Quest Magazine

Printed in the Spring 2016  issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Abbasova, Pyarvin. "Women in the Shadows: Reflections on a Muslim Girlhood" Quest 104.2 (Spring 2016): pg. 68-69

By  Pyarvin Abbasova 

There are two main denominations in Islam, Sunni and Shi’a. The division happened soon after the death of the Prophet. Shi’as see Ali, cousin of Muhammad, as his successor; Sunnis believe that it was Abu-Bakr, the Prophet’s father-in-law. After many wars and persecutions over the centuries, Sunni has become the largest denomination. Shi’a is practiced mostly in Iran, Azerbaijan, Iraq, India, and Pakistan, and accounts for about 10 percent of all of the Muslims in the world. Over the centuries the Shi’as established different traditions, holidays, and rules that set them even further apart from the Sunnis. The two sides are in constant conflict with each other, sometimes resulting in violence or war.

My family is from Azerbaijan, where 90 percent of the population is Shi’a. I grew up in a Shi’a family in Russia. Because I did not grow up surrounded by my own culture, I was ignorant about this rift in the Islamic world. In Russia I often felt like a stranger to my own people, because we lived in a Christian country, as well as a stranger to the Russians. My black hair, dark eyes, and olive skin unmistakably showed that my roots were not Slavic.

Like many Muslim girls who are growing up in non-Muslim countries, I just wanted to be like the rest of my peers. With little or no desire to wear long skirts, long sleeves, and a scarf on my head (known as a hijab) or to marry my first cousin (a normal practice in Azerbaijan), I was seen as a rebellious teenager, shaming my family. So at the age of nineteen I moved to the United States to start life on my own terms, an action that few Muslim women have dared to take because of the consequences they might face. I have also converted to Orthodox Christianity and begun my exploration of world religions that, among other things, has led me to Theosophy. Although during my teen years I rejected Islam and the role it offers women, studying Theosophy has helped me to make peace with the religion of my ancestors.

I have actually seen many happy Muslim families, where Islam was practiced with a pure heart and mind, where namaz (prayer) became meditation and Allah is seen in all living things. I have learned about the beauty of Sufism. Some of my friends willingly choose to wear hijab. They stay at home, even though they are lawyers, doctors, and accountants. These women are happy. They don’t want to experience the stress of an everyday job, going to work after six weeks of having a baby, or leaving a child at the hands of unknown people at the day-care center. And I can understand that — actually most Western women can probably relate to some degree.

In his book Man, Son of Man Sri Madhava Ashish says that in our present world there are people of three races— the fourth, the fifth and the emerging sixth race— living side by side. Those living in the shadow and in ignorance are of the fourth race, but there will be less and lessfewer and fewer of them as the planet evolves.

There is a shadow side of Islam that is impossible for me to accept. It comes from the unconscious desires and fears of men, and it hides its ugly form behind interpretations of the Qur’an.

It’s likely that few readers are familiar with the word namus. The word is Arabic in origin and literally means honor and respect. However, the meaning of this word is much broader. Namus is the cornerstone of any Muslim woman’s life. Her sexual integrity and purity is what earns respect and honor for her father, brothers, and, later, her husband. Anything that promotes that purity is reinforced, and anything that threatens it is prohibited. Virginity before marriage is of the utmost importance, and in many cultures it needs to be proved. That makes one’s virginity a social rather than personal matter. The infamous “hanging of the sheets” — whereby on the wedding night, blood-stained sheets are hung out to prove that the bride was a virgin —is not an old wives’ tale, but a strong, living tradition. Other things that can violate a man’s namus are the birth of a daughter (particularly if she is a first child), an offense on the woman’s part that the husband has tolerated, and the loss of control over the women in his family.

The concept of namus has led to the horrible things that are done to women in the name of Islam. A man’s respect and public opinion are of the greatest importance in Islam. As a result, any means is used to achieve respect, and in the eyes of society anything is justifiable. There are verses from the Qur’an that prescribe rules for women, but many ethnic groups take it further. Some people live in ignorance so dark that they perform abortions based on the sex of a child, murder raped women, and force women to commit suicide. One of the ways to ensure the purity of a woman is to hide her from the eyes of any man that is not her immediate family. As a result, women do not get an education, go to work, or in some countries drive a car.

For most Westerners the way Muslim women are dressed is a bit frightening. Their modest clothing is seen as an instrument of male oppression and tyranny. The classic image is of a woman in a burqa — all draped in black with only a little gap for her eyes to be shown. Very few know that according to the Qur’an this is only one of the many ways to dress. Hijab, burqa, niqab, shayla, khimar, chador, and al-amira are all styles of clothing for Muslim women. While the requirement is mostly to wear long sleeves and a long skirt, the color, fabric, design and type of headscarves are infinite. A burqa does not always have to be black; it can be blue, green, or golden brown. Different nations have different styles of traditional outdoor dress. It’s also important to understand that this is only the style of clothing for outdoors. When women are inside the house, in the company of women only, or with men who are close relatives, the veils are not required. It is interesting how Western ladies wear their best clothes when they go out, but Muslim women wear their best clothes, makeup, and jewelry at home. 

There are a growing number of women in different countries who willingly choose “modest” clothing. Believe it or not, there are even some Jewish women wearing burqas. Bruria Keren, one of the religious leaders of the Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) sect, has encouraged wearing burqas based on one interpretation of Jewish scriptures. She states: “Follow these rules of modesty to save men from themselves. A man who sees a woman’s body parts is sexually aroused, and this might cause him to commit sin. Even if he doesn’t actually sin physically, his impure thoughts are sin in themselves.” Hundreds of women follow her lead and wear Arabian-style veils.I have heard Muslim women saying the exact same thing over and over again. In their eyes, covering up from head to toe is a way to be merciful to the weak minds of men.

In his book Yogatherapy, Swami Shivanada says the inability of men to control sexual energy is a major obstacle on the path of yoga. He says that for women this issue does not exist, because the nature of female energy is pure, whereas men need to achieve purity through tapas (discipline and hard work) and austerities. He also adds that women should not fast or be ascetics, because they will practice austerities too fiercely and in the end hurt themselves. But somehow in the Islamic world things are not viewed this way. It is the women that sacrifice in order for men to refrain from sin.

While there are many restrictions in Islam, there are also many paradoxes. One of them is the perception of men as strong, dominant figures, but who are nevertheless not strong enough to control their own sexuality. Another paradox is the practice of temporary marriage or nikah mut’ah practiced byamong Shi’a Muslims. Nikah mut’ah is a contract that allows men to “marry” women for a specific duration of time, usually no less than three days. The sole purpose of this “marriage” is to have a sexual relationship with the woman without any further obligation. The contract is private. and no one has to know about it, not even the man’s legal wife. It can be verbal or written. The woman will usually get financial support or payment. Sound a bit like prostitution? Not according to Twelver Shi’as, who believe in the sacred nature of nikah mut’ah. (Twelvers are the largest Shi’a sect. Their name comes from the fact that they believe in twelve divinely appointed leaders, or imams, the last of whom is hidden or occluded and due to reappear as the Mahdi, the promised redeemer.) Sunnis are very critical of nikah mut’ah, but it has been around for centuries and is still widely practiced today.

I often wonder where we would be if great women hadn’t taken a stand against cultural and religious norms. If H.P. Blavatsky had followed the rules of Russian society and stayed with her husband, had children, and lived a “happy” marital life, the Theosophical Society might never have been formed. She rebelled, she smoked, she cursed, and she tested every boundary. She traveled the world, became accepted as a chela, founded the TS, and wrote brilliant books. It makes me think that there are many women out there covered in scarves, chadors, veils, and saris that have never had a chance to spark, to get an education or explore their spiritual potential.

What would the world look like if all the women in Islam suddenly had the freedom to do what they wanted? This new world, I believe, would be a blessing to some and a curse to others, but it would not look like the world we live in right now.

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Pyarvin Abbasova, M.D., was born and raised in Siberia. She is a psyhiatrist and yoga teacher, and has been a member of the Theosophical Society since 2009. has beenis a longtime volunteer Pumpkin Hollow Retreat Center in Craryville, New York Her article “Altered States of Consciousness” was published in Quest, winter 2015.

 

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Printed in the Spring 2016  issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Millar, Angel. "Islam and Prince Charles " Quest 104.2 (Spring 2016): pg. 64-67

 

By Angel Millar

Although still a relatively unknown figure in both the West and in contemporary Islamic thought, the French esotericist René Guénon (1886–1951) “has exercised profound influence in certain significant circles in a number of Islamic countries,” says Seyyed Hossein Nasr, an Iranian-born scholar of Islam, “and [Guénon’s] impact is very much on the rise” (Nasr, 363). Members of these circles either read Guénon in the original French or in translation, or have learned about his ideas through the writings of other major Traditionalist authors as well as a number of “Muslim-born” thinkers.

“Tradition,” capitalized, is a technical term associated with Guénon. It does not indicate a conservative reverence for the customs of a particular society. Rather, “Tradition” refers to the authentic revelations of Deity and a way of life that was in accord with Divinity, cosmic laws, and so on, that preceded contemporary religions.

According to the Traditionalist doctrine, knowledge (gnosis) of Divinity is acquired through stages of esoteric learning, which is, necessarily, structured hierarchically, as is the case in initiatic organizations such as Sufism, Freemasonry, and Hindu Tantra. For Guénon, as for Islamic esotericists, it was the haqiqa (the inner, spiritual truth) that counted. The Qur’an had to be understood not by the procedures of the doctors of the shari‘a (external Islamic law) but by inward truth. Guénon personally observed the shari‘a, but believed that the raison d’être of Islamic law could only be grasped through comprehending its haqiqa. (For more on Guénon and his relation to Theosophy, see Richard Smoley, “Against Blavatsky: René Guénon’s Critique of Theosophy,” Quest, winter 2010.)

Although less influential in the Arabic-speaking world than in Iran, Turkey, Paksitan, Bosnia, or Southeast Asia, Guénon’s Crisis of the Modern World — critical of Western modernity — as well as a number of his essays on esotericism and Sufism, have been translated into Arabic since the turn of the century. Nasr himself introduced Guénon’s work to Iran when he returned from studying in the U.S. in 1958. During the 1960s, Nasr commissioned the translation into Farsi of Guénon’s La crise du monde moderne (“The Crisis of the Modern World”) and Le règne de la quantité (“The Reign of Quantity”), and from the middle of the decade, he says, the ideas of Traditionalist authors “became part of the general intellectual discourse” in Iran.

If the Islamic Revolution of 1979 disrupted the growing interest in Traditionalism, it was only a temporary blip. In 1998 and 1999 Mufid University in Qom devoted two issues of its journal to the subject. These included translations of some of Guénon’s articles as well as others about Guénon himself. Also significant, a “major conference” on “Traditionalism and modernism” was held in Tehran in 2002. Guénon’s books Le symbolisme de la croix (“The Symbolism of the Cross”), Aperçus sur l’ésotérisme islamique et le taoisme (“Insights into Islamic Esoterism and Taoism”), and Orient et Occident (“East and West”) have been translated into Farsi, and a Persian-language book on Guénon’s life and work has also been published.

Defender of Faith

But Guénon has also had a significant if largely unacknowledged impact on some Western thinkers vis-à-vis Islam. Perhaps one of the most unlikely contemporary defenders of Islam, from a perspective that is at least informed by Traditionalism, is Charles, Prince of Wales. Though heir to the British throne, he is perhaps best known to Americans and many others outside of Great Britain as the former husband of Diana, Princess of Wales, from 1981 to her death in Paris in 1997.

The country’s monarch has traditionally been the head of the Church of England. Consequently, the prince’s admiration and sympathy for Islam has sparked controversy, partly because he may one day be made king of what many still regard as a Christian country, partly because Islam — and more especially Islamism — is not infrequently regarded as a threat to Britain’s secular, liberal institutions, such as women’s equality with men.

Unlike Guénon, who had to move to Egypt to live under shari‘a, the prince lives in a time in which shari‘a family tribunals are operating in Britain, with their rulings on civil matters, such as inheritance, legally binding. In 2008, when the existence of these tribunals — some of which are run from the back rooms of shops or other commercial premises — was reported, it provoked alarm and debate in the country, which has since been witness to campaigns by Saudi-style “morality police” patrols proclaiming areas of London and other cities “shari‘a-controlled zones.”

With this background, the prince’s views on Islam are more controversial than they might be otherwise, though he seems to be fully aware that, on a range of issues, his opinions are outside of the mainstream. In 2010, the prince published Harmony: A New Way of Looking at Our World, with the opening words “This is a call to revolution” — not exactly what one would anticipate from a member of the British royal family. Harmony’s premise is that the environmental crisis, financial crisis, and other crises of the modern world are the result of “a crisis of perception.” Man no longer knows how to live in harmony with the planet because he no longer has any knowledge of the sacred principles that it embodies, and that, for at least thousands of years, traditional cultures have revered and represented in their material culture, such as the architecture of temples, cathedrals, mosques, and so on.

Max Hastings, a writer for the British newspaper The Daily Mail, was alarmed by 7 message and proclaimed, “Anyone who reads the Prince of Wales’ new book will have little doubt that the chief peril to our royal institution in the decades ahead lies within his well-meaning, muddled, woolly head.” For Hastings, modern monarchs had to be “distant symbols of glamour, beauty and decency.” The public should not know their opinions, especially if they happened to think that “revolution” — even of an internal sort — would be a good idea.

In general, the prince’s outlook is usually believed to be a combination of nostalgic longing for the past and slavishness to political multicultural ideology, which holds all cultures and religions to be inherently equal and, in some sense, the same. A more thorough reading of Charles’s statements and interests show that, even if he does not formally call himself a Traditionalist, his thinking approximates Guénon’s Traditionalism, of whose doctrines and thinkers the prince is well aware.

But it is his sympathy for Islam that has worried especially center-right journalists in Great Britain and, in a few cases, abroad. Daniel Pipes, an author and journalist broadly in the American neoconservative camp, has aired the suspicion that Charles might even be a secret convert to Islam. Similarly, one of the biggest firestorms to erupt around the prince occurred in 2008, when Charles announced that he planned to be known as the “Defender of Faith” rather than by the official title of “Defender of the Faith” (i.e., of the Church of England) when he ascends to the throne.

It is probably true that this change was intended, in part, to reflect the fact that Britain was no longer primarily a churchgoing nation, but one in which Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, etc., are active, alongside the various, dwindling denominations of Christianity, propped up by large-scale immigration. If this were the whole story, the declaration would be — and was seen to be — impeccably multicultural. Misconstrued, for many, Charles’s statement has come to signify that he is out of touch with the problems of contemporary Britain. The prince would probably contend that he is looking deeper.

In a nation fracturing along lines of various competing “identities” — religious identities in particular — and increasingly ill at ease with political multiculturalism, it was easy to lambaste the prince’s comment as just the latest pandering to the politically correct — and some, of course, seized the moment. Damian Thompson of The Telegraph, a conservative British newspaper, complained that the heir to the throne’s statement had “a whiff of vanity about it.”

It was, he suggested, as if the prince were saying: “Britain is a multicultural society, so aren’t you lucky that I contain multitudes?” Thompson wanted to know whether spiritualism or the Church of Jesus Christ of Aryan Nations would be considered faiths to be defended. “How,” he addressed the prince directly, “are you going to tiptoe through the theological and constitutional minefield created when unscrupulous, bizarre or extreme religions demand Royal protection — as they will?”

Thompson’s main concern with the prince becoming the “Defender of Faith” was, perhaps not surprisingly, the erosion of the country’s Christian identity, which had informed its unwritten constitution and even its secular traditions. In the popular, center-right media, Christianity seemed to be under sustained assault. The concern was a valid one, although Thompson’s assertion that the proposed change was “the Royal equivalent of replacing the word ‘Christmas’ with ‘Winterval’” was grossly in error. Such secularizing of Britain, and the West more broadly, profoundly disturbs the heir to the throne. Thompson had misinterpreted a small but crucial detail. The prince had expressed his desire to defend “faith,” not “faiths,” to be a champion, in other words, not for various competing religious and cultural groups, but for a sense of the sacred in contemporary life.

Still, not everyone believes that monarchs should be seen but not heard. Writing in The American Spectator, Rod Dreher defended the prince against his critics, despite being fully aware of the intellectual influences on the heir to the British throne. “It’s impossible to read his words on Islam,” commented Dreher, “without recalling the thought of René Guénon . . . the French traditionalist who converted to Sufi Islam.” Picking up on Charles’s statement in Harmony that “we are not the masters of creation,” Dreher concluded his article and assessment of the prince with apparent approval: “In modern Western civilization, it is hard to imagine a more profoundly conservative statement,” he said, “or a more revolutionary one.”

A Guénonian Prince

Defending faith, from the Traditionalist perspective (and, it would seem, from Prince Charles’s perspective), could have nothing to do with the exterior, that is, with pandering to particular politicized groups. Rather, it is to defend the spirit against a modernity that has squeezed out the Divine, and turned man away from eternal and immutable truths and into a mere consumer. It is, in simpler terms, to defend the sacred against the superficial. The prince himself articulated this in his video address to the Traditionalist-oriented Sacred Web Conference held in the Canadian province of Alberta in 2006: “In these uprooted times, there is a great need for constancy; a need for those who can rise above the clamor, the din and the sheer pace of our lives to help us to rediscover those truths that are immutable and eternal; a need for those who can speak of that eternal wisdom which is called the perennial philosophy.”

“The perennial philosophy,” we should note, is sometimes used as another name for Traditionalism, but in case we are in any doubt, Prince Charles continues, observing that the conference that he is introducing is dedicated “to a critique of the false premises of Modernity — a critique set out in one of the seminal texts of the traditionalists, René Guénon’s The Reign of Quantity.” Referring to the Traditionalists, the prince contended that “their’s [sic] is not a nostalgia for the past, but a yearning for the sacred and, if they defend the past, it is because in the pre-modern world all civilizations were marked by the presence of the sacred.”

We should recall the prince’s phrase “Defender of Faith.”

For Prince Charles, Traditionalism represents the prospect of “integration” in an era of “dis-integration, dis-connection and de-construction,” and one that is, consequently, hurtling toward a “Dark Age” of environmental disaster.

In his introduction to the Sacred Web Conference, Charles reminded his audience that “the traditionalist perspective is that we are living at the end of an historical cycle,” i.e., the Kali Yuga or Dark Age. According to this doctrine, as Charles observed, at the beginning of the cycle of time all potential manifestations were latent. Emanating throughout the ages, these manifestation descended from higher, spiritual forms to lower and more materialistic ones. However, because of the ever-increasing distance of existence, society, etc., from eternal, spiritual laws, at a certain point collapse becomes inevitable. Yet, Charles went on, it is “through our understanding of and attachment to traditional norms of metaphysical doctrine and spiritual practice that we can, in a measure, transcend the baleful influence of the descent that is the eventual exhaustion and end of our cycle of history and prepare ourselves and the world for the beginning of the next.”

According to the prince, “tradition” is not something constructed by man, but “a God-given intuition” of the rhythms and harmony of opposites that can be found throughout nature. Imbalance has occurred because over the last four centuries, the prince asserts, the West has become increasingly characterized “by a mechanistic approach to science.” Although science is valuable, he says, it cannot “articulate matters of the soul.” Guénon is nowhere mentioned in Harmony, but the spirit of Traditionalism and esotericism more broadly is apparent: ancient traditions, Christianity, Islam, sacred geometry, ancient Egypt, and Hermeticism are all used to illustrate the prince’s worldview.

Like Guénon before him, the prince conceives that Islam is able to act as a bulwark against a type of modernity that strips man of his relationship to the Divine. We in the West must rediscover our relationship to the sacred, both have asserted. It is a task that will require us to understand not with the head but with the “heart” — a word that Charles sometimes uses when speaking of the Islamic faith. Quoting an Arab proverb, “What comes from the lips reaches the ears. What comes from the heart reaches the heart,” the prince has reminded audiences (at the Open University in Cambridge in 2007, and in Oxford in 1993) both of his own sincerity and, if one reads between the lines, the necessity for what the Sufis refer to as tawajjuh, or spiritual concentration.

The history of Islam and the West has long been intertwined and overlapping, and Muslims and Christians share essential beliefs — “one divine God,” an afterlife, accountability for one’s actions after the death of the body, etc. — as Charles asserted in an article published in The Telegraph a month after the 9/11 attacks in 2001. Both sides had to be aware of the dangers of misunderstanding each other, and of seeing history only from their own perspective. More daringly, considering the timing, the prince renewed his call for Westerners to “understand the Islamic world better,” including “the extent to which many Muslims genuinely fear our own Western materialism and mass culture” as a threat to their traditional culture and societies.

Although, in 1993, the prince spoke at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, attempting to dispel Western stereotypes about Muslim countries — telling the audience, for example, that women in Turkey, Egypt, and Syria are given equal pay, and received the vote as early as women in much of Europe — his interest in Islam is not that he views it, as some multiculturalists do, as more liberal or progressive than the West. For the heir to the British throne, it is not politics that will enable the West to understand the East, or vice versa. “TADABBUR is the word . . . to open our minds and unlock our hearts to each other,” he declared in 1993. The Arabic term tadabbur refers to contemplation of the Divine, especially through meditating upon chapters of the Qur’an (tadabbur al-Qur’an), on what they tell the Muslim, and how their lessons are to be implemented in daily life. Tadabbur is often defined as the “remembrance of God” and “remembrance of the thoughts of God.”

The prince’s is a gnostic, esoteric understanding of Islam. It is not primarily the faith of the shari’a or fiqh (jurisprudence)— nor of what is permitted (halal) and forbidden (haram) — or of international politics and group identity, but of the inner reality connecting man and God. It is the faith of the Islamic mystics, Rumi and Ibn Ashir, whom the prince has cited in his speeches, albeit in passing. Like the Traditionalists, Britain’s heir to the throne believes that the West has focused on the external at the expense of the inner, creating a confused and “exploitative” materialist culture. The “oneness and trusteeship of the vital sacramental and spiritual character of the world about us,” the prince has said, “is surely something important we can re-learn from Islam.”

Sources

Camber, Rebecca. “‘No Porn or Prostitution’: Islamic Extremists Set Up Sharia Law Controlled Zones in British Cities”; Mail Online, July 28, 2011; http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2019547/Anjem-Choudary-Islamic-extremists-set-Sharia-law-zones-UK-cities.html.

Charles, Prince of Wales. Harmony: A New Way of Looking at the World. New York: Harper Collins, 2010.

———. “Sacred Web Conference : An Introduction from His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, Sept. 23–24, 2006”; SacredWeb.com; http://www.sacredweb.com/conference06/conference_introduction.html.

———.“A Speech by HRH the Prince of Wales Titled ‘Islam and the West’ at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies”; Princeofwales.gov.uk, Oct. 27, 1993, https://www.princeofwales.gov.uk/media/speeches/speech-hrh-the-prince-of-wales-titled-islam-and-the-west-the-oxford-centre-islamic.

Doughty, Steve. “Just 800,000 Worshippers Attend a Church of England Service on the Average Sunday”; Mail Online, March 21, 2014; http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2586596/Just-800-000-worshipers-attend-Church-England-service-average-Sunday.html.

Dreher, Rod. “Philosopher Prince: The Revolutionary Anti-Modernism of Britain’s Heir Apparent”; The American Conservative, March 12, 2012; http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/philosopher-prince/.

Gledhill, Ruth. “Church Attendance Has Been Propped Up by Immigrants, Says Study”; The Guardian, June 3, 2014; http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/03/church-attendance-propped-immigrants-study.

Hastings, Max. “Why Prince Charles Is Too Dangerous to Be King”; Mail Online, Dec. 18, 2010; http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1339707/Prince-Charles-dangerous-king-This-eccentric-royal-imperil-monarchy.html.

Hickley, Matthew. “Islamic Sharia Courts in Britain Are Now ‘Legally Binding’”; Mail Online, Sept. 15, 2008; http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1055764/Islamic-sharia-courts-Britain-legally-binding.html.

Nasr, Seyyed Hossein. Islam in the Modern World: Challenged by the West, Threatened by Fundamentalism, Keeping Faith with Tradition. San Francisco: Harper One, 2010.

Pipes, Daniel. “Is Prince Charles a Convert to Islam?”; Danielpipes.org, Nov. 3, 2009, http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2003/11/is-prince-charles-a-convert-to-islam.

Thompson, Damian. “Prince Charles’s Plan to Become ‘Defender of Faith’ Will Help Destroy Our Christian Identity”; The Telegraph, November 14, 2008; http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/damianthompson/5718748/Prince_Charless_plan_to_become_Defender_of_Faith_will_help_destroy_our_Christian_identity/

Angel Millar is the author of Freemasonry: Foundation of the Western Esoteric Tradition (2014) and Freemasonry: A History (2005). His articles and papers have been published in The Journal of Indo-European Studies, New Dawn, and Eurasian Review, among others. This article is adapted from his book The Crescent and the Compass: Islam, Freemasonry, Esotericism, and Revolution in the Modern Age (Numen Books, 2015). Reprinted with permission.

 

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Printed in the Spring 2016  issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Smoley, Richard. "A Glossary of Islam " Quest 104.2 (Spring 2016): pg. 62-63

By Richard Smoley

A list of this length obviously cannot be comprehensive. It is designed principally to explain the Islamic terms most commonly used in this issue. Unless otherwise noted, the language from which these words are derived is Arabic.

Arabic words are often transliterated using diacritical marks: e.g., ḥadīth. These have been left out of this glossary and this issue.

Allah. God.

Baraka. Also barakah. Grace or blessing. A spiritual influence or energy infusing the universe. Saints, spiritual teachers, Sufi orders, and the tombs of saints are considered to be conduits of baraka.

Dervish. A member of a Sufi order. From a Persian root meaning “needy” or “beggar.”

Dhikr. Also zikr. Literally, “remembrance.” Usually refers to a spiritual practice involving repetition of one of the names of God. Sometimes used to characterize a state of mystical contemplation.

Five Pillars. The five essential practices of Islam: shahada, salat, zakat (charity), sawm (fasting during the month of Ramadan), and hajj.

Fiqh. The body of Islamic jurisprudence.

Hadith. (Plural ahadith). Literally, “report.” Reports of the deeds and utterances of the Prophet Muhammad not contained in the Qur’an.

Hajj. The pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia, obligatory (if financially possible) once in a lifetime for Muslims.

Hijra. Also Hegira. The flight of Muhammad and his followers from Mecca to Medina in AD 622. It marks the first year of the Islamic calendar.

Islam. Literally, “submission” or “surrender.” 1. The surrender of the individual human will to God. 2. The faith proclaimed by the Prophet Muhammad, or Mohammed (AD 570–632). An adherent of Islam is called a Muslim (in an older form, Moslem).

Jihad. Literally, “struggle.” The obligatory effort to sustain the Muslim faith. The “greater jihad” is regarded as the inner spiritual struggle within the believer. The “lesser jihad” is the struggle against enemies of Islam. Jihad, often translated as “holy war,” usually has the second meaning in the Western media. One who carries out a jihad of either sort is a mujahid or (in Western media) a jihadi.

Jinn (singular and plural); occasionally djinn. Invisible spirits, mostly malevolent, created from “smokeless fire” (Qur’an 55:15). The English derivative is genie.

Kaaba. A cuboid structure, made of hollow granite bricks, located in Mecca. It is the focal point of Muslim worship. Muslims worldwide are required to perform daily salat in the direction of the Kaaba.

Khalifa. Literally, “successor.” 1. The successor of the Prophet Muhammad. The correct line of succession is a source of dispute between Sunnis and Shi’ites. Anglicized as caliph. 2. In Sufism, the representative of a master, or sheikh.

Pir. (Persian, “old one.”) In Sufism, an elder or guide; the equivalent of sheikh.

Qur’an, Quran. Also Koran. The holy book of Islam. According to Muslim belief, the Qur’an was revealed in verses by the angel Jibril (Gabriel) to the Prophet Muhammad over the period AD 610–32.

Salat. The daily prayer, obligatory five times a day for Muslims.

Shahada. The attestation of faith: “There is no god but God [Allah], and Muhammad is the Prophet of God.” One must recite this statement in front of two witnesses in order to be acknowledged as a Muslim.

Shari‘a. Also shariat. The exoteric rules, or law, of the Muslim faith.

Sheikh. Also shaikh. In Sufism, the designated head of a Sufi tariqah or order.

Shi’a, Shi’as, Shi’ite. One of the two largest Islamic sects, comprising some 10–13 percent of the world’s Muslims. Shi’as hold that Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad, was his true khalifa, or successor. Most Shi’ites are found in Iran and Iraq. Shi’a can apply to the sect as a whole or to individual believers, who may also be known as Shi’ites.

Silsilah. Literally, “chain.” The line of succession in a Sufi order.

Sufi. A term generally applied to Islamic mystics. The name is usually said to be derived from the Arabic suf, “wool,” referring to a particular type of garment believed to be worn by Sufis, or from the Persian saf, “pure.” Another theory holds that it is derived from the Greek sá½¹phoi, “wise ones.”

Suhbat. Literally, “companionship.” The practice of keeping company with a Sufi sheikh in order to gain his baraka.

Sunna. The exemplary behavior of the Prophet Muhammad, expressed in the ahadith.

Sunni. The largest sect of Islam, comprising about 85 percent of the world’s Muslims. Sunnis holds that Abu Bakr, the father-in-law of the Prophet, was his true khalifa or successor. The word Sunni applies both to the sect and to individual believers.

Sura. Also sura. A chapter of the Qur’an.

Tariqa. Literally, “path.” A Sufi order or brotherhood.

Ummah. The community of Muslims worldwide.

Zikr. See dhikr.

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The author wishes to thank Robert Frager, Jay Kinney, and Kenneth P. Lizzio for their helpful comments on this glossary.

Sources

Frager, Robert. Sufi Talks: Teachings of an American Sufi Sheikh. Wheaton: Quest, 2012.

Glassé, Cyril. A Concise Encyclopedia of Islam. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989.

Kinney, Jay. A Glossary of Sufism. Gnosis 30 (winter 1994), 13.

Lizzio, Kenneth P. Embattled Saints: My Year with the Sufis of Afghanistan. Wheaton: Quest, 2014.

Nasr, Seyyed Hossein, ed. The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary. San Francisco: Harper One, 2015.

Toussulis, Yannis. Sufism and the Way of Blame: Hidden Sources of a Sacred Psychology. Wheaton: Quest, 2010.

 

 

Richard Smoley’s new book, How God Became God: What Scholars Are Really Saying about God and the Bible, will be published in June 2016 by Tarcher/Penguin.

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Printed in the Spring 2016  issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Voorham, Barend. "Esoteric Islam " Quest 104.2 (Spring 2016): pg. 55-61

 By Barend Voorham  

There is a lot of Islamic violence in the world, often among Muslims themselves. That is one reason people think Islam in itself is violent. But like any other religion, Islam is noble at its core, inspiring a spiritual and ethical way of life. Nevertheless, if a religion is interpreted in a sectarian way, it divides people instead of unifying them, and thus it becomes a source of evil. Therefore it is time to take a closer look at Islam and its principles in the hope that more people will discover its real fundamentals.  

Voluntary Submission 

The core idea of every religion is Unity. Practicing religion means to unify yourself with the divine and so with your fellow humans, for the divine is the unifying aspect of human consciousness. 

This idea of Unity does not belong exclusively to Islam. On the contrary, it is at the core of every religion. That is why the Qur’an repeatedly refers to the other “peoples of the Book” and to other prophets that preached the same message. In fact the word Islam originates from the Arabic slm, the root of many words that relate to wholeness and peace. Most scholars translate Islam as voluntary submission to God. A Muslim is someone who submits himself — that is, lives in the perception of Unity. 

Islam should not be regarded as a religion that started with Muhammad. Rather it is a current of that broad river of religious wisdom and compassion that has flowed through all cultures and eras. Many Jewish, Persian, and Christian influences can easily be found in Islam, but especially in its more philosophical side, it was strongly influenced by the Neoplatonist philosophers, particularly Plotinus. Plotinus, who lived in the third century AD, went to Persia in the company of the Roman emperor Gordian III and influenced a group of mystics that in later days were called the Sufis. Like Muslims in later centuries, Plotinus put a strong emphasis on the One. But for Plotinus the One was not a personal God, but an impersonal Principle. As we will see, that his concept of the One is more like the original concept of Allah than is the current Christian belief about God. 

It is difficult, if not impossible, to describe the underlying Oneness of manifestation. Although one seeks for words, none fit. That is also the problem with the word God. In the way Christians use this word nowadays, God seems to be a kind of superhuman being, a personal God. But that was not always so. 

Certain books from the early Christians, such as the Gnostic texts known as the Nag Hammadi library, provide a totally different view of God. Like Plotinus’s idea of the One, this God has no properties. It is not right to think of him as a god or something similar. Everything exists in him. He is illimitable, unsearchable, immeasurable, invisible, unnamable, and eternal, and no one can comprehend him. (See the Apocryphon of John in Robinson, 106.) 

Every Muslim, whether Sunni or Shi’ite, whether living in Europe, Pakistan, America, or Arabia, uses the same word to express that Unity: Allah.  

Allah: Unity 

Allah is the Arabic word for God. And without any doubt many Muslims imagine Allah as a personal God, just as other believers of monotheistic religions, such as Christians, Jews or Sikhs, anthropomorphize their God. But is Allah, as presented in the Qur’an, a personal God? 

All Muslims, whether they are illiterates or great scholars, highlight the Unity of Allah. Rightly so, because in many places in the Qur’an, and also in the ahadith (hadith in the singular) — the recorded traditions of the Prophet Muhammad— that Unity is also strongly emphasized. In the 112th sura (chapter) of the Qur’an we read:  

Say, “He, God is One,
God, the Eternally Sufficient unto Himself.
He begets not; nor was He begotten.
And none is like unto Him.”  

This verse leaves the impression not of a personal God but of a Principle of life that is everything and everyone. 

Allah is One and cannot be divided. Therefore there cannot be a thing that is not Allah. So he cannot be a person, an ego. In fact it would be more accurate to refer to Allah with the impersonal pronoun it rather than with he. 

Furthermore, Allah is eternal. He has always been and will always be. “He begetteth not nor was begotten.” When Allah does not beget, nothing flows forth. That means that he has created nothing. Allah cannot create, because then there would be something separated from Allah. Then there would have been two Unities, two Gods, and not one. 

The only positive thing you can say about Allah is that Deity is there, eternal and unchangeable. 

Some Muslims interpret this verse as being directed against Christianity, for Christians assert that Jesus is the only-begotten Son of God. To prove they are wrong, these pious Muslims quote the verse “Allah was not begotten.”

But the meaning of this verse goes much further. Allah has begotten nothing, for a principle cannot conceive, nor can it create. That is why the whole idea of Allah is beyond our comprehension. Just as Lao Tzu says that the true Tao — the infinite — cannot be named, this verse indicates that Allah is in fact everything but nothing in particular and thus beyond our understanding.  

Allahu Akbar 

This idea is also reflected in the saying Allahu akbar, which is usually translated as God is great. That phrase is frequently uttered to justify the most terrible things, but in fact it means that God is greater than anything we can conceive (Nasr, Heart of Islam, 5). Allah goes beyond our imagination, beyond the horizon of our existence. This is the same as the Hindu idea of Parabrahman, which means beyond Brahman, beyond the top of our hierarchy. The divine is greater than our grandest imagination. 

But the Qur’an also states that Allah is also very close, closer than the jugular vein (50:16). There is also this statement: “Wheresoever you turn, there is the Face of God”(2:115). Some Muslim scholars place this verse in the context of the fact that at one point Muhammad changed the direction of prayer from Jerusalem to Mecca. That may be so, but Ali ibn Taleb, the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet, says that each Qur’anic verse has four meanings, four layers of interpretation (Corbin, 20). Without a doubt, then, this verse refers to more than just the direction of prayer. The divine is everywhere. Up, down, left, right, closer than your jugular vein and yet above and beyond your greatest imagination. Allahu akbar. The Deity is both transcendent and omnipresent at the same time: beyond or behind the phenomenal world. Too great to understand, even approximately. And on the other hand, divinity is everywhere in the phenomenal world. Everything is imbued with the divine. That is the image of the immanent Deity.  

Shahada 

The same picture is evoked by the shahada, the “testimony,” the first of the Five Pillars of Islam: La ilaha ill’allah. Literally this means: There is no God; there is one God. The usual translation is There is no God but God. A remarkable phrase, composed of both an affirmation and a denial. Like all paradoxes, it should be food for thought. 

What is meant by the statement that there is no God, and there is one God? 

Again it means that you can say nothing at all about Allah. Anything you say about it detracts from it. The only thing you can say about the Deity is that it is everything. It is boundless, timeless, unchanging. 

If you meditate upon La ilaha ill’allah, you can come to profound insights. There is affirmation and negation, but affirmation and negation are only applicable in the manifest world. Allah is both the manifest and unmanifest, and at the same time it is not, for it is more. 

So Allah is, as was said, the transcendent divinity, the force beyond the world, beyond the universe, beyond the phenomena, unknowable in its essence. The first part of the shahada — there is no God — relates to this aspect. It is too far, too high, too dark, and incomprehensible for us. Beyond our imagination. 

And yet the divinity is present in the manifestation. It is a force that is everywhere. That is the part of the shahada that says there is one God. 

This idea is also expressed in the following verse: “He is the First, and the Last, and the Outward, and the Inward; and He is Knower of all things” (57:3). The Outward is the manifestation, and the Inward is what is not manifested. This statement gives a picture of the Deity, who is both transcendent and immanent. In other words: being and nonbeing.

You might think that Allah is the synthesis between affirmation and negation, between nonbeing and being, between transcendent and immanent, but even the word synthesis does not express a correct understanding of Allah. Allah is Unity per se. God is absolute Unity, indivisible, and impossible to define. That Unity is the starting point, the principle, on which the whole of Islamic philosophy and mysticism is based.  

Names of Allah 

Allah is given a number of names, such as the Beneficent, the Merciful, the Seer, the Creator, and the King. In fact there are ninety-nine names, of which only eighty-four are mentioned in the Qur’an. 

It may seem as if those names prejudice the vastness and infinity of Allah. After all, a name indicates a property. And if someone has a certain property, then he lacks another property and is therefore not boundless. A property — however exalted it may be — always implies a certain limitation. But previously we determined that the Allah Principle is the boundlessness itself. That is the reason why the Mu’tazili — an influential group in the early centuries of Islam — taught that each property or characteristic that you grant to God is a form of anthropomorphism and in fact polytheism, which is the greatest of all heresies. Indeed, when you consider the names as attributes of Allah, you interpret the idea of the boundlessness anthropomorphically. You modify the big picture according to your little human perceptions. 

The Sufi sage Ibn Arabi, for example, who lived from 1165 to 1240, has a very different interpretation of these names. The central idea of his philosophy is, of course, the Unity of Allah. He calls it the Unity of Being. And since everything must be, by definition, Being, and since there are not two Beings, or two absolute truths, the universe must be permeated by Being, or is identical to Being. Nevertheless, this does not mean that Being, Allah, is the universe, or that the universe is Allah, because Allah is more than mere conditional existence. 

Allah, says Ibn Arabi, is exalted above all properties, while manifest existence arises as a result of properties. The properties are not God, but, paradoxically, neither is God different from those properties. God manifests only by means of his names, but they never can manifest his essence. In its essence, in what you can call Necessary Being, Allah cannot be understood to experience nor in any way to become aware of anything. Nevertheless, from the divine flows forth life, and life returns back into it. That life is present as the names of Allah (Nasr, Introduction, 202).  

Emanation 

This idea of the flowing out or emanation of life, so well-known in early Islam, is deeply rooted in the doctrines of the Neoplatonists, especially Plotinus. The doctrine of emanation implies that each being is the starting point of a flow of life. It is like a source from which other beings are originated. 

Imagine a being that creates an atmosphere in which less developed beings can manifest themselves. These are entities with the same characteristics as the Source-Being who created that atmosphere. In that sense, every entity is the result of a more highly developed being and is also the source for less developed entities. Thus we humans stem from higher beings and create an atmosphere for less developed entities. Some of those lesser beings are the trillions of cells that make up the body, or the atoms that compose the cells. 

So we are the creators of those less developed beings, not in the literal sense, but in the sense that in our atmosphere they can live and have their being. In Arabian scriptures these lower beings are referred to as jinn: elemental, primitive, barely evolved beings, completely un-self-conscious. 

In turn, we emerged, or rather were attracted, to the sphere of what we may call a divine being that comes out of a still nobler being, etc. In that way, hierarchies of life come to being, in which each link switches or transforms the life to a lower link. Each being is a link in a current of life. 

The concept of the hierarchical structure of the universe is easy to find in Islam, albeit sometimes in symbolic form. Take for example the Night Journey, the journey that Muhammad made on the buraq — a mythical steed — to Jerusalem. If you study the teachings of the Ismaili, a group of Muslims who were very influential in the tenth and eleventh centuries, you will see that they emphasized these heavenly hierarchies, which they divided into seven steps, as in the Night Journey the Prophet was taken through seven heavens. 

Light Verse 

Let us now take a look at the famous Light verse (24:35) of the Qur’an.  

God is the Light of the heavens and the earth. The parable of His Light is a niche, wherein is a lamp. The lamp is in a glass. The glass is as a shining star kindled from a blessed olive tree, neither of the East nor of the West. Its oil would well-nigh shine forth even if no fire had touched it. Light upon light. 

Many scholars have studied this verse. Although you can interpret it in different ways, it seems clear that the divine life principle — the Light of the heavens and the earth — transforms by way of a number of links into the material world. The expression “Light upon Light” is a phrase you can also find in the work of Plotinus, four centuries before Muhammad (Plotinus, Enneads, 5.3.12.) 

This doctrine of emanation was widespread in Islam. Ibn Sina (980–1037), known in the West as Avicenna, the great philosopher who has exerted so much influence on medieval thinking, uses the following comparison to make this thought clear. You can compare Allah — or Being — with the sun. The universe is formed by the rays of the sun. While these rays are different from the sun, at the same time they are nothing more than the sun. This comparison was probably well known among the Neoplatonists. It goes back to Plato himself (Republic 508c). It is basically what Krishna says in the Bhagavad Gita: “I establish this universe with a single portion of myself, and  remain separate”(Bhagavad Gita, 10:42). 

The Ummah

 All Muslim ethics are based on the doctrine of the Oneness of Allah, combined with that of emanation. 

If Unity is the basis of all life, we have all emerged from the same source, so we are essentially the same. We consist of the same life. So we are all brothers. We must live for each other. We should not only help each other but render service to the whole community.

In Islam the community is called Ummah. To see this in its proper perspective, we need to place it in historical context. In the Arabia of the time of the Prophet, there was no feeling of collective interest. It was a time of tribalism. Every tribe had its principles and laws and was almost constantly at war with the other ones. The message of Muhammad was to bring about unity. Every man, every nation, every tribe is a facet of the Unity. So the Ummah is not only the community of  Muslims, but of all human beings. As the Qur’an states:  

O mankind! Truly We created you from a male and a female, and We made you peoples and tribes that you may come to know one another. (49:13)  

Mankind was one community. (2:213)  

According to a hadith, Muhammad also said that an Arab is not better than a non-Arab, a white man no better than a black or vice versa, except in terms of piety and good deeds. 

When Muhammad was forced to flee from Mecca to Medina, where he became the leader of the Muslims who had fled with him, a document was drafted under his leadership, which is nowadays known as the Constitution of Medina. It expressly stated that the community does not only consist of Muslims but also of Jews, Christians, and pagans residing in the city. It was a universal community, to which people of all faiths and races belonged. 

A community can only function harmoniously if people respect each other. So you should never force someone to accept your faith. 

It may be dangerous to quote Qur’anic texts as evidence for an opinion, especially out of context. Fanatics do that too much. Yet the famous verse 2:256 — “There is no coercion in religion” — can hardly be explained in any other way than by cherishing freedom of belief for everybody.  

Polytheism 

The importance of Unity in Islamic thought explains its aversion to polytheism, the belief in various gods. 

It is true that the Qur’an describes a whole army of archangels and angels. According to tradition, the Qur’an itself was dictated by the archangel Jibril or Gabriel. So there is no doubt that there are beings that are more advanced than humans. The Qur’an tells also about beings that are less developed than humans: the jinn. But this whole hierarchy forms a unity. 

This emphasis on the unity of Allah leads to the rejection of any other gods. The gods in ancient Arabia were all tribal in nature. Each tribe had its own god, who was of supreme importance, even to the detriment of other tribes. Hence ethical practice was limited to one’s own tribe. There were no ethics that applied universally. As a result, there was much war and discord. 

But because of the hijra — Muhammad’s flight from Mecca to Medina — Islam acquired a universal character. Initially the preaching of Muhammad was only addressed to the Meccans, but now he spoke to all mankind. Every tribe had its own god. If you denied the existence of those gods, you put an end to the tribal sense of separateness. Polytheism was thus rejected as being a reversion to the separateness of living in one’s own tribe.

Compare this with today’s national symbols. The symbol of the U.S. is an eagle, of France, a rooster, of Spain, a bull, and of the Netherlands, a lion. Suppose that these nations believe that their symbol has great power. They pray to it. They beg it for prosperity. In doing so, they isolate themselves from other nations, with hatred and war as a result. 

You can counteract this by saying that all those symbols are illusions and false. There is Unity. People need to know each other and learn from each other, so they can better shape the Unity. 

An important conclusion that can be drawn from the doctrine of emanation is that the divine is not outside but within us. When all is One, there can be nothing but Oneness. So every being is rooted in the Oneness. Rooted in a common divine Source, the divine is in all. 

Nevertheless, there is a great variety of beings in the world. Humans are different from animals, animals from plants, etc. Humans too differ from one another. The doctrine of emanation explains this fact as well. Every entity gives shape to the Unity in its own unique way. Therefore beings always differ in their outward form. Because of those differences, they can learn from each other.  

Evolution 

The Light Verse shows that life — the Light of the heavens and the earth — is cascading down through various steps to the material world. The divine falls, as it were, into the fabric of materiality. As the Qur’an says: “Truly We created man in the most beautiful stature, then We cast him to the lowest of the low” (95:4–5).

This idea may be more understandable in view of the hadith, popular among the Sufis, that the Prophet had said that all things were created in darkness, but every being attracted light to itself according to its ability, and by doing so was illuminated. Every being comes from the depths of the depth, from the unknown transcendent Deity. That is the aspect of the shahada that says there is no God. That is to say: there is no God for us, because the abyss for us is formless, it is the great Void, as Buddhists say. It is nothing, in the sense of no thing. But then a being comes into manifestation, just a fire throws off sparks, or, as Ibn Sina says, the sun radiates rays. Every being is a spark of the divine light. The gloss of every man is like a sparkle of the Deity. That is the aspect of the shahada that says there is one God. Everything is the one God, because everything comes from that depth into being and is therefore at the core of the core of his being that God. 

This idea is expressed in another way. A tradition states that every human being is in fact a Muslim, one who submits himself. “When the Lord took from the Children of Adam, from their loins, their loins, their progeny and made them bear witness concerning themselves, ‘Am I not your Lord?’ they said, ‘Yea, we bear witness’” (Qur’an 7:172).

Consequently man is basically good. Few doctrines erode ethics more than those which say that man is always inclined to be evil. No. In the depths of his heart man is a noble creature. But apparently he does not realize this yet. He must learn to be who he really is. And in order to learn, he has descended into the fabric of materiality. He became “the lowest of the low.”

So the being, divine in origin, descends into matter. Thus it loses the divine state, as well as the knowledge of where it once resided. 

How can it learn? How can it remember that it has to return to that divine state? Through knowledge.  

Knowledge and Return 

Knowledge, said Muhammad, is light (Nasr, Garden of Truth, 32). The ink of the scholar is therefore more valuable than the blood of the martyr, according to a hadith. 

It is obvious that many cruelties executed by the so-called jihadis have nothing to do with genuine Islam. Many Islamic scholars have noticed this. In September 2014 more than a hundred prominent Muslims wrote an open letter to the leader of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. In that letter, they condemn the actions of ISIS and specify ways in which ISIS is violating Islamic teachings.

Islam sharply disapproves of cruelty and revenge. As the Sufi sheikh Sharfuddin Maneri says: “Find him that flees for you; forgive him that offends you; do good unto him that does not want to bestow you anything” (Maneri, 74).

Islam clearly teaches that not war but study opens the path to Allah. That’s why there is no other religion that more emphasizes the accumulation of knowledge than Islam. 

The light of the heavens and the earth streams through links into the manifestation. The more it descends, the darker it gets. Sometimes, unfortunately, it is almost completely extinguished. Then people hate each other; then they live in the separation of their tribes. Whether they give their tribes the name of their religion, their country, or race, is actually an afterthought. They believe that others outside the tribe are different, evil, heretical. They kill each other. Then there is no knowledge, and so there is no light. 

But we can come to knowledge. Then we return to where we came from, and we learn to live in the light that is in us. 

The whole of the Qur’an, the whole of Islam, particularly its mystical branch, is dominated by tauba. This Arabic word is often translated as repentance or remorse, but a better word may be return. If it is true that all souls emanated from Allah, then they will return to the Source one day. 

That is the meaning of religion. You will reconnect to the Source from which you come. We return to Him, we read constantly in the Qur’an. 

The methods for “going home” are the rules of exoteric Islam: the Five Pillars, which you can find in every book on this faith. But for those who want to go faster, there is the esoteric path, such as the different tariqas (paths) of the Sufi masters. They practice poverty, asceticism, detachment, and meditation.  

Nafs: The Lower Self 

The difficulty is that the light inside oneself is dimmed by what is called the nafs. 

Man does have a spark of light in his soul, but that soul is composed of several parts. There is also a part of that soul that identifies itself with the earthly, the transient. That part is the nafs. (On the nafs, see Schimmel, 112–14).

The nafs did not exist in the Garden of Eden, the heavenly state, the initial stage in human evolution, when we still lived in Allah and were created in the highest state. 

Then we descended. In this process of emanation in which we became the “lowest,” the nafs was developed. The nafs is the instrument with which we can work in this outer world. We identified ourselves, however, with this external instrument, so that we have forgotten who we really are. 

The nafs is described as the seat of the passions. In many Sufi writings it is presented as a very real thing. It sometimes lives as a separate entity outside the body. It is compared with the cruel Pharaoh, so it is the tyrant in us. It is compared to a woman (nafs in Arabic is a feminine noun) that seduces men. More often it takes the form of an animal, frequently a pig. 

Those who are aware of the composite constitution of the human being, as Theosophy teaches, understand this metaphor all too well. The personal man may easily focus himself on his animal nature and then banishes the divinity. 

Sometimes the nafs takes the form of hypocrisy. It comes with the Qur’an and rosary in one hand and with the scimitar and dagger in the sleeve, says the Sufi poet Jalaleddin Rumi. Hence you find many warnings in Islamic literature not to give in to the desires of the nafs. 

Yet it is not that we should eliminate the nafs, not in the absolute sense, but we must not listen to its voice. We should not be affected by it. Nafs is the element in us that attaches us to phenomena. Therefore we must rise above it. 

The fight against this nafs is the true jihad, the true holy war. A hadith says: the worst enemy — the nafs — is between your sides. And the Prophet Muhammad have said, when he returned from a battlefield, “We are going now to the jihad akbar — the great battle, the fight against the nafs.” 

In the Qur’an we read: “But I absolve not my own soul. Surely the soul commands to evil, save whom my Lord may show mercy” (12:53).

Nafs is here translated as soul, which could be misleading, for one could draw the wrong conclusion: that man is prone to evil. It is the nafs, the lower part of the soul that, left to itself, focuses on the material side of life. 

But as evidenced by the Qur’an, the nafs may be also used for good. Live in unity and you win the great jihad. Sufis love to compare the attempts to master the nafs with the training of a dog. The lower aspects should not be slain; they must be controlled, so that they can serve us. 

Rumi compares that struggle with a man trying to maneuver his camel in the right direction, for example to the tent of the beloved. If you live in the knowledge of Allah, the soul obeys its master.  

Extinction 

Returning to the Source is described as a journey full of perils and temptations. 

It is often expressed in symbolic language, as in the famous allegory The Conversation of the Birds by Farid ad-Din Attar. In this inspiring story, the birds — who represent souls — set out to find the mysterious Simurgh. They pass through seven valleys. The last is that of destruction. What does that mean? 

It is basically the same as nirvana. Nirvana literally means blown out or extinguished. But what is extinguished?

The lower part of man. The lower principles are destroyed. The nafs is destroyed. Only when that is the case, you can merge into the Unity. There is an absorption in pure cosmic Being. 

The Sufis use this image of destruction. In Arabic it is called fana, or fana’ fi-allah, which means annihilation in God. But to fully understand this, they link it with baqa’ bi-allah, being eternal in God. You destroy the personal man, you detach yourself from all the limited, oppressive shadows and illusions. In fact you detach from all emanations. And because of that destruction you live in Allah. You are aware of the all-encompassing unity of life. You do not see yourself as a separate being, but as a drop in the sea of life. 

Wherever there is a form of “I,” where one’s own “I” desires to be destroyed, where that “I” wants to live in Allah, there is still a form of illusion. When the ego is on the foreground, man limits himself. 

You can never wake up the divine completely within yourself, if the “I” is still the dominant factor in your consciousness. No one describes this more clearly and beautifully than Rumi, the greatest of the Sufi poets:  

One went to the door of the Beloved and knocked.
A voice asked: “Who is there?” 
He answered: “It is I.”
The voice said: “There is no room here for me and thee.”
The door was shut.
After a year of solitude and deprivation
this man returned to the door of the Beloved.
He knocked.
A voice from within asked: “Who is there?”
The man said: “It is Thou.”
The door was opened for him. (Shah, 189)

The voyage does not end. After all, there is boundlessness, so there can never be limits. Indeed there is yet another stage beyond fana’ fi-allah and baqa’ bi-allah. It is the journey from God with God. This means that after the destruction of the “I,” when you live in Allah, you descend again into the world of phenomena. You remain conscious of the Unity, but nevertheless live in the multiplicity of the outer world. Therefore we should not live for our own salvation, but should identify ourselves with the whole, the Ummah. Compassion is the highest form of unification. 

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 Sources

Bhagavad Gita: Recension by William Q. Judge. Theosophical University Press online ed.; http://www.theosociety.org/pasadena/gita/bg10.htm; accessed Dec. 14, 2015.

Corbin, Henry. Histoire de la philosophie islamique, part 1. Paris: Gallimard, 1964. 

Nasr, Seyyed Hossein, et al., eds. The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary. San Francisco: Harper One, 2015.

Robinson, James M., ed., The Nag Hammadi Library in English. Leiden: Brill, 1988. 

Maneri, Shaikh Sharfuddin. Letters from a Sufi Teacher. Translated by Baijnath Singh. Benares: Theosophical Publishing Society, n.d; http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/47749?msg=welcome_stranger; accessed Dec. 1, 2015.

Nasr, Seyyed Hossein. The Garden of Truth. New York: Harper Collins 2007.

 ———. The Heart of Islam. New York: Harper Collins, 2004. 

———. An Introduction to Islamic Cosmological Doctrines. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1973. 

Schimmel, Annemarie. Mystical Dimensions of Islam. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975. 

Shah, Idries. The Way of the Sufi. London: Octagon Press, 2004.

 

Barend Voorham is an active member of the Theosophical Society Point Loma Blavatskyhouse. Besides giving lectures and courses, he is the author of the Dutch book Another Side of Islam. This article first appeared in Lucifer: The Messenger of Light, 3:1 (2015). Reprinted with permission.

Qur’an quotes in this article are taken from S.H. Nasr et al., ed., The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary

 

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