil by overcoming negative passions within ourselves. The repairing of the wall symbolizes the perfecting of character that occurs when ones’ bodily passions and lower soul have been subdued. 23 For later generations of Muslims, Khidr clearly represents the institution of the Sufi shaykh or pir who can facilitate the perfecting of one’s character. Through this narrative, the Qurʾan argues that there are forms of knowledge that transcend the didactic teachings of the shariʿa. Learning that kind of knowledge requires a particular kind of teaching. For example, patience is not something one can learn through didactic instruction. It is not enough to know intellectually that one should be patient; it is a virtue, which one must cultivate through practice. One can only develop patience through experience and the personal guidance of a teacher. The story of Khidr and Musa acts as a corrective to those who might be tempted to read the Qurʾan solely as an exoteric rulebook. While that is certainly one aspect

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of the text, at a deeper level it is a book that speaks to the necessity of a situational and existential approach to the cosmos. It understands that there are multiple ways of knowing available to human beings, and that some of those modes of knowing are existential and affective rather than didactic and discursive.

Conclusion: Humanity in the Qurʾʾan The Qurʾan consistently affirms the centrality of humanity. This explains why it tells the story of the creation of Adam, not once but multiple, times. In those accounts, Adam, who is destined to be become God’s khalifa, was first formed from clay, but then the spirit of God (ruh) was placed inside him. The spirit of God resides in humanity. Adam’s stature in the cosmos is, thus, so significant that God commands the angels to bow down before him, establishing humanity as the first qibla. In the Qurʾan, humanity alone in the entire universe has accepted the world as a trust (amana) from God. Furthermore, the Qurʾan takes care to assure its readers that that amana is not somehow limited to the first human being alone by describing how God brought forth all of the future generations of Adam forth from and asked “Ana Alastu bi-Rabbikum?”—Am I not your Lord? Humanity replied in the affirmative establishing a bond between God and human beings that is at the core of our nature. We are, indeed, forgetful and, as the angels warned, at times unjust and violent. For that reason, humanity needs reminding and guidance. Nonetheless, we remain God’s vice-regents, especially close to God. In its very first revealed aya, the Qurʾan asserts that God is not only the universe’s creator, but also, more particularly, humanity’s. Furthermore, the Qurʾan asserts that God is also humanity’s teacher, who taught us by “means of the Pen.” Whatever the mysterious Pen refers to (some say it represents the Divine Intellect) the crucial implication is that human beings are creatures of immense potential, who are able to learn and evolve. The Qurʾan is revealed as a book and, as such, it represents guidance and teaching to aid us in our evolution as they can be delivered through words. To that end, the Qurʾan contains explicit teachings that are, in terms of the text, “straightforward” (muhkamat). These are clear and require little interpretation. It also contains many other verses, which are allegorical (mutashabihat) and require taʾwil for understanding. Whom can we trust to engage in that interpretation? The Qurʾan asserts that there are some among us who have the ability to do just that. In many different ways, the Qurʾan itself asserts, in contradiction to the Caliph ʿUmar’s assertion at the deathbed of the Prophet, that it is not sufficient as a source of guidance. Significantly, the Qurʾan was delivered by a human being, the Prophet Muhammad, who is like us, but also something more. Furthermore, he is not only the revealer and interpreter of the text; he is also a model of human virtue whom we should aspire to emulate. Throughout the text, the Qurʾan asserts that there are some among us, who have a special relationship with God. Of course, the Qurʾan assumes the existence of

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prophets. Adam, who accepts the primordial amana; Ibrahim, who was God’s khalil; Musa, who encountered God at Sinai; and most importantly, Muhammad, who was able to approach within “two bows length” of God and is the “seal of the prophets.” Some of these prophets, like Musa and Muhammad were agents for revealing knowledge in the form of words, in their cases the Torah and the Qurʾan respectively. The Qurʾan also tells stories of other “Friends of God” who exist in this world as guides to teach humanity through experience. As the story of Khidr and Musa demonstrates, the Qurʾan asserts that some of those “Friends of God” have access to intimate forms of knowledge. Khidr has knowledge direct from ourselves (‘ilm laduuni) and he teaches, not didactically through words, but instead existentially in a manner that is direct and unmediated. Thus, the Qurʾan assumes the existence of holy persons, persons with special knowledge, who can guide us on the path to recovering our true humanity. Over time the notion of devotional allegiance to holy persons—whether prophets, the Shiʿi Imams, or the awliyaʾ of the Sufi tradition—developed into a central element of Islamic piety. In the following chapter, we will examine some specific narratives connected to devotional allegiance to holy persons, and what they have to say about the concept of humanity within Islam.

Questions for Discussion 1. How does the Qur’an speak to the importance of humanity in the cosmos? How does it seem to understand human virtues? Does it see those virtues as uniquely Islamic or universally human? 2. What does it mean to say that the Qur’an is a “sacred presence?” In what ways is it sacred in ways that the Greek testament or the Pali Buddhist Canon might not be? 3. How does the fact that the Qur’an is arranged non-linearly impact they ways in which we might read it? 4. Much of the Qur’an consists of affirmations of the reality of tawhid and the qiyama? How are these two topics connected in the Qur’an? How do they speak to issues of human behavior and human virtue? 5. What role does narrative play in the Qur’an? Who are the protagonists in most Qur’anic narratives? 6. Can one read the Qur’an without interpreting it? What are some of the issues involved in reading and interpreting the Qur’an ? What is the difference between muhkamat and mutashabihat verses? According to the Qur’an who has the authority and the ability to know the difference between them and interpret them? 7. The Qur’anic narratives about the creation of Adam play an important role in Islamic understandings of humanity. What do these narratives say about humanity and its relationship with God? What role does Trust (amana) play in these narratives? Why do the angels ultimately agree to prostrate before Adam? Why does Iblis refuse? In your opinion, was he was right or wrong in his decision?

Notes

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8. The story of Khidr and Musa is frequently used to justify the existence of the Sufi tradition in Islam? Why? What does this story say about human nature?

Notes 1. This should not be surprising as the description of what constitutes an exemplary human put forward by Islam is remarkably similar to that of other religious and ethical systems, a fact that was seldom lost on Muslims who from the very beginning of Islam existed in culturally diverse environments where they continually interacted with people of different religions. As Muslims encountered polytheistic, monotheistic, monist, and even atheistic religions their list of positive virtues nearly always included honesty, patience, compassion, altruism, and self-sacrifice. Similarly, greed, arrogance, and selfishness were universally condemned. A “good” Muslim looks very much like a “good” Jew, Christian, Hindu, or Buddhist. In fact, in the first generation of Islam the notion of a “good Muslim” also shared much in common with that of a “good Arab.” One of the reasons that many of that first generation accepted Islam was the virtuous character of the Prophet Muhammad, who was a model of trustworthy behavior. In later centuries, Sufi pirs similarly drew followers to themselves in places as far afield as the Balkans, South and Central Asian because they were seen as remarkable human beings according to values shared by Islam and the local religious traditions. 2. http://www.islamicity.org/6509/qurans-­message-­for-­humanity/ 3. For this reason when writing or lecturing about the Qurʾan I believe it is preferable to simply say the “Qurʾan says” when quoting from the text thus avoiding the issue of the Qurʾanic authorship altogether. 4. In my experience this is a much more common reading of this verse. 5. Fazlur Rahman, Major Themes of the Qurʾan (Chicago: Univesity of Chicago Press, 2009), 24, 6. See for example Amina Wadud, Inside the Gender Jihad (Oxford: Oneworld, 2006). 7. This is the reading of feminist Muslims like Asma Barlas and amina wadud drawing on the hermeneutics of Fazlur Rahman. 8. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, et. al., The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary (New York: Harper Collins, 2015), 878–881. 9. Schubel Vernon James Schubel, Religious Performance in Contemporary Islam: Shiʿi Devotional Rituals in Islam, (Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1993), 163–170. 10. It is also reported that ʿAli grandson Imam Zayn al-‘Abidin the son of the martyred Imam Husayn said: “If the murderer of my father gives me in trust the sword which he used in killing my father (martyred at Karbala), I will return it to him whenever he comes back demanding its return” See, http://www.al-­islam.org/inner-­voice-­rizvi/64.htm 11. Some critics of Islam like the neo-atheist, Sam Harris have argued that this somehow proves that Muslims literally believe that mountains can talk, but it is clear that this is meant as a metaphor. 12. All of this raises an interesting issue. Should we take this verse literally? Was there a precise historical moment when the primordial human being acknowledged the amana? Or is the point of this verse to remind us, the descendants of Adam, of our moral responsibility? Clearly many in the Muslim tradition has read this account, and other accounts of prophets, as “historical” but does it lose its moral value if we read it for its message affirming the moral responsibility of human beings rather than as a narrative describing an actual historical event.

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4  Teaching Humanity: The Human Being as the Object and Means of Revelation… 13. Sahih Muslim, Book 033, Number 6426. See, http://hadithcollection.com/ sahihmuslim/161-­Sahih%20Muslim%20Book%2033.%20Destiny/14594-­sahih-­muslim-­ book-­033-­hadith-­number-­6426.html 14. Michael Sells, Early Islamic Mysticism: Sufi, Qurʾan, Mi’raj, Poetic and Theological Writings, (Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1996), 278–279. 15. Sells, Early Islamic Mysticism, 275–276. 16. Ibid., 276. 17. We discuss this in more detail in Chap. 5. 18. Private conversation with Alevi author Suleiman Demiroğlu. Although I first came across this in an Alevi context I have sense encountered it in other Sufi contexts. 19. Interestingly the great western scholar of Hallaj, Henri Massignon in his monumental work. The Passion of Hallaj (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994) writes: The isnad of Bektashi descent goes back, via Ahmad Yesawi, to Yusuf Hamadhani…an Iranian Kurd, settled in Marv, whose Hallajism originated in a Khurasanian Hallajian Center in Talaqan,and afterwards in Balkh, which goes back in a continuous line to Hallaj himself, or to a Kurdish center…But on one fundamental point, the damnation of the saints through Love (and thus the sanctity of Iblis) the Iranian Hallajian tradition is unanimous…while the whole of the Turkish Hallajian tradition (and especially the Bektashis) ignores the “Satanic” interpretation of the Tawasin, and weigh the sanctity of Hallaj against the damnation of Iblis (Massignon, pp. 99–100) While he includes a series of interpretations of the Quranic narratives about Adam and Iblis in his work on Mansur, he ignores this ultimately rather obvious reading of the narrative provided by the Alevi tradition–that the angels were asked to bow down not before Adam’s clay but rather before God’s ruh. 20. See the commentary on these verses in the aforementioned Seyyed Hossein Nasr, et. al., The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary (New York: Harper Collins, 2015) 21. See the wonderful and erudite discussion of this narrative in The Study Quran, 749–56. 22. I remember first heard this argument made in the context of an interfaith dialogue about this narrative on Public Television by Seyyed Hossein Nasr. 23. Nasr, The Study Qurʾan, 755.

Chapter 5

Patterns of Devotional Allegiance: God’s Friends (Awliyaʾ Allah) and Perfected Persons (al-Insan al-Kamil)

In the previous chapter, we examined narratives in the Qurʾan that speak to the nature of humanity. The Qurʾan emphasizes the ability of human beings “to know” as the characteristic that most sets humanity apart from the rest of creation. According to the Qurʾan, the angels initially challenged God’s decision to create humanity, until Adam demonstrated knowledge of “the names.” It is Adam’s ability to know and learn that sets him above the angels and proves his worthiness as God’s designated khalifa. His knowledge of “the names” forced the angels to recognize his superiority and obey God’s command to prostrate before him. In the story of Khidr and Musa, the Qurʾan affirms two different kinds of human knowledge. Musa, as a rasul, has command over exoteric zahiri knowledge, while the mysterious stranger identified with Khidr, possesses ʿilm ladunni—“knowledge from Our Presence.”1 The idea that human beings are creatures who “know” is essential to Islam. After all, human moral responsibility requires an ability to know right from wrong, to sort things into the categories of halal (permissible) and haram (forbidden) and to comprehend the consequences of our actions. Furthermore, humanity has distinguished itself from the rest of creation by accepting the primordial trust (amana) offered by God. In order to be worthy of that trust, humanity must be able to know and understand its nature. Furthermore, the notion of remembrance (dhikr), which is so central to the Qurʾanic message, requires that we know. How can we remember without first knowing? If we think of the discursive dimension of Islam as something intrinsically didactic, as something God teaches with words, “by the Pen,” then one path to submission is clearly a path of knowledge (ʿilm). Through the words of the Qurʾan, God “teaches humanity” by making an argument. If we are able to understand that argument and learn the lessons of the Qurʾan, we can choose to accept those teachings and thereby submit to God. Thus, it is not surprising that the Islamic tradition has placed such a great emphasis on learning and scholarship. There is the famous hadith that states, “The ink of scholars is weightier than the blood of martyrs.” Another which commands, “Seek knowledge, even if you must go to China.”2 This high regard for knowledge and © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 V. J. Schubel, Teaching Humanity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22362-4_5

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learning is especially evident in Islam’s discursive tradition, the Islam of textual scholarship that manifests itself in shariʿa and theology. Viewed from this perspective, the ability to learn and to know is perhaps the critical characteristic of human nature that precipitates the Qurʾanic event, and, for that matter, all of the previous revelatory events in human history, in the first place. After all, we might ask why God should choose to speak to humanity at all. From the theological standpoint, God is complete. God needs nothing. Why then did God bother to create creatures capable of knowing and learning and then proceed to teach them? Some Muslims find an answer to that question in the famous hadith qudsi in which God declares, “I was a Hidden Treasure and would love to be known.”3 According to this cryptic hadith, God is capable of desire and what God desires is “to be known.” The idea of “being known” by another implies something more than knowledge in the simple sense of sharing information or data. The hadith identifies God as a “Hidden Treasure,” in the sense of something secret or intimate to be shared only with someone close and trusted. It suggests a relationship between God and creation, and, in particular, humanity, that it is intimate and close, in the way that friends or lovers know each other. It suggests a relationship of love. Despite the Qurʾanic emphasis on knowledge, within the larger worldview of Islam human beings are not only “creatures that know;” they are also “creatures that love.” Muslims consider love an intrinsic part of human nature. The human lover’s desire for annihilation in his or her beloved is as natural as a moth’s desire for annihilation in the flame of a candle, a popular metaphor for love in mystical poetry, which for centuries, has used the burning passion of romantic love as an allegory for the innate human desire for annihilation in God. Sufi poets have similarly used the tale of the tormented lover Majnun, who in the throes of love and separation could think of nothing but his unobtainable beloved Layla, to describe the madness of love on the spiritual path. In his Masnavi, the great Persian poet Rumi goes so far as to imply that romantic love is one of the things that actually define humanity.4 This position, that romantic love facilitates the spiritual journey is perhaps best expressed in the Sufi aphorism, which states, “the allegorical is the bridge to the Real (al-­ majaz qantarat al-haqiqa).”5 Of course, it is not only romantic love that defines humanity. Do parents need to be reminded to feel affection and concern for of their children? Would not most of them willingly sacrifice themselves for their children without a moment’s thought, simply because they love them? True love leads inexorably to the sacrifice and annihilation of the self. As Hallaj’s sacrifice makes clear, within the secret and intimate realm of love, all thoughts of the self must disappear. Love demands submission and surrender, in fact, it makes it a willing and inevitable act. Thus, if discursive knowledge is one path to Islam, a path that convinces one to submit through argument and discussion, love provides another path. In many ways, the path of love is a far more all-consuming and compelling path. After all, lovers do not need to perform rituals of remembrance to remind themselves that they have fallen in love. When one is intensively and passionately in love with someone, one

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cannot help but think about them incessantly. The great Sufi poets remind us that those who love cannot help but lose themselves in their beloved. The Sufi tradition celebrates the ability to love as an essential characteristic of human identity. It is every bit as important to our humanity, if not even more important than, our ability to know. Of course, loving and knowing are intimately connected. Who knows us more than those who loves us, and those whom we love in return? In fact, love is at the core of the Sufi tradition, which teaches that love—love for God, love for the Prophet and his family, love for the awliyaʾ Allah—is the fuel that drives human beings on the path to perfecting their humanity, the path to becoming fully human and, in so doing, achieving true intimacy with and knowledge of God. The path of love is ultimately the path to knowledge. We see this clearly in the diverse expressions of love for God’s Friends, the awliyaʾ Allah, that one finds all throughout the Muslim world. For many Muslims, the awliyaʾ, are the heroes of the path of love. As perfected examples of humanity, al-insan al-kamil, they are evidence of what we can aspire to as human beings. That is why in Turkish, they are provocatively called the “erenler,” “those who have achieved.” As people who have already made the journey from the zahiri to the batini, from the external word to the Truth, haqiqa, and have found true gnosis, maʿrifa, they can show us the way. There is no one more qualified to “teach humanity.” Sufi tariqas, based in the master-disciple relationship of pir-murid, emerged in the medieval period as among the most important institutions in the Islamic world, and they continue into the contemporary world. At a more popular level, the veneration of the awliyaʾ, especially in the form of pilgrimage to their tombs (mazar), is one of the most popular and visible expressions of Muslim piety. The Muslim world maintains a sacred geography dotted with the mazars of the awliyaʾ, which pilgrims consider the palaces of the true rulers of the world. These function as mystical power stations plugged into an invisible spiritual realm. Love and devotional allegiance to the awliyaʾ has been an integral part of Islamic identity and practice for the great majority of Muslims. Yet, many observers of the Islamic tradition, both Muslim and non-Muslim, contend that Islam in its purest form—its straight path—must of necessity reject any manifestations of “saint veneration.” Introductory books on religion frequently present Islam as a religion so uncompromising in its monotheism that it completely rejects any form of devotion to human beings, including the Prophet Muhammad. For this reason, they frequently cite the famous hadith in which Abu Bakr announces, at the time of the Prophet Muhammad’s death: Muslims! If any of you has worshipped Muhammad, let me tell you that Muhammad is dead. But, if you who worship God, then know that God is living and will never die.6

Indeed, Muslims are in unanimous agreement that the Prophet Muhammad, like all human beings, died a physical death; moreover, unlike Jesus in the New Testament, he does not resurrect. His body rests in a well-known tomb. The fact that Muslims believe that Muhammad was a mortal man who experienced death does not mean, however, that they see him as an “ordinary” human being. As the renowned scholar of Islam, Vincent Cornell once said, while it is true that the Prophet is just a

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human being, he is merely human in the same way that a ruby is merely a stone.7 Moreover, while Muhammad is certainly not an object of worship for Muslims, he is nonetheless, the “Beloved of God” and considered the model of human perfection and thus worthy of both emulation and veneration. Certainly, most Muslims have vigorously and legitimately objected to the Orientalist use of the term “Mohammedanism” as a synonym for Islam, precisely because they do not believe that the Prophet is God, or even God incarnate. They correctly argue that Muslims have never worshipped Muhammad, in the way that Christians worship Jesus, and to do so would be an unconscionable violation of tawhid. Nevertheless, the fact that God is the absolute center of worship in Islam in no way detracts from the fact that there has always been a powerful tradition of devotional allegiance to Muhammad. Who knows God better than the Prophet Muhammad, the beloved of God, who approached within “two bows lengths” of the Divine Presence? For many Muslims, especially within the Sufi and Shiʿi traditions, the mystery of the love between God and humanity expresses itself most fully in the relationship between God and the Prophet Muhammad. Given this, it is not surprising that many Muslims have concluded that there is no better way to demonstrate one’s love for God than by loving his Prophet.

Devotional Allegiance to the Prophet Muhammad The great majority of Muslims consider the Prophet Muhammad much more than the historical founder of the Muslim community. While the Prophet was clearly a human being who participated fully in the material and social realities of the historical moment into which he was born, he also exists as a spiritual reality worthy of devotion. As mentioned in Chap. 1, there are well-known and popular hadiths that state that the light (nur) of Muhammad was the first thing created by God, who then created the universe so that the Prophet would have a place in which to be born. Muhammad is not only Habibu Allah, “the Beloved of God,” he is also the beloved Prophet of his community, and in that role he is a focus of both devotion and allegiance for the overwhelming majority of Muslims.8 The recitation of the shahada, the defining ritual action by which one becomes a Muslim and formally enters into the umma, reflects the importance of devotional allegiance to the Prophet Muhammad in Islam. In reciting the shahada, one accepts both belief in the unity of God (tawhid) and belief in prophets (nubuwwa), specifically the Prophet Muhammad. To become a Muslim, to join the umma, one must accept not only the oneness of God but also the authority of Muhammad. For some Muslims, the most important implication of accepting Muhammad as a Prophet is the corollary acceptance of the revelation he delivered to his community, the Holy Qurʾan. Certainly, recognizing Muhammad as the rasul implies accepting the authority of the Qurʾan as the word of God. However, as one Muslim intellectual explained it to me, we should remember that at the time of the earliest conversions to Islam the Qurʾan, as we now know it, did not yet exist. When his

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earliest companions accepted the Muslim faith there were only a handful of verses of what would eventually become Islam’s sacred text. For those first converts, becoming a Muslim, in its most immediate and practical sense, meant giving an oath of allegiance (bayʿa) to the Prophet Muhammad.9 The second statement of the shahada, bearing witness that Muhammad is the messenger of God, is essentially a repetition of that act of giving bayʿa to the Prophet that was such a crucial aspect of conversion for the first generation of Muslims. Significantly, despite the unquestionable importance of the Qurʾan within Islam there is no comparable shahada, bearing witness to the fact that the Holy Qurʾan is the Word of God. Traditionally, to be a Muslim did not simply mean following the Qurʾan; it meant becoming a follower of the Prophet Muhammad as a person. While belief in the authority of the Qurʾan is certainly a crucial element of Islamic piety and despite ʿUmar’s alleged statement to the contrary at the Prophet’s deathbed, most Muslims reject the notion that the Qurʾan alone is sufficient. While “the Book” certainly provides necessary guidance, ultimately the act of “teaching humanity” requires human beings. That is why many Muslim believe that the Qurʾan, which itself states that it was revealed “by a man from among yourselves,” also assumes the Prophet as its necessary interpreter. As the twentieth-century Chishti Sufi Shaikh Shahidullah Faridi eloquently put it: The Book of Allah was not sent alone; it was sent through the medium of the Prophet, who was at the time its conveyor, its commentator and its living interpretation. ….It is due to this vital role of the Prophet in respect of Allah’s Message that it is belief in him as the Messenger, which has been made obligatory in the declaration of faith after the belief in the Unity of Allah, implying that belief in the Book is a corollary to belief in the Man and not vice-versa. This is the principle, which is followed in the system of teaching of the Sufis; theoretical knowledge has to be quickened to life by association with the man of God, and the ahead cannot be traversed without the Guide.10

Islam assumes that God has provided humanity with guidance in the form of exceptional human beings who represent the best of human nature. Of course, all Muslims recognize the existence of nabis and rasuls, especially the seal of the prophets, the Prophet Muhammad, and look to them for guidance. This is essence of the concept of nubuwwa, which is one of the usul al-din, essential to Islam. The prophets are, by definition, connected to God through ties of knowledge and love. God has chosen to communicate to them either directly, or through the agency of angels, in ways that ordinary human beings can never fully understand. By virtue of their exalted status, they have a far more intimate knowledge of God than the rest of humanity. Because of their superior knowledge they have access to things both seen and unseen, zahiri and batini. However, the prophets are not connected to God through bonds of knowledge, alone. They are also connected through bonds of love. Thus, Abraham is not only God’s servant but also God’s intimate friend (khalil). Most importantly, even before the moment of creation as a pre-eternal light (nur), Muhammad has always been God’s beloved. The logical conclusion, that most Muslims have accepted, is that if we love God, we should also love those whom God has loved; and, as God loves no one more than he loves Muhammad, love for him is a crucial element of Islamic piety.

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Love and Devotional Allegiance to the Prophet Muhammad Muslims express their love for the Prophet Muhammad in numerous ways. Songs praising the Prophet called na’at are composed in nearly every Islamicate language. In many parts of the Muslim world, the Prophet’s birthday or Eid Milad al-Nabi is a festive day of celebration. Unlike Jesus, in both the Christian and Muslim traditions, Muhammad has a clearly identified and well-known tomb that has become a major center of pilgrimage. Ziyara, or pilgrimage, to the Prophet’s tomb in Medina is an important act of Islamic devotion and Muslims, who can afford to do so, include it as part of their journey to perform Hajj or ʿumrah. Many Muslims believe that when pilgrims perform ziyara (visitation) to the Prophet’s tomb he hears their prayers and devotions. Indeed, most Muslims consider the Prophet to be a living spiritual presence. As such he should be known, not only in an exoteric, or zahiri, way as a person whose external behaviors can be studied as a basis for the shariʿa, but more personally as a human being whose internal characteristics, especially his moral and ethical character, provide a model of human nature to be emulated. Not surprisingly, the personal characteristics of the Prophet Muhammad that Muslims most cherish are those that manifest his kindness and humanity. They love him for his patience, his generosity, his fairness and his mercy; and of course, they love him as al-Amin-“the trustworthy one”—the perfect representation of humanity who flawlessly carries forward the amana that Adam accepted at the beginning of creation. These characteristics, many of which are recorded in written narratives of his life by early scholars like al-Tabari and Ibn Ishaq, have also become part of a shared popular oral tradition. Other stories have a less obvious origin in the primary sources, but nonetheless remain popular because they reflect the way the community understands the Prophet’s character. Among the most popular stories about the Prophet are those that portray him as a figure of wisdom and compassion. One good example is the story of how during the early years of Islam, at the height of the boycott against him and his followers launched by the Quraysh, there was a woman who used to throw garbage down on the Prophet’s head whenever he walked beneath her window. One day, as he walked by her house, he noticed that the woman did not appear to throw the usual refuse at him. The Prophet became concerned that she might have fallen ill and sent someone to check on her. The fact that despite her earlier hostility towards him the Prophet Muhammad responded to her with kindness and concern so impressed the woman that she converted to Islam.11 One important aspect of the Prophet Muhammad’s life, one that Muslims especially emphasized in the pre-modern Islamic world, is his voluntary poverty. Although Muhammad as the ruler of a state could have easily lived a life of wealth and comfort, he chose instead a life of poverty (faqr). He was a faqir, who never forgot that he was himself an orphan and consistently stood with the downtrodden and oppressed. For many centuries, Muslims have considered voluntary poverty to be a great virtue, especially within the Sufi tradition, where he has become the model for all future dervishes and faqirs.

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As the bringer of revelation and a reminder to humanity, the Qurʾan refers to Muhammad as “a blessing to the world” (Sura 21:107). More than simply the bringer of the Qurʾan, he is a living teacher providing humanity with the necessary guidance both to prepare us for eternity and to make our lives better in this world. Furthermore, although some within the umma have contested the Prophet’s role as an intercessor within Islam, the great majority of Muslims believe that on the last day the Prophet Muhammad will be able to intercede with God on behalf of his community. Thus, Muhammad is not only God’s friend and beloved; he is humanity’s friend and beloved as well. Of course, Muhammad is not humanity’s only guide and teacher. For most Muslims, there are other guides, as well; exceptional human beings, bound to both God and the Prophet by ties of love and knowledge, who themselves have become the focus of love and devotion for countless Muslims. Over time, that devotional allegiance to the Prophet Muhammad, that began when the first converts gave bayʿa to him in Mecca nearly a millennium and a half ago, extended to include other persons who have a close familial or spiritual connection to him. For the Shiʿa, these include the ahl al-bayt, his family, literally the people of his house, especially ʿAli ibn Abu Talib and especially the line of Imams descended from his daughter Fatima. They consider love for them to be essential to Islam. Furthermore, the popularity of the Sufi tradition has meant that devotional allegiance to the awliyaʾ Allah as the spiritual successors of Muhammad, has become nearly ubiquitous among Sunni Muslims as well. Despite the serious reservations and criticism of certain minority Muslim voices, including the so-called Wahhabis and other Salafis, most Muslims do not consider devotion and allegiance to the awliyaʾ a rejection of tawhid, but rather an affirmation of it. In fact, for most Muslims, love for the awliyaʾ is the necessary and logical extension both of love for God and devotional allegiance to the Prophet. For most Muslims, Sunni and Shiʿa alike, those awliyaʾ include members of his household, especially ʿAli ibn Abu Talib (Fig. 5.1).

Love and Devotion for ʿAli b. Abu Talib Muslims who love the Prophet Muhammad nearly always extend their love to include his close family members, the ahl al-bayt, and particularly ʿAli b. Abu Talib. While devotional allegiance to ʿAli b. Abu Talib is especially important to Shiʿi Muslims, for whom he is their first Imam, it is also widespread among Sunni Muslims. Many Sunni Muslims refer to Mawla ʿAli as the “King of Men (Shah-i Mardan),” and the “King of the Friends (Shah-i Awliyaʾ).” Both Sunni and Shiʿi Muslims have composed songs and poetry about ʿAli in numerous Islamicate languages throughout Eurasia and Africa. I once attended an open-air Sufi music performance at the purported tomb of Imam ʿAli’s grandson, Imam Zayn al-‘Abidin, in the overwhelmingly Sunni city of Cairo. The munshid captured the crowd by singing “Ya Nabi min Nur Allah, ʿAli ʿAli min Nur Allah (Oh Prophet from the light of God, ʿAli ʿAli from the light of God).” No one objected.

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Fig. 5.1  Images and souvenirs evocative of ʿAli ibn Abu Talib and the ahl al-bayt for sale at shop near the tomb of Hacı Bektaş Veli in Central Anatolia

Many Muslims, both Sunni and Shiʿa, revere ʿAli as “the Helper” (Madadgar) and call upon him for aid in times of illness or distress by saying “Ya ʿAli Madad (Oh, Help ʿAli).” He is widely revered as Haydar ʿAli, the “Lion of God.” ʿAli is associated with numerous miracles. For example, some Muslims believe that ʿAli, like Muhammad, left no footprints on earth and clay, but would leave them in rock. Consequently, numerous shrines claim a miraculous stone footprint of ʿAli, such as the pilgrimage site in Hyderabad in India for which that city is named. The purported tomb of Hazrat ʿAli in Mazar-i Sharif, in the province of Balkh in Afghanistan,

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has similarly been a major site of pilgrimage for Muslims from Central and South Asia and would have likely never been able to afford to travel to Najaf in Iraq where most Muslims believe him to be buried. Central Asia Muslims have sometimes blended the heroic actions of ʿAli together with tales of the tribal hero Manas. As a result, there is a pilgrimage site nearby Talas, Kyrgyzstan called al-Zulfikar in commemoration of the sword of both heroes. For many Muslims, Sunni and Shiʿa alike, ʿAli is as an exemplary model of human virtue. Like the Prophet he is “trustworthy”—the perfect bearer of (amana). He is the devoted friend and companion upon whom the Prophet relied in times of his greatest need, such as on the eve of the Hijrah when he slept without fear in the bed of the Prophet. He is a paragon of bravery and courage, the hero of both the battles of Badr and Khaybar, of whom the angels said “there is no hero but ʿAli and no sword but Zulfikar.” Muslims consider ʿAli forgiving and merciful, especially to conquered foes, respectful even of those with whom he disagreed. Like the Prophet Muhammad, he voluntarily chose a life of poverty and was a model of altruistic behavior. Like his father-in-law, ʿAli consistently stood with the weak against the unjust and powerful. He manifested exceptional patience and self-control. Rumi recounts the story of how ʿAli once refused to slay a man whom he had vanquish in combat because his opponent spit on him during their combat angering him. ʿAli walked away from his adversary rather than risk taking a human life out of personal anger. When he learned why ʿAli walked away from their fight, his astonished opponent converted to Islam.12 ʿAli shares these characteristics not only with the Prophet but also with the other Shiʿi Imams and the awliyaʾ Allah. Significantly, these are not specifically Muslim virtues, but rather human virtues valued across cultural and religious boundaries. As a result, by virtue of their character many non-Muslims have found themselves attracted to Muhammad, ʿAli and the awliyaʾ and ultimately to the religion of Islam. Their lives spoke to potential converts as if to say, if Islam can produce human beings of this caliber, perhaps it is something worth exploring. ʿAli’s person is defined, in large part, by his knowledge, not only didactic zahiri knowledge, but more importantly his esoteric batini knowledge. According to one particularly famous hadith, ʿAli is identified as the gate (bab) to the city of knowledge (madinat al-ʿilm), who is the Prophet Muhammad. Thus, ʿAli is linked to the Prophet by virtue of shared knowledge, both zahiri and batini. Even more importantly, emotional, familial and spiritual bonds of love unite the two. ʿAli is the husband of the Prophet’s beloved daughter Fatima. He is the father of the Prophet’s beloved grandsons, Hasan and Husayn. However, bonds of love, much more than bonds of blood, connect the ahl al-bayt to each other. From both the Sunni and Shiʿi perspective that is a central message of Ghadir Humm, where Muhammad designated ʿAli as Mawla, telling all those that claim to love him that they must love ʿAli as well. There is a mysterious and profound intimacy between them. ʿAli’s exalted status is the result of bonds of love that link him to the Prophet and God; bonds of love that demand Muslims love him as well (Fig. 5.2).

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Fig 5.2 Bektaşı callıgraphy showing human face composed of the names of ʿAli ibn Abu Talib, Muhammad, and Allah

Such attitudes of devotional allegiance towards ʿAli have a long history in Islam. Over time, they have been extended to include ʿAli’s descendants and successors. The great historian Marshall Hodgson coined the phrase “ʿAlid loyalism” to refer to: That varied complex of special religious attitudes associated with loyalty to the ʿAlids (descendants of ʿAli)—not only reverence for the ʿAlids themselves, but certain exalted ideas about Muhammad’s person and the supposition of a secret teaching he transmitted especially to ʿAli and so on—whether these attitudes appear among Jamai’i Sunnis or among those who, by explicitly rejecting the jama’ah, identified themselves as Shiʿis in the Proper sense.13

Significantly, Hodgson notes that this devotional allegiance to ʿAli and his descendants is rooted in reverence for the Prophet Muhammad, as it rests upon the notion of a special relationship between him and ʿAli. Furthermore, it is not limited to Shiʿi Muslims. Devotional allegiance to the Prophet and ʿAli is prevalent throughout the Muslim world. However, “ʿAlid loyalism” is most fully and broadly expressed within the Shiʿi traditions, where it is an essential and necessary aspect of religious piety.

Karbala: Shiʿi Islam’s Spiritual Fulcrum The narratives of the lives of the Imams, and others from among the ahl al-bayt, have provided Shiʿi Muslims with numerous opportunities for powerful emotional encounters with them. The recounting of the sufferings and tribulations of the ahl

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al-bayt, and their heroic responses to them, provide their devotees with models of behavior to emulate and opportunities to bond emotionally with them. This allows the Shiʿi community to come together in a matrix of shared love and devotion as they encounter their stories. Of all of the narratives connected with the ahl al-bayt, perhaps none is as powerful as the story of Imam Husayn’s martyrdom at Karbala. The brutal killing of the last remaining grandson of the Prophet Muhammad and his companions at Karbala, which is described in Chap. 2 of this volume, was a turning point in Islamic history. Especially for Shiʿi Muslims, this event evokes feelings of deep horror and grief; intensified by the realization that it was people who called themselves Muslims who committed these horrendous actions. For them, Karbala divides the community of Islam, once and for all, between those who accept the necessity of allegiance to the ahl al-bayt and those who reject it. The retelling and commemoration of the martyrdom of Imam Husayn at Karbala is a central feature of Twelver Shiʿi piety throughout the Muslim world. For the Twelver Shiʿa, the event of Karbala is a defining moment in the spiritual history of Islam, and one’s response to it has deep religious and soteriological significance. The remembrance of Karbala demands mourning as a sign of one’s love for the ahl al-bayt. Although the specific forms of this practice may vary–taziyeh plays in which people act out the events of Karbala in Iran, mourning assemblies (majalis) and processions (julus) in South Asia—certain forms of religious devotion are found almost universally. These include ritual mourning (maʾtam), the recitation of mourning poetry (marsiyeh), and communal gatherings for relating the events of Karbala. For Shiʿi Muslims, Imam Husayn and his companions are much more than ordinary people involved in a political, or even religious, struggle. Succeeding generations consider them models of human perfection, to be imitated as paradigms and venerated as the true “Friends of God (awliyaʾ Allah).” No matter in which age we live we are always being asked to choose between the path of Yazid and the path of Husayn. It is therefore not surprising that Karbala has become a central focus of the narrative and ritual lives of Twelver Shiʿi Muslims. The lives of the Imams provide the necessary paradigms to create a spiritual orientation towards the world. For Shiʿi Muslims everywhere, the narrative of Imam Husayn’s martyrdom at Karbala is both a story to be remembered and an event to be imitated.14 In that sense, it is perhaps useful to think of Karbala as a meme.

