Voices of Islam (67 page)

Of course, there are millions of ordinary Muslims around the world who are not political activists but are deeply pious in the ways advocated by the Qur’an and Islamic tradition. This set would be remiss if it did not include their voices too. Before modern times, it was possible to express one’s piety in Islam in a variety of theological and philosophical perspectives. However, it seems that today, if one wants to find a reformist intellectual who sees piety as foundational for Islam, one must look for a person who has been exposed to Sufi even if one is not a Sufi oneself. An example of such a reformist intellectual is Enes Karic¸, Dean of the Faculty of Islamic Studies in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina. The intellectual culture of Bosnia includes both Sufis

xxii
Introduction

and non-Sufis, but it is resolutely opposed to the imposition of a single dom- inant interpretation of Islam. In his writings on Islam, Karic¸ evokes the mod- ernist notion of an
effi Islam
, ‘‘an Islam that would be a viable proposition in the present world, an Islam that would confer strength and respectability on its followers in the world, particularly in this part of Europe.’’
8
However, unlike other reformist writers, Karic¸ does not overlook the importance of individual piety and spirituality. If Islam is indeed a ‘‘sys- tem,’’ Karic¸ observes, ‘‘It is a system of piousness. To be a Muslim transpar- ently means to be a Muslim simply because Islam has revealed the faith through a total, wholesome practice of piousness. This mighty wave of pious- ness grants to Islam as a faith an ever new freshness: schools of theology may succeed one another, the legal elaboration of the Message may later be renewed, political systems may vanish, but Islam remains as piousness, Islam as commitment to the One and Only God.’’
9

This statement reflects the underlying premise of
Voices of the Spirit
. Rather than viewing spirituality as an obstacle to a progressive Islamic social con- sciousness, the editors of
Voices of Islam
regard spirituality as the necessary ground for all religiously directed action. Not only is spirituality the soul of Islam, but it also constitutes Islam’s most valuable contribution to world reli- gions. One must not deny the importance of social justice and political action in the Islamic world, but what is one to do with the heart? If one accepts the Greek metaphor of society as a body, which was adopted by many Muslim political theorists such as the philosopher Farabi (d. 950
CE
), then treating outward social ills without giving sufficient importance to the spiritual well- being of the person is as foolish as treating gangrene from outside an infec- tion and ignoring the poison that is already circulating in the bloodstream. Even when viewed instrumentally, a sense of spirituality is undeniably impor- tant for curing the diseases of the soul. What are these diseases? Frithjof Schuon’s essay once again provides the answer:

A false life, a false death, a false activity, a false rest. A false life: passion which engenders suffering; a false death: egoism which hardens the heart and separates it from God and his mercy; a false activity: dissipation, which casts the soul into an insatiable vortex and makes it forget God, who is Peace; a false rest or a false passivity: the weakness and laziness which deliver up the soul without resistance to the countless solicitations of the world.
10

Tragically, as can be seen in recent articles and television reports on the problem of ‘‘home-grown’’ Muslim terrorists in countries such as the United Kingdom and Spain, and among jihadists who have been trained by Al Qaeda or its allies, many of the most sincere and religiously committed Muslim youths have, for want of a heart and a soul in their Islam, condemned them- selves to a false life, a false death, a false activity, and a false rest. The April 8, 2002, issue of
Time
magazine carried an essay on suicide terrorism by Eyad Sarraj, a secular and politically moderate Palestinian psychiatrist and founder

Introduction
xxiii

of the Palestinian Independent Commission for Citizens’ Rights. Sarraj asserted that young Palestinians become suicide bombers because of the shame and despair they feel at the Israeli occupation of their country. ‘‘Shame is the most painful emotion in the Arab culture,’’ said Sarraj, ‘‘producing the feeling that one is unworthy to live. The honorable Arab is the one who refuses to suffer shame and dies in dignity.’’
11

