We are all of us exposed to grief: the people we love die, as we shall ourselves in due course; expectations are disappointed and ambitions are thwarted by circumstance. Finally, there are some who insist upon feeling guilty over the ill they have done or simply on account of the ugliness which they perceive in their own souls. A solution of a kind has been found to this problem in the form of sedatives and anti-depressant drugs, so that many human experiences which used to be accepted as an integral part of human life are now defined and dealt with as medical problems. The widow who grieves for a beloved husband becomes a 'case', as does the man saddened by the recollection of the napalm or high explosives he has dropped on civilian populations. One had thought that guilt was a way, however indirect, in which we might perceive the nature of reality and the laws which govern our human experience; but it is now an illness that can be cured.
Death however, remains incurable. Though we might be embarrassed by Victorian death-bed scenes or the practices of mourning among people less sophisticated than ourselves, the fact of death tells us so much about the realities of our condition that to ignore it or try to forget it is to be unaware of the most important thing we need to know about our situation as living creatures. Equally, to witness and participate in the dying of our fellow men and women is to learn what we are and, if we have any wisdom at all, to draw conclusions which must in their way affect our every thought and our every act.
Islamic scholar, writer and diplomat (1921–2010)
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The Qur'an, set on a shelf with other books, has a function entirely different to theirs and exists in a different dimension. It moves an illiterate shepherd to tears when recited to him, and it has shaped the lives of millions of simple people over the course of almost fourteen centuries; it has nourished some of the most powerful intellects known to the human record; it has stopped sophisticates in their tracks and made saints of them, and it has been the source of the most subtle philosophy and of an art which expresses its deepest meaning in visual terms; it has brought the wandering tribes of mankind together in communities and civilizations upon which its imprint is apparent even to the most casual observer.
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It is clear that if we are to fulfill our true function, we must first identify and then become our true selves; the man alienated from his own centre is alienated from all things, not only a stranger to himself but also a stranger in the universe. Yet he cannot find the centre nor can he ‘become himself’ without help. For the Muslim, the Prophet not only shows us the way to the centre but, in a certain sense, is himself the way, since it is by taking him as our model, or by entering into the mound of his personality, that we are best able to travel to our destination. Action which springs from our own true centre - ‘without external cause’, as the dictionary has it - is the only truly ‘spontaneous action, and it is therefore in imitating him that we achieve spontaneity.
The modern Westerner, persuaded that he has a right to 'think for himself' and imagining that he exercises this right, is unwilling to acknowledge that his every thought has been shaped by cultural and historical influences and that his opinions fit, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, into a pattern which has nothing random about it. Statements which begin with the words 'I think...' reflect a climate created by all those strands of belief and experience - as also of folly and corruption - which have gone to form the current mindset and to establish principles which cannot be doubted by any sane and reasonable man in this place and at this point in time.
Not everyone - to say the least - seeks communion, dialogue with God; most of those who turn towards the heavens in prayer do so from desire or from fear, and those who do so from fear are in search of forgiveness. We are told that God does not greatly care about the motive so long as people do turn to Him and thereby establish the essential link. This is brought out in an astonishing hadith which might have been considered doubtful had it not been recorded by one of the most highly respected of mutahadithun: ‘By Him in whose hand is my soul, had you not sinned Allah would have removed you and brought a people who sin, then ask for Allah’s forgiveness and are forgiven.’ According to a hadith qudsi, ‘Allah has said: O son of Adam, so long as you call upon Me and ask of Me, I shall forgive you what you have done and I shall not care. O son of Adam, though your sins reached the clouds in the sky, if you were then to ask for My forgiveness I would forgive you. O son of Adam, were you to come to Me with sins almost as great as the earth [itself] and then face Me, ascribing to Me to “partner”, I would bring you forgiveness in like measure.
...the angels, for all their splendour, are ‘peripheral’ beings, in the sense that each represents a particular aspect of the divine Plenitude; no single one among one them reflects in his nature the totality of God’s attributes. The Perfect Man, on the other hand, though far distant from the Light of heaven, stands, as it were, directly between the divine axis and mirrors Totality. This is why man, when his nature is fully developed and perfectly balanced, is described as a ‘central’ being, and this is why it is possible for him to be the ‘Khalifah of Allah on earth’, the Viceregent.
The agnostic has a very curious notion of religion. He is convinced that a man who says 'I believe in God' should at once become perfect; if this does not happen, then the believer must be a fraud and a hypocrite. He thinks that adherence to a religion is the end of the road, whereas it is in fact only the beginning of a very long and sometimes very rough road. He looks for consistency in religious people, however aware he may be of inconsistencies in himself. The fact that we do expect consistency of others - and are astonished by their lack of it - is sufficient proof of our awareness that the human personality ought to be unified under one command. Perhaps the most difficult of all the requirements of religion is simplicity, for the simple man is all of one piece; he does not leave bits of himself scattered all over the landscape of his life. He is, so to speak, the same all through, whichever way you slice him, and it has been said that only the saint has a right to say 'I'; the rest of us would do better to confess 'My name is legion'.
