Muslim Theology and Islamic Mysticism - Part 1 of 2 (Understanding Islam Series: Session 5)

have you all made an announcement okay yeah with your permission alhamdulillah i want to kick off this morning by um making a plea um i have a lot to say today and i'm not going to be leaving any time for questions so if you have any any questions post the thought that you should not understand everything i say but just in case um 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 um because the questions might uh prove too much for me although it that would not be the first time that it happened but uh 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 so i have my work cut out and um i just um ask you to sit back and and and just follow me as an audience this morning you're going to be rather like those of us who are being driven by john across some of the more difficult mountains of new mexico yesterday we just had to sit back and trust that we were safely heading towards some kind of coherent destination this lecture is going to be a bit like that anyway i want to start with uh an obscure fact about the famous german philosopher emmanuel kant one of the lesser known facts about kant is that his doctoral certificate dated 1755 bears at the top the unmistakable arabic words bismillahirrahmanirrahim 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 uh a teasing little problem that has some occupied the leisure time of of intellectual historians for many years did the anonymous graffiti artist who knows perhaps even can't 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 that 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 but 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 ascenting to the revelation and thus of knowing god well there are a lot of muslims particularly today who would find the presence of uh the quranic words on khan'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 bi-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 um it's an interesting comparison incidentally that the the bible starts out with the narrative of the physical creation of the world whereas the quran if you set aside the preliminary first chapter which is essentially a kind of introductory prayer the second chapter of the quran begins with the narrative of the the creation of the human soul and the human being it's in the first 30 or 40 verses of of the second chapter if you want to to check it out 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 kodama he died in 1223 very representative of this literalist tendency and he wrote a whole book called the sensor 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 era good piece of medieval rhetoric there but fairly characteristic of a certain type of literalist polemic against any use of reason in in religious discourse that kind of attitude was fairly common amongst the alama 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 so in classical christianity again these are huge generalizations but in this context we have to um learn them in classical christianity theology is at the center of our struggle to know god in classical islam mysticism is at the center and this year volume of the literature generated by each tradition bears this out so to get back to this this polemical point that you'll sometimes hear you'll find a lot of muslims today contemplating the lack of intellectual moorings of of modernity or what we nowadays term postmodernity and hurt also by the paradox of the brazen triumph of modernity point to the huge intellectual energy which christians traditionally invested in philosophical theology as the clue to the emergence of that enlightenment rationalism which ultimately let the greek genie out of out of the bottle it was the christians according to this view that released the genie the muslims always kept it corked up so the muslims were the wise ones who rejected the the excessive use of pure reason following either the scriptures or the delights of mystical speculation or quite frequently both put together now obviously you don't need to know too much about medieval christian intellectual history to realize that this polemic actually misrepresents the classical christian scholastic position it is true that they relied on the intellect but their definition of the term intellect was quite different to the one we use today um for them ratio the use of rationation dialectics um taking place in in the mind was a path principally to the articulation and not to the discovery of truth the truth for the christian scholastics was located in the thing that they called the intellect which unlike our modern definition actually included several other phenomena notably the intuitive divinely um inspired capacity to to to discover truth providential intuition as part of the faculty of intellect nowadays we exclude it so we find for instance in dante he tells beatrice towards the close of the divine comedy now do i see that never may the intellects be sated unless the truth do shine upon it so philosophy in medieval christendom was famously the handmaid of theology there were some who tried to promote it beyond its ability um the medieval abhorrence particularly of of padua were those who thought that if revelation and reason collide then reason has to be given given prime priority a number of averages such as uh seeger of brabant great medieval christian theology the theologian were actually smacked down for doing this and interestingly the avaroism that they were bringing in came from the islamic world um avaros was of course ibn rushd the famous philosopher and maliki jurist of cordoba anyway so what i'm saying is this traditional muslim critique actually misunderstands what the scholastic were doing um but it does reciprocate in quite an interesting way the the mirror image of this which was the classical or early modern christian repudiation or interrogation of islamic reason we're told uh particularly by 19th century orientalists such as reynolds and israel one of the great intellectuals of 19th century france and also by a number of orientalists in the present century that islam cannot foster a reason-based theology because islam emphasizes practice and not thought the very word islam itself these people would tell us implies a kind of blind unthinking submission to the inscrutable will of god and what the religious leaders require is not orthodoxy so much as orthopraxy in other words practicing in the right way not believing in the right way orthodoxy in islam being limited to ascent to a very few elementary propositions perhaps even just the two propositions enshrined in the shahada itself now this traditional european assumption is i think that islam is a kind of regrettable lapse into judaic formalism and it has a judaic type of god who is so transcendent that the mind simply cannot reach him and hence this kind of religion is suited to less intellectually gifted people desert dwellers for whom the image is that the sky is very clearly distinguished from the earth the triune christian god is an intellectual stimulus and a challenge whereas allah or yahweh is unknowable and hence all his devotees