Apophatic Theology and concealment in the Islamic tradition

 

 

 

It’s revealing that the tired and mundane discourse on Islam, whether in its parental protectionist British variant or as a principled concern in the case of North America revolves entirely around a largely unchallenged dichotomy between a “moderate” and “fundamentalist” Islam. This has no doubt alarmed Muslims that found themselves caught in an imaginary crisis, an inauthentic dialectic alien to what are serious challenges to the Islamic faith as a whole. These essentialist distinctions that the likes of Mahmood Mamdani have beautifully challenged and conscious attempts to fabricate a critical juncture in Islamic history whereby the two irreconcilable poles emerge which unlike Orientalism which can be said to be a misguided obsession with extrapolation, is a more insidious and an explicit messianic imperative to throw the veil over the crumbling legacy of Descartes by subjecting the world’s second largest ( and until recently untouched by this “reformist” tendency) religious tradition to the same destructive fanaticism that has afflicted western Christianity. Some in Western Muslim communities have struck to reclaim the label “fundamentalist”, itself an inapplicable label to Islamic sects, quite rightly defending reactionary theology as the most legitimate mode through which the sacred can be experienced. The problem however lies in refusal to ground the reaction in a traditional Islamic theology, instead championing the literalist and puritanical reformist streak which ironically resembles more closely the imagined “fundamentalism” of the neurotic analysts in the west than it does any fundamental truths within Islam.

 

This week, the Jihadi plague which taints all it bloats into from its host in North Syria have declared a new blasphemy which surpasses even apostasy and heresy. A child was promptly executed for joking about the prophet to whom the perpetrators loudly proclaimed, “he who insults god is given three days to repent, and he who insults the prophet is executed immediately”. This is wholly significant, not only in that it is the now official doctrine of those most in a position to produce Islam in recent times but in that it effectively translates into the mass consciousness of Muslims in the West who as we are all familiar, wholly obsessed with the prophet and not as an ideal, or principle but as threatened idol whose provocation requires a relentlessly hostile defence. Are Muslims playing the “Muhammad card” in the same way Fr. Richard Rohr locates the elevation of Christ from the Trinity to a pseudo-pagan titan as a serious error within Christianity? Indeed, the comparability of the Cross and by token the trinity and the Shahada as the revealing of the celestial hierarchy through the meeting of the eternal with the historical and the association of both symbolisms with the masters of their respective eras (Christ and Muhammad) is no new phenomena. Is this then a Romanisation of Islam? I believe the actual process is far more degenerative and while the distortion of the trinity in Christianity wasn’t enough to vanquish the transfiguring light of the eternal Christ, the segregation and elevation of Muhammad from the Shahada risks collapsing the language of Islam entirely.

 

Two points must be clarified before proceeding, given that Muhammad’s position in the hierarchy isn’t quite comparable to “The Son” in the trinity despite their celestial correspondence to the Universal intellects. The “elevation” of Muhammad from the Shahada is actually degradation given that the prophets while both human (nasut) and spiritual (lasut), is not the latter incardinated into the former. The Shahada operates within the realm of faith and sustains the hududs (horizons) of the celestial realm; therefore a manipulation of any exoteric component of the Shahada disrupts and nullifies its ontological significance. The Heideggerian notion of “World withdrawal” is useful in illuminating the process in which the symbolic prophet is reduced to a totem and robbed of the significance of his recognition. The declaration of faith is catalogued and museumised, and although it is not historical in the sense that it is still projected into present possibilities, it is in danger of losing its function in “opening” or clearing. In removing Muhammad from the two negations and affirmations, they have not removed Islam from Muhammad but instead removed Muhammad from Islam. Within the authenticity of Muhammad within the Shahada, as the master of divine inspiration then the figure is reduced to an aesthetic, an undead apparition, driving men to relish in a highly eroticised violence as offering to this alien intruder of the Islamic tradition.

