Would you then force people to become believers? Jili began his analysis by taking the sacred text at its literal word. It is only to say that his interpretation is as valid as any other interpretation derived from the literal meaning of these three verses.
Even more, Jili affirms that Islam is the quintessential religion of God. In the modern age, the chief problem for Islamic theology is not the proliferation of local religions, but the competition of rival world religions, most of which have histories longer than that of Islam and have developed sophisticated means of defense and interpretation.
If God had truly intended to save the world through the message of Christ alone, then why would He have allowed the theological challenge of Islam?
If Islam resolved all of the contradictions of Christian theology, then why is Christianity still the largest religion? Part of the answer to these questions, Jili would assert, lies in the recognition that each religion contains a portion of universal truth, to which people respond in their own way. Theological hostility can never be transformed into tolerance until this fact is recognized.
According to Akbarian moral theology, there are two types of divine command, which entail different kinds of human obligations. Each command implies a different way of approaching the religious other. The first type of divine command conceives of the other in a universal sense, as a fellow descendant of Adam, the first human being. According to this perspective, all human beings share the same natural rights and duties that derive from the covenant contracted between God and humanity before the creation of Adam.
The second type of divine command is addressed more specifically and narrowly to the Muslim believer. These verses discuss the relations between the Muslim community and other religious communities, the theological relationship between Islam and other religions, and the rules of social interaction, including the rules of war. The divine names of mercy, al-Rahman and al-Rahim , govern the Creative Command because the act of divine creativity — the bestowal of existence upon nonexistence — is the most merciful act that God performs.
Under the terms of this command, the most important duty of the human being is to recognize that insofar as she is human and created, she has one God, one origin, one ancestor Adam , one race, and shares with all other human beings the same nature, dignity, and religion.
This relationship also expresses what the liberal moral philosopher John Rawls d. This is because the Creative Command sets the most basic and fundamental terms on which the relationship between self and other is predicated. This is because the Islamic Original Position conceives of all human beings as ontologically and morally equivalent and as sharing the same natural rights and duties.
The normal human condition is to see God from the starting point of the world. To see God from this perspective is to see God as the Lord and Creator of everything.
The fact that this covenant was contracted before humans were on earth implies that human beings have a transcendent side to their nature, and thus have the ability to rise above their earthly condition and view the world as if from a distance or a height.
Keep your duty to your Lord, who created you from a single soul, and created its mate from it and from whom issued forth many men and women. Clearly, this duty applies to genealogical kinship, but it also applies to the greater kinship of the human species, since all of humankind, as the children of Eve, are born from the same womb. The fact that such rights are both mutual and reciprocal is also part of the Islamic Original Position and is a consequence of the shared ontology of humanity.
This ontology includes a transcendent aspect, which is the spiritual potential of each human being. Thus, human beings, who are composed of both spirit and matter, have a natural duty to respect the rights of others, because both self and other share the same combination of material being and spirit.
To objectify and depersonalize another human being because of ideological or religious differences is to forget that all humans are made up of the same combination of spirit and clay. The idea that all created things possess rights that are part of their ontological nature is fundamental to the Islamic conception of justice.
The duty to respect the inherent rights of others is a corollary of this premise; human dignity is a right that is not exclusive to Muslims. It would make a mockery of the God-given rights of dignity, life, and free choice for Muslims to restrict the social and political rights of confessional minorities or to assign collective guilt to a nation because of its religion or system of government.
The basic rights in Islam — the right to life, the right to freedom, and the right to dignity — depend on a second natural duty that arises from the Islamic Original Position.
What this means in practice is that when the performance of an obligation calls for severity, it is the duty of Muslims to temper severity with mercy. In terms of religious practice, the concept of obligation has more of a day-to-day impact on the lives of individual Muslims than the concept of right. Thus, it is no surprise that the type of divine command most often discussed in Islamic literature is the Command of Obligation al-amr al-taklifi. The latter category includes business transactions, criminal justice, and the laws of nations.
The Arabic term, taklif , used in the phrase al-amr al-taklifi , is a legal and moral concept that refers to the responsibility of individuals to carry out their obligations. The Command of Obligation imposes specific obligations on Muslims, either individually or collectively. It is a matter of debate whether such obligations should be obeyed simply because they come from God or because they are good intrinsically. What is perhaps most significant is that neither side seems to have discussed this question from the standpoint of a systematic moral philosophy.
