Friendship in Islamic Ethics and World Politics 9780472131570, 9780472126040

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Friendship in Islamic Ethics and World Politics

Based on a decade of direct diplomatic engagement with the United Nations, a decade of teaching on international relations, and another decade of research and teaching on Islamic and comparative peace studies, this book offers a friendship-­ related academic framework that examines shared moral concepts, philosophical paradigms, and political experiences that can facilitate developing and expanding multidisciplinary conversations between the Christian West and the Muslim East. The multicultural and interreligious discourses on friendship that are advanced in this book can help promote actual friendships among diverse cultures and peoples. This book has no published parallels, so far, in the current century. Most important, it is not a monologue. Rather, it provides a model of conversations among scholars and political actors who come from diverse international and religious backgrounds. The word Islamic in the title should not mislead the reader to suspect that this edited volume delves only into religious discourses. On the contrary, it provides a forum for conversations both within and between religious and philosophical perspectives. In short, this book is a forum for friendship conversations both thematically and in terms of disciplinary and cultural diversity. This volume presents a model for intellectual conversations about friendship. The result of the work of many prominent international scholars and diplomats over many years, it conveys at least one message clearly: friendship matters for not only our happiness but also our survival. Mohammad Jafar Amir Mahallati is the Presidential Scholar in Islamic Studies and Nancy Schrom Dye Chair in Middle East and North African Studies at Oberlin College. Mahallati is the founder of interdisciplinary friendship studies in America and Iran and has published on the subject both in English and Persian.

Friendship in Islamic Ethics and World Politics

Mohammad Jafar Amir Mahallati, Editor

University of Michigan Press Ann Arbor

Copyright © 2019 by Mohammad Jafar Amir Mahallati All rights reserved This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publisher. Published in the United States of America by the University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America Printed on acid-­free paper A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. First published December 2019 Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Mahallati, Mohammad Jafer, 1952–­editor. Title: Friendship in Islamic ethics and world politics / Mohammad Jafar Amir Mahallati, editor. Description: Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019027693 (print) | LCCN 2019027694 (ebook) | ISBN 9780472131570 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780472126040 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Friendship—­Religious aspects—­Islam. | Islam—­Relations—­Christianity. | Islam and international relations. Classification: LCC BP190.5.F73 F75 2019 (print) | LCC BP190.5.F73 (ebook) | DDC 297.5/6762—­dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019027693 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019027694

To Tahereh and Majdeddin Mahallati—­ best parents, best friends

Contents Contributors

xi

Acknowledgments

xvii

Preface

xix

Introduction Mohammad Jafar Amir Mahallati

1

Part 1. Friendship in Primary Sources: Definitions, Epistemological Realms, and Conceptual Frameworks 1 Friendship in Arabic: Its Synonyms, Etymologies, and Transformations A. Z. Obiedat

49

2 Treatment of Friends Ibn al-­Muqaffa‘ Translated from Arabic by Ali Yedes

69

3 Friendship and Love in Islamic Spirituality William C. Chittick

77

4 Aristotle and Iranian Ethicists: Friendship as a Moral and a Political Paradigm Mohammad Jafar Amir Mahallati

89

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5 The Mystery of Friendship: A View from Islam Paul L. Heck

111

6 Three Dimensions of Friendship: A Qur’ānic Perspective Mohammad Jafar Amir Mahallati

125

Part 2. Friendship within and between Religions, Nations, and Civilizations 7 Friendship in Pre-­Islamic Iranian Writings Jamsheed K. Choksy

145

8 On Friendship Rabbi Zalman Schachter-­Shalomi

153

9 Friendship in Confucian Islam Sachiko Murata

165

10 Friendship between Islamic and Christian Civilizations Richard Bulliet

173

11 Friendship in the Muslim World Abdulaziz Othman Altwaijri

183

12 Friendship between Religions and Cultures: The Foundation for Friendship between Civilizations Seyyed Hossein Nasr 13 Friendship in International Relations Iqbal Riza

191

209

Part 3. Friendship as an Agent of a Paradigm Shift in Human Relations 14 Will to Friendship: Rūmī’s Perspective Abdolkarim Soroush

221

Contents    ix

15 Friends without Borders: A Case Study John Marks 16 Global Loneliness and the State of Human Mental Health: How Religion Can Promote Friendship as a Paradigm of Peace in Postmodernity Mohammad Jafar Amir Mahallati

231

241

Epilogue: A Friendship Manifesto Mohammad Jafar Amir Mahallati

267

Appendix: A Sample Friendship Resolution

283

Notes

285

Bibliography

317

Index

327

Digital materials related to this title can be found on the Fulcrum platform via the following citable URL: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.11300847

Contributors

Abdulaziz Othman Altwaijri is the director general of the Islamic Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (ISESCO). He has served this organization since 1985. Altwaijri received his BA in English language and history with distinction from the College of Education at King Saud University (1974), followed by an MA in applied linguistics (1977) and a PhD in curriculum (1982) at the University of Oregon. He became assistant professor at the College of Education at King Saud University (1982–­85) and supervisor of the Center of Authorship, Translation, and Publication and of the School Textbooks Center at King Saud University in 1984. He has also served as secretary general of the Federation of the Universities of the Islamic World. Dr. Altwaijri has published many books and articles, including The Current Status of Arabic; Islam and Inter-­ religious Coexistence on the Threshold of the 21st Century; Islamic Diplomacy at the Service of Dialogue and Peace; Common Cultural Heritage, Alliance of Civilizations; and The Characteristics of the Islamic Civilization and Its Future Prospects. He has been awarded distinctions from several states and has been granted prizes and medals from different international and regional organizations. Richard Bulliet is a professor of history at Columbia University who focuses on the history and development of Islamic societies and institutions, the history of technology, and the history of the role of animals in human society. He received a BA in history (1962), an MA in Middle East studies (1964), and a PhD in history and Middle East studies (1967) from Harvard University. He has taught and lectured at the University of California, Berkeley, and at Harvard University. Bulliet has held a number of positions dedicated to Middle Eastern studies, Iranian studies, comparative cultural studies, and intercultural dialogue between Muslim cultures. He has writ-

xii    Contributors

ten and edited many books, including The Columbia History of the Twentieth Century, The Encyclopedia of the Modern Middle East, and The Earth and Its Peoples: A Global History. His individual publications include numerous scholarly articles and books, as well as several novels informed by his research in international relations and Middle Eastern cultures. He is credited for coining the term Islamo-­Christian civilization in his critique of Samuel P. Huntington’s book The Clash of Civilizations. William C. Chittick is a professor of religious studies in the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He received a BA from the College of Wooster (1966) and a PhD in Persian literature from the University of Tehran (1973). Chittick studied Persian at the University of Texas and in Iran, where he taught comparative religion and studied Islamic thought until just before the Iranian Revolution. He spent time as an editor of the Encyclopedia Iranica at Columbia University with his wife, Sachiko Murata, before joining the faculty at Stony Brook in 1983. Today, he is a renowned translator of Islamic mystic texts and has published dozens of books and numerous articles on such topics as Rūmī, Ibn ‘Arabi, the history of Islamic thought, the interplay between Sufi mysticism and philosophy, Shiism, and Islamic cosmology. Jamsheed K. Choksy is a professor of Central Eurasian studies, history, ancient studies, India studies, medieval studies, Middle Eastern and Islamic studies, and religious studies at Indiana University Bloomington. He received a BA from Columbia University (1985) and a PhD from Harvard University (1991). Choksy’s research covers a broad array of topics, including ancient and modern Zoroastrianism, Islam, archaeology, and languages of the Near East and Central Asia. Currently, he serves as a presidentially nominated and congressionally confirmed member of the US National Council on the Humanities. Paul L. Heck is a professor of Islamic studies in the Department of Theology at Georgetown University and founding director of Study of Religions across Civilizations (SORAC). He received a BA in classical literature from Harvard University (1988), an MS in classical literature from Oxford University (1990), and a PhD in Islamic studies from the University of Chicago (2000), where he was awarded a Whiting Fellowship. Dr. Heck was a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Jordan and spent summers in Turkey (1997 and 1998) and Syria (2002 and 2003). Before Georgetown, Heck held teaching positions at Princeton University and John Carroll University. He continues to work with Mu-

Contributors    xiii

hammad V University in Rabat as an Islamicist. His primary areas of research include the history of skepticism and spirituality within Muslim cultures, martyrdom in monotheistic religions, religious humanism, and political theology. He has published numerous articles and several books, including Common Ground: Islam, Christianity, and Religious Pluralism; Sufism and Politics: The Power of Spirituality; and The Construction of Knowledge in Islamic Civilization. His most recent monograph is Skepticism in Classical Islam: Moments of Confusion (2013). Mohammad Jafar Amir Mahallati is currently the Presidential Scholar in Islamic Studies and Nancy Schrom Dye Chair in Middle East and North African Studies at Oberlin College in Ohio. He received his PhD in Islamic studies from McGill University, writing his dissertation on the ethics of war in Muslim cultures. As the Iranian ambassador to the United Nations from 1987 to 1989, he was instrumental in bringing the eight-­year war between Iraq and Iran to a close. From 2005 to 2006, he was the recipient of the Harvard Fellowship for Persian Studies. Since 1991, he has given lectures and seminars related to various aspects of the Muslim world, at Columbia, Princeton, Yale, and Georgetown. He also served as a senior scholar and has been affiliated with several think tanks, including the Middle East Institute, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and Search for Common Ground. His current research involves the ethics of friendship and forgiveness in Muslim cultures and examines cultural and traditional factors that could be utilized in modern international relations. Mahallati is the author of Ethics of War and Peace in Iran and Shi‘i Islam (2016). John Marks was the president, until September 2014, of Search for Common Ground, a peace-­building NGO he founded in 1982 that has grown to six hundred staff with offices in thirty-­six countries. He also founded and headed Common Ground Productions, and from his new base in Amsterdam, he remains a senior advisor to both organizations. He has produced or executive-­ produced a wide variety of TV and film productions. Marks is also a best-­ selling, award-­winning author. He was a US Foreign Service officer and an executive assistant for foreign policy to US senator Clifford Case. A graduate of Cornell University, he was a fellow at the Harvard Institute of Politics and a visiting scholar at Harvard Law School. Marks received the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship, is an Ashoka Senior Fellow, and holds an honorary doctorate from the UN University for Peace in Costa Rica.

xiv    Contributors

Sachiko Murata is the founding director of Japanese studies at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. She received a BA in family law from Chiba University in Japan and worked at a law firm in Tokyo, before studying Islamic law and Persian literature at the University of Tehran. She was The first woman and first non-­Muslim to enroll in the theology department there, receiving a PhD in 1971. In 1975, she completed an MA in Islamic jurisprudence, but the Iranian Revolution prevented her from finishing a PhD in that area. In 1983, Murata joined the faculty at Stony Brook with her husband, William Chittick. Her research includes Japanese Buddhism, Japanese American culture, feminine spirituality, and Huiru, or Confucian-­ Islamic thought and history. Seyyed Hossein Nasr is an Iranian professor of Islamic studies at George Washington University, where he specializes in Persian Muslim philosophy, comparative religion, and Sufism. Nasr moved to the United States from Tehran at a young age, ultimately studying physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He stayed on at MIT to receive MS degrees in geology and geophysics, before pursuing a PhD from Harvard University in the history of science and learning. Nasr began his teaching career in 1955 and later returned to Iran to teach and serve as academic vice-­chancellor at the University of Tehran; thereafter, he acted as president of Arya-­Mehr University of Technology. He was also the head of the Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy and has held positions at the University of Edinburgh, Temple University, Princeton University, the University of Utah, and the University of Southern California. In 2000, Nasr became the first Muslim to deliver the Gifford Lectures. He has been a longtime proponent of perennial philosophy and follows the work of Frithjof Schuon in discussions of environmentalism, metaphysics, science, and Islamic culture. Nasr’s latest work, The Study Quran, is a new translation and commentary based on traditional Qur’ānic sources, prepared by him, Caner Dagli, Maria Dakake, and Joseph Lumbard, with Nasr acting as editor in chief. A. Z. Obiedat is an assistant professor of Arabic language and culture at Wake Forest University. He received his PhD in Arab-­Islamic philosophy and secularism from McGill University, where he also received his MA in Arabic discourse analysis in Islamic law. In addition to secularism, the current focus of his research is modern views on Arabic semantics (‘ilm al-­dilalah) as manifested in Arabic literature, rhetoric, and Islamic scholasticism. His study of Arabic and applied linguistics led to his interest in Arabic philology, transla-

Contributors    xv

tion studies, and the sociolinguistic-­ pragmatic approach of the Moroccan logician-­linguist Taha ‘Abd al-­Rahman. Dr. Obiedat has served the University of Virginia since 2007 as senior lecturer of Arabic language and culture and as program coordinator of its Arabic program. His research has been featured in prominent academic journals, including the Journal of Qu’ranic Studies, published by Edinburgh University Press, and Al-­mukhatabat. His scholarship has been funded by the University of Virginia’s Jefferson Trust and by a Bridging Cultures grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Iqbal Riza is a former Pakistani diplomat, currently serving as a special advisor to the secretary-­general of the United Nations. Riza received a graduate degree in law and diplomacy from the Fletcher School and served in Pakistan’s Foreign Service (1958–­77). In the United Nations, he has served as secretary of the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People (1978–­80), principal officer in the Department of Public Information (1980–­82), director of the Office for Special Political Affairs (1983–­88), director of the Division for Political and General Assembly Affairs (1988–­89), chief of mission in the Nicaraguan election (1989–­90), and chief of mission on the UN Transition Team to El Salvador (1990). As assistant secretary-­general in the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (1993), Riza served as a special representative of the UN secretary-­general twice, for missions in El Salvador (1991–­33) and Bosnia and Herzegovina (1996–­97). He has also worked for Concordia 21, a Spanish foundation dedicated to humanitarian aid projects, and was the chief of staff to UN secretary-­general Kofi Annan (1997–­2005). Rabbi Zalman Schachter-­Shalomi, known to many as Reb Zalman, is regarded as the father of the Jewish Renewal and Spiritual Eldering movements and was influential in Hasidic and Jewish mystic thought and ecumenical dialogue. He was born in Zholkiew, Poland, in 1924 and later moved to Vienna. In 1941, when he was fourteen, Reb Zalman’s family fled Nazi oppression and immigrated to Brooklyn, New York. He was ordained in 1947 at the yeshiva of the Lubavitcher Hasidim and later received an MA in the psychology of religion from Boston University (1956) and a PhD of Hebrew letters from Hebrew Union College (1968). In subsequent years, Reb Zalman founded his own organization, the Children of Light (B’nai Or). He taught at the University of Manitoba, Canada (1956–­75), and at Temple University (1975–­87) and served as the World Wisdom Chair at Naropa University (1995–­2004). From his last residence, in Boulder, Colorado, he continued to advocate for the importance of deep interfaith dialogue, spiritual mentoring practices, and the inclusion of

xvi    Contributors

active meditation in Jewish prayer. He died in July 2014 and, with global fame, left a great legacy for an inclusive approach to other faiths. Abdolkarim Soroush is a renowned scholar of Iranian history, political theory, and Islam. He is a former professor of philosophy at the University of Tehran and at Imam Khomeini International University and has taught and lectured at Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Columbia, Georgetown, Stanford, the University of Chicago, the Leiden University and the Wissenschaft Institute at Berlin. Soroush received an MS in analytical chemistry from the University of London, before moving on to study the history and philosophy of science at Chelsea College. During the Iranian Cultural Revolution, Soroush was selected by Ayatollah Khomeini to serve the Cultural Revolution Institute’s project of restructuring the academic curriculum in Iranian universities toward a greater emphasis on Islamization (1980–­83). He resigned after transferring to the Institute for Social and Cultural Studies in Iran. During the 1990s, Soroush took an increasingly critical stance against the political role of Iranian clergy, cofounding the magazine Kiyan and publishing controversial articles on religious pluralism, hermeneutics, and religious tolerance. His writings emphasize the distinction between religious experience and the understanding of religion, expounding values of reason, liberty, freedom, democracy, and equity. Some scholars liken his critical role in Islamic culture to that of Martin Luther in Christian Germany. Time magazine named Soroush among the one hundred most influential people for 2005, and Prospect magazine named him one of the most influential intellectuals in the world in 2008. Ali Yedes is a former associate professor of French/francophone and comparative literature at Oberlin College. He was the chair of the Arabic and the Comparative Muslim Cultures and Civilizations programs at Oberlin College, and he also taught at Colby College. He received his PhD from the University of California, Davis. Yedes is the author of Camus l’algérien (The Algerian Camus).

Acknowledgments

There cannot be enough appreciation for the opportunity to compose a volume on friendship, the finest divine invention in human relations. Abū Alī Sinā (d. 1037), known as Avicenna in Western literature and globally recognized as the father of early modern medicine, believed that both the cause of the cosmic creation and the power maintaining it is love. If we exist by virtue of love, then, any minimal success in exploring the qualities and the possibilities of friendship could not be credited to individuals or personal endeavors. This volume is truly the result of so many invaluable friendships in my life, from my immediate family, my close friends, and my professional colleagues. From my parents, Majdeddin and Tahereh Mahallati, I learned that the concept of “home” is meaningless without a welcoming door open to friends. From my siblings, Hossein, Amineh, and Ahmad Mahallati, I learned that it is more important that your best friends be your siblings than that your siblings be friendly. They showed me the unconditionality in the primacy of love and friendship. My parents and siblings have fortunately deprived me from understanding and experience of loneliness. What a blissful depravation! From all other friends, I learned that friendship knows no cultural, political, or time borders. From poets in my hometown of Shiraz, specifically Hāfeẓ and Sa‘dī, I learned that friendship is the content of paradise, while its opposites, loneliness and hostility, are the contents of hellfire. From the Qur’ān, I learned that friendship and love are the finest products of religiosity. The long and inexhaustive list of appreciations for the real inspirators of this volume cannot come to a pause without my offering deep gratitude to the colleagues who supported my work during my entire twelve years at Oberlin College. I must pay tribute to the soul of the late college president Nancy Schrom Dye, whose friendship brought me to that lovely academic space. David Kamitsuka, the chair of the Department of Religion when I arrived at Ober-

xviii    Acknowledgments

lin, gave me full support in my academic dreaming, as well as invaluable friendship in my intellectual journey. All my other academic associates were also far more than colleagues: they gave me the taste of working full-­time in a homelike space. For the realization of this volume, my colleague Maggi Kamitsuka helped obtain Mead-­Swing funds that gave me financial support, inviting field scholars to campus and asking for their contributions. All contributors to this volume did far more than the standard expected from an academic guest speaker. They not only wrote important essays but also supplied their academic views on friendship from their professional lives. My friends Clairemarie Fisher, Suzanne E. Guiod, Carla DeSantis and above all Mary Hashman did monumental work in editing this volume and making valuable suggestions for improvement. I am very appreciative to Carol Reed and her excellent indexing skills. Finally, I offer deep gratitude to senior acquiring editor Elizabeth Demers and editorial associate Danielle Coty at the University of Michigan Press, who received this volume with a visionary approach and handled the publication process so professionally, beautifully, and amicably. Looking back at all my friends together, I now see a garden with many tall trees, many unique flowers of wisdom and kindness, no repetitive color, no redundant aroma, and no replaceable leaf of livelihood. I appreciate every single one, without which the most rigorous concept of life loses its mystery, magnificence, and green essence. All one’s friends are most necessary for discovering full meaning in life and for perceiving paradise in the afterlife.

Preface The word for human being in the Qur’ān is insān. It is derivative from the Arabic root word uns, which means “intimacy/gregariousness.” —Abū Alī Miskawayh (d. 1030)1

In the spring of 2007, the year when I joined Oberlin College, I already had spent two decades of my diplomatic and teaching careers on peacemaking and the ethics of war. As a diplomat in multilateral relations during the 1980s, I had no choice but to devote my entire attention to the calamities of the Iran-­Iraq War (1980–­88) and to using diplomatic leverages to curb the scope and the intensity of that devastative and longest war in the contemporary history of the developing world. When war, ideology, revolution, vested interests of the global military industry, and superpower cold-­war dynamics entangle, peacemaking efforts become a difficult act of swimming against the flow of a flood. During February 1982, it was Iran’s turn to chair the UN Conference on Disarmament in Geneva. I became the youngest and, probably for that reason, the most inexperienced chair of that forum. Guiding technical and highly sensitive conversations between representatives of such superpowers as the United States and the Soviet Union was no easy task. How could a diplomat in his midtwenties meddle in conversations between George Bush Sr. and the Soviet UN ambassador? If I only could have foreseen that Iraq would use chemical weapons in the Iran-­Iraq War in 1983, I would have had a better sense of the significance of that UN forum and its conversations about the ban of use, production, and stockpiling of chemical weapons. I also would have had a better sense about the moral implications of the use of weapons of mass destruction. Soon, those lessons came to me by force and taught me that ethics matter in war and that peace has primacy even over as valuable a moral virtue as justice. The Iran-­Iraq War consumed some of the most important resources of

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many countries in the region for over a decade. It is little to no exaggeration to suggest that the wars with ISIS in Syria and Iraq and the Saudi carnage in the Yemen Civil War since 2015 represent the continuation of the unfinished Iran-­ Iraq War, which has disturbed the sociopolitical structures of the region beyond repair. The Office of the Secretary-­General of the United Nations, specifically under Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, spent more than a decade of its expertise in conflict resolution on bilateral and multilateral negotiations with the goal of limiting the scope of the Iran-­Iraq War and searching for avenues of peace between the two neighboring nations. As the second-­longest war in the twentieth century, the Iran-­Iraq War, with its unprecedented scope, demonstrated what Michael Walzer describes as the “naked body of moralities” of all conflicting parties and their supporters.2 Initially, Iraq was the aggressor, and Iran was the defender. But as all wars do, the Iran-­Iraq War rendered both parties insensitive to the numbers of lives and opportunities for peace lost—­a testimony to Stalin’s proverbial statement “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” In addition, the warring parties overlooked the irony that soldiers fighting on both sides of the conflict were Muslims from the same religious denominations and the same civilizational backgrounds. The Iran-­Iraq War was a full-­fledged fratricide with no real victor and no measurable gain for either side, presenting a very complex case for “just war” theories. It also represented a battle between the two ideologies of pan-­Arabism and pan-­Islamism. We know well, through a lens provided by Hannah Arendt, that, by themselves, collectivist ideological systems tend to annihilate individuality and to destroy the conversation opportunities needed for true power politics; in the words of Arendt’s commentator Jon Nixon, such politics rest in friendship and are comprised of the trio “relationality, mutuality and reciprocity.”3 When two ideologies are at war, they suppress the possibility of self-­criticism and self-­assessment that, in the proverbial words of the prophet Muḥammad, are the meaning of the “greater jihad.”4 Ideologies at war also suppress the potential for intrastate and interstate friendships, an opportunity cost for which war strategists rarely account. Obsession with “punitive justice” is blinding. For many, myself included, the existential question during the Iran-­Iraq War was that even if “just wars” could implement punitive justice, is justice the highest moral standard by which to make decisions about war and peace and to determine how to live life and conduct human relations? It cost me many years of my career to learn that the answer to this question is a well-­qualified no. Exhausted with spending a decade of my diplomatic career and another decade of my teaching career on war and its ethics, I came to Oberlin College,

Preface    xxi

in the spring of 2007, searching for a higher aspect of ethics—­something that could give me a scholarly break from struggling with the ethics of war and retributive justice.5 Soon enough, the rule of thumb turned my attention to friendship, a moral sphere that is the opposite of war, related to the ethics of friendship, and important in defining the most advanced realm in peacemaking. At face value, friendship seemed too obvious and accessible, too private and sentimental, and perhaps too general a virtue to motivate a vigorous scholarly research in connection with religion and peacemaking. Yet it did not take me long to abandon that illusion, my freedom from which I owe to, among other factors, the religiorational advocacy of Abraham and Aristotle for universal friendship, as well as their eternally fresh perceptions of divine and human relationships. A review of Western literature on the subject leads a researcher to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and its two chapters on friendship, containing puzzling and sometimes paradoxical statements. On the one hand, Aristotle defined justice as the sum of all virtues. On the other hand, he maintained that in a society of friends, there is no need for justice. The latter, somehow utopian idea prompted me to arrange an annual lecture series at Oberlin titled “Friendship in Muslim Cultures: Theory and Practice.” The question addressed by the series was how Muslim ethicists have dealt with the relationship between justice and friendship. Soon enough, at the early stage of my research, I learned that these scholars have not produced much literature on the subject over the last two centuries, during which most Muslim nations have been entangled with various degrees of colonialism, anticolonial liberation wars, and resistance literatures. Muslim philosophers’ silence on friendship began with Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt at the end of eighteenth century, which initiated the era of colonialism. As a result, contemporary Islamic political philosophy focused primarily on the paradigm of justice—­specifically retributive, restorative, and redistributive justice—­for the last two centuries. Colonialism manifested universal political and socioeconomic injustice against Muslims, disturbed their communal sociomoral fabrics, and suppressed their sense of self-­esteem, which is necessary for philosophical thought and for collective and contemplative modes of friendship. The Muslim anticolonial movements sought primarily to restore justice, with little or no intellectual space left for universal/international friendships and related discourses. Looking outside the Muslim world, I soon found that friendship studies had received substantial attention by Western moral philosophers of various schools in the aftermath of the Second World War. Confronted with the clear gap on friendship scholarship when postmodern Western and Muslim cultures

xxii    Preface

are compared, I asked myself a series of questions. How can I contribute to bridging this gap? How could friendship studies within various cultural frameworks help peace studies? How are both friendship studies and peace studies related to the study of comparative religions? Finally, if, as maintained by Michael Mitias, friendship has lost its paradigmatic significance in the last three phases of Western civilization since the medieval era,6 does friendship have a paradigmatic status in contemporary Muslim life? All the above points gave fundamental merits to the Oberlin friendship project and kept my increasing enthusiasm about friendship studies specifically in the framework of religions. It has now been about twelve wonderful years since I began this academic journey, which I take as a sheer blessing. Interest in the study of friendship brought me many friends across the globe. The subject matter proved to have an auspicious karma. During this journey, I learned that Abrahamic religions in general and Islamic tradition in particular have much to offer the three realms of peacemaking. Through ethics of war, religions encourage us to act morally even in war and to do our best to come to a cease-­fire. By encouraging apology and forgiveness, religions help end a cold war or a collective or individual hatred. Finally, by pointing at the primacy of relations, religions help us to overcome cold peace and understand that nonrelations are not “normal,” because indifference to others ignores the main point of life and religiosity. Jonathan Sacks is right in saying that “religion is the moralization of love.”7 I am utterly pleased that the present volume is a collaborative work. It offers a major contribution by the editor, conceptualizing friendship arguments within religiopolitical and civilizational frameworks, but it also offers a wide scope of friendship perspectives from many prominent academics and international administrators. In this way, one can see both friendship among scholarships and scholarships on friendship. In between the First World War and our time (2019), the last century in our current history has been caught, at both ends, between a devastating collective war and a resurgent regressive unilateralism. In its heart, this century also experienced a number of authoritarian ideological phenomena, such as fascism, communism, and Daeshism, which, together, spared no contemporary culture from devastative contributions in global life. If extreme individualism of the liberal philosophies was achieved at the cost of harming various human bonds, totalitarian ideologies took their adherents and victims to the opposite extreme of individual annihilation in the name of societal pseudo-­utopias. A short history of the last century is summarized as a period of interplay between collective wars, unilateralism, individualism, epidemic loneliness, and annihi-

Preface    xxiii

lation of individual rights in utopian illusions. These tendencies at the individual or communal levels have defined our postmodern era across all borders and cultures. Friendship, as the contributors to this volume discuss, is the only antidote to all the above evils, if brought back as a paradigm of our current connected civilizations. Friendship studies do not seem, therefore, to be optional, if we care about our life quality, our happiness, or even our survival. Mohammad Jafar Amir Mahallati

Introduction Mohammad Jafar Amir Mahallati First choose the boon companion, then the path to life [al-­rafīq thumma ’ṭ-­ṭarīq]. —­Prophet Muḥammad1 Everyone, if sober or drunk, is in quest of the Friend: Every place is the house of love, whether mosque or temple. —­Shamsuddīn Moḥammad Ḥāfeẓ2 The relationship to one’s fellow man is the relationship of prayer; the relationship to oneself is the relationship of striving; out of prayer is drawn the strength with which to strive. —­Franz Kafka3 The indefinability of friendship might be part of its “essence.” It is neither accidental, nor our “failure” that we “circle around” the precise nature of friendship—­on the contrary, this is inevitable, since friendship itself is about “circling around.” —­E. van der Zweerde4

Friendship and Its Paradigmatic Necessity On January 17, 2018, the British Prime Minister Theresa May created a ministerial position and appointed a new cabinet member with no precedence in the world’s geography and history of governments. With the appointment of the new minister of loneliness, the status and the future of friendship studies has changed forever. The field is now transformed from a subject of intellectual, academic, and ethical inquiry into a cutting-­edge field of policy making. Ironically, the leader of the Brexit government appointed the first minister of loneliness, a cure plan for a symbolically self-­inflicted injury.

2     Friendship in Islamic Ethics and World Politics

This historic decision came as a result of an official report from the Jo Cox Commission on Loneliness (“UK Must Tackle Loneliness,” issued on December 14, 2017), demonstrating, through concrete evidences, that more than nine million British citizens are suffering from chronic loneliness, with many serious ill effects on their mental and physical health. It is interesting that the title of the new ministerial position references “loneliness” instead of “friendship.” Justice departments, created to prevent and remedy social injustices and now present in all countries, are not called “injustice departments.” The groundbreaking decision to create the ministry of loneliness has nevertheless rendered friendship studies a historic potential to provide guidelines for policy making at communal, national, and international levels. Currently, toward the end of the second decade of the twenty-­first century, chronic economic recessions, waves of famine and drought, millions of war-­ stricken refugees migrating from the greater Middle East and North Africa to Western societies, and the outburst of global terrorism have encouraged ultraright, isolationist, and populist political parties to mushroom across Europe and North America. Brexit, Trumpocracy (so called by David Frum), the threat of Frexit in 2017, the increasing undemocratic tendencies in China and Russia in favor of lifetime presidents, the eight wars continuing in the Middle East (from Afghanistan to Nigeria), and the policy of Muslim cleansing led (ironically) by a Nobel laureate politician in Myanmar are but a few examples, among many more, of the global eruption of ideological, ethnic, and nationalistic tensions. Moreover, quite paradoxically, the internet, Facebook, and other global communication facilities have not rendered closer and deeper intimacies within various societies. There are various explanations for the aforementioned regressions. “The Great Regression that we are witnessing currently,” argues the contemporary Indian American anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, “may be the product of a collaboration between the risks of globalization and neoliberalism. The problems that have arisen from the failure of politicians to exercise some control over global interdependence are impinging on societies that are institutionally and culturally unprepared for them.”5 Like many other analysts, Appadurai holds that neoliberal economy and globalization are at odds with each other because the dissolution of national economy and economic sovereignty in neoliberal economy creates an identity crisis that makes cultures compensate for it by resisting globalization.6 Appadurai specifically points to three realms where this identity crisis is well manifested. There are three ways in which today’s widespread feeling of being fed up with democracy itself has a distinctive logic and context. The first is that

Introduction    3

the extension of the internet and social media to growing sectors of the population and the availability of web-­based mobilization, propaganda, identity-­building and peer-­seeking have created the dangerous illusion that we can all find peers, allies, friends, collaborators, converts and colleagues, whoever we are and whatever we want. The second is the fact that every single nation-­state has lost ground in its efforts to maintain any semblance of economic sovereignty. The third factor is that the worldwide spread of the ideology of human rights has given some minimal purchase to strangers, foreigners and migrants in virtually every country in the world, even if they face a harsh welcome and severe conditions wherever they go. Together, these three factors have deepened the global intolerance for due process, deliberative rationality and political patience that democratic systems always require.7 Ivan Krastev sheds light on another side of the problem, the ramifications of global migration and technological progress: “Demography makes Europeans imagine a world in which their cultures are vanishing, while the technological revolution promises them a world in which their current jobs will disappear.”8 Krastev adds, “In the first decades after 1989 the spread of free elections meant the inclusion of different minority groups (ethnic, religious, sexual) in public life. Today elections foster the empowerment of majority groups.”9 But this majority lacks integrity. Thus, Krastev points out, “We live in a world that is more connected but also less integrated.”10 The reason for this unsettlement is what Krastev calls “the dictatorship of global comparisons.” “People do not compare their lives with those of their neighbours any more,” Krastev explains, concluding, “They compare themselves with the most prosperous inhabitants of the planet.”11 Adding to the ironies of our contemporary life, the internet, the most influential means of global connectedness, was created in the United States, a country becoming a pioneer for separationism, as is well formulated by the contemporary French philosopher Bruno Latour. By pointing to the election of Donald Trump, Latour holds, “The country that imposed its own particular globalization on the world, and with such violence; the country that built itself on the basis of migration, while eliminating its earliest inhabitants; that same country is now entrusting its destiny to a man who is promising to lock himself away in a fortress, refusing entry to any refugees, no longer coming to the aid of any cause that is not rooted in his own soil, while preparing to intervene anywhere and everywhere in the same casual, blundering way.”12 The slogan “Make America Great Again” is an endeavor to define American identity as opposed to “others,” in the spirit of the dictatorship of global competition. But

4     Friendship in Islamic Ethics and World Politics

who are “us” and “them”? Zigmunt Bauman, a highly influential contemporary European intellectual, answers, None of the extant political formations, however, measures up to a genuinely “cosmopolitan” standard; all of them pair a “we” against a “them.” Each member of that opposition combines a uniting or integrating function with a dividing and separating one—­indeed, each can perform one of the two assigned functions by and through acquitting itself from the other. “Us” and “them” are related as heads and tails—­two faces of the same coin; and a coin with only one face is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. The two members of the opposition are reciprocally “negatively defined”: “them” as “not-­us,” and “we” as “not-­them.”13 Bauman refers to Umberto Eco to address the heart of a global danger: “Eco goes so far as to say ‘most dangerous form’ of intolerance is that which arises in the absence of any doctrine.”14 This intellectual void and a lack of moral control are among the causes of what the contemporary German sociologist Oliver Nachtwey calls the “process of decivilization.” “A kind of uncontrolled rage has entered the political public sphere,” Nachtwey holds, explaining, “Hatred is openly expressed; dangerous feelings, fantasies of violence and even the wish to kill are frivolously voiced. People’s affect control has been eroded in many ways: on the Internet, in the street and in everyday behaviour.” He adds, “Norbert Elias [a contemporary German sociologist] has described the process of civilization as a long-­term trend of social interaction leading to greater control of our feelings and the ability to organize our lives. But if we put all the symptoms mentioned above together we have the dangerous prospect of a regressive process of decivilization.”15 Consider the state of the mental health of individuals in contemporary societies. Widespread global isolationism is rampant at both individual and societal levels. Addressing the universal epidemic of mental and physical diseases caused by increasing loneliness in modern humanity, which threatens many societies, George Monbiot, a contemporary journalist, wrote, in an opinion piece in the Guardian, “It’s unsurprising that social isolation is strongly associated with depression, suicide, anxiety, insomnia, fear and the perception of threat.” “It’s more surprising,” Monbiot asserts, “to discover the range of physical illnesses it causes or exacerbates. Dementia, high blood pressure, heart disease, strokes, lowered resistance to viruses, even accidents are more common among chronically lonely people.” Monbiot is addressing a serious crisis caused primarily by the neoliberal economics that advocates, on the one

Introduction    5

hand, intense individualistic competition and, on the other, unconscious consumerism. He concludes, “Consumerism fills the social void. But far from curing the disease of isolation, it intensifies social comparison to the point at which, having consumed all else, we start to prey upon ourselves.”16 Reflecting on isolationism on economic and industrial levels in a 2016 World Politics Review article, Steven Metz quoted strategist scholar T. X. Hammes of the National Defense University in Washington, DC: “The increasing regionalization of economies and differences in rates of growth will create instability and challenge international security arrangements.” Metz adds, Hammes believes that just as technology fueled the rise of globalization over the past half-­century, emerging technology will reverse it. Robotics, artificial intelligence and 3-­D printing will undercut the manufacturing advantage enjoyed by regions with low labor costs, while advances in indoor agricultural technologies will reduce the need for imported produce. The resulting ability of developed economies to move industrial and agricultural production closer to their domestic markets will reduce global trade and, combined with greater energy independence and efficiency, lessen the global movement of coal and oil. The net effect will be a delinkage of national prosperity and global stability. The United States will be able to distance itself from turmoil and conflict.17 In short, Hammes, countering New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s proverbial theory that global markets have become “flat,” is informing us that the earth is no longer flat but is again becoming bumpy and uneven, due to unglobalized closed societies.18 A statement from Antonio Guterres, the present secretary-­general of the United Nations, completes the foregoing picture: “The point is, in my opinion, the multipolar world without strong multilateral institutions is not necessarily a peaceful one.”19 By pointing at mainstream politicians who resort to bigotry and prejudice to win votes, an article in the Guardian concludes, “Guterres was referring to a precarious world order in which American pre-­eminence has given way to challenges from both China and Russia, and in which multilateral institutions are arguably weaker than at any point since 1945.”20 Appadurai, Bauman, Krastev, Latour, Nachtwey, Monbiot, Hammes, and Guterres—­each in their own way—­address various aspects of the same emerging phenomenon: humanity is facing a new global trend of political, economic, societal, and individual isolationism and civilizational regression that have made our collective lives less safe and less sane. The combined message indi-

6     Friendship in Islamic Ethics and World Politics

cates that unless we create paradigmatic concepts and institutions capable of managing the independence of individual nations peacefully, our global societies of collective loneliness exist dangerously and fatally alone, which they cannot afford to do. Later in this introduction, I discuss how, according to contemporary political philosophers Heyking and Avramenko, the concept of self-­autonomy as the highest value in a liberal democracy has pushed aside friendship and thus rendered all relations between individual citizens legalistic and contractual. We are now hearing that the same thing is happening in relationships between all nations. As contemporary expert in Islamic civilization Seyyed Hossein Nasr mentions in his contribution to this volume (chapter 12), humanity did not appreciate the value and significance of a clean environment before it was faced with a deteriorating climate. The case of friendship between individuals, nations, and civilizations is similar. The murky depictions of increasing multilateral loneliness noted above serve as a clear warning that we are losing the most significant goal of our human existence. All the aforementioned factors point to a global need to take friendship seriously in academic studies, in governmental and NGO policy making on friendship, and in international relations. It is fortunate that the Brexit government has recently pioneered in creating a ministerial position in this field, but we need friendship studies in academia and friendship departments in all governments and in the United Nations systems, particularly in UNESCO. We need to look into friendship as an agent of paradigm shift in our contemporary global life. As is true in all policy-­making fields, effective friendship policies may not take place without benefiting from deep scholarship. A brief overview of the Western scholarship on friendship has important insights for our generation. Heather Devere, a contemporary political philosopher with substantial studies on political friendship, has discovered that the contemporary history of Western scholarship in friendship studies is promising, because it shows that these studies are resurrected after a long historic lapse.21 This resurrection can be better appreciated in the context of an overview of the history of friendship studies as portrayed by Michael Mitias, to whom I return later in this introduction. Pointing out that friendship studies were resurrected in the ending decades of the twentieth century and flourished in the early decades of the twenty-­first century, Devere holds, “There is now a range of published books that cover the politics of friendships . . . re-­examine the classical and medieval writings on friendship, from political, philosophical and theological perspectives.” She adds, “There are sociological, anthropological, psychological and

Introduction    7

interdisciplinary studies.” Yet she concludes, “There is room here for much more politically directed research on friendship. The evidence is building for the claim that the relationship that is the most important for politics has been inadequately explored.”22 The preceding observations, important as they are, have only provided significant insights about friendship as a paradigm defined within Western intellectual and political traditions. The need for considering friendship as an agent of paradigm shift in our life is, however, deeply global. If friendship studies are experiencing a fortunate resurrection in Western cultures and politics, their successful implementations in international arenas entail both deep knowledge about developments of these field studies in other world cultures and also dialogical interactions with these cultures. The present book serves just this crucial purpose. Providing an overview of scholarships and politics of friendship in Islamic traditions, cultures, and politics, it posits both classical and modern major Islamic theologians and political philosophers in conversation with their Western counterparts. Based on a decade of direct diplomatic engagement with the United Nations, a decade of teaching on international relations, and another decade of research and teaching on Islamic and comparative peace studies, this book offers a friendship-­related academic framework for looking into shared moral concepts, philosophical paradigms, and political experiences that can facilitate developing and expanding multidisciplinary conversations between the Christian West and the Muslim East. The multicultural and interreligious discourses on friendship that are advanced in this book can help promote actual and institutional friendships among diverse cultures and peoples. In terms of its theme, this book has rare, if any, published parallels. Importantly, it is not a monologue. Rather, it provides a model of conversations among scholars and political actors who come from very diverse international and interreligious backgrounds and who also talk to various audiences. The word Islamic should not mislead the reader to suspect that this volume only delves into religious discourses. On the contrary, it provides a forum for conversations both within and between religious and philosophical perspectives. In short, the book is a forum for friendship conversations both thematically and in terms of disciplinary and cultural diversity. I hope that this work presents a friendly model for intellectual conversations about friendship. By being the result works of many prominent international scholars and diplomats over many years, this volume is a concerted effort to emphasize that friendship matters in all its forms and that its institutional realization needs multilateral and multicultural cooperation.

8    

Friendship in Islamic Ethics and World Politics

Friendship as the Ultimate Goal of Morality Aside from a global practical need for the return of friendship as a paradigm for our contemporary life, friendship also appears as a focal aim in the reconceptualization of a paradigmatic moral theory, with implications in various cultural frameworks. It seems to be the right time in our history for moral philosophers to revisit the trilateral productive relationships between religion, morality, and friendship. If we agree with Christian theologian Kai Nielsen’s wisdom that “it is not morality that rests on religion but religion on morality,”23 we may as well agree with the proposition that a better future for all humankind can only be imagined and attained through a higher wisdom: it is not friendship that rests on morality but morality on friendship. For scholars who are well acquainted with the Aristotelian and modern philosophy of friendship, the proposition that morality rests on friendship may sound simultaneously somewhat familiar and novel. It recalls Aristotle’s statement “When men are friends, they have no need of justice, while when they are just, they need friendship as well, and the truest form of justice is thought to be a friendly quality.”24 A number of modern philosophers have uttered similar statements. Jean-­Jacques Rousseau (d. 1778), the Genevan philosopher whose ideas influenced the French Revolution, said, “Morality would be only a less effective substitute for love.”25 Friedrich Nietzsche (d. 1900) repeated the same idea but used different words: “What is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.”26 The proposition of morality resting on friendship sounds new and novel because, for the aforementioned philosophers who consider friendship/love as a paradigm superior to justice/morality, there is little or no qualifying and productive relationship between the two realms. This book proposes the existence of such a relationship—­specifically regarding religion—­and maintains that as religion must be moral, morality must be friendly. One should not understand this proposition in a linear way; in fact, as a number of contributions in this volume demonstrate, friendship/love is both religion’s cause and, at the same time, its ultimate effect. In one of the oldest Persian treatises on Sufism, author Abū’l-­Ḥassan ‘Alī Hūjwīrī (d. 1072) stated, “Friendship is a duty because loneliness is death” (my translation).27 Al-­Rāghib al-­Isfahānī (d. 1108), an Iranian chief ethicist contemporary with Hūjwīrī, stated, “Justice is the caliph of love/friendship [maḥabba in Arabic].”28 For both these scholars writing a millennium ago, friendship represents far more than a luxury: it is an essential necessity without which human beings will either die or be condemned to live an inferior life.

Introduction    9

Their worldviews therefore fully agree with the paradigmatic notion that the highest goal of morality is friendship, both vertically, in human-­divine, and horizontally, in human-­human relationships.

Friendship in Islamic Ethical Literature Two centuries of Western colonialism caused a Muslim silence on the ethics of friendship, which unfortunately continued in the postcolonial era. The current thriving Western studies of Islam have not paid any earnest attention to ethics and the practice of friendship in Muslim cultures. The dominant scholarly preoccupation is with legalistic or radical political Islam and with theoretical endeavors to interpret paradigms of traditional sharī‘a from the prism of a modern nation-­state and the possibility of “Islamic states”—­an effort that, according to Wael Hallaq, is doomed because the very term Islamic state is self-­ contradictory. Hallaq emphasizes that in premodern Islamic tradition, “there was only Islamic governance whose moral, legal, political, social, and metaphysical foundations were dramatically different.”29 Then, Hallaq holds, there was “no separation between the legal and the moral.”30 In essence, Hallaq believes that colonialism disrupted the organic fabric of Muslim cultures and thus rendered Muslim communities and their political perspectives very confused. Under such circumstances, one can hardly expect a contemporary emergence of Muslim scholarship on friendship, even though a cursory review of Islamic traditional literature on the subject, as demonstrated below, points at very rich and rigorous resources. Considering the foregoing backdrop and the substantial scholarship shortages in the field, the Oberlin lecture series on friendship met goals beyond expectations. The first striking observation that caught the attention of many scholars, including this author, was that, in contrast with modern Muslim silence on the ethics of friendship, numerous classical authors wrote important works on friendship, beginning with Ibn al-­Muqaffa‘ (d. ca. 756)31 and ending with the last two Muslim ethicists to address the concept of friendship, Mawlā Mahdī (d. 1795) and Mawlā Aḥmad Narāqī (d. 1824).32 Other Muslim scholars who wrote important treatises on friendship include Ibn al-­Qutayba al-­Dīnawarī (d. ca. 885),33 Ibn Abī al-­Dunyā (d. ca. 894),34 Ikhwān as-­Ṣafā (tenth century),35 Ibn Bābawayh (d. ca. 991),36 Abū’l-­Ḥassan Alī b. Muḥammad al-­ Daylamī (d. 1012),37 Ibn Ḥusayn al-Ā­bī (d. ca. 1030),38 Abū Ḥayyān al-­Tawḥīdī (d. 1023),39 Abū Alī Aḥmad Miskawayh (d. 1030),40 al-­Rāghib al-­Isfahānī (d. ca. 1108),41 Abū’l-­Ḥassan Alī al-­Māwardī (d. 1058),42 Ibn Ḥazm (d. 1060),43

10     Friendship in Islamic Ethics and World Politics

Abū Ḥāmid al-­Ghazālī (d. 1111),44 Ibn Ḥamdūn (d. ca. 1152),45 Naṣīr ad-­Dīn Ṭūsī (d. 1274) (trans. Wickens, 1964), Jalāl al-­Dīn Dawānī (d. 1502), Moḥsin Fayḍ Kāshānī (d. 1680),46 and Abū Barakāt Badreddīn Muḥammad al-­Ghazzī (d. 1573).47 After Narāqīs, however, no serious work on ethics offered a fresh look into friendship as a field of ethical inquiry. For this goal to be realized, Muslim thinkers and scholars of Islam need to accomplish two tasks: (1) conducting an in-­depth comparative study of the history of ethics of friendship in Islamic and Western civilizations and (2) developing a political philosophy that conceptualizes and facilitates institutionalization of friendship in contemporary Muslim societies. To my knowledge, there are few endeavors in either realm, with scant exceptions. An important one is a brief history of the ethics of friendship by the contemporary Egyptian scholar Yousef al-­Shārūnī. In his book Love and Friendship in the Arabic Heritage and Contemporary Scholarship,48 al-­ Shārūnī provides a brief overview of major Islamic classical works in Arabic on love and friendship. Unfortunately, since al-­Shārūnī did not have access to works in the Persian language—­such as The Nasirean Ethics (Akhlāq-­e Nāṣirī), by Naṣīr al-­Dīn Ṭūsī—­his survey on Islamic friendship suffers from some lacunas, which al-­Shārūnī will not deny, because his focus is only on Arabic texts up through al-­Ghazālī. Al-­Shārūnī argues, based on readings from primary texts, that most classical Muslim ethicists believed, almost by consensus, in the superiority of friendship over love. They generally considered love as passion-­based and regarded friendship as a matter of volition and reason. Al-­Shārūnī notes, however, that the topic of love received far more attention from Muslim scholars than did friendship.49 As proof, he asserts that “there is no independent book in Arabic literature with focus of friendship except what was written in fifth century (hijri-­eleven century CE) by Abū Ḥayyān al-­Tawḥīdī titled Al-­adab wa’l-­ inshā’ fi’l-­ṣadāqa wa’l-­ṣadīq (The etiquette and literature on friendship and friend).” Al-­Shārūnī notes that early ethicists such as Ibn al-­Muqaffa‘ synthesized elements of Persian, Greek, Indian, and Arabic aphorism into a perennial and syncretic ethical wisdom that was developed into a very rich tradition across the vast geography of Islamic civilization. Since some chapters in this volume deal with perspectives from a few major ethicists (e.g., Ibn al-­Muqaffa‘, al-­Isfāhānī, Miskawayh, Ṭūsī, al-­Tawḥīdī, and al-­Ghazālī), I do not elaborate here on al-­Shārūnī’s overview of them. But he provides significant comparative perspectives. Al-­Shārūnī asserts that Miskawayh was far more impressed by non-­ Islamic sources (specifically Aristotle) than was al-­Ghazālī, who, because of

Introduction    11

his vast knowledge of both Islamic and foreign sources, presents more “originality” (a characterization with which I take issue).50 For notions related to love and friendship, Miskawayh offers six categories, whereas al-­Māwardī categorizes them into nine, embracing all earthly ties, including those between objects and animals. Al-­Māwardī’s list includes gender similarity (tajānus), connection (irtibāṭ), intimacy (uns), purity (muṣāfāt) attained by purity of intention, mutual kindness (mawadda), friendship (ṣadāqa), love (maḥabba) caused by kindness, exaltation (i‘ẓām) caused by attraction to virtues, and passionate love (‘ishq) caused by attraction to physical features.51 Ibn Ḥazm holds that genuine friendship is very difficult to practice because it requires at least nine ethical ingredients, including patience, forgiveness, forbearance, loyalty, physical ability, cooperation, chastity, support, and mutual education. He asserts that since the attainment of these virtues altogether is extremely difficult, numbers of genuine friends are very limited. Those nine necessary ingredients of friendship only reflect a minimalist moral perspective for Ibn Ḥazm. His ideal ingredients, as stated in his own words, are striking. One of the things devoutly to be desired in Love is that Almighty God shall bestow upon a man a sincere friend, one moreover who is agreeable in speech, of amply abundant means, adroit in laying hold of an affair and shrewd in coming through it, masterly in setting forth an argument, sharp of tongue, of splendid magnanimity, widely learned, little apt to contradict, mighty in succor, strong to endure, patient in the face of impudence, broadly complaisant, a grand confederate, evenly matched, of praiseworthy character, innocent of all injustice, determined to be of help, loathing estrangement, noble in all his undertakings, averse to secret wickedness, profound in his conceptions, understanding his friend’s desires, of virtuous habits, high-­born, absolutely discreet, abounding in good works, truly trustworthy, incapable of treachery, of a generous spirit, of penetrating sensibility, accurate in intuition, wholly dependable, a perfect shield, renowned for his fidelity, of manifest constancy, steady in temper, ready with good counsel, sure in his affection, easy to lean on, having a lively faith, truthful in all that he utters, of a gay heart, strictly chaste, wide in prowess, endowed with fortitude, accustomed to sincerity, a stranger to revulsion, a haven of rest in times of trouble, ready to share the privacy of his friend’s poverty and to partake of all its most intimate secrets. In such a friend the lover may truly find his greatest repose. But where is such a man to be found?52

12     Friendship in Islamic Ethics and World Politics

Ibn Ḥazm refers to a unique friendship case between two notable contemporaries, Muẓaffar and Mubārak, who deflected every cause of separation. He asserts that if he did not personally observe these examples, he would have hardly believed that ideal friendship was ever possible.53 Importantly, both Ibn Ḥazm and al-­Tawḥīdī (whose views are discussed in chapter 16 of the present volume) are highly impressed by friendship role models. For Ibn Ḥazm, Mubārak and Muẓaffar served as such models. For al-­Tawḥīdī, al-­Sijistānī and Ibn Sayyār were paragons of friendship in practice (see chapter 16 of the present volume). Their arguments about these figures can establish friendship studies in the context of comparative role ethics given similarities between role models in the works of the mentioned Muslim scholars and such Western authors on friendship as Cicero (d. 43 BCE), Montaigne (d. 1592), Wadell, and Nehamas (the last two authors are discussed below). For all these authors, observing actual friendship role models informed their theoretical approach to friendship. Al-­Shārūnī believes that no one among all Muslim ethicists has the Islamic “originality” of al-­Ghazālī, who, in contrast with others and even though he is learned on Aristotle, draws his view of friendship strictly from Islamic sources. As a result, the legitimate causes of adhering to friendships and of severing from them are very different for al-­Ghazālī compared with other Muslim ethicists.54 Al-­Ghazālī defines quality friendship within the realms and codes of religion and believes that Muslims should befriend people based on their adherence to codes of sharī‘a and should keep distance from them when they commit sins. In reality, al-­Ghazālī was convinced that people have tendencies toward both law and sin and that the exercise of friendship should be managed with a policy of moderation, with mixed tendencies toward intimacy and praise, on the one hand, and distance and admonishing, on the other, as required for encouraging others toward the right/straight path.55 In the next section of this introduction, where I present a very short review of Western scholarship on friendship, I discuss how Sibyl Schwarzenbach proposes that civic friendship can be enhanced by introducing elements of friendship into political justice systems such as universal welfare. Al-­Ghazālī, in contrast, seems to be trying to interject elements of justice into personal friendships. I argue that both perspectives are complementary. Moderation in actual and personal friendships aside, al-­Ghazālī asserts that if a man loves God, then he should love all creatures God loves. This perspective denotes al-­Ghazālī’s bidimensional model of friendship, which connects love for the divine with love for all creatures. But what are qualities and mechanisms of human-­divine friendship? Al-­Ghazālī’s friendship theology

Introduction    13

that deals with the question of friendship with God is inconceivable in an Aristotelian view, because the power inequality between the two does not allow for reciprocity, which is one of the Aristotelian three characteristics of ideal friendship: cognitive, affective, and active (wishing well for each other, a genuine reciprocity, and a shared good). In his essay “Friendship with God in al-­Ghazali and Aquinas,” David Burrell argues that al-­Ghazālī and Aquinas, coming from the heart of Islamic and Christian traditions, present similar arguments that resolve the Aristotelian problem of divine-­human relationship. The two are linked, Burrell argues, by “a robust account of the free creation of the universe, attributable to God alone, without intermediaries of any sort: an untrammeled initiative on the part of the One from whom all that is comes forth, to which all human beings have been invited to respond by the gracious gift of God’s own word.” Suggesting, “For Aquinas that Word was made flesh in Jesus, while for Ghazali it offers a ‘straight path’ in the Qur’an given to Muḥammad to recite.” Burrell explains, “For Ghazali, human love for God (desire) is transformed by God’s love for us, leading to intimacy with God [uns] and perfect contentment [riḍā]: the state of friendship [wilāya], in which the creature acts freely with the very freedom of the creator.”56 As for patterns of friendship manifestation, “The ninety-­nine names of God,” Burrell asserts, “culled from the Qur’an, constitute a pattern to which faithful servants of God are called to conform their lives, imitating as best they can the One from whom their existence and activity derives.”57 This process of imitating God’s attributes is laid through a series of spiritual stations that can be realized under guidance from Sufi masters. “The progressive stations,” Burrell notes, “are then described as successive unveilings of the heart.”58 Al-­ Ghazālī’s journey of love comes to culmination when “those who have reached the stage of intimacy with God,” Burrell concludes, “realize that ‘they act with the very action of God,’” relinquishing “awareness of oneself as an autonomous agent.”59 Three of Burrell’s conclusions are most significant here. First, as he observes, “The fact that a theologian as central to Islam as al-­Ghazālī would propose that a reciprocal love between Muslims and the one God offers the paradigm form of Islam challenges those stereotypes and counters the commonplace translation of ‘Islam’ as ‘submission.’” Second, because al-­Ghazālī’s “anthropology is more clearly derived from the Sufis,” Burrell asserts, “the parallels emerge between his [al-­Ghazālī’s] dynamic and that of Aquinas.” “Both see human action at its best as a response to the divine initiative,” explains Burrell, “and this response-­character of human activity as a corollary of the originating creature-­creator relationships.” 60 Third, drawing from his sec-

14     Friendship in Islamic Ethics and World Politics

ond argument, Burrell concludes that in the context al-­Ghazālī supplies, one can see the emergence of a “genuine mutuality” that is a hallmark of Aristotelian perspective on friendship. The human-­human friendship between friends of the one God is granted so that “creatures might (adapting Aristotle’s culminating word on friends) stand in the same relationship to God as to themselves” and so that “God, the partner, would stand in the same relationship to a creature as God’s own self.” “This is indeed,” Burrell concludes, “the most acceptable formula for an intimacy which not only allows but demands that each be itself, while acknowledging and celebrating that each lives by the life of the other.”61 One of al-­Ghazālī’s major preoccupations concerning the ethics of friendship is friendship duties. He looks at friends as moral mirrors showing us to ourselves. In his magnum opus, Iḥyā’, al-­Ghazālī dedicates a whole elaborate section to duties incumbent upon all regarding their friends, including how one should find many excuses to forgive friends’ errors. Before he describes those duties in detail, he asserts, “A friend should have religious nature to give benefit,” and he adds, “There is no good in keeping company with a sinner.”62 Al-­Ghazālī notes that any person who is not God-­fearing follows carnal passion, is not trustworthy, and thus will be harmful to friends. He frames a full list of both positive and negative characteristics and types of friends in classical aphorisms related to Islamic sage figures. The following passages are telling: Alī ibn Abī Ṭālib said, “You should take friends. They will be counted in this world and in the next. Have you not heard about the inmates of Hell [from the Qur’ān] saying ‘We have got no intercessors or bosom friends?’”63 The sage Alqamah Attar advised his son at the time his death, “O dear son, if you feel necessity of making friendship, make friendship with such a man who will save you if you save him, who will increase your beauty if you keep company with him, who will help you when you fall in trouble. If you extend your hand of good toward him, he will also extend his hand of good toward you. He will help you in any good you undertake. He will remove any evil if he sees it in you. He will give to you if you want something from him. He will think of you when he remains silent. He will be sorry when any disaster falls on you and gives you pain. He will confirm your word as true when you speak. He will advise you when you intend to do an action. He will place your opinion above his when there arise difference of opinion among you.”64

Introduction    15

The sage Jafar al-­Ṣādiq said, “Don’t keep company with four persons: (1) a liar, you will get deception from him, and he will make the distant near and the near distant; (2) a fool, you will not get any benefit from him, when he will do you harm if he goes to do you benefit; (3) a miser, he will forsake you at the time of your dire necessity; (4) a coward, he will flee away after surrendering you in the hands of enemies; (5) a great sinner, he will sell you in lieu of a morsel of food for a thing of lesser value.”65 Perhaps the most important contribution of al-­Ghazālī to friendship theology is his elaborate lists of the rights of friendship, including rights in wealth and properties, rights in assistance when needed, right about tongue, according good treatment in words and deeds, forgiving faults, praying for friends in life and afterlife, loyalty and sincerity, and avoiding harm to friends.66 Although, in his overview of history of Muslim thought on friendship, al-­Shārūnī has done a good job in discussing al-­Ghazālī and a number of scholars prior to al-­Ghazālī, he left out all post-­Ghazālian ethicists who wrote treatises on love and friendship, such as Dawānī, Dashtakī, and Narāqīs (mentioned earlier in this section). Most significant in the approach of these latter authors to friendship is that they bring perspectives from Aristotle, expressed through Miskawayh and Ṭūsī, to negotiate with the sharī‘a-­based Ghazālian views. The significance of this negotiation between the two dominant schools is better understood through Cyrus Ali Zargar’s description of what distinguishes the Ghazālian school of ethics, influenced by the Ṣufi concept of renunciation, from that of Miskawayh, influenced by Aristotelian and Neoplatonist virtue ethics. “While Miskawayh advocates a balanced life,” Zargar notes, “Ghazali’s ethics advocates a more rigorous and self-­denialist ethics.”67 As is discussed in chapter 4 of the present volume, for Miskawayh and his contemporary ethicist al-­Isfahānī, any practice of ethics has to go through interaction with the society. That is why both ethicists regard sociability as the foundation of one’s humanity. For al-­Ghazālī, however, the primary process of ethics is based on self-­refinement; even though friendships function as mirrors to discover the intricacies of the self, sociability is not a necessity for ethical life and salvation. In fact, al-­Ghazālī offers elaborate justification for merits of seclusion, both within and outside a Ṣufi framework.68 Searching for traces of virtue ethics in Islamic philosophy and Sufism, Zargar notes that the Illuminationist school of Shihāb al-­Dīn Suhrawardī (d. 1191)—­who draws on Islamic, Zoroastrian, and Platonic moral concepts—­ offers a method of practicing ethics based on “the isolation of retreat (khal-

16    

Friendship in Islamic Ethics and World Politics

wat)” and “redirecting awareness” from “one’s sense of ‘being’ for ‘not-­ being,’ which is a replacement of one’s sense of self for an awareness of the Other.”69 Can we conclude that Suhrawardī regards friendship as the finest manifestation of both the self and the other and, therefore, his friendship theory bridges the gap between the positions of al-­Ghazālī and Miskawayh? Whether we can make that conclusion or not, the positions discussed above, taken together, point at the wide range of theoretical frameworks available in classical Islamic ethics on friendship that provide fertile grounds for East-­ West conversations on the subject and that facilitate paradigmatic agreements in peace theology. Like Western Christian and philosophic authors on friendship, Muslim scholars were very cognizant of its complex nature. Al-­Isfahānī, discussed in chapter 4 of this volume, asserts that life is not possible without friendship and that access to genuine friendship is also not possible. This puzzle can only be solved by God’s direct intervention. This intervention is facilitated, however, by religious collective rituals, as stipulated in tradition. Again like their Western counterparts, Muslim friendship philosophers were cognizant of the problem of partiality, but they resolved in shifting human relations from the conceptual space of a zero-­sum game to the arena of divine bounty. There are good enough provisions for all of us; thus, we can afford to be generous and transcend mental preoccupation with fair shares of provisions. In this approach, as held by Ṭūsī, favor does not defy justice but culminates it. It is significant to note that in the view of Muslim friendship ethicists in the eleventh century—­generally known as the era of the Islamic renaissance—­a justice-­based society is only second-­best compared with a friendship-­based society. Ṭūsī believes that the furthest person from civilization is an isolated person,70 a belief that echoes well with the postmodern views, discussed at the beginning of this introduction, warning that with increasing loneliness in our global village, we are witness to a process of “decivilization.”

Genres of Muslim Works on Friendship Earlier in the preceding section, I mentioned about eighteen classical and modern authors that, together, are major contributors to Islamic friendship studies. As primary sources in these studies, their works should be properly classified into specific genres of friendship literatures. So far, I have detected four such genres: Arabic belles lettres, informed by literary Arabic text in poetry and prose forms; religious ethics, primarily informed by Qur’ānic verses and pro-

Introduction    17

phetic hadiths; perennial philosophy, informed by aphorisms in Greek, Indian, Persian, and Arabic philosophical works; and a fourth genre that is a moral synthesis of some of the preceding independent genres. Without claiming watertight precision or total independence for any of these categories, I here offer some representatives. Ibn al-­Muqaffa‘, Ikhwān aṣ-­Ṣafā, Ibn Ḥazm, Miskawayh, and Ṭūsi represent the perennial philosophy of friendship. Ibn Abī al-­ Dunyā, Ibn Bābawayh, al-­Māwardī, al-­Ghazālī, and Fayḍ Kāshānī represent the religious ethics approach. Ibn Qutayba, al-­Ābī, al-­Tawḥīdī, and Ibn Ḥamdūn represent Arabic belles lettres. Al-­Daylamī, al-­Isfāhāni, Dawānī, al-­ Ghazzī, and Narāqīs represent the moral synthesis school. These classifications are rough, because almost all of the authors mentioned and their works are, to various degrees, informed from other sources and literature genres. My four categories of friendship literature are not exhaustive. In this volume, the contribution by Soroush is focused on Rūmī’s concept of love and friendship, so Persian and Arabic poetries provide yet another category for friendship literature. One can also add, for example, Khwāja Shamsuddīn Moḥammad Ḥāfeẓ (d. 1390), Shaykh Muṣliḥiddīn Sa‘dī (d. 1292), and Abū at-­Ṭayyib Aḥmad Mutanabbī (d. 965), as classical Muslim poets who entertained friendship in their prose and offer many conceptually rich friendship perspectives. In fact, in both Islamic and Western literature, poetry is friendship-­ rich. The presence and the common usage of more than 60 Arabic words related to friendship points at the epistemological expanse of Muslim’s conception of friendship and its protean nature in Islamic literature. As we will see in the following section of this introduction, one contemporary Western author on ethics of friendship, Alexander Nehamas, argues that while medieval, modern, and contemporary Western moral philosophies have failed to pay serious attention to friendship, Western dramatic literature (specifically, theater drama) and, to a certain extent, Western poetry literature are friendship-­rich. Not without ground do I argue that, similarly, Islamic belles lettres paid their most serious attention to friendship and its significance in ideal social life. A master of belles lettres, Abū Ḥayyān al-­Tawḥīdī (d. 1023), wrote an entire volume on friendship, mentioned before (Al-­ṣadāqa wa al-­ ṣadīq).71 Al-­Shārūnī admits that al-­Tawḥīdī’s book is indeed unique in its field. But I must say that until the early modern period, classical Muslim ethicists did not show any attention deficit to this subject either. So, there are significant similarities and differences between the Western and Muslim histories of thought on friendship. For Muslim ethicists, friendship never lost coinage in their perennial and universal moral thought. In the West, as addressed in the next section of this introduction, friendship was not influential in the making

18     Friendship in Islamic Ethics and World Politics

of Western thought and theology since the Hellenistic era, with only one exception, St. Thomas Aquinas, toward the end of the medieval period. Aquinas was well informed and learned about the Aristotelian ethics thanks to Latin translations of Aristotle’s major works from Arabic, along with Muslim commentaries on them during Aquinas’s time. Within Muslim philosophical traditions, between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries, Muslim ethicists such as Miskawayh, al-­Isfahānī, Ṭūsī, Dawānī, and both Narāqīs consistently argued in favor of love and friendship as a superior mode of ethics. As discussed in chapter 4, Miskawayh and Ṭūsī provide substantial arguments for the political philosophy of friendship, rich enough to put them in conversation with Hannah Arendt despite a millennium of time difference between them. To effectively initiate such conversations, we need to understand some conceptual impediments that could still stand in the way of their realization. The first problem is that, for various reasons, political philosophy did not develop in Islamic civilization as much as other branches of philosophy did; hence, works of al-­Fārābī (d. 950) and al-­Māwardī (d. 1058), the classical political philosophers of the tenth and eleventh centuries, have remained unparalleled until late modernity. One reason for this lack of development was a tension between political jurisprudence and political philosophy. In modern time, another related tension has culminated in a fundamentalist desire to establish an “Islamic state” whose main characteristics revolve around the implementation of sharī‘a law out of its historical contexts. The result has been political disasters such as Daesh (ISIS), who experimented with rule by terror in the name of sharī‘a, a system antithetical to friendship. The second problem, as briefly mentioned earlier, is that two hundred years of European colonialism, beginning with Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798, eradicated socio-­academic incentives for the study of universal friendship in Muslim states. Passionate urges to react against colonialism deprived Muslim nations and their political philosophers from chances to develop friendship-­based political philosophies and to expand on what was established by Miskawayh, al-­Isfahānī, Ṭūsī, al-­Tawḥīdī, and their like. This impediment and the preceding one notwithstanding, virtue ethics and friendship as a revered high virtue never lost significance and never experienced scholarly rapture in the thoughts of Muslim moral philosophers, as it did in Western cultures. In fact, from Miskawayh’s work on friendship in the eleventh century to works by Mawlā Mahdī and Mawlā Aḥmad Narāqī at the turn of the nineteenth century, Muslim moral philosophers showed an impressive consistency in their views of and interests in friendship as a significant paradigm for moral life.

Introduction    19

The present book is addressing an urgent need for Muslim thinkers and authors to revisit their tradition and produce more works on friendship as an agent of paradigm shift in intercommunal and international relations. The first step for this task is getting engaged with a comparative study of friendship. The gap of contemporary Muslim authorship on friendship becomes much clearer only when Muslims become aware of the very thriving contemporary Western scholarship in the field, for which I shortly provide a brief overview to establish some terms of reference and a few arenas for conversations. Revival of the rich Islamic traditions of the ethics and philosophy of friendship, which developed from the mid-­eighth to the early nineteenth centuries, now seems to be a compelling moral and political necessity. Various contributions within this volume offer the authors’ knowledge, thoughts, and experiences on the subject of friendship, as well as their commitment to revive this tradition. The golden thread throughout this work is the significance and potential of friendship, in both theory and practice, to facilitate a paradigmatic enhancement of dialogues, discourses, and relations promoting global peace.

Western Scholarship on Friendship At the macrolevel in historical analysis, Michael Mitias, a scholar in the history of the philosophy of friendship, holds that Hellenic and Hellenistic cultures changed their focus from natural desire, emotions, “and conformism with the law of polis” (metaphysical, teleological, and humanistic) to attaining truth based on reason in the cosmopolis.72 This change was, in Mitias’s view, a “shift from relations to self-­development.” Still, he maintains, “friendship remained central to both cultures.” “In spite of their different worldviews, philosophical temperament, and moral outlooks,” Mitias asserts, “both Hellenic and Hellenistic moral philosophers gave a prominent place to friendship in their moral theories.”73 The reason for this shared moral paradigm was that under both worldviews, friendship was essential for happiness, and happiness was defined as goodness. According to that understanding, friendship helps us to fulfill our humanity, because of friendship’s product (i.e., happiness);74 in other words, neither the art of relations nor individual perfection are possible without friendship. As the Hellenistic era turned into the Middle Ages, Mitias points out, friendship became irrelevant to happiness and lost its status as a central paradigm in Western culture. Since the medieval era, friendship has lost its prominence as a main paradigm in Western life. Love of God, which entails love of

20     Friendship in Islamic Ethics and World Politics

all human fellows, does not leave a space for preferential friendship: “Any satisfaction that may result from human ingenuity or effort is shallow and transient compared to the profundity of the beatific vision of God.”75 For Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, friendship had paradigmatic significance in a happy life. It was a foundational virtue and an end in itself, it was goodness, and it had a prominent role in political life. Even though it could be categorized into several types, it could not receive a watertight definition, because of its complexities. For Plato, as James Rhodes formulated, militaristic tendencies in Athenian society was a disease that could be cured: “First produce small friendship circles and ultimately a just polity essentially constituted by philia;” such a polity “would create necessary contexts for both the personal and political fulfillment of human nature.”76 Rhodes adds, “Plato, speaking in his own name in the Seventh Letter, tells the story of his youthful aspirations to be a statesman. He was discouraged by the pervasive injustices of the Athenians and withdrew, concluding that it is impossible to act politically without friends (325d1).”77 Aristotle conveys the same idea and holds that, in the words of Brian Carr, “what we are capable of cannot be discovered in a solitary existence or in the cold, competitive rivalry which sadly marks too much of human existence.”78 For Aristotle, as Stephen Salkever has put it, friendship is more than a virtue, it is “a mode of human being together or interaction, similar to the polity or the family/household.” Salkever notes that “neither philosophy nor politics (ruling and being ruled in turn with a view to the laws) nor virtue, friendship alone is adequate to constitute human flourishing.”79 Friendship “opens the possibility of the life-­long self-­reflection and critique without which human virtue, in political praxis and in philosophical inquiry, is a dream.”80 What is the relationship between friendship and truth? Salkever argues that unlike Hannah Arendt, who believes that “friendship, like citizenship, lives in continual tension with truthfulness,” Aristotle maintains that “philia is a path, however indirect and complex, to a variety of contingent truths about ourselves and our world, truths that lead beyond us toward a more adequate and accurate theoretical sense of the beings, including those beings more perfect than we are.”81 Salkever concludes, “The heart of Aristotelian friendship is neither consolation nor transcendent unity, but conversation about the way particular friends live their lives. The quality of a friendship thus depends on the quality of the conversation that constitutes it.”82 Even though the methodology of Aristotle and Hellenic philosophers was aporetic, their insights about relationships between friendship, virtue ethics, justice, morality, politics, utility, reason, truth, conversation, and self-­ reflection provide standards and prisms

Introduction    21

through which we can look at later philosophies and theologies of friendship and figure out most outstanding realms of potential friendship dialogues between Muslim scholars and their Western counterparts. As discussed with more detail later in this introduction, the paradigmatic virtue ethics and one of its important ancillaries, the ethics of friendship, lost their significance when the Christian study of ethics became preoccupied mostly with agape (spiritual love) through St. Augustine’s theology (d. 430). Nevertheless, before the revival of virtue ethics in the mid-­twentieth century, friendship received occasional yet significant attention from some European intellectuals who made important references to this virtue. As mentioned earlier, Jean-­Jacques Rousseau and Friedrich Nietzsche gave love/friendship a higher normative status than morality in its entirety. David Hume (d. 1776) held, “A perfect solitude is, perhaps, the greatest punishment we can suffer. Every pleasure languishes when enjoy’d apart from society.”83 Immanuel Kant (d. 1804), the German philosopher whose works influenced the European Enlightenment, contended that “a man with a feeling for the bounty of nature can hardly be simply corrupt or immoral.”84 Charles Darwin (d. 1882), the father of the scientific theory of evolution, proverbially stated, “A man’s friendships are one of the best measures of his worth.” Ralph W. Emerson (d. 1882) said, “A select and sacred relation, which is a kind of absolute, and which even leaves the language of love suspicious and common, so much is this purer, and nothing is so much divine.”85 Long before Emerson, John Milton (d. 1674) identified friendship with paradise: “Without it, even Paradise is robbed of its pleasure.” After his exile from paradise, Adam laments, in Milton’s voice, “What happiness? Who can enjoy alone?”86 William Blake (d. 1827) formulated the normative status of friendship in a proverbial phrase: “The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship.” All these statements demonstrate that even before the revival of virtue ethics in the second half of the twentieth century, some major Western thinkers were cognizant of the need to search for morality through friendship rather than for friendship through morality. Yet, except in a few works on the cross section between theology and politics (discussed below), these ideal conceptualizations of friendship were not reflected in the dominant modern Western political philosophies. The short history of the modern treatment of friendship in the West is well articulated by contemporary political philosopher van der Zweerde. Among Modern political philosophers, enmity occupies a much more important place than friendship. Since the rise of Modern political philosophy, with Niccolò Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes, emphasis is on the

22    

Friendship in Islamic Ethics and World Politics

essentially conflictual nature of social relations and on the potential hostility of every human being towards every other human being. Today’s dominant line of political thinking, the Lockean-­Rawlsian-­ Habermasian line of liberal democracy, is more optimistic, but also more ideological . . . based upon an anthropology in which human beings are, first of all, individuals, who have a clear view of their own interests, and organize their behavior in such a way as their power of reason tells them will best serve their interests.87 Considering the dominant trends outlined by van der Zweerde, very few exceptional authors have offered groundbreaking perspectives and epistemological approaches to the notion of friendship in politics and philosophy. Perhaps because of the shock of two world wars, Western literature on friendship has been thriving since the mid-­twentieth century, as a result of the revival of virtue ethics by Gertrude Anscombe (d. 2001), C. S. Lewis (d. 1963), and a few others. Hannah Arendt (d. 1975) offered important views on friendship, plurality, promise, and forgiveness in politics.88 In Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Friendship, Jon Nixon presents an erudite account of Arendt’s political philosophy of friendship, which Nixon believes that Arendt enacted in her personal life. Nixon shows how Arendt echoes Aristotle’s view of friendship in stressing that “friendship is a necessity because without it we are unable to engage fully as citizens in the life and work of the polity.”89 As defined by Arendt, power, distinguished from force, establishes friendship as the foundation of politics. For Arendt, totalitarianism is based on force, and true power politics cannot work or even be defined without friendship.90 As Nixon has expressed it, “The continuity of relationship, mutuality of commitment and recognition of plurality that were, for Arendt, fundamental to friendship are negated by totalitarianism.”91 Furthermore, attaining truth, a significant goal for all religions, is, in Arendt’s opinion, predicated on friendship: “The political element in friendship is that in the truthful dialogue each of the friends can understand the truth inherent in the other’s opinion.”92 For Arendt, according to Nixon, “friendship provides the promise of certainty and continuity in a world of uncertainty and discontinuity, but always within the bounds and constraints of that particular friendship.”93 Unlike Aristotle, Arendt does not focus on perfect and idealized friendship; rather, she addresses a friendship that is accessible to a wide range of people. In this respect, Arendt defines friendship as a paradigm that, in contrast to love, belongs to both the private and public realms. “Love, in distinction from friendship,” Arendt stresses in The Human Condition, “is killed, or rather

Introduction    23

extinguished, the moment it is displayed in public.” For Arendt, Nixon maintains, “friendship is worldly, whereas love is unworldly; love achieves equality through oneness, whereas friendship achieves it through plurality; friendship is propolitical whereas love is apolitical or even antipolitical.” In Arendt’s words, “Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but antipolitical, perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical human forces.”94 Like Edward Vacek, Arendt adopts a concept of friendship that, according to Nixon, is based not on “self-­obeisance” or “self-­sacrifice” but, rather, on “self-­assertion” and “self-­preservation.”95 The notion of self-­assertion here must not be interpreted as self-­autonomy, a trait that is criticized by some modern authors as an impediment in the way of civic friendship. Arendt’s political philosophy of friendship finds vibrant resonance in the works of contemporary French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (d. 1995) and his reader Gregg Lambert, who, from a pathological stance, believe that whereas philosophy, in its original Greek etymology, was once situated in tandem with the concept of friendship, that situation was consequently misplaced through many wars and social disruptions, which proliferated such notions as “stranger,” “emigrant,” “refugee,” and “alien.” In Philosophy after Friendship, Lambert discusses and expands on the Deleuzian perspective of friendship and states. The idea of friendship certainly has suffered from an essential amnesia and aphasia and no longer signifies thought being divided within itself according to the categories of unity and equality, either because the living category of the friend no longer signifies this identity of thought thinking itself or because friendship has exhausted this division, originated by the Greeks, and we must conclude that the historical image of friendship may no longer have anything in common with philosophy from the present moment onward. . . . Perhaps we are witnessing the overturning of an earlier philosophical idealism that invoked friendship as the destination of the political and in its place the emergence of what I will call a nonphilosophical understanding that has determined conflict or war (polemic), even the realization of a perpetual war between the two permanent classes (or populations), which today are represented by the global rich and the global poor, as the ultimate ground from which any future thinking of the political must now depart.96 In other words, Deleuze maintains that since philosophy lost its friendship with friendship (philosophy originally involved conversations between friends [phi-

24     Friendship in Islamic Ethics and World Politics

lotes]),97 its ancillary discipline, politics, focused on divisions, separations, and notions that convey otherness. Noticing that, according to Deleuze, philosophy is no longer viewed as Greek, which means it is no longer friendly, Lambert points out that modern philosophy has become entangled with much confusion resulting from identity-­ based divisions “not only between ‘who is the friend?’ and ‘who is the enemy?’ but also, today, between Greek and Roma, German and Jew, and American and Muslim.”98 Lambert asserts that in Deleuze’s view and that of like-­minded philosophers, such as Felix Guattari, “modern philosophy has replaced the principle of ‘rivalry.’”99 He adds that “especially in the context of war on terror,” modern democracies target a “new class of strangers who, it could be argued, were only created by ‘the last war.’”100 Our present era is therefore one in which both modern philosophy and politics are creating artificial identities and strangers, concepts and social categories that form the necessary ingredients for “permanent war,” an essential war that is no longer accidental. Lambert quotes the following conclusion from Deleuze and Guattari: Doubtless, the present situation is highly discouraging. We have watched the war machine grow stronger and stronger, as in the science fiction story; we have seen it assign as its objective a peace that is more terrifying than fascist death; we have seen it maintain or instigate the most terrible local wars as part of itself; we have seen it set sights on a new type of enemy, no longer another state, nor even another regime, but the “unspecific enemy.”101 Lambert and other readers of these words are puzzled at the accuracy of their prediction. In the latter years of the second decade of the third millennium, more than two decades after Deleuze’s death, racist exceptionalism and religious fundamentalism have violently turned against all unidentified others, to advance an artificial sense of identity.102 In the final chapter of his book, Lambert sheds light on how the idea of state sovereignty could be abused just as easily as the concept of “the sacred.” Both concepts paradoxically bred self-­isolation in the collective and the individual aspects of life. “Today,” Lambert exclaims, “the rich man can no longer be redeemed by his image of politics, and the poor man can no longer be justified by his image of sacredness.” He adds, “It is in this ‘concrete situation’ of war that an ever-­growing demographic portion of humanity lives today, where there is neither rule of law nor any possibility of justice but rather an essential lawless field of battle, since neither claim can be

Introduction    25

founded on any principle of universal right, which is to say, neither in the name of humanity nor in the name of the prophet.”103 In these words, Lambert rightly notes that extreme sovereignty and the exclusive claim to represent the sacred are equally antifriendship platforms that lead to isolation and perpetual war. Lambert hopes for an end not only to all philosophies and theologies of war (even “just war” theories) but also to the war among philosophies. Agreeing with Deleuze that postfriendship philosophy has predominantly represented and contributed to international rivalry, Lambert goes one step farther, to argue that the only hope of bringing philosophy back to its friendship cradle is to begin a postwar philosophy.104 Lambert’s pathological work on the critical and paradoxical state of international relations shares parallels with another work that examines the modern paradigmatic impediments hindering political and private friendships. In one of the best-­researched academic works on the history, theology, and philosophy of friendship, Friendship and Politics: Essays in Political Thought, the volume’s editors, Heyking and Avramenko, argue that Christian Protestantism and the liberal Kantian emphasis on self-­autonomy as the most valued moral achievement in an individual’s life have together undermined friendship’s significance in modern Western political and moral philosophies. Heyking and Avramenko note, “The apparent conflict between Athens and Jerusalem, to use a trope favored by Leo Strauss, has important political implications for friendship.” They add, “The hostility—­or, at best, the ambivalence—­toward friendship among various Protestant thinkers is one of the roots for the ambiguous place of friendship in liberalism.” “Both this stream of Christianity and liberalism,” the editors conclude, “throw suspicion on particular attachments, which is one reason why such political thinkers as Machiavelli and Rousseau regard Christianity as corrosive to patriotism and community.”105 Heyking and Avramenko extend their criticism of unfriendly theologies to unfriendly political philosophies and question many concerns that have stalled philosophers from looking at friendship as the prime value in human life. “Hobbes regards all love,” they assert, “a species of self-­love.” Thus, by reducing the role of friendship in politics to patronage and favoritism, Hobbes seeks to substitute it with a “neutral state.”106 Arendt’s view of friendship as the function of “power, promise, and plurality,” without which politics cannot be defined, completely contrasts with the view of Hobbes, who considers friendship problematic for an ideal state. For Arendt, who comes very close to Aristotle’s view on friendship, “human beings,” in the words of Stephen Salkever, “cannot live genuinely human lives without friendships involving continued conversation and thought,” and humanizing friendship cannot be substituted by

26     Friendship in Islamic Ethics and World Politics

citizenship or ethnic solidarity.107 In Arendt’s view, not even brotherhood, ideological or otherwise, can replace friendship. As demonstrated here already, scholars such as Arendt and Deleuze have worked hard to reintroduce and revive friendship as a significant paradigm of contemporary life. At least part of their success depends on whether they can solve the core problem of partiality facing the main two branches of modern philosophy. This problem is well addressed by Alexander Nehamas in one of the most recent works on friendship. “C. S. Lewis thought that modernity rejected the ancients’ seriousness about friendship because of ‘Romanticism’ and ‘the exaltation of Sentiments,’” Nehamas explains, arguing, “But neither Romanticism nor the exaltation of sentiment can account for its neglect; the ancients weren’t nearly as otherworldly as Lewis thought.” Nehamas concludes, “Rather, it was the exaltation of a new kind of reason, common to everyone, which, before Romanticism came into the picture, made friendship an unlikely subject for modern philosophy. Modern moral thought centered its attention on the impartial principles that govern our obligation to one another in the abstract, our duties and responsibilities to the world at large, and in so doing, turned away from the narrower, partial, and preferential relationships of which friendship was often the emblem.”108 Nehamas agrees with Mitias, with little difference, that friendship lost its paradigmatic significance during the medieval, modern, and contemporary trends of Western thought. Except briefly in 12th century among Cistercian Christians, Nehamas notes, there was no accord between the Christian concepts of love your neighbor and charity on the one hand and friendship on the other. “Even St. Thomas Aquinas,” Nehamas holds, “who offered in the following century an Aristotelian defense of friendship in his Summa Theologia . . . was unable to integrate it smoothly into Christian doctrine . . .”109 When it comes to modernity, Nehamas points out that the two major branches of modern philosophy, Kantian and Consequentialist philosophies, have serious conflict with friendship’s partiality: “Kantianism holds that moral value depends on acting for the right reason, whatever the consequences; Consequentialism locates moral worth in acting with the aim of bringing about the best possible outcome for the greatest number of people.” He adds, “For the Kantians, the common feature that joins human being together is rationality; for the Consequentialists, it is our need and desire for well-­being.” About the Kantians and Consequentialists, Nehamas concludes, “Despite their differences, however, they are at one on a more fundamental issue: all moral behavior must be impartial and universally acceptable.”110 Nevertheless, he accepts

Introduction    27

that both philosophical trends have tried to embrace friendship, though with little success. In the very short piece on friendship in Doctrine of Virtue, Kant distinguishes between moral and emotional friendships and holds that since emotions are subject to many interruptions, an ideal friendship is based on morality.111 Addressing the tension between the need to keep a good distance of respect from friends and the responsibility to inform them of their faults, Kant notes that if the principle of love commands friends to come together, the principle of respect requires them to keep each other at a proper distance. The following words from Kant are telling: Men have a duty of friendship. The striving for perfect friendship (as the maximum good in the attitude of friends to each other) is a duty imposed by reason—­not, indeed, an ordinary duty but a duty of honor. Yet it is easy to see that [perfect] friendship is a mere idea (although a practically necessary one), which cannot be achieved in practice. For in his relations with his neighbor how can a man ascertain whether one of the attitudes essential to his duty (e.g. mutual benevolence) is equal on the part of both friends? . . . And how can he be sure that if one of the friends is more ardent in his love he may not, just because of this, forfeit something of the other’s respect? Does not all this mean that love and respect on the part of both friends can hardly be brought subjectively into that balanced proportion which is yet necessary for friendship?112 The hardship in balancing love and respect in a mutual relation renders the realization of ideal friendship next to impossible. Moreover, regarding rational friendship as a duty, as in the Kantian perspective, deprives it of the volitional element that is connected to the affective nature of Aristotelian friendship. As Mark Vernon has put it, for Kant, “friendship’s suspect nature is revealed in other ways. He observes that people may form circles of friends on the basis that they share the same beliefs, interests or identity. But again, these gestures are morally suspect because they tend to harden the heart against those outside the charmed circle.”113 “Kant,” according to Vernon, “was so uneasy about the place of friendship in his moral universe that he speculated upon a time when friendship will cease.” Kant asserts, “Friendship is not of heaven but of the earth; the complete moral perfection of heaven must be universal; but friendship is not universal.”114 Vernon asserts, “All in all, what Kant achieves is a reinvention of the

28     Friendship in Islamic Ethics and World Politics

reactionary attitude to friendship that originates in Augustinian Christianity, reinvigorated for the modern, secular world. For a full-­blown belief in heaven he substitutes an ideal perfection; for sinfulness, selfishness; for unconditional love, universal obligation.” “This new ‘religious’ language of universal duty and categorical imperatives,” Vernon concludes, “simply does not know what to do with friendship, and tends to think that it is suspect and perhaps better done away with.”115 In the end, despite his endeavor, Kant could not reintroduce friendship to modern life as a significant paradigm. This task needed to receive further endeavor by contemporary philosophers.

