Abstract In this article, we discuss the current trend of authoritarianism in theIslamic world, especially as embodied in the institution of taqlîd, whereby a lay per-son blindly follows a religious scholar. We will compare this to the mystical traditionof Ibn ‘Arabî as well as the early esoteric Shî’ite tradition, where a much more “rebel-lious” type of Islam was offered and provided purviews of pluralism and universal-ism that challenge authoritarian closures of interpretation in relationship with God.By way of further comparison, we will also attend to the writings of some liberal andpluralistic thinkers in the Muslim world.
Keywords Islam · Pluralism ·Mysticism · Nietzche
Maintaining cheerfulness in the midst of a gloomy task, fraught with immeasur-able responsibility, is no small feat; and yet what is needed more than cheerful-ness?
– Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
Introduction
In this article, we will be discussing the current trend of authoritarianism in the Islamicworld, especially as embodied in the institution of taqlîd, whereby a lay person blindlyfollows a religious scholar. Wewill compare this to the mystical tradition of Ibn ‘Arabî
‘Abd al-Hakeem Carney is deceased.
Corresponding Author: Charlotte O’Kelly, 76 Summit Avenue, Providence, RI 02906-2704, USA.
‘A. al-H. Carney (B)Near Eastern and Asian Studies, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, USAe-mail: [email protected]
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as well as the early esoteric Shî’ite tradition, where a much more “rebellious” type ofIslam was offered in the form of a mysticism that challenged authoritarian closures ofinterpretation in relationship with God. There will be some long translations from Ibn‘Arabî and the Shî’ite tradition that are not available in English, which are providedfor the ease of the non-Arabic reading audience. We will also attend to the writingsof some liberal and pluralistic thinkers in the Muslim world to see how the Muslimworld could eventually change for the better.
Idols and authoritarianism
One of the most fascinating and difficult to translate Qur’anic terms is that of tagut,which occurs eight times in the Qur’an.1 The classical Arabic-Arabic dictionary Lisan
al-‘Arabdefines it as “anythingwhich isworshipped alongside ofAllah” (Lisan8:444).Interestingly enough, the word is often used both to describe false idols and devils,as well as authoritarian dictators. Linguistically, the word derives from the verb tagu
or taga, which is defined as anything that exceeds the normal bounds set for it. Inanother Arabic dictionary, Kitab al-‘Ayn, the author gives the interesting example ofNoah’s deluge to explain the meaning of the verb tagha, saying that the water ofthe flood “overwhelmed” (taga) Noah’s people (Kitab al-‘Ayn 4:435), in the sensethat the waters of the earth exceeded their previous bounds. Commenting upon thefirst sequential appearance of the word tagut in the Qur’an (verse 2:256: “And thosewho disbelieve in the tagut and believe in Allah, then they have grasped the firmesthandhold”) the modern Shi’a Qur’anic commentator (mufassir) ‘AllamahMuhammadHusayn Tabataba’î writes:
Tagut means to tyrannize (tugyan, which can also mean to flood or deluge) andto exceed the limits, and the word has a certain intensification of meaning toit…it is used in things which lead towards such tyranny. This includes all ofthe things that are worshipped alongside of Allah, such as idols, devils, spirits,human leaders of disbelief, and everythingwhich people followwithout a Divinepermission (Tabataba’î 2, 1998, p. 348).
The verb taga is specifically used in condemnation of the arch-dictator in theQur’anic narrative, Pharaoh. In the surah of Ta Ha, which primarily concerns thestory of Moses, God speaks from the burning bush and says: “Go to Pharaoh, forindeed he has exceeded all bounds (taga)” (20:24, 79:17). It is important to note that,in the Qur’anic narrative, the main crime of Pharaoh (alongside of his genocide ofthe Children of Israel, cf. 14:6) was his institution of emperor-worship, saying to hispeople: “I am your Lord, the Most High” (79:24). As such, it would seem that theQur’an posits anybody who claims the authority of God without right is regardedas being an equivalent to idols, and those who follow such people are equivalent toidol-worshippers.One can broaden this understanding to all authoritarian discourse, where one speaks
“in God’s Name” without right and one attempts to foster a mentality of interpretive
and spiritual closure, as amaterial example (in terms of Arabic formal logic, amusdaq)of the general Qur’anic discourse concerning idol worship. Khaled Abou El Fadl hasargued that one of the greatest problems facing the Muslim world is the prevalenceof such authoritarian closures of interpretation (Abou El Fadl 2001, pp. 2–7). AbouEl Fadl is one of a number of leading intellectuals in the Muslim world (includingAbdolkarim Soroush and Abdulaziz Sachedina) who have been attempting to advancea pluralistic understanding of Islam that recognizes the salvetory value of other faiths.While there is no doubt that these thinkers all attempt to ground their ideas within tra-ditional Islamic disciplines,2 these attempts to reformulate traditional understandingsof Islam must be seen in a wider context. The 20th-century witnessed both the riseof a utopian ideal of the Islamic state3 and the almost spectacular (and humiliating)failure of such systems in Sudan, Iran, and Afghanistan. The rise of religiously-ori-ented reform movements in Iran and other countries (especially the call for an IslamicProtestantism, for which the Iranian historian Hasan Aghajari was sentenced to hangin 2002) is symptomatic of a widening disenchantment with authoritarian discoursesthat operate in the name of Islam, and a growing suspicion of Muslim ‘ulama’ whoarrogate a Divine authority for their rulings and downplay (if not ignore) the subjec-tivities and ambiguities inherent in the juristic hermeneutical process. For example,Abou El Fadl devotes a large portion of his book to attacking what he perceives as thedisingenuous legal rulings (fatawa) of Saudi Arabia’s official juristic body, especiallywith regards to women (Abou El Fadl 2001, pp. 209–249), not merely because ofthe problematic juristic mechanisms that these ‘ulama’ have used, but on their failureto disclose honestly rival interpretations and evidences (cf. Abou El Fadl 2001, pp.185–188) and the identification of their position with that of God. Based upon theQur’anic use of the term tagut, and especially its intimate relationship with Pharaonicauthoritarianism, one could argue that such authoritarian closure is the prime form of“idolatry” in the Muslim world today.Coupled with this authoritarian closure is the idea, perhaps more prominent in the
Shi’a world today than it is in the Sunni, that the “masses” (al-‘uwam) are entirelybeholden to blindly follow (a process known as taqlîd) the ‘ulama’ and not disputewith them on these issues, in deference to their “learnedness.” This distinction of theMuslim world into the “learned” (the ‘ulama’) and the “ignorant” (the juhala’) is theflipside of clerical legalism and authoritarianism. Primarily, it was the institution oftaqlîd that Aghajari rebelled against, and it was for this that he was sentenced to deathby a judge in Hamadan. The link between nomianistic, clerical elitism and idolatry isof course familiar from the history of Protestantism, as well as the anarchist traditionin Christianity. Islamic anti-clericalism and Christian anarchism are both based uponthe idea that supreme sovereignty belongs only to God, and that blind obedience to
2 Specifically the disciplines of tafsîr (Qur’anic commentary), fiqh (the interpretation of Islamic Law)kalam (rational theology), as well as mysticism and philosophy.3 I have argued elsewhere that the widely held faith in a sacralised state power is somewhat of an innovationin the Islamic tradition. (cf. Carney 2003). Also important in this regard is Eliash’s “Misconceptions regard-ing the Juridicial Status of the Iranian ‘Ulama,” where he presents a strong argument that the Khomeinistidea of the Islamic jurisprudent’s Divinely ordained and absolute authority is basically spurious in light ofthe Shi’a juristic tradition.
