Reflections 1903682827, 9781903682821

Citation preview

REFLECTIONS

OTHER AVAILABLE

FROM

TITLES THE

BY

GAI EATON

ISLAMIC

TEXTS

Islam and the Destiny ofMan King ofthe Castle Remembering God

SOCIETY

REFLECTIONS

Gai Eaton

THE ISLAMIC TEXTS SOCIETY

Copyright © The Estate of Gai Eaton 2012

First published in 2012 by Tue Istamic TEXTS SOCIETY

MILLerR’s HOUSE Kincs

GREAT

CAMBRIDGE Reprint

Mitt

LANE

SHELFORD

CB22

5EN, UK

2016, 2018

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978 1903682 821 paper

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be produced, installed in retrieval systems, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written

permission of the publishers.

GON TENDS Preface Reflections: Sufism

Reflections: The Five Pillars of Islam Reflections: Fear, Love and Knowledge

Reflections: Seeing and Being Seen Reflections: Beauty

Reflections: Living by the Book Reflections: Of One Accord Reflections: Contemplations

Reflections: Faith and Action Reflections: Contemplation and Action

Words of Faith: Man as Viceroy Words of Faith: Detachment Words of Faith: The Capacity to See Near and Far Words of Faith: Inner and Outer Peace Words of Faith: Islam: The Sunni/Shi‘ah Divide Words of Faith: Who is the Infidel? Words of Faith: The ‘Labels’ of Religion Words of Faith: A Relationship of Reciprocity Words of Faith: The Night Journey Words of Faith: The Islamic Way of Life: The Shariah

Words of Faith: The Islamic Shari ‘ah Today Pause for Thought: The Need to Pause

Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2022 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/reflectionsO000eato

PREPACE AXES MY FATHER, Gai Eaton, died in 2010 at the age of eighty-nine, he left behind a body of work that included King of the Castle, Islam and the Destiny of Man, and Remembering God, books that continue to inspire Muslims and all seekers of truth from around the world, and an autobiography, A Bad Beginning, that was published only weeks before his death. My father was a passionate Englishman who first converted to Islam at the age of thirty while living in

Egypt, inspired by the writings of René Guénon, Ananda Coomaraswamy and Frithjof Schuon, and a close friendship with Muslim scholar and philosopher Martin Lings. After spending much of his life as a diplomat in the Caribbean and India, Gai Eaton returned to England in 1977 and for the

next 22 years worked from the Islamic Cultural Centre in London, lecturing widely on Islam and doing what he could to counter the growing radicalization of many younger members of the congregation, which he believed was counter to the basic tenets of the faith he loved so much, reminding them of

the Prophet Muhammad’s remark that “anger burns up good deeds just as fire burns up dry wood.” His intellectual honesty led him to disagree with mainstream British Muslim opinion on many issues. As he told me on several occasions, “those who refuse to listen should not expect to be heard.”

As he grew older, all of his passion was channelled into his faith, his love for the majestic beauty of the Qur'an, and for

telling truth as he saw it, eloquently sharing the lessons of a 7

REFLECTIONS

lifetime with the world. In addition to his books, and the lec-

tures he gave around the world, he also gave a series of Friday talks on BBC Radio about Islam and its role in contemporary society. Between 1978 and 1996, he recorded eighty-six of these talks; variously titled Reflections, Words of Faith and Pause for Thought, and they were heard around the world. My brother, sisters and I thought these talks lost forever, vanished across the Event Horizon of that Black Hole where so many old magnetic recordings disappeared before the advent of digital memory. But then, shortly after my father’s death, Dr Jeremy Henzell-Thomas of the Book Foundation

contacted me, and it seemed my father had entrusted him with all the scripts from those eighteen years of BBC talks.

As we prepared them for publication, we came to understand that together they provide a beautifully clear and accessible

introduction to the central tenets, principles and practices at the heart of Islam and, as such, are not only a unique guide for non-Muslims, but also an inspiring reminder to Muslims of the essence of their faith. While some of what my father said in these talks has been published in different forms in his earlier books, there is much that is new and I know he would be happy that they are finally being published. While it was in Islam that Gai Eaton found his foundation and his home, he wrote his books for people of all faiths, and none, never doubting that all the great revealed religions offered visions of the one true God. He has been called a perennialist, but what does that mean for such a devout Muslim?

He once said: “I can only follow one religion; that is the sun while all others are just stars. But stars are suns to other people, and they are all paths to God.”

In his second, book King ofthe Castle, he wrote: “Imagine a fertile landscape, surrounded by desert and inhabited by many nations, many tribes, set in a circle around a great mountain

that stands alone, filling the view. Depending on where they 8

Preface stand, different people see the mountain differently. Some stand close and see clearly but only from a particular and lim-

ited point of view. As far as their perspective permits, they see truly. Some, because of faulty eyesight or distance, see darkly with much disagreement and uncertainty about what they see. Others stand with their back to the mountain and describe only the desert in front of them. Only a very few will know the mountain whole, either because they’ve climbed it or their sight has been inspired.” I believe Hasan Gai Eaton’s sight was inspired. We live in dangerous and challenging times. On one side, too many insist that belief in God is mere superstition. On the other side, too

many across all faiths take the name of God to justify and reflect their own narrow prejudices and ambitions. My father’s words and work suggest a better way. This is why he speaks so clearly to a new generation, and why I am so delighted to let his words and wisdom take flight again to embrace all who believe, as he did, that “whatever we do that is good comes from God, not from our creaturely selves. If we are praised, it is only He that is praised. We have no excuse for self-congratulation, only thankfulness.” And I am especially thankful that the Islamic Text Society is making this book of my father’s Reflections available for old and new admirers around the world. Gai Eaton may have left us but his work remains. Like a stone tossed into a pond, its ripples spread, and with God’s will, it can help others glirnpse the

mountain whole, working as he did, in his eloquent and quietly courageous way, to calm the turmoil of an unquiet world. Leo Eaton

July 2012

iba regePaki.

a

e i Nie aee i PV eG

u ™

iw

awe

pid

f >

cis

a

ES

ee

ae

ho)

Pees

De

. a 7 ee

¥

con

ay

ee

pte:

+eb §. a Toad 32

TS

es

7

Pee,

x a

f

,

ey;

ok 7

7

;

—

—

3

be

r

£

si,

ay

“

A

rna

ot

:

-

ve

: iy

:

;

i

'

oA

:

(4% :

Abe

»

‘9

;

t

ee

©

Pied a

yo

=

rn, ee" =

ba

yan

7 i

=~

Pen

ne

=e

=

ea

yee ey

-

un i

ae

rr"- a, |

ia

;

bbs on

7

rR

ad

i

7

ee

i

nies

‘

a,

-

ee Ata.

haa

myobiteehe

;

RECPEECTIONS Sufism (NOVEMBER

1978)

I =]ppc IS A STORY I READ somewhere years ago that sticks in my mind. A spiritual Master was strolling by the river with a young disciple who kept on demanding to know how he could “find God”. He did not look where he was going, stumbled and fell into the river. The Master bent down and held his head under water till he was more than half drowned, then fished

him out and said: “When your need to find God is as powerful as was your need just now for a breath of air, then you'll be well on the way.” I think that provides a good introduction to what I want to talk about. Most men and women can be satisfied with what outward religion gives them. They know (assuming that they

are believers) that obedience to the rules—the divine commands and prohibitions—is sufficient to carry them through life and bring them safely to the other shore. But there are others who

have a compelling need—seeded in them (so we believe) by God—for something more; and, when a legitimate need is created in us, then the means of satisfying it is created at the same time. And so, in the Islamic context, we come to Sufism.

What is Sufism? In the first place, it is the inner or mystical dimension of the religion of Islam. Some have compared it to the heart; in which case the outward religion—the Shari ah—is

REFLECTIONS

the body. Others have spoken of it as dhawq, an Arabic word meaning “taste”. For those who follow this way, it is not enough

to know the truths of their religion with their minds and to follow its rules with their bodies. They want to taste these truths, as you taste a fruit, so that the whole of their being is flooded

with this flavour. Or, to put it another way, they want to make these truths—which are initially outward and abstract—both inward and concrete. Those who follow this way believe that Sufism—not the name, but the thing itself—derives directly from the Prophet Muhammad. The name came later, to describe something implicit in the religion from the very start. And that’s an important point, because many Western orientalists have tried to attribute the development of Sufism to foreign influences, “borrowings’—Neoplatonism, Hindu Vedanta and so on. It’s an understandable misconception. Early Islamic mysticism was, in a sense, inarticulate; it was there, but it did not possess the technical terms by which to define itself. Neoplatonism in particular offered a convenient terminology—so why not use it? “All wisdom”, it is said, “is the believer’s lost camel.” And all wisdom is one. Islam does not “borrow” what is alien to its true nature, but it makes use of what comes to it from elsewhere provided this fits the pattern. But whatever the language in which it

finds expression, Sufism is rooted in the Qur’an and in the teaching of the Prophet, and these are the sources which guarantee

both its truth and its efficacy. What I have said might suggest a rare—even

rarified—

minority interest of little concern to the mass of believers, so it

is important to emphasise that Sufism has penetrated the whole body of Islam. A Sufi brotherhood is called a tarigah (its plural is

turuq), meaning “path” or “way”. Whereas in Christianity mysticism has been largely confined to the monasteries, the turuq

have played an important role in Islamic history. In the main it was Sufis who converted the Turks to Islam

Reflections

(with tremendous historical tepercussions) and also the Indonesians (who make up the largest Islamic nation today). In the Middle Ages, and particularly in times of political disorder, it was the furuq that kept society together; and the spiritual life even of people who have had no direct contact with any Sufi order has been enriched and deepened by Sufi teachings throughout the ages. Sufism is indeed the inward way, but its repercussions have extended outwards through the whole body of believers.

II You may remember that last time I said that the men and women who follow a Sufi way are driven by the need to realize the truths of their religion; in other words, to make these truths real and concrete in their own experience.

People who have read a certain amount of Sufi poetry and been moved by these transports of love and mystical ecstasy are often surprised to find that so many Sufi books are dry and severe, dealing not with ecstasy but with questions of virtue and obedience. What has all this to do with mysticism? The answer is that you cannot build any firm structure on a pile of debris or of pebbles. The profane man’s selfhood is precisely this: a debris of memories and dreams, false hopes and

lingering guilts, or hard little pebbles of self-concern, desire and fear. Before anyone can seek the divine Unity he must, in some measure, be unified in himself. It is common in the West to refer to someone as being “a Sufi”, but those who follow this way hesitate so to describe

themselves. The preferred term is fagir, meaning “a poor man’, a reference to the spiritual poverty or emptiness which is the

precondition—in every religion, surely?—of mysticism. A vessel must be empty before it can be filled. Only someone who has swept the worldly hopes and desires, dreams and memories—which dominate most of us—out from the centre of his

13

REFLECTIONS

being can hope that something of the divine Plenitude will flow into him. Since we do not and cannot control that flow, there is really only one thing we can do for ourselves: that is to make ourselves fit to receive it. This is our “work”; the rest, of course, is not work but pure gift, pure bounty from outside ourselves. There is another way of putting this. In our unredeemed, cluttered selves we are, as it were, enclosed in a wall of ice. Ice has a certain transparency, so occasionally we can glimpse what lies outside—I think most people do at one time or another in their lives. The fagir sets himself to melt this wall of ice.

It takes heat to melt ice—to melt the frozen heart. I spoke last time of the intense longing which brings people to the path. It is this longing, combined with faith, which generates the necessary heat. Shall I add, love? Yes, of course, but with a qualifi-

cation. Sufis prefer to speak of “ardent longing”, because “love”, particularly nowadays, suggests something purely emotional, and here we are beyond the realm of personal, subjective emotions. They come into the picture—how could they not, since we are human?—but Sufism cannot be reduced to emotionalism or to subjective feelings. All religion has three dimensions: fear, love and knowledge. The outward religion, of which obedience to the Almighty is

the essence, has fear as its starting point, though it may deepen into love. The inward religion—in this case Sufism—is characterised by a lucid love and a loving knowledge. The two merge. No one can point to a dividing line; but the emphasis will sometimes be on one side, sometimes on the other. Finally—because I’m circling round the central point, try-

ing to give you an idea of where and what it is—Sufism is an awakening from the subjective dream in which we normally live out our lives. I have called it the inward religion. Inwardness

initially suggests subjectivism; but I said earlier that the fagir is trying to get away from himself. So what does “inwardness” really mean?

14

Reflections The Qur'an tells us that God is not only the First and the Last, He is also the Outward and Inward. You could say that this little self—yours or mine—is suspended in its ice-capsule between two absolutes: the God who is outward, transcendent; and the God who is inward, immanent. Go deep enough through the layers of selfhood and you come to the inward reality, which is one with your outward reality. Come out into the open again and the extremes meet, and there remains

only the One, Allah. Il] I have tried to give you some idea of what Sufism is and of what it means to someone who follows this path. Very well, you may say; but what does he actually do? In the first place he follows the religion of Islam, just as, say, a Christian mystic adheres to Christianity. There are a number of people in the West who would disagree with this, believing, as they do, that one can be a Sufi without being a Muslim. I think they are wrong. In fact I think they are, in a sense, trying to get something for nothing. We are not disembodied spirits. We live in this world, and we have human personalities. The outward religion governs our outward life, and it is, at the same time, the starting point for the journey beyond the world and beyond ourselves. Without a starting point there is no journey; without foundations there is no building. | Islam—the very word implies “peace”—aims at a state of equilibrium in society and within man himself. You might call this the horizontal dimension. What, then, is the vertical dimension? This is spirituality, rising straight upwards and penetrating deep down. You have, then, the figure of a cross—an image used by Sufi writers to represent the Perfect Man, whose human substance is perfectly balanced and whose spirit reaches

to the heights and plumbs the depths, finding God in both. Secondly, the fagir has a Master—a Shaykh or a Pir. Perhaps IS

REFLECTIONS

you have to start on this path to know just how incompetent we all are when it comes to going beyond ourselves. Without a guide, this would be virtually impossible and could only lead into blind alleys, ending with self-delusion. The ego is very

powerful and very cunning; there is nothing it cannot turn to its own narrow purposes, given the chance, unless there is someone there not only to point the way but also to warn and prevent. At

whatever age you come to this way, you start as a child again— and who would leave a child to wander freely on the dangerous roads? The Shaykh not only guides, he gives initiation, thereby attaching the disciple to a whole line of spiritual “ancestors”— leading back to the Prophet himself—and implanting in him a grace, an influence, a power which derives from this ancestry. But given the religious framework and given the Shaykh (and the initiation he bestows), how does our fagir do his work? As his faith and his understanding increase, these are poured into the five daily prayers which are incumbent on every Muslim. In addition, at least twice a day, he recites three formulae on his rosary. In the first, he seeks forgiveness, not for specific sins but for being what he is, a pretentious little god beside God. Secondly, he asks for blessings on the Prophet, pouring his fragmentary being into this perfect mould. Thirdly, he bears witness to the divine Unity, forgetting himself before the overwhelm-

ing presence of the One Reality. And then—most important of all—he performs the dhikr, a word which means both “remembrance” and “invocation”. He pronounces either certain sacred phrases or else the name “Allah” alone, with as much concentration and self-forgetfulness.as he can muster, and in so doing he meditates upon the divine object of his attention. He repeats this phrase or this Name again and again, reaching out to what may first be known only as a void, but which

eventually becomes Presence, becomes Reality. 16

Reflections Reaching out in invocation and in the “meditations of his heart”, he knows that what he is doing is really no more than responding to the divine attraction, which was always there, inviting his response. There is, in human terms, an interaction,

a reciprocity, and one cannot say who it is that calls and who it is that answers. Here we come to a region in which words are inadequate and may be positively misleading. Only those who follow this way can hope to know what is meant. This is Sufism: the inward dimension of Islam, the limitless

dimension in which, even in this life, a man—or a woman— may find the taste of Paradise, the warmth of intimacy and the reality of Union.

17

REPEECHIONS The Five Pillars of Islam (SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER

1985)

I N THE SAME DAY that the BBC asked me to do a series OC): short “Reflections” on the Five Pillars of Islam, I received a telephone call from a friend who was organising a seminar for Religious Instruction teachers in local schools. He asked me to give them a “thumbnail sketch” of Islam, and he added: “Do explain to them that the Five Pillars are not everything!” I think I had better start by taking his advice and tell you that they are certainly not “everything”. But they are important as a binding element in the religion and they are very useful as a framework for talks on Islam. Christian writers have described Islam as binding its adherents more firmly to it than any other

world Faith, and this is surprising. There is no Church structure, there is no priesthood (as Christians

understand

the

term), there is no final authority to determine what is or is not orthodox. How on earth can such an unorganised religion have such binding power? I suppose the best answer to that question is that this power comes from God. But how does it actually work? In the first place, Islam is not just a “religion”, it is a way of life which encompasses every aspect both of public and private life; in this way it shapes a human personality which is neither more nor less than a “fish out of water” when cut off from the 18

Reflections body of the believers. The Muslim who abandons his Faith no longer knows how to function. Moreover, he has lost his family and is quite alone. The Ummah, the sacred community, or

“brotherhood” of Islam, provides that element of stability, of “belonging”, without which most people feel completely lost in this world. God knows, it is a quarrelsome brotherhood, but the sense of “family” somehow endures. Then there is the sense of being on the winning side, which has its appeal (human nature being what it is). For at least nine out of the past fourteen centuries the story of Islam was a story of almost unbroken success. Since the late seventeenth century the West has triumphed and dominated; but this seems to the average Muslim so unnatural, such an absurd aberration, that it can only be regarded as a brief hiccup. To choose but a single example—though a striking one—the fifty million Muslims in the Soviet Union take it for granted that the Russians, who-——for the moment—rule over them, will soon be put in their place and submit, as they did in the past,

to their betters. And then—as a binding force—there are the “Five Pillars”. The Prophet Muhammad was sitting once with his companions when the angel Gabriel came to him in human form and said to him: “Tell me about Islam!” He said: “Islam is to testify that there is no God but Allah and that Muhammad is the messenger of Allah, to perform the canonical prayers, to pay the poor-tax, to fast in the month of Ramadan, and to make the Pilgrimage to the Ka‘ba if you are able.” Gabriel said: “You have spoken rightly!” These are the Pillars: faith, prayer, concern for the neighbour, self-denial, and a bodily journey to the place where the

divine Presence in this world—though omnipresent—is specifically focussed. These provide an unalterable framework for the Muslim’s life while he prepares himself to pass through the gateway of death.

19

REFLECTIONS

II People will tell you that the great strength of the religion of Islam derives from its simplicity. They have a point, although no doctrine of what lies beyond our earthly experience can be

without its complexities. What they really mean is that the presiding principle of Islam, the first Pillar of the religion, called the Shahada, the “Witnessing”, has a quality of stark simplicity; and it is generally agreed that to pronounce the words of the Shahada sincerely and with understanding suffices to identify a man or a woman as a Muslim. What is this extraordinary verbal formula which binds one billion people to the Faith? It has two parts. The first goes as follows in Arabic: La ilaha illa ‘Llah. “No deity if-not Allah”. La! Short, sharp, strong: “No!” An unqualified “No” to everything that might claim to be separated from God, independent, selfsufficient; that is to say, to every “idol”. But idols do not only come in the form of wood, metal or stone. Our lives are littered with them. Wealth, power, success—even the person we love more than we love God—all these are idols, and every desire which displaces the desire to please our Lord is a form of idolatry. To all these the La of the Shahada says: No! Stop! That is not your goal! So you can see that the next word, ilaha—translated as “deity”—can mean any of these things, anything that

we maybe tempted to put in the place of God. But for Muslim mystics there is just one great “idol”, and all the rest are its off-

shoots, its children. This is man’s greedy “ego” when it behaves as though it were self-sufficient, a little god. These two words are called “the denial”. Then comes the “affirmation”: illa ‘Llah, “if not God”. Everything had been denied,

lostto us, deprived of independent reality. Now that little word illa restores it to life. It opens the door onto the true Reality from which all things derive their existence: Allah. The initial negative has given way to what is supremely positive, and all is well.

The second part of the Witnessing brings this seemingly 20

Reflections abstract formula down to earth and makes it relevant to our lives: Muhammadun rasilu ‘Llah; “Muhammad (is) the messenger of Allah.” We have not been left to work out the implications

of the first part on our own. A message of guidance and reassurance has come from above through the instrumentality of a man like ourselves, and that message is the Qur’an, the sacred scripture of Islam. I remember many years ago I was invigilating an examination

in Cairo University and, because the annual exams take place at the hottest time of the year, they were held in a huge marquee by the Nile. Several hundred students were sitting at their desks, their whole future depending on what they wrote upon those terrible blank sheets of paper before them. A strange tension built up, almost palpable; one student after another put his or her pen down, staring into space. I expected a storm to clear the air.

Suddenly one student raised his head and shouted: La ilaha illa ‘Llah. A sound filled the marquee, something between a sigh and a sob, and there was a ripple of laughter. The students took up their pens again and went back to work. All was well.

Ill I said in my last talk that, in the general view, it is enough to pronounce the Shahada, the Confession of Faith, to qualify as a Muslim; but some jurists have claimed that a man or woman

who does not pray the five daily prayers “owed to God” cannot be considered a member of the community of Islam. That is understandable. It is all very well to say that one believes in God and in the messengerhood of Muhammad but this is, to say the least, a sterile, inoperative faith if one proceeds to ignore Him

and to ignore the specific instructions of His messenger. The canonical prayer of Islam is, according to a saying of Muhammad, the “key to Paradise”, and he once asked his companions: “Tell me, if there were a river at someone’s door in which we washed five times a day, would any dirt remain upon 21

REFLECTIONS

him?” When

they replied that none would remain, he said:

“That is like the five times of prayer by which Allah obliterates sins.” One day a man came to him saying: “Messenger of Allah, I have done something which merits punishment, so appoint a punishment for me!” Muhammad said nothing and, when the time came for the next prayer, the man prayed with him and his companions, returning afterwards to repeat his request for punishment. “Did you not pray with usjust now?” Muhammad asked him. He agreed that he had done so. “Then Allah has forgiven your offence!” Our sins belong to the horizontal dimension of time and life; prayer relates to the vertical dimension, our meeting with God. In prayer we are loosed from the world, loosed from time, and this is comparable to bathing in a river of sweet water after floundering in a muddy pool. We emerge renewed, purified; and then, of course, unless we are saints, we go back into the pool, fall once more into the clutches of our greedy selfhood;

but soon another prayer will be due, another dive into the sweet waters. The Muslim, when he stands up to pray, orientates himself; that is to say, he faces the direction of the Ka‘ba in Mecca.

In his daily life he may have been turning round and around like a dog chasing its own tail. Now he stands still and faces in the right direction. He raises his hands level with his ears and glorifies God. Then he recites two short passages from the Qur’an—in Arabic—taking in his mouth the very words chosen by God to express His eternal message in a form accessible to mankind. After that he bows, glorifying God the Infinite, the All-Encompassing. After rising again, he goes down on his

knees, with his forehead on the ground, and in this posture he glorifies God the Transcendent, the Absolute, and he does this twice, completing one unit of prayer. The morning prayer has

two units, the sunset prayer three, and all the rest have four. Private

prayer—called

duG’—is, 22

of course,

an entirely

Reflections different matter. Then we pray in our own language in our own time, praising God or complaining to Him, expressing our gratitude or our dismay, our hopes and our fears. But salt, the canonical prayer, is a rite—a sacrament—and every gesture is precisely regulated in accordance with the example set by Muhammad himself. It punctuates the day and gives it a particular rhythm, it breaks the monotony of time and lifts the busy man out of his business, the sad man out of his distress, the foolish man out of his folly. And the call of the muezzin, echoing over the Islamic city from dawn till deep night, summoning to prayer, summoning to salvation, reminding the people that they are something more than poor, doomed creatures of the earth, is the characteristic sound of Islam. This is the second Pillar of the Faith.

IV With the third Pillar of Islam we come into what might seem to be a different area. The first two—about which I talked on previous occasions—concern our relationship with God; the third concerns our relationship with our fellows. But the difference is only apparent. The way we behave towards other people reflects—perhaps tests—both our faith and our prayer.

The Arabic word zakat is usually translated as “poortax”, but this term has two basic meanings: “purification” and “growth”. Our wealth and our possessions (if we have any)

are “purified” by setting aside a proportion of them for those less fortunate than ourselves. But how is this connected with “srowth”? Think for a moment of the pruning of shrubs and certain plants to encourage them to grow more vigorously and to give them a more balanced shape. I think you will see the connection.

The calculation of zakat is rather complicated, but basically it involves the payment each year of two-and-a-half percent of our wealth, excluding those things which we use in earning our

REFLECTIONS

living, for the relief of the poor and the unfortunate. This is not charity. Those who are able to do so have a religious duty to pay zakat, and the poor have an absolute right to receive it. This relates to one of the most important principles of Islam. God is the owner of everything that exists, everything He has created. We own nothing; not even our own bodies and souls. “You can’t take it with you!” as we say ofarich man’s possessions. Whatever we have is on loan and, above all, held in trust, to be used and administered in the way that a good servant looks after his master’s property. Of course it is very pleasant to have the use of lots of money and nice things, but—for the Muslim—this is not an unmixed blessing. It brings with it heavy responsibilities, not to mention the serious risk that we may become greedy and so neglect the duties which wealth imposes. There are quite a number of Muslims who prefer to “travel light” through this brief life. But, just as the obligatory prayers—the second Pillar—are,

so to speak, a minimum (most people offer additional prayers), zakat represents our minimal duty to the neighbour. The pious man also gives sadagah (so, of course, does the pious woman) and does so preferably in secret, and although this word could be translated as “voluntary charity”, it has a wider meaning. The Prophet said that “even meeting your brother with a cheerful face is sadaqah”, and even the poorest of us can afford to do that. When it does take the form of a monetary gift, there is noth-

ing demeaning in accepting such “charity” since all good things come from God, whether through a human intermediary or not. The recipient will say “Thanks be to God”, not: “Thank you very much, Sir, for your kindness!” The giver neither deserves nor expects any gratitude; after all, he has earned merit in the sight of his Lord, and that is a tremendous recompense. Zakat, with sadaqah close behind it, is a cement holding the

Muslim community together and it is a recognition of our common ancestry—"You are all the children of Adam,” said the

24

Reflections Prophet—our brotherhood, ;our shared human nature and our common destiny, which is to travel as best we can through this world and seek the right exit from it.

V I talked to you about the third Pillar of Islam, the “poor-tax”, called zakat. 1 might have added that this contribution to the welfare of our brothers and sisters in the community also has the merit of inducing a certain detachment from earthly possessions. The fourth Pillar, the Fast during the month of Ramadan, takes this a step further and requires that we practice detach-

ment from our natural desires and appetites. The basic rules are simple. year, the Muslim must abstain first dim light of dawn until endanger his health. But that,

During that one month of the from food and drink from the sunset, provided this does not in a sense, is only the outward

aspect of the matter. We must abstain also from anger and malice, and all evil thoughts; this, of course, is something we ought to do all the time, but we are human and Islam is not intolerant of our human failings. It does, however, require us

to make a very special effort during Ramadan, and there is not much point in suffering hunger and thirst if, at the same time, we behave badly to our fellows; if we are going to do that, we might just as well eat, drink and be merry, for anger and malice break the Fast as surely as eating and drinking. Fasting has a very special place in Islam, because God tas said: “Fasting is Mine!” He alone knows whether we are really keeping the Fast. Anyone can pretend to do so while sneaking the odd sandwich in secret. The Muslim fasts to please God, not to please his fellow men and women, and he does so for

the sake of coming closer to his Lord. Our normal, everyday habits—though legitimate—are only too often a barrier to this closeness. This world is a sticky place. That image occurs to me because, when I was young, almost every kitchen had a roll of 25

REFLECTIONS

fly-paper hung in it—paper coated with a sweet, gummy substance which attracted flies. As soon as they settled on it their legs were stuck to the paper and there was no escape for them. If we want to approach God we must from time to time break loose—dare I say: “unstick” ourselves? In other words, we must practice detachment, and that can be rather a painful process. But we are not flies. We are human beings, and we do have the power to break loose. Habits are an adhesive, and for one month each year the habitual patterns of life are turned upside down. In a sense, day is turned into night and vice versa, for the days are hard and

therefore dark—though we remember the words of the Qur’an: “With hardship cometh ease”—while the nights are convivial, food and drink are enjoyed with a sharpened appetite, and children (who, of course, do not fast) have a wonderful time because no one remembers to send them to bed. If we really belonged here, if this world were our true home, there would be no point in fasting. It is precisely because we have a tendency to make ourselves too much at home here that we need to break loose from time to time and, in doing so, to remember that we must die. We are, as the Prophet said, “travellers’—travellers through the landscape of our earthly lives—and we have to keep our destination constantly in mind, however attractive the towns and villages through which we pass and the people we meet. Journey’s end is in the presence of God, to be judged and so to pass on either to the joy of Paradise

or to a less happy place. Through enforced detachment and the breaking of habits, the Fast reminds us of this.

VI Today, in my final talk, we come to the fifth and last of the Pillars of Islam: the Pilgrimage. Let us see if this can be connected with the other four. The declaration of faith: Yes, the Pilgrimage is an act of faith. Prayer? It is certainly an act of 26

Reflections worship. The community? Its indeed a communal act and one that strengthens the sense of brotherhood. But how about the Fast?-The Pilgrimage has its hardships too, and in the past these were often severe; moreover, like the Fast, it is an act of detachment from the world and from the habits of everyday life. Each year in the month of Pilgrimage a vast number of Muslims—some two million nowadays—make their way to Mecca, many of them from the most distant outposts of the Islamic world. There and, later, on the Plain of ‘Arafa and at Mina (outside the town) they perform the prescribed rites, which are numerous and complex, so that a guide is needed to take each party of pilgrims every step of the way. Before doing so they put on the pilgrim garb, two pieces of unsewn cloth, one knotted around the waist, the other thrown over the shoulder. In doing so, they put aside their worldly identity, their race, nationality, rank and so on. From that moment on, king and commoner, president and road sweeper, rich and poor are indistinguishable one from another. All such distinctions have been left behind, like a snake’s skin cast off on the rocks. The comparison is appropriate because the pilgrims have also divested themselves of all the sins they committed up to this moment and, when the rites are ended, they will be as innocent as newborn babies. I think there are two points—among many others—that

need to be emphasised. The first has to do with orientation: facing in the right direction and travelling in the right direction. Earlier I had described the Muslim as a “traveller”. There is no point in travelling unless you know where you are going. The journey is towards God. But—surely—God is here, now, always, everywhere? Indeed He is, but our sense of the divine Presence is blunted. We need to find it focussed on a particular place and, for the Muslim, that place is the Ka‘ba at Mecca, which he has faced every time he prayed and to which he now journeys in pilgrimage.

27

REFLECTIONS

Secondly, the Pilgrimage reminds us of the factor of continuity, which is such an essential aspect of Islam. The rites of the Pilgrimage are very ancient, pre-historic in the proper sense of the term. The Prophet Muhammad never claimed to bring a new religion to mankind; what he brought, under the weight of divine Revelation, was the primordial faith of humanity which had taken many different forms in the course of time but which was always, in essence, one Truth, revealed again and again, and—again and again—forgotten or distorted. In his time, the Pilgrimage rites had been taken over by idol-worshippers; he did not change them, he rectified them. _ And so, in the Pilgrimage, the Muslim is at one with his brothers and sisters, past and present, but he is also united with the men and women of the remote past, beyond the mists of time, reaching back to the primordial moment of man’s creation. In a sense, he has stepped out of time into timelessness when he stands before the Ka‘ba in Mecca.