can do is to busy themselves with discussing the laws in some kind of casualistic or even parasitic fashion so we have a kind of double smugness in recent debate between islam and christendom some muslims and some christians purveying the image of a uniformly non-intellectualist islam however recent scholarship very thankfully has managed to overturn this image and this overturning has come about in two ways firstly we have thanks to uh research in the archives a growing realization that medieval muslims did in fact do a lot of genuine and profound theologizing but that given the way in which knowledge was ordered in classical islamic civilization this theology doesn't always appear where a westerner would expect to find it so books on theology might be quite small creedal statements but in fact you find a lot of what christians would regard as theological issues discussed for instance in books on jurisprudence the preliminary chapters on islamic jurisprudence often contain issues on what is the nature of man who is actually required to follow the law who has a soul who doesn't and so forth similarly of course a lot of theological discussion took place in the flourishing traditions of islamic mysticism secondly there has been a lot of research being done into islamic formal theology itself which goes under the name of kalam it's one of the key technical terms in islamic studies which simply means speech and it became applied to theology because one of the early discussions that the theologians were interested in was the question of god's speech are either quran is it created in time or has it always existed so qalam means systematic theology rationalizing theology and we know that classical islamic thought did not so much make war on the greeks as enlist at least some of them as allies so this medieval kalam tradition is not just some kind of scripturalist piety platitudes rephrasing the jews of scripture but actually builds in many cases a very sophisticated and internally coherent metaphysical superstructure which in many ways operates in a kind of register that's not too far from that of medieval christian scholasticism now i'll be talking about both of these traditions today the kalam i.e the theological dimension of islam and mysticism in due course but before i can do this and get onto the the the real subject of today's lecture which is namely these two areas of iman and irsen mentioned in the hadith of gabriel i want to backtrack a little bit historically and investigate and retell the narrative of the early muslim community because islamic theology like christian theology is something that can only be understood in terms of its historical background and the processes which which brought it about remember that right at the beginning of islam there was no systematic theology and there was no systematic mysticism in the forms that later became normative in islam 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 reina and his friends would consider to be normative islam or for praxis 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 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 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 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 were put in the outward outermost of these circles the area of of islam in fact some people say that only about 80 or 90 of the verses of the quran which are about six and a half thousand altogether are actually to do with do's and don'ts which is a good antidote to those who would regard the quran as primarily a legalistic document in fact we find a lot more about these higher areas iman in particular is is constantly referred to in the in the quran and there are also many mystical allusions so one of the interesting things about classical islamic literature is that you will find more a higher percentage of quranic illusions in doctrinal and particularly in classical mystical texts than you will find in the the texts that are simply about practice and law so the source for all of this is of course the quran itself and i want to go back and see what the quran itself has to say about these two higher types of knowledge 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 um rather senator or perhaps some sensory faculties who can't see or feel god this is obvious and the best known proof text for this is um 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 in other words you can't see god one of the great revelations on sinai is that god does not reveal himself in in that crude way 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 seventy thousand veils of light and were they to be lifted the flashing light 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 his chosen ones but also and even more conveniently god actually names himself in the quran several prophetic hadith indicate that god has 99 names these are in the quran but they're scattered about you don't find one chapter that dishes up the 99 names of god but early generations lost no time in assembling these and meditating upon them some of these affirm the moral character of deity for instance the quran says god is compassionate and merciful he is the loving kind he is the just he is the clement etc others point to more abstract metaphysical truths about god for instance in the famous closing verses of surah 59 he is god besides whom there is no other god noah 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 so immediately we see in the quran a distinction between the moral and metaphysical qualities in god as disclosed in the names but a further and related distinction also imposes itself this divinity allah is axiomatically one this is the 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 one unified unique unitive creator al-ahad and he's also one as he relates to creation this comes from the same root has different resonances so this oneness has a dimension of transcendence and it also has a dimension of immanence remember i mentioned briefly this distinction between uh tenzi and teshbee with john's permission i'll expunge these uh have you all taken these down okay clear a bit of space here tenzi refers to the divine transcendence the unique high unknowable deity fundamental term in islamic theology and the term in which it exists in a kind of dynamic tension is teshbi which is the divine imminence so if you look at the handouts um i've dug out a few quranic quotes here the first one god is beyond everything that they describe can't be put into words the unknowable god but wheresoever you turn there is the face of god that's the the second register of the divine oneness which is teshbir um so we find in this first register tanzir that's the prayer the five daily prayers of islam the salat that happened in the mosque emphasized this first register the keynote of the prayer is this constantly repeated phrase allahu akbar the non-comparative comparative god is greater which is referring to the divine transcendence and god as al ahad in other words he is greater than whatever we can assert about him and greater than any conceptualization that we might have of him so this divine transcendence