Karbala as a Meme Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” in 1976 in his book, The Selfish Gene, to describe a cultural replicator, analogous to the biological replicator of the gene that would explain the transmission of ideas through culture. Dawkins proposed the term “meme” as “a name for that new replicator, a noun that conveys the unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation.”15 The imitation of others is an inherently complex behavior. While this ability exists rudimentarily in other species, it is fully developed only in human beings. The

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mimeticist Susan Blackmore has gone so far as to identify this remarkable ability for imitation as the crucial factor distinguishing human beings from other primates. Some evolutionary biologists, in fact, argue that our skill at imitation ultimately resulted in the development of language and the cognate ability to tell stories. From the perspective of mimetics, there came a point in human evolution when memes began to take control over the direction of our evolution. Essentially, the meme became dominant over the gene as humans evolved in ways that have encouraged the spread of memes. According to some of the most prominent mimeticists, human beings have essentially become hosts for memes.16 The act of imitation lies at the heart of religion. Within religious traditions, rituals direct participants to imitate the actions of countless other human beings leading back in an unbroken chain to their founders. In fact, the concept of religious “tradition” is itself rooted in the continuing imitation of the practices of previous generations. The rituals and stories connected to religious traditions move from mind to mind, replicating themselves in competition with other memes. In that sense, Blackmore accurately describes religions as “memeplexes.”17 Religious memes are particularly tenacious and long lasting. One need only think of the continuity of ancient rituals like the Jewish Passover or the memorization the Vedas in an unbroken chain by Hindu Brahmins for over two millennia. In Islam, the act of ritual prayer involves repeating the words and bodily actions of the founder of the tradition, the Prophet Muhammad. Islamic ritual has stressed the importance of imitation, with some conservative Muslims going so far as to negatively characterize all forms of practice that cannot be traced back to the Prophet or his companions as bida’ or innovation. For the Shiʿa, in fact, for Muslims in general, Karbala, is itself an intricate and profound complex of memes—a continuously remembered, communicated and imitated event. The image of the rider-less horse Dhuljinnah, returning to the tents of the women at Karbala sticks in the minds of people, who describe it to others, who then pass it on to more and more people. The same is true of the cradle of the murdered infant ʿAli Ashgar, or the severed hand of Husayn’s standard-bearer Abbas, which overtime becomes conflated with the five-fingered hand symbolizing the five primary members of the ahl al-bayt—Muhammad, Fatima, ʿAli, Hasan and Husayn. While the growing field of mimetics has paid a great deal of attention to religions as successful and long lasting memeplexes, there is an unfortunate pejorative and dismissive tone towards religion in the writings of many mimeticists, who have had a tendency to present religion in largely negative terms. They sometimes describe religion as a disease, a virus or a scourge on humanity.18 This attitude unfortunately dismisses the many positive reasons people have for accepting religion. At the very minimum, on a psychological level religion helps to explain suffering and provides people a sense of security in an uncertain world. More importantly, from an evolutionary perspective, religion encourages altruism, a characteristic of Homo sapiens that has arguably been essential to our survival as a species. Human survival depends heavily on social as well as individual factors. Early Homo sapiens lived together in small groups, rarely exceeding 25 or 30. In order to

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survive and pass on our genetic legacy we had to be able to rely upon each other. Individuals had to be willing to make sacrifices for the group—to take care of each other’s’ children, to collectively hunt and gather food, which they would then share communally. Thus, over time we evolved as creatures with an innate tendency towards altruistic behavior. Over time, in Homo sapiens a capacity for empathy and altruism has emerged, even more than competition, as a defining aspect of our nature as a species.19 Given the importance of altruism to our survival, it is not surprising that we have, over time, developed and maintained powerful memes that encourage and reinforce self-sacrifice, especially in the context of religion. Looked at from an evolutionary perspective, religion serves a critical function by facilitating and reinforcing altruistic behaviors that encourage individuals to sacrifice for the good of others.20 One of the most fascinating elements of religion is the nearly universal emphasis it places on the necessity of self-sacrifice by individuals for the good of others. From the Buddhist monk, living a life of poverty in exchange for teaching the dharma, to Jesus suffering on the cross, to the myriad narratives recounting the martyrdom of saints, to the narrative of Purusha sacrificing himself in order to create the world, it is striking how many religious memes speak to the necessity of self-sacrifice. Of course, Islam is no exception. Numerous memes within Islam encourage self-­ sacrifice and altruism. One thinks immediately of the voluntary poverty of Muhammad and ʿAli, which is mirrored and emulated in the asceticism of many of the renowned awliyaʾ of later centuries. One thinks of Ibrahim ibn Adham, the former King of Balkh, who noted wryly that he purchased his asceticism by exchanging a kingdom for it, and the price was still cheap. However, perhaps no memeplex within Islam speaks so deeply to issues of sacrifice as Karbala, where Imam Husayn, sacrifices everything he has, including his life, rather than submit to and facilitate injustice. Through this sacrificial act, he earns the title Shahid-i Insaniyya (The Martyr of Humanity). Given Karbala’s depth and multivalence, perhaps the term meme does not do it adequate justice. After all, mimetic theory understands the process of imitation as essentially mechanical and largely unconscious. Given that fact, coupled with the generally negative attitude towards religion among prominent meme theorists, perhaps we should seek a more effective term to describe the process of imitation within religion, especially when discussing such complex events as Karbala.

Karbala as a Root Paradigm In 1974, two years before Dawkins proposed the term meme, the renowned anthropologist Victor Turner, in his analysis of the spiritual transformation and martyrdom of Thomas a Beckett, coined the term “root paradigms” to refer to the “cultural DNA” which provides models for imitation. Turner writes:

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Root paradigms are the cultural transliterations of genetic codes–they represent that in the human individual as a cultural entity which the DNA and RNA codes represent in him as a biological entity, the species life raised to the more complex and symbolic organizational level of culture. Furthermore, insofar as root paradigms are religious they entail some aspect of self-sacrifice as an evident sign of the ultimate predominance of group survival over individual survival.21

“Root paradigms,” which Turner explicitly notes are often found in the context of religion, unlike memes, are not mechanical elements of imitation. Neither do they represent simple moral guidelines, which one can easily communicate discursively. Rather, they are powerful ineffable and multivalent presences that speak to the deepest levels of human experience. Furthermore, they encourage human beings to overcome the self-serving components of their natures and embrace instead their more altruistic side.22 As Turner describes them: By paradigm, I do not mean a system of univocal concepts, logically arrayed. I do not mean either a stereotyped set of guidelines for ethical, aesthetic, or conventional action. A paradigm of this sort goes beyond the cognitive and even the moral to the existential domain; and in so doing becomes clothed with allusiveness, implications and metaphors–for in the stress of action, firm definitional outlines become blurred by the encounter of emotionally charged wills. Paradigms of this type, cultural root paradigms, so to speak, reach down to irreducible life stances of individuals, passing beneath conscious prehension to a fiduciary hold on what they sense to be axiomatic values, matters literally of life and death.23

Rather than a “stereotyped set of guidelines,” a “root paradigm” reaches beyond the limits of cognitive and didactic knowledge to the existential core of human existence. Root paradigms exist in the realm of metaphor. Think of the image of Christ in the garden of Gethsemane, or the starving Buddha on the verge of achieving enlightenment beneath the Bodhi tree. Think of Karbala, or Hallaj dancing to his martyrdom. Through relationships with “root paradigms,” one encounters the unspeakable and unutterable truths of the human condition not through our intellects, but rather in our very being. The “truth” of a root paradigm lies not in a rational explanation of its meaning, but rather in one’s immediate encounter with and experience of it. In my opinion, Turner’s concept of root paradigm is far richer than Dawkins’ notion of meme. Whereas memes are mechanical and morally empty units of transmission that spread themselves blindly from host to host, root paradigms are consciously embraced models of imitation, which re-orient the self through an existential encounter with axiomatic values that encourage sacrifice and altruistic behavior. Karbala functions in this way. Imitated in ritual and evoked in emotional narratives it encourages people to follow the paradigm of sacrifice and resistance initiated by ʿAli ibn Abu Talib and his beloved son, Imam Husayn. One learns the true meaning of devotion and sacrifice from the actions of the Imam’s companions through the narratives of Karbala. Through rituals of imitation commemorating Karbala, one actively visualizes oneself within the Karbala paradigm, feeling the hunger and thirst of Imam Husayn and his companions, experiencing the grief of the ahl al-­ bayt. Through this emotional encounter, one imagines oneself among the martyrs. One aspires to be like them, a concept expressed in the popular bumper stickers I

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purchased in Karachi in 1983 which read “Live Like ʿAli, Die Like Husayn.” Encountered, both in ritual and in narrative, Karbala is clearly a “root paradigm.” Rather than instilling specific behaviors in individuals, it assists them in transformations that are often creative and unpredictable. One’s participation in the ritual encounter with Karbala prepares one to face the moral struggles of their own lives, knowing that, as Imam Jaʿfar As-Sadiq famously said, “Every day is Ashura, every land is Karbala.” The narratives of Karbala, which Shiʿi Muslims tell and retell each year, bind the Shiʿi community together. Imam Husayn presents his followers in every new generation with a model of human virtue and perfection from which they can learn compassion, courage, passion and dedication. Like his grandfather, the Prophet Muhammad, and his father, Mawla ʿAli, he is an example of al-insan al-kamil a model of human perfection to be both loved and emulated. Moreover it is not only from Husayn that one learns the lessons of Karbala. At Karbala the Imam’s followers bravely went, one by one, to face their deaths rather than submit to evil and inhumanity. Imam Husayn’s standard- bearer and half-brother, Abbas, rode out to find water for their camp’s thirsty children only to die with his hands severed from his arms. There is the tragic story of young Qasim ibn Hasan, who was married in the camp right before he rode out to fight and die against the forces of Yazid, leaving his new bride a widow; and the Imam’s teenage son, ʿAli Akbar, said to be the spitting image of the Prophet Muhammad, who was brutally cut down in his youth. Imam Husayn’s sister, Zaynab, plays a particularly crucial role as the primary witness to the horrific events of Karbala. She was the one who stood before the victorious Yazid in Damascus and condemned him for his brutality and treachery, thus providing an important potential model of feminine piety for later generations of Shiʿi women to draw upon. Especially compelling is the story of Hurr, whose name literally means “free” in Arabic. Hurr had been promised a great financial reward for helping force Imam Husayn to give bayʿa to Yazid. However, recognizing the immorality of his actions he deserted the army of Yazid’s general Ibn Ziyad before the Day of Ashura and joined the forces of Husayn, although it meant certain death for him to do so. At that moment Imam Husayn told him, “Today you are truly Hurr (free).” At Karbala, an entire community had united in bonds of love and sacrifice that represent the best of what humanity can be, providing future generations with an undying paradigm. One the one hand, there is something specifically Muslim and Shiʿi about Karbala. Particularly for the Shiʿa, connected by bonds of love to the family of the Prophet, ʿAshuraʾ is a day of unimaginable sadness and grief. The tears they weep on that day annually out of grief for the Prophet’s beloved grandson provide evidence that they truly love the ahl al-bayt and by extension the Prophet Muhammad and God. Many Shiʿi Muslims believe that Fatima gathers the tears of those who mourn her son. On the Day of Judgement, she will present those tears to God and beg forgiveness for those who loved her son. There is, thus, a soteriological dimension to the remembrance of Karbala, rooted in the specifically Muslim experience of love for the Prophet and his family. However, Karbala also communicates something universal

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about humanity that transcends communal Muslim identity. From Husayn and his companions one learns such virtues as compassion, courage, passion, and dedication, values that are not specifically Muslim but cross-culturally “human.”

Victor Turner on Human Nature: Communitas and Structure Significantly, Victor Turner understood “root paradigms” as reaching beyond the boundaries of one’s particular religious and cultural identity and speaking to questions of the nature of humanity itself. Turner says: …I would expect a connection between root paradigms and the experience of “communitas,” an “essential we” relationship (to quote Buber) which is at the same time a generic human bond underlying or transcending all particular cultural definitions and normative orderings of social ties. The root paradigm… is probably concerned with fundamental assumptions underlying the human societal bond with pre-conditions of communitas. (Italics mine.).24

This notion of communitas, which Victor Turner developed in his groundbreaking work on ritual, is crucial for understanding his notion of “root paradigm.” In Turner’s ethnography, The Forest of Symbols, he used the tripartite model of rite of passage rituals developed by Van Gennep, to explain how these rituals facilitate the transformation of persons from one social status to another. Van Gennep noted that “the ritual process” consisted of three phases. The first he called “separation,” when initiates are removed from their normal structural role and stripped of all symbols of social status. The ritual process concludes with a third and final phase he called “reaggregation,” in which the initiate was returned to the society transformed into a representative of his or her new social status. In the context of the Ndembu people of Central Africa, who were the focus of The Forest of Symbols, a child would separate from society, as a boy or a girl and return at the end of the ritual process transformed into a man, or a woman. Turner was not primarily interested in these first and third phases, but rather the middle phase of the ritual process which Van Gennep identified as “the liminal phase” in which the initiate was “betwixt or between” and “neither this nor that.” In the liminal state, the initiate was no longer a boy, but not yet a man; not a boy, and not not a boy, not a man and not not a man.25 Turner saw in this middle liminal portion of these rituals, the period when an initiate was without social status, as an engine of creativity. Freed from the power of structural definition in the state of liminality, the initiate exists temporarily in the subjunctive mode of “what ifs” and possibility. Furthermore, in this state of liminality participants might encounter the most powerful and sacred symbols of their culture, not as persons programmed by social forces but rather as individuals, temporarily free form social classification and thus able to encounter and integrate those symbols in new and compelling ways. This “anti-structural” dimension of ritual provides an important space for human creativity and innovation.26 Most importantly, the liminal phase is characterized by what Turner called the experience of communitas, which he defined as “the unmediated relationship

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between, historical, idiosyncratic, concrete individuals.”27 For Turner, communitas describes an immediate connection between human beings, which transcends the hierarchy of structure through which we ordinarily interact with other human beings. He argues that all societies maintain both hierarchical modes of structure and egalitarian modes of anti-structure, marked by the liminal characteristic of communitas. While we experience the realm of structure in a society’s legal and hierarchical relationships; on the other hand, we experience communitas, in the unmediated and unstructured relationships between equals, the relationships between lovers and intimate friends, between pilgrims and participants in rituals, between close comrades on the battlefield. In his book, The Ritual Process, Turner lists the characteristics of communitas and antistructure as including equality, anonymity, absence of property, status and rank, humility, nakedness, and sacredness.28 Communitas represents an environment of “lowliness and sacredness, of homogeneity, and comradeship.”29 It is the realm of the egalitarian, of voluntary poverty, of empathy and altruism. As he says in his discussion of “root paradigms,” it is Martin Buber’s “We relationship.”30 For Turner, we are at our most human—our most humane—during the experience of communitas. In general, humanistic social scientists have been among the harshest critics of sociobiology, rejecting what they see as its inherent biological reductionism inherent. It is, therefore, somewhat surprising that Victor Turner, arguably the most humanistic of all modern anthropologists, whose voice championed the creative character of human beings in the face of reductionist theories, was deeply interested in the biological roots of culture. For Turner, the fundamental anthropological question is the relationship between “the person” and “the individual.” “Person” refers to one’s identity as a social being–husband, father, wife, mother, son, daughter, teacher, student, Brahmin, untouchable. “Personhood” is rooted in the realm of structure. “Person”—the word, in fact, comes from the Latin “personae” meaning, “mask”—is the structural mask worn by individuals. The concept of the “individual” is much more elusive. It represents the core of one’s being upon which one wears the social masks of “the person” needed to function in the world of structure. Most of the time we live the world of “the person,” the world in which the proper course of our actions is dictated by social constraints and boundaries that have become, quite literally, second nature. What of the individual? Who are we as individuals? The fact that we have to ask such questions as social persons, using language and categories that come from our culture and society makes it difficult to actually arrive at and experience our human nature as individuals. The individual is, thus, elusive. Ultimately, Turner places “the individual” in our “species being.” Many humanists instinctively reject any kind of biological essentialism, preferring to see our “humanity” as something purely cultural. However, Turner alerts us to the darker side of that proposition. If human values are purely cultural, what does that say about our free will? If a child is raised in a totalitarian society, is he or she then doomed to accept and hold the totalitarian views of that society? Turner instead suggests that our ability to love, to share and sacrifice is instead inherent in our “individual” self, rather than in the socially

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constructed realm of the person. In the end, he was convinced that those aspects of our nature which our most humane are rooted in our species being, in our biology. Our “humanity” is innate.31 Turner argues that we catch glimpses of “the individual” in our experience of communitas. We encounter it in anti-structural phenomena–in the aforementioned liminal state of rituals, in the exuberance of Carnival and other ecstatic communal celebrations, in the experience of intense romantic or mystical love, or the peripheral existence of religious ascetics. The ritual remembrance of Karbala, evoked by both emotional storytelling and communal performance, is one such liminal environment. As previously noted, Imam Jaʿfar As-Sadiq said, “Every day is ʿAshuraʾ, every place is Karbala” This aphorism not only implies that each of us must in our own moral lives choose between the path of Yazid and the path of Imam Husayn; it also implies that the events of Karbala, like the Day of Alast, are transcendent and primordial. For the Shiʿa, Karbala is a transcendent event always occurring just beneath the surface of our daily reality. When one ritually evokes Karbala during the first ten days of Muharram, it allows one temporarily to enter into its liminal realm. Karbala is both a field of battle and a field of love. It is permeated by communitas. In the subjunctive realm of Karbala we can imagine what we would have done had we been there with the Imam. In that charged arena, we can confront ourselves and possibly come away from that experience better, more human. For Turner, liminal worlds, like those evoked by the remembrance of Karbala, allow us to leave behind the everyday realm of hierarchy and structure and instead experience, however briefly, communitas, Within that anti-structural experience of communitas we encounter those aspects of human nature that are universally considered virtuous behaviors across cultural and religious boundaries–compassion, self-sacrifice, empathy, and love.

Etic and Emic It is perhaps worthwhile to pause here and ask if it is appropriate to impose “etic” social science categories like meme and “root paradigm” onto the Shiʿi and Muslim traditions at the center of this volume. Are there any “emic” concepts within the Muslim tradition that resonate with this kind of analysis? I believe that there are. The idea that there is something inherently positive, even spiritual, in human nature; that within our biological form there is something of a divine design, is not alien to Islam. After all, the Qurʾan tells us that God’s ruh resides in Adam. From the perspective of the Qurʾan, we are all born Muslim with an innate tendency to turn towards God, having affirmed our submission on the primordial Day of Alast. As we discussed in Chap. 2, in the classical Sufi understanding of human psychology we have three selfs–the qalb (intellect), the nafs (the animal self), and the ruh (spiritual self). Our animal self, the nafs, is, indeed, acquisitive, competitive, and selfish. It is necessary for our physical survival, but certainly not our highest nature. Our spiritual self, the ruh, on the other hand, is self-effacing, self-sacrificing

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and ascetic. Within Sufism, a primary goal of the mystical path is to diminish the effect of the nafs upon the qalb while increasing the impact of the ruh. In so doing, we can perfect our humanity and become truly human. The human condition, which includes the reality of having a physical and mortal body, is not something to escape but, rather, perfect. Not only does Karbala provide models—that is to say, root paradigms,—of individuals who have accomplished this, the remembrance of Karbala functions as a kind of dhikr to encourage and facilitate the desire to imitate those paradigms within the hearts of believers. Similarly, the forces of Yazid are portrayed as humans who have degenerated to the level of beasts by succumbing fully to their nafs, and provide counter examples that show one how not to behave. I beg the reader’s indulgence at taking the time and space to acknowledge my debt to Victor Turner in thinking about religion and Islam, but I do so largely because his “etic” understanding of humanity resonates so well with “emic” Islamic notions of human nature. In Islam, our humaneness—our humanity—is an essential and integral constituent of our original natures. Thus, a major theme in Islam is the necessity of the remembrance (dhikr) of our original state as servants of God on the Day of Alast. As Turner suggests, Shiʿi Muslims see the “root paradigm” of Imam Husayn and his companions at Karbala as transcending the communal boundaries of Islam and extending to humanity as a whole. The concept of humanity (insaniyya) is particularly crucial to Shiʿi thought, which is why Imam Husayn is called “Shahid al-Insaniyya” the “Martyr of Humanity,” and not just the “Martyr of Islam.” In South Asia, the Shiʿi community is proud to point out that even non-Muslims respond positively to the paradigm of Husayn, participating in Muharram rituals and writing poetry in praise of Imam Husayn. Nowhere is this clearer than in the Turkish Alevi tradition, which considers the Imams the epitome of insaniyya, or, in Turkish, insanlık. Among Alevis, the cultivation of insanlık—to become truly human—is the highest goal one can seek. Maʿrifa (spiritual gnosis) resides solely in the domain of human beings. Among the most famous of all Alevi sayings is, Maarifatsiz hayat, hayvan hayatı–a life without spiritual gnosis is an animal life. Alevis seek therefore to become human in a larger spiritual sense. In fact, to be truly spiritual one must become truly human. Karbala provides a paradigm to facilitate that transformation. Such narratives “teach humanity” by “teaching humanity”—by providing paradigmatic human models that inspire our devotion and imitation and lead us to behave in truly “humane” ways.

Devotional Allegiance in the Sufi Tradition Devotional allegiance to Muhammad and ʿAli is, of course, not limited to the Shiʿi tradition. While the phenomenon of devotional allegiance is particularly strong in Shiʿi Islam where devotion and allegiance to the Imams is an essential aspect of piety, it also has deep roots in Sunni Islam, where the Prophet and ʿAli are also focuses of love and devotion. ʿAli is a heroic figure for the entirety of the Muslim

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community. Furthermore, Imam Husayn is the hero of Karbala for Sunni Muslims, just as he is for the Shiʿa. Only a tiny handful of Muslims see Yazid, or even his father Muʿawiya, as a heroic, or virtuous, figure. Witin the Sunni community, devotional allegiance is most clearly located in the Sufi tradition, where it extends beyond love for Muhammad and ʿAli, who is, understood to be the “King of the Friends (Shah-i awliyaʾ),” to also include the “Friends of God (awliyaʾ Allah),” who themselves are mirrors who reflect the light of God onto this world. For most Muslims, the awliyaʾ are powerful root paradigms, deserving both devotion and allegiance. Through the Sufi tradition, love for the awliyaʾ, who are linked by ties of love and knowledge to God and the Prophet has become an integral part of Islam for the great majority of Muslims, and narratives of the awliyaʾ provide an essential means of transmitting the values of humanity from one generation to the next. As discussed in Chap. 2, I use the term Sufism (or tasawwuf) to refer to that entire complex of institutions which accepts devotional allegiance to the awliyaʾ Allah, who are seen as the legitimate spiritual successors to the Prophet Muhammad, as a crucial expression of Islamic piety. In most cases these awliyaʾ trace their authority back through an unbroken spiritual chain of teachers that reaches all the way back to the Prophet. Traditionally, the awliyaʾ fulfill a variety of roles in society both as spiritual teachers, as pirs initiating disciples into Sufi orders (tariqas), and as focuses of devotion and veneration. They are model expressions of Islamic piety and human virtue whose lives and practices are to be emulated. They are also persons of spiritual power to whom one can come seeking blessings, guidance or, even, miraculous intervention. I, furthermore, apply the term “Sufism” to refer to the entirety of the worldview that accepts the efficacy and legitimacy of belief in the awliyaʾ Allah, whether or not the persons holding that worldview are actually involved in the disciplined practice of pir-murid. I, therefore, include within this term not only Sufi tariqas, but also much of what is often referred to as popular Islam–pilgrimage to shrines, miracle stories, mystical poetry and spiritual music. Throughout most of Islamic history and in most parts of the Muslim world, this belief in the awliyaʾ has been fully accepted as an element of religious piety. The awliyaʾ, who are privy to secret knowledge and possess miraculous powers, constitute an invisible hierarchy, which serves as the spiritual government of this world. Believers encounter the awliyaʾ in a variety of different ways. The most immediate means of encounter is through actual contact with living Sufi shaykhs or pirs, within the context of the institution of the tariqa. Although the fullest expression of this relationship with a living wali is within the disciplined context of the pir-murid relationship, many people seek out living awliyaʾ for more mundane reasons such as blessings and healings. For example, they might come to a wali to ask for help in finding a job or resolving marital difficulties. People also encounter the awliyaʾ through visitation (ziyara) to their tombs. Like the Prophet Muhammad in Medina, although their bodies are entombed after their physical passing the awliyaʾ maintain a spiritual existence that allows them communication with their devotees.32

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Perhaps the most common way in which Muslims encounter the awliyaʾ is through oral and written narratives about their lives. Stories about the awliyaʾ communicate the moral and spiritual teachings of Islam while affirming the general worldview of Sufism. These narratives help to establish belief in the awliyaʾ as a basic cultural belief, providing powerful root paradigms both at the level of so-­ called “high culture”—for example, in the highly sophisticated and literary Persian tazkirah tradition—and at the “popular level” through countless oral narratives about the awliyaʾ in vernacular languages. Belief in the awliyaʾ is prevalent throughout most of the Muslim world. Despite concerted and virulent attacks upon it by certain exclusivist voices within the umma, who consider belief in the awliyaʾ a dangerous form of shirk, especially many modernist Muslims reformers who see it as an irrational aberration within an otherwise rational faith, it remains, for most Muslims, part of the organic fabric of Islam. For most Muslims, diligence in ʿibadat–for example, whether or not one prays five times a day or keeps the whole of the Ramadan fast—is not the deciding factor in determining whether someone is or is not a Muslim. One’s Muslim identity arises out of one’s immersion in countless indicators of that identity, as if in water. From the time a local imam comes to first whisper the Qurʾan into one’s ear as an infant, to the time one is finally carried away for burial in a Muslim cemetery, one encounters Islam in a myriad of less formal ways. Stories, songs, poetry, and celebrations all contain crucial pieces of religious and spiritual guidance and information, which help shape one’s Muslim identity. For most Muslims, belief in the awliyaʾ and the general worldview of tasawwuf are crucial aspects of that identity. In nearly every town or village there is a shrine where one might go with parents or other relatives on ziyara. While there, one might make a vow or sacrifice a sheep and share the food with friends and strangers. Families may visit shrines together to attend the festivals connected with the annual ʿurs, or death anniversary of a local or regional wali. Perhaps most importantly people grow up hearing and remembering stories that evoke the awliyaʾ–their miracles, their encounters with non-Muslims, their ethical teachings–and these become a primary means for the transmission of piety and ethics (akhlaq) both orally and in writing. Sufi imagery permeates vernacular poetry and songs throughout the Muslim world–much of it with roots in the classical and medieval period. Is there a Turk who does not know some of the poetry of Yunus Emre by heart or has never heard the nefes of Pir Sultan Abdal? Similarly, is there a native Persian speaker who cannot recite some of the mystical poetry of Mawlana Jalal al-Din Rumi, Attar, or Hafiz? This literature both assumes and promotes a general understanding and acceptance of the worldview of tasawwuf. Along with poetry, stories associated with the awliyaʾ have also became a major form of literature in the Islamicate world. Tazkirahs, which collect stories of famous awliyaʾ, have become especially popular. Farid al-Din Attar, the author of The Conference of the Birds, is equally famous for a Persian tazkirah collecting stories of awliyaʾ including Mansur al-Hallaj, Ibrahim ibn Adham, and the great female saint Rabia of Basra.33

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This hagiographical literature is an important vehicle for the transmission of important lessons about the perfection of humanity, which the Sufi tradition suggests is the ultimate purpose of Islam. The characteristics the Sufi tradition uses to describe the perfected human (al-insan al-kamil), include such virtues as humility, courage, forbearance, voluntary poverty and hospitality. On the one hand, these are Muslim virtues rooted in the Qurʾan and the life of the Prophet. They are the essential characteristics of Muhammad, and beyond him, those of his cousin and son-in-­ law, Imam ʿAli, the other Shiʿi Imams and the great saints (awliyaʾ) of the Sufi mystical tradition. However, as we have noted throughout this volume they are also universal human values shared by numerous religious and cultural traditions. This hagiographical literature, by emphasizing these values, has played a major role in the transmission of Islam as a humanistic tradition. In the remainder of this chapter I will focus on two specific stories—one from the South Asian Chishti Sufi tradition the other from the Anatolian Alevi tradition. The two stories I have chosen to present are not among the best-known stories of Sufi awliyaʾ. However, each provides an excellent example of critical themes that are common in such narratives. Despite being originally told in a different language and coming from different places and religious traditions within the world Islam, they both draw upon a common universe of symbols and ideas. Both affirm the reality of the awliyaʾ. They take as a given the idea that persons who have special knowledge and abilities, who are able to see beyond the surface reality to the hidden batini dimension of existence, who are able to perform miracles, and who can provide us with badly needed guidance live among us. Both present a view of human nature that affirms the superiority of values of communitas—values of humility, empathy, simplicity and compassion—over the values of structure and hierarchy. In their own ways, both present a similar vision of how an exemplary human being should behave.

The Story of Baba Farid Shakr Ganj and Mullah Sahab This first narrative comes from a published Urdu collection of stories of the awliyaʾ, entitled, Anwar-i Asfiyan.34 This particular story concerns the great thirteenth-­ century Sufi pir Baba Farid Shakr Ganj, whose mazar is in Pakpattan Sharif in modern Pakistan. He is one of the most famous and beloved Sufis in South Asia. Baba Farid is one of the founders of the Chishti order in South Asia, an order famous because of its concern for and outreach to the poor. The Chishti tariqa’s musical tradition of qawwali is extremely popular in South Asian, even among non-­Muslims. The late qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh ʿAli Khan, from Baba Farid’s hometown of Pakpattan Sharif, became an international star in the 1990s introducing hundreds of thousands of listeners not only to qawwali music but also to the Chishti Sufi path. The themes in the following narrative, reported on the authority of his khalifa Hazrat Maulana Khwaja Badruddin Ishaq, are ones common to Sufi hagiography throughout not only South Asia, but also the entire Muslim world. Furthermore, they are themes that speak well beyond the confines of the Islamic umma to the

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larger human family. It concerns an arrogant ʿalim who, because of his great textual learning, looked down upon faqirs and dervishes like Baba Farid. One day, this ʿalim, referred to in the story simply as Mullah Sahab, visited the assembly (majlis) of Baba Farid and his disciples. Baba Farid turned to Mullah Sahab and asked him, “How many pillars are there in Islam?” The mulla replied that there were five and proceeded to list them-the shahada, daily prayer, the Ramadan fast, the paying of zakat and the Hajj. Baba Farid replied that there were not five, but instead, six. An argument ensued.35 Baba Farid maintained that he had heard that there was a sixth pillar: “roti” (bread). Mullah Sahab angrily countered that there was no mention of such a pillar “in the Qurʾan nor in the hadith nor in the books of fiqh.” He then insulted Baba Farid, accusing him of being unjust (zalim) and quoting Sura 6:68 of the Qurʾan, which reads, “After recollection do not sit with unjust people (qawm al-zalimin).” He then angrily stormed out of Baba Farid’s majlis.36 Not long after this, Mullah Sahib left for the Hajj. He made the arduous and dangerous journey to the Arabian Peninsula by sea and then remained in Mecca for the next seven years. Each year he was fastidious about saying all of his required daily prayers (salat), keeping the Ramadan fast, and paying his zakat as well as completing all of the rituals of the Hajj in each year. Finally, at the end of those seven years, he headed back to Hindustan. On the way back to his home, his boat was wrecked in a storm and he washed up on the shore of a deserted island. For three days and nights, Mullah Sahab went without food or water and, as a result, was overcome with hunger and thirst.37 Suddenly a man appeared from over a ridge bearing a tray holding food and water, and offering them for sale. The starving Mullah Sahab approached the man and asked him for food; but the man demanded payment before he would feed him. Mullah Sahab protested, stating that he had no money with which to pay. He complained that he did not have a single paise (small coin). When the mysterious man with the tray identified himself as a Muslim, Mullah Sahab chided him for his lack of hospitality, arguing that as a Muslim he was obligated to help guests, travelers, and those beset by difficulties. The man, however, replied that he was a merchant and, as such, he could not expect him to offer food or water without payment.38 So, they struck a deal. The man proposed to Mullah Sahab that he trade the thawab (the spiritual benefit gained from performing a religious action) that he had earned from his seven performances of the Hajj over the last seven years in exchange for food and water. Thinking to himself that it was actually impossible to trade away one’s thawab, he insincerely agreed to give the man his thawab for his multiple performances of the Hajj in exchange for the necessary sustenance. As soon as Mullah Sahab took the food and water from him, the merchant disappeared. When he tried to follow him, he could find no trace of this mysterious man.39 Three days later Mullah Sahab was once again hungry and thirsty. The mysterious man re-appeared and this time he talked him into trading away his thawab from his seven years of fasting during the month of Ramadan for more food and water. He subsequently returned twice more and acquired the thawab, first, from Mullah Sahab’s giving of alms in zakat and finally for his namaz, his daily prayers, during

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his seven-year sojourn in Mecca. After this, he found himself once again beset by hunger and thirst. The man appeared one last time but this time he had nothing left to trade. On this occasion, he instead agreed to write and sign a document attesting to the fact that he had already traded the thawab for his seven years of prayer, fasting, hajj and zakat for food and water. As the merchant disappeared for the last time he rushed off after him, but once again, he could find no trace of him.40 At that very moment, however, he saw a boat in the distance. As a result, he was finally rescued. He eventually made his way back to Hindustan where he ultimately found himself once more in the presence of Baba Farid. Baba Farid reminded Mullah Sahib how at their last meeting he had accused him of being one of the “unjust people.” Mullah Sahib at first did not remember saying this and denied it, until Baba Farid further reminded him of their conversation about bread (roti) and how it was the sixth pillar of Islam. Upon remembering their conversation, Mullah Sahab became indignant and once again began to criticize “the ignorance of dervishes.” He claimed that there existed no book where one could find reference to bread as the sixth pillar of Islam. Baba Farid insisted that there was indeed such a book. At this point in the conversation, he pointed out a huge book and instructed one of his disciples to bring it over to Mullah Sahab, who began to look through the book. He noticed as he turned from page to page in the massive book that each one of those pages was completely blank. Finally, in the middle of the book he came upon a page upon which was written the document he had signed on the desert island trading away all of the thawab for his seven years of ʿibadat. Astonished and humbled, he immediately fell silent at the feet of the master and never spoke again as long as he lived.41

Interpretation This story, which might be easily and unfairly dismissed as a “simple folktale,” is, in fact, both remarkably profound and deeply Islamic in it themes. First, we must note that this is clearly a Sufi story affirming both the existence of the awliyaʾ and their power. It assumes that the awliyaʾ exist. This is one of the primary purposes of such literature. It performs a kind of Sufi da‘wa, inviting the reader to first recognize the existence and authenticity of the Sufi path, and then decide whether to seek to enter it. Like the Star Wars movies, which put before their viewers the charismatic figure of the Jedi master, Sufi hagiography puts before its audience the compelling image of the Sufi pir. The viewer of the Star Wars movies however cannot leave the theater and expect to locate a Jedi master to teach him or her the mysteries of “the Force.” The Jedi simply do not exist. Sufi institutions, however, do exist. If one wishes to attempt to “walk the path of love,” one can begin the quest for one’s master whenever one wishes.42 Furthermore, the story not only tells us that the awliyaʾ exist. It also warns us that we should respect them. In fact, we show them disrespect at our own peril. There is another popular story about Baba Farid that communicates a similar message in a

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humorous, but equally profound, manner. That story concerns a sugar merchant who sees Baba Farid approaching him as he is heading home from the market with bags of sugar on his donkey. Everyone knew how much Baba Farid loved sugar. He was famous for it. After exchanging greetings, Baba Farid asked the merchant what he had in his bags. The merchant knew that if he told the pir there was sugar in the bags he would have to share it with the Sufi master. To refuse to offer him some of his sugar would be a terrible breach of hospitality and politeness (adab). Being a greedy man, the merchant lied. He told Baba Farid that the bags his donkey was carrying contained salt. Baba Farid smiled at him and said, “Oh. It is salt then.” They said their farewells and the merchant returned home with his bags of sugar intact. Or so he thought. Entering his home, he opened his bags and discovered to his great astonishment, and annoyance, that their contents had miraculously transformed into salt. The message is clear; one should not lie to avoid offering hospitality, and one should especially not lie to the Friends of God.43 The story of Mullah Sahab and Baba Farid demonstrates the ways in which the “Friends of God” guide us in ways that transcend the mere rational and didactic exchange of knowledge. Baba Farid teaches Mullah Sahab a lesson about his arrogant and rude behavior but does not do so through argument and debate. Instead he creates an experience that transforms him in a much more profound and convincing manner. The story also emphasizes a crucial aspect of the Sufi tradition—the necessity of adab (the proper etiquette between human beings). Adab is something different from law and even ethics (akhlaq). People who practice proper adab treat one another in a respectful manner, regardless of their station in life. Many people, encountering the living Sufi tradition for the first time, are amazed at how much of Sufi practice is simply about learning proper behavior. Disciples learn how speak to others politely and how to offer hospitality to guests. One learns much of this behavior simply by being in the presence of one’s pir and emulating his or her actions. In a very real sense, adab rubs off.44 Because of his arrogance, Mullah Sahab behaves rudely (be-adab, literally without adab) towards Baba Farid. His rudeness is both his undoing and, ironically, ultimately his salvation, as it provides an opportunity for his education. Mullah Sahab’s arrogance is rooted in his pride in his textual knowledge. He confidently asserts there is no book that identifies bread as the sixth pillar of Islam. Unjustified pride based upon one’s academic learning is a prevalent theme in Sufi hagiography. Often in such stories, an arrogant ʿalim approaches a dervish and secretly feels superior to him because of his textual learning. In the end, the potential disciple needs to give up his sense of superiority and learn humility if he is to proceed on the spiritual path. There is a story about the great Central Asian Sufi, Najmuddin Kubra, and how, when he met his Sufi master he initially felt superior to him because of his more extensive textual knowledge. One day he noticed that when his master was performing ablutions for prayer he washed his hands improperly. At the same moment that thought crossed his mind, Najmuddin Kubra passed into a state of unconsciousness. When he awoke, he found himself in hell surrounded by flames. He began to run

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through hell in terror and panic until suddenly the improperly washed hand of his master reached into the flames of hell, pulling him out the fire.45 Similarly, Mullah Sahab is a man who feels intellectually superior to “ignorant dervishes.” He is a man who indeed, possesses knowledge of texts and especially shariʿa. He is a master of Islam’s discursive tradition. However, as the story unfolds, we learn that he is in many ways oblivious of the realities of the lives of actual human beings. Thus, the question of “bread” as a pillar of Islam is for him initially a purely intellectual one. It is only when he falls victim to a shipwreck and finds himself penniless and hungry that he experiences a lack of bread, existentially. At that point, the learned ʿalim willingly trades away all of his acquired thawab for the performance of the “real five pillars of Islam” for access to the sixth, for food, although he does not recognize that irony until much later when he is back in Hindustan in the presence of the pir. Interestingly, this challenges the common assumption that mysticism is somehow otherworldly. In this narrative, it is the “mystic,” Baba Farid, rather than the ʿalim, who is aware of the importance of the body. He knows that without bread—without bodily sustenance—we have no hope of meaningful religious action. He recognizes the body as part of our humanity. The tale is, in fact, full of ironies. For example, Mullah Sahab quotes the Qurʾan in order to attack Baba Farid as unjust without understanding that he is actually the one who is giving erroneous teaching and acting as one of the zalimin (oppressors). The ʿalim knows the literal meaning of the text, but his arrogance makes it impossible for him to comprehend the wisdom in what Baba Farid is saying. One should note, however, that in this story there is, in fact, no rejection of the shariʿa or textual Islam. Baba Farid clearly knows and recognizes the validity of the five ʿibadat. The story assumes that one gains thawab by performing them. Both Baba Farid and Mullah Sahab are men who are familiar with the Qurʾan. Mullah Sahab’s problem—and it is one that Sufi stories commonly address—is not his knowledge, it is that his learning has made him arrogant. As in the story of Musa and Khidr in the Qurʾan, where Musa cannot “bear to have patience (sabr) with Khidr,” Mullah Sahab has no patience with Baba Farid. In part, this is because he is utterly convinced of the value and accuracy of his own textually based knowledge. However, just as in the Qurʾanic story, he does not understand that his own discursive and didactic knowledge is not the only kind of knowledge there is. Mullah Sahab is a man of structure and hierarchy. He uses his learning to define his social status and, sadly, to demean others. His world is ordered by hierarchical and binary categories—dervish and ʿalim, Muslim and non-Muslim. He is not a man of communitas—able to deal with others at the non-structural level of a shared and unmediated humanity. He only begins to understand this mode of existence after circumstances thrust him into a liminal environment, shipwrecked on a beach trapped betwixt and between, where his structural identity no longer matters. Even then, he behaves like a man of structure and hierarchy. He tells the mysterious man on the beach that he must give him sustenance because offering hospitality and helping musafirs (travelers) are legal necessities of Islam. The merchant then also argues back from the standpoint of structural identity, stating that he is a businessperson and “this is business.” He ultimately makes Mullah Sahab prepare a contract. He thus treats him as a man of structure, hierarchy and law, not as a fellow traveler