If this is indeed the motivation for suicide bombing, then Schuon’s words, which were written in the 1960s, have been proved prophetic in ways that no one at that time could have imagined. A feeling of despair that causes a per- son to seek death is not only the sign of a false life, but it is also a grave sin in Islam, as attested by Qur’an 4:29, ‘‘Do not kill yourselves, for God is mer- ciful to you.’’ Killing oneself out of despair means despairing of God’s mercy, which no Muslim should ever do. Suicide bombing is a false death because suicide, especially a suicide that infl pain and suffering on the innocent, is a selfish act of egoism, which results, as the Qur’an implies, from a harden- ing of the heart and a spiritual separation from God and His mercy. False activity can be found in the often strident and obsessive concern with activism for its own sake, which goes beyond the necessary struggle for social and political justice, and casts the soul, as Schuon says, ‘‘into an insatiable vortex and makes it forget God, who is Peace.’’ Finally, the false rest or passivity that Schuon decries can be found in indoctrinated minds that abandon the will to question—which, after all, is part of the human instinct for self-preservation

—and deliver up their souls to the world in a false desire for a death that they wrongly believe will be virtuous, painless, and paradisal.

Ironically, it is the converted Alsatian Muslim Frithjof Schuon, more than the secular Palestinian psychiatrist Sarraj or the born Muslim suicide bomber from Iraq, Chechnya, or the United Kingdom, who is consistent with the teachings of the Qur’an and historical Islamic tradition. Nowhere is this truer than when Schuon provides his antidote for the troubles of our times:

To this false life is opposed a true death: the death of passion; this is a spiritual death, the cold and crystalline purity of the soul conscious of its immortality. To false death is opposed a true life: the life of the heart turned towards God and open to the warmth of his love. To false activity is opposed a true rest, a true peace: the repose of the soul which is simple and generous and content with God, the soul which turns aside from agitations and curiosity and ambition, to rest in the Divine beauty. To false rest is opposed a true activity: the battle of the spirit against the multiple weaknesses which squander the soul—and this pre- cious life—as in a game or a dream.
12

Despite the distortions of jihad that are committed by Muslim terrorists and suicide bombers, Muslim pietists and political activists both agree on one point: struggle in the way of God in Islam is an intensely spiritual act. This is why the chapter, ‘‘Jihad in Islam,’’ by the Syrian-born Sufi shaykh Muhammad Hisham Kabbani is included in this volume. Islam still retains, in a way that has become rare in the United States since the end of the civil

xxiv
Introduction

rights movement, the notion that struggling to establish God’s justice is a path to salvation. For this reason, it is important to remind the readers, as Shaykh Kabbani does, that jihad against the unbelievers is only one of many forms of what Schuon has termed ‘‘the battle of the spirit’’ in Islam. Follow- ing the fourteenth-century Muslim scholar Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, Shaykh Kabbani notes that frequently encountered forms of jihad include those against hypocrisy, Satan, and the self. All of these jihads depend on a deep and profound sense of spirituality. In fact, these above three forms of jihad, if followed carefully by Muslim activists, would serve as an antidote to the dis- tortions of jihad that are now committed in the name of Islam. The irony of political Islam is that it often seeks to win the world at the cost of the soul. As a friend of the Saudi intellectual Muhammad Asad once observed of the Wahhabi insurgents who opposed King Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia for enter- ing into treaties with non-Muslims, Muslim political extremists ‘‘are like the
jinns
...
who know neither joy of life nor fear of death
.. .
. They are brave and strong in faith, no one can deny that—but all they dream about is blood and death and Paradise.’’
13
The ultimate tragedy for many Muslims is that they forget that such a ‘‘Paradise’’ is in fact Paradise lost.

This volume does not contain a complete inventory of spirituality in Islam, as it would take an entire set of volumes to produce. However, the volume was designed to provide a representative sample of spiritual perspectives, both Sufi and non-Sufi and both Sunni and Shiite. The volume begins with a refl n on prayer in Islam that links Islamic spirituality to its origins through the sacred space of the Ka‘ba in Mecca and to the wide varieties of prayer that one finds in the universe of Muslim spiritual experiences. The dis- cussion then moves to the concept of remembrance and links the remem- brance of God in Islam through the formal prayer (
Salat
) and supererogatory invocation (
dhikr
) to the popular remembrance of the Prophet Muhammad, without whom the historical religion of Islam would not exist. In this section, the reader is taken from a reflection on the Proph- et’s inner nature, through a spiritual tour (
ziyara
) of Medina, the Prophet’s City, and fi ally to the experience of sitting in the remembrance of the Prophet before his tomb. From the remembrance of the Prophet Muham- mad, the reader is next led to the remembrance of the Prophet’s descendants in Shiite Islam, through the visitation by women of the tombs of Imams and their descendants in Iran and then via a discussion of ‘Ashura, the important Shiite commemoration of the martyrdom of the Prophet’s grandson Husayn. From the theme of remembrance, the narrative next moves to other important spiritual themes in Islam: Shaykh ‘Ali Jum‘a, the Mufti of Egypt, discusses the heart as a seat of spiritual guidance; the eminent Iranian-born scholar Seyyid Hossein Nasr discusses evil in Islam as an absence of the good rather than as an actively malefi presence; and Virginia Gray Henry- Blakemore discusses the spiritual value of fear in the tradition of the great Spanish Sufi Abu Madyan (d. 1198
CE
), who said: ‘‘Fear is a whip that urges

