A Confrontation with the Native Europeans
01 01 09
(This piece is in the form of two letters, that need a brief foreword. I have stayed in UK for about two decades and was associated with SOAS all along first as PhD student and then as a research associate. In March 2007 I was invited to teach in the department of philosophy at my alma Mater, now GC University, which I was happy to accept. But my family is still based in London. I have three daughters and a son, Nirvan, the youngest one, now 18 is doing his A Levels. Meera is his older sister who has just graduated.
What happened is that my family planned to visit New York this year (they got there the new year day). Nirvan, who has been very keen of this visit, however, opted out for his school work and other things. I then wrote to him that he might go to Obama's America in June. His response rather surprised me and triggered a response of my own. Both are attached for your reading. Hope you would enjoy it and I would love to hear your comments)
31 012 08
Dad,Yeah i will try and visit one day, maybe with friends, although I'm not sure at the moment. Also would it be different with Obama there? I think people are slightly getting ahead of themselves at the moment with Obama. I believe he is a strong symbol, especially for black Americans, although what are his policies of change he brags about? Meera is currently put -off by Obama as apparently he supports the Israelis, rather than Palestinian people. She thinks it's an anti- Muslim view maybe.Also Good luck with your course, wasn't there a book by the same title. Also it sounds quiet broad, but Philosophy always is i suppose.Happy New Year, to you also, currently we are 2 and a half hours away from the countdown.Love,Nirvan.
****
01 01 09
Dear Nirvava
Salaam
I must say that I was a pleased as I was surprised to read your email. Your writing was mature, perhaps a different genre from what you used to write few years ago. You really sound like an A Level student who is ready to go to the university.
You brief note about Obama and his America was very succinct, while both critical and appreciative. This sentence f yours, 'I think people are slightly getting ahead of themselves at the moment with Obama,' said a whole lot of things and I was much pleased with this expression. May be one day you become a pretty good columnist of a paper, if you ever turn to it.
Being of a non-European origin while being born in Europe gives you an edge that your reference to Meera beautifully indicates. You can see from the other perspective that a native European cannot. No one in modern lexicon has used this phrase, namely, native European. As if natives just live outside Europe. But the truth is that there is the large minority of people of non-Western ethnic origin in the West, born and raised in the Western system of education though, of which you and Meera are the two specimens, for instance, in relation to whom the ethnic Europeans become natives.
So there are two Western perspectives: one of ethnic or native Europeans who believe in the Israeli side of the narrative as absolute narrative and see the world system from that narrative.
The other perspective is of course yours, the non-natives’ of the West, who have to demonstrate that the above narrative is deeply Eurocentric, and it is constructed not by the Israelis but the native Europeans. So any rarely coming apologies for this blatant imbalance are rather mute. The most humanists among them say that they have no power to reign in the Israelis. They are the victim of the situation.
The problem is it is the European natives themselves who are the victim of the situation, who cannot reign in themselves, that is, their imperial legacy. On what grounds the colonialism that created Israel has been given legitimacy while the rest part of it is now deligitimized?
Laughingly, the grounds are religious for a system that seeks its identification and legitimacy from science, the anti-thesis of religion, is a contradiction that a native European cannot see. So in this case the native is really handicapped, though in this instance it happens to be the European itself. (Laughter)
To seek justification for the monolith Jewish Israel from history of religion for a civilization that roots itself firmly in the history of science is an interesting phenomenon that only a non-European can enjoy. Hugely funny but not funny at all for the natives.
Obama is as firmly rooted in the native tradition as is the American and Western democracy at large. It’s a huge limitation of modern Western democracy that is increasingly making it so weak. The construction or appearance of Guantanamo Bay is a clear symptom of this weakness. The native shudders to think that it could ever degenerate to fascism as it earlier did in the 1930s due to internal and external pressures. But it has no safety system, to be honest, and the appearance of Guantanamo Bay, a surreal construction, as if taken out of some futuristic fiction, is a clear proof of that. This ‘lawless space’ suggests that it has potential of spreading. And in the current war on terror, George Bush, who masterminded this torture camp, made no qualms about that.
So it is not just Israel that is going to test Obama’s rhetoric. On Camp Delta too he is going to face the trial of his life. And I wonder he is ready for it or has even thought to it. He happens to be professionally a lawyer, so let him prepare his own case.
Rhetoric, you know, those trained in classics know too, is a form of persuasive logical argument invented by the ancient Greeks. Generally, Perecles is cited as one of the masters of rhetoric. Perhaps he was the one who made this form of speech so popular in Greece and particularly in Athens’ city life. It was instrumental in generating the great movement in Greek thought, namely, Sophism. This movement finally created Socrates who turned it upside down and laid the seeds for Plato in Greek soil.
I won’t go much further on this point. Rather would just cite the opening sentence of Socrates’ defence that he presented during his trial. It refers to the masterful rhetoric of his accusers that almost carried away even Socrates himself, his biting irony notwithstanding.
The suggestion that native European is the modern descendent of the Sophists would hurt them a lot. But lets for the moment turn to what’s going to hurt them in the immediate present. For Obama will have to clarify his rhetoric, is it that of the Sophists, the great ancestors of modern man, the white native, or that of Socrates. The latter lost his life though, but he won his case and routed the Sophists so comprehensively that their work disappeared from the Greek horizon. They met the worst humiliation that any intellectual movement can imagine, namely, to survive through its adversaries. (Laughter) So Socrates opened his defence with these words:
I do not know, men of Athens, how my accusers affected you; as for me, I was almost carried away in spite of myself, so persuasively did they speak.
For Obama it would not be enough at all just to close the Guantanamo Bay down and wash it off from the face of history. He would have to order an independent tribunal to establish how this crime against humanity, crime against the black human was committed in the first decade of the twenty first century by the most advanced democratic state. Who masterminded it? Whose idea was it? Obviously Bush and his immediate associates would have to answer. The journey from White House to trial room might not be that long.
Finally the moment has come to bring Socrates’ accusers to the trial, for wrongful death sentence because he did not belong to the same system of belief.
Saturday, July 11, 2009
5. The Allah of the Quran
The Allah of the Quran
A special contribution to the structure of pre-modern civilizations
Book review
Thus thy Lord will…teach thee (Joseph) the interpretation of events….
Quran[1]
……..science describes the kind of world that philosophy tells it to describe.
B. Register[2]
…..it is a magnificent feeling to recognize the unity of a complex of phenomena that to direct observation appear to be quite separate things. Einstein[3]
The Glorious Quran. Text and explanatory translation by Marmduck M. Pickthall. Iqra International Foundation. Chicago. (year n.m.)
Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall (1875-1936) translated the Quran in the heydays of Orientalism. But he was no Orientalist. He embraced the civilization to which he converted, and died in it. The son of an Anglican clergyman, who died when he was six, he was destined to become one of the chief English translators of the Quran. He was born in London and was educated at Harrow, the most prestigious private school in England, where he befriended Winston Churchill. Before he turned to the translation of the Quran in 1928, he had already earned a name as an accomplished novelist, journalist, political and religious leader and commentator.[4]
It is a pity that even the students of English literature know little of his literary achievements which were acknowledged by his great contemporaries such as H. G. Wells. According to one of his biographers, his novels “contain the circumstantiality of Sir Walter Scott, the exuberance of Charles Dickens, the moral strength of George Eliot, and compassionate tragedy of Thomas Hardy and the universality of E.M. Forster."[5] If his work has been to this day ignored to the point of having gone to virtual extinction, one wonders if this was the price he had to pay for his conversion! If that be the case, then it must be the task of the Islamic intelligentsia to rediscover his literary legacy.
He had a special talent for languages. He learnt Welsh and Gaelic (native language of Ireland) in his teens and developed a passion to travel in the East, especially the Islamic lands of Egypt, Syria and Palestine, where he would experience the traditional life and learn Arabic. Thanks to his mother who respected his youthful enthusiasm to see the world for himself, he was in his dream world even before he was twenty. Perhaps he was a born rebel who felt compressed and straitened in his state-oriented society that took great pride in its colonial possessions and the culture that it promoted. Later in his life he recalled those moments in his travelogue, Oriental Encounters: Palestine and Syria, 1894-6, which he opens in these words, worth quoting at length:
Early in the year 1894 I was a candidate for one of two vacancies inthe Consular Service for Turkey, Persia, and the Levant, but failed togain the necessary place in the competitive examination. I was indespair. All my hopes for months had been turned towards sunnycountries and old civilisations, away from the drab monotone of Londonfog, which seemed a nightmare when the prospect of escape eluded me. Iwas eighteen years old, and, having failed in one or two adventures, Ithought myself an all-round failure, and was much depressed. I dreamedof Eastern sunshine, palm trees, camels, desert sand, as of a Paradisewhich I had lost by my shortcomings. What was my rapture when mymother one fine day suggested that it might be good for me to travelin the East, because my longing for it seemed to indicate a naturalinstinct, with which she herself, possessing Eastern memories, was infull sympathy! I fancy there was some idea at the time that if I learnt the languagesand studied life upon the spot I might eventually find somebackstairs way into the service of the Foreign Office; but that idea,though cherished by my elders as some excuse for the expenses of myexpedition, had never, from the first, appealed to me; and from themoment when I got to Egypt, my first destination, it lost whateverlustre it had had at home. For then the European ceased to interestme, appearing somehow inappropriate and false in those surroundings.At first I tried to overcome this feeling or perception which, while Ilived with English people, seemed unlawful. All my education untilthen had tended to impose on me the cult of the thing done habituallyupon a certain plane of our society. To seek to mix on an equalitywith Orientals, of whatever breeding, was one of those things whichwere never done, nor even contemplated, by the kind of person who hadalways been my model.[6]
So he had not gone there as the English or most Europeans did, i.e., as representatives of a superior civilization, but with ‘a sneaking wish to fraternize with Orientals.’ Luckily, as he set foot in Jaffa, he met a native of Syria who helped him ‘to throw off the European and plunge into the native way of living.’ To acquaintance ourselves well with him it might be instructive to go through the following paragraph of the line just quoted:
With him I rode about the plain of Sharon, sojourning among the fellâhîn, and sitting in the coffee-shops of Ramleh, Lydda, Gaza, meeting all sorts of people, and acquiring the vernacular without an effort, in the manner of amusement. From dawn to sunset we were in the saddle. We went on pilgrimage to Nebi Rubîn, themosque upon the edge of marshes by the sea, half-way to Gaza; we rodeup northward to the foot of Carmel; explored the gorges of themountains of Judæa; frequented Turkish baths; ate native meals andslept in native houses--following the customs of the people of theland in all respects. And I was amazed at the immense relief I foundin such a life. In all my previous years I had not seen happy people.These were happy. Poor they might be, but they had no dream of wealth;the very thought of competition was unknown to them, and rivalry wasstill a matter of the horse and spear. Wages and rent were troublesthey had never heard of. Class distinctions, as we understand them,were not. Everybody talked to everybody. With inequality they had atrue fraternity. People complained that they were badly governed,which merely meant that they were left to their devices save on greatoccasions. A Government which touches every individual and interfereswith him to some extent in daily life, though much esteemed byEuropeans, seems intolerable to the Oriental. I had a vision of thetortured peoples of the earth impelled by their own misery to desolatethe happy peoples, a vision which grew clearer in the after years.But in that easy-going Eastern life there is a power of resistance,as everybody knows who tries to change it, which may yet defeat thehosts of joyless drudgery.[7]
He had ‘gone native’, so to speak, and when his mother came to know of it, he was called back home. Before his departure he wished to convert to Islam. The Muslim Shaikh in Damascus to whom he expressed thus would, however, not agree. What would be his mother’s reaction back home when she knew of it, he asked? She would be devastated, he replied. Then do not do so at this juncture, he advised, for it was a serious affair which required a prolonged reflection. This was indeed wise counsel, for it would take Pickthall another twenty one years after his return to England to become a Muslim. In the course of these years, during which he traveled again to his ‘beloved East’ and also visited Turkey for a few months, he produced fifteen novels and three collections of short stories. Said the Fisherman, his second one, published in 1903, received good reviews, becoming a bestseller in England. H. G. Wells wrote to him that ‘I wish that I could feel as certain about my own work as I do of yours, that it will be alive and interesting people fifty years from now.’[8] Little did Wells know of the turn waiting further on the course of his life.
