Modernity and Islam
June 4th, 2008All of us are children of modernity and the thought under which it is hinged, a world view fashioned by the most pervasive intellectual and moral influences of recent European history, an outlook in conformity with the Zeitgeist of the times. Seyyed Hossein Nasr has noted that modernist tendencies fall under four general marks:
a) Anthropomorphism (and by extension, secularism), or homocentrism
b) Evolutionist progressivism
c) The absence of any sense of the sacred; and
d) An unrelieved ignorance of meta-physical principles
From these four underlying facets characterizing modernity arise arrays of inter-related “mindsets” and “-isms”: scientism, rationalism, relativism, materialism, positivism, empiricism, evolutionism, psychologism, individualism, humanism, and existentialism.
Behind this bizarre assortment of ideologies which have proliferated in the last few centuries we can discern a growing and persistent ignorance concerning ultimate realities and an indifference, if not always an overt hostility, to the eternal verities conveyed by heavenly tradition. Not without reason did William Blake characterize the modern worldview as “Single Vision,” a horizontal understanding of reality which strips the “outer” world of its mystery, its grandeur and its revelatory function, and denies our human vocation as the “arks of God.”
This is an apt metaphor, it is as the prophetic tradition: “Indeed God has vessels among the people of the earth, the vessels of your Lord are the hearts of His wholesomely, righteous servants; the most beloved to Him are those which are the most clear and most compassionate”.
We, the faith community of Muhammad, are trustees of God in conveying in this time the heavenly tradition, or “Din Samawī”; of “rediscovering” it within our own “dar’l Islam”, and extending it to all the other sons and daughters of Adam beguiled by the wiles of modernity. Unlike Karl Marx, a ‘prophet’ of modernity who said: “Humanism is the denial of God and the total affirmation of man”, we speak from a different cosmological platform.
Every aspect of the “Din” as articulated so eloquently in the Gabriel Hadith is about re-directing those of humanity who respond, to the vertical, heavenly axial reality which defines our Adamic heritage. It is of no insignificance that the concepts of “jiha, tawajjuh and qibla” are so fundamental to the Muhammadan dispensation.
Seminally the prayer of Abraham, “I turn my face to that which created the heavens and the earth, hanifan, submissive; my prayer and sacrifice, my living and dying are for God, Lord of all creation”; lays out the foundation of this divine compass that redirects us homeward, that is heavenly, for his laying the foundation of the Kaaba and Muhammads restoring it to primacy are acts of this redirecting.
Interestingly William Shaddon of Columbia Universities College of Physicians has noticed:
Continued observation in clinical practice leads almost inevitably to the conclusion that deeper and more fundamental than sexuality, deeper than the craving for social power, deeper even than the desire for possessions, there is a still more generalized and universal craving in the human makeup. It is craving for the knowledge of the right direction –for orientation.
Huston Smith has noted that one of the characteristics of the now post modern age is one where direction is lost, he has written:
If we think of contemporary Westerners from all walks of life and the numberless directions in which their hopes and thoughts extend, we can only conclude what has become a truism: no comprehensive vision, no concerted sense of reality, informs our age. The opening lines of Dante’s Divine Comedy could have been written for our twenty-first-century’s Everyman:
Midway this way of life we’re bound upon
I woke to find myself in a dark wood,
Where the right road was wholly lost and gone.
The orienting affect of Heavenly Prophetic Religion, “Din”, is of crucial significance in our time, a time of where the voice of Nietzsche’s madman cries out “I seek God”! When amused bystanders asked if he had imagined that God had emigrated or taken a holiday, the madman glared. “Where has God gone?” he demanded. “We have killed him–you and I! We are all his murderers!” In a sense he is right, for when ritual and prayer that have their origin in heavenly realms is stripped from humanity, then mankind’s connectedness to their paradisial origin is severed, their vision is limited to the horizontal, the flat, and the vertically ascending is undone. The reality of “Ritual prayer is the ascension of the believer”is lost.
Every aspect of Islam as enumerated by the Messenger of God when Gabriel asked him: “Inform me as to Islam”; is about redirecting those who emulate him in one aspect or another of something which is of the Garden. Two are of particular significance: ritual prayer and pilgrimage.
In ritual prayer we enter into angelic, heavenly realms. The practitioner of ritual prayer clothes his or herself in angelic acts. The Messenger of Allah said, “Should you not array yourselves in prayer as the angels are arrayed before their Lord?” We asked, “O Messenger of Allah, how do the angels array themselves before their Lord?” He said, “They complete the first rows, packing themselves therein.” [Muslim] Every constituent act in the prayer: the standing and bowing, prostrating and sitting are each angelic, for the angels are thus before their Lord. It was Gabriel who taught the Messenger of Allah the prayer and it was during the Ascension where he received while in intimate proximity to his Lord the divine ordinance for their time specific collective performance.
Beginning at the center of the world, the Kaaba, where the heavenly and earthly realms join, and radiating outwardly there from the community of faith direct their faces “tawajjuh” towards that structure whose significance for many has become blurred. For it is an earthly manifestation of something more real and enduring, the “Bait l’Mamur” located in the seventh ‘tabaqa’ in the paradisial hierarchies. Each practitioner of the prayer, whether collectively or individually, aligns his or herself towards that point where the heavenly axis intersects the horizontal earthly reality. This is a profound act breaking William Bakes “Single Vision”.