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fallible human authorities can only be a kind of idolatry. The 19th-century Americananarchist Adin Ballou argues that a true believer must disobey all
…parents, patriarchs, priests, kings, nobles, presidents, governors, generals, leg-islatures, constitutions, armies, mobs, all rather than disobey God…We MUST;and then patiently endure the penal consequences. Then surely human govern-ment is nothing against the government of God…What then becomes a human
government, as contradistinguished from the divine government? Is it not a merecipher? When it opposes God’s government it is nothing; when it agrees withhis government it is nothing; and when it discovers a new item of duty—a newapplication of the general law of God—it is nothing (Ballou 1966, pp. 141–143).
The basic Islamic commitment to obeying God and God alone can be used to chal-lenge and break down the authoritarian discourses that have led to social and religiousdecay within the Muslim world. Such a resistance to authoritarian closure in Islamsuggests an anticipation of the “twilight of the idols” in the Islamic world. The phrasewas, of course, made famous by Nietzsche, and reflects Nietzsche’s 28th maxim in thebook of that title: “I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. The will to a system isa lack of integrity.” In contrast to this “lack of integrity” would be an openness bothtowards the canonical sources of Islam (the Qur’an and the hadîth literature), but alsotowards God Himself, and it is precisely such an openness that many Muslim mysticshave posited as the true perfection of faith. This is because authoritarian closures ofreligious texts are not only a violation of the text itself but also a violation againstGod: it is an attempt to subject a professedly Transcendent, Absolute, and IneffableDivine Reality to the limitations of human conception.This “openness” that accepts the Ineffability of the Divine Reality is the grounds
for a religious and spiritual pluralism. The statement that God is Infinite, acceptedby most religious people, is often given lip service without facing up to the demandsthat such a statement makes. When one abandons the attempt to apply authoritariandiscourses to God, and one abandons the “idolatry” inherent in such discourses, thenthe only other alternative is a pluralistic spirituality. For when one gives up the “willto a system,” one has no other choice but to recognize that one’s own understandingsof God are as fallible as any others, and that there is therefore as much salvetory valueto other Paths as there is to one’s own. Authoritarian discourses are sadly prominentwithin the Muslim world, yet there is the hope such authoritarianism has reached itshigh-water mark. In order for pluralistic ideals to gain ground and acceptance in theIslamic world, however, there must be a greater effort to discern the spiritual bases forsuch religious pluralism.
Pluralism and “rebellious” mysticism
Pluralism, in this context, should be differentiated from mere religious tolerance. Ashas been noted by innumerable commentators on both the Right and the Left, “toler-ance” implies evil within the Other (cf. Sachedina 2001, p. 12): the Other is toleratedas a much as the body “tolerates” a small dose of strychnine. Here, the term “reli-gious” or “spiritual” pluralism will be used to refer to a set of beliefs that start from
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a very different set of premises; it acknowledges the salvetory value of various paths,dispensing with the idea of a single Path to God and a single way of understandingHim. While such a pluralist may nonetheless feel confident in asserting his Path asbeing the best, he or she does not deny the religious value of other faiths (cf. Sachedina2001). Religious pluralism, in this sense, does not “tolerate” the presence of the Otheras evil: a “pluralist” in this sense is somebody who, in spite of their own specific faithcommitments, is none the less able to acknowledge the Divinity and soundness ofother religious paths.The type of pluralism that merely tolerates difference is best described as political
pluralism; this would be the mere constitutional acceptance of various faiths. Such apluralism can be accepted by the atheist as much as the religious believer, and canbe justified in purely “secular” terms as the most pragmatic way of creating a har-monious society where members of different religious faiths co-mingle. The attemptto ground such a political pluralism in an Islamic context has been well-argued bya number of current researchers, such as Abdullahi an-Na’im. Abdulaziz Sachedinahas also attempted to link religious and political pluralism in his The Islamic Roots
of Democratic Pluralism. This spirit of religious pluralism is best summed up by theverse of Qur’an:
Indeed, those who believe, and those from the Jews, the Christians, and theSabeans, those who believe in Allah and the Last Day and work righteous deeds,they will have their reward with their Lord. No fear shall be upon them, nor willthey grieve (2:62).
Sachedina argues that this verse is one of the most explicit acknowledgments ofreligious pluralism (Sachedina 2001, pp. 31–32). Throughout the Qur’an, the diver-gence of religions is acknowledged as a Divinely ordained system, intrinsic to the lifeof human beings. Perhaps the most explicit verse in this regard is the following:
If your Lord had willed, He would have humanity one nation. But humanity doesnot cease to be in dispute, except for those upon whom thy Lord has bestowedMercy. It was for this reason that we created them (11:118–119).