28

KREELEGTIONS Fear, Love and Knowledge (MAY-JUNE 1986)

I ROM TIME TO TIME someone says to me, usually in a challenging tone of voice: “Of course, I’m not very religious!” The appropriate answer might be: “So what?” I can’t very well fix the person concerned with a beady eye and say: “Tell me, my friend, what exactly do you mean by ‘religious’?” But that is what I would like to know. As it is, I can only guess, and my guess is that they mean one of three things. Either they have a vague belief in God but see no need to do anything about it; or they do not “feel” religious, and they think it is all a matter

of “feeling” or else they regard religion as “irrational”, without intellectual content. That suggests an interesting distinction between three different kinds of people. Islam—and I speak as a Muslim—distinguishes between different attitudes or different approaches to God. These are fear, love and knowledge. The Arabic terms are makhafah, mahabbah and mavifah: fear of God, love of God, knowledge of God. It would be a little too neat, a little too

sweeping to suggest that religious people can usually be slotted under one or other of these headings—those who tremble before

God, those who adore Him, and those enlightened by knowledge—but this does provide a rough and ready classification. What really matters is that each of us may be motivated—in

varying degrees—by fear, love and knowledge. Unless we are 29

REFLECTIONS

saints, we have—each of us—elements in our make-up that can only be controlled and set moving on what Muslims call “the straight path” by fear. But we also need to love and be loved, and that too is a powerful motive for religious faith. Finally, we possess certain intellectual faculties—we are by nature “thinking creatures’—and we require intellectual satisfaction. So, “being religious” involves a great deal more than having the right sort of feelings. The “fear of God” is rather out of fashion nowadays. Surely God is love? How could we fear Him? I think the Christian writer C. S. Lewis answered that when he wrote, after the death of his much loved wife: “What do people mean when they say, ‘I am not afraid of God because I know He is good’? Have they never even been to a dentist?” If we say, as do the theologians, that God is the ultimate object of all true love, then we are bound to add—if we fear anything (and only an idiot fears nothing)— that He is also the object of all true fear. Islam and Christianity both lay considerable emphasis upon the Last Judgment, and which of us can feel entirely easy in his or her mind about that? Above all, the very idea of divine omnipotence, a power that makes the greatest powers of this world seem puny and of no account, is awe-inspiring, and what is awe but holy fear? And the saying that “Fear is the beginning of wisdom” is common to all three monotheistic faiths. There is plenty of wickedness

in the world, but what a dreadful place this would be if human beings were incapable of fear. Fear restrains, but it also awakens. Whether we are Jews, Christians or Muslims, we are commanded to be watchful, like

people who live surrounded by dangers, constantly alert, always on‘the look-out not only for enemies beyond the stockade but also for enemies within. If there were no dangers, if there was

nothing to fear, we should be tempted to sleep our lives away—or lose ourselves in dreams. In Islam we speak sometimes (as does the Qur'an) of the “divine Threat”. That “Threat” keeps us awake. 30

Reflections rao I was talking yesterday about the three principal motives for committing oneself to a religion—fear, love and knowledge, and I quoted the saying, common toJudaism, Christianity and Islam, that “Fear is the beginning of wisdom.” Obviously, whatever has a beginning must also have a middle and an end, so let’s now leave fear behind and speak of love. Everyone knows what love is. Or do they? A boy says to a girl (or vice versa): “Do you really love me, I mean really?” So what is this “real” love? The dictionary tells me that it is “warm attachment, fondness or affectionate devotion”, but I must admit I do not find that very helpful. One thing I am sure of: you cannot define love purely in terms of feeling, because our subjective feelings can change from day to day, even from one hour to the next. Well, I will not attempt the impossible, but I will suggest a definition that may be useful in context. Let us say that love is closely bound up with an act of recognition, the recognition of something that is lovable, that draws us out of ourselves, for what it is. Whether explicitly or implicitly, we always believe that the object of love deserves to be loved; we believe, in other words, that our feelings have an objective basis and are not

entirely dependent upon passing moods. Love is said to be firm or constant when it endures even in those times when we feel quite unloving; the feeling as such waxes and wanes, the recognition remains no less valid. This, I think, is why many religious

writers have said that loving God relates more to the will than to the emotions. Let me take this a step further and say that the truth as such is lovable, at whatever level we seek it, and—indeed—no one would seek the truth if it did not possess the inherent power to draw us towards it. This is not some'theory that might be proved

or disproved by argument. For the Muslim, at least, it is selfevident. The Truth, with a capital “T”, is one of those Names of

God given us in the Qur’an as themes for meditation, and linked 31

REFLECTIONS

with it are other Names which draw us to Him, not from fear of His wrath but from what the Sufis, the Islamic mystics, call “passionate desire”. He is, according to the Qur’an, the All-Merciful, the All-Generous, the Loving. He is the Nourisher—and even a dog loves the person who feeds it—and the Sustainer, but for whom we would all fall down. He is al-Jamal, “Beauty” —and all the beauties we love in this world merely reflect that supreme Beauty. He is as-Salam, “Peace”—and there is no peace apart from Him. He is an-Nar, “Light”’—and even the humblest plant turns spontaneously towards the light. His power and His wrath are indeed to be feared, but love drives out fear, and the Qur’an asks: “Who else but those who have lost their way could despair of the mercy of their Lord?” He is dangerous—how could we not tremble, in our littleness, before such greatness?—but we are no longer frightened when we are drawn, as are iron filings to a magnet, towards that which is supremely beautiful, supremely lovable, supremely desirable. Not even our sense of sin and inadequacy can hold us back when we know that Mercy and Beauty await us at journey’s end. According to a saying of the Prophet Muhammad, the sky and the oceans and the earth all complained to God of mankind’s wickedness. The sky said: “Let me crush them!” The oceans said: “Let us drown them!” The earth said: “Let me swallow them!” But God replied: “If

you had created them, you would have mercy upon them.” _ But I said earlier that love is a form of recognition, and what is recognition if not understanding? The Bible speaks of a man and a woman “knowing” each other when they come together in loving union, and that is no mere figure of speech. Love is not simply an emotion. It is a kind of knowledge. And that is what I hope to turn to in my final talk.

Hl

I had a friend—he is dead now—who edited a journal on comparative religion. One day his neighbour leaned over the garden 32

Reflections

fence and said to him: “I hearsyou produce some sort of magazine about religion. I think you ought to know that I’m an athe“Ts that so?” said my friend; “Tell me, have you ever read St Augustine?” “Can’t say I have.” “Aquinas, perhaps?” “Never heard of him.” My friend mentioned. a few other great men who have inspired and enlightened the Christian tradition, and he received the same response. Finally he told his neighbour: “You're not an atheist, old chap. You're an ignoramus.” Perhaps this is what saddens and also irritates many religious believers. Argument and debate might be possible with the atheist and agnostic if they knew what they were talking about. Most of them do not. But the believers are themselves partly to blame. They are hardly less ignorant, and it is commonly assumed that religion has no need ofintellectual armour. Surely faith is enough? Faith is what counts, and—anyway— most people are not “intellectuals”. Now—surely?—that is rather a patronising assumption to make. It is primarily intellect that distinguishes man from the animal creation or, if “intellect” seems a daunting word, then let’s say the capacity to deal with ideas and concepts. Have we any right to suppose that ordinary people lack this capacity? It seems more likely that they have never been encouraged to use it, to study and read more about religion. As to faith sufficing for salvation, ist !”

no doubt this is true in principle, but in practice, if people are not given a sound theology to chew on, it is very likely that they will swallow a false one. Even the simplest person has certain ideas about the nature of things and is therefore governed, whether consciously or not, by a philosophy or a theology. How could this not be so, since we are thinking creatures? But I am cheating just a little. In my first talk I used the Arabic word marifah for “knowledge”, and this is something quite different to the information gained from books and study, (much as we need this information). Marifah is direct knowledge of things divine; immediate, intuitive knowledge which 33

REFLECTIONS

cannot be learned from books or passed round the classroom. It is personal, but that does not mean that it is purely subjective. You and I might look out together on a splendid landscape; we would see it each with his own eyes in his own way, and we might not be able to describe what we see (we are not poets). But that does not mean that the landscape is a figment of our imagination. It is there. It is real. But what about self-deception when we come to intuitive knowledge? Yes, that is a real danger, and this is precisely why these direct perceptions of the truth require a framework. That framework is provided by the religion which we follow. It conditions the way we see the truth, just as the observer’s standpoint conditions the way he sees a landscape. But something else is

necessary if we are to escape the danger of self-deception, and that something else is clear sight, sharp eyes. Eyes sharpened by the fear of God and given penetrating power by the love of God, together with an open heart and an informed mind. So, you see, in the end it all comes together. Our different faculties and the different sides of our nature play their allotted parts. Fear, love and the two kinds of knowledge are not opposed to each other. They serve the same purpose, they point in the same direction and, at the end of the day—God willing—they ferry the whole man, the whole woman, to safe harbour on the

other shore.

34

REFLECTIONS Seeing and Being Seen (OCTOBER

1986)

I I; I HAD BEEN ASKED to give a general title to this series of five short Friday “Reflections”, I think I might have chosen “Seeing and Being Seen”. What do I mean? Well, I hope that will become obvious over the course of time, but I’m afraid the BBC is not offering prizes for listeners who guess right. The Prophet made use of three terms to define our religion: first, iskam, meaning submission to God and to His Law; then iman, meaning faith in God and in what He has revealed to us, and finally ihsan, which is usually translated as “excellence”—in other words “submission” and “faith” brought to their highest point, perfected. And he defined ihsan in this way: “It is to worship God as though you saw Him; for, though you see Him not, yet He sees you.”

The Qur’4an—the sacred scripture of Islam—speaks again and again of God as al-Basir, the All-Seeing, and also as al-Khabir, He-who-is-totally-aware-of-everything. “Nota leaf falls but He knows it”, says the Qur’an; and “He knows the secret thoughts and what is even more hidden.” So He sees us at every moment, and He sees into the most secret recesses of our being. Now here, I think, we are on dangerous ground. I have known people brought up in a Christian environment who have turned against religion precisely because they were taught, as children, that God is some sort of super-spy. 35

REFLECTIONS

They were told that a fearsome “Old Man in the Sky” sees everything that they do; he was just waiting to catch them out when they were naughty, and he would punish them even for those shameful secret thoughts which they hardly dared acknowledge to themselves. No wonder they rebelled against this. Most of us have an impulse to duck when we come into a building and notice a security camera pointing in our direction. Surely we have a right to a bit of privacy? This is not—I believe—the way Muslims understand God’s all-seeing presence. They find it reassuring, comforting. They are glad not to be alone in an alien universe. They want to be understood, and they know that they are understood. The sense of loneliness which haunts many people, just below the threshold of everyday life, cries out for love, friendship, companionship and is not easily satisfied; cries out, in truth, for the divine Presence. In our personal relationships in this world we seek to be understood, at least by the people we love and by our friends; but also, perhaps, by our enemies for, if only we could explain ourselves to them, they would not be our enemies. Even if we are embarrassed to admit it, we do look for the ideal lover, the ideal friend, even the reconciled enemy. What a relief, then, to discover that—in the only way it

really matters—we

are totally understood because we are

totally known. What a relief also to be aware that there is one Person in whose presence we no longer have to pretend or deceive or protect ourselves. One of the Names given to

God in the Qur'an is “The Friend”; the Sufis—the “mystics” of Islam—have gone further and dared to call Him “The Beloved”. Whether we are Muslims or Christians we know—

or should know!—that our God is no tyrant, and that He who made us as we are is in the best position to know us and

to forgive us. The Qur’an insists constantly upon the divine Mercy; His Mercy, it tells us, “embraces all things’—and He

can hardly wait to forgive us for our sins and our stupidities. 36

Reflections But He has to wait, if only for a moment, to give us time to understand, in other words to “repent” and to acknowledge, in the light of the truth, that we have fallen short of what could reasonably be expected of us. “Repentance” does not imply self-indulgent and self-pitying guilt; it means turning back to God when we had turned away from Him and admitting the simple truth of our situation. As we turn—at the very moment at which we turn—He turns to us, and the barriers which we had wilfully erected between Him and us are dissolved. He was always there, waiting; it is we who had made ourselves absent from Him. We have come back where we always belonged. We are known, understood, seen and forgiven.

I I talked about the Muslim’s conviction—based upon what the

Qur’an teaches him—that we are seen by God at every moment of our lives and that even our most secret thoughts are exposed to Him, which is one way of saying that we live constantly in the divine Presence. It could even be said that awareness of this Presence is at the very heart of the Islamic way of life. “When My servants question thee concerning Me,” says the

Qur’an, which is—for us—the Word of God revealed through Muhammad, “then indeed I am close. I answer the prayer of the supplicant when he cries unto Me. So let them hear My call, and let them trust in Me.” There are certain sayings of the Prophet, quite’ separate

from the Qur’anic revelation, in which God spoke directly

through his mouth. Let me quote to you one of the most important of these inspired sayings: “I am with (My servant) when he makes mention of Me. If he makes mention of Me to himself, I make mention of him to Myself; and if he makes mention of Me in company, I make mention of him in a better company than that; and if he draws near to Mea hand’s span, I draw near to him an arm’s length; and if he draws near to Me Bi

REFLECTIONS

an arm’s length, I draw near to him a fathom’s length; and if he comes to Me walking, I go to him speedily.” A whole book could be written—in fact books have been written!—by way of commentary on that saying, but let us consider just one point. “I am with (My servant) when he makes mention of Me.” But isn’t He always with us? Yes, of course He is. But are we aware of the fact? Probably not, most of the time. That is why we behave the way we do. We are busy, everyday life occupies our attention to the exclusion of everything else. We

forget; and the Qur’an refers again and again to man’s forgetfulness. But isn’t there something rather foolish and incompetent about people who keep forgetting where they are and in Whose Presence they stand, each day and every day? Well, perhaps if we acknowledge our own foolishness and incompetence, we may already have taken a step towards God. The next step is to do something about it, and that is to “mention” Him, whether “in ourselves” or “in company”. That might not seem to amount to very much, but—in Islam—it is the key both to faith and to practice. The Arabic word

dhikr has two meanings: “mention” and “remembrance”, and God tells us in the Qur’an: “Remember Me, and I will remember thee!” What we are doing when we “mention” His Name is reminding ourselves of His Presence, waking up from the dream in which we live so much of the time and recollecting where we are. This, you see, is simply a matter of realism. If 1am in London but, for some stupid reason, I think that I am in Paris, then I am likely to get everything wrong and make a fool of myself. And if, as Islam teaches, everything that we do and everything that we think is seen and known by God, then to forget this is to forget where we are. But this raises another point, with which I hope to deal in my next talk. If we do not know where we are, then it is very likely that we do not know who we are. And what could be worse

than that? There is a verse of the Qur’an which says: “They forget God, therefore He has caused them to forget themselves.” 38

Reflections To understand ourselves means to know ourselves in relation to reality; it is to see ourselves as ‘we are in the light of the truth. If we have forgotten what the truth is and if we therefore live in a fantasy world, we cannot even begin to know who we are. Selfknowledge depends upon knowledge of the Presence of God.

Ill I had quoted to you a verse from the Qur’an which tells us that, if we forget God, He makes us forget ourselves. Another way

of putting this, also derived from the Qur’n, is to say that He leaves us to wander this world like blind men. The Book speaks of those who have “hearts wherewith they understand not, and eyes wherewith they see not, and ears wherewith they hear not”, and it compares such people to “cattle”. But let us consider, for the moment, one particular kind of blindness: the inability to see or know or understand ourselves. There is a line from a poem by the Scots poet Robbie Burns which has probably been quoted more often than any other line of poetry. I cannot do a Scots accent, but it goes like this: “Would some Power the giftie gie us to see ourselves as others see us.” Perhaps that should be taken with a grain of salt. If we could really see ourselves as others see us, we would be in the position of someone standing in front of a whole row of distorting mirrors, each showing a different image; we might become so confused that we would be paralysed. But supposing we change the poet’s words and say: “Would some Power the giftie gie us to see ourselves as He sees us”? That is quite a different matter. What is it that makes us so unwilling to look at ourselves calmly and objectively? Fear, I suppose, and defensiveness. If we were to admit our weaknesses to ourselves, we would—so we think—be weakened in the face of the world and less able to cope with the dangers and the problems that surround us; and, if we do not build up our own image, no one else is going to do it for us. Of what use is a deflated balloon, even if there is a fierce-looking a9

REFLECTIONS

face painted on it? We must blow the balloon up and present that face to the world.

But there is a problem here. The more we try to live a lie, the more vulnerable we become. We are afraid of being caught out by other people; above all, we are afraid of being caught out by

ourselves. A lie always needs to be supported by further lies, and then by still more lies, until we find that we have constructed a

house of cards that may be blown down at any moment. What happens then? A nervous breakdown, perhaps, or what the psychiatrists call an “identity crisis”. Self-deception has its dangers, to say the least. But, to be able to do without self-deception, we have to feel secure, and, speaking as a Muslim, I believe that this sense of security can come about in only one way. That is from the knowledge that, even here and now in this turbulent world, we

are living in the presence of God, who see us objectively, and yet with mercy and loving-kindness. In that all-seeing Presence

there is no longer any point in lying or in pretending to be other than we are. This, surely, is what we call “serenity”; to be oneself, to recognise oneself, in the calm certainty that He sees us as we are and accepts us as we are. If we are aware of living in that Presence, then we are aware of living face-to-face with the truth: a bright, clear light that encompasses everything. In that light we are free, not only to see ourselves, without false pride or false guilt, but also to look around us, no longer hampered by tunnel-vision, and see things as they really are. And what they are, in the presence of God, is something quite different to what they appear to be when we consider them only in terms of self-interest—in the way cattle see them. They have become symbols of what exists above and beyond them; and that is what I want to discuss next. IV “Seeing and Being Seen” was what I had thought of calling

4O

Reflections this series on ‘Reflections”. So far I have talked mainly about

“being seen”, being aware that we live in the presence of God. But in every aspect of religious life there is a kind of reciprocity between God and man; there are two sides to evety coin. There

is a connection between “seeing” and “being seen”, as is clearly suggested by this verse of the Qur’an: “We”—and this is God speaking through Revelation—*“We shall show them Our signs on the horizons and within themselves until it is evident to them that this is the truth. Are they not, then, satisfied with their Lord in that He is the Witness over all things?” The fact that things point beyond themselves—but for which they would be dead ends—is a recurrent theme of the Qur'an. “Truly”, the Book tells us, “in the heavens and the earth are signs for those who believe; and in your own creation and in the animals He scatters in the earth, are signs for people whose faith is sure; and in the alternation of night and day and in the provision that God sends down from the heavens, quickening the earth after her death, and in the ordering of the winds, are signs for people of understanding.” Even the colours of this colourful world have something to tell us; they have, says the Qur’an, “a message for people who are aware”. And then again: “God does not disdain to coin the similitude even of a gnat, or of something still smaller...” Well, that is a fairly comprehensive list: the wind, the rain, the animals—even a gnat—the plants, light and darkness; you and me. In other words everything—every single thing, great or small—points towards its Creator and says to us: “Do not look just at me, look at Him who made me!” One of the greatest philosophers of Islam, al-Ghazali, said

that everything we see here, and that includes ourselves, has two faces: a face of its own and a face of God—or we could say, a “sign” of God. He adds that, so far as its own face is concerned, it is nothing; in relation to the “face of God” it is being—it is real. Modern science can tell us a lot about the “nothingness” of things, but

41

REFLECTIONS

their meaning is beyond its range; and that is what really concerns us. But how do we discover meaning? First through Revelation; secondly through “seeing eyes”. Revelation—and

Iam thinking particularly of the Qur’an—reminds us of what we so easily forget. It says: “See! God is”; and then it explains all that follows from that overwhelming fact. But what about “seeing eyes”? You and I cannot tell ourselves: “At midday, on the dot, I’ll start to see the signs of God in everything around me.” That kind of vision is a gift, but we can at least do something to make ourselves fit to receive this gift, which brings me back to what I said earlier about living in the divine Presence. It is actually in our power to remind ourselves again and again of this simple fact of life. The Prophet was asked once what was the best cure for

forgetfulness—or

for what the Qur’an calls “rust on the

heart” —and he said it was to think frequently of death and to remember God constantly. You see, if we forget how soon we shall have to die, and if we overlook the fact that everything around us is perishing before our eyes, then we are living in a fantasy world. It is only when we wake up to the truth that the perishable, once it is recognised as such, points towards the Imperishable, and things lost in time point towards the Timeless, that our vision pierces through surface appearances. I spoke earlier of the “tunnel vision” of people who forget

these truths. Our religion convinces us that there is light at the end of the tunnel; and that is all that really matters.

V I reminded you earlier that everything around us is perishable, here one moment and gone the next, and that we ourselves are short-lived creatures. When the end comes, says the

Qur'an, “You will think that you tarried for no more than an hour.” According to another verse, God will ask us: “How long did you live on earth, counting in years?” We will answer,

42

Reflections in confusion: “We lived for a day or a part thereof—ask those who can count!”, because we ourselves will have lost all sense of

time. Then our Creator will ask: “Did you think that We created you for no purpose and that you would never come back to Use* That question seems to me to indicate a paradox. If we live for such a short time, then does anything matter? Do we matter? After all, the Qur'an tells us at one point that life is made up mainly of trivialities, and the Hereafter “is better and more lasting”. Let us take a simple, everyday comparison. Suppose you find yourself spending a few days in a strange place: you could, of course, say, “I’m here such a short time, it doesn’t mat-

ter what happens.” But then again, you might say the opposite, you might say: “I'll be gone so soon, every moment I spend here is precious.” And if you knew that the rest of your life depended on what you did in those few days, I think I can guess

what you would say. The Qur’an emphasises life’s brevity, but it speaks also of “a life long enough for those who are prepared to take thought to do so”; to take thought, to reflect, to see and to understand. That is the point. We are given the time we need.

For Muslims, the Qur’an is God’s final Revelation, His last

word. This is why it conveys such a sense of urgency. Do not waste time—it seems to tell us—you have none to spare! And a Muslim philosopher wrote: “Neither eat nor drink nor sleep without presence of heart and a seeing eye.” In other words, remember where you are and observe God’s signs scattered all around you. There are a thousand different ways in which this could be illustrated. I could take examples of heroism and self-

sacrifice, or talk of saints whose utter devotion to God dazzles us. But sometimes it is the small things that demonstrate most vividly what it means to be constantly aware. So let me take a

very humble example of “presence of heart and a seeing eye’. A few years ago, travellers in North Africa often stopped to stare at rather a strange sight. They would see a man bend 43

REFLECTIONS

down, pick something up from the road, put it for a moment to

his forehead and then place it safely on the nearest wall. What was it that this man treated with such respect? Usually a crust of bread, dropped by a passer-by; nothing more than that, but then our nourishment comes from God. Or it might have been a scrap of paper with writing on it, possibly the name of God. That too deserved better than to be trodden underfoot. What a small gesture, and yet—what a momentous acknowledgement! An acknowledgement of the fact that the sacred surrounds us and that we can never be too busy to recognise it. And what is this recognition of the sacred if not a practical sign of awareness that we live, every moment, in the presence of God, amongst things which come from Him and belong to Him— though we are allowed to borrow them—things which bear His signature upon them.

I mentioned earlier that, according to the Qur'an, “God disdains not to coin the similitude even of a gnat;” so why not a crust of bread, a scrap of paper? If He is indeed present with us,

wherever we may be—and the Qur'an tells us that this is so— then everything is in his Presence. For those who have “hearts that understand and eyes that see”, things shine and glitter with a light that is not their own. It is said that the Prophet used to pray: “O my Lord, increase me in marvelling!”; and those who see do, indeed, marvel—and increase throughout their lives in

marvelling.

44

REPoRe

TONS

Beauty (AUGUST 1987)

I |

es

THE OTHER DAY froma

holiday in France, staying

for a while with friends in the South. They have bought an old farmhouse, right up in the mountains, and rebuilt it with space for a dozen or more people. Both husband and wife are trained psychologists, and they hold courses for townspeople who have

lost all sense of purpose in their lives. They try to help people who are not exactly sick, but who are empty, and I am sure they

do help them. But Iam equally sure that the astonishing beauty of the landscape in which that farmhouse is set also contributes to the healing process, for healing is related to wholeness and, in such a place as that, you begin to feel “whole”, at home in the world (because it is so beautiful) and at home in yourself.

Speaking as a Muslim, this is just what I would expect. The very word Islam comes from a word meaning “peace”. The most

basic principle of the religion is Unity: first the unity of God, who is One without equal, without associate, then the unity of . His creation in which every element, however tiny, has its place and its function, and finally the unity achieved in every man and woman once they know who they are and where they are going, at peace with their Lord, at peace in the world, at peace with themselves. That peace is closely bound up with the awareness of beauty. In one of his most famous sayings, the Prophet Muhammad told 45

REFLECTIONS

his people: Allahu jamilun yuhibbu’l-jamal—*God is beautiful and He loves beauty!” Now, that is not a statement about feelings or impressions, it is a statement about the nature of Reality. And that, in turn, suggests something very important. It suggests that ugliness—and, yes!, there’s plenty of that in the world in which we live—is not on an equal footing with beauty. It is not one of a pair, like hot and cold, black and white; it represents the spoiling of beauty, the unmaking of what had been well made, the denial of God or His seeming absence. You might compare it to a hole in the pattern, a stain on the fabric, and it belongs to that class of things which, so the Qur'an tells us, last for but a short time and are then wiped away, while beauty endures. To know this is to possess a sense of the sacred and so to be aware of the radiance that illuminates unspoilt nature from within and which may be found also in the things we make, when these are well and lovingly made. The tragedy of modern man, in the midst of his riches and his technological achievements, is that he has

lost this sense of the sacred and lives in a world drained of light. No wonder the people who come to my friends’ farmhouse need help. They live in cities from which beauty has been banished as an irrelevance, as though it were a luxury which we can do without, and this is an environment in which it is difficult to believe in God since it has been constructed in forgetfulness of Him; and—in Islam—to forget God is the greatest sin, or the root of all other sins. Those who have told us, over the past century, that “God is dead” should have had the honesty to complete the sentence: “God is dead, therefore man is dead!” When nothing in our surroundings reminds us of Him, then He does—in a sense—die in our hearts, and all that makes life worth living dies with Him. But those visitors to the farmhouse are fortunate. Not everyone has such opportunities, to say the least. Of what use is it to _

suggest to the majority of city dwellers that they should turn to the empty spaces of virgin nature, where the sacred is nakedly 406

Reflections

apparent and where souls are healed? Their lives are restricted to the narrow streets in which no one has the time to say “Good day!” and in which the roar of traffic drowns the human voice. Is there no escape for them, no possibility of healing? God willing, I hope to take up this point next.

i I have talked about the healing powers of unspoilt nature and I talked about beauty—the seal of authenticity that God has placed on His creation—but I had to admit that a vast number of people in the world today are isolated from nature by an ugly man-made environment from which they cannot escape. Thus, is that entirely true? Is anyone totally cut off from the good things that God has given us? Surely not! But, while those who are lucky enough to live in the midst of beauty need make no effort to enjoy what they have been given, the rest of us have to get down to work and teach ourselves to appreciate the gifts that come our way. No one need make an effort to see God’s presence in mountains, rivers and forests, but to find joy in a single flower or to feel respect for a crust of bread is a different matter. It requires what is called—in Islam—the unceasing “remembrance of God”, and it requires an understanding of

the simple fact that everything created praises its Creator and reminds us of Him. “Do you not see”, asks the Qur’an, “that everything in the heavens and all that is in the earth adores God, as do the sun and the moon and the stars, and the hills and the trees and the beasts,

and many of mankind...?” The tale is told of aMuslim Sufi Master who sent his young-

est disciple to gather flowers for the house. The young man was gone a long time, and he finally returned with one miserable bloom in his hand. The Master raised an eyebrow—perhaps both eyebrows—and asked for an explanation. “When I went

to pick the flowers,” said the disciple, “I found them all singing 47

REFLECTIONS

the praises of their Lord and Creator, and I dared not interrupt them; but then I saw that one had finished her song. This is the one that I have brought you.” I spoke previously of a puzzling sight that travellers might have seen in North Africa until fairly recently, when the habits of modern life began to get a real grip on the area. They would observe a man walking down the street—going about his business—stop suddenly, bend down, pick up a discarded crust of bread and, after touching it to his forehead, place it safely on the nearest wall. What does that story tell us, and what is the significance of this act of respect and gratitude for the nourishment God gives us— even for a dry crust? Both the story and the action demonstrate, in the first place, a true sense of the sacred and an awareness that this sense of the sacred embraces all that God has made, all that He has given for our sustenance or for our delight. Everything we see when we open our eyes, everything we grasp when we hold out our hands comes from Him and—when rightly used—reminds us of Him. Muhammad used to pray: “O my Lord, increase me in

marvelling!” But we also have to understand that everything in existence has certain rights, and our own rights do not extend to misusing these things, squandering them, exploiting them. I can imagine someone saying: “This is really too much! Women’s rights, animal rights, even plant rights, and now you talk about the rights of sticks and stones! Where will it end?” It has no end—that is the only possible answer. We did not make the world. You can-

not, the Qur’an tells us, even create a fly. And the Qur’an assures us also that the whole universe is like a vast picture-book filled

with the signs of God, if only we have eyes to see and the sense to understand. In other words, nothing is merely what it seems. Appearances—as people so often tell us—are deceptive and, if we float only on the surface of the world around us, then we are indeed deceived. There is always more to it than that, and

then more and more, until you have plumbed the depths and 48

Reflections found—behind the seventy-thousand veils of light and darkness—the face of God. Ill

I had said that, from the Muslim point of view, even thelittle things which surround us or of which we make use in our daily lives can serve to remind us of God and therefore deserve to be treated with respect. These things form part of the material world, and how often have you been told—how often have I been told— that we are “too materialistic” in this modern age? If that means simply that we are too greedy for material possessions, then it is a fair criticism; but I am going to suggest to you that—in one very

important sense—we are not materialistic enough. You and I— unless we are either mystics or scientists—see the material world as a solid, inert lump. We seldom bother to look beneath the surface. For the Muslim mystic however it is a tapestry into which the signs of God are woven. But how does the contemporary physicist see it? He too is obliged to probe beneath the surface and, the deeper he penetrates, the greater the mystery which faces him. This solid table in front of me is, he says, a space in which minute quanta of energy move at incredible speeds: particles, he calls them but then he corrects himself and says that they are waves which sometimes behave like particles—or particles which sometimes behave like waves. It is all very confusing, and so it should be, for it reminds us that nothing is as it seems and that mystery surrounds our little enclosure of “common sense”. Is this unsettling? If it is, then I am sure we need to be “unsettled”. Earlier in this series of “Reflections” I spoke of those people

who have lost all sense of purpose, who live in a grey, monotonous world and who need contact with the splendours of virgin nature

if they are to be healed. But what we have to understand—and perhaps what they need to understand—is that their “grey” world is an illusion. The fault is not in their surroundings but in them-

selves. “It is not the eyes that grow blind,” says the Qur'an in this context, “but the hearts within the breasts that grow blind.”

49

REFLECTIONS

There is a story which crops up in several different traditions; I first came across it in Hinduism, but then I discovered it again in a Muslim book. It goes like this: A man living at a certain address in Baghdad (let’s say “Baghdad” for convenience, but it could be any city) has a vivid dream in which he learns that a vast treasure is hidden under the floor of a certain house in Cairo. He sets out to seek this treasure, and it’s a hard journey; he gets mugged on the way, he nearly drowns and he comes close to starvation, but in the end he arrives at the address in Cairo. The owner of the house says: “You've just caught me—I was about to set out for Baghdad, for I dreamed the other night that a great treasure was hidden under the floor of a certain house there.” I think you can guess whose house that is! The traveller returns home—no

doubt getting mugged again on the way—and, sure enough, the treasure is under his own living-room. Did he make a wasted journey? The moral of the story is that we sometimes have to venture out and travel far in order to find the treasure which was always ours. We have all that we need—you and I and anyone else you care to name. That is one of the basic principles of the spiritual life. But we need help, a great deal of help, to discover what we already possess. That help comes, obviously, from God, provided we ask for it eagerly and in all sincerity. But, as Muslim, Jew and Christian will agree, He uses many instruments, and in fact—in His hands—anyone or anything can become an instrument of guidance: men and women, the beauties of nature, true works of art, the little things we handle each day—even sticks and stones. But we have to do our part. We have to ask!

