The Five Pillars of Islam

Opening

Muslim Theology and Islamic Mysticism - Part 1 of 2

Opening Remarks

I want to kick off this morning by making a plea. I have a lot to say today and I'm not going to be leaving any time for questions. So if you have any questions, perish the thought that you should not understand everything I say, but just in case, please store them up for Wednesday because at least half an hour towards the end of that lecture I will be leaving free specifically for questions on any subject.

Now the reason I'm entering this plea is not because the questions might prove too much for me, although that would not be the first time that it happened, but because I have been landed with rather a lot to set before you today. The administrators, God bless them, have asked me to speak about Islamic theology and about Islamic mysticism in the course of a single morning. These are in essence the two most important subjects that we'll be looking at.

The Question of Reason and Revelation

This lecture is going to be a bit like that. Anyway, I want to start with an obscure fact about the famous German philosopher Immanuel Kant. One of the lesser known facts about Kant is that his doctoral certificate dated 1755 bears at the top the unmistakable Arabic words:

These words, which are of course the first verse of the Holy Quran. Now who on earth could have scribbled these in and for what obscure purpose is a teasing little problem that has occupied the leisure time of intellectual historians for many years.

Did the anonymous graffiti artist, who knows perhaps even Kant himself, intend to suggest that there was any kind of congruence between his proto-idealistic philosophy and the teachings of the Arabian prophet? Or is the gesture, as is more usually held, some kind of ironic joke which upholds philosophy as necessarily the polar opposite of revelation? Well, probably we'll never know.

We don't know who put those words in and for what reason. But for our purposes today, the question is surely quite a teasing one. If God has defined reality in the Quran with the hadith providing as it were an apparatus of detailed footnotes, what use could anybody have for reason? After all, if God had intended

and created the reason in order to penetrate the ultimate secrets of existence and the heavens and the earth, he wouldn't probably have bothered to provide revelation in the first place.

Put more simply, can there be an Islamic philosophy or an Islamic philosophical theology? Or does the mind exist simply to work out some of the marginal entailments of the revealed law with the heart given the job of assenting to the revelation and thus of knowing God?

Early Opposition to Rational Theology

Well, there are a lot of Muslims, particularly today, who would find the presence of the Quranic words on Kant's certificate particularly horrifying. After all, Kant was the one who made Hegel possible, the man who floated these great metaphysical balloons to fill the spaces left by receding theology. And the job of philosophy in the 20th century basically has been to pop those balloons, leaving us, in most cases, with not very much.

Now, this anti-philosophical judgment would be shared, interestingly enough, by mystics and by textual literalists alike. The book and the heart propose an epistemology, a means of acquiring knowledge that is guaranteed by Almighty God. The mind, however, seems to be too governed by its conditions and its training in space and time and by the ego to be reliable.

After all, the Quran itself begins by recounting how an angel fell from grace by using his mind to defy God. Refusing to bow before Adam, the angel who later became Satan, said:

"I am better than him. You have created me from fire and created him from mere clay."

So the very existence of the principle of evil in the world, this Quranic text seems to be suggesting, comes from the use or the abuse of the intellect.

And this view has been quite widespread. You can't really use reason to determine ultimate truths. For instance, there's a very famous Syrian theologian following the literalist Hanbali school of law called Ibn Qudamah. He died in 1223. Very representative of this literalist tendency. And he wrote a whole book called The Censure of Dialectical Theology, which was all about how wicked and blasphemous it is to use the mind in order to attempt to penetrate the divine secrets.

So he says, we must renounce the evilness of theology as shown in its condemnation by our religious leaders who are universally agreed that its advocates are partisans of heretical innovations and abominable error.

The Historical Development of Islamic Theology

That kind of attitude was fairly common amongst the ulama, the religious scholars, and we can clearly see

that it was even more common amongst the pretty non-intellectual masses. God and his prophet didn't use philosophy, so how can we have the temerity to do so?

So perhaps we should acquiesce in the polemical Muslim position that you often hear in sessions of dialogue, for instance, that blames the modern world, seen as godless hubris, on a readiness to follow the mind that grew from medieval Christian intellectualism. One of the big contrasts between the intellectual history of Christianity and that of Islam is that in Christianity, the crown of the intellectual disciplines was always theology. That was the central Christian intellectual concern.

