The Great Theft: Wrestling Islam From the Extremists (17 page)

The actual social impact that the law might have upon people is considered irrelevant. Although people might feel

that the law is harsh or that its application results in social suffering, this perception is considered delusional. This is why, for instance, the Taliban in Afghanistan were oblivious to the social suffering caused by the laws that they en- forced—since they believed that the law was Divine, there was no point to evaluating its actual impact upon the people they governed.

The approach of moderate Muslims to the relationship with God is materially different in several respects. Explaining the moderate approach must begin with the idea of trust between God and humanity. The Qur’an describes the moment of cre- ation as the moment in which humanity was entrusted with a heavy responsibility. God gave humanity the blessing of ratio- nality and the ability to differentiate between right and wrong. God made human beings God’s agents or viceroys on the earth and entrusted them with the responsibility to civilize the land. In the moderate conception, God is inherently and funda- mentally moral. Puritans give God a whimsical quality—God is just, but justice is whatever God wills it to be. Similarly, God is merciful, but mercy is whatever God wills it to be. So, for instance, if God in the Final Day decides to damn all women or all Caucasians regardless of their actions, that

would be just and good, simply because God willed it.

For moderates, this would be impossible. God is moral and ethical, in the sense that God shares with human beings an ob- jective standard for goodness, morality, and beauty. Civilizing the earth does not mean constructing buildings or paving roads. It means striving to spread on the earth the Divine at- tributes such as justice, mercy, compassion, goodness, and beauty. In doing so, human beings spread Divinity itself upon the earth. In contrast, corrupting the earth—spreading vio- lence, hatred, vengeance, and ugliness—means failure in dis- charging one’s obligations toward God. The Qur’an teaches

that the act of destroying or spreading ruin on this earth is one of the gravest sins possible—
fasad fi al-ard,
which means to corrupt the earth by destroying the beauty of creation, is con- sidered an ultimate act of blasphemy against God.
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Those who corrupt the earth by destroying lives, property, and nature are designated as
mufsidun
(corrupters and evildoers who, in ef- fect, wage war against God by dismantling the very fabric of existence.
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The earth was given to human beings in trust, and humans share the burden of establishing Godliness—in spreading at- tributes that constitute the essence of Godliness. The more the earth is permeated with justice, mercy, compassion, and beauty, the nearer the earth is to the Divine ideal. The more corruption permeates the earth, the further away the earth is from Godliness.

The purpose of the gift of rationality given to human beings is to investigate the meaning of Godliness and the nature of the opposite of Godliness—evil. God charges Muslims with a sacred and central obligation: the duty to enjoin the good and forbid the evil, and to bear witness upon humanity for God. Conservatives, puritans, and moderates do not dispute that this is a fundamental and basic obligation upon all Muslims. In the puritan interpretation, enjoining the good and forbid- ding the evil means applying the Divine law and then bearing witness on the Final Day that the majority of humanity re- fused to submit to God. Moderates believe that the enjoin- ment of good and forbidding the evil imposes an obligation to investigate the nature of good and evil, and by necessity inves- tigating the nature of Godliness and the absence of it. The en- joinment of good is part and parcel of the duty to civilize the earth and resist the spread of corruption. But the enjoinment of good and avoidance of evil is an ongoing, everlasting obli- gation to investigate the nature of Godliness and to attempt to

make this Godliness, as much as possible, a part of the reality on earth. Human beings will never be able to reach the perfec- tion of Divinity, but they must relentlessly seek to fulfill the at- tributes of Godliness. To bear witness upon humanity means that Muslims have an added obligation and a greater burden. Muslims must set an example for the rest of humanity in their diligence and persistence in seeking the perfection of Divinity. If Muslims fail in setting an example for humanity in their fi- delity to justice, mercy, compassion, and beauty, then Muslims have failed God.