In the coming years he wrote regularly for the New Age, a literary magazine, contributing alongside such luminaries as Bernard Shaw, Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence, and G. K. Chesterton. As the First World War approached, he found himself on the side of the Ottoman Empire which entered into the War as an ally of the Central Powers. When he was conscripted, he announced that he would only serve his country where she was not directly engaged with the Ottoman forces. He was thus appointed at a hospital while he continued to write in the defence of Turkey. The War, and especially the Christian fanaticism displayed variously, became a catalyst for him. Being increasingly pulled towards Islam inwardly he underwent a crisis of faith, finally announcing his conversion in November 1917. ‘He took the name of Muhammed and almost immediately became a pillar of the British Islamic Community.’[9] He worked for a year at Islamic Information Bureau in London which issued The Muslim Outlook, a weekly paper.
He moved to India in 1920 accepting an invitation to edit Bombay Chronicle, a prestigious Indian newspaper, doubling its circulation in six months time. In India he would spend the next fifteen years of his life, returning to England in 1935 where he died a year after. Almost as soon as he set foot on Indian soil he became an associate of Gandhi whose ideas of non-violent resistance attracted him. This affiliation grew stronger when Gandhi joined Khilafat Movement.
So the Englishman became an Indian nationalist leader, fluent in Urdu, and attending dawn prayers in the mosque, dressed in Gandhian homespun adorned with the purple crescent of the Khilafatists. He wrote to a friend: ‘They expect me to be a sort of political leader as well as a newspaper editor. I have grown quite used to haranguing multitudes of anything from 5 to 30,000 people in the open air, although I hate it still as much as ever and inwardly am just as miserably shy.’ He also continued his Friday sermons, preaching at the great mosque of Bijapur and elsewhere.[10]
The letter that Gandhi wrote to his widow on his death says much about his character:
Your husband and I met often enough to grow to love each other and I found Mr. Pickthall a most amiable and deeply religious man. And although he was a convert he had nothing of the fanatic in him that most converts, no matter to what faith they are converted, betray in their speech and act. Mr. Pickthall seemed to me to live his faith unobtrusively.[11]
Pickthall disengaged from politics with the establishment of modern Turkey and with this, the Bombay Chronicle having been closed by the government, he moved to Hyderabad in 1925 where he accepted a post of school principle on the invitation of the Nizam. Two years later there he founded the scholarly journal Islamic Culture (that runs to this day) and in the same while delivered a series of lectures on the cultural aspects of Islam in Madras.[12] Since, as he himself put it, ‘All Muslim India seems to be possessed with the idea that I ought to translate the Qur’an into real English,’ in 1928 the Nizam agreed to let him go on sabbatical for two years to complete his work that would leave his mark in the cultural history of Islamic civilization. During his devout years of Christian faith he had drunk deep from the Christian scriptures which the Quran speaks of as its inalienable historical predecessors. Thus he became the living witness to the Quran’s chief claim made to the Jews and Christians, that if they let their self go for a while, they will inevitably reach to the Quran.
The need to translate the Quran into English arose foremost from the fact that it had been already rendered into this language by some English scholars who would now be termed as Orientalists. Missionaries from all over Europe had followed in the heel of their colonial armies and there was a widespread suspicion that the English translations of the Quran by Orientalist scholars were deeply imbued with their vested interests. Hence the whole Muslim India getting ‘possessed with the idea’ that Pickthall take up the challenge.
During his work he traveled to Cairo to seek support for his project from the leading scholars of Al-Azhar. Somewhat to his surprise he found little backing from them. In the Islamic world, as Kidwai has noted, ‘whereas the idea of interpreting the Quran has not been so controversial, the emotional motives behind rendering the Quranic text into languages other than Arabic have always been looked upon with suspicion,’[13] more so by an Englishman in the contemporary colonial setting. However, Pickthall’s sincerity and scholarship prevailed upon the Al-Azhar scholars, and his The Meaning of the Glorious Quran was published from London in 1930 where each surah or chapter is given a brief introduction. The present edition contains a short though very valuable biography of the Prophet. Four years after its publication Abdullah Yousaf Ali, a Britain based Muslim scholar, published his translation of the Book.[14] Though various other Muslim scholars have carried out their renderings, Pickthall’s provided a solid foundation for improvisation to all of them.
Pickthall was emphatic that his was a kind of interpretation as translation of the Quran was impossible. This goes well with the contemporary understanding that translation from one language into another is always an approximation. And this is especially so when it comes to revelation where a word in original language would normally require more than one words to convey the meaning of the original. It is thus always advisable to consult more than one translations of the Quran if one seeks to get somewhere near to the original meanings. Abudullah Yousaf Ali’s translation, then, is a good source to correlate with Pickthall’s. The way the latter absorbs the idiom and metaphors of the Quran, though, speaks for itself. The following two verses, taken from different suras, illustrate the point well:
Wa li-rab-bika fasbir (74:7)
Fasbir sabran-jamiilaa (70:5)
Pickthall: For the sake of thy Lord, be patient!
But be patient (O Muhammad) with a patience fair to see.
Ali: But for thy Lord’s (cause), Be patient and constant.
Therefore do thou hold patience, -- a patience of beautiful (contentment).
A small point of difference with Pickthall on my behalf is his rendering of al-kitaab as Scripture instead of Book. He might have availed the opportunity of having two words in English for where there is apparently one in Arabic. This seems to be an oversight thanks to his Christian legacy of which the separation between the sacred and profane does not go well with the Unitarian vision of the Quran. The inadequacy of translating kitaab as scripture should have been apparent to him when he was translating, for instance, the following verses:
‘In-nahuu la-qur-‘aanun-kariim,
fii kitaabim-mak-nunn,
laa yamas-suhuu ‘il-lal-mutah-haruun (56:77-9)
That (this) is indeed a noble Quran
In a Book kept hidden
Which none toucheth saveth the purified.
Perhaps the chief limitation that he himself set on his translation, as also Abdullah Yousaf Ali later on, was his failure to employ the English of everyday usage. Did these translators still harbour the prejudice that revelation was too sacred to be put in everyday speech? Whatever the answer but the constraint and artificiality that such usage imposes on the text becomes evident when we compare Pickthall and Ali with, for instance, N. J. Dawood, who chose to render the text in plain simple English.[15] The effect is apparent when we see, for instance, the following verses:
Pickthall: Seest thou not how Allah coineth a similitude: A goodly saying, as a goodly tree, its root set firm, its branches reaching into heaven,
Giving its fruit at every season by the permission of its Lord? Allah coineth the similitudes for mankind in order that they may reflect. (14:24-5)
Ali: Seest thou not how God sets a parable? - A goodly Word like a goodly tree,
Whose root is firmly fixed, And its branches reach to the heavens, --
It brings forth its fruit at all times, by the leave of its Lord.
So God sets forth parables for men, in order that they may receive admonition.
Dawood: Do you not see how God compares a good word to a good tree?
Its root is firm and its branches are in the sky;
It yields its fruit in every season by God’s leave.
God speaks in parables to men so that they may take heed.
Pickthall was not merely a translator of the Quran but also its scholar. He ‘warned against the danger of adoring the book rather than its content.’[16] In a separate note, he posed two inter-related questions to the contemporary Islamic civilization: how can we enter into the world of the Quran ‘as if Allah were speaking to us through it now and today?’ And secondly, how it can, once again, become relevant and power of transformation in today’s world.[17] Needless to say, both questions are as relevant today as in Pickthall’s day. Furthermore, the two questions are actually one, because once we enter into the world of the Quran by locating the necessary code, or, to be more precise, employing the requisite methodology, we enter into the world of power, the power to comprehend, control and transform the events that constitute our world. Only then, as he put it bravely, ‘instead of being a mere revered book, a sacred fossil, or a source of magic-like blessing, it will change into a mighty force, impinging, stirring, moving and guiding us deeper and higher achievements, just as it did before.’[18] To this end the rest of this article is devoted.
The hypothesi,s or the fact, the event to be interpreted
It is one thing to recite the Quran, which is an art in itself, but quite another to destructure it as a text. It is indeed the problem with all revelation, in which Plato’s dialogues occupy a special place. For the moment, though, we would focus on the Quran.
The Quran presents itself as a complex structure which makes its claim to be the greatest wonder, or miracle as the Islamic tradition knows it, of the pre-modern civilizations worth considering. It does not imply belittling of the other wonders, for it repeatedly claims to be the inheritor of all of them.
The hypothesis that I want to suggest in this regard may be stated thus.[19] The structure of the Quran is a mirror image of pre-modern civilizations, on the one hand, and of the nature of reality as perceived by these civilizations, on the other. Or, the structure of the one, that is, of the Quran is the same as that of pre-modern civilizations, more particularly of the Islamic civilization of pre-modern times, and of the nature of reality to which they adhered. The Quran, it needs to be emphasized, claims to be the final text or book of the revelation which began with the creation of Adam, or the appearance of the human in the universe. This means that while the revelation prior to the Quran, or the texts/books of it, such as those which it mentions (e.g. the Torah, the Psalms of David and the Gospels) and those which it does not, each created its own civilization or community, the Quran not only created its own civilization but, being the final chapter of the Book that began with Adam, it is the most succinct and clear statement of reality of which the pre-modern civilizations as a whole were the embodiment.
Now the immediate point that needs to be clarified here is the notion of pre-modern civilizations, or, let us say, pre-modern Islamic civilization.[20] For I am intending to make a clear distinction between the pre-modern and modern Islamic civilization (a distinction applicable to all non-Western civilizations), that is, the one prior to the rise of modernity and the other which was subjugated by modernity, a subjugation that continues to the present day. What I am suggesting, then, is that, to put it succinctly, the prevalent idea that the present day, or the modern Islamic world is a continuation of the pre-modern Islamic civilization is an illusion. What implies is that while the structure of the pre-modern Islamic civilization was the mirror image of the structure of the Quran, the modern Islamic world is not. I am not positing an absolute discontinuity between the pre-modern and modern Islamic world. But what I intend to argue presently is that the discontinuity between them is as important as the continuity between them and it is only by a full view of these opposite aspects of our history that we can make sense of it, or truly interpret the event that we call Islamic history. We would soon turn to the continuity between them, but presently we are emphasizing the discontinuity between them. What follows is that while it is not a mistake to say that the cotemporary Islamic world is a continuation of the pre-modern world, it is also equally important to see that there is a difference or discontinuity between them. The difference is so pronounced that, as just noted, while the structure of pre-modern Islamic world reflected the structure of the Quran, the contemporary world does not.