If the term 'science' has any precise meaning - relating it to knowledge of the real - then it is the science of tawhid. It could be said, and with good reason, that the kafir should never be permitted to approach the physical sciences or to involve himself in them. He does not possess the key to them, and he is therefore bound to go astray and to lead others astray. He divides when he should unite, and his fragmented mind deals only with fragments: it is little wonder that he splits the atom, with devastating results. Those who know nothing of the principle are incompetent to study its manifestations. 'Pursue not that of which thou hast no knowledge. Surely hearing and sight and heart - all these - shall be called to account' (Q.17.36).
It is precisely because Islam goes so far in accepting the natural instincts, and in sanctifying them, that it is obliged to 'draw the line' so firmly and to punish with such severity departures from the norm and excursions beyond the limits established by the religious Law. The requirements of social and psychological equilibrium, the need to protect women and the security of children are the motives that determine this Law, and, since the whole social structure is anchored in the family, its infringements threaten society as a whole and are punished accordingly. As a civilization and a 'way of life' Islam stands or falls in terms of the delicate balance maintained between order and liberty, as also between society and the individual.
A man might spend a lifetime reading spiritual books and studying the writings of the great mystics. He might feel that he had penetrated the secrets of the heavens and the earth, but unless this knowledge was incorporated into his very nature and transformed him, it was sterile. I began to suspect that a simple man of faith, praying to God with little understanding but with a full heart, might be worth more than the most learned student of the spiritual sciences.
Sadly but, perhaps, not altogether unexpectedly this society has had very limited success in achieving what is supposed to be the justification for its existence — the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest possible number of people. In so far as its citizens are saved from the major anxieties and responsibilities which normally surround the business of being a man, they transfer what appears to be an unvarying human capacity for worry to the most trivial things, making mountains out of molehills on a vast scale; and they have 'nervous breakdowns' over problems which men and women living under sterner conditions would hardly find time to notice.
The evidence is all around us. There are a thousand ways in which our existence may be terminated between one moment and the next; a simple drug will transform the most intelligent among us into an idiot, or the bravest among us into a coward; and we know from our reading if not from experience that techniques of torture, more widely practised today than at any time in the past, can destroy every vestige of human dignity in a very short time. Such human dignity as we may have - and the Viceregent of God is indeed a figure of great dignity - is a robe loaned to us, just as a woman’s beauty is loaned to her, just as our skills, whether hereditary or acquired, are on loan, as are our strengths and our virtues. We can claim nothing as being truly ours except for our weaknesses and our vices, together with the ill we do in the world; for the Quran assures us that all good comes from God, all ill from man. We do not even control the breath of life within us, and: ‘No soul knoweth what it will earn tomorrow nor doth any soul know in what land it will die. Truly Allah is the Knower, the Aware!’ (Q.31.34).
It is related that on one occasion the Prophet asked the archangel Gabriel to show himself in the 'mighty form' in which God created him. 'O Beloved of God,' said Gabriel, 'I have a terrifying form such as no one could look upon without being rapt from himself.' The Prophet insisted none the less, and Gabriel finally agreed to allow his angelic dimension to encompass earthly vision. There was a great rush of sound, as of a hurricane in full spate, and Gabriel appeared in his earth-crushing splendour so that his form blotted out the horizon. the Prophet fainted under the impact of this vision, whereupon the archangel resumed his earthly disguise, embraced the fallen man and kissed him, saying: 'Be not afraid, O Beloved of god, for I am thy brother Gabriel!' but he added: 'What would it have been like if you had seen Israfil (he who summons to the Last Judgement), for then my own form would have seemed to you a small and puny thing.
The independence movements in the colonies and protectorates came into being, not through return to indigenous values on the part of those concerned, but through the absorption of occidental ideas and ideologies, liberal or revolutionary as the case might be. The process of modernization - a euphemism for Westernization - far from being halted by this withdrawal, was in fact accelerated. The enthusiasm of the new rulers for everything 'modern' was not restrained, as had been the enthusiasm of their former masters, by any element of self-doubt. The irony implicit in this whole situation was tragically apparent in the Vietnam war, when the people of that country fought, not to preserve their own traditions or to gain the right to be truly themselves, but under the banner of a shoddy occidental ideology and for the privilege of imitating their former masters in terms of nationalism and socialism. The west was at war with its own mirror image in a vicious dance of death.