LY. In this series of short reflections

I’ve been

talking about

beauty—its healing properties—and about the praise which rises from every created thing towards its Creator. “Have you not seen,” asks the Qur’an, “that God is He Whom all in the sO

Reflections heavens and the earth praise, and the birds in their flight? He indeed knows the worship and the praise of each, and God is aware of all that they do.” And the pious Muslim, when things go badly for him, says: “al-hamdu lillahi ‘ala kulli hal” ;“Praise be to God under all circumstances”; not just on the bright day, but on the dark one too. But what is really meant by this much-abused word, “praise”? It may have different meanings for different people, but—for the Muslim, anyway—it suggests that what is given by God is transmuted on earth into praise of the Giver, just as the falling rain is transmuted into a vapour which returns to the clouds. Men and women praise consciously when they are aware of the source of their existence; sticks and stones praise by their very existence, for existence is itself a miracle. According to the Qur'an, God “says unto a thing “Be!’, and it is”; and however humble its situation here, among the people of the earth or among the stones of the earth, it is the direct product of God’s command and therefore it participates, in some way, in the mystery of His being. This—precisely—is why it can serve as a reminder, inviting us to focus our attention, not upon what

has been made, but upon its Maker. “He scatters His mercy,” says the Qur'an, just as the rain is scattered over the dry land, and we—you and I—take and use as much of this as we may

be capable of absorbing. Listen to the Qur’an once again: “God sends down rain from the sky so that the valleys flow according to their measure, and the flood bears away swelling foam... thus does God indicate the true and the false. As for the foam, it passes away as scum upon the banks, while—as for that which is of use to mankind—it remains in the earth.” But, in talking of beauty and praise, the healing powers of nature and the meaning hidden in sticks and stones, have I left out something important? What about the Dos and Don'ts

of religion? They have, ultimately, one purpose, and that is to establish harmony,

balance,

order within py!

the individual

REFLECTIONS

personality as also in society; the same harmony, balance and order visible in creation as a whole, maintaining the birds in their flight, turning the growing plant towards the life-giving sun, and bringing the fruit to ripeness on the tree. In the disordered personality and in the disordered society, the Dos and Don’ts may have to be imposed, but those are conditions under which the equilibrium inherent in creation has already been disturbed as happens when people forget who they are and where they are going. There is another word for equilibrium in the human domain, and that is “sanity”—bearing in mind its derivation from the Latin sanus, which means neither more nor less than “healthy”. Health is what those unhappy townspeople (whom I mentioned in the first talk of this series) are seeking when they take refuge with my friends in the French mountains. Perhaps that is what we all seek, at the level of the spirit as also at the bodily level? And health, understood in its deepest sense, relates to the most fundamental principle of the religion of Islam. This is Tawhid: unity, unification, wholeness, the interconnectedness of every single thing from the highest to the lowest; the Oneness of God reflected in the oneness of being. When we are aware of this unity, then we are at home wherever we may find ourselves; when we forget it, we are isolated even in.the warmest embrace. It is then that we need help, and help is offered through the thousand-and-one things we see and touch. But we have to reach out, we have to ask. The answer comes with the asking.

$2

REFLEC

TIONS

Living by the Book (SEPTEMBER

1988)

I “Living by the Book”—that is a provocative phrase, anyway in this last quarter of the twentieth century. We are supposed to think for ourselves and devise our own personal lifestyle. That is the theory, though most people do as others do, just as they did in the past. But “living by the Book” suggests that we take our principles and our morality as “given”, at second-hand. It

suggests that there is a wisdom greater than our private wisdom and a morality superior to our own ideas of right and wrong. It implies that we are servants, not masters.

None the less, some of us do still try to live by a book and submit to a will which takes precedence over our self-will. But what book? Iam a Muslim, so in this series of talks I shall be concerned with the sacred scripture of Islam, the Qur'an. But that does not mean that I shall be talking only of matters which concern Muslims. We are all God’s creatures, including those who think they do not believe in Him. We have the same needs, hopes,

fears. The Qur’an is not the exclusive property of Muslims. It has something to say to all men and women of good will.

But what is this book, al-Qur’an—“the Reading” or “the Recital”? Let it speak for itself: “This is a Scripture wherein there is no doubt, a guidance for those who are conscious of God; who believe in the unseen, and establish worship, and spend out

of that which We have bestowed upon them (in charity); and a8

REFLECTIONS

who believe in what has been revealed to thee (Muhammad) and what was revealed before thee, and who are certain of the Hereafter. These are the successful.” The contents of this book were revealed to Muhammad— the perfect scribe, as he has been called—over a period of twenty-three years. Yet, in another sense, they were sent down as a single whole ona particular night, called the Night of Power, entering into the heart of God’s Messenger and issuing from his lips, bit by bit, according to the circumstances of the moment: a timeless whole fragmented in time. Let me quote again: “Indeed We revealed it on the Night of Power. What can convey to thee what the Night of Power is? The Night of Power is better than a thousand months. The angels and the Spirit descend therein by their Lord’s permission, with all decrees. Peace (it is) until the coming of dawn.” Muslims give a very special meaning to this concept of “Revelation”. God, transcendent—beyond all that we can think or say of Him, hidden (it is said) by ten thousand veils of light and darkness—sends down from His treasury something of His wisdom to inform and guide mankind, who would otherwise wander this earth like sightless creatures. The words in which this

revelation takes form are not of human choosing, they are God’s choice, and these words are in the language of the only the meaning of the Book that was revealed, the language in which this meaning is expressed revelation and cannot be separated from it, which

Arabs. It is not “sent down’; is part of the is why a trans-

lation, though useful and necessary, is not the Qur’an. Muslims are often puzzled by Christianity because—so it seems to us— Christians do not possess their scripture; they have only translations, and what God has said in one language cannot be adequately

expressed in any other tongue. God spoke to the Jewish prophets in Hebrew, to Jesus in Aramaic, and we cannot tell what special richness is lost when these complex Semitic languages have passed

through the filter of our rough-and-ready European speech.

54

Reflections

This marks the most specific difference between the two religions: the Christian’s faith is focussed upon the person of Jesus, the Muslim’s faith upon the Book. But, when all is said and done, God’s mercy compensates for every limitation. He gives us what we need, and that cannot be less than enough.

Il Thad talked about the Muslims’ understanding of Revelation— the sending down of a message from God to mankind—in relation to our scripture, the Qur’an. For us this book is, quite literally, divine Speech. Let me quote: “Had we caused this

Qur’an to descend upon a mountain, truly you would have seen it shattered, rent asunder by the fear of God. Thus do We coin similitudes for mankind that perhaps they may reflect.” But it descended upon a man, and how could a poor mortal creature be stronger than a mountain? The answer to this turns upon a concept which is central to the Islamic Faith: the “viceregal” status of the human being, his function as God’s direct representative on earth. You might even define what we are simply by saying that man is the creature to whom God speaks and

who is capable of bearing the burden of this speech. The rest of creation, animate and inanimate, does what is required of it, takes its place within the divine order effortlessly; but man has been endowed with the gift of intellect, the capacity of

understand, and a will free either to accept or to reject God’s messages.

The Qur'an is frequently described as the supreme “miracle” of Islam, even as the only miracle that is of any significance. The very notion that the Absolute communicates with the relative, that the Eternal makes itself understood by the short-lived creatures of time, seems contrary to sense, and therefore miraculous. In Christian belief, Jesus is the divine Word incarnate;

for us the Qur’an is—to borrow a word invented by a writer on Islam—the divine Word “inlibrate”, become Book. Yet we S5

REFLECTIONS

read: “If all the trees on the earth were pens, and the seas with

seven more seas added to them (were ink), God’s words could never be exhausted.” So how could they be comprised within the covers of a book? I had said earlier that God sent down upon Muhammad, not merely a message couched in general terms, but one in which every word is precisely what it has to be and could never be exchanged for any other word, and this is how the Infinite finds a means of expression within the limits of the finite. We are told that every verse—and every word in each verse—has a variety of different meanings at different levels of understanding. It

is the particular nature of the Arabic language that makes this possible. Each verse, then, is like a window opening onto the limitless. This leads to two questions which I and other Muslims in the West are frequently asked. Why, in the first place, is there

no “historical criticism” of the Qur’4n, as there is of the Bible? Here we have a simple misunderstanding. The Bible is made up

of many different parts, compiled over many centuries. It is possible to cast doubt upon one part without impugning the rest.

But the Qur’an is a single revelation received by just one man. Either you accept it for what it claims to be, in which case you are a Muslim, or you reject this claim and so place yourself outside the fold of Islam. Secondly, we are sometimes asked why we hesitate to

“adapt” the Qur’an to the needs of the modern age. The Book itself answers this question: “There is no changing the words of God!” The fact that it was “sent down” in the seventh century of the Christian era, not the twentieth, is irrelevant. You do not

wear down a diamond by constant handling, and the passage of the centuries cannot erode the words of God. That, after all, is the whole point of a divine intervention in the affairs of this world. The act—the Revelation—is located in time, but it is

itself timeless, and Islamic theology always defines the essence 56

Reflections

of the Qur'an as “uncreated”, therefore eternal. This question is so important in relation to contemporary religious debate that I hope to return to it in a later talk. For the moment, suffice it to say that, as Muslims, we ask, not how the Book can be adapted to our lives in the world of today, but how our daily lives can be

adapted to the Qur’an. That is the real problem.

Ill “Living by the Book”—for Muslims that means following the

guidance given us in the Qur’an and living within the framework which this guidance provides. We believe that God has spoken to us through this Book: “With truth have We sent it down,” He tells us, “and with Truth has it descended; and We have sent thee (Muhammad) only as a bearer of good tidings and as a warner.” And again we read: “Yet when Our clear revelations are recited to them, those who do not look towards the meeting with Us say: ‘Bring us a recital other than this or change it!’ Say (to them): ‘It is not for me to change it of my own accord. I follow only that which is revealed to me...’.”

The Qur’an describes itself as a “reminder to mankind” and this theme of “reminding” runs right through the book and offers a key to the Muslim’s spiritual life. We can be reminded only of something that we once knew and then forgot, possibly because we choose to forget facts—realities—which are by nature demanding and even uncomfortable. Ostriches may not actually hide their heads in the sand when faced with danger, but human beings are certainly inclined to do something of the sort. There can therefore be a moral dimension to this “forgetting” which requires a “reminder” from God. Islam has never claimed to be a “new” religion in the sense in which most of us would understand the term. On the contrary, it presents itself as a restoration and re-statement of the Din

al-Fitrah: the perennial religion of mankind, the eternal Truth

of which our ancestors had to be reminded again and again. a.

REFLECTIONS

In fact, this process of revelation or “reminding” starts where

we started. So we read in the Qur’4n that, after the fall from Paradise, Adam “received from his Lord words (of revelation), and his Lord relented toward him; for He is the Relenting, the Merciful;” and this passage continues: “We said, ‘Go down from hence, but truly there comes to you from Me a guidance, and whosoever follows My guidance, no fear shall come upon them neither shall they grieve.” It does not really matter whether we take this literally or figuratively. The lesson is the same. But why should it have been necessary for these divine revelations, each perfect and adequate in its way, to have been repeated again and again down the years? The principal reason—there are others, concerned with the nature of time and with local differences—is human forgetfulness combined with our tendency, as soon as we get our grubby hands on any truth, to bend it to suit our convenience. The crystal-clear stream is polluted in its downward course. This, in the Muslim view, is what has happened to a greater or lesser extent to the previous divine Messages. Islam, then does not claim to be unique, but it does claim to be final and therefore a summing-up of all that came before. As the cycle of time draws to its close, there will be no more “ropes of salvation” lowered to struggling humanity, so. this one has to be meticulously preserved in its pristine purity—“There is no changing the words of God.” This means, also, that its foundation-stone, the Qur’an, must have a universal relevance. It must offer spiritual nourishment both to the wise and to the foolish, to the sophisticated intelligence and to the simple mind. And this it does, and has

always done, as the history of our Faith proves. “The proof of the pudding is in the eating”, as we say in England. It is the efficacy of these words—their saving and transforming power— |

that seems to us most clearly to demonstrate the divine origin of the Qur’an. 58

Reflections But, as the final revelations offered to mankind, the Qur’an recognises the efficacy of other “ropes of salvation”. Let me quote once more from the Book: “Indeed, those who believe”— that is to say, in the Faith of Islam—“and those who are Jews and Christians and Sabaeans, whoever believes in God and the Last Day and who does right, truly their reward is with their Lord, and no fear shall come upon them and neither shall they grieve.” That is a message of peace which the Qur’4n offers to all men and women of good will and good sense.

IV

We read in the Qur’an: “It is not righteousness that you turn your faces to the East and the West, but righteous is he who has faith in God and the Last Day and the angels and the Scripture and the prophets; and gives wealth—out of love for Him—to kinsfolk and to orphans and the needy and the wayfarer and to those who ask and for the ransom of slaves; to be steadfast in

prayer and practice regular charity; to fulfil the contracts you have made, and to be patient in adversity and time of stress. Such are they who are sincere, and it is they who are (truly) conscious of God.” That is a fairly comprehensive list of the obligations which the religion of Islam places upon us if we wish to “live by the Book”. Here in the Western sector of humanity we argue.as to whether there is a religious revival or not. We carry out surveys, asking people in the street and busy housewives if they believe in God. The answer is usually Yes. But if the question ‘is put a different way and we ask, “Are you committed to an organised religion?” the answer is more likely to be No, quite apart from the fact that the term “organised religion” is decidedly off-putting. It might be better to ask, “Do you have faith in a revealed religion and belong to a community which worships God in approved forms of worship and tries to obey the rules of 59

REFLECTIONS

the game?” If I can judge from the people I have known over the past fifty years, I think the answer would still be in the negative. I have lost count of how many friends, acquaintances and casual contacts have said to me: “I’m sure there must be something,

someone, up there, and I try to lead a decent life and help my neighbours. Isn’t that all that matters?” So why belong to some particular religion—Islam, Christianity or any other—with all that this involves? Let me ask the

question that I’m usually too polite to ask the people who say this kind of thing. Do you really have that much trust in your own subjective wisdom and judgment? Are your intentions so

pure—is your will so detached from self-interest—that you can be sure of your own righteousness? Do you never deceive yourself, not to mention others? And, if the answer to these ques-

tions is a confident Yes!, then I really have to say that this is a most extraordinary claim and seems to ignore all that we might learn from the wisdom of the past regarding our human capacity for self-deception and all that we might learn from history regarding human wickedness. Self-reliance is all very well, but to reject help when it is offered seldom makes sense.

The Qur’an is described as “a mercy to mankind”. Divine guidance is a gift, and the religions are therefore gifts. Not even

the smallest child rejects a gift without examining it. Can adults have.less sense than children? Well, yes, I’m afraid they can; that’s the pity of it.

The Qur'an speaks often of the “straight path”, and the religious law of Islam is called the Shari‘ah, which means the “high-

road”. When people ask—as they do ask—if it is not possible to reach our destination without following such a road, the answer thust be Yes because, with God, all things are possible and we

cannot set limits to His mercy; but to insist upon finding your own way through the forests and the mountains (accompanied. by your worst enemy, your own self-will), hacking out a path with your penknife, rather than following the road opened up 60

Reflections by God’s mercy which leads surely to where you must go is, to say the least, a risky choice. That destination is before us from the moment we are born, call it what you will: Paradise, salvation, liberation—or, simply, Peace. Seen or unseen, it is the magnet that draws us through our lives.

Vv The Qur'an speaks thus of “people who understand”: they are “such as keep their pact with God and break not the covenant, such as unite what God has commanded should be joined and fear their Lord and dread a severe reckoning; such as persevere in seeking the countenance of their Lord and are regular in prayer...and overcome evil with good.” And it speaks of the reckoning, “When the earth is shaken with her final quaking, and the earth yields up her burdens... That day she will tell what she knows, for her Lord will have inspired her...and whoso has done an atom’s weight of good will see it then, and whoso has done an atom’s weight of ill will see it then.” I talked of the reasons for adhering to a traditional religion rather than relying upon one’s own dubious wisdom and personal morality, so we have come now to the key question of moral codes. For Jews, Christians or Muslims who “live by the Book” there is no basic problem. Whether they obey the rules or not, they acknowledge the rules and accept certain standards of right and wrong given by God, not invented by men. But the modern world, the secular world, does not function within a religious framework and its laws reflect current opinions which

change from year to year. |

Watch any television programme or listen to any broadcast

discussion dealing with moral questions. One participant says, “I think such actions are are wrong.” No one asks pose that their thoughts to claim that unguided

right,” another, “J think such actions either of them why they should suphave any bearing on the matter. Yet human thought can determine such 61

REFLECTIONS

questions on its own is a daring claim and, in terms of what people have believed throughout most of our history, a strange one. It seems to me that we behave rather like rich people who tell you that money does not matter. The modern world, however

irreligious it may be, still lives on capital accumulated over millennia on a basis of religious faith. That capital is being rapidly eroded, and the time must come when there will no longer be enough left in the cultural bank to support us in the manner to which we have been accustomed. Let me, at this point, indulge in a brief personal reminiscence. I was brought up without any religious teaching and, since I did not go to school until I was nearly ten, it was not until then that I heard, for the first time, that strange little word, “God”. “What’s that?” I asked the teacher. I remember that when I was about fourteen, we were asked to write an essay on the subject of “assassination”. I wrote a vigorous defence of what seemed to me the logical way of dealing with inconvenient people, particularly politicians. My form master, an amiable clergyman, took me aside for a little talk. He explained to me that it was wrong to kill people. I asked why. Rather to my surprise, for I thought him a wise man, he could not tell me. The Bible said it was wrong, but I could not

see what the Bible had to do with me. I was reminded of this

the other day when a young man in a documentary film about Beirut remarked quite casually: “Shooting a man is like eating a sweet or kissing a girl; nothing special!” I think he spoke for a generation brought up as I was, without access to the capital in the bank, and I cannot share the view of so many good people that we have, in our very nature, an inhibition against killing our fellow men and women. In this twentieth century in which

we have slaughtered more people than in all the preceding cen-

turies of recorded history put together, I am sorry to say that I. may be right. That is an extreme case, but it may serve to drive the point 62

Reflections home. On purely rational groyinds, if you exclude assumptions derived from our religious and cultural past, I doubt whether there exists any firm basis for the morality which alone makes a tolerable social life possible. We cannot fall back upon the instincts which lead social animals and insects to cooperate. They obey the law of their species. We are human. We have to be taught the laws appropriate to our kind. And that, whether we like it or not, means “living by the Book”.

VI I’ve suggested more than once that our own self-will is a poor

guide to what is best for us in the long run. The Qur’an asks, “Who goes further astray than he who follows his own desires without guidance from God?”, and explains in another chapter that: “If the Truth were in accord with their own likes and dislikes, then indeed the heavens and the earth and all the beings therein would have been corrupted. Nay, We have sent them a reminder, but they turn their backs upon this reminder.” In an earlier talk I spoke of the religious law of Islam as a “high-road”,

which is what the word Shari‘ah means, and the Qur’an refers more than once to those who “wander confusedly through all the valleys”, getting nowhere. These are they who rely upon what is called in Arabic dhann, “personal opinion”, and the

Qur’an dismisses summarily all who “dispute concerning God without knowledge or guidance or a book to enlighten them”. This is all very shocking, at least to people whose minds are entirely conditioned by the modern age. We may not be taught many basic principles at school nowadays, but we are certainly taught that we must “think for ourselves” and stand by our own opinions. Are not all sincere opinions worthy of respect? Well,

no, not necessarily—unless you can give me a good reason for supposing that folly is on a level with wisdom and that ignorant opinions carry the same weight as informed ones, which means, if you take this to its logical conclusion, that evil has

63

REFLECTIONS

the same rights as good. I do not think anybody really believes that, but a great many pretend to believe it for fear of appearing “dogmatic”, “judgemental” and so on. Now, the Qur’an commands us to make just such judgments. For Muslims, the capacity to discriminate—in the light of Revelation and by means of the God-given intelligence which reflects this Revelation— between light and darkness, truth and error, good and evil is the

mark of our humanity. I have ventured now into a difficult area of debate. There has been much public argument recently as to whether any “absolute values” exist. I believe that the answer is yes and no. I take my cue from a Qur’anic verse, addressed to the Muslims, the Jews and the Christians, which says: “For each of you We have appointed a divine Law and a way of life. Had God so willed, He could have made you one people; but, so that He might try you by that which He has bestowed upon you (He

willed otherwise). Therefore compete in doing good. Unto God you will return, and He will enlighten you concerning that wherein you differ.” How can this be? Let me put it this way. A divine revelation which inaugurates a religion as such is what, in modern parlance, might be called a “package”. It is a coherent pattern, an organic whole in which each part fits precisely with every

other part and in which all the parts are inter-dependent. This is why you cannot take the “best bits” from each religion and combine them in some sort of super-Faith. Moral laws differ— though less than many people suppose—between the religions, but these laws always make perfect sense in the context of the basic doctrines, the theology and the cosmology of the Faith to which they relate. God wills variety because His infinite richness cannot be fully reflected in any earthly pattern. How could it be, given His Infinity and our limitations? We do not need to ask how these differences can be reconciled. We are finite beings

and there is a boundary set to our understanding. So the Qur’an

64

Reflections commands us to be patient. We will know the answers soon enough. Meanwhile, we seek enlightenment from the origin of all Light, we seek help from the source of all Help, and we put our trust where it belongs: not in the con-man within us but in God beyond us, not in Me with a capital M but in the Book

given for our guidance and as a “mercy for mankind”. Vil I sometimes think that one of the simplest ways to identify the sickness of the age is to observe how certain important words have lost their true meaning. An obvious example in the English language might be the word “awful”. The dictionary defines it in terms

of inspiring

reverence

and respect. Nowadays

if

someone loses their wallet or misses a train, we exclaim “How awful!” Have we, I wonder, lost the capacity to feel awe when faced with the sublime (another word that has been trivialised)? But today I am concerned with the words “normal” and “nor-

mality”. They too have tumbled into the pit, and this tells us something about modern man and the loss of religious faith. What do we mean when we say that a person is “normal”? We generally mean that he or she is very much like everyone else, behaves the way most people behave and stays within current conventions. Normal folk are certainly not religious or, if they are, they keep quiet about it. But they do have a problem, because nowadays the idea of what is “normal” changes from one decade to another. Fortunately the popular press keeps them

up to date by surveys and through advice columns. A recent survey in the United States is supposed to show that most people commit adultery, so now we know that fidelity in marriage is “abnormal” and therefore a little shameful. How does this fit in with “living by the Book”, the theme of these talks? There is an Arabic word that occurs frequently

in the Qur’an: aktharahum. It means “most of them”, “most

people”. We read, for example: “Perfected is the Word of your 65

REFLECTIONS

Lord in Truth and Justice. Nothing can change His words. He is the Hearer, the Knower. If you were to follow most of those on earth they would lead you far from God’s way. They follow

nothing but personal opinion, they only guess.” We are warned again and again not to follow aktharahum, not to do as most people do. There are certain stories that are

common

to the Qur’an and the Bible, such as the stories of

Noah and Lot. Noah refused to follow the ways of his people and was mocked for this abnormality. He—with his family and the animal pairs—was saved from the Flood. The rest perished. The story of Lot and the destruction of Sodom makes the same point. Beware, in an irreligious age, of doing as others do. “Normality”, in fact, has nothing to do with statistics. It refers to a norm, a model of perfection, an example to be followed. It indicates what we should be. Normality is therefore something to strive for, something at which to aim. It is not what most people do. It is what they would do if they lived up to their human potential. I think it was a Catholic poet who said that the only real failure in life is the failure to achieve sanctity, a view with which Muslims can agree in terms of what we call ihsan, which means spiritual excellence. For us that excellence is exemplified in the prophet of Islam, Muhammad. He is the human norm for every Muslim. We fall short of the norm. Of course we do. What matters most is where we fix our eyes and aim our intentions, rather than whether we actually hit the target.

The Book—the Qur’an—directs us to a straight road and

tells us our destination, our goal. We stumble towards it, we tumble into one ditch or another, but we do not lose sight of

the goal. And one day, maybe—just maybe—He will lift us up and, since the greatest distance means nothing to Him, bring us home in a flash.

God’s messengers, according to the Qur'an, say to the doubters—the questioners—as they have said from the beginning of 66

Reflections

time: “Can there be any doubt concerning the Creator of the heavens and the earth? He calls you that He may forgive you your sins... We are but mortals like you, but God gives grace to whom He will among His servants,..How should we not put our trust in God, when He has shown us our ways.” So says the Qur’an to those who live by the Book.

VItl I had talked of normality, defined in relation to a norm,

a

model in terms of which we try to shape our characters and our behaviour, and I took a risk in saying that this involved living up to our human potential. The word human has different meanings for different people. For secular thought, man is a clever animal whose potential is to become even more clever,

until it is master of all it surveys. For Islam, as for Christianity, humanity can only be defined in relation to God. We are, it is said, made in His image, not in the image of a wolf, a monkey

or a rat. Today, when people are urged to “be themselves” and develop their full potential, no distinction is made between the highest of which we are capable and the lowest—which is very low indeed. Perhaps it is just as well that this advice is seldom taken literally. In real life most people would still

rather be someone else than themselves, whether it is a matter

of a boy or girl modelling themselves on a pop star or an older person imitating someone they admire. One way or another, people do need to look beyond themselves for a model. But what kind of model? It has been said with good rea-

son that those who do not aim at the highest are likely to aim at the lowest, and Muslims say that those who refuse to obey

God will inevitably end up obeying the devil. Why should we obey cither? Because we are human, and the fact is that human beings are not self-sufficient. The Qur'an tells us, “You

are the poor, He is the Rich”; that is to say, you are a creature in constant need, whereas He is plenitude and has no needs.

67

REFLECTIONS

Think of the infant, totally dependent. Think of the aged man or woman, no less dependent. There is an interval between the two ends of life during which we can pretend to be in command of ourselves, but it is only a pretence. Watch any successful man or woman when real disaster strikes and the unseen prop upon which they leaned is snatched away; see them crumble, see their tears. It was all a big act; at heart most people know this, which is why most people—deep down— are afraid. But only when we acknowledge our dependence can we expect support from Him who is alone Independent. God

speaks thus in the Qur’an: “O you servants of Mine who have transgressed against your own souls, despair not of God’s mercy. Behold, God forgives all sins. He is the Forgiving,

the Merciful. Turn unto Him repentant, and surrender unto Him.” In speaking of the creation of the world and all its creatures, the Qur’an frequently substitutes the name ar-Rahman, “the Merciful”, for the name Allah. Overflowing Mercy created what is created, and how could Mercy leave this creation to its own poor devices? It did not. Hence the “books”, the revelations, the words of guidance. But words are not always enough. We need to be shown how the Book’s guidance works out in real life. And so we have been given a norm; a living,

breathing exemplar. “We sent thee only as a mercy for all creatures”, God tells Muhammad; and the lady ‘A’isha, questioned about her husband’s inner nature, said: “His nature is that of

the Qur’an.” In short, he embodied the Qur’an and demon-

strated, day in and day out, what the book means. For the Muslim, “living by the Book” means, above all else, following

the example of the man through whom the Book was transmitted to mankind and, since he was supremely lovable, doing

so most willingly as a labour of love.

68

Reflections €

IX

The Qur'an, which has been the central theme of my recent talks, urges us to take life seriously. What, then, are we to make of verses such as this one? “Know that the life of this world is only play and a passing delight and pageantry, and boasting and rivalry in wealth and children; as the likeness of vegetation after rain—its growth is pleasing to the farmer; then it withers, and you see it turn yellow and become straw.” And yet, elsewhere in the Book, God tells us: “We did not create the heavens and the earth and all that is between them in play; We created them in and by the Truth, but most people are

unaware.” The Qur’an glorifies the richness, the bounties and the beauties of this earth, and they glorify Him. We are commanded to give thanks for these things and, indeed, for our very existence as men and women “ranging widely”, enjoying what is to be enjoyed and making the most of every moment. Surely there is a contradiction here?

I think not. We need no urging to attach ourselves to the world. But we do need constant urging to remember the utter disproportion between eternity and time. If we were to weigh them against each other on the scales, we would find that the things of time weigh nothing at all in comparison with that

which has no beginning and no end. The Qur'an speaks repeatedly of life’s brevity; when the end comes, it says, “You will

think that you lived no more than an hour of one day.” And it is said sometimes that a drowning man sees the whole of his life pass before him in a flash. That’s what it is, a flash. But this tells us nothing about its value. Most of us can look back upon a day in our past which was more real and more vivid than all the intervening time. Time gets its true value

from its content, not from its length or its brevity; and that offers a hint that may resolve the apparent contradiction in the Qur’an. There are two utterly different ways in which we can experience our existence. If we see it as a series of isolated

69

REFLECTIONS

incidents—“one

damn

thing after another”,

as the saying

goes—without purpose and without meaning, then it is indeed no more than play and tomfoolery. But all the sacred books tell us that, in some mysterious way, time reflects eternity. Put this

another way: eternity, what the Qur’an calls al-akhirah—the Hereafter, the Beyond—is not just some distant point on the horizon; it is here and now, because God is always here and now. The English novelist Forster used as the motto for one of his best-known novels the two words “only connect”. That could be the motto of Islam, the religion of Tawhid, which means unity, unification, connection. Among those condemned to

purification in the Fire, the Qur'an mentions those who “prefer the life of this world to the akhirah”, that which is beyond this life. Don’t we all? But that is not the point. To prefer the akhirah is to relate our everyday existence, so empty when isolated from its source, to God and therefore to all that is contained in His eternal treasury. “Only connect.” Then, if we set up the scales again, we will find that this brief life has taken on real weight, and in truth it has been said that every single thing in this world and every incident in the days of our life is, potentially, a window opening onto eternity.