If the contemporary Islamic world is not the reflection of the Quranic conception of reality, what follows is that, as argued earlier in a paper just cited, the vision of pre-modern Islam as expounded by the modern or contemporary Islamic intelligentsia is seriously modern, that is, seriously flawed and therefore does not accord with or correspond to the pre-modern Islam and the Islamic world. Therefore their contention that they represent and are fighting for the original Islam is mistaken. Their vision of the structure of the Quran and of their ideal Islam and Islamic world of pre-modern times has been constructed under the influence of and the tools provided by modernity and the modern mind that originated in Europe in the 16th-17th centuries. Thus, in spite of their much proclaimed hostility to modernity, they (the modern or contemporary Islamic intelligentsia) tend to see the pre-modern world and the supreme knowledge of it as embodied in the revelation and the Quran, the last book of it, with essentially the same eyes as do the modern intelligentsia (both Western and non-Western).
What follows from this is that the conception of reality that the modern intelligentsia (MI) and the modern Islamic intelligentsia (MII) adhere to is essentially same and essentially different from the conception of reality of the Quran and the pre-modern world. The conception of the pre-modern world, of religion, of tradition, or of the pre-modern knowledge or conception of reality as embodied supremely in the revelation, as perceived by the modern mind, is a modern construction, that does not correspond with the fact or the event that it purports to be describing. And the modern Muslim mind has succumbed to it.
The whole difference between the pre-modern and modern conception of reality arises in response to the ultimate philosophical problem and which is: what is there? For modern mind it is matter alone, for nothing else exists, is real but matter and its varied variations or forms such as the plant, the animal, or the human mind. There are various philosophies of social science in vogue presently, from empiricism or positivism to (Marxist) materialism, realism, phenomenology and hermeneutics and so forth.[21] But all their differences fail to conceal their common, founding premise, that nothing exists beside the material. In order to account for their differences, let us say that for all of them only that is real which can be reduced to the human’s sensory experience. Any human experience that cannot be traced back to sensory impressions is false at the best and illusion at the worst. Thus the modern mind defines knowledge as the formulation of human experience furnished ultimately through the sensory organs, or that can be reduced to the activity of human senses. Since the natural sciences, so the argument goes, adhere to this principle most faithfully, they constitute the highest form of knowledge, to which the social sciences and philosophy must also aspire.
Since the experience underlying the revelation, the ultimate embodiment of pre-modern knowledge, cannot be reduced to the sensory experience, it is an illusory experience for the modern mind. Therefore the knowledge constructed on this experience must also be false knowledge. We will investigate this claim, for what is apparent is that the modern mind has only changed the definition of knowledge and by thus doing relegated the knowledge of the pre-modern civilizations to the dustbin of history.
The chief problem with this claim is that it is founded on a premise proclaimed as self-evident by the modern mind, but which is neither self-evident nor true. It is purely a construction of the modern mind. And this is that, as Marx and Engels famously put it, reality is either material or non-material, either matter or mind. So whereas the modern, or scientific mind adheres to the reality of the former, the pre-modern mind adhered to the reality of the latter. Common sense, it was argued, shows that mind, or the human came long after the appearance of the material world, so the reality must be accorded to the material sphere alone. The pre-modern perception of the reality of the non-material sphere was therefore an illusory perception.
It is apparent that the whole support of this argument is common sense. We will see that this is the same common sense which once supported the geo-centric world. Einstein too, who was called the new Copernicus by Max Planck, the founder of the quantum theory, when he came up with his theory of relativity, found this common sense in staunch opposition to his vision of reality. The mention of these two giants of what is known as the early 20th century scientific revolution has been made advisedly. For if Planck destroyed the absolute opposition or separation between the particle and wave natures of light (thus unifying the two contraries of light and particle natures of light), Einstein demolished the absolute world or standard of perception which could be visualized to exist independent of the human observer. With the further evolution in the quantum theory, with which Einstein himself became uneasy, the so-called common sense view, which continues to be the chief dogma of modern science and of the mind built on it, that there is an objective world existing independently of human experience of it was undermined.
The idea that the world is inseparable from human experience of it, let us remember, is the founding premise of the (knowledge of the) pre-modern civilizations. And if the knowledge revolution of the twentieth century, spearheaded by the early 20th century scientific revolution, reached to the same premise, so much the worse for the modern mind.
The human is the centre of the universe in the pre-modern world and so is it for the world as envisioned by the relativity and quantum. The latter perception thus unifies the two contraries: the geo-centric and helio-centric worlds in so far as the former implied the human as the centre of the world. One of the chief arguments furnished by the modern mind to debunk the pre-modern vision of the human-centered world is that it allegedly was based the geo-centric world view of the world. So, since the geo-centric world was discovered to be an illusion, so the human centered world, a world invariably tied with the human experience of it, must also be an illusion.
The point is that the pre-modern mind did not base its vision of the human-centered world on the physical fact of a geo-centric world. The 20th century knowledge revolution has demonstrated that the world is indeed inseparable form human experience even though it is a helio-centric world.
So now we come to the structure of reality as envisioned by the Quran.
It is not easy to enter into it. For, it has a very complex structure hidden behind a blinding simplicity. The simplicity is so perfect a ruse that the reader gets carried away by it. It is almost like the structure a palm-date stone in which the core seems to have been concealed with great care; as if demanding a struggle to enter into it. And for which the Quran frequently incites.
So one must be clear what one is looking for. We find what you seek for. As the Quran puts it, if you are asking for this world you would be given. If the higher, which is the realm of the inner structure, you would find it too. But it’s a struggle. What follows is that there are two perceptions, one for the exterior, the other for the interior or core structure whereby each generates its own knowledge, or each unfolding its own world. So the Quran operates on two modes or plains of being, one normal, the other higher. For instance if speed of light is finite in one perception, it’s infinite from the other. The Quran for instance speaks of stairways to heavens, on which the angels are ascending and they travel the distance of fifty thousand years in a single day.
From Allah, Lord of the Ascending Stairways, (whereby) the angels and the Spirit ascend unto Him in a Day whereof the span is fifty thousand years.[22]
Apparently it makes little sense. Or at best a legacy of mythology. But it is not nonsense though the heritage of mythology is underlying it. It’s just a different experience of light that the normal perception cannot generate. The idea is perennial, from the age of mythology or the rise of civilization, the age of the so-called archaic or primitive man. But it took very long for its final formulation which the Quran claims to be. It stretches the revelation, of which it is the final heir, back to the first human, or Adam, who received the names of things from Allah. It is the recasting of the biblical view in almost a new language.
Within normal behavior or given framework, in both its religious and modern representations, it is difficult to enter into the interior structure of the Quran. Both fail to enter into it. This failure takes the power of this work away. Instead of being cognizant of their failure, they think it’s simply not there. For each, unity is the exclusion of either this or other mode of being. So, they appear different or enemies of each other, yet they are same in their inability to see that unity without difference cannot be conceived.
All violence and war generates from this perception of unity in which difference and opposition are identical with violence and war. Once it is understood that opposition is inherent in unity and thus unite apparently contradictory entities, as Einstein meant when he unified mass and energy in his famous E=mc2 equation, war and violence would cease to be the inherent condition of opposition and difference.
This pluralist vision of the Quran, in which pluralism defines unity, the sectarian consciousness of the religious and the modern, which incites the exclusion of opposition from unity, is transcended. This thing is at the heart of a social change through violence, a belief in which the existing social theory, whether religious or modern, concur.
The Quran then opens up a huge and immense potential of peace and universal harmony on this planet once its internal structure is entered into.
The Quran helps us to comprehend and decode the structure of pre-modern civilization of which it claims to be one of the chief documents. The structure of pre-modern civilization is raised on the structure as conceived in the Quran. So, what is the Quran’s structure?
We have seen that it is made up of two spheres, internal and external like the structure of the atom. The structure of the pre-modern civilization, and of the Quran and the atom, concords with each other.
Now what follows from this is that if the velocity of light is absolute as Einstein suggested and built the subsequent scientific development on this premises, then this does not imply that it should be absolute in the subatomic world, in the entire of the cosmos. We already have plenty of evidence for it. For we know that the subatomic world phenomena behave almost as it was almost alive. We know that the phenomena behave differently under the human gaze than they would otherwise. As if the internal structure of man was same as that of the world, where the observer and the observed discover each other as the one and the other in one whole.
Neil Bohr drew attention of this remarkable fact that it is the apparatus that man employs that largely determines what he perceives in the subatomic world, for there is no such thing as world itself. Different perception creates different worlds.
This leads to the idea of the physical world as human construction.
The idea of the social world as being human creation may not surprise as much but that of natural world sounds against the common sense. But it is the same common sense that once supported the geo-centric view.
Incidentally once we comprehend that there are mainly two perceptions corresponding to the two plains of being, there would be little difficulty to see that the two natures of light, those of particle and wave, must have varied velocities too. For it is possible to suggest that the speed of light of 300000km per sec is only the velocity of particle motion of light, and that the wave motion of light is infinite. In other words there are two speeds, finite and infinite, corresponding to its particle and wave natures. Once we come to grip with this the eternal enigma that exhausted Einstein to death, the problem of the unification of the four forces, would be resolved.
The idea of the finite, the so-called absolute speed of light, let us remember, was Einstein’s creation. It was earlier presented by Leibniz if I am not mistaken. Newton, as we know adhered to infinite speed of light which he had inherited from his studies of the structure of pre modern civilizations. He was deeply involved in the science of the day which was alchemy. This science claimed to be the science of interior structure of the pre modern civilizations. The hypothesis of Newton, of infinite speed of light along with its particle nature of light was upheld by the modern science.
Newton failed to see the contradiction in it. If light was infinite, it meant that it did not belong to the world of matter, of particle nature, which was finite. So Newton begged down there, and Leibniz, on the other hand, was equally confused, who opposed Newton, on both counts. Newton was, it seems, all the way involved to resolve this contradiction but failed which probably caused his nervous breakdown in 1694.
The puzzle took a step towards its resolution when in the 19th century the wave nature of light, largely at the hands of Faraday, the discover of the electromagnetic fields, was discovered. Now the infinite speed of light looked sensible. But then came the bomb shell of the discovery of the interior structure of the atom at the hands of J. J. Thomson in 1898. This new phenomenon created problems. Instances were observed where it didn’t seem to conform to either wave or particle nature of light. The loss of ether at the hands of Michelson and this strange behavior of light were the two great challenges that physics as the queen sciences faced at the turn of the century.
Two giants appeared, one older and the other younger one who together resolved these crises by abandoning the world which the existing concepts of physics described. Common sense was going to face a challenge greater then it faced at the shift from geocentric to heliocentric world: the mental habit or the hypothesis that light must behave either as particle or wave had to be abandoned.
New concepts had to be created to describe the new experience of the world as Planck and Einstein both emphasized.