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and pilgrim in the world. Rather than treat him like a fellow human being, he mirrors back to Mullah Sahab his own legalistic and structural view of the world. On many levels, this is clearly an Islamic story. It is full of references to the Qurʾan, and to Muslim authority figures—‘ulama and Sufis. It draws heavily on the Islamic motif of dhikr or remembrance. For example, Mullah Sahib at several points in the story cannot recollect his previous actions. He forgets himself. The wali reminds him. As in Qurʾanic descriptions of the Day of Judgment (qiyama), Mullah Sahab’s sins confront him. Interestingly that confrontation takes the form of an encounter with a book, the ultimate source of his pride as an ʿalim. Like the story Attar retells in The Conference of the Birds of Joseph’s brothers, who find themselves confronted with and forced to read the document by which they sold their brother into slavery, he is compelled to remember and confront his own prideful self by looking at a contract he had thought he had made in secret.46 This is clearly an Islamic story sharing common elements with other Sufi stories from Central Asia, Anatolia and the Arab world. However, this is also a specifically South Asian story. The intended audience is clearly not only Muslim but also South Asian. The tension between the ‘alim and the Sufi, while one that is universal in medieval Islamic hagiography, is one that is especially popular in Urdu hagiography. The penniless Mullah Sahab has not even one paise, a form of South Asian currency. The story identifies the sixth pillar not just as bread, but also as roti, a specifically South Asian bread. Specifically Urdu phrases and words mark the narrative as taking place in a recognizably South Asian locality. Perhaps most importantly this is also a human story and, as such, one that is intelligible cross-culturally. One does not have to be either a Muslim or South Asian to “get it.” It tells the universal story of an arrogant man of rational knowledge, in this case an ʿalim, and the humble man of immediate human knowledge, a Sufi. This could just as easily be the story of an arrogant pandit and a wise sannyasin, or a simple monk and haughty bishop. It resonates with the way Gospel narratives juxtapose their negative depictions of the legalistic Pharisees against Jesus, the simple carpenter who speaks to common people at their own level. The struggle to find a balance between maintaining the hierarchy and structure necessary for maintaining a society and our desire for egalitarian and immediate relationships of communitas is universal. Tellingly, in narratives like this, the representative of communitas always wins against the representative of structure. In popular culture, audiences naturally support Robin Williams’ character over the rigid teachers in Dead Poets’ Society. They root for Paul Newman’s character in Cool Hand Luke over the prison guards who hold him captive. As a species, it seems to be our nature to choose love over “the law,” even as we recognize its necessity. Thus, this story speaks to non-­Muslims, not only allowing for mutual understanding between them and the Muslims who are its primary audience, but also perhaps, facilitating the possibility of conversion. This is a story where we see Baba Farid “teaching humanity” to the arrogant mullah. In the end, the point of this story is to get people to accept a view of Islam that incorporates a Sufi worldview by demonstrating that Baba Farid’s Islam is a true path; and not only a Muslim path, but also a human one. By demonstrating the humanity of Baba Farid, this story makes Islam compelling to non-Muslims as it

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challenges and diminishes any sense of the otherness of Islam, by showing us that at its heart its values are deeply human

Ahmet Yesevi in the Vilayetname The next story comes from the Vilayetname of Hacı Bektaş an important source for the Turkish Alevi and Bektaşi traditions. Written in Ottoman Turkish—its earliest manuscript dating from the seventh century—the Vilayetname tells the story of Hacı Bektaş, the thirteenth-century wali who purportedly came to Anatolia from Central Asia to convert the local population to Islam. Hacı Bektaş is the purported founder of the Bektaşi Sufi order and the first pir of the Alevi tradition, which accounts for perhaps as much as twenty-five or thirty percent of the population of modern Turkey. The Vilayetname, which establishes a genealogical connection between Hacı Bektaş and the Twelve Imams through Imam Musa al-Kazim, describes his life, his teachings and his miracles. The following story describes an incident in the life of Hoca Ahmet Yesevi, one of Haci Bektaş’s pirs, and himself an important figure in Central Asia Sufism. His massive tomb in Kazakhstan, near the border with Uzbekistan, is still a place of living pilgrimage. Many scholars believe that his book, Hikmet, is the first Sufi text written in Turkic. He is especially famous for refusing to walk the earth longer than the Prophet Muhammad did, moving into an underground cell at the age of sixty-three and never again coming out. This following short tale speaks volumes about Muslim notions of humanity (Fig. 5.3).

 he Proclamation of the Praiseworthy Qualities of Hoca T Ahmet Yesevi Hezretleri47 Hoca Ahmet Yesevi Hezretleri, the king of the Gnostics and the axis of the age (kutb, Arabic, qutb), came from the lineage of Muhammad Hanife. Having received permission to teach (icazet, Arabic, ijaza) from the Shiʿi Imam ʿAli- ibn Musa al-­ Riza, he established himself in Turkistan with a court in the city of Yesu. Because he personally trained ninety nine thousand halifes (Arabic, Khalilfahs), he is widely known as the highest of the ninety-nine thousand pirs of Turkistan. He was also one of the great ulema (Arabic ʿulamaʾ). No one was his equal in exoteric knowledge (zahiri ʿilm). He was superior to all of the other ulema in knowledge; so much so, that none could challenge him. Ahmet Yesevi was also perfect in matters of esoteric knowledge (ʿilm- batini). He never neglected his ibadet (Arabic ʿibadat), not for an instant nor an hour. He was also a great ascetic, free from worldly accumulation. Whatever people brought him in the form of sadiqa (donations) or qurban (sacrifice) was prepared in the kitchen and distributed among the poor, who ate from it.48 Ahmet Yesevi used to make spoons and bowls. He used to put them in a saddlebag, which he would place on his ox, and then send him out to the bazaar. Everybody in Yesu knew how much to pay for his wares. People would take whatever they

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Fig. 5.3  Tomb of Hoca Ahmet Yesevi in Kazakhstan in the town of Yasa near the border with Uzbekistan (under reconstruction in the 1990s)

needed from the saddlebag, and in exchange leave the proper amount. If anyone took something without paying, the ox would follow him around. This would alert the people to the fact that he had not paid and they would then take the money from him and put it in the ox’s saddlebag. The ox would then return to the Hoca with this money who would take the money from the saddlebag and purchase food, which he distributed to the people. Those who were fasting would break their fast with this food from Hazrat Hoca.49 Hoca Ahmed Yesevi performed countless miracles many of which have been recorded in his biographies. In fact, he performed so many that it would be impossible to write them all down. This is one of them.50 One day, some people wanted to slander and humiliate Hoca Ahmet Yesevi. In the middle of the night, they slaughtered an ox on the outskirts of the town. They left the intestines, feet and head where they killed the animal and then took the meat to Hoca Ahmet Yesevi’s kitchen where they hung it up. The next morning, they woke up and pretended to search for their “missing ox.” They went to the place where they themselves had slaughtered the animal and exclaimed, “This is from our ox.” They then proceeded to pretend to search the entire town. Finally, “by chance” they arrived at Ahmed Yesevi’s tekke (lodge). After first asking permission from the Hoca, they entered his tekke. They went into his kitchen and saw the meat hanging there. When they saw the meat, Hazrat Ahmet Yesevi asked God (al-Haqq) to turn them into dogs. In that form, they fell upon the meat and ate it. Having consumed it all, they then turned on each other tearing themselves apart. In the end, they killed each other. When the people of the city learned what had happened they realized

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that they had received the just consequences of their own deeds. Through the vilayet (power) of Hoca Ahmed Yesevi they were subjected to this calamity, which they had brought upon themselves. After that, their own faith became strong and the people turned away from engaging in these kinds of slander.51

Analysis Although this is a vernacular story, told in straightforward Turkish, with very few Arabic or technical Islamic terms, it is also clearly an Islamic narrative. In fact, its themes and descriptions of insaniyya are similar to those in the earlier Urdu story. The opening part of the story establishes the Islamic authority of Ahmet Yesevi. The text describes him as a pir, in fact the Qutb of the age, the pole around which all other awliyaʾ rotate, and the murshid, or teacher, of ninety-nine thousand khalifas. Beyond this, he is also a person of exoteric Islamic learning—an ʿalim. He is a master of zahiri learning and in terms of shariʿa a person who is fastidious about ʿibadat. While the Alevi-Bektaşi tradition is essentially beshar, in that its followers do not say namaz or keep the Ramadan fast, it nevertheless considers shariʿa the first of its four doors—shariʿa, tariqat, haqiqa and maʿrifa. As a pir, Ahmet Yesevi is a master of all four including the shariʿa Beyond this, he manifests the classical Islamic virtues of humility and poverty. Like the Prophet and ʿAli, he lives a life of voluntary poverty and simplicity. Whatever money he earns, he freely shares with the poor. With his great learning he could easily have served as an ʿalim at court, but instead he earns a living making spoons and bowls. Even in his roles as artisan and merchant, he lives in and encourages communitas rather than structure. He allows his ox—perhaps the symbol of his well-trained nafs—to do his selling for him. He does so with a remarkable sense of trust (tawakkul). He trusts people to put the right amount of money in his ox’s saddlebag. There are no contracts, no written rules. The money he earns he uses to feed the poor, mirroring not only other Sufi stories, but also narratives of the Prophet Muhammad and the ahl al-bayt. The next part of the story initially may seem less explicitly Islamic, but on closer inspection, it mirrors the same Sufi themes of insaniyya. The villains in the story are driven by their envy of Ahmet Yesevi to commit a sinful act. They lie. They bear false witness. As a result, they lose their humanity. They are turned into dogs—first devouring the meat they hoped to use to humiliate the pir, and then, ultimately, killing each other. This provides a perfect example of the famous Bektaşi saying: “A life without gnosis (maʿrifa), is the life of an animal.” It is also provides a wonderful image of the specifically Alevi-Bektaşi understanding of the qiyama. For the Alevi-Bektaşis, the afterlife is already here. As each moment itself contains an infinity of moments of time, eternity, including, heaven and hell, is occurring all around us all of the time. For those of us who are truly human, we are already living in paradise (janna). But for those of us who refuse to behave as human beings we are already in Hell (jahannam) in the eternity of the present moment, where we live the lives of animals rather human beings.

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Ahmet Yesevi “teaches humanity” not by didactically laying out rules and regulations, despite his knowledge of the discursive tradition of fiqh, but rather by providing an example of life as it could and should be lived in a spirit of trust and communitas. Ahmet Yesevi, by trusting the people in his village to be honest, demonstrates what life could be like if we behaved like real human beings. If we were all trustworthy, we would not need rules and regulations. Once again, as in the earlier story of Mullah Sahib and Baba Farid, this is a story that speaks to Muslim and non-Muslim alike, because it speaks to shared notions of humanity rather than specifically Islamic values. Stories like this played a crucial role in facilitating conversion to Islam. If being a Muslim meant being like Ahmet Yesevi, that is something to which many, if not most, people might aspire.

Conclusion At the beginning of this volume, we addressed issues of unity and diversity within Islam. In many ways the issues raised in this chapter speak to the larger, but related, issue of “unity and diversity” among humankind. In many ways, this is the underlying issue in the humanities and social sciences, especially in disciplines like anthropology and the history of religions. On the one hand, as scholars we teach and write about individual and discrete cultural traditions, and on the other hand, we seek to illuminate universal aspects of the human condition. Of course, it would be foolish to argue either that humanity is not diverse, or that human diversity is unimportant. We speak hundreds of languages and thousands of dialects. We practice numerous religions, with radically different notions of ultimate reality, different ritual practices, and different understandings of authority. There are many who consider these cultural factors determinative. They hold that our beliefs and actions are largely driven by culture. We are each a part of, for example, Western Civilization or Islamic Civilization. We are French or English, Turks, or Indians. In terms of religion, we are Christians, Jews, Buddhist, and Muslims. Each of these traditions has its own specific beliefs and practices. If we are to understand them, we need to know the things that distinguish them from each other. From this perspective, we should, as scholars and teachers, emphasize the differences between cultures and religions.52 However, despite our religious and cultural differences, there is also surely a unity in being human. It seems likely that that continuity at least in part is natural, something written in our species being that is the result of the process of evolutionary biology. I agree with Victor Turner, that the most universally and highly prized human virtues—altruism, compassion, empathy, and self-sacrifice—likely do not originate in the culturally defined realms of hierarchy and structure, but rather in the realm of communitas. What I find most compelling about Turner’s view of humanity is that he rejects the early modern notion that in our natural state we are nasty and brutish Hobbesian monsters, whose worst tendencies must be mediated and controlled by social constraints and authority, or like Freud’s discontented moderns, forced to deny our basic urges through the development of necessary neuroses. For

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Turner, the source of our altruism and empathy, of our humanity, is located within our species being itself. Perhaps, the reason that “root paradigms” encouraging self-sacrifice and altruism are so ubiquitous cross-culturally is that self-sacrifice was necessary for our very survival as a species, which could can only survive in social groups. Empathy and altruism evolved as a part of our nature because we need them in order to survive. It is why we smile at children, even other peoples’ children, and go out of our way to help strangers. Such feelings and behavior are at the very core of our humanity. Interestingly this accords with most Islamic conceptions of humanity, especially within the Sufi tradition. For most interpretations of Islam, our humaneness is an integral and inseparable element of our nature. In the Qurʾan, we are made of clay but more importantly, we are also receptacles, which contain the spirit (ruh) of God. God sends prophets and saints to live among us not primarily to tell us to control our otherwise willful and sinful natures, but instead to remind us of our true nature, our primordial humanity. From this perspective, Islam has not come primarily to create and replicate Muslims, but to create better human beings. Islamic thought of course recognizes that human beings must live in society, and thus as social beings we need rules and order. To that end, Muslim intellectuals created the remarkable discursive tradition of the shariʿa. However, at a deeper and more fundamental level, Islam, as an affective tradition, has also taught that essential equality of all humankind and the necessity of the virtues of communitas. For many within the Muslim tradition, to be fully human requires us to somehow strike a balance between the two. Islam presents humanity with exemplary human beings—Muhammad, ʿAli, Imam Husayn, Fatimah, Zaynab, the awliyaʾ Allah. They are root paradigms that provide models for al-insan al-kamil, a vision of perfected humanity. They provide examples not only of how we should act, but of what we should become. They provide examples not only of how to be good Muslims, but more importantly how to be good human beings. The stories in this chapter share a common theme. We are at our best, we are at our most human, when we have empathy for others, when we transcend our arrogance, when we treat each other as equals, when we are willing to sacrifice for others. Our best nature lies in communitas. That is where creativity lies. That is where meaning lies. That is where love lies. That is who we really are. Narratives about the awliyaʾ evoke that message in powerful ways. They “teach humanity” by reminding us how best to be human.

Questions for Discussion 1. How do love and devotion function as ways of remembrance (dhikr)? What does it mean to say that “the metaphorical is the bridge to the real?” In what ways does Islam define humanity as creatures uniquely capable of knowledge, trust and love? 2. In what ways have Muslims demonstrated devotional allegiance to the Prophet Muhammad? In what ways are expressions of love and devotion for the Prophet Muhammad contested within Islam?

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3. Love for ʿAli is usually associated with Shiʿi Islam but it is also a prominent among Sunni Muslims. Why do you think devotional allegiance to ʿAli is so prevalent in the Islamic world? How is it connected to love for the Prophet? 4. Shiʿi Muslims often refer to Imam Husayn as Shahid-i Insaniyya (the Martyr of Humanity). He is seen as a model of heroism and self-sacrifice not only by both Sunni and Shiʿi Muslims but by people from other religious tradition as well. What is it about the story of Karbala that seems to speak to a universally shared notion of humanity? How does Imam Husayn fit Victor Turner’s notion of a “root paradigm?” Is Karbala a meme? Is that a useful category for understanding religious phenomenon? 5. What is the role of devotional allegiance to the awliyaʾ in Sufi Islam? How is it connected to devotional allegiance to the Prophet and ʿAli? 6. What does the story of Mullah Shahab and Baba Farid communicate about the Sufi path and its place within Islam? What does it have to say about human nature? In what ways might this story be meaningful to non-Muslims? Similarly, how does the short narrative about Hoca Ahmet Yesevi define exemplary human character? What are his virtues as a paradigmatic human being? As a paradigmatic Muslim? According to the narrative, what are the consequences of letting one’s greed and jealousy overcome one’s humanity?

Notes 1. This is the way that The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary translates the term “ilm ladunni.” In terms of consistency, I have followed this translation. Other translations render it more literally as “knowledge direct from us.” The point is the same in either case. The phrase indicates that the mysterious stranger has special knowledge that comes directly from God. 2. These two hadiths are extremely well known within the umma. Both exist in various versions. They have a long history of popularity within the Muslim world. They are, however, controversial. A brief survey of contemporary Islam oriented websites demonstrates that despite their immense popularity, there are many Muslims, who argue that these hadiths have weak isnads, or chains of transmission, and are thus not fully trustworthy. Nevertheless, I would argue that the very popularity of these hadiths, which has triggered such an active response among a subgroup of Muslim scholars and activists who have decided to challenge them, is itself evidence of the value that Muslims place on knowledge as a virtue. Whether these hadiths are “authentic” or not, Muslims have spread them because they believe that they reflect Islam’s love of knowledge, which they see as one of its core values. 3. This is perhaps the most famous of all the hadith qudsi, or messages from God that are not included in the Qurʾan, and one that is frequently discussed in Sufi discourse. As with the aforementioned hadiths about knowledge, whatever the authenticity of this hadith, the fact that Muslims continue to embrace it, says something about their understanding of the importance of the concepts it contains within the Islamic tradition. 4. Maulana Jalal al-Din Rumi makes this particularly clear in Book One of his Masnavi, in his story of the “The Poor Bedouin and his Wife” in which the Bedouin realizes his humanity after he makes his wife cry by “mansplaining” his position on the virtues of asceticism to her, and then feels shame for hurting his beloved through his arrogance. Rumi says: The Prophet once said, “Women all control Intelligent men, those who have a soul,

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5  Patterns of Devotional Allegiance: Gods Friends (Awliyaʾ Allah)… But stupid men rule women, for they’re crude And hold a simple, bullish attitude. They lack all tenderness and can’t be kind Their animal soul controls their mind: Tenderness is a human quality, While lust and rage shows animality, A ray from God is that one whom you love, Created, uncreated from above. See, Jalal al-Din Rumi, The Masnavi: Book 1, translated by Jawid Mojaddedi, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 150. 5. Cyrus Ali Zargar. Sufi Aesthetics: Beauty, Love, and the Human Form in the Writings of Ibn ʿArabi and ʿIraqi. (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 2011.), 106 and 199n 112. 6. For just one example see, John Esposito, Islam: The Straight Path, Fifth Edition, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 42. 7. https://onbeing.org/programs/vincent-­c ornell-­t he-­f ace-­o f-­t he-­p rophet-­c artoons­and-­chasm/ 8. For a detailed examination of these issues see Annemarie Schimmel And Muhammad Is His Messenger: The Veneration of the Prophet in Islamic Piety, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), 2014. 9. Vernon Schubel, Religious Performance in Contemporary Islam: Shiʿi Devotional Rituals in South Asia, (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1993), 16. 10. Shahidullah Faridi, Inner Aspects of Faith, second edition (Karachi: Mahfil-e-Zauqia, 1986), 66. 11. This story about the life of the Prophet Muhammad is nearly ubiquitous. It frequently crops up in popular biographies of the Prophet even though its critics argue that it is not part of the Sunnah. If one looks at the internet discourse about this story there are numerous posts from Islamophobic voices that argue it is a complete fabrication, intending to prove that the Prophet was not, in fact, kind and forgiving. Nevertheless, I would argue that the fact that the story is remarkably popular and most Muslims believe it to be true, often referring to it as a way of demonstrating the kindness of the Prophet, speaks volumes about how the umma sees Muhammad. 12. Rumi, Masnavi, 227–243. 13. Marshall Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, Volume One: The Classical Age of Islam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 372. 14. Of course, we should note that another important element shared by Alevis and shariʿaminded Twelvers is the common hostility directed at them by some members of the Sunni community. Both Turkish Alevis and South Asian Twelver Shiʿi Muslims constitute minority communities surrounded by Sunni majorities. Although it is often differences in ritual practice, which sometimes provoke instances of violence, it is the differences in belief, which underlie the hostility. During most times of the year the identity of Alevis, like those of the Shiʿa in South Asia are invisible from other Muslims. In South Asia– where the Sunni and Shiʿi communities are similarly shariʿa-minded—it is public performances of mourning for Husayn, which render the Shiʿi community temporarily visible, and it is at these times that violent conflicts between the two communities becomes most likely. Similarly, one cannot tell Alevis from Sunnis on the streets of Ankara. Istanbul or Bursa, unless one chooses to visibly identify oneself as a Sunni by wearing turban or other religiously identifying symbols. For the most part Muharram ritual in Turkey do not entail public performances; and, thus, the Muharram fast, matem oruc, is something that allows solidarity within the community without provoking outsiders. However, differences in religious worldview between Sunni and Shiʿa and Alevis do lead to dissension. During Muharram in Pakistan in 1983, some Sunni Muslims displayed bumper stickers that proclaimed, Sirf Allah Madadgar (Only God is the Helper), a not so subtle attack on the Shiʿi notion that ʿAli is madadgar. This is a point of contention between the two communities in South Asia. There is a similar point of contention in Turkey. In Istanbul I once saw a

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similar sign in a Taxi which similarly read “Bu Dunyada benim dostum yalnız Allah (In this world my only Friend is God),” i.e. not ʿAli, a parody of the lyrics to the famous song “Kara Toprak” by the Alevi singer Aşik Veysel, thus makıng effectively the same attack on the Alevi community. 15. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene: 40th Anniversary Edition, (Oxford: Oxford Landmark Science, 2016), 249. See also, Susan Blackmore, The Meme Machine, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). While memes are difficult to describe “we know them when we see them.” Blackmore discusses the opening notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony as a popular explanatory example for memes. Once heard, those four notes embed firmly in the mind and are not easily forgotten. More importantly, they quickly spread from one mind to another. Although one cannot impute intention to a “meme” any more than one can to a “gene,” some are more successful than others at replicating themselves. From this perspective, humans are hosts for memes. Once a meme begins to circulate, it continues to travel from human host to human host replicating itself, over and over again. In the end the most successful memes are, as is the case with genes, the ones most efficient at reproducing themselves. 16. Blackmore, Meme Machine. 76–81. Susan Blackmore notes the crucial role that imitation has played in human evolution. For her the memes are in the driver’s seat. Not only did we transmit our memes themselves–in the forms of songs, dances and songs—we mated with those who were the best at passing them on, the best imitators. At some point in our evolutionary history, we stopped choosing our mates primarily on biological grounds and instead began to choose them for cultural reasons. We became attracted to the best singers, the best dancers, and the best storytellers rather than the fastest, strongest or most fertile as possible mates. In order to ensure the transmission of our memes, we selected our partners for the ability to imitate. According to Blackmore, our memetic nature in large part explains the need for our large brains, which are not particularly useful in an evolutionary scheme except for their role in facilitating the uniquely human phenomenon of complex imitation. Through selective breeding, we became uniquely “big-brained”, language using, storytelling primates. We have become “imitation beings,” spreading the “viruses” of language, songs, stories, art, and architecture and, of course, religion. 17. Blackmore, Meme Machine, 187–203. 18. This is true for both Dawkins, who is famous for his opposition to religion in general and Islam, in particular, and Blackmore, whose negative attitude towards religion includes her refusal to identify as a Buddhist despite years of Zen practice. 19. There has been a growing body of literature about the role of altruism and empathy in evolution including the work of D.S.  Wilson and Frans De Waal. Even the founder of sociobiology, E.O. Wilson has moved from a view of evolution fueled by kin selection to an acceptance of group selection facilitated by altruistic behavior. 20. See, Michael Shermer, How We Believe: The Search for God in an Age of Science, (New York: W.H. Freeman and Company, 1999), 162–68. Shermer, who is deeply influenced by memetics and evolutionary biology, defines religion as: ….a social institution that evolved as an integral mechanism of human culture to create and promote myths, to encourage altruism and to reveal the level of commitment to cooperate and reciprocate among members of the community; 21. Victor Turner, Dramas Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975), 67. 22. Put in Islamic terms, they lead us to control the nafs by encouraging the influence of the ruh. 23. Turner, Dramas, 67–68. 24. Ibid., 68. 25. Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1967), 93–111. 26. Turner, Dramas, 252–53. 27. Ibid., 49.

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5  Patterns of Devotional Allegiance: Gods Friends (Awliyaʾ Allah)… 28. Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1969), 106. 29. Turner, Ritual Process, 96. 30. Turner, Dramas, 68. 31. Personal conversation with Victor Turner in 1982. For further discussion of these issues, see Victor Turner, On the Edge of the Bush: Anthropology on the Edge, (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1985), 249–273. 32. For more on ziyara see Sophia Rose Arjana, Pilgrimage in Islam: Traditional and Modern Practices, Oneworld, 2017. Another of the best books on the activities at Sufi shrines is Robert Rozehnal, Islamic Sufism Unbound: Politics and Piety in Twenty-First Century Pakistan, Palgrave, Macmillan, 2007. 33. See Farid al-Din Attar, translated by A.J.Arberry, Muslim Saints and Mystics: Episodes from the Tadhkirat al-Auliyah (Memorial of the Saints) (London. Boston and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966). 34. Anwar Asfiyan, (Lahore, Hyderabad, and Karachi: Shaikh Ghulam Ali and Sons Limited, Publishers, 1983), pp. 198–202. 35. Anwar Asfiyan, 198. 36. Ibid., 199. 37. Ibid., 199. 38. Ibid., 200. 39. Ibid., 200. 40. Ibid., 200. 41. Ibid., 201–202. 42. Muge Galin, Between East and West: Sufism in the Novels of Doris Lessing, (Albany: Albany State University Press, 1997), 180. 43. See Vernon Schubel, “Devotional Life and Practices” in Azim Nanji, editor, The Muslim Almanac, (New York and London: Gale Research, 1966). I came across this story in Pakistan in the 1980s and referenced in the article above. At this point, I cannot remember the exact source for this narrative, but it is a good example of numerous stories of his type. The website Sufiwiki (http://www.sufiwiki.com/Title_of_Ganjshakar) contains a version of this story and lists as its source “the author of Khazinat-ul-Asfiya who refers to the book Tazkarat-ul-Aashqeen.” 44. Faridi, Inner Aspects, 65–74. 45. Nazhmiddin Kamilov, Nazhmiddin Kubro: Risola (Tashkent: Ezuvchi Nashrietti, 1994.), 14–15. 46. Attar, 217–218. 47. This version of the story comes from the transliterated Ottoman version of the text prepared by Sefer Aytekin and the 2007 versions published by the Diyanet Vakfı See Sefer, Aytekin, Vilayetname (Ankara: Ayyıldız Yayınları, 1995) and Hamıye Duran, Velayetname Hacı Bektaş Velı (Ankara: Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı, 2007). 48. Sefer Aytekin, Vilayetname (Ankara: Ayyıldız Yayınları, 1995), 54–55; Hamıye Duran, Hacı Bektaş Velı (Ankara: Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı, 2007), 97–98. 49. Aytekin, Vilayetname, 55; Duran, Velayetname, 98. 50. Aytekin, Vilayetname, 55–56; Duran, Velayetname, 98–101. 51. Aytekin, Vilayetname, 56; Duran, Velayetname, 101. 52. It is interesting that those who most emphasize “difference” tend to define Islam in terms of shariʿa. After all, it is at the level of religious law that traditions are most visibly different from each other. It is therefore not surprising that people like Franklin Graham, Daniel Pipes and Robert Spenser on the one side, and the most radical Islamists on the other hand are most likely to define Islam almost entirely in terms of shariʿa.

Chapter 6

My Qibla Is a Man: Islam Beyond the Shariʿa

What defines Islam? This question lies at the heart of this book. There are many people, both Muslim and non-Muslim, who firmly believe that Islam is best defined by a set of common practices. They argue that while the history of Christianity can in some sense be defined by its search for orthodoxy, Islam has instead been engaged in a similar quest for orthopraxy. I remember watching the academic and former MSNBC commentator Melissa Harris Perry, a person I often agreed with on political issues, answering critics who accused President Barack Obama of being a Muslim by arguing that to be a Muslim means engaging in certain kinds of visible ritual practices. If Obama were a Muslim, she argued, we would have seen him praying or noticed him fasting. The fact that we did not see him engage in these Muslim ritual practices was, she argued, clear evidence that he is not a Muslim. Of course, this argument is inherently flawed. Just because we do not see a man or woman pray does not mean that he or she does not do so. More importantly, many Muslims disregard or neglect daily ritual prayer, do not participate in the Ramadan fast, and have never been on the pilgrimage to Mecca. Similarly, there are countless Muslims who do not wear headscarves or grow beards, or present any other visible markers that might express their religious identity. Yet, they would likely be deeply, and rightly, offended if someone told them that because they did not do these things they were not really Muslim. In his essay, “Islam as a Civilizational Project,” the noted scholar of Islam, Ahmet Karamustafa, argues that Islam cannot be defined by a shared group of common shariʿa practices; because even if we were to define shariʿa to only include the core five pillars of the ʿibadat, it is only the shahada that is shared by the entirety of the umma. As he puts it: Let me cut to the chase here and announce the main point directly and clearly: the four ritualistic pillars do not form a good and accurate measure of being a Muslim historically, sociologically or theologically. To put it in reverse, there have been and continue to be millions of people who wholeheartedly adhere to the shahada but who do not perform these

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 V. J. Schubel, Teaching Humanity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22362-4_6

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four particular ritualistic acts in the manner prescribed in ritualistic manual. Not only that: a good percentage of such Muslims would not agree that these four rituals are necessary to be considered a Muslim.1

As Karamustafa notes, not only are there millions of Muslim “who choose to emphasize belief over acts and consequently de-value performance of some or all of the four ritualistic pillars”; but there are also “Muslims who choose to prioritize certain beliefs over certain ritualistic acts in accordance with longstanding theological orientations in Islamic history.”2 These include the Ahl al-Haqq of Iran, the Syrian ʿAlawiyya, the Nizari Ismaʿilis, and of course the Turkish Alevi community, who constitute as significant percentage of the population of the Republic of Turkey, perhaps as much as 25 or 30 percent.3 The religious attitudes and practices of the Alevi community are particularly relevant to any discussion of the role of shariʿa (Turkish, şerıat) practice in defining Islam. While on one level, Alevis recognize as the first of four doors on the spiritual path—the other three being tariqa (spiritual path), maʿarifa (gnosis) and haqiqa (ultimate reality), in Turkish, tarikat, marifet, and hakikat,—the overwhelming majority of them do not practice the four ritual pillars of the şerıat.4 They place far greater emphasis on proper behavior in the sense of akhlaq (Turkish, ahlak)and adab (Turkish, edep) following the Sufi pir Hacı Bektaş Veli’s teaching that a true human being is one who is in control of one’s hand (el), tongue (dil), and body (bel). Nevertheless, there is no doubt about the Islamic nature of their worldview. They are emotionally devoted not only to the Prophet Muhammad, but also to Imam ʿAli and the other eleven Imams of the Ithnaʿashari tradition and the Sufi pirs from the spiritual lineage of Hacı Bektaş Veli. In that sense, they are clearly part of an affective Islamic tradition of devotional allegiance that reaches all the way back to the Prophet Muhammad. The Alevi tradition thus provides us with a wonderful opportunity to see what Islam might look like without the practice of shariʿa. Not only is it possible for us to imagine an Islam without shariʿa, for millions of Turkish Alevis, such an Islam already exists. In previous chapters, I have referred numerous times to the Turkish Alevi tradition. The Alevi tradition provides a particularly useful example of the general theme of this monograph, that Islam is a humanistic religion, because of the self-conscious emphasis its followers give to the concept of humanity (insaniyya, Turkish, insanlık,). For the Alevis, who hold to the dictum that “My qibla is a man (benim kabem insandır),” the ultimate goal of religion is to become fully human. While this might initially sound like a radically secular ideal, it is fully consistent with the larger Muslim Sufi worldview.5 The Alevi tradition shares much in common with other Islamic mystical traditions. Their view of tawhid (Turkish, tevhit), which is rooted in the unity of being (wahdat al-wujud, Turkish, vahdet-i vücut), their understanding of and emphasis on pir-murid (Turkish, pir-mürit), their vision of proper human relations based on akhlaq (Turkish, ahlak) and adab (Turkish, edep), and the centrality of the insan al-kamil (perfected human being) are in no way alien to the larger Muslim tradition. Their religious worldview is a specific distillation of a larger discourse that is fully intelligible to Muslims anywhere in the world.

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Defining Alevilik The Anatolian Alevi-Bektaşi community is undoubtedly the most important surviving example of what Marshall G.S.  Hodgson has identified as “tariqa Shiʿism.” As Hodgson notes, the fifteenth century C.E. witnessed the proliferation of religiously based movements of populist opposition against the largely Sunni amirs and upper classes. This resistance was often both ʿAlid loyalist and batini in character,6 taking the form of Sufi orders, which incorporated important aspects of Shiʿi doctrine and symbolism, including silsilas which included the Shiʿi imams. These orders proved particularly attractive to the Turkic peoples of Azerbaijan and Anatolia.7 Two of the most prominent of these tariqa Shiʿi groups were the Safavids and the Bektaşis. Both of these initially Turkic orders accepted the authority of the twelve Ithnaʿashari Imams. The Bektaşis followed the person and teachings of Hacı Bektaş Veli, a descendant of Imam ʿAli Riza, whom they viewed as the repository of the authority (vilayet) of the Twelfth Imam. One of the Bektaşi tradition’s distinguishing characteristics was a strong current of anti-authoritarianism. As Hodgson points out, there was a general tendency among the Bektaşis to distrust authority and manifest a distinct irreverence for “anything official, including all religious dogmas.”8 However, it would be a mistake to read this tendency as antinomianism. While the Bektaşis explicitly rejected and at times even ridiculed the şeriat and the authority of the ulema, they maintained a deeply refined understanding of ethics (ahlak) and mystical piety. The Safavids, which also began as a largely Turkic order, initially shared a great deal in common with the religious worldview of the Bektaşis, including a devotional allegiance to the Imams of the Twelver tradition. Over time, the Safavids emerged as not only as a tariqa, but also as a powerful military and political movement. Ultimately, their great pir and poet Shah, Ismaʿil, Hatayi founded the Safavid Empire in Iran at the beginning of the sixteenth century. The importance of the Bektaşis and Safavids in the history of Eurasia cannot be overestimated. The Bektaşis played a crucial role in the Ottoman state, eventually emerging as the religious order of the Janissaries, the elite “slave soldiers” of the empire. The establishment of the Safavid dynasty in Iran, which resulted in the emergence of a powerful Shiʿi polity amidst the Sunni Ottomans and the Sunni polities of Central Asia, influenced the history of the region for centuries to come. The Alevis of contemporary Turkey are the descendants of the Kızılbaş (literally, “red head”) tribes of medieval Anatolia, who had been religious and military supporters of the Safavid movement. They account for perhaps as much as one third of the 70,000,000 inhabitants of the contemporary Turkish Republic. While Safavid Shiʿism in Iran over time became increasingly shariʿa -minded and ulema centered, the Kızılbaş tribes of Anatolia retained the batini and anti-authoritarian perspective of tariqa Shiʿism.9 Often living on the periphery of the Ottoman empire, they suffered years of continuous persecution from the Sunni Ottomans. Rather than submit to state authority, they developed and maintained an attitude of defiance and resistance exemplified in their well-known aphorism, “The Sultan may have his

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commands (ferman), but we have the mountains.” Although they found themselves somewhat cut off from the intellectual institutions of the major urban centers of the Ottoman Empire, nevertheless, the Anatolian Alevis developed their own extremely sophisticated esoteric religious worldview.

