Riding the Tiger of Modernity

Riding the Tiger of Modernity

Sheikh Abdal Hakim Murad

Opening

"In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful."

"All praise is due to Allah, and blessings and peace upon the Messenger of Allah, his family, his companions, and those who are loyal to him."

"Peace be upon you, and the mercy of Allah and His blessings."

Introduction to "Riding the Tiger"

Some of you will recognize the lack of originality in the title. "Riding the tiger" is a fairly hackneyed expression used quite often by those whose policy of responding to the perhaps unheralded challenges of the modern world consists not in the perhaps requisite eschatological Sharia expectation or directive to head for the hills with the proverbial flock of sheep, but to jump on the back of this threatening tiger and to see if one can attempt to tame it.

Much of the so-called Islamist agenda of the past 50 years, perhaps more, has been based on the idea that one can, for instance, rather than retreat from the banking system, attempt to carve out a niche within it or even to tame it in some sense so that it can once again be directed towards a just and legitimate Sharia end.

The idea of the nation state, another bugbear of many of our brethren, is in the eyes of many something that can be appropriated and turned into something called an Islamic state. We can even have an Islamic republic - an interesting irony when you consider that republicanism, particularly in its enlightenment guise, emerged specifically as an antidote to a perceived clericy or theocracy.

Julius Evola and the Critique of Modernity

Some of you may recall that "riding the tiger" goes back in certain circles to the by now classic work of Julius Evola: Chevaucher le Tigre (Ride the Tiger). His full title is "a survival manual for the aristocrats of the soul."

This emerges from an intellectual world generally unfamiliar to most Muslims who have difficulties strolling into a bookshop and even picking up books to enable them to understand the mainstream principles of modernity, let alone dissident voices within it.

Within the story of Western modernity and the agonistic progress towards a still undefined, unimaginable, utopian endgame, there have been many dissidents - sometimes of a Christian disposition, sometimes of a class war disposition, sometimes of a racist disposition - who have sought to jump ship because of their radical interrogation of the value of the modern project.

The European Far-Right and Missed Opportunities

The European far-right represents yet another missed opportunity. It is partly xenophobic, anti- immigrant, quite often explicitly or implicitly racist, but it is also often based on a certain anxiety about the loss of meaning, the confiscation of identity by modernity, for which it uses often the immigrant, the strange-looking guy with the corner shop, as the scapegoat.

But it also represents a form of dissidence that has as its root a genuine unease about what and who we become when all of the traditional constituents of our identity - monarchy, district, pilgrimage, the sacred, priesthood, going to church, everything - has been taken away, even the significance of the flag and the old regiments.

The Paradox of Liberal Tolerance

If the dominant ideology is to be liberalism, to what extent can liberalism, ostensibly a doctrine of tolerance, actually tolerate anything other than itself? Liberalism, in some ways, seems to be becoming increasingly coercive. You must have such and such a curriculum. You must have certain views about alternative sexualities. You must have certain views about gender.

The current strange liberal inquisition into schools - "thou shalt be a liberal" - instituted by Ofsted and other quasi-state institutions, is just an example of the inherent paradox of this late liberal, or you might say, coercive liberal project.

The Crisis of the Self in Modernity

So much Muslim talk is about boundary issues, is about identity, is about being something, more than it is about believing something. Ethics tends to be subsumed under a kind of furious legalism that is largely a matter of defending one's threatened sense of self at all costs, rather than being connected to a genuine sense of what is right and what is wrong.

Recently, one of my students carried out a set of experiments - he's got a PhD in neurology - in which he wired up various religious young British Muslims, measuring them as their brains responded to certain propositions. And very often he found, to his embarrassment, that what the Muslim brains were actually doing was very different to what the Muslim mouths were actually saying.

This cognitive dissonance is something that is very painful for a lot of people and generates forms of fundamentalism that seek to inhabit that critical space, that dissonance, and to try and close that gap.

Ibn Taymiyyah and the Sovereignty of the Self

Why is it that so many people find their spiritual home with the works of Ibn Taymiyyah, rather than al- Ghazali? Ibn Taymiyyah, really an outlier in Islamic history - not even his famous followers didn't really follow him in a lot of things, and the Ummah generally passed by his thought in silence.

He believed that beyond the claimed contemporary consensus of the Ulama, and the established wisdom of the four Madhhabs and the Asha'ira and the established Sufi tariqas, there could be some sovereign principle within the soul of the believer himself, namely the fitrah, which could enable one ultimately to have a good intuitive believer's sense of what actually is right or wrong.

If you're saying, "the four Madhhabs require me to pray like this, but my fitrah reading the Quran and the sunnah say that actually I should pray like that," you have something that might claim to be a unifying principle, but which in practice tends to shatter the madhhab of Islam into as many madhhab as there are human beings who think they're in touch with their fitrah.

The Jahiliyyah of Modern Fundamentalism

The Jahiliyyah is precisely predicated on the sovereign human self. The hamiyyah to Jahiliyyah, the feverishness of the Jahiliyyah, is about us versus them, my tribe, right or wrong, with no real aversion to higher ethics or a sense that every soul is a hostage for what it has acquired.

This aversion is precisely what happens when the nafs becomes sovereign and is so pleased with itself that it thinks that it can sit on some high throne and look down on the ulema of the madahib and all of the ulema of tasawwuf and all of the ulema of kalam and say, "Nope, I may just be a dentistry student in Antwerp, but I know better than al-Ghazali and Juwayni and Ibn Hanbal and all of those."

Louis Massignon and the Cave of Treasures

Louis Massignon, perhaps of all Western writers on the religion of Islam, the one who really sought to go deepest and who has had quite an influence in Muslim circles, whose disciples, some of them did become Muslim, like his most famous disciple Vincent Mortay, who was professor of Arabic at the Sorbonne and was the French translator of Ibn Khaldun and Albiruni.

Massignon's star pupil went into the Islamic ummah but from a position of real erudition and from a position of looking at what's essential and what is deepest rather than the incrustations of the surface and seen from the perspective of the turbulences of the ego.

The fundamentalist in that cave says "well this doesn't look right, who made this stuff? We'll melt it all down and we'll just have the gold. Islam will be just gold and we won't have all of this stuff and that stuff and that's all confusing and that's culture and let's just have the gold."

What they do is to melt down those treasures and to take the gold of the Quran and the Sunnah and to create new and often horrifying forms called suicide bombing or whatever it might be, to replace those old and beautiful forms.

The Wali Songo: A Model of Enculturation

We should know about the Wali Songo. They are the nine awliya, the nine great scholars and saints, who are traditionally credited with the conversion of the island of Java to Islam.

For him, the great genius of Islam is that it retains its structures of doctrine and of practice absolutely and miraculously intact, in the midst of outward cultural forms that can be more diverse than those cultural forms generated by any other civilization.

The Wali Songo's strategy was to say: take people to what is deepest in religion, and don't waste their time with the surface things. That'll come later, and it's not the most important thing. What they believe is actually more important than what they're wearing.

Sunan Bonang's Wisdom

Sunan Bonang's great legacy in many ways was his mastery of the Javanese language and his creation of songs and poems that use the forms of the traditional Indic devotional literature of Java, but with an Islamic content.

One of his very simple nasheeds teaches:

"Know that there are five cures to your heart:

First, read the Quran with an understanding of its meaning.

Secondly, do not forget the tahajjud prayer.

Third, keep the company of the people whose hearts are luminous.

Fourthly, keep your stomach hungry regularly.

Fifthly, do not forget to remember God at night.

Anyone who can do one of these, may Allah bless him forever."

Nothing could be simpler. You could get a five-year-old to understand that completely. But everybody in Indonesia knows that, and it's on the song competitions and the pesantren.

Thanks to these people, these Wali Songo, the 80 million strong population of Java is actually mostly Muslim now, which is pretty impressive.

The Challenge of Modernity

The question that then arises is how you pull the same stunt in the context of modernity. How do you do that today? The obvious response is that it's going to be easier and harder.

Easier because you're not dealing with deeply entrenched traditional people who really can't imagine doing anything different to what their great-grandmothers would have approved of. Modern world is not like that. People are much more mobile.

But harder, because you're telling people, actually religion isn't just the surface and headlines and wearing desert clothes and eating biryani and being freaky about it - it's about going deep. It's about Tawheed, about la ilaha illallah, about stillness, about connection to the sacred.

The Prophetic Guidance for Times of Fitna

The hadith tells us:

(Sahih al-Bukhari)

"There will come a time when the best property a Muslim can have will be sheep with which he follows the mountain peaks and places where rain falls, fleeing with his religion from fitna."

The real meaning of that is that there has to be a certain inner withdrawal - that the surface is going to be so turbulent and crazy that the believer has to be more of a diver than he was in the past. And that should be a good thing because that's where the reality of religion is.

The Importance of Looking for Good in Others

The sound believer when looking at others will always by his fitrah look at whatever is most lovable in that person, and the sign of the sickness of the soul is to see whatever is the flaw in others. This is an inflexible rule that should be applied in every situation whether the person you're engaging with is a Muslim or non-Muslim or you don't know.

Always look to your soul to see if your soul is reaching for and attracted by and impressed by whatever is most beautiful and good in that person. This is an important skill because it does give us a detachment while still being engaged.

Conclusion: The Qibla as Center

If we inhabit those depths and we put the core of the religion where it belongs - at the core of our lives - and treat the surface things as being something two-dimensional and passing, part of the ebb and flow, the flux of space and time and separation distance from Allah, then we will inshallah be in a healthier state.

You do need to have this basic disposition of the soul which is: the soul is oriented towards the Qibla, which means the depths, the ancient dark mystery, the Abrahamic beauty of God's unchangeability. If that's the center of your life, the Qibla is the center of your life, then you will be able to engage with those spaces inshallah with some degree of protection, with some sort of heft from the craziness and the polluted gases which humanity unfortunately has generated for itself as a result of our excessive greed and our forgetfulness.

Closing

"And Allah knows best and is the Most Wise."

"May Allah send blessings upon our master Muhammad, and upon his family and companions, and grant them peace."

"Peace be upon you, and the mercy of Allah and His blessings."