In moderate thought, God is too great to be embodied in a code of law. The law helps Muslims in the
quest
for Godliness, but Godliness cannot be equated to the law. The ultimate ob- jective of the law is to achieve goodness, which includes jus- tice, mercy, and compassion, and the technicalities of the law cannot be allowed to subvert the objectives of the law. There- fore, if the application of the law produces injustice, suffering, and misery, this means that the law is not serving its purposes. In this situation, the law is corrupting the earth instead of civ- ilizing it. In short, if the application of the law results in injus- tice, suffering, or misery, then the law must be reinterpreted, suspended, or reconstructed, depending on the law in ques- tion.

Moderates agree with puritans that submission to God is the pivotal obligation of human beings, individually and col- lectively. Only by submitting the self to God can a human being liberate himself/herself from his or her base and whimsi- cal desires. Submission to God means refusing to submit to any other person or thing. For a Muslim to be dominated or subjugated by a human oppressor is fundamentally at odds with the duty of submission to God. Human free will cannot be surrendered or submitted to anyone but God, and a Mus- lim is commanded to accept no master other than God.

However, the moderate conception of submission is differ- ent from the puritan notion in very important respects. Mod- erates differentiate between levels of submission. It is possible to obey God without submitting to God. It is possible to obey God’s commands while remaining narcissistically self-centered and selfish. In other words, it is possible to obey God, for whatever reason, while caring little about God, and while being entirely motivated by self-interest and without develop- ing any emotional attachment toward God and without both- ering to invest the time and effort in coming to know God by reflecting upon God’s attributes, which are reflected in God’s wondrous creation. Obeying God out of fear of punishment or out of a desire for a reward keeps one vested in the paradigm of self-interest and the artificiality of the mundane physical world. If this constitutes submission to God, it is formalistic and superficial because it does not attempt or even seek to in- ternalize the sublime nature of the Divine. To submit to the Divine in a meaningful and genuine way is to elevate oneself to the transcendental and the sublime, to overcome the artifi- cial physical world and to seek union with the ultimate Beauty. As one struggles to purefy and cleanse oneself—as one engages in what is known as the inner jihad (
jihad al-nafs
), and struggles to know oneself and know God, one is able to achieve higher levels of submission.

Submission to God through fear and obedience, for moder- ates, is considered a primitive and even vulgar stage of sub- mission. Submitting to God through fear means that the worshipper has a tenuous relationship with God—a relation- ship that is driven by human self-interest or by the primitive desire to avoid pain or seek pleasure. In the moderate concep- tion, submission to God means to have a relationship with God that is marked by absolute trust and confidence in God.
Islam
means to surrender oneself, but linguistically,
Islam

means a particular kind of surrender. It is a surrender in which one is in complete tranquility and peace with that who is the object of the surrender. The dynamic of this surrender is to know God and to seek Godliness in oneself. Submission is meaningful only if one strives to internalize and reproduce the qualities that make God deserving of our gratitude. These qualities are the same qualities which a human being is charged with spreading on this earth: justice, mercy, compas- sion, and beauty.

The ultimate stage in this process is to love God for what God is. First, God consistently sets out in the Qur’an the types of people that God loves—God loves those who are just, fair, equitable, merciful, kind, and forgiving, those who persistently purify themselves, and so on.
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At the same time, the Qur’an repeats that God does not love those who are aggressors, un- just, corrupters, cruel, unforgiving, treacherous, liars, ungrate- ful, arrogant, and so on.
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This addresses the types of people that God loves or does not love because of their actions, re- gardless of how those people feel about God. In this first in- stance, what triggers God’s love is certain acts and qualities that are appealing to God. God loves those who act in partic- ular ways or possess certain qualities even if some of these people do not love God back.

Second are those who have a reciprocal love relationship with God. Through gratitude one will inevitably love God for God’s kindness, generosity, mercifulness, compassion, and beauty. In true gratitude, the only appropriate sentiment would be love. God describes God’s self as appreciative for this love, and makes a commitment to those who love God that their love will be reciprocated.
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To love God, a person must love all that God loves and dislike all that God dislikes. In the terminology of the Islamic tradition, one’s desires and whims become consistent with the Divine Will and desire.