is written into the most fundamental devotional practice of islam and it's also a key quranic postulate which emphasizes the gulf between the absolute and ever-living god on the one hand and the relative contingent nature of creation between the two there is no commensurability no common measure in the second register we find the quran balancing it with some clear assertions of the divine proximity i mentioned one from this this handout 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 verses speak of god's hand his face and so forth these anthropomorphisms are of course to be understood only metaphorically and the quran also introduces a concept which is the unfolding of the of the imminence which it calls baraka i don't know if some of you got to see a movie that appeared two or three years ago by coppola which is called baraka it was shot in 70 mil and really to get the impact of it you have to see it on a proper big screen and it's a narrative-less sequence of incredibly beautiful images that attempt to convey in as much as the silver screen ever can the sense of the sacred this idea as we look for instance out of our windows here at islam and see this staggering scenery that there is something infused into the natural world that is not of this world but that recalls the the presence of the divine and invites us towards it and this concept of barakah is a key quranic term and in fact coppola noted um that he'd borrowed this term specifically from the quran and from islamic spirituality the usual translation of this term is blessing or grace but that doesn't exactly get across the almost electrical quality of this of this force now the quranic view of the natural world is precisely that it is a locus of baraka and a locus of theophanies of manifestations that recall and point to the the divine source of everything the world is an endlessly complex exquisite unfolding of the 99 names the existence of the world is other than god islam does not go in for hindu-style pantheism equating the world in any sense with god no the tenzi is always recognized however the the being of the world does partake in an ultimately inexpressible way in the divine nature in as much as the world is a kind of shadow of of god that's the most that can that can be said um so we find again in this surah that i pointed out wheresoever you turn there is the face of god so this tension between the moral and the metaphysical attributes of god seen differently the divine transcendence and the divine immanence is the most fundamental of all of the quranic postulates and it underlies underlies most of subsequent muslim theological and also mystical reflection theologians obviously focus their attention on the register of tenzi the divine transcendence whereas mystics are interested in the divine imminence but in fact if you look at the literature you'll see that neither was fixated on one to the exclusion of the other and it was typical in medieval islam for mystics also to be theologians theologians also to be mystics ghazali was the most obvious example of this so you'll find in the theological tracts flashes of mystical insight come in also the mystics will be happy to to introduce formal theological themes 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 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 and this controversy uh ranged believers in free will on the one hand those who upheld god's moral nature against determinists people who believed everything is 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 of all things he is preeminently an omnipotent deity he has a the divine power which is constantly incessantly manifested in every movement every stillness every event in the created world and this quadra is so powerful that it seems at first sight to overwhelm any contingent potency or power that individual people might think they have so we find the quran saying god created you and created what you do seemingly quite a determinist statement the problem for the early muslims as they tried to frame a theology was that god also has to be morally consistent so we find in surah 4 49 god shall not wrong a man so much as the weight of the hair on a date stone and in surah 45 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 so the first great doctrinal problem in islam and really the most recurrent one in our theology involves the evident tension between these two rival almost registers of the divine perfection the quran juxtaposes them but how can god be just when he rewards or punishes human actions which he himself through his qudra has known we're going to happen has actually determined anyway so in surah 2 verse 7 we read concerning those who willfully deny the truth god has sealed up their hearts and a heavy covering lies over their eyes and their ears now if god himself has sealed up their hearts how can he punish them in consequence when they sin well this apparent contradiction is of course simply the islamic form of the most taxing difficulty which besets any theistic religion judaism and christianity famously experienced their own disputes here and with the libertarians and those who emphasized human free will particularly in judaism generally getting the better of the argument and christianity the deterministic position um lingers on today in some churches with a strong calvinistic influence um some of the scottish churches for instance influenced by by knox do very much believe in a form of predestination and the coherence of predestination ideas is still at least tacitly recognized by by many others in islam both positions seem to be vindicated by the revelation itself god is perfect both morally and metaphysically first believers accepted this on trust and were content to leave the paradox unexplained however as the early muslims started to debate with the philosophically much more sophisticated at that time christians particularly in places like damascus this simply led to embarrassment the apparent tension couldn't be explained and the two rival positions voluntaristic and deterministic soon became identifiable dogmatic tendencies within the early community of believers so some people felt themselves inclined to believe in free will others were more interested in deterministic ideas and 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 and these people seem to have been supported by the um ever cynical umayyad regime in damascus for the simple reason that it was politically useful if people thought that everything in the world was determined by god anyway then they would be less inclined to challenge the corruption of the regime so it had political backing opposed to the mujbira you find believers in free will and these people are called mortalites now these distinctions believe it or not continue to endure because shia islam which accounts for maybe 10 percent of the world's muslim is still for the most part get rid of that strongly influenced by later mortezalite thinking and a later scholar describes the view of the mortezalite 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 mojamer didn't agree with this because they thought it somehow suggested