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.
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