Therefore, to love God in an honest and genuine way, a per- son would necessarily desire and even covet attributes such as fairness, justice, mercy, compassion, equity, forgiveness, and purity. The converse is also true. To love God in a genuine and true fashion, a person would dislike what God finds offensive, such as aggression, injustice, cruelty, treachery, dishonesty, and arrogance, among others.

The highest stage of submission is to love God more than any other, even more than oneself, and for those who achieve this lofty position of loving God absolutely and completely, they become God’s beloved, endowed with true perception, wisdom, and compassion.
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For human beings to love God nec- essarily means that they must love all that God has created and represents. It would make little sense to love God but hate God’s creatures and creation. To truly love God, one must love all human beings, whether Muslim or not, and love all living beings as well as all of God’s nature. To truly love God means that one must also detest the destruction of what God has created. For those who reach the lofty stature of being God’s beloved, their hearts will be full with love for justice, and full of compassion and love for all. As the classical schol- ars used to put it, if you find a man full of anger, resentment, hate, and cruelty toward human beings, animals, or nature, then know that the love of God has not entered his heart. In short, it is impossible to love God or be beloved by God and not to exhibit the characteristics of Godliness.

Another important aspect to this relationship with the Di- vine is the notion of partnership. Puritans place God beyond any emotion such as love. As an absolute master, God re- wards the obedient and punishes the disobedient, but this is the extent of the relationship. Moderates emphasize the Qur’anic discourse that reminds human beings of the near- ness of God to them. God is ever-present and always inter-

acting with His creation.
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In fact, the Qur’an explains that God often intercedes to save human beings from the conse- quences of their follies. Hence, the Qur’an asserts that if it had not been for Divine benevolence, many mosques, churches, synagogues, and homes would have been destroyed because of the ignorance and pettiness of human beings.
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The Qur’an also states that often God mercifully intervenes to put out the fires of war and save human beings from their follies.
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The notion that God intercedes to prevent human beings from destroying each other through wars and other acts of violence is of central importance to understanding the nature of Divine benevolence in Islam. God is a savior and caretaker of human beings.

Furthermore, a well-known tradition teaches that if a human being takes one step toward God, God reciprocates with ten steps. Therefore, moderates believe that God’s rela- tionship with human beings is not simply the act of judgment. Rather, if people seek God, God reaches out to them as well. Most importantly, for those who strive after Godliness, and through gratitude reach the point of loving God, God recipro- cates their love. It is through love that union with the Divine becomes possible, and the manifestation of this union is a partnership between the Creator and the created.

In a well-known tradition the Prophet is reported to have said: “That who knows himself/herself knows his/her God.” For moderates, this tradition is of pivotal importance for achieving partnership with God. Only by knowing oneself, which is achieved by self-critical reflection and struggling against one’s base and selfish desires, can a person know who or what one honestly and truly worships. A person might be- lieve that he/she worships and has submitted to God, but through critical self-reflection and by engaging in persistent inner jihad such a person will come to realize that in reality

he/she worships and has submitted to no one but himself/ herself. Critical self-reflection and self-knowledge are neces- sary to overcome the self-deceptions of the ego that lead to self-idolatry. For moderates, the worst self-deception is for one to slip in the pitfall of self-idolatry while pretending, or while deceiving oneself into believing, that he/she has submitted to God. The ego (
al-nafs
), if not disciplined by critical introspec- tion, can easily deceive human beings into believing that they worship God, while in truth their real god and genuine source of guidance are self-centered desires such as a sense of self- promotion, the love of material gain, the intoxications of power and dominance over others, or, in extreme cases, it is possible to become enslaved and submit oneself to the unadul- terated epitome of evil and true source of ugliness and corrup- tion on the earth, Satan himself. This is why the Qur’an asserts that it is in a state of heedlessness and self-forgetfulness that people come to forget God. Often the converse is also true: forgetting who the true God is causes people to forget themselves by pretending to be who they are not and by de- manding to be or have what is not their due or right.
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