The Inner Light In Islam

 

Olive Greene

 

Duncan Black Macdonald, beloved professor of Semitics at Hartford Theological Seminary, delivered the Haskell Lectures on Comparative Religions before the University of Chicago in 1906; published under the title The Religious Attitude and Life in Islam, they have remained a classic for students of Mohammedanism ever since. The lay reader finds in this volume not only a delightful book but also insight into the ways in which a large section of our fellowmen think—probably not only the world of Islam but much of the Far East as well.¹

Quoting William James, Professor Macdonald defines the religious attitude of the soul as belief in the unseen, and adjustment thereto. For Eastern peoples that world is admittedly nearer, more familiar, more important than to Westerners. This is not because Semitic minds or Oriental souls are more religious, but because of the time-lag in the acquisition of the scientific point of view.

It is true that many of us in the stiff-necked West are apt to think wistfully of the mystic spirituality of the East. The East, however, is a vast area of scores of different peoples, tongues, temperaments, religions, and races. Muslims there are of all sorts scattered throughout. Jesus and Mohammed were Semitic, as were Isaiah and Hosea; but in general Arabs are skeptical and materialistic—hard headed; Turks are realistic and practical; while we do not expect to find a disproportionate number of “devout” and “saintly” people among our Jewish friends and acquaintances. There was, and is, moreover, a great deal of true piety in the West which we may tend to overlook. Stories of the Muslim saints, Persian, Turkish, and Arab, read for all the world like the legends of Roman Catholic saints. The Middle Ages were the age of faith in, East and West alike. It is not, then, that, the East is so devout, but that it is still Mediaeval (or something still earlier), and has not been appreciably touched by Greek thought or the modern scientific approach to reality.

But let me invite you to Professor Macdonald’s book:

It is not really faith that is the question here, but knowledge; it is not the attitude of God, but the attitude to law. The essential difference in the Oriental mind is not credulity as to unseen things, but inability to construct a system as to seen things. (p. 6 ff.)

 Easterners are keen enough in analyzing a point, and they can spin a whole system out of it, in true scholastic fashion, without being troubled by contradictions and what are to us necessary interrelationships.

The supernatural, to them, is the familiar—the usual; only it is not subject to law, and they never dream that it can be … There is no immovable order of nature … The strict theologian of Islam would [say] … that all action and reaction spring from the immediate will of God … It is evident that anything is possible to the Oriental. The supernatural is so near that it may touch him at any moment … The Oriental feels no need to explain everything; he simply ignores the incompatible. (pp. 7-10)

The Arabs believed, and still believe, in soothsayers, diviners, magic, jinns, dreams, charms, saints, and prophets. Through these men may come into touch with the unseen world. Israel had schools of the prophets in ancient times, probably much like dervish groups in Islam. Poetry too is “magical utterance, inspired by powers from the unseen, and the poet is in part a soothsayer, in part an adviser and admonisher, and in part a hurler of magical formulae against his enemies.” The most common and primitive word for poet in Arabic (and also in Turkish) is sha’ir, which means simply “he who perceives, knows.” So Gabriel “pressed out” of Mohammed, his first prophecies, and the Koran “came down” to him bit by bit. Mohammed was “in truth a poet of the old Arab type, without skill of verse, and with all his being given to the prophetic side of poetry” (p. 20).

There must have been something about Mohammed to convince the skeptical, scoffing Arabs of Mecca that he had dealings with the unseen world. His words are from God; he is the messenger. A whole theory of creation spins itself out of this belief. “He must have been the first of all creatures, created before all worlds, existent from the beginning of time—we have exactly the Arian doctrine of the person of Christ.” In tradition (Hadith) Allah declares, “Had it not been for thee, I had not created the worlds” (p. 10).

But Mohammed’s book is dreary reading in translation. There are threats of the Fire for unbelievers, promises of a cool and watered Garden for the faithful, repetitious stories of the prophet, Abraham and others, some beautiful verses enjoining care of the poor and the helpless, and much about the unity of God and his absolute sovereignty. God and his creation (angels, men, jinn, devils) are totally unlike. The philosophers may ask how God can communicate with man, the completely other, but Mohammed and Muslims down through the years know that God does reveal himself through prophets, and man can come to God directly in prayer, metaphysics notwithstanding.