Civic Friendship Among contemporary philosophers reimagining friendship, perhaps Sibyl Schwarzenbach has been one of the most impressive. She tries to enhance friendship from an exercise in private life to a public one. She extends and extrapolates the three conditions Aristotle suggested for civic friendship: mutual awareness, affection, and doing together. Schwarzenbach asserts, “Aristotle clearly has no difficulty conceiving the three necessary criteria of all genuine friendship exhibited in a ‘political’ or civic form (unlike the modern methodological individualists).” She adds, “In the political version of friendship (politike philia) the traits of reciprocal awareness and recognition of equality, of wishing the other well and of practical doing for them, continue to operate only now no longer personally.” This is the way, she suggests, to exercise political friendship in modern nation-­state, where “citizens can number in the hundreds of millions.”116 Methodologically, following Aristotle, Schwarzenbach tries to build friendship into justice. She refers to Aristotle’s saying that “the truest form of justice is thought to be a friendly quality.” Then she adds, “On my reading, his [Aristotle’s] point is that in general atmosphere of distrust, ill will or even indifference, justice emerges as impossible because citizens lack the subjective conditions necessary to perceive and execute it. That is, in the midst of hostility, ill will or indifference, many will continue to perceive themselves as unjustly treated even if some narrower notion of justice . . . is strictly being adhered to.” Therefore, she concludes, “a high degree of civic friendship is a necessary constituent of genuine justice.”117 In Schwarzenbach’s view, making justice friendly will facilitate a transformation in the very nature of modern nation-­states. She explains, “The modern liberal political state must be reconceived so that it’s central organizing principle shifts away from being an instrument of productive competition and war,

Introduction    29

and takes on an explicit concern with the conditions of civic friendship and a public function of care.”118 Here, she comes close to the Deleuzian perspective of serious need for a postwar philosophy, mentioned above. She asserts that we need not only new states but also new citizens: “This new citizen would be one who, from the start, is carefully nurtured, respectfully educated, and thoroughly grounded in the ways of civic good will, reproductive praxis and democratic cooperation—­long before it learns anything of the arts of war.”119 Addressing the epistemological variations of societal relations in an article that criticizes religious-­based notions of “fraternity” and the politico-­ economic and male-­based concept of “solidarity,” Schwarzenbach argues for friendship as a term with stronger potentials for modern states. She argues that modern friendship is different from the Aristotelian conception of the relationship, in the sense that modern friendship should be based on difference rather than similarity. Difference-­based friendship “summons up a flexible give and take between citizens who, though neither blood related nor personally known to one another, nor particularly similar, etc., are nonetheless good willed and aware society wide; they reciprocally seek to maintain a rough equality amongst themselves, and work practically to establish and maintain institutions that treat all fairly—­as if among friends.”120 She concludes, “The alternative social vision which here plays the role of guiding norm is the model of an ethical labor and reproduction of relations of philia, a model which now centrally includes women and other overlooked groups. Hence, our conception of the democratic citizen is no longer primarily that of citizen soldier, nor is it the self-­interested homo economicos, but neither is it a model of pure altruism—­of the mother or ‘caring person’—­as some feminists suggest.”121 By giving an important twist to the aristocratic Aristotelian notion of friendship (by embracing citizens’ differences of all types and liberating the notion from ideological, chauvinistic, gender, militaristic, and economic biases), Schwarzenbach builds friendship into universal standards of justice—­as does the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—­and renders civic friendship possible and accessible.

Friendship and Economics Western critical scholarship on friendship does not stop at the border of religious and political disciplines but has advanced into the field of economics in significant ways. Taking a pathological approach to liberal philosophy’s emphasis on self-­autonomy as the highest value, Heyking and Avramenko argue that this normative system renders all relations as transactions.

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The liberal principle that society is grounded in a contract reached into other areas of life to the point that we regard all our relationships in similar terms. We come to our private relationships, to our loves and friendships, with the same desire to get a good bargain as we do when we purchase a car or a computer. We network, we schmooze, and we realize the “autonomous self,” the ideal to which much of contemporary liberalism seeks. The autonomous self, however, while proudly asserting her independence, is forced to seek respite from her existential solitude in the companionship offered by her dog, the chitchat found on the internet, and the respite found in her lithium.122 This problem is analyzed at a deeper level by Todd May, whose interdisciplinary work (Friendship in an Age of Economics: Resisting the Forces of Neoliberalism) studies the pitfalls of the culture of consumerism that has engulfed the majority of our globe, as well as how friendship could overcome this economic vicious cycle that is directly responsible for disastrous global warming, ethical numbness, and many other plagues of our time. May argues that when the Keynesian economics of governmental financial interventionism, which worked well during the Great Depression of the 1930s, were subdued by the neoliberal economics of the Chicago School in the mid-­1970s, all human beings were subsequently transformed into the “figures” (a term borrowed from Michel Foucault) of a consumer, an entrepreneur, or both in one person. This phenomenal sociopolitical and institutional turning point was justified by a logic formulated by Milton Friedman, as May attests: “Economic arrangements play a dual role in the promotion of a free society. On the one hand, freedom in economic arrangements is an end in itself. In the second place, economic freedom is also an indispensable means toward the achievement of political freedom.”123 This neoliberal paradigm, as good and logical as it may seem, transformed, according to May, “not only our economic but also our political, social, and personal relationships” to “become markets, and we better and worse participants in those markets,” within a global process of “normalization.”124 As the end result of this process, May maintains, shopping malls become “a central space of socialization,” and “shopping becomes a central form of activity associated with socialization and in turn a central way in and through which one identifies oneself and one’s relationships.”125 The psychological effect of human beings identifying as the first figure produced by the neoliberal economic perspective, the consumer, is, according to May, “to discourage wider consideration on who one is and what one wants to be, and to substitute for those considerations the imperative of present con-

Introduction    31

sumption,” which is driven by “individualized egoism.”126 The worth of the second figure produced by the perspective, the entrepreneur, is measured, May argues, by assessing his or her capital returns. May stresses that measuring individuals’ entrepreneurial and even educational value based on their rate of capital return, as suggested by Theodore Schulz and Gary Becker with their concept of “human capital,” completes the neoliberal paradigm and explains the vicious cycle that has engulfed our global life.127 In a shopping-­and market-­based social lifestyle, in which we are constantly made to feel stupid if we reject an offer to “buy two, get one for free,” it is easy to see how every individual in all corners of the globe becomes helpless prey to the culture of multinational corporations. Exactly at this point of disappointment, May presents friendship as a concept and a practice that can break the aforementioned vicious cycle. May argues that what he terms “deep friendship” can save current humanity from the tight grips of neoliberal consumerism. This deep friendship has four characteristics: “regard for the other, passion . . . , relationship’s past . . . , and the meaningfulness of a deep or close friendship.”128 “Deep friendships,” May states, “are best thought of as contributing not just (and not primarily) to the happiness of our lives but to the meaning they display, both to us and likely to others as well. . . . The shape a life takes is in part a product of its deep friendship.”129 May concludes that because deep friendships ignore accounting to live in the spirit of gift giving, as elaborated by Marcel Mauss, and provide a sense of security, they “cut against the grain of neoliberal relationships.”130 “Deep friendships,” he asserts, “because they allow for reflection on evaluative outlooks, and because they offer safe havens for self-­invention, open up a space for reflection on the values of a given social, political, and economic arrangement.”131

Modern Theologies of Friendship In his essay “Friendship in the Civic Order,” Thomas Heilke maintains that friendship is prephilosophy; thus, we do not necessarily depend on Aristotle to understand friendship. He asserts, “Aristotle’s work was essentially unknown to the medieval era in which specifically Christian notions of friendship developed.” “These medieval practices, however,” notes Heilke, “were informed by other classical accounts of friendship, especially that of Cicero” (d. 43 BCE).132 Cicero, therefore, is broadly known to be the teacher of St. Augustine, even though they lived four centuries apart. Heyking agrees with a scholar of St. Augustine, Carolinne White, that Cicero’s view of friendship helped Augustine

32     Friendship in Islamic Ethics and World Politics

to develop his understanding of the commandment “Love your neighbor.”133 Augustine also agrees with Cicero, Heyking points out, “on how networks of friends form the micropolitics of political society and how the highest friendships cultivate the virtues.”134 Heyking further asserts, “Augustine’s practice of friendship enables us to see his appreciation for the manner in which friendship ripples throughout the political order.”135 In short, for Augustine, friendship functions as “a school of love.”136 “He who does not love his brother,” Augustine writes, “is not in love; and he who is not in love is not in God, because God is love” (De Trinitate 8.8.12).137 Heyking points out that one definition of justice by Augustine connects it with friendship. Justice is “giving to each his or her due.” To the question of what each person is due, Augustine answers that we “owe no one anything except to love one another.”138 Even though, as we noticed, Augustine has important views on friendship, his support for this relationship is limited to Christian brotherhood. Mark Vernon notes that long before Augustine’s conversion to Christianity, when he was Manichean, he was emotionally devastated by the loss of a very close friend. His reassessment of this sad memory after conversion framed friendship for him in a whole different perspective: “What madness,” Augustine exclaims, “to love a man as something more than human!”139 “Ours was not the friendship which should be between true friends,” Augustine concludes, “for though they cling together, no friends are true friends unless you, my God, bind them fast to one another through that love which is sown in our hearts by the Holy Ghost.”140 Vernon notes, “All Augustine wanted to do was recast the vicissitudes of human love within the steadfast love of God.” Vernon asserts that for Augustine, as mentioned in The City of God, friends will die “or betray you, in matters of state or affairs of the heart.”141 Vernon references how these perspectives are summarized by Peter Brown, a biographer of Augustine: “The loss of faith in friendship became, as Brown described it, ‘the silent tragedy’ of his Christian life.”142 For Aristotle, according to Vernon, love for others begins with self-­love. For Augustine, self-­love must be replaced with self-­renunciation. This twist of the foundation of friendship downgrades it in the hierarchy of values.143 Augustine’s focus is on the Christian substitute for friendship, love for neighbor. But this universal unpreferential love, by definition, cannot embrace preferential love. This view is well formulated by Soren Kierkegaard, “Christian love teaches love of all men, unconditionally all.” In the words of Vernon, “This means that there is no way, according to Kierkegaard, to integrate a notion of friendship into neighbor-­love.”144 As we move away from the Augustinian era and come close to the thir-

Introduction    33

teenth century’s seminal moment in the Western history of thought, Christianity experiences a turning point in friendship theology through St. Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274), who, in contrast with Augustine, was well educated on Aristotle. Perhaps exactly because of this difference, Aquinas offered a friendship-­ friendly theology that is a major departure from St. Augustine’s perspective. Mark Vernon is right to say that “Greek philosophy was in large part unknown” in the greater part of the Middle Ages.145 Muslim ethicists and philosophers preserved a good part of Greek philosophical literatures in Arabic, and the translation of these texts from Arabic to Latin gave impetus to the European Renaissance. Vernon mentions that in 1247, an English philosopher, Grosseteste, completed an important translation of Nicomachean Ethics, with its two chapters on friendship. “By the time Thomas became a professor of theology in Paris at the age of 30,” explains Vernon, “Aristotle was so dominant that he was commonly known simply as ‘the philosopher.’”146 Vernon identifies “Aristotle’s leading interpreter at the time” as “the Muslim philosopher Ibn Rushd (d. 1198) also called Averroes, and correspondingly ‘the Commentator.’” “It was the Commentator,” Vernon concludes, “who determined Thomas’s life’s work: the Christianization of the Philosopher.”147 According to Vernon, Aquinas ventures an epistemological shift toward friendship by establishing two major points: first, that the reality of friendship is always in between selfish and unselfish motivations (egoistic love vs. altruistic love) and never tends to be absolutely one-­sided; second, that it always benefits both sides to various degrees.148 The lack of absolute selfishness and actual one-­sided benefit in friendship makes it a suitable venture to be embraced by Thomistic Christianity. This epistemological fluidity helps position friendship among Christian virtues. By recognizing “that friendship has mixed motives and is based upon loving the complex particularities of another individual who has egoistic and altruistic intentions,” Vernon asserts, Aquinas, who lived six centuries before Kierkegaard, seems to have provided the best response to Kierkegaard’s ambivalence about the conditionality and partiality of friendship.149 For Aquinas (as for Augustine), “friendship,” notes Vernon, “is a school of love.”150 Aquinas calls God a friend just to “unsettle the assumption that God’s love is distant and transcendent.”151 Aquinas’s “rehabilitation of friendship” (as Vernon calls it) in Christian tradition gave proverbial status to some of his perspectives, such as that “there is nothing on this earth more to be prized than true friendship.”152As theological historian Patrick Quinn has expressed, Aquinas gave the Aristotelian view of friendship a “theological context.” “According to this [context],” Quinn adds, “God’s relationship with Himself can be primarily defined in terms of

34     Friendship in Islamic Ethics and World Politics

Friendship. . . . God is said to be a primarily social being whose friendship is manifested not in terms of the divine-­human relationship but first of all in the divine life itself.”153 Aquinas believed, Quinn asserts, that “friendship ensures an ordered and harmonious network of human relationships.”154 In Summa theologiae (1–­2.28.1), according to Quinn, “between those who love, there is a unity of co-­presence and affection, where he [Aquinas] explores the relationship between love (amor) and union.”155 Quinn believes that Aquinas’s most important contribution in theologizing Aristotle’s view is probably the concept of “self-­transcendence through concern for the other.”156 James Schall contributes, “Aquinas even argued that the universe itself was established in mercy, not justice (I, 21. 4).” In Schall’s reading of Aquinas, “since the existence of the universe, creation, was not ‘owed’ or ‘due’ to anyone, something more than justice seemed to regulate its ultimate order.” Schall concludes, “This view of St. Thomas is one of the deepest insights in all for political philosophy to consider.”157 Significantly, Jeanne Schindler maintains that the friendship a man enjoys with God dictates the term of his friendship within the city.158 Aquinas’s political philosophy benefits from his theology through the order of grace: “Christian charity is friendship between God and man.”159 For Aquinas, “grace,” Schindler notes, “sustains friendship,” and “genuine law in its promulgation and reception is always a reflection of civic friendship.”160 Despite Aquinas’s efforts to establish friendship as a foundation for the theology of the Trinity and to have his theology serve civic friendship, Aristotelian virtue ethics, along with friendship as a cardinal virtue, were overshadowed by agapic perspectives and the quest for truth, particularly since the Protestant movement. Thomas Heilke, a scholar of Martin Luther (d. 1546) and John Calvin (d. 1564), argues that both those leaders of Protestant Christianity had issues with friendship as a virtue. Luther believed that friends and authorities, at their best, restrained evil; they did not necessarily produce virtues.161 Moreover, Hilke asserts that for Luther, holding and adhering to “truth” (specifically, divine truth) was the highest value, and all other possessions—­honor, favor, friendship, and the like—­must be given up for truth. Hilke believes that for Luther, friendship was “useless for any works in political, social, or personal ethics,” as even “a wicked can have friends.”162 Moreover, Hilke holds that for both Luther and Calvin, “the church is the realm of forgiving, being forgiven and helping one another,” and friendship has little or no function in a church where faith is entirely an individual venture.163 Both Protestant leaders did not make any effort to solve the tension that early Christianity considered between “neighbor” and “friend.” Telling is Calvin’s universal statement that the “whole human race, with-

Introduction    35

out exception, should be embraced with one feeling of charity.”164 Hilke concludes that whereas for Aristotle and Aquinas, “the quality of our friendships and the quality of our moral lives are inseparable,” for Luther and Calvin, the essential elements for a virtuous life (including duty, law, command, and grace) were independent of friendship.165 As discussed by Mitias, Nehamas, Vernon, Hilke, and others, both Western secular philosophy and modern Christianity (with the exception of Thomas Aquinas) had serious suspicions of friendship and, thus, did not let it flourish as a civilizational paradigm.

Contemporary Western Friendship Theologies Perhaps because of the many devastating international wars in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a number of contemporary Western theologians were motivated to bridge the conceptual gap between friendship, neighbor, and the “other.” Among the proponents of the vertical divine-­human and horizontal human-­human friendships, German theologian Martin Buber (d. 1965) is one of the most influential thinkers who argued against the possibility of the concept of religiosity as isolated from mutuality and partnership. In his seminal work Ich und Du (I and Thou), Buber contends that “the primary word I-­you can be spoken only with the whole being” and “establishes the world of religion.”166 Addressing the nature of the I-­you partnership, Buber states, “This does not mean a giving up of, say, the I, as mystical writings usually suppose: The I is as indispensable to this, the Supreme, as to every relation, since relation is only possible between I and Thou.”167 Buber therefore defines love as “the responsibility of an I for a thou.”168 One of the most conspicuous aspects of the Buberian theology of human-­ divine relations is that these relations are predicated neither in the sacrificial concept of agape love nor in the realm of selfish erotic friendship. A generation after Buber, the significant mutuality of relations based on philia (brotherly love) is well expounded in the works of Western philosophers/theologians of friendship within the Jewish and Christian traditions, such as Jonathan Sacks, Edward Vacek, James Schall, and Robert Sokolowski. Impressed by his Jewish predecessor Buber, Sacks defines the function of religion as a system needed to moralize love.169 Vacek takes a fundamental step to liberate Christian theology from a unidirectional, sacrificial human-­divine relationship to the unique experience of what he calls the “shared life”: “Most Christian authors praise a self-­sacrificing love that works for the other; some praise a love by which we live from others. . . . Only a few argue at length on behalf of a love that means

36     Friendship in Islamic Ethics and World Politics

being with others.”170 Focusing on the quality of mutuality in philia, Vacek reemphasizes, “In philia, as in all love, we love our beloveds. But in philia, we love them not for their own sake, as separate individuals, nor for our sake (nor for the sake of yet another party), but for the sake of the mutual relationship we share with them.”171 James Schall also offers important perspectives on the theology and political philosophy of friendship. In a book chapter titled “Friendship and Political Philosophy,” Schall argues that “questions that friendship implies require considerations that do not seem capable of being solved by political living or by philosophy alone.” He adds, “Even in revelation, we are left in hope, not vision.” Schall rightly notes, “Friendship both as a reality and as a topic of reflection seems to leave the philosopher in a condition of anxious waiting, of anticipating answers to the questions he suspects are impossible of resolution.”172 From the perspective of political philosophy, Schall argues that deep friendship is, by definition, antidictatorship. Even good commerce, he maintains, needs “a friendship that would unite seller and buyer or worker and owner in a bond of more than simple justice.” His reflection on the complex relationship between justice and friendship is very candid: “In a perfectly just world, we would be intrinsically lonely. We would deal only with relationships, not persons.” “Friendship,” Schall asserts, “exists that we might not, ultimately, be lonely.”173 The foregoing philosophical statements helped Schall to develop his theology of friendship and arrive at several important conclusions: “The search for truth or the mediation on beauty, however solitary, seeks an overview in friendship.” Schall maintains, “Unlike the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, which identified otherness of persons in God, Aristotle’s First Mover seemed to be merely solitary.” Schall finds the second contribution of Christianity to universal friendship in the character of Jesus Christ, who was accessible to a humanity that could reach God in his transcendence, which is why “the relationship between Christ and His disciples” at the Last Supper “is presented as a form of proper friendship.” Schall concludes, “By neglecting the transcendent import of friendship, political philosophy has avoided its most fascinating enterprise and dignity.”174 Another Christian theologian, Robert Sokolowski, argues that a “touch of friendship in all good moral action is a natural substrate that can be elevated by grace into the Christian theological virtue of charity.” Addressing the impersonality, coldness, and disconnectedness of justice, he asserts that friendship, which cannot be shopped in our various relations, is a gift that must be appreciated when it happens.175 The global abuse of religion in justifying interfaith conflicts has prompted

Introduction    37

a number of theologians to address the fallacy of dogmatic “truth” and how organized religions’ exclusivist claims to its access have added fuel to political fires. Werner Jeanrond, a Christian theologian, asserts in his article “Theological Truth from the Perspective of an Interreligious Hermeneutics of Love,” “A hermeneutics of love must not be limited to processes of encountering otherness in carefully defined dialogues and conversations. Rather, every occasion of meeting and communicating with the human (and the divine) other may always already be inspired by our shared experience of humanity.”176 Translating John 1:1, “In the beginning was communication,” Jeanrond concludes, “When this communication, beyond mere declamation, proclamation and monologue, gives rise to genuine conversation, growing relationship, and mutuality, though not necessarily symmetry, then we enter more fully into the orbit of love.”177 For Jeanrond, “any claim to the manifestation of truth at the cost of neglecting difference, otherness and possible confusion would amount to a manifestation of idols.”178 He adds, “Religious truth . . . requires more participation than belonging and more praxis than practice. . . . Truth in a wider sense can only be pursued through the praxis of love.”179 Jeanrond believes that the concept of “totally other” destroys the essence of religiosity that is love.180 This centrally significant love, he suggests, must be protected and enhanced through institutionalization: “The praxis of love also requires institutions of love in order to promote learning in and critical thinking about the praxis of love.”181 This short overview of the story of friendship in Western philosophical and theological history needs mention of one more Christian theologian who treats friendship extensively in his works. In Friendship and the Moral Life, Wadell offers several arguments, suggesting that friendship “is the center of our moral formation” and “puts goodness within our reach.” “It is through friendship,” he argues, “that virtues that make us whole would be learned.”182 Wadell critically addresses the centrality of freedom as the master goal for contemporary life, mentioning its pitfalls: “If the crucial moral questions admit only of individual answers, the most meaningful convictions of our life are haunted by an awful arbitrariness.”183 “There is a terrible loneliness in this kind of freedom,” he points out, adding, “Ironically, the freedom we are given to determine the moral life for ourselves becomes a burden which grows heavier with each step.”184 Wadell’s alternative moral goal is “a model for morality that emphasizes fidelity more than freedom, transformation more than choice.” He believes that extreme emphasis on freedom has detached it from morality, in the sense that we seek morality only when our abuse of freedom puts us in trouble, using what Wadell calls “quandary ethics.” “We think of morality,” he asserts, “only when we are in some kind of mess. This is a negative approach

38     Friendship in Islamic Ethics and World Politics

to morality. Morality operates in time of crisis. As if the focus is the problem not the person.”185 For Wadell, friendship provides the right framework for our exercise of morality. “Friendship helps us see that ethics is not a solution we seek to a problem we wish we could avoid, but is our life lived in a certain way.” In other words, Wadell emphasizes, “The moral life is the saga of the making and remaking of persons through a shared love.” He concludes, “We do not reach our wholeness directly, it is mediated in relationships bounded by a good both seek. . . . Fullness of life is something we receive in friendship with others.”186

Goals, Organization, and Content The ideas and perspectives presented briefly in this introduction—­and many more that are beyond the limits and focuses of this book—­point to fertile theological, philosophical, psychological, sociological, political, and even economic grounds that invite the cultivation of friendship in various realms of human life. Unfortunately, such fine thoughts have yet to be elaborated on and developed into the languages of major world religions and into institutions that could influence modern international relations in a multipolar world order. One major cause for this delay is that the conceptual relation between faith, freedom, and friendship still seems problematic in the view of many scholars and within various theologies and cultures. On the one hand, international organizations and political philosophers alike are in serious need of convincing arguments that can demonstrate a productive relationship between faith, freedom, and friendship. On the other hand, religious advocates and authorities, while being critical of secular and “liberal peace” paradigms, have not succeeded in presenting a cultural and tradition-­based paradigmatic alternative for strategic and positive peace among modern nations and communities. In the wake of the current emergence of isolationist international politics (Brexit, Trumpism, etc.) and the appearance of Islamic radicalism (e.g., Daesh/ ISIS or the Taliban in the heartland of the Muslim world), anti-­Muslim ethnic cleansing (e.g., Myanmar’s policies against Rohingyan Muslims in a Buddhist majority state), and radical Zionism in Israel, it seems that all sides of global politics are in dire need of a common language of friendly peace. One important step to facilitate the development of such a language is to prompt Muslim scholars and Islamic sociopolitical activists to respond to, and negotiate with the aforementioned philosophies and theologies of friendship. This is exactly the primary goal of this volume, which includes a book-­length contribution by

Introduction    39

the editor and conceptually guided scholarly contributions by authorities in the field who have been invited to write on the subject. By inciting conversation within and between Islam and other traditions through the moral prism of friendship, the present volume tries to produce a conceptual, moral, and political language that, in a dialogical framework, can facilitate an Islamic response to the current trends of Western thought on friendship, as well as to strategic peacemaking efforts in international arenas. The overarching thesis of this volume is that friendship has solid roots in Muslim and connected cultures, with fundamental potentials to facilitate a fertile East-­West dialogue on positive peace. This dialogue can make a paradigm shift in communal, interfaith, and international relations. The interdisciplinary approaches presented in this book, encompassing various religious, philosophical, and political traditions, offer perspectives that point at both the necessity and the possibility of such a dialogue and paradigm shift. The volume intends to address the gap that currently exists in teaching friendship as a field of inquiry in both Islamic and comparative religious studies. I hope that this volume, with contributions from many authorities in the field, will serve as a valuable resource to scholars and students of social sciences, humanities, religious studies, and, especially, peace studies. Part I of this volume presents six chapters that provide definitions and conceptual frameworks of friendship as reflected in primary sources of Islamic literature. In chapter 1, “Friendship in Arabic: Its Synonyms, Etymologies, and Transformations,” A. Z. Obiedat draws attention to the importance of semantic analysis for understanding “friendship” and “animosity” in Arabic on a lexical level. His chapter argues that by mapping out the etymologies of the s-­ḥ-­b, ṣ-­ d-­q, and ‘a-­d-­w roots, the semantic network established by their antonyms and synonyms and the resulting hierarchy offer significant insights into the cognitive and emotional content of the notions of friendship and animosity in Arabic. Obiedat analyzes seventeen friendship-­related words that, when considered together, will help to create a conceptual road map for the semantic topography of the various concepts of friendship in Arabic/Muslim cultures. The depth and the breadth of friendship-­related words in the Arabic vocabulary reflect the centrality of friendship in Muslim cultures. Obiedat’s chapter is an especially important read for ethicists and linguists. In “Treatment of Friends,” the last section of Al-­adab al-­kabīr (The greater essay on right conduct), Ibn al-­Muqaffa‘ (720–­57 CE), a pioneer master of Arabic literature, discusses the etiquette, merits, and qualities of friendship and how to avoid enemies. He focuses on friendship from a didactic perspective, drawn from perennial aphorisms rooted in Arabic, Persian, and

40     Friendship in Islamic Ethics and World Politics

Sanskrit sources. Ali Yedes has made an invaluable effort to translate the text, not only from Arabic into English but also from one culture to another. Chapter 2 is an important classical read for both ethicists and historians of ethics. In “Friendship and Love in Islamic Spirituality,” William C. Chittick tackles friendship as a domain of spirituality and looks into the relationship between love and friendship within the ethico-­spiritual space of Muslim cultures. He argues that while love and friendship have not been treated as subjects of any significant inquiry in Islamic jurisprudence and dogmatic theology, they are viewed by both Islamic philosophy and Sufi literature as the highest calling of the human soul. Love and friendship are perceived as the actualization of divine character traits in human beings and as a driving force in bringing human beings closer to God. Chapter 3 finds specific interest among students of Sufism and comparative mysticism. In “Aristotle and Iranian Ethicists: Friendship as a Moral and a Political Paradigm,” I show how three Muslim ethicists—­Aḥmad Ibn Miskawayh, Rāghib al-­Isfahānī, and Naṣīr al-­Dīn Ṭūsī—­have adopted and expanded Aristotle’s philosophy of friendship to new horizons in social and religious life. These Iranian ethicists also enhance the justice-­based traditional Iranian cosmopolitanism to a friendship-­based one. Through ingenious linguistic, epistemological, and philosophical approaches, these Muslim moral philosophers have managed to produce a theology of friendship that holds potential for a sophisticated political philosophy. More significantly, this theology may facilitate conversation on friendship between Qur’ānic and biblical exegeses and modern exegetes. Arguments in this chapter raise important questions that may inspire further research on the relationships among happiness, reason, justice, politics, power, and friendship. Students of philosophical and comparative ethics will find a fresh argument on friendship and cosmopolitanism in chapter 4. In “The Mystery of Friendship: A View from Islam,” Paul L. Heck discusses the views of al-­Ghazālī on friendship and the relevance of these views to the challenges of our contemporary life. Heck situates his theory of friendship within a historical context, which is very relevant today, by describing the sociopolitical circumstances of al-­Ghazālī’s time and then comparing al-­ Ghazālī’s views on friendship with those of Abū Ḥayyān al-­Tawḥīdī and Ibn Ḥamdūn. Chapter 5 sheds new light on religious ethics in Islam and complements chapter 4 in terms of the two distinct schools of ethics mentioned earlier in this introduction. In the last chapter of part I, “Three Dimensions of Friendship: A Qur’ānic Perspective,” I rely on hermeneutical help received from early Muslim ethicists such as Miskawayh, al-­Isfahānī, and Ṭūsī, to argue that the Qur’ān pro-

Introduction    41

vides material that clearly expounds the significance of universal friendship, based on its importance, as a central moral category, to personal, social, and political ethics. I argue that the eschatological concepts of paradise and hellfire in the Qur’ān are predicated and defined upon two notions: the eternal possibility and the impossibility of friendship. As such, I suggest that according to the Qur’ānic worldview, friendship becomes a moral paradigm that not only describes the most significant characteristics of the afterlife but also (almost by default) shows us our moral priorities in the present life. Chapter 6 offers some fresh perspectives in the Qur’ānic exegesis and eschatological studies. Part II delves into friendship as perceived and treated by various religious, political, and civilizational views, offering Zoroastrian, Jewish, Islamic, Confucian, and Christian perspectives. It explores friendship among nations and civilizations and provides an in-­depth analysis about the significance of interfaith friendship for relations among them. By comparing how various religions view friendship, part II provides tools and concepts that can facilitate interfaith friendship. Through critical insights into the stumbling blocks hindering international, interfaith, and intercivilizational friendships, part II demonstrates the gap that exists between reality and the ideal in world politics. In “Friendship in Pre-­Islamic Iranian Writings,” Jamsheed K. Choksy sheds light on friendship in ancient Iranian and Zoroastrian literature that conveys a broad range of relationships and bonds across both public and private spheres. Choksy provides a linguistic and cultural examination of friendship in the Middle Eastern communities that endorsed the Zoroastrian tradition in and around modern-­day Iran, before they were subsumed into the Muslim caliphates in the seventh century. This examination shows that pre-­ Islamic Iranian cultures understood friendship to be rooted in love and a sort of covenant considered to be the best manifestation of good on an ethical plane. Comparable to essays that examine classical Greek literature on friendship, chapter 7 may specifically find interest among students of Iranian and ancient philosophical studies. In “On Friendship,” Rabbi Zalman Schachter-­Shalomi discusses friendship from a Jewish Renewal perspective. Arguing that there is far more involved in the foundation of friendship than simply an abstraction of mental commonalities, he discusses three narrative examples from the classical Greek and Judeo-­Muslim traditions that call for a friendship—­based on charity, generosity, and magnanimity—­that transcends material bonds and embraces a wide range of people beyond all religious and intellectual borders. Students of Jewish studies may find that chapter 8 offers them new perspectives on friendship.

42     Friendship in Islamic Ethics and World Politics

In chapter 9, Sachiko Murata uses the ethics of friendship to present aspects of what she terms “Confucian Islam.” She explores the last four hundred years of Muslim life in China and argues that Chinese Muslim scholars began to translate major texts of Islamic teachings into Chinese, using neo-­Confucian language, so that lack in knowledge of Arabic and Persian by younger generations would not transform their faith into a meaningless set of rituals. Murata discusses the works of two of these authors, Wang Daiyu and Liu Zhi. Wang Daiyu, the first Chinese Muslim to write a book explaining Islamic teachings to a Confucian Chinese audience, mentioned friendship as one the five constants of the Islamic worldview. In the eighteenth century, Liu Zhi wrote many books asserting that Islam and Confucianism share many common principles, including friendship as one of the five cardinal virtues. Murata points out that for both authors, the goal of friendship is to bring oneself into harmony with God’s desires. In Confucian Islam, friendship is therefore more expansive than interpersonal relations and becomes a spiritual exercise that connects a person to the entire universe. Murata concludes that the virtue of friendship was considered to be among the most important cardinal virtues for early Confucian Muslims and that their very endeavor to provide Chinese translations of Islamic teachings led to a formidable friendship between the two religions of Islam and Confucianism. Murata’s “Friendship in Confucian Islam” sheds new light in the comparative study of ancient religions. In “Friendship between Islamic and Christian Civilizations,” Richard Bulliet provides insight into past relations between Eastern and the Western civilizations. He describes the two invented master narratives that post–­World War II historians use when they interpret the Middle East through the prism of “Judeo-­Christian civilization” and “the clash of civilizations.” Critical of these divisive inventions, which have no truth in actual history, Bulliet argues that a new master narrative, “friendship between Islamic and Christian civilizations” or “the Islamo-­Christian civilization,” better captures the long-­standing interdependence between Muslims and Christians. He emphasizes the shared roots of Islamic and Christian cultures and questions the utility of modernization theory (which equates secularization with progress) in analyzing the robust public religiosity of the United States and the Middle East today. Chapter 10 offers fresh ideas for students of analytical history. Abdulaziz Othman Altwaijri begins his chapter, “Friendship in the Muslim World,” with an etymological analysis of many of the words that pertain to friendship in the Arabic language and related literary philology. He shows that the two main virtues that define friendship are truthfulness and generosity, or sincerity and selflessness in relations between friends. Such a synergy creates harmony, both within a person and between friends, in thoughts, feelings, and

Introduction    43

deeds, to ensure that differences do not spiral into animosity and hatred. While Muslim scholars of various disciplines have produced a robust body of literature on the ethics, etiquette, qualities, varieties, conditions, and status of friendship in Muslim cultures, Altwaijri posits a consensus among Muslim authors that friendship is not constrained by religion or a belief system, a notion supported by specific Qur’ānic verses and hadith literature. The last part of his chapter forms a critical assessment of the state of relations both within the Muslim world and outside of it. Altwaijri invites Muslim intellectuals and statesmen to pay serious attention to the ethics of friendship in international relations. Chapter 11 partially complements this volume’s first chapter, by Ahmad Obiedat, on friendship-­related Arabic linguistics. However, Altwaijri’s chapter primarily serves students of intercultural studies and international relations. In chapter 12, Seyyed Hossein Nasr provides an in-­depth analysis of friendship among religions and discusses why and how interfaith friendship is a necessity for intercivilizational friendship. Nasr contends that religion, or a sacred worldview, is at the foundation of every civilization. Religion, he argues, “is at the heart of sympathetic understanding of other civilizations.” To be friends with a society, therefore, one must understand the spiritual traditions of that society. Nasr concludes that we need to be “engaged with other civilizations for something more than private gain, business transactions, or national interest” and to focus instead on spiritualism, art, and religion. “Friendship between Religions and Cultures: The Foundation for Friendship between Civilizations” is a very rich chapter for students of comparative religion and also for political activists and diplomats. In “Friendship in International Relations,” Iqbal Riza examines the main paradigms that offer a practical assessment of ways that friendship can be advanced from within the realm of international relations. Riza examines whether an entity based on self-­interest, power, and domination can entertain the concept of friendship. He defines the nature of friendship in international relations and explores cultural identities, the differences between friendship and alliance, and friendship as a subject of political manipulation in international relations. Riza concludes that while international relations are still ruled by either self-­interest or, at best, union for power, a path to friendship between nation-­ states remains evidenced by the increased emergence of many political and economic unions and nongovernmental organizations and by increasing global attention to the rule of law. Reflecting on Riza’s direct experience in multilateral diplomacy, chapter 13 provides important insights for scholars of political science and for international diplomats. Part III looks at friendship as a paradigm that may be used to shift the nature of both interpersonal and international relations. In “Will to Friendship:

44     Friendship in Islamic Ethics and World Politics

Rūmī’s Perspective,” Abdolkarim Soroush invites us to view friendship as a possible remedy for the moral defect in the present state of international relations. Contending that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is not balanced by a charter for human responsibilities, Soroush holds that friendship may be an effective agent for breaking such politico-­moral deadlock. By examining the views of the great thirteenth-­century Sufi scholar Jalāl al-­Dīn Rūmī, Soroush provides a model of ethical transformation that is applicable to both interpersonal and interorganizational relations. Chapter 14 serves students of comparative mystical literature and political philosophy. In “Friends without Borders: A Case Study,” John Marks demonstrates how personal friendships among private citizens of hostile countries can have a transforming impact on the relations between their states. As the founder of Search for Common Ground, a nongovernmental organization with branches in thirty-­five countries, Marks presents a history of US-­Iran “Track II” diplomacy that has continued, with monumental results, for twenty years, and he points at scores of remarkable successes in US-­Iran relations, achieved against many political odds. Marks shows how private transcultural and transpolitical friendships have the potential to overcome intense international negative histories that have paralyzed official bilateral relations between two countries. The case study presented in chapter 15 will be very useful in the field of applied and political ethics. Finally, in the last chapter of part III, “Global Loneliness and the State of Human Mental Health: How Religion Can Promote Friendship as a Paradigm of Peace in Postmodernity,” I argue that despite all expectations that modern technologies of communication and worldwide access to the virtual world will facilitate human relations, it seems that contemporary societies are experiencing deep loneliness, with proven mental side effects and disorders. The appointment of the first minister of loneliness in Britain in January 2018 has signaled that there is an urgent global need to address increasing human loneliness and to look for remedies through effective policy making. Certainly, one logical remedy seems to be promoting friendship in intercultural frameworks. Toward this end, chapter 16 offers conceptual negotiation between perspectives from the Qur’ān and from political philosophers and theologians such as Arendt, Vacek, al-­Tawḥīdī, and Sam‘ānī. By presenting a tradition-­supported model for applied friendship in both private and public relations, I suggest that friendship, with its various dimensions and deep philosophical roots in both religious and secular perspectives, can provide a better approach for strategically building peace. This book aims at rethinking friendship in Islamic ethics and world poli-

Introduction    45

tics in four ways simultaneously: as a frame for morality; as a moral category superior to the ethics of tolerance and punitive justice in international relations; as an advanced space of ethics that receives ultimate support by Abrahamic faiths; and as a paradigmatic concept that can advance our contemporary approaches to peacemaking, conflict resolution, and increasing mass loneliness. The volume’s conclusion appears in the epilogue as a “Friendship Manifesto,” which sums up insights drawn from all chapters and suggests that friendship needs to be revisited, reconceptualized, and brought back as a central paradigm of contemporary civilization. Friendship should be considered as the highest end of religiosity, rationality, and life itself. The appendix at the end of the volume presents a sample friendship resolution adopted by a mayor.

Methodology and Audience The chapters included in this volume reflect various methodological, systematic, and critical approaches. They represent a mix of longer scholarly contributions with detailed endnotes, essays with few references, and short works that are included because of the significance and practical contributions of the author in global, international and interfaith peacemaking. We may therefore view this mix as a friendship among multiple approaches to the subject matter. Offering a multidisciplinary, theoretical, and applied approach through contributions by many top authorities in their field, this volume may serve as a valuable resource to scholars and students of the social sciences, humanities, peace studies, international diplomacy, comparative religious ethics, Islamic studies, and comparative civilization. Equally important, I hope that this volume finds interest among social and political activists, NGO leaders, peacemakers, and diplomats. Given the broad scope of the topic and its various aspects, the interdisciplinary approach used in this book gives dimensionality to the monolithic approaches that are all too common in scholarship on Islamic cultures. In this book, all transliterations for Arabic terms generally follow the standards of the International Journal of Middle East Studies. To facilitate Arabic transliteration, I have chosen Times New Arabic as the primary font for all texts. For diacritical markings, I use long vowels, mark ayn (‘) and hamza (’), and use dots where necessary, such as in the first chapter. Except in that chapter, transliterated Arabic words in the text do not show the unpronounced ending h. All dates refer to the Common Era (CE) except when the Arabic hijri calendar is important.

Part 1 Friendship in Primary Sources: Defnitions, Epistemological Realms, and Conceptual Frameworks

Chapter 1

Friendship in Arabic: Its Synonyms, Etymologies, and Transformations A. Z. Obiedat

Rather than adopting a literary, religious, or philosophical approach to the definition of concepts, this essay1 attempts to bring attention to the importance of semantic analysis for understanding friendship terms in Arabic at the lexical level.2 It argues that by mapping the etymologies of the s-­ḥ-­b and ṣ-­d-­q roots, the semantic network established by antonyms and the resulting hierarchy offer insights into the cognitive and emotional content of the notions of “friendship” and “animosity” in Arabic language and culture. The Arabic synonyms for “friendship” constitute a spectrum that increases in a linear and unified manner and then forks, after the sixth synonym, to express three different linear branches. The first, basic Arabic notion of friendship reflects an increase of sincerity and closeness to one’s personal activities and intellect, the second indicates total alliance, and the third reflects desire and closeness to one’s emotions. In particular, ma‘ārif (acquaintances) constitute the first step out of the circle of strangers; a zamīl (colleague) shares one’s professional or sport setting but does not go beyond these realms; a qarīn (match) shares one’s generation, neighborhood, or common interests and engages with one on more than a professional or nonprofessional level yet is not admitted into one’s spatial proximity; a rafīq (comrade) shares one’s activities by accompanying one’s journey and being spatially close yet is not admitted to one’s heart. At this level, the friendship line continues to increase based on intellectual relatedness or personality, that is, inner proximity. Without the regular participation of a ṣāḥib (companion), one’s activities would lose their pleasure and meaning; a ṣadīq (truthful friend) adds the feature of internal truthfulness, so that person is closer 49

50     Friendship in Islamic Ethics and World Politics

to one’s heart without suspicions of harm or betrayal. At this level, the tree of friendship branches in three directions. The first branch continues the notion of a ṣadīq (truthful friend). The anīs (amiable friend) might not be friendlier (i.e., more truthful) than a friend at the former level, but the presence of this person always brings joy. A ṣafī (highly selected friend) is part of the crème de la crème of one’s trusted friends. A khalīl (soulmate) is very close to oneself, to the extent that the two individuals mutually influence each other’s personalities and lives, similar (as the investigation below reveals) to the processes of collective pickling or fermenting. The second branch indicates alliance. To the former aspects of friendship, a walī (faithful ally) adds strong ties in matters of religious, military, or factional comradery. An akh (brother) is that close friend who is elevated to blood relationship; there is no breaking of this tie, since brotherhood cannot, in principle, be undone. The third branch, the line of passionate proximity, starts with the walīf or alīf (affable and sociable). That person brings joy to all aspects of life, serious or playful, where there is no disharmony. The third branch includes the nadīm, or drinking partner, who is entrusted to engage in this private matter; the samīr (entertaining partner), who brings joy to the cool Arabian nights of the summer; the ‘ishīr (domestic), who shares household or private life, whether sexual or not; the khadīn (playmate), who adds the feature of passionate and desirable attraction; and, finally, the ḥabīb (beloved), who is wholeheartedly loved in all aspects of life, sexually as well as sentimentally. The accompanying figure represents the hierarchic increase of the seventeen roles of friendship and its three branches. In sum, the tree of friendliness is spatial in origin, moving from the vaguely known person to the spatially close one and then to the individual close to one’s personality, social struggles, or heart, until friendship goes to the brotherhood tie or love bond. A detailed etymological account of the semantic field of friendship follows.

Ṣadāqah and Ṣuḥbah as the Most Common Words for Friendship Ṣadīq refers to a truthful friend, but the connection from the trilateral root to the meaning “truthful friend” is not as direct and short as one would expect. Originally, the combination of ṣ-­d-­q refers “to strength in something. . . . This is why ṣidq (lit. truth) is due to its inherent strength while falsity (lit. kadhib) has no strength in itself.”3 In this context, classical Arab linguists propose to modern linguists an amazing hypothesis, pioneered by Ibn Jinnī (932–­1002 CE

Friendship in Arabic    51

‘

Fig. 1. The Semantic Tree of Friendship. (© A. Z. Obiedat.)

/ AH 320–­92) and elegantly summarized by al-­Suyūṭī as “al-­ishtiqāq al-­kabīr” (the greater derivation).4 This idea, which can be translated as the “photonic relatedness hypothesis,” claims that every Arabic trilateral radical is semantically related to all its different trilateral arrangements. In this case, the ṣ-­d-­q arrangement of radicals should be related to q-­ṣ-­d and other closely related sounds. In numerical manner, the radicals ṣ-­d-­q, numbered as 1-­2-­3, are related in meaning to the converse order (3-­2-­1), in addition to the other two possibilities, (2-­3-­1 and 1-­3-­2). If we take the photonic relatedness hypothesis seriously, the order at hand (1-­2-­3, i.e., ṣ-­d-­q) leads to “strength,” and the reverse arrangement (3-­2-­1, i.e., q-­d-­ṣ) leads to “straightforwardness.”5 Clearly, truthfulness is related to straightforwardness. Yet the related root ṣ-­d-­f is associated with contingency or “deviation.”6 Etymologists indicate that qualifying a thing, such as a spear, as being ṣadq refers to being “solid.”7 A dowry a husband gives to a wife in consumma-

52     Friendship in Islamic Ethics and World Politics

tion of marriage is a ṣadāq, affirming the strength of the man’s intentions and the marriage bond.8 Since the witnesses of the marriage contract and the wedding attendee engage in observing the delivery of that dowry, ṣadāq is a suitable word indicating strength. In this line, to say of someone that “he is a sidq man” means that he is a true one.9 Furthermore, a mutaṣaddīq, or giver of charity, is someone who “fulfills his promise.”10 Based on the various meanings “strength,” “solidity,” “firm dowry,” and “delivered charity,” we can understand why ṣadāqah became the choice word for friendship. Ibn Fāris states that “friendship (lit. ṣadāqah) is truthfulness in affectation: wudd.”11 Other lexicographers suggest that ṣadīq refers to the one who is “truth telling,”12 “continuous in believing” one’s speech,13 or trusting what is said or “advised”14 by that person. Jurjānī identifies a ṣadīq as “that person who never claims by his tongue something that he doesn’t fulfill by his heart and action.”15 That is a sound analysis when the word ṣiddīq16 describes a person reaching a level higher than a ṣadīq in generating trust. Recognizing the qualities of truthfulness and trust would make sense in ancient Arab cultures where the central quality in social relations was tribal loyalty rather than guild, ecclesiastical, royal, or republican cross-­tribal political organization. In such lack of order, tribal rivalry is robust, and finding an outsider worthy of trust is certainly a friend or, rather, a person where trust can be established. It is quite important to note a cultural difference here: the English word friend indicates someone who exhibits the quality of being “friendly.” English friendly can be translated to Arabic wadūd (approachable).17 Therefore, it is sound to say, “I visited that foreign country and found people very friendly over there.” This does not mean that I befriended everyone I met during my journey and found them to be truthful and close. Instead, such an English statement indicates that the foreigners were approachable and not aggressive, arrogant, or displeasing. In short, the Arabic equivalent for the English word friend seems to be not ṣadīq (truthful friend) but wadūd (approachable). The alternative word that competes in usage and approximately means friend is ṣaḥāb. Noting that the combination of the radicals ṣ-­ḥ-­b “refers to the conjunction and closeness to something,” Ibn Fāris concludes that “from that is the friend.”18 Also compare “aṣḥaba al-­b‘īr [the camel was easily lead]”19 and “aṣḥaba al-­rajul if he reaches puberty, and istaṣḥaba when everything becomes suitable to another. It is said muṣḥab, if a piece of hair is left on bread and aṣḥaba al-­mā’ if algae comes on top of water.”20 The general notion in all these instances is the company of someone or something to another. The verb that describes such a notion where “everything is associated with something else”21 is istaṣḥaba. Association metaphorically shifts into the expression of

Friendship in Arabic    53

ownership, as in aṣaḥāb al-­kursī (people of the throne). Hence, the ṣāḥib of anything is the owner of that thing. Ownership of material items can also transform into ownership of intellectual properties, as in aṣḥāb al-­riyā’ (people of hypocrisy)22 and aṣḥāb al-­yamīn (people of benevolence or right-­handedness), indicating those who draw close to god in worshipping.23 A historically significant cultural term is used for the Prophet Muḥammad’s companions. Aṣḥāb refers to “whoever saw the Prophet or sat with him believing in him.”24 Another derivational variety of “companions” with the same meaning is ṣaḥābī, indicating “whoever met the Prophet and has accompanied him in a lengthy manner even if he did not narrate anything from him.”25 In short, a ṣāḥib is someone who is physically associated with another person, whether because of an emotional or a business relationship. In contrast, ṣadīq indicates truthfulness and trust between two persons, stronger qualities than mere company. Based on this analysis, a ṣadīq must be a stronger friend than a ṣāḥib. Although ṣāḥib is the word indicating the Prophet’s companions, his longest companion, father in-­law, and first successor in political leadership, Abū Bakr, was distinguished from the rest of the companions by being called ṣiddīq. We might infer from this that a ṣadīq should be a stronger friend than a ṣāḥib.

The Hierarchy and Synonyms of Friendship through Their Etymologies The notion of friendship considered here is that which, in Arabic, generally refers to the relationship between two or more human beings. Compassionate blood relationship and contractual membership in institutions, such as the relationship between an employer and an employee, are excluded from this analysis of the words synonymous with “friendship.” Although highly relevant, expressions of passion and physical intimacy that may occur without reasonable length of companionship are not considered here as direct synonyms of “friendship.” Friendship can indeed be related to both organizational work and fondness, but without setting conceptual limitations, we will end up with massive and diverse semantic fields that will hurl us into an infinite regress and distract from the proposed investigation. Friendship is so central to human affairs that studying it thoroughly will pull up the totality of the web of human life itself, for which there is not space in this essay. The following hierarchy maps out the synonyms of the friendship notion by arranging them based on increase in the degree of affinity to oneself. It offers suggested translations and hints on etymological relations. This hierarchi-

54     Friendship in Islamic Ethics and World Politics

cal arrangement of the increased degrees of friendship is solely mine, and many readers may disagree with it.26 Therefore, the reader is invited to contemplate the word meanings based on their specific roots first. Then I present some inferences and explanations for the hierarchy. I here attempt to provide literal translations close to entries provided in dictionaries. The Stem 1. Ma‘rifah, acquaintance The ‘-­r-­f root indicates “the continuity of something with another.”27 Repetition or predictability would psychologically lessen anxiety, leading to “serenity.”28 Ma‘rūf, or a known item, is something or someone that does not scare one or cause one feelings of alienation or strangeness, that is, tawaḥḥush.29 When defined, al-­ma‘rūf means “customarily acceptable.”30 More generally, ma‘rifah is “knowledge,”31 and one of the many ways to derive the verbal noun, maṣdar, or gerund is to say, “‘Araftuh ma‘rifatan,”32 that is, “I knew him well.”33 Ma‘rūf is also the opposite of the unknown or indefinite nakirah.34 The persons with whom we are acquainted through their faces, appearances, names, or professions are the ones we do not consider strangers. An acquaintance is part of our knowledge, but there is no personal or emotional participation. 2. Zamīl, colleague The z-­m-­l root refers to the act of hurrying up “using one leg,”35 which is why zāmil refers to livestock that shows lameness.36 The camel in general seems to show this strange and uneven movement and therefore was called zāmilh.37 Yet al-­zūmlah is the “loaded camel.”38 Similarly, Ibn Fāris states that z-­m-­l refers to a “heavy burden.”39 A zamīl “is a weak man”40 or, rather, a person who is too weak to walk and is therefore carried on an animal. In short, from the strange camel movement, to the burden on its back, to the person in need of a lift, a new meaning emerged, zamīl. In the larger field of friendship, zamīl came to be commonly understood as “colleague,”41 probably because camelback company is a close relationship in long and harsh travel contexts. This notion is flexible enough to additionally mean “apprenticeship,” as in the modern usage of zamālah. I see the connection in that the apprentice starts as a nascent trained or week worker in the company of a more experienced professional in close relationship.

Friendship in Arabic    55

3. Rafīq, comrade The r-­f-­q root refers to “agreement and convergence without violence,”42 which is why “kindness [rifq] is the contrary to violence.”43 Mirfaq is the human’s elbow that “one leans on,”44 and al-­rufqah is the “group that one accompanies in his travel.”45 Ibn Sīdah adds, “When two men are jobless, they are rafīqān, and when they get a job, they are zamīlān.”46 Amazingly, another arrangement of the root r-­f-­q, f-­r-­q, would mean the opposite of group company, that is, furqah, which is the scattering or dispersing of that group.47 This is an astonishing example of Ibn Jinnī’s photonic relatedness hypothesis, mentioned above. 4. Qarīn, match The q-­r-­n root refers to the “connection between two things.”48 Accordingly, a rope is qirān, the connection in one’s eyebrows is qaran, and someone’s wife is qarīnah.49 Al-­Khalīl Ibn Aḥmad50 and Ibn Sīdah differ by claiming that the essence of the q-­r-­n radical is a cattle horn, since this is what the word qarn means.51 This view makes sense given the connectivity or pairing nature of cattle horns. Ibn Sīdah later covers this possibility by noting that when two items or persons come together, qirān happens.52 In the friendship domain, the person who has the same age or task of someone else is considered a match, that is, qarīn. A match is a friend based on engagement in similar activities, such as a classmate or neighborhood friend. 5. Ṣāḥib, companion As explained in further detail in the first section of this chapter, ṣ-­ḥ-­b “refers to the conjunction and closeness to something,” and “from that is the friend [ṣāḥib].”53 In the final analysis, the term means “companion.” 6. Ṣadīq, truthful friend As explained in further detail in the first section of this chapter, a ṣadīq is “that person who never claims by his tongue something that he doesn’t fulfill by his heart and action.”54 In the final analysis, he or she is the “truthful friend.”

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Branch A 7. Anīs, mu’nis, or mu’ānis, amiable friend The a-­n-­s root refers to the “appearance of something and any [manifestation] other than tawaḥḥush [a scene of perplexing inexperience or concealment].”55 The verb ānastu means “I sensed it,” as in saw or heard it.56 Interestingly, insān is the most used word in Arabic to denote a human person,57 since he or she is a familiar creature in contrast with strange beasts, waḥsh, or invisible spirits, jin. Relevant to this chapter’s focus, to be in a state of serenity caused by someone else, uns, is to feel familiarity in opposition to strangeness, tawaḥḥush. To indicate a higher level than mere human being (insān), the word ānisah indicates the unmarried mature female to whom talking is pleasant.58 Ānisah became the standard Arabic translation for the English title “Miss.” Although the male equivalent of ānisah is morphologically possible and seneschal, ānis is not commonly used. Possibly for that reason, another morphological derivation, anīs, came to indicate a person whose company would lead to tranquility and conversation enjoyment. 8. Alīf, wilf, or walīf, affable and sociable friend The a-­l-­f root refers to “the joining of something to another or others.”59 The verb ālafat refers to the gathering of camels. The verb ālaftu means “I made them a thousand,”60 indicating the process of combination. Mu’allif, from the same root, indicates an “author,” who synthesizes and combines several written pieces. When birds are said to be ālafat at a particular spot, they are not scared and do not leave their place.61 The sum of these notions indicates the performance of gathering, unity, physical proximity, and mutual harmony. The friend who exhibits these qualities is said to be an alīf, wilf, or walīf. Interestingly, a different arrangement of the same root, a-­f-­l, means “sunset”62 or disappearance, which strengthens the contrast with the notion of physical proximity. 9. Ṣafī, highly selected friend The ṣ-­f-­w root indicates purity from contamination and impurities.63 Ṣafwah refers to the distilled part of pure oil or to similar processes. The equivalent of the French expression crème de la crème is ṣafwat al-­ṣafwah. This purity can be enlarged to other phenomena—­hence, the expression, ṣafā al-­jawwu,

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“the weather became clear.”64 Ṣafiyyah refers to a female camel known for immense “ability to make milk.”65 As for humans, the passive participle al-­ muṣṭafā means “the selected one” and is commonly attributed to the prophet Muḥammad, as the human selected to deliver the Qur’ānic revelation. Additionally, ṣāfaytu al-­rajula means “I established brotherhood with him.”66 From this last usage, someone’s highly selected friends are called aṣfiyā’ who formulate the upper tier of someone’s truthful friends. Given the purification and selection process, Arab historians and narrators have taken seriously the reports and narratives from the highly selected friends of a leader, intellectual, or poet, since aṣfiyā’ hear testimonies and see incidents that no one does. Certainly, important figures would not have elevated certain friends to the level of aṣfiyā’ without recognizing special qualities in those persons. Laymen, too, can have aṣfiyā’, if they care about the selection of their friends. 10. Khill or khalīl, soulmate Ibn Sīdah offers some nine pages for the kh-­l-­l entry, and the meanings are extremely diverse. Ibn Fāris attempts to reduce the essence of the kh-­l-­l entry to “the space between two things.”67 He contends that kh-­l-­l refers to any space or minute thing that goes between tight spaces. The fusion of the two meanings happens when someone eats his own khulālah, that is, food debris stuck between teeth. There are several applications for these notions, from transparent female clothing, khalkhāl, to small pieces of wood that fill holes in a wall, akhillah. Lexicographers move freely between these notions, based on their actual existence in the usage. So they also list derivations that indicate the “purest of friendly emotions,”68 without distinguishing them from each other; for example, kahlīl, khill, khullah all refer to a level of strong friendship. Kahlīl was mentioned twice in the Qur’ān, where friendship occurs with God himself.69 The unifying meaning of these varieties might reveal itself when someone performs the act of khallal, that is, cleans “his fingers with water”;70 the water completely goes between and circumvents the fingers. In other words, the friendship that the kahlīl feels is composed of minute things that go between tight spaces, or, rather, it is so circumventing and penetrating that it goes into every sensing neuron in one’s body. The material or immaterial penetrability indicated by kh-­l-­l makes us understand why the word for “vinegar” is khall. I suggest that this derivation occurred either because of the overwilling effect of vinegar on the processes of pickling vegetables, mukhallal, or because of the strong effect of vinegar on one’s throat. Kahlīl means overwhelmed by the sense of strong friendship to others. It is

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no wonder that an additional meaning of kahlīl is the “heart.”71 The combination of these notions is best expressed in the English word soulmate. Branch B 11. Walī, faithful ally The w-­l-­y root indicates spatial “closeness.”72 When it is conjugated as a verb in the present, yalī, it refers to the thing that comes “next.”73 When the verb is in the twallā form, it means “ran away.”74 This spatial notion is captured in the noun awalā, which indicates that something is logically or materially closer to the proper order. More generally, awalā means “more appropriate.”75 This relatedness in space as being “near to” is visible when someone follows someone else. This notion is expressed in the root where walī is related to the domain of friendship. In particular, the walī can be the “emancipator, friend, ally, cousin, supporter, and neighbor.”76 Walī is a highly confusing word because it can indicate the name of the slave’s master and, at the same time, indicate the slave. The word can still be used after emancipation, to refer to a positive alliance between the protector and the protected person. Al-­Jurjānī further clarifies the meaning of walī “as an active participle [‫]اسم فاعل‬, whoever his obedience have continued without disobedience, or as a passive participle [‫]اسم مفعول‬, whoever god’s benevolence has continued upon him.”77 Meanwhile, wilāyah means “a relatedness . . . that results from emancipation or muwālāha [tribal protection or admission].”78 Due to this confusion, a new term appeared, mawlā al-­muwālah, meaning a person “whose lineage is unknown” but who “was brothered [assigned to be a brother] to someone whose linage is [known].”79 These two “brothers” become related in the obligations of tribal criminal law. In mysticism, this relation is attributed to the process where “the servant of god [the believer] is handling truth while annihilating [or decentralizing the primacy of] his self.”80 The Arabic usage does not take this relation lightly, since God himself can be that protecting friend, walī. The Qur’ān (2:257) states, “God is the walī of those who have faith, from the depths of darkness He will lead them forth into light.” The general horizon of the term walī is seen, I suggest, in the spatial “closeness”81 between two individuals that is translated as an inclusion in the domain of ownership, tribe, faction, army, or divine guardianship. Walī, “faithful ally,” can refer to any of these or to all of them at the

Friendship in Arabic    59

same time, if one happens to be the blood cousin who neighbors, supports, and fights alongside his faithful cousin.

12. Akh, brother The a-­kh-­kh root, according to Ibn Fāris, refers to an involuntary vocal reaction to pain or disgust.82 In the first case, it is an equivalent to the English ouch. However, the relevant root here is a-­kh-­w, which indicates brotherhood in “[blood] relation.”83 Al-­Zabīdī further adds that al-­akh is one who is “born by your mother and father or one of them,”84 and it can also be said about brotherhood in breastfeeding, “Al-­akh min al-­raḍā‘.” This case happens where a female takes the responsibly of breastfeeding a child who is not hers, due to the absence of the child’s mother or the lack of the mother’s breastfeeding. Brotherhood could also be a result of friendship, as it can apply to a “ṣadīq and ṣāḥib.”85 A famous proverb goes, “There could be a brother for you whom your mother never carried.”86 Al-­Zabīdī attributes to Abū Ḥātim that “ikhwah [the plural of “brother”] is for lineage relationship and [the other plural possibility] ikhwān is for friendship,”87 but Al-­Zabīdī adduces a Qur’ānic verse (49:10) that does not abide by this distinction, “indeed, believers are but brothers [ikhwah],” indicating the possibility that brotherhood can be created by belief choice, with a friend with or without blood or upbringing relationships. Arabic can formulate a verb from this root that means “to brother,” ākhā.88 In short, ākhā can elevate an outsider, with proper conditions, to the level of a brother, akh. Branch C 13. Samīr or musāmir, pleasing chat partner The s-­m-­r root indicates the “opposite of whiteness in color.”89 Ibn Sīdah refines this meaning to a “state between whiteness and blackness,”90 such as tan or dark brown, as in the color ḥinṭī91 in the case of a heap of cracked wheat. This gray shade is dominant in nights with visibility due to moonlight or artificial light where the whiteness of light and blackness of night come into effect. Given this context, the night chat came to be known as samar.92 Moving from the gray shade color at night to the activity of night chat, a samīr or musāmir is that friend who engages in a pleasant night chat. Such a chat must

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be in a pleasant atmosphere, and cool nights take place in summer, when people can stay out late without the freezing winter temperatures and when the moon is presenting a lovely effect in the clear Arabian skies.93 A late-­night converser, samīr, embodies the effects of such an enjoyable atmosphere. 14. Nadīm or munādim, entertaining partner The n-­d-­m root indicates a feeling of “regret on something past.”94 Moving from that generalized notion, a nadīm or munādim is a wine-­drinking partner whose presence is missed. Such a situation would provoke feelings of regret.95 Yet this conclusion is not uniform, for the act of joining (not missing) someone else in drinking is also called munādamah.96 This indicates that the feeling of regret became a lost meaning, while association with drinking became the dominant aspect of nadīm. Ibn Fāris points to an interpretation that he thinks is uncertain, ‫وفيه نظر‬, (i.e., needs further reflection and investigation),97 yet al-­Zabīdī repeats the same opinion without reservation, claiming that munādamah is a phonetic inversion of mudāmanah,98 referencing alcohol addiction. Since the condition of drunkenness involves misspoken words in addition to the need to hide the condition of alcoholism from the public, munādimī, “drinking partner,” becomes an alternative to the unacceptable word mudminī, “alcoholic partner.” Similar to Ibn Fāris’s semantic caution, this interpretation needs further reflection and investigation, but I find it a likely one. 15. Khidn or khadīn, desired friend The kh-­d-­n root indicates friendship, muṣādaqah, and company, muṣāḥabah, as Ibn Fāris points out.99 Ibn Sīdah adds that the khidn is a pleasantly talkative friend.100 However, this word was used in the Qur’ān in prohibitive ruling,101 and it is quite amazing that neither lexicographer cited above elaborates. Al-­Zabīdī articulates that khidn is a friend who befriends with “psychological desire”102 and that mukhādanah is the ‫ال ُمكاسرة بالعينين‬, which can be translated as “the clash between the eyes.” Such a clash is not a common expression with a straightforward meaning. I suggest that if the khidn’s “psychological desire”103 is not an expressive act, the person holding the desire feels embarrassed of his or her gaze once the desired other discovers it. This discovery leads the desirer to change the direction of the gaze, which clarifies the notion of the “clash between the eyes.” The desired friend, khidn,

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is in a higher level than the pleasing converser, samīr, and the drinking partner, nadīm, given that this desire can transform into a love relationship. 16. ‘Ashīr or mu‘āshir, playmate The ‘-­sh-­r root indicates someone becoming “the tenth member of a group,”104 hence the number ‘ashrah (ten). The term ‘āshūrā’ refers to the tenth day of the muḥarram month in the Islamic lunar calendar.105 ‘Ishr refers to camels approaching a source of water in the tenth day of their grazing.106 ‘Ashīrah means a tribe or clan.107 In all these usages, the indication of ten or the intermingling with a large group, mukhālaṭah,108 comprises the core meaning. However, an ‘ashrā’ is a female camel who completed the ten-­ month pregnancy period.109 Intermingling and the pregnancy period went through a metaphorical shift to indicate a sexual relationship exhibited by a husband and wife, where the first is called ‘ashīr and the second is called ‘ashīrah.110 The combined meanings of intermingling with a group and intimate relation yielded the generalized meaning of ‘ashīr or ‘ashīrah, the notion of a close friend who, at least, shares a living space or, at most, engages in a love relationship. 17. Ḥabīb, “beloved” Ibn Fāris states that the combination of the radicals ḥā’ and bā’ (i.e., ḥabb and ḥubb) generally refers to three meanings: (1) “smallness in size,” (2) “shortness,” and (3) “fixation and perseverance.”111 An example of the first meaning is found in ḥabb, which means “seeds,” as in the case of grain seeds; the singular of ḥabb is ḥabba, which can be “a drop of water,” “a pellet of hail,” or “a white tooth.” An example of the combination’s second meaning, which is not as common as the first or third, is ḥabḥāb, which refers to “a short man.”112 An example of the third usage is the word ḥubb, referring to “love.”113 It is quite difficult to grasp the connection between the three usages of the radicals ḥ-­b-­b. I propose that from the fact that seeds are small comes the metaphorical usage of the second meaning, since a short man can be imagined to be as small as a seed. As for the third meaning, I propose that love is considered analogous to the life of a seed; metaphorically, love can grow like a plant from a seed and can branch out like a tree by procreation, and love originates in an imperceptible intention in the heart, as in an unseen seed under the surface of the ground. In short, the letters of the ḥ-­b-­b root

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preserve the notion that love is an invisible act of growth and proliferation, and the ḥabīb is the lover.114 I must note two issues regarding the preceding hierarchy of seventeen roles of friendship. First, there are words relevant to friendship that do not occur in the list. This omission is due to the distinction between these words expressing friendship and words that usually accompany them as adjectives that describe the quality of friendship. Those adjectives include wadūd (approachable), ḥamīm (warm), qarīb (close), muqarrab (extremely close), barr (sincere), thiqah or mawthūq (trustworthy), ‘azīz (dear), and al-­‘azz (the dearest). These words can stand alone to indicate a certain type of friend; however, they mostly come as qualifications to the word used for “friend,” such as ṣadīq. Hence, we have such common expressions as ṣadīq hamīm (warm friend), ṣadīq muqarrab (extremely close friend), and ṣadīq ‘aziz (dear friend). Due to this linguistic situation, these adjectives are excluded from the seventeen-­stage hierarchy above but can still be attached to the words in it. Second, in the semantic field of support and betrayal, “al-­ma‘ūnah wal-­ khudhlān,”115 we find a rich and massive field that is on par with, if not larger than, that of friendship. A full etymological account of this semantic field deserves a study on its own, but I here briefly enlist the hierarchic increase of “support”: musā‘id (assistant), mu‘āwin (cooperator), ḥalīf (ally), mudāfi‘ (defender), musānid (supporter), mu‘āḍid (giver of a strong arm), mu’āzir (firm supporter), mushāyi‘ (faithful partisan),116 mu‘azziz (strength provider), munāṣir (victory giver),117 munjid (reliever), munjī (rescuer), mughīth (life giver), mukhalliṣ (savior), and mu‘izz (glory giver). For the hierarchic increase of betrayal, we find mukhayyib (disappointment giver), muhīn (humiliator), muḍ‘if (weakness giver), mukhadhdhil (bad news spreader or fifth columnar), muthabbiṭ (discourager), nadhl (miscreant or ill doer while in position to do good), and khā’in (traitor). The semantic field of support and betrayal is highly connected to friendship and animosity. Nevertheless, the former field deals with certain human functions or occasions (e.g., moments of rescue and defense), while the latter deals with intentions and intrinsic personal qualities (e.g., truthfulness or vengefulness). Certainly, there are possibilities of convergence as well as diversion between these two fields. For instance, a zamīl (colleague), from the first field, can be a zamīl mu‘āwin (cooperating colleague) as well as a zamīl mukhayyib (disappointing colleague). This is an indicator that the semantic field of friendship and animosity is distinct from the semantic field of support and betrayal, with possibilities of convergence as well as diversion.

Friendship in Arabic    63

Fluctuations in Friendship and Transformations into Animosity Again, the common words for friendship, ṣadāqah and ṣuḥbah, by no means reference the lowest or highest levels of friendship. Lower levels of friendship start with the ma‘ārif (acquaintances) who escape the circle of strangers. Then the zamīl (colleague) shares with us a professional or play setting, without being psychologically close. The qarīn (match) shares with us a decent proportion of our daily activities yet is not admitted into our spatial proximity, and the rafīq (comrade) goes further by sharing our activities and by accompanying our journey and being spatially close to us yet is not admitted to our hearts. At the second level of friendship, the ṣāḥib (companion) and ṣadīq (truthful friend) are those with whom we can identify as close and special. After this level, friendship still increases but splits into three distinctive branches—­of sincerity, loyalty, and pleasure—­showing a division of labor in the manner in which friendship behaves in Arabic. The sincerity dimension starts with the anīs, mu’nis, or mu’ānis (amiable friend), who is entrusted by elevating us from feelings of strangeness and alienation. That dimension then moves to the ṣafī (highly selected friend), who is in the rank of best friends, and to the khill or khalīl (soulmate), who is very close to oneself, to the extent of reshaping each other continuously. The dimension of loyalty starts with total alliance, with the walī (faithful ally), then ascends to the akh (brother), who is elevated to the irreversible familial relationship that includes all kinds of comraderies and sincerities. The dimension of pleasurable friendship starts with the walīf, wilf, or alīf (affable and sociable), who is agreeable without any trace of disharmony. That dimension then ascends to the samīr (entertaining partner), who removes the burdens of a long day with a pleasing night chat that eliminates tensions; the nadīm (drinking partner), who shares the frequent, private, and highly craved activity of wine drinking; the ‘ishīr (domestic), who shares one’s living or sexual space; the khadīn (playmate), who becomes mainly the romantically and sexually desirable partner; and, finally, the ḥabīb (beloved), the one loved in all aspects of life, sexually as well as sentimentally, anticipating long-­term outcomes. After friendship establishes itself truthfully, we find that the higher levels of friendship—­sincerity, loyalty, and pleasure—­reflect a division of labor in relationships between humans. An ideologically loyal friend need not give pleasure, a financially sincere friend need not join battles, and a sexually desired friend need not be professionally engaging. Humans vary in their capacities and their contexts, as do the styles of friendship involved. Interestingly, the close-

64     Friendship in Islamic Ethics and World Politics

ness and truthfulness of the ṣadiq and ṣāḥib are bases from which sincerity, loyalty, and pleasure can mature and solidify. In other words, types of friendship are on a continuous path of transformation or fluctuation. I can be a mere companion to someone on a city tour, but if we share the same party politics, we could become loyal friends. If we feel mutual attraction, we might end up as lovers. If neither loyalty nor pleasure were the context, that person’s being an appreciative but critical observer and corrector of my writings, drawings, artifacts, performance, or music can lead to friendship of the sincerity type. The whole line of increase in friendship, including its split into three dimensions, hinges on the human capacity for transformation. None of the roles that friendship involve are given, fixed, or immediate, as if written on someone’s forehead. Thus, friendship can be seen as an evolutionary tactic to increase our human social space. A human needs to work hard to increase or at least sustain one’s level of friendship. Otherwise, one’s level might descend, or a person might leave the realm of friendship altogether and go back to strangeness. This movement up and down is an essential feature of friendship, hence the feelings of disappoint or betrayal when our estimation of a friendship is higher than how it actually serves in some of life’s tests. For instance, I might think that a person admires my rock-­and-­roll performance, until he or she proclaims that anything other than classical music is not worthy to be called “music.” A moment of great disharmony then ensues. Conversely, surprise and delight happen when our initial estimation of a friendship is lower than what the friend actually exhibits in relation to us. For example, I might perceive that a well-­traveled food journalist does not think highly of my cooking style, unless I find out that his or her essay recommends my restaurant as superior to the five-­star ones in Paris and Rome. In that context, the strong admiration is unexpected. The upward and downward movement on the friendship scale is unpredictable and can only be verified based on real-­life tests. Transformation is the capacity entailed by any friendship relation because a friend was not at a certain position in the friendship hierarchy until some effort of spatial, intellectual, or sentimental proximity was performed. Without such effort and sustenance, friendship would succumb to the lowest level of mere acquaintance. More importantly, like almost all human actions, transformation can also be extreme by going to opposite directions, that is, conversion. This is where antifriendship (i.e., animosity) happens.

Friendship in Arabic    65

The Hierarchy and Synonyms of Antifriendship through Their Etymologies Unfortunately, several important classical references on antonyms, such as Qutrub’s Kitāb al-­Aḍdād and Ibn al-­Anbarī’s Mu‘jam al-­Aḍdād, were of no help in determining the antonyms of the “friendship” words.118 I had to construct these by tracing the antonyms of the “friendship” synonyms individually and by tracing synonyms of “animosity.” Some caution should be used; the notion of a “friendship” antonym discussed here refers to intentions and emotions of disharmony between individuals in most, if not all, of its forms. “Animosity” could also include notions associated with physical violence, beyond mere feelings of “hatred.”119 The nonfriendly spectrum behaves in the opposite direction of spatial, intellectual, or sentimental proximity. So its semantic field starts with gharīb and includes muwḥish, munāfis, muzāḥim, munāwi’, munahiḍ, gharīm, khaṣm, and ‘aduw. The preceding hierarchical arrangement of the increased degrees of animosity is solely mine, and many readers might disagree with it. Below, therefore, the reader is invited to contemplate the logic behind this hierarchy. A gharīb (stranger) is one who is completely unknown. Such a person can be repeatedly seen around, but there is no verbal exchange or face-­to-­face communication. The stranger is not dangerous as such. However, there is no occasion to probe the approachability of that person. The acquaintance name, ma‘rifah, cannot be given to the stranger. Whereas the evaluation of the stranger can lead in both malignant and benign directions, the next word in the antifriendship hierarchy is clearly malignant. Mutawḥḥish, muwḥish, waḥshī, or mustawḥash are attributes given to the wild and uninhabited space or wild and undomesticated beast. All these derivations of “beast” can be attributed to the human committing criminal savagery or disgusting behavior or to members of a foreign hunter-­gatherer tribes or Arabian nomadic tribes.120 The beast description is due to the lack of a common language, appearance, or behavior that can facilitate interaction with others. Such a human is feared and far away from friendship. Obviously, not having learned how to deal with urbanized Arabs is not a mistake on the part of the hunter-­gatherer or Arabian nomad. However, these words describe the predicament of the collision of these distant human groups, whether we adopt its value judgment or not. On this first level of the antifriendship hierarchy, stranger and beast, both persons can be avoided, and the story ends there. The second level presents more complex situations where avoidance is not an option. A munāfis (competitor) is one whose only function is to defeat

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another in sport, business, love affairs, or any domain of competition. There can be a form of benign competitiveness between friends, but if the only aspect of the other is being a competitor, that person is not in the domain of friendship. A muzāḥim (hustler) can be not only a peaceful competitor but also an aggressive one seeking to force one’s way at the cost of the other. Such a person is outside the domain of comradery or collegiality and, a fortiori, the domain of truthful friendship. Whereas the nouns in the first and second levels reflect situational disharmony between two individuals or more, the third and fourth levels pose a long-­ term and not merely situational disharmony. At the third level, the munāwi’ (rival) and munāhiḍ (adversary) hold an intellectual and/or psychological attitude toward the other, seeking his or her loss, at best, or harm, at worst. This is more than competitiveness in the scale of negativity. At the fourth level, a khaṣm (opponent) is a person with a publicly open animosity that makes the situation of disharmony partially outside the hands of two people in disagreement. The public case of the opponent makes reconciliation a harder decision, because the public is observing the ending of the rivalry, leaving certain pressures on the psyches of the two opponents to defeat the other. A gharīm is literarily the debtor. However, when there is a defection on the debt, the debtor is chasing the defector to gain back the money. Gharīm undergoes further metaphorical shifts where a thief, abductor, killer, or humiliator are the defectors on the run that the gharīm seeks, in which case “avenger” seems to be an appropriate translation of gharīm. Finally, a ‘aduw (enemy) is one seeking the highest levels of disharmony and antifriendship that is harm. The first level of antifriendship antonyms moves from strangeness to beastly appearance. Strangeness can be countered by approaching the other and presenting oneself, and the feelings of fear from the beastly appearance can be eliminated when a person is with a protective group and presenting that beastly human with a friendly gesture or aid. The second-­level situations of competition and hustling can still be overcome by an apology opening the path for peace or friendship, making it a lightly problematic form of disharmony. In the third level, the rival and adversary each hold negative attitudes seeking the failure of the other. Such feelings usually need strong causes to be harbored in one’s heart. Still, a conversion of this negativity with an apology could open the path to reconciliation and friendship. The problem lies in the fourth level, where antifriendship is blocked by publicly announced animosity, which could develop into active chasing by the avenger and, finally, firm intention to harm the enemy.

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Conclusion Because of disharmony, the animosity spectrum behaves in the opposite direction of spatial, intellectual, or sentimental proximity to disinterest, avoidance, competitiveness, and animosity. Friendship elevates the outsider into a soulmate, brother, or beloved, thus expanding the individual’s social circle and creating new fruitful roles. Conversely, the animosity spectrum could remove a lifetime colleague, brother, or beloved from one’s social circle and create new, troublesome roles. Friendly people have larger acquired societies, while unfriendly ones have smaller, if not vanishing, ones. To be a human, insān, is to be an amiable friend, anīs. To be beastly and lacking civility, waḥshī, is to be muwḥish, worthy of fear and lacking humanity. Arabic saw the human as friend, homo phílos, which is a manifestation of enlarged, rather than shrinking, humanity.

Chapter 2

Treatment of Friends Ibn al-­Muqaffa‘ Translated from Arabic by Ali Yedes

Ruzbeh Abdullah Ibn Muqqafa‘ (720–­57 CE), known to be one of the earliest contributors to the “mirrors of princes” literary genre in the Arabic language, was an Iranian scholar in the court of the Abbasid caliph al-­Mansour, who advanced political ethics during the early Middle Ages. Born in Fars (a Persian province) to a Zoroastrian family, Ibn Muqqafa‘ was the author of what is known to be the first masterpiece in Arabic literary prose, Kalila wa Dimna. Originally a Sanskrit text attributed to Vishnu Sharma, that collection of aphoristic animal fables was translated into Persian in the Sassanid court and then into Arabic by Ibn Muqqafa‘. It is widely agreed among scholars that Ibn Muqqafa‘’s most important scholarship is Al-­Adab al-­Kabīr (The greater essay on right conduct), whose fourth and last chapter is an exhortation on the etiquettes, merits, and qualities of friendship and on how to avoid enemies. That text is one of the oldest of the genre of adab (corresponding to “polite letters” in English and belles lettres in French) on ethics of friendship in Arabic language, which brings concepts and normative elements of friendship in Arab, Persian, and Hindu cultures into negotiation. Ibn Muqqafa‘’s text is an important primary source in ethics of friendship, used by numerous classical authors of Islamic ethics. In the following fresh and erudite English translation of the aforementioned chapter from Al-­Adab al-­Kabīr, Ali Yedes has made an invaluable effort to translate the text not only from one language to another but also from one culture to another. His translation is indispensable for any research on ethics of friendship in Muslim cultures. It is translated from the Arabic text of Al-­Adab al-­Kabīr (section 4), edited and annotated by Yousif Abu Halqah (Beirut: Maktabat al-­Bayan, n.d.), 142–­57. 69

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On Friendship Section 4 from Al-­Adab al-­Kabīr (The greater essay on right conduct) Ruzbeh Abdullah Ibn Muqaffa‘ Devote yourself and your resources to your friend; for an acquaintance, provide generosity and presence; for the common public, gaiety and compassion; for your enemy, offer justice and fairness. Keep your honor (particularly the one related to female family members) and religious beliefs for yourself. If you hear a statement or an idea that you like from a friend, do not arrogate it to yourself in order to shine in public. You can still shine if you content yourself with harvesting apposite statements when you hear them, attributing them to their author. Notice that arrogating that to yourself is an offense to your friend, besides the fact that doing so is shameful and absurd. If you go as far as arrogating to yourself your friend’s opinion and using his own words in his presence, you are adding wrong to shamelessness. This lack of civility is spread among people. The height of ethics and civility in this matter is to be bountiful to your friend in his appropriation of your words and opinions. At the same time, attribute to him his opinions and statements, embellishing them as much as you can. It is not ethical to start talking about a subject and interrupt it by saying, “I will continue this later,” as if you pondered over it after you already started it. Pondering over it should be before you utter a word about it. Cutting off your own discourse after opening it is sheer absurdity and concealment. Save your brainpower and words for the right context and moment. That which is right does not always apply to all situations. What makes the expression of opinions and statements relevant and valuable is the right context. If you pick the wrong timing to communicate them, you would bring harm to your knowledge—­in such a way that when you bring it forward in the future, even if you do so within the right context and time, it would bear no radiance and no grace. When you accompany knowledgeable people, let them perceive that you are more interested in listening than speaking. If you choose to vie in glory with someone you feel comfortable with in a light conversation, aim for a serious objective; and do not get into the habit of talking lightly. When you realize that the conversation has reached a serious point or close to it, leave it.

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Do not mix earnestness with jesting, nor jesting with earnestness. If you mix earnestness with jesting, you distort it; and if you mix jesting with earnestness, you make it dreary. I know, however, of one situation where by managing to welcome drollery in a serious setting, you would do the right thing, and you would shine among your companions. That is when somebody attacks you with obscenity, anger, and foul language, and you would respond jokingly, playfully, with generous patience, a happy mien, and firmness in enunciation. If you see your companion with your enemy, that should not upset you, because he is one of two men: If he is trustworthy, the closer he gets to your enemy, the better for you; he could ward off some harm intended for you, conceal a defect of yours, or get you some information that was hidden from you. In the case of your crony, obviously, being with those whom you trust should not be an issue. If a man is from outside the circle of your comrades, you have no right to cut him off from people and impose on him to associate only with whom you like. Be careful not to utter impudent remarks in social gatherings and when you talk in general, and be willing to hold most suitable opinions and relevant observations, lest your companions should think that the impudent remarks were directed to them. If somebody approaches you with amicability and compassion, and you are so pleased with him that you wish he did not leave, do not rush to seek his companionship and totally open yourself to him. Human beings have a natural disposition to all sorts of improper behaviors; they would distance themselves from those who cling to them, and seek out those who distance themselves from them. Beware of the above and do not extend this behavior to others. Do not often claim to be knowledgeable about everything that is debated between you and your friends. If you do so, you set yourself between two scandals: either they dispute your claim and bring out its strangeness and lack of civility, or they do not dispute it and leave things in your hands, and ultimately your pretense and shortcoming will be revealed. Be extremely careful not to let your friend know that you are knowledgeable and he is not, be that in a statement or an insinuation. And if you happen to be presumptuous with competent people, do not trust their serenity with you anymore. If you happen to entertain a merit with a strong urge to mention it or reveal it, be advised that disclosing it in such circumstances would bring into people’s hearts more the sense of flaw than that of credit.