The Nature of Alevi Religion The religious worldview of the Alevis, including their beliefs about the nature of God, prophecy and imama, is similar to that of other esoteric and batini Shiʿi groups such as the Ismaʿilis. Purporting an interpretation of tevhit rooted in wahdat al-­ wujud (Turkish. vahdet-i vücut), they honor the memory of other famous proponents of that position including Mansur al-Hallaj and the Turkish Sufis like Nesimi and Shaykh Bedreddin. Their mystical understanding of tevhit leads them to see a mystical identity between God—who they often refer to in Turkish as Dost (the Friend)—and those who have attained a special intimacy with Him. These persons include the Prophet Muhammad, Imam ʿAli, the other eleven Imams of the Ithnaʿashari tradition, and the important pirs of their lineage–in particular Hacı Bektaş Veli and Pir Sultan Abdal. As they have all achieved intimacy with and annihilation (fanaʾ) in God, Alevis sometimes refer to them using the term Dost, as well. Interestingly, although the poetry of the Safavid pir and ruler Shah Ismaʿil Hatayi plays a crucial role in their rituals, the essential distinguishing characteristics of the Turkish speaking Alevi tradition is its connection to Hacı Bektaş Veli, the titular founder of the Bektaşi order. Alevis have maintained close ties with the Bektaşi tarikat, with whom they share a nearly identical religious worldview. In fact, in recent years it has become commonplace among many Alevis to speak of the two traditions as one, using the single term Alevilik-Bektaşilik.10 At first glance, the Alevis might seem to differ so dramatically from shariʿa-­ minded Sunni Muslims that one might be temped to see them as outside of the Islamic tradition altogether. As mentioned above, the Alevi community rejects the necessity of the shariʿa (Turkish, şeriat), as an essential aspect of piety; the great majority of them neither keep the Ramadan fast, nor offer daily ritual prayers, nor attend congregational Friday prayers in the mosque. Instead, the Alevi community participates in a variety of other distinctive practices, most notably the ayn-i cem–a form of communal dhikr (Turkish, zikr), and semah, which includes physical movements resembling dance and the performance of devotional songs in Turkish called nefes. Unlike Sunni namaz, men and women perform the rituals of the ayn-i cem together. As a result, many conservative Sunni Muslims in Turkey deny that Alevis are Muslim at all. In fact, a minority of Alevis, including the influential Pir Sultan Abdal Vakf, an institution that is generally Marxist and materialist in its outlook, also maintain that they are not Muslim.11 For these Alevis, true Alevilik predates Islam and is in reality an “Islamified” version of the original shamanism of pre-Islamic central Anatolia.12

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Nevertheless, the majority of Alevis consider themselves Muslims.13 They argue that their lack of shariʿa -mindedness in no way indicates either disbelief in God or a rejection of the authority of Muhammad. I have talked with many Alevis who deeply resent the ways in which some conservative Sunnis have denied their Islamic identity. As one Alevi explained it to me, the fact that we do not perform namaz does not mean that we do not pray, only that the form of our prayer is different.14 As one dede in Istanbul described it to me, from the very inception of Islam the Prophet and ʿAli taught the doctrine of dört kapı and kırk makam (4 doors and 40 stations). According to this batini understanding of Islam, there are four doors into Islam— şeriat (the lowest and most exoteric form of Islam), tarikat, marifet and hakikat Each of these contains 40 stations through which a mürit must travel. The Alevis contend that because of the relentless persecution of the ahl al-bayt (Turkish, ehl-i beyt) and their supporters by Muslim rulers, first by the Bani Umayya and later by the Abbasids, only a minority of Muslims have remembered and acknowledged this true and original teaching of Islam. According to this perspective, Muʿawiya and his descendants used the power and authority of the state to spread lies and slander against the ehl-i beyt from the minbar every Friday during the jumʿa (Turkish, cuma), prayers. For this reason, some Alevis refuse to enter masjids, (Turkish, mescit). Furthermore, they reject the standard Sunni namaz, which from their perspective was rendered polluted by the murder of Hazrat ʿAli, who was murdered while prostrate in prayer in the mescit in Najaf. A careful examination of this Alevi tradition reveals a complex and sophisticated religious worldview deeply rooted in Islamic sources and symbols. While it differs in many ways from shariʿa-minded Sunni Islam, it shares important characteristics with both Shiʿi and Sufi expressions of Islam. First, the Alevi tradition shares with these groups an emphasis on the necessity of devotional allegiance to the Prophet Muhammad and Hazrat ʿAli. Alevis believe that it is a necessary aspect of piety to express love and devotion to Muhammad and his spiritual descendants. For the Alevis, as for Shiʿi Muslims and Sufi Muslims, the Qurʾan is not sufficient. It requires a true imam or pir to interpret it.15 Drawing on the Shiʿi, tradition Alevilik places a strong emphasis on the necessity of devotional allegiance to the ehl-i beyt, especially the Twelve Imams of Ithnaʿashari Shiʿism. Drawing on the Sufi tradition, it stresses a similar allegiance to their pirs, who are descended from the spiritual lineage of Hacı Bektaş Veli.

Alevilik as Shiʿi Piety There are obvious connections between the religious worldview of shariʿa-minded Twelver Shiʿi Muslims and that of the Alevi-Bektaşis. In fact, from one perspective, it useful to think of the Alevi tradition as a uniquely esoteric interpretation of Twelver Shiʿi piety, which emphasizes the batini over the zahiri. While Alevis reject the shariʿa -mindedness of the larger Twelver community, they both inhabit a

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common symbolic universe. Both communities express devotion and allegiance to the Twelve Imams. Although the Alevi tradition emphasizes the esoteric over the exoteric, rejecting the necessity of the şeriat, the narratives that both communities tell about the Prophet Muhammad, Imam ʿAli and his descendants are in most cases identical. A crucial intersection between the worldview of the exoteric Twelvers and that of the Alevis is the centrality of Karbala in both traditions. For both communities, Imam Husayn, in Turkish, Imam Hüseyin, provides a “root paradigm” defining the virtues and values of the community. Within the Alevi tradition, later martyrs–especially Pir Sultan Abdal who was sentenced to death by his disciple Hızır Pasha—can be seen as a retracing the Karbala narrative, which itself mirrors the martyrdom of ʿAli at the hands of the Kharijite, Ibn Muljam. Historically, the nomadic and tribal Alevis themselves identified with Imam Hüseyin and his small band of supporters at Karbala as they were themselves forced to undergo the oppression (zülm) of a centralized state that at times seemed to them a manifestation of Muʿawiya or Yazid. This has facilitated the emergence of resistance as a central motif in Alevi poetry. Their opposition to political and economic exploitation and oppression has meant that to this day members of the Alevi community are largely supporters of the political left. Simultaneously, non-Alevi leftists and social activists have adopted Alevi poetry and music as their own. Not surprisingly, the Karbala story, as a story of resistance, has helped define the nature of Alevi identity. As the Alevi writer, Rıza Zelyut, puts it: For the Alevis, Hüseyin has a separate place. Throughout the centuries, Imam Hüseyin’s character, attitudes, opinions and the things that happened to him have been passed on from generation to generation down to the present day like a destan. Imam Hüseyin’s manner has had a tremendous impact on the formation of Alevi’s socialist attitudes and willingness to persevere in the face of opposition. On the one hand, the event of Kerbala was a great tragedy, but on the other, it was the seed of a social uprising, an endless torch burning hearts.16

Despite their connections to the symbolic universe of Shiʿism, many Alevis explicitly deny that they are Shiʿa, in part in order to disassociate themselves from the shariʿa-minded ʿulama centered Twelver Shiʿism that became dominant in the Safavid empire and is currently normative throughout much of the larger Shiʿi world. Generally staunch defenders of the secular Turkish state, many Turkish Alevis have been particularly critical of the form of Shiʿism practiced in Iraq and Iran and, especially, of the religious dimension of the Iranian revolution. However, there is also a more specifically religious reason that many Alevis distance themselves from the larger Twelver community. For the majority of Turkish speaking Alevis, it is not only necessary to accept the vilayet (authority) of the Twelve Imams but also that of the their pirs. One reason that the exoteric Twelvers of Iran should be seen as a separate community distinct from the Alevis, is that unlike them they do not recognize Hacı Bektaş Veli as their pir. It is this tradition of pir-mürit that defines the Alevis. From this perspective, rather than supporters of vilayat-i faqih, or the authority of jurists, like many Twelvers in Iran, the Alevis are instead the primary proponents of what one might call vilayat-i awliya’, or in Turkish, vilayet-i evliya. The centrality of pir-mürit in the worldview of the Alevis, connects them to the Sufi tradition.

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Alevilik as a Sufi Tradition For the Alevis, like many Sufi orders, religion has four gates–shariʿa, tariqat, maʿarifa and haqiqa (Turkish, şeriat, tarikat, marifet, hakikat) of which the shariʿa is the lowest. One way to describe Alevi piety is that it raises the batin to the level of the zahir. This emphasis on the batini aspect of Islam reveals its connections to the Sufi tradition. The entire Alevi community is connected by pir-mürit to the path (tarikat) of Hacı Bektaş, which is itself rooted in devotional allegiance to both Imam ʿAli and the Prophet Muhammad. For the Alevis, devotional allegiance extends not only to the Imams but also to those perfected human beings (erenler) who trace their lineage back to Imam ʿAli through Hacı Bektaş, who is part of the lineage of the great Central Asian sheikh Ahmet Yesevi, who is commonly believed to have composed the oldest extant Sufi poetry in Turkic. The Alevis believe that ʿAli, Muhammad and God all participate in a single mysterious reality. As a result, some critics of the Alevi tradition consider it a ghulluw (extremist) Shiʿi tradition that deifies Muhammad and ʿAli by identifying them with God. This is inaccurate. The Alevi understanding of the mystical relationship between God, ʿAli and Muhammad is, in fact, thoroughly consistent with the mainstream Sufi understanding of annihilation (fanaʾ) in God through love. ʿAli and Muhammad are connected intimately with God, and each other, by powerful bonds of mutual love. According to the Alevi tradition, the bonds of intimacy and love between God, ʿAli and Muhammad are so strong that whenever one sees one of them, one cannot help but also see the others. In fact, Alevis share numerous beliefs with Sufis. They both believe in the continued spiritual existence of the Prophet Muhammad, the existence and authority of the erenler, the legitimacy of pir-mürit, and the efficacy of visits to the tombs of the awliyaʾ (Turkish, evliya). As noted earlier in this volume, far from being peripheral to Islam, as aspects of the Sufi tradition, these beliefs have been an accepted part of mainstream Muslim belief for centuries. It should be further be added that devotion to the ehl-i beyt, which has long been a part of popular Islamic piety, is also central to many of the Sufi orders in Anatolia, such as the Halvetis and Rifa‘i. Just as many contemporary Alevis do not wish to identify themselves as Shiʿi Muslims, many are similarly uncomfortable calling themselves Sufis. There are several reasons for this. In contemporary Turkey, Sufism is often associated with politically and religiously conservative shariʿa-minded Sunni orders like the trans-national Naqshbandiyyah ( Turkish, Nakşibendi), with whom Alevis feel little affinity. Many Alevis, who have been among the strongest supporters of the secular Republic in Turkey, share some of the suspicions of Sufism common among many Turkish secularists. In today’s Turkey, the very word tarikat has become tainted for many people and is often used as a synonym for “cult.” Thus, they often refer to the Alevi way not with the Arabic loan word tarikat but rather the Turkish term yol, describing their tradition as a ruhani yol (spiritual path) within Islam.17

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The Cem The cem, or ayn-i cem. is in many ways the defining ritual of the Alevi tradition. It provides a ritual space in which the Alevi community collectively demonstrates its devotion to the lineage of Hacı Bektaş, Imam ʿAli, Muhammad and God. The cem may take place in large private homes or in special religious and cultural centers called cem evis under the auspices of a religious specialist called a dede. Dedes must be descendants of the Prophet Muhammad. Especially in the village context, the dede functions not only as a pir, but also as a community judge and arbiter. The cem is a lengthy complex ritual that can last for hours. It involves music, semah, and the communal sharing of food. The language of the cem is usually Turkish, rather than Arabic. The cem allows community members to come together and reaffirm bonds and connections with each other. In rural contexts, the entire community of an Alevi village attends the cem together. Before the ritual of the cem may begin, any members of the community who might be engaged in disputes with each other must first present themselves to the dede and resolve their conflicts. Alevis often note this communal solidarity as a major difference between the cem and congregational prayer of Sunni Muslims. In the mosque during prayer, everyone is anonymous. As one Alevi put it to me, you might be praying with a murderer to your left and a rapist to your right. There is no way of knowing. In the cem, on the other hand, all the participants involved know and trust another. Before the cem begins, the congregation sits in the cem evi and waits for the coming of the dede. As he arrives, he is announced with the phrase “pir geldi,” the “pir has come.” As the dede is simultaneously one with both Hacı Bektaş and Imam ʿAli, they are also present among the community. The cem is thus a ritual arena for a spiritual encounter with Imam ʿAli. Interestingly, there are many current books on Alevilik, which provide detailed explanations and descriptions of the rituals, ibadet and erkan, necessary for the performance of the cem. Such books would of course, never have been necessary in the organic context of an Alevi village. However, among urban migrant in cities, where many young people of Alevi background have never been to a village cem, such texts play a crucial role in the maintenance and transmission of the tradition.

The Origin of the Cem in the Miraç of the Prophet18 According to Alevi tradition, the ayn-i cem originates in the miʿraj (Turkish, miraç), of the Prophet Muhammad, described, in the opening narrative of the Alevi text Buyruk Imam Cafer-i Sadık, an important primary source for the Alevi community that exists in numerous different versions. This narrative lays out a cosmogonic blueprint for the entire Alevi worldview. It describes how when the Prophet was traveling on his way to the throne of God during his miraç he encountered a lion. At

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that moment he heard a voice from heaven telling him to calm the lion by placing his ring—the symbol of his authority—in the its mouth. Having done this, the Prophet then proceeded to the throne of God, his Friend (Dost). According to Buyruk, while there he spoke ninety thousand words with him. Thirty thousand of these words concerned the şeriat and were shared with the believers. The other sixty thousand remained secret with ʿAli. In this way, Muhammad is confirmed as the master of the şeriat and exoteric knowledge, while ʿAli is confirmed as the keeper of the esoteric teachings of Islam. As the Prophet Muhammad makes his way back to earth, he comes upon a building where the gathering (majlis, Turkish, meclis) of “the Forty” (kırklar) is taking place. These forty erenler include both men and women. We also know that at least one of them was a non-Arab, because the text tells us at one point that Salman, an Iranian companion of the Prophet known as “the Persian,” was absent from them as he was traveling. Muhammad tries to gain entry to the meclis, but when he identifies himself as the messenger (peygamber), he is denied access. Although Muhammad tries multiple times to enter, each time he is refused entry until he finally sets aside his status as peygamber and instead identifies himself only as a fakir, “a poor man who came from nothing.” At that point, the assembled erenler invite him in. The Prophet is unable to join the meclis in his role as the peygamber, because the cem is a place of equality and communitas rather one than hierarchy and status. “The Forty” constitute a community of equals; there is no lesser or greater among them, so much so that Muhammad does not recognize ʿAli sitting among them. Furthermore, whatever one of them suffers, they all feel. When one of them cuts Imam ʿAli drawing blood, all of them miraculously bleed together, including their absent companion Salman, whose blood flows in through the window. Simiarly, when Ali’s wound is bound up, they all cease bleeding as well. Eventually, Salman returns to the cem bearing a single grape. The erenler ask the Prophet to help them find a way to share it equally among themselves. Gabriel descends from Paradise with a mortar and pestle. The Prophet makes şerbet from the single grape and “the Forty” drink from it. As a result, they become drunk and naked, “as on the Day of Alast,” when all human souls recognized Allah as their Lord (Rabb). As they then danced together in semah the Prophet’s turban (imame) falls from his head and “the Forty” wrap themselves in mantles made from it. Thus, the erenler are all clothed in the mantle of Muhammad. Symbolically the batini community of the erenler is now forever bound to the larger exoteric community of Muhammad. The esoteric and exoteric are thus joined together. It is only at this point that Muhammad finally recognizes ʿAli sitting among them as one of “the Forty” wearing the ring he had earlier placed in the mouth of the lion, who was, of course, ʿAli, all along. One purpose of this narrative is to simultaneously contrast and connect the exoteric role of Muhammad and the batini role of ʿAli and the erenler, who express the social simplicity of equality and voluntary poverty. In “etic” terms, Muhammad is the man of structure. He is the lawgiver who provides the necessary elements of hierarchy, rank and status one needs to build and maintain a community. On the other hand, the cem of the erenler, who exist in a liminal place of communitas, offers

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an environment of “lowliness and sacredness, of homogeneity and comradeship,”19 and a realm of “free interplay and mutual support, what is sometimes called love.”20 On one level, this is a story about ʿAli being chosen as the successor to the Prophet’s authority. However, it is not dealing with the exoteric issue of the Caliphate, but rather the question of spiritual succession. For the Alevis, the spiritual leadership of the Prophet Muhammad continues, not only through the person of Imam ʿAli and the other Imams of the Twelver lineage; it is now located in the vilayet of the erenler. This is a distinguishing characteristic of the Alevi tradition, identifying it as something other than exoteric Twelver Shiʿism. By continuing the practice of the cem, the Alevis maintain the affective tradition of love connecting them through their pirs to ʿAli and Muhammad and the communitas of the Forty. It promotes a vision of humanity as they were on the Day of Alast, equals before God, sharing all things in common, free from differences of status, nationality, even gender; an imagined idealized human community free from distinctions and discrimination.

Contemporary Alevilik The intense social and political transformations of the last century have had a major impact on the nature of the Alevi tradition and Alevi identity. Long persecuted as a religious minority in the officially Sunni Ottoman Empire, the establishment of the Republic of Turkey as a secular state greatly improved the religious status of Alevis. For this reason, Alevis have been, without question, among the strongest supporters of Turkey as a secular Republic. Consequently, they have tended to show a deep reverence towards the Republic’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, whose visage is often found alongside those of Hacı Bektaş and Hazrat ʿAli on the walls of the cem evi. While the government in the early days of the Republic was sometimes hostile to tarikats in general and pir-mürit in particular, the Alevis escaped some of the most direct consequences of the state’s anti-Sufi position, in part because they were not seen as a tarikat but rather as a “folk tradition.” As a result, in many ways, it is now the most vital repository of mystical Islamic ideas in contemporary Turkey. Perhaps the most important influence in the transformation of modern Alevilik has been the massive interior migration of Alevis from rural areas to urban centers. Today the majority of Alevis reside not in villages, but rather in the major cities. In this new urban context, the nature of their religious life has changed dramatically. In cities, the kind of immediate functional social integration that once characterized village Alevilik is impossible. There are relatively few cem evis within cities. Most Alevis do not attend the cem at all. Those who do attend the ayn-i cem at one of the newly established urban cem evis may rarely see each other outside of that ritual environment. Furthermore, people may come to the same cem having migrated from different home villages where their rituals and ceremonies may have been performed differently under the supervision of different dedes.21 In this new environment, urban Alevis are constructing a new religious identity based less on shared practice and more on a shared religious belief and worldview.

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Urban Cems and Cem Evis In the rural context, the cem was the ritual heart of the Alevi religion. Given the centrality of the cem it is not surprising that there have been attempts to find ways to establish the practice of the ayn-i cem in the new urban setting. In Istanbul and Ankara, major cem evis have been built which also serve as cultural centers. These include the Karacaahmet Center, the Şah Kulu Center and the Garib Dede Complex in Istanbul22 and the Hacı Bektaş Cultural Center in Dikmen, Ankara. These centers serve not only as places for the performance of ayn-i cem, but also as teaching centers for classes about Alevilik, courses in bağlama, Alevi music, and semah performance, as well as places for the preparation and distribution of sacrifice (kurban). They also contain bookstores and lecture halls. Along with these large centers, there are numerous smaller communities such as the former Dostlar Cem Evi in Sıncan near Ankara, which serve the needs of more localized Alevi communities. Participants point out that the main point of these centers is to provide education about Alevi culture and religion for the young. All of these centers maintain spaces for the regular performance of cem and semah. Nearly everyone I have spoken to in the Alevi community (including dedes associated with major urban centers) have told me that there can be no “true” cem outside of a village. Urban cems are often described as educational (öğrenmek) cems not as gerçek (real) or ruhani (spiritual) cems. This opinion has led me to pose frequently the following question during my years of research: Given the centrality of the cem in Alevi practice, if an authentic cem can only take place in a village and the great majority of Alevis now live in cities, what is the future of Alevilik? There is, in fact, a great deal of pessimism on this point. Several people I have spoken to have gone so far as to tell me they thought that true Alevilik was, in fact, finished–especially since, unlike Sunni Islam, it gets no support from the state. In this new urban environment, Alevilik is being rethought. In the absence of the functional solidarity of the rural community, the construction of a consistent and coherent Alevi worldview has become increasingly important. Thus, it is not surprising that simultaneously with this migration to the cities, there has been a marked increase in the number of Alevi publications. Widespread literacy has transformed the Alevi community. Many Alevis have completed university educations. In this context, writings on Alevilik by Alevi intellectuals have become increasingly available. The once esoteric Alevi community has lifted, to a large degree, its veil of esoteric secrecy, even going so far in some places as to allow sympathetic non-­Alevis to attend the cem.23

Alevi Music and Performance Among the most compelling and popular aspects of the Alevi tradition is the music associated with the cem called nefes. The nefes is the core of the cem. During the cem a musician called an aşık, literally a “lover,” sings to the accompaniment of the bağlama, the stringed instrument traditionally associated with Alevis, a repertoire

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of songs about Imam ʿAli, the events of Kerbala, the lives of the Imams and other topics central to the Alevi tradition. Although the nefes are performed in the context of the cem as a form of zikir, they are also a central device for the transmission and maintenance of the Alevi worldview. Every year numerous CDs and cassettes of Alevi music are produced and sold in Turkey. Alevi musicians like Arıf Sağ, Sabahat Akkiraz, Musa Eroğlu and Hüseyin & Ali Riza Albayrak have huge followings and sell out concerts all over Anatolia. Over the years, the songs on many of these cassettes have increasingly become more explicitly religious. Some albums by artists like Yavuz Top and Hüseyin & Ali Riza Albayrak have consisted almost entirely of ruhani (spiritual) songs. There have also been recordings of entire cem performances including one by the Şah Kulu semah group entitled, Yolumuz Erkanımız. Istanbul and Ankara both have thriving Alevi radio stations. At the major cem evis, young people learn the semah not only as a religious performance, but also as an art form. They often perform at public festivals throughout Turkey. It should be noted that the popularity of the Alevi-Bektaşi musical tradition and its primary instrument, the saz or bağlama, extends well beyond the boundaries of the explicitly Alevi community. The popularity of this music is linked to a larger türkü folk music revival. This music is extremely popular with young people, and especially leftist students who see in it a universal appeal to justice and a call to resistance to tyranny. The popular band Kardeş Türküler, which originated among students at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, has many Alevi members and features Alevi music as a substantial part of its repertoire. It has been especially popular with young people involved in political resistance against the more authoritarian aspects of the Turkish state. The tremendous popularity of Alevi music provides profound evidence of the immense significance of Alevilik within larger Turkish culture. The Alevi community is important not only because of its size but also because of its influence on the rest of society. Alevi poets–such as Pir Sultan Abdal and Yunus Emre–are beloved by Alevi and Sunni Turks alike. One can easily argue that Alevilik is a primary source of a general Turkish cultural suspicion of religious authority figures that predates Atatürk by centuries. Since its inception, Alevilik has been a repository of protest and dissent against both state and religious authority, a tradition of resistance that continues up until the present day. Many of the people arrested and targeted by the police in the wake of the resistance movement sparked by the Gezi Park protests in 2013 were Alevis. Furthermore, many of the people shot by police in demonstrations in subsequent years have been Alevi as well. One wonders whether the reason that so many Alevi young people have been at the forefront of calls for human rights and justice in Turkey has something to do with the deeply humanistic nature of their religious tradition.

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The Saz and the Minaret Despite the Alevi community’s acceptance of and loyalty to the modern secular Republic, there is still a general sense among the Alevi community that they remain a threatened and persecuted minority. There has long been a prejudice against Alevis based, at least in part, on misconceptions of their faith. At times, this has erupted in violence. In particular, the notorious Sivas massacre in 1993, in which a mob of fundamentalist Sunnis set fire to the Madımak Hotel in which an Alevi conference was taking place, taking the lives of numerous people, including prominent aşıks and political activists, has assumed a deep symbolic significance for the community. As a result, many Alevis have become increasingly open both in their identity and in their resistance, refusing to remain in the shadows in the face of persecution and prejudice. Apart from the fear of extremist violence, there is a pervasive sense that the state itself is anti-Alevi. It may seem contradictory that Turkey, a nation that prides itself on its commitment to secularism funds a Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) whose primary purpose is the support of Sunni Islam. The Diyanet is a huge undertaking, housed in a massive complex of buildings located on the Eskişehir road leading into Ankara. It is the second largest organ of the state after the military. Its primary functions include authorizing and building mosques, as well as training and paying the salaries of hocas associated with them. There seems to be a huge number of mosques proliferating throughout the country. Leftists and Alevis are fond of pointing out that there are now more mosques than schools in Turkey. During Friday prayers, many of them are attended by only a handful of worshippers. For some. this seems to be a scam designed to provide jobs for graduates of the theology (ilahiyat) faculties and allow President Erdoğan’s right-wing AK party to placate its Islamist supporters.24 From the Alevi standpoint, this is an obvious injustice. Millions of Turkish lira go to support Sunni Islam as if it is the only from of religion in the nation. No money goes towards Alevilik, except as support for its “cultural” and “artistic” activities. In the Alevi village of Tekke Koy, where the tomb of Alevi pir Abdal Musa Sultan is located, there is a massive Alevi cultural center, but as a dede pointed out to me, it is built not by the Diyanet but rather by the Ministry of Culture–as if Alevilik is a form of folklore rather than a living spiritual community. At the same time, there is an imposing minaret at the recently constructed mosque in the center of the village–as one Alevi described it to me sarcastically, “a gift from the Diyanet (Fig. 6.1).” Contemporary Alevis see themselves as a community in peril. They see the government, and particularly the current AKP regime, as essentially pro-Sunni in its outlook and, thus, a threat to their identity. Despite the official policy of state secularism, the Diyanet has not only supported Sunni Islam and its institutions; it has also simultaneously worked to undermine Alevilik by attempting to convert Alevis to Sunni Islam. For decades, the Diyanet has had a policy of building mosques in Alevi villages and sending hocas to educate what they see as the ignorant Alevi community about the “real” Islam. There is even a new verb to describe this process

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Fig. 6.1  Shrine of Abdal Musa in Southwestern Anatolia

of promoting conversion to Sunni Islam–sunnileştirmek. At times, this process been explicitly politically motivated. Former Prime Minister Ciller, angry at Alevi support for Leftist parties, fostered the policy of sunnileştirmek in hopes of increasing the electoral power of center right parties. From the view of the Alevi community, the tremendous amount of money that goes to Diyanet to support Sunni Islam as the official religion of Turkey is a betrayal of the founding principles of the Republic.

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It might be argued that there are two public voices of Islam in contemporary Turkey. One is the saz, accompanying the singing of the nefes and its message of devotion to the ehl-i beyt. The other is the minaret calling the şeriat oriented faithful to the official faith of Sunni Islam–although it is interesting to note that in the present context the minaret calls out to a Sunni Islam largely divorced from the mystical dimension of Sufism that was once at its core. These two voices are nothing new to Anatolia as they have both been present for centuries; however, the batini call of the bağlama, once heard only clandestinely, is rapidly moving from the periphery to the cultural center. Against the backdrop of the officially secular Republic of Turkey, that voice is becoming increasingly organized and public, demanding recognition as a viable and alternative form of Islam.

Contemporary Alevi Literature One important aspect of Alevi integration into the secular Turkish Republic and subsequent migration to cities has been a veritable explosion of writing over the last few decades about Alevilik by Alevis themselves. While the Alevi tradition is often thought of as a largely oral tradition, it has in fact always had a strong literary component as well. Important Alevi texts include the various versions of the aforementioned Buyruk, and various menakıbnames (hagiographies) especially the Vilayetname of Hacı Bektaş, the Faziletname,25 an epic poem describing the virtues of Imam ʿAli and Tam Hüsniye,26 a fascinating narrative describing a slave girl’s defense of devotion to the ehl-i beyt to Harun al-Rashid. In recent years, many of these sources have become available both in transliterated versions and in modern Turkish translations. As literacy has skyrocketed among Alevis (as it has among all Turks) these texts have now become available not only to dedes, but to ordinary Alevis as well. As a result, lay Alevis have greater access to the primary texts of their tradition than they have ever had before. Along with the publishing of these primary texts, there has been a remarkable number of secondary works about Alevilik. Publishing houses like Ay Yıldız Yayınları and Can Yayınları have made literally hundreds of books on Alevilik available to the community at large. These include not only primary sources like Buyruk and various menakıbnames, but also books on ibadet, collections of Alevi poetry and nefes, manuals for performing pilgrimage to holy places, and books on the ehl-i beyt. Much of this literature consists of general works concerned with defining the nature of the tradition for the new generation of Alevis living in the cities.

Narratives from the Vilayetname The Menakıb-ı Hacı Bektaş Veli, or the Vilayetname, as it is commonly called, is among the most popular and important of all Alevi sources. It is the primary hagiographical account of the life of Hacı Bektaş Veli, the titular founder of the Bektaşi

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order, and a central figure in the devotional life of the Alevi tradition. Hacı Bektaş is a celebrated cultural and religious personality in Turkey. His iconic representation, wearing a distinctive tall hat and holding a deer in one arm and a lion in the other, is recognizable to everyone in the country. His tomb in central Anatolia is a popular place of pilgrimage for Alevis and non-Alevis alike. Originally composed in Ottoman Turkish, the earliest known manuscript of the Vilayetname dates from 1624 C.E. It remains an important text for the Alevi-Bektaşi tradition. It is readily available in modern Turkish translations—first, in the still published version done by Abdülbaki Gölpınarlı in 1958,27 and more recently in more modernized versions like the one prepared by the Alevi writer Eşat Korkmaz in and first published in 1998.28 Unlike the Makalat-ı Hacı Bektaş Veli, which has sometimes been used by Sunni scholars to discredit the Alevi-Bektaşi understanding of Hacı Bektaş, it is a source held in high regard by Alevis. The Vilayetname, like most Sufi hagiographies, is full of miraculous and supernatural occurrences. As a result, some scholars have emphasized the similarities between some of the imagery in the Vilayetname and that of pre-Islamic Central Asian traditions. A close examination of the Vilayetname, however, reveals the Islamic nature of the text. In fact, its imagery is remarkably similar to that found in popular Sufi and Shiʿi narratives throughout the Islamic world. In the remainder of this chapter, I will explore some of the uses of Islamic imagery in the Vilayetname, especially Shiʿi motifs of devotion to the ehl-i beyt and Sufi motifs of pir-mürit. I will first focus on a few of the narratives from the beginning of the text–including the story of the conception and birth of Hacı Bektaş, the description of his education, his spiritual journey to Mecca that resulted in the appellation “Hacı,” and his confirmation as the secret (sırr) of Imam ʿAli before the assembled mystics of Horasan. Each of these narratives resonates with similar kinds of stories found in other mystical Islamic texts. There has been a tendency among scholars of Alevilik-Bektaşilik to emphasize the “syncretistic” nature of the tradition, especially as it is presented in the Vilayetname. For example, on the basis of the Vilayetname, Irene Melinkoff explicitly identifies Alevilik as “religious syncretism.” She notes in particular the use of the shamanistic imagery in the Vilayetname such as the burning of fires and juniper trees. Her student, Ahmet Yaşar Ocak, downplays the influence of shamanism, but argues for the influences of Central Asian nature worship, Buddhism and Manicheanism on Alevi thought and practice.29 While the Vilayetname undoubtedly shares certain motifs with these other traditions, its primary religious orientation is clearly Islamic. Granted, it uses symbols that may have originated in other traditions, but this is no more evidence of “syncretism” than the fact that American Christians bring trees into their houses at Christmas is evidence of “syncretism” with Norse pagan beliefs. Whatever its origins, the Christmas tree has been so fully incorporated into the lives of Christians that it has become, for all practical purposes, a Christian symbol. Few people feel that they are worshipping Odin or Thor when they decorate their Christmas trees. Similarly, when symbols associated with other traditions appear in the Vilayetname, the context transforms them into Muslim symbols. When the erenler transform themselves

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into dragons or doves in the Vilayetname, they do so not as Central Asian shamans, but as representatives of the erenler performing miracles (keramet) in order to defeat infidels who are oppressing innocent Muslims, or as part of a process of proselytization and conversion. The spiritual lessons they teach through their miracles are clearly connected to Islamic values and virtues. The overriding religious theme of the Vilayetname—the existence and spiritual authority of the erenler—is explicitly Islamic. The text emphasizes the necessity and efficacy of devotion to the erenler– and the danger of showing them disrespect. It portrays the pir-mürit relationship as a crucial aspect of Islam. The text describes the erenler, who are presented as the legitimate spiritual successors of the Prophet by virtue of lineage, or silsila, as having miraculous powers. They not only possess the ability to see beneath the external appearance of things to the esoteric reality underlying them, but also more spectacular abilities—the abilities to change shape, to heal the sick, and to travel great distances in an instant. The abilities of the erenler are rooted in their intimate relationship to the Prophet and the Imams, who maintain a spiritual existence in the hidden spiritual world (ghayb), and with whom they have spiritual contact. The Shiʿi resonances in the text are evident in its emphasis on the legitimacy and spiritual authority of the ehl-i beyt, and particularly the Twelve Imams. From the very beginning of its narratives, it emphasizes the virtues and sufferings of the ehl-i beyt, as well as, the necessity and the efficacy of devotion to them. From the standpoint of the Vilayetname, the authority of erenler ultimately emanates from them. These themes are completely congruent with Sufi and Shiʿi narratives found all over the world. In fact, as we have argued throughout this book, these ideas—far from being peripheral—are especially, popular aspects of Muslim piety. Similarly, the ‘alid emphasis on respect for the ehl-i beyt and the special spiritual excellence of ʿAli has long been a part of all but the most radical Sunni pieties. While certain aspects of the Vilayetname may identify it as a specifically Alevi text, most of it can fit comfortably within the boundaries of a shared Sufi worldview that would be familiar throughout the Muslim world. It is, in that sense, a thoroughly Islamic text.

 he Narrative of the Lineage and Birth of Hacı Bektaş T in the Vilayetname30 The Islamic tone of the Vilayetname is especially apparent in its opening narrative, which sets up the genealogy and birth of Hacı Bektaş. The purpose of this opening chapter is to establish that “Hacı Bektaş was without a doubt a descendant of the Prophet (seyit).”31 Because his authority rests on this lineage, the text goes into detail, demonstrating that the familial lineage of Hacı Bektaş can be traced back through Imam Musa al-Kazım and Imam ʿAli to the Prophet Muhammad. The theme of the suffering of the ehl-i beyt also occurs early in the text. Immediately after presenting the lineage of Hacı Bektaş through Hüseyin to ʿAli and Fatima and ultimately to the Prophet Muhammad, the text recounts the martyrdom of the seventh Imam Musa al-Kazım by the Caliph Harun al-Rashid and the

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dispersal of the Imam’s sons to the four corners of the world. Imam ʿAli Rıza, who eventually becomes the Eighth Imam, went to Mecca, while his brother, Ibrahim al-Mucab, fled to Horasan. The text then recounts the treachery of the Sunni Caliph, Harun al-Rashid, who deceptively invited the Imam to Meshed promising to offer his allegiance (bayʿa) to him, only to poison him instead.32 Harun al-Rashid died shortly after the murder of Imam ʿAli Rıza. At this point Maʾmun, the son of Harun al-Rashid, who had been ruling in Horasan, returned to Baghdad to assume the Caliphate from his father. Following Maʾmun’s departure, the people of Horasan raised Ibrahim al-Mucab to the level of padişah and he replaced Maʾmun as their ruler.33 This part of the story has obvious Shiʿi resonances. Unjust suffering and oppression afflict the ehl-i beyt. They are inevitably forced into exile or murdered. All the while, they remain paradigms of justice and virtue. By contrast, the government of Harun al-Rashid, the official Caliphate of the Islamic world, commits acts, which violate basic Islamic and human codes of decency and hospitality. In the worldview of the Vilayetname, the “real Islam” is not the Islam of political power and authority, but rather the Islam of the ehl-i beyt, who, despite their virtue, endure rejection and suffering. It is interesting to note that the people of Horasan recognize the moral superiority of Ibrahim, so much so that when Maʾmun leaves for Baghdad to assume the Caliphate, they appoint him as their ruler in his place. Before Ibrahim Mucab died, he appointed his son, Musa as-Sani, to take his place as the ruler of Horasan. The Vilayetname describes Musa as-Sani as an extremely just ruler. He marries a local noblewoman, Zeynep Hatun, but the couple remain childless for a lengthy period. As a result, they were full of sadness and despair. Then, one day while sitting in her palace, Zeynep Hatun, spied a young man dismounting his horse by a spring to perform his ablutions for prayer. When Zeynep Hatun, “who had been immersed in sorrow, saw this indescribable young man, composed of and adorned with a lovely radiance which dazzled the eyes when one looked at his face, her heart lifted.” She was filled with joy and light. She sent a servant out to meet him, who returned with the message that the young man was, in fact, ʿAli Musa al-Rıza, the former Shiʿi Imam, a situation made all the more remarkable by the fact that he had already died. (It is interesting to note that neither Zeynep Hatun nor Musa as-Sani seem especially surprised by this miraculous event. They treat it as a remarkable, but not impossible occurrence.) Hearing this, she called her husband over to meet his uncle.34 Musa as-Sani greeted him saying, “Welcome, Oh Imam (sefa kelding ya imam),” and invited him to his palace where he had food prepared for him. As the Vilayetname describes it, food was laid out on a cloth before him (sofra cekildi). Imam ʿAli Rıza initially refused to eat saying, “I am fasting. I cannot eat anything.” Musa as-Sani grew sad and said, “Oh, my cousin, please, for our sake, take something.” For their sake, Imam al-Rıza took a few morsels. They said a prayer (duʿaʾ) together and praised God. Zeynep Hatun prepared crushed sugar şerbet, placed it in a cup and sent it to them. When he saw the şerbet, Imam ʿAli Rıza sighed and said “Our ancestor Imam Hüseyin was martyred at Karbala without any water.” He then spat out the

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şerbet, which he already had briefly taken into his mouth, into his cup. Tears began to flow from his eyes. When Musa as-Sani saw that the Imam did not drink, he also refused to drink the şerbet. Placing the cup in front of him, he also began to cry. The Imam said, “Oh, cousin, why are you crying?” Musa replied, “O Imam, much of my life has already passed and I have not yet had any children. Your prayer would be accepted, for you are sitting on the seat of Imamate. Say a prayer (duʿaʾ) that God would grant us a child.” The Imam immediately lifted his hands and made a supplication (munacat) to the court of God. Passing his hands over his face, he then requested permission from Musa as-Sani to depart. He left the palace, mounted his horse and rode off towards Horasan.35 After that, Sultan Musa as-Sani brought the cup with the şerbet back to Zeynep Hatun. When she learned what had happened she took the cup in her hands and drank down all of the şerbet. The text continues: That night she and her husband lay together and Zeynep Hatun became pregnant. When the time for her delivery came, she gave a birth to a son whose face resembled the beauty of the full moon (literally, ayın ondürdu, the fourteenth of the moon). When Musa as-Sani saw the child, he was filled with joy. He gave many alms to the poor (faqir ve fuqara) and distributed food, clothing and booty to all of the people. Some of the nobles said let us name him “Sevinç” (happiness) and some said “Guvenç” (trust). Finally, they named him Muhammad. In his genealogy (şecere) his name is Muhammad, but because in appearance he resembled his ancestor Ibrahim al-Mucab, they called him Ibrahim as-Sani.36

This story of the birth of Ibrahim as-Sani, the father of Hacı Bektaş contains profound Shiʿi and Sufi imagery. Lost in despair and needing help (medet), Zeynep Hatun encountered the Imam in spiritual form. He appeared from the ghayb, having previously died at the hands of the wicked Harun al-Rashid. Despite his physical death, his help (medet) is still available. The story is clearly metaphorical of the human condition in general–where humanity is suffering and in need of the medet of the ehl-i beyt. One can compare elements of this story to the popular South Asian “miracle stories” (muʿjizat kahanis), which relate similar encounters with ʿAli, Fatima and the Imams.37 ʿAli and the Imams are commonly seen as helpers, or madadgar, not only by Alevis, but by the majority of the Shiʿa and many Sunnis throughout the Muslim world. The description of the Imam as one flooded with light (nur) reflects the common symbolism of the shared nur of the Prophet and the Imams: the nur from which ʿAli and Muhammad were made from which was the first act of creation. At first, the Imam refuses to partake of the food hıs hosts offer him, as he is fasting. However, because of his personal connection to his host, and a sense of hospitality, he agrees to eat. He violates a “rule” out of personal concern for another. Thus, the story implies that love and affection sometimes transcend rules, that love is greater than shariʿa. However, upon remembering the suffering of Imam Hüseyin at Karbala, Imam ʿAli al-Rıza is filled with sadness and love for his ancestor, who died suffering from thirst in the desert. As a result, he spits the şerbet back into the cup. This piece of the narrative reveals the primacy of devotion to the Imams in the Alevi tradition. While hospitality initially led the Imam to break his fast, remembrance (zikr) of the sufferings of the ehl-i beyt ultimately took precedence over