So it is that we are tested: Do you see, or are you blind? Do you understand or have you closed your mind and your senses to the truth? For Islam as for Christianity we are here (today and everyday) to demonstrate what we are made of and what we are

fit for. By the time the game is over and the toys are put away we will have exposed ourselves completely. It is in terms of this exposure that we will be judged. x The scripture which is confined between the covers of a book— the Qur’an—says to us: “Look! In the heavens and the earth are signs for believers, and in your creation and in all the beasts that He scatters upon the earth are signs for those whose faith is sure; 7O

Reflections and in the difference between night and day and in the provision that God sends down from the sky... And in the ordering of the winds are signs for people of sense. These are signs of God which We recite to you with truth. In what else—if not in God’s signs—will they then believe?” I talked of the way in which our brief human lifespan derives its value, its weight, from what lies beyond it, and yet is ever present. But we do not float in empty space. Our lives are passed in an environment which includes the stars above and the house next door. It is true that each of us exists in a kind of private capsule—the body of flesh, bone and skin—but, in a sense, we have also a more extensive body composed of the things that surround us. They have their effect upon us, as do we upon them, and this truth is inherent in the basic Islamic doctrine of Tawhid, the doctrine of unity and connectedness. When, I started this series of talks on “living by the Book”, I

began with the Qur’an, God’s direct message to mankind. Later on, I spoke of Muhammad as embodying the Qur'an, its living exemplar. Now, perhaps, we can extend the notion of “the Book” still further. The stars, the mountains and the rivers,

like the rain and the winds, are not merely what they appear to be. Their existence derives from the fact that they embody messages—a meaning—for “people who have sense”. It is no

coincidence that the Arabic word for a verse of the Qur’an is ayah, the same word that I have translated here as “sign”. Just as the written Book is composed of verses, so the natural world, the whole universe, is composed of signs. Two books, but with the same message. And it is a message clothed in beauty for, in an inspired saying, Muhammad told us that, “God is beautiful, and He loves beauty.” To perceive beauty is already to be wise. Thus, in “living by the Book”, we are not—as might be sup-

posed—going against the grain of nature; quite the contrary. Islam maintains that the whole of the natural world is as God means it to be and obeys Him in perfect obedience; man alone U3

REFLECTIONS

is free to depart from a pattern that is both divine and natural, going astray in disobedience. Animals find their way by instinct;

we need light, the light of revelation, to find our way. The poet Rumi said that a house without a window is hell. He added that religion exists to make a window. That window illuminates everything in the house; the people, the furnishings and even

the little mouse scuttling about his business. But there is a distinction to be made when we speak of our surroundings, for they are of two kinds: natural and man-made. The natural world is divine creation and therefore full of “signs”; but the man-made things are our responsibility, and it is for us to endow them with beauty and meaning. What is the principal

visual expression of the meaning of the Qur’an, so far as Muslims are concerned? Not painting, not sculpture, but architecture; the man-made environment. After all, this immediate environment is much closer to us than the moon and the stars and has the greater effect upon us, both spiritually and psychologically. Moreover, everything that we make, whether a public building or some small household object, reflects both what we are and the way we see the world and our place in it. If we think that life is pointless then we shall create, in art and architecture, objects which say this, loud and clear. But if there is a “window” for us, this too will be apparent in everything that is fashioned by our busy hands. But more needs to be said on this subject, and I hope to return to it, bearing in mind that “God is beautiful”, bearing in mind that “He loves beauty”.

XI The Qur'an makes a promise to those who follow its guidance: “Truly, the men and women who submit (to God), And men who believe and women who believe, And the devout men and the devout women, And the men and women who are true to their word,

Reflections And the men and women who are patient in adversity, And the men and women who humble themselves (before God), And the men and women who give in charity, And the self-denying men and the self-denying women, And the men and women who guard their chastity, And the men and women who remember God ceaselessly. For all such has God prepared forgiveness, and a vast reward.”

Now let me ask what may seem a strange question. Where do these admirable men and women live? Is their spiritual and moral life helped or hindered by their immediate surroundings? And, since they must remember God “ceaselessly” —which is not easy in a busy life—do they live among things which constantly remind them of Him or in a place devoid of radiance? I said in my last talk that architecture is, for Muslims, the supreme art, because Islam is the religion of unity in which everything must contribute to man’s journeying towards his goal, and the human

habitation plays a major role in determining the way we think, the way we feel and the way we act. It is, indeed, like an exten-

sion of our physical bodies. The Qur’an says of the wicked and the negligent: “They forget God, therefore He forgets them;” and, of all things possible, nothing can be worse than to be forgotten by God. Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam, said that he had been sent, not to make things difficult, but to make our religion easy

for us. If our daily lives are framed in an environment which makes it easier, more natural, for us to behave well, then there

is a fair chance that we will do so. The opposite applies equally. As I said earlier, people reveal themselves and their basic beliefs in everything that they make, and particularly in the nest which

they construct out of available materials; and what they have made or built reflects these beliefs back upon them. It is hard to remember God in a building or a city which, so to speak, crystallises forgetfulness of Him. This issue has come to the fore recently in Britain as the Je

REFLECTIONS

result of a television programme in which the Prince of Wales expressed his abhorrence of much modern architecture. The architects complain. Ordinary people applaud. But royalty is constrained regarding what can be said in public. Prince Charles could not employ the word “satanic”; this would have been thought excessive, even ridiculous. But, as a Muslim, I can use it, and I do use it. For Islam, Satan’s chief aim is to make people forget God; after that he can do as he pleases with them and, deprived of the light by which they might have discerned his presence, they are not even aware of him. An environment which is ugly, trivial and, in the most pejorative sense, “worldly” is indeed a satanic environment. And now the blight of modern architecture has invaded the Islamic world with devastating results. The “believing men and the believing women” are bereft of a most necessary support. A whole sector of the Book by which they lived has been closed. We are often told that such judgements are “subjective”. This ignores the fact that people who are spiritually healthy and therefore fully human possess a sense of the sacred which infallibly detects the profane and the satanic. Let us suppose that you are walking with a friend down a street in which the drains have been exposed. You hold your nose, but your friend finds nothing disagreeable in the air and tells you that your reaction is purely subjective. Might you not suggest to him that he should visit a doctor? The loss of the sense of the sacred, the incapacity to feel awe in the presence of the great mysteries, and the exteriorisation of spiritual and psychological sickness so apparent in modern

art are among the “signs of the times”. It is to this subject that I shall return. I shall not be able to escape speaking of the shad-

ows which are closing in upon us; but I should be untrue to my beliefs if I did not speak also of a light that is inextinguishable.

74

Reflections XU One of the shortest and most often quoted Siiras in the Qur’an swears: “By the Declining Day— Man is indeed in a state ofloss, Save for those who believe and do good, And exhort to Truth And exhort to Patience.”

Muslims in the West are asked: Why don’t you bring your religion up to date? How can a holy book of the seventh century be taken literally in the twentieth? So let me raise some questions. Why do today’s artists and architects think they have a duty to break with the traditions of the past? Why is “old-fashioned” a term of abuse, and why do so many people dismiss traditional religion as “out of date”? Is not it because they believe that they know better and that the ages of ignorance have been superseded

by an age of knowledge? If so, they are indeed “in a state of loss”; but faith in progress has become the dominant creed of the dominant culture, Western culture. Old is bad. Change is sacred. No wonder the notion of living by the Book is out of fashion.

The books—whether we speak of the Qur’an or the Gospels, the Torah or the Vedas—are very old. Yet the creed of progress is of recent and local origin. Every

other culture known to us has assumed the exact opposite, assumed that a process of decline takes place over the course of the ages. Loss follows upon loss. Clocks run down, things wear out, and mankind grows forgetful, hasty and unwise. So why should Muslims be expected to adopt an alien creed?

Muhammad is reported to have said: “The best of my people are my generation, then those who come after them, and then those who come after them.” Like Jesus before him, he knew that time

was approaching its shadowed end. If we were on an upward path towards greater light, we might have reason to jettison things 7S

REFLECTIONS

past; but, if the path leads downwards, then every fragment we can preserve is worth preserving. Islam teaches that mankind has

never been left without divine revelations bringing guidance but that this process ended with the revelation of the Qur’an, the

definitive scripture. If the Qur’an were to be changed, adapted to changing fashions and momentary convenience, then all would be lost. Hence the Muslim’s horror of what is called bid‘a, meaning “innovation”. Aboard ship in a rough sea you stand firm; you

don’t jump overboard. The religion of the Qur’an is the ship. Time is the sea. The poet Yeats wrote: “Things fall apart, the centre will not hold...” For us, as Muslims, the centre still holds so long as we hold fast to it. Truth does not change with the changing seasons, nor does the goal of human living. The centre is the mark of eternity stamped upon time by timeless revelation. It is the norm ~ by which temporal things are judged. When we face the speculations of the age—modern “knowledge”, in short—we assess them in relation to the Book. We take the Book in our right hand, this “knowledge” in our left, and we balance these two

against each other. It seems to us that the Qur’an is the heavier. So—is there only darkness and error as time draws to its close? No. There is no corner so dark that Mercy does not penetrate it. There is a law of compensation built into the very nature of things, and it is commonly said that “the wind is tempered to the shorn lamb.” The greater our need, the more abundant the response from above and, amidst the shadows of the “declining day”, we need only turn and ask for the divine Mercy to overflow. In every age and in every place the greater overwhelms the lesser, and, beneath such radiance, falsehood dissolves like mist under the sun. Let me end with a quotation from the Book by

which we live: “Say: O my Lord! Cause me to enter with a firm incoming and depart with a firm outgoing. And say: Truth has

come and falsehood has perished. Falsehood is indeed by nature perishable.” There is no more to be said.

76

REPLECTIONS Of One Accord I YX J

ALL

OF US tend to take words for granted—and no

wonder! If our human hearing were a little more acute than it is, we should be completely overwhelmed by a world of chatter. It is easy to forget that human language is a kind of miracle, though one that is much abused. This miracle has, I suggest, two dimensions: one you could call horizontal, the other vertical. The first dimension is that in which we communicate, or try to communicate, with each other. Anyone who has attempted to convey something vitally

important about himself to other people, and anyone who tries to communicate with the public through writing or broadcast-

ing, knows how imprecise words are and how easily misunderstood; in fact, half the quarrels that we see around us arise from the fact that the listener has misunderstood what the speaker wanted to say. : Even on this level, the level of everyday human communication, work is involved—and effort. Not only the effort to find the words that will make your meaning plain, but also the effort on the other side, the side of the listener, to grasp the meaning behind the words. If we really want to understand, then we do not take the words as they come, entirely at their face value; we

try to get behind them, learning from tone of voice and facial expression (if we are face to face); but also through a kind of ig

REFLECTIONS

intuition which interprets meaning in terms of what we know about the speaker. But I spoke of a second dimension, a vertical one—and this is the dimension in which God addresses us in the Scriptures and to which we respond in prayer. Now the problem of the divine words is that we have no tone of voice, no human contours, by which to fill them out. Yet we know that their literal meaning is no more than the tip of an iceberg; for the thing that distinguishes sacred Scripture from all purely human writing is that it describes—or conveys to us—what is ultimately indescribable within the limited range of our language.

The Word of God, these words contained in the Scriptures, are food for the Spirit, food for the heart; but only if we absorb them into ourselves. Hunger is not appeased by gazing at a plate of food (or by talking about it); and spiritual hunger is not appeased by reading the Scriptures in the way we would read

some profane, entirely human book. These words—the words of the Qur’an, or the words ofJesus in the Gospels—and all the other messages that have been flashed onto the screen of human existence, contain depth beyond depth. And just as we must digest our food to benefit from it, so we have to meditate on the Scriptures to profit from them. That, I think, is one possible definition of this much abused word, meditation; it is, or should be, a digestive process. So where does that leave us? Things that cannot be described in words, as a tree or a house is described, are nonetheless

described in the Scriptures, not so that we should stop at the surface meaning, like animals which see only what is to be seen, but like a bait to draw us out of this world of words into a world of meaning and to lead us from what is described to what cannot be described. Let me end, then, with a Muslim invocation to God Most High: “O Thou who art described, though no descrip-

tion reaches Thy true Being; Thou who are absent from us in 78

Reflections mystery yet never lost; thou Seer who are never seen; Thou who art sought and found; neither the heavens nor the earth nor the space between is void of Thee for the flicker of an eyelid; Thou art the Light of lights, the Lord of lords, encompassing all. Glory to Him Whom nothing resembles, the All-Hearer, the All-Seer.”

II In my last talk I spoke about communication between God and man as the “vertical dimension” of language. Revelation is one pole of this relationship. The other is worship, prayer. But why use words at all in our worship? Certainly, there is a wordless prayer in which love or need move directly towards their goal. But usually we are forced to use words if we want to formulate our thoughts; either our own, fumbling words, or else the words given us in revealed or traditional prayers—in the Muslim Fatiha or the Christian Lord’s Prayer—using these as a mould into which to pour our invocation. God does not need our words, for He knows our most secret thoughts, knows them as they are—not as we try to express them—but we need words to open, as it were, a channel between ourselves and Him. Whether we are Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, we are commanded to pray, but this command would mean very little if it did not correspond to something already present in our make-up, something very deep

and very real—possibly the most real element in our changing, time-bound nature. Islam teaches that man is created primarily for worship. This is his most important function, and everything else is secondary.

The Qur’an (and the recorded sayings of the Prophet) go even further. We are told that everything in creation is made for worship, each after its own fashion. The flower worships by turning towards the sun, source of its life and of its growth; and the

Prophet Muhammad told one of his companions that a prophet 79

REFLECTIONS

of earlier times was reproached by God for destroying an ant’s nest: “You have destroyed a community that praised Me!” In the words of a Muslim prayer: “Thou art He before whom the blackness of night, the light of day, the rays of the sun, the rustling of the trees, the voice of the waters make their prostration.” But in man alone this worship is, so to speak, both conscious and voluntary. This marks the whole difference between

the human and the non-human, making of us—as the Qur’an says—the representatives or viceregents of God on earth, His friends and, to use that cumbersome Latinate word which is the only one we have to describe the person with whom we converse, His interlocutors. But why should God want us to praise Him since, by definition, He has no need of us? When intelligent people want to avoid religion and its troublesome demands, they usually make themselves stupid and refuse to understand what is easily understood; and in this context they mock a God who is said to demand constant praise and adulation in the way that His crea-

tures need food. They refuse to see that the need is all on our side. Worship is our very human way of turning towards the light; because once we perceive—or merely suspect—that this light is there and that it is the supreme object of all desire, then

the need to praise fills our hearts and catches us by the throat; and, in fulfilling this need of ours, we find the comfort of sat-

isfaction, knowing that we are neither alone nor abandoned to the chill winds of the universe, and that what flows from us does

not disappear into the void. “As Thou hast comforted the people of this world through the things of their world,” says another Muslim prayer, “so

comfort me through Thy worship.”

Worship is a total act of the person. Here is another short prayer, attributed to one of the great interpreters of the Qur'an, ar-Razi: “The worship of the eyes is weeping, the worship of 80

Reflections the ears is listening, the worship of the tongue is praise, the worship of the hands is giving, the worship of the body is effort, the-worship of the heart is fear and hope, and the worship of the spirit is surrender—and satisfaction in God.”

Ill In the chapter of the Qur’an called “al-Hujurat”, God addresses His Messenger, Muhammad, in these words: “The Bedouin say, ‘We believe!’ Say unto them: You believe not, but say rather ‘We have surrendered.’ For the faith hath not yet entered into your hearts. Yet if you obey Allah and His Messenger, He will not withhold from you any part of the reward for your deeds.” Nowadays most people think of faith as a gift which may be given to one man and denied to another, but which we can do nothing about. If you happen to lack this gift, then you shrug your shoulders and go about your business. Certainly, both Islam and Christianity tell us that faith is a

gift from beyond ourselves, a grace from God; but it seems to me that this point is readily misunderstood. In nine cases out of ten this grace is a reward for human effort rather than something that comes upon us out of the blue, like a bird from nowhere which alights upon your shoulder when you are occupied with other things. To receive gifts from heaven, a man must prepare himself to receive them, not because God makes bargains with His creatures, but because such gifts can find no place in a house that has not been made ready for them. In what we now refer to as the “Ages of Faith” (so far as the European world is concerned) ordinary men and women were able, as it were, to “borrow” faith before possessing it— persuaded by their whole environment and by all the influences brought to bear upon them that belief in God was the natural human condition. Starting by accepting what they were told they must accept, they might come—each according to his or her spiritual capacity—to the fullness of belief. At the start 81

REFLECTIONS

there was a compulsion to accept the truth, and after that the community itself provided protection against the temptations to unbelief. If there is any compulsion today, it is on the other side of the scales; a compulsion to accept a picture of the world which really leaves no room for God or for the supernatural as such; and the common human tendency to take the easy way, to drift and, as it were, to live at the lowest level of ourselves is even reinforced by the environment, as it is by our whole education. If “surrender” is still, for most people, the first step to faith, then to whom or to what are we to surrender? I suggest to you that we are required to surrender on the one hand to the traditional wisdom which has been given to humanity through the ages and, on the other, to a knowledge buried deep within ourselves, awaiting rediscovery if only we will cast aside the debris of false notions which conceals it. The almost total unanimity of human beings—at least, the wisest among them—up to the beginning of modern times cannot be denied, even though this single-mindedness has expressed itself in very different ways in the different religions. This merits our attention and, ultimately, our acceptance. At the same time, the majority of people even in this secularised age have, I believe, moments when they know that this life is not all there is and that the world itself is not merely what it appears to be to our human senses. They lose sight of such moments because they make no effort to hold onto them or because no one has told them that such moments are intimations of an enduring truth. All this requires an act of will and an act of decision, the decision not to let go of what we have found but to persevere in discovering its meaning. Help comes then, and the awaited gift; and, if we are fortunate, illumination

of what was previously obscure. It is for this illumination that we must pray; and here is a Muslim prayer for light: “O God, appoint for me light in my heart, and light before me and light

behind me, light on my right hand and light on my left, light 82

Reflections above me and light below mie, light in my sight and light in my

perception, light in my countenance and light in my flesh, light in my blood and light in my bones; increase for me light, and give me light!”

IV Throughout most of the present century there has been an almost universal reaction against something which belongs to the last century and is often called Victorian “complacency”. One of the commonest examples given of that complacency is a line from a poem by Robert Browning: “God’s in His heaven, all’s right with the world.” To many people, either themselves in pain or seeing the suffering around them and more aware, probably, than any previous generation of the extent of that suffering, this line represents a monstrous mis-statement. All is not right with the world, and only a fool would say that it is. And yet there is a problem here; for Browning prefaced that statement with the words, “God’s in His heaven.” Now it is surely quite impossible for the believer, whatever his religion, to deny that, if there is a God—a God who holds us in the palm of His hand and who is merciful—then ultimately everything must be right, all must be well.

Religion assures us—all the authentic religions say this, whether openly or by implication—that what lies beyond our brief life or, to put it another way, what lies outside the little world we know, is more real than anything that we experience here. For us who are imprisoned in our senses, this world seems to have a massive, overwhelming reality, and yet—if we are believers—we know that the God who made it can dissolve it as a dream dissolves when we awaken. “You will see the mountains,” says the Qur’an, “which seem to you so solid pass away

as clouds pass away—the art of Allah, who perfects all things.” And again, the Qur’an says: “On the Day when He shall gather

83

REFLECTIONS

them to himself, it will seem to them as if they had tarried on earth no longer than a single hour...” Would any of us, waking to a perfect day after a bad dream, still complain about our nightmare? But, then would that thought be any comfort to the dreamer, caught up in horror? If there is something more real than this world which we now experience, then it cannot be entirely hidden, even here. It

must underlie everything around us; and—no less important— it must underlie what we are in ourselves. And, to take this a step further, if we are believers—whether Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus—we must believe that this hidden reality is joyful, though we live in a kind of fog which blots it out from our vision.

Even the worst of our troubles here has a term set to it and will end. The reality beyond the fog has no term set to it and no end. History bears witness to the fact that the saints and sages and holy men of all times have lived and died in this knowledge. The word used in Islam for martyrs who have suffered and died in defence of faith, defence of the Real, defence ofjoy, is a word which means “witnesses” ;and the very fact that the martyr rises above all thoughts of self-preservation and dies in the name of the unseen, makes him—indeed—a witness to a greater and more enduring Reality. For the rest of us who are neither saints nor martyrs, joy may be glimpsed only very occasionally; for the rest of the time we live in our fog. But, if we have had such glimpses, we

know that the blue sky is still there—and will be there, when the fog lifts. And here is another Muslim invocation “O Lord of the clear heavens and the light and the darkness in them, O Lord of the outspread lands and the creatures in them, O Lord of the sweep-

ing winds and of the airy clouds balanced between heaven and earth, O Lord of the stars, by Thee sent on their business and flashing in the air of heaven

Wee

84

Reflections

ba

Vi

I spoke earlier in this series of the work, the effort, required to achieve faith and to establish it as an enduring element in our make-up. We ourselves are the raw material of this labour, and we possess by nature one thing which distinguishes us from the rest of creation, the power of abstract thought. We are, by definition, thinking beings, and language itself bears wit-

ness to this fact. “This is the very truth,” says the Qur’an, in relation to the message it brings, “as true as the fact that you are endowed with speech.” And when, in another chapter, the

Qur'an says, “The All-Merciful taught the Qur’an, created man,

endowed him with speech,” the word used for “speech” also means “articulate thought”. Faith itself has more to do with knowledge than with feelings, for, after all, feelings come and go, quite outside our control, but knowledge endures. I think it must have been easy enough in earlier ages in the Christian world, and is still easy in those parts of the Muslim world which remain traditional, to hold to a simple faith without much intellectual content. I do not believe this is any longer possible in the modern world, for the spirit of our times asks questions—questions for the most part hostile to faith— which demand answers, and those answers can only come from informed and thoughtful faith, from study and meditation. This, surely, is as it should be, for since we are created with the faculty of thought, then to leave this faculty unused is indeed a criminal waste. Whatever our religion, we can no longer be sure of holding onto it out of habit or by an act of will. We have to be, if not theologians, then at the very least people who study their religion and who think about it. So I come back again to the necessity for work, for effort. But it is a part of faith to believe that God helps those who help themselves; and, as I said in an earlier talk, faith starts with work but is found as a gift. Just so, the labour of thinking about our religion and

85

REFLECTIONS

learning what the wise men of the past have thought about it,

is in itself only a preparatory step. By opening our minds and broadening our vision, we prepare ourselves for a gift of knowledge or a gift of understanding far beyond anything we could achieve by ourselves. This, I believe, is the basic meaning of meditation—rather a grand word for a very simple and natural process. By seeking wisdom and being prepared to devote time and effort to the search, we prepare ourselves to receive it as a gift. But there are

two aspects to this work of preparation. One, certainly relates to study and thought; the other is stillness, a stillness achieved only by training ourselves to shut out—if only for short periods—

both the noise of the world and the uproar within ourselves, the uproar of memories and hopes, of desires and fears and dreams. This stillness is like the surface of a pool, unruffled by any wind, a mirror to the sky. “For the presence-chamber of true vision”, says a Muslim author, “is the presence-chamber of speechless wonder and dumbness, where voices are hushed in awe of the Most-Merciful.” But the teaching that this inward silence is the key to understanding is not confined to any one religion; so let me conclude by quoting that ancient sage, Plotinus, whose influence upon Islam was no less than his influence upon Christianity: “Calmed be the body for it in that hour, and the tumult of the flesh; aye, all that is about it calm; calm be the earth, the sea, the air—and let heaven itself be still.”

86

REFEECTIONS Contemplations

I

HEN I WAS VERY YOUNG there was a British philosopher who, unlike—I suppose—any other philosopher of our time, became a household name. This was Professor Joad, who was heard every week on the BBC Brains Trust programme. Whatever the question he was asked, he always began his answer with what has become a catch phrase, one for which he has often been mocked since then: “It depends what you mean by.. .(suchand-such a word).” But so it does; and I wish everyone would

start off with that. How often have you heard two people arguing bitterly because they mean quite different things by the key word in the argument? So let’s start with the dictionary: To contemplate—to gaze fixedly at something, to look intently at something, to view something mentally. Wherever these talks may lead us, it is important not to lose hold of the literal meaning of the word and to remember that it relates to the action—if you can call this action—of looking. Why do I say “if you can call this an action”? Because sometimes it might be better described as a nonaction, as when a mirror faithfully reflects what is in front of it. Please hold onto that image, the image of the mirror, because

we will probably return to it later in these talks. What we are concerned with now is “contemplation” in a special sense, that is to say, in the context of religion and, quite

87

REFLECTIONS

particularly, of mysticism. I speak as a Muslim; but I would not be surprised if most of what I say could be accepted with-

out difficulty by a Christian, perhaps by a Hindu, possibly by a Buddhist. Think of a great circle, as vast as you can make it. The religions as such are out on the periphery, out where the action is and where the dogmas are set up like posts to which you can tether your soul. But every circle has a centre, and every point on the circumference is joined to the centre by a radius. When we talk about mystics and contemplatives we are talking about

people who are trying to follow that radius towards the centre; and the further you go on the path the more closely the radii converge. Until—at the centre—they meet. However, in this first talk 1am going to stick to definitions;

you may think this a dull topic, but just consider for a moment how impossible it is to talk about anything unless we first establish what we mean by it. So to help define contemplation, | am going to contrast it with meditation. The two are often confused.

They are related, but they are quite different. Meditation is definitely an action. When you meditate you may be sitting quietly with your eyes closed, but you are working at something, your mind is busy—as busy as it can possibly be. The late Lord Thompson, when he was asked by a young man, “How can I become a millionaire like you?”, answered, “Think till it hurts!” That is what meditation is—thinking till it hurts the same way a muscle hurts when you have exercised it

to its full capacity. The Muslim, when he meditates, chooses a basic principle of

the religion or a verse from our holy book, the Qur'an, or perhaps one of the Names by which the Qur’an characterises God,

and he uses all his mental powers to deepen his understanding of this idea, this verse or this Name. He turns it this way and that. He explores it. He thinks about its implications; and he uses it as a key to unlock the secrets of his faith. He tries to take it into 88

Reflections himself—you could almost say he tries to eat it and digest it, so that his meditation becomes a way of working on his own nature and moulding himself in the likeness of the sacred principle or the verse or the divine Name he is considering. But when he contemplates he is no longer at work. He is still and quiet. But I will turn to this in my next talk.

I In my last talk I made a distinction between meditation and contemplation, and I said that contemplation is quiet and still rather than active. But most of us cannot suddenly stop what we are doing and—still out of breath—-sit down to contemplate just like that. One starts, generally, by meditating, that is to say by thinking hard about something that is central to one’s religion. Only when we have managed to put the outside world aside and to bring our faculties together in concentrated attention—only then can we let our thought processes die down, like an engine that has been switched off; it still gives a few coughs, the wheels still turn for a little while, but after that silence falls. And then you look. You gaze. You contemplate—with the

mind’s eye or the inner eye or (to use a very significant term) with the Eye of the Heart. But what are you looking at? That is a difficult question to answer. Some might say that you are looking at your Creator, looking at the source of your being—looking at God. Yes. But, of course, we cannot look at God, not directly anyway. We cannot even look directly into

the sun with our physical eyes. We, His creatures, cannot look at God. But we can look at something which represents Him. In other words, we can look at a symbol of the Divine. And this is

another reason why a period of meditation usually precedes contemplation. The object of our previous meditation—the concept or the divine Name or whatever it may be—now becomes the object of our concentrated vision. Only we are no longer think-

ing about it; we are just looking at it, quietly and peacefully.

89

REFLECTIONS

Concentration is the key word here. I remember an occasion some years ago when I had to entertain a wealthy and very successful businessman in the bar of the Hilton in Port of Spain— not really the place for a Muslim to be entertaining, but that was my job. This man had devoted all his energies for forty years or more to achieving success; now he was growing old, he saw death before him. After he had had a few drinks I caught him staring fixedly at an empty bottle on the bar. “You know,” he said, “I’ve come to realize lately that what matters most is to believe in something and concentrate all your attention on it— even if it’s only that empty bottle over there!” It is odd how this small incident has stuck in my mind. But he was quite right; except that empty bottles just will not do. You have to believe in something that—for you—trepresents the Divine, the Source, the Centre; and you have to concentrate on it as though your life depended upon seeing it straight, seeing it clear. And then—if we stick to the image of the bottle—you drink from it, and it becomes an inexhaustible fountain. People who have never set foot on this way always ask one question after another. They seek a primer on contemplation in easy stages—*Teach Yourself Contemplation in Three Months”. So why can’t they have this? I suppose because contemplation is not really a matter of doing something or of practicing a technique. Certainly, everything that happens in the world involves action in one sense or another; but in this case it is the object that is active; ultimately it is God who is active. In other words, the contemplative state involves an act of grace. Our job is to open ourselves to this grace. We make ourselves ready, and then we have done our part. The rest is in other hands.

I]

In an earlier talk I compared contemplation to the action—or non-action—of a mirror which faithfully reflects what is placed before it and I suggested that this comparison would come in gO

Reflections useful later on. So let me rettirn to it now. Muslim mystics compare the contemplative’s technique to the polishing of a mirror, in fact, they say that this is really all he can do for himself. Once the mirror is well polished it reflects the truth. But that is no easy matter. So far as most of us are concerned, the mirror is very dirty indeed; in fact it is so smudged and begrimed that it reflects nothing at all. The contemplative way is beset with obstacles, and dealing with these obstacles is a lifetime’s task. But let us get one thing clear. God does not place them in our way; quite the contrary. The obstacles are in ourselves. The first set of obstacles is made up of what are commonly called distractions, and dealing with these is a matter of technique and practice. Even in the most ordinary, secular tasks people can learn how to concentrate. Practice makes perfect or, if not perfect, at least adequate to the job in hand, and all that need be said here is that distractions play a little game with us; they try to trap us into a wrestling match. To become involved in fighting against distractions is just another way of being

distracted. The technique, as anyone who has tried this will tell you, is to deal gently with these nuisances and—to use a phrase that fits rather aptly here—not to lose your cool. You have to let idle thoughts play around for a few moments and then, very quietly, bring your attention back to the object of your contemplation. After a little while distractions begin to dissolve like scraps of cloud when the sky is clearing on a summer’s day. But the real obstacles are more formidable and much more difficult to overcome, for they are deeply rooted in ourselves. These are our own faults of character—faults that are like stains on the mirror or cracks in the glass. We may not even be aware of them until we try to achieve a state of recollectedness—a contemplative state—but as soon as we make that attempt they loom up before us, disturbing, obstructive and frustrating.

QI

REFLECTIONS

People who start reading about Sufism, Islamic mysticism, are often disappointed by what they find in the works of the great Sufi writers. They expect marvellous accounts of spiritual experiences, visions and so on. Sometimes they do find that. But far more often these writers are concerned with the virtues, the training of character and obedience to the divine commandments. They write about the duties of the human condition: fear of the Lord, trust in God, detachment from the passions and, above all, spiritual poverty (which, in Arabic, is called fagr); in fact the follower of a contemplative way is usually called a fagir, a “poor man”, rather than a Sufi. What do the virtues have to do with mystical experience? Everything—well, nearly everything. Because what comes to us—or may come to us is a gift from God which is adjusted

to our readiness or receptivity. Our job is to make ourselves ready, make ourselves receptive. And the experience of anyone who has entered on this way is that everything possible is there, everything is available, except that he is unfit to receive it. What is offered is clear and simple; but he finds, to his great dismay, that he is himself twisted, a mass of contradictions, a tangled web which has to be sorted out before he can hope to get through to the light. And then he sees the neces-

sity for doing something about himself, not for moral reasons—not to become a “better person”, so as to be admired and respected—but because he has discovered that he is his

own worst enemy; and when you meet the enemy who stands in the way of all your hopes and ambitions what can you do but fight him? So is it surprising that the Arabic word jihad, is usually translated as “holy war”, but—according to a saying of the

Prophet Muhammad—it

is primarily the war against our-

selves; in other words, the polishing of the mirror?