Dr. Macdonald gives a revealing picture of one of the great saints, Abu Hamid Ghazzali, who died in 1111 AD. He was a “man of the intellectual rank of Augustine,” whose work it was “to build up again the breaches in the Muslim Zion, and that Islam exists still is largely due to him” (p. 6). Yet he was an “ascetic scholastic and all his endeavor was to gain assurance of the world to come (p. 15). Al-Ghazzali had held in contempt the wandering Sufis, but in 1095, apparently through fear of the judgment day—fear of the Fire has played a tremendous role in Islam—he was converted and became one of them, and later taught again, now Sufi theology. He wrote an autobiographical apology for the mystic way, from which Dr. Macdonald quotes at length on pp. 176-188. From his childhood Al-Ghazzali had been unable to believe what he was taught but had wanted “knowledge of the real nature of things.” He wrote:

I examined all the things which I knew, and found that I had no knowledge which could be described in this way, except sense-perceptions and necessary intuitive knowledge.

I turned zealously to consider the objects of sense and necessary knowledge, and to try whether I could bring myself to doubt them. And doubt reached the point with me, that I could not permit myself to extend trust even to objects of the senses …

So I said, “My trust in the objects of the senses, too, is gone; perhaps there can be no trust save in those intellectual results which are axiomatic, as our saying that ten is more than three, or that negation and affirmation cannot exist together in one thing, and that a thing cannot be both created and eternal …” But the objects of the senses said, “what assurance have you that your trust in conclusions of reason is not like your trust in the objects of the senses?” … Perhaps, behind the perceptions of the reason there is another test; whenever it appears reason will be given the lie by it, just as reason appeared and gave sense the lie.

His soul suggested to him:

“… it is possible that a condition may surprise you, the relationship of which to your waking-state is like the relationship of your waking-state to your dreams; and your waking-state is a sleep in relation to it. Then, whenever that condition comes upon you, you will be assured that all which you have vainly imagined by your reason consists of baseless phantoms only. Or, perhaps, that condition is what the Sufis claim to be their condition; since they assert that they have open soul perception in their states, which come when they plunge into their souls and are apart from their physical senses …”

When these thoughts came to me, a deep impression was made upon me, and I desired some treatment against them, but it was not easy… This disease troubled me and remained with me almost two months. During that time, I was an absolute sceptic in mind, if not in statement.

At length God healed me of that disease, and my soul returned to health and balance, and the necessary intellectual truths came back, accepted and certain. That was not by means of a proof or by any form of words; but by a light which God cast into my breast. That light is the key of the most of knowledge; and whoever believes that the mystical unveiling is based upon proofs narrows the wide mercy of God. When the apostle was asked what was the meaning of “opening,” in the saying of God, “Whom God wills to guide, he opens his breast to Islam,” he said, “It is light which God throws into the heart.”

Having been healed of his “disease,” al-Ghazzali observed that the seekers about him could be divided into four classes. There were scholastic theologians, allegorists, philosophers, and the Sufis. Examining the last named of, these more fully, he says:

It was plain to me that it was impossible to obtain the most characteristic elements by study; these called for experience and “state” and change in one’s qualities … He who is drunk does not know the definition and science of drunkenness; he is drunk and has no knowledge at all. The sober man knows the definition of drunkenness and its elements, and yet nothing of drunkenness is with him … “States” and not definitions were of importance; [I knew] that I had got all that could be got by way of learning; that what was left could not be reached by hearing and studying, but only by experience and the following of a certain course of action…

It had become plain to me that I had no hope of attaining to the salvation of the world to come except by piety and the restraint of the soul from lust; and that the beginning of all that must be the cutting of the ties of the heart to this world, the abode of deceit, and the return to the abode of eternity; and by striving toward God with absoluteness of purpose.

That, too, I knew, could not be completely carried out, except by turning away from ambition and wealth and by flight from entanglements and restraint. I looked at my conditions, and lo, I was plunged in restraints which surrounded me on all sides. I looked at my works; the best of them mere studying and teaching; and lo, in them, I was striving after knowledge that was unimportant and useless with regard to the world to come. Then I considered my purpose in studying; and lo, it was not purely for the sake of seeing the fact of God, but its inciter and mover was the search for repute and for the spread of renown.