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And be advised that if you exercise patience and do not rush, people would welcome that as a fine deed, as they usually do. It goes without saying that a person’s yearning to display his knowledge, and the lack of gravity in this matter, is a form of greed and baseness. The best antidote for that is generosity and bounteousness. If you want to be dressed in a cloak of beauty and dignity, adorn yourself with compassion from the common people, and follow a path where you would not lose your footing or stumble; be both learned and ignorant, and both expressive and reserved. Knowledge would lead you to the right path, and being reserved about it will ward off jealousy. Logic, when you need it, will help you reach your goal. Silence will help you gain love and dignity. If you hear someone talking about something you know or reporting some news that you heard about, do not take part in his performance, and do not pursue it or make any comments related to it, in order to make sure that people would not realize that you knew about it, which would suggest flightiness, stinginess, lack of civility, and sheer frivolity. Let your friends and the common people know, if you can, that you tend to accomplish what you do not talk about rather than talk about what you do not accomplish. The tendency to favor words over doing is a disgrace and a serious flaw. Favoring action over words is beauty. It is appropriate to conceal part of what you promised yourself to accomplish or to inform a friend about it. Use that as a safeguard in case you come short of fully realizing your promise, which is often the case. Memorize the following wise man’s saying: “Let justice govern your relationship with your enemy; your relationship with your friend is based on contentment. That is because your enemy is an adversary that you contain with the proof of evidence and you defeat with judges, whereas between you and a friend, there is no judge and the only rule is satisfaction.” Let your ultimate objective be to continue your fraternization with whom you mingle and to maintain close relations with whom you are in relation. Cultivate in yourself the determination of never breaking up with a brotherly companion even if he does something you dislike. Remember that he is not a slave to whom you give freedom at will, and not a wife that you divorce at will, but he is your honor and your chivalry. A man’s chivalry is his fraternal circle and his friends. If people realize that you broke up with one of your comrades, even if you provide a good reason for it, they would take this as betrayal to and wearying of the concept of fraternity. If you are dissatisfied with a comrade, and your relation with him is maintained and governed by patience rather than

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fraternization, it would be a flaw and a drawback. Beware and beware of this; and be firm about it. If you look into the case of a person you would like to befriend, if he is religious, let him be a genuine jurisprudent and not a dissembler or stingy. And if he belongs to those attached to life in this world, let him be genuine, and not ignorant, a liar, wicked, or a hideous slanderer. As for the ignorant, his own parents would not be blamed for running away from him. A liar cannot be a genuine friend, because falsehood that runs through his mouth is actually the secretion of falsehood lodged in his heart. Etymologically, however, the word “friend” (ṣadīq) is derived from the word “truth” (ṣidq). Be aware that someone’s heart can be accused of falsehood even if his words reflect the truth, and a fortiori if falsehood is administered by mouth. The wicked will bring you enemies. You do not need a friendship that generates enmity. As for the hideous slanderer, anyone who befriends him will eventually be subjected to his hideous slander. Be careful not to be intoxicated by authority, riches, knowledge, high status, or the vigor of youth. All these are nothing but a wave of foolishness that will rob your mind, take your dignity away, and divert your heart, ears, eyes, and tongue from any benefit. Let it be known that living in isolation brings animosity, and being gregarious brings bad companionship. And be aware that the baseness of friends is more harmful than the hatred of enemies. If you establish a relation with a bad person, be weary of his misdeeds, and if you break up with him, you will be blemished by the stigma of abandonment, all the more so that your so-­called fault would be accentuated, with no reference to the good reason behind your action. Unfortunately, flaws build up and excuses do not. A wise person has no choice but to wear two types of clothes for people, and there is neither life nor sense of honor without them both: a coat of tightness and reservation for common people, where you always appear reserved, strict, cautious, and alert; and a coat of extraversion and amiability worn for the trustworthy elite, with whom you could give way to your anxieties, bring about your subjects of interest, and relieve yourself from the burden of cautiousness and reserve in whatever is between you and them. People who belong to this social class, those who deserve to be so, are in fact the minority of a minority; this is because wise people do not accept anybody to join their group before they test and examine his integrity and loyalty. Let it be known that your tongue is by nature a defeated agency, overcome either by your mind, anger, caprice, or ignorance. It is conquered by and entertains a love relationship with each. If the conqueror is your mind, then your

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tongue is on your side; if the conquerors are any of the others I named above or the like, your tongue will be on your enemy’s side. If you can guard your tongue and retain it, so that it will only be on your side, and your enemies would not dominate or share it with you, do so. If a calamity befalls one of your friends, like an adversity or loss of fortune, that calamity should affect you in the same way, either via comforting and sharing the catastrophe, or through abandonment, which will bring infamy that you have to put up with. In such circumstances, get the best way out and choose nobility over anything else. If your friend is struck by a financial disaster that you do not feel like sharing, then comfort him with nice words; maybe that is the right thing to do, since it is scarce among people. If your friend is blessed with a merit, it is not an ignominy to get closer to him, seek his cordiality, and be humble to him. Take that opportunity and be part of it. Make apologies only to the one who is willing to accept your apology. And seek help only from someone who is willing to get you the help you need. Unless you have to, talk only to people who take interest in your speech. If you implement a beneficent and you support it financially, do not withhold from sponsoring its nurture and growth, lest the initial funds would have been spent in vain. If someone apologizes to you, receive him with a radiant face, a cheerful attitude, and an articulate tongue, except the one whose separation is a blessing. Let it be known that friends are the best gain on earth: they are ornament during prosperity, stock-­in-­trade during hardship, and reliable aid during life and the hereafter. Do not miss the opportunity to have them as allies, and seek their companionship and all means to relate to them. Be aware of the fact that you could realize your wish of having friends in groups of people from whom you are separated by some grandeur that might accompany people of chivalry, which pushes away many of those they would wish to befriend. If you see someone of this type that fortune made stumble, rescue him. If you happen to offer a service to or do a favor for someone, seek the revival of that action by banalizing its past credit, and maximize its glory by minimizing it. And be a fan of the lack of praise of such deeds, by saying, for example, “I do not recall doing that, and I give a deaf ear to whoever mentions it.” This might make abashed some of those who cannot be referred to as wise or magnificent. And be careful when in his company, or while talking to him in order to seek his help or to go along with him on something, not to mention

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something that would suggest audacity. Audacity destroys good deeds and tarnishes courtesy. Be careful of excessive anger, zeal, grudge, and ignorance. For all these, prepare virtuosities that help you fight against them, like forbearance, forgiveness, consideration, contemplation of the aftermath, and the aspiration for kindness. Remember that you do not hit success without diligence and that the lack of preparation to push away people with personal aspirations is giving in to them. There is in every person’s character a sum of bad impulses, and the rivalry between people for superiority is in combating these bad impulses. There is no hope for anybody to rid himself from these bad impulses. The strong person, however, could fight them by means of repression each time they appear; soon he kills them as if they have never existed in him; but it actually remains hidden in him as fire is hidden in wood or stones; if it finds a catalyzer from a disorder or inadvertence, it would ignite again like a flame in firewood; and it would start by harming its owner, like fire that would reignite in the log that was housing it. Humble yourself to a bad neighbor, a bad relationship, or a bad companion with patience; you cannot go wrong on that.

Chapter 3

Friendship and Love in Islamic Spirituality William C. Chittick

I would have been happy to talk about “friendship” without mentioning “love” if I could have done so. But differentiating between these two concepts is not easy in Arabic and Persian, the two great languages of classical Islamic civilization.1 Those who know Persian might say that dūst and dūstī mean “friend” and “friendship” and that friendship is different from love, which is maḥabbat or ‘ishq. This approach ignores the fact that the Persian phrase for saying “I love you” is dūstat dāram, literally, “I have you as a friend.” This usage goes back to the beginnings of the modern Persian language. For example, Maybudī who completed a grand Persian commentary on the Qur’ān in the year 1126, consistently translates the Arabic verb “to love” (ḥubb) with this very expression, “to have as a friend.”2 Nine hundred years ago, just as today, the Persian expression for saying “I love you” was dūstat dāram. Something similar is true for Arabic, in which the generic word for love is ḥubb (or maḥabba). It means not only love (in Western meanings of the word) but also friendship. Arabic and Persian have dozens of other words that are used to indicate various sorts of love and friendship, but in those two languages, the most inclusive and commonly used words designate both relations.

Schools of Islamic Thought Whatever word we use to talk about friendship and love, we are discussing qualities of the human soul. Love pertains essentially to our inner lives, the realm of life and consciousness known as the self. No matter how many outward signs of love and friendship there may be, they cannot be defined in terms of behavior and activity. Once it is accepted that love and friendship pertain 77

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primarily to the life of the soul, it should be obvious that some of the more prominent schools of Islamic thought have little or nothing to say about them. Probably the best-­known form of Islamic learning nowadays—­at least the most newsworthy—­is jurisprudence, the science of sharī‘a, the ritual and social law derived from the Qur’ān and the example of the Prophet. The jurists, who are the experts in sharī‘a, have nothing to say, in their capacity as jurists, about love and friendship, for the simple reason that these relationships cannot be legislated. There is no possible way to enforce the edicts “Love God” and “Love your neighbor.” A second major school of thought in classical Islamic civilization was Kalām, or dogmatic theology. Kalām was closely allied with jurisprudence and talked about God as an omnipotent and somewhat tyrannical supreme legislator. Kalām could not ignore the many mentions of love in the Qur’ān and the sayings of the Prophet, so it defined love in terms of lawful activity. Basically, Kalām experts held that it is equally absurd to suggest either that frail, imperfect, ignorant creatures—­that is, human beings—­can love the transcendent God or that the omnipotent God can relate to us in any way other than telling us what to do. In short, according to Kalām, God’s love for us is that he provides us with commandments, and our love for God is that we obey. The Kalām interpretation of love does violence to the meaning of the word, so it was often criticized by other scholars. In any case, by the time of al-­Ghazālī in the eleventh century, Kalām experts were modifying this view of love, bringing it more in line with the actual experience of love as a transforming presence in the soul.3 Two other major streams of Islamic learning—­streams that developed at the same time as jurisprudence and Kalām—­paid a great deal of attention to love and friendship. One was philosophy, whose experts followed in the footsteps of Aristotle and Plotinus. They developed a sophisticated science of ethics and gave friendship a prominent role, not least because it was one of Aristotle’s favorite virtues. One should keep in mind, however, that philosophy, then as now, was an elite enterprise. Very few people studied the details of philosophy or had any real idea of what the philosophers were talking about; the same, by the way, was true of dogmatic theology. The second stream, commonly called “Sufism,” focuses on moral and spiritual perfection. Its goal is to achieve a profound transformation in the very substance of the human soul, changing the way we see ourselves and the world. In contrast to both philosophy and dogmatic theology, Sufism was readily accessible to all Muslims. The Sufi teachers wrote extensively and clearly, they

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founded schools and centers of learning, and they preached in the mosques. Moreover, the greatest poets of Islamic civilization were often Sufi teachers. The tremendous popularity of their poetry derived largely from the fact that they sang about love—­an object of perennial human fascination. The most famous of these poets in the West, Rūmī, was a superb storyteller and one of Islam’s great spiritual teachers. Rūmī’s radiance—­like that of several other Sufi poets—­extended throughout the Persianate world, from the Balkans through Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and the Indian subcontinent. Among Arabic speakers, the Egyptian Sufi poet Ibn al-­Fāriḍ, who died when Rūmī was a youth, played a similar role in highlighting love as the key to all human and divine relationships.

The One Reality If we want to grasp the role of love and friendship in Islamic spirituality, we need to begin where the Sufi teachers typically began, that is, with God. Both Islamic spirituality and the Koran, which is the one anchor of all Islamic thought, take God for granted and call everything else into question. The only certainty is that God is real. The human realm is one of ambiguity and fog. We can never know what is what, except in one respect: the true reality is always present. In contrast, we ourselves are sometimes present and mostly absent. Our existence is something new, and on any cosmic scale, it lasts but a moment. Permanence is God’s attribute, not ours. Knowledge belongs to God, not us. Whatever we possess belongs to us for the time being, not essentially. These points can be put into the language of traditional Islamic thought by saying that the truth from which all truth derives is that the ultimate reality is the only true reality. Put more simply, there is no true reality but God. This notion is expressed most succinctly in the four Arabic words that are the primary teaching of the Qur’ān: “(There is) no god but God.” Everything other than God, including us, is not truly real. We are partly real and mostly unreal. The big question is, In what respect are we real, and in what respect are we unreal? Once the issue is posed in these terms, it becomes clear that human life should aim at searching for true reality and abandoning false reality. With one voice, the spiritual tradition says that this process of reaching out for reality is called “love.” To understand why this name is appropriate, we need to look at four basic issues: love as the divine reality, love as the human image of the divine reality, the consummation of love, and the path that leads to consummation.

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Love as the Divine Reality In many verses, the Qur’ān says that God loves certain people. It also says that people love God and that they love other things as well. The Qur’ān makes clear that between God and human beings, love is mutual. The most commonly cited Qur’ānic verse in discussions of love makes precisely this point: “He loves them, and they love Him” (5:54). If God is the only true reality and if everything other than God is a foggy, ambiguous mixture of reality and unreality, God’s attributes are true and real, while the same attributes ascribed to anything else are ambiguous and tentative. Thus, when it is said that people love, their love is tremendously watered down compared to God’s love, and it is also easily distracted and misdirected. The Qur’ān often alludes to the fact that everything that people love other than God is bound to disappoint them. The reality of God’s love as contrasted with the unreality of human love is typically explained in terms of the formula of divine unity—­“No god but God.” God loves people, so he is a lover, and his love is true and real, but love of anything else is not. It follows that there is no true lover but God. We know that God is the object of love, so there is no true beloved but God. In short, this is the basic position of the Qur’ān and Islamic spirituality concerning God and love: in reality and in the final analysis, God alone is lover, God alone is beloved, and God alone is love. Moreover, love is God’s eternal reality, because he does not change. God is lover and beloved outside of time and whether or not there happens to be a universe. In his unity, God loves himself, because there is nothing else to love. The Prophet alluded to God’s self-­love in a famous saying: “God is beautiful, and He loves beauty.” God’s beauty is eternal, so he loves himself eternally. If this all sounds rather “self-­centered,” that is exactly the point. There is only one true reality, one true self (as the Upanishads like to remind us). In the Qur’ān, when God speaks to Moses from the burning bush, he says, “There is no god but I.” In other words, there is no true “I” but the divine I; there is no true self but the divine Self.

Love as the Divine Image Once we understand that God is love and that he loves himself, we need to ask how his love impinges on us. Why does God love human beings? The Qur’ān’s basic answer is that in loving his own beauty, God also loves every possible beauty, because all possible beauty is simply a reverberation or an echo of his

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infinite beauty. By loving himself, God also loves the noneternal beauties that arise as a result of his infinite creativity. These noneternal beauties are everything other than God, the entire universe, in all its temporal and spatial expanse. As the Qur’ān puts it, “He made everything that He created beautiful” (32:7). Since he loves beauty and since everything he created is beautiful, he loves everything. But all beauty is not created equal. The most beautiful of created things is that which displays God’s beauty to the fullest possible degree. In several verses, the Qur’ān calls God’s attributes “the most beautiful names.” In an echo of the Hebrew Bible, the Prophet said that God created Adam in God’s own form. The Qur’ān itself says, “We created the human being in the most beautiful stature” (95:4). The most beautiful stature can only be that which reflects all the most beautiful names of God. Hence the most beautiful of all created things is the human being, made in God’s form. This helps explain why the Qur’ān never says explicitly that God loves anything other than human beings. The basic teaching of the Qur’ān about human beings can be summed up in two verses: first, “He loves them” (5:54); second, “He taught Adam the names, all of them” (2:31). God loves human beings because they are the most beautiful of all created things. When he created them in his own, beautiful form, he bestowed on them the understanding of all the names, including his own, most beautiful names. What distinguishes human beings from other created things is not just their perfect beauty but also their God-­given ability to recognize the names and realities of things and thus to recognize beauty wherever they see it. Just as God loves beauty, so do those created in his form. Human beings love beauty as soon as they recognize it. They were taught all the names, so they have the capacity to recognize the beauty of everything, since every name designates some beautiful creation. They also have the capacity to recognize all of God’s most beautiful names and to love God in terms of each name as well as in terms of the totality of the names—­that is, inasmuch as all the names together designate God in himself. In summary, God loves human beings, he created them in his own form, and he taught them all the names. The Qur’ān inserts a caveat, however: generally, people do not recover their innate knowledge of all the names, nor do they act in conformity with the beauty of God’s names and the beauty of their own form. Human beings were created with a beautiful stature, but they do not live up to it. To the degree that they do not live up to it, they are ugly, and God does not love the ugly. An interesting question arises: if God loves everything, why does he not love the ugly? There are many answers to this question. One way to deal with

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it is to say that ugliness is not really something; rather, it is the lack of beauty. Another way is to distinguish between two basic kinds of love. The first kind is called raḥma, which is typically translated as “mercy” or “compassion.” Raḥma is an abstract noun derived from the concrete noun raḥīm, which means “womb.” On the human level, the most obvious example of merciful love is that of mothers, a point that the Prophet made in several sayings. Mothers want their children to act beautifully and to avoid ugliness. They praise children for being good and blame them for being bad, without ever ceasing to love them. The second kind of divine love responds to human beauty or the lack of it, a point that I will come back to shortly. First, however, it is important to understand what is meant by human beauty and ugliness. These are not physical characteristics but moral and spiritual characteristics, which is to say that they pertain to the inner qualities of the soul. The Qur’ān cites some of these qualities in verses that mention various people whom God loves, such as those who have faith, those who act with benevolence, those who trust in God, those who act with justice. The book also mentions people with various ugly qualities—­such as wrongdoing, transgression, pride, and boastfulness—­and says explicitly that God does not love them inasmuch as they have these qualities. In this view of human nature, God created human beings in the most beautiful form, but then he put them into a situation where their form became obscured. For the innate beauty of people’s divine forms to appear, they need to employ their free will to the best effect. To the extent that their beauty does appear, God will love them with an additional love, over and above the original creative love. Once it is understood that people need to do something to become beautiful, the question that arises is, what exactly must they do? In the Qur’ānic view, people have forgotten their own beautiful form and the love that goes along with it. In response to their forgetfulness, God sent the prophets, who are traditionally numbered 124,000. All prophets have the same mission: to remind people of what they have forgotten and to teach them how to love God and to recover their own innate beauty.

Definitions of Love Love is not explicitly defined in the Islamic tradition. Most Islamic texts on love insist that it cannot be defined. As for beauty, the Islamic tradition usually explains it as “that which attracts love.” As such, beauty, too, remains undefined. Any attempt to explain love falls flat on its face. Anyone who has ever

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been “in love” can appreciate this. Something essential about love is inexplicable. Instead of trying to define it, Sufis, philosophers, and other scholars describe the qualities that are found in lovers. Some of them call these qualities “symptoms,” comparing love to a disease. When Rūmī says that you must be a lover to understand love, he is reminding us that love is inexplicable. When he says that he can talk about love until the Day of Resurrection, he means that he can talk forever about its signs and symptoms.4 Generally, those who talk about love agree that its most basic attribute is the desire to achieve nearness. Lovers want to be together, not apart. Nearness to what you love is happiness; distance from what you love is misery. The goal of love is, in one word, is “union,” which means coming together and becoming one. On the physical level, “union” can mean the sexual act. Most people know, however, that referring to sex as “love” is, at best, a metaphor. Real love involves a good deal more than physical coupling. The Qur’ān teaches that the goal of human life is to gain nearness to God. People are separate from God because he is one thing while they are something else. He is the creator; they are creatures. Nonetheless, God created human beings out of love for them. Creation means to bestow existence. God already knew he loved people before he created them; that is, he loved them in eternity. But that was one-­sided love, because people were not there as conscious and aware individuals. God created them so that they could share in the joy of love. As I already noted, love is the desire for togetherness and union. By giving human beings existence in his own form, God gave them the desire for togetherness, union, and unity. Togetherness with God is the original state of human beings before they existed. In the realm of preexistence, people were potentialities, not actualities. Once they came into existence, they began to sense the separation that permeates their existence, so they began to desire togetherness. Separation plays an important role in all discussions of love. Without it, there can be no desire for togetherness. The very first line of Rūmī’s epic story of love and lovers, the Mathnawī (in 25,000 couplets), begins, Listen to this flute as it complains, telling the tale of separation. The tale of love as told by poets and lovers is the tale of separation and the quest for union. Having come into existence as individual beings, people are now aware that they exist apart from others and that they desire to come together. They know that they do not have what they want, and they are driven by love to reach for it.

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But what exactly do people want? This question takes us back to the formula of unity: there is no true beloved but the divine beloved. People think they want this or that thing. In fact, when they love things, they love God’s attributes, such as beauty, generosity, and kindness. What makes human love problematic is that people find these attributes in ephemeral things. Rūmī likes to say that the beauty we perceive and love in things and people is gold plating. The only thing that can satisfy the human craving for beauty is the very source of gold itself. Thus, Rūmī writes, in a typical passage, All the hopes, desires, loves, and affections that people have for different things—­fathers, mothers, friends, heaven, earth, gardens, palaces, knowledge, activity, food, drink—­all of these are desires for God, and these things are veils.5 The reason that everything we love is a veil is simply that all things are creatures, not the Creator. Created things conceal the Creator, but they also reveal God’s most beautiful names and attributes, so they perform a valuable and necessary role in the process of love. Rūmī says, for example, that God gives us our disparate loves and desires, for the same reason that a soldier gives a wooden sword to his child. People must learn how to love, which means that, ultimately, they must learn what they truly love. The sooner they learn the difference between gold plating and gold itself, the sooner they can dispense with wooden swords. Rūmī explains, In man there is a love, a pain, an itch, and an urgency such that, if a hundred thousand worlds were to become his property, he would gain no rest or ease. These people occupy themselves totally with every kind of craft, industry, and status; they learn astronomy, medicine, and other things, but they find no ease, for their goal has not been attained. . . . All these pleasures and goals are like a ladder. The rungs of a ladder are no place to take up residence and stay—­they’re for passing on. Happy is he who wakes up quickly and becomes aware! Then the long road becomes short, and he does not waste his life on the ladder’s rungs.6

The Consummation of Love The goal of love and friendship for two lovers or two friends is for them to come together, not to stay apart. It should be obvious that this togetherness,

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even in personal relationships, is not physical. Rather, it is an invisible harmony and conformity of nature. It is an inexplicable quality that attracts two people and can be strengthened and nurtured by appropriate activity, though there are no guarantees that it will last. When you want to achieve togetherness with someone, one of the standard tactics is to do things the way she or he likes them done. You give of yourself for the sake of your friend or lover, not for your own sake. If you act for your own benefit, that is not love for the other; it is love for yourself. If you love someone to gain status, wealth, or some other desirable quality, you love the quality, not the person. In God’s case also, when you want to be God’s friend or lover, you do what you can to establish harmony. You do things the way your beloved wants them done. Serving God with your own benefit in view does not deserve the name love. The desire for togetherness demands surrender of self, because selfhood is the cause of duality and separation. The more complete the surrender is, the more complete the consummation will be. In the case of the divine beloved, togetherness was the original state before we came into existence, and it is also the final goal of love. There is a major difference, however, between the beginning and the end. Before we became separate, we did not know that we were together. The final consummation demands full awareness of the reality of separation. Only then can we understand and appreciate the meaning of togetherness. In the Islamic context, it is clear that God, as the only true lover, is pure of any ulterior motive. In other words, God is infinitely rich and gains nothing for himself by loving others and bringing them into existence. Others receive the overflow of God’s infinite being. They gain from him; he does not gain from them. His love is a free gift, with no strings attached. Putting aside all the details of how God relates to human beings, it is not too difficult to see that the basic point in discussions of divine and human love, in Islamic spirituality at least, is that God’s love for human beings is so unconditional that the gift he bestows on them is himself. He created us in his own form, and that form embraces all of his most beautiful names. We already possess the divine beauty within ourselves. Our craving to return to our original unity is simultaneously a craving to return to our true selves. Our true selves are the unique divine forms represented by each of us. From one point of view, the goal of love is to achieve togetherness with God. From another point of view, the goal is to overcome the fragmentation of the self—­the pain, suffering, disorder, disarray, and disharmony that typify our daily existence.

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Ethical Transformation in Love Many Sufis and later theologians (e.g., al-­Ghazālī) refer to the dual process of becoming one with God and integrated with one’s true self as “becoming characterized by the character traits of God” (takhalluq bi akhlāq Allāh). God loves beauty, but he does not love ugliness, a quality that specifically arises from the forgetfulness and self-­centeredness of the human soul. If we are to be the objects of God’s love, we need to discard the ugly character traits that conceal the soul’s innate beauty. The beautiful character traits are designated by divine names—­compassion, justice, generosity, forgiveness, and so on. The sum total of these traits is precisely the form of God. To actualize this form is to achieve togetherness with one’s true self, which is, simultaneously, to achieve togetherness with the beautiful attributes of God. Discussion of human perfection as the actualization of the divine character traits is one of the points on which Islamic spirituality intersects with philosophy. The Muslim philosophers discuss friendship in addressing the perfection of the practical intellect (‘aql ‘amalī), which they contrast with the theoretical intellect (‘aql naẓarī). The practical intellect applies the theoretical vision to the realm of activity, and the philosophers discuss the principles of its practical vision as “ethics.” The Arabic word for ethics is akhlāq, “character traits,” the same word used by Sufis and theologians. So, in the philosophical discussion, friendship/love is one of the ethical traits innate to the soul. It demands various ways of proper interaction with others, but it can only be fully actualized when the soul achieves the intellectual perfection that is the goal of philosophical training. One of the words the philosophers used to designate the achievement of this goal is ta’alluh (from the same root as Allah). This word means “deformity,” that is, actualizing as one’s own the form of God. In other words, ta’alluh is a synonym for takhalluq bi akhlāq Allāh, “becoming characterized by God’s character traits.” In short, the “friendship” that Muslim philosophers considered to be one of the highest virtues of the human soul is precisely the same divine attribute that the Sufis discussed as the highest calling of the soul. This does not mean, however, that the Sufis paid less attention to explaining how this virtue needs to be extended to all people, for they took as their model the sunnah of the Prophet and his compassion for all. If the philosophers (especially in the early period) seem to have placed a greater stress on interpersonal ethics, this may be because they were disinclined to talk about the virtues with explicit reference to the Qur’ān and the hadith, where God and the Prophet are always at the center of the discussion.

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The Path of Love In this picture of the human situation, when people come to understand that the real object of their love is God, they need to strive to become characterized by God’s beautiful character traits. To do this, they must follow prophetic guidance, because the prophets teach how to love. For those whom the Qur’ān is addressing, this means following the prophet Muḥammad, whom the Qur’ān calls “a beautiful example” (33:21). That his example is beautiful is enough to indicate that God loves him. Those who follow his example can also be loved by God. Spiritual teachers have always taught that Muḥammad’s beautiful example lies primarily in the inner qualities of his soul, which are precisely the divine character traits. Imitating these qualities demands much more than simply obeying the rules and following sharī‘a. It means overcoming the everyday forgetfulness of the soul and transforming its consciousness and awareness through characterization by the divine character traits. The Qur’ān makes clear that people should follow Muḥammad’s example to polish and hone their love for God. Anyone can say, “I love God,” but those are empty words until they are put into practice. The Qur’ān explains the basic principle here in a verse addressed to Muḥammad: “Say [to the people]: ‘If you love God, follow me, and God will love you’” (3:31). In other words, no matter how much you may think you love God, he will not love you in return until you change yourselves, until you become worthy of God’s love. The way to become worthy is to follow prophetic guidance. The goal of following prophetic guidance is explained by a famous saying in which the Prophet quotes the words of God: “When My servant approaches Me through good works, then I love him. When I love him, I am the hearing with which he hears, the eyes with which he sees, the hand with which he grasps, and the foot with which he walks.” In other words, the practice of love on the human side attracts God’s reciprocating love and results in union, which is the goal of love. God’s creative love is entirely outside of our hands. In contrast, his responsive love demands human effort in order to be achieved. Nonetheless, most Islamic authors add that the effort itself is a result of God’s grace, love, and mercy, because people do not have the power to lift themselves up on their own. In any case, the basic point of relevance here is that to benefit fully from the initial, creative love that gave us existence, we need to do something in response to it.

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Summary In the context of the Qur’ān and Islamic spirituality generally, love and friendship are a single reality. In the final analysis, that reality is nothing other than God himself. God created the universe out of love, and he created human beings in his own image, so love pertains to their very selves. Human beings love by nature, and they have the potential to love God for himself, not simply for his bounties and blessings. The reality of love permeates existence and drives people to search and seek. For the most part, people have forgotten what it is that they truly love, so they are constantly disappointed in their love. The cause of human confusion is that the single reality of love has become fragmented, which prevents them from seeing that the whole universe is playing out the game of love. In trying to help people see through their muddle, God sends prophets, whose job is to teach people how to love. Only when they learn to love by following the prophetic example can they truly love God and (as a function of love for God) their neighbors as well.

Chapter 4

Aristotle and Iranian Ethicists: Friendship as a Moral and a Political Paradigm1 Mohammad Jafar Amir Mahallati For the seeker of truth, friendship is an obligation [farīḍa], because loneliness is death.2 —­Abu’l-­Ḥassan Hūjwīrī (d. 1072) In a liquid modern setting of life, relationships are perhaps the most common, acute, deeply felt and troublesome incarnations of ambivalence.3 —­Zygmunt Bauman (d. 2017)

When the article from which this chapter is adapted was written,4 there were more than eight continuing wars in the Middle East and North Africa region between Afghanistan and Nigeria. The current Iranian and Iraqi generations still remember the calamities of the eight-­year war between the two countries, both with a majority Shi‘i population. Aside from real foreign, regional, or local motives for these wars, combatants and warlords of all sides establish and justify their moral logic on the much-­misinterpreted notion of “justice.” For more than two and a half millennia, in between Plato and John Rawls, justice has embraced many epistemological and definitional nuances across traditions and histories. It has kept its centrality, however, in various systems of normative ethics and political order.5 Additionally, an abusive approach to justice by politicians and even by scholars has given this virtue an absolutist status. They introduce justice as the ultimate goal in politics, hence the primacy of punitive or redistributive justice over peace and friendship in current international relations.6 In the course of Islamic civilization, Muslim scholars, specifically Mu’tazilites,7 perhaps cognizant of the dangers of political abuses of the absolutist notions of justice, deployed much effort to keep the definition of justice 89

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within the universal realm of objective ethics. Moreover, as a minority religious denomination that has struggled with dominant religiopolitical powers for a good part of its history, Shi‘ites defined an extradoctrinal sense of justice as the first principle of their school of thought. Among Muslims, Iranian scholars played a major role in establishing justice as the core criterion for political legitimacy. According to Ann Lambton, the predominantly sharī‘a-­based political philosophy of the Islamic classical periods was replaced by the justice-­ centered theory of the medieval periods.8 This substitute theory, which was highly influenced by Sasanian and Greek political theory, de-­emphasized the necessity of sharī‘a knowledge for the ruler. It focused instead on the sense of justice as the most important quality for political authorities.9 In this sense, however, justice was no longer the implementation of sharī‘a but, rather, a general and universal sense of moderation in all affairs. Although the significance of justice for maintenance of political order was a granted notion for all major Muslim scholars, a few important classical Iranian ethicists, discussed below, considered justice alone insufficient to produce an ideal peaceful society. In modern time, the United Nations, acting on the present body of justice-­based international law, has had limited successes in curbing violence and war. This reality points to the necessity of a paradigm shift in political philosophy beyond parameters of justice. Since the end of World War II (as I mentioned in this volume’s introduction), Western scholars are increasingly paying attention to friendship as an agent of this paradigm shift in human relations. From Aristotle to the end of the Middle Ages, friendship was considered the core notion in Western political philosophy. However, as Von Heyking and Avramenko argue, friendship has lost its prominent politico-­philosophical status in the modern era, particularly in the Western liberal tradition. Fortunately, contemporary scholars such as C. S. Lewis (d. 1963),10 Hannah Arendt (d. 1975),11 Jacques Derrida (d. 2004),12 Gilles Deleuze (d. 1995),13 Felix Guattari (d. 1992),14 Michael Mitias,15 Alexander Nehamas,16 Heather Devere,17 and Sibyl Schwarzenbach18 have systematically worked to bring friendship back to its central paradigmatic status in political philosophy and social life. In the Muslim tradition, specifically in the history of Iranian thought, the moral paradigm of friendship went through a different course of development. In this chapter, I present a comparative view of the ethics of friendship in the works of Abū Alī Aḥmad Miskawayh (d. 1030), al-­Rāghib al-­Isfahānī (d. ca. 1108),19 and Naṣīr al-­Dīn Ṭūsī (d. 1274). I examine perspectives on friendship that are rooted in the Islamic philosophical tradition as it developed in the Iranian milieu. In the course of Iranian intellectual history, a number of prominent scholars of ethics were cognizant of friendship as a moral paradigm that nor-

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matively stands superior to justice. This thought, I argue, can facilitate an East-­ West dialogue on friendship, with the result of a paradigm shift in contemporary human relations. By “friendship,” I do not here mean a sort of favoritism that defies impartiality and universal justice. Rather, I am referring to friendship in the sense of the primacy of human intimacy, gregariousness, companionship, and partnership, a mode and goal of life that exceeds interests in fair shares of goods and honors. In this sense, friendship does not oppose justice. In the words of contemporary theologian James Schall, “it is the condition of the flourishing of the virtues, the relationship in which they are most real.”20 As a justice-­plus21 worldview, friendship is the finest product of a moral society. Justice, in all its realms and definitions, has a survival value. But as C. S. Lewis has stated, “Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art. . . . It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that gives value to survival.”22 This chapter argues that whereas justice, as moderation and a moral agent of objective ethics, could give the Iranian and the Shi‘i worldviews an egalitarian posture, friendship, as conceived by Miskawayh, al-­Isfahānī, and Ṭūsī, promotes genuine cosmopolitanism and peacemaking beyond the parameters of “liberal peace” or “cold peace.’23 Moreover, friendship, as understood by certain Iranian ethicists, has a better chance of modifying the prevalent political philosophy toward global peace than have the notions of distributive or punitive justice.24 Where the philosophy of peacemaking underscores the real costs of wars in the destruction of material, the primacy of friendship accentuates a greater cost of wars: the loss of opportunities to realize friendship as the finest moral exercise of life. Justice is a necessity and a foundation for human relations, but it is not sufficient for living an ideal cosmopolitanism of friendship (compared with liberal cosmopolitanism) in the sense of maximization of human relations beyond cultural or political borders. I suggest that in addition to a notion of objective justice that is not subject to arbitrary ideological interpretations, Iranian cosmopolitanism is also informed by friendship as an existential value and a virtue. In other words, I argue that Iranian cosmopolitanism asks for more than moderation in politics and egalitarianism. It promotes a friendship that is essential for happiness in this shared life and in the afterlife.

Background The story of friendship is probably as old as humanity. The earliest known literature on friendship goes back to the mythical writings of Gilgamesh and the statements of Cyrus the Great. Both had direct references to divine friendship

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in their words.25 But perhaps the first thinker who treated friendship through a comprehensive and systematic philosophical approach was Aristotle. For him, life was not worth living without friends.26 Friendship as a virtue was an important subject for medieval Iranian ethicists as well. As I briefly discussed in the introduction to this volume, even before they had read Aristotle in Arabic translation, they had conceptualized the place of friendship in human relations.

Aristotle and Significant Aspects of Friendship In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle treats friendship from three different angles: as a virtue, as a means to attain happiness, and as a mode of ethics superior to justice. Aristotle determines three major categories of friendship: pleasure-­ based, utility-­based, and good-­based. The last category is friendship for its own sake. Aristotle asserts that while this type of friendship is the most noble and the least common, friendship for utility is widely practiced and forms a base for both interpersonal and interstate relations: “Men apply the name of friends even to those whose motive is utility, in which sense states are said to be friendly” (8.1157a26–­27).27 Addressing the essentiality of friendship for happiness and social life, Aristotle compares friendship to justice and asserts that friendship is the most effective means of creating consensus that holds states together. He points out that lawgivers “care more for it than for justice.”28 Within the domain of applied political ethics, friendship becomes an essential element of state life and, by extension, an important instrument for international relations.29 But the significance of friendship is not limited to a necessary means for human self-­ sufficiency. It is, in fact, a fundamental goal of life. Aristotle asserts, For without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods; even rich men and those in possession of office and of dominating power are thought to need friends most of all; for what is the use of such prosperity without the opportunity of beneficence, which is exercised chiefly and in its most laudable form towards friends? . . . And in poverty and in other misfortunes men think friends are the only refuge. It helps the young, too, to keep from error; it aids older people by ministering to their needs and supplementing the activities that are failing from weakness. (8.1155a5–­16)30 These statements by Aristotle denote multiple dimensions of friendship and promote its status above all other human virtues—­for the rich, poor, young,

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old, and members of all other social strata. In his third view on friendship, Aristotle presents friendship as a mode of life that is far superior to justice. Asserting, “When men are friends they have no need of justice, while when they are just they need friendship as well,” he adds, “The truest form of justice is thought to be a friendly quality” (8.1155a27–­28).31 In short, at its culmination, justice enters friendship’s realm. Friendship is an ideal mode of life that is independent of and superior to justice. This latter notion of friendship may seem inconsistent with Platonic and Aristotelian views of justice as the sum of all virtues.32 For Aristotle, friendship is a multidimensional notion that influences many aspects of humanity’s individual, collective, real, and ideal lives. It is an exercise in interpersonal relations and a necessary means for collective life. It is also a foundational goal and a distinct mode of life that is superior to a life based exclusively on the pursuit of justice. Friendship is indeed the apex of moral excellence in human activities. At the macrolevel, one might raise the theoretical possibility of a friendship-­based society in which justice is redundant. Is a friendship-­based society—­or, in other words, an extralegal society—­above all other virtues? Aristotle does not provide an elaborate detailed answer to this question, nor does he define friendship.33 However, one can infer from Aristotle’s qualification of friendship that a friendship-­based moral system includes a whole set of higher-­level virtues. Stephen Salkever, a contemporary political philosopher and scholar on Aristotle, argues that for Aristotle, friendship is “transcultural.” “According to the common culture of his [Aristotle’s] time,” Salkever notes, “friendship was associated in the popular mind with courage, with republicanism, and with spirited resistance to injustice and tyranny.” Salkever further notes that Aristotle tries “to move friendship from the margins to the center of our moral universe.”34 Whereas a justice-­based moral system seems to produce a society in which distributive, protective, and penal laws guarantee people’s rights, their properties, and their fair share in all goods and fortunes, a friendship-­based moral system tends to promote virtues that encourage sociality, generosity, magnanimity, forgiveness, and gregariousness. In short, this dichotomy represents two distinct moral systems: one, informed by limits of law and legal justice, focuses on equal rights and fair shares in goods and honors for all; the other promotes qualities or modes of life beyond possessiveness, in which case protective laws seem to be redundant.35 One might argue that these two distinct moral systems live together in real life, in various degrees and proportions within a society or even within a single person. Theoretically, however, they are of distinct moral postures and represent two sets of moral values, one supe-

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rior to the other. In Aristotle’s view, friendship holds a higher moral space and is applicable to civic life. Some scholars contend that in real life, however, “the appropriation of this Aristotelian concept for direct intervention within communities is rare.”36 This socioethical gap prompts a look at three Iranian ethicists who seem to offer helpful ideas to bridge the gap in the frame of cosmopolitan friendship.

Miskawayh Rāzī: The Chief Muslim Philosopher of Friendship The period of the mid-­tenth to mid-­eleventh centuries, well known as the era of the Islamic renaissance, witnessed the rise of the Iranian dynasty of Būyids (934–­1062), which represented the most significant Iranian interlude in Islamic history. Originating from the Iranian province of Gilān (Daylam), that dynasty, as Nuha Alshaar has put it, symbolized two major shifts in social hierarchy: from Arabs to non-­Arabs and from a Sunni to a Shi‘i rule.37 “The brilliant spirit and complexity of the Būyid period,” Alshaar maintains, “exercised a profound influence upon intellectual activities and practices throughout the contemporary Islamic world, especially Iraq and western Iran.” Būyids, who were given credit for the formation of the so-­called era of Islamic humanism and cultural efflorescence, facilitated significant progress in cultural and literary activities in major cities, such as Baghdād, Samarqand, Shirāz, and Rayy.38 Abū Alī Aḥmad Miskawayh (d. 1030), an ethicist, historian, physician, chemist, courtier, and humanist, was a product of the Būyid era and was one of the first Iranian scholars who studied and philosophized friendship.39 Miskawayh, who received the honorific title of “the Third teacher,” after Aristotle and al-­Fārābī, was the second most influential Iranian author of the Islamic period, after Ibn al-­Muqaffa‘, who combined elements of Indio-­Persian and Greco-­Islamic cultures into authorship of a universal history and a humanistic perennial philosophy. Miskawayh reflected on Aristotle’s ethics of friendship and expanded it in sociopolitical and civic realms. Miskawayh dedicated one of the six chapters in Tahdhīb al-­akhlāq (The Refinement of Character) to love and friendship.40 As Mājid Fakhry points out (Ethical Theories in Islam, 117), Miskawayh places the pinnacle of friendship and love in the human-­divine relationship on Platonic terms. But regarding human-­human relations, Miskawayh adopts Aristotle’s views in Nicomachean Ethics on the three distinct categories and qualities of friendship, with little differences.41 He also supports Aristotle’s arguments about the essentiality of friendship in attaining happiness. Miskawayh argues that because people are

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civic by nature, “man’s complete human happiness is realized through his friends; and whoever finds his completion through others cannot possibly attain his full happiness in solitude and seclusion.” He continues, “The happy man, therefore, is he who wins friends and endeavors to distribute goods generously among them in order that he may attain with them what he cannot attain by himself.” Miskawayh reasserts, “This is the nature of human happiness which cannot be achieved without bodily actions, civic conditions, good assistance, and sincere friends.”42 When it comes to friendship as a socially foundational virtue, Miskawayh defines it as an ethical space that is superior to justice. At the macrolevel, he divides the entire human moral space into the two categories of justice-­based and bounty-­based virtues. Just like Aristotle, he addresses the relationship between the two essential and cardinal virtues, justice (‘adāla) and benevolence (faḍl),43 and asserts that benevolence, as a virtue, is not a subcategory of justice, because justice “is an equality, while benevolence is an excess.”44 Immediately after this assertion, Miskawayh addresses the problematic Aristotelian conclusion that justice is “the sum of all virtues.” In full agreement with Aristotle, he argues that justice embraces all virtues and that any excess or deficiency of justice should be checked so that the dignity of moderation in respect to the various aspects of any character may be realized. Asking his readers how one can reconcile the contradictory statement that defines justice as the sum of all virtues, on the one hand, and makes it inferior to friendship, on the other, Miskawayh responds, “The answer to this question is that benevolence is [a sort of] circumspection on the part of the benevolent person in exercising justice so as to ensure that he has not missed any of its conditions.”45 To make his point clearer, he reemphasizes, “The foundation for benevolence must still be justice [because] there is no benevolence where there is no justice.” He explains, however, that benevolence is “justice plus circumspection in its exercise.”46 After he establishes the relationship between justice and benevolence, Miskawayh turns to define the relationship between the set of standards for implementation of justice, law, and benevolence (faḍl). “While the Islamic Law [sharī‘a] prescribes universal justice,” he asserts, “it does not prescribe benevolence. It only advises people to practice benevolence, and this in particulars which cannot be specified because they are endless [without limits].” He concludes, “On the other hand, Law is definitive in [prescribing] universal justice because it is limited and can be specified.”47 In other words, Miskawayh maintains that because benevolence as a justice-­plus virtue knows no limits, Islamic law neither defines its qualities nor codifies rules for it.

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Explaining the difference between justice and benevolence, Miskawayh compares their meanings and implications in the field of transaction: “Justice occurs in the acquisition of money . . . whereas liberality [al-­khayrīyya] occurs in the spending of money.” He adds, “It is in the nature of the man who acquires to take and, thus, he is more like the passive, while it is in the nature of the man who spends to give, and thus he is more like the active.” He states that for this reason, “people’s love of the liberal is stronger than their love of the just.” This is simply because the liberal, in his words, “gathers it [money] not for its own sake, but in order to spend it in the ways which earn for him love and praise.” He concludes, “Every liberal man [khayyīr] is just, but not every just man is liberal.”48 Moreover, Miskawayh emphatically repeats this last assertion in an Aristotelian tone. He explains how friendship necessarily secures justice and therefore belongs to an ethical domain that is superior to justice. Furthermore, he points out that peoples’ unification by means of love and friendship “is the noblest end for the people of a city” and that an ideal situation creating affectionate ties and friendship among citizens should be the main goal for “the manager of the city.”49 He thus asserts the centrality of friendship in an ideal society. Chapter 5 of Tahdhīb is dedicated to the discussion of love and friendship. Miskawayh there supersedes Aristotle. He states that the Arabic word for fellowship, intimacy, or gregariousness (uns) is the root for the Arabic word human being (insān) and is therefore reflective of the fact that fellowship and intimacy are the essence of humanity. Man is, by nature, inclined to fellowship and not savage or averse to others. From this word [uns], the name “man” [insān] is derived in the Arabic language. . . . You must realize that this fellowship innate in man is the [value] that we must be easier to keep and to acquire in common with our fellow man. We must exert our efforts and our capacities so as not to miss achieving it, because it is the origin of all kinds of love. It is indeed to help develop fellowship that both the Law [sharī‘a] and good custom have enjoined people to invite one another and to meet in banquets. Possibly the Law made it an obligation on people to meet five times a day in their mosques and preferred communal prayer to individual prayer in order that they may experience this inborn fellowship which is the origin of all love and which exists in them in potency. In this way, this inborn fellowship would become actual and would then be strengthened by the right beliefs, which bind them together.50

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As Lenn E. Goodman observes, Miskawayh treats “the idea of humanity as the derivative notion and sociability as the basic one.”51 Miskawayh’s view of devotional rituals as agents for promotion of fellowship in society culminates in an interesting political philosophy. For Miskawayh, the major function of the imām, the religiopolitical leader52 in a Muslim society, is the “maintenance of those very traditions, rituals and laws that advance gregariousness [uns] in that society.”53 Salkever elaborates on this modern view of fellowship: “In the modern ideal the activity is secondary to the value of sheer togetherness, while for Aristotle intimacy is a necessary condition for the most important kinds of shared activity and not an end in itself.”54 People in Miskawayh’s world live to love, befriend, and endear one another to attain their humanity and happiness. He believed that “unification which is realized in a collectivity . . . is the noblest end for the people of a city.”55 What ultimately distinguishes that view of friendship from those of ethicists such as al-­Ghazālī56 is Miskawayh’s attention to social friendship and the way he relates collective friendship to Islam in the context of Muslim devotional ritual traditions. For al-­Ghazālī, friends are considered moral mirrors. In Miskawayh’s ethical worldview, religion loses its essence in an isolated life, where the notion of the self can hardly be defined. Yet the individual is not dissolved in a social entity.57 Miskawayh is very conscious that power hierarchy may ruin friendship. He stresses the significance of equality between friends: “They [friends] exchange advice and agree to be just and equal in their desire of good. This equal rendering of advice and desire of good is what unifies their multiplicity.” Immediately after this assertion, he concludes that sovereigns cannot exercise friendship, because they “show friendship as if they were being beneficent and charitable to those whom they befriend.” “Their friendship,” he concludes, “admits of excess and deficiency, and quality is rarely found among them.”58 The power factor can be ruinous even among citizens: “He who loves domination, authority, and excessive praise will not be fair to you in his affection and will not be satisfied to get from you as much as he gives you. Arrogance and self-­conceit will cause him to belittle his friends and to try to hold himself above them.”59 Between these lines, one can see how power asymmetry stalls free conversation between individuals. According to Aristotle and modern political philosophers such as Hannah Arendt, conversation is the most significant manifestation of friendship (Nixon, Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Friendship, 6). Importantly, one of the terms used for friendship in Islamic Persian literature is suḥba, which means conversation and friendship at the same time.60

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While Miskawayh adopts many elements of the Aristotelian conception and categorization of friendships, he adds dimensions and interpretations with far-­reaching implications in Muslim theology and political philosophy. First and foremost, at the ontological level, he defines human “being” as a social phenomenon. In other words, a person’s true essence is predicated in friendly relations to others. Miskawayh’s philosophy of friendship conveys mutuality rather than unilateralism. The term philia, therefore, is most appropriate for defining Miskawayh’s sense of friendship. Second, Miskawayh expands the ethics of friendship to human-­divine relations. “Aristotle’s god,” in the words of Salkever, “neither philosophizes nor politicizes nor loves.”61 In contrast, in Miskawayh’s reading of the Qur’ān, God does all the above: “And he who shows such love of God (exalted is He!), such interest in seeking His favor, and such obedience to Him will be loved, favored, and gratified by God and will become worthy of His Friendship—­that friendship which is ascribed to some men by the Law wherein Abraham is called ‘the friend of God’ and Muḥammad ‘the beloved of God’ (may peace be upon both of them!).”62 Miskawayh’s choice of the Qur’ānic term for benevolence or bounty (faḍl) as the Arabic term corresponding to the Aristotelian notion of justice-­ plus friendship was an ingenious epistemological approach on several grounds. It enables Qur’ān readers to identify philosophy, theology, and ethics of friendship in this scripture, within two dimensions: vertical, human-­divine relations and horizontal, human-­human relations. The divinization of friendship gives it an eschatological dimension, and friendship thus becomes both infinite and the cause of happiness and salvation in this life and the afterlife. The Qur’ānic connotations of benevolence in human-­divine friendship help bridge the divide between the religious and the secular. Such an epistemological method can facilitate dialogue between various societies at an international scale, based on intercultural friendships in the realm of justice-­plus, which will promote forgiveness and other virtues in politics. The third important contribution of Miskawayh is his assertion that the most significant function of the imām is to protect collective religious traditions/rituals, the function of which is primarily promoting friendship in society. This is a major moral and political departure from the dominant Muslim political philosophy, which defines rulers’ primary functions and legitimation only in relation to their ability in providing security. By implication, even a nonviolent and legal society that functions on justice alone, with little or no friendly relations, is a failure in Miskawayh’s political philosophy. Importantly, defining the imām as the protector of religious institutions of friendship conditions Miskawayh’s view that because of power hierarchy, sovereigns can-

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not exercise personal friendships. It seems that the latter assertion is based more on practical observation of his contemporary realpolitik than on theoretical reflection.63 Miskawayh’s fourth contribution to ethics of friendship is that he defines all Muslim collective devotional rituals as means of promoting a social bond among the actors. This idea conveys the primacy of friendship as the pinnacle of a religious act and also as a moral end. Here, religiosity becomes the art and ethics of sociability.

Al-­Isfahānī: The Religious Ethicist of Friendship Miskawayh’s view of friendship influenced many other Muslim ethicists in the following centuries. But it is unclear whether his contemporary Abū’l-­Qāsim Ḥussain b. Muḥammad al-­Rāghib al-­Isfahānī (d. 1109)64 was aware of Miskawayh’s view of friendship or reached similar conclusions independently. Al-­ Isfahānī, born in Isfahān, a city in central Iran under the Būyid dynasty, is known among Muslim scholars for his works in Qur’ānic exegesis and Arabic linguistics. He also wrote extensively on ethics and philosophy. His dictionary of Arabic vocabulary is still in use in advanced educational institutions across the Islamic world. In chapter 5 of his major work on religious ethics, Al-­dharī‘a ilā makārim al-­sharī‘a (The Means of Noble Religious Traits), al-­Isfahānī dedicates six short sections to natural attraction (maḥabba), passionate love (‘ishq), and friendship (ṣadāqa). First, he identifies various kinds of love, very similar to the Aristotelian categories. He asserts that the best kind is the one based on virtue (faḍīla), like the relation between teacher and student, because it is most enduring in time. Al-­Isfahānī draws support for his claim by referring to the Qur’ānic assertion that many types of friendship will transfer to animosity in the next life, except those based on piety (taqwā).65 As was customary among Muslim ethicists, al-­Isfahānī’s view on justice was both Platonic and Aristotelian. He echoes Plato in saying that “justice is the sum of all virtues.”66 Al-­Isfahānī then combines this concept with Aristotle’s view when it comes to the relationship between justice and friendship. In a chapter section titled “The Virtue of Love,” al-­Isfahānī asserts, “One of the means of social order is friendship/love [maḥabba] and then justice [‘adāla]. . . . If people were tied by bonds of love and friendship they would have not been in any need for justice; because it is proverbially said that justice becomes a substitute [khalīfa] necessity wherever love and friendship are absent.”67 Immediately after these assertions, al-­Isfahānī provides a short analysis of genu-

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ine friendship that, in his view, as the Qur’ān asserts, does not occur except as a divine reward for true faith and good deeds.68 He then elaborates on the superiority of a social order based on friendship, over one based on fear of punitive justice. He maintains that only the former order can lead to social prosperity and beyond. “Indeed fear [al-­maḥāba] alienates and love binds,” al-­Isfahānī asserts, “and it is said, ‘following the order of love is superior to following the order of fear: for an action based on love has internal incentive, and an action based on fear has external derive and will stop as the cause would disappear.” Al-­Isfahānī concludes his section on love’s virtue by arguing that when all nations love each other, they connect; when they connect, they cooperate; when they cooperate, they get into action; when they act, they make development; and when they develop, they extend their life span.69 This argument comes to culmination when al-­Isfahānī exclaims, “Indeed solitude nullifies one’s humanity and denies him any virtue.”70 Like Miskawayh, al-­Isfahānī believed that the creation of social fellowship is the main reason for Muslim piety rituals such as pilgrimage (ḥajj) and the congressional Friday prayer.71 Al-­Isfahānī maintains that the possibility of living without friends is a vain thought caused by arrogance. However, he indicates that finding a genuine friend is also difficult, almost impossible. This impasse can only be overcome by divine will, as facilitated by institutions such as congressional Friday prayer.72 For al-­Isfahānī, love’s ontology could not be established through the usual chain effects of causal equations. Rather, he believed that love is of a different essence and involves a miraculous process, as reflected in a prophetic hadith: “If god likes a servant, as the Prophet has mentioned, He pours love for him into all waters, and no drinker of water could be spared from loving that servant.”73 Al-­Isfahānī’s assertion that justice is a caliph of (a substitute for) love and friendship parallels a similar statement by Miskawayh.74 If the caliph to which he refers is God’s vicegerent on earth, friendship earns a divine status standing above the status of justice. Al-­Isfahānī’s real contribution to friendship ethics is his assertion that friendship is a divine gift and a precious blessing. This understanding does not make friendship a religious phenomenon; rather, it makes religion a friendly phenomenon, just as a Qur’ānic verse (19:96) defines kindness as the ultimate result of faith and righteous deeds.75 In another, recently discovered treatise authored by al-­Isfahānī, Risāla fi adab al-­ikhtilāṭ bi’l-­nās (Treatise on Etiquettes of Sociability with People), he discusses many aspects of friendship in relation to religion, reason, politics, and economics.76 It is beyond the capacity of the present chapter to sift through that whole treatise on the ethics of friendship. But a cursory review of it demonstrates

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how al-­Isfahānī brings elements of Persian, Greek, Indian, and Arabic aphorism into elaborate negotiations on the essence and etiquettes of friendship. Through innovative interpretations and expansion of the Aristotelian conception of friendship, both Miskawayh and al-­Isfahānī developed frameworks and terminologies that helped the configuration of some very significant dimensions of friendship within Islamic thought and tradition. They believed that an innate and divine-­willed attraction among all objects has come to a culmination in human relations. Their views on the causes and ends of friendship stretch across time and geography and into the next life, in a way that Aristotle’s thought did not.

Ṭūsī on the Politics of Friendship The three categories of Aristotelian friendship adopted and elaborated by Miskawayh were reaffirmed by Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad ibn al-­Ḥassan (d. 1274) from Ṭūsi, a city in a northern province of Iran (Khūrāsān). Known as Khāwja Naṣīr al-­Dīn Ṭūsī (d. 1274), he was a Persian polymath with expertise in architecture, philosophy, theology, medicine, mysticism, astronomy, mathematics, science, ethics, and political administration. With more than 150 treatises in Arabic and Persian, his successful ministerial work in the court of the Mongolian warlord Hulegu Khan (d. 1265), and the establishment of institutions of scholarship such as the observatory and the library of Marāgha, Ṭūsī was a civilizational bridge in one person. For this reason, he received the honorific title “the teacher of humanity” (‘ustād al-­bashar). Ṭūsī’s influence on the Mongolian warlord and ascendance in Hulegu’s administration, from an Iranian captive to a minister and scientific adviser to the ruler, keep puzzling many historians and denote his exceptional diplomatic power. Akhlāq-­i Nāṣirī (The Nāṣirean Ethics),77 an adaptation and translation into Persian of Miskawayh’s Tahdhīb al-­akhlāq, is among the most famous books written by Ṭūsī and is dedicated to Nāṣir al-­Dīn ‘Abd al-­Raḥīm, the Ismā’īlī Shi‘i governor of Alamūt in northern Iran. In that book, his major work on ethics, Ṭūsī addresses friendship/faḍl and its relationship to justice in two chapters, with two extra chapters on economics and politics. From an ontological perspective, Ṭūsī’s view of love is influenced by the view of chief Muslim philosopher Ibn Sīnā (d. 1037), who maintained that love is the fuel of all universal motions. The foundational perspective informing Ṭūsī’s theory of friendship is that love is both the generator of and the maintaining power for the universe.

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Taking on the qualities of justice and its relationship to other virtues, Ṭūsī refers to Plato’s view, adopted by Aristotle, that “justice necessarily produces all virtues.”78 Just like Miskawayh, however, Ṭūsi addresses the problematic question of the relationship between justice and faḍl (favor).79 “Favor,” he points out, “is praiseworthy, but it has no part in justice, for justice is equivalence, while favor is augmentation.” He then asks if all deficiencies from justice (the balance or midpoint) is blameworthy, how can favor escape this universal formula?80 Answering this contradiction, Ṭūsī explains, “Favor is circumspection in justice so as to be secure from the occurrence of deficiency. . . . Favor is justice in augmentation.” Ṭūsī concludes, “The one showing favor is a just man circumspect in justice.”81 He then points to a formula that can be called the “golden rule of friendship”: “His [a man’s] conduct is such that he gives himself less and others more of what is beneficial; and of what is harmful, he gives himself more and others less—­and this in opposition to injustice.”82 This argument comes to its culmination in clarifying the justice-­ bounty relation: “Favor is superior to justice inasmuch as it is taking justice to extreme lengths, not in the sense that it lies outside justice.”83 Here, Ṭūsī clearly refers to a moral space that is based on more than justice and that is therefore superior to the justice-­based moral system. In the next phase of his argument, Ṭūsī comments on the universal modalities of justice and faḍl within the Qur’ānic context. He argues that the reason why the Prophet said, “By justice stand the heavens and the earth,” is that the universal “favor [bounty] cannot be encompassed,” because of its unlimited nature. Ṭūsi points out that in contrast to bounty, “justice is general and all encompassing.”84 As an example, Ṭūsī notes that “if a person becomes an arbitrator between two contestants, he can show favor to neither side, since it comes ill from him to observe anything but pure justice and absolute equality.” He adds that a person can only be bounteous using his or her own portion of goods.85 At the end of his arguments on justice, Ṭūsī states, One group of philosophers have said that the arrangement of existent things and the ordering of generables are affected by love, and that man’s compulsion to acquire the virtue of justice is due to losing the nobility of love; for if people concerned with transactions are marked by love of one another, they will fairly deal with each other, so that opposition will be removed and order results.86 Ṭūsī further stresses the superiority and preference of friendship/faḍl over justice when he argues, “The reason for this idea is that Justice requires artificial

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union whereas Love [friendship] requires natural union.” Ṭūsī alludes to yet another major difference between justice and friendship, which is that the former concerns equal shares of fortune and thus multiplicity, whereas the latter causes union. He adds, “If Love [friendship] were to accrue between individuals, there would be no necessity for equity and impartiality.”87 In short, he means that justice primarily looks at the individual and his rights, which, by definition, separates him from others, whereas friendship cares for mutual bonds between people, even if it means foregoing one’s fair share of goods and honors in a society. The former moral posture is a self-­centered one, and the latter focuses on relationships that are indispensable for attaining ultimate happiness. Ṭūsī’s view of the relationship between friendship and justice is probably better understood in the light of what contemporary philosopher Robert Sokolowski has offered on this subject. Sokolowski holds that “justice does not involve reciprocity and intimacy as friendship does.” He adds, “If I judge justly in regard to certain other people, they do not necessarily judge justly toward me, and they are not necessarily close to me: Justice always involves a certain moral distance between the one who acts and the ones who are affected. For this reason, a person should not be called upon to exercise formal justice in regard to his relatives and friends.”88 James Schall differently defines this cold “distance” required by justice: “Neither justice nor courage nor temperance nor liberality requires friends to be practiced. We must often be brave or temperate or just or liberal to those we do not know or do not like.” He concludes, “There can be a kind of stoic grimness to the virtues without the tract on friendship. . . . In a perfectly just world, we would be intrinsically lonely. We would deal only with relationships, not persons.”89 Exactly the “distance” and “grimness” involved in justice prompts Miskawayh, al-­Isfahānī, and Ṭūsī to imagine a friendship-­based or justice-­plus society. Sokolowski comes to another conclusion on friendship that is in full concordance with the Qur’ānic view of love/friendship as a gift. All three Iranian authors are cognizant of the Qur’ānic assertion “If you [the Prophet] had spent all that is in the earth, you could not have brought their hearts together; but Allah brought them together. Indeed, He is Exalted in Might and Wise” (8:63). From a theological perspective, then, friendship is not and could not be produced by human agency alone. It needs God’s direct intervention. That intervention contributes to the foundation of friendship theology. God may be befriended vertically, and his agency is also indispensable for horizontal human-­human friendships. In Sokolowski’s words, “One does not shop for a friend in the way that one shops for an article of clothing. It should be noted, however, that we may indeed shop for useful or pleasant friends in this manner;

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we might look in the advertisements for a good auto mechanic or a doctor, but we do not look there for friends in the highest sense of the term.” He concludes,” We receive such perfect friendships; we are blessed or lucky when we make them.”90 As a prelude to his discussion on the essentiality of friendship for human happiness, Ṭūsī begins, “Since men are naturally city-­dwellers, with the completion of their felicity lying among their friends and their other associates in the species; and inasmuch as whoever has his completion in something other than himself, cannot be perfect in solitude; so, the perfect and felicitous man is the man who spares no pains to win friends. . . .”91 For Ṭūsī, friendship is worth far more than all the treasures of land and sea, because in times of affliction, nothing can replace a trusted friend.92 He further accentuates this conviction in The Nāṣirean Ethics: “The farthest of men from virtue are those who depart from civilized life and sociability and incline to solitude and loneliness.” He concludes, “Thus, the virtue of love and friendship is the greatest of virtues, and its preservation is the most important task.”93 For Ṭūsī, happiness in solitude is inconceivable, as solitude diminishes the essence of a person and, thereby, that person’s felicity. Based on the assertions quoted above, it is not surprising to see that in Ṭūsī’s view, a very important characteristic of his “Virtuous City” is deep friendship and concordance among its residents. “The people of Virtuous City,” he holds, “albeit diversified throughout the world, are in reality agreed, for their hearts are upright one towards another and they are adorned with love for each other. . . . In their close-­knit affection, they are like one individual.”94

The Problem of Partiality and Its Implications for Political Philosophy Aristotle’s statement that “he who has many friends has no friends” is proverbial. It addresses two central problems with friendship: the question of partiality in favor of friends, with the presumed side effect of being unjust to “others”; and the limited life span of individual human beings, who do not have enough time to befriend all of humanity. Therefore, quality and deep friendships limit numbers of friends who are given preference and who are subject to favoritism by their friends to the disadvantage of others. In contrast, justice is impartial and impersonal and therefore applies universally. In Schall’s words, the universality of “brotherhood or fraternity can become antiphilosophical in the name of political philosophy when it promises a friendship it cannot guarantee.”95 How, then, can one argue for the normative primacy of friendship

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over justice? Schall asks further questions about the problem of limited friendship capacity as it violates the scriptural order that believers must love one another.96 On top of all problems is that favoritism helps tyrannical systems that are based on selective privileges for the few. Schall formulates Aristotle’s answer to some of these problems as follows: For Aristotle, all tyrants consider friendships of good men to be dangerous to their deviant rule, which rule is defined by the tyrants’ freedom to direct all things to themselves. It was in the interest of tyrannical state to prevent friendships of the high order. Friendship implied a level of commitment to real persons and a devotion to truth that the tyrant could not control or even fathom. The tyrant’s own evil activities would not be seen with approval by good friends who could, because of their friendships, generate the confidence to overthrow him. . . . The tyrant as a kind of perverted philosopher-­king had to corrupt the most exalted of human relationships in order to secure his own safety and to prevent his rule from being questioned by those devoted to something other than his own success or interests.97 The problems of partiality and limited friendship capacity find different answers by the three Iranian ethicists. All three (Miskawayh, al-­Isfahānī, and Ṭūsī) put universal intimacy between constituent Muslim practitioners as the ultimate functional goal of collective religious rituals in Islam. Furthermore, all three ethicists believed that the prime role of an imām is to maintain these congregational institutions that, by definition, are created for enhancing friendship in society. By implication, an imām, whether he is only believed to have spiritual leadership or has political leadership as well, risks loss of legitimacy. The perspectives of these Iranian ethicists provide two institutional solutions for the problems of partiality and limited friendship capacity. Every daily prayer is a new chance to randomly stand by and connect with a new person, and every congressional gathering is an occasion for new friendships. All three Iranian ethicists also view friendship and justice outside a moral zero-­sum framework, in the sense that favors to friends never happen at the cost of universal justice. They look at friendship as a justice-­plus mode of thought and action. Furthermore, none of the three ethicists look at a just and legal society as the ideal society. For Ṭūsī, even a just ruler who implements only justice in society is not an ideal leader: at best, he rules over and maintains what he calls “an artificial union,” which is similar to what al-­Isfahānī calls “rule by fear.” Ṭūsī also reaffirms, as Miskawayh established before him, that

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a doctor of sharī‘a law (jurisprudent) whose expertise is only rule of law (called ḥudūd in Arabic) cannot be a community leader whose function is primarily the promotion and protection of friendship in a given society. As a result, expertise in law alone does not provide enough reason and legitimacy for community leadership. As for the problem of partiality of friendship, Ṭūsī formulates his theory of faḍl (a Qur’ānic terminology that offers a range of meaning, including bounty, friendship, justice-­plus, forgiveness, and condescendence) not at the cost of universal justice but, indeed, above it. His view of kindness to friends does not mean treating other people below justice. As briefly mentioned earlier, he asserts that “favor is justice in augmentation.” Of course, in a zero-­sum worldview, all “augmentations” and “favors” are defined as costs. But the theory of faḍl depends on a worldview that stems from unlimited divine bounty. This ontological need for a moral realm above justice is shared between Christianity and Islam, though with different manifestations and nuances.98 The problem of a reverse equation between the number of friends and the quality of friendship has been well recognized by all three Iranian ethicists, with similar advice to that of Aristotle: one should not compromise the quality of friendship in favor of numbers. However, Muslim authors used two religious concepts that helped them go beyond Aristotle: (1) the concept of faḍl that defined a human-­divine justice-­plus attitude toward all and (2) the eschatological perspective of infinite life span for a human being. Even if the mundane life’s physical and geographic limits would not allow for numerous friendships, human souls have the desire and the capacity to befriend all righteous souls in the next life. “O Lord, please resurrect us with all righteous souls in the next life,” a proverbial prayer that frequently appears in Islamic liturgical texts, is inspired by certain Qur’ānic verses.99 Certain reliable hadiths, reported by Ja‘far al-­Ṣādīq (d. 765),100 give emphatic advice to Muslims to make as many friends as possible, because no one knows who among our friends will receive the power of intercession in the next life. “Take many friends in this world, for they are useful in life and afterlife; in this world, they will assist [your] tasks; in the next [you will avoid the situation of] the residents of hellfire complaining, ‘we do not have intercessors, nor sincere friends.’”101 Thus, it is wise to have a large number of friends, some of whom could mediate on behalf of friends in the next life. Another hadith from Ja‘far al-­Ṣādīq encourages believers to have multiple brothers (friends), because “for every believer, there is an accepted prayer/wish, and for every believer there is an intercession.”102 A prophetic hadith maintains, “Two Mus-

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lims who avoid each other and do not reconcile after three days, their unfriendliness will make them walk out of Islam. Therefore, anyone who precedes the other in initiating [reconciling] talk, he also enters paradise earlier.”103 Schall echoes ideas similar to the aforementioned traces of thought, “The restriction on the number of friends one might have implied some sort of unfinished agenda in the universe, an agenda with which we seem to be involved: that the highest purpose of this life could be completed without our being friends with everyone who ever existed. . . . The doctrines of eternal life and of its relation to time, finally, relate to the problem of shortness of time in which we, the mortals, can know all that is, all who are.” Schall concludes, “Polity and family exist for virtue, but virtue exists for friendship.”104 As briefly mentioned earlier, Miskawayh, al-­Isfahānī, and Ṭūsī see all collective religious rituals as exercises to maximize friendships. They are cognizant that in congressional prayers, people stand next to each other randomly and in tight order. Symbolically and traditionally, before commencing the prayer, the prayer leader always turns back and asks everyone to stand tightly together, so that Satan has no chance to go in between them. The idea that evil lives on separations and disconnections is well expanded across eschatological perspectives in Islam. Paradise is defined as the realm of maximal friendships, just as hellfire is the realm of hostility and loneliness. The proverbial prophetic hadith holds, “This life is the cultivating farm for the harvest in the next life.” By implication, one could hardly experience eschatological friendship if he or she fails to befriend in this life. On the question of vertical friendship that identifies human-­divine relations, Aristotle’s “first mover” is absolutely lonely and transcendent. Muslim ethicists were cognizant, however, that according to the proverbial verse of the Qur’ān (50:16), God is closer to human beings than their jugular veins. Therefore, in Islam, God is the supreme and the perfect friend. It is no surprise that in the greater part of the Islamic mystic literature in Persian, the word for “friend,” doost, is alternately used for both human and divine friendships.105 If we define politics as the art of collective living, Miskawayh, al-­Isfahānī, and Ṭūsī seem to be very consistent and on the right track in their search for an extralegal and justice-­plus political philosophy that aims at universal senses of intimacy and unity. Such a philosophy is very much missing in our contemporary regressive political trends. In a civilizational period when contemporary philosophers like Zygmunt Bauman warn against a dominating trend of “liquid love,”106 there is much relevance in Ṭūsī’s words that “the virtue of love/friendship is the greatest of virtues, and its preservation is the most important task.”

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Hands-­on-­Fire Friendship Ethicists I have argued that the three focal scholars of friendship ethics who are discussed in this chapter shared many thoughts on friendship, as both a moral and a political paradigm in social life. Another factor that brings them close to one another is their administrational engagement in high politics. Two of the first classical Iranian scholars of friendship, Miskawayh and al-­Isfahānī, lived during the Būyid era (934–­1062), categorized by some scholars as the era of Islamic humanism.107 Besides being an ethicist, Miskawayh was a historian and a Būyid administrator. In his voluminous work Tajārib al-­umam (Experiences of Nations), he pays deep attention to realpolitik, from ancient times to the medieval era. In addition to being a prolific scholar, Ṭūsī was a prominent administrator and diplomat, who managed to transform the devastative power of the Mongol warlords into sponsorship of arts and sciences. Both Ṭūsī and Miskawayh experienced politics closely; thus, their political philosophies were not isolated speculations. Al-­Isfahānī was less engaged with the Būyid’s administrators and was imprisoned for a time; nevertheless, he was a close observer of high politics. So was Abū Ḥayyān al-­Tawḥīdī (d. 1023), the author of Al-­ ṣadāqa wa’l-­ṣadīq (The Friendship and the Friend) and an authority in Islamic belles lettres, who was in communication with Miskawayh.108 Can we conclude that these Iranian scholars of friendship were both the products and, at the same time, advocates of cosmopolitanism (jahānvandī), in a deeper sense than what universal and extradoctrinal justice conveys?109 Do philosophies and ethics of friendship as articulated by these medieval Iranian thinkers defy Anthony Pagden’s notion of the exclusivity of cosmopolitanism to European political philosophy?110 Supporting evidences presented in this chapter show that they do. The genre of Persian advice literature (naṣīḥatu’l-­ mulūk), one of the unique characteristics of Iranian political philosophy, was originally designed to contain political power and practice in a moral framework. Coming from top advisers and scholars of the Būyid and Mongol courts, the writings of Miskawayh, al-­Isfahānī, and Ṭūsī on friendship add new quality to this literature and set the bar for moral politics at a higher level than universal notions of justice would require. Targeting a political goal above fairness, focusing on friendship as the most necessary political paradigm, and defining religious rituals as institutions for promoting social friendship constitute an invitation to a quality cosmopolitanism that is still hard to transcend in the twenty-­first-­century imagination.

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Conclusion The Iranian classical scholars discussed in this chapter looked at friendship not only as a necessity for attaining ultimate happiness but also as the ultimate goal in both this world and the next. Their ontological, epistemological, religious, institutional, and political approaches to friendship bear tremendous significance in defining a political philosophy that formulates universal friendships. Furthermore, by looking at friendship as the philosophical foundation of collective devotional rituals in Islamic tradition, these scholars brought friendship to the heart of Muslim praxis and political philosophy. Theoretically, for the three Iranian scholars studied in this chapter, friendship in the private and public realms had the highest status among all virtues in the normative hierarchy. Practically, however, the Iranian hands-­on political philosophers were cognizant of how power politics and territorial borders render friendship conditional. By looking at friendship as the ideal moral paradigm and by presenting models for its institutionalization, they nevertheless helped the historic humanism of the Būyid era and the constructive transformation of the Mongol destructive power. Presenting itself occasionally in the course of real history, political thought, and moral philosophy, Iranian cosmopolitanism has manifested itself in two levels: first, through parameters of universal and objective justice; second and more importantly, through friendship philosophy, as this chapter has demonstrated. Milad Odabaei is therefore correct in criticizing the reduction of the notion of cosmopolitanism to the Western construct of a nation-­state. The works of the Iranian ethicists reflect a transcultural and transnational understanding of the natures of universal justice and friendship and offer a different lens for measuring cosmopolitanism.111 After Ṭūsī and until the turn of nineteenth century, Iranian Muslim ethicists consistently kept emphasizing the significance of friendship in their scholarships. Elsewhere in the Muslim world, however, the advent of European colonialism in the last two centuries did not provide incentives for successive authors to develop friendship concepts, beyond classical perspectives and into contemporary political philosophies. After five centuries followed by two devastating world wars, Western scholarship finally started to revisit virtue and friendship ethics in the mid-­twentieth century, with fresh eyes and minds. Now seems to be the right time not only for Iranian but for all Muslim scholars to revive, elaborate, and expand a philosophical and ethical tradition that was open enough to let Aristotle intellectually meet his Iranian Muslim counterparts.

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To mobilize an effective endeavor in applying the philosophy and ethics of friendship to modern private, organizational, and international relations, contemporary descendants of Aristotle, Miskawayh, Ṭūsī, and al-­Isfahānī in the East and the West have to meet, like their ancestors, in a space and a spirit of transcultural dialogue. They need to establish that friendship does not depend on morality but that morality depends on friendship. Today, we know that universal friendship is an important and indispensable paradigm for durable peace both within and between societies. Justice alone has not brought peace. With this in mind, consider the devastating impacts of continuous wars in the heart of the Middle East, not to mention myriads of war and famine-­stricken refugees across the whole world. This chapter suggests that the renewal of the academic study of friendship should be undertaken with a sense of urgency by Iranians, all Muslims, and global societies. This topic, at least theoretically, presents specific and general continuity in the Iranian cosmopolitanism and also in the Islamic civilizational traditions, to various degrees. Friendship may indeed be the only effective elixir to revive dynamic political philosophies and to bring about a humanism much needed in our fragile and somehow regressive global relations. British prime minister Theresa May made a wise move in appointing a minister for loneliness on January 18, 2018. It will be even wiser if all other governments bring friendship into policy making through appointment of ministers for friendship. There is good hope that al-­Isfahānī’s conviction is better understood by the global community now, a millennium after he exclaimed that solitude nullifies our humanity.

Chapter 5

The Mystery of Friendship: A View from Islam Paul L. Heck

The pluralistic moment in which we live, with people of diverse walks of life interacting in unprecedented fashion, poses a challenge for the question of friendship. It is usually held that friendship comes into being when two or more people hold something in common—­a shared interest, a shared goal, a shared history, a shared set of values, and so on. There is, however, constant interaction among peoples who do not hold the same beliefs but who nevertheless share a single destiny. Whether at the local, national, or international level, their fortunes are closely linked together, at the very least in economic terms. Yet natural differences among people make it difficult for us to conclude that friendship is the obvious consequence of common destiny. The ambiguity surrounding friendship today is well illustrated in the story of Ali Hashemi and his boyhood friend Parviz, which Roy Mottahedeh weaves into his wide-­ranging description of Iran’s cultural heritage.1 The two friends are different on so many levels, yet they help one another aspire to greater heights. The climax of their story is their unexpected reunion in prison, where both men were placed for suspected fomentation against the regime. Isolated in solitary cells, they connect by reciting poetry to one another over the threats of the guards. Connecting in that way strengthens their souls, helping them to persevere in the face of the inhumanity of their surroundings. Once released, the men grow apart, in what Mottahedeh calls “a suspension of judgment.”2 Parviz, unable to understand why Ali does not share his revolutionary politics, goes underground, leaving Ali to observe events at a distance. The friendship that binds together a community—­in this case, a nation—­is no longer able to serve its purpose. The paralysis of friendship symbolizes the disintegration of a common bond, a shared cultural tradition that had held the Iranian nation together for so long but that is now confronted by alternative points of view. The two childhood friends realize, as so many do, 111

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that they no longer have anything in common. They seem unable to find concord on the question of what the future of their nation ought to be. They each opt to protect their own particular truths about the nation rather than to risk the doubts that their differences might force on them if they were to continue as companions in a shared venture. They are divided over opposing positions instead of united over shared values. This is the very challenge of today: maintaining friendship amid differences. A common destiny is undeniable at this global moment, yet differences appear too great, making it difficult to achieve a friendship the destiny demands. Al-­Ghazāli (d. 1111), a towering figure of the intellectual history of Islam, can offer us insight. His understanding of friendship operates according to the traditional boundaries of his day and is essentially limited to those who share a common faith. Of worth for our pluralistic age, therefore, is not the scope he sets for friendship but, rather, his understanding of the nature of friendship. He sees friendship as a mystery, a relation that by no means operates above normal human affairs yet nevertheless draws people’s attention to the transcendent in their midst. The possibility that we might look at others as a source of mystery even when they are manifestly different from us can, I believe, help us reconsider friendship in a way that speaks to our contemporary complexities. The idea of friendship in Islam has been variously conceived. The Qur’ān speaks of God taking Abraham as his bosom friend (khalīl, 4:125). Muḥammad attracted a group of companions (sahāba) from diverse tribal and ethnic backgrounds, offering them unity in the message he conveyed. Over the centuries, Muslims who have excelled in piety have been known as the friends of God (awliyā’ allāh). The confidante or boon companion (nadīm) was a common figure in the courtly life of Islamic dynasts throughout the centuries. Ironically, “brotherhood” (ukhuwwa) is the term most commonly used to refer to nonbiological association that results from a willing choice to be with another and not from a simple accident of living or working together in a single location. With a basis in the Qur’ān (e.g., 3:103), the concept of brotherhood in Islam, while it implies a shared outlook, speaks to the idea of a voluntary association or what is generally known as friendship for a common purpose. From this perspective, I here consider the concept of brotherhood in Islam as a specific kind of friendship, in the terms spelled out by al-­Ghazāli. There were, of course, exact words for “friend” and “friendship,” as seen in the title of a work on the topic by the tenth-­century litterateur, Abū Hayyān al-­ Tawhīdī.3 In that work, he treats friendship as a goal in itself, not a means to a goal. He is quite aware that friendship often exists at the service of specific ends

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in the realm of business and politics. These friendships could be called “alliances.” They exist for a purpose and therefore, he claims, always end in disappointment. Friendship in the true sense exists not for the sake of gain but simply for the enjoyment it brings in terms of intimacy, affection, and tranquility.4 Quoting his teacher Abū Sulaymān al-­Sijistānī, who affirmed Aristotle’s idea that a friend is a second you,5 Abū Hayyān claims that friendship stands at the core of what it means to be human. Friendship is about harmony, sharing a single spirit. It is therefore distinct from kinds of association that exist for the sake of a common goal. Those associations are a function of our instincts, which we share with animals. Associating with others to obtain a shared interest is thus a beastly, not a human, quality. In contrast, friendship in the true sense is not instinct but choice. It is what distinguishes us from animals and imbues our human nature with angelic quality. A well-­chosen friendship will engender a union of minds that allows us to appreciate the angelic side of our human condition. While using what might today be considered quasi-­ theological language, Abū Hayyān envisions friendship in humanistic terms, not as for a godly cause, but as a naturally occurring phenomenon among humans and, as such, worthy to be called divine. Another litterateur, this time from the eleventh century, offers a different view on friendship. Ibn Hamdūn, who served as administrative comptroller for the Abbasid dynasty before falling from favor, also spoke from the Aristotelian understanding that brotherhood among the political elite was a necessary element of good rule. Indeed, he addresses that “brotherhood” in a massive literary anthology, meant to instill in the elite a cultural ethic (adab) that is a vital ingredient for the maintenance of concord in the polity as a whole.6 In classical Islam, a healthy political life (good governance) involved many things: a strong ruler, enforcement of laws, justice and equity, a system of oath-­taking that bound people to promises, the fulfillment of contracts, and obligations to one’s social group, whether it be a branch of administration, a military unit, or a professional guild.7 Another element very much at play, though often overlooked in scholarly literature on the topic, is character. The brethren depicted by Ibn Hamdūn, high-­ranking officials (including non-­Muslims), are supposed to understand the political importance of shared character. In this context, friendship, which exists not for religion but for political well-­being, is the fruit of a commonly held character, and such character is cultivated through a code of ethics operative among the members of the governing class. Politics, then, requires character—­indeed, nobility of character (makārim al-­akhlāq),8 including such traits as discretion, generosity, forbearance, sincerity, devotion, magnanimity, liberality, altruism, clemency, thinking

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well of others even when they are the object of rumor, and a willingness to help others even if it means great sacrifice of wealth. The absence of such virtues among the governing class is a signal that the polity as a whole is on the verge of breakdown. Political concord is not the product of simple justice. The demand for perfect justice—­apart from clemency and the willingness to forgo one’s rights or to give others help that goes beyond the demands of justice—­can destroy a society, sinking it in a cycle of litigious competition. Indeed, without nobility of character on the part of the powerful, it becomes difficult to secure the rights of the weak. A stable society needs generosity as well as formal fairness. Ibn Hamdūn thus makes a crucial point: friendship, with its attendant set of character traits, is the foregrounding of politics—­without friendship, there can be no politics, or at least no harmonious politics—­and friendship itself cannot exist without a commitment to these virtues. Politics therefore requires nobility not of blood but of character, and the latter is best achieved through the nexus of friendship. In a political context, friendship is subordinate to the highest form of association—­namely, the polity—­and exists for the public interest. At risk if the elite does not cultivate such friendship is not simply the smooth running of governance but the common good of all, since the overall welfare of society depends on good rule. Al-­Ghazāli, who was a prolific writer and a controversial figure in his own day, sought to orient all knowledge and all experience to the unseen world of mystery, not obscurity and inscrutability but, rather, the depths of the human being in relation to the transcendent realm. Such a goal implies that humanity, while not transcendent itself, is where transcendence is witnessed. For al-­ Ghazāli, friendship is the best means for manifesting such a process. Family. as a biological—­and hence worldly—­phenomenon, falls short, whereas friendship is better suited to the cultivation of transcendent awareness. Al-­Ghazāli articulates this argument in a section of his magnum opus, The Revival of the Religious Sciences, entitled “The Ethics of Harmony, Brotherhood, Companionship, and Affection.”9 In that section of Revival are three subsections, on the rights and duties of Al-­Ghazāli’s concept of brotherhood, on the nature of that brotherhood, and on other kinds of associations (e.g., neighbors, relatives, children, and parents) that diverge from that brotherhood. In what follows, I focus on the first two subsections. Though al-­Ghazāli’s outlook is very much defined by Islamic thought of the eleventh century, his understanding of friendship can offer us insight today. While he uses varied terminology, from “brotherhood” to “companionship,” he essentially has in mind what we would see as a kind of spiri-

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tual friendship—­that is, voluntary association based on a shared commitment to God. There are eight categories of “rights” that your brother-­friend has over you: rights to your property, your life, your speech, your heart, your forgiveness, your prayers, and your loyalty, as well as a right that you not be a burden to him. Al-­Ghazāli draws on a legal concept of rights but gives it a deeper meaning in light of the concept of friendship, thereby heightening the expectations of social interaction. For example, in speaking of property, he mentions three categories of people: those who look to themselves before their friend and meet his needs only from their extra wealth, those who consider their friend as they do themselves and share their wealth with him without reserve, and those who prefer their friend to themselves and place his needs before theirs. For al-­Ghazāli, those who do not belong to one of these three categories have purely formal relations with others. Even friendship reflecting the third category is insufficient when it comes to the depth of association that al-­ Ghazāli has in mind. Al-­Ghazāli’s point is that one’s attitude toward one’s own possessions is indicative of one’s interior state. Friendship, then, is the litmus test of the interior life, shedding light on one’s relation to the transcendent. A story illustrates this: A man goes to his friend and tells him he needs four thousand dirham. When offered two thousand, he turns away, claiming that his friend prefers this world over God. In other words, attachment to one’s wealth over the needs of one’s friend indicates a deficiency in one’s interior life and, thus, in one’s orientation to the transcendent. In this sense, living for others is a way to embody godliness, where sacrifice for others demonstrates commitment to the transcendent over the self. In this way, something of the mercy of God is made manifest in this world. To this end, al-­Ghazāli claims that providing for one’s friends is better than charity to the poor or manumission of a slave. The precedent is Muḥammad, who always put others before himself. A related teaching of his is that one will be held accountable on Judgment Day for one’s actions while companioning others, even for encounters of only a single hour’s duration. Friendship involves the rights of God and not simply the way two people interact. Indeed, for al-­Ghazāli, friendship is no less effective than worship in orienting us to the transcendent, and he relates a teaching of Muḥammad that to God, the more beloved of two companions is the one who is kinder to the other. The basic idea throughout al-­Ghazāli’s explanation of friendship is that you should hold the needs of your friend as greater than your own. You should always be on the lookout for their needs just as you do not neglect your own

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needs, and you should meet their needs without expecting anything in return. Your friend is to be more beloved to you than family and children, since family and children remind us of this world, while friends remind us of the other one. To illustrate the idea of friendship as otherworldly in orientation, al-­Ghazāli mentions that a man who visits a brother in God with no desire other than to see him will be visited by an angel who will inform him that he merits paradise. Friendship is thus a tangible index of one’s heavenly status. The high esteem due a friend is further spelled out in the rights your friend has in your speech. You should not utter something your friend detests. If it is necessary to reprove him for failing to adhere to God’s commands and prohibitions, you should do so with kindness and discretion, even if not to his liking. When it comes to his bad qualities, however, their mention is slander. In other words, al-­Ghazāli is calling for a higher ethics based on a detachment from doing what one would not necessarily be wrong in doing, such as speaking about the bad qualities that another person has. In his view, you should see only the good qualities of your friend and should find excuses to cover the bad ones, so that others might feel only respect and affection for him. Only hypocrites note the shortcomings of their friends. Taking the legal heritage to a deeper level, al-­Ghazāli claims that silence is obligatory not only in speech but even in the heart. It is not enough to refrain from saying bad things. You should also have no bad opinions of your friend, as they would be slander of the heart and would be a crime against him at the interior level, as slander in speech is at the exterior level. This kind of consociation operates not merely according to visible categories but also according to hidden standards. For al-­Ghazāli, it is a manifest way to live out a life in God. Indeed, it is a way to become like God, who overlooks the shortcomings of his creatures and even covers over their failings in his mercy. Refusing to discount a companion’s blemishes is thus the result of an interior illness—­namely, spite and envy—­and al-­Ghazāli counsels that it is better to break off association with someone known for these sickly qualities, since no benefit can be derived from it. It is not clear if al-­Ghazāli means that you cannot have a friend who does not share your religious outlook in all its theological specificities, although there are certainly limits. Friendship requires a concord of wills, which means a preference for truth (even if not entirely agreed on in all its details) over one’s own personal whims. For al-­Ghazāli, truth is determined by God and mediated by religious teaching, making theological innovation a reason for a friendship to fail if such innovation is the choice of a conscious rebellion against truth and not simply a difference of opinion. In short, it can be argued that despite his polemical writings

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especially against “esoteric” forms of Islam, al-­Ghazāli found cause to end friendship not necessarily in religious difference but, rather, in the inclination to live for oneself apart from any recognition of truth. Of course, he would see a certain connection between theological deviance and the failure to put God first in one’s life. Also carrying ills of the soul, in al-­Ghazāli’s estimation, are people with resentment in their breasts, who are weak in faith, ugly in heart, and unaware of transcendence. Being friends with them is difficult, since friendship is possible only when both parties are aware of something greater than themselves. Friendship is therefore a way to prove one’s moral character and demonstrate whether one is fit to be in the presence of God, a state requiring not only proper action at the exterior level but also proper disposition at the interior level. If you want to make someone your friend, al-­Ghazāli advises, make him angry and then have someone ask him about you. If he conceals the matter, make him your friend. Do not befriend those whose behavior follows their emotions, because they become kindly when happy but become spiteful when angered. If one is truly a friend “in God,” one should be kindly irrespective of the circumstances. What is the nature of this form of association between two people who love “in God” and hate “in God” (i.e., as opposed to their own personal likes and dislikes)? This kind of association, according to al-­Ghazāli, is the best qurba, that is, the best means by which one is drawn close to God. In this sense, al-­Ghazāli is harnessing something quite human, friendship, to the purposes of religion, transcendent life. For example, when two men are brothers in God but one has a higher spiritual status than the other, God will raise the other to the higher level. Al-­Ghazāli’s point is that God works to bring people close to him primarily through the bonds of friendship, one companion inspiring the other to grow closer to God. The presence of God is realized through human association—­visiting, supporting, and looking out for one another—­if such activity is conducted not for personal gain but with a correct orientation to the other person. In short, doing things without personal interest is the way to be truly godly. In this sense, our actions in the company of others in this world, while real, are only real insofar as they reflect a transcendent realm. As a result, the actions that sharī‘a prescribes as formal worship of God are not enough. It was revealed to Jesus, al-­Ghazālī states, that it is not enough to worship God through formal channels if such worship is not accompanied by a state of being “in God” in what one loves and hates. After all, hypocrites can go through the motions of prayer without a sense of being in God. The duties prescribed by sharī‘a are not necessarily selfless, even if one is not a hypocrite, since they are performed to protect oneself from heavenly disapproval.

