SCIENCE, KNOWLEDGE,

AND

SUFISM
SUFIC KNOWLEDGE FOR ALL HUMANITY

By

Henry Bayman

www.henrybayman.com

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Beyond philosophy... beyond science... beyond even science fiction!

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For many years, Henry Bayman has been in close contact with the Sufi masters of
Central Anatolia. Now, out of that heartland, he brings us a powerhouse of a book
and a message of faith and hope, a message startlingly relevant to our times. He
shows us how the teachings of Islamic Sufism, which constitute a body of knowledge
that starts with accepted science and extends beyond it, are not only applicable to our
modern and postmodern world, but how they offer a unique way out of the double
binds we find ourselves in. This book will take pride of place on the bookshelf of
anyone interested in spiritual growth, Sufism, Islam, and the problems that beset our
world today.

(Henry Bayman is the author of The Meaning of the Four Books, which takes a closer
look at the teachings of the Sufi master, Mr. Ahmet Kayhan.)

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 CONTENTS

Foreword

Prologue

1. Nietzsche, God and Doomsday: The Consequences of Atheism

2. Irrational Rationalism: An Assessment of Atheism

3. Einstein on God

4. Was Mohammed foretold in the Bible?

5. Can There Be a “Reformation” in Islam?

6. The Crisis of Global Civilization

7. Solving the Riddle of the Universe

8. Science, Bioethics, and Islam

9. Islam and Modernity

10. Sufism and Modernity

11. From Hermetism to Sufism

12. 2001, 3001, and the Cube

13. Sufism: The Case of the Cryptic Wineglass

Epilogue

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 FOREWORD

For almost quarter of a century now, I have been in close contact with the Sufi
masters of Central Anatolia. Most of this period has been spent in association with
Master (and Mr.) Ahmet Kayhan.
The Islamic Sufism practised and preached by these masters is so different, so
wonderful, and so uplifting, that I consider it my duty to humanity to make its
existence known. I choose my words with care, and after great deliberation. Fully
aware of its gravity, I make the following categorical statement: Here is something so
valuable that the whole world stands in need of it. It is light-years ahead of any
comparable philosophy, religion, or spiritual path.
Peter D. Ouspensky suspected that such a source exists, and now stands
confirmed. John G. Bennett, in an effort to track down Gurdjieff's 1 teachers,
uncovered its Central Asian precedents just before he died. Even if we do not know
them, we must consider ourselves very lucky indeed to live in the same world as these
luminaries.
The Master's approach combines the best faces of Islam and Sufism—faces
that are actually inseparable from one another. It may come as a surprise to some that
this is no recent synthesis, but an integral wisdom passed down from the very
beginning via an authentic and authoritative chain of transmission.
The bitter, harsh and vindictive image cast by so-called "Moslems" is a result
of their failure to be informed by this wisdom. Although they may mean well, they
have projected a false picture of Islam into other people's minds, precisely because
they themselves have fallen victim to ignorance. (Needless to say, this excludes the
vast majority of meek, innocent, and peaceful Moslems.) That is why everyone,
Moslem or otherwise, stands in need of these teachings.
Let me elaborate by way of a simple example. As Hans Koning has noted:
"most of us nowadays would rather come upon a wild animal on a lonely road than
upon a strange man. We fear the stranger, 'the other': We feel we don't really
understand him ... Or we may know him only too well and he may hate us for reasons
we choose to forget. ... Our children are inheriting a world of locks and alarms..." 2
Now contrast this with Robert Kaplan's account of a shantytown called
"Golden Mountain" in Ankara, Turkey. (The name itself is quite symbolic.)
Comparing it with the slums of Abidjan in the Ivory Coast, which has been called
"the Paris of West Africa," Kaplan concludes: "in Turkey I learned that shantytowns
are not all bad.
"Slum quarters in Abidjan terrify and repel the outsider. In Turkey it is the
opposite. The closer I got to Golden Mountain the better it looked, and the safer I felt.
I had $1,500 worth of Turkish lira in one pocket and $1,000 in traveler's checks in the

1Born in Eastern Anatolia, the enigmatic George I. Gurdjieff traveled widely in Asia in search of secret
wisdom. In his communications to the West, he relied heavily on Sufi lore. Gurdjieff cannot be
pinned down to any single tradition, because he made liberal and eclectic use of far too diverse
traditions, perhaps even inventing some of his material along the way. In so doing, he lifted huge
chunks of Sufi wisdom and transported them unchanged to a Western setting even while leaving out
many essential things, as anyone with sufficient knowledge of Sufism will recognize when studying
the Gurdjieff literature.
2"Notes on the Twentieth Century," The Atlantic Monthly, September 1997, p. 90-100.

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other, yet I felt no fear. Golden Mountain was a real neighborhood." A lady
inhabitant told him: "Here we fast. Here we are more religious." 3
Is it only Abidjan that could benefit from the example of Golden Mountain?
What about certain parts of New York, or any city, or—for that matter—the whole
world? Doesn't this example indicate that poverty is not the only factor operating
behind violence or the lack of it? Doesn't it show that money alone cannot buy
peace?
Having lived in a culture where you needn't fear an approaching stranger—
where you needn't even think about him, except perhaps to say "Hello"—I want
everyone in the world to enjoy this bliss, to share it with them. Earlier, this culture
didn't even have locks on doors, because robbery was almost unheard-of. While this
may sound too good to be true, the fact that people in the past were able to
accomplish it means that it is within the realm of human possibility, and therefore an
option open to us also—however remote it might seem from our standpoint. But we
don't have to be utopian; I'll settle for Golden Mountain.
No amount of locks will deter a determined thief, and the security walls you
erect around yourself (or your "gated community") will only increase your sense of
mental insecurity and anxiety. It is only when a majority of people agree upon
principles (or axioms, or postulates) that are inherently capable of lending security
that we will not only feel, but actually be, secure.
Make no mistake: what hangs in the balance today is not this or that
civilization, but world civilization. It is our global civilization that is at stake. We
must inform that civilization with the life-giving breath, the tolerance, compassion
and humaneness, of Islamic Sufism, if it is not to disintegrate into anarchy and chaos.
The famous writer, E. M. Forster, used to be called "the custodian of civilization."
Today, we must all take it upon ourselves to become custodians of civilization, and
stewards of this planet, if we expect to survive in a tolerable world and to bequeath it
to our children, and to our children's children. If we fail to do this, we will not have
our children's children.

In a preceding book (The Meaning of the Four Books) I tried to present a

contemporary overview of the Master's wisdom. In this new one, I attempt to look at
some present-day issues in the light of his teachings. Actually, this book should have
preceded the Four Books, because I believe it is closer to where our civilization now
stands.
It would not be correct to attribute everything in what follows to the Master.
He is too sophisticated for that, and any failures or errors must be attributed only to
my imperfect self.
Each utterance of the Master is a study in brevity. With an optimal economy
of words, he can summarize a subject in a few brief sentences without losing
comprehensiveness, and uses the fewest number of words needed to do so. But each
sentence speaks volumes. It is a "seed thought" that, when planted in the mind of a
listener, will sprout and bloom if enough attention is given.
This book, therefore, is the result of such a crystallization. It represents the
response of one individual to the seeds that were planted. In each case, I have woven
the essays in this book around several utterances of the Master. This is how those
seed ideas connected, upon reflection, with other information I already possessed (or
encountered while preparing this book). What was implicate in them became

3 Robert D. Kaplan, "The Coming Anarchy," The Atlantic Monthly, February 1994, p. 44-76.

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explicate and full-blown. In addition, I have made extensive use of teaching material
distributed by the Master. References to Western sources belong almost entirely to
me.
An abler person could have extracted more meaning, or written a better book.
I thought, however, that the Master's ideas were far too important for me to withhold
them just because of any personal shortcomings of mine. Let those who can, do
better.
Reading the book, you will encounter the Master's thoughts interspersed—
even though they are not explicitly indicated—throughout the text. I hope they will
serve you better than they have served me. As I have, so to speak, merely "filled in
the blanks," the truly crucial ideas will be more or less apparent. If these alone were
given, a few pages would be enough, but there would then be no book, and the reader
would be hard put to view them in context. I have taken pains to draw out their
implications and make them as easily comprehensible as possible to the newcomer. I
have been led to this approach by the extent of ignorance about Islam and Sufism
generally, within the Islamic world itself no less than outside it.
The present work represents an attempt to apply Islamic and Sufic wisdom to
the contemporary world. How may we understand certain pressing problems? What
might be the best approach to solving them? What are the portents of certain
philosophies or events? I have tried not to overstate my case, so the arguments are
compact. A more prolific writer using the same core material could, perhaps, have
come up with a book several times the length of this one. To my mind, however, the
essentials of each case have been stated, and I prefer not to dilute the thrust of the
Master's teachings any further.

* * *

‘Islam’, Sufism’, ‘Reason’, ‘Faith’—terms that we use constantly, terms that

we interpret according to our own preconceptions and according to the extent of our
knowledge. It is my hope that this book provides us with a clearer and a purer vision
of what these are, or I should say, what they could be, given their potential. Islamic
Sufism is the blueprint for the success of humanity—but it is part of the Divine Plan
that the success of this project should be in our hands.
The dichotomy between reason and faith does not exist in Islam. The
importance of this fact cannot be over-emphasized. Nor can the insidious
consequences of believing that there is or has to be such a dichotomy. For readers
from a tradition that has already taken many decisions on the subject of God and faith
and on reason—and for that matter on Islam itself—much of this book will be wasted
if they are unable to suspend their disbelief. As the saying goes, “Nothing ventured,
nothing gained.”

* * *

I have tried to follow the conventions adopted in The Four Books and stated
in its Preface. These are summarized below for the reader's convenience:
In "translations" (the right word here is "interpretations," of which several
were consulted) from the Koran, clarity rather than literal accuracy has been the aim.
Original technical terms have been kept to an absolute minimum, even more so than
in the case of the earlier book. Diacritical marks have been omitted in transliterations
from the Arabic language.

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 "God" has been used for "Allah," the proper name of God in Islam. Dhikr,
remembrance or repetition, is rendered by "invocation." "Formal Prayer" has been
used for salat in Arabic and namadh in Persian. There was no way to circumvent that
bane of English grammar—gender associations in the third person singular—so,
unless explicitly indicated as masculine, "he" always refers to "she or he," and the
same goes for "his" or "him."
Since the essays in this book are stand-alone texts, a minor degree of
repetition could not be avoided, as any attempt to eliminate it would have forfeited
the completeness of each chapter. The order of the texts does follow a progression,
the spectrum ranging from atheism to Sufism.
The question may arise as to why atheism should be addressed at all in a book
so eminently monotheistic as this one. My reply is that many atheists have arrived at
their views because they have not encountered anything better. Some have been
driven by intellectual honesty, others by rationality. For them, our better-known
religions leave something to be desired. As for Islam, the smokescreen of
interminable mishaps in individual “Islamic” countries—Iran, Libya, Saudi Arabia,
Afghanistan, etc.—has blinded us to what this religion really claims and upholds. We
must judge the religion on its own merits and not on the failings of latter-day
Moslems. It must frankly be admitted that if religions are to be judged on the basis of
their representatives, either Moslems have failed to represent Islam properly, or else
those who have failed in this path have been assumed to represent it.
Even among atheists, there are those who will benefit from learning the facts,
and it is to them that parts of this book are addressed. Islam is a religion that
celebrates both the material and the spiritual worlds, that is both theistic and
humanistic, that upholds both faith and reason. It is a religion with strong morals,
helping to build strong moral fiber and ethical commitment. While it accepts the
secular world, it also looks beyond it to see the sacred and to enjoy a true spirituality.
It seemed to me that some people would prefer a wholesome existence over a half-
choice, a “both/and” over an “either/or,” if they were aware that such an option exists.
As before, I owe thanks to Tim Thurston and Peter Murphy, whose help and
suggestions have proved invaluable—but for them, this book would not have been
what it is—as well as to all others who have aided in bringing the book to its present
form. My gratitude also to what I call the "Web Library"—all the sources available
on the World Wide Web, whether I have used them or not.
I have used more sources than are indicated in the text, but any attempt to give
them all would have hopelessly swamped us in a tyranny of footnotes. Hence, only
those sources which I consider the most germane are indicated. For example, I have
not bothered to document what I deem to be more commonly known facts.
To err is human, and there are few books entirely free of errors. If, in spite of
all the painstaking care I have taken, any errors do crop up, I plead the reader's
indulgence.

March 1, 1998

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 PROLOGUE

Monsieur de Fortgibu has nothing on me. Never heard of him? Well, he

figures in a Jungian case of synchronicity, a true story related by the French
astronomer Camille Flammarion: when M. Deschamps was a little boy in Orleans, he
was treated to some plum pudding by a neighbor, M. de Fortgibu. Ten years later, he
again encountered plum pudding in a restaurant in Paris. He wanted to order some,
but the waiter told him that the last dish had already been ordered by another
customer. M. Deschamps looked; it was M. de Fortgibu who had ordered the dish.
Years later, M. Deschamps was again offered some plum pudding at a
gathering. As he ate, he recalled the earlier incidents and told his listeners that the
only thing missing at that moment was M. de Fortgibu. Suddenly the door burst open,
and a very old man verging on senility staggered in. Who should it be but M. de
Fortgibu, who had got hold of the wrong address and come to the party by mistake.
Such “meaningful coincidences”—and I could tell you many more—give us
an intimation of the subtler workings of the universe. Behind the coarse mechanics
that strike the undiscerning eye, there are connections as fine as the thread of a
spider’s web, or even finer, justifying Wordsworth’s “sense of something far more
deeply interfused...” Some people call it “fate,” others call it “coincidence.” I say
names are unimportant; it’s the phenomenon and what it portends that count. Such
phenomena are too small and slippery to be caught in the coarse meshes of science’s
net, 4 though they didn’t escape the net of the French astronomer. In any case, my
discovery of the Master was as fortuitous—or was it?—as M. de Fortgibu and his
plum puddings.
Did it all begin there, at the Library of Congress, the repository of all the
knowledge in the world? Who knows? I had asked for a book, and the librarians had
been unable to locate it. I insisted that it had to be there—how couldn’t it? So,
although it’s against the rules, I was for once allowed to go in and check, to see for
myself.
Down and down went the elevator—how much below ground level, I’m
unable to say. There were many underground floors like the one I was about to see.
Then the doors opened, and all of a sudden I found myself in a hall as large as a
football field. To my right and left stretched corridors of shelves as far as the eye
could see; and ahead of me, countless such corridors stretching down to the horizon
branched off right and left. I entered a corridor on my right; the shelves, piled up to
the rafters with books, looked like the Grand Gallery in the Great Pyramid of Cheops.
It was the closest thing to the Akashic Records on earth, and I was awed. I reached
out for a book; the one that arrived in my hands was The Morning of the Magicians,
by L. Pauwels and J. Bergier, which fell open where the binding was cracked. There I
saw an excerpt from Gustav Meyrink’s The Green Face. The Green Face, I was to
find out years later, was—surprise, surprise—none other than Khidr (which means
“the green one”). So was it that “Khidr manifestation”—the manifestation of the
saving power of Khidr, who helps those in distress—that saved me? And how had

4 In The Philosophy of Physical Science (1958), physicist Arthur Eddington compared the scientist to
an ichthyologist who draws fish of a certain size out of the sea using a net with a certain mesh size, and
then claims that all fish in the sea can only be this size.

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Meyrink found out about Khidr in the alchemistic bookshops tucked away in the
narrow back streets of old Prague? I don’t know. Anyhow, I began to read:

You must climb from one rung to another if you want to conquer death.
The lowest rung is called: genius.
What are we to call the higher ones? They are hidden from the mass of
mankind and looked upon as legends.
The story of Troy was thought to be a legend until one day a Man had the
courage to start excavating by himself.

That is, of course, the story of Heinrich Schliemann, who dreamt as a seven-
year old boy of discovering Homer’s fabulous city, and 39 years later actually
discovered it, treasure and all. Was he working in vain when, with watch in one hand
and Homer in the other, he re-enacted the movements of the Trojan War, retracing the
steps of the soldiers? Not at all. A day before the diggings were terminated in 1873,
he found one of the most priceless treasures ever from beneath seven layers of ancient
cities. 5 And today I ask, are believers working in vain when they retrace the
movements of a prophet and circumambulate a Holy Sanctuary seven times? No, but
their reward lies in the spiritual world, not in the physical.
Anyway. Two other episodes seem relevant: when I was whisked to the top of
the Empire State Building by high-speed elevators and beheld the magnificent
splendor of New York by night—an ocean of light—and when I visited Cape
Canaveral from which the moon rockets were launched, did these have anything to do
with my initial descent into the cellars of the Library—an ocean of knowledge? You
tell me. Karl Jaspers believed that the universe is a vast cyphertext, a cryptogram, a
book of symbols. Over the years I’ve come to believe (or was it always a deep-seated
intuition?) that the universe—and the Koran which is its mirror image—is, to quote
Jorge Luis Borges, “an immense liturgical text where the iotas and dots are worth no
less than the entire verses or chapters, but the importance of one and the other is
indeterminable and profoundly hidden.” A work dictated by God is, says Borges, “an
absolute text: in other words, a text in which the collaboration of chance [is]
calculable as zero... nothing can be contingent in the work of an infinite mind.” 6 Is
this what synchronistic events are trying to help us discover?
In any case, like another Borges character, I too arrived at a mysterious
conclusion. The truth, beauty and goodness you see in anyone is a reflection of a
friend, or a Friend of the Friend: “some place in the world there is a man from whom
this clarity emanates; some place in the world there is a man who is this clarity”, this
perfection. Exactly like Borges’ inquisitive student, a telltale trail led me on through
increasing heights “of reason, of the imagination and of good.” 7 As I came closer to
the Source, I began to hear rumors. It was said that the Master lived on top of the
tallest building in the world; that he lived on top of the world; that he himself was the

5 This is based on Schliemann’s own account, as related in C.W. Ceram’s (Kurt W. Marek) Gods,
Graves and Scholars. I take note that subsequent research seems to have cast doubt on certain aspects
of his account.
6 J.L. Borges, “The Mirror of Enigmas” (tr. James E. Irby), Labyrinths, Middlesex: Penguin, 1970, p.
244-47.
7 J.L. Borges, “The Approach to al-Mu’tasim” (tr. Anthony Kerrigan), Ficciones, New York: Grove
Press, 1962, p. 37-43. The following lines are also inspired by this story, and are based on it. What is
interesting is that in large measure it corresponds to the truth, which is why I could find no better
source of inspiration.

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tallest building in the world; that his apartment was the Noah’s Ark of our day. At
two steps’ remove from the Master, I encountered an immensely happy and courteous
man; at a remove of one step, I encountered a saint.
Then, one day, I was led into an apartment where an immense spiritual
radiance shone from behind a curtain. I caught a reflection in a glass of the Master, a
venerable and—to all outward appearances—an ordinary-looking man. So as not to
disturb the crowd already there, I sank into an empty chair, and began to listen. What
follows is, after many years, a report of my conclusions.

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 NIETZSCHE, GOD AND DOOMSDAY:
THE CONSEQUENCES OF ATHEISM

"Reason divorced of knowledge of the divine burns into itself, like

acid."

—Seyyed Hossein Nasr 8

"Do you know what fear and loneliness mean?... You will see nothing
in that expanse of eternal emptiness, you will not hear your own step,
you will find nothing solid for you to rest upon."

—Mephistopheles 9

In the Mouth of Madness

Nietzsche saw it coming. "The story I have to tell," he wrote, "is the history of
the next two centuries... For a long time now our whole civilization has been driving,
with a tortured intensity growing from decade to decade, as if towards a catastrophe:
restlessly, violently, tempestuously, like a mighty river desiring the end of its journey,
without pausing to reflect, indeed fearful of reflection... Where we live, soon nobody
will be able to exist." 10
Nietzsche's was a mind that thought so deeply and with such intensity that it
threw off sparks and crackled like a high-voltage generator. Poised on the brink of
the 20th century, he saw it all in the crystal ball of his mind, and the abyss he beheld
was so horrifying that he desperately tugged at the emergency brakes, vainly trying to
stop the runaway train. "There will be wars," he prophesied, "such as have never been
waged on earth.." And again: "I foresee something terrible, Chaos everywhere.
Nothing left which is of any value; nothing which commands: Thou shalt!" 11
Nietzsche was no stranger to paradox and contradiction. He was
simultaneously the opponent, proponent and victim of the nihilism he foresaw. His
was a mind at war against his soul, a spirit locked in titanic struggle with the intellect.
A student of Sufi psychology might observe that his ego—his "Me", his egotistical
self—had gained control over his mind, and the latter thwarted all attempts of his
spirit to elevate itself by placing before it a self-defeating intellectual obstacle around
which it could find no way.
One observation, one singular realization was the motive force behind all his
struggles, driving him on feverishly until his mind burned itself out trying to devise an
escape. This was a formula, simply stated in three monosyllabic words, yet earth-
shaking in its implications: "God is dead." 12

8Paraphrase from longer quotation in Nasr, Man and Nature, Kuala Lumpur: Foundation for
Traditional Studies, 1986 (c.1968), p. 20.
9Goethe, Faust II, verses 6227, 6246-48.
10Quoted in Erich Heller, The Importance of Nietzsche, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988,
p.5.
11Ibid.
12 “Gott ist tot” rhymes in German, presumably with its own peculiar reverberations in Nietzsche’s
psyche.

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 Nowadays, of course, lots of people believe in this notion without giving it a
second thought. Yet the genius of Nietzsche was able to foresee all it implied, to
draw most, if not indeed all, of the conclusions that would follow from its acceptance.
It is for this reason that we must inspect it more closely, and in order to do this we
must begin with what Nietzsche actually said.

The formula: "God is dead" appears, to be sure, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra,

but it makes its first appearance in Section 108 of The Joyous Science (1882),13
written two years before Zarathustra during Nietzsche's so-called positivist period.
Not only is God dead, he says, but we must banish even his shadow from the caves of
our minds. There follow aphorisms extolling science and a "naturalistic" world-view.
And then, suddenly, the concept appears full-blown in Section 125, under the title of
"the Madman." The madman is actually Nietzsche himself, who casts the former in
the image of a new Diogenes. The following extract contains the gist of it.

Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning
hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: "I seek God! I seek
God!"...
The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes.
"Whither is God?" he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I.
All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up
the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were
we doing when we unchained the earth from its sun? Whither is it moving
now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns?"

The madman asks questions which imply that: we are plunging continually,
backward, sideward, foreward, in all directions. There is no longer any up or down.
We are straying as through an infinite nothing. We feel the breath of empty space; it
has become colder. The night is continually closing in on us—we need to light
lanterns in the morning. Then he continues:

"God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.

"How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was
holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death
under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us
to clean ourselves?... Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must
we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?..."
Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners... "I have come
too early," he said then; "my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on
its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and
thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done,
still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from
them than the most distant stars—and yet they have done it themselves." 14

But what does Nietzsche mean when he says: "God is dead"? In 1887, in the
second edition of The Joyous Science, Nietzsche added Book Five to the original,

13FriedrichNietzsche, The Gay Science (referred to below as GS ), Walter Kaufmann (tr.), New York:
Vintage Books, 1974 (1882, 1887). (The "gay [or joyous] science" is actually poetry, which Emerson,
esteemed by Nietzsche, claimed to be a professor of.)
14GS, p. 181-2.

13
which begins with Section 343 and the statement: "The greatest recent event—that
God is dead, that the belief in the Christian God has become unbelievable..." As
translator and eminent Nietzsche scholar Walter Kaufmann points out: "This clause is
clearly offered as an explanation of 'God is dead.'" 15 In The Antichrist (1888),
Nietzsche is more specific: "The Christian conception of God... is one of the most
corrupt conceptions of God arrived at on earth..." 16 And, when he was already close
to insanity, he called himself "the Anti-Christ." 17
We may now pause here and think. Nietzsche obviously means that the
Christian notion of God is dead, that this notion has become unbelievable. But to
extrapolate from this to the assertion that God Almighty, the Lord of the universe and
of all the worlds, now cannot be believed in, is as incorrect as it is dangerous.
In what way is the Christian notion of God different? Basically, it postulates a
set of beliefs and makes certain attributions regarding the relationship between God
and Jesus. It is these, according to Nietzsche, that set the Christian concept of God
apart from other forms of monotheism, and which it has become increasingly
untenable to support.18
Christian scholars and churchmen are still working on this point. But
meanwhile, belief in God cannot wait, for this is the linchpin on which all our moral
actions are based. Nietzsche saw clearly that morality without religion is impossible:
"All purely moral demands without their religious basis must needs end in nihilism." 19
Moral systems created by man without reference to God are actually unconscious
regressions to religious morality. With the demise of faith, furthermore, not only
morality but the universe of meanings begins to collapse, and since man cannot live
without meaning, he tries to resurrect meaning under different headings. Richard
Wilhelm once equated the Chinese concept of Tao with the German word Sinn, or
meaning, 20 and in the same way we may say that God is the meaning, the esprit (both
the spirit and the meaning) of the universe. In order to believe in God and practice
moral behavior, we cannot wait for the resolution of fine theological points.
Yet we must also recognize that Nietzsche's rejection of God goes deeper—
starting from "a critique of the Christian conception of God," 21 he generalizes to all
forms of monotheism, accusing all religions of pious fraud, of "the holy lie." 22 His
hatred of Christianity is so profound that it overflows beyond its proper bounds to
encompass other religions as well. It then becomes necessary to draw out the
implications of this stance.

Nietzsche and Science

15Ibid. p. 279n3.
16R.J. Hollingdale, A Nietzsche Reader, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977, p. 187.
17Heller, p. 130.
18In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche outlines some of his objections to the Christian God: "A god
who begets children on a mortal woman; a sage who calls upon us no longer to work...; a justice which
accepts an innocent man as a substitute sacrifice; someone who bids his disciples drink his blood; ...
sins perpetrated against a god atoned for by [the same] god; ... the figure of the Cross as a symbol in an
age which no longer knows the meaning and shame of the cross..." (Quoted in Hollingdale, p. 168-9.)
19Quoted in Heller, p. 11.
20See C.G. Jung, Nietzsche's Zarathustra (Notes of a seminar given in 1934-39), 2 vols. James L.
Jarrett (ed.), Princeton: Princeton University Press (Bollingen Series), 1988, vol. 2, p. 1374.
21The Antichrist, Section 16, in Walter Kaufmann (ed.), The Portable Nietzsche, New York: Viking
Press, 1954, 1968 (referred to below as VPN ), p. 582.
22Ibid., Section 55, p. 642.

14
 Nietzsche's relationship with science was ambivalent. While he recognized its
utility and praised its naturalism, he also regarded science as being based on faith.

To make it possible for this discipline to begin, must there not be some prior
conviction...? We see that science also rests on faith; there simply is no
science "without presuppositions." 23

And in this, Nietzsche is right. Michael Polanyi, himself a scientist and a profound
thinker on the philosophy of science, found belief to be an essential requirement of
science: "no one can become a scientist unless he presumes that the scientific doctrine
and method are fundamentally sound and that their ultimate premises can be
unquestioningly accepted." 24 "Any account of science which does not explicitly
describe it as something we believe in is essentially incomplete and a false
pretense." 25 Nietzsche then continues:

... from where [does] science [take] its unconditional faith or conviction on
which it rests, that truth is more important than any other thing, including
every other conviction?... "I will not deceive, not even myself"; and with that
we stand on moral ground. 26

Thus Nietzsche proves himself to be a moralist of knowledge. There is no

"objective", i.e. morally neutral, knowledge. If we were to adopt a Sufic standpoint,
we would see that Nietzsche demonstrates this from two perspectives. The
perspective given above, that knowledge is sublime truth, is the standpoint of the
Purified Self. Elsewhere, Nietzsche also demonstrates "that knowledge... is the
subtlest guise of the Will to Power [of the egotistical self, as it is called in Sufi
terminology]; and that as a manifestation of the will it is liable to be judged morally.
" 27

Thus the question "Why science?" leads back to the moral problem: Why have
morality at all when life, nature and history are "not moral"? No doubt, those
who are truthful in that audacious and ultimate sense that is presupposed by
faith and science thus affirm another world than the world of life, nature, and
history; and insofar as they affirm this "other world"—look, must they not by
the same token negate its counterpart, this world, our world? 28

As Edwin A. Burtt has shown, the world of science is an abstraction from this world,
a 'Platonic' world based on mathematics. 29

—But you will have gathered what I am driving at, namely, that it is still a
metaphysical faith upon which our faith in science rests—that even we seekers

23GS, Section 344, p. 281.

24Polanyi, Science, Faith and Society, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964 (1946), p. 45.
25Polanyi, Scientific Thought and Social Reality, New York: International University Press, 1974, p.
51.
26GS, Section 344, p. 281-2.
27Heller, p. 8.
28GS, Section 345, p. 282-3.
29E.A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science, New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1955.

15
 after knowledge today, we godless anti-metaphysicians still take our fire, too,
from... that Christian faith which was also the faith of Plato, that God is the
truth, that truth is divine. 30

Following his own logic, Nietzsche necessarily comes to the point where God must be
eradicated from his belief system, which is the antithesis of faith:

—But what if this should become more and more incredible... if God himself
should prove to be our most enduring lie? 31

This forms the bedrock for Nietzsche's earlier comments:

The total character of the world, however, is in all eternity chaos—in the sense
not of a lack of necessity but of a lack of order, arrangement, form, beauty,
wisdom, and whatever other names there are for our aesthetic
anthropomorphisms... Let us beware of saying that there are laws in nature.
There are only necessities: there is nobody who commands, nobody who
obeys, nobody who trespasses. Once you know that there are no purposes, you
also know that there is no accident; for it is only beside a world of purposes
that the word "accident" has any meaning.32

Thus, the denial of God has driven Nietzsche to deny science, the laws of nature, the
existence of order and even of causality. There is no purpose in the world, only
chaos. Instead of "law," Nietzsche substitutes "necessity." But what is this but
another name for "law"? Likewise, biologist Jacques Monod, in Chance and
Necessity (1971), denied the purposefulness implied by "teleology" only to exchange
it with an almost identical word, "teleonomy." What is gained by substituting one
word for another if both are intended to describe the same thing?
Now it is interesting to note that Nietzsche is not alone in the conclusions he
reaches. Before him, David Hume trod the same path, and in his efforts to deny God
did away even with the connection between cause and effect. Thus, as Professor
Jacques Barzun notes, Hume arrived at a distrust of science and religion alike:
"Hume's last word of doubt on religion carries with it such a doubt about the mind of
man that the certainty of science goes down in shipwreck too." 33 It was Kant who,
transcending Hume, slipped a fresh foundation under the work of science.
Strikingly, we find the same attitude in Nietzsche. In The Will to Power, he
states: "the psychological necessity for a belief in causality lies in the inconceivability
of an event divorced from intent... The belief in [causes] falls with the belief in
[purpose]." 34 Thus the denial of God leads to the denial of causality, the basic
underpinning of science. The world is not an organism, it is not even a machine.
Even grammar does not escape his attacks, for it is a system of rules, order, and the
repository of a hidden belief in causality. 35

30GS, Section 345, p.283.

31Ibid.
32Ibid. Section 109, p. 168.
33Jacques Barzun, "Science versus Theology," in J.A. Garraty and Peter Gay (eds.), The Columbia
History of the World, New York: Columbia University Press, 1972, p. 719.
34Quoted in Leslie Paul Thiele, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of the Soul, Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1990, p. 108 (Will to Power 335).
35Ibid. p. 109 (Twilight of the Idols 38, Human, All Too Human 323, GS 300).

16
 Why? Why do both Hume and Nietzsche, in their overzeal to deny God, end
up debauching science as well? Because their denial of God is dependent on the
denial of any order whatsoever in the universe. Because they knew that science took
its origin, and is still based on, a world in which order prevails. If the world is chaos,
there can be no order, and hence no laws either of nature or of science. (In our day,
however, even the word "chaos" is being redefined, as mathematicians and scientists
discern hidden order in chaos.) For the existence of any kind of laws presupposes a
Lawgiver, and indeed the originators of modern science—Newton, Descartes,
Leibniz, etc.—quite openly expressed their faith in a Divine Lawmaker. In order to
deny the latter, Hume, Nietzsche, and those who follow their path must deny the
existence of any kind of order at all. But without such order, the whole enterprise of
science falls down, for it is then senseless to seek for laws, order or pattern in a
disordered world. Nietzsche borders on Orwellian Newspeak in his implied
conclusion: "truth is a lie," and falls into the same rut that he so despises in those who
confuse mortality and immortality (see "Misconceptions About God" below). Yet
paradoxically, Nietzsche was also genius enough to recognize that his nihilistic
teaching (and Zarathustra's) is a "rebound from 'God is truth' to the fanatical faith 'All
is false'." 36
But is all this true? "By their fruits you shall judge them." Science works—it
is the most successful enterprise in the history of humanity. Even chance, even
probability, has its laws and is not chaos. In that case, it makes sense to view the
world as ordered, a place where laws—laws of science, laws of nature—hold. So it
makes sense, in turn, to talk about a Lawgiver—which Newton, Copernicus, et al.
had told us right from the very beginning, and which we would never have lost sight
of had we not extended our debunking of the Christian conception of God to God
Himself. The alternative is to assume that we ourselves project order onto the
universe, which is a form of solipsism. In that case, though, the basis for an objective
universe and materialism collapses. Even granting the point of solipsism, however, if
man finds meaning within himself, where does he dredge up this meaning from? For
according to Sufism, God is both Within and Without, so that we approach God even
when we go within. God is both transcendent and immanent. Contrary to what
Nietzsche thought, He is not just incarnate in Jesus, and not just beyond the universe.
Having denied the existence of all order, all laws, Nietzsche then turns around
and postulates his own "law" of eternal recurrence—the universe as a finite-state
system in infinite time, 37 an endless loop of tape replayed forever—for which there is
not the slightest shred of physical evidence. Thus he replaces (as many people after
him have also done) all the physics and metaphysics he has overthrown by his own
brand of "naturalistic" metaphysics. Assuming that the universe is purely physical,
this is the way Nietzsche reintroduces "rebirth" and "immortality"—primal yearnings
of the human soul. In Germanic mythology, the world begins anew after the great
destruction. The Greek concept of apokatastasis or restoration, and the early
Christian views on redemption, are similar constructs. As Mircea Eliade has shown in
his Myth of the Eternal Return, primitives, too, overcome the irreversibility of time by
investing it with a cyclic attribute. 38 The cosmic rhythms we observe, such as day

36Quoted in Laurence Lampert, Nietzsche's Teaching, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986, p.
298 (Will to Power 1).
37Here, time is linear. In Zarathustra he introduces the concept of circular time.
38See Jung, vol. 2, p. 1341-2. Nietzsche would have been familiar with the cosmic cycle constituted by
the Greek mythological sequence of the Four Ages (Gold, Silver, Bronze, Iron) which in turn has its

17
and night or the seasons, lead in the end to an extrapolation to the universe as a whole,
as evidenced even in the conjecture in modern cosmology of an "oscillating universe."
Thus Nietzsche merely rediscovered an age-old concept of man.
One final point. Nietzsche's attempt to proclaim God dead results not only in
the denial of truth, of science, but also of life. Had Nietzsche realized this, he would
no doubt have deemed it necessary to revise his standpoint, for one of his main
objections against Christianity was that it devalued life and this world by emphasizing
the existence of—and the happier future state in—a next world. Now observe:

Let us beware of saying that death is opposed to life. The living is merely a
type of what is dead, and a very rare type. 39

By reducing spirit to matter and life to death, Nietzsche makes life an abnormal
condition. And in the practice of lesser minds, such abstract philosophical concepts
translate into an effort to kill off living things, to reduce them to their "normal" state.
In Thomas Berger's novel, Little Big Man, an Indian chief says that such men
"believe that everything is dead: stones, earth, animals, and people, even their own
people. And if, in spite of that, things persist in trying to live, [they] will rub them
out."
And hence, as Nietzsche feared, but also advocated in spite of himself, we
reach total nihilism—the effort to turn everything into nothing.

Misconceptions about God

Man is man, and God is God. Man is mortal, God is immortal. This is a
crucial rule by which all forms of monotheism must abide. Man may be spiritually
purified and elevated to a "vision of God," but this does not allow us to confuse one
with the other.
On a sunny day, go out into the sunshine. Bathe in it, be enlightened in it, be
warmed by it. Then come back indoors and ask yourself: "Did I see the sun?" Yes.
"Did it enlighten me?" Yes. "Did it warm me up?" Yes.
But: "Am I the sun?" No!
The case of God is similar to the case of the sun. No one who has enjoyed a
special relationship with God, however close, can claim to be God Himself on the
basis of that relationship or experience.
When Mohammed—the Prophet of God—died, there was a great commotion.
People could not believe that the event had actually happened. Omar, one of his
closest Companions, drew out his sword and threatened to impale anyone who uttered
that the Prophet was dead. At this point Abu Bakr, the closest Companion,
intervened, and after calming them all down, said: "Those who believe in
Mohammed, know that Mohammed is dead. Those who believe in God, know that
God is immortal, and cannot die."
Now this is the proper attitude. And this is the crux of the problem: What is
needed is a fresh, a healthy, approach to God. For if we equate God with a certain
man—granted, a great and wonderful man—then when that man dies, we are justified
in saying that "God is dead (or crucified)." Thus when Nietzsche speaks about "the

counterpart in the Hindu Round of the Four Yugas, after which the cycle repeats itself. Note the
similarity with the four seasons in a year.
39GS, Section 109, p. 168.

18
death of God," he is also talking about the death of Christ on the cross. 40 In this
sense, Nietzsche's remark is a direct consequence of this dangerous equation, and
properly belongs not in the 19th century, but 19 centuries ago. Nietzsche displays
awareness of this when he says: "We deny God as God. If one were to prove this
God of the Christians to us, we should be even less able to believe in him. In a
formula: God, as Paul created him, is the negation of God. " 41
The Mansion and the Houseguests

Two other frequent misconceptions about God concern those on the other side
of the fence. The concept of God as a puppet-master or an oriental despot, so often
advanced by atheists, is simply wrong. If God had wanted absolute hegemony over
man, nothing could have been simpler: He could simply have created a race of
mindless robots. Instead He has given man a mind and free will, and placed him in
charge of this planet. But there is no authority without responsibility. Hence man is
responsible for what he does on earth. Free will means that man is free to choose both
good and bad: God does not compel man to anything. Man is bound by his
circumstances, but he is free to make moral choices and actions. If he does
something out of compulsion, he is not responsible—which is precisely why Omar,
the second Caliph whose penchant for justice was as legendary as that of King
Solomon, forgave a destitute man when he stole some food from the market place.
But free will without guidance is naught, for without guidance man might not be able
to tell right from wrong. Hence God has given man both free will and the right
guidance to use that freedom wisely.
But such freedom comes at a price. The price is that man is responsible, and
hence accountable, for his actions. For this freedom of will and action means that
man can hurt other men, that he can harm other creatures. If man has the license to
interfere with God's creation, this does not mean he has the right to destroy or
misplace anything.
The following parable is more to the point than the similes of either puppet-
master or oriental despot. The rich owner of a country manor has sent various friends
of his to stay there during their summer vacation. The trip, however, proves so rough
that the guests are afflicted with amnesia by the time they arrive at the mansion.
Inside they find rooms full of wondrous objects, tables decked with fruit, and
beautiful tapestries. The owner of the house, aware of the difficult passage of his
guests, has left a manual on the main table outlining the house rules. One of these
rules is that the guests should share in the daily household chores, such as cooking
and washing the dishes. Another is that they should show proper love and respect for
each other, since they have all been chosen and sent there by the same landlord. It is
also good etiquette to remember the landlord from time to time, to phone him and
thank him for the beautiful gift he has made to his guests.

40"God is dead; God died of his pity for man." (The devil, to Zarathustra, in VPN, p. 202. Also
related: the godless Pope, "pity choked/strangled him," p. 372-3.) The insights that God here refers to
Christ, and that the Crucifixion is the act of supreme pity, belong to Professor Jung (Jung, p. 997-8).
41The Antichrist, Section 47, in VPN, p. 627; translation of the Latin formula given in
footnote. This equation of God with a human being was not dominant initially, but
proceeded step by step, culminating with the Nicaean Council in 324 AD, where
Ossius (or Hosius), a follower of Athanasius, caused Emperor Constantine to declare
and impose upon the bishops the formula: homo-ousios ("of the same essence"). But
its seeds were already present in Paul's epistles.

19
 So from that point on, it is the guests' collective responsibility to manage the
household. But if they fall among each other; if they start quarreling and attacking
one another; if they dump their waste in the middle of the living room; if they start
swinging from the chandeliers; if they make a hell out of this paradise resort; if they
pretend that the landlord does not exist, or pick up the phone and curse him for all
their own self-caused troubles; if their response is grumpiness instead of gratitude,
then they will have sunk into the depths of discourtesy. And what if the guests ruin
the house, if they destroy the furniture? What if they burn the house down in the end?
Now this is exactly our situation on earth. And for this reason if for nothing
else, we must unmask all atheistic philosophies as a self-deception that provides man
with an excuse to shirk his responsibilities, and to defile the mansion in which he is a
guest—the world—with his abominations.
Nietzsche sees this quite clearly. In The Twilight of the Idols, after branding
free will an "error", he states: "We deny God; in denying God, we deny
accountability..." 42 As a Dostoevsky character says: "If there is no God, everything is
permitted." This is the real reason for denying God: the purpose is not to unveil some
profound truth (as it happens, an untruth), but to deliver our egotistical selves from
moral qualms and considerations. Eradicate belief in God, and you rip out the root of
morality. Nietzsche has deciphered the sequence well: if no God, then no
accountability; if no accountability, then no need, indeed no possibility, for morality.
It is the next step in this sequence that Nietzsche instinctively shrinks away from:
without morality, it becomes not merely possible, but inevitable, for us to perpetrate
unspeakable monstrosities against each other, against other beings, against nature. 43
Of course, declaring the death of God has no more effect on His existence than
the claim: "the President of the United States does not exist" has on the American
President. Hence, we will be held to account whether we believe in God or not, and
to think we can evade it is simply a delusion. Meanwhile, burying our heads in the
ground like an ostrich only serves—by instilling a false sense of relief and license—to
increase the dastardly deeds on our account, throwing us ever further "into the red."
One other point needs to be borne in mind. In a Holy Tradition of the Prophet,
God declares: "I conform [limit] Myself to the opinion that My servant has of Me,"
which means: "I manifest Myself to a human being (appear to him) only in the form
of his belief"—or unbelief. In other words, if a person expects God to act in a certain
way, God will generally comply. If a person believes that only blind nature exists,
God will act in such a way as to confirm him in his belief. If he believes that the
essence of the universe is meaninglessness, God will oblige him. If a person thinks
that there is no proof for the existence of God, God will remove all proof, indeed all
possibility of proof, from his sphere of experience. If man forsakes God, God in turn
forsakes man: "As the blind man views God, so God views the blind man."

The Base Self versus God

42Hollingdale, p. 212.
43 There is one sense in which Nietzsche’s concept of Beyond Good and Evil is justified. God is
Absolute Unity, i.e. beyond all multiplicity and duality. Hence in approaching God, passing beyond
dualities and opposites would be a valid project—if Nietzsche believed in God. But even then, God
can only be approached from the side of the good, for this is how He, who is beyond all need, desires it
for us. The reason is that in psychic/spiritual/inner space, good is up and evil is down, with God at the
zenith or summit. To disregard good and evil disorientates man, so it becomes terribly easy for him to
land in the domain of absolute evil, in the abyss of Hell. For Nietzsche with his Protestant background,
however, "beyond good and evil" paradoxically implies Paradise, the blissful state prior to the Fall of
Man, before he ate the fruit of "the tree of knowledge of good and evil."

20
 Let us now follow the consequences of the statement: "The belief in God is
dead" to its logical conclusions. In this we shall employ a singular insight of Sufi
psychology: the existence of the ego, Base Self, or "egotistical self" in man.
What are the basic drives of the egotistical self? They are, first, its material—
and by implication its financial—interests, its drive toward sexual satisfaction, and its
will to power. Now all three points were dealt with in the 19th century by Marx,
Freud, and Nietzsche, respectively. The insights of these men cannot be gainsaid.
But they all lacked the knowledge that would allow them to integrate the three. And,
furthermore, each one reduced questions of cosmic importance to his own discovery
regarding a species inhabiting a dust speck in the vast expanses of the universe. Thus,
the concept of God was, for Marx, a consequence of what he termed the
"superstructure"; for Freud, a "sublimation, projection, or illusion"; and for Nietzsche,
a self-deception.
Let us now go back to the egotistical self. Assume that its material needs, food
and comfort are provided for. Assume, too, that its sexual drives have been satisfied.
Yet for the Base Self this is not the end but merely a beginning, for it is precisely
from this point onward that its further expansion must proceed. Nietzsche's original
term for this in Daybreak and The Joyous Science, the "lust for power" or "love of
power" (machtgelüst), is more revealing than his later "will to power." And indeed,
left to its own devices, the Base Self will try to appropriate more and more power to
itself—whether it be political power, social power, or pecuniary power. And
Nietzsche, better than Marx or Freud, was able to discern this motivation. (Following
in Nietzsche's footsteps, Alfred Adler and Bertrand Russell, too, identified power as
the motive force in man.) Ahmad Sirhindi (1563-1624), one of the greatest Sufi
saints, once explained it this way:

The self in its state of impulsiveness (ammara) always strives to be superior...

It refuses to acknowledge its dependence on and debt to others. This is
nothing but a claim to divinity... Indeed, [such a] self will not settle even for
partnership with God, but desires to subjugate even Him, to enslave all that
exists. It is for this reason that aiding and abetting this self, the enemy of God,
... is the greatest of follies and disasters.

Here, the basic motivation of the Base Self stands revealed: it wants to be God, even
if this is impossible. It desires absolute submission on the part of others. 44
Now the greatest obstacle in this way is belief in God Himself. The selfish
ego in man cannot tolerate even God, or perhaps especially God, so it will try to
abolish belief in God the first chance it gets. In all their merciless unmasking of base
motives, Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche never suspected that this was the reason for their
atheism, and the subtlest thinkers fell victim to the even subtler tricks of the Base
Self. Nietzsche's madman reveals the consequences of "God is dead": "... must not
we ourselves become gods?" One of Dostoevsky's characters remarks: "If there is no
God, then I am God." Nietzsche's following remark, the apogee of hubris, tells it all:

44In 1884, Nietzsche quotes Plato: "Each of us would like to be master, if possible, over all men, and
best of all, God"—to which Nietzsche adds: "This attitude must exist again" (quoted in Lampert, p.
326n10: Plato Theages 126a, Will to Power 958).

21
"Today I love myself as my god." 45 And indeed, in the final throes of Nietzsche's
megalomania, he claimed that he was God. 46
This Sufic analysis is also corroborated by Jungian psychology. In his
treatment of Nietzsche's Zarathustra, Carl G. Jung, the great psychologist, remarks:

If you knew what reality that fact possesses which has been called God, you
would know that you could not possibly get away from it. But you have lost
sight of it; you don't know what that thing means and so it gets at you
unconsciously, and then without knowing it you are transformed into God
almighty, as happened to Nietzsche. It got into him to such an extent that he
went crazy and signed his letters "the dismembered [Dionysos] Zagreus," or
"Christ Dionysos," because he became identical with the God he had
eliminated. You see, inasmuch as we have eliminated God to a great extent, it
is just as if we were all denying the fact that we were hungry, but then we
begin to eat each other; we get so hungry that a catastrophe will follow... we
now think that the progress of thought and the development of the human mind
is hampered by the existence of such old prejudices, and we destroy those old
forms because we think that we are gods and can do without them... There, of
course, is the great danger of any creation: it destroys something which should
not be destroyed, and out of that develop the most catastrophic consequences,
as in Nietzsche's case. 47

Jung goes on to point out Nietzsche‘s "identification with the deity—the Superman
takes the place of the deity."
But there is a further problem to be reckoned with here. Having declared God
dead, Nietzsche's self-deification followed as a matter of course. But even this
megalomania may not have been his real undoing. For there is yet a final twist, a
further step to go: if God is dead, and Nietzsche is God, then Nietzsche is—dead!
Dead, and yet alive! (Recall that he refers to himself as "the dismembered," "the
crucified.") This short-circuit, this final paradox, must have proved too much of a
strain for even the likes of his nimble mind, which thereupon committed mental
suicide, and he became the ultimate embodiment—or is it the entombment?—of his
own reasoning: a dead, shattered mind in a living body. Thus, it can be seen that in
Nietzsche's case, the egotistical self declared its final rebellion by totally blotting out
his mind, which it had driven to the point of exhaustion. (This is why Sirhindi says
that aiding the Base Self is the greatest folly, the worst disaster.) Like a tool which
has outlived its usefulness, it was then broken and thrown away, after all the efforts of
his great spirit to achieve salvation had been successfully vanquished by his intellect
using the deadly formula: "God is dead." Nietzsche's insanity has been linked with
tertiary syphilis, but this—if true—can only have accelerated, not caused, the process.
It is a pity that this had to be the outcome, since Nietzsche had already deduced
that "strenuousness," or self-exertion, was the way to go—in Sufi psychology, a
cardinal method for cornering the Base Self. And this brings us to a discussion of
Nietzsche's "Superman."

The Superman

45Gesammelte Werke 14:43, quoted in Thiele, p. 193.

46J.P.Stern, A Study of Nietzsche, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979, p. 31.
47 Jung, p. 903 (6 May 1936).

22
 "Man is a rope," says Nietzsche in Zarathustra, "suspended between animal
and superman—a rope over an abyss." 48 Thus he portrays man as an unfinished,
incomplete being. In this he is entirely in accord with Sufi psychology and the
mystics of all traditions. But just at the point where Nietzsche's ideas begin to show
the greatest potential, his project proves self-defeating—for he trips himself up by his
continued adherence to "the death of God." Without God, there can be no Superman,
no God-realized man, no saint, no man who is close to God; without that light and
guidance, one can only be close to the devil.
In some respects, Nietzsche has intuited the path that leads to a Sufi saint or
"friend of God": he talks of "a war against oneself, that is to say, self-control." 49
"The greatest war," said the Prophet of God, "is the war against our selves." In
Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche recognizes the existence of a "higher self." 50
"The discipline of suffering, of great suffering—do you not know that it is this
discipline alone which has created every elevation of mankind hitherto?" 51 He asks
"what type of human being one ought to breed" : "This more valuable type has existed
often enough already: but as a lucky accident, as an exception, never as willed." 52 He
talks of a "type of higher species of man, half 'saint', half 'genius'..." 53
Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in particular, shows how closely Nietzsche was able
to approach the truths of Sufi psychology at some points. Couched in dreamlike
imagery, it is Nietzsche’s spiritual journey and testament. Nietzsche wrote its major
parts very quickly in a trancelike state, and elaborated upon them afterwards; his
subconscious gushed forth onto the paper like a broken dam. In Jungian terms, the
archetype of the "wise old man" became activated in him in the person of Zarathustra,
and in Ecce Homo Nietzsche himself speaks of being "merely an incarnation,
mouthpiece or medium" for that figure. Yet he appears to have only partially digested
or assimilated the insights of the latter; as C.G. Jung notes, lacking the means of
modern psychology, he does not display awareness in many cases of what the
revelations flowing out through his hand really mean.
Zarathustra is replete with symbolism pertaining to the Base Self (called nafs
al-ammara in Sufism). Not surprisingly, this aspect of Zarathustra has gone almost
entirely unnoticed, for as Jung observed, "in the west we have no philosophy of the
self" 54, and even a man of his stature was not always able to discern the portent of
these symbols (he refers to the Base Self as the "shadow" or "inferior man" when he
does).
Since Nietzsche is preoccupied with questions of self-surmounting and the
Superman, images of the base and higher selves keep cropping up in a highly
symbolic form which is quite abstruse, but not undecipherable to Sufic wisdom. The
jester (or dwarf) who jumps over the tightrope walker trying to get to the Superman,
causing him to fall to his death; "The Ugliest Man" who murders God, because he
can’t stand the discovery of the ugliness of his innermost depths by all-seeing eyes;
the large black snake that bites the young shepherd inside his throat—all these are

48Hollingdale, p. 239. I have preferred “suspended” to Hollingdale’s “fastened.”

49Ibid. p. 245.
50Thiele, p. 66 (Human, All Too Human 197).
51Hollingdale, p. 246.
52Ibid. p. 247. It is actually not correct to state that the higher man is accidental, for this type can only
be realized by the Great Work and needs the utmost cultivation.
53Ibid. p. 248.
54 Jung, vol. 2, p. 792.

23
prime symbols of the Base Self. When the shepherd bites off the head of the snake,
i.e. vanquishes his lower self, 55 he laughs as no man has laughed before—i.e.,
becomes the Superman or Purified Self. In "The Way of the Creative One," when
Nietzsche remarks: "You yourself will always be the worst enemy you can meet," he
is again referring to the lower, egotistical self. In the same chapter, "your way leads
past yourself and your seven devils" is an uncanny divination of the seven stages of
self and their "spirits of gravity" dragging one down, trying to arrest and reverse one’s
spiritual development, in Sufism. 56 "You must be ready to burn yourself in your own
flame; how could you become new if you haven’t first become ashes" is again the
Phoenix-like rebirth of the self. And at the end of this chapter, "I love him who seeks
to create beyond himself, and thus succumbs" is another reference to self-
transcendence and the Superman, who is too similar in these respects to the Purified
(or Perfected) Self in Sufism to be ignored.
Thus it appears as though Nietzsche has made undeniable progress in
rediscovering the "Perfect Man" of Islamic Sufism. But he can never reach his goal,
for he has already defeated his own purpose by accepting that "God is dead." Hence
he deprives his 'higher species', the Superman or Overman (übermensch), of an ideal
towards which to strive and approach asymptotically. The rocket he would shoot to
the stars then misfires and burrows into the ground: "'Man must become better and
more evil'—thus do I teach. The most evil is necessary for the superman's best." 57
He castigates altruism as "the morality of decadence": "An 'altruistic' morality—a
morality in which self-interest wilts away—remains a bad sign under all
circumstances... The best is lacking when self-interest begins to be lacking... Man is
finished when he becomes altruistic." 58 Approvingly calling his Zarathustra "the
destroyer of morality" 59 and himself an 'immoralist', he continues in The Gay Science:
"You will never again pray, never again worship... you have no perpetual guardian
and friend... there is no longer for you any rewarder and recompenser, no final
corrector—there is no longer any reason in what happens, no longer any love in what
happens to you..." 60
Thus, like Dr. Frankenstein, Nietzsche sets out to create a superior human
being, yet succeeds only in producing a monster. In Zarathustra, he lets the cat out
of the bag: "I guess you would call my overman—devil." 61 In The Antichrist, he
defines happiness as "not peace, but war", and criticizes Christianity for having
pictured "the strong man as the typically reprehensible man." 62 Barred from elevation
in the vertical direction, his "self-overcoming" can take place in only one direction:
the ego can only expand—or rather inflate—in the horizontal. Lacking this vertical
direction, the only thing left for him is to claim superiority through his own will to
power. Thus every individual is left pitted against every other, and a common
morality becomes impossible. Locked in the basement of the Base Self, with evil and
cruelty as its guides, with the only goal repudiated, with the elevator and even the

55 This is what Moses meant when he exhorted his people to “slay your selves” (the Koran, 2:54).
56 The seven devils can also be interpreted as the seven deadly sins. In Sufism, the devil’s deceits are
ineffectual after Stage Four.
57Ibid. p. 244.
58Twilight of the Idols, Section 35, in VPN, pp. 535-6.
59Hollingdale, p. 247. "Zarathustra the godless" also prefigures all our latter-day would-be gurus who
misinform us that there is no God. In this, too, Nietzsche was prophetic.
60Ibid. p. 236 (GS 285, p. 229-30).
61Pt. 2, "On Human Prudence," in VPN, p. 256.
62VPN, p. 570-71.

24
stairway out of the labyrinth bricked over, his 'superman' becomes, not a sage or saint,
but a Hitler, a Stalin. His wine turns to vinegar, his elixir of life to poison. No
wonder he went insane. As things stand, his 'superman' is hopelessly confused; a
hodgepodge of the highest stage of selfhood, the "Purified Self," and the worst of the
Base Self—a tainted mixture instead of pure, clear, sparkling water.
Yet after all is said and done, it cannot be denied that Nietzsche had great
potential in him. Had he fallen into the hands of a competent Master, he would no
doubt have borne fruit, his mind and his spirit would have declared peace, and would
have begun to pull in the same direction instead of in opposite directions. Perhaps he
himself might have become a 'superman' in the better sense of the term. Nietzsche
realized as much: "If only I had a Master!" he once exclaimed—but it was not to be.
There was nothing in the Western intellectual tradition to provide Nietzsche with the
master he needed, nor is there still.

The Base Self and Science

Let us now turn to the question of the Base Self versus knowledge. We have
already noted that Nietzsche was a moralist of knowledge. Although he knew nothing
about Sufism, he conceived of knowledge in two different ways: as sublime Truth
(which Nietzsche attributed to Plato and the wisest of all ages), and as the subtlest
guise of the Will to Power (which Nietzsche himself advocated: the will to truth is the
Will to Power, the passion to rule). The first of these corresponds, in terms of Sufi
psychology, to the Purified Self; the latter to the Base Self, the Ego.
Ever since Bacon, we have known that "knowledge is power." Lord Acton has
informed us that: "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
Using the equivalence of knowledge and power, we arrive at: "absolute knowledge
corrupts absolutely." This refers to the Base Self. The Base Self seeks knowledge not
for its own sake, but for the love of power. This lust for power is progressively
diminished as higher levels of selfhood are attained, until the Purified Self is reached;
the latter contemplates knowledge as divine truth solely out of its love for Truth, not
out of lust for the power that knowledge will give. Only the Purified Self is worthy of
possessing knowledge, and deserves Truth, because it will never misappropriate,
misuse, or abuse it.
Hence, knowledge in the hands of the Base Self is an extremely dangerous
thing. The more the selfish ego knows, the more arrogant does it become, the greater
is its tendency to self-deification. And awareness of this fact has never been so
relevant as it is today, in the Information Age of our scientific civilization. Never
have we possessed so much knowledge, and never has science, or information, been
so dangerously open to misuse. 63 Einstein's equation E=mc2 is a case in point: from
the knowledge that matter can be converted into energy, we have fashioned weapons
that will destroy the human race. But Copernicus, at the very beginning of the
scientific revolution, was already aware of the implications, which explains his
reluctance to make his discoveries widely known.
The following apocryphal letter, purportedly by Lysis, shook Copernicus to his
very core and caused him to withhold his great discoveries for almost four decades:

63 We are now at the doorstep of biotechnology, where even greater dangers lie in wait. All we need to
claim godhood is to create life; even worse, a human being—Frankenstein all over again.

25
 After the death of Pythagoras... it remains our sacred duty to remember the
divine teaching of our master and not to divulge the treasures of philosophy
[read: "science"] to those who have not undergone preliminary purification of
the mind... Some of his imitators achieve many and great things, but in an
improper way... thus their audience is encouraged to ruthlessness and
insolence, for they stain the pure tenets of philosophy with rash and impure
demeanour. It is as if one were to pour clean, fresh water into a well filled
with dirt—for the dirt will only get agitated, and the water will be wasted.
This is what happens to those who teach and are taught in this manner. Thick
and dark forests cover the minds and hearts of those who have not been
initiated in the proper manner, and disturb the mild contemplation of ideas... 64

The overtones of secrecy and initiation in the above goes against the grain of our
modern intellectual tradition, where knowledge is freely available and open to all who
would avail themselves of it. Yet at the same time, we must realize that it contains a
gem of truth: in the hands of the unwise, knowledge can, and does, lead to disaster. If
knowledge is freely available to all, then all must also be endowed with the ethics to
use it wisely. During the building of the atomic bomb, the scientists on the Manhattan
Project were overcome by their curiosity and wonder: each technical hurdle became
an exhilerating intellectual experience. With few exceptions (notably Leo Szilard),
they gave little thought to the enormity of their achievements, to the uses to which
their brainchild would finally be put. 65 Contrast this attitude now with that of the
great Christian physician Hunayn Ibn Ishaq (d. 873), who, when ordered to concoct a
poison by the highest authorities, responded fearlessly:

I am skilled in useful things, and do not research other matters. My religion

and my profession prevent me from this. My religion commands me to do
good to other human beings, even if they are my enemies. As for my
profession, it has been established for the happiness of the human race, and has
forbidden harming our fellow men.

Yet once the atomic bomb was finished, the decision to use it, and to stockpile
weapons the measure of whose destruction is beyond belief, was made by others.
This signals the fact that in a technological civilization, in a scientific society, 66 it is
not enough to have scientists who are moral; everybody should pass through proper
moral training. And if one considers that university students can now design an
atomic bomb, plus the fact that the smallest nations are eager to lay hands on one, it
becomes clear that the project must be worldwide.
All this demonstrates that in order to handle knowledge wisely, we must aim
at an elevation and purification of the Base Self. But this is precisely the project of
Islamic Sufism, which envisions the training and purification of the Self through

64Quoted in Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers, Harmondsworth: Pelican Books, 1959, 1968, p. 153.
65Of course, it was wartime, and people were afraid Hitler might get the Bomb first. But what of its
actual use? At the Nuremberg trials, the Nazi war criminals used exactly the same argument: "It was
wartime, and we were under orders." It is a thorny ethical problem that cannot be resolved on an
individual, but only on a social, basis. The solution is to have a society in which a Hitler cannot
appear, and in which those in command do not make ethically unjustified use of weapons as a result of
the moral debility of society. But this can be accomplished only by widespread and proper instruction
in a proper religion.
66 Indeed, in any society and civilization.

26
seven successive stages, beginning with the Base (or Egotistical) Self and ending with
the Purified Self. Ideally, only the Purified Self has the right to higher knowledge
(whether physical or spiritual), for only it can wield and use such knowledge
selflessly, with wisdom and compassion. Otherwise, knowledge or information in the
hands of the Base Self can only lead to the misuse and abuse of power. Scientists, if
they are not themselves evil, then become the instruments of those who are. In his
novel Ape and Essence, Aldous Huxley portrayed this graphically by representing
Einstein at the end of a leash held by a gorilla in a general's uniform.
This should not be misunderstood as a call to elitism. It is a call to the
democratization of self-purification, somewhat in the manner of general education.
This was what Islamic societies in general, and Ottoman society in particular,
attempted at their zenith—the institutions of formal education (the madrasahs) were
complemented by informal schools giving spiritual training (the Sufi takkas)—
although they could not finally maintain their superior stand because physical
knowledge fell into unwise and undeserved neglect. The exquisite balance between
physical and spiritual knowledge was lost—just as we have today lost the same
balance, this time at the expense of spiritual knowledge. What we now have to do is
to revive this vision—to consider the increase of knowledge together with the increase
in morality and concomitant levels of selfhood needed to use that knowledge wisely,
humanely, life-affirmatively. If our spiritual and moral progress does not match our
scientific progress, all will sooner or later be lost, as would be the case with a bunch
of irresponsible children playing with matches in a warehouse full of dynamite.

The Consequences

So much for the beginning—but what of the end? What are the final
consequences of the loss of belief in God? Nietzsche's formula cost him his sanity;
what is the outcome if large sections of humanity cease to believe in God?
It is no longer possible to ignore the following fact: highfalutin, abstract
metaphysical propositions have consequences in the physical world. A philosophical
proposition declaimed by a pundit from his ivory tower, when acclaimed and acted
out by men of lesser intelligence and even less conscience, lead to concrete results in
the real world. These are the fruits of that seed, and "by their fruits you shall judge
them." The fruits immediately lay bare the peculiar properties concealed in the seed
which cannot be discovered without sowing it.
Nietzsche's formula has been sown for more than a century. It has become a
standard, a stock item, an integral part in the intellectual equipment of the West.
During this time, it has had the chance to grow, to bear fruit. A century after
Nietzsche, where do we now find ourselves?
The history of the 20th century has been one of increasing decimation and
devastation. The discovery of the most hideous weapon in history at the end of World
War 2 has guaranteed that there will be few, if any, survivors at the end of the next
world war, and those few will envy the dead. Two bombs—two bombs were all we
had in 1945. Today, half a century later, we have not ten, not one hundred, but tens of
thousands of these weapons, temporarily gathering mothballs. But don't be fooled—
they're still there, all nations are lusting after them, and there's enough raw material
for thousands more. The H-Bombs in their cocoons, the ballistic missiles in their silos
may be hibernating now, but when their springtime comes they will resume
proliferation.

27
 Alongside this tremendous increase in murder-power—and murder is its
proper name, for their greatest destruction is wrought on innocent civilians—the
century soon to be left behind has witnessed atrocities unparalleled in history. Human
beings have slaughtered each other in gas chambers, in ovens, in concentration camps,
under torture, not by the thousands but by the tens of millions. To paraphrase Turkish
poet M. A. Ersoy, "whole continents went boiling down into that maelstrom."
What is the magnitude of the death toll? Precise figures are impossible to
obtain. In a chapter on “The Century of Megadeath” in his Out of Control (1993),
Zbigniew Brzezinski attempted a rough estimate. His reckoning is conservative, and
closer to a minimum value than what the losses actually were.
Brzezinski estimated that approximately 87 million people had perished in
wars during the 20th century. An almost equal number, more than 80 million, had
been murdered in cold blood as a result of ideologically motivated terror and
totalitarian genocide. Thus upwards of 167 million, or almost 170 million people,
represent the lower limit on this century’s dreadful ledger. “This,” concludes
Brzezinski, “is more than the total killed in all previous wars, civil conflicts, and
religious persecutions throughout human history.” The mind cannot deal adequately
with carnage of such monstrous proportions, and is numbed into incomprehension by
the very magnitudes involved. This incomprehension serves as a refuge for the
human mind, which instinctively recoils from coming to terms with evil of such
dimensions.
The 70 million dead in two world wars; the 50 million dead or missing in
combat during the so-called “peace” period since the last world war; the 6 million
Jews butchered in extermination camps; the untold millions handed over to famine;
the tens of millions that perished in the Soviet Gulag (the devastation is of such
magnitude that accurate figures cannot be cited, estimates ranging between 15 and 66
million); the comparable number that went to their deaths in China; 67 the progressive
institutionalization of torture by almost all the nations of the world; the ever-
increasing degree of violence in the methods of torture; the lack of compassion for
women, children and the aged—quite to the contrary, the compulsion to inflict even
more merciless torture on precisely those who are most at our mercy 68—the terrors of
the 20th century are far beyond the comprehension of any horror movie. What has
happened in fact leaves fiction speechless, no matter how depraved or imaginative.
George Steiner hit the nail on the head:

The concentration and death camps of the twentieth century, wherever they
exist, under whatever régime, are Hell made immanent. They are the
transference of Hell from below the earth to its surface... The absence of the
familiar damned opened a vortex which the modern totalitarian state has
filled. 69

It is crucially important that we understand the reason for this. Why should it
happen? What is going on? The reason is that without belief in God, combined with

67The lesson should not be lost on us that Communist Russia and China were both atheistic states,
which thus unleashed the ego. Together with Nazi Germany, furthermore, they represented societies in
which one man, instead of God, was idolized.
68If man is regarded as a soulless lump of clay, it then becomes permissible to inflict one's will on him.
Combined with the Base Self's drive to play God, the denial of a God-given inviolable spirit in man
becomes a step to the egotistical self's proving that it is "god" over that helpless lump of clay.
69George Steiner, In Bluebeard's Castle, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971, p. 54-5.

28
the proper exercise of morality and self-purification, there is nothing to hold the Base
Self in check. Fear and love of God cannot exist unless you have belief in Him first.
Fear of God restrains the Base Self, preventing it from descending too far toward the
negative. Love of God elevates the self toward the positive (i.e., God and Heaven).
When belief in God is eliminated, therefore, the push from below (fear) and the pull
from above (love) collapse with it, and the elevator plummets under the gravitational
pull of Hell. The ego unleashed then becomes a conduit, a volcanic shaft, through
which infernal contents erupt into everyday life. Under certain conditions—of which
the paramount is lack of faith in God—the Base Self becomes truly satanic: a mere
plaything, a puppet, of Satan. It makes no difference that a person under this
influence remains unaware of his situation, all the while denying the existence of
God, Satan, Heaven and Hell—his very denial makes him all the more susceptible to
this generally unrecognized law of human nature.
True, men have always practiced cruelty. But it is in the degree and scale of
cruelty that this century has surpassed all others. Previously, religions held man's
selfish drives in check and counseled compassion for all of "God's little creatures." A
true Moslem, for instance, would empathize with Abu Bakr, who said: "My Lord, put
me in your Hell and expand me to its limits, so that no place will be left for the
suffering of anyone else." Thus whereas, in the past, the majority of humanity had
compassion even for animals, for even a kitten; whereas they would try to spare even
an ant, an insect, from being trampled over—we now stockpile weapons to decimate
our very own children. And this is the concrete result of loss of belief in God.
Without that faith, morality cannot exist, and still less can it be practised properly.
Nietzsche's premonitions, quoted at the beginning of this paper, have been realized
with a vengeance. It is no accident that the same person who foretold the death of
belief in God also was intelligent enough to foresee its consequences. And here are
the results:
If there is no belief in God, love and compassion have a propensity to
evaporate.
If there is no belief in God, people become liable to inflict violence and cruelty
on each other in an ever-increasing scale and degree.
If there is no belief in God, human beings begin stockpiling weapons of global
destruction that will slaughter their own children and the entire biosphere—nature
itself.
If there is no belief in God, human beings find no reason to refrain from
violating and destroying everything.
If there is no belief in God, neither can conscience exist in its fullest form; the
most diabolical and bestial in man takes over.

Is God to blame for all this? Is there a single divine commandment that orders
us to do these? Since when has "Thou shalt not kill" been inverted into "Thou shalt"?
Or is it rather that our own selfish egos have performed the inversion?
It is not God who desires it this way. God has placed us on this earth as its
stewards, not to maltreat each other and other creatures. If we abide by His laws, we
should live in harmony with Him, with ourselves, with one another, with nature, and
with all creation. If we do not, things will get progressively worse, and finally we
shall burn down the earth—we shall incinerate it to a cinder. We shall collectively
become murderers of our own children. It is not God, but our egotistical selves, that
will dictate this outcome. He who forgets God cannot recognize his children, either.

29
 Jean-Paul Sartre, despite his atheism, spoke of the “God-shaped hole” in the
human soul left by the death of faith. But he found it necessary to reject God whether
He existed or not, since the idea of God, he supposed, negates human freedom—
which was, of course, Nietzsche’s problem also. The crucial question, however, is
freedom for what, exactly. If the laws of God “enjoin the good and forbid the evil,” 70
are we asking for anything else than freedom for evil when we ask for more freedom?
And what possible good is going to derive from unleashing evil? If the freedom of
man is not going to serve good, what possible value does it have? Are we asking for
the freedom to murder multiples of six million human beings, like a Hitler, or tens of
millions of human beings, like a Stalin? Are much smaller concentrations of evil
absolved from being evil just because they are less? And are not such unspeakable,
unnameable atrocities merely the accumulation of countless lesser evils? When one
lives in a coccoon of abstractions, it is quite easy to lose sight of such simple things.
And the “God-shaped hole” can only be filled by God again; nothing smaller will do.
All divinely inspired books have taught love and compassion. The Torah, the
Psalms, the Gospel have all preached them. To the extent that a person's actions are
not informed by love, the fear of God has restrained people from committing the
worst crimes. Finally, the Koran has brought the last, the complete, version of God's
revelation. It—like its predecessors—has taught peace and love. Those actions
which are detrimental to human beings have been called "sins." Even if a believer
were driven to extremes, for example, he would not touch what is forbidden (i.e.
would not steal). These are the preconditions for our continued survival on earth. We
cannot violate them and still expect to survive.
Perhaps, in Nietzsche‘s time, the consequences of unbelief were still not
sufficiently apparent. Perhaps it could still be claimed that a metaphysical belief was
no different from the lack thereof. But today, we do not have this luxury open to us.
Everything is now crystal clear. Man at the pinnacle of civilization, science, and
technology is no different than a caveman wearing a tie. In terms of his capacity to
inflict destruction, he is incomparably worse.
"Hatred does not cease by hatred; hatred ceases by love." Such has been the
teaching of all true religions. The heart of all religion is love. We cannot extinguish
fire with fire—to douse fire, water is required; the water of peace, the water of life.
Belief in God, and meticulous performance of His requirements for humanity,
constitute this water.
If belief in God is dead, then Doomsday is on the agenda. Mankind will self-
destruct sooner or later in a gigantic spasm of insanity. Unbelief in God, in short, can
mean only one thing: man's collective suicide. Nietzsche gives voice to a "deepest
suspicion that is more and more gaining worse and worse control of us Europeans and
that could easily confront coming generations with the terrifying Either/Or: 'Either
abolish your reverences or—yourselves!' The latter would be nihilism; but would not
the former also be—nihilism? That is our question mark." 71
In retrospect, we can see that the question is not one of Either/Or, but
Both/And—better yet, If/Then: If you abolish faith in God, then you abolish
yourselves. The first nihilism begets the second.
In The Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche makes the uncanny observation: "We
have abolished the true world [the ideal world of Plato, the God of Christian religion]:

70 Note that man still can, and does, perform evil. This is an admonition, not a curtailment of the
freedom of man. Yet we would like to do away with even this admonition.
71GS, Section 346, p. 287.

30
which world is left? Perhaps the apparent one? Certainly not! Together with the true
world we have also abolished the apparent one!" 72 Nietzsche here not only makes the
distinction between Necessary Being (God) and Contingent Being (universe) as dealt
with in Sufism and Islamic philosophy, predicating the existence of the latter on the
"Ground of all being." Much more eerily and perhaps unwittingly, he shows that by
shutting the door on the light of God, we cripple the projection of that light into the
universe. As long as that door remains closed, peace, love and meaning are not
replenished but depleted, and mankind becomes steadily more depraved, merciless
and desperate—psychologically abnormal. The stage grows darker and darker, until
its collective consciousness of the universe is blotted out in a catastrophic paroxysm
of global proportions.
This is the exact antithesis of what a student of Sufism would regard as God’s
proper purpose for man: "I created the universe for man, and man I created for
myself." The understanding and actualization of this formula are the very raison
d’étre of religion itself. And this is what Nietzsche and those who follow him are
prepared to turn their backs upon—unknowingly, of course.
If Nietzsche is the prophet of atheism, Thus Spoke Zarathustra is the Bible of
atheism. But one fundamental question remains: why, then, was Nietzsche not
satisfied with the simple death of God; why did he find it necessary to search beyond
it for Zarathustra and the Superman? The reason is that he cannot stop, and man
cannot stop; his noble spirit, though choking, continues on its spiritual quest. His
greatness resides in the fact that he realizes that there lies something higher,
something greater, beyond his conceptions, even if he cannot come to proper terms
with it. His attempt manifests itself, as Jung demonstrates, in the archetypal symbol
of Zarathustra. He is trying to find a way out of the nihilism that the death of God
leaves in its wake. In the best humanistic tradition, he devalues a God "out there" in
order to elevate Man. But what if God is not merely external to man, but also internal
to him? 73
By rejecting God in toto, Nietzsche also inadvertently devalues man. Man is
thereby estranged from the divine spark within and left as a husk, a mere shell. He is
alienated from the wellsprings of his soul. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche proposes
that man should not flow out to a God, but should ever accumulate water like a dam;
he fails to see that it is the same God who flows into man, nourishing him from
within, so that if man builds a dam against God, he will be left in the end with a dry
riverbed on both sides of the dam, for the spring will dry up—or rather, be diverted.
He thus obviates any possibility of man’s self-realization, and defeats the purpose of
his mission. But man as he exists now is an unfinished being, and will always try to
transcend himself; atheist or not, this is the condition of man. The quest that
Nietzsche set out on has been realized in all true spiritual traditions, of which Islamic
Sufism represents the culmination. From his Birth of Tragedy to the very end, this is
the tragedy of Nietzsche, and this tragedy has become part of the very fabric of the
twentieth century. "The true calling of man," said Aldous Huxley echoing Nietzsche,
"is to find the way to himself." The "death of God" has blighted our lives to the
extent that it has become the definitive concept in modern thought, and it is high
time—"the highest time," in Zarathustra’s words—that we began the examination of
Sufism in this light.

72Quoted in Heller, p. 168-9.

73 Not as a mental construct or thought or imagination or projection, but as man’s very essence.

31
 Nietzsche criticized Christianity for its supernatural aspect, for its emphasis on
spirit to the detriment of nature, for its denial of nature and worldly life; and he was
genius enough to see where this dichotomy has been transcended: "the culture of
Islam... more congenial to our senses and tastes than Rome and Greece... owed its
origins to noble... instincts, because it said Yes to life..." 74 He saw, in other words,
that the pair of opposites are here constellated in a radically different way, and that the
rights of the body are recognized just as much as the rights of the spirit. A little more
time, and he might also have realized that the "transvaluation of values" he was
searching for had already been affected in Islam. For at bottom he was trying, not to
do away with all values, but to transcend conventional morality with all its mendacity,
contradictions and hypocrisies, to go beyond the specifically Christian conceptions of
good and evil; and "evil" in the Christian sense has never existed in Islam.
"Nietzsche was by no means anti-moral in general but only anti-moral in the
Christian, Buddhist, or any other strength-denying senses. He wanted to go beyond
Good and Evil to reach the valid (as he thought) opposition, Good and Bad" 75—which
are precisely the categories found in Islam. 76 In line with the ego/power relationship
discussed above, he attempted to formulate the contents of these categories solely in
terms of power; 77 but in addition to that, a sick, ailing, sleepless ex-professor, in pain
but also in love with life, can perhaps be excused his resentment for weakness in all
its forms; it is his own weaknesses he is reacting against. To him, life is strength;
hence his opposition to Buddhism no less than to Christianity, as well as all other life-
denying religions that wish to escape this world. 78

The Nightmare of Insanity

Nietzsche, who said: "God is dead," finally went insane. In a premonitory

nightmare attributed to Zarathustra, Nietzsche provides us with a rare and chilling
glimpse into his condition:

I had turned my back on all life, thus I dreamed. I had become a night
watchman and a guardian of tombs upon the lonely mountain castle of Death.
Up there I guarded his coffins... Life that had been overcome, looked at me
out of glass coffins. I breathed the odor of dusty eternities: sultry and dusty
lay my soul. And who could have aired his soul there?
The brightness of midnight was always about me; loneliness crouched next to
it; and as a third, death-rattle silence, the worst of my friends. I had keys, the
rustiest of all keys; and I knew how to use them to open the most creaking of
all gates. Like a wickedly angry croaking, the sound ran through the long
corridors when the gate's wings moved: fiendishly cried this bird, ferocious at
being awakened. Yet still more terrible and heart-constricting was the moment

74 VPN, Section 60, p.652.

75See Jung, vol.1, p. 233n13.
76 The word “evil” is generally used in the sense of “ill” in this paper.
77 “What is good? Everything that heightens the feeling of power in man, the will to power, power
itself.
“What is bad? Everything that is born of weakness.” VPN p.570 (Antichrist 2).
For comparison, one might attempt to define the Islamic concept of Good as follows: “anything that
furthers the material and spiritual well-being of Man.” The opposite of this would be Bad.
78 Ibid. p. 343.

32
 when silence returned and it grew quiet about me, and I sat alone in this
treacherous silence.
Thus time passed and crawled, if time still existed... But eventually that
happened which awakened me. Thrice, strokes struck at the gate like thunder;
the vaults echoed and howled thrice; then I went to the gate. "Alpa," I cried,
"who is carrying his ashes up the mountain? Alpa! Alpa! Who is carrying his
ashes up the mountain?" 79 And I pressed the key and tried to lift the gate and
exerted myself; but still it did not give an inch. Then a roaring wind tore its
wings apart; whistling, shrilling, and piercing, it cast up a black coffin before
me.
And amid the roaring and whistling and shrilling the coffin burst and spewed
out a thousandfold laughter. And from a thousand grimaces of children,
angels, owls, fools, and butterflies as big as children, it laughed and mocked
and roared at me. Then I was terribly frightened; it threw me to the ground.
And I cried in horror as I have never cried. And my own cry awakened me—
and I came to my senses. 80

As Professor Jung points out in his masterly analysis of this dream: "It is a
horrible foreboding of [Nietzsche's] insanity... Insanity is the secret, the utter
destruction of his mind... [The dream is weakly laid down to Zarathustra’s 'enemies.']
But who is his enemy? His own unconscious—his enemy is himself. So he has
dreamt himself, that is his own case, his own insanity." 81
Having identified "God" with death and the devil in his mind, Nietzsche's
dream takes the form of a descent into Hades, into hell. From time immemorial men
have tried to master the unconscious—to unlock its secrets and to dominate it—using
the rusty keys of their willpower. But the unconscious has always proved singularly
impervious to such attempts at taming it: it has a life, a will of its own, and the will to
power is ineffectual against it.
Nietzsche's Abysmal Thought, his unconscious, asks a question which
Nietzsche reiterates above: "Who is carrying his own ashes up the mountain?" The
answer is: Nietzsche himself is carrying the ashes of his own burnt-out mind. And the
black coffin—both blackness and coffin symbolizing death—is again Nietzsche, out
of which issue the thousand peals of laughter, the insane laughter of Nietzsche.
(Zarathustra's disciple recognizes as much: "Are you not yourself the coffin?" he
asks.) He tries to unlock the creaky gates of his unconscious; but his unconscious is
also straining at the gates from the other side,82 and it then bursts forth with a roar,
sweeping away the thin fabric of his reason, inundating him, overwhelming him with
its contents—which is indeed what happened in the end. He became one of the
"undead:" a dead mind in a living body, an insane laughter in a coffin.

79The "Alpa" cried out three times by the dreamer may be a coinage based on Alp, the old High
German word for nightmare. Or it may be the personified bringer of the nightmare, the demon who sits
on the dreamer's chest causing evil dreams. This part of the dream is biographical: in the summer of
1877, Nietzsche related that in a dream he had to climb an endless mountain path; just below the
mountain peak, he came across a cave. Out of its dark depths, a voice called out to him: "Alpa, Alpa—
who is carrying his ashes to the mountain?" (quoted in Lampert, p. 333n82). Thus Zarathustra's dream
might be a composite.
80VPN, p. 246-7 (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Pt. 2: "The Soothsayer").
81Jung, p. 1226-29.
82It is the same gate, with his intellect on the one side and his unconscious on the other.

33
 Such a welling up of the unconscious—whether spontaneous or drug-
induced—leaves one as helpless as a small boat on stormy seas. Under these
conditions, there is only one solution: to anchor oneself solidly to the ground of this
ocean: the Ground of all Being who is also the Ground of the unconscious. God, and
God alone, can help against this merciless onslaught, and by taking refuge in God, by
fixing one's attention, centering one's thoughts, on God, 83 one can be saved from
being drowned before the storm abates. But if we have repudiated God like
Nietzsche, then there is nothing solid left to hold on to, and then there is "no exit"
from the hell of insanity: certainly Nietzsche, who considered his Zarathustra—and
therefore himself—as "a psychologist... who has no equal," 84 did not prove immune.
To the extent that we think God is dead, we partake of Nietzsche's madness,
we participate—however partially or subconsciously—in his insanity. If we wish to
avoid his fate; if we wish to avoid the precipice towards which we all are still
invisibly hurtling, we would do well to heed the following wise words:

He whose footsteps you follow in,

His destination you will reach.

83For the sake of those in dire need of help—invocation of the sacred name: "Allah."
84Quoted in Lampert, p. 38 (Ecce Homo, "Books," 5).

34
 IRRATIONAL RATIONALISM:
AN ASSESSMENT OF ATHEISM

"After Jesus as God

we shall come back to the God of Jesus."

—Henri-Frédéric Amiel

"A rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain
kinds of truth, if those kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule."

—William James

God as Supreme Mathematician

It is an unfortunate commonplace to posit that faith and reason are mutually

exclusive, as it is also one to perceive faith as something "irrational" and "illogical."
Since we live in an age that has witnessed such an increase in the pace at which
science and technology have become incorporated into our daily lives, and because
this process is so pervasive, we might be forgiven for thinking that humanity has
somehow chosen science "over faith," or even that such a choice has to be made if we
are to break the "shackles" that we imagine faith has on us; only this, it is contended,
will allow for the full liberation of human consciousness.
The price of our increasing reliance on science and technology should not and
need not be our faith in One God. Nor has it been the case for a great number of
scientists. From Kepler to Copernicus, from Newton to Einstein, many scientists
have believed in the existence and unity of One God. This shows that there is no
inherent contradiction between faith and science. The God of the scientists is not the
God of the theologians, nor that of the philosophers; He should rather be called,
perhaps, "the God of the mathematicians."85 "This grand book of nature," said
Galileo, "is written in the language of mathematics." The very act of "writing"
presupposes a hand that writes. Even Stephen Hawking, who does not seem to have
need of the God hypothesis in accounting for the universe, has noted the incredible
mathematics embedded in the structure of the cosmos, and felt compelled to remark:
"God spoke that language." 86 Why, furthermore, does mathematics work? Why does
this "unreal" mental construct correspond so grandly to the design of the universe?
As Hawking puts it, "what is it that breathes fire into the equations?" The question is
not "what" but "who," and the answer is: God.
God, who created man along with the universe, is also the prime source of
rationality, logic, and mathematics. The astounding fact that man continues to
discover reflections of his most abstract mathematical concepts in the external world
is evidence that a superior Intelligence was at work in designing the cosmos; and no
matter how far science progresses, it continues to find deeper and deeper levels of
increasingly more sophisticated mathematics coded into the structure of the universe.

85Inreality, of course, He is the same God; it is just One God being approached from the perspective
of mathematics.
86Newsweek, June 13, 1988.

35
Why should the external world conform so closely to man's interior, abstract
mathematical thinking, and was doing so long before there were even human beings
on earth, unless an immeasurable Intelligence built it into both man and the universe
in the first place? We can hardly claim that dead, inert matter possesses intelligence
of this sort; and if we did claim it, this would be tantamount to pantheism.
Science has discovered that the universe is isotropic—that the same scientific
laws hold in all regions of the universe—and so far has found no solid evidence to
contest this proposition. Moreover, mathematics is a single whole, a single edifice. If
there were no intelligent design in the universe, all would be chaos, and no
structure—including human beings to discern it—would exist; while if there were a
multiplicity of deities, different zones of the universe would have to be subject to the
different laws of different deities, and scientific laws could not be universally
applicable. The fact that the latter possibility is preposterous intuitively leads us
away from polytheism, while the fact that order exists at all in the universe, to such an
extent that even probability and so-called "chaos" have their mathematical laws,
argues for the existence of a Law-Giver. (Of course, not only order but nothing at all
could in fact exist without God; the above argument focuses only on the existence of
mathematical order in the physical universe.)
God has created everything in the universe "in due proportion;" 87 and if at
times there seem to be exceptions to this rule, it is because our mathematics has not
yet progressed to the point of being able to take them into account. As time goes by,
greater and greater parts of the universe become amenable to scientific treatment, and
at each turn we discover with amazement the incredibly complex mathematics,
hitherto unnoticed, that has gone into structuring the processes we focus on. "Look,
then look again; your gaze will return to you, dazzled and amazed." 88 Not for nothing
has it been said that "A little science leads one away from God; a great deal of it leads
one back to Him."
One of the Names of "Supreme Intelligence," as Edison called Him, is Artist.
One of His Attributes is Beauty. The great mathematician G. H. Hardy once referred
to mathematics as "abstract art," whence we are led to a connection—through
beauty—of art and mathematics. Physicist David Bohm has advanced the parallel
view that physics is a form of art. According to Nobel prize-winning physicist and
one-time CERN director, Carlo Rubbia: "Science for me is very close to art.
Scientific discovery is an irrational act. It's an intuition which turns out to be reality
at the end of it—and I see no difference between a scientist developing a marvellous
theory and an artist making a painting." 89 In an all-inclusive world view, science, art,
and mathematics cannot remain separate from each other, but must ultimately unite in
a synthesis that transcends all boundaries.

The Baby and the Bathwater

Thus we can see that—far from being mutually exclusive—science and faith
complement one another, each giving fuller expression to the other as humanity tries
to fathom the mysteries of ourselves and our world. As Albert Einstein has said:

87The Koran, 15:21.

88Ibid.,
67:4.
89 Quoted in Lewis Wolpert and Alison Richards, Passionate Minds, Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1998.

36
"Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind." Man is
constructed in such a way that faith is an essential part of his constitution. It is so
ingrained that attempts to excise faith have only led to the replacement of the hole left
behind by other "faiths" that are even more irrational than the article they were
supposed to eliminate.
Human beings have filled the niche of faith by many things in all ages. Yet
there is an essential and irreducible element that cannot and must not be eradicated,
and this is the faith in One God.
God can be neither less than, nor more than, one; hence He must be equal to
One. The former proposition is that of atheism, which sets God equal to zero. The
latter stand is that of polytheism, which holds that there is a multiplicity of "gods."
There seems, therefore, to be a kind of symmetry, even an inverse relationship,
between atheism and polytheism, and in fact the extremes of both viewpoints may
actually meet and blend into each other. Like monetary currency, inflation in the
number of "gods" leads to the devaluation of the God concept, and perhaps to its total
rejection in the end. Since atheism leaves the niche of faith in the human constitution
unoccupied, and since nature abhors a vacuum, other things rush in to fill the void.
These may be any number of things: football, money, sex, food, rock stars, Fuehrer-
figures, aliens, etc. Faith cannot be eliminated from the human constitution; it is an
irreducible part of it, and since God wishes us to "discover" Him, we must consider
the consequences of our failure to utilize this faculty. In decrying all the irrational
things perpetrated in the name of faith, we should be careful not to throw out the baby
with the bathwater.
Atheism, as an "alternative" to faith, often attempts to claim the higher ground
of rationality and freedom from "superstition." Of course, many people who profess
atheism are lucid and rational people. But, we might ask ourselves, is atheism itself
rational?

The Captain and the Riverboat

The story is related of Abou Khanifa, one of the founders of the Four Schools
of Islam, who was once visited by a group of naturalist professors in Baghdad. Their
intention was to confuse and so to heap ridicule upon him. He greeted them, and
bade them wait ten minutes while he attended to an earlier appointment in another
room. He then went into an adjoining room and began to read a book. He waited half
an hour instead of ten minutes, and then rejoined the naturalists.
"Sorry to have kept you waiting," he told them, "but the guests I had been
expecting didn't arrive, and I had to take an ablution, so I wandered down to the
Euphrates River close by to do so. There I witnessed a most amazing spectacle. I
saw a riverboat without a captain, and yet the boat was proceeding exactly as if it
were being guided by a captain, deftly maneuvering around the twists and turns of the
river. It was propagating without any guidance, and without running aground at any
point."
The professors laughed. "How can you expect us to believe that?" they
exclaimed. "A boat can't just move without a captain to guide it, and still give the
appearance of being guided."
Abou Khanifa replied: "You don't believe that a boat can be guided without a
captain. Then how can this whole universe, which is far vaster than a puny riverboat,

37
in which processes of immense complexity are going on at every moment without
fail—how can this universe be expected to proceed without a Captain?"
The professors thanked him. "We came here to make fun of you," they said,
"yet you have taught us something valuable."
This also indicates that God did not simply create the universe at the
beginning and then go off on vacation (this is the fallacy of the "Divine Watchmaker"
analogy); He actively maintains the order of the universe at every instant.
Put like this, doesn't it seem strange to suggest—as the dominant ideology of
modern thought would have us believe—that the universe somehow originated of
itself, without purpose, as a whole series of chance occurences that resulted in such a
supremely fine-tuned and uniformly designed world?