Though the Qur’anic text is not clear about the reasons why such plurality has beenordained, the topic has become a favorite theme among Muslim mystics, who havebeen more sensitive to the ineffability and transcendence of God. The infinity of God,acknowledgedby almost all people forwhom the term“God”has spiritual and religiousmeaning, precludes any authoritarian disclosure with regard to any understanding ofHis Essence as well as any understanding of how to worship Him. To believe that Godis infinite and unlimited, while simultaneously asserting that one’s own conceptionof God is the only valid conception, is a logical contradiction. Nonetheless, humanbeings are fundamentally limited beings; while the Divine Essencemay be Infinite, thehuman intellect is not. Because of this limitation, a human being will always be forcedto adopt a position with regard to his God. Human beings who are inclined towardsreligion and spirituality feel a compelling need to come to know God, even thoughmost realize that His Infinity precludes any attempt to truly understand Him. Recog-nizing the infinity of God can lead people toward one of two positions: either they mayenter into a state of complete despair, or they may nonetheless pursue knowledge of
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God and affirm an at least tentative theological position, while still acknowledging theconfines of their own fallibility. In fact, it would seem that the only real choice is thelatter: for despair is itself a position, a theory, and an attempt to understand. The sameapplies for agnosticism; and in fact many medieval Ismaili philosophers made thiskind of “agnosticism” a centre-point of their theological speculations.4 The impor-tant point to observe here is that anybody who is religiously or spiritually minded iscompelled to take a position of one kind or another.This “taking of a position,” however, may take one of two forms: it may be one
where the subjectivity and fallibility of the position is acknowledged before the Infinityof the Deity, or it may be one that consists of an authoritarian closure of rival inter-pretations, where God is made to “fit” into a single person’s limited conception. Thissecond type of position has been quite common throughout the history of religions,but there has always been a minority (primarily mystics) who have acknowledged thetranscendence of God beyond the limited conceptions of human beings. In the Islamictradition, the most significant thinker in this area would have to be Muhîy ad-Dîn Ibn‘Arabî (b. 1165/d. 1240). Throughout his system, we find the idea of “transcendingthe Gods created in faith”5 takes a central position (cf. Corbin 1997, pp. 195–200).The ordinary believer is seen as someone who attempts to fix God to a specific set ofbeliefs; though he or shemay be piously devoted to a particular faith, he or she remainsheedless of the Divine Essence’s intrinsic Infinity. In a very real sense he or she “cre-ates” their God, which is distinguished from God as such (i.e., God in His Essence orIpseity (cf. ‘Afîfî 2, 1946, p. 67)). Such a person attempts to fix the Ineffable Deityaccording to a specific understanding or interpretation, the interpretation that accordswith his or her belief system (‘aqîdah). Yet this ordinary way of believing is far fromcomplete; by attempting to fix God to a specific doctrine or belief, one limits Him,and therefore one is unable to confront His Infinity and the burdens that it places uponfaith. Here, it is important to note that the Arabic word for doctrine or creed (‘aqîdah)is lexicographically derived from the same word as “knot” (‘aqd) (Lisan 3:296, Kitab
al-‘Ayn 1:140, Almond 2002, p. 518). The people who hold to various belief systems,then, are seen to “tie knots” upon God; as such, it would seem that (for Ibn ‘Arabîat least) that there is an incipient authoritarianism inherent in most ordinary religiousdiscourse.Contrasted to this is the gnostic (‘arif) who transcends such limitations: such a per-
son does not limit the deity to any specific form (‘Afîfî 2, 1946, p. 147). In a sense, thisis the person who is able to see the Divine manifested in the entirety of religious faiths.Ibn ‘Arabî denies the possibility of seeing the Divine in its Ipseity; but this “agnosti-cism” is overcome by the perception of His Manifestation in the infinite successionof created forms, of which all religious paths are a part by virtue of the fact that theyexist in the human experience. Such a gnostic, then, is a pluralist in the true sense:
4 So much so that even categories like existence and non-existence are denied. See the quasi-Ismailiphilosophical speculations of the noted heresiographer Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Karîm ash-Shahristanî(Ash-Shahristani 41–42) as well the discussions of the 11th-century Fatimid da‘îHamîd ad-Dîn al-Kirmanî(Kirmanî 1968, pp. 130–131). in his Rahat al-‘Aql 130–131. In fact, a large part of their doctrine of Imamateis an attempt to understand the way that an absolutely transcendent God makes Himself known to Creation:cf. Corbin 1983: 84–87.5 For a further discussion on the God created in faith, see Chittick 1998, pp. 23–24, 92, 275–276
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he or she perceives Divinity in every form, and does not limit the manifestation ofGod to one religious path. In this regard, Ibn ‘Arabî’s great commentator ‘Abu al-‘AlaAl-‘Afîfî writes:The Real,6 in terms of His Essence as described by Attributes and Names, is not
manifest to anybody except through the path of theophany (mujali) and existentialtheophanic forms (mazahir), the forms which constitute the universe. But the Realis manifest to every heart, and He is manifest to the heart of the saint in a specialway: there, He is manifest in the forms of beliefs7 the one who possesses this [saintly]heart…True knowledge (ma‘rifah) of the Real is that you do not limit (tuqayyid) Himto a specific form, so that you dispute about it and deny every other form. No, trueknowledge is that you absolutely free Him (tatlaquhi itlaqan) [to appear] in every exis-tential form equally,8 meaning that He appears in the form of every religious beliefequally. The forms of existence are infinite, and so your knowledge of Him can neverend (‘Afîfî 2, 1946, p. 147).The verb talaq, used here, has many meanings, most commonly used to refer to
divorce (in the sense of letting one’s spouse “free”). Some of its derivatives are oftenused in the sense of “generality” or absoluteness; in Islamic jurisprudence general(mutlaq) or text are contrasted to rulings or texts that are limited (muqayyad) to cer-tain conditions or circumstances. Such generality is “freedom” from any limitation,and so for this reason I have chosen to translate the text as “absolutely free Him.” It isan acknowledgment and acceptance of the infinity of God. Using identical terminol-ogy, the Sudanese reformer Mahmoud Mohamed Ta Ha (executed by the Sudanesegovernment for apostasy in 1985) wrote:
The Qur’an can never be finally and conclusively explained. Islam, too, cannever be concluded. Progress in it is eternal.: “Surely, the [true] religion withGod is Islam” (3:19). “With God” [is eternal] beyond time and space. Progressinto Islam, by means of the Qur’an, is progress towards God in infinitude (itlaq).As such it has not been, and can never be, fully and conclusively explained (TaHa 1998, p. 247).
This idea of seeing God manifest in every faith is perhaps best summarized in Ibn‘Arabî’s most famous poem. I rely upon Michael Sells’ excellent translation:
My heart can take on any form:For gazelles a meadow,A cloister for monks,For the idols, sacred ground,Ka’ba for the circling pilgrim,The tables of the Torah,The scrolls of the Qur’an.
6 Al-Haqq, the Truth: one of the Ninety-Nine Names of God in traditional Islamic theology. It is generallyIbn ‘Arabi’s preferred term for God.7 Note the use of the plural here, seemingly implying that a saint participates in a plurality of faiths.8 So much so that many Sufis (such as Hallaj) were even able to find spiritual inspiration in the Devilhimself. See Nurbaksh 1986, pp. 5–48.