Whereas the juridical tradition of Islam dealt with questions of moral choice pragmatically on a case-by-case basis, it was primarily the philosophers and the Sufis who attempted to assess the Islamic concept of obligation within the context of more universal conceptions of right and justice. The duty that governs the moral obligations of Muslims under the Command of Obligation is justice. Justice, in the sense of what is right and proper, is a secondary meaning of the Arabic term, haqq.
A problem with applying the notion of justice to specific obligations in Islam is that justice is most commonly understood as a moral duty, whereas the Command of Obligation is understood as a legal requirement. Because the exact relationship between duties and obligations has not been philosophically determined in contemporary Islam, there is a tendency to fall into a confusion of priorities in the attempt to apply one or the other. Because of the reciprocal nature of justice, any act of mercy bestowed by one human being upon another constitutes a gift for both the receiver and the giver.
For the receiver, the gift of mercy compensates for the severity of justice. For the giver, the duty to act mercifully is also a gift from God because it counteracts the tendency of the ego to indulge in self-righteousness:. God exercises mercy as a gratuitous act under the name al-Rahman The Beneficent , while he obligates Himself to requite with mercy under the name al-Rahim The Merciful.
Obligation is part of the Gratuitous Gift, and so al-Rahim is contained within al-Rahman. This kind of mercy is an obligation upon God with which He has bound Himself toward those servants, and the latter rightfully merit this kind of mercy by their good works. To summarize: the natural duty of mercy is part of the Islamic Original Position by virtue of the Creative Command, which corresponds to the divine name al-Rahman.
In like manner, the Command of Obligation obliges human beings to act mercifully by virtue of the divine name al-Rahim. Just as human mercy rahma is implicit in the idea of mercy as a universal principle al-Rahim , so the obligation to act mercifully on all possible occasions is a necessary corollary to the notion of mercy as a natural duty.
However, most people are not aware of the logical priority of mercy and other natural duties that arise from the Creative Command. Mired as they are in a world of difference and subjectivity, they interpret the Command of Obligation in an exclusive sense, and overlook the logical priority of both the Creative Command and the natural duties that arise from it:.
The divine effusion is vast, because [God] is vast in bestowal. There is no shortcoming on His part. But you have nothing of Him except what your essence accepts. Hence, your own essence keeps the Vast away from you and places you in the midst of constraint. It is He that you serve and He alone that you recognize. This is the mark within which He will transmute Himself to you on the day of resurrection, by unveiling Himself.
In this world, this mark is unseen for most people. Every human being knows it from himself, but he does not know that it is what he knows. The Muslim who views the world from a narrow, fideistic perspective can only perceive God through his or her personal experiences.
The sectarian interpretations that the believer gives the commands of God may be justified in a qualified sense, but they are likely to lead to injustice if they are applied universally and uncritically. Even the Muslim jurist, who is trained to consider a scriptural obligation as prior to a moral duty, must assess each obligation according to whether the divine command that governs it is general or specific in its application.
If the application is specific, he must inquire about any limitations to its application that might arise through the historical context of its revelation. An example of this dual problematic of prioritization and contextualization can be found in Surat al-Tawba Chapter on Repentance , where some of the most hostile verses concerning Muslim and non-Muslim relations appear.
Certainly, it is helpful to know that there is a limiting context: this discourse was revealed at a time when the polytheists and the Jews in Arabia had broken their treaties with the Muslims and banded together against the Prophet in what proved to be the final assault on Medina. However, as late as the mid-twentieth century, Sayyid Qutb, who was fully aware of the historical background of this verse, interpreted it as a general obligation to compel non-Muslim minorities to pay the jizya -tax.
Even more, he defined the jizya not as an exemption from military service as Muslim apologists have often done, but as a protection tax and token of humiliation that temporarily exempted Jews and Christians from persecution by the Islamic state. The first step toward a new Islamic theology of difference is for Muslims to recognize that ultimately, everything happens because God wants it to happen. Herein indeed, are portents for those with knowledge Oh humankind! We have created you male and female, and have made you nations and tribes so that you may come to know one another.
Verily, the noblest of you, in the sight of God, is the most God-conscious of you. Verily, God is the Knowing and the Aware However, the acceptance of plural perspectives on the Absolute does not mean that all religions are ultimately the same, or even that some religions might not be more effective paths to the knowledge of God than others. By the same token, prioritizing the natural duty of mercy by acknowledging the dignity of Buddhists and Christians or accepting the divine origins of Judaism and Hinduism does not mean that Muslims cannot oppose the unjust actions of believers in other religions.