92

Reflections ’

IV

So far I have been talking about the meaning of contemplation and the way people make themselves ready for it. But the time has come for a digression, because there is a question which has to be got out of the way before we proceed. What is the commonest remark you hear made about the contemplative orders—monks and nuns, for example, in the Catholic Church? The remark, surely, that their lives are “use-

less to society”. We hear the same kind of comment in Islam concerning those who keep themselves quiet, who meditate—

as the Qur’an commands us to do—and who look about them and look towards their Lord with peaceful eyes. We are sometimes told that they ought to be out and about, shouting, waving their fists, reforming the world of Islam and, in short, making a

nuisance of themselves. As it happens, the Muslims who say this sort of thing know very little about their own history. It is the contemplatives who

have been the really effective people in the long and chequered story of Islam. It is they who were foremost in defying tyrants and resisting foreign invaders; and it is they who converted whole peoples—the Turks, the Malays—to the religion. And now, in the 1980s, it is men of this calibre among the forty or so million Muslims in the Soviet territories who lead resistance

against the pressures of the atheist regime. That, however, is a relatively minor aspect of thé matter, for nothing that is achieved in this world lasts for very long and we must look deeper to see the real effectiveness of the contemplatives whether in Islam or in Christianity. At this point, believer and unbeliever part company and are bound to see things from opposite and irreconcilable points of view. The latter—the unbeliever—does not admit that there are any other dimensions than those which seem to enclose us in our physical experience: He must say that the contemplative life is useless, and he would be inconsistent if he said anything else. os

REFLECTIONS

The believer does not have to argue with him. There is no point in trying to argue across such a gulf; for the believer is, by definition, someone who denies that this world as we experience it is the only reality. The believer maintains, as an article of faith, that there are realities beyond what we see and touch here; and, if he is also a contemplative, it may be that he has glimpsed—in his personal experience—something of these greater realities or at least sensed their presence, permeating the seen world. What we are speaking of here—the “unseen”, as it is called

in the Qur’an—may seem far off, quite out of range, in terms of our ordinary daily experience; but the Muslim believes that it is in fact very close to us. He believes that the world swarms with unseen spirits; he believes that the angels hear every word we speak and cluster around us when we pray, and he

believes—as the Qur’an tells him—that God is “closer to man than his jugular vein.” So what has this to do with the effectiveness of the contemplative? Everything! For it is these unseen dimensions which govern our lives and determine all that happens under the sun. It is there, not here, that true effectiveness resides. And it is in those dimensions that the man or woman who rises above himself—or above herself—in prayer or contemplation is operating. If there were no contemplatives and no one who knelt and bowed down in prayer, this world would be like a sealed compartment in which seemingly random forces rage. It would be—in the phrase which C. S. Lewis used as the title for one of his books—“the Silent Planet”. But it is not like that at all, for everywhere, in every corner of the earth, there are people who

pray and there are people who contemplate what may seem to be far beyond them but is really quite close; and each of them is, as it were, a point of contact between heaven and earth, a

mirror reflecting the light outwards into what would otherwise be a world of darkness.

94

Reflections ‘

Vv

In my last talk I said that the contemplative, sitting quietly ina

quiet place and looking towards all that lies beyond our common world of experience is, in a very real sense, active on those other levels of reality which determine everything that happens here. This leads us to a question that has been debated, in the West as in the East, for centuries if not for millennia: the question of the relationship between contemplation and action. It seems to me that what we suffer from most painfully in the contemporary world is thoughtless action; but let me go a step further and suggest that action which is not—at least to some extent—rooted in contemplation tends to do more harm than good. For what the out-and-out activists are doing is simply reacting to the events that come upon them or to the impact of their own emotions; and that is what animals do. You can see why this is characteristic of the age in which we live. Once people have lost any sure faith in other dimensions of being, what can they do but react blindly to circumstances? What are these circumstances? If this world were perfect

(and if people were all that they might be) it would not be the world any longer. It would be Heaven. But, when faith ebbs away, the world’s imperfections become intolerable. If this is all we have and all we can hope for—if death is the end, full stop!—then why should we put up with anything here that is less than perfect? So people set about trying to change the world in the short time allowed them; and, when their attempts to change it make matters even worse than before, they try harder still to force the world—and the men and women around them—into their pattern of perfection; and again they are frustrated, until they become very angry indeed. From then on the whole process is | destructive.

Now contemplation serves two clear purposes in relation to action. In the first place it distances us from the battlefield SS)

REFLECTIONS

and gives us a sense of proportion. Man can hardly be called “man” unless he is able, to some small extent, to rise above circumstances and even to rise above himself; and that means seeing his own actions with a certain detachment. What he sees

then is likely to make him less inclined to behave like a bull in a china shop. It is likely also to make him more self-critical, and possibly less critical of the world’s imperfections and of other people’s shortcomings. There is another word for this state of mind: objectivity. Concentration on an object beyond ourselves leads to objectivity about ourselves and about the circumstances which sur-

round us and press in upon us. Secondly, the contemplative lays himself open to wisdom and so to the possibility of acting wisely. From the Muslim point of view, wisdom does not belong to any man or any woman. God alone is wise, says the Muslim. But if men and women can open themselves in prayer—in contemplation—to what God has to give and gives most willingly, then wisdom is infused into them according to their capacity to receive it. This leads to a fundamental principle, at least so far as Islam

is concerned. The only truly effective action in this world is God’s action. It follows that man is only truly effective if he makes himself the instrument of God’s action; and that means putting himself—his own feelings, his own angers, his own

wishes—aside and submitting to what comes from beyond himself.

The Qur'an defines man as the “viceroy of God on earth”, and yet the proudest title of the Prophet Muhammad was “abd, “slave” —the slave of God, the willing instrument of the divine

Will. But the two things go together. The “viceroy” has great power for good or ill, but he is not the King, indeed he only

deserves the title of “viceroy” if he executes the King’s commands to the best of his ability. This he cannot do unless he listens. So contemplation, which I spoke of earlier in terms of 96

Reflections looking, also means listening; and both are aspects of that quiet receptivity which is the secret of contemplation.

VI I said something in my last talk about “objectivity”, achieved through single-minded concentration on an object beyond ourselves. This raises a very important question; because-—remem-

ber—when

we

talk about contemplation

we are, in effect,

talking about what is commonly called “mysticism”. Not a very helpful word. It suggests mystification, although what the contemplative is really seeking is clarity, lucidity. My dictionary defines the mystic as “one who seeks by contemplation and self-surrender to obtain union with the Deity or who believes in spiritual apprehension of truths beyond the understanding.” It is the second part of the definition that concerns us here; and though I do not like quarrelling with the Oxford Dictionary, I must. Surely “apprehension” and “understanding” mean almost the same thing? It is not understanding that is the problem. The problem is expressing these things in a way that can be understood. But these truths are not easy to communicate or to prove by rational argument.

You look out of awindow and you can see a tree. You know you have seen it—-no mystery there. You apprehend—or understand—that this is a tree, with branches, leaves and a trunk. But how do you explain all this to someone who has never seen a tree—or someone blind from birth? And, if he insists on your proving that trees exist and that this was not just a hallucination,

how do you do it? Most people quite approve of mysticism, at least in theory.

Friends and acquaintances of mine who are hostile to all “organised” religion—I do not think they mind disorganised religion—

have nothing to say against mysticism. I suppose they regard it as harmless; a kind of poetic day-dreaming. And down-to-earth

Christians, in common with down-to-earth Muslims, take up a 97

REFLECTIONS

very similar attitude. The one thing they will not admit is that the mystic—the contemplative—may have seen, with his inward eye, what is really, objectively there. This, surely, is the crux of the matter? If the mystic’s vision is purely subjective, then we might just as well experiment with hallucinatory drugs—or snooze by the fire, immersed in pleasant dreams.

Every Muslim acknowledges that the Prophet Muhammad saw, or apprehended, objective truths, and every Christian acknowledges the same with regard to Jesus; at least I hope they do! But the idea that men and women who follow in the footsteps of Muhammad or of Jesus may have direct apprehension of supernatural truths is, for many, a sticking-point. How could you ever prove it, anyway? Well, the proof of any proposition depends upon the kind of evidence which a particular human mind—conditioned in a particular way—finds convincing. The kind of proofs which people find acceptable (or unacceptable) varies from one age to another and from one culture to another. The simple answer, often given to those who demand proof of the objective validity of contemplative vision, is: “Do as I have done, come with me, stand where I stand, and then you will know.” Yes. True enough. But there is a proof which I, personally,

find compelling and which, many years ago, converted me from agnosticism to a belief in the truth of religion. This is the unanimity of witness. The unanimity of the mystics throughout the ages, even though they have spoken, as it were, in different tongues, different imagery.

Suppose that from the beginning of time, or at least from the moment when the record of what human beings have thought and said begins, people of different ages and different persuasions had

described in detail a marvellous tree they had seen in some remote and inaccessible part of the world, could their witness be lightly dismissed? For my part, I think not.

98

Reflections ’ Vil Earlier I talked about mysticism, of which contemplation is the essence, and I suggested to you that what the mystic perceives is objectively real. The proof of this which I find convincing is, as I said, the unanimity of the mystics right across the religious spectrum, though I must add that this unanimity is not always obvious on the surface. I learned to see it through three very extraordinary writers or interpreters: the Frenchman, René Guénon; the Anglo-Indian exponent of traditional symbolism, Ananda Coomaraswamy ; and, more recently, Frithjof Schuon. But if, for the moment, you will accept my point of view,

then I think you may agree that this implies a “psychology”, an analysis of the human make-up, which has nothing in common with the contemporary, “scientific” view of man. Most people today see the human being as an isolated unit, connected with what is outside or beyond his little shell only by the physical senses. If you cut the nerves which convey senseimpressions to the brain, then you would have a consciousness completely cut of from reality. This is not the way religion—any religion—-sees the matter, nor is it the way the ancients saw it. From the religious point of view, there is—deep within every man and every woman—a window which opens onto the universal, or a mirror which reflects all that is beyond this little ego, this spark of consciousness; and, indeed, this may be something more than a window or a mirror. It may be a door, through which one can walk. Beneath the conscious self, so the psychologists tell us, is the unconscious or subconscious; if they are Jungians, they will add that, deeper still, there is a “collective unconscious”, no longer individual, no longer isolated. So far so good; but at this point they

stop. The preconceptions of modern science make it impossible for them to go further, deeper. If they did so, they might come out into the open.

Og

REFLECTIONS

Everyday religion envisages a pyramid, its base the world, its apex God. The mystics—and traditional wisdom as such— accept this image but add to it a mirror-image, an inverted pyramid in which the second apex points inwards to the heart. What does this mean in practice? It means that God is to be found both in the heights and in the depths, above and beneath, transcendent and immanent; and, with Him, the “Kingdom of Heaven”, with Him the angelic spheres, with Him everything

that is beyond us. Go high enough or go deep enough; journey’s end is the same. So, in this image of man, which I believe to have been expressed one way or another in every human sector, we have a being who is, so to speak, “layered”. Beneath daylight consciousness of the world around us lie layer upon layer of “unconscious” images and impulses, becoming more universal—less exclusively individual—the deeper you go; but beneath these there is again daylight, but this is a celestial daylight—shall we call it the “Kingdom of Heaven”? In many different traditions this window or this mirror

(reflecting the heavens)—or this door leading out into the open— is referred to as the “heart”, that same heart which, according

to the Qur’an, is covered with rust in the sinner or in the man who forgets God. But why all these different images? To confuse you? No. To express things that are difficult to express by any other means; but, because there is a danger that people will

seize on one particular image and take it too literally, it is necessary to flash onto the mind’s screen a whole series of images— window, mirror, door, heart—to put across a single concept, a

single truth; it is in this way that mysteries are clarified and the “indescribable” is described. VUl

I spoke of the images by which those endowed with vision try to convey the truths they perceive, and I referred to the heart as 100

Reflections the organ of vision or contemplation. Let me add just one more image, that of an eye; in this case, the “Eye of the Heart”. The Hindus and the Buddhists speak of it. In the Christian tradition St Augustine had much to say about the Oculus Cordis, the Eye of the Heart already mentioned by St Paul in his Epistle to the Ephesians, whereby the human intellect is illuminated by divine wisdom. Among the Sioux Indians of North America a spiritual teacher is on record as saying: “It is with the Eye of my Heart that I see all things;” and Islam, of course, considers the heart to be the organ of knowledge and understanding. I have a friend, a fellow Muslim, who has—or thinks he has—a great dislike for mysticism and what he considers as “fancy ideas”. He was talking in this vein once when, to change the subject, I mentioned that I had to give a lecture on Islam the following day. “In that case,” he said, “you must be sure to tell them that everything begins and ends with the heart. That’s the

organ of true knowledge. And tell them that the heart, although it’s in man, belongs to God. It comes from God and it returns to Him.” I am not often speechless, but on this occasion I was. Without thinking what he was saying, my friend had expressed a notion so universal that perhaps we do not even need to speak

of “mysticism” in this context. Obviously, we are not talking about the physical heart, that useful pump which nowadays is shifted around by transplant surgeons; the physical heart is the centre of the body, veins and arteries fanning out fromit to keep the structure alive, and so

mankind seems always to have taken this as an image of the spiritual centre which is the organ of contemplation and by which we are kept spiritually alive. If we stick with this imagery, it can be said that the heart has

two doors. My friend said that it is “in us” but that it “belongs to God”, and Muslim mystics call it the barzakh, which means isthmus; on one side is the sea of this world, on the other the ocean of the beyond, the celestial ocean. An isthmus divides two IOI

REFLECTIONS

bodies of water, but it is also the link between them; on this side you can step into this sea, but cross the little strip of land and you may plunge into the great ocean. This isthmus belongs to both, just as the heart is ours and yet not ours. But the entrance to it is narrow, and perhaps this is the “needle’s eye” of which the Prophet Muhammad spoke and of which Jesus spoke in the Gospels; the narrow gate through which the rich, burdened with the ego’s wealth, have difficulty in passing. But gates are made for passing through, and now we have come some way from the ideas I first put to you concerning contemplation as non-action, simply a matter of looking at something beyond ourselves. For ultimately it is in the nature of things that we should no longer be content merely to gaze at the perceived splendour, but that we should want to participate, to join ourselves to it, to pass through the door. From seeing we must come to being and now the effort of which I spoke earlier in these talks becomes the supreme effort to break through the barrier of selfhood and cross the isthmus. In closing my contributions to this series | cannot do better than quote from a man who has written more eloquently of such matters than anyone else of whom I know, Frithjof Schuon. There is, he says, no common measure between the means which we put into operation and the result. “What separates man from divine Reality is the slightest of barriers: God is infinitely close to man, but man is infinitely far from God. This barrier, for man, is a mountain; he stands in front of a mountain which he must remove with his own hands. He digs away the earth, but in vain; the mountain remains; man, however, goes on digging, in the name of God. And the mountain vanishes. It was never there.”

[O02

REFLECTIONS Faith and Action

I | a YEAR, at the beginning of the Holy month of Ramadan, Muslims the world over will begin their fast,

one hopes—abstaining also from anger and malice by night as well as by day. This fasting is a demonstration of faith and I want, in the first talk, to reflect briefly on the nature of faith and on why it should need to be demonstrated. I have an old friend, an agnostic, who has told me on more than one occasion how lucky I am to be a believer and how nice—how comforting—this must be. I do not think it has ever occurred to him that he too might acquire faith if he were prepared to spend some blood and sweat in the job of acquiring it. He seems to think that faith is something given to a few people, gift-wrapped, without any effort on their part. It is true, of course, that some people are given faithin this way; it comes to them like a flash of lightning and overwhelms them; true also that many people, as it were, “inherit” faith

from their parents or pick it up from the society in which they have grown up, but in this case it may be doubted whether their faith is secure unless they themselves make an effort to root it in their hearts and then tend the plant. A few years ago there was an article in one of the Sunday papers which illustrates what I mean. A Catholic priest in a

103

REFLECTIONS

remote Irish parish had been asked what his people believed happened to them after death. He answered that—of course!— they believed all that the Church teaches about the immortality of the soul, the resurrection of the body, reward and punishment. He added, after a moment’s thought, that they also believed that when a man was dead he was dead “like an animal”—“and that’s that!” This should not really surprise anyone. You need only consider the behaviour of many religious believers—whether Muslim or Christian—now as in the past to see that they could not possibly behave as they do if their whole personalities were impregnated with faith. They are not necessarily hypocrites. With a part of themselves—a very important part of themselves—they do sincerely believe; but a part is not the whole, and that is where the hard work comes in. The mind may be convinced of the truth and in our best moments—the moments when we feel we are most completely “ourselves”—we may be passionately sure of our faith; but there are all sorts of bits and pieces within us which still have to be converted. In other words, the believer has to be a missionary, not in foreign parts but within his own divided personality. We are always saying

“T...this” and “T...that”, but most of us might do better to say “My name is legion!” The Qur’an, the sacred scripture of Islam, has a lot to say about the kafirtin—the “unbelievers” or “deniers of the Truth”—and that has its obvious outward, historical signifi-

cance; but many Muslims apply these particular passages of the Book inwardly as well. The Messenger of God—Muhammad— said that the “lesser holy war” was against the unbelievers who were attacking Islam, but that the greater one was to be fought

within ourselves against that part of the human soul which, according to the Qur’an, “incites to evil”’—in other words

against all those elements in our personalities which do not for one moment accept what the mind and the heart have accepted 104

Reflections

as the truth. That is why there is always work to be done and why faith needs proving. II Yesterday I said that real faith, wholehearted faith, is achieved only through hard work or even by inward “holy war” to per-

suade the rebel elements in our personality to accept the truth which the heart and the mind have already accepted. Muslims— and I am one—speak of this in terms of “reminding”. You see, we believe that belief in God is natural to the human creature, implanted in him. We do not need to be told an astonishing new truth—*“There really is a God!” —but only to be reminded of something that we already know in our hearts. The Qur’an describes itself as “a reminder to mankind”, and Muhammad, the Messenger of God, was sent to “remind” people. For Islam “forgetfulness” is the root of all sin; “forgetfulness” together with what is called ghaflah in Arabic, meaning a lazy indifference

to the truth. The main rites and practices of Islam, including the Fast of Ramadan, exist for the purpose of reminding us of what we find it so easy to forget. This is particularly clear in the case of the five daily prayer sessions which are obligatory for the Muslim. The Muslim who neglects his prayers may indeed believe in God and in all that follows from that belief, but nine-tenths of the time—or ninety-nine hundredths of the time—he forgets what it is that he believes. Those who do observe the prayers, on the other hand, however much they may be occupied with worldly business, are constantly being brought back to “remembrance”

of God and “reminded” of the only things that really matter. “If you were always as you are in my presence and in your times of ‘remembrance’,” Muhammad told his companions, “the angels would come and take you by the hand.. .” According to Islamic tradition, God at first commanded Muhammad to insti-

tute fifty daily prayers, and one can see why: fifty might be just 105

REFLECTIONS

enough to keep us in that constant state of “remembrance”, aware in every moment of our lives of who we are and why we exist. The number of daily prayers was reduced to five as a concession to human weakness and we have to manage as best we can on that modest stock of “reminders”, but once every year—in the month of Ramadan—we are obliged to maintain the “remembrance of God” more consistently. “Why am I hungry?” Because

God is God and I am his servant. “Why am I thirsty?” For the same reason! Suppose a man were to pinch himself every time he forgot God—forgot that he is here, in this world, as God’s “representative” in the midst of creation—he would soon be black and blue. Perhaps the Fast is an easier discipline. But there are, in addition to the outward practices of Islam incumbent upon every believer, other “reminders”, and these are the techniques of Sufism, the mystical dimension of the religion, techniques of invocation and meditation which are designed to engage the whole personality in awareness of God and finally to put an end to “forgetfulness”. The Sufi has two objectives: the first is to unify his personality so that all the stray elements—the bits and pieces—are integrated into one single pattern which reflects the “singleness” of God; the

second is to eliminate from his life not only the hours of forgetfulness but even the minutes, even the seconds, of forgetfulness,

until his awareness of what lies beyond this earthly experience of ours is as sure and as constant as his awareness of the job he is doing, the friends he is with or the food he is eating. Only then is the reminder fully effective; only then is the sleeper fully awake.

Ill

I talked to you yesterday about the Fast of Ramadan in terms of “remembrance”, that is to say as a reminder of the real world in which we live, a world from which God is never for one moment

absent (however often we may absent ourselves from Him). Today I want to reflect on the Fast as a lesson in detachment. 106

Reflections $

That is an awkward word, easily misunderstood. When I was very young I read everything I could lay my hands on about the lives and teachings of the great mystics of Christianity, Islam and Hinduism; so did a friend of mine, and when we discussed what we had been reading we always came up against an impassable stumbling-block. We were sure these men and women had seen the truth and, if so, nothing could be more important than that. But we were young—nineteen or twenty—and the life that stretched before us was like a great pool full of wonders. We were just waiting for the day when we could dive in, seize these wonders, possess them, involve ourselves in everything that was offered: sex, friendship, adventure, travel, maybe even politics. What the mystics and, when it came down to brass tacks, religion as such seemed to demand was “detachment”, and that sounded to us like another word for suicide. How could we turn our backs on the pool before we had even had a chance to swim in it? So we went our ways, and there was no more talk of “detachment”. What we did not know was that, just as there are different degrees of reality stretching all the way from the Absolute (which represents itself to us as God) to the fragile dreams which lighten our sleep, so there are different levels in the human personality. There is a level, a very human level, on which we must be fully involved and live our lives to the full. But there is more to us than that, and this “more” is what distinguishes us from the animal creation. There is something in us that has the capacity to rise above the business of our lives, the joy and the distress. We cannot always live at that level nor are we required to do so, but we must be aware of it and, from time to time, take refuge in it when we are in danger of being totally submerged by our human experiences. For Muslims there is this

one month of the year, Ramadan, in which detachment is practiced to the exclusion of our habitual needs and inclinations. The Qur’an, when it speaks in the language of detachment, 107

REFLECTIONS

commands us not to grieve over that which escapes us nor to rejoice unduly over that which comes to us, yet the Messenger of God—Muhammad—whose nature was said to be an embodi-

ment of the teachings of the Qur’an, wept openly when his little son died and when his friends were killed in battle. He was asked

the meaning of his tears and said: “This is compassion, which God has placed in the hearts of His servants.” To be detached and yet to weep, to know when to be detached and when to weep, to hold the different levels of our personality in balance: this is one of the basic requirements of Islam, and self-denial—exemplified

in the Fast of Ramadan—is the principal means of achieving this balance. My friend and I were wrong. It is possible to be both detached and involved. There is a time for standing on the snowy heights and a time for walking in the warm valley. The art—and to live well is an art—lies in the right timing. That can be achieved only if we are capable of detachment and so of seeing our own lives in perspective. During the month of Ramadan, we are training ourselves in this art—insha’ Allah, God willing.

108

IEPEBCIONS Contemplation and Action

I HEN

I TALKED

TO

YOU about Ramadan, the Muslim

month of fasting, I discussed the thorny question of “detachment”, that is to say, detachment from the world and even

from our own egos—or our own turbulent emotions. I want to return to this theme, though from a slightly different angle. For Muslims the key to this detachment is the Confession of Faith or, to be exact, the first part of it: [a ilaha illa ‘Llah, commonly translated as “There is no god but God.” Yes, well... That is not inaccurate but it is inadequate as a translation. The word ilah, literally “divinity”, covers just about any positive quality you care to name. There is no power but the Power, no love but the Love, no mercy but the Mercy, no helper but the Helper—God, Allah. He alone uplifts and He alone casts down, gives prosperity or withdraws it, makes us happy or makes us sad. And so on till the tongue wearies but the heart is enlightened and so, finally,

there is no reality but the Reality and nothing exists or ever could exist except by participation in the one eternal Existant. All this may sound rather abstract, and to understand how decisive this formula—a ilaha illa ‘Llah—is in the life of the ordinary man or woman you have, so to speak, to see it in action.

Earlier I described a time many years ago when I was invigilating the end-of-year exams at Cairo University. It is a story

worth repeating because it shows the power of this formula in 109

REFLECTIONS

everyday life. It was June, and very hot, so the Exams were held in a vast tent or marquee beside the Nile. There must have been five or six hundred students at their desks, and their anxiety, combined with the heat, built up a tension you could actually feel like a kind of stickiness in the air. I watched them put their pens down one after the other, fiddling with their papers and frowning. Suddenly one boy put his head back and shouted—ZIa ilaha illa ‘Llah! The effect was astonishing. The tension had gone. Some of the boys and girls laughed in sheer relief. They picked up their pens again and got on with their work. They had been reminded of the one thing that really matters and this moment of detachment made it possible for them to return, refreshed, to the immediate task. Most of the time our attention is focussed on the little patch of ground ahead of us till we are obsessed with it; then we are suddenly made aware of the great dome of the sky above us, full of light, and we are out of prison. On a lighter note—a friend of mine, driving through East Africa with his wife and two small children, swerved into a ditch. All efforts to start the car failed, so he stood aside and exclaimed /4@ ilaha illa ‘Llah. There wasn’t much else he could do. At once a number of Muslim villagers who had been watching the proceedings from behind the surrounding bushes, came out, righted the car and fed the family. God, says the Qur’an, is “the Best of Providers”. The only one, in the long run. Whether we are aware of it or not, we live and die in the palm of His hand, and our poor efforts to cope with our problems on our own would be hilariously

funny if they were not—only too often—so sad. But to know this, not just in theory but in our flesh and in our bones, we do have to lift our heads now and then, forget ourselves and our absurd anxieties, and trust in what we cannot see but know is

there, everywhere present, always and for ever.

Ilo

Reflections

» Il When I talked to you yesterday I started by saying something about detachment and ended by speaking of trust. One of the great problems in talking about religion is that the terms we use are like coins that have been in too many pockets over too many years. They are worn, and the inscriptions which indicate their value are all but rubbed out. If only we could find a new-minted language we might be more convincing; but then no one would understand us. Certainly the phrase “trust in God”—tawakkul as it is called in Islam—is one of those worn coins, moreover when people come across it in the context of Islam they tend to say: Oh yes, we know all about that! Muslims are fatalists, aren’t they? So let me try to put the record straight. Muhammad, the Messenger of God, said to his companions: “Tether your camel and trust in God!” In other words, do your part, do what you can for what it’s worth, and then leave the matter in other hands. Tethers break. Camels get stolen, as do motor cars. The sensible person does what it is in his power to do to protect his property, but he knows that this power amounts to very little since we do not control our own destinies. We cannot make either ourselves or our possessions safe in this world—it is not at all a safe world—but we can act responsibly and, at the same time, put our trust in the only real power there is, the power of God. So what happens then? We live here in a very eel place with limited horizons and we calculate profit and loss in terms of this place. God sees us in an infinitely wider perspective—there are no horizons for Him, no limits—and He alone knows what is best for us, not just in this brief life, this tiny segment of time, but in other dimensions. Perhaps it may be to my advantage, spiritually, psychologically or in some other

way ifIlose my camel or my car. How can I possibly know? All I can do is take sensible precautions in terms of the world Laen

REFLECTIONS

in which I find myself, without for one moment imagining that this world is everything. If my precautions prove to have been useless, then I remember another saying of Muhammad’s: “All is well with the believers under all circumstances;” in other words, whatever happens. Trust, we believe, is always rewarded, not necessarily here but sometimes here and now. I have a friend from an and now Arab country who recently got news that if any family owned property of a certain type they must file the deeds within fortyeight hours or lose it. He had the papers here in London and there was only twenty-four hours left by the time his family contacted him. He drove as fast as he could to Heathrow airport hoping that some passenger on the one daily flight to his country could take the papers for him. There was a traffic block on the motorway. By the time he reached Heathrow the air-

craft had already been boarded. He had done his best, and failed. Standing in the concourse, he raised his hands and prayed for help. As he was doing so he felt a tap on the shoulder and turned round to find himself face-to-face with the pilot of the plane, an old school friend. All was well. And when that happens we say— Allah karim, “God is generous.” But what if it doesn’t happen? Then we try to accept the fact that this too must be for the best—beyond our horizon— because we know that God is always and eternally karim, “generous’, and we remind ourselves of our true situation saying in the words of the Qur'an: inna lillahi wa-inna ilayhi raji'in; “Truly, unto God we belong and unto Him we return.” It is, I think, this truth that gives us a sense of safety even when terror strikes.

Ill In this final talk let me try to draw some of the threads together. I started by considering some of the implications of the Muslim Fast of Ramadan. But one thing led to another, and I talked about detachment, about the different levels of the human personality Ii2

.

Reflections

and about trusting in God, whether He does what we would like Him to do for us or not. I ended my talk yesterday by saying that the Muslim who trusts in God feels safe even when terror strikes,

and that brings us back to the question of living simultaneously on different levels: knowing that one is safe, being frightened nonetheless, and yet rising above the fear. I read once of an officer in the Napoleonic wars who, as he mounted his horse one morning to lead his troops into the heat of battle, noticed that his legs were shaking. He laughed out loud, slapped his thighs, looked down at his legs and said: “By God, if you knew where I was taking you, you'd tremble far more!” But instead of talking about different levels we could just as well speak of two dimensions, the inward and the outward, or of the contrast—and necessary balance—between contemplation and action. Among Muslims today and also, I am sure, among Christians we often find two contrasting attitudes. On the one hand there are the people who are very meticulous about outward observance, strict in their obedience to every jot and tittle of the religious law if they are Muslims, regular churchgoers if they are Christians, who nonetheless have no spiritual life at all and who can act in a most irreligious manner when they come up against a situation for which their rule-book does not provide. On the other hand, there are those who say that outward forms

do not matter—*What’s the point of organised religion!” —and who add that the only thing that really matters is “what you have in your heart.” I do not think I need to point out the shortcomings of the first group; I suppose they are the ones who give religion a bad

name, and we tend to call them hypocrites. The hypocrisy of the second group is less obvious; after all, if someone’s heart is in the right place, what can be wrong? But the fact is that the human creature—spirit, soul and body—with all his different levels and different aspects is a whole, Gestalt as the Germans put it, a pattern in which every single part relates to every other part. 113

REFLECTIONS

Contemplation divorced from action and from the personality as a whole dissipates into fantasy. Action divorced from contemplation degenerates into frantic hyperactivity which does more harm than good. Faith in the heart dries up when there is no outward observance to support it and when it does not shape the character; and religious observance when there is no spiritual life to enlighten it is on a level with aerobics, an outward activity without any inward content. I said in a previous talk that to live well is an art, so let’s now define that art or at least one major aspect of it. It is to keep the

channels open between all the different levels of our being as also between the inward and the outward; never to be less than ourselves, our whole selves, even when this involves accepting— as did the Napoleonic soldier I mentioned—the fact that we may be calm and serene on one level, terrified on another. When this is accepted we may yet find that serenity encompasses terror, resignation lightens the burden of distress, and that which is best in us flows from its deep source to irrigate the whole organism till it reaches even our toes and we no longer tremble. Then, in the words of the Qur’an, “with hardship cometh ease,” and all is well.

114

WORDS*OF

FAITH

Man as Viceroy (SEPTEMBER 1989)

I “Green” issues are in the news today. Quite suddenly, the question of preserving our human environment from further damage has become a major political issue, and people who, until recently, were regarded as impractical idealists, are now listened to with respect. There are no prizes for guessing how this has come about. The world has not changed. The principles which govern—or should govern—our relationship with the natural environment are what they always were. All that has happened is that the most powerful of motives, self-interest, has asserted itself. There is nothing like a threat to our personal well-being to jolt us into an awareness of reality. That is perfectly understandable. But perhaps the moment has come to consider in greater depth the spiritual and moral issues involved. What does religion have to say on this subject? Specifically, since: Iam a Muslim, what does Islam have to say? The human creature—feeble, wayward, often disobedient to the laws of his own nature—is, according to Islamic teaching, the khalifah of God on earth. What does this word khalifah

or, in its anglicised form, “caliph”, mean? Viceroy (if one thinks of God as a great king), representative, agent, manager—any of these terms will serve if we understand the essential meaning. God has given us this earth as our province. It is a gift to be

115

REFLECTIONS

enjoyed, but—to borrow a cynical American phrase that has a profound significance—“there is no such thing as a free lunch”.

In delegating to mankind, as it were, a certain responsibility for His creation, He has placed a heavy burden on our shoulders, and He has warned us of the dire consequences if we fail to live up to this responsibility.