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I profess the religion of love.Wherever its caravan turnsAlong the way, that is the belief,The faith I keep (Sells 2000, p. 75)
In contrast to the “ordinary” believer who, as ‘Afîfî describes, seeks to privilege hisor her understanding of God over all others, the gnostic is the pluralist par excellence.Not only is the gnostic able to witness the Divinity in other religious paths, but heor she reflects all of those paths within his or her heart. Even though a gnostic mustalso “take a position” with regard to God (and so openly follow a specific religiouspath), he or she is inwardly “believing” in every faith equally. Interestingly enough,we find this theme taken in the Shi’a hadîth literature, in those narrations dealing withthe “bounties” (fada’il) of the Prophet, his daughter Fatimah, and the Imams. As hasbeen amply demonstrated by Mohammad Alî Amir-Moezzi in his Divine Guide in
Early Shi’ism, “primitive” Shi’ism regarded the Imams as being greatly exalted aboutthe mere law-giving function that later Shi’a orthodoxy would ascribe to them (Amir-Moezzi 139). The Imams were regarded fundamentally as beings of Light, the Faceof God Himself (Amir-Moezzi 45), in which the entirety of Creation is recapitulated.They were not limited to their physical appearance in terrestrial history; just as Jesussaid: “Before Abraham was, I am” so the Prophet is reported to have said: “I was aProphet when Adam was between water and clay”;9 and the first Shi’a Imam ‘Alî ibnAbî Talib is said to have stated: “I was a saint [walî] when Adam was between waterand clay” (cf. Amulî 1969, pp. 380–382). Much like the Perfect Human of AkbarianSufism, the Imam is regarded as the perfect manifestation of God, and this seems tohave been a central pivot of early Shi’ism, so much so that whole chapters of earlyShi’a hadîth works are devoted to the subject. Long before Ibn ‘Arabî, we see thesame ideas discussed, albeit with less technical sophistication. Many of these narra-tions have not been presented in English language studies on Shi’ism, and so it willbe of benefit to cite two of them here:
When Ja’far as-Sadiq was asked about this verse, he said: ‘It [His Face] meansHis Religion, and the Prophet and the Prince of Believers were the religion ofAllah andHis Face. They are His Eye over His Servants, andHis Tongue throughwhich He speaks, and His Hand over His Creation.
We are the Face of Allah, through which He is reached.” (Saduq 1398, p. 151).
‘Alî said: I am the side of Allah, and the word of Allah, and the heart of Allah,and the gate of Allah. Whoever enters this gate in prostration, I will forgive himhis sins, and I will aid the righteous. Throughme, the Hour will come, and withinme the evil doers are destroyed. I am the First, and the Last. I am the Manifest,and the Hidden, and I know all (Mazandaranî 3, 1379, p. 387).
These narrations can, and have, been read in an authoritarian fashion, where theImam (because of his Divine function) is viewed as being a kind of theocratic dictator,any religion other than his is denied any value. Yet the question remains as to what
9 i.e., before Adam was created.
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“his” religion is; and another body of narrations (which, in actuality, deal with thesame themes as the previous hadîths, albeit from a different angle) establish him asthe Imam of all faiths: his religion is not a single dogmatic path, but encompasses allthe paths, and the “Imam of Light” is seen to transcend the limitations of the “godscreated in faith.” The identification of the transcendent Imam with the “Face of God”is especially important in this regard, especially in light of the verse of Qur’an thatreads: “To Allah is the East and the West. Wherever you turn, then there is the Faceof Allah.” (2:114) This verse has been meditated upon those who have believed inthe unity of existence and the manifestation of God in every form (cf. ‘Afîfî 1, 1946,p. 33). In the Shi’a context, the Imam, as the gnostic par excellence, is omnipresent(for the Face of God is not isolated to his form, but is seen everywhere) because his“heart” is a perpetual reflection of the manifested Divine reality. As such, even thoughsectarians may attempt to use him as a shibboleth to set their religion against that ofothers, a number of hadîths establish the Imam as the Imam of all faiths. This is madeexplicit in the following well-known hadîth, dealing with the Mahdî.
Indeed, the Mahdî is called the Mahdi [the Guided One] because he will guidetowards a hidden affair. He will take the Torah, and all the books of Allah theExalted, from a cave in Antioch. He will then rule the people of the Torah by theTorah, the people of the Gospel by the Gospel, and the people of the Psalms bythe Psalms, and the people of the Qur’an by the Qur’an (Nu‘manî 1398, p. 237).
The universal aspect of the Imam, as the Perfect Human, is only intelligible whenthe Imam is understood in his “Luminous Reality,” as a being of Light that has radiatedthroughout the ages. The “universalism” of the Imam in the Shi’a theological contextonly becomes intelligible when the Imam ceases to be a merely dogmatic authority,and is understood as the bearer of the esoteric “secret” underlying all faiths (cf. Corbin1997, p. 83). The famous Shi’a theosophist Haydar Al-‘Amulî (b. 1320), was a devotedfollower of Ibn ‘Arabî’s school (cf. Corbin 1993, pp. 334–335), interpreting his ideasin a Shi’a context and emphatically arguing that the figure of the Imam (andmost espe-cially that of the first Imam ‘Alî) is the repository for the entirety of every propheticmessage, and the essence of all these religious faiths (‘Amulî 1982, pp. 152–153).Within the context of this highly esoteric theology, the physical beings of the Imamsare seen as being nothing but the physical re-manifestation of previous prophets andsaints, encompassing all of them within their being. Concerning the Mahdi, it is statedin one narration:
Truly, anyone who wishes to see Adam and Seth, should know that I am thatAdam and Seth. Anyonewhowishes to see Noah and his son Shem, should knowthat I am that Noah and Shem. Anyone who wishes to see Abraham and Ishmael,should know that I am that Abraham and Ishmael. Anyone who wishes to seeMoses and Joshua should know that I am that Moses and Joshua. Anyone whowishes to see Jesus and Simon, should know that I am that Jesus and Simon.Anyone who wishes to see Muhammad and Ali, the Prince of the Believers,should know that I am that Muhammad and Ali. Anyone who wishes to seeal-Hasan and al-Husayn, should know that I am that al-Hasan and al-Husayn.Anyonewhowishes to see the Imams from the descendents of al-Husayn, should
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know that I am those pure Imams. Accept my call and assemble near me so that Iwill inform you whatever you wish to know. Anyone who has read the heavenlyscriptures and divine scrolls, will now hear them from me (Qtd. in Sachedina1981, p. 163).
Similar ecstatic utterances are attributed to other Imams, especially the first Imam‘Alî. In the famous (and controversial) Khutbah al-Bayan, we read:
I am the one who has the knowledge of the book, about what is and what shallbecome. I am the first Adam. I am the first Noah. I am Ibrahim the Friend whenhe was cast in the fire. I am the reality of secrets…I am the one who has athousand books from the books of the Prophets. I am the one who speaks everylanguage of the world. I am the Lord (sahib) of Noah, and the one who rescuedhim. I am the Lord of Jonah, and the one who saved him (Rihand, pp. 119–128).
In another important sermon of ‘Alî in this regard is the sermon of LuminousKnowl-edge (al-ma‘rifat an-nurwaniyyah) where ‘Alî addresses two of his most prominentcompanions, Abu Dharr al-Gafarî and Salman al-Farsî. The hadîth opens where ‘Alîproclaims his own “luminosity” as a saint:
Abu Dharr and Salman al-Farsî—may Allah be pleased with them—said to ‘Alî:“We have come to you, O prince of the believers, to ask you about the LuminousKnowledge of you.” ‘Ali replied: “Welcome, both of you, you who are of myfriends and those who have held fast and not broken their covenant. By my life,I say that the Luminous Knowledge of me is obligatory on every believing manand woman.”
Then he said: “O Salman and Jundab [Abu Dharr]!” To which they replied: “Weare here, O prince of the believers.” ‘Ali continued: “No one’s faith is completewithout knowing me in my Essence, by knowing me through my LuminousReality. If one knows me through this knowledge, then Allah has tested thatperson’s heart for faith, and expanded his breast to Islam, and such a personhas become a Knower (‘arif) and Seer (mustabsir). Whoever falls short of thisknowledge, then he is a doubter and an apostate. O Salman and Jundab…theLuminous Knowledge of me is knowledge of Allah the Exalted and Glorified,and knowledge of Allah is the Luminous Knowledge of me (Majlisî 26, 1404,p. 6).
He then goes on to present his own “universality,” identifying himself with manyof the previous prophets and saints mentioned in the Qur’an.
I am the one who carried Noah in his boat by the command of my Lord. I am theone who brought Jonah from the belly of the fish by the command of my Lord. Iam the one who brought Musa son of ‘Imran through the sea by the command ofmy Lord. I am the one who took Abraham from the fire by the command of myLord. I am the one who flows the rivers, opens the wells, and plants the trees,by the command of my Lord. Everyday I heard the words of the hypocrites andtyrants, and understand their languages. I am Khidr, the teacher of Moses. I wasthe teacher of Solomon the son of David. (Majlisî 26, 1404, p. 6).
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Similar statements are made in a number of other places. For example, in anotherhadîth ‘Alî says to the “people of the Book” (the Jews, Christians, and Sabeans): “Iam he whose name in the Gospel is Elijah.” (Qtd. in Corbin 1997, p. 58) Corbin alsoquotes the following Ismaili narration: “I am the Christ who cures the blind and thelepers. I am he and he is I.” (Ibid.) A similar “universal” spirit can be evidenced in otherreligious traditions as well. We can recall, for example, the sermon of the Buddha inthe Lankavatara Sutra, where (similar to the sermons of ‘Alî above) he recounts someof the names (described by him as being “uncounted trillions of names” by which hehas been in different times and places, including names well known from Hinduismlike Brahma, Vishnu, Ishvara, Rama, Indra, andVaruna (Goddard 1994, p. 344). None,however, are seen to have “grasped” the Buddha in his reality, seeing him only “asthe moon is seen in water” (Ibid.), just as ‘Alî states that only the true believer is theone who has grasped him in his “Luminous Essence.” While such ideas have oftenbeen used to justify a vehemently sectarian spirit amongst Twelver Shi’as, the ideaof the Imam’s “Luminosity” would challenge any attempt to limit the spiritual figureof the Imam to any given form; rather, as the “Face of God” he is seen to be mani-fest in every religion. Rather than the Imam being a purely dogmatic figure, he setshimself the task of coming to guide people towards their own “inner Imam,” the lightof “sacred intellect” that exists within them. Imamate, as another term for sainthoodwalayat, is not isolated to the figure of the temporal Imam: it is a reality that remainslatent within every believer, but has to be “brought out” into manifestation througha process of self-realization, of discovering the Divine within. The fifth Shi’a Imam,Muhammad al-Baqir, speeking of the verse of Qur’an: “And so believe in Allah andhis Prophet and the Light which he has sent down” (24:55),” said
I swear by Allah that the Light is the Imams of the Prophet’s family, which lastsuntil the day of judgment. I swear by Allah, that they are the Light which He hassent down. I swear by Allah, that they are the Light of Allah in the heavens andthe Earth. I swear by Allah, the Light of the Imam in the hearts of the believersis brighter than the brilliant day star. By Allah, the Imams illuminate the heartsof the believers. (Kulaynî 1, 1451, p. 194).
Here, the authoritative position of the Imam as the “Light of God” is presentedalongside of the Imam’s spiritual presence within the heart of a believer. Such nar-rations challenge a purely dogmatic authoritarian understanding of Imamate. Theinstruction, frequent in the Shi’a hadîth literature, to “know one’s Imam”, rather thanbeing an instruction to merely submit to an external authority, becomes a matter ofknowing the Imam within, of actualizing the Imam’s “universal reality” by becominga saint oneself. In some hadîths, this reality is seen to be always-already latent withinthe human being, in whom God has breathed His Spirit (38:72). In a famous poem of‘Alî, we read:
Your sickness is within you, though you do not realize,And your cure is within, yet you do not see.You claim that you are nothing but a tiny entity,Yet wrapped up inside of you is the greatest universe.You are the clear book, through whose letters
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All that is secret is revealed and made known.So you have no need for anything outside of you,Your consciousness is within you, though you do not know.
This poem would seem to imply that discovering the Divinity within is completelybound up with transcending the limitations of ordinary religious belief. Actualizingthe spiritual reality of the Imam, who will rule every people according to their partic-ular dispensation, involves unveiling the “greatest universe” that exists inside everyhuman being. For this reason, many Shi’a mystics (such as Mulla Šadra) have arguedthat Imamate, rather than being an externalized dogmatic office, is the “secret” realityof every human being (cf. Corbin 1983, pp. 127–128). But it would seem that, basedupon the teachings of the Imams and the later generations of Sufi mystics, that no onemay “reach” that reality without moving past the narrow-confines of ordinary belief.StephenMitchell has found a similar teaching in as diverse sources as the teachings
of Christ, Zen Buddhism, and Hasidic mysticism. The primary teaching of these reli-gious masters, he argues, is that of “Divine presence” and discovering the “Kingdomof God” within (Mitchell 1991, p. 10).
How moving and at the same time how ridiculous is the story of the Hasidicrabbi who, every morning, as soon as he woke up, would rush out his front doorto see if the Messiah had arrived…Another Hasidic story, about a more maturestage of this consciousness, takes place at the Passover seder. The rabbi tells hischief disciple to go outside and see if the Messiah has come. “But Rabbi, if theMessiah came, would you know it in here?” the disciple says, pointing to hisheart. “Ah,” says the rabbi, pointing to his own heart, “but in here, the Messiahhas already come” (Mitchell 1991, p. 11).