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everything else. Thus, the story emphasizes the importance of devotional allegiance to the Imams, arguing that it overrides other concerns. This entire incident says something important about the fluidity of moral action based on one’s context and situation. At first, the Imam will not eat or drink because he is in the midst of a fast. However, out of a sense of adab and respect for his hosts he sets aside his fast. Then, finally, when reminded of the thirst of his ancestor, Imam Hüseyin, he is overcome with sadness out of love for the Prophet’s grandson and, once again, refuses to drink the şerbet his cousin has offered him. The message seems clear. Whether one chooses to fast or break one’s fast, one should make that decision out of empathy and love. Love should guide us when we make our decisions concerning ritual practice. Feelings of love, respect and devotion take precedence over mere legal prescriptions, even in the performance of what is essentially a ritual action. One should not follow a rule for its own sake. The story seems to speak directly to the nature of the Alevi fast during Muharram. According to some Alevis, during the ʿAshuraʾ period, one may eat certain kinds of food but should not drink at all. Any fluids one consumes must come only from food such as fruit or soup. The Imam breaks his fast by eating a few morsels but draws the line at drinking şerbet. Interestingly, later in the text Hacı Bektaş differentiates between what he disparages as “the çile (seclusion) of women,” in which one abstains from food and water during the daylight hours in the manner of the Sunni Ramadan fast, and “the çile of men” in which one drinks no water for an entire month, during which time one survives only on ox-soup.38 Another key to unlocking this story is the character of Zeynep, who like her namesake at Karbala, is the ultimate witness to events as they transpire. Like the other Zeynep she demonstrates complete faith in the Imam. From the moment she sees him she recognizes his light and his beauty. She is the perfect lover (aşık). Later on, when she sees that the Imam has spit the şerbet back into the cup, she unhesitatingly proceeds to drink from his cup out of her belief in the efficacy of his baraka. After drinking the şerbet, which the Imam had held his mouth, she is at last able to become pregnant. This incident expresses one of the overarching themes of the Vilayetname, the spiritual power and authority of the ehl-i beyt and the efficacy of devotion to them. Once again, this affirms the Islamic nature of the text, reinforcing a clearly Muslim worldview rooted in faith in those linked to the Prophet Muhammad. The story then continues by presenting a similar tale about Zeynep and Ibrahim Mucab’s son, Ibrahim as-Sani. When the time eventually comes for Ibrahim as-Sani to marry, the beauty of a young woman named Hatem Hatun, who happens to be the daughter of “a perfect and humble scholar” named Shaykh Ahmed, intoxicates the young Sultan. (The intoxication of romantic love is, as we have seen throughout this volume, a familiar theme in Sufi literature.) The two marry, but, as in the previous account about the young man’s parents, many years passed and they also found themselves unable to conceive a child. Following the guidance of his advisers, Ibrahim as-Sani organizes a gathering, or majlis, of holy persons.39 As the text describes:

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However many scholars, Qur’an reciters, dervishes and mendicants there were in the city gathered in one place and made a great assembly. Scholars and Qur’an reciters began to recite the Qur’an and dervishes and mendicants opened their hands for prayer (dua). For an entire week, they prayed turning their faces towards God. That night Sultan Ibrahim drew close to his wife and with the power of God, Hatem Hatun became pregnant. When her time came, a son was born into the world. The birth of their son was miraculous. The text states that while she slept, Hatem Hatun “dreamt that she was giving birth to a child with ease and she, in fact, gave birth without feeling pain of any kind.” When Sultan Ibrahim awoke he saw that “a child was born the light of whose face seemed to illuminate the whole world. His face resembled the beauty of the full moon.” He named him “Bektaş” (one who is equal in rank with a prince.) While he was still an infant, he lifted his index finger, and recited the kelime-i şehadet (the shahada). The kelime was thus the first word which came from the tongue of the Hazret Hünkar.40

This account of the birth of Hacı Bektaş is, once again, full of explicitly Islamic imagery. One can find similar accounts in other Sufi hagiographies. For example, the image of an infant reciting the shahada, or performing similar pious actions in the cradle, is well known in the Sufi traditions. For example, as an infant, the renowned Iraqi wali, ʿAbdul Qadir Jilani, who was born during the month of Ramadan, would only nurse after sundown. Clearly, the author of the Vilayetname wants to establish not only the lineage of Hacı Bektaş, but also his special status as an explicitly Muslim holy person. Of course, it also resembles hadiths that describe the infant ʿAli reciting the Qurʾan in the cradle, which affirms the Alevi belief that the spiritual essence of the pir is somehow identical with the spiritual essence of Imam ʿAli. The child’s birth is, at least in part, the result of Qurʾan recitation and duʿaʾs by saintly persons. While Ibrahim as-Sani’s birth is the result of the batini intercession of the Imam from the ghayb, Hacı Bektaş is born as the result of a similar but somewhat different manner of intercession, this time a more zahiri one–the recitation of the Qurʾan and the prayers of scholars and mendicants. Whereas Ibrahim is born because of the intercession of one who sits on “the seat of imamate,” Hacı Bektaş is born through the prayers of scholars and the recitation of the “Book of God.” In that sense, the Vilayetname seems to be pointing to the Shiʿi emphasis on the aforementioned hadith of the “two treasures,” in which the Prophet on his deathbed leaves two treasures to his community his ehl-i beyt and the Qurʾan, by showing that Hacı Bektaş is brought into this world through the power of both. To put it in more “etic” language, Hacı Bektaş is the product of both the discursive and affective traditions of Islam, both that which can be communicated through words and that which is communicated through human love and devotion. This theme is amplified in the next section of the narrative, which describes the manner in which Hacı Bektaş acquires both zahiri and batini ʿilm. According to the Vilayetname, Sultan Ibrahim entrusted his young son, Hacı Bektaş, to one of the khalifas (Turkish, halife) of Hoca Ahmed Yesevi, Lokman Perende, as his teacher (hoca). One day, when Lokman Perende was entering the classroom, he saw two men each sitting at either shoulder of Hacı Bektaş, teaching him the Qurʾan. The room was illuminated with the light that shone from their faces (much like the light that emanated from Imam ʿAli Riza in the previous narrative). As soon as Shaykh

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Lokman entered the room, the two men vanished. Lokman Perende wondered who these persons were and Hacı Bektaş revealed that the one on the right was “the Sun of the two worlds, my father Muhammad Mustafa, and the one on my left was the Lion of God, the Commander of the Faithful, ʿAli Murtaza.” Miraculously, ʿAli was teaching him the batini knowledge of the Qurʾan and the Prophet its zahiri knowledge.41 Once again, we see the obviously Islamic nature of the text. Hacı Bektaş is a disciple of the twin lights of Muhammad and ʿAli, the Prophet of Islam and the first Shiʿi Imam. In clear reference to ʿAli’s status as “the King of the Friends (Şah-i Evliya)” and the famous hadith in which the Prophet says “I am the City of Knowledge and ʿAli is its Gate,” they are portrayed as teaching the exoteric and esoteric dimensions of Islam, respectively. The author of the text takes for granted the spiritual existence of both Muhammad and ʿAli, as persons that can communicate with the erenler. Following a section of the text that explains the spiritual authority and power of Lokman Perende, describing him as superior in austerities even to the great mystic Beyazid Bistami, the Persian-speaking Sufi who helped popularize the doctrine of wahdat al-wujud, and noting that he had the special support of the Shiʿi Imam Jaʿfar as-Sadiq, the Vilayetname continues with its account of Hacı Bektaş. One day when Lokman Perende instructed the young Hacı Bektaş to bring him water for ablutions, the young man suggested that it would be more convenient if there were a flowing stream of water within the classroom. When Lokman Perende responded that this was beyond his powers, Hacı Bektaş said a prayer (duʿaʾ) and immediately a beautiful spring emerged in the middle of the room. At this point Lokman exclaimed, “O Hünkar (Oh, Monarch).”42 This explains how Hacı Bektaş became known as Hünkar, the Monarch, an appellation by which he is commonly known. It affirms the proposition that the erenler can intervene in the world and perform miracles for their friends and disciples. It also, most importantly, affirms the spiritual superiority of Hacı Bektaş. In another story from the Vilayetname, Lokman Perende went on the Hajj. While standing on ʿArafat, he pointed out to his friends that, as it was the day of the feast, back at home his wife must be preparing bishi, a special kind of pancake. Back in Central Asia, Hacı Bektaş miraculously overheard this conversation. He went to Lokman Perende’s wife and requested that she place a few bishi on a tray. Miraculously, Hacı Bektaş then carried the tray instantaneously to Mecca, and offered the bishi to Sheikh Lokman. Sheikh Lokman immediately understood what was happening, ate the bishi and hid the tray away. Later, after completing the Hajj he returned from the Hijaz to Central Asia. As he approached Horasan, the population ran out to meet him offering him congratulations on his successful pilgrimage. However, Shaykh Lokman said to them, “Bektaş is the Hacı,” went over to him, kissed his hand and explained the miracle that had occurred. When the people heard this, they bowed their heads to Hacı Bektaş.43 This story, which explains how Hacı Bektaş became known as a Hacı Bektaş, is interesting on several levels. Miraculous travel to Mecca is common in many Central and South Asian tazkhiras. For example, in the popular Central Asian collection of

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hagiography, the Rashohat, there are similar stories of awliya’ miraculously saying their daily namaz in Mecca. As in the previous story, the serving of food as an act of hospitality is a clear thematic device, which provides an opportunity for Hacı Bektaş to perform a miracle, affirming the ability of the erenler to hear the desires of their friends over long distances. More particularly, it assumes a special relationship between pir and mürit. Interestingly, however, in this case, the mürit fulfills the desire of his pir, and not the other way around. Perhaps most significantly, Shaykh Lokman’s action singling out his disciple for praise while returning from Hajj is clearly analogous with the Prophet Muhammad’s recognition of Mawla ʿAli at the well of Ghadir Humm on his farewell pilgrimage. Lokman Perende is similarly recognizing Hacı Bektaş as his friend and successor. In so doing, he demonstrates that his disciple is retracing the root paradigm of Imam ʿAli. This identification with ʿAli is made even clearer in the next section of the text where Lokman Perende relates the miracles of Hacı Bektaş to a group of Horasani mystics, identifying him as “truly a Hacı” who prayed behind him at the Ka’ba. When the mystics asked him to explain this, Hacı Bektaş declares, “I am the secret (sirr) of the commander of the faithful amir al-muʾmin, Hazrat ʿAli, the waterbearer saki of the river Kevser, the Lion of God, the Ruler of the Two Worlds, the sultan of vilayet.” He then states that he is of the lineage of the Prophet and that these miracles are his inheritance from God. At this point, he reveals a green mole on his palm and another on his forehead that are identical to marks on the body of Imam Ali. This leads the mystics of Horasan to accept his authority.44

The Vilayetname as an Islamic Text In the current political and social context of Turkey, the relationship between Islam and the Alevi-Bektaşi tradition is contested. On the one hand, most Alevis are insistent about the “Islamic-ness” of their tradition, while firmly recognizing and affirming its differences with shariʿa-minded Islam. On the other, not only do some radical Sunnis wish to portray the Alevis as non-Muslims in order to discredit them, there is also a minority of Alevis, who wish to distance themselves from Islam altogether. Academic scholarship on the Vilayetname has also weighed in, playing a role in this debate. The Vilayetname, like most Sufi hagiographies, is, of course, full of miraculous and supernatural occurrences. As mentioned earlier, scholars like Irene Melikoff and Ahmet Yaşar Ocak have emphasized the similarities between some of the miraculous imagery in the Vilayetname and that of pre-Islamic Central Asian and Anatolian traditions. A close examination of the Vilayetname, however, reveals, its imagery as remarkably consistent with Sufi and Shiʿi narratives in other parts of the Islamic world. It seems clear that whatever shamanic or Buddhist motifs may be found in the text, the author of the Vilayetname goes to great pains to demonstrate that Hacı Bektaş is a Muslim figure, an inheritor of the mantle of the Prophet, one of the erenler. It is definitely an Islamic text, assuming a familiarity with Muslim

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concepts and terminology in its readers and simultaneously arguing for a particular batini Islamic worldview. When one speaks to contemporary Turkish Alevis about which textual sources they consider authoritative, they tend to identify three as central for understanding their religious worldview. The first of these is the Vilayetname. The other two are the aforementioned, Buyruk of Imam Cafer As-Sadik and the body of poetry, which is sung as part of the cem, called the nefes. All three of these sources affirm the religious worldview of the great majority of Alevis who consider the cem as an Islamic form of ibadet. The poetry of the nefes allows for a continually developing commentary on the basic beliefs and ideals of Alevilik. The two texts, Buyruk and the Vilayetname, point to the connections between the Alevi conception of religion and the larger symbolic universe of Islam. We have previously discussed the opening narrative in Buyruk, which describes the Prophet’s mirac. It not only lays out the radically egalitarian vision of human relations that is at the center of the Alevi view of humanity; it also roots that vision firmly within Islam by making clear the mystical connection between ʿAli, Muhammad and God, as well as the origin of the cem as a ritual integrating the exoteric knowledge of the Prophet with the batıni knowledge of Ali. The opening chapters of the Vilayetname, similarly, go to great lengths both to place Hacı Bektaş in the lineage of Imam ʿAli through Imam ʿAli Riza and simultaneously to locate him in the tradition of pir-mürit that connects him to the contemporary Alevi community. Other narratives in the Vilayetname describe the life and mission of Hacı Bektaş after he leaves Horasan, with the icazet of Ahmet Yesevi, finally settling in the Anatolian town of Suluca Karahöyük, after first arriving there in the miraculous form of a bird. They describe his teaching and his miracles as he spread his message to the people of that region. These narratives, which like all Sufi hagiography affirm the existence of the erenler, proclaim the superiority of the path of Hacı Bektaş, while placing him and his disciples into an ongoing tradition of pir-mürit that is still available for those who wish to enter it.

The Narrative of Güvenç Abdal45 Perhaps no narrative in the Vilayetname does this so overtly (or effectively) as the story of Güvenç Abdal. Güvenç Abdal is one of the best known of Hacı Bektaş’s murids (Turkish, mürits). His grave occupies a prominent place in a room within the tomb complex of Hacı Bektaş himself. The story of Güvenç Abdal is a truly remarkable narrative which draws on aspects of storytelling often associated with folk tales, including supernatural occurrences, adventure and romance. Nevertheless it is clearly an Islamic narrative, which communicates ideas integral both to the Alevi-­ Bektaşi mystical path and to the larger Sufi hagiographical tradition (Fig. 6.2). The narrative focuses on Güvenç Abdal, one of Hacı Bektaş’s mürits, a young dervish who is described in the text as just (adıl). One day the young man asked his pir a series of questions about the meaning of certain terms associated with the

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Fig. 6.2  Poem by Guvenç Abdal hanging near his tomb in the Hacı Bektaş shrine complex in Turkey. It reads: Oh Genç Abdal (Güvenç Abdal), If you want to reach the Truth, If you want to give your life and your head to the Path of Reality, If you want to see the beauty of Reality, conceal what you have seen, and don’t talk about what you haven’t.

spiritual path: Who is the şeyh? Who is the mürit? Who is the muhip? Who is the aşık? Instead of answering him directly, Hacı Bektaş assigns him a task. He sends him out to locate a certain gold merchant (sarraf) who had made a vow (nezr) of a thousand gold pieces so that he can retrieve his offering. Without hesitation the young dervish sets out to accomplish his assigned task.46 It is clear from the start that this is a narrative concerned with the mystical path. The story begins with Güvenç Abdal asking his pir about the meanings of four Turkish terms, şeyh, mürit, aşık and muhip. These are certainly not unique to the Alevi tradition as they are frequently used in the Sufi tradition more generally. All four terms have their original roots ın the Arabic language, the language of the Qurʾan and hadith. Şeyh is Turkish for “shaykh,” a word which in this context is synonymous with “pir.” Both muhip and aşık are related to Arabic words for love— mahabba and ʿishq. While the first of these is used in the Qurʾan, the second, which is commonly used to refer to intense romantic love, is not, although its presence is ubiquitous in Sufi poetry. Mürit is related to the Arabic word irada, which also has connotations of intention or desire. As a mürit of his şeyh, Güvenç Abdal wants clarify the meaning of these terms, which refer to different gradations of “lover” that mirror terms like muslim, muʾmin and muhsin in exoteric Islam.

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In fact, Güvenç Abdal’s question mirrors one asked in an important, and universally accepted, hadith, the so-called hadith of Jibraʾil. According to this hadith, one day a stranger came to the Prophet Muhammad and asked him to define three different terms used in the Qurʾan to describe members of his community. He first asked, “What is faith (iman)?” The Prophet replied, “Faith consists of belief in God, His angels, the meeting with Him, his Apostles and the resurrection.” He then asks, “What is Islam?” The Prophet responded by saying that it “consists of the service of God, the refusal to associate with Him, prayer, alms-giving and fasting during the month of Ramadan.” He then asked him the meaning of ihsan, and the Prophet answers that it is “to serve God as though you could see him. Even though you cannot see him he can see you.” The stranger then posed a final question about the coming Day of Judgment and then vanished. Afterwards, the Prophet reveals to his companions that the stranger was, in fact, the angel Jibraʾil.47 Just as Jibraʾil asks the Prophet about the meaning of three terms crucial to understanding Qurʾanic designations for believers—muʾmin, muslim and muhsin— Güvenç Abdal asks the meaning of three terms used to describe people on the interior path. However, these are terms that defy linear didactic explanation because they deal with the experience of love. Love—either romantic love or mystical love—is its own proof. It is by its very nature ineffable. Its meaning cannot be adequately communicated or explained through words alone. It must be felt in order to be understood. As these are terms having to do with the experience of love, they can only be fully understood through actual experience. Thus, Hacı Bektaş provides an answer existentially, rather than didactically and discursively, by sending his mürit on a journey which initiates a liminal period in which the young dervish is separated from his home and removed from his ordinary structural identity ın the manner of Turner’s tripartite model of the ritual process. The narrative presents an interesting inversion of Attar’s famous story of Sheikh San’an in The Conference of the Birds, in which a famed religious teacher travels to Rum, literally Rome, in this case meaning Anatolia, where he ultimately learns about the nature of love by falling madly in love with a Christian girl who becomes for all intents and purposes an object of worship, an ilah, for him.48 Güvenç Abdal instead leaves Rum and travels east on a journey that will similarly help him discover the mysteries of love and the path. Interestingly, he goes in search of gold something frequently associated not with self-sacrifice and spirituality but rather avarice, greed and materialism. Having traveled by foot for three days, the young dervish miraculously finds himself in in Hindustan, in the city of Delhi. The text describes his emotional state upon finding himself there as one of confusion and astonishment. Unable to account for how he has arrived in Delhi he himself, “Where is Rum? Where is Hindustan?”49 He is quite literally in a state of liminality, lost “betwixt and between.” Time and space are thoroughly distorted and confused. How could he possibly have traveled to Hindustan in a mere three days? There were no rational answers to his questions. He would have to seek his answers in experience itself. After some time wandering through the streets of Delhi, the young man and the gold merchant encountered each other. Upon confirming that Güvenç Abdal was a

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disciple of Hacı Bektaş Veli the gold merchant invited the young man to his house as a guest and offered him hospitality for three days. He explained to the dervish how some time earlier he had been caught in a deadly storm while out at sea. Just as his ship was about to sink under the waves he called out to the erenler to save him, offering a thousand gold pieces if he survived. Hacı Bektaş heard his plea, took his boat in his hands and brought him safely to shore. In gratitude the gold merchant asked the pir how he might arrange to deliver his promised offering of a thousand gold pieces to him. Hacı Bektaş replied that he would send someone to retrieve it and described his young disciple, Güvenç Abdal.50 The merchant not only gave Güvenç Abdal the thousand gold pieces he had originally vowed, but added another thousand, with instructions to distribute them among those who were in service to Hacı Bektaş, and yet another thousand for himself. The young dervish placed the three thousand gold pieces in his purse and set out for home.51 However, on his way out of the city, he came upon a house where he caught a glimpse a beautiful young girl through a window. He immediately fell in love (aşık oldu), so much so that he sat transfixed at her window for three days and nights. When the girl, who was the daughter of a wealthy merchant who was away on business, became aware of his presence she sent one of her servants to send him away.52 The servant told the young man that he would have to leave, warning him that if the girl’s fathers’ servants were to discover him it would not end well for him. Furthermore, she informed the lovesick dervish that there was no way that a poor man like him would ever be able to win the hand of her wealthy mistress. Hearing this, the young dervish opened up his purse to reveal the three thousand pieces of gold. The servant returned to the girl and informed her that this seemingly impoverished dervish was actually in possession of three thousand gold pieces. As a result the girl invited Güvenç Abdal inside the house, where he opened his purse in front of his intended beloved.53 According to the text, at that very moment, just as Güvenç Abdal was about to go down the “path of the Şeytan (Satan),” a hand miraculously emerged from the wall behind him. It threw the young dervish to the ground where he was rendered unconscious. When Güvenç Abdal finally came to his senses the astonished girl asked him to explain what was had just happened. He told her that his pir, Hacı Bektaş, had used his power (vilayet) to protect him by preventing him from committing an evil deed. He then explained everything to her—how he had left Rum and come to India at the request of his pir and all of the subsequent events that had ultimately brought them together. Hearing this, she herself became a lover (aşık) of Hacı Bektaş and asked the young man to take her with him to meet his pir. Taking the three thousand gold pieces with them they set off together on the road to Anatolia.54 Having walked together until late in the night, the lay down in a deserted place to sleep. The next morning, they awoke far away from where they had slept the night before, at a spot alongside the road leading into Suluca Karahöyük, the hometown of Hacı Bektaş Veli. There they were greeted by his deputies who brought them to

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Hacı Bektaş where Güvenç Abdal kissed his pir’s hands, pressed his face against his feet, and explained to him everything that had happened on hıs journey.55 It was then that Hacı Bektaş reminded the young man of his initial questions— who is the şeyh? Who is the mürit? Who is the muhip? Who is the aşık? At this point in the narrative Hacı Bektaş finally explains the meaning of these terms. Hacı Bektaş, of course, represents the şeyh, one who possesses spiritual power and authority, is able to perform acts of miraculous intervention (keramet) and, most importantly, protect and teach his mürits. He is the friend (dost) and the master (mawla, Turkish, mevla) of his mürits and others who love him. He intercedes on behalf of his mürit, Güvenç Abdal, in his role as a pir protecting him from both physical and spiritual dangers, even from a distance. Like Khidr in the Qur’an he has batini knowledge and an ability to see that which is otherwise unseen. Thus, he had been able to hear the sarraf’s cry for help from a distance and save him from a shipwreck (a common trope in Sufi hagiography, which we explored in the previous chapter in the story of Baba Farid and Mullah Sahab). More importantly, he knew interior state of his disciple, even when he was far away from him, allowing him to intervene and ultimately transform the young man’s attraction and desire for the girl into something spiritual, thus facilitating their move from the realm of animals (hayvanlar), into the realm of humanity (insan) which is the ultimate goal of the Sufi path. Güvenç Abdal represents the mürit, as he obeyed his pir without hesitation and without question. As a mürit, he behaves with complete obedience, presenting himself to his pir like “a corpse to be prepared for burial, ” in accordance with the larger Sufi tradition. This, of course, resonates with the story in the Qurʾan of Musa and Khidr, or in Turkish, Hızır, where Hızır, the man of tarikat, who possesses spiritual knowledge (ilim ladunni), tells Musa, the man of şeriat that he will be unable to follow him because he will not be able to show patience (sabr) and keep from asking questions. Only love can make one act without question in obedience to one’s beloved. The mürit acts out of love for the pir. Equally importantly, the pir acts out of love for the mürit. (Like ʿAli and Muhammad in the story of Ghadir Humm, an essential narrative in the Alevi tradition, that is retold in Buyruk, as true friends, each is both master and servant to the other.) The sarraf represents the muhip. He is clearly a person of this world, the world of business, and, as such, while not able to become a mürit in the manner of Güvenç Abdal, taking on the intense discipline of the tarikat, he is nonetheless a believer and a person of ahlak and edep. Thus, when threatened with death and destruction in a shipwreck he had the faith to call upon the erenler. Moreover, when he encountered Güvenç Abdal, as Hacı Bektaş had predicted he would, he offered him gracious hospitality and not only gave what he had vowed as a nezr, but even more. He is thus revealed as a lover because he called out in sincerity to the pir when he was in trouble. The pir then saves him and goes on to use him in his plan to teach his disciple. The girl is an aşık. Like the sarraf, she is a person of means who comes out of the transactional world of the marketplace, as her father is a merchant. She initially rejects Güvenç Abdal because he appears to her as a poor dervish. Initially she seems unwilling to accept him, only feeling desire for him when she discovers his material wealth, which she greedily covets. In the end, however, her greed is transformed into something more spiritual. She too recognizes the vilayet of Hacı Bektaş. Most

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importantly, as a result she is overwhelmed with the desire to meet him and leaves her home in order to do so. She becomes a lover of the pir who wants nothing more than to meet him and be in his presence. In his role as a pir, Hacı Bektaş unites all three of them into a single interrelated mystical community where each plays a part in leading the others to become the best most loving human being that they can be. The Vilayetname recognizes that not everyone can aspire to be a disciple (mürit) or a halife of the sheikh. The narrative of Güvenç Abdal affirms the centrality of the pir in the ongoing spiritual transformation of human beings as physical creatures living in the material world, not only those who are mürits but also those who are aşıks and those who are muhips. This aspect of the narrative is particularly important from the perspective of the Alevi-Bektaşi religious worldview. In the Alevi understanding of tevhit there is no clear distinction between this world (Turkish, dünya) and the next (Turkish, ahiret). For them the Day of Judgment is not some distant event that will happen in a linear future. Rather, it is occurring at every instant, because every instant contains an eternity within it. Most of us live the lives of animals (hayvan) and are thus, knowingly or not, already in Hell, like the men in the previous story about Hoca Ahmet Yesevi who because of their greed became dogs and destroyed each other. But, those among us who are truly human (insan) and manifest human virtues (Turkish, insanlık) are already in paradise (Turkish, cennet). The material world, rather than something to be escaped, should be seen as providing opportunities for transformation. With the aid of a pir we all possess the possibility of becoming truly human and achieving paradise. This is clearly a narrative that is rooted in the Islamic tradition. It shares much in common with the larger Sufi tradition. Belief in the ability of the erenler to work miracles places this narrative clearly into the cannon of earlier Islamic mystical hagiography.56 It speaks to the transformative power of love to change people for the better, to make them more fully human. It affirms love a natural proclivity within humanity to which we should all aspire and a force that allows us to become truly human. If the first part of the Vilayetname is devoted to showing that Hacı Bektaş is the repository of the vilayet of the Twelve Imams, later narratives like the story of Güvenç Abdal affirm Hacı Bektaş as the Hünkar, the Qutb of the World, as a source of medet for anyone who reaches out to him. In so doing, the text brilliantly unites the worldviews of Shiʿi and Sufi Islam. By doing so it reveals Alevilik as its own unique tradition.

My Qibla is a Man: Islam Beyond the Law At the beginning of this volume, I discussed the presence of certain powerful voices—both Muslim and non-Muslim—that have sought to equate Islam with shariʿa, as if the two are one and the same. These voices put forward a vision of Islam that focuses almost entirely on external behavior as “the real Islam.” It is not

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only the proponents and followers of movements like the Taliban, ISIS/ISIL, and al-Qaeda who equate shariʿa with Islam, but also non-Muslim critics of Islam who seek to demean the Islamic tradition by reducing it to a harsh and legalistic system of rules and commandments. For those who maintain this position, the idea that there might be an Islam without shariʿa is unthinkable. When these critics of Islam discuss shariʿa, they tend to focus almost entirely on the most controversial aspects of “social law,” pointing out harsh pre-modern penalties for adultery, fornication and theft, patriarchal restrictions on women, and discursive arguments for the permissibility of armed jihad against “infidels.” In general, I find that the people, who condemn shariʿa in this way, rarely understand how it has historically functioned within the umma. Rather than seeing it as what it actually is, a continually evolving body of discourse about social and ritual practice, they treat it quite literally as “Islamic law,” despite the fact that, as we have discussed previously in this volume, shariʿa was seldom used as the law of the state in the modern sense of the term. Historically, it should be noted, Muslims have rarely seen the shariʿa as a claustrophobic prison of rules and regulations. To the extent that the shariʿa is about social relations, the reason it has proven attractive to many people is that it more often than not incorporates the egalitarian ethos of the Qurʾan and practice of the Prophet—a single set of prescriptions for the ruler and the ruled, the rich and the poor, the high and the low. While the discourse of shariʿa has incorporated a certain degree of patriarchal norms limiting the rights of the women, arguably it has not done so in ways that are any more egregious than similar forms of discourse within Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism or Hinduism. Moreover, in the pre-modern context in which it developed it provided certain protections from spousal and familial mistreatment, as well. More often than not, Muslims saw the shariʿa as providing potential protections from the abuses of those in power over them more than a system that limited their freedom. Furthermore, in terms of ritual practice, there is an undeniable beauty to the shariʿa that one should be careful not to dismiss. The daily prayer which many ritually pious Muslims pause five times throughout the day to perform so that they might remember their Creator, not only mentally but physically, falling in submission and prostration before the ruler of the universe is both elegant and profound. The communal experience of the Ramadan fast forces one to experience within one’s own body one’s finitude and dependence upon God, through hunger and thirst. Similarly, God’s command to humanity that one’s wealth must be purified through zakat by first sharing it with the poor before one can partake of any personal share in the “amana” of creation reminds Muslims of their responsibilities to each other and their Creator. There is perhaps no more magnificent communal religious event than the Hajj, when Muslims travel once in a lifetime to the site of the qibla to perform rites that culminate in the standing on Mount ʿArafat, dressed only in simple white cloth that prefigures their funeral shrouds. Exoteric Muslim ʿibadat can be spiritually powerful and aesthetically moving. Given the sheer beauty of ʿibadat, I think it is a serious mistake to condemn shariʿa as inherently inhumane.

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However, as the Sufi tradition that has long been at the center of Muslim discourse teaches, we should not confuse the goblet with the wine. As aesthetically beautiful as Muslim ritual may be, the great majority of Muslims have never seen the shariʿa as an end in itself. It is a path, and like any path, it is designed to allow one to go on a journey. It is not an end in itself. It leads to something deeper and more fundamental. For all but a tiny minority of Muslims, the core of their faith is something far more profound than the external prescriptions of shariʿa. For them, Islam is a tradition rooted in love, empathy and altruism, and other core virtues of humanity (insaniyya). One of the reasons it is useful to imagine the possibility of an Islam without shariʿa is that it allows us to see something that should be obvious. For most Muslims, what lies at the heart of Islam is not law, but love. The Alevi tradition reveals not only the possibility of an Islam that transcends the shariʿa, but the reality of such an Islam. In Anatolia, there is a unique Islamic tradition embraced by millions of people that embraces tawhid, nubuwwa and qiyama— as do all Muslims—and does so in a way that brings together all of those elements of Islam that one might identify as “humanistic” and pushes them to the fore. Of course, some people dismiss Alevi piety as insufficiently Muslim because it is not rooted firmly enough in the discursive tradition of dialogue with Qurʾan and hadith. Indeed, some argue that the ayn-i cem, in which men and women engage in semah together, its incorporation of music in worship, and its rejection of daily namaz in order to replace it with continuous prayer of the heart, is far removed from the Islam of Sunni shariʿa -minded piety. However, its moral and ethical values, as well as its mystical vision, are part of an affective tradition of Islam that reaches back to the Prophet through the ahl al-bayt. Furthermore, the great majority of its religious worldview is one that it shares with countless other Muslims, especially its vision of al-insan al-kamil, the perfected human being, forged on the path of love. An Alevi nefes made popular by the great Alevi singer Arıf Sağ, provocatively called “I Have Come to be a Human Being (İnsan Olmaya Geldim )” puts it elegantly and succinctly: I have laid myself open, I have come to be a human being. What all the teachers have described; The halting place that the true ones have reached; Where the Prophets and saints have gone; In these footsteps, I have come to become a human being… I burned wıth love and was consumed In the ashes, I have come to become a human being… . At last I have come, drinking the wine of love. I have chosen each pure beam from the darkness. The mountains of existence I have pierced and passed over; On the level, I have come to become a human being. I have laid myself open, I have come to be a human being.57

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According to the words of this nefes, the point of life is, quite simply, to become fully human. That is the distillation of the teachings of all of the teachers of the Muslim tradition, including both the prophets and the “saints “(literally, the nabis and the awliyaʾ). We should follow their example, if we want to become truly human; and the path that they have taught us, the path to humanity, is the path of love. One becomes human by being burned in the fire of love and consumed. One navigates existence and learns to discriminate between the darkness and the light by drinking the wine of love. To be human means to be transformed by love. Given its emphasis on love and humanity it is perhaps not surprising that so many of the voices in contemporary Turkey, who have been speaking out against authoritarianism and prejudice, corporate greed and corruption, gender discrimination and ethnic prejudice have been Alevi. However, it is not the fact that Alevis do not practice shariʿa that leads them to stand up and speak out on these issues. Rather it is because they have embraced the same “radical” human values that they find at the root of Islam, that many Sunni Muslims who similarly stand up and speak out have at the core of their religious worldview as well. That is why “Insan Olmaya Geldim” speaks not only to Alevis but is widely loved by Sunnis and non-believers, as well. It is especially popular among those who are politically active and committed to social justice. The lyrics to this nefes speak to an abiding humanism, that while central to the message of Islam, transcends it as well. The Alevi tradition is one particularly creative manifestation of the humanistic impulse, which lies at the core of Islam. It is only one expression of an essential humanism that has challenged generations of Muslims to embrace the human condition, as creatures who are uniquely able both to know and to love, and calls on them to fulfill the awesome responsibility of taking on God’s amana by perfecting their humanity and becoming truly human.

Questions for Discussion 1. How does the Alevi tradition complicate the relationship between Islam and shariʿa? Is the Alevi tradition antinomian? 2. In what ways does the Alevi tradition resonate with Shiʿi Islam? In what ways does it seem to be part of the larger Sufi tradition? In what ways is it unique? 3. Some scholars (and some Alevis) deny that Alevi’s are Muslims. Why? Do you find their arguments convincing? 4. What does the story of the Prophet’s Miraç in Buyruk tell us about the Alevi tradition? How does it explain the origins of the ayn-i cem? 5. What do the narratives in the Vilayetname about the lineage and origins of Hacı Bektaş tell us about that text’s interpretation of Islam? How might it speak to non-Muslim readers more generally about the nature of humanity? Could these stories possibly facilitate conversion of non-Muslims to Islam?

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6. The story of Güvenç Abdal is clearly Alevi in character but it is also fully consistent with the larger Sufi worldview as well. What do we learn about the Sufi path from this story? How might this narrative encourage conversion to Islam?