there's a plurality of creators in the world hence it's a polytheistic doctrine let me try at the risk of perhaps losing you oh to go into this very interesting debate in in a little bit more depth i'll be skating very superficially over some of the other controversies in islamic theology but this i think we can use as a case study the more tessellates shared with all of the people of kalam those who liked systematic theology a belief in they thought that there is such a thing as the smallest possible particle in the world and that was the basis of their cosmology now their opponents held that the motions of atoms were not related causally what does that mean well the asharites thought that there is no natural causality in the world which is an apparently rather dramatic and seemingly unscientific attitude which says for instance that if i throw a football at the window normally you'd expect the window to break but that's not because the football is making the window break that's because god is interac is affecting the window directly and causing it to break they thought that if you affirmed any secondary causes in creation you are thereby limiting the omnipotence of god and this continues to be the the mainstream islamic view and it's the one that's associated with the third great tendency in classical islamic theology one that still predominates and is regarded as the orthodoxy the asharites named after the great early theologian abu hassan al-ashari and what the asharites thought was there is no natural causality causality in the world is simply an illusion they developed a system which modern philosophers would refer to as occasionalism which is sometimes popped up in western thought male branch is the most obvious european exponent of an occasionalistic theory they said that atoms do not have a duration an atom is created instantaneously in time and vanishes instantaneously and hence you cannot say that there is any kind of natural causality in the world you can say that act a may give rise predictably to act b but that is only because god's actions in the world are consistent you can assume if you chuck your football at the window that god will cause the window to break because that's the way he operates but you must not say that it's the football that's doing it that is perceived as infringing on the divine omnipotence now this view is an interesting example of how a classical islamic thesis can actually be sustained in the modern world and there was actually at the moment a great revival of ashurite theology particularly in places like turkey the most lively muslim theology at the moment is actually taking place in in turkey because in the 19th century when there was a very mechanistic view of the universe people thought this was simply absurd they knew what atoms were they could measure them they could show them up in their equations and actualism simply seemed to be wrong atoms did have a duration what has the lights looked as if they were right and in the early 20th century partly for this reason there was a kind of revival of more tesla thought in islam more recently however with the new physics physics is always calling itself new but with the new generation of physicists for instance in cambridge we have somebody called stephen hawking who has produced this famous book um the brief history of time what hawking is saying is that you cannot in fact speak of the duration of atoms in fact you can't even speak coherently of the existence of any subatomic particles you can see them as particles you can see them as waves you can see them as instantaneous instances of a universal phenomenon that actually encompasses the entire universe it's i'm not going to try and summarize this argument um in a few sentences but the point is that astrologism is now regarded as more cosmologically coherent than it used to be because of this notion of occasionalism we don't need to look at this in detail but the conclusion is asherism has always denied real causality now the reason why the azurites were interested in this is that the mortezalites following the opposite position thought that this kind of metaphysical speculation simply is beside the point most important point is that god has to remain the author of a coherent religion and he has to be morally coherent in genuinely punishing or rewarding human beings for what they do and this can only make sense if the relationship between human acts and moral consequence is grounded in predictable and real moral uh causal laws so the mortezalites hold atoms do have a duration they're not recreated in each instant by god and they said if we accept this then automatically we have to accept that we can speak meaningfully of the generation of acts they call this tawalud generation of acts by human beings god's acts in the world are direct human acts are generated through this tiwalud and there are divisions amongst the more tesolites over what this could could mean um now this ties in very much with the related question of theodicy um those of you who've looked at christian theology will know that this means that the complex of problems relating to the existence of evil in the world one of the biggest dilemmas for theistic theology and recently reintroduced to me by my four-year-old daughter when she came in from the garden with a sad expression on her face and said daddy why did god create stinging nettles and i didn't have an answer for her and you have to be a good deal older than four before you can even begin to understand that the variant responses that the theistic religions have given to this difficult problem um the more tesolites insisted that good and evil are intrinsic properties and that when human beings work evil or bring about evil in the world it is not ultimately god that can be blamed for that whereas the ashares believed that there is no intrinsic reality to good and evil this is another of the classic propositions of muslim theology according to the asher is good actions are good only because god himself considers them to be good and this position foreshadows i think some debates in modern christian theology such as you'll find discussed in the book by alistair mcintyre or beyond virtue the great question of whether something is good because it's good in some perhaps some philosophically unframeable absolute way or because god has has made it good is there some reality to good and evil in the world fundamental ethical argument and the mortezalites said the perfection of god demands that he do things that are truly good not good simply because he does them similarly god commands mankind to things that are authentic and are not just some kind of conventional virtue good and evil the mortezalites thought can be established on purely rational grounds and god is bound to act in accordance with that system of values so they said that the quran condemns female infanticide not to establish the principle that female infanticide is wrong but in conformity with an absolute principle that the thing is is wrong um so on the basis of this understanding the mortezalites quite simply limited god they said that he was constrained