Yet anybody who makes such a “discovery” will inevitably be challenging theorthodoxies of his or her time. By discovering the Imam within, he or she will havediscovered the Light of God within. The power of jurisprudents within the Muslimworld revolves around their role as the guardians of orthodoxy and their status as inter-mediaries between theMuslim faithful and God; even in religious traditions where thejurisprudent is not given any kind of “Divine status,” his legal expertise is seen to becritical for assisting the laity in deciphering the Law of a transcendent and basicallyunreachable God. An individualized mysticism and an “interior” Imamate, however,“transcends” this transcendence, and allows God to be reached within the heart. Andyet this internal experience of God, at least as the teaching of most Sufi mystics andthe Shi’a Imam’s is concerned, does not lead towards a selfish individualism. Discov-ering the Imam within entails discovering everything within, “the greatest universe”that ‘Alî says is contained within the human heart. In addition to challenging the needfor a body of clerics to mediate between God and man, such a mysticism will alsorebel against the authoritarianism that is latent in much of (though certainly not all)the Muslim world’s contemporary juristic discourse. As such, this kind of mysticismcannot help but be anti-authoritarian, anti-dogmatic, and iconoclastic. As will be dis-cussed, it seems that such mystical teachings have greatly contributed to the discourseof anti-authoritarianism in many Islamic reform movements, especially in Iran.
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Bewilderment and anti-authoritarian discourse
This understanding of sainthood and spiritual wisdom ultimately precludes the typeof authoritarian closures that have come to characterize much of Islamic religiousdiscourse. The saint abandons the “will to a system,” and exists in a state of bewilder-ment before the ineffability and Infinity of the Divine reality. This bewilderment hasbeen admirably described in IanAlmond’s “Honesty of the Perplexed”: such bewilder-ment is seen, not as the result of spiritual misguidance or delusion, but rather signifiesa state of spiritual maturity, even perfection (Almond 2002, pp. 527–528). This bewil-derment seems to be preceded by a dissatisfaction and confusion with regards to one’schoice of belief system (cf. Almond Ibid.), and an ability to participate in a latent(or explicit) authoritarianism that “binds” or “ties” God to a specific form. ‘Abd ar-Rahman Jamî presents one of the most succinct discussions of this process, where heoutlines three stages of bewilderment. The first is a basic agnosticism before settingout on a path; here, the believer is attempting to discover which “knot” it is best tofix upon God. Ordinary people are usually satisfied at this stage; but some proceedto a second re-occurrence of bewilderment and confusion. This second stage occurswhen the believer witnesses the various other “knots” (i.e., belief systems) that peoplehave ascribed to God. His original determination is now held into question. This is notthe realm of agnosticism proper, but rather confusion when he finds himself unable toascribe an absolute Truth to his particular “knot.” Perhaps this realization bears somesimilarities to the Dark Night of the Soul of St. John of the Cross, where an immatureenjoyment of spiritual practice (at least immature in St. John’s of the Cross vision) isremoved and replaced with aching sense of God’s absence (St. John 1998, pp. 64–67,Larkin 1974, 112). It would seem that, according to Jamî’s interpretation, a person’sknot is beginning to become undone at this stage. Jamî argues that this bewildermentcan only be removed by an act of despair at fixing God according to such knots; thenhe is said to advance to the stage of a true saint or gnostic (‘arif), the kind that Ibn‘Arabi described in the passage above. Such a person is seen to have transcended thelimitations of normal belief systems; he is able to see God in every form, while atthe same time holding God’s transcendence above all forms. Concerning this finalbewilderment, Ibn ‘Arabi writes in his Futuhat:
Arrival at bewilderment in the Real is itself arrival at God. Bewilderment is themost magnificent thing that belongs to the folk of self-disclosure, because theforms are diverse for them in the One Entity. The limits are diverse because ofthe diversity of forms, but limit does not apply to the Entity.10 The Entity is notwitnessed, just as It is not known. Those who stop with the limits that followupon the forms are bewildered, but those who know that there is an Entity thatfluctuates through the forms in the eyes of the viewers but not in Itself knowthat there is an Unknown Essence that is not known and not witnessed (Chittick1998, p. 84).
10 Al-‘Ayn. The word is notoriously difficult to translate (with dozens of different and disparate meanings),but in this context we will rely upon Chittick’s choice of the word “entity.” See Qashani 1991, pp. 87–88[English section] p. 127 [Arabic section].
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This experience of bewilderment, before the endless “play of God’s manifestation,”can be seen as akin to the only God which Nietzsche’s Zarathustra proclaimed whenhe said: “I should only believe in a God who understood how to dance” (Nietzsche1969, p. 68), a “Dionysian” Deity that transcends and destroys the comfortable con-fines of ordinary belief. It is such an Absolute, “uncontrollable God” that Nietzschewas hesitatingly willing to accept, the same Absolute that (especially in Kierkegaard’snarrative) Abraham confronted in the desert when he was ordered to murder his ownson (Kierkegaard 1985, pp. 97–108). Ultimately Nietzsche’s “noble God” seemed toremain only a possibility within his thought, but his positing of such a Deity as a merepossibility is perhaps more telling than anything else: for many mystics the realm ofthe Transcendent Godhead, the Divine Ipseity as such, is n(N)othing but the realm ofpure possibility, beyond any fixed determinations (cf. Suzuki 2002, pp. 12–13, 80–81).Nietzsche seen as the Antichrist has become synonymous with atheism, but one mustnot understand his atheism as a merely rational opposition to the existence of God:rather, his refusal to commit to a theological stance seems much more like a stateof bewilderment than anything else. As Kee notes, it was not so much theism thatNietzsche was opposed to but “monoto-theism,” the boring faith in a predictable deity(Kee 1999, pp. 162–163). The same Nietzsche who proclaimed the death of God wasalso the same one who, in The Will to Power, wrote:
And howmany new gods are still possible! As for myself, in whom the religious,that is to say god-forming, instinct occasionally becomes active at impossibletimes—how differently, how variously the divine has revealed itself to me eachtime! (Qtd. in Kee 1999, p. 169).
Perhaps somewhere in Nietzsche’s tortured mind, a kind of spiritual bewildermentwas looming. Ultimately, one could say that the fundamental difference between an“atheist” like Nietzsche and a mystic theist like Ibn ‘Arabî is that Ibn ‘Arabî did nothesitate in affirming the reality of a “noble God,” and made this the cornerstone ofa radical and unique theology. To Ibn ‘Arabî and his followers, it would seem thatthe will to a system is nothing but a lack of integrity in one’s relationship with God,a refusal to confront the Absolute and Infinite. True mystical knowledge is equatedwith the attempt to abandon a system, and to face honestly and openly the Infinity ofGod. It is to abandon the attempt to set “one’s soul at peace,” and enter into a stateof bewilderment. In a very different context, the same spirit seems to be at work inNietzsche’s attack upon the quest for “peace of soul” in Twilight of the Idols:
Our attitude to the “internal enemy” is no different: here too we have spiritu-alized hostility; here too we have come to appreciate its value. The price offruitfulness is to be rich in internal opposition; one remains young only as longas the soul does not stretch itself and desire peace. Nothing has become morealien to us than that desideratum of former times, “peace of soul,” the Christiandesideratum; there is nothing we envy less than the moralistic cow and the fathappiness of the good conscience. One has renounced the great life when onerenounces war (Nietzsche 1998, pp. 22–23).
