Tag: human responsibility

Categories
New Muslims Pillars of Islam

The Muslim and Belief in Divine Decree

The sixth and last article of Islamic faith is belief in divine decree which means that everything good or bad, all moments of happiness or sorrow, pleasure or pain, come from God.

nature-calmness

Nothing occurs in the heavens or on earth without the Will of God.

First, God’s foreknowledge is infallible. God is not indifferent to this world or its people. He is Wise and Loving, but this should not make us fatalists, throwing up our hands and saying, ‘what’s the point of making any effort?’

God’s foreknowledge does not compromise human responsibility. God holds us accountable for what we can do, what is within our capability, but He does not hold us accountable for things we cannot do. He is Just and, as He has given us only limited responsibility, judges us accordingly.

We should think, plan and make the right choices, but, if sometimes things do not turn out the way we want, we need not lose hope or get depressed. We should pray to God and try again. If in the end we still do not achieve what we wanted, we should know we have tried our best and are not responsible for the results.

God knows what the creatures will do, encompassing everything by His knowledge. He knows all that exists, in entirety and totality, by virtue of His eternal foreknowledge.

Truly, nothing is hidden from God, in the earth or in the heavens. (Aal `Imran 3:5)

Whoever refuses this denies God’s perfection, because the opposite of knowledge is either ignorance or forgetfulness. It would mean God would have been mistaken in his foreknowledge of future events; He would no longer be omniscient. Both are deficiencies which God is free of.

Second, God has recorded everything that will occur until the Day of Judgment in the Preserved Tablet (Al-Lawh Al-Mahfuz). The life spans of all human beings are written and the amount of their sustenance apportioned. Everything that is created or occurs in the universe is according to what is recorded there. God has said:

Did you not know that God knows (all) that is in the heavens and the earth?  It is (all) in a record.  Surely that is easy for God. (Al-Hajj 22:70)

Third, whatever God wills to happen happens, and whatever God does not will does not happen.  Nothing occurs in the heavens or on earth without the Will of God.

Fourth, God is the Creator of everything.

…He has created everything, and has ordained for it a measure. (Al-Furqan 25:2)

In Islamic doctrine every human act both in material and spiritual life is predestined, yet it is incorrect to believe the action of fate is blind, arbitrary, and relentless. Without denying divine interference in human affairs, human liberty is kept intact. It does not discount the principle of man’s moral freedom and responsibility. All is known, but freedom is also granted.

Man is not a helpless creature borne along by destiny. Rather, each person is responsible for his acts. Lethargic nations and individuals indolent to ordinary affairs of life are to blame themselves, not God. Man is bound to obey the moral law; and he will receive merited punishment or reward as he violates or observes that law.

However, if such is so, man must have within his power the ability to break or keep the law.  God would not hold us responsible for something unless we were capable of doing it:

God does not burden any human being with more than he is well able to bear. (Al-Baqarah 2:286)

Belief in divine decree strengthens one’s belief in God. A person realizes that God alone controls everything, so he trusts and relies on Him. Even though a person tries his best, at the same time he relies on God for the final outcome. His hard work or intelligence does not make him arrogant, for God is the source of all that comes his way.

Finally, a person attains peace of mind in the realization that God is the Wise and His Actions are dictated by wisdom. Things don’t happen without a purpose. If something reached him, he realizes it could never have escaped him. If something misses him, he realizes it was never meant to be. A man achieves an inner peace, inwardly at rest with this realization.

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Source: islamreligion.com.

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Categories
Divine Unity New Muslims

He Is One and We Are All Human

perfect nature

A relationship of obligation, trust is fully achieved with God when we cross the threshold of the realm of inner peace.

The notion of tawheed (the Oneness of God, tawheed al-rububiyya), of His names and His attributes (tawheed al-asma’ was-sifat), determines that the conception of human nature will be “a mirror image” and “a contrario,” one may say.

If God is one, everything in creation is in pairs, double, seeking union. Oneness, for the Transcendent, is an expression of the essence of being; union, for created beings, is achieved through marriage, fusion, movement.

The Body & the Soul

Created by the One, humans must go in search of the unity of their own being; their heart, their soul, their mind, and their body.

Put thus, it may give the impression that there is nothing to differentiate this from the Greek, Jewish, or Christian traditions. We well know the approach whose most familiar expression is the opposition between the soul and the body.

