By: Aftab A. Malik
Source: http://www.abc.net.au/
This is the second article in a series of three instalments, comprising Aftab A. Malik’s reflections on his three month stay in Lakemba, Sydney.
Even before I began giving lectures, controversy had spread concerning my presence in Lakemba. Who was I? Why was I here? What was my agenda?
Needless to say, some emails that trickled into the Lebanese Muslim Association (LMA) weren’t very polite, while others were outright obnoxious. Later during my stay, rumours surfaced that I was an anti-terrorism agent, training young Muslims how to defuse bombs (well, that’s better than being accused of training young Muslims to make bombs, I suppose). I actually read a few of those emails just to prepare myself for the sort of attitudes that I would come across during my stay.
Even when I met the first wave of young Muslims, I was faced with a few “face-offs.” Perhaps I am being too harsh. I guess the scepticism was natural: we live in an age in which people clamour to have their “fifteen minutes of fame” and broadcast themselves on YouTube, as if everyone simply needs to hear what they have to say. We are inundated by self-made celebrities and their opinions. The sad thing is that there is always an audience.
In fact, I did not come to Sydney to carve out a niche for myself on the celebrity circuit, nor did I wish to inundate others with my opinions. If I articulated any opinions, they were only echoes of what the scholarly community has said. I wanted to convey, not necessarily teach. My hope was simply to get people thinking, allow them some insight into the richness and vastness of the Islamic scholarly tradition, and articulate that the Qur’an (the principal source for Islamic law) has a pluralistic worldview that recognizes religious diversity.
Truth and beauty in Islam
In fact, the Qur’an addresses the whole of humanity, emphasizing that those who are religiously oriented and those who are not are all “children of Adam” (Banu Adam). I emphasized that normative Islam is predicated on the Arabic word adab, which, in its original meaning, means “an invitation to a banquet.” This is a banquet of honourable, refined guests. It’s a gathering defined by etiquette. Today, the word is often and frequently translated as “manners.”
On one level, this is certainly true, but it has a more profound and deeper meaning. For instance, from this word, we obtain another, adib, which relates to a person of letters, or of grammar more specifically. The idea follows that the person of adab, through discipline, acquires knowledge (‘ilm), from which they are able to determine and place things in their proper context and place, giving that thing its true and proper meaning.
We could all do with a good dose of adab, but this requires seeking out those living authorities who can impart such knowledge and wisdom. Normative Islamic scholarship is and has always been established by transmission – a handing down from one generation to another of sound religious knowledge by individuals who carry a formal license to teach (‘ijaza) that confirms their mastery over a particular discipline or text, which they are then authorized to teach to others. It carries with it authority, since it is only given by masters who themselves received it from their teachers and so on until this chain (isnad) is traced back to the first generation of Muslims (al-Salaf) and to the Prophet Muhammad himself.
In an age in which the last of those scholars – the inheritors of the prophets – who were raised in societies that valued transmission-based knowledge are dying, these valuable chains of transmission are being lost, so that, instead of knowledge, we find opinion; instead of clarity, we find confusion. For those who cannot make the distinction between information and knowledge, it is wise to reflect upon the words of the Prophet Muhammad, who said that God “does not withdraw knowledge from the people, but takes the learned and with them knowledge disappears. What remains among the people are ignorant leaders who make religious decisions for them without knowledge. They misguide and are misguided.”
How often do we hear Muslims warning non-Muslims not to take their understanding about Islam and Muslims from dubious sources, pundits and self-proclaimed experts? Yet, this is precisely the same advice given to Muslims from the elect among the scholars who lived in the earliest days of Islam. The scholar of prophetic traditions and jurist par excellence, ‘Abd Allah ibn al-Mubarak (d. 726) said: “According to me, the isnad is from the faith. If it were not for the isnad, whoever wished could have said whatever he wished.” While Imam al-Zuhri (d. 741), a principal compiler of prophetic traditions, warned Muslims that: “This knowledge is religion, so look well to whom you are taking your religion from.”
The problem today is not that there is no one speaking on behalf of Islam; rather, the problem is that everyone with an opinion now speaks on behalf of Islam, and this confuses both Muslims and non-Muslims alike.
While normative Islam nurtured people of adab, it also generated beauty. In the Islamic tradition, God has 99 names, one of which is al-Jamil, the Beautiful. The Prophet Muhammad said: “God is Beautiful and He loves beauty” – it is that beauty which attempts to reflect the divine reality on the human plane which is being praised, and which has been captured throughout the centuries in Islamic art.
The highest form of Islamic sacred art is, and has always been, the Qur’an, which has been decorated, illuminated and written in beautiful calligraphy. Islamic architecture reflects God’s beauty with its intricate design and calligraphic motifs. Clothing was refined and decorative; while carpets, textiles and utensils produced hundreds of years ago and which reflected this focus on beauty now go on sale at prestigious auction houses fetching thousands and hundreds of thousands of dollars.
However, all of these creative enterprises came into being at the hands of believers whose souls were imbued with the highest form of human beauty, ihsan (virtuous beauty). In what is considered a succinct summary of the entire religion of Islam, the hadith of Gabriel informs Muslims that ihsan forms one of three dimensions of Islam, in which ihsan is the highest station; it is a state of being that arises from subduing the ego (nafs) and edifying oneself with noble, beautifying traits. As the Prophet Muhammad said: “Among the best of you is the most beautiful in character traits,” and “I was only sent to complete the noble character traits.”
Confronted with trials and tribulations, achieving the state of ihsan ensures that we act beautifully, ever moving closer to God. The Qur’an states, “Who is more beautiful in religion than one who submits his face to God, does what is beautiful, and follows the way of Abraham in pure faith” (Qur’an 4:125), and “Who submits his face to God and does what is beautiful, he has his reward with God, he shall not fear, nor shall he sorrow” (Qur’an 2:112). In short, normative Islam teaches Muslims how to beautify their souls, and everything around them, and it was that beauty which I stressed needed to become part of our daily lives once again.
Modern mayhem
I think what surprised many about my lectures was, first, the uncertainty that existed as to who actually comprises the scholastic community – those sages and savants that had codified the religion of Islam for us over the centuries – and, second, the fact that a diversity of opinion exists within that scholastic community. In other words, what was intriguing was my assertion that it is probably closer to the truth to represent the Islamic intellectual tradition as one of dissent.
Certainly, there are unequivocal truths upon which a scholastic consensus has been established over the centuries, such as the prohibition of killing innocents, civilians (and certainly women and children), the prohibition of fomenting and spreading sedition/persecution (fitnah), vigilantism, the abuse of covenants, trusts and contracts and so on. While I advocated looking back to see what these great scholars said, I did not suggest that the solution to our ills was to simply cling to the past.
There is a tendency to treat medieval legal precedents as sacrosanct rather than to see them as the intellectual outcomes of great people who exerted themselves to make sense of the world that they were living in. Tradition is the living faith of the dead and not the dead faith of the living: it is about accessing the collective wisdom of past communities and articulating and living by it in the context of the present. While progressive in outlook, it is rooted within the established traditions of Islamic law, philosophy, theology and spirituality. The system for extrapolating legal rulings makes dissent unavoidable, and the classical epoch of Islamic legal thought bears witness to this dynamic process, in which creativity was the hallmark of the most brilliant minds.
While the Islamic tradition is one of nuance, comprising a broad-based interpretive methodology, sadly, today, some modern Muslims try to paint Islam as a faith of black and white, and articulate the “it’s my way or the highway” approach. I proposed the notion that Muslims, through their own hands, had made Islam appear ugly to others. Whereas our ancestors built a civilization that was synonymous with knowledge and beauty, sadly, some modern Muslims contribute to a picture of Islam that is ugly, harsh, decaying, devoid of colour and life. They alienate not only other Muslims, but the wider community also. Islam for many people, especially those in the West, has thus come to be seen as an idiosyncrasy – a social oddity that is incapable of living with others.
Responding to the West
Such a state of confusion and disarray did not simply happen overnight. Around two hundred years ago, Muslims sought to respond to the growing power, influence and domination of the West in Muslim lands. They adopted various strategies. Some called for modernisation and reform, while others clung to a literal understanding of the Qur’an, wishing to adhere to what they believed was a “pure” form of Islam.
The common thread that most of these intellectual currents shared was their opposition to the West. Their reading of Islamic texts was filtered through a siege mentality. Muslims, as they understood it, were under attack. In their zeal to make sacred that which was profane, they readily excommunicated other Muslims en masse for emulating the “unbelievers” and for abandoning the implementation of the rule of God. Their rebellion against God made killing them a religious duty, or so they concluded.
Today, we can quite clearly see that their decisions have left Muslims reeling in a state of confusion. Rather than bringing clarity, these steps to bolster Muslim power simply created bloodshed as Islam fell victim to ill-equipped interpreters of Islamic law who had little or no training in the Islamic sciences. The reformation that engulfed the Muslim world in the nineteenth century was meant to “modernise” Islam and bring it on a par with the superiority of the West, but it backfired: Muslim intellectuals did away with established legal principles and demonised Islam’s system of spirituality. This laid the path for the decentralization of religious authority, which in turn gave birth to the phenomenon of the amateur mujtahid, or the autodidact. Thus, the democratisation of ijtihad (scholarly independent reasoning) ensured a further crisis: anyone could say almost anything about what Islam is and what it isn’t.
The need for mercy
We are living in rigorous times, a time in which God is asserting His attribute of Majesty. This is not the time to be myopic, rigid and harsh, when so many people are experiencing tribulations as a result. More than ever, I argued, Muslims need to take on the attribute of mercy (rahma). Indeed, showing mercy to others is an indication of true faith, as the Prophet Muhammad mentioned.
The metaphysical embodiment of mercy on this earthly plane, I suggested, are women, and should we fail to honour them, mercy will gradually disappear from our homes, communities and societies. After all, did not the Prophet Muhammad say that the womb was derived from God’s own name, the All-Merciful? Any abuse of women by men is a violation of God’s command and is nothing other than patriarchal ignorance (jahiliyya). The Prophet Muhammad said: “No one honours a woman except an honourable man, and no one demonises a woman except a demeaning human being.”
Is it a coincidence that the first tradition (hadith) of the Prophet Muhammad that students of knowledge who are traditionally taught, is called the “tradition of mercy,” in which the Prophet Muhammad said: “People who show mercy to others will be shown mercy by the All-Merciful. Be merciful to those on earth, and He who is in heaven will be merciful to you.” This tradition informs believers that mercy isn’t something reserved for other Muslims only: it is to be shown to the whole of humanity.
Once, a funeral procession passed by the Prophet Muhammad, and out of respect, he stood up, and in emulating the Prophet, all his companions followed. It was then pointed out to him that the funeral procession was that of a Jew, whereupon the Prophet replied: “Was he not a human being?” And let’s not forget about the animals. The Prophet told his companions of two incidents; one about a prostitute who drew some water from a well and put it in her shoe, to quench a dog’s thirst, and another woman who intentionally starved a cat to death. Because the prostitute showed mercy to the dog, she entered into paradise, whereas the woman who tortured the cat was damned.
Sadly, Shariah (“Islamic law”) is a word more likely to be associated with cruelty and violence today than mercy. Yet most will be surprised to hear me say, that if any Shariah ruling results in oppression and the absence of mercy, it really can’t be said to stem from Islamic law. This isn’t my opinion – it was articulated by the conservative fifteenth-century scholar, Ibn al-Qayyim.
Mercy is also hard-wired into the Islamic tradition itself. It is a blessing and a mercy that within the Sunni legal tradition, we have four Sunni schools of Law, not one. Can you imagine the difficulties that Muslims around the world would face if there was only one way of doing everything? Even within the schools, there are dissenting opinions, and within each school, a normative tradition was eventually established, known as the “dominant” (mashhur) opinion. Even then, the dominant opinion varied by geographical regions. In our lifetime, it is nearly impossible for someone to master one legal school, let alone claim to know the nuances of all four.
Authoritarian autodidacts
Rather than seeing this pluralistic legal tradition as a mercy, some modern Muslims see it as chaos and confusion, but that thinking has very little do with the intellectual foundations of Islamic civilization, and more to do with a destructive need to impose an authoritarian voice across the Muslim world. The authoritative is giving way to the authoritarian.
There are also other Muslims who feel they are no longer obliged to adhere to one legal school of law, but believe that they have the tools and ability to derive Islamic law from the primary texts. Following a legal school of law was never before an issue. Throughout the past one thousand years, from the greatest scholars that ever lived to the lay people on the street, they all followed one of the four legal schools. Yet in the high-tech age of “Shaykh Google,” some Muslims think they know everything and therefore have no need to “ask the people of remembrance” (Qur’an 16:43) – and the numbers of these autodidacts are ever on the rise.
It is sad that, today, when normative Islam is presented, many Muslims think that it is an oddity – at best, strange and at worse, deviant. The truth is that we are living in strange times, besieged by ignorance about the basic foundations of our faith. It’s a time in which some Muslims strip away all ethical and moral imperatives from the very fabric of Islam. A time in which some Muslims believe that compassion, love and mercy can only be shown to other Muslims. It is a time in which tribal Islam (Banu Islam) is promoted at the expense of the brotherhood (and sisterhood) of humanity (Banu Adam). It is a time plagued by theological and legal confusion which has resulted in devastating consequences for Muslims and non-Muslims worldwide.
Some audience members would approach me and say that they were told, or had heard, or had seen on YouTube, messages contrary to my own and were quite wary about the content of my lectures. At other times, I met with cheerful faces, with people saying that they knew deep down that Islam is a religion of balance, beauty and mercy. That was the spirit that I sought to instil in people’s hearts: the spirit of mercy.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of MuslimVillage.com.