Whereas in Islam, although there was, as I'll go on to explain, forms of sophisticated theology, nonetheless, their existence was always somewhat marginal. They were taught and continue to be taught in the great orthodox faculties of learning, but the principal Muslim intellectual endeavor has traditionally been mysticism rather than theology.

The Three Levels of Religious Practice

So in classical Christianity, again, these are huge generalizations, but in this context, we have to rely on them. In classical Christianity, theology is at the centre of our struggle to know God. In classical Islam, mysticism is at the centre, and the sheer volume of the literature generated by each tradition bears this out.

This famous hadith of Gabriel, which I passed around in my first lecture, does allude to the legitimacy of levels that transcend the pure outward forms of Islam, that which Renan and his friends would consider to be normative Islam, orthopraxy, the five pillars, etc., because the hadith of Gabriel, which is unanimously accepted as canonical by the Muslims, explains explicitly that there are higher dimensions, there is a level of iman, which means confident, faithful trust in the existence and goodness of God, and ihsan, which means excellence, explicitly defined in this hadith as meaning spiritual excellence.

Now these things obviously exist concentrically, both in individuals and in society, and the hadith makes this quite clear. It's easy to practice the outward rituals of a religion, you can be a very stupid person or a very bad person, and still practice Islam well, you can pray five times a day, fast, etc., so you can exist in this realm. However, a smaller number of human beings are able to move up to the second area of iman and actually internalize the meanings of these outward practices so that they become true believers and do it sincerely for God. Of those people, again, a smaller minority will be called to the level of ihsan, which leads to sainthood itself, the ultimate goal of religious practice in all religions, selflessness and absolute goodness and living joyously in the presence of God.

The Quranic Understanding of God

So these three things exist concentrically. Now you may remember that I pointed out that in fact less than 10% of the Quran is concerned with those things that we would put in the outermost of these circles, the

area of Islam. In fact, some people say that only about 80 or 90 of the verses of the Quran, which are about 6,500 altogether, are actually to do with dos and don'ts, which is a good antidote to those who would regard the Quran as primarily a legalistic document.

The Quran is the speech of God. It's also speech about God. In fact, it's entirely about God and the other themes simply exist there to elucidate its central concern. But how is this Quranic God to be known? Well, the God that the Quran proposes cannot be known directly by the rational faculties, whether these be ratiocinative or perhaps sensory faculties. You can't see or feel God.

This is obvious. And the best-known proof text for this is Surah 7, verse 143:

"And when Moses came to our appointed place and his Lord had spoken to him, he said, My Lord, show me yourself that I may look upon you. He said, You will not see me, but look at the mountain. If it stands still in its place, then shall you see me. And when his Lord revealed his glory to the mountain, he sent it crashing down. And Moses fell down in a swoon. And when he woke, he said, Glory to you. I turn to you repentant, and I am the first to believe."

The Divine Names and Attributes

So what does this tell us about our ability to know God? We cannot perceive his essence. It's simply too glorious. A famous hadith tells us that God is concealed behind 70,000 veils of light. And were they to be lifted, the flashing lights of his face would destroy anyone who looked upon him.

However, we can know him through his attributes because they're around us to see quite clearly. We can deduce conclusions about the attributes of God from the saving events recorded in the Quran, what he does with his prophets and to his chosen ones. But also, and even more conveniently, God actually names himself in the Quran. Several prophetic hadiths indicate that God has 99 names. These are in the Quran, but they're scattered about.

For instance, in the famous closing verses of Surah 59:

"He is God, besides whom there is no other God, knower of the visible and the invisible. He is the compassionate and merciful. He is God, besides whom there is no other God. He is the sovereign Lord, the Holy One, the source of safety, the keeper of faith, the guardian, the mighty, the powerful, the proud.

Exalted is he above any partners they ascribe to him. He is God, the creator, the originator, the fashioner. His are the most beautiful names. All that is in the heavens and the earth glorifies him, and he is the mighty, the wise."

Divine Transcendence and Immanence

This divinity, Allah, is axiomatically one. This is the primary message in theology that the Quran gets across. He is one both in himself, and this is the name that is applied to this aspect of the divine unity, Al- Ahad. One unified, unitive creator, Al-Ahad. And he is also one as he relates to creation. This comes from the same root, has different resonances, Al-Wahid.