According to the Qur’an, the sacred scripture of Islam in which God speaks directly to mankind: “We offered the trust to the heavens and to the earth and to the hills, but they shrank back from bearing it and were afraid. And man took it up. Indeed he has proved a tyrant and a fool.” Over the centuries, Muslims have often disagreed as to the exact meaning of this “Trust”, but we can hardly doubt that one of the primary meanings is, precisely, the role of “caliph”, “viceroy”, responsible for overseeing creation. This caliph does not act on his own initiative or according to personal inclination; he follows orders from above. When he closes his ears to these orders and tries to

act independently, a king in his own right, then he does indeed become a tyrant and prove himself a fool. Why a fool? Because “he”, which in this case means you or me, makes a complete mess of the job. We maltreat our fellow men and women so they, of course, respond by maltreating us. We behave towards animals as though they were inanimate objects, and we exploit the hills and the fields, the oceans and

the rivers as though their God-given riches were inexhaustible; and then, having proved ourselves to be bad stewards, we complain if the world of nature begins to turn against us. And so we fail the test, the supremely important test. “See!” God tells us in the Qur’an, “We have placed all that is on the earth as an ornament thereof so that We may test them, which of them is the best in conduct.”

There was a time when this tyranny, this folly, made but a small impact upon the good earth. Our destructive power, when we turn destructive, has been vastly increased by technology. 116

Words of Faith

The damage which our ancestors might do to the environment was strictly limited and the natural world survived the worst

that they could do. Now, for the first time in human history, we may see the effects of our destructiveness, our irresponsibility, within one lifetime. That is a sobering experience. Does it perhaps offer us an opportunity to learn the necessary lessons before it is too late?

II I talked about the Muslim’s belief, derived from the Qur’an, that God has placed us on this earth as His viceroys, setting us a hard

task and burdening us with a heavy responsibility. But the Qur’an makes it clear that we chose to bear this burden because it is for

that very purpose that we were created and, like every other creature, we must do what comes naturally to us. I doubt whether there can be a more important issue for human beings than the

manner in which power is used or misused, whether we operate on a wide scale or a narrow one. When it comes to the abuse of power, the dictator who has his political enemies murdered, the man who mistreats an animal in his care, and those who destroy a beautiful landscape or pollute the oceans are in the same league, and it may be that God judges them with equal severity.

So far as our daily lives are concerned, it is the misuse of political power that most obviously affects us and, only half a

century after the start of that war in which people of my generation fought—supposedly—to rid the world for ever of “dictators”, only a few modern nations are free from the grip of what used to be called “tyranny” and should still be called by that

name. “Umar, the second ruler of the Muslim community after the death of Muhammad, said to a friend: “By God, I do not

know if Iam a caliph or a king. If lam a king, then that is a fearful thing!” The exercise of power is indeed a fearful responsibility, but “Umar had not asked to bear this burden. Muhammad

the Messenger of God, is reported to have said: “Do not ask 107

REFLECTIONS

for rulership. If you are given it without asking, you will be helped in undertaking it.” It is also reported that he told his companions that even the man who has been ruler over no more than ten people will be brought to Judgement—on the Day when all of us are judged—bound and shackled and that he will not be loosed until there is proof positive that he never abused his power. It is little wonder that, throughout history, pious Muslims have sought to escape this responsibility, fleeing from those who wished to impose it upon them. The barrier which separates the ruler from those he rules is plain for all to see. Hardly less visible are the barriers which separate us from the animal creation when we consider the beasts and the birds only in terms of their usefulness to us and, likewise, our alienation from the world of nature when we see it only as raw material to be exploited. The opposite to such attitudes is not, as some might suppose, poetic fantasy or idealism; it is simple realism. If we are realists, we do not exceed our rights or disobey our Creator because we understand what the consequences will be for ourselves. All such barriers preclude the possibility of relationship, and Islam is pre-eminently the religion of relationship. When the

Qur’an denounces “breaking ties of relationship” as a sin likely to lead us to damnation it indicates quite clearly that establishing and maintaining such ties is a primary duty for God’s “viceroy

on earth”. Here we are—you and me and units, pebbles on the beach. It is by our are defined. First our relationship to God, hardly be said to exist except as shadows;

the rest of us—little relationships that we but for which we can then our relationship

with other people, with the animals and with the natural world,

all of which, ultimately, point back towards the Creator of the heavens and the earth.

118

Words of Faith

dil

According to the Islamic scripture, the Qur'an, we human beings are the “viceroys” or representatives of God on earth. Discussing this in previous talks I have mentioned animals more than once, and with good reason. Muslims believe that everything that comes our way is a test in terms of which we demonstrate what we are made of, and it seems to me that animals show up our good or bad qualities with ruthless clarity. In our dealings with other people we may act well out of self-interest, perhaps from fear, perhaps seeking favours. We are not always spontaneous. Face to face with an animal in our care, we show our true colours. The man whose social behaviour is impeccable may none the less kick a dog when he thinks no one is looking. Traditional Christianity has been somewhat ambiguous on the subject of animals. There has, I think, been a tendency to see them as representing the “lower” side of our human nature and even today, in the courts, you will often hear a magistrate describe some particularly cruel or perverted criminal as “an animal”. This seems strange to the Muslim, who believes that the animal creation obeys and praises its Creator without any of the deviations we find among mankind. “Hast thou not seen,”

asks the Qur’an, “that unto God pays adoration whatsoever is in the heavens and on the earth...and the hills and the trees and the beasts, and many of mankind?” Many, but by no means all!

And, again, the Qur’an tells us that “there is not an animal on earth nor a bird flying on two wings, but they are peoples like unto yourselves... Then unto their Lord they will be gathered;” it tells us also that “God inspired the bee, saying: Choose dwellings in the hills and in the trees and in what men build; then eat of all the fruits and follow the ways of thy Lord made smooth for thee.” It is worth noting that the instincts by which animals are guided are divinely inspired. Muhammad, the Messenger of God, warned his people to

“fear God regarding these dumb creatures.” He mentioned that 11g

REFLECTIONS

a prostitute was forgiven all her sins because, coming one day upon a dog dying of thirst, she gave it water from a well, and he said that a certain woman was condemned to hell because she caged a cat and left it to die of hunger and thirst. Obviously, we are not saved—nor damned—on account of a single incident, but such incidents reveal the ascending or descending tendency inherent in each man and woman. Moreover the animals themselves have lessons for us if we are prepared to learn. One of Muhammad’s companions heard chirping in a thicket. He found some young birds, gathered them in his cloak and brought them to the Prophet, while their mother fluttered around his head, crying in distress. He was at once ordered to put them back

where he had found them, and Muhammad said: “By Him who sent me with the truth, God shows more pity towards His servants than this mother of young birds shows to her young.” After all this, what is one to say or think of those who treat animals as if they were no different to the “natural resources” which we take from the earth; something to be exploited at our convenience? And what of factory farmers and the scientists who subject animals to cruel and unnecessary experiments, often from no better motive than idle curiosity? My fellow Muslims do not always agree on this. Certainly, God has given us—as “viceroys’—certain rights over His creation, but these rights are limited and therefore subject to abuse. For my part, I would not like to be in the shoes of the abusers when we come

to Judgement. IV So far in this series of talks I have been concerned with the responsibility which, according to Muslim belief, God has devolved upon us as His “viceroys” on earth. This leads to one

of the most basic questions regarding our human condition. Who owns what? In one of what we call his divinely inspired sayings, the Prophet Muhammad is reported to have said: “The 120

Words of Faith

son of Adam is constantly claiming: This is my property, my property! Have you, O son of Adam, anything but what you eat or use up, wear and make threadbare, or give away in generosity and so make it perpetual?” Islamic teaching is absolutely clear on this point. Everything on the earth and in the heavens—and that really does mean everything, great or small—belongs to God. Whatever we think is ours is on loan. In the course of the heated debate now going on here and in the United States on the subject of abortion, there is a phrase that crops up again and again. Interviewed on television or radio, a woman says: “I can do as I please with my body!” I find that use of the possessive pronoun very interesting. Iam tempted to say:

“Excuse me, Madam, but did you create that body you claim as yours, did you shape it to your liking and cause it to grow from

embryo to adulthood? Can you control all its natural functions at will, can you prevent it ageing, can you postpone its death?” This seems to me a poor sort of ownership, if we have so little control over the object owned.

But if our ownership of our physical bodies is, to say the least, questionable, what of this world, this resources which we exploit so greedily and exist only for human exploitation? There drawn here, but it is no less important than arates heaven from hell. As God’s “viceroys”

earth, these natural which, we believe, is a fine line to be the line which sepwe have the right to

make use of His gifts, the good things of the earth. The Qur’an tells us so. But “use” is one thing; waste is quite another, and the

Qur’an is severe in its condemnation of wastefulness. “You are

obsessed by greed for more and more,” it tells us, “until you go down to your graves. Yet in time you will come to understand!” This environment which appears to invite greedy exploitation is an environment which, in every part, praises God and bears witness to His splendour by its very existence. “Hast thou not seen,” asks the Qur’an, “that God it is whom all that is in

the heavens and the earth praise, and the birds in their flight? He [21

REFLECTIONS

indeed knows the worship and the praise of each one.” Muhammad told his companions that there was a prophet before his time who was stung by an ant and therefore ordered a whole colony of ants to be burned; and God reproached him, saying: “Because an ant stung you, you have destroyed a community that glorified Me.” So how can we be justified in taking, for our own use, this or that—anything—from the vast fabric of universal praise and glorification which we call our “environment”? The Muslim’s answer is simple: we are permitted to take these things for our use, our livelihood, our enjoyment because we are the most articulate praise-singers. All else glorifies God with inarticulate praise. We alone understand what we are doing, perceive His glory in its fullness, and choose to praise. This is the only basis for the rights we claim over the world of nature. The “viceroy”, you see, has a dual function. Nature, for which he has a delegated responsibility, finds its voice through him and, when he prays—when he praises—he does so on its behalf as well as on his own.

Vv Throughout this series of talks I have tried to emphasis the truth that power carries with it responsibility. For Islam, man is the “viceroy of God on earth”, but only if he fulfils his proper function and does his duty. The higher our office, the further we have to

fall, and the office of “viceroy” is indeed a high one. But one does not have to be a Muslim to be aware of the power we have over our environment. Only too often this power goes to our heads. We become proud, tyrannical and pretentious, forgetting Whom

it is that we represent, setting ourselves up as little gods, responsible to no one and free to do as we please. This is the ultimate folly,

since it does not correspond to reality. We are not “gods”. We are underlings. We are servants. The Qur’an, which names us “viceroys’, tells us none the less: “Walk not proudly on the earth. See! You cannot rend the earth nor can you stretch to the height of the

hills.” Nowadays we try to rend the earth with our excavators and [22

Words of Faith to rival the hills with our skyscrapers, but, in the terms of the great

order of Creation, it is a puny effort. The earth heals herself and the hills outlast the skyscrapers, and we—for our part—hasten to

our graves. Throughout most of their history, until the modern age (with its dazzling temptations) confused them, Muslims were immune from the titanic pretentions which have characterised Western civilization since the Renaissance. They built their cities, their dwellings and their places of business in the spirit of modesty that

the Qur’an commands, reserving all splendour and high artistry for the mosques which dominated city, town and village. They built, not to challenge the physical environment or to imitate its grandeur, but in accordance with the requirements of the environment. They were unlikely to forget that the Prophet Muhammad, when he spoke of the “signs” which would presage the end of the world, specifically mentioned “the construction of high build-

ings”, nor could they overlook the Qur’anic verse which tells us that “the true servants of the All-Merciful are whose who walk upon the earth gently and, when addressed by the foolish, answer: Peace!” Our greatness—if it is permissible to speak of “greatness” in relation to such little, short-lived creatures—does not rest upon the “conquest” of nature, the scientific investigation of her manner of operation, technological inventiveness, or the devastation of mountain, forest and field. It rests upon our knowing our place, our function and our role, and in fulfilling that role by reflecting, in our characters and in our conduct, the qualities of the Lord we claim to represent: His wisdom, His mercy and His generosity. Then and then only do the heavens and the earth accept us and give us our due. According toa saying of the Prophet Muhammad: “God, His angels, the inhabitants of the heavens and the earth, even the ant in its hole, even the fish, invoke blessings upon him who teaches what is right.” That is true greatness. That is “viceregality”. That is fulfilment. 123

WORDS

OF FAITH

Detachment (FEBRUARY 1991)

I HENEVER PEOPLE TALK OF WAR and its causes I remember a small incident that happened long, long ago. I think

it was the summer of 1943. I was a young officer serving with my regiment in a northern town called Blackburn. One way of coping with the complete disruption of normal life is to stick to a few cherished habits, and it was my habit, whenever possible,

to visit a local tea-shop for afternoon tea, preferably with toast and homemade cake. In Blackburn, I was lucky. Just round the corner there was an excellent tea-shop.

Excellent except for one thing. The woman in charge was one of the most unpleasant people I had ever met. She seemed

to be possessed by anger and malice. Pretending to read a book, I could not help overhearing her conversations with anyone who would listen. Her theme was the wickedness of her family, her neighbours, the people of the town and just about everyone else in the world; her hatred poured out in a torrent of abuse. One

day I happened to go early to the shop and found myself alone. She descended upon me. “Why,” she demanded, “do we have wars? You see how horrible people are! They think of nothing but killing each other. What’s the cause of it all, eh?”

I suppose I mumbled some answer. What I wanted to say was: “Madam, you are the cause of war!” She had made me so angry

124

Words of Faith that I might even have added: “And I hope you fry in hell.” So I too, in my anger, was a cause éf war. Hatred breeds hatred, just as

love engenders love, and only too often we take on the colouring of our enemy—the colouring of blood—till we are ase ina vicious circle. It does not always have to be so.’ There is an Islamic story which makes this point very clearly. In one of the battles which the Muslims had to fight to preserve the new religion from destruction, the Prophet Muhammad’s son-in-law, ‘Ali, felled an enemy in single combat. He drew his sword for the killing blow,

but at that moment the man spat in his face. He at once sheathed his sword. He had been seized by anger, and he knew that to kill this man in anger would be a grave sin. He was fighting, not to satisfy his own feelings, but to preserve the light in the midst of darkness, to maintain justice in the midst of injustice, and to protect the Word of God from those who meant to silence it. There is a word which serves to define the only legitimate

attitude of the warrior who fights in a just cause: the word is “detachment”. Human nature is what it is, and human nature contains a streak of viciousness which always seeks an outlet. For the most part, it is blocked by the universal desire for social approval, so it needs justification. Where can this be found? Most commonly in religion or in a political ideology. To be angry and filled with hatred—to kill and to destroy —from motives of selfsatisfaction is shameful and therefore leaves the self unsatisfied.

But to do so in the name of God or to bring about righteous government, social justice or “a better world” is glorious. Evil, which cannot subsist on its own, attaches itself to good like a parasite. To do battle in a righteous cause requires, not only the discipline of courage, but also the discipline of detachment; not

only war against the enemy, but also war against our own worst impulses. And this is hard, very hard. I hope to suggest how the rules which Islam applies to the conduct of war set strict limits to the most terrible of all human activities. as

REFLECTIONS

II I mentioned that the religious Law of Islam includes strict rules limiting the conduct of warfare. These rules are derived princi-

pally from the Qur’n, but also from the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad. For thirteen years in his native city of Mecca, he and the converts to the new Faith had suffered persecution at the hands of their pagan fellow citizens. They had never retaliated. Muhammad waited patiently for divine guidance and this came, finally, in a revelation which is recorded in the twenty-

second chapter of the Qur’an: “Permission is given unto those who fight because they have been wronged, and Allah is indeed able to give them victory; those who have been driven from their homes unjustly, only because they said: Our Lord is Allah! For were it not that Allah repels some people by means of others, monasteries and churches and synagogues and mosques in

which the name of Allah is extolled would surely have been destroyed...” Were it not for such action, repelling the destroyers, corruption would—according to a later revelation—“overwhelm the whole earth”. The words immediately following this are significant: “And Allah is the Lord of Kindness over His creatures.” The word translated here as “kindness” is often given as “grace” and it relates to the divine Mercy which, according

to the Qur’an, “embraces all things”. Evil exists, and to resist it—“repel” it—is an act of mercy. Perhaps we might think of this globe of ours as a fruit; an apple or an orange. It is for us to preserve it from corruption and keep it sweet, even at the cost of

great self-sacrifice and even at the cost of killing those who have allowed themselves to become the tools of corruption. In Islam warfare has divine sanction only under the fol-

lowing circumstances: in self-defence (which includes defence of the Faith), on behalf of those “driven unjustly from their homes”, and to stem the spread of corruption before it “over-

whelms the whole earth”. Even so, the Qur’4n reminds us: “It 126

Words of Faith

may be that Allah will bring about friendship between you and those with whom you are dt enmity,” and it commands us to deal justly with our enemies. This world is indeed a theatre of changing scenery and changing roles. It is a theatre of conflict, and yet the all-embracing Mercy is nowhere absent. “If they incline to peace,” says the Qur’an with reference to our enemies, “incline thou also to it, and trust in Allah, for He is the Hearer,

the Knower.” Even in combat, care and moderation are the rule. This aspect of the Islamic tradition is embodied in the instructions given by Abi Bakr, the first leader of the community after the death of the Prophet, when he commanded his soldiers to avoid any act of treachery or deceit, not to kill any woman, child or old person, or injure date palms or cut down any tree that provided food for man or beast; to slay no flocks except for minimum sustenance and never to molest monks. Someone might ask—everyone may ask—what this has to do with the real world. Are these rules actually followed? Have

they been followed over the past thousand years? Do they have any practical relevance? I think it is reasonable to reply with another question. Does the existence of wickedness make good irrelevant and does folly make wisdom obsolete? Principles may be ignored. That is the way of the world. But the great disaster, the irrevocable calamity, is to lose sight of the principles altogether. Once they are forgotten, out of sight, chaos is let loose

and darkness triumphs. Muslims sin, as do Christians and Jews. So long as they are aware of breaking the rules and ignoring what God has commanded, there is hope for them. Only when the tenuous thread which still connects them with righteousness is broken, only then has evil triumphed, only then are they lost

beyond redemption.

REFLECTIONS

Ill I was talking about the rules which govern—or should govern—the Muslim’s conduct in war, but perhaps it is time to ask what we mean by this word. The whole nature of warfare has changed so much over the centuries that I wonder if we should not distinguish wars of the twentieth century from those of the seventh, by different words. Let me give a striking example: the Battle of Badr. It changed the course of human history. Forget about the Battle of Hastings, which established the Normans in England.

Forget about Waterloo, which postponed the unification of Europe for a while. But consider the fateful meeting of two armies by the wells of Badr. How many human lives were lost in that great battle, the first and most decisive military encounter

between the Muslims and their pagan enemies? Millions, thousands, hundreds? Between seventy and eighty of the combatants lay dead on the field when it was over. The moral questions we ask today when war is waged are inevitably different to those raised by men and women of faith fourteen centuries ago. Technology has transformed warfare as has the notion of “total war”, for which we can thank—or curse—the French revolutionaries of the eighteenth century. The benefits of technology are all around us; we bask in the warm comforts they provide. But nothing in this world is free, every benefit has its price. We are becoming increasingly aware ofthe pollution of the planet. None of us can be unaware of the horrors of modern war. As time passes, we may find there is still more to pay for what is commonly called “progress”. In the midst of such rapid change, can there be any principles that remain changeless? As a Muslim, my answer is an unqualified yes. And I believe that these principles have been

inscribed on the hearts of men and women by God’s guidance. Their applications change according to circumstances; that is certain. But there is nothing that could ever nullify them. So 128

Words of Faith let me consider one of the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad which seems to me basic to the Islamic outlook.

Muhammad said that when we encounter evil and wickedness our duty is to “change” it. But how? If we are able, we should—he said—change it “with our hand”, in other words by action. If this is not possible, we should change it by word. Even this may be impossible, in which case we must change it in our own hearts. In Islam the Sunna, that is to say, the practice and example of Muhammad, offers a lesson in realism. He never asked the impossible of his people. On the contrary, he taught them to act always within the bounds of what is practicable and effective. When we have the power to change evil into good or to prevent the spread of corruption by physical means, we have a duty to do so, and this may include taking up arms. But we seldom have this power. Our duty then is to speak out and condemn the evil we see before us; and yet there are circumstances in which even this is impossible. Under a brutal dictatorship our words go unheard and we go to the gallows. What then? Then we turn to the very root of this evil and seek it in our own hearts. We make war on the “streak of viciousness” which—I suggested in the first of these talks—lies deeply hidden within us. Other ways of action may have been barred to us,

but this way is always open. Muhammad called it the “greater holy war”, the greater jihad. In my final talk I hope, God willing, to say something about this much misunderstood term, jihad, our human struggle to resist evil.

IV I promised that I would say something today about jihad—a word that provokes an immediate reaction from Westerners,

reminding them of the threat posed by Islam to the peoples of Europe over many centuries. In fact, this Arabic word means neither more nor less than wholehearted effort to promote good 129

REFLECTIONS

and combat evil. In this sense, it is the duty of every Muslim to engage in jihad. Only in extreme cases, when all else has failed, does this involve taking up the sword and engaging in armed conflict. The image of the sword, however, may be found in

different levels of human life. The Qur’an itself is sometimes described as a “sword of discrimination”, cutting through all our pretences and self-deception to separate light from darkness, good from evil. Every Muslim is required to grasp in his right hand the “spiritual sword” and wield it against the powers of darkness, within and without. Returning once from a military campaign, the Prophet Muhammad told his people that they were now returning from the “lesser” jihad to the “greater” one. The “great war”—the lifelong war—is waged against our own evil impulses, against forgetfulness of God and spiritual apathy. As I suggested in the first of these talks, the outer war starts within. If our hearts were pure and our natures disciplined, there would be no outward

sword-play, no thunder of guns nor any “mushroom cloud”. This calls up another image at the very centre of Islamic

teachings. The Qur’an speaks of “rust on the heart”, comparing the centre of the human being, his nucleus, to a metal mirror. From its reflected light—the light of truth and guidance, the light of heaven—the soul, the mind and even the body are enlightened. But when the surface rusts and the debris of greed and self-interest accumulate upon it, then the mirror is darkened and we ourselves are in darkness. All things are possible in darkness and, in the dark, evil blossoms. The greater holy war involves keeping that mirror-surface clear and bright. According

to a saying of Muhammad, this is achieved by the constant remembrance of God. To remember Him is to be aware of His presence and, in his presence, the rust dissolves. The Prophet suggested a further remedy, and that is the constant remembrance of death, for we are short-lived creatures and shall soon meet our Maker to be judged by Him. 130

Words of Faith

But can we, in seeking the causes of war, identify the deepest and most deadly root of conflict? It is, I believe, self-righteousness, and this is closely related to fanaticism. The fanatic, it

seems to me, is the man or woman who mistakes partial truth for total truth, too proud and too self-satisfied to admit that it is beyond our human Capacity to grasp and assimilate truth in its

totality. Truth is all-powerful, but truth splinters in our divided world and each of these little splinters has an explosive power. When one of them lodges in your heart or mine, only humility and self-knowledge will prevent us from going into battle convinced that we alone are right and all the others are wrong. The greater holy war, therefore, is not only combat against the obvious temptations to sin; that is the easiest part of it. Far more demanding is the struggle against pride and self-righteousness. So long as we are convinced that wickedness exists only in “the other”—the neighbour, the enemy—you and I are warmongers. When the finger of blame which pointed away from us turns back upon us, then—perhaps—we may discover the Palace of Peace.

131

WORDS

OF FAITH

The Capacity to See Near and Far (FEBRUARY 1993)

I REMEMBER

SOME

LITTLE

WHILE

AGO,

discussing with an

ee friend our school days, vividly remembered after more than half a century. In those distant times teachers believed in discipline and frequently imposed it with the cane. My friend remarked that he had never regretted being beaten, hard and often, for things he had not done. Although he had a twinkle in his eye, I realized that he was at least half-serious. I asked him what he meant. “It taught me at an early age”, he said, “to accept life’s unfairness and not to complain about it!” I thought then of all the people I had known who made themselves utterly miserable because they felt they had been

unfairly treated, either by others or by circumstances. They had been hurt and then, on top of that, they had hurt themselves, nursing their grievances. But I have also known people who suffered bitterly, not on their own account, but on account of the

injustices which surround us on every side in this world; and that raises a very difficult question. As a Muslim, I seek answers in the teachings of my religion;

in the Qur'an and in the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad. What do I find? In the first place, we have a duty, as Muslims,

to fight injustice and oppression wherever we may encounter them. If we have the power to do so, we must take action against

ee)

Words of Faith these evils. If we lack power, we must condemn them verbally. If even this is impossible, then we must at least see them for

what they are and reject them in our own hearts. But, at the samé time, we have an absolute obligation to accept the will of God without protest. How can we reconcile these contrary atti-

tudes: either to oppose or to accept what seems to us wrong? When it is a matter of our own case—when we feel that we ourselves have suffered injustice—then, certainly, we have the right to stand up for ourselves; but we have to remember that we are biased, to say the least, and seldom see our situation objectively. Most of the conflicts that afflict our world are between parties both of whom are convinced that they are in the right. What we dislike is not always unjust. The Qur’an tells us: “If the Truth were in accordance with their wishes, then indeed the heavens and the earth and whosoever is therein would have

been corrupted.” Again and again it counsels patience in the face of misfortune, and, when the worst happens, we are commanded to remind ourselves of the most important thing we know: “Truly we belong to God and, truly, to Him we return.” There is no room here for resentment, bitterness, self-imposed misery. Nor is there any place for futile regret over the past. The Prophet Muhammad told his Companions that, when things went wrong, they should never say “If only I had done suchand-such, this would not have happened;” on the contrary, they should say “God decrees, and what He wishes He does,” and the

Prophet added that “If only I had...” provides an opening for the devil. We all seek happiness in this life. Even if there were no religious or moral reasons for accepting what cannot be changed and—ultimately—for accepting the will of God, it would still be true that the only happy people in this world are those who accept what cannot be changed and then get on with their lives.

But this still leaves open the question of injustice done to others—the question of unfairness in society and in human lives. 133

REFLECTIONS

Perhaps we need to put this in its proper context; to consider it from a wider viewpoint which takes in the whole scheme of things rather than one small segment of unfolding destiny.

II There are, in this world, things we must accept, whether we like it or not. If there were no suffering and no injustice here we would already be in Paradise; but Paradise is elsewhere, and it has to be earned. “Acceptance” is not a popular idea nowadays, and I have laid myself open to the charge ofindifference in the face of injustice. So let me make an important distinction between two kinds of people. On the one hand, there are those who do what little is in their power to correct injustices, starting with themselves, since there is little point in finding fault with others if we ourselves are unjust. On the other hand, there are those who agonise over the condition of the world (without necessarily doing anything about it themselves) until

they become bitter and disillusioned, eventually blaming God or other people. How often have you heard someone say: “People are so wicked! I really hate humanity!”, forgetting that they themselves belong to the human tribe? The first thing we have to recognise and accept is our own

condition of dependence. The Qur’an tells us: “You are the poor in relation to God: He is the rich;” and, for “the rich’,

we might substitute the word “plenitude”, a plenitude which overflows as “a mercy to mankind”. On the earthly level, we cannot long survive without food or water, we are always in

need of this or that, which only reflects our human condition, a condition of unrelenting needfulness. And, behind all passing needs, there is a single need—the need for God. We fill our bellies, but they are never filled for long. Emptiness, which is our true state, reasserts itself; and this, precisely, is why we are called “the poor”. In the Sufi tradition of Islam, the man or woman who follows the Path describes him or herself as a fagir,

134

Words of Faith meaning one who is poor by nature, utterly dependent, perpetually in need. But every man’or woman alive is, in this sense, a fagir, whatever they may believe. No one is self-sufficient. Recognition of our true state of poverty opens a channel between man and God, between droplet and ocean, between the short-lived creature of time and That which is eternal and unchanging; but our wretchedness is no cause for breast-beating. It suffices to know that plenitude is there; the fact that it is not here, at least in any sense that we can directly perceive, is of no account. The second thing that we must accept, particularly when we try to judge other people, is our ignorance. “He knows,” says the

Qur'an; “you know not.” Such true and certain knowledge as we have is a gift from Him, and the greatest gift is wisdom, which derives, not from our intelligence or learning, but from His generosity. Our judgements—unless enlightened from above—are always clouded both by ignorance and self-interest. We see, at most, a tiny segment of reality; the whole is far beyond the range of our vision. And this is why the injustices that enrage us may, for all we know, be an aspect of the divine Justice. Ultimately

they cannot be otherwise, for God has named Himself “the Just”. Beyond the little corner in which we live out our lives there is an immensity quite beyond our comprehension. I think that most Muslims, whether they articulate it or not, have a constant sense of this immensity. But it has nothing in common with the vastness of inter-stellar space, cold and impersonal, which intimidates those who cannot see beyond it. This immensity is our true home, and it is within us as well as far above us. We are not lost in it, but found in it. To be aware of this requires a kind of double vision; the

capacity to see both the near and the far.

REFLECTIONS

Ill The Arabic word for “world” is dunya, which means literally

that which is close to us, often contrasted in the Qur’an with akhirah, the Hereafter, which still seems far away over the horizon. One of the greatest problems for all believers, not least for Muslims, is to hold the balance between our concern for the one

and our concern for the other. There are, no doubt, some people who neglect their earthly duties in favour of a single-minded pre-occupation with the Hereafter, and Islam discourages this; but most of us have the opposite problem. We cannot disentangle ourselves from what is nearest to us, and we lose sight of “the far”. Yet we cannot fulfil our duties here unless we have a sense of proportion and that means seeing them in the context of eternity. For the most part we are too busy—or think we are too busy—to take the long view. That is one reason for the fact that the Muslim is required to pray five times each day. This might be described as a blessed interruption of our worldly affairs. We had lost ourselves in the business of time and then, inexorably, we have been dragged back to an awareness of that which is beyond time. In the prostration, when our foreheads touch the ground and we praise “our Lord the Most High”, the transcendent, we are (or should be) aware of the immensity beyond us.

The Qur’an refers to those who are “bowed down to the ground with heaviness”, clinging to the earth, “so small compated with the Beyond.” Elsewhere it refers to them as “worse than cattle” in their exclusive concern for the patch of grass

under their noses. The Prophet Muhammad is reported to have told his Companions: “Be in this world as though you were a stranger, or one in transit,” and he said: “In relation to this world I am a rider who shades himself under a tree, then goes on and leaves it behind.”

The Qur'an never tires of emphasising life’s brevity. When the end comes, it tells us, we will think that we spent no more 136

Words of Faith than a day or part of a day in this world. When we begin to grow

old we understand this very Well. Trying recently to explain to a friend how fast time passes for me now, I said it was as though I bent down to tie my shoelace and, as I straightened up, found that a whole week had passed. It follows that to place ourselves by choice—for we always have a choice—among the “cattle” is an act of extraordinary short-sightedness. It is unrealistic in terms of our human situation as creatures destined for wider horizons and aware, though dimly, of the eternity which presses upon us more urgently

with every passing moment. The Qur’an speaks of “those who love the life of this world more than they love the Hereafter” as being among the “the lost”; and, indeed, they do not know where they are, being exclusively occupied with that little patch of grass under their noses. To believe in what we cannot see or touch, to believe in God and in an immensity beyond all that we can imagine, requires both patience and detachment from the dunya, “the near”. For belief to become faith, which is a kind of inward certainty, requires far-sightedness which is but another word for wisdom; and wisdom, because it sees beyond the immediate, puts everything in its place; which brings us back to where we started. The best definition of justice or of fairness is that everything is situated exactly where it belongs, just where it should be in the scheme of things. And yet, when all is said and done, to believe and, ultimately, to have faith is only human; no more nor less than human.

