Dedication To Godliness

 

7.  DEDICATION TO AND RESOLUTION FOR GODLINESS

 

Many Muslims, whatever their level of practicing Islam have a gnawing doubt that committing themselves ‘too much’ to Islam they risk losing out in many matters related to the pleasures of this world. They believe or suspect that being freer in one’s choices and actions will help them to lead a more fulfilling life and despite any sins such freedom could lead them into they will most probably meet a happy end given the mercy of Allah. In other words, enjoy yourself sinfully at least every now and then no matter what Allah says, and given that Allah is merciful, all will be well in the end. I remember an old muezzin (mosque official calling the azan and at times deputising the imam) who drank brandy at every evening meal except during Ramadans and when criticised defended his act through his alcohol-smelling and unsteady bluish lips that Allah was ‘ghafurur-rahim’, i.e., mercifully forgiving. That his family led a very poor life and his brandy was the most expensive item on their shopping list did not seem to bother him at all. I believe that a profound misunderstanding lies at the bottom of such thinking. To begin with, such thinkers do not understand what Allah means. They think that Allah is a difficult master outside His creation with little and conditional consent to their enjoying themselves and that is because He, being free from our human wants, cannot understand our weakness in front of our needs or desires and like all non-understanding masters cannot help being harsh with us. Accordingly His at least some of commandments needed not be taken too seriously and instead it could be hoped that He could be deceived and confounded by reminding Him how kind He was or should be towards His weak servants.  Mind you, cheating gods by compliments was a time-honoured pagan stratagem; in Islam, as true religion, honesty and humility before Allah is a non-negotiable requirement.

 

The fact is that Allah and we (I mean we at our best) are not separate but united in one purpose: the enhancement of the total and final happiness of us human beings. He made us with a potential of outgrowing all kinds of moral weakness albeit gradually and prepared for such moral growers unimaginably great prizes and rewards. This being so we must also be aware that He and we are not equals at all. One difference between us and Him is that He knows what is best for us while we often do not. We see a small scale representation of this in the relationship between a good parent and a child. The good parent not only knows what is best for the child but he or she will not hesitate to say so and urge and at times even force the child to follow the parental directives. In case a serious disobedience is shown the parent will not hesitate to apply punishment. Yet, as the parent applies it he or she hurts more than the child. A good parent punishes out of mercy and not for personal revenge.

 

In our relationship with Allah this control takes the form of the workings of a conscience. Conscience (wijdan), if developed in a person at all, can be the undisputed king of his or her life. There is a catch though: the conscience must develop Islamically, that is to say under the influence of Allah’s Book and His Messenger’s teachings and example under that Book. To see what I mean let me tell you what I witnessed about a year ago. I was visiting a fellow homeopath (I am a homeopath) who was a lady from an Eastern country and a non-Muslim. We were discussing children born severely handicapped. She told me quite matter-of-factly and with obvious approval that in her country such babies were taken to the wilderness and let to perish whatever way they may: some just starved, others could be claimed by foxes, wolves and birds of prey. Mind you, this is not what only some backward nations still do. In that supposedly most philosophic and enlightened Greece of the antic age where Socrateses and Platoes flourished child abandonment and murder were routinely practiced. Spartan elders examined all new-born among them and those they found defective they just hurled from the precipices. But that was not all: almost all nations of old could abandon or kill any of their children however healthy, simply because they saw them too many to feed or in case of girl children, less  profitable to raise than male children. In fact this bias against girls still survives among the majority of world’s nations, including ‘Muslims’. And please hold your breath: Muhammad had come to demolish this bias: from Allah he banned the abandonment and killing of girls and in their later lives he improved their lot beyond recognition. If most Muslims reneged on their commitments to women after Muhammad, that is a wastage natural to all reforms and revolutions: ideals are never fully realised; their function is giving a boost to improvements in human life but by the laws of nature no natural process can ever be fully efficient and that is the Second Law of Thermodynamics (mind you I am a scientist). What is more, surely fully aware of this natural fact Allah says “If you can abstain from the greater sins you have been prohibited from, We then cover up your smaller errors…” (4: 31). You see, Allah is aware of our shortcomings and prepared to accommodate them provided we do our humble imperfect best.  What we need to do, is trying harder and harder.