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For example, associating with others “in God” is done “for God,” whereas carrying out one’s sharī‘a duties is driven by the expectation of a reward (or to ward off punishment) on Judgment Day. In this sense, friendship is an exercise in self-­emptying, a way to put aside the self and make room for the presence of God by fully acknowledging the presence of others beyond one’s legal obligations. Companionship in God opens the door to being in the presence of God. For this reason, formal worship is ineffective if isolated from friendship, since ritual action without a sense of transcendence defeats the very purpose such ritual is supposed to achieve. For its purposes to be fulfilled, the law of sharī‘a requires friendship. Friendship is therefore a qurba and thus essential to religion. The way to God is not fleeing the world as a hermit but, rather, companionship as a means for growth in selflessness that is, loving (and hating) “in God.” This view is illustrated in an anecdotal conversation between God and King David. When God asks why David has isolated himself from the world, David responds that he has done so to preserve himself for God’s sake—­that is to obtain divine favor through a kind of ascetic renunciation of the world and its ways. God chides him, telling him to find confidantes, since, if well chosen, they will help him to know God’s delight (masarra). In another anecdote, a crowd of people ask Jesus about companionship, and he instructs them to sit with people whose sight reminds them of God, whose speech increases their knowledge of God, and whose action heightens their desire for the other world. A quote attributed to ‘Ali Ibn Abī Tālib, a key figure in early Islam after Muḥammad, speaks of the importance of acquiring brethren, for they will be a shield in both this world and the other. Friends, then, can act as intercessors, witnessing to a person’s worthiness to be in the presence of God in the life to come. Another saying, related by Mujāhid, an early commentator on the Qur’ān, epitomizes this idea of friendship’s impact on one’s relation to God: “Those who love one another in God, when they meet and one looks at the face of the other, sins fall from them as leaves from the tree in winter.” A quote attribute to Fudayl Ibn ‘Iyād, an eighth-­century spiritual virtuoso from Samarqand, confirms, “Glancing at your brother in affection and mercy is worship.” Finally, an anecdotal conversation between God and Moses captures the crux of al-­Ghazāli’s argument. When God asks what Moses has done for him, Moses accounts his adherence to the duties of formal worship, noting that he has prayed and fasted and given alms, all for God. God responds by saying that Moses will be served on Judgment Day by prayer as a proof of his faith, fasting as a witness to his faith, and charity as protection from punishment for any

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misdeeds he might have committed. Again God queries what Moses did for him. When Moses, a bit confused, asks God to show him a deed he might do, God answers him with a query: “O Moses, did you ever befriend a friend for me? Did you ever show enmity to an enemy for me?” Thus Moses learns that the best of deeds is to love and hate “in God” (i.e., according to what God loves and hates). The intensity of al-­Ghazāli’s otherworldly vision did not keep him from locating his vision of friendship within the realities of human nature. He therefore speaks of secondary love, that is, a love for things that need not reference the transcendent; such things can also be part of brotherhood in God. One might take a normal pleasure in friendship, such as the pleasure of physical attraction (e.g., a comely countenance) or the pleasure of a hidden attraction (e.g., noble character), and it is ultimately the attraction to another’s interior being that engenders concord between two people. What produces such a meeting of spirits is obscure. A believer will find another amid a crowd of hypocrites, just as a hypocrite will find another amid a crowd of believers, but this unfolds in very normal ways. The beauty of God that attracts people to him need not be explicitly divine but can be captured in human form, especially in the nobility of character with which one pursues life’s endeavors. One might have a love for knowledge or for wealth and power and for the circles where such things exist, and if pursued with a proper end, such love need not fall outside the realm of love “in God.” A teacher might love a student, or a student a teacher; companions might love one who has prepared a sumptuous meal for them; you might love someone who provides you with money. All these examples, while very normal, are not in opposition to the transcendent but actually point to it. Love of one’s wife, al-­Ghazāli adds, if meant to keep her chaste and thus protect her religion or to produce and rear a good child—­all very natural instincts—­can also be a way of loving “in God.” Such thinking gives witness to what the Christian view regards as the cooperation of nature with grace. For al-­Ghazāli too, nature and grace are tightly interwoven. The promptings of human nature, if set toward their proper end, can be a way to manifest the grace of love “in God.” Such love can be pursued through mundane categories, especially friendship. There is no dichotomy, al-­Ghazāli affirms, between happiness in this world and happiness in the other world. The two worlds are simply two conditions of a single state, namely, life in the presence of God. The difference is one of degree (or closeness) and not of reality. Indeed, since existence is undivided, loving a worldly aim can be part of loving in God. There is no contradiction as long as happiness is the single end. What man, al-­Ghazāli asks, loves his fortunes of tomorrow

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but not those of today? Moreover, if you love someone, you love all that surrounds him, even his dog. After all, everything is from God. This argument hardly recommends indifference to religious duties, but it does show that al-­ Ghazāli embraced both the human and the transcendent in his vision of friendship. For al-­Ghazāli, religion was not what it is for many today (i.e., a self-­ contained identity) but unfolded across a wide range of intellectual patterns and cultural categories. For similar reasons, al-­Ghazāli instructs his readers not to abandon a friend who sins; that is, human realities are not to be discounted. No one is perfect. For example, obedience and disobedience are invariably mixed in the human condition, and it is not right to hate a fellow Muslim who adheres to the religion of God. Even if he slips on occasion, he is no infidel. Hate his disobedience to God, but love him for his Islam. After all, among the first Muslims, there were those who consumed alcohol and committed sexual improprieties but were not spurned by Muḥammad. He reprimanded some, turned away from others, and looked with mercy on still others. Choices exist in dealing with a wayward brother. To make it possible to maintain friendship in God amid the realities of the human condition, al-­Ghazāli sets forth a system of rules for dealing with the imperfections of those with whom one associates in God. All people are not worthy of companionship, and one does not associate with others without considering the worldly and otherworldly benefits of doing so; al-­Ghazāli is, of course, chiefly concerned with the otherworldly benefits. The ideal companion will protect your character and increase your knowledge of God, but rarely does one find the ideal, so you must make due. Junayd, the great spiritual master of ninth-­century Baghdad, is reported to have expressed his preference for companionship with a sinner known for good character over someone who is able to recite the Qur’ān flawlessly but has bad character. The point is that you are influenced by those you companion, for better or worse, so it is best to companion those who desire the spiritual realm, where God’s presence is fully manifest and where the companionship of your friends will be worth something to you. Such a conception of friendship is not without some basis in al-­Ghazāli’s cultural and historical context. Indeed, he shares something with Abū Hayyān al-­Tawhīdī. Both see friendship as potentially angelic in character. However, for al-­Ghazāli, it would seem, the ideal form of human association is not the end in itself but forms the testing ground for one’s existence in God. How one deals with one’s companions is a key indicator of one’s inner life and therefore of one’s capacity to be with God. Friendship is the vehicle for growing in iden-

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tification with God, and friendship in the world serves as a metaphor for the true reality of friendship with God. In this sense, friendship becomes the theater in which relation with God plays out, positively or negatively. Much has been written about al-­Ghazāli, but there is almost no scholarship on his notion of friendship. An article by Lenn E. Goodman offers much insight but seems to reduce al-­Ghazāli’s perspective to a teleological agenda.10 It is true that al-­Ghazāli diverges from classical ideals of friendship by reorienting it to the spiritual realm. He is not a humanist, but this does not imply a disconnect with the humanist ideal. In contrast to humanists, al-­Ghazāli would not say that what is most human is divine, but he would say that what is human, including aspects of human existence that are completely ordinary, can be ennobled by the divine without losing its human nature. As we have seen, he recognizes the worldly, even imperfect sides of friendship but does not set them off from the process of growing toward the transcendent. Al-­does not dehumanize friendship. Indeed, his formulation for it does not really change anything about it as it normally exists. Rather, he simply reconsiders it, in all of its ordinariness, as part of something greater than us all—­for him, life in God. Briefly considering the circumstances of al-­Ghazāli’s day helps get at the potential motives behind his project and the place of friendship in it. Ultimately, those circumstances nurtured in him anxieties about the standing of the umma before God. To judge from his many writings, he saw his age as one characterized by laxity in religious practice, a lack of spiritual vigor among religious leaders, and theological challenges to the integrity of visible religion from so-­called esoteric forms of Islam that elevated philosophy over religion as a guide to life. As perhaps the greatest scholar of his day, al-­Ghazāli sought to counter these challenges on many levels. At the heart of his program is a desire to demonstrate that religion is still an effective guide for life—­at a time when the political order, epitomized in the caliphal office, seemed entirely incapable of representing Islam. The situation raised essential questions: What binds humans together? What is the cement of communal life? Can a political office, even one with a religious origin, be expected to represent a transcendent vision for society? In the face of such ambiguities, al-­Ghazāli looked elsewhere, beyond the ruling order, to demonstrate that Islam was indeed effectively guiding the umma to life in God. In short, it was no longer reasonable, if it ever had been, to hope that political institutions could embody the ideals of Islam. By al-­Ghazāli’s day, the community of Muḥammad was interwoven into a multitude of local cultures that made representation in a single polity untenable. The caliphate itself had long been subject to military powers, making it suspect as a guarantor of a

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spiritual way of life. Al-­Ghazāli’s own teacher, al-­Juwayni, had suggested doing away with the caliphate entirely. As he saw it, the Abbasid caliphs, even if descendants of the clan of the Prophet, were no longer up to the task of guarding and guaranteeing the moral life of Islam. For this reason, al-­Juwayni proposed deposing the Abbasids. He still put his hopes in rulers as agents of religious order, but he felt order would be better accomplished by the real holders of power. The Seljuk Turks, especially their talented vizier Nizam al-­Mulk (d. 1092), had no prophetic lineage, but as the strongmen of the day, they could be expected to enforce the norms of Islam. At least, al-­Juwayni hoped for such an end to the divisions in the umma that, in his opinion, posed a challenge to the existence of a single truth in the name of Islam.11 In contrast to his teacher, al-­Ghazāli had no hope for a political solution to the religious crisis, but he did hope for some visible demonstration that Islam remained effective in achieving its purposes. The political order’s inability to guarantee piety would seem to jeopardize the community’s standing before God. Therefore, the earthly city had to be abandoned for the city of God, but abandonment did not mean rapture to the heavenly realm and rupture with the earthly one. Muslims still lived in the earthly city, and al-­Ghazāli sought not to uproot them from this world but, rather, to orient them more perfectly to the city of God. He was sorely disappointed in the earthly city but did not reject it outright. The integrity of the umma would be maintained in view of the transcendence of the other world, not because of the polity in this one. Yet one must not only anticipate the other world in a life to come but also represent it in some way in this world. In need of something other than political institutions to show that the umma was effectively representing the ultimate purpose of Islam, al-­Ghazāli looked to friendship. In this sense, al-­Ghazāli had a much larger project in mind than spiritual redefinition of the classical ideals of friendship. He reframed the way in which Islam is understood to be effectively at work in the world—­not as a political society (although he does not entirely abandon the caliphate), but primarily as a spiritual society, which must display some kind of visible representation if it is to be worth anything. For this end, he looked to the ideal of human association: the guarantor of Islam would be not a political body but a body of friends in God. Al-­Ghazāli thus recasts friendship as the measure of the religious integrity of the umma, in contrast to Ibn Hamdūn, for example, for whom it is an agent of political concord. The political order does have its purpose, but as al-­ Ghazāli sets forth his project, that order is no longer essential for the religious integrity of the umma—­nor is the religious establishment. For al-­Ghazāli, the bulk of religious scholars were corrupt. Attached to the world and enamored of

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political power, they could not be expected to guide the umma to its divine purpose but were themselves in need of reform. Sufism is, of course, part of al-­Ghazāli’s vision, but it is only one strand within his project—­namely, orienting the umma to the transcendent. Thus, while spiritual association stands at the heart of Sufism, al-­Ghazāli does not limit the idea to the specific sense it has in Sufism—­namely, as a means of binding disciple to spiritual master. His notion of friendship is much more expansive, with the potential to embrace the entire umma. The society of friendship is not quite an open society, but it also does not demand spiritual perfection or a hierarchy of spiritual relations. Rather, it is a way for the umma to integrate its religious life more closely to its existence in God. Some of al-­ Ghazāli’s writings assume a spiritual virtuosity attainable only by the saints, but in his formulation of friendship, he is proposing a new conception of religious community, including a pastoral concern for the common man and for that man’s susceptibility to the troubles and ambiguities of the day. This notion of friendship cannot be called spiritually elitist. The spirituality that friendship engenders here is based on a transcendent orientation, but it is not at all about transcending ordinary human activity in this world. Since al-­ Ghazāli would not be satisfied in confining religion to an unseen realm (e.g., some heavenly sphere that only the mind can access), he had to include the realities of this world in his spiritual project. His concern was to demonstrate the truth of Islam at a time when the political institutions entrusted with representing Islam had failed to do so, making one wonder whether the umma still had a connection to its divine source. Al-­Ghazāli offered a new standard by which to judge the umma, by relocating its integrity toward a more human ideal, one that embodies expectations of character and encourages believers not to despair of transcendence but to look to form a community of friends in God. Among the many things about al-­Ghazāli’s conception of friendship with enduring appeal, perhaps most important for today is his understanding of friendship as, in part, a mystery. While the scope he set for brotherhood in God may have limited relevance in modern times, his understanding of the nature of friendship can speak significantly to the way people relate to one another today. While remaining within the arena of a single religious tradition, al-­Ghazāli wanted to push his fellow believers toward a sense of religion that moved beyond definitions (even if not abandoning them), to a dynamic sense of interrelation disclosing something that, even if greater than them all, bound them together in mysterious ways. Today, political uncertainties exist alongside trends toward greater human contact, raising questions about the bonds that hold humanity together. We

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cannot—­and should not try to—­overcome our natural specificities that are the result of the time and place of our birth, but such things need not be the final mark of who we are as a global community, nor must they dictate the way we relate—­or fail to relate—­to one another. Within our individual and communal specificities, we can also look at the other as a mystery to be discovered. Do I look at others in my life as worldly categories? Or do I look at others, who may or may not believe and act as I do and who may or may not share my physical and character traits, as a mystery—­that is, not as someone obscure and inscrutable, but as a source of infinite insight, in whose company I can be pulled beyond myself and to greater things? This approach to relationship does not mean letting go of what is natural, including the pursuit of our own worldly interests, but informed by the perspectives of al-­Ghazāli, it enables our encounters with others to offer us a gateway into a reality that shapes the deepest contours of our existence even amid our sociological diversity. In this sense, even if the details of life have greatly changed, the way we befriend others remains, today as in al-­Ghazāli’s age, the deepest test of our character and the most effective expression of shared meaning in the face of unsettling circumstances. Then as now, it involves a risk, but the reward is incalculable.

Chapter 6

Three Dimensions of Friendship: A Qur’ānic Perspective Mohammad Jafar Amir Mahallati From the Apostle, prayer of God be upon him and his family: “Indeed God, Glorified and Sublime be He, has servants who reside on pulpits of light underneath His throne in the Day of Judgment and who make apostles and martyrs envy their status. They are those who love one another in God Glorified and Sublime be He.”1 —­Prophetic hadith reported by Ibn ‘Abbās The Domain of Paradise is only a branch on the tree of friendship.2 —­Khwājah ‘Abdullāh Anṣārī Hiravī A perfect solitude is, perhaps, the greatest punishment we can suffer. Every pleasure languishes when enjoyed apart from society.” —­David Hume

Ever since the monumental book Tahdhīb al-­akhlāq (The Refinement of Character) by Abū ‘Alī Aḥmad Miskawayh (d. 1030 CE), Muslim philosophical ethicists have been adopting and expanding Aristotelian perspectives of friendship as a virtue in terms of both qualities and categories. They have built a narrative around the nascent idea that friendship is a foundational virtue for an ideal society, superior to a society built on justice alone. Meanwhile, Muslim scholars, who primarily focused on Qur’ānic exegesis and hadith literature, paid little attention to friendship as an independent subject of ethical inquiry, referring to it mostly in the context of Muslim fellowship rather than universal friendship. In this chapter, I argue that the Qur’ān provides fertile ground for a discussion of the philosophy and ethics of friendship, topics that have remained largely uncultivated for hundreds of years. I present a new reading of some 125

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Qur’ānic terms and demonstrate that scripture consistently points to friendship not only as an interpersonal virtue but also as an ethical space that exalts both human-­divine and human-­human relationships to their highest moral planes.

Bounty (faḍl) versus Justice (‘adl) In his commentary on verse 4:175, “So those who believe in Allah and hold fast to Him—­He will admit them to mercy from Himself and bounty [faḍl] and guide them to Himself on a straight path,” the Qur’ānic exegete Khwājah ‘Abdullāh Anṣārī Hiravī (d. 1088 CE) refers to a hadith that provides a meaning for faḍl (bounty). Al-­Muṣṭafā [the prophet Muḥammad] is reported to have said: “It is not the servants’ good deeds that ultimately save them in the hereafter; rather, they are saved only by God’s bounty [faḍl] and mercy [raḥma].” He was asked whether the rule applies even to his own righteous deeds. He [the Prophet] responded: “Indeed, unless He brings me near His mercy and subjects me to His kind attention.”3 This hadith denotes an important concept that defines the relationship between bounty (faḍl) and justice (‘adl). In the Qur’ānic worldview, the world has been created and is maintained primarily by bounty rather than justice. In other words, justice alone cannot save the world. This concept is echoed in the Qur’ānic verse “Were Allah to take mankind to task because of what they have earned, He would not leave any living being on its back! But He respites them until a specified time, and when their time comes, Allah indeed sees best His servants.”4 The same notion is found in the verse “Were Allah to hasten ill for mankind with their haste for good, their term would have been over.”5 Although the word justice (‘adl) is not directly used in these verses, the context refers to punitive or retributive justice by which, if applied, all living creatures would perish. The verses provide two grounds based on which the execution of justice by God is either abandoned or postponed: God’s patience and reluctance to retaliate against wrongdoing. The same concept is frequently expressed in the Qur’ān through emphasis on God’s bounty as the sole cause of the world’s survival: “Were it not for Allah’s grace and His mercy upon you in this world and the Hereafter, there would have befallen you a great punishment for what you ventured into.”6 Verses 10, 20, and 21 of the same chapter 24, as well as some other verses in

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other Qur’ānic chapters, repeat the same notion with similar phraseology.7 In many other Qur’ānic passages, the root word faḍl is used, in its various derived forms, as a systematic reminder of the cosmic significance of bounty and the ontological foundation of creation. As I discuss in chapter 4 of the present volume, there is no single English equivalent for the Arabic word faḍl.8 In ethical epistemology, faḍl refers to the realm of ethics that is superior to justice. It is the treatment of a person or a moral action that is more rewarding than what the criterion of justice entails. It conveys a sense of moral interaction above justice, deserving, rights, and fair entitlements. In short, faḍl is the realm of justice-­plus and provision without cause, where senses of generosity, magnanimity, grace, forgiveness, and friendship rule. While bounty, or faḍl, has a fundamental significance for cosmological creation in a Qur’ānic worldview, it is also significant in the micromanagement of the world in relation to both the mundane life and God’s rewarding standards in the hereafter. The topography of bounty in this life is introduced as an uneven ground designed to test people on their moral performance in various realms of gratitude, contentment, generosity, and humility, as well as their opposing vices. Verse 17:21 reminds the Qur’ānic reader that God’s faḍl is unevenly spread on earth and in heaven: “Observe how We have given some of them [people] an advantage [faḍl] over some others; yet the Hereafter is surely greater in respect of ranks and greater in respect of relative merits [bounty].” This mention of uneven bounty may seem contrary to the egalitarian spirit of Islam and, more important, may challenge the very concept of faḍl, which, by definition, should not be a limiting notion. But another Qur’ānic verse sheds better light on the cause of these limits: “Were Allah to expand the provision for His servants, they would surely create havoc on the earth. But He sends down in a [precise] measure whatever He wishes. Indeed, He is all-­aware, all-­ seeing about His servants” (42:27). In this passage, the philosophy of limits in provisions is connected to the idea of human greed and one’s capacity and ability to manage or mismanage excesses. The uneven spread of divine bounty, therefore, has no random basis or nature. As a result, it can be argued that limited provisions for someone who does not enjoy the art or the sense of balance in life is by itself a blessing, as the person has less chance to do evil and to harm himself or herself. A number of Qur’ānic verses emphatically stress that God’s punishment is based on justice. But these verses unequivocally assert that his reward system is based on bounty and that righteous deeds receive multiple credits, far more than sheer justice would entail. The Qur’ānic assertion that good deeds

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receive tenfold reward refers to what one may call the “golden ratio of God’s bounty.” One verse maintains, “Whoever brings virtue shall receive ten times its like; but whoever brings vice shall not be requited except with its like, and they will not be wronged” (6:160). Two other verses convey a similar message: “Those who are virtuous shall receive the best reward and an enhancement. . . . For those who have committed misdeeds, the requital of a misdeed shall be its like” (10:26, 27). One can indeed argue that according to several Qur’ānic assertions, all punitive measures inflicted on wrongdoers are directly caused by their own actions rather than stemming from God’s retribution. “Whatever good befalls you,” one Qur’ānic verse emphasizes, “is from Allah; and whatever ill befalls you is from yourself” (4:79). This causation is asserted with a stronger tone in the verse “Whatever affliction that may visit you is because of what your hands have earned, and He excuses many [an offense]” (42:30). These verses emphasize that short of God’s forgiveness in his protection of his human subjects, their own misdeeds would have justly destroyed them. Humanity is fortunate to be exempted, through God’s mercy, from the full negative impact of its own evil deeds. The Qur’ān pays more attention to bounty than to justice; it views justice as an inferior moral plane to establish the lowest common denominator of order. In other words, satisfaction with justice alone is an earthly pursuit that, at best, ends up in fair shares of goods and honors. As James Schall and Naṣīr al-­Dīn Ṭūsī have put it, justice or fairness alone addresses multiplicity and conveys a cold sense of distance between actors.9 Transcendent relations, such as friendship, require justice-­plus (faḍl). Friendship or a sense of unity requires liberality, forgiveness, and generosity. Several Qur’ānic verses set the reward for righteous deeds at a much higher level than the tenfold standard already mentioned. These verses refer to a bounteous space that is beyond all limits and standards of justice, reciprocation, and fair compensation. The concept of unbounded and unlimited reward is introduced through the phrase “without reckoning,” as exemplified at verses 24:37–­38. He is glorified therein, morning and evening by men whom neither trading nor bargaining distracts from the remembrance of Allah, and the maintenance of prayer and the giving of Zakāt [almsgiving]. They are fearful of a day wherein the heart and the sight will be transformed, so that Allah may reward them by the best of what they have done, and enhance them out of His grace [faḍl], and Allah provides for whomever He wishes without any reckoning.

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Several other Qur’ānic verses repeat the last sentence in similar forms.10 In an instance where the Qur’ān refers to the high status of Mary before God, his unbounded provision, which extends to this world, is also emphasized. There upon, her Lord accepted her with a gracious acceptance, and made her grow up in a worthy fashion, and He charged Zechariah with her care. Whenever Zechariah visited her in the sanctuary, he would find provisions with her. He said, “O Mary, where does this come for you?” She said, “It comes from Allah. Allah provides for whomever He wishes without reckoning.” (3:37) In the Qur’ānic context, the phrase “without reckoning” signifies one of the most important aspects of the ethical realm of bounty: it is void of any notion of quantitative reciprocity and limited compensation for good deeds; it is where the limited meets the infinity. The verses quoted above point to the existence of two specific moral realms positioned vertically, one on top of the other. The justice-­based system, defined as the inferior moral realm in both this life and the hereafter, is the abode of accountability and reciprocation. The justice-­plus or bounty-­based realm is the abode of generosity, abundance, forgiveness, and infinite blessing. What are the implications of this divine dual moral hierarchy for human life on earth? The Qur’ān frequently invites its readers to apply justice in their daily affairs. But justice is addressed as the basic standard required in human behavior, rather than the ideal. The proverbial Qur’ānic injunction “Indeed Allah enjoins justice [‘adl] and kindness [iḥsān]” should be understood not as giving priority to justice but as setting justice as a minimum standard to be complemented by generosity and kindness, which belong to the realm of bounty.11 In advising men to treat divorced women fairly, for example, one verse encourages a justice-­plus behavior and reminds the reader, “Do not forget graciousness among yourselves” (2:237). Graciousness belongs to the realm of bounty and suggests the optimal standard in human-­human relations, especially with the disenfranchised. That verse is a reminder that although aspects of justice are set as moral benchmarks, the pursuit of a nobler course of action is optimal. In his Qur’ānic commentary on the relations between bounty and justice, ‘Abdullah Anṣārī points out that benevolence and bounty always subsume justice. Commenting on verse 35:32, he says, “Be cognizant that whatever is undertaken on the basis of faḍl will never be inflicted by any defect, for justice never dominates benevolence.” He adds, “Look at the Qur’ān and see wherever mercy is mentioned before punishment in the text, it is a warning [wa‘īd],

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but wherever punishment precedes the mention of mercy, punishment becomes annulled. And wherever mercy and punishment are mentioned together, the ruling is mercy-­based.” Anṣārī concludes, “This is because the All-­wise gives priority to people’s rights over His own rights.”12 As referred to by the Muslim ethicist al-­Rāghib al-­Isfahānī, the Qur’ān introduces friendly bonds among Muslim believers within the moral space of bounty as a divine gift and an essential necessity for the survival of the Muslim community. A verse addressing the Prophet emphatically reminds him, “Had you spent all that is in the earth, you could not have united their hearts, but Allah united them together. Indeed, He is all-­mighty, all-­wise” (8:63). The bond of love and friendship is therefore not defined in the Qur’ān as an ordinary phenomenon in the chain of causal events produced by human agents. It is introduced as an extraordinary creation of God that is bestowed on human beings as a pure, divine gift. This view is reemphasized through a proverbial verse: “Hold fast, all together, to Allah’s cord, and do not be divided [into sects]. And remember Allah’s favor [faḍl] upon you when you were enemies, then He brought your hearts together, so you became brothers with His blessing” (3:103). Here, friendship, as a blessing from God, saves all believers from the torment of hostility. Such communal brotherhood and friendship was directly encouraged among members of the early Muslim community when the prophet Muḥammad demanded property sharing between Medinese inhabitants (anṣār) and Meccan immigrants to Medina (muhājirūn). The extralegal act of property sharing was the first implementation of the compact of brotherhood (as reflected in the famous Constitution of Medina), which was defined not on the basis of individual rights, justice, and interest but on merits of benevolence, friendship, and communal happiness. Bestowed by God on believers, beyond the natural course of human inclination toward selfish interests, benevolence and bounty appeared to be of existential value for the formation and the survival of the early Muslim community. We can argue that as much as the prophet Joseph’s forgiveness of his half-­brothers in Egypt helped the foundation of the Hebrew nation, the compact of friendship between the Meccan immigrants and the Medinese Muslim residents helped the formation of the early Muslim community.13 That narrative sits well with the foundational position of faḍl or friendship in the Qur’ān; it also bodes well for innovative modern approaches to conflict transformation and strategic peace-­building. The Qur’ān unequivocally condemns self-­centered interest, as opposed to the communal interest. One passage brands as hypocrites (munāfiqūn) some of the early members of the Medinese society who cared about their own lives more than the lives of others.

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O you who have faith! Take your precautions, then go forth in companies, or go forth en masse. Among you is indeed he who drags his feet, and should an affliction visit you, he says, “It was certainly Allah’s blessing that I did not accompany them!” But should a grace from Allah come to you, he will surely say, as if there were no affection between you and him, “I wish I were with them so that I had achieved a great success!” (4:71–­73) According to that verse, communal friendship and affection between members of a Muslim community are an expected divinely quality in social life. By the same token, those members of the community who live without affection for others and are not touched by their sufferings do not deserve friendship. “So do not make friends from among them,” verse 4:89 commands. In the Qur’ānic worldview, the narrowly defined justice for the individual should give way to the communal practice of bounty, generosity, and liberality. According to this paradigm, friendship is essential, rather than accidental; it is not only an ideal feature of a functional society but a requisite one. At the cosmological level, short of God’s bounty (faḍl), if human beings had been left to themselves, they would have been doomed to Satan’s whispers. Such a disastrous consequence is asserted in the verse 4:83: “When a report of safety or alarm comes to them, they immediately broadcast it; but had they referred it to the Apostle or those vested with authority among them, those of them who investigate would have ascertained it. And were it not for Allah’s grace [faḍl] upon you and His mercy, you would have surely followed Satan, [all] except a few.” In a more universal tone, another verse reads, “O you who have faith! Do not follow in Satan’s steps. Whoever follows Satan’s steps should know that he indeed prompts [you to commit] indecent acts and wrong. Were it not for Allah’s grace [faḍl] and His mercy upon you, not one of you would ever be pure. But Allah purifies whomever He wishes, and Allah is all-­ hearing, all-­knowing” (24:21). Left to himself, no human being could possibly avoid corruption, and if treated with justice alone, no one could ever be saved from divine torment. The Qur’ān’s overwhelmingly positive news about the all-­encompassing bounty and friendship with which God treats people, even though most human beings are unthankful, is further emphasized in verse 27:73: “Indeed your Lord is gracious [bestowing faḍl] to mankind, but most of them do not give thanks.” Faḍl is therefore a preferable mode of ethics and moral standard by which God treats his subjects in the mortal world. An ethic of faḍl can save humanity from the consequences of justice alone, if human beings only pursued a higher friendship with each other as God does for them. This blanket faḍl is further

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echoed and reemphasized when it comes to treatment of people who are faithful and thankful: “Announce to the faithful the good news that there will be for them a great grace [faḍl] from Allah” (33:47).14 This may already sound familiar to the Qur’ānic reader who remembers that God has given human beings a unique status among all his creations: “Certainly We have honored the Children of Adam, and carried them over land and sea, and provided them with all the good things, and given them an advantage over many of those We have created with a complete preference” (17:70). The words used for “advantage” and “preference” in the preceding verse both come from the root word faḍl, enabling us to conclude that God decided, from the day he created humans, to treat them, among all other creations, with the highest level of divine friendship. Those who are thankful, as promised in the previous verse, will be subject to additional friendly rewards. Considering the multidimensional space of friendship in which humans have been treated at the universal and particular levels since their creation, might we infer that God expects all humans to elevate their moral standards from a justice-­based system to a bounty-­based one?

Paradise and Hellfire Viewed through the Concepts of Friendship, Hostility, and Loneliness The Qur’ān provides a fertile ground for various interpretations about the nature, levels, and qualities of the eschatological phenomena of paradise and hellfire. Whatever differences exegetes may have about this subject, certain Qur’ānic verses unequivocally describe some of the characteristics and features of those realms. Verse 69:35 points out that faithless people who end up in hellfire do not find any friends there. Elsewhere in the Qur’ān, scripture conveys part of a conversation by followers of Iblis (Satan) who have been cast into hellfire: “By Allah, we had indeed been in manifest error, when we equated you (Satan) with the Lord of all the worlds! And no one led us astray except the guilty. Now we have no intercessors, nor do we have any sympathetic friends” (26:97–­101). One may ask whether the lack of friends or intercessors is among the horrors of hellfire or is an element of its definition. One of the horrors of Judgment Day is the lack of friends and the horrific loneliness that one experiences. “Tell my servants who have faith,” one Qur’ānic verse points out, “to maintain the prayer and to spend out of what We have provided them with, secretly and openly, before there comes a day on which there will be neither any bargaining nor friendship [khilāl]” (14:31). Judgment Day is

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described as a day “when a friend will not avail a friend in any way, nor will they be helped, except for him on whom Allah has mercy” (44:41). Another verse puts more emphasis on human loneliness: “And no friend will inquire about [the welfare of his] friends” (70:10). Being locked eternally in a space defined by lack of friends, helpers, and protectors is defined by the Qur’ān as the most horrific experience of hellfire and God’s curse: “Indeed Allah has cursed the faithless and prepared for them a blaze, in which they will remain forever. They will not find any guardian or helper” (33:64–­65). The transformation of all wrongdoing friends into enemies is another important characteristic of the torment on Judgment Day: “On that day, friends will be one another’s enemies, except for the Godwary” (Q 43:67). One can imagine that the lack of access to friends will create a sense of absolute loneliness in a time and space where one is about to be judged by God and to face accounting for his or her deeds. This is a fundamental physiological rupture from the security people experience in this life through companionship and friendship. The Qur’ān also introduces friendship with wrongdoers as a cause for remorse on Judgment Day: “And it will be a hard day for the faithless. A day when the wrongdoer will bite his hands, saying, ‘I wish I had followed the Apostle’s way! Woe to me! I wish I had not taken so and so as a friend!’” (25:26–­28). Here, friendship of the wrong kind is introduced as an effective cause and agent for damnation. This notion is further accentuated in a verse in which God discusses his enemies: “We have assigned them companions [quranā’]15 who make to seem decorous to them whatever is before them and whatever is behind them, and the word became due against them as it did against the nations that passed away before them of jinn and humans. They were indeed losers” (41:25). While the Qur’ān condemns wrong friendship as a cause for eschatological curse, it indirectly denotes and acknowledges the deep human need for friendship, which might take people to the extreme case of embracing idolatry. A verse related to Abraham’s struggle against idolatry sheds light on this perspective through a divine discourse. “You have taken idols [for worship] besides Allah,” declares the voice of God, “for the sake of [mutual] affection amongst yourselves in the life of the world.” The verse predicts, “Then on the Day of Judgment, you will disown one another and curse one another” (29:25). Idolatry, which the Qur’ān considers an unforgivable vice next to polytheism, is totally grounded on man’s spiritual and psychological need for accessibility, friendship, and intimacy. The preceding verse reminds people to be conscious of their natural urges for companionship and careful about the ways they want

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to fulfill this foundational need. A mystic exegesis could conclude that the partial justification the verse gives for the root cause of idolatry might ultimately pave the ground for an all-­embracing divine forgiveness. Many Qur’ānic verses refer to evildoers as “friends of Satan” (awliyā’ ash-­shayṭān).16 The “right” friends can lead you to paradise, the “wrong” ones to hellfire. To add to the negative impacts of wrong friendship, the Qur’ān mentions that there cannot be any friendship among residents of hellfire. This assertion implies that those who are led to hellfire because of wrong friends are also deprived of having even bad companionship in their unfortunate residence. To make the situation even worse, the Qur’ān points out that not only is there no sympathetic positive relationship between residents of hellfire, but all the hosts of Iblis are in permanent hostility toward each other (26:96). Loneliness and living in eternal hostility are the ultimate results of demonic-­human friendship. Three consecutive verses in Surat al-­Nisā’ (Q 4:144–­46) present the inseparability of the concepts of paradise and hellfire from the notion of friendship. Verse 144 warns believers against wrong friendship: “O you who have faith! Do not take the faithless for friends [awliyā’, Arabic plural for walī] instead of the faithful. Do you wish to give Allah a clear sanction against yourself?” The next verse defines the eschatological status of hypocrites in hellfire at its lowest level: “Indeed the hypocrites will be in the lowest reach of the Fire, and you [the Prophet] will not find any helper [naṣīr] for them.” Verse 146 immediately changes the tone: “Except for those who repent and reform, and hold fast to Allah and dedicated their religion [exclusively] to Allah. Those are with the faithful, and soon Allah will give the faithful a great reward.” Together, these verses convey at least three points: First, friendship with the faithless will enter one into the category of hypocrites who deserve the worst location of hellfire; second, the lowest level of hellfire is defined as a miserable location where there is no naṣīr, or helper (naṣīr is a friendship word); finally, if a hypocrite pursues repentance, he or she will be saved and will receive the companionship of believers. Within this full cycle, companionship and the lack thereof (loneliness) are introduced as ends for reward and punishment and are in full play in an eschatological compass. While the lack of friendship defines an important characteristic of hellfire, the Qur’ānic definition and description of paradise are conversely shaped by positive friendship. As echoed in the prophetic hadith quoted at the beginning of the present chapter, the Qur’ān links faith and friendship together: “Indeed those who have faith and do righteous deeds—­the All-­beneficent will endear them [to His creation]” (19:96). The term used for endearment or

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friendliness in the preceding verse is wudd, the root word for Wadūd, one of God’s ninety-­nine names mentioned in the Qur’ān. Wadūd is translated as affectionate or friendly.17 Mawadda, an Arabic verbal noun also derived from wūdd, is used in the Qur’ān to address the affectionate bonds between individuals: “And of His signs is that He created for you mates from your own selves that you may take comfort in them, and He ordained affection [friendship] and mercy between you” (30:21). Mawadda is not limited to affectionate bonds between mates but includes such bonds between social groups as well. The broader use of the term is addressed in verse 60:7: “It may be that Allah will bring about between you and those with whom you are at enmity affection [friendship], and Allah is all-­powerful, and Allah is all-­forgiving and all-­ merciful.” The same state of productive relationship between faith and friendship is well echoed when friendship is mentioned as the only reward for prophethood: “Say [O Prophet], ‘I do not ask you any reward for it [prophethood] except love of [my] relatives (kinfolks).’ Whoever performs a good deed, we shall enhance for him its goodness. Indeed, Allah is all-­forgiving, all-­appreciative” (42:23). According to these verses, faith becomes an agent for conflict resolution and friendship in this world and the next. Faith is not the only agent for building friendship. The Qur’ān introduces goodness in response to evil in order to transform animosity to intimate friendship. One verse reads, “Good and evil [conduct] are not equal. Repel [evil] with what is best, [if you do so,] behold, he between whom and you was enmity will be as though he were a sympathetic friend [waliyūn ḥamīm]” (Q 41:34). Various Qur’ānic verses point to friendship and companionship among the residents of paradise, “Allah’s exclusive servants . . . in their gardens of bliss . . . [reclining] on couches, facing one another” (37:40, 43, 44). Although scripture promises beautiful mates for the believers in paradise, the joy of sitting face-­to-­face with friends comes first. The heavenly companionship promised by the Qur’ān extends from friendly to romantic relations. A verse depicting a heavenly scene suggests, “Indeed today the inhabitants of paradise rejoice in their engagements—­they and their mates, reclining on their couches in the shade” (4:57). Another verse depicts a divine voice inviting believers to paradise upon their arrival at its gates: “Enter paradise, you and your spouses, rejoining” (43:70). These assertions reflect on the communal spirit of paradise, conspicuously affirmed by scripture as above all other blessings available for heaven’s residents. Companionship in paradise extends from individual relationships to relations between specific groups of believers. According to a hadith, a companion of the prophet Muḥammad was very worried about the fact that death could

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separate him from his beloved prophet. “I love you more than myself and my own children,” the companion told the Prophet, “and whenever I miss you at home, I cannot stay calm till I come and see you; and thinking of death, I am worried that when you enter paradise, you will naturally be in the company of other prophets and if I enter paradise too, [given my status] I will never meet you again.” In response to that concern, the Prophet was silent. A moment later, the angel Gabriel came with verse 4:69 from the Qur’ān:18 “Whoever obeys Allah and the Apostle, they are with those whom Allah has blessed, including the prophets and the truthful, the martyrs and the righteous, and excellent companions are they!” The next verse puts such heavenly friendship in the context of bounty: “That is the grace [faḍl] of Allah, and Allah suffices as knower [of his creatures]” (4:70). Here, the vertical human-­divine space of friendship passes to horizontal human-­human friendship in the eternity of paradise. The key to entering this multidimensional friendship that passes through time and space is to be in concordance with God’s commands and those of the prophets. The message is clear: people who cultivate friendship with God will harvest multifold friendships on many planes of relationship, individual and communal. Human concerns about being separated from loved ones by death have been the subject of numerous eschatological inquiries in Islamic studies. Many such inquiries appear in works of Qur’ānic exegeses, which talk about the question of companionship in the afterlife. A major question to this effect concerns the fate of relations between relatives. Verse 52:21 addresses this concern clearly: “The faithful and their descendants who followed them in faith, We will make their descendants join them, and We will not stint anything from [the reward of] their deeds.” A following verse describes the space and qualities of such companionship in details: “There they will pass from hand to hand a cup wherein there will be neither any vain talk nor sinful speech” (52:23). A heavenly discourse between relatives that reside in paradise points to one of the Qur’ānic friendship words, shafīq (caring). “They will be waited upon by youths, their own, as if they were guarded pearls,” the Qur’ān describes, continuing, “They will turn to one another, questioning each other. . . . They will say, ‘Indeed, aforetime, we used to be apprehensive [caring] about our families. But Allah showed us favor and He saved us from the punishment of the [infernal] miasma; indeed, we used to supplicate Him aforetime’” (52:24–­27). To reassure believers about companionship in paradise, scripture goes into detail about supporting factors for heavenly friendship, as well as about mechanisms by which God removes the major impediment in the way of such friendship. In response to the assertion that Shayṭān will try his best to pervert all human beings, except sincere believers, God proclaims,

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Indeed, as for My servants you do not have any authority over them, except the perverse who follow you, and indeed hell is the tryst of them all. It has seven gates, and to each gate belongs a separate portion of them. Indeed the Godwary will be amid gardens and springs. ‘Enter it in peace and safety!’ We will remove whatever rancor there is in their breast; [intimate like] brothers, [they will be reclining] on couches, facing one another. Therein neither weariness shall touch them, nor will they [ever] be expelled from it. (Q 15:42–­48) These verses signify a few points, underlining, first, that God hints at the possibility of eternal friendship among residents of paradise as the most important counter incentive against satanic temptations. Second, the verses describe how the removal of rancor from believers’ hearts will guarantee their eternal friendship within a heavenly space that is prepared for absolute peace and safety, which are the prerequisites of friendship. Moreover, the image of brothers sitting face-­to-­face, with no distractions or weariness, tacitly signifies the joy of conversation and intimate engagement between them. The verses end with extra assurance about the eternality and uninterrupted nature of such companionship, which is additionally guaranteed by God’s forgiveness and mercy. Scripture treats peace, safety, forgiveness, and mercy as extrinsic factors that, together with the intrinsic removal of rancor from one’s own heart, will provide the best space for the eternal friendship as enjoyed by the residents of paradise. The identification of companionship and the concept of paradise is well attested by several verses in the Qur’ān. A few proverbial verses at the end of Surat al-­Fajr assert, “O soul at peace! Return to your Lord, pleased, pleasing! Then enter among my servants! And enter my paradise!” (89:27–­30). According to these verses, immediately after their departure from material life, righteous souls begin joining other good human souls. Curiously, their entrance to paradise is mentioned in the next phrase, which conveys how the joy of companionship and the entrance into paradise are closely interconnected. A verse from Surat al-­‘Ankabūt makes no mention of paradise altogether, as if righteous friendship is the highest corporeal bliss one can achieve: “Those who have faith and do righteous deeds, We will surely admit them among the righteous” (29:9). Heavenly companionship for human beings is not limited to human-­ human relations only but extends to human-­ angelic relations as well. A Qur’ānic verse pointing to a multitude of pieties that ultimately takes the pious to paradise reflects on this extrahuman relationship in a detailed description of paradise: “The Gardens of Eden, which they will enter along with whoever is

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righteous from among their forebears, their spouses, and their descendants, and the angels will call on them from every door: ‘Peace be to you for your patience’” (13:23). One verse uses walī to denote friendship between angels and human beings in both worlds: “Indeed those who say, ‘Our Lord is Allah!’ and then remain steadfast, the angels descend upon them, [saying,] ‘Do not fear, nor be grieved! Receive the good news of the paradise, which you have been promised. . . . We are your ally [awlīā’, Arabic plural for walī has a range meaning between ally and friend] in the life of this world and in the Hereafter” (41:30–­31). Human-­angelic relations in paradise appear to work in deeper levels of affection. Some Qur’ānic verse depicting the details of such relations describes a heavenly scene: “[reclining] on couches, facing one another, served around with a cup from a clear fountain, snow-­white, delicious to drinkers, wherein there will be neither headache nor will it cause them stupefaction, and with them will be maidens of restrained glances with big [beautiful] eyes, as if they were hidden ostrich eggs.” The next verse explains the occurrence of heavenly conversations: “Some of them [believers] turn to others, questioning each other” (37:44–­52).19 Another Qur’ānic chapter similarly provides details about the communal situation of those who have entered paradise, including the nature of their discourses. “They will not hear therein any vain talk or sinful speech, but only the watchword, ‘Peace!’ ‘Peace!’” (56:25).20 These verses reaffirm that various types of friendships—­human-­divine, human-­human, human-­angelic, and human-­demonic relations—­mirror paradise and hellfire. The Qur’ān defines paradise as a space of high-­quality and multidimensional companionship, while the torments of hellfire are defined by various degrees, intensities, and qualities of loneliness and hostility. The definition applies to all four mentioned dimensions of human relations.

Deferred Divine Justice as Deterrent That the word for “justice” (‘adl) serves as one of God’s names points to justice as a foundational concept in the Qur’ānic eschatological perspective. In regulating the mundane life, the Qur’ān frequently invites believers to establish justice and treat friends and foes justly in day-­to-­day life. These institutions and injunctions are set to ensure the lowest limit of morality rather than the highest. Justice is the base standard for human behavior and therefore appears in the Qur’ān as a duty rather than as an optional virtue. The Qur’ānic antonym of justice is ẓulm, which means “injustice” and “transgression.” To be just, therefore, is to be normal. The imperative tone of all Qur’ānic verses that

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call for justice conveys a clear warning that injustice is considered to be immoral and subject to retribution. Yet, as mentioned earlier in this chapter, a number of Qur’ānic concepts—­such as the all-­ and ever-­forgiving nature of God, the possibility of repentance, and divine, angelic, and prophetic intercessions—­mitigate the nature of strict penal justice and make it possible for life to continue according to higher moral standards. A few verses point to two interrelated moral constructs: first, all torments and hardships that human beings receive are direct results of their own deeds; second, God, by systematically forgiving interference in these processes of self-­inflicting harm by human beings, prevents the full impact of such transgressions. “Whatever affliction that may visit them,” one Qur’ānic verse asserts, “is because of what they have earned, and He pardons many [offenses]” (42:34). In the Qur’ān, penal justice is systematically incomplete, and incomplete punishment functions more as a deterrent than as a mechanism designed to create value. There is no value in punishment per se, but punishment is only a protective instrument. The preceding verse reaffirms what is clearly expressed in the paradigmatic verses 35:45 and 16:61 regarding the impossibility of life without forgiveness. The instrumental definition of penal codes in the Qur’ān presents a challenge for legalistic readings, which tend to give an absolutist status to law and its implementation as a requirement of justice.

Three Moral Realms in the Qur’ānic Normative Structure In The Moral World of the Qur’an, Egyptian scholar M. A. Draz uses the metaphor of a five-­story building to show the Qur’ānic normative structure.21 I have reformulated his metaphor to a three-­story building. The underground, sublegal basement is a space where aggression is the predominant norm and reality in human relations. Prevailing there is a Hobbesian worldview wherein all individuals and all nation-­states have an intrinsic tendency to transgress against one another in the name of security. The central moral principle that can mitigate human suffering in this state of relations is tolerance. Tolerance is therefore the cardinal virtue in this violent basement. As such, what we may call the “realm of aggression” is the sublegal level. The ethical ground floor, one level above the realm of aggression, is dominated by the cardinal virtue of justice, based on fair shares (of both honor and material) and equal rights for every individual. This legal space is superior, by one step, to a realm in which energies are most spent on controlling aggressions. The main moral preoccupation of the normative ground floor, in contrast to the basement, is egalitarianism. On this floor, justice and fairness are cardi-

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nal virtues, aggression and war are not normal, and occasional violence against “others” is subject to punitive measures. I term this level the “realm of justice.” There, because of our natural rights, we are entitled to fair shares and owe no appreciation to anyone. In this legal yet subfriendly society, we deal with the ethics of getting and forgetting. Here, people tend to act legally, though not necessarily morally. They do not tend to break the law but are not inclined to be charitable. Above the ground floor is a superior moral space that I call the “realm of friendship.” There, both justice and responsibility are already assumed and respected as duties, and just persons do not seek credit for having fulfilled these duties. Everyone is obliged to be just, responsible, and nonaggressive. The residents of this space have no anxiety about getting their fair shares of goods and honors. They are magnanimous, generous, and forgiving. Unlike the residents of the lower floors, who look at life as a zero-­sum game, the residents of this realm are confident of God’s bounty and benevolence. They believe that their lives are not subject to random evil accidents. If existence is not limited to the here and now and to eschatological infinity, chances to receive provisions are unlimited, and the anxiety to possess becomes irrelevant. In this realm, we deal with the ethical space of giving and forgiving. All bounty-­based virtues—­such as gratitude, magnanimity, mercy, grace, clemency, generosity, forgiveness, and forbearance—­belong to this realm, with one essential shared focus: the essentiality of relationships. That focus is reminiscent of the proverbial Aristotle’s statement that “in the society of friends, there is no need for justice.” No one finds any incentive to fight a generous giver or a liberal forgiver. All conflicts are between those who only take in, believing in the closed cosmos of zero-­sum games. The categories and hierarchical moral spaces I have specified may not exist in real life and in their absolute forms. Their importance is only laid in their conceptual possibility. With the exception of the purest saints or vilest sinners, each of us, individually or collectively, may move between all three or more advanced moral floors on daily or hourly bases. Human beings certainly have the capacity to live on all three floors simultaneously. While the weblike circular normative system of the Qur’ān, as Toshihiko Izutsu has eloquently described,22 has accommodated the wide spectrum of human moral capacities, this scripture consistently and systematically reminds its audience of the ideal and optimal moral space, which is the realm of faḍl/friendship. The best manifestation of these three realms of morality, as I further explain in the final chapter of this volume, is addressed in the Qur’ān when three specific options are offered in response to homicide. Scripture advises retaliation in kind (qiṣāṣ), economic compensation (dīya), and the morally optimal

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option of forgiveness (‘afw). Clearly, these options are exclusive and cannot be implemented simultaneously. I believe that the three options are respectively relevant to primitive or sublegal, ground-­level legal/contractual, and morally advanced settings or societies. A Sufi way to address these three vertically advanced normative hierarchies appears when Sufi practical manuals used for the refinement of one’s character talk about various capacities regarding stations of moral advancement. The standard first station is usually repentance. But these manuals talk about at least three qualities of repentance. They prescribe repentance from bad deeds for the commoners, from good deeds for the elect, and from repentance itself for the elect of the elect.23 A primitive Sufi repents from vices, an intermediate Sufi repents from incomplete or less-­than-­perfect good deeds, and an advanced Sufi repents from the very arrogance that a self-­conscious repentance may cause. The political manifestation of the moral trichotomy described above appears in the works of such scholars as Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, who speaks about three Islams: Islam of the sword, needed for violent societies who “abused freedom”; Islam of law (sharī‘a), needed for societies that require legal regulation; and Islam of absolute liberty and persuasion (to be realized in the Society of Muslims, or the Good Society), which is the ideal and yet-­to-­ come Islam where, he believes, every person will be economically, politically, and socially equal to others and will have his or her own individual sharī‘a.24 I argue that the advanced level of morality, in all its manifestations, is the space of friendship exemplified in the characteristic quality of the Qur’ānic paradise (janna), devoid of fear and sadness based on the primacy of relations.

Conclusion Working within the Islamic tradition, I have tried to demonstrate that the Qur’ānic theory of virtue, as understood and conceptualized by Muslim philosophical ethicists in theoretical conversation with Aristotle, addresses a spectrum of justice-­based (‘adl) and bounty-­based (faḍl) moral systems. In the classical Qur’ānic exegeses, faḍl is often marginalized and reduced to an interpersonal virtue. Here, it is understood as a transcendent ethical space, one that engenders superior human-­divine and human-­human relationships. While justice offers a basic standard required for the primary level of social engagement, the ideal rests well beyond these limitations. The moral frameworks advanced by Aḥmad Miskawayh, al-­Rāghib al-­ Isfahānī, and Naṣīr ad-­Dīn Ṭūsī (discussed in chapter 4) are in full accord with

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the view that justice ensures an artificial union focused on equality, while friendship inculcates natural union between individuals, a union that transcends limits of rights and possessions. Philosophical Muslim ethicists also agree that faḍl and friendship, by definition, extend beyond the limits of codification in Islamic law and, therefore, require a justice-­plus mode of ethics for their realization. In my short analysis, I have shown that the Qur’ān fully accommodates the justice-­plus perspective and draws a clear line between the law-­based and the bounty-­based codes of moral behavior in human-­divine and human-­human relations. I have also demonstrated that friendship, as opposed to loneliness and animosity, constitutes a fundamental element that demarcates borders between paradise and hellfire. The Qur’ānic paradise is the realm of fearless companionship, and hellfire is the realm of loneliness and discord. Because of the significance scripture gives to heavenly companionship in the afterlife, I have argued that these factors are not only among the various characteristics of paradise and hellfire but are central to their definition. Paradise is good companionship, and hell is loneliness. In other words, one can define the Qur’ānic paradise as the realm of friendship, as opposed to hellfire, the realm of hostilities. The most important message of the Qur’ānic eschatology is more than the infinity of life beyond the physical world. It is the infinity and primacy of intimacy and companionship. Faith and friendship are therefore existentially interdependent, and religiosity is the art of relationships—­or, in the proverbial words of Jonathan Sachs, “the moralization of love.”25 Friendship’s third dimension, the categories and qualities of friendship as a cardinal virtue, is also well addressed in scripture, where the Qur’ān addresses human-­divine, human-­human, and human-­angelic relations. Friendships between God and the prophets provide ideal models for human-­human relations. The conditions and factors that help facilitate friendship in paradise can provide models for good earthly relations as well. Together with the removal of rancor from one’s heart as an interior factor, scripture treats peace, safety, forgiveness, and mercy as exterior factors that provide the best space for friendship. This third dimension of friendship has provided a fertile ground for the development of an elaborate body of hadith and, more important, supplication literatures, worthy of additional studies. The primacy of friendship in the Qur’ān inspires supplicants to address God as the ultimate friend—­“O He in Whom those who are seeking find friendship” (yā man hūwa yasta’nisu bihi al-­murīdūn), “O He Who is the friend of those who have no friends” (yā rafīqa man lā rafīqa lahu), and “O the intimate Companion of His saintly friends” (yā ‘anīs al-­awlīyā’).26

Part 2 Friendship within and between Religions, Nations, and Civilizations

Chapter 7

Friendship in Pre-­Islamic Iranian Writings Jamsheed K. Choksy

“U-­m kē dōst?” (And who is my friend?), asked a Zoroastrian priest in the ninth century CE.1 The question was wholly appropriate. Dōst (friends) and dōstīh (friendship, or freewill associations) served as “drubušt-­tar abāyēd” (very essential fortitudes) for ancient Iranian society and for each person’s life, according to words in the Handarz i Ōšnar (Counsels of Oshnar), a Pahlavi collection of sayings dating from the sixth century CE and credited to a legendary Kayanian sage.2 Indeed, maintaining the vigor of true friendships was so important that it even led Sa‘di (ca. 1200–­1292 CE), the famed medieval Muslim poet of Shiraz, to recommend, in his Golestān (The Rose Garden), that “moshtāgh beh ke malul” (anticipation [of a friend] is better than dreariness [in his/her company]).3 Friendships were expected to provide paywand (connection) via formation of mihr (New Persian mehr, “bonds”), not just of friendship but of love (hence the latter term’s more frequent use to denote “love”), between individuals and groups. Those ties, in turn, were believed to generate airiiaman (fellowship, comradeship) across Iran’s society, irrespective of place and time. Zoroastrians believe that fellowship persisted among them even after their ancestral land became part of the Muslim caliphates after the Arabs conquered the Sasanian Empire during the seventh century CE, as Iranians gradually adopted Islam over the subsequent six hundred years.4 Those values influenced another celebrated Muslim Persian poet in Shiraz, Hāfez (1326–­89 CE), to urge his compatriots to “ruz-­e vasl-­e dustdārān yād bād” (remember the day of [re-­]union of the loving friends).5 The notion of friendship generating ties that linked persons to each other and to social and religious institutions found a central place in the Mihr Yašt, a devotional poem to Miθra (Mithra) that, like other Standard Avestan texts, was canonized during the first millennium BCE.6 In that religious text, Mithra, as a 145

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yazata (worship-­worthy spirit), was said to bestow xvarәnah (Old Persian farnah, Middle Persian or Pahlavi xwarrah, New Persian or Fārsi farr: “glory”) on deserving Iranians who made and upheld bonds of friendship. Those ties were regarded as covenants and contracts, so the term mihr came to be applied to them as well (Yašt 10.16). The Gaθic Avestan prayer “Ā Airiimā Išiiō” (Let Aryaman the Desirable) invoked both the social concept of friendship and its spiritual embodiment.7 Its text reads, “Ā airiimā išiiō rafәδrāi jaṇtū, nәrәbiiascā nāiribiiascā zaraθuštrahē, vahuš rafәδrāi manahō, yā daēnā vairīm hanā mīždəm, aahiiā yāsā aim, yąm išiiam ahurō masatā mazdā” (Yasna [Worship] 54.1; Let Aryaman the desirable come to the support of the men and women of Zarathushtra, to the support of the good thought, to [the support of] the religious conscience which has chosen the worthy recompense; I seek from order [specifically] the power-­granting order which Ahura Mazdā has).8 So words for friends and friendship became common in the Iranian languages and included *miθraya-­, Avestan and Old Persian miθra-­, Old Persian mitra-­, Middle Persian mihr, New Persian mehr; *aryaman-­, Avestan airiiaman-­, Middle Persian ērmān/ērmānīh, New Persian ermāneh; and most frequently, especially in Middle Persian writings, Avestan zaoš-­, Old Persian dauštar-­, Middle Persian dōst/dōstīh, New Persian dust/dusteh.9

Avestan Scriptures One of the oldest terms for friendship in Iranian languages is attested in Gaθic Avestan as fraē-­, present stem frīnā-­/friiąn-­, “to act friendly, to present oneself as a friend.”10 That term reflects the range of meanings embodied by friendships—­from goodwill to love—­all freely and voluntarily bestowed. The Avestan fraē-­, after all, derives from Indo-­European prī-­, “to love” and, hence, “to befriend,” “to set free,” and “to be beloved.”11 Early Mazdā worshipers or Zoroastrians would chant “Tāiš friiąnmahī” (We befriend you with them), referring to the names Ahura Mazdā gave them (Yasna Haptahāiti, “Worship in Seven Chapters,” 38.4). They were following the example set by their community’s founder, Zaraθuštra (Zarathushtra, Middle Persian Zardušt, New Persian Zardosht, Greek/Western Zoroaster), who began his career as a poet-­priest and ended it as a religious leader or prophet among the proto-­or earliest Iranians in Central Asia during the second millennium BCE. In an especially poignant line of his Gāθās/Gāthās (Religious songs), Zarathushtra seeks the greatest of all friendships, imploring Ahura

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Mazdā (Middle Persian and New Persian Ohrmazd), the Wise Lord and creator, “Yauuōi vīspāi fraēšthō hāmā” (Yasna 49.8; Let us be dearest friends for all time). Indeed, the granting of that boon embodies the eternal ties between god and humans. Yet even friendship with the creator deity was expected to be reciprocally beneficial, for Zarathushtra is recorded as having then asked, “Ka tōi vohū manahā, y v staotāiš mazdā frīnāi ahurā?” (Yasna 49.12; What do you have through good thought, for me who wants to befriend you through praises, O Ahura Mazdā?) The query should not be surprising, because Zarathushtra and his followers, like Zoroastrians for centuries subsequently, were seeking social harmony and well-­being as reflected through lines in the Gāthās that read, “Yūžǝm aēibiio ahurā aogō dātā aā xšaθrǝmcā, auua vohū manahā yā hušǝitiš rāmąmcā dā, azǝmcī ahiiā mazdā θβąm mǝhī paouruuīm vaēdǝm” (Yasna 29.10; O Ahura Mazdā grant us strength through order and, through good thought, that power by which one can establish good dwellings and peace, [for] indeed I know that you are the prime dispenser of these things). In many ways, friendship was a contract or covenant between individuals and groups who chose to become and remain friends. For friendship to succeed, therefore, each individual has to “dauuąscinā humǝrǝtōiš baxštā” (maintain a good reputation), which the Gāthās claim those persons who yell, misbehave, cause harm, and disavow their friendships and bonds—­that is, who are “miθrō.druxš” (friendship/covenant breakers)—­do not (Yasna 31.10; Yašt 10.18). Indeed, words attributed to Zarathushtra himself stress, “Hiia tā uruuātā saaθā yā mazd dadā maiihō, xvīticā . . . a aipi tāiš ahaitī uštā” (Yasna 30.11; When you follow the codes that Mazdā has laid down for good behavior, O mortals, . . . then the things desired will be there [for you]). Zarathushtra added, “Mazd dadā ahurō hauruuatō amǝrǝtātascā, būrōiš ā aaiiācā xvāpaiθiiā xšaθrahiiā sarō, vahuš vazduuar manahō y hōi mainiiū iiaoθanāišcā uruuaθō” (Yasna 31.21; Ahura Mazdā grants from his plentitude of wholeness and immortality, through order and authority, the product of good thought to one who is his [i.e., Ahura Mazdā’s] partner in thought and deed). These ideas of and requirements for friendship would persist throughout Iranian history. In the Standard Avesta language, friendship’s tenacity was attributed as arising from its necessity for human well-­being. Indeed, the notion of friendship as assuaging or healing ills of the body and spirit is reflected in the Avestan Vidēvdād (Code to ward off evil spirits). Aryaman, divinized as a yazata, is there said to have provided remedies for 99,999 diseases that Angra Mainyu (Middle Persian and New Persian Ahriman)—­the Angry Spirit or Devil—­

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brought into the corporeal world (22.2–­24). The scripture’s authors concluded that Aryaman was responding to Ahura Mazdā’s request for a friendly gesture toward humans in need. Likewise, friendship was seen as essential for both genders and across genders. In the Rām Yašt (Yašt 15), dedicated to Vayu (Avestan Vaiiu, Middle Persian Way, Wād, Gowād), the male yazata of the celestial good wind, Hutaosā of the Naotara clan is depicted as beseeching Vayu to grant her a boon. Hutaosā was praying that she receive “friia friθa paiti.zanta” (a friendly, pleasurable, good reception) at the house of her future husband Kavi Vishtāspa, who would become the patron of Zarathushtra (Yašt 15.36). Likewise, men sought the friendship of a divinized Mithra, who could grant his friends “sraogəna sraoraθa, ništarətō.spaiia niδātō.barəzištā nmānā masitā” (Yašt 10.30; large houses with beautiful women, fast chariots, unfurled rugs, and fluffed pillows). Drawing on its Avestan basis, friendship would continue to be seen, in the years to come, as a source of both the essential and the desirable.

Old Persian Inscriptions Among societal and religious essentialities of society is the ability to discern between order and confusion, right and wrong, good and bad—­which results in friends and enemies. That dualism was denoted in the Old Persian language by the concepts of arta-­versus drauga-­(and in the Avestan language as aa-­versus drug-­). Kings, especially, were expected to distinguish correctly between those two. Dārayavauš I (Darius I), who ruled from 522 to 486 BCE as the Achaemenid King of Kings, claimed, “Taya rāstam dauštā amiy miθa naiy daušta amiy” (Naqsh-­e Rostam inscription b 7–­8; I am a friend of one who is right, not to one who is wrong), adding, “Martiyam draujanam naiy dauštā amiy” (12; I am not a friend of the man who is lies).12 Consequently, Darius asserted, “Mam AM dauštā āha taya aku (navam avamaiy visam ucāram āha)” (Susa inscription j 4; Ahura Mazdā was a friend to me [and therefore] everything I did was successful for me). He went on to instruct subsequent monarchs, “Martiya haya draujana ahatiy hayavā zūrakara ahatiy avaiy mā dauštā biyā ufraštādiš parsā” (Behistun inscription 4.68–­69; Do not be the friend of a man who is a liar or does bad deeds [but] punish him severely). His son, heir, and successor Xšayāršā I (Xerxes I), who led the Persian Empire between 486 and 465 BCE, mirrored those sentiments in an Old Persian inscription at Persepolis, “Taya rāstam dauš(tā ahmiy mi)θa naiy daušta ahmiy” (Persepolis inscription l 7–­8; I am a

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friend of one who is right, not to one who is wrong), adding, like his father, “Martiyam draujana(m nai)y dauštā ahmiy” (12; I am not a friend of the man who is lies).13 Darius I had inscribed for anyone holding to the ethics of friendship, especially truthfulness, prescribed by Zoroastrianism, “Auramazdā θuvām dauštā biyā” (Behistun inscription 4.55–­56, also 4.74–­75; May Ahura Mazdā be your friend). By the first half of the fourth century BCE, Artaxšacā II (Artaxerxes II Mnemon) would be requesting the divinized Mithra to extend friendly protection from “vispā gastā” (Susa inscription a 5, d 4 / Hamadan inscription a 6; everything ghastly). Shortly thereafter, Artaxšacā III (Artaxerxes III Ochus), who held the Achaemenid throne from 358 to 338 BCE, also would seek similar friendly intervention: “Mām Auramazdā utā Miθra baga pātuv utā imām DHyaum utā taya mām kartā” (Persepolis inscription a 24–­26; May Ahura Mazdā and the apportioner Mithra protect me, this country, and that [which] was built by me). Thus, befriending correctly was seen as having many benefits to individuals and society, on scales that ranged from domestic to national ones.

Middle Persian Texts The fundamentality of needing to discern carefully would come to be expressed in Middle Persian words attributed to the legendary sage Oshnar, who credited much that was regarded as ignorant to those who “dōst ud dušmen nē-­šnāsēd” (Handarz i Ōšnar 40; do not distinguish between friend and foe). The prophet Mani (216–­76 CE), in the Šābuhragān (Book for [King] Shāpur I) that summarized his preaching in Middle Persian, went even further by pointing specifically to the “hayyārān īg dēnāwarān” (M475; friends of the religious ones) as most worthy.14 In the writings of Ādurbād ī Ēmēdān, the authoritative high magus of Persia in the ninth century CE who compiled book 6 of the Dēnkard (Acts of the religion) by drawing on teachings and sayings from his Sasanian predecessors, friendship found its greatest literary emphasis in the Zoroastrian tradition. He wrote that “dōstīh weh hast” (Dēnkard 500; friendship is good [i.e., best]) and that “dōstīh wehīh” (550; friendship is goodness [itself]).15 Ādurbād philosophized that “xēm zīndagīh az dōstīh” (525; the charactered life [arises] from friendship). So he urged others to “harw kas dōst bāš u-­t ēd xēm” (474; be each person’s friend, for this is [the test of] your character), noting that “dōst andar widang paydāg” (478; the [true] friend is revealed in hard times;” cf.

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Handarz i Ōšnar 37). He also cautioned, “Xwad dōst kam windēd kē dōīh kunēd” (Dēnkard 556; One who acts duplicitously makes few friends). As a response to the question with which this analysis began, a saying attributed to the ancient Iranian sages stated, “U-­m dōst Ohrmazd” (Čīdag Handarz ī Pōryōtkēšān 9; My friend is Ahura Mazdā). Expanding this tradition of advice or wisdom literature (Middle Persian handarz, New Persian andarz), Ādurbād ī Ēmēdān went on to write that dēn (religion)—­ in his case, Zoroastrianism—­was the basis of relationships between friends. He believed that “dād ī Ohrmazd mardōm dōstīh” (Dēnkard 497, 589; the law of Ahura Mazdā [requires] friendship of humanity). He added, accordingly, “Ke weh dōstīh nēst abē-­wehīh nēst ud ke wehīh rāy wehān dōst abē-­wehīh ast” (499; The person who is without friendship for the good is without goodness, and the person who is the friend of goodness for the sake of the good has goodness). Ādurbād ī Ēmēdān would go so far as to claim that “ke pad dēn dōst ēdar ud ānōh harw dō abāg” (Dēnkard 508; the friend in religion is with [you] here and there—­in both [worlds]), even declaring that “paywand ī dēn pad mihr” (525; connection with religion is through love. He urged, “Rōz rōz ō abzāyīdan mardōmān ranj abēr burdan kū pad (gē) hān and mihr ud dōstīh ōh abzāyēm čē abdom-­iz harw druz pad ēn mihr ud dōstīh be-­šāyēd absihīdān” (526; People should expend much effort each day for increasing love and friendship greatly in the world so that perhaps it will become possible to destroy all evil through this love and friendship). He felt that each individual should “ruwān ī xwēš pad dōstīh kunēd” (528; take one’s own soul as a friend), “āštīh ud mihr andar harw dām dahišn” (528; instill peace and love in every creature), and even try to “ān ī dōšmān dōst kardan” (546; turn an enemy into a friend). Ādurbād ī Ēmēdān was building on a long line of magian thought about the nature of friendship and its connections with the wider society. Tōsar (Tansar), the chief herbed (theologian) under the Sasanian King of Kings Ardeshīr I in the early third century CE, had supposedly noted that without religion, reason, and a sense of values, there could be no kinship, friendship, counsel, law, and good order. Tōsar was linking the observances of friendship directly to socioreligious and political harmony (Tōsar nāme [Letter of Tōsar] 14–­ 15).16 Extending those ideas to civic life, Ādurbād demanded that “kē ō hanjamān šawēd pad mardōm dōstīh andar šawišn” (Dēnkard 590; one who goes to the public assembly should go [there] with friendship toward people). Indeed, to ensure concord ensued, friends were expected to gather together with “ēr-­mēnišnīh” (Čīdag Handarz ī Pōryōtkēšān 54; noble thoughts). Friendships were thought of as foundational not just in public settings but, as importantly, in personal dealings. It was regarded as prudent and beneficial

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to be friendly toward “mard ī dānāg ud bizešk ī nēk ud xwēš ī zan ī nēk” (Handarz i Ōšnar 27; a wise man, a skilled physician, and one’s own virtuous wife). Likewise, when Sasanian King of Kings Xusrō I (r. 531–­79 CE) allegedly asked a prospective courtier, “Zan ī kadām wēh?” (Xusrō ud Rēdag [Xusrō and the page] 95; Which woman is good [i.e., the best]?), the response was “Zan ī ān wēh ī pad mēnišn mard dōst” (96; That woman who is man’s friend by disposition is good [i.e., the best]).17 The Mēnōg ī Xrad ([Book of the] Spirit of Wisdom), a catechism dating from the ninth or tenth century CE—­codified during Islamic times, drawing on pre-­Islamic Zoroastrian themes placed within an imaginary dialogue between the Spirit of Wisdom and an ancient sage, and probably influenced by both Jewish and Muslim traditions of wisdom narratives—­extended the need for friendship to other family members: “Dōst brad ī nēk wēh” (14.10; a virtuous brother is the best friend).18 In these ways, at least in theory, friendships were expected to bind together pre-­Islamic Zoroastrian Iran’s communities and families despite rivalries and conflagrations wrecking many lives.19

The Essence of Friendship Tōsar, the chief Zoroastrian theologian of the third century CE, is said to have observed that for friendship to thrive, there could be no room for doubt (Tōsar nāme 6). So, when it came to selecting a fragrant flower that symbolized friendship in pre-­Islamic or ancient Iran, the one chosen had petals in a color representing Zoroastrianism’s notion of pākīh (purity), or the absence of doubt and deceit, also visually symbolized in the garments of the magi. It would thus be written that “Sūsan ī spēd bōy ēdōn čiyōn bōy ī dōstīh” (Xusrō ud Rēdag 79; the scent of the white lily is just like the scent of friendship). Likewise, the uštānīh (vitality) of bonds between friends through thick and thin was reflected by choosing a fragrant flower in a color reflecting both life and the clothing of nobles: “Hērīg ī suxr bōy ēdōn čiyōn bōy ī dōstān” (Xusrō ud Rēdag 74; The scent of the red iris is just like the scent of friends).20 In medieval Islamic times, the Arabic word ‘ishq (love), rendered into New Persian as ‘eshgh, would become common parlance, for it not only worked well as a substitute for Persian mehr but overlapped with the concepts signified by dusteh and ermāneh.21 Indeed, previously in Manichaean Middle Persian writings, the word dōst had come to mean both “friend” and “lover,” and dōstī was used for both “friendship” and “love”—­as had been the Avestan fraē-­ and as was the Middle Persian word ayār, still used in New Persian as

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yār.22 Combining the ideas represented by those words, the medieval poet Rūmī (1207–­73 CE) would chant, “Jushesh-­e ‘eshgh ast kandar may fotād” (Masnavi 10; It is the ferment of love which falls into wine); again, love was given generously and in friendship, with the hope of benefiting from the action.23 By linking an abstract concept to a tangible and popular commodity (wine flowed like friendship in the taverns and dining halls of Muslim Iran during the medieval period), Rūmī was following in the footsteps of even more venerable sages from the Iranian past. The essence of friendship had already found eloquent expression in words ascribed to a renowned chief magus of the fourth century CE whose advice was preserved in the ninth-­century Pahlavi texts, Ādurbād, son of Māraspand: “Drōst (ī) kahwan owōn homānāg čiyōn may (ī) kahwan ka harw čand kahwantar pad xwarišn ī šahryārān wēš wēh ud sazāgtar šāyēd” (1.101; An old friend is like an aged wine, which becomes better and more suitable for consumption by rulers the older it is).24

Chapter 8

On Friendship Rabbi Zalman Schachter-­Shalomi

Editor’s Note: When I joined Oberlin College in February 2007, I was already a member of the Conference on World Affairs at the University of Colorado Boulder, a unique annual occasion that brought me many friends, including Rabbi Zalman Schachter-­Shalomi. Known as the founder of Renewal Judaism, he was a visionary rabbi who, in the words of Shaul Magid, looked for “an idea that human civilization is now experiencing a radical transformation of consciousness.” As Magid explains, Rabbi Zalman believed in “sharing spiritual traditions in order to create a world where distinct religions remain but are integrated with one another.” Magid adds, “Adopting Buddhist meditation, Gregorian chants and Sufi zikher [dhikr] to Jewish prayer, Schachter-­Shalomi sought to broaden the possibilities of Jewish spiritual life.”1 Rabbi Zalman, known among friends as Reb Zalman, advocated “post-­triumphalism” and pioneered participating in Muslim spiritual rituals in Jerusalem and beyond, with firm belief in the need for friendship between religions. I was honored to be invited by Rabbi Zalman to his synagogue and to share a panel with him (on October 9, 2005) on repentance (teshuvah/tawbah) in the Judaic and Islamic traditions. Beyond his vast knowledge and charismatic character, what impressed me most was his humility and humanity. When he asked me to pray for him and gave me his mother’s name according to the Jewish tradition, he changed my perception of a Jewish rabbi and taught me that we all need prayers beyond the limits of our own tradition if we seek a divine forgiveness that comes close to the immense magnitude of our errors, flaws, and inadvertent or deliberate sins. When I asked Rabbi Zalman to contribute to this volume, he did not hesitate to accept, despite the many tasks he had on his hands and mind. May peace be upon his great and friendly soul!

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Defining Friendship Any attempt to define friendship, to try to make it objective, brings us away from the reality that friendship is not a thing in the world of physical action, Assiyah. It exists in the world of Yetzirah, the realm of attitude and enchantment, which Sufis term Alam al-­Mithal. In that universe of the heart and relationships are many different manners in which individuals relate to one another in loving, positive ways. Each relationship has an implicit covenant to which God is a witness. Today, I got an email suggesting that I look at a short video. It showed a friend of mine from long ago sharing a drink with some people. Even though I had not seen him for a long time, I felt an upwelling of friendship—­love for him. Although it had been a long time, the feeling in my heart was carrying friendship from the past to him in the present. Each friendship is different. It is as if each person has a basic and primary vibratory field. Today, people speak of mirror neurons and the way in which two people attune to each other. In a real and enduring friendship, these fields have a way of penetrating one another to the point that one friend can feel what the other one is feeling. How does friendship differ between friends? No matter how I tried, I could not find a broad commonality in the feeling realm. Mentally, it was not very hard to find a common abstraction of friendship, but emotionally, each friend awakens—­in all of us—­more nuanced feelings than we can explain. After the abstraction of friendship, each friend feels different emotionally and is therefore treated differently. The “I” that faces one friend is different from than the “I” that faces another. We are not static but modify our behavior, to a certain extent, given each of our unique relationships. The Kotzker Rebbe is reported to have said, “If I am I because you are you and you are you because I am I—­then I am not I and you’re not you. But if I am I because I am I and you are you because you are you, then I am I and you are you and we can talk.” There is a great deal of significance in that statement of the Kotzker Rebbe, who discusses the center of the personality and not how it modifies itself to present itself in a good light. Nevertheless, there is a subtle relational modification that is the result of being met. It puts us in a different universe of discourse than the merely social one, and it also differentiates who I am then from who I am in my solitude. The field of energy in relationships in our tradition is represented by an angel. Tradition tells that if a year has gone by and the relationship has not been nurtured, it is as if the angel has died. When the year has gone by and the

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friends meet one another, again they recite the blessing “We worship you, Yah, our God, ruler of the universe, who restores the dead to life.” The word friend takes for granted the matrix on which we are told to love our neighbors as ourselves. Friendship is to be extended as the basis of the people who share a covenant with us. To try to make this more accessible to our intellect, we have to make the implicit more explicit. We can talk about social fibers that extend from the heart of one person to other people. In our day, the social fibers have been greatly shortened. In the past, people had three, four, and sometimes five generations living under one roof. But with social dispersion, we now do not live in the same community with our families. These fibers were once very personal and strong. It is amazing to see how, in the absence of the social bodies, virtual social connections are afforded to us at this time by the internet.

Friendship in the Bible The Hasidic tradition tells of such intimate friend-­to-­friend relationships in which there was a conscious telepathic bond between them. Even when they went into very deep meditative spiritual realms, friends were able to be aware of the state of the other. In the Hebrew word for friend/neighbor/fellow as in the statement “Love your RE’akha, neighbor, as yourself,” we find the word for pastor/shepherd, Ro’Eh, so REaKha can then mean your cograzer, one with whom you are glad to share the pasture, miR’Eh. You trust in the Shepherd/God, who oversees and cements your relationship. You are not worried that the friend will take anything away from you and diminish you, as friendship is as much about giving as it is about receiving. In the Hasidic environment, the rebbe is the shepherd, and the Hasidim are intimate friends to whom one can reveal the “the afflictions of the heart” without having to pretend. When two people share in spiritual work, they are of great help to each other. Rebbe Joseph Isaac Schneersohn was fond of saying that when two friends share with each other, two inclinations of good battle one inclination for evil, and the two good ones always prevail. The Bible tells us about our patriarch Abraham: the city of his sojourn was called HeBRon in Hebrew and KhaLiL in Arabic. Both names are related to the word for friendship. (Abraham is called the HaBeR, the KhaLiL of Allah, the friend of God). Abraham had three friends, and in the Oak Grove of Mamre (likely an Egyptian), according to our tradition, they gave him the advice to

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undergo circumcision. He did so in their presence; this was a prelude to God’s appearance to him. Further examples of friendship appear in the Bible with Judah and his Adullamite friend, the close friendship of Joshua and Caleb, and the intimate friendship of David and Jonathan. In rabbinic times, we find many such relationships. For example, Rabbi Yochanan and Resh Lakish are among other great friend-­teachers. There is also a description of Rabbi Judah the Prince and his relationship with the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. Friendship is difficult to treat academically and objectively. The region in which friendship operates is within the universe of relationships. What makes relationships real are not the words but the invisible tendrils of energy between two or more persons. Following the Kabbalah, we understand things under the categories of the four letters of the Divine Name in the four worlds: the material world of Assiyah, the affective world of Yetzirah, the abstract intellectual world of Briyah, and the essentially divine world of Atzilut. To describe where friends are located and what they look like, how often they meet, and all the other things that would make for sociological data would be in the world of Assiyah. To speak denotationally about the abstract normative values inherent in friendship would take place in the world of Briyah. In the world of Atzilut, we have no separate existence apart from the Source. But if I were to locate the place of the interaction of friends, I would have to enter into the enchanted world of Yetzirah. This is located in the world of the heart, feeling, and intuition. It would be much easier to sing about friendship and express it in the connotational language of poetry, or to tell a Ma’aseh. Professor Heschel used to define a Ma’aseh as “a story in which the soul surprises the mind.” Here, I need to speak in illustrative patterns designed to evoke feelings and images rather than in normative objectivity. Some friendships last for a lifetime. You can always rely on those. You can call your friend at all times, and when you see your friend, your heart jumps for joy, and you feel into your friend’s situation. Rabbi Moshe Leib of Sassov liked to tell a story about when he overheard two peasants talk to each other in a pub. One said to the other, “Do you love me?” The other responded, “Yes I do,” and the first one said, “No, you don’t. If you did, you would know what I need.” That sense of empathic relation can also occur in just a short moment. Professor Buber would speak about this as “the meeting.” As he described it, the “I and Thou” relationship created a field in which true dialogue could take place. Many of us have experienced that luminous moment in which we fully

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saw and were seen by the one who faced us. Even if we do not ever meet again, that moment and the quality of that encounter transcend everyday temporality. The Talmud has the adage “Either friendship or death.” When I am with my friend, I do not experience loneliness. For this reason, the Ethics of the Fathers offers the counsel “Appoint for yourself a teacher and invest at acquiring for yourself a friend.” A friend is someone who has part of your heart, and you have part of their heart. We never know what is going to happen in our sharing with each other. In the dialogical moment, I do not know what my friend will say to me. I have no ready-­made program from which I will respond to my friend. We both are in a timeless moment of intimate sharing. Sufis speak of Sohbet. Hasidim talk about the way in which we can share the afflictions of the heart. Each one of us drifts at times into moments of despair, and this usually happens when we are experiencing loneliness. When we are vulnerable, we crawl into a space in the heart. It is our sanctuary of refuge. What we experience and feel there is not available for public inspection. There we rest in a very hidden garden. To admit into that garden someone else whom we cannot trust in the deepest way is always fraught with the danger that they will disparage the tender plants that grow there. How much trust we need to have to share that inner space with another person! On the other hand, we would be very lonely if we could never share that. Friendship demands trust. Something in my heart will tell me if I can trust the one I consider my friend to come with me into the sanctuary of my heart, which is also the place from which I offer my prayers to the Source.

Friendship and Loyalty A friend’s loyalty is the greatest asset we have in our lives. Friedrich Schiller took a remarkable story from the Greek tradition and offered it in a very moving ballad, “Die Buergschaft.” The story goes as follows: In Syracuse, there was a tyrant by the name of Dyonisius. Because of his cruelty, two friends, Damon and Pytheas, decided that Dyonisius had to be eliminated. One of them was going to seek an audience with him and stab him to death. However, there were guards there, and they caught Damon with his dagger. They seized and shackled him. Dyonisius condemned him and said, “For this you will be crucified; you will die on the cross.” Damon said, “When I undertook to do this, I knew that my life

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was at stake, and I’m prepared to be crucified. However, I have a sister, and she needs to be married, and I have to be there to give her away. It is one day’s journey from here, and it will take another day for the wedding. I will return then, and then you can crucify me.” Dyonisius, prepared, in his cynicism, to show the people in his city how faithless his attacker was, said, “And you want me to believe that you will come back?” Pytheas spoke up and said, “I will be in his place until he comes back.” Dyonisius said, “Now I will be able to demonstrate why I am so cynical about human beings. Now I will have the opportunity to show that Damon will not come back. This will be so clear to the rest of the people in our city that they will not ever deal with me in the same way.” And he permitted Damon to go. Damon went for a day, he married off his sister, and on his way back the next day, the weather was inclement. He expended every effort; he ran and tried to get there on time. Already they were beginning to set up the cross for Pytheas, when Damon shouted, “Stop! I am back. You take me!” The two friends embraced. Dyonisius looked at them, and a feeling rose from his throat, and with tears he said, “You will not be crucified. But I ask you to allow me to be the third one in your bond of friendship.” This story is in the Greek tradition pointing to the bond of lifelong friendships, in which each friend is willing to give their life for the other. In the Jewish tradition, we have the remarkable story of the friendship of Rabbi Moshe Galanti, who lived in Damascus, and a Sufi sheikh. In the city of Damascus, there once lived a saintly rabbi, a tzaddik, named Rabbi Moshe Galanti. He was a baki, an expert, in all the seven wisdoms and a good shepherd to his flock. He heard that there lived a Muslim dervish in town and that when people in Damascus got sick, they would go to the dervish, and he would pray for them. After he prayed, the dervish would tell them, “This man will live,” or, God forbid, “This man will not live.” Many Jews went to the dervish too, and the rabbi was very upset by that. Although it says in the Talmud that Reb Chanina Ben Dosa could tell if a patient would live or not after he prayed for him, Reb Moshe Galanti could not imagine that anyone, especially a non-­Jewish dervish, could know such things and have the power of prediction. Reb Moshe wanted to denounce the dervish from the pulpit, but since the Bible (Deuteronomy 13:15) says, “V’darashta v’chakarta vesha’alta

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heytev” (check things out very carefully), he decided to seek to get to know the dervish. He figured he could not just go up to the man and say, “Hey, how do you do it?” So he sent some gifts and invited him to come visit. The dervish came, they sat and talked, and as they talked, they checked out each other’s knowledge, as people do in conversation. They discussed mathematics, and Reb Galanti saw the dervish knew mathematics. They discussed astronomy; he knew astronomy. They discussed physics; he knew physics. Six of the seven wisdoms the dervish knew, but the seventh one he didn’t know. The dervish said to the rabbi, “Could you possibly teach me the seventh wisdom?” “Yes, I’d be delighted to,” the rabbi said. “I like your company; you are a wise man, but I have one condition to make.” “What is your condition?” The rabbi answered, “After I teach you the seventh wisdom, please don’t say no to me when I will ask something of you.” Reb Moshe taught him the seventh wisdom, and afterward they sat together and shared a meal, and the dervish thanked him. “I’m so glad I now have all seven wisdoms. Now tell me please, what is your request?” The rabbi said, “Well, there is a rumor around that you pray for people, and then you predict whether or not they will get well. I would like to know how you do it.” “That is a very difficult request,” the dervish replied, “but since I’ve already committed myself, I’ll tell you, but you must be worthy of it.” “What must I do to become worthy?” “Purify yourself. Repent and return to God. It is a very awesome thing that can’t be shared in an ordinary way.” The rabbi fasted, did tshuva, what the dervish called tawba. But the next time he came to the dervish, that man looked at the rabbi and said, “Uh-­uh, no, it is not yet time.” “Why?” asked the rabbi, surprised. “It is not yet time because you still don’t believe that I have something special that comes from holiness that I can teach you. You’re looking for a mechanical trick here, and it is not a mechanical thing.” Rabbi Galanti went home heartbroken, recited psalms all week, and prayed, “Dear Lord, he can see the truth. I really didn’t think he had anything to teach me. In fact, I am really afraid. Maybe he gets his powers from unholy places, and I don’t want to fall away from Your service for the sake of my curiosity. Please help me God.”