by an axiology by a set of system of values that was beyond him that that transcended him they said in short that his omnipotence his quadra did not include the ability to will what is evil that would entail some kind of futility what they called abbath on his part and it would invite of course the conclusion that he himself is evil so god must consistently will the good he cannot will man to sin nor can he withhold guidance if people go astray that's always their choice and god can't be blamed and so concerned were they with this uh with upholding this principle of the divine justice that they even developed a further thesis which said that every suffering in the world has to receive a due compensation so if you stumble over a stone in this world god will recompense you for it either later in this life or in the next life so we find most of them are teslalites even saying that animals will go to heaven which orthodoxy has not accepted because animals can suffer in this world god out of his justice cannot allow that to be the end of the story therefore he will give them pleasure in the next world to compensate for what they've suffered um the orthodox of course um never went went along with this while kindness to animals is very much part of the muslim ethical package orthodox islam has assumed that animals because they don't have the ability to choose between good and evil cannot be resurrected to face judgment so we have this characteristic mortezali doctrine which you'll still find taught in some of the theological colleges in shia parts of the world such as iran for instance which is that god must act to secure the best interests of his creation in arabic now to the ashraes this seemed to encapsulate everything that was wrong with a certain type of over rational mortality mentality it imposes a compulsion upon god and such apparent compulsions are simply the inventions of limited human intellect which god himself has created and which simply are not qualified to rise sufficiently high to decide on what is or is not possible for god now the classical argument which the asher is deploy is called the story of the three brothers um this is a story of three imaginary brothers and we're told that one of them was good one of them was wicked and a third of them died as a child so the first is in paradise second is in hell and the third is in a limbo where he experiences neither reward nor punishment now the third in the next life explains to god that he'd never been given a chance to obey god and hence merits merit paradise so he complains to god for having made him die before he had a chance to to work for heaven because the laws of islam and the moral law obviously does not apply to children as it does to adults and the reply is that god made him die young because he knew that if he grew up to maturity he would actually be a sinner and hence merit hell and what tesolites could see see the reason behind that and then the second brother speaks up and asks why he had not been made to die young as well so that he would be spared hell and of course the mortalites on their system had no answer to this second question and this story becomes the classical uh ashari orthodox refutation of of mortezalli rationalism the idea being that by attempting to impose these limits on god's action and imposing human categories of good and evil on god one ends up simply an absurd paradoxes of this kind the later writers on on heresy cite this story as the reason for the conversion of al-ashari himself he had been a more tesolite in the southern iraqi city of basra and then converted to to ascharism according to the story because the prophet had appeared him in a dream and urged him neither to accept the simple textual scriptural literalism of many of the hadith scholars and the hanbilis one extreme nor to go to the other extreme and become lost in this kind of rationalistic speculation and so ashley himself charts a kind of median position between these two that is scripturally sensitive but also includes rationalistic possibilities and certainly in developed ashuri thought we find that the considerable importation of greek categories and particularly the use of greek logic in islamic theology so ashwari theology muslim orthodox theology that is is essentially a kind of median or compromised position between strict scriptural literalism on the one hand and freewheeling rationalism on the other the great period of ashari orthodoxy was really the 12th and the 13th century it took some time for this this tradition to to evolve um its classical exponent is a truly brilliant mind called al shahristani which is translated as the summer philosophy there's an english translation of it if you want to look at it and books like shahrukh stanis are still the standard set texts for muslim theology and the great sunni universities now in shah rastani's developed position we find the final and definitive orthodox sunni repudiation of the mortazalite ethical system um to support the ashurite denial of the intrinsic nature of good and evil shaharastani conjures up a kind of thought picture which later becomes fairly standard in the literature he asks us to imagine a man who is born fully competent to understand and to reason he's intelligent but is brought up in some remote place desert island for instance and has absolutely no ethical training of any kind no moral education such a person obviously will be enabled as he grows up to see the truth of say mathematical propositions but he will have no verdict to give on the judgment that murder is wrong for instance or that god is bound to condemn it he simply won't have been trained into that that that view so for stani there is no analogy between theoretical and moral propositions this desert island person if he witnesses a murder will certainly understand that the mechanical medical processes by which the victim dies but he'll have no knowledge of whether the thing is actually good or bad so these moral concepts for shahraztani do not form part of the essential attributes of the event but for god according to the ashuris murder would simply be morally neutral so in this sense you can say that god wills everything in the world without ever willing something that is evil this is the crux of the argument what he wills is by definition good since the only coherent non-subjective definition of what is good is what god does so you can no more say that god wills evil then you can say that the rays of the sun are dark it's simply what philosophers would call a category mistake by definition he cannot do what is evil so evil in the world is ultimately not a reality but simply an illusion caused by necessarily inadequate human perception there are a number of other arguments here in the theology which i'll have to as i say skate over another one which i won't attempt to explain in detail but just briefly outline is the key escherite doctrine of casp again the subject of some very brilliant medieval expositions casp means literally acquisition and this was a device which the asher is employed in order to deal with the problem of theodicy how god can apparently judge people