God as First Cause

The boundlessness of erroneous thinking regarding God is exceeded, perhaps,

only by the boundlessness of His creation. One of the fallacies in this respect is to
invoke God as First Cause, the moving power behind natural law. But a God who has
created the world and then left it to govern itself by natural law has walled Himself in
by barriers through which even He cannot break, and this deprives Him of the ability
to answer prayers. Such a God is too remote, too inaccessible, to be of service to
man.
Of course, in reality it is only man who creates obstacles for himself to a
proper appreciation of God by such thinking. There are at least two errors in this way
of thought. (A third has already been mentioned above, in the Watchmaker analogy.)
The first is that God is pictured as the initiator of an infinite sequence of causes and
effects, and unless the utmost care is taken, the danger exists that God will be
construed as another cause among causes. Since causes—like effects—are things
created by God, this argument reduces God to the status of a creature. This is the
same kind of mistake that occurs in the question: “If God created the universe, who
created God?” where the Creator is similarly reduced to the category of a creature—a
rather elementary logical error.
Even in the physical world, there are regions known to physics where the
ordinary laws of nature collapse. In such a “singularity,” also known as a black hole,
matter is crushed to an infinite density and the physical laws of spacetime are no
longer applicable. Surely God, as the Creator of black holes along with the rest of the
universe, can be accorded the dignity at least of a black hole by exempting Him from
the categories and laws of physical matter?
The second error in the First Cause (or Prime Mover) argument is that it
subjects God to natural law. If your God is a God of miracles and magic, He
becomes enclosed in a circle of natural law from which He cannot escape, and is
deprived of the power to interfere with the normal sequence of cause and effect.
What, however, if God is the Supreme Lawgiver who establishes the laws of the
universe in the first place? The correct way of thinking would be as follows: God
created both the material world—matter and energy—and the laws of nature
governing it. Hence, The Constrainer created constraints which rule the constrained.
These are the rules by which Infinity creates and maintains finitude. To claim that the
constraints restrict the Constrainer instead is to reverse the order of creation, to claim
that the car drives the driver.

38
 So what would be the proper way of thinking? At each instant, God upholds
the laws of nature which allow the observable universe to come into being. They are
subordinate to God, not God to them. These laws are an expression of the way in
which God has decided to manifest the universe, but they cannot be considered to be
binding upon Him.
Assuming, then, that God has adopted the laws of nature as His “style” in
creating the universe, these do not dictate a single inexorable outcome on the material
world. Newton’s Principle of Gravitation, for example, tells us that an object I throw
up will fall down, but it does not constrain me to throw a single specific object in a
single direction only; I can throw any object in any direction. Simply because they
are generalizations, the laws of science allow a wide variety of phenomena which are
bound, in each case, by a single mathematical relationship (or set of relationships).
Matter and energy possess many “degrees of freedom” that do not violate any laws of
science. To view the universe as a giant single-outcome machine (philosophical
“mechanism”) is therefore an abstraction and an oversimplification. Only the past is
settled to human knowledge, not the future.
Note that God can, in principle, intervene in the workings of the universe in a
manner that is neither miraculous nor, however, easily perceptible. God can bring
about a result entirely in conformity with natural law simply by arranging affairs in a
way that will produce the outcome He desires, without ever needing to suspend the
laws of nature at all. Omnipotence does not merely mean the power to produce
miracles, it also means the power of not needing to resort to miracles in order to
achieve a desired result. At each instant, countless things change all over the universe
which man cannot monitor simultaneously, or, even if he were able to, could not
divine the significance of. Only infinite knowledge, such as is possessed by God,
could enable man to tell exactly how God accomplished a certain outcome—where
He changed which parameters, when, and how. Any local influence can be effected
by a nonlocal interaction that, when spread over the universe, would be so minute at
any point as to be undetectable. 90 This is logically conceivable, to say the least. We
may conclude, then, that in the vast majority of cases, God brings about results
according to the “rules of the game,” without needing to suspend the laws of nature.
As for rare exceptions, they do not violate but rather prove the rule, precisely because
they are exceptions. Obviously God is not going to revoke laws that He has chosen to
His own satisfaction, except in cases where He deems it necessary.

Predestination

So what about predetermination or destiny? We infer these only in retrospect.

When we look at the past in a rear-view mirror, we find a definite history realized out
of countless possibilities. This is one of the reasons why we tend to think in terms of
a clockwork universe. Of course, in the future a definite “world line” is also going to
be realized. God will bring about a certain outcome, in which the laws of nature have
a specific role to play. But we, as human beings, cannot know what this will be until
after the event. Our only duty is to take precautions to avoid, or secure, a certain
outcome, not to discuss the metaphysical problems of predestination.

90 As physicist Henry Stapp observes: “any Heisenberg collapse of the wave function ... generally
changes expectation values all over the universe.” (H.P. Stapp, “Why Classical Mechanics Cannot
Naturally Accommodate Consciousness but Quantum Mechanics Can,” Psyche, 2 (5) (May 1995)
Appendix D.4b.)

39
 When Omar (one of the closest Companions of the Prophet, and Second
Caliph after his demise) was about to join some troops on one occasion, he received
news that a plague epidemic had broken out among them. After conferring with his
associates, Omar decided to go back rather than carry through his original intention.
Another Companion inquired: “Does this return have the meaning of escaping
the fate decreed by God?”
Omar’s reply is both admirable and unforgettable. “Yes,” said he, “escape is
indeed involved. But even as we are running away from one fate of God, we are
simultaneously moving toward another. Although we are using our individual,
fragmentary will, it is God who realizes events with His total, universal will.
Whether you allow your camel to graze at a verdant spot or lead it over rocky areas,
both happen in accordance with God’s determination.” (Emphasis added.)
This is how the Prophet’s Companions understood destiny. This is an active,
dynamic view of fate, having nothing to do with the resignation, fatalism or indolence
usually ascribed to Islam.

The Role of Chance

Some have attempted to enthrone Chance in God's rightful place. To this, the
answer is threefold:
1. Chance cannot explain the intricate workings of the universe, any more than
it could account for the successful navigation of a boat in our example given above.
It is impossible for dead, inert, passive matter to exhibit intelligent behavior or to
generate lawful action on its own. As for the so-called "self-organizing" properties of
matter, it is precisely here—as also elsewhere—that the imposition of order by God
over the universe is observed. To claim that nature imposes nonrandom, lawful
behavior on itself is to claim that it created itself, its order, and all the intelligence
embedded therein out of nothing, which is to assimilate God into matter.
2. Even random events obey the mathematical laws of probability, and where
there are scientific laws, a Law-Giver cannot be far behind. The fact that random
events can obey laws at all is so counterintuitive that mathematician John von
Neumann once called probability "black magic." 91
3. People who believe that chance can explain the workings of the universe
are not getting rid of the God concept at all. They are enthroning "Chance" in place
of "God" in their own niche of faith.
Chance is not the creator of order—it is the backdrop against which the
existence of order can be discerned, because both come into existence together.

The Baboon and the Typewriter

In this connection, the example is famously repeated of the baboon who, given
infinite time and typing randomly at a typewriter, would eventually produce all the
works of William Shakespeare. The Bard himself was no monkey, of course, and he

91In fact, randomness as a concept is itself controversial and anything but simple. There is a difference
between applying the term “random” to a sequence of numbers as opposed to a process that generates a
sequence of numbers (Mike May, American Scientist, 85 (May-June 1997) 222-3; Mark Kac, Ibid., 71
(1983) 405-6). It may be possible to simulate any finite sequence of apparently random numbers using
a deterministic process; “... any probabilistic theory ... can be replaced by a deterministic theory
yielding the same predictions.” (P.H. Eberhard, Il Nuovo Cimento, 46B (2) (1978) 401.)

40
had somewhat less than infinite time to spare in composing the original. So we
cannot assume that a work of surpassing genius is the product of chance even if we
were to accept that it might be randomly replicable in infinite time. Nor do we
assume when we look at Einstein's original articles on relativity that his equations are
random traces left by ink-daubed flies crawling across the paper. Give unto great
intelligence the credit that is its due. The same holds true of God's production of the
universe—of which Einstein's equations form but a minuscule part—only infinitely
more so.
Apart, therefore, from the obvious absurdity of such an idea, the baboon
example overlooks the facts that: 1) No baboon is everlasting, 2) No typewriter is
everlasting, 3) The experiment has not been performed, and 4) Nobody has been there
to verify the experiment.
The example thus stands exposed for the metaphysical fallacy that it really is.
As the noted biologist C. H. Waddington once observed:

To suppose that the evolution of the wonderfully adapted biological

mechanisms has depended only on a selection out of a haphazard set of
variations, each produced by blind chance, is like suggesting that if we went
on throwing bricks together into heaps, we should eventually be able to
choose ourselves the most desirable house. 92

To this I would like to add a remark of a friend of mine, a medical doctor. "I
can accept that a baboon could type the entire works of Shakespeare, given infinite
time," he said. "But that the workings of the human body, with all their incredible
complexity and marvelous intricacy, should have ever come about by chance—that,
even I cannot swallow." And he was talking only about a single human body, not the
entire universe.
Part of the problem is that atheists indulge in anthropomorphism when trying
to discredit faith—something they accuse people of faith for doing. They simply fail
to give God His due, to imagine that God has infinite intelligence and infinite power,
and are totally unable to conceive of the ways in which He creates the universe.
Instead, they posit a "Father in heaven" with a Santa Claus beard who sits above the
world (slightly above the clouds) and talks in a rumbling voice. They then say—quite
rightly—that this is a preposterous fiction.
This anthropomorphic conception of God is more akin to that of the Greeks.
Zeus was neither infinitely intelligent, nor all-powerful; though he was the director of
Olympus, he had to answer to the board of directors of a faceless corporation: the
moera (Fate). There are places where anthropomorphic thinking in relation to God
may be justified, but this is not one of them. Perhaps an influence of the classics
accounts for this unwarranted diminution of God Almighty to the status of Zeus.
Part of the mistake here is in our trying to conceive of God by taking
ourselves as the starting point. People unconsciously set themselves up in place of
God, and try to think: "If I were in God's shoes, how would I deal with things?" The
answer to this question is nearly always: "Had I been present at the creation, I would
have given some useful hints for the better ordering of the universe." 93 Indeed.
Given our finite intelligence, we shall naturally find fault with one part of creation or
other. But as psychologist Carl G. Jung remarked: "a man can know ... less about

92 Quoted in Arthur Koestler, Janus: A Summing Up, London: Picador, 1978, p. 173.
93Attributed to Alfonso X (the "Wise").

41
God than an ant can know of the contents of the British Museum." No matter how
clever one might be, our intelligence is still finite; and any finite number, no matter
how large, still gives zero when divided by infinity. Hence, no human being,
however intelligent, can approximate the infinite intelligence of God. This particular
fallacy of atheism is similar to the case of the frog in Aesop's fable who tried to
imitate a cow.

The Butter in the Milk

One objection of atheism to the existence of God is that in looking at the

farthest reaches of the universe, science can find no trace of God—only of matter
everywhere. Apparently, this flies in the face of the Omnipresence of God.
The answer to this is again provided by a story related to Abou Khanifa; this
event occurred when he was only twelve years old.
He had gone to attend a congregational Friday Prayer at the mosque, and as
usual there was a preacher delivering the Friday Sermon. The preacher had become
confused in his mind, however, so he was asking the congregation:
"They say that God is present everywhere. Yet when I look at nature, He is
nowhere to be seen. Where is He? Show Him to me."
At this, Abou Khanifa rose to his feet, and called out: "I accept your
challenge, provided that you step down from the pulpit and take off your religious
garment, for you are unfit to wear it."
The preacher became flustered at this, and tried to wave away the counter-
challenge, but the people were by this time excited, and overruled him so that Abou
Khanifa could have his say.
The child then donned the preacher's robes, which ill fitted him, climbed up to
the pulpit, and inquired: "Can anyone fetch me a glass of milk?" Someone rushed out
and fetched a glass of milk from his house nearby.
Abou Khanifa then asked the renegade preacher: "Do you see this glass of
milk?"
"Yes," said the preacher.
"And do you accept that there is butter in it?"
"Of course," said the preacher. "Everyone knows that butter is extracted from
milk."
"Very well," replied Abou Khanifa: "Show it to me."
The preacher was taken aback. "How can you expect me to show you the
butter, here and now?" he said. "The process of extraction is a lengthy and involved
process that I can't demonstrate to you at a moment's notice."
"All right," said Abou Khanifa. "The presence of God at every point in the
universe is similar to the presence of butter in this milk. But it is also incredibly
subtler. 94 The realization of this fact is given only to the fewest of the few. Now if
you were to follow the injunctions of Islam, to study the Koran, and to meditate for
many, many years, you still would not be able to realize this Presence, but perhaps
you would catch a whiff of its truth."
"God," says the Koran, "is closer to you than your jugular vein" (50:16). And,
similarly: "Whichever way you turn, there is the face of God" (2:115). God is both
transcendent (infinitely distant) and immanent (infinitely close); He is separated from

94The same analogy applies with sugar dissolved in tea, etc., similar to the example of salt dissolved in
water, provided by Svetaketu's father in Chandogya Upanishad.

42
every point in the universe by only an epsilon (the mathematical term for
infinitesimal distances), yet this is sufficient to make all the difference, and to remove
Him from the realm of physical observability.

Modern Physics

In the nineteenth century, physics was characterized by a materialistic and

deterministic view. Iron laws drove blind, inanimate matter relentlessly on, with no
concern for human existence. The factories of the Industrial Revolution became, in a
sense, the prototype on which the scientific paradigm was based. There was no place
for God, for mercy, or for the human soul.
Today, as we approach the end of the twentieth century, we find scientists
much more willing to entertain the God concept. Cullen Murphy of The Atlantic
Monthly notes that "those working in the hard sciences, especially physics, [are] the
people in academe most open to discussing seriously the question of the existence of
God. ... With each new advance in our understanding of how the universe came to
be—with each new advance in our understanding of how the subatomic world is
ordered—we seem only to deepen the mystery of existence, even as the architecture
of physical reality is cause for dizzying wonder." 95
In his Physics and Beyond (1971), quantum physicist Werner Heisenberg
relates how he and Niels Bohr (the co-founder of the "Copenhagen School" of
interpretation of quantum mechanics) agreed that there is nothing in quantum physics
to explain life and consciousness. This view has been shared by other eminent
physicists such as Erwin Schrödinger. Recently, mathematician-philosopher David
Chalmers has reached the conclusion that "consciousness is a nonphysical feature of
the world", on the grounds that "the physical structure of the world—the exact
distribution of particles, fields, and forces in spacetime—is logically consistent with
the absence of consciousness, so the presence of consciousness is a further fact about
our world." 96 The author of The Conscious Mind (1996), Chalmers is known for what
he calls the "hard problem" of consciousness: why consciousness arises from a
physical process.
In fact, consciousness inexorably comes in as soon as we consider the
fundamental descriptor of reality in quantum physics, the state vector (or wave
function). This is not the place to go into an involved discussion of this subject.
Suffice it to say that the state vector describes the probabilities of the states in which a
given physical system is to be found. It evolves deterministically as an ensemble of
probabilities, until it "collapses" stochastically and only one probability is actualized.
So what causes this "reduction" of the wave function, this collapse of the state
vector? In a brief, inexhaustive survey of the recent literature, I have come across the
following suggestions. Besides consciousness, state vector reduction is variously
ascribed to: 1) gravity, 2) heat, 3) human speech, 4) symbols, 5) the environment
(which is perhaps all-inclusive). 97 No doubt there are others that I have missed.

95 “Religion and the Cultural Elite” (Lecture given at Saint Ambrose University, April 7, 1994).
96New York Review of Books, May 15, 1997. For a more detailed treatment, see e.g. David J.
Chalmers, "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness," Journal of Consciousness Studies 2 (3),
1995, pp. 200-219.
97An alternative is to deny that the state vector is reduced at all, and to assert that all the possibilities
represented by the state vector are actualized in parallel universes. First proposed by Hugh Everett III,
this is known as the EWG (Everett-Wheeler-Graham) interpretation of quantum mechanics. In this

43
 What this reveals, in my humble opinion, is the diversity prevailing in the
field. If something causes the state vector reduction R, obviously it somehow has to
have a status of higher priority than that which is reduced. But in the physical realm,
we have no basis for supposing that any physical object or process has higher priority
than another. More to the point, are not all the supposed causes 1-5 themselves in
need of R? How else can we know of them? Can any of these causes reduce their
own state vectors also? Can a knife cut itself? How can anything which stands in
need of R supply anything else with that which it, itself, stands in need of? This is in
fact nothing else but the metaphysical presupposition, operative ever since we
discarded the God hypothesis, that the world can actually pull itself into existence by
its own bootstraps. 98 I'll believe that when a stone manages to remain suspended in
mid-air by its own efforts. 99
But what causes the collapse of the state vector? Suppose it is brought about
by the measurement performed by a measuring device. But the original system then
becomes part of a larger system, composed of itself plus the measuring device, so we
need a second measuring device to measure the new system; and so on ad infinitum.
The "measurement problem" in quantum mechanics leads to what is known as "von
Neumann's catastrophe of infinite regression" and, as physicist Eugene P. Wigner has
observed, cannot be finally resolved without reference to consciousness, 'where the
buck stops.'
Now consciousness is not the only available explanation or interpretation of
quantum mechanics. But it is a valid one, and the other interpretations pass over the
existence of consciousness in silence. Using "Occam's razor" in the interests of
parsimony to excise consciousness, our most fundamental experience as human
beings, from the picture, is to amputate reality and then call the resulting reduction
"complete." Furthermore, much has been made in recent years of the mysterious
aspects of consciousness and quantum physics by irresponsible persons, leading one
skeptic to decry "quantum quackery."
Yet there is one aspect of the issue of utmost gravity. As physicist Paul C.W.
Davies has argued in The Ghost in the Atom (1991), "Wigner's enigma" forces a
choice between God and solipsism. If we claim, as science does, that an external
reality exists independently of human beings, we have no recourse but to accept that
it exists in the universal consciousness of God. As one famous philosopher used to
say, the sound of a tree falling in a forest with no human beings around is heard—by
God.
The only other alternative is to accept that the reduction of the wave function
is brought about by the consciousness of the scientist doing the measurement, that his
consciousness "creates reality." (Einstein is said to have remarked that according to
the Copenhagen interpretation, a mouse could collapse the wave function of the
universe.) But in that case, reality becomes totally subjective. And what about all the
rest of reality which the scientist does not measure or perceive, but that we know
exists? The only way to save the independent, objective reality of the external world
is to accept that the state vector takes on a definite value in the consciousness of God.
Hence the only healthy alternative to the scientifically unpalatable position of
solipsism is to accept—the existence of God.

view, the “multiverse” splits into myriads of universes each instant, but these remain forever beyond
our access and are thus not subject to experimental verification. David Bohm’s real quantum field
approach also excludes the reduction of the state vector.
98No reference to Geoffrey Chew’s bootstrap theory.
99 Excluding antigravity.

44
Mind and Spirit

It is now three and a half centuries since Descartes asked two simple
questions: Are minds and bodies distinct? And if so, how do they interact? After
more than three hundred years of the most intensive interrogation of nature ever
performed by man, Descartes' two questions are still waiting for the answers. We
have made great headway in discovering the material world, but we come up against
a brick wall as soon as the subject of mind is broached (ignoring for a moment the
difficulties involved in its definition).
The French word l'esprit means both "mind" and "spirit." It is not clear which
one Descartes intended when he divided existence into two fundamental elements, res
cogitans (mind/spirit) and res extensa (matter), but it is clear that "spirit" went under
the surface of discussion like a sinking subduction zone, and we have been stuck with
"mind" ever since, which is something entirely different. In turn, attempts have been
made to reduce mind to speech, to electrochemical activity in the brain—anything, so
long as its independent existence can be escaped.
If you can't reduce mind to matter, the next best tactic is to deny that the
problem exists. But the sad fact is that subjective experience—what you see when
you look inside yourself—is still there whether you deny the problem or not. What
nobody has been able to explain after three hundred years of the most merciless
questioning by the most intelligent minds of our species is how, exactly—assuming
that matter is more fundamental than mind (or even assuming it's not)—a bunch of
electrons bouncing around in your brain gets translated into the consciousness of the
scent of a rose. Neurobiologists have been able, and will continue, to discover many
things about the workings of the brain. They have traced the signals leading from the
sense organs into the brain, the specific regions where they are processed, all the
intricate detail down perhaps even to molecular level. Where they have drawn a
complete blank, where all attempts at progress have met with utter failure, is where
the marvelous hardware of the brain somehow gets converted into conscious
experience.
Now, in another three hundred years the problem may be solved. Or in three
thousand. Or in fifty thousand. Someone may even come up with a solution
tomorrow. But until that day arrives, three hundred years of painstaking research plus
common sense tells me that we may be looking for the pot of gold at the end of the
rainbow. We may be on a wild-goose chase. That is why Descartes and other
philosophers are still with us. The best thing is to admit two distinct, experiential,
existential realms to man, an internal and an external, both equally real, both created
by God 100—and carry on from there, until such a time as our knowledge permits a
satisfactory answer. At length, one gets tired of all the people pretending to know
this answer when they don't.
As John Searle's recent analysis implies, one can accept the existence of the
objective world without denying the ontological irreducibility of the subjective
world. 101 Like the wave-particle duality in quantum physics, consciousness—with

100 Note that this is neither materialism, which reduces mind to matter, nor idealism, which reduces
matter to mind, but realism, which accords equal reality to both (mind being a subset of the more
general concept of spirit).
101 John Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992, p. 28, 93-94.

45
the mind as a subset—and matter can be viewed as complementary aspects of a single
whole. 102
In The Mystery of the Mind (1975), neurologist Wilder Penfield told how his
surgical findings forced him toward a hypothesis of a mind as distinct from the brain,
with energies different from the brain's. That hypothesis is still with us, and—
distasteful as this might be to some people—it seems destined to remain with us for a
long time to come.
Contrary to mind and spirit, memory is at least something to which few people
would deny existence. Now listen to neurobiologist Steven Rose, who has studied
memory for the past 30 years: "It is impossible to ask where in the brain a particular
memory is located... Memory resides simultaneously everywhere and nowhere in the
brain." 103 Surely, then, it would not be entirely amiss to conceive of mind and spirit
in similar terms?

The Mind/Brain Problem

Some people have difficulty imagining why, if mind and matter are
independent and hence the mind is independent of the brain, malfunctions of the brain
have such a decisive influence on mental acumen. The answer is that the brain may
be viewed as a transducer which acts as a two-way interface between the
mental/spiritual and the material realms.
Any physiological disturbance in the brain, then, will be naturally reflected
onto mental activity. Think of the mind in terms of electromagnetic waves
transmitted from a remote radio or TV station. The brain would then be comparable
to a local receiver. Now any hardware error in the receiver will obviously affect
reception, even though the electromagnetic waves themselves are not produced by the
receiver and thus remain unimpaired.
But the brain is not just a one-way transducer that relates the mind to the
external world; it also interfaces for sensory input and relays it to the mind. Hence,
consider the simile of a computer, which accepts data as input and outputs the results
of its calculations. The computer is composed of two distinct but well-matched parts:
hardware and software. Now any problem with the input circuits of the hardware will
lead to the incorrect reading of data from the external world, and even if the software
is fine, it cannot help producing erroneous results on the basis of ill-conditioned
input.
It should be emphasized that these similes are intended as analogies only. It is
not being suggested that the brain is—or is equivalent to—hardware and the mind to
software, for instance, but that within the limits of applicability of the analogy, the
brain and the mind may act in ways similar to the hardware and software,
respectively, of a computer.

Mysticism

102 The analogy does not apply in the sense that the same thing (unless this be the divine unity) would
not manifest itself sometimes as mind and sometimes as matter, whereas a photon, for instance,
manifests itself alternatively as either a wave or a particle.
103 Time, May 5, 1997, p. 40.

46
 Mystical experience lies at the root of religion; it is the hub that unites the
spokes of the various faiths. A complicating factor is that, according to the level of
their experience, not all mystics agree upon the same things; yet when all is said and
done, "the consensus of testimonies is too unanimous to be rejected" (Marechal). Its
experiential nature places it at the edge—potentially beyond the ken—of reason.
However, it must be stressed that "the peace that passes understanding" is not built on
any antithesis to reason. It is only that another God-given human faculty takes over.
It would be absurd to suggest that this means the rational mind is being abandoned.
On the contrary, what true mystical "revelation" involves is the furthest possible
development of human consciousness. In this context, "faith" is a kind of tool—a
vehicle for "proximity" to God. 104
As a matter of fact, the way of the mystic has much in common with the way
of the scientist. The scientist frames a hypothesis from his data and then sets out to
test it. While he is entertaining this hypothesis, the scientist necessarily has some sort
of "faith" in the hypothesis, at least to the extent of deeming it worthy of verification.
The mystic, too, is an empiricist, and he has to start with a set of "hypotheses" and an
experimental procedure in order to verify the working of spiritual "laws" within
himself. This suggests that just as there are laws that cover our knowledge of the
external world, there similarly are laws that apply to the internal world of man that
are not person- or culture-specific. But if you do not accept that America exists, then
there is no need even to set out on the voyage to discover it. It is in this sense that
faith is necessary for most forms of mysticism. As a famous Sufi remarked: "Not all
who seek God find Him, but those who find Him are only those who seek."
One of the forerunners of modern science, Roger Bacon, was both a mystic
and a scientist. His theory was that all certain knowledge is experimental, but
experiment is of two kinds: that performed on external nature, and experimental work
within oneself through a spiritual discipline, leading ultimately to the vision of
God. 105 If only Bacon's insight had not been lost, we might have been spared the
predicament we now find ourselves in.
The defense of reason to the exclusion of everything else is intimately bound
up with the way in which the concept of the intellect has evolved in Western classical
thought. Indeed, the concept of the intellect in non-Christian traditions is a rich one
that is not based on the simple dichotomy between reason and unreason. The Heart in
Sufism, for example, is the "seat of the Intellect"—its fundamental support. 106 The
reason-based critique of mysticism is often centered on the Western conception of
God, which therefore inherits any weaknesses this model may have. If the project is
to establish reason—as this word is ordinarily used—at the peak of human
consciousness, then we are also denying man the realization of his full potentials,
including such fields as art and ethics.
A further complication is that the word "mysticism" is generally poorly
understood, and is often taken as a blanket term to cover all kinds of foggy-
headedness. The nature, or ineffability, of mystical experience lends itself to
confusion, giving its detractors a field day.

104It is precisely this relationship of proximity through faith to the Lord of The Worlds, He who is
without beginning and without end, beyond all our conceptions of Him, that constitutes "mysticism."
105 A.E. Taylor, European Civilization, quoted in Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Man and Nature (London
1968), p. 113n66. Roger Bacon should not be confused with Francis Bacon, who may be considered
the father of reductionist science.
106A useful explanation of the "Heart" and the "Intellect" and the relationship between them may be
found in William Stoddart, Sufism (New York: Paragon House, 1985).

47
 One approach to discrediting religion is to strike at its root by "demystifying"
mystical experience, the heart of all religion. Since there are many obstacles to a
proper understanding of mysticism already, the recipe is to mix it with a lot of
scientific words we are more familiar with, and shake well. When the concept of
"mysticism" has been jostled around in the mind in this way for a suitable period, it is
assumed to be "understood," i.e., broken down into smaller parts capable of digestion
by the mind. The next step is to dismiss it as being of little or no value, or of interest
only as a clinical case of psychopathology or neurological disorder—whereas it
remains as little understood as ever.
All verbal communication presupposes shared experience. If you have not
eaten buttum, for example, no amount of verbal description is going to tell you what it
tastes like. You know this when, and only when, you have tasted it. Similarly, no
amount of verbal description is going to tell a person who has not had the experience
what a mystical experience is. He is going to regard the descriptions given by
mystics as incomprehensible, paradoxical, or worse, whereas many such descriptions
are lucid and serve as signposts for those who know what it is all about.
Concerning the view of mysticism as a neurobiological disorder, this all
hinges on what we regard as "abnormality." If we take the statistical average of
human beings' EEGs as a norm, then anything that deviates from this will seem
"abnormal." But this will include not only the psychotic, but also Einstein; not only
the subnormal, but also the supernormal. Are we then to accord the same place to an
Einstein as we do to a psychotic? Obviously there are differences between the brain
functions of an Einstein and an ordinary human being—otherwise, we would all be
Einsteins.
Now the brain functions of a mystic will presumably also be different. Are
we to conclude from this that he is mad, or a neuropath? We know that human beings
ordinarily utilize only 2 or 3 percent of the capacity of their brains. Assume that an
Einstein uses, say, 10 percent. The brain of a truly "awakened" mystic may utilize a
greater percentage, or its structure and processes may be ordered differently. Since
the spirit is coupled to the body and to the brain, his experiences in the spiritual world
may possibly leave a trace, a "footprint," in his EEG. Are we to think of this as a
mere artifact or an evidence of "abnormality"? In a similar way, 95 percent of the
human DNA has been relegated to the status of "junk DNA," since scientists have not
yet been able to figure out what it is there for. It is only recently that studies have
indicated that this "junk DNA" may be structured like a language—i.e., that it is not
randomly coded. 107
The problem with the reductionist view is that it assumes, without
justification, that our present knowledge constitutes all there is to be known about the
universe; it presumes our omniscience at present. So did 19th century physics.
Towards the end of the 19th century, physicists thought that all there was to know had
already been discovered, and that there remained only a few odds and ends to tidy up.
Today we know how wrong they were. Shall we fall into the same trap? Then
science itself should have come to an end—an outcome not visible anywhere. Where
our minds cannot reach, it would be better to confess ignorance—or at least,
agnosticism—and gracefully withdraw.
The truth is that those who wish to reduce mysticism to a naturalistic
explanation know nothing whatever about mysticism, and it is questionable how well
they know "nature" itself, since the mystic is himself a part of it. As Frits Staal once

107Science, 266 (1994) p. 1320.

48
remarked, "the study of Yoga and of mysticism generally, through EEG, ECG and
similar methods, is like studying art through the films of the eye movements of art
viewers."
Even supposing that the mystic represents an example of a "supernormal"
individual, and that something is to be gained from studying his brain functions, our
problems will still be far from solved. Where are we going to find such a person?
What generally passes for "mysticism" is such a watered-down version, such a
travesty, of the real thing that finding a true "mystic" is like searching for a needle in
a haystack. True mystics are few and far between. Perhaps the scientific study of a
true mystic would indeed yield fruitful results—if only we were able to find one.
Even granting that we did, would you harness a contemporary Jesus or Buddha to
recording equipment in order to measure his blood pressure and metabolism, or
would you prefer to learn something from him instead?

Practical versus Obsessive

The examples discussed in the preceding sections show how faith in God rests
upon inherently rational processes of thought and reflection. This, in turn, shows that
we must look elsewhere if we wish to understand the claims of atheism, for if the
criterion is rationality, there is nothing in these examples to violate it.
There are many shades of atheism, but for our present purposes we can
distinguish between two kinds: practical ("weak") atheism and obsessive ("strong")
atheism.
Practical atheism is by far the most widespread in our day. In fact, it is not so
much atheism as secularism; people are only concerned with their daily lives and
activities, and do not devote much thought to the existence or otherwise of God.
They are preoccupied with worldly affairs, and with the match they are going to
watch on TV next Sunday. This is the milder form of atheism: you might even say it
is a form of unconscious slumber. 108 If you question people who subscribe to it—
trying to awaken them, as it were—you will most likely discover that their position is
more akin to agnosticism than to atheism. With them, it is not a deeply emotional
commitment to deny or oppose God, and you may even find that somewhere deep
down they harbor a faith in God, albeit an obscure and dormant one.
Very different is the case of compulsive atheism. Here, a person will
strenuously deny God and, no matter how hard you try, you will not be able to
convince that individual about God.
Whenever a person, in denying God, insists on rationality to the point of being
irrational, we might ask ourselves why an individual should have vehement
arguments against His existence. A famous historical example is Nietzsche, whose
father—a parson—died when he was an infant, and who grew up in the stifling
religious atmosphere of his grandmother and sisters. He reacted, and spent the rest of
his life trying to heal the wounds. Another type of case occurs when a man looks up
to his men of religion, only to discover that they do not practice what they preach.
This points to an important aspect of the atheist project: that many atheists
may, without realizing it, be emotionally rather than rationally driven. It also
indicates that religious instruction should be gentle rather than forced. The use of

108Thisa common metaphor in much religious literature. As the Prophet observed: "Men are asleep
and when they die, they wake up."

49
force should never be attempted in such a delicate matter involving one's innermost
values and emotions. "There [must be] no compulsion in religion." 109
This is not to say that all the arguments of hard-core atheists are irrational, or
wrong. Some of their conclusions are to the point, even extremely so. You will find
among their number, for instance, those who earnestly took up New Age mysticism
and meditation, and brought disaster upon themselves. The profusion of "methods"
and fake gurus virtually ensures that many people who start out with high hopes often
end in bitterness and disappointment. Moreover, we must realize that they are being
sold short, accepting counterfeit for the real thing. There are many more fakes than
real masters around, and without a truly enlightened master the Quest is practically
hopeless, not to say dangerous. Further, enlightenment is a two-way process. It
would not do to blame only the master while exonerating the disciple. Your local TV
station may be transmitting fine, but if your TV set is broken, how can you blame the
station for your lack of reception?
Those who have come a cropper or become otherwise disillusioned by the
results of their quest sometimes fall back upon materialism, naturalism or rationalism
as their savior. Their atheism may even be geared to altruistic purposes, since they
wish to spare others from experiencing the devastation they have regrettably gone
through.
Hence, in such cases a return to materialism and naturalism acts as a safeguard
against the ruin—even the death—of the ego. It represents a regression into everyday
life from the dangers of self-improvement. The purpose is to protect the ego from
shattering and dissolution.
Another objection of atheists is that religion can only lead to human strife.
But what true religion—or what true understanding of a religion—ever counseled:
"Thou shalt kill" instead of "Thou shalt not"? The heart of all true religion is love,
kindness, compassion, and charity—exactly those things which the skeptics take the
New Age philosophies to task for. All the wicked things that continue to be done in
the name of religions have been perpetrated not because of the truth they contain, but
in spite of it—in flagrant contradiction to their tenets. And just imagine: if religion
had not provided such damping as may be observed, how much worse things might
people not have inflicted on each other? The point is not to throw away faith by
appealing to the "higher moral ground," since the faith under discussion is often
misunderstood. Put quite simply, no true person of faith could support the things that
many purport to do—or others attribute to them—"in the name of God."
To all the rationalists who lament the rise of irrationalism and the pseudo-
spirituality oozing out of the woodwork, we would say: "We're on your side. We're
all for rationality. Faith is an ineradicable component of human nature." What these
often sad cases demonstrate is not the "death of faith," but its refusal to go away.
They are acts committed by those left with little of real intelligent value to stand
upon—and again it must be stressed that this is often the fault of those who purport to
represent the faithful, themselves victims of the unnessesary and incorrect dichotomy
of "faith" and "reason." We must realize that it is precisely because we lack a
rational faith in God and a rational spirituality that the spiritual urge in man is
deflected, becomes thwarted, distorted and destructive, and results in death cults, cult
suicides, and the whole gamut of wild superstition. 110

109The Koran, 2:256.

110It is no coincidence that in Europe, where atheism is more prevalent than in the USA, there are
1,300 cults—three times the number in the United States. Japan, a highly secular country with no
tradition of monotheism, likewise sports hundreds of new cults. (Newsweek, April 14, 1997, p. 19.)

50
 Two common pitfalls should be avoided in any endeavor to separate the wheat
from the chaff. The first is to lump religions, paranormal phenomena, magic, UFOs,
astrology, superstition, etc. in one common package and chuck them all out the
window. In this way, the most valuable is degraded to the same status as the
worthless, precluding any salvation from our predicament.
The second pitfall is to treat all religions on the same par as each other, to
accord the same treatment to Taoism, say, as to the cargo cults of South America.
Though all religions may look the same to the untrained eye, religious relativism is a
serious error. Religions can be arranged in a spectrum ranging from the most
primitive to the most sophisticated. Our choice should logically be the most
advanced, the most edifying, among these. There is nothing in the concept of One
God that contradicts logic or rationality, although other hypotheses grafted onto this
concept may or may not be rational.

Naturalism

One problem with naturalism arises from the definition of the word "nature."
Once you define "nature" as meaning the material world only, anything other than the
physical automatically becomes "supernatural." But in reality, nature comprises both
the material and the spiritual worlds, each with its own indigeneous laws. The
Enlightenment era, for instance, understood "nature" not as the existence of physical
things but as the origin and foundation of truths. It did not oppose the "material" to
the "spiritual;" the term included not only the physical world but also the intellectual
and moral worlds. The fact that the laws of the spiritual world are unknown is
because we have for centuries never bothered to study them in the first place. If I live
in a two-room flat, always remaining in one and never stepping into the other, and
persistently denying that the adjacent room even exists, naturally I am going to know
next to nothing about it. As to the fact that the spiritual world does not show up in
our measurements: have you ever tried to measure electricity with a ruler? Or the
intensity of light by a clock? Everything should be investigated using tools
appropriate to it.

Cosmicizing the World

Mircea Eliade, the historian of comparative religion, has drawn attention to

the fact that all peoples "cosmicize" their world; i.e., they render it intelligible by the
use of religion or explanatory myths. The domain they are able to explain becomes
"cosmos"; what lies beyond is, to them, chaos, a domain to be feared and shunned.
In a similar way, the adherent of compulsive atheism has "cosmicized" his
world, and is trying to protect that hard-won intelligibility. In this he is no different
from the religiously-minded peoples of the world, who try to protect their "cosmos"
from disintegrating into "chaos." In fact, the case can be made for atheism as a
religion, or more precisely as a pseudo-religion, in that a system of beliefs is built up
and steadfastly adhered to.111 The belief that God does not exist is as much a belief
(however incorrect) as the belief that God exists.

111 A leading proponent of evolutionary psychology, for instance, has written: “The theory of natural
selection is so elegant and powerful as to inspire a kind of faith in it—not blind faith, really ... But

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 The irony is that all this is done in the name of reason. But as Bryan S. Turner
argues in his introduction to Theories of Modernity and Postmodernity (1990),
rationalization can make the world neat and safe, but it cannot render it meaningful.
Turner draws attention to the "erosion of meaning" and rise of mediocrity that
accompanies modernization, leading in the end to a world controlled by heartless and
soulless people. Earlier in the century, Max Weber had proclaimed the
"disenchantment of the world" (entzauberung), the result of which is life in an "iron
cage." The reduction of the world and man to entities measurable only in the
dimension of reason is like disabling the picture circuits of a TV set and listening to
its sound reception alone. Rationalization may "cosmicize" the world for the atheist,
but at the price of a significant loss of meaning. Both the world and the atheist are
the poorer for it. Instead of enriching and liberating man, modernity and
postmodernity drown him in material toys, while impoverishing him by excising his
higher faculties—of which reason is merely the first step—beyond hope of recovery.

Philosophy

Although there is such a thing as "religious philosophy" and perhaps even

"philosophical religion," we have to understand that philosophy and religion—like
philosophy and science—are two different things, especially as philosophy is defined
and understood in our present day. The emphasis in philosophy is on mind, on the
intellect, and the abstract understanding of the world we live in. Religion is about
faith, love, spirituality and—above all—experiencing, although it too does not—and
cannot—leave out the intellect.
While it is all right to philosophize about religion, therefore, it should also be
understood that beyond a certain point, philosophy is an inadequate tool for dealing
with religion. The problems begin when philosophy is used to delve into religion
beyond that point—for instance, when it is used to replace the experience itself with a
map of that experience. Florida may be a beautiful place, but a map of Florida is a
poor substitute for being there. 112
The employment of philosophy in the service of atheism is roughly as follows.
With its emphasis on language itself, (often high-sounding) terms are used to describe
phenomena in a wholly "rational" manner, thereby subjecting to reduction that which
may not yield itself to this tool. This necessarily—when discussing a subject as
multi-dimensional as faith—tends toward obscurity, not to say irrelevance. As
Bernard Shaw remarked: "when the religion of the high mind is offered to the lower
mind, the lower mind, ... being incapable of rising to it, drags it down to its level by
degrading it." This is no less true for the opponents of religion than for its adherents.
Now, to give the atheistic viewpoint the benefit of the doubt, it is true that
genius may find itself unable at times to express its thoughts clearly to lesser minds.
But at other times, the impression is left that a deliberate obfuscation is involved to
mask the fact that the author is as much at sea as we are, since our subject does not
lend itself to such treatment and what can be said about it ought to be expressed

faith nonetheless ... I must admit to having reached this point.” (Quoted in Stephen Jay Gould,
“Evolution: the Pleasures of Pluralism,” New York Review of Books, June 26, 1997.) Albert Camus
relates in The Rebel (1951) that according to the 19th-century Russian intellectual Pisarev, since
Darwin was right, Lamarck had to be a traitor.
112In connection with mysticism, perhaps the best source is Walter T. Stace, Mysticism and Philosophy
(London: Macmillan, 1960).

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clearly and simply. Thus a child may be needed to advertise the fact that the emperor
is wearing no clothes. Exactly as in magic, the "incantation" of sufficient "power-
words" is supposed to ward off opposing "spirits" and cow the populace into
submission. It is almost like a ritual of exorcism which, if successful, leaves the
protagonist's "cosmicization" safe. In such cases, some proponents of atheism are
akin to stage magicians who weave a web of illusion about our eyes—a web to which,
unfortunately, they themselves have more likely than not fallen victim.

Beyond Contradiction

The universe accommodates many seeming contradictions. Moreover, it is

part of God's plan that atheists and the Faithful should exist side by side; 113 the world
is big enough for them both (although Heaven isn't). The proponents of die-hard
atheism should realize that their beliefs are neither as "rational" as they may assert,
nor do they have a monopoly on rationality per se. Had God wished, He could have
made His existence undeniably clear to everyone, in which case the question of faith
would not have arisen at all. God, however, has given us freedom of belief; He wants
us to have faith out of our own free will.
The most fundamental deficiency of atheism is the poverty of its vision. The
ramifications of this are not restricted to the logic games of philosophical discussion
held in the backrooms of colleges or obscure quarters of the Internet—they may be
seen in every aspect of our lives. This is not to say that such endeavors do not have
their place; it is just that ultimately, what matters is how people live and the quality of
their lives—and the quality of their deaths. To this end, we need to question both the
principles by which people are guided, and the likely outcome of their strivings.
It does not require great intelligence to see that man's scientific and material
progress has not been supplemented by an equal amount of moral and spiritual
progress. On the contrary, the gaping hole of faith has led to the deterioration, rather
than the improvement, of our moral life. But only by the application of moral
principles, which faith provides and science doesn't, can we continue to enjoy our
material blessings. Otherwise the edifice will topple, sooner or later. Sustainable
material progress is dependent on moral and spiritual progress.
As has been argued above, "reason" is not the tool that secures the atheist
project against faith, it is a faculty common to us all; in many ways it defines man.
For our fullest development, therefore, we need a true fusion of the benefits of
science and technology with a clear and pristine faith in One God—a fusion that
uplifts and develops the spirit as well as the mind. Such understanding is built upon
ethical action, upon reflection and contemplation, alongside the classical tools of
research and experiment; where the natural world is a point of departure for us, rather
than a limit to our understanding. It is not for nothing that all the great religious texts
call us to examine the world as "sign"; as the proverbial finger pointing to the moon.
Why then confine yourself to the "finger"?
"In the creation of the heavens and the earth; in the alternation of night and
day; in the sailing of ships through the ocean for the profit of mankind; in the rain
which God sends down from the skies, and the life which He gives therewith to an

113"If thy Lord had so willed, He could have made mankind one People" (11:118).

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earth that is dead; in the beasts of all kinds that He scatters throughout the earth; in
the change of the winds and the clouds which they trail [are] Signs for a people that
are wise." 114
We have to transcend the seeming contradiction between faith and reason, to
reach out to something that lies beyond both. Only a "sacred marriage" between faith
and reason will yield that result. We need a knowledge that nourishes, that heals—
and makes us wise. 115 Reason and information are fine, but insufficient by
themselves; what we must not relinquish is wisdom, our birthright as human beings
and our passport to survival.

EINSTEIN ON GOD

"The Lord God may be subtle, But He is not malicious."

—Albert Einstein

The Proof of the Proofreader

There can be no Sufism without the concept of God, whose natural laws
operate throughout the universe, and who has issued a special, additional law for
human use. A little contemplation is enough to show that chance alone cannot
explain everything, and it is only through the utmost squirming that we can manage to
avoid the concept of God. Even scientists rejecting organized religion have found it
difficult to dispense with this concept, because God is greater than all religions—
greater, indeed, than the universe. On the basis of examples available to him, Edison
thought that "Religion is bunk;" yet he also believed in the existence of a "Supreme
Intelligence."
Why does Edison use this term? Because in the artwork of the universe can
be discerned the unique signature of a master mathematician, a surpassing
intelligence, a peerless artist, a Great Architect.
Take the human body. It contains ten trillion cells. Each cell contains a
strand of DNA six feet long. This means that several billion miles of DNA are
packed into your humble frame, defining and regulating every biological
characteristic. Who except a sublime engineer could have planned this amazing
structure? And if even the discoveries of science cannot inspire awe and admiration
in us for the handiwork of God, what can?
Of all people, the proofreader and the software debugger are the two who are
in the best position to know how hellishly difficult it is to print a typo-free book or
write error-free software. No matter how many times you check it out painstakingly,
a comma or character can always slip by your attention. Some years back, when the
Strategic Defense Initiative was being discussed, one of the objections raised against
it was the well-nigh impossibility of writing ten million lines of error-free code. Yet
in living systems, beginning with our very own body, we are faced with billions of
miles of "software" correctly encoding every physical trait, thanks to the flawless
operation of which you are enabled to read this sentence at this very moment.

114The Koran, 2:164.

115In the words of Seyyed Hossein Nasr, “gnosis or illuminative knowledge... is at once the source and
meeting ground of both faith and reason”, where gnosis is defined as “unitive knowledge which saves
and illumines and is inseparable from love...” Nasr, p. 56; 77n11.

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 Similarly, any proofreader can tell you that small errors can escape the most
careful scrutiny, even if the book is a short pamphlet. Now suppose someone comes
up to you and says: "Here, I've found several errors in your book. This proves that
every letter, every word, was selected randomly, by the toss of a coin. Zillions of its
less perfect prototypes were weeded out by a process of selection, and what we now
have is the final product."
If you are the author or proofreader of that book, you will rise up in
indignation and protest: "No! A great deal of effort went into that book. Every word
was carefully thought up, the flow of ideas carefully thought through, and everything
was placed in order to the best of my ability. You have no idea of the sleepless nights
I spent, the mental strain I went through. If there are still any errors, that does not
prove that the book was produced by a random or haphazard process, it means that
chance played a role in the mistakes I missed." You may even take the person's
misattribution as an insult to your intelligence. Chance has indeed played a role, but
not in the design, writing, typesetting, or proofreading of the book; it is in whatever
errors remain that it has had its say. Whatever has been overlooked may or may not
end up correct—more likely not, given the span of its sample space (i.e., since it can
go wrong in so many ways).
Now God's position is similar to the example of writing a book. Galileo
called it "the grand book of nature." Here is this stupendous cosmos, more
comparable to a vast library than a single book, brimming with wonders that we are
still continuing to discover thanks to science, and someone comes along and attributes
it all to chance. This does not erase order from the universe. It merely means that
person has decided to elevate chance to the status of God, or to call Him by that
name.
Furthermore, to err is human, and naturally there is bound to be some error,
however negligible, in all human affairs. But "there is nothing contingent in the work
of an Infinite Mind." When you are talking about the Supreme Scientist, the Supreme
Engineer, you would do well to allow for the possibility that the supposed flaw you
perceive has actually been built into the design for reasons totally obscure to lesser
minds. Omniscience is likely to do things a little differently from us pedestrians.

Cosmic Hyperlinks

It is well-known that in mystical states of consciousness, the cosmos is

revealed in all its splendor of infinite interrelatedness. The loftiest Buddhist texts, for
example, speak of "mutual interpenetration," and Sufism would elaborate this by
stating that all things are linked in an infinitely multiply connected way. This is a
natural implication of the concept of “One” (Sufism) or “Not-two” (Vedanta).
Try to conceive of this in terms of the recent concept of "hypertext." In this
form of text, impossible of realization before the age of computers and the Internet, a
text string can "jump" to another information source via a hyperlink. It does not
matter where this other source is located—the hypertext could be in Switzerland and
its connection in Japan, for instance. Yet we can access the latter as easily as we do
the former by clicking on the link, without even realizing that it may be on a server at
a globally remote location.
The idea is, then, that any supposed "flaws" in the structure of the universe
are actually links—pointers—to other locations where they are completed. Suppose,
for instance, that somewhere in nature a geometric series occurs: e.g., 1, 2, 4, 8, 16,

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64 ... The alert reader will have noticed that 32 is missing from the sequence. The
vision of the mystics in general and the Sufis in particular allows us to conjecture that
the "missing link," 32, actually exists elsewhere in some context in the spacetime
continuum—if the series is in front of you, the missing "hyperlink" may be
manifested in Cuba, for instance, as a result of the stupendous order built into the
universe. The problem is that we would not know where to look for the connection,
this being a task which calls for the capabilities of an Infinite Mind. As time goes on,
however, humanity may, perhaps, be able to dimly discern a small part of this
hypercomplexity. (Could this have anything to do with cosmic strings?)
According to this conception, apparent "flaws" are not defects at all, but
hyperlinks that connect to other spacetime points irrespective of locality. We have
already begun to approach such mindspaces via "entangled electrons" and "quantum
teleportation" in physics, and the time may be coming when our ignorance will
diminish to a point at which randomness becomes the name for determination of a
different order. These hyperlinks are part of the rich tapestry which God weaves
(naqsh means “woven pattern,” from which the name of the Naqshbandi Sufis
derives).

Randomness and Biological Systems

Entropy. Maximum disorder. Randomness. These are all very well in their
place, and help to explain part of the universe when confined to their correct sphere,
such as our present understanding of gases, statistical mechanics, or radioactive
decay.
But of all things, living systems are the entities that lend themselves least well
to being attributed to chance. Any physicist (say, Erwin Schroedinger in his 1944
monograph What is Life?) will tell you that life is the very opposite of entropy, of
disorder; it is the epitome of negative entropy, synergy, organization, complexity.
Hence, to predicate something of such incredible complexity and order on
randomness is to build a castle on sand. Even genes that appear to be utterly useless
have recently been shown to somehow contribute to the well-being of an organism,
thus confounding the conception of junk DNA. 116
Each cell in the human body contains 3 billion chemical bases (called
nucleotides) of DNA in which are encoded an estimated 80,000 genes. (There may
be up to 100,000 of them.) Traveling along this sequence is not unlike a night-time
cross-continent plane flight. Each gene is located on one of 23 chromosomes, which
may be compared to centers of high population density—conurbations or
megalopolises, visible by their concentration of light. Genes are strung along a
chromosome like cities and towns on a major highway. Along the way are stretches
of DNA made up of small blocks of a repeated sequence of nucleotides called
minisatellites, and of even smaller chunks called microsatellites. We might fancy that
these correspond, in our analogy, to constellations, strings and pinpoints of light—the
unmistakable signs of human residence, civilization, and hence intelligence. Yet we
look at the entire genomic inventory of a cell and call it the result of “blind chance.”
The problem, of course, is that those who deny the existence of God on the
grounds that a proof is nonexistent, do not apply the same standard when it comes to
enthroning Lord Chance. They take the random emergence of variant life forms for

116 Nell Boyce, “Good for Nothing,” New Scientist, 17 January 1998.

56
granted, and proceed from there. Nothing could be further from the truth. Since no
new species are emerging (our time being one of extinctions rather than genesis),
there is no way we can base the supposition of random factors in the evolution of
different species on empirical observation. Moreover, the philosophical unprovability
of God has the further consequence that no other metaphysical presupposition can be
proved, either. If you cannot settle the existence of God philosophically, neither can
you settle any other metaphysical claim. This is what those who base life on the slow
accumulation of fortuitous coincidences over billions of years usually overlook.
Theirs is nothing but an assumption. As for its individual details, these must always
and ever remain a sandcastle built on flimsy evidence and subject to the vagaries of
scientific discovery, which may point one way this moment and another the next.
The question then becomes one of choice: to each his own. The weightings
are, of course, different. If your universe is ruled by chance, there is no meaning, and
your existence as empty as anything else’s. If it is ruled by God, there is meaning,
significance, love, charity, compassion, survival. Everyone is quite free to choose
one or the other. But let us not delude ourselves that the former metaphysical
assumption is somehow more “rational” or “scientific.”
If the only lesson we have gleaned from nature is that no significance exists
beyond the toss of a coin, it is a poor lesson indeed. For man bereft of meaning is no
longer man.
Here is another example. Whole armies of medical professionals have been
tackling the problem of cancer for decades. The issue is not whether a cure for cancer
and similar intractable diseases (such as Alzheimer's) will be found. The issue is that
familiarity with their subject matter has bred such boredom into some people that
they cannot recognize what is lying under their very nose. Molecular geneticist
Richard Lewontin explains why, even after the Human Genome Project is finished,
we will still be far from explaining everything about the human body:
"The prevention or cure of metabolic and developmental disorders depends on
a detailed knowledge of the mechanisms operating in cells and tissues above the level
of genes, and there is no relevant information about those mechanisms in DNA
sequences. In fact, if I know the DNA sequence of a gene I have no hint about the
function of a protein specified by that gene, or how it enters into an organism's
biology.” 117
An incredible amount of information has been coded into a lowly cell invisible
to the naked eye. And the whole of human history, all the efforts with all the
available resources of human beings working for thousands of years, have not yet
been able to crack that safe. Even if the remaining mysteries were deciphered
tomorrow, does it not say something for the immensity of the Intelligence that went
into that design? Is it because the collective resources of entire humanity have not
been able to even come near that intelligence that we choose to deny it instead?

Einstein and Mysticism

Sufism is the most advanced form of mysticism, which is the highest

expression of religion. This much-abused term is not "misty schism" or
obscurantism. Properly understood, it is the concrete experience of Absolute Unity
(or Nonduality). Even Bertrand Russell, the doyen of rationalists who once wrote an

117 New York Review of Books, January 4, 1997.

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essay, “Mysticism and Logic,” contrasting the two, finally came to the conclusion
that the distinction between subject and object is not fundamental, 118 which is what
the mystics have been saying all along.
Although some have attempted to oppose Sufism to science, it is itself the
zenith of esoteric science. Sciences are of two kinds: exoteric (external) and esoteric
(internal). Not everyone realizes that human subjectivity, while more fluid and
unpredictable than the external world, is itself ruled by objective laws, and it is due to
this that we can talk about esoteric sciences. This, too, is why the mystics of all ages
have spoken the same language.
Albert Einstein, one of the greatest scientists and intellects of our age, would
have been quite at home with mysticism. If scientists are supposed to know their
business, then Einstein, as one of the greatest among their number, was in a position
to know it best. If there had been anything in the generic concepts of God, spirit,
religion and mysticism that was anti-science, he would have been the first to detect
this and take his stand against it. Yet far from opposing these, he regarded mysticism
as the most sublime manifestation of religion, and as the wellspring of all true art and
science: “The most beautiful and most profound religious emotion that we can
experience is the sensation of the mystical. And this mysticality is the power of all
true science.” 119 It is well known that he did not believe in a personal God, but this
did not rule out an impersonal conception of the Divine. “God,” according to
Einstein, “is a subtle spirit”: “In essence, my religion consists of a humble admiration
for this illimitable superior spirit that reveals itself in the slight details that we are able
to perceive with our frail and feeble minds.” 120 The serious scientist comes to the
realization that “a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe—a spirit vastly
superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must
feel humble. In this way the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special
sort...” 121
Although he did not profess any official religion, Einstein’s understanding of a
“cosmic religion” was quite in tune with the concept of a Cosmic Consciousness (or
Intelligence): “The cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for
scientific research.” 122 The scientist's “religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous
amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such
superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human
beings is an utterly insignificant reflection.” 123
Not only did Einstein not oppose the concepts of God and spirit, of religion
and mysticism, but he placed them at the root of all scientific endeavor. Even the
single example of this great physicist is sufficient to make mincemeat out of concepts
which deny every form of religion, and which claim that science has disposed of the
concepts of God and spirit once and for all. Quite to the contrary, one of the greatest
scientists of all time is telling us that science finds its source in them. But then, you

118 Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1964 (1945), p.
812. Thanks to Ken Wilber for this nugget: A Brief History of Everything, Dublin: Gill and Macmillan,
1996, p. 234.
119 Peter A. Bucky and Allen G. Weakland, The Private Albert Einstein, Kansas City: Andrews and
McMeel, 1992, p. 85-87.
120 Ibid.
121 Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman, Albert Einstein—The Human Side, Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1979, p. 32-33.
122 Albert Einstein, The World as I See It, New York: Philosophical Library, 1949.
123 Ibid., p. 28-29.

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can’t expect everyone to possess the genius of an Einstein. He was a man of great
intellect and great heart, the combination of which is the hallmark of true intelligence.
And this, indeed, is the goal of mysticism in general and Sufism in particular: to
integrate the Mind, or Intellect, with the Heart, “Sound Heart, sound Mind” being a
motto of the Sufis. Take your pick: on the one hand, the cold glare of heartless reason;
on the other, the golden glow of mind wed to heart.

A Personal God

I would now like to address Einstein's confinement of God to His impersonal

aspect. To restrict the Illimitable to any one element in a pair of opposites is a
limitation, for Ultimate Reality includes and transcends all opposites. What caused
the great scientist to turn away from the concept of a personal God? Perhaps, in
discussing his ideas, we shall be addressing the reservations of many other people.
There are two reasons for Einstein's lack of faith in a personal God, and both
of them are rooted in his belief that nature operates according to strict deterministic
principles. In this view, the universe may be compared to a statue. It is rigid, and
once God created the universe, there was nothing left to do, for Him or anybody else.
But we know from experience that the universe is not quite so inelastic as this
analogy suggests.
The first assumption behind Einstein's lack of faith is that God is not supposed
to interfere in the laws of nature. Einstein considers a scientist, actually representing
himself, "who is very well-acquainted with the different laws of the universe, such as
how the planets orbit the sun and how the satellites in turn orbit around their
respective planets. ... how could he possibly believe in one God who would be
capable of disturbing the paths of these great orbiting masses?
"No, the natural laws of science have not only been worked out theoretically
but have been proven also in practice. I cannot then believe in this concept of an
anthropomorphic God who has the powers of interfering with these natural laws." 124
This is to think that the Creator of the entire universe, of the planets and the
laws that govern their motion, is incapable of altering His own creation. It is to
situate God the Omnipotent within the limitations of nature. In denying an
anthropomorphic God who can interfere with the laws of nature, we are unwittingly
anthropomorphizing Him in another respect: we are supposing that God is afflicted
with the same limitations as frail humanity, who cannot alter the laws of nature. But
"God is able to do all things."
There is a subtle point at issue here which is frequently overlooked.
According to the Book of Genesis, after He had created the universe, God viewed His
creation, and saw that "everything was good." If this is the case, why should He
change the laws of nature and the universe which He himself had ordained, except
within temporary pockets where they might be waived? In Islam, the laws of nature
are referred to as "the Custom of God" or "the Way of God" 125 (sunnat-Allah; see e.g.
48:23). Why should He, in the overwhelming majority of cases, deem it necessary to
stray from that? If everything were to change arbitrarily all the time, would there
even be a science to demonstrate the cosmic order God has created? This is why the
Koran states: "There is no change in God's creation" (30:30). Since change is part of

124 Bucky and Weakland, p. 85-87.

125 Since one meaning of the Chinese word Tao is “Way,” we could also call this “the Tao of God.”

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existence, of becoming, the reference here is obviously to God's immutable laws of
the universe, the investigation of which falls within the domain of science.
In any case, such "pockets" would be rare exceptions rather than the rule, and
exceptions do not disprove the rule; they are exceptions precisely because the rule is
otherwise. God is quite able to accommodate changes He dictates upon the universe
by His will without always having to change the rules, because the laws of science do
not create a rigid constraint which dictates that a certain event can happen only in one
way and no other—it is God who imposes that constraint. Science does not, and
cannot, nail down every atom in the universe as if by an iron law. This is the
prerogative of God, and science observes the results. Even within the deterministic
realm, chaos theory has taught us that vanishingly small differences in initial
conditions can lead to macroscopic variations in final outcomes. In this area as well
as elsewhere, there is freedom both for the action of God and the free will of human
agents.
A continuation of this point is that in a rigidly deterministic universe, God
should not be able to answer prayers. Einstein again: "Scientific research is based on
the idea that everything that takes place is determined by laws of nature, and therefore
this holds for the actions of people. For this reason, a research scientist will hardly be
inclined to believe that events could be influenced by a prayer, i.e. by a wish
addressed to a supernatural Being." 126
This, again, is to place a limitation on Omnipotence. It is also based on the
presupposition that science now knows everything there is to know about the
universe, and that it has consequently ruled out, once and for all, the possibility of
interference by God in the subtler workings of the universe. But we are nowhere near
such perfect scientific knowledge.
Note that this concept of a "remote God" who created the universe, never to
interfere with it again or order its affairs, is the result of an emphasis on
Transcendence in Judaism—which, however, also conflicts with other elements in
that religion.

The Problem of Prayer

While on the subject of prayer, it might be useful as an aside to answer certain

objections leveled at it. There are some people, for example, who think that God's
benevolence, omniscience and omnipotence are mutually contradictory in the context
of petitionary prayer.
The reasoning goes somewhat as follows: if God is good, how can He allow
bad things to happen to His subjects? If He is Omnipotent, why doesn't He stop such
things? If He is omniscient, doesn't He know our need, that we should have to
petition Him for it?
To which the following answers may be suggested:
Of course, God is good and it would be a breach of etiquette to say otherwise.
But we also have to recognize that God is beyond all dualities, beyond all opposites,
and hence beyond good and evil in the limited human sense. He created the universe
out of dualities; there is a role for Satan no less than for angels in the divine plan—he
wouldn't exist if there weren't. As for God's disposition towards human beings, this
too is double-edged: Beauty and Grace on the one hand, Majesty and Wrath on the

126 Dukas and Hoffman, p. 32-33.

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other. Certainly God's grace, or mercy, will be reserved for those who heed His
advice, and those who disobey His orders will be recipients of divine wrath.
According to the writer C. S. Lewis: “If God were good, He would wish to
make His creatures perfectly happy... But the creatures are not happy.” To which
God replies: “But it is possible that you dislike a thing which is good for you and that
you love a thing which is bad for you. God knows, and you do not” (2:216). The
argument thus hinges on a faulty definition of “good”—provided, of course, that we
are divine-law-abiding human beings and have not incurred displeasure.
God's omnipotence is sufficient to save us from all troubles. But then, our
comfort is not the primary concern of the divine plan, which calls rather for testing
man's perseverance and loyalty under strenuous conditions. Any ill that befalls us is
either an admonition for misconduct, or a test which, if passed successfully, will be
richly rewarded. Hence, believers are exhorted to take refuge in God, struggle in the
right way, and hope for the best.
Of course, any affliction that befalls anyone is already present in the eternal
knowledge of God. Yet He has made relief incumbent on supplication: "Ask,
request, and I shall give you." No prayer ever goes unnoticed. If immediate relief
does not arrive, then the answer to that prayer has been reserved for an improvement
of our condition in the future, or in the Afterlife.
In Sufism and especially in the teachings of Ibn Arabi, the necessity of prayer
has been linked to the process in which the universe is created. The observable
universe comes into being as a manifestation of the Names of God, where each Name
is associated with an Attribute. The universe is God's self-expression, or self-
revelation, and it must necessarily reflect all of His countless Attributes. This is why
we perceive the cosmos in exactly the way we do.
First, there is the matter of dualities. Dualities are required for the creation of
the universe, both in the form of opposities—such as light and darkness—and in the
form of active/passive. In the latter form, God is usually the agent and the universe
the recipient, such as Creator versus created.
Take the Attribute of divine Mercy. This divine attribute is an inexhaustible
source of benevolence. Yet in order for it to become manifest within the realm of
creation, there must be a sink for it of comparable proportions—there must be some
need for mercy if it is to work its saving power. Similarly, God's Attribute of Justice
could not be exercised if injustice did not exist, His Attribute of Speech could not be
fulfilled if there were no creatures capable of receiving and understanding speech, the
Attribute of Life can only be manifested in complex organic "receptacles" capable of
sustaining it, and so on.
Now at least in some cases, the nature of a recipient or receptacle is such that
it positively demands that which it lacks. For example, when an embryo has
developed sufficiently, it is almost as if it sucks in a higher life form distinct from
simple cell division and development. People with an evil bent go out and actively
seek mischief, and God obliges them as well by giving what they want, even if they
are thereby disobeying His will. (His attitude may be compared to that of an
exasperated father accommodating a teenage rebel: "Have it your way, but you're
going to regret it." More about this freedom of choice below.)
Hence, when it comes to God's Name: "Acceptor (of prayers)," there has to be
an active request if this divine Name is to be activated. This is why God has left the
manifestation of its effects contingent upon our demand. We have to form a vacuum
into which saving grace may be drawn, and this is the main purpose of prayer.

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 Prayer does not necessarily mean that we should constantly be asking God for
something, like children pestering their parents, although realizing our own weakness
will help us take refuge in God. Giving thanks to God for the bounties He has
bestowed on us, or asking forgiveness for our errors—which we are bound to
commit, given that we are all human beings and to err is human—these are also part
of prayer. As a matter of fact, it is related in tradition that God has remarked: "If you
were free of sin, I would create a nation of sinners in your place." The reason is that
God's Forgiveness needs to be manifested in the universe, and if people did not sin,
there would be nothing to forgive, and hence no way in which this Attribute could
manifest itself.

Why Prayer Can be Effective

Einstein's view of natural laws is that they are inexorable and invincible. If
they have been imposed by a Lawgiver, however, such a Lawgiver is at liberty to
waive them where and when He deems necessary, although He usually wouldn't
bother. Let us try to understand the process by which this may happen.
One of God's Names mentioned in the Koran is "the Splitter" (fatir), which
also has the meaning of giving things their natural disposition. Combined with this,
"Splitter" means not only that all pairs of opposites are—i.e., the observable universe
is—created by splitting an originally fused Primal Matter (if you want, we can call
these "quark soup" and "symmetry breaking"), but also that multiplicity, or
differentiation, is inherent in the very nature of things. This does not mean that
Unification is not impossible, only that it is difficult—you have to struggle uphill,
like salmon swimming against the river flow.
One of the opposites that the universe is split into is heaven and earth
("above" and "below," or "space" and "matter," if you want). This is explicitly stated
in the Koran: "The heavens and the earth were originally fused, and We split them
apart" (21:30). Moreover, "He holds back heaven lest it should fall upon the
earth"(22:65). In other words, if God did not constantly maintain this separation,
heaven would instantly collapse back upon the earth, and they would fuse again. The
entire universe—including all the laws operating throughout it—is sustained only
through the Will of God. What might seem to us an infinite effort, however, is child's
play for God: "To Him belongs all that is in the heavens and the earth ... and it does
not tire Him to preserve them" (2:255). "God's only command, when He desires a
thing, is to say to it 'Be,' and it is" (36:82).
Now according to the Sufis, and especially to Ibn Arabi, the collapse of the
universe actually happens every infinitesimal instant, and this is how Becoming
arises from Being—a question that has plagued the minds of philosophers for
millenia. In other words, not only did God create the heavens and the earth in the
beginning, but He actively continues to do so.

The unreal never is;

The Real never is not.
This truth indeed has been known
By those who have known the truth.

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 Since relative reality (the universe) is less real than Ultimate Reality (God), it
needs to be constantly maintained and nurtured by the latter. It is much more fragile
than we, who are even more fragile, might be led to believe.
Before the Big Bang theory won the upper hand in cosmology, it had a
contender, called "continuous creation," the most prominent proponent of which was
astrophysicist Fred Hoyle. According to this viewpoint, in order to compensate for
the expansion of the universe, an atom of hydrogen per cubic mile, say, had to be
created every now and then. The cosmic background radiation of 3 degrees Kelvin,
however, has tipped the scales in favor of the Big Bang.
In any case, as Toshihiko Izutsu has explained, 127 the mystics are telling us
that God not only created the universe in the beginning, but that it is destroyed at
every instant, and that He continues to recreate it instantaneously. This cannot be
clocked by our measurements and is a cognition available only to mystical states of
consciousness, because when the universe disappears, the clock to measure the time
intervals disappears along with it. (In the technical terminology of mathematics, this
is referred to as "fractional dimensions," in the sense first proposed by Charles
Muses. 128) "Every moment a man dies," a poet once said, "every moment one is
born." This should be paraphrased as:

Every moment a cosmos dies

Every moment one is born.

Ibn Arabi finds covert justification for his thesis in the Koranic term: "new
creation" (khalq al-jadid, 50:15). In its mundane sense, of course, this renewal
means the creation of "a new heaven and a new earth" at the Resurrection. According
to Ibn Arabi, however, it also has a finer, more esoteric meaning in that it refers to the
"continuous creation" (not used here in Hoyle's sense) which helps the universe to re-
emerge every instant.
How can we conceive of this "cosmic refresh"? Think of a strip of movie
film. Each frame in the strip contains an image very similar to those in adjacent
frames, yet if we inspect a length of celluloid closely we find that change is actually
occurring from one frame to another. It is as a result of passing the strip in front of a
bright light at a speed of 24 frames per second that the illusion of motion is presented
to our eyes. In the same way, the vision of the mystics compels them to tell us that
our perception of temporal continuity is equally illusory—counterintuitive as this
may seem.
Now think of a movie strip for the entire universe. Each frame is again
discrete, but the distinctness of each frame cannot be ascertained by us, because we
also exist in the film—that is, only within the frames. Another analogy could be the
sampling achieved with strobe light in a discotheque.
What happens may be described using the terms of quantum physics roughly
as follows. Consider a state vector for the entire universe. This state vector describes
the probability ensemble of where each particle will be at each instant. A particle can
exist in many places, though with higher probabilities in some locations than in
others. Theoretically, an electron could even be at the other side of the universe,

127 “The Concept of Perpetual Creation in Islamic Mysticism and Zen Buddhism,” in T. Izutsu,
Creation and the Timeless Order of Things, Ashland, OR: White Cloud Press, 1994, p. 141-173. Here
the vision of the Zen master Dogen is compared with those of Ibn Arabi and other Sufis.
128 C. Muses, “Fractional Dimensions and their Experiential Meaning,” J. Study of Consciousness, 5, 2
(1972-73) 315-26.

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though the probability for this is as good as zero. At each instant the infinite
consciousness of God "collapses" this state vector, and only a single location is
actualized for every particle out of a vast range of locations. ("Collapse" is used here
in the sense that many probabilities are reduced to a single actuality, and not in the
same sense as heaven "collapsing" upon the earth described above.)
The next instant, however, the state vector—as unactualized potential 129—
describing God's creation is back there again, waiting to be recollapsed. This
incessant destruction and creation intimates that the "iron laws" of nature, though
they may appear inexorable to us, are much more malleable from the viewpoint of a
Being of infinite power who brought them forth in the first place. And that
Omnipotent Being is quite able to respond to our pleas by condescending to collapse
the state vector—refresh the universe—in an ever-so-slightly-different way, even
without altering the laws He saw fit to create the universe with, which provide the
apparent continuity from one cosmic "frame" to the next. With God, all things are
easy. If this is not the way things actually happen, then it is at least a plausible
analogy for what does occur in practice.
If we take our cue from the vision of the Sufis, we might arrive at the
conjecture that the universal wavefunction is paradoxically both collapsed, as
required by the Copenhagen Interpretation, and not collapsed, as required by the
Many-Worlds or EWG (Everett-Wheeler-Graham) Interpretation. The cross-
fertilization of such ideas might be helpful to physicists in their future theoretical and
interpretative efforts.

Freedom of Choice

Einstein's second point has to do with the lack of free will in human beings. If
this is the case, he asks, how can a good and just Creator punish human beings for
things He has compelled them to do?
"The more a man is imbued with the ordered regularity of all events the firmer
becomes his conviction that there is no room left by the side of this ordered regularity
for causes of a different nature. For him neither the rule of human nor the rule of
divine will exists as an independent cause of natural events."130 "I cannot conceive of
a personal God who would directly influence the actions of individuals, or would
directly sit in judgment on creatures of his own creation. I cannot do this in spite of
the fact that mechanistic causality has, to a certain extent, been placed in doubt by

129 There appear to be certain affinities between the state vector (also called the wave function) in
quantum physics, and the level of “nondetermination” (la taayyun) of the Sufis, the “Uncarved Block”
of the Taoists which Chuang Tzu referred to as “chaos” (hun tun), and the Pregnant Void of the
Buddhists which is a fullness, a plenum and not a vacuum. Apparently the ancients conceived of chaos
and vacuum in different terms than we do. To us chaos means disorder, whereas to them it meant:
“that out of which cosmos is created.” And similarly for vacuum: as physicist Fred Alan Wolf states,
“The pre-quantum or Newtonian picture of the vacuum is simply the non-presence of matter. Well
before modern physics, however, the vacuum was seen by ancient philosophers as the potentiality to
become anything. It turns out that this ancient view has more in common with the quantum physics
view than does the Newtonian mechanical picture.” (The Spiritual Universe, New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1996.) Whether we call it the Uncarved Block, Chi, Primal Matter, or the “fundamentally
unstable vacuum,” this would be the first creation of God out of which the universe unfolds. However,
the ancient concepts are more general than the state vector or physical space, in that they are not
confined only to the physical realm.
130 In Science, Philosophy, and Religion, A Symposium, published by the Conference on Science,
Philosophy and Religion in Their Relation to the Democratic Way of Life, Inc., New York, 1941.

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modern science." 131 "... if this being is omnipotent, then every occurrence, including
every human action, every human thought, and every human feeling and aspiration is
also His work; how is it possible to think of holding men responsible for their deeds
and thoughts before such an almighty Being? In giving out punishment and rewards
He would to a certain extent be passing judgment on Himself. How can this be
combined with the goodness and righteousness ascribed to Him?" 132
It can be seen that Einstein's faith in determinism leads him to deny free will
both to human beings and to God, undermining God's omnipotence which, however,
he uses as a basis for his last statement.
If we pin the Illimitable down to determinism, that too is still a limitation,
which is why we have both determinism and indeterminism, both relativity and
quantum theory, both particle and wave (recall Bohr’s Principle of Complementarity).
Determinism as we know it is an oversimplification. Everything in the observable
universe is relative; only God is Absolute. To affirm determinism and to deny
indeterminism—its opposite and complement in the humanly observable world—
unconditionally is to raise determinism to the status of an absolute. Determinism
does not rule God; it is subordinate to God. And if we encounter events in the
external world that we can only model probabilistically, this too is by His leave. If
there were not chaos or disorder, how could we recognize the existence of order?
In the phenomenal world of multiplicity, dualities of the generic form
yin/yang must coexist. Opposites come into existence together; only through one
another are they known. Without positive and negative, North pole and South pole,
active and passive, it is not even possible to have a universe. In the Koran, this finds
expression in the form of two seas, one sweet and the other bitter/salty, which do not
mix due to a barrier between them. 133 There are always two sides to the same
multidimensional coin. And we have to remember that even dualities are an
abstraction, a simplification: black and white do not exist in stark distinction, but
shade into each other through various tones of gray—not to mention all the other
colors, such as red and blue. Reality includes and transcends both black and white,
object and subject, personal and impersonal, good and evil, east and west, night and
day. Dualities are, like spirit and matter, irreducible to each other, but ultimately
transcended in the Unity of God, of which “the meeting point of the two seas” (18:60)
is symbolic. Perhaps the easiest way to conceive of this unity is to remember
physicist Arnold Sommerfeld’s observation that an electron is in itself neither particle
nor wave, but exhibits properties under certain conditions which conform to our
mental models of either a particle or a wave. “We created everything in pairs ... Flee
to God” (51:49-50)—that is, if you want to escape from duality to nonduality, from
multiplicity to unity, or (while still remaining in the realm of dualities) from hell to
heaven.
Free will and predestination are, again, two sides of the same coin. Each
explains part of reality. Although human beings are bound by the circumstances they
find themselves in, there is room for different courses of action, and especially for
differing moral choices.

131Dukas and Hoffman, p. 66. Einstein's statement about mechanistic causality is a reference to the
indeterministic nature of quantum events.
132See Symposium (1941).
133 25:53, 27:61, 35:12, 55:19-20. Note that this does not exhaust the symbolic meaning of the Two
Seas; according to the Prophet, the Koran has one external (literal) meaning and seven levels of inner
(metaphorical) meanings. The “two hands of God” mentioned in the Koran is another reference to
duality.

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 Einstein would be right, of course, if human beings were to be denied free
will. The fact that we do possess freedom of moral choice suggests that we must
understand determinism or predetermination in another way than is construed above.
Such an understanding is provided by the great Sufi sage, Ibn Arabi, in the
advice he added to the end of his Meccan Revelations. His understanding sheds a
different light on the issue. According to Ibn Arabi, destiny is God's determination
("measuring out" 134 or apportioning) and desire. This determination begins after
human beings have used their fragmentary wills 135 in the service of good or evil, not
before, and is made in order to evaluate this use. (This judgment will be based, not
on what we have actually done, but on our intent behind it. What counts is right
intention. Again, it is only our moral choices that will be judged; we can do with
impunity anything other than what God has expressly Forbidden or frowned upon.
Prohibitions are relatively few, while there is a vast field of morally neutral or
positively Allowed actions.)
If a person has not yet reached the age of puberty—has not learned to use his
intellect and fragmentary will for good or ill—what is God supposed to pass
judgment on, evaluate, or foreordain? This means that human beings determine their
own destiny (in the afterworld, but frequently also in this world) by their decisions
and actions as responsible adults. This is why dying infants are exempt from
judgment and are considered innocent.
It is a benevolent gesture from God to a person reaching the age of puberty
that He should allow him the opportunity to learn. This is why it is a crime for
parents to refrain from instructing their children in religion.
The "writing on one's forehead" (i.e., fate) is God's foreknowledge of how His
servants will use their fragmentary wills and what their end will be. God knows past
eternity, the present, and future eternity, but He never interferes with His servants'
right to use their wills and minds freely. If He were to interfere, the basis for personal
responsibility would vanish, and Heaven and Hell would become meaningless. The
very existence of reward and punishment presupposes freedom of will. (Further,
people are constantly exhorted to "struggle in God's way" in the Koran. One verse
states: "Man possesses only that which he has labored for." This would be
meaningless unless human efforts made a difference.)
Ibn Arabi also states that religion does not mean Heaven and Hell, which
consist only of reward and punishment. In his view, the purpose of religion is to win
the gifts and pleasure of God.
These explanations of Ibn Arabi suggest that we have to distinguish between
the determinism of natural law and "predestination," which is more properly
understood as God's judgment over human beings. Whether this will occur in our
earthly future or in the afterlife cannot be known in advance, for both can happen.
God's foreknowledge of human actions has nothing to do with constraining freedom
of moral choice. Just as God has used His omnipotence to create the universe in the
way we observe it and no other, He refrains from using His omnipotence to force
human beings to a certain course of action, although He knows how they will act.
This is God's choice, His option.
This is also why God has not provided incontrovertible evidence of His
existence, but has left this as a matter of faith. God doesn't want to have to prove

134 There is a second meaning of this “measuring out” or quantification (taqdir), in that it refers to the
precise mathematical order that God implements throughout the universe.
135 The “fragmentary will” of a human being is an infinitesimal chip off the “total will” of God, from
whom it is on loan.

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Himself to human beings. If God's existence were known beyond doubt to human
beings, this would constrain them to obeying His commandments. But then, freedom
of choice would evaporate. Even if He did not force them, human beings would
consider it impossible to ignore the commands of a being of such awesome power.
And they would then hate Him, not love Him. God has no use for such a dictatorship
over humankind. And if he were to force them, the dictatorship would be even worse,
because human beings would be reduced to puppets in the hand of a puppet-master,
or to mere robots. Though this notion may appeal to the frenzied ego of a despot, it
has no appeal for God, who wants us to love Him out of our own free choice, not to
hate Him or to become mindless machines or automatons. This is why the Koran
constantly invites us to "reflect." It also goes to show how erroneous the conception
of God as a puppet-master is: although His laws operate throughout the universe, He
does not compel human beings, who thus constitute an exception.
Because He has created them, however, out of His Grace he has provided
them with guidelines leading to felicity. But if you don't believe in Him, how are you
going to follow those instructions? Many people do so partially, of course;136 but then
they will receive partial recompense, not complete happiness.
It can be seen, then, that this question of predestination has led to boundless
confusion because it has not been approached from the right perspective. We have to
be very sure what we are talking about. Even today, carelessness in this regard can
lead to endless and fruitless discussion. It is because it frequently leads nowhere that
the Prophet of God warned, "God has not instructed you to discuss the question of
destiny." His instructions are for our edification, not for our loss, of time or energy or
anything else. This says it all for men possessed of minds.

Edison did not believe in organized religion, but his invention of the light bulb
turned night into day for untold millions of human beings—a matchless service to
humanity. Einstein may not have believed in a personal God, but he believed in God
under His impersonal cloak. And somewhere in the darkness, we have reason to hope
that they both broke even. May God's saving Grace be upon us all.

136There are atheists with high morals and concern for their fellow-men, just as there are believers
who lack these.

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 WAS MOHAMMED FORETOLD IN THE BIBLE?

“Jesus son of Mary said: ‘Children of Israel, verily I am

the Messenger of God to you, confirming the Torah that
was before me, and giving the good news of a Messenger
who shall come after me, whose name shall be Ahmad.”’

—The Koran, 61:6.

The Three Sisters

Judaism, Christianity, Islam. The three great monotheistic religions—three

sisters, in a sense. Although they have had their quarrels in the past, this does not
change the fact that they are linked by deep affinities.
Islam has always reserved a special place for People of the Book—basically,
Jews and Christians. It has gone to great lengths to secure their rights, and allowed
them to practise their religion in peace. No Islamic rule has persecuted Jews and
Christians; rather, countries where Islamic rule held sway have provided safe havens
for both.
The other night,137 for the first time since childhood, I sat down together with
a circle of Moslem friends and again watched Cecil B. de Mille's rendition of The Ten
Commandments, with Charlton Heston playing Moses. Again, I was struck by the
profound unity that lay at the root of all three religions, beneath the layers of
superficial bickering and discord. The shechina, the "presence of the Lord," the peace
that passeth understanding, the silence from which all sound proceeds: these have
inspired, and will continue to inspire, countless human beings till the end of time,
giving them happiness and strength in the face of adversity.
There were many lessons to be drawn from the movie, of course. But for me,
two had an impact of quite a different order. Before the movie started, Mr. de Mille
came onstage, and explained how God desires freedom for His servants, how—
thousands of years after Moses—the struggle between slavery and freedom, between
oppression and liberation, is continuing even today. It was not for nothing that the
prophets came, and we ignore their message at our peril. If we forget—or dismiss—
their warnings, we run the risk of being judged under what I prefer to call Santayana's
Law: "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to relive it."
The other point was driven home to me by a slave who expired in Moses'
arms. As he breathed his last, the old man said: "God did not answer my prayer."
"And what was that?" Moses asked. The old man looked him straight in the face and
said: "That I should see the Savior [i.e., Moses] before I die."
Now of course, we all know that the Lord answers our prayers in different
ways, ofttimes subtly and not always immediately. But that we should remain
unaware that he has answered our prayers even after He has done so—this, I submit,
is a possibility we seldom contemplate. God's bounty, His lovingkindness for us, His
servants, knows no bounds, if we are but patient and obedient to His will.
Another possibility is that some of our prayers, at least, may lead to
unforeseen and regrettable consequences. "Beware the fulfillment of your prayers" is
a possibility few of us have given thought to.

137 January 31, 1998, to be precise—the last day of the year’s Candy (Ramadan) Festival.

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 It has been said that Moses employed shock therapy in order to liberate his
people from serfdom. He figures prominently in many Sufi teaching stories, which I
hope to publish if I get the chance someday.

The Koran accepts that Jesus was the Messiah. It accepts the Virgin Birth,
that Jesus was the Word of God and a spirit from God, and that he was free of sin.
In a chapter named after the Virgin Mary, the Koran describes the birth of
Jesus in touching words full of pathos:

And mention in the Book Mary

when she withdrew from her people
to an eastern place,
and she took a veil apart from them;
then We sent unto her Our angel [Gabriel],
who presented himself to her
as a handsome man.
[Alarmed,] she said: “I take refuge
in the All-merciful from you!
If you fear God—”
He said, “I am only a messenger from your Lord,
here to give you a holy son, a boy most pure.”
She said, “How shall I have a son, seeing that
no mortal has touched me, and I am not unchaste?”
He said: “Your Lord says, ‘That is easy for Me, and
We shall appoint him as a sign unto men
and a mercy from Us; it is a thing decreed.’ ”
So she conceived him, and withdrew to a distant place... (19:16-22)

When Mary came back to her people with her newborn baby boy, they reproached her
for having done a monstrous thing, and accused her of wickedness. But the infant
Jesus was in that instant endowed with speech, and addressed them from his cradle:

“I am God’s servant; God has given me

the Book, and made me a Prophet.
Blessed He has made me, wherever
I may be; ... He has not made me
arrogant, nor miserable.
Peace be upon me, the day I was born,
and the day I die, and the day I am
raised up alive!” (19:30-33)

The Koran has words of high praise for Christians:

Nearest among men in love to believers [Moslems]

are those who say, “We are Christians,”
because among them are priests and monks,
men devoted to learning,
men who have renounced the world, and
who are not arrogant.
And when they hear the revelation

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 sent down to the Prophet, you will see
their eyes overflowing with tears,
for they recognise the truth:
They pray, “Our Lord, we believe;
write us down among the witnesses.
Why shouldn’t we believe in God
and the truth which has come to us?
We long for our Lord to admit us
with the righteous people.”
And for this prayer of theirs, God
has rewarded them with gardens
underneath which rivers flow,
therein to dwell forever.
That is the recompense of good-doers. (5:85-88)

According to Sufi lore, God accepted the sacrifices of the first Christian monastics—
such as St. Anthony—even though He had not advised them to perform such worship.
So sincere were they in their intentions and struggles that He accepted their
renunciations as if these had indeed been worship He had decreed for them.
The Koran has advised its adherents to speak wisely and constructively with
their fellow-monotheists:

Do not dispute with the People of the Book

save in the fairest way, except for those of them who do wrong;
and say, “We believe in what has been sent down to us,
and what has been sent down to you;
our God and your God is One,
and to Him we have surrendered.” (29:46)

Prophesying Future Prophets

The purpose of the present essay is to gain a better understanding of Jesus, of

Mohammed, and of the relationship between the two. Its purpose is to engage in a
clear-headed analysis of textual evidence and to draw out its implications. Jesus was
an example to all human beings. He was a Perfect Man, and one of the greatest
prophets of God. Like all true prophets and saints, Jesus was a receptacle of God, a
channel for God’s message, and a window unto God’s light.
Judaism, Christianity and Islam are the three great monotheistic religions, and
their historical succession has been in that order. Many prophets have been sent by
God, and humanity was introduced to each of the above religions by a prophet. As
everyone knows, Judaism was founded by Moses, Christianity by Jesus, and Islam by
Mohammed. In addition, the Hebrews had many other prophets, as acknowledged in
the Old Testament.
There is a difference, however, in the acceptance of these prophets in each
religion. Jews believe in Moses first and foremost, and in the Hebrew prophets. They
do not accept Jesus and Mohammed. Christians, for their part, accept Jesus plus
Moses and the Hebrew prophets, but not Mohammed. In this sense, Islam is all-
embracing, for it acknowledges not only Jesus, Moses and the remaining prophets, but
also the founders of other religions such as the Buddha and Zoroaster, even though

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they lie outside the Middle-Eastern monotheistic tradition. Interestingly, the attitudes
of Jews toward Jesus and of Christians toward Mohammed present a striking
similarity. Just as Jews do not accept Jesus as the Messiah, Christians do not accept
Mohammed as the Messenger of God. Moslems, on the other hand, accept them all.
One of the functions that comes with being a prophet is to “prophesy”, i.e. to
foretell future events. It is a long-standing tradition that prophets have on occasion
indicated their successors, sometimes even by name. On this basis, Christians have
found evidence in many places in the Old Testament that Jesus was foretold. This is
supported in the New Testament, where the phrase: “in order that Scripture might be
fulfilled” occurs on various occasions. Here, the reference is to Old Testament
prophecies regarding the advent of Jesus.
Since this is the case, the following becomes a legitimate question for inquiry:
was Mohammed also foretold in previous Scripture (both the Old Testament and the
New)? Moslems are justified in asking this question on the same basis that Christians
are justified in framing it for Jesus and the Old Testament.

Mohammed in the New Testament: The Paraclete

In the four Canonical Gospels, the first inkling in this connection is given in
Luke’s Gospel. Before Jesus departs, he says to his disciples: “I am going to send you
what my Father has promised” (Luke 24:49), but the point is not elaborated any
further. In the Gospel of John, however, this oblique reference is clarified. For Jesus
gives detailed information regarding the “Paraclete” (Greek parakletos), whom he is
going to send. Although the Gospel of John has generally been considered the latest to
be committed to writing, recent scholarship now regards it as the only account of an
eyewitness among the four Gospels, and hence the closest to the Source. Before we
begin to discuss the Paraclete, therefore, it will be well to present the passages in John
in which this term occurs:

“I will pray to the Father and he will give you another Paraclete, the Spirit of
Truth, to be with you permanently... you will know him, because he will dwell
with you and be with you” (John 14:16-17). “When the Paraclete comes,
whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of Truth who will go out
from the Father, he will bear witness to me” (15:26). “It is to your advantage
that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Paraclete will not come to you. But
if I go, I will send him to you. And when he comes, he will convince the world
of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment” (16:7-8).
“I have a great deal more to tell you, but you cannot receive it now. But when
the Spirit of Truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth [give you full
instructions]; for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears
he will speak, and he will tell you what is to come. He will glorify me,
because he will receive what is mine and convey it to you” (16:12-14).
“The Paraclete, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he
will teach you everything and remind you of everything I have told you”
(14:26).