Significantly on the Night of the Ascension, or Layla l’M’iraj, the Messenger of Allah meets his father Abraham leaning next to the “Bait l’Mamur”. He described the frequently visited house as one in which in a day and night numerous angels enter into it not to enter into it again and that they circumambulate it, a paradisial manifestation with definite earthly parallels.
The Muhammadan ascension is the corrective, or “islah” to the Adamic decent, or “Hubut” into the world. His ascension transcends his father Adam whom he meets in the first “tabaqa” of the paradisial hierarchies; he ascends through those hierarchies, past Moses and Abraham until his final arrival is to the Sidrat l’Muntaha, the place where angelic knowledge ends, but he goes beyond this, to a place where he is privy to intimate divine discourse.
With his return to the “dunya” Muhammad has set in place a means by which any individual who practices “i’tiba” of him will acquire through prophetic inheritance ultimate restoration to his or her final “ma’wa”, or arrival point.
Though the Night of Ascension was a time specific, fully bodily and real experience for the Messenger of Allah, each individual who enters into the “haram sharif” approaching the Kaaba, either in the season of the Hajj or during an act of ‘umra, can experience a ‘shadowy’ something of that heavenly event by passing the station of Abraham, Maqam Ibrahīm, and proceeding on into the time honored flow of the unsegregated bodies of believers, men and women in their participation with the angels in “tawwawf”. Thus in these acts again humanity is invited to have a ‘taste’ of the lofty, heavenly truths which await them in their true ‘home’ to which God calls them. “Indeed God invites to the abode of peace”!
The essential nature of true heavenly religion is that it is ever fresh, and always germane to both our immediate condition and to our ultimate destiny. But it can affectively only be so when a properly grounded understanding or “fiqh” of it exists for us. Did not the Messenger of God say, “When God desires good for a person He gives him a comprehensive knowledge of the din?”
This knowledge though is not from the myriad “isms” and “mindsets” which were listed at the beginning of our discussion. The “din” articulated by Gabriel is comprehensive: bodily, intellectually and experientially; respectively, islam, iman and ihsan. Unless these three are brought into union, or “tawhīd”, then the “Din” can not ameliorate the malaise which afflicts both Muslims and non-Muslims. Striving to recover an authentic Islamic intellectual as well as spiritual tradition is essential for us.
As humankind has exhibited a tendency to be heedless of tawhīd and to forget and ignore its implications, the Quran states that God has sent messengers to remind them of this essential truth. It is in this spirit that the Quran tells us, “Verily this is a reminder” (73:19, 76:29). This reminder is the truth of tawhīd, a truth expressed in the first testimony of faith, “There is no god but God” (la ilaha illa Lah). It is to remind humankind of this truth that every prophet has been sent. In the Quran, God specifically addresses Moses: “I am God! There is no god but I. So worship Me” (20:14). The seventh chapter of the Quran tells us that the Prophets Noah, Hud, Salih, and Shu’ayb all said to their people in different lands and in different ages, “O my people! Worship God! You have no other god but Him” (7:59, 65, 73, and 85). In another passage we are told, “Ask those of Our messengers We sent before thee: Have We appointed gods to be worshiped apart from the Merciful? (43:45) But the answer to this has already been given:”And we never sent a messenger before thee except that We revealed to him, saying, ‘There is no god but I, so serve Me’” (21:25). It is a fundamental principle of the Quran that every human collectivity has been sent a prophet: “And we have sent to every people a messenger that they may worship God” (16:36). Every human collectivity has thus been sent a reminder of tawhīd and its consequences. From this perspective, the purpose of revelation is not to bring a new truth, but to reaffirm the one truth, the only truth that is, the only truth that has ever been.
From another perspective the central message of the Quran finds expression in the verse: “Truth has come and falsehood has vanished. Falsehood is ever bound to vanish!” (18:81). In this spirit the text reads, “And we have made the book descend as a clarification for all things” (16:89). The emphasis in this Quranic rubric is to experience this clarification and thus to know; as is revealed, “We have made it descent as an Arabic Quran that you may now” (12:2). Such verses do not refer to a knowledge experienced through transmission from one generation to the next; rather, they call humankind to an immediate knowledge of things as they are in themselves (kama hiya). To posses such knowledge is the human norm, the fitra. The function of the Islamic intellectual tradition is therefore not only to transmit and preserve textual authority which clarifies tawhīd form one generation to the next, but moreover to cultivate God-centered intellect and authentic spiritual awareness by which one is able to aver this basic truth through one’s own experience and consciousness.
We need in these days a new metanoia, or ‘change of mind’. It is as the renowned renewer of the faith of seventeenth century India, Ahmad Sirhindi noted in that one must be of either an ‘aqal ma’ash’ or ‘aqal ma’ad’, either with a ‘mindset for this world’ or a ‘mindset of everlastingness’. This requires therefore a re-orientation of ourselves a shift in our direction, a tawba, a return back, ruju’. Ours is a tradition of sacredness that rests upon generational transmission, as Ibn Sirin one of the foremost companions of the Sahaba noted, “Indeed this knowledge is the Din, so be aware from whom you take your din”. The knowledge he was speaking of specifically was of transmitted prophetic narratives, hadith, but for us it can be extended to all the categories and types of sacred knowledge which through sanad, or transmission have generationally sustained this sacred community who are the heirs to prophetic knowledge. When we with conscious and diligent effort restore this knowledge to our local communities we will be able to begin to replace the anthropomorphic, homo-centric and secular world view with a theocentric heavenly oriented one and the sacred, meta-physical realities of which heavenly tradition and religion affirm can be restored to the sons and daughters of Adam as is their birthright.