for evil actions when he is himself the the omnipotent creator of all actions the usher is very briefly distinguished 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 that a human being acts and that is sufficient grounds for god to to to reward or to condemn us and it's such a subtle doctrine that in fact is an arabic proverb now if something is really complicated you say it's more subtle than the cusp of al-ashari but those of you who are interested in following the rigorous arguments through to their conclusions um i can give you references in in modern studies of muslim philosophical theology um and the difficulty of this doctrine in fact encouraged many later muslim thinkers to view the whole question of predestination versus free will as actually something that cannot be adequately framed within the the categories and the concepts of formal theology and increasingly an islamic thought we find it being dealt with by mystics rather than by theologians 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 casp 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 god's image as a famous hadith records and this recalls the quranic statement that god himself has blown something of his spirit his rooh into adam the primordial type of of humanity which means that man as a theomorphic being partakes obviously in a contingent way in all of the divine attributes and this includes the attribute of will so just as god is the compassionate human beings can be compassionate as well in a contingent way god is the just human beings can be just god is the strong human beings can be strong all of the 99 names can have a human application similarly god is el murid he is the one who has volition who has will and human beings also in a contingent way can participate in this and it is this participation ghazali thought that contains the the solution to this paradox ghazali says that moral decisions located in the conscience the self-aware core of the human creature are not located in the mind as theologians supposed but in the roh this divine spark within man this kind of spark which is separated in a ultimately illusory fashion from the divine fire as the mystic sword and razali says as for the secrets of god's decree this is the subject which has bewildered most of humanity and those who have been given mystical insights and illumination by god are prohibited from disclosing it the secret seems to be um and as much as we can frame it that when man truly becomes god's deputy on earth we see that the separation of man's will from the will of god is like all other separations merely an illusion so that's a case study of how theological questions ultimately ended up moving into a mystical register which is quite a common feature of muslim intellectual history and the final satisfying solution that muslims found was in the realm of of mysticism well i've been talking um for some time on muslim theology probably i've done no more than bewilder you and convince you that this is as intricate and hard to understand as other theologies it is a brilliant and a very diverse tradition of thought and what i want to do for the rest of this lecture is to follow this cue of ghazalis and turn to the third core aspect of the totality of the religion of islam the level of ichsen now before i do this i think i should repeat the disclaimer that i issued at the beginning of my lectures maybe that a formal presentation like this can't encapsulate the reality of the spiritual life and there's a quote here again from ghazali expresses this point such ideas i.e transcendent mystical ideas are like virgins and the hand of words cannot reach the edge of their veil even though our task is to marry the virgin ideas to the men of words in the bed chambers of speech yet verbal expressions cannot but be allusions to misleadingly different ideas but having uttered that that caveat i'm going to eventually venture at least some superficial judgments about the nature of the spiritual life in islam in as much as we we can speak about it again as i did with theology i'd like to go back to the beginning and the archetype what's the foundation of all discourse about about the spiritual life of muslims well obviously it's revelation itself heaven is too high for human beings to to be able to build and lift up the stairway to it we need god to lower a stare 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 his perfection in this view is only complete when it is witnessed classical images the peacock's tale must be unfurled the inevitability of manifestation this apparently impossible paradox of why anything other than good good should exist so islam sees the spiritual life as a kind of natural innate human response to the very fact of our existence confronted constantly however much we may distract ourselves from from from the fact constantly confronting what heidegger called our throneness the mere inexplicable fact of our existence as as self-conscious souls in this extraordinary world so we find a volition within god to create the world a necessary evolution not quite the near platonic idea of the inevitable constant emanation of the world as part of the divine perception it's it's very much in the semitic tradition of god creating in time so this this volition within god to bring the world into being is seen by the muslim thinkers as a necessary unfolding or manifestation of the divine perfection and as i mentioned in my previous lecture specifically that aspect of perfection which the quran calls the divine compassion remember i said that in a certain perspective god looks out upon all of the latent uncreated beings and in his infinite compassion has pity on them because they are still in the imperfection of non-existence so he breathes upon them and and bestows upon them the blessing of existence again this this feminine idea of rahma of the the divine compassion the divine engendering of the world so this is essentially why the world exists it is the the simple manifestation of the divine volition to be known in the register of the divine love and compassion is the world is the solidification in this view of divine love that's all very well but it doesn't necessarily answer the question of why human beings should exist inanimate objects in creation all right but actually self-conscious discreet souls that seem to have a separate conscious distinct existence apart from god that's even more complicated 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 29 man is a representation not as is the rest of the world just of the divine love but of something more exalted still namely of the divine intellect 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 this teaching of adam of the names is said to mean that man alone out of all of the endless ramifying phenomena of creation can grasp the phenomena of the world through abstract categories rather than through the senses and simple blind instinct uniquely human beings share albeit in a clearly contingent way in the divine ability to assess and to know unlike the animals also they can be held morally accountable for their decisions so when a mosquito bites you for