Introduction
xxv

and restrains; it urges one toward obedience and restrains one from disobedi- ence.’’
14
Next the reader is introduced to Sufi spirituality, first with a chapter that describes the Catholic monk Thomas Merton’s encounter with a Sufi saint, then with a discussion of the Sufi way of love and peace by Nasrollah Pourjavady, the foremost academic specialist on Sufism in Iran. Sufi women’s spirituality is explored by Rkia E. Cornell, who discusses the theology of ser- vitude practiced by early Sufi women, and by Leslie Cadavid, who recounts the biography of Fatima al-Yashrutiyya, a twentieth-century woman Sufi master from Palestine. A more counterintuitive approach to spirituality for the Western reader is found in Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore’s poem about his encounter in Mecca with a man who was ‘‘attracted to God’’ (
majdhub
) as a moth is attracted to a flame; such a person may appear mad on the outside but is profoundly in touch with the spirit on the inside. This poetic depiction precedes the important chapter on jihad by Shaykh Muhammad Hisham Kabbani, discussed above, which thoroughly discusses the inner, spiritual dimension of struggle in the way of God in Islam. The volume ends with ‘‘Letter to Mankind,’’ another poem by Abdal-Hayy Moore that eloquently summarizes what it means for one to have experienced the spiritual dimen- sion of Islam.

This volume of
Voices of Islam
, like the others, contains the voices of Mus- lims from several parts of the world, from the Arab countries of Morocco, Egypt, and Syria to Iran. However, its path also detours into the United States and includes the voices of converts to Islam who have spent large por- tions of their lives in the Muslim world. For the most part, this was not a con- scious editorial decision but refl ts the topics on which the authors who were solicited for this set wished to write. Looking back on the mix of authors, both those who were born as Muslims and those who embraced Islam by way of personal choice, one cannot help but feel that their choice of topics was more than a mere coincidence, for it refl in very tangible terms the point made by the Moroccan Sufi Muhammad ibn al-Habib: The Breath of the All-Merciful blows in every corner of the world. If it blows in the east, it heals the west, and if it blows in the west, it heals the east. In the Introduction to Volume 4,
Voices of Art, Beauty, and Science
, I discuss the hybridity of European and American voices of Islam and their importance as an expression of what culture theorist Homi Bhabha calls ‘‘contra- modernity.’’ For me, ‘‘contra-modernity’’ is best understood as a secular and postmodern way of saying with Shyakh Ibn al-Habib that the Breath of the Merciful—the spirituality that is so essential to Islam—can blow just as strongly in the west as in the east.

Muslims who have been born into the faith should not dismiss this opinion as just another argument for an Orientalism that still seeks to dominate the Muslim world. For some nationalistic Muslims, those who have embraced Islam from other religions pose a threat to Islam, in that such ‘‘Muslims by conviction’’ may act as a fifth column that promotes the domination of Islam

xxvi
Introduction

by Western values now imposed from the inside. However, more traditionally minded Muslim scholars often have very different opinions. A little more than twenty years ago, ‘Umar al-Rish, former administrator of Islamic endowments in Rabat and religious advisor to King Hassan II of Morocco, told me that in his opinion, the intellectual and spiritual future of Islam would be found in America and Europe, not in the countries that have histor- ically been associated with Islam. Agreeing with the views of the Sufi Ibn ‘Arabi and Ibn al-Habib, Sidi ‘Umar believed that the effects of colonialism and the stresses of modernization would render those who lived in the so- called Muslim world insensitive to the Breath of the All-Merciful as it blew across their societies. If Islam were not to become a stranger in its own lands, he felt, it needed a re-infusion of spirituality from the countries of the West, lands whose inhabitants were already jaded with materialism and who sought a deeply spiritual perspective in their own lives.