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The next week, he came, and the dervish saw how heartbroken he was, and how ready to learn, and yet how concerned he was about not being turned to idolatry. The dervish said, “All right. Come with me now.” They went to the dervish’s house, and the dervish described what they would do. “Behind the house is a garden, and in the garden is a pond, and in the center of the pond is an island. On that island, there is a shrine building. The shrine has two chambers; in the outer chamber, you will find a robe. Put it on, and then follow me, and we will open the door to the inner chamber, but you must keep your eyes closed. I will hold your hand, and we will bow down, completely to the floor, seven times. The seventh time, when I squeeze your hand, begin to pray for the person who needs your prayers, and then when I squeeze your hand again, open your eyes, look straight ahead of you, and then you will see whether the person will live or not.” They did everything just as the dervish described it—­coming in the shrine, putting on the robe. And the whole time, Reb Moshe Galanti was trembling inside. He was praying, “Please Ribbono shel Olam, Master of the World, I want to serve You, so if there is an idol there, it is to You that I am bowing down, not to an idol.” He bowed down once, then a second time, a third time. Finally they stood, and he said his prayer for the sick person, and then the dervish squeezed his hand. The rabbi opened his eyes, and he saw the name of God in front of him. Light shone forth from the name, a sign that the prayer had been answered. They both bowed down, walked backward, bowed down again. Then they left the room, taking off the robes in the outer chamber. The rabbi said, “I can’t talk now,” and went home. The next Shabbos, he had the beadle go around and call the people from the various synagogues in Damascus, and then he gave the following sermon: “I want you all to know that this dervish is a holy man who has built a shrine to house God’s holy name, and he goes there only in great awe and trembling. All of you say God’s holy name so often, you say the Shma and you make blessings, and none of you feel as much awe as this holy dervish. We are supposed to be a holy people, but see how we do not pay attention to the proper way of mentioning God’s name. Anyone who wants the holy dervish to pray for him has my blessing too, and may we learn to be as holy as he.” They became good friends in their love for God and shared many a problem in spiritual matters and dealt with thorny questions in halakha and fiqh.

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I want to tell you one more story about the demands and the burdens of friendship. A man once visited the holy master, the Baal Shem Tov. The Baal Shem Tov asked the man if he had any requests for a particular blessing in anything in his life. The man replied, “Thank God I am well in body health, I’m happy in my family life, I have children and sons-­in-­law who are students of the Torah, and my business affairs are going well and everybody is healthy. No, Rabbi, thank you, I do not need a blessing in any of these things.” The Baal Shem Tov said to him, “If so, you wouldn’t mind if I told you a story. Once there were two little infants, they had the same wet nurse to nurse them. The two of them grew up and became inseparable. They studied together and learned together and played together. As is our practice, they became a study pair of two friends (chaverim), called a chevruta. They went deeply into their studies and had good discussions, even disputations about their studies. Both of them proved to be great scholars. It so happened that they studied in a great Torah academy. Various rich people would come to the academy looking for sons-­in-­law to marry to their daughters. So it happened that each of these two—­we’ll call one of them Simon and the other Reuben—­were married. Each one came to live in a different town, where they were studying still each day, because their fathers-­in-­law provided them with a scholarship to meet all their needs so they would be able to continue in their studies. They would share with each other each day, discussing in a letter all the insights they had in dealing with the sacred texts. As time went by, they didn’t have much time to do it every day, so it was only once a week that they exchanged letters with each other. After a while, they had to enter into the business of their in-­laws and only wrote each other once a year. They became each one an independent businessman. “It so happened Simon experienced difficulty in his business, and he could not meet his obligations. He was facing bankruptcy. He didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t tell people that he needed loans to tide him over. He remembered his friendship with Reuben and decided that that he would go to Reuben and ask for his help. So he took his carriage and traveled to Reuben, who greeted him with joy, made him comfortable, listened to his problem, and told him to relax. ‘Go lie down and rest, and in the morning we will talk.’ “Then Reuben called his bookkeeper and said to him, ‘Please make a

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list of all the assets that I have. Bring me the list in the morning.’ In the morning, he looked over the list and divided all his assets into two. After Reuben and Simon prayed and studied for a while, they had breakfast together. Reuben gave half of his assets to Simon and said, ‘God bless you.’ “Simon made his way back home with the money he had gotten. He found some other business opportunities, and by the time he came home, the wheel of fortune had turned very high for him, and he became rich again. In the meantime, Reuben’s fortune turned, and soon he found himself in the same position where Simon was before, so Reuben said to himself, ‘Let me go and see my friend Simon. He will help me out like I helped him.’ He made his way, and he came to Simon, and Simon saw him and greeted him and said, ‘Go rest and I will see what I can do.’ “However, after Reuben went to sleep, Simon had his stable man bring the horses and the wagon, and he left his home without telling where he went. The next morning, Reuben realized that the friend had abandoned him. As he made his way back home, he was heartbroken, but on the way, he had some business opportunities. By the time he came home, the wheel of fortune was going up for him, and he would be solvent in a while. So it was, and he became more and more prosperous. “But then Simon faced a similar situation that he did before. He was very embarrassed; still he made his way to Reuben and, with great apologies, said, ‘I am ashamed and sorry. I couldn’t help it. Something inside of me broke, and I had to leave. I couldn’t summon the same generosity that you showed to me, but here I am, and I need your help.’ “Again Reuben did the same thing he did last time and divided his assets in two. But this time, before he gave the money to Simon, he asked him for an IOU, so that if he needed, he could come and collect it back from Simon. They wrote the note of debt, and Simon left. “Again on his way back, Simon’s fortunes went up, and he became prosperous again. Reuben again found himself in financial difficulties, so he said, ‘I will go with my IOU, with my promissory note, and collect from Simon.’ He came to see Simon, who refused to pay him back. Reuben went to the rabbi and wanted to call Simon to court to collect his debt, but the rabbi said, ‘I know Simon. He is a person with whom we cannot deal. He is hard-­hearted; he will not obey the will of the court.’ This time Reuben was truly heartbroken. Twice it had happened to him. He made his way back, and on his way, he took sick and died. The Baal Shem Tov continued, “As Reuben arrived in the other world, the judges of the heavenly court decreed and said, ‘For you there is a

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place in paradise.’ In the meantime, Simon died and was brought to the heavenly court and was condemned to purgatory, whereupon Reuben said, ‘Oh you magistrates of the heavenly court! How could I possibly enjoy paradise when my good friend will be suffering all kinds of sufferings and tortures in purgatory? Please, you must come to another conclusion.’ They came to an agreement as Reuben said, ‘Here’s what I propose: to be sent back into this world. I will be a beggar, and he will be a rich man from birth, so that he won’t have to worry about anything. He will have good health, good children, good sons-­in-­law, good family life, and a good business, and I will come to him as a beggar. He will give me alms, and in this way, he will be saved.’ “So it was decreed, and so it happened that the beggar came to this man and knocked on his door and started to ask for alms. It was a cold day; there was ice on the ground. It was very slippery. Somehow, the rich man could not stand seeing the face of the beggar in front of him, fiercely pleading. He pushed him away, and the beggar fell on the ice and died.” The man who stood in front of the Baal Shem Tov nearly fainted, recognizing that he was the rich Simon of the story, because only a few days before had been that incident with the beggar. He had pushed the beggar, and the beggar fell and died with a great cry. He turned to the Baal Shem Tov and asked, ‘What can I do? What can I do to make penance?’ The Baal Shem Tov said, “First of all, you must take inventory of all of your assets and divide them and bring half to the widow and the children of that beggar, who really was your friend from before. Then we will meet again, and I hope to help you to complete your penance.”

Friendship and Professionalism Friendship can also exist in a professional setting. Some situations I experienced in counseling in relation to friendship stand out. In the Hasidic setting, when the master counsels the disciple, there is the friendship and tyust of spiritual intimacy. In my book Spiritual Intimacy, I wrote about the special relationship between the chassid and his rebbe. The experiences of both the rebbe and the chassid take place in a field of great generosity and friendship. I have experienced similar things in psychotherapy. The Freudian terms transference and countertransference describe, in clinical language, the deep friendship that allows a client to have the trust to open up to areas of awareness that are very well protected in the usual social setting. Such trust is also there

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when a caring physician treats a patient. I am grateful to my surgeons and the anesthesiologist for coming to see me before surgery and exuding friendship-­ like care. In education, there is a similar need to establish a field of friendship between the instructor and the student. I remember Leo Buscaglia talking about the field of love that is necessary in the classroom. As I am writing these lines, I am visualizing you, the reader. I want my words on the page to flow to you with the reassurance that I, the writer, am your friend.

Chapter 9

Friendship in Confucian Islam Sachiko Murata

Confucian Islam offers an exceptionally interesting example of the cultural and intellectual diversity of the Islamic tradition and the religious dimensions of Confucianism, which is so often classified as a nonreligious ethical system. By “Confucian Islam,” I mean a specific school of thought that developed in the sixteenth century and flourished through the nineteenth century. The members of this school were sometimes called Huiru (回儒), the “Muslim Confucians.” They practiced the religion of Islam and observed its rites and rituals, identified themselves as Chinese and followed Confucian social rules, and developed a unique way of expressing Islamic theology, cosmology, and spiritual psychology. Muslims entered China in the seventh century, during the first century of Islam, mainly as merchants and diplomats. Many of them settled down and married local women. Archaeological records indicate that there were Chinese-­ speaking Muslim communities by the tenth century. Today, the official number of Muslims in China is twenty million, with unofficial estimates running much higher. By the sixteenth century, many Muslim teachers and scholars had realized that Islam could not survive in the Chinese environment without adequate explanation of the worldview behind its practices and social norms. Rituals and rules can easily be transmitted by families and communities, but correct practice does not necessarily involve thinking and understanding. If Muslims were going to grasp the rationale behind their own practices, they needed to understand the worldview on which the practices were based. By that time, however, the vast majority of Muslims in China were not able to read the books in Arabic and Persian that explained the meaning of Islamic teachings. The solution reached by the Muslim Confucians was to reformulate the worldview and ethos of Islam in terms of neo-­Confucian philosophy, which 165

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had begun to flourish in the tenth century. That philosophy provided a grand, overarching vision of existence and the human role in the universe, offering sophisticated expositions of metaphysics, theology, cosmology, psychology, and spiritual anthropology. In many ways, it responded to the intellectual challenges posed by Daoism and Buddhism, and by the sixteenth century, it provided the foundation for most Chinese education. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Muslim scholars established several new centers of learning in various parts of China. Their goal was to transmit Islamic learning in Chinese. Students had to study Confucius, Mencius, and other Chinese classics along with standard books in Arabic and Persian. Among the Muslim authors who wrote in Chinese, two stand out: Wang Daiyu (王岱輿) and Liu Zhi (劉智). Wang Daiyu is the author of the first book in Chinese explaining Islamic teachings, a book that appeared in 1642. Liu Zhi was born a few years after Wang Daiyu’s death and published a series of influential books, beginning in the early eighteenth century. Wang Daiyu’s book is called The Real Commentary on the True Teaching (Zhengjiao zhenquan, 正教真詮).1 It is divided into two sections of twenty chapters each. The first section addresses the theological, metaphysical, and cosmological teachings of Islam. In thoroughly Confucian language, it talks about such standard Islamic teachings as divine unity, free will and predestination, varieties of divine mercy, the nature of human perfection, levels of human consciousness, the relationship between life and death, and the role of angels and demons in the cosmos. Only those familiar with Islamic thought as it developed from the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries will see that Wang has employed Confucian terminology without losing the Islamic meaning. The second section of The Real Commentary goes into some detail about the ethical and practical teachings of Islam. Wang is completely at home with Confucian ethics and shows that it has exact parallels in the Qur’an and the Islamic tradition. He pays little attention to the actual rules and regulations set down by sharī‘a. Only when Islamic teachings clash with Chinese norms does he explain the rationale behind the injunctions, as in the cases of the prohibition of pork, alcohol, gambling, and interest. In his second section, Wang talks a good deal about the Five Constants (wuchang, 五常), five basic virtues on which human relationships should be built. Friendship is one of these five relationships, and Wang devotes the sixth chapter of his second section to it. The second major Muslim author who wrote in Chinese, Liu Zhi, wrote three important books. The first is devoted to the Islamic worldview, the second to the Islamic ethos, and the third to the life of the Prophet as the perfect embodiment of both the worldview and the ethos. Two colleagues

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and I have translated the first of Liu Zhi’s three volumes as Nature and Principle in Islam (Tianfang xingli, 天方性理).2 In that book, Liu’s primary concern is to explain the nature of things, beginning, as all Islamic thought does, with the unity of God. In good Neo-­Confucian fashion, Liu Zhi refers to God with such names as the Real Ruler, the Root Substance, the Real Being, and the Root Suchness. These names may sound abstract to those who are accustomed to discussions of the personal side of God, but they are not unusual in Islamic texts. In fact, they are rather good translations of some of the many Arabic names used for God by Muslim theologians. In Nature and Principle, Liu Zhi speaks about the grand issues of Neo-­ Confucian philosophy, such as the origin of heaven and earth, the intermediary role of human beings between heaven and earth, and the nature of spiritual and intellectual perfection. He also has a great deal to say about how people can follow in the footsteps of the sages. Like all Muslim Confucians, he uses the word sheng (聖), “sage,” to translate the Arabic term nabî, “prophet”; and he employs the term xian (賢), “worthy,” to translate the Arabic term walî, which means “saint” or “friend of God.” Liu explains in detail that the goal of emulating the sages is to achieve “one body with heaven and earth.” That is a typical Confucian expression for human perfection, going back to the Yijing, the Chinese classic that deals most thoroughly with metaphysics and cosmology. Liu Zhi called his second major book Rules and Proprieties of Islam (Tianfang dianli, 天方典禮).3 It addresses the basic practices of Islam, that is, sharī‘a. It is not a book on jurisprudence, however, because it does not go into the details typical of the juridical approach. Rather, it provides an overview of Islamic practices, such as the Five Pillars, and then explains the underlying wisdom in terms of the quest for human perfection.

The Five Constants Let me take a brief detour here to remind you of the importance of the Five Constants in Confucian thought. These five specific virtues are discussed in detail by Confucius, Mencius, and Confucian thinkers generally. The Five Constants provide the basis for harmonious human relationships in any society. They are humaneness, righteousness, knowledge, faithfulness, and propriety. Each of the virtues comprising the Five Constants represents the ideal relationship in a specific human situation. Righteousness is the virtue that should sustain the relationship between a ruler and his subjects. Humanity is

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the virtue that should flourish between father and son. Knowledge is the virtue that should dominate the relationship between siblings. Propriety is the virtue that should govern the relationship between husband and wife. Finally, faithfulness, which is closely allied with loyalty and sincerity, is the virtue that should provide the backbone for the relationship between two friends. The Five Constants are often discussed in the context of cosmology. Tu Weiming calls the Chinese approach an “anthropocosmic vision,” because it looks at human beings and the entire universe as intimate and inseparable partners. We all know that there are no human beings without a universe, but this vision adds that there is no universe without human beings. This typically Confucian notion is also standard in Islamic anthropology, where human beings are the final cause of the cosmos. Moreover, many Muslim thinkers explain that God not only created human beings in his own image but also created the whole universe in his image. The perfected human being and the universe are two sides of the same coin, dependent on each other for flourishing and continuance. In the Confucian version of this anthropocosmic vision, the Five Constants represent principles that are inherent in the nature of things and rooted in the Dao itself. The Dao, or “Way,” is the ultimate principle and primal reality that gave rise to heaven, earth, and the ten thousand things and that simultaneously made human beings the intermediary between heaven and earth. People have the unique ability to upset the balance established by the Way and to disrupt the normative relationships among the ten thousand things. If people do not understand the relationship between the Way and the universe or do not act in keeping with the mandate of Heaven, they will destroy the equilibrium of their own selves, upsetting their family, society at large, and, ultimately, the universe. Human beings have a truly cosmic role to play, and they cannot play it correctly if they do not act in keeping with the Five Constants.

Friendship in Wang and Liu Wang Daiyu and Liu Zhi are careful to situate friendship within the wider context of the five human relationships. Both point out that friendship is a virtue achieved fully only by sages and worthies. Ordinary people need to imitate the sages and worthies in order to practice friendship and all other virtues. Both authors have a chapter or a section called “The Way of Friendship,” detailing the specific manner of practicing this virtue. In all cases, the final goal of friendship should be the same as the goal of the other virtues: to bring

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oneself into harmony with the way of heaven and earth, that is, to conform to what God wants from people. The two authors generally agree on their analysis of friendship, but on the whole, Wang is more anecdotal, while Liu is more systematic. In this section, I quote a few passages from their chapters on friendship to provide an idea of their approaches. In the first passage, Wang advises his readers on the proper manner of choosing friends. The way of friendship has the utmost eminence. One must certainly choose it with care. For instance, when a sick person seeks a physician, he will certainly visit a physician of the highest skill. If he is treated by someone of ordinary ability, not only will his root illness not be diminished, but new diseases will also be added. The honorable [Ja‘far] Ṣādiq said that there is one with whom you should have friendship, and six from whom you should cut yourself off; you should know them all. You should have friendship with the one who reminds you when you forget and guides you when you are mistaken. You should not go near someone who lies, for he will always cheat you and harm everyone; even if he has something good, he also has evil. You should not go near someone who is ignorant and dark, for he may want to benefit you but he will harm you instead; in reality he does not have self-­ knowledge. You should not go near someone who is niggardly, for he will treat people harshly without humaneness and go far from the good way. You should not go near someone who has no faithfulness, for he will abandon you on dangerous ground at the most important time. You should not go near someone who gives weight to mouth and stomach, for he will throw people away even if they are his relatives for the sake of a single meal of bean soup. You should not go near someone who covets wealth, regardless of nearness or distance [in kinship], for when he sees profit, he will forget righteousness. These are the six people from whom you should cut yourself off. You should also know that those with whom you should have friendship can help you avoid losing the present moment, and then you will always be at ease and happy. Those with whom you should not make friendship can make you neglect the truth, and later you will lament and regret, for the lost moment cannot be recovered. The thing of utmost nobility is nothing but the present moment. Losing it and neglecting it are worse than death. Why? Because death cuts you off only from people, but losing and neglecting the present moment betrays the Lord. This is because disobeying the mandate and losing the moment are caused mainly by losing

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friends. Having friendship with good people is better than good affairs, and having friendship with evil people is worse than evil deeds. Why? Because each affair of good and evil has but one part, but both good and evil people have been provided with everything. Should we not be cautious?4 Wang Daiyu also talks about friendship as a cosmic quality. Toward the end of his chapter on friendship, he extends the notion of friendship to include the ideal human relationship with the entire universe. He says that the sages and worthies establish friendship with the cosmos itself and thereby actualize the virtues that typify the cosmic principles. The utmost person makes friends with the sun and the moon in order to imitate their highness and clarity, which illuminate the universe. He makes friends with the earth and soil in order to imitate their modesty and lowliness, which undertake what is proper. He makes friends with the mountains and forests in order to imitate their purity and cleanliness, which take part in the creative transformation. He makes friends with the rivers and seas in order to imitate their kind-­heartedness, which has nourished from ancient times to the present. He never holds on to only one part.5 In Rules and Proprieties of Islam, Liu Zhi begins talking about the way of friendship by saying that if two people are to be friends, they must achieve unity in both their will and their righteousness, and then they must be harmonious in applying their will to righteous action. He explains that in true friendship, the two friends are two halves of a single self. Liu concludes this discussion by saying, A friend is one-­half of the I, so he is a second I. . . . Two friends are like the sun and the moon. They represent each other and do not rebel against each other; this explains the meaning of the second I. The sun and the moon are different substances, but they have the same virtue. The sun beautifies the daytime and the moon beautifies the night. They follow in a circle and represent each other, so in reality they do not rebel against each other.6 After describing a general theory of friendship, Liu explains that people should engage in friendship for the sake of the mutual enhancement of virtue.

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Notice his appeal, in typical Chinese fashion, to the example of the ancients. He means not only the sages and kings of ancient China but the whole series of prophets that are discussed in Islamic texts, whether in Arabic or Chinese. He writes, The way of friendship is to associate with each other for the sake of virtue; it is not to associate for the sake of power. Association means to have mutual respect and to exercise mutual restraint. People in ancient times made friends for the sake of virtue, so they exerted themselves in virtue; if one of them did not have as much virtue as the other, he would be ashamed. Nowadays people make friends for the sake of power. They say that you should strive for power; if you do not have as much power as the other, you should be ashamed. How is it that people of ancient times and today are so different? To fully realize friendship, one should return to the way of ancient times.7 Liu takes care to differentiate between what people usually mean when they talk about friends and what they should be striving to achieve through having friends. He says that friends are of three sorts: friends for righteousness and virtue, friends for profit, and friends for amusement. After explaining why only the first sort of friend is true and authentic, he offers advice on how to choose friends. In one passage, he says that one must pay close attention to how the other person deals with virtues. In making friendship, first observe how someone serves his parents and how he attends to his siblings. If he does not serve his parents and attend to his siblings with care, then do not become his friend. This is the rule of discerning people by their acts. Filial piety and submission to elder brothers are the roots of a hundred good acts.8 Once friendship becomes established for the sake of virtue, the other four human relationships will be aided and supported. Liu writes, If there are any defects between lord and subject, father and son, husband and wife, and elder and younger brother, then you cannot establish the true principle in these relationships. A friend can act in such a way as to overcome and mend disagreements so that things come home to complete beauty. A friend will rectify your mistakes and release and deliver you from calamities. Thus many things will be accomplished. When you re-

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ceive assistance from a friend who speaks directly with confidence and boldness, you can repent of your mistakes. . . . Among the five human relationships, is not the work and endeavor of friends the greatest? As I look toward perfection in a friend, the friend looks toward perfection in me. If I seek only that my friend makes me perfect and complete and I do nothing to perfect and complete my friend, then I will be greatly ashamed.9 I conclude this discussion on friendship with one more piece of advice from Liu Zhi. This advice alone is perhaps enough to suggest that both traditional China and traditional Islam took friendship a lot more seriously than we do today. Liu writes, The Sage said, “A good friend is felicity in the two worlds.” A “good friend” is a loyal and faithful friend. “The two worlds” are this world and the next world. When you obtain a good friend, you can lean on him while perfecting virtue when you are still alive. After death, you can rely on him to release you from calamity. Hence the good friend is a bliss in both worlds.10

Chapter 10

Friendship between Islamic and Christian Civilizations Richard Bulliet

Master narratives are stories that are so well known, so frequently cited, so thoroughly described, and so embedded in the literature about the past that people take them to be self-­evident or true. Yet they never are. Master narratives are inventions. They are not always invented by historians, but historians are paramount in perpetuating them, because historians are charged with making sense of very broad arrays of data and theories of events. You may be familiar with the Heraclitean saying “You cannot step into the same river twice.” It is a well-­known notion that the flow of time, the passage of history, is like a river. The question for me is always: When you step into the river are you looking upstream or downstream? Historians are looking downstream. The current is coming from their back, and they are seeing patterns in the currents that flow past. The currents are harder and harder to see the farther away they get, but historians see the convergence and divergence of various streams and try to capture those in master narratives. Policy makers and political scientists, by contrast, look upstream. The waves are splashing in their faces, and they usually cannot see more than two or three inches in front of them. It is often said that political leaders learn from history. Therefore, historians, who record and interpret history, influence the rule of the world. What historians do in the creation of master narratives is consequential. In the 1950s, if you read general histories of Europe, you would have found no women, because the master narrative of European history was the master narrative of European men. Then we came to the feminist movement: a generation of extremely hardworking, innovative, and brilliant female scholars went out and found sources, interpreted them, and incorporated them into the narrative of European history. Now you cannot write about European history without talk173

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ing about women, because the master narrative has changed. For an example on a smaller scale, in a local history class in my hometown of Rockford, Illinois, I was taught that a Mr. Kent and a Mr. Blake founded Rockford. A year or two ago, I went to Rockford’s town website and learned that three people founded Rockford: Mr. Kent, Mr. Blake, and the black slave owned by one of them. There had been no black slave in the narrative when I was in the school system there. The change in Rockford’s narrative is a case in which the civil rights movement caused a refiguration of racial history not only in the broad master narrative of the country but even down to the level of very local history. When it comes to Middle Eastern and Islamic affairs, there have been two master narratives in the post–­World War II era. The first, the creation and the spread of the idea of “Judeo-­Christian civilization,” developed in the 1950s. When you go to the pre–­World War II period, European history is not characterized as the history of “Judeo-­Christian civilization.” On the rare occasions when that phrase was used then, it was not always used favorably. Nietzsche, for example, used the term Judeo-­Christian as a nasty way to say, basically, “Here’s the slave mentality of the Judeo-­Christian ideology against which the superman must make his savage way.” Yet the phrase “Judeo-­Christian civilization” became so standard in the 1950s that no one questions it today. You would think that Judeo-­Christian civilization must be a civilization founded in a joint and peacefully collaborative fashion by Christians and Jews, as if Christians and Jews got along well. That they got along very badly—­to the extent that the Holocaust was an attempt to totally eliminate the Jews—­should not come as a surprise to anybody. It is fairly clear that if Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, or Moses Maimonides heard the phrase “Judeo-­Christian civilization,” they would feel very uneasy about it. But given the context of the 1950s, the reason for the concept’s adoption is not surprising. As the feminist movement gave rise to a new history that incorporates women and as the civil rights movement gave rise to inclusiveness with respect to race, so the Holocaust led to the adoption of the term Judeo-­Christian as a symbolic affirmation that Christians would never again be party to an effort to eliminate the Jews. In fact, quite to the contrary, Christians would make every effort to be sympathetic to and understanding and inclusive of the world’s Jewish population, not least its Middle Eastern origins. The other master narrative that dealt with the Middle East came later, in the 1990s. Samuel Huntington, a political science professor at Harvard University, popularized the phrase “clash of civilizations.” That phrase calls to mind the opposite of the implicit harmony of the phrase “Judeo-­Christian civiliza-

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tion.” Much of what Huntington said related to the state of the political science profession, which had a dominant tendency to say that all political relations can be determined in a fashion that was not culturally specific: a peasant is a peasant is a peasant, and an oligarch is an oligarch is an oligarch, regardless of cultural context. Huntington was doing what came to be known in that field as bringing culture back into the discussion. He was saying that culture was an important variable, but he favored focusing on inevitable clash as opposed to inevitable intermingling. In the 1920s, a student of missionary movements published a book entitled Young Islam on Trek: A Study in the Clash of Civilizations.1 That book is interesting to read in the context of the Huntington-­based notion of a “clash of civilizations,” because their arguments are very similar. Both theories are very Protestant. They are related to the missionary vision of the pre–­World War II era, when Protestant missionaries went around the world and tried to demonstrate that the Christian way of life, particularly the Protestant way, was superior to all others. Missionaries to the Ottoman Empire were not permitted to convert people—­that was against the law—­but they believed that if their lives simply demonstrated the superior moral, ethical, and intellectual standards of Americanism in a Protestant guise, people would be transformed. After World War II, that notion of an American example transforming a population became embodied in what is known as modernization theory, which was the dominant master narrative of Middle East studies from the 1950s onward. Even though it has become obsolete today, it was still the predominant theory of the US government’s Middle Eastern foreign policy under the administration of George H. W. Bush. Modernization theory posits that modernity began in Europe but spread through Europe and North America and is destined to be the shaping civilization of the entire globe. The theory is based on the notion of progress on the Euro-­American model: progress is not imposed on other countries but is demonstrated by the superior economic and political systems of the West, which other countries will want to imitate. The difference between modernization theory and the earlier Protestant view is that modernization dropped religion as a shaping force in society. That role for religion would become increasingly obsolete with the advance of modernization, so that people would become engaged in entrepreneurship and free enterprise. They would start businesses and develop institutions of civil society, such as medical and legal associations and labor unions. They would eventually get to the point where they would discover democracy. Religion would not contribute to modernization but, eventu-

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ally, fade away in the face of progress. Sometimes scholars spoke of “civil religion,” national and secular creeds and rituals, which would supersede sectarian religion. But sectarian religion did not vanish in the modernizing Middle East. Between the end of World War II and the Iranian Revolution in 1979, American-­ trained scholars wrote, according to my best calculation, only three books on contemporary Islam. Two were written about the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt (one of those by a CIA agent), and the third (by a sociologist at Princeton) was also about Egypt. Nothing written about Islam by American scholars between 1945 and 1979 dealt with any place other than Egypt. Meanwhile, during that period, enormously important transformations were taking place in the wider Islamic world. A growth in revolutionary tendencies ultimately led to the Iranian Revolution and, later, to groups like Al-­Qaeda. A growth in democratizing tendencies led to any number of movements currently seeking regime change through the ballot box. Moral and religious movements inspired people to become much more intense and faithful observers of Islam. Rather than disappearing from the public arena, Islam increased in visibility. American scholarship could not see that increase, because modernization theory indicated that Islamic religion was supposed to disappear. US institutions sent hundreds of doctoral students to write theses about what was happening in the Middle East, and none of them bothered to read the books that were changing the lives of Muslim students of their own age. That oversight is an example of how ideology (in this case, not Islamic, but American) can blind you to what is actually happening in the world. This ignorance gave rise to the notion of the “clash of civilizations,” probably the worst theory to come along in my lifetime. Part of the problem is the theory’s later manifestations, rather than what Huntington wrote. He was neither knowledgeable about nor interested in religion, but he used the word Islam to describe the Middle East. You have an Islamic civilization irresolvably different from and at war—­or, at least, in millennium-­long conflict—­with Western civilization. Huntington did not spell out the conflict much, but other people have done so. In a recent book called Worlds at War, historian Anthony Pagden says that Islam and the West have been at war with each other since the time of Herodotus and the conflict between Athens and the Persian Empire.2 By that logic, the war with Islam started a thousand years before Islam did. But as Pagden and many other people see it, this war is a battle between tyranny and freedom. The East wants to enslave the West, and the West is all for freedom. We know about serfs in Europe and slaves in the American South, so the West is about freedom not literally but conceptually, vis-­à-­vis the contrasting idea of a tyrannical East.

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I hope you realize that I am trying to ridicule Pagden’s book, for which I wrote a review. One of the things you can do these days is make lists of books that are sympathetic to a given thesis and books that are opposed to it, then visit Amazon.com and see how well those books are selling. If you compare the sales of books that are Islam-­friendly, including my own, and books that basically say, “Let’s kill all the Muslims, because Islam is a disgusting religion created by pedophiles and designed to oppress women and go to war against Christians,” you will find that the Islamophobic books vastly outsell the Islam-­friendly books. The notion of a clash of civilizations, in which Islam and the West are bitterly opposed, is becoming stronger and stronger in the United States. When I looked at this master narrative of conflict on the basis of my experience and my historical work, I saw two religious cultures—­two faith communities, the Christian and the Muslim—­that have been almost the same for fourteen centuries. These two communities share vastly more than they disagree on, not simply on a religious level, but on civilizational and cultural levels. Keeping in mind the power of the phrase “Judeo-­Christian civilization,” which minimized two thousand years of actual hatred and pointed to commonalities, how would one challenge the master narrative? To begin with, there are many historical parallels in the growth of the Islamic faith community and the Christian faith community. Muslims tend to appreciate that Islam and Christianity are pretty much the same. You do not have to persuade them. Several years ago, I was talking to the ambassador to the United Nations from the Islamic Republic of Iran. He said that once, while he was living in Washington, DC, a couple of well-­spoken, nicely dressed people knocked on his door and wanted to talk to him about religion. He said, “Oh! You want me to become a Christian.” They said, “Yes!” He said, “Oh, there’s no problem; I already am a Christian.” He meant it, because Muslims believe that Jesus was one of God’s messengers. They believe in the virgin birth of Jesus and that he will come at the end of time and fight successfully against an anti-­Christ. They venerate the birthday of Jesus. For Muslims, these Christian beliefs are added to the Muslim creed that the message of Muḥammad was the final prophetic message from God and was superior to that of Jesus. Also, Muslims dispute the notion that Jesus was the son of God and a member of the Trinity. Of course, lots of Christians historically have found the Trinity problematic. The first great council of Christian religious leaders, the Council of Nicaea in the fourth century, was designed to determine whether Christians who believed that Jesus was the son of God could declare as heretics the followers of a bishop named Arius, who did not believe Jesus was of the same substance as God. The Arians believed Jesus was a great teacher, but they did not believe he was the same as God. They identi-

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fied as Christians but did not believe in the Trinity. It was decided at the Council of Nicaea that the Arians were heretics. Over the next couple hundred years, the Arian populations gradually switched over to the now-­orthodox view that Jesus was of the same substance as God. But the Arian heresy that Jesus was a teacher but not the same as God reappears again and again in history, down to the Unitarian movement in America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. At first, Islam was actually closer to being a Christian heresy than a separate religion. That is how Christians saw it at the time. In descriptions of Islam by early Christian writers, such as John Toland’s Comparisons, the Christian view was that the people we call Muslims were misguided Christians—­in other words, heretics. For the first several hundred years of Islamic history, Christians did not place Muslims in the same category as Jews, who were definitively outside the faith. For example, in the medieval period, books of exempla compiled anecdotes to use in sermons. If you compare the anti-­Jewish anecdotes with the anti-­Muslim anecdotes in these Christian works, you will find the anti-­Jewish anecdotes particularly nasty, saying that the Jews killed Christ and so on. With all these allegations, Jews were considered totally bad, whereas Muslims were seen as people who could be persuaded to become Christians. Indeed, the idea that Muslims were close to becoming Christians was an inspiration for many Christian missionaries—­Roman Catholics or Orthodox first and Protestants later. For example, in the first book on the history of the conversion of the Middle East to Islam, The Preaching of Islam,3 Englishman Thomas Arnold, an ardent Protestant, and made it very clear that most Eastern Orthodox Christians who converted to Islam were doing a good thing, because they were taking a step in the direction of Protestantism. To him, Roman Catholics and Orthodox Christians were at the bottom of the religious hierarchy, Muslims were in the middle, and Protestants were at the top. The notion behind this Christian view of Muslims was that Islam and Christianity were not interchangeable but were remarkably similar. Among the many similar details, Christians and Muslims each had a language of faith (Latin or Greek versus Arabic) and a clerical establishment (the clergy of the Roman Catholic Church or the Eastern Orthodox Church and the ulama of the Muslim world). The main point is that Islam and Christianity were not seen as poles apart. A very different view is now embodied in the master narrative of the “clash of civilizations,” a view of warfare, invasion, and jihad. The development of that view is understandable. At the time of the Arab conquest that took place in the seventh century and had its culmination in the first quarter of the eighth century, a majority of all the Christians in the world were living, by dint of military action, in areas ruled by Muslims. Not only did the most populated Christian areas come under Muslim rule—­that is, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and

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Tunisia; Northern Europe was not yet Christian—­but the creation of the Islamic Empire, stretching from Spain to Pakistan, had the effect of severing what had previously been continuous links between Christian populations. Therefore, the Ethiopians in Africa and the Christian populations in Georgia and Armenia (now western Turkey) were severed from the rest of the Christian world. Clearly, some Christians felt that Christianity was doomed and that Islam was going to wipe it out. Ironically, the Muslims who came to rule had no interest in converting people to Islam. They had great interest in collecting taxes and exercising military power, but we have no substantial evidence that there was a missionary movement to convert non-­Arabs—­that is, Christians—­in the first four centuries of Islam. Only about four hundred years after conquest did Christian conversion to Islam take place, and it occurred rather gradually. The Christians were nonetheless scared to death. In some of the earliest postconquest Christian writings, authors would say things like “You know, Islam really is a danger, because the Muslims are so rich and their culture is so advanced and they are so successful and their religion is so easy to believe that some of our weak sisters are converting to Islam.” Interestingly, the characterization that you get from Islamophobes today, of Islam as vicious, was not the characterization of the postconquest. The Christian characterization then was that Islam was the soft option, because it was so appealing. As in so many other instances, the master narratives in the case of Islam do not systematically represent the views of the time they reference but, rather, represent views that become politically instrumental at some later time. I recently overheard a conversation involving one of my colleagues in Columbia University’s Department of History. At a cocktail party, somebody asked, “Well, what kind of history do you do?” My colleague responded, “Oh, I do early modern era.” The first person looked puzzled and said, “What is early modern era?” My colleague answered that it used to be called “Renaissance history,” until historians using new master narratives pointed out that nobody in the Renaissance knew it was the Renaissance. Nobody got up in the morning and said, “Hey this is a great Renaissance morning! I better go write a Petrarchan sonnet this morning. I’m going to sculpt an incredibly sexy male torso after lunch, and then I’m going to design a new architectural fantasy in the evening, ’cause I’m a Renaissance man.” The Renaissance was a master narrative. It was invented. Feudalism, too, was a legal term popularized in the early modern period to try to make sense of a lot of confused legal documents from earlier centuries. Similarly, the narrative of the “clash of civilizations” came to be emphasized during the Crusades and in response to the Ottoman conquest of Eastern Europe, not in the first Muslim-­Western encounters.

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Moreover, the phrase “clash of civilizations” was less a description of reality than a propaganda tool of the West. The period of the Crusades, from with the First Crusade (in 1095) through the time when the Ottomans were a threat to the Europeans, included some four and one-­half centuries, during which the foundations of European modern civilization were paved. A tremendous portion of Europe’s industrial, entrepreneurial, and religious foundations were borrowed from the Muslim world. When you are borrowing wholesale from another culture, it is good to point out that you are also at war with them. Otherwise, you look like a wuss. You do not say, “Oh, those Arabs, they are so clever; I really want to do something just like them!” You say, “I want to develop something just like that to compete with them, and we’re going to kill them at the same time!” Ironically, we are looking at the flip side of this response now. At a time when Western culture is being massively adopted in the Muslim world, you have defensive Muslims who are saying, “Jihad, jihad—­ America is the Great Satan!” One must balance these expostulations against what is really happening in the culture. Looking back at the early Crusades and the early modern period, one must contend with both crusade and countercrusade ideology, as well as what the reality of these cultural interactions were like. How were they manifested? When you get up in the morning and take a shower, the hard soap that you use is a fabrication borrowed from the Muslim world. Soap making was one of the great industries of the Muslim world. The idea of printing that led to the newspaper you read originated in the Muslim world. Drinking orange juice and coffee comes from the Muslim world, as do clear glass like that you drink juice from and the glaze on your ceramic coffee cup. Playing guitar and chess or backgammon come from the Muslim world. Pasta that is not Chinese wanton originated in the Muslim world. When you consider borrowing, not just at the levels of philosophy or science but in daily life, the Muslim world transformed the West. Interestingly, so much of the misunderstanding of the Islamic narrative has to do with the old master narrative of the Renaissance. The history of Europe includes the Renaissance and the Northern Renaissance. A basic interpretation of those events could begin in Italy and progress up through Northern Europe with the passage of time and trade. But the Renaissance began in Spain and North Africa before it went to Italy. Historians have constructed the Renaissance narrative to be Eurocentric, to praise, beyond measure, the incredible inventiveness and superiority of Europeans. Yet the Renaissance is a combined culture, an Islamo-­Christian civilization, in which sister faith communities have been in constant interaction back and forth over time and in which the episodes of warfare are minor when compared with the currents of contact.

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Underlying the Renaissance is a common culture that we call “late antiquity.” Academic classics departments study late antiquity and know that everyone in the Eastern Mediterranean spoke and read Greek and that everyone in the Western Mediterranean spoke and read Latin. You could draw a line and say there was a “clash of civilizations,” the Latins versus the Greeks. Was there warfare? Was there oppression and tyranny and freedom? Was there slavery? Absolutely! Could you create a master narrative of hostility between the Greeks and the Latins? You could. Instead, scholars have basically said, “Let’s talk about Greco-­Roman culture, let’s talk about classical antiquity, and let’s force every classics student to learn both Greek and Latin.” Thus, we have one Western civilization even though we could have created a warlike master narrative. By contrast, when the Arabs conquer, it becomes very easy for European historians to draw a horizontal line and say things like “Everyone above the line speaks European languages and everyone south of the line is a Muslim barbarian.” That master narrative becomes a war-­minded one. If we had medieval studies programs that required learning Latin and Arabic, we would begin to perceive what the reality was. One of the biggest cultural changes was a massive transfer of high-­level philosophy and science from the Muslim world to the Latin world in Spain, Sicily, and Southern France. People who have a hard time digesting this fact say that the Arabs contributed nothing, that the Arabs translated works into Latin but did not add anything. What these people never seem to perceive is how singular this whole enterprise was. Through Muslim scholars who knew the corpus of Greek thought and Greek science, Aristotle, Plato, and Galen were transferred to the Latin world. Muslim scholars went to China and created a Muslim community in China, but Aristotle and Galen were not translated into Chinese. Instead, Muḥammad was conceived of as a sage of the West, comparable to Confucius, the sage of the East, and Islam was naturalized into Confucian civilization. Similarly, the Muslims who took this higher level of knowledge to India did not translate Aristotle and Galen into Sanskrit. The Sanskrit scholars basically said, “We have our philosophy already. We have our medicine. We don’t want your stuff.” Christians accepted all this stuff because it was part of their heritage, too. They were part of the same civilization. After the Muslim conquest, they continued to be part of the same civilization. To my mind, it is incumbent on historians to revise their thinking according to a master narrative that recognizes the reality of an Islamo-­Christian civilization. I also think a very desirable public purpose could be served if the phrase “Islamo-­Christian civilization,” rather than “clash of civilizations,” became more common within our political and religious discourse.

Chapter 11

Friendship in the Muslim World Abdulaziz Othman Altwaijri

The Arabic language is rich in lexical items, accurate word meanings, and connotations. One Arabic word can connote many concepts and be composed of varied sources, which may seem disconnected at face value. However, a closer look at the dimensions of such components reveals the common features embedded into Arabic words. This coherent linguistic texture is referred to as “the genius of Arabic.” This characteristic has had a strong impact on the growth of this Semitic language, the sustainability of its excellence, and its resistance to weakness, hence serving as the basis of its survival. One word exhibiting this characteristic is the Arabic word for “friendship,” sadāqa, which can hardly be dissociated from a set of lexical items that are complementary in semantic content and interrelated in terms of the concepts they express. Some of the word forms derived from the same Arabic root (s-­d-­q) but with different canonical patterns are sidq (truthfulness), sadāqa (charity, generosity), musādaqa (mutual sincerity, showing friendship to one another), tasdīq (authentication, belief, translation into action), and tasāduq (keeping friends with each other). The objective understanding of the meanings of these words is conducted within the framework of philology, an independent academic discipline with its own rules that is also subsumed within the discipline of the philosophy of language. Such an explanation goes beyond the conventional lexical explanations, to the scientific analysis of language structures. This approach opens up the horizon for deeper understanding of the lexical items addressed, which constitute the key to accessing accurate treatment of the topics under study. Hence, associating sadāqa, sidq, musādaqa, tasdīq, and tasāduq in a social linguistic context is well motivated. We will see, with reference to our heritage sources, which explain language and clarify the meanings of words, that such association is a valid method for dealing with the topic of friendship in the Muslim world. 183

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In At-­ta‘rifāt (Definitions), Ali bin Mohammad al-­Sharif al-­Jurjānī defines a friend as someone who translates all that he says into feelings and actions. Al-­Jurjānī refers to a statement by al-­Qushayri: “A friend is someone whose conditions do not involve any faults, whose belief does not involve any doubt, and whose action does not involve any flaws.” Sidq (truthfulness) means the condition where judgment corresponds to reality. Islamic mystics take sidq to be “the truth in situations of danger,” or “being truthful in a situation where only lying can save your life.” In Al-­Kulīyāt (Universals), Abulbaqā al-­Kafāwī defines friendship as the truthful belief in love, which is exclusive to humans, and he identifies sadāqa as what one gives for the sake of God. Giving may be both material and moral. Full truthfulness is the state whereby external overt behavior is compatible with belief. The absence of one of these two elements makes truthfulness deficient. Friendship is a relation of affection between two or more parties. Truthfulness at work is the state in which one spares no effort in good faith. Truthfulness in dealings is the opposite of cheating. A truthful friend (ṣadīq ṣiddīq) is someone who shows mutual sincere affection to others. According to the preceding transparent meanings, friendship is a spiritual harmony that lasts for years due to the determination of nice people. Such people show a certain synergy to each other without physical contact. Their experiences, wishes, tastes, and thoughts are congruent. Though their opinions diverge concerning a certain issue, they do not turn into enemies, nor do they ask each other to have a unified attitude. True friendship is founded on freedom and mutual trust. Some wise scholars have reduced friendship to the statement “True friendship is to perform good deeds.” Books on language define tasāduq (where the canonical pattern Ta–­C–­ā–­ D–­U–­C indicates reciprocity)1 as interaction in friendship, that is, showing true and sincere friendship to each other. Hence, friendship is the true belief in affection, in good treatment whatever the circumstances may be. Sincerity is the crux of affection, which makes true friendship the encounter of truthful and sincere affection. Lisān al-­‘Arab (Language of Arabs), by Ibn Mandur, defines friendship as being derived from sincerity, which is the opposite of lying. Based on that explanation, friendship is truthful advice and brotherhood, whereas a friend is someone who is truthful to you. With reference to the book Al-­Furūq fi’l-­lugha (Differences in Language), by Abu Hilāl al-­Askarī, friendship means the agreement of minds on love. It stands to reason that friendship is closely related to tasdīq (translation into action). Friendship can only be fully fledged through translation into ac-

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tual caring. It is founded on the requirement that it should be instilled in the heart and materialized via concrete action. Moreover, friendship can only grow and come to fruition if it is linked with musādaqa (showing friendship to each other). Two or more parties interact in friendship to enhance and consolidate it. Besides these sublime meanings, the word sadaqa (charity) is also relevant to friendship. Sincere charity is a kind of generosity for the sake of God Almighty. It is so generous that it is crowned with friendship relating two or more parties, generated by love, affection, and faithfulness, as well as the feeling of harmony relating two or more people, which results from permanent social and emotional interaction, according to the psychological interpretation adopted. Regarding the relationship between spouses, the Qur’ān states, “He has set between you love and mercy” (Surat ar-­Rūm 12), that is, affection, harmony, faithfulness, and friendship. These are the foundations of sustainable friendship that never fades away. Friendship has been an ethical and social topic subjected to research and analysis by a great number of Muslim Arab scholars, philosophers, authors, and intellectuals. Some heritage books dealing with this topic show a clear influence from Aristotle. Many other books contain authentic and insightful Islamic thoughts that are pioneering and groundbreaking.2 In Al-­Adab al-­kabīr (major work on etiquette), Ibn al-­Muqaffa‘ focuses on the etiquette of interaction between friends. One of his sayings in this regard reads, “Be informed that the brothers of truthfulness are the best benefits of this life. They are good company in good times and serve as support in difficult times; they are helpful in livelihood and times of need. Do not fail to make these friends and to seek approaching them.” The following passages illustrate some aspects of the etiquette suggested by Ibn al-­Muqaffa‘ in dealing with friends: If you see your friend with your enemy, do not be upset; he is one of two men: if he is trustworthy, he may serve to protect you against your enemy, to prevent his harm or to protect your defects, or to inform you about backbiting against you. If he is a man who is not a true brother of yours, how can you isolate him from people and order him to keep company of only those to your liking? . . . If someone comes to you showing affection that pleases you, do not exaggerate in opening up to him. Humans are by nature vile. They would leave those who stick to them, and stick to those who leave them, except those

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who adopt etiquette to preserve themselves and transcend their natural disposition. . . . Be informed that if you stay away from people, you would generate enemies, and if you open up to them, you would generate bad friends, and a bad friend is more harmful than the hatred of enemies. . . . Let your friends and the public know you would rather do what you do not say than to say what you do not do. Preferring words to action is a shame, while preferring action to words is an honor.3 In his book Tahdīb al-­Akhlāq wa Tathīr al-­A‘rāq (Refinement of Character and Purification of Dispositions), philosopher Ahmad Miskawayh argues, The joy of friendship is established fast and fades away fast, because joy is variable and more common among youngsters. The friendship of interest is established slowly and disappears soon after interest ceases to exist; it is common among adults. The friendship of virtue is established fast and fades away slowly, because goodness is sustainable among people, and this is the friendship of good people.4 This is a wise statement put forward by an intellectual known as “the Philosopher of Ethics.” Muslim scholar al-­Ghazālī suggests the need to make sure that a friend satisfies the requirements of friendship, such as reason, good conduct, good character, generosity, and truthfulness. He argues that friendship rights that should be observed are unselfishness in terms of money, initiative to help, confidentiality, covering defects, lack of backbiting, informing a friend about other’s praise of him, good listening in conversation, calling him with the name he likes best, praising him for the good characteristics of which he is aware, thanking him overtly for his good deeds, defending him in his absence, advising him in a gentle way, forgiving him for mistakes, treating his family well, supporting him in difficult times, showing pleasure at seeing him, and greeting him. In Adab ad-­Dunyā wa’d-­Dīn (Secular and Religious Ethics), Abū al-­ Ḥassan Al-­Māwardī claims, “While homogeneity and compatibility constitute

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rules of friendship, and reasons for cordiality, reason and generosity involve rare friends, because one would seek his reasonable peers. And because the elite in all species is the fewest, there are not many friends who are reasonable and generous.” This type of friendship could be called the friendship of philosophers and wise men. Abū Hayyān al-­Tawhīdī Shīrāzī (d. 1023) argues that friendship transcends kinship. A friend is entitled to have his friend do his tasks while he is away, protect and help him while he is around, cheer him up if he gets upset, reward him for good performance, and talk positively about him with other friends. An outstanding Arab orator, philosopher, and writer, Abū Hayyān al-­ Tawhīdī devoted a whole book to friendship, Al-­Ṣadāqa wa’l-­ṣadīq (friendship and friends), published [in Arabic] in many editions after authentication. Ḍiyauddīn al-­Suhrawardī, in turn, devoted a chapter of his book Ādāb al-­ murīdīn (ethics of the righteous) to friendship, outlining its requirements and etiquette. Some of the requirements are similarity of belief and religion, caution in selection, and avoidance of bad company, since people are attracted to others with similar moral standards. Al-­Suhrawardī is the only Muslim intellectual who requires friends to have the same religion. This is a type of self-­ isolation, though he is known to have been quite open-­minded. In fact, there is a consensus among intellectuals, scholars, and philosophers that friendship is open and unlimited by any constraints except good character, sense of honor, and kindness. Hence, Muslims sought to establish friendship with others who have different religions, cultures, and civilizations. The Arab Islamic heritage is replete with such insightful analytical perspectives regarding friendship and friends, as well as the values and ethics that make friendship sustainable and influential in terms of human relations. The impact of Islamic culture on creative minds has been conspicuously clear in such perspectives, putting the insight into the crux of friendship that has predominated in Islamic communities, as well as constituting one of its characteristics. This tradition is in line with a saying of God Almighty that emphasizes the unity of humankind: “O mankind, fear your Lord, who created you from one soul and created from it its mate and dispersed from both of them many men and women. And fear Allah, through whom you ask one another, and the wombs. Indeed, Allah is ever, over you, an Observer” (Surat an-­Nisā’ 1). Put differently, humans are all descendants of Adam and Eve, related by the bonds of human brotherhood. The unity of origin makes people stand on equal footing as brothers in humanity. It also makes friendship among them founded on this principle: “O

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mankind, indeed We have created you from male and female and made you peoples and tribes that you may know one another. Indeed, the most noble of you in the sight of Allah is the most righteous of you. Indeed, Allah is Knowing and Acquainted” (Surat al-­Hujurāt 13). Friendship is established when communities and peoples get to know one another, regardless of their gender, ethnic background, language, religions, and traditions. For people to become acquainted with each other in conformity with the concept of the Qur’ān is the optimal formula of friendship. When brotherhood is founded on religion, it involves many advantages, chief of which is that it strengthens the social fabric and intellectual ties among individuals and groups. Brotherhood has a deeper impact and a more far-­reaching effect than friendship in human life. For this reason, friendship among Muslims has been an aspect of brotherhood for the sake of God that represents the most solid unbreakable bond. Allah Almighty says, “The believers are but brothers, so make settlement between your brothers. And fear Allah that you may receive mercy” (Surat al-­Hujurāt 10). This creative and firm Godly bond that involves brotherhood, reconciliation, piety, and mercy from God demonstrates, beyond any doubt, that these inspiring concepts would influence the development of humans and the construction of society on the most solid foundations. Brotherhood is not confined to Muslims, excluding other sects and creeds. Rather, human brotherhood accommodates the entire set of humankind. This accommodation is reflected in the concept of friendship in Islamic communities, which is not limited by difference in belief, origin, or language, since it is comprehensive in nature and human in origin. Hence, it is one way for humans to get acquainted with each other, which Allah has made an objective of creation. Imām Alī b. abī Ṭālib (peace be upon him) said, “Know that people are of two types: they are either your brothers in religion or your equals in creation” (Nahju’l-­balāgha, sermon 53). It is not a requirement of friendship that people should agree on everything and belong to the same religion, culture, and social environment. Such requirements are constraints on friendship as Muslims understood it and used it to integrate human communities in general. These inspiring concepts of friendship based on sublime ethical values instilled in the minds of Muslims prompted them, down the ages, to serve as apostles of love, tolerance, understanding, coexistence, and harmony, since they established links of convergence and dialogue with the followers of other human religions, cultures, and civilizations. Friendship among Muslims has been an aspect of Islamic brotherhood to the same extent it has been between

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Muslims and non-­Muslims, representing a brilliant example of human dialogue, which has served Islamic civilization, uniting the components of Islamic communities and participation in building Islamic civilization. Equipped with these sublime values and fine ethics, Muslims have opened up to the world since the first century of the Hegira and established friendship links with the nations with which they mixed and intermarried. This constitutes a unique human experience, unprecedented in other human communities, which confirms the distinctive character of Islamic civilization down the ages—­ancient, medieval, and modern alike. This distinction is true without any exaggeration or self-­praise. It is a reality reflecting Islamic ethics that are founded in human brotherhood, equality in rights and obligations, ethics of benevolence, and recognition of the right to be different. While friendship, based on Islamic principles and values, is one of the characteristics of Islamic civilization, friendship in the modern Muslim world is not adequate for many reasons. Such values have faded away as a result of derailing from the path of Islam, which itself does not involve any imperfection or defect. People have been influenced by Western ideas and values, which do not appreciate or care about friendship, due to the surge of globalization, transcending boundaries and destroying ethics and values. The predominant relations of Muslims with each other reflect this. They do not show an appropriate standard of cohesion, solidarity, and cooperation in the way they relate to one another. Hence, friendship relations have receded and been replaced by selfishness and shying away from participation in public life, instead of generosity, love, brotherhood, cooperation, and partnership to achieve good deeds. The relations between Muslims and non-­Muslims also reflect this inadequate situation. Ironically, the idea of intercultural and intercivilizational dialogue, which originated in the Muslim world and has been adopted by the United Nations, is one of the best expressions of friendship among nations. A case in point is the initiative on dialogue among followers of religions and cultures, launched by the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, King Abdullah b. Abdulaziz al Saud, as a true expression of the spirit of friendship between Muslims and the nations of the entire world. Dialogue is a faithful reflection of friendship. It could be argued that, in general, friendship in the Muslim world, domestically or with the outside world, will not deliver good results as long as Muslims are at odds with the sublime values of their religion, culture, history, and civilization. People in the Muslim world seek to strengthen friendship bonds with the peoples of the world to achieve security and peace, based on God Almighty’s saying “O People of the Scripture, come to a word that is equitable between us

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and you—­that we will not worship except Allah and not associate anything with Him” (Surat Āli ‘Imrān 64). It stands to reason that in this holy verse, the word “equitable” connotes, inter alia, friendship that is sincere, pure, and targeting good deeds for the sake of humanity. This is the way of renovating human civilizational edifice, founded on friendship, love, harmony, mutual understanding, coexistence, and dialogue, which promote the values of peace.

Chapter 12

Friendship between Religions and Cultures: The Foundation for Friendship between Civilizations1 Seyyed Hossein Nasr

Why Friendship Day? Why do we have a Friendship Day? Why do we keep having Earth Day, this day, that day, and now Friendship Day? During all the earlier millennia of history, human beings did not have an Earth Day and lived on the earth without polluting it, destroying it, or exhausting its bounties. Earth Day came into being when we began to destroy, on a massive scale, our home here on earth. To a great extent, that is our situation today as far as friendship is concerned. Friendship has always been a universal factor in human existence, even before civilizations took form. In the present day, modernism, based so much on individualism, has ground down many social structures and, to a large extent, weakened relations between individuals. We are, therefore, thirsty, more than ever before, for friendship. Of course, most of us still do have friends (thank God), but we all feel that the world needs more friendship, which is ultimately a blessing from God, like the air that we breathe. Indeed, many people feel a lack of friendship in modern society. There is so much solitude, loneliness, and lack of connection, ironically in dense urban areas. There are also many relations that are governed by pretentions and selfishness. This atomization of society appears to spread through our technology and social structures and may be detrimental in the long run if we are not careful. How can one doubt that we live in a time when we need more friendship? But we must realize that for friendship to be meaningful, it must be real. Everyone in the field of politics speaks today with a certain sense of cynicism. Nations have no friends; they only have self-­interest. How tragic that is! But in 191

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our world, it is true. We live in a world in which nations are friends until interests change, and then they are no longer friends. How many alliances have we recognized and then broken? At the political level, we live cynically, based on self-­interest, even if we speak of friendship. As nations, we live with a sense of the irrelevance of real friendship in contrast to the central reality of self-­ interest. Even individuals within societies who are friends with members of other societies and nations often end those friendships when the situation between the societies changes politically. As a Persian, I have experienced this reality. I left Iran at the time of the Iranian Revolution and came as an exile to the United States. I recall that at the moment the political situation changed, some of the best Western “friends” of Iran rescinded their friendship with Iranians, and vice versa. We must come back to a better understanding of friendship, which we need on both the individual and the collective levels, even more now than in ages past. Jalāl al-­Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī is the great troubadour of friendship in the Persian language. He says in the very beginning of the Mathnawī, “Everyone befriended me based on his conjecture. / None ever sought from me what the secret of my heart is.” Rūmī was complaining of the rarity of friendship in his own lifetime. How much rarer is real friendship today. True friendship can only endure when hearts meet, when we love someone for who that person is, not for what he or she can do for us. Friendship, therefore, is a way of loving another, of melting selfishness. Just as we need love, we need friendship to be fully human. No matter how inflated or strong our egos might be, our heart, if left by itself, still always needs support. We seek this support through human friendship, for the ordinary human being, and through divine friendship, for the saint, who, in Islam, is called the “friend of God” (walī Allāh). Friendship is like the cane that I carry in my hands to help me walk despite the pain in my legs. The ego cannot walk by itself. Even the most self-­sufficient person in society still needs someone to talk to, needs friends. Traditional societies were able to provide a gradation of friendship, of which the highest was always friendship with God. Many spiritual men and women in various societies have said, “I have no human friends. My only friend is God.” Ascetics and mystics who asserted that their only friend was God were very important for the existence of such societies and the reality of friendship itself within them. They emphasized the importance of the most enduring of all friendships, which is friendship with “the Friend,” that is, God. In Sufism, friendship possesses a hierarchy and refers to all kinds of friendship, of which divine friendship is the most important, for it is the most perma-

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nent in our lives. It is the ultimate basis that makes enduring friendship with God’s creatures possible. Otherwise, friendships come and go depending on earthly circumstances. Most often, so-­called friends are mere acquaintances, not real friends. In traditional Persian society, for example, this hierarchy went all the way from friendship with the Friend to friendship with family, friendship with neighbors, and then friendship, based on human will and choice, with other human beings and even other creatures. Often, this spectrum of friendship includes one’s spouse and is intertwined with love for that person. When it comes to one’s father, mother, and siblings, one has no choice concerning who they are, but we do have a choice of being also their friends or not. God has chosen our family for us, but to be friends with them has been left as a choice to be decided on by family members. Friendship by choice embraces the totality of human relationships. When it comes to the human order, human beings can usually have a deep friendship only with a few. Deep friendship transcends selfish interest and requires a spiritual attitude. Blessed is the person who has even a few good friends. Such friends are rare indeed and are great gifts from God. Yet, as social beings, we must cultivate friendship to whatever degree possible, even friendship that is not or cannot be the profound or deep kind of friendship that is such a rarity. The same way that our concern with the destruction of the earth and the natural order has prompted us to celebrate Earth Day, the current belittlement of friendship at the global scale has turned the serious attention of many to the need to revive it by having a Friendship Day. I hope that that there will one day be a universal day of celebration for this all-­important quality. I also hope and pray that it will not become commercialized, leading to an increase in the sales of boxes of chocolate, like so many other “days,” even days that celebrate the birth and resurrection of Christ. I hope that Friendship Day does not go down the path of so many other holidays. We must respect it for what it represents and be able to preserve its spiritual quality. Doing so can be an important step in being able to preserve our humanity and our worthiness of being called human beings. I thank Dr. Mahallati and all the professors, teachers, and students at Oberlin College who took the first successful step in launching Friendship Day. I was part of the very first group that launched the first Earth Day. But they are in a stronger position. Only a few of us launched the idea of Earth Day, and we never thought that it would catch on so widely. Now we realize how important that endeavor was. I pray to God for the success of this enterprise, this Friendship Day initiative—­that it will enrich the lives of people not only in the small midwestern town where it began but throughout the world.

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Friendship between Civilizations For the initiators of Friendship Day and for many others, paying attention to the importance of friendship between civilizations should be of the greatest significance. That we talk about “civilizations” today is itself an important development in the relation between them. For millennia, different civilizations in the world were usually separated and isolated from each other, although there were sometimes interactions between them. Whether or not they had contacts with each other, but they were usually aware—­even the isolated Japanese or Chinese civilizations—­of the presence of other civilizations. Although most people considered themselves to be superior to those who belonged to other civilizations, they did not completely overlook the existence of those civilizations. The medieval West hated Islam as a religion, and many books were written in Latin against the Prophet of Islam, nevertheless, the West had great respect for Islamic civilization and learned much from it. The crusaders who conquered Jerusalem by massacring numerous Jews and Muslims wrote back home that they were living in and fighting against a more refined civilization than their own. The idea of only one civilization is a modern invention. It came about gradually during the European Renaissance at the end of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when Europeans came to see world history as only a prelude to a Eurocentric history. The Chinese also saw the world in a Sinocentric manner, but they did not consider Islamic or Indian civilizations to be relevant only as phases in the development of Chinese civilization. Within the modern European worldview, all other civilizations came to be seen as being irrelevant in themselves in the march of history and were considered to be no more than contributors to “the civilization,” that is, modern Western civilization. Over time, the plural term civilizations ceased to be used, especially in the political and cultural domains, and European thinkers began to use the singular civilization, by which they meant their own civilization. Only those who belonged to their civilization or had emulated its ways were called “civilized.” As the colonial period began and Western Europe commenced to dominate the rest of the world, to be “civilized” came to mean to be Western, to be European or, at least, Europeanized. The other civilizations of the world developed a strong inferiority complex because of Western European military domination over them, and many within them tried to become “civilized” in the European sense. Among the upper classes of other civilizations, it became common for some time to try to become Western-­like in various areas, from

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dress to food to even the transformation of language. Even today, in many modernized circles, to say in Persian that someone is mutamaddin (from the word mudun, meaning “cities”) means that someone knows how to use a fork when eating peas and how to use a second glass at the table for this and that purpose, in the way that Europeans do. The term has nothing to do with ethics, nothing to do with Persian culture. This attitude was widespread until a few decades ago and still exists in certain circles even now, although many have rebelled against this cultural slavery. Despite the revolutionary change in such Muslim countries as Iran and Egypt or in Japan and India, where the Shinto, Buddhist, and Hindu faiths are practiced, the situation is the same. For a long time, the idea that there was only one civilization dominated much of the world. It was turned into a philosophy of history by Hegel, in an idealistic sense, and by Karl Marx, in a materialistic one. Communism itself is based on the idea of the denial of the multiplicity of civilizations, as is modern liberalism, which also has many of its roots in the idealism of Hegel. Gradually, Western civilization began to face deep scissions within itself, leading to notable problems. While the French, Spanish, and English, among others, were vying for colonial influence in Africa and Asia, they were also fighting each other in a new, very powerful and destructive manner, from the Franco-­German War all the way up to the First World War. Among many members of the intelligentsia of the West, who understood what was going on, these events finally led to the death of the idea of one single civilization. Today, some American politicians come on television and try to get votes by saying, “We are civilized; those in Yemen are not civilized.” Those trends are remnants of the older ways of thinking. The intelligentsia—­the philosophers, the thinkers, the poets, among them the greatest twentieth-­century poets of the English language, such as William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot—­have been aware that something was seriously wrong with the unicivilizational perspective of the West. Many began to think of other ways of looking at the world and turned their interest to the other civilizations that were still alive, although weakened by the onslaught of Western powers. Over time, those other subdued civilizations have begun to raise their heads. Most people in the West paid little attention, until recently, to certain major events of the twentieth century, including the revival of Islam in the Islamic world and of Hinduism in the Hindu world and the more recent revival in China of its Confucian traditions, even under the veneer of the Western pseudoreligion called Marxism. In many ways, however, Confucian China is coming back to life as an independent civilization. Needless to say, these non-­

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Western civilizations would not like to be considered part of the “civilized world” as defined by some French philosophers in the Age of Enlightenment and by some Westerners even today. Fortunately, despite the withering effect of Westernization, today’s world includes not one civilization but several. In the context of this reality, a professor from Harvard University, the late Samuel Huntington, presented an unfortunate thesis, about three decades ago, called “The Clash of Civilizations.” His essay was not only a scholarly analysis but also a position paper for action, as I pointed out when it first appeared. Many people, especially among those called “neocons” on the present American political scene, accepted Huntington’s idea that other civilizations are challenging the West and that the greatest danger to the West is the possible alliance between the Islamic World and China. Some even came to speak of “the West and the rest,” believing that other civilizations are always in clash or in enmity with the West, which is not true. Such people see every desire for self-­assertion by non-­Western nations and civilizations as a threat that the West must confront. These aggressive attitudes and actions have themselves helped to create enmity toward the West in certain circles in non-­Western regions of the world. This way of looking at the world has had a devastating effect on international relations in the past few decades. America has suffered through conflict directly with Iraq and Afghanistan and indirectly with Yemen, Bahrain, Somalia, Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, and now Syria. These American clashes seem to be with the Islamic world for the moment; no matter what the Chinese or even the North Koreans do, no one is going to send Western soldiers to their countries. The thesis of Huntington did have a positive aspect, the acceptance of several civilizations, although he envisaged their relation in terms of clash rather than friendship. The Islamic world has experienced much more suffering than the aggressors, including the death and maiming of over a million Iraqis, the uprooting of four million of them, and the loss of many of their cultural centers and much of their heritage, through looting and physical destruction. Hardly anyone in the West even speaks about these catastrophes. Many unfortunate things, such as the destruction of archaeological sites, libraries, and historical buildings, have resulted from these tragic and aggressive events, not only in Iraq, but also in Afghanistan. Yet this situation has also prompted at least some well-­intentioned people in the West to emphasize the necessity of cultivating friendship rather than creating clashes between civilizations. These events are mentioned here to situate where we are and to show why the very notion of friendship among civilizations is so important. Of course, friendship is not possible unless two

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people, nations, or civilizations feel the need to be friends. To talk of the necessity of friendship is already to accept the cardinal reality that there is more than one civilization in the world, as friendship assumes the existence of another. For many, this reality is very difficult to accept. Most people are taught to believe that how they see the world is the only correct way and that, sooner or later, other people will come to accept their perspective. We see this habit of mind concretely in such a mundane domain as women’s fashion coming out of Paris. For many in the West and their Westernized followers in other civilizations, everyone should emulate what someone has designed in Paris. But that is not how the world works, and, more and more, the multiplicity of voices in the world are becoming louder and more persistent. The non-­Western cultures and religions that many writers and analysts in the West in the early twentieth century thought would soon die out did not. In fact, the latter part of the twentieth century was witness not to the dying out but to the reassertion—­often necessarily aggressive and sometimes militaristic—­of non-­Western manners of living, cultures, and religions, all of which were supposed to be absorbed, sooner or later, by the process called “modernization,” which almost always means Westernization. Those days are finished; on a certain level, modernism itself has reached a dead end. That is why many people now talk about postmodernism. But other civilizations and cultures do not even accept the idea of relativity preached by postmodernism, because it assumes a kind of nihilism, a lack of any values of absolute character, a thesis that these non-­Western civilizations do not accept. Civilizations and the religions that lie at their heart continue to survive, necessitating friendship, rather than simple domination, as the governing principle of their relationships. Which civilizations are we talking about? In The Clash of Civilizations, Huntington separates North America from South America and unites North America and Western Europe as one civilization. He mentions the Orthodox world of Eastern Christianity—­including Russia, Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, and Serbia—­as another civilization. Then he refers to the Islamic civilization. Next, he separates the Chinese and Japanese civilizations and speaks of Indian and Black African civilizations. His enumeration of various civilizations is very cogent and intelligible. Of course, one could argue that South America is part of Western civilization, although it has more Mesoamerican than North American elements, ethnically, culturally, and even religiously. Consider the question of religion in Brazil. Even Christianity in Brazil is so different from Christianity in Oberlin, Ohio. One of the major differences comes from the presence of the Mesoamerican religious traditions in Brazil, which have died

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out completely in Ohio, where there is no remnant of American Indian religion. So, the question of South America as a civilization distinct from North America is a complicated one, and Huntington’s distinction has both pros and cons. The basic reality is that there are multiple civilizations in the world today, although Western civilization is dominant even in certain regions of Africa and Asia. This domination can be seen in relationships between North and South America. Colombia belongs to South America, and Ohio belongs to North America, but there is no equality or parity of power and wealth between them. At this moment of human history, the powers of various civilizations, especially military power, are not equal. Nevertheless, other civilizations continue to exist; they cannot be ignored and brushed aside. To enter into a relationship with other political, economic, and social entities in the world can no longer be based on the premise that there is only one civilization of significance—­the West—­and that one can act as if other civilizations do not exist. Not only the reality on the ground but the very processes of modern technology and communication have made that presumption impossible. Thus, we come to the question of the crucial importance of friendship, if we accept that there are other civilizations and if, at the same time, we hope to live at peace and not in a constant state of war and contention. How can one have friendship? Friendship has many levels, as I have already pointed out. Here, I do not discuss the metaphysical or spiritual significance of friendship but concern myself with the human level. First, friendship—­ even between civilizations, societies, or nations—­implies the acceptance of the other, which means the acceptance of certain rights, prerogatives, and choices that the other must have as the “I” has. This is true in friendship between civilizations, societies, or nations, as well as friendship between individuals. If there is only the “I,” there cannot be any friendship; that situation is like talking to oneself. For there to be a conversation, there must be both a subject and an other. Friendship implies a duality, a multiplicity of subjects, who can then be friendly. Second, for friendship to exist, there needs to be a certain amount of respect for the other as the other and not only concern with one’s own self-­ interest. If one becomes friendly with someone just for the sake of self-­interest that is not really friendship. We encounter this pseudofriendship throughout life. Most people come and go. They call themselves our friends, but at our first moment of need, they disappear or lie to us with the hypocrisy that characterizes so much of human relationships. Real friendship is hard to find on even the individual level, not to speak of nations and civilizations. As far as civilizations are concerned, this respect for the other means that a civilization would

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accept another civilization for itself and not only out of its own self-­interest. In human history until now, friendship with other civilizations and nations has been based mostly on the interests of the party involved, and that is understandable in earlier historical conditions. For example, when France was seeking to further its own interests, it became friendly with Austria for a while. When those interests terminated, it became friends with another country within Europe. In European history, even countries that were traditional enemies, such as France and England or France and Germany, have become friends at a turn of events, with some reverting to being enemies when the situation changed again. One can see all kinds of friendships of this nature—­between nations, tribes, and civilizations—­in the history of every continent in the world. Today, historical conditions are such that we need friendship that is not based simply on self-­interest. Otherwise, we would be wasting our time talking about friendship between civilizations. We need deeper understanding than considering civilizations as simply political bodies. We must consider them as cultural, spiritual, artistic, literary, human structures—­not only political entities. It is not correct to think that the East, the West, and so forth are reducible to their governments. We do not even have the full presence of the peoples of the nations of the world in the United Nations; we only have the presence of some governments and their agencies and representatives. We need to spread friendship between civilizations beyond national governments and see civilizations in a larger context than simply the political one. Otherwise, friendship does not have any meaning except expediency and flies away like dust in the wind.

Religions as Foundations for Civilization When we look upon civilizations, we find that every civilization was founded by a religion or by what Marco Pallis, a great English scholar of Tibetan Buddhism, called “the presiding idea.” Presiding over every civilization is an idea about the nature of reality. Moreover, that idea is always considered by followers of traditional civilizations to be of divine origin. Even if one does not want to use the word religion, which is primarily an Abrahamic term, or does not have a word for the idea—­as in, say, Navajo or Hopi religions of North America—­one can refer to a “sacred worldview” on which all civilizations are based. Those who have accepted the worldview that founds a civilization have always accepted it to be of a sacred character and to have a divine origin. This fact is impossible to refute historically. The Greek, Egyptian, and Hindu civili-

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zations were all based on a religion or sacred worldview. European civilization began with Christianity. When Christianity spread in Europe, it resulted in the creation of a new civilization that was not simply the continuation of the Roman civilization. It incorporated many elements from Roman civilization, but it was a Christian civilization that then became partly secularized from the fifteenth century onward. We can identify the same reality in Islamic civilization, where the appearances and spread of Islam rapidly created a distinct and new civilization, stretching from the Pamir Mountains to the Pyrenees. We can furthermore trace the reality of this relationship all the way to small civilizations of faraway places, such as that of the Aborigines of Australia. Most of their remarkable civilization was destroyed by the white man, but some of it survives and shows that it was based on a sacred worldview or “religion,” in the universal sense of that term. Consequently, friendship between civilizations requires, more than anything else, friendship between religions and the worldviews that have formed and dominated over those civilizations. Friendship between religions (using the universal sense of the term religion) is at the heart of sympathetic understanding of other civilizations and is essential for friendship between civilizations. Suppose I want to understand Japanese civilization, and I begin to read about Japanese culture and history, including the medieval period, when Kyoto became capital of Japan. That is fine, and I will learn much from that exercise, but to understand the essence of Japanese civilization, I will have to know something about Buddhism, Shintoism, and Japanese Confucianism. If I do not understand anything about Zen, I will not understand anything essential about the spirit of all the beautiful gardens or samurai culture in Japan, no matter how much I study the geology of the rocks placed on the ground and the techniques applied in a Zen garden. That kind of study is not going to explain the spiritual and inner meaning of the Japanese garden, nor will the study of Japanese social history explain for me the source of the ethos of samurai ethics. To develop real empathy, love, and friendship for Japanese civilization, an authentic knowledge of the spiritual traditions and religions of Japan is required. For a long time, so many Western scholars shunned precisely this kind of knowledge and familiarity, and some still do. Western academia suffers a great deal because many of the academic disciplines are still burdened by the baggage of the secularized nineteenth-­century view of social science and history, in addition to current postmodern ideas that are, spiritually speaking, largely nihilistic. People who study political science and do not study the religions of the world, as if religions were and are irrelevant, simply miss the point that

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most of the political events that take place globally have a religious element. Of course, economic and other nonreligious factors are important. But failing to consider religion is why disciplines created to study structures, forces, and events in relation to the international scene, such as political science and international relations, are so incompetent in predicting single events of importance that take place. Just look at the Islamic world. As far as I know, not a single notable political scientist in either the United States or Western Europe predicted an event as important as the Iranian Revolution, one of the most significant political events of the twentieth century. A couple historians of Shiism and of Iran had written something related to the possibility of the occurrence of such an event, but they wrote as historians and not political scientists. Look at what has happened in the Arab world during what is called the “Arab Spring.” The departments of political science on which millions of dollars are spent for graduate programs in Arab studies, Arab politics, and so forth were good for Monday-­morning quarterbacking, but nobody could provide a real study that could predict the outcome of the game on Sunday afternoon. That possibility is out of the question because Western political science, as usually practiced, systematically neglects or marginalizes the religious element. The word science would be taken out of the name of any other discipline with that record, because science is related to predictability. If an astronomy department could not predict, just once, where Jupiter would be in the sky on a given night, the department would be in crisis. Their practice of astronomy would be questioned. In the English language, the word science has a particular meaning. It always includes predictability according to the prevalent philosophy of science in the West. One cannot give serious study to the relation between civilizations without considering the religions that constitute their heart. Civilization studies in the West are caught in a difficult situation, because many of the departments that deal with the understanding of other civilizations have put themselves in a straitjacket by refusing to consider elements of a spiritual, religious, and artistic nature, which remain of extreme significance in the lives of most members of various civilizations. Many graduate schools (even at the best universities, such as the University of Chicago or Harvard) and some of the best think tanks advising governments have condemned themselves to narrow-­mindedness in their academic approach, by excluding from their analyses religious and spiritual factors. Knowledge of cultural and spiritual elements simply does not fit into most of the models, paradigms, and methodologies that are taught in these institutions. This phenomenon is to be found everywhere. So, when talking about friendship between civilizations,

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even making people realize that we must first bring about understanding between the religions and worldviews that created these civilizations is a very difficult task. For this and many other reasons, comparative religion is a very important subject. In the West, comparative religion and the history of religions have been studied much since the end of the eighteenth century, especially from the middle of the nineteenth century onward, when different schools developed in these fields. However, in Europe and America, even the study of religion on the global scale was influenced by secularism and historicism and dominated by the Eurocentric view of the world, which also dominated other fields. From that background developed the so-­called scientific study of religion, or Religionswissenschaft, and other perspectives with which I do not deal here. Until quite recently, it was very difficult for Western scholars of religion to develop a methodology whereby they could remain good Christians or good Jews and understand Buddhism or Islam or some other religion both objectively and sympathetically, without reducing them to merely socioeconomic or historic phenomena. The reductionism that the seventeenth-­century scholars introduced into the European mind is prevalent in many different fields and remains an obstacle to the creation of friendship between religions and civilizations. The core problem for comparative religious study is how to explore religious authenticity without reductionism, to study other religions religiously and theologically, rather than through the lens of secularism. Much has been done that is very positive. The traditional school that speaks of the perennial philosophy implies that there is a divine truth at the center of the realities of every heavenly revealed religion. Frithjof Schuon coined the phrase serving as the title of his The Transcendent Unity of Religions for the idea that the universality of tradition and the multiplicity of religious forms have the same central unity at the level of their inner meaning. Fortunately, some have come to take notice of the literature based on this perspective and to seek to know more about it, even in academic religion departments as well as seminaries. But this philosophy has not been integrated in a transformative manner into the study of religious pluralism and civilizational studies in general. There is no place in America, as far as I know, where looking at what is at the heart of each civilization is integrated with the study of various civilizations in relation to one’s own civilization. If one accepts only one’s own civilization as being authentic and of value, one cannot understand another civilization and be able to penetrate into the heart of that civilization or to cultivate friendship with that other. All civilizations face this basic problem. If I, a Muslim and a Persian, try to study the German philosopher Heidegger only outwardly, without penetrat-

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ing into the background of his thought, I will not understand him fully. Moreover, if I try to leave my own philosophical tradition and become Heideggerian to understand Heidegger, I become a tenth-­rate Heideggerian scholar or philosopher, of no use for civilizational understanding and dialogue. Tenth-­rate European philosophers fill the Orient. Japan has more neo-­Kantians than Germany does. However, they are no longer there as Japanese thinkers able to bring about deeper civilizational understanding between Japanese and Western civilizations. They are there as, at best, second-­rate Western thinkers who cannot play a significant role in creating understanding and friendship between Japanese and Western tradition. To carry out meaningful civilizational dialogue, one must be rooted in one’s own civilization and its intellectual dimensions and penetrate as such into the ideas dominant in another civilization. Many people, especially in the East, have been so absorbed into another culture that they are unable to present that culture to their own and act as a bridge between the two cultures in a meaningful and efficacious manner. They cannot do so because they are cut off from their own base. Today, the world needs people who can build bridges across civilizations, people who understand the essence of their own civilization and culture and, at the same time, can penetrate into the essence of other civilizations. At the heart of that endeavor is an understanding of the worldview and “God-­view” that have dominated civilizations throughout the ages, as well as strong roots or deep knowledge of one’s own culture. A great deal of existing material—­articles and books in major libraries, such as the Library of Congress and the Widener Library of Harvard University—­can be helpful in this domain. But the integration of this approach into the mainstream, which has not taken place in most cases, is necessary, especially now that we need to cultivate friendship between civilizations in order to survive ourselves. Understanding and cultivating friendships with civilizations and cultures other than our own is now necessary in an unprecedented manner, because we no longer live in an insular world. In the consciousness of a person in days of old, the “world” meant, for all intents and purposes, China to a Chinese person, India to an Indian, or the West to a European. Now, referring to the “world” implies not only our hemisphere but the whole globe. I do not believe, however, that this new situation means that there is or soon will be a single homogenized “world,” or civilization, covering the whole globe. We have heard so much lately about globalization and the “global village.” There is, however, no such thing as the latter. That metaphor is overused. Even today, a village in Sumatra is very different from one in upper New York State. There is still tremendous diversity of cultures and civilizations in the world (for which we

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should be grateful to God). Ours is an era of very extensive communication on a global scale, yet we communicate more and more about less and less. We are in contact with each other all the time but mostly about superficialities. Many young people in modern societies hardly talk to each other directly any more. They have difficulty in establishing direct human relations and real friendship, because they are texting all the time. How can you love a girl if you only communicate with her by texting? You cannot look into her eyes and say something. It is going to be a catastrophe for my grandchildren if ordinary human contact diminishes. There is ever-­ greater communication within an ever-­ diminishing framework of real connection and direct human contact. Nevertheless, the fact remains that we live in a world abounding with a great deal of information and communication. This can be both destructive and constructive, depending on how we act and live in this unprecedented human condition. Like it or not, modern electronic means provide a great deal of information, on a global scale, at the fingertips of everybody who knows how to use a computer, read avidly, or listen to the radio and television. Everybody can get information about anything that he or she wants, but it is often information that skims at the surface of things and rarely penetrates into deeper realities and truths. So, all these means of mass communication have not brought about greater mutual understanding, greater care for the natural environment, peace, or greater friendship between cultures, societies, and civilizations. We are accentuating the environmental crisis by revealing information about every hitherto unknown corner of the earth, so that a boatful of tourists soon lands at some island heretofore unknown and leaves behind four thousand pounds of plastic bags and containers on the beaches, while the very norm of native life becomes theatrical. This is hardly the way to cultivate friendships. Many of the problems that result from the degradation of the environment and destruction of other cultures are consequences of having more information about the world. We cannot simply be proud of having increased communication if we do not communicate about what is really significant in bringing about better understanding and empathy for the other, whether that be other religions, civilizations, and cultures or the pristine natural world. I do not think that simple communication between followers of Islam and Christianity through books, articles, telephone, the internet, radio, and television has brought about greater empathy and understanding between their religions and cultures than existed in Spain in the eleventh century. I have participated for fifty years in dialogue with Christianity and personally represented the Islamic world twice as the leader of an Islamic delegation to the pope, delivering a speech before Pope Benedict XVI. I have been in the middle of this

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process of dialogue perhaps more than any other Muslim alive today. As a humble observer of the scene, I maintain that communication by itself has not been a guarantee of greater understanding and means to friendship. Occasionally, a cardinal or a priest and a Muslim scholar who both want to speak about the essentials of their faiths find each other. When such a condition prevails alongside a desire for understanding and friendship based on truth and not only expediency, they can sit down and really speak to each other from the heart. But some used to do that in Toledo a thousand years ago, without any modern means of communication. We must understand that mass communication and the modern media can also have a negative effect. They do not create friendship or empathy automatically between either religions or civilizations. If you watch a program about Madagascar on CNN, it does not necessarily mean that you will love the people of Madagascar more. That depends on what kind of program you are watching; such programs can also create hatred and diminish empathy toward others. Islamophobia has sprung up in the past twenty or thirty years in the United States and Europe, seemingly out of nowhere. Without Pat Robertson and other Christian fundamentalists persistently shouting insults and spreading hatred against Islam on the internet or on television, this phobia would not have been as strong. The simple availability of means of communication is not in itself sufficient to create friendship. We also need love and understanding. We need to have empathy that attracts us to the other. In this period of history, the nonpolitical and nongovernmental elements of other civilizations can play a very important role in creating greater empathy and authentic knowledge of others. The arts—­plastic arts, music, literature, philosophy, architecture, and the so-­called minor arts, which are not minor in Islam—­can all play a major role in our present-­day condition. Today, these cultural aspects of other civilizations are destined to play a very important role—­indeed, a providential one—­in creating friendship between cultures and civilizations. One example comes from France, where there is now a very strong wave of Islamophobia. There are five to eight million Muslims living there, most living in ghettos, much like the black ghettos in America in the nineteenth century. Occasionally, these ghettos explode, for the Muslims in them have nowhere to turn. They have no means of being heard and integrated into French society. Moreover, there is a lot of hatred and hate literature being written about them in France. In this deplorable condition, a concert of classical Persian or Arabic music is performed in Paris or some other French city once in a while, and the hall is always full. A few years ago, Shahram Nazeri, one of the greatest singers of Iran today, gave a concert of Sufi music at the

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Municipality Auditorium in Paris, which is one of the biggest halls in Paris outside of the Grand Opera. I was present at that concert, amid a packed audience, and was astounded to see that about one-­tenth of the audience was comprised of Persians, Arabs, and other Muslims, while nine-­tenths consisted of French men and women. Sacred and traditional art cuts through even the barriers created by Le Pen and other political rightists who have sought to create discord and hatred against Islam as part of their political program. European opposition to the Muslims manifests itself on a political, military, and economic level, but when it comes to culture, the barriers are lifted. As another example, for many years, there has been a festival of sacred music in the beautiful city of Fez, the old medieval capital of Morocco. Every year, the city invites people from different regions of the world to perform sacred music, including Western music. Sometimes a chorus comes and performs a work by Bach, not popular music, but sacred music. Much of the program, however, is Islamic. Much of it is from Persia, and the Persians have won several awards in the festival. Every year, thousands upon thousands of Europeans make a pilgrimage to Morocco just so they can attend these concerts. If further proof be needed, one can point to the thousands of people who visit the recently established exhibition of Islamic art at the Louvre. One has to stand in line for a long time just to enter the exhibit. The flexibility of cultural barriers is precisely why there is presently such a dire need for understanding the cultural and spiritual elements of the various civilizations, in order to create friendship and respect between them. We need to take a step forward in this direction and be engaged with other civilizations for something more than private gain, business transactions, or national interest. I am not speaking against business interests, but real friendship cannot be based on that factor. Friendship cannot be based on the establishment of a new computer center in Bangalore by some Western company. Such business by itself does not bring about friendship between Western and Indian civilizations. Friendship is based on the love of the other. All civilizations are so rich in different domains that it should not be difficult to gain respect for them, cultivate friendship with and a greater authentic understanding of them, and open one’s heart to the other. As the blight of materialism, modernism, and postmodernism has swept over the West during the past few centuries, many Westerners have become thirsty for religious, intellectual, and cultural understanding of others, seeking elsewhere what they have not been able to find in their own “world.” They need relationship based on empathy and understanding of civilizations other

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than their own, and this need is in itself very positive. In the same way, many people in the East have a liking for certain aspects of Western culture, even if they oppose economic, political, and military domination by the West over them. Japanese conductor Seiji Ozawa was, until recently, the conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, possibly the best orchestra in the United States, but that does not mean that he is in favor of the obliteration of Japanese civilization through Westernization. Cultural empathy goes both ways. It is not a one-­way street. Love for the spiritual aspect of Western civilization—­of Dante, Shakespeare, and many other great poets and philosophers of the West—­is increasing among many people in the East. Even Mahatma Gandhi, who rebelled against the domination of Western civilization over India, had a great love for many English mystical writers and for the mystical poetry in which the English language is very rich. I want to assert the primacy and significance of basing friendship with other civilizations, whether from the non-­Western or the Western side, on spiritual, artistic, and religious elements, rather than relying on official political structures, governments, and governmental organizations, foreign nongovernmental organizations, military considerations, or the World Bank and economic activity. The World Bank is not going to make people friendlier, whether we like it or not. After the catastrophic mistakes it made in Brazil, which resulted in the destruction of much of the Amazon rainforest, the World Bank itself admitted its negative impact even on the material and cultural levels in various parts of the world. Such official international organizations cannot do much for friendship between civilizations. The time has come for people who have the spiritual capacity and the God-­given gift of empathy toward other people, religions, cultures, and worldviews, people who have the capability to give of themselves and to bring about empathy and understanding, to carry out the very important task of cultivating global friendship, a task crucial for all of humanity. I think that even at least most of the people who think only of self-­interest, who deny the environmental crisis or that a million people were killed and maimed in Iraq as a result of the Iraq War, realize in their hearts that precisely because of the present state of modern technology, all humanity is in the same boat together. A radiation disaster like that in Japan cannot be completely avoided in Seattle. If we have another catastrophe like that or the one in Chernobyl, the price of milk might triple in Washington State and elsewhere. People do not realize that the meltdown at Chernobyl killed half the population of Lapland; hardly anyone mentions that what happened there killed or sickened half the population of that primordial ancient culture of northern Sweden. Because of

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what happened in Chernobyl, much of the population of reindeer died in Ukraine, a thousand miles away. If we meditate about these and similar facts, we realize that we are all interconnected. We must accept the reality of this interconnection or perish. We are all in the same boat in this stormy sea, in a situation that the world has never witnessed with such ferocity and globality. The storm encompasses the whole world. We must realize that we will either sink or navigate through this crisis together. The captains of the ship must be those who have in mind a goal beyond self-­interest. They should have a sense of humanity and seek to cultivate friendship with the other, even if the other is different than themselves and the collectivity with which they identify.