Returning to the context of Islamic mysticism, the saint is the one who has aban-doned such a quest, dispensing with and finished with the realm of knots and moving
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on to a higher level of faith. Such faith is at once universal (insofar as it encom-passes all the forms in which the Deity is worshipped) and individual (insofar as thegnostic is free from the tyranny of any given form). This “mystical freedom” (that,given ‘Afîfî’s interpretation, seems to be given by God in exchange for “freeing Him”from the limitations of beliefs) has an anarchistic quality to it. In this regard Corbinwrites:
The gnostic unravels the knots of all the particular faiths, and yet he too has atheophanic vision of his Lord. For this vision is no longer given him in the formof this or that faith prescribed and imposed by a religious or social collectivity(Corbin 1997, p. 198).
Such a person, then, is fundamentally an iconoclast. But this iconoclastic spirit isnot motivated by a spirit of sectarian hate; we have already seen how Al-‘Afîfî has dis-tinguished between the gnostic and those who enjoy “disputing” about their particularreligious dispensation. Rather, this iconoclastic spirit ismotivated by an overwhelminglove (hayman, ‘ishq) for God, which purifies the heart of the believer from all spiritualidols and allows him to gaze upon no one but God. This “uniqueness of vision,” wherethe only being ever beheld is God Himself, is seen by many mystics to be the comple-tion of faith and monotheism, and the goal of religious worship. ‘Amulî argues thatthe ritual purification of the true gnostics (ahl al-haqîqah) is the purifying of one’sheart (or one’s “secret,” one’s inner reality) from witnessing anything other than God(‘Amulî 1982, p. 138). As we have seen, solely gazing upon God is intimately linkedwith transcending the “gods created in faith”; for one cannot gaze upon the Infinite’sself-disclosure in religious forms unless one gives up the “will to a system” that limitsHim.It is probably no coincidence that, in Ibn ‘Arabî’s work, the archetype for perfect
human being and “the wisdom of ecstatic Divine love” (al-hikmat al-muhayyamîyah)was none other than Abraham (Corbin 1997, pp. 314–315), the chief iconoclast of theQur’anic narrative (21:51–71). In his discussion on Abraham, we see that the gnosticis a pluralist insofar as the Ineffable Divine Reality becomes continually manifest inhis or her heart; but transcending the realm of the “gods created in faiths,” he or shecannot help but undo the knots tied by simple dogmatist and authoritarian religionists.This is the realm of a more genuine confrontation with the Absolute; it is perhaps alsoworth remembering that Kierkegaard saw Abraham as another archetypal figure, theone who transcends the Universal for the sake of the Absolute, who wonders freelyin the realm of the absurd. The link between this overwhelming love for God and thespirit of religious pluralism becomes clearer if we analyze ‘Afîfî’s interpretation ofIbn ‘Arabî’s words, where he understands the specific “Abrahamic wisdom” as beinguniversal to all saints. He writes:
The word muhayyamîyah is derived from the words hayam and hayman, and itrefers to an extreme ardor in love (‘ishq). It has been attributed to Ibrahim (byIbn ‘Arabî) because Allah the Exalted has explicitly acknowledged that He tookIbrahim as his intimate friend (khalîl) when He says: “And Allah took Ibrahimas a khalîl. The khalîl is a lover, who is overwhelmed in his sincere love forhis beloved…But there is no doubt that [Ibn ‘Arabî] is not using the name of
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Abraham to refer merely to the famous prophet of this name, but rather uses it asa cipher to depict a the species (nau‘)of the Perfect Human, of which includes allthe prophets, messengers and saints. (‘Afîfî 1946, p. 57). This Perfect Human, inthe school of our author, is the most complete and encompassing manifestationof all the Divine Names and Attributes (‘Afîfî Ibid.).
Ibn ‘Arabî does not deal with Abraham’s smashing of his people’s idols in his dis-cussion on the “Abrahamic wisdom.” But what is important here is the link betweena genuine love of the Divine (i.e., a love that is coupled with integrity and avoids thepitfalls of authoritarianism) and that of pluralism: the saint, as we have seen, is onewho not only perceives the Divine in the plethora of religious faiths but also reflectsall of those faiths within his or her own heart. This is the “perfect human”; for insofaras he or she is the supreme theophany and all Divine Names are manifest within him,then so all the Names that are ascribed to Him in all religious faiths will be encom-passed by his soul. But this “universality” is coupled with a rebellious spirit, and so themystic is in a somewhat paradoxical relation to the faiths of ordinary religions: whilehe or she witnesses the Divine in the faiths of others, the Perfect Human rejects thelatent authoritarianism of those faiths. By being a pluralist in this fashion, the PerfectHuman cannot help but be an iconoclast.Here we see a mysticism that is “rebellious” in the theological field, that sets itself
the task of breaking easily held social conventions and transcending the confines ofthe “God created in faiths.” Given the way that Corbin has interpreted Ibn ‘Arabî and‘Afîfî’s understanding of the mystic, one can see that there is a certain anti-authoritar-ian praxis that underlies the mystic devotion. Even though the praxis of mystics isoften counter-posed to the praxis of political reformers, the lines are not as cut anddried as they may seem. For the mystic’s process of theological “deconstruction,” analmost Socratic attempt to untie the religious knots that have been fixed by ordinarybelieverswill always present a challenge to the status quo, especially in societieswhereauthoritarianism is often justified in the name of religion. The most salient example ofthis would be the most famous Sufi martyr, Hallaj, whose antinomian proclamationsearned him a brutal death-sentence at the hands of the ‘Abbasid state (cf. Massignon1982, p. 38). Perhaps Hallaj embodies the pluralistic and iconoclastic spirit more thananybody else. Hallaj challenged the nomianistic orthodoxy of his day. He is reported tohave once said that a sincere prayer in one’s house was sufficient to fulfill the religiousobligation of the hajj (Mason 1999, p. 73); but his greatest crime was to challenge theorthodox bipolar dichotomy of God and creation with his famous statement: “I am theReal (ana al-haqq).” Such a statement was authoritarian when uttered by Pharaoh, butwhen uttered by Hallaj it was as meant to be as liberating as Jesus’s famous dictum:“The Kingdom of God is within you.” And yet just as Hallaj was an iconoclast, he wasalso a pluralist, famously writing: “I meditated upon religions, making great effort tounderstand them, and I came to realize that they are a unique Principle with numerousramifications” (Qtd. in Nasr 1980, p. 280). In the figure of Hallaj, the pluralistic andiconoclastic spirits were united.The “iconoclasm” of mystic, Divine Love is perhaps evident in a particular passage
of Abdolkarim Soroush. For him, a spiritualized religion is not “tame;” it does not leadto a dolorous passivity or the kind of lethargic “peace of the soul” that Nietzsche crit-
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icizes. This is a religion that is based on love, but not one that narcotizes the spiritualsenses: it is a wild Divine love, at one moment both anarchic and yet capable of greatspiritual production and synthesis (and it is this kind of love that is indicated by theecstatic or rapturous love, ‘ishq and hayman, that Ibn ‘Arabî attributed to Abraham).Perhaps this was the love of whichNietzsche’s Zarathustra spokewhen he said: “Thereis always a certain madness in love. But also there is a certain method in madness”(Nietzsche 1969, p. 68). Soroush writes:
Surely, the faith of the emulators,11 not unlike their minds and their actions, areuniform, tame, and suggestible. But how about the faith of the sages and lovers?And which is nobler? A religious society becomes more religious as it growsmore free and freedom loving, as it trades die-hard dogma with examined faith,as it favours inner plurality over outer mechanical and nominal unity, and as itfavours voluntary submission to involuntary subservience. This is the spirit thatbreaks the tyrannical arm of religious despotism and breathes the soul of freefaith in the body of power. Verily, the religious jurisprudential government overa society of imitators is as remote from the spirit of democracy as love is frompatience and the devil from the Qur’an (Soroush, 2000, p. 145).
Muchof the contemporary Iranian intellectualAbdolkarimSoroush’s thought seemsto be motivated by a famous hadîth of the Prophet: “There are as many paths towardGod as there are breaths of the human beings” (cf. Soroush 2000, p. 145), which hasbeen meditated upon by many Sufis. Such narrations have the purpose of challengingauthoritarian interpretive closure, and opening the way towards an iconoclastic plu-ralism that does more than “tolerate” the presence of the religious Other. Soroush’sattack on “emulation” (taqlîd) is also of great importance here: it basically amountsto an iconoclastic attack upon authoritarian religious discourse, a discourse that hasoften been used to justify terrible acts of violence and oppression. Such authoritarianclosures are contrasted to a spirit of love and pluralism, and perhaps Soroush is rightthat these two spirits are about as diametrically opposed as they could be. Such aniconoclastic and pluralistic spirit is, of course, coming under great attack.As we have seen, the mystics of Islam have often viewed confusion in a positive
light, as a prelude to Enlightenment. For Soroush, the simple faith of the emulatorstands in marked contrast to the “lover” who is bewildered in the ineffability of theDivine; here it is perhaps worth remembering that Nietzsche located the creation ofthe priestly class precisely in the attempt to tame the noble God that burst through thestrictures of ordinary belief and ethics (cf. Kee 1999, p. 165). Everyday belief is clas-sified as being a merely imaginary attempt to explain the seeming madness of life; allpain and suffering is seen as Divine retribution, good feelings are the reward for faithand the working of righteous deeds, and so forth (Nietzsche 1998, pp. 30–31). Suchbelief systems may provide a great deal of comfort; yet for the radical “atheist” likeNietzsche (his atheism is so theological that we can only place the words in quotes)and the “bewildered mystic” alike, the quest for easy answers lacks spiritual integrity.
11 i.e., the people who do taqlîd.
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It would seem that many pluralistically oriented Muslim intellectuals are attempt-ing a kind of Zarathustran “wake-up” call. Though the Muslim world would perhapsnever be able to accept the proclamation that “God is dead,” nonetheless the spiritof the Nietzschean claim seems to be at work here: not a crude atheism, but anannouncement that the time for a comfortable nomianism of simple belief (and itssometimes authoritarian tendencies) should now draw to a close. Mahmoud Ta Ha’s“deconstruction” ofGod, by acknowledging that Islam is never complete and that thereis no end to exploring the infinity of God, was perhaps such a Zarathustrian wake up-call couched within Qur’anic terms (Ta Ha 1998). Though God was certainly far fromdead for a faithful Islamic scholar like Ta Ha, nonetheless the finite and neatly definedGod that underlies much authoritarian religious discourse in the Muslim world seemsto have been quite dead for him, destroyed by the Infinite Deity. The “death of God”is not a purely atheistic construct; it signifies a movement into this Infinite realm. AsKee has admirably put it, “Only those who have been and continue to be religious canexperience the death of God” (Kee 1999, p. 126). But given the threat that the Infiniteposes to the authoritarian finite, it is not surprising that the guardians a non-pluralisticorthodoxy would come down on such people with great vigor and violence.Such battles have been commonplace throughout history; Ibn ‘Arabî was himself
castigated by many of the jurisprudents of his day, and left his temporary residencein Egypt mainly on their account (Corbin 1997, pp. 68–69). We find the same spiritmanifest in iconoclasts of other traditions. Leo Tolstoy, for example, attacked the blindemulation and conformity he found rooted in the minds of Russian army soldiers, sentoff by the Tsar to crush peasant uprisings in the Russian countryside. He describes howhe challenged such soldiers to justify the violence that they committed against otherhuman beings even though God has written “Thou shalt not kill” in the Decalogue.One soldier’s response mirrors the attitude of many “emulators” in the Muslim worldwho blindly follow the clergy in all matters, even when it comes to imprisonment,exile, and killing. When Tolstoy asked how this could be justified, he was told:
“They [the government] must have found a law for it. The archbishops know asmuch about it as we do, I should hope.” And in saying this the soldier obviouslyset his mind at rest, in the full conviction that his spiritual guides had found a lawwhich authorized his ancestors, and the tzars and their descendents, and millionsof men, to serve as he was doing himself, and that the question I had put himwas a kind of hoax or conundrum on my part (Tolstoy 1984, p. 304).
The argument in favor of blindly following the Tsar’s archbishops seems to benearly identical to the “rational” proofs many offer for taqlîd: the ‘ulama’ are moreknowledgeable about Islam, and so therefore one must always trust their opinions andnever dispute with them on any issue, and this basically seems to be of the defensegiven for As-Sistanî’s fatwa cited above. Abou El Fadl argues that the Muslims arepresently in an intellectual dark age (Abou El Fadl 2001, p. 269). But if this is so, thepluralistic/universalistic strands of gnostic apodictic thought and mystical praxis andthe work of current liberal and pluralistic theologians offer the seeds of an Enlight-enment which is both thoroughly Islamic and religiously universal. What seems tobe necessary now is an increasingly iconoclastic spirit that has spiritual pluralism atits core. We can close with Nietzsche’s declaration of war against idols, where (like
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Abraham) he sets himself the task of the iconoclast, “posing questions with a hammer”and smashing the idols of the age:
Another mode of convalescence (in certain situations even more to my liking)is sounding out idols. There are more idols than realities in the world: that is my“evil eye” upon this world; that is also my “evil ear.” Finally to pose questionswith a hammer, and sometimes to hear as a reply that famous hollow sound thatcan only come from bloated entrails—what a delight for one who has ears evenbehind his ears, for me, an old psychologist and pied piper before whom justthat which would remain silent must finally speak out (Nietzsche 1998, p. 3).
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