So this oneness has a dimension of transcendence, and it also has a dimension of immanence. This distinction between Tanzih and Tashbih. Tanzih refers to the divine transcendence. The unique, high, unknowable deity. A fundamental term in Islamic theology. And the term in which it exists in a kind of dynamic tension is Tashbih, which is the divine immanence.

"God is beyond everything that they describe."

But:

"But wheresoever you turn, there is the face of God."

We also find, for instance, famously in Surah 50, verse 16:

"We, i.e., God, are nearer to man than his jugular vein."

In Surah 8, verse 24:

"God stands between a man and his heart."

The Free Will Debate in Islamic Theology

Now, this tension dictates the key features of Muslim theology, and you won't understand why Muslim theology is the way it is without understanding this dialectic. And I want to look now in a little bit more detail at the best-known early controversy in Islamic theology, which manifests very clearly this key distinction.

Now, this controversy ranged believers in free will, on the one hand, those who upheld God's moral nature, against determinists, people who believed everything is predetermined in order to preserve the stress on God's more metaphysical qualities, the divine omnipotence, and so forth.

What does the Quran itself have to say as a basis for this discussion? Well, the Quran says that God is powerful over all things. He is preeminently an omnipotent deity. He has a qudra, the divine power, which is constantly, incessantly manifested in every movement, every stillness, every event in the created world.

So we find the Quran saying:

"Allah created you and created what you do."

The problem for the early Muslims as they tried to frame theology was that God also has to be morally consistent. So we find in Surah 4, verse 49:

"God shall not wrong a man so much as the weight of an atom."

And in Surah 45, verse 22:

"God created the heavens and the earth with the truth so that each soul might be recompensed according to what it has earned with no one wronged."

The Mu'tazilites and the Ash'arites

The hardest line of all of the determinists were people called Mujbira. These were absolute determinists. They said, everything you do has actually been decided upon not by you, that's just an illusion, but by God himself.

Opposed to the Mujbira, you find believers in free will, and these people are called Mu'tazilites. Now these distinctions, believe it or not, continue to endure because Shia Islam, which accounts for maybe 10% of the world's Muslim, is still, for the most part, strongly influenced by later Mu'tazilite thinking.

And a later scholar describes the view of the Mu'tazilites as follows: Man is the creator of his deeds, good or bad, and hence is deserving of reward or punishment in the afterlife for whatever he does.

The third great tendency in classical Islamic theology, one that still predominates and is regarded as the orthodoxy, the Ash'arites. Ash'arites, named after the great early theologian Abul Hasan al-Ash'ari.

The Doctrine of Acquisition (Kasb)

Another key Asharite doctrine is Kasb. Kasb means literally acquisition. This was a device which the Asharites employed in order to deal with the problem of theodicy, how God can apparently judge people for evil actions when he is himself the omnipotent creator of all actions.

The Asharites very briefly distinguish between God's creation of acts on the one hand and man's acquisition of acts on the other. They thought there was a kind of almost instantaneous bubble, almost a free will around the human soul at the moment that a human being acts.

The Mystical Resolution

I mentioned earlier that in Christianity formal theology has traditionally been central, mysticism

something marginal, even sometimes questionable. Whereas in Islam the reverse has been the case. And we find in this case that the medieval doctrine of kasb was accepted by the consensus of medieval Muslim intellectuals. But the more satisfying resolution of this paradox was attempted by the mystical thinkers.

So we find Al-Ghazali, who died in 1111, affirming acquisitionist theology as being part and parcel of the formal creed. But he suggests a further level of truth. He says man is made in God's image, as a famous hadith records. And this recalls the Quranic statement that God himself has blown something of his spirit, his ruh, into Adam, the primordial type of humanity.

Ghazali says that moral decisions located in the conscience, the self-aware core of the human creature, are not located in the mind, as the theologians supposed, but in the ruh, this divine spark within man. This kind of spark which is separated in an ultimately illusory fashion from the divine fire, as the mystics saw it.

And Ghazali says:

"As for the secrets of God's decree, this is the subject which has bewildered most of humanity."