Planck wrestled with himself as he prepared to challenge the two greatest dogmas of physics. That light behaved only as wave and second that it could only do as particle or wave. The eternal law of logic of modern rationality of either /or, of being and not being, as two hostile opposites, had to be abandoned. Light as Planck discovered must be behaving both as light and wave in that particular epiphany of it which Plank was observing and studying at that time. To overcome this lasting absolute of science, Planck had to struggle hard. Of this he spoke to his son during a walk a short while before presenting this paper in October 1900. He thought it was a discovery equal to that of the great Newton’s. Einstein generalized this plural nature of light, thus asserting its two natures universally. While seeing the slipping of the earth from under its feet, he went on to create a dogma of his own. This was the new the absolute, the absolute velocity of light.
But did it occur to anyone even after the atomic explosion, that the energy released could be different than that of which the speed was fixed, 300,000. This figure was already too large. To think that light had also an infinite nature was impossible to conceive So the implication is obvious. Light must behave both finitely and infinitely, though not at the same time, just like particle and wave. The classic double slit experiment proves Bohr’s point that all phenomena behave differently under a different apparatus. The human is inseparable from nature, the cardinal belief of the pre modern civilizations.
Neil Bohr, in spite of his tremendous effort to lead quantum away from Einstein’s dogmatic slumber, could not get to question Einstein’s ultimate dogma and thus paid the price of his beloved theory of complimentarity getting little attention. Had he been able to take a step forward to see and insist on the dual velocity of light corresponding to the wave and particle natures of light which he did so much to establish in spite of all Einstein’s intellectual assaults especially at the Solvoy Congress of 1927, he would have broken through. But the breakthrough they had made was exhausted.
In order, then then, to resurrect the discarded hypothesis of Newton of the infinite velocity of light we need to turn to the roots from where Newton derived it. Planck had resurrected his particle hypothesis in a new setting. We need only to extend a little and affirm that it is both particle and wave, finite and infinite.
(III)
The roots go back, as already stated, go back to the age of mythology, of which the Quranic revelation is the ultimate continuum. Mythology is an essential component of human psyche. The human must make myths which in its essence, is the human construction of entities which are invisible but which provide the necessary connections between the phenomena of the material world. Since both correspond to different perceptions, both are unlike each other. The world of invisible events cannot be reduced to the world of visible entities or events. But the images and symbols employed to describe each undergo change. So the suggestion by the modern mind that it has freed human mind from mythological psyche is false.
Ether was the greatest god that physics created in the 19th century, although its earlier forms had a long history. On its death, though, another one was soon to be created by ironically the great iconoclast Einstein himself. If we can decode the duality of Einstein rightly we can get the heart of the Quran. The new god was the absolute speed of light. The Quran demolished this god ages ago, in its longing for unity. Light is the ultimate image of Allah, the chief concept created and employed to expound the nature of reality, which the Quran calls Allah. Although Allah as ‘the light of the heavens and the earth’ is an often repeated simile in the Quran, perhaps the most beautiful is the following one:
Noor an ‘ala noor Light upon light
Allah sounds strange but not Ether; why? Allah sounds strange but not the absolute speed of light; why?
What is the nature of light in the Quran? Simple! Relative and absolute character of light, with the difference that what we know as absolute velocity of Einstein, turns into relative and the infinitude of light becomes the absolute. This means that it is possible for light to be at two celestial bodies at the same time, without any time interval, just like the electron emerging in two orbits at the same time. So to hypothesis that there is an absolute divide between the micro and macro nature, subatomic and atomic world, is false. A leap of imagination that Einstein dared not take. They are opposites of each other and yet one is unthinkable without the other. It is the harmony of opposites that defines its unity. Their inner unity is that mass and energy in that great equation of E=mc2.
What this equation suggests in that the energy that manifests itself or is created after the interaction of mc2 is not the same that interacted with mass. After all the energy created by mc2 is not part of our ordinary experience, it does not fall within the view of our ordinary, given perception. That which is beyond our sensual experience must be the reflection of the infinite; that must be the realm of infinite.
(IV)
The revelation describes itself as inimitable. This was the point of contention between the exterior or inner tradition, the rationalist scholars and the Sufis within the Islamic tradition.
The scholars and the Sufis understand inimitability of the Quran differently. The Sufis did not deny that experience of revelation can be shared; that it is almost universal to mankind or it could never be understood, because this is invisible and beyond our sensory experience, of outer and inward perception, against all the false accusation of the modern mind is never denied. The seed structure of reality is never denied.
If the modern mind denies the inner experience, it assumes that the traditional, pre-modern mind denies the sensory experience. What is difficult for it, though, is its self-imposed difficulty that one of the two perceptions or the experiences is false. This so called logical law might be the law of sensory experience, but it does not hold in the subatomic world. The logic or the rationality of the mind, which it considers to be absolute, then is the law of the constitution or structure of the external and sensory experience. Its limitation is evident is so far as in the realm of finitude alone. Revelation is inimitable in the sense that it cannot be copied, which is the realm of the finitude. That is, you cannot parallel it with anything in physical plain.
Reference:
The religious intelligence did not realize that if we restrict revelation to exceptional events in natural, as violation of the law, then the sensory realm emerges as partner to Allah. It becomes in between the human and the world beyond, the realm of infinite. It simply disappears behind the veil of sensory experience. An experience, that at times is common to the religious and modern intelligentsia.
The Quran insists that it is the most common form of shirk, the unconscious association of Allah and the sensory world as partners. You reckon this world, or the life in it……… as the ultimate and you have made it God’s associate.
Revelation is the chief source or testimony of the world beyond, so it is never-ending. If there is a world of infinity that it must continually manifest. That is, what the Quran calls revelation.
A.R. Kidwai. ‘Translating the Untranslatable: A Survey of English Translations of the Quran’ http://www.soundvision.com/Info/quran/english.asp ((Originally printed in The Muslim World Book Review, Vol. 7, No. 4 Summer 1987)
‘Marmaduke Pickthalla brief biography,’ http://www.masud.co.uk/ISLAM/bmh/BMM-AHM-pickthall_bio.htm
[1] 12:26
[2] http://enlightenment.supersaturated.com/essays/text/bryanregister/ bohr_compliementarity.html)
[3] Holten. G. 1996. Einstein, History, and Other Passions: The Rebellion Against Science at the End of the Twentieth Century. Perseus Books. 1996:114)
[4] For a brief biography of Pickthall see Abdul Hakim Murad, http://www.masud.co.uk/ISLAM/bmh/BMM-AHM-pickthall_bio.htm
[5] Cited by Rentfrow, D. http://islam.thetruecall.com/
[6] http://www.gutenberg.org/files/19378/19378-8.txt; pp. 3-4.
[7] Ibid., p. 5.
[8] http://www.masud.co.uk/ISLAM/bmh/BMM-AHM-pickthall_bio.htm; p. 9.
[9] Rentfrow, D. http://islam.thetruecall.com/; p. 3.
[10] http://www.masud.co.uk/ISLAM/bmh/BMM-AHM-pickthall_bio.htm; p. 17.
[11] Ibid., p. 18.
[12] It was later published under the title The Cultural Side of Islam (1984). Lahore: Qadiria Book Traders.
[13] Kidwai, A. R. ‘Translating the Untranslatable: A Survey of English Translations of the Quran,’ http://www.soundvision.com/Info/quran/english.asp; p. 1.
[14] The Glorious Quran, 1991, translation by Abdullah Yousaf Ali, transliteration by M. S. Tajar, Maktabah ar-Rasul al ‘Ammah, Kuwait.
[15] N. J. Dawood…
[16] Hadhrami, A.A. ‘Marmaduke Pickthall: A Servant of Islam,’ http://www.witness-pioneer.org/vil/Articles/scholars/marmaduke_pickthall_a_servant_of_islam.htm
[17] The New World that Awaits You
[18] Ibid.
[19] The hypothesis presented here originates in my study of the Quran initiated nearly two decades ago while I was working on my Ph. D. thesis, which was incorporated in the work subsequently published as A Forgotten Vision: A study of human spirituality in the light of Islamic tradition, 1996, Vanguard Books: Lahore.
[20] It would be instructive to see my article ‘Islam and Modernity: Towards a new paradigm,’ appearing in this issue especially for the clarification of the terms such as modernity.
[21] Outhwaite, W. 1987. New Philosophies of Social Science: Realism,
[22] 70:3-4.
A special contribution to the structure of pre-modern civilizations
Book review
Thus thy Lord will…teach thee (Joseph) the interpretation of events….
Quran[1]
……..science describes the kind of world that philosophy tells it to describe.
B. Register[2]
…..it is a magnificent feeling to recognize the unity of a complex of phenomena that to direct observation appear to be quite separate things. Einstein[3]
The Glorious Quran. Text and explanatory translation by Marmduck M. Pickthall. Iqra International Foundation. Chicago. (year n.m.)
Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall (1875-1936) translated the Quran in the heydays of Orientalism. But he was no Orientalist. He embraced the civilization to which he converted, and died in it. The son of an Anglican clergyman, who died when he was six, he was destined to become one of the chief English translators of the Quran. He was born in London and was educated at Harrow, the most prestigious private school in England, where he befriended Winston Churchill. Before he turned to the translation of the Quran in 1928, he had already earned a name as an accomplished novelist, journalist, political and religious leader and commentator.[4]
It is a pity that even the students of English literature know little of his literary achievements which were acknowledged by his great contemporaries such as H. G. Wells. According to one of his biographers, his novels “contain the circumstantiality of Sir Walter Scott, the exuberance of Charles Dickens, the moral strength of George Eliot, and compassionate tragedy of Thomas Hardy and the universality of E.M. Forster."[5] If his work has been to this day ignored to the point of having gone to virtual extinction, one wonders if this was the price he had to pay for his conversion! If that be the case, then it must be the task of the Islamic intelligentsia to rediscover his literary legacy.