 

Some Sufi orders in their wisdom recognised the fallacy in presentation of the historical figures of Islam in the literalist tradition as Nasut. The Bektashi’s for example through their upholding of the concept of Haqq-Muhammad-Ali both conceal and clear the space of Gnostic revelation. Though this is often misunderstood as Trinity, it occupies the same space in the realm of faith among similar horizons in the celestial realm. The saying of the Prophet;

 

“Ana madinat al Ilm wa Ali babu’ha (I am the city of knowledge and Ali is the gate)”

 

 Is evidence of the vital importance in recognition and veneration of the hududs in the understanding of concepts and symbolisms pertinent to the realm of faith. Also at the first, this seems a hopeless descriptive endeavour to codify the divine, it is given it’s dualistic revelation a far more conservative a cautious approach than the literalist tradition which disrupts the exoteric manifestation through anthropomorphising the divine without thought to the dimension  of lasut within these phenomena. An opening line in a Bektashi nefes should explain the inseparability of the historical figures of Islam more clearly:

 

“God forbid that anyone should see them as separate from one another. Muhammad is Ali, Ali Muhammad”

 

Curiously the Muhammad of both traditions is the transfiguring light (as is Christ); the relationship between the resurrector (Qa’ism), the prophet (Nur al Nabi) and the gate (Bab) is worth meditating on. Is this however Apophatic? Or is it at least more so than the current dominant trends within Islamic discourse? Perhaps a more general Sufi tradition not exclusive to any particular Sufi sect is more convincing, that of Dhikir (remembrance). As Henry Corbin explains, many forms of Dhikir consist on the repetition and meditation of the first statement of the Shahada, that is the negation (Nullus Deus) both as a guard against the Nafs (ego) by rejecting all claims and pretence to divine authority or immunity. Borrowing again from Heidegger, it is the unconealment of the Shahada which conceals and the exclusive power of the one paradoxically conceals its nature. We cannot simply disclose anything we wish from the Shahada nor can we ignore its esoteric function, what are not present lies in an unimaginable cosmic abyss.

 

It is in this sense that we should perhaps repeat and meditate upon the first principle of the declaration of faith “La ilaha” before we are ready to carry the burden that the affirmation entails.             

The Gothic-Ghulat Manifesto

Written for the Moorish Orthodox Church, late 2012

The Gothic-Ghulat Manifesto

 

By

Isaac Nejem

 

“Ah, Moon of my Delight who know'st no wane,
The Moon of Heav'n is rising once again:
How oft hereafter rising shall she look
Through this same Garden after me — in vain”

 

 

Since the works of Horace Walpole, specifically The Castle of Otranto first introduced, or arguably reintroduced a veneer of dreadful romanticism in western literature, the sort that had been abandoned  by the totalising cultural phenomena we now know as the renaissance, a literary juncture was established where the horrific undertones, proto-anti humanist rhetoric and a more cynical interpretation of human behaviour could be explored and elaborated, much to the disgust of the intellectual establishment. Frustrated with the banality of renaissance romanticism as well as the rigidity and narrowing scope of early realism, a artistic tradition was born that was at once heretical and religiously obsessed, morbid yet aesthetically fascinating, fictional and yet embracing of a politically and socially sarcastic tradition.

 

            It is without doubt that the tradition of gothic fiction, and much later, the gothic sub-culture remained fixated within religious, particularly catholic symbolisms, iconography and even artistic expression. Early examples of this on-going relationship include Lewis’s “The Monk” which became one of the first literary examples whereby a member of the religious clergy portrayed the primary antagonist. The apparent “anti-religious” provocation, however, over shadowed a very genuine artistic attempt to return to a literary tradition whereby the symbolic order held significant importance. The horror in “The Monk” lay not in some fantastical, primal fetishisation, instead emphasising the unknowable forces that reside both internally as well as the forces that lay outside human control, forever meddling among us.

 

            Since its beginnings as a neo-romantic literary movement, the “Gothic” has come to signify a particular interpretative tradition within popular culture, particularly with the turn of the 20^th century and the exploration of the more horrific themes of interest to the brooding cultural pioneers, tragically stranded in the modern while remaining firmly fixated with the past.

 

            Keeping in mind the “Gothic” in this particular instance refers to that very interpretative tradition rather than the thinly veiled anti-Catholic social commentaries of the likes of “The Monk”, one can draw parallels between what is often seen as the Islamic equivalent of the religious aesthetic focus of Gothic literature, that is Shi’ism. At first, one may question the legitimacy of such a comparison, given the disparate historical circumstances surrounding the two, as well as the inherent difficulty in contrasting a religious sect with a 18^th century European literary movement, one which never felt the need to offer such a commentary in the first place. Yet to limit the “Gothic” to such a euro-centric sphere of influence would surely to injustice to the tradition itself. Surely there is more to “The Monk” and “Dracula” than Castles, monasteries and monsters.