But a careful reading of the scriptural sources reveals that there is nothing in the Islamic tradition that can serve as a basis for the dualistic approach that opposes two constituent elements of humankind, each characterized by a positive or negative ethical quality: the soul would be the expression (explicitly or implicitly) of good, the body the expression (explicitly or implicitly) of evil.

Never does the Qur’anic revelation or the Prophetic tradition suggest anything of the sort. The ethical crux is not in the opposition of two elements that are separate and ethically fixed (which would represent the two poles of morality) but rather in controlling and guiding them toward their necessary merger, their inevitable union.

From the beginning, the Islamic tradition rejects this kind of antithetical dualism and bases the measurement of moral categories on the ability of human consciousness to take responsibility for finding balance, establishing harmony, making peace.

Human Responsibility

The human being is, essentially, responsible; awareness of tawheed invites humanity to set out on the quest, along the divine path (sabil Allah), to control, in the midst of the fluctuations of life, the contradictions within its being, its weaknesses, and its deficiencies.

This exercise of responsible control is an education that makes the human being truly human at the heart of a search which is like a virtuous and ascending circle; union, which is at the center of being, brings us toward the oneness of the being.

The opposite here would be an absence of boundaries and morality, a lack of constraint, that would drag the conscience into sleep, into the vicious circle of excess, which may even extend to bestiality.

An interesting passage in the Qur’an speaks of beings who lose awareness completely as being more lost than animals.

They have hearts wherewith they understand not, eyes wherewith they see not, and ears wherewith they hear not. They are like cattle- nay more misguided: for they are heedless (of warning). (Al-A`raf 7:179)

Thus, consciousness, when it atrophies to the point of prompting the human being only by means of the same instinct as the animals possess, is dehumanized. It is consciousness and control that define the humanity of humankind.

Thus, there is no moral quality good “in itself” attached to an-nafs (the soul in the body), the heart, or the spirit, and there is no moral quality bad “in itself” attached to the body, the senses, or the emotions.

& Ability

It is the human ability to control, to combine, and to guide that determines the ethical quality of individuals, their nafs, their hearts, their bodies, feelings, each of their emotions, as well as each of their actions.

This perception is the basis of the relationship that Muslims are invited to have with the world, which is not evil in itself (as opposed to the next world, which is presumed to be absolute good). Conversely, motherhood and fatherhood are not good in themselves (as opposed to the solitary life, which is presumed to be evil).

Knowledge is not always positive in itself (in contrast to ignorance, which is by nature negative). Nothing like this is to be found in the Islamic universe of reference. Sexuality may be a prayer and motherhood may be hell, depending on the moral intention that motivates the person.

In other words, the ethical quality of the elements of which we are constituted (nafs, heart, body, and so on), the faculties by which we are characterized (such as perception, intelligence, and imagination) and, of course, the actions we produce are determined only by the guidance our conscience gives them.

Get in Motion

This teaching reveals a perception of the human that is at once very demanding and very optimistic—demanding because the human conscience must acquire alone – “No one can bear another’s burden” (Al-Israa’ 17:15) – responsible control in a world where evil is neither an indelible mark on the being-in-the-world (like original sin) nor in itself a constituent part of the being- like the body or the imagination.

It is above all optimistic, for it requires us not to reject any part of our being, encouraging in us the confidence that the Only One will give us in every situation the means to meet this ethical challenge. “God only imposes on each soul [human being] what it is able to bear,” (Al-Baqarah 2:186) and along the way He provides numerous signs, invitations, and supports.

Thus, a relationship of obligation and trust is established with the divine that is fully achieved only when we cross the threshold of the realm of inner peace.

It remains to discover how to discern the guidance we have spoken of.

The Islamic tradition also offers an original conception of humankind that the sufis (Muslim mystics) have very much emphasized. It contains the idea of movement and dynamism that, as we have seen, characterizes Islamic thought.

Awareness of the divine, far from the dualist thinking which opposes “faith” to “reason,” sets in motion, as we shall see, a quest for the original breath that cannot dispense with reason in order successfully to bring to birth a faith that is both confirmation and reconciliation.

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The article is an excerpt from the author’s book Western Muslims and the Future of Islam, Oxford University Press (2004).

 

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Categories
Divine Unity New Muslims

Man’s Quest for God: Between Reason and Heart

In the quest for God, is there a contradiction between the realm of faith and the realm of reason? Could this quest for God and the truth be undertaken with only one of them?