He had a special talent for languages. He learnt Welsh and Gaelic (native language of Ireland) in his teens and developed a passion to travel in the East, especially the Islamic lands of Egypt, Syria and Palestine, where he would experience the traditional life and learn Arabic. Thanks to his mother who respected his youthful enthusiasm to see the world for himself, he was in his dream world even before he was twenty. Perhaps he was a born rebel who felt compressed and straitened in his state-oriented society that took great pride in its colonial possessions and the culture that it promoted. Later in his life he recalled those moments in his travelogue, Oriental Encounters: Palestine and Syria, 1894-6, which he opens in these words, worth quoting at length:
Early in the year 1894 I was a candidate for one of two vacancies inthe Consular Service for Turkey, Persia, and the Levant, but failed togain the necessary place in the competitive examination. I was indespair. All my hopes for months had been turned towards sunnycountries and old civilisations, away from the drab monotone of Londonfog, which seemed a nightmare when the prospect of escape eluded me. Iwas eighteen years old, and, having failed in one or two adventures, Ithought myself an all-round failure, and was much depressed. I dreamedof Eastern sunshine, palm trees, camels, desert sand, as of a Paradisewhich I had lost by my shortcomings. What was my rapture when mymother one fine day suggested that it might be good for me to travelin the East, because my longing for it seemed to indicate a naturalinstinct, with which she herself, possessing Eastern memories, was infull sympathy! I fancy there was some idea at the time that if I learnt the languagesand studied life upon the spot I might eventually find somebackstairs way into the service of the Foreign Office; but that idea,though cherished by my elders as some excuse for the expenses of myexpedition, had never, from the first, appealed to me; and from themoment when I got to Egypt, my first destination, it lost whateverlustre it had had at home. For then the European ceased to interestme, appearing somehow inappropriate and false in those surroundings.At first I tried to overcome this feeling or perception which, while Ilived with English people, seemed unlawful. All my education untilthen had tended to impose on me the cult of the thing done habituallyupon a certain plane of our society. To seek to mix on an equalitywith Orientals, of whatever breeding, was one of those things whichwere never done, nor even contemplated, by the kind of person who hadalways been my model.[6]
So he had not gone there as the English or most Europeans did, i.e., as representatives of a superior civilization, but with ‘a sneaking wish to fraternize with Orientals.’ Luckily, as he set foot in Jaffa, he met a native of Syria who helped him ‘to throw off the European and plunge into the native way of living.’ To acquaintance ourselves well with him it might be instructive to go through the following paragraph of the line just quoted:
With him I rode about the plain of Sharon, sojourning among the fellâhîn, and sitting in the coffee-shops of Ramleh, Lydda, Gaza, meeting all sorts of people, and acquiring the vernacular without an effort, in the manner of amusement. From dawn to sunset we were in the saddle. We went on pilgrimage to Nebi Rubîn, themosque upon the edge of marshes by the sea, half-way to Gaza; we rodeup northward to the foot of Carmel; explored the gorges of themountains of Judæa; frequented Turkish baths; ate native meals andslept in native houses--following the customs of the people of theland in all respects. And I was amazed at the immense relief I foundin such a life. In all my previous years I had not seen happy people.These were happy. Poor they might be, but they had no dream of wealth;the very thought of competition was unknown to them, and rivalry wasstill a matter of the horse and spear. Wages and rent were troublesthey had never heard of. Class distinctions, as we understand them,were not. Everybody talked to everybody. With inequality they had atrue fraternity. People complained that they were badly governed,which merely meant that they were left to their devices save on greatoccasions. A Government which touches every individual and interfereswith him to some extent in daily life, though much esteemed byEuropeans, seems intolerable to the Oriental. I had a vision of thetortured peoples of the earth impelled by their own misery to desolatethe happy peoples, a vision which grew clearer in the after years.But in that easy-going Eastern life there is a power of resistance,as everybody knows who tries to change it, which may yet defeat thehosts of joyless drudgery.[7]
He had ‘gone native’, so to speak, and when his mother came to know of it, he was called back home. Before his departure he wished to convert to Islam. The Muslim Shaikh in Damascus to whom he expressed thus would, however, not agree. What would be his mother’s reaction back home when she knew of it, he asked? She would be devastated, he replied. Then do not do so at this juncture, he advised, for it was a serious affair which required a prolonged reflection. This was indeed wise counsel, for it would take Pickthall another twenty one years after his return to England to become a Muslim. In the course of these years, during which he traveled again to his ‘beloved East’ and also visited Turkey for a few months, he produced fifteen novels and three collections of short stories. Said the Fisherman, his second one, published in 1903, received good reviews, becoming a bestseller in England. H. G. Wells wrote to him that ‘I wish that I could feel as certain about my own work as I do of yours, that it will be alive and interesting people fifty years from now.’[8] Little did Wells know of the turn waiting further on the course of his life.
In the coming years he wrote regularly for the New Age, a literary magazine, contributing alongside such luminaries as Bernard Shaw, Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence, and G. K. Chesterton. As the First World War approached, he found himself on the side of the Ottoman Empire which entered into the War as an ally of the Central Powers. When he was conscripted, he announced that he would only serve his country where she was not directly engaged with the Ottoman forces. He was thus appointed at a hospital while he continued to write in the defence of Turkey. The War, and especially the Christian fanaticism displayed variously, became a catalyst for him. Being increasingly pulled towards Islam inwardly he underwent a crisis of faith, finally announcing his conversion in November 1917. ‘He took the name of Muhammed and almost immediately became a pillar of the British Islamic Community.’[9] He worked for a year at Islamic Information Bureau in London which issued The Muslim Outlook, a weekly paper.
He moved to India in 1920 accepting an invitation to edit Bombay Chronicle, a prestigious Indian newspaper, doubling its circulation in six months time. In India he would spend the next fifteen years of his life, returning to England in 1935 where he died a year after. Almost as soon as he set foot on Indian soil he became an associate of Gandhi whose ideas of non-violent resistance attracted him. This affiliation grew stronger when Gandhi joined Khilafat Movement.
So the Englishman became an Indian nationalist leader, fluent in Urdu, and attending dawn prayers in the mosque, dressed in Gandhian homespun adorned with the purple crescent of the Khilafatists. He wrote to a friend: ‘They expect me to be a sort of political leader as well as a newspaper editor. I have grown quite used to haranguing multitudes of anything from 5 to 30,000 people in the open air, although I hate it still as much as ever and inwardly am just as miserably shy.’ He also continued his Friday sermons, preaching at the great mosque of Bijapur and elsewhere.[10]
The letter that Gandhi wrote to his widow on his death says much about his character:
Your husband and I met often enough to grow to love each other and I found Mr. Pickthall a most amiable and deeply religious man. And although he was a convert he had nothing of the fanatic in him that most converts, no matter to what faith they are converted, betray in their speech and act. Mr. Pickthall seemed to me to live his faith unobtrusively.[11]
Pickthall disengaged from politics with the establishment of modern Turkey and with this, the Bombay Chronicle having been closed by the government, he moved to Hyderabad in 1925 where he accepted a post of school principle on the invitation of the Nizam. Two years later there he founded the scholarly journal Islamic Culture (that runs to this day) and in the same while delivered a series of lectures on the cultural aspects of Islam in Madras.[12] Since, as he himself put it, ‘All Muslim India seems to be possessed with the idea that I ought to translate the Qur’an into real English,’ in 1928 the Nizam agreed to let him go on sabbatical for two years to complete his work that would leave his mark in the cultural history of Islamic civilization. During his devout years of Christian faith he had drunk deep from the Christian scriptures which the Quran speaks of as its inalienable historical predecessors. Thus he became the living witness to the Quran’s chief claim made to the Jews and Christians, that if they let their self go for a while, they will inevitably reach to the Quran.
The need to translate the Quran into English arose foremost from the fact that it had been already rendered into this language by some English scholars who would now be termed as Orientalists. Missionaries from all over Europe had followed in the heel of their colonial armies and there was a widespread suspicion that the English translations of the Quran by Orientalist scholars were deeply imbued with their vested interests. Hence the whole Muslim India getting ‘possessed with the idea’ that Pickthall take up the challenge.
During his work he traveled to Cairo to seek support for his project from the leading scholars of Al-Azhar. Somewhat to his surprise he found little backing from them. In the Islamic world, as Kidwai has noted, ‘whereas the idea of interpreting the Quran has not been so controversial, the emotional motives behind rendering the Quranic text into languages other than Arabic have always been looked upon with suspicion,’[13] more so by an Englishman in the contemporary colonial setting. However, Pickthall’s sincerity and scholarship prevailed upon the Al-Azhar scholars, and his The Meaning of the Glorious Quran was published from London in 1930 where each surah or chapter is given a brief introduction. The present edition contains a short though very valuable biography of the Prophet. Four years after its publication Abdullah Yousaf Ali, a Britain based Muslim scholar, published his translation of the Book.[14] Though various other Muslim scholars have carried out their renderings, Pickthall’s provided a solid foundation for improvisation to all of them.
Pickthall was emphatic that his was a kind of interpretation as translation of the Quran was impossible. This goes well with the contemporary understanding that translation from one language into another is always an approximation. And this is especially so when it comes to revelation where a word in original language would normally require more than one words to convey the meaning of the original. It is thus always advisable to consult more than one translations of the Quran if one seeks to get somewhere near to the original meanings. Abudullah Yousaf Ali’s translation, then, is a good source to correlate with Pickthall’s. The way the latter absorbs the idiom and metaphors of the Quran, though, speaks for itself. The following two verses, taken from different suras, illustrate the point well:
Wa li-rab-bika fasbir (74:7)
Fasbir sabran-jamiilaa (70:5)
Pickthall: For the sake of thy Lord, be patient!
But be patient (O Muhammad) with a patience fair to see.
Ali: But for thy Lord’s (cause), Be patient and constant.
Therefore do thou hold patience, -- a patience of beautiful (contentment).
A small point of difference with Pickthall on my behalf is his rendering of al-kitaab as Scripture instead of Book. He might have availed the opportunity of having two words in English for where there is apparently one in Arabic. This seems to be an oversight thanks to his Christian legacy of which the separation between the sacred and profane does not go well with the Unitarian vision of the Quran. The inadequacy of translating kitaab as scripture should have been apparent to him when he was translating, for instance, the following verses:
‘In-nahuu la-qur-‘aanun-kariim,
fii kitaabim-mak-nunn,
laa yamas-suhuu ‘il-lal-mutah-haruun (56:77-9)
That (this) is indeed a noble Quran
In a Book kept hidden
Which none toucheth saveth the purified.
Perhaps the chief limitation that he himself set on his translation, as also Abdullah Yousaf Ali later on, was his failure to employ the English of everyday usage. Did these translators still harbour the prejudice that revelation was too sacred to be put in everyday speech? Whatever the answer but the constraint and artificiality that such usage imposes on the text becomes evident when we compare Pickthall and Ali with, for instance, N. J. Dawood, who chose to render the text in plain simple English.[15] The effect is apparent when we see, for instance, the following verses:
Pickthall: Seest thou not how Allah coineth a similitude: A goodly saying, as a goodly tree, its root set firm, its branches reaching into heaven,
Giving its fruit at every season by the permission of its Lord? Allah coineth the similitudes for mankind in order that they may reflect. (14:24-5)
Ali: Seest thou not how God sets a parable? - A goodly Word like a goodly tree,
Whose root is firmly fixed, And its branches reach to the heavens, --
It brings forth its fruit at all times, by the leave of its Lord.
So God sets forth parables for men, in order that they may receive admonition.
Dawood: Do you not see how God compares a good word to a good tree?
Its root is firm and its branches are in the sky;
It yields its fruit in every season by God’s leave.
God speaks in parables to men so that they may take heed.
Pickthall was not merely a translator of the Quran but also its scholar. He ‘warned against the danger of adoring the book rather than its content.’[16] In a separate note, he posed two inter-related questions to the contemporary Islamic civilization: how can we enter into the world of the Quran ‘as if Allah were speaking to us through it now and today?’ And secondly, how it can, once again, become relevant and power of transformation in today’s world.[17] Needless to say, both questions are as relevant today as in Pickthall’s day. Furthermore, the two questions are actually one, because once we enter into the world of the Quran by locating the necessary code, or, to be more precise, employing the requisite methodology, we enter into the world of power, the power to comprehend, control and transform the events that constitute our world. Only then, as he put it bravely, ‘instead of being a mere revered book, a sacred fossil, or a source of magic-like blessing, it will change into a mighty force, impinging, stirring, moving and guiding us deeper and higher achievements, just as it did before.’[18] To this end the rest of this article is devoted.
The hypothesi,s or the fact, the event to be interpreted
It is one thing to recite the Quran, which is an art in itself, but quite another to destructure it as a text. It is indeed the problem with all revelation, in which Plato’s dialogues occupy a special place. For the moment, though, we would focus on the Quran.
The Quran presents itself as a complex structure which makes its claim to be the greatest wonder, or miracle as the Islamic tradition knows it, of the pre-modern civilizations worth considering. It does not imply belittling of the other wonders, for it repeatedly claims to be the inheritor of all of them.
