Voices of Islam (94 page)

SHN: Yes, but that cannot just be done personally, because who is the person doing the purifying if the ego itself is not purified? That is why you need tradition and objective revelation from the source of All Good. It’s important to mention that there is a reality to the human state before what Christianity calls the fallen state of Original Sin. That is what we call in Islam the
fi
or primordial nature, which was molded in the good and with the good. And that always remains.

We have separated ourselves from our primordial nature. The outer human has forgotten the inner. But always, deep in ourselves, we have the sense of goodness and know what is evil in the deepest moral sense. But we have to delve deeply into ourselves, which many of us do not do. That is why revelation is indispensable.

GH: Every moment, we say, ‘‘I should do that, I shouldn’t do that.’’ There must be a final accountability because we are in fact continually taking account of ourselves.

SHN: Of course. That tendency, that impulse is still within us. But it’s stronger in some people and weaker in others. Unless a society has the objective framework of morality, it cannot survive on this impulse alone.

GH: In the Qur’an, God punishes the mighty who do evil. Why do monstrous heads of state, for example, go seemingly unpunished today?

Evil as the Absence of the Good
137

SHN: That’s a question that people often pose, not only about the mighty, but about people who have committed evil and who seem to be living a fairly comfortable life. And some people who’ve done much good suffer a great deal. The answer, of course, is that we have devel- oped a truncated vision of both divine reality and our own reality, because we associate all of life with only this life. We associate divine justice with our own assessment of it. An evil person may seem to be living a very comfortable life, but he will be punished in the larger curve of life. One has to understand, especially in the case of human beings, that we have a very long journey from our origination in God to our return to the Divine. Our earthly life is only a small part of this circle. To judge things only by the little bit of this trajectory that we are able to observe is false. What appears outwardly as good is not necessarily so inwardly. There are people who seem to have a very comfortable life and live in beautiful surroundings, but who live in hell within themselves.

GH: Can evil, in the end, be overcome? In terms of our own self, that is?

SHN: Evil can
always
be overcome within ourselves. We live in this world in order to do that. We are not in this world to eradicate evil in the whole of the world. This is one of the false ideas that many people have. Outside of us, we must do as much as we can. But our main responsibility is, first of all, to our soul, to God—to cleanse ourselves. One of the great errors of modern society is that by the inversion of all values, people want to eradicate evil in the world without having purified themselves. And so this impulse within the soul for perfection and goodness skips over that which is most diffi correcting of ourselves. It is much easier to feed the hungry in India than to fast oneself.

GH: Does evil have an inherent attraction to some people? What would there be in a human being that would attract it to evil?

SHN: Although we were created in the perfect mold, we are also cast into this world and given the possibility of being the lowest of the low. There is within the world a tendency toward what Islam calls forgetfulness of Divine reality; Christianity calls it Original Sin. Although God created us in goodness, we have fallen from that state. There is in fact a tendency in the soul toward falling down. It’s what the Hindus call the
tamasic
tendency. Water flows downward. If you let a stone go, it falls down. It takes effort to push something up. God has put us in this world in such a way that He has given us the will,

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but because He loves us and love needs effort, He wants us to use this effort to move upward.

GH: Is there a difference between evil in thought and evil in deed?

SHN: Yes. We cannot perform an evil deed without having the thought that goes with it. That is the intention. God judges our deeds according to our intentions. Let’s say we walk in the street and suddenly step on an animal and hurt it. Or if we’re driving, hit a tree, and a bird falls down and dies—we have not premeditated this perfor- mance of an evil deed. That is not evil. It’s unfortunate, and we have to ask God’s pardon that we were the instrument for such a thing, but it is not an evil deed in the theological and moral sense of the term. Every deed is preceded by thought. An evil thought is more dangerous than an evil deed, because it is the source of evil deeds. Society can only judge by the deeds, but evil thoughts are punished by God.

GH: What if one just pops into your head?

SHN: That’s temptation. Evil thoughts are evil thoughts when they become
our
thoughts, when we hold them.

GH: One last question. What is a simple thought an average person can hold onto when dealing with questions concerning evil?

SHN: The simplest thought is that God, being good, has created a world in which there is a remarkable predominance of the good over evil, of the beautiful over the ugly, and that no matter what situation we encounter in life, we always have access to the good and the beauti- ful. It’s for us to take advantage of being human and to make this choice of the good over that which is evil, which is ultimately both ugly and a negation.

NOTE

This chapter first appeared in
Parabola
24:4, winter 1999, 59–66. It is reproduced with slight modifications in this volume with the permission of the editors of
Parabola.