Chapter 13

Friendship in International Relations Iqbal Riza

That friendship is a fundamental, indispensable, and unique element in human existence is a self-­evident truth. Its essence can be found in a myriad of aphorisms, such as “Pitiable in life is the person who has no friends.” In this book, scholars elaborate on the meaning, significance, and many attributes of friendship. This chapter dwells on the nature of friendship in international relations, which immediately transports the discussion from the human or individual level to the level of the polity. At the human level, relationships began out of the inescapability of mutual dependence in a life of constant peril and have transformed, as society has progressed to freedom from fear and want, into voluntary relations between individualistic self-­interested beings in the modern age. This raises the question of how the idea of friendship between polities began and changed in the course of history. In recent years, scholarly articles have claimed that friendship in international relations either already exists or is in the realm of the possible. Others assert that such a relationship does not and cannot exist in a reality determined by power, domination, and self-­interest. Without entering into this debate, a glance at these perspectives can provide a context for this discussion. The polity in the classical age, the Greek city-­state, expected the active participation of all citizens in its public life. Aristotle is cited as a proponent of the role of friendships in contributing to the conduct of politics within the city-­ state, as well as of extending that role to the cultivation of friendships between city-­states to preserve peace between them. The ideal of friendship was differentiated from the practice of alliances—­a practical necessity when war loomed. While such concepts were commendable, the course of politics and of war and peace was often determined by the ambitions and caprices of kings and queens, warriors and their consorts, and gods and goddesses, as vividly recounted in Homer’s Iliad. 209

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According to research on friendship in international relations,1 in the Roman period, the concept of amiciata held greater sway, still distinct from alliances. But this concept of amity, in the sense of benevolent relations, did not always imply equality between the parties; it more often masked an unequal relationship between empires and vassals, sometimes on the basis of an inequitable treaty. Recourse to unequal treaties seems to have declined in the medieval era and then revived again in the sixteenth century, in relations between European sovereigns and their vassals, rather than between the traditional notions of states. Vestiges of the role of friendship in internal politics seem to have survived into the Middle Ages. Evgeny Roshchin denotes them as “vertical” relations between rulers and their nobles and subjects. As competing interests between sovereigns demanded more attention to the conduct of relations between them and their dominions, Roshchin views friendships as assuming more of a “horizontal” character, albeit with continuing inequalities in terms of power. A common interest in uniting against the newly emergent threat from “the Turks” then manifested in “treaties of friendship,” with the clear political motive of defense against the common enemy of Christendom. Roshchin further sees that trend as leading to “friendship (as) one of the central concepts in political theory at the constitutive moment of the modern international system,” when the “gradual affirmation of sovereignty was reflected in the emergence of the modern concept of the state.”2 The treaty of Westphalia in 1648, although citing the sovereignty of the Holy Roman Empire, is widely accepted as establishing the concept of the new polity of the state, with its essential attributes of sovereignty, nation, and territory. This concept is widely regarded as drawing on the writings of Hugo Grotius’s magnum opus, De jure belli ac pacis. Grotius, “the father of international law,” elaborated the concepts of sovereignty and the “just war,” which launched Europe toward an order of kingdoms and empires, first ruled by sovereigns, but eventually ceding to the consent of the governed. From this European order began the evolution of the sovereign nation-­state as the basic unit of an international order in which the role of friendship may be considered. In the course of the evolution of such an order, its very nature was subject to political and even philosophical scrutiny. Two contrasting examples may be cited. Thomas Hobbes postulated that a sovereign state could not be constrained by any law whatsoever, even to avert conflict with other states, and must exist in a state of anarchy, in which it was obliged to seek alliances with friends against common enemies. Clearly, such friendship was only for the sake of survival. In contrast, Immanuel Kant, rejecting lawlessness as an inte-

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gral characteristic of interstate relations, drew on Grotius and suggested, in his essay Perpetual Peace, that the only sustainable international order would consist of a federation of constitutional democratic republics whose actions were limited by respect for the rule of law. In such an ideal order, friendship could find a role. Among contemporary writers, Carl Schmitt is notable in any discussion of friendship in international relations, precisely because he postulates that, far from seeking friendship, the recognition of the enemy is the dominant characteristic of politics of any kind, perhaps the genesis of the idea of “the other.” In such a perspective, there is little (if any) space for friendships to flourish. Indeed, Andrea Oelsner and Antoine Vion assert that for Schmitt, “the distinction between friendship and enmity is at the center of politics, yet given the asymmetry between the two in his philosophy, his approach can ultimately be read as a Politics of Enmity.” Yet, to demonstrate the opposite truth, they labor to affirm that international friendship can be understood both as a pattern of civism based on positive common perceptions, reciprocal support and solidarity, and as a cumulative process engaging a plurality of social spheres in strong commitments and promises, which are reinforced through mutual proofs, increasingly coordinated cooperation and the expression of a long-­standing common destiny and common political goals.3 A brief look at instances of these two contrasting perspectives among some other contemporary scholars is informative. Graham Smith propagates the benevolent view that friendship, which binds person to person, can be conceptualized as a concern with the nature and fabric of the political. Seen from this vantage point, friendship highlights what an analysis through the state tends to overshadow: the enduring affinities, identifications and bonds that permeate the dynamics of the world of states. Thus friendship need not remain the preserve of the premodern (Aristotle), nor be usurped as an adjunct to sovereignty and power (Schmitt), but investigated as an ongoing site of analysis for phenomena within, between and beyond states.4 Elaborating, Smith asserts that on an assumption that the international order is a form of “Hobbesian anarchy . . . then talk of friendship appears utopian, naïve and totally unrealistic,” but “Hobbesian anarchical relations between sov-

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ereign states are not the only dynamic of interest in the international forum.” Smith’s view is that for the friendship that exists between persons to find its place between states, “the state must be brought into and out of relief in order to see friendship, and in doing so a better understanding of both the state and International Relations is achieved.” He acknowledges that this “movement is from an emotive obligation to a handful of people (personal virtue) to the formalized and rational obligation to others as ‘citizens of the world’ (cosmopolitanism). In such a story, it might also be supposed that obligations, duties, and responsibilities to others grew weaker the further from the local we travelled.”5 (Interestingly, Smith does not refer to the United Nations’ goal to promote an international system with respect for the rule of law, which might usher in an order in which friendship between states might flower). A more exacting perspective emanates from Heather Devere, Simon Mark, and Jane Verbitsky. They seem to align with Schmitt’s perspective in asserting, It has been war and enmity rather than friendship that has dominated analysis in international relations literature. . . . Friendship is more a tool of public relations and spin, rather than diplomacy and peace-­building, and the cynical use of friendship does not sit easily with the Nehruvian concept of friendship as an understanding between states and nations.6 They base this opinion on an analysis of the “cynical” use of the term friendship in treaties (referenced earlier in the present chapter as a practice continuing from the sixteenth century to the last century). They cite the manifestly unequal treaties of “friendship” in the eighteenth century between Great Britain and France (separately), on the one hand, and the indigenous American tribes, on the other, as well as similar treaties in the nineteenth century (with Germany and the United States now in the picture) with chiefs in the South Pacific islands, which they contrast with the treaties concluded by the more mature states in Southeast Asia with Australia and New Zealand. Characterizing the treaty between Germany and the USSR in 1939 for the fifth partition of Polish territory as a “cynical use of the diplomatic language of friendship,” they conclude that in certain cases “the wording of the treaties raises issues about the manipulation of the terminology of friendship by the larger powers in order to create an environment of trust primarily for their own benefits.”7 Roshchin takes a similar view (deviating somewhat from his view cited earlier in this chapter), observing that “the international order of the twentieth century was constructed and maintained also with the help of friendship agree-

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ments . . . a metaphor for unequal relations.” He cites treaties concluded by the United Kingdom with rulers in the new Gulf States in the 1970s and by Russia with the newly independent members of the Commonwealth of Independent States in the 1990s, including the founding agreement of the CIS itself. He sees the term friendship being “used by governments as a rhetorical tool with which parties can bring about and legitimize changes in the global and regional orders and draw new ‘amity lines.’”8 Similar are the views of G. Smith and Preston King, who declare unequivocally that there is no room for friendship in power politics between states, though coexistence and cooperation are possible, even essential.9 King further points out that in any friendship in politics, some reciprocity is a sine qua non, even if complete equality may not be possible. In fact, inequality may be inherent, but it cannot be drastic if the friendship is to have any meaning. Total dependency can foster a dependent friendship in which the weaker party willingly accepts the domination of the stronger.10 Evert Van Der Zweerde makes the point that while disagreements can be settled face-­to-­face in personal friendships, reaching a compromise or agreement in politics may require negotiations.11 The preceding brief survey of recent scholarly works sets a context for a sober consideration of whether the notion of friendship, with all the connotations it carries, can play a meaningful role in interstate relations. An objective answer must be that in the international system as it exists, the self-­interest of the state still reigns supreme, and there is little space for friendship as it is understood in human relations. Particularly relevant is the maxim that states have permanent interests and no permanent friends. While academic opinion furnishes valuable perspectives on the evolution of such concepts as friendship in international relations, a practitioner will seek empirical evidence of friendship playing a substantive role in international relations, at least in recent times. From time immemorial, power has been a primary force in shaping history, first in its raw form of force, lately in many other manifestations. Polities in various stages of the historical process have depended on alliances to maximize the power that can be deployed to achieve their goals, but these alliances are founded on power politics and shared political interests, rather than on friendship. From this point of view, it is not necessary to delve deep into the past to search for friendship in international relations. Just under a century ago, Europe experienced one of the most devastating wars in human history. Military alliances formed the Entente of the United Kingdom, France, and Russia, joined later by the United States, and the opposing Central Powers of the Ger-

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man, Austro-­Hungarian, and Ottoman Empires. These alliances were based on political and military interests, and there is no evidence that any of these relationships built during that inferno could be characterized as friendships between nations. The goal of the League of Nations was not to establish such friendships but to preserve the international order, including Western empires. It also attempted to establish an orderly process for the disposal of vast territories of the defeated Ottoman Empire, which ended the institution of the caliphate that had prevailed in the Muslim world and mind for over a millennium. Affinities between nations are also not widely evident in the turbulent two decades that followed. Throughout those times, matrimonial unions between royal families may have continued to be presented as demonstrating friendship between empires and nations, as they had been in preceding centuries, but they really served more as unions for power. Military alliances also drove the Second World War: the totalitarian Axis powers, dominated by Germany, Italy, and Japan, were resisted by the Allied powers, led by the British Empire, France, and the USSR, joined later by China and the United States. The annihilating weaponry deployed in that conflict opened the way to the weapons of mass destruction familiar in today’s world. Of the two dominant alliances in the Cold War that followed, the Warsaw Pact is defunct, while NATO ranges far and wide, from Central Europe to Central Asia to North Africa. Both of those alliances were founded not on friendship but on political and security compulsions. In brief, the postwar decades showed little evidence of the emergence of a new age of friendships between states. The earlier period was scarred by vicious wars in Asia and, after the end of the tense stability imposed by the Cold War, in the Middle East, Southeastern Europe, Africa, and Latin America. The dissolution of the Western empires was, of course, a historic turning point in international relations. The newly independent countries joined the United Nations on the basis of sovereign equality, but in reality, many continued under the economic domination—­and often the political influence or even tutelage—­of their former rulers. New categories of “developed” and “developing” countries appeared in international relations. Notwithstanding the cultural impact of an association, unequal but often beneficial, with markedly more advanced societies, the new relationships that these countries formed with their former colonizers hardly constituted “friendship.” Yet, in the wake of the Second World War, the first glimmers of an instance of friendship in international relations, albeit in a somewhat esoteric contour, began to emerge. What was termed a “special relationship” between Great Britain and the United States, forged in the battle against the threat of

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rampant Nazism, eventually widened, almost spontaneously, to encompass the select Anglo-­Saxon and predominantly Protestant countries of the British Commonwealth, as a convincing indication that shared political values and strong cultural affinities of race, religion, and language might provide an example of friendship between nations. Curiously, significant similar trends have not appeared among the two new categories of countries in other cultural spheres with similar affinities. In Latin America, a kind of friendship may have emerged between the small ruling classes, with shared history, culture, and language and with a shared interest in preserving their dominance in their respective societies, but that relationship did not include the region’s vast indigenous populations, who were excluded from the political process and economic activity. Only in recent decades have these societies introduced changes in their social structures and developed links with their former colonizers in the Ibero-­American system, which may provide another example of friendship between nations. As is widely recognized, the promise of international peace and stability, in which friendship in international relations might have found fertile soil, was vested in the creation of the United Nations. This promise did not come to fruition, as war persisted with even greater lethality. Yet nations advanced new endeavors to find peaceful, diplomatic solutions. Western Europe initiated moves toward economic integration with political aims, leading to the European Union, whose members ceded some sovereignty and have avoided conflict. In other parts of the world, regional organizations established under the umbrella of the UN Charter, such as the Organization of American States, the African Union, and the Arab League, met uneven success in immunizing their regions against war. International nongovernmental organizations and civil society organizations founded to aid survivors of conflict and then broaden the scope of their activities in cultural spheres show varying degrees of progress in fostering understanding, if not friendship, across borders. A decade or so ago, hopes were raised for a “global village” on a planet shrunk by a surge toward “globalization,” spurred by unprecedented innovations in communications technologies that would bind the different peoples of the world closer together, with borders between countries fading and divisions between them weakening. Sadly, such hopes appear to be receding in the face of unanticipated reactions that have strengthened awareness of identities rooted in cultures, traditions, and history. Instead, our times see societies perceiving each other with suspicion and even antagonism, arising from a new realization of different identities rooted in dissimilar evolutions of cultures, traditions, and worldviews, often expressed in hostility against “the other.” The levels of vio-

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lence these trends have produced, whether perpetrated by forces of the state or by extremist groups, have led to vast humanitarian crises and have found their victims largely among innocent civilians, including women and children, thus horrifying decent people in all societies and lending credence to Professor Huntington’s thesis of a “clash of civilizations.” If that thesis is accepted, how is such confrontation to be averted? Civilizations cannot negotiate. So states, the United Nations, and other multilateral organizations established by states must find ways to counter the threats, which is simple challenge. Beyond such efforts, innovative initiatives have been proposed by individuals, by unofficial bodies, and by governments. Efforts for people-­to-­people diplomacy, interfaith and interreligious dialogue, and intercultural initiatives have multiplied. Some have felt obliged to adopt the new (if inexact) terminology of “civilizations.” One initiative meant to counter the “clash of civilizations” is the Dialogue of Civilizations, launched in 2000 by the former president of Iran, Mohammad Khatami. With his guidance, a group of eminent persons concluded their deliberations on this topic with the publication of the essay collection Crossing the Divide.12 Fatefully and ironically, the UN General Assembly had declared 2001 as the “Year of the Dialogue of Civilizations” and held a debate on the topic in the weeks after the unprecedented atrocity in New York and Washington, DC, on September 11, 2001. A second initiative intended to counter the “clash” is the Alliance of Civilizations, launched in 2004 (some months after another atrocity, in Madrid) by the former prime minister of Spain, Jose Luis Rodrigo Zapatero, and cosponsored by the prime minister of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Under their auspices, another group of eminent persons concluded in a study13 that the deep hostility that has become evident between the Western and Muslim societies arise from two principal causes (among many others). One was the series of Western military interventions in Muslim countries continuing from soon after the establishment of the United Nations until the present. The other was the failure of Muslim societies to keep pace with a rapidly changing world in contemporary times.14 To conclude, a new age of friendship between nations still seems distant. For the foreseeable future, we can expect international relations to be dominated by power politics and national interests, while we wait for the maturity of international institutions (still in their infancy in historical terms) and for the rule of law, rather than of force, to take root. Yet initiatives and efforts by individuals and bodies outside the formal state structures must be encouraged and enabled to try to build bridges between societies, across the deep divides that

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have appeared in recent times. They can take heart from the very first words of the UN Charter: “We the peoples of the United Nations determined . . . to practice tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good neighbors.”15 It is significant that the drafters of the charter decided on the term tolerance. Did they view the plethora of societies in the world, with their diverse histories, traditions, cultures, religions, languages, and worldviews, as being so diverse that tolerance was the most appropriate term? Did they imagine that such diversity was so rich and precious that it should be preserved rather than being moved toward a homogeneity, even if such movement might reduce frictions? Whatever their reasons, we still can endeavor to advance beyond mere tolerance in the search for meaningful friendship between the peoples of the nation-­ state polities constituting the prevailing international order.

Part 3 Friendship as an Agent of Paradigm Shift in Human Relations

Chapter 14

Will to Friendship: Rūmī’s Perspective Abdolkarim Soroush*

Friendship is a forgotten virtue. We are in dire need these days to think more carefully about the nature of friendship, in order to draw lessons that are pertinent to our individual as well as social lives. This chapter discusses friendship and love from the perspective of the Sufi mystic Rūmī, the “prophet of love.” The word love is often used in relation to friendship. There are properties of love that you cannot see in friendship, and vice versa. In love, for example, you have one beloved. If there are two lovers for one beloved, those two lovers become enemies of each other. But that is not the case in friendship. You can be friends with somebody and not care if he has a thousand other friends. So, while a thousand people can become friends with each other, two lovers cannot love the same beloved, or they will have a hostile relationship. Love has something to do with friendship, and some would say it is the consummation or the pinnacle of friendship or a friendly relationship. In youth, many categories become mixed and intertwined; love and sex and romantic love all mix together. It is just accidental that love and sex come together. When you mature, the distinction between these categories becomes clearer. Love begins to take on a more sublime meaning, a level of existence beyond sexuality. Likewise, when you mature, friendship takes on another meaning as well. The mysticism of the poet Rūmī—­my master, my teacher, my prophet—­ was based on the concept and practice of love. Rūmī was well respected by the people and rulers of his time. From the world’s perspective, he was very lucky and very rich. He had no deficiencies whatsoever. He was married and had three children. Then suddenly, when he was forty years old, he met an older master of about sixty. For two or three months, he met with this master every day. Rūmī virtually separated himself from all his social responsibilities. He had many students, preached to many people, and presided over a mosque, but he abandoned all these things. For those months, he spent all his life and time 221

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exclusively with this strange man who came to this city in Turkey for a short time and then left to no-­man’s-­land. Nobody knows where he went, but what he left behind changed Rūmī drastically. From that point on, Rūmī became a poet. In the remaining time of his life, he produced more than sixty thousand lines of poetry until his death at sixty-­eight. At forty, he had an extraordinary meeting with that strange man, and over the next twenty-­eight years, he produced many of the works that changed mysticism altogether. When Rūmī describes his meeting with the strange man, whose name means “sun,” he describes it as is a sun rising and shining upon him. About his own status and position, Rūmī says, “I was a dead person, and now I am alive. I was crying, but now I am laughing.” He changed his personality and became a different man altogether. Some of his old students left him. He became a very natural man. Describing himself after that strange meeting, he says, “I was a person who could find myself in limited cages. I could be this according to this definition or that according to that definition. Now I am absolutely free. I got it through love.”1 The main lesson that the strange man taught Rūmī was the lesson of love. He taught that love brings freedom and courage with it. Rūmī became absolutely free—­from everything, from every consideration, even from religion, though he was a religious man, a mufti. Rūmī says love is about all religions. Once you become a lover, once you become familiar with love, you enter a domain that is free from all considerations, including religious considerations. Faith from love is over and above faith from the Prophet. Rūmī was my main entrance to love and friendship. Through him and from him, I learned and became able to appreciate the importance of the idea of the long-­forgotten virtue of friendship. We know war much better and in a much more elaborate way than friendship. If asked to write an article about conflict, conflict resolution, enmity, hostility, clash of civilizations, class conflict, and so on and so forth, we are ready to do the job and write something. But when you squeeze your mind to write about friendship, you may dry up after two or three sentences and find that there is nothing more to say, because we think that friendship is self-­evident. Friendship is a learned quality. It is a very important subject and a very important concept. One of the main teachings of Rūmī is that you must learn how to be a friend and how to love. It is not something that just comes to you. There is a very good old book by German/Swiss psychiatrist and psychologist Erich Fromm called The Art of Loving. I was surprised to learn from that book how Fromm came to know Rūmī and use his materials. Fromm was an atheist. He believed neither in God nor in any religion whatsoever, but the

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idea of love he found in Rūmī was so fascinating to him and so telling that he mentioned it in his book. The main idea of the book is that loving is an art. It is not a trap into which you passively fall. The English expression “fall in love” is misled. Fromm argues that one does not fall in love, as into a trap or a snare. Love is not something that hunts you. It is an art. For it to be an art, you have to learn it. This is one of the main teachings of Rūmī. Fromm mentions in his book that love is an art like painting or music. Like any other art, you have to learn and understand the art of love before you can become a real lover and a real friend. We do not think that love and friendship are learnable, because we have taken them as self-­evident concepts. But they are not self-­evident. Indeed, because we have neglected them, they have become even darker than they should be and very obscure. That is why we are more in need of the idea of friendship. We need to learn it more and more and to practice and apply it. We are in dire need of applying friendship, because humanity begins with friendship. Without friendship and without coming together, there would be no humanity. Therefore, such a foundation needs to be as firm as possible, as consolidated as possible. The word philosophy has two parts, from Greek sophia, which means “wisdom,” and philo-­, which means “to love.” A philosopher is a philosopher not because he is a bag of wisdom or a bag of knowledge but because he is a lover of wisdom, a lover of knowledge. Love comes first. That needs to be the priority. Your computer may be full of wisdom or knowledge, and a book may be full of science statements and propositions, but they are not philosophers. A philosopher is someone who loves wisdom, who seeks wisdom. Loving and making friends with wisdom is the sign, foundation, basis, and cause of humanity. Without this, we become cold and deficient. That is Rūmī’s main argument. As I already mentioned, Rūmī was the first gate that led me into the landscape of friendship. He taught me that even between a man and God, there should be a relationship of friendship, not a master-­slave relationship, as some religions teach, which is absolutely misconceived and misleading. For example, according to Hegel, love and friendship are the relationship between a man and God in Christianity but not in Judaism. That view needs correction. According to Rūmī, to be a good servant to God, you must be a good friend of God. The mystics showed us that we can befriend God. Do not think that he is so superior to us that there can be no relationship between us, for that is not the case. A leveling effect, so to speak, is one of the consequences, one of the sweet fruits, of love.

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Love puts everybody and everything at the same level. Whether you are the king or the subject of the king, if there is a friendship between you, then you are at the same level. A very beautiful proverbial verse in Persian reads, “I appreciate the tavern of love, or the tavern of friendship, in which the monarch and the subject sit together.” The miracle of friendship and love is that they make two different persons in two different social positions sit and chat together and become on the same level. The following proverbial lines from Rūmī reflect on his view of love’s transforming power: Through love the bitter turns sweet, as we’ve told; Through love all copper too becomes pure gold; Through love the goblet’s dregs turn clear and pure; Through love the pain we feel becomes our cure; Through love some even can revive the dead; Through love the king becomes a slave instead. Elsewhere, Rūmī also writes, If the devil become a lover, he has carried off the palm; He has become a Gabriel and his devilish nature is dead.2 My second gate to the idea of friendship is rather more abstract. Rūmī is a concrete person. His teachings, his books, and his divan are quite concrete and material. But the world of humanity is rife with abstraction and benefits from abstract material. One abstraction of relevance here is the idea of rights and duties. More people are familiar with the idea of rights than with the idea of responsibilities and obligations. Whenever I give a talk in the West—­in America, in Europe—­I mainly emphasize the idea of responsibility, because responsibility is a forgotten virtue and a much-­neglected concept by the people and media of the West. We are living in the age of rights. Everywhere, we hear about the rights of men, of women, of homosexuals, and so on. The air is imbued with the idea of rights. In the year 2008, I was invited to a conference in Vienna, where attendees were working on a draft of the Declaration of Human Responsibilities. The main idea behind the draft was the recognition that we must revive the neglected idea of responsibility and that, in parallel with the Declaration of Human Rights, there should be a declaration of human duties, obligations, and responsibilities. All the members of that seminar were outstanding scholars from various walks of life and different religions, not limited to Buddhism,

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Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. They drafted the declaration and sent it to all the European governments, but none of the governments accepted the draft for the Declaration of Human Responsibilities. They said that once we introduce the idea of duties and obligations, dictatorship will come in the other window, as if duties and responsibilities are hand in glove with dictatorship, rights hand in glove with liberty and democracy. This misleading idea prevails nowadays. To correct that misconception, especially in university environments, it is important to continually remind students and attendees of halls of learning that rights must be balanced with responsibilities, and vice versa. At home in Iran, my lectures are quite different. I do not mention the business of responsibility and obligation there, because the whole air in that country is imbued with these ideas: you must do this or that out of duty or obligation; you have to be an obedient subject. There, I have to remind listeners of the idea of rights. There is an imbalance between rights and duties not only in the West but also in the East. To bring back the balance, we need a huge effort, first to make a foundation, then to practice it, to do a lot of work in order to apply that foundation in society. We have to say that besides obligations, we have rights. Obligations and rights always go together. You will not always be credited your rights; sometimes you have to claim them. When you ask for something, you must be prepared to do something or to give something back. That reciprocity is often forgotten. Even according to the teachings of Christianity, which is a love religion, donations and almsgiving are required. Unfortunately, the capitalist culture of the West has made us forget these values. I have concluded that neither the paradigm of rights nor the paradigm of duties is enough. The more you think about the business of rights and duties, the more you come to realize that we need a third paradigm. First, we need balance between rights and duties. Then, we need a third paradigm that, in a Hegelian way, contains both rights and duties and also goes beyond them, to a higher level. The third paradigm is the paradigm of friendship. Coming to this realization is like discovering gravity. In the third paradigm, you have both rights and duties, and you also have love and friendship. Do you think friendship is a right or a duty? There are a number of categories that quite obviously fall into either right or duty. For example, the right to marry, the right of religion, the right of assembly, the right to listen to music, the right to live. These are obviously human rights, and we do not hesitate to call them natural rights, inalienable rights. Then there are duties. If you have promised somebody to do something, it is your duty to honor that promise and your obligation to fulfill it. It is your duty not to lie to anybody, to pay your

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debts, and so on. All these categories are rather clear-­cut. You can see which one is a duty and which one is a right. But is becoming a friend a right, a duty, or a third category that cannot be subsumed under either the category of rights or the category of duties? On its own, friendship opens a gate to a new space, in which you can feel free from the categories of rights and duties, while you have them under your hands. Look at friendship philosophically, from the point of view that you would like to go beyond the paradigms of rights and duties and discover a new paradigm. The paradigm of rights will never end. Every day, something new is claimed. Being a claimant is not enough. Suppose that two people are in front of each other, and each one is claiming something from the other. They will never end up in friendship. Something will always be between them, resulting in quarreling and dispute. Absolute obedience or absolute obligation is also not a good thing. It will lead to dictatorship. Eventually, somebody is the supreme king or the supreme leader, all others are his subjects and have to obey him, and he defines and redefines new daily duties and responsibilities for others. We must go beyond obedience and obligation. In the past, slavery was acceptable to people because they viewed everything in the paradigm of duties and obligations. These days, democracy is a self-­evident truth because we are living in the age of rights. To go beyond the paradigms of duty and right, we have to embrace the paradigm of friendship and love. Friendship actually works, not only among people, but between people and God, which is one of the positive aspects of the idea of friendship. When we talk about the relationship between people and God, we cannot say that God has duties or responsibilities. At least, we do not find this concept in religions. Generally speaking, religions and prophets have rarely spoken of the responsibilities or obligations of God.3 All that we see in religion are the rights of God and the duties of people, his servants. Friendship is a different concept altogether. The paradigm of friendship tells you that such a relationship can happen between you and God without any contradiction of or disrespect to the position of the Creator. Rūmī’s philosophy and the abstract idea of rights and duties are two ways, two gates that lead to friendship. A third has opened up from the field of ethics, of vices and virtues, in the study of justice, by far the most comprehensive concept, the arch virtue, in ethics and in politics. Justice is the place where ethics goes hand in hand with politics. They reconcile and come together through justice. But justice is not the toughest or the highest value we have. Within the category of duty or the category of rights, justice is the highest, but in the field of ethics, we have a much more important, more vital category, that of love or generosity.

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Generosity sometimes comes with love and sometimes is virtually interchangeable with love. All the philosophers and mystics who have spoken about love have invariably spoken about generosity as well. You must be generous to be a lover, for somebody who is not ready to give generously is not amenable or perhaps does not deserve to become a lover. So, rights and obligations come together in the idea or the concept of generosity and friendship. That is even more important than justice, because there will be no justice among friends. Justice is always for the cases in which there is a possible hostility, a possible enmity, a possible quarrel, a possible unfulfilled claim. Those are the pillars of justice. Law, which is based on justice and the embodiment of justice, is only for when you come in dispute or conflict with another person. If you are friends, you need no law, no justice. You just go along without having any need for somebody to come and judge among you according to justice; therefore, you see the value of friendship, which is even more valuable than the virtue of justice. That tells you why we need love and friendship nowadays. Rūmī was a jurist. However, in one of his books, he mentions that even the sharī‘a is for times of conflict; outside such times, we need another aspect in order to live together, to come together, and that is the concept of friendship, of love, which is more than justice. Law is also based on justice, but in the domain of love and generosity, law takes a backseat. Many different domains lead to the idea of friendship. Its importance is why we need it so radically in our lives. I base what I say here on the teachings of Rūmī. His fascinating discoveries and teachings are imbued and informed with a kind of mystical vision. For mystics, this material world we live in is like a dream, like Plato’s allegory of the cave: all that you see are life’s shadows, and the reality lies elsewhere. Therefore, whatever you do or see in your dreams can be applied in your real life in this world, which is another kind of dream. Rūmī tells us (and now it is a common idea) that whomever you see in your dream is another face of yourself. If you see, for example, your father or your mother, this does not mean you have seen your father in your dream or that your mother has come to visit you in your dream. You have come to visit yourself. You see yourself in a different face, in a different mask, in a different picture. Therefore, when you see your father, you are appearing to yourself as your father. In your dream, the relationship between you and yourself is like that between you and your father. In dreaming, we are free, naked, whereas in social life, we are all dressed and do not show our real self, either to ourselves or to others, but are hiding all the time. We have a superego, according to Freud, and our ego is not free in this life. But when we are sleeping and dreaming, when our naked person becomes

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apparent, then we see ourselves in a better light. We can then discover secrets about ourselves that we cannot discover when we are awake. According to Rūmī, if you are quarreling with someone in your dream, this means you are quarreling with yourself. If you are at peace with your neighbor or someone in your dream, this means you are at peace with yourself. The conclusion that he draws is that the root of all enmities, of all friendship, lies in your soul. If you are friends with yourself, you will be a good friend to others. If you are an enemy of or alien to yourself, you will be an enemy of or alien to others. If you quarrel with yourself, you will be quarreling all the time with others. Everything stems from ourselves. We should not allege or accuse others. In Rūmī’s proverbial words, “You are hurting yourself, and then you accuse others that they are hurting you!” If you are complaining about everybody and everything, you need to complain about yourself. You would like others to fix themselves, but you must go back and fix yourself. This need shows up in dreams. Real life is another dream. Not only do we have to interpret our dreams in real life, but real life will be interpreted in our dreams, so real life and dreams are reciprocal, like two mirrors in front of each other. We have two kinds of sleeping, two kinds of dreaming, and these two kinds are complementary. They come to help each other and to assist each other, and each can help interpret the other. There is some scientific basis behind this, but I am not going to base what I am saying on that. My argument is common knowledge, a common understanding, and a commonsensical interpretation of what happens in our real life and what happens in our dreams. As Rūmī says, if you see that you cannot be friends with others, you have to learn and believe that you are not at peace with yourself. Therefore, the virtue of friendship that we have forgotten is not only friendship with others but also friendship with ourselves. Most people are not at peace with themselves. Being at peace with yourself is a very important value and an important practice that you have to try to learn and apply to yourself. Once you are at peace with yourself, you will be at peace with others, and others will be at peace with you. The word for “faith” in Arabic or in Persian is īmān. It means being at peace and is very important. In the Qur’ān are verses explaining that word’s meaning. Īmān does not mean to believe in something. It means to come to be peaceful with one’s self. When you apply this practice, you are at peace with yourself and will be at peace with God and with others. You will have an optimistic view about everything. This world will become like a garden for you, according to Rūmī. Everywhere, you will see flowers, smell their fragrances, and so on. If you are not at peace with yourself, the whole world will become

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your enemy, and you will become the enemy of the whole world. You will see in your dreams that you are quarreling with yourself and hurting yourself, and this behavior will build up and distort your whole personality. Everything begins from ourselves. Let us not expect others to change themselves. Let us raise our expectations of ourselves, fix our souls and change our personalities. We will come to real peace with ourselves and take friendship beyond justice. Not only do you have to be just to your friends, the least expected from you, but you must go higher than that. You have to be generous to your friends. To be generous to someone means not to claim your rights, even your justifiable rights. You have to be prepared to pass on them, not to claim them. This is real generosity and real friendship. So many virtues that do not emerge among nonfriends can emerge among friends. In the real meaning assigned to them by Rūmī, friendship and love are beyond religion. In all religions, people expect God to be just to them, but in friendship, you expect God to be a friend to you, and the idea of friendship is far beyond justice.4 That friendship surpasses justice is true not only in human society but between people and God. So let us work together, first to become peaceful with ourselves, make a balance, and drive out the alien things in us, then also to be at peace with our fellow human beings and with our creator. That will be the true meaning of friendship.

Chapter 15

Friends without Borders: A Case Study John Marks

Clearly, friendship alone is not sufficient to overcome enmity between countries. However, friendship can provide a basis for substantial achievements that would almost certainly be impossible without it. Friendship can provide a framework within which problems are solved and constructive action is taken. This chapter presents a personal story and, at the same time, a case study of how friendship can provide a foundation that supports better relations between Iran and the United States.

Developing Track II Relations I am the founder of Search for Common Ground, a nongovernmental organization dedicated to conflict prevention and transformation. In 1994, I had been Search’s president for twelve years. Among other projects, my colleagues and I were sponsoring meetings that convened Arabs, Israelis, Iranians, and Turks—­former ambassadors, generals, think-­tank analysts, human rights activists, and reporters. The goal was to promote peace and cooperation in the Middle East. These meetings started as hardheaded, policy-­oriented sessions, but they became suffused with—­ and driven by—­ friendships. Participants came to genuinely like each other. The tone was set at the first meeting, in Rome, when an Arab participant started to criticize a right-­wing Israeli general. As the tension mounted in the room, a Lebanese participant who had fought with the Palestine Liberation Organization walked across the room, put his arm around the general, and declared, “He is my friend.” Dr. Mohammad Jafar Amir Mahallati, called “Amir,” was an active participant in those meetings. As Amir puts it, “For the first time, I experienced a kind of atmosphere—­a kind of spirit—­in a conference, in a gathering, which 231

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permits people to open themselves up without reservation and speak out of their hearts.” Amir had been the Iranian ambassador to the United Nations and had played a key role in negotiating an end to the Iran-­Iraq War. In 1994, after participating in several of our Middle East workshops, he proposed that we should hold similar meetings between Americans and Iranians. The idea was to bring together well-­placed, unofficial participants from Iran and the United States for facilitated dialogue. At a time when no diplomatic relations existed, Amir felt that we should try to cut through the mistrust and initiate unofficial contact that would bring the two countries together on both the human and the policy levels. I was initially horrified by the idea. The Iran hostage crisis was fresh in my mind, and I must confess that I still held a stereotypical view of Iranians. I knew that Amir’s father was an ayatollah, and deep down (probably like many Americans), I thought that ayatollahs were religious fanatics who exhorted followers to take hostages and shout “Death to America.” But my stereotype disappeared when I met Amir’s father, a wonderfully wise man with an impish smile and a lovely personality. To me, he embodied everything a man of God should be. Amir and I gradually built up enough trust that we were able to become real friends, and that made working together possible. A year after he proposed meetings between Americans and Iranians, I agreed to work with him on that project. At the same time, I kept in mind Ronald Reagan’s old adage “Trust but verify.” Since Amir and I agreed to cooperate twenty years ago, my internal verification detector has never once indicated that I could not trust him. Amir and I set up an ongoing process with the aim of improving relations between the United States and Iran. We created a planning team that included my South African wife, Susan Collin Marks; Search’s executive vice president, a highly skilled facilitator and mediator; and William Kirby, a former deputy assistant secretary of state, who was then heading Search’s Middle East program. We devised a strategy for holding confidential meetings between well-­ placed, unofficial Iranians and Americans. Amir took care of identifying the Iranian participants, who included professors and an official in the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, acting in his private capacity. Bill Kirby and I chose the Americans. One very well known, retired US ambassador refused to participate and warned that we were putting Search for Common Ground at risk by working with Iranians. Still, we persisted, and we were able to enroll a distinguished group that included a former assistant secretary of state, former National Security Council officials, a professor, and retired ambassadors—­one of whom had been held hostage after the seizure of the US embassy in Tehran.

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Planning the meetings was complicated. We had to figure out where to hold them and how to pay for them. We understood that the process probably required a government sponsor, if for no other reason than because the Iranians would need visas to enter most countries, and only a cooperative government could guarantee that visas would be issued. The Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs had previously been a generous supporter of Search’s Middle East initiative, so I approached a top Swedish diplomat. He said that his ministry was willing to support us, but only on the condition that the US State Department did not object. He confided to me that his minister wanted to make sure that if Sweden backed our process, there would be no damage to the country’s relationship with the United States—­as had occurred during the Vietnam War, when intense opposition from Swedish Prime Minister Olaf Palme toward US policy had caused a serious rift. My colleagues and I knew that the State Department would be highly unlikely to formally approve these meetings, so we asked a high-­level US official if he would telephone his Swedish counterpart and informally give a green light. We never knew if the American official cleared the idea with any of his colleagues, but he did make the call and say that the US government would understand if the Swedes went ahead. That communication allayed the Swedish minister’s concerns, and we were in business. The Swedes stipulated that the funds they would contribute for the meetings needed to be paid through a Swedish institute, and we arranged for that. As for a place to meet, they referred us to an isolated country inn in Sjovillian, on a small lake, not too far from Stockholm’s airport. Not only was it a beautiful setting, but we had the whole place to ourselves, which was important in maintaining the confidentiality of our sessions. In the language of diplomacy, unofficial meetings, such as the ones we planned to hold, are known as “Track II” sessions, as opposed to official “Track I” meetings, which involve government representatives. In Track II work, it is not unusual that, to secure participation of well-­connected people who can potentially have an impact on policy, there needs to be tacit agreement from Track I officials. In this case, on the American side, we selectively briefed—­ but did not ask for permission from—­key people in the State Department and the White House. The Iranians were particularly careful about whom they informed, because the simple act of talking to Americans, if discovered, could have put them in danger. Thus, from the beginning, participants needed to be able to trust each other’s good intentions. We held our first meeting in May 1996. Through a friend who worked at the National Security Council, we were able to obtain a private message from President Clinton, saying that he wished our proceedings well. My wife, Susan, facilitated the meetings and quickly created an atmosphere in which the

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Iranian and American participants connected with each other and cut through the sort of stereotyping and demonization that had made me initially wary of Amir. Instead of facing each other as adversaries, participants sat together, facing a shared problem: namely, how to improve relations between the United States and Iran. As the meetings proceeded, participants moved beyond professional connections and formed genuine friendships—­just as Amir and I had done. Today, two decades later, participants are still in touch and continue to work together. Susan’s cofacilitator for the meetings was a Lebanese man who speaks fluent Farsi, and one of his key roles was to find out from the Iranians if and when they had problems with the process. During breaks, he would walk around the scenic lake with the Iranians, and they would let him know what, if anything, was bothering them. Though they knew he was part of the facilitation team and was passing on their complaints, they were willing to talk to him about issues that they did not want to bring up directly with the Americans. For example, at one point, the Iranians felt that the process was one-­sided, because the Americans were asking most of the questions; the Iranians were providing information and were learning much less themselves. This imbalance had not been apparent to the Americans, who were acting out of curiosity about life and politics inside Iran, a society mostly closed to them. After our Farsi-­speaking cofacilitator pointed out the Iranian concern, the American side responded with what they called a “Paula Jones briefing.” At that time, Paula Jones was in the headlines as someone who claimed she had had an intimate relationship with President Bill Clinton, and the “Paula Jones briefing” was a gossipy way of providing the Iranians with an inside scoop of what was happening in Washington. During the first thirteen months of our Track II project, participants came together for three meetings that each lasted for three days. At the third meeting, they reached consensus around a “grand bargain” for improving US-­Iranian relations. Included were ways to deal with issues related to frozen assets, expropriated property, security, narcotics, and culture. Participants felt good about finding common ground, but they were subsequently disappointed when they went home and could not sell their ideas in either country.

Wrestling Diplomacy The group was somewhat dispirited when it returned to Sjovillian in September 1997 for its fourth meeting. At that point, one of the Iranian participants, a university professor, made an exciting proposal. He suggested that one way to

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help break the deadlock might be for Americans to return openly to Tehran, where they had not publicly appeared in almost twenty years. He said that any Americans who came to Iran would be criticized, but those who would be the least criticized would be wrestlers. In Iranian folklore, wrestlers are great mythic heroes, and wrestling is still the most popular sport with the Iranian masses. Taking American wrestlers to Iran seemed like a plausible, culturally appropriate way of not directly confronting but finding a way around the conflict between countries. It was an “aikido strategy,” in the spirit of that Japanese martial art that encourages deflecting and blending with an opponent’s energy. After returning to Washington, I contacted USA Wrestling, America’s national wrestling federation. It turned out that American wrestlers had recently been invited to Tehran to compete for the Takhti Cup, but because of security fears, they were not likely to go. I was able to convince USA Wrestling that it would be safe and desirable to participate, and I offered a partnership in which USA Wrestling would take care of the wrestling, while Search for Common Ground would look after the security and the politics. Wrestling is a minor sport in America, and USA Wrestling envisioned making it into a major one. For that and other reasons, its leadership became willing to send America’s national team to Iran. Once the US State Department quietly passed on word that it had “no objection” to our idea, which meant that it gave tacit approval while maintaining official separation, I set up a meeting between Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations and USA Wrestling leaders. In addition, I secured the support of the Swiss government, which represents American interests in Iran. As a final touch, I was able to provide USA Wrestling with the private cell phone number of the Swiss ambassador in Tehran, who could be called in case of trouble. “Wrestling diplomacy” turned out to be the right project at the right time. After USA Wrestling had made its decision to go, Iranian president Mohammad Khatami gave an interview in which he called for a “dialogue of civilizations.” My colleagues and I wanted to make sure that wrestling would be widely seen as part of that dialogue. In February 1998, I flew to Tehran with the US national wrestling team, and Amir met me there. He showed me around as we discussed how to give maximum exposure to our new venture. A first stop was Tehran’s bazaar, where I bought a small rug and ate lunch at a famous restaurant that featured long, communal tables. Amir ordered Iranian delicacies and translated our interactions for me. Each time a new shopkeeper or trader sat down, Amir introduced me as an American. I was amazed by how pleased the Iranians were to see me.

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In my view, their responses went well beyond politeness, and I witnessed no trace of anti-­American rhetoric. On the following day, the wrestlers were greeted with similar warmth at the arena. There was heavy media coverage, and most of the newspaper, television, and radio pieces focused on the return to Iran of Americans and their flags. The last time the American flag had appeared openly in Tehran was during the hostage crisis, when it had been burned on a daily basis. For a new reality to take hold between Iran and the United States, that image needed to be updated. Obviously, substantive changes were also required. But substance can be affected by a shift in the overall framework in which it is considered. Thanks to “wrestling diplomacy,” the two countries were exposed to very different imagery—­of strong, proud athletes carrying flags and even hugging each other. Through the media, these pictures were seen by tens of millions of people. Shifting metaphors is a key to our Track II diplomatic work. I had never attended a defining sporting event. But for me, the Takhti Cup proved to be just that. There were thirteen thousand spectators packed into an arena with twelve thousand seats. The crowd clearly came to see the Americans. Whenever a US wrestler competed, the place became electric. The crowd was torn between wanting Iranians to win and wanting to show approval of the American guests. So the fans cheered for both. They roared when Zeke Jones won a silver medal and waved the Iranian flag. A moment of disappointment when Kevin Jackson defeated an Iranian opponent was followed by a huge ovation after the two wrestlers shared a long embrace. The fans loved it when Jackson took a victory lap around the arena, high-­fiving spectators as he ran. In the last match of the event, Melvin Douglas wrestled Abbas Jadidi, who narrowly missed a gold medal at the 1996 Olympics because of a referee’s controversial decision. The crowd kept shouting “Ja-­di-­di, Ja-­di-­di.” He was obviously the hometown favorite. He and Douglas faced off in an epic struggle. Neither could gain a real edge, and at the end of regulation time, they were tied at three points each. With only a minute left in overtime, Jadidi managed to get behind Douglas and pick up his legs. Douglas struggled to escape. For twenty agonizing seconds, he showed almost superhuman resolve in not being flipped. Then Jadidi turned over the American and won the match. Exhausted, the wrestlers collapsed on the mat and then quickly rose to hug each other. The crowd screamed the familiar refrain, “Ja-­di-­di, Ja-­di-­di.” But they alternated it with “Doug-­las, Doug-­las.” Carrying a large portrait of the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Jadidi walked to the podium to accept his medal. Douglas followed him, holding a picture of Iran’s current Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The fans roared their approval. The same crowd that, at the

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beginning of the match, had loudly demonstrated disapproval for Ali Akbar Nateq-­Nuri (a defeated presidential candidate who sat in the box of honor) appreciated Douglas’s gesture of respect toward Iran. (I later asked Douglas how he came to carry Khamenei’s picture. He said that Jadidi asked him to, which he did not want to refuse.) After we returned home, President Clinton invited the wrestlers, Bill Kirby, and me to the Oval Office. The Clinton administration wanted to send a positive signal to Iran, and we were happy to be used in this way. Thus, our time with the president was filmed and then transmitted to Iran by satellite television.

Meeting of Hearts and Minds After our organizational euphoria subsided, we faced an operational dilemma. Our meetings in Sweden had been conducted in great secrecy. Then, ironically, our involvement in the wrestling had been widely publicized by the global media. We decided to make a virtue out of necessity and to adopt a two-­track strategy. Henceforth, we decided both to sponsor more public exchanges and to continue to hold back-­channel meetings. During the following years, we organized two Iranian-­American film summits, brought Iranian filmmakers and films to the United States; arranged reciprocal visits of astronauts and scientists; carried out exchanges of environmentalists, academics, and doctors; and cosponsored a traveling exhibit of Iranian art. In all, we sponsored more than forty exchanges and events. As an Iranian professor said, “What [Search for Common Ground] has been doing has had a profound effect on the psyche of both the [Iranian] public and the elite. . . . No other activities have had such an effect.” For better or worse, we became the most active US organization working to build bridges between the two countries. This was underlined in 2000, when the hard-­line Tehran newspaper Letharat—­which did not intend to pay us a compliment—­wrote, Informed sources say that a very important center is active in America, called “Research on Common Grounds” [sic]. . . . Most of the activities in connection with Iran are first planned in that center. The Clinton administration showed considerable interest in improving relations with Iran, but the initiative failed for a variety of reasons. In the wake of 9/11, in 2001 and 2002, the Iranians offered to cooperate to prevent terror-

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ism and worked in tandem with the United States in installing a post-­Taliban government in Afghanistan. But after President George W. Bush asserted that Iran was part of the “axis of evil,” the relationship turned completely sour, and for all practical purposes, official communications between the two governments stopped. When governments are not talking with each other, unofficial, Track II practitioners like us can become important intermediaries. As American-­ Iranian relations worsened, retired ambassador William Green Miller, who has served as our senior advisor since 1998, became a principal conduit between the two countries. Bill had spent five years in Iran as a US diplomat, and President Jimmy Carter had nominated him to be ambassador to Iran in 1979, before the embassy in Tehran was seized. Needless to say, Miller never served in that capacity, but he has proved to be a superb “citizen diplomat” and has established close relationships with numerous well-­placed Iranians. After Mahmoud Ahmadinejad became Iran’s president in 2005, it was virtually impossible for us to get visas to carry out exchanges. On several occasions, we had to cancel trips at the last minute because our Iranian partners were unable to provide necessary authorizations. Consequently, we de-­ emphasized exchanges and concentrated on facilitating communication between high-­level Iranians and Americans.

The Power of Showing Up in Track II Relations In the film Annie Hall, Woody Allen famously said, “Eighty percent of success is showing up.” For nineteen years, we have been showing up, working with friends across national lines, and searching for common ground between Iran and the United States. We were frequently stymied during that time, but our persistence, rooted in friendship, has, on occasion, paid off in unexpected ways. For example, we played a key role in bringing home the three American hikers who had inadvertently crossed the border into Iran in 2009 and were being held in Tehran’s Evin Prison. Their mothers heard about our US-­Iran activities and asked us for help. Bill Miller, in his capacity as a senior consultant for Search for Common Ground, used his regular meetings with Iranian officials to urge the hikers’ release. He kept pushing, probing, and talking. Finally, he arranged travel to Iran for Cardinal Theodore McCarrick (since thoroughly discredited for other reasons), the Catholic archbishop emeritus of Washington, and episcopal bishop John Chane. While the group was changing planes in Istanbul, President Obama called to wish them luck. Bishop Chane

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reported that when they met President Ahmadinejad in Iran, they learned from him that “it was because of our presence that they were able to move the process forward in releasing the hikers.” As a result of our two decades of “showing up” whenever opportunities present themselves, we often know people who can help us move things forward. In April 2014, we were contacted by Grammy-­winning saxophonist Bob Belden, who had a vision of taking his American jazz ensemble, Animation, to Iran. We were able to identify the people in Iran who could make it happen, and Animation became the first US music group of any genre to perform in Iran since 1979. The musicians were received with great enthusiasm by a packed house at the Tehran Opera House. The following week, Bill Miller was in New York meeting with Iranian UN ambassador Gholamali Khoshroo, who suddenly took out his iPad, showed a video of Animation performing in Tehran, and said, “We need symbolic acts of friendship like this one.” He then proceeded to pull out that day’s New York Times, which contained an article about the trip. Not surprisingly, Ambassador Khoshroo had attended one of our meetings, in a previous, unofficial capacity. In other words, he was a friend.

Chapter 16

Global Loneliness and the State of Human Mental Health: How Religion Can Promote Friendship as a Paradigm of Peace in Postmodernity Mohammad Jafar Amir Mahallati Let it be known that friends are the best gain on earth: they are ornament during prosperity, stock-­in-­trade during hardship, and reliable aid during life and the hereafter. Do not miss the opportunity to have them as allies, and seek their companionship and all means to relate to them.1 —­Abdullāh Ibn al-Muqaffa‘ My friend is here with me—­what more should I desire? The riches of our talk are all that I require. . . . They’re quite enough for me.2 —­Khwāja Shamsuddīn Mohammad Ḥāfez Separation between loved ones is one of the things dear to Satan, just as committing sin is dear to him. —­Abu Ḥāmid al-­Ghazālī Of all the fantasies human beings entertain, the idea that we can go it alone is the most absurd and perhaps the most dangerous. We stand together or we fall apart.3 —­George Monbiot

Robert Waldinger, the current director of the Study of Adult Development at Harvard University, has directed a longitudinal study that tracking the health and mental well-­being of a group of 724 American men for seventy-­six years, the longest study on adult life and happiness. On the study’s official website,4 Waldinger, a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and Zen priest, sums up his findings about what the good life actually entails: “Taking care of your body is impor241

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tant, but tending to your relationships is a form of self-­care too. That, I think, is the revelation.”5 Waldinger’s findings brought him to conclude that “close relationships, more than money or fame, are what keep people happy throughout their lives.” The study asserts, “Those ties protect people from life’s discontents, help to delay mental and physical decline, and are better predictors of long and happy lives than social class, IQ, or even genes.” According to the report, “That finding proved true across the board among both the Harvard men and the inner-­city participants.”6 Stressing that “those who kept warm relationships got to live longer and happier, and the loners often died earlier,” Waldinger concludes that “loneliness kills,” adding that “it’s as powerful as smoking or alcoholism.”7 Another scientist, George Vaillant, who joined the same study team in 1966, has come to similar conclusions: “When the study began, nobody cared about empathy or attachment. But the key to healthy aging is relationships, relationships, relationships.”8 Admitting that “it’s easy to get isolated, to get caught up in work and not remembering, ‘Oh, I haven’t seen these friends in a long time,’” Waldinger noted, “So I try to pay more attention to my relationships than I used to.”9 The Harvard study’s conclusion that “loneliness is a killer” directly addresses the relationship between mental health and the human practice of friendship, which is an antithesis for loneliness. Friendship is also a paradigm of societal and international peace. Some recent developments shed more light on how the above equations are gaining increasing international and intrasocietal dimensions. On January 17, 2018, British Prime Minister Theresa May created a ministerial position and appointed a new cabinet member with no precedence anywhere in the world’s geography or history. With the appointment of the new minister of loneliness, the status and the future of friendship studies has changed forever. That field is now transformed from a subject of intellectual, academic, and ethical inquiry into a cutting-­edge field of policy making. It is ironic that the leader of the Brexit government appointed the first minister of loneliness, a remedy plan for a self-­inflicted injury. May’s historic decision came as a result of an official report, from the Jo Cox Commission on Loneliness, titled “UK Must Tackle Loneliness” (issued on December 14, 2017).” The report demonstrated, through concrete evidences, that more than nine million British citizens are suffering from chronic loneliness, with many serious ill effects on their mental and physical health. It is mind-­boggling to note that both the Harvard study and the appointment of a minister for loneliness took place exactly at a historic time when a new global wave of protectionist, isolationist, and separationist political tendencies appeared across the globe, exemplified in Brexit and the ascendance of

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Donald Trump to presidency in the United States. It is quite ironic that health authorities in Western countries began warning against expansive loneliness exactly at the time when politicians in the same countries vouched for protectionist policies that are, in effect, loneliness generating. In short, the same societies that got involved in highly separationist politics notified the whole world that loneliness is a killer disease and called on the world community to look for remedies. Given that background, this chapter argues that among cultural sources that can help societal loneliness, religions have great potential. I argue that Abrahamic religions in general and the Islamic tradition in particular can offer practical measures in promotion of friendship, thereby curbing loneliness and contributing to societal health and global peace.

Applied Friendship: Conceptual Foundations A religious theory of applied friendship can be constructed on seven interrelated principles and premises. First, friendship is a normative criterion that qualifies moral outcomes of religious systems. Second, friendship is a moral linchpin between reason and faith in theory and practice. Third, Abrahamic practical legacy is predicated on friendship. Fourth, eschatological friendship, as defined in Islamic primary sources and as the content of salvation, entails the practice of friendship in this life. Fifth, the human-­divine ethical system of mutual love and mutual engagement is superior to a moral system that bases the dynamics of socioreligious life on the legalistic approach of divine command and human obedience. Sixth, forgiveness and political forgetting, as two imperatives of social and civic friendship, can liberate international and interfaith relations from constructed negative histories and politics of revenge. Seventh, the Qur’ānic moral concept of remembrance of mutual excellence in human-­divine relations is a model for human-­human relations. In this chapter, I present a brief description of all seven of these arguments. Friendship as the Ultimate Determinant and Qualifier of Ideal Religiosity and Moral Society In chapter 4 of the present volume, I discuss that medieval Muslim scholars Miskawayh, al-­Isfahānī, and Ṭūsī are among the top influential scholars of their time who have extensively written on the ethics of friendship. A shared perspective among all three of those ethicists is that religion is a friendly phenomenon. In other words, they maintain that the ultimate purpose of sharī‘a in

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prescribing collective piety rituals, such as congregational prayer and ḥajj, is to promote friendly ties and gregariousness among community members. Sharī‘a’s main function, therefore, is to institutionalize social friendship. Among medieval Muslim scholars, only Abū Ḥayyān al-­Tawḥīdī (d. 1023) has written a whole volume on friendship, Al-­ṣadāqa wa al-­ṣadīq (Friendship and Friend), in which he elaborately engages with friendship as both a moral category and a political one. According to Nuha Alshaar, a scholar of al-­Tawḥīdī, “humanism” and “political philosophy” are the two most conspicuous themes engaged in al-­Tawḥīdī’s work.10 Alshaar maintains that al-­ Tawḥīdī “adds a new image and signification to ṣadāqa (friendship) beyond its conventional meaning, placing it at the center of a moral order which is not found in the existing social context. It promotes moral practices such as companionship, brotherhood, intimacy, caring, protection, sincerity, help, advice, benevolence, and generosity, which specify its universal meaning and make its realization possible.” For al-­Tawḥīdī, Alshaar concludes, friendship “has an inclusive function that transcends exclusionary boundaries of intellectual, religious and ethnic sense.”11 Denoting the extrareligious scope of friendship in al-­Tawḥīdi’s view, Alshaar maintains, “Friendship is not defined by race, social category, authority, or even religion.” “It is,” she adds, “of an intellectual nature based on reason and shared interest.”12 Ṣadāqa can be defined, according to al-­Tawḥīdī, as where knowledge meets revelation—­or, in other words, where Greek philosophy meets Islamic sharī‘a. Alshaar mentions that according to Marc Berge and Mohammad Arkoun, two prominent contemporary scholars, “al-­Tawhīdī’s ideas could play a prominent role in cross-­cultural dialogue and in bridging the gap between Islam and other intellectual traditions in the contemporary world.”13 Al-­Tawḥīdī’s view of friendship diagonally counters a fundamentalist view of religion, which, in a reverse order, subdues ethics to religion and then friendship to ethics. For the fundamentalist project, the practice of friendship is defined as the exclusive expression of political loyalty within a dogmatic organization. That project seeks to deny and delete a substantial part of social and intellectual history from the public memory, to revive a puritan and base society. Even within the limits of that domain, the extents and qualities of friendship are conditioned by other factors, such as the degrees of obedience to authority hierarchies. In short, within a fundamentalist worldview, friendship and its most fundamental quality, free conversation, are limited to dogmatic and organizational loyalties. At best, a fundamentalist friendship leads to an artificial union that, in the view of Ṭūsī, as discussed in chapter 4, is inferior to the natural union that results from true friendship.14

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A friendship confined within and conditioned by parameters of organized religion gives rise to several irresolvable problems. First, because the exercise of piety is unimaginable outside social relations, a fundamentalist worldview limits the manifestation of piety by reducing the permissible domain of friendship. Fewer relations both within a community and between communities will logically lead to fewer piety exercises. Paradoxically, this view goes against the very core value claimed by fundamentalism, maximalization of social religiosity. In effect, even the term religious fundamentalism contradicts itself. One of the philosophical claims of modernity is that ethics must qualify religiosity. In the introduction to this book, I already alluded to Kai Nielsen’s position that “it is not morality that rests on religion but religion on morality.”15 There is more to it, however—­we also need a criterion to choose from a plethora of diverse moral systems.16 Most of the Muslim scholars mentioned in this book suggest that the ultimate moral production of any given society must be advanced social friendships among members of that society. That necessary argument should complete the first half of the equation that defines morality as the litmus test for religiosity. In short, if morality qualifies religiosity, friendship is the ultimate qualifier of both morality and religiosity. Friendship as a Moral Linchpin between Reason and Faith in Theory and Practice A hadith narrated frequently in various Islamic sources (and considered reliable) holds that “friendliness is half of the faith” (al-­tawaddudu niṣfu’l-­īmān).17 Another, more telling hadith emphatically defines friendship within the universal realm of reason: “Friendliness is half of the reason” (al-­tawaddudu niṣfu’l-­ ‘aql).18 These two prophetic traditions together introduce friendship as an existential necessity for a moral society and as a linchpin between faith and reason, an argument that is developed well by al-­Tawḥīdī in Al-­ṣadāqa wa al-­ṣadīq. In full concordance with the above proposition, friendship (ṣadāqa) can be defined, according to al-­Tawḥīdī, as where knowledge meets revelation. Alshaar’s view of why al-­Tawḥīdī looks for scopes, qualities, and foundations of friendship through the prism of actual friendship between Abū Sulaymān al-­Sijistānī, a scholar learned in Greek philosophy, and Ibn Sayyār, a judge learned in sharī‘a, is that they together symbolize the combination of philosophical knowledge and religion as foundations for friendship. Al-­Tawḥīdī’s view is not limited to theoretical perspectives. He extends it to the empirical realm and believes that while scholars and theologians are generally capable of

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friendship, kings of his era and their entourages could not attain true friendship, because of their corrupted characters. They are mighty, above friendship; and this is why its rules are not appropriate for them and its contracts are not fulfilled. Their affairs run on the basis of power [force], oppression, passion, impulsiveness, caprice, and flightiness. Their entourage and their allies resemble them to the highest degree and are as identical to them as possible because they cling to them and claim to be related to them and show an enthusiasm for everything which comes from and returns to them.19 As Alshaar emphatically mentions, the preceding statement does not deny the possibility of friendship to political entities, only to corrupt ones. Theoretically, only governance, which combines philosophy and sharī‘a, can incite social perfection and harmony. Focusing on political philosophy, Alshaar argues that for Aristotle, friendship, or philia, “encompasses social cooperation without which humanity cannot realize itself, and from this comes Aristotle’s idea of civil friendship, giving people something to like about each other, and to benefit from each other.” People “do not necessarily need,” adds Alshaar, “to love each other as best friends in order to live together in a city. The focus is on the existence of society rather than harmony.” Ṣadāqa, however, “has a different scope,” Alshaar concludes, “since it is based on reason, which differentiates it from philia, and is assigned a different function than other forms of sociability. It is understood as a higher stage of perfection for religious and social community reform. It is thus not only necessary for society to exist . . . but to exist well. As such, it introduces a new category of loyalty-­based continuity in society at all levels.”20 Al-­Tawḥīdī’s political philosophy on the source of power of accumulated social friendship resonates well with Hannah Arendt’s distinction between power and force. For Arendt, free conversation among friends creates a power that is different from authoritarian force. Al-­Tawḥīdī states, Harmony and unity would bring in a friend and a friend, then a second and a third, then the young and the old, the obeying and obeyed, governor and governed, one neighbor after another, quarter after quarter, and country after country, until it reaches the valleys and the highlands and spreads wide over the nearest or farthest [place]. Only then will you perceive the magnificent Word of God and the highest way to obey Him.21

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In short, friendship, as the highest manifestation of the divine order, is the linchpin between reason and faith. Symbolically, it is a road that connects Athens to Jerusalem—­a road where Aristotle meets Abraham. Abrahamic Prophets as Paragon Role Models in Friendship Turning to the Qur’ān, we may ask whether friendship must be limited and defined by a belief system. Two Qur’ānic verses reflect on Abraham’s prayers asking God to forgive all those who defied Abraham in his struggles against idolatry. One verse quotes Abraham, ‘My Lord! Indeed, they have misled many people. So whoever follows me indeed belongs to me, and as for someone who disobeys me, well, You are indeed All-­Forgiving, All-­Merciful” (14:36). In the next verse, Abraham seeks divine forgiveness for his relatives and all believers on Judgment Day: “Our Lord! Forgive me and my parents, and all the faithful, on the day when the reckoning is held” (14:41). These verses reveal that Abrahamic mediation/intercession sought universal forgiveness for believers and nonbelievers alike. Although religious conformism is mentioned as a cause for “belonging” to Abraham, the disobedient are also left with nothing less than God’s attribute of forgiveness; Abraham does not ask for their punishment. Perhaps, in addition to his hospitality, the magnanimous attitude of Abraham to “others” contributed to granting Abraham the honorific title al-­Khalīl (the Friend). But do the verses just cited define friendship within an extrareligious moral context? Beyond situations of war and existential threats, organizational divide between the various Abrahamic faiths must not, according to the Qur’ān, be a cause against interfaith friendship. It may be that Allah will bring about between you and those with whom you are at enmity affection [friendship], and Allah is all-­powerful, and Allah is all-­forgiving, all merciful. Allah does not forbid you in regard to those who did not make war against you on account of religion and did not expel you from your homes, that you deal with them with kindness and justice. Indeed, Allah loves the just. Allah forbids you only in regard to those who made war against you on account of religion and expelled you from your homes and supported [others] in your expulsion, that you make friends with them, and whoever makes friends with them—­it is they who are wrongdoers (60:7–­9).

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According to these verses, nothing impedes Muslims from befriending “people of the Book”—­namely, Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, and, according to some Qur’ānic exegetical accounts, even Buddhists—­provided that there is mutual respect for each party’s basic rights and liberties. The Qur’ān significantly introduces Abraham as both the first Muslim and God’s friend (al-­Khalīl). “Abraham,” the Qur’ān asserts, “was neither a Jew nor a Christian, but he was one inclining toward truth, a Muslim [submitting to Allah]. And he was not of the polytheists” (3:12). In the Qur’ān, therefore, the word Muslim does not refer to membership in an organized religion. It denotes the very action of submitting to God. Thus, the disciples of Jesus are also called Muslims: “But when Jesus felt [persistence in] disbelief from them, he said, ‘Who are my supporters for [the cause of] Allah?’ The disciples said, ‘We are supporters for Allah. We have believed in Allah and testify that we are Muslims [submitting to Him]’” (3:52). The preceding verses demonstrate that the Qur’ānic reference to Prophet Muḥammad as “the first Muslim” (39:12) applies not in a universal sense but within the circumstantial framework of his contemporary society. While most of the information about the reason(s) for which Abraham received his honorific title al-­Khalīl is provided by hadith literature, a Qur’ānic passage sheds some light on the matter: “And who is better in religion than one who submits himself to Allah while being a doer of good and follows the religion of Abraham, inclining toward truth? And Allah took Abraham as an intimate friend” (4:125). As Ahmad Obiedat explains when discussing the etymological roots of khalīl , “The friendship that the khalīl feels is composed of minute things that go between tight spaces, or, rather, it is so circumventing and penetrating that it goes into every sensing neuron in one’s body.”22 In this sense, Abraham’s friendship with God and Muslim identity make him a perfect role model who brings to culmination the sense and primacy of intimacy and the relationship between faith and friendship. Some hadith sources provide more details about possible causes of this honor, as reflected in works of Qur’ānic exegesis. According to a classical exegete, Abū’l-­Futūḥ Rāzī (d. after 1157), Abraham received the honorific title because he bestowed all his wealth upon people, his son upon God, his body upon fire for God’s sake, and his soul upon the beloved, keeping nothing for himself.23 Moḥammad Ḥossein Ṭabāṭabā’ī, a contemporary exegete, reformulates that explanation into a more concise phrase: “Al-­Khalīl never rejected any demand for help and never demanded anything from anyone except God.”24 Such generosity and compassion ultimately earned him the title “the Friend.”

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Abraham was not the only prophet who received a title related to friendship. The last of the Abrahamic chain of prophets, Prophet Muḥammad, is addressed by the Qur’ān as the companion of believers (ṣāḥib)25 and by tradition as Ḥabīb Allah (the Beloved of God). A verse in the Qur’ān introduces the Prophet as the role model whose guidance will make every follower a beloved of God: “Say, ‘In case you (really) love Allah, then closely follow me, (and) Allah will love you and forgive you your guilty (deeds); and Allah is Ever-­ Forgiving, Ever-­Merciful’” (3:31). According to that verse, the very person of the Prophet is a gate through which all his followers are able to establish a mutual love relationship with God that is superior to other categories of human-­ divine relationships, such as those governed by divine command and natural law, as defined by Edward Vacek.26 This verse provides a Qur’ānic basis for the title Ḥabīb Allah as the seal of prophecy and establishes human-­divine love as the highest goal of the last prophet in the Abrahamic chain. According to Islamic Sunni tradition, the Prophet’s successor, as the first caliph, was also given the friendship-­related honorific title al-­Ṣiddīq (the Friend). Abū Bakr (d. 634) was given that title because of his close friendship with the Prophet. According to Shi‘i sources, the Prophet’s son-­in-­law and the fourth Muslim caliph, ‘Alī b. Abī Ṭālib, also had a friendship-­related title, Walī-­Allah (friendly ally to God).27 A widely used Shi’i supplication text, Zīārati Wārith (The Visitation of the Inheritor), which references the chain of all major Abrahamic prophets by their most significant titles, salutes al-­Husayn (the Shi’i martyred third imām and the Prophet’s grandson) with the words “O the inheritor of Abraham, familiar beloved friend of Allah! O the inheritor of Muḥammad, the select most beloved friend of Allah!” and “O the inheritor of ‘Alī, the commander of the faithful, and Allah’s close ally and deputy!”28 Titles used for Abraham, Muḥammad, Abū Bakr, and ‘Alī—­namely, Khalīl-­Allah, Ṣahib, Ḥabīb-­Allah, al-­Ṣiddiq, and Walī-­Allah—­are all alternatives for various qualities of friendship with God.29 One may ask whether such titles were given to these figures because of their characteristically friendly qualities or because these titles refer to friendship as a philosophy of religion symbolized in an honorific title of the highest order under which Abrahamic prophets performed. I argue for both these cases and propose that these titles represent many virtues that their holders enjoyed and that helped them act in the higher realm of bounty (faḍl). In short, I argue that the concept of friendship as a mode of ethics superior to justice (faḍl) is manifested in the very titles of the founder and the sealer of Abrahamic faith and that this was not accidental. The message was the primacy of friendship. The personas of these prophets also became the ideal manifestations of the mutual tie between faith and friend-

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ship, a concept that we have seen highly emphasized in various Qur’ānic verses. In role ethics, a prominent moral school among various cultures, human role models become central in the formation of normative standards in specific societies. For Qur’ānic audiences, therefore, both Abraham and Muḥammad, certainly ideal role models, should be emulated in their best qualities. In short, the very characters and honorific titles of both the founder and the sealer of Abrahamic faiths make an unfriendly Muslim a living oxymoron. Friendship as Paradise: An Eschatological Perspective with Practical Implications The proverbial prophetic hadith “This life is the cultivation land for hereafter” (al-­dunyā mazra‘atu’l-­ākhira) is one of the most frequently used aphoristic wisdoms in all Muslim societies. In essence, it means that the eschatological expectation of Muslims should be directly predicated on their course of action in this life. Therefore, a believer must cultivate friendship in order to harvest friendship in the afterlife. In other words, without practicing friendship in this life, one cannot attain any level of friendship in the next. Moreover, based on a number of Qur’ānic verses (including those discussed in chapter 6 of the present volume), the realm of paradise and the realm of hellfire cannot be defined outside concepts of friendship and loneliness/animosity, respectively. The preceding propositions transform friendship from a moral option into an imperative wisdom. The association of the concept of paradise with companionship is well attested by several verses in the Qur’ān, as discussed in chapter 6. I have also demonstrated that according to several Qur’ānic verses, heavenly companionship for human beings is cosmic and not limited to human-­human relations only, extending to human-­angelic ones as well. Friendship as paradise is reaffirmed in Qur’ānic scripture by identifying hellfire with loneliness and animosity, which are exact antonyms of friendship. In his review of Gnostic Qur’ānic exegesis in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, William Chittick has paid important attention to the view of Khwāja Abdullāh Anṣārī on the salvific function of friendship. Chittick notes that according to Anṣārī and based on a hadith, “no matter how well or badly someone may perform his religious obligation, ‘A man will be with the one he loves [or befriends].’”30 As Chittick notes, in the view of the prominent eleventh-­ century Qur’ānic exegete, “people will be judged  .  .  . by their choice of friends.”31 A few passages by Anṣārī on the biworldly significance of friend-

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ship are telling and show how, in Chittick’s words, “to love is to actualize a divine attribute.” Anṣārī writes, A man is with his friend and goes forth on his path. . . . Even if he cannot be like him in inward presence, togetherness, and friendship with God, he will be with him in effort, seriousness, and worship, and he will desire his station. Hence he will be with him in what he is able to do with his steps and what he cannot reach with his breath. In desire, love, and eagerness, he will be with him. He will reach what his own hands and capacity can reach, and through friendship and love he will reach what he himself cannot reach. Hence he will be with the one he loves both today and tomorrow. . . . Friendship is not in the heart, but in the spirit. . . . Living with the friend is life. Being held back from the friend is to be held back from living spirit. . . . He who lives through the living spirit lives through water and bread, and he who lives through the Friend lives for ever. . . . One mark of friendship is that in every state the friend is with the friend, breathing the same breath in happiness and sorrow. . . . He [God] said to those who claimed friendship that if you want friendship with God, strive in following so that you may reach friendship: Say “If you love God, follow me; God will love you” [Q 3:31].32 The spirit of the preceding passage is not far from Aristotle’s conclusion that friendship is both the goal and the way of life. The eschatological significance of friendship in an Islamic worldview, which ties the extent and the quality of friendship to one’s eternal life, enhances it as an existential and monumental imperative. As William Blake has eloquently put it, “The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship.” If paradise is friendship, if a believer’s endeavor toward salvation is a rational duty, and if one cannot attain any eschatological advance without efforts toward the same field in the present life, friendship becomes the most rational and highest moral activity, both individually and collectively. Friendship as the Ultimate Model for Human-­Divine Relations Many Sufi schools in Islam, just like the majority of Christian theological schools, have focused on human-­divine relations in the framework of agape, with its one-­ sided and sacrificial characteristics. Nevertheless, important thoughts in classical Sufism focus on the bilateral, philial friendship in human-­

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divine relations. The spirit of these thoughts is perhaps best formulated in the following prophetic hadith: I swear by Him in whose hand is my soul, if you were a people who did not commit sin, Allah would take you away and replace you with a people who would sin and then seek Allah’s forgiveness so He could forgive them.33 A twelfth-­century Sufi commentator of the Qur’ān, Abd al-­Karīm Sam‘ānī (d. 1167), expresses the same idea in different words: “The great ones of the religion have said: ‘It may happen that sin becomes the cause of reaching God. Do you not see that the hoopoe reached conversation with Solomon through that?’”34 Elsewhere, Sam‘ānī points at a hadith where God reveals the monumental scale of forgiveness: “O intellects! Be dazzled by my artisanry. When I call to account, I take to task iota by iota. When I act with indulgence, I overlook mountain upon mountain.”35 The preceding statements provide an alternative to the obedience-­centric theology of divine command, which regulates human affairs through threats and temptations. The alternative is based on the relations-­centric theology of mutual love. The first theology draws from the paradigm of force, the second from love. In the first, God punishes disobedience; in the second, he warns against disengagement. In the first, the ultimate goal in the act of human obedience is eschatological rewards; the second goes beyond punishment and rewarding and looks for advancement in human-­divine mutual friendship. The second, love-­based perspective, which made mysticism an alternative to ascetic Islam and its traces that go back to the eighth-­century Sufi practitioner Rābi‘a al-­‘Adawīyya (d. 808), looks at sin and forgiveness not as a closed circle but, rather, as an excuse to establish intimate relations between God and human beings. Contemporary Christian scholar Edward Vacek expresses similar ideas in a different theological context. Focusing on the quality of mutuality in philia, Vacek reemphasizes, “In philia, as in all love, we love our beloveds. But in philia, we love them not for their own sake, as separate individuals, nor for our sake (nor for the sake of yet another party), but for the sake of the mutual relationship we share with them.”36 Although Vacek’s focal debate is within the realm of Christianity, his argument carries a strong resonance in Sufi Islam. He is critical of the fact that “agapic love is, if not exclusive to Christianity, surely characteristic of it.”37 He complains that a large number of Christian theolo-

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gians systematically overlook many parts of the Bible to give prominence to sacrificial love at the cost of mutual human-­divine friendship. Vacek invites his readers to rethink a couple of biblical passages in the frame of philial relationships: “God, who used to speak to Moses face to face, says to Moses, ‘This request, too, which you have made, I will carry out because . . . you are my intimate friend’ (Ex 3:11–­12).” He adds, “At the end of his public life, he [Jesus] renames his relation to the disciples: ‘I no longer speak of you as slaves. . . . Instead I call you friends’ (Jn 15:14–­15).”38 The central point of those passages is the mutuality of the human-­divine relationship. In Vacek’s view, this mutuality has four parts that can be broadly defined as “(1) a form of sharing life (2) through interaction of free persons (3) who communicate themselves to one another (4) in a way that is progressively involving.” Vacek’s concluding criticism is telling. Philosophy and theology often reflect on our moral lives as if we were isolated individuals performing isolated acts aimed at other isolated individuals. A theological focus on agape or eros without philia tends to feed this individualism. Most of our daily moral acts, however, have to do with our communal relationships. We belong to special relationships, are loyal to special others, and enact special roles. Friendship, trust, and loyalty are essential in our daily lives.39 Vacek’s criticism has significant relevance to a traditional juristic reading of the Qur’ān, which predominantly looks at the human-­divine relationship in the context of command and obedience. But the Qur’ān provides many philosophically overlooked passages and conceptual frameworks that expound on human-­divine mutual friendship. For example, as much as God expects human beings to be thankful and exercise gratitude, he is mutually a thankful God. A verse from the Qur’ān points out this mutuality: “Why should Allah punish you if you give thanks and be faithful? And Allah is appreciative, all-­knowing” (4:147). Forgiveness: An Imperative for Social and Private Friendships Forgiveness, both divine and human, is a central concept in Abrahamic traditions. In Islam, in addition to the vast epistemological approach to various degrees of forgiveness, there are a number of forgiveness institutions, one of which, ḥajj, is important enough to be included among the faith’s standard Five

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Pillars. As a once-­in-­a-­lifetime obligatory pilgrimage with the central function of seeking both eschatological and human forgiveness, ḥajj also plays an important role in developing universal friendship among pilgrims. Ḥajj is a reenactment of the tradition of Abraham, a prophet who, as mentioned earlier in this chapter, received the honorific title al-­Khalīl (the Friend [of God]) in biblical sources. Within the Qur’ānic moral structure, forgiveness and mercy are attributes of Allah that save the penitent from the retribution of justice on Judgment Day. The Qur’ān contains many terms that address multiple forgiving attributes of God and, therefore, convey various degrees and conditions by which individuals and groups of people could be subject to Allah’s mercy. Among these Qur’ānic terms are ghāfir, “the Forgiving”; ghaffār, “ever–­Forgiving”; ghafūr, “all-­Forgiving”; ‘afuww, “the Effacer of sins”; and raḥīm, “the Merciful.” Various interpretations and implications of God’s forgiveness are discussed well by Moucarry, who likewise suggests that God’s forgiveness takes place in a moral space of friendship, superior to justice, because God does not seek any benefits for his forgiveness. Accordingly, divine forgiveness is a measure and manifestation of God’s friendship toward human beings. This point is addressed well by Qur’ānic exegete al-­Rāzī, who argued, “Everyone except You [God] forgive in order to be praised, to be rewarded or to get rid of painful feelings. In short, people forgive either to gain an advantage or to set themselves from something harmful. As for You [God], You forgive your servants for no other purpose or reward than bestowing Your favor [faḍl] and generosity.”40 The productive relationship between friendship and forgiveness appears in many Qur’ānic verses with an unequivocal language. One verse presents this interconnection at a foundational, moral level: “Say, [O Muḥammad], ‘If you should love Allah, then follow me, [so] Allah will love you and forgive you your sins. And Allah is Forgiving and Merciful’” (3:31). According to that verse, love for God will be reciprocated by God’s love, which grants forgiveness to the lover. But as other verses demonstrate, the relationship between love and forgiveness is not linear. In the same Christian spirit with which Donald Shriver addresses forgiveness as a community builder,41 the Qur’ān also reflects on forgiveness as a cause for community building (applied friendship). One verse reads, “And it was by God’s grace that you [O Prophet] did deal gently with your followers: for if you had been harsh and hard of heart, they would indeed have broken away from you. Pardon them, then, and pray that they be forgiven. And take counsel with them in all matters of public concern; then, when you have decided upon a course of action, place your trust in God: for, verily, God loves those who place their trust in Him” (3:159). As a com-

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munity/friendship builder, forgiveness functions, according to the Qur’ānic injunction, as a foundation for a viable society. This perspective serves as Qur’ānic support for Hannah Arendt’s conceptualization of political forgiveness as a pillar of a durable society.42 Various scopes and degrees of forgiveness are suggested throughout the Qur’ān, in different forms and, on many occasions, in relation to binary divine attributes, such as ghafūrun raḥīmun (all-­Forgiving Merciful) and ‘afūwwun ghafūrun (the Effacer of sin, the all-­Forgiving). While mercy and forgiveness could only be defined within the broader space of God’s bounty, one verse from the Qur’ān specifies the connection between God’s forgiveness and friendship: “Plead with your Lord for forgiveness,” the prophet Shu‘ayb appealed to his people, “then turn to Him penitently. My Lord is indeed all-­ merciful, all-­affectionate (wadūd)” (11:90). In that verse, God’s mercy and friendship are put on the same level, the former concept as a characteristic of the latter. Two Qur’ānic verses signify this relationship more clearly. “If we wish,” one verse points out to Prophet Muḥammad, “We would take away what We have revealed to you. Then you would not find for yourself any defender against Us, except a mercy from your Lord. Indeed, His grace [faḍl] has been great upon you” (17:86–­87). As other verses in the Qur’ān point out, God’s grace has not been an exclusive privilege for the Prophet. Rather, despite the unthankful majority of human beings, the whole of humanity has been subject to that grace. One verse says, “Indeed Allah is gracious to mankind, but most of them do not give thanks” (10:60). A few other verses in the same chapter then define the relationship between God’s mercy, friendship, and eternal happiness: “Look! The friends of Allah will indeed have no fear nor will they grieve. Those who have faith, and are Godwary. For them is good news in the life of this world and in the Hereafter (There is no altering the words of Allah). That is the great success” (10:62–­64). This formula clearly establishes that God’s all-­embracing mercy provides the possibility of forgiveness, resulting in eternal amnesty and security by the perpetual removal of fear and grief. That process leads to the ultimate and unwavering success that is eternal happiness. One can conclude from the preceding verses that justice alone cannot provide happiness; we need a justice-­plus (faḍl) realm of ethics, both in this life and in the next. The relationship between God’s mercy and bounty suggests the superiority of mercy over punitive justice in the greater space of benevolence, that is, friendship. Once forgiveness is established in the Qur’ānic context as a defining attribute of God and as a manifestation of his bounty in vertical, human-­ divine relationship, the scripture shows its application in horizontal, human-­

