ZANUYAY CONTEMPLATIONS

The Most Beautiful Name

2010-01-04T10:21:00.001-08:00

MEDITATIONS ON THE VEIL

2009-04-07T16:24:00.000-07:00

MEDITATIONS ON THE VEIL
Five Images of Contemporary Islamic Calligraphy
That Transcend the Boundaries of the Eye
by Aaron Vlek

(click all images to enlarge)

Few native English speakers can comprehend the possibilities, the depth of meaning and subtle implications inherent in the concept of the living sacred text, language, and alphabet such as that of Qur’anic Arabic. We write and read, even our most elegant treatises and love letters, often with a sterile and utilitarian efficiency that prefigures and starkly illustrates the highly prized transitory and disposable quality of our culture, our ideas, and perhaps even our very aspirations.
Drawing from the works of five contemporary examples of Islamic calligraphy, I will provide a brief examination of the traditional Qur’anic, personal and sigilistic, and even one piece which appears seemingly wholly abstract. Yet, as radically distinct from one another as these individual works appear at first to be, as divergent from the ritual formality of what is typically considered Islamic calligraphy, all share three important features. The images are constructed, crafted, drawn, and evoked from the body of the written Arabic script. Each work possesses a bold and imposing visual composition that challenges viewers to abandon their habitual default modes of looking and seeing as they are compelled to confront and contemplate that which is being presented in each image.
And most importantly, each image seductively illuminates the mystery of the Arabic script as it both veils and reveals the secrets it wishes to share with us. In each of these works here under discussion, the artist has employed the Arabic script as a master composer might create a complex and intricate symphony. Where the English and Western languages seem to lay flat upon the page, divesting themselves quickly of their contents and then waiting silently, as if to say, that is all and nothing more, the Arabic calligraphy is never static, never quiet, always tempting us with this, and again perhaps, with so much more.

Image #1

Al-Waqfa (2006)
Al-Arif – The man of Knowledge
Nazar Yahya (b. Iraq, 1963-)
Handmade book, 10 digital prints with collage

Yahya has crafted a handmade book featuring ten digital prints and a bound cover. As contemporary as this piece may be, with its slick, high-tech execution , it recalls the elegance of a near monastic care and meticulousness in what is clearly a cursive style of personal Arabic penmanship and not a formal and traditionally Qur’anic calligraphic style at all. The color palate is quite reminiscent of both Zen and Shinto painting styles with the bold and dramatic hand against the royal glow of a warm and sunny background. As with Shinto and Zen works, the prominent solar sphere commands the viewer’s gaze and forces the eye to penetrate through the distracting veil of the thickly and carefully rendered sacred and mystic text.
In Yahya’s piece, al-Arif, the Man of Knowledge, the text derives from al-Niffari, a 9th century mystic from the artist’s native Iraq known for his passionate evocations of God. The viewer is invited to transcend the material reality in which he is seemingly forever entrenched, through the protecting veil of the written and visible exoteric text, itself perhaps looming like the Sphinx before the gates of the gnosis, ready to turn away the unworthy, or the unprepared. Niffari states in the text upon the page,, “Whenever the vision is broadened, the words become narrowed." Are Yahya and al-Niffari suggesting, or hinting, that regardless of how beautiful the calligraphic script may be, it is but the outer husk of the meanings and Reality hidden behind the veil of the text? And perhaps even this, the hidden meaning itself which the trained eye, the scholastic theologian, or the mystic may comprehend, is merely another veil of many yet to part as we transcend the limitations of the senses, the reasoning mind, and all knowledge which we may smugly call our “own” and come finally to encounter that which destroys forever the clamor of the mind.

Image #2

RITUAL SIGNS II (1999)
Iman Abdullah Mahmud
(b. Iraq, 1956-)

Ritual Signs II is a clear and typical example of the ancient form of table or tablet of corresponding mystic symbols, elements, and images. Almost a cookbook or roadmap for attempting to decipher the inner nature of deepest reality, and navigating the intricate connective relationships between all things in creation, this type of formula was developed and used extensively in the ancient world among the Hebrews, Egyptians, Chaldeans and many others and has survived into modern usage in forms little changed in either style or content.
Some examples of this form which thrive today are the anagrams and other common amusement puzzles found everywhere in popular culture from Barnes & Noble to the back pages of The New York Times. As with the tarot cards and their mundane cousins the playing card deck which lacks the major arcane or trumps, these modern puzzles and anagrams offer seemingly only amusement and distraction.
The intriguing feature of Mahmud’s table of sigils, is that it truly appears to be a “working magician’s” drawing board. It’s old and worn, tattered and frayed at the edges and clearly shows evidence of fevered erasings and mad scribbling, one can almost imagine by candlelight at the midnight hour. The bold and almost violent strokes across the surface of the work seem disturbingly new, perhaps the ink still damp, giving evidence of a final and triumphant AHA! Moment as these dramatic dark symbols almost leap from the page to preeminently wipe out all that has gone before, or has lead up to, this final secret and private revelation.
Even a light comparison between this work and other similar examples from cultures as disparate as the Hebrew, the Caribbean, and of the 16th, 19th, and 20th century European, as well as those of neo-occultists of the John Dee, Austin Osman Spare, and Aleister Crowley schools of thought, will reveal an uncanny similarity. One cannot easily dismiss the haunting universality of man’s attempt to categorize, symbolize, and then manipulate his observations and theories of the non-spatial and spiritual realms with the same hunger and precision, and with a similar methodology, as do the empirical scientists who scoff at them.

Image #3

SALOME (1993)
Rachid Koraïchi
(b. Algeria, 1947-)
Gold and indigo hand-woven silk

Koraïchi’s Salome evokes similar ritual styles from diverse cultural sources as does Mahmud in the previous image. Disdaining the canvas, the high-tech digital program, and the calligrapher’s nib and parchment, Koraïchi traces his arcane and indecipherable formulae on azure silk with gold lettering and symbols. These three mediums tell us a great deal. Silk is very costly and exquisite, azure is the color of heaven and indeed even “the gods,” and gold is the most precious of material elements. Although Koraïchi is an artist from the “Islamic” world, his stretched and twisted calligraphic renderings resemble the Japanese kanji figures far more than the Arabic script from which they are derived. The figures at the top of the work bear a remarkable resemblance to the classical hieroglyphic depictions of the gods seated within the Barq of Re as it makes its journey across the heavens twice daily, at dawn and at sunset. Dawn and sunset are two of the Muslim times of prayer as well. Also similarly to the Mahmud piece, Koraïchi utilizes the table schema in the central portion of the work with the left portion of the panel resembling the rayed chart of the Zodiac, and the entire central portion similar in style to typical ancient Egyptian stelea or formulaic devotional tablets. Together these provocatively suggestive images create a delightful mélange of surprisingly cohesive cross cultural references.
At the very outset, we know that Koraïchi’s configurations are of the utmost import. However, the artist forever locks us out of these formulae by creating a completely private and interior secret script, which he then flaunts defiantly and gloriously before our eyes. We may glean certain hintings from the composition and the execution materials, but we will never know with certainty what Koraïchi has discovered by merely sitting passively in our chairs and gazing upon his travel notes. The artist seems to be suggesting that we must go forth and embark upon our own explorations, carve unique inroads towards the unknown, and devise our own private and interior languages with which to communicate our discoveries to ourselves and to the world. And perhaps Koraïchi is again like the Sphinx, retaining his silence as a final sacred oath.
Comparing other examples of similar models such as Tibetan prayer flags, ancient and contemporary, as well as Buddhist Thanka sacred paintings on cloth, we find silk and gold used frequently to convey the sacredness of the inner teachings and to beautifully decorate outward texts for the less initiated eye. Modern day “occultists” from the 19th and 20th centuries and well into the present have often endeavored to create secret working languages decipherable only to their creators to express and symbolize the expanse of the inner drawing board.

Image #4

The Attributes of Divine Perfection (1987)
Ahmed Moustafa
(b. Egypt, 1943)
Oil and watercolor on paper

This work is perhaps the most intriguing of this grouping under discussion. Moustafa’s central image depicts a cube highly reminiscent of the Ka’aba at Mecca to which Muslims turn in prayer five times a day. Yet the clever and almost playfully reverent use of the Islamic imagery extends provocatively to every element of the work’s composition. The dark blue background of the piece is subtly worked with the Throne Verse (Ayat al-Kursi 2:255) of the Qur’an. This backdrop is textured ambiguously to suggest the lovely appearance of a vast hanging curtain or veil, its folds almost visible and rippling, again reminiscent of the fabulously text-embroidered curtain that shrouds the exterior of the Ka’aba.
Furthering this idea of the deepening layers, inside the blue veil is the Ka’aba itself, but the walls of this Ka’aba are protected with yet another layer, this time with the second half of the shahada, or declaration of faith, that Muhammad is the Prophet of Allah. Once inside these protecting veils, the interior of the cube is opened, or revealed, to display the 99 Beautiful Names, or Attributes of Allah modeled intricately and suggestively into a pattern evoking the molecular structure of everything in the material creation from gross matter and crystalline structures to that of the highest of animal life, Mankind himself. These Attributes of Allah, the artist seems to declare, aggregate in countless wondrous combinations to form the basis of all existence, and display the mystery of seemingly diverse multiplicity of creation through differing mixtures of these subtle essences of Allah’s nature.
The remaining element of the work, the foreground which leads from the image of the cube outwards right off the canvas towards the viewer like a royal road, is worked with yet another Qur’anic passage admonishing, inviting, calling upon man to call in return upon God by any of these beautiful names. The result, we are promised, is that this road will open before us and guide us through the veils to the final personal revelation of the Mystery. This lovely image bridges the seeming gap between the heights of modern empirical knowledge and the often quoted ancient and sacred tenet of faith: Wheresoever ye shall look, there is the Face of God.

Image #5

A FINE FRENZY (2004)
Shirazeh Houshiary
(b. Iran, 1955-)
Black and white aquacyl, white pencil
and ink on canvas
This final piece almost needs no words. Similar images emerge frequently in many times and cultures. Always, it seems a meditation upon the descent of the soul as it turns away from the external realities and closes in upon its own concealed center. As Houshiary explains this work, this piece is created from a single word that is written over and over and over again upon the surface of the canvas, and then erased, written again and erased, smudged, and then written over and erased again producing an almost impossible to believe texture and symmetry. It recalls Moustafa’s Divine Attributes as this single word becomes the distilled substance of the entire work, but which loses any continuity with an actual written word of human origin and script. Again, this harkens back to Nazar Yahya’s work Al-Arif, which points beyond the veils to where the word ceases to have meaning as the rational mind is taken from itself.
Houshiary removes veils by removing the rational meaning of the word without diminishing the purity of its essence. She declares, and rightly so, that this method transcends culture and speaks deeply to us all at a level that ravages the conditioned meanings we all live by. If one gazes into the center of this piece, there is very much something there to be seen. Is it the intent of the artist? A hallucination on the part of the viewer? Or is there something there that each of us might discover by focusing intently on the center of A Fine Frenzy as it works like an Escher maze upon the brain and plays its tricks upon the supremely malleable human consciousness? Houshiary states openly that it is her hope, through this work, to allow the viewer to set aside the rational consciousness, to rend this veil that separates the viewer, all of us, from the Real that we all share at the core of our own inner fine frenzy.

What these five works all share in common, what they all tantalizingly suggest and challenge us to explore and discover for ourselves, is that there is indeed a great and beautiful mystery, a commanding and defining Truth to all of this great Thisness that surrounds and fills us. But that it is, as we are so often maddeningly reminded, hidden in plain sight, and that we must be transformed into creatures that can apprehend, see, taste, encounter, and Be with that Mystery. But that to undertake this great adventure, we must courageously chart virgin territory, the inner core of our own unique beings, and set aside those veils so that we may abandon ourselves to something so much more. Each of these five works both veils, and reveals that Mystery.

2008-05-11T09:51:00.001-07:00

CONFESSIONS IN SOLITUDE: A Necessary Sin Against Humanity

2008-04-28T15:55:00.000-07:00

“I came to love withdrawing into seclusion (khalwa) at home, as well as going forth into the [deserted] countryside. And I would wander about in the ruins and amongst the tombs situated near the city. This was my constant practice. And I sought sincere companions who might be of assistance to me in this matter, but I didn’t succeed and I withdrew from those places of retirement.”

Like the pregnant cat who would guard her precious secret from the danger of prying eyes, al-Hakim Tirmidhi, one of the great saints of 9th century Islam, discovered in solitude, that which his many years of scholarly training in his faith had not produced. As a youth he had undergone education appropriate to the son of a scholar and entered formal education at the age of eight years. But it was not until after his twenty-fifth year and a journey to Mecca, that the inner worlds of mystical conversion began to ripen and wipe away the elaborate scaffolding of the scholarly and rational dogmatism of the exoteric practice of his faith. And like the pregnant cat, he sought passionately for the jealously guarded places of privacy and “alone with the Aloneness” through which he might explore and give himself completely to experiences which catastrophically destroyed his former being and identity within traditional Islamic scholarship.
What is truly remarkable in this narrative is the suggestive similarity it bears to the autobiographical accounts of al-Ghazali in the 12th century, Jalaladin Rumi in the 13th century, and numerous other notable saints in Islam. But the phenomena of the observable an definable mystical unfolding is not confined to Islam. St Bernard of Clairvaux, St. John of the Cross, Theresa of Avila and Thomas Merton spanned the centuries of the Christian era. Evelyn Underhill’s classic and massive tome Mysticism beautifully reveals in delicious prose the common hallmarks of this spiritual unfolding and the many points all mystics seems to share in common. Most have undergone a formal education in the faith of their culture. All seem at one point to withdraw from the society of their fellows, often literally to a cave, the desert, a forest, or an isolated cell, where they undergo a cataclysmic change of perception and being from which they never “recover” and which ushers in points of heightened clarity, moral elevation, and a range of deep conversion experiences held similarly in common across disparate religious and cultural paradigms. These elements of heightened intellectual and aesthetic clarity, positive changes in personality, and perhaps most notably the moral elevation and a marked sobriety juxtaposed with periods of ecstatic states, separates the mystic from the psychotic or other mental disorder, many of which are accompanied by religious delusions and visions.
The need for solitude is felt to be a necessity in which the individual may explore, experience, and enjoy the new state and its many wonders. In the Deliverance from Error, al-Ghazali describes, upon returning reluctantly from his own Wandering the need to cut himself off, to live alone and only frequent society when necessary to teach. Does he not sound like the new bride just back from her honeymoon, only venturing out as needed and racing back to the joys of solitude that is not so very lonely at all?
The problem, a very big problem, is that the happy picture does not remain so idyllic for long. The villagers, it seems, are always jealous. Whether the mystic’s Beloved is Allah, Jesus of Nazareth, a strange wanderer named Shems, or a mysterious daemon pregnant and growing within the hidden confines of his psychic Being, these angry villagers, regardless of the century or culture from which they spring will endeavor to destroy those who become consumed with a drawing away from their midst in search of an aloneness that threatens the love of the reality of the visible and more trivial layers of the world. Such mystics seem also to fall into two varieties. Those who cannot keep their mouths shut, and spill their secrets to the world and pay with their lives. The most notable of course being Mansur al-Hallaj in the 10th century and his dance to the gallows.
The second type are those who know and keep their silence to themselves, sharing their secrets only with those who may be touched in similar ways by tasting the fruit of their gnostic experiences. These come back from their wanderings, but resume their place within society if but to a controlled and limited degree. Al-Ghazali was a man of profound traditional scholastic and legal achievements from an important and powerful family. He could not return to society and maintain a wholly obscure existence. Bernard of Clairvaux, a contemporary of al-Ghazali and the founder of the Cistercian monastic order within Roman Catholicism had a career very similar to al-Ghazali, underwent a similar conversion, and returned to public life of the church to pursue a career very similar to al-Ghazali’s with many of the same messages and techniques, teaching through letter writing and a call to attain both to the letter of religious law and to the inner gnosis. Both men maintained that either hand alone could not grasp the truth.
Al-Ghazali and Bernard both served the calling of the public “church” and the private gnosis, and their conversions lead them back into important and powerful roles within the society of the religious. Both men enjoy a tremendous fame and respect today in many communities. And both men came back to the world and embraced her, and shared with her the secrets that she was able to embrace and understand. Both al-Ghazali and Bernard worked for and supported the religious system and its role in an ordered and rational society, while quietly disseminating the more viral wines and fruits of their explorations to their private students through poetic writings, letters, and discourses.
Mansur al-Hallaj was an agent of chaotic upset. He tipped over the gracefully ordered dinner table and told people to eat off the floor, to grab food bare handed from the trees and to take savory morsels from the lips of strangers. It is easy to imagine the fear and horror this birthed in the hearts and minds of both the clergy and lay believers as well. Not only does this speak to destroy the girders or order in a value based society, but is hints at the monstrous ocean of the unknowable, That Which is Discovered in Solitude which would turn the safe and reliable order of the world on its head and drive a man presumably mad. Blasphemy, heresy, insanity are the only possible explanations and provide powerful protecting talismans against facing or even considering that Unknown by the masses.
But one must then consider the innocent girl child and her virginal isolation from the world of Men until she is ready to receive them in an appropriate and mutually enjoyable way. Just so with the horror, the fear, the revulsion felt towards even the subconscious suggestion of the Violation of the individual consciousness by that which it utterly alien and outside of Itself . Appropriate indeed that the masses remain separate, protected in their virginal innocence against that which would destroy the world if more than just a strange and isolated few pass quietly and unnoticed in the crowd, sharing a word, a story, a pamphlet, a few books, with one another.
But even in the secular world, solitude is warned against, is ridiculed, is pitied, all messages to those who might be warned against it, lest the balance of those who Know outweigh those who must not in order to keep the world machine functioning as it is. Similar injunctions are found against getting too excited about tantalizing and provocative sentiments found within the words of al-Ghazali, Hafez, Rumi, Abil-Khayr, Jami, Hallaj and the list goes on forever. Al-Ghazali warns in Deliverance from Error that the masses are not suited to a close study of certain kinds of knowledge as it will drive them mad.
“Beware! Beware! Do not think [for a moment] that this rational knowledge is a trifle matter. One must suffer greatly before one knows what [precisely] “proof” is. There are very few people in the world who know what [exactly] proof is. Indeed there are even very few who even if they want to learn what [exactly] “proof” is can do so. The majority of the [so-called] “’ulama” of your time have just heard of the name “proof.” They are far from [knowing] what it truly [means]. To make a long story short, if there be a student as intelligent as you are, then in no less than two years, certainly noting short of a year, one can teach what [precisely] the rational method and “proof” are. And that is in case I be the teacher. Otherwise, if someone else were to teach you “proof” and what it truly means, he would pluck you out of your faith [just] like a strand of your hair from your temples. [No sir!] This is not a sort of sea from which you and your contemporaries can emerge safely. Nothing but resonances of the Divine Grace can save [a person] there. You must stay where you are and do not even mention the name of “proof”! Else you would lose yourself, because on this path the blood of many people like you has been spilled.”

This suggestive admonition from 12th century notable “individual” ‘Ayn al-Qudat Hamadhani speaks clearly to the climber not suited to an all-out assault on the Everest of the internal Being and whose safety, well-being, and true aspirations and nature would be better suited to a Sunday stroll and picnic in the company of friends among the foothills on a sunny day. But those heartier and more relentless beings, those driven by passions they can neither control or deny were they even to wish to, will glean the secret and seductive message embedded therein. Like the half obscured and glittering gate not to be ignored that calls irresistibly to the likes of every lonely Steppenwolf, it whispers in the dark of solitude, Magic Theater, not for everybody!
Solitude is the darkness outside the reassuring glow of “civilization,” the silence beyond the collective monkey chatter of humanity that rejects that single most precious commodity held necessary and inviolate by the majority: the perpetual noise of social connectivity. Human beings will congregate with other people who they despise, just to avoid being “alone.” They will turn on television sets, radios, and video games, with the sole purpose of drowning the challenging echoes of the silence within their own beings, a silence that calls them to a loss of virginity they are not yet prepared to endure. But they will always hate and fear those who remind them that perhaps the girders of a seeming reality that keeps them from the unraveling insanity of the Rabbit Hole are just as tenuous as our collective tribal campfire and that it too will die and grow cold if they do not remain perpetually awake to feed it.
Solitude is a dark mother, a Kali of the soul that teaches her young brutal truths in the blood-milk she feeds their hunger. Do not, she seems to warn the unworthy, slip out of bed in the middle of a dark night to answer the call of strange men in the cold and silent alleys outside your window, unless sadness, horror, despair, disillusionment, and the loss of your humanity are small coins in the exchange. The virgin will always be afraid, but when her desire overrides her fear, then only is she ready and able to be taken by the Knowledge she seeks.

Transitions of the Liminal Wilderness

2008-04-28T15:52:00.000-07:00

The New Islam of Dr. Ali Shari'ati

TRANSITIONS OF THE LIMINAL WILDERNESS
The New Islam of Dr. Ali Shari’ati
by Aaron Vlek

What is religion? This is one of the most frequently asked yet little understood questions in the human dialogue. It’s undeniably the most argued about, the most debated, and one of the most controversially loaded terms in any language. Many would argue that the purpose of religion is to provide mankind with the sacramental methods by which he may encounter, know, and embrace the divine. Others contend that religion’s most critical role is to prescribe laws and norms of human social conduct and to provide a system for defining and enforcing man’s place within the world in relation to the divine through the direction of a wise or clerical class. There are however those who have undertaken to examine this seemingly universal human experience and attempted to isolate its distinctive features.
In this paper I will examine some of the fundamental ideas of Dr. Ali Shari’ati as he addresses this question within his model for a new Islam in 20th century Iran. To illustrate this examination I will use the theoretical model of German cultural anthropologist Arnold van Gennep (1873-1957) and his observations of the liminal experience and its function in religious structure. Van Gennep has created a template for this examination which has been applied frequently and with general success in examining cultures ancient and modern, east and west, tribal and cosmopolitan, settled and nomadic. This model also works with striking elegance in the individual transformative experience outside of an overarching cultural model, and suggests a fundamental and highly organic role of such states of being in the human experience. While acknowledging the obvious limitations and criticisms of van Gennep’s admittedly Western starting point, I hope to show that his model, and Shari’ati’s understanding of the human condition and psyche both transcends and manipulates culture, race, time, and gender.
In his important work Rites of Passage (1909) van Gennep separates his model into the religious, the shaman/holy man, and the witchcraft/spiritual outsider elements within societies and defines their distinctive functions. Briefly, witchcraft generally serves an “outlaw” role and often provides outlet or focus for negative and socially destructive energies. The shaman/holy man strives to guide individuals outside the confines of societal structures and into discrete encounters with the divine. Religion, in van Gennep’s model, serves to define and unify the social fabric and mythic identity of a people. This model then establishes an accessible place within the liminal outer boundaries of the social experience which allows the individual and the society to participate sacramentally in the mythical elements of their defining world vision.
The presence of the liminal function provides controlled opportunities for a repetitious cascade of culturally energizing and reinforcing experiences which provide enduring shape, cohesion, uniformity of existence, and security to the society through these ritualized breakdowns of the social norms. Through this structure, cycles both inside and outside the temporal collective experience of the group are maintained and manipulated in predictable ways even within situations of the controlled and focused chaos of the liminal state, thereby enlightening consciousness of the individual participants and establishing the reality of the shared mythos.
These experiences transition the individual through different levels of social status and individual states of being and exhibit several features in common throughout differing cultural milieu. Rites of passage therefore are designed to create moments outside of collective time and space through which individuals and perhaps whole societies may enter the wilderness of the liminal and undergo transformation that would otherwise remain impossible.
The model I have created for this examination of the ideas and phenomenon of Dr. Ali Shari’ati in the religious politics of 20th century Iran is based upon the van Gennep model of religion as a social structure. Shari’ati’s model is a response in part to the static formula to which all institutionalized religions must eventually succumb as their initial explosive momentum, revelatory or otherwise, begins to degrade and dissipate. In response to this dissipation, the appearance of Shari’ati and his ideas served as an initial ritualistic explosion of generative energy which had the effect of ushering great numbers of people across widely disparate social, economic, and ideological strata into a common, and I plan to demonstrate, liminal state that exhibited all the defining characteristics of the typical rite of passage in the van Gennep model.
As in the van Gennep structure, Ali Shari’ati makes brutally clear the role of religion in the life of humanity, man’s responsibilities to religion and to his fellows, and his rights and duties within both religion and the world that God has mandated upon him. He then provides access to a regenerated and purely Iranian liminal state to transition the people from the phase of loss and abnegation to the mythic and potently charged liminal state which becomes the nexus for extreme change in the personal or collective state.
First, it is important to establish a general description of the concept of liminality. The liminal state is that which exists both abstractly and with visceral reality outside of the normal experience as defined by time, custom, place, identity, and relationship; to self, to other, and to one’s society. The liminal is the twilight time of death before one is reborn into a new state of being or social status. What is known and comfortable, the nature of the real and the definition of the self, either as an individual, or collectively as a group or a society, has come to an end, has broken down, and the stability of the new state, its responsibilities and privileges, its possibilities and uncharted limitations are yet to be established.
This uncertainty destabilizes the mind and creates a sense of the hyper-aware in which all things appear to become possible. It is a marginal time of strange and mysteriously directed chaos and intellectual weightlessness. It is a time characterized by a unique reconciliation of seeming opposites: crippling fear and ecstatic excitement, the complete darkness of the unknown/unknowable and supra-rational hope and confidence, and a timelessness in which mythologized experience becomes both sacramental and profoundly accessible to be communally shared. Shari’ati’s ideas, when examined collectively and viewed within the context of the economic and social crises they sought to address, form a seamless entrance into the possibility of just such a liminal experience.
However as with all processes, the rite of passage model and its reliance upon the liminal state must reach completion for the full transformative growth state to be attained and stabilized. Without such completion, the individual, group, or society, may remain dangerously caught in a perpetual state of liminality from which an equally profound agent of change must appear to break the tornado-like pattern of circular, self perpetuating energy.
Looking at the Shari’ati phenomenal model it is critical to identify the necessity which required a transitional passage, the complex social issues and the resulting window of opportunity which made possible an escape from these crises. In rites of passage models involving the individual coming to the age of maturity, the rituals and rhetoric, the symbology of passage to a new state of being in adulthood will have no meaning or effect if one is not caught in the inner maelstrom of psychological and physiological changes associated with onset of maturity and anticipation of participation in a new adult status in society.
Shari’ati understood with a crystalline clarity the critical need to address the specific states of most acute crisis in the people he sought to transform. In Part-1 of Where Shall We Begin Shari’ati identifies two actors on the stage. The enlightened soul who occupies a liminal plateau within society is an indefinable creature who is neither part of the ruling or intellectual elites, nor a part of the common masses. For Shari’ati, the enlightened soul exists to view society from a distance and assess its full parameters and thereby recognize the weaknesses, failings, the corruptions and disease which plague it, and the nature and location of its culturally shared guilt and shame. Such an individual must then identify the root causes of this disease and corruption, and then devise clear and communicable solutions for the eradication of these social ills as well as methods for their execution. But first he must ensure that these methods may be enthusiastically embraced by all elements within society and that his remedies are appropriately suited to the time and place, and to the history and cultural identity of the people whom he strives to reach. The first step in this process, for Shari’ati as for the enlightened soul, is to build a bridge that will reach from himself to all in society and unite that society to himself.
As with the prophetic calling, the enlightened soul is burdened with a profound mission: it is the task and duty of this person to awaken the masses to an awareness of the depth of their suffering, to unify them through a common and universal language and experience, and to usher them through a series of shared events which will lead them out of the wilderness of the diseased state of social being and into a new and creatively dynamic model capable of self-generating change and growth. The enlightened soul must also ensure that the people be armed with the means of defending themselves and the vulnerability of their new state against threats both from external sources, and from within their own society.
The second player on this mythic stage is the varied and diverse peoples of 20th century Iran whom the enlightened soul, Shari’ati himself, had to unify as beads upon a single thread. For Ali Shari’ati, that obvious thread was Islam. But Islam at the time Shari’ati was writing was not a unifying factor and had, in the case of a corrupt clerical class, served to further diversify social groups and actually made possible many of the worst crises which challenged Iranian society at the time. Islam was also not a unifying force amongst certain factions of the intellectual elite who had embraced the ideas of Marx, Mao, and others and who disavowed any role for religion in the societies of modern humanity.

The Pre-Liminal Stage: The Banishing of the Known

In the van Gennep model, the full potency of the liminal state would not be achievable if the individual or group is not first removed from all normative and rational points of orientation and reference. In this pre-liminal stage all systems of security, power, and identity are stripped away. This includes ideas and assumptions of what constitutes the real, of what composes memory, history, physicality, and may even include, in the case of individual liminal experience, instances of extreme physical distancing from normal elements of security, safety, and personal dignity. Only by undergoing this stripping away of all elements by which the human creature defines his experience may the liminal state be entered and the zone of the endlessly possible be attained.
In this stage, Shari’ati removes each component element of Iranian society from the matrix of its established identity and forms. He accomplishes this in his writings Man and Islam and Where Shall We Begin. In Man and Islam the nature of humanity is defined as dual, for he is composed of both mud and of the spirit of God. This duality of man is highly suited to his role as the vice-regent of God on Earth. The spirit of God which He has infused into man with His breath awards man his dignity and power and establishes the appropriateness of his will, a will subject only to the will of God, a will not to be broken or usurped arbitrarily at the whim and greed of other men.
This dual nature is a model evidenced and reinforced by God Himself in the Qur’an, a God both of severity and of mercy, a deity who establishes temporal authority and justice and offers otherworldly forgiveness. The God of the Qur’an is the natural embodiment of God as He is revealed in both the Old and New Testaments and He establishes His dual nature in the world and in man. This dual nature is again demonstrated in the person and the activities of the Prophet of Islam and his companions, men of both justice and piety, but men of war and political struggle when and where it was deemed necessary to establish and maintain that justice and piety.
Ali Shari’ati pronounces a deep and profound sentence upon the Islam of the traditional clerics and of the masses of Muslims themselves. They have one and all failed in fulfilling this dual nature, a nature whose balance alone will yield the fulfillment which is man’s birthright as God’s agent upon the earth. This failure has, Shari’ati contends, been the downfall and failure of all the religions and philosophies. In the past, cultures, religions, ideologies clung exclusively to either a materialist orientation at the expense of the spirit, or they looked only to the afterlife and the things of the monastic experience at the expense of the world and man’s place of dignity and success within it.
For Shari’ati, this focus solely upon the afterlife and matters of the spirit, as taught and enforced by the Muslim clerical classes was no less of a betrayal of the true Islam and of humanity than is the abandonment of Islam in favor of a purely materialistic and sensual existence. This resigned forfeiture of the material rewards of a healthy life in the this world, a life of competition with other cultures and societies on equal material footing, had made possible the economic subjugation by imperialist nations and corrupt internal governments of countless peoples and cultures in the Islamic world and most notably for Shari’ati, those of Iran.
Shari’ati cites the failure of European Renaissance and Enlightenment era humanism to address the failings of medieval Christianity. Given man’s dual nature, a pendulum that drags humanity from one unhealthy polar extreme to the other, from Roman Catholicism of the Middle Ages to rampant and soulless materialism and opportunism where the individual cannibalizes his brothers to advance his own worldly interests is just as monstrous a failure as that of humanity downtrodden and in a perpetual state of self loathing and awaiting a final judgment. In this condemnation, Shari’ati creates a holism of collective guilt and failure from which none can easily escape. His argument also challenges the collective world outside of Islam and Iran and points to the complete ineffectiveness of any other world model to provide a suitable and two dimensional means for man’s satisfactory integration into the world of one’s fellows, one’s self, one’s God and within which the world may become the arena of humanity’s natural and rightful supremacy.
The stark materialist, even amidst an personal success, must recognize the failure of the purely material model to address the totality of humanity’s needs. In Shari’ati’s assessment, all classes of Iranian society arrived at the middle of the 20th century suffering from multiple layers of betrayal. The clerical class had historically disarmed all but the aristocratic and socialist classes of the means to fight both imperialism and the wholesale sell-out of the nation’s resources and means of production to foreign interests and franchises that failed to contribute to the indigenous Iranian economy. They had also robbed the Muslim people of the rightful rewards of what Shari’ati defined as the true Islam in favor of a corrupt form.
The ruling elites had betrayed the people by robbing them of the means of productivity, by privately selling the country’s natural resources needed to produce a healthy economy and by sending their own profiteered monies abroad instead of investing back into infrastructures of the Iranian economy. Both classes illustrated clearly Shari’ati’s allegations that both the singularly material or the purely spiritual models could be nothing but cultural suicide for a people. These wealthy and ruling classes were betrayed ultimately by their own greed and by a myopic hubris which barred them from seeing their own hand in the actions which caused their catastrophic downfall.
The intellectual elites were betrayed by everyone: by lower and peasant classes who had no understanding of their aims and in many cases no interest in their efforts and political struggles, by economic elites who saw socialist and Marxist agendas as a clear threat to their power bases, by their foreign Communist and socialist allies who used them as long as it secured their own global goals but disposed of them as soon as they became inconvenient and outlived their usefulness, and they were betrayed by the ‘Ulama who fought their secular atheism. These intellectual classes, many among them socialists and Marxists themselves, suffered perhaps their greatest betrayal from within as factionalism and the inability to compromise toward collective socialist goals destroyed their numerous unaligned parties, perpetuated infighting and even assassination from within their own ranks. Again, for Shari’ati this purely secular opportunism betrayed the fatal flaw in a model that did not derive from a worldly perspective founded within a spiritual mandate upon the dignity of man as a dual being of both spirit and matter.
At the end of this Pre-liminal phase, Shari’ati had succeeded in articulating the crises of social chaos, economic ruin, imperialist encroachment on several fronts, and the recognition of a corrupt clerical class that had failed both the people and Islam and thereby God. He also showed the failures of a broken intellectual class cast adrift in a complex cultural tableau that could not be unified to endorse in any cohesive way their socialist goals and which in many cases had no context or meaning for the majority of the common people. When carefully and closely considered, this articulation left no possible room for comfort or security for anyone. All models had failed; a unifying social agenda had not materialized because no voice was capable of being heard by all classes.
Any hope which might have been placed in external social models, i.e. western secularism and materialism, or Humanism, which Shari’ati viewed as a failed response to medieval scholasticism and therefore a product of an imbalanced Christianity, was brushed aside and viewed as impotent in their one dimensionality. In Mission of a Free Thinker Shari’ati outlines the call for the Iranian people to extricate themselves from the thrall of foreign European intellectual models in favor of uniquely Iranian historical world views. Such foreign ideas he contends are doomed to wither and die and to serve no productive purpose when they are grafted onto a people for whom they have no historical or cultural precedent. He then called for a search for solutions to the problems Iran faced from within its own rich and complex three thousand year philosophical history; solutions which might address the unique and disparate identities of his people and the possibility of a united psyche of the societies of Iran. The success of these solutions, Shari’ati insisted, mandated the Iranian people being the innovators and masters of their own future and their own resources and not merely remain consumers of foreign ideas and goods.
This isolation, this plateau of neither nor, neither past nor future, neither secular or monastic, created just the sort of vacuum where something new and wholly outside of these failed models could explode within the beleaguered Iranian political narrative and possibly capture the imagination and hope of the Iranian people. Shari’ati as the enlightened soul identified and named each distinct and possible social ill and he identified its source. He pointed to the weaknesses, failings, betrayals, states of hopelessness, and the impotent trajectory towards the future that his nation had embarked upon through an economically suicidal involvement and dependence upon external political and economic forces, and by failing to adhere to an Islam that addressed man’s dual nature.
For Shari’ati the historic manifestation of institutionalized Islam of the previous thirteen centuries and of his own time was antithetical to his reading of Qur’anic instructions and promises to humankind. Once again in Where Shall We Begin and in Man and Islam Shari’ati points to passages in the Qur’an which speak of man’s superiority and rights of self determination, qualities he showed to be lacking in the contemporary Islam of the mid 20th century with its emphasis on fatalism and resignation to oppressive external conditions as a manifestation of God’s will, and by focus upon a delayed future reward in the afterlife. Shari’ati suggests, arguably and with solid reason, that this robbery of man’s power in the world is in part a byproduct of late Roman political expediency in subduing large numbers of disenfranchised peoples and certainly not founded in the Qur’an. Historically power elites within all times and places of human culture have made use of this very tool to restrain the striving of the masses. However for Shari’ati, this trend had its deadliest precedent in the deviations of the earliest generations of Islam after the time of the Prophet and his companions and in the establishment of the Umayyad dynasty
In Arise and Bear Witness Shari’ati traces two fatal flaws that began to appear with the first deviations after the death of the Prophet and which first appeared in the Umayyad period during the late 7th century CE: The establishment of religious authorities who misappropriate interpretation of the Qur’an as a means of establishing the suppression of ideas, and the fatalism which ensures the acceptance of these deviations and oppression as the will of God. This calls sharply and alarmingly into question the whole premise of the manifestation of historical Islam and the authority of the ‘Ulamma who represents and perpetuates it in Shari’ati’s own time.
This cutting away of the web of a flawed traditional Islamic religious culture by Sharia’ti’s deft hand was the last theoretical piece to fall away and the final shove of the Iranian people towards the inescapable abyss into which they had descended, been pushed, or in some cases never been allowed to emerge from. But for Shari’ati, this final push, this dismantling of the historical manifestation of a corrupt and humanly manipulated Islam, was a meticulously considered articulation of the controlled chaos of the liminal state and a powerful fulcrum of vast potential change.
Looking once more at the van Gennep model, Shari’ati’s argument was that all classes of Iranian people had lost themselves, that they had been betrayed at every turn and most tragically by those in whom they should have had the greatest cause for hope. Even the religion to which many of them clung for salvation, Shari’ati showed to be a betrayal which diverted the people’s concerns from looking after their own protection and wellbeing. Much like the profound inner transformations and secrets of the youth on the verge of adulthood, and the ancient rituals which speak to those inner and universal changes both frightening and exhilarating, Sharia’ti’s words found no denial in the souls of many in all classes of Iranian readers. It then became his task to build for the Iranian people a bridge they might all recognize and cleave to.

The Liminal Dimension: Cult of Martyrdom

Having removed or destroyed the girders of deviant religious faith and brought to light the full extent to which all classes of people in Iranian society had been betrayed repeatedly and used for the purposes of others than themselves, betrayed by foreign powers and domestic alike, Shari’ati knew his people were truly vulnerable and desperate. But they were ready; they were deep within the liminal zone, trapped at the center between deepest loss and greatest potentiality. It was at this most pregnant moment that Dr. Ali Shari’ati chose to strike, and to extend the bridge to his people that would provide the carefully constructed means to their salvation against the oncoming of any possible enemy from external directions or from within.
Central to the liminal experience there must be a tri-part axis which unifies the rational, the irrational, and the supra-rational. Leave any of these elements out of the equation and there can be no psychic chemical reaction of experiential combustion. Ali Shari’ati knew that what his people needed was not another dry and abstract philosophy founded on western models and precariously burdened with yet more books that no one cared to read because they offered no immediate and tangible answers. They didn’t need an imitative trope repackaged in Iranian garb and bolstered with irrational hopes for social unification where no precedent for such unification had ever emerged.
Shari’ati had placed his most impassioned readers outside of time, place, and identity, and his next move was to extend to them a bridge by which they could move to a new state of prosperity and dignity, and that bridge was Islam. But this was not to be the old, flagging, and by Sharia’ti’s charge a corrupt and false Islam, but rather an Islam rescued, as he proposed to rescue the Iranian people themselves, out of time and from the hands of enemies both internal to Iran and external abroad, enemies both historic and contemporary. Shari’ati presents the stark picture of Islam, betrayed in its earliest days after the death of the Prophet, betrayed by foreign enemies, and from within by various descendents of the Prophet’s companions and his enemies. Shari’ati paints an startling and avaricious portrait of a companion of the Prophet selling or creating his words in the form of Hadith factories to serve a corrupt Umayyad dynasty which had commandeered Islam from its rightful defenders and begun to rewrite the words of the Prophet and to reinterpret the Qur’an in ways suited to their own political and social ends. Chief among these scandalous rewrites were those which robbed the faithful of their rightful power and dignity in the world. This reinterpretation of Qur’anic passages assigned to them a fatalism which taught Muslims to accept all forms of oppression and corruption as the will of Allah, and consigned them to the role of spiritual peasants dutifully awaiting the glories of the afterlife when by the promises of their Prophet and the word of God they should be thriving and happy upon the Earth as His vice-regents.
This is a clear challenge that Islam had endured for over twelve centuries, and for Shari’ati continued to suffer in the hands of corrupt usurpers of the Prophet’s message and God’s word. This Shari’ati underscored by the further charge that this usurpation is directly responsible for the misery and economic subjugation that was plaguing the Iranian people in the 20th century. This was a clear and vocal call to rescue this hostage Islam and restore it to its true position of power and justice. But if Islam had been in a corrupt form for twelve centuries, and Shari’ati’s argument has many strong points, then how are these modern rescuers to know what is the true Islam? Perhaps Ali Shari’ati could humbly come forward and offer his services in this regard. But Shari’ati was too clever, too shrewd, and far too much in command of his understanding of the juggernaut of processes he had unleashed to instill into this model the corruption of his own personality, at least too visibly. Repeatedly Shari’ati voices his own intellectual limitations, his spiritual weakness, his inability to understand and adequately communicate these sublime and critically delicate matters to the people.
In Arise and Bear Witness Shari’ati outlines the next critical element in the psychic potion he is concocting to treat the many ills of his people. He explains that the Prophet is himself the remedy against the foreign enemy and he posits the model of Islam, a restored and purified Islam, as the bulwark against imperialism and the encroaching vampirism of western consumerism. Yet what of the internal threat, the threat of corruption and betrayal from within the ranks of Islam and specifically from within the Iranian people? Shari’ati presents here a model in the Imams of these earliest days. Ali, Hasan, and Hussein, martyrs who had died willingly in the face of this very corruption and betrayal from within the ranks of their companions and friends, within the “faithful.” Again in Arise and Bear Witness Shari’ati illustrates within the lives of these martyrs the same betrayals that his contemporaries faced and suffered. For Shari’ati, each of these early Imams provides a model of perfect conduct in the face of such conditions as war, physical abuse, loss of dignity, oppression, and a betrayal of the Prophet’s legacy.
Shari’ati’s methods in his creation of the liminal experience are both brilliant and poetic. He understood that without the excitation and exultations of the passions, all of his ideas, his plans for positive change and a reenergizing of his society would remain only theoretical and abstract. He then needed to apply the lighted match that would ignite and conjoin the fuel of previously incompatible groups caught in the kindling of common enemies and crises and carry them forward as a united body prepared to confront horrific obstacles and persevere to the only possible conclusion: success.
The lighted match that Shari’ati chose to ignite the excitations and exultations within the passions of the Iranian people was the seminal role of martyrdom in Shi’ite Islam, a uniquely Iranian feature and one exquisitely suited to the personal and collective entrance to the liminal state. Shari’ati held in complete contempt those Muslims who retreated to the privacy of personal prayer and inner devotions. For him, these people were weak, they were among the worst betrayers, and they willingly succumbed to and perpetrated the corruptions of the past while allowing Islam’s heroic martyrs to die while they played it safe. Such people willingly disavow and abandon the path of courageous and virtuous action in the world of faith and justice; a model lived to the fullest by the Prophet. Martyrdom for Shari’ati is not a tragedy, not a loss; it is a sacramental cleansing of both the individual and Shi’ite society that one must feel both privileged and honored to embrace.
What Shari’ati offers his fellows at this most auspicious time, should they choose to join him in the crossing of this bridge, is nothing less than fellowship with Ali, with Hasan and with Hussein in their sacred timelessness. For as Shari’ati contends, these great martyrs of Shi’ite Islam are not truly dead, they are forever present and with the faithful. They stand as eternal guides and models of right action, models which put to shame those who follow any other course in the world than the model of action and justice as a means of throwing off all oppression, both in the form of the external enemy, and the enemy within their own society. For Shari’ati the two polarities of a secular and materialistic ruling class, and a clergy devoid of the powerful models of the Prophet and his companions in the world were the supreme betrayal of the passionate commitment to the faithful as displayed in the lives of Ali, Hasan, and Hussein.
It is within the lines of the poetic and mystical prose of martyrdom that Shari’ati attains his magnificent height as he culminates in an orgiastic igniting of the final conflagration as his people are invited to identify, not only metaphorically, but in spirit and deed, with their greatest religious heroes, and to participate in their glorious destiny. Shari’ati offered the Iranian people an equation where they might joyously and with truth and justice join with him on his journey, or turn away in shame and earn the contempt and disgust of those whom they abandon and thereby join the ranks of the corrupt usurpers of Islam, both the timelessly past and the eternally present. Shari’ati guided those who walked with him on this journey through an almost seamlessly choreographed series of steps, the natural culmination of which is the shared ascent into the mythic state via the collective embrace and renewal, the reaffirmation of the sacrament of martyrdom.
This acceptance and internalization of the renewed embrace of martyrdom and its bridge to kinship with the great Imams of Shi’ite Islam, allows those who have followed Shari’ati to enter a deeply liminal state. This state is characterized by unlimited possibility, by the hyper-aware state from which one finds the power to act instantly and in ways dramatically beyond the norm, and through which they may participate in the ever-present nearness of eternity.
One could easily devise a vastly elegant chemical table, place all elements within the Iranian social and political climate upon the graph, map their failings, and see a direct and highly rational corollary and solution in Shari’ati’s model. Those who had sold Iran out to foreign interests and those who had cannibalized her from within were placed under a keen and merciless microscope and their guilt of greed, materialism, and secularism was easily revealed within the lines of Shari’ati’s accessible and impassioned prose. The guilty could recant these crimes under the duress of great shame before their people. If they chose not to recant, all the better. Within the tenets of the new Islam, it was morally and religiously incumbent upon Muslims to depose all corrupt rulers who shared in the guilt of historic betrayers of the sacred role of, to use the medieval Christian term, ministerial kingship. The ‘ulama could resign their corrupt transmission of Islam and reform the faith to be in tune with the “true” Islam, or they could go down to defeat along with the corrupt administration and share in the condemnation of early destroyers of Islam and be likened to the enemies of the faith who betrayed and killed Ali, Hasan, and Hussein. Shari’ati states frequently that the enemy within the ranks of one’s would-be brothers is far more foul and dangerous than any foreign enemy.
The intellectuals were highly skeptical and wary of anything in clerical robes. Yet they had been betrayed at every corner and had no allies. Shari’ati’s model revealed a God who had taught mankind “the names” which he took to mean, education, learning, and understanding. Sharia’ti’s model for a virtually classless Islamic society based upon a rational scheme and wielding the tools of socialism could be swallowed by these intellectual elites by minimizing the specifically religious rhetoric of Islam. Women also found something new and exciting in Shari’ati. The Qur’anic passage describing woman’s creation from Adam’s “rib” and therefore inferior to him, was a great error in mistranslation according to Shari’ati. The true meaning, he claimed, was that woman had been created of man’s “nature, of the same “nature’ as he and this was taken to mean that she was created from the spirit or soul of God as was man and therefore women were the inheritors of the same dignities, essence, and nature as males.
Shari’ati consistently played down his own role while pointing to the Prophet, and even more closely to the martyred Imams as the true guides and models of perfect faith and action. He created a sound and rational agenda of first critical steps on the journey to attaining political, economic, and cultural autonomy for his people. He rescued and revitalized their faith and their religion, and he reintroduced to them their martyrs, those who had died for the faith for which they were now the guardians. These martyrs, their stories, their lives, their blood and their wounds, Shari’ati placed into their hands with no less power and passionate agony than the visage of any thorn-crowned man on a cross. And then he placed upon their hearts the sacrament of participation in that mystery of sacred martyrdom.

The Post-Liminal State: The One Unstable Element
Visiting once more the van Gennep model, as the orgiastic thrust and explosion of the liminal state dissipates and closes, the known world, the rational and predictable, the verdant and productive stage must be reentered so that the fruits of the fecundity of the liminal phase may integrate properly into the new states of being. The seeds have indeed burst wide, but now they must grow patiently and with great care under the nurturing elements, or rot and die. Shari’ati’s use of martyrdom was a powerful and highly effective component of his program. It was sublime in every regard but one. The potency and efficacy of martyrdom as a fulcrum to the liminal state was undeniable. However as an element, martyrdom is altogether too unstable to use in any system which strives to achieve enduring predictable ends, productive methodologies, and which seeks to become a viable and self-perpetuating society.
As sublime and transcendental as the conception of martyrdom may be poetically and theoretically, historically and practically it cannot endure as a permanent feature of a productive society that Shari’ati sought to awaken in 20th century Iran. Schoolyards full of happy playing children cannot for long endure if their fathers are busy attaining personal martyrdom. Economies do not thrive when the best of their working generations are out seeking opportunities for physical martyrdom. Families, marriages, youth designed to become next generations cannot thrive when the desire for true and physical martyrdom is the secret gem buried within their hearts. Societies cannot evolve, create, innovate, and master new technologies, ideas, sciences, and arts, when they have become addicted to and trapped within the liminal state and its peculiar and hyper-real conditions. Societies cannot evolve when they become habituated to bizarre states of social consciousness which require, like any fantastical drug, a very short period of ecstasy, rapid destabilization of simplistic energy modalities, and then ever and increasingly rapid ascending plateaus.
In 1977, Ali Shari’ati died under unclear circumstances. Both “natural causes” and assassination at the hands of SAVAK were reported. In either circumstance he attained his own martyrdom. The Shari’ati model for a new Islamic society, one with the aspirations to thrive and succeed with its feet firmly resting in many worlds, religious, worldly, and above all free by its own definition and on its own intellectual terms, did not materialize. What is striking is how solid and rational the majority of Shari’ati’s ideas and equations were. What is even more striking is that he did not appear to set in place a safeguard for the uncontrollable tornado that a juggernaut such as the widespread romantic embrace of martyrdom would unleash. But this very concept; a safeguard, a control, a limitation, a boundary, renders impotent and metaphorical the nature of the liminal condition and that is antithetical to the potentiality of such states.
It is both tempting and far too simplistic to merely assume that martyrdom was a powerful but ultimately flawed element within an otherwise elegant and intriguing schema. It is equally seductive and problematic to consider that the perpetually turbulent and chaotic era of the closing days of the Qajar Dynasty and the tragedies of the Pahlavi Dynasty and ensuing world events created a permanent state of the collective liminal within which the Iranian people were already addictively entrenched long before the arrival of Ali Shari’ati on the scene.
The tri-part religious equation as posited by Arnold van Gennep was clearly initiated by Ali Shari’ati in the volumes of his numerous written works, but it never saw completion in the transitional stages within Iranian society. The rectifying steps which he sought to inspire in his people have yet to unfold, and it could be argued that since Shari’ati’s death, Iran has remained in a revolving door of a succession of increasingly destructive liminal states. It would require little argument to demonstrate that as in the days of Shari’ati, as in the days of the Qajars, and of the Pahlavi, the west and other artificial influences continue to keep the dirty finger in the Petri dish and never allow the coming together of natural elements to stabilize and become something solid and self-perpetuating. And it is perhaps sad and chilling to consider that as with conglomerates of unstable natural elements that come together briefly and dynamically yet possess no common nucleus, Iran may be destined to come together and fall violently apart again and again as it remains trapped within a revolving cycle of uncompleted liminality that never establishes the stability and continuity such states have been shown to bestow on other cultures typical of the van Gennep model.

A Bit of Black Cloth

2008-04-28T15:50:00.000-07:00

Bi’ismillah ir-Rahman ir-Rahim ……….. Sura 24/Verse 31 – Qur’an[24:31] And tell the believing women to subdue their eyes, and maintain their chastity. They shall not reveal any parts of their bodies, except that which is necessary. They shall cover their chests, and shall not relax this code in the presence of other than their husbands, their fathers, the fathers of their husbands, their sons, the sons of their husbands, their brothers, the sons of their brothers, the sons of their sisters, other women, the male servants or employees whose sexual drive has been nullified, or the children who have not reached puberty. They shall not strike their feet when they walk in order to shake and reveal certain details of their bodies. All of you shall repent to GOD, O you believers, that you may succeed. This is a very revealing passage from this notable text. What are perhaps of even greater interest are several additional English translations of this passage, including those by Muhammad Asad, Yusufali, Cleary, Pickthal, Shakira, and Khalifa which read almost exactly as the above sura (chapter) with very little if any profound variation. One version admonishes women not to stamp their feet in order to make known their weight of jewelry and trinkets, while the above speaks of not revealing “certain details” of their bodies. What these several translations have in common however is the same wording and caution for women to cover “their bosoms” or “their chests.” This is the often quoted passage of the Qur’an used to mandate the full veiling of women in some Islamic countries and sects. Yet nowhere in any of these or similar translations of other pertinent Qur’anic passages, at least in the English translations, does the requirement extend to covering the face of the woman. Head coverings are frequently referred to in passages describing modesty in dress for all Muslims and which includes head covering for men as well. Hijab, or covering, has burst into the passionate and often confused discussion of current events as a highly charged and volatile word in the press, in political circles where it is being used as a battle standard on both sides of the veil, and in the lives of moderate Muslims in the West, both native born to the faith as well as those converted to Islam as adults. Hijab has become a source of rage and indignation for many non-Muslims who see the practice as a backward remnant of a dying cultural tableau, but one which is defiantly elbowing its way into the workplace, onto modern western streets, and with increasing demands to be respected along with the identifying dress codes of other world religions. Many Muslim women in the west cover their head, hair, neck and upper body with a scarf, often of stylish and attractive fabrics, while others adhere to the more conservative and increasingly provocative solid black. Infrequently does one see the full kit, the niqab which conceals the entire face, on the streets or in the workplace of a western city, although ghetto communities in large metropolitan areas are home to many immigrant women, some of whom do maintain this tradition. What interests me for the purposes of this discussion however, is the western female convert to Islam with no experience of veiling or required dress growing up in her native culture who embraces hijab and who gladly wears it openly in public. It is however a phenomenon with what appears to be a remarkably short and identifiable history. It was in 1975, in San Francisco, that I embraced Islam, and although I did not take a Muslim name my adherence to the Sunni Five Pillars of Islam (shahada, profession of faith, salat, five daily prayers, zaqat, charity along with many of the various do’s and don’ts, the Ramadan fast, and the Hajj, pilgrimage to Mecca) was sincere and complete, with the exception of, to date, the Hajj. I ran with two very different crowds in those days. I was the manager of a printing shop with an ocean view and a customer base that included a large number of Palestinians, many of whom ran grocery stores. The largest population of Palestinians outside of the Middle East in the world, at that time, was located in San Francisco and every corner deli sold falafel and interesting conversation. These people were politically active and wise and considerate friends, and they delighted in discovering a Muslim convert and undertook to broaden my education in Islam, and in the truth about what was going on “back home.” They were equally delighted that I was learning to speak Arabic “like a human being.” A large number of these people and the extended circle to which I was frequently included in social and cultural events, were women. Without exception these women were strong and intelligent and every one of them had seen and heard a hell of a lot more out in the world than I ever would. They were raw and vital, open, up front and in your face, and they were highly action oriented. They were also fiercely committed to their faith and to the salvation of their homeland, and none of them wore hijab of any kind. But this was the mid 1970s, Afghanistan and the Americans was decades away, Afghanistan and the Russians had not yet happened, and the political writings of ideologues like Dr. Ali Shari’ati and Jalal Al-i Ahmad and others that would change the face of Islam and arguably the world forever, were just going to press. The other side of my Islamic family, and completely separate from the Palestinians was the Sufi order to which I belonged and which had a Persian master and a large number of Iranian immigrants. This was a very, very different crew. Here was the Chanel suit crowd, the Mercedes dripping with a wealth of Persian carpets on the floorboards, the Rolex watches and the elegance, the graciousness, the poetry and the ney in place of the angry handbill, the bullhorn, and the never discrete collection envelope. And although we women did cover our heads during salat (prayer) in the service in the Khaniqah (meeting place) none of these Iranian women ever wore any sort of hijab on the streets. But this was the ‘70s and ‘80s in San Francisco after all. We were staggering out of the hippie era and bulldozing headlong into the glitter and the glam of the rock mega-media generation and just getting warmed up for the arrival of New Wave splendor and there were no rules of fashion except look cool, develop your own unique style, and have as much fun as possible doing it. This was also the era of a confused and experimental explosion of cults and religions and spiritual groups and every possible and shameless cultural rip-off and the accompanying countless opportunities to buy and wear lots of great stuff. The commonplace of turbans and harem pants, of saris and dhotis, of a wealth of African plunder and Chinese imperial garb trailing in splendid layers off blue-eyed white bodies on the streets and in the cafes of San Francisco only increased the stark contrast of the Palestinians in their blue jeans and inexpensive brown business suits, and the Persians in their Chanel and Armani. And everyone drooled over the pages of National Geographic and the award winning photographs of veiled women jingled down under a wealth of coined jewelry and we each thought something very different, my two Islamic families and I. Of course all us whiteys thought the veils were beautiful and exotic, we thought they were cool in our neo-Romantic ignorance and plagiarism of world culture. And all my Palestinian and Persian women friends hated the veil as an outdated symbol of former oppression, quaint, old fashioned and something their grandmothers did. And that’s where it stayed for a while, in the West, like a secret pregnancy, or a hidden virus, depending on how you chose to see it. A quaint old fashioned garment, hated by some, charming to others, tucked away with the whalebone corsets and starched white collars in the global archive of fading eras. Over the next few years more friends came and went. Kareema from Libya, Meryem from Lebanon, never a hijab in sight. But the world did not become as charming and as hopeful as the menagerie in San Francisco had naively envisioned. There were widespread and growing changes reshaping the world long before the events of September 11, 2001, changes which had their dark and tangled roots in Iran and the Middle East and in the economic policies of three Western nations, Great Britain, the US, and Russia/USSR, and in events of the earliest decades of the 20th century and beyond which shaped future global conflicts and which continue clearly yet unresolved and escalating today. Then there came the arrival of several waves of immigrants from places in the world referred to loosely as “the Middle East” but which included many countries not truly located in that geographic region at all: Afghans fleeing the Russians came first, and some of them wore hijab, and some did not, then came Iranians fleeing theAyatollah, some veiled and some not, and of course there were more and more Palestinians fleeing everybody, and later still the arrival of large numbers of people from many African nations fleeing famine, war, corrupt and oppressive governments, drought, and AIDS. And somehow this little piece of cloth, hijab, a woman’s head covering which can be as simple as a scarf, dormant in many arenas for so long, was brought out of the closet to become the branding logo for a whole new generation and a diverse range of conflicts, both cultural and economic, religious and secular, that are continuing to shape our world in sad and alarming ways. But why? Why on October 19, 2006 was a twenty-three year old Afghan immigrant shot and killed on the streets of Fremont, California while walking her young child to school? She carried no purse or money, but she was wearing hijab. This was termed a “hate killing” and unfortunately such crimes are not new. Fremont is just over the bridge from San Francisco. Back in the ‘70s and ‘80s the victims of hate crimes were frequently high visibility gays. Even the lightest examination will detect an ironic yet striking similarity between hijab and the black leathers and blue jeans cuffed-just-so-and-no-more of the visible San Francisco gay scene in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Back in the day, the emergence of a visible and vocal gay community posed as much of a perceived threat to the moral and cultural values of many in society and was accompanied by as much fear as any falling towers in Manhattan. Why, in October of this same year, did the British Leader of the House of Commons Jack Straw condemn the wearing of the full face veil in public in England as an affront to that country’s disdain for public anonymity? The enraged outcry from the Muslim community has overwhelmingly been that the remarks constitute an attack on Islamic religious custom, and that such prejudices against visible symbols of religion do not extend to other religious groups such as Jews, Sikhs, and others with equally visible religious dress affiliations, and therefore single out Muslims for racial prejudice. Yet at least in the United States, it is illegal in most places for anyone to appear in public or to operate a motor vehicle wearing a ski mask, Halloween mask other than on October 31st, or in any other way to obscure one’s personal identity for fear they are doing so to perpetrate a crime. When large numbers of individuals from one culture migrate into another culture with radically different social mores and customs, and do not embrace the new adopted cultural model but rather remain isolated and begin to form social groups and political networks of their own, and when those networks mature to the point where they seek to impact public policy for the state as a whole, this impact may significantly alter the social face of the adopted culture. And the adopted culture will always resist, and often by whatever means necessary. When this phenomenon is carried out in political arenas and world class newspapers, you get international incidents. When it moves to the grassroots, to less metropolitan areas, and among the lower socioeconomic groups for whom immigrants are traditionally economic competition, you see the rise of increasingly violent “hate crimes.” There is no moral or political value in this statement. It is an observed phenomena that has manifested in cultures as varied as the fifth century Roman Empire, imperial China, the Greek city states of antiquity, and the so-called West in the modern world. There is currently in Britain an organized call for public funding for a Muslim-only school. Does Britain fund religious schools run by the Church of England? By the Roman Catholic Church? By any other Protestant sects, or by Buddhists, Taoists, or any other group? Which Muslims would this publicly funded exclusive school serve? Sunnis, Shi’ites, Arabs, Pakistanis? Would the children of white converts be welcome? To what standards would this school be held? What outside scrutiny would it be willing to endure? In 1998, several American college girls in Sacramento, California were employed by the Sacramento Metropolitan Airport in a large national car rental chain. There were several Afghan male immigrants also employed by the company. When summer set in with the typical Sacramento heat in excess of 100 degrees often unrelenting for days, the company provided summer uniforms for its employees. The women’s uniform featured the company logo and colors on a sleeveless shirt: Modest in all regards by Sacramento and US standards. The Afghan males however fought angrily with the company to force the girls to wear long sleeved shirts. After some weeks of this, the company, American citizens, relented and apologetically asked the girls to wear the winter, long sleeved shirts. The girls took take this case to an attorney where it was quickly settled out of court and the social customs of that local area and the rights of its citizens were upheld. It would be untenable to envision Americans living in an Islamic nation such as Saudi Arabia for example, suing local governments and residents of that nation to conform to western modes of dress. All these issues and many more, all frightening to consider and impossible to solve without the elixir of time, a very long span of it, have now been distilled down to this little piece of black cloth. Like the burning flag and burning bra of the ‘60s, the hijab is on fire in the opening decade of the 21st century. But perhaps one of the strangest forums in which this controversy is raging is among Western converts to Islam, and between the women themselves. Progressive Muslims (a very liberal and academically focused group of Muslims, many of whom are converts) has a high profile presence on the internet where the war on hijab continues to inflame inter-Muslim dialogue. Their generally anti-hijab stance is the voice of fully westernized women, women of Middle Eastern and Southeast Asian descent born in this country and abroad, and western converts. Much of their agenda seems based in a desire to assure non-Muslims in the United States that they are educated and modern and above all safe and not like those people “over there.” The dialogue among Western convert women however at times takes an almost circus-like air. Several times I have encountered hijab-wearing white women on the streets of New York City, their angry faces starring defiantly out at me as I pass by, glaring at everyone, and oh so very, very aware that they have willingly adopted a mode of dress that singles them out as different and which affords them a strange and usually painless sort of martyrdom. The purpose of hijab, as stated in the Qur’an, is modesty, and its ultimate goal is to remind one of their submission to Allah. Yet the reasons many convert women have cited to me for wearing hijab seldom include remembrance of God. Many women have spoken of the great pride they feel when they wear hijab in public. Yet hijab, according the Qur’an is modesty, Qur’anic Islam is a religion of humility, and the purpose of life is to turn towards God and away from the hubris of material existence. With the growing number of mosques in the United States and the greater immigrant population, western converts to Islam increasingly find themselves unwelcome in mosques that frequently serve one ethnic or national group or another, and these converts will often adopt the national dress of the people whose mosque they attend in order to fit in. This too is a change from decades in the past. In the ‘70s and ‘80s the cultural and political climate was very different and converts were almost always welcomed in mosques, including women. Today often convert women are not welcome at all if they happen to show up alone on the doorsteps of the mosque, where they might be more welcome if they come as part of a family group. This is also the product of very different social classes emigrating to the US. In California thirty years ago most native Muslims one would encounter in a mosque were highly educated and often from the upper classes of their countries of origin and so had a more inclusive worldview through exposure to many places and people. Often today the populations of mosques and their mullahs and sheikhs are middle class or from smaller towns, and increasingly they are armed with a highly politicized and exclusionary agenda. Increasingly much of the Islamic scene is being taken virtual hostage by what are referred to as the Wahabis, followers of the 18th century Arab theologian Mohammed ibn Abd al-Wahhab, an extremely fundamentalist and puritanical strain of Islam that demands absolute adherence and uniformity of practice, belief, and appearance. Wahabi belief argues that one’s submission to God may be evidenced by adherence to strict codes of dress, codes of dress that the Wahabi themselves have defined and which they seek to enforce in an expanding reach within the Muslim community and which includes full veiling and a black almost monastic garb for women. The Wahabis have used violence and outright massacre to secure control of whole villages in the Arab world and they have used extreme degrees of intimidation to take over Islamic communities all over the world. They have secured control of many mosques in the US. Many find it hard or even impossible to resist the pressured suggestion that their faith is somehow tainted or invalid because they have been corrupted by western influences, such as by abandoning the full veiling of women, by watching television, reading Western literature and newspapers, and in some cases by having westerners for friends. Some convert women have told me that one cannot be a Muslim at all without adhering to not only hijab but an entire mode of Middle Eastern dress. Great, bring it on. But I tell these women, at least be honest and admit to yourselves, if to no one else the real reason you don that foreign garb. It’s cool, it’s beautiful, and you like it, and the human creature always delights to drink deeply at the well of novelty. And there will always be those who secretly thrill to the kiss of hubris by feeling that they have shouldered a heavy and visible burden for the sake of religion. But does it bring one closer to God or constitute all the work one needs upon the self to glean the real benefits out of a sincere adherence to Islam? No. I have refrained from saying to these women, “Oh, Muslim Amish?” Which century, which country, which social class, tribe, or religious sect within Islam is considered the correct mode of dress to adopt? I am not proposing that as was the policy during the reign of Reza Shah, founder of Iran’s Pahlavi dynasty in 1920s, the hijab be forcibly ripped from women’s heads on the street, that they be fined or that any other restrictions be placed upon them. Nor do I seek to discourage women, any women, from wearing hijab or any other garment. I defend a woman’s right to wear hijab if it is her sincere desire to do so, as I defend all sincere expressions of faith that cause no unnecessary or unprovoked harm. But neither do I wish to be told by a furious white woman who has not so long ago converted to Islam and has no conception of the cultural and political trajectory of hijab, that the contents of my heart are invalid as long as I am not wearing a piece of fabric on my head. I make a point of asking these women, these sister converts like myself, when they came to Islam, under what circumstances, and what spiritual benefits they find in hijab. Without exception, the women who have most aggressively thrust this issue unsolicited into my face, have come to Islam in recent years, years since the changes in Islam as a result of the writings of Shari’ati, the Wahabis and others, since hijab became the required and visible proof of submission to a religious form if not to God.But what I am always most intrigued to discover is the lack of historic understanding of that piece of cloth, the role that hijab is playing in some very troubling global movements within Islam, and the ease with which some western women have embraced and championed various elements within Islam that are clearly under historic and heated internal debate and which are being used to polarize various camps in a global conflict. And I wonder, as I have over the years in my own inner and outward explorations of the spirit of Islam and its most inspired writings, if people who convert to a new religion cling to the visible signs of a cultural faith in ways those naturally born into that faith often do not. Do such people become addicted to the strange and novel and its antinomian place within American culture, and become so enamored with these surface symbols that they never penetrate to the real treasures they might discover within their new faith by foraging off the well trodden and visible path? Do I wear hijab on the streets of New York City or in my home? No, it holds no meaning for me beyond a piece of cultural trapping. It is the meaning that it holds in the minds of others that I disdain. Can I and have I worn hijab in a mosque or other Islamic religious settings where it is appropriate and required and the custom? Yes, and with the same ease and willingness with which I can remove my shoes upon entering a Buddhist setting. It means nothing to me so I can put it on and forget about it in its place. But for me, that place is private and so for me, it has no place on the streets of a modern western city. Could I wear hijab without the slightest second thought or irritation on the streets of Jeddah in Saudi Arabia? Absolutely, and with the same ease with which I throw a scarf over my head when entering a cathedral in Florence or Venice. Could I wear hijab in any place where it was the custom, and appropriate, and respectful of the home culture of my fellow Muslims and fellow human beings to do so? Gladly and with great pleasure. Could I wear hijab in a place in which it draws ridicule, and casts Islam in a poor light with those who are misinformed, could I wear hijab in a place where it has come to mean a thousand and one things that have nothing whatsoever to do with Allah and everything to do with the all too mundane agendas of Man? Never.

HISTORY

2008-04-28T15:42:00.000-07:00

The tired mantra “History repeats itself” is of course absurd. History is not a cognizant being that can “repeat itself” or even possess an “itself.” What this hackneyed trope reflects however is a limited observation of what could arguably be called a fact. Historical events are invariably necessitated by an aggregation of factors culminating in an unavoidable outcome. Clouds form with a peculiar density of elements and the appropriate temperature and rain, or snow, falls. Minerals within the earth undergo a necessary pressure of stress and weight and angle, and they melt, cool, and form other distinct yet predictable elements. Herbivore animals, in the presence of drought and famine either die or begin to mutate into predators and omnivores.
The empirical observations of the world are remarkably sublime, elegant, and predictable where even mutations and discrete teratomas within a body, a larger system or an entire society may only develop and evolve from available local elements. What humankind, with the exception of a few schools of scientific philosophy refuse to consider, is that we too behave in exquisitely narrow ranges of possibility given the aggregation of conditions, ideation, resources, and biological determinants of our species. Of course until the European “Enlightenment” the role of history was aesthetic. Since then history has still been an art and not a science but the discipline has tried to cut and paste certain pieces of rhetoric onto it to give it a cheap veneer of an empiric science. But it is a useful tool, if approached from enough angles to get as clear a bead on the matter as possible. Just as the nefarious “Marco Polo” was completely discredited when he failed to appear in the Chinese Imperial court journals, journals known for meticulous recording of minutia, particularly as relating to foreign visitors. There are mention of various missionaries by full name and even the names of their servants. No mention of any “Marco.”
History is a funny thing. At the same time the Pope was issuing a description of Attila as having horns and a tail, Priscus, the Byzantine court “historian,” scribe, and the only person to write a description of the man based on first hand meetings within him, and whose accounts are still extant today, describes a passionate chess player of modest skills, awkwardly attempting to fit into a court ill-suited to his rustic and politically inexperienced ways, but who won everyone over with his voracious appetite to learn of anything new and different to his experience. Which account will the individual reader find compelling and convincing? Attila with horns or the “axis of Evil,” history is not repeating itself but social, economic impetus to growth; similar factors create similar results regardless of time and place. Progress is a myth, part of the sparkle and glow of the campfire of our ancestors that we tend against the encroaching darkness, but the darkness never left town. We build bigger and better tools, but we can still slide with just as much abandon and predictability back into the chaos of intellectual barbarism and fetishistic localization. The “angry villagers with torches” syndrome. Now the angry unlettered villagers with torches are inhabiting major US cities. Did Marcus Tullius Cicero penning reams of elegant sarcastic prose and social commentary on what Roman society matrons were wearing at parties that season from exile on his country estate suspect that in a few of hundred years the powerful social class he occupied would be all but wiped out and exiled en masse to a few raged estates while new and voracious classes of “outsiders” elbowed their way onto the stage and took their turn at the mike?
History does not repeat itself, but historians generally cite the demise of the Roman Empire as predicated upon these key factors, themselves all inevitable outcomes of their own trajectories of momentum.
1) Too large an expanse of geography to be controlled by too few who operated as autonomous overlords with no responsibility to the localities ruled and their people’s. Rape and pillage and send the fruits back home.
2) The Roman military, once an aristocratic class, needed to enlarge beyond that class and increasingly employed mercenaries loyal only to a single general and not the state who were motivated by personal gain only. Prior to this period returning veterans were given land to start new farms and families. This practice was abandoned and soldiers were increasingly consigned to perpetual military careers, thus investing nothing in the state.
3) Massive losses in war debt caused a collapse in the military’s ability to pay soldiers in the field and provide food and supplies creating a desperate scavenger mentality among an increasingly chaotic and uncontrollable army.
4) Open infighting and competition among Roman military factions and generals.
5) Undertaking of increasing campaigns of conquest without the manpower or resources to complete them and for reasons solely to bolster a dying economy on the Italian peninsula. Seasoned war-hardened men with no prospects come home to destabilize the peace of a civic society back home. Dead soldiers don’t come home to feed their families and tend their farms to create food and other goods and millions flood into the cities consigned to crime of all kinds. Millions of farms abandoned and turn to waste. Bread and Circuses. Rise of prostitution, increase in illegitimate poor. Collapse of economy. Rise of violent combative games and blood sport for diverting rising dissatisfaction among increasingly uncontrollable growing classes of destitute and illiterate.
6) Wealthy classes begin abandoning cities and isolating themselves in elite enclaves outside the cities.

History does not repeat itself, but the same chemicals mixed in the same precise quantities, temperature, and order of mixing, will invariably create the same result. History does not repeat itself, but the Six Points listed above without exception describe the conditions of the US military today. Can Man or the individual man or woman consciously “write history” or create it? With rare exceptions, no. The British seem perhaps to have diverted the Socialist revolution that Marx predicted for England by ushering in modest reforms in its, by our standards, monstrous labor practices. Five year olds were no longer allowed to work sixteen hours a day in the mines to the point where their bodies were warped in strange configurations that shortened their lives and limited their work capacity. But in many among the extreme poor, this loss of a working member of the family created worse financial hardships, often driving women, vast numbers of women, into prostitution, thus increasing the proliferation of disease, and the unemployable sick.
Women were allowed to bring infants to work. But they were not allowed to cry and scream, so they were placed in baskets beneath the sewing machines, perhaps a hundred in a room, their small faces wrapped in rags soaked in laudanum to silence their cries. Who did these children grow up to be and what was their impact upon British society? In the US child labor laws are extensive. Yet many Americans grow and remain perpetual children all their lives, never learning how to create a means of sustenance for themselves beyond the subsistence.
Where is all of this rant and screed going? Simply this, in CORPSE: Nature, Forensics, and the Struggle to Pinpoint the Time of Death, Jessica, Snyder Sachs describes the vastly elegant and complex multilayered society found within the folds and gases of the rotting human corpse. This society is wholly interdependent, its strata and their functions are empirically observable, and minutely discernable along a trajectory of time into past, to the moment of death, and the point of ultimate decay. This whole process hinges upon one of several species of blowflies and the larvae it produces. There are many other occupants and citizens necessary to this banquet. They all show up at a very specific and necessary time within the process, their arrival is necessitated by other necessary events immediately preceding their arrival, and their presence and function makes possible and necessitates other arrivals and other successive events in this process. All of these conditions lead to predictable and observable, quantifiable conclusions in the decay process. No variations, no discrete artistic mutations, no anomalies occurring outside the aggregation of components and their interactions.
All of this is a sublimely functional mechanism of the world processing itself and all the elements within itself. It’s also really quite beautiful once you get past the initial conditioned response to such things. But what Sachs and other researchers have discovered that is perhaps most interesting in all of this, is that the components and elements of initial decay and the breakdown of healthy organisms are already always present within life. If a person is shot and killed, the gases and chemicals of decay and dissolution are already at work before he hits the ground, while they had not yet begun the moment before. There is much, much for us to learn from this. Not to change, but to be the witnesses of it. All things in the observable universe, including the individual human being, the race, the culture, the species, the old stars in the heavens that explode on camera to delight the eyes of scientists, all things manifest a cycle of coming into existence, maturation, period of progeneration, of sterility, of decadence and decay, (the real definition of the word decadence) and the white hot last flush of existence, and extinguishment. It’s remarkably simple.
Why does the old Sufi not come down off his mountain and pick up a shovel and a pack of seeds, or a Kalashnikov, or a stack of handbills and a bullhorn? Is it because he has grown too tired, or jaded? Is it because he feels powerless to effect the grim realities of a beleaguered world? Is it because he has run out of ideas? Is it because he IS old and the exciting new undreamed of world is even now gathering its forces on the horizon and it’s beyond his capacity to even “get it”? No. It is because the darkness of his Solitude has shown him Its Truth. That maybe God, whatever He really is, created all of this just to explore His own unlimited possibilities, and He is, as they say, just playing with Himself. Those that know this, seem always to find a very great and exquisite joy in this. Once they get over the sadness.

PIONEER OF TRUTH

2008-04-28T15:26:00.000-07:00

Al-Ghazali and the Two-fold Path

“Oh my God, I invoke Thee in public as lords are invoked, but in private as loved ones are invoked. Publicly I say, ‘O my God!’ but privately I say, ‘O my Beloved!’”

During the politically turbulent and religiously chaotic 11th-12th century, the Abbassid Caliphate centered in Baghdad was beyond salvation and in sharp decline. Spain was in open revolt against Islamic rule, the Sunni-Shi’ite schism was blossoming into a confusing warren of battle lines and border disputes, and the Crusaders were at the gate. A loss of clear political and military rule, fractures and clear ruptures in cultural cohesion, and the inflowing of radically different peoples and disruptive beliefs and world views predictably created a vacuum within which irreconcilable philosophies, competing sects, the rise of charismatic leaders in a boomtown intellectual economy came to be seen by many as an angry and confusing mob, with each faction vying, often violently, for the upper hand.
It was into just such a tableau as this that Abu Hamid al-Ghazali was born. The son of a powerful politically academic and scholastic family, al-Ghazali was groomed, in much the same way as would a young Kennedy princeling today, for the fast track career path enjoyed by the males of his line. At age thirty-four, he was awarded a teaching post at Baghdad’s prestigious Nizamayah school. However, much to the shock and dismay of his family, al-Ghazali was to abandon this excellent career a mere four years later, amidst a most remarkable crisis of the soul, and begin a ten-year period of solitary wandering in search of answers to questions, doubts, and unbearable skepticisms which plagued him. A lesser man would have contented himself with the glories of academic and civic religious fame and the comforts such attainments would afford him, and set such inner crises to rest.
Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, later in life to be called the Proof of Islam, chose another route, one in keeping with his deepest nature. He undertook to assault, scale, and master each of the great peaks of intellectual and religious learning that had shaped the world in which he lived. In his seminal work, Deliverance from Error, al-Ghazali defines four basic areas to be addressed as a framework for his deeper examinations. The method of ‘Ilm al-kalam, or the discussion and debate, the intellectual comprehension of theology, or of the attributes of Allah. This is a decidedly public venue of religious exploration, and after thoroughly exhausting the possibilities of this method, al-Ghazali casts it aside as flawed and incomplete and not suitable in the critical inner search he must embark upon.
Next, the Imam examines al ta-‘lim, the charismatic and irreproachable teachers and leaders, the unarguable interpreters of law and the founders of the schools of fiqh. In this group are the Batinites which al-Ghazali examines with some of the most heated and vehement language in any of his texts. Then al-Ghazali takes to task al-tafalsuf, the philosophers and what he terms their poisonous and dangerously flawed ideas which may mislead those intellectually unequipped or ill-prepared to understand their meanings, their grains of truth, and their fatal shortcomings. And finally, al-tasawwuf, or Sufism, which al-Ghazali finds to be a most worthy and necessary undertaking in the journey to knowledge and truth, and to God.
Within each of these categories, the Imam identifies the basic tenets of the belief system, its partial or flawed truth, and the reasons he believes it must be kept from the masses of mankind. With the end of this schema, this paper will then consider the second of al-Ghazali’s works under discussion, Faysal al-Tafriqa bayn al-Islam wa l-Zandaqa,, The Clear Criteria for Distinguishing Islam from Godlessness. The intent of this paper is to demonstrate al-Ghazali’s rationale for both the necessity of maintaining the structure of religious education, belief and practice in a theocratic society as well as in private faith and worship, and perhaps, for some, the mandatory abandonment of that at times unyielding structure as the seeker leaves the well trodden path and embarks upon the interior search. I will also demonstrate al-Ghazali’s final position that one must again take up the structures of orthodoxy in order to maintain the ordered civic and public religious life and to guard against the errors of personal fantasy which only enflame the individual personality, while remaining ever open and responsive to the spontaneity of the interior relationship with God. It will be, as my intent will show, clear that such a “Magic Theater” of the soul is not for everyone, and only the soberest of madmen need apply.
At the outset of this discussion of but two of al-Ghazali’s works it is important to establish that here is one of the most prolific writers of the era of classical Islamic thought. The Imam was an eloquent and clever writer and a teacher that recognized that not all students were fit or prepared to receive the same gruel of the soul and he clearly packaged his messages to specific audiences. From Deliverance from Error it is clear he was reluctant to return to public life after making his own private discoveries. He understood his own innate intelligence and the extreme rigors he undertook to glean the essential meanings behind the philosophical models of the day which he ultimately rejected, as well as the inner and Gnostic attainments he enjoyed. He knew that such were not the purview of everyman in a society as diverse as that if Persia in the 12th [or any] century. And like other scholastic mystics such as his Catholic contemporary Bernard of Clairvaux, he entertained a wide and lively circle of intellectual religious students for whom he often prepared lessons in the form of letters to students, written debates in which he cleverly outlined a meticulous trajectory of argumentation, and what could only be called Socratic group discussions.
With this in mind it is necessary to mention that at several points it appears that al-Ghazali’s various works come into peculiar disagreement with one another. When considering the focused and varied groups of individuals at vastly different places along the journey to Truth that his young students, seasoned followers, popular audiences, and scrutinizing public theologians might bring to bear upon his writings, it is perfectly reasonable that al-Ghazali would package his message to his specific readers. Similarly the exercise regimens directed towards grade school children, people in wheelchairs, professional athletes, and middle aged housewives might be seen to sharply contradict the advice of one another.
However, it is interesting also to note that these incongruities have often been exploited through both innocent ignorance and willful manipulation. Al-Ghazali has therefore become the standard bearer for intellectual crusading armies pushing everything from liberal scholasticism to reactionary fundamentalism to fanatical Sufism to a complete rejection of all worldly knowledge and even the disavowal of education and literacy. Each of these crusading armies can cite clear evidence in the works of al-Ghazali to support their claims and validate their programs. So what must we do? Ignore this brilliant and prolific mind and say he was flip flopping and didn’t know what he believed from day to day? Or assume he was lying and pandering to the hopes of each audience and we can have no real idea what the man truly believed?
Or do we peel away the surface to examine the connecting threads and discover the weft of al-Ghazali’s ideas and how they permeate the holism of his teaching to create a very clear picture that not only addresses the needs of all peoples of Islam, regardless of their individual development, cultural environment, intelligence, education, or aptitudes and longings for a deeper embrace of this Truth? Such an examination of the overarching themes of al-Ghazali’s works in the body of but two texts will, I hope to show, reveal also a complex and beautiful illustration of the diversity of man and how Islam can meet the needs of all, while revealing the Imam’s keen understanding that the worldly humanity is not a homogenous entity and that Islam is not a monolithic “cloak” of a singular hue.

Deliverance from Error
This work serves many purposes and follows the classic teacher’s letter to a student model. Al-Ghazali employs this model to offer an all too brief discussion of his personal crisis of faith and subsequent abandonment of an important teaching career to wander in search of answers to the questions that were haunting him. In the opening pages, al-Ghazali establishes a clear distinction between the lowland of servile conformism which he later further identifies with the followers of taclim and defines as the uncritical following of what religious leaders say, and the highland of independent investigation, which he clearly and forcefully defines as the only source of certainty, or unshakable knowledge in things one knows. The Imam applies the methods of this independent investigation first to the numerous popular and esoteric philosophies of the day and then to the elements of the Islamic faith. It is in the science of this investigation that al-Ghazali makes possible the abandonment of rote adherence to the demands of faith and a deeper commitment based on personal knowledge or gnosis. Al-Ghazali makes it clear that this freedom is affordable only to those of singular intellectual capacity and the diligence to build the necessary rigorous foundations, as he did himself. For the masses, this influx of conflicting knowledge would only create a chaos of uncertainty and doubt and serve to destabilize and possibly collapse the structure of social worship, which he details as tenuous and resting on servile conformism.

The Fitra
When each child is born, it is possessed of a knowledge, a deep awareness of Truth, of the presence and existence of God in his being and in all of creation and the lordship of this God over all of existence. This knowledge, the fitra is then systematically put to sleep or buried by the child’s parents who make of him a Muslim, a Jew, a Christian, an atheist or any other faith. The concerns and experiences of life and social existence further serve to reinforce this outer identity and the child falls further and further from the knowledge of Truth. This sense of falling away, conscious or not, is the source of human misery, and for those such as al-Ghazali, it is the source of longing which drives them out of this narcotic slumber in search of a reawakening and rekindling of this awareness. Al-Ghazali reveals humbly that he is himself a man in whom the fitra, through God’s grace, was never wholly asleep. He describes how from a young age he sought deeper meanings and noticed the unmindful adherence to religion that most believers embraced. His own longing was a deeply felt inner need that would not rest until it was satisfied, regardless of the cost to his worldly life and comfort.
Throughout the entire Deliverance, the Imam reiterates again and again the meticulous attention to sifting out the threads of truth from uncritical beliefs via the methods of personal and rational, critical scrutiny. However, the first juncture of possible manipulative interpretation appears in al-Ghazali’s reference to the Prophet’s warning that “My community will split into seventy-odd sects, of which one will be saved.” And that indeed this warning had come to pass. Al-Ghazali refers to the multiplicity of doctrines, sects, methodologies, and the contention and disagreement amongst these groups as “ … a deep sea in which most men flounder and from which only a few are saved.” al-Ghazali warns against innovation as did the Prophet himself.
Al-Ghazali seems here to be championing a monolithic and unilateral interpretation of Islamic holism. Indeed, it has been long held that the Imam laid the groundwork for the so called “closing of the doors of ijtihad” or the rational inquiry and multiple possible interpretation of the essential tenets of Islam. Yet the various formulae of The Deliverance from Error provide the means by which this very ijtihad may be conducted in a systematic and layered approach. The steps that al-Ghazali outlines from his own history detail this journey.
This trajectory is marked by his response to a series of personal spiritual crises, the first of which is a loss of exoteric faith in the reliance upon the religious and dogmatic declarations of others. Being a man of marked intelligence and rigorous training, al-Ghazali navigated the locks of sense data, reason, and inquiry as means of determining the truth of any matter. He at first supposed that sense data was the primary means by which the truth of anything might be determined. But then he observed that often the reality of a thing belied its sensory appearances. The phenomena of mirages, of the ratio of stars as they appear to the human eye and their true size and distance, and the reality of sensory experiences in dreams showed the sometimes faulty basis of sensory data to comprehend a thing.
The cacophony of these conflicting voices, those of sense, reason, and imagination, each attempting to provide the Imam with a true means of judging reality, caused yet another crises and drove him in search of more reliable and deeper means of knowledge. Al-Ghazali declares it was God Himself who opened the eye of deeper knowledge for him and showed him the way to proceed. This awakening, what he calls a “dilation of the breast” instilled in al-Ghazali the conviction that it was not through a methodic approach alone on the part of man that truth may be known, but through the grace and help of God. However, the effort and striving, the exercise of the soul and mind, the transformations through these works, were necessary groundwork. The Imam cites the Prophet when he says –“Your Lord, in the days of your lifetime, sends forth gusts of grace: do you then put yourselves in the way of them!” Clearly here is the active part of man, “put yourselves in the way of them” going to meet the active part of God as He bestows His grace. Nowhere in The Deliverance does the Imam advocate a stopping at the rote performance of the minimum demands of religion, which he describes on almost every page of this work as, again, servile conformism.
What al-Ghazali outlines is The Categories of Those Who Seek the Truth, is, 1) the Mutakallimun, those who claim full and independent apprehension of the truth through independent judgment and reasoning. 2) The Batinites who claim to posses the knowledge of Truth from the Infallible Imams. 3) The Philosophers who claim to have figured God out based on rational formulae, explainable means, and mathematical equations, and 4) The Sufis who claim to be the intimate companions of God and who, as with the other three constituencies, also have God all figured out based on their intimate and reliable proximity, thereby, as with all four groups, relegating the Most High to a quantifiable possession based upon their preferred interpretations of His nature and their reliable place within that nature.
What is ironic is that the descendents of these very groups are the ones that claim al-Ghazali as their own champion to the exclusion of the others. When a careful read of The Deliverance From Error taken with the piece to follow, The Clear Criteria for Distinguishing Islam from Godlessness, reveals al-Ghazali’s conclusion that each of these methods had some merit and partial truth, but also contained partial faults and error. When examining al-Ghazali’s descriptions of his own journey however, he clearly employed all these methods and valued their usefulness in his discoveries. Much like the man who journeys by car, then boat, then plane on his honeymoon, but then comes to rest in the final place of delight he would never have reached without the car, the boat, the plane, but which is finally and ultimately determined by his Bride.
Al-Ghazali states that the task of the Mutakallimun is to preserve orthodoxy through systematic discussion. However he faults these scholars for not possessing sufficient understanding of the various modes of thought they sought to safeguard against. As such their arguments were unconvincing to those most likely to be swayed into error through partial flawed knowledge. Interestingly, the Imam states in regards to these Mutakallimun that “Healing remedies differ as the sickness [spiritual crisis] differs, and many a remedy helps one sick man and harms another.” This comment alone would seem to refute any suggestion that al-Ghazali advocated a monolithic and singular religious [Islamic] path for all. His recognition of the disparity of human natures, aptitudes, and abilities is in evidence throughout his works in a constant cadence of reminders and hints and overt statements.
Later, in the Clear Criteria for Distinguishing Islam from Godlessness, al-Ghazali defines the Muslim, the true believer in Islam as that one who declares that there is no God but Allah, that Muhammad is His messenger, and who believes in the oneness of Allah, the existence of His angels, and in the resurrection of the body on the Day of Judgment. It is in this distinction that the Imam lays out an elaborate and succinct picture which allows for and encourages a diversity of approaches within the basic tenets of Islamic orthodoxy. The other matters, the diverse interpretations and layered meanings, al-Ghazali calls “details” and likens them to discerning the direction of the qibla while traveling. One cannot always know for sure what the exact direction is and it is personal judgment to which one must rely in making those determinations which lie outside the purview of the Qur’an and the sunnah.
The second category, the philosophers, the Imam has undertaken to examine thoroughly in his task of explaining their premises fully enough to refute them soundly on their own grounds. The three schools that al-Ghazali examines are: 1) the materialists whom he declares to be atheists because they describe the world as an ever existing phenomena under its own mindless schema and devoid of any cognizant Creator. 2) The naturalists who define the world and creation in terms of animal life only, and refute the concept of any spirit. Hereby these materialists maintain that when a creature, such as man, has died, whatever animating force he possessed has dissipated and cannot be retrieved. And 3) The Theists who refute the first two schools yet maintain only a rational and logical and one would argue homocentric locus to any possibility of understanding the universe and creation.
For al-Ghazali, all three of these schools and their numerous derivatives are guilty of unbelief. The materialists deny the existence of Allah, the naturalists deny the possibility of a resurrection of spirit at the Judgment, and the theists deny man’s need for Allah’s grace, forgiveness, and benevolent intervention. As such, these philosophies are wholly outside possible inclusion in Islam, other than as fragmentary elements.
For the Ta climites, their critical question was a matter of infallible authority. For them, the infallible authority, the person of the Prophet, was dead and his day-to-day influence on all manner of issues that would arise, that had not arisen during his own time and were therefore new, was gone and absent from contemporary affairs. They could not put their trust in their own personal judgment, nor in the disparity of jurists who wrangled over legal matters. Their vision of an infallible living imam in each generation bordered on innovation of a particularly pernicious sort. As the Imam states in the Deliverance,

“The prophets and religious leaders referred men to the exercise of personal judgment, and necessarily so, despite their knowledge that men might err. The Apostle of God—God’s blessings and peace be upon him!—even said: ’I judge by externals. But God undertakes to judge the hearts of men.’ “This means: I judge according to the most probably opinion resulting from the witness’ statements, but they may err about the matter. The prophets had no way to be safe from error in such cases involving personal judgment: how, then, can anyone else aspire to such safety?”

If the prophets from antiquity and indeed Mohammad himself were not free from error, i.e. infallible, from whence then did this “Infallible Imam” arise who outstripped even the Prophet’s own state and function in Islam? To these Ta climites, al-Ghazali countered that in fact the wisdom and guidance of the Prophet was not absent from the world for it existed in the form of the Qur’an, if God’s own words in that text are to be believed! “Today I have perfected for you your religion and have accorded you My full favor.” [Surah 5:3] For al-Ghazali then, this need for an appeal to a new authority not initiated by the Qur’an or the sunnah could be nothing other than innovation.
Of these four groups, it is the Sufis who al-Ghazali clearly held in the highest esteem. He recognizes the purity and passion of their beliefs and the methods used to “put themselves in the way of” Allah’s grace and the dilation of their hearts. The Imam’s own mystical calling would resonate more deeply than any mere intellectual or rational argument, no matter how compelling, for it is this very dilation of the heart which bestows the desired certainty which can suffer no shattering. Throughout the deliverance the Imam references his own sickness of the soul and the intellectual doubts which caused him no rest. Without the inner calling, the dynamism of the still vibrant fitna within him, al-Ghazali like so many successful scholars would have been satisfied with the high profile success he enjoyed. Instead, he walked away from this success and entered a period of wandering and discovery that lasted for ten years.
Al-Ghazali would find much that spoke to him from heart to heart within the teachings and the experience of Sufism. He compares their preference for seclusion to his own in which the inner secrets are enjoyed and contemplated. He likens their turning from the world and self purification from all but God as the opening to the prayer in which one focuses the sole attention upon God and turns away from all else.
Modern Sufis often cite al-Ghazali as a proof of their position that one cannot hope to attain to the gnosis or any knowledge of God without the aid of a recognized Sufi teacher from, as many claim, a traditional order with lineage dating from the time of the Prophet. [Such lineages which are highly questionable as many did not appear until the 11th century and later]. They seem to base this claim on several references in the works of al-Ghazali to seeking out a teacher who is most versed in disciplines one wishes to study, as did he himself. However these references refer virtually without exception to al-Ghazali’s own search for a mastery of understanding of the philosophies and sciences which he undertook and mastered in order to consider and ultimately refute them as both possessed of much truth, and dangerous to the faith of the common man.
Al-Ghazali prided himself, if that may be said, on his surgical thoroughness in examining these schools. He spent ten years undistracted by any other issues in life in the pursuit of this mastery. But nowhere does al-Ghazali declare or imply that such a human agency is necessary for one to attain the Gnostic dilation of the heart, or the enlightenment of the gnosis. Indeed, he declares very directly that the failing of the philosophers, the Mutakallimun, and the Taclimites themselves is their reliance upon human agency, and not upon God alone, for this awakening. Al-Ghazali’s refutation of the Ta climites is in stark and irrefutable opposition to such a mandate for a human agency, a human agency not clearly outlined and defined by the Prophet or by Allah in the Qur’an.
But just as al-Ghazali applied his careful balanced critique to the other approaches to Truth, he does so with Sufism as well. He finds language in their texts and poetry that does not remain consistent with the pure tawhid of orthodoxy. And while it may be argued that such terms as “union,” “indwelling,” “reaching,” and other terms implying a going forth and a coming back, a becoming something other than one is, or any other changes which directly impact and alter the fundamental and essential holism of the declaration of Allah’s Oneness, are metaphorical or partial reflections of something unutterable, for al-Ghazali, these ideas are wrong and tantamount to unbelief, regardless of how lovely they might be and how closely they may speak to his own experience. For he adds that :

“ … one intimately possessed of that state ought not go beyond saying: There was what was of what I do not mention: So think well of it, and ask for no account!”

How eloquently and clearly this speaks of al-Ghazali’s own secret, and his admonition for silence lest it upset the strictures of the social orthodoxy. That al-Ghazali strove to care for and maintain this stratified orthodoxy wherein each circle from the outer strata of common faith and public religious adherence demanded of all, to the inner circles of which he hints in the above beautiful passage, and the attending knowledge and explorations appropriate to both, are clear in his admonitions that there were areas of knowledge and inquiry that much be kept from the average man. The following passages by the Imam speaks more clearly to this than has any detractor or champion of this stratification.

“The money-changer suffers no harm if he puts his hand into the sack of the trickster and pulls out either the genuine pure gold from among the false and counterfeit coins, so long as he can rely on his professional acumen. It is not the expert money-changer, but rather the inexperienced bumpkin who must be restrained from dealing with the trickster.”

The Clear Criteria for Distinguishing Islam from Godlessness
This second work under discussion from al-Ghazali could be thought of as the Clear Criteria for Turning the Inexperienced Bumpkin into the Expert Money-changer. At the close of the Deliverance from Error, al-Ghazali introduces the singular problematic suggestion that is repeated and elaborated upon, and explained further throughout the Clear Criteria. He states, in connection with the passage above regarding the “bumpkin” and the “expert money-changer” that :
“It is certainly true, since most men have an overweening
opinion of their own competence and cleverness and think
they are perfectly equipped intellectually to discern truth
from error, that the door must be blocked to prevent the
generality of men, as far as possible, from perusing the
works of those addicted to error.”

It is with this precedent that those who have deemed the “doors of ijtihad” to be forever closed have built their argument. The first major sections of the Clear Criteria however, present a meticulously crafted and systematic formula for this very speculation and considered wading in and thorough examination of all the schools of thought and ideation in order to rationally and personally, and through subjective understanding, discern truth, or Islam from godlessness. Both texts refer several times to the Hadith of the prophet where he states – “My Community will be split into seventy-odd sects. Of which one will be saved.” Al-Ghazali confirms that, in his time certainly this was true. This is taken as further justification that the emergence of these numerous “sects” of interpretation and meaning were an innovation and that only one could prevail as the true manifestation of the pure Islam of the Qur’an and the Sunnah.
In this regard, al-Ghazali agrees, but he devotes the entire work of the Clear Criteria, and it is very clear indeed, to explaining exactly what he means by this. The Imam laments that these many sects of Muslims are all in heated and violent opposition to one another, each claiming the others are “taxing their fellow Muslims with unbelief.” It is established early on within this text exactly how al-Ghazali is defining belief. Does the individual affirm the existence and tawhid of the One God? Does he affirm the existence of God’s angels and the Resurrection, and does he affirm that Mohammad is the Prophet of God? If one assents and confirms these tenets, he is deemed, by al-Ghazali, to be a believer.
However all of the sects were flinging the term “heretic” at the others based on their perceptions and explanations of five modes of existence. Al-Ghazali outlines these five modes as (1) Essential existence – meaning the true and absolute nature of something as it truly is, regardless of human perception. (2) Sensible existence – being the sense perception of anything and confined solely to the individual whose perception grasps this thing. This perceptions of existence is confined to the individual and not shared wholly with any other person. (3) Imaginative existence – being that which is called to mind from memory or previous experience of the object. (4) Mental existence – being the spirit or power of a thing, its meaning and function. And (5) Analogical existence - those qualities that do not exist in the form of a thing, but may be used to illustrate an idea that the human mind may grasp.
Al-Ghazali states that these five modes of existence were accepted and outlined by the prophet and the Qur’an, and therefore are beyond dispute and apply to all believers, within the time, context, and capacity of their understanding to grasp them in turn. He then proceeds to outline throughout the body of the work examples of each of these modes of existence when applied to the nature of God, to the existence and “place” of heaven and the many layered tapestry of these modes of understanding. The Imam uses The Throne in several places to demonstrate these different modes of perception. The literalists who had claimed to take the Qur’an exactly at its word, were reviled as heretics and anthropomorphists who denied the oneness of God by claiming that he could be seated on a throne at all, that he would need a humanoid body to do so, and that he would be fixed on one location and not another to be in fact seated, “on” the throne and not elsewhere.
For al-Ghazali, this posed no problem, as the concept of the Throne would indeed fall clearly into all five of the categories of existence. There is an essential existence of a material throne, or of the “Throne of God” regardless of what human understanding make take from that essence. There is an imaginative throne, as all have seen a throne of some kind and a clear mental image could be had of this symbol. There is a mental existence, as all know what a throne implies: kingship, dominion, and majesty. And the concept of the analogical existence allows the mind to grasp and accept this kingship, this dominion, this majesty, and through references to a throne, allow the mind to rest in a metaphor for something it cannot possibly grasp as God Himself is beyond human comprehension.
Al-Ghazali also leads the student through a series of mental exercises whereby he comes to see the flaws in the various sense perceptions, and their partial truth. Thereby showing the partial truth to each of these modes of existence. One example he uses is the live ember of glowing coal. The visual sense sees the coal ember, but if one whirls the ember around rapidly in a circle or a straight line, the eye creates the image of a straight glowing line or connected circle, when in truth, there is but a point at all times. A very intriguing example to introduce the tenuous reality we all rely upon when the Essential Existence lies beyond all material substantiation and wholly alludes our senses, both bodily and mental. Three primary warring factions that al-Ghazali cites, the Hanbalites, the Mu ctazilites, and the Ash carites were all claiming to be the true and pure believers, each faction seeking to have the other sects declared heretics so that they might prevail, all citing the prophet and his warning that the Community would be divided into factions and that only one would be saved.
The whole of the Clear Criteria then can be viewed as an attempt to knit together these disparate threads and the numerous other sects within orthodoxy as each reflecting one of the possible and continuous modes of existence. For al-Ghazali, the declaration of God’s existence and His oneness, the recognition of the Prophet, and the acknowledgement of the resurrection, these tenets of faith made one a believer. The rest were details and accessible only according to the individual’s capacity to understand and comprehend the deepening layers of truth. The entire formula of the Criteria is a step by step method through which one is lead, stage by stage through the layers of sensory of mental and intellectual comprehension of material events and subtle ideas of faith and the existence of nature. This schema is seamless, elegant, and beautifully holistic in its acknowledgement of differing capacities among human beings, and layers together to strengthen the foundation of successive layers of knowledge.
But there remains the seemingly problematic issue: Al-Ghazali’s clear and oft repeated mantra that the common man (Muslim) should be barred from an unrestrained and untutored delving into the conflicting schools of philosophy, the sciences and mathematics, and the personal interpretation and questioning of religious faith that were extant during his time, and which are equally afoot today. Yet the Imam himself clearly delved deeply into these many arts and sciences, and embraced them as providing much clear proof of the nature of God’s creation.
As stated at the outset of this paper, this very “loophole” has been used to justify the closing of the doors to individual discussion and interpretation of religion. Yet in Deliverance from Error the Imam states clearly that there are times when man must rely on his judgments, despite his human potential for error. Al-Ghazali himself spent ten years mastering the works and ideas of philosophers, non-Muslim religious thinkers, and schools of science.
This seeming incongruity, and the attempt to use the Imam’s works to forbid deeper inquiry into religion (what he himself called “service conformism” countless times and clearly held in contempt) may be explained and clarified in the following passage:

“At this point it is clear to you that we have two positions. One
of them is the position of the masses of men. In this the right
thing is to follow [the literal or the common view] and to refrain
entirely from changing literal meanings, and to be wary of
introducing the sanctioning of an interpretation that was not
sanctioned by the companions [of the Prophet,] and to shut
immediately the door to questioning, and to restrain men from
engaging in discussion and inquiry and following what is
ambiguous in the Book and the Sunna.”

This sets up the perfect precedent and is often quoted to support the very servile conformism that the Imam held in the deepest contempt. And this would be most puzzling and seem to be a contradiction, if al-Ghazali had not gone on to further state in the very next passage that :
“The second position [is that found] among the men of speculation
whose traditional beliefs have been troubled. Their inquiry ought to
be as much as necessity requires and they should forsake thethe meaning because of the necessity imposed by decisive apodeictic
proof. But one ought not to tax another with unbelief on the ground
that he considers him to be mistaken regarding what he thinks to be
an apodeictic proof, for that is not something simple and easily grasped.
So let there be among them an agreed rule for apodeictic proof
acknowledged by them all. For if they do not agree about the balance,
they cannot do away with differences over the weighing. Now we have
already mentioned the five scales in the Book of Correct Balance. They
are those about which dispute is absolutely inconceivable once they have
been understood. Nay, more, every one who understands them
acknowledges that they are the channels of sure and certain knowledge
in a decisive fashion. For those who have learned them, it is easy to be
fair and equitable and to uncover the truth and to eliminate dispute.” 11

Abu Hamid al-Ghazali is absolutely clear in outlining the keys to understanding the gates of human understanding as they ascend from the common man to the man of knowledge. Like layers of an onion, they lay folded within each other, opening like petals as one is able to rend their layers. Each complete and whole for those who wish to go no further. Each another mirror’s image of a single truth. The contention that the Prophet warned of, was these layers being shredded apart and each vying for supremacy where none could prevail for all men at all times and in all contextual need.
In reading the two above passages, one can easily envision al-Ghazali as the mountaineer, advising day hikers of the beautiful sights not to be missed, the clear safe pathways that must be adhered to for those not prepared for a more rigorous hike. While advising those who would trek higher, embrace more dangers, and require more preparation, training, and conditioning if they are to attain the goals. And for those who seek the cloud obscured peaks, the night time trails in the places of avalanches and forbidden passes, the Imam advises them, again, as they climb fearlessly with hungry troubled hearts:

“There was what was of what I do not mention:
think well of it, and ask for no account!”

FURTHER DELIVERANCE FROM ERROR

2008-04-28T15:19:00.000-07:00

Al-Ghazzali, Soroush, and the Courageous Jurisconsult

“Now then: You have asked me, my brother in religion, to communicate to you the aim and secrets of the science and the dangerous and intricate depths of the different doctrines and views. You want me to give you an account of my travail in disengaging the truth from amid the welter of the sects, despite the polarity of their means and methods. You also want to hear about my daring in mounting from the lowland of servile conformism to the highland of independent investigation.”

This introduction to Al-Ghazzali’s notable work, Deliverance from Error, seems to declare not only the Imam’s own reasons for composing his text, but also to inspire and provide a clear outline for the theses of Abdolkarim Soroush in his work Reason, Freedom, and Democracy in Islam. Indeed this entire work by Soroush seems a response to and elaboration upon the Deliverance with commentary and an attempt to bring al-Ghazzali’s ideas to a logical next-step for the current era.
The Deliverance introduction also responds to the assignment of this particular paper. In the first part of this current work I shall employ the al-Ghazzali text as a reference and contrast-point of departure from which to examine several of Soroush’s theses found in Chapter II: “ Islamic Revival and Reform” from Reason, Freedom and Democracy in Islam and the models of change he suggests as they embody a logical outgrowth of al-Ghazzali’s ideas. I will highlight a few critical limitations in the theses of both men, and in the second portion of this paper I will present my own perspectives and suggestions for models of possible change in the profession of Islam in the world today. I will not succumb to the temptation of elaborating upon wholly fanciful and unrealistic suggestions which too commonly find their way into such examinations and which ultimately trivialize the gravity and provocative opportunities contained in volatile crossroads of profound change. Cotton candy bridges may be charming projects in art school experimental models, but such bridges will never carry people to places of greater worldly or spiritual fulfillment.

REVIVIFICATION
Both al-Ghazzali and Soroush outline the critical need for a periodic renewal, reaffirmation, and clarification of religion within Islamic society. Both men are very careful to outline a falling away into errors and misunderstanding of the elements and essence of religion which necessitates renewal and the failure to integrate empirically derived knowledge with spiritual knowledge. This failure stimulates a social and moral collapse into confusion, loss of faith, and a backward looking protectionism that closes society to the growth and development of human knowledge of the world. The sharpest danger outlined by both writers is the complete failure to attain the true gem of religion, personal spiritual knowledge, which both men claim has taken a subordinate role to the collective obsession with law and the details of exoteric and cultural expression of faith. Both al-Ghazzali in the 6th/12th century and Soroush and Soroush in the 21st describe the environments in which they live and write as in danger of becoming stagnant and one might suggest religiously reactionary. Both al-Ghazzali and Soroush address environments caught precariously between two seemingly disastrous poles: reversion to a distant past rich with romantic ideals but devoid of the benefits of scientific empiricism and social rationalism, and the fear of a complete disintegration of religious faith and a subsequent breakdown of Islamic religious society. For both al-Ghazzali and Soroush the revivification process is needed to circumvent these possibilities and create a renewed environment of fluid engagement between religion and knowledge which may allow the culture of Islam to enter into a era of not merely rigid and artificially bolstered survival, but a renaissance of thinking and expression, a renaissance at once dynamic and creative yet undeniably Islamic in body and spirit.
Such periodic revivification seems a natural component of the observable development of human knowledge. Soroush, as a man thoroughly steeped in the modern sciences, underlines the importance of these sciences and other branches of human knowledge as tools and gifts for mankind’s development in material and social prosperity. He also calls for a clear understanding of the difference between knowledge of religion as distinct from religion “as it is.” Knowledge of religion, for Soroush, is a branch of human knowledge which evolves and changes over time through an ongoing dialogue with other branches of human knowledge. Hence man’s understanding of religion, God, revelation, and prophecy, evolves and changes, expands over time in response to new discoveries and developments in thought and ideas. An understanding of this fluctuation can be found in Soroush’s theory of contraction and expansion, itself an interesting concept found in the writings of the Sufis as a description of the fluctuations which the hearts of men undergo though their transformations in God.
Al-Ghazzali cleverly defends the idea and role of prophecy against attacks by the rationalists of his day in the Deliverance by stating that prophecy applies not only to divine revelation found in sacred texts, but also to the genius of individual consciousness as it comes to “know” things it could not have known through any other means than through inspiration. He applies this definition to both mystical gnosis, ‘irfan, as well as to the grasping of previously unknown scientific discoveries and ideas such as the observation of the ordered movement of the stars and the gleaning of the nature of the workings of the human body.
Soroush also defends the importance of scientific knowledge and other branches of human knowledge such as sociology and psychology in man’s development and demonstrates that they are not incompatible with either religion, or man’s knowledge of religion. What neither al-Ghazzali nor Soroush suggests however is that this periodic revival of religious knowledge is a natural and positive necessity, much like the yearly clearing away and burning off of dead fields to make way for the replanting of those fields with the seeds left from the harvest, seeds which carry the permanent and perpetuating essence of the nourishing crops. This idea illustrates the cyclical nature of expansion and contraction as a function of God’s possible nature and His manifestation in material nature which mirrors His attributes. Instead al-Ghazzali and Soroush both seem to describe this process of renewal almost as the need to cut away a dangerously gangrenous limb to save a body: an unexpected and unfortunate crisis rather than a productive and affirming opportunity. Were the process to be undertaken with more creative regularity, the point of desperation and crisis possibly would not arise. The first view, that of a healthy and natural process of cyclical renewal, can facilitate an environment of hope and enthusiasm, participation and inclusion. The amputation of the gangrenous limb image will bring only resistance, violence, and protectionism as many will see in themselves and their faith that which others are calling a disease to be extricated and disposed of.
Al-Ghazzali and Soroush both give a central place to the concept of kallam and of a formalized series of debates upon the issues in this revitalization and renewal of Islam in the epochs in which they wrote and commented upon. For al-Ghazzali the mutakllimun did indeed arise and systematically address many of the challenges and innovations that he believed were destroying Islam at its roots. However his complaint, a complaint mirrored in Abdolkarimi Soroush, is that these efforts did not go far enough, but only addressed individual and immediate questions and did not provide a systematic means of undertaking the overarching phenomena of and need for healthy and appropriate change, nor the necessity of taking a proactive rather than a reactive response to the inevitability of sometimes threatening and unpredictable change.
For al-Ghazzali, the mutakallimun were also too deeply entrenched in their own disciplines of Islamic knowledge and sought only to champion and maintain or revive the status quo of their own immediate branch of thought. Proponents of ‘fiqh or law sought to place the law and its rituals and sciences of procedure as the supreme and sole head of religious expression with arguably rote expression of the law standing as the proof of Islam. The same complaint is made today by Soroush. Al-Ghazzali abhorred this as “servile conformism.” Soroush also tackles the component elements of Islam as did al-Ghazzali and identifies the same players on the field: among them those of the law, of theology, and of personal knowledge of religion, gnosis, or ‘irfan. Both Soroush and al-Ghazzali find the only salvation is the holistic marriage of these three approaches, combined with the clear differentiation between religion as it is and religious knowledge, or the eternal and unchanging truth of religion and the time/location-bound expression of that understanding of religion that changes over time regardless of man’s attempts to hold it within a vacuum of suspension.
The significant issue which differentiates the theses of Soroush from those of al-Ghazzali up to this point in the discussion is that of scientific knowledge and its function in human society. As a scientist and champion of such knowledge, Soroush would harness this unfolding mystery to aid man while ensuring that it carried society not in unrestrained directions but in those compatible with an Islamic society. Al-Ghazzali is of the same mind but with a very dramatic difference. He clearly affirms the lawfulness within religion of scientific and empirical study, methods, and knowledge, but contends that for the “average man” the exposure to their study will lead only to limited understanding, doubt, error, loss of faith, and the abandonment of religion. So here he distinctly stratifies two groups within society: those who openly study and develop knowledge and understanding of the material world, and those who are systematically excluded from this knowledge. At no point however, at least in the Deliverance, does al-Ghazzali explain who comprises these two groups, how their separation is maintained, and how such knowledge is attained and then disseminated into the public purview and to what ends it is to be used and by whom.
For Soroush, as well as al-Ghazzali, partial knowledge is dangerous to faith. For Soroush, the solution is a full comprehension of knowledge, the sciences, and all branches of human knowledge. However what Soroush does not fully suggest is that such expanding of human knowledge, in contrast to diminishing knowledge of religion can serve to broaden the horizons of its approach. Soroush describes religion with the following curious phrase: “The efforts of our contemporaries are devoted to the safe conduct of religion through the perilous path of the temporal world and to bestowing proper meaning and relevance upon it in an increasingly turbulent secular world.” (pg 28)
What is problematic about this idea is that it presents religion as a vulnerable and veiled bride being escorted through hostile hill country on the way to her wedding feast. The brigands of secularization are armed and looming behind every rock. However if religion, “as it is,” is the manifestation and gift of God to access knowledge and experience of Him and an evolving understanding of and mastery of our existence in this life, how then can it be vulnerable to any threat or encroachment? Why must religion be ushered or escorted anywhere? How can religion, if there indeed be Truth within it, be in need of our protection?
Al-Ghazzali’s belief that the masses of humanity must be kept from a close scrutiny of empiric knowledge of the world is only marginally updated with Soroush. He suggests, and rightly, that to close off and forbid people from exposing themselves to the new technologies, particularly those of communication and knowledge of the world and all that hides beneath its cloak, is only to enflame their desire for it. There are many who believe that the Apple in the Garden offered by Shaytan was not the knowledge of good and evil, but was Knowledge itself. Abdolkarim Soroush generously allows people to be exposed to all the fruit in the world, but with unspecified limitations. He would still “protect” people from the onslaught of the modern western moral encroachment. Again the image of religion as the tender virginal bride, wide eyed and helpless in a world of cultural monsters where she is either destroyed or forever violated and corrupted to their camp.
In many places Soroush reaffirms the need to embrace knowledge of the sciences, both physical and social while extricating them from western cultural models and goals. He restates over and again the critical need to distinguish between religion and religious knowledge, between the enduring and eternal in religion and the changeable, between the universal elements of religion, the consistently and essentially human elements which endure through time, and the cultural or time/place manifestations of religious expression among individual groups of people. He calls for a Courageous Jurisconsult to step forward and tackle this necessity. In Deliverance from Error al-Ghazzali offers himself as the model of this trajectory and he itemizes the same elements within Islamic religion as does Soroush, theology, law, and personal knowledge or gnosis.
Al-Ghazzali explains very clearly how his own path of questioning grew from servile conformism to doubt, to an emptiness of complete despair, and eventually to a systematic and almost scientific exploration of the component elements and various approaches to religious inquiry within Islam and other avenues of thought popular in the 12th century. Abdolkarim Soroush, when one includes autobiographical portions of the introduction of his work, does the same. And both men come to the same conclusion. These elements of religion, philosophy, theology, law: all are incomplete without the fourth leg of the table, personal religious experience through direct knowledge. Both thinkers suggest very strongly that it is this element, the gnostic and personal experience of religion which is an indispensable component of any possible revivification of Islamic society, for the individual, or for the whole of that society.
Soroush describes the necessity for the Courageous Jurisconsult with the same passionate rhetoric as if a cry for a new prophet. He calls for this person, or body of people, to bravely undertake this revivification amidst what would invariably involve an almost insurmountable firefight of resistance and violence. Al-Ghazzali describes himself as the individual who has completed this journey and who has come back, literally from the wilderness of ten years of wandering and searching, and against his will, to teach those who will hear him. Soroush seems to make his evocation of the Courageous Jurisconsult upon the backs of a few pointed and provocative allusions to ‘irfan and then he retreats into the shadows of mute and pregnant suggestion.
The critical task then of this Jurisconsult is many faceted. He must first define and extricate the eternal elements of religion from those elements subject to being updated and avoid the danger of discarding that which is foundational and essential in favor of that which is transitory and perhaps illusory. He must then identify those updated or new components to be added to the program and implicate them within religion and culture in such a way as to both minimize and maximize their impact. Minimize the impact that would be harmful (however that may then be described) to the religious society, yet maximize the benefits these elements would bring to society and determine the appropriate line between these two issues.
Soroush discusses one example of this as the various communication modalities in operation in wide use today. For him, vast networks and instantaneous communication undeniably offer great strides and conveniences for society and for Islam. However, like al-Ghazzali before him, Soroush would limit and filter exposure and access to these technologies and the external cultural influences they represent. However he fails to identify the methods and criteria to be used in this filtering. Soroush recognizes that a complete social lock-down on these external cultural influences will only render them more salaciously irresistible to the youth he seems so committed to protecting. Again he touches upon the need to protect the vulnerable from influences they cannot seemingly understand or resist. Soroush disavows the complete totalitarian closing of society, but he would still limit, artificially, the exposure of the Muslim population, and particularly the youth within Islamic society, to these elements.
Soroush eloquently outlines many undeniably destructive and unhealthy social conditions in the West which he contends mandate this filtered exposure to external cultural influences. The problem with both al-Ghazzali’s complete suppression of empirical knowledge of the material world to all but his undesignated elite, and Soroush’s partial closing of the door, is that the phenomenal process of human knowledge moves dynamically through time like a juggernaut, and precludes both the sustained totalitarian exclusion of knowledge from the social sphere, and the partial exposure to world cultural influences. One could easily cite in the US the decline of education producing what can only be called the new superstition and a dangerously circumscribed and misperceived view of world and domestic events. One could also easily cite today’s headlines which states that three out of five web sites featuring violent sexual pornography and children under the age of twelve originates in the US.
However the puzzling point in the works of both ah-Ghazzali and Soroush is their insistence on the importance of the personal spiritual knowledge to the individual and the benefits this knowledge would bring to culture, yet neither man offers a unique approach to developing and using that personal knowledge, that gnosis, ‘irfan as the natural armor and grease upon which people may move forward in the world and in their religious lives without the perpetual vulnerability of exposure to so-called threatening influences. Neither author touches upon the unlikely and unique cohesion that such direct religious experiences can provide between the seeming irrationality and incompatibility of mysteries, prophecy, mystical experience and a transcendental/imminent God, and the world of modern science and rational inquiry.

THE COURAGEOUS JURICONSULT
Because both al-Ghazzali and Abdolkarim Soroush posited their intriguing models of the need for a sustained and periodic revivification of human religious knowledge, Soroush called for the appearance of the Courageous Jurisconsult, and then both writers retreated from the stage, I shall assume that role and offer my own suggestions for a Further Deliverance from Error. First however I must enlist time to aid me and state emphatically that the only way that any model for change, particularly wide sweeping and enduring change can manifest is with the appropriate time necessary for its natural fruition. This seems to be an element that many forget or willingly overlook when they hope for instantaneous change and offer their dazzling if narrowly considered manifestos for unilateral world enlightenment. Such change of any sort enacted overnight can only be launched and maintained through force and can never hope to be anything more than what Soroush himself calls “cosmetic changes” that remain vulnerable to dissolution and further crises within society as they fail to meet the changing needs of a dynamic society. Such superficial and cosmetic changes can only be reinforced through compulsion and the terrifying technology of restraint and punishment.
Yet one of the most often repeated mantras of Islam is “there is no compulsion in religion” and God is the knower of hearts, not merely the Watcher of the right number of raka’ah correctly performed in the proper garb at the exact designated moment. Al-Ghazzali and Soroush both talk about theology, and law, and ‘irfan as though they were three rambunctious brothers who refuse to get along to the loss and discredit of all three, yet they do not suggest or design a plan for them to coexist much less reinforce and grow through exposure to one another in the same interactive dialogue that Soroush declares works so well with human branches of knowledge.
Soroush states the need to distinguish those elements of religion that are eternal from those which are transitory and therefore by definition fall rather into the category of religious knowledge. Yet he does not set about a coherent plan for making such distinctions. He also touches very briefly and suggestively on the notion of the danger of a “paid clergy” without elaborating on the inevitability of such a paid class using all political agencies at its disposal to ensure it retains the level of power it enjoys and never has to share that power. This facet of a religious society is the primary agency of stagnation and a restriction of change and growth.
The model therefore that I would propose would be one of comprehensive remodeling of education from the youngest levels with an inclusion of new models in both religion and politics to address the three fundamental aspects of religion; theology, law, and ‘irfan equally, and to create new institutions for the study and participation in these three aspects of religion. This model would also create a fourth body with power not to act directly within society but solely to negotiate and arbitrate balance between the other three branches and to facilitate the ongoing and evolving synergistic and dynamic interaction between them.
This model would be built upon a template, developed within the ‘Irfan School, of the emotional and spiritual progress and development of the individual in a dynamic and mystical capacity. How do people unfold through the process of spiritual search and inquiry, through liminal experiences and mystical transformation? What role does initiation and cathartic transcendental experiences play in this evolution? What are the states and stations of this progress and what conditions of life are unique and necessary to each? Within this model it will clearly be recognized that not all people desire for or progress to the same levels of discovery and this is a faculty of their personal nature. The ‘Irfan School would be responsible for providing the initial basic exposure to these inner arts and sciences and to awaken and instill in children the desirability of and the availability of access to them to the degree that each feels compelled and called to pursue. This model would include exercises of meditation and quiet introspection and the desirability of the personal inner search for a unique religious experience from childhood on. The ‘Irfan School would then develop schools, curriculums, systems of developmental exercises and techniques, appropriate teachers etc. for this education to people to explore literally to their hearts’ content from grade school programs, to higher education and college level, and beyond in the form of orders, monasteries, etc. These programs would co-exist equally with regular programs of non-religious-specific education.
However it would also be understood that this process of gnostic attainment cannot be owned or mandated or be held as a compulsive institution by the ‘Irfan School itself nor that access to the mysteries of the gnosis of God is dependent upon any school, teacher, or particular mystic sect within Islam and that in fact the higher levels of attainment are beyond any regulatory or systematized body, school, or teacher to maintain, assess, facilitate, or withhold. This would eliminate the branded co-opting of Sufism and its states and stations as it is today in which it is widely circulated, at least in the west, that the higher regions of access to and union with God are absolutely closed to those not signed up and dues-current with a recognized sheikh in a recognized and historically traditional order. (Such tradition which is highly open to historic legitimacy.) The Schools of Law and Theology would safeguard against the emergence of cults of personality within the ‘Irfan School and abuses of power and respect by sheikhs and other gnostic religious teachers.
The duties of the School of Law would be among its other duties to ensure that the ‘Irfan School did not “incorporate God” or restrictively systematize through uniformity of exercise and expression the individual’s journey through the higher inner dimensions of Islam which would be presumed to be wholly private and personalized. The ‘Irfan School’s central function would be to serve the true spiritual needs of the people and not the maintenance of its own powers and privileges. The role of the Arbitration School would be to ensure a balance between the Schools of Law, Theology and ‘Irfan and that the School of Law did not infringe upon the natural fluidity and creativity of the ‘Irfan foundational approaches to the gnostic maturation process. The duties of the School of ‘Irfan would include identifying those elements of religion which are universal and enduring as evidenced through direct contact with God and the human soul through time and found in the writings of the established gnostics both living and classical as well as those found within Qur’an and Hadith. Their writings paint a clear picture of a consistency and similarity of experience through time and cultural expression. Yet the absence of stark and unbending uniformity in the language of the mystics and expression of their individual gnosis would leave open the possibility of new, unique, and perhaps unexpected expressions of the gnostic experience.
Together with the School of Theology and the School of Law these essential elements, these “gems” of religion would be implemented within the worship, and religious education of society. The ‘Irfan School would identify and encourage individuality of religious expression within the cannon of Islamic forms of worship and would develop a palate of modalities, Guilds of Excellence based upon the 99 Beautiful Names of Allah and which would aid individuals in discovering the methods most suited to their own emotional and psychological needs and aptitudes and facilitate a broad ranging development of culture, both Islamic and universalist. These Guilds would then develop and provide opportunities for expression in associated fields of the arts, sciences, music, oration, and all fields of human cultural expression. Mix n Match highly encouraged! However it would be understood that all such expressions and investigations would not be confined solely to the Guilds or within any such (loosely) structured environment. Within this process a practical a dynamic method of determining the soundness of these essential elements will then be tested by the Schools of Theology and Law. It will be a function of the education process to ensure that all members of the Schools of Theology, Law, and ‘Irfan are masters to a determined degree of the other two schools. The School of Arbitration would consist of those masters of the social sciences of business arbitration, psychology, conflict resolution, secular ethics, and will typically hold no interest specifically in the supremacy of any of the three other Schools but rather be committed to the smooth and effective working of the three in concert.
The School of Theology would interpret revealed texts, Hadith, and the writings of the classical scholars and saints within the context of both the determinants of what is held to be essential and enduring in religion, and what is considered knowledge of religion. They would, with the help of the School of Law determine the liberality and breadth of gray zones in which personal interpretation may be freely exercised. The School of Law then would reinforce such laws as are determined as legitimate within the edicts of the schools of ‘Irfan and Theology. Laws of correction when absolutely necessary would be issued not to punish but to further facilitate the spiritual unfolding of the individual. The School of Arbitration would ensure that such correction did not degenerate into Spanish Inquisition style coercion and indoctrination.
This model follows closely the Soroush idea of expansion and contraction. The theocratic model of retribution and punishment, of restriction and fear can be seen as a Jalal based model where the idea of a severe and wrathful God imposes stringent and painful disciplines on His people and the governing regimes facilitate this stern and contraction-based leadership. The model this paper proposes is a Jamal based approach where the beauty, mercy, and love of God are offered as opportunities to expand into wholeness and a closer relationship with Him rather than a shrinking or contracting through fear and obedience. Such an open and expanding model would facilitate creativity and new models of expression.
The ‘Irfan School would provide access to and reinforce the presence of God’s beauty, love, and mercy as social influences and in individual lives by which certainty and not faith, personal engagement and involvement form a much more binding hold on hearts, minds, lives and behaviors than any totalitarian institution of punishment and control can ever hope to attain. It is then to be hoped that through this model (admittedly very loosely outlined herein) the individual and his society can weather any onslaught of religiously and personally destabilizing forces, temptations, and threats while exploring and developing new horizons of culture and human knowledge.
Abdolkarim Soroush speaks of the fall of the Islamic civilization of the past and the need for the creation of a new Islamic civilization. Perhaps it might be suggested that there is much to be retrieved from the past of the Islamic epoch of the likes of the Abu Hamid Al-Ghazzalis and the vast and dazzling array of 12th century saints, scholars, scientists, theologians, mathematicians, mystics, and writers as this epoch embodied the best that Islam had to offer mankind of the time. Today, we can embrace a deepened understanding of what is essential and enduring in religion and in man’s religious nature, and develop numerous methods and a creative open religious environment conducive to the fulfillment of that nature while creating and maintaining a culture suited to that attainment in freedom and the spirit of discovery both inwardly and within the world of rational inquiry and civic society.