The hypothesis that I want to suggest in this regard may be stated thus.[19] The structure of the Quran is a mirror image of pre-modern civilizations, on the one hand, and of the nature of reality as perceived by these civilizations, on the other. Or, the structure of the one, that is, of the Quran is the same as that of pre-modern civilizations, more particularly of the Islamic civilization of pre-modern times, and of the nature of reality to which they adhered. The Quran, it needs to be emphasized, claims to be the final text or book of the revelation which began with the creation of Adam, or the appearance of the human in the universe. This means that while the revelation prior to the Quran, or the texts/books of it, such as those which it mentions (e.g. the Torah, the Psalms of David and the Gospels) and those which it does not, each created its own civilization or community, the Quran not only created its own civilization but, being the final chapter of the Book that began with Adam, it is the most succinct and clear statement of reality of which the pre-modern civilizations as a whole were the embodiment.
Now the immediate point that needs to be clarified here is the notion of pre-modern civilizations, or, let us say, pre-modern Islamic civilization.[20] For I am intending to make a clear distinction between the pre-modern and modern Islamic civilization (a distinction applicable to all non-Western civilizations), that is, the one prior to the rise of modernity and the other which was subjugated by modernity, a subjugation that continues to the present day. What I am suggesting, then, is that, to put it succinctly, the prevalent idea that the present day, or the modern Islamic world is a continuation of the pre-modern Islamic civilization is an illusion. What implies is that while the structure of the pre-modern Islamic civilization was the mirror image of the structure of the Quran, the modern Islamic world is not. I am not positing an absolute discontinuity between the pre-modern and modern Islamic world. But what I intend to argue presently is that the discontinuity between them is as important as the continuity between them and it is only by a full view of these opposite aspects of our history that we can make sense of it, or truly interpret the event that we call Islamic history. We would soon turn to the continuity between them, but presently we are emphasizing the discontinuity between them. What follows is that while it is not a mistake to say that the cotemporary Islamic world is a continuation of the pre-modern world, it is also equally important to see that there is a difference or discontinuity between them. The difference is so pronounced that, as just noted, while the structure of pre-modern Islamic world reflected the structure of the Quran, the contemporary world does not.
If the contemporary Islamic world is not the reflection of the Quranic conception of reality, what follows is that, as argued earlier in a paper just cited, the vision of pre-modern Islam as expounded by the modern or contemporary Islamic intelligentsia is seriously modern, that is, seriously flawed and therefore does not accord with or correspond to the pre-modern Islam and the Islamic world. Therefore their contention that they represent and are fighting for the original Islam is mistaken. Their vision of the structure of the Quran and of their ideal Islam and Islamic world of pre-modern times has been constructed under the influence of and the tools provided by modernity and the modern mind that originated in Europe in the 16th-17th centuries. Thus, in spite of their much proclaimed hostility to modernity, they (the modern or contemporary Islamic intelligentsia) tend to see the pre-modern world and the supreme knowledge of it as embodied in the revelation and the Quran, the last book of it, with essentially the same eyes as do the modern intelligentsia (both Western and non-Western).
What follows from this is that the conception of reality that the modern intelligentsia (MI) and the modern Islamic intelligentsia (MII) adhere to is essentially same and essentially different from the conception of reality of the Quran and the pre-modern world. The conception of the pre-modern world, of religion, of tradition, or of the pre-modern knowledge or conception of reality as embodied supremely in the revelation, as perceived by the modern mind, is a modern construction, that does not correspond with the fact or the event that it purports to be describing. And the modern Muslim mind has succumbed to it.
The whole difference between the pre-modern and modern conception of reality arises in response to the ultimate philosophical problem and which is: what is there? For modern mind it is matter alone, for nothing else exists, is real but matter and its varied variations or forms such as the plant, the animal, or the human mind. There are various philosophies of social science in vogue presently, from empiricism or positivism to (Marxist) materialism, realism, phenomenology and hermeneutics and so forth.[21] But all their differences fail to conceal their common, founding premise, that nothing exists beside the material. In order to account for their differences, let us say that for all of them only that is real which can be reduced to the human’s sensory experience. Any human experience that cannot be traced back to sensory impressions is false at the best and illusion at the worst. Thus the modern mind defines knowledge as the formulation of human experience furnished ultimately through the sensory organs, or that can be reduced to the activity of human senses. Since the natural sciences, so the argument goes, adhere to this principle most faithfully, they constitute the highest form of knowledge, to which the social sciences and philosophy must also aspire.
Since the experience underlying the revelation, the ultimate embodiment of pre-modern knowledge, cannot be reduced to the sensory experience, it is an illusory experience for the modern mind. Therefore the knowledge constructed on this experience must also be false knowledge. We will investigate this claim, for what is apparent is that the modern mind has only changed the definition of knowledge and by thus doing relegated the knowledge of the pre-modern civilizations to the dustbin of history.
The chief problem with this claim is that it is founded on a premise proclaimed as self-evident by the modern mind, but which is neither self-evident nor true. It is purely a construction of the modern mind. And this is that, as Marx and Engels famously put it, reality is either material or non-material, either matter or mind. So whereas the modern, or scientific mind adheres to the reality of the former, the pre-modern mind adhered to the reality of the latter. Common sense, it was argued, shows that mind, or the human came long after the appearance of the material world, so the reality must be accorded to the material sphere alone. The pre-modern perception of the reality of the non-material sphere was therefore an illusory perception.
It is apparent that the whole support of this argument is common sense. We will see that this is the same common sense which once supported the geo-centric world. Einstein too, who was called the new Copernicus by Max Planck, the founder of the quantum theory, when he came up with his theory of relativity, found this common sense in staunch opposition to his vision of reality. The mention of these two giants of what is known as the early 20th century scientific revolution has been made advisedly. For if Planck destroyed the absolute opposition or separation between the particle and wave natures of light (thus unifying the two contraries of light and particle natures of light), Einstein demolished the absolute world or standard of perception which could be visualized to exist independent of the human observer. With the further evolution in the quantum theory, with which Einstein himself became uneasy, the so-called common sense view, which continues to be the chief dogma of modern science and of the mind built on it, that there is an objective world existing independently of human experience of it was undermined.
The idea that the world is inseparable from human experience of it, let us remember, is the founding premise of the (knowledge of the) pre-modern civilizations. And if the knowledge revolution of the twentieth century, spearheaded by the early 20th century scientific revolution, reached to the same premise, so much the worse for the modern mind.
The human is the centre of the universe in the pre-modern world and so is it for the world as envisioned by the relativity and quantum. The latter perception thus unifies the two contraries: the geo-centric and helio-centric worlds in so far as the former implied the human as the centre of the world. One of the chief arguments furnished by the modern mind to debunk the pre-modern vision of the human-centered world is that it allegedly was based the geo-centric world view of the world. So, since the geo-centric world was discovered to be an illusion, so the human centered world, a world invariably tied with the human experience of it, must also be an illusion.
The point is that the pre-modern mind did not base its vision of the human-centered world on the physical fact of a geo-centric world. The 20th century knowledge revolution has demonstrated that the world is indeed inseparable form human experience even though it is a helio-centric world.
So now we come to the structure of reality as envisioned by the Quran.
It is not easy to enter into it. For, it has a very complex structure hidden behind a blinding simplicity. The simplicity is so perfect a ruse that the reader gets carried away by it. It is almost like the structure a palm-date stone in which the core seems to have been concealed with great care; as if demanding a struggle to enter into it. And for which the Quran frequently incites.
So one must be clear what one is looking for. We find what you seek for. As the Quran puts it, if you are asking for this world you would be given. If the higher, which is the realm of the inner structure, you would find it too. But it’s a struggle. What follows is that there are two perceptions, one for the exterior, the other for the interior or core structure whereby each generates its own knowledge, or each unfolding its own world. So the Quran operates on two modes or plains of being, one normal, the other higher. For instance if speed of light is finite in one perception, it’s infinite from the other. The Quran for instance speaks of stairways to heavens, on which the angels are ascending and they travel the distance of fifty thousand years in a single day.
From Allah, Lord of the Ascending Stairways, (whereby) the angels and the Spirit ascend unto Him in a Day whereof the span is fifty thousand years.[22]
Apparently it makes little sense. Or at best a legacy of mythology. But it is not nonsense though the heritage of mythology is underlying it. It’s just a different experience of light that the normal perception cannot generate. The idea is perennial, from the age of mythology or the rise of civilization, the age of the so-called archaic or primitive man. But it took very long for its final formulation which the Quran claims to be. It stretches the revelation, of which it is the final heir, back to the first human, or Adam, who received the names of things from Allah. It is the recasting of the biblical view in almost a new language.
Within normal behavior or given framework, in both its religious and modern representations, it is difficult to enter into the interior structure of the Quran. Both fail to enter into it. This failure takes the power of this work away. Instead of being cognizant of their failure, they think it’s simply not there. For each, unity is the exclusion of either this or other mode of being. So, they appear different or enemies of each other, yet they are same in their inability to see that unity without difference cannot be conceived.
All violence and war generates from this perception of unity in which difference and opposition are identical with violence and war. Once it is understood that opposition is inherent in unity and thus unite apparently contradictory entities, as Einstein meant when he unified mass and energy in his famous E=mc2 equation, war and violence would cease to be the inherent condition of opposition and difference.
This pluralist vision of the Quran, in which pluralism defines unity, the sectarian consciousness of the religious and the modern, which incites the exclusion of opposition from unity, is transcended. This thing is at the heart of a social change through violence, a belief in which the existing social theory, whether religious or modern, concur.
The Quran then opens up a huge and immense potential of peace and universal harmony on this planet once its internal structure is entered into.
The Quran helps us to comprehend and decode the structure of pre-modern civilization of which it claims to be one of the chief documents. The structure of pre-modern civilization is raised on the structure as conceived in the Quran. So, what is the Quran’s structure?
We have seen that it is made up of two spheres, internal and external like the structure of the atom. The structure of the pre-modern civilization, and of the Quran and the atom, concords with each other.
Now what follows from this is that if the velocity of light is absolute as Einstein suggested and built the subsequent scientific development on this premises, then this does not imply that it should be absolute in the subatomic world, in the entire of the cosmos. We already have plenty of evidence for it. For we know that the subatomic world phenomena behave almost as it was almost alive. We know that the phenomena behave differently under the human gaze than they would otherwise. As if the internal structure of man was same as that of the world, where the observer and the observed discover each other as the one and the other in one whole.
Neil Bohr drew attention of this remarkable fact that it is the apparatus that man employs that largely determines what he perceives in the subatomic world, for there is no such thing as world itself. Different perception creates different worlds.
This leads to the idea of the physical world as human construction.
The idea of the social world as being human creation may not surprise as much but that of natural world sounds against the common sense. But it is the same common sense that once supported the geo-centric view.
Incidentally once we comprehend that there are mainly two perceptions corresponding to the two plains of being, there would be little difficulty to see that the two natures of light, those of particle and wave, must have varied velocities too. For it is possible to suggest that the speed of light of 300000km per sec is only the velocity of particle motion of light, and that the wave motion of light is infinite. In other words there are two speeds, finite and infinite, corresponding to its particle and wave natures. Once we come to grip with this the eternal enigma that exhausted Einstein to death, the problem of the unification of the four forces, would be resolved.