 

Of all improvements in human life none is as essential as moral improvement. You may have all the most advanced scientific and technological means at your disposal but if you have no moral sense, no conscience that is to say, you can at any time and on any pretext blow up other people and grab their any goods. That was why and how almost all wars were fought and are still being fought. Arms race is such that terrestrial warfare may soon be dwarfed by the stellar. Remember the ‘star wars’ scenario.

 

Yes, scientific and technological advances are not bad in themselves and can and have often been great boons to human happiness. Thanks to them food is becoming more plentiful and affordable, various terrible illnesses are becoming curable and overall life is becoming more comfortable and safe. But without parallel moral advancements the same old dangers from human selfishness, treachery and brutality will never be far away and aren’t. See the ongoing wars in the seven corners of earth. See the ever-resurgent terrorist acts either on the part of terrorists as such or the states which terrorise other people but under the guise of legal and righteous war-making.  All sides are resorting to all the dirty tricks in the book and then craftily projecting them as glorious moral struggle designed to bring justice and peace.

 

Is there a cure then? We believe yes, there is. That is doing more on enhancing the human conscience which should keep up with the enhancements in human material ingenuity, the scientific and technological advancements. This is nowhere else is more pressing and urgent than in education and reproduction. Mind-boggling and too fast advancements in biological sciences are such that we are probably at the verge of designing and producing new forms of life and new ways of human reproduction- they both are being tentatively tried. Genetically modified crops and food animals are already a fact. Designer human babies are in the offing. Sex has already been divorced from reproduction and family responsibilities: people can now engage in any form of sexual satisfaction, that is to say getting a sexual orgasm which has nothing to do with parentage let alone family life and responsibility. What is equally bad is the ability modern technology put in people’s hands to make themselves feel as happy as they want. Modern mind-altering drugs are called ‘designer drugs’ and a lot of them can be manufactured entirely synthetically from raw materials having nothing to do with natural sources like opium or cannabis. In a laboratory and beginning from simplest organic and inorganic substances chemists are able to manufacture gases, liquids and tablets capable of sending the moods of users heavenwards. What they do with their experiences of paradise or in their aftermath is not much debated: Deranged as the user’s mind becomes he or she can then commit any cruel or silly act as he or she can fancy and finds the opportunity for. Murder or suicide is not uncommon. In the past we only had to contend with alcohol, opium and cannabis; we now have a big pharmacopoeia (drugs list) of mind-altering and behaviour-distorting substances flooding the consumers and overwhelming the forces of law and order in almost all countries. Religious faith, the only ‘medicine’ in the past for the treatment of human psychological and moral ills is going out of the window with its functions being hijacked by mind-altering drugs and also pragmatic and commercialised cults like yoga and also by exhausting wild entertainments like ‘gigs’, i.e., mass music concerts often in open air. By just moving wildly and indulging all their momentary impulses thousands of youths at a time are forgetting themselves and ‘living in heaven’ thanks to the incessant beatings of drums the cacophony of other musical instruments and swaying of tunes and bodies they induce. These modern forms of mass worship of the lower instincts take place in massive concert halls often converted from sheds and defunct factories or in large public squares. When awakened from such chemical or physical trips to heaven the youths have little reason to be concerned with the morality or otherwise of their acts; Throughout they could have drunk pints of alcohol, taken a gamut of drugs and committed or subjected to a dozen sordid sexual acts.