Notes 1. Ahmet Karamustafa, “Islam a Civilizational Project in Progress,” in Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender and Pluralism, ed. Omid Safi (Oxford: Oneworld, 2003), 108. 2. Karamustafa, 108. 3. The number of Alevis in Turkey is a deeply contested issue. Although religion is listed on one’s passport in the Turkish Republic, Alevi is not an option. There is no religious census in Turkey. Markus Dressler says that they constitute only ten to fifteen percent. The European Policy Centre says they constitute twenty-five percent of the population, between fifteen and twenty million people http://tawhid.epc.eu/pub_details.php?pub_ id=4093). The Alevi-Bektaşi foundation argues they account for thirty-three percent of the population. (http://tawhid.refworld.org/docid/49749c9950.html). My own anecdotal sense is that there are more Alevis in Turkey than most people think 4. Of course, this emphasis on four doors is not unique to Alevis. It is a position shared with several important Sufi order including some far more shariʿa oriented than the Alevis. 5. Since I have written the majority of this chapter, I have become aware of a new book by the historian Ayfer Karakaya-Stump which is one of the best sources on the history of the Alevi tradition. Among other things her research makes a powerful case for the both the uniqueness of the Alevi tradition and its clear resonance with other Anatolian Sufi communities, See Ayfer Karakaya-Stump The Kizilbash-Alevis in Ottoman Anatolia: Sufism, Politics and Community, Edinburgh Studies on the Ottoman Empire(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022). 6. Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, Vol.2, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 493. 7. Hodgson, Venture, Vol. 2, 498–500. 8. Ibid., 500. 9. The relationship between the Kızılbaş and the Alevis has partially been clouded by the fact that many Alevis resent the term, which has historically been used as a derogatory epithet by urban Sunnis. However, recently the term has been resurrected with a degree of pride. The contemporary aşık and bağlama virtuoso Yavuz Top on a CD entitled Suçumuz Nerede uses lyrics adapted from a nineteenth-century Bektaşi poet to put the case that the “crime” of the kızılbaş is their devotion to the ahl al-bayt and to proudly equate Alevilik with the kızılbaş tradition. 10. The late Prof. Bedre Noyan Dede-Baba, a prolific and influential Alevi-Bektaşi author, is one of the persons associated with this position. He makes a convincing case that on issues of theology and religious world view there are no significant differences between the Alevis and the historically more urban and literary Bektaşis. Both emphasize the use of Turkish language in their rituals and use the same nefes poetry in their semah. Both maintain the same “lax” attitude towards the shariʿa, substituting their own ritual practices. Both maintain devotional allegiance to the Twelve Imams (Oniki Imam) as a central facet of their piety. Both venerate the legendary medieval saint Hacı Bektaşi Veli. Perhaps the most significant difference between them is that while it is possible for anyone found worthy to enter the Bektaşi tarikat, it is generally thought that one must be born into the Alevi tradition. 11. This is the position held by Faik Bulut, the author of Ali’siz Alevilik. (Istanbul: Berfin Yayınları, 2007). For him, and many others, the Hazrat Ali of Alevilik is not the Hazrat Ali

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6 My Qibla Is a Man: Islam Beyond the Shariʿa of the first generation of Islam. Rather he is a purely symbolic figure standing for justice, resistance, solidarity with the poor and other Alevi values. 12. Supporters of this position draw heavily upon the writings of the European scholar Irene Melikoff who has written extensively on the Alevi tradition, emphasizing its shamanic and pre-Islamic elements. 13. The second position holds that Alevilik is, in fact, the original and true Islam. This position is represented by scholars like Mehmet Yaman, the author of Alevilik Inanç-EdebErkan, and Niand İzzettin Doğan, the founder of the Cem Vakf. 14. For example, unlike “secularists” who may refuse to pray because of “scientific” or “modernist” reasons, the avoidance of namaz has for many Alevis has a religious basis–the refusal to take part in an activity that according to their tradition has been rendered polluted by Hz. ʿAli’s murder in a mosque while in the act of prayer. 15. As we have noted throughout this volume devotional allegiance to exemplary persons was never a peripheral mode of piety in medieval Islam. Belief in the authority and efficacy of pirs was a crucial element of most of medieval piety. While it is still a powerful force in Islam it has come under increasing attack in the modern world. In fact, the critique of devotional allegiance, or at least what is perceived as its excesses, it lies at the core of the anti-Shiʿi and anti-Sufi rhetoric of many of the Islamic reform movement that have arisen since the eighteenth century. From this perspective, the Republic of Turkey’s attack on Sufism was not something unique but rather part of a larger tendency within Islam to view with suspicion the notion that obedience to a pir or imam is central to Muslim piety. 16. Rıza Zelyut, Öz Kaynaklarına Göre Alevilik, (Istanbul: Yön Yayıncılık Ltd. Şti, 1998), 111. 17. Interestingly, there is a tendency to avoid the use of the term tarikat, replacing it with the Turkish yol, as tarikat has a negative connotation in Turkey where it is popularly used as a synonym for “cult.” The Pir Sultan Abdal Vakf and the Cem Vakf are not surprisingly somewhat antagonistic towards each other as they hold remarkably different attitudes about the future of Alevilik. Each side holds that the other will lead the community into peril. For the members of the Cem Vakf the central problem with the Pir Sultan Abdal Vakf is that they are not only leftist but also materialist. They are seen therefore as atheists who deny the reality of God and the religious nature of the Alevi tradition. As one official of the Cem Vakf explained this to me, this allows others to slander the Alevi community as kafirs and zındıklar. For members of the Pir Sultan Abdal Vakf their criticism of the Cem Vakf centers on its position concerning the relationship of the community to the Diyanet, the official organ of the state for religious affairs. The Cem Vakf believes that the Diyanet should give support to the Alevis as well as the Sunnis. This position is completely rejected by the Pir Sultan Abdal Vakf. 18. I have previously told an analyzed this narrative in a more detailed fashion in my chapter entitled, “When the Prophet Went on the Miraç He Saw a Lion On the Road: The Mirac in  the  Alevi-Bektaşi Tradition,” in  Frederick Colby and  Christiane Gruber, eds., The Prophet Muhammad’s Ascension: New Cross-Cultural Encounters, Indiana University Press, 2010. 19. Victor Turner, The Ritual Process, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 96. 20. Victor Turner, On the Edge of the Bush: Anthropology on the Edge, (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1985), 272. 21. It was not unusual for me to witness arguments about the proper performance of Alevi ibadet during the ayn-i cem. Almost always the first question asked was, “What village do you come from?” 22. The Karacaahmet and Garib Dede centers are built alongside tombs of Alevi erenler. The Şah Kulu center is a magnificent reconstruction of an old Bektaşi tekke that had previously fallen into ruins. 23. This has been particularly true since the 1993 tragedy in Sivas. The community seems to have reached the conclusion that a public profile offers them more protection from such acts of violence, than a secretive one.

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24. It should be noted that the Diyanet prepares the khutbas that are read on Friday in every mosque in the country. From the standpoint of the state, this represents not only support but also substantial control over Sunni Islam. In fact, supporters of Diyanet argue that if they did exist to control the khutbas this could lead to a proliferation of radical Islamists using the minbar to attack the secular nature of the State. 25. Faziletname: Beyan-ı Mucizatı Ahmedi Fazlı Fazilet Hazreti Ali. ed. Fevzi Gürgen, (Ankara: Ayyıldız Yayıları, 1995). 26. Adil Ali Atalay Vaktidolu, Tam Hüsniye, (Istanbul: Can Yayınları, 1998). 27. Abdülbaki Gölpınarlı, Vilâyet-nâme Menâkıb-ı Hacı Bektâş-ı Velî, (Istanbul: Inkilap Kitabevi, 2016). 28. Esat Korkmaz, Buyruk Yorumlu İmam Cafer Buyruğu, (Istanbul: Anadolu Kültür, 2002). 29. Markus Dressler, Writing Religion: The Making of Turkish Alevi Islam (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 256–263. 30. The following series of narratives from the Vilayetname are prepared from the transliteration of an Ottoman manuscript prepared by Sefer Aytekin. 31. Sefer, Aytekin, Vilayetname (Ankara: Ayyıldız Yayınları, 1995), 11. 32. Aytekin, Vilayetname, 11. 33. Ibid., 12. 34. Ibid., pp.12–13. 35. Ibid., 13–15. 36. Ibid., 15. 37. Vernon Schubel, Religious Performance in Contemporary Islam (Columbia, S.  C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1993), 35–70. 38. Aytekin, Vilayetname, 69. 39. Ibid., 16–17. 40. Ibid., 17–18. 41. Ibid., 19–20. 42. Ibid., 21–22. 43. Ibid., 23. 44. Ibid., 24–25. 45. This version of the narrative is taken primarily from the version published by Yrd. Doc. Dr. Hamiye Duran, published by the Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı in 2007. I published a somewhat different translation and discussion of this narrative under the title “The Transmission of Truth in the Hagiography of Hacı Bektaş Veli” in Rico G. Monge, Kerry P.C. Chirico and Rachel Smith, eds., Hagiography and Religious Truth: Case Studies in Abrahamic and  Dharmic Traditions, ed. (London and  New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 109–123. 46. Hamıye Duran, Velayetname Hacı Bektaş Velı (Ankara: Türkiye Diyanet Vakf, 2007), 309–310. 47. Kenneth Cragg and Marston Speight, Islam from Within: Anthology of a Religion (Belmont, California: Wadsworth Publishing), 80. 48. Farid ud-din Attar, The Conference of the Birds, trans., Afkham Darbandi and Dick Davis (London: Penguin, 1984), 57–76. 49. Duran, Velayetname, 310. 50. Ibid., 310–314. 51. Ibid., 314. 52. Ibid., 314–317. 53. Ibid., 317–18. 54. Ibid., 318–21. 55. Ibid., 321.

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6 My Qibla Is a Man: Islam Beyond the Shariʿa 56. It also has resonances with Sufi poetry. A clear example is the aforementioned story of Sheikh San’an from Attar. In The Conference of the Birds, Sheikh San’an travels to Rum where he falls under the spell of the beauty of a Christian girl, for the first time learning the meaning of love in all of its burning intensity. In Attar’s story, the Sheikh is rescued by the intercession of the Prophet Muhammad, who intervenes because of the prayers of the lovestruck Sheikh’s mürits. In this story, it is the mürit, who is similarly smitten and saved by the direct miraculous intercession, not of the Prophet Muhammad, but instead by his pir. Significantly, in both stories, the girl is ultimately transformed and drawn to accept a true spiritual path, but unlike in Attar’s story, where the girl, having accepted Islam, dies at the end, in this narrative she is happily united in marriage with Güvenç Abdal. Nonetheless, in both stories, we see travelers find their way to the spiritual truth through engagement in the material world, rather than withdrawal from it. 57. Paul Koerbin, “İnsan Olmaya Geldim (Nimri Dede),” on his page Pir Sultan Abdal and Me, https://koerbin.wordpress.com/2009/04/07/40/

Chapter 7

Conclusion: Not an Excess of Religion, But a Lack of Humanity—In Search of “Mainstream Islam”

Islam is a religion of diverse paths and communities—Sunni and Shiʿa, Sufi and Salafi, tariqa and shariʿa. The universe of those who identify as Muslim—of those who accept the authority of God and the Prophet Muhammad and the necessity of belief in tawhid, nubuwwa and qiyama—include persons and communities who have been variously described as legalists and antinomians, monotheists and monists, ascetics and proponents of radical love, progressives and conservatives. On the one hand, the religion of Islam has been associated with ideas and practices of great subtlety and beauty. It has nurtured and inspired the nearly universally admired poetry of Maulana Jalal al-Din Rumi and Yunus Emre, the musical traditions of nefes and qawwali, the architecture of Sinan, the semah of the Mevlevis, the philosophy of Ibn Rushd and Ibn Sina, spiritual and ethical role models of like Rabi’a of Basra and Zainab b. ʿAli, the mystical worldviews of Ibn ‘Arabi and Ken’an Rifai, the sophisticated shariʿa discourse of Imam Shafi‘i and Ahmad Ibn Hanbal, and the social activism of Malcolm X and amina wadud. Sadly, it has also inspired puritanical and exclusivist movements like al-Qaeda and the Islamic State which subscribe to virulent forms of patriarchy, wish to reinstitute slavery, and deny the validity of all interpretations of Islam other than their own. It includes the self-identified Muslims who flew hijacked airplanes into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Many of us who call ourselves Muslim would like nothing more than to simply declare the latter non-Muslims, placing them beyond the pale. Unfortunately, one can no more remove these people and their ideologies from the history of Islam and Muslims than we can eliminate the Spanish Inquisition, the Crusades, and virulent anti-Semitism from the history of Christianity; or erase the stain of white supremacy, anti-immigration bigotry and homophobia from the history of America. However distasteful one may find their interpretations of Islam, the puritanical and exclusivist Muslims who engage in unjust violence and intolerance accept both the reality and urgency of tawhid, nubuwwa and qiyama. They justify their actions on the basis of their understanding of texts, history and traditions which have arisen out of the Qur’anic event. Thus, as a © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 V. J. Schubel, Teaching Humanity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22362-4_7

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scholar I regretfully feel that I have no choice but to identify them as Muslims, even if to do so seems to insult the great majority of Muslims, myself included, who feel no affinity with them whatsoever. Otherwise, I would be to some degree guilty of the exclusivity I criticize in their beliefs and actions. Despite the presence of intolerant and inhumane voices within the history of the umma I nevertheless have argued throughout this book that Islam is at its heart a deeply humanistic tradition in which the concept of insaniyya, or humanity, is absolutely central. While Islam, of course, holds that the universe is inherently theocentric, the “meaningfulness” of that universe depends on the presence of creatures who are able to recognize and respond to the God at its center. That is why the existence of humanity is so critical within Islam. There are some who argue that the proper role and response of humanity within a theocentric universe is simply “to submit.” In fact, the word “Islam” is frequently translated as “submission.” Certainly, if we understand God primarily as “the Lawgiver,” who through the agency of prophets reveals the proper way for human beings to live and worship, then it logically follows that the primary purpose of human beings would be to submit to that God’s commands. If the primary goal of existence (and religion) is submission, it might seem that shariʿa, and more specifically “the five pillars,” constitutes the essence and defining characteristic of Islam. This is the position frequently taken in introductory textbooks which generally define Islam in terms of “the five pillars.” In many ways, I have written this book as a counterargument to this approach. As I have argued previously in this volume, while the shariʿa is indeed a crucial element of Islam, it is traditionally not considered one of its roots (usul) but rather one of its branches (furu‘). After all, shariʿa literally means “path” or “way,” and a path is generally designed to lead someone to something, not as an end in itself. To refer back to another metaphor, one commonly used in the Alevi and Sufi traditions, it is perhaps useful to think of the shariʿa as a door into a building, rather than an edifice itself. It is designed to provide us access to something much larger and more important. To refer back to another popular emic metaphor I have previously mentioned, if the essence of Islam is, as many Muslims have argued, “the wine of Divine Love,” we should think of the shariʿa as the goblet that holds the wine, while being careful not to confuse it with the wine itself. If we treat shariʿa as the essence of Islam we risk seeing Muslims as analogous to the Pharisees of the Greek Testament, who are criticized by the authors of those texts for valuing the law over love and compassion. Treating Islam as a religion that privileges rules over people makes it difficult to see it as a humane tradition. We should ask ourselves, is it actually the case that all, or even most, Muslims have believed that God exists in relation to humanity primarily as a “Lawgiver?” Have Muslims understood the principle role of humanity in the cosmos as one of blind obedience and submission to Divine commands? Are those Muslims who accept the most legalistic interpretation the one’s most representative of the Islamic tradition? The core argument of this book is that the answer to all of these questions is a resounding “No.”

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Radical Muslims and Muslim Extremists In an article I published in the Huffington Post several years ago, I argued against the use of the terms “radical Islam” and “Muslim extremism” to describe puritanical, exclusivist, violent and intolerant movements within the umma.1 Conservative critics of Islam often describe these minority Muslim movements as “radical Islam,” as if the ultimate cause of the violent, patriarchal and misogynist actions they commit is Islam itself. After all, as many of us remember from our high school math classes, the term “radical” literally means to go back to “the root.” A “radical Muslim” is, thus, one who returns to the roots of Islam. If we define a “radical Muslim” as one who commits inhumane and violent actions in the name of an unbending religious law, are we not saying that Islam is at its root, at its core, a legalistic religion devoid of love and empathy? Are we not saying that it is a religion lacking in humanity? There are similar problems with the term “extremist Islam.” It assumes that Islam is at its core a set of harsh and inhumane legal strictures. Thus, an “extremist Islam,” an Islam taken to its extreme, must of necessity resemble alQaeda or ISIS. To call such movements “radical” or “extreme” is in my opinion decidedly inaccurate. To imply that violent and intolerant acts committed in the name of Islam are the inevitable result of taking Islam to its “extreme,” implies that injustice, violence and intolerance are encoded within Islam’s DNA as its root and essence. Such terminology surely defames the overwhelming majority of Muslims who have been and are peaceful, tolerant, and decent human beings. Of course, the use of the term “religious extremism” to connote the worst impulses of religion is not limited to Islam. Most of us are all too familiar with the use of the term “Christian extremist” in the United States to describe those who espouse misogyny, homophobia, white supremacy and religious nationalism, “Jewish extremists” for those who persecute Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, and Hindu extremists for those who attack Muslim shopkeepers in urban India. Needless to say, I find these designations deeply problematic for the same reason that I do “Muslim extremist” and “radical Islam.” I find it fascinating that we seldom see the terms “religious extremist” or “religious radical” used to refer to those who take their faith to an “extreme” by proclaiming “radical” expressions of love and hope over fear and division or standing in solidarity with the powerless and downtrodden against their oppressors. We seldom hear Martin Luther King, Thich Nat Hahn, or Daniel Berrigan called “religious extremists” or “religious radicals” in this positive sense, although it can easily be argued that they certainly were. Similarly, we might argue that the term “radical extremist Muslim” might better describe Mansur al-Hallaj who chose to go to his death rather than deny the secret of Divine Love he believed lay in his experience of tawhid. Or perhaps the Sufi pir, Muʿinuddin Chishti, who lived a life of voluntary poverty, and fed the poor, both Muslims and non-Muslims, with the offerings people brought to him as a better model of “a radical Muslim.” After all, to this day, throughout South Asia, non-Muslims and Muslims alike know him as Gharib

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Fig. 7.1  Langar pot at the tomb of Mu‘inuddin Chishti in India used for cooking food to distribute to pilgrims during his ‘urs

Nawaz, “the Gift to the Poor.” When we think of a “radical extremist Muslim,” we might imagine of Hacı Bektaş Veli who took the form of a dove and came to Anatolia to peacefully teach his simple but profound message that we must all serve God by becoming truly human. Instead we generally reserve such terms for the most puritanical, misogynist, homophobic, violent and intolerant expressions of religious piety. This does a tremendous disservice to those people of faith who have discovered at the root and core of their religious traditions the simple affirmation that to be truly human we must love and serve humanity (Fig. 7.1). The use of the term “religious extremism” as a negative term, is often associated with the corollary attitude frequently espoused by contemporary “new atheists,” that holds that because religion is at its core inherently violent, intolerant and misogynistic it should therefore be eradicated or abandoned. Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and the late Christopher Hitchens among others have argued that the world would be better off without religion, and especially without Islam. It should come as no surprise that I respectfully disagree. I also find myself in disagreement with the contemporary scholar of religions Robert Orsi, someone whose work I admire and has deeply influenced my own, who has recently argued that religion has produced more harm than good.2 I am, of course, not foolish enough to argue that human beings have never behaved inhumanely or cruelly as a result of their religious beliefs and identities. However, it seems similarly self-evident that religion has also inspired people to perform acts of kindness and self-sacrifice and to work tirelessly and courageously

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for peace and social justice. It has also encouraged and nurtured the kinds of quotidian acts of altruism and reciprocal altruism necessary for the survival and evolution of the human species.3 I would argue that the problem with those who commit acts of violence and intolerance in the name of religion is not so much an excess of religion, as it is a lack of humanity. Religious people who behave in the ways that are inhumane and oppressive almost invariably do so because they have refused to recognize the humanity of those with whom they disagree. Instead they have turned them into “the Other.” When Serbian militias engaged in genocide against Muslims in the former Yugoslavia near the end of the last century they did not do so because of something inherently toxic at the core of Eastern Orthodoxy but rather because, at that particular moment in history, they actively chose to deny the humanity of their Muslim neighbors. Similarly, when Buddhist nationalists in Myanmar kill Rohingya Muslims or Hindutva mobs burn the shops of Muslim merchants I would argue that their actions are not rooted in the core values of the Buddhist or Hindu traditions but in rather in an obstinate refusal to recognize the humanity of those whom they persecute. When Christian fundamentalists in North America deny the humanity of their LGBTQ neighbors they do so not because of something essential to their Christian faith that they have taken to an extreme, but rather because they have chosen to deny the humanity of those whom they attack. When we deny the humanity of others we cannot help but diminish our own humanity. In my opinion, this is the problem with Muslims who engage in acts of intolerance and inhumanity. Muslims who understand their faith as being primarily about exclusion, rather than inclusion; who commit acts of violence against those with whom they disagree; who proclaim themselves as the sole purveyors of religious truth, or who deny the full humanity of women is that they have been far too willing to ignore the calls within their own tradition to recognize and embrace the humanity of “the Other”—the stranger, the gharib—and to treat them with love and respect simply because they are fellow beings. Those who demand that we use the adjectives “radical” and “extremists” to describe intolerant and violent Muslims often do so precisely because they wish to locate the roots of that intolerance and violence within the religion itself, often by pointing to individual “prooftexts” within Qur’an and hadith rather than attempting to examine the entirety of the tradition. In so doing, they hope to spread the idea that Islam is both “the Other” and something to fear. After all, if Islam itself is inherently violent and intolerant it helps to provide a justification for their own inhumane political agendas such as banning all Muslims, including refugees, from entry into Europe the United States. As a scholar whose work is centered on the study of Islam and Muslims, I see no good reason to continue to use the terms “radical Muslim” and “Muslim extremist.” These terms distort much more than they reveal. In the wrong hands, such terms are used to promote fear of the larger Muslim community among non-Muslims, and furthermore, to justify authoritarianism and the existence of a surveillance state. Furthermore, they hide the numerous ways that Islam as a religion has actually encouraged humane and tolerant behavior and added positively to our shared global human heritage.

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How to Write About Muslims My life over the last several decades, both as an academic studying Islam, and as a Muslim, has coincided with a series of significant historical events that have profoundly impacted the way in which non-Muslims, and more specifically non-­ Muslims living in North America and Europe, have understood the world of Islam and Muslims. As I noted in the introduction to this volume, I began my graduate studies at the University of Virginia during the Iranian Revolution and the subsequent “hostage crisis.” In the years which followed, a series other events unfolded including Desert Storm, the attacks on the mainland of the United States by al-­ Qaeda on September 11, 2001, the Danish Cartoon Crisis, the American invasion and occupation of Iraq, the Charlie Hebdo attack, and the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States partly as the result of a campaign that explicitly targeted Muslims as people to fear. Thus, my career a scholar and teacher has coincided with an ambivalent attitude towards Islam within the academy. On the one hand there was suddenly a demand for people who could teach courses about Islam and Muslims which allowed me and many of my colleagues the opportunity to have successful careers as scholars and teachers. Unfortunately, part of that interest was the result of fear. I must admit, I have always envied my fellow scholars of religion whose primary area of teaching expertise is Buddhism. American students tend take courses on Buddhism because they think it is “cool.” They identify Buddhism with pacifism and tolerance. The associate it with Beat poets and the Dalai Lama, whom they invariably see as one of the “good guys.” Those of us who have taught about Islam in the last few decades have, on the other hand, done so in an atmosphere in which Islamophobia has been in many ways a socially acceptable form of prejudice. Many students enrolled in courses on Islam to learn why “they” hate “us,” why “they” take hostages, why “they” hijack planes, and how to fight back against “them.” In liberal arts colleges, where the humanities are given a place of privilege and this kind of discourse is generally  unacceptable, such things were not always said directly. But too many non-Muslim students took courses on Islam not because they saw it as a valuable part of their shared global human heritage from which they could gain insights that would make them better human beings. Instead, they took them to learn about “the Other.” As I noted in the introduction to this volume, over the years numerous people have come to me knowing who I was (a convert to Islam) and what I did for a living (a college professor who taught about Islam and Muslims) and asked, “Can you recommend a book I can read to better understand Islam?” As I have suggested, one impetus behind my writing this volume has been an attempt to provide a response to that question. Of course, I fully recognize the folly of such an endeavor. I am well aware that the religion of Islam, like any religious tradition, is far too complex and nuanced to be adequately explored within the pages any single volume. Furthermore, there are often unrecognized assumptions underlying such requests for the recommendation of a book on Islam. Many people want to understand Islam not so much because they are interested in the religion per se, but rather so that they

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can better understand political events and situations like 9–11, the Iranian revolution, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, or the Iraq war. This is rooted in the assumption that understanding the religious beliefs of Muslims is somehow the key to understanding everything one might need to know about them and the world in which they live, as if Muslims do not respond to economic and political situations, the experience of colonialism and neo-colonialism, and the alienation inherent in modernity in any other way than through the lens of religion. It is commonly assumed that the entirety of the civilization associated with Islam—its politics, cultures, history, arts. literatures, philosophies—can be reduced to or explained by religion. Of course, this is clearly not the case. Would anyone even think to ask a similar question about the so-called “ the West?” The notion that “the West” can be reduced to Christianity or is best explained as if it is “Christendom” or through Christianity has, in fact, been largely abandoned. However, the corollary idea that if we can understand Islam we can understand everything important we need to know about Muslims persists and does a disservice both to the religion and the complex civilization associated with it. A second assumption is that the religion of Islam is somehow simple, straightforward, and easily comprehended. If my decades of studying and teaching about Islam and Muslims have taught me anything it is that the religion of Islam is complex, immense, and multivalent. To be more metaphorical, Islam is neither a lake nor a river but an ocean. The deeper one dives into that ocean the more it reveals still unfathomed depths yet to be revealed. I have chosen in this volume to stress one particular emic concept from within the tradition that I have found to be central to any meaningful understanding of it, the concept of humanity (insaniyya). Islam is a religious tradition that provides a remarkably deep discourse regarding human beings and their role in the cosmos, a discourse that shares much in common with similar discourses in other religions and civilizations. Focusing on that discourse allows Muslims and non-Muslims alike to see ways which we can recognize our common humanity in our common search to understand the human condition.

Islam and Humanity By stressing the importance of humanity within Islam, I am in no way trying to diminish its emphasis on tawhid. The shahada, the ritual act by which one embraces Islam and becomes a Muslim, requires one to, first of all, affirm the unity of God by publicly witnessing that there is “No god but God.” It is an affirmation that God is at the center of everything, At the same time, the significance of humanity within that theocentric and theotropic universe of Islam is impossible to deny. Islam is a religion that places humanity into a particular and pivotal relationship with God. In the Qur’an, God demands that the angels prostrate themselves before humanity. Human beings have taken upon themselves the trust (amana) of God. Humanity is God’s chosen vice-regent (khalifa). Thus, the second half of the act of shahada

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significantly requires affirming that Muhammad, a human being, is God’s messenger. God has tasked a human being, who is also God’s Beloved (Habibu Allah) to teach humanity. Becoming a Muslim means not only accepting the unity of God but also the uniqueness of humanity. How have Muslims understood the proper relationship between God and humanity within Islam? On the one hand the relationship of human beings to God can be seen as one requiring “submission,” but what precisely does “submission” mean? As the contemporary feminist scholar of Islam, amina wadud, has argued, perhaps the word “Islam” is better translated not as “submission,” as is most frequently done, but rather as “engaged surrender.”4 There is a subtle but crucial distinction between these two translations of the word “Islam.” The term “submission” can easily be read as implying a lack of agency. One can submit to God obediently and mechanically, by simply doing what one is told whether one wants to or not. By comparison, “surrender,” or more specifically “engaged surrender,” implies both desire and an informed commitment. Defined in this way, Islam points towards a affective relationship of love between God and human beings. Indeed, this is how the Sufi tradition has tended to understand the “engaged surrender” of Islam—as an act of love. It means choosing to surrender because one wishes to please one’s Beloved rather than obeying a command from “the Lawgiver” out of fear or obligation, or even a transactional desire to achieve Paradise and avoid Hell. This implies that one should engage in prayer five times a day because it provides opportunities to spend time alone with one’s Beloved, or because it will help one to discipline the nafs, the animal soul, and thus overtime, become more fully human and thus better able to know God, rather than simply because it is a command to be obeyed without question. Whether we choose to describe Islam as “engaged surrender” or “submission,” clearly one of the primary ways that Muslims have expressed their relationship to God is through the shariʿa, especially through ‘ibadat (Turkish, ibadet). Sura Baqarah 2:189 advices people “to enter houses through their doors.” Traditionally there are four such doors—shariʿa, tariqa, ma‘arifa and haqiqa. Each door allows entrance into a deeper room within the house of Islam, and closer and closer to the ultimate reality at its center. The door which most Muslims pass through first is, of course, the shariʿa. The shariʿa provides a way for one to demonstrate engaged surrender through the body. It allows one to discipline and control the self and become more fully human. However, just as it would be a mistake to deny the importance of the shariʿa within Islam, it is also possible to exaggerate its place within the tradition, and thereby diminish the importance of the other more mystically oriented doors (and, thus, to become like the ducks in Attar’s Conference of the Birds, who refuse to go on the journey to find their king, the Simorgh, for fear that they may encounter deserts in which they will be unable to find water for their ablutions for prayer).5 While the shariʿa is certainly an institution that has played and continues to play a critical role within Islam, it is not Islam in its entirety. Neither can it be said to represent its essence. It has traditionally been seen as a door and a path, but not the only door or path. If we place too much emphasis on those worldviews within

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Islam that stress the shariʿa to the exclusion of other paths, we risk seriously misunderstanding the tradition as a whole. This tendency to privilege the shariʿa has been mirrored in many introductory books and articles on Islam which reflect the attitudes of certain modern Islamist thinkers, and the movements associated with them, who emphasize the zahiri aspect of Islam while simultaneously attacking or ignoring the more batini ones.

The “Reformers” and Their Legacy Most introductions to the study Islam present a version of “mainstream” Islam that either resonates comfortably with or explicitly draws upon the thought of the pre-­ modern scholar Ibn Taymiyya, who in the wake of the Mongol conquests, sought to cleanse Islam from what he saw as heretical innovation (bid ‘a). For example, John Esposito’s influential Islam the Straight Path surprisingly devotes considerably more attention to nineteenth- and twentieth-century reformers like Jamal al-Din Afghani, Muhammad Abduh, Syed Qutb, and Maulana Maududi, who like Ibn Taymiyya called for a return to an Islam stripped of popular practices like pilgrimage to Sufi shrines and devotional allegiance to the family of the Prophet, than he does to the Sufi and Shiʿa traditions. While the individual worldviews of these reformers are each in their own ways distinctive, they all share certain key characteristics with the thought and practice of movements like Salafism and Wahhabism, which seek to limit Islam as nearly as possible to their vision of the practices of the earliest generations of Muslims. They all concur on the rejection of bid ‘a, or innovation, which inevitably means ignoring much of the last 1400 years of Islamic thought as either irrelevant or heretical. They all propose shariʿa-centric approaches to Islam, stressing “orthopraxy” as central to Islamic identity. These iterations of Islam—the Islam of the aforementioned reformers, Salafism, and Wahhabism—can be succinctly boiled down to a few easily understandable essential beliefs and practices that can be contained within and proselytized through pamphlets (and more recently the internet).6 Perhaps most significantly, despite their claim to return to the practice of the earliest Muslims, they are remarkably modern and rational in their outlook, privileging a zahiri view of Islam which emphasizes the most straightforward reading of Qur’an and hadith, while presenting a populist view of religion rather than one dependent upon the interpretation of scholars or awliyaʾ. Influential organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaat-i Islami, organized like modern political parties, have tied these ideas to powerful religious nationalist and anti-colonial visions of states and societies governed by shariʿa. More militant Islamist groups like al-Qaeda and ISIL have convincingly used their own versions of this worldview to recruit and mobilize soldiers in a global political movement that has encouraged armed struggle in the name of their idiosyncratic interpretations of Islam. The worldviews associated with these reformers and movements have proven attractive to many contemporary Muslims in part because of their claim to return to the purity of Islam at its origins and also

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because they provide a rational vision of religion that fits relatively comfortably within the alienation inherent in modernity. It can be argued that much the interest in modernist and Salafi interpretations of Islam within the academy is rooted in a perception that they constitute an oppositional binary to “the West.” This is the hostile attitude towards Islam that lies at the heart of Samuel Huntington’s notorious Clash of Civilizations.7 With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the functional adoption of capitalism by the People’s Republic of China in the 1980s many political scientists sought a new explanatory binary to replace the former Cold War model of “Democracy” vs. “Communism.” While some were careful to pose that binary as “Islamism” or “Islamic Fundamentalism” vs. “Democracy,” in the popular consciousness the notion that the religion called Islam existed as one pole of a binary with “the West” took hold. Simultaneously, in the minds of many Islam became increasingly defined by its most puritanical and exclusivist iterations. Within the Islamic world however, the neo-Salafi versions of Islam are more frequently viewed as existing not so much in an oppositional binary with the West, but rather with more traditional expressions of Islam, especially with those which incorporated elements of Sufism. In particular, the modern “reformers” and Salafis are in many ways defined by their antipathy towards the Sufi tradition. For many of them, Sufism, especially at the popular level, was rooted in backwardness and superstition. From the rational modernist outlook of many of the “reformers,” Sufism was a quietist, apolitical, and inward-looking manifestation of Islam that was at least in part responsible for the fact that much of the Islamic world remained backwards and was therefore colonized by “the West.” The view of tawhid associated with Salafism and reformers tends to resonate closely with the austere monotheism of earlier anti-Sufi figures like Ibn Taymiyya and stands in distinct opposition to the mystical notion of the unity of being (wahdat ul -wujud) associated with Ibn ‘Arabi. They oppose visitation to shrines as shirk. They criticize pir-murid as a source of corruption. In fact, they similarly oppose all overt expressions of devotional allegiance to human beings whether the Shiʿi Imams, or the Sufi awliyaʾ, and in the case of the eighteenth-century Wahhabis, even the Prophet Muhammad, whose tomb they razed to the ground in order to make a statement against what they considered innovation and shirk. Even now the Saudi Arabian government, while allowing pilgrimage to the tomb of the Prophet, tries to prevent expressions of spiritual ecstasy by those who come for ziyara. While most of the modern “reform”-minded Muslims did not go to the extremes of the Wahhabis in trying to limit expressions of devotion to the Prophet Muhammad, they have generally tended to emphasize his “ordinary humanity” over his “extraordinary spiritual station.” This attitude is often reflected in introductory texts in English on Islam. In a previous chapter, I noted the frequent mention of Abu Bakr’s pronouncement following the death of the Prophet that “he who worships Muhammad should know that Muhammad has died but all those who worships know that Allah does not die,” a statement which clearly stresses the Prophet’s ordinary humanity. However, such sources almost never discuss materials that might similarly emphasize the spiritual continuity and availability of the Prophet

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Muhammad to his devotees following his physical demise. Nor do they emphasize commonly held beliefs about the Prophet that paint him as extraordinary, such as the belief that God’s first act of creation was the nur (light) of Muhammad, or his station as the Habibu Allah (the Beloved of God), or that God created the world specifically so that his beloved would have a place in which to take physical form. The image of the Prophet one takes away from most introductory texts is one that is consistent with that of the modern “reformers,” a respected leader whose primary roles within Islam are as the deliverer of the Qur’an and a model for the shariʿa through his speech and actions as transmitted in hadith. The “reformers” and the Salafis tend to define Islam according to its zahiri, aspects especially the shariʿa. Many of them are also Islamists, committed to the establishment of governments and societies that are rooted in and based upon the shariʿa. One of the most prominent of the twentieth-century “reformers,” the South Asian Islamist Maulana Maududi, went so far as to argue that saying the shahada does not actually make one a Muslim. It is instead, he argues, akin to signing a contract to become one. If one then does not then follow through by actually practicing the shariʿa one has broken that contract and is not, in fact, a Muslim.8 Similarly, societies that are not governed by shariʿa he declares non-Islamic. He writes: (I)t is God and not man whose will is the source of law in a Muslim society.,. If an Islamic society consciously resolves not to the accept the shariʿa and decides to enact its own constitution or laws and borrow them from any other source in disregard of the shari‘a, such a society breaks its contract with God and forfeits its right to be called Islamic.9

Influential Egyptian Islamists like Muhammad Abduh and Syed Qutb have put forward romanticized visions of imagined shariʿa-compliant states as a “third way” in opposition to Western secularism and communism as a solution to the social ills of modernity. Islam is described by these “reformers” as the only real cure for the social ills inherent in modernity. This emphasis on the shariʿa, or more specifically shari‘a as law, which is at the forefront of the “reformers” view of Islam, has also been amplified by most introductory writing on Islam. Whether it is John Esposito in Islam: the Straight Path, who, while recognizing that “Islam incorporated a variety of beliefs and activities that grew out of religious and historical experience and the needs of specific Muslim communities” nevertheless insists that “the five pillars and shariʿa remain the common basis of faith and practice for all Muslims;”10 or more general scholars of religion like Stephen Prothero who, in his bestselling textbook, God is Not One, defines Islam as “the way of submission” to distinguish it from Christianity as “the way of salvation” or Hinduism as “the way of devotion,” 11 or the influential anthropologist Talal Asad, discussed in some detail in the introduction to this volume, who defines Islam as a “discursive tradition” in search of orthopraxy, Islam is frequently depicted as a religion that stresses external obedience rather than interior experience. A zahiri Islam focused on shariʿa compliance is generally put forward as the “straight path” alluded to in first sura of the Qur’an. It is easy to understand the academic investment in the shariʿa-centered worldview of the aforementioned reformers and the Salafis. After all, much of the interest

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in Islam in North American colleges and universities, especially since the events of 9/11, has been driven by a desire to understand the agenda of Islamist movements like the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, al-Qaeda and ISIL because of their impact on regional and global politics. The global influence of the Wahhabi dominated Saudi government which controls the sacred sites in Mecca and Medina has also played a role. Simultaneously, the spread of Salafi influenced versions of Islam through organizations like ISNA and the Muslim Students Association on American college campuses has made shariʿa-centered Islam seem much more prominent than, in my opinion, it actually is. While the Salafi versions of Islam have been influential we have to be careful to recognize that they do not represent, nor have they ever represented, the “mainstream” of Islam.

In Search of “Mainstream” Islam In the remainder of this chapter let me present a description of an alternative Islamic worldview; one very different from that of the “reformers” and the Salafis, one that stresses love and humanity over “law.” It is a worldview that embraces, rather than rejects as heretical innovation, aspects of the Islamic tradition that emerged over the centuries in response to the Qur’anic event, especially elements of Sufism, which it assumes is an integral part of Islam. It is a worldview that while it generally accepts the shariʿa as a necessary and valuable element of the spiritual path, nonetheless places love rather than law at the center of Islam. It is a worldview that understands tawhid not as an austere monotheism in which the Creator remains completely separate and distinct from creation, but rather as a reflection of a mysterious unity of being between “the Beloved” and the universe. It is a worldview that affirms the importance of humanity within the cosmos, not only as a creature who is God’s servant and slave but, more fundamentally, as His friend and lover. It is a worldview that views the purpose of religion to be the perfection of human beings so that they might truly know “the Beloved.” It is a worldview that stresses the necessity of love for the Prophet Muhammad, not only as the deliverer of the Qur’an, but as God’s Beloved (Habibu Allah), the perfection of humanity and a source of spiritual guidance. It is a worldview that, in most cases, also incorporates devotion and love for the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law ʿAli b. Abu Talib, his closest friend and disciple, as an essential part of the spiritual path. It is, furthermore, a worldview that holds that besides Muhammad and ʿAli there are other perfected human beings among us, the awliyaʾ who are also insan al-kamil who know and understand the path to God and, most importantly, can guide us on our spiritual journey. It is my contention that for most of its history various versions of this worldview have been dominant within the world of Islam. For the purpose of the discussion that follows I will refer to this worldview as “mainstream Islam.” Of course, one should be careful about what it means to say that something is “mainstream.” Just because something represents the majority view does not mean it is necessarily the “correct” one. As a scholar of Shiʿi Islam, I have always been troubled by the way

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that Shiʿism is often defined by comparing it to “mainstream” Sunni Islam, rather than on its own terms. I hope that the discussion of the Alevi community in the previous chapter provides convincing evidence of the reasons why the study of Islam should include not only majority voices and traditions but minority ones as well; and why it should do so in ways that allow those minority voices to speak for themselves. Furthermore, I am not trying to argue that what I am calling “mainstream Islam” is somehow the “real Islam,” or “the straight path” as opposed to the Islam of the Salafis or the “reformers.” Of course, Ibn Taymiyya and his spiritual descendants are every bit as Islamic as Ibn ‘Arabi and his. Neither am I arguing, using the terminology of Robert Orsi, that “mainstream Islam” represents “good religion” as opposed to the “bad religion’ of Salafis, or that it is inherently progressive. While some aspects of “mainstream Islam” have been used by progressive Muslims to explain how Islam can incorporate feminist or egalitarian social values, “mainstream Islam” is not necessarily politically liberal in twenty-first-century terms. I do, however, think it is important to recognize that the common assumption that a zahiri view of Islam that is skeptical of mystical experience and devotional allegiance to holy persons represents the majority position within the Islamic world is most likely historically inaccurate. Even now at a moment when many scholars believe that contemporary Islam is dominated by the ascendant voices of the reformers and the Salafis this “mainstream Islam” persists and thrives. “Mainstream Islam,” like Islam itself is multivalent. It is expressed in many different forms each of them with its own distinctive characteristics. Different proponents of this worldview have taught different and practices. Some versions of this worldview place more importance on shariʿa than others. There are disagreements within “mainstream Islam” about the centrality of devotion to ʿAli on the path. Some forms of “mainstream Islam” are more hierarchical than others. Some are more egalitarian. There are important disagreements among “mainstream” Muslims about sexuality and gender roles. It is not necessarily “progressive,” although its general outlines have allowed such voices to function within its parameters. There are inevitable arguments about the exact nature of tawhid. Some versions of the worldview are more “sober” and “reserved,” while others are more drunken and openly ecstatic. But the basic outline of this mainstream worldview—a mystical understanding of tawhid and nubuwwa, an emphasis on God as the Beloved, the centrality of humanity in the cosmos—is remarkably consistent. I would argue that some form or other of the worldview has been the “mainstream” of Islam for most of its history. And while a minority might dismiss its importance by identifying it as a worldview contaminated by Sufism, and thus peripheral to Islam, or even heretical, it is clearly an Islamic worldview, rooted in tawhid, nubuwwa and qiyama and responding to the Qur’anic event. It is certainly a vision of Islam that has historically been far more dominant than the view of Ibn Taymiyya and the modern reformers who look to him for their inspiration. Nevertheless, it is an understanding of Islam that remains largely unknown to non-Muslims. And, despite the fact that it has been vigorously challenged in the last two centuries by the “reformers” who have so captured the imagination of recent scholars—so much so that many of them have uncritically chosen to treat

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them as the “mainstream” of contemporary Islam—it persists up into the present day. Let me close this volume with a modern example of that “mainstream” Islam that, for me, truly demonstrates the power of Islam as a humanistic religious tradition.