The idea of the finite, the so-called absolute speed of light, let us remember, was Einstein’s creation. It was earlier presented by Leibniz if I am not mistaken. Newton, as we know adhered to infinite speed of light which he had inherited from his studies of the structure of pre modern civilizations. He was deeply involved in the science of the day which was alchemy. This science claimed to be the science of interior structure of the pre modern civilizations. The hypothesis of Newton, of infinite speed of light along with its particle nature of light was upheld by the modern science.
Newton failed to see the contradiction in it. If light was infinite, it meant that it did not belong to the world of matter, of particle nature, which was finite. So Newton begged down there, and Leibniz, on the other hand, was equally confused, who opposed Newton, on both counts. Newton was, it seems, all the way involved to resolve this contradiction but failed which probably caused his nervous breakdown in 1694.
The puzzle took a step towards its resolution when in the 19th century the wave nature of light, largely at the hands of Faraday, the discover of the electromagnetic fields, was discovered. Now the infinite speed of light looked sensible. But then came the bomb shell of the discovery of the interior structure of the atom at the hands of J. J. Thomson in 1898. This new phenomenon created problems. Instances were observed where it didn’t seem to conform to either wave or particle nature of light. The loss of ether at the hands of Michelson and this strange behavior of light were the two great challenges that physics as the queen sciences faced at the turn of the century.
Two giants appeared, one older and the other younger one who together resolved these crises by abandoning the world which the existing concepts of physics described. Common sense was going to face a challenge greater then it faced at the shift from geocentric to heliocentric world: the mental habit or the hypothesis that light must behave either as particle or wave had to be abandoned.
New concepts had to be created to describe the new experience of the world as Planck and Einstein both emphasized.
Planck wrestled with himself as he prepared to challenge the two greatest dogmas of physics. That light behaved only as wave and second that it could only do as particle or wave. The eternal law of logic of modern rationality of either /or, of being and not being, as two hostile opposites, had to be abandoned. Light as Planck discovered must be behaving both as light and wave in that particular epiphany of it which Plank was observing and studying at that time. To overcome this lasting absolute of science, Planck had to struggle hard. Of this he spoke to his son during a walk a short while before presenting this paper in October 1900. He thought it was a discovery equal to that of the great Newton’s. Einstein generalized this plural nature of light, thus asserting its two natures universally. While seeing the slipping of the earth from under its feet, he went on to create a dogma of his own. This was the new the absolute, the absolute velocity of light.
But did it occur to anyone even after the atomic explosion, that the energy released could be different than that of which the speed was fixed, 300,000. This figure was already too large. To think that light had also an infinite nature was impossible to conceive So the implication is obvious. Light must behave both finitely and infinitely, though not at the same time, just like particle and wave. The classic double slit experiment proves Bohr’s point that all phenomena behave differently under a different apparatus. The human is inseparable from nature, the cardinal belief of the pre modern civilizations.
Neil Bohr, in spite of his tremendous effort to lead quantum away from Einstein’s dogmatic slumber, could not get to question Einstein’s ultimate dogma and thus paid the price of his beloved theory of complimentarity getting little attention. Had he been able to take a step forward to see and insist on the dual velocity of light corresponding to the wave and particle natures of light which he did so much to establish in spite of all Einstein’s intellectual assaults especially at the Solvoy Congress of 1927, he would have broken through. But the breakthrough they had made was exhausted.
In order, then then, to resurrect the discarded hypothesis of Newton of the infinite velocity of light we need to turn to the roots from where Newton derived it. Planck had resurrected his particle hypothesis in a new setting. We need only to extend a little and affirm that it is both particle and wave, finite and infinite.
(III)
The roots go back, as already stated, go back to the age of mythology, of which the Quranic revelation is the ultimate continuum. Mythology is an essential component of human psyche. The human must make myths which in its essence, is the human construction of entities which are invisible but which provide the necessary connections between the phenomena of the material world. Since both correspond to different perceptions, both are unlike each other. The world of invisible events cannot be reduced to the world of visible entities or events. But the images and symbols employed to describe each undergo change. So the suggestion by the modern mind that it has freed human mind from mythological psyche is false.
Ether was the greatest god that physics created in the 19th century, although its earlier forms had a long history. On its death, though, another one was soon to be created by ironically the great iconoclast Einstein himself. If we can decode the duality of Einstein rightly we can get the heart of the Quran. The new god was the absolute speed of light. The Quran demolished this god ages ago, in its longing for unity. Light is the ultimate image of Allah, the chief concept created and employed to expound the nature of reality, which the Quran calls Allah. Although Allah as ‘the light of the heavens and the earth’ is an often repeated simile in the Quran, perhaps the most beautiful is the following one:
Noor an ‘ala noor Light upon light
Allah sounds strange but not Ether; why? Allah sounds strange but not the absolute speed of light; why?
What is the nature of light in the Quran? Simple! Relative and absolute character of light, with the difference that what we know as absolute velocity of Einstein, turns into relative and the infinitude of light becomes the absolute. This means that it is possible for light to be at two celestial bodies at the same time, without any time interval, just like the electron emerging in two orbits at the same time. So to hypothesis that there is an absolute divide between the micro and macro nature, subatomic and atomic world, is false. A leap of imagination that Einstein dared not take. They are opposites of each other and yet one is unthinkable without the other. It is the harmony of opposites that defines its unity. Their inner unity is that mass and energy in that great equation of E=mc2.
What this equation suggests in that the energy that manifests itself or is created after the interaction of mc2 is not the same that interacted with mass. After all the energy created by mc2 is not part of our ordinary experience, it does not fall within the view of our ordinary, given perception. That which is beyond our sensual experience must be the reflection of the infinite; that must be the realm of infinite.
(IV)
The revelation describes itself as inimitable. This was the point of contention between the exterior or inner tradition, the rationalist scholars and the Sufis within the Islamic tradition.
The scholars and the Sufis understand inimitability of the Quran differently. The Sufis did not deny that experience of revelation can be shared; that it is almost universal to mankind or it could never be understood, because this is invisible and beyond our sensory experience, of outer and inward perception, against all the false accusation of the modern mind is never denied. The seed structure of reality is never denied.
If the modern mind denies the inner experience, it assumes that the traditional, pre-modern mind denies the sensory experience. What is difficult for it, though, is its self-imposed difficulty that one of the two perceptions or the experiences is false. This so called logical law might be the law of sensory experience, but it does not hold in the subatomic world. The logic or the rationality of the mind, which it considers to be absolute, then is the law of the constitution or structure of the external and sensory experience. Its limitation is evident is so far as in the realm of finitude alone. Revelation is inimitable in the sense that it cannot be copied, which is the realm of the finitude. That is, you cannot parallel it with anything in physical plain.
Reference:
The religious intelligence did not realize that if we restrict revelation to exceptional events in natural, as violation of the law, then the sensory realm emerges as partner to Allah. It becomes in between the human and the world beyond, the realm of infinite. It simply disappears behind the veil of sensory experience. An experience, that at times is common to the religious and modern intelligentsia.
The Quran insists that it is the most common form of shirk, the unconscious association of Allah and the sensory world as partners. You reckon this world, or the life in it……… as the ultimate and you have made it God’s associate.
Revelation is the chief source or testimony of the world beyond, so it is never-ending. If there is a world of infinity that it must continually manifest. That is, what the Quran calls revelation.
A.R. Kidwai. ‘Translating the Untranslatable: A Survey of English Translations of the Quran’ http://www.soundvision.com/Info/quran/english.asp ((Originally printed in The Muslim World Book Review, Vol. 7, No. 4 Summer 1987)
‘Marmaduke Pickthalla brief biography,’ http://www.masud.co.uk/ISLAM/bmh/BMM-AHM-pickthall_bio.htm
[1] 12:26
[2] http://enlightenment.supersaturated.com/essays/text/bryanregister/ bohr_compliementarity.html)
[3] Holten. G. 1996. Einstein, History, and Other Passions: The Rebellion Against Science at the End of the Twentieth Century. Perseus Books. 1996:114)
[4] For a brief biography of Pickthall see Abdul Hakim Murad, http://www.masud.co.uk/ISLAM/bmh/BMM-AHM-pickthall_bio.htm
[5] Cited by Rentfrow, D. http://islam.thetruecall.com/
[6] http://www.gutenberg.org/files/19378/19378-8.txt; pp. 3-4.
[7] Ibid., p. 5.
[8] http://www.masud.co.uk/ISLAM/bmh/BMM-AHM-pickthall_bio.htm; p. 9.
[9] Rentfrow, D. http://islam.thetruecall.com/; p. 3.
[10] http://www.masud.co.uk/ISLAM/bmh/BMM-AHM-pickthall_bio.htm; p. 17.
[11] Ibid., p. 18.
[12] It was later published under the title The Cultural Side of Islam (1984). Lahore: Qadiria Book Traders.
[13] Kidwai, A. R. ‘Translating the Untranslatable: A Survey of English Translations of the Quran,’ http://www.soundvision.com/Info/quran/english.asp; p. 1.
[14] The Glorious Quran, 1991, translation by Abdullah Yousaf Ali, transliteration by M. S. Tajar, Maktabah ar-Rasul al ‘Ammah, Kuwait.
[15] N. J. Dawood…
[16] Hadhrami, A.A. ‘Marmaduke Pickthall: A Servant of Islam,’ http://www.witness-pioneer.org/vil/Articles/scholars/marmaduke_pickthall_a_servant_of_islam.htm
[17] The New World that Awaits You
[18] Ibid.
[19] The hypothesis presented here originates in my study of the Quran initiated nearly two decades ago while I was working on my Ph. D. thesis, which was incorporated in the work subsequently published as A Forgotten Vision: A study of human spirituality in the light of Islamic tradition, 1996, Vanguard Books: Lahore.
[20] It would be instructive to see my article ‘Islam and Modernity: Towards a new paradigm,’ appearing in this issue especially for the clarification of the terms such as modernity.
[21] Outhwaite, W. 1987. New Philosophies of Social Science: Realism,
[22] 70:3-4.
4. Sufi Tradition and the Postcolonial Condition
Sufi Tradition and the Postcolonial Condition
A Report on Knowledge
(An outline)
There seems to be a fair measure of agreement among thoughtful and properly equipped students of the Old Testament that there is little in it, save a few fragments of poetry, which took its present form earlier than about 850 B. C. The literatures of Egypt and Babylonia were at that date already hundreds, one might almost say thousands, of years old.
T. E. Peet[1]*
My dear child, it is true that you cannot perceive Being here, but it is equally true that it is here. This finest essence,–– the whole universe has it as its Self: That is the Real: That is the Self: That you are, Svetaketu!
Upanishads[2]
I have good hope that some future awaits men after death, as we have been told for years, a much better future for the good than for the wicked.…I am afraid that other people do not realize that the one aim of those who practice philosophy in the proper manner is to practice for dying and death. Plato[3]
…..it is a magnificent feeling to recognize the unity of a complex of phenomena that to direct observation appear to be quite separate things.
Einstein[4]
Why this report?