instance it's not just that your understanding of the mosquito is different from its understanding of you it's not that you have a bigger brain there is actually a categoric distinction between you and the mosquito mosquito is simply following its instincts it's ultimately reducible to a machine the human being can take decisions of a completely different order such as whether to kill it or not for instance so a trivial example but it illustrates this assumption that the quran is is proposing that there is a categoric distinction between human beings who are insoled creatures and the rest of of creation and this also entails of course that unlike animals we human creatures can be held accountable for our actions this is the meaning obviously of the the prophet's declaration that man is made in god's image man has this extraordinary ability to decide to recognize good and evil it's not to be understood in some crude anthropomorphic sense so we immediately see that the islamic vision attributes a very high status to human beings god made adam this quranic passage continues beginning of surah 2 he is khalifa key term for the mystics meaning his vice gerund rather strange jacobian word but it's the nearest thing we have in english his representative his lieutenant on earth and he commands even the angels to bow down before him this is because the angels have not been taught all of the names they do nothing but constantly worship god in a perfect perfectly obedient way whereas man has this ambiguous capacity to worship god if he chooses and hence become higher than the angels he also has the ability to refuse to recognize the existence and goodness of god and hence become lower than the animals which at least can't be taken to to account so man has this extraordinary range of options so again in this sense man does have a mysterious semblance of free will and this is where the free will argument kicks into mystical questions 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 this is the first step in the spiritual path in all traditions instead it uses this word tauba which means turning around reorienting yourself and the reason why it uses this term is because of its anthropology it's understanding of who and what man is 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 the quran goes on to say that was so that you might not say of this we are unaware it might be an excuse you could come up with at the judgment and so all of us as the muslim poets put it weeping bitterly as we move out of the divine presence and enter the world and behold for the first time that which is not god retains somewhere within our souls a memorial of a memory of that primordial covenant with god the persian poets famously called it the rules the day of am i not your lord if you read rumi you'll see it constantly invoked um rumi says for instance we were born to be the companions of the angels let us go there again friend for that is our country that urging us to to reflection and to spiritual progress so human beings in the world have a passional aspect which they share with the animals in that sense they are of the world but they nonetheless are the shrines of the rooh of the spirit which is yearning for the return to that country in fact those of you who've looked at rumi's great spiritual poem the math navy and we'll see that he actually starts by comparing the human soul to a reed to a reed pipe in medieval anatolia long pipes were made out of reeds and he says that the song of the of the reed pipe is actually its lament its mournful desire to return to the reed bed from which it was torn and the human soul when god breathes through it is actually singing the same the same lament it's a kind of nostalgia now this nostalgia is generally termed in islamic spirituality means something like yearning longing one reason why so much muslim song and poetry is about separation from the beloved it's a classic theme that the the lover has been separated from from his loved one and he has him a desire to be reunited with her and this is an image which our poets very often use for this this loving desire to be reunited to the divine beloved so we have this nostalgia which is the the novices as yet inarticulate yearning to return to the divine read bed from which we were torn and we find so much of the muslim devotional literature focusing on this question of hima to celebrate it and also to inspire it in in people sometimes we'll find wistful poems about heaven for instance sometimes we'll find verses about the fullness of life in god which our intuition somehow tells us is possible that somehow in some unimaginable past we shared in the life in god but which we in our worldly state grasp only very vaguely so saying common amongst the early muslims was people are asleep and when they die they wake up and the task of the spiritual wayfarer is to wake up before you actually die um a famous bosnian poet for instance hassan said um wake up and see do you even understand the bed where you were sleeping only those who are awake may truly claim to be lovers one could literally cite millions of other verses by muslim poets along the same lines now that's all very well as the beginning for the spiritual life amongst those people who are gifted with this kind of remembering of what they once had but what of those souls which feel this yearning only very vaguely or in very infrequent moments or seemingly not at all well such people are in the islamic understanding victims of something called the the thickness of the world fairly direct image okay mystical term the catheter the veil has become very thick for them they can no longer see through it in a divine beloved um so these people are victims as it were the negative possibilities of the world the world this complex of phenomena in which we find ourselves is a two-edged sword it's true that as the quran says constantly celebrates it recalls and reminds us of its divine origin however the same world can also veil and obscure it because we become too obsessed with the signpost that we no longer see where the sign is pointing most human beings marinated as it were from birth in a kind of worldliness because of their upbringing because of their culture distracted by the sheer brilliance and and multiplicity of creation simply find it hard to see through the world and perceive or even intuit what might lie behind it this error can be both mental we presume from the evidence of our senses that the world represents all that can exist which is the error of contemporary philosophy and also it can be spiritual because our innate knowledge of god with which we were born remember islam doesn't recognize the concept of original sin our innate knowledge of god which gives us the ability to recognize the works of god as works of god has somehow atrophied and this problem which is the product of catheter of the illusory thickness of the world is famously referred to as rafla the gh sound is pronounced roughly like this the french r it's a kind of um guttural r 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 are polar opposites thicker means remembrance recollection also