 

            Indeed, as I’ve suggested above dark romanticism is at it’s a core a meditation on the dynamic interplay of tradition and religion, all within an encompassing aesthetic focus. There can never truly be a rationalist, atheist Gothic creation, the only possible exception being Lovecraft who may have delved into the Islamic tradition more than is realised, by forsaking the centrality of Earth and our species as dictated by Chriso-centric worldview, and juxtapositioning the human perspective among a myriad of unknowable horrors. While Sufi (particularly within the Sunni tradition) esotericism may be compatible with this arguably post-gothic thematic, the same cannot be said for the heterodox Shi’i cultural tradition whose immediate and mystic principles are far closer to Shelley than to Lovecraft.

 

            In this admittedly brief analysis, I’ll outline instances of similarity in the Ghulat Shi’i tradition (that is the heterodox sects who often deified Imam Ali or the following Imams) and key themes within the Gothic principle with the intention in opening an alternative mode to think of the Ghulat faiths as well as the Gothic subculture. Firstly I will consider the prevalence of a “deathly aesthetic” as an essential condition of Shi’i cultural expression, particularly the beautification of death as a principle among the living in the philosophy of Imam Ali, as well as some theological meditations on esoteric significance of tombs are all that is related to graves. Secondly, the idea of a romantic theology will be discussed, keeping in mind the spiritual significance of a glorious ancestral past (often associated with Iran) with an individual’s elevation to the spiritual light. Finally, in a subversion of the Gothic has the profane, the tradition of religious profanity as adherence, that is the utilisation of blasphemous and macabre symbolisms in Shi’i-Sufi literature as a Gnostic strategy to overcome the falsities of orthodoxy.

 

A deathly aesthetic

 

            Death as a literary theme is perhaps most often associated with the Gothic genre, perhaps unfortunately so since it tends to obscure the richness and diversity of its use as well as elements of the Gothic unrelated to mere obscenity and mortal dread. Yet for its over-association, there is no doubt that death features prominently in the Gothic, both as a source of great anxiety and fascination. Whether in Edgar Allan Poe’s Ligea or Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, both of which have greatly diverging views on the use of death but both of which force the reader to consider death in an alternative light, albeit a dark one at that. Whereas Poe’s death challenges the assumption of the absolute finality in the departure of a character, Shelley almost ironically warns the reader on a scientific obsession with the prolonging of life. Just as Gothic culture’s preoccupation with death can arguably be traced to the religious origins of the Christ on the cross and it’s fetishisation throughout European history, so to can we find a similar process in Shi’i cultural history which includes a far more tragic narrative considering the lack of a redeeming resurrection in the case of the martyrs in Karbala, placing the blame on the believers as well as the perpetrators. Every year, this event is commemorated and re-enacted in a similar manner to the Christian passion plays yet the mourning of Muharram is no mere dramatisation but a realisation of the eternal tragic circumstances that the faithful remained bound too. The individual mourner finds himself within a tragedy in a vaguely Shakespearean sense where he/she plays the part of an anti-villain, symbolised as the collectively imagined people of Kufa who refused to follow Hussain to confront the Umayyad Empire, and in doing so sealed his horrid fate. The believer remains displaced by the contradictory circumstances of his position in relation to the Imam, declaring his allegiance to the fallen Hussain with the words “Labaik ya Hussain” all while acknowledging the impossibility of such a statement given the temporal barrier he/she faces. Hamid Dabashi locates the mourners of Muharram within a Shakespearean lens declaring that for the Shi’i, the “time is out of joint, O cursed spite that ever they were born to set it right”.

 

            This visual and performative meditation on death is applicable to all Shi’i, and is by no means limited to the Ghulat sects who arguably contain fewer of these immediately visceral displays of tragedy and death. In analysing the philosophical and literary manifestations of these ideas, it would be best to start with a Gnostic reading of the words of Imam Ali and how those influenced a culture fixated on a beautification of deathly expressions of faith.