IV Some years ago, after I had given a series of talks on the BBC, I received an angry letter from a man who accused me of try-

ing to undermine his atheism. At first I thought this was a joke. It was not. The man meant what he said. It seems that I had touched the spark of faith which he had tried, unsuccessfully, 137

REFLECTIONS

to extinguish by his denial of God, and this troubled him. In the secular West, it is commonly assumed that belief and unbelief are a matter of personal opinion and that no one should be blamed for his opinions. The fact that Muslims condemn the unbeliever, the “infidel”, as though he were at fault strikes most Westerners as weird if not wicked. The Arabic term for an unbeliever is kafir, which means literally “one who covers”; and what he “covers” is the knowledge of God’s reality planted at the deepest level in every human creature. It follows that the kafir has chosen deliberately to deny what, at heart, he knows infallibly. He has, in effect, cut himself off from Reality. He has severed the umbilical cord like a foetus dying in the womb, which is why the Qur’an, which addresses itself specifically to “the living”, asks: “Are the living and the dead alike?” Since he has lost contact with Reality, it follows that the unbeliever lacks the sense of proportion which places suffering and injustice in their true context. The term kafir, however, has a second meaning closely connected with the first. It can sometimes be translated as “one who is ungrateful”. Life is a gift. “God brought you forth from the wombs of your mothers knowing nothing,” says the Qur’an, “and He gave you hearing and sight and hearts that perhaps you might give thanks.” “And He it is who has made the earth subservient to you, so walk on its paths and partake of the sustenance which He provides; and to Him will you be returned.” This same earth is filled throughout with the signs of His presence and those who have their eyes open—the “living”—tejoice in these signs, finding a profound meaning in the dawn and the dusk, the mountains and the rivers and the forests; indeed in all that surrounds them in a meaningful universe. It is the meaning that matters, not the ephemeral object which bears it. The

Qur’an reminds us of this: “Indeed We have placed all the earth’s

adornments that We may put them (mankind) toa test...and We shall reduce all that is upon it to barren dust.” 138

Words of Faith The Muslim rejoices in all this, and the fact that his earthly substance—like all around him—will soon be dust is no cause for distress since he knows that what comes after, the akhirah,

endures and will never fade. According to a saying of the Prophet Muhammad, all is well with the believer under all circumstances. “If happiness comes to him, he gives thanks and it turns out well for him; if misfortune befalls him, he shows endurance—and it turns out well for him.” What else is “endurance’ but that sense of proportion of which I spoke earlier? All is well because the good endures and is comparable to light, while evil vanishes as shadows vanish in the radiance of that light. The knowledge that this is so forms the basis of endurance, but for which it would be no more that a grim Stoicism. Yet the balance must be maintained throughout our earthly life, the balance between a constant struggle against injustice—this life being a test in which we show our quality—and resignation to the divine Will, to the nature of things; acceptance of the fact that this sweet earth is inevitably a place of shadows since it is far from the light. Only through faith can this balance be maintained; for, when all is said and done, we are creatures of the light, not denizens of the shadow-land.

139

WORDS OF FAITH Inner and Outer Peace

(JUNE 1994) I EACE IS MY

THEME

TODAY. What better theme could a

Muslim choose? The very word Islam (like its derivative, Muslim) comes from the same root as the Arabic word for peace, as-salam, which is on the tongue of every Muslim, many times each day, when he or she greets companions on the path, the “straight path” which is the path of faith. But then—everyone,

regardless of their religion, is in favour of peace, aren't they? Well, yes—so long as it is on their terms. . First, however, I think it is important to consider the complexities of this word, and to make a distinction. On the one hand, there is the fragile peace which may be defined simply as

the absence of war—one of a pair indissolubly linked—and, on the other, there is what Christians call “the peace which passeth understanding”, although this concept is by no means exclusive to’ any particular religion; it is, perhaps, what all men and all women seek, whether they know it or not. Peace merely as the absence of conflict is situated in the midst of the changes and chances of time and can never be more than a temporary condition. Inner peace, however, is unassailable because it is rooted beyond time. It is impossible to talk of peace on the temporal level without talking of war, and here I have a problem. Christians, for

140

Words of Faith the most part, regard Islam as a violent and warlike Faith. They refer to the history of the past fourteen centuries to prove their point. Strange as it might seem, Muslims regard Christians as violent and warlike. We too call history to witness. We could argue about this—and probably will argue about this—until the end of time, and still get nowhere. It is better to leave the matter to God, who alone knows the truth of it, and pass on to more immediate matters attempting to clarify one particular issue which has led to so many misunderstandings. This is jihad. Where better to seek a definition than in the writings of the great jurisprudents, the lawyers, who have drawn from the

Holy Qur’an and from the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad a great body of religious law which provides a framework for the Muslim’s life and sets bounds to his actions so far and no further! The word jihad simply means effort, striving wholeheartedly, and the lawyers distinguish four ways in which the duty of jihad may be fulfilled: by the heart, by the tongue, by the hands or

by the sword. The first, which is called the “greater” jihad, the greater holy war, concerns the individual’s struggle against the evil within himself, so that he may comply perfectly with the divine Will, purifying both his soul and his actions. What is its goal? Briefly, its goal is the human norm; a return to the condition in which God created us. All wickedness is therefore a departure from that norm. We are required to pursue the inward jihad throughout our lives. The second and third forms of “holy war” concern mainly

the obligation—in the words of the Qur’an—“to enjoin what is right and to forbid what is wrong.” This is a question of morality, both individual and collective, and it includes exhorting others to mend their ways, not by the use of force but by reminding, counselling and, when necessary, offering practical help. But can we exhort others to do better if we have not

already waged war against the evil within ourselves? Ah—that’s the point, isn’t it? That is why the greater jihad has priority.

IAI

REFLECTIONS

Only with the fourth of these categories do we come to actual combat against the enemies of the Faith, but even in this case (according to the jurists) “war” does not always involve taking up the sword—or the kalashnikov. It may be waged by political and diplomatic means. Only when all else fails do we come to warfare as such. May God preserve us from that desperate conclusion.

II I took Peace as my theme and then went on to talk about jihad, the obligation of every Muslim to struggle against evil, first within himself and then in the world beyond his skin, and to stand up for what is best; for what is true and good andjoyful. That led, inevitably, to the question of warfare as a last resort when all else fails. What is the most common argument that we hear raised against religion? In my experience, it is not an argument about faith or about the existence of God. It is a simple and rather dev-

astating accusation: Religions cause wars, don’t they? Well— no, they don’t. But, only too often, they are used as an excuse to make aggression seem respectable. Christianity has a doctrine of original sin; Islam teaches that no one is free from evil impulses, everyone has his or her personal “devil”. The whole point of the greater jihad, the inward battle, is to subdue those impulses and conquer that devil. Most of us, however, are subject to social constraints which prevent us from acting as badly as we might otherwise do. We want to be liked. We seek the approval of our

fellows and their respect. Social pressures keep us from following our worst inclinations. But that devil within is always on the look out for an excuse to take command without losing the respect of his social milieu. Religion and politics are at hand to

be used as an excuse, and they are used. Murder becomes justified. The murderer is a hero.

In Islam, jihad (always as a last resort) is the only permissible 142

Words of Faith form of warfare, and it is permissible only under strictly defined circumstances: in self-defencé (which must include defence of the Faith), on behalf of those who, in the words of the Qur’an, have been “driven unjustly from their homes” and, finally, to prevent the spread and the triumph of devastating corruption in the world, particularly the oppression of one group by another. Warfare, unless one or more of these circumstances are present, is neither more nor less than mass murder and will be seen by God as such, and punished accordingly. So what happens when some Muslim ruler, devoid of true faith, wishes to give full rein to his impulses of aggression, ambition and hatred? He must pretend that he is waging jihad and persuade his people that his cause is just. In this context, we have to remember that Christian leaders, both in England and in Germany during the First World War, announced publicly that God was on their side. It is a trick as old as human history; and religion gets the blame. We may identify in all this two culprits: self-deception and self-righteousness. They often go together, and they are a deadly combination. The greater jihad can achieve nothing if it does not lead to clear-sightedness; seeing things as they are and seeing ourselves as we are. Those who attempt to fight in a dense fog —the fog of self-deception—will miss their foe and strike the wrong target. Self-knowledge, in so far as it is possible for any human being, is the precondition for such success as we may be able to achieve in dealing with that “devil” within. But so is humility. Self-righteousness, like social approval, can justify anything and lead its victims—for the self-righteous are their own victims— into the pit. It is the great temptation which besets religious people. Satan is not very interested in small prizes. He is always after ~ the Big One. If he can subvert faith and twist what is best in us to his own ends, then he may wear his crown of fire with pride. It is against this subversion that we are commanded to wage the greater holy war.

143

REFLECTIONS

Ill In my earlier talks this month I spoke of peace and war, and also of the Islamic concept of jihad, often translated as “holy war”.

Whatever may be our religious or cultural background, there is nothing unfamiliar in the notion of a battle between good and evil, a battle that cannot be avoided in this ambiguous world

of ours. This is one way of looking at the matter but, from a | Muslim point of view, it can give a false impression. It seems to imply that there is some kind of equality between good and evil, two forces or tendencies equally matched and on the same level. Not so! Good and evil are no more equal than are truth and falsehood. The one is real in the full sense of the term; the other has a shadowy, purely relative existence. When the truth is seen,

the lie vanishes utterly, as though it had never been. The Qur’an constantly emphasises this point, and the Arabic word here translated as “falsehood” also has the meaning of emptiness. It is so also with evil, which often seems to us so formidable, so menacing and, only too often, triumphant. Its operation is confined to this little place, this dunya, the everyday world which lasts for

but a short time. And so the Qur’4n commands us to repel evil with good. In the forty-first chapter of the Book we read: “Since good and evil cannot be equal, repel thou evil with something better;” and, in another chapter, “These it is who shall receive a twofold reward for having been patient in adversity and for having repelled evil with good. ..and, whenever they hear frivolous talk,

having turned away from it and said: “Unto us shall be accounted our deeds, and unto you your deeds. Peace be upon you!” Commenting

on this verse,

a wise man

explained (regarding

those who merit a twofold reward): “When they are deprived of anything, they give; and when they are wronged they forgive”. And at-Tabari, the most famous of Qur’anic commentators, said: “They repel the evil done to them by doing good to those who

144

Words of Faith did it... They do not repay evil with evil, but with good.” So

here we see yet another aspect of jihad; to combat evil with the weapon of goodness. Let me now consider this question of human goodness and human evil from a slightly different perspective. I said in my first talk that the goal of the greater jihad, the inward spiritual struggle, is a return to the norm, the condition in which God created us. It is often said in Islamic teachings that the animals obey what God has decreed for them without ever deviating from their own “straight path”; like the angels, they are what they are meant to be and cannot be otherwise. Man alone is capable, at least in appearance, of opposing the divine Will and so departing from his own norm, following ways that are crooked and perverse. It is for this reason that we, in our perilous but magnificent state of freedom, are required to pursue the inward jihad throughout our lives and to remember God constantly; this remembrance, this awareness, is our principal weapon against all temptations to go astray.

It follows that, in seeking what is best, we are not in some way going against human nature or turning our backs on what

is most truly human in our constitution. On the contrary, we are struggling to regain our norm, to be what we were always meant to be; and, since we are meant to be happy, even under adverse and difficult circumstances, this is also the search for happiness, which is what everyone seeks if they make any claim to being normal. And this, for Muslims, is the “straight path”

through the mists of uncertainty and the jungle of temptation. IV I began this series of talks by saying that my theme would be Peace. I then went on to talk of war, but most specifically of

the greater holy war, the inward and spiritual struggle. Yet the object of all legitimate warfare—and that, in practice, means jihad—is peace through subduing all those forces which,

145

REFLECTIONS

whether inwardly or in the great world, make for conflict. The objective is to establish order in place of disorder, harmony in place of disharmony and, above all, justice where injustice reigns supreme. Precisely because Islam lays such emphasis upon the oneness of God, it emphasises also the unity of the human personality; integration and harmonious balance. Yet this is a rare achievement, for we are all of us pulled by two contrary forces. Put aside, for the moment, the terms “good” and “evil”. Let us substitute for them the terms “centripetal” and “centrifugal”; on the one hand, the winged flight towards the Centre; on the other the leaden flight—as though pulled downwards by the force of gravity—towards the periphery, the ultimate remoteness which lies in the direction of nothingness. There is something in us which, in the absence of any counter-force, will always drag us downwards; and that, above all, is why we can never completely relax in the course of this life. That is why the native American tradition speaks of the “salmon leap”; the leap upstream, against the tide. So the greater holy war is to be waged, not only against our worst impulses; it is also a struggle against laziness, inadvertence and—perhaps most dangerous of all—indifference. It may be that those who shrug their shoulders when the name of God is mentioned and turn away are in a worse case than the outright atheist of whom it can at least be said that he is not indifferent. Why are Muslims required to pray five times a day and between the times of prayer, to “remember God constantly”? To many of those who live outside the fold of Islam this seems excessive. It is, in fact, barely adequate. Prayer prevents us from sliding, slipping, falling away as we do so easily, and it obliges us to turn

back towards the Centre which is, in the words of the Qur’4n, the “Abode of Peace”. The opposite to indifference is vigilance, alertness, wakefulness. I remember after more than fifty years my experiences 146

Words of Faith as a wartime officer cadet. One of the most frequent terms of abuse which the drill sergeants directed against us was “dozy”, meaning half-asleep when we should have been fully awake, and “doziness” is one of those subtle faults against which the Muslim wages his holy war. To be fully awake is to see, not only the dangers and temptations which threaten us, but also all that is to be seen in the world around us: the world of people, the world of nature, the world of treasures. Islam detects in all that surround us the “signs of God”, and these are indeed treasures. They remind us of our Creator, they point back towards Him who is both our origin and our end. To see things in this way is also to escape from the apparent opposition between inward and outward, between me and the other, in accordance with the Islamic doctrine of Tawhid, Oneness. Inner peace is then reflected in our environment, and the harmony perceived in the environment supports and strengthens that “peace which passeth understanding”. For it is all there if only we open our eyes, alert to see what is to be seen. There is peace in the signs of God which are scattered all around us; and nothing, ultimately, can eradicate from our innermost self—the core of our being—the glint of light and the seed of peace.

147

WORDS OF FAITH Islam: The Sunni/Shi‘ah Divide

(MAY 1995) HERE ARE TWO WAYS in which the division between the Sunni and the Shi‘ah sectors of Islam might be defined: the first is simple, the second is rather more complicated. The Sunnis follow meticulously the Sunna of the Prophet Muhammad: his example, his way of life. The Shiah, who

make up some twelve percent of the Muslim community worldwide, believe that the Islamic world should be ruled by direct descendants of the Prophet and they have a very special reverence for his early descendants who are known as the Imams. That is the simple definition. It does not take us very far. In the first place, the Shivah also follow the Sunna of the

Prophet, although they differ in certain details regarding the things he is reported to have said. The origin of their movement lies in a difference of opinion at the time of Muhammad’s death. Who was to step into his shoes, not as a prophet—there would be no more prophets—but as ruler

of the community, as caliph? The most senior among the Companions, that is to say the disciples, met together and elected one of their number, Abi Bakr, as their leader. There were, however, others in the community whose devotion

to the Prophet’s family was so intense that they favoured a hereditary principle. The caliph should be his cousin and son-in-law, “Ali, and the caliphate should rest in perpetuity 148

Words of Faith

with his bloodline. In due course they would come to be known as the Shiat ‘Ali, that is to say the |Party Ole Ale: As it turned out, ‘Ali did in fact become caliph after the first three leaders of the community had died but, when he himself was murdered, a powerful man—the Governor of Damascus—seized the caliphate, ignoring the claims of

‘Ali’s sons, Hasan and Husayn. This was the point at which a mere difference of opinion was transformed into something much more intense, more passionate, more desperate. Hasan, the elder of the two, resigned his claim, unwilling to provoke bloodshed in his own cause. Husayn, however, was persuaded to assert his rights. The man whom his people regarded as a false caliph had died by then and been succeeded by his son. At the head of a small army, Husayn challenged the vastly superior forces of the new ruler on the field of Karbala. He never stood a chance. He was killed and his head was cut off. This, remember, was the beloved grandson of the Prophet and, for the Shiah, his murder— that was how they saw it—was the greatest crime in human history. To this day they lament his death with demonstrations of grief and anger which shock Sunnis to the core. For them, his descendants, the Imams, although they never held power in this world, were the spiritual leaders, governors and guides of the Islamic community until the twelfth imam—or, according to others, the seventh—withdrew into the unseen, abandoning a world that had become intolerably corrupt. He will, according to the Shi‘ah, return

at the end of time to inaugurate a reign of righteousness. Meanwhile, the senior religious scholars hold authority on his behalf, which is why we find, specifically in Iran, a powerful class of clergy, something that does not really exist in the Sunni sector of Islam. As was bound to happen in a community cut off from the mainstream, the Shi‘ah developed, over the course of

149

REFLECTIONS

time, a slightly different outlook to that of the Sunnis. The distinction between them is not a matter of basic doctrine: it has to do with the spiritual life, it is a difference in psychology and in religious emotion. A subtle difference, therefore, but sufficient to have set the two communities against each other on the popular level. The fact remains that both accept the Qur’an as the Word of God and both attempt to follow the example of the Prophet. In the end, this is what matters.

150

WORDS OF FAITH Who is the Infidel? (SEPTEMBER

1995)

I Ne

I WAS A SCHOOLBOY, long ago, we were still being

presented with the age-old image of the “menacing” Muslims; an image of barbaric hoards intent upon slaughtering the “infidel” and putting a torch to civilisation. Nowadays, I am sure, children are no longer exposed to this particular indoctrination, but we still find it echoed in the media and the image of the Muslim fanatic is never far off. That, I suppose, is understandable. We do have our fanatics, more is the pity, but then fanaticism has been fairly universal in the twentieth century and

it usually has more to do with politics than with any kind of spiritual Faith. This has been a directionless century, seeking a direction; seeking for certainties in an uncertain world. But what about the “infidel”? I do not mean the non-Muslim. That would be much too simple and would conflict with the basic tolerance of the Islamic Faith. I mean the real unbeliever, the true atheist who rejects God in every form, preaches rejection and denies the possibility of any reality beyond what our

physical senses can grasp. In Islam he or she is described as a kafir and it is important to understand the meaning of this word. It

is very difficult for people in the West, dedicated as they are to “freedom of thought” as the basic principle of their culture, to accept the fact that a different culture can treat total unbelief—

kufr—as a sin rather than as a matter of opinion. Surely everyone has a right to his or her opinions? No, says the Muslim; not if that ISI

REFLECTIONS

opinion is a lie, a betrayal, the breaking of a sacred covenant. The word kafir, often translated as “infidel”, means “one who covers”, someone who conceals what lies there, open to the sky. This covering is a deliberate act motivated by a desire to hide the truth. For Islam, every human being is born with an innate knowledge that God is; an awareness that there exists a transcendent Reality, all-powerful and all-merciful, which cannot be

denied. According to a mysterious passage in the Qur’an relating to an event which took place before creation, even before time, we were taken from the “loins of Adam”—the human archetype— and brought before God who asked: “Am I not your Lord?” We answered with a resounding: “Yes!” We acknowledged our Lord even before we came into this world. It follows that to deny him, now that we are here, is truly a betrayal. Moreover, we are denying what is, for the Muslim, self-evident, as though a man walking in the desert under the burning sun were to say: “No, I don’t

believe in the sun! You can’t prove to me that it exists.” What can you say of such a man? Either he is mad—that’s a possibility—or else he has some deep, dark motive for denying the obvious. He’s

up to no good. Even so, the Muslim is not permitted to attack this scoundrel, let alone slay him, unless he attacks first. He is to be treated with mercy because only through mercy will he be persuaded to mend his ways and to acknowledge what, at heart, he already

knows. -The Qur’an commands

us to fight evil with good,

to overcome the lie with the truth, and to recognise, at every

moment and under all conditions, that everything is in the safe hands of the God who created us and who is ever-present with us. We do what we can, clumsily and with limited understanding. The rest is in the hands of God and we do not know, we cannot know, what He intends for this man or this woman who has chosen darkness in preference to light, ignorance in place of

knowledge, and the ruling of their own self-will above the rule of their Creator.

Words of Faith .

I

In my last talk, I explained why Muslims regard “infidelity”— atheism—as a deliberate denial of what, at heart, we know to be the truth. The denier is called, in Arabic, a kafir. He buries the truth out of sight. He covers it over with deceptions and illusions

so that he can do as he pleases, not as God pleases. The Qur’an speaks also of the covering over of the heart’s light, which results from sins that are repeated again and again, so that a kind of debris—a load of rubbish—piles up, the light is no longer seen and we can go merrily on our way, no longer aware that we are living in darkness. But who is the kafir? Can we recognise him without any possibility of error? Of course not! God alone sees and knows the inmost being of every man and woman. We see only the surface appearance, and we can never be entirely sure that we know anyone, know them in their deepest reality. That is why we have to be very cautious about using that word kafir. As Muslims, we are warned of the dire consequences of applying it where

it does not apply. Supposing you say to someone who claims to be a believer, “You're a kafir!”, and you are wrong. Then—God help you!—the punishment which the unbeliever suffers after death falls upon you. This is something often forgotten by young Muslim militants today. I would not like to be in their shoes. All this has to do with the outer world and with worldly encounters. The condemnation of the “unbelievers” has another side to it, and this may be its most important aspect. There is a

short Sara of the Qur’an which begins: “Say: O you unbelievers! I worship not that which you worship, nor do you worship that which I worship...” Many pious Muslims understand this as having an inward, spiritual application. Should we search for these unbelievers, these infidels? They ask themselves. We should. Where should we search? In our own divided souls! These, indeed, are the most dangerous infidels; subtle, unseen

but profoundly threatening. TS3

REFLECTIONS

Why do “religious people” —true believers in appearance— so often act in ways that seem to deny the principles of their faith? The answer is inescapable. No doubt they do believe, no doubt they want to act as they should, but they have neglected the battle—the holy war—against the elements of infidelity within themselves. It is these elements that determine their actions. Self-righteous, sure of their own superiority to those who do not share their faith and who must surely go to perdition, they are blind to what is going on within themselves. If we think—-you and I—that we are all of one piece and imbued throughout our being with the principles of our Faith, then we must think again. The Prophet Muhammad remarked once to his wife, ‘A’isha, that every one of us has a “devil” within. “Even you, Messenger of Allah?” she asked in astonishment. “Even me,” he said; “but Allah has helped me against it.” Only with divine help can we hope to eradicate the infidels within. We cannot do it on our own, for they are a part of us, integrated into our personalities. This brings us back to the idea of the kafir as “one who covers’. The “infidel” in the usual sense of the word covers and conceals the truth which, at heart, he knows. The infidels within the human breast do the same. They too cover the light of faith which can never be put out, but which can be effectively stifled so that it no longer shines in our awareness and no longer directs our thoughts or our conduct.

154

WORDS

OF FAITH

The ‘Labels’ of Religion (JANUARY 1996)

I

nee PROPHET MUHAMMAD is reported to have said that all wisdom is “the believer’s lost camel”. Truth and wisdom

are no one’s exclusive property, and the Qur’an reminds the “People of the Book” that they “have no control over God’s bounty, since all bounty is in God’s hand alone, and He grants it to whomever He will—for God is limitless in His bounty.” In the past, different religions were so isolated from each other that they could exist cheerfully in mutual incomprehension. It did not matter. Today, whether we like it or not, we are forced together, obliged to face our differences and compelled to come to terms with each other. That creates problems, particularly

for those who cannot stretch their understanding or extend their imagination to accommodate such richness. But this has its positive side. We Muslims can locate our “lost camels” in other faiths, and why should not Christians find their lost sheep in alien religions?

Our world is short on wisdom. Seek it and find it where you can! Over the past fifty years I have found it in so many unexpected places, not least in the writings of a French Christian, Gustave Thibon. A reviewer of one of my books mocked me

for my interest in what he called this “homespun philosopher”. Well, Thibon is not an academic; he is a man of peasant origin, a

TSS

REFLECTIONS

man whose mind and spirit have soared to the heights while his feet remain firmly planted in the good earth. That, I suppose, is why I value him so highly. So here is one quotation from Thibon which offers me a theme for these talks. “Everything that passes by way of God is purified,” he says, “but everything is corrupted beneath the ‘divine’ label which so many believers stick onto their earthly passions. Then God is no longer light which transfigures. He becomes the mask which disguises.” Wherever we turn—and no matter which tradition we follow—we see these masks employed to disguise anger, hatred, resentment and, above all, a self-righteous pride which is all too human. That which

the Qur’an characterises as “the selfhood inciting to evil” likes nothing better than to borrow a “divine” label, for that is a jus-

tification on two fronts. The self-justification which pacifies

consciences, and the social justification without which we cannot live at ease.

Religion is judged, not by its doctrines or its preaching, but by the way in which its adherents behave. In the modern age, atheism and agnosticism owe a great deal to a false view of science, the belief that science has all the answers and eliminates God from the equation; but that is an illusion which can be

fairly easily dissipated. Far more difficult to answer is the bitter and, to me, quite devastating “child’s prayer” which someone quoted to me years ago. “Lord, please make good people religious and—Lord!—please make religious people good.” That is the problem, isn’t it? The unbeliever sees others who have no faith engaged in acts of self-sacrifice; kind, caring, generous. He sees many of those who claim to be “believers” behaving selfishly; cruel, greedy and uncaring or perhaps killing in the name

of what they call their religion. What do you have to say about that? he asks. And those of us who claim to be “believers” are

put on the defensive; we try to disown our brothers and sisters in the Faith. 156

Words of Faith The first answer to this question is simple, but although it is true, any people find it unconvincing or irrelevant. This is that nothing human beings can do either proves or disproves the reality of God. If He is, then He is. The sun shines. Its shining is unaffected by human behaviour, and it would still shine if everyone on earth tried to deny its existence. But there has to be a more practical answer, and that is what I hope to talk about next.

I In my last talk I posed a problem. Religions are judged by the way in which their adherents behave. Few of us live up to the Faith in which we claim to believe, and some make use of religion as a mask to conceal their worst impulses. And this, precisely, is what persuades many people in the modern world to turn their backs on religion. They reserve their sternest condemnation

for the

religious elite, those who are expected to set an example. I have quoted the French philosopher, Gustave Thibon. Now let me quote him again. “It is difficult”, he says, “to be truthful when one is obliged to represent certain values which, if they are to be lived, demand qualities of character which God accords only to an infinitesimal number of mortals.” It is the gap between the demands which our Faith makes upon us and our human nature that surprises and even shocks those who know religious faith only from the outside. They should not be surprised. To recognise a fact—to acknowledge the reality of God—does not

necessarily change the character of a man or a woman. Admitting that two and two make four does not transform us. Religion is about incorporating into our very being truths which we either take for granted or have discovered. Someone who has been born into a patucular religion and sticks onto his breast a label saying “Muslim” or “Christian” does not always understand the neces-

sity to go beyond this labelling. The convert, likewise, amazed to have discovered what he now sees as the truth, imagines that he ED

REFLECTIONS

has reached a goal rather than committed himself to a troublesome journey. For Islam, God is Light. He has many other names in the

Qur’an but, when the Prophet Muhammad was asked if he had “seen God” he answered, “I saw Light.” We are all of us composite beings, part good, part evil in varying proportions. So long as we are in darkness, these qualities remain confused. When light falls upon us, the distinction between good and evil becomes inescapable. This, no doubt, is why one of the names given to

the Qur’an is “The Criterion”. The encounter with faith, the encounter with Light, brings to the surface what is in us; the evil as well as the good. The bitter fact is that the worst in us, rather than the best in us, may seize upon this faith and find in it an instrument of self-justification. This brings me to the lowest point in the long history of the disfigurement of religion. The modern age, at least in the West,

does not like to admit that we are killers, yet human history suggests that, alone among living creatures, many of us rejoice in killing our fellows. We are restrained by social pressure. We seek

the approval of our friends and neighbours. The readiness to kill is capped, though still latent. Then, one day, here or there, the cap is removed. A sector of society, suffering from a bitter sense of injustice, reaches the end of the road, and violence appears to them justified—either in the name of religion or of a political ideology. Now the potential killers crawl out from under the rocks and from every dark corner. They can do what they have always wanted to do—whether they knew it or not—with social approval. They will become heroes or, if they are killed, martyrs. In this way, faith—noble in itself—becomes inextricably

mixed with human passions, and self-righteousness enthrones itself—for, indeed, God never enthroned it. If the “label” (to use Thibon’s word) is a religious one, then the religion itself will be condemned; for these—the men and women of violence—are

the ones who occupy the headlines and it is by them that their 158

Words of Faith Faith is judged. Next, I hope to consider the dark side of “reli-

gious” people; in other words, the nature of self-righteousness. Ill I said that I would talk today about the “dark” side of religious people: self-righteousness. Those of us who believe in God value strong faith, deeply entrenched in the human personality. This is what religion is all about, so we must value it. Strong faith implies the conviction that “Iam right!” No one can believe passionately if he doubts his own convictions. But the assurance that “Tam right” is only too often followed by the further assurance

that everyone else is wrong. The Qur’an reminds us that: “You do not measure God by His true measure,” and this, for me, has a very wide application. The total truth is with God alone, and it is many-faceted. The believer is right because he has assimilated as much of this truth as he is capable of grasping. He is wrong when he imagines that the little light he has been granted covers the whole spectrum of the God who, in the Qur’an, names Himself

al-Hagq; the truth. Who does he think we are? Gods? This might not matter if it went no further. We could smile indulgently at someone who thinks that his little candle, though indeed it is a light, is equivalent to the sun in all its glory. The trouble is that he soon attributes this glory to himself, a reward for his virtues or an indication of his wisdom. “Do not walk

proudly on the earth!” says the Qur'an; but he walks proudly. Islam comes down on such attitudes like the proverbial “ton of bricks”. In yourselves, it assures us, you are nothing. Every posi-

tive quality you think you posses—but cannot possess—is a gratuitous gift from God and may at any moment be withdrawn. All good, we are told, comes from Him; all evil from ourselves. And,

to stamp on false pride, Islamic teaching constantly reminds us that “God does as He wills”, and it is not for us to examine His motives, let alone to judge them by human standards. I remem-

ber a wise old man, a spiritual Master, speaking of someone who 159

REFLECTIONS

had received great gifts of insight but was guilty of many sins, saying to his questioner: “You understand nothing. God makes use of whom He will. He may use a foolish man. He may even use a bad man. He does as He wills.” But still pride bubbles up. In Islam there are certain people who, throughout the ages, have been called malamatiyya, which means “people of blame”. They have received great spiritual gifts and an understanding beyond that of ordinary people, and they are afraid. They fear the adoring gaze of those who perceive their wisdom and think them great men. So they behave foolishly and invite the disapproval of their society, hoping that no one will think well of them. This is not false modesty. It is selfprotection. They know themselves. They know how swiftly

we can swell up with a sense of our own righteousness. They see that, if this were to happen to them, they might lose the precious gifts which God has given them given them, not for their merits but solely for His own eternally mysterious reasons. But surely we have our part to play? Surely we must try to be pleasing to God in our lives and in our persons in the hope of receiving His gifts? Indeed we must. But our task is simply to make room for what may come. Our task is a negative one; a matter of clearing the rubbish out of the inmost chamber the “heart” as it is called in Islam—and eliminating, so far as we can, the obstructions which prevent the light from entering. This requires humility and detachment. In my next talk, when I again look at the sacred month of Ramadan, I hope to relate these qualities to the Muslim Fast.