reminding oneself invocation now the classic muslim text on how to overcome this sickness of rafale is as always the holy quran itself the quran is there to articulate for us a vision of the world which we all had before we were born hence i think it's 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 so the normal discursive linear techniques of say history books or novels simply nowhere in sight in the quran it speaks directly to the heart constantly pushing remembering challenging and it has to be listened to with the heart and there are many verses in the quran itself which indicate this non-rationative nature of god's speech for instance where it proclaims god has placed covers over the hearts of those who have no faith in the other world lest they should understand it the quran and he has set a barrier over their ears note by the way that the text is not here just referring to muslims it merely says that the key to lifting the veil from the quran is faith so if you come to the quran from a position of unfaith you will merely see a mirror of yourself in the quran if you come to it with a higher degree of spirituality the quran here suggests that it doesn't have to be something achieved simply or exclusively within a muslim context then you will begin to see something deeper and of course the great saints the delight famously in islamic hey geography is that they are inseparable from the quran they read the quran constantly they recite from it they find it a constant delight as one of them said the quran is god's banquet 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 talba he returns to god god accepts that and the line is drawn under original sin key distinction between muslim and christian types of spirituality is that islam does not accept an idea of original original sin so the world is not fallen and as such it almost glows with reminders of its divine provenance and the quran itself constantly celebrates nature as a system of signs of ayat as signposts reminders of the divine reality one of the most recurrent characteristic features of the quranic text 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 thicker 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 in other words how the heavens and earth are created our lord you have not created all this in vain now in texts such as this the quran invariably uses as its term for the the human agent that grasps this this reality is one of the key elements of the quran's vocabulary so the verse is saying um there are signs in this wonderful creation for those people who have lub plural love 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 and blossom and this love 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 loop within them so the very first stage in the spiritual life the quran is suggesting is to look at and try to look through the beautiful forms of nature and in the middle ages it was a very common form of muslim piety for people simply to wander god's earth marveling at the variety and brilliance of his creation and this principle also helps us to understand why muslim art and architecture has so often included vegetal and floral motifs if you look at the mosaics on the dome of the rock in jerusalem for instance or the illumination of a chapter heading in a medieval quran invariably you'll see the intertwining of plants and leaves something which is profoundly satisfying to the muslim aesthetic precisely because it recalls this quranic impetus this quranic idea that it is through nature that we perceive the divine the convention of course as doctors tab and ahman so well explained to you became more and more um conventionalized over the year and stylized until the arabesque was born the arabesque really is the the classical archetypal expression of islamic decorative art because it's kind of repeated geometrical image of reality a statement of the beautiful intertwining endlessly consistent patterns which god has set in the natural world and whose radiance brings art and architecture back into line with the rest of creation that's one reason incidentally when muslim art has classically preferred abstract or vegetal motifs to human representation in the christian perspective of course the divine came into the world once only as a man so the great symbol of contemplation in a church is the the icon or the symbol of of christ um because it's the theomorphic qualities of the god man that provide the inspiration really for all christian sacred art whereas islam sees the natural world as the manifestation of god's love hence we find the natural world invoked albeit in these very abstract forms in muslim places of worship and the complete absence of any figure or representation and then a number of poems and it's a recurrent theme in the spiritual literature and in little pious stories that all of creation is praising god this is in the quran all of creation is praising god it is simply uh you do not understand their praising their glorification of god there's a nice little turkish story that i heard recently in istanbul of um a saint and his followers and they were gathered in the little lodge in istanbul and the saint was growing very old and he wanted to appoint a successor and in order to test his followers to see who would deserve this distinction he said please go out today and bring me in the evening the most beautiful flowers you can find and so all of the zealous disciples go around and in the evening some of them bring bunches of carnations others bring beautiful tulips roses or whatever and then one rather simple little man called marquez effendi comes with a dead flower and sets it humbly apologetically before the saint and everybody else is absolutely shocked and they say what is this this is an insult but mercedes efendi explains it by saying well i went out into the world and i saw all of the beautiful flowers but they were all praising god so i was ashamed to pick them then i found one that has stopped so i brought you that one that's a fairly typical muslim empire story that indicates how the natural world is seen as being something that is very much part of the divine order so i've spoken briefly about thicker and also introduced this concept of thicker i think since it's 10 30 you're probably in need of some material as well as spiritual sustenance but as i said because i've got so much to get through today if we can be back within 15 or 20 minutes i'd be grateful thank you you

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Keywords: Abdal, Hakim, Murad, Abdul, Hakeem, Abdullah, Understanding, Islam, Cordoba, Dar, al, Teachers, Institute, Abiquiu, New, Mexico, Introduction, Basic, Beliefs, Basics, 101, Qur'an, Quran, Koran, Muslim, Moslem, Intro, Religion, Misconception, Misunderstanding, Stereotypes, Islamophobia, Facts, Clarify, Truth, Non-Muslims, Da'wah, Dawah, MeccaCentric, On, Demand, Islaam, Winter, Mystic, Wird, Music, Sufi, Sufism, Biddah, Bida, Bidda, Bid'ah, Bid'a, Innovation, Deviant, Haraam, Haram, Whirling, Dervish, Allah, God, Prophet, Muhammad

Id: CbvG4KffgSI

Length: 81min 59sec (4919 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 22 2011