And Jesus tops it all with:

“All this I have told you so that you will not go astray” (16:1).

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 Who can this “Paraclete” be? Moslems have traditionally identified him with
Mohammed, the Prophet of Islam. Christians, on the other hand, have seen in him the
Holy Spirit, on the basis of John 14:26. Before we pass on to other matters, it will be
useful to see why Moslems make this claim, and why Christians disagree.

Paraclete or Periclyte?

The first thing we have to do is start with the name Mohammed. This name
and its correlate Ahmad both derive from the Arabic root H-M-D. “Ahmad” is also a
name of the Prophet. In Arabic, Mohammed has such meanings as “much praised,
famous, illustrious”, while Ahmad has the related meaning of “most praiseworthy”.
Hence, Moslems have claimed that the word “Paraclete” is a Greek rendition
of these meanings. Christians, on the other hand, demur. They claim that the word
rendering these meanings is not parakletos but periklytos, “Periclyte”, which—if it
had occurred in the Bible—would indeed have justified the Moslem view. Moslems
retort that parakletos is an easy corruption of periklytos. Perhaps, then, we should
look a little more deeply into the matter.
The Gospel of John was written in Greek. Jesus, as everyone knows, spoke
Aramaic. Jesus’ Aramaic words, therefore, were somehow transposed into Greek at
some stage.
Now “Mohammed” in Aramaic is menahhemana. (In Syriac it is
manhamanna, which is how “Paraclete” occurs in the Peshitta—Syriac—version of
the Bible.)
However, F.C. Burkitt of Trinity College, Cambridge, has pointed out that
while menahhemana normally corresponds to periklytos in Greek, there is one dialect
in Aramaic where its meaning is rendered by parakletos. This is the so-called
Palestinian dialect.
“Paraclete” and “Periclyte” are related, therefore, through their common
Aramaic source. Furthermore, if the translation channel passed through this “window
of transposition”, as it were, menahhemana in Jesus’ language would have emerged as
parakletos in Greek, even though its meaning more properly corresponded to
periklytos. The Palestinian Aramaic dialect provides a loophole for such confusion.

The Meaning of “Paraclete”

Suppose, however, that such a transposition never occurred, and that

parakletos as it appears in the New Testament is indeed the authentic version. We
have postponed giving its meaning until now, because we shall have a few things to
say regarding this term as well.
Parakletos in old translations used to be rendered as “Comforter”. Of course,
Moslems have no reason to contest this translation, because Mohammed is addressed
in the Koran as: “We did not send thee except as a comfort to the worlds” (21:107).
More recent English translations give the meaning of the Paraclete as:
“Adviser, Counselor, Advocate, helper, one who speaks in one’s defense”. These are
all appellations of prophethood, for such functions are usually ascribed to prophets
and more especially to Mohammed.

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 In the First Letter of John, the term parakletos is used for Jesus. But here, it is
translated as “intercessor” rather than “Comforter” (1 John 2:1). Here it is obvious
that a prophet—in this case, Jesus himself—is meant, because only a prophet can
“intercede” with God to plead a follower’s case. Read in this light, “God will give you
another Paraclete” clearly means “another intercessor or prophet like me.” Hence
there are not one but two Paracletes, one of whom is Jesus. This also dovetails with
the expectation of two messiahs in the Dead Sea Scrolls, one priestly (Jesus) and the
other political (Mohammed). It is also mentioned in the Old Testament, where “two
anointed ones who stand by the Lord” are mentioned in Zechariah, 4:14. (“Messiah”
means “anointed one.”) As the Jews were expecting a kingly messiah at the time,
they did not accept Jesus as the messiah. Because Mohammed was successful
politically, he would have proved acceptable—had it not been for the fact that he
emerged from among the Arabs instead of the Jews.
Now all this is very interesting. For Christians have always considered that the
Paraclete, the “Spirit of Truth” as he is named in John 16:13, is the Holy Spirit (due to
John 14:26).
Unfortunately, this is not true. For the Spirit of Truth, whoever else he might
be, cannot be the Holy Spirit.

First Proof

We now claim that the “Holy Spirit”, as it has occurred in Bible translations in
relation to the Paraclete, is either a gloss or a mistranslation. The proof of this
statement follows.
John 14:26 is the only basis for any identification of the Paraclete with the
Holy Spirit. Therefore, we need concentrate only on this verse.
The Gospel of John is one with many variant readings. One of the earliest
translations of the Bible, the Palimpsest version written in Syriac, only says “Spirit”
in this verse, not “Holy Spirit”. Fortunately, however, we can prove that the Spirit of
Truth is not the Holy Spirit directly from the present text of the Bible, without having
to resort to the analysis and comparison of original textual variants.
1 . In John 16:l0, Jesus says: “I am going to the Father, where you can see me
no longer.” In John 16:7, he says: “If I do not go away, the Paraclete will not come to
you, but if I go, I will send him to you.” In John 14:16, he says: “I will pray to the
Father, and he will give you another Paraclete.”
The sequence of events is thus as follows: First, Jesus departs, never to return;
he ascends to the Father. Then, he prays to the Father, and then the Father sends
another Paraclete like Jesus. In the words of noted biblical scholar and historian Hugh
J. Schonfeld: “The Spirit of Truth is to be sent much later, after Jesus has returned to
the Father and interceded with him to send it.”
2. After the resurrection, Jesus appears to Mary Magdalene. “He said to her: ‘I
have not yet ascended to the Father”’ (John 20:17). Apparently, this ascent is not
described throughout the remainder of the Gospel.
3. On the evening of the same day, and still not having ascended, Jesus meets
the disciples: “He breathed on them and said to them: ‘Receive the Holy Spirit”’
(John 20:22).
4. But the Paraclete cannot come unless Jesus has first gone away forever.
5. Hence, the Paraclete cannot be the Holy Spirit.

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 (All this in no way implies a denial of the existence of the Holy Spirit,
sometimes identified with Gabriel. In fact, the Koran twice mentions that Jesus was
“confirmed with the Holy Spirit” (2:87, 2:253). It is only the identification of the
Spirit of Truth with the Holy Spirit that is impossible, as demonstrated above.)

Second Proof

From John 20:22 just quoted, we understand that the Holy Spirit is either
directly the “breath of Jesus”, or is of a comparable nature. In either case, it is
intangible.
Concerning the Spirit of Truth, John 16:13 declares: “As he hears, so he will
speak.” In Greek, akouei corresponds to “he hears” and lalesei to “he will speak”.
1. The Greek verb akouô translates as “to hear”. It means “to perceive
sounds”. For instance, the science of sounds, namely acoustics, derives from this
word.
2. The Greek verb laleô translates as “to speak”. It has the general meaning of
“to emit sounds”. This verb occurs very frequently in the Greek text of the Gospels,
and is in fact applied to Jesus himself. It is used to designate a solemn declaration by
Jesus during his preachings, and in no way involves the Holy Spirit as interlocutor.
Moreover, it has a very obvious material character.
In the words of Dr. Maurice Bucaille: “The two Greek verbs akouô and laleô
therefore define concrete actions which can only be applied to a being with hearing
and speech organs. It is consequently impossible to apply them to the Holy Spirit.” 138
The Paraclete can only be “a human being like Jesus, possessing the faculties of
hearing and speech formally implied in John’s Greek text. Jesus therefore predicts
that God will later send a human being to Earth ... to be a prophet who hears God’s
word and repeats his message to man.” 139
But the only prophet to appear since, of a comparable stature to Jesus as
founder of a world religion, is Mohammed. Therefore, Mohammed must be the
Paraclete.
The Spirit of Truth was to bear witness to and glorify Jesus. Mohammed never
spoke a word of untruth in his life; even prior to prophethood, he was known among
his people as “the Trustworthy”. Moreover, Mohammed bore ample witness to Jesus
and glorified him. On Jesus’ own admission, Mohammed received and conveyed what
belonged to Jesus (John 16:14). And when Jesus says he will tell what is to come
(John 16:13), this refers to the Last Judgment (John 16:8).

Gloss or Mistranslation?

The first impulse, in view of the above, may be to write off “Holy” as a gloss,
an explanatory note or correction made by a later editor. This, however, need not be
the case.

138 M. Bucaille, The Bible, the Qur’an and Science, (tr. Alastair D. Pannell and M. Bucaille) Paris:
Seghers, 1976, p. 114.
139 Ibid., p. 115.

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 In the Greek original of John 14:26, the Holy Spirit occurs as to pneuma to
agion, where to is the article “the”, pneuma is “spirit” and agion is “holy”. The
second to is usually suppressed, yielding “the Holy Spirit”.
However, this is a highly atypical occurence of the Holy Spirit. Other
occurences are, e.g.: agiou pneumatos (Matthew 28:19), pneumati agio (Romans 9:1),
pneumati... agio (Acts 1:5), and pneuma agion (John 20:22, Acts 19:2). In all of
these examples, the insertion of an article between “holy” and “spirit” does not occur
at all. We have just seen that the Paraclete cannot be the Holy Spirit. The proper
translation of to pneuma to agion, then, could simply be “the spirit, the holy”.
But if this spirit is not the Holy Spirit, then who can it be?
The Spirit of Truth, of course. And it is quite natural for the Spirit of Truth to
be holy, as well.
Hence, we need not even conjecture a gloss, for the association of the
Paraclete with the Holy Spirit may have resulted from a simple mistranslation. Under
prevailing assumptions concerning the Holy Spirit, such a mistake would follow as a
matter of course. Further, Church doctrine in the early centuries held that Jesus was
the last of the prophets, so that another prophet would not be expected.
The conclusion from all this is inescapable. Jesus has described with blinding
clarity the advent of a prophet who will not speak of his own accord but say only what
he hears. This is how the Koranic revelation occurred, and indeed, the Koran bears
out Jesus’ claim: “Nor does he [Mohammed] say anything of his own desire” (53:3).
Perhaps now we may look at evidence from the Old Testament: “I will raise
up for them a prophet like you from among their own people, I will put my words in
the mouth of the prophet, who shall speak to them everything I command. Anyone
who does not heed the words that he shall speak in my name, I myself will hold
accountable” (Deuteronomy 18:15-19). (Compare “Obey God, obey the Prophet”—
Koran 4:59.)
Although this passage is usually taken by Christians to foretell the coming of
Jesus, the meaning is more general and can equally well be taken to refer to other
prophets. Here we are given a clear description of a type of prophecy that is quite
direct: “I will put my words in the mouth of the prophet.” Since the prophet
Mohammed’s message is known to be of a direct source, i.e. the word of God, we
finally have evidence in the Torah, too, of the ministry of Mohammed.

The Mystery of the Trinity

The Bible does not mention the concept of the Trinity. (The only passage in
the New Testament that seems indicative of it was a fourth-century addition. 140)
Without intending a full-length treatment of the subject, we may simply note here that
the Church itself has confessed it to be a mystery, incapable of being comprehended.
At least part of this mystery may be resolved if we consider that the third person of
the Trinity, the Holy Spirit in theological tradition, comprises not merely the Holy
Spirit but also the Paraclete. This means that the functions and characteristics of the
Paraclete, such as that of personhood, have erroneously been ascribed to the Holy
Spirit through a confusion of the two. Even when they are confused in this way, it is
still difficult to conceive of the Holy Spirit as a “person”. Once its distinction from the

140 Paul Johnson, A History of Christianity, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980 (1976), p. 26. The
reference is to the text of 1 John 5:7.

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Paraclete is realized, it becomes easier to see that there are in fact two “Trinities”: the
more traditional, though still modified, one of God, Jesus and Holy Ghost, and the
second one of God, Jesus and Mohammed. The term “Trinity” itself fails us here, and
a different one—such as Triad—seems called for. The first Triad pertains to
Christianity; the second, to the fulfillment of Jesus’ promise in Islam.
Yet another parallel between Jesus and Mohammed is that both come from
God. The Paraclete “proceeds from the Father” (John 15:26), while Jesus says: “I
came forth from God” (John 16:27). In both cases, para means “from the side of”. No
wonder, then, that Mohammed called Jesus “my brother”.
Furthermore, Jesus is called “a spirit (proceeding) from God” in the Koran
(4:171). Since the Koran specifies Jesus in this way, there is nothing surprising in the
fact that the Bible should refer to Mohammed as “the Spirit of Truth” who “proceeds
from God”.
Jesus declared that the “Spirit of Truth” would give full instructions and leave
nothing incomplete (John 16:13). Only one person has been authorized by Jesus as
being capable of faithfully transmitting God’s word: “Whatever he hears, he will
speak” (John 16:13), and that is the Paraclete or Mohammed.
It is in this sense, then, that Islam constitutes the continuation and fulfillment
of Christianity.

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 CAN THERE BE A "REFORMATION"
IN ISLAM? 141

Introduction

As the twentieth century draws to a close, Moslems all over the world
would seem to be sliding into aberrant behavior, causing concern to the world
and distress to their friends.
If we take the “representatives” of Islam around the world, we find that
their actions are frequently at variance with the teachings they supposedly
uphold. Consider the following facts:

• The Taliban in Afghanistan forbid girls from going to school (1997).

Mohammed, the Prophet of God, said: "It is incumbent on every Moslem
man and every Moslem woman to seek and learn knowledge." Where is one
to learn knowledge/science, except at school? And which one is the religion
whose educational institutions were once legendary?
• Iran's Khomeini passes a death sentence on writer Salman Rushdie which his
successors refuse to revoke (1989).
When Mohammed conquered Mecca, he forgave all his greatest enemies at
the peak of his power and allowed them to go scot-free.
• Middle-Eastern guerillas engage in terrorist activities, causing the concept of
"terrorism" to become associated with the name of Islam (the 1970s and
80s).
The victims of terrorism are almost always innocent people. In Islam,
human beings are personally responsible for their words and deeds. The
Koran says: "No soul bears the burden of another." To kill an innocent
human being for the errors of others is a flagrant violation of this principle.
• Various purportedly "Islamic" regimes attempt—or give the impression of
attempting—to enforce Islam by repression and cruelty.
The Prophet said: "A society where cruelty and oppression are present
cannot survive."

In an age of increasing violence, is this how Moslems hope to set an

example for emulation by other people? Or do they themselves thereby become
compliant victims of the same trend? Not only do such actions put off those
who might otherwise be inclined to view Islam in a favorable light, but they
themselves constitute grave offenses against the religion, inviting the wrath of
God. The crime is thus compounded. To make things clearer, Islam doesn’t
need reform, Moslems do. The only consolation is that the perpetrators of such
acts do not represent the vast "silent majority" of Moslems who peacefully go
about their business and worship every day, and that only news unusual enough
to attract attention has the sales potential to get reported in the news media—
these are "worst case" characteristics.

141 In preparing this essay, I have relied heavily on articles concerning "reform in Islam" in
Ahmet Kayhan's Turkish-language anthology, I Found What I Was Looking For (1991).

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 All this—and more—suggests that Islam and these kinds of "Moslems"
have become two different things. It does no good to attempt to hide this fact,
or to find excuses, such as that Moslems in our day are operating under a siege
mentality. 142 The reasons may be many and varied, deriving both from within
Moslems and without. These are, of course, important in themselves. But what
is even more important is to recognize that such "Moslems" have, by and large,
lost their ability to be regarded as representatives of Islam.
Fundamentalists are fundamentally confused: they seem to be unaware
of the highest principles (ethical, spiritual and human) that the Prophet
Mohammed represents. Since Islam is strictly monotheistic, the fear of covert
polytheism (associating partners with God) has led to the devaluation and
conscious evasion of anything other than God and the Koran—including, in the
case of Persia and Arabia, even the example of the Prophet himself. But the
Koran cannot be lived without the human example who embodies it.
Any uninformed outsider observing the behavior of such present-day
"Moslems" would conclude—would be justified in concluding—that Islam is an
oppressive, bloodthirsty, intolerant, fanatical religion. So we are led to the sad
conclusion that neither outsiders nor these "Moslems" themselves any longer
know what Islam really is.
If this is the case, then we must, Moslems and non-Moslems alike, first
disabuse ourselves of our ignorance concerning Islam. Is the behavior we
associate with "Moslems" commensurate with the principles of Islam? Can
"Moslems," in all fairness, claim that they faithfully represent their religion?
And which stands in need of reform: "Moslems," Islam, or both?
Just consider the words of a prominent Moslem of the past, Abou Darda.
When asked: "What is good for human beings?" he replied: "Good does not
consist in much property or many children. It lies in the increase of one's
knowledge, one's modesty, and one's gentleness. Good consists in vying with
human beings in the service of God and in serving one's religion. If you do
good, give thanks to God; if you do bad, repent to Him." (Emphasis added.)
One look at these words is enough to convince us that there is a great
discrepancy between them and the items listed above. Obviously, "something is
rotten in the kingdom of Denmark." But what? Who, or what, needs to be
changed?
Religion is a social institution of primary importance. As times and
societies change, it is natural to expect changes in their institutions as well.
Thus the question arises as to whether the religion of Islam can be changed to
adapt to changing circumstances, and if so, how.
Many people think that the wide-reaching changes in society resulting
from scientific and technological advances, especially in the twentieth century,
call for a reform or revision in established religions. In this connection, it is
suggested that Islam should undergo a "Reformation" similar to that which
occurred in Christianity in the sixteenth century.
The intention of this essay is to investigate the question of "Reform in
Islam." To this end, some basic information will be presented regarding the

142If it be claimed that Moslems are engaged in some sort of "jihad," the reply is that nowhere
in the world are Moslems currently engaged in a war declared on others. If you want to fight,
officially declare war first. Neither, however, should this be misread as an endorsement of
atrocities perpetrated against Moslems anywhere.

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Islamic religion. Some attention will be devoted to the Christian Reformation,
and the possibilities of renewal in Islam will be discussed.

What is Religion?

Religion is a divine Law set down by God Almighty that guides mankind
along the paths of happiness, leads them to felicity, tells them the purpose for
which they were created, and teaches them how to worship God. It exhorts
human beings—those possessed of minds who accept religion of their own free
will—to do good deeds.
The prophets have received this holy Law from God by Revelation, and
conveyed it to their fellow men. Hence, religion consists of the pronouncements
of prophets based on divine Revelation, and its true founder is God. The
prophets cannot themselves make religion or Law; their duty is only to
proclaim religious precepts. To call them the "founders" of religions or "Law-
givers" is therefore metaphorical, not literal.

Natural Religion

In the past, some philosophers have set forth certain principles under the
name of "natural religion" as distinct from Revelatory religion, and have
believed in the need for such a religion to meet the condition of rationality, the
requirements of human conscience, and the order and peace of society.
These principles, however, can never occupy the exalted position of a
true religion. They constitute, in the end, nothing but a philosophical
profession. A religion invented—or a philosophical system constructed—by
human beings will never, in principle, be able to secure the salvation and
happiness of mankind, because, lacking a basis in Revelation and divine
inspiration, without roots in that divine source and not welling forth from it,
such constructions can never penetrate to the depths of the human spirit or
appeal to human hearts. It is one of the clearest proofs of Revelation that the
most prominent thinkers of various countries throughout history have accepted
and embraced divine religions.
Religion is the strongest basis of morality. Without religion, not a trace
can be found in individuals of the highest ethics and virtues. A society
composed of such individuals cannot achieve harmony and peace. Nothing can
really take the place of religion.

Religion is Necessary for Mankind

Because it orders and gives shape to society, religion is an institution of

which mankind stands in need. The higher its aspirations and the deeper its
roots in wisdom, the greater this necessity is.
Man is by nature a slave to his passions and desires. In order to lead a
collective life and establish mutual trust and love, the individual must be able to
control his personal desires, his selfish passions. Otherwise, he cannot lead a

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social life and become civilized. Human beings, who by nature have unlimited
passions, need a restraining force to temper and moderate them, and this force is
religion. Without the restraint of religion, it would be impossible to maintain
moral or legal restraints. A true religion is the marrow of moral virtue and
justice.
If ethics is the proper use of our freedoms, then the science of ethics is
the science of duty. This duty is to do good, thus producing virtue. Hence,
religion and ethics are at one in upholding and approving of virtue. Just as
religion determines the proper ways in which human freedoms are to be used,
so it also enjoins the good and forbids the evil, thus propagating virtue. Since
there can be no doubt that all societies need morals, the necessity of religion is
also evident in its intention to establish moral virtue and to ensure the proper use
of freedoms.
Because its origin is divine, religion is a very potent and influential
judge over human beings. Religious restraint is the only force that is always
present with human beings, even when they are alone—a judge that surveys
human beings under all circumstances, and calls upon their conscience to refrain
from evil and perform the good, thus leading both the individual and society to
loftier heights.
Consideration of the social consequences of atheism and irreligion
likewise compels one to admit the necessity of religion. Atheism leads to the
loss of first, moral and then, legal imperatives. Without religion, no sanction is
left for morality. This leads to an invasion of evil, and the evaporation of
morality results in the eventual disintegration and depletion of society. The
concept of law is likewise thrown to the winds.
The following may be stated as an implacable social law: "Religion
exists, and is necessary. Nations without religion are doomed to destruction."
Even the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 20th century stands as sufficient
testimony to this fact. Atheism leads to the downfall of societies. Only if the
individuals constituting a society agree upon mutual morals and feelings can its
moral harmony be assured. This harmony disappears together with religion.
Indeed, there can be no doubt that human societies will become bankrupt and be
dragged into anarchy the day religion is abolished. Religion is a social
institution that must be maintained for the happiness of the individual, the
family, and society itself.
This should not be taken to imply the social or political control of
individuals, for this would in turn imply control by someone else. But it is self-
control (more precisely, one's control of one's Base Self) that is intended here.
The Sacred Law is there to help people first and foremost, to guide human
beings about things they don't know, not to control them. It is a personal creed,
a "dress" or "suit" one puts on of one's own free will, long before it becomes
codified as a social contract into the legal self-imposition of a society keeping
the faith.

Can Conscience Take the Place of Religion?

Some philosophers have claimed that conscience can take the place of
religion, but this is not true. Yes, human beings do have an innate aptitude to
discriminate right from wrong and good from evil. But just as this aptitude—

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which we call conscience—can be nurtured through education and training, it is
equally the case that it can be corrupted and even entirely abolished through the
negative influence and suggestions of evil surroundings. That this aptitude does
not manifest itself equally in everyone is the greatest proof of this fact. Those
who are ashamed of the slightest error or misdemeanor exist side by side with
those who do not flinch even at murdering their parents or abusing children.
There are criminals in this world in whom the slightest trace of conscience has
vanished as a result of lawless habits. Rousseau's observations are of the utmost
importance here: "Conscience is a divine and unerring guide... But it is not
enough that it should exist, it is necessary to recognize and follow it. Why is it
that those who heed the voice of conscience are so few, in spite of the fact that it
informs every heart of the situation? Because it speaks to us in the language of
nature, whereas everything else makes us forget that language."
In order to have a good conscience, it is necessary to receive good
religious training, which engenders moral elevation, and to live in well-
mannered surroundings. Conscience alone, therefore, cannot inform man of his
reason for being, guide him to the right way, or distinguish between good and
evil. Neither can conscience be a sufficient measure or justifying sanction of
goodness and virtue. In order to avoid subversion and confusion, conscience
needs a guide, and that guide is divine Revelation—it is religion.
It is only the conscience of people who have received a proper religious
education and have benefited therefrom that can prevent them entirely from evil
and guide them to virtue.

Religion and Humanity

The investigation of history and the human condition reveals that

religion came into being for and together with mankind, for no society lacking
knowledge of it has been encountered, since religion is God's gift to humankind.
Research has shown that wherever there is man, there has been some kind of
faith and worship. It is an undeniable fact that even prehistoric or primitive
societies have had some form of religion.
From this it can—and should—be surmised that religion is part of being
human, and will survive as long as humanity exists. As the philosopher Sabatier
noted, religion has survived all the upheavals and revolutions of humanity. The
visible foliage of this tree has been cut down a thousand times, yet the real root
never fails to produce new offshoots. Far from its source being dried up with
time, we observe that this wellspring becomes wider and deeper under the twin
influences of philosophical thought and the bitter experiences of life. Hence,
human life will be strengthened and will end with religion, just as it began with
religion. As Benjamin Constant observed: "Religion is a paramount influence in
human history. The religious life is an eternal property and inseparable
characteristic of our nature. It is impossible not to think of religion when the
essence of man is considered."
The testimony of such philosophers proves that the notion of religion is
one of the essential needs of humanity. Religion will exist as long as mankind
survives; its suppression only leads to its underground growth and eventual re-
emergence on the surface, or to its distortion and proliferation in potentially
unhealthy forms.

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 Of course, from a purely spiritual point of view, the perfect religion
needs the perfect vehicle for God's expression: Humanity itself. As God told
David: "David, My love for them is so much greater than theirs for Me." It may
be said on this basis that not only was man made for religion, but religion was
made for man.

The Source of Religion and the Role of the Intellect

We can conclude from all this that religion is an innate characteristic of

humanity; it is a basic and irreducible human trait. But history also bears
witness that without the guidance of God, it can take on multifarious irrational
forms. Without revelation from God and the leadership of prophets, human
beings can easily be misled down byways ending only in despair. Hence,
according to the Islamic faith, the source of religion is Revelation and
Prophethood. These are both historically established facts and not open to
doubt.
To view religion as arising from fear or hope or as an accidental
occurrence is, therefore, a radical error. To accept this proposal, maintained by
some, would be to accept that the vast majority of human beings throughout
history have been gullible fools, and that religions, which have formed the basis
of all morals and ethics, and of all the legal and social rules serving the survival
of society, were themselves based on nothing but illusion and delusion. Not
only is this arrogance of the first order, but it also undermines the respect for
humanity to which the proponents of this view lay claim.

Islam as a Natural Religion

Islam is the best candidate for the "natural religion" which some
philosophers have sought, especially since, as we shall see below, Revelation
and reason need not be at odds with each other. For the precondition of a
natural and universal religion is that it should contain nothing in its articles of
faith, as well as its moral and social precepts, that goes against nature or human
nature. Further, it should be able to affirm all the religions and holy books of all
nations, and meet all the requirements of the age. But the results of in-depth
investigation suggest that Islam is the religion that fulfills all these prerequisites.
There is nothing among the beliefs of Islam that calls for changing the principles
of reason or nature. Its faith is based not on miracles, but on reason and
lucidity. It does not contradict or conflict with science or modern thought.
The ethical principles of Islam are lofty and strong enough to challenge
the highest and most demanding philosophy. So are its other tenets. Science
and wisdom have a very high standing in Islam. It has firmly established the
principles of freedom and equality before the law. It forbids belief in delusions
and superstitions. It lends order to life and exaltation to thought. All its
principles are based on simplicity and ease. Its greatest enemies are ignorance,
superstition, despotism, oppression, cruelty and injustice.
Islam always enjoins justice, knowledge, wisdom and expertise. It is
"natural" in the sense that it dovetails with the natural disposition of man
without violating it. It is because it bears such high moral and human principles
within itself that we say that Islam is the natural and ecumenical religion of

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choice. Its metaphysical dimension does not conflict with reason or nature,
since it is the supreme Revelation of God, who created both the physical and the
spiritual worlds, both man and nature, both the mind and the spirit, both the
body and the universe. Since these all coexist without violating or negating
each other, they must be mutually noncontradictory.

Basic Principles

One definition of religion would be that it is the love and quest of man
for his origin, his Creator. It answers the questions of man's origin, where he
came from, and where he is going.
Islam's creed is simplicity itself. There is no God but God, the
Almighty, the infinitely wise and powerful Absolute Being who created the
universe, and He is One. Mohammed is His Prophet, the last in a long line of
prophets and holy men who have been appointed by God to teach wisdom to
humanity and show the way to liberation or salvation. Man is mortal, and has
freedom of moral choice in this world; however, he will be resurrected after
death, called to account for his deeds in this world, and will meet reward or
chastisement accordingly.
The religion of Islam is based on two pillars: the Koran, which is
Revelation from God, and the Way of the Prophet, which comprises both the
sayings ("Traditions") and actions of Mohammed, the Messenger of God.

The Koran

In presenting this final Revelation to humanity, it was God's intention

not to leave any loose ends. He also wished to bequeath to humanity a religion
that would, from that point onwards, suffice to meet all its religious needs.
Accordingly He revealed the Koran, which is preserved in the form it was
intended and is the best-preserved book in history.
The Koran contains everything that God wished to convey to humanity
for the rest of time. For those who can decipher it, it contains everything of
importance that humanity needs for salvation. It is a book totally free of internal
contradictions. This is why there have been no heterodoxies or heresies within
Islam proper—in fact, it is not only an orthodoxy but, as such commentators as
Hans Küng and Malise Ruthven have noted, also an orthopraxy.
At the same time, it should be recognized that the Koran, being the last
and most sophisticated of holy texts, is not always an easy proposition. Side by
side with simple statements, it contains expressions which make it more akin to
a textbook in advanced calculus than a primary-school book. That it can be
easily read in Arabic or another language obscures its difficulties, and gives the
deceptive appearance of simplicity. Also, various religious observances are
mentioned only briefly therein. With the Book, therefore, there also had to be
the Man—the Prophet who would both convey the Revelation, and would, in
word and deed, exemplify the kind of human being (homo religiosus and,
beyond that, homo perfectus) desired by God. Left standing alone, the more
difficult parts of the Koran would have lent themselves to a variety of
interpretations. (They still do, but not to the point of engendering schisms.)

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The exemplar of the Prophet was necessary to show how the Koran should be
lived out in real life. And indeed, when asked about the morality of the Prophet,
his wife Aisha replied: "His morality was the Koran." In addressing the
Prophet, God adds the rejoinder in the Koran: "Verily you are upon a mighty
morality."

The Prophet of God

When pronouncing on religious matters, Mohammed never spoke on his

own. Hence, the scholars of Islam have distinguished between "Revelation that
is recited"—written Revelation, meaning the Koran—and "Revelation that is not
recited," or the pronouncements and actions of the Prophet. The two complete
and complement each other. The extensive body of knowledge covering the
sayings and actions of the Prophet, as well as those of his close followers, the
saints, delivers the Koran from being interpreted by everyone in his own way,
which could lead to individualism, anarchy, and even nihilism.
Mohammed told human beings what to do. He provided the knowledge
needed by human beings to shape their course through life. Every Moslem
knows how to live correctly, how best to meet each situation, what action is
suited to which occasion.
Mohammed instructed people how to live. He explained the relations
between man and wife, between employer and employee, how to preserve
health, how to educate children, how to make a living, how to prevent poverty
and suffering, how to wage war even though war itself is undesirable, 143 and
how to restore peace at the earliest opportunity. Mohammed gave much
practical information, and his spiritual advice was clear and perennial enough to
be applied to any age—including modern (or postmodern) conditions.
Such a person, who would act as a role model for humanity in the future,
had perforce to live in the very thick of life. He not only had to establish and
defend the new Revelation, but he had to be "a man among men"—eating,
drinking, marrying, having children and grandchildren, fighting wars of self-
defense, engaging in commerce, acting as statesman, etc. In doing all these, he
had to demonstrate to his followers and to future generations how, exactly, a
pious person should behave, or is expected to behave by God, under these
widely varying conditions. This truly gargantuan task could be entrusted by
God only to a person capable of bearing such a tremendous weight and carrying
out the mission successfully.
Most of all, anyone should be able to imitate such a person, and this
imitation should end not in death or despair, but in salvation and liberation.
Such imitation should lead to success and happiness both in this world and the
next. To exclude the world is neither desirable, nor possible; that kind of
solution just wouldn't work. A model for humanity has to be someone who is
acquainted with worldly life, who wholeheartedly accepts the life on earth.
Only a person who has survived to an old age, who has lived and experienced
the world, who has married and had a profession, could be a model of how to
live for the vast majority of human beings.

143 War is justified in Islam only in self-defense or when the Faith is under assault.

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 Here we come to the crux of the matter. How can such a life be
reconciled with spirituality, sanctity, and true piety? Is such a thing even
possible? Can a human being both live a secular life, and yet still achieve true
sainthood? The answer given by the life of Mohammed to all these questions is
a resounding Yes. Islam stands as proof that the saintly life does not require
becoming a hermit, an ascetic, or a recluse. Human beings do many other things
besides walking about, talking wisely and doing nothing at all.
Such a person as Mohammed, then, can be a model, a solution, and an
answer. In other words, true spirituality does not require a life dedicated
entirely to the spirit, to the exclusion of the physical world and daily life. To be
"in the world, but not of it" is the motto of the Moslem saint, or Sufi.
This is not to say that such a life would be easy. But it was made easy
by God for humanity, as exemplified in the life of Mohammed. Spiritual life
wedded to material life makes for the well-rounded human being whose entire
range of potentials is actualized. The Prophet was such an exemplar, with an
optimum blend of the secular and the spiritual.
In a religion intended for all human beings, we should be careful to
distinguish between what is universal and what is merely local. That the
Prophet spoke and prayed in Arabic doesn't mean we have to do so, too. Just
because he lived in a naturally polygamous society doesn't mean that every man
has to take several wives. That the Prophet rode on a camel need no more
detain us from driving a car than the fact that Jesus rode on an ass. If
Mohammed had lived in this day and age, we may be sure that he would have
worn a suit and tie and used the amenities of modern technology.
Once such quirks of local custom, culture, geography and history are
weeded out, we are left with a template, a program, of how the pious human
being should behave. The Prophet did mend his own clothing, eat with his
servants, and play with his children and grandchildren. Mohammed, who lived
in a comparatively recent age, is the first and only prophet for whom definite
historical data are available.
When we examine the Prophet's life in detail, we find that its hallmark is
courtesy towards, and compassion for, all beings. He was the quintessential
gentleman, even toward his enemies. He was always kind and considerate to his
wives. Even when he became the uncontested ruler of the fledgling Islamic
community, he combined "sageliness within and kingliness without"—he was,
to use Nietzsche's words, "Caesar with the heart of Christ."
Here, then, we have a Man whom we can, without reservation, commend
as a model of beautiful conduct to anyone. The reason we have dwelt on the
Prophet at such length is because this aspect of his importance is so frequently
neglected in discussions on Islam. Moslems and non-Moslems alike, in
focusing on the primary importance of the Koran as the word of God, too often
overlook the fact that it was the Prophet who interpreted the Koran for human
use—for practical implementation—by his words and actions, and that we
would not know where to start understanding the Koran otherwise. Indeed, the
image in the West of Islam as harsh and unforgiving is due to the fact that many
of its adherents fail to live up to his example. The all-pervasive lovingkindness
of the Prophet too often fails to find expression in the brittle behavior of would-
be followers.

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 Now these twin pillars—the Koran and the Prophet's Way—render a
church unnecessary in Islam. 144 Everything is nailed down clearly and
definitely. Hence, there is no church, clergy, theocracy, or religious
bureaucracy bent on self-perpetuation. 145 There is no need for a Teaching
Authority, and although scholars, saints and Sufis carry out religious instruction,
they do not constitute a social or religious class apart from the laity. Since there
are no Sacraments, neither is there any need for a Sacramental Agent. Between
a human being and God stands nothing. Everyone knows what to do, and does
not need a separate agency or external authority to mediate with God. One
worships, confesses and repents to God oneself. The individual's relationship
with God is a sacred and private matter that brooks no intervention. We might,
in fact, call this the democratization of faith, or the emancipation of humankind.
This does not mean that Islam neglects the social aspect. The Alms-tax,
the Pilgrimage, congregational prayers, religious holidays, charity, etc. are all
matters of social import. It is only that an entrenched religious institution is not
required as intermediary between God and man. Where there is no church, the
separation of church and state likewise becomes a nonproblem. 146

The Koran tells us that true Moslems are a "middle people"—or, if you
like, "people of the Middle Way"—and, as such, an example to everyone. In
what follows we shall take a look at Islam's stand on major themes of concern to
humanity. As we shall see, its principles are general enough to encompass
every human situation. The quotations interspersed are mostly from the Koran
and the Prophet's Traditions.

Reason

The basis of religion is Revelation and its Transmission. Revelation is

also the source of all laws of nature and of science. Hence, Revelation and
reason—as described by religion—cannot be opposed to each other, but are
partners. The Prophet himself has stated: "Who has no reason has no religion,
either." In Islam, reason and Revelation (or transmission) cannot conflict with
each other. This is true right from the ground level of daily life, all the way up
to the loftiest heights of spirituality and mysticism. If there is an apparent
contradiction between the two, either reason is in error, or Revelation has been
improperly understood. The Koran and the Prophet's Way form an internally

144 The transmission and interpretation of Revelation does not require a church. Sacred
scripture on the one hand and Tradition on the other cannot be used to justify the existence of a
church, when Islam has been able to preserve both in the absence of one for 14 centuries. In
Islam, the “sacred deposit” has been entrusted to the community as a whole, not to a separate
ecclesiastical organization. If an excommunicatory authority had existed in Islam, this book—
and many books like it—could never have been written.
145It might be argued that the example of Iran violates this statement. But it is in fact an
exception, spanning less than one-seventieth of Islam's history, and the Shi'ites constitute less
than a tenth of the present world population of Moslems. Where the role of the Prophet's Way
is diminished, other authorities rush in to fill the void. This is one of the reasons for its
importance, and many will agree that the results of its absence leave much to be desired.
146 Some Western sources have recently begun to speak of the “separation of mosque and
state,” as if the church and mosque were comparable. But the mosque is not a religious
institution. It is a building of worship, a temple pure and simple.

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self-consistent, noncontradictory body of doctrine. No institution is needed to
pronounce orthodoxy.
There are no "mysteries" in Islam. Since there is no Original Sin, neither
are there sacraments to cure one's spiritual ills or achieve immortality; worship
and good works take care of everything. Thus, the need for a religious
institution administering sacraments is obviated. The individual soul is not
sacrificed to collectivism, and it becomes possible to obtain an individual
religious experience of God.
Every principle of Islam is in accordance with reason and logic. This
entirely rational attitude, however, does not lead to the loss of mysticism and
access to the higher reaches of the human personality, but to a rational and
reasonable approach at every step in the spiritual ascent of man. No one is
driven to a choice between his faith and his reason, or to a decision that will
torment his conscience.
Islam satisfies both the emotions and the intellect. Man's spirit is
addressed, but the appeal is to reason, which is highly valued. Islam does not
consist only of reason, however, for it would then be a rational philosophy and
nothing more. As a result, a positive faith and an enlightened intellect are prized
as against fanaticism. "Strip yourself of bigotry and selfishness, leave aside bias
and egotism, then love God," is Islam's advice. It claims that "It is not enough
to know, it is necessary to think," and calls us to "see that which is"—to
recognize Reality.

Knowledge and Science

Among religions, Islam places the greatest premium on knowledge and

science. It tells us that: "Ignorance leads to bad morals, and bad morals lead to
destruction." Inherent in this is the recognition that knowledge saves, sooner or
later. The Prophet of God has stated: "Desiring and learning knowledge/science
is mandatory upon every Moslem man and woman."
The very first word of Revelation to the Prophet was: "Read" (96:1). So
was the second. Even the single Prophetic precept: "Learn knowledge from
cradle to the grave" would be enough to secure the education of mankind.
Islam proclaims that no matter from which nation scientific advances
originate, they are the common property of all humanity. There is no opposition
between religion and science in Islam. The more one progresses in science and
knowledge, the more one is able to appreciate the handiwork of God displayed
throughout the universe, and the greater one's admiration becomes for the
infinitely superior Intelligence and wisdom pervading the cosmos. "A person
who does not know astronomy [the workings of the universe] and anatomy [the
workings of the human body] is lacking in the Knowledge of God." In other
words, one who does not comprehend the workings of the world cannot
understand God well enough, either. "Science consists of two sciences: first, the
science of bodies [physical science], and then the science of religions [spiritual
science]." Knowledge of one to the exclusion of the other would be one-sided,
and therefore deficient.

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Faith

The only unforgiveable error in Islam is to worship finite creatures;

Divine Grace can forgive all other sins. Islam is entirely free of this mistake,
and replaces it with the faith in One God. "One" here does not mean the first
number in an infinite arithmetic sequence, but rather That than which there is no
other, the One without a Second, the All-Encompassing. God is an illimitable
Living Presence, not an abstraction or an idol. He loves human beings, His
servants, but His retribution can be wrathful, too. It is a mark of wisdom never
to consider oneself exempt from such retribution.
The word for faithlessness or infidelity is "concealment" in Islam. This
means that since God is the Ultimate Reality, those who lack faith are only
concealing the Truth—from themselves even more than from others.
Concealment is based on two principles: the ridicule of exaltation, and the
exaltation of ridicule. Hence, it is not worthy of further comment here.
A person of faith finds solace, not in causing injury to others, but in
healing injuries. For Islam defines life not as warfare, but as a sharing and
mutual aid. The outcome of discord and strife is division, while the result of
mutual aid is embracing one another.
Neither will a faithful person tolerate cruelty and injustice. He says:
"There is One who knows me better than I know myself," and even: "I am not,
He is." He lives like a perfect human being, and avoids opposing and attacking
the rights of others. Far from doing such things, he won't even touch a lost
article he finds on the road.
Whenever mankind has lived in faith, the world has been a peaceful
place. When faith is corrupted and religion degenerates, then come the times
when every crime and ill pervades society.

Faithlessness and Despair

Lack of faith in God leads to desperation on both the individual and

social levels.
A person of piety believes that the success or failure of his endeavors
depends on a superior regulatory Power. Because he believes in eternal life, the
failures he meets with in this life do not faze him. Thanks to his faith, he never
falls into despair. Such faith precludes hopelessness. In a heart full of faith in
the Omnipresence of Reality, not a trace can be found of despair.
The heart lacking faith is the playground of doubts. It falls prey to one
doubt after another, never experiencing the bliss of certainty. It is plagued by
distress and uncertainties.
Faith in eternity is essential if people are to accept the essence of
morality. A person convinced that the universe is nothing but a coincidence,
that he is evolved from the animals, that the afterlife and Eternity are mere fairy
tales, will never think about paying his debts to society and humanity, for he
will say: "Life and fulfilment consist in my ability to satisfy the desires and
drives of my self." Only the belief in an ultimate Judgment can restrain human
beings from committing the worst they are capable of. Without faith, there is no
basis for preferring altruism over egotism or self-sacrifice over self-promotion.
In its absence, the greatest geniuses, the best economists, the most powerful
security agencies will be powerless to curb the ego's desires or the resulting

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cries of despair. Civilizations built upon the passions of the Base Self will be
torn apart by those same passions.
While Islam tries to prevent this on the one hand, it also advises us to
heal wounds mutually by administering to one another, rather than injuring
others and increasing the present ills and sorrows of society. Since this will
eliminate despair, it will also put an end to suicide and insanity, and peace and
contentment will reign.

Faith and Evidence

Islam advises us that faith should rest, not on empty claims, but on firm
evidence: accept nothing without proof that convinces your reason. If
something is absurd or a logical impossibility, don't believe it.
Faith rooted in proof is someting new in the history of religions. The
Koran tells us that God Himself will demand unbelievers to "produce their
evidence" for their claims on Judgment Day. If their evidence doesn't hold
water, too bad—but also, too late. "Accept nothing which you do not know to
be true. And don't claim knowledge in things you are ignorant of, for you will
be held to account." People of true faith are considered to possess uncommon
discernment in Islam: "Beware the discernment of the faithful, for he sees by the
light of God."
The adherents of this religion are called, not to feel sorry about death,
but for the Meaning that slips through their fingers, for the irretrievable spiritual
happiness that escapes them. They are called upon to "consider the Artist, not
just the painting."

Faith in Action

Faith is hidden in the heart; only God can know of it. But if such
abstract faith were enough, God would have spared us the trouble of religious
rules requiring worship and Right Action. To declare that religion is a matter
for conscience without harvesting its concrete fruits would be a vacuous claim
and a waste of time. "Faith without works is naught," and if the works are there,
one may be reasonably assured of God's grace—though this shouldn't lead to
self-congratulation, vanity, or pride, which could yield terrible results.
Surrender to God becomes explicit in surrender to His commands and
prohibitions. Hence, faith must be fortified with deeds; theory should be
complemented by practice.

Attitude to Nonbelievers

What of those who, in spite of everything, refuse to believe? "You are

only a warner," God advises Mohammed in the Koran. Leave them to their own
devices if they refuse to accept your message. "Tell them: 'To you, your
religion; to me, mine.'" The use of violence in observing Islam is prohibited by
the Koran itself: "There is no compulsion in [the Islamic] religion" (2:256).
Faith is a matter for individual conscience. Hence, freedom of religion is
guaranteed right from its very inception. Even those who do not belong to "the
People of the Book" (possessing holy texts of earlier Revelation, such as Jews
and Christians) cannot be compelled to obey the rules of the Koran.

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Ethics and Morality

Islam is the religion of morality. The Prophet remarked: "I was sent
only in order to complete morality." The essence of this religion is to become
adorned with all praiseworthy morals, and to shed all blameworthy traits. It is
thanks to this fact that Islam was able to win the hearts of those who came into
contact with it; contrary to theories of "conquest by the sword," it was never
imposed upon people by coercion.
Islam tells us that: "An immoral society cannot survive," and also: "The
imitation of evil is suicide." Love, morality, measure and proper balance are the
cornerstones of this religion. It encourages us to strive constantly to transcend
ourselves. The Prophet informs us that: "Whoever is at the same level—
materially and spiritually—for two consecutive days has been deceived, and
whoever is worse off today than he was yesterday has suffered a loss." Again:
"Even if you receive news that Doomsday is imminent, don't refrain from
planting a sapling." The Moslem is defined as "the person who does others no
harm, by hand or by word," and is called to "leave those alone who leave you
alone." One is encouraged to seek the counsel of others, since in heeding others
the false sense of self is demolished.

Freedom and Duty

According to Islam, the freedom desired by humankind is bounded by

morality, where morality consists of respect for one's duties. The lowest level of
duty is justice towards others and control towards one's self. Its highest level is
generosity to others, and restraint of the self.
Islam defines only the person who knows his self, who can control his
passions and sorrows, as "free." Hence, freedom is possible only by knowing
the tricks of the Base Self, and by refusing to obey it. That person is "free" who
knows his self, and is not the prisoner of his passions or the offences given by
others. The devil, the personified external principle of evil, has no great power
unless he finds an ally in the Base Self, in which case the evil becomes
internalized and the ego becomes an instrument of the devil.
One must always be careful to grant the Base Self its rights, but to deny
it its Forbidden pleasures. Every pleasure is not a sin. Anything agreeable is
not necessarily immoral, but the Base Self should not be permitted self-
satisfaction. Morality is not self-torture or doing unpleasant things, though
these may be necessary under certain conditions. As long as Illicit Gain and
Illicit Sex are avoided, one will not have much trouble confining the Base Self.
Islam's claim is that only by preserving freedoms can human potentials
flower, and that it offers freedom tempered by justice. True freedom, then, is
Islam itself. It is the staff of life; it encourages valiant deeds, and forbids vile
desires.
It may be asked: from where does man receive his sense of freedom?
Does matter give him the desire for it?
But if matter does not possess will, how can it lend man freedom? In
Islam, the spiritual world is frequently referred to as "the World of Meaning",
because it is this which infuses sense and order into matter. In other words, no

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account of the universe that leaves out Meaning (the spiritual world) can be
considered complete. Man cannot receive will or freedom from insensate,
meaningless existence. Ultimately, man receives freedom from God. Since
freedom is nowhere to be found in the universe of matter, it is obviously a gift
from God. In that case, he who denies God is depriving himself of freedom, for
he can never discover the hidden Source of will and freedom within himself.

Ecological and Social Catastrophe

The reason that we are faced with crises, psychic and social
disintegration, violence and dissatisfaction in the midst of plenty and at the peak
of civilization, is that we have tried to quench our thirst by material means
alone. But man is not just a material being. As long as his spiritual dimension
is overlooked, entire oceans of matter will not suffice to sate the spiritual hunger
gnawing inside him. Yet, under the mistaken impression that his problem is one
of quantity, man craves more and ever more, straining the resources of our
planet that can feed everyone but, being finite, cannot satisfy a craving that is
infinite. Only God, eternal life, and the assurance of personal survival after
death can fill this gaping void in man. And the priorities of God and the spirit
are different from the drive towards material excess. The Koran advises us to
consider the ruins strewn across the earth of civilizations that were, in certain
respects, superior to ours. Their remains stand as mute testimony to the fact that
as long as all man's needs are not met by a fine-tuned adjustment, he will refuse
to show a clear picture like a TV set out of kilter, and sooner or later self-
destruct. Unless our civilization rises to this challenge, it will be only one in a
long series—or, given the magnitude of its capacity for destruction, perhaps the
last.

Peace

Who can deny that humanity is in need of peace? Why does it prove so
elusive to our grasp? How come minds able to dive to the bottom of the sea,
probe the farthest reaches of space, and send millions of souls to Kingdom
Come at the press of a button, fail miserably to devise a solution when it comes
to peace? Because only a religion that satisfies the whole spectrum of human
possibilities can fill the bill, and because nobody is knocking at its door.
The very name "Islam" is derived from "peace." The peace of heart
granted by this religion is such that all the material treasures of the world weigh
less than a mosquito's wing in the eyes of the spiritually mature. Ideally, the
Moslem is a person at peace with God, with himself, with fellow human beings,
with nature, and with the cosmos.
Unfortunately, there are those who would capitalize on the peaceful
intentions of others. Although Islam counsels peace, it does not disregard
conditions from which the only escape is combat. "If you want peace, prepare
for war," the old adage goes. Even the gentle Einstein had to abandon his
pacifism during the Second World War. When provoked in the extreme or
defending themselves, human beings have no recourse but to engage in battle.
The Arabic word jihad, which is usually mistranslated as "holy war,"
actually means "struggle" in the way of God: struggle with one's possessions
and oneself—i.e., against one's Base Self. The age of conquests is now closed,

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for weapons of mass destruction ensure the decimation of innocents and threaten
the very existence of the human race. The verses dealing with war in the Koran
are now "deactivated," and can only be interpreted in terms of struggle as
described above. Today, real valor resides in the ability to conquer men's
hearts—with the pen, with sublime truths, not with the sword.

Luxury and Ecology

Islam counsels a streamlined life, free of troubles, pretensions, and

excess baggage. This saves one from wasting time on unnecessary things, and
leads to a peaceful and comfortable life as a consequence. Religion directs one
to a balanced living and to right livelihood. Just as it forbids laziness and
insufficient work, it also prohibits work harmful to others.
No matter how much work it involves, an ostentatious and luxurious life
cannot be maintained solely on the work of one person. A lifestyle that
ceaselessly excites the appetites of the Base Self must in some way or other
involve the exploitation of others, because a single person's earnings would be
insufficient to satisfy these appetites. One must then make use of the earnings
of others, as one's own earnings will never be enough. Excessive profits may
also exact a cost on the environment and on future generations. As a result,
religion tells us, cries of despair will never cease in society. Wealth is
approved, but not at the expense of others.
The concept of luxury differs according to the society we live in. In the
developed countries of our day, for example, having a telephone and a car are
not luxuries but necessities. It is only when wealth is squandered in excess of
the current social norm that it becomes a waste of valuable resources.
Moreover, Islam advises us to use resources sparingly even when in possession
of an apparently inexhaustible supply—to use only so much water as we need,
for instance, even when we are standing beside an ocean. This is not only a
recognition of the finite nature of our planet, vast though it may be, but also a
recognition of the natural rights of our human brethren.

Charity and Equality

Those with magnanimity in their nature, feeling compassion for all

beings, are invariably impressed by the Alms-tax, one of the five pillars of
Islam. In this scheme, the poor are shareholders with the rich. Although the
injunction to perform the Prayer occurs 32 times in the Koran, and the
Pilgrimage and Fasting are each mentioned only once, the commandment to
"give" and to "share," to help the downtrodden, is repeated 72 times. To raise
the fallen by charity is worship of the highest order. While parsimony is sinful,
the Koran advises us to be balanced, not excessive, in our handouts; our charity
should not lead to destitution for ourselves. Otherwise, the count of the
charitable will be decreased, and the number of those needing charity increased,
by at least one the next time around.

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 Before God, rich and poor are one. Bloodline does not confer privilege.
Human beings are absolutely equal; a slave can—and in early Islamic history,
did—become a commander, and even a king.
But in Islam, charity means much more than donations to the needy.
"Any good deed is charity." "Any good word is charity." It is charity for a
creditor to postpone payment for a debtor who is unable to pay up. "To treat
your wife kindly is also charity; to remove a stone from a path which could
cause a person to trip and fall is also charity; to greet or smile at someone you
meet along the road is also charity." Any act of giving, ultimately of one's very
self, is hallowed.

Of Vice and Virtue

Islam holds that like gold and silver, there are virtues of perennial value
and lasting worth. Courtesy, in particular, is so highly valued that its presence is
equal to the fulfilment of half the religion.
Islamic morality requires that one should submit to God out of one's own
free will, avoid anything that runs counter to reason and logic, and uphold the
fraternity of humankind. It calls upon us to abide with truth at all costs. It tells
us to conquer evil with good rather than surrendering to it, and shows the easy
ways of doing this. Personal responsibility is fundamental; there are no
scapegoats. Every human being, having reached puberty and of sound mind, is
responsible for himself and no one else: "No soul bears the load of another,"
states the Koran.
This religion counsels patience against anger, gentleness in the face of
ignorance, and forgiveness towards evil. "Be patient, forbearing, and take
refuge in God so that you may attain salvation." Patience and forbearance do
not mean passive abandon, but an active struggle against the Base Self, which
the Prophet defined as "the Greatest Battle." As for salvation, all this takes is an
honest resolve and earnest intention—nothing could be simpler.
Whoever surveys creation with the eye of wisdom tries not to see
anything ugly, because any perceived ugliness is a mask, a shell, for beauty
within beauty. The wise person remembers that: "There are no thorns in
Reality. If you find one, it is your self." He recognizes the same Light shining
from every corner in the universe, from behind every façade, and meets anger
with patience, ignorance with gentleness, and ill will with friendship.
One is invited to self-criticism, to call oneself to account, before one
criticizes anyone else, and before one is called to account at the Last Judgment.
One must examine one's conscience in an objective, matter-of-fact way, without
excessive self-blame or guilt, and rectify one's future conduct accordingly.
Hypocrisy, jealousy and lying are among the worst evils. Eliminate
these, and the Almighty will spread Heaven beneath your feet. Bigotry is
condemned, because this religion is opposed to the weakness, ignorance and
imitation of evil that are the basis of fanaticism. It is only in relation to God that
weakness is proper. "He who knows his self knows his Lord"—i.e., whoever
knows that he is weak and inconsequential before his Lord of infinite power will
efface himself, and when that is done, the attributes of the Lord are manifested.
In other words, knowledge of one's self leads to the Knowledge of God, or
Gnosis.

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Gnosis

Islam proclaims Gnosis 147 (the Knowledge of God) as the reason for
creation. Sufism and mysticism are built into the religion and—barring extreme
manifestations—are an integral part of it. Gnosis leads to the overflow of
happiness. It is the cause of peace with one's conscience. It is the legacy of
Islam, and the essence of being human.
Gnosis represents the pinnacle of knowledge for man, because God is the
loftiest Being capable of being known. God desires us to "contemplate His
loftiness." All pleasures other than the pleasure of knowing God are temporary.
The purpose in this life is to reach God, and Gnosis is closeness to God or
certainty of God. To this end, in addition to the external world, man's inner
(spiritual) states must be studied. A constellation of sacred images helps to
organize man's unconscious psychic contents in the most beneficial way. At the
same time, idolatry is avoided by the exclusion of icons and the emphasis on
worship of only One God. Islam is radically iconoclastic; the veneration of
saints is deep respect only, and not worship.
The stations of wisdom begin with the realization that the universe as
macrocosmos is mirrored in man the microcosmos: "whatever is in the universe
exists in man;" "the cosmos is a big man, man is a small universe." The essence
of existence is hidden in man. Man is the essence of the universe, as the Heart
is the essence of man's body. This Heart, the essence of essences, is the House
of the Lord, the place God looks upon. He who comes to the last station of
wisdom, the highest level of selfhood, becomes a sage, a Perfect Human.
Man, according to Islam, is the bearer of God's trust. For this reason, the
honor of man cannot be desecrated. The Koran tells us that man is the deputy
of God on earth. He is the viceregent of God's Attributes, and the steward of the
heavens and the earth, of all existence. "There are so many signs, so many
truths to draw lessons from in the earth and the heavens, yet [some people] pass
them all by."
Knowledge of God starts with faith in God, with the belief that there is
Something to be known to begin with: God, who is present with His Being
(before the Beginning and after the End), encompassing through His Attributes,
known via His Names, manifest in His Actions, and apparent through His
works. Faith is attendant upon Gnosis, which, as the true purpose of man and of
existence, is superior to worship and obeying God's commandments. Unless
Knowledge of God is aimed at, nothing much will come from the rote repetition
of worship and obedience to God out of habit, although these are in themselves
sufficient to secure man's salvation in the afterlife. Faith is only the prelude to
experience.
This religion defines the liberation of man as the harmonious
development of his potentials. It is every man's duty to foster this development,
to "tend his own garden." We sow in this life in order that we may reap both in
this life and the next. He who sows ignorance cannot reap the fruit of Gnosis, of
wisdom. "Humanity exists, not for consumption, but for honest work and
earnings, and for elevation." "True exaltation is not possible as long as virtue is
not preferred over self-interest."

147 Not to be confused with Gnosticism, an early Christian heresy.

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Repayment of Evil

Islam counsels us that we have the right to demand just retribution for an
evil. It allows us to "repay enmity to the same extent." To "turn the other
cheek" is not recommended, because this is just not realistic. At the same time,
however, it advises us that whoever possesses a higher morality should repay
evil with good. "The punishment for a wrong is repayment in proportion and
kind. But whoever chooses the path of forgiveness and goodness, his reward
lies with God, who will repay this in a way befitting with His Majesty. God
does not love oppressors." "If you forgive, you will have acted as befits the
God-fearing." "Cling to mercy, enjoin the good, and turn away from
ignorance." In a Tradition of the Prophet, we are told that those who forgive
people will enter Paradise directly, without Judgment or retribution.
The thoroughbred horse of a prominent Moslem was stolen as he was
Praying. "I saw the thief," he remarked, "but I was engaged in something vastly
more important, so I couldn't interrupt it." When his friends began to curse the
thief, he stopped them: "Nobody has wronged me, that fellow has wronged
himself. Isn't his self-wronging enough for him, that you and I should wrong
him too?"
Such nobility of soul will find an echo only in those who share it.
Otherwise, those doomed to a shadow play in a house of mirrors will simply
laugh the whole affair off.
The murderer of Ali, the Fourth Caliph, struck him in the neck with a
poisoned sword. His friends captured the fiend and began to manhandle him.
Ali, in pain, warded them off, warning them to beware of doing wrong
themselves in their efforts to avenge him.
In combat, the same Ali had bested his opponent and was about to strike
his last blow, when the man spat in his face. Ali immediately rose to his feet,
and told him to get up. The enemy was astonished. "Why are you releasing
me?" he asked. "When you spat in my face," replied Ali, "my Base Self (ego)
became furious. If I had struck you at that point, it would have been for my
Base Self, not for the sake of God. Our struggle is only for the objective
purpose of defending God's religion. Now we must fight again."

Gentleness

Islam counsels us to be gentle as far as possible. In the Koran, it is

related that God sent Moses and Aaron to Pharaoh, advising them to "speak
gently" with him. God knew, of course, that Pharaoh would not accept Moses's
message, yet He advised them to treat even this arch-foe of God with gentleness.
This means that gentleness and gentle(wo)manly conduct should be our guiding
light in all our dealings.

Cleanliness

"Cleanliness derives from Godliness." Not only is bodily cleanness

necessary, but sins are defined as spiritual dirt needing cleansing in accordance

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with the precepts of the Koran, which distinguish right from wrong and
discriminate between good and bad. For instance, doing good with the ulterior
motive of obtaining a favor is considered to be a "dirty" act.

Prohibitions

Anything capable of inflicting harm, not merely on man but on the

tiniest creature, is branded "Forbidden" in Islam. Whatever harms your body,
your religion, and your good manners is prohibited. Together with all other
things detrimental to the well-being of man—to his courtesy, his body, and his
religion—Islam has forbidden gambling, alcohol, and fornication.

Legal Sanctions

In terms of morality, people may be roughly divided into three classes.

The first class consists of those who can find the right way with only a little
guidance, and become Perfect Men in the hands of an able Master. The second
are those who know right from wrong well enough, but are unable to extricate
themselves from the wicked circumstances which their Base Self lands them in.
The third are the ones redeemable with difficulty, who have a predilection to
doing wrong.
Obviously, then, people are not all the same morally, and the remedy
needed to discourage one group from ill deeds must necessarily differ from
another. For some people, merely pointing out that they are wrong is enough to
put them to shame. They suffer pangs of conscience and secretly ask for
forgiveness. In their case, Islam advises: "Try to pass over them by saying:
'These are deeds unworthy of human beings, it's unlikely that that person should
have done such a thing.'" For some, this is punishment enough.
Then there are those who commit the most heinous crimes and are proud
of their achievement, who brag about their murders as if they were war heroes.
Islam has punishments to deal with this sort, as well. The main thing is to
observe justice in all cases, and not to confuse one group with the other.
Shame saves a person whose foot slides. It is a great gift from the
treasures of God. But it is useless to speak of such things to a person who views
shame merely as a weakness, and nothing more.

Love

Islam is the religion of love. "What becomes man is to love selflessly

and to compare others with oneself." As the Prophet explained: "You cannot
enter Paradise unless you have faith, and you cannot have faith unless you love
one another." Thus, "faith" in Islam is practically synonymous with "love."
Knowledge of God leads to the flowering of divine love in one's heart.
Love is such a purging influence that it will drive out everything else from the
heart in which it becomes established. To renounce a part of love is to renounce
the whole: love restricted is love denied.
He who attains divine love is the happiest person in the world. For there
is nothing in the universe greater than love. God Himself becomes one's Friend

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in divine love. Worship with such love in one's heart is worthy of being called
true worship: "... the Faithful love God more ardently" (2:165); "He loves them,
and they love Him" (5:54).
God loved man so much that He created this whole vast universe just for
man's sake. Man is everything—of all the creatures in the world, it is only man
that can produce the highest good and fulfill God's hopes of him. If man, in
turn, lives for God and not for himself, every happiness will throw itself at his
feet. Love of God makes a conscience just and righteous; it does not leave man
alone with any crime that caters to the Base Self.
Human beings constantly fall victim to their Base Selves. Hence, they
deny facts which run counter to their desires and expectations, and human rights
are impaired as a result. Only the love of God can prevent this. This religion
demands that the love of God should inform all the senses, that people should
love Truth, be intellectually unbiased, and equitable in conscience.
"The heart of the Moslem loves Truth above all things." "He loves God
after stripping from selfhood." The reason for this is that God Almighty is
Ultimate Reality.
Islam advises the Heart to "find the Beloved," and the ailing body to
"find a doctor." It acts as a balm for sores, whether psychic or physical. "My
mercy embraces all things" (7:156), says God; "He has prescribed mercy for
Himself" (6:12).
Islam exhorts us to "live as one spirit in many bodies." It tells us that the
Other is "either your brother in religion, or your equal in creation." Only when
love is removed from a nation, and the sickness of discord spreads within it,
does it destine itself to destruction.
The Prophet of God has said: "When you are summoned to the Divine
Presence, God will recognize you through your love for your children and your
friendship with other human beings. Do you Love God? Love other people
first. Do you wish to draw close to God? Love God's creatures. Desire for
them what you desire for yourself." To regard any creature with contempt is
one of the greatest sins; not even the tiniest mote should be viewed in this way.
Rather, one should concentrate on one's own failings, and try to rectify them.
A person informed by such principles will place the well-being of others
above his own. He will work for the good of others, his nation, and mankind
with the same diligence as for his own gain.
True friendship is the mark of this religion's adherents. A person whose
heart does not beat in common with humanity is unworthy of being called
human: "The believers are those who share"; "The faithful are brethren of one
another."
Unity is the utmost concern of such a sensibility. For Divine Power is
telling us: "You are not separate or alienated or strangers, you are parts of one
another." It is for this reason that any person in whom the heart, compassion,
and feeling for others are not entirely dead will be distressed by the predicament
of other people—what is happening to them is happening to himself. Unity—
the Unity of God, the unity of mankind, the unity of the universe—is the basic
principle in Islam. And we are united, or re-member (re-assemble) our primal
unity, through love.

Fear of God

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 Why, as the Psalms state and the Prophet echoes, is fear of God the
beginning of wisdom? Because if we fear God, we obey His commandments
and observe His prohibitions. Such "Right Action" leads to the blossoming of
love for God in our hearts, which replaces the earlier fear. Not only do we avoid
actions with regrettable consequences, but we draw closer to God in proportion
to our love for Him. The essence of this closeness is wisdom; it is
"wakefulness of the Heart," on which our very future depends. "Do not speak
with those whose hearts are dead. They carry their own tombs with them." The
dead-hearted is one lost in the darkness of his Base Self, in the ugliness of his
ignorance. And the ignorant is one bereft of Right Feeling, having renounced
the taste of God. Such people are derelict in both this world and the next.
Wakefulness of the Heart demands righteousness from man, and
righteousness is also there at the last stage of human evolution; it gives rise to a
sense of shame, which in turn leads to patience. One should be ashamed of
oneself, first and foremost. Without such a sense of self-shame, a person is
liable to do anything, and indeed the Prophet has announced: "If you have no
shame, do what you want"—for there is then no obstacle to committing any
crime at all.
Without fear of God, man is cruel: "The cruel are only those who don't
fear God." And the end of all cruelty is disappointment. "The cruel, like Satan,
are deprived of divine mercy." Besides, a single fear (the fear of God) is then
replaced by a thousand other fears (of everything else).

Spirituality

In Islam, "the world" is defined not as "visible forms," but as the stage
that leads to eternal happiness. In its negative aspect, it is "that which prevents
recognition of Truth and Reality." It is not evil or sinful in itself, but bad only to
the extent that it hampers spiritual elevation. This in turn is not the fault of the
world itself, but only of the individual's exclusive preoccupation with it.
This religion tells us that both matter and spirit must be given their due,
that neither can be neglected without precipitating calamity. It counsels a life
that is simultaneously secular and spiritual—a "both/and" approach rather than
an "either/or." Because the spiritual principle is always present, secular "state
religions" are not formed as substitutes for the real thing.
Hence, neither the needs of the body nor those of the spirit should be
neglected. The Prophet has said: "Your body is the vehicle of your spirit. Treat
it gently." And also: "The best among you are those who don't sacrifice this
world for the next or the next world for this, working for both worlds as hard as
they can without becoming a burden on anyone."
The spiritual development of man is inextricably linked with ethics and
morality; morality is the instructor of the spirit.
Hearts can be purified only by obeying the commandments and
prohibitions flowing from the spring of Prophethood, by accepting these as
guides to behavior. Forgetting spirituality and assigning value only to material
things is considered a sign of decadence and impending disaster.

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Social Principles

Islam claims that the society worth living in, the "virtuous society," is a
society composed of individuals possessing reason, freedom of thought, honor,
generosity, contentment, gentleness, good manners, greatness of effort, courage,
respect, compassion, peace of heart, love of justice, kindness, etc. Accordingly,
its project is to instill as many of these traits in as many individuals as possible.
The root of all social ills is: "You shall work and I shall eat," together with: "I
don't care what happens to you, so long as I live my life." The vast majority of
human beings on this planet still suffer as a result of this attitude.
A human child comes into this world complete with animal nature, but
what makes it specifically human will require years of careful nurture. Reviling
natural, God-given instincts is meaningless; the child should be trained, not to
suppress them, but in a way that will allow their harmonious, edifying
integration with all the elements of the mature human personality. It is religion
that will fill this creature with an agreeable disposition and turn it towards God.
Religious training will inform the essence, the spirit, of this child; it is the
remedy for the past and the hope of the future.

Family Life

Islam is the staunchest supporter of a stable family life. It does not

support temporary liaisons of a hedonistic nature. Everything is not permitted in
Islam; all actions are not equal in virtue. A loving family is the best
environment for nurturing free, virtuous, and mature human beings. Temporary
pleasures cannot fulfill the healthy and fit survival of our species.
Women, who were practically slaves in the pre-Islamic period, were
given rights by Islam—beginning with the right to proper marriage—which we
are still not finished granting them. Even entry into Paradise is dependent on
women: "Paradise lies beneath the feet of mothers." The Prophet has
admonished: "Do not hope for my intercession if you have violated women's
rights." Compassion and Mercy, two of the most fundamental Attributes of
God, are feminine in the Arabic language, and women are the bearers of these—
as well as other—divine attributes.
A healthy, wholesome, Permitted (i.e. marital) sex life is a part of nature
and being human for people, men of religion, and saints alike. Neither sex, nor
the body, nor the soul is inherently sinful in Islam.

Work and Social Obligations

The Koran tells us that "ease is found side by side with hardship." There
is no convenience without difficulty—no pain, no gain. If people work to
overcome hardships, they will succeed, and even be granted a reprieve. But if
they lose hope and cease to work, this will spell their downfall. The Great Work
of the Sufis comprises both material and spiritual work, and in this they are only
carrying out the Prophet's instructions to all Moslems: "Work for this world,"
said he, "as if you were never going to die, and work for the next world as if you
were going to die tomorrow." The two must go hand in hand.

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 To be industrious and become tired through hard work is the "mirror of
Grace." "When you are finished with a task, busy yourself with another. Rely
upon your Lord alone for support."
A rich man once asked the Prophet how he should pay the wages of the
workers he employed. The Prophet said: "Put yourself in their place, and pay
them what you would expect to be paid if you yourself had done the job." To
the question: "And when should I pay them?" he replied: "Before the sweat on
their brow is dry." If these principles alone had been observed, humanity would
have been spared many an evil of exploitation.
"Whose heart beats with compassion for creatures, by this measure he
has chosen the way of God." As the Prophet says in various Traditions: "A
person whose heart does not beat with compassion for creatures cannot be
saved." "Who fills his stomach while his neighbor goes hungry is not a
believer." "Whoever falls ill and dies as a result of the callousness of his
locality, that locality is his murderer." "The superior worship is to inspire joy in
the hearts of human beings. A person gains fame only with what he instills in a
broken heart, and that is the only true fame."

Progress

In addition to being an immensely practical religion, Islam guides

mankind to scientific and material progress. It is a great and noble struggle to
work for the welfare of human beings and the improvement of their lives. There
is no limit to social or spiritual progress. Nowhere in the Koran is a limit set to
the progress of man or the universe.
Progress, however, should not mean progress into sin or the progress of
evil, which would be rather a regression, a degeneration. To work hard and talk
little in the service of humanity is one of the greatest virtues. The progress that
enhances love instead of hate, life instead of death, safety instead of insecurity,
is true progress worthy of the name.

Administration: the Just Society

Islam aims to establish "right" in place of "might," virtue in place of self-

interest. The Prophet told governors: "Always ease the way for the people. Do
not make things difficult. Agree with the people, don't cause disagreement."
Islam upholds the rule of Law. The administrative unit in Islam is the
state; it considers anarchy and lawlessness to be beneath civilization. Nor does
this mean that it favors oppression or despotism; government must be by the
consent of those governed. The ruler of the state bears responsibility towards
his subjects; he must treat the people with justice and mercy. In return, the
populace should submit to the regulations, law and order of a just government.
"Freedom tempered by justice" is the yardstick, with the emphasis on justice.
The Prophet has observed that: "A society can resist God and still survive, but it
cannot survive where cruelty (oppression) is present." Justice is justice and
cruelty is cruelty, no matter where they may occur. Serving justice is more
important than many years of worship.
Man's greatest sin is to present his own selfish desires as God's law.
Self-interest feeds the cravings of the ego, and the Base Self is never satisfied
with anything. If God's commandments are thrown to the winds and the

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powerful become enamored of their whims, therein lies the beginning of all
cruelty. Islam identifies the root of all oppression as the refusal to acknowledge
the supremacy of divine Power over those in power. In the Islamic conception,
acquiscence to cruelty is itself cruelty. When the desires of the powerful rather
than the laws of God govern society, the door is opened to oppression, and
society becomes the victim of the Base Self. In the absence of love, one seeks
to escape God's laws. And no law of society can ensure that a loveless person
will not be harmful to others. Only the laws of God have the power to rule over
hearts.

The Reformation

Such, in short, are the credentials of the religion for which we are called
upon to consider a reform—never mind the actual situation of its adherents.
Moslems may be invited to reform themselves in accordance with the above, but
we would be hard put to find anything in need of reform among the foregoing
principles. There is nothing among them that is inherently objectionable. This
religion is "natural" for man in the sense that it is entirely in tune with his innate
characteristics and contains nothing offensive to reason. One would be justified
in thinking, however, that so-called "Moslems" should reform themselves in
light of the above precepts. If—as the above evidence suggests—this is Islam,
Moslems cannot be criticized for being Moslems; they can be criticized for not
practicing their religion sufficiently well.
Now, to return to the question of our title: can there be a Reformation in
Islam?
It is not the purpose of this paper, written as it is from an Islamic
viewpoint, to pass judgment on something as portentous as the Reformation.
Discretion precludes taking sides on a subject which many people would regard
as an internal affair of Christianity. The most that courtesy would allow is to
recognize that both sides probably had points in their favor. In any case, the
intention here is not to argue who was, or is, in the right, but to investigate
whether the concept of "Reformation" is applicable to Islam.
The result of the Reformation has been a lasting split in Christianity.
That the Reformation occurred at all bespeaks the existence of historical facts
and doctrinal circumstances which made it inevitable. Our reticence in
expressing these should not be mistaken for an ignorance of the issues involved,
but should rather be ascribed to the effort to observe the proper discretion, as
stated above. Without going into the details, it can flatly be stated that these
circumstances have never been, and moreover are never likely to be, mirrored in
Islam. (It doesn't have a church, for one thing.) Only the challenge of
modernity can be an issue in Islam, not doctrinal schisms.
When people talk about reform in Islam, what they usually have in
mind—or in the back of their minds—is changing the fundamental tenets of the
religion, such as getting rid of the Formal Prayer. However, this may be just an
excuse to avoid what is good for us, but what we also find difficult. God in His
wisdom has ordained these precepts for the benefit of human beings, to enable
them to realize their full and truly human potential (i.e. the fully realized human
being).

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 In connection with Islam, it is probably better to state the situation in
terms of reform rather than a Reformation. When this is done, it becomes clear
that to "re-form" something becomes necessary only when it is "deformed," i.e.,
when it loses its original, pure form. But, thankfully, this has never happened in
the case of Islam. It has been preserved as it was revealed, certain later and
undesirable accretions notwithstanding, because each generation has shown the
diligence to weed out such unwanted residues. Its holy book, the Koran, does
not need or admit of reform. The fact that the Koran has survived without
alteration for fourteen centuries, and that the most recent copies—apart,
perhaps, from a few printer's and copyist's errors of a typographical nature—are
replicas of the earliest Master Copy, testifies to the utmost care taken to preserve
the original; while the Traditions of the Prophet have always been kept alive,
both in word and in practice, within the Islamic community. The existence of
some controversial Traditions does not affect the main body of Prophetic
doctrine which is firmly established, and disregarding these does not present an
obstacle to understanding and practicing the religion as a whole—which means
that Islam is "fault-tolerant" in terms of the Prophetic Traditions.
On this foundation, a superstructure has been erected throughout the
course of the centuries that has made explicit what was previously only implicit.
Like a seed that sprouts and, in becoming a tree, displays the traits genetically
coded into it to full view, Islamic thought has built upon the dual foundation
composed of the Koran and the Way (of the Prophet) to elaborate many things
that were already contained in them in potential form. The result is a living
body of doctrine that has weathered many centuries, always growing and
becoming stronger in the process.
Hence, the idea of "reform" is singularly out of place when it comes to
Islam, both because its foundations are free of error, and because it has not
undergone any notable distortions in coming down to this day.
As soon as the focus becomes centered on modernity, we see that the
question is one of "response" (which lies beyond the scope of this essay) rather
than "reform." For, as we have already seen, no deformation has occurred in
Islam that calls for a re-forming. It has never been distorted from its original
teachings to entail a correction or a return to the roots. What has happened,
instead, is at most that the understanding of Moslems has become dulled with
the passage of time, that their educational institutions dedicated to handing
down the religion have deteriorated, so that many Moslems today have an
insufficient grasp of their own religion. This may call for a reform of education,
but not of Islam itself. As a matter of fact, both Moslems and non-Moslems are
poorly informed about this religion today, so that it would be much better on the
part of everyone to take a fresh look at Islam. When we do this, we shall
discover that the answers to many contemporary problems have been ready and
waiting for us there.

Renewal, not Reform

While Islam does not admit of reform, however, this does not mean that
it should not adapt to changing times. The Prophet of God has said: "God sends
a Renewer every 100 years to renew the religion of Islam." This renewal (tajdid
) never aims to alter the foundations of the religion, but rather to give fresh

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expression to perennial religious truths. One of the most famous of such
renewers was Ahmad Sirhindi, who was known as "the Renewer (mujaddid ) of
the Second Millenium A.H. 148"
Such renewers restate Islam for their contemporaries. They present a
new vision (a restoration or "re-vision" in the sense of taking a fresh look, not a
"revision" in the sense of correcting, improving or revising) of the religion that
is timely and meaningful and that updates the idiom of discourse to meet present
needs. They make important changes, not in essential principles but in matters
of detail. They derive certain conclusions according to the requirements of the
age, answer the obstinate, and explain certain matters the divulgence of which
has been left to their time.
While reform is out of the question, therefore, this does not mean that
Islam is frozen in its means of expression to an earlier period. In each age, the
attempt is made to "let the Koran speak in the language, and to the
comprehension, of the current century." It is a distinctive characteristic of the
Koran that it always remains fresh and new—always youthful, though humanity
itself may age. Hence, the answer to whether and how Islam can change is:
Reform: No—Renewal: Yes. As a universal religion, Islam has always shown
the resilience to convey its meaning to the thought of its age.
Again, this renewal should not be confused with "innovation" (bid'ah)
which would be to introduce external principles or practices into the Islamic
religion, itself already complete and self-sufficient. The principles of Islam are
simple, entirely rational, streamlined, and free of excess baggage. In this, His
Final Testament and statement to mankind, God did not leave out anything
essential that matters, and what He discarded can only be a hindrance.

148 Anno Hegira: the year of migration of the Prophet from Mecca to Medina in 622 A.D.

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 THE CRISIS OF GLOBAL CIVILIZATION

Crisis: Danger plus Opportunity. 149

"And Then the Atomic Bomb"

"Improbable, but not impossible." This is how the speaker describes a war
between the West versus China in cohorts with Iran, in an interview granted to the
respected German periodical Der Spiegel. 150 He is speaking of a Yellow Menace
allied to a Green Menace, of a Far-Eastern Confucianism united with Middle-Eastern
Islam against the Christian West.
The speaker is Samuel P. Huntington, Harvard professor of international
politics, propounder of the "clash of civilizations" thesis, and a figure of some
influence on U.S. foreign policy. In 1993, Huntington articulated his view that
throughout the 20th century, the world has moved from nation-state conflict (World
War 1) to ideological conflict (WW2 and the cold war) to cultural conflict
(WW3?). 151
The article, followed by a more recent book, created a stir. It is easy, of
course, to drill holes in Huntington's paradigm, and many have hastened to puncture
it. Cultural and civilizational conflict is mostly intra, not inter—between Turkey and
Iran, Iran and Iraq, Iraq and Quwait in the House of Islam, between Catholics and
Protestants in Ireland; not to mention Pol Pot's genocide in Cambodia.
Cold warrior habits of thinking die hard. With the downfall of the Soviet
Union, it appeared that a new enemy was needed, and some people started shopping
around for suitable candidates. One did not need to look far; militant Islam and the
bulging population of China seemed the only threats around. What is surprising is
not Huntington's conclusions, but that he was led to them so late in the day after 1990.
Excluding even Greece because of its Orthodoxy, Huntington describes a small core
of Catholic-Protestant Westerndom hunkering down for the next big collision.
In passing, I would like to confess an admiration both for Huntington's
credentials and his ideas; he has a point. What I wish to suggest, however, is that we
have today a very real possibility of averting his worst nightmares. Aren't we tired
yet of perpetual warfare? Thirty Years' Wars. Hundred Years' Wars. We have spent
the better part of the 20th century in hot and cold wars—the period 1914-1990 could
even be viewed as a single intermittent war. But if intelligent and responsible people
of good will everywhere now take up the call, we can soon find ourselves in a state
involving not the clash of civilizations, but the harmony and even the symphony of
civilizations—a truly global civilization, befitting the global village—for the first
time in history. Let us dare to think big.
Must we always take precautions against the pessimistic view, rather than
strive for an optimistic outcome? Don't we realize that the optimistic result, if we can
achieve it, will include and transcend pessimistic measures? And doesn't pessimism

149Chinese ideogram for “crisis.”

150Der Spiegel, No. 48, 1996, p. 178-186.
151S.P. Huntington, "A Clash of Civilizations?" Foreign Affairs, Summer, 1993.

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usually materialize into a self-fulfilling prophecy, giving rise to the very thing we
fear? To demonize Islam is to radicalize it. Bogeymen become real to the extent that
we imagine they are.

The New World Order

Some have called it the "new world order," others the "new world disorder."
Whatever name you call it by, "it" is characterized by centripretal and centrifugal
forces acting in concert—forces of unprecedented unification and disintegration.
Global markets and high technology tend to unify it, minority ethnicities and
differences tend to pull it apart. Professor Benjamin Barber has argued that neither
tendency is very democratic, although he does not rule out the possibility of
participatory and confederal democracy. 152
Against this backdrop, theses of cultural conflict stand out as divisive and
anti-pluralistic; by implication, perhaps even anti-democratic. They miss the
opportunity to move towards a world relatively free of strife, a nonaggressive and
even a benign world. In Islamic Sufism, the ultimate vision is that of "Unity in
Diversity," of an inner oneness that binds together all externally disparate events. I
suggest that the time has come to consider this view seriously on a global scale, to
celebrate our differences as richness and not use them as pretexts for combat. Is this
not what America, "the melting pot of nations," is all about? Is it not the reason for
the sole remaining superpower's phenomenal success? "United we stand, divided we
fall"—and if the West divides itself off from the rest of humanity, it too will fall, no
matter how superior a position it starts out from initially. It is the "unity in diversity"
thesis, not the conflict model, that is worthy of the foreign policy of any superpower
today. Thankfully, there are signs that this truth has been understood.
In a study of the post-cold-war era, former U.S. national security adviser
Zbigniew Brzezinski concludes that the people of the world need a new moral
consensus in order to survive the challenge of the future. 153 Here is breadth of vision
indeed. To take the argument further, when you are talking morals, you are talking
religion, explicitly or implicitly; and where the greater part of the human race is
concerned, you are talking religion explicitly. 154 To forge a global moral consensus
calls for the participation of all ecumenical faiths—of Christianity, Buddhism, and
Islam. Which brings us back to Huntington's thesis.
Islam is hardly a fitting candidate to fill the boots of communism. It is a
venerable faith that has led countless people to happiness, to inner peace, to peace
with God and the world. It certainly is a poor substitute for an "empire of evil" armed
to the teeth with hydrogen bombs and bent on "burying you."
The problem is not simply that one is a religion while the other is a political
ideology. Its roots go deeper than that. To illustrate the difference in the most
striking terms, I shall make use of two quotations. The first is from Desiderata II.
The second is from Lenin, as laid down in 1915.

152Benjamin R. Barber, "Jihad vs. McWorld," The Atlantic Monthly, March 1992, p. 53-65.
153Zbigniew Brzezinski, Out of Control, New York: Collier Books, 1993, 1996.
154Long before morals became separated from religion, they were part and parcel of it, and are still
rooted in it so strongly that any new morals would have to contradict existing ones in order to conflict
with religion. For the majority of humankind, religion is the only provider of moral action, and
divesting them of religion would strip them of moral behavior also.

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 According to Desiderata: "The heart of all religion is love"—the love of God,
the love of one's fellow human beings, the love of all God's little creatures, even unto
the least of them. This is true even of a nontheistic religious philosophy such as
Buddhism. Thus the Dhammapada: "Hatred does not cease by hatred, hatred ceases
by love." Islam, as the final religion and (according to Islamic belief) the archetypal
religion present in all earlier religions, is the very fount of such love.
According to Lenin, on the other hand: "We must hate—hatred is the basis of
Communism. Children must be taught to hate their parents if these are not
Communists." 155 Lest it be thought that Lenin introduced an “innovation” that was
not present earlier in communism (Marxism-Leninism), here is Lewis Mumford’s
conclusion on Marx: “The poison of Marx’s hate contaminated the pure, humane
streams of socialist doctrine.”156
The question, in other words, is not simply one of atheism, though of course
this is how the satanic strain creeps into an ideology ostensibly dedicated to the
eradication of social wrongs and injustice. Nor is it one of dictatorship, although this,
too, stems from atheism. (It has been argued elsewhere that democracy finds its real
roots in religion. 157) The main difference between the two is that while Islam
counsels us to love even a fly, communism requires children to hate even their
parents. Although Islam, too, weighs in heavily on the side of social justice and
egalitarianism, the two are at bottom incommensurable.
Nor does Islam present us with a monolithic façade—not even communism
did that. A recent leader in The Economist noted that Islamic terrorism is only one of
the "many faces of Islam," and even in such an intransigent country as Iran, the 1997
elections have shown that people want freedom, not rhetoric or ideological
propaganda. Instead of demonizing this religion, we should focus on its more
positive aspects; perhaps it is only a siege mentality that drives some Moslems to
extremes.
Viewed in historical terms, it is a startling fact that terrorism and theocracy
have become only very recently associated with Islam. This suggests that instruction
in the religion has degenerated in recent times—otherwise, how explain dissonant
behavior in the adherents of a religion counseling chivalrous action even in wartime?
If Moslems themselves now have an insufficient grasp of their religion, others may
certainly be excused for knowing even less about it. This realization, however, sets a
task before us: the task of understanding what Islam really is, and what it really says.
Contrary to all its recent supposed manifestations, contact with the Sufi
masters of Central Anatolia has convinced me that authentic Islam is cosmopolitan,
loving, ecumenical, rationalist, universalizing, gracious, integrating, and urbane. One
look at this list is enough to tell us that it contains all the factors needed to achieve a
unitary world. May I go so far as to state that Islam has a unique contribution to
make to a "melting pot of civilizations." To explain more clearly what I mean, let us
look at two major world trends as we approach the end of the second millenium AD.

Consumerism

155 V. I. Lenin, “Defeat of One’s Own Government in Imperialist War” (1915), in Selected Works, Vol.
5 (New York, 1938), p. 147; quoted in Encounter, December 1986, p. 20.
156Mumford, The Condition of Man, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973 (1944), p. 339.
157 “Islam and Democracy,” in Henry Bayman, The Meaning of the Four Books (Prepublication copy
available on the Internet).

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 The postmodern agenda of the New World Order is consumerism plus
anthropocentrism. E. Kohak has argued that the problem is not political or economic
but philosophical or perhaps prephilosophical, 158 and I shall suggest that it is a
religious one. Our crisis of values is at bottom a religious crisis.
Consumption is an ordinary fact of human life. Consumerism, as distinct
from consumption or even the consumer, is based on the artificial creation of needs
that are really not needs at all. A craving, a lack, has first to be installed in a human
being in order to sell him yet another thing he is really in no need of.
Before proceeding further, it should be noted that the following critique of
consumerism is not intended to advocate a return to an agrarian or a hunter-gatherer
society. There's nothing wrong with modern civilization—only with
overconsumption. We need to remember the time-honored principle of the Golden
Mean—avoid excess, even when standing beside an ocean. Before anything else, this
is an appeal to the reader's conscience. It does not advocate building a utopian
society, and especially not imposition from above; although, if sufficient numbers of
people adopted it freely, the result would be well-nigh utopian.
But can a society be both Islamic and consumer-oriented, civilized, and
modern or post-modern? Of course it can. Islam is a religion that can be practiced in
any time, place, or society. We should not, and aren't supposed to, turn our backs on
the fruits of civilization or the amenities of modern life. The agenda of Islam has
nothing to do with that of the Luddites.
Consumerism fuels the fires of the global economy no matter where we live.
It is based on ever-increasing material consumption as the ultimate goal, on the
gratification of personal greed, often tickled and whipped up beyond its normal limits
through relentless advertising and sales push. We are led to believe that material
consumption is the central fact about being human. People everywhere are forced to
negotiate this hamster's mill, running faster and faster and getting nowhere. There
appears to be no other purpose in life except conspicuous consumption, except the
accumulation of ever-increasing amounts of goods. It is only after the acquisition of
the third car, the fourth washing machine and the fifth television that people begin,
perhaps, to wonder if it is all really worth the trouble. But lacking a point of
reference, in the absence of an alternative we know of, and trapped in a rat maze, we
continue to travel the same old route until, finally, our time is up one day.
Neither triumphant capitalism nor now-defunct communism have been able to
point to a way out of this crass materialism, precisely because they are both based on
it. Possessing wealth without well-being and "things" without fulfilment, we live in a
spiritual vacuum.
Consumerism is the contemporary manifestation of a perennial, deeper
element in man—the Base Self (about which more below). In other ages it has
caused man's greed in other forms, and today this prime mover behind human folly is
working in this form.
In psychology, a "displacement reaction" is what happens when a normal need
cannot be met and something else is substituted in its stead. For example, the lack of
gratification of a primary need can lead to overeating as a compensatory factor. This
example is chosen advisedly, because there is a clear parallel with consumptive greed.
Surrounding ourselves with ever more objects is indicative of a deeper malaise, of an
unfulfilled yearning that no amount of material wealth can cure. We are like thirsty
people who, drinking sea-water, only become thirstier.

158Erazim Kohàk, "The Importance of Tolstoy," Dissent, Winter 1987, p. 5-9.

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 The reason is that we, like all normal human beings, have a psychospiritual
aspect to our existence in addition to the material aspect. Leaving the spirit hungry is
as deadly as material hunger in the long run. So we are faced with the following
chain of questions: Do we know what a spirit is? Do we know that we have one? Do
we know how to care for it? What is food for the spirit? 159 Do we feed our spirit
regularly? If our answers to these questions are "no" or "don't know," the odds are
that we have starved our spirit into suspended animation. No amount of material
gratification is then going to secure satisfaction for us.
All this should not be taken as advocating material poverty or as a denial of
the benefits of technology. On the contrary. What is implied is that we should satisfy
every need properly, instead of starving some and having to deal with a "displacement
reaction." Here, as elsewhere, the Golden Mean, or Happy Medium, should be
observed: avoid excess. This will not only serve ecology, it will also serve our fellow
men. We will be making our own small contribution, incumbent on everyone, toward
putting less strain on our planet's biosphere, and in addition, we shall be releasing
resources we would otherwise tie up for the use of our fellow human beings, so that
someone else's real need will be met where our overconsumption would be mere
waste.
One should never belittle the extent of one's contribution. It has been said that
if all the people in China were to jump simultaneously, there would be an earthquake,
and if everyone were to contribute their own two cents, to that extent we would live
in a better world.
Everybody knows that it is impossible for the whole world to achieve or
maintain a consumption level such as exists, for example, in the richest parts of the
world. Nor is it necessary, the rich themselves included. To be force-fed on a diet of
material objects creates its own undesirable side-effects (such as obesity and
boredom) after a while.
But this is at bottom an ethical stance, a discrimination between good and bad.
It says that ecology (or ecology-conscious action) and equity are good, and since all
ethics are historically as well as metaphysically rooted in religion, it is also a
religious—in the present context, a specifically Islamic—stance. Only a full-fledged
religion can show us the way. Eastern philosophies suffer from the same
Godlessness—the same spiritual aridity—that plagues us already, and so cannot help
us.
Not only do we, as normal human beings, need to nurture our spirit; not only
will optimal—as opposed to maximal—consumption lead to ecologically desirable
consequences; but, further, solving the economic problem of mankind will make
cultivation of the spirit almost inevitable. Because the fact is that for the first time in
history, we are nearing a point where we will be able to eradicate material want from
the world—if we play our cards right. Our technological prowess is approaching
such a point that, using such techniques as computer-integrated manufacturing (CIM),
we will be able to deploy automated factories with no or few human attendants. The
same goes for automated farming. The richer nations, at least, will at some point face
the prospect of reducing—or leveling off—production. If or when that day comes,
many people will be able to work shorter hours, and many people will not need to

159For those who want to know: Formal Prayer is the food of the spirit. And it is only the invocation of
God's name(s) that satisfies Hearts (the Koran, 13:28).

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work at all. 160 They will be freed completely of the drudgery of work that has been
the burden of mankind for millenia.
Some people view this prospect with dread. They cannot imagine what a
work-less society can be like, because we identify with our work to such an extent.
Societies may actually be forced to keep part of their population off the labor force,
while nevertheless providing for their needs. 161 Ingrained attitudes will cause some to
regard these people as freeloaders and parasites.
But if humankind actually solves its "economic problem," then there will be
no need to work, for humanity will, after centuries of effort, have completed the
mechanical-cybernetic infrastructure needed to liberate it from labor.162 (This is
impossible, of course, given the presupposition that the economic needs of man are
infinite. But in a world where these needs are considered finite, it would be possible,
and people could live reasonably well off. The "unlimited growth" hypothesis makes
sense only where a displacement reaction exists. On a small planet with finite
resources, it is obvious that this hypothesis is unrealistic.)
With this freedom from drudgery will presumably come a vast increase in
more creative activity—an explosion in the arts and sciences. Human beings will be
able to realize more of their potentials than ever before. 163 Under such conditions, it
is not unreasonable to suppose that humanity will experience an unparalleled spiritual
flowering, as well. For the liberation from menial chores will provide the leisure time
for people to devote themselves wholeheartedly—and more completely—to spiritual
growth. 164
Time was when the present author believed that this improvement would
occur in mental activity alone—that human beings would become intellectuals, then
super-intellectuals or geniuses, etc. by utilizing progressively greater parts of their
brains. I mention this because it is an error that other people may also fall into easily.
It is a result of assuming that the intellect, and only the intellect, is the highest good.
Since then, having come into contact with Sufism, I have found it necessary to
revise this conception. Not the mind or brain alone, but the human totality complete
with the body, needs to be developed. This is because the universe as macrocosmos
is mapped into man as microcosmos, and a one-sided development would fail to
capture the harmony of the universe at large. We are not simply intellect, just as a
computer is not only its monitor. We are composed of a variety of elements, among
the foremost of which are the spirit, the Heart, the body, and the intellect (as duly
noted). The harmonious development of the human personality, with the integration
of all aspects of man to yield a synthesis otherwise unachievable, is what will lead to
the flowering of the Perfect—or Universal—Human, the last word in human
development.

160 See Jeremy Rifkin’s The End of Work, New York: Putnam, 1995, for a recent restatement of this
idea.
161 This indicates that the Islamic concept of an "Alms-tax" will remain relevant even in a
postindustrial, post-work society.
162In the early 1970s, Robert Theobald was one of the first to envisage this outcome, but John Maynard
Keynes had already foreshadowed him.
163Not that some forms of drudgery aren't useful; they have a disciplining and purifying effect on the
soul. The great danger in a work-less society is that human energies which cannot find a constructive
outlet will turn destructive, so that a form of right livelihood has to be found.
164This does not mean that we have to leave the material world in order to engage in the spiritual
world. There is no monasticism in Islam. It only means that freedom from heavy labor will leave more
people free for self-improvement. We don’t have to “leave the city and head for the hills” in order to
find God—not in Islam, anyway.

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 But once such a goal is in sight, it becomes apparent that we need not wait for
an—at present still hypothetical—arrival of economic emancipation. If such a goal
exists for humanity, it exists independently of geography, time, or culture. Anyone
anywhere, at any time, who feels the calling can begin the journey—the spiritual
journey of the Sufi.
If increasing consumption fails to provide gratification, we must learn to both
limit that consumption and return to spiritual forms of satisfaction, which are the only
sure means of happiness once basic needs have been satisfied. The alternative to
spiritual growth is arrested growth and stagnation. Failure to heed its call withers the
human soul, and in many cases will result in a crash.

Anthropocentrism

Together with consumerism, a second defining characteristic of our times is

anthropocentrism. Man, or more precisely his individual well-being, is taken to be
"the measure of all things." This well-being becomes the sole measure of good or
bad—which is not entirely wrong in itself, if only we were able to divine what that
well-being consisted in. But since man does not know what is really good for his
well-being, mere whims and pleasures become ends in themselves. To paraphrase
Kohak, humans are not the center of all meaning and the source of all value, and
material consumption is not all that being human is about.165 Otherwise, the highest
aspirations of man degenerate into the gratification of individual greed.
One thing is certain: placing man at the center of the universe does not work
any more than placing the earth at the center of the solar system does. One reason
why it does not work is that we do not take "man" to mean "humanity," but rather
"me, myself, and I." When we say: "Man is the measure of all things," we are
actually—if only subconsciously—saying: "I am the measure of all things."
Thus, we see that a double displacement has occurred. Step One: The Total
Self of the universe (namely, God) gets displaced from the focus of attention, and the
collective self of humanity is substituted for it. This is a drastic reduction, because no
matter how great and wonderful humanity is on the one hand, it is also imperfect, in
need of improvement, and insignificant compared to the universe on the other.
Totality and perfection are no longer the target, but rather partiality and imperfection.
This brings about a stasis. Confucius said: "In order to climb a tree, you have to aim
at the stars." In order to achieve true humanity, you have to set your sights beyond
man. With perfection no longer the goal, the prospect of psychospiritual progress is
vitiated. What remains is only "horizontal" evolution: progress in the material and
technological spheres. No matter how great, this is bound to be one-sided and to
belie man's true potentials. The Sufis have compared this to the situation of a king,
the ruler of a great kingdom, who becomes deranged, goes down to the dungeon,
picks up a bone which he thinks to be his scepter, and proceeds to rule the rats, which
he mistakes for his subjects.
The devolution of our vision leads on, inevitably, to Step Two: the
substitution of man's own self ("I, me") for the self of humanity. Herein lies the rub.
Practically unknown outside Islamic Sufism, yet half-suspected in some religious
traditions and just below their threshold of consciousness, is a paramount fact of the

165Kohàk, p. 8.

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human constitution: the Base Self, which lurks within each of us, has both conscious
and unconscious components psychologically, and silently plots our destruction.
(Freud came close to fingering its destructive aspect when he hypothesized the death
instinct or "thanatos.")
So Step Two is really the exaltation—or even the deification—of the Base
Self, the ego. Since God had already been derailed in Step One, this Moloch now
becomes our new idol. In a Kafkaesque somersault, "Man is the measure of all
things" metamorphoses into: "My Base Self is the measure of all things." It is true
that we do not worship it consciously. Atheists, for example, would deny that they
worship anything at all. Yet we worship the Base Self unconsciously. Self-love,
pride, greed, self-adoration are just the tip of the iceberg that constitutes this worship.
We should take care to distinguish between this demonstrably false meaning
of "man is the center of the universe" and its other sense, its true portent. To go
"beyond" man is to go to God through man. God placed man at the center of the
universe, in the middle of past and future eternity and of infinite space, at the center
of a vast spacetime sphere. 166 We cannot be "anti-man," precisely because God isn't.
The Base Self confronts us with a problem that is difficult to solve. We
cannot kill it, for to kill it would mean to kill ourselves. When a person says "I," it is
not only his spirit but also his Base Self that is contained in this "I." The only
solution is self-purification, by which the Base Self becomes elevated to higher levels
of selfhood. And only by aiming at the stars can we climb this tree. We should
"strive to become perfect, even as God is perfect." When we have removed all the
baseness of the Base Self, then we will have purified ourselves 100 percent, and we
shall have attained the Perfected Self. This is the equivalent of the king's regaining
his kingdom, ascending to his palace, and ruling his land as he used to before.
This kind of evolution can only be actualized by psychospiritual progress. It
bespeaks a level of human perfection, of maturity and bliss, which we cannot even
begin to imagine in our present ground-level (basement) condition. And this is what
we have to do if we want to achieve true civilization. For civilization does not mean
only material plenty. One can be in a state of material affluence, and yet live in Hell.
(Those who do so already will know what I am talking about.) By true civilization I
intend not only material, but also spiritual well-being, and this can be achieved only
by action in its own domain. A corollary of this is the following: "No spirituality
without morality." Ethics is the bedrock on which any spiritual edifice whatsoever is
to be founded. If we prove ourselves able to adopt the ethics of the prophets, if we
adorn ourselves with the morality of angels, there is no reason why this world should
not become a paradise. And this is the real, though not the whole, point about the
prophets and the angels. They are beacons to man's self-transcendence.

A Global Religion

At a recent international gathering, Professor Barbara Stowasser explained

that the concepts of equality and democracy are inherent in Islam, while Professor
Richard Langhorne suggested that the moral principles of Islam ordering daily life do

166 The boundaries of this sphere are defined by the t = 0 instant of the universe, which yields a radius
of about 15 billion light-years.

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not exist among Western values, and that all humanity stands in need of them. 167 The
civility and comity engendered by authentic Islam has to be seen to be believed.
It is vital that this inherently democratic, peaceful "original Islam" be
resurrected and returned to. But it is not enough that Islamic nations be drawn to this
ideal, it is also commendable for everyone to adopt it as a guidebook. For only when
we all adopt such a nonaggressive, constructive, truly global approach will life-
affirmative solutions be forthcoming.
Why should we adopt Islam? Because this religion, properly understood,
interpreted and applied, holds the keys to salvation from our present quandary. Only
if we adopt universal morals will we be able to extricate the world from this
predicament. Our present situation does not admit of a solution that is divisive. A
truly global, one-world approach will yield a viable solution, and this can be provided
by Islam. Otherwise, whole armies of economists, social analysts and international-
relations experts will wring their hands in vain. The religion required by the New
World Order, then, is actually Islam, unless we want to sink into a mire of conflict,
chaos and, ultimately, extinction.
It should be stressed that one need not be a Moslem in order to be concerned
about global and social problems. Being human, plus a feeling of responsibility, is
enough. However, it is in Islam that one encounters a concerted approach to all our
problems simultaneously, rather than a piecemeal approach that tries to solve them
one by one, in isolation from each other.
There is evidence that the thinking of ecologists is also moving in this
direction. Noted environmentalist Barry Commoner was among the first to link
global poverty with the ecological crisis. On 30 May 1997, on the occasion of his
eightieth birthday, Commoner stated in an interview with Scientific American:

We must remember that the human inhabitants of the earth's ecosphere are
engulfed in a global epidemic of poverty, hunger and despair. The grim
statistics can be summarized in a simple image. As the earth spins through
space, a view from above the North Pole would encompass most of the wealth
of the world—most of its food, productive machines, doctors, engineers and
teachers. A view from the opposite pole would encompass most of the world's
poor. The planet is split by a chasm that separates the North from the South,
the rich from the poor. This global chasm must be bridged. This is the rational,
logical outcome of the environmental experience.
If environmentalism is to be devoted to human welfare, there are reasons
more powerful than the environmental ones. Simple morality dictates that the
rich should share their productive capacity with the poor. And an even more
compelling imperative is justice, for the poor half of the planet has been
brought to that plight through the exploitation of its resources and its people
by the imperial nations of the North.
We, who are environmental advocates, must find a way—for the sake of the
planet and the people who live on it—to join a historic mission to end poverty
wherever it exists. That is what is yet to be done.

These statements by one of the world’s foremost ‘Green’ thinkers reflect a

consciousness that the environmental problem will not be solved unless it is extended
to deal with the plight of the poor. Compassion for the earth’s living things does not,

167 International Congress for the Dialogue of Civilizations, Istanbul, June 6-7, 1997.

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and must not, exclude compassion for our destitute brethren. And it is in Islam that
we find the two kinds of compassion combined. Not only that, but we also find
concrete suggestions that, if implemented, will yield guaranteed solutions.
As a specific solution to the world's social ills, let us conclude by considering
an Islamic proposal as to how global poverty can be alleviated.

A Global Alms-Tax

Before suggesting this proposal, it should be made quite clear that the purpose
here is not the imposition of tyranny or of the solution by coercion, but to make use of
Islam's remedies for the alleviation of this problem. The sociological benefits of the
religion should not be twisted to imply such an evil outcome.
These remedies can be used without becoming Moslems. But these and other
cures are avalable to any human being(s) adopting Islam as a grace; they are built into
the religion. As Jesus said: "Seek first the Kingdom of God, and all things shall be
added unto you."
Just as it is not realistic to expect that everybody can have equal income and
access to resources, it is equally unrealistic to expect that our global village can
survive without some kind of charity toward the economically unfortunate. The
world's resources belong to us all, 168 and it is a grave injustice that the wealthiest 20
percent of the world's population should consume 80 percent of the world's goods and
resources, while the share of the world's poorest 20 percent has declined from 2.3 to
1.4 percent. 169 Like it or not, we have to adopt the following (Islamic) working
principle in our ethics: The poor have a rightful share in our earnings. The alms-tax
is not charity; it is separate from it. The understanding in the alms-tax is that in
paying it to a poor person, we are returning what actually belongs to him. This is the
way Providence wants those to whom life has been good to give thanks: by
supporting those in the human family who haven't been lucky enough. It is the
application of this principle which will result in a more equitable redistribution of
wealth.
So how long must the rich (nations no less than persons) help the poor, the
North help the South? For as long as is necessary, which means: for the foreseeable
future. There is no other way. This help must be granted gratuitously, not
grudgingly, with no strings attached, and not given as refundable aid or interest-based
credit. We all know that the accumulated interest debts of poor nations by now
exceed the loan capital extended to them as aid in the first place. After a certain
point, their income becomes devoted entirely to appeasing this insatiable black hole.
The rich countries need not allocate more than 2.5 percent annually of their
Gross Domestic Products (the customary percentage of Alms-tax in Islam170) as
nonreturnable, interest-free aid in order to observe a noticeable improvement in the
fare of poorer nations. Lest this notion be dismissed as utopian, consider what two
exceptional commentators on global politics have to say. Lamenting the fact that the
OECD (European plus North American) countries have failed to live up to their
quarter-century-old promise of donating an annual 0.7 percent of their GDPs as

168More precisely, it’s all on loan from God, who as the rightful owner judges us for its misuse.
169Mark Sagoff, “Do We Consume Too Much,” Atlantic Monthly, June 1997, p. 80-96.
170There is a difference between the alms-tax and charity in Islam, which may need spelling out here.
The alms-tax is mandatory, and is based on one’s Permitted (i.e. legal) earnings. Although it is
encouraged, charity is optional, and it can be given from either licit or illicit earnings.

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development aid, Matthew Connelly and Paul Kennedy have observed: "What if the
OECD countries were bold enough to contribute one percent of GDP each year? As a
kind of global insurance premium—protecting not only poorer countries but also
ourselves from the worst consequences of mismatched demographics and
development—this is not very much. In fact, if viewed more positively, as an
investment in the future of the people of our planet, it is a modest sum indeed."171
Since population growth is stimulated by the threat of extinction (survival of the
species takes over from the endangered survival of the individual), the prospect of a
better life will also curb the population increase in poor nations which constitutes
such great cause for concern with the rich.
The rich (nations as well as persons) can do this only if they view the poor not
as a burden, but as a Godsent opportunity. For individuals, charity is an opportunity
to absolve them of their sins or to do good and so accumulate virtue. For nations, it is
a means to foster world peace and the commonweal of humankind, and so indirectly
their own well-being. Yes, we are our brothers' keepers; yes, all the world's children
are our children. Charity begins at home, but it must not stop at our national—or
regional—borders. Only such a vision can save us. Unless we take this all-inclusive
view, our own well-being will be placed in jeopardy—it is only a question of "when,"
not of "if."
So do we have to give to the poor? Not unless we value our future and our
children's future. This is not a threat or blackmail, it is a simple fact of life. To quote
Connelly and Kennedy again, "too large a proportion of humankind is heading into
the twenty-first century in too distressed a condition for any nation to imagine that it
can avoid the larger consequences."
Aid of the alms-tax (or negative income tax 172) type need not even take the
form of hard cash. Imagine what would happen if developed countries sent their
surplus food production to poor and starving nations—surplus that is going to be
dumped into the sea or otherwise destroyed to keep prices artificially high, anyway.
The only thing needed is an efficient transport mechanism, perhaps with UN
supervision, to ensure that goods get delivered to their proper destination before
spoiling. One thing is certain: food is too valuable a resource to be wasted in a
starving world; even one iota must not be squandered. This will also prevent over-
exploitation of environmental resource stocks and consequent natural resource
depletion by the poor in order to survive.
Another way to help poor countries is to buy their exports, even if these are
pricey or unneeded—somewhat in the vein of a philanthropist buying a box of
matches from a matchgirl (no condescension implied). Perhaps a lasting solution will
arrive when we are able to teach poor countries to stand on their own two feet without
support, by transferring technological know-how. The problem is a difficult one
requiring attack on all fronts. Just as ill will and wicked deeds among or within
nations are not soon forgotten historically, the cultivation of brotherhood, of amity,
will not soon result in amnesia or ingratitude.
We may not have a one-world government, but the fact remains that we all
have one world, and one world only, and we have to take measures to keep it that
way.
We must understand that the question is not one of affluence levels. Surely
the rich nations are rich enough to afford giving to the poor nations, and all but the

171"Must It Be the Rest Against the West?" The Atlantic Monthly, December 1994, p. 61-84.
172The name given to the alms-tax concept 14 centuries later.

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poorest nations could, in principle, give—as long as there is the will to do so.
Anthropologist Ruth Benedict once observed that even in some primitive societies,
where people lived at the subsistence level but where giving was valued, no one went
hungry or died of want. Charity can begin at any level higher than the economic
absolute zero, or it cannot begin no matter how rich one is as long as the intention is
lacking. This is a matter of moral choice much more than one of wealth.
The richer one is and thus the more able to give, the more one comes under
danger of being branded a miser if one is not charitable. Miserliness, whether in
nations, individuals, or anything else, is immoral. And the result of such immorality,
injustice, and callousness can only be rebellion—on the part of nations powerful and
cruel enough to do so if not on the part of those prostrate in their weakness. The next
time we read history, we would do well to give it a moral reading. Even recent
history will substantiate this thesis—as instanced in the Versailles Treaty and the
subsequent rise to power of Hitler. (The injustice meted out to the German nation
resulted in their resentment, which found political expression in the movement that
swept Hitler to power.)
It is for the purpose of redistributing wealth and eliminating poverty that
modern nations have established the institutions of welfare, social security, health
care, and so on. But we do not have their equivalents on the global scale, because we
do not have a one-world government. To date, the latter has proved too unrealistic
and impractical to implement. But just as, when a rich person decides to give in
charity, he has no need to resort to the government, the rich nations need not wait for
the arrival of a world government in order to give to the poor nations. If all nations
were sufficiently charitable, poverty could be eradicated without the need for a
political one-world apparatus. In fact, given the past record of international agencies
to misdirect the flow of funds, it may be better for each rich nation to adopt, as it
were, a "free-market" approach. Given official corruption in recipient countries, it
may be necessary to bypass or monitor local authorities. In any case, "where there's a
will, there's a way."
This does not mean that relative poverty will be abolished. In all likelihood,
there will always continue to be relatively richer and poorer nations, just as there have
always been relatively richer and poorer people. But at least the specter of utter
destitution will have been averted.

A Small Blue Planet

Two Traditions of the Prophet of God are relevant at this point. One is: "The
person who goes to bed on a full stomach while his neighbor goes hungry is not one
of us." This applies at any level starting from the individual, all the way up to the
nation state. The other is: "If a sick person dies as the result of neglect in his locality,
that whole locality is guilty of his murder." In the global village, this locality happens
to be a small blue planet, the third one out from a star called the Sun in a galaxy
called the Milky Way.
Our minds are large enough to aspire to the stars. But are our Hearts large
enough, too? Or are they so small that they won't suffice to secure even our own
survival? It would be criminal neglect to shut our eyes and ears to the message being
offered and the hand that is extended—while there is still time.

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 SOLVING THE RIDDLE OF UNIVERSE

"I believe a leaf of grass

is no less than the journey-work of the stars 173...
To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,
Every cubic inch of space is a miracle."

—Walt Whitman

The First day at School

It was the first day of the school year, and the auditorium was packed. The
teacher was introducing the subject that they would be dealing with for the rest of the
semester: the universe.
The student was just one among a myriad others. He was not ordinarily given
to interrupting teachers or lectures. But when he heard the existence of the universe
being attributed to chance, he began fidgeting in his seat, and finally raised his hand.
"Yes?" asked the teacher, noticing him.
"Pardon me," the student said, "but it seems to me that in days of old, the
existence of the universe was attributed to God, whereas nowadays it isn't attributed
to anything at all, or to chance at most. It's not obvious to me that the more recent
position is the more superior one. It's impossible for chance to build the order of the
stars."
"You may be right," said the teacher, an open-minded fellow who also did not
want to discourage a student making the first query of the first day. "But what
evidence have we of God's existence? You realize that we can't conclude anything
unless there are some clues."
"Let me try to show you," the student said.
He hastily drew a five-cornered star on a sheet of paper—it didn't turn out
quite right, because of his hurry—and took it over to the teacher.
"Try to grasp the star," the student said. "You can't. You can only grasp the
sheet as a whole. And neither can the star grasp you. The most the star could do if it
were intelligent, and if you were able to stick your finger through the paper without
disrupting its fabric, would be to perceive a cross-section of your finger. But
although it would be a cross-section of your finger and nobody else's, it would still be
a far cry from the total you.
"For the same reason, we can't apprehend God in three-dimensional space—
or, if you add time, in a four-dimensional universe. Just like Edwin Abbott's two-
dimensional creatures in Flatland, we are only able to cognize things of limited
dimensionality. An organism or creature may inspire the notion of intelligent design,
but it is not the same as encountering that Intelligence itself. This, as well as the
whole of creation with all its particulars, is God's Way; it is the Style of God. It's
how God has chosen to create the universe.

173Since more than 90 percent of the physical universe is composed of hydrogen, the heavier elements
present in organic life have been cooked up in the interior of now-dead stars. Thus, Whitman’s insight
is a striking instance of artistic inspiration anticipating science—“Truth is beauty, beauty truth.”

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 "That is why we can't have a direct experience of God in the external world
revealed to us by the senses. We can only infer His existence from the vastness and
intricacy of His handiwork.
"But there are other things which we infer the existence of, even if they aren't
directly available to our senses. No one has seen, or ever will see, an atom with the
naked eye. We know the air exists, but not through our ability to see it. At this very
moment, there are countless entities in this room—radio waves, television waves,
cosmic rays, neutrinos—that we can't hear or see directly, but which we know exist."
"But," said the teacher, "we know of their existence because their effects or
themselves can be made known to us indirectly. So what evidence do you have that
God has made himself known to us?"
"Let me put it this way," said the student. "None of us go about verifying the
Stern-Gerlach experiment or the quantum Hall effect every day. The deeper you
probe into the structure of nature, the more complicated and expensive your
experiments and equipment become, until you have to take it for granted when a
bunch of physicists claim that they have discovered the latest flavor of quark.
"In the same way, we have to take it for granted when a prophet or saint
comes up and says that God has revealed Himself to him."
"The problem, though," said the teacher, "is that science is based on
repeatability. When some physicists claim they have found a boson, another group
can repeat the experiment and verify its existence."
"Not everyone seems to realize it, but it's the same with God," replied the
student. "It's not as if someone once claimed God's existence, and then no one was
able to verify him forever after. On the contrary, history is full of Prophets—and, in
their absence, of saints—who have come forth to confirm the existence of God, who
reveals Himself to whom He will. The consensus of testimonies is too unanimous to
be rejected."
"But," protested the teacher, "scientists, and physicists in particular, have been
studying nature for centuries now, and they still have found no trace of God."
"They were looking for other things, not God," said the student. "And they
weren't looking in the right way, or in the right place. Recall that others have claimed
to have found God. Remember what Jesus said? 'Seek, and you shall find.'"
"Do you mean to say," exclaimed the teacher, "that the existence of God can
be proved?"
The student smiled. He would keep that little piece of information to himself.
"Our duty is only to believe," he said. "God only wishes us to have faith in Him, and
to heed His advice. If He had desired to prove His existence to everyone, He would
have done so Himself, without need of an intermediary. If I can take Einstein's word
for it when he says spacetime is curved, I can also take Mohammed's word for it
when he says he ascended to God, even though both lie outside my immediate
experience. It all turns on the veracity and dependability of your source—but even
more, on whom you want to believe. As far as I'm concerned, anything that does not
involve a logical contradiction is acceptable.
"Anyway, I apologize for having taken up so much time from your lecture,"
he said. As he was moving toward his seat, the bell rang, and the student was lost
from sight in the general hubbub.
"Quick!" said the teacher, directing several other students to find him and
bring him back. Oddly enough, however, they returned empty-handed. For all
practical purposes, the student had vanished into thin air, and he was never seen or

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heard of again in those quarters. Whether he disappeared out of shyness, or for some
entirely different reason, will never be known.

Some Preliminaries

In order to understand something about the universe, we have to refresh our

memories about some elementary arithmetic facts. For merely naming large numbers
one after the other soon numbs one's mind to the enormity of the magnitudes
involved.
There are 24 x 3600 = 86 400 seconds in a day, and 365.25 x 86 400 = 31 557
600, or nearly 32 million, seconds in a year. In other words, if a person began
counting and continued nonstop at the rate of one number each second without food
or drink or sleep, he would not yet have counted up to 32 million by the end of a year.
This means that one cannot count up to 100 million in three years, or up to a
billion in thirty years. It means further that if a person somehow endowed with
immortality started to count thirty thousand years ago, a number a second, twenty-
four hours a day, he would not yet quite have reached the number one trillion.
As soon as we leave the solar system, we are forced to use a unit of
astronomical distance called the light-year. Light travels at the speed of about 300
thousand kilometers per second, and as is well known, could zip around the equator
of the earth—itself 40 thousand km—more than seven times in the space of a second
if it could follow a circular path.
A light-year is the distance traveled by a beam of light in a year. If you do the
calculations, this works out to less than ten trillion kilometers. This basic
astronomical unit, however, still does not measure the distance of the star nearest to
the sun, Alpha Centauri, which happens to be 4.3 light-years, or 40 trillion kilometers,
away.
What does this figure tell us? It tells us that if some human being or hominid,
such as Lucy or Homo Erectus, had started counting 1.2 million years ago, day in,
day out, every second without fail, s/he still would not have reached the number of
kilometers from the sun to the nearest star by the time the Age of the Internet had
arrived. To give a sense of the time period involved, if we assume that the pyramids
were built four thousand years ago, three hundred times the present age of the
pyramids would have elapsed without reaching the number that represents the
distance to the closest star.

The Solar System

But before we venture further, let us take a brief look at our solar system.
There are, as everyone knows, one star and nine planets in it. The sun is 1.3 million
times the size of the earth, which circles the sun at a distance of 150 million km or
eight light-minutes. The fierce thermonuclear furnace of the sun converts 4 million
tons of matter directly into energy each second, 174 radiating a colossal amount of
energy into space, only a small fraction of which is captured by Earth and yet is
sufficient to drive its processes, life and all. The distance to the sun of the innermost

174 For comparison, the matter converted into energy at Hiroshima (with an explosive force equal to
12.5 kilotons of TNT) was about a gram.

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planet, Mercury, is about 58 million km, and of Pluto, the outermost, almost 6 billion
km (5.5 light-hours). Jupiter, the biggest planet at 1400 times the size of the earth,
circles the sun at a distance 778.3 million kilometers.
For comparison, if the sun were the size of a grapefruit, Earth would be a
grain of sand 12 meters away, Jupiter would be a cranberry 60 meters away, and
Pluto would be another grain of sand almost half a kilometer away. Alpha Centauri
would be another grapefruit about 3000 km distant from the sun. Not counting the
solar system, in between these two grapefruits would be nothing. 175

The Milky Way

But enough of the solar system—we have yet far to go. We shall not tarry
with stars called white dwarfs and degenerate dwarfs, nor with neutron stars—a
spoonful of matter from which could weigh 15 thousand tons—or pulsars rotating at
642 times a second. Nor shall we waste time with stars called red giants, one of
which happens to have a diameter the size of Jupiter's orbit—those interested in such
details can consult any standard astronomy textbook. Rather, let us quickly press on
to that band of luminosity we observe in the night sky—the Milky Way, the island of
stars to which we belong. The sun is located near the outer rim of this saucer-shaped
galaxy; it has a diameter of about 125 thousand light-years and contains a hundred
billion stars,176 many larger than the sun. Its core may be driven by a massive black
hole. The sun circles the galactic center at a speed of 220 km/sec, and takes 250
million years to complete one revolution.

The Local Group and Beyond

The Milky Way is just one of a few dozen galaxies known prosaically as the
Local Group. In addition to the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, which are
irregular galaxies very close to our "mother ship," the Local Group includes the
Andromeda galaxy 2.3 million light-years away, a breathtakingly beautiful spiral
galaxy comparable to our own.
Invisible to the naked eye and beyond the Local Group, at a distance of 50
million light-years, is the Virgo cluster comprising about 2500 galaxies. Astronomers
have learned that galaxies come in clusters, as well as clusters of clusters or
superclusters. The Local Group and Virgo are both members of the Local
Supercluster.
After the Local Supercluster, in every direction we look, we observe clusters
and superclusters of galaxies speeding away from us—the farther away, the faster.
There are perhaps a billion observable galaxies, giving the impression that it is as
easy for God to create entire galaxies as it is to create atoms or grains of sand. Close
to the edge of the visible universe, as well as closer to us, are the quasars, which emit
the energy of thousands of galaxies from an area much smaller than the Milky Way.
The farthest quasars are rushing away from us at 90 percent the speed of light. In
order to gain a rough impression of the energy of a quasar, imagine a giant 1000-

175It is not entirely accurate to represent Alpha Centauri as a grapefruit, since it is actually a multiple
stellar system consisting of three stars.
176As our instruments improve, astronomical estimates have a tendency to increase. More recent
figures place the stellar population of the Milky Way at hundreds of billions, with a larger diameter.

119
megawatt power plant. Multiply this by ten billion. Now multiply the result by a
billion trillion. That will give you the power of a quasar.
Because light takes a definite amount of time to reach us, when we look into
space we are also looking back into time, into the past. The light of the farthest
quasars, 14 billion light-years away, set out to reach us 14 billion years ago. That is
very close to the beginning of the observable universe, roughly 15 billion years ago,
when the universe exploded into existence with the Big Bang. It grew out of a region
many billions of times smaller than a single proton, the nucleus of a hydrogen atom.
While still a speck, the universe had a temperature of a million trillion trillion
degrees. The original singularity began to differentiate into the known universe at
Planck time, or one-ten thousand million billion trillion trillionths of a second after
the Big Bang.
Astronomers have been looking for "dark matter" in the universe, 90 percent
of whose mass seems to be missing. Some of this matter is now known to be located
in "low-surface-brightness" galaxies that dwarf the Milky Way. The first was
discovered only in 1986, despite the fact that it is a mere 800 million light-years
away. If it were as close as the Andromeda galaxy, it would appear to us at forty
times the apparent width of a full moon. 177
In late 1995, scientists trained the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) on an
unremarkable patch of sky, one-140th the apparent size of the full moon, to make the
Hubble Deep Field (HDF) observations. The HDF images revealed some 3000 faint
galaxies, many of which were more than a billion times fainter than what can be seen
with the naked eye. 178
Thus, wherever we look, we are faced with a mind-boggling splendor, a
dizzying, dazzling majesty that overwhelms man's imagination, an incomparable
wealth beyond human comprehension. The mind-numbing numbers given above can
only illustrate the unfathomable depths of mystery that the universe holds.

Man and Universe

The scale on which the pageant of the universe unfolds is awesome. We are
not even specks on earth, the earth is not even a speck in the Milky Way, and our
galaxy is not even a speck among the countless other galaxies in the universe.
Compared with the age of the earth, estimated at about 5 billion years, the entire
history of the human race is but a brief flicker. Since the sun itself is expected to
shine for another 5 billion years, man stands practically at the nexus between past
eternity and future eternity in terms of time, and between minus and plus infinity in
terms of space.
Man is not even a dot in terms of cosmic space, and he is not even the blink of
an eye in cosmic time. This picture of the universe would crush man to nothingness,
would annihilate him instantly, were it not for the following subtle fact:
Outer than the outermost, inner than the innermost, beyond the beyond, within
the within, is God Almighty, Lord of the universe, Lord of all the worlds. 179 Like a
deep sea fish whose inner pressure prevents it from being crushed by the tremendous

177G.D. Bothun, "The Ghostliest Galaxies," Scientific American, 276, 2 (Feb. 1997), p. 40-45.
178F.D. Macchetto, M. Dickinson, "Galaxies in the Young Universe," Sci. Am., 276, 5 (May 1997), p.
66-73.
179Whitley Streiber, the author of Communion, once asked if the innermost and outermost edges of the
universe meet. Not only do they meet, but they are actually One.

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pressure of the ocean depths, faith in God saves man from despair and lends him the
resistance needed to withstand the vicissitudes of life. If he is connected to God, if he
is rooted in the Almighty, man can draw on an unlimited supply of inner strength and
fortitude, rescuing him from nihilism and self-destruction.
This marvelous universe is the home of man, who is no alien to it but was
designed into it from the start. "I and the ten thousand things," remarked the Chinese
sage Chuang Tzu, "came into being together." No less than the stellar phenomena
trillions of times our size yet which we can barely see, we too are part of the design of
the universe. The same intricate blueprints that laid down the plans of the galaxies or
the atomic nucleus went into designing human DNA. It was all at once. Just as a
playwright can entertain different sections of a play—or even entire plays—
simultaneously in his mind, God is capable of casting past, present and future in a
single timeless instant. Everything—cosmological constants and all—had to be
planned down to the minutest detail. In a probabilistic universe, there are so many
things that can go wrong that God had to make sure at the very beginning that man
would be the outcome (this is known as the "strong anthropic principle" in science).
Man is suspended between the infinitely large and the infinitely small—at the
point of inflexion, so to speak. This center position allows man to probe and
comprehend both the macrocosmos of galactic superclusters and the microcosmos of
elementary particles.
What is more, all ancient traditions have agreed that man is not a nonentity,
but the noblest of God's creations, a cosmos in miniature—a microcosm.
This man is not any man, however, whom you may choose to pick off the
streets. The traditions of India, of China, of Hermeticism, of Islamic Sufism, all
speak of the Whole Man, the Perfect Man, the King, the True Man, the Primordial
Man (Adam Kadmon), the Viceregent of God on earth. But every human being
partakes of this honor by belonging to the same species, to the extent that s/he shares
the attributes of the Universal Human. It is for this reason that "the world has been
placed at your disposal," as God informs the human race in the Koran.
The ancient traditions are unanimous in telling us that somehow, in some
unfathomable sense, this human being is homologous with the universe; the universe
is mapped into man. 180 A saying attributed to Hermes Trismegistus states: "The
world is a living creature endowed with a body which men can see and an intelligence
which men cannot see." 181 One is reminded here of the claim, repeated by both the
Bible and Mohammed, that God created man in His own image. This too is
incomprehensible to us, but if, as the sources of Sufism tell us, "the universe is man
writ large, man is cosmos in the small," then the "macroman" or "ultra-man"182 would
be such a being that an entire galaxy would be merely a hair on its body, or a cell in
it.
One thing is certain: the external description of the universe can only be a
starting point for unraveling its mysteries. "The universe has remained beyond
comprehension," notes Hans Koning, "even if we are now able to count the number of

180 How does this happen? By way of suggestion, I would like to draw attention to the Tarski-Banach
conjecture in mathematics, also known as the "Banach-Tarski paradoxical decomposition," whereby a
ball or sphere can be subdivided and reassembled into a sphere of different size. This is a solely
mathematical procedure that defies visualization or any easy comprehension.
181 “He [Ultimate Reality] is the spirit of the universe and its administrator. Hence, the cosmos is a big
man.” Ibn Arabi, Fusus. (Because God made man in His own image.)
182 I intentionally avoid using the term “superman,” since Nietzsche has contaminated this word by
associating it with Godlessness. The Perfect Man is the epitome of Godliness, not its opposite.

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electrons it holds..." 183 The zillions or the zillionths that we can measure are only the
wrappings of a gift that is as inscrutable as it is wonderful—the gift of being human
in this vast, amazing universe.
As for those who deny the existence of God, let the answer be given by the
Hindu Upanishads :
"If you think you know the truth about Brahman, know that you know little,
indeed."

Transcending the Dichotomy

For a long time, we have been misled into believing that God and man are at
odds, that they are engaged in a zero-sum game, that if God wins, man loses.
Nothing could be further from the truth. The foregoing should suffice to show
that God exalts man above all other creatures. The Perfect Man, who is the living
embodiment of the God-realized human being, teaches human beings the ways of
drawing nigh to God. In the Age of Prophethood, he could have been a prophet.
Nowadays, he would be a saint. If God were outside man, man would have to
become alienated to himself in order to find God. This is the misconception we have
been saddled with for so long. But since God is also "the Beyond Within," man's
self-realization coincides with the ideal of saintliness.
Man's present self is a convincing show. It is a plausible construct, yet it is
fictitious, like a Hollywood prop. It is real enough (so is the prop), but within it exists
a self that is immeasurably more real. Only to the extent that man discards this make-
believe self and discovers his true self will he be able to draw close to God. In The
Drama of Love and Death (1912), the poet-scientist Edward Carpenter spoke of "a
realization of an altogether vaster self than that to which we are accustomed":

... since the ordinary consciousness, with which we are concerned in ordinary
life, is before all things founded on the little local self, and is in fact self-
conscious in the little local sense, it follows that to pass out of that is to die to
the ordinary self and the ordinary world.
It is to die in the ordinary sense, but in another sense, it is to wake up and
find that the "I," one's real, most intimate self, pervades the universe and all
other beings—that the mountains and the sea and the stars are a part of one's
body and that one's soul is in touch with the souls of all creatures...
So great, so splendid is this experience, that ... in thousands and thousands of
cases the fact of its having come even once to a man has completely
revolutionized his subsequent life and outlook on the world.

Religion as it is here conceived, then, does not imply the debasing of man at
all, but his elevation through successive stages of inner realization and fulfilment.
Proximity to God is precisely man's self-transcendence. Remove God, and you
remove man's possibility of surpassing himself, for it is only by striving toward God
that man can achieve unitary consciousness.
Even a small step in this direction does not go unrewarded. Since man's spirit
is immortal while his body is mortal, any effort—however small—to obey God's
Law, which is only there to help and guide us, will result in an improvement in one's

183 “Notes on the Twentieth Century,” Atlantic Monthly, September 1997, p. 90-100.

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after-death state, too. Unfortunately, the converse is also true: ignoring Sacred Law
can only result in loss—not only in the afterlife, but quite frequently in this world, as
well.

The Evolution of the Universe

In an unimaginably brief moment, the universe exploded into existence out of

an inconceivably small, dense, and hot point—the arch-Singularity, the ultimate
White Hole, The Primeval Fireball, the "Cosmic Egg" out of which all the galaxies
and superclusters would be formed. Alan Guth's theory of the "inflationary universe"
posits that for a period, gravity acted like antigravity to facilitate this blinding,
stupendous explosion. Matter and energy, quarks and leptons, differentiated and
congealed out of a "cosmic soup" by symmetry breaking in order to constitute the
stuff of the universe. Galaxies and stars formed out of hydrogen, the primal matter of
the physical cosmos. The higher elements had to be forged in cosmic furnaces before
they could be incorporated into planetary formations (involving, according to one
theory, "planetesimals").
The estimates vary with time, but for our present purposes we can assume that
the history of the solar system began 5 billion years ago; that of the earth, about 4.6
billion years ago; of terrestrial life, 3 billion years ago. From unicellular organisms,
life evolved to higher life forms in an inconceivably complex interweaving of species,
finally culminating in man. 184
The creation of man is a unique event. In creating the human brain, God
endowed a species for the first time with an organ vastly in excess of its needs—or so
it seems. 185 When Alfred Russell Wallace, co-founder of the theory of evolution by
natural selection, pointed out that: "An instrument has been developed in advance of
the needs of its possessor.. Natural selection could only have endowed the savage
with a brain a little superior to that of the ape, whereas he possesses one very little
inferior to that of the average member of our learned societies", Darwin knew at once
that he had no satisfactory answer to this criticism, and wrote Wallace: "I hope you

184There is nothing wrong with the concept of evolution per se, as long as we realize that this has to be
guided or directed evolution. Otherwise, there is nothing to rule out the accidental annulment of an
evolutionary gain. Any mutation would, unless this directionality or "purposiveness" is maintained, be
canceled or deflected in a counterproductive direction by a subsequent mutation. Thus random events
would average out and entropy would be maximized, whereas we witness negative entropy (called
"synergy" by some and "extropy" by others) in life processes. Comparing the steady buildup of
biological diversity and complexity to the random walk of a drunkard ignores the fact that even the
drunkard has a destination in mind—it is the ability, not the will or intention, to get there that is
lacking. Otherwise, why should he stray from the lamppost in the first place?
Evolution by random mutation is a contradiction in terms, which would yield fluctuations
around a point of origin rather than a sustained ascent for billions of years. (In this connection, see
also biologist John Cairns's discovery of "directed mutation": J. Cairns et al., Nature, 335 (1988) 142-
45, and the ensuing debate.)
The creation of man is a separate event, which occurs after the earth has been populated
through the process of directed evolution. It represents a quantum jump, a discontinuity, in directed
evolution.
Since random evolution is nothing but a faulty metaphysical presupposition, one may be
excused for taking metaphysical exception to it.
185At any one time, we use only a small fraction (some neurologists have said 2 or 3 percent, and
Charles Sherrington claimed 10 percent) of our brains. If an Einstein uses—say—15 percent, what
would a human being who uses 50, or even 100, percent be like?

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have not murdered completely your own and my child." 186 To this day, despite the
ongoing search for a "missing link," man's descent from the apes stands under the
shadow of Wallace's original observation.

In both Genesis and the Koran (57:4), it is stated that it took God "six days" to
finish creation. The question we now turn to is how this "day" is to be interpreted.
In the Koran, a "day" can be variously equal to an "instant" (55:29), to "a
thousand of your years" (22:47, 32:5), or to "fifty thousand years" (70:4). This
highlights the totally relative nature of "day" in terms of the human measurement of
time, and indicates that "day" should be understood as "stage" or "era". (The Arabic
word for "day" has the meaning of "cyclic period.") A stage may take a moment, or
several billion years; from the point of view of Eternity both are equal, because
equally negligible—just as an atom and a galaxy are all the same to Infinity. It is
only on the finite, human scale that the (to us) vast difference between them takes on
meaning.
Humanity was the culmination of God's vast cosmic project. In order to
understand why this was so, we now shift our perspective to look at things from the
God's-eye point of view.

The Significance of Man

The process of creation we have been describing has been painstakingly

pieced together by scientists from observations of the physical universe. Despite the
grandeur of this vision, it is still incomplete, because it is based on monocular or
"single vision"—it does not take into account that component of the universe called
"spiritual," and hence is too constricted. The following description is offered with the
hope that scientists will able to discover and elaborate on its mathematical and
physical dimensions, as well. 187
When God decided to create the universe, He began by "defining" Permanent
Archetypes (or Immutable Essences) 188 and positing Names and Attributes through
which divine light shone. These may be compared to a system of lenses and prisms
through which ordinary white light may be pictured as passing, resulting in an
endless, ever-changing rainbow interplay of patterns and colors. This last
corresponds, in our analogy, to the created universe.
The following mathematical metaphor ("mathephor"?) may be helpful. First,
there is nonspace ("the space of space," in Sheikh Gilani's words). From this is
spawned an infinite-dimensional superspace filled with infinite energy or potential (it
is a Plenum, not a vacuum). In this space, certain abstract, multidimensional
reference points are defined for its decomposition or differentiation into subspaces
with differing qualitative characteristics. It is the intersection of two or more of these
subspaces that gives rise either to the prototypes of entities existing in the observable
universe, or to the entities themselves.
Thus, any given creature would be connected to one or more Permanent
Archetypes and be a locus of manifestation for one or more Divine Attributes and

186Quoted in Arthur Koestler, Janus: A Summing Up, London: Picador, 1978, p. 274-5.
187In what follows, we shall rely on the descriptions underlying the great Sufi sage Ibn Arabi's Fusus
("Bezels of Wisdom" or "Wisdom of the Prophets").
188These may also be called Eternal Archetypes, Divine Truths or Knowledge Forms—i.e., forms
established in God's infinite Knowledge. These are the forms of Divine Attributes.

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Names. Physical size or temporal extensity is of little importance here; what matters
is complexity. The human brain may be incomparably smaller than a galaxy, but it is
the most marvelously complex piece of organic matter in the universe.
Not the brain alone, however, but the total human constitution is the purpose
of creation. The reason is that, while all other things in the universe are loci of
manifestation for some—perhaps many—Names and Attributes, only the constitution
of a human being, including his spiritual dimension, has the capacity to manifest all
of them. 189
God has infinitely many Attributes which become manifest in the creation of
the universe, and His Names are the names of these Attributes. "God made man in
His own image" means that God made man in His Attributes—all of them. This is
why, despite his insignificance in cosmic terms, man is the acme of creation and the
intent behind it. The human being who has realized this potential is the one whom we
call Archetypal, Cosmic, or Perfect. If we obey His commandments and follow His
instructions to the letter, this is what God has in store for us; but even partial success
will be amply rewarded. The Universal Man has become a "cosmos in miniature" in
the sense that his essential attributes are arranged—constellated—in the same
structure and composition as the Attributes that give birth to the universe—a
possibility that the humanists, for all their exaltation of man, never dared dream of
even in their wildest dreams.
In one respect, there is something disturbing about this parallelism between
man and universe. When we look at the organic matter that composes him, and then
at the cosmos, there seems to be no correlation whatever between the two. How do
we reconcile them?
Think of the fruit of a particular tree. The fruit does not resemble the tree at
all, yet we know that the DNA coded into the fruit is capable of representing—and
reproducing—the entire tree. Hence, the lack of similarity between the tree and its
fruit does not invalidate the claim that the fruit contains the essence of the tree.
In a similar way, man is the fruit of the cosmos. He has grown out of it as its
most delicate, refined product. But just as man can represent the universe, he can also
remain stuck at a partial representation, or can represent the baser aspects of the
universe. From the heart of the Complete Man, however, the entire universe can
flower.

The Evolution of Man

Adam, the first man, was also the first viceregent of God on earth—the first
prophet. We cannot suppose, however, that Adam enjoyed anything similar to the
living standards of our day. On the contrary, everything we know leads us to suppose
that after the Fall, 190 Adam and Eve lived under primitive conditions, for the

189It should not be supposed that we are indulging in unprovable speculation. Just as the more
mundane quantities and information in the preceding sections were based on the empirical observations
of astronomers and astrophysicists, the information now being presented is based on the empirical
observations of Sufis. It involves the profoundest experiential states, and has nothing to do with
metaphysical speculation.
190It should be stressed that in Islam, the fall of Adam was an individual mistake and did not afflict the
entire human race with a genetic disease called “original sin.” Adam and Eve were forgiven
subsequently. Human beings come into this world pure and innocent. In the Koran, human beings are
exhorted to take care and not repeat the disobedience of Adam and Eve; if they obey God, they are
assured of Paradise in the afterlife even now.

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development of science, technology and civilization would take thousands of years
and the collective efforts of humanity. What we mean by the evolution of man, then,
is cultural and mental evolution—an evolution which is not open to doubt.
Primitive conditions did not prevent Adam from being the first prophet,
though, because what was necessary for prophethood was not an advanced level of
civilization or technology, but the presence of a Man, of which Adam was the first.
For our purposes, "Man" is definable as "a locus capable of manifesting all Divine
Names and Attributes." Because they stood at the dawn of human history as the
representatives of their subsequent progeny, before any social groupings or borders of
any kind, Adam and Eve were eminently suited to be truly cosmic man and woman.

The beginning of humanity also spelled its infancy. We know today that
knowledge and culture do not spring spontaneously into the human mind, but that a
gradual, slow accumulation of learning is necessary. What only the genius of Newton
could once discern, every schoolboy knows today. Hence, viewed as a total,
humanity passed—as the universe and life on earth had passed before it—through
various stages of evolution. We may imagine that humanity as a whole went through
the stages of growth of a single human being, corresponding to infancy, childhood,
youth, maturity and adulthood.
At each stage, as the level of human possibilities expanded, new prophets
arrived to deliver a wider version—with wider horizons—of God's same truth to
human beings. Just as a university professor cannot be expected to teach his subject
to primary-school students in an undiluted form, each prophet expounded the same
truth, but on a higher turn of the spiral.
The Revelation of Truth was also tempered by local conditions. We can see,
in retrospect, that through all the childish—even churlish—displays of human folly
(constant bickerings, wars, and the like) God was guiding humanity to a future
according to His plan. When, for example, Taoism emerged in China, it was not
directly as a theistic concept, but as the Style of God or Way of God (Tao: Way)—
called the "Custom of God" in Islam—that Truth was revealed, due to the naturalistic
predilection of Chinese mentality at that time. Similar—though not identical—
considerations hold in the case of such religious philosophies as Buddhism or Zen. If
humanity at a certain time and place was not able to digest lamb chops, it had to be
weaned on milk until such a time as it would grow teeth of its own. To impose
regulations beyond its capacity on humanity would have conflicted with God's
attribute of justice. Consequently, the science of prophethood given to each prophet
is exactly suited to the level of the community addressed in his term; no more, no
less. This is also why Sacred Law at times abrogated earlier versions of itself.
The fact that each prophet emphasized a different aspect of "the Whole Truth"
to his people also meant that a certain Name and Attribute was dominant in his
constitution. Although each prophet was a locus for the manifestation of all Names
and Attributes, these were not entirely balanced but weighted differently, as a result
of which one or another Name/Attribute came to the forefront. Thus in Adam, "the
Divine" was more pronounced; in Noah, "Glory" was outstanding; in Abraham,
"Love" was in excess, and so on. It was only in Mohammed that the weightings of
Names and Attributes were distributed as a mirror image of the macrocosm, giving
him the distinction of "Singularity."
Many prophets, sung and unsung, came to humanity revealing this or that
subset of God's Truth. Finally, the time arrived for the emancipation of humankind.
From this time on, Revelation would be complete, and there would be no need for

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further prophets. The arrival of the final Prophet needs to be judged within the wider
scope of humanity's preparedness at the time, rather than the small community of his
immediate surroundings. This means that, although some people have occupied—and
continue to content—themselves with lesser things, the whole of humanity was now
potentially (if not practically) capable of assimilating the entire message, including
the subtlest points, of the Koran. In addition, the education and consciousness of
humanity had reached such a level that God saw no further need to speak to
humankind through envoys—for every single man, woman or child, no matter where
or when they lived, would henceforth be able to contact divine inspiration directly via
this final channel, without need of an intermediary. There was no further need for
special persons or institutions mediating between God and man, such as a priest, a
new prophet, or a church. Because of this, Moslem scholars and saints are guides
who impart knowledge, but not mediators.
Hence, God in His infinite mercy sent Mohammed as His final Messenger, to
reveal the culminating version of the perennial knowledge He wished to impart to
man, in order that man might fulfill his destiny. In this version, God outlined the
things to be done and the dangers to be avoided in order to partake of divine truth.
This is why Mohammed was the last Prophet ("the seal of the prophets"), and why the
Koran is the perfect book. Every Moslem is connected directly to God without
passing through a religious hierarchy.
Mohammed combined the attributes of prophethood and sainthood in his
person. Although prophethood in the sense of new Revelation has ended, sainthood
continues, and will do so until the end of humanity. There is always a fully realized
saint (called "the Pole of Poles") manifesting all divine Names and Attributes in their
full maturity.
In retrospect, we can again see that God sent His final Revelation at the
earliest opportunity, as soon as the development of humanity permitted it. Every
word of the Koran is true—literally as well as metaphorically. Yet implicit in it were
teachings that could not yet be digested by Bedouins who had only recently been
worshipping stones, but again had to be drawn out and elaborated throughout the
centuries. The concept of the Perfect Human, as discussed in this text, is one such
example. 191 Islamic exegesis and its esoteric (Sufic) counterpart produced a literature
that made explicit what was implicitly present in the Koran and the sayings of the
Prophet—a process that still continues, despite the fact that there is "nothing new
under the sun" and that the really crucial truths have been retold countless times
before. The education, as well as the cultural and mental evolution, of humanity has
continued to this day, and is expected to do so in the future unless humanity self-
destructs.

Prophets and Sacred Texts

To recapitulate. Throughout history, God has sent many prophets to deliver

the good tidings of being human and worshiping God to humankind. Such have been

191 The Perfect Man was first written by Abdelkarim Jili (pronounced “gee-lee”), who borrowed the
term from Ibn Arabi. Other related examples:
“In the World of Forms [the external world] you are microcosm; in the World of Meanings [the
spiritual world], you are macrocosm.” Rumi, Mathnawi.
“You think you are a tiny atom. But the greatest cosmos is enfolded within you.” Ali, the Fourth
Caliph.

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the Prophets of Israel, culminating with Jesus. In addition, the Koran informs us that
there have been prophets who are not named therein, and hence we must suspend
judgment as to other prophets and religions; either they or their predecessors might
have been true envoys or bearers of true revelations.
Until the arrival of Islam, all these revelations were culture- and society-
specific, which accounts for the wide variations and even apparent discrepancies
between religions. Not that the revelations themselves were divergent—all religions
have taught basically the same things, up to and including Islam. But the fact that
each religion was culture-bound meant that revelation had to be repeated every once
in a while and in differing points of geography. Another reason for this repetition
was that people tended to stray from the original true teachings with the passage of
time. It was obvious that this state of affairs could not go on, and that a universal
religion tailored to the needs of global humanity, capable of meeting its needs in
every time and clime, would eventually be called for.
In each age, God has informed human beings of the ways in which they can
worship Him and so improve themselves. To facilitate this, He has also made known
His desires and commandments through sacred texts. But the law of entropy has also
worked its effects on these texts, so they have not always been able to come down to
us in the exact form they were revealed. In revealing a final religion, it was God's
intention that this time, the revelation would remain immune to textual errors,
obviating the need for yet another revelation. This has indeed proved the case—the
earliest and the latest versions of the Koran are almost identical, except perhaps for a
few typographical errors.
The study of the Koran as an absolute text—one dictated word for word by
God Himself, rather than just conveying the general sense of His meaning—raises
difficulties (but also, opportunities) not faced with elsewhere. The problem is not just
one of language. One issue is the deceptive simplicity of the Koran, the most
advanced of religious texts.
The Koran reveals many things that are implicit in earlier sacred texts, while
things that have been explicitly mentioned in some of them are present only covertly
in the Koran. This is because it is beneficial to humankind to expand on some points,
whereas certain others are bound to be misunderstood. A revelatory statement must
be able to withstand the test of truth at every level of existence. If a statement is true
on, say, the mystical level but flagrantly contradictory on the mundane level, it is
bound to mislead people and thus be a hindrance rather than a help.
In addition, the Koran has corrected accumulated communications errors and
errors of transcription in earlier texts. It therefore combines all that is truthful and
valuable in what preceded it. It also provides a yardstick against which the validity
and truthfulness of other texts can be measured.
The Koran lays special emphasis on the Abrahamic and Mosaic prophets, and
on Jesus. As such, it unites all earlier prophets, true religions and revelations. It is a
lamentable fact, for instance, that the original Gospel of Jesus has not survived,
simply because it was never committed to writing. The four canonical—as well as
the many apocryphal—Gospels that have come down to us were all written or
dictated by others, not by Jesus. But this should give no cause for despair, because
the essence of Jesus' Gospel—as well as of texts belonging to the other prophets—has
been preserved intact in the Koran, as close scrutiny will reveal.
In addition, the famous Oral Tradition of the Sufis has preserved surpassing
wisdom implicit, but not overtly articulated, in the Koran and its counterpart, the
Traditions (sayings) of the Prophet. Most of us know, for example, that Moses

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smashed the tablets on which the Ten Commandments were written into hundreds of
smithereens. But how many of us know that this prefigures subsequent Jewish Law
with its 613 precepts? 192
God originally revealed one law to Moses. When this did not suffice, Moses
was given the tablets of the Ten Commandments. When Moses came back from
Mount Sinai and saw his people worshipping the golden calf, he realized that the Ten
Commandments, too, would not be enough. Whereupon God said: "If they cannot
run, let them walk," and it was then that the greatly elaborated Mosaic code began to
be revealed. The Sufic Oral Tradition not only sheds unexpected light on such
events, it is also eminently rational and logical.

Islam as Metareligion

It is true that Islam has no need to refer to other religions or traditions—it is

complete and self-sufficient. But in order to really understand Islam, it is useful to
compare it with other religions. Comparative religion is very helpful in gaining a
better comprehension—and appreciation—of the Islamic religion. It is here that the
"transcendent unity of religions," as the religious philosopher Frithjof Schuon termed
it, shines clear for all to see. It then becomes apparent that Islam is not just a religion
but also a metareligion, a religion of religions, that brings together and binds all their
seemingly disparate parts. It is universal and expansive enough to accomodate other
religions, even to the extent of coexisting with them as its brethren, as has historically
been the case.
In saying this, let me hasten to add that the image, quite common nowadays,
that associates Islam with terrorism or fanaticism is erroneous. On the contrary, the
heaviest punishments are outlined in the Koran for precisely such unjust acts as
terrorism. Unfortunately, Moslems themselves have not been entirely free of blame
in projecting such a false image. As long ago as 1954, the orientalist Alfred
Guillaume observed that the scholars of Islam, "by encouraging a violent and
fanatical spirit have given Muhammadanism a sinister reputation contrary to many
precepts of its founder." 193 Such things can happen when book-knowledge, while
presumably vast, has not been well-digested, when the knowledge in the mind has not
sunk down, penetrated and established itself in the Heart. The version of Islam I
speak of is always that practised by the Sufi masters of Central Anatolia, which is the
original, true Islam as it should actually be lived, and is not to be met with at Azhar
University, Qum, or anywhere else.

Since many truths of Islam have also been expressed by its predecessors, one
can quote from other religions and traditions in support of an Islamic point. The
prerequisite here is that one has to know Islam and the other religion very well;
otherwise, the danger exists of associating incorrect or obsolete assertions with Islam.
Such interreligious excursions should only be attempted with the greatest caution.
Nevertheless, it is possible that certain Islamic principles and practices may
only be understood—or best be understood—in terms of what we already know from
other religions and traditions. Where a simple leap of faith would be sufficient,
skeptics may insist on a more rigorous approach in order to be convinced.

192This figure is quoted from the Talmud in Thomas Sheehan, The First Coming, New York: Dorset
Press, 1990 (c. 1986), p. 37.
193A. Guillaume, Islam, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979 (c. 1954), p. 187. Orientalist: A western
scholar of Islamica.

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 It is due to this possibility that in what follows, an attempt will be made to
understand certain Islamic precepts in a somewhat different light—the light shed by
other traditions. Otherwise, as already stated, Islam is a completely self-sufficient
system in no need of "imports," and the following should not be construed as such.

Taoism

Although apparently naturalistic, Taoism is steeped in mysticism. In Sufism

and Taoism, 194 Toshihiko Izutsu has drawn attention to the convergence between the
teaching of Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu and that of the great Sufi sheikh, Ibn Arabi.
But the Great Sheikh never studied Taoism; he merely made explicit what was
already present in Koranic and Prophetic lore. We must conclude that the same
Universal Reality was tapped independently at widely differing times and places.
In both the Koran and the sayings of the Prophet, knowledge in the most
general sense is praised, without ever limiting it to either physical science or spiritual
knowledge. If the Prophet said: "Seek knowledge, even if it be in China," he
therefore presumably meant not just knowledge of physical things (such as paper,
gunpowder, and silk), but also the esoteric traditions of the Chinese. Although Islam
is self-sufficient, the Chinese perspective, viewed as an exotic subset of Islamic
Sufism, sheds unexpected light on certain matters. It may be no coincidence, then,
that China was singled out; after Islam—the religion to end all religions—and its
precursor, Christianity, the highest form of esoteric knowledge is to be found in
China.
In passing one might also mention Confucianism, which is like the ethical and
exoteric counterpart of Taoism, and corresponds to the exoteric—outward—code of
moral and social behavior in Islam. In Jung's classification of psychological types,
the extravert is more socially oriented, while the introvert is more inwardly oriented
and meditative. A universal religion must address both kinds of temperament. The
whole, balanced human being should not be lacking in either aspect, nor should his
religion; hence, the synthesis of social (ethical/legal) and psychological (mystical)
precepts in Islam. The reason for calling this a "synthesis" is that the exoteric and
esoteric aspects are entirely in harmony and nowhere in contradiction within the
whole of Islamic doctrine.

Buddhism

As an originally nontheistic religious philosophy, it may be supposed that

Buddhism is far removed from the scope of Islam. Yet the nirvana ("extinction")
described by Buddhism is very similar, if not identical, to the spiritual state of fana
("annihilation") encountered in Islamic Sufism. Moreover, the Bhagavad Gita makes
an explicit theistic connection in speaking of "the nirvana that is Brahman." 195 That
the Buddha made no overt reference to God arose, perhaps, from his emphasis on
practical results and experience rather than—as it were—"theory." (Actually, theory
and practice, faith and method, belong together; neither can stand without the other.)

194 T. Izutsu, Sufism and Taoism: A Comparative Study of Key Philosophical Concepts, Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1983 (c. 1967).
195 Bhagavad Gita, V, 24, quoted in Mircea Eliade, Yoga: Immortality and Freedom, Willard Trask
(tr.), Princeton: Princeton University Press (Bollingen Series), 1971 (c. 1954), p. 166.

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But then, all mystics are empiricists, and Buddhistic descriptions of "the clear light of
the Void 196 (sunyatta)" are very similar to certain descriptions of theistic mystics.
To my mind, the most striking resemblance between Mohammed and the
Buddha is that both have been related as turning with their entire body, and not their
heads only, when addressing a person. This is the outward indication of an inner
state. 197 If there were no other clues, this alone would be the surest giveaway that the
Buddha was indeed the recipient of Ultimate Reality in one of its manifestations. 198
The Buddhist doctrine of anatta ("no-self") should, perhaps, be understood
not in the sense that ephemeral, temporary selves do not exist, but that none of them
are the real, the true, the permanent or Inner Self, which "wears" these derivative
selves as one might wear a mask. Maya (the illusory, or rather misleading, nature of
our perceptions regarding the external world) arises together with these lesser
selves—they all experience various subsets of Reality, not Reality in its entirety.

Myth and Ancient Egypt

As mythologist Joseph Campbell has shown, myths everywhere and

everywhen are actually versions of the same "monomyth": the hero fights various
enemies, dives—like Ghilgamesh—to the bottom of the ocean of wisdom, rescues the
priceless pearl (or treasure), and returns with it as a gift to his society and humanity,
by virtue of which he is a boon to them. 199 Is not Mohammed's life, as historically
recorded, a vindication of the hero's epic that calls for victory on the battlefield and
the bequeathing of a repository of wisdom (in this case, an entire religion) to
humankind as a legacy?
I suppress an urge to write at length about the religion of ancient Egypt.
Egyptian religion is like a beautiful vase that has been shattered into a thousand
fragments, where each fragment is considered to be a "god." Nevertheless, there are
indications that the hierophants and adepts really knew what they were talking about,
but this was largely lost on the public who practiced a popularized and bowdlerized
form of religion.
On the one hand are concepts, symbols and images that will convince any
knowledgeable person that the Egyptians did indeed have a handle on Truth. On the
other hand, the multiplicity of "gods"—barring exceptional periods when the unity of
God was recognized—militated against a correct understanding on this crucial
subject. We may be thankful, however, that whatever of value in ancient Egypt that
has been lost has been preserved in the Koran and in Islamic Sufism. In other words,
the loss is only an illusory one.

Monotheistic Religions

196 It should be noted that this is not an empty, but a Pregnant Void—a Plenum, not a Vacuum.
197 “State” and “station” are Sufic technical terms, the former temporary and the latter permanent. To
be more precise, one would have to use the term “station” in the present context.
198 For the Buddha, see Eliade, p. 235. For Mohammed, this is stated in almost every copy of hilya
(lit. “ornament”: description of the appearance and character of the Prophet). In this connection, it is
interesting to note another property mentioned in hilyas: “He walked as though he were stepping down
from a high place.”
199 Of course, this does not rule out other interpretations of myth, all of which may possess intrinsic
worth.

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 It is here, of course, that the continuity of Islam with earlier religious
traditions is most directly evident. No one has any difficulty in picturing Islam as a
continuation of Judaism and Christianity, and Islam itself has the highest words of
praise for Moses, the prophets of Israel, and for Jesus. In fact, much of the Koran is
devoted to summarizing the major aspects of their biographies. In the grand
monotheistic tradition, the existence and unity of God has been emphasized above all
else because it provides the shortest route to Salvation, Enlightenment, and Reality.
Needless to say, whole volumes could be written on the correspondences and
differences between Islam and each of the religious traditions. To spare the reader,
however—life is short, for readers no less than for writers—we shall be content to
confine ourselves to the case study presented below. In brief, it can be shown, as
Islam has always claimed, that there is a "core-Islamic" component in each religion or
religious philosophy in addition to a non-Islamic component, but the former are not
always identical. They may, however, overlap to a greater or lesser extent.

Yoga and Religion

In Sanskrit, yoga means "union," the same as tawhid (unification), wahdah

(union) and ahad (One) in Arabic. Islam is also known as the religion of unification.
Another sense of yoga, from which the English word "yoke" is derived, means "to
bind together," and this sense approaches the Latin re-ligio ("rebind") or religion—
binding together man and God or Ultimate Reality, that is. This sense is reflected in
the Arabic word aqd, "binding" or "covenant," while aqida means "belief, faith." The
Arabic word for religion is din, namely law or judgment, while in Hebrew din means
judgment, and also rigor.
All these terms suggest that man and God are bound together in a covenant
that unites them, and that under this contract, which man must have faith in, he is
liable to obey God's law and will be accountable in judgment if he violates it.
Yoga has been traditionally understood as a body of psychophysiological
techniques that will, if diligently applied, lead to freedom, liberation, and immortality.
As Mircea Eliade has noted, Yoga involves "transforming the human body into a
cosmic body". 200 There are many forms of Yoga, the principal geographical versions
being Indian, Tibetan, and Chinese Yoga. Yogic techniques have found application
in Hinduism, Buddhism and Zen, not to mention such exotic areas as Taoist alchemy.
We have already seen that man is a mirror of the universe—man is a
microcosmos, the universe is a macroanthropos. If this is true, an affinity may be
expected to obtain between bodily energies and cosmic energies. 201 The universe is
composed of two realms—the physical and the spiritual. From our worldly
standpoint, there is no correspondence between the material world of stars and the
internal organs of man; hence, the claims of the traditions can hold only in the
spiritual realm. It may be conjectured that when human energies are brought into
tune with the energies of the cosmos, a "resonance" occurs which allows the ordinary
human being to partake in a wider existence. It may be further conjectured that the
situation is not black-and-white, that there exist different gradations, different colors

200Eliade, p. 135.
201Material energies, such as cosmic rays, are not meant here.

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or shades of gray, corresponding to different levels of realization between the macro
and the micro.
The techniques of Yoga, then, endeavor to fine-tune the body to bring about
such a realization, the body here implying not just the physical but also the
psychospiritual, or "subtle," body. To this end, various approaches are employed, and
we shall focus particularly on: verbal repetitions (mantra), bodily postures (asana),
control of respiration (pranayama), concentration (dharana) and meditation (dhyana).
Moral law is a prerequisite, and some of the Ten Commandments are repeated in the
Five Restraints of Yoga. 202
To begin with mantras, the similarities with the Islamic invocation (dhikr)
have long been recognized. 203 Whereas the mantra is generally a nonsense syllable
presumed to have mystical significance, however, dhikr is the incessant repetition of a
Name of God or a sacred formula suffused with divine meaning. In addition, breath-
control, concentration, and meditation are combined during Sufic dhikr.
The following quote, from an introductory book on Yoga, could have been
written by a Sufi: "every man has sooner or later to give birth to his own perfection—
in which sense the struggling being of today is the father of his own future perfect
self, or perfect man." 204

Formal Prayer and Fasting

The most important worship in Islam is Formal Prayer (Ar. salat, Pers.
namadh), repeated five times daily and totaling approximately forty minutes (at the
average rate of a cycle a minute) per day. It is called "Formal" here for lack of a
better word, and because it involves a sequence of "forms," or bodily movements.
Formal Prayer is so essential to Islam ("Peace"205) that, if one wants to be a Moslem
without doing it, one shouldn't bother.
Poise. Equilibrium. Calm. Serenity. These are terms that characterize the
practitioner of Formal Prayer, for he is in tune with God and with the cosmic rhythms
of life. Regarding the Formal Prayer, Alfred Guillaume, himself a Christian, has
noted wistfully: "... apart from the testimony to Muhammad being the apostle of God
there is nothing in the official worship of Islam in which a Christian could not join,
and one who understands the words of praise and adoration is tempted to do so."206
According to Phil Parshall, a Protestant missionary, Moslems are more biblical in
their worship than Christians, since the Bible mentions prostration and other positions
used by Moslems in Formal Prayer. 207 A person who performs the Prayer properly
achieves harmony with God, with the cosmos, with his fellow human beings, and
with himself.
What does this Formal Prayer consist of? First comes the external
requirement of Ablution, which implies both physical cleansing and freshening and
spiritual purification. The basic components of the Formal Prayer are: The Opening

202Eliade, p. 48-9.
203Eliade, p. 216.
204 Ernest Wood, Yoga, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968 (c. 1959), p. 200.
205 Islam is usually translated as “submission” or “surrender.” I have used its auxiliary meaning,
peace, to draw attention to this neglected aspect of the word.
206Guillaume, p. 68.
207 Phil Parshall, The Cross and the Crescent (1989), p. 70, paraphrased in Kate Zebiri, Muslims and
Christians Face to Face, Oxford: Oneworld, 1997, p. 103.

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Proclamation ("God Most Great"), standing with hands clasped (at the waist for men,
over the chest for women), genuflection, straightening up, prostration (twice), and
sitting on one's heels. All the while, prayers appropriate to each stage are recited.
In the Opening Proclamation, the hands are brought to the ears in a motion
that, until it reaches the horizontal level, is almost identical with the initial gesture of
the solo exercise in T'ai-Chi Chuan. 208
Photographic plates depicting a sequence very similar to the standing, bowing
and straightening postures are to be found in a book dealing with Tibetan wisdom. 209
Although these are techniques of youthfulness and long life, it is interesting that the
Tibetans have approached the subject in a ritual mentality. The Yogic postures have
to do with transforming and raising energy, which is the true meaning of the Elixir of
Life. With each genuflection and prostration, perhaps, energies within the subtle
body swirl and are brought into harmony with the energies whirling within the
cosmos at large.
The prostration and subsequent sitting position is quite reminiscent of the
Yoga Mudra—literally, "symbol (or binding) of union"—posture in Hatha Yoga. A
popular book on this subject notes: "This exercise is extraordinarily beneficial for
persons who are inclined to be proud. Pride is driven away from us. We learn to bow
humbly before God and to turn to the source of life within us." 210
What few people realize is that the prostration is also the position of the
foetus, and many peoples place their dead in an embryonic position before burial in
the hope of securing its rebirth. As an embryonic posture, the prostration signifies the
spiritual death-rebirth of the individual. The Tradition of the Prophet: "One is closest
to God during prostration"—like both a newborn babe and a dead man—is further
evidence of this fact.
A discovery of paramount importance in Islamic Sufism is the concept of the
egotistical or base self (nafs al-ammara), firmly rooted in the Koran (12:53). This is
the ground level of human psychic development, and always dictates evil. This
dastardly self colludes with the external principle of evil, and is responsible for most
of human misery.
The Base Self—"the little local self," recalling Edward Carpenter—fears only
three things: hunger, the Formal Prayer, and death. Short of physical death, which
would be a cop-out, Fasting and Formal Prayer are therefore the basic methods of
taming and transforming the Base Self. This is why people instinctively shy away
from these two forms of worship.
The thirty days of Fasting (from dawn to sundown) during the month of
Ramadan purifies and fine-tunes the body to subtle energies at the same time that it
subdues the Base Self. Fasting is a time-honored method of purification practised all
over the world. For those who would keep the Base Self under strict control, to eat
and drink sparingly is a necessity at other times, too. This leads to light and sparing
sleep, with the resulting enhancement in wakefulness, consciousness, and attention.
This cannot be maintained on a full stomach, which engenders drowsiness.

208Cheng Man-ch’ing, Robert W. Smith, T’ai-Chi, Vermont: Charles E. Tuttle, 1981 (1966), p. 13-14.
209Peter Kelder, Tibetan Secrets of Youth and Vitality, Wellingborough: Aquarian Press, 1988. See the
section on the Sixth Ritual.
210Selvarajan Yesudian and Elisabeth Haich, Yoga and Health, London: Unwin Books, 1969 (1953), p.
122.

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 Fasting is to refrain, to abstain—and in Sufism it has the further meaning of
abstaining from "everything-other-than-God." Fasting is to refrain from seeing
otherness; it is "the presence of the Essence." 211
Nietzsche's term, "the spirit of gravity," is a good way of describing the Base
Self, whose inertia resists any change that might lead to its dissolution. The fear of
death is also why, during Formal Prayer, the Base Self can be kept at bay via breath-
control.
The Base Self floods the mind with distractions—memories, imaginings,
etc.—during Formal Prayer in an effort to nullify its beneficial effects. When breath-
control and breath-retention are applied during Formal Prayer, however, the Base Self
becomes preoccupied with its own survival, for it interprets the cessation of breathing
as a state of emergency. The barrage of distractions it imposes on consciousness is
then interrupted, aiding concentration on a fixed point (God) and allowing the
performer to derive the maximum benefit from his performance. 212
The recitation of prayers—mostly from the Koran—allows a person to focus
concentration on God and induces a meditative state. 213 The frequent repetition of
Names of God during Formal Prayer approximates dhikr (invocation).
Thus, it can be seen that Formal Prayer incorporates all the Yogic techniques
listed above combined—mantras or rather their higher form, dhikr, asanas (postures),
breath-control, concentration on God, and meditation (dhyana, from which Zen is
derived) are built into it. In other words, the single worship of Formal Prayer spans
the entire spectrum of Yogic techniques.
This is not to reduce Formal Prayer to Yoga. Formal Prayer is not Yoga, it is
beyond that. But even when measured against the backdrop of Yoga, it can be seen
that a whole series of Yogic techniques are implicit in one of the Five Pillars (basic
requirements) of Islam. Moslems do not perform Prayer as a technique, but as a form
of worship enjoined upon them by God, seeking His pleasure alone. (Not that God
needs our Prayer; it's for our own good that Prayer is enjoined upon us.) Viewed
from a different perspective, however, it becomes obvious that Formal Prayer is the
most sophisticated program for spiritual elevation—which is why the Prophet
remarked, in one of his Traditions, that "Formal Prayer is the Ascension of the
faithful."
Up to this point, we have discussed the form of Formal Prayer, because this is
its outwardly visible aspect. But what about its content? That content, if all goes
well, is the flowering of love—the love of God and, for His sake, the love of His
creations—in the heart of the worshiper. In a Sacred Tradition, God has declared: "I
was a hidden treasure, and desired to be known. Hence, in order to be known, I
created the universe"—according to a variant translation—"through love."
The Turkish Sufi poet Yunus observed that "Love is a long syllable." Just
how long is explained by another Sufi poet, Fuzuli: "Whatever exists in the universe
is love." This means that the entire cosmos is woven out of love. If he performs his
Formal Prayers properly, the realization of this truth will gradually dawn on a person,

211Shaykh al-Alawi, Knowledge of God, Norwich: Diwan Press, 1981, p. 299-300.

212This method of breath retention is practised among the Sufis, and is not generally known among
Moslems.
213Since the original of the Koran is in Arabic, recitations are normally in this language. However,
those who find this too difficult can recite prayers in their own language, or in any other—God
understands all languages. Nonetheless, we always say that something is lost in translation, and this is
much more so in the case of the Koran. Hence, reciting prayers in Arabic is advisable for maximum
effect.

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and he will finally become suffused with, and engulfed in, love. He will thus be
practising Bhakti Yoga, the Yoga of Love. This will lead to Divine Attraction and
Gnosis, or experiential Knowledge of God, and the practitioner will be engaged in
Jnana Yoga, the Yoga of Knowledge. It can be seen, then, that Formal Prayer runs
across a whole range of Yogic practices, with the reservation that what is essential
has been retained, and what is non-essential has been streamlined out.

The Symbolic Meaning of Prayer

For the Sufis, every stage of the Formal Prayer has its symbolic meaning. The
Ablution, which is purification done with pure water, has its spiritual counterpart in
the "water of the unseen," dispensed from the Hearts of Gnostics. The purpose is to
cleanse the self of impurities (everything other than God, connections with the world)
simultaneously with bodily purification.
In the Sufic conception, Prayer is the link between the servant of God and his
Lord. Ideally, it is Arrival. Standing is the courtesy of Formal Prayer—ideally,
Extinction (fana). Clasping the hands is contraction—one becomes "gathered" (jam)
and draws closer to "the Real" (Haqq: Ultimate Reality or God). Recitation is speech;
Sufis call it "conversation with God." Bowing is the Unification of Acts and
Attributes. More precisely, it is the effacement of these from oneself as well as from
"everything-other-than-God," and dedicating them to their true source, who is God.
Straightening up is ideally performed by the Lord, and not by the servant.
The first prostration is the Unification of the Essence, at which point
Annihilation from existence is experienced. The performer annihilates himself from
everything-other-than-God. The second prostration is the Annihilation from
Annihilation (the "negation of the negation"). The performer rises from it, reborn in
Continuation (baqa). Henceforth, his existence is with his Lord.
Saluting the right and the left by saying "Peace" at the end of the Prayer is to
return to creation, to normal, everyday life, after the servant has been in the Presence
of the Supreme Ultimate (his Lord). Existence becomes confirmed again in his
view. 214
Needless to say, this is the Prayer only of the accomplished Gnostic. But
every Formal Prayer is a preparation for that accomplishment. The processes that
elevate a person, resulting ultimately in Arrival, occur largely in the subconscious.
But no matter how unconscious they may be, these processes lead a servant toward
his Lord as surely as the world turns even though we cannot feel it.
Many, many repetitions are necessary before one can achieve Arrival. Just
how many depends on numerous things. It may involve lifelong effort, and even this
may not be enough—but in that case, the elevation serves its purpose in the Afterlife.
And even one who has "Arrived" must continue to do the Prayer, because such is the
command of his Lord. He continues to perform the Formal Prayer both to maintain
his Realization, and as an example to other people.

A Place in the Sun

214Knowledge of God, p. 79-166.

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 God has given man everything—has exalted him above all else—but He has
not given him His Divinity, His Godhood. As the Prophet of God said, the highest
station is the station of being a servant of God. The Koran counsels us to "call on
Him humbly, with fear and longing" (7:55-6). Obedience to God and humility are
man's best tools on this path.
The Perfect Man is not God—heaven forbid!—he is, rather, the viceregent of
God on earth. As such, although he is a human being, and although there is little to
distinguish him from other people in his outward appearance, yet in his inner,
spiritual life, he is invested with exceptional qualities that set him apart from ordinary
human beings. These superior qualities are in principle available to all ordinary
mortals by virtue of their being human (though some may be more gifted than others).
The Perfect Human differs from others only in that he has undergone special training
to enhance or develop these qualities, endured the hardships of the Way, and emerged
triumphantly on the far shore of Realization.
For example, the Koran states of the prophet Idris: "We raised him to a lofty
station" (19:57). Sometimes identified with Enoch, Idris is also confused with
Hermes, due to the similarity between the spectacular heavenly journeys experienced
by the two.
The great Sufi sage, Ibn Arabi, has explained in his Fusus that Idris and Noah
were both raised to the sphere of the sun. In classical astronomy, the nine principal
spheres denoted a series of nested, concentric transparent spheres surrounding the
earth, on which the orbit of each heavenly body resided. Before we dismiss these as
fantasies of the ancients, however, we might pause to consider the possibility that
these spheres can also be taken to mean something quite in accord with modern
astronomy—namely, the spheroid shapes of the heavenly bodies themselves. "The
sphere of the sun" can then be understood as "the sun disk," or simply "the sun."
Noah's and Idris's Ascension and establishment in the sun must have a very profound
meaning in terms of the relationship between man and cosmos, yet its exact meaning
escapes us, and in such a case silence is preferable to misleading speculation. Still,
we should strive to get out of the walnut-shell of our brains, and take (spiritual) wing
to the Milky Way.

We have indeed looked into depths of the universe, perhaps all the way to its
very borders, but we have not yet solved its riddle. Our sight is confined to visible
light, which occupies a narrow slit in the electromagnetic spectrum. We cannot see
energies that fall outside its range. We cannot see things that are too near, too far, too
big, or too small. We do not see deeply enough. We do not see clearly enough. We
do not see.
Every outward travel brings man back to himself. Perhaps, when we look
deeply enough into ourselves, we shall discover the treasure hidden within. Then we
shall know the answer. Perhaps we shall not know all the answers. But we shall
know the one answer that counts—the solution to the riddle. Beyond this point,
words fail us.

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138
 SCIENCE, BIOETHICS, AND ISLAM

The Sheep and the Pomegranate

The surprises which the wellsprings of Sufism hold in store for us never
cease to amaze me. Consider, for example, the following Tradition (saying) of
the Prophet Mohammed:
"... When that day comes, a community will eat a pomegranate and will
shade themselves under its rind. Milk will be given bountifulness; a single
camel that has given birth recently will be enough for many people, and
similarly with a single cow or sheep." 215
At least several people sheltering under the rind of a pomegranate as if it
were a parasol? With the recent advances in biotechnology, such prospects no
longer seem impossible. Ian Wilmut and his associates have already cloned
sheep for milk that can be used in nursing human babies. 216 The days when a
potato ten times heavier than normal can be grown, at a rate accelerated five
times, or when wheat many times its normal size can be cultivated, no longer
seem far off. In an increasingly overcrowded and poverty-stricken world, the
revolutionary significance of such developments is obvious.
But biotechnology also raises ethical issues which humanity has never
had to face before. Where do we draw the line between obviously beneficial
applications, such as the above, and more controversial matters, such as the
cloning of human beings? Do we have the right—should we have the right—to
alter the genetic makeup of our children? Supposing we possessed the means to
reproduce dinosaurs, as suggested in Michael Crichton's and Steven Spielberg's
Jurassic Park—should we do so or not? Do we have the right to play God?
These are unprecedented questions, and for this reason we are at a loss to
answer them properly. Religion, the main source of human ethics, is likewise in
a quandary, for revelation has never addressed these questions prior to our
times.
Or has it? The Tradition of the Prophet quoted above is so surprising in
its prescience that it leads one to wonder whether there might not be other gems
of a similar nature hidden away for our discovery.
Another example is a Tradition where it is mentioned that a time will
come when "goods will be so plentiful that they will lie around in piles, and no
one will bother to turn around and look at them." Although we have not yet
reached this cornucopia, the rate at which hi-tech products are introduced into
the market and the rapidity with which their prices plunge, so that ever more
sophisticated technology tends to become ever cheaper, would seem to be a
harbinger of such an era. Another Tradition that predicts widespread obesity in
society appears to be linked with such affluence.
It has long been my impression that the Koran, and the body of Prophetic
Traditions supporting it, have a certain similarity to the genetic code, especially
in that certain parts of them are activated at any one time. A different section
finds expression as time passes, somewhat in the manner that a gene is

215Free translation. Muslim, "Fitan," 110; Tirmizi, "Fitan," 59; Musnad, 4:182.
216I. Wilmut et al., Nature, 385, 810-813 (1997).

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"switched on" or expressed. The Koran itself bears witness that parts of it are
activated sequentially: "For every Message there is a season" (or: "For every
announcement there is a time") (6:67). 217 Alternatively, only when our
understanding has progressed sufficiently do we have an inkling of what a
Koranic Verse or Prophetic Tradition is talking about. If this is indeed the case,
a search for bioethical answers within the sphere of Islam would be both a
nontrivial and profitable enterprise. And this is precisely the intention of the
present essay.

Brave New World

In his dystopian novel Brave New World (1932), Aldous Huxley

conjured the chilling vision of a world where the population consisted of classes
of cloned human beings. At that time, Huxley projected his nightmare several
hundred years into the future, but by the time he wrote Brave New World
Revisited (1961), he had changed his mind—the scientific developments
necessary for the realization of his vision now seemed merely decades, not
centuries, away. In any discussion of bioethics, we owe a tribute before all else
to Huxley, who was the first to think through the issues now facing us in a
detailed manner. What was the nature of the problems he addressed?
It is tempting to compare Mustapha Mond, Brave New World's
Coordinator, with the Grand Inquisitor of Dostoevsky. 218 To be sure, Huxley's
Mond is a much more urbane—perhaps even liberal—character than
Dostoevsky's Inquisitor, who excells in fearsomeness. Mond is sure of the
rock-like stability of his synthetic society, whereas the Grand Inquisitor still
needs to assert his power. Yet the two are united in their trade. They give
people happiness and bread, and take away their freedom.
Part of the Inquisitor's social agenda is identical with Mond's: "Yes, we
shall force them to work but, in their leisure hours, we shall organize their lives
into a children's game in which they will sing children's songs together and
perform innocent dances. Oh, we shall allow them to sin, too, for weak and
defenseless as they are, they will love us like children if we allow them to sin.
We shall tell them that every sin they commit with our permission can be
expiated, that we allow them to sin because we love them..." 219 These words
would not sit awkwardly in the mouth of Mond, especially when the free sex
and the legal use of "happiness" drugs in Brave New World are considered.
Both Mond and the Inquisitor play God to their puppets who are human beings,
yet they are not motivated only by political powerlust; 220 they genuinely (if
misguidedly) believe that they are doing something that is right.
In Mond's static clonal society, there is no God, no religion, no art, not
much science, and no adventure—the unmistakable pawprint of totalitarian
control. Everything has been sacrificed for happiness, comfort, and stability.
The most disturbing thing about Huxley's vision is that, since the latter are not
bad things in themselves, one is left with a vague sense that something has gone

217The so-called “war verses” are of this nature; they are no longer “expressed.”
218"The Grand Inquisitor" constitutes a chapter in The Brothers Karamazov (1880); it has been
published under separate cover, and has been hailed as the greatest masterpiece of all literature.
219The Brothers Karamazov, tr. Andrew MacAndrew, (New York: Bantam, 1972), p. 312.
220Nietzsche's machtgelüst, the more revealing precursor of his "will to power."

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terribly wrong, without being able to put one's finger on it. It is also disturbing
because it resembles contemporary society in so many ways.
But man does not exist only for stability and happiness. From man's
point of view, such a diet leaves many of his potentials unfulfilled. From God's
point of view, man has been created to adore and worship God (the Koran,
51:56). What few people realize is that these are two sides of the same coin.
God does not need our worship, we do. Then if God does need our worship,
why has He prescribed it for us? Because it is for our own good, for our well-
being. In His unbounded 221 love for man, God has shown man the methods by
which he can transcend himself. Worship will draw us closer to God, and we
shall experience greater freedom and happiness than are dreamt of in the
philosophies of either a Mond or an Inquisitor. To thirst after knowledge, or
science, is—in Islam—a commandment of God, one of whose Prime Attributes
is Knowledge/Science. Whatever we learn, we are drinking from God's
inexhaustible cup of knowledge. Because "God is Beautiful, He loves Beauty,"
man also has a profound aesthetic sensibility for art. To the Grand Inquisitor's
claim that the vast majority of human beings are weak, meek and despicable,
Islam would answer, with Carlyle: "In the meanest soul lies something nobler."
So the mutual project offered us by the Mond-Inquisitor team sells man
short; far shorter, infinitely shorter than what he has the potential to become.
That project reduces humanity to a flock of docile sheep, totally abandoned to
its worldly, political rulers. For those who want to play God over humanity,
there is no sweeter dream than to turn rebellious, unruly humankind into a flock
of obedient mindless sheep. Is it merely a coincidence, or rather an omen—a
sign from Heaven—that "Dolly," the first clone ever, was a sheep? 222

The Perfect Crime

Suppose you know the way to commit the perfect crime. You will get
away with it, come into a large sum of money, live the rest of your life in
luxury, and no one will ever catch you. But it requires transgressing the rights
of other human beings.
Should you do it?
That, in a nutshell, is the question posed by ethics. And it is also the
question posed by bioethics as its subset. What is involved here is the
difference between knowledge and implementation. We may know many
things, some useful and others harmful. There may be no way to unlearn, or
avoid knowing, the harmful stuff. Yet no harm is done as long as we do not
attempt to translate theory into practice.
This is the situation with all science and technology. Knowledge in and
of itself is neutral; it is the way in which knowledge, or science, is utilized that

221I use the word "unbounded" advisedly, in the mathematical sense of the term and in
preference to "boundless" or "infinite." In mathematics, a surface can be "finite but unbounded,"
such as the surface of a sphere. To speak of God's "infinite love" for man might draw objections
to the effect that all sins, no matter how evil, should be capable of dissolution in this universal
solvent, and hence forgivable. The sphere of God's love for man is very great, and "His mercy is
greater than His wrath," especially for penitents, but this does not mean that man is not
accountable or responsible.
222The first mammalian clone, to be precise.

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gives rise to ethical problems. 223 The Prophet emphasized the absolutely
indispensable nature of science: "Learn knowledge/science from cradle to the
grave" is just one among a long list of Traditions praising science. Far from
being inimical to it, Islam is science-friendly.
The clincher comes when we attempt to make practical use of our
knowledge. We can use our knowledge of nuclear physics either to make an
atomic bomb that will kill millions of people, or a nuclear power plant that will
serve them. This issue begins at the very start of technology, and even here
there is some inherent ambiguity. A flintstone spear can be used by an Abel to
provide for his family, or by a Cain to murder his brother. A kitchen knife can
be used to slice bread, or for less innocent purposes. A hypodermic needle can
be used either to save a life or to ruin one. But such ambiguity does not exist for
a nuclear bomb, for instance, because the bomb cannot be used for any other
purpose than killing people. 224 As for the nuclear reactor, if it introduces
substantial amounts of lethal, nondisposable radioactive waste into the
environment, is it better to continue with its use and jeopardize our children's
world, or to seek out other alternatives such as solar energy?

These considerations lead, therefore, to some general guidelines which

may be summarized as follows:
1. Knowledge or science is not itself immoral; rather, it is amoral.
2. Technology is not itself immoral.
3. Ethics or morality comes into the picture when people attempt to
design a technology for a specific purpose, or when they use a device for
purposes different from those it was designed for.
4. When, in the course of developing our technology, we come to a
bifurcation where we are faced with an ethical choice, we should take the
ethically desirable path, or even retreat if necessary.
5. Ethics is more a social problem than a scientific or technological one.
Modern science and technology place too much power in the hands of
irresponsible people—nuclear bombs in the hands of terrorists, for example.
The solution here is not more technology, but the moral education of all society
so that everyone will be inhibited from ethically irresponsible action.
6. Our modern societies as they exist possess no such inhibitory
mechanism for controlling science—"anything that can be done, must be done."
It is precisely here that restraint is necessary. What is required is a moral
consensus, and this cannot occur unless people have been instilled with morality
in the first place. Otherwise, the consensus will tend to gravitate to the immoral
side.
7. Since it is impossible to police every single human being, only
religion is capable of providing the inhibitions and incentives that will prevent

223Ethical neutrality refers to the domain of what is broadly understood by "science" in our day:
the physical and social sciences. The normative sciences such as ethics, and the religious (or
spiritual) sciences, cannot be considered ethically neutral.
224Not counting deterrence, which boils down to the same thing. Early on in the development of
nuclear technology, the notion was fielded that nuclear weapons could be used for "good"
purposes, such as drilling long tunnels or space travel. The fact remains that since the 1950s
when these ideas were first propounded, no attempt has ever been made to put them into
practice.

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people from doing wrong (and encourage them to do good) when no one is
looking.

These general conclusions will be helpful in establishing more specific

ethical guidelines for the case of biotechnology. Concerning the last point, note
that the aim here is not social or political control of individuals, but self-control.
The Sacred Law is there to help man, to guide people, not to control people. It
informs people about things they don't know. According to Islamic ethics, man
is morally responsible for his actions, and love of God inevitably calls for the
love of His creation as well. Man's ethical behavior then becomes the vehicle
for the entrance of God's mercy into the world. (This is why it is possible to
criticize unethical believers. In Islam, both normative ethics and metaethics are
resolved by the Koran and the Prophet's Way.)

Basic Principles

We may begin with the general principle of the Koran. In the Koran,
anything that enhances the well-being of human beings is called a "virtue," and
anything that is detrimental to it is called a "sin." (One should be careful to note
here that what is pleasurable or comfortable is not always what is good.) The
Koran also informs us that "the world has been placed at your disposal," that
everything in the world serves the needs of human beings, who, like proper
stewards or custodians, should in turn utilize resources sparingly—i.e., they
should not place too great a stress on the environment.
A fundamental principle of ethics is stated in the Tradition: "Actions are
[judged] according to their intentions." 225 Edison was acting virtuously in
trying to invent the electric light bulb; it was an immoral act (though justified by
wartime circumstances) to use electricity for constructing nuclear weapons. 226
Whenever a previously unapparent deleterious or immoral effect is observed, it
may be best to retreat from that course of action.
Another rule of thumb in deriving guidelines from the Koran and
Traditions is that anything not explicitly Prohibited or which cannot be traced to
a Prohibition in its ramifications is to be considered Permitted.

225This is the very first entry in Bokhari, the most famous among the collections of Traditions.
The most reliable of these are known as "the Six Books." In addition to the Koran, these
constitute the primary works of reference for Islamic lore.
226Weapons of mass destruction constitute a special category of evil, since they are aimed to
decimate innocent civilians rather than a nation's war machine. This is an act of terrorism,
because personal responsibility for crimes is upheld in Islam. Everything about modern warfare,
starting with Clausewitz' conception of "total war," is unethical from this standpoint. Islam's
position here is much more akin to that of Taoism, which may be called "minimal
interventionism": it dictates the minimum damage to the adversary needed to achieve surrender,
or peace. Overkill is imbalance, disequilibrium, injustice; it can only lead to further wars. But if
this is the way war must be waged, the Prophetic injunction: "Arm yourselves with the weapons
of your enemy" is a directive to achieve arms parity, which all nations carry out today regardless
of religious faith. This is why the abolition of mass-destruction (nuclear, biological, chemical)
weapons is a must.

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 Let us now take a look at some specific questions raised by
biotechnology. It is impossible to be comprehensive because of the vast range
of possible phenomena; individual cases must be investigated separately.

Abortion

The first issue to be addressed is not new; in fact, it is a very old one.
Abortion is a religous issue that continues to bedevil the West: is abortion
morally acceptable or not? What can be said about this problem from the
Islamic standpoint?
Let us start with contraception. Contraception is permissible, because
new life has not yet been created. A woman should take measures to protect
herself; if she is unable to, her husband should. This is the point where
precautions should be taken against unwanted pregnancies, rather than worrying
about the thornier problem of abortion once conception has occurred.
According to the Koran, it is one of the greatest sins to murder an
innocent human being. For this to happen, however, one first has to have a
being distinct from a growth in the mother's abdomen. One cannot "kill" a
human being where independent human life does not exist.
Hence, the critical point for an abortion is the instant at which the spirit
becomes engaged to the body, and this moment corresponds to that of the first
heartbeat, just as the moment of death—when the soul disconnects from the
body—corresponds to the time when the heart stops. 227 One cannot claim that a
human organism with no heartbeat is alive. During gestation, the initial
heartbeat occurs at the end of the third week of pregnancy. Thus, there is a
window of opportunity, albeit a short one, when an abortion may be performed
without blame.
From a more esoteric point of view, a further twist is added. The spirit
of homo sapiens consists of two levels: the animal level and the human level.
Although the embryo has become animated after the third week, it has not yet
developed to the point of acting as a receptacle for the specifically human
component of the human spirit. This point is generally reached at the end of the
fourth month, or between 26-28 weeks.
The point at which the human level or component becomes infused into
the embryo is generally recognized by pregnant women, and may be called the
"flutter experience." This is a moment towards the end of the fourth month
when the woman experiences a sudden, uplifting state transition, during which
the baby may move perceptibly. Up to this point, the embryo was not capable of
accepting the human level; although animated, it could not be said to bear a full
human soul.
The question then arises as to what can be said about abortion during this
period between 3-28 weeks. Obviously—with the exception to be stated
below—abortion is not acceptable after the "flutter" experience, which is in
accordance with accepted medical practice anyway.
For this 3-28 week period, the general principle is this: although not yet
human, the embryo already bears life. It is therefore customarily considered as
a future child or proto-child, for whom the following Koranic precepts apply:

227 “Brain death” occurs five minutes later.

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"Do not slay your children for fear of poverty. This is folly and a grievous sin.
God will provide for you and them" (6:140, 151, 17:31). Note that in Islam,
extramarital sex is not allowed, and pregnancy out of wedlock is not supposed to
occur in the first place.
Hence, unless the embryo has a significant defect (such as the lack of a
limb) or the prospective mother's life is in danger, it is better to let the
pregnancy run its normal course. In a world where many couples cannot have
children even when they're dying to do so, the child should be accepted both as
a gift from God and the will of God. Divine decree has ordained new life, and it
is best not to tamper with it. Abortion cannot be officially sanctioned or
condoned in this period. For example, rape is a grievous wrong, and so is
abortion in cases of pregnancies resulting from rape—it is "wrong within
wrong." Having seen it fit for the conception to occur, God will provide for the
child, since He does not create any life without assuring its sustenance until
death arrives.

In addition, there may be cases where the foetus becomes dangerous to

the health, or even the survival, of the mother. In these cases, an abortion may
be performed at a date later than three weeks, and even after four months,
whenever it may prove medically necessary.

Artificial Insemination

Our age has seen such novelties as sperm banks, in vitro fertilization,
and surrogate mothers. Few people know how to take an ethical approach to
these matters.
In Islam, for a man and a woman to have a child, they must be legally
married. Thus, if a normally infertile married couple are able to procreate by in
vitro fertilization or artificial insemination, there is no obstacle to doing so. The
condition is that no sperm other than her lawful husband's must be introduced
into a woman's abdomen, and no sperm and ovum belonging to an unmarried
couple should be combined in in vitro fertilization.
By analogy, this would rule out almost all forms of surrogate
motherhood, as the sperm that goes into producing the embryo is foreign to the
host body in this case. The only exception to the last two cases known to this
writer is where a wife's ovaries are sterile but her womb is healthy, in which
case—with the consent of all parties—the husband's sperm may be combined in
vitro with an ovum from a female donor (a process called "egg donation"), and
placed in the wife's womb. Since she will nurture the baby for nine months until
its birth, she will be its mother.

Eugenics

The artificial improvement of human beings will be practiced as soon as

the means become available. Many people will want to protect their children
against genetic disease, against genetically preventable illnesses, or—in a more
positive vein—will want to enhance their intelligence, beauty, or other traits.
The trouble is that once the means become available, less humane third
parties will also begin to have similar ideas. The memory of Nazi doctors

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sterilizing Jews and killing defective children has still not been forgotten. The
desire to better one's own breed while worsening one's enemy's—however one
happens to define that enemy—will become more irresistible as the biotech
hurdles are circumvented.

Clones

Before anything else, one thing should be made clear: in cloning a new
organism, we are not "creating new life;" we are working within nature and
making use of its laws to produce a locus susceptible of receiving life. (To
create new life would be to resurrect a dead person, for example.)
With this in mind, let us consider some of the major implications of
cloning:

a) The world is already overpopulated with people underfed and

undercared for. On the one hand, we try to practice contraception and abortion
to curb the population explosion; on the other, we resort to new methods such as
cloning that would result in population increase. Any specific gene set (that of a
single human being) already has exercised its right to exist, without displacing
the right of another and usurping the resources required by a normally-born
human baby. The time-honored, natural way of human breeding is more than
sufficient to populate the earth.
b) How about cloning an Einstein, though? Wouldn't it be nice to have
more geniuses around?
The problem with this point is that the genes of an Einstein do not
guarantee an Einstein. Identical twins grow up to be widely different
individuals with different, and sometimes opposing, characteristics. Nurture is
as important and nature, and we can never control nurture precisely enough to
ensure a desired outcome. Cloning is quite similar to having an identical twin.
But suppose we aimed at producing the benign genius of an Einstein, and the
outcome was the evil genius of a Hitler or the criminal genius of an Al Capone
instead? (Not that there aren't people who admire these worthies.) So cloning
does not guarantee a desired result, even barring the risk factor of accident.
c) The subtler and by far the more insidious result of cloning—as well as
of many other aspects of biotechnology—will be the devaluation of human life
and human dignity. Where human beings are all too easily produced or
reproduced, there will be a tendency to view them as a mere commodity, a
regression to materialism, and an increase in everything in a spectrum ranging
from inconsiderateness to outright cruelty. We already live in a world where
human embryos are found serving as cat chow in trash cans, where unspeakable
atrocities are perpetrated on children, where people are abducted off the streets
and their bodies pirated for spare parts. Certainly those who already do such
things won't think twice about breeding clones only for their brains or livers.
But the clone will presumably be a human being like, and with the same rights
as, you or me. It will be a boon for humanity if individual organs can be
"farmed," but even this will still subtly devalue human life.
d) The cloning process will be seen as a fundamental difference between
clones and human beings, in addition to less important ones such as race, class,
and nationality. One can imagine caste societies where clones are used as
slaves, or idiot clones, or semihuman, half-animal clones are bred for lifelong

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slavery. And if clones ever get the upper hand, they will declare themselves the
Master Race. In any case, cloning stands poised to increase the inequality
between human beings, which is undesirable even from a normal democratic—
let alone religious—point of view. The lessons of Huxley's Brave New World
have still not been sufficiently absorbed. It is a relief to see a worldwide ban on
experiments involving human cloning, but it is doubtful that everyone will abide
by it.
e) It is not the process of cloning that is unethical, for this is neutral, and
has been practiced in plants long before it was applied to animals. It is rather its
application to human beings that raises the question of ethics. A human clone is
not a "child" in the ordinary sense, because it is not produced by the ordinary
process of child-bearing. Yet theoretically, a human clone will become an
ordinary human being.
f) From an Islamic viewpoint, it is on the issue of nonmarital
reproduction that the ethical question of cloning hinges. Even before cloning,
human beings could reproduce, yet the Sacred Law distinguishes between
marital sex, which is Allowed, and extramarital sex, which is Forbidden.
Hence, the "Allowed" form of reproduction is the marital kind, which is a subset
of natural human reproduction. Cloning lies beyond the outer limits of even this
larger set, and is necessarily prohibited. By analogy, it too has to be considered
unethical.
g) The rules of the Sacred Law have been set for man's benefit by God
rigorously and with brevity. The reasons for circumscribing man's actions are
not explained in detail. It is only when man trespasses, and has already
progressed some ways in his violation, that he discovers to his chagrin the
reason(s) for the prohibition.

The above discussion indicates that the benefits of human cloning are
questionable at best, while its harms can border on the horrific at their worst.
From the Islamic viewpoint, therefore, it would be best not to do it. Yet in spite
of this, it is almost a certainty that it will be attempted.

New Species

Before we go on to consider mutant species, i.e. the creation of hybrids,

monsters and chimeras, it is proper to see what Islam has to say about ordinary
household pets:
Having a pet is considered to be a task requiring great responsibility in
Islam. We should recognize first of all that the pet—usually an animal—is the
bearer of life, which is sacred (because God-given), and therefore possesses
rights. But it is handicapped because it cannot convey its needs and problems to
us by ordinary speech. Any person adopting a pet is, therefore, assuming a great
burden. S/he must take care of the animal to the best of his ability, must be very
careful to meet its needs, and not only protect it, but also protect others from any
harm or disturbance it might cause. If one is not able to care for a pet properly,
it is better not to have one at all.
This is the case for an ordinary pet. Consider now what the case might
be for introducing a new animal species (or reintroducing an extinct one). The
inventor(s) of that species, because he is bringing an entirely new form of life

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into existence, 228 is responsible for all the subsequent members of that species
till the end of time. (The analogical precedent for this is the Islamic principle
that a person's legacy continues to gather sin or gain merit for him after he dies;
a book he has written or a water fountain he has built, for instance, will continue
to accumulate posthumous virtue. Another relevant Tradition in this respect is:
"Whoever invents a bad custom, both its sin and the sins of those who practise it
will be upon him.") In the future, others will bear responsibility for the
sustenance of the offspring and the damage they will cause to the environment,
etc; but the author of the innovation is responsible above all others.
Still want to resuscitate a T-Rex? Go ahead. But first make sure you
have really understood the italicized print above in all its implications.
This last example also serves to demonstrate that the principles of Islam
are general enough to be applicable under the widest variety of conditions.
Even if the creation of monster (or at least, new) species is a possibility that has
only just swung into view, we are able to find guidelines from the basic sources
(the Koran and the Prophet's sayings) that enable us to get a handle on the
subject. In the future, too, it is reasonable to expect that Islamic principles will
prove fecund in yielding ethical guidelines for totally unprecedented situations.

Hubris

The ability to manipulate the basic processes of life will lead to an

immense increase in hubris, to the conceit—and illusion—that we are all-
powerful. This trend, which is almost a normal by-product of increasing
knowledge and technology, will be immensely magnified when biotechnology
delivers its results. This, from the Islamic standpoint, is a greater invitation to
disaster than all the other abuses of biotech combined.
If human beings were to engage in research and development with
humility; if they were to worship God in the manner He desires; if they were to
refrain from immoral applications of technology or biotech; if they could see
that "the more you know, the more you understand how little you know" of the
omniscience God put into creating the universe; if the increase of knowledge led
to wonder, admiration, and adoration rather than self-adulation and vanity—then
certainly there would be nothing objectionable in all this.
Instead, given the existence of the "Base Self" as it is designated in Sufi
psychology, and the total ignorance of contemporary man regarding this
existence—which in turn leads to a total lack of precautions to guard against it—
every achievement goes to man's head, every discovery spins it, every
breakthrough makes him dizzier with arrogance. Man, puny man, inflates his
fragmentary ego with delusions of grandeur—delusions, even, of Divinity.
Thus, for example, the words of a physicist with plans to open a commercial
human cloning clinic are graphically revealing: "Cloning ... is the first serious
step in becoming one with God." 229 This is how the Base Self plots partnership
with God, with the ulterior motive of dispensing with God later on and setting
itself up as the sole Absolute.

228 This is still not the creation of life, but the preparation, using biological principles, of a new
form, a new receptacle, capable of bearing life. By analogy with electricity, it is the hardware
of an electrical appliance that is produced, not "electricity" itself.
229 Reported in Time, Jan. 19, 1998.

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 If there is one thing God finds intolerable, it is that man should associate
omnipotence with anything other than God. It is already bad enough when man
sets up other associates beside God, when he worships other gods. When man
sets himself up as that very associate, while simultaneously denying (i.e.
displacing) God, that is the pinnacle of folly and the surest invitation to disaster.
Both in the Koran and the Traditions, we are warned that God does not love the
haughty, that the destination of misers and the conceited is Hell. In many cases,
divine retribution arrives sooner than the afterlife—i.e., while we are already in
this world, which accounts for many otherwise inexplicable events and for the
ruin of many a past civilization. God has given man many things—even an
entire universe—but He has not given him His Godhood.
Ever since Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, it has been obvious to those
possessed of minds that man is half-consciously trying to create man through
the use of science; to imitate God; to create himself in his own image; and, in
the end, to usurp God's rightful place. When that happens—or rather, since man
cannot create his duplicate out of nothing, when the illusion of having done so is
complete—the tenuous membrane protecting man from God's wrath will be
dissolved, and disaster will become our destiny. We cannot be sure what form
this catastrophe will take, but it is an understatement to say that thousands of
people will die. We cannot be certain from what quarter disaster will strike; we
can only be sure that it will. The punishment will likely come from within the
precincts of biotechnology itself, precisely from the place where man thought he
had outwitted and surpassed God. In this respect, Frankenstein was prophetic
enough.

Conclusions

All this suggests that biotechnology is opening a Pandora's box, out of

which will emerge a host of problems difficult to resolve ethically. When man
began to tinker with the atom, it exploded in his face as the hydrogen bomb.
Now that he is beginning to play around with the genetic code, we have no
assurance that something similar will not happen.
Many of the fruits of biotechnology will be beneficial to human
beings—in Islam, the ultimate determinant of virtue. It seems equally clear,
however, that many other applications will be harmful. It is these we must
refrain from. But our societies and even our sciences are slaves to the principle:
"Anything that can be done, must be done." (Compare Dostoevsky's atheist: "If
there is no God, everything is permitted.") This is at bottom an ethical, and
beyond that a religious, choice rather than a scientific one. Obeying this
principle can only lead to regret: in trying to change everything, man ruins
everything. But the question thus arises: what can man tamper with? From the
Islamic standpoint, The Law (as we have seen in this essay) is for our benefit,
for our guidance. Moreover, the development of humanity is only possible
through efforts enlightened by God's Law.
The more our knowledge, our technology, and our science advance, the
more imperative it becomes to complement and counterbalance them with equal
progress in ethics, morality, and wisdom. A man of knowledge has greater
potential to do good—but also, to do more evil—than an ignorant man. In a
society where all are well-informed, everyone is at the mercy of everyone else.

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 Islam tells us that a nation's science will rise only as high as its morality
permits—after which it will fall to the ground, and society with it. Before we
open the box of Brave New World, therefore, we need to ask ourselves, not
whether we will be able to achieve these prodigies, but: are we morally ready
for this? Is society ethically prepared? Will every one of us be able to exercise
the self-control, the moral restraint, necessary to refrain from unethical
applications? Have we educated ourselves and our children in this way? Do we
possess the minimal wisdom necessary to guarantee our survival? Have we paid
enough attention to obtaining a moral consensus, ultimately—since knowledge
cannot be restricted—a worldwide one?
These questions, and their answers, do not belong in the domain of
science. They are for religion to answer. And the moral questions involved are
what this humble essay has attempted to clarify, with specific reference to the
case of Islam.
Our investigation has revealed that Islam holds the answers to pressing
present-day ethical questions. The answers, however, are by themselves
insufficient. They also need to be carried out, to be implemented—and the great
question is: who will do so?
The Prophet has informed us: "Knowledge depends on practice. It
abides as long as practice continues. If it is not practised, knowledge
disappears."
This is what has happened with the science of ethics, with our
knowledge of morality. We have not practised these for such a long time that
they have now vanished, and we have to start climbing, like Sisyphus—ever so
slowly and painfully—back up the mountain again.

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 ISLAM AND MODERNITY

Prelude: A Rational Faith

Before we turn to the main topic of this chapter, we must first address a
seemingly unrelated but much more fundamental problem: is a rational faith possible?
Or is this just a contradiction in terms?
In order to evaluate this, we have to go back a bit. Consider the following
debate:

"If the Father begot the Son, he that was begotten had a beginning of
existence; hence it is clear that there was a time when the Son was not."
"No. The Son has always been with the Father, not only since time began, but
before all time. For the Father could not have been so named unless he had a
Son; and there could be no Son without a Father."
"If you say that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father as the Son does, why
don't you say that he is the brother of the Son? If he proceeds from the Son,
why don't you say he is the grandson of the Father?"
"The Son is not the Father, but is what the Father is; nor is the Spirit the Son,
but is what the Son is. These Three are One if you look at the divinity, and the
One is Three if you take account of their distinguishing characteristics. Nor
are the Three split up by these modern pestiferous dividings."
"With regard to the Holy Spirit, it is not yet clearly known whether he is to be
thought of as begotten or unbegotten, or as being himself a Son of God or
not."
"The Holy Virgin is not the mother of the God-part of Jesus, but only the
mother of the man Jesus."
"No. When Mary conceived Jesus, she conceived him not only as man but as
God also. The Holy Virgin is the Mother of God." 230

The legacy of these arguments, occurring early in the first millenium and
mutating as time went on, has plagued us down to this very day. They form the basis
for our conception that reason and faith are in implacable and irreconcilable
opposition. The talk of fathers, sons, grandsons, grandfathers, and mothers of one and
the same God (of Himself being these) has been the bane of our heritage from the
beginning. Nor, unfortunately, does it end there. Faith in the West has been so
radically opposed to reason for almost two thousand years that Tertullian was
compelled to say: "I believe because it is absurd," while Martin Luther echoed him
with: "Reason should be destroyed in all Christians." Today, when someone comes
up to us and says that reason and faith need not be opposed to each other, our normal
reaction is to view him as a madman or, if we are convinced of his sanity, to dismiss
his words as a joke.
Yet this need not be the case. Reason can be rooted in faith, and faith in
reason. A conception of God that violates no known laws of logic is possible. This is

230Bamber Gascoigne, The Christians, St. Albans, Herts: Granada, 1977, p. 44; Karen Armstrong, The
First Christian, London: Pan, 1983, p. 151.

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the big rift, the great divide, that we have to span. But no one can do this for us; we
have to do it on our own. We have to be audacious and brave enough to take the leap,
to at least entertain the possibility of a rational faith, a rational spirituality.
There is no contradiction between reason and faith, between thought and love,
between the mind and the Heart, or the brain and the (physical) heart. Like the latter,
they serve different functions and complement each other. It is only in certain forms
of religious expression that reason and faith are pitted against one another.
The universe undergoes infinitely many transformations, and modernity is but
one of the guises worn by the Spirit. A Perfect Human will be no less a Perfect
Human if he wears a suit and tie.
In what follows, I shall ask the patient reader to suspend judgment, and abstain
from reaching a decision until all the facts are in. This applies, in fact, to the entire
book. When we are presented with a new viewpoint that differs from ours, it is quite
difficult to suffer a long argument to its end. I can only plead the reader's indulgence
in this respect.

The "Win-Win" Option

The conflict between faith and reason, or religion and science, has for
centuries condemned us to a zero-sum game: if one side wins, the other side loses.
Religion pertains to the spiritual world, science to the physical world. For a long
time, Western culture was interested predominantly in the world of the spirit; the
material world was castigated. This was the "win-lose" option. Then science took
over, and, even if it did not categorically deny the existence of the spiritual world, it
concerned itself almost exclusively with the material world, and was used as a basis
for such denial by those with agendas of their own. This, in turn, is the "lose-win"
option.
Faith, because it had opposed reason for so long, was equated with
superstition. Since the particular brand of faith we have in the West is still stuck
somewhere in the above debate, it represents a dead-end from which there is no exit.
But if the spiritual world exists—and even those who deny its existence grant that
human beings have an inner world—and is subject to laws of its own, the conflation
of faith with superstition is itself an error, no matter how justified it may seem on the
surface.
In that case, we have to make a fresh start. We have to accept the possibility
of a rational faith, and see where we can go from there. The pendulum has swung
from one extreme, of spiritualism, to the other extreme, of materialism. Every person
is condemned to live as half a human being. We have to find the happy medium, the
correct balance, that will allow us to realize our potentials to the full, without denying
either aspect of our existence.
It is widely recognized that science gives the means, but does not propose
ends. It is amoral and value-free. But human beings cannot help deteriorating in a
moral vacuum. Moral/ethical values are a precondition for the proper pursuit of
happiness. Since this automatically brings us into the social field, a religion—a
lifestance, if you will—that is both personally (spiritually) and socially (ethically)
satisfying—which, at the same time, celebrates reason and science—is called for.
This is the kind of religion that can coexist with science. Although we may not be
aware of it, such a religion already exists.

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Modernity and the Misunderstood Religion

The relentless progress of modern science and technology represents one of

the greatest and fastest changes in the history of humankind. It has swept all before
it—empires, kingdoms, inequalities, sects, philosophies, and religions. People now
expect technology to deliver what they formerly requested of God. And it is true that
technology delivers. But it cannot deliver everything. Just as man cannot live by
bread alone, neither can he live by cars, computers or television alone. (Granted,
they're all a great help.)
The problem is that in all this material progress, man has forgotten to
complement it with moral and spiritual progress. The ways in which people behave
towards each other, and the interior world, the inner experience, of human beings, are
at least as important—if not more—to the quality of life as a luxury car or plane
flights. In a superpower such as America, one day of anarchy or natural disaster is
enough to remind us that technology means little when our very lives are in jeopardy.
In the dichotomy between reason and faith, between technology and religion,
all religions are as a rule lumped together and treated as a single bloc. Among these,
Islam in particular is treated as an archaic and provincial religion. It is the purpose of
this chapter to investigate how justified this viewpoint is.

Islam is actually a tolerant religion not at all incompatible with modernity.

Obviously, a religion designed by God to last till the end of time cannot be fazed by
the vicissitudes of technical progress. As Ataturk, the founder of Turkey and a
staunch supporter of modernity—who first set that country on its course towards
modernization—once observed: "Our religion is a most rational and natural religion.
And this is why it was the final religion. For a religion to be natural, it has to be
compatible with reason, with technology, with science and with logic. Our religion is
entirely compatible with all of these. ... It contains nothing against consciousness,
against progress. ... If our religion had not been harmonious with reason and logic, it
would not have been perfect, it would not have been the last religion." 231
The Arabs, among whom Islam originally flourished, interpreted it according
to their own constitution and applied it according to their own lights. This does not
detract from the universality of that religion.
The image of Islam was marked by the racial and ethnic character of the
Arabs. Sociologically, this was inevitable. Yet in spite of its Arabic background,
Islam is also an ecumenical religion which needs to be looked at after removing the
cultural filter that has resulted from organic growth in a specific geography and
period. It is the universal aspect of Islam which holds the greater interest for us.
Since it is to be valid for all human beings till the end of time, its cultural modulation
has to be demodulated and readapted to the needs of other cultures. This is a difficult
task, but it is not impossible once the essentials of the religion are grasped. Luckily,
the entire teaching of the Koran and most of the Prophet's Traditions have survived
intact, greatly easing this task.

231 I am indebted to this great soldier and statesman for some of the ideas presented in this chapter.
Though he never acknowledged it, I have it on the testimony of the highest Sufi circles that a great deal
of his thought was based on the Koran and Prophetic Tradition, which accounted for his phenomenal
success.

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Think Globally, Act Locally

Every society (and, in fact, every human being) finds itself situated in a
different location in spacetime and under different circumstances. Starting from the
particular, Einstein's theory of relativity sought to reach the general, to identify what
remains invariant under a wide variety of coordinate transformations. We, on the
other hand, should seek to reach the particular from the general, to apply the
universal principles of Religion to our own situation. These principles are moderate
in number, and can be mastered by more or less anyone. The basic principles need to
be sufficiently abstract, yet we often find them spelled out in terms of concrete and
easy-to-implement do's and don'ts. No one has equalled the Prophet in translating
abstruse theoretical principles into simple, practical terms.
If the principles were too general, the course of action to be followed would
remain too hazy; while if they were too binding, they would constrict the range of
choices to such an extent that they could no longer be universally applicable. Hence,
in the Koran and the Traditions, we find just the right blend of general versus specific.
What remains is to project these principles onto our plane of action as required by the
particular case at hand.
When we go back to the roots of Islam, we find scant reference to the Arab
people; it is almost always "human beings" who are addressed. Hence, we have to
take a fresh look at the religion by removing the goggles that have "Arab" and
"Middle East" stamped on their eyepieces. Those who view Islam as a primarily
Arabic religion are grossly in error. In the case where these happen to be Moslems,
they are also doing Islam a disservice by condemning it to a parochial and pastoral
existence, instead of recognizing its universality. Islam may have first arisen in an
Arab milieu, but its message to all human beings takes precedence over its birthplace.
The Arabs shall always enjoy the distinction of having been honored with the
presence of the last prophet in their midst. But Mohammed does not belong to the
Arabs alone, he belongs to all humanity, to all of us. One might as well lay claim to
ownership of the sun, or the air we breathe.
Islam is universal. This means that it cannot be confined to any geography
(Arabia, the Middle East), to any time period (whether 7th or 19th century A.D.), or to
any level of social development (agricultural, industrial, postindustrial, technological,
modern, or postmodern society).

The Importance of Practice

Islam is not just a religion, but a metareligion 232—it is the religion beyond all
religions, in that it incorporates the best aspects of them all. This does not mean that
the Prophet sat down one fine day and decided to paste together an ad hoc, synthetic
religion. It means, rather, that the final Revelation of God had to be all-
comprehensive in order to be final, and that its predecessors were subsets of it. Islam

232 I use the term “metareligion” not only to denote the fact that Islam is the religion of religions that
combines and completes all religious truth, but also to translate the Arabic word din. Although usually
translated as “religion,” this term is different in the sense that there is no distinction in it between the
secular and the religious spheres. “Religion” as understood in the West is concerned exclusively with
the afterlife. Din, on the other hand, concerns itself not only with the afterworld but with this world
also, giving practical guidance for activities in daily life. It is this sense I am trying to capture with the
designation “metareligion.”

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binds them all together, and as the definitive dispensation, its rules are binding on all
humanity. However, it is not Islam's agenda to confront other religions, because it
recognizes what truth there is in all of them.
But, it may be objected, the adherents of other religions continue to prosper.
They pray, their prayers are answered, they too produce mystics. How does this come
about?
God has two sets of laws. One is natural law, as studied by science. (One is
tempted to call this "divine natural law." Though this might sound like a
contradiction in terms, it is meant in the sense that all natural law was ordained by
God, and so is rooted in the divine.) The other is human law, or the law for human
beings, as laid down by Religion. Far from being contradictory or incompatible, these
two sets complete and complement each other. The same Hand that wrote the laws of
the universe also authored the Koran. Therefore, there can be no contradiction
between the two.
Just as life exhibits properties different from those of dead matter, human
beings—as the highest life form—display characteristics that cannot be fathomed by
studying other domains of nature. This does not mean that human beings are not
subject to the laws of nature, but that their safety and happiness requires Right
Conduct, which imposes on them certain requirements in addition to those of natural
law. For example, it is not actually necessary to know Newton's Law of Gravitation
in order to survive in conformity with it. One may be blissfully ignorant—even
totally unconscious—of it, but one is safe as long as one refrains from walking off the
fifth floor. Yet the knowledge at least that "things fall down" will be immensely
helpful in avoiding a sad end. The same goes for the laws of God operative over
human beings. One may be obeying a commandment without even realizing it, but it
is much preferable to act consciously—in knowledge of it—and not leave matters to
chance. In the latter case, however, volition comes into play. One cannot avoid the
laws of nature. One cannot help falling down, but one can choose to ignore God's
suggestions and warnings if one wishes—though, of course, at one's own risk.
The final form of these requirements has been laid down by Islam, so that the
earlier revelations are updated. If we recall that these all contained subsets of the
rules for Right Conduct, however, we shall realize that the adherents of other religions
are, not infrequently, acting in conformity with God's human laws. Islam is only the
most comprehensive, all-inclusive and untainted version of these laws.
The adherents of other religions, therefore, are successful to the extent that
they—unknowingly, of course—fulfill the requirements and obey the instructions that
correspond to Islam's in their religion. In this respect, not even belief in a religion
may be necessary. An atheist who abstains from drugs or alcohol, for instance, will
enjoy the benefits of abstention regardless, although he will be depriving himself of
all the other benefits that he would have incurred had he been practising Islam—or
even some other religion—instead. This means that even a single step in the right
direction—towards Right Conduct—will be beneficial. Just think what will happen if
one takes all the steps!
For instance, take the phenomenal prosperity achieved by America, Europe,
and Japan. This has been brought about mainly through the application of the
following rules (I make no attempt to be exhaustive): 1) hard work and
industriousness, 2) honesty, 3) cleanliness, 4) respect for and active research in
science, 5) commerce. These are all requirements of Islam. In other words, the
pinnacle of civilization has been reached thanks to a subset of Islam's precepts. It is

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the great advantage of these countries that their religions share these precepts with
Islam, or at least allow them.
But is mere theoretical acceptance of these principles enough? Consider the
case of a person who stands beside a mountain of food, and yet does not eat. He
knows that the food is good for him, that he can eat all the food he wants; yet unless
he actually eats that food, he will starve to death.
So if we happen to wonder why it is that non-Islamic countries have
prosperred while the so-called "Islamic" ones have fallen behind, the answer is:
Because the non-Islamic countries don't say they're Islamic, but practise (partially)
what Islam preaches; whereas the so-called "Islamic" countries say they're Islamic,
but don't fulfill the requirements of Islam necessary for worldly success.
When there is a discrepancy between word and deed, it is the deed that counts,
not the word. This holds true for both sides. The former practise what their religions
(or philosophies) preach in common with Islam, while the latter don't do what their
own faith requires of them.
The reasons for the decline of so-called "Islamic" nations can be analyzed in
two parts: internal and external. Indeed, these reasons can be conceived, not only on
the sociological level, but on the personal level as well; they are as valid, if not more
so, for individuals as they are for societies. (What is society made up of but
individuals?)

Internal Reasons

Prior to its acceptance of a religion—call this religion "X"—each society (call

it "S") has its own sociohistorical dynamic which determines its overall "state" (this
term being used not in the political, but in the systems-dynamical sense) at the time it
accepts X. This state determines the "initial conditions," so to speak, as that society
sets off into X. In other words, many mores, customs, habits, etc. have already
evolved within a society by the time a majority, say, of its population accepts the
religion.
Needless to say, this legacy of the past, out of sheer inertia, will be carrying
forward a trend that may or may not be in accordance with the precepts of X. In a
general sense, we may say that while some of its mores and customs will be in
accordance with X's requirements, others will form a residue that runs counter to
them.
At the time it accepts X, this residual component of S's total inheritance will
perhaps be submerged by the initial burst of religious fervor. For a while, all will
appear in order, and the new religion will seem to be well-established. But after a
while, the buildup and inertia of the residue—integrated for multitudes of individuals
over a period of decades or even centuries—will begin to reassert itself. The result
will be the re-emergence of certain fundamental traits and characteristics of S which
have not been shed or transformed by adopting X. This is an all-too-human failing,
and those keen on criticizing it would do well to try changing themselves first to see if
it is easy. Coercion is no good and must be avoided, for these deeply ingrained "field
lines" of S cannot be eradicated by force. They can only be tempered in the long run,
perhaps, by gentle persuasion and correct instruction in the religion.

External Reasons

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 In addition to the dynamical evolution within a society, we must next consider
influences between societies. Through trade, warfare, international relations, reports
by travellers, and even invasion, societies contact each other by peaceful or not-so-
peaceful means and influence one another. This influence may take the shape of a
"graft" in which the mores, customs or other traits of a society are grafted onto
another. Admiration may play a role (as with the Japanese, who copied the Chinese
solely out of admiration).
Hence, a society which was formerly innocent of certain undesirable traits
may contract them, as it were, by contagion through contact with another society.
Consider, now, what happens when a society, B, embraces a religion (X) that
has emerged in a different society, A. The "pure-form" stage of X has likely been
superseded, old traits have presumably reasserted themselves, and what arrives at B's
doorstep is not X, but X-plus-R, where R represents the residual component of society
A's heritage. The people of B, being new to the religion, will have difficulty in
discriminating between X and R even when they are able to see a difference between
the two, and in general will be unsuccessful in this endeavor. As a result, R will be
smuggled in under the "brand name" of X, even though the former has nothing to do
with the latter.
One can imagine further extensions of this scenario, where society D, for
example, receives X via societies A, B and C, each adding its particular residue R0, R1
and R2. But the logic is the same. Last but not least is D's own internal residue, R3.
X thus reaches the later generations of D in the considerably diluted form
X+R0+...+R3, by which time it is quite difficult to distinguish what part belongs to the
residues and what to X proper. But if, of course, the "source code" (as it were) of X is
still available, and if information in accordance with X—or at least not in violation of
it—has been handed down through successive generations, it is still more or less
possible to reconstitute X in its unmixed, pristine condition.
This, in effect, is what happens to any religion, and it is also what has
happened to Islam. It is the source of calls for a "return to the roots," although
attempts to do so have so far met with varying—and dubious—degrees of success.
It can be seen from all this that certain situations so often ascribed to Islam are
actually the result of deep-seated historical and social residues, indigeneous or
extraneous. It is necessary to dissociate Islam from such flaws, since they were
initially absent from the religion. Although Islam is blamed for the decline of Islamic
nations, this is a serious mistake. Islam has never decreed, for instance, that women
should fall behind men. God's orders are that men and women together should learn
knowledge (science) and culture. Thus the Prophet: "It is obligatory on each Moslem
man and woman to study knowledge." Likewise, it is the duty of each Moslem man
and woman to enlighten the community. It is obvious that a nation which leaves half
its population in ignorance cannot progress. Look at this saying of the Prophet, then
at the so-called "Islamic" countries, and decide for yourself what has occurred.

The Problem of Modernity

Islam has to be disentangled from geography-specific cultural residues

because it is these, and not the religion itself, that run counter to modernization and
resist it. Of course, there are elements within modernity itself that confict with
religion. But these are not the essential, indispensable components of modernity.

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They have not been seriously thought out, in which case they would have been easily
rejected; rather, we have, as it were, backed into them by default.
While it may be necessary to set Islam free of its cultural moorings, therefore,
this does not imply an unconditional surrender to modernity in all its aspects.
Following the German sociologist Jürgen Habermas, we may aim at a "selective
reappropriation" of modernity. This would not be necessary, naturally, if modernism
were an unmixed blessing. In particular, we do not have to buy the wholesale
rejection of God that seems to go with the package of modernity.
Before we could capitulate to this viewpoint, the existence of cars and
computers, of rockets and refrigerators, would have to provide incontrovertible proof
that God does not exist. This they do not and cannot. Neither in the scientific
theories nor the practical principles they are based on can such proof be found, for the
simple reason that these do not concern themselves with the existence of God in the
first place. Neither do Einstein's theory of relativity and quantum theory, which are
the basic theories at the forefront of physics, itself the flagship of modern science.
If science does not concern itself with the existence of God, how can we
expect that it will ever discover Him? Science concerns itself with the physical
world, with the material universe. It does not devote attention to man's spiritual
dimension. Consequently, it can have nothing whatever to say about the matter.
Although psychology is supposed to study man's inner world, it has not yet dived
deep enough to fathom his spirituality.
Where does all this leave us? All the elaborate musings and intricate mental
constructs of would-be debunkers who misuse science to denigrate religion are in
vain, and are mostly aimed at some intolerable aspect of this or that religion rather
than God Himself. The most striking fact after four centuries of atheism passing itself
off as science is the nonexistence of a proof of the nonexistence of God. (Even if such
"proof" were to be advanced, it would necessarily be wrong since God exists anyway,
and would be speedily demolished.) Hence, we are free to believe in God and to obey
His commandments; there is nothing in science or modernity that compels us to reject
the existence of God. Science cannot disprove God; it is not even interested in Him.
People have tried to use science where it is not applicable.

The Strength of Islam

The immense strength of Islam, however, derives from the fact that its "source
code" has survived intact. The Koran is the best-preserved book in history, and the
Traditions of the Prophet have substantially survived. Scribes dictated the Koran
even as it issued from the Prophet's mouth. This is an advantage available to no other
religion, since their books were set down in written form long after they were
revealed, and finding original copies is next to impossible. Hence, whereas accessing
the initial forms of other religions cannot even be contemplated, it is a real possibility
in the case of Islam—all that is needed is hard work, which, however, few people
seem resourceful enough to attempt. Add to this the Sufi tradition, where esoteric lore
has been handed down and the Prophet's example faithfully emulated down through
the centuries, and you have a kind of "time tunnel" that extends back to the original
teachings.

Application of the Holy Law

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 The legal status of the Holy Law has already been discussed elsewhere.233 To
summarize, the strictly Islamic injunctions—with a few exceptions—can only serve
as general guidelines, and have to be supplemented by additional jurisprudence. This
may be based either on Islamic principles, or, in cases where Islam has not laid down
any guidelines (neutral cases, where it is all the same to Islam how things turn out) on
additional logical and legal principles. As we shall see below, despite initial
impressions, the legal aspects of the Holy Law are not as important as the formation
of a nonegotistical personality, to which the Law is really addressed.
It is well known that the Koran and the Way of the Prophet form the basis for
the Holy Law (shariah: literally "road to a fresh-water spring") of Islam. The
elaboration of this has resulted in Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh: lit. "understanding").
Finding themselves in possession of powerful moral and ethical rulings, it was natural
for Moslems to build an elaborate legal system on this foundation to govern their
societies. But rulers have frequently found it necessary to supplement this with
"customary" law or law based on custom (urf: lit. "what is known"), in cases not
covered by Islamic principles. Let us first take a brief look at the strictly legal
interpretation of God's Law, although this is not operative outside predominantly
"Islamic" countries.
There are certain rulings in the Koran that seem too harsh in our permissive
age. However, it needs to be borne in mind that the Koran does not dictate these
punishments in order that they be used in an indiscriminate manner. First, since an
ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, they are meant as a deterrent. In
addition, there has to be a grading for every violation. Certainly a boy who steals an
apple cannot receive the same punishment as a person convicted of armed robbery.
To ignore such distinctions would fly in the face of justice, which is one of God's
most important Attributes.
The name given to these punishments is revealing: they are called "limiting
punishments." In other words, they are stated not in order to be meted out
indiscriminately, but in order to define the maximum penalty beyond which jurists
may not venture. Provided everything goes according to principles, a legist can
decide on a lesser punishment than the limiting case, but not a greater one. So these
limits actually place restrictions on the formulators and appliers of the Law. For
instance, theft is not punishable by a death sentence. And the Koran always counsels
pardoning the repentant. For the purpose is not to transform justice into cruelty, but
to win the errant individual back to society as far as possible.
The importance of Prophetic Tradition can never be overemphasized; we
would not know how to interpret the Koran without it. For instance, there is a
controversial verse in the Koran that allows men to "strike" their wives as a last
resort in order to prevent adultery (4:34). 234 After this verse was revealed, and after
the Prophet had given men permission to treat their womenfolk roughly though
without injuring or bruising them, the women came to the Prophet, complained that
their men were overdoing it, and implored that the Prophet save them. Whereupon the
Messenger of God ruled: "Do not beat your wives." Now the sayings of the Prophet
are second in importance only to the verses of the Koran, and while this injunction
would not be sufficient to abrogate that particular verse, it tempers it to such a degree
that only a male Moslem who has totally lost control of himself would violate the

233Chapter on ”Islam and Democracy” in The Meaning of the Four Books.

234 This has already been discussed in ibid., Chapter on “Women in Islam.”

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Prophet's request. (Unfortunately, few people possess enough self-control, within
Islam or without it.)
Regulations concerning women also need to be considered in the context of
the age. In the same age and even afterwards, for example, polygamy, concubinage,
children born out of wedlock, infanticide, slavery and slave trade, and the forced labor
of peasants were extant in various parts of Europe. 235 Such were the times. Some
rulings of Islam about women were so advanced that not until the 20th century were
we able to catch up with them.

The Holy Law as a Civilizing Influence

Although we are accustomed to thinking of Islam as a purely "legalistic"

religion, it is first and foremost a moral religion. The Holy Law—to say nothing of
Jurisprudence—does not possess legal significance outside Islamic countries (and not
even in all Islamic ones). Beyond the House of Islam, it is a guide to Right Conduct
left to the discretion of each practising Moslem. And even within it, its cultural
significance is greater than its legal one. This fact may seem surprising, but it is
corroborated by Western scholarship. For instance, after a profound evaluation of
Sharia (Sacred Law) and fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence), Malise Ruthven concludes:

...the fiqh is less a system of law, with a developed apparatus of procedure and
enforcement, than a process of socialization and acculturation which
progressively transforms human societies in a more or less autonomous
manner. ... In time the process of Islamization takes root, imposing a degree of
cultural homogeneity. Observance of the divine law becomes a social factor
functioning more or less independently of the state. 236

As André Malraux (a leading intellectual who once served as Minister of Culture for
France) pointed out, culture is the sum total of the modes of perception and value
judgments of a people. Hence, viewed historically, the Holy Law has provided a set
of Islamic perceptions and value judgments—more precisely, the sublime ethics of
Mohammed—which people have agreed upon. What this means is spelled out more
clearly by Professor Annemarie Schimmel:

The imitation of the noble actions and thoughts that Muhammad, the
"beautiful model," had taught his community by his personal example was
meant to form each and every Muslim, as it were, into a likeness of the
Messenger. This is so that each, like him, should give witness of God's unity
through his or her whole being and existence. ...
It is this ideal of the imitatio Muhammadi that has provided Muslims from
Morocco to Indonesia with such a uniformity of action: wherever one may be,
one knows how to behave when entering a house, which formulas of greeting
to employ, what to avoid in good company, how to eat, and how to travel. For
centuries Muslim children have been brought up in these ways, and only
recently has this traditional world broken down under the onslaught of modern

235 Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom, Oxford: Blackwell, 1997. Polygamy: p. 207, 259-
60; concubinage etc.: 306; infanticide: 225; forced labor: 258. See the book’s index for slavery and
slave trade as the listing is longer.
236Malise Ruthven, Islam in the World, London: Penguin, 1991 (1984), p. 160.

160
 technological culture. Awareness of the danger that now confronts Islamic
tradition has certainly contributed to the sudden growth of Muslim
fundamentalism that came as such a surprise to the unprepared Western
world. 237

Schimmel observes elsewhere: "The imitatio Muhammadi, as Armand Abel said

correctly, consists of the imitation of the Prophet's actions, not, as in the imitatio
Christi, of participating in the role model's suffering." 238
Of course, the imitation of the Prophet is an entirely voluntary thing. The
adoption of a religion cannot be enforced in Islam, this being ruled out by the Koranic
injunction: "There is no compulsion in religion" (2:256). Both because Islam is itself
a religion, and because when "Religion" is mentioned in Islam it is the latter that is
usually meant, there can be no compulsion within Islam, either. Freedom of religion
is the essence of Islam. (Once religious law becomes codified, it becomes a separate
thing subject to law enforcement, but this still does not allow the enforcement of
religious beliefs and practices. Any such application is incorrect.) Gentleness, in
conduct as well as in persuading others, is the byword of Islam.

The Role of Politics

Islam is a religion, not a political ideology. An explicit political choice is

indicated neither in the Koran nor in the Prophet's Traditions, and this is the way it
had to be, for otherwise Islam's universality would have been compromised. If Islam
had explicitly favored a certain political form, people living under other forms would
have run the risk of not being considered Moslems. But Islam is primarily a matter of
faith and moral action, and we cannot exclude certain people from Islam just because
fate has decreed that they should be living under this or that regime. On Judgment
Day, God will look at the actions of believers and into their hearts, not at the political
rule they lived under.
From a strictly religious point of view, freedom of belief and freedom of
worship are quite sufficient to allow the fulfillment of Islamic duties, and both these
freedoms are available in most democracies in our day. The notion of an "Islamic
state" as a political ideal, whatever its merits, is utopian and has been influenced by
the Shi'ite revolution of 1979. There is nothing in the Koran or in Tradition that
compels us to adopt it. So-called "political Islam" subverts Islam to political ends,
until what is left is a maximum of politics and a minimum of Islam. A political
approach to Islam also reduces it to this single dimension, until neither its proponents
nor its opponents are able to perceive it under anything other than a political light.
This means that we become blinded to practically everything that commends Islam to
us, and are left with the naked assertion—without proof—of its superiority. Not
everyone, however, will find this convincing. Unfortunately, this is a pitfall which
some intelligent people seem unable to avoid.
In our age, many people, mesmerized by the revolutionary movements of the
twentieth century, have become enamored of the political approach as a solution to all
our problems. They believe that politics is the surest and speediest way to achieve a

237 A. Schimmel, And Muhammad Is His Messenger, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina
Press, 1985 (1981), p. 55.
238 A. Schimmel, Deciphering the Signs of God, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press,
1994, p. 90.

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given project. And of course, it would be extremely one-sided to deny any effectivity
at all to politics.
But it would be a serious mistake to attribute all—or even most—significant
social change to politics. Social factors may be less visible and apparently less
influential than political factors, but they are more important in the long run. As
social science professor Peter F. Drucker elaborates:

if this century proves one thing, it is the futility of politics. Even the most
dogmatic believer in historical determinism would have a hard time explaining
the social transformations of this century as caused by the headline-making
political events, or the headline-making political events as caused by the social
transformations. But it is the social transformations, like ocean currents deep
below the hurricane-tormented surface of the sea, that have had the lasting,
indeed the permanent, effect. They, rather than all the violence of the political
surface, have transformed not only the society but also the economy, the
community, and the polity we live in. 239

Furthermore, since politics in the real world is often a naked grab for power, it
militates against the ethical principles which society is most in need of. In general,
politics should not attempt to dictate social change (the "top-down" approach); rather,
peaceful, ethical social change should inform politics. This is the more democratic
and peaceful way, and for this reason it will also yield more enduring results. Politics
should therefore not be confused with morally enlightened social action. Islam
demands social justice, but this is focussed upon the individual believer and his
conscience—and therefore, it is not a strictly political matter.

II

What is Modernity?

In order to get a grip on modernity, we first need to understand what is meant

by the term, and sociologist Peter Berger's analysis is as good a starting point as
any. 240 His emphasis is on the disadvantages rather than the benefits of modernity,
presumably because few people question its undeniable gains. Berger cites the main
positive assumptions of modernity: "the abolition of material want and social
inequality," "history as progress (an idea which must be understood as a
secularization of biblical eschatology), the perfectability of man, scientific reason as
the great liberator from illusion, and man's ability to overcome all or nearly all of his
afflictions by taking rational control of his destiny." 241

239P.F. Drucker, "The Age of Social Transformation," The Atlantic Monthly, November, 1994,
p. 53-80.
240"Towards a Critique of Modernity," in Peter L. Berger, Facing Up to Modernity, Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1977, p. 101-112. For a different, recent approach, see Anthony Giddens, The Consequences
of Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990. In Giddens' analysis, modernity encompasses
industrialism, capitalism, the nation-state, organization, trust, and dynamism. This dynamism covers
reflexivity (the use of knowledge to transform society), and disembedding mechanisms (i.e. abstract
systems, which consist of: 1. symbolic tokens, or media of exchange, such as money, and 2. expert
systems, or systems of scientific, technological, therapeutic and psychotherapeutic expertise).
241Ibid., p. 90.

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 Berger then lists the basic characteristics of modernity as follows: 1)
abstraction, 2) futurity, 3) individuation, 4) liberation, and 5) secularization. I shall
try to summarize what is meant by these terms.
Abstraction seems to be linked with abstract reasoning, which has burst out of
its proper domain and invaded every facet of our lives. Modernity rests on abstract
institutional processes: the capitalist market, the bureaucratized state, the
technologized economy, the megalopolis, and the mass communication media.
Modern man is forced to live in a number of abstract structures (especially those of
technology and bureaucracy). These have replaced the cohesive, homely
communities that used to provide a secure habitat for human beings. The result is
social atomization and David Riesman's "lonely crowd," leading to alienation and
anomie.
Futurity refers to the future-oriented mentality, the obsession with time and
bureaucratic planning, the regimentation of our lives to the mechanical rhythms of a
clock. To quote Berger: "Futurity means endless striving, restlessness, and a
mounting incapacity for repose. It is precisely this aspect of modernization that is
perceived as dehumanizing in many non-Western cultures." 242
Individuation refers to the progressive separation of the individual from
collective entities, which leads to an unprecedented counterpoising of the individual
and society, and causes identity crises and alienation. (Here, too, fragmentation sets
in.)
Liberation is "the Promethean element in modernity," the multiplication of
future possibilities concomitant with technological development, and thus a
broadening of the spectrum of choices. But we cannot choose this broadening of
opportunities itself; it is forced upon us. In Sartre's words, "we are condemned to be
free." Since this freedom is experienced in a total vacuum—or rather, relativity—of
moral values, people do not know what to choose, and the result is chaos. There is
not one truth, there are many truths.
Secularization, finally, is the "disenchantment of the world" (to use Weber's
term). The world we apprehend with our five senses—namely, the physical or
material world—is all there is to existence, and what falls to us is to eat, drink, and
make merry like all good hedonists. Worldly, sensual pleasures are all one can hope
for. Secularization excises the dimension of transcendence from human experience,
leading to an ultimately meaningless cosmos.
The uniqueness of modernity is, however, that it is the result of all these forces
acting together in concert. Any one of them simultaneously influences the others, and
the effect is reflected back and forth, so consideration of any one of them in isolation
is insufficient.
Other analyses of modernity mention differentiation (the division of work,
specialization, the polarization of subcultures or segments within a society), and
rationality (the organization or coordination of life spheres in the light of reason—a
rational order).
Berger notes that previously,

Human beings were at home in reality—even if, perhaps especially if, this
home was often a less than satisfactory place.
Modernity, by contrast, is marked by homelessness. The forces of
modernization have descended like a gigantic steel hammer upon all the old

242Ibid., p. 105.

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 communal institutions—clan, village, tribe, region—distorting or greatly
weakening them, if not destroying them altogether. The capitalist market
economy, the centralized bureaucratic state, the new technology let loose by
industrialism, the consequent rapid population growth and urbanization, and
finally the mass media of communication—these modernizing forces have
caused havoc to all the social and cultural formations in which human beings
used to be at home, creating a radically new context for human life. It is
hardly surprising that this transformation caused severe discontents... 243

One may modify these ideas, adding some here and subtracting others there, but
this—more or less—is the heart of the matter. Looking at these points, we can see
that modernity constitutes a mixed blessing (which is why Postmodernism 244 has
arisen as a movement criticizing modernity); it is clear, further, that those who praise
modernity often do not bear its drawbacks in mind.
Our agenda, then, is to retain the greatest number of benefits of modernity,
while eliminating as many as possible of its harms. Let us try to see how this may be
done. We shall in the main try to follow the order given above. The main ills
engendered by modernity would appear to be: alienation, stress, dehumanization,
confusion, and desacralization. I shall argue that these are all parts of a single whole,
only indirectly related to modernity, although it shows itself from under that façade.
Our problem is the lack of a life-affirmative, as opposed to a life-denying, religion.
There is nothing wrong with cars and radios and computers and skyscrapers and
lathes and air conditioners and space shuttles and all the other amenities of modern
life.
Take the influence of the mass media, for instance. No one questions that they
spew out sex, violence, immoralities and amoralities of every kind. Who, however, is
responsible? Is it the marvelous technology behind television and the modern printing
press? Is the cathode-ray tube responsible? Are the transistors? The printed circuits?
These are all lifeless components with no independent will of their own. It's not
technology that's to blame for such evils, it's the uses people put it to. We must look
to the sponsors and producers of such shows (or publications), and in every case we
will find an edifying moral code conspicuous by its absence. But this also reflects
back on the population at large. If people didn't buy it, those responsible couldn't sell
it, and so wouldn't try to. Since the sponsors and producers step forth from the same
society and aren't imported from outer space, it becomes clear that the lack of a life-
enhancing religion is not merely an individual problem, it is a social problem.

Abstraction

Abstract institutions are a fact of life. Capitalism, private property,

acquisitiveness, commerce, and free markets have always existed in some form, as
has bureaucracy (this last notably in China, in historical terms). The effects of
technology and large conurbations have their drawbacks, but their advantages, too.
The mass media are in the end dependent on those who consume their output, and so a
general change of mind would not leave them unaffected. A contemporary tendency

243Ibid.,
p. 91-2.
244Not to be confused, as Bryan Turner rightly notes, with “postmodernity.” The latter term may be
understood as the “hyper” form of modernity, characterized by globalization and consumerism.

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is to cast man as a passive recipient. This may indeed be the case when man does not
know what to do, but conscious choice can transform him into active agent.
Every age, every human life, has its more or less tolerable aspects. No life is
exactly a drowsy summer afternoon or a Sunday picnic. So the effects of faceless
institutions, though undeniable, should not be exaggerated.
While it is true that these all have an alienating influence, the real cause of
alienation and anomie is the lack of a religion and faith in God. Colin Wilson, in his
famous study of The Outsider (1956), put his finger squarely on the point when he
diagnosed the Outsider's problem as a religious—even a mystical—one. This singular
insight has seldom been matched by anything that has succeeded it, despite the
mountains of literature produced in the social sciences. (In Part III below, I propose
to take a psychological approach to the problem of alienation.)
To reject God is to cut oneself off from one's wellsprings, from one's very
roots. Then, alienation from other people, from nature, from oneself, from the
product even of one's own hands, sets in as well. But if one is firmly established in
the Ground of All Being—how can one remain separate from all other things, when
he is connected through that Essence to everything else?

Progress and Distress

Regarding futurity, people have always planned for the future, though the pace
today is more hectic than ever. This results in stress, with the concomitant fatigue and
distress caused by it. People are driven to ever greater strivings; aspiration plays its
part in this, but there is also valor.
Islam is all for hard work and progress. "A human being has with him only
what he has striven for," 245 declares God (53:39). As the Prophet said: "He who
spends two identical days has suffered a loss," so there is nothing wrong in striving
itself. Having forsaken our spiritual duties, however, we have concentrated all our
efforts on the material world. The result is that, with a doubled effort in the material
sphere, our material progress enters a steep climb, while the graph of our spirituality
goes into decline because of the lack of effort in that sphere. The balanced approach
would be to work for progress in both the material and spiritual spheres, resulting in
harmonious development of the personality. This will also alleviate the stress caused
by excessive preoccupation with this world, or else one will gain the inner strength to
withstand stress; one will fatigue less easily. If we invested only a fraction of the
energy we devote to worldly affairs in our spiritual lives, we would find our
appreciation for life substantially improved. Tranquillity is not only our right, it is
also our duty if we wish to retain—or regain—our mental and physical health.
The Formal Prayer of Islam is a sure-fire method against stress, where one
takes time out at certain intervals of the day 246 to withdraw from the hubbub of
everyday life and be alone with his Lord. Performed properly, the Formal Prayer is a
realization of “the peace that passeth understanding.” One returns from the
experience—and it is an experience, if done in the right way—completely rejuvenated
and refreshed, ready to face the world again. One will still face one's tasks, but this

245Again, I must lament the lack of a gender-neutral third-person indicator in English. As always, "he"
stands for "she or he."
246There are certain fixed hours for these, but a working person can perform them at any hour during
the day. All told, they will take only between half an hour and an hour in a 24-hour period.

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time relaxed, with peace of mind, and without a ball of tension clumped up in one‘s
guts.

A Community that is Global

Regarding individuation (not used here in Carl G. Jung's sense), it is important

to strike a balance, to be of "the Middle People," as the Koran puts it. Belongingness
is an essential human need, but this should not lead to submerging the individual
consciousness in a collective entity (although people do crave that sometimes). One
should be both a tree and part of a forest; neither should obscure the other.
Belongingness is best served by the brotherhood of man, and by the more
closely-knit brotherhood of the Faithful. One expects greater love, respect, and
tolerance from one's brethren, and in order to achieve this, a moral code must be
mutually adopted that renders it feasible. It is important that everyone agree upon and
practise this code; otherwise, every violation will remove a piece from the common
fabric.
Beyond this, people everywhere in free countries already seek and find
membership in formal and informal organizations of their choice. But the
friendliness, compassion and help of any human being who may be at hand is more
important than belonging to a more specialized organization. And this can only be
obtained by the common acceptance of the life-affirmative moral principles of God.

The Liberation of Man

Liberation is a great thing—who can deny the desirability of freedom from

material want, from inequality, from slavery and oppression, from disease and
poverty? At the same time, the liberation of man seems to have somewhat overshot
the mark in some respects, while it still remains insufficient in others. One is
reminded of Lewis Carroll's Alice, standing bewildered in front of a flock of signs
pointing every which way.
Belongingness to a community also implies belongingness to a common
vision of the truth. If there is no common vision of truth, society fractures along the
fault lines of those adhering to different truths. Yet social cohesion demands that
there be some "least common multiple" of agreed-upon truths uniting the whole
society and, ultimately, all humankind.
The behavior of human beings towards each other, that is, a common morality,
would have the highest priority in choosing this mutual area of universally accepted
truth, were it not for the fact that morality is not independent, but itself based on the
metaphysics one accepts. If you believe there is one God toward whom you are
ultimately accountable, your behavior will be different than what it would be if you
believed you were free to act as you please. Since life on earth is a series of trials and
anything but Paradise, people are sorely tested in their magnanimity towards their
fellow-men in real life. Under less than ideal circumstances, only the firm resolve of
a person will keep him from wronging another, and such resolve can only derive from
the authority a Universal Ruler who enjoins morality.
But what is being said here is not Voltaire's famous: "If God did not exist, it
would be necessary to invent him." We are not asking people to believe in an
illusion; that would be a travesty of the truth, and fall flat on its face sooner or later.

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God does, as a matter of fact, exist—He is infinitely more real than we are. In fact,
our own small reality is nothing but a chip off His total reality. It is because we
ourselves are not real enough that we cannot apprehend Him.
As soon as we realize that God exists and that he expects us to behave in a
certain manner, we also notice something we should have recognized earlier—
namely, that all paths are not the same, or equal, in their consequences. The right-
hand path does not lead to the same destination as the left-hand path. The physical
universe may be isotropic—although recently this too has been questioned—but the
moral universe is not. Abstaining from drugs, alcohol, gambling and promiscuity do
not lead to the same consequences as indulging in them, even in this life. Because
human beings have freedom of choice, they can choose anything they want; but the
wise choice is not to choose what is harmful. Hence, self-restraint in certain matters
is often ultimately the happier, if not initially the easier, choice.
Only He who loves us and who created us and the universe together can know
what is good for us; we will fare best if we follow His counsel. Since His message
has often been distorted throughout history, however, He has revealed an
incorruptible message as His final declaration to humanity, and carved it in stone with
the concrete example of His Messenger. Following that example means following "a
mighty morality," as the Koran puts it; it does not mean that we are not free to live our
own lives, it means our lives will be enriched and improved by following that
example.
The solution to a chaos of multiple truths, then, is to realize that it is a sham,
an illusion. There is nothing to be confused about, for Truth is only one; otherwise,
science would not be one but many, which means that there would not be any science
at all. The various truths are all different reflections off the facets of the same jewel;
they are subsets of the same Ultimate Reality. Whatever is not such a subset is a
falsehood, an illusion.
So the liberation of man must include liberation from chaos, from the
confusion caused by a plethora of apparently equivalent but actually divergent
choices. But that is not all. There is also liberation in the religious sense. In
Buddhism and Hinduism, it is liberation from the veil of Maya, from illusion; and
what else is this, in Islamic terms, than the illusion of multiplicity, of separateness,
instead of the Unity of God and its realization? In other words, the liberation
bestowed by modernization is estimable, but not enough; it needs to be consummated
by an existential, religious liberation—not liberation from religion, but the liberation
promised by all the great religious traditions. The wonder is that there exists on earth
a religion that allows us to achieve this at every level of technological development,
without having to return to a more primitive stage of existence.

Life in the Secular City

So, finally, we come to secularization. This is the really important issue, the
source of all presumed conflicts between modernity and religion. Every day the mass
media hammer into our minds: life is trivial, death is the end of all things, the best
thing to do is to indulge in pleasure for its own sake. But because of depression or
deadening resulting from over-indulgence (see also Part III), the hedonist, like a
heroin addict, requires larger and larger doses of pleasure to keep him going;
especially in sex (but also in other areas) the result is first, excess and next,
perversion. One is driven to extremes until something breaks.

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 The first thing we need to recognize is that, among other things, secularization
is a reaction, a backlash, against a worldview that is too otherworldly, that views the
physical world with disdain and even with contempt. Like all reactions, it has tended
to go overboard in the opposite direction. This time, it is the world of the spirit, the
inner world of human beings, that is denied the right even to exist. But man is an
amphibious creature—he lives in a social, external world and a psychological inner
world simultaneously. Overemphasize one, and the other suffers. What is necessary,
then, is to bring back to the center the pendulum that has swung over too far to the
other side this time. We need relinquish neither this world, nor the other one—why
should we be condemned to eat only half our rightful cake? The proper attitude is to
give both worlds their due. We need neither renounce worldly goods and the benefits
of technology, nor a happy inner life in this world and felicity in the next. This is
definitely a "win-win" proposition, and it shows just how much God has actually
loved us human beings, His servants. We may not be His children—no family
kinship is implied, because that would lead us astray into thinking wrong things—but
He does love us very much more than a mother loves her baby. For all the love, all
the blessings, we receive throughout our entire lives come indirectly from God. As
for any misfortunes that befall us, they are either a result of our errors, or a trial of
endurance. The thing to do, then, is to neglect neither the physical world nor the
spiritual world.

Church and State

To give secularization its proper due, we should consider both of its

dimensions: its cultural dimension, and its political dimension.
The cultural dimension has already been discussed. To recap, there is nothing
wrong with this-worldly activities, with the benefits of modern technology, as long as
we do not neglect our other world either. (People who do this are ultimately forced to
return, but they fall prey to soothsayers and fortune-tellers, or embrace this or that
wacky cult.)
The political dimension involves the separation of church and state. There are
two aspects to this. First, it prevents religious influence from spreading beyond its
domain to usurp worldly, political power. And second, it grants religious freedom, in
that everyone is free to believe in a faith of his own choice.
But in Islam, these advantages have been built into the very fabric of the
religion. First, there is no church—that is, no social institution embodying a religious
hierarchy—in Islam. Thus, the Prophet: "There is no clergy (and no monkery) in
Islam." The mosque is just a temple, a building of worship, not an institution. Hence,
to speak of a "separation of mosque and state" in the same way as the "separation of
church and state" is to make a statement devoid of meaningful content. 247

247The attempt of certain fundamentalists to build an "Islamic state" along the lines of the initial
community in Medina is, while perhaps admirable, grossly unfeasible in the absence of the Prophet
himself, and in any social unit larger than a few thousand people. In addition, these people tend to
forget that religion is primarily a psychosocial, not a political, affair. When the Prophet of God told
his disciples to spread the Religion of Truth, he did not imply that they should assume political power
in other countries. The Prophet never even contemplated taking over political leadership elsewhere.
There is nothing in the Koran or his Traditions to substantiate such a claim. Otherwise, Islam would
cease to be a religion and become a political ideology, with all the bickering, backbiting and mendacity
that that implies. This would effectively limit Islam to discourse at the level of the Base Self—the
Door of Transcendence would be reduced to a rat maze. Islam may concern itself with politics in the

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 And second, God's commandment: "There can be no compulsion in religion"
(2:256), forbids anyone to coerce others into accepting his religious viewpoint.
A final point about secularization is that human beings are free to make their
own laws instead of obeying God's Law. But whether in the legal or moral sphere,
total relativity sets in, and people oscillate from one law to another, unless they hit
upon a correct law and stick to it—in which case it will, upon investigation, be found
to be based on God's Law anyway (although people may not have realized it). Since
Justice is one of God's Attributes, we can be sure that God's will is being done
wherever justice occurs. Conversely, wherever human moral principles or laws go
against that will, there can only be oppression and cruelty, no matter in how diluted or
disguised a form.

The Myths of Modernism

We should be careful to distinguish between modernity as a social

phenonenon, and modernism as its philosophical advocacy. Although we have been
careful to disentangle the positive and negative traits of modernity, modernism would
take everything about modernity as desirable in itself, and work within that frame. It
makes a virtue even out of modernity's "vices."
The essence of the modernist project is the reinvention of man: "Man makes
himself." All the religions and philosophies of old have been superseded, and the
image of man fostered by them has been swept away. Man should begin
reconstructing himself and build a new morality, based on the use of his reason alone.
Granted, there is something heroic in this. Nietzsche, who with justification has been
called the first modern, has his Zarathustra cry: "Break, my brethren, break these new
tablets, too!" He is against any rules that bind man and limit his freedom. And it is
precisely at this point that the two contemporary fallacies, or perhaps myths, of
modernism rear their heads.
The first myth is that of independence. Nietzsche criticized Christian
morality, yet he criticized it from the standpoint of a higher morality—in this sense,
he was more Christian than Christianity itself. More precisely, he held up for view
certain contradictions of Christian morality from a moral base he had established for
himself.
Yet Nietzsche took this moral base itself from Christianity. His project is self-
defeating, because morality was not invented yesterday. It has been with humanity
from the very start, and has generally fallen within the domain of the great religions.
Perhaps people didn't have computers or telephones then, but that doesn't mean they
were stupid. We have to dispense with this notion of ours that "we are the greatest
and the smartest." It is very difficult to invent a new morality that has not, in one way
or other, been anticipated by the religions of the past—unless we were to invent an
anti-morality and call that "morality," and even then it would not have been
unanticipated. It is even more difficult to avoid falling under the sway of the ethics

original Greek sense of building a virtuous society with virtuous citizens, but this project will come
about through conscientious living of the religion itself, not through political agitation. "You would
reform the world? Begin with yourself, brother!"
This does not mean that Moslems should not concern themselves with politics, or withdraw
from political life. It does mean that politics is not Islam's primary concern. If the Prophet of God had
intended a theocracy to rule society, he would have founded a church. Certainly he had ample
opportunity and authority to do so.

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instilled in oneself by society, which, while one might want to shake it off
consciously, makes its effects felt unconsciously. Nietzsche tried it, and failed.
The second great myth is that the reinvention of man and morality can be
achieved solely by the use of man's rational faculty. Modernism proposes to achieve
this goal using the faculty of human reason alone.
Now reason, of course, is a wonderful thing. It is one of God's greatest gifts to
humankind. But reason is not everything, and it cannot accomplish everything. All
the philosophers have employed reason, but they have found that they reached widely
diverging conclusions. Science is one of the fields where reason alone is found
insufficient—unless it is based on observation and experiment, rationalism by itself
cannot provide a basis for science. If reason cannot suffice to tell us what is true, how
can we trust it, and it alone, to tell us what is good and what is beautiful? Rationality
has been able to tell us precisely nothing about spirituality, the goal of man's
existence, or the meaning of the universe. Nor should it be expected to.
Similarly, in the field of ethics, it would be unfair to expect that reason in
isolation can accomplish much. This is because, like geometry, ethics must be based
on certain axioms and postulates—assumptions, if you like. Now once these
normative principles are given, reason can work on them and, just as in geometry,
derive conclusions that were not immediately obvious from the start. But reason
cannot supply the principles themselves. Only Revelation can do that, in the case of
ethics. Otherwise, man could have discovered Revelation by his reason alone, and
then it would not have been necessary for God to send Revelation to human beings. It
is due to the inadequacy of reason in this respect that Revelation had to be revealed at
all.
The result of these two myths, then, is that the modernist is trying to write his
own Revelation—a dismal prospect if ever there was one. Once certain basic
principles about man, universe, and ethical conduct are given, reason can then be used
to derive the consequences which follow from them—as Islamic jurisprudence, in
fact, set out to do. But discovering those principles on the basis of reason alone is like
trying to weigh a truck on a household balance—it just will not support that weight.
The modernist attempt of reinvention, then, will never get anywhere because it
is condemned to moving in circles. And the only way out of this vicious circle is to
accept help from above—to accept Revelation already available to us, and take that as
our starting point. (Of course, not every Revelation will do—only its final, most up-
to-date, internally self-consistent version will work.) We have to escape from two-
dimensional wild-goose chases into the third, the vertical, dimension.
So is anything wrong with secular, flatland existence? No. It is just that it
does not comprise totality, it is not all that exists. Further, it doesn't satisfy our
deepest cravings, and the answer to our problems must be sought elsewhere within
existence. The dislocations, the upheavals, the alienations, the cultural segregations
and reaggregations attributed to modernity can only be resolved at a higher level than
the secular. The problems of secularity have to do with the multidimensional nature
of the human entity, and cannot be solved from within secularity.
Nor does this mean that we should forsake our physical existence and return to
a world view based entirely on the spirit. Both swings of the pendulum represent an
extreme. The trick is to strike a balance between the material and spiritual worlds, to
abstain from overindulging in either. It is this balanced approach that will heal the
wounds opened by exclusive one-sidedness, no matter which side happens to be
preferred.

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The Self as Project

This flatland circularity is even more evident in "the project of the self" which
modernism opens up. Thus far, therapy—viewed not just as a cure or adjustment, but
in a more favorable light as self-understanding, self-determination, and engagement—
has been the most that can be offered in the way of constructing or creating one's self.
As Giddens points out, therapy is "the exemplary form of the reflexive project of the
self". 248
In the annals of psychological and sociological research, it is always the
ordinary human self as we know it—individualistic, egotistical, self-centered,
minimal—that is dealt with. One may encounter concepts such as enlarging or
"expanding" one's self, but this is always in a purely quantitative sense—there is no
inkling of radical qualitative change.
This understanding of the self does not allow the possibility of higher levels of
selfhood, and thus of self-transcendence or self-transformation. (Two-dimensional
expansion is not the same thing as transformation.) We aspire to jump upwards, only
to fall back to the same, everyday self, however enlarged—because we can conceive
of nothing beyond it. And even if we did, we would have no idea how to get there.
Here, too, it is only a certain kind of Revelation that can supply us with a vision of
higher stages of self-development, that can break the vicious circle and lead us
upwards out of it. Only this Revelation guides you to your Inner Self, your True Self
or Essential Self, who is closer to God than to anything else. It is this kind of
Revelation that will help us realize our project of authenticity, of self-realization. (A
word of caution: feelings of grandeur can only reinforce the egotistical self. It is in
the opposite way, via humility, that God and, indirectly, the inner self are
approached.)
The means to the progress of the self should, in our age, depend not on
external, but on internal control. No bureaucratic organization claiming divine
sanction should exercise power over us; rather, we ourselves should exercise self-
control, self-restraint, according to a model set out for us, and to the extent that we
wish to participate in this algorithm. (Of course, the more faithfully this model is
emulated, the more we would benefit from it.) No matter how benign, the very
existence of a social/religious institution goes against the grain of emancipated,
modern and postmodern humanity. One must come to terms with the transcendent on
individual terms. Any relationship with the divine should be on a strictly personal
level without need of a middleman. This means that every human being has a direct
line to God, and orders his or her affairs with Him alone. The relationship of a person
with God is an unmediated, private affair. Guidance from people of knowledge and
wisdom is not excluded, but such people do not exercise control over oneself; their
counsel is freely offered and freely—if desired—accepted.
In the final analysis, our liberation depends only on us—on our thoughts
(especially beliefs), intentions, and actions. This is why we must work out our own
salvation, diligently.
In this enterprise, we must always bear in mind that moral and spiritual
progress go hand in hand. In other words: no moral progress, no spiritual progress.
Supreme spirituality is inextricably linked with sublime conduct. It is due to our habit
of considering these fields unrelated—or at best, weakly coupled—that few self-

248Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991, p. 202.

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realization projects ever get off the ground: the rocket either fizzles or explodes on the
launch pad, or disintegrates in mid-flight before the destination can be reached.

III

Alienation

Alienation is conceived of as arising primarily from abstraction and

secularization. Sociologically, alienation has been the subject of much study, and has
been characterized as: 1) powerlessness (against a maze of machines, regulations, and
complex rules), 2) meaninglessness, 3) normlessness (Durkheim's "anomie"—also
linked with moral relativism), 4) isolation, and 5) self-estrangement.
I shall suggest below that while abstraction and secularization may play a role
in bringing about these results, they do not constitute the primary cause. Although
few people appear to have considered it, items 2-5 all arise in the absence of a strong
faith. And even item 1 may be influenced by this, because the inner strength that
derives from faith in God can also translate into real power. (One need only
remember Emile Durkheim's observation: "The believer who has communicated with
his God... is a man who is stronger.") It is easy and understandable, but misleading,
to blame alienation on technology and modernity. Since the lack of faith has
accompanied the onslaught of modernization, the effects of the former are often
confused for those of the latter.

The Crisis of Meaninglessness

Secularization leads to loss of meaning (not surprisingly, as God is the

meaning of the universe), which leads to alienation, which leads to anomie, which
leads to... But we shall see.
Flying in the teeth of all evidence to the contrary, we are told that we are
accidental conglomerations of atoms, that the universe has no meaning, that evolution
itself is totally purposeless and so devoid of sense. In the words of psychiatrist Victor
Frankl, who once wrote a book called Man's Search for Meaning, this has created an
"existential vacuum": "What I mean thereby is the experience of a total lack, or loss,
of an ultimate meaning to one's existence that would make life worth while. The
consequent void, the state of inner emptiness, is at present one of the major challenges
to psychiatry." 249 According to Frankl, man cannot live without meaning, and must
search for it. Furthermore, when a psychological illness becomes widespread, it
ceases to be individual and becomes a social malaise.
Now it is a fact that our present crisis has already been experienced by highly
sensitive individuals in the past. Since it is an existential crisis, it can be timeless and
ubiquitous; but the fact is that it has forced itself upon our attention with irresistible
force since the dawn of the modern age. We could not have expected such a far-
reaching influence to have gone unnoticed by writers and artists, the sensors and
nerve endings of society. Albert Camus was not long in concluding that a
meaningless, purposeless existence was absurd. His short novel, The Stranger,

249V.E.Frankl, Psychotherapy and Existentialism, Souvenir Press, 1970; quoted in John L. Randall,
Parapsychology and the Nature of Life,London: Abacus, 1977 (1975), p. 59.

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depicted the end result of this phenomenon: a logical but insensate man who had been
anesthetized toward life.
With the loss of meaning comes a loss of spirit, of feeling, a loss of joy, a
deadening of the senses, a general lowering of vitality, listlessness, apathy. The color
goes out of life; it is as if the world had been reduced to a two-dimensional, black-and
white movie. This may sound like an exaggeration, but it actually happens. Arthur
Koestler has related the experience of the communist (and, naturally, atheist) writer,
Anna Saeghers, who once had a clandestine meeting in an Austrian forest with a
comrade in the springtime. She greatly enjoyed her walk through the woods, but from
the moment she began to discuss "business" with her friend, it "seemed to her that the
birds had become silent, and the air had lost its fragrance. ... this experience greatly
disturbed her. 'Why,' she asked pathetically, 'why is it that the leaves die wherever we
go?'" 250
The same thing happened to Charles Darwin. Before the great turning point of
his life, he had been a devout man, and on at least one occasion, watching the
grandeur of the Brazilian forest, he had a religious, "deep inward experience" which
left him convinced that there must be more to man than "the mere breath of his body."
But then came the Galapagos Islands, The Origin of Species (1859), and the
theory of evolution by random mutation and natural selection. The problem with the
Darwinian theory was that it was a purely mechanistic theory: it removed not only the
necessity of a Creator (though without explaining the question of who designed the
machine in the first place), but also the concept of any purpose in nature. (One should
call this probabilistic mechanism: nature was reduced to a giant pinball machine, a
random number generator.) As for human beings, they were reduced to soulless
robots. "I have loved my fellow men," wrote D. H. Lawrence in his Last Poems, "and
lived to learn that they are neither fellow nor men but machine robots." And once this
basic ingredient, this jaundiced world view, is in place, the robot state or insect
society, depending on what you want to call it, cannot be far behind—as evidenced in
the robot states of the twentieth century. 251
Generations fed on evolutionary theory were overcome by a sense of
emptiness and purposelessness in life—not least, Darwin himself. He felt as if he
were a man who had become color-blind. During the same critical period, when he
was about thirty, Darwin suffered what he himself called a "curious and lamentable
loss of the higher aesthetic tastes." Like Sartre's Roquentin, an attempt to re-read
Shakespeare bored him "to the point of physical nausea." In his autobiography he
complained that he had formerly been fond of poetry:

But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry. My mind
seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of a
large collection of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that
part of the brain on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive. The
loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the
intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the
emotional part of our nature. 252

250 A. Koestler, Bricks to Babel, London: Picador, 1980, p. 103.

251 For further details, see sociologist Lewis Yablonsky’s Robopaths (Baltimore: Penguin, 1972).
252 Quoted in ibid., p. 417-8.

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 Note that Darwin's deadening coincided with the replacement of his faith in God
with his theory of random mechanics. Now this is exactly what the psychologist
William James describes as anhedonia (first coined by Professor Ribot): joylessness,
dreariness and dejection, a lack of taste and zest, a complete absence—like Camus's
"Stranger"—of emotional reaction. 253 (It may be called "depression" nowadays.)

Descent Into Despair

This condition of melancholy follows upon "counter-conversion" (the

transition from faith to unbelief, ungodification, desacralization). Theodore Jouffroy,
the French philosopher, has left us a graphic and frightening account of his own
disillusionment:

I shall never forget that night of December, in which the veil that concealed
from me my own incredulity was torn. I hear again my steps in that narrow
naked chamber where long after the hour of sleep had come I had the habit of
walking up and down. I see again that moon, half-veiled by clouds, which
now and again illuminated the frigid window-panes. The hours of the night
flowed on and I did not note their passage. Anxiously I followed my thoughts,
as from layer to layer they descended towards the foundation of my
consciousness, and, scattering one by one all the illusions which until then had
screened its windings from my view, made them every moment more clearly
visible.
Vainly I clung to these last beliefs as a shipwrecked sailor clings to the
fragments of his vessel; vainly, frightened at the unknown void in which I was
about to float, I turned with them towards my childhood, my family, my
country, all that was dear and sacred to me: the inflexible current of my
thought was too strong—parents, family, memory, beliefs, it forced me to let
go of everything. The investigation went on more obstinate and more severe
as it drew near its term, and did not stop until the end was reached. I knew
then that in the depth of my mind nothing was left that stood erect.
This moment was a frightful one; and when towards morning I threw myself
exhausted on my bed, I seemed to feel my earlier life, so smiling and so full,
go out like a fire, and before me another life opened, sombre and unpeopled,
where in future I must live alone, alone with my fatal thought which had
exiled me thither, and which I was tempted to curse. The days which followed
this discovery were the saddest in my life. 254

With sadness, we can also surmise the presence of a depression. I have quoted
Jouffroy's account at length in order to rescue it from obscurity, because this is really
the crux of the matter: what most people experience semiconsciously or
unconsciously, he has lived through and recorded—as it were—in broad daylight.
Falling out of faith corresponds, for ordinary human beings—the children of Adam—

253 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), New York: Collier Books, 1972, p.
127.
254 Ibid., p. 150-51.

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to the Fall, to Exile from the Kingdom. 255 Further, what was earlier the problem of
the occasional individual has, in our age, become a widespread social phenomenon.
Indeed, there is reason for implicating the lack of religious faith not only in the
case of alienation and anomie (reflected in the individual as personal disorientation,
anxiety, and social isolation), but of other kinds of mental illness as well. As the
renowned psychologist Carl G. Jung wrote in Modern Man in Search of a Soul
(1933):

During the past thirty years, people from all the civilized countries of the earth
have consulted me... Among all my patients in the second half of life—that is
to say, over thirty-five—there has not been one whose problem in the last
resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that
every one of them fell ill because he had lost that which the living religions of
every age have given to their followers, and none of them has been really
healed who did not regain his religious outlook. 256

In his short treatise called My Confession, the great Russian writer Leo Tostoy has
left us an intimate testament of his own religious crisis. As James notes, it is a classic
case of anhedonia, a loss of appetite for all life's values. At about the age of fifty,
Tolstoy began to have moments of perplexity. Life had deflated like a flat tire;
previously enchanting, it had now become sober, even dead. Meaning had gone out
of existence.

I felt that something had broken within me on which my life had always
rested, that I had nothing left to hold on to, and that morally my life had
stopped. An invincible force impelled me to get rid of my existence, in one
way or another. ...the force that drew me away from life ... was an aspiration
of my whole being to get out of life.
Behold me then, a man happy and in good health, hiding the rope in order not
to hang myself to the rafters of the room where every night I went to sleep
alone; behold me no longer going shooting, lest I should yield to the too easy
temptation of putting an end to myself with my gun. 257

How, at this point, can one fail to remember Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf (1927),
Harry Haller? He, too, is a suicide case, who contemplates having an "accident"
while shaving: "Let suicide be as stupid, cowardly, shabby as you please, call it an
infamous and ignominious escape, still, any escape, even the most ignominious, from
this treadmill of suffering was the only thing to wish for." 258 It is not some incredible
tragedy or misfortune that Haller is trying to escape from, however, but the
contentment of a lukewarm existence, the mediocrity of everyday life, which the less
fortunate might sacrifice an arm and a leg to enjoy. At a deeper level, it is the
dichotomy between the wolf-nature (the Base Self of Sufism) and man-nature (spirit
striving toward self-transcendence) within him. But, as Hesse demonstrates in his
extraordinary novel, the Steppenwolf finds a way out of his quandary. And so does
Tolstoy.

255 In Islam, the sin of Adam and Eve is not visited upon their progeny, and they themselves were later
pardoned by God.
256 Quoted in Randall, p. 61.
257 Quoted in James, p. 133.
258 Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf, tr. Basil Creighton, New York: Bantam, 1969, p. 79.

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 At first glance, their solutions appear to be diametrically opposite. Hesse
advocates "the way to true manhood, the way to the immortals" and their "smilng
wisdom." Tolstoy, on the other hand, finds salvation in faith in God. Little did both
realize that the two paths are one and the same. If they had studied Islamic Sufism,
both Hesse and Tolstoy would have realized that the apparently impossible had come
true, that there existed—and exists today—a system of thought and action, belief and
practice, in which the two great, divergent strands of Western thought, humanism and
religion, are synthesized. But the starting point, the "opening hand," belongs to
Tolstoy.

The Way Out

Tolstoy found the way out of the labyrinth. Though intensely personal, his
words also herald the possibility of escape from despair for all human beings:

Yet, whilst my intellect was working, something else in me was working too,
and kept me from the deed... During the whole course of this year, when I
almost unceasingly kept asking myself how to end the business, whether by
the rope or by the bullet, ... my heart kept languishing with another pining
emotion. I can call this by no other name than the thirst for God. 259

Tolstoy reached the conclusion that if one believes in the infinite as common people
do, life grows possible again:

Since mankind has existed, wherever life has been, there also has been the
faith that gave the possibility of living. Faith is the sense of life, that sense by
virtue of which man does not destroy himself, but continues to live on. It is
the force whereby we live. If Man did not believe that he must live for
something, he would not live at all. The idea of an infinite God, of the
divinity of the soul, of the union of men's actions with God—these are ideas
elaborated in the infinite secret depths of human thought. They are ideas
without which there would be no life, without which I myself would not exist.
I began to see that I had no right to rely on my individual reasoning and
neglect these answers given by faith, for they are the only answers to the
question. 260

Closer to our times, psychologist Abraham Maslow, who studied self-actualized

people, concluded that they were as far removed from run-of-the-mill humanity in the
direction of positive mental health as the mentally ill were in the negative. They were
all characterized by experiencing moments of deep and intense happiness, which
Maslow called “peak experiences.” 261 Colin Wilson, having fingered anomie and
apathy as the entrance to mental illness, was quick to realize that Maslow’s peak
experiences provided the antidote. 262 Maslow found that religious experiences were a

259 Quoted in James, p. 135.

260 Quoted In James, p. 156.
261 See A. Maslow, Religions, Values and Peak Experiences (1964) and Toward a Psychology of Being
(1970).
262 See C. Wilson, New Pathways in Psychology: Maslow and the Post-Freudian Revolution, New
York: Taplinger, 1973.

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major element among such ecstatic moments in life. When he shifted his attention to
“non-peakers,” he discovered that: “Any person whose character structure (or
Weltanschauung, or way of life) forces him to try to be extremely rational or
‘materialistic’ or mechanistic tends to become a non-peaker...” 263 This only
corroborates the conclusion we have already reached, that mental health correlates
with faith and religion, whereas lack of faith is a precondition of mental illness.

We have dwelt on the subject of alienation to such an extent in order to reach

the following conclusion: It is not modernity itself, but the desacralization that has
accompanied it, which has resulted in the predicament of modern man. Although the
two appear to be of a piece, the desacralization component can still be disentangled,
and replaced by faith in a rational, life-positive, noncontradictory religion. The
metaphysical presuppositions leading to desacralization need to be recognized for
what they are. Once this is done, science and religion need no longer remain inimical
to each other, but can cooperate for the improvement of the human lot.
The opposition of science and religion has come about only under particular
circumstances, and cannot be generalized to other cases. Once the two make peace
again, the major drawbacks of modernity will fade away, for neither in our science
nor in our technology is there anything to contradict the existence of God. It is not
technology that turns man into a robot; it is that, looking at the works of his own
hands, man fancies he is like them. But this is erroneous. Before we blame either
technology or modernity for our troubles, we would do well to reach the correct
diagnosis first.
And yet, although alienation has everything to do with lack of religion and
little to do with modernity as such, there is an important respect in which machine
civilization impinges on individual psychology. The crux of our problem is that
modern man's exclusive preoccupation with machines finds a reflection in his heart.
According to an ancient Chinese story:

One who uses machines does everything like a machine; he who handles his
affairs like a machine has a heart like a machine. He who has a heart like a
machine in his breast loses his innocence. He who loses his pure innocence is
unstable in the movements of his spirit. Instability of spirit is not compatible
with Right Meaning. 264

In Sufi esoteric psychology, anything on which attention is excessively concentrated

swamps the Heart Center with its images. Machines, as objects of thought and visual
cognition, leave a dominant impression on the Heart. Images that have flooded the
Heart can be erased or cleansed by the Invocation (Remembrance) of God. Indeed,
"Only by the Invocation of God do Hearts find solace" (13:28). If we can cast
devotion to machines out of the Heart and devote it to its rightful owner, namely God,
we will regain our purity, our innocence; and then our machines will not mutilate us
inwardly any more. We will be able to enjoy the fruits of our machine-based
civilization without suffering its drawbacks.
"Is it really too much," Arthur Koestler once lamented, "to ask and hope for a
religion whose content is perennial but not archaic, which provides ethical guidance,

263 Quoted from Maslow (1964) in David Hay, Exploring Inner Space, Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1982, p. 198.
264 Quoted via Werner Heisenberg in Daryush Shayegan, Mutilated Consciousness (Paris: Albin
Michel, 1989).

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teaches the lost art of contemplation, and restores contact with the supernatural
without requiring reason to abdicate?" No, it is not too much. But is there such a
religion? Yes, there is.

What Kind of Humanism?

We have seen that alienation arises from lack of faith. But we still have not
seen why Tolstoy comes first, and how that path ends with Hesse. That task will now
be addressed.
According to Islam, man is the noblest of God’s creations. He is the
viceregent of God on earth. All creatures have been placed at his disposal. In all this,
Islam is in substantial agreement with humanism as we have known it in the West
since the Renaissance.
Who, however, is the human that receives all this praise? We have to
distinguish between indiscriminate humanism and its discriminating form. Are we to
equate a Hitler with a Leonardo Da Vinci? A Stalin with an Einstein? Jack the Ripper
with Mozart?
While, therefore, all human beings may possess great intrinsic worth, this must
not blind us to their differences, nor to their achievements. We cannot measure all
human beings on the same scale. And as soon as we differentiate between human
beings, the question arises of which one(s) we are to choose as a role model, an ideal
type. Of course, a physicist might want to choose Einstein as his role model, while a
musician might want to pick Mozart. But these are special, vocation-specific cases.
Who would we like to choose as an example for all human beings to emulate?
Obviously, this must be a human being in the most general sense, who has realized his
or her humanity to the fullest.
Few of us have ever seen a fully self-actualized human being, but if we did, we
would think, as Alan Watts once remarked of the poet Gary Snyder, that he justifies
the existence of the universe. And there are indeed such people. Hence, it is the
guide we choose who will determine where we go. If we choose carelessly, we will
be dragged down into ultimate humiliation and despair. If we choose the average, we
will remain at the level where we (most likely) were anyway. If we choose a superior
human, then we have the chance of elevating ourselves, of doing something
constructive with our lives.
We conclude, then, that man is a bridge between the subhuman and
superhuman; 265 the spectrum of humanity spans the whole range from thieves,
murderers, sadists, etc., to geniuses, scientists, artists, philosophers, saints, mystics,
and prophets. To measure all these on the same scale would be the height of injustice.
Similarly, man is a bridge extended between animal and God. Though he can
become neither, man can share characteristics with one or the other. Indeed, modern
science never tires of rediscovering the obvious, that there is much that relates man to
the animal kingdom, which was recognized long ago in such clichés as “man is a
social animal,” “man is a political animal,” “man is the animal that laughs,” and so
on.
But in the same breath, these statements are also telling us that in important
ways, man is different from animals. Even though we resemble them in important
respects, such as eating, drinking and reproduction, we know that we are also

265 Though not quite in Nietzsche’s sense.

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different. Even in these predominantly animal properties, a human being can exhibit
distinctively human characteristics—such as holding a spoon and carrying it to one’s
mouth. Further, no animal has the level of human intelligence, consciousness and
thought needed to build sciences or philosophies, cities or civilizations.
So man stands—we ourselves stand—at a fork in the road. He can either
reduce himself to the level of the beasts, can become even worse than those innocents
in his iniquity, or he can become more fully human, can actualize the True Human
Being within him. Both paths are possible for man.
Man loses his humanity and falls to undesirable depths to the extent that he
becomes selfish, a slave to his ego, does not care for others and is not kind or
considerate toward them. Contrariwise, he is exalted to the extent that he serves all
creatures, beginning with his fellow human beings.
We have now reached a critical point in our argument, a point that seems to
have been generally missed. The exaltation of man is to draw near to God, our
Creator as well as the Creator of all things. The Perfect Human, the Superior Human,
is the one who approaches God. This is accomplished by obeying the Prophet’s
injunction: “Adorn yourselves with the morals of God.”
From this we infer that God has a morality, and that we human beings should
moralize ourselves with it, should “clothe” ourselves in that morality. But what can
this morality be?

The Ethics of God

God’s morality is characterized by boundless Love for all his creatures. If not
for that love, which sustains all beings at every moment of their existence, the
universe would collapse instantly. All the love we ourselves receive throughout our
lives, from parents, friends and loved ones, comes indirectly from God. As the
Prophet remarked, “God’s love for you is much greater than a mother’s love for her
child.”
God is also Compassionate. In spite of our many errors, wrongs and
misdeeds, He forgives our mistakes, ignores our evils and patiently waits for us to
correct ourselves. But equally, God is also Just. He cannot be expected to tolerate
injustice perpetrated against His creatures, “even unto the least of them;” and we will
receive our just desserts in the next world even if not in this one (and note with care
that many ills are not left to the Last Judgment, either). The reason for this is that we
are all God’s creatures, and we all share the same status—are equal—in this respect.
Furthermore, we are human, and accountable. Being human entails a great burden of
responsibility. If God has created us as human beings, if He has bestowed superiority
on us far in excess of other beings, we are saddled with the duty of fulfilling its
criteria.
This means that lovingkindness, compassion, mercy, and justice are some of
God’s attributes. Whoever, therefore, is overflowing with love, compassion, and
mercy, who is never unjust—to that extent has approached God in respect of these
characteristics. But there is an almost insurmountable obstacle that prevents us from
realizing this goal: the egoism, the innate selfishness, of human beings.

The Goldiamond Highway

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 This is why it is no child’s play to draw near to God, but rather the most
difficult thing in the world. And it is for this reason that God has given instructions
and set some prohibitions, so that we may be able to come closer to Him. He has
drawn a path for us in order to ease our way. And because throughout history this
path has been covered with sand again and again, He has finally built a goldiamond
highway that will never need refurbishing. The name of this path is religion, and its
final version—the highway—is Islam. Though we do not know it, this highway
provides us with the greatest ease, and maximizes the returns for even our minimal
efforts. And though sandstorms may cover it temporarily, a gust of wind will sweep it
clear and shiny again, indestructible as ever.
But of course, faith is the prime prerequisite in order to follow this road. If we
do not believe in God, His Prophet, and His religion, naturally we are not going to lift
a finger. But this is equivalent to surrendering ourselves to the embrace of our ego,
our Base Self. Then we will not only lose our chances of exaltation, but will be
reduced to the lowest of the low. This is why the main thing that separates human
from animal is religion. And this is why the Prophet remarked: “Who has no reason
has no religion, either.”
So this is how we start with faith and end with True Human—start with
Tolstoy, and end with Hesse. If God had been outside man, Nietzsche would have
been right; man would have diminished to the extent that he poured himself out to
such a God. But God is not only without, He is also within: “The Kingdom of
Heaven is within you.” It is amazing that this truth has been taken and twisted around
until it turned into its diametrical opposite, which ultimately led to a wholesale
rejection of God. This is why God had to pave that highway in the end—not for
Himself, for He has no need, but for us.

IV

Principles of Faith and Action

Islam is composed of certain principles that are not time-, geography- or

culture-specific. These can be listed as principles of faith and principles of action. I
shall try to summarize these principles on the basis of the Word (Formula) of Unity,
the Five Pillars of Islam, and the Six Pillars of Faith.

1. The first principle is the Existence and Unity of God. There is only One
Absolute, however you conceive Him to be (and people have conceived of Him in
many ways), who created the universe and everything there is. There exists an
Absolute, and there is only One Absolute (otherwise, it would not be Absolute, there
would be two entities relative to each other.) He, and He alone, is worthy of worship
and adoration.
2. God wants us, not simply to act morally, but to perfect our morality. The
Prophet said: "I was sent only to perfect morality."
3. Such is the cosmic condition that God is near, yet we are far from Him, and
such is the condition of man that to err is human. Hence, God has sent messages to
guide us to Truth and Wisdom. For this purpose, He has used select human beings
from among us called prophets. These were all righteous and wise men, who tried to
guide their people to truth.

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 4. Mohammed is the last in a long line of prophets, of whom Adam was the
first.
5. Some of these messages have been short, others have been book-length.
Among these are the Torah revealed to Moses (which forms part of the Old
Testament) and the Gospel of Jesus (partially embodied in the writings of the New
Testament).
6. The Koran, as the last Revelation, is God's Final Testament to humanity.
Anyone who believes that God is One, that there is no deity (worthy of worship) other
than Him, and that Mohammed was His Messenger (i.e., a faithful conveyor of Divine
Truth), believes in the veracity of the Koran. And as the Koran itself says: "Do you
believe in part of the Book, and disbelieve in part?" (2:85) (The essential principles
of the Koran, if not all, are being summarized here.)
7. God created two realms of existence and experience: the physical, and the
spiritual—both equally valid. The physical we know of through our five senses. The
spiritual actually comprises several layers of existence or "worlds," which are
ontologically "pre"-physical. These realms are not accessible to the physical senses.
They are unobservable ("unseen") and can be accessed only via the human spirit,
which, like matter or energy, is indestructible. Man inhabits both existential worlds.
8. Part of God's creation are the angels, sentient, nonphysical beings, who
carry out God's orders. The word "angel" in English derives from the Greek aggelos,
"messenger," emphasizing the communicative aspect of their existence. The Arabic
word for angel, on the other hand, is derived from the root MLK and, in addition to
"messenger," is associated with force, power, and faculty. In other words, it is much
better to dispense with anthropomorphic imagery and think of angels as conscious
"forces"—it is in this aspect of consciousness that they differ from physical force or
energy. The "power" of death (personified by Azrael), or of revelation (by Gabriel),
is much more in keeping with our contemporary mentality. (Nevertheless, they can
assume any form, including human form, if necessary.) They are normally superior to
man, yet man has the potential to surpass them—or to sink lower than the devil
(considering angel and devil as positive and negative ideal "types" for ethical
behavior).
9. God not only enjoins morality on us—He holds us responsible, and
ultimately accountable, for our actions.
10. Whatever fate befalls us, whether good or ill, is from God. Nevertheless,
God wishes us well, so that anything bad that happens to us is either a trial, or
recompense for earlier misdeeds.
11. The spirit, being indestructible, survives bodily death. Hence, one is
resurrected, or raised from the dead, in the afterlife. Then, one will be brought to
account for one's actions during the present life on the Day of Reckoning.
12. Depending on the Last Judgment, we will be assigned to a place of
rewards and delights (Heaven) or punishment (Hell).

The dozen principles listed above pertain to faith. As for the principles of
action, these are:

1. To exhibit perfect ethics and morality in practice. Our guides in this are the
Koran and the Prophet (both his advice, and his concrete example).
2. To do the Formal Prayer. This will keep us out of trouble, and draw us
closer to God.

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 3. To fast for one month at the prescribed time. This will cleanse the body,
purify the soul, and help us to an appreciation of what the needy live through; it will
strengthen our compassion towards the unfortunate.
4. To give the alms-tax every year from part of our assets. This will enhance
social cohesion and redistribute wealth; even if poverty is not eradicated, its ill effects
will be substantially reduced.
5. For those with the wherewithal to do so, to visit Mecca once in a lifetime
and fulfill the prescribed worship.

It can be seen from the principles listed above that these have nothing to do
with living in a primitive or advanced society. They are universally applicable
principles of belief and practice. Either you believe in them and do them, or you
don't. The only thing about modernity incompatible with these would be immoralities
arising from desacralization, which one would need to guard against. Otherwise,
there is nothing inherently anti-modern or irrational about the ethics advised by Islam;
on the contrary, it is perennial and universally applicable.
Islam has often been portrayed as a legal religion. But in a society that is not
composed predominantly of Moslems—which, consequently, has not crystallized the
Koran's moral principles into a legal code—only the laws of that particular society
count. The Sacred Law is first and foremost a moral code of behavior to be followed
at the discretion of every individual conscience; it is only secondarily a legal code.
And this is the case regardless—the moral principles can exist without the code of
law, but the legal code cannot exist without the moral principles which it is based on.
In addition to the laws of the society he lives in, the Moslem is bound by the moral
regulations of God's Law. It is through practising these that he will attain liberation,
or salvation.

Morality

Regarding morality, there is so much to be said that this is not the place to tell
the whole story. Yet one aspect is so outstanding that I cannot pass by without a few
remarks.
In Islam, there is a basic distinction between what is Permitted or Allowed,
and Prohibitions or Forbidden things. The Permitted are definitely the Do's, and the
Forbidden are definitely the Don'ts, the no-no's. Between these two, different
gradations are recognized, but these are the things to really watch out for. And among
the no-no's are two fatally important things: illicit gain, and illicit sex.
Illicit gain refers to acquisitions that are not rightfully and honestly earned, or
given freely. Illicit sex refers to sexual encounters with anyone other than one's
lawfully wedded spouse of the opposite sex. These two points are so critical that they
lie at the bottom of all human decadence and decline. Even a person who does not
believe in Islam would be doing both himself and his fellow men a great service just
by steering clear of them.

Rationality

There is nothing inherently unreasonable about the dozen belief principles

listed above. The existence of an Ultimate Reality is not illogical, nor, given that this

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is the case, that it should be One. There is no reason why God should not
communicate with human beings and send them messages via specially appointed
messengers.
That God should have created several noninteracting or weakly-interacting
parallel worlds is not implausible in the face of the fact that the Everett-Wheeler-
Graham (EWG) interpretation of quantum mechanics postulates the existence of an
infinite number of noninteracting universes. And it is conceivable—nor is it logically
inconsistent—that God should have populated those worlds with nonhuman conscious
entities to handle the affairs therein. (Besides, angels are well established in the
Judaeo-Christian tradition.)
It is also proper that justice be done sooner or later. Only a wronged person
can understand the need for justice. Since life on earth is too short, not all "court
cases" get resolved here, so the remainder is left for the afterlife. God's aspect (Name
and Attribute) of Justice would be left incomplete if it were not fulfilled somewhere,
somehow.
Actually, the Principle of Unification in Islam requires that justice be served.
The immediate meaning of this principle is the recognition that God is One. On
another level, it means that Totality is a single whole, and within that Totality every
action has a reaction.
The-universe-and-I are a single system, just like the-universe-and-you. Think
of the rest of existence as a single black box. This black box may have an immensely
complicated interior, but on its outside, you can be sure of one thing: whatever you do
to it, it will do to you, whatever you throw in will get thrown back at you. What you
put in is what you get out. If you smile at it, this black box will, like a mirror, smile
back at you, if you frown at it, it will frown back. Maybe not immediately. But the
"response of the universe" is assured. Your actions and their results are inextricably
"entangled."

What is Entanglement?

In quantum physics, entanglement is a property of nonlocality, which means

that a measurement can have an instantaneous effect elsewhere. Back in 1936,
Einstein, who considered quantum mechanics incomplete, conceived of a thought
experiment together with Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen in order to counter Bohr's
arguments. According to this "EPR paradox," if quantum theory was an adequate
description of nature, a faster-than-light link had to connect two previously united but
presently separated events. 266 Einstein could not swallow the existence of such
"nonlocal" links; he thought that the universe was separable or compartmentalizable
into local, noninteracting parts. Any interaction between these parts would then have
to be "spooky action at a distance."
But the time came when Einstein was proved wrong. In 1982, Alain Aspect
and his friends in Paris performed what had previously been merely a thought
experiment, and confirmed nonlocality over a distance of a few meters. 15 years
later, Nicholas Gisin in Geneva vindicated the quantum correlations at a distance of
10 kilometers. 267

266 My apologies to specialists in this field for expressing this in simplified and perhaps slightly
inaccurate language.
267 New Scientist, 28 June 1997.

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 Consider, for instance, the case of entangled electrons. In quantum physics,
two electrons created by a process remain (and act as though they were) connected—
even one—after they have been separated. For instance, a measurement of spin on
one will instantly determine the spin on the other as well, whereas both had remained
indeterminate—not just unknown, but actually indefinite—before the measurement.
In the same way, an act and its moral consequences—its recompense—may be
viewed as "entangled" in a similar sense. Do something, and you immediately radiate
a vector into the future determining certain things. "As you sow, so shall you reap."
The Koran itself speaks of what a person's "own hands have sent forward" (18:57) in
time. Newton's law: "Every action entails an equal and opposite reaction," holds
sway in the moral realm, as well. Reward or punishment, whether in this world or the
next, is determined at the very moment of committing an act, and by ourselves.
Temporally, the tip of the vector may be far removed; it may even lie in the afterlife,
beyond the zone of the physical. A lifetime, death, the Last Judgment, and finally
assignment to heaven or hell may all intervene before the final outcome. But it is all
determined in the instant of the act. We "determine" our heaven or hell, previously
indefinite, by our moral "measurements," as it were—or, if we do not determine it, we
secure our place therein. To paraphrase Sir Edwin Arnold: "You suffer from
yourselves. None else compels..." And as God Himself states: "We did not wrong
them, they wronged themselves" (11:101).
In general, one may say that the destiny of a human being is a function of his
moral behavior: d = f (m). This destiny is of the same "sign" as one's morality; if the
latter is "positive," so is the former, and vice versa; i.e., d > 0 iff m > 0 and d < 0 iff m
< 0.

The Religion of Modernity

It transpires, then, that Islam is not merely compatible with modernity. It is

required if the various social and psychological ills blamed on or caused by
modernity are to be cured. It is a balm that will, if correctly applied by everyone, lead
us to enjoy the benefits of modernity without suffering its worst consequences. It is
the metareligion that combines and transcends all religions.
It is true that up to this time, we have perceived Islam as a predominantly
Middle-Eastern religion. This, however, is an error that prevents us from enjoying its
true benefits. Appearances can be deceptive. With a slightly different interpretation,
it becomes clear that the whole world can be served by Islam.
We have too often been preoccupied with the formal (exoteric) aspects of
Islam, to the neglect of its inward (esoteric) aspect, and how the two—inner and
outer—fit together. We have also been misled by perceiving it solely in a political
light. If we can concentrate on what Islam really says, we not only stand to gain
ourselves, but also will be enabled to rescue our civilization from oblivion. Our
institutions will be subtly transformed, because man himself will be healed; they will
cease to be "meat grinders" and take on a more benevolent aspect. The prescription
handed to man by God is fully realizable, in this age as in all ages. Material progress
has provided the greatest opportunities for Man in recorded history. What remains is

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to supplement or complement it with spiritual progress.268 And this, I submit, is a
prospect well worth the wager.

268 The ideal balance has been indicated by the Prophet: “Don’t sacrifice your present world for the
afterworld, nor your afterworld for this world.”

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 SUFISM AND MODERNITY

"Neophilia—the fetishization of the new—is the buried engine that drives

consumer society... the warp speed of postmodern life [results from]
a world jammed on fast forward."

—Mark Dery, author of Escape Velocity

"... they destroyed themselves with the guillotine of reason."

—Daniel J. Boorstin

"There is a mode of vital experience", begins Marshall Berman's magnificent

study on modernity, "—experience of space and time, of the self and others, of life's
possibilities and perils—that is shared by men and women all over the world today. I
will call this body of experience 'modernity.' To be modern is to find ourselves in an
environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of
ourselves and the world—and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything
we have, everything we know, everything we are. ... modernity can be said to to unite
all mankind. But it is a paradoxical unity, a unity of disunity: it pours us all into a
maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of
ambiguity and anguish." 269
Berman begins his treatment of modernity with Goethe's Faust, the tale of the
scientist-scholar who sells his soul to the devil, which he calls "the first, and still the
best, tragedy of development." Generations have been spellbound by Goethe's
treatment of this medieval story. What is the secret of Faust?
The secret is that Faust is the archetypal culture hero of modernity. The two
volumes—which took Goethe a lifetime to complete—span the entire cultural history
of the West, from the cloistered society of the Middle Ages to the great technological
projects of the 19th century and even of our day. Goethe's Faust stands apart from its
predecessors in that it emphasizes development, and in Goethe's view the
development of the individual and of society must go hand in hand. Goethe is the man
of the unitary vision: the self's development and economic development must
complement one another. This is the true meaning of modernity.
We might well ask, then, how successful we have been in this project. We
have indeed transformed the world. But have we also been able to reconstruct our
selves, to become better human beings? To the extent that the answer is "No," the
other half of modernity awaits us for its completion. As we shall see, however, this
half has mostly been abandoned. As for the Sufic concept of self-transformation and
the evolution of the self through seven stages of selfhood, these have, for the most
part, not even been heard of.

269Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity, London: Verso,
1990 (1982), p. 15.

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 Berman considers three stages in Faust's evolution: the dreamer, the lover, and
the developer. 270 At the beginning of the story, Faust is already an accomplished
man. He has conquered realms of the mind. He is a respected scientist, philosopher,
doctor, professor, lawyer, theologian. Yet these achievements give him no peace.
Two souls live within his breast. He wants to complement his triumphs of
inwardness. He longs for adventure, for change, for action, for social achievement.
His intellectual progress has culminated in a dynamism that contradicts the stagnant
society he lives in. It is at this point that Mephistopheles approaches him, and offers
his services. In Faust's person, it is Western society that will be making a pact with
the devil.
Note that Faust's situation is very similar to the predicament of Job. The devil
is there to tempt him. Restless spirit that he is, Faust accepts the pact, under one
condition: if ever he says to a moment: "stay, thou art so sweet," the devil will have
triumphed. Yet at the very end of Faust II, when Faust dies, he has still not uttered
these words. This is why the devil is finally foiled, and Faust is borne away by angels
in the afterlife. All Mephisto's efforts have been in vain, and he is, in Goethe's words,
"part of the power that would / Do nothing but evil, yet creates the good."
Note that this picture of the devil is quite different from that of earlier
Christianity, where Satan was a figure of immense power, able to kill "God's Son" and
comprising not only himself, but also the angel Azrael; he commanded the powers of
evil and death combined. Meph is a tamer fellow altogether, much closer to the
Islamic view of the devil, who is distinct from the angel of death and able to succeed
only by deceitful suggestion ("whisperings").
Faust experiences a love affair with Gretchen, yet his love results in her
destruction. Gretchen is the most delicate flower of the cloistered society, and as that
society destroys her, it destroys its own highest values: generosity, devotion, humility.
But it is Faust, the thinker of the deep, who first destroys her virginity, naiveté, and
innocence. Faust's involvement with Gretchen—and by implication with other
people—for the sake of his self-development is egotistic. He must either take
responsibility for the development of people he comes in contact with, or be
responsible for their doom.
This also draws attention to how most self-development and "care of the self"
projects of our day are steeped in narcissism. Unless there is a moral and ethical law
which mediates rules of conduct between self and others, schemes for self-
transformation will become ever more selfish and never get off the ground. Self-
realization cannot be considered apart from salutary moral conduct. Otherwise, it can
easily and imperceptibly degenerate into egotism, narcissism, and anthropocentrism,
as instanced in the expression "the Me Decade".

Faustian Man

Berman's treatment of the second part of Faust skips over themes—such as

alchemy—that have little to do with modernity, but which occupy a significant place
in Western cultural history. After many an escapade, Faust finally harnesses his
restless drive toward self-expansion to the financial, social and technological forces
that power the world. The romantic quest for self-development becomes a struggle
for economic development. As Berman points out, Goethe himself was excited by the

270 Ibid., p. 37-86.

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great tasks of engineering that marked his age, such as the prospect of building the
Panama Canal. Faust now becomes the master builder, the developer of
megaprojects, the captain of industry, the great capitalist mogul. He revels over his
new power over people, over labor. When his development project is thwarted by an
elderly, virtuous couple, Faust callously sends in Meph and his "liquidation squad" to
get rid of them. As Berman notes, this is Faust's first self-consciously evil act, and he
pays for it with his eyesight; he becomes blind, but then he has been blind all along,
as the remover of his sight tells him. He has been conquered by the narcissistic will to
power. No wonder we first hear of Nietzsche's Superman (übermensch) early in
Faust, Part I (published in 1808), which is how the Earth Spirit addresses Faust.
Later on, Berman gives an example of the archetypal Faustian man in the
person of Robert Moses, whose public works dislocated great masses of people and
kneaded the face of New York, that unrecognized world capital, for more than half a
century (1910s-1960s). Two things emerge from Faust's end: one, he fears the past,
which is why he wants the elderly couple out of his way; he fears it so badly that he
wants to abolish even its name. But two, once he has destroyed the past, there is
nothing more left for him to do. He too becomes the past, and must perish.
So who is Faustian Man? He is the restless soul who incessantly wants to
change the world, but fails to change himself. He destroys in order to create, but does
not always succeed in improving things. In building the outer world he devastates his
inner world, although he had hoped to manage both together. He loves the public but
hates the people, is fond of an abstract concept of humanity but detests human beings
in person, not so much because he has anything against them as because they get in
the way of his projects. He is driven by boundless, frenzied ambition and a
megalomaniac will to power. He is the midwife of modernity. Such are the
contradictions, and the tragedy, of Faust. The lesson that Goethe cast his character in
an alliance with the devil should not be lost on us.

The Cataclysm of Modernity

One characteristic of modernity that has often been noted is its massive
dynamism, its sheer pace of change. We constantly find modernity described in terms
of great natural disasters: upheaval, hurtling, uprooting, cataclysmic, drastic, vast,
explosive, shattering, whirlwind, volcanic eruptions, turbulence, perpetual clash,
apalling, devastation, abyss, earthquakes... are some of the epithets used to describe it.
Baudelaire, the first poet of modernity, called progress a perpetual form of suicide. In
the words of Mexican poet and critic Octavio Paz, modernity is "cut off from the past
and continually hurtling toward the future at such a dizzy pace that it cannot take root,
that it merely survives from one day to the next: it is unable to return to its beginnings
and thus recover its powers of renewal." 271 A second relevant point is the universal
nature of modernity: its scope of change is global.
From all this, we understand that modernity is experienced as an upheaval, a
hurricane. Unless one is anchored to a solid spot in stormy seas, one is bound to get
tossed by the waves and drown in the end.
That solid spot is God. God is the "eye of the hurricane," "the still point of the
turning world" which one can resort to for solitude, strength and reassurance in times
of rapid change. The fact that about ninety percent of the citizens of the United

271 Quoted in Ibid., p. 35.

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States, the most modernized country in the world, and about forty percent of its
scientists, believe in God and religion at any given time, demonstrates that modernity
and the sacred do not in fact negate but rather, complement each other. The example
of the USA also makes nonsense of the idea of evolutionism, namely, that countries
are arranged along an axis that moves from tradition and religion to modernity and
irreligion. America is the best example of the fact that modernity does not mean
atheism. According to Alain Touraine: "A society which completely abolishes both
past and belief cannot be described as modern. A modern society is a society which
transforms the old into the new without destroying it", 272 in line with the concept of
"change through continuity" which anthropologists such as Margaret Mead have
always been careful to emphasize. "Both Western Europe and the United States
provide convincing examples of how change can be associated with continuity..." 273
As a result, the coexistence of modern and antimodern is the surest sign of modernity.
Berman makes the same point when he observes that "for the sake of the modern we
must preserve the old and resist the new." 274 And in fact, only by a deep faith in God
can an ultramodern society survive the cataclysm of modernity, or any society survive
for a protracted period of time.

A Brief History of Modernity

In order to understand exactly what we are talking about when we mention

modernity, we need to look at its history, at how it all came about. In the following
summary, I shall rely upon the work of a French social scientist, on Alain Touraine's
Critique of Modernity. 275 Needless to say, such a vast subject cannot be summarized
in a few paragraphs, and I shall confine myself to what is essential for our present
purposes.
All the revealed religions entail a subjectivation of the divine. Judaism started
this, and it continued with Christianity. Jesus came to reaffirm the subject, the inner
life of man, and the primacy of the person. His was an emphasis of man's spiritual
aspect, and did not extend to politics. ("Give unto Caesar...") St. Augustine, in Book
X (the most important part) of his Confessions, distinguished between the body of
man and his soul, the more important and inner part. This became the basis for
Christian dualism, where it was recognized that man inhabited both worlds.
Christianity was also heir to the ancient Greek philosophers, especially Aristotle, from
whom it inherited the idea of a rationally ordered cosmos. God was rational, and
man, created in His image, was also rational. Thomas Aquinas represented the
culmination of the scholastics.
Nevertheless, by the Middle Ages, two other trends had also asserted
themselves. The medieval Christian lived in what sociologists call a magical world,

272 Touraine, p. 321 (see footnote 7).

273 Touraine, p. 316.
274 Berman, p. 318.
275 Alain Touraine, Critique of Modernity, tr. David Macey, Oxford: Blackwell, 1995 (1992). I have
opted for a historical approach; Touraine orders his material differently.
Incidentally, during the research conducted for the present essay, I was pleasantly surprised to
discover that Touraine makes use of the concept of "the democratic personality" (p. 349-51), even to
the extent of making the same reference to Adorno et al.'s Authoritarian Personality. This is a concept
I myself made use of several years ago ("Islam and Democracy," in The Meaning of the Four Books).
This should be a case of the independent recognition of the same truth by different authors, which
indicates once again that the road of reason is one. Or could it be the spirit of the times?

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an enchanted world of sacraments. God was "a supreme being ... who could be
influenced by magic." 276 Further, although St. Paul had revoked Jewish law, the
medieval Church had become the prime arbiter of social and political order. It could
empower or excommunicate even kings. An elaborate divine law had been developed
that was, in some respects, more stifling than Jewish law. The result was a cloistered
and static society.
It was the perpetuation of its inherent injustices that finally led people to
confront the traditional order. The Renaissance, with its humanism and its return to
Greek civilization, introduced a worldly whiff of fresh air into this seclusion. The
Renaissance was like the awakening from a long dream, and Western man, now
refreshed, took in the physical world with receptive eyes. Attention began to be
focussed on man, and the age saw the birth of humanism.
It was the Reformation which marked the true onset of modernity, although in
those days nobody would have thought of it in such terms. Luther defied authority,
and this is the deed for which he is best known; but he also did two other things that
were to have far-reaching consequences. He abolished the sacraments (though not
entirely), and so put an end to the magical, enchanted world of the Christians. Yet he
also introduced the concept of the arbitrary will of God. While this viewpoint had the
advantage of freeing God from accountability and justifying inscrutable events ("The
ways of the Lord are mysterious"), it also severed the connection which might have
been preserved between the rational cosmic order of earlier Christianity and
Enlightenment rationalism. For example, a man with faith and good works could
earlier have been assured of good recompense in proportion to his deeds. Luther
removed that support. One's lifelong efforts could go up in smoke. Faith alone could
save, and even that was not guaranteed. Thus Luther, in disposing of the rational
cosmic order of earlier Christianity, threw away the baby with the bathwater. That
rational order had earlier conflicted with the magical world. Now, both were gone.
Luther's case is interesting because he represented the starting point of two
conflicting tendencies. On the one hand, he was brave enough to oppose authority
and clever enough to survive. Yet it was also Luther, and not the Enlightenment, that
initiated the split between faith and reason.
It is also interesting to speculate what might have happened if Erasmus,
Luther's contemporary, had won the day with his Christian-based humanism.
Erasmus and his followers stressed piety, argued for a minimal theology, and upheld
both reason and faith. But their influence was marginal in this battle of the titans.
The Reformation brought on the backlash of the Counter-Reformation and
many years of religious wars. Amidst the turmoil, a group of intellectuals and
humanists struggled to rescue reason and faith. Among them were Pascal and
Descartes.
Descartes is known as the father of rationalism, but he was actually the heir of
Christian dualism. In his Discourse on Method (1637), Part IV, Descartes states on
two consecutive pages his argument for the existence of an immortal rational soul, the
phenomenal world, and God. His approach was the opposite of idealism. Descartes
did not say cogitatio sum ("It thinks within me"), he said cogito ("I think"). This set
him apart from those who thought that God was within man, and it also set him apart
from those who subscribed to Mind or Being. For the first time, Cartesian dualism
replaced the divine subject with the human subject; both are true without involving
idealism, but this was not recognized at the time. The subject was defined by reason.

276 Touraine, p.12.

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Man was midway between God and nature, but distinct from both. It is surprising to
discover that Descartes, often invoked in the battle against unreason, had a more
balanced grasp on things. "For both Pascal and Descartes, thought and personal
experience are unitary and not contradictory, and together they are a source of
religious inspiration. We therefore have to question the identification of rationalism
with an antireligious mode of thought which all too easily moves from being a social
critique of the Church and religious practices to being a materialism". 277
Shortly after Descartes, we encounter John Locke. In his Essay Concerning
Human Understanding (1690), Locke is concerned to formulate a naturalist view of
man, and to reject the central role that Cartesianism gives to God. At that time, nature
was understood in a wider sense than physical things alone; it also included the
intellectual order and the moral order, and Locke is attempting to maintain the unity
of man and universe.
Locke states that the identity felt by man shows the unity of body and soul.
(This is an attempt to escape dualism, but note how the soul is subtly being
assimilated into the body. When the definition of nature is reduced to the material
world, the soul will evaporate.) Human understanding is a passive reflection based on
the sensations. In the social field, Locke inaugurates the age of individualism, private
property, natural human rights, and labor as the property of the worker. Although he
does not defend rebellion, he justifies rebellion against oppression. (Grotius had
earlier introduced the concept of natural law.)

The Enlightenment

We are now moving into the thick of modernity. The Enlightenment is its
turning point, and the French Revolution which followed is the trigger that explodes
the forces of modernity, scattering them everywhere.
In evaluating the events of this age, we have to bear in mind that this was war
to the death. The Enlightenment was not so much a philosophy (although, of course,
it was that too) as it was a modernist political ideology. Its primary aim was the
destruction of the absolute monarchy, and reason was used as a weapon in this
struggle. For the Counter-Reformation brought on its own reaction. The divine right
of kings was based on the alliance of throne and altar, and that in turn was based on
the authority of the Church. The Counter-Reformation had strengthened absolutism,
and the alliance between throne and altar had subordinated civil society.
The lines of battle were drawn. In order to reach the fruit, the Enlightenment
struck at the roots. It attacked not merely the Church, but the very faith that the
Church rested on. This is the point of no return, after which reason and faith, body
and soul, can no longer be reconciled. The struggle against religion led to the
rejection of transcendence. "Enlightenment rationalism ... reduced modernity to
rationalization and secularization." 278
Because it was born (or triggered) in revolution, modernity itself was
experienced as a revolution. In its efforts to abolish the social order, the modernist
ideology indulged with glee in the destruction of the sacred; it hacked and bit and tore
until there was no longer any social order left, but neither was any meaningful
concept of the sacred. Earlier, in the person of Luther, faith had turned its back on

277 Ibid., p. 46.

278 Ibid., p. 117.

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reason; now reason turned its back on faith. The divorce between the two was
complete.
Yet even as they attacked religion, many Enlightenment thinkers were careful
to exclude God Himself from this attack. Philosophers like Rousseau and Voltaire
were Deists or Theists. Only a very few accepted atheism. In most cases it was not
God, but the religion they knew, that they were opposed to.
Down through the centuries (starting with the 16th), the humanists struggled to
bring about a reconciliation between faith and reason, but in vain. The positivists in
the 19th century attempted the same thing, but all they could accomplish was a
secularized "religion of humanity" which never really caught on. In their full
acceptance of secularism, today's humanists demonstrate that they have lost hope in
the realization of this project.
For the notion of original sin, the thought of the Enlightenment substituted the
notion of man's natural goodness; in place of guilt, modern consciousness substituted
hope. This optimism was justified, but it was also naive in that it turned a blind eye
on horrors worthy of the Marquis de Sade.
But if God was not to define morality and order, what was? In the minds of
the Enlightenment philosophers, the answer was embodied in a single word: society.
Society replaced God as the definitive principle behind moral activity. What was
good and what, evil was to be defined in terms of social utility: we had to be good
workers, good citizens, good mothers, good sons.
In this society, science replaced religion as the source of inspiration. "The idea
of modernity makes science, rather than God, central to society and at best relegates
religious beliefs to the inner realm of private life... In all cases, rationalization was
seen as the sole principle behind the organization of personal and collective life, and it
was associated with the theme of secularization". 279 Modernization "is the
achievement of reason itself, and it is therefore primarily the achievement of science,
technology and education. ... Reason takes nothing for granted; it sweeps away social
and political beliefs and forms of organization which are not based upon scientific
proofs." 280
Its intention to extend the life lived according to reason to all men was the
distinguishing characteristic of the Enlightenment. "The only thing that matters is that
the political order can be founded without recourse to religious principles."281 The
purpose is to create a new society and a new man. "The philosophy of the
Enlightenment eradicated Christian dualism and the world of the soul in the name of
rationalization and secularization." 282
Yet precisely because the modernist ideology was a weapon for militant
revolutionaries, it was strong on criticism but weak on positive construction. And the
philosophies of Rousseau and Kant, its highest representatives, were attempts to
define a secular order that again aimed at the unity of man and universe in the light of
universal reason. After them, this vision of unity would be irrevocably shattered.
Reason would come to signify, not the quest for understanding, but the power to
transform and control—just what the capitalism and technology of the 19th century
needed. The first modernist critique of modernity was also provided by Rousseau,
who thus fathered the Romantic movement.

279 Ibid., p. 9-10.

280 Ibid., p. 11.
281 Ibid., p. 16.
282 Ibid., p. 227.

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 One significant effect of the Enlightenment was the deification of rationality
in the minds of many, i.e., the elevation of reason to the status of an absolute. (During
the French Revolution, some people even enthroned "the Goddess Reason" in the
Notre Dame.) This, of course, created the problem that, while reason and doubt were
to be taken as arbiters in the acceptance of everything else, they themselves had to be
held exempt from the same treatment, which means that reason became dogma. For
what grounds do we have for accepting reason as ultimate arbiter, if not blind faith in
reason itself? Make the system self-referential, i.e. apply the method of doubt to
reason itself, and the whole edifice collapses. As Anthony Giddens observes,
"Modernity is not only unsettling because of the circularity of reason, but because the
nature of that circularity is ultimately puzzling. How can we justify a commitment to
reason in the name of reason?" 283 This shows that we have to take at least one thing
as an unquestioned assumption, a metaphysical presupposition, a fundamental
foundation; and if this is not God, then it will have to be reason, chance, progress,
positivism, Marxism, or some other substitute. As Einstein put it:

During the last century, and part of the one before, it was widely held that
there was an unreconcilable conflict between knowledge and belief. The
opinion prevailed among advanced minds that it was time that belief should be
replaced increasingly by knowledge; belief that did not itself rest on
knowledge was superstition, and as such had to be opposed. ... The knowledge
of truth as such is wonderful, but it is so little capable of acting as a guide that
it cannot prove even the justification and the value of the aspiration toward
that very knowledge of truth. Here we face, therefore, the limits of the purely
rational conception of our existence. ... mere thinking cannot give us a sense
of the ultimate fundamental ends. [These ends] come into being not through
demonstration but through revelation, through the medium of powerful
personalities. 284

Modernity and Post-Modernity

The 19th century saw the triumph of capitalism, industrialism, and technology,
but in this very triumph were to be found the seeds of its own dissolution. Marx,
Nietzsche and Freud provided the strongest critiques of modernity, and in this sense
they were the fathers of post-modernism. They were both modern in their
rationalism, and antimodern in their respective criticisms. Together they destroyed
the concept of modernity. Freud, in particular, was responsible for the most
systematic attack ever to be launched on the ideology of modernity. He made short
shrift of the concept of a rational Ego, and showed that it floated like an island on a
sea of irrationality. Contrary to the rationalist hopes of the Enlightenment,
consciousness and rationality were mere components of the human psyche, and
beyond technology and the economy, few human activities truly rested on rational
decision.
Where capitalism and democracy were not available for modernization, the
State stepped in to realize it by authoritarian or totalitarian means. In freeing society

283 Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990, p. 49.
284 Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions, New York: Crown Publishers, 1954, p.41-49.

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from religious power, political philosophies of modernity legitimized absolute power.
Just as the ecological crisis led to a loss of faith in progress and in the idea that
science and technology were unmixed blessings, totalitarianism pointed to a dark side
of modernity and showed that something essential—including concern for human life
and well-being—was lacking, or had irretrievably been lost. Totalitarianism was
itself a by-product of modernity. Without efficient technologies of surveillance,
control, and extermination, despotism, violent though it was, could not have been
transformed into totalitarianism.
The 20th century saw the crisis of modernity. This crisis was due to a
transition from one society to another, from limited modernity to full modernity.
Industrial society was marked by production and rational activity; today's society is
characterized by markets and marketing. Modernity no longer means the reign of
reason, but the gratification of needs and the satiation of desires. The society we live
in is called by many names: modern, late modern, high modern, post-modern,
hypermodern, hyper-industrialized, post-industrial, programmed, the information
society, the knowledge society, etc. This consumer society is primarily sensate and
hedonistic. It no longer consumes industrial goods, but cultural goods. Ours is an age
of cultural pluralism, but, for that reason, also of moral relativism.
So what is the identifying characteristic of this culture? It rejects symbols,
because these refer to a supra-human world. It rejects depth, or the distance between
signs and meaning. Signs have no significance beyond themselves; that is, they are
not signs at all. "The world seems to have become as flat as a stage set or a page of
writing." 285 For the pre-moderns, the world was a divine text to be read
hermeneutically; post-modernism spells the end of hermeneutics.
No matter by what name we call it, then, it is clear that the essence of
modernity has not changed today. Even where it finds a subject, our society
substitutes an object for it. It desires to "eliminate all reference to the subject, which
is regarded as a disguised form of the divine substance. Modernity is, it would seem,
by definition materialist." 286 Nor is this anything new, since modernity has been
materialist from the 16th century onwards. Quite contrary to the intentions of the
initiators of modernity, however, we live in a broken and fragmented world, which is
undergoing an increasingly complete decomposition of social life. The subject is first
amputated, and we then try to discover an illusory unity in what is left behind—the
objective world—whereas only the complementarity of object and subject, of yin and
yang, would have made sense in terms of unity. A maimed person, too, constitutes a
unity of sorts, but this does not obscure the fact that some essential organ is missing.
What are the consequences of this? The first result is the loss of meaning.
20th century intellectuals have been haunted by the feeling that everything is
meaningless. Modernity "is caught up in an increasingly complete eradication of
meaning", 287 and when modernity, too, loses its meaning, it abolishes itself—there is
no sense in modernity, or anything else. This, as Nietzsche was quick to realize, is
nihilism. And for this reason, the intellectuals of the modern age "have constantly
sought to replace religion with another version of the absolute: beauty, reason,
history, the Id, or energy." 288 Or even art: art in its modern form was born in 18th-
century Germany as a substitute for the sacred, and such people as Nietzsche, Adorno

285 Touraine, p. 270.

286 Ibid., p. 259.
287 Ibid., p. 187.
288 Ibid., p. 316.

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and Roland Barthes have tried to discover an absolute without transcendence in art.
And this, of course, explains why such quests are invariably doomed to failure: we
cannot discover the absolute in a world of finitude, within a world of relativity and
transience, such as the material world is. We are looking for the right thing in the
wrong place.
The final consequence of a modernity that takes shape in the way described
above is antihumanism. "Modernism is an antihumanism, because ... the idea of man
is bound up with the idea of the soul, which necessarily implies the idea of God." 289
Even Descartes, the father of rationalism, did not discard the concept of God when he
defined the human subject, the "I". And this is why even the human subject has to be
rejected by those who wish to keep God—or rather themselves—confined to outer
darkness. In sociology but also elsewhere, the Self is defined as a set of roles we play
in the social system—as boring (if true) a conception of the Self as can be found.
But if the material world is half of existence, and if we can access the other
half without falling into contradiction with the material half, there is no reason why
we should suffer any of the worst consequences of modernity.

The Subject

According to Touraine's analysis, our conception of modernity has hitherto left

out something vitally important. This he calls "the Subject," which he defines as
"both body and soul." "Our modernity's tragedy is that it developed in the course of a
struggle against half of modernity itself. The subject had to be driven out in the name
of science. The entire heritage of Christianity, which lived on in Descartes and
through him into the following century, had to be rejected. ... What we go on calling
modernity therefore meant the destruction of an essential part of modernity. Although
modernity can only exist because of the growing interaction between subject and
reason, between consciousness and science, we became convinced that we had to
abandon the idea of a subject in order to permit the triumph of reason, that we had to
stifle our feelings and imagination in order to se[t] reason free..." 290
Although most people would associate modernity with rationality and
secularization, with technology and industrialization, with commodification, etc.,
these are all partial aspects. According to Touraine, "The best definition of modernity
is ... the demand for freedom and the defence of freedom against everything that
transforms individuals into instruments, objects or absolute strangers." 291 This is one
reason why he introduces the concepts of subject and subjectivation. In his view,
modernity can only be understood as a combination of rationalization and
subjectivation. "The idea of a subject is a dissident idea which has always upheld the
right to rebel against an unjust power. ... The modern spirit was defined by its struggle
against religion. ... modernity's subject is none other than the secularized descendant
of religious expression of the subject." 292
Touraine's discussion of subjectivation is important, and in support of it I
would like to call in two witnesses. The first is Thomas Carlyle. "Protestantism,"
says Carlyle, "is the grand root from which our whole subsequent European History

289 Ibid., p. 30.

290 Ibid., p. 206-7.
291 Ibid., p. 232.
292 Ibid., p. 213.

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branches out." Luther is the father of many things: capitalism (which, as Weber
pointed out, marked a transition from otherworldly asceticism to worldly asceticism),
nationalism, individualism... But his most significant achievement was in the
defiance of arbitrary authority. Here is Carlyle's testimony:

The Diet of Worms, Luther's appearance there on the 17th of April 1521, may
be considered as the greatest scene in Modern European History; the point,
indeed, from which the whole subsequent history of civilization takes its rise.
... His speech, of two hours, distinguished itself by its respectful, wise, and
honest tone; submissive to whatsoever could lawfully claim submission, not
submissive to anything more than that. ... "Confute me," he concluded, "by
proofs of Scripture, or else by plain just arguments: I cannot recant otherwise.
For it is neither safe nor prudent to do aught against conscience. Here stand I;
I can do no other: God assist me!"—It is, as we say, the greatest moment in the
Modern History of Men. English Puritanism, England and its Parliaments,
Americas, and vast work these two centuries; French Revolution, Europe and
its work everywhere at present: the germ of it all lay there: had Luther in that
moment done other, it had all been otherwise! 293

Let us now review the witness of Lancelot Law Whyte:

The social principle which made possible the unique achievement of Europe
was this: in the European tradition the individual is conceived to be in direct
relation to the universals in terms of which individual and social life are
organized; every man stands in direct relation to God, to the world of ideas,
and to the law and justice of the community. In the centralized ancient
societies the formative tendencies of the individual were stifled under the rigid
system which dominated him; the new communities which laid the foundations
of Europe threw aside that tyrannical bondage. ... the European... is free to
think, to pray, to interpret justice, for himself. Europe is the name of this
priceless inheritance.
The European tradition is unique in ... the assumption that all men are
potentially equal, each and all having direct access to God, being endowed
with the faculty of thought, and entitled to the appropriate forms of justice. ...
The most important consequence of this element ... was ... in its effect on the
subjective confidence of the individual in his own abilities... the individual
dared more than he ever could before.
... The individual sometimes dared to stand alone against tradition and
tyranny because of this sense of power withim him. This is the permanent gift
of Europe to mankind, which no other civilization or continent has equaled. 294

We are now in a better position to appreciate Touraine's identification of the Subject

with dissidence, with social movements, and with rebellion. When we go down to the
bottom of things, we find resistance to unjust authority at their root. Modernity owes
its very existence to the human subject who had the courage to speak out against
tradition; yet it has ended up denying precisely the thing that brought it about. This is
what Marshall Berman calls "modernization's betrayal of its own human promise",

293Carlyle, "The Hero as Priest," in On Heroes and Hero-Worship, London: Chapman and Hall, 1841.
294L.L. Whyte, The Next Development in Man, New York: Mentor, 1961 (1948), p. 91-3.

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which is that "modern men and women must become the subjects as well as the
objects of modernization". 295
But hold on. Religious institutions are not—or need not be—identical with
religion. If we can find a guiltless, churchless, rational religion that does not oppose
faith to knowledge, there is no reason why we should not re-establish connection with
the Transcendent. Our opposition to those who claimed to speak in the name of God
need not result in turning our backs on God Himself—unless, of course, we have
passed the point of no return in deconstructing the concept of God. The trouble is,
certain institutions have become so identified with divinity in our minds that we
cannot break the conceived link between them. If we ponder it carefully, Whyte's
statement: "every man stands in direct relation to God" is already enough to do away
with any and all mediating institutions. But we have yet to realize this completely and
to act upon it. Even Luther, who felt the oppression of the mediating structure so
deeply, ended up by founding a substitute, leaving his main project incomplete. It
was left for the Enlightenment to complete this task, but it, in turn, fell overboard on
the other side by rejecting, in toto, God and the inner world of man.
Secularization has resulted in the dissolution of institutionally organized
personal connections. Assuming that we moderns do not want to return to a church-
based social order, and perhaps also cannot, we must look forward to a religion that
renounces clerical institutions right from the start. In contrast to Christianity and
Buddhism, which are "church religions," Hinduism and Islam are "organic religious
systems" (to use Donald E. Smith's terminology 296), and only one of the latter fulfills
the condition of monotheism.
There are many overlaps, but also many differences, between the religion of
Islam and our Western religions. The differences are most confusing in concepts
which have the same name, and therefore ought to mean the same thing, at least
theoretically. Yet such is not the case. Some of us believe God is Triune, Islam holds
that God is—and can only be—One. Some of us believe that The Word of God is a
man, Islam—while not denying that man, nor even that title—claims that the Word of
God is more properly a book (the Koran). To us, God is love; in Islam, God created
the universe through love, and the universe—not God—is therefore love, or the fruit
of thereof. We believe "God said: 'Let there be light,' and there was light"; according
to the Koran, "God is the light of the heavens and the earth; light upon light." 297 It is
not that we have got things wrong; it is rather that various factors are emphasized or
weighted differently, enabling a stable equilibrium to be achieved.

The Solution

Modernity, we have said, is totally materialistic and has banished meaning.

Why is this so? Because modern science, on which it is based, is also materialistic.
And why should science concern itself only with the physical world? Because that is
all it ever set out to study to begin with. Listen to Richard Lewontin:

295 Marshall Berman, “Why Modernism Still Matters,” in Scott Lash and Jonathan Friedman (eds.),
Modernity and Identity, Oxford: Blackwell, 1992, p. 33.
296 Briefly, “church sytems” separate religion from society, whereas “organic sytems” are based on
their identity; in the latter, religion and society are coextensive, and distinctive (“non-laity”) religious
institutions do not exist. See Donald E. Smith, “Comparative Perspectives,” in D.E. Smith (ed.),
Religion and Political Modernization, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974.
297In the sense of divine Lux, not perceived lumen or physical light.

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 "... we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that
the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material
explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a
priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of
concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no
matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute ...” 298
Early on, those engaged in the pursuit of science decided that they would
restrict their investigations to the inert and tangible world of matter. Although the
scope of science has subsequently expanded to include animate and intangible things
as well, the tendency has been to restrict attention to the animate or intangible aspects
of the material world; or, in cases where this is not possible, to reduce phenomena to
their physical manifestations, and to study these projections or "shadows."
Now, let us by no means forsake such investigations. Let us by all means
study the physical world to its very limits. And, by the use of technology, let us make
the fullest use of the physical resources of the cosmos, and avail ourselves to the
utmost of its amenities. Let us enjoy those pleasures of secular existence to which we
have a right.
But let us not delude ourselves about two things. First, let us not expect to
discover meaning within the world of matter. And second, let us not believe that we
will be able to explain everything in the physical world solely by reference to that
world.
In order to clarify what I mean, consider a jigsaw puzzle. When the puzzle is
complete, you usually have some sort of sensible depiction, such as a landscape or
Mona Lisa. We now scramble the puzzle, take a handful from among the mass of
scrambled pieces, define this as the total set of our new puzzle, and proceed to solve
it.
What chances do we have of success? Even if, by some legerdemain, we were
able to place all the pieces in their correct places, immense gaps would remain in our
picture. At this point we would have two options. We could either realize that the
puzzle as it is was incomplete, go back to the pile of pieces we left behind, and solve
for the entire set.
Or else we could insist that our handful of pieces is, after all, the total set. In
this case, since there are gaps between the pieces when they are in their correct
positions, and since gaps ordinarily oughtn't to occur in a jigsaw puzzle, we would try
to rearrange them. After that, we would never get it right. Of course, we might be
able to piece together apparently meaningful subpatterns, which, however, were as a
matter of fact not intended in the original puzzle.
Now this is almost exactly where we find ourselves today. There are gaps in
our knowledge because the universe unfolds through a series of levels of existence, as
defined by Sufism. The observable universe, the physical world, is only the final
outcome—the crystallization or "congealment"—of these levels, which are
ontologically prior to it. It is true that the universe is so vast and wonderful that we
can discern tantalizing patterns just by remaining within the world of matter and
referring it to itself. But as long as our view of matter remains self-referential (i.e.,
"everything in the world of matter is ultimately explicable in terms of matter,") we
shall get nowhere.
Think of these other levels of existence as filters. We start with a meaningful
whole. Every level filters out certain things, until we are left, in the material world,

298 New York Review of Books, January 4, 1997.

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with an apparently random ensemble. This is why we can never find meaning solely
within the material world.
These other levels are ontologically prephysical. Yet they are all potentially
accessible to human consciousness, just as the material world is. The difference is
that their finer "substances" have been "filtered out" by the time we reach the coarsest
level, the material world, and hence cannot be apprehended by our five physical
senses working within the physical realm. Yet the human entity includes correlates of
the physical senses that can render these other levels perceptible, provided we never
forget that these other levels are nonphysical.
Totality (the "real universe" or "omniverse") is comprised of these levels plus
the physical level, which complete and complement each other. Traditionally, they
have been lumped together under the—by now fuzzy—name of "spiritual world."
But another word for "spirit" in Arabic is "meaning" (ma'na). And the word for
"spiritual" is "meaningful." In Islamic and Sufic thought, the world of meaning
completes the world of matter, precisely because it supplies the meaning that is
missing from the material world. When we think about it, it becomes clear that
"spirit" has this sense even in our Western languages, as in the word l'esprit in French.
At the zenith of all these levels is God. God is the ultimate meaning of the
universe. Because He is the ultimate meaning, God is the First Fact about the
universe. He is the first Being we need to consider in our dealings with the universe;
but because He is beyond all levels, He is also the subtlest, the farthest removed from
our faculties of perception (whether physical, spiritual, or mental). This is why His
existence must be taken on faith.
If we want to reach meaning, we must climb higher and higher through the
levels. Only by getting closer to God can we achieve higher levels of meaning—
which implies, as a by-product, a heightened level of perception and an enhanced
intelligence. (The gray matter in our brains is capable of perceiving more than just
clay.) For this there are certain psychospiritual exercises or psychophysical practices,
but the foundation of them all is a moral law, without which spiritual elevation is
impossible. The moral law is the mediator between the physical and the spiritual
world, as well as the collective world of society and the psychological world of the
individual, for human beings. In this conception, religion need not impose any social
order or institutions other than the freely chosen moral conduct of human beings.
Emancipated humanity does not need a nanny or a chaperon.
We conclude that although modernity may be incomplete, it can be
complemented—and its deficiencies completed—by the services of a rational
religion. This is how we can find inner happiness and fulfilment.

The Subject and Self-Realization

We have already seen that modern and antimodern can coexist within
modernity. The point is to find a combination that does not interfere destructively.
Pre-modern does not necessarily mean antimodern. There are many elements of pre-
modern thought that can easily be accommodated within modernity, not least because
much of modernity is rooted therein. (The philosophers and mathematicians of
Antiquity were all pre-moderns.)
For one thing, we can restore the human subject to its former dignity. The
idea of the human soul has traditionally been referenced to the divine that is within it.
We can accept both the divine subject and the human subject without opposing one

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against the other. In other words, the traditional view and the modern view need not
contradict one another. Further, we have yet to come to terms with Goethe's telling
insight that the self-development of the individual and the socioeconomic
development of society must complement each other: "these two modes of
development must come together, must fuse into one, before either of these
archetypally modern promises can be fulfilled." 299 We have accomplished the second
but neglected the first, and that task still lies ahead of us.
Another thing we can do is to return to hermeneutics. The meaninglessness of
the world is a result of our own projection upon it. This does not mean that there is
nothing behind the surface, but simply that we have persuaded ourselves that this is
so. The Koran and Sufism, on the contrary, explain that everything is a sign from
God, if only we can begin to divine its significance. A cloud, a star, a tree will all
divulge their secrets if studied carefully, which is how science came about in the first
place. A spiritual/hermeneutical reading of the universe, then, need not contradict
physical science but can actually complement it; it is an extension of science to deeper
levels of meaning.
There is a further twist to this. If the world is meaningless, then so is the
subject. If the world has no depth, neither does the soul of man. If this is true, then
what is self-realization all about? In a world of Hollywood props, the human self, too,
would have nothing behind it and nowhere to go. Cosmic meaninglessness is
supplemented by personal meaninglessness. The fact, however, that I have a visual
impairment and cannot see a table does not mean that it does not exist. There are
other faculties besides sight that our vision-centered civilization has overlooked.
Since God is the essence and meaning of the universe, if you evict Him, all you will
be left with is an empty shell—which is none other than nihilism, as Nietzsche clearly
understood.
The moment you accept that the world can be read hermeneutically, you allow
the self, the subject, to be read in the same way. It, too, is full of depth and meaning.
This, as a matter of fact, is not a projection, but a recognition of what is already there.
What happens if we don't allow this? "Personal meaninglessness—the feeling
that life has nothing worthwhile to offer—becomes a fundamental psychic problem in
circumstances of late modernity. ... The self in modern society is frail, brittle,
fractured, fragmented... for authors writing in the poststructuralist [antihermeneutic]
vein, the self effectively ceases to exist: the only subject is a decentred subject, which
finds its identity in the fragments of language or discourse." 300 Under these
circumstances, the promise of self-actualization withers away into a farce: to enlarge
one's self becomes mere ego-inflation, and the quest for new tastes and sensations
degenerates into hedonism.
Reopening the pathways that lead the human subject to God also heralds the
prospect of ending the troubles of Faustian Man, the possibility of soothing and
beautifying his soul. The fact that we have not yet discovered the correct algorithm
for approaching God simply means that we have not encountered it yet. In his Life
Against Death (1959), Norman O. Brown remarked: "The Faustian restlessness of
man in history shows that men are not satisfied by the satisfaction of their conscious
desires." His hope was that the right form of psychoanalytic thought would "offer a

299 Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, p. 40.

300Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991, p. 6; 169-170.

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way out of the nightmare of endless 'progress' and endless Faustian discontent, a way
out of the human neurosis..." 301
But since the essence of man and the essence of the universe are ultimately
One, we need to plumb depths that were never dreamt of in the philosophy of
psychoanalysis, which stopped at a shallow point in the ocean of consciousness. Only
the divine can fill the infinite vacuum that its absence leaves in the human heart and
bestow contentment on the latter. Then, we won't need to sell our souls or make pacts
with shady characters, either.
Finally, the phenomenon of radical doubt—which, as an integral part of
modernity, has come to plague modern humans and which fills them with existential
angst (anxiety)—can be removed only by an act of faith: not blind faith or
superstition, which I have never intended nor shall ever intend, but an enlightened
faith, a rational faith (like that of Descartes) which recognizes what is invariant
among a wide variety of human transformations, and anchors itself therein. For we
must not only recognize the revolt of reason against faith. We must also take account,
in Yeats's words, of the "revolt of the soul against the intellect," which, if not allowed
rational, legitimate expression, will surely erupt through irrational, destructive outlets.
The methodology of doubt can be overdone, and its more extreme forms can
lead to schizophrenia, to the denial that there is any kind of reality at all. 302 The best
way is the Middle Way, which renounces neither religion nor science—like Einstein,
who observed "that science without religion is lame and, conversely, that religion
without science is blind. Both are important and should work hand-in-hand.” 303
According to the methodology of doubt, even an established scientific tenet
can be "open to revision—or might have to be discarded altogether—in the light of
new ideas or findings." 304 But this is only normal, for science or scientific knowledge
is relative; it speaks of relative truths, and such truths can change. The only thing that
cannot change is the Absolute, which remains what it is under all coordinate
transformations and all transformations of man. Hence, it is the one fixed point in
which we can anchor—or establish—ourselves. Rational faith or radical doubt? Take
your pick.

Cyberculture and the Future of Modernity

And what of the future? Where, if present trends continue, are we headed? 305
Indications are that post-postmodernism may be a post-humanism, which is an anti-
humanism and, in the final analysis, a subhumanism. A cultural critic who also
happened to be a student of Sufism might make the following observations:
Granting the validity of many other interpretations, it remains a fact that man,
with his intelligence and labor, his discoveries and inventions, is the motive force
behind technology. If man does not believe in God, and does not abide by the rules

301 Berman, All That Is Solid..., p. 79.

302 As an example, see the story: “No Particular Night or Morning” in Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated
Man.
303 Peter A. Bucky and Allen G. Weakland, The Private Albert Einstein, Kansas City: Andrews and
McMeel, 1992, p. 85 - 87.
304 Giddens, p. 21.
305 For an in-depth treatment of the topics dealt with in this section, and to see how yesterday’s science
fiction becomes the cyberculture of today and tomorrow, see Mark Dery, Escape Velocity, New York:
Grove Press, 1996.

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outlined by God for the benefit of man, he will be ensnared and enslaved by his Base
Self. The Base Self then becomes the engine driving technology, the motor behind
civilisation. And to the extent that this bestial self is at the helm, whatever good that
results will be, not due to it, but in opposition to its innate disposition.
Intelligence is of little use here. In fact, the greater the intelligence, the more
the Base Self is enabled to do harm. For, supposing a genius to be involved, the Base
Self is able to avail itself—somewhat like a computer virus—of all the brain circuits,
all the firepower, of that genius. Its capacity to wreak havoc, its ability to cause harm,
is correspondingly amplified and enhanced.
At the beginning of the scientific revolution, "Francis Bacon and René
Descartes set forth a philosophy of power that founded the modern world view.
Guided by the love of mankind, by 'charity' and 'generosity,' they undertook to
transform the world into a garden through the conquest of nature, with the aim of
eventual planetary mastery by man..." 306 The Base Self relishes power, but since
they were in that age imbued with the high morals of Christianity, both men at least
tried to harness that power to good ends.
In the sixth and final part of the Discourse on Method, Descartes debates with
himself whether or not to publicize his discoveries, and is persuaded to do so by the
fact that they will be useful to humanity. "In his effort to do great things for others,
Descartes gives mankind a method that will lead [in his own words] 'to the invention
of an infinity of devices that would enable us to enjoy without pain the fruits of the
earth and all the goods one finds in it'..." 307 This is, above all, a Christian sentiment,
one of altruism and concern for one's fellow man.
Today, however, this inspiration of the Founding Fathers has been lost, along
with faith in God, and the Base Self has been released from all its inhibitions. Only to
the extent that it survives as an atavism, therefore, will the humanly beneficial use of
technology bother hardened hearts and callous consciences. In what Mark Dery calls
"Ballard's Rule," sci-fi writer J.G. Ballard identified "the most terrifying casualty" of
the twentieth century as the "demise of feeling and emotion." Idolaters are cursed by
progressively becoming like their idols—they turn into what they adore—and
mechanolaters or cyberlaters have similarly been doomed to become increasingly
unfeeling and insensitive. Everyone else, watch out! All those evil cyborgs and killer
robots you see in movies are images of the Base Self—in a technological setting—
bubbling up from the psyche.
Technology is about control, and one of the greatest kicks of the Base Self is
to bend others to its desires, to subjugate them to its will. A whole gamut of dangers
lies here, from the remote control of electrode-implanted human beings to
cybertorture and sadism (obtaining pleasure by inflicting pain), to cybertotalitarianism
where a whole populace is reduced to unthinking obedience by chip implants in the
brain. Only the fear of God can prevent people from engaging in such affairs without
compunction, for the only effective restraint is self-restraint.

The Future is Now

306 Laurence Lampert, Nietzsche’s Teaching: An Interpretation of Thus Spake Zarathustra, New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1986, p. 263.
307 Ibid., p. 266.

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 Looking at the cyberculture scene, certain trends are already evident that
provide a foretaste of the future. Earlier this century, Teilhard de Chardin tried to
reconcile Darwinian evolution with the God concept. Evolution culminated with
man, but man, in turn, would be superseded by the emergence of the "noosphere"—
the sphere of pure intelligence—at the Omega Point. Already, there are those who
think of individual human beings as neurons and the Internet as a "world brain."
Meanwhile, the computer screen and its wraparound extension, Virtual Reality,
provide an escapism from mundane reality, its troubles and its cares, in a more potent
way than television did in the past.
Man has always fashioned his idols with his own hands, and then worshiped
them. Where a satisfactory faith in God is absent, the adulation of the machine and
the deification of technology, a Sufi student would say, is the natural outcome of an
unrestrained Base Self and an unguided—or rather, misguided—spirit. Technology
confers on man both power and a sense of power, and power (plus sex) is what the
Base Self is mainly interested in. Knowledge is power, and as Lord Acton observed,
absolute power corrupts absolutely—it seduces the Base Self beyond its wildest
dreams, which in turn gives thanks to the machines that have placed so much in its
hands by worshiping them as superior to man.
If man is imperfect and machines superior, the more closely man ought to
approach perfection the more mechanized he gets. The notion of a cybernetic
organism, or "cyborg," has been in the air for a long time. Ultimately, one's mental
patterns would be tranferred to a machine, getting rid of the human body altogether.
This prospect, however; is viewed with euphoria by some and with anxiety by others,
for the perfection of the man-machine symbiosis also spells the demolition of man.
This is a mere continuation, when viewed in perspective, of the Christian
loathing of the flesh and the fear of death. Since we now believe that we do not
possess immortal souls, but rather are supposed to be composed of bioelectronic
currents in the brain, immortality is to be attained by "downloading" those currents
into a suitable machine. This is supposed to be an improvement over the human
condition, based on a body which is full of fluids, messy, and prone to sickness, pain,
old age and death. The idea has been around for a long time in science fiction, and as
usual, Arthur C. Clarke was there before many of them. Long before Hans Moravec
argued that we would be able to transfer the "patterns of information" that are
"ourselves" into robot bodies, 308 for example, Clarke described the extraterrestrials of
2001:

... as soon as their machines were better than their bodies, it was time to move.
First their brains, then their thoughts alone, they transferred into shining new
homes of metal and plastic. ... They no longer built spaceships. They were
spaceships.
[Later on,] they had learned to store knowledge in the structure of space
itself, and to preserve their thoughts for eternity in frozen lattices of light.
They could become creatures of radiation, free at last from the tyranny of
matter.
Into pure energy, therefore, they presently transformed themselves... Now
they were lords of the Galaxy, beyond the reach of time. 309

308 See his Mind Children (1988). Moravec gives us fifty years for the realization of this prospect.
309 Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey, London: Arrow Books, 1968, p. 215.

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 This is all very well, and very inspiring. The student of Sufism, however, would
maintain that what these aliens evolved to in thousands or millions of years, every
human being now possesses as a natural birthright by virtue of one's immortal soul,
and that we have not yet fathomed the perfection of a fully awakened body harnessed
to a fully enlightened spirit, infinitely beyond the possibilities of any machine,
however wondrous.
The entrenched habits of a culture die hard. Even Clarke, who stands quite
remote from Christianity, cannot resist viewing the body as inferior to machines,
which, still being material, are in turn inferior to light/energy (which the spirit already
consists of, though not the physical sort). If matter is something to be disposed of,
however, why the fear of death, wherein we shed our material shells anyway?
Furthermore, why did God create man with both a body and a soul if the soul is more
perfect? The answer is that certain options, such as self-improvement, are open to us
only during our sojourn on earth, when we are incarnate.
There is, therefore, another possibility beyond what is offered us by our
present civilization, that paradoxically unites both alternatives viewed as mutually
exclusive or contradictory in that civilization: the harmonious togetherness and
development of the body and the soul. We can either remain within the confines of
such contradictions, or move on to an exhilerating synthesis—that provided by the
Sufi vision of things.
The radiant future, the immense potential promised us by the cyberprophets,
we possess already. All we need to do is become aware of it, open up to it here and
now, using the techniques of Sufism. Machines and computers are all right in
themselves; it is only when they are made into a be-all and end-all that the healthy
balance is lost. Man impoverishes himself by expecting too much from machines and
too little from himself. But man is always superior, since the computer emerged from
man and not the other way around. In producing Artificial Intelligence, what man has
effectively done is to take his own intelligence and place it in the machine. The
machine did not create its own intelligence of itself, independently of man. If we can
keep matters in proper perspective, machines can continue their role of helping man
and not harming him. Otherwise, man will be enslaved by his own slaves.

Sufism and Social Science

It is a fact, as interesting as it is unexpected, that the concepts of Sufism can

help us to understand the human condition at the turn of the second millenium. It
comes as a surprise that the intellectual tools of a mystical teaching, which one would
not expect to be of any practical use to the man in the street, can offer insights leading
to a better appreciation of our contemporary predicament. But it becomes intelligible
when we consider that Sufism is the highest expression of the perennial philosophy,
and represents man's loftiest aspirations and potentialities. We shall deal with one
such example below.

Similarity and Incomparability

Let us see where an analysis in terms of the two Sufic conceptions, tashbih
and tanzih, will lead us. First, of course, we need the definitions of these technical
terms. Tashbih is the "similarity" of certain attributes of God to those of created

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things; one makes use of analogy. Tanzih is the "incomparability" of certain other
attributes of God with creaturely attributes; here, one dissociates God from creation.
To make things clearer, incomparability makes use of the so-called "negative
attributes." That is, God is immortal, infinite, unlimited, invisible, and so on.
Similarity, on the other hand, makes use of positive attributes, only to a superlative
degree. So God is the All-Knowing, the Everlasting, the Ultimately Real, the All-
Seeing, the Omnipotent, etc. There is a close correspondence here, though perhaps
not identity, with Transcendence and Immanence. In one case, we affirm that God is
beyond all things; in the other, we claim that when God created the universe, He did
this as His self-expression, so that everything contains—itself constitutes—a "sign" or
signature of God, however minute and remote, and God is "inner than the innermost."
Talking about God is a difficult matter, because He is singular, and unlike anything
we know. Hence, we must resort to the dual use of the tools of similarity
(immanence) and incomparability (transcendence).
Now one of the cardinal principles of Islam is that these two tools must be
used together, and in a balanced fashion. Ibn Arabi's selection from the Koran is an
oft-quoted example: "Nothing is like Him; He is All-Hearing, All-Seeing" (42:11).
The former part of this sacred verse displays incomparability, the latter part similarity.
This combination of transcendence and immanence is unique to Islam. By this
means, it avoids the pitfalls encountered when either approach is taken alone,
exclusive of the other.

The Case of Transcendence

The investigation of these pitfalls proves both enlightening and revealing.

Take, first, the case of transcendentalism (associated with tanzih). The consequences
of this stance is well illustrated by the following Sufi teaching-story: A scholar was
addressing an audience, among whom happened to be a sage. 310 The scholar was
outlining the incomparability characteristics of God: "God cannot be seen, He cannot
be heard, He cannot be known..." After a while, the sage interrupted the scholar, and
remarked: "You're trying to say God doesn't exist, but you can't quite bring yourself to
say it."
The negative characteristics of God, then, if overemphasized, can lead to a
total rejection of His existence. God is effectively placed beyond the observable
universe—He becomes a remote god. The Latin term for the inactive god, deus
otiosus, quite clearly indicates his nature: idle, sterile, useless. The implication is that
after he created the universe, such a god either lost interest in his creation, or became
so exhausted that he left creation to take care of itself. This is the fallacy of the
"Divine Watchmaker" analogy, in which God, after designing and building a
clockwork universe, leaves it alone to tick on unattended till the end of time.
Human beings have little use for a remote god indifferent to the affairs of men;
as Mircea Eliade has shown, the tendency in many cultures is to conceive of a
substitute, a demiurge or son who carries on the affairs of this world and to whom

310 This story also illustrates the difference between the wise man, or sage, and the man who is merely
learned, the man of knowledge (the scientist or scholar). Though knowledge is highly valued in Islam,
wisdom is superior to knowledge, just as information is superior to data and knowledge to information
in the hierarchy of knowledge.

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recourse may be had. The remote god is still there, perhaps, but he is appealed to only
as a last resort, when all other supplications to other eminences have failed. 311
Once man has banished God from the universe in this manner, two
consequences follow. One is that human beings become more this-worldly and
materialistic. Since God does not interest Himself in human affairs, men are left to
shift for themselves, and to pay inordinate attention to the physical world. The second
result is that they become more rationalistic, because reason is a very good tool for
dealing with the affairs of this world. The Jews are a significant—though not the
only—example of this situation. Although God, in their view, is omnipotent, His
transcendent characteristic leads, in time, to a this-worldly attitude (especially after
the Age of the Prophets and God's direct involvement in the history of Judaism),
while rationalism is built into the structure of Jewish casuistry.
Things may not end there, however. As soon as God is pushed out of the
universe, He becomes "supernatural," in contrast to physical nature which is
accessible to the senses and lends itself to scientific investigation. Once God is
relocated utterly beyond the universe, it is only one step to dispensing with Him
entirely. Under these conditions, the absolute transcendence of God may lead to
atheism or a position perilously close to it.
Once the point of atheism is reached, it is dangerously easy for a human being
to fall victim to egotistic drives, the core of which has been described in Sufism as
"the Base Self." The Base Self is always intent on extending its sphere of influence,
and its inmost desire is to usurp God's place—in effect, to become God, even if it
never can. One then becomes subject to self-adulation and self-approval, narcissism
and pride, with megalomanic tendencies. In the political sphere, totalitarianism is the
tendency of the unchecked Base Self, and it is no coincidence that the rationalistic and
materialistic utopias of our time have ended in dictatorships.

The Case of Immanence

Let us now consider what happens when one goes to the other extreme, that of
similarity (tashbih). Three stages can be discerned here. The first step is that, due to
analogies drawn between the Supreme Being and other beings, as well as the
conception that God is "within" all things, Creation comes to be confused with the
Creator. God is reduced to the observable universe, so that the result is pantheism.
As Murata and Chittick 312 have also observed, however, the process does not
stop at pantheism. Once the concept of God is absorbed into the universe, the human
tendency to draw distinctions takes over. Theoretically, the universe should be
"saturated" with God in a homogeneous manner, but in practice things work out
differently. It is difficult to conceive of divinity as equally immanent in a piece of
garbage and a valuable jewel, so the jewel has, as it were, a "higher coefficient of
sacralization." The ground is thus laid for polytheism and idolatry.
Pantheism can also lead to atheism, since the existence of a God separate from
the universe is denied. In fact, it appears to be a halfway house, or waystation, along
the road from theism to atheism. Pantheists regard the universe and nature as divine.
In their haste to distance themselves from the concept of a creator God, however, the

311Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, tr. Willard Trask, New York: Harcourt, Brace & World,
1959, p. 121-125.
312Sachiko Murata and William Chittick, The Vision of Islam, London: I.B. Tauris, 1996, p.
255-56.

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pantheists of our day have drawn on the arguments of atheism to such an extent that
they have undermined their own position and defeated their own purpose. However
unintentionally on their part, these arguments do away with the concept of divinity so
thoroughly that no basis is left for considering anything (including the universe)
divine. Pantheism can thus slide into pan-atheism; "all is God" is a less defensible
position than "all is not God." 313 In misappropriating specific attributes of God—such
as infinity and eternity—to the universe, pantheists are also making an
unsubstantiated metaphysical claim from the scientific point of view, and a claim that
is simply wrong from the mystical (empirical/experiential) viewpoint.
The ultimate outcome of similarity in an absence of the checks and balances of
incomparability, however, is the deification of man. The reader will easily discern
that this plays straight into the hands of the Base Self, which, as already noted, has a
thirst for self-deification. In the second stage of our process, the tactic of the Base
Self is to establish divinity closer to home. It does this, not by declaring itself God
directly (which other human beings might dispute), but by declaring another human
being divine. This is seen in such cases as the pharaohs of Egypt, the ancient god-
kings of Persia, or Jesus in Christianity.
Because a human being is the most advanced creature in the universe, it is
easier to confuse man with God in drawing analogies than anything else. For
instance, the attributes of Sight and Hearing belong to the higher animal species, but
the attribute of Knowledge—comprehensive knowledge—belongs to man alone. But
it is the spirit of man, above all, that is compared to God in all traditional cultures.
Once this point is reached, therefore, the spirit and the life of the spirit become all-
important. If God is pure spirit and the transience of material life inessential, one is
tempted to ignore the physical world as far as possible and to live the life of a hermit
or monk. This overemphasis on the spiritual world to the virtual exclusion of the
material world is what happened, for instance, in Christianity.
The hazard of immanence or analogy, then, is that it results in anthropotheism.
But immanence should not be confused with identity. "God is in man"—any man at
all—does not mean "God is man," any more than "God is within all things" means
that God is identical with the universe.
The Base Self, on the other hand, would like to fancy otherwise. By equating a
human being—any human being—with God, it is establishing for itself an outpost, a
base, from which it becomes easier to declare its own divinity. For if a human being
can be God, members of the same species—other human beings—are that much
closer to being God themselves. If one can claim to be closer, in some sense, to the
deified human than other people, one is already a demigod. This is what is known as
"covert associationism" in Islam—i.e., the Base Self's pretence to be an associate with
God, if indeed not God Himself, which may go consciously unnoticed. The third
stage, therefore, is this self-deification of the Base Self—an abomination if ever there
was one. Because of the totalitarian tendencies of the unleashed ego, this also results
in rigid hierarchical structures and inquisitions.
If, on the other hand, it appears preposterous to one's reason that a human
being can be God, one is likely to again land in atheism. For while human beings are
endowed with very special characteristics in some respects, they are also ailing,

313 This last we can well accept, on the level of duality-speech: all is not God; only God is God. On
the unitary or nondual level, there is only God anyway, not "all" or "everything" or "anything."
(Duality and nonduality are drastically different conditions, so that what is true and obvious for one
may appear false and unacceptable for the other. But the ontological status of nonduality/Unity is
absolute, while that of duality/multiplicity is only relative, yielding a basic asymmetry.)

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failing creatures in other respects, such that picturing a human being, no matter how
wonderful, as God may indeed overtax the imagination.
It follows, then, that the extremes of incomparability and similarity, of
dissociation and analogy, of transcendence and immanence—when taken alone, all of
them lead to trouble. The only firm ground is the middle ground, balancing the two
sides. At either extreme, the Base Self wins. This does not imply that God loses,
since God is beyond loss or gain. It means that we lose, that humanity suffers.
At first, it may appear paradoxical that extreme spiritualism and extreme
materialism should lead to similar results. It may be normal for atheists to engage in
totalitarianism. But how can ostensibly God-fearing people show the same
predilection?
The secret lies in the Base Self. Since it has already deified itself, it
appropriates the right to mete out "divine" punishment to those who oppose it.
Furthermore, since the Base Self is cruel and unjust—it always commands, and
compels to, evil—it will do this even to the innocent. Its alibi is that it is acting in the
name of God, but its actions are diametrically opposite to God's desires. It is only
when God is respected and loved—something a person in the grip of his Base Self is
hardly capable of—that one is wary of encroaching on territory and authorization
reserved for God alone. The totalitarian tendencies of the Base Self, then, will assert
themselves regardless of whether the supremacy of the Base Self is approached from
the spiritualistic or the materialistic extreme.

A Different Interpretation

Let us now chart—very briefly, for this could be a life's work if elaborated in
detail—the course of our civilization in the light of transcendence and immanence.
We begin with Judaism, a this-worldly and legalistic, rationalistic religion. Two
thousand years ago, Christ appeared in order to redress the balance, to remind
humankind of its spiritual roots. But his teaching was interpreted from an exclusively
other-worldly viewpoint, until the Renaissance came along. The reaction to a
spiritually-oriented existence culminated with Protestantism and the Enlightenment.
As a protest against Catholicism, Protestantism was marked by a resurgence of
worldly activity, placing it closer to the original Judaism with its emphasis on
transcendence. As sociologist Max Weber pointed out in The Protestant Ethic and the
Spirit of Capitalism (1904), latter-day capitalism had its roots in worldly asceticism
rather than other-worldly asceticism.
We have, then, an oscillation from transcendence (Judaism) to immanence
(Catholic Christianity) back to transcendence (Protestantism); from materialism to
spiritualism back to materialism. It is this latter materialism (in science, in
economics, etc.), coupled with rationalism, that has acted for nearly four hundred
years as the driving force behind modernity, which subsequently shed all its ties with
religion. In the Faustian restlessness of modern man, in the relentless striving to
conquer and subdue nature, in the drive to overpower and master entire planets, in the
worship of ceaseless change to such an extent that continuity and stability are thrown
to the winds, there is much for the Base Self to feed on.
We now stand, if the cycle is to continue, at the threshold of another swing of
the pendulum, a swing back to spiritualism. But the shortcomings of either extreme
have long been apparent. Do we have any alternative?

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 The alternative is to strike a harmonious balance between transcendence and
immanence, between materialism and spiritualism. And this is the balance advocated
by Islam—to accept both aspects of human existence, without going to extremes.
Both aspects are represented in our culture, this-worldliness by Judaism,
Protestantism and secularism, other-worldliness by Catholicism. But a synthesis of
both is what is called for. Interpreted in this light, "Judeo-Christian," when taken not
as "Either/Or" but in the sense of "Both/And," would actually mean "Moslem,"
especially if it is considered that Islam also represents a constructive and optimal
synthesis between other aspects of Judaism and Christianity (such as the social versus
the individual, the legal versus the moral, etc.). Islam includes and transcends
Judaism and Christianity, with all the plusses of both. If we can set aside for a
moment the preposterous notion that a bunch of latter-day Middle-Eastern terrorists314
are capable of representing the most advanced religion of the world, with its billions
of adherents throughout the course of 14 centuries, we shall come to realize that Islam
provides us with the opportunity to make the best of both religions and of both
worlds.

Art and Self-Realization

Let us now consider the possible contribution of Sufic thought to modernity,

with art as the special focus.
In a world in which—as Touraine points out—the distance between sign and
meaning has collapsed, where Meaning has evaporated, where the human subject is
repressed, what are the chances of self-actualization? Quite obviously, the self, too,
becomes shorn of its higher potentials. Its further dimensions and possibilities are
reduced to zero. The self is then placed in a rat maze; its freedom of movement is
restricted to two dimensions and certain pathways, plus such goals as psychologists
may be able to devise.
As Charles Taylor has pointed out, 315 moral relativism 316 in our age also leads
to an emphasis on one's self-development and the exclusion of ethical considerations
in relations with other human beings. The moral ideal behind self-realization is
sincerity and authenticity, which means to be honest toward oneself. Anthony
Giddens notes that authenticity has become the framework for self-actualization.
When the moral dimension is lost, self-actualization can degenerate into narcissism
and hedonism. Yet this should not blind us to the high ideals that the concept of self-
realization embodies. It cannot be explained away simply as egoism, moral laxity or
selfishness.
Everyone has the right to be, or to become, himself. Self-discovery and self-
definition is closely linked with artistic creativity. Art as we understand it today
came into existence in the 1800s, and since then there has been a tendency to view the
artist as a culture hero, to respect him as the creator of cultural values.

314 It has been noted by unbiased observers that certain "methods of warfare—such as mass killing and
terrorism—... are explicitly forbidden by the Shariah." Murata and Chittick, p. 334.
315Charles Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992
(1991).
316 I use “moral relativism” to indicate the lack of a moral absolute, a point of origin against which
moral actions may be measured. In the absence of such a reference, “Black” is morally equivalent to
“White,” and up is indistinguishable from down.

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 Art in its modern conception differs from sacred art and from art as mimesis,
as a simulation of nature or a representation of reality. Modern art came into being as
a reaction against these forms. What counts now, according to Taylor's analysis, is
not the copying of something that already exists, but the creation of something
entirely new. We think of the imagination as creative.
This means, says Taylor, that the artist is discovering himself through the
thing he creates. He produces a new artistic language, and only by this means does he
become what he was supposed to be. Self-discovery is an act of building, of
construction. In creating his art, the artist creates himself. And only authenticity,
being sincere to oneself, can infuse self-discovery with value.
According to Taylor, self-realization, if it is to be authentic, must—far from
excluding ethical principles and moral values—make them mandatory. If the art of
the artist is his self-discovery and this self-discovery is also his self-realization,
applying Taylor's idea to art yields a situation where ethics and aesthetics, goodness
and beauty, are fused.
Many artists have rejected this possibility as impeding or cramping their art.
And their view is right if we accept moral relativism, where up and down or right and
wrong are the same. But if there are universally valid moral principles for humanity,
we have to face the fact that a work of art can positively aid or negatively impede not
only an artist's self-discovery, but also the self-actualization of others. (Banning
freedom of artistic expression is not a solution here. What is required is the self-
control and self-restraint of the artist.)

The Art or the Artist?

Among the various fields of artistic endeavor, the figurative arts (by which I
primarily mean painting and sculpture, but also such fields as photography and
cinematography) have provided the most impressive range of masterpieces. These
are part of the cultural heritage of mankind, and their importance cannot be gainsaid.
In the visual field, Islamic patterns of endlessly-repeated exquisite geometrical
figures have the most direct quality of sacred art. It is not so much the precise
mathematical forms that define them, as the spaces between the forms. It is this
seeming emptiness, which is not a vacuum but actually a plenum, that congeals into
these forms; it is as if the forms themselves, representing the intricate mathematical
and scientific laws of our observable universe, are what remains after the other levels
of reality (of which we have spoken above) have been filtered out. These levels, too,
possess form and meaning, and it is only by perceiving these levels, which appear to
the physical senses as empty space, that one can complete the jigsaw puzzle. Even
when the physical universe appears random, it is not, for it meshes precisely with the
other, filtered levels.
An additional problem in contemporary art is that many of its forms have
become emptied of meaning. If we believe that the world is meaningless, there is no
reason to assume that art forms have to—indeed, can—be meaningful. The
widespread feeling of cosmic and personal meaninglessness are inevitably reflected,
through the artist's consciousness, onto works of art.
Traditionally, idol-worship was the greatest danger behind the production of
images and forms (remember the Golden Calf). That we are not entirely free of this
possibility even in our age is proved by an anecdote related of Rodin, who, after

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finishing his statue of Moses, stood back and contemplated his creation in wonder. It
was so lifelike that he felt compelled to address it: "Speak, O Moses!"
Another great danger is that, because the artist is engaged in the act of
creation, he begins to mistake himself for the Creator. It has already been remarked
that the Base Self is always bent on self-apotheosis. Of course, this can happen in
any field of art, but the tendency is more pronounced in the figurative arts. For
example, the sublimity of Beethoven's music led him to see himself as a demigod, an
intermediary between God and man. The same thing happened to Tolstoy, who at
times saw himself as "God's elder brother."
It is the field of the visual arts, however, that is especially precarious in this
respect. Picasso, in his old age, fancied himself as an art-god, a magician transmuting
the base materials of his trade into high art. Historian Paul Johnson, after giving
these examples, relates the following which should rank among the classics:

Matisse was a similar case. Having completed the chapel he had designed
and decorated in the South of France, he showed and explained his work to
two nuns, a prioress and a simple sister whom he had known for many years.
The prioress thanked him for devoting so much time and genius to the glory of
God. Matisse replied: "But I did it all for myself." The sister, shocked, said:
"But Maìtre, when you were still at work, you told me you were doing it for
Almighty God." Matisse replied calmly: "I am God." 317

These are the dangers of the creative act if it serves to feed one's ego. But there is
more, much more, to art than this. In order to appreciate what is involved, let us
consider the following story, taken from Okakuro Kakuzo's The Book of Tea.

Peiwoh and the Reluctant Harp

In the forest beside the river Lungmen, there was a tree with roots extending to
the depths of the earth and branches high enough to speak with the stars. One day, a
powerful sorcerer turned this tree into a harp; a harp of such savage spirit, however,
that only a master musician could tame it. The harp, from which no musician was
able to extract a pleasing note, remained for a long time in the treasury of the Chinese
Emperor. Despite all the efforts of the musicians, the harp only emitted nasty and
discordant sounds.
One day, Peiwoh, the greatest harpist in the world, chanced to come by and
asked to try his hand at the harp, whose fame had reached him. When the Emperor
gave permission, Peiwoh took his place at the harp, began to stroke and caress it
kindly as if soothing a wild stallion, and, gently touching its strings, began to sing the
songs of the seasons, lofty mountains, and rivers. Suddenly, the harp remembered
that it had once been a tree, and all its forest memories were recalled to it.
Now, sweet spring breezes were playing on its branches; little waterfalls were
dancing on the brooks and smiling at flowers and blossoms. Next, the dreamy sounds
of summer with its thousands of insects, the gentle patter of rain, the plaintive cry of a
cuckoo bird was heard. A tiger roared from afar, the brooks answered. Then came
autumn and next, winter. After this, Peiwoh changed tunes and sang love songs, and
then songs of war. With Peiwoh's every song, a thousand memories of the forest

317Paul Johnson, The Quest for God, London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1996, p. 170.

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came to life in the wood from which the harp had been made, floating through and
engulfing the Emperor's palace.
Enraptured, the Emperor asked Peiwoh the secret of his success. "Your
Majesty," replied Peiwoh, "those before me failed because they all sang their own
songs. As for me, I left the tune to the harp. Did the harp then become Peiwoh, or
did Peiwoh become the harp? Even I do not know."

Beauty, Love, and Sufism

I want to suggest that there is more than one thing of crucial importance to art
in this story. First, it suggests that in order to produce truly great art, the artist must
become united—or even one—with his instrument or medium. This is sympathy or
empathy, which lies at the root of aesthetic perception.
Second, when such a unity is achieved, the artist is indeed creating or
discovering himself through his art; the modern conception of art is vindicated.
Baudelaire conceived of the sort of modern person who "made himself into a work of
art" by changing his external appearance; the artist enjoying some mode of unity with
his creation is not only the subject but also the object of the artistic process (through
his art he shapes himself), while the Sufi fashions himself as a work of art by working
on his self and modifying his internal states.
Third, such a degree of unity can only be obtained by love, and where love and
unity are concerned, the Sufis have the last word: the artist's union with his medium
and creation is a subset of the Sufi's love for God and the universe. And is not true
love, indeed, the total concern for the other to the exclusion of one's own self-
interest?—until one even ceases to have a separate existence (as in the Persian tale of
Laila and Majnun, where Majnun finally says: "I am Laila"), and if the love is mutual,
both cease to exist separately, and only God is left. True love is the rarest and most
delicate thing in the world, not reducible to sex or to anything else; it is, in Dante's
words, "the power that moves the sun and other stars," a manifestation of the sacred.
Love is the answer to all things, love is the balm of sore hearts, love is what—if deep
enough—will lead us straight to God.
Fourth, great art reaches out and involves its audience, too, in the unity and
ecstasy of the process that created it—it pulls them into the vortex of the artistic
process. The spectators become actors or active participators. This happens on the
subtler levels of consciousness, so that we are aware, perhaps, only of a general,
diffuse feeling of elation, of being in the presence of grandeur. But sympathy is
involved not only in the creation, but also in the perception of such a work. And this
kind of sympathy is a spiritual thing—it cannot be understood in terms of the motions
of matter, of waves or particles or wavicles. If we want to understand this
phenomenon, the proper conceptual tool to invoke is consciousness.
Few people realize that in the appreciation of a work of art, we enter a semi-
or quasi-meditative state. Receptivity, alertness, attention, concentration are all
involved. Now as psychologists studying the psychology of meditation have noted,
the concentration of attention on any object (not just objets d'art) yields interesting
results. For instance, psychiatrist Arthur J. Deikman used an ordinary blue vase as an
object on which to concentrate attention. 318 To summarize only the most important
results, the vase became vivid and "luminous"; it seemed to take on a life of its own,

318Quoted in David Hay, Exploring Inner Space, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982, p. 183-4.

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and there was a decrease in the subjects' sense of being separate from the vase (a
sense of merging with it or that "the vase and I were one"). Further, "when the vase
changes shape, I feel this in my body"—which, when applied to a work of art,
indicates that exactly as in the case of the artist, the alert and receptive audience, too,
experiences a partial communion and becomes both object and subject in a limited
sense, which is exactly what "sympathy" and "aesthetics" are all about. A better way
of expressing this is that the distinction between subject and object is abolished, in
however incomplete or temporary a degree. Now in Sufic terms, this is a partial
experience of Unity, which can be far more encompassing and profound, so that
Sufism represents the artist, his art, and its audience when such experiences are
enhanced to an infinitely higher degree—that is, in this sense, Sufism is the highest
goal of art.
Fifth, the creation of the artist is particular—bounded by space and time, by
culture and geography, by the personal touch of the artist; yet it strikes a universal
chord: in that presence breathe we all. Through the particular, there shines the light
of the universal—which, ultimately, is the light of the Divine.
Art itself, then, is a sign of God—as are, indeed, all things in the universe. But
because it involves itself directly with beauty and with a sensibility that can only be
understood in terms of spirit, art—especially great art—is a more direct pointer than
ordinary things. A saying of the Prophet goes: "God is Beautiful, He loves beauty."
In a great work of art, therefore, not only are we admiring the Divine in its Immanent
aspect, but God is both manifesting Himself under His aspect of Beauty, and
appreciating through us the wonder of that manifestation. This means that great art is
imbued with meaning to an extent not encountered in other works.
If we can read art correctly as a signpost, it can lead us to God. If we can read
it correctly, anything can lead us to God, but art is a better guide. Yet we must
remember that every sign is also a veil—a veil to something beyond, something
ineffable. If we equate the distance between sign and meaning to zero, if we deny
depth—if, in other words, we indulge in the current fashion that says everything is
meaningless—we will be stuck where we are, and the process of self-realization,
which was the whole point of the artist's journey of self-discovery, will be aborted.
Then we will truly be a fragmented consciousness randomly ricocheting through a
fragmented world, and a human being, with all its promise and potential, will be
reduced to the Brownian motion of a gas molecule. But that is the job of gas
molecules, and they do it already; if that was the whole point, there would have been
no reason for anything more advanced or complicated than molecules of gas (i.e., for
the existence of human beings in the universe).

Towards a Sacred Art

Might one expect the rebirth, sometime in the future, of sacred art? Since
sacred art means that art which conforms to the principles of a spiritual tradition, this
would entail the widespread adoption of some such tradition. Sacred art considers
"this world above all as the shadow or symbol of the next, man as the shadow or
symbol of God". 319 More profoundly than "secular" or "profane" art, sacred art helps
us to realize our source and destination.

319 Martin Lings, The Secret of Shakespeare, New York: Inner Traditions, 1984, p. 12.

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 Two characteristics distinguish sacred art: one, different meanings coexist in it
simultaneously at different levels. "One meaning can ... open out on to another
deeper meaning that lies beyond it. In this way sacred art often conveys far more
than it appears to convey." 320 This is also what Gurdjieff means when he speaks of
"objective art." 321 In subjective art, both the creation of the work and its effect on
human beings is accidental: much depends on the particular circumstances and moods
in which it is produced or perceived. In objective art, on the other hand, nothing is
haphazard; instead of the superficial consciousness, which may be compared to the
waves appearing and subsiding incessantly on the surface of the sea, it addresses
deeper levels of the human psyche, which are more permanent, firmly anchored, and
common to all human beings. Hence, the effect of such art on its participants is quite
definite: each receives, according to his own level, exactly the impression that the
artist wanted to convey, quite apart from the particulars of culture, time, or
geography.
And two, sacred art is allusive rather than explicit: it communicates secrets,
"not by blurting them out but by offering them as it were with half open hand, by
bringing them near and inviting us to approach." 322 It is subtle rather than gross,
thrifty rather than prodigal.
We thus see that the rebirth of sacred art requires that the "distance between
sign and meaning" again be nonzero: first, there should be a finger pointing to the
moon, and then we should be looking, not at the finger, but at the moon. What does
the finger stand for? What does the moon signify? If we ever do get to the stage of
understanding this, our civilization may be considered to be on its way to healing
itself.
The creation and appreciation of sacred art calls for the existence of people
who can create such art. These would have to be highly realized, Unified persons in
themselves in order to be able to communicate a spiritually uplifting message through
the language of art. What counts, in the end, is the aesthetic sensibility, and the
incorporation of beauty into our lives. In other words, it should serve to elevate us, to
improve our existence, and it is here that art and morality find a common ground.
The Unified person is the most graceful person imaginable—worth, if you can find
one, a million works of art.

Concluding Remarks

We may justifiably claim, then, that Sufism holds the keys, not just to
understanding modernity, but to actually enjoying it without being compelled to taste
its bitter fruits. Without that life-giving breath, our concrete and steel and plastic
civilization will wither and die. We will drive through miles of sinister skyscrapers
whose skeletons are rotting, the rusty dull-brown color of decay. The sheer force of
progress will become—if it is not one already—a train with all of us on board,
hurtling, screaming toward a precipice.

320 Ibid., p. 28.

321 Peter D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous, New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1949, p.
295-7.
322 Lings, p. 140.

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 The real question about technology is not whether we should use it or how far
it can progress, but who uses or controls it, and how: a saint or a Faust? If it is the
former, no need to worry; if it is the latter, better beware.
We have tried to get rid of the spirit, to rub it out of existence. We have
failed—failed bitterly and implacably, for the very same reason that we failed a
thousand years ago, when we tried to ignore matter in favor of spirit. It simply will
not work. Our amphibian nature is not open to choice. We cannot choose one side
and discard the other. Rather, both aspects of our existence are thrust upon us, and we
violate our essence, violate ourselves, by neglecting either aspect. This we cannot
afford to do. The challenge is thrown down in front of us: "Be full humans, not half-
humans!" We must rise to that challenge, or perish. God, whom we thought had
taken leave of us, is our ally in this enterprise. Without renewing and honoring that
alliance, we cannot succeed. The one thing we must never forget is: If man abandons
God, his humanity abandons man.

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 FROM HERMETISM TO SUFISM

"When information doubles, knowledge halves and wisdom quarters."

⎯Robert Theobald

The Knowledge Society

With the widespread use of computers in all fields of life, social observers
have begun to speak of the emergence of an “information society.” In Megatrends
2000, John Naisbitt predicted a shift from industrial society to information society. In
The Post-Capitalist Society (1993), management guru Peter F. Drucker claimed that
we were now moving from capitalist society to a “knowledge society.” 323
Ever since the advent of the scientific revolution, knowledge has been highly
valued in the West. But this new, knowledge-based society differs from its
predecessors in the fact that knowledge now becomes a prime mover driving the
economy. Industrial society no longer answers economic, technological and social
needs. Knowledge has become the fourth production factor after labour, ground and
capital; it is now an economic asset.
Key to this development is the use of information technologies (IT), basically
meaning the Information Highway, comprised of the Internet and the World Wide
Web. With its global reach via satellite communications, fiber optics and the like, the
Web integrates the entire world, making knowledge available to anyone with access
to a computer. In a knowledge-based information society, the Web is fast evolving
into an essential component of business, leisure and culture. The turn of the
millenium is marked by the emergence of this knowledge society.
Another significant aspect of the knowledge-based society is that it signals
lifelong learning for eveyone. Education cannot stop, because new information is
ceaselessly being produced. This also entails a hitherto unparalleled degree of
integration between the universities and industrial companies, from which, perhaps,
an entirely new entity will emerge.
It will also entail a crucial shift in the way that we view information and
knowledge per se. The very abundance of information necessarily forces man to try
to distinguish between the two. As the ease with which we can access information
increases, so does the difficulty in simply dealing with it, in learning how to use it.
We have to actively choose, as we become inundated with information, between the
useful and the superfluous. Thus the vertical axis of understanding becomes even Comment: The data, the information
more crucial for postmodern man. (We might profitably ask ourselves what we possess may be as plentiful as grains
of sand. But that still makes them no less
knowledge itself is, but the answer to that will emerge shortly.) a spiritual desert for us if we are unable to
find nourishment or a way out. On this
point, see also Neil Postman’s thoughtful
and perceptive speech, “Informing
The Other Knowledge Society Ourselves to Death” (given at a meeting
of the German Informatics Society,
Stuttgart, 11 Oct. 1990). The title of a
Washington Post article says it all: “The
Too-Much-Information Age: Today’s
323 data glut jams libraries and lives. But is
For a summary of Drucker’s observations concerning the knowledge society, see P.F. Drucker, anyone getting any wiser?” (March 12,
“The Age of Social Transformation,” Atlantic Monthly, November 1994, 53-80. 1999, p. A01.)

216
 At this point, we may do well to remember another turn of the millenium, and
another knowledge society. Just as the year 2000 marks the knowledge society of
globalized Western civilization, the year 1000 AD (with a margin of ± 200 years)
marked the knowledge society of Islamic civilization. At that time, it was the
universities of the Islamic world that attracted attention, and scientific developments
occurred almost wholly in Islamic lands. The scientific knowledge, discoveries, and
inventions stemming from Islamic regions astounded the court of Charlemagne and
later generations in Europe. 324 Just at the point where the West conceived an
appreciation for physical science (circa 1600), however, the world of Islam lost
interest, and handed the torch over to the West. But the grounds for that appreciation
had already been laid earlier. Cultural historian William Irwin Thompson expresses it
this way: “In the culture of Europe, the father is Islam and the mother is Dark Age
Europe⎯the child is the Renaissance which then moves to America and the New
World.” 325
Besides the West, medieval Islamic civilization is the only other society
(discounting uncertain possibilities such as Atlantis) to have been infatuated with
knowledge in the most general sense. In his Knowledge Triumphant, eminent scholar
Franz Rosenthal made an in-depth study of this infatuation, starting with the Arabic
word for knowledge:

Arabic `ilm is fairly well rendered by our "knowledge". However,

"knowledge" falls short of expressing all the factual and emotional contents of
`ilm. For `ilm is one of those concepts that have dominated Islam and given
Muslim civilization its distinctive shape and complexion. In fact, there is no
other concept that has been operative as a determinant of Muslim civilization
in all its aspects to the same extent as `ilm. This holds good even for the most
powerful among the terms of Muslim religious life such as, for instance,
tawhîd "recognition of the oneness of God," ad-dîn "the true religion", and
many others that are used constantly and emphatically. None of them equals
`ilm in depth of meaning and wide incidence of use. There is no branch of
Muslim intellectual life, of Muslim religious and political life, and of the daily
life of the average Muslim that remained untouched by the all-pervasive
attitude toward "knowledge" as something of supreme value for Muslim being.
`Ilm is Islam... 326

The word ilm occurs about 750 times in the Koran, which represents nearly 1 percent
of a 78,000-word text. Rosenthal demonstrates how knowledge was identified with
spiritual food, with light, and even with life itself. Books were regarded as the best
friends a person could have. “For medieval Muslim civilization ... the glorification of
knowledge ... extended to all phases of life and educational activity and to all classes
of the population.” 327
The Islamic view of education was identical with our postmodern views of
lifelong learning: “education had to be a continuous process throughout the lifetime of

324 This is not the place to go into a lengthy summary of scientific achievements in the Islamic
civilization. See e.g. Seyyed Hossein Nasr’s Islamic Science: An Illustrated Study (1976) and Science
and Civilization in Islam (1968).
325Quoted in David Jay Brown and Rebecca McClen Novick, Mavericks of the Mind,
Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1993.
326 F. Rosenthal, Knowledge Triumphant, Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1970, 1-2.
327 Ibid., 240.

217
the individual. Both the vastness of knowledge and the natural dynamics of the
process of learning required that it never stopped.”328 Men of knowledge comprised a
meritocracy: “In Islam ... knowledge acquired tremendous significance for an
individual's social standing...” 329 Rosenthal deftly summarizes the Islamic stance
regarding this most exalted of human pursuits in the following words: “Nothing is
more sterile than uncommunicated knowledge. Nothing is more significant for society
at large than the small groupings of teachers and students. Nothing, in short, has
greater basic value for society than knowledge.” 330 His conclusion is that “in Islam,
the concept of knowledge enjoyed an importance unparalleled in other
civilizations.” 331
It is interesting to compare the contemporary knowledge society with the one
of a thousand years ago. Science and technology have, of course, progressed
immensely since then. Yet, as Rosenthal observes: “If two different civilizations were
to hold the same value judgments on matters of central concern to them, they
probably would not be really different.” 332

In the Koran and the Traditions of the Prophet, “knowledge” is used in the
most general sense, without differentiating between knowledge of the physical world
and religious (i.e., moral and spiritual) knowledge. This is why Islam was able to
achieve deep inroads into physical science in the medieval period. Yet the term can
easily be misread, as Rosenthal observes, to denote purely religious knowledge,333
and more specifically, that deriving from the Prophet. This, perhaps, explains the
subsequent Islamic disaffection from studies of the external world (what we would
call “scientific research” today). “For the Sufi,” writes Rosenthal, “the knowledge of
God was the only knowledge deserving of the name...” 334 This is quite
understandable, and designates a more specialized sense of knowledge⎯though there
have been exceptional Sufis, such as Ibrahim Hakki of Erzurum, who were well-
versed in both the physical and the spiritual sciences of their day. For those who
viewed physical science as the study of God’s custom (sunnah Allah), as the way God
chose to manifest Himself (or His will) in the external world, there was never a
problem⎯they could, like physicist Stephen Hawking, consider that they were
obtaining direct insight into the workings of “the mind of God.” To others, the study
of the external world represented a distraction from deeper things. One is tempted to
observe that maintaining a balance between extremes is one of the most difficult
things for human beings to achieve, despite the fact that the Koran summons its
adherents, as “middle people,” to the Middle Way.
We, unfortunately, are likewise not exempt from that failing. For our
phenomenal success in science and technology has blinded us to the need for a moral
and spiritual science that complements our achievements in the physical realm.
Vaclav Havel, Czech president and former dissident playwright under the Communist
regime, puts it this way: “contemporary global civilization ... is in essence a deeply

328 Ibid., 309-10.

329 Ibid., 311.
330 Ibid., 333.
331 Ibid., 334.
332 Ibid., 340.
333 Ibid., 30.
334 Ibid., 105.

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atheistic one. Indeed, it is the first atheistic civilization in the history of
humankind.” 335
We, too, have failed. We, too, have been unable to strike a proper balance.
We have erred against the side of morality and spirituality. Our civilization, which
prides itself on being the best-informed in history, is yet lacking in moral and spiritual
knowledge. Even when we possess such knowledge, we delegate it to the same place
as fortune-telling and soothsaying, and fail to act on it. But knowledge without action
is practically the same thing as no knowledge at all—which was also a failing of
Islamic civilization. A parallel trend is that there is a great interest in spiritual growth,
but because this need is not satisfied through normal outlets, the way is opened for all
kinds of irrationality to rush in.
It is high time we disabused ourselves of this deplorable ignorance. We have
to realize that Reason (or the Enlightenment of the West) is by no means inimical to
Spirit (or the Enlightenment of the East). Far from being so, the world of the spirit
has its own laws, which, while they might be different from the laws of the physical
world, are equally universal. But the fruits of true knowledge of the spiritual path are
only available to those who walk this path, who know the meaning of knowledge and
action.
Comparative-religion specialist Mircea Eliade and many others have lamented
the singularity of Western civilization in its almost total neglect of spiritual matters.
Of all the peoples the earth has seen, we are alone in our ignorance⎯or even outright
denial⎯of the transcendent. For most of humankind, knowledge always meant
spiritual as well as material, esoteric as well as exoteric, knowledge, though again it
has not always been easy to maintain a healthy balance between the two. We can
trace this all the way back into the misty depths of time.

Thoth

For the ancient Egyptians, Thoth (a Greek corruption from the Egyptian name,
Tahuti) was the god of knowledge and wisdom. (I prefer the term “archetype” to god
here.) He was also the inventor of writing, and was credited with having taught men
how to write. According to Shawn C. Knight, who bases his information on E.A.
Wallis Budge: “Thoth was depicted as a man with the head of an ibis bird, and carried
a pen and scrolls upon which he recorded all things.” His wife was Maat, “Truth,
Justice.” Thoth invented numbers, making him the first mathematician. He measured
time, making him the first experimental physicist. He was the inventor of medicine,
or the first doctor. The lore of plants belonged to him, so he was a botanist⎯as did
that of minerals, making him a mineralogist.
In ancient Greece, Euhemerus advanced the idea that the “gods” were
originally exceptional human beings, who later became magnified to divine status.
Given the fact that similar events have happened even in our age, there is nothing to
prevent us from accepting this view, provided it is not extended to Absolute Reality
itself. Originally, Thoth could well have been the first outstanding patron of the arts
and sciences, of learning and knowledge, or the human inventor of writing. The
Jewish people were to associate him with Enoch, Moslems with the prophet Idris.
It can be seen, then, that Thoth prefigured physical science. It is of the
greatest significance, however, that his knowledge was not confined to that of the

335 V. Havel, “Faith in the World,” Civilization, May 1998.

219
external world alone⎯on the contrary. As Joscelyn Godwin has written: “In
Egyptian myth, Thoth is described variously as the spirit and intelligence of the
Creator; god of learning and of healing; judge of celestial disputes and secretary of the
gods; weigher of the souls of the dead.” 336 It was widely believed that he invented
the magical and hermetic arts. In the popular imagination, he was associated with
magic spells and astrology.
In particular, Thoth presided over the judgment of the soul in the after-death
state. According to the Egyptian Book of the Dead (“The Book of Coming Forth by
Day”), the soul of the deceased had to pass through a series of halls (stages). The soul
engaged in the famous “negative confession,” in which it denied that it had
perpetrated any evils during worldly life. Finally, it reached the scene of the great
judgment.
There, the heart of the deceased would be weighed against the feather of Maat,
of truth and justice, and if the soul passed this test, it would be ready for the fields of
bounty and the banquet table of Osiris. The heavy-hearted souls, laden with sins
which are “excreta of the heart,” would be devoured by serpents or chimerical
monsters. It was Thoth who supervised this ceremony in the afterworld, carefully
taking note of the weighing process. In the Book of the Dead, Chapters 101-124 give
the prayers necessary for the deceased to gain knowledge of the Secret Books of
Thoth. These prayers enabled the soul to pass the Seven “Degrees of Light” and enter
the kingdom of Osiris, the “god” of death and resurrection who gives birth to his son,
the Horus-child. 337
Of course, as soon as we bring in the spiritual knowledge of Thoth, the whole
complex of Egyptian Mysteries and mythology gets dragged in right away, but we
have to resist this temptation because the subject is too vast to fit into the confines of
this essay. Nevertheless, we should bear in mind that the Egyptians did have their
Mystery rites, and these in turn influenced the Greeks at a later date. Solon, Thales,
Pythagoras, Plato, etc. were all to trod the path to Egypt, and Pythagoras in particular
would be initiated by the Egyptian priests in all the sacred ceremonies, remaining
there some 20 years.

Hermes

Hermes, fleet-footed messenger (conveyor of information, or knowledge) to

the Greek gods, was likewise involved in the post-death journey of the soul: he guided
souls to Hades (a duty performed by Anubis in Egypt). With the conquests of
Alexander the Great, the Egyptian gods quickly became disseminated throughout the
Hellenistic world, and would soon be copied or combined with their classical
counterparts. In this process, Thoth became associated with Hermes (although
Daedalus might have been a better choice), under the name “Thrice-Greatest Hermes”
(Hermes Trismegistus). The celestial journey attributed to Hermes parallels, in some
ways, the ancient Egyptian journey of the soul. The Greek philosophical mind,
savoring a divine cosmic order, found great appeal in the combination of material and
spiritual knowledge that this philosopher king, Hermes-Thoth, represented.

336 J. Godwin, “The Hermetic Tradition,” Lapis, 1, 1 (1995).

337 Albert Champdor, The Book of the Dead, New York: Helix Press, 1966, p. 43.

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The Corpus Hermeticum

The main writings of Hermetism (or Hermeticism) that have come down to us
date from the first to the third centuries AD. Called the Corpus Hermeticum and
written in Hellenistic Egypt, they are a collection of writings by several unknown
authors. While they are not entirely consistent with each other, the fact they do agree
upon many things shows that there was a coherent Hermetic doctrine, however fuzzy
it may have been around the edges. The most famous among these writings is the
“Divine Pymander” or Poimandres (Gk. Poimen Anthropos, “the Shepherd of Men”).
In what follows, I have boiled the Corpus Hermeticum down to its essentials
without attempting to be exhaustive.338 This will serve as a basis for later
comparison.

God
God is the source of all things (3.1): “there is someone who is the Maker and the
Lord of all these things” (5.4). He is the author of all things, the One and Only (4.1,
8).
One, then, is God (11.11). God does not stand in need of anything. Nothing is
superior to Him (6.1). All things depend on Him (9.9). God is Light (1.6), the father
(Creator) of all. He is Mind and Light and Life (1.12). He is the Eternal (8.2). God
is All-powerful, holy, better than all praise (1.31). God should be conceived, not as
space, but as energy that can contain all space (2.6). God is not Mind, or Spirit, or
Light, but their common Cause (2.14).
The names: Good, 339 and Father, belong to Him and no one else (2.14, 6.1, 3). The
Good is he who gives all things and receives nothing. God, then, gives all things and
receives nothing (2.16). The other name of God is Father, because He is the That-
which-makes-all (i.e., the Creator) (2.17).
God, being unmanifest, is changeless. Becoming belongs to what is manifest (5.1).
(Yet at the same time,) nothing is more manifest than He, for He has made all things
in order that through them all, you may see Him (11.22). Neither is He inactive, since
all things would then lack activity, for all are full of God (11.5). He ever is at work.
For if He separated Himself from His creation, all things would then collapse, and all
must die. God is the One Life, and He makes and supports them all (11.14). He is
“our Lord and Father, the One-and-Only One” (5.2).
“He is Himself, both things that are and things that are not” (5.9, 12.23). He who
makes all things, is in them all (Immanence) (11.6, 12.21). But equally, all are in
God, He contains them all (Transcendence) (11.18). He surrounds all and permeates
all (12.20). Nothing is like Him, That which has no like, and is Alone and One (11.5).
“No ear can hear Him, nor can eye see Him, nor tongue speak of Him, but [only]
mind and heart” (7.2).

338 I have made use of the on-line version⎯the G.R.S. Mead translation⎯of the Corpus Hermeticum,
available (as of June 1998) at www.hermetic.com/caduceus/hermetica/index.html through the good
offices of John Michael Greer. I have edited and simplified the language, and used the numbering
given therein for convenience.
339 Greer comments: “‘The Good,’ in Greek thought, is also the self-caused and self-sufficient, and
thus has little in common with later conceptions of ‘goodness’” (Intro. to Chapter 6). Another such
meaning in Greek is that the good of any being is that being’s necessary goal (Intro. To Ch. 2). These
meanings bring Plato’s “Good” much closer to God.

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 “God's essence is the Beautiful; the Beautiful is further also Good” (6.4). If you
seek God, you seek the Beautiful whose Beauty is beyond compare. The Path that
leads to the Beautiful is One⎯Devotion joined with Gnosis (6.5).
If you would contemplate God, behold the ordering of the kosmos (Gk. “order”), and
see the orderly behavior of its ordering (12.21).

Man
The world was made for man, man was made for God (1.26). 340 God brought forth
man, whom He loved, and who, having the Image of his Father, is beautiful (1.12).
Man is mortal in body and immortal in essence (1.15). The Soul is deathless (8.1).
Body’s sleep (which may also mean death) becomes soul’s awakening (1.30). Pious
and merciful men, loving God and invoking His name, win his love (1.22). The
wicked are punished by fire, their torment and darkness increases (1.23). People have
given themselves to drunkenness, sleep, and ignorance of God (1.27). Some people
devote themselves to the pleasures of the body, but others know this is not what they
are here for (4.5). Passions and irrational desires are great ills, And God has set up
Mind (a function of Thoth) to play the part of judge and executioner over these (12.4).

The Straight Path

“The greatest bad there is, is not to know God's Good; but to be able to know
[Good], and will, and hope, is a Straight Way, the Good's own [Path], both leading
there and easy.” If you set foot on this path, it will meet you everywhere (11.21).
There is only one way to worship God, and that is: not to be bad (i.e., to be good)
(12.23).

The Base Self

To travel on the way to Truth, to make the journey to the Good, the Soul must first
war against its own self (1.8-9). The one hastens to the Good, desiring liberty. The
other is neighbor to Evil, and loves bondage and slavery (1.10).
But you must first tear off from yourself the web of ignorance, the ground of bad, the
robber in your house who hates you and bears enmity towards you (7.2). This hateful
cloak you wear keeps you from gazing above. It schemes against you and throttles
you. It has blocked up the senses and crammed them full of loathsome lust, so that
you may not hear the things you should hear, nor see the things you should see.341
(7.3).
Belly-lust is a great ill, the error that leads the band of all other ills and turns us away
from Good (6.3). He who expends his love upon his body through a love that leads
astray, stays in darkness and in death (1.19).

Gnosis
Gnosis (God-knowledge) is possible for human beings (11.20). He who has faith can
ascend to God (4.4). There is something called the “Eye of the Heart” (7.1) (its
meaning is not explained). Rebirth is to pass into a body that can never die, yet this
can occur while still in the (physical) body (10.6, 13.3).

340 The on-line Corpus is incomplete, so I have supplemented this with the Everard translation and
indicated such use with bold numerals. The printed copy I use is The Divine Pymander (ed. P.B.
Randolph), Rosicrucian Publishing Co., 1871, reprinted by the Yogi Publication Society, Des Plaines,
IL (no date). Please note that the ordering of chapters and the numbering differ from Greer’s.
341 One is reminded of William Blake’s remark: “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything
would appear to man as it is, infinite.”

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 The part of father is to make. So it is the most pious thing in this world to have a
child, 342 and the soul of a person who has no child is condemned and pitiable (2.17).
The natural body perceived by sense is mortal, but death cannot touch the birth of the
essence (13.14).
The soul, in its ascent through the seven heavenly spheres,343 leaves behind a
negative trait at every stage, finally achieving the eighth stage of those who praise
God ceaselessly (the company of the Blessed) (1.25-26). This is the way of Birth in
God (13.6). The way to achieve this is to withdraw into yourself, to shut the doors of
the senses, to rid yourself of twelve tormentors (sins) and adorn yourself with ten
virtues (13.7). This is the manner of Rebirth, of Birth in God: driving out the twelve
sins and replacing them with the ten virtues.
This is the way of purification. The result is bliss (13.10). When the Gnosis of God
arrives, ignorance is cast out and joy comes (13.8). “Error flees, and truth is with us”
(13.9). He who knows himself, reaches Good and goes to God (1.19, 21). You
become a knower of thyself and our common Father (13.22).

Before continuing, I should like to draw special attention to 4.4, which brings
on the obverse corollary that: “He who has no faith cannot ascend to God.” This is
why faith is necessary. Only if you believe that: 1. God exists, 2. one can ascend to
God, and: 3. this is a worthwhile enterprise, will you trouble yourself enough to
perform the experiment⎯just as a scientist, unless he has faith that his experiment is
going to yield fruitful results, will not perform the experiment. The ascent to God
means following His directions, which will lead us out of the realm of hells, into the
realm of paradises, and beyond them all⎯if we are able⎯to the Paradise of the
Essence. This spiritual ascension is such that all other human experiences pale into
insignificance when compared to it. Faith, then, is necessary in order to expend the
effort required for the climb to God, during which process one continually improves
one’s destiny.
To be released from hell is great. To enter heaven is even better. But the
grandest of all is the Paradise of the Essence, to which nothing at all can be compared.
There are no adequate terms for describing it. I can only point to it by saying that if
one were to experience this for only a few minutes, it would be worth more than a
blissful lifetime. This is why the ascent to God is so valuable, and why mystics in
general and Sufis in particular place it above all else.

Later Developments

Hermetism was also associated with alchemy, in which the true adept
concentrated on forging a “radiant body,” instead of (or at least, in parallel with)
attempting to transform physical lead into gold. After the Roman Empire,
Hermeticism was to inspire much of the Western esoteric tradition. It influenced the
Cabbalists, the students of magic, the Rosicrucians and the Freemasons. In these, the
effects of the Hermetic tradition can be easily seen. As Harold Waldwin Percival, for
example, explained: "The purpose of Masonry is to train a human being so that he
will reconstuct, through the body of change and death which he now has, a perfect
physical body which shall not be subject to death. The plan is to build this deathless

342 This is meant both in the ordinary and the esoteric senses.
343 The ancients associated these with the planets, but this need not be the case.

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body, called by modern masons Solomon's Temple, out of material in the physical
body, which is called the ruins of Solomon's Temple" (Masonry and Its Symbols in
the Light of 'Thinking and Destiny'). This, of course, is what is also meant by the
“diamond body of the Buddha,” or the “most sacred body” (wujud al-aqdas) of the
Sufis. (One important flaw in Percival’s statement is that the immortal body is not a
physical body, but rather the attempt is made to forge it while one is still in the
physical body. Otherwise, even Methuselah, allegedly the longest-lived human, is
credited with having lived only 969 years. What Masons need to do is to study the
works of famous Sufis, such as Yusuf Hamadani, Abdelqader Gilani, and Ahmed
Yasawi.)

The Final Revelation

Because the exoteric aspect⎯the external practice⎯of Islam is in full view,

people are easily misled into believing that this is all there is to it and that there is
nothing more. My hope is that by the time we reach the end of this essay, the reader
will be better informed in this respect.
Hence, what I now propose to do is to compare the compression from the body
of Hermetic writings presented above with statements from the Koran, from the
sayings of the Prophet, and from the great sages who follow in his wake.
A word of caution is called for at this point. The parallels between the Koran
and the Corpus Hermeticum or any other text should not lead us to suppose the earlier
texts somehow “influenced” the composition of the Koran. The similarity between
religious texts throughout history betrays the existence of a primordial wisdom
tradition and a unity of revelation from Adam onwards.344 According to Islam, all
religions preceding it are also Islam⎯the Islam of their times, in having preached
submission to God (which is what “Islam” means).
Suppose a person looks out a window and says: “I see the sun.” Then he
departs. After a while, another person comes in, looks out the window, and also says:
“I see the sun, it is there.” This does not mean that the second person was in any way
influenced or instructed by the first, it means that both gave testimony to the same
reality independently of each other. What unites them is the truth to which they both
testify.
When, for example, St. Paul says: “No eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the
human heart conceived, what God has prepared for those who love Him” (1
Corinthians 2:9), and when the Koran states: “No soul knows what delights of the eye
have been prepared for them secretly, as a reward for what they used to do” (32:17),
this does not mean that the Prophet, who was in any case unlettered, somehow read
the New Testament⎯or heard it recited⎯and fell under its influence. Rather, it
means that Gabriel inspired Paul as the Holy Spirit in the first case and revealed the
verse to the Prophet in the second. In both cases, the source of the information is the
same: God and His messenger. (The Greek word aggelos, from which “angel” is
derived, means “messenger.”)
In the Islamic view, an evolution of religions has occurred throughout history,
culminating in the perfect and final religion. At each successive stage, God revealed

344Those who are still in doubt about this can consult Frithjof Schuon’s The Transcendent Unity of
Religions.

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more information to human beings, which is equivalent to saying that they discovered
deeper and more profound secrets of the spiritual realm.
In the theory of evolution, higher life forms may have evolved from lower
organisms, but this does not mean that the higher are reducible to the lower. The
higher organisms are incredibly more complex, and no study of the lower is going to
inform you about the higher. We cannot extrapolate an ape from an amoeba or
predict it on that basis. (Man himself was created independently, as his creation was
analogous to the creation of the universe.) Evolution is, therefore, a progress and not
a regress, an ascent and not a descent. Rivers flow out to the ocean, but no river can
contain the ocean.
Moreover, this evolution is purposeful, goal-oriented. God could afford to
wait⎯a billion years is but a fleeting moment in Eternity. Besides, He is equidistant
to all points in the space-time continuum. God guided the evolution of the universe,
of the stars and planets, of life on earth at every step of the way. Through eons of
preparation, God always had man in mind. First came unicellular organisms, then
plants and animals. In all this, God was preparing the way for man, decorating the
earth for him. God loved man so much that He gave him this beautiful world, this
wondrous universe, and then He went further and gave even Himself.
Quantum physicist Werner Heisenberg once observed that the passage of time
may be attributable, not to the push of the past, but to the pull of the future. Time was
striving towards a goal. As with less evolved organisms in the case of biology, the
incomplete revelations were, in the case of religion, inching toward completion. With
the revelation of the Koran to Mohammed, all previous religions, philosophies and
mystical paths found their culmination and fulfilment.
Hence, we cannot suppose that the Koran could have been “derived” from any
of the earlier texts. According to the Islamic conception, they represent earlier
versions of Revelation, while the Koran represents its pinnacle. Nevertheless, their
thematic unity reveals the existence of a single, primordial wisdom running like a
golden thread through history. Given this premise, every religion or religious
philosophy may be regarded as a proper subset.

Correspondences

Before passing on to Hermes, we might prefer to examine a parallel with

Thoth. We have already seen how the soul of the deceased is judged in the scene of
psychostasis, or weighing of the soul. In Islamic eschatology, too, the soul of the
deceased is judged. His sins are put on one pan of the scales, and his merits on the
other. If his merits outweigh his sins, he wins Paradise; if vice versa, he has earned
punishment. Although the details are different, the basics do not diverge substantially
from the ancient Egyptian conception to the Islamic one. Moreover, almost all
traditions have agreed on the existence of post-mortem justice, reward and retribution
in one form or another.
We shall now embark on a point-by-point comparison between the Hermetic
Corpus and esoteric Islam. First, however, let us examine a line from the Secret
Hymn of the Hermetists:

Let us all give praise to Him, sublime above the Heavens, Lord of every
nature. I give Thee thanks, O God (13.17-18).

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We next go to the Koran, and open the first line of the first chapter on the first page,
where we read:

Praise be to God, the Lord of the Worlds (1:1).

The Arabic word hamd encompasses the meanings of both praise and thanksgiving.
This means that the Secret Hymn of the Hermetic adepts has found expression in the
very first verse of the first chapter of the Holy Book of Islam. But this is the Chapter
of the “Opening,” which is recited by all Moslems during each cycle of every Formal
Prayer. In other words, what earlier belonged only to the very few has now become
the common praise of all.
Let us now proceed to our comparison. The numbers in parentheses are
chapter and verse numbers from the Koran. Traditions of the Prophet are marked by a
“T,” and sources for quotations from the sages are given in footnotes.

God
God is the Creator of all things (2:29, 117, 6:73). He creates and sustains all (7:54,
11:6-7, 13:16). It is He who created all nature (25:61-62). “Your God is One god;
there is no God but He” (2:163).
“God is One; He is the Samad” (112:1-2). Now in Arabic, Samad means That which
is in need of nothing, but which all things stand in need of. In other words, the
Hermetic writings in this respect and the Unity Chapter of the Koran dovetail with
each other. The same holds for the so-called Light Verse: “God is the Light of the
heavens and the earth … Light upon Light” (24:35). He is Life, the Living (2:255,
3:2, 40:65). He is the Eternal, the Everlasting (2:255, 20:111). God is All-powerful
(2:284, 6:17), the Holy, worthy of all praise (31:26). All things in the heavens and the
earth praise Him (59:24). His abode is nonspace: “There is no space for Me. I am the
space of space.” 345
God is the Sustainer of all (51:58): He gives, and receives nothing in return. The
senses of “the Good” in Greek thought, self-sufficient and self-caused, find their echo
in the Koran: God is the Self-sufficient (6:133), the Self-subsisting (3:2). All good is
from God (16:53). The sense of Father as That-which-makes-all is given by “the
Originator of the heavens and the earth” (6:101, 42:11).
“You will not find any change in the Way of God” (35:43). “Whichever way you
turn, there is the Face of God” (2:115). “Nothing covers the face of Truth/Nothing is
more manifest than Truth/But to the eyeless He is hidden.” 346 God is both the
Manifest and the Hidden, the Outward and the Inward (rendered in the Koran by
Zahir and Batin). “Every instant He is upon some task” (55:29). “There is no god but
One God” (5:73).
God is both within everything and without. He (4:127) and His knowledge (6:80,
20:98) encompass all things. God’s attributes are of two kinds: those of Similarity
with other things (tashbih: Association, akin to Immanence), and attributes of
Incomparability (tanzih: Dissociation, akin to Transcendence). Both are needed, and
only when both are present can Unification (tawhid) be complete.347 “Nothing is like
Him” (42:11). “Eyes cannot attain to Him” (6:103).

345 Inspiration to Sheikh Abdelqader Gilani, Treatise on Divine Aid (The Holy Bestowal).
346 From a poem by Niyazi Misri. Truth: the Real, or Absolute Reality, i.e. God.
347 See e.g. Ibn Arabi’s writings.

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 “God is Beautiful, He loves beauty” (T). The path that leads to Him is observance of
His Law (shariah) joined with Gnosis (marifah). “With the Law, God Almighty
desires us to order our external world, and with Knowledge, He wishes us to arrange
our internal world. From the combination of these two, Truth is born.”348
The Koran constantly invites human beings to contemplate nature, which is a place
of beauty and wonder. God created all things, and ordered them in measured
proportions (25:2). “We shall show them our signs on the horizons (in the external
world) and in their selves (man’s inner world)” (41:53). God orders all things (6:95-
99). The wisdom of the Creator is apparent in the book of the universe, the secrets of
which are explained in the book of the Koran.

Man
“The cosmos I created for man, and man, and man I created for myself.” 349 “We
created man in the most beautiful stature” (95:4). “God created man in His own
image” (T). “The Compassionate created man in His own image” (T).
“Every soul shall taste of death” (3:185, 29:57). Who dies once does not die again:
"After the first death, they never taste death again" (44:56). “Human beings are
asleep. When they die, they awake” (T). God accepts their best deeds from the Good,
and ignores their misdeeds (29:7, 46:16). “Only by the invocation of God do hearts
find solace” (13:28). Pious men and adepts invoke (dhikr) God’s names: “They love
Him and He loves them” (5:54). Many in the world will lead you astray from God’s
path, but God does not love evil-doers, and they will be chastised in the afterlife.
Whatever you do, you do to yourself: “If you do good, you do it to yourself, and if
you do bad, you do it to yourself” (17:7). Because: “Whoever does an atom’s-weight
of good will see its recompense, and whoever does an atom’s weight of evil will see
its recompense” (99:7-8).

The Straight Path

“Guide us along Your Straight Path, the path of those whom You favor” (1:5-6). “If
my servant comes to me walking, I will go to him running.” 350 God recognizes all
good (4:147); no good deed is wasted. So remain in the Straight Path (6:153, etc.) as
you have been commanded to (42:15).

The Base Self

This “self always compels to evil (nafs al-ammara)” (12:53). “The greatest war is
the war against the self” (T). The Base Self is one of the most important teachings of
the Sufis, and is mentioned in almost every book on the subject. The Base Self is the
prime obstacle separating us from God, and is our mortal enemy. This self has to be
purified if we wish to get anywhere, to do something with our lives. Illicit lusts and
passions (sexual and pecuniary) are the prime weapons of the Base Self, whose only
intent is to lead us astray from God’s path. 351

Gnosis
The result of purification is spiritual Ascension. In the Koran, one of the titles of
God is “Lord of the Ascensions” (70:3). “Gnosis is attained by uncovering the dark

348 Gilani, The Secret of Secrets.

349 Gilani, Treatise.
350 Holy Tradition (a saying of God uttered through the Prophet’s mouth that is not included in the
Koran).
351 From the teachings of Master Ahmet Kayhan.

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veil of the Base Self from the mirror of the heart, and by purifying the heart.” 352 This
process opens “the Eye of the Heart,” which is a psychospiritual organ of perception
with the capacity for “visual” cognition: "The Heart (fouad) did not deny what it saw"
(53:11). This also implies that hearts can be blind (22:46).
To have a child has two meanings: exoteric and esoteric. Exoterically, the Prophet
said: “Get married, and multiply. I shall take pride in the numbers of my community”
(T). But there is also an esoteric meaning. God will create you in new forms after
death (56:60-61): “Towards the end of the spiritual journey (a journey that is made
while still in the physical body), a different kind of spirit is formed. This spirit is
subtler than all other spirits, and is called ‘the Child of Meaning’” or “the Child of the
Heart.” 353 This is Rebirth, and anyone who has achieved this is called “Twice-born.”
The Sufis have traditionally identified seven levels in the process of the self’s
purification, corresponding to the “seven heavens” (17:44). There are seven cardinal
sins, and eight paradises that one enters as these sins are left behind. Passing through
all by shedding one’s negative traits at every stage, one joins the “Friends of God”
(5:55) (the company of the Blessed). For this, one must cleanse oneself from sins and
adorn oneself with virtues. Additionally, one must engage in meditation (tafakkur),
which is concentration on God alone, to the exclusion of everything-other-than-God
from the senses.
“God loves those who purify themselves” (9:108): “He desires to purify you” (5:6).
Whoever purifies himself does it only for his own good (35:18). “Those who struggle
in Our cause, surely we shall guide them in our ways” (29:69) to Truth. The reward
of the self-purified is eternal Paradise (20:76). If the goal of human existence is to
find happiness, the Friends of God are the ones who have found it. “No fear is upon
them, neither shall they sorrow” (10:62). “Truth has come, and falsehood has
vanished away. Surely falsehood is ever certain to vanish” (17:81). Hence, one must
seek ways to draw near to God (5:35): “He who knows himself knows his Lord” (T).

Assessment

This comparison shows, I hope, the essential harmony between Hermetism

and the Koran, and again demonstrates a prime assertion of Islam: the transcendent
unity of all religions. “Thirty spokes,” says Lao Tzu in the Tao Te Ching, “are made
one by a hub.” Likewise, though they differ around the perimeter of the wheel, the
essence of all religions is one. At this point we should need a metareligion⎯except
that we happen to have one already.
It is not to be supposed that the Koran and the teachings deriving from it are
confined to what has been presented above. I have merely extracted the “Hermetic
subset,” as it were, of Islamic Sufism.
It can readily be seen that the Koran suggests new terms for “Good” and
“Father,” due to the possibility of misinterpretation evoked by these names.
Similarly, a Sufic technical term, “the Eye of the Heart,” is also found in
Hermeticism, but is left unexplained. This point, too, becomes much clearer in the
light of Koranic teachings. In turn, the Hermetic writings are clear and simple, but

352 Gilani, Secret.

353 Ibid.

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any impression of coherence would be deceptive, because only in the summarized
version given above do certain points stand out.
But this is not all. Even the humblest Moslem has been blessed with forms of
worship no Hermetic adept heard of: the Formal Prayer, the Alms-tax, the Pilgrimage
to Mecca. Even if he fasted and performed something akin to Invocation, the
Hermeticist lacked the Formal Prayer, which is “the Ascension of the Faithful” (T).
We again conclude that what was earlier the privilege of the very few has become the
birthright of the many.

Hermetic Initiation

Very little has come down to us regarding the Mysteries, whether Greek or
Egyptian. Aspirants were sworn to strictest secrecy, and we can only surmise that the
secret was well kept. From time to time, an oblique reference survives, but it is
impossible for anyone who does not know the whole picture to make much of it.
Nevertheless, this has not prevented people from trying to penetrate the
darkness. Edouard Schuré, in his classic study of The Great Initiates, tried to
reassemble the various pieces of the puzzle. In this he was more successful than he
himself may have realized. For a number of years, Master Ahmet Kayhan has made
use of Schuré’s imaginative account describing the initiation ceremonies of
Hermeticism. There is a paramount reason for this, which we shall be investigating in
a moment. But even apart from that reason, we have it on the Master’s authority that
the Hermetic ceremony has its parallels in the spiritual journey of the Sufi.
To summarize the highlights of this ceremony, which are actually “rites of
passage,” a disciple or aspirant arriving at an Egyptian temple is first subjected to an
“entrance exam.” The test occurs on the grounds of the temple and in its underground
crypts. First, the disciple has to spend a week performing menial chores. When the
trials begin, he must pass through a fearsome corridor lined with statues having the
bodies of men and the heads of animals, such as a hawk, a lion, or a jackal. Then he
is shut away into a dark tunnel, where the timid may easily be discouraged or even die
of fright. Having passed this test, he is instructed in an arcane alphabet and its
symbolic meanings. It begins to dawn on him that there is more to existence than
meets the eye.
Next, the disciple has to pass through what appears to be a red-hot furnace.
The hierophant soothes his fear, saying that he himself once passed through the fire as
if it had been a bed of roses. Then he has to pass through water, experiencing the
danger of being drowned.

Trial by Lust

We now come to the centerpiece of the trial period, and the prime reason
behind the Master’s endorsement of Schuré’s account, the whole point of his
bothering with Hermeticism at all in the first place. This is the trial in which the
aspirant’s self-control is tested by a lovely woman. If he succumbs to her charms, he
loses his chance of any spiritual progress forever.

What the youth has experienced up to this point is the acceptance ceremony—
nothing but an entrance examination. The university teaching can now commence.

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The aspirant has taken his first step towards being accepted amongst the community
of Truth.
If he passes this final trial as well, he is admitted to the second stage of the
university—or, if we regard the period of trials as a university in itself, to the second
university. Years of study and meditation—both in the physical and spiritual sciences
and arts—now begin. The teachers mostly leave the students to shift for themselves,
and many students fail to understand why instruction is so rare. The burden of
learning is on the student.
Finally, the day arrives when the student is led down to an “initiation crypt,”
an underground sarcophagus, there to undergo spiritual death and rebirth. Of all the
secret practices of the ancients, this is the best-attested one: the one for which we
have the most evidence. Albert Champdor, for instance, elaborates:

Priests performed complex and secret initiatory rites in dark and spare crypts,
virtually tombs, beneath the temple floors. They … removed all light from the
vault. Locked in the blackness and isolated from all living things, the initiates
to be came close to the death that delivers, exalts and purifies. Their long vigil
in the secret room of the sanctuary cracked slightly the formidable mystery of
resurrection. The trial symbolically separated the soul from the body. …
Those who returned from the depths of these spiritual and physical abysses in
the pits of the mastaba burial chambers, were initiates. 354

The student experiences dissolution in the darkness; for all practical purposes,
he is indeed dying. His life passes before his eyes. Then in the darkness, a bright
point appears, taking the shape of a three-pointed star which becomes a sun. A white
rose ripens into a red rose. Finally, a smiling young woman appears, telling the
disciple that she is his soul. Then all of a sudden the images disappear, and the
initiate finds himself entering his body. The priests and their chief⎯his teacher⎯are
ready and waiting for him. They offer him a glass of sherbet in congratulation, and
lead him to a banquet. After this, his instruction by the high priest continues at a
more advanced level.

Sufic Interpretation

Such, in brief, is a synopsis of Hermetic initiation. But what has all this got to
do with Sufism?
The Master has, on various occasions, given brief explanations regarding this
or that aspect of the ceremony. In what follows, I shall bring together and summarize
those explanations I have encountered, except for a longer digression (my own) on the
sexual trial, because the importance the Master attaches to this event calls for a more
detailed treatment.
According to the Master, then, the phenomena described in the Hermetic
ceremony all arise and are manifested during the spiritual journey (thuluq) of the Sufi,
but not within the confines or crypts of a temple. Instead, they are manifested in
conditions of real life and during meditation (tafakkur).
In the beginning, the Seeker is frightened while passing through the corridor
full of animal-headed, human-bodied statues. Although we have become accustomed

354 Champdor, Book of the Dead, p. 25.

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to viewing these as the “gods” of the Egyptians, they are all “keepers of the gate” or
“guardians of the way.” Their collective message is: “You cannot pass!” All this
inspires the fear of death, and is intended to scare the disciple.
Such figures (called “demonic beings” in the West and “wrathful deities” in
the East) all emerge during the initial stages of meditation. As one is purified, they
take on the countenance of beauty (and are replaced by “angelic beings” or “blissful
deities,” respectively). These are actually forms within oneself, reflections of the
beauty coefficient of one’s soul.
The symbolic alphabet has its Sufic counterpart in the Abjad letters in
Arabic, 355 the purpose of which is to attain Truth.
The trials by fire and water are all included in Sufism. These represent
difficulties: they are not actual fire or water, but the difficulties of life. It becomes
easy to cross those difficulties if one has reached the stage of the Contented Self (nafs
al-mutmainnah).

The Determining Factor: Sex

We now come to the trial by sex, which bears the whole force of the Master’s
emphasis. It must be stated that this is not just a matter of concern for the disciple of
Hermeticism or Sufism⎯it is one of great importance for us all. In a pamphlet on the
subject, the Master has declared: “O student of the path, illicit lust has been forbidden
to you. Beware: you will be cast out of the university altogether unless you can
successfully complete this trial.” To him, illicit sex represents the total negation of
human potentials and possibilities⎯not only for the adept, but for everybody. Human
beings are meant to discover the mysteries of the universe, rather than falling victim
to their wayward passions and their base instincts.

Our approach toward sex is characterized by extremity. It either becomes a

thing of absolute good or of unmitigated evil. But surely science has taught us to
recognize different shadings, to distinguish between subtle yet important differences?
Chemical substances, which are deadly poisons at certain doses, are, at different
doses, used as medicine to save lives. Conversely, overindulgence can cause
something that is normally harmless to become fatal.
Such is the case with sex. Sex can be part of man’s salvation or the cause of
his ruin. More correctly, our lifestyles will determine our salvation or our ruin, and
this includes our sexual habits too. The important point here is that we must achieve
balance in every aspect of our lives. There is a middle way between excessive
celibacy and total promiscuity, and mankind has not, in thousands of years, been able
to devise a better solution for this than normal marriage, which God ordained from the
very beginning.

355 The Abjad (“ABCD”) calculations in Islam assign a value to each letter in a word or sentence, and
attempt to find deeper correspondences on the basis of these numerical values. Although similar to
numerology in its popular and vulgar use (e.g. fortune-telling), the more sophisticated applications seek
deeper truth from numerical equivalents. Adepts sometimes used it as a code that yielded profound
meaning when deciphered. The decorative tulips on porcelain in mosques, for instance, are symbolic
of God, because the numerical values of “tulip” and “God” in Arabic are equal. The decorations
therefore constitute a pictorial calligraphy.

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 When a married couple bring themselves to a deep participation, a total
involvement in each other, within a relationship formed of emotional caring and
commitment, sexuality becomes an experience bordering on the divine. And within
the limits of legally approved marriage, God has pronounced His blessings on the
experience He has ordained for the propagation of the human race: “Be fruitful and
multiply.” In such peace and security, spirituality may also blossom.
Marriage also provides the support that we need in the struggle against our
lower natures. It is only within a secure relationship that the individual can achieve
self-mastery and self-control, the weapons he needs to use against that tyrant, his Base
Self. It should not be forgotten that we are at our most vulnerable against our own
selves.
The road to man’s ruin, on the other hand, is paved with excess: sexual
promiscuity associated entirely with pleasure, divorced from any other considerations
at all. People indulging in it take their own transient desires as their guiding principle,
ostensibly released from any consequences for their actions, moral or spiritual. Sex
can become the strongest weapon of the Base Self. And this is the pivot around
which self-mastery and self-control rotate. One is reminded of the statement of the
Buddha, who said that if there had been a second equally powerful drive to conquer,
he would not have been able to achieve Enlightenment.
The consequences of promiscuous sexual encounters glare at us from every
corner of the globe: children and the women who have to care for them on dingy
street corners are nothing but victims of men’s selfishness.
To satisfy man’s unfettered desires, in many parts of the world women are
forced, often at an early age, to become “sex slaves”⎯selling their bodies to earn a
living. The so-called “free sex” movement, ostensibly advocating freedom, has done
nothing but exacerbate this “sexploitation” of woman. And where women and
children are sacrificed, the whole of humanity pays the price. In this lamentable
situation, not only is man enslaved to his lower self, but women are victimized by that
self: abused by the men who exploit them and the desires they are forced to service.
And the offspring of these relationships⎯what do they experience of “freedom”?
Characterized as they are by pain, by regret and recriminations, extramarital
relationships have always been complex and debilitating⎯they do nothing but sap our
physical and spiritual resources, both at the individual and the societal level.
This is why all monotheistic religions have denounced extramarital sex (rather
than sex per se), and have tried to foster healthy marital relationships. The purpose of
marriage is not to put women under the subjugation of men, but to prevent them from
carrying the brunt of male selfishness⎯to secure their rights and their children’s
rights. Doing so provides the ground for a healthy individual and therefore a healthy
society. It is because God loves man so much that He has insisted on banning
behavior which is sure to lead to suffering. Man might be able to put up with such
degradation himself, but God will not suffer His finest creation to be abased in this
way.
Psychologically, illicit sex is damaging to those involved. Sociologically, it is
damaging to society. But there is yet a further type of damage that needs to be
considered most carefully⎯the spiritual. All sacred texts are united in their love of
purity and cleanliness. But we need to ask ourselves: “why?”
It is because the spirit, by its very nature, is subtle and pure. It is also very
delicate. It needs “light” and “water” to survive in the healthiest of conditions.
Consequently, it needs to be protected, to be nurtured. In all kinds of illicit sex,
however, the aura or etheric envelope covering man and woman alike becomes

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punctured. Like a plastic pitcher with a hole at the bottom, it becomes incapable of
retaining divine light. The cocoon of the subtle body is ruptured like a pierced
eggshell, precluding spiritual metamorphosis.
This is the deeper significance of God’s ban on illicit sex. This is why the
Corpus Hermeticum states that a love which leads astray keeps one in darkness and
death (1.19). This is why the Trial by Lust in the Hermetic ceremonies is the decisive
test determining whether one will attain liberation or remain a slave of one’s Base
Self. And this, again, is why in Sufism, legitimate (marital) sex is considered,
together with lawful gain and Formal Prayer, a precondition to the Friendship of God.
Against this backdrop, we can now see that the role of the moral Law is to
create and preserve the infrastructure necessary for spiritual progress. Remove it, and
you cannot have progress: you are denying yourself access to the Path. This is the
meaning of the Trial by Passion⎯it is a spiritual barrier, and the moral barrier is there
because the two are inseparable. Without morality, there is no spirituality. Thus, in
the Divine Law, anything that helps spiritual advancement has been called “good,”
and anything that hinders it has been called “bad.” It is not for nothing that God
forbids or allows certain things.
The whole point of knowledge (ilm), to return to the subject that opened this
paper, is that it takes man⎯or more correctly, it allows him to take himself⎯from
what is bad to what is good: it improves his life. Knowledge, as knowledge, needs to
be translated into right action; action characterized by both material and spiritual gain.
Only such action will allow us to realize our true potential as human beings, taking us
from the schoolhouse to the university.

Graduation

Let us now return to the parallels between the Hermetic ceremony and the
Sufic Journey.
Seclusion and the drawing in of the senses are an essential part of the spiritual
death-rebirth process. Underground vaults, rooms or cellars have been traditionally
used for this purpose. Many Sufi sages have experienced Unveiling (kashf)
underground: Hadji Bektash, Rumi, Yunus Emre, Hadji Bayram, Eshrefoghlu... In
the words of one sage: “I was raw, I was cooked, I burned.” Whilst we are
preoccupied with the world and its treasures, we are denied spiritual growth simply
because our focus needs to become more refined, more purified, less dominated by
the outer and more by the inner. We need to journey from the garden to the house and
then to the most secret rooms in that house.
The star that appears during the journey occurs also in Sufism, and has been
incorporated into the higher stages of Freemasonry. That is, the Masons have
accepted this star. The ripening mystic rose or blooming flower are also experienced
at this stage in Sufism.
The pretty woman who appears and says: “I am your soul” is your spirit. From
here on, all men are your brothers and all women are your sisters. Passions of illicit
lust do not arise in you. This woman has a double-edged aspect, for although
she represents a great achievement, she is at the same time a final “obstacle” (hitan),
because she still possesses form. In other words, one still hasn’t broken loose from
the world of forms and appearances⎯finitude⎯to attain the Formless, the Infinite.
The sherbet offered to the disciple is actually given in the “imaginal world”
(alam al-mithal), and has an orange-lemon color. Once you drink it, nothing is left of

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the Base Self (nafs al-ammara). There is also an imaginal meal, where food is
brought to the triumphant adept for him to dine.
At that point, the third and final university begins. One becomes a Perfect
Man (insan-i kamil). Although one doesn’t see the Face of God, one does hear His
voice and can⎯like Moses⎯converse with Him.

Conclusion

We have come a long way from the knowledge society, but we have not
forgotten it. Knowledge of the physical world, we possess in abundance already.
What we lack is authentic spiritual knowledge⎯both in theory and in practice. The
day we recover the vision of Thoth, of Hermes, will be a grand day for humanity. In
that vision, physical knowledge and moral/spiritual knowledge are united, and⎯as
Einstein always desired⎯complement each other.
Up to now, a superficial perspective that only focuses on the surface of things
has cramped our vision. And science too has become compartmentalized, too
specialized, since it is only interested in the material realm. So has religion. We have
to withdraw to a distance from which the earth can be seen, in astrophysicist Carl
Sagan’s words, as a “pale blue dot.” Then, all our quibblings over detail will fade
from view, and we will be left with the grandeur of the universe and with a Unitary
vision.

The communication protocols on which the Internet, that globe-girdling

computer network, is based, took their cue from the Open Systems Interconnection
model. In this model, there are seven layers: the physical, data link, network,
transport, session, presentation, and application layers.
Think of this in terms of a seven-layered cake. The physical layer deals with
how data signals are transmitted: the production and transmission of streams of
electrons (or photons). It is oblivious to even the kind of information that is
transmitted. We rise from the physical level through various levels of abstraction,
until we reach the application layer, at which stage information transfer is occurring in
its most sophisticated form.
In a similar way, my feeling is that our adherence to a strictly materialistic
reading of the universe⎯the “what knocks you on the head is real” kind of
materialism⎯is causing us to ignore all the other layers of information in the
universe. Everything except atoms and photons, electrons and protons, neutrinos and
neutrons, is passing us by. We go through life imagining a mute, silent universe, and
then, suddenly, the darkness closes in around us. We fail to see the Signified behind
all these signs. If this isn’t a waste of human potential, a total negation of human
possibilities, I don’t know what is. Because all around us, at this very moment,
information transfer of the subtlest kind is going on at the most sophisticated levels.
At this very moment, if nothing else, TV and radio waves from a thousand stations are
passing around us and through you. Show me just one of them! And these are only
the coarsest harbingers of what is actually going on. Some day our sciences, I
believe, will progress enough to understand this.
Researchers studying the lowly leech, for example, found that when they
touched a leech at an angle b away from the point on the skin that causes a neuron to
fire most rapidly, the corresponding neuron fired at a rate proportional to the cosine of
b. The leech's nervous system thus computes, with mathematical precision, the

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coordinates of the point where its skin is touched, and is able to perform even more
complicated trigonometric calculations. The ability to do this sort of calculation is
built into the neurons themselves. 356 In other words, we now know that mathematical
information⎯beyond any simple signal transfer⎯is being processed in a highly
sophisticated manner in this “primitive organism.” The neural system then uses this
information to bend away from the stimulus. (As an aside: if the leech can do this
with its forty neurons, what might a man be able to do with his billions of neurons,
were they to be in tune?)
Since the leech itself did not design this ability into its neurons, who did? Any
engineer can tell you: there are so many ways a design can go wrong that only the
greatest conscious effort will prevent it from doing so. If you leave things to chance,
you will never get it right. No engineer, no inventor, ever designed anything by
randomly flipping coins. And since when did random evolution learn trigonometry?
To attribute mathematical order of this kind to chance is to disregard the laws of
probability, which set the limits for what chance can or cannot do. The only way to
get around this is to confuse the definitions of order and randomness. The laws of
probability tell us that it is almost impossible for chance to achieve order of this kind.
Meanwhile, we can surmise that we live in an ocean of information, and that
astounding things are happening all around us all the time in the most unexpected
places. As the Koran puts it: “Look, then look again. Your gaze will return to you,
dazzled and amazed” (67:4). But where information (nonrandom data) is, there must
also be intelligence, and this Intelligence predates man or his discovery of that
information.

It is interesting that Hermeticism and Islam were the only wisdom traditions to
find equal worth in physical and spiritual knowledge, which they viewed as
complementary. In both, the divine order evident in the cosmos and within man
reflected the omniscience of God.
Our comparison between the selected Hermetic writings and Koran-based
teachings has revealed an almost one-to-one correspondence. We have seen, further,
how the Hermetic initiation ceremonies are vindicated and corroborated by living
Sufic practice. In other words, both the theory and the practice of Hermeticism are
validated in our day by the (true) followers of Mohammed. The fact, moreover, that
the two wisdom traditions are in substantial agreement despite great variations in
time, locality, and the persons involved, demonstrates that there exists an objective
science of spiritual transformation.
The conclusion, then, is inescapable:
Although it is itself now extinct, the Hermetic tradition lives on in Islam, in
Sufism.

356 Rory Howlett quoting from Nature, 391 (1998) 76 in New Scientist, 20 June 1998.

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 2001, 3001, AND THE CUBE

Two men looked out through prison bars

One saw mud—the other, stars.

— Frederick Langbridge

In the beginning was the Monolith.

There it stood, at the dawn of mankind, entrancing Moon-Watcher and
his fellow apemen, doing strange things to them, preparing them for intelligence
and civilization. There it (or rather, its counterpart) stood again, eons later, as
Heywood Floyd beheld it, this time on the moon, under the name of Tycho
Magnetic Anomaly-1. It was a vertical slab of jet-black material, about ten feet
high and five feet wide: a perfect, symmetrical rectangular block, reflecting
almost no light at all. And it stood yet again on the surface of Japetus, a moon
of Saturn (the movie version has it floating in space near Jupiter), this time as
the mile-high big brother of TMA-1: TMA-2, beheld by astronaut David
Bowman.
"Call it the Star Gate," says Arthur C. Clarke in his novel, 2001: A Space
Odyssey (1968), so brilliantly depicted by Stanley Kubrick in the movie of the
same name. Clarke also calls it "the Sentinel," after his 1948 short story on
which the novel was based. As astronaut Bowman watched, the thing inverted,
turned itself inside out; it was no longer a rectangular block but a hollow shaft,
and Bowman had time for just a single broken remark: "The thing's hollow—it
goes on forever—and—oh my God—it's full of stars!"
"The Star Gate opened," writes Clarke. "The Star Gate closed." And
that was the last Mission Control back on earth ever heard of Bowman.
What follows in the movie is the most dazzling sequence of images that
depict a transfinite celestial journey, unsurpassed even after all these years of
development in cinematographic technology and computer graphics. What
Kubrick shows us on the screen is nothing less than a view of a spiritual
Ascension, even if still only a pale copy of the latter. Beyond time and space,
Bowman is transported to a location where he ages prematurely—old age is
perennially understood to be a sign of wisdom—and, on his deathbed ("Die
before you die"—Mohammed), comes face to face for the last time with the
black Monolith, which acts as midwife in his rebirth as the "Star-Child" in the
vicinity of the earth.

What is it in 2001 that held generations of movie-goers spellbound?

What was the reason for its astounding success?
A symbol, according to psychologist Carl G. Jung, is something that is
never directly comprehensible at first glance. It excites the psyche of man in a
way that does not readily lend itself to logical analysis. And Kubrick was
careful to film the movie so that many of the clues in the novel were left out, as
primarily a visual experience which let watchers view it without tying it down

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finally to anything definite—which is what made 2001 a great work of art. But
this brings up the further question of the role in modern society of the science
fiction genre as a whole.
Most science fiction, of course, projects the present into the future tense.
It rephrases contemporary issues of society and technology in a future setting.
But science fiction at its most profound—like all great works of art and
literature—speaks to the mythic dimension in man. With all due respect to
Freud and his achievements, rockets and aliens address depths of the psyche
unplumbed by Freudian symbolism. Why does sci-fi enthrall many of us to
such a degree? Because at its best, science fiction is, whether we realize it or
not, the mythology of our time. In ages past, myths and fairy tales referred back
to a previous time or beginning. In keeping with our contemporary progressive
world view, science fiction is forward-looking, but this really does not make
much of a difference, for what is in our past is in our future as well: as the
Koran puts it, "You have come from God, and you shall return to Him."
Perhaps, in situating major themes in the future instead of the past, it is even
more apt; for what is past is past, and for us the really significant things still
remain in the future.

Science Fiction as Future-Oriented Myth

To the perceptive eye, great science fiction betrays mythological sources

from the very first step. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), the first work of
fiction to bear all the characteristics of the genre, is a retelling, in physical
terms, of the Cabalistic legend of the Golem. In Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a
Strange Land, Mike's return recalls the Second Coming of Christ; in Walter
Miller's Canticle for Leibowitz, Rachel's primal innocence recalls the Creation
story. In Childhood's End, another Clarke novel, Karellen the alien, with his
"sheer size" and "voice like an organ" upon whom "no man may look and live"
(Exodus 33:19), plays God to Stromgren's Moses. The Overlords, to whose race
Karellen belongs, are like angels in that unlike man, they cannot attain
immortality but can only act—in a similar way to 2001—as midwives in his
rebirth, and hence are finally inferior to him. The "Total Breakthrough" which
spreads through mankind like an epidemic at the end of the book recalls
apokatastasis (the restoration of all souls to a state of blessedness) and the
Descent of Grace: "In a real sense, those no-longer-humans floating off into
space are entering a heaven." 357 In George Lucas' Star Wars movie trilogy,
Luke Skywalker plays the archetypal role of the hero; it comes as no surprise
that director George Lucas was studying the works of mythologist Joseph
Campbell at the time. And “the Force,” according to Lucas, is “a distillation of
a lot of mythological religious teachings.”358
As a further example, just consider H.G. Wells' The Time Machine. The
Time Traveller goes hundreds of thousands of years into the future, there to find
the earth transformed into a Garden of Delights and inhabited by the peaceable
Eloi, while beneath the earth, in infernal regions, dwell the repulsive and brutal

357Robert Scholes & Eric S. Rabkin, Science Fiction: History-Science-Vision, New York:
Oxford University Press, 1977, pp. 165-69, 220.
358 Time, 3.17.1997, p. 82.

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Morlocks. What are the Eloi but angels in Heaven, and the Morlocks demons in
Hell?
Naturally, all these authors tap rich sources of the Western cultural
heritage, although when it comes to myth, we find that similar themes are
sounded in all the mythologies of the world. But something is going on here
that lies deeper than the inheritance or imagination of any science-fiction writer.
Mankind has always had stories of other worlds and other beings. But whereas
these worlds and beings were originally located in the spiritual realm, they are
now transposed, due to modern man's alienation from his spiritual wellsprings,
into the physical universe. The "higher worlds" have now become planets
circling stars in other galaxies, and there are two types of aliens: angelic (such
as Spielberg's E.T.) and demonic (the whole class of bug-eyed monsters). Is it a
coincidence that, just when we erased the spiritual world from our minds, we
began to think about extraterrestrial life in three-dimensional space? Is it a
coincidence that, just when we decided to dismiss fairies, elves, demons and the
djinn, people began reporting UFOs and alien abductions? (The two form an
almost unbroken temporal continuity.) Having renounced another, invisible,
parallel world accessible to his consciousness, modern man now projects such
things into the physical world. This may not only be erroneous, in the sense that
we have misplaced these objects of our attention—extraterrestrial physical life
may not actually exist and thus continue to remain unproved. It may also be
dangerous, in the sense that forming the wrong conception about a phenomenon
prevents the possibility of coping with it effectively.

The Symbolism of the Monolith

So let us return to 2001. In this novel, Clarke has made use of four
major mythical/spiritual themes. The first is the death-rebirth experience of the
soul, common to all the major traditions of humanity. The second is the Star-
Child—the Child of the Heart (walad al-qalb) of Islamic Sufism, the Golden
Child (hiranyagarbha) of Hinduism, etc., which is the outcome of the rebirth.
The third is the Ascension that one experiences as the result of this spiritual
rebirth. These all indicate that Clarke is tapping the deepest levels of the human
psyche. There remains only one theme to discuss: the Monolith. Inscrutable,
enigmatic, it baffles any immediate attempt to unwrap its mystery. What can it
symbolize?
We obtain a clue when we realize that Clarke has endowed this black
stone, resembling nothing so much as a flattened and elongated United Nations
2 2 2
building, with the proportions of 1-4-9, or 1 -2 -3 . Thus it stands, Clarke tells
us, for the squares of the first dimension (width), the second dimension (length),
and third dimension (height), respectively, and he goes on to imply that the
sequence is continued beyond three dimensions. Hence, we discover that the
Monolith has to do with dimensionality, and if we do not square them, we have
the sequence 1-2-3. Note that the notion of “squaredness” is implicit in Clarke’s
numbers: we have a square in length, a square in width, and a square in height.
Now these squares naturally lead one to think of an object whose faces are
composed of squares, which is a cube. Moreover, in three dimensions the
simplest regular geometrical solid resembling the Monolith is a cube, and in two
dimensions the simplest corresponding figure is a square, both of which are

238
mathematically simpler and aesthetically more appealing than the slab. Our
problem is thus reduced to a treatment of the square/cube, and its blackness. Let
us tackle the square first.

Square, Circle, Cube, Sphere

As soon as we "renormalize" Clarke's rectangular prism to the

square/cube, we find ourselves on familiar ground. For in addition to its
geometrical import, it has frequently been used as a symbol of the psyche in
many cultures and traditions. Closely related to the square is the circle in two
dimensions and to the cube, the sphere in three dimensions, which are perhaps
of even greater symbolic significance.
In what follows we shall make use of—but not confine ourselves to—the
findings of Jungian analysis. 359 To begin with, the square (and often the
rectangle, like Clarke's "panel") represents the four classical elements (Air,
Water, Earth, Fire) and is thus a symbol of earthbound matter, of the body and
physical reality. Its four corners suggest differentiation, and thus the created
universe. Furthermore, Pythagoras associated the square with the soul; the
saying that the soul is a square and that four is the number of all living things
was attributed to him by his pupils. The quadrangle also stands for the
realization of wholeness in consciousness.
The cube is the extension of the two-dimensional square into three
dimensions. Cartesian in its simplicity, the cube is the basic building block of
Euclidian 3-space and architecture. It thus symbolizes matter, and more
specifically, solid stone. The cube is also the simplest structure that is
architecturally feasible. Now stone, whether precious or otherwise, is a symbol
of the Self. According to Mircea Eliade, the stone is an archetypal image
expressing absolute reality, 360 out of which relative or conditioned reality is
born; for the Chinese Taoists, the entire universe proceeded out of the "uncarved
block." Man is mortal; stone is impervious to the passage of time and hence a
symbol of immortality (just remember the pyramids of Egypt). The medieval
alchemists, who were psychologists and mystics more than chemists,
symbolized their famous "philosopher's stone" by a cube, because of the
perfection of its proportions. The philosopher's stone is the stone that
transmutes other materials into gold when it comes in contact with them, and
symbolizes—gold being the most precious metal—the Purified Self of the
Master, the Perfect Man or Universal Man of the Sufis or the True Man of the
Chinese, who perfects the souls of other human beings when allowed to shine on
them. The cube is thus the symbol of completion and perfection.
The Star of David (also called the Seal of Solomon), the Jewish symbol,
is composed of two equilateral triangles inscribed in a hexagon, one standing on
its base (symbolizing Fire) and the other on its apex (symbolizing Water). Thus
the Star as a whole, like the Chinese Tai-gi-tu, symbolizes the union of
opposites. Now the hexagon in which it is inscribed can also be seen as a cube
in three dimensions, viewed directly from above one vertex; and the cube itself
unfolds to yield the Latin Cross, composed of six squares in two dimensions. If

359C.G. Jung, Man and his Symbols, New York: Doubleday, 1964, as well as Jung's other writings.
360Mircea Eliade, The Forge and the Crucible, New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1971 (1956), p. 43.

239
either the top or the bottom is omitted, the cube unfolds into a Greek Cross with
equal branches. Thus, the cube is a synthesis in three dimensions of the two-
dimensional symbols of Judaism and Christianity.
In the Biblical Book of Revelation, the Heavenly Jerusalem has a square
ground plan. No temple is at its center, for God's immediate presence is the
center of it. St. John of the Cross describes how, in a vision, he saw the
Heavenly City in the form of a perfect cube, equal in length, breadth and height.
The "Holy of Holies" (Sanctum Sanctorum), the inmost sanctuary of the Hebrew
Temple, was likewise constructed in the form of a perfect cube, symbolizing
Heaven and the wholeness of God. It contained the Ark of the Covenant, and
was entered only once a year, by the High Priest alone. 361 Since the Temple
plans were revealed to David by God (2 Chronicles, 28:19), we have to
conclude that it, too, was part of God's Revelation. And Solomon affirms that
the altar is "a resemblance of the holy tabernacle which Thou hast prepared from
the beginning" (Wisdom of Solomon, 9:8).
Like the stone cube, the circle, too, is a symbol of the Self. It is a
symbol of Unity because, unlike the straight line which has two ends, its ends
are united as one. Its roundness stands for wholeness, whether psychic or
natural. It expresses the totality of the psyche in all its aspects. In Zen, it stands
for enlightenment and human perfection. In contrast to the sharp-cornered
square, it suggests nondifferentiation and is thus a symbol of the divine.
Because one can go around and around it forever without any interruption, it
also stands for infinity and eternity, or eternal return and cyclic time. Further,
stretched out into three dimensions, circular motion provides the basis for the
spiral, the helix, and the rhythmic oscillation of the sine wave. The ring and the
tail-eating serpent ouroboros are “isotopes” of (types of equal value as) the
circle. The Chinese tai-gi-tu disk comprises both Yin and Yang, thus
representing Totality. In non-Christian cultures, sun-wheels are a frequent
occurence, which leads us on to the sun disk, considered to be divine ever since
the Egyptians. Gold takes its color from the sun, and thus stands for solidified
light. The ancient Indian texts never tire of telling us that "gold is immortality."
The dazzling globe of the sun provides our entry point for a discussion
of the sphere, the three-dimensional counterpart of the circle. (Sipihr in Persian
originally meant the hemisphere of the sky.) Like the circle but even more so, it
is a symbol of completion and perfection, encountered frequently in nature (such
as in planets, stars, and various kinds of fruit). For Plato, the sphere symbolized
the psyche. Empedocles thought of God as the sphairos, "a rounded sphere
enjoying a circular solitude." 362 This precedes the remark by such luminaries as
St. Bonaventure and Nicholas of Cusa that "God is an intelligible sphere whose
center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere." For a long time,
the sky was conceived as a hemisphere covering the earth.
In this connection, the ovoid is also worth mentioning, obtained when
the sphere is distorted into an oval shape. This is the "Cosmic Egg" from which
the universe was created, according to the conception of many peoples. In
modern science, it still commands our attention as the Primordial Fireball or
"white hole" that exploded with the Big Bang to produce the physical universe.

361Alan Watts, Myth and Ritual in Christianity, London: Thames & Hudson, 1983 (1954), p. 244.
362Kathleen Freeman (ed.), Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers, Oxford, 1948.

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 Now it is interesting that human beings have always and everywhere not
remained content with only the circle or only the square, but have striven to
combine the two. For the Chinese, the symbol of Heaven is a circle, while the
symbol of earth is a rectangle. 363 The simplest such combination, appealing in
its symmetry, is a square inscribed in a circle or a circle inscribed in a square.
This is the basic "mandala" form, evidenced everywhere from the sand paintings
of the Amerindians to Hindu and Buddhist India and Tibet, while in the
Chinese Secret of the Golden Flower the "golden mandala" is a squared circle.
The vision and understanding of the Hermetic philosophers likewise led to the
concept of the squared circle, and the alchemists were for a time preoccupied
with the mathematically insoluble problem of "squaring the circle." This may
strike us as quaint nowadays, but to them it represented a valid—if
unattainable—symbol, and those who knew that it signified the descent of spirit
into matter or the divine into the human (and thus psychic completion—what
Jung calls "individuation") never bothered with the geometrical exercise at all—
just as they disdained the mundane aspiration to transform physical lead into
physical gold. For mundane gold was mere chickenfeed to them, compared to
the incomparably nobler and more exalted goal of cultivating the "Star-Child,"
the "glorious body" (which recalls the "diamond body" of the Buddha), the True
Gold of which the ordinary version was only a simile.
An old alchemical drawing depicts a square nested in a circle, with a
small circle at the center, out of which radiate, along the diagonals of the square,
four lines dividing the figure into four sections. As Jung has shown, these
correspond to the four classical elements, while the disk in the middle is the
quintessence, the fifth element. The Chinese accepted gold as this fifth element
(their classification contains five elements, not four), and as the alchemists have
always cautioned: "Our gold is not ordinary gold."
The attempt to realize the combination of the square and the circle in the
basic mandala form was evident in many ancient cities and temples, and is
visible even in their present-day survivals. The Ottoman style of mosque-
building is perhaps the most ambitious of such attempts, in that it combines the
cube and the sphere, but only the combination of a hemisphere resting on a cube
is architecturally feasible—the best solution, perhaps, to "cubing the sphere," or
bringing heaven and earth together. 364
We can conclude, then, that the square, the circle, the cube and the
sphere constitute a family of related and more or less interchangeable symbols.
But if one asks where on earth is to be found the earliest, most prominent and
simplest example of divine architecture combining the circle and the square (or,
more precisely, the circle and the cube), the answer has to be—the Kaaba.

The Monolith and the Cube

363See the Richard Wilhelm translation of the I Ching, K'un, "the Receptive."
364An alternative structure to the hemispherical dome is the four-sided pyramid with a square
base, the shape of the Egyptian pyramids, which is another form of the Cosmic Mountain (see
below). The pyramid is, in fact, the alchemists' diagonally divided square expanded into three
dimensions—the four corners representing the four elements of creation, with the quintessence,
the Source, at the apex. This is mentioned because "The Sentinel," on which 2001 was based,
involved a pyramid instead of the Monolith. Many temples and buildings involve such a
pyramid resting on a cube.

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 The Arabic word Kaaba means, simply: "Cube." As everyone knows,
the Kaaba is situated in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. It is an extremely simple
structure, measuring 15 meters high on a 10 m by 12 m base, thus
approximating a perfect cube. All year long, it is draped in a jet-black covering,
except for a few days during the Major Pilgrimage, when it is draped in white.
The color black symbolizes night, deep space (inner or outer), death, and the
unknown (including the Invisible World, the unobservable universe, a subset of
which is the "dark matter" of the astrophysicists comprising 90 percent of the
universe). It also symbolizes wisdom of such things. White is the color of
purity, innocence, and of milk, which in Islamic interpretation stands for
nourishment, both material and spiritual, and for knowledge, science and
wisdom. It also stands for the blinding light of the sun at mid-day, which—as
Jung will tell you—is the light of full consciousness, or even super-
consciousness.
It should by now be obvious that the Kaaba, in its customary black color,
is the exact symbolic equivalent of the Monolith in 2001. 365 Arthur Clarke, the
peerless aquanaut of science fiction, has dredged up this amazing symbol from
the depths of the psyche. It thus becomes incumbent on us to take a closer look
at "the Cube" in Mecca. We must examine its history, the legends surrounding
it, its ultimate import—more intensively, perhaps (though not necessarily more
exhaustively), than has ever been done before.

Methodological Notes

Before we proceed, it would be wise to clarify the meanings of such

expressions as "ritual," "myth" and "sacred history" as they are used in this text,
in order to avoid any misunderstandings and problems arising from terminology.
These are all much-abused concepts. "Ritual" has come to mean the mindless,
mechanical repetition of certain acts, "mythic" now means illusory and
fictitious, and "sacred history" can be taken as supernatural and thus unreal.
Hence, it would perhaps be best to avoid using these terms altogether,
were it not for the fact that ordinary people and experts alike continue to use
them in less derogatory senses. According to Joseph Campbell: "A ritual is an
organization of mythological symbols..." 366 What, in that case, is myth? Mircea
Eliade makes the following very simple equation: "Myth = Paradigmatic

365Another interesting correlation is that the renegade computer bent on killing the astronauts
was named HAL, which means (spiritual) “state” in Sufism and is related to the meaning “to
turn off.” This means that a “state” can be experienced only when the Base Self, together with
its egotistical drives, computational thinking, and mechanistic cogitation, is turned off, recalling
the Zen doctrine of “no-mind” and requiring a leap of faith. (The reason is that all mentation is
based on an implcit assumption of multiplicity, whereas one has to go beyond all mutiplicity
and all dualities in order to experience pristine Unity). If the spaceship in 2001 is taken to
represent the ecology of the personality, the dismantling of the AI (Artificial Intelligence)
machine by Bowman symbolizes the Spirit’s conquest of the Base Self; it is only afterwards that
the Spirit can embark on the Great Journey. Clarke could not have conjured an apter metaphor
if he had consciously planned to do so, which of course he did not.
366Joseph Campbell, Myths to Live By, New York: Bantam, 1972, 1973, p. 98.

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Model." 367 I.e., a myth is a model that guides one's understanding, attitudes and
actions. "The myth relates a sacred history," continues Eliade, "that is, a
primordial event" 368 involving gods, demigods, or heros. In Islam, the
monotheistic religion par excellence, there can be no question of any divinity
other than God, and the heros are prophets. Hence, "sacred history" takes on the
meaning of events unfolding in real time and space as a result of the relationship
between God and His chosen human beings, the Prophets.
Moslems believe that the Koran is the revealed word of God, and that
everything related in it is therefore true, period. That independent written
documents have not survived to confirm such events does not detract from their
truth; that such documents should have survived over the vast time periods
involved is unlikely even if they had been written, which they most probably
were not. (In some cases, it would have been impossible.) Even today, living
as we do in an information glut and an overflow of documents, events go
unrecorded which seem unimportant to us but which posterity might wish to
view in a different light. Sacred history, then, depends in this case entirely upon
one written document: the Koran, which cannot be gainsaid bearing in mind its
Author.
In addition, oral tradition (which at some point became written) has
brought down various details and embellishments that help to flesh out the story,
and which we have no warrant to disbelieve unless there is a compelling reason.
In any case, this is the material we have to work with, and criticism is incapable
of providing fresh or more reliable data in exchange.
In sum, then, we shall be looking at some primordial events which serve
as paradigmatic models and provide an organization of symbols that guide the
thinking and action of human beings.

The Sacred History of the Kaaba

To make sense of the Pilgrimage without its metahistorical precedents

would be a vain attempt, so we begin with a short outline.
"The first house built for men," says God in the Koran, "is the Kaaba in
Mecca, which shows the Right Way and is a blessing for the worlds" (3:96).
It is said that the archetypal original of the Kaaba is the House of
Splendor (or Prosperity: bayt al-mamoor, mentioned in 52:4) in Heaven. The
House of Splendor is the Heavenly Kaaba, and the Kaaba we know is the
projection or shadow on earth of this House located in spiritual space. In
Sufism, the House of Splendor, or "the house that has been perfectly
constructed," is known as the Heart of the Perfect Man.
Adam saw the House of Splendor in Paradise for the first time in the
shape of a tabernacle or shade. Angels were ceaselessly circumambulating the
pavilion. This shaded canopy with a seat of honor at its center consisted of a
gigantic ruby, supported by four columns of emerald. Inside it was a shining
white stone. This stone, consisting of white ruby, was Adam's throne. When
Adam "fell" to earth, this stone likewise descended to where the Kaaba now

367Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, tr. Willard Trask, New York: Harcourt, Brace &
World, 1959 (1957), p. 95. (All further quotations from Eliade in this text are from this source.)
368Ibid.

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stands. A better way of saying this might be that like the Kaaba, the stone, too,
is a shadow or projection of its heavenly counterpart. The original earthly
Kaaba was formed when Adam surrounded this stone with a wall of stones.
Because it absorbed the sins of countless people who touched it down
the eons, this white stone became darkened and blackened in time. This is the
famous Black Stone that now forms the Kaaba's Cornerstone on its Eastern
corner.
When Adam and Eve were expelled from Heaven, they landed on earth
in widely separate geographical locations. They longed for and searched for
each other, but it was forty years before they were reunited. In search of Eve,
Adam finally arrived in Mecca. Here he first built the Kaaba by surrounding the
Black Stone (still white then) with other stones, and then honored it by
circumambulating it seven times. From here he proceeded eastward, to the plain
now called Arafat. Meanwhile, Eve too was headed in the same direction, and
they finally came together on top of the Mount of Mercy at Arafat. A white
pillar marks this point today.
The Kaaba (meaning, as we have seen, "Cube") is the House of God
(bayt Allah). This does not mean that God, who is Omnipresent, can be
confined in it, but that He has designated it as the locus of veneration for human
beings: when Moslems prostrate themselves towards the Kaaba, they are not
worshiping the Kaaba's gray stones or drapery, but God.
The reason that the earthly Kaaba, in contrast to its heavenly archetype,
is constructed of stones and earth is due to the fact that Adam, too, was created
of clay or earth. A little secret lies buried here.
Even though Adam was made of clay, the angels, who were made of
light, were commanded to bow down to the ground to him. Gold, silver and
precious stones are not more valuable in God's sight than clay. A thing gains
value only as God values it.
The foundations of the Kaaba were preserved during Noah's Flood, but
with the passage of time all traces of it were obliterated.

Abraham and His Family

Ages passed. In time, some say around 1800 BC, a child was born
called Abraham, to whom, in turn, two children would be born: Isaac from his
wife, Sarah, and Ishmael from Hagar, Sarah's Egyptian slavewoman (whom
Sarah married to Abraham with her blessings, since she herself could not—at
that time—give him a son). From Isaac descended all the Prophets down to
Jesus, and from Ishmael descended Mohammed. Thus, the Patriarch Abraham
is the world-historical pivot around which all the three great monotheistic
religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—revolve.
The story of Abraham is related in Genesis, the very first book of the
Bible (and of the Torah), and also in the Koran. The Koran vindicates a
substantial part of the Bible; it is the Final Testament of God, which
supplements and emends the Old and New Testaments. Hence, except for a few
details, what follows is also to be found in the Bible.
When Ishmael was born, Sarah became jealous. "Cast out this slave
woman with her son," she told Abraham (Genesis, 21:10). She prevailed upon
him to such an extent that Abraham had no choice but to take Hagar and their

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little child and lead them into the wilderness of Beer-sheba (Gen. 21:14—
according to the Bible account, Hagar and her child departed without Abraham).
Genesis has it that they traveled further south, and that Ishmael later lived in the
wilderness of Paran (Gen. 21:21). The latter is just north of the Gulf of Aqaba,
and the former to the northeast of that. But it is possible that Abraham and his
little company traveled even further south, and eventually arrived, as Islamic
sources relate, in the vicinity of Mecca. Such a journey wouldn't have fazed
Abraham, who had already traveled the whole perimeter of the Fertile Crescent,
and he might have wished to conceal Hagar's whereabouts from Sarah, also
because he intended to—and did—visit them from time to time, which would
explain the silence of the Bible in this respect.
Of course, there was then no city of Mecca to speak of. God had
directed Abraham to lead his wife and baby to what was apparently a desert
spot. Unknown to them, this was none other than environs of the Kaaba, where
the White (now Black) Stone had descended in the beginning. God instructed
Abraham to leave them there, and gave assurance that all would be well with
them. So Abraham bade leave of his wife, embraced their little son, and
departed with a heavy heart and a lump in his throat.
Hagar looked around. There was nothing and no one in sight. She
began to wait. Abraham had left them some food and water, but when these ran
out there was nothing else around they could eat or drink. In the blinding light
of the desert sun, hunger and thirst soon overcame them. Still no one arrived.
Time passed. Then Hagar saw that her little boy was about to die of thirst.
In desperation she ran up a low hill nearby, in an effort to spy
someone—anyone!—who could rescue them. She looked long and hard. As far
as the eye could see, there was no one in sight. Her fear mounting, she ran to
another hill, about 400 m away, to check if anything could be seen from there.
Still no luck.
With increasing desperation, Hagar ran seven times from one hill to the
other, praying to God for salvation, looking for a trace, however small, of
water, trying to find a place from which rescue might arrive. Sweating, panting
with increasing exhaustion, she displayed a stupendous struggle for survival.
By the time she climbed the second hill for the last time, she was on the verge of
collapse.
Then God in His mercy told Archangel Gabriel to strike the ground with
his wing under the baby's heel. Suddenly, water gushed forth. Hagar was made
aware of it through the strange, humming sound it emitted, and ran over. The
water spewed forth, the flow getting fiercer every second, until Hagar felt
compelled to cry: "Stop, stop!" The water calmed down at this, and settled into
a leisurely bubbling. Zamzam, the name of this water, means either "stop" or
"humming." As Gershom Scholem, the eminent scholar of Jewish mysticism,
has noted, the Hebraic root zimzum means "contraction, withdrawal," 369 which
would favor the former meaning. The first hill Hagar ran up is called Safa, and
the second Merva.
Only from great ordeals do great results follow. Moses was at the end of
his tether when he saw the Burning Bush. Jonah experienced his Ascension
while in the belly of the whale, and Mohammed after being stoned and driven
from the town of Taif. By her tribulations, Hagar had not only saved her son,

369Gershom Scholem, Kabbalah, New York: Dorset Press, 1987 (1974), p. 129-30.

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she had also presented humanity with a spring in the middle of the desert that
would flow for the rest of time. She had been a boon to untold numbers of
human beings.
Hagar and Ishmael survived on the Zamzam water until a nomadic tribe
came by. Seeing the water, they decided to settle there, and because they were
there from the start, Hagar and Ishmael possessed ownership rights of the water,
assuring them a distinguished status in the tribe.

The Sacrifice

The story of the Sacrifice is told in Genesis, 22:1-19. According to the

Bible, this sacrifice involved Abraham's "one and only son, Isaac" (Gen. 22:2).
There is a problem with this statement, however, in that Isaac was not born until
Ishmael, Abraham's firstborn son, was 14. So either the former or the latter part
of the statement can be true. Isaac is the second son of Abraham, not the first.
The son involved in the sacrifice is not mentioned by name in the Koran;
eminent Moslems have tended to the idea that it was Isaac, while others have
said it was Ishmael. In view of the fact that Ishmael was Abraham's "one and
only son" for 14 years, and also because it fits the geographical facts better, we
shall follow the customary procedure and relate the story in terms of Ishmael.
As Ishmael grew up, Abraham visited them from time to time. He had
wished dearly to have offspring, and little Ishmael was the apple of his eye.
Because they were separated for most of the time, his love and longing for
Ishmael grew until it became almost an obsession. It reached a point where it
was about to displace the love of God in Abraham's heart. The time was ripe to
do something about it.
Before Ishmael was born, Abraham, advancing in age as Sarah was, had
vowed to God that if only he could have children, he would sacrifice his
firstborn to Him. Sacrifice of the firstborn child was the custom until then. But
Abraham's great love for Ishmael prevented him from fulfilling his promise; he
kept postponing it until later, and this "later" stretched off indefinitely. Finally
one night, at a time when he was with Ishmael and Hagar, Abraham had a
dream.
In this dream, Abraham saw himself in the act of sacrificing Ishmael.
He woke up with a start. He was greatly disturbed by the dream, but tried to put
it out of his mind. The dream would not go away, however. The next night
Abraham saw the same dream, and on the third night he saw it yet again.
Abraham realized that he was being called upon to fulfill his promise,
and that he could not postpone it any longer. So the next morning, he took
Ishmael, who was ten years old by then, and went off into the wilderness toward
the East. He bore a sharp knife with him.
A while after their departure, Satan, the Adversary of mankind, assumed
the form of a man and came to Hagar. "Do you know where Abraham has taken
your only son?" he asked. "He is about to sacrifice Ishmael."
Hagar was taken aback. "And why should he do that?" she asked.
"Because the Lord has commanded him to do so."
"Abraham would never do such a thing unless he were indeed
commanded by the Lord," said Hagar with mounting anger. "If what you say is
true, we all must submit to the Lord, and you are trying to make me disobey

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Him. If not, then you are lying. In either case, you must be the Devil," she
cried, and threw a stone at him.
Thus foiled, the Devil departed. He next approached Abraham.
Abraham had left Ishmael sitting someplace and wandered off, so he was alone.
"I know what you intend to do," the Devil told him. "Desist from this
act of unspeakable cruelty."
"Are you trying to make me disobey God's orders, and further, to break
my vow? Begone, Satan!" And Abraham threw a second stone at the Devil.
Satan mused; things were beginning to look pretty bleak. Finally, he
approached Ishmael, who was sitting where his father had left him.
"Do you know why your father has brought you out into this wilderness?
He intends to sacrifice you to God."
"If those are God's orders, we all must submit to him," cried the little
boy. "Get away from me, whoever you are!" And he threw a third stone at the
Devil. Thus driven off, the schemes of the Devil were brought to nothing, and
he departed in failure.
Abraham then approached Ishmael. "My dearest son, one and only," he
said, "I have a confession to make. Do you know why I brought you out into
this wilderness? I once made a promise to the Lord before you were born that I
would sacrifice you to Him. For three nights in succession, God, whom I love
so much, has reminded me of my vow, and much as I love you, I can see no
recourse except to obey His orders."
"Father, dearest," said Ishmael, "if such is the commandment of the
Lord, of course we have no way out but to submit to it. But tell me, how did
God make His desire known to you?"
"In my dream."
"If you really love God that much, Father, tell me: how could you sleep
in His presence, that you should have a dream? But you will find me an
obedient son, both to my father and to God. Tie me up and blindfold me,
however, so that I may not resist you involuntarily when the time comes."
With tears in his eyes, Abraham did as his son wished.
We must pause to consider for a moment what a great trial this was,
both for Abraham and for Ishmael. It is the most difficult thing for a father to
sacrifice his only son whom he loves so much, and also for the son to submit to
it. Yet great good would follow from it, as we shall see.
Finally, everything was ready. Abraham took the knife, and struck
Ishmael's throat with all the force he could muster in order to spare him a
painful death.
The knife, however, simply turned around in his palm. Abraham was
astonished. Had the blade, which he had sharpened so carefully, become
inexplicably blunted? He decided to test it on a large rock nearby.
He struck the rock, and behold, the knife sliced through it as if it were
made of butter. Abraham decided there was nothing wrong with the blade, and
attempted the sacrifice a second time. Again the same thing happened.
Then, at that moment, Abraham saw the Angel of the Lord descending
with a ram. Gabriel placed it in front of Abraham. "I bring you greetings from
your Lord, Abraham," the angel spoke. "God is pleased that you have kept your
promise. But it is His wish that you should sacrifice this ram in Ishmael's stead,
so that you may all be spared, and the custom of sacrificing the firstborn be
removed forever from your people."

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 Both father and son were overwhelmed with gratitude. Crying, they
embraced each other, and gave thanks to the Lord. While they were thus
occupied, the ram ran off in the direction of Mina, where they were finally able
to corner it and accomplish the sacrifice.
And this is how the custom of human sacrifice was ended. If Abraham
had sacrificed his son, the custom would have become even further entrenched,
and all firstborn children of all the Faithful would have had to be sacrificed. But
many of the Prophets, including Jesus and Mohammed, were firstborn, and so
have many great men been since then. This single event of the sacrifice, we
now begin to realize, at one stroke rewrote the whole of human history.

How the Kaaba was Rebuilt

The Great Kaaba was built in its present shape for the first time by
Abraham and Ishmael. After some years had passed, the Lord commanded
Abraham: "Build an exalted House for Me."
Hence, Abraham set out on this mission, and after a while arrived in
Mecca. Ishmael was by now a mature man. Abraham told Ishmael about his
new task, and requested his help. But since no trace of the old Kaaba was left,
they had no idea where to begin. By dint of divine intervention, a roughly
square-shaped cloud appeared, and hovered over the present spot of the Kaaba,
marking out its borders to their view by the shadow it cast on the ground. While
Ishmael quarried stones from the hills, Abraham worked on the masonry. When
the walls became too high to lay stones, Abraham used a stone to elevate
himself. This was the same rock that he used to mount his animals when he was
visiting Hagar and Ishmael, and is today preserved at the "Station of Abraham"
in the Holy Sanctuary facing the door of the Kaaba. Climbing on top of the
rock, Abraham was able to raise the walls higher. The famous Black Stone was
used as the eastern cornerstone. They left it as four walls without a roof, but
today the Kaaba is covered by a flat roof supported by three wooden pillars on
the inside.
In time the Kaaba, always an object of veneration, became the center of
pagan practices and ceremonies. People could not stick to the strict monotheism
of Abraham and Ishmael, and degenerated into polytheism and the worship of
stones. At the time when Mecca was conquered by Mohammed (630 AD), it is
said to have sheltered 360 idols. The Prophet of God removed these idols from
the inside, and today it stands empty, except for calligraphic prayers hung on the
walls and a maintenance staircase that leads to the roof. Its door, the only
entrance, stands 2 m above ground level and is accessed via a portable stairway.
The covering of black silk cloth is decorated with verses from the Koran
embroidered in gold bands.

The Call to All Human Beings

When the construction work was completed, father and son prayed as
follows:
"Dear Lord, accept this House we have constructed as a token of our
servanthood. Surely You hear our prayers, and know our intentions. Make us

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obedient to You, and bring forth a nation from us that submits to You. Show us
the procedure of the Pilgrimage. Accept our repentance. Surely You alone are
the Most Merciful, the greatest Acceptor of Repentance.
"Dear Lord, send [our descendants] a Prophet from among them who
will recite them Your verses; teach them the Book and the Wisdom, and purify
them. Surely You are the Lofty, the Wise" (2:128-30).
God accepted this prayer of Abraham and Ishmael, and sent their
descendants the final Prophet, Mohammed, who established the religion of
Islam.
Archangel Gabriel came to them, and taught them how to perform the
Pilgrimage. They circumambulated the Kaaba seven times and ran between the
Twin Hills of Safa and Merva seven times, just as Adam and Hagar had done
before them.
Just when Abraham was about to leave, he received the mission to call
human beings to the Pilgrimage. The Lord Almighty declared:
"Purify my House. Call human beings to the Pilgrimage. They will
come to you on foot or astride from far distances" (22:26-27).
Abraham asked: "My Lord, how far can my voice reach?"
"To call out the invitation belongs to you, to make it heard belongs to
Me."
So Abraham turned back, stood on top of the Station of Abraham,
plugged his ears with his fingers, and to each of the four points of the compass,
he called out:
"Human beings, your Lord has built a House for you, and commanded
you to visit (hajj : 370 Pilgrimage) it. Be sure to visit it in Pilgrimage."
It is said that Abraham's call transcended time and space. It reached all
places and all times, past and present. Of those in whose destiny the Pilgrimage
lies, not one soul remained who did not reply: "Here I am, my God, here I am."
Everyone repeated this reply once if they would perform the Pilgrimage once in
their lifetime, twice if twice, and so on.
Note that God did not call simply Moslems, but "all human beings," to
the Pilgrimage. Therefore, everyone should be allowed to enter the Holy Land.
Jews and Christians, in whose holy books Abraham figures so prominently,
should be allowed to perform the Pilgrimage too if they want to, or come
visiting even if they are just curious. It is to be hoped that the Hajj
Administration will review and revise its position on this matter in the future.

The Procedure of the Pilgrimage

Such, in its basics, is the story. The main verses dealing with the
Pilgrimage in the Koran are 2:196-200, 3:96-7, 5:95-7, and 22:26-33. When
Mohammed received his Prophethood, he reorganized the Pilgrimage that had
been continuing from time immemorial, cleared it of spurious accretions, and
instituted it in the way it is performed today. It is one of the Five Pillars—the
five principal requirements—of Islam that one should, provided one has the
material resources, perform the Pilgrimage once in one's lifetime.

370 Hajj: A spiritual journey involving struggle.

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 You have been preparing expectantly for this day for a long time, or else
it may happen with astonishing suddenness. Time was when the Pilgrimage was
no task to be undertaken lightly. People used to travel for months, on foot or on
primitive vehicles, risking highway robbery and even death. Nowadays, it's a
piece of cake. You land in Jiddah by plane, or arrive by ship or by bus. From
the moment you start your journey, you are travelling in non-ordinary space and
non-ordinary time. This will make itself felt to you by subtle, telltale signs.
Taking a bus to Mecca, you arrive at the border of the Sacred Territory.
This is a circular area with the Kaaba as its center, and with a radius of about 30
km. You get off the bus at one of the facilities erected around its perimeter, and
proceed to enter Restriction (the ihram). For men, this consists of donning two
pieces of seamless white cotton terry cloth, which are wrapped around the waist
and shoulders. It resembles a shroud, and signifies that one is about to go before
one's Lord as one will after death, at the Resurrection. Women can wear a dress
that covers their extremities properly. From here on, until you finish your
Pilgrimage and take off the garment, it is forbidden to engage in sexual
intercourse, to harm or kill any living thing, to cut your figernails, and even to
pull out your hair, as cells would be dying. These are all requirements of the
Restriction.
Getting on the bus again, you continue on your way to Mecca, chanting:
"Here I am, my God, here I am," giving evidence that you have come to fulfill
the commandment of the Lord. You first go to the hotel booked for you, then
proceed with your group to the Holy Sanctuary. This consists of the Holy
Mosque, a structure of two nested squares, a two-story, arched collonade with
an inner courtyard the size of a football field. At the center of this courtyard
stands the House of God—the Kaaba.
The Holy Mosque is a sight to be seen. You enter it and proceed toward
the courtyard. Your guides have told you to keep your eyes lowered, so that
your first glance at the Kaaba will reveal its brilliant splendor to you. You have
also been told that whatever wish you make at this first sighting will come true.
You raise your eyes, and there it is—the Kaaba in all its dazzling
radiance, draped in black if it is the time of the Lesser Pilgrimage (practically all
the year round), in white if it is time for the Great Pilgrimage. The courtyard is
paved with white marble, so clean you can walk on it barefoot. You may sense
an invisible vortex of energy extending about halfway up the Kaaba.
You proceed to the starting point, which is the Black Stone, the eastern
Cornerstone encased in silver with a diameter of about 20 cm. A line of dark
marble extending radially outward marks its direction. (The diagonals of the
Kaaba seen from above point North-South and East-West, respectively.)
You start your circumambulation by kissing the Black Stone if you can.
This was started by the Prophet, and some have had reservations about it. Omar
the second Caliph, for instance, remarked: "You are just a stone, and I wouldn't
kiss you if the Prophet hadn't done so." It is kissed because it is held to be
sacred, not because it is a stone. Nowadays, however, its vicinity is so crowded
that you can start just by standing on the dark marble line and saluting the Black
Stone. You state your intention—for instance, "I will now begin the Minor
Pilgrimage."
Then, turning so that the Black Stone stands to your left, you perform
seven leftward circuits around the Kaaba, flowing with the crowd at a pace that
is neither too slow nor too fast, reciting the prayers appropriate to each circuit,

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saluting the Black Stone again as you reach your starting line. Thus, you follow
in the footsteps of Adam at the beginning, of Abraham and Ishmael, and of
Mohammed, the last Prophet.
Having finished the circuits, you perform a Prayer near the Station of
Abraham, offer your supplications, and then proceed to the Zamzam well, which
has now been moved underground. The authorities have also provided
numerous plastic dispensers and cups, so you can drink Zamzam wherever you
are in the Holy Mosque.
You taste the Zamzam, and discover that contrary to what you have read
in some sources, its taste is not brackish, but delicious. You drink your fill, and
proceed to the hill of Safa, which is also where the Prophet of God made his
mission public for the first time. A long, two-story gallery covers the space
between the Twin Hills, and a central aisle has been reserved for the sick and
elderly confined to wheelchairs. The corridor extends almost exactly North-
South, though not entirely.
You then climb the Safa Hill, make a statement of your intention, and
begin the Labor (say). You start walking toward Merva, reciting the appropriate
prayer at each pass, running part of the way that is indicated by green lights,
climbing Merva, returning to Safa three times and going to Merva four times.
Thus, you make seven trips between the Twin Hills.
Arriving at Merva for the last time, you have your hair cut—just a few
locks will do—and then return to your hotel to remove your garment, if you
have performed the Lesser Pilgrimage. Otherwise, you continue the Great
Pilgrimage.
Southeast from Mecca is, first: Mina, next: Muzdalifa, and last: Arafat,
not exactly along a straight line.
You go directly to the easternmost location first: Arafat, where the
Mount of Mercy is. You will remain standing at or near this Mount from noon
until sundown, bearing witness to your Lord, obeying His call and praying,
commemorating the reunion of Adam and Eve and the beginning of the human
race. This is also where the Prophet of God delivered the Farewell Sermon
during his last Pilgrimage.
In the evening you go to the plain of Muzdalifa, here to gather pebbles
for your next task. When morning comes, you continue on your way to Mina.
There are three pillars here symbolizing the Devil. Just as Abraham, Hagar and
Ishmael did before you, you throw seven pebbles at each of the three pillars.
Next, you sacrifice a ram—professional butchers can do it for you—as
Abraham did once upon a time, and have your head shaven if you are male.
This is the time of the Festival of the Sacrifice. (The other Islamic festivity is
the Ramadan Festival, celebrating the end of the Fasting period and signaling
that the Grace of the Lord has been harvested.) Those in other Islamic lands
participate in the Pilgrimage activities by sacrificing a ram, and distributing the
fresh meat to the poor and needy. After this, the Pilgrimage is finished, and you
can return to your hotel to take off your special attire.
It is highly recommended to visit the Prophet’s final resting place in
Medina afterwards, to pay homage to him most carefully and with the best of
manners (and also to the martyrs and other luminaries resting in the “Eternal
Garden” nearby). There, some gnostics are blessed enough to be engulfed in the
Presence of the Prophet.

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 Of course, this account leaves out many details, but this—in brief—is
the sequence of events in the Pilgrimage. It is no picnic but, after all, hard work,
and the younger you go, the easier it will be for you. Tired but exhilerated, you
will now return home, where people will greet you with a special respect
reserved for Pilgrims (hajji). From now on, you should be more careful in all
your words and deeds, for the merit you have gained—or the virtue you have
earned—needs to be preserved with a dignity becoming of that station.

So far we have dealt with the sacred history of the Kaaba, the primordial
events surrounding it, and the exoteric actions deriving from them. We must
press on further, however, if we wish to attain a better understanding. We have
not yet looked at the esoteric aspect, the organization of paradigmatic symbols,
and what these symbols mean. This, then, is the task we must tackle next.

A Word of Caution

In what follows, we shall attempt to interpret the events of the

Pilgrimage for the modern, rational mentality. This does not mean that
Moslems know, or need to know, the details about to be covered. When you get
in your car and turn on the ignition, you do not need to know how the car is
constructed. You may know next to nothing about its thousands of intricate
components, how they combine to form the sleek machine at your fingertips.
Nor are you called upon to build the car from scratch, which would require
resources far beyond your own. You only need to know how to drive a car.
Similarly, you are not called upon to build the road under its wheels—a vast
collective effort has gone into putting it there, and it is now at your service.
Again, you need to know nothing about the electronics and technology behind a
TV set in order to watch it—all you need to do is switch it on.
In a similar way, Moslems do not need to know why, and by what
process exactly, the acts they perform are meritorious. They perform them
simply and only because God has commanded them to do so, and has
vouchsafed an auspicious outcome. Even the most ignorant person is assured of
this promise—never mind the reasons why.
Nor, again, does the following pretend to be a comprehensive exposition
of the truth. Only God and His Prophet can know the whole truth in this matter.
What is attempted below is only to provide certain guidelines, using the
information and tools available to us, that will render the Pilgrimage more
intelligible to our modern intellect. Since our understanding is zero already,
anything—however small—is better than nil.
Nor would the author, being only human, wish to be held responsible for
errors arising from miscomprehension—or insufficient comprehension or the
lack thereof—of the concepts involved; or for any erroneous statement that has,
despite all his attention and efforts, managed to slip through; or for errors
resulting from mistranslation into other languages. When in doubt, always
return to the ultimate authority: the Koran and the authentic sayings of the
Prophet.
Bearing this disclaimer constantly in mind, the fact remains that our
knowledge has progressed to the point where, after all these centuries, we can at
least attempt to decipher the symbolism involved. One thing is certain: there is

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great truth—and great promise—in the Pilgrimage. As to what that truth is,
exactly, God—and God alone—knows best.

The Esoteric Aspect

The Pilgrimage signifies the return to the Origin—not only the origin of
Islam, of monotheism and of humanity, but the Source of all that is, namely,
God.
We may start our investigation with the Sufis, who are loosely known as
the mystics of Islam. Every true religion consists of exoteric teaching, i.e.
external rules and procedures, and esoteric teaching which reveals inner
meaning. The literalist or exoterist is concerned only with the outward, the
esoterist only with the inward. The Sufis are followers of the Middle Way,
upholding both the inner and the outer. In this sense, then, "Sufism = true
Islam."
According to the Sufis, the Kaaba on earth is a symbol for the Heart in
man. We capitalize the word "heart" in order to distinguish it from the blood
pump made of flesh; the Heart the Sufis mean is not your physical ticker, but its
spiritual counterpart. The heart is located at the center of the human body, just
as the Kaaba is located at the center of the world (more about this below). Just
as the Kaaba was cleared of idols when Mecca was conquered, all idols,
associates, and anything other than God should be cleansed from the Heart if we
wish to conquer Paradise. According to Fritjof Schuon: "The pilgrimage is a
pre-figuration of the inward journey toward the kaaba of the heart..." 371 The
famous mystic poet Rumi notes in his Discourses that the Kaaba stands for
union with God. We have already seen that the elevated, purified Heart of the
Perfect Man corresponds to the House of Splendor, the Heavenly archetype and
counterpart of the Kaaba. "Build a Heart (please someone)," say the Sufis, "and
you build the Kaaba; ruin (break) a Heart, and you wreck the Kaaba."
Why have the Sufis accorded such great importance to the Heart? And
why have they compared it to the Kaaba? Because the Heart is the dwelling-
place, the seat, of God. "The heavens and the earth cannot contain Me," says
God in a Holy Tradition, "but the Heart of my Faithful servant does." Hence,
when God declares: "Purify My House" (22:26), the exoterist understands this to
mean the physical building of the Kaaba. The Sufi does not deny this, but
claims that it has a further meaning, namely, "Purify your Heart," so that the
divine light may shine through.
This light has often been compared to the light of the sun, the sphere of
which, as we have seen, has the same symbolic significance as the Cube
(Kaaba). According to the famous Sufi sage and author of The Perfect Man,
Abdulkarim Jili, the sun is analogous to the heart (qalb). Gold, as we know, is
the solar metal, and according to another great Sufi sage, Ibn Arabi, gold is the
symbol of the original purity of the soul. Each child is born with that purity, 372
and it can be regained by great effort. Since equivalent symbols can be
substituted for each other, we can exchange the sun with gold to obtain "a heart
of gold," or vice versa to obtain a "soul of light" or "enlightened soul."

371Fritjof Schuon, Understanding Islam, London: Allen & Unwin, 1976 (1963), p. 79.
372Titus Burckhardt, Alchemy, Baltimore, Md.: Penguin, 1972 (1960), p. 85, 126.

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 The number 7 occurs in the seven counterclockwise (viewed from
above) circuits, the seven trips between the Twin Hills, and the seven stones
thrown at the three pillars (symbolizing the three appearances of the devil to
Hagar, Abraham, and Ishmael). 373 This is the number of levels of selfhood in
Sufism: 1. the Base Self, 2. the Critical Self, 3. the Inspired Self, 4. The Serene
(Contented) Self, 5. the Pleased (with God) Self, 6. the (God-)Pleasing Self, and
7. the Purified (Perfected) Self. In other words, one circumambulation, trip, or
pebble corresponds to each stage in the development of the self. 374
The Arabic word tafa, from which tawaf (circumambulation) is derived,
can mean "to attain the summit of a thing by spiraling around it." 375 The
circumambulation, according to Jili, "signifies that we must attain to our
selfhood, origin, root, point of union." 376
Now the sense of an ascent by spiraling immediately suggests a vertical
dimension. But since one does not climb to the top of the Kaaba during
circumambulation, but remains circling at ground level, this vertical elevation
must involve, not the third dimension of height, but another dimension. We
shall shortly return to this subject. For now, let us move on to consider the
meaning of the sacrifice.
According to Ibn Arabi writing in the Meccan Revelations (Futuhat), as
with Shakespeare and Schopenhauer later on, "life is but a dream." This is
supported by the Saying of the Prophet: "Men are asleep; when they die they
wake up." In that case, says Arabi, the events occuring in one's life can, and
should, be interpreted exactly as one interprets symbols in a dream. He has
written elsewhere (Fusus, "the Bezels of Wisdom") that Abraham should have
interpreted his sacrifice dream symbolically, in which case he would have seen
the truth, that he would be sacrificing a ram rather than his own son.
All this goes to show that the sacrifice of the ram in real life is itself a
symbolic act. Sacrifice has been a part of religion all over the world, and has
signified people's adoration of their Lord (or in polytheism, which is a
degeneration of monotheism, of more than one deity). Its meaning, however,
lies deeper.
"Sacrifice," sacrum plus facere, means "to make sacred." In Arabic as in
Hebrew, korban means "closeness" (to God). Of course, this cannot mean that
the sacrificial animal is somehow being sacralized or becoming closer to God.
Rather, the offerer of the sacrifice is himself attaining sacrality, is by this act
becoming close to God. And finally, it is the sacrifice of himself to God that is
involved. What is meant by this is not that one should commit suicide—for
otherwise the Faithful would cease to exist, which is obviously not what God
intends—but that one should purify one's self of all things displeasing to the
Lord. One should sacrifice the things that are most pleasing to one's self in

373 In connection with the esoteric aspect of the journey, it is also said that the three pillars stand
for satanic manifestations that prevent the Unification of Actions, of Attributes, and of the
Essence. Or, again, satanic manifestations at the level of Sacred Law, of Spiritual Schools, and
of Gnostic Knowledge (the culmination of which is the attainment of Reality).
374 According to Ibn Arabi, 7 represents the Seven Essential Attributes of God: Power, Will,
Knowledge, Life, Hearing, Sight and Speech.
375Fritz Meier, "The Mystery of the Ka'ba," in Joseph Campbell (ed.), The Mysteries: Papers
from the Eranos Yearbooks, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press (Bollingen Series), 1990
(1955), p. 164n41.
376Jili, The Perfect Man, quoted in ibid., n42.

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order to draw closer to God. In Abraham's case this was his son, whom he
loved most. But since this is a tall order—how many of us ordinary mortals are
prepared to sacrifice the things we love?—God has accepted, from us, the
sacrifice of a substitute in their stead. This has been specified and
institutionalized in order to avoid confusion.
The sacrifice, then, is symbolic of our sacrifice of our selves, or of those
things associated with the self which prevent us from attaining closeness to God.
As for the Zamzam water: water symbolizes life, purity, and
nourishment. By drinking the Zamzam, one purifies oneself, both materially
and spiritually.
Being bathed in sunlight while standing still at Arafat is symbolic of the
pilgrim’s being “washed” and “clothed” in divine light. According to a saying
of the Prophet: “The (Major) Pilgrimage is Arafat,” while according to another
of his sayings, Abraham set the precedent in this case as well.
Finally, let us consider the meaning of shaving the head. In Christianity
as well as in other religions, the tonsure has been a distinction of priests and the
pious. Hairlessness is characteristic of both old age, signifying wisdom, and of
extreme infancy, signifying the innocence and purity of a newborn baby (which
is why the author of the Tao Te Ching was called Lao Tzu, "old boy"). In a very
real sense, the Pilgrim has died to his old self and been reborn: has donned a
"shroud" during the Restriction, has gone through what is even now an ordeal,
and come out intact—and, hopefully, transformed—on the other side. Further,
a shining head is a solar symbol representing spiritual enlightenment, depicted
by the halos of saints. Hence, the shaving of the head denotes the completion of
the Pilgrimage, and signifies that one has been rewarded by the Lord for one's
troubles—has been promoted to an exalted station. Like Clarke’s monoliths, the
Kaaba is a “door of transcendence”: it uplifts the spirit of the pilgrim in the
same way that they transform ape-men into man or man into Star-Child.

Signs and Similitudes

Each age must perforce understand religion according to its own

conceptions. This does not mean that the basics of religion can be changed, but
rather that our mentality is different from that of our ancestors, as indeed our
children's will be from ours. This means that the same truths will be retold in
every age in an idiom specific to that age. Is there anything in our age that
would help us better understand the details of the Pilgrimage?
The Koran constantly exhorts human beings to investigate the
phenomena that surround us. This emphasis led to Islamic interest in all fields
of knowledge, which, as science historian George Sarton (of Harvard) and
others have reminded us, laid the basis for the Renaissance and modern science.
God Himself declares that He has created signs in all things (6:95-9) for human
beings. Among such signs are the forces of nature (89:1-5). "We will show
them our signs on the horizons and their own souls" (41:53), He says—signs "on
earth, in your own selves, and in Heaven" (51:20-3). God also proclaims that
He will not hesitate to draw a simile from even a gnat. As Goethe said:

Everything perishable

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 Is but an allegory

—for the Eternal, that is.

One aspect of these signs and similitudes is that they also have symbolic
significance in the spiritual realm (in our selves). Every object and every
process in the universe has a hidden meaning, and science, in the full unfolding
of its discoveries, has also—when viewed in a different light—been cataloguing
"the knowledge of hidden things" (Ar. ilm ladunni). This is meant not only in
the sense that science is discovering previously unknown things about the
physical world, though it includes this meaning as well. If we knew, in addition,
what these physical truths corresponded to in the spiritual/psychic and symbolic
realms, we would then be in possession of "hidden wisdom." For example, the
transformation of carbon into diamond under great heat and pressure represents
the transmutation of an ordinary human being, after great ordeals, into the
"divine body" of a Perfect Man. What other lessons might be drawn from the
discoveries of modern science and technology for our present purposes?
The first analogy that the circumambulation of the Kaaba brings to mind
is the circling of the planets around the sun. In physics, an object in orbital
motion is understood to be undergoing acceleration, even if its angular velocity
does not change, because its direction is continually being altered by a force (in
the case of the planets, gravitation). Another interesting correspondence is to be
found in the realm of electromagnetism. Electrons move in a circular path under
the influence of a magnetic field; or, conversely, the circular motion of electrons
gives rise to a magnetic field perpendicular to the plane defined by the circle in
which the motion takes place. The transverse fields of electric and magnetic
force are in fact intimately related, so that it makes more sense to talk about an
electromagnetic field rather than to consider the two fields in isolation. The
helical motion of electrons in a coil gives rise to a strong magnetic field directed
along the axis of the coil.
This relationship between the electric and magnetic fields made possible
the first particle accelerator: the cyclotron, invented by Ernest O. Lawrence.
Electrons emitted from a central point were kept under the influence of a
constant magnetic field and an alternating electrical field to spiral outward in a
plane, accelerating as they did so.

The Accelerator

These early attempts to obtain highly energetic particles have culminated

in the giant particle accelerators of our day. Consider, for example, the CERN
facility at Geneva, Switzerland. Its Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) accelerates
protons around a circular path up to energies of 24 billion electron volts (GeV).
Even more impressive, however, is CERN's Large Electron-Positron (LEP)
Collider, a mammoth ring-shaped tunnel with a 27-kilometer circumference,
where gigantic superconducting electromagnets whip particles up to within a
fraction of the speed of light, and their collisions are monitored by
supercomputers to unlock the secrets of the primordial fireball and the Big
Bang.
Two points may be singled out for examination from these examples.
The first is the relationship between circular (or spiral or helical) motion and

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acceleration, which means, in the end, an increase in energy. The second is that
the circular motion of electric charges is coupled to a magnetic force field in the
third dimension.
Now, there is no need to insist on the differences. Nothing could be
more obvious than the differences between an elementary particle and a human
"particle," which are enormous and obvious at a glance. Yet one might,
perhaps, be forgiven for wondering whether some kind of force field may not in
some way be involved in the circumambulation of the Kaaba—not necessarily a
physical force field, but a spiritual force field that either creates, or is created
by, but is in any case inextricably linked to the ceaseless circular motion of
untold millions of human beings. By an application of the principle of
equivalence, the descent of God's Grace may, perhaps, be viewed as a bestowal
of, and thus an increase in, spiritual/psychic energy. Furthermore, the circular
motion would be linked to a force field in a higher dimension than the plane in
which the circular motion occurs—not necessarily the third dimension.

The Fifth Dimension

Higher dimensions have become a stock-in-trade of modern physics.

For instance, quantum physics uses a mathematical space of 3n dimensions in
order to describe the behavior of an ensemble of n particles. In high-energy
physics, string theory has used 11 dimensions with interesting results. Infinite-
dimensional phase spaces and Hilbert spaces are not uncommon. The ordinary
world we inhabit, however, has hitherto been successfully described by the three
spatial dimensions, plus—ever since Einstein—the fourth dimension of time.
Nevertheless, we now have to consider the existence of at least a fifth
dimension in order to account for the spiritual dimension in man (and the
universe). This dimension, though accessible to man's consciousness, is not
reducible to the four dimensions of spacetime, and phenomena occuring within
it are not necessarily measurable in physical terms. Man, then, is a five-
dimensional creature, not four. He is an amphibious being that inhabits two
worlds: the physical world with his body, and the spiritual world with his soul.
A bird needs two wings in order to be able to fly. Remove one wing, and it
cannot. Remove one of man's two worlds, and he will become a cripple, a
stunted creature, no matter how proficient or successful he may be in the other.

The Laser

We shall soon return to the subject of the fifth dimension. Before we

move on, however, we must consider the second part of the Pilgrimage. We
have already mentioned the circumambulations. What metaphor, what simile,
does science suggest regarding the Labor between the Twin Hills?
Another extraordinary discovery of modern science and technology has
been the laser. This involves, not elementary particles of matter as in the case of
the accelerator, but particles of energy—electromagnetic photons, or light.

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 Ordinary light consists of photons of differing wavelengths,
directionality, and phase. The comparison was early made that this corresponds
to a choir where everybody is singing a different tune, at a different time, and
with a different pitch of voice—a cacophony, in fact. The object of the laser is
to ensure, as it were, that all the members of the choir sing the same tune at the
same time, and with the same pitch.
The "lasing medium" has two mirrors at both ends, one semitransparent.
Light enters this medium and moves back and forth (at the speed of light,
naturally) between these two mirrors, exciting the atoms or molecules of the
lasing medium. Light of a different directionality escapes through the walls of
the cylinder. This back-and-forth movement continues until the atoms discharge
exactly in lockstep, producing a light ray of great "purity" in which all the
photons are exactly in phase and monochromatic (of the same color or
frequency). When a sufficiently energetic beam is built up, it escapes through
the semitransparent mirror, yielding a pencil of "coherent" light—with the same
directionality, frequency, and phase.
Here again, we must be careful to observe that there can be no
comparison between a beam of laser light and a human being emerging from the
seven trips between the Twin Hills. Yet an analogy does suggest itself, in that
perhaps the spiritual energy of the Pilgrim is being further focused, intensified,
and rendered coherent during this process—which is the same thing as saying
that the Grace of God is somehow being further tempered and improved.
One must be extremely cautious not to overdo such metaphors, or to
draw the wrong parallels. The subject must be approached with a gravity
commensurate with the occasion. In any case, the simile of the laser, like that of
the accelerator, is an interesting one—an allegory 377 that excites the
imagination, and suggests that there may be more things in heaven and earth
"than are dreamt of in our philosophy."

Re-enactment, Participation, Regeneration

The story does not end there, however. As Mircea Eliade has
convincingly argued, 378 religious ceremonies are an attempt to re-create the
original situation considered to be sacred, and the sacred he has shown to mean
the real—or at least, the more real. Everything we experience in our profane,
four-dimensional spacetime is finite, evanescent, fleeting, temporary. The
sacred, on the other hand, is permanent, eternal, ever-present and everlasting.
Sacred time is eternally present; it is the eternal now or—to use Alan Watts'
coinage—"nowever," as indeed sacred space is the eternal here or "here-ever."
Our ordinary spacetime is in some way a subset of this sacred spacetime—a
surface of lesser dimension, as it were, in a space of higher dimension. This
space is coextensive with, but not limited or bounded by, our own continuum,
and its structure is such that it can be, but is not usually, accessed from every
point in our world.

377"Allegory is the interpretation of experience by means of images"—Dorothy Sayers (in her

Introduction to the Divine Comedy, quoted by Philip Wayne in the Introduction to his translation
of Faust, Part Two ).
378Eliade, op. cit.

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 Hence, when a religious person performs a ceremony, he is attempting to
draw closer to the primordial event that occurred either solely in sacred
spacetime, or in its intersection with ours. This means that the "surface" of our
continuum is not a smooth plane; it is an undulating surface of both crests and
throughs, peaks and valleys. This is the reason why the Kaaba is considered to
be "the highest place on earth," in spite of the fact that the mountains
surrounding it are there for all to see. This clearly indicates that the "height" in
question is not the physical height of the third dimension.
What all this means is this: the events experienced by Abraham, Hagar,
and Ishmael happened in both ordinary spacetime and in sacred spacetime.
They happened on a "mountaintop," as it were, and precipitated the descent of
Divine Grace. Hence, when a pilgrim implements the procedure of the
Pilgrimage, he is also attempting to draw closer to that point in spacetime by
means of this implementation, in order to share in the "rain" of Grace. (Ideally,
though impossibly, this would abolish the interval separating the here-now from
the there-then.) This follows a three-stage process: Re-enactment, participation,
and regeneration.
By re-enacting the details of the original ordeals, the pilgrims place
themselves in the condition of, the same state-space as, Abraham and his family.
They are thus led to participate in the very actions they are emulating by reason
of this emulation. (Induction may be an appropriate physical simile for this.)
Finally, they harvest the same auspicious results as their archetypal role-models
did, since God has here opened an avenue—a channel—to the reception of His
Grace. This is regeneration or sanctification, involving a death to the old self
and rebirth of a new, pure self, due to which the pilgrim has been promised that
"all his earlier sins will be cleansed (forgiven), and he will be as if newborn,"
like a Star-Child.

The Black Stone

Of the complex of symbols and processes surrounding the Pilgrimage,

one remains to be dealt with: the Black Stone—the heart, as it were, of the
Black Cube that comprises the Kaaba.
All pilgrimages are, to borrow a phrase from Jules Verne, a "Journey to
the Center of the World." ("World" here does not, of course, mean the physical
globe of the earth.) In a certain very real sense, the pilgrim is returning to the
Origin, both in space and in time, of the universe. The North Pole—pointing
toward the North Star—is a fitting image for this "still point of the turning
world." Since Adam, the first man, was the first to visit the Black Stone and
circumambulate it, this event is an archetypal model for all subsequent journeys
by all human beings to all other sanctuaries conceived of as being "the Center of
the World," 379 for which, in turn, the Black Stone constitutes the archetype.
This is not all, however. The Kaaba also "faces the center of Heaven" 380, which
means that a vertical axis connects the Center of the World with the Center of
Heaven. This can be represented if we lump the three spatial dimensions x, y, z
into one axis and show the dimension of time t on a second axis, thus reducing

379Eliade, p. 183.
380Quoted in Eliade, p. 38.

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spacetime to a plane. (This is, in fact, nothing other than adding a third axis to a
Feynman Diagram.) Again, it should be stressed that this vertical dimension is
not the third physical dimension of height.
This axis, then, is in fact the path of "descent" or projection of the Black
Stone from its heavenly counterpart onto the earth. It is also the invisible axis
around which the counterclockwise circuits occur, and toward which Moslems
in concentric circles prostrate themselves in Formal Prayer all over the world.
(We have already mentioned the force field occuring perpendicular to the plane
of circular motion, which if existent would coincide with this axis.)
The Black Stone is the foundation stone of the Kaaba, in the sense that it
was originally at its center and was the first stone to be "laid." Later, however,
it was moved from the center to the corner for easy access (since the House of
God is seldom entered), and during the reconstruction of the Kaaba at various
times it was the cornerstone, the last stone to be lifted into place. And "the
cornerstone is at the exact center of the world." 381
The Black Stone, then, is the keystone in the sense that it is both the first
and the last, the alpha and the omega. At first, its displacement from the center
of the Kaaba (the vertical axis) to the corner may appear to be a discrepancy.
The alif, however—the first letter of the Arabic alphabet, as is aleph in the
Hebrew—consists of a vertical stroke slightly curved to one side at the bottom.
Now the significance of this alif is threefold. First, it is the first letter of
the Supreme Name of God (Allah), and hence represents that Divine Name.
Second, it highly resembles the numeral "1", and reminds us that God is One.
And finally, it represents the vertical axis, the axial pillar. Its upper point
represents the Secret of Secrets, reaching all the way up to the Archetypal Stone
in Heaven and passing, perhaps, even beyond, to the Paradise of the Essence.
And on the other hand, its lower end corresponds exactly to the position of the
Keystone, the Black Stone of the Kaaba. 382
Now we have already associated the seven circumambulations with an
increase in spiritual/psychic energy, and the seven trips with a refinement, a
coherence, of this energy. One question, however, remains: energy for what?

3001

And now, after almost thirty years, Arthur C. Clarke has given us 3001:
The Final Odyssey. His plot is as imaginative as ever. Astronaut Poole dies, is Comment: A.C. Clarke, 3001: The
Final Odyssey, New York: Ballantine
resurrected a thousand years in the future, goes to Star City (the "Heavenly Books, 1997.
City"—remember New Jerusalem and Wells' Time Traveller), up to which
leads, from the earth, the "Space Elevator." There are four of these elevators
contained in towers reaching up to "the Heavenly City," which girdles the earth
like a ring (refer back to the symbolism of the ring and the circle). This Tower
is a "gigantic, sky-piercing cylinder" which, as Clarke tells us in his "Sources,"
until recently could only be made of diamond. But this is precisely Plato's "axis
of diamond" which he describes as the World Axis, another description for
which is the "pillar of light." 383

381Ibid.,
p. 54. (Italics in the original.)
382RenéGuénon, Fundamental Symbols, Cambridge: Quinta Essentia, 1996 (1962), p. 192n19.
383Guénon, p. 196.

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 Now the primeval Pen (the Qalam, mentioned in 68:1) is light in Islam.
According to a Tradition, the Pen, of which the pencil-like minarets of a mosque
are symbolic, was the First Light and the First Spirit to be created.384 Likewise,
the writing by the Pen on the Guarded Tablet is a light of God.
At this point we might remember that there was another House of God
besides the Kaaba, for which, as we have seen, the latter provides the archetype.
Jacob, in his dream at Haran, saw a ladder reaching up to heaven, with angels
ascending and descending on it, and heard the Lord speaking from above it,
saying: "I am the Lord God of Abraham." Jacob woke up, and said: "This is
none other but the house of God, and this is the Gate of Heaven" (named the
"Sun Door" in other traditions—recall the "Star Gate" of 2001). He took a stone
that had been serving as his pillow, set it up as a monument, and called the place
Beth-El: "the House of God" (Genesis, 28:12-19).
Moreover, Eliade has collated evidence from all over the world that this
cosmic pillar, or "Jacob's Ladder," has been known to all people of all cultures
and all places. Here are some of the names it has been called: Pillar of the
Universe (which supports heaven and all things). World Axis. Universal
Column. Sacred Pillar. Door to the World Above. Cosmic Pole. Pole of
Heaven. Center of the World (located "in the Middle," at the "Navel of the
Earth"). Post of the World. Universal Pillar. Jedi Column. Link between
Heaven and Earth. As Eliade is careful to note: "The multiplicity, or even the
infinity, of centers of the world raises no difficulty for religious thought. For it
is not a matter of geometrical space, but of an existential and sacred space that
has an entirely different structure, that admits of an infinite number of breaks
and hence is capable of an infinite number of communications with the
transcendent." 385
Furthermore, this Cosmic Pillar forms the axis of the Cosmic Mountain
(the Magic Mountain that represents the universe), the Sacred Mountain (e.g.
Mt. Meru, Mt. Alburz, Mt. Gerizim, Mt. Olympus), the cone that represents this
mountain, the evergreen Christmas tree with a star at the top which resembles
the mountain, the Wheel of Life, the World Tree, the Tree of Life, of which—
for example—the shinbashira pillar at the center of Japanese pagodas is
symbolic. In the upward direction are ordered the various heavens. Its base is
in our four-dimensional spacetime continuum. In the negative direction,
towards the underground roots, are the various hells and infernal regions.
Now, the laser would probably be the best simile for this world axis.
Two facts, however, militate against it. First, the laser is monochromatic (of a
single frequency or color), whereas the pillar is always composed of white light,
which is a composite of all colors. Second, the axis is curved at the bottom,
which never occurs with a laser. So, as our final symbol or metaphor from
modern science and technology, we shall choose: the fusion reactor.

The Tokamak

Two schemes have been proposed for achieving thermonuclear fusion:

inertial confinement and magnetic confinement. Of these strategies, we select

384 “First” here corresponding to “Mohammedan.”

385Eliade, p. 57.

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magnetic confinement as our model, and more specifically the tokamak design,
first proposed by Igor Tamm and Andrei Sakharov.
The four classical elements of earth, water, air, and fire have today found
their counterparts in the four states of matter recognized by modern physics:
solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. When matter is heated to temperatures that exist
within the sun's core—say, a hundred million degrees—the ordinary structure of
the atom can no longer be maintained, and a fourth, "plasma," state is reached
where electrons and nuclei exist freely without bonding to each other. The
nuclei, thus stripped of their electrons, are able to "fuse," liberating immense
amounts of energy.
This plasma would, of course, instantly vaporize anything it came into
contact with, so the idea has been proposed of confining it in a "magnetic
bottle." In the tokamak design, this bottle consists of a toroid, or doughnut-
shaped ring. Although tokamaks of the same circumference as the LEP Collider
have not yet been built, one can imagine such a device, a short segment of
which—while still curved—would then approximate a straight line.
In this device, a shaft of white-hot plasma is separated from all external
things by means of an insulating wall, and is confined by magnetic field lines
that prevent the plasma from touching the wall. Here, too, would be a sign for
those who wish to consider such "signs on the horizons and in themselves."

The Inner Space Elevator

Most important of all, the cosmic pillar is the axis along which the
Ascension to Heaven occurs. We hasten to add that this Ascension, also known
to all peoples, does not refer to a physical elevation into outer space, but again
to a spiritual elevation in inner space. This Ascension to Heaven and to God is
called miraj in Arabic. The latter word should not be confused with "mirage,"
meaning an optical illusion and deriving from the Latin mirari (to wonder at) as
well as the French mirer (to look at, to aim at). On the contrary, miraj means
"ladder" or "stairway," and in our day would mean "elevator" or "escalator." Its
plural, maarij, is the name of a chapter in the Koran and is mentioned in the
same chapter (70:3-4). This implies that there are more than two "stairways"—
in fact, a plurality of Ascensions, the greatest and most famous of which is
Mohammed's Ascension.
Thus, Clarke's "Space Elevator" in psychic reality corresponds to the
Inner Space Elevator, called miraj in Islam. And this elevator itself is symbolic
of the Ascending 386 Straight Path of Islam, which, when carried out faithfully,
constitutes the foolproof algorithm for sanctity and happiness. We thus begin
to see how right Moslems have been in claiming that Islam is the perennial
religion, the archetypal religion that combines and incorporates all religions,
philosophies, and mysticism.

386 Sirat al-mustaqim: “The ascending path.” Ibid., p. 156n7.

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Conclusion

We see, therefore, that the spiritual/psychic energy granted by God

during the Pilgrimage will help pilgrims, in the future life, to ascend to a level in
accordance with their accomplishments. This is one of the greatest boons of
God that can be bestowed on a human being—any human being.
A good analogy for this process by which people are “beamed up” might
be the model of the atom provided by modern physics. The atom pictured as a
miniature solar system came to Niels Bohr (like Kekulé’s benzene ring, and the
DNA double helix) in a dream. Although this view has long since been
superseded, a part of Bohr’s model is still with us, in which the electrons
orbiting an atomic nucleus are conceived of as inhabiting different energy
levels. Each “shell” surrounding the nucleus corresponds to a different step on
the “energy staircase.” An electron absorbing a quantum of energy (a photon)
jumps to a higher energy level, and any electron receiving enough energy to be
knocked out of the upmost level becomes “liberated” to wander as a free
electron. In the present analogy, the steps of the energy staircase would
correspond to the various levels of heavens, and the liberated electrons would
correspond to the saints (or “friends of God,” or “the Free”) who are drawn near
to the Divine Presence. (Proximity to God is preferable to any heavenly state,
no matter how wonderful.)
But the Pilgrimage is a journey which, after all, only a comparatively
few can embark on. What about all the rest who cannot make the trip in their
lifetimes?
Fortunately, the Pilgrimage is not the only way that one can attain to
Ascension. For the Prophet of God returned from his Ascension with the great
good news that human beings can purify themselves and come closer to God by
another method, which he enjoined on all Moslems: namely, the Formal Prayer.
"The (Formal) Prayer," he said, "is the Ascension of the Faithful." And, further:
"Who has no (Formal) Prayer has no Ascension." This means that God has
folded up the possibility of Ascension and placed it in the Formal Prayer.
All this, and much more besides, is dealt with in the Koran, which
incorporates and goes beyond (represents the culmination of) the previous three
books (the Bible), and which constitutes God's Final Testament to mankind.
This would be the obvious point for a discussion of the Formal Prayer, of
the relationship between man as microcosm and the universe as macrocosm, and
the unheard-of things that God has prepared in Paradise for His servants who
obey the Sacred Law.
... But that's another story.387

387 See the chapter: “Solving the Riddle of the Universe.”

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 SUFISM: THE CASE OF THE CRYPTIC WINEGLASS

Aleph and the Transfinite

Borges. Borges the Memorable. Borges, who foreshadowed the coming of

the World Wide Web and the pocket computer in The Book of Sands. Jorge Luis
Borges, whose interest in Sufism and Cabalism, in metaphysics and mysticism, has
been the subject of more than one study. It is to him that we owe that gripping tale of
uncanny power: "The Aleph."
"Borges" (the first-person narrator) is first alerted to the existence of the
Aleph through Carlos Argentino, whose house has a cellar containing one; "an
Aleph," writes Borges by way of introduction, "is one of the points in space
containing all points... the place where, without any possible confusion, all places in
the world are found, seen from every angle."
The incredulous narrator is led by the cranky Argentino down the stairs, and
told to fix his gaze on the 19th step. He has a moment's hesitation where he suspects
treachery and fears for his life. "Then," he writes, "I saw the Aleph."
"In that gigantic instant I saw millions of delightful and atrocious acts; none
astonished me more than the fact that all of them together occupied the same point,
without superposition and without transparency. ... The Aleph's diameter must have
been about two or three centimeters, but Cosmic Space was within it, without
diminution of size. Each object was infinite objects, for I clearly saw it from all
points in the universe." Here, Borges embarks on a listing of the multifarious things
he saw; to my knowledge, the only thing to compare with it in all of modern literature
is the vision in Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha. "[I] cried," writes Borges, "because my
eyes had seen that conjectural and secret object whose name men usurp but which no
man has gazed on: the inconceivable universe.
"I felt infinite veneration, infinite compassion." 388

This, of course, is not the first occurence of this overwhelming concept. One
is reminded of the gipsy madam's crystal ball. Borges himself mentions the mirror of
Alexander, the mirror of Merlin, "the septuple goblet of Kai Josru." By this route we
are led back into Persian mythology, and to the crystal wineglass of Jem (or Jemshid).
According to legend, Jem was the inventor of wine, and his wineglass was
capable of displaying to view all eternity and infinity at once. According to a variant
form, the goblet is made of a mixture of seven metals. It is known as jaam-i jem
(rhymes with "john-a gem," substituting an "m" for the "n"). Let us trace the story of
the wineglass through Fariduddin Attar, the Sufi poet, who deals with it in The Book
of God.
According to Attar, the Persian king Kai Khosru somehow came into
possession of Jem's Wineglass, and was watching the secrets of the seven climes, and
the courses of the seven stars (note the repetition of the number seven). "There was
nothing, whether good or bad," continues Attar, "that remained hidden from him. He
wanted to see the Cup of Jem, to watch the entire universe in it." And so he did, but
by and by he came to a curious realization: although he could see everything in the

388Quotationsare from J.L. Borges, "The Aleph" (tr. Anthony Kerrigan), in A Personal Anthology,
London: Picador, 1972, p. 113-125.

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universe through the goblet, he could not see the goblet itself therein. As he was
pondering this mystery, an inscription appeared in the goblet. It said:
"How can you see us in us? We have passed away entirely from ourselves.
Whatever you see, is not us. You can see everything through us, but it is impossible
to see us in between."
Reading these words, the Sassanid king Kai Khosru understands that his
kingdom itself is naught, and renounces his crown and his throne. He enters a cave
with the goblet. There, he draws Jim's Wineglass to his bosom, takes refuge in the
Fortress of Nonbeing, dons the Cloak of Invisibility, and is lost forever from human
cognition.

Such is the story. Now for the interpretation:

"Know," says the great Persian Sufi poet Sanai in his Food for Seekers, "know
that the cup of Jem is your heart. If you want to see the cosmos, it is possible to see
all things in that heart. The eye of the head sees bodies composed of the elements;
only the Eye of the Heart can see what is hidden. First open the Eye of your Heart,
watch everything afterwards."
The Wineglass, then, is a symbol for the heart of the Islamic mystic, the Sufi.
As René Guénon has shown, the cave is also a metaphor of the heart. Hence, we
should search for the Aleph, not on the 19th step of a cellar staircase, but in our own
hearts. Nevertheless, the staircase, implying spiritual elevation or Ascension, has its
own significance. In classical Islamic cosmology, the number of worlds created by
God is 18 (or 18,000, a thousand subuniverses to each universe); 19 points beyond
them all, and was considered a sacred number in the ancient Near East. The
sevenfold nature of the goblet derives from the fact that only after the spiritual
journey through the Seven Stages of Selfhood is finished does the heart "become" the
Wineglass—that is, it displays the entire universe to view.
For this to happen, however, the Sufi must first experience the transformation,
or transmutation, of the self (the crude, raw self) to Self: he or she must be lost to this
world. Not only must the world be unable to find him, but he himself must be unable
to find himself, having found God. One cannot find God without losing one's self,
one's individual selfhood. Jane Smith cannot find God without first dissolving and
losing Jane Smith (the Fortress of Nonbeing). Hence, when Jane Smith rests in
Witnessing (Observation), she beholds God's infinite beauty; she experiences the
incredible fullness—effulgence—of God. In that moment, she is invisible, she is
nowhere to be found, she cannot be seen—which is the actual meaning of the Cloak
of Invisibility.
The greatest obstacle to the clear perception of God is your own individuality.
Get rid of it, and you will see what was always already there to begin with!
Moreover, when you look into your heart, you will see the universe and everything
that is in it—which, of course, is easier said than done.
So why don't we see anything, let alone the universe, when we look into our
hearts? It is because our hearts have become clouded over with concerns other than
God. Think of a glass full of murky water. It is impossible to see anything in it. Or
if the glass itself has become opaque, one cannot see whether there is any liquid in it
or not. But if you purify your heart—of everything other than God, that is—it will
become crystal clear, and will contain the divine water of life. Then, like a crystal
ball, it will reveal what is on the other side. Because God's unmanifest Essence
cannot be seen in the observable universe, it is through His Attributes—which
manifest themselves as the cosmos— that He becomes known.

265
 But why a wineglass, exactly? Because wine, in Sufism—but especially in
Persian Sufism—is the symbol of love; not physical love, but divine love, the love of
God. This love is heady; it makes your head spin. Like ordinary wine, it makes you
drunk, but it is worlds apart from ordinary wine. It is wine divine; it is the ambrosia
of God, to which nothing can be compared. 389 Hence, ordinary wine can only be a
simile for it, and an immeasurably inadequate one at that. The wineglass, in that case,
is a metaphor for the pure heart full of the love of God.

Man and God

Man's plans for himself and God's plans for man are two different things.
Man wishes to make the best of his time in this fleeting world, to have a good time
before his hour strikes. God, too, wishes for man to use his time wisely,
productively—but man and God differ in how this is to be done. Man, knowing little,
not knowing where he has come from nor where he is going, tries to act in accordance
with his own limited preconceptions. God, knowing why He created the universe,
knowing why and to what purpose He created man, has an infinitely better knowledge
of what man should do, and why. It is in man's own best self-interest to heed the
counsel of God. We are fortunate indeed that God, the Lord of the Worlds, should
have bothered at all to guide humanity every now and then. We are even luckier to
possess a foolproof method revealed by God leading to felicity. Not heeding it would
be tantamount to our own self-condemnation. Life is short, and we shall not have this
opportunity forever. It is better to act wisely now than to make the wrong choice and
regret it in the end.
The Wineglass is not for the timid, the lazy, or the faint of heart. Just as not
everyone can become an Einstein or Mozart, neither can everyone become a saint or a
Friend of God. Nevertheless, even a small step in the right direction helps. Even if
you cannot achieve total liberation, if you have taken one step forward, to that extent
you are closer to salvation.
Here we encounter a problem. Historically, the path of the solitary saint has
been quite different and much more exacting than that of the ordinary man, resulting
in extreme asceticism, monkery, and monastic retreat. Nevertheless, it stands to
reason that there must exist a path that leads to Grand Central, if only one keeps on
doing more of the same. In other words, the path should be the same, and the
difference should be one of degree, not of direction. If you and I set out to climb a
mountain, and you make it to the top, I should be able to get there too if only I follow
in your footsteps—but I may not be resourceful or diligent enough to do so. Yet I
should still end up higher than I was before.
This is what the methods of Islam address. Islam is, by and large, for the
ordinary man, yet the ordinary man, if he really applies himself to it, can become a
mystic or saint merely by practising its methods with greater intensity (but not
necessarily greater quantity—a healthy balance is all-important). The path itself is
not different. Paradise is a waystation on the road that leads to God, it does not lie at
the end of a different road. Hence, as you invest your energy, so shall you reap.
At the same time, it should be realized that "effortless Enlightenment" and
"instant Nirvana" are not viable options. Even if it may be easier today, those who

389In the Koran, “heavenly wine,” which is pure and not comparable to earthly wine, is mentioned in
47:15, 76:21, and 83:25.

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wish to conquer Mt. Everest should be prepared to expend an effort at least
comparable to that of Hillary and Tenzing. And even then, it is only by the grace of
God that one finally reaches the top.

Courtesy

Perhaps because Islam has had a bad press lately, there is a tendency to
dissociate Sufism from Islam, and to treat it as an entirely separate entity. Some
works on Sufism scarcely make any reference to Islam. Unfortunately, this is
misleading. Islam as a religion does not deserve the derisive treatment it receives in
the media, especially since it is at one with the media in condemning wrong action,
even if such action comes from its adherents. Where terrorism (unjust murder of
innocents) begins, Islam ends.
Islam comprises an exoteric and an esoteric aspect. The exoteric aspect,
composed of exterior rules and regulations, a code of moral conduct and
psychophysical practices, is called the Divine Law (sharia). 390 The esoteric side,
which deals with the interiority, the spiritual aspect of man, is called Sufism.
Properly, Islam is the Law plus Sufism, the exoteric plus the esoteric. However,
because its esotericism is accessed with difficulty while its exotericism is in full
display, there is a tendency to equate Islam with the exoteric Law alone. This is a
terminological error.
In fact, the Law and Sufism—or exoteric Islam and Sufism—are related to
each other as body and soul. Without Sufism, the Law alone would be a lifeless
corpse. Without the Law, Sufism would be a disembodied spirit—a ghost. It is the
combination of both that transforms them into a living, breathing being.
It is well-known that those who have faith and do good works will be
rewarded in the afterlife, and unbelievers who do ill will be punished. But this is not
all. A golden thread that leads beyond this simple Heaven-Hell dualism is woven into
the very fabric of the Koran. This thread is for the Elect, for those who are not
satisfied with mere gardens of Paradise and aspire to greater things. Although all
human beings will be subject to judgment, the Elect can, by individual struggle, attain
nobler goals.
But it must be added at once: how best may we serve the deeper meaning of
the Koran? By being as faithful as possible to its exoteric meaning. For the literal
meaning is the shell, the wrapping, that protects the soft kernel inside. The two are
related to each other as form and content; both are indispensable.
Therefore, one cannot have Sufism without the Law. The divine law provides
the foundation upon which rises the superstructure of Sufism. Pull out the base from
underneath, and the whole edifice would collapse. The moral and ethical principles,
the external observations, are essential if any true spiritual progress is to be achieved.
If, for example, the spiritual development of a person disregards the rights of others,
if it throws moral conduct to the winds, the result will be a journey into narcissism, a
horizontal inflation of the ego rather than a vertical elevation of the Self. The Italian
Professor of Turcology, Anna Masala, who has spent many years in association with
Sufis, is quite unequivocal in viewing the Law as a prerequisite of true spirituality.

390 As I have suggested earlier in this book, the derivation and implementation of a legal code over
society is distinct from this, and more properly called fiqh.

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"People," she says, "want to pass directly from Christianity to Sufism. This is not
possible. One must first learn and understand Islam, and then make the transition to
Sufism."
In particular, the fact that the concept of original sin does not exist has
profound implications for Islam. (Even though Adam and Eve were relocated from
Heaven to earth, thus initiating the great adventure of humanity, this did not result in
an irrevocable genetic pathology visited upon their progeny for the rest of time. 391)
Because of this, there is no need for a Savior, or the train of associated concepts that
follows in its wake: the sacrificial death of the Savior, salvation of the community
through this supreme act of sacrifice, sacraments such as the Eucharist, or a
priesthood with the authority to administer such sacraments. As one study notes
about Islam: "Those who lead prayers, preach sermons, and interpret the law do so by
virtue of their superior religious knowledge and scholarship rather than because of
any special powers or prerogatives conferred by ordination." 392
In a saying attributed to him, the Prophet of God declared: "Ignorance is the
mother of all evil." In the Islamic view, the fundamental problem of the human
condition is ignorance rather than sin. Man is viewed as essentially good but, because
of his ignorance, easily prone to error. It is this weakness that Islam sets out to
remedy, by fortifying man with knowledge.
The most important thing in Sufism is not visions or spiritual experiences or
an elated state of mind. The most important thing is salutary moral conduct, which is
honed to a refinement where it surpasses pure and simple ethical behavior, and
becomes what the Sufis call Courtesy, or gracious conduct (adab). This is the
epitome of gentle(wo)manly behavior towards all creatures, to act with consideration
toward everything, nobility of soul; to extend tolerance and compassion to all God's
creatures out of our love for Him. No spiritual experience, no matter how lofty or
impressive, can substitute for courteous conduct, for it is this conduct which certifies
the experience's authenticity. And it is only when it is severely tested that it becomes
clear whether this courtesy is permanent, or whether it bleaches at the first wash. It is
easy to be magnanimous when one is in a happy mood, but it becomes extremely
difficult to maintain this attitude when faced with hardships. Thus, self- and spiritual
development is grounded in moral conduct from the very first step.
This is one of the reasons why alcohol is prohibited in Islam. (Another reason
is that, as a doctor of my acquaintance once put it, "Alcohol is physiologically
injurious to the body all the way from its point of entry to the point of exit.") The
Arabic original word for wine is hamr, which, however, has the meaning of "dulling
one's senses and consciousness." In other words, not just wine or alcohol but
anything that pulls a veil over one's attention, one's awareness (such as narcotics),
falls in this category. The main result of dulled mental acumen is the failure to
discriminate between right and wrong, and hence to avoid unethical conduct while
drunk. One is then open to the hazard of flagrantly violating all moral inhibitions and
regretting the outcome. Sufism aims at reaching a higher consciousness, not a lower
one.

Contact

391 Is this one reason why Lamarck’s “inheritance of acquired characteristics” was opposed so
vehemently, and Darwin’s “natural selection through random mutation” championed?
392 “Tenets of Sunni Islam,” in Country Studies: Turkey, Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1987
(www.loc.gov).

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 The inner, spiritual, side of man just will not be repressed. The more we try to
drive it out, the more insistently it keeps coming back to us. This is not just because
it is an integral part of our existence, but rather because it is our fundamental reason
for being in this universe, on this planet. According to the Koran, God created us
only that we should worship Him, and a relative of the Prophet—as well as Sufis ever
since—interpreted this to mean that we should know Him, since God has no need for
our worship and worship only serves to bring us closer to Him.
Take, for example, the case of Carl Sagan, who passed away towards the end
of 1996. Many of us were exposed to our first serious treatment of the possibility of
extraterrestrial life through a work he co-authored with I. M. Shklovskii, Intelligent
Life In The Universe (1966). The great astrophysicist was a peerless popularizer of
science, and could never bring himself to a faith in God; he died an agnostic. Yet
Contact (1985), his only novel, deals with the perennial concerns and condition of
humankind under the guise of space beings.
The movie Contact (1997), filmed by Robert Zemeckis and dedicated "for
Carl," is replete with bleed-throughs that make eminent sense when viewed from a
spiritual standpoint. It deserves to be called the second 2001. The movie opens with
the earth seen from space. We are treated to an Ascension (Ar. miraj) that moves out
through the solar system, beyond the rings of Saturn, goes out to loci of star
formation shot by the Hubble Space Telescope, out to myriads of galaxies revealed
through the Hubble Deep Field study, and ends with "Let there be Light."
Cut to the childhood of Ellie Arroway, who is searching for her dead mother
over the airwaves of ham radio. Her father dies of a heart attack, and contacting outer
space becomes an obsession for her. She grows up to become a radio astronomer, an
agnostic like Carl Sagan, who will not believe anything unsupported by scientific
evidence. Angels (beings from inner space) are out; aliens (beings from outer space)
are in.
Dr. Eleanor Arroway's research is sponsored by Hadden, a reclusive magnate,
formerly an engineer, who does not live on earth (he resides either on a private jet or,
later on, in the space station Mir). Finally, she intercepts a radio transmission from
Vega, a star 27 light-years from earth. Once the code is deciphered, it turns out that
the extraterrestrials are sending the plans for a transporter.
To cut a long story short, Arroway is chosen to represent humanity. The
transporter is a contraption made of rotating rings, somewhat like the Bohr model of
the atom, and a spherical metal capsule housing Arroway is supposed to fall into its
center. Inside the capsule is only a seat.
The metal hatch seals on her, and she is isolated from the rest of the world. A
vibration begins building up; the bottom of the capsule becomes transparent at times.
Then she is hurled through a system of "Einstein-Rosen wormholes," but the
armchair breaks off and hits the ceiling—she is left in pitch dark—the capsule has
become her tomb.
She moves to the top, which becomes transparent and reveals a galaxy in all
its splendor. Through its reflection in her eyeball we move to a scene where she is
descending onto a planet, to a beautiful coast with palm trees. It develops that this is
exactly the scene she painted when she was a child. Along comes an apparition of
her father, and tells her that the extraterrestrials have selected this mode of
communicating with her to make her feel at home. She clocks eighteen hours.

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 Cut to the capsule, falling into the sea. It has fallen straight through the
contraption! As far as those outside are concerned, nothing at all extraordinary has
happened. In fact, the experiment might be considered a big failure.
And now Arroway—in an instance of supreme irony (or is it divine
justice?)—who once did not believe in claims unsupported by evidence, is herself
unable to convince others of her experience. The only shred of evidence that speaks
in her favor is eighteen hours of recorded static on the monitors.
All this is well and good, and as plausible a scenario of extraterrestrial contact
as could be expected.
But now, interpret this from the time-honored point of view. Hadden the
magnate (hairless and reminiscent of a Buddhist) is our heroine's guru, who contacts
her from other planes of existence. Her entombment in the capsule is a flashback to
the initiation ceremonies of Hermeticism, a precursor of Sufism. 393 The mechanical
vibration she experiences is possibly a side-effect of an Out-of-Body Experience
(OBE). The wormholes are instances of the "space bending (or folding)" (tayy al-
makan) reported by Sufis. 394 She is left in utter darkness, experiences an Unveiling,
and her spirit (the "inner Arroway") is transported to a place resembling Heaven.
Here she meets a being in the guise of her father—in religious traditions, it is well-
known that angels can assume human form, perhaps for precisely the same reason as
do the hypothesized aliens. She returns to the ordinary world, and is unable to
convince anyone else of her experience.
Look at the spiritual traditions of the entire world, and everywhere, for as far
back as the mind's eye can see, you will find similar experiences reported in a similar
way by human beings from totally different cultural backgrounds. It is not for
nothing that more than one critic has remarked the religious overtones, in addition to
the more mundane physical interpretation, of Contact. The difference is that today,
we transpose the experience into the physical realm. This, however, does not detract
from its importance, for it is crying out loud to make us stand up and take notice of it.
No matter how much man denies his spiritual side, it will keep knocking at the door,
whether you are an agnostic or an atheist or a free-thinker, or just a plain ordinary
secular human being. All we have to do is sit up and get the message.
Dare we press the analogy a bit further? The message from outer space is a
message from "the Supreme Extraterrestrial;" the incomprehensible alien cipher is the
Koran. Once decoded properly, the Koran bears the plans (God's instructions to
human beings) for a transporter that will "beam us up" straight to Unity.

Some Parallels

It is not only in its plot, then, that Contact resembles 2001. Both were produced
from a nontheistic, if not overtly atheistic, viewpoint, describing purely physical
events or a physical evolution; yet the concerns they give voice to are the perennial
concerns of religion and self-transcendence, despite the fact that nothing could have Comment: A statement from the Web
been further from the conscious intentions of their creators. What is happening is that supporting this view: “The interesting
thing about Clarke is that even though he
the latter are taking valid religious and transcendental metaphors, projecting these is an atheist and a humanist, the books he
onto the physical plane, then conceiving the realization of these shadows. Now these has written that I have read have all
contained supernatural/metaphysical
elements. … It is just unusual, it seems to
me, for someone to write on a consistent
393See the chapter on Hermeticism in The Meaning of the Four Books for a plausible, imaginative basis about that which they don’t even
believe
account of Hermetic initiation. in.”⎯www.california.com/~rpcman/2061
394 Ibid., “Spacewarps, Timewarps.” .htm (accessed 08.26. 1998)

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flatland projections may themselves represent valid goals. But they are not the
original goals, and they cannot lead to the grander experience.
In the first chapter of this book, we saw how Nietzsche tried to heal the
damage of the toxic assertion “God is dead” by positing a goal for man: the
Superman. 2001 has more in common with Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra than
just Richard Strauss’ composition of the same name. For, taking both terms in their
most positive senses, the Superman and the Star-Child are one and the same thing.
These concepts have their analogues in the mystical teachings of the world, and
especially in the case of Sufism, the “Heart-Child” grows up to become the “Perfect
Human.” Thus we see that in the last two centuries, the highest aspirations of our
Western culture have coincided with the highest aspirations of the Sufis. The
difference is that, because it refuses to acknowledge God, our culture is trapped in a
dead-end, whereas the Sufis are not⎯their recognition of God opens up avenues of
self-transformation that are otherwise denied.
This brings us, furthermore, to a crucial insight of Sufism: the love of God and
the love of man (indeed, of all creation, of which man is the acme) are not inimical to
each other, but must go hand in hand. Not only that, but denying one leads, in the
end, to the inevitable negation of the other: “Love restricted is love denied.” This is
what lies at the root of our failure⎯we have tried to reach the Superman without God,
or else we have denied the possibility of human perfection (due to the doctrine of
original sin). The first leads to the fate of Icarus: his wings of wax are melted by the
sun, and he plunges to his doom. As for the second case, one cannot even jump off
the ground.
To put it in a nutshell:
God is both Within and Without. If you do not believe in God, you are not
going to search for Him within you. And while it’s not guaranteed that you will find
God if you seek Him, you are definitely never going to find Him if you don’t search
for Him. (As one famous Sufi put it: “Not all who seek God find Him, but those who
find Him are only those who seek.”) And supposing you don’t seek Him⎯which is
quite natural, since this is not everyone’s calling⎯lack of faith in God will cause you
to be careless with His Prohibitions, about which God is very particular, leaving you
open to error and unprotected by Right Action against negative recompense.

Law, School, Gnosis, Reality

Let us compare the edifice of Sufism to a three-story building. The ground

floor, the entry level, is the divine law (sharia). The second floor is the mystical
schools and their practices (tariqa). The top floor is Gnosis—i.e., learning about God
or the knowledge of God (marifa).
We now climb onto the flat roof of the building, where a helicopter is parked
or, if you wish, a rocket rests on its launchpad. This is the takeoff point for the
Ascension (miraj), for the last lap of the spiritual journey to Ultimate Reality. Hence,
the roof and what lies beyond is called Reality (haqiqa).
We can also conceive of these four levels as primary school, secondary
school, high school, and university. Just as there can be no second floor without a
first floor or higher education without primary school, there can be no esoteric
success without the divine (and moral) law.
The Sufi view of God is that God is both Within and Without; He is the
Inward as well as the Outward. Note that there is room here both for the human

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subject and the divine subject. The human "I" is not God, but somewhere within,
deep below the layers of the subconscious, the divine subject exists. The human
subject, the individual's consciousness, is a raft floating on an ocean; the entire depth
of that ocean separates a person from the Ground of all Being.
On the other hand, if God were purely Inward, that would limit the Illimitable
to a single or multiple location; the divine would exist within a human or humans, and
nowhere else. This is why God is also the Outward—He pervades the universe and
what is beyond. Nevertheless, the place for a human being to discover God is within
himself. In the external world, one can discover not God Himself, but only His signs;
in the inner world, too, His signs veil God from man. Man can draw near God, and
God may reveal as many of His signs to man as He pleases; but man can never
become God. When God chooses to reveal His more intimate signs, neither man nor
mountain can survive that blast. This is the story of Moses as related in the Koran
(7:143). When Moses pleaded with God on Mount Sinai: "Reveal Yourself," God
said: "You cannot see Me. But I shall manifest Myself to the mountain, and if the
mountain survives, then you can see Me." Whereupon God manifested Himself, and
the mountain shattered. When he came to, Moses begged God's forgiveness, and
said: "I am the first of the believers."

Stages in Deconstructing the Base Self

Deconstruction has become a byword of postmodern discourse. In recent

times, our thinkers have "deconstructed" everything from language to history.
Welcome, then, to the ultimate event: the deconstruction of the self. The undesired
(and undesirable) disintegration of the self—leading to loss of contact with reality,
schizophrenia, and other forms of mental disorder—is not what is intended here. By
deconstructing the self, I mean that the bad habits of the Base Self need to be
willfully deconstructed if we expect to find the polished jewel, the Pure Self within,
which is at present lying under a mountain of rubbish. (This is also what the
medieval alchemists meant; unfortunately, I know of one famous case where the
person, taking their sense too literally, bought a physical pile of excrement and
actually sifted through it to find the "pearl of great price," as it were.)
Moviegoers will doubtless remember Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke's
2001: A Space Oddysey, in which astronaut Bowman "deconstructs" the circuits of
HAL, the berserk computer. It is only after this that he is able to get on with his
journey. Here, Bowman represents our spirit and HAL, the Base Self. Once all
traces of the Base Self are deactivated, the Pure or Perfect Self shines forth. In
between are discrete stages of selfhood, all with their distinctive characteristics.
Although the stages of self-development have received attention from
psychologists in recent years, it is only the mystical thinkers—Ken Wilber among
them—who have recognized that there are stages beyond the normal, well-adjusted
adult personality. The Sufis have traditionally enumerated seven discrete stages: 1.
the Compelling Self (what we have been calling the "Base Self" all along), 2. The
Incriminating Self (which blames itself), 3. the Inspired Self (which has begun to
receive partial inspirations—like the partial transparencies in Ellie's capsule—from
the Divine), 4. the Peaceful Self (which has finally arrived at a point where spiritual
development is irreversibly secured), 5. The Pleased Self (pleased with his Lord), 6.
the Pleasing Self (which is pleasing to God), and 7. The Purified or Perfected Self
(which is the final stage).

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 Each stage is distinguished by its own characteristics, which an authentic
teacher can monitor in a disciple. (Such a journey should never even be
contemplated, let alone attempted, without a true teacher. So where does one find
such a master? "When the disciple is ready, the teacher will appear." Until you find
one, stick to the normal Prohibitions, Permissions, and practices—the Five Pillars—
of Islam.)
If you wish, you can compare the elevation through these stages to climbing
the Eiffel Tower, or a skyscraper. 395 At the base level, you are in the ordinary,
everyday world. As you progress upwards, the restrictions on your view fall away,
and you can see a farther horizon at each stage of your ascent. When, finally, you
arrive at the top, you take in the magnificent beauty of the entire landscape, and are
engulfed in spellbound rapture.

Sufism and Gurdjieff

A great deal of information about Sufism has reached the West at various
times, some along quite unexpected avenues. George I. Gurdjieff was one of the
bridges who acted as a long-unrecognized conveyor of such information.
Gurdjieff: A Very Great Enigma was the title of a book by John G. Bennett,
echoing the intermediate conclusion reached by a very close student. Bennett
devoted most of his life to tracking down the sources of Gurdjieff's wisdom. By the
time he wrote Gurdjieff: Making a New World (1973), he had identified these as the
Masters of Wisdom of Central Asia, the Khwajagan Order that initiated the
Naqshibandi branch of the Sufis. Based on information gleaned from the Sufi Master
Hasan Shushud of Istanbul, Bennett wrote his last book, The Masters of Wisdom
(1977). In this book, published posthumously (he died in 1974), he definitively
identified the Sufis as Gurdjieff's source—or at least, the source of the essential core
of Gurdjieff's multifaceted teachings.
To outline a justification in support of Bennett's case would require a separate
study in itself, so I shall be content to indicate just one of the dead giveaways which
demonstrate Gurdjieff's debt to Sufism.
Some time around 1915, Gurdjieff identified three "ways to immortality" and
immediately suggested a fourth way. These he described as the way of the fakir, the
way of the monk, and the way of the yogi. To summarize, the fakir worked on the
physical body, the monk chose the path of religious faith and love, and the yogi
worked with the mind and knowledge (Gurdjieff must have had the Raja and Jnana
modes of Yoga in mind). All three, Gurdjieff added, required retirement from the
world and renunciation of worldly life. This would leave the ordinary man in a
hopeless situation in terms of spiritual development, were it not for the fact that a
"fourth way" existed. This way, he added, did not require seclusion, but could be
practised under the usual conditions of life, work, and social involvement, without
having to go into the hills or the desert. 396 He described the essence of this way as
follows: "what substances he needs for his aims ... can be introduced into the
organism from without if it is known how to do it." 397

395 The Koranic verse: “He created the seven heavens” (65:12) may be relevant in this context.
396 Peter D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous, New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1949, p.
44-49.
397 Ibid., p. 50; italics in the original.

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 What could this cryptic method be? Gurdjieff leaves few clues as to its
nature. We are left in the dark, until we learn from Professor Annemarie Schimmel
of the Sufic technique of rabita, wherein a "tie" or "connection" is established
between master and disciple, 398 enabling the transfer—download—of spiritual power
or baraka into the disciple's heart. Establishing "contact" is mentioned as rabitu in
the Koran (3:200), but almost never interpreted—due to lack of knowledge—in the
sense described here. (Schimmel also gives an alternate technical term, tawajjuh, i.e.
concentration of the disciple upon the master or vice versa.) In no other tradition
does there exist anything remotely comparable; it is a trademark of the Sufis.
Furthermore, Sufism does not counsel becoming a recluse; it advises us to be in the
world but not of the world, to remain aloof from the ebb and flow of daily life.
This single example should suffice to show that Gurdjieff was deeply indebted
to the Sufis for his information, but he was so reticent in divulging his sources that it
took John Bennett most of his life to track down and identify the roots.

Paranormal Powers

Having first been led to religion and mysticism partly via the scientific study
of the paranormal, I can testify that this is not the best route to approach the subject.
There are two reasons for this. The first is that paranormal phenomena cannot be
demonstrated conclusively, at any rate to the satisfaction of hard-boiled critics. Every
paranormal event is subjected to the razor: "extraordinary claims demand
extraordinary evidence," and to my knowledge there has not been a single survivor to
date. Nor can there be. For, whereas the total amount of evidence that can be
produced for a particular event is necessarily finite, one can always consider this
insufficient and demand more. The limit of the latter process tends to infinity, so that
some people will never be convinced of the authenticity of paranormal events, no
matter what. Additionally, in our day, stage magic and technological fixes enable us
to fake such feats with comparative ease. For readers of this persuasion, there is
nothing more to be said in this respect.
Second, for readers who do attach credence to such phenomena, it should be
said that even if they are true, paranormal events are still not the avenue of choice for
a proper approach to Sufism. It is much better approached through a level-headed
attitude that emphasizes morality, good manners, and serving one's fellow-men.
It is accepted as a matter of course, for example, that psychic phenomena may
be experienced with increasing frequency by the Seeker during progress on the Path.
(The powers that manifest themselves in this way are called karama by the Sufis and
siddhis in Yoga.) Far from attaching importance to these, however, the disciple is
advised to ignore them, since they are only signposts on the road leading to an
immeasurably greater and grander goal. Under no circumstances should they be
confused with the destination. They may be considered as data reflecting the level of
attainment a person has reached, and nothing more. They are mere byproducts of a
largely involuntary nature, spontaneous spin-offs, and rarely under conscious control
by the individual. For this reason, many saints have regarded such uncontrolled
manifestation of extraordinary powers as positively shameful, like a kind of drooling

398 Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1975, p. 237.

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at the mouth. They can also engender a false sense of ego and power in a person,
leading to the loss of whatever ground had been previously gained.
The way to travel this course is through meekness and humility, through
healthy morals, salutary conduct, self-effacement, and being socially useful to others
(helping all beings, in fact). Aggrandizement of the ego through the display of so-
called "powers," or being fascinated or obsessed by them, is a hindrance that can not
only retard progress, but even nullify it entirely.

Asceticism

Ascetic practices have been the perennial method of reaching mystical

enlightenment. Extreme asceticism becomes unnecessary, however, once it is
recognized—as modern Sufis have done—that all the goals of asceticism are
contained in two Prohibitions: do not touch what is not lawfully yours, whether
financially or sexually. The icy baths at midnight, the starvation of the body almost
to the point of no return, the cutting off of eyelids, and the many and varied methods
employed by mystics all had, as their ultimate goal, the mastering of the Base Self in
these two respects. If you have pulled in these two reins, you don't need the rest; and
if you have not, then the rest will be of no avail. In terms of profit, do not take what
you have not earned or what has not been freely given to you. In terms of sex,
approach no one except your lawfully wedded spouse of the opposite sex. Sounds
easy, doesn't it?
Once this base is secure, one needs three things to tread the Sufi path: a
spouse, a job, and faith in God. If any of these three is lacking, a person will be
unable to walk on this path. But if these prerequisites are fulfilled, spiritual progress
becomes possible. Note that the first two items provide legitimate, healthy outlets for
meeting the needs specified in the two Prohibitions above. This is the normal way.
In order to progress on the Path, one should apply the techniques discussed
elsewhere in this book—mainly, the Five Pillars of Islam, among which Formal
Prayer has the highest priority. However, these cannot be complete without another
ingredient of prime importance: hunger. It is not just fasting we are talking about
here, but light food intake (ditto for drink) at normal times as well (not to mention
short hours of sleep). This does not mean an extreme diet that exhausts the body and
causes more harm than good, but eating and drinking sparingly.
In recent years, experiments on rodents have shown not only that their life
span is improved by almost a third through low food ingestion, but that the risk of
cancer is also significantly reduced. 399 These, however, are only the physical effects
easiest to observe.
In an earlier chapter, 400 we discussed how the discoveries of modern science
have their correlates in the spiritual realm and can be viewed as metaphors for
spiritual events. This is the true meaning of "hidden science" (ilm ladunni), and we
here reach an understanding where all knowledge or science—physical and
spiritual—is one. This is a higher form of knowledge that has manifestations or
shadows—projections—in both the physical and spiritual worlds.
Black holes. Supernovae. The metamorphosis of insects. These and others
all have their precise correlates in the Knowledge of the Self. One such example,

399 Reported by Philip Cohen in New Scientist, 8 November 1997.

400 “2001, 3001, and the Cube.”

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relevant here, is the method that led to the recent resounding success in cloning
experiments. 401
To recall that method briefly, cells were starved of nutrients until they entered
a latent, quiescent state. It is well-known that, although each cell in an organism
contains the entire genetic blueprint, i.e. all the DNA-coded information to
reconstruct any part—or even the whole—of the organism, it loses the ability to do so
once these cells are differentiated to form a hand, a toe, or a liver. Only specific
genes are now activated, and all the others are switched off. The great discovery of
the Scottish group was to dedifferentiate the cells and render them capable of such
universal expression once more—a result previously considered impossible—and this
they achieved through undernourishment.
What is more, John Cairns, in his directed mutation experiments, took bacteria
lacking the genes to digest lactose, and starved them on no food at all for several
days. These then entered a trans-mutable state, and when he placed them in a
solution with lactose as the only nutrient, they were able to develop genes that would
digest lactose. One may surmise that under nutritional stress, random behavior is
suspended, ordinary laws of probability cease to apply, and another level of
determinism begins to operate. 402
Now this is the exact physical counterpart of a spiritual phenomenon. For all
the prophets, sages and mystics, from time immemorial, have used hyponutrition to
corner, control, and overcome the Base Self; to return to their origin, their essence.
Not for nothing did the Prophet remark: "Hunger is the food of God." The human
spiritual entity, once it is brought to a state of quiscence through hunger, becomes,
like DNA, capable of universal expression. Then the cosmos can flower in one's
heart, and then one can watch the galaxies as they unfold through oneself. One

Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,

Sermons in stones, and good in everything. 403

Formal Prayer alone, important as it is, is not sufficient to secure this result. If you
want Unveiling, hunger—sparse food intake—is a must.

Fusion: The Unitive Vision

And so we come back to Borges, and to the astounding Cup of Jem. We have
seen the role of Jem as a mythical hero. There is another meaning of the word jem,
however, which is important to Sufis and for which reason they have employed it in
wordplay. Jem means "fusion, integration, union," in the same way that all points in
the universe are unified in the Aleph.
Aleph was the mathematical symbol chosen by Georg Cantor for his
transfinite mathematics, a fact which was also not lost on Borges. Its corresponding
letter in Arabic is the alif, which is very similar to our numeral 1. That unity and
infinity should be united in the same symbol and its correlates is itself significant.

401 Keith Campbell et al., Nature, 380 (1996) 64-66.

402 Discover, September 1994, p. 27-8; Scientific American, September 1997, p. 9-12. An alternative
explanation, called “hypermutability,” has been advanced based on randomness.
403 Shakespeare, As You Like It, II, 1.

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 The purified heart displays the Aleph, meaning that God takes His seat in the
pure heart, that His manifestations—which comprise the universe—are reflected in
the heart of the Sufi sage.
Just as there is a place within us, within our hearts, that allows totality to be
seen, so there is a place within our minds, our intellects, from which vantage point we
can see truth, goodness, and beauty as One. This means that there is a mental state—
a state of consciousness, if you will—where science, ethics, and art are integrated,
where they are seen to be different facets of the same overall Reality. Just think—not
only a synthesis of mathematics, physics and biology; not only of music and painting
and sculpture; not only of love, compassion and charity—but a synthesis of all of
these with all the rest.
What I intend by this is not necessarily a superhuman state of mind. It also
means that we can appreciate the beauty sculpted into a DNA molecule, the beauty in
the music of waves slowly lapping against the shore at night, in the magnificence of a
sunset accompanied by wisps of cloud, in the sleek "aero"dynamics of a dolphin. We
can also perceive the beauty of an act of charity, of nonpossessive love, of self-
sacrificing compassion. And in the beauty of planetary orbits we can discern precise
mathematical shapes, or be surprised by fractal order arising out of what seemed for
eons to be random chaos. And perhaps we can discern, in all of these, facets of the
self-expression, the infinitely varied unfolding, of the One—unity in diversity in
unity.
(The term that is given to this process, Unification (Tawhid), is often
misunderstood as a kind of levelling process that somehow blends all differences into
some more bland admixture. The reality, however, is that of One being reflected in
the many. This also guards against the danger of attributing Divinity to the things in
themselves. At all times this higher vision—of unity in diversity in unity—must be
kept in mind, particularly if, to use the language of the mystics, we are to assert the
seamlessness of the One.)
This is why Sufism is not just a science, but a superscience. This if anything,
I submit, is worthy of being called a Grand Unified Theory (GUT), a Theory of
Everything (ToE). Philosophers, astronomers, physicists, biologists and artists all
have parts of the big picture. Such an all-comprehensive view cannot be
encompassed by one field of science alone (or even several), but it can be attained by
the Total Human Being. In this book, I have been trying to suggest that: 1) such a
state exists, and 2) it is possible for a human being to achieve it. It exists, not in some
far-off ancient civilization or mystery school, but today. Here. Now. For you.
(Provided, of course, you're interested.)
This is such a state that all imagination pales and falls to the ground in the
attempt to come to terms with it. Moreover, it is the only game there is: the struggle
for human self-realization to a degree surpassing the dreams of Maslow and the rest
of the psychologists. This, moreover, is not my own personal invention, courtesy of
yours truly, but a perennial wisdom attested to by all the mystics, saints, and prophets
of history—although perhaps their point of view was not expressed in quite this way.
And the portal, the entrance, the doorway to this is faith in God, the one and
only, the Alpha and the Omega and the Outward and the Inward. As the Chinese
proverb has it, "The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step." Anyone who
plays The Only Game There Is becomes eligible to progress and reward, no matter Comment: The universe is “a tale told
how feeble his efforts. As for those who think that the universe is devoid of meaning, by an idiot…” Frank Miele, “Darwin’s
Dangerous Disciple: An Interview with
"a tale ... full of fire and fury, signifying nothing," leave them to their idle play, for Richard Dawkins,” Skeptic, vol. 3, no. 4,
they will be—by their own choices they destine themselves to be—the losers. 1995, pp. 80-85.

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 EPILOGUE

By now it was nightfall. The Master was exhausted, and needed his rest. He
had attended to our cares, individually and collectively, much longer than any of us
deserved. We filed out the door and into the clean night air. I looked up at the stars
above, and thanked God that I had been lucky enough to enjoy the company of such
an august presence.
For a long time afterwards, I would give thanks for the chain of lucky
"coincidences" which had led me to that door. I would also wonder how all this
could possibly be—that, first of all, there were still such people on earth—"O brave
new world, that has such people in't!"—who (one would have thought) properly
belonged only in legends; that here and now, at the end of the war-tossed twentieth
century, they should possess—and freely impart to everyone—not simply data,
information, or knowledge, but a wisdom that saves, a priceless wisdom, capable of
answering all the contemporary questions we have become accustomed to regarding
as insoluble. That science and faith should not merely be reconciled to each other,
but become partners, even bosom buddies, once more. That there should exist a
system of knowledge and belief that encompasses, not just this or that nation or race,
not only the human race exclusively, but the whole planet and even the entire
universe. Theoretically, none of this should have been possible.
How can it be, I would ask myself, that a much maligned religion, considered
by some to be not worth a second glance, should prove itself capable of providing
wellsprings strong enough to nourish the whole world, to slake the thirst of friend and
foe alike, if once they knew what it really said? How was it possible that an
algorithm for complete success could be found, incorporating not just piecemeal
answers to this or that problem, but all the answers at once—embodying concrete and
easily comprehensible solutions to both our physical and social existence on the one
hand, and our inner, spiritual life on the other?
As if by accident, I had stumbled upon something everyone was yearning for,
searching—searching all their lives—for only a glimmer of. Something so precious,
so extraordinary, that it would justify our existence, would make or break its meaning
for us. How could any of this be explained, I would wonder, except as a windfall of
Divine Grace?

I'm still wondering.

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