IV I ended my last talk with a reference to humility and detach-

ment as the best cure for the temptation to self-righteousness which lies in wait for “religious” people, a cure also for the dangerous conviction, “I am right and everyone else is wrong.” The Muslim is described as ‘abd Allah, although, in truth, 160

Words of Faith this term applies to everything that lives. Nowadays we usually translate it as “servant of Géd” to avoid the ugly associations of

the term “slave”. The fact remains that the Qur’an instructs us to say: “To God we belong, and to Him we return,” and the definition of a slave is that he belongs, not to himself, but to another. In this case, it is an honourable term and, whatever his outward circumstances, the true “slave of God” can never see himself as the slave of any man or, for that matter, of his own passions or of money or of his profession. He is truly independent because his Master is not of this world and nothing in this world can claim mastery over him. He is also, as the Qur’an reminds us, “poor”, no matter what earthly riches he

may possess. There is nothing that belongs to him as of right; neither his wealth nor his virtues nor even his own body. Everything he has is a loan from his Creator, a loan which will be returned to the Owner of the heavens and the earth when the time is ripe. Humility is not a feeling, but a fact, a cool recognition of what we are and of our existential situation. This brings me to detachment. In the first of these talks I quoted the French philosopher, Gustave Thibon’s reference to the “divine” label which so many believers stick onto their

earthly passions. Human emotions have their share in religious faith, but faith itself is not an emotion. It is a form of knowledge, perhaps even the supreme form of knowledge. It is the means by which, despite our ignorance, we know God with-

out being able to define Him. We cannot know what He is, but we can know that He is. We are prevented from knowing this if we are the slaves

of our own passions. They muddy the waters. Let me quote Thibon once again. “Give the same welcome”, he says, “and maintain the same distance with regard both to joy and to sorrow...Let your passions flow within you, but do not flow with them.” I am reminded immediately of a verse in the Qur’an

which tells us neither to grieve over what escapes us nor to 161

REFLECTIONS

rejoice unduly over what comes to us; in other words, to maintain an attitude of detachment in the midst of worldly vicissitudes, never allowing ourselves to be so totally engulfed either by grief or by joy that we forget God, who both gives

and withholds blessings according to His eternal, all-seeing wisdom. A difficult lesson, but one that is forcefully pointed by the month of fasting, the sacred month of Ramadan. Outwardly we abstain from food and drink during the daylight hours, but this would have little value if it were not the outward sign of an inward state. However much we may be a prey to our emotions throughout the rest of the year, we must distance

ourselves from them during Ramadan. The fast is ruined if we give way to anger, hatred, resentment, envy or to any overmastering passion. This is true detachment; an emptiness which is to be filled with the remembrance of God, the thought of Him, the awareness of His Presence; for, as the Prophet said, “Though you see Him not, yet He sees you!” This “month of detachment” is of value in itself, but it is of far greater value if the state of mind which it requires is prolonged through all the months of the year. That is the true significance of Ramadan.

162

WORDS

OF FAITH

A Relationship of Reciprocity (DECEMBER

1996)

I O* OF THE ODDEST THINGS about the people who reject what they call “organised religion” in favour of strange cults is that they so readily replace the profound with the superficial. The great religions have a breadth and a depth which could never be explored, even in a lifetime, whereas the cults, when their surface glamour is scraped away, are empty and narrow. But it is inevitable that the believers in the great Faiths find in them more than they can absorb—dare one say more than they can use?—and often neglect aspects of their religion which do not seem immediately relevant to their lives. This, I believe, has been the case with a majority of Muslims who have tended

to ignore what the Qur’an has to say about our environment and regarding our obligations towards the animal creation.

The Qur’an speaks of the Day when the earth will “yield up her burdens”. She will then “tell her tales”. “On that Day”, we read, “mankind will issue, separately, to be shown their deeds. Whosoever has done an atom’s weight of good will see it then, and whosoever has done an atom’s weight of ill will see it.” It might be said that we leave our fingerprints on everything that we touch, and they remain in place long after we have gone on our way. But this is only one side of the relationship we have with everything around us, a relationship of reciprocity. We are not insulated from our surroundings. We are, so to speak, porous and soak up elements from whatever we see, hear or touch. When we treat the natural world only as an object 163

REFLECTIONS

to be exploited and conquered, we are damaging ourselves. Environmentalists predict that our abuse of the earth will have disastrous consequences for humanity as a whole, but that may be the least of our worries. The consequences are on many different levels; the higher the level, the more deadly they are likely to be. “Work not confusion in the earth after the fair ordering

thereof,” says the Qur’an. The Muslim is assured that the whole earth is a mosque for him. The walled buildings to which he is summoned to prayer are simply a convenience. The fields, the forest and the desert are equally fitting places for prayer and therefore demand the same respect that is accorded to a conventional mosque. To show respect for everything that God has created is a part of faith, for everything bears the imprint of His

hand. The man or woman who stands, bows and prostrates in the midst of nature is a member of a universal congregation, joining in a universal prayer. “All that is in the heavens and the

earth glorifies God,” says the Qur’an. The beauties of the earth are, the Qur’an tells us, a “reminder to mankind”, a reminder to those who are disposed to remember their origin and their end. For such as these, the natural world sparkles with light. It is not some chance agglomeration of atoms, unrelated to our innermost being. It gives, if we are receptive to the gift, and it receives if we, in our turn, offer it the care which is its right. The objective world around us and our human subjectivity might be compared to two circles which intersect rather than float, separate and divided, independently

of each other. This is implicit in the Islamic principle of Tawhid, the Oneness of God and the unbroken unity of all that He has created. It is implicit also in the word “cosmos” (as opposed to “universe”, a neutral term that implies nothing). The cosmos is, by definition, an ordered and harmonious whole, in which the parts are interdependent. “No man is an island,” as the poet Donne said, and the human creature—totally dependent on God, but dependent also upon the environment—is for ever in the bonds of need and the net of love. 164

Words of Faith

II I drew attention to the importance which the Qur’an attaches to the environment, the natural world, as a “reminder” which helps us to keep God always present in our awareness. Nothing in our surroundings is quite what it seems, or rather nothing is only what it seems, and, for the Muslim, it is a part of faith to look upon all things with “seeing eyes”. But to perceive, even dimly, these inescapable signs of God requires a child’s eye preserved into maturity. The Prophet is reported to have prayed: “O my Lord, increase me in marvelling!” This is how a child sees the world, fresh from the Hand of God and full of wonders but, with the passage of the years, the vision fades. Yet, in the

words of the Qur’an, “It is not the eyes that grow blind but the hearts within the breasts that grow blind.” Imbued with faith, the heart may still regain its sight, its insight.

The loss of harmony between man and his environment is but an aspect of the loss of harmony between man and his Creator. Those who turn their backs on their Creator and forget Him can no longer feel at home in creation. “God’s viceregent

on earth”, as the Qur’an describes the man who truly fulfils his human function, is then no longer the custodian of nature and has become a stranger in the world, a stranger who cannot recognise the landmarks or conform to the customs of this place. Today, whether we are Muslims or Christians—or of any other Faith—we seem to have lost the key to the language of “signs”, God’s language. That is dangerous, particularly for the

Muslim for whom the Qur’4n must eventually become a partially-closed book if its constant references to the natural world as a tissue of “signs” no longer coincide with his experience or touch his heart. Since everything has to be spelled out nowadays, there are many who will ask: “But what do these ‘signs’ mean?”

If they could be expressed in words they would be redundant. They touch us at a deeper level than articulate speech. The Prophet Muhammad is reported to have said: “God is 165

REFLECTIONS

beautiful and He loves beauty.” To speak of the natural world is to speak of beauty, whether we are receptive to it or not. And what is this beauty if not an act of adoration? “Do you not see,”

asks the Qur’an, “that everything in the heavens and all that is in the earth pays adoration to God, as do the sun and the moon and the stars, the hills and the trees and the beasts?” It is only too easy to see this as a “poetic” statement, not to be taken quite literally. On the contrary, for the believing Muslim this is—or

should be—an undeniable fact. When the Qur’an speaks, as it does on so many occasions, of this universal and perpetual adoration, it is doing neither more nor less than telling us what hap-

pens, the down-to-earth reality of the situation. Our subjective awareness—or lack of awareness—cannot alter the facts. We did not make this world, we do not own it. “You can-

not,” the Qur’an reminds us, “create even a fly.” As I have said earlier, this vast picture-book, filled with the “signs of God”, is what it is. Appearances are, as we are so often told, deceptive and if we float only on the surface of our world, we are indeed deceived. There is always more to it than that, then more and still more until you have plumbed the depths and found, beyond all the veils—those “seventy-thousand veils of light and darkness’, according to one of the Prophet’s sayings—the Face of God, the glory that lies hidden behind the things we take for granted. Look, we are commanded, and then look again, until you can see.

Il I mentioned in my first talk of this series that many Muslims

seem to have ignored the implications of what the Qur’an tells us about the natural world and about the importance of the

animal creation. Not only the Qur'an. The recorded sayings of the Prophet, the hadith literature, refer again and again to these aspects of the Faith. The good Muslim’s life is lived in imitation of the Prophet 166

Words of Faith Muhammad’s example, and it is in the ahadith [pl. of hadith] that we find the most uncompromising references to animal welfare. They have grave implications for all who fall short in their care for the animals in their charge. Not only are there the famous stories of the woman condemned to hell for shutting up a cat till it died of hunger and of the prostitute forgiven all her sins because she gave water to a dog that was dying of thirst, but there are a number of small incidents in the record which emphasise the same principle. When the Prophet saw a donkey that had been branded on its face, he cried out: “God curse the one who branded it!” A man who was about to slaughter a goat for food was severely reproached for letting the animal see him sharpening his knife. A prophet of earlier times, so we are told, was scolded by God Himself for burning an ant’s nest because an ant had stung him: “You have destroyed a community that glorified Me!” and there is, according to another saying, a reward in Paradise for whoever shows kindness to a creature with “a living heart”.

The Qur’an tells us: “Your Lord inspired the bee, saying: Choose dwellings in the hills and in the trees and in what is built; then eat all manner of fruit and follow humbly the ways of your Lord made smooth.” In other words, follow your Shari ‘ah. Islam teaches that, just as mankind has been given a Shari‘ah, a path of righteousness to be followed by all who believe in God and are obedient to Him, so each of the non-human species has a path laid down for it. And each of these “communities”, as the Qur’an describes them, has a particular relationship with its Lord. But the Lord is One. Ours as well as theirs. There is, however, an important difference here. The animals cannot diverge from their path. They cannot “sin”. Whereas mankind has been given the freedom to choose between following the

right way—the “straight path”, as it is called —or wandering off into a trackless wilderness.

Since we of the human community so readily trip and 167

REFLECTIONS

stumble on our way, constantly tempted to go astray, we have in the animal creation an example of perfect obedience to the divine Rule. If we depart too far from the path laid down for us we do not become, as some would have it, “like animals”; we fall below their level. Free choice is our privilege, a very dangerous privilege if we abuse it. Were it not for the divine Mercy, scattered like rain throughout creation, we would indeed be in a bad way, but what matters most is that we should keep in mind what might be called the prime directive of Islam: the constant “remembrance of God”. Yet we are by nature forgetful. The world presses upon us and

makes its demands. We are busy, all too busy. We are in haste, though the Prophet said once that haste comes from Satan, slow-

ness (and patience) from God. So we are given reminders. The Qur’an describes itself, precisely, as “a reminder to mankind”. The “signs” which abound in the natural world are similarly described, and here we have the animals—wild and domesticated—saying to us, in effect, “Remember!” There is one complaint we cannot make, one excuse we cannot offer: we can never say—*We forgot to remember God, and no one reminded us!” But if we do remember and follow the path “made smooth for us”, then we are in step with the animals, the plants and the earth itself.

168

WORDS

OF FAITH

The Night Journey (DECEMBER

1996)

ip THE ORTHODOX VIEW, Islam claims only one miracle. The

revelation of the Qur’an to the Prophet Muhammad. Legend attributes many other marvels to him, but we are free to believe

or disbelieve in these. What matters is the Qur’an, the foundation stone of the Faith. Yet there is something else, something that is, perhaps, beyond the miraculous, and that is the Prophet’s “Night Journey”, his ascension to heaven and his standing, quite alone, before the Throne of God.

The Qur'an itself bears witness to this event in rather mysterious terms: “Glorified be He who carried His servant by night from the sacred mosque to the far-distant mosque, whose precincts We have blessed, in order that We might show him some of our signs.” The “sacred mosque” is the Ka‘ba in Mecca. The far-distant one is the place in Jerusalem where the Dome of the Rock now stands. These few lines have opened up a whole spiritual landscape and a visionary teaching of the utmost

importance to the religion of Islam. Taken by themselves, they may seem to tell us little. But the event was illuminated by what the Prophet himself said, and, following his death, commenta-

tors and mystics expanded the story in great detail. From that seminal verse has grown a great tree which has given shelter and nourishment, hope and inspiration, to countless millions of believers. One night late in the year 620 of the Christian era, Gabriel, 169

REFLECTIONS

the Angel of Revelation, entered the Prophet’s chamber, woke him and led him to where a marvellous winged steed named Buraq waited impatiently. It carried him—in the twinkling of an eye or little more—to Jerusalem. There he was welcomed by a number of earlier prophets, with Abraham, Moses and Jesus at their head; and there he led them in prayer. The revelation which God had sent to mankind through him was the culmination and fulfilment of the messages which it had been their destiny to convey to a humanity always inclined to forget and to deviate from the path laid down by the Creator. From Jerusalem, still guided by Gabriel, he mounted through the heavens, each of them guarded and enlightened by a particular prophet, until the moment came when the angel could go no further, for even the mightiest of supernatural beings is limited to its sphere of operation. The travellers had come to the “uttermost boundary” beyond which only man, mortal man, could proceed to the supreme encounter. Exalted

above time and space—even above the heavens—Muhammad bowed down before the Throne of God and, with the eye of his heart, contemplated his Lord. Asked, when he had returned to himself, if he had seen God, he replied: “I saw Light.” For every Muslim, this story of the night journey and the ascension has been an assurance of the Prophet’s pre-eminence

and of the truth of the Qur’an. For the mystics, it has been an indication that, although we are immersed in time and space— swimming like fish in these dimensions—we are not entirely their prisoner. No other human being can hope to follow in the footsteps of the Prophet on his journey and his ascension. This was a privilege which God accorded to him alone. But there

are other journeys beyond the limits of our habitual awareness which are still possible for those who dedicate their lives to the love and service of their Creator; those who know how close God is to us and how far we are from Him. For the mystics, self-

purification is the first step on such a journey. We are burdened 170

Words of Faith with the dross which we accumulate in our earthly lives. No bird could fly so burdened. ‘We start, as it were, by lightening the load. From then on the whole matter is in God’s hands. Only He knows if we are fit to go further.

ill

WORDS OF FAITH The Islamic Way of Life: The Shariah HIS WORLD might be a more peaceful place if only peoDee would define the key words they use before embarking on an argument. Muslims talk constantly about the Shariah, whether it is unchangeable or adaptable, how it should be applied to human societies and so on. They do not always mean the same thing by this word. In origin, it means the path by which animals come down to the waterhole. Were there no such path they would die of thirst, so this is essentially the water of life, infinitely precious and incomparably sweet. Since we are human creatures, not an-imals, our path leads, not to the earthly waterhole but to the spiritual realm, to Paradise and, ultimately,

to God who is named “The Nourisher” in the Qur’an. Learned Muslims will tell you that the Shariah is the Islamic

way of life in its entirety and in all its aspects, but most people equate it with the religious Law, called Figh in Arabic. This distinction is of crucial importance in modern times. The great body of Islamic Law, Figh, is a codification of the Muslim way oflife, Shari'ah. But it was drawn up by men, wise yet inevitably fallible. It was drawn up by lawyers—jurisprudents—with strictly legalistic minds some hundred-and-fifty years after the death of the Prophet. They based the Laws of Islam on the

Qur’an and the hadith, the reported sayings of Muhammad. This is one of the great marvels of human endeavour. But it cannot

have the absolute authority which belongs solely to the Qur’an. Moreover, it was devised to cover every imaginable or foreseeable contingency at that time, more than a thousand years ago.

V7

Words of Faith It is in the nature of the legal mind to insist on crossing every ‘t’ and dotting every “?. The founders of the four schools of Sunni law did so. I remember a particular paragraph in a law book I helped to edit. The author was considering the factors which might make the water of a well unfit for purposes of ablution. If an animal fell into the well its decaying body would soon pollute it. He calculated the sizes of various creatures in relation to a given volume of water. Obviously a donkey would pollute the well more quickly than a frog. Then he considered the matter of frogs. I can picture the scene. This learned man is working late into the night. It is bedtime and his taper is burning low. Has he left anything out? A thought strikes him. Somewhere in this wonderful world there may exist skinless frogs. They would decay more quickly. He takes up his pen

again and adds a paragraph on skinless frogs. There are four schools of Law universally accepted as essential guides to right living in Sunni Islam. They differ only in certain details or in differences of emphasis. All four are accepted as embodiments of the Islamic way of life. These are the Dos and Don'ts which govern the behaviour of the good Muslim down to the tiniest details. They were the basis of the extraordinary

stability of Islamic civilisation for more than a thousand years. But they are, in a sense, incomplete. The law books cannot, by their very nature, incorporate the spirit of Islam; the spirit of mercy, the love of beauty, tolerance, moderation and, also resignation in the face of the mysteries of human destiny. They are

an important aspect of the Shari ‘ah, but they are not the Shari ah as such in all its splendour, its spiritual depth and its eternal relevance to the problems of human life.

173

WORDS OF FAITH The Islamic Shariah Today N MY LAST TALK I suggested that there is an important disTeer between the Shari‘ah, which governs the Muslim’s way of life, and Figh, its codification in the law books. The Shari‘ah is “for ever”. It is unchangeable. But the way in which it was codified, more than a thousand years ago, in laws, rules and regulations does not have—cannot have—the same degree of sanctity. And yet, if the Law is to be in any way adapted to changing circumstances, this requires the utmost caution and a minimum of dilution. This is the year 1415 in the Islamic calendar [1994 C.E.]. I do not know how many times I have been asked by Christians whether I think Islam will “develop” in the way that Christianity has developed, adapting itself to changing times; in other words, progressing. The short answer is that there can be no “progress” in Islam. We believe that it was perfect in its inception

and could only go downhill after that. Consider for a moment the question: Why Islam? Why did God reveal a new way of

salvation? The Qur'an tells us that countless divine messengers had preceded Muhammad. Was that not sufficient? No, says the Muslim, because the previous messages had been distorted over the course of time; they had, in other words, been adapted to human desires and human convenience. They had, let us say,

been made “relevant” to ages of decadence. Muslims are determined that Islam must not suffer the same fate. What, they ask,

174

Words of Faith is religion for if not to stand as a fixed point when everything else is falling away from the True ‘and the Good? This is the almost overwhelming problem that Muslims face today, in a world dominated by Western culture, secular ideas and the marginalisation of religion. How far can we compromise, under circumstances never foreseen by the early law-makers, without dragging our Faith down a slippery slope? There are no simple answers to this agonising question, but over the past hundred years there have been leaders of the Community who thought they knew the answer: back to the source, they said, back to the Qur’an! In other words, put the ancient Law to one side and rediscover the true Shariah on the basis of the Revelation itself. At this point, a warning light flashes in my mind. The founders of the schools of Law worked on the basis of a scholarship and a depth of understanding hardly to be found among Muslims today. What actually happens is that ignorant people, on the

basis of a superficial reading of the Qur’an, set themselves up as the new law-makers. That, I am afraid, includes the so-called

Fundamentalists. The consensus, upon which the stability of the Community depended, has been broken into pieces. What is to be done? The first necessity, I believe, is the reawakening of consciences. For more than a thousand years the Muslim did not need to consult his or her conscience because everything had been spelled out, every moral question had a simple answer in the law books. That is no longer so, and Muslims are now required to follow the Prophet’s advice and “consult their

hearts”. Secondly, those who search the Qur’an for solutions to contemporary problems must learn humility. False certainties are the curse of the Islamic world today, hence the bitter, divisive conflicts. Finally, the true spirit of Islam, compassionate and tolerant, must take precedence over all other considerations. We

know that God is One. We know that Muhammad was his final Messenger and Prophet. Beyond that, we have opinions, and opinions are not certainties. Meanwhile, there is something else 175

REFLECTIONS

we know. We know how great a sin it is to cause divisions within the Community of Islam [the umma]. On this basis, and on the basis of prayer, the love of God, and the love of our fellow crea-

tures—the “children of Adam”—we may yet solve our problems.

PAUSE FOR THOUGHT The Need to Pause

I HEN I FIRST GAVEa series of short talks on this service they were called “Reflections”. Later they became “Words of Faith”, and now they are just a “Pause for Thought”. Well—that gives me my theme today and for the next three talks: the need

to pause, the importance of pausing in our busy lives. A few days ago there was an article in one of the papers about senior executives who dare not even pause for a holiday, fearing that, on their return, they will find someone else occupying their desk. There you have it. The rat race, as it is so aptly described. Speaking as a Muslim, I believe that, unless we have a true order of priorities, our lives go astray and our spiritual well-

being is sacrificed to trivial pursuits. The Qur’an tells us, without fudging the issue, that we were created to pray, to worship God, to keep Him always in mind and to give Him precedence

over everything else. Certainly, we have to earn our living, our sufficiency. That is obvious. But the modern world demands something more. Unless we occupy some humble position and are content with that, it demands that we give ourselves, body and soul, to the job. Our spiritual life and—tor that matter—our

family life is subordinated to this claim. What kind of job? A few people are doing creative work which may well have a spiritual aspect and which does not oblige them to forget their Creator,

but they are exceptionally fortunate. The majority work only LGif

REFLECTIONS

to keep the wheels turning, and no one asks what is the point of keeping them turning. Economic growth, perhaps, and an

increasingly comfortable standard of life? The Qur’an condemns this as “greed for more and more” and adds “until you come to the graves”. Muslims have to be aware—constantly aware—of life’s brevity. We are told that, when the end comes, we will think that we spent only an hour or a part of a day in this world. A whole lifetime is gone in a flash, and only one thing matters; whether we have used that little time to good effect and made ourselves fit for what comes after, the “real” life according to

the Qur’an, enduring joy. With such a prize in sight, it is only common sense to make good use of the time allowed us. Think now of the executive who dare not take a holiday—a holy day, for that is what the word means—and who stays late at the office, not always to do effective work but simply to prove that he or she gives absolute priority to the job and, perhaps, to steal a march on fellow workers less dedicated. They are too busy to “pause for thought”, to pause for God. Spiritual life, awareness of our origin and of our end, requires space, requires time free from worldly concerns, and—

if we have no spiritual life—we shall come to the graves as empty husks, the sad leavings of wasted lives. We shall, quite simply,

have got our priorities wrong, and that—from a Muslim point of view—is the greatest sin. We have preferred the world to the Creator of the world and forgotten why we came here.

II I talked last week about wasted time. Time in which all our energy, all our thoughts, all our attention are given exclusively

to the job we do, the job which is supposed to define our identity. “What do you do?” is a common question when meeting a stranger; never “ Who are you?” or, as in the Arab world, “What

is your family?” But surely productive work is positive, not a 178

Pause for Thought waste of time? God has said in the Qur’an: “Remember Me, I will remember you.” But He has also said: “They forgot God,

therefore He forgot them,” and to be forgotten is truly to be cast into outer darkness. So, for the Muslim, those periods of the day in which we do not pause to ) think of our Creator and

Sustainer are pure loss. I said also that, in the Islamic perspective, man—woman too—is created to worship and to seek wisdom. This requires explanation. Prayer and worship, whatever form they may take, are simply an act of turning, turning in the right direction, turning towards God. By this simple act we open a channel connecting what is above with what is below. It is upon that connection that our identity as specifically human beings depends; when it is broken our humanity withers, the gift of wisdom is withdrawn from us; we swim in a turbulent ocean without anchor and without tether. But does God need our worship, in some way depend upon it? One of the most basic principles of Islam is His total independence of all needs. If every human creature worshipped Him, this would not increase His power or His splendour by one iota. If no man or woman on earth gave a thought to Him, this power and this splendour would not decrease even by an infinitesimal degree. He is what He is, and nothing that we do can aftect Him. It is for our own sakes that we worship because we are defined

in the Qur’an as “the needy” and we depend upon keeping that channel open. Aware that plants turn naturally towards the sun, we are never so foolish as to suppose that the sun depends for its existence upon this vegetable devotion. It is the plant that seeks life from the source of its life, and everyone knows this. Religion is an awkward thing. After all, it comes from above and does not fit comfortably into our worldly framework, in fact it often breaks the frame. It refuses to be content to occupy one small corner of our lives, to be one element among others in

the complex structure of our brief human existence. Religion 179

REFLECTIONS

is all or nothing. Those for whom it is indeed nothing—a myth,

a superstition—go their way. In the Qur'an, the Prophet is instructed to say to them, “To you your way, and to me mine.” But those who claim to have faith and who at least acknowledge a reality beyond this place are obliged, if they are logical, to accept an order of priorities which puts everything in its place and to deny precedence to their work or their play. For all who get their priorities right, there is an immediate reward, quite apart from the promised recompense hereafter: relief from the

corroding anxiety which afflicts so many people in our time. For if only one thing really matters, then everything else is secondary, relatively trivial. It does not merit even one sleepless night.

Ill As a schoolboy, some sixty years ago, I learned reams of poetry by heart. Little remains; a verse here or there, a few lines still fixed in my memory. I do remember this from the hobo poet, W. H. Davies:

What is this life if, full of We have no time to stand No time to stand beneath And stare as long as sheep

care, and stare. the boughs or cows.

A good question, inviting us to pause for thought. Many of my fellow Muslims might be surprised if I describe Islam as a contemplative religion. That, in essence, is what it is. The Qur’an constantly commands us to think, to consider, to meditate, and many of its verses are specifically addressed to “those who think”. It commands us also to remember God constantly, and that is a form of meditation. But it also encourages the true

Muslim to look upon the signs of God scattered all around; in other words, “to stand and stare”. There are, in truth, two sacred

books which demand our attention; the first is the Qur’an, the second is the book of nature. The two are closely interconnected, 180

Pause for Thought for the Qur’an takes its images and its similes from nature: the wind and the rain, ocean waves and hurrying clouds, the earth made fruitful by water from the heavens. And these, in their turn, are illuminated by the written book, which gives them depth and meaning. Everything on earth, so the Qur’an tells us, glorifies God in its own way, though we do not understand this prayer and this praise. But we can participate in it when we contemplate these wonders; that is, if we have time to contemplate them. Which brings me back to the subject of my earlier talks. Time lost in hurry and worry and routine work is not only the time in which we forget God; it is also that part of our lives in which our eyes are closed to the signs of God and our hearts are hardened against the glorification present in nature. The Prophet Muhammad said that haste comes from Satan, slowness from God. The work most people do today is hasty work, “beating the clock” and in anxious awareness of that inexorable clock. When they are required to take themselves from one part of the world to another, they do not travel; they are transported from here to there in a few hours and nothing is seen of the mountains, rivers or forests that bear witness to their Creator always ready to teach us about Him. In so far as we are cut off from the natural world, we are separated from.wisdom, and, with each year that passes, we are increasingly cut off. Where are the stars—to which the Qur’an refers to often as a source of guidance—when street lighting obliterates them? Where are the streams of pure water which remind us of Paradise, and where—in this noisy world—is the silence that pacifies the busy mind? What has been lost is the sense of the sacred which is the heart of wisdom and, in every tradition, has been associated with the world of nature, and nothing we have gained in wealth, in comfort or in safety can compensate for this devastating loss. We are made for the sacred and, ultimately, for nothing else. 181

REFLECTIONS

IV I havea very particular prejudice—one among others—against

the term “professionalism”. I know why. Years ago, when my children were very young, I was working in the Diplomatic Service in Madras. From time to time, I had to go to Delhi for meetings in the High Commission, and on this occasion I had taken my wife with me. One evening a very senior ofhcial cornered her and delivered a severe lecture. We should, he told her, send the children to boarding school in England, although our son was only four. We must be “professional” about this. It was our duty to adopt a “professional” attitude in such matters. The implication was clear. The job came first. When necessary, the family must be sacrificed to what were called the “exigencies of the Service”. Needless to say, we took no notice, but the incident has remained vividly in my memory. It encapsulated the contemporary attitude to work and it betrayed a distorted order of priorities. For Muslims, the family takes precedence. In my previous talks, Ihave suggested that prayer, worship—the remembrance of God and meditation on His splendour—take precedence over everything else, in principle if not in practice. According to the Qur’an, it is for this that we were created. But, in the Islamic order of priorities, the family, the extended family, comes a good second. I think there are two reasons for this. On the purely human level, the family is the only counterweight we have to the power of the ruler or the state (whether

democratic nor not). It is our only defence against the greed for power and still more power which always characterises “the powers that be”. When the citizens have become separate units—single mothers and men who drift from one partner to

another—they are completely at the mercy of the State. Secondly, a unitary society bound together by countless webs of relationship, as is the case with the extended family, 182

Pause for Thought reflects, in its own way, the divine Unity and exemplifies the basic principle of Islam: Tawhid, the Onenesss of God. The inter connectedness of all the individuals in this society is the foundation upon which the life of worship is built, a solid and unshakeable foundation. In the West today, the home is little more than a dormitory for the worker whose real life unfolds in the office or the factory. No wonder there is so much criticism of Islam for tending to keep women in the home rather than sending them out to fight for money or position in a working environment. But change the order of priorities, exalt home and family above the workplace, and you have a different picture. Women preside over what matters most while men—poor wretches—are bound to the merciless wheel of labour, fighting to preserve the welfare of their family. I spoke earlier in terms of priorities. Let me, in conclusion, emphasise one of the most basic principles of Islam. Balance, both in spiritual life and in our human existence as creatures plunged into the light and shade of this world. As the Muslim sees it, there is another word for balance, and that is peace. The very word Islam is derived from the Arabic word for peace. Where balance is lacking there is conflict and disorder, both outward and inward. While it is maintained, men and women are free to turn'to God as plants turn to the sun.

183

~

oe AL = ‘neg foie phigh ney

_ ie

a a

Bouh

Wias

i

: :*ob

a

ct 36,

' re, rw

1h Py

=

4 ’

at ve

bei

a

“}*

aparece ig

is" vt Eo

>

7

Oa? oy.

—

> ae

*5

Ue

ETWEEN THE YEARS 1978 and 1996, the late Gai Eaton gave a series of Baw on BBC Radio about Islam and its role in contemporary society. Eighty-six of these talks—variously titled Reflections, Words of Faith

and Pause for Thought—are published here for the first time as Reflections. Together these talks provide a beautifully clear and accessible introduction to the central tenets, principles and practices at the heart of Islam and, as such, are not only a unique guide for non-Muslims, but also an

inspiring reminder to Muslims of the essence of their faith. Connecting

everything that Eaton discusses in Reflections are the

two principles of the Oneness of God (Tawhid) and the Viceregency of man (khilafah). Whether discussing the five pillars of Islam, or the Sufi concepts of fear, love and knowledge, or the idea of a ‘just war’, or environmental changes, Gai Eaton reminds us that nothing is independent of the One who is Truth, Mercy and Beauty and that we, who are the Viceregents of this Truth, must—if we are to live up to the potential within us—undertake the human struggle, the inner jihad, to convert our divided souls into unified, harmonious, balanced souls; souls not motivated by selfishness, self-regard and self-righteousness, but souls in

a state of peace, illumined by the permanent consciousness of the Divine. While always expressing himself as a Muslim, Gai Eaton’s voice, with all its wisdom, its humanity and its humour, speaks to all those interested in a spiritual approach to life.

Charles Le Gai Eaton was born in Switzerland and educated at Charterhouse and King’s College, Cambridge. He worked for many

years as a teacher and journalist in Jamaica and Egypt (where he embraced Islam in 1951) before joining the British Diplomatic Service. For more than twenty years, he was consultant to the Islamic Cultural Centre in London. Among his other titles are Islam and the Destiny ofMan, Remembering God and King ofthe Castle. Cover image © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. THE ISLAMIC TEXTS SOCIETY CAMBRIDGE

B21 49

903" 68 i:

ie