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human relations. This application is reflected in the Qur’ānic master narratives, including those related to the prophet Abraham. Within the expansive, epistemological realm of forgiveness in the Qur’ān, the binary term ‘afūwwun ghafūrun (the Effacer of sin, the all-­Forgiving) offers eschatological forgetting as the highest degree of divine forgiving. ‘Afw (forgiving punishment), ṣafḥ (a higher level of forgiveness through dropping all excuses for a sinful act), and ghufrān (covering up the very act of sin) are introduced by Qur’ānic exegetes as various levels of forgiveness, including forgetting.43 All three terms appear together in the following verse: “O you who have believed, indeed, among your wives and your children are enemies to you, so beware of them. But if you pardon, overlook and forgive—­then indeed, Allah is Forgiving and Merciful” (64:4). Many medieval Muslim ethicists were cognizant that forgiveness is an integral part of the ideal friendship in both private and public realms. In clear terms, al-­Tawḥīdī alludes to forgiveness as an imperative for friendship. Commenting on al-­Tawḥīdī, Alshaar writes, “Forgiveness is an important act for the ruler-­friend, just as it is for anyone else; without it man is at risk of living a solitary life. It is a means to reducing hatred, purifying one’s soul.” Forgiveness “associated with friendship,” Alshaar adds, “is the way to reduce conflicts and social tensions between different groups.” As Alshaar notes, al-­Tawḥīdī “quotes a Bedouin saying that the most generous companion among people is the one who forgives someone’s fault even if he is unjustly treated, and who extends excuses for others.”44 A reliable prophetic hadith accentuates the significance of forgiveness as an instrumental and effective means of preserving friendship. It shows that the prophetic tradition regards supreme generosity in forgiveness as a standard attribute in a society obliged to preserve a maximum level of friendship. Referring to the hadith, al-­Ghazālī writes, It has been said that you should seek seventy excuses for your brother’s misdeed, and if your heart will accept none of them you should turn the blame upon yourself, saying to your heart: ‘How hard you are! Your brother pleads seventy excuses, yet you will not accept him. You are the one at fault, not your brother!’ Even if it appears impossible to see things in a good light you ought not to get angry, if you can help it, though this may be asking too much.45 Al-­Ghazālī posits friendship above kinship, which carries two important implications. First, based on prophetic tradition, al-­Ghazālī emphasizes that because

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fellowship is more valuable than blood relations, it must be protected and preserved at least as much as one is obliged to care for kin. Second, he defines friendship as a sacred contract, just like marriage, the annulling of which, as Prophet Muḥammad is quoted as stipulating in many hadith sources, is the most despised legal action in Islam. Al-­Ghazālī emphatically points out that as much as severing kinship relations is warned against in Islamic tradition, severing ties of long-­standing friendships could cause harm. “[I]t is said that kinship,” asserts al-­Ghazālī, “needs affection, but affection has no need of kinship.” He reports, “Ja‘far al-­ Ṣādiq (may God be pleased with him!) said: ‘The affection of a day is a link. That of a month is kinship. That of a year is a blood-­tie. If anyone cuts it, God will cut him off.’” Al-­Ghazālī maintains, “Fulfillment of the contract of brotherhood is obligatory, once it has been concluded.”46 To reemphasize the normative abhorrence of severing friendship, al-­Ghazālī reminds his readers, “Separation between loved ones is one of the things dear to Satan, just as the commission of sin is dear to him.”47 In the preceding statements, al-­Ghazālī keeps the vice of severance of friendships on the border between sharī‘a law and ethics, while he places all the negative implications for it at the level of serving Satan. His strong, normative tone brings forgiveness close to an obligation as a means of preserving friendship. One can extend al-­Ghazālī’s view of friendship from the realm of private to public and collective relations and even claim that because of its vast societal and negative ramifications, severing relations between communities and countries is a far greater sin in Islam than a similar act in private relations. Consequently, mutual forgiveness in international relations becomes key in preserving good relations and is thus a significant collective virtue and a moral necessity. Negative History: How Forgetting Can Facilitate Friendship Fortunately, the concept of forgiveness in politics is now a thriving perspective in contemporary peacemaking literature, with substantial contributions by religious sources. Still quite new in the field, however, is volitional forgetting. Among recent authors in the field, David Rieff provides elaborate justification for forgetting, in his In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies.48 Rieff offers an alternative view to a paradigm known universally as “Forgive but do not forget.” Paulo Coelho has formulated the logic for this paradigm in a proverbial phrase: “Forgive but do not forget, or you will be hurt again. Forgiving changes the perspectives. Forgetting loses the lesson.” Criti-

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cal of this logic, Rieff argues that “historical importance of an event in its own time and in the decades that follow offers no guarantee that it will be remembered in the next century, let alone for many centuries after.”49 For Rieff, “reigniting pieties about remembrance” is neither a moral imperative nor an empirically useful exercise in the course of history or collective relations.50 “We can still admire the Iliad and Cicero, the Pantheon and Acropolis, and be inspired by their force and beauty,” Rieff stresses, “but only in a form stripped of any authority over our moral and political imaginations.”51 Impressed by the theoretical view that Maurice Halbwachs had of social collective memory, Rieff agrees with him that every time a society reconstructs its past, it deforms it at the same time. Additionally, Rieff holds, “To say that collective memory is a social construct, however, tells us little or nothing about the moral character of such remembrance.”52 Citing a statement from Jacque Le Goff, Rieff supports Goff’s position about the need to “ensure that collective memory contributes to the liberation rather than the enslavement of mankind.”53 For Rieff, “We have entered a world in which the essential function of collective memory is one of legitimizing a particular worldview and political and social agenda, and delegitimizing those of one’s ideological opponents.”54 Rieff emphatically stresses that unlike the situation in the 1970s, states no longer have monopoly in shaping collective memory. “Now,” he points out, “it is up for grabs, with ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities challenging traditional mainstream accounts and seeking to modify them if not to transform them entirely.”55 Rieff navigates many complex philosophical, ethical, and political questions that are laid among three opposite stances proverbially formulated by Nietzsche, Santayana, and Ricoeur. “Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time,” Nietzsche maintains, “is a function of power, not of truth.”56 Santayana asserts, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Ricoeur gives Santayana’s position a moral accent: “We must remember because remembering is a moral duty. We owe a debt to the victims. . . . By remembering and telling, we . . . prevent forgetfulness from killing the victims twice.”57 Rieff has no problem accepting the moral and practical benefits of remembering by an individual. But by presenting numerous cases of governmental engineering of collective memory in various cultures, he expresses serious reservations toward the selectivity of such memories at the service of political agendas. Such agendas overlook the distinction made by Karl Jaspers “between moral guilt based on what one has done,” Rieff notes, “and moral guilt based on who one is.”58 When comprehensive, impartial, and universal collective remembering is impossible, how—­through which narrative and on

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what normative bases—­can one decide which human tragedy should be retold? Based on empirical observations, Rieff rejects the validity of Santayana’s position holding that remembrance of tragedies will prevent their reoccurring. “Auschwitz did not inoculate us against East Pakistan in 1971, or East Pakistan against Cambodia under Khmer Rouge, or Cambodia under Khmer Rouge against Hutu Power in Rwanda in 1994.”59 The list can continue, of course—­ with many more tragedies in Bosnia, Syria, and Iraq under Daesh (ISIS) or in Yemen under Saudi bombs. As a Persian proverb holds, “Impartial injustice to all is a type of justice.”60 It is the worst justice one can imagine. But perhaps Rieff’s main argument is based on his concern that selective collective memory engineered and advocated by political entities is short of attaining even a minimum justice. The most significant implication of Rieff’s advocacy of political forgetting may be his amendment to the widely believed stance that durable peace cannot be attained without attaining justice first. In the world as it is, peace and justice can sometimes be inimical to each other. This reality should be cause for mourning: it certainly was for the victims of a war such as the relatives and friends of the eight thousand Bosnian men and boys massacred at Srebrenica, where the failure to secure justice for them has inflicted a moral affront in addition to all that they have already suffered. Still, those who insist that there can be no lasting peace without justice blind themselves to reality. The sad fact is that history is replete with outcomes that provided the first while denying the second. When General Pinochet stepped down in 1990, for instance, thus clearing the way for Chile’s return to democracy, it was clear that justice had been not done. But the demand for democracy seemed more compelling to more Chileans who had opposed Pinochet (if not necessary to all the families of Pinochet’s victims) than did the demand for justice. At the time, what appeared to be a grant of immunity to Pinochet seemed like a price worth paying. That a measure of justice was finally done eight years later when Judge Garzon handed down his indictment cannot change the earlier injustice. But put the case that Pinochet had never been indicted and arrested. In a hundred years, how many Chileans are likely to look back on the transition from dictatorship to democracy in Chile in the 1990s and conclude that impunity for Pinochet had been an intolerable price to pay for their country’s freedom?61

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In Rieff’s view, peace does not need to wait for justice, although justice is very important on its own normative ground. For him, collective urges for justice and their connection to collective memory define both memory and justice as elements of sacred equations. Citing Pierre Nora, Rieff affirms Nora’s statement that “memory instills remembrance within the sacred; history, always prosaic, releases it again.” In other words, sometimes memory functions as nostalgia, and such nostalgia is at times so strong that it leads to, in the words of Svetlana Boym cited by Rieff, “the dictatorship of nostalgia.”62 Rieff’s argument explains, for example, why the Iran-­Iraq War was prolonged for eight years without either side winning. The paradigm of “justice before peace” overlooks the opportunity cost of potentials for friendships in collective relations. Is voluntary forgetting possible, for the sake of universal friendship? Rieff notes two sides of the argument with two positions: Philip Roth’s statement “Remember to forget” and Avishai Margalit’s view that “forgetting cannot be voluntary.”63 “A socially constructed community of forgetting,” Rieff argues, is “neither less artificial, more to the point, nor less imaginable” than the community of remembrance. To define forgetting as the opposite of justice does injustice to both concepts, because a hasty and disproportional punitive justice, as was the case in the conclusion of World War I, may lead to a far greater injustice later. Therefore, forgetting cannot be considered as an antonym of justice. When negative memory between two communities becomes an agent of national identity, it is hardly imaginable that these communities can overcome chronic resentments and move toward neutrality—­or let blood dry. Many times in the course of history, a compound of apology, forgiveness, and forgetting was necessary before two wounded collective entities could transform a cold war to a cold and then friendly peace. Rieff’s theory of forgetting provides many important details relevant to modern life. However, his theoretical framework permits a conversation between him, al-­Ghazālī, and Fayḍ Kāshānī, whose Ulfatnāma advises his fellow countrymen, “Friendliness will result in intimacy, and intimacy helps consensus in economic management . . . , and intimacy entails friendship that is the ultimate kindness based on closeness of souls and hearts, and friendship leads to brotherhood. So if kindness does not form naturally, it must be formed gradually through good politics with the hope that it becomes natural. So my fellows in religion and seekers of God’s happiness, let’s educate ourselves about the art of kindness . . . , forgo blaming others in humility, overlook each other’s shortcomings, errors and mistakes, perhaps [then] we can gradually attain friendliness.”64

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Positive Memory: Searching for Mutual Excellence in Human-­ Divine and Human-­Human Relations David Rieff’s excellent critique of selective collective memory is totally focused on negative intracommunal and intercommunal history. He has no say on positive history and collective remembrance. A good part of Rieff’s advocacy for forgetting—­if not his entire stance—­does not apply to positive remembrances, even those purposefully engineered by politics. Rieff has only provided half of the necessary response to expediencies of strategic and friendly peace. Forgetting negative histories can only bring us to intercommunal disinterest and neutrality. Collective positive relations require an accumulated positive remembrance. Ethically speaking, little logical critique may be laid against someone who desires to be charitable to a specific person or group of people through acts on a justice-­plus moral plane. No one criticizes a charitable organization for favoritism if its acts are not at the cost of justice for others. Positive memory, or remembering past occasions of good relations, can be a key to friendship making, both between individuals and between collective entities, such as states. Its effects can be discussed on secular and religious planes alike. When it comes to the realm of theology, there are many instances where believers are encouraged to emulate God’s attributes. Perhaps most pertinent to the present discussion is the realm in which such emulation provides a strong and universal conceptual framework for applied friendship in human-­human relations. This realm is a moral paradigm that can be called “shared excellence in mutual positive remembrance.” To understand this concept, we need to pay careful attention to the following Qur’ānic verses: And follow the best of what was revealed to you from your Lord, before the punishment overtakes you suddenly while you are unaware. Lest anyone should say, “Alas for my negligence in the vicinage of Allah! Indeed I was among those who ridiculed.” (39:55–­56)65 He said, “O Moses! Verily I have chosen you above mankind through My messages and My speaking [unto thee]. So take that which I have given thee, and be among the thankful.” And We wrote for him upon the Tablets an exhortation concerning all things, and an elaboration of all things. “Take hold of them with strength, and command thy people to hold to the best of them. Soon I shall show thee the abode of the iniquitous.” (7:145–­46) And whosoever comes with the truth and confirms it, it is they who are

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reverent. With their Lord they shall have whatsoever they will—­that God may absolve them of the worst of that which they have done and render onto them their reward for the best of that which they used to do. Does not God suffice His servant? (39:34–­37)66 Whoever acts righteously, [whether] male or female, should he/she be faithful, We shall revive him/her with a good life and pay them their reward by the best of what they used to do. (16:97)67 Those are they from whom We accept the best of what they do, and overlook their evil deeds. (They are) among the owners of the garden. This is the true promise, which they were promised (in the world). (46:16)68 The preceding verses can be summarized as follows: when you act according to the highest moral standards of the revelation, you will be rewarded according to your best deeds, while your misdeeds will be overlooked/absolved. In other words, when you act on the best injunctions of divine scriptures (the Qur’an and the tablets of Moses), God will judge and reward you according to your best performance and will make some of your worst records disappear. The shared human-­divine moral space of mutual “best-­taking”—­ reciprocal excellence in moral and judgmental attitude toward one another—­ presents a methodology and behavioral pattern that can be modeled in human-­ human political and collective relations. Another Qur’ānic verse echoes the best-­taking formulation in relations between the Prophet and his audience, thus making it universal: “Say, O my people! Act according to your ability/capacity/position. I too am acting. Soon you shall know” (39:40).69 Applying the preceding Qur’ānic advice to interfaith relations has the potential to dissolve many impediments in the way of shared life. From ancient times to the present, Christian and Muslim histories demonstrate many narratives regarding mutual negative memories. More often than not, these negative histories have overlooked many of the instances of communal friendship between these religious traditions, as mentioned by Richard Bulliet.70 Contemporary Muslims tend to look at Christian politics through prisms of European colonialism, the Spanish Reconquista, the Crusades, and recent wars in Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and Yemen. Christians tend to read their relations with the Muslim world through the prisms of early Muslim expansionist wars against Byzantium and Spain and modern jihadists’ assaults against Western nations. These hate-­based perspectives do not allow even a sustained cold peace between the two sides, let alone positive or friendly peace. On the basis of the Qur’ānic model, followers of these religions can al-

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ternatively look at the best of each other’s records in their mutual relations. Muslims can think of how the North African Christian country of Abyssinia gave sanctuary to the earliest Muslim community that escaped persecutions by Meccan polytheists (615–­29). They can think of the many progressive institutions and technologies of modern life enjoyed by Muslim societies, such as democracy, human rights organizations, nongovernmental organizations, the internet, the automobile, and electricity. Christians can think of Muslims’ essential contributions to the European Renaissance, science, Enlightenment rational theology, post-­Enlightenment romantic literature, college education (madrasa), the legal invention of endowment (waqf), energy resourcefulness, such goods as newspapers and coffee and soap, the science of optics, and more. Mutual remembrance of positive history by both Christian and Muslim groups can significantly contribute to the institutionalization of political forgiveness and collective friendship, just as the Qur’ān prescribes in the larger, eschatological context. The Qur’ānic model of attaining relational and reciprocal excellence by looking at the best side of the “other”—­in both vertical, human-­divine and horizontal, human-­human relations—­may sound utopian. Nonetheless, it can become practical through the institutionalization of friendship. The philosophical/psychological key to the success of this approach is to pay existential attention to the fact that the “other” does not exist as a separate entity, just as paradise becomes impossible without the perception of others and togetherness with others. Friendship among individuals and communities, across political, ethnic, religious, and racial borders, is a moral imperative. Attaining any levels of excellence in life necessarily passes through discovering excellence beyond the individual self. To secure the global appreciation of the existential friendship, we also need collective and historic forgiveness and volitional forgetting. We already know that with justice alone, we cannot survive. We need to liberate both friendship and forgiveness from the prison of private life, emulate the divine ethics of benevolence in public life, and leave behind our mutual negative histories, to prevent previous catastrophes from occurring again. Presently, there are continuous attempts by peace-­building activists and scholars in search of new methods of conflict resolution, management, and transformation. Unfortunately, most of these attempts, within both religious and secular frameworks, are still struggling with the paradigms of distributive or restorative justice. The negative virtue of tolerance still defines the backbone of intercommunal relations and peace-­building. To break away from this institutional and conceptual cycle, we need to advance our peace-­building goals to friendship building. This leap in peacemaking entails reframing spe-

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cific moral concepts that are articulate enough to speak to modern societies but also have roots in religious traditions. One such concept is collective forgiving and forgetting in politics. Another, collective and mutual remembering of the positive past, requires dedication to build on it.

Conclusion Through a hermeneutical approach, I have argued in this chapter that primary sources in Islamic tradition, such as the Qur’ān, the hadith tradition, and medieval Muslim ethical literature provide plenty of room for both the theory and the practice of friendship in interfaith and international relations. This chapter shows that based on the theoretical foundations of friendship as a qualifier of morality and religiosity, as a linchpin connector of faith and reason, as the highest goal in role ethics in Abrahamic traditions, and as a necessity for eschatological happiness, friendship is a religious, moral, and reasonable imperative. This chapter also demonstrates that the aforementioned theoretical foundations prompt a systematic approach to realizing friendship. I have discussed how Islamic primary sources provide clear methodologies for friendship in the realm of applied ethics, based on forgiveness, forgetting, and positive memory. Due to its relational nature, religious ethics in general and Islamic ethics in particular play a significant role in defining and institutionalizing friendship in many aspects of intellectual, spiritual, and communal life. As an ethical paradigm with deep roots in scriptures, friendship has remarkable potential to be an effective catalyst for containing loneliness and promoting conflict resolution and conflict transformation in modern life. All these elements help individual and societal mental health and thereby contribute to durable peace both within and between societies. Our modern relations should develop beyond an obsessive focus on punitive justice and negative histories, which take a good part of our communal energies to fix the past, at the opportunity cost of present and future friendships. For this development to happen, we need a concept that has solid roots in major world traditions and perennial philosophies. The paradigm of friendship is a moral bridge where Aristotle meets Abraham. To institutionalize this bridge across many ethnic, religious, political, and geographic borders, we need new methodologies in applied friendship. One way to institutionalize friendship and curb increasing and multidimensional loneliness cases that cause mental disorders across all walks of life is to create modern peace literature, museums of positive memory, and institutions that reflect on the Gruen

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effects of human isolation. Philosophies focusing on forgiveness and on forgetting the negative past can only bring humanity from hostility to neutrality. We need concepts and institutions that liberate us from a collective cold indifference and from the unnecessary separations that are the prime causes for “global isolationism.” We need friendship and friends without borders. Loneliness, as a disease caused by neoliberal economy, must be treated both at the communal and international levels. The position of the British minister of loneliness should transform and expand into ministries and departments of friendship across the whole world. Friendship is accessible. As Rūmī has put it, we just need to see its potential in our vicinity, redirect our attention from self-­ autonomy toward it, and sit thirsty at a riverbank. Thou searchest through the earth The great untying; In union was thy birth, In parting thy dying. Besides the river, athirst, Alseep thou liest; Hard by the treasure, accursed. A beggar thou diest.71

Epilogue: A Friendship Manifesto Mohammad Jafar Amir Mahallati Do not practice hostility against anyone, even if in your estimation he/she will not harm you, and do not miss the chance of befriending any person, even if you do not expect any benefit from him/her. —­‘Alī b. al-­Ḥusayn Zayn al-­‘Ābidīn1 I swear to the soul of the friend that in Sa‘dī’s belief, the world has no territory except the land of friendship. —­Shaykh Muṣlih al-­Dīn Sa‘dī Shīrāzī Morality comes into being and continues to exist by imitating the love it lacks. —­Andre Comte-­Sponville2 A breast which separation’s split in two Is what I seek, to share this pain with you: When kept from their true origin, all yearn For union on the day they can return. —­Jalāl al-­Dīn Rūmī3

The journey of finishing this volume took me much longer than expected. I began in the spring of 2007, and it is coming to close over a decade later. Somehow, mysteriously, I could not conclude the volume earlier as I had wished. I wondered why. My question was answered by shocks of ISIS and its brutality in the Muslim heartland, hundreds among more than sixty-­five million global migrants and refugees drowning in oceans in search of a safer living situation, tragedies in Syria and Yemen, genocide in Myanmar, Brexit and the emergence of extreme-­right politics in Europe, President Trump’s wholesale ideas of barring citizens of seven Muslim states from the United States and building a long tall wall on the Mexican border, and the appointment of a 267

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minister of loneliness in Britain. I needed to observe the striking ugliness of extreme intercultural and international hostilities, isolationism, and decivilization on this large scale to fully appreciate the significance and the vitality of friendship as a mode of life, a “structure of soul,” and a worldview. Hostilities and wars have two types of costs. One is material destruction and loss of life. The other, loss of the quality and the true value of life, occurs when various levels of friendship are deficit in a society. Our current humanity acts as if we are fully ignorant of the opportunity costs, the consequences of the lack of friendship, the higher meaning of life, and the very life purpose that justifies our survival endeavor. The global normalization of indifference and loneliness has normalized earthly hellfire. This volume has been written as a reminder of the costs. Amid current global crises and resurgent national isolationism, very rare cultures, next to none, can claim comparative superiority over others in the sense of acting less destructive or hostile. There are large-­ scale cultural and sociopolitical failures on all sides of the globe. On November 1, 2016, Owen Holdaway reported from Iraq, “Troops liberating Qaraqosh find sick militants [ISIS] had desecrated church, sowed booby traps and beheaded statue of Jesus.”4 Irina Bokova, UNESCO’s director-­general, responded, “Islamic, Christian, Kurdish and Jewish heritage, among others, is being intentionally destroyed or attacked in what is clearly a form of cultural cleansing.”5 The emergence of ISIS in the Muslim heartland and the memory of crimes they committed against humanity will remain as an ugly immoral monument that will keep reminding many generations of Islamic societies of their fallibility. By now, they should have learned that no matter how they emphasize the slogan “Islam is a religion of peace,” they are not immune from inhumanity if they remain reactive to their past and act on bankrupt paradigms. In August 2016, the Daily Mail published an article titled “Controversial election-­favourite Geert Wilders calls for all mosques to be shut and the Koran banned in Holland—­as German right wingers want undocumented migrants sent to camps in chilling echo of the Nazis.” The article’s authors added, “Geert Wilders has launched his one-­page ‘de-­Islamification’ manifesto. The right wing politician wants all Islamic symbols stripped from Holland. He also wants to follow Brexit and withdraw from the European Union. German right wingers, meanwhile, want migrants sent to special camps.”6 These fresh echoes of Nazi ideology, together with memories of ethnic cleansing committed in Bosnia and of the Holocaust in Germany, all coming from the heart of the Christian world, stand against the central motto of Christianity as a “religion of mercy.”

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On May 15, 2015, more than two and a half years before the culmination of Muslim cleansing in Myanmar, a reporter wrote on events in that majority-­ Buddhist country, “Radical Buddhist? Violent monks? Ethnic cleansing? Concentration camps? And now, mass graves? What’s happening in Myanmar is terrible, but it should be impossible.” He added, “The genocidal campaign for the elimination of a people, the Rohingya, has been gathering steam in Myanmar since 2011, but counter to common stereotype, the victims are Muslims, and their attackers include Buddhist monks.”7 Ironically, under a militant government influenced by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, massive genocidal Muslim cleansing through torture, rape, and violence caused more than four hundred thousand refugees to leave home under horrifying conditions in September 2017. The anti-­Muslim genocide in Myanmar will remain a historic thorn to the claim that Buddhism is a “religion of esoteric meditation.” On March 18, 2017, an article by Ben White published by Al Jazeera noted that a United Nations report brands Israel as “an apartheid regime that oppresses and dominates the Palestinian people as a whole.” The report, written by two American professors, argues that Israel is “guilty of policies and practices that constitute the crime of apartheid,” that is, a “crime against humanity under customary international law and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.”8 Obviously, apartheid and systematic suppression of Palestinians during the entire history of Israel stands against claims that Judaism is a “religion of liberation.” The worldviews that caused all the aforementioned crimes against humanity sound like one echo expressed differently. Are these intolerances intrinsic in religions? Norman Naimark, a historian of the Soviet Union, reports that “between the early 1930s and his death in 1953, Joseph Stalin had more than a million of his own citizens executed.” He adds, “Millions more fell victim to forced labor, deportation, famine, bloody massacres, and detention and interrogation by Stalin’s henchmen.”9 All these crimes came in the name of an atheistic ideology (namely, Marxism) that claimed to seek “equality” among humankind. All these tragic events point at global multicultural inclinations toward exclusivism, exceptionalism, and large-­scale violence. Ironically, ideologues responsible for these tragedies, whether religious or not, justify their policies with specific interpretations/corruptions of the notions of “justice” and “rights.” In the face of the evil resulting from immoral abuses of those notions, this book proposes that in parallel with contemporary Western scholarship, which is calling for paradigmatic friendship as a cure for the above ills, Islamic ethical tradition and contemporary thought are conceptually rich and provide fertile grounds for helping a friendship-­

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based paradigm shift in our global relations. There seems, therefore, a possibility of initiating Western-­Islamic dialogues that can facilitate building institutional friendships. A focus on friendship, rather than on “shares,” “rights,” and “punitive justice,” can produce antidotes of isolationism, war, animosity, and loneliness. Friendship can effectively delegitimize ideologies of exceptionalism and ontological separationalism. Charles Eisenstein, a public intellectual, has elaborately demonstrated how our generation is experiencing a fatal multitude of separations from nature, from the self, and from the “other.” An extreme separatist perspective prompts homicide and what Eisenstein calls “echocide.” “The root and the epitome of separation,” Eisenstein maintains, “is the discrete, isolated self of modern perception: the ‘I am’ of Descartes, the ‘economic man’ of Adam Smith, the individual phenotype of Darwinian competition for resources, the skin-­encapsulated ego of Alan Watts.” He adds, “It is a self conditionally dependent on, but fundamentally separate from, the Other: from nature and other people.”10 Eisenstein sees the root of separation in a perception of multilayered dualism that penetrates all aspects of life. Dualism is the idea that the universe is divided into two parts, which go by the names of matter and spirit, God and creation, human and nature or, most fundamentally, self and other. These two parts are by no means symmetrical: self is more important, other less. In religion, soul is self, body is other. The soul is important while the flesh is at best irrelevant and at worst an impediment to the life of the spirit. Outside religion, the same dualism, following Descartes, manifests as mind = self, body = other. Either way, we identify with our minds and not our bodies, not other life forms, not the world at large. Even if we try hard to cultivate compassion, a narrow identity with an illusory separate self is built in to our deepest worldview. . . . No wonder we are so out of touch with our bodies and suffer chronically poor health. No wonder we treat our bodies and our material planet so cavalierly. No wonder we visit such violence on these (unimportant) others—­other religion, other nation, other race, other species.11 Based on the preceding argument, Eisenstein’s pathological perspective ends in the assertion that “the logical conclusion of dualism—­that Other is important only to the extent it affects Self—­is a hidden abscess constantly leaking poison into the body of our civilization.”12 More than seven centuries before Eisenstein, one of the greatest figures in

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the history of mystic literature, Jalāl al-­Dīn Rūmī, began his magnum opus, the Mathnavi, with the following couplets: Now listen to this reed-­flute’s deep lament, About the heartache being apart has meant: “Since from the reed-­bed they uprooted me My song’s expressed each human’s agony, A breast which separation’s split in two Is what I seek, to share this pain with you: When kept from their true origin, all yearn For union on the day they can return. Body and soul are joined to form one whole But no one is allowed to see the soul.” It’s fire not just hot air the reed-­flute’s cry, If you do not have this fire then you should die! Love’s fire is what makes every reed-­flute pine, Love’s fervor thus lends potency to wine; The reed consoles those forced to be apart, Its note will lift the veil upon your heart, Good times have long passed, but we could not care When you’re with us, our friend beyond compare! Be joyful, love, our sweetest bliss is you, Physician for all kinds of ailments too, The cure for our conceit and stubborn pride Like Plato here with Galen, side by side; Through love the earthly form soars heavenward, The mountain dances nimbly like a bird: Love made Mount Sinai drunken visibly, So Moses fell and swooned immediately! With my own confidant if I’d been paired, Just like the reed, such stories I’d have shared: Without a kindred spirit there to hear The storyteller’s voice must disappear, “When shunned by love you’re left with emptiness A bird without its wings knows such distress:

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How can my mind stay calm this lonely night? When I can’t find here my beloved’s light?” Love wants its tale revealed to everyone, But your heart’s mirror won’t reflect this sun, Don’t you know why we can’t perceive it here? Your mirror’s face is rusty—­scrape it clear!13 In much detail, Rūmī presents the story of human separation and prescribes, “Unchain yourself, my son, escape its hold. How long will you remain a slave of Gold?” He encourages love and friendship through relinquishing the ownership caused by, as Eisenstein has put it, the “quantization and propertization of the world.” Rūmī advocates connection in being, not in having—­in the horizontal approach to life, not in exercising vertical authority and control, which Eisenstein calls “lordship over nature.” For Eisenstein, such lordship predicates a reductionist perspective of life, a “reduction of feeling, and a reduction of being: a true Faustian exchange of the infinite for the finite.” He concludes, “Because it is a reduction of life, violence is its inevitable accompaniment. . . . . Hence the rising crescendo of violence that has bled our civilization for thousands of years and approaches its feverish apogee as we conclude the present wholesale destruction of entire species, oceans, ecosystems, languages, cultures, and people.”14 The point emphasized by Eisenstein, that separation through perception or realization of ownership is the root cause for violence, is a question to which the Qur’ān has responded frequently and unequivocally: “. . . the path of God, unto Whom belongs whatsoever is in the heavens and whatsoever is on the earth. Behold! All affaires are journeying unto God” (42:53); “Unto Him belongs sovereignty over the heavens and the earth, and unto God are all matters returned” (57:5); “Unto God belongs sovereignty over the heavens and earth and whatsoever is between them, and unto Him is the journey’s end” (5:18).15 Primarily, these verses convey two points: first, a denial of universal ownership except to God; second, the ultimate return of every matter to God. In sum, the above verses are strong reminders that ultimate propertization and separation are impossible and that acts of violence are therefore futile and irrational and will not accomplish their ill-­intended goals. As an antidote to separation and the concept of universal duality, friendship unveils paths to unification. That is the central principle of Islamic Gnosticism, which defines faith and all its rituals as a concept and a practical methodology for creating nearness—­ between the Creator and the created and among the created—­and for ending cosmic separations. On the path toward

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this ultimate goal, religious sin and obedience are defined by and manifested in, as thirteenth-­century Sufi author ‘Azīz al-­Dīn Nasafī has expressed, “causing pain or giving comfort to others.”16 Sin, therefore, causes separations, and obedience prompts universal friendship, which is the ultimate goal of faith. For Ṭūsī, al-­Isfahānī, and Miskawayh, religiosity is about friendship. All sixteen chapters in this volume, each from their specific perspective, consider friendship as more than a cardinal virtue: it is a standard that tests the validity of moral systems. Friendship is the ultimate and ideal product of moral systems. It is a moral worldview indispensable in attaining happiness both here and hereafter. If this volume has succeeded in showing that significant primary sources of monotheistic faiths in general and Islam in particular agree with the preceding conclusions, its reader can see how perspectives that conceive of religions as sources of universal conflict are erroneous. At the end of my decade-­long academic journey in search of the causes, manifestations, and meaning of friendship, I can summarize the most important conceptual and practical elements of the moral worldview of friendship in a set of propositions that I call a “friendship manifesto.” This manifesto will never be complete; I am sure that, a few years from now, I will add new elements to it. I ask readers to complete it according to their unique experiences, perspectives, insights, and paradigms.

Friendship Manifesto

1. On both sides of the recent millennium, Muslim classical ethicists (e.g., Ibn al-­Muqaffa‘ Miskawayh, Tawḥīdī, Isfahānī, Anṣārī, Sam‘ānī, al-­ Ghazālī, Ibn Ḥazm, and Ṭūsī), contemporary scholars of Islam (e.g., Nasr, Soroush, Bulliet, Heck, Chittick, Soroush, and Murata), contemporary Western moral philosophers (e.g., Lewis, Arendt, Deleuze, Telfer, May, Mitias, Vernon, Nehamas, and Schwarzenbach), and theologians (e.g., Aquinas, Buber, Wadell, Vacek, Jeanrond, and Schall) seem to agree that friendship is essential and indispensable for a virtuous society, for true religiosity, and for powerful democracy. In modern times, an increasing number of Muslim and Western thinkers are emphatically arguing that true democracy cannot be realized except within a society that advocates friendship by securing open and free dialogue and conversation among its constituents. Because of its loyalty to truth, deep friendship, as Schall argues, opposes tyranny. True political power, as opposed

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to force, Arendt argues, cannot be attained except through free discourse, which can only occur among equal friends. Civilizational friendship, Nasr holds, is predicated on friendship among religions. All the aforementioned thinkers agree that because of its primacy, friendship must be both conceptualized and institutionalized in various religious and secular domains of life. For both the secular and the sacred, friendship matters. 2. Many of the aforementioned thinkers and their contemporary advocates who authored various chapters of this volume believe that friendship represents the ultimate moral test for the validity and even the legitimacy of ethical, religious, and civilizational systems. In other words, they believe that both a religion that fails to produce a moral society and a normative system that fails to produce a friendlier community are problematic and, by definition, flawed. 3. Friendship is superior to moral concepts such as justice, human rights, self-­autonomy, and sovereignty. It is also the highest goal of freedom. In other words, friendship is the most valued object one can buy with the currency of freedom. We do not befriend at the cost of our freedom; rather, we struggle to gain freedom to increase our ability to gain friendships. Symbolically, the most independent person or nation on earth would manifest the most tragic waste of freedom. This is why some of the greatest thinkers of Islamic civilization (e.g., Ḥāfeẓ, Sa‘dī, and Rūmī) volunteered to give up their freedom for love and friendship. They were cognizant that in friendship, we do not lose our freedom but, rather, give meaning to it. 4. In one way or another, almost all modern emancipatory literature inevitably uses the term empowerment as the most useful concept for attaining its goals. While the goal of empowerment has important merits, the focus on “power” will not provide a cure for social inequalities. Our modern societies are already exhausted by a high dose of devastating negative competitions that advocate a worldview based on a zero-­sum game. We really do not want to add to this rivalry. A much better alternative would be to negotiate with authoritarian societies to shift their focus from power to friendship and from empowerment to endearment. A society infused with more negative rivalry will be consequently more self-­ destructive. We need to shift the focus to a different paradigm. Arguments offered in this volume suggest that friendship could be the new paradigm through which human emancipation from authoritarian rule and majoritarian dictatorship will be possible. 5. The high value that some modern Western thinkers (e.g., Kant, Ni-

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etzsche, and Rousseau) have placed on love and friendship has rendered these values as metaethics. The problem with such a proposal is that metaethics may not be accessible to nonidealistic and practical politics, thereby resulting in political ideals that are limited to justice—­in most cases, only punitive or distributive justice. In contrast, contributors to this volume argue that virtue ethics, as adopted and expanded by Muslim ethicists, define friendship within ethics and make it accessible both to religion and realpolitik. Fortunately, on this point, as mentioned in this volume, some contemporary Western thinkers have agreed with their Muslim counterparts. This agreement needs to be thoroughly considered throughout many forums and can substantially enhance dialogue among nations, civilizations, and religions. By virtue of its subject, this dialogue can be an effective antidote to the theory of the clash of civilizations and to the regressive protectionist and populist politics that are currently the main cause of many international tensions and decivilizations. 6. In one way or another, many of our current regional wars or global political tensions are marked by identity crises, caused partially by the multiple choices of identities accessible through the virtual space and partially by the loss of national sovereignties in the neoliberal economy. Human obsession with identity seems to be a permanent psychological characteristic, which cannot be overlooked. Retro-­ Hobbesian politics—­as manifested and symbolized by Brexit, Trump, Le Pen, Wilders, Netanyahu, Suu Kyi, and like-­ minded populist and exceptionalist Muslims—­advocates nationalist isolationism, marks many communities as the enemy in a wholesale manner, and participates in the creation of more “stranger” communities by means of phobias and wars. Among the many ill results of these trends are a new global arms race and institutional indifference to environmental deterioration. If the philosophical, religious, economic, and ethical primacy of friendship is not well advocated and institutionalized, we risk the danger that many institutions presently holding the rest of humanity together might be dissolved, in which case no barrier would stand in the way of retro-­fascism and regressive politics. 7. In the realm of economic ideology, it seems that the whole world is presently divided between two extremes: on one hand, the neoliberal economy, which, according to May, has promoted consumerism and devastating rivalry between individual citizens; on the other hand, the neoprotectionism advocated by Brexit, Trump, and Putin, with the by-­ product of devastating rivalry between nation-­states. Clearly, both sys-

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tems are not sensitive to environmentalism. May’s proposal that deep friendship can offer an antidote to extreme consumerism is also a viable alternative to protectionism. 8. The twenty-­first century is more religious than expected. This does not mean that influential friendship projects need to be religious. Conversely, we could argue that we need to make religions friendlier. Also, deep negotiations and dialogue between theology and philosophy or between faith and intellect provide fertile grounds for the advancement of friendship. As this volume has discussed, al-­Ghazālī fully agreed with Aristotle that friends mirror character for each other and therefore help each other to improve. By applying this perspective to intercommunal and international relations, one can argue that a significant litmus test for the religiosity of nation-­states could be found in the kind and the number of friends they have. This type of test would reveal important insight for Saudis, Iranians, and Turks, as well as for Western and Eastern powers. In other words, we could say to every individual country, “Tell me who your friends are, and we will tell you who you are.” This volume argues that by expanding and extrapolating the elements of friendship from the realm of personal life to that of public, collective, and political life, we can help to effect a paradigm shift in global relations. As Arendt and a number of post–­World War II intellectuals have argued, a modern political philosophy that can handle our precarious global relations at this juncture inevitably needs to incorporate religious virtues and values such as forgiveness and promise. This volume argues that Abrahamic religions generally and Islam in particular could advocate friendship and its inclusion in modern political philosophy and thus complete Arendt’s survival formula by adding friendship as a third necessary element. Strategic global peace cannot become a reality without the normative triad of forgiveness, promise, and friendship (‘afw, ‘ahd, and ulfa in Arabic). 9. Islamic eschatology defines paradise as the realm of friendship. Jesus ultimately calls all his disciples friends. On one hand, friendship itself defines paradise, rather than being merely one element within the concept of paradise. On the other hand, according to prophetic tradition, this life is an opportunity for eschatological cultivation, and the afterlife is the realm of harvesting. Without exercising friendship in this life, attainment to paradise becomes impossible almost by definition. As an eschatological imperative, friendship then becomes a necessity in the present life. Religiously speaking, the concept of salvation without exercising friendship becomes inconceivable. One can effectively argue that not

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only individual friendship but collective and communal friendship is imperative. Lonely individuals and, by the same token, lonely nations are far from both-­worldly happiness. Such an eschatological perspective can offer a substantial contribution to modern political philosophy if we look for an alternative to the current exclusionist ideologies. 10. Social separations and disconnections between political elites and masses, between migrant refugees and settled societies, and between national majorities and minorities—­phenomena that, according to intellectuals such as Bauman, Deleuze, Appadurai, Krastev, and Eisenstein, have caused recent protectionism, isolationism, and separatism or decivilization in the Western world—­are symptoms of modern unfriendliness. One can argue that many Muslim countries also suffer from the same disconnect and decivilization. A natural remedy is that the elite must initiate a significant dialogue with the masses. By the same token, majorities must communicate with minorities. In other words, friendships between the elite and the masses and between the majority and the minority create antitheses to isolationism both within and among nations. This effect could apply also to the relations between Northern and Southern countries. Conceptually, we also need a postwar philosophy (as Deleuze argues) and a postwar understanding of religion that do not justify war and violence under any excuse, including justice, divine command, or absolute moralism. Such a project could find full support in the friendship literature provided by this volume. Friendship politics can, in fact, have a moderating impact on negative and destructive revolutions from above or below, which are caused by disconnect, misunderstanding, and miscommunication. 11. As maintained by modern theologians on both sides of the globe (e.g., Shaykh Bahā’ī [d. 1621] and contemporary theologian Werner Jeanrond),17 religious truth can only be attained through the “praxis of love” and friendship. Isolationism, indifference, and unfriendly relations are barren fields for the attainment of religious truth. Because Islam is an orthopraxy, rather than orthodoxy, even the intellectual attainment of truth or faith does not guarantee eschatological salvation; friendship and relationships therefore become necessities for religious salvation. The broader and more numerous the realms of relationships become, the deeper the degree of religiosity and salvation will be. For Miskawayh, al-­Isfahānī, Ṭūsī, and many moral philosophers after them, all collective religious rituals are designed to enhance social friendships. 12. Human happiness in this life or in the afterlife cannot be achieved by the

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application of justice alone. Muslim medieval ethicists such as Miskawayh, al-­Isfahānī, Tawḥīdī, and Ṭūsī seem in perfect agreement with contemporary Western theologians such as Buber, Schall, Wadell, and Sokolowsky in addressing the coldness of justice and its barrenness in relationships. Modern international relations are therefore in urgent need of a normative paradigm shift from the ethics of tolerance and punitive-­ distributive justice to the ethics of friendship primacy, if we wish to seek, for the rest of the twenty-­first century, a life that is truly postwar, post–­ cold war, and post–­cold peace. As I mentioned in this volume’s introduction, Schwarzenbach is very right in proposing that justice itself must universally be friendlier. 13. The field of friendship studies represents the culmination of peace studies. If war ethics help to contain the scope of wars and to bring us (at best) to a cease-­fire, if forgiveness ethics can help us move from communal hatred to relational indifference, only through friendship ethics can we contemplate and practice a quality life through relationships. If modernity’s greatest leap of virtue has been to liberate human societies from duty-­oriented ideologies and to make all societies rights-­conscious, the second paradigmatic normative leap can only lie in making our societies friendship-­conscious. The concepts of justice and freedom act as springboards that help us to jump to higher horizons. We cannot live on those normative springboards. They are only agents of transcendence. 14. A universal agreement on the need to embrace friendship philosophies is not sufficient to alleviate our chronic social problems. We equally need new and innovative approaches and methodologies that will institutionalize friendship-­based philosophies, theologies, and economies. Such initiatives could result from both popular (bottom-­up) and elite (top-­ down) endeavors. Nongovernmental organizations and educational institutions can play very important roles in this vein. As an example, the Oberlin Friendship Initiative has proved a success story commensurate to its scale. We need universal friendship festivals, awards, academic programs and university chairs for friendship studies, endowments, UN initiatives, student movements, and more governmental departments of friendship like the first one, established in Britain in January 2018 under the British Minister of Loneliness. 15. It was a great success when the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights launched the “Faith for Rights” framework, with an expert workshop in Beirut in 2017. The UN document related to that event held, “This framework provides space for a cross-­disciplinary reflection

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on the deep, and mutually enriching, connections between religions and human rights. The objective is to foster the development of peaceful societies, which uphold human dignity and equality for all and where diversity is not just tolerated but fully respected and celebrated.” The document further pointed out, “The Beirut Declaration considers that all believers—­whether theistic, non-­theistic, atheistic or other—­should join hands and hearts in articulating ways in which ‘Faith’ can stand up for ‘Rights’ more effectively so that both enhance each other. Individual and communal expressions of religions or beliefs thrive and flourish in environments where human rights are protected. Similarly, human rights can benefit from deeply rooted ethical and spiritual foundations provided by religions or beliefs.”18 While the foregoing declaration certainly deserves and merits full attention and realization, the notion of “rights,” which is based on a universal sense of justice, does not address full potentials for faith-­based worldviews in promoting positive and friendly peace, as distinct from neutral or disinterested peace that only fulfills (at best) distributive justice or fairness. We truly need a justice-­plus moral paradigm shift to deflect negative-­isolationist peace and attain positive-­ friendly peace. Abrahamic traditions generally and Islam in particular have significant sources and moral views on paradigmatic friendship that, if systematically explored and developed into political philosophies, have ample potentials to facilitate positive peace. In effect, there is a potential to complement the UN “Faith for Rights” declaration with a “Faith for Friendships” declaration. Taking such a monumental step requires concerted academic, practical, institutional, and governmental efforts to revisit and reintroduce friendship, as a fundamental moral paradigm, to our major contemporary world cultures and political philosophies. A UN “Faith for Friendship” declaration seems to be a groundbreaking approach to deliver the much-­needed paradigm shift toward positive peace. It can promote and advance friendship studies, practices, and institutions in various disciplines, cultural traditions, and countries. Developing cutting-­edge views on friendship seems to be an integral part of any global effort to curb wars and isolationism, recurrent popularism, and extreme nationalism. Friendship is the only antidote to all those poisons. Some ideas discussed in this volume, such as intimacy, could be considered as emotional and therefore not applicable to rational politics. I argue that there is no epistemological inconsistency if we consider the experience of the

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European Union, in its various sociopolitical and economic fields, as a manifestation of multifaceted socionational intimacy, or collective uns (intimacy)—­to use the term coined by Miskawayh, as chapter 4 of this volume discusses. As I noted in the introduction, contemporary scholars such as Schwarzenbach have effectively argued that the three Aristotelian elements of friendship—­ mutual awareness, affection, and doing together—­ can be expanded and enhanced into universal justice institutions in the sense that these friendly exercises are available for all humankind. In short, Miskawayh’s concept of uns can be politically institutionalized just as religions institutionalized it through collective rituals. Here, religion can help political modeling. For example, ḥajj (Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca) exemplifies an institution that facilitates the collective application of apology and forgiveness in human-­ divine and human-­human relations. Certain aspects of that ritual could inspire political institutions, an example of which is the Parliament of the World’s Religions. Therefore, religions can play an important role in the institutionalization of morality, which, by definition, occurs within political domains. As a high moral order, friendship is not limited to political, ideological, cultural, and cognitive borders between the self and the other. Mutuality is the essence of friendship. Employing selflessness as a key to promoting friendship results in the spiritual cultivation of the self. Therefore, friends on both sides of friendship equations are never in moral debt to each other. They know that almost by definition, the practice of friendship takes more than one actor. The wide range of questions pertinent to friendship as a superior moral order in Islamic ethics and Muslim politics goes far beyond the arguments of this volume. That reality points at two important facts. First, there is a chronic literature deficit in the field. Second, this volume is by no means capable of responding to all friendship-­related questions from an Islamic stance. Rather, it serves as a reminder to ethicists and political philosophers of Islam that there is an urgent need for the authorship of many more related works responding to the thriving Western scholarship on friendship. Our world is still intoxicated with philosophies of conflict, theologies of hatred, economies that produce deeper gaps between the haves and the have-­ nots, politics obsessed with power, industries that are numb to environment, and global media networks that advocate all kinds of phobia. The Middle East, once the cradle of civilization, is now the arena for the most uncivilized atrocities and sectarian bloodshed. In Islam, justice is not an option but a duty. A just person can hardly claim any credit, for we all are supposed to be just. Creating values is conceivable only in the realm of justice-­plus, which is benevolence or friendship. A more religious person must therefore, by definition, be a friend-

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lier person. Friendship is not only an indispensable key to happiness but also the content of happiness in life and the afterlife. It is the most important criterion by which to measure our religiosity, rationality, and political health. Together, all the contributors to this volume have demonstrated, through various angles that Abraham and Aristotle have already met on the bridge of friendship in more than one way, one history, and one geography. Aristotle conceptualized what Abraham practiced. This book has been written and composed in the hope that the monumental steps of those towering figures will be followed in the intellectual, practical, artistic, ritualistic, and academic arenas on all sides of the globe, through a constructive friendship dialogue between the Muslim East and the Christian West. The present cold peace (if not cold war) that frames all of our international discourses should give way to a warm, positive, friendly peace based on a new paradigm that lifts our relations from the basement of communal ethics to its higher moral planes. Many early Muslim biographers of Prophet Muḥammad wrote his life story under a historiographic genre called al-­maghāzī (the wars). That description came about not because the Prophet’s most important preoccupation was war but because the Islamic society of the seventh century, like all contemporary societies of the era, considered victory in war to be the most significant sign of divine support. Such perspectives were and still are important inspirations for militant religious orientations seeking both-­worldly salvation through triumphalism. This thinking is, of course, not exclusive to Islam. Other faiths suffer from the same misinterpretations. By looking for Islamic responses to various questions of friendship ethics, this volume presents a collective endeavor, by many top authorities in their fields, to offer an alternative view of faith that is suitable for a postwar, postjihadist life. As I mentioned in this book’s introduction, Mitias has timely and aptly suggested that friendship needs to return to Western life as a major cultural paradigm, after it was dismissed during the medieval, modern, and contemporary histories. This volume proposes that the primacy of friendship should also return to contemporary Muslim life, which has suffered from both foreign and native imposition of antagonistic and divisive ideologies. Fortunately, as Ahmad Obiedat’s contribution to this volume (chapter 1) demonstrates, the very rich stock of Arabic friendship concepts, manifested through the vast array of friendship-­related Arabic vocabulary, points at the protean nature of friendship in Islamic culture. Muḥyī al-­Dīn Ibn al-­‘Arabī (d. 1240), the father of theoretical Islamic mysticism, has proverbially said that if people spend their time in this world on anything other than searching for addresses in Paradise, their lives will be a waste. One can argue that the more than sixty friendship-­and

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love-­related words in the Arabic language are addresses of Paradise that are available for seekers. By preserving a good part of Greek literature, including works of Aristotle on friendship, in Arabic translation, then developing it and delivering it to the Europeans, Muslims gifted Western culture with the roots of the Renaissance. That literature was not available for St. Augustine but was accessible for St. Thomas Aquinas and made the latter monumental figure of Christianity far more appreciative of human friendships than his predecessor. I think we can say that Muslims helped the Christian theology of the High Middle Ages to embrace friendship as a primary high virtue. To make this contribution historically circular, I suggest that it is time for contemporary scholars of Islam, in their postcolonial, postjihadist mode of mind, to appreciate the Western thriving scholarship on friendship and seriously begin to adopt and develop its institutional concepts within Islamic frameworks. After all, this friendship tree is historically homegrown in Muslim lands. I hope that the present volume contributes a step toward that direction. The French philosopher Deleuze aptly wished for a “postwar philosophy” as a necessary precondition for relocating philosophy back in its original cradle, next to philia. I resonate with that wish in suggesting to all religions, Islam included, that it is time to develop postwar theologies so that we can prepare for optimally relocating religions back to where they originally belonged, in divine, human-­ human, and human-­ the realm of friendship in human-­ environment relations. As Sa‘dī of Shiraz said, “If I will be given free will, on the Day of Judgment, to choose between all that I can have / Give me the friend and take away all other blessings in Paradise.”19 Hāfez expands that eschatological perspective to cover both worlds: “Become a lover, otherwise the business of the world will be over / The intended plan of being’s workshop undeciphered.”20 Thus far, human existence has not found any better concept, feeling, purpose, and act than friendship. I end this book with a supplication text from “the oldest prayer manual in Islamic sources and one of the most seminal works of Islamic spirituality of the early [Islamic] period.”21 This prayer presents an Islamic road map for universal friendship, clear evidence that friendship is a mode of thought and spirit, a worldview. O God, bless Muḥammad and Muḥammad’s Household and replace for me, the animosity of the people of hatred with love, the envy of the people of insolence with affection, the suspicion of the people of righteousness with trust,

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the enmity of those close with friendship, the disrespect of womb relatives with devotion, the abandonment of relatives with help, the attachment of flatterers with love set right, the rejection of fellows with generous friendliness, and the bitterness of the fear of wrongdoers with the sweetness of security!22

Notes

PREFACE 1. All translations are from ‘Alī Qulī Qarā’ī, The Qur’ān, London: ICAS Press, 2004. 2. Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations. 3. Nixon, Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Friendship, 6. 4. “Some troops came back from an expedition and went to see the Messenger of Allah sallallahu `alayhi wa-­Sallam. He said: ‘You have come for the best, from the smaller jihad (al-­jihad al-­asghar) to the greater jihad (al-­jihad al-­akbar).’ Someone said, ‘What is the greater jihad?’ He said: ‘The servant’s struggle against his lust (mujahadat al-­`abdi hawah)’” (Living Islam, accessed September 14, 2017, http://www.livingislam.org/n/dgjh_e.html 5. Mahallati, Ethics of War and Peace in Iran and Shi‘i Islam. 6. Mitias’s view is discussed in more detail in the introduction to this volume. 7. See Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning.

INTRODUCTION

1. Nūrī, Mustadrak al-­wasā’il wa musṭanbiṭ al-­masā’il, 8:209. 2. Avery, The Collected Lyrics of Hafiz of Shiraz, 118. 3. Kafka, Aphorisms, 106. 4. Zweerde, “Friendship and the Political,” 47. 5. Appadurai, “Democracy Fatigue,” 33. 6. Ibid., 43.

285

286    Notes to Pages 2–8



7. Ibid., 43–­44. 8. Krastev, “Majoritarian Futures,” 172. 9. Ibid., 171. 10. Ibid., 176. 11. Ibid., 186. 12. Latour, “Europe as Refuge,” 198. 13. Bauman, “Symptoms in Search of an Object and a Name,” 68–­69. 14. Ibid., 65. Bauman quotes from Eco, Migration, Tolerance, and the Intolerable, 99–­100. 15. Nachtwey, “Decivilization: On Regressive Tendencies in Western Societies,” 305–­6. 16. Monbiot, “Neoliberalism Is Creating Loneliness; That’s What’s Wrenching Society Apart.” 17. Metz, “The New Isolationism: Rethinking U.S. Power for a Deglobalized World,” World Politics Review, August 5, 2016. 18. In his book The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-­first Century, Friedman argues that the vast and rapid course of global technological transportation between states is flattening the topography of technological know-­how across the world. 19. “UN Chief: United Europe Essential to Keep Peace in ‘Chaotic’ World,” Guardian, February 15, 2017. 20. Ibid. 21. In a well-­researched paper, Heather Devere, director of practice at the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Otago, reports, “Thirty years ago, there was very little being written about political friendship.” She asserts that “from the mid-­1980s,” however, “there has been a continuing increase in the number of studies on friendship philosophy, sociology and politics.” Devere demonstrates that twenty-­nine texts were published on the topic between 2001 and 2011, compared with two texts between 1900 and 1960. See Devere, “Amity Update: The Academic Debate on Friendship and Politics,” 6, 10, 26. 22. Ibid., 25. 23. Nielsen, “God and the Basis of Morality,” 345. 24. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 8.1155a28. 25. Quoted in Bloom, Love and Friendship, 65. 26. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 98. 27. Hūjwīrī, Kashfu’l-­maḥjub, 499. 28. Al-­Rāghib al-­Isfahānī, Al-­dharī‘a ilā makārim al-­sharī‘a, 257.

Notes to Pages 9–10    287

29. Hallaq, The Impossible State: Islam, Politics, and Modernity’s Moral Predicament, 49. 30. Ibid., 82. 31. Section related to friendship in Al-­adab al-­kabīr, mostly composed of belles lettres from Indo-­Persian sources. 32. Sections on friendship in Jami‘al-­aa‘ādāt, by Mawlā Mehdi, and Mi‘rāj al-­sa‘āda, by Mawlā Aḥmad Narāqī. 33. A chapter on friendship in ‘Uyūn al-­akhbār (Arabic belles lettres mixed with hadith and poetry). 34. Chapters in Al-­Ikhwān (hadith collections). 35. Ikhwān al-­Ṣafā (the Brethren of Purity or Sincerity) are the anonymous authorities of an esoteric fraternity and authors of the Rasā’il al-­Ikhwān al-­ṣafā’ (Epistles of the Brethren of Purity), an Islamic encyclopedia consisting of fifty-­two treatises and an additional comprehensive treatise (Risālat al-­jāmi‘a) on various philosophical sciences, collected and interpreted by Shī‘ī scholars. They lived in Iraq between the late ninth and early eleventh centuries CE. From among fifty-­two epistles of the encyclopedia, Epistle 45 is dedicated to friendship between the Brethren of Purity. Epistle 2 of Ikhwān’s encyclopedia stresses that spiritual salvation on one’s own is impossible. See Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, accessed September 14, 2017, http://www.iep.utm.edu/ikhwan-al-safa/ 36. A short book, Fī Muṣādaqat al-­ikhwān (composed mostly of prophetic hadith literature). 37. Sections on divine love and human friendship in ‘Aṭfu’l-­‘alif al-­ma’lūf ‘alā al-­lām al-­ma‘ṭūf (hadith and collections of and pieces on traditional aphorism). 38. Chapter 6 of Al-­‘Uns wa’l-­‘urs (Arabic literature and poetry). 39. An entire volume on friendship, Al-­adab wa’l inshā’ fi al-­ṣadāqa wa al-­ ṣadīq (The etiquette and literature on friendship and Friend). 40. Discussion of friendship in chapter 6 of Tahdhīb al-­akhlāq (The Refinement of Character), also known as Taṭhīr al-­a‘rāq (The Purity of Dispositions). 41. Discussion of friendship in Al-­dharī‘a ilā makārim al-­sharī‘a (The Means of Noble Religious Traits). Al-­Isfahānī is also the author of Risāla fī adab al-­ikhtilāṭ bi’l-­nās wa rasā’l ukhrā (Treatise on Ethics of Social Relations and other Treatises). 42. Reference to friendship in Adab al-­dunyā wa’l-­dīn (Ethics for this world and hereafter). 43. A chapter on friendship in Mudāwāt al-­nufūs wa tahdhīb al-­akhlāq wa’l-­ zuhd fī al-­radhā’il (A rational approach to friendship).

288    Notes to Pages 10–15

44. Book 15, “On the Duties of Brotherhood,” in the second quarter of al-­ Ghazālī’s magnum opus, Al-­Iḥya’ fī ‘ulūm al-­dīn (The Revival of Religious Sciences). 45. A chapter on friendship in Al-­Tadhkira al-­Ḥamdūnīyya (Arabic belles lettres including hadith and narratives from Persian classics). 46. A short treatise titled Ulfatnāma (The book on intimacy). Mohsin Fayḍ Kāshānī believes that the perfection of a human being reaches its culmination in the manifestation of intimacy. His political philosophy focuses on solidarity among members of an ideal society. The primacy of social unity is therefore the cornerstone of Fayḍ’s political philosophy. He stresses, “Kindness results in intimacy, and intimacy brings consensus needed to run the affairs of a nation.” For further details, see Farhikhtegan-­e tamaddon-­e Shi‘i, accessed September 14, 2017, http:// nbo.ir/‫نامه‬-‫__الفت‬a-1121.aspx 47. Adab al-­‘ishrah wa dhikr al-­Ṣuḥba wa’l-­‘ukhuwwa. 48. Al-­Shārūnī, Al-­ḥubb wa al-­ṣadāqa fi’l-­turāth al-­‘arabī wa’l-­dirāsāt al-­ muāṣira. 49. Ibid., 131. 50. Ibid., 133. 51. Ibid., 179–­80. 52. Ibn Ḥazm, The Ring of the Dove: A Treatise on the Art and Practice of Arab Love. 53. Ibid., 183. 54. Ibid., 187. 55. Ibid., 190. 56. Burrell, “Friendship with God in al-­Ghazali and Aquinas,” 77–­78. 57. Ibid., 78. 58. Ibid., 79. 59. Ibid., 81. 60. Ibid., 82–­83. 61. Ibid. 62. Al-­Ghazālī, The Revival of Religious Sciences (Iḥyā’ fī ‘ulūm al-­dīn), 99. 63. Ibid., 92. 64. Ibid., 100. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid., 102–­13. 67. Zargar, The Polished Mirror, 92. 68. See al-­Ghazālī, Iḥyā’ fī‘ulūm al-­dīn, chapter 5 of vol. 2, “Rules of Living in Seclusion,” 137–­50.

Notes to Pages 16–23    289

69. Ibid., 145. 70. See chapter 4 of the present volume. 71. Fortunately, al-­Tawḥīdī’s works, time, relations, character, and biography have received an erudite and fresh reevaluation and analysis by Alshaar in Ethics in Islam: Friendship in the Political Thought of al-­Tawhīdī and His Contemporaries. 72. Mitias, Friendship: A Central Moral Value, 62. 73. Ibid., 61. 74. Ibid., 62. 75. Ibid., 114. 76. Rhodes, “Platonic Philia and Political Order,” 22. 77. Ibid., 47. 78. Carr, “Friendship in Plato’s Lysis,” 30. 79. Salkever, “Taking Friendship Seriously: Aristotle on the Place(s) of Philia in Human Life,” 67. 80. Ibid., 69. 81. Ibid., 74–­75. 82. Ibid., 75. 83. Cited in Nehamas, On Friendship, 12. 84. Cited in Compte-­Sponville, A Small Treatise on the Great Virtues, 3. 85. Cited in Nehamas, On Friendship, 12. 86. Cited in ibid. 87. Zweerde, “Friendship and the Political,” 41–­42. 88. Arendt maintains, “Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences forever. . . . Without being bound to the fulfillment of promises, we would never be able to keep our identities; we would be condemned to wander helplessly and without direction in the darkness of each man’s lonely heart” (The Human Condition, 237). 89. Nixon, Hannah Arendt, 51. 90. Ibid., 26. 91. Ibid., 28. 92. Ibid., 52. 93. Ibid., 49. 94. Ibid., 28. 95. Ibid., 63. 96. Lambert, Philosophy after Friendship, 17, 18.

290    Notes to Pages 24–29

97. Ibid., 9. 98. Ibid., 15. 99. Ibid., 20. 100. Ibid., 21. 101. Ibid., 134. 102. A New York Times article published in response to President Donald Trump’s request for an increase of fifty-­four billion dollars in the US defense budget stated, “A day before delivering a high-­stakes address on Tuesday to a joint session of Congress, Mr. Trump will demand a budget with tens of billions of dollars in reductions to the Environmental Protection Agency and State Department, according to four senior administration officials with direct knowledge of the plan. Social safety net programs, aside from the big entitlement programs for retirees, would also be hit hard.” Cutting the State Department’s budget and increasing the defense budget means: stop talking to the rest of the world and feed the war machines that should not be wasted by inaction! (Glenn Thrush, Kate Kelly, and Maggie Haberman, “Trump to Ask for Sharp Increases in Military Spending, Officials Say,” New York Times, February 26, 2017, accessed March 20, 2018, https://www.nytimes. com/2017/02/26/us/politics/trump-budget.html?_r=0). 103. Lambert, Philosophy after Friendship, 146. 104. Ibid., 159. 105. Von Heyking and Avramenko, Friendship and Politics: Essays in Political Philosophy, 7. 106. Ibid. 107. Stephen Salkever, “Taking Friendship Seriously,” 74. 108. Nehamas, On Friendship, 58. 109. Ibid., 28. 110. Ibid., 58–­59. 111. Paton, Kant on Friendship, 216. 112. Ibid., 215. 113. Vernon, The Meaning of Friendship, 134. 114. Cited in ibid., 136. 115. Ibid. 116. Schwarzenbach, “Civic Friendship: A Critique of Recent Care Theory,” 120. 117. Ibid., 122. 118. Ibid., 137. 119. Ibid., 138.

Notes to Pages 29–34    291

120. Schwarzenbach, “Fraternity, Solidarity, and Civic Friendship,” 1, 15. 121. Ibid. 122. Von Heyking and Avramenko, Friendship and Politics, 3. 123. Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom, 8, quoted in May, Friendship in an Age of Economics: Resisting the Forces of Neoliberalism, 6. 124. May, Friendship in an Age of Economics, 30. 125. Ibid., 32. 126. Ibid., 40–­41. 127. Ibid., 44–­45. 128. Ibid., 79. 129. Ibid., 99. 130. Ibid., 108. May cites Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. 131. May, Friendship in an Age of Economics, 208. 132. Heilke, “Friendship in the Civic Order: A Reformation Absence,” 180. 133. Von Heyking, “The Luminous Path of Friendship,” 115. 134. Ibid., 116. 135. Ibid., 118. 136. Ibid., 123. 137. Ibid., 129. 138. Ibid., 130. 139. Vernon, The Meaning of Friendship, 127. 140. Ibid., 125. 141. Ibid., 126. 142. Ibid., 127. 143. Ibid., 129. 144. Ibid., 130. 145. Ibid., 139. 146. Ibid. 147. Ibid. 148. Ibid., 140–­41. 149. Ibid., 144. 150. Ibid., 140. 151. Ibid., 150. 152. Ibid. 153. Leaman, Friendship East and West: A Philosophical Perspective, 270. 154. Ibid., 271.

292    Notes to Pages 34–38

155. Ibid., 273. 156. Ibid., 278. 157. Schall, At the Limits of Political Philosophy, 225, 226. 158. Jeanne Schindler, “A Companionship of Caritas: Friendship in St. Thomas Aquinas,” 153. 159. Ibid., 148. 160. Ibid., 152. 161. Heilke, “Friendship in the Civic Order,” 173. 162. Ibid., 174–­75. 163. Ibid. 164. Ibid., 178. 165. Ibid., 187. 166. Buber, I and Thou, 26, 21. 167. Ibid., 79. 168. Ibid., 29. 169. Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning. 170. Vacek, Love, Human and Divine: The Heart of Christian Ethics, 280. 171. Ibid., 281. 172. Schall, At the Limits of Political Philosophy, 221. 173. Ibid., 226. 174. Ibid., 331–­36. 175. Sokolowski, “Phenomenology of Friendship,” 470, 467. 176. Jeanrond, “Theological Truth from the Perspective of an Interreligious Hermeneutics of Love,” 182. 177. Ibid. 178. Ibid., 183. 179. Ibid., 186. 180. Ibid., 187. 181. Ibid., 192. 182. Paul Wadell, Friendship and the Moral Life, 8. 183. Ibid., 14. 184. Ibid. 185. Ibid., 17. 186. Ibid., 25.

Notes to Pages 49–53    293

CHAPTER 1 1. I am grateful to Dr. William Maynard Hutchins, professor of Arabic and Islamic studies at Appalachian State University, for kindly reading an earlier draft of this essay. His wide knowledge, deep insights, and sharp corrections were extremely valuable. 2. I state the methodological justification of this approach in “The Semantic Field of Love in Classical Arabic: Understanding the Subconscious Meaning Preserved in the Ḥubb Synonyms and Antonyms through Their Etymologies,” in The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures: The Culture of Love and Languishing, ed. Alireza Korangy, Michael Beard, and Hanadi Al-­Samman, London, New York: I. B. Tauris, 2018, 300–­323. 3. Ibn Fāris al-­Qazwīnī, Muʻjam maqāyīs al-­lughah, 565. 4. Al-­Suyūṭī, Al-­Muzhir fī ‘ulūm al-­lugha wa anwā‘ihā, ed. ʻAlī Muḥammad al-­Bajāwī, 1:347. 5. Ibn Sīdah, Al-­Muḥkam w’l-­l-­muḥīṭ al-­aʻẓam fī al-­lughah, 6:115. 6. Ibn Manẓūr, Lisān al-­‘Arab, ed. ‘Abd Allāh ‘Alī al-­Kabīr et al., 27:2416. 7. Ibn Fāris, Muʻjam maqāyīs al-­lughah, 565. 8. Ibid. 9. Al-­Farāhīdī, Kitāb al-­‘ayn murattaban ‘alā hurūf al-­mu‘jam, ed. Abd al-­ Ḥamīd Hindāwī, 2:385. 10. Ibn Manẓūr, Lisān al-­‘Arab, 27:2419. 11. Ibn Fāris, Muʻjam maqāyīs al-­lughah, 565. 12. Ibn Sīdah, Al-­Muḥkam wal-Muḥīṭ al-­aʻẓam, 6:117. 13. Ibn Manẓūr, Lisān al-­‘Arab, 27:2417. 14. Ibid., 27:2418. 15. Jurjānī, Muʻjam al-­taʻrīfāt, 113. 16. Ibn Manẓūr, Lisān al-­‘Arab, 27:2418. 17. The word wudd is included in the semantic field of love in my study “The Semantic Field of Love in Classical Arabic,” 310. 18. Ibn Fāris, Muʻjam maqāyīs al-­lughah, 563. 19. Ibn Manẓūr, Lisān al-­‘Arab, 27:2401. 20. Ibn Fāris, Muʻjam maqāyīs al-­lughah, 563. 21. Al-­Farāhīdī, Kitāb al-­‘ayn murattaban ‘alā hurūf al-­mu‘jam, 2:379. 22. Al-­Muḥāsibī, Ādāb al-­nufūs, 74. 23. Qur’an 56:27. 24. Jurjānī, Muʻjam al-­taʻrīfāt, 27.

294    Notes to Pages 53–56

25. Ibid., 113. 26. For an excellent list of friendship synonyms, see the online dictionary Almaany, accessed April 27, 2017, http://www.almaany.com/ar/thes/arar/%D8%B5%D8%AF%D9%8A%D9%82/ 27. Ibn Fāris, Muʻjam maqāyīs al-­lughah, 732. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibn Sīdah, Al-­Muḥkam wal-Muḥīṭ al-­aʻẓam, 2:108. 32. Ibid. 33. It is a sound sentence in English to say “Disappointingly, he disappointed us.” However, it is not uniform in English that the suffix -­ing, indicating the gerund, can always be followed by the suffix -­ly, indicating the adverb. Contrariwise, Arabic uses this style uniformly. So, it is quite standard to say, “He knows that knowingly,” meaning “He knows it well or in the most perfect manner.” 34. Ibn Sīdah, Al-­Muḥkam wal-Muḥīṭ al-­aʻẓam, 2:108. 35. Ibid., 9:55. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid., 9:56. 38. Ibid., 9:56. 39. Ibn Fāris, Muʻjam maqāyīs al-­lughah, 439. 40. Ibid. 41. Majma‘ al-­Lughah al-­‘Arabī bil-­Qāhirah, Al-­Mu‘jam al-­wasīṭ, 401. 42. Ibn Fāris, Muʻjam maqāyīs al-­lughah, 393. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid. 46. Ibn Sīdah, Al-­Muḥkam wal-Muḥīṭ al-­aʻẓam, 6:382. 47. Ibid., 6:383. 48. Ibn Fāris, Muʻjam maqāyīs al-­lughah, 852. 49. Ibid. 50. Al-­Farāhīdī, Kitāb al-­‘ayn murattaban ‘alā hurūf al-­mu‘jam, 3:382. 51. Ibn Sīdah, Al-­Muḥkam wal-Muḥīṭ al-­aʻẓam, 6:361. 52. Ibid., 365. 53. Ibn Fāris, Muʻjam maqāyīs al-­lughah, 563. 54. Jurjānī, Muʻjam al-­taʻrīfāt, 113. 55. Ibn Fāris, Muʻjam maqāyīs al-­lughah, 76. 56. Ibid.

Notes to Pages 56–59    295

57. Ibn Sīdah, Al-­Muḥkam wal-Muḥīṭ al-­aʻẓam, 8:552. 58. Ibid., 8:558. 59. Ibn Fāris, Muʻjam maqāyīs al-­lughah, 70. 60. Ibid. 61. Ibid. 62. Ibn Sīdah, Al-­Muḥkam wal-Muḥīṭ al-­aʻẓam, 10:405. 63. Ibn Fāris, Muʻjam maqāyīs al-­lughah, 545. 64. Ibn Sīdah, Al-­Muḥkam wal-Muḥīṭ al-­aʻẓam, 8:380. 65. Ibn Fāris, Muʻjam maqāyīs al-­lughah, 546. 66. Ibn Sīdah, Al-­Muḥkam wal-Muḥīṭ al-­aʻẓam, 8:381. 67. Ibn Fāris, Muʻjam maqāyīs al-­lughah, 286. 68. Ibn Sīdah, Al-­Muḥkam wal-Muḥīṭ al-­aʻẓam, 8:517. 69. The first occurrence in the Qur’an is at 4:125: “And who is better in religion than he who submits himself entirely to God while doing good [to others] and follows the faith of Abraham, the upright one? And God took Abraham for a soulmate [khalīl].” The same word for “soulmate” is used in the plural at 43:67, “Soulmates [al-­akhillā’] on that day [i.e., Judgment Day] will be foes one to another, except those who are good doers.” 70. Ibn Sīdah, Al-­Muḥkam wal-Muḥīṭ al-­aʻẓam, 4:513. 71. Ibid., 4:517. 72. Ibn Fāris, Mu‘jam maqāyīs al-­lughah, 1064. 73. Ibn Sīdah, Al-­Muḥkam wal-Muḥīṭ al-­aʻẓam, 10:458. 74. Ibid., 10:459. 75. Ibn Fāris, Mu‘jam maqāyīs al-­lughah, 1065. 76. Ibn Fāris, Mu‘jam maqāyīs al-­lughah, 1064–­65. 77. Jurjānī, Muʻjam Al-­Taʻrīfāt, 213. 78. Ibid. 79. Ibid., 199. 80. Ibid., 213. 81. Ibn Fāris, Mu‘jam maqāyīs al-­lughah, 1064. 82. Ibid., 26. 83. Ibn Sīdah, Al-­Muḥkam wal-Muḥīṭ al-­aʻẓam, 5:312. 84. Al-­Zabīdī, Tāj al-­ʻarūs min jawāhir al-­qāmūs, ed. ʻAbd al-­Sattar Aḥmad Faraj, 36:45. 85. Ibn Sīdah, Al-­Muḥkam wal-Muḥīṭ al-­aʻẓam, 5:312. 86. Al-­Zabīdī, Tāj Al-­ʻArūs Min Jawāhir Al-­Qāmūs, 36:45. The original Arabic is beautifully more concise than my English translation: ‫ك‬ َ ‫ك ل ْم تَلِ ْدهُ أُ ُّم‬ َ َ‫خ ل‬ ٍ َ‫ رُبَّ أ‬. 87. Ibid., 36:46.

296    Notes to Pages 59–62

88. Ibid., 36:48. 89. Ibn Fāris, Mu‘jam maqāyīs al-­lughah, 470. 90. Ibn Sīdah, Al-­Muḥkam wal-Muḥīṭ al-­aʻẓam, 8:490. 91. Ibn Fāris, Muʻjam maqāyīs al-­lughah, 470. 92. Ibn Sīdah, Al-­Muḥkam wal-Muḥīṭ al-­aʻẓam, 8:490. 93. Some cultures view the moon as an evil element, perhaps because in cloudy weather and forested areas, moon shades can create scary effects that can be confused with dangerous creatures or evil spirits. No such evil perception is attributed to the moon in Arabic culture, where the summer sky is usually clear and where forests are nearly absent. The moon is there regarded as a cooler and lighter-­white sun. 94. Ibn Fāris, Mu‘jam maqāyīs al-­lughah, 983. 95. Ibid. 96. Al-­Zabīdī, Tāj al-­ʻarūs min jawāhir al-­qāmūs, 33:486. 97. Ibn Fāris, Mu‘jam maqāyīs al-­lughah , 983. 98. Al-­Zabīdī, Tāj al-­ʻarūs min jawāhir al-­qāmūs, 33:486. 99. Ibn Fāris, Mu‘jam maqāyīs al-­lughah, 289. 100. Ibn Sīdah, Al-­Muḥkam wal-Muḥīṭ al-­aʻẓam, 5:142. 101. Qur’an 4:25. 102. Al-­Zabīdī, Tāj al-­ʻarūs min jawāhir al-­qāmūs, 34:483. 103. Ibid. 104. Ibn Fāris, Mu‘jam maqāyīs al-­lughah , 748. 105. Ibn Sīdah, Al-­Muḥkam wal-Muḥīṭ al-­aʻẓam, 1:358. 106. Ibn Fāris, Mu‘jam maqāyīs al-­lughah , 749. 107. Ibn Sīdah, Al-­Muḥkam wal-Muḥīṭ al-­aʻẓam, 1:360. 108. Ibid. 109. Ibn Fāris, Mu‘jam maqāyīs al-­lughah , 749. 110. Ibid. 111. Ibn Fāris, Mu‘jam maqāyīs al-­lughah, ed. ‘Abd al-­Salām Harūn, 2:26. 112. Ibid., 2:26. 113. Ibn Manẓūr, Lisān al-­‘Arab, 107:45. 114. I have investigated this in further detail in “The Semantic Field of Love in Classical Arabic,” 300–­323. 115. ʻUmar, Al-­Maknaz al-­kabīr: muʻjam shāmil lil-­majālāt wa al-­mutarādifāt wa al-­mutaḍādāt, 819–­20. 116. The name of the second-­largest Islamic sect, Shia, is another derivational

Notes to Pages 62–84    297

form of mushāyi‘, referring to the faction of Muslims supporting the fourth successor of the Prophet in leadership, ‘Alī Ibn Abī Ṭalib, against his adversary, Mu‘āwiyah Ibn Abī Sufyān. 117. Pagan Arabs of Madīnah who accepted Islam and asked Prophet Muḥammad to migrate to their city and leave tribal and pagan persecution in Makkah are called anṣār, which is another form of the word munāṣir, “victory giver.” Amazingly, the disciples of Jesus are known in the Qur’ān and Arabic culture by the term al-­ naṣārā, which is another form of munāṣir. It seems that Prophet Muḥammad desired to have his supporters in Madīnah, anṣār, be like the disciples of Jesus, al-­ naṣārā. 118. The contemporary work Al-­Maknaz al-­kabīr seems to be the most comprehensive regarding friendship. See ʻUmar, Al-­Maknaz al-­kabīr: muʻjam shāmil lil-­ majālāt wa al-­mutarādifāt wa al-­mutaḍādāt, 554. 119. I surveyed the semantic spectrum of “hate”—­‘ayaf, majaj, inkār, sakhaṭ, shana’ān, kurh, bughḍ, maqt, ḥiqd, ḍaghīna, naqama, qilā, and ghill—­in Korangy, Beard, and Al-­Samman, The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures, 314. 120. Ibn Khaldūn, Muqaddimat Ibn Khaldūn, ed. Alī ʻAbd al-­Wāḥid Wāfī, 2:494, 502.

CHAPTER 3 1. On love in Islamic thought generally, see Chittick, “Divine and Human Love in Islam,” 163–­200. 2. Maybudī, whose commentary is called Kashfu’l-­asrār, has a great deal to say about love and friendship. See The Unveiling of the Mysteries, trans. William C. Chittick (Amman: Royal Aal al-­Bayt Institute, 2005), accessed April 24, 2019, http://altafsir.com/Books/kashf.pdf. 3. See, for example, Bell, Love Theory in Later Hanbalite Islam. 4. See Chittick, The Sufi Path of Love, 194–­95 (for love’s indefinability), 196, verse 2189 (for the endlessness of explanation). 5. Fīhi mā fīhi, 35. For a different translation of the passage, in context, see Arberry, Discourses of Rumi, 46. 6. Fīhi, 64; Arberry, Discourses, 205.

298    Notes to Pages 89–90

CHAPTER 4 1. This essay was originally written as an article for the Journal of Comparative Islamic Studies (special issue on Iranian cosmopolitanism, forthcoming (fall, 2019). 2. Hūjwīrī, Kashfu’l-­maḥjūb, 499. 3. Bauman, Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds, viii. 4. This essay was written in the spring of 2017. 5. For an overview of epistemological nuances applied to justice in various philosophical and religious traditions, see Bhandari, “The Ancient and Modern Thinking about Justice: An Appraisal of the Positive Paradigm and the Influence of International Law.” 6. Although the notion of justice has received many interpretations in various cultures, Aristotle remains the most influential philosopher in defining its major categories. He recognizes “commutative justice,” which, according to Chroust and Osborn, is the “justice of co-­ordination,” under “private law.” Distributive justice that includes punitive justice is the “justice of subordination,” to legal authorities, and is defined as “public law.” For more details on these terms, see Chroust and Osborn, “Aristotle’s Conception of Justice,” 129, 140–­42. For critiques of absolutist views of justice in politics and political theory, see Shriver, An Ethics for Enemies: Forgiveness in Politics, 12–­32; Audard, “Peace or Justice? Some Remarks on Rawls’s Law of Peoples.” 7. The Mu‘tazilites refer to a number of the earliest theologians in Islamic history who based their theological perspective on reason. They are usually compared with rival theologians from the Ash’rite school who considered all normative values to be drawn only from revelation. 8. Lambton, “Justice in the Medieval Theory of Kingship.” 9. Khaleghi-­Motlagh, “ADAB i. Adab in Iran.” 10. Lewis, The Four Loves: An Exploration of the Nature of Love. 11. Nixon, Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Friendship. 12. Derrida, The Politics of Friendship. 13. Lambert, Philosophy after Friendship. 14. Bifo, Felix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography. 15. Mitias, Friendship: A Central Moral Value. 16. Nehamas, On Friendship. 17. Devere, “Amity Update: The Academic Debate on Friendship and Politics.” 18. Schwarzenbach, On Civic Friendship: Including Women in the State. 19. Majid Fakhry (Ethical Theories in Islam) assigns al-­Isfahānī to the school of religious ethics, whereas the Bibliography of Islamic Ethics (Aḥmadpour et al.)

Notes to Pages 91–93    299

categorizes al-­Isfahānī as a scholar of moral synthesis. Given the content of one of al-­Isfahānī’s books, Al-­dharī‘a ilā makārim al-­sharī‘a, I agree with the second categorization. 20. Schall, At the Limits of Political Philosophy, 219. 21. By “justice-­plus,” I mean an ethical mode of thought and behavior that looks at human relations beyond and above securing an individual’s fair share of goods and honors. A justice-­plus or an extralegal society considers the quality of intimate human relations to be far more essential than rights and ownerships. 22. Lewis, The Four Loves. 23. The rubric “liberal peace” defines parameters of strategic peace on only three standards: free market, human rights, and democracy. This theory has been criticized by a number of scholars who maintain that “liberal peace” has ignored cultural parameters such as religion and therefore has not worked effectively. On this argument, see Philpott and Powers, Strategies of Peace: Transforming Conflict in a Violent World. The term cold peace, which is only slightly better than cold war, refers to a peace that is based, at best, on relational indifference or, at worst, on tolerance. 24. In criticizing the abusive reference to punitive justice as a precondition to peace, David Rieff elaborately argues that based on a number of modern empirical case studies in national and international politics, peace before justice may prove to work far more effectively than justice before peace (see Rieff, In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies, 91–­92). 25. For a section of The Epic of Gilgamesh alluding to human-­divine friendship, see Blosser and Bradley, Friendship: Philosophic Reflections on a Perennial Concern, 2–­6. For the Old Testament reference to Cyrus’s friendship with the god Marduk, see Matthews and Benjamin, Old Testament Parallels: Laws and Stories from the Ancient Near East, 193–­94. 26. Barnes, The Complete Works of Aristotle, 1825. 27. Ibid., 1828. 28. Ibid., 1825. 29. Friendship as a necessary means for life is a less controversial subject between Aristotle and Plato than friendship as a goal of life. Plato mentions, “The heavens and the earth, gods and men, are bound together by fellowship and friendship, and order and temperance and justice” (Gorgias 508a). He nevertheless asserts in Phaedo, as Sherman points out (“Aristotle on the Shared Life,” 95), that because friendship makes self-­sufficiency vulnerable, it may get in the way of happiness. See also Hamilton and Cairns, Plato: The Collected Dialogues, 290). 30. Barnes, The Complete Works of Aristotle, 1825. 31. Ibid.

300    Notes to Pages 93–96

32. See Aristotle’s mention of the proverbial statement “In justice is every excellence comprehended” (Barnes, The Complete Works of Aristotle, 1783). 33. Noting that Aristotle “fails to provide a clear and precise definition of what friendship is or of the principles he thinks should govern our friendships,” Salkever adds, “For Aristotle, as for Plato, the goal and the task of practical philosophy is reorientation rather than systematic doctrine, an attempt to teach questions and a mode of inquiry rather than to supply definitive answers” (“Taking Friendship Seriously: Aristotle on the Place(s) of Philia in Human Life,” 54–­55). 34. Salkever, “Taking Friendship Seriously,” 55–­56. 35. According to virtue theory in Sufī Islam, even within the highest of all virtues, which is love, the two distinct attributes of giver-­love and receiver-­love are well distinguished. In an interview (in Persian) with the author, Abu’l-­Qāsim Fanā’ī, a contemporary philosopher of ethics, stated that the well-­recognized morally transformative love in Sufi theory is the giver-­love rather than the receiver-­ love (a love that expects to receive benefits from the beloved). 36. Enright, Enright, and Hotler, “Turning from Hatred to Community Friendship: Forgiveness Education as a Resource for Strategic Peacebuilding in Postaccord Belfast,” 291. 37. Alshaar, Ethics in Islam, 28. 38. Ibid., 1–­2. 39. Well known among Muslim scholars for his methodological works on world history (Tajārib al-­umam) and perennial philosophy (Jāvīdān kherad), Miskawayh is the founder of philosophical ethics in the history of Islamic scholarship. 40. This book is also known as Taṭhīr al-­a‘rāq (Purity of disposition). 41. These are friendships for pleasure, for interest, and for the good. 42. Miskawayh, Tahdhīb al-­akhlāq wa taṭhīr al-­a‘rāq, 138; The Refinement of Character, 139. 43. The Qur’ānic term faḍl can hardly be translated into one English term. It conveys benevolence, bounty, generosity, forgiveness, gift, and more. Defined by the Qur’ān as a mode of ethics that is higher than justice, it is frequently used in a context where human survival becomes impossible with justice alone. Cf. Q 2:64. 44. Miskawayh, Tahdhīb al-­akhlāq, 121; The Refinement of Character, 114. 45. Miskawayh, Tahdhīb al-­akhlāq, 122; The Refinement of Character, 115. 46. Ibid. 47. Miskawayh, Tahdhīb al-­akhlāq, 122; The Refinement of Character, 116. 48. Miskawayh, Tahdhīb al-­akhlāq, 119; The Refinement of Character, 112. 49. Miskawayh, Tahdhīb al-­akhlāq, 124; The Refinement of Character, 118.