 

In the past it was the morality of our acts which gave us a sense of honour and a satisfaction with our human qualities both of which contributed to public and private peace and  order- now we can deaden these two anxieties by our mood- and mind-altering drugs and instead commit any immoral or illegal act which we think we can get away with. That must be the reason behind the unstoppable rise in crime rates in all countries. Many people, equipped with a drug in one pocket and a weapon in the other roam the streets and rob and at times maim or kill or rape total strangers just out of the spur of a moment. Schools are flush with drugs and also some weapons; discipline is a shadow of what it used to be only a generation or two ago and is getting worse by the day. ‘Human rights’ of the offenders seem to be the more concern of those ever-proliferating ‘human rights’ organisations than the rights of the victims and their near ones. Prisons are bursting to capacity and vomiting out more and more prisoners earlier and earlier than their prescribed terms in order to cope with the ever-increasing inflow. Despite increases in manpower and budget police forces are not only being more overwhelmed but also being corrupted from within thanks to the sophistication and financial resources of the ever-mushrooming and proliferating criminal gangs a lot of which are international consortiums. Organised crime is almost certainly the biggest of all business enterprises and the governments’ battle against this business is becoming an increasingly losing battle. In fact many governments and their functionaries are at the payroll of gangsters and in fact may be run by some gangsters posing as ‘elected’ politicians or otherwise.

 

Of course corruption in personal and social matters is as old as humanity but never in history it has been as universal and fast-growing as today. The cure always trumpeted by messengers of Allah has been the cultivation of personal morality as well as a just and decent social order; the latter largely depends on the former and this former in its turn can only be based on that most useful and blessing of inner forces- a well developed and entrenched conscience. If you have an irresistible, all seeing, all hearing controlling power in your heart you are at your safest against wrongdoing; even if you sometimes lapse and do some wrong your heart will torment you until you get up and remedy the situation. This is why God is such an indispensable concept and EMOTION to have; this is why the Creator of man created him in a way that makes an irresistible, invincible inner controller called a conscience to monitor and steer him at all times under all circumstances. No police, no outer demon, no parent can exercise the power a developed and entrenched personal conscience can do; that is why all godless, hedonistic and dirty-minded people hate God so much and fight so much to expel Him from the hearts of other people.

 

But people of God are even more determined to keep to God than the enemies of God are determined to escape from God. In Him they find both their salvation and contentment as all else seem so partial, conditional and ultimately vain. With God they can contain their evil and maintain their contentment; with Him they can bless others; with Him they can face all the tempting ups and depressing downs of life. God is the Rock they stand on with unshakeable firmness and the Centre of Guidance which will never fail them.

 

Yet this does not mean that godly people are not for fun that their life is one of grimness and dourness. On the contrary theirs is a life of almost total and constant cool contentment having benefiting from an infinite perspective of the whole existence past, present and future and as far as Islam is concerned this is also a very realistic outlook since Islam is extremely factual, practical and pragmatic and equally this-worldly and other-worldly. A Muslim is not only allowed but positively encouraged to avail himself or herself of all the nice and healthy gifts of a physical life as can be seen from the Allah’s Gracious Qur’an below:

 

“O children of Adam! Put on your fineries at every place of prostration (mosque); eat and drink but do not be wasteful. He does not like the wasteful. Who is banning the finery and good provisions (including good food) Allah issued to His servants? Say: It is for those who believe in this world’s life and exclusive to them in the next. Thus are We are detailing our verses for a people who would know (7: 31- 32)

 

Here we find blank licence for Muslims to take their hearty share of this world’s all natural and legitimate enjoyments short of being wasteful and that includes both good dress, good and delicious food and pleasant social interaction.

 

What it is that Allah does not like and will not allow? The next verse puts it:

 

“Say: My Lord is banning (making haram) only indecent, unethical things whether overt or covert, plain sins (as defined), overstepping into other’s rights unjustly and that you join other gods to Allah about which Allah never sent down any authorization and lastly that you say things about Allah you do not know” (7:33)

 

Now please compare the above commandments with the behaviour of some ignorant or over-zealous Muslims. The ignorant may perform their prayers and keep their fasts but between these there may be no meanness and nastiness they will not dabble in. They may backbite, cheat, slander and even murder. Why do you think there is so much infighting, blood-feuds and mutual cheating and robbing in tribal Muslim communities? Why some Muslims fight even in the mosques? Why Muslim women must be very careful in the midst of their very Muslim community lest they are molested and even raped?

 

As for the not so ignorant these may not (only may not, they also may) commit the gross and glaring scandals of their ignorant brethren but they may offend Allah’s commandments in even more serious ways. Allah is not mincing His words but hitting the bull in the eye: He is saying that the two most serious wrongs are joining with Allah other gods and saying about Allah things which Allah never authorised but the sinners have invented out of their whims.