Evils should be opposed in themselves, and they should not be seen as inescapable consequences of alternative religious beliefs. According to the Akbarian perspective, no religion that God allows to exist is bad per se, and no one has the right to exclude a believer in another religion from the brotherhood of the Islamic Original Position. Individual Christians and Hindus can do bad things, but so can Muslims. In fact, the situation is quite the opposite.
This is very different from the belief, expressed by contemporary Hamas and Islamic Jihad extremists, that strapping on a bomb belt and blowing up a bus of Israeli school children will earn the martyr a reward in heaven because the children are potential Israeli soldiers.
All morally significant acts, whether performed by Muslims or non-Muslims, must be judged by prioritizing the rights and duties of the Creative Command over the requirements of the Command of Obligation. The will of God is not one-dimensional. Five centuries ago, the Sufi and jurist Ahmad Zarruq of Fez d. As a unique combination of spirit and matter, the human being is by nature a builder of bridges between conceptual worlds.
Beneath the differences that obtain between religious doctrines, sacred laws, and worldviews, all normal human beings share the ability to transcend their limitations; all have the intellectual means to communicate with each other across religious divides. If believers in different religions are unable to understand each other, it means that one or both are lacking in spiritual insight, or that one or both are in fundamental error about the nature of God. Among the rights bestowed upon us by God, the right not to understand is nowhere to be found.
XXXVI, See also Richard P. The term came into the vocabulary many years later. Tasawouf has been referred to as a path, a journey, a journey of the heart. Such a journey has a beginning; a point of departure that leads towards a destination. A Sufi takes an inner journey to attain the knowledge of Self, a knowledge that leads towards the understanding the Divine.
A journey towards understanding such truth will necessarily involve steps, one has to pass through stations of learning, awareness and understanding. One must learn the rules, disciplines and practices. One does not become a Sufi without honoring the rules of the Path. Being attracted to the teachings of Sufism does not necessarily make one a Sufi. In Sufism, the traveler departs from the station of limited knowledge and understanding and takes the journey towards the destination of greater understanding, understanding the Divine.
In passing the successive stages of the journey, the traveler will learn the meaning of Divinity, will become aware and knowledgeable of the teachings of truth, will pass the levels of purification to discover the meaning of unity which lies hidden behind the veils of multiplicity. In the journey of the heart the Sufi, the traveler, becomes enraptured by the magnificent existence of the Divine, the Divine becomes the eternal Beloved and the journey becomes the journey of the lovers towards the Beloved where finally the Sufi declares:.
Throughout the world of Sufism, love has become the eternal theme. Sufis have gracefully glorified this theme in their poetry, in their principles, in their songs and practices, to the point that the Sufi proclaims:.
Let love exist No fear if I exist or not Let this iron change into gold Rising from this fire of love. We must understand that it is a human right to be able to find the way towards understanding the reality of the Divine, an understanding which is direct without the need for a medium. One needs to dissolve into the being of the Beloved, the Divine, where there remains no need to refer to You referring to the Divine and I referring to oneself. In such a state the veils of multiplicity will fall and essential unity will remain.
The seeker will become the true manifestation of la illaha illa Allah, there is nothing except one Divine Unity. It is in this state that the seeker becomes a truthful monotheist. There is an I No longer exists.
Mansur al-Halaj 10th Century Persian Sufi. In the life story of the Prophet, whose title was Habib-u-Allah, the beloved of Allah, we read of his immeasurable love for Allah. His state of Unification is beyond words. Such tradition, annihilation in the Divine has remained strong in Sufism, certainly it was strong among the People of Suffa.
After the passing of the Prophet those founders of Sufism went back to their own homelands. They began teaching what they had learned. Students gathered around them and centers were created. Among the most organized and established centers were: Khorasan northeastern Iran ; Fars central Iran ; and Baghdad Iraq. The students of these teachers, in turn, traveled to many lands and with them the teaching and message of Sufism was introduced to the hearts of many nations and many people.
Over the centuries, gradually two systems of Sufism developed: practical Sufism and philosophical Sufism. Sufism is established on the essential laws of Being, and the laws of Being are timeless, free from dimensions of time and place and the limitations of human qualities. Individuals do have the ability to understand the laws of Being, yet they cannot change the laws. The same principle applies in Sufism. As a result, the essential principles of Sufism have remained free from the dimensions of time or place, gender or race, cultures or ceremonies and all human qualities.
Such essential law does not change as cultures or times change. When Practical Sufism has entered different cultures and times, sometimes its surface might have taken the colors of cultures and times, but its essence has remained secure and unchanged in the chests of its owners.
This spiritual journey is not a matter of chance, of following intuition, or trusting empty verbal formula.
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