13
‌

T
HE
B
LESSED
S
TATE OF
F
EAR
: R
EFLECTIONS FROM
I
SLAM AND
C
HRISTIANITY

•

Virginia Gray Henry-Blakemore

There is only one Real Fear: that we do not fully avail ourselves of the opportunity afforded by the human state and that at the moment of death we are not content with the state or degree of spiritual integrity we have realized. Once we are separated from our bodies, our vehicles of ‘‘doing’’ and change, we are left with who we
are.
Even knowing this, we go along abusing the human state.

In the various spiritual traditions, fear and its related attitudes of contrition and repentance can be seen as the blessed impetus and key for the commence- ment of the spiritual life. Fear incites the soul to move forward. In Islamic mysticism, the movement of the soul toward its true nature is described in three stages: the first is called
makhafa
or Fear of God; the second is called
mahabba,
which refers to the Love of God; and the third stage is
ma‘rifa,
which means Gnosis or Knowledge of God. According to Martin Lings, each of these stages has two aspects: ‘‘The domain of fear-action is that of ‘must not’ and ‘must’; love has likewise, in addition to its dynamic intensity, the static aspect of contemplative bliss; and spiritual knowledge is both objective and subjective being ultimately concerned with the Absolute as Transcendent Truth and Immanent Selfhood
.. .
. Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and it is to fear that the first two stations are related. They are thus concerned with danger, and they are two because danger confronts man with two possibilities, flight or attack, that is, abstention and accomplishment. The aforementioned six stations of wisdom might be called dimensions of holiness.’’
1

According to Lings, these same three principles of Fear, Love, and Knowledge are apparent in Islamic art and in Qur’anic illumination. The majority of calligraphers were Sufis who had a great fear of intruding on the perfection of the Qur’an with their art. In Islamic art, the geometric aspect of design corresponds with the principles of Rigor and Fear. The arabesque or endlessly entwining plant tendrils represent Love.

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Voices of the Spirit

Finally, the calligraphy of the Revealed Word corresponds to the domain of Knowledge.

Frithjof Schuon has explained, ‘‘Every spiritual path must start with a ‘conversion,’ an apparently negative turning round of the will, an indirect movement towards God in the form of an inner separation from the false plenitude of the world. This withdrawal corresponds to the station of renunciation or detachment, of sobriety, of fear of God: what has to be overcome is desire, passional attachment, and idolatry of ephemeral things.’’
2
The Sufi use of prayer beads or ‘‘rosary’’ (Ar.
tasbih
) can be compared to the Catholic rite of Holy Communion. Both begin with the attitudes of fear and repentance—an emptying of oneself from one’s Self. When reciting pray- ers on the
tasbih,
a Muslim repeats 99 times, ‘‘God forgive me.’’ This is said with the intention of
tawba
—Repentance or ‘‘turning’’—that is, of sincerely desiring to change. The Catholic, before approaching the altar to receive the sacrament, prays, ‘‘Lord have mercy upon me, Christ have mercy upon me.’’
3
Both Muslims and Catholic Christians thus participate in an emptying—a death of all that is unholy or low in themselves. This is the stage that might be referred to as the ‘‘death’’ that St. John of the Cross described when he said, ‘‘Die before you die.’’ However, after death comes resurrection, and in the third stage comes eternal life. After the act of emptying comes reformation; according to Meister Eckhart, this leads ultimately to Union with the Godhead: ‘‘When I preach, I usually speak of disinterest and say that a man should be
empty
of self and all things; and secondly, that he should be
reconstructed
in the simple Good that God is; and thirdly, that he should consider the great aristocracy which God has set up in the soul, such that by means of it man may wonderfully
attain to God
; and fourthly, of
the purity

of the divine nature
.’’

In the second stage of prayer with the
tasbih
the Muslim asks for God’s blessing and praise upon the Prophet Muhammad with the idea that he himself may return to his own pure and primordial nature, the
fi
the condition of the True Man. The Christian, as he kneels before the altar now empty, waits to receive the bread and wine, whether understood symbolically or literally to be the presence of the Word of God. When the Host is taken within his own emptiness he thereby regains his Christ-like nature. He has been
re
-formed for that moment in the Self, which he hopes he will have realized for the time of his resurrection.

The third stage of spiritual movement initiated by fear is that of union or return to the Divine Source of all Being—the froth subsiding into the sea from which it has been manifested. One hopes that if purity of soul has not been realized, if one has not awakened to one’s true state of being, God will bestow His Grace and Mercy for the intention of sincere effort in God’s direction.