The story of creation, as it is told in the Qur’an, is remarkable. It all began, one may say, with a testimony and a covenant. Indeed, Revelation tells us that in the first stage of creation the Only One brought together the whole of mankind and made them bear witness:

And when your Sustainer took the offspring of Adam from his loins to bear witness about themselves: ‘Am I not your Lord?,’ they replied, ‘Assuredly, yes. We bear witness to it.’ This is a reminder lest on the day of judgment you say: ‘We did not know!’  (Al-A`raf 7:172)

This original testimony is of fundamental importance for the formation of the Islamic conception of humanity. It teaches us that in the heart and consciousness of each individual there exists an essential and profound intuitive awareness and recognition of the presence of the Transcendent.

Fitrah

Just as the sun, the clouds, the winds, the birds, and all the animals express their natural submission, as we have seen, the human being has within it an almost instinctive longing for a dimension that is “beyond.”

This is the idea of the fitrah, which has given rise to numerous exegetical, mystical, and philosophical commentaries, so central is it to the Islamic conception of the human being, faith, and the sacred. We find it mentioned in the following verse: “Surrender your whole being as a true believer and in accordance with the nature (natural desire) which God gave to human beings when He created them. There is no change in God’s creation. This is the unchangeable religion, but most people do not know” (Ar-Rum 30:30), and confirmed by a Prophetic tradition: “Every newborn child is born in fitrah: it is his parents who make of him a Jew, a Christian, or a Zoroastrian.” (Al-Bukhari and Muslim)

So this “original testimony” has impressed each person’s heart with a mark, which is a memory, a spark, a quest for God (transcendence) in a sense very close to Mircea Eliade’s insight when he affirms that religions “play a part in the structure of human consciousness.”

Original Covenant

This statement from the first age, in which human beings declared their recognition of the Creator, fashions their relationship with God: they are bound by a sort of original covenant to which their consciousness presses them to stay faithful.

There is no original sin in Islam: every being is born innocent and then becomes responsible for his or her faithfulness to the covenant. Those who do not believe, the un-faithful (kafir), are those who are not faithful to the original covenant, whose memory is faint and whose sight is veiled.

In the notion of kufr in Arabic there is the idea of a veiling that leads to the denial of the Truth. Only God decides whether human beings will be enlightened or veiled. Their responsibility consists in their constant action and personal effort to keep the memory alive.

Little by little, we feel that the outlines of an Islamic conception of human nature are emerging. If none of the elements that make up the human being has, in itself, a positive or negative moral quality, if, on the contrary, it is the awakened, responsible conscience that exerts, through the exercise of control, ethical guidance on one’s way of being in the world, one is naturally entitled to wonder how to comply with the way this guidance is leading, how, in short, to be with God.

The answer to this is: all of us are required to return to ourselves and to rediscover the original breath, to revive it and confirm it. In order for this to be achieved, the Creator has made available to human beings two kinds of Revelation. One is spread out before us in space—the whole universe. The other stands out in history at points in time.

Quest for God…Truth

These two kinds of Revelation “remind” and send the conscious back to itself:

We will show them our signs on the horizons and in themselves so that it will be clear to them that (this message) is the truth. (Fussilat 41:53)

This quest for God (the Transcendent) cannot be undertaken without the mind. There is absolutely no contradiction here between the realm of faith and the realm of reason.

On the contrary, the spark of faith, born in the original testimony, needs intellect to confirm that testimony and to be capable of being faithful to the original covenant.

The realm of faith necessarily calls on intellect, which, by accepting the two types of Revelation, allows faith to be confirmed, deepened, and rooted and to grow to fullness in the heart and in human consciousness.

Here again the two must be wedded, and each has a part to play: a living faith makes it possible for the intellect to accept signs beyond simple elements of nature, and active reason makes it possible for faith to understand and also to acquire more self-understanding, and in that way to draw closer to the divine:

Of all the servants, those who know are those who are (fully) open to the intimate awareness of God. (Fatir 35:28)

Blaise Pascal had an apt expression: “The heart has reasons that reason does not know,” thus differentiating the two realms of faith and reason (even though this formula has often been (wrongly) reduced to an opposition between the emotional and the rational).

From an Islamic point of view, the relationship of the heart (where the first longing, the first breath toward faith takes place) and the intellect (which responds to the call of this breath and takes up the quest for God) might rather be expressed this way: the heart has reasons that reason will recognize.

Apart from the expression, the difference is profound.

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The article is an excerpt from the author’s book Western Muslims and the Future of Islam, Oxford University Press (2004).

 

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