I became assured that I was upon the extremity of a crumbling edge, and was looking down into the Fire, if I did not turn and amend my state. So I continued meditating upon that for a time, and, having still freedom of choice, one day I would fix my resolve upon going away from Baghdad and separating myself from these conditions, and another day I would relax that resolution. I would put forward one foot and draw back the other. I could not have a pure desire of seeking the world to come in the morning, without the army of lust making an attack and breaking it in the evening. The lusts of the world kept dragging me by their chains to abiding; and the crier of faith kept proclaiming, “Journeying! Journeying! there remaineth not of life save a little …”

So I continued swaying between the affections of the lusts of this world and the summons of the other world almost six months. In the [first] month, the matter passed the bound of choice to compulsion, in that God locked my tongue till it was bound so that I could not teach. I would put pressure upon myself to teach a single day, in order to satisfy certain persons, but could not bring my tongue to utter a single word. Then, this laming of my tongue brought upon me a sorrow in my mind; my digestion and desire for food were destroyed; I could not swallow a drop nor digest a mouthful, my strength began to fail, and the physicians despaired of my cure. “This is a mental trouble,” they said, “which has come to affect the physical organization, and it can be healed only by rest of the mind from the care which has befallen it.” Then, feeling my weakness and giving up entirely my own will, I took refuge with God, as one under necessity and with no resource left. And he, “who answers the driven when he calls,” answered me and made easy to me my turning away from ambition and wealth and family and companions.

So al-Ghazzali, to the great consternation and distress of all his friends at the court of the caliph in Baghdad, became a wandering dervish. There were revealed to him

… in the course of these periods of solitude things which cannot be numbered or exhausted … All actions of the Sufis … are derived from the lamp of prophecy. And other than the light of prophecy there is none on the face of the earth from which illumination can be sought … [The] first condition [on entering the mystic way] is a cleansing of the mind entirely from all that is not God … from the beginning of the path unveilings and clear soul-perceptions begin; and the traveler therein, while awake sees angels and the souls of prophets, and hears their voices, and learns from them. Then his spiritual condition advances from witnessing of forms and similitudes to stages where the limit of language is too narrow, and no rendering in words is possible, for such expression would contain manifest errors, against which there could be no guarding. A point of nearness to God is reached which some have thought to render as “fusion of being;” some as “identification;” and some as “union.” But all these expressions contain error …

He who has not been granted actual experience of anything of this, can know of the essence of prophecy only the name … Whoever follows the Sufis in their course can verify this condition by experience, and whoever is not granted actual experience can be assured of it by the test of listening … He who companies with them will gain from them their faith; for they are not such that their companion is lost. But he who cannot company with them, let him know assuredly the possibility of that of which we have proofs, such as we have laid down in the Book of Marvels of the Heart. Verification, then, by proof is knowledge; having intimate contact with the essence of that condition is experience; receiving on the test of listening, with approval, is faith; these are three stages.

Since we cannot company with these Muslim mystics, let us turn to al-Ghazzali’s book of the Marvels of the Heart.

The “heart” in English connotes the seat of the emotions and feelings. Not so in al-Ghazzali. It is, rather, the seat of spiritual, extrasensory perception. It is what differentiates man from beast. It is perhaps the rational soul. It is allied to spirit, which is an outpouring of God, an outpouring as of light. It is at war with the nefs (literally, breath), das dicke Ich, the “flesh” of St. Paul. The “heart” is potentially the knower. God sets no bounds, but there are degrees of knowing: that of ordinary men; the direct vision of the saints; God’s revelation to the prophets. A man’s heart may be childish; or blurred by sin; or badly oriented, e.g., absorbed in religious detail or self-purification; limited by inherited prejudice or sectarianism; ignorant of the way to go at finding the truth. Theoretically, any man can be a saint. Mohammed said, “Every child is born according to God’s plan; it is only the parents who make it a Jew or a Christian or a Muslim,” and, “If it were not that the devils are hovering around the hearts of men, verily they would behold the heavenly kingdom.” When he was asked, “Where is God? in the earth or the heavens?” he answered, “In the hearts of his believing creatures.” By tradition God said, “My earth cannot contain me, nor my heaven, but the tender and tranquil heart of my believing creature contains me” (p. 244)

Al-Ghazzali likens the heart also to a pond fed by streams, knowledge through the senses, and by springs, knowledge that comes directly. Into this heart then is “cast” the minor inspirations of the saints. Over against them is the Preserved Tablet of God’s plan. An unseen angel of God may part the veil of sense and some of the hidden things may be revealed. Suitable meditations and exercises can help remove the veil. “Direct heart vision” is a permanent property of the nature of man, and “every man is potentially a seer and a saint.”

 

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Olive Greene taught for some forty years in the Girls’ Collegiate Institute at Izmir (Smyrna), Turkey. She has now retired and is studying currently at Hartford Theological Seminary.

The writer found that her own forty years’ experience in Turkey accorded so fully with the findings of this remarkable book, that she elected to share them with us in the form of a review.