 

“Death is more intimate to me than the breast of a mother is to a suckling babe” Imam Ali

 

To die in this sense, is of course to be interpreted entirely esoterically and in conjunction to what would become the Sufi idea of self-obliteration or Al Fana fi Ilah (extinction in god). In Shia theology, there is a prevalent motif which states the believer must die before his death, to walk with one foot firmly in the grave thus partially awakening the sleeping divinity within ones Nafs (soul). As the Imam himself is documented as saying, “he who knows one’s Nafs knows one’s lord”. It is interesting then that the Imam should bring our attention to the image of the mother and the suckling babe since the process of death as self elevation works symbolically through a Freudian lens whereby the desire of the child to remain in the weaning stage represents the death drive inherent in all individuals, that is the desire to return to the mother’s womb and revert back in an inanimate state. So to, the believers desire to embrace death is to return to some transcendental state, from the perspective of those on this plain of understanding, inanimate but as the Qur’an reminds us; “nay for they are alive but ye perceive not”. In keeping with the idea of death in Gothic literature as a challenge to the finality of passing, we can think of death in a Shi’i scope in a deconstructed sense, since our approach is from that of he who is already dead.

 

“I am the death of the dead” Imam Ali     

 

Jacques Derrida believed the concept of the “undead” to be a useful concept in the binary deconstruction between the dead and living. Whereas the Vampyre can be thought of as the personification of a guilt ridden anxiety between lovers on separated by death and life, or the modern Prometheus as the disgusting transgression of mankind which makes the thinking of the undead a horrid endeavour, the undead in Shi’i theology shortens the gap between the world of spirits and the worlds of bodies, existing only partially as a fluctuating image in the realm of visible perception. The Persian philosopher and mystic Mushin Fayz Kashani thought of this immeasurable gap between the bodily world and the spiritual as being located of separate ends of an intermediately plain which he calls the world of archetypal images. This universe while being the object of material and intellectual perception exists only from the Quranic “Nur”, and is best thought as a “duality of dimensions”. It is through this dimensional correspondence with symbolisations in the human imagination that spiritual interties become corporealised. It is from this sphere the Imams visit in corporeal form in the highly symbolised imaginings of men. It is interesting then that many have hypothesised the Vampyre from a Jungian perspective whereby the Vampire archetype is the fetishisation of the Shadow, the unconscious irrational projection which the ego fails to recognise. Of course, unlike Christianity which rejects the idea of God as responsible for what is understood as evil, the concept of Tawhid which even the Ghulat sects hold sacrament necessitates this manifestation of the divine as we are reminded in Surat Al Nur;

 

“Or else they are like shades obscure over a vast ocean,

Enveloped by the waves,

Above which are waves,

Above which is fog;

Darkest shades piled one upon the other.

If he stretches forth his hand, he can scarcely see it.

He on whom God sheds no light, no light has he.” 

 

For a chapter so often remembered for the “light upon light”, one may too often overlook the “Dark upon dark” as an essential component in understanding the divine. It’s interesting to note the concept of Black light is important in the understanding of Iranian Shi’i Sufism but we shall leave this component out for a later analysis.

 

In keeping with the theme of the deathly aesthetic in both the Gothic and Shi’ism, one simply can’t ignore the role of architecture in embodying the pleasure of a heightened emotional state in a permanent reflective structure. The word gothic itself largely lends to the architectural legacy of the medieval Gothic which had found a new appreciation in its revival during the 18^th century. The Gothic ruins scattered across an otherwise unspoilt countryside or the lordly manor of an eastern count serve to amplify a sense of decay and a certain futility in the face of the supernatural. The use of religious buildings, despite often espousing a certain anti-catholic sentiment, was more effective in invoking a sense of awe and insignificance. The esoteric symbolism of tombs is just as widespread in the Islamic world, and not limited to any particular sect. The largely Sunni Mevlevi orders attire is entirely bound up in graveyard symbolisms, from the tomb shaped headgear to the white robes worn by corpses, the Mevlevi dervish wears his death to the bodily world in his uniform while remaining attentively awaken to the transcendental realm in Zikir and Semma. For this study, we’ll consider the work of the Iranian theological innovator Shaykh Ahmad Al Ahsai, founded of the Shaykhi School which would later develop into the post-Islamic faith, Babism. The tomb understood esoterically by Al Ahsai is thought to be revealing of the innermost essence of an individual in life. The spirit and subtle body is fixed within the higher plane of the degrees of time. The example of sleeping it utilised as the entrance into the autonomous archetypal realm, at least temporarily. Therefore while the tomb in classic gothic literature may be a strategy to capture an ecstatic state in stagnated horror, the tomb in heterodox Shi’ism projects these states by way of manifestations of spiritual and bodily properties in the imaginary and transcendental realms.