The legitimacy of it derives from the hypothesis that in spite of Edward Said’s phenomenal Orientalism[5] and the consequent discipline of postcolonial studies that it initiated, knowledge continues to be manufactured and centered in the West. Such centralization implies that knowledge must be seen and mean the same to a non-Western observer as it does to a Western one. The findings of this report question this assumption by showing a vantage point from where knowledge appears differently than it does from the present, supposedly only position. More importantly, the crisis which has plagued the social sciences since the later decades of the twentieth century seems to be the specific condition of the established perception of knowledge.[6]
Looking from the other, the other’s, or the alternative perspective what we immediately become aware of is that the Western hegemony was imposed on the non-Western world by reducing the latter into an ignorant, almost non-literate entity. The disempowerment of the colonized, that is, was realized by a contempt for and obliteration of its knowledge from the world of being and truth. The postcolonial condition, however, is realized not in turning the wheel of time back but in reconciliation, or creating a new equation between the two apparently contradictory perceptions of knowledge or ways of seeing the world.
In so far as this is a narrative of the knowledge that was banished from the conscious life of the human in the last few centuries, and at the same time it aims to construct a condition that does not yet exist, it may be taken as a work of fiction. Hence it must be an aesthetic project.[7]
In order for the modern, Western theory to be true, a legacy of over four and a half thousand years of knowledge had to be rendered obsolete. For a while (for what is two or three hundred years but a while!), it seemed to work. Not any more though. And it is not we in the periphery who are the first ones to find out that all is not well with it. Rather it is the Westerners themselves who are quarrelling amongst themselves whether the whole project, the so-called Enlightenment project (or the project of modernity)[8] was worth the cost that it is ever demanding, with the Ozone already bleeding and no hope of the ‘most developed societies’ agreeing to cut their consumerist ambitions.
It was the knowledge revolution of the 16th-18th centuries that took place in Europe that proclaimed an absolute discontinuity between what we know as modern knowledge and premodern knowledge, a distinction that ousted the latter from the domain of knowledge and its then possessor from the domain of culture, civilization and freedom. Once we call the legitimacy of this Berlin Wall to question and act to pull it down, as it is already weakened and unable to stand anyway, we find the span and amount of the subject of our investigation extended to nearly five thousand years. It would be pretentious, though, even to suggest that ours is going to be an attempt to give a full review of the knowledge of that enormity. I would rather confine myself to demonstrating that however necessary the Berlin Wall might have been in the first place, it has lost its legitimacy and meaning in the present. Furthermore, the unity of knowledge, of thought, following such dismantling is the precondition of the postcolonial condition.
Sufi tradition is seen as a representation of the tradition, of a way of seeing and living, that formed the core or nucleus of premodern corpus of knowledge. Sufi tradition as a way of thought and practice, then, it should be clear at the outset, is and has been treated in the following pages as a species of a genus and not a genus itself. This tradition, that is, is seen as a manifestation or articulation in Islam or in the Islamic world of a tradition that emerged nearly three millennia before. Though India can be termed as its first home where it became nearly the defining current in both Hinduism and then Buddhism, Upanishads being its first great formulation, it soon appeared universally, China and Greece being the second most powerful centres after India. Subsequently it played major role in the shaping of Christianity and finally found its probably the most powerful expression in Islam, whereby it is known as tassawuf , Sufism, or the Sufi tradition.[9]
The tradition, of which Sufism is the Islamic expression, can be designated variously as oppositional, parallel, critical, inner, core or counter tradition. It can be represented through the help of a picture (figure 1) where there are five (or more) spheres. These spheres represent living religions, preeminently Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in the Abrahamic family of religions and Hinduism and Buddhism from the Indo-Chinese family. Jainism, Confucianism, Taoism, Shintoism and various other and later religions such as Sikhism can be denoted through other spheres. Presently, for brevity’s sake, we would continue to speak of five spheres, which can be distinguished through separate colours such as red, blue, green, orange and yellow. However, within each sphere the core tradition is designated by a single colour, let us say black, of varying shades.
Figure 1
Figure 2
The central idea that this diagram purports to convey is that the critical tradition is one, single, continuous tradition running through various living living religions. For precision’s sake we can simplify this diagram into a single sphere (figure 2) in which the core tradition is represented in black.[10]
Now it needs to be made clear that this report does not aim to take us unto paradisiacal state in which there are no problems to confront. Rather it just intends to say that instead of old problems which Western knowledge has imposed upon us, we need to deal with new ones.
The first problem of course relates to the word tradition. For this word generally refers to, and rightly so, the five spheres as a whole so that the words religion and tradition appear to be synonymous. In this case critical tradition emerges as a tradition within tradition, both forming one whole in a relationship of essential tension, to borrow an elegant phrase from the title of a book of Thomas Kuhn.[11] Thus we would distinguish between them by referring the one as tradition and the other with one of the prefixes related above.
The second problem is that in figure1 there does not appear any representation for the Greek critical tradition that originated there contemporaneously with China or a little later, in the fifth century B.C., to be more precise, and subsequently flourished in Greco-Roman world up to the second-century of the common era. The reason for this omission is that that pagan religion in which it appeared, or of which it was the core tradition, did not survive. And yet the critical tradition, of which Socrates was the founder and Plato the chief expounder, played a titanic role in the formation of the Christian tradition and more specifically of the core tradition within the Abrahamic tradition.
The postcolonial condition, on the other hand, is a hypothesis. It is a condition and an idea waiting to be realized. It may be a reality as a periodizing concept, in so far as colonialism as a form of occupation and total control of the non-Western world by the Western powers has largely come to an end. However, since the control has changed into an indirect, neocolonial mode, the dependency of the non-Western peoples being the continuing condition of the independence of the Western peoples, postcolonial condition as a state of being, or as an experience, both individually and collectively, in which humanity becomes estranged from the estrangement within, awaits for its tenets to be articulated first as a system of knowledge and then translated into an alternative mode of seeing and doing, thinking and behaviour. This report is directed towards that end.
The following words of Neera Chandhoke serve well as a preamble to the starting hypothesis of this report:
A crisis develops in the social sciences when its practitioners become apprehensive that existing epistemologies and modes of cognition are no longer capable of perceiving or grasping the complexities of social phenomena – in other words when realization dawns that a particular way of comprehending the world is inadequate or even faulty. This may be due to the fact that the object of theoretical investigation is seen to have changed, or that the particular mode of inquiry is flawed in its inner logic and structuration. The theorist realizing that the concepts hitherto available for understanding the world are no longer capable of doing so, seeks either to restructure conceptual hierarchies, or to incorporate another theoretical tradition which seems to be more promising. …. Given also the fact that social sciences are characterized by competing frames of knowledge systems, switches or the appropriation of one tradition by another have been possible. Indeed, even when one tradition of knowledge acquires hegemony, others exist as alternatives on the horizon.[12]
It is now commonplace that the state of knowledge since the latter part of the last century is in crisis that prompted Lyotard’s earlier report on knowledge.[13] The main premise of our hypothesis, then, is that the crisis is two-fold, that is, not only ‘the object of theoretical investigation is ….changed,’ but also ‘the particular mode of inquiry [hitherto employed] is flawed in its inner logic and structuration.’ To be more precise, ‘the particular mode of inquiry,’ the ‘existing epistemologies, and modes of cognition’ would refer in the following discussion to modernity, modern epistemology, or modern mode of inquiry which appears to be faulty and flawed due in part to the fact that the object of its investigation or the world for which this epistemology was evolved has undergone phenomenal transformations.
To explicate the premise further, modernity is seen as ‘a particular way of comprehending the world’ which began taking shape in Europe at the beginning of the latter half of the last millennium. The new era began by overturning the traditional or religious knowledge systems which had hitherto governed the millennia old pre-modern civilizations.
The second premise of our hypothesis is that in so far as the modern mode of cognition turns out to be flawed, its rejection or critique of the traditional mode must also be flawed, thus pushing us towards a radical re-evaluation of the epistemology of premodern or traditional knowledge systems. If the prevalent mode of cognition has turned out to be seriously faulty in its perception of the totality of human condition, then its judgment of the preceding mode of cognition of reality must also lose all legitimacy. There is nothing striking in this observation. For the knowledge revolution that ushered in the modern era brought virtually a change of regime, as radical a change of regime as, for instance, was the French Revolution of 1789, or perhaps more appropriately the October Revolution of 1917. However, as this regime collapsed, the fallen regime’s perception of pre-1917 state of affairs was also rendered obsolete.
It would be immediately apparent that the metaphor of regime and regime change is being used advisedly. As Chandhoke has mentioned, the human condition is characterised by a plurality of knowledge systems, or paradigms, if we can say so for heuristic purposes. The crisis in knowledge is usually marked by the fact that the leading, dominant or reigning tradition starts losing its grip on the minds and imagination of the humans as it increasingly manifests its failure in the comprehension of the social and natural reality. The weakening of its grip on reality and on the mind of the human are the two sides of the same coin. In such situations, the alternative or rival conceptual frameworks of reality raise their heads for hegemony and power. This point leads to the third premise of our hypothesis.
As modernity or modern civilization endeavoured to overthrow the traditional regime and marched towards establishing its hegemony, during the nineteenth century a split occurred in its ranks down to the bottom which would have fatal consequences at the end. Henceforth modernity had two faces, or two identities engaged in a mortal combat for the ultimate supremacy. These two modern modes are known variedly as capitalist and communist, liberal and Marxist, rightist and leftist and so forth.
As the conflict between the two modes or forms of modernity entered into the most violent phase of its conflict, or what is known as the Cold War, it soon began to be realized by many that the promise of freedom offered by each party might be a chimera. By the 1970s the Marxist, or what had been the opposing mode in this conflict, especially in its Soviet form, began losing its credibility as a real alternative to the established capitalist, liberal perspective. This led to a questioning of the legitimacy of the modernist perspective itself, a challenge led by what is known as post-structuralism and which in its turn inspired postmodern and postcolonial critiques of the fundamentals and founding premises of modernity.
The third premise of our hypothesis derives from the contention that both postmodern and postcolonial perspectives have never been able to come up to their claim of challenging the fundamental premises of modernity. Indeed, as we would argue, most of the ‘posts’ to date have thought and functioned, in spite of their claims to the contrary, within the larger framework of modernity and historical trajectory of Europe/West. It is for this reason that they have been seen largely as variations of modernity. Not alternatives to modernity, offering a new regime, a new way of thought and action, that is, but merely the revolts within the larger spectrum of modernity, and which seem to employ the categories, or the intellectual weapons of the system which they seek to overthrow.
If, then, they have failed to appeal to the imagination of global people in general and the new generations in particular since the dying days of the Cold War era, it is because they have been unable to locate and confront the epistemological and defining premise of modernity. This premise, this defining character of modern mode of engaging with the world, we would argue, derives from its flawed comprehension of the premodern conception of reality which resulted in its wholesale repudiation of the traditional legacy. The absolute breach, then, that occurred between the past and present, we suggest further, is chiefly responsible for the confusion and malaise in contemporary thought and human condition.
The fourth premise of our hypothesis is that in so far as modernity and colonialism concurred in their rise, to the extent that they became two sides of the same coin, the postcolonial, and in similar vein the postmodern, condition can be defined as that in which the breach between the past and the present has been overcome. Needless to say, time has put the task of creating such condition largely on the shoulders of the intelligentsia and peoples of the non-Western world on whom modern perception of reality was imposed by the might of colonialism. For the fact that this imposition for varied reasons never succeeded in full, the legacy of the predmodern human experience has survived in the non-Western world, though mutilated by colonial, modernist violence and for which reason not always recognizable at first sight.
The final premise of the hypothesis around which the perspective underlying this study endeavours to evolve is that the failure of the two modern perