WHY DARKNESS AT NOON?
THIS series of discussion in these columns has evoked unusual interest. We do not pretend to know more than what has already been said on the subject by contributors from various parts of the country. Indeed, we feel flattered that in the circle of our readers we have so many of high intellectual calibre. We enjoyed all contributions, those by Rationalist friends all the more for their candour and courage of conviction, which is the hallmark of a truly religious mind.
The present issue also carries some letters on the topic. The one from Dacca after taking to task our ”Rationalist” friends for their view of the Quranic revelation being the Prophet’s own composition, goes on to reiterate that Muslims have fallen low not because of but in spite of the Quran, and the remedy lies in harking back to the voice of God as revealed in the Quran. The other from the ”Rationalist” friends, however, insists on the replacement of religion by what they call “Rational Humanism.”
There is nothing unusual in the view taken of the phenomenon of revelation by Rationalist friends. That is how the Western mind looks at it. And that is how some eminent Muslims, under Western influence, are inclined to think. Among them was a man of no less intellectual and Islamic calibre than the illustrious founder of the Aligarh Movement, Sir Syed Ahmad Khan.
What we must not forget, however, is that if Western thinkers have taken the view against verbal revelation, they did so because of their Christian background. They found so many things in the Bible at direct variance with scientific truths and historical facts and had therefore no alternative but to explain this by denying the verbal character of revelation, and falling back upon the view that the Scriptures were human Compositions in their inspired moments, not the Word of God coming from an extraneous source.
The case of revelation in Islam, however, is quite different. Islam does not deny the kind of inspiration in the general sense in which we speak of poets or scientists being “inspired” when given to intensive thinking. Sudden flashes of thought come to illumine the whole of their mental landscape. The Quran speaks of God inspiring even a bee, which means the light of instinct planted in its very nature. But when the Quran uses the term of the prophetic relation, it is a category by itself, with the specific connotation that the source of revelation is extraneous to the recipient, the recipient being just a passive listener of the message transmitted from outside, something like a radio set attuned to the proper wavelength reacting to what is broadcast from the transmitting station.
Indeed, verbal revelation constitutes the dividing line between religion and irreligion. The core of religion lies in direct access to the Source of life – Allah, God, Creator, Ultimate Reality, the Ground of our being, whatever you may call it – and a personal relationship between man and God. It is a process involving intense seeking by man meeting with response from God. The highest culmination of such personal contact is reached in the spiritual experience known as revelation.
This is not to say, however, that the human mind has nothing to do with the process. From the bee to man is a long way, so far as mental capacities are concerned. Likewise, between men and men, there are different levels of mental capacities, and the prophetic mind has an aptitude of its own, which is beyond a common man’s level. In the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, this innate capacity reached the highest possible level, and hence the unique character of the Qur’anic revelation in every respect – in depth of wisdom, in eloquence of expression, in force of appeal to human nature, and in force of conviction.
This is however a vast subject which we can only briefly touch here. The Founder of the Ahmadiyya Movement’s greatest contribution to religion lies exactly in throwing a flood of light on this ultra-sensuous phenomenon of revelation. He has written a voluminous book, Haqiqat-al-Wahee on this subject, proving not only rationally the possibility of such an experience but also demonstrating scientifically from his own experience the validity of the Word of God coming to men of deep faith and purity.
In fact, he started his quest in the realm of the spirit as a rationalist. His masterpiece, the Barahin-i-Ahmadiyya, which was acclaimed as the most illuminating exposition of Islamic truths, unparalleled in the whole literature on Islam, as its very name shows, was an exposition on the reasoning level. But as he proceeded in his quest, it seems, he discovered that the wings of human reason were too clipped to soar into the higher regions of the spirit and found a new super sensuous window on Truth opened on his mind. But for revelation, he discovered, one could not soar beyond the clouds of doubt and land into the sunshine of sure and factual knowledge of God.
Religion as an institution stands or falls by the reality or otherwise of the phenomenon of revelation. The latest theory of psychoanalysis goes farther than our Rationalist friends’ position, dismissing the very experience of “inspiration” or “revelation” as an illusion of man’s own mind, a trick played upon it by its own subconscious. God Himself being a mere projection of man’s own mind, seeking some sort of prop to lean upon in life’s rough and tumble. With Freud even the ideas, which according to our Rationalist friends come in inspired moments are no more than the recipient’s own illusions. This pulls down by the roots the whole fabric of religion, reducing such highlights of the spiritual heritage of mankind as Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Krishna, Buddha, and Muhammad ﷺ to cases of neurotic obsession, the victims of their own illusions.
The Rationalist friends are perfectly right in their denunciation of religions as having soaked history with human blood. But is this really anything different from what happens if we abuse other gifts of God, say, water, food, fire, air and so forth? If a man overeats and gets stomach upset or if he thrusts his hand in fire and gets burnt, will it be very rational on his part to turn round and curse these gifts of God?
That Muslims have fallen low is only additional proof of the worth of Islam as a purifying, uplifting, invigorating and progressive force. Did not Muslims lead the van of civilization when they had a firm grip on the core, the spirit, the basic urge of Islam? That is a matter of history. As that grip loosened, they started on the downward course, which continued for centuries. This has been the story of all civilizations – Sumerian, Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman. All showed vigour and vitality as long as they held fast to certain high principles of life. With the decay in these life-principles set in their decadence.
Another point worth considering for our Rationalist friends is what was put long ago in the famous words: “There are more things in heaven and earth than our little philosophy dreams of.” Human reason is after all the product of the data supplied by our limited physical senses. How can it sit in judgement on what belongs to a higher realm beyond the reach of those senses? The kind of knowledge we get through sense-data is at best like muddy water, to use a commonplace metaphor. To get crystal clear water we must dig into the deepest depths of the soil. Even so in the matter of clear spiritual water. It lies in the deepest depths of the human ego. Rationalism tends to become irrational when it dictates that we should deny the reality of what does not fail within our own experience.
Rationalism was once the boom of the day in the West, but it is already awakening to its own limitations in the face of the new hitherto unimagined dimensions of reality that have been unlocked by new scientific advances. It is increasingly realised that man must either discover this new continent, the Kingdom of God, or perish. As one eminent thinker has put it:
“The future religion will not be based on so called theological truths, but on the truths of feelings and experience. We will either know God in the same way as we know our mother or our village street or not know Him at all.”
This is, however, not to minimise the value of Humanism. Indeed, Humanism in the sense of human good, human freedom, human rights, human well-being is full half of religion, the second commandment of the Bible and the Huqooq-al-ibad of Islam. But man has been vested with a destiny bordering almost on the fringes of Divinity, and it would be an injustice to it, humanistic if we may borrow that term of our Rationalist friends, to bolt on it the door to those higher reaches.
It is something like what the frog in the fable told the fish, when the latter boasted of the vast expanse of the river. “Don’t talk nonsense!”, it snubbed the denizen of the river. “Could there be anything bigger than this beautiful little pond of mine”?
The Quran and Sunnah
Now to come to the answers from the other side, the “Orthodox” side, all the contributions are unanimous that it is a case of a good tree bearing bad fruit, that the teachings of Islam are the best and most perfect, that the fault lies with Muslims who have thrown the original sources of those teachings, the Quran and Sunnah, in the background and that the remedy lies in turning back to those sources.
We do wish it were so simple as all that. But facts tell a different story. Muslims have been at loggerheads for centuries past over these very sources, hurling texts from the Quran and the Hadith at one another. The teaching that came to unite Muslims into a fraternal bond has been made an occasion for interminable wranglings, dissensions and conflicts and a hymn of irate against one another.
Indeed, in this respect, the so called “rationalist”, and “Westernised” sections have a cleaner record of tolerance and goodwill. The sections that are the more steeped in this kind of scriptural lore have been the farther away from these great virtues, which are the essence of the Quranic teachings. The Quran has a very uncomplimentary reference to this kind of scriptural lore. In the case of the Jews (and by implication of Muslim Ulema as well) the Quran likens, this class of theologians to “asses laden with books”.
The Quran and the Sunnah may mean anything and everything in the hands of these worthy men. In the name of the Quran and the Sunnah, our Ulema have perpetrated the worst barbarities on fellowmen. Even in this fag end of the 20th century, our Rationalist friend from Chittagong does not feel himself safe from these custodians of the Quran and the Sunnah for some of his views. In the name of the Quran and Sunnah, the wheel of progress was stopped. In the name of the Quran and the Sunnah, acquisition of Western scientific knowledge was banned. The list can be carried on to any length. What help therefore, can a vague statement that we must go back to the Quran and the Sunnah be?
The Quran and the Sunnah, are undoubtedly, two greatest sources of light. But there is such a thing as the spirit and the letter of a teaching. In the memorable words of Jesus Christ, whereas the letter killeth, the spirit giveth life. Muslims seem to have lost the main thread of the spirit of the Quranic message in the mushroom of the details that they have spun around it – something like missing the wood in the individual trees.
In the Prophet’s Day Islam was never equated with books or bookish knowledge. Islam meant a direct impact with the Prophet’s personality – a living Quran. A good life is not the sum-total of the individual acts of piety, and goodness but the outcome of the good spirit within. Human personality is not built up by piecing together the separate bricks of individual virtues. It is the totality of one’s, attitude towards life that determines the pattern of it.
The Quran has an apt parable to give an idea of good life: The parable of a tree. Now where lies the secret of the growth and fructification of a tree? Not in the individual parts that compose it, but in the totality of the subtle something within, the life-sap that runs through it, and keeps the tree as an integrated whole. Where the life-sap is missing the tree either withers away or does not bear fruit.
That was the significance of the Gospels parable of the fig tree, which, although luxuriant in foliage and outward greenery, Jesus found to be without any actual figs. The parable only depicts the state of the Jews of his day who were punctilious in the observance of the law in its numerous minutest details but were devoid of the inner wholeness of the spirit, that is to say, the totality of their attitude towards God’s sovereignty.
In depicting the Patriarch Abraham, the Quran does not emphasise any of his individual acts of virtue. It speaks of his dedication to God with the totality of his heart. That is what Qalb-i-Salim signifies, i.e. a heart dedicated to God in the totality of its urges.
The tragedy with the Muslim society soon after the Prophet’s Day seems to have been to have subjected Islam to the process of fragmentation, making it the sum total of individual virtues. The organic character of the Islam of the Prophet’s Day which meant absorbing the general climate of the faith something like the invisible life-sap of the tree, was submerged under the heavy organisational superstructure that was built on that inner urge. Truth cut up, into pieces ceases to be truth, even as a rose torn into bits ceases to be a rose.
There are just random thoughts that come to mind. The theme is worth a deep probe. A tree is known by the fruit it bears. How is it that a good tree like Islam has borne the bad fruit like us present-day Muslims? There must be something wrong with our understanding of the Quran and the Sunnah. May be, what passes for Islam in our hands is a mere semblance of Islam – not its substance.
M.Y.Khan
(The Light – 24 December 1964)