The Foundation of Islamic Mysticism

What's the foundation of all discourse about Ihsan, about the spiritual life of Muslims? Well, obviously it's revelation itself. Heaven is too high for human beings to be able to build and lift up a stairway to it. We need God to lower a stair from above, and it's then our responsibility to climb it.

So the basic obligation and purpose of religion is to find and to understand and ultimately to climb that stairway that leads upwards. In fact, it's not just the basic obligation of religion, it can be seen as the reason for our very creation. In Islam's understanding, God, being perfect, wishes his perfection to be known.

The Human as Khalifa

According to the Quran, the human creature was distinguished from the rest of the clay of creation by receiving the breath of God's spirit. So the world is generically the breathing out of God into non- existence. But the human being is a special case. You'll find this in Surah 15, verse 29:

"So when I have proportioned him and breathed into him of My spirit, then fall down to him in prostration."

The Quran says that Adam was taught all of the names. Again, this comes from this quasi-Genesis-like passage at the beginning of Surah 2:

"And He taught Adam all the names."

God made Adam, this Quranic passage continues, beginning of Surah 2, his Khalifa, key term for the mystics, meaning his vicegerent, his representative, his lieutenant on earth. And he commands even the angels to bow down before him.

The Primordial Covenant

Without free will, there can be no self-discipline, no spiritual wayfaring, because spiritual progress is a gift from God, granted only when the seeker turns freely and sincerely to him. And this turning is in fact a returning. The Quran doesn't really have a concept of repentance, as is the first step in the spiritual path in all traditions. Instead it uses this word taubah, which means turning round, reorienting yourself.

The Quran explains that before the creation of the world, God summoned all the human souls that would be breathed into the world. He summoned them to his presence and he asked them, as the Quran says:

"Am I not your lord? And they replied, yes, we testify, we bear witness. That was so that you might not say on the Day of Resurrection, indeed, we were of this unaware."

The Path of Remembrance (Dhikr)

And this problem which is the product of the illusory thickness of the world is famously referred to as ghafla. This means heedlessness, forgetfulness, and this is the state of most human beings. And this is why the beginning of the spiritual path in Islam is not so much a repentance as a turning or a returning, turning away from the things we consider to be real but aren't, back towards what we once knew to be real, it's a remembering, a dhikr.

Dhikr and ghafla are polar opposites, dhikr means remembrance, recollection, also reminding oneself invocation. Now the classic Muslim text on how to overcome this sickness of ghafla is as always the Holy Quran itself.

The World as Signs

The Quran is there to articulate for us a vision of the world which we all had before we were born. Hence I think its surprising and to some even disconcerting literary style. The Quran's intention is not to supply us with information that we never had but simply to unearth it from our souls.

Now in the Muslim understanding, because this world around us is a manifestation of God, whether or not we are as yet equipped to read it as such, and more precisely a manifestation of God in his aspect of limitless love, it is not fallen. Remember if you look at the Quranic narratives of the fall, you'll find that Adam makes tawbah, he returns to God, God accepts that and a line is drawn under original sin.

But in order to appreciate these signs, we have to learn the second basic virtue of Muslim spirituality, conveniently rhyming with the first, the Quranic virtue of fikr, meditation, contemplation. Typical Quranic verse on the theme for instance:

"Verily in the creation of the heavens and the earth and the succession of night and day are signs for people of inward understanding. Those who remember God whether they be standing, sitting or on their sides and who meditate on the creation of the heavens and the earth. Our Lord you have not created all this in vain."

Now in text such as this, the Quran invariably uses as its term for the human agent that grasps this reality is lub, one of the key elements of the Quran's vocabulary. So the verse is saying there are signs in this wonderful creation for those people who have lub, plural al-bab. Lub etymologically means a seed or a core.

So it's here implying that there is a core or something within man that needs to grow and blossom. And this lub here is simply a metaphor for man's immortal, pre-existent, unfallen soul. The Quran is telling us that nature is translucent to those who have kept this lub within them pure.

Closing

This concludes our examination of Muslim theology and Islamic mysticism. The tension between divine transcendence and immanence, the debates over free will and predestination, and the mystical path of remembrance and contemplation all represent the rich intellectual and spiritual heritage of Islamic civilization.