 

Had not these last items been a serious risk among the more learned Muslims Allah would not press with them. Because both Jewish and Christian scholars had went down this path of error Allah is warning us. And He is justified as we see that in the matter of creed Muslims also split into camps which are in the wrong except the camp called ‘Ahl al Sunna wa’l Jama’a’. This is the main body of Muslims who follow the Prophet’s practices as he actually and historically demonstrated which practices conform to the Book of Allah in their entirety.

 

Creedal claims and ritual and legal practices unsupported by the Book of Allah and those reported practices of the Prophet which agree with or at least do not fly in the face of the Book of Allah are to be seen as suspect and left alone even if they feature in the most reputable Hadith collections.  Among the last and the best are the collections of imams Bukhari and Muslims; these I find about at least 90% perfectly reliable, especially the hadiths about the rituals. The other four are slightly less reliable but still good in practical matters. Below these come dozens of later collections with increasingly dangerous pieces featuring in them. In one for example, Allah supposedly appears to the Prophet in a dream where Allah appears as a young boy in golden sandals and wearing a golden mask, and with a profuse hair, a figure more at home in Babylonian or Greek pantheons. What good such reports could bring is a moot question.

 

But talking dubious things about Allah is not confined to dubious hadith pieces. Some mystics produced their own dubious claims without any reference either to the Qur’an or the Hadith. They said they just ‘discovered’ (kashafa) their findings. They claimed to have seen Allah, address and addressed by Him, praised Him and praised by Him and in fact to have become Allah Himself albeit in a coy, elusive and evasive sense. What gave the game away has always been that the ‘revelations’ they claimed to have received from Allah did not materialise. Some gave the day and date of the Judgment Day or the advent of an eschatological figure like Mahdi or the Christ which dates subsequently came and went uneventfully. These have been the exact replicas of Jewish and Christian errors and Allah’s warnings should have to be taken more seriously by our mystics and lesser hadith compilers.

 

Let all above serve as a warning and guidance to all sincere seekers of Allah’s Face: they must mean real godliness (taqwa), they must dedicate their lives to the Only True God as shining forth from the pages of the Qur’an and nowhere else, not even the Hadith if a piece from it defies the Qur’an and stay put resolutely on this Path which Allah describes as

“Thus We have revealed to thee a Spirit from Our Affair. You used not to know neither what the Book nor faith was but We made it a Light with which We guide to the Right Path whom We will from among Our servants. No doubts thou art showing the Right Path, the Path of Allah to Whom belong all that are in the heavens and in the earth. Beware! Are not all affairs to be returning to Allah?” (42: 52- 53)

 

8.  COOPERATING WITH ALLAH

 

Allah is both the Most Certain Truth/Reality (al Haqq) and most elusive of all truths and realities. If you ask why it is so the answer could be that this double-faced fact is intended to test our moral substance: is our moral claims and effort genuine and all-out, i.e., a totally committed one or a sham or at best a cowardly, lukewarm semi-effort?

That Allah is the Most Certain of truths and realities shines forth from the verse:

“That Day Allah will award them their true religion and they know that Allah is the Obvious True Reality” (24: 25)

 

We translated ‘deenahum al haqq’ (their haqq deen) not in the usually as “Their true punishment” which is legitimate enough a translation but more literally as “their true religion” because this second alternative implies something richer and more fundamental than the first. It tells us that whatever one was believing in his heart while on this earth shall be represented to him or her as the basis of the Divine Judgment against him or her. More relevant to our subject is this though: the person facing Divine Judgment will see then for sure that Allah had been and also should have been to him or her the Most Obvious True Reality all along.  True believers had always seen this fact back on earth and they now stand to be awarded the prizes of their true, workable, fruitful faith, their valid religion.

Yet depending on who we are Allah may also be the most elusive of all truths, all realities.