Notes to Pages 96–99    301

50. Miskawayh, Tahdhīb al-­akhlāq, 128–­29; The Refinement of Character, 127. 51. Goodman, Islamic Humanism, 177. 52. The function of an imām has been subject to much controversy in Islamic history, with some believing that it combines both religious and legitimate political leadership, while others emphasize its religious function only. Either perspective works well in the context of this chapter’s subject matter. 53. Miskawayh, Tahdhīb al-­akhlāq, 129; The Refinement of Character, 128. 54. Salkever, “Taking Friendship Seriously,” 71. 55. Miskawayh, Tahdhīb al-­akhlāq, 117; The Refinement of Character, 118. 56. Abu Ḥamid al-­Ghazālī (d. 1111) is known as a chief ethicist and scholar with deep influence in many areas of Islamic studies. 57. Miskawayh, Tahdhīb al-­akhlāq, 127; The Refinement of Character, 128. 58. Miskawayh, Tahdhīb al-­akhlāq, 129; The Refinement of Character, 132. 59. Miskawayh, Tahdhīb al-­akhlāq, 143; The Refinement of Character, 144. 60. All major academic Persian dictionaries define ṣuḥba as both “friendship/ companionship” and “conversation.” An online Persian dictionary provides the following meaning: “1) conversation; 2) engagement with something; 3) sexual intercourse; 4) companionship; 5) socialization” (Vajehyab, accessed September 20, 2018, https://www.vajehyab.com/?q=‫)تبحص‬. 61. Salkever, “Taking Friendship Seriously,” 67. 62. Miskawayh, Tahdhīb al-­akhlāq, 152; The Refinement of Character, 153. 63. Among the Iranian dynasties known to Miskawayh, Būyids where one of the most tolerant and humanistic in the history of Islamic civilization, as Kraemer and Goodman hold (Kraemer, Humanism in the Renaissance of Islam: The Cultural Revival during the Buyid Age; Goodman, “Friendship in Aristotle, Miskawayh, and al-­Ghazali”). For example, the Shi‘i orientation of Būyid sultans did not cause removal of Sunni Abbasid caliphs. Still, in Miskawayh’s view, they could not represent politics of friendship. 64. Al-­Isfahānī also was impressed by the open intellectual space of his time. He authored many books but did not enjoy as much fame as such contemporary figures as Miskawayh or Abū Ḥayyān al-­Tawḥīdī. According to some of his biographers, one reason for this is that al-­Isfahānī was at odds with governmental officials, causing his imprisonment at one time. 65. Al-­Isfahānī, Al-­dharī‘a ilā makārim al-­sharī‘a, 256. Qur’ān 43:67 reads, “On that day [Judgment Day], friends will be one another’s enemy except for the God-­wary.” See Qarā’ī, The Qur’an with a Phrase-­by-­Phrase English Translation.

302    Notes to Pages 99–103

66. Al-­Isfahānī, Al-­dharī‘a ilā makārim al-­sharī‘a, 249. On al-­Isfahānī’s view of justice and love see (Fakhry, Ethical Theories in Islam, 181–­83). 67. Al-­Isfahānī, Al-­dharī‘a ilā makārim al-­sharī‘a, 257. Jean-­Jacque Rousseau is said to have made a proverbial statement that is not far from al-­Isfahānī’s view: “Morality would be only a less effective substitute for love” (Bloom, Love and Friendship, 65). 68. “Had you [the Prophet] spent all that is in the earth, you could not have united their [believer’s] hearts, but Allah united them together” (Q 8:63); “Indeed those who have faith and do righteous deeds—­the All-­beneficent will endear them [to His creation]” (Q 19:96). 69. Al-­Isfahānī, Al-­dharī‘a ilā makārim al-­sharī‘a, 257. All statements from al-­Isfahānī herein are my own translation. 70. Ibid., 260. 71. Ibid., 257. 72. Ibid. 73. Ibid., 258. 74. Ibid., 257. 75. See n. 68. 76. In addition to Risāla fi adab al-­ikhtilāṭ bi’l-­nās, al-­Isfahānī wrote a Persian treatise on ethics (Akhlāq-­i Rāghib) that is unfortunately lost, according to some sources. On al-­Isfahānī, see http://wikifeqh.ir (accessed September 22, 2018). 77. Ṭūsī, The Nasirean Ethics. 78. Ṭūsī, Akhlāq-­i Nāṣirī, 143; The Nasirean Ethics, 104. 79. Wickens has translated faḍl to “favor” in the literary sense, but as mentioned earlier in this chapter, Arabic faḍl does not have an exact English translation. It and its derivative verbal noun tafaḍḍul convey a range of meanings, including bounty, friendship, justice-­plus, forgiveness, and condescendence. 80. Ṭūsī, Akhlāq-­i Nāṣirī, 145; The Nasirean Ethics, 106. 81. Ṭūsī, Akhlāq-­i Nāṣirī, 146; The Nasirean Ethics, 106. 82. Ibid. 83. Ibid. 84. Ṭūsī, Akhlāq-­i Nāṣirī, 147; The Nasirean Ethics, 107. 85. Ibid. 86. Ṭūsī, Akhlāq-­i Nāṣirī, 149; The Nasirean Ethics, 108. 87. Ṭūsī, Akhlāq-­i Nāṣirī, 258; The Nasirean Ethics, 196. 88. Sokolowski, “Phenomenology of Friendship,” 463. 89. Schall, At the Limits of Political Philosophy, 223, 226.

Notes to Pages 104–8    303

90. Sokolowski, “Phenomenology of Friendship,” 467. 91. Ṭūsī, Akhlāq-­i Nāṣirī, 321; The Nasirean Ethics, 242. 92. Ṭūsī, Akhlāq-­i Nāṣirī, 321; The Nasirean Ethics, 244. 93. Ṭūsī, Akhlāq-­i Nāṣirī, 334; The Nasirean Ethics, 252. 94. Ṭūsī, Akhlāq-­i Nāṣirī, 284–­85; The Nasirean Ethics, 215. 95. Schall, At the Limits of Political Philosophy, 224. 96. Ibid. 97. Schall, At the Limits of Political Philosophy, 224–­25. 98. St. Thomas Aquinas argued that the universe itself was established in mercy, not justice (1.21.4). Schall (At the Limits of Political Philosophy, 225) elaborates on Aquinas’s point: “Since the existence of the universe, creation, was not ‘owed’ or ‘due’ to anyone, something more than justice seemed to regulate ultimate order.” Cf. the following views from the Qur’ān: “And if Allah were to impose blame on the people for what they have earned, He would not leave upon the earth any creature” (35:45; this Qur’ānic verse clearly states that with justice alone, life becomes impossible); “My Lord! Grant me wisdom/judgment and unite/bind me to the righteous” (26:83). 99. Cf. Q 3:193: “Our Lord, indeed we have heard a caller calling to faith, [saying], ‘Believe in your Lord,’ and we have believed. Our Lord, so forgive us our sins and remove from us our misdeeds and cause us to die with the righteous.” 100. Ja‘far b. Muḥammad al-­Ṣādīq (d. 765) was the sixth Shia imām and a prominent scholar, jurist, and hadith transmitter in Sunni schools of Islam. 101. Ibn Bābawayh, Fi Musadaqat al-­ikhwan, 46. 102. Ibid. 103. Ibid., 48. 104. Schall, At the Limits of Political Philosophy, 227, 235, 229. 105. Cf. the following poetic verses from Sa‘dī Shīrāzī (d. 1292): “Opening one’s eyes in a morning to paradise / is not as blissful as opening it to the face of a friend” (Ghazalīyāt, no. 505). 106. Bauman, Liquid Love. 107. Kraemer, Humanism in the Renaissance of Islam; Goodman, Islamic Humanism. 108. Al-­Tawḥīdī, known among his contemporaries as the philosopher of literatures, gave friendship a literary treatment that deserves a whole separate discussion. Alshaar (Ethics in Islam) has provided an elaborate and articulate account of al-­Tawḥīdī and the Būyid era, with conclusions that support the thesis of the present chapter.

304    Notes to Pages 108–26

109. In a personal conversation that I had in the summer of 2014 with Bahāeddīn Khorramshāhī, an authority in Persian literature and Qur’anic exegesis, he suggested the Persian compound word jahānvand as the most accurate translation for English cosmopolitan. 110. Pagden, “Stoicism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Legacy of European Imperialism.” 111. See Odabaei, review of Iranian Identity and Cosmopolitanism: Spheres of Belonging, 234–­40.

CHAPTER 5 1. Mottahedeh, The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran. 2. Ibid., 286. 3. Al-­Tawḥīdī, Al-­adab wa’l-­inshā’ fī al-­ṣadāqa wa’l-­ṣadīq. 4. Ibid., 201–­2. 5. Ibid., 66. 6. Al-­Tawḥīdī, Al-­Tadhkira al-­ḥamdūniyya, 2:165–­250. 7. Mottahedeh, Loyalty and Leadership in an Early Islamic Society. 8. The concept of noble character is based on a prophetic saying but gets used in various ways in different circles. See Heck, “Noble Character as Humanistic Concern: Makārim al-­akhlāq in Abbasid Political Culture,” 71–­93. 9. Al-­Ghazālī, “Kitāb Adāb al-­Ulfa wa-­al-­Ukhuwwa wa-­l-­Suhba wa-­l-­ Mu‘āshara.” 10. Goodman, “Friendship in Aristotle, Miskawayh, and al-­Ghazāli.” 11. Hallaq, “Caliphs, Jurists, and the Saljuqs in the Political Thought of Juwayni.”

CHAPTER 6 1. See http://hadith.islambeacon.com/index.php?title=_‫األحاديث_الصحيحة_فى‬ ‫فضل_الحب_في_الله‬ 2. Anṣārī Hiravī, Manāzil as-­Sā’irīn (Stations of the wanderers), 187. 3. Ibid., 233. 4. Q 35:45. All Qur’ānic translations in this chapter are from Qarā’ī, The Qur’an with a Phrase-­by-­Phrase English Translation.

Notes to Pages 126–35    305

5. Q 10:11. 6. Q 24:14. 7. See Q 2:64; 4:83, 113. 8. As noted in chapter 4, the word faḍl has a range of meanings, including excess, benevolence, bounty, favor, generosity, grace, and so on. Based on translations for both faḍl and bounty in some of the frequently used Arabic and English dictionaries, bounty—­translated as “liberality in giving”—­is the closest English equivalent of faḍl, which is sometimes translated as “to give without cause.” Both terms seem to connote giving out of grace, kindness, and generosity rather than in expectation of a reciprocal reward. For further inquiry, see Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary, Oxford Advanced Dictionary of Current English, and Al-­Munjid fī al-­Lughāti wa’l-­A‘lām. 9. For the full range of views from Ṭūsī and Schall on justice and bounty, see chapter 3 of the present volume. 10. Cf. Q 2:212, 3:27, 38:39, 39:10, 40:40. 11. Q 16:90. 12. Meybodī, Kashfu’l-­asrār wa ‘uddatu’l -­abrār (Summary of ‘Abdullah Anṣārī Hiravī’s Gnostic exegesis of the Qur’ān), 2:289. 13. A new thriving scholarship in Persian has recently appeared in Iran with the goal to challenge the traditional historiographies that have framed the Prophet Muḥammad’s biography (sira) mostly through the prism of early military campaigns (al-­maghāzī). Cf. Ṣāber Adāk, Raḥmat-­e nabavī, Khoshūnat-­e Jāhelī (The Prophetic Compassion and the Jāhilī Violence: A New Approach to The Prophet’s Treatment of Others). Adak points out that the aggregate time spent by the Prophet in wars amounts to less than a year of his decade-­long residence in Medina. Why then, Adak asks, should the whole life of the Prophet be viewed in the framework of military campaigns? 14. Q 10:60 echoes a similar notion: “Verily Allah is full of Bounty to mankind, but most of them are ungrateful.” 15. Quranā’ is the Arabic plural of qarīn, another word for “friend” in scripture. For more details on qarīn, see chapter 1 of this volume. 16. Q 4:76 reads, “Those who have faith fight in the way of Allah, and those who are faithless fight in the way of the Rebel. So fight the friends of Satan; indeed, the stratagems of Satan are always flimsy.” 17. See Munir Baalbaki and Rohi Baalbaki, Al-­Mawrid Al-­Quareeb: Arabic–­ English Dictionary (Beirut: Dar El-­Ilm li’l-­Malayen, 2000). Also see the full treatment of the word wadūd in chapter 1 of the present volume.

306    Notes to Pages 136–46

18. Moḥammadī, Mīzān al-­ḥikmah, 464–­65. 19. See also Q 52:20. 20. See also Q 76:19. 21. Draz (The Moral World of the Qur’an) suggests the following moral levels for various categories of acts: illegal = second basement (−2); immoral = first basement (−1); amoral = roadway (0); acceptable = ground floor (0’); good = first floor (+1); better = upper floor (+2). 22. See Izutsu, Ethico-­Religious Concepts in the Qur’ān. 23. See Atif Khalil, “Early Sufi Approaches to Tawba: From the Qur’ān to Abū Talib al-­Makkī.” 24. Taha, “The Second Message of Islam,” 269–­83. 25. Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning. 26. Al-­Jawshan al-­Kabir, A Supplication of Prophet Muḥammad, 39, 52, 80.

CHAPTER 7 1. Kanga, Čītak Handarž ī Pōryōtkēšān: A Pahlavi Text, 1. 2. Dhabar, Andarj-­ī-­Aōshnar-­i Dānāk, 24. 3. Thackston, The Golestān, 5.7. In Iranian pand (advice) literature, the term weh (New Persian beh) is often used not only in the base sense of “good” but also to mean comparative “better” (Middle Persian weh-­tar, New Persian beh-­tar) and superlative “best” (Middle Persian wahišt, New Persian behesht). 4. On the process of conquest and Islamization, see my Conflict and Cooperation: Zoroastrian Subalterns and Muslim Elites in Medieval Iranian Society, especially 68–­109. 5. Bell, The Hafez Poems, 35. 6. On the dating of the Avestan scriptures, see my “To Cut-­Off, Purify, and Make Whole: Historiographical and Ecclesiastical Conceptions of Ritual Space,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 123, no. 1 (2003), 22; Skjærvø, The Spirit of Zoroastrianism, 2. 7. These issues have been discussed in my article “Friends and Friendships in Iranian Society: Human and Immortal” and will not be raised here. On Aryaman, see Windfuhr, “A Note on Aryaman’s Social and Cosmic Setting,” 295–­336. 8. Texts from the Avesta, including the Gāθās, Yasna, Yasna Haptahāiti, Yašt,

Notes to Pages 146–52    307

Vidēvdād, Vīsperad, Xwurdag Abestāg, Sirōza, and Niyāyišn, are taken from Geldner, Avesta: The Sacred Books of the Parsis, 3 vols. 9. Bartholomae, Altiranisches Wörterbuch, 198–­99, 1183–­85, 1655; Kent, Old Persian: Grammar, Text, Lexicon, 189, 203; Nyberg, A Manual of Pahlavi, 65, 132; MacKenzie, A Concise Pahlavi Dictionary, 26–­27, 31, 56. 10. Bartholomae, Altiranisches Wörterbuch, 1026. 11. Watkins, The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-­European Roots, 69. 12. Texts of the Old Persian inscriptions are taken from Kent, Old Persian, with exceptions so noted. Only major reconstructions have been indicated within parentheses. 13. Schmitt, “Epigraphisch-­ exegetische Probleme der altpersischen Texte ‘DNb’ und ‘XPl.’” Only major reconstructions have been indicated within parentheses. 14. See Mackenzie, “Mani’s Šābuhragān,” in A Concise Pahlavi Dictionary, 500–­533. Contra Mackenzie’s reading of hayyārān as “helpers” (507), see my “Friends and Friendships in Iranian Society,” 260. 15. Madan, The Complete Text of the Pahlavi Dinkard. 16. Minovi, Tansar nāma. The Middle Persian “letter” attributed by tradition to Tōsar, but actually a document probably revised several times from his time forward, survives in a New Persian or Fārsi translation from the thirteenth century CE. 17. Unvala, The Pahlavi Text “King Husrav and His Boy.” 18. Peshotan Sanjana, The Dīnā ī maīnū ī khrat. 19. The moral aspect is discussed further in Kreyenbroek, “Morals and Society in Zoroastrian Philosophy,” 46–­63. 20. On the use of colors like white and red in Iran, see early comments by the Greek historian Herodotus (fifth century BCE) at History 1.98 (Herodotus: The Persian Wars). For an overview of color symbolism among Iranians, consult Schimmel, “Color Symbolism in Persian Literature.” 21. Lane, An Arabic–­English Lexicon, 2054. 22. Boyce, A Word-­List of Manichaean Middle Persian and Parthian, 37. On the overlap of friendship and love in ayār/yār, note Hāfez’s classic line “Dardā ke yār dar gham o dard-­am ne-­mānd o raft” (Alas that the friend/lover did not stay and left me in sorrow and pain); see Boyce, A Word-­List, 27. 23. Nicholson, Masnavi-­e ma‘navi. 24. Jamasp-­Asana, The Pahlavi Texts.

308    Notes to Pages 153–85

CHAPTER 8 1. See Shaul Magid, “Reb Zalman Married Counter Culture to Hasidic Judaism,” Forward, July 3, 2014, accessed June 24, 2017, http://forward.com/ news/201430/reb-zalman-married-counter-culture-to-hasidic-juda/

CHAPTER 9 1. I have published a translation and study of the text as The First Islamic Classic in Chinese. 2. Murata, Chittick, and Weiming, The Sage Learning of Liu Zhi: Islamic Thought in Confucian Terms. 3. I am using the edition published in Shanghai in 1924. 4. Murata, First Islamic Classic, 173–­74. 5. Ibid., 175. 6. Tianfang dianli, section 13, p. 8. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid., p. 9. 9. Ibid., pp. 9–­10. 10. Ibid., p. 13.

CHAPTER 10 1. Mathews, Young Islam on Trek: A Study in the Clash of Civilizations. 2. Pagden, Worlds at War: The 2,500-­Year Struggle between East and West. 3. Arnold, The Preaching of Islam: A History of the Propagation of the Muslim Faith.

CHAPTER 11 1. C stands for “root consonant.” 2. Such books include as-­Ṣadāqa wa’s-­ṣadīq (Friendship and Friends), by Abū Ḥayyān al-­Tawḥīdī (d. 1023); Adab ad-­dunyā wa’d-­dīn (Secular and Religious Ethics), by Abū al-­Ḥassan al-­Māwardī (d. 1058); Al-­Adab al-­kabīr (Major

Notes to Pages 186–216    309

Work on Etiquette), by Ibn al-­Muqaffa‘ (d. ca. 756); Bidāyatu al-­hidāya (Introduction to Good Faith), by Abu Hāmid al-­Ghazālī (d. 1111); Adab al-­murīdīn (Ethics of the Righteous), by Dīyauddīn al-­Swhrawrdī (d. 1168); and Tahdīb al-­‘akhlāq wa taṭhīr al-­‘aarāq (Refinement of Character and Purification of Dispositions), by Ahmad Miskawayh (d. 1030). All masterpieces of the heritage of the Arab Islamic library, they deal with friendship from various perspectives. 3. Abdullah al-­Muqaffa‘, Al-­Adab al-­kabīr (mostly composed of belles lettres from Indo-­Persian sources). 4. Ahmad Miskawayh, Tahdhīb al-­akhlāq, ed. C. Zurayk (Beirut: n.p., 1967).

CHAPTER 12 1. This essay originated as an oral presentation at Oberlin College for Universal Friendship Day on April 8, 2011, and was substantially revised for publication by the author.

CHAPTER 13 1. For articles on this topic, see European Journal of International Relations 12, No. 4, (2006); Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 10, no. 2 (2007); International Politics 48, no. 1, (2011), cited herein as International Politics. 2. Roshchin, “The Concept of Friendship: From Princes to States.” 3. International Politics, 2, 6. 4. “Friendship and the World of States,” International Politics, 10. 5. Ibid., 23. 6. Devere, Mark, and Verbitsky, “A History of the Language of Friendship in International Treaties,” 48, no. 1: 46–­70. 7. Ibid., 54–­57, 62, 64–­65. 8. Roshchin, “Friendship of the Enemies: Twentieth Century Treaties of the United Kingdom and the USSR,” 73, 77, 88. 9. King and Smith, “Introduction.” 10. King, “Friendship in Politics.” 11. Zweerde “Friendship and the Political,” 47–­48. 12. Choksy, Crossing the Divide: Dialogue among Civilizations.

310    Notes to Pages 216–42

13. Alliance of Civilizations, Report of the High-­Level Group (New York: United Nations, 2006). 14. This is a gross oversimplification of the complex analysis in the study. 15. Preamble of the Charter of the United Nations.

CHAPTER 14 *May peace be upon the great soul of the late Sarah Hammond who transcribed and edited this chapter from the original talk. 1. Jalal al-­Din Rumi, Divan Shams, poem 1393, translation from: www.umass. edu/gso/rumi7.htm 2. Rumi, the Mathnavi, trans. Mojaddedi, vol. 2, 1533–­35; 6.3648. 3. One can find exceptional cases in hadith literature. For example, the Prophet said to Muadh, “O Muadh! Do you know what are God’s rights over the worshippers? And what are the worshippers’ rights over God?” Muadh replied, “God and His Prophet know best!” The Prophet responded, “The right of God over the worshippers is that they worship Him, and not associate any partner with Him; and the right of the servant over God is that He not chastise one who does not associate any partner with the Divine!” Muadh then said, “O Messenger of God, should I not give them the good news?” The Prophet said, “No! Because then they will rely solely upon that.” This hadith is reported in several variants in Ṣaḥiḥ Muslim and Ṣaḥiḥ al-­Bukhārī. The version presented here occurs in hadith 2856 of Ṣaḥiḥ al-­Bukhārī. 4. The term “religion of love” is referenced at Mathnavi 2.1774 (see Sūbḥānī, Mathnavī-­e Ma‘navī): “The religion of love is above all other faiths / God Himself is the religion of lovers.”

CHAPTER 16 1. See chapter 2 of the present volume. 2. Davis, Faces of Love: Hafez and the Poets of Shiraz, 97. 3. Monbiot, “Neoliberalism Is Creating Loneliness; That’s What’s Wrenching Society Apart.” 4. Robert Waldinger’s official website, accessed August 28, 2018, http://robertwaldinger.com/ 5. Liz Mineo, “Good Genes Are Nice, but Joy Is Better, Harvard Gazette, April 11, 2017, https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/04/over-nearly80-years-harvard-study-has-been-showing-how-to-live-a-healthy-and-happy-life/

Notes to Pages 242–52    311

6. Ibid. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10. Alshaar, Ethics in Islam: Friendship in the Political Thought of al-­Tawhīdī and His Contemporaries, 5. 11. Ibid., 159–­60. 12. Ibid., 184. 13. Ibid., 3. 14. In addition to the discussion of Ṭūsī in chapter 4 of the present volume, see Ṭūsī. The Nasirean Ethics, 196. 15. Nielsen, “God and the Basis of Morality,” 345. 16. A cursory web search about various ethical schools and distinct systems leads to more than twenty-­four schools, including virtue, role, deontological, consequentialist, formal, relative, law-­based, love-­based, capacity-­based, and other systems. 17. Moḥammadī and Taqdīrī, Doosti dar Qur‘an wa Hadith, 4. 18. Ibid. 19. Alshaar, Ethics in Islam, 140. 20. Ibid., 168–­69. 21. Ibid., 169. 22. See Obiedat’s contribution in this volume (chapter 1) on the etymology of Arabic words with friendship connotations. 23. Rāzī, Rawḍ (Rawḥ) al-­jinān wa rawḥ al-­janān, 1–­2:24. 24. Ṭabāṭabā‘ī, Tafsīr al-­Mīzān, 5:155. 25. Q 53:2. 26. Vacek, “Divine-­Command, Natural-­Law, and Mutual-­Love Ethics,” 639. 27. Besides being recognized by the Shia as the legitimate successor of the prophet Muḥammad and the first imām of the sect, ‘Alī is recognized as the First Initiator in most Sufi and Futuwwah (Muslim chivalry) orders. 28. Al-­Qummī, 227. 29. A discussion of the first two titles is presented in Miskawayh, The Refinement of Character, 151–­52. 30. Chittick, Divine Love: Islamic Literature and the Path to God, 336. 31. Ibid. 32. The passage is translated by Chittick (Divine Love, 336) from Abdullah Anṣārī’s book Chihil u du faṣl (Forty-­two chapters). 33. This hadith is narrated in Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim, one of the six standard hadith

312    Notes to Pages 252–60

sources. See hadith 2687 at http://sunnah.com/riyadussaliheen/20; Chittick, Divine Love, 10. 34. The passage is a translation from Sam‘ānī’s book Rawḥ al-­arwāḥ. 35. Chittick, Divine Love, 103. 36. Vacek, “Divine-­Command, Natural-­Law, and Mutual-­Love Ethics,” 281. 37. Ibid., 282. 38. Ibid., 283. 39. Ibid., 312. 40. Moucarry, The Search for Forgiveness: Pardon and Punishment in Islam and Christianity, 38. 41. Shriver, An Ethics for Enemies: Forgiveness in Politics, 9. 42. Arendt, The Human Condition, 237. 43. See Mohammad Hossein Ṭabāṭabā’ī’s exegesis of these terms in Al-­Mizan, accessed September 14, 2017, http://www.aviny.com/quran/almizan/jeld-17/ mizan-15.aspx 44. Alshaar, Ethics in Islam, 182. 45. Holland, The Duties of Brotherhood in Islam, 67. 46. Ibid., 65–­66. 47. Ibid., 66. 48. Rieff, In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies. 49. Ibid., 17. 50. Ibid., 18. 51. Ibid., 19–­20. 52. Ibid., 24. 53. Ibid., 62. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid., 67. 57. Ibid., 56. 58. Ibid., 74. 59. Ibid., 83–­84. 60. In Persian, “Ẓulm be’l-­sawiyyeh ‘adl ast.” 61. Rieff, In Praise of Forgetting, 91–­92. 62. Ibid., 93. 63. Ibid., 98. 64. Fayḍ Kāshānī, Ulfatnāmeh, accessed September 14, 2017, http://nbo.ir/-‫الفت‬ ‫__نامه‬a-1121.aspx

Notes to Pages 261–65    313

65. In his commentary on Q 39:55, Ezzedin Naguib, a contemporary Egyptian scholar, provides an excellent interpretation and a friendship-­oriented exegesis for the verse. He states that the phrase “follow the best of what was revealed to you” does not mean follow the entire Qur’ān as the best of all scriptures, because other scriptures were not sent to Arabs. It means that wherever the Qur’ān provides choices between good, better, and best, follow the best, just like in the cases of treating murder, divorce, prisoners of war, and so on. Naguib mentions that in the case of inadvertent murder, for example, when the family of the deceased is given choices between financial compensation, while charitable forgiveness is advised by the Qur’ān (4:92), the financial compensation is good, and forgiveness is best. On the Qur’anic exegeses of this verse, see the following works (accessed September 14, 2017): Tafsir Qurtubi, http://lib.eshia. ir/15390/15/270; Tafsir Sāfi, http://alkafeel.net/islamiclibrary/quranscience/ safi2/18.html; Al-­Mizan, http://www.aviny.com/quran/almizan/jeld-17/ mizan-15.aspx; Ezzedin Naguib, http://www.ahl-alquran.com/arabic/show_article.php?main_id=8848 66. Nasr, The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary. 67. The contemporary Shia exegete Mohammad Hossein Tabātabā’ī notes, in his Qur’ānic exegesis Al-­Mizan, that classical exegetes have offered three interpretations for this verse, including rewarding the best of their deeds, best rewards to their deeds, or better rewards than what their deeds would deserve. He believes that the first interpretation is the most accurate and that according to the verse, God’s eschatological reward is according to the best acts of believers in this life. See file:///Users/jmahalla/Downloads/jeld-­12 (aviny-­2.com)/Mizan-­17.htm. 68. McAuliffe, The Qur’ān, 270. I intentionally chose a few of the most recent English translations of the Qur’ān for various verses, to show the consistency of the meaning. 69. Nasr uses “position” where other translators use “ability.” See The Study Quran, 1127. I thank Helene Tiley for bringing this verse to my attention. 70. Bulliet, The Case for Islamo-­Christian Civilization. 71. Rūmī, Silent Words: A Selection of Poetry and Prose, trans. R. A. Nicholson and A. J. Arberry, 1423.

314    Notes to Pages 267–82

EPILOGUE 1. Moḥammad Moḥammadi, Mizān al-­ḥikma (Arabic-­Persian). Hamid Reza Shaykhi, trans. Qom: Dar al-­Hadith, 1999. Vol 7, 106. 2. Andre Compte-­Sponville, A Small Treatise on the Great Virtues, 224–­25. 3. Rūmī, The Masnavi, Book One, trans. Jawid Mojaddedi, 4. 4. Holdaway, “ISIS Christian Massacre,” Sun, November 1, 2017. 5. “A Call to Save Iraq’s Cultural Heritage,” UNESCO official website. 6. Darren Boyle and Allan Hall, “Controversial Election-­ Favourite Geert Wilders Calls for All Mosques to Be Shut and the Koran Banned in Holland—­as German Right Wingers Want Undocumented Migrants Sent to Camps in Chilling Echo of the Nazis,” Daily Mail, August 26, 2016. 7. Haroon Mughal, “Islamophobia Is Killing Myanmar’s Rohingya, but the Muslim World Can Help,” Quarts Media, May 31, 2015. 8. Ben White, “UN Report: Israel Has Established an ‘Apartheid Regime,” Al Jazeera, March 18, 2017. 9. Naimark, Stalin’s Genocides. 10. Eisenstein, The Ascent of Humanity, 18. 11. Ibid., 471. 11. Ibid., 472. 13. Rūmī, The Masnavi, 4. 14. Eisenstein, The Ascent of Humanity, 477. 15. Nasr, The Study Quran. 16. Nasafī, Kitāb al-­insān al-­kāmil, 216. 17. Bahā’ al-­Dīn al-­‘Āmilī, a theologian and prominent scholar/polymath of the Safavid court, believed, as reflected in his proverbial poem, “true knowledge is only the knowledge of love / the rest are trickery of the cruel Satan” (‘ilm nabwad ghayr-­e ilm-­e ‘āsheqī / mā baqī telbis-­e iblis-­e shaqī). Werner Jeanrond, a prominent theologian and scholar at Oxford University, has many articles on theology and hermeneutics of love; see A Theology of Love (London: T&T Clark; New York: Continuum, 2010). 18. The Beirut Declaration and Its 18 Commitments on Faith for Rights: Report and Outlook (Geneva: Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, 2018), https://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/FreedomReligion/Pages/FaithForRights. aspx 19. Shaykh Muṣliḥ al-­Dīn Sa‘dī, Ganjoor, lyric 6. 20. The Collected Lyrics of Hāfiz of Shīrāz, trans. Peter Avery, 514 (poem 426).

Notes to Pages 282–83    315

21. Chittick, Al-­Sahifa al-­sajjadiyya, xv. The supplication is from Alī ibn al-­ Ḥusay Zayn al-‛Ābidīn (d. 713). As the grandson of Prophet Muḥammad’s daughter Fatimat al-­Zara and Alī ibn Abī Ṭālib, the first male convert to Islam and the Prophet’s cousin, Zayn al-­Abidīn, also the fourth Shi‘i imām, is well known across the Muslim world for mastery of supplication texts and as a prominent authority on the Prophet’s traditions and law. 22. Chittick, Al-­Sahifa al-­sajjadiyya, 67–­69.

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Index

Note: Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. “A Airii mā Išiiō” (Let Aryaman the Desirable), 146 al-­Ābī, Ibn Ḥusayn, 17 Abī Tālib, Alī b., 14, 118, 249, 311n27 Abraham, 247, 248, 250, 254, 264, 281 Abū Bakr, 53, 249 Adab ad-­dunyā wa’d-­dīn (Secular and Religious Ethics, Al-­Māwardī), 186–­87 Al-­Adab al-­kabīr (Major Work on Etiquette, al-­Muqaffa‘), 66, 70–­75, 185 Ādāb al-­murīdīn (Ethics of the Righteous, al-­Suhrawardī), 187 Adak, Ṣāber, 305n8 al-­‘Adawīyya, Rābi‘a, 252 ‘adl (justice), 126–­32, 138, 141, 142 Adurbād ī Ēmēdān, 149–­50 ‘aduw (enemy), 66 ‘afūwwun ghafūrun (the Effacer of sin, the all-­Forgiving), 256 agape, 21, 34, 35, 251, 252–­53 aggression, realm of, 139, 141, 142 Ahmadinejad, Mahmoud, 238, 239 akh (brother), 50, 59, 63 akhlāq (character traits, ethics), 86 Akhlāq-­i Nāṣirī (The Nāṣirean Ethics, Ṭūsī), 101, 104 alīf (affable and sociable friend), 50, 56, 63 Allah bounty of, 126–­29, 132 Confucian Islamic names for, 167 forgiveness of, 254, 255–­56 grace of, 131–­32, 255

love for, 83–­87 love of, 80–­82, 85, 86, 87, 98, 100 mercy of, 126, 128, 130, 131, 254, 255 ownership of, 272 reality of, 79 responsibilities/obligations of, 226, 310n3 Allah, human friendship with beauty and, 81–­82, 86 desirability of, 83–­84 forgiveness and, 254, 255 as highest friendship, 192–­93 human friendship as model for, 121, 251–­53 language for, 57, 58, 107 leveling effect of, 223 in paradise, 136, 138 for prophets, 135–­36, 142, 249 in relations-­centric theology, 252 thankfulness for, 132 Allen, Woody, 238 alliance vs. friendship, 112–­13, 192, 213–­14 Alliance of Civilizations, 216 Alshaar, Nuha, 94, 244, 246, 256 Altwaijri, Abdulaziz Othman, 42–­43, 183 al-­‘Amilī, Bahā’ al-­Dīn, 314n17 animosity Arabic terms relating to, 65–­66 cost of, 268 defined, 65 friendship transferred to, 99, 133, 301n65 327

328    Index animosity (continued) hellfire and, 134, 138, 142 Islamophobia, 205 rooted in soul, 228 transformation into friendship, 135 between Western and Muslim societies, 194, 196–­97, 215–­16, 238, 262 (see also “clash of civilizations” narrative) anīs (amiable friend), 50, 56, 63, 67 Anṣārī Hiravī, Khwāja Abdullāh, 126, 129–­30, 250–­51 Anscombe, Gertrude, 22 Appadurai, Arjun, 2–­3, 5 applied friendship, religious theory of Abrahamic prophets as role models in friendship, 247–­50 community building and, 254, 277 eschatological perspective in, 250–­51 forgetting in, 257–­64 forgiveness in, 253–­57 human-­divine relational modeling in, 251–­53 positive memory in, 261–­64 reason-­faith connection in, 245–­47 religious and moral qualification in, 243–­45, 273, 274 Aquinas. See Thomas Aquinas (saint) Arabic belles lettres, 16, 69 Arabic language, friendship-­related terms animosity, 65–­66 common terms, 50–­53 forgiveness and mercy in, 254 hierarchy of synonyms, 53–­62, 63–­64 levels/dimensions of, 63–­64 “love,” 77, 281–­82 prevalence of, 17 in Qur’ān, 155 semantic analysis of, 49–­50, 51, 53, 183–­85 support and betrayal, 62 Arabic language, richness of, 183 Arendt, Hannah conversation as manifestation of friendship, 97 on friendship-­truth tension, 20, 22 on friendship vs. love, 22–­23 on political forgiveness, 255, 289n88 political philosophy of friendship,

22–­23, 25–­26, 276 on power vs. force, 246, 273–­74 Aristotle Abrahamic connection to, 248, 264, 281 Aquinas influenced by, 18, 26, 33, 34, 282 Arabic translations of, 18, 33, 282 justice as sum of all virtues, 93, 95 justice categories identified by, 298n6 Miskawayh influenced by, 94–­95 practical philosophy of, 300n33 Aristotle, on friendship categories, 92, 94 Christian concept development and, 31 civic friendship, 13, 28, 94, 209, 246, 280 as goal of life, 92, 299n29 happiness relationship, 20, 92, 94 intimacy-­fellowship relationship, 97 limited human capacity, 104 manifested in conversation, 97 superiority to justice, 8, 28, 92, 93, 95 transcultural nature of, 93 tyrants’ prevention of, 105 as virtue, 92–­93 Arkoun, Mohammad, 244 Arnold, Thomas, 178 Artaxšacā II, 149 Artaxšacā III, 149 Art of Loving, The (Fromm), 222–­23 arts and culture, in inter-­civilizational friendship, 205–­6 aṣfiyā’, 57 aṣḥāb (whoever saw the Prophet or sat with him believing in him), 53 ‘ashīr (playmate), 61 al-­Askarī, Abū Hilāl, 184 Attar, Alqamah, 14 attitudes, toward friends, 116 Augustine (saint), 21, 28, 31–­32 Aung San Suu Kyi, 269 Avestan scriptures, friendship in, 146–­ 48 Avramenko, Richard, 25, 29–­30, 90 Bauman, Zigmunt, 4, 5, 107 beauty, 81–­82, 86, 119 Belden, Bob, 239

Index    329 belles lettres, Arabic, 16, 69 benevolence absent in sharī‘a, 95, 117–­18 of brotherhood, 130 in human-­divine friendship, 98 inequality masked by, 210 justice and, 95–­96, 98, 129, 280 language for, 95, 98, 106 positive memories and, 263, 313n65, 313n67 Berge, Marc, 244 Bible, friendships in, 155–­56 Blake, William, 21, 251 bounty. See faḍl Boym, Svetlana, 260 brotherhood advantages of, 188 bounty/benevolence of, 130 as contract, 257 as friendship for common purpose, 112 human, 188, 189 limited modern relevance of, 123 religious, 188–­89 rights and duties of, 114–­15 Brown, Peter, 32 Buber, Martin, 35, 156 Buddhism, 269 “Buergschaft, Die” (Schiller), 157–­58 Bulliet, Richard, 42, 173, 262 Burrell, David, 13–­14 Buscaglia, Leo, 164 Bush, George W., 238 Būyid period (934–­1062), 94, 108, 301n63 caliphate, 121–­22 Calvin, John, 34–­35 Carr, Brian, 20 Carter, Jimmy, 238 Chane, John, 238–­39 character friends chosen for, 118, 120, 169–­70, 171, 186, 187 God’s beauty reflected in, 119 necessary for healthy political life, 113–­14 China, Islam in, 165 See also “Islam, Confucian” Chinese language, 167

Chittick, William, 40, 77, 250, 251 Choksy, Jamsheed, 41, 145 Christianity conflicting paradigms driving, 268 ethnic and cultural diversity within, 197–­98 friendship de-­emphasized by, 21, 25, 26, 28, 34, 35, 252–­53 friendship limited to Christians, 32 friendship with Islamic civilizations (see under civilizations, friendship between) individualism in, 34, 253 Islamic contributions to theology of, 18, 282 Islam’s shared roots with, 177–­79, 180–­81 “I-­thou” relationship, 35, 156 Muslim friendship with (See civilizations, friendship between) Muslim tension with, 262–­63 “neighbor” vs. “friend” tension in, 34 partiality problematic for, 32–­33 theologies of friendship in, 31–­35, 177–­78 universal friendship and, 36 Cicero, 31–­32 civic friendship. See friendship, civic civilizations clash of (see “clash of civilizations” narrative) “Judeo-­Christian,” 42, 174–­75, 177 religions/sacred worldviews as foundations for, 43, 199–­208 singular vs. multiple, 195, 197, 198 Western domination among, 194–­96, 197, 198, 202 civilizations, friendship between communication insufficient for, 204–­5 Islamic-­Christian shared roots, 177–­ 79, 180–­81 necessity of, 196–­97, 207–­8 obstacles to, 174–­75, 179, 181, 192, 197, 202, 205 (see also animosity; “clash of civilizations” narrative) promotion of, 205–­7, 231–­36, 237 requirements for, 189–­90, 198–­99, 200, 205, 274 See also international relations

330    Index Clash of Civilizations, The (Huntington), 197 “clash of civilizations” narrative contextual invention of, 179 countering, 216, 275 development of, 174–­75 vs. “Islamo-­Christian” civilization, 181, 262 manifestations of, 176–­77, 196, 216 as propaganda tool, 180 Clinton, Bill, 233, 237 Coelho, Paulo, 257 “cold peace,” 91, 299n23 colonialism, Western, 9, 18, 197 comparative religion studies, 202 comparison, social, 3, 5 Confucianism, 165–­66 See also Islam, Confucian Consequentialist philosophy, 26–­27 consumerism. See neoliberal economics cosmology, 168, 170 cosmopolitanism, 94, 108, 109, 212, 304n109 Daesh (ISIS), 9, 18, 268 Dao, 168 Darius I, 148, 149 Darwin, Charles, 21 Dawānī, Jalāl al-­Dīn, 17 al-­Daylamī, Abū’l-­Ḥassan Alī b. Muḥammad, 17 decivilization, process of, 4 See also Great Regression Declaration of Human Responsibilities, 224–­25 Deleuze, Gilles, 23, 24, 282 Devere, Heather, 6–­7, 212, 286n21 Al-­dharī‘a ilā makārim al-­sharī‘a (The Means of Noble Religious Traits, al-­Isfahānī), 99 Dialogue of Civilizations, 216 Doctrine of Virtue (Kant), 27 dōst (friendship, love), 151 Douglas, Melvin, 236–­37 Draz, M. A., 139 dualism and separation, 270 duties and rights in friendship, 114–­15, 224–­26 duty, paradigm of, 226

“echocide,” 270 Eco, Umberto, 4 economics, friendship and, 29–­31 See also neoliberal economics Eisenstein, Charles, 270, 272 Elias, Norbert, 4 Emerson, Ralph, 21 enemies friendship with, 186 friends transformed into, 99, 133, 301n65 of sovereign states, 211 See also animosity English language, friendship-­related words in, 52 entrepreneurs, 30–­31 Erdogan, Recep Tayyip, 216 eschatology, Islamic, 250–­51 See also hellfire; paradise ethics justice-­plus mode of (see justice-­plus mode of ethics) love and generosity as category in, 226 in realm of justice, 139–­40 religiosity qualified by, 245 religious, 16–­17 virtue, 15, 18, 22, 109, 275 Western, 17–­18, 21 ethics, classical Iranian friendship as moral paradigm in, 90–­ 91, 92, 94–­99, 107, 109 al-­Isfahānī (see al-­Isfahānī, Al-­ Rāghib) on justice and peace, 90, 91 on justice and political legitimacy, 90 Miskawayh (see Miskawayh, Abū Alī Aḥmad) Ṭūsī (see Ṭūsī, Khwaja Naṣīr al-­Dīn) ethics, classical Islamic friendship addressed by, 17, 18, 69, 86, 243 friendship neglected by, 9 al-­Ghazāli (see al-­Ghazālī, Abū Ḥāmid) Greek philosophy preserved in, 33 Illuminationist, 15–­16 Iranian (see ethics, classical Iranian) in literature, 9–­16, 287n35, 288n46 practical intellect and, 86

Index    331 ethics, Confucian, 166 etiquette of friendship, 185–­86, 187 European Union, 215 faḍīla (virtue-­based love), 99 faḍl (benevolence), 95, 98, 106 faḍl (bounty) communal practice of, 131 in divine gift of love and friendship, 130 generosity of, 305n8 “golden ratio of,” 127–­29 heavenly friendship and, 136 justice and, 98, 102, 106, 126–­32 moral systems based on, 140, 141, 142 uneven spreading of, 127 virtues based on, 140 faḍl (favor), 102, 302n79 faḍl (grace), 131, 132, 136, 255 faḍl (justice-­plus, provision without cause), 127 faḍl, translation challenges for, 300n43 fairness, 139–­40 faith friendship and, 134–­35, 150, 187–­88, 245–­47, 249–­50 reason and, 245–­47, 298n7 See also religion(s) “Faith for Rights” framework, 278–­79 faithfulness, 168 Fakhry, Mājid, 94 family, friendship within, 193 Fanā’ī, Abu’l-­Qāsim, 300n33 al-­Fārābī, Abu Naṣr, 18 Fayḍ Kāshānī, Moḥsin, 17, 260, 288n46 fear, 100 Five Constants, 167–­68 forgetting friendship facilitated by, 257–­64 as highest degree of divine forgiveness, 256 justice and, 260 political, 257–­60 vs. positive memory, 261, 262 vs. social collective remembering, 258–­60 forgiveness of Allah, 254, 255–­56

between communities and countries, 257 in human-­divine relations, 252 in politics, 255, 257–­60, 288, 289n88 in social and private friendships, 253–­ 57 fraē-­(friendship), 146, 151 France, Islamophobia in, 205–­6 freedom, 37 Friedman, Milton, 30 Friedman, Thomas, 5, 286n18 “friend,” 52 friends character of, 118, 120, 186, 187 character revealed by, 276 choosing, 118, 169–­70, 171, 186 hellfire as absence of, 132–­34, 142, 268 intercessory power of, 106, 118 number of, 104–­5, 106, 118 as two halves of single self, 170 friends, types of acquaintance, 49, 54, 63 affable and sociable friend, 50, 56, 63 amiable friend, 50, 56, 63, 67 beloved, 50, 61–­62, 63 brother, 50, 59, 63 colleague, 49, 54, 63 companion, 49, 53, 55, 63, 64, 249 comrade, 49, 55, 63 desired friend, 60–­61 entertaining partner, 50, 59–­60, 63, 171, 296n93 faithful ally, 50, 58–­59, 63 highly selected friend, 50, 56–­57, 63 match, 49, 55, 63 playmate, 50, 60–­61, 63 righteousness/virtue-­based, 171 soulmate, 50, 57–­58, 63, 248, 295n69 truthful friend, 49–­50, 52, 53, 55, 63, 64, 184 friendship, absence of as earthly hellfire, 132–­34, 142, 268 hostility and, 268 (see also animosity) loneliness and (see loneliness) war and, 24, 25, 268 friendship, as moral/political paradigm vs. alliance, 112–­13, 192, 213–­14 contemporary advocacy efforts, 231–­ 36, 237, 278

332    Index friendship, as moral/political paradigm (continued) in contemporary Western political philosophy, 19, 20–­21, 90, 92–­93, 286n21 ethical support for (See ethics) Friendship Manifesto, 273–­79 Islamic tradition and contemporary thought supporting, 269–­70, 279 as justice-­plus ethic (see justice-­plus mode of ethics) literary support for (see literature) as meta-­ethics, 275 as moral bridge, 264 philosophical support for (See philosophy) potential impact of, 237, 272–­73, 277, 279 (see also virtue) rare community application of, 94 religious support for (see applied friendship, religious theory of; friendship, religious perspectives on) friendship, characterization of as antidote to separation, 272–­73, 277, 279 as antithesis of loneliness, 242 connection and bonds, 145–­46, 151, 158 as contract/covenant function, 147, 154, 155, 257 at core of humanity, 113, 244 cosmic quality, 170 demands and burdens, 161–­63 as divine gift, 100, 103–­4, 130 as essential to religion, 115–­19 as felicity in two worlds, 172 as foundation of politics, 22 goal of friendship, 84, 168–­69 as goal of life, 92, 109, 112–­13, 299n29 happiness dependent on friendship, 20, 92, 94, 95, 281 as highest calling of soul, 86 as highest goal of morality, 8–­9 as impossible, 27, 41, 100 as inclusive, 187–­88 as learned quality, 222 as loyal, 63–­64, 157–­63 as mutual, 252–­53, 280

as mystery (see mystery, friendship as) as pleasurable, 50, 60, 63–­64 as private and public in nature, 22–­23 as qualifier of morality and religiosity, 243–­45, 273, 276, 277 as rare, 191–­92, 198 as reason-­faith linchpin, 245–­47 as rooted in soul, 228 as “school of love,” 32, 33 as sincere, 63–­64, 184 as tenacious, 145, 147 transcendence manifested in, 112, 114, 115, 116–­19, 120–­21, 142, 247 (see also mystery, friendship as) unconstrained by religion or belief, 43 as unique, 154 as valuable, 274 friendship, civic Aristotle on, 13, 28, 94, 209, 246, 280 law as reflection of, 34 necessary for justice, 12, 28–­29, 278 See also friendship, political friendship, concepts related to economics, 29–­31 (see also neoliberal economics) global decivilization, 6 harmony (see harmony) identity, 23–­25, 154 love (see love; love and friendship, in Muslim cultures) loyalty, 63–­64, 157–­63 morality, 9, 21, 27, 37, 38, 110, 253, 263, 264 reason, 186–­87, 245–­47 truth, 20, 22 virtue (see virtue) friendship, defining, 154–­55, 184 friendship, human-­divine (vertical) as agape, 251 in Avestan scriptures, 146–­47 benevolence and bounty in, 98, 132 Christian views on, 13–­14, 34, 249 duties/responsibilities in, 226 Islamic views on (see Allah, human friendship with) mutuality of, 243 positive memory in, 261–­64

Index    333 power inequality and, 13–­14, 223 in Sufi hierarchy, 192–­93 friendship, human-­human (horizontal) among/across genders, 148, 187–­88 among Muslims, 112, 114–­15, 123, 130, 188–­89, 257 bounty in, 98, 136 between civilizations (see civilizations, friendship between) demands and burdens of, 161–­63 with family members, 193 God’s agency in, 103, 136 interfaith (see interfaith friendship) kinship transcended by, 187, 256–­57 limited capacity for, 104–­5, 106 as litmus test of interior state, 115, 116, 120 necessary for human well-­being, 147–­ 48, 192 paradise associated with, 76, 107, 142, 263 partiality in (see partiality in friendship) of philosophers and wise men, 187 positive memory in, 261–­64 practice of (see friendship, practice of) professionalism and, 163–­64 between spouses, 185, 193 unity in, 170 virtue and (see virtue) with wrongdoers, 133–­34, 148 friendship, language for Arabic (see Arabic language, friendship-­related terms) English, 52 Hebrew, 155 Iranian, 146, 151–­52 usage notes, 91 friendship, perspectives on ethical (see ethics) literary (see literature, Islamic; literature, Pre-­Islamic Iranian; literature, Western) philosophical (see philosophy, classical Islamic; philosophy, Western) religious (see friendship, religious perspectives on; specific religions) friendship, political alliances and, 112–­13, 192, 213–­14

among nations (see civilizations, friendship between; international relations) character required in, 113–­14 forgiveness in, 255, 257–­60, 289n88 foundational nature of, 22–­23 in internal politics, 210 philosophical views on (See political philosophy) political manipulation and, 212–­13 positive memory in, 261–­64 See also friendship, as moral/political paradigm; friendship, civic friendship, practice of action vs. words in, 184–­85, 186 choosing friends, 118, 169–­70, 171, 186 demands and burdens in, 161–­63 duties and rights in, 114–­15, 224–­26 ending friendships, 116–­17, 120, 257 etiquette of, 185–­86, 187 fluctuation/transformation of, 64 forgiveness in (see forgiveness) rules for, 102, 120, 168–­69 speech in, 116, 117, 186 friendship, realm of, 140, 141–­42 friendship, religious perspectives on Abrahamic prophets as role models in, 247–­50 in Christianity (see under Christianity) in Confucian Islam, 168–­72 in Hasidic tradition, 155–­57 in traditional Islam (see Islam, traditional; Qur’ān) See also religion(s) friendship, types of brotherhood (see brotherhood) civic (see friendship, civic) deep, 31, 36, 273, 275, 276 difference-­based, 29 good-­based, 92 human-­angelic, 137–­38, 142, 250 human-­demonic, 134, 138 human-­divine (see friendship, human-­ divine) human-­human (see friendship, human-­human) interfaith (see interfaith friendship) international (see civilizations, friendship between; international relations)

334    Index friendship, types of (continued) pleasure-­based, 92 political (see friendship, political) for righteousness and virtue, 171 spiritual, 114–­15, 116–­17 universal, 36, 41, 109 utility-­based, 92 See also friends, types of friendship, with self, 228 Friendship and Politics (Ed. von Heyking, Avramenko), 24–­25 Friendship and the Moral Life (Wadell), 37 Friendship Day, 191, 193 “Friendship in the Civic Order” (Heilke), 31 friendship literature, genres of, 16–­19 Friendship Manifesto, 273–­79 friendship studies in classical Islamic works, 10–­16 contemporary Muslim scholarship lacking in, 9–­10, 18, 280 critical nature of, 6–­7, 278 Iranian cosmopolitanism in, 94, 108, 109 partiality addressed by, 16 policy making potential of, 2 role models in, 12, 247, 248, 250 urgency of, 110 Western resurrection of, 6, 286n21 Fromm, Erich, 222–­23 Fuḍayl ibn ‘Iyāḍ, 118 Al-­Furūq fi’l-­lugha (Differences in Language, al-­Askarī), 184 Galanti, Moshe, 158–­60 Gandhi, Mahatma, 207 gender, friendship and, 148, 187–­88 generosity, in friendship, 186–­87, 227, 229 Germany, 268 gharīb (stranger), 65 gharīm (debtor/avenger), 66 al-­Ghazālī, Abū Ḥāmid on forgiveness in friendship, 256–­57 friends as moral mirrors for, 97, 276 on friendship as mystery (see mystery, friendship as) on justice-­friendship relationship, 12 “originality” of, 10–­11, 12

on religion-­friendship relationship, 12–­14 religious ethics approach, 15, 17 on requirements of friendship, 186 on rights and duties of friendship, 14–­ 15 al-­Ghazzī, Abū Barakāt Badreddīn Muḥammad, 17 globalization cultural diversity and, 203–­4 Muslim friendships affected by, 189 mystery mindset and, 112, 124 neoliberalism at odds with, 2–­3 relational hopes for, 215 U.S. isolationism and, 3–­4, 5 violence resulting from, 215–­16 “global village,” 203–­4, 215 God, Christian view of friendship with, 13–­14, 33–­34, 253 human-­divine relations, 13–­14, 34, 249 as love, 32 God, Islamic view of. See Allah; Allah, human friendship with Goodman, Lenn, 96, 121 grace of Allah, 131–­32, 255 friendship sustained by, 34 language for, 131, 132, 136, 255 nature and, 119–­20 Great Britain-­U.S. relations, 214–­15 Great Regression, 2–­6 Grosseteste, Robert, 33 Grotius, Hugo, 210 Guattari, Felix, 23 Guterres, Antonio, 5 ḥabīb (beloved), 50, 61–­62, 63 Ḥabīb Allah, 249 Hāfez, 145, 282 ḥajj, 253–­54, 280 Halbwachs, Maurice, 258 Hallaq, Wael, 9 Hammes, T. X., 5 Handarz i Ōšnar (Counsels of Oshnar), 145 Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Friendship (Nixon), 22 happiness friendship essential to, 20, 92, 94, 95, 281

Index    335 justice insufficient for, 255, 277–­78 vs. vulnerability, 299n29 worldly and transcendent, 119 harmony vs. animosity, 65, 66, 67 between friends, 113, 170, 184, 185 as goal of friendship, 168–­69 with God, 85 within individuals, 42–­43 love as, 85 political, 150 socioreligious, 147, 150 with universe, 170 Hasidic tradition, friendship in, 155–­57 Hebrew language, friendship-­related words in, 155 Heck, Paul, 40, 111 Hegel, Georg, 195, 223 Heilke, Thomas, 31.34 hellfire absence of friendship and, 132–­34, 142, 268 hostility and, 134, 138, 142, 250 loneliness and, 107, 132–­33, 134, 138, 142, 250 Heschel, Abraham Joshua, 156 historians, 173, 281 Hobbes, Thomas, 21, 25, 210 Holland, 268 homicide, Qur’ānic responses to, 140–­ 41 horizontal friendship. See friendship, human-­human hostility. See animosity ḥubb (to love), 77 Hūjwīrī, Abū’l-­Ḥassan ‘Alī, 8 humanity, in Five Constants, 167–­68 human rights, 3, 29, 225, 278–­79, 299n23 Hume, David, 21 Huntington, Samuel, 174–­75, 196, 197, 198, 216 hypocrites (munāfiqūn), 116, 117, 130, 134 Ibn Abī al-­Dunyā, 17 Ibn Aḥmad, al-­Khalīl, 55 Ibn al-­‘Arabī, Myhyi al-­Dīn, 281 Ibn al-­Fāriḍ, 79 Ibn al-­Muqaffa‘

biographical background, 69 friendship addressed by, 9, 17, 39–­40, 69, 185–­86 influence of, 94 Ibn Bābawayh, 17 Ibn Fāris, 52, 54, 57, 59, 60, 61 Ibn Ḥamdūn, 17, 113, 114, 122 Ibn Ḥazm, 11–­12, 17 Ibn Jinnī, 50–­51, 55 Ibn Mandur, 184 Ibn Qutayba, 17 Ibn Rushd, 33 Ibn Sayyār, 245 Ibn Sīdah, 55, 57, 59, 60 Ibn Sīnā, 101 identity friendship and, 154 national, 260, 275 in neoliberal economics, 30–­31 philosophical divisions based on, 24 identity crisis, 2–­3 Ikhwān al-­Ṣafā (the Brethren of Purity or Sincerity), 287n35 imams, 97, 98–­99, 105 īmān (faith), 228 individualism/self-­autonomy in Christianity, 34, 253 consumerism and, 30–­31 duality and separation caused by, 85 in friendship, 23 vs. friendship in Western philosophy, 25, 29–­30 loneliness related to, 5 surrender of, 85 in Western political philosophy, 22 See also self-­interest/selfishness injustice, 139, 163 In Praise of Forgetting (Rieff), 257 intellect, practical/theoretical, 86 interfaith friendship example of, 158–­60 necessary for intercivilizational friendship, 189–­90, 274 positive memory in, 262–­63 in Qur’ān, 247 unity of origin and, 187–­88 international relations cultural identities and, 215–­16

336    Index international relations (continued) friendship and international order in, 210–­13 friendship and political manipulation in, 212–­13 friendship paradigm as remedy for, 264, 270, 272–­73, 277, 279 friendship vs. alliance in, 192, 213–­14 friendship vs. distributive/punitive justice in, 91 globalization and (see globalization) Great Britain-­U.S., 214–­15 interpersonal relationships and, 216–­ 17 Iran-­U.S., 231–­39 religious understanding necessary for, 189–­90, 274 tolerance in, 263 United Nations, 90, 214, 215, 278–­79 virtue in, 212 Western-­Muslim hostilities (see animosity) internet, 3 interpersonal relationships. See friendship, human-­human intimacy collective, 280 necessary for shared activity, 97 rational politics and, 279–­80, 288n46 Iranian languages, friendship-­related terms in, 146, 151–­52 Iranian literature. See literature, Pre-­ Islamic Iranian Iran-­U.S. relations, 231–­39 al-­Isfahānī, Al-­Rāghib administrative engagement in high politics, 108 biographical background, 99, 301n64 complexity of friendship recognized by, 16 on friendship and collective religious rituals, 100, 105, 107, 277 on friendship and justice, 8, 99–­100, 105, 107, 108 on friendship as moral paradigm, 99–­ 101, 103 on friendship as reward for faith and good deeds, 99–­100, 302n68 moral synthesis approach, 17 ontology of love, 99, 100

virtue-­based love favored by, 99 ‘ishīr (domestic), 50, 63 ISIS (Daesh), 9, 18, 268 Islam, Confucian choice of friends in, 169–­70, 171 Confucian terminology and Islamic meaning in, 166 cosmological approach in, 168, 170 Five Constants in, 167–­68 five human relationships and, 168, 171–­72 Islamic worldview reformulated in, 165–­66 term usage, 165 way of friendship in, 168, 169, 170, 171 Islam, contemporary conflicting paradigms guiding, 268 diminished friendships in, 189, 281 neglected by post-­WWII American scholarship, 176 post-­WWII changes in, 176 Islam, traditional Christianity’s shared roots with, 177–­ 79, 180–­81 eschatological views, 250–­51 (see also hellfire; paradise) forgiveness in, 253–­54 friendship and religious rituals in, 97, 98–­99, 100, 105, 107, 277 friendship as frame for Islamic community, 122–­23 friendship as knowledge-­revelation meeting in, 244, 245 friendship as reward for prophethood in, 135 friendship conceptions in, 112, 279 friendship-­faith relationship in, 134–­ 35, 150, 187–­88, 245–­47, 249–­50 religious theory of (see applied friendship, religious theory of) schools of thought on love and friendship, 78 spiritual friendship in, 114–­15, 116–­ 18, 134 three dimensions of friendship in, 63–­ 64 Western characterizations of, 173–­75, 179, 180, 181

Index    337 See also love and friendship, in Muslim cultures Islamic culture, 9, 180, 181, 196–­97, 225, 282 See also love and friendship, in Muslim cultures “Islamic state,” 9, 18 Islamic studies, 9, 174–­75, 176–­77, 179 Islamophobia, 205–­6 isolationism, 2, 3–­4, 5–­6, 275 Israel, 269 istaṣḥaba, 52 “I-­Thou” relationship, 35 Izutsu, Toshihiko, 140 Jackson, Kevin, 236 Jadidi, Abbas, 236–­37 Jaspers, Karl, 258 Jeanrond, Werner, 37 Jesus Christian view of, 177–­78 disciples as friends of, 253, 276 hypocrisy identified by, 117 Muslim view of, 177, 248, 276 universal friendship and character of, 36 Jewish Renewal perspective, 41 Jones, Zeke, 236 Judaism, 41, 269 “Judeo-­Christian civilization” narrative, 42, 174–­75, 177 Junayd, 120 jurisprudence, 78 al-­Jurjānī, ʻAlī ibn Muḥammad al-­ Sharīf, 52, 184 justice abusive/absolutist approach to, 89, 269 benevolence/favor and, 95–­96, 98, 102, 129 bounty and, 98, 102, 106, 126–­32 categories of, 298n6 commutative, 298n6 definitions for, 89–­90 as disconnected, 36 distance required by, 103 distributive, 89, 91, 93, 263, 275, 278, 298n6 in ethical realm, 139–­40 ethics and politics joined in, 226

forgetting and, 260 as impartial, 104 insufficient for peace/happiness, 90, 91, 105–­6, 110, 126, 128, 225–­26, 255, 277–­78 in international law, 90 language for, 126–­32, 138, 141, 142 vs. mercy in creation, 34 as minimum standard, 129, 138 as moral paradigm, 93 peace and, 90, 91, 259–­60 political legitimacy and, 90 punitive/retributive, 89, 91, 126, 128, 140, 260, 298n6, 299n24 realm of, 139–­40, 141 vs. selective collective memory, 259 transgressions deterred by, 139 virtue produced by, 102 war justified by, 89 justice-­friendship relationship civic friendship in political justice systems, 12, 28–­29, 278 friendship as justice-­plus mode, 91, 95, 98, 105, 106 friendship superior to justice, 8, 28, 92, 93, 95, 96, 100, 102–­3, 106, 125, 227, 229, 244, 274 justice as friendly, 8, 28–­29, 91 justice in personal friendships, 12, 227 partiality and, 16, 102, 104 justice-­plus mode of ethics bounty/benevolence in, 127, 129, 280 defined, 299n21 vs. justice-­only mode, 90, 91, 105–­6, 110, 126, 128, 225–­26, 255, 277–­ 78 in political philosophy, 105, 107, 108 as solution to limited capacity for friendship, 106 as superior to isolationism, 279, 280 “just war” concept, 210 al-­Juwayni, 122 al-­Kafāwī, Abulbaqā, 184 Kalām (dogmatic theology), 78 Kant, Immanuel, 21, 25, 26–­28, 211 khadīn (desired friend), 60–­61 khadīn (playmate), 50, 63

338    Index khalīl (soulmate), 50, 57–­58, 63, 248, 295n69 Khan, Hulegu, 101 khaṣm (opponent), 66 Khatami, Mohammad, 216 khidn (desired friend), 60–­61 khill (soulmate), 57–­58, 63 Khoshroo, Gholamali, 239 Kierkegaard, Soren, 32 kindness, 260 King, Preston, 213 kinship, 187, 256–­57 Kirby, William, 232, 237 knowledge, in Five Constants, 168 Koran. See Qur’ān Kotzker Rebbe, 154 Krastev, Ivan, 3, 5 Al-­Kulīyāt (Universals, al-­Kafāwī), 184 Lambert, Gregg, 23–­25 Lambton, Ann, 90 “late antiquity,” 181 Latour, Bruno, 3, 5 League of Nations, 214 Le Goff, Jacque, 258 Leib, Moshe, 156 Lewis, C. S., 22 “liberal peace,” 91, 299n23 Lisān al-­‘Arab (Language of Arabs, Ibn Mandur), 184 literature, Islamic ethical, 9–­16, 287n35, 288n46 genres of friendship literature, 16–­19 language for friendship in (see Arabic language, friendship-­related terms) nature of friendship in, 112–­14 literature, Persian advice, 108 literature, Pre-­Islamic Iranian Avestan scriptures, 146–­48 essence of friendship in, 151–­52 Middle Persian texts, 149–­50 Old Persian inscriptions, 148–­49 literature, Western, 21, 22 Liu Zhi, 42, 166–­67, 170–­72 loneliness freedom and, 37 friendship as antithesis of, 242 global scale of, 277 hellfire associated with, 107, 132–­33, 134, 138, 142

loss of friendship and, 6, 191 mental health and, 4, 242 mortality and, 242 neoliberal economics and, 4–­5 normalization of, 268 perfect justice and, 36, 103 protectionist policies and, 242–­43 strategies for addressing, 1–­2, 10, 44, 242, 264–­65 technology and, 191 trusted friends and, 157 vs. virtue, 104 love agape, 21, 34, 35, 251, 252–­53 Arabic and Persian words for, 77, 281–­82 classical Islamic scholarship on, 10 consummation of, 79, 84–­85 definitions of, 82–­84 as divine image, 79, 80–­82 as divine reality, 79, 80, 88 equality in, 224 ethical transformation in, 86 vs. force, 252 vs. friendship, 22 friendship as school of, 32, 33 goal of, 84–­85 for God, 83–­87 of God, 80–­82, 85, 86, 87, 100 “in God,” 117, 118, 119 in Islamic poetry (See Rūmī) as lawful activity, 78 learning to love, 222 as mercy or compassion, 82 morality and, 8, 302n67 for neighbors, 27, 32, 34, 35, 78, 88, 155 path toward consummation of, 79, 84, 87 philia, 20, 28, 29, 35–­36, 97, 246, 251–­53 religion and, 142, 150, 222, 229, 277 vs. respect, 27 as responsibility of I for thou, 35 secondary, 119–­20 of self, 25, 32 truth and, 37 unenforceability of, 78 universe generated and powered by, 101

Index    339 virtue-­based (faḍīla), 99 See also love and friendship, in Muslim cultures love and friendship, in Muslim cultures about life of soul, 77–­78 absence in contemporary Islamic thought, 78 categories for, 11 as divine gift, 130 as essence of humanity, 96 as ethical trait, 86 goal of, 84–­85 as greatest virtue, 107 in Islamic poetry (see Rūmī) in Islamic spirituality, 78–­79 as single divine reality, 88 as superior to justice, 95, 96, 100, 102–­3, 106, 125, 227, 229, 244, 274 term similarity, 77 Love and Friendship in the Arabic Heritage and Contemporary Scholarship (al-­Shārūnī), 10 loyalty, 63–­64, 157–­63 Luther, Martin, 34–­35 ma‘ārif (acquaintance), 49, 63 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 21, 25 Mahallati, Mohammad Jafar Amir, 40–­ 41, 44, 89, 125, 231–­35, 241 Mahdī, Mawlā, 9 manāhiḍ (adversary), 66 Margalit, Avishai, 260 al-­maghāzī genre (the wars), 281 ma‘rifah (acquaintance), 54 Mark, Simon, 212 Marks, John, 44, 231 Marks, Susan Collins, 232, 233–­34 Marx, Karl, 195 Masnavi (Rūmī), 270–­71 master narratives, 173–­75, 179, 181 See also “clash of civilizations” narrative Mathnawī (Rūmī), 83 Mauss, Marcel, 31 mawadda (affectionate bonds), 135 al-­Māwardī, Abū’l-­Ḥassan Alī, 11, 17, 18, 186–­87 May, Theresa, 1, 110, 242 May, Todd, 30–­31, 275, 276

Maybudī, 77 McCarrick, Theodore, 238 media, influence of, 205 memory, social collective, 258–­60, 261 mercy, 120, 128, 129–­30, 131, 254, 303n98 Metz, Steven, 5 migration, global, 3 Mihr Yašt, 145–­46 Miller, William Green, 238, 239 Milton, John, 21 minister of loneliness, UK, 2, 10, 44, 242, 265 Miskawayh, Abū Alī Aḥmad administrative engagement in high politics, 108 in Būyid era context, 94, 301n63 categories and qualities of friendship, 94–­95 collective intimacy concept (uns), 280 on equality vs. power hierarchies in friendship, 97, 98–­99 ethical perspective of, 15 on friendship and happiness, 95 on friendship and justice, 95, 96, 100, 105–­6, 108 on friendship and religious rituals, 97, 98–­99, 100, 105, 107, 277 friendship as moral paradigm for, 94–­ 99, 103 human “being” as social phenomenon for, 98 on human-­divine relation, 98 impressed by non-­Islamic sources, 10 on justice and benevolence, 95–­96, 98 legacy of, 94, 300n39 love/friendship categories, 11 perennial philosophy of friendship, 17 sociability emphasized by, 96–­97, 98 Mitias, Michael, 19, 20, 26, 281 modernization, as Westernization, 197 modernization theory, 175–­76, 200–­202 Monbiot, George, 4–­5 morality dependent on friendship, 110, 253, 263 friendship and moral formation, 37, 38 friendship as goal of, 8–­9, 21, 27

340    Index morality (continued) friendship as moral bridge, 264 as impartial, 26–­27 love and, 8, 302n67 religion and, 8, 35, 245 Western, 19 moral realms, in Qur’ānic normative structure, 139–­42 moral synthesis, 17 moral systems, friendship as qualifier/ product of, 273, 274, 276 Mottahedeh, Roy, 111–­12 Moucarry, Chawkat., 254 mu’ānis (amiable friend), 56, 63 mu‘āshir (playmate), 61 Muhammad beautiful example of, 87, 88 friendships of, 112 historical framing of, 281, 305n13 as role model in friendship, 249, 250 as sage of the West, 181 munādim (entertaining partner), 60 munāfiqūn (hypocrites), 116, 117, 130, 134 munāfis (competitor), 65–­66 munāwi’ (rival), 66 mu’nis (amiable friend), 56, 63 Murata, Sachiko, 42, 165 muṣādaqa (showing friendship to each other), 185 musāmir (pleasing chat partner), 59–­60, 296n93 Muslim, defined, 248 Muslim-­Christian relations. See animosity; civilizations, friendship between mutamaddin, 195 mutaṣaddīq (one who fulfills his promise), 52 Mu’tazilites, 89–­90, 298n7 muzāḥim (hustler), 66 Myanmar genocide, 269 mystery, friendship as attitude toward possessions and, 115–­ 16 brotherhood and, 112, 114–­15, 123 contemporary global application of, 112, 124 cultural/historical context for, 120–­21

difference vs. common destiny in, 111, 112 friend’s needs above own in, 115–­16 human-­divine relationship in, 121 Islamic community and, 122–­23 rules and, 120 secondary love and, 119–­20 speech/attitudes toward friends and, 116 spiritual friendship and, 114–­15, 116–­ 17 transcendence and, 112, 114, 115, 116–­19, 120–­21, 142, 247 Nachtwey, Oliver, 4, 5 nadīm (drinking partner), 50, 60, 63 Naguib, Ezzedin, 313n65 Naimark, Norman, 269 Narāqī, Mawlā Aḥmad, 9, 15, 17, 18 Narāqī, Mawlā Mahdī, 15, 17, 18 Nasafī, ‘Azīz al-­Dīn, 273 Nasr, Seyyed Hossein, 6, 43, 191, 274 nature, grace and, 119–­20 Nature and Principle (Liu), 167 Nazeri, Shahram, 205–­6 Nehamas, Alexander, 26 neighbor love, 27, 32, 34, 35, 78, 88, 155 neoliberal economics globalization at odds with, 2–­3 human identity in, 30–­31 mental health issues and, 4–­5 national identity in, 275 Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle), 33, 92 Nielsen, Kai, 8, 245 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 8, 21, 174, 258 Nixon, Jon, 22–­23 Nizamu’l-­Mulk, Abu ‘Ali, 122 Nora, Pierre, 260 Oberlin Friendship Initiative, 278 Obiedat, A. Z., 39, 49, 109, 248, 281 Oelsner, Andrea, 211 Oshnar, 149 Ozawa, Seiji, 207 Pagden, Anthony, 108, 176 Pallis, Marco, 199 paradise

Index    341 friendship associated with, 107, 142, 263, 276 friendship in, 134, 135–­37, 138, 141, 142, 250, 251 partiality in friendship justice and, 16, 102, 104 as modern philosophical problem, 26–­27, 104–­7 as modern theological problem, 32–­ 33 peace, 90, 91, 259–­60, 276, 299n23 Persian language. See Iranian languages, friendship-­related terms in philia vs. agape, 35 Aristotle’s view of, 20, 246 in civic friendship, 29 in contemporary theologies of friendship, 35–­36 human-­divine relations described as, 251–­52 Miskawayh’s view of friendship as, 97 mutuality of, 252–­53 philosophy, classical Islamic on friendship and intellect, 86 friendship consistent in, 18 Greek philosophy preserved in, 33 Islamic spirituality and, 86 political, 18, 90 as stream of Islamic learning, 78 philosophy, Confucian, 165–­66 philosophy, Consequentialist, 26–­27 philosophy, Kantian, 25, 26–­27 philosophy, perennial, 17, 202 philosophy, postfriendship, 24 philosophy, Western friendship addressed by, 19, 21, 27–­ 29 friendship neglected in, 19, 23–­24, 25, 26, 27–­28 political (see political philosophy, Western) self-­autonomy in, 25, 29–­30 virtue ethics in, 18, 22, 109 Philosophy after Friendship (Lambert), 23 “photonic relatedness hypothesis,” 51, 55 Pinochet, Augusto, 259

Plato, 20, 93, 99, 299n29, 300n33 pleasure, friendship characterized by, 50, 60, 63–­64 pluralism, religious, 202–­3 poetry, 17, 79, 83, 84 See also Rūmī political friendship. See friendship, political political philosophy, Islamic, 18, 90 political philosophy, Western friendship addressed in, 19, 20–­21, 90, 92–­93, 286n21 friendship de-­emphasized in, 19–­20, 21–­22, 36, 90 friendship revived in, 22–­26, 90 See also Arendt, Hannah politics character in, 113–­14 friendship as foundation of, 22, 113 politike philia, 28 postmodernism, 197 power of friendship, 246 insufficiency of, 274 presence, nobility of, 169–­70 professionalism, 163–­64 prophets, Islamic friendship with God, 135–­36, 249 mission of, 82, 88 as role models in friendship, 247–­50 titles given to, 249 propriety, in Five Constants, 168 qarīn (match), 49, 55, 63 Quinn, Patrick, 33–­34 Qur’ān on bounty vs. justice, 126–­32 Confucian ethics in parallel with, 166 eternal possibility of friendship, 137 on following Muhammad’s example, 87 on forgiveness, 254–­55 on friendship-­animosity transfer, 99, 133 on friendship as cardinal virtue, 142 friendship conceptions in, 112 friendship-­related language in, 57, 58, 60, 295n69 on friendship with wrongdoers, 133–­ 34

342    Index Qur’ān (continued) God as divine unity in, 79, 80 on hellfire, 132–­34, 138, 142 on homicide, 140–­41 on human-­angelic friendship, 137–­38, 142, 250 on human-­divine friendship, 253 on human-­human friendship, 98, 136, 138, 142 impossibility of friendship, 41 on interfaith friendship, 247 on justice, 138–­39 justice-­plus perspective supported by, 142 kindness as result of faith, 100 love of God in, 80–­81 normative structure of, 139–­41 on paradise, 136, 138, 142, 263 positive memory in, 261–­63, 313n65, 313n67 prophets as role models in friendship, 247–­50 universal friendship in, 41 rafīq (comrade), 49, 55, 63 raḥma (mercy, compassion), 82 Rām Yašt, 148 Rāzī, Abū’l-­Futūḥ, 248 al-­Rāzī, Aḥmad b. Muḥammad, 254 Real Commentary on the True Teaching, The (Wang), 166 reason faith and, 245–­47, 298n7 in friendship, 186–­87, 245–­47 religion(s) applied friendship and (see applied friendship, religious theory of) as basis of friendships, 150, 187, 188 (see also brotherhood) as foundation of civilizations, 43, 199–­208 friendly nature of, 100, 243–­44 friendship and devotional rituals, 97, 98–­99, 105, 107, 277 friendship as qualifier of, 273, 274, 276, 277, 280–­81 friendship as spiritual exercise, 42 friendship between, 200, 202 friendship essential to, 115–­19 friendship/love beyond, 229

friendship paradigm modeled by, 280 friendship within realm of, 12 fundamentalist view of friendship, 244–­45 inter-­civilization friendship and (see civilizations, friendship between) intolerance of, 269 love and, 142, 222, 277 vs. modernization theory, 175–­76 morality and, 8, 35, 245 persistence of, 197 religious pluralism, 202–­3 scholarly neglect/reduction of, 200–­ 203 scientific study of, 202 See also specific religions Renaissance narrative, 179, 180–­81 Renewal Judaism, 154–­55 repentance, 134, 139, 141, 163 responsibility, 224–­25 Revival of the Religious Sciences, The (Al-­Ghazāli), 114 Rhodes, James, 20 Ricoeur, Paul, 258 Rieff, David, 257–­59, 260, 261, 299n24 righteousness, in Five Constants, 167 rights corrupt interpretation of, 269 in “Faith for Rights” framework, 278–­79 paradigm of, 226 See also human rights rights and duties in friendship, 114–­15, 224–­26 Risāla fi adab al-­ikhtilāṭ bi’l-­nās (Treatise on Etiquettes of Sociability with People, al-­Isfahānī), 100–­101 Riza, Iqbal, 43, 209 Roshchin, Evgeny, 210, 212–­13 Roth, Philip, 260 Rousseau, Jean-­Jacques, 8, 21, 25, 302n67 Rules and Properties of Islam (Liu), 167, 170 Rūmī, Jalāl al-­Dīn on dreaming, 227–­28, 229 friendship/love beyond religion for, 229 on friendship with God, 223, 226 on human separation, 271–­72

Index    343 on human yearning for love, 84 influence of, 79 on learning to love, 84, 222–­23 love and friendship, 152 love as inexplicable, 83 mysticism based on love for, 221 on peace with self, 228–­29 on rarity of friendship, 192 on relationship with master, 221–­22 on seeing potential solutions, 265 on sharī‘a vs. friendship, 227 Sacks, Jonathan, 35, 142 sacred, exclusive claim to, 23–­24, 36–­37 sacred truth, exclusive claim to, 24 ṣadāq (strength), 52 sadaqa (charity), 185 ṣadāqah (friendship), 52, 63, 184, 244, 246 Al-­Ṣadāqa wa’l-­ṣadīq (friendship and friends, al-­Tawhīdī), 187, 244, 245 Sa‘di, Muṣliḥiddīn, 145, 282 ṣadīq (truthful friend), 49–­50, 52, 53, 55, 63, 64 al-­Ṣādīq, Ja‘far, 15, 106, 169 ṣadq (solid), 51 aṣ-­Ṣafā, Ikhwān, 17 ṣafī (highly selected friend), 50, 56–­57, 63 ṣaḥāb (friend), 52 ṣaḥābī (whoever met the Prophet and has accompanied him in a lengthy manner even if he did not narrate anything from him), 53 ṣāḥib (companion), 49, 53, 55, 63, 64, 249 Al-­Sahifa al-­sajjadiyya (Chittick), 282–­ 83, 315n21 Salkever, Stephen, 20, 25, 93, 97, 98, 300n33 Sam‘ānī, Abd al-­Karīm, 252 samīr (entertaining partner), 50, 59–­60, 63, 296n93 Santayana, George, 258, 259 Schachter-­Shalomi, Zalman, 41, 153 Schall, James on friendship and justice, 91, 103 on friendship and political philosophy, 36, 91 on insufficiency of justice alone, 128

on limited friendship capacity problem, 104–­5 on mercy vs. justice, 34 on mutuality of love, 35 on tyranny vs. deep friendship, 273 Schiller, Friedrich, 157–­58 Schindler, Jeanne, 34 Schmitt, Carl, 211 Schneersohn, Joseph Isaac, 155 Schuon, Frithjof, 202 Schwarzenbach, Sibyl, 12, 28–­29, 278 “science,” 201 Search for Common Ground, 231–­36, 237 self, true, 85, 86 self-­autonomy. See individualism/self-­ autonomy self-­interest/selfishness condemnation of, 130–­31 vs. deep friendship, 193 inter-­civilization friendship hindered by, 43, 191–­92, 198–­99 selflessness, 85, 115–­16, 118, 280 self-­love, 25, 32, 80 semantic analysis of “animosity,” 65–­66 conceptual limitations applied for, 53 of friendship-­related terms, 49–­50, 51, 53, 183–­85 “photonic relatedness hypothesis,” 51, 55 of support and betrayal, 62, 296nn116–­17 separation dualism and ownership as roots of, 270 friendship as antidote to, 272–­73, 277, 279 manifestations of, 3–­5, 272, 277 Rūmī on, 271–­72 sharī‘a benevolence absent in, 95, 117–­18 in Confucian Islam, 167 friendship and, 118, 243–­44 ideal individual, 141 “Islamic state” implementation of, 18 jurisprudence emphasized by, 78 justice prescribed by, 90, 95 al-­Shārūnī, Yousef, 10–­11, 12, 15 Shia, etymology of, 296n116

344    Index Shi‘ites, justice perspective of, 90 Shriver, Donald, 254 ṣiddīq, 52, 53 ṣidq (truthfulness), 52, 184 al-­Sijistānī, Abū Sulaymān, 245 sin, 252, 254, 257, 273 sincerity, 63–­64, 184 Smith, G., 213 Smith, Graham, 211–­12 social collective memory, 258–­60, 261 Socrates, 20 Sokolowski, Robert, 35, 36, 103 solitude, 100, 104 See also loneliness Soroush, Abdolkarim, 44, 221 Soviet Union, 269 speech, friendship and, 116, 117 Stalin, Joseph, 269 state sovereignty, 23–­24, 210–­12 Sufism accessibility of, 78–­79 disciple-­master bonding in, 123 ethical transformation in love, 86 friendship as highest calling of soul, 86 giver-­love and receiver-­love in, 300n33 hierarchy of friendship in, 192–­93 on human-­divine relationships, 251–­ 52 love as theme in, 79 stations of moral advancement in, 141 as stream of Islamic learning, 78–­ 79 suḥba (conversation, friendship), 97, 301n60 ṣuḥbah, 50, 63 Suhrawardī, Shihāb al-­Dīn, 15–­16 al-­Suhrawardī, Ḍiyauddīn, 187 support/betrayal, semantic field of, 62, 296nn116–­17 al-­Suyūṭī, 51 ta’alluh (deformity), 86 Ṭabāṭabā’ī, Moḥammad Ḥossein, 248, 313n67 Taha, Mahmoud Mohamed, 141 Tahdīb al-­akhlāq wa tathīr al-­a‘rāq (Refinement of Character and

Purification of Dispositions Miskawayh), 186 taṣāduq (interaction in friendship), 184 taṣdīq (translation into action), 184–­85 al-­Tawḥīdī, Abū Ḥayyān administrative engagement with high politics, 108 Arabic belles lettres approach to friendship, 17 impressed by friendship role models, 12 kinship transcended by friendship for, 187 on nature of friendship, 112–­13, 244, 245–­46 technology Great Regression and, 3 inter-­civilizational communication and, 204–­5 interpersonal communication and, 204 isolationism fueled by, 5 loneliness and, 191 See also internet “Theological Truth from the Perspective of an Interreligious Hermeneutics of Love” (Jeanrond), 37 theologies, Western agape in, 21, 34, 35, 251, 252–­53 friendship-­friendly, 33–­34 “I-­Thou” frame in, 35 partiality as problem for, 32–­33 philia in, 35, 36 See also Christianity theology, dogmatic, 78, 252 Thomas Aquinas (saint) Aristotle’s influence on, 18, 26, 33, 34, 282 divine-­human relationship, 13–­14, 34 friendship-­friendly theology of, 33– ­34 friendship in ethics of, 18, 26 theology of friendship overshadowed, 34 universe established in mercy, 303n98 three Islams, 141 tolerance, 139, 263, 278 Tōsar, 150, 151 totalitarianism, 22

Index    345 “Track II” diplomatic efforts, 231–­34, 236, 238–­39 Transcendent Unity of Religions, The (Schuon), 202 Trump, Donald, 3–­4, 242–­43, 290n102 truth friendship and, 20, 22, 184 love and, 37 religious abuse of, 23–­24, 36–­37 Ṭūsī, Khwāja Naṣīr al-­Dīn administrative engagement in high politics, 108 biographical background, 101 on friendship and religious rituals, 105, 107, 277 on friendship as justice-­plus mode, 105, 107, 108 on friendship as moral paradigm, 101–­4 on friendship-­based vs. justice-­based society, 16, 105–­6, 128 friendship superior to justice for, 102–­ 3, 106, 244 on justice and virtues, 102 ontology of love, 101 partiality-­justice approach, 16 perennial philosophy of friendship, 17 Tu Weiming, 168

Vernon, Mark, 27–­28, 32, 33 vertical friendship. See friendship, human-­divine Vidēvdād (Code to ward off evil spirits), 147–­48 Vion, Antoine, 211 virtue bounty-­based, 140 in Five Constants, 167–­68 vs. friendship, 34–­35 friendship and commitment to, 113, 170–­71 friendship as (cardinal), 86, 92, 95, 109, 125, 142, 166, 168 friendship as purpose of, 107 friendship defined by, 170–­72 friendship of, 186 in international relations, 212 justice and, 93, 99, 102, 139–­40 promoted by friendship, 93 virtue ethics, 15, 18, 22, 109, 275 virtue theory, Sufi, 300n35 Von Heyking, John, 25, 29–­30, 31–­32, 90 Wadell, Paul, 37–­38 wadūd (affectionate, friendly), 135 wadūd (approachable), 52, 255 Waldinger, Robert, 241–­42 walī (faithful ally), 50, 58–­59, 63 walīf (affable and sociable friend), 50, 56, 63 Wang Daiyu, 42, 166, 168–­70 war, 24, 25, 89, 210, 268 White, Ben, 269 Wickens, G. M., 302n79 Wilders, Geert, 268 wilf (affable and sociable friend), 56, 63 Worlds at War (Pagden), 176 World War II, 214 worship, 115, 117, 118 “wrestling diplomacy,” 234–­37 wūdd, 52

Ulfatnāma (The book on intimacy), 287n35 United Kingdom “friendship” with United States, 214–­15 loneliness in, 1–­2, 242 United Nations, 90, 214, 215, 217, 278–­ 79 United States “friendship” with Great Britain, 214–­ 15 globalism vs. isolationism in, 3–­4, 5 relations with Iran, 231–­39 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 29, 44, 224 universal friendship, 36, 41, 109 uns (intimacy), 11, 13, 17, 56, 96, 97, 280 USA Wrestling, 235

Xerxes I, 148–­49 Xusrō I, 151

Vacek, Edward, 23, 35–­36, 249, 252–­53 Verbitsky, Jane, 212

Yedes, Ali, 69 Young Islam on Trek (Mathews), 175

346    Index al-­Zabīdī, 59, 60 zamīl (colleague), 49, 54, 63 Zapatero, Jose Luis Rodrigo, 216 Zarathushtra, 146–­47 Zargar, Cyrus Ali, 15–­16 Zayn al-­‘Abidīn, ‘Alī ibn al-Ḥ­usayn 315n21

Zīārati Wārith (The Visitation of the Inheritor), 249 Zoroastrianism, 145–­51 Zweerde, E. van der, 21–­22, 213