“ I Created Everything for You and You for Me:” An Alternative View of Islam The twentieth-century Turkish Muslim intellectual and Rifa‘i pir, Ken’an Rifai (1867–1950) was once asked if God “the Beloved” (maşuk) had no need of His Lover (aşıkından müstağnı).12 Rifai responded by stating that “the Beloved takes pleasure (zevk alır) from His lover. To see a fragment (bir cüz) endowed with His own qualities, and painted with His own colors certainly pleases Him.” Rifai then supported his argument with reference to a series of related hadith qudsi which reads as follows: I was a hidden treasure and I wanted to be known. Humanity is my secret and I am its secret. I created humanity for myself and the world for them.13

The question, its answer and the context in which they occurred, all of which reflect the aforementioned worldview of “mainstream Islam,” can be found in a book entitled Sohbetler, a massive published compilation of conversations between Ken’an Rifai and his mürits over the course of his lifetime. Ken’an Rifai is an important figure in late Ottoman and Turkish Republican Sufism. His life and career spanned the crucial period of transition from the late Ottoman Empire through the formative decades of the Turkish Republic. Like most late Ottoman intellectuals, Ken’an Rifai assumed both the importance and Islamic-­ ness of the Sufi tradition. He was thoroughly familiar with Arabic and Persian Islamic literature, including the Qur’an, the Masnavi, on which he wrote a detailed commentary, and the thought of Ibn ‘Arabi. He was also a deeply modern individual who spoke multiple European languages, was well-versed in European literature, art and music and fully conversant with modern science and technology. He served for years as an educator, both as a teacher and principal, in a variety of government and private schools.14 Ken’an Rifai was a Muslim, a Sufi and a man of the twentieth century who saw no inherent contradiction between his Islamic beliefs and modernity. The aforementioned exchange—like all of the conversations in Sohbetler— assumes the authenticity and authoritativeness of the Sufi path as well as its inherent Islamic-ness. The question about the relationship between “the Beloved” and “His lover” is posed within the context of the institution of pir-mürit. The person who poses the question does so as a dervish on the path, who clearly trusts the person he is asking as a pir, as one of the erenler. The questioner clearly views Ken’an Rifai, as someone who has knowledge about God and can speak authoritatively. Ken’an Rifai supports his answer by referring to a series of well-known hadith qudsi, thus

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firmly rooting his answer in the Islamic tradition, although it should be noted that the answers he gives to the questions posed to him throughout the collected conversations in Sohbetler refer not only to hadith and Qur’an, but also vernacular Sufi poets like Mevlana Rumi and Yunus Emre, as well as, his own personal experiences and insights. The entire exchange assumes that the proper relationship between God and human beings is one rooted in love. Both the questioner and Ken’an Rifai describe the relationship between God and humanity as one between maşuk (beloved) and aşık (lover), terms which are derived from the Arabic word “ʿishq” meaning “love. ” Interestingly, while “ʿishq” does not appear in the Qur’an, which instead uses the term “hub” and other words derived from that same root for “love,” by the twelfth century C.E. it had become firmly established within the Islamic tradition, especially in Sufi poetry, where it is used to refer to the kind of burning, passionate love that dissolves the distinction between lover and beloved. It is significant that in this instance both the questioner and the pir refer to God, not as the “Lawgiver,” or even as Allah, but as “the Beloved” thus implying an affective and intimate relationship between God and humanity. The question itself is incredibly profound. It is not simply “What is the relationship between God and humanity?” The questioner assumes that the relationship is, or should be, one of lovers. The question is “Why?” Does God get anything from His lover? Buried in that question are (at least) two larger questions. Why did God create the universe? And why did God create humanity? Ken’an Rifai answers his disciple’s question by stating that God takes pleasure in His lover because He sees His own characteristics reflected in him. Thus, the presence of the lover allows God to know Himself. He provides evidence in the form of the well-known hadith qudsi in which God says “I was a hidden (gizli) treasure and wanted to be known,” in which God self-identifies as a secret. A secret implies intimacy. It is something shared between those who love and trust each other. Furthermore, God also admits to being capable of desire. Interestingly, God’s desire is to be known (rather than feared or obeyed). Who is it that can know “the Beloved” and fulfill God’s desire? It is humanity and humanity alone. The hadith qudsi continues by noting that God and humanity share a common secret (sırr). Secrets are things shared by those who trust each other—friends and lovers. Accordingly, this is the kind of affective and intimate relationship with God to which we should aspire. Most strikingly, the hadith qudsi strikingly concludes by stating explicitly, that the reason for the creation of the universe was to allow for the existence of human beings, creatures uniquely capable of knowing and loving the Creator. That is to say, God created the universe for us and us for himself so that He could be known and loved. The notion of tawhid expressed here is definitely not the austere monotheism of Ibn Taymiyya, the Muslim Brotherhood, or the Wahhabi tradition. Rather, it reflects the wahdat al-wujud of Ibn ‘Arabi or the mystery of the divine secret shared between Mansur al-Hallaj and God, that was so intense that it blurred the boundaries between lover and “the Beloved” and led him to exclaim, “Ana’l Haqq.” Although it was Hallaj who was executed in the tenth century C.E., and according to stories of his

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martyrdom that are still widely known, purposefully denied a grave so it could not become a place of pilgrimage, it is significant that it is he rather than his executioners who has lived continually in the popular culture of Islam through poetry, paintings and songs as the martyr of Divine Love. In fact, the poetry and literature of Islam is dominated by voices who emphasize an understanding of the unity of God that is expressed in metaphors of the ecstasy of romantic love and intimacy between lover and Beloved. This mystical view of tawhid has long been “mainstream” which is precisely why “reformers” from Ibn Taymiyya to Maulana Maududi have felt such a need to oppose it. Those Muslim voices who gravitate to some form of wahdat al-wujud seldom refer to their understanding of tawhid with theological terms like monism, pantheism or Neo-Platonism. Rather, proponents of the unity of being tend to avoid defining it at all, instead describing it as an ineffable connection between the world and its Creator in which the only thing which is truly real is God. They speak to a universe in which the Names, the attributes of God, who in His essence is pure Unity, devoid of subject or object, are cast forth into multiplicity, like light through a prism, and manifested in creation where they can be seen by humanity. As Kenan Rifai explains in his commentary on the Masnavi: (T)here can be no duality or multiplicity in the realm of God’s oneness. There is no other being (varlık) in that being (vücut) of God and Truth. Look carefully at the things of the world which appear in so many colors and varieties to your eyes. Try to see the oneness gleaming in their varieties. 15

As Ken’an Rifai ultimately concludes his answer to the aforementioned question about the relationship between God and His lover in Sohbetler: The Beloved created multiplicity (kesret) in order to see Himself. I ask you, are you able to see yourself in that window? Surely it is necessary to put a glaze (sir) behind it for you to be able to see yourself in it. Without a doubt, that glaze is the physical world (vucut), is humanity (beşiriyet), it is existence (taayün). 16

Most of the created universe is blind, deaf and dumb. While the stars and planets may reflect the beauty and majesty of God they can neither recognize it nor reflect upon its meaning. Thus, they are incapable of fulfilling the desire of “the Beloved” to be known. Ultimately, it is only with the emergence of life that creatures with eyes could finally look upon creation and see the majesty and beauty of God’s Names manifest within the universe. However, they are still unable to truly know them. A cat or a monkey looking through the Hubble telescope at a distant nebula cannot be awestruck by its grandeur or ponder its meaning and significance. It is only with the creation of human beings, creatures capable of reason, emotion, contemplation and ethical understanding that the universe takes on meaning.17 It is only human beings who can learn to follow the Names back to their origin. According to Cemalnur Sargut a contemporary Rifa‘i pir in the spiritual lineage of Ke’nan Rifai: According to tasavvuf, only the human being is the site of manifestation of greatness while being the site of manifestation of tremendousness and the sum of all engendered things (mükevvenat). “Human being” means not only a creature living on the sphere of the earth but one possessed of a conscience capable of comprehending the realities of things in the

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Realm of Eternity, in whatever center or sphere, and of bearing witness to the unity of God the Creator (bari).18

The existence of humanity, who while made of matter possesses the divine spirit (ruh), allows for the self-disclosure of God. As she explains: The human being is a piece of God (Tanrı parçası) sent to earth in order to rise to the skies. The human is the self-disclosure and manifestation of divine light on the face of the earth. It was with the self-disclosure of God Himself in the human that, spiritually, earth became more luminous than heaven.19

Ironically, the physical world is essential as the locus of the spiritual path that allows for “the Beloved” to be known. It is the existence of the material world which allows the spiritual world to be known, and the creation of humanity as material beings that is the final key which unlocks that knowledge. Alone in all of Creation only humanity can accomplish the Divine purpose. As Cemalnur Sargut eloquently puts it: The true home of God is the human conscience (vicdan), the human heart. The human being is the monument of creation, the masterpiece of creation. Whatever exists in the world exists in the human being. Only the heart understood the Trust that God charged humankind to uphold; the heart encompassed it. Love was offered to the inanimate things, yet no existent but the human being could bear it.20

This is the reason that the Sufi tradition that is such a crucial part of “mainstream Islam” has placed so much importance on the Qur’anic narrative describing the creation of Adam. It speaks to the unique nature of Adam and thus of all humanity. It is Adam alone, the progenitor of humanity, who takes upon himself the weight of the Trust (amana) of God, thus, becoming a moral being. God and humanity exist together in a relationship of trust. It is what allows us to be friends and lovers. It is only Adam who knows. We, humanity, “know the Names.” Only human beings are the able to reflect all of the Names of the Divine and thus act as mirrors reflecting them completely onto Creation. As Cemalnur Sargut says of the creation of Adam: When the divine will made necessary the manifestation of the world, or a mirror in which God the Truth would see Himself as Being, this mirror had to be silvered in order for the meaning of seeing to be completely realized. Thus Adam (the human being) became this silvering itself, because if not for Adam, the mirror of being would have been dark and blind, and the divine perfection would not have been reflected on a surface in which it could be seen and known. The aim of creation, as we have said, is for God to be known, for his word and perfections to be comprehended. For the mirror to be silvered is for being and its mysteries to be unveiled by the intellect and the light of the heart. And this is possible only for the human being. 21

Creating Insan al-Kamil: The End of Humanity While every human being possesses the latent capacity to know God, it is only a perfected human being (al-insan al-kamil), someone who is fully human, who can actually do so. Human beings are by their nature material creatures who contain the

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spirit of God, but as a result of the fact that they exist as physical creatures, they are largely governed not by the spiritual self (ruh) but instead by the animal self (nafs). If the purpose of existence is for God to be known, the purpose of religion is to facilitate the perfection of humanity, by providing the tools by which human beings can discipline their animal natures and embrace their spiritual reality. The insan al-­ kamil is crucial to this process as they are not only able to know God themselves but also teach and guide others. Their role is to teach humanity how to become truly human so that they may know God. Chief among the insan al-kamil is of, course, the Prophet Muhammad who for Muslims is not only a focus of respect as the deliverer of the Qur’an, but also of love and devotion. As Muhammad is the Beloved of God (Habibu Allah), it thus incumbent upon us to love him as well. The noted scholar of Islam, Omid Safi, in his introduction to Cemalnur Sargut’s Qur’anic commentary on Surah Ya-sin, notes that she considers the Prophet to be “the Straight Path” mentioned both in Sura Ya Sin and Sura Fatiha. He writes: In both the opening chapter of the Qur’an and the Surah of Ya-Sin, the Qur’an talks about the “straight path.” There is at times a tendency among some Muslims to define the “straight” path as the straight and narrow, but that is a far cry from Cemalnur’s take. In her reading, the straight path is nothing other than the shortest distance to behold the One (Ahad), which is to enter the heart of a realized human being, epitomized in the Prophet.22

Safi similarly points out how, in contradistinction to the “reformers,” who emphasize the Prophet’s “ordinary” humanity Sargut, as a contemporary Rifa‘i pir instead stresses the extraordinary nature of the Prophet, going so far as to call Muhammad a divine theophany.23 He writes: In distinction to many contemporary interpretations of the Prophet which reduce him to a “mere man” and almost a delivery man of the Qur’anic revelation alone, in Cemalnur’s Ibn ‘Arabi-inflected interpretation the very being of the Prophet is a site of Divine manifestation: “When Hazret Muhammed’s (s.a.s.) body came into existence with all the divine realities, it became the site of self-disclosure of the name One (Wāḥid).24

The Rifa‘i order, like majority of the tariqas that developed in the pre-modern era not only identifies the Prophet as the Insan al-Kamil but extends their devotional allegiance to ʿAli b. Talib as well, expressing what Marshall G.S.  Hodgson has called ʿAlid loyalism, a set of religious attitudes towards ʿAli and the ahl al-bayt rooted in the supposition of a secret teaching transmitted, especially to ʿAli.25 The Sufi infused worldview of “mainstream Islam” has generally included a particular devotion to ʿAli b. Abu Talib. If Muhammad is the ultimate guide who teaches us the religion, ʿAli is the perfect disciple, and thus a model for all of us to emulate. The Rifa‘i order is no exception in this. Like most Sufi orders it is deeply ʿAlid in its focus, recognizing ʿAli as the Prophet’s closest companion and disciple and identifying devotion to him and his family as central to the spiritual path. As one commentator on the Rifa‘i tradition puts it: In another powerful verse of the Qur’an, God mentions having sent down the “Scripture and the Light.” Whereas the Scripture (Kitab) is readily identified with the Qur’an, the Light is often identified in the Sufi tradition as the Nur Muhammad, the Light of Muhammad, that pre-eternal effusing of Divine light that overflows in all the prophet to Imam Ali, and from

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ʿAli to the whole community of saints. The heart knowledge of the Qur’an is perhaps most clearly seen through the traditions attributed to Imam ʿAli, who received the esoteric interpretation of the Qur’an directly from the Prophet. At one point, ʿAli said: “All of the books of God are in the Qur’an, all of the Qur’an is in the Fatiha, all of the Fatiha is in the Basmala, and all of the Basmala is in the nuqta of the bā. I am the nuqta.”26

ʿAli, who is identified within “mainstream” Islam, according to a famous hadith, as the gate to the city of knowledge who is Muhammad is the model murid. As a result, he has become a perfected human being who is able to see God reflected fully in all of creation. Thus, he represents perfect knowledge of the Divine Unity manifest in creation, which is itself represented by the symbolic unity of the single dot of ink which is the nuqta of the letter “ b” in the first word of the Qur’an. That dot, like ʿAli himself, miraculously contains knowledge of everything including all of the knowledge present in the Qur’an and the cosmos itself. It is, thus, not surprising that most Sufi tariqas trace their lineage back to Muhammad through ʿAli. While ʿAli and Muhammad are the primary human sources for both esoteric and exoteric knowledge and guidance within this “mainstream” Islamic worldview, human beings remain in need of more immediate and personal guidance. Thus, guidance persists in the person of pirs and murshids who are able to lead individual murids on the spiritual path, facilitating their ability to achieve real humanity and fulfill the desire of God to be known that led to the creation of both the universe and humanity. As Cemalnur Sargut describes the awliya’ they “stand in the place” of Gods prophets: They are the persons who stand in the place of the messengers. Thus, you should accept what they tell you. Perform what they command. For there is no doubt that they command you only with the commands of God and the Messenger, prohibit you with their prohibitions. They speak as God causes them to speak…Whether in their words or their actions and movements, they follow the Messenger of God. For they have given ear to the speech of God who is the Exalted and Glorious. God whose dignity is sublime says: “Embrace what the Messenger commands and avoid what he has forbidden” (59:7)27

For the Rifa‘i tarikat, and for “mainstream Islam” more generally, finding one’s pir is thus seen as a necessary step on the path that facilitates one’s ability to achieve true humanity, and experience the mystery of the Love of God that is the true goal of human existence. As Cemalnur Sargut has said: (I)f a person meets a perfect human in this world, that is, if a murshid, a spiritual guide, awakens him and he comes to recognize his own substance, he will understand what the object of the profound longing he feels is. He finds God first in the external world and then in himself.28

“Mainstream Islam” and Shari‘a The Rifa‘i, like the great majority of Sufi orders, are generally a shariʿa compliant tariqa. In particular, dervishes in the Rifa’i order are encouraged to practice salat and keep the Ramadan fast. The issue of compliance with shariʿa is one of the most controversial within the Sufi tradition. For all Muslims, shariʿa compliance is a

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matter of degree. Very few things are obligatory (wajib) according to shariʿa and for the few that that are, like ritual namaz, there are usually no earthly penalties attached to neglecting them. In most places throughout the world, throughout most of Islamic history, if believers neglected their required daily prayers that was more often than not treated as a matter between them and God. Furthermore, it should be noted that severe shariʿa punishments such as amputation for theft and stoning for adultery were seldom if ever enforced. The issue of shariʿa is complicated by the fact that some Sufis have argued that aspects of the shariʿa could be omitted or neglected once a person had reached a certain level of spiritual enlightenment. If the purpose of prayer is to discipline the nafs so as to prepare for the rigors of the path, or to become a more ethical and human person, could one leave the shariʿa behind once one had reached a certain level of spiritual maturity? In the previous chapter we saw how the Alevis have for the most part replaced the ibadet with their own distinctive practices. The Rifa‘i have, on the other hand, in general been a shariʿa compliant tarikat, especially with regard to ibadet, encouraging their dervishes to follow it precisely because it was the practice of the Prophet and, thus, by definition a part of their path. Asked how one should respond to those on other paths who argue that prayer is no longer necessary for those who are “in love with God” and thus is some sense already constantly engaged in the prayer of the heart, Cemalnur Sargut responded with a line of poetry from Yunus Emre which reads: Our direction (kible) is the face of the beloved Our prayer is continuous Love is our Imam and the illuminated heart is our community.29

While this poem might seem to deny the necessity of outer zahiri prayer, she nevertheless adds: In order for a person’s prayer to be continuous, as mentioned in the couplet here, and for them to be firm with it, God says, “Even the Prophet is obliged to worship his Beloved with his body.” Worship of the outward form is the continuation of this state. People of God have performed prayer in various forms. None of the knowers of God, who I have been humbled to meet and know, renounced prayer. On the contrary the spiritually elevated people of their time increased their prayers. I know that the Prophet used to pray until morning. My teacher Ken’an Rifai would perform hundreds of units of prayer each night…Prayer demonstrates that our connection with the Beloved is not only spiritual; it needs material from. The outer (zahir) is the same as the inner. 30

While the Rifa‘i tariqa is shariʿa-compliant, at the same time, it does not make an idol of zahiri practice. Zahiri practice is considered both necessary and beneficial because it facilitates batini experience and understanding. However, while the law is important, human beings are clearly more important than “the Law.” “The Law” is designed to serve the needs of people not the other way around.

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“Mainstream Islam” and Modernity This conversation has focused largely on the Rifa‘i tarikat. They are but one example of an institution that fits within the model of “mainstream Islam.” It is significant that all of the above examples from the writings of Rifa‘i intellectuals are taken not from the pre-modern era, but rather from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, when “reformist” voices critical of Sufism are said to be in the ascendancy, gaining in power and volume. For those who wish to argue that Sufism is on the wane in the modern and contemporary world, far from dying out, the Rifa‘i order like many Sufi institutions has been adapting successfully to modernity and finding ways to speak to new generations of Muslims coming to grips with capitalism, nationalism, colonialism, imperialism and feminism. In fact, perhaps the most significant element of Ken’an Rifai and his legacy is the way it demonstrates how Sufism, as both an intellectual and popular tradition, can effectively speak to the situation of modernity. He was particularly successful in making Sufism relevant in the secular and nationalist realities of the Turkish Republic; and had remarkably progressive ideas on gender which were possibly the result of the fact that, like Ibn ‘Arabi before him, many of the teachers who introduced him to the Sufi path were women.31 Branches of the Rifa‘i tarikat associated with him are thriving in the contemporary world. For example, the aforementioned Cemalnur Sargut is the pir of a successful transnational Sufi order with connections all over the world. Of course, the persistence of the Rifa‘i order is only one example among many of successful Sufi organizations that have continued in and adapted to modernity. One thinks for example of the South Asian Chishti Sabri order that has grown to become a major transnational order,32 the Iranian Nimatullahi order, the Turkish Halveti-Cerrahis, the West African Tijaniyya and Muridiyya, the various sober and shariʿa-minded branches of transnational Naqshbandi orders, as well as neo-Sufi groups such as the Inayati movement, associated with Hazrat Inayat Khan, and various groups connected with Meher Baba (Fig. 7.2). Even more importantly, elements of “mainstream Islam” including belief in the awliyaʾ, ziyarat and other critical aspects of the Sufi tradition continue to be relevant for millions of Muslims who are not formal participants in pir-murid or institutionalized tariqas. The notion that Sufi interpretations of Islam have somehow been displaced by the shariʿa-centered Islamism associated with the Salafis and “reformers” is quite simply inaccurate. The Barelvi movement in South Asia, which arguably represents the largest plurality of Sunni Muslims in the region, explicitly accepts and encourages Sufi beliefs and practices, especially those of the Chishti and Qadariyya orders, as fully Islamic. One need only pay a visit to any major Sufi shrine in South Asia, Anatolia, or even post-Soviet Central Asia, where Sufism has survived nearly a century of official scientific atheism, to witness the continuing attraction of the Sufi tradition in the contemporary world. It is important to recognize that phenomena associated with Sufism like ziyarat, zikr, pir-murid, as the “mainstream” Islamic practices that they are. While the Salafis and “reformers” may deny the Islamic-ness of the Sufi tradition, this is not

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Fig. 7.2  Tomb of Bahauddin Naqshband, the pir for whom the successful and popular modern transnational Naqshbandi Order is named, outside of Bukhara, Uzbekistan

something that most Muslims have felt the need to do. The very act that figures from the time of Ibn Taymiyya to the present day have felt the need over so many centuries to critique and attack Sufism is clear evidence of just how powerful, pervasive and longstanding Sufi ideas and practices have been within Islam. Sufism is too often discussed as if it is something somehow set apart from Islam. As previously noted, introductory texts on Islam tend to gather the material on Sufism into one or two chapters at the end of the book, as if the Sufi tradition is an appendage tacked on to Islam. There is a long history in the academic study of Islam of seeking to locate the roots of Sufism somewhere else such as Vedanta, Christianity, or Neo-Platonism. The scholar of South Asian religion, Carla Bellamy has gone so far as to argue that the activities at the shrines of Muslim holy people in India should be identified as “dargah culture” or South Asian, rather than as Islamic, not only because as she correctly points out non-Muslims visit them, but because they do not fit Talal Asad’s paradigmatic definition of Islam as a discursive tradition in dialogue with Qur’an and hadith.33 Sometimes this need to separate Sufism from Islam has the whiff of Islamophobia about it. It is easier for some to justify an appreciation for writers like Rumi or Attar or musicians like Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan if they see them not as Muslims, followers of a religion wildly unpopular among Americans, and instead simply redefine them as Sufis. Similarly, one encounters American suburban converts to certain forms of Sufism who freely admit to being Sufis but adamantly deny that they are Muslims.

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When scholars of Islam discuss fiqh or kalam they seldom feel the need to identify it as merely one aspect of Islam (nor should they), but this is often the case when addressing Sufi beliefs and practices. Practices like zikr and ziyara are generally referred to as Sufi practices (which they are), much less frequently as Islamic ones (which they also are). The same is seldom true for aspects of Islam rooted in shariʿa. Shariʿa practices such as namaz and the Hajj are invariably labeled Islamic practices (and quite rightly so) even though there are many Muslims who do not perform therm. We have, of course, already encountered variations of “mainstream Islam” as I have described it here, numerous times throughout the pages of this volume, especially in the discussions of the Sufi and Alevi traditions. This should not be surprising as the Sufi tradition has in fact, permeated the popular cultures of the Islamicate world. Aspects of Sufi thought and practice have been nearly ubiquitous everywhere that Muslims have lived. The central ideas associated with it, including wahdat al-­ wujud, the importance of devotional allegiance, belief in radical love, and the centrality of humanity within the cosmos have been dominant within Islam for most of its history. Even Shiʿism, which from one perspective is a minority tradition, fits into this idea of “mainstream Islam.” The “mainstream” of Islam is at its core deeply humanistic, a tradition which values humanity and human virtue. It is indicative of the fact that for most Muslims, Islam is not merely a legal tradition presenting a unifying orthopraxy, but also an affective tradition rooted in love for humanity and love for God and also, as the late Shahab Ahmad has so eloquently noted, an exploratory tradition that understands human existence as an opportunity to explore the deep mysteries of God and the cosmos. Far from a “simple” religion of the desert, as some have tried to paint it, it is a remarkably field of possibilities for understanding the beauty of humanity, and through humanity reality itself.

Conclusion The Quran’ic event began when the first sura of the Qur’an was revealed to the Prophet Muhammad commanding him to recite in the name of God, a God whose stated intention is to “teach humanity.” This remarkable moment set into a motion a chain of events that would forever change the course of all human history. It resulted not only in the emergence of the religion of Islam, in all of its remarkable complexity and diversity, but simultaneously a major world empire, and ultimately a complex civilization. As a result, it has sent ripples that have radiated out throughout history and continued to do so up until the present day, leaving a legacy that has become a crucial part of our shared global human heritage. There is no one alive who has not in some way been touched by those ripples. Thus, any meaningful understanding of that heritage most of necessity include an understanding of Islam. One of the crucial defining characteristics of the religion of Islam is its emphasis on understanding the complexity of the human predicament. Islam simultaneously

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has understood and described human beings as creatures of unique value and possibility—we alone are worthy of the prostration of angels. We are God’s viceregents, the creatures that accepted the trust (amana) of God. We are the sons and daughters of Adam of which God reportedly said, “ I have made everything for you and you for me.” We are the niche for God’s light in the world. We are the knower of the Names and the reflector of the Divine into the material world. We are the mirror in which God is able to see His own attributes. Later generations of Muslims have looked back to the Qur’an and hadith and found codes and signs for unlocking the remarkable field of meaning and possibilities that is humanity. At the same time, we are also portrayed within Islam as creatures governed by our animal natures, who therefore tend to behave in ways that are petty, gossiping, greedy and grasping. Among our most prominent characteristics, we are portrayed as forgetful and, as a result, capable of thoughtless and cruel behavior. In all of the universe, having accepted the amana we alone in all creation are morally responsible for are actions and thus all too capable  of hypocrisy, arrogance and ethical failure. Islam tries through a variety of ways to come to grips with the contradiction and complexity of the human predicament. On the one hand Muslims have sought ways that we as human beings can discipline our animal nature and our baser impulses, to learn to control our hands, our tongues and our bodies (eline, diline, beline sahip ol). To that end Muslims sought to discover the shariʿa, a path uncovered and constructed through a discursive and rational process to guide us through life. As we are likely to forget that we are the servants of God and behave rebelliously, the shariʿa is there to demand, among other things, that we pause briefly several times a day, remember who we are and worship the Creator. For some, this is the essence of Islam, but most Muslims understand Islam to be about much more than just this. Some have chosen to emphasize that the best cure for the forgetfulness that causes us to behave unwisely is love. After all, lovers do not need to be reminded to remember their beloveds. Some Muslims have developed elaborate ways of learning to walk through live on the path of love. Along the way, they have developed affective paths of devotional allegiance to paradigmatic examples of how to be human in order that they might learn to emulate those heroes and teachers and in so doing become more virtuous—more patient, more generous, kinder. Islam has also inspired numerous paths by which human beings, the only creatures in the cosmos capable of doing so, might explore the ineffable reality that must surely exist behind and beyond the Quran’ic event—the wondrous Truth it points to, the “hidden treasure that yearns to be known.” These are things than only human beings may do and Islam encourages us to pursue them. From its very first revelation Islam has been about teaching humanity through the agency of human beings how to become truly human. In the process of trying to accomplish that goal Islam and Muslims have made remarkable contributions to the global humanities that are worthy of the attention of all of us Muslim and non-Muslim alike.

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Questions for Discussion 1. Why are the terms “radical Islam” and “extremist Muslim” problematic? With what other terms might we replace them? 2. What are some of the central ideas associated with reformers like Syed Qutb and Maulana Maududi and modern Salafis? How do their visions of Islam differ from “mainstream Islam?” What aspects of “mainstream Islam” do the reformers and Salafis reject?” Which do they embrace? Why? 3. Ken’an Rifai and the contemporary Rifa‘i tariqa represent modern expressions of “mainstream Islam.” How do the Rifa‘i represent a response and adaptation to modernity? How does their existence challenge the “reformers” critique of the Sufi tradition as backward?

Notes 1. Vernon Schubel, “What’s in a Name: What’s Wrong With “Radical Islamic Extremism”, Huffington Post, Dec, 11, 2015. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/whats-­in-­a-­name-­ whats-­wro_b_8782396 2. Robert Orsi, “The Study of Religion on the Other Side of Disgust,” Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Spring/Summer. 2019. 3. Michael Shermer, How We Believe: The Search for God in an Age of Science, (New York: W.H. Freeman and Company, 1999), 162–168. 4. Amina Wadud, Inside the Gender Jihad: Women’s Reform in Islam, (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2006), 23–24. 5. Farid ud-Din Attar, translated by Afkham Darbandi and Dick Davis, The Conference of the Birds, (London: Penguin, 1984), 40–41. 6. See Michael Muhammad Knight, Why I Am a Salafi, (Berkeley: Soft Skull Press, 2015) See especially Chap. 2, “Return to Pamphlet Islam.” In my opinion the best anthology of writings on Salafis and “reformers’ is Roxanne L. Euben and Muhammad Qasim Zaman, Princeton Readings in Isamist Thought: Texts and Contexts from al-Banna to Bin-Laden (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). 7. See, Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order, (New York: Touchstone, 1997). 8. Sayyid Abul A’la Maududi, translated by Khurshid Ahmad, Islamic Way of Life, translated by Khurshid Ahmad (Lahore Islamic Publications limited, 1979), 10–11. 9. Euben and Zaman, Princeton Readings in Islamist Thought, 92. 10. John L.  Esposito, Islam the Straight Path, Revised Third Edition, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 114. 11. Stephen Prothero, God is Not One; The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World, (New York; HarperOne, 2010). 12. I have tried as much as possible within this volume to avoid gendering God. To that end I have tried to avoid using personal pronouns for God. Unfortunately, given the affective and personal nature of the discussion of the relationship between God and humanity that follows I have felt the need to use gendered pronouns to refer to the Beloved. In Turkish there is no distinction between the pronouns between for He, She, or It. Sadly, in English one has to choose. I certainly do not mean to imply that God is male. I refer back to the note at the beginning of this volume for further explanation of why I have chosen to refer to “the Beloved” as “Him.”

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7  Conclusion: Not an Excess of Religion, But a Lack of Humanity—In Search… 13. Ken’an Rifai, Sobhetler (Istanbul: Kubbealti Neşriyati, 2021), 47 14. Ken’an Rifai, ed, Türkkad Istanbul, Listen from Love: A 20th Century Turkish Sufi Master, (Istanbul: Nefes Publishing, 2021), 9–14. 15. Ken’an Rifai. Translated by Victoria Holbrooke, Listen: Commentary on the Spiritual Couplets of Mevlana Rumi, (Louisville: Fons Vitae, 2010), 88. 16. Rifai, Sohbetler, 47–48. 17. Fatemeh Keshavarz makes a similar argument in Jasmine and Stars: Reading More Than Lolita in Tehran (Islamic Civilization and Muslim Networks), (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). pp. 75–76. 18. Sargut, Cemalnur. O Humankind: Surah Ya-Sin (p. 52). Nefes Publishing. Kindle Edition. 19. Sargut, O Humankind, 54. 20. Ibid., 55–56. 21. Ibid., 53. 22. Ibid., 26. 23. Ibid., 25. 24. Ibid., 25–26 25. Hodgson, Marshall G.  S. The Venture of Islam, Volume 1: The Classical Age of Islam, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 260. 26. Sargut, O Humankind, 20. 27. Ibid., 212–213. 28. Ibid., 55–56. 29. Cemalnur Sargut, Beauty and Light: Mystical Discourses of a Female Sufi Master, ed. Tehseen Thaver, translated Cangüzel Zülfikar, (Louisville: Fons Vitae, 2017), 149. 30. Sargut, Beauty and Light, 19. 31. For a discussion of ibn ‘Arabi’s female teachers see Sa’diyya Shaikh. Sufi Narratives of Intimacy: Ibn ‘Arabī, Gender, and Sexuality (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 95–117. 32. See Robert Rozehnal, Islamic Sufism Unbound: Politics and Piety in 21st Century Pakistan, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 33. See Carla Bellamy, The Powerful Ephemeral: Everyday Healing in an Ambiguously Islamic Place, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 6. For a thoughtful critique of her position see Anand Vivek Taneja, Jinnealogy: Time, Islam, and Ecological Thought in the Medieval Ruins of Delhi. (Stanford: Stanford University Press 2018), 139–141.

Glossary1

ʿAbd “Servant” or “slave,” frequently used to form names such as “‘Abdullah” meaning “Servant of God.” Adab (Turkish, edep)  Proper etiquette or comportment, frequently use in the context of Sufism. ʿAdala  Justice, especially the justice of God; belief in God’s justice is one of the five usul-al-din for Shiʿi Muslims. Adhan  The call to the prescribed daily ritual prayers (salat) in Arabic. Ahl al-bayt (Turkish, Ehl-i Beyt)  The family of the Prophet, literally “the People of the House, refers especially to Muhammad, Ali, Fatima, Hasan and Husayn. Ahl al-Kitab “People of the Book,” includes Jews and Christians, who have a Prophet and a book. Ahl al-Sunna wal-Jamaʿa  Sunni Islam, literally the people of the Sunna and the Community. Akhlaq (Turkish, Ahlak)  Ethics or morality. Al-Amin  “The Trustworthy,” an important epithet of the Prophet Muhammad. Surat Al-Baqara  Second and longest chapter of the Qur’an. Surat Al-Fatiha First sura of the Qur’an, said to contain all of the meaning of the Qur’an. ʿAlim (plural, ‘Ulama) A scholar well versed in religious knowledge, especially of fiqh. Al-insan al-kamil  A perfected human being.

 The following is a glossary of some of the technical terms which occur most frequently in the text. For terms that are commonly used throughout the Muslim world I have used the Arabic transliteration. If the Turkish, Persian or Urdu form is different enough from the Arabic for it to be possibly confusing, I have included it as well. I have also listed some Turkish terms that are unrelated to the Arabic language. 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 V. J. Schubel, Teaching Humanity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22362-4

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Glossary

Al-majaz qantarat al-haqiqa  Literally “the allegorical is the bridge to the real,” a Sufi aphorism that affirms that the material world points to the divine names of God, or, more specifically, that the ability to experience romantic love points to the love of God. Al-salamu ʿalaykum  “Peace be upon you”: The traditional Muslim greeting. Al-sirat al-mustaqim  “The straight path” mentioned in Sura Fatiha. It refers to the path which God wishes humanity to follow. Amana  “Trust,” a crucial virtue in Islam; Adam becomes God’s khalifa by accepting “the Trust”; the Prophet is known as al-Amin “the Trustworthy”. Amir al-muʾminin  “Commander of the Faithful,” one of the sobriquets of Ali b. Abu Talib. Ana Alastu bi-Rabbikum  “Am I not your Lord (Rabb),” refers to the event in the Qur’an called the Day of Alast when God asked all of the human souls in pre-­ eternity this question and they responded in the affirmative. Ana al-Haqq  “I am the Truth,” the ecstatic utterance of Mansur Al-Hallaj for which he was accused of blasphemy. Ansar  “The Helpers,” residents of Medina who converted to Islam when the Prophet came there on the Hijra. ʿArafat  Mountain outside of Mecca where the central ritual of the Hajj takes place. Ashhaduanna la ilaha illa Allah  “I bear witness that there is no God, but God,” the first sentence of the shahada. Ashhadu anna Muhammadan Rasulu Allah  “I bear witness that Muhammad is the Messenger of God, the second statement of the shahadah. ʿAshiq (Turkish, Aşık)  “A lover,” this term has multiple implications based on context but, in general, refers to a lover of God on the Sufi path. ʿAshuraʾ  The tenth day of the lunar month of Muharram, when Imam Husayn was martyred at Karbala. Awliyaʾ Allah (Turkish, Evliya Allah)  “Friends of God,” from the Arabic plural of wali (friend), refers to Sufi “saints” Aya  A verse of the Qur’an. Ayat al-Kursi  The Throne Verse of the Qur’an (Sura 2:255), frequently used for protection. Bab  Literally, “the Gate” or “the Door,” according to a hadith the Prophet designated ʿAli as “the Gate” to “the City of Knowledge,” which is himself. Badr  Early battle during the lifetime of the Prophet where outnumbered Muslims defeated a much larger pagan force. Bani Umayya The clan of the Quraysh to which Abu Sufyan and Mu’awiya belonged. Banu Hashim  The clan of the Quraysh to which the Prophet Muhammad belonged. Baraka  The spiritual power or blessing inherent in a sacred person or object. Basmala The first line of Sura Fatiha (and most chapters of the Qur’an) which reads,” bi-smi illahi al-rahman al-rahim” (In the name of God the Merciful and the Compassionate). Batin  The hidden or esoteric meaning or nature of a text or reality itself.

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Bayʿa  An oath of allegiance, such as the one given when one becomes the disciple of a Sufi master. Bi-la kayf  “Without asking how?” Ahmad Ibn Hanbal’s answer as to how to “literally” read anthropomorphic and allegorical verses of the Qur’an. bi-smi illahi al-rahman al-rahim The basmallah, “In the name of God the merciful and the compassionate.” Daʿi al-Mutlaq  In the Musta‘li Isma‘ili tradition the one person who knows the identity of the hidden Imam. Dhikr.(Persian, zikr, Turkish, zıkır )  “Remembrance,” especially the remembrance of God, a crucial theme in Islam, which also refers to Sufi rituals that facilitate remembering God. Dhul-Hijja  The lunar month of the Islamic calendar in which the Hajj takes place. Duʿa’  Spontaneous and individual prayers of supplication or petition. Eid a-Adha  The Feast of the Sacrifice commemorating Ibrahim’s willingness to sacrifice his son. Eid al-Fitr  The Feast celebrating the end of the Ramadan fast. Eid Milad al-Nabi  The birthday of the Prophet Muhammad. Erenler  Turkish term for the ‘awliya’. Fana  “Annihilation, ” especially mystical annihilation in God, a primary goal of the Sufi path. Faqir  A mendicant, a person who practices spiritual poverty. Faqr  “Poverty,” an important station on the Sufi path. Fiqh  The process of “jurisprudence” by which one “uncovers” the shari’a. Fitna  The term used refers to the period of conflict, or civil war, that took place within the umma after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, including Husayn’s martyrdom at Karbala. Furuʿ al-Din  Literally, “the Branches of Religion,” as opposed to the “Roots of Religion (usul al-din), refers to shari’a and theology (kalam). Ghayb  The hidden mystical realm. Habibu Allah  “The beloved of God,” a title of the Prophet Muhammad. Hadith A report about the actions or speech of the Prophet, collected into the Sunna, a major source for the shari’a. Hadith qudsi  A report about something said by God and reported by the Prophet but not included in the Qur’an. Hajj The Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca that is part of the “Five Pillars” of the ‘ibadat. Halal  Things that are permissible under shari’a. Haqiqa  Ultimate reality. Haram  Things that are forbidden under shari’a. Hijra  The migration of Muhammad and his followers from Mecca to Medina in 622 C.E. ʿibadat  Literally “service,” ritual practices in Islam, refers especially to the “Five Pillars.”

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Glossary

Iblis  The angel, or possibly jinn, who refuses to prostrate before Adam and thus becomes the Shaytan (Satan). Iʿjaz  Literally, “miraculous nature”; refers especially to the extraordinary nature of the Qur’an that is proof of its divine origin. Ijmaʿ  Refers to “consensus,” one of the usul al-fiqh used to uncover the shari’a. Ijtihad  Independent reasoning, a source of shari’a especially used by Shiʿi Muslims. ʿIlm  Literally “knowledge,” overtime it has come to mean zahiri knowledge, especially of surces of fiqh. ʿIlm ladunni  Knowledge direct from God,” in the story of Musa and Khidr from the Qur’an this is the special mystical knowledge possessed by the Khidr. Imam  A leader; it can refer to the leader of congregational prayer; for the Shiʿa it refers to the divinely chosen leader from the family of the Prophet through the lineage of ʿAli. Imama  The status of being the Imam; belief in imama is part of the usul al-din for Shiʿa Muslim. Iman  Religious faith, a deeper level of conviction than “islam”; one who has iman is a mu’min. InshaʾAllah  “God willing,” said by pious Muslims when speaking of possible future actions or occurrences as only god knows what will happen in the future. Insan  Human being. Insaniyya (Turkish, insanlık)  Humanity; the quality of being human. Iqraʾ “Read” or “recite”; what the angel Jibra’il commanded the Prophet to do before he revealed the first aya of the Qur’an. ʿishq (Turkish, aşk)  Love, especially passionate, ecstatic overwhelming love that blurs the distinction between lover and Beloved, frequently used in Sufi poetry. Ismaʿili  Branches of Shiʿi Islam which believes in a continuous lineage of Imams that emerge from the lineage of Ja’far as-Sadiq’s eldest son Isma’il. Isnad  The chain of transmitters back to the Prophet Muhammad that verifies the authenticity of a hadith. Ithnaʿashari  Twelver Shiʿa, those who believe in the authority of the Twelfth Imam who went into permanent “occultation” in the year 941 C.E. but is still alive; they are the largest Shiʿi community. Jahannam (Turkish, Cehennem)  The Arabic word for Hell. Jahiliyya  Literally “the time of ignorance,” refers to the situation in the Arabian Peninsula before Muhammad brought Islam. Jaʾiz  Things that are considered neutral and thus permissible under shari’a. Janna (Turkish, Cennet)  The Arabic word for Heaven or Paradise. Jibraʾil  The angel of revelation in Islam. Jihad Literally “struggle,” can refer to armed struggle against injustice and the enemies of Islam or the interior struggle with the nafs. Jinn  Sentient creatures made of fire that live alongside of humanity in the world; they are mentioned in Qur’an; Muhammad converted many of the jinn to Islam. Kaʿba  The cubic structure in Mecca that marks the direction of prayer. Kalam Theology.

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Khalifa Literally, “Viceregent,” Adam became God’s khalifa by accepting His Trust (amana); also, the title for the political successor of the Muslim polity, often rendered in English as “the Caliph,” after the death of Muhammad. Khatam al-Nabiyyin  “The Seal of the Prophets,” title of the Prophet signifying that he is the perfection of prophethood and the final prophet. Khawaraj  Followers of ʿAli who deserted him after the Battle of Siffin and rejected the authority of both Mu’awiya and ʿAli and formed their own community; they ultimately assassinated ʿAli. Madinat al-ʿilm  “City of Knowledge,” a title of the Prophet Muhammad. Mahabba “Love,” this word and other grammatical forms from the root “hub” appear multiple times in the Qur’an as opposed to ‘ishq which does not but becomes ubiquitous in later Sufi poetry. Majnun  “Insane,” literally to be possessed by a jinn; the character Majnun in the story of Layla and Majnun, has this epithet because he is driven mad by his love for Layla, and is seen as a metaphor for those “drunkenly” in love with God. Makruh  Things that are considered reprehensible but not forbidden under shari‘a. Mandub  Things that are considered recommended bur are not obligatory under the shari‘a. Maʿarifa  Gnosis, mystical knowledge. Masjid (Turkish, mescit)  A mosque, literally, a place of prostration. Maʿsum  The state of being protected from sin or error; most Muslims believe that the Prophet is ma’sum and Shiʿi Mulims believe that their Imams are also ma’sum. Mawla  Means both master and servant; it is an important title of ʿAli b. Abu Talib; also, refers to clients of Arab tribes. Mazar  Tomb or shrine, especially the tombs of Sufi awliya’. Miʿraj (Turkish, Miraç)  The Prophet Muhammad’s Ascension or night journey to the throne of God. Muʿamalat  Parts of the shari‘a that deal with social and commercial interactions. Muharram  The first lunar month of the Islamic calendar; the month in which Imam Husayn was martyred. Muhkamat  Verses of the Qur’an that are considered decisive or straightforward as opposed to allegorical in nature. Muʿjizat  Miracles that are performed by the prophets or Shiʿi Imams as opposed to karamat which are performed by awliya’. Munafiq “Hypocrites,” those who claimed to follow the Prophet in Medina but actually worked to undermine him. Murid  A disciple of a Sufi pir or shaykh. Muslim  One who has accepted the religion of Islam. Mutashabihat Verses of the Qur’an which are considered allegorical rather than straightforward or decisive. Nabi  A prophet, Muslim prophets include Adam, Abraham (Ibrahim), Isaac (Ishaq), Ishmael (Isma’il), Moses (Musa), Jesus (Isa) and Muhammad, among others named and unnamed in the Qur’an. Nafs  The animal self that must be tamed if human beings are to be perfected.

262

Glossary

Niyya  “Intention,” in Islam ritual acts must be made with intention in order to be efficacious. Nubuwwa The status of prophethood; belief in nubuwwa is an essential part of Islam and one of the usul al-din. Nuqta  A dot, a symbol of unity, for example the letter “B” in Arabic script in the basmala contains a dot at the bottom which is said to contain the entirety of the Qur’an. Nur  Light; this is an important symbol in Islamic mysticism, the first thing created by god was the light of Muhammad. Pir  A Sufi master. Qalb  Literally, “the heart,” the part of the human soul that is the site of discernment and identity which is acted upon by the nafs and the ruh. Qawwali  South Asian form of Sufi music associated with Chishti ritual. Qibla  The direction of ritual prayer; Muslims pray facing the Ka’ba. Qiyama  The Day of Judgment; belief in a Day of Judgment when human beings will be held responsible for their actions is one of the usul al-din. Qiyas  Analogical reasoning, one of the sources of fiqh used for uncovering shari’a. Qurʾan  The sacred book of Islam revealed humanity through Muhammad which is believed to contain the words of God. Qurban  Sacrifice, refers to especially to Ibrahim’s willingness to sacrifice his son commemorated every year on Eid al-Adha. Rabb  Usually translated as “Lord” it is perhaps better translated as Guardian and refers to God as the nurturer of humanity. Raʾi  The use of personal opinion in fiqh. Rakʿa  A cycle of ritual prayer (salat) including standing, bowing, prostration, and sitting. Rashidun Caliphs  The first four Caliphs of the first Islamic polity considered by Sunni Muslims to be “rightly guided.” Rasul A Messenger, a nabi who is associated with a book and a community; Muhammad, Moses, and Jesus are considered rasuls. Rida  “Satisfaction,” the Sufi station of being content with God’s will. Ridda  “Apostasy,” the term applied to the rebellion in early Islam put down by Abu Bakr in which some Muslims refused to pay taxes to the central government after the death of the Prophet. Risala  The status of being a rasul; risalat ended with the death of the Prophet. Ruh  The spiritual self; this is the presence of the divine within the human being. Sabr  “Patience,” an important human virtue in Islam and a crucial station on the Sufi path. Salat  The ritual daily prayer in Islam, also called namaz. Saqifa  The place and event where Abu Bakr was appointed as the first Caliph of Islamic polity. Sawm Fasting, Muslims fast from sunrise to sunset during the lunar month of Ramadan.

Glossary

263

Shahada  The first of the “Five Pillars” in which one bears witness that there is no god but God and Muhammad is God’s Messenger and thereby becomes a Muslim. Shahid  A martyr or a witness. Shahid al-Insaniyya  “The Martyr of Humanity,” an epithet of Imam Husayn. Shariʿa (Turkish, Şeriat)  Literally “the way to waterhole,” the term used for Islamic “law,“ the body of discourse concerning proper behavior. Shaykh  Term used for a chief, elder, or religious scholar; more specifically it is a term used for a Sufi maste. Shiʿa  Refers to followers of ʿAli, more specifically to the community who believe him to be the Imam. Shirk  Associating something else with God, a general term for idolatry of any kind. Silsila  A chain of transmission of teachers reaching back from a Sufi pir all the way back to the Prophet Muhammad. Sirr Literally “secret,” refers the secret intimacy between God and His lovers (ashiqs) such as Mansur al-Hallaj. Sufi An Islamic mystic, so called because early Muslim ascetics wore clothing made of coarse wool (suf). Sunna  Literally, “the trodden path,” refers to custom and the way of acting, especially the Sunna of the Prophet, which is recorded in hadith. Sura  A chapter of the Qur’an. Tafsir  A commentary on the Qur’an. Taqwa  “Sober alertness,” the state of living in remembrance of the presence of god and the inevitability of moral judgment. Tariqa (Turkish, Tarikat)  The Sufi way or path that leads to ultimate reality; it is used to refer to individual Sufi orders. Tasawwuf Sufism. Tawba  “Repentance,” the first station of the Sufi path. Tawhid (Turkish, Tevhit) The unity or oneness of God; belief in tawhid is the essence of Islam and the first and most important of the usul al-din. Taʾwil  Allegorical or esoteric interpretation of the Qur’an. Thawab  The spiritual merit one receives from performing pious actions. Uhud  Important early battle in Islam where Muslims were defeated by their enemies and the Prophet was wounded. ʿUlamaʾ  The plural of ʿalim, the class of religious scholars. Umma  The community of Muslims. Ummi  “Unlearned” or “illiterate”; the Prophet is considered to have been ummi. ʿumra:   The “lesser Hajj,” which can be performed anytime and is limited to rituals performed near the Ka’ba. ʿUrs  Literally, “wedding,” the celebration of the death anniversary of one of the ‘awliya. Usul al-din  “The Roots of Religion.” including tawhid, nubuwwa, and qiyama; the Shiʿa also include imama and adala.

264

Glossary

Wahdat al-Wujud (Turkish, Vahdet-i Vücut)  “Unity of Being,” an understanding of tawhid often associated with Ibn ‘Arabi, often seen as a kind of monism, that holds that the only reality is God, and that the world is only existent to the extent that it participates in the reality of God. Wajib  Those things which are considered obligatory under shari’ah. Wali  A friend of God, a Sufi “saint.” Zahir  The external or exoteric meaning of a text or reality itself. Zakat  The almsgiving that is part of the “five pillars” and considered obligatory under the shari’a. Ziyara  Visitation to a shrine, such as the tomb of the prophet or a Sufi wali. Zulm  “Oppression,” one who commits oppression is zalim.

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Index1

A ʿAbd al-Wahhab, 65, 73n3 ʿAbdul Qadir Jilani, 110, 215 Abraham, 2, 45, 51, 81, 88, 131, 134–136, 152, 156, 163, 171, 179, 212–215 Abu Bakr, 61, 87, 89, 90, 93, 98, 100, 161, 240, 262 Abu Hanifa, 79 Abu Lahab, 105 Abu Sufyan, 61, 62, 91, 102, 103, 258 Abu Talib, 57, 60, 90, 97 Adab (Turkish, Edep), 28, 83–84, 115, 149, 183, 196, 214, 222, 257 ʿAdala, 28, 73n12, 99, 100, 257, 263 Adhan, 47, 80, 257 Ahl al-bayt (Turkish, Ehl-i Beyt), 84, 94, 97–101, 103, 106, 116, 165–170, 172, 173, 188, 199, 201, 209–215, 225, 227n9, 248, 257 Ahl al-kitab, 56, 257 Ahl al-sunna wal-Jamaʿa, see Sunni Islam Ahmad ibn Hanbal, 79, 104, 231, 259 Ahmed, Shahab, 19–23, 30, 35n37, 35n40, 36n43, 36n50, 36n53, 37n65, 73n7, 74n20 Context, 21, 23 Pre-text, 21–23, 30 Text, 21–23, 30 What is Islam?: The Importance of Being Islamic, 20, 35n37

Ahmet Yesevi, Hoca, 186–189, 201, 215, 218, 223 Hikmet, 186 ʿAisha, 61, 89, 91 Akhlaq (Turkish, ahlak), 28, 83–84, 115, 149, 179, 183, 196, 197, 222, 257 Al-Amin, 58, 94, 164, 257, 258 Al-Ashʿari, 105 Alevis (Alevilik) Alevi literature, 209 Alevi music, 205–206 bağlama, 205, 206, 209, 227n9 cem evis, 202, 204–206 urban cems, 204, 205 ʿAli b. Abu Talib, 43, 57, 59–61, 84, 90–93, 95–103, 106, 108, 113–116, 117–118n17, 118n18, 127, 136, 137, 145, 148, 153, 157n10, 165–168, 170–173, 177, 178, 180, 188, 190, 192–193n14, 196, 198–201, 203, 204, 210, 211, 213, 215–218, 222, 228n14, 231, 242, 243, 248, 249, 257, 258, 260, 261, 263 devotional allegiance to, 98, 115, 116, 165, 168, 177, 178, 196, 201, 248 as Gate to the City of Knowledge, 65, 97, 108, 167, 216, 249, 258 as insan al-kamil, 242, 248 as Khalifa, 93

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271

272 ʿAli b. Abu Talib  (cont.) as Mawla, 90, 96–98, 108, 113, 165, 167, 173, 261 as Shah-i Awliya’(Şah-i Evlıya), 108, 165, 178, 216 as Shiʿi Imam, 84, 98, 115, 180, 216 Alid loyalism, 168, 248 ʿAlim (plural, ‘ulama, Turkish, ulema), see ʿUlamaʾ (Turkish, ulema) Al-insan al-kamil, 2, 29, 108, 115, 159–190, 225, 247, 257 Al-Khalil, 135 Al-majaz qantarat al-haqiqa, 160, 258 Al-Qaeda, 30, 224, 231, 233, 236, 239, 242 Al-salamu ʿalaykum, 258 Al-sirat al-mustaqim, 42, 258 Al-Tabari (Tabari), 57, 164 Amana/amana, 57, 58, 60, 67, 80, 108, 115, 121, 129, 137–139, 142, 154–156, 157n12, 159, 164, 167, 224, 226, 237, 247, 254, 258, 261 Amir al-muʾminin, 217, 258 Ana Alastu bi-Rabbikum, 138, 139, 155, 258 Ana al-Haqq, 53–55, 112, 142, 258 Ansar, 62, 89, 90, 258 Arafat, 81, 128, 216, 224, 258 Asad, Talal, 19–21, 23, 24, 30, 35n36, 35n37, 35n38, 35n40, 36n55, 48, 73n7, 241, 252 definition of Islam, 19, 30, 252 Ashiq (Turkish, aşık), 84, 85, 205, 207, 214, 219, 221–223, 227n9, 258, 263 ‘Ashura,’ 92, 101, 173, 176, 214, 258 Attar, Farid al-Din, 6, 32n16, 52, 66, 112, 179, 185, 220, 230n56, 238, 252 Conference of the Birds, 32n16, 52, 66, 112, 179, 185, 220, 230n56, 238 Awliyaʾ (Awliyaʾ Allah), ix, 2, 16, 27, 29, 46, 52, 66, 73n3, 84, 100, 106–110, 115, 116, 123, 125, 131, 134–136, 140, 145, 147, 148, 153, 156, 159–190, 201, 217, 226, 239, 242, 249, 251, 258, 259, 261, 263 devotional allegiance to, 106, 156, 159–190 Aya, 126, 127, 129, 130, 132–136, 138–140, 155, 258, 260 Ayat al-Kursi, 126, 258 Ayn-i cem, 143, 198, 202, 204, 205, 225, 226, 228n21

Index B Bab, 97, 108, 167, 258 Baba Farid Shakr Ganj, 180–182 Bani Umayya, 61, 62, 91, 102, 258 al-Banna, Hasan, 18, 34n23 Banu Hashim, 60, 89, 258 Baraka, 107, 109, 214, 258 Barelvi, 251 Basmala, 127, 249, 258, 262 Batin (batini), 65, 97, 107, 133, 140, 151, 161, 163, 167, 180, 197–199, 201, 203, 209, 215, 216, 218, 222, 239, 250, 258 Battle of Badr, 62, 90, 92, 103 Battle of Uhud, 62, 132 Bawa Muhaiyaddeen, 111, 113 Bayʿa, 60, 92, 108, 163, 165, 173, 212, 259 Bida, 170 Bi-la kayf, 105, 259 Buyruk Imam Cafer-I Sadık, 202 Prophet’s miraj in, 202 D Daʿi al-Mutlaq, 102, 259 Day of Alast, 138, 139, 176, 177, 203, 204, 258 Dede, 143–145, 199, 202, 204, 205, 207, 209 Devotional allegiance, 2, 16, 23, 24, 37n68, 43, 94–106, 110, 113, 115, 116, 156, 159–190, 196, 197, 199, 201, 214, 227n10, 228n15, 239, 240, 243, 248, 253, 254 Dhikr (Persian, Zikr, Turkish, Zıkır), 22, 68, 123, 128, 139, 147, 148, 150, 151, 159, 177, 185, 198, 206, 213, 251, 253, 259 Dhul-Hijja, 259 Dost, 52, 145, 146, 198, 203, 222 Duʿaʾ, 80, 212, 213, 215, 216, 259 E Eid Milad al-Nabi, 164, 259 Esposito, John, 17, 18, 239, 241 Islam: The Straight Path, 16–19, 241 F Fanaʾ fi-Allah, 65, 108 Fana’ fi pir, 108 Fana’ fi-rasul, 65, 108

Index Faqir, 110, 164, 181, 259 Faqr, 108, 164, 259 Fatima, 61, 84, 90, 92, 95, 97, 98, 100, 114, 118n17, 134, 165, 167, 170, 173, 211, 213, 257 Fiqh, 24, 50, 77–79, 81, 115, 181, 189, 253, 257, 259, 260, 262 Fitna, 92, 259 Furuʿ al-din, 50, 259 G Ghadir Khumm, 90, 96–99, 108 Ghayb, 27, 211, 213, 215, 259 Ghulluw, 201 H Habibu Allah, 57, 71, 94, 108, 162, 238, 241, 242, 248, 259 Hacı Bektaş Veli, 15, 166, 196–200, 209, 221, 229n45, 234 Hadith, 10, 19–25, 27, 32n11, 34n22, 35n38, 36n43, 45, 49, 57, 64, 65, 68, 69, 71, 78, 79, 83, 86, 94, 97, 99, 104, 108, 116n1, 117n7, 129, 137, 139, 143, 159–162, 167, 181, 191n2, 191n3, 215, 216, 219, 220, 225, 235, 239, 241, 245, 249, 252, 254, 258–260, 263 Hadith al-thaqqalin, 97 Hadith qudsi, 160, 191n3, 244, 245, 259 Hafiz, 126 Hagiography, 16, 180, 182, 183, 185, 209, 210, 215, 217, 218, 222, 223, 229n45 Hajj, 47, 48, 53, 58, 62, 80, 81, 99, 128, 145, 164, 181, 182, 216, 217, 224, 253, 258, 259 Halal, 159, 259 Hanafi, 79 Hanbali, 73n3, 79 Haqiqa, 108, 161, 188, 196, 201, 238, 259 Haram, 78, 81, 133, 159, 259 Harun al-Rashid, 209, 212, 213 Hasan ibn ʿAli, 61, 84, 90–92, 95, 97, 98, 102, 134, 167, 170, 257 Hijra, 61, 62, 89, 90, 97, 137, 258 Hodgson, Marshall G.S., 31n2, 32n10, 32n16, 34n22, 35n30, 46, 48, 74n22, 88, 116, 116n1, 117n6, 168, 197, 248 The Venture of Islam, 32n10, 35n30, 74n22, 116n1, 117n6 Hudaybiyya, 62

273 Humanism, 3–7, 12, 28, 30, 57, 226 Humanities, v, 1–30, 39, 46, 50, 52, 55, 56, 59, 65–71, 77, 81, 83, 84, 99–101, 104, 108–110, 113–116, 121–157, 159–165, 170, 173–178, 180, 184–186, 188–190, 191n4, 196, 204, 213, 218, 222–226, 231–255, 258, 260, 262 Husayn, 84, 90–93, 95, 97, 98, 101, 102, 114, 116, 134, 167, 169, 170, 173, 174, 177, 192n14, 259 Hussain, Karrar, 94 I ʿIbada (turkish, ibadet), 80–81 Iblis, 139–147, 154, 156, 158n19 Ibn al- Waqt, 102 Ibn ʿArabi, 20, 24, 52, 55, 107, 146 Ibn Kathir, 146 Ibn Rushd, 5, 6, 231 Ibn Sina, 5, 6, 231 Ibn Taymiyya, 55, 64, 74n20, 74n21, 87, 146, 239, 240, 243, 245, 246, 252 Ibrahim, see Abraham Ihsan, 220 Iʿjaz, 64, 94 Ijaza, 186 Ijmaʿ, 79, 86 Ijtihad, 34n23, 79, 86, 106 ʿIlm, 140, 146, 159 ʿIlm ladunni, 148, 159 Imam, 96, 136, 179 Imama, 73n12, 99–101, 135, 136, 198 Imam Shafiʿi, 79 Imam Zayn al-Abidin, 157n10, 165 Iman, 220 Insan, 1, 2, 31n1, 59, 66, 115, 122, 145, 222, 223 Insaniyya (Turkish, İnslanık), 1–3, 29, 37n68, 66, 69, 83, 115, 121, 130, 145, 177, 188, 196, 225, 232, 237 İnsan Olmaya Geldim, 225, 226 InshaʾAllah, 260 Iqraʾ, 58, 59, 96, 260 ʿIsa (Jesus), 131 ʿIshq (Turkish, aşk), 28, 84, 219, 245, 260 ISIS/ISIL, 224, 233 Islam definition of, 19, 30, 46, 135, 252 extremism, 29, 233 as legalistic tradition, 10–12, 25, 28, 30 “mainstream” Islam, 17, 30, 87, 231–255 radical Islam, 30, 233, 255

274 Islamic reformers, 46 Ismaʿili, 2, 43, 47, 100–103, 198, 260 Isnad, 78, 158n19, 191n2, 260 Ithnaʿashari, 100–102, 106, 196–199, 260 J Jaʿfar al-Sadiq, 101–103 Jahannam, 68, 123, 188 Jahiliyya, 57, 137 Jaʾiz, 78 Jalal al-Din Rumi, 6, 7, 12, 117n3, 160, 167, 191n4, 231, 252 Masnavi, 32n16, 117n3, 160, 191n4, 244, 246 Maulana, 7, 191n4, 231 Mevlana, 245 Jamal al-Din Afghani, 18, 239 Jamati Islami, 24 Janna (Turkish, Cennet), 68, 123, 188 Jibraʾil, 97, 98, 220 Jihad, 224 Jinn, 139 Jumʿa, 199 K Kaʿba, 57, 58, 60–62, 80, 95, 140, 145 Kalam, 14, 50, 253 Karamustafa, Ahmet, 48, 195, 196 Karbala as meme, 169–172, 176, 193n15, 193n16 as root paradigm, 171–174, 176–178, 200 See also Kerbala Kerbala, 200, 206 Khadija, 59, 61 Khalifa, 87–89, 93, 115, 137, 139, 140, 142, 145, 155, 159, 180, 188, 215, 237 Kharijites, 92, 200 Khatam al-Nabiyyin, 66 Khawarij, see Kharijites Khidr (Turkish, Hızır), 29, 136, 146–156, 159, 184, 222 Kırk makam, 199 Kızılbaş, 197, 227n9 Knight, Michael Muhammad, 18 L Layla and Majnun, 85–86 Love, v, ix, 6, 10, 13, 15, 16, 19, 22–24, 28–30, 42–45, 49, 52–55, 63, 64, 70, 71, 74n20, 77, 83–86, 93–97, 99–101, 103, 105, 106, 108, 110,

Index 112–115, 121, 131, 135, 142, 143, 158n19, 160–169, 173, 175–178, 182, 185, 190, 191n2, 199, 201, 204, 213–215, 219–223, 225, 226, 230n56, 231–235, 238, 242, 245–248, 250, 253, 254 M MacCaulay’s Minute, 32n9 Madinat al-ʿilm, 97, 167 Mahabba, 28, 84, 108, 121, 219 “Mainstream” Islam, 30, 231–255 Makruh, 78 Malik b. Anas, 79 Maliki, 79 Mandub, 78 Mansur al-Hallaj, 53–55, 74n18, 84, 87, 112, 142–146, 158n19, 160, 172, 179, 198, 233, 245 Ana al-Haqq, 112, 142 martyrdom of, 172, 246 Maʿrifa, 145, 146, 161, 177, 188 Masjid, 80, 199 Maʿsum, 99 al-Maududi, Abul A’la (Maulana Maududi), 18, 34n23, 239, 241, 246, 255 Mawla, 90, 96, 97, 108, 113, 146, 165, 167, 173, 222 Mawlana Jalal al-Din Rumi, 13, 52, 179 Masnavi, 32n16, 117n3, 160, 191n4, 244, 246 Mevlana, 245 Mazar, 161, 180 Memes, 30, 169–172, 176, 193n15, 193n16 Mewithoutyou, 111, 113 Miʿraj (Turkish, Miraç), 64, 202–204, 218 Mu‘amalat, 80–81 Muʿawiya, 91, 92, 100, 102, 103, 105, 178, 199, 200 Muhammad as al-Amin, 58, 94, 164 death of, 66 devotional allegiance to, 94–101, 106, 115, 162–165, 168, 177, 178, 196, 199, 201 as faqir, 164 as Habibu Allah, 49, 57, 71, 94, 108, 162, 238, 241, 242, 248 historical Muhammad, 56–63 miracles of, 64, 71, 166 as nur, 49, 57, 94, 113, 133, 162, 163, 213, 241

Index as the Prophet, 1–3, 11, 16, 17, 19, 23, 32n11, 33n20, 35n38, 37n66, 40, 42–46, 48–50, 56, 57, 59–67, 70, 71, 74n22, 78, 79, 83, 84, 87, 88, 90–95, 98–100, 102, 104, 107, 108, 114, 115, 117n17, 122, 123, 125, 134, 135, 137, 139, 148, 151, 153, 155, 157n1, 161–165, 167–170, 173, 178, 186, 188, 192n11, 196, 198–204, 211, 214, 217, 220, 230n56, 231, 240–242, 248, 253 as rasul, 64, 66, 80, 88, 99, 136, 162, 163 Muhammad Abduh, 239, 241 Muhammad al-Mahdi, 102 Muhammad Ibn ʿArabi, 52 Muharram, 16, 92, 101, 117n13, 176, 177, 192n14, 214 Muhip, 219, 222, 223 Muhkamat verses, 126, 133–134, 155 Muʾinuddin Chishti, 14, 233 Gharib Nawaz, 233–234 tomb in Ajmeer, 14 Muiʿjizat, 213 Muʾmin, 3, 219, 220 Munafiq, 61 Murid, 108, 109, 114, 148–150, 218, 249 Musa al-Kazim, 102, 186, 211 Musafir, 184 Musa, Prophet, 146, 147 Muslim, ix, x, 1, 39, 77, 121, 160, 195, 231, 233–237 Muslim Brotherhood, 24, 239, 242, 245 Muslim extremism, 30, 233 Musta‘li, 102 Mutashabihat verses, 126, 133–134, 155 N Nabi, 55, 56, 69, 71, 115, 135, 136, 149, 163, 226 Nafs, 108, 109, 176, 177, 188, 193n22, 238, 248, 250 Namaz, 11, 47, 48, 80, 82, 126, 181, 249, 262 Nefes, 15, 143, 179, 198, 205, 206, 209, 218, 225, 226, 227n10, 231 Neo-Platonsim, 246, 252 Nesimi, 198 Niyya, 80 Nubuwwa, 29, 50, 55–57, 65–68, 70, 71, 73n12, 77, 87, 100, 114, 122, 127, 135, 136, 162, 163, 225, 231, 243 Nuh, 56, 131 Nuqta, 127, 249

275 Nur, 49, 57, 94, 113, 133, 162, 163, 213, 241 Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, 14, 180, 252 O Orientalism, 8–10, 25 Orsi, Robert, 26, 234, 243 P Pir-murid, 109, 161, 178, 196, 240, 251 Pir Sultan Abdal, 150, 179, 198, 200, 206, 228n17 Pre-Islamic Arabia, 17 Q Qalb, 108, 109, 176, 177 Qawwali, 14, 180, 231 Qibla, 80, 115, 140, 145, 155, 195–227 Qiyama, 29, 50, 67–70, 73n12, 77, 84, 87, 100, 114, 122, 127–129, 136, 138, 185, 188, 225, 231, 243 Qiyas, 79 Qur’anic event, 74n22, 231, 242, 243 Qurʾan creation of Adam in, 29, 137, 139, 154, 155, 247 Musa and Khidr in, 146, 148, 184, 222 Qur’anic interpretation, 131, 132 Qur’anic narratives, 247 as sacred presence, 29, 124–126 tawhid and qiyama in the Qur’an, 127–129, 136 Quraysh, 57, 58, 60–62, 89, 90, 100, 102, 132, 164 Qurban, 186 Qutb, 186, 188, 223 R Rabb, 203 Radical Islam, 29, 233 Raʾi, 79 Rakʿa, 47, 80 Ramadan fast, 29, 47, 55, 80, 98, 128, 179, 181, 188, 195, 198, 214, 224, 249 Rashidun Caliphs, 105 Rasul, 55, 56, 64, 66, 69, 80, 88, 96, 99, 115, 135, 136, 148, 149, 152, 153, 159, 162, 163 Rida, 83, 108 Ridda War, 90

276 Rifa‘i, 201, 244, 248–251 Rifai, Ken’an, 231, 244–246, 251 Rifa‘i tarikat, 249, 251 Risala, 66, 88, 99 Ruh, 67, 108, 109, 145, 146, 155, 158n19, 176, 177, 190, 193n22, 247, 248 S Sabr, 83, 108, 121, 149–151, 154, 184, 222, 262 Sağ, Arıf, 15, 206, 225 Sahih Bukhari, 79 Sahih Muslim, 79 Said, Edward, 8, 9, 30, 32n14, 32n15, 33n20 Orientalism, 8–9, 14, 30, 32n14, 32n15, 32n19, 33n20 Sajda, 80, 140, 144 Salat, see Namaz Saqifa, 88–93, 102, 262 Sargut, Cemalnur, 246–251 Sawm, 80, 262 Sayyid Qutb, 18 Shahada, 45, 47, 48, 50, 55, 80, 88, 162, 163, 181, 195, 215, 237, 241, 258, 263 Shahid, 142 Shahid al-Insaniyya, 177, 263 Shah Isma’il Hatayi, 143, 197, 198 Shariʿa-mindedness, 48, 106, 199 Shariʿa (Turkish, Şeriat), 196, 198, 201, 263 Shaykh, 49, 84, 134, 143, 150, 154, 178, 219, 261, 263 Shaytan, 136, 139, 141, 142, 145–148, 260 Sheikh San’an, 220, 230n56 Shiʿat ʿAli, 90 Shiʿi Islam (Shiʿa. Shiʿism), 47, 100–103, 106, 200, 204, 242 Ismaʿili, 100–103, 198 Ithna‘ashari, 43 Twelver, 47, 100–103, 106, 200, 204 Zaydi, 101 Shirk, 42, 52, 53, 65, 73n3, 179, 240, 263 Silsila, 66, 108, 197, 211, 263 Sinan, 6, 231 Sirr, 53, 54, 210, 217, 245, 263 Sufi, x, 2, 13, 14, 16–20, 22–24, 26–29, 39, 42, 43, 46, 47, 49, 52–55, 65, 83–88, 96, 97, 106–114, 121, 122, 131, 134, 136, 138, 139, 143, 160–162, 164, 165, 176–180, 196, 197, 199–201, 231–233, 238–240, 263

Index Sulayman, 56 Sunna, 42, 45, 46, 48, 64, 77–79, 103–106, 129, 133, 257, 259 Sunni Islam, 16, 17, 19, 87, 96, 103–106, 110, 114, 116, 177, 199, 205, 207–209, 229n24, 243, 257 Sura, 1, 31n1, 42, 80, 96, 126, 127, 132, 133, 135, 139, 140, 144, 145, 147, 241, 253, 257 Surat Al-Baqara, 127, 132, 135, 139, 257 Surat Al-Fatiha, 42, 127, 257 Surat Al-ʿImran, 126 Surat al-Kahf, 133, 147 Surat al-Nur, 133 Syed Qutb, 34n23, 146, 239, 241, 255 T Tafsir, 118n18, 131–133, 263 Taqwa, 68, 69, 148, 263 Tariqa (Turkish, Tarikat), 145, 196, 263 Tariqa Shiʿism, 197 Tasawwuf, 107, 178, 179, 263 Tawakkul, 148, 149, 188 Tawasin, see Mansur al-Hallaj Tawba, 83, 263 Tawhid (Turkish, Tevhit), 29, 49–55, 64, 65, 67, 68, 70, 72, 73n3, 73n12, 74n21, 77, 80, 87, 100, 104, 110, 112, 114, 121, 127–129, 135, 136, 140, 142–144, 156, 162, 165, 196, 198, 223, 225, 231, 233, 237, 240, 242, 243, 245, 246 Taʾwil, 134, 151, 155 Thawab, 181, 182, 184 Turner, Victor, 24, 30, 36n61, 74n19, 171, 172, 174–177, 189, 190, 194n31, 220, 228n19, 228n20 anti-structure, 24, 30 communitas, 24, 30, 174–176, 189, 190, 203 liminality, 174 root paradigm, 74n19, 171, 172, 174, 175, 177, 190 structure, 24, 30, 174–176, 189 U Uhud, Battle of, 62, 132 ʿUlamaʾ (Turkish, ulema), ix, 2, 11, 23, 27, 37n66, 37n67, 79, 82, 86, 112, 181, 183–186, 188, 197, 200, 257, 263

Index ʿUmar ibn al-Khattab, 59, 61, 89–91, 93, 99, 100, 104, 155, 163 Umma, 18, 19, 33n20, 47, 48, 50, 61, 64, 66, 73n3, 80, 83, 86, 88, 90, 101, 103, 104, 121, 129, 131, 162, 165, 179, 180, 191n2, 192n11, 195, 224, 232, 233 Ummi, 96 Unity of Being, see Wahdat al-wujud (Turkish, vahdet-i vucut) ʿUrs, 14, 107, 179 Usul al-din, 28–29, 49–51, 55, 66, 67, 70, 71, 73n12, 73–74n13, 87, 100, 114, 163 ʿUthman ibn ʿAffan, 61 V Vedanta, 252 Vilayetname, 186, 209–218, 223, 229n30 Vilayetname of Hacı Bektaş Veli Hoca Ahmet Yesevi in, 187 lineage and birth of Hacı Bektaş Veli in, 211–217 narrative of Güvenç Abdal in, 218–223 See also Velayetname

277 W Wahdat al-wujud (Turkish, vahdet-i vucut), 52, 70, 110–114, 116, 196, 198, 216, 240, 242, 246, 253 Wajib, 78, 81, 250 Wali, 43, 96, 125, 136, 178, 179, 185, 186, 215 Y Ya ʿAli Madad, 97, 106, 166 Yazid, 92, 93, 101–103, 105, 106, 169, 173, 176–178, 200 Yunus Emre, 53, 179, 206, 231, 245, 250 Yusuf, 56, 130, 131, 158n19 Z Zahir (zahiri), 65, 97, 107, 133, 140, 152, 159, 161, 163, 164, 167, 186, 188, 199, 201, 215, 216, 239, 241, 243, 250 Zakat, ix, 47, 80, 129, 181, 182, 224 Zaydi, 101, 116 Zaynab bint ʿAli, 100 Ziyara, 16, 107, 110, 164, 178, 179, 194n32, 240, 253 Zulm, 138, 200