If we boast of a purely rational and scientific mind we may well remain blind to Allah. Will you believe it, true scientists are very rare. Two recent articles I browsed in a famous scientific magazine were questioning survival of the human soul/consciousness after death and the existence of an intelligent design (a neutral term for God) behind creation as against purely physical/materialistic theory of causation of the universe. As always, both the survival and the intelligent design were subtly and politely rubbished; most scientists are too afraid of being seen as not hard-nosed enough rational minds and the peer pressure on them is so strong that they better be cautious and still better join the chorus of the booers of survival and design.

 

What anti-soul, anti-God scientists don’t understand is that there is far more to man than his rational mind and those extra-rational mental capacities and inclinations are there for a good reason. ‘Man cannot live by bread alone’ is an irrefutable fact; we are not machines which must be fed so much energy and raw materials to turn out so much changed material and other energy to a given design and formula. Strictly scientifically speaking SOUL SHOULD NOT EXIST. It should not because it cannot be detected, defined and measured by any method science regards valid: that is why the so-called psychical research is not valid in a strictly scientific sense however much gadgets and mathematics it may employ. THE SUBJECTIVE experience is never a scientific concept and from the outside man is just a flesh and bone super computer and super machine. Only a mechanical study of man advances human biology; psychology is a reluctant concession to man’s incurable and inscrutable non-scientific quality of inside the man. Even the most materialistic, hard-nosed (as they proudly and also foolishly see themselves) scientists have their non-material, fears, hopes, romantic loves and devastating disappointments and even suicides. The subjective is not only unconquerable and undeniable: it is also the PRIMARY GIVEN of and the only basis of the study and understanding of all existence.

 

Mere robots cannot be curious about the universe, study it, catalogue their findings and store them alongside theories trying to explain them. Robots are our mechanical extensions like a walking stick is and they can do nothing more than helping us in an instrumental sense as we designed and prescribed them for. It is always us, the SUBJECTIVE us who determines everything and says the last word. Philosophers have been rightly saying (often with wrong intentions and without understanding) that God is our projection of ourselves into the whole of the universe. That is to say, we imagine that the universe is a body whose consciousness is a super person with similar subjective powers and experiences like ours. Conversely religions say that the universe is the self-projection of God and man as God’s known highest creation is so designed as to project back an image of God inhabiting and ruling the universe. This must be the more correct view; God First, man follows. In one sense it is back to the ‘egg from hen or hen from egg’ dilemma. God can neither be proven or disproven  scientifically but that is no weakness as the hard-nosed colleagues of mine would have it. Since consciousness also cannot be proven or disproven but exists all the same as the PRIMARY GIVEN for all of us so can God be. Who can prove that a CONSCIOUSNESS (and Power going with it) to be called God is not inhabiting and ruling the universe and not chuckling at our interminable disputes whether God exists or not?

The conclusion can only be then that God, like our consciousness, can be, at one and the same time, both unscientific and real in the most primary and fundamental sense. We cannot prove this but neither can we prove from the outside that our own consciousness does exist. What we do instead, if we are not mad and we behave pragmatically, is accepting our consciousness as our fundamental nature and overarching power and as a result functioning effortlessly and surely in any direction we want and can.  Parallel to this, we can also accept the existence of God as the most perfect, most powerful and most good being, recognise Him as our infallible Lord and hope to attain an unending sequence of moral perfections and emotional satisfactions no other career in a personal relationship can provide. What is more, God can be worked for and towards as the greatest and best employer we have while at the same time we can work similarly but on a smaller scale for fellow human employers or customers or those depending on us like our families.

 

In other words without religious faith a man is an incomplete being, a disabled, a crippled person. Only a workable, realistic, objectively moral religious faith can raise man from being just another (albeit highest known animal) fumbling in all kinds of rivalries and conspiracies to a being which moves peacefully with the rest of the creation so long any does not pose a threat to him, moving in absolute loving mercy and goodwill, in tune with his Most Magnificent and Benevolent God of All Existence.  This grandest Beatific Vision is available to all who would care to ask for it: having it can only enhance one’s scientific pursuits thanks to the new sense of responsibility a Godly scientist would feel towards the rest of creation. For example, he will not join and help efforts to produce newer and more terrible, inhuman weapons but instead, if they are being made by others, he will work at developing systems to neutralise those inhuman weapons. If Nazis worked at inventing more and more inhuman methods and means to destroy as many people as they thought they should it was done from a mentality of godlessness, for supposedly being a Christian or Muslim or any other faith does not stop evil people to indulge and relish their evil aims. True godliness is adopting the graces of an essentially Graceful God despite the reservations which makes that God to hurt His creatures at times. God sometimes hurts simply because without hurts the joys cease to be felt: all subjective experience is possible only when contrasts are there to be experienced and compared. This is a non-negotiable and irremovable fact and attacking it and trying for it to go away is doomed to failure. To enjoy food one must bear with a sense of being hungry for a while. To enjoy the sunshine night must intervene, to enjoy love, hate must be feared. The hope religious faith promises is that a state of existence shall come when and where only good and joy will inform us and even that will be possible thanks to the bad and pain being known in the past. Let me tell you just one experience of mine: I was a prisoner of war and had therefore to live through many sufferings from inadequate food and comforts to worry about my and my family’s death which were not prisoners but captives in the hands of the enemy. When I was released my experience of the world became one of almost constant, unbroken joy: I could not simply be angry with or resentful of anything or anybody; my being was too desiccated to do anything else than absorbing all the moisture of pleasures my re-found freedom gave to me. All mystics and in fact all wise people recognise that suffering is a necessary as well as inevitable part of life and it at least absolves and justifies itself when we find that it greatly enhances all joys found subsequent to it. What can be more ecstatic than the joy two lovers long separated meet again?

 

When one considers the above scientific, philosophical and emotional points, provided one is not self-crippled with his phobia against religious faith, one should rather see that ultimately God is the highest value, the highest product of human mind, more than all science, a product of the human mind in the sense that our Creator created us in a way so as to enable us to create Him back in our imagination.  Sufis, those top mystics teach that God is All in All and He and man are the closest and dearest of friends if man chooses to accept God’s call to friendship.

 

This friendship is about such great love that cooperation between God and man becomes man’s greatest, dearest aim and God’s greatest pleasure. Cooperating with God means becoming an active, untiring, unlooking-back agent of God’s Grace in the world, entertaining grace, sowing grace, dispensing grace and extinguishing as much suffering and as many avoidable pains as one can in the Name and for the Sake of God and replacing them, as far as possible, with legitimate joy.

 

Denial and denigration of God on the part of some scientists, philosophers and other atheists are betrayals of human chances for bettering the human condition. True, religion has always been abused but what has not? Is science less abused? Is art? Is politics? Things should be judged by the best uses they can be put to and not the worst. A cutting instrument is worth having, nay indispensable, since only with one a surgeon can save a life; that the same instrument can be used for murder is no argument to justify its extinction.

 

Yes, there are plain bad religions, like primitive religions sanctifying human, in fact even innocent human lives or endangering health (e.g. extreme, corrosive, self-crippling asceticism) or encouraging racist barbarity (e.g., ‘only our race are sons of god’ and the rest are exploitable and dispensable animals). But we also have well-developed, highly enlightened and humane faiths whose main ambition registers itself as universal loving mercy at a well-informed level, with an auto-critical saintly attitude. Both Islam and Christianity are like that and the members of the two should be best friends. Read if you wish:

 

“Those closest to (Muslim) believers in lovingness you will find those who say ‘We are the Nazarenes (Christians)’. That is because among them are monks and priests who do not puff themselves up with pride” (The Holy Qur’an, 5: 82). Apparently saintly people act as catalysts and preservatives in keeping a lot of people a lot of time oriented towards God.

True Christianity is about love and humility and the above verse could not put it a more apt and to-the-point manner.  Among we Muslims we have our pious scholars (ulema al muttaqoon) and well-behaving saints (awliya al salihoon) often called Sufis and what good company, what good agents of social moral improvement they are (hasuna ulaaika rafeeqa)!

 

Yet, how many true Muslims and true Christians we have is another question and in fact the burning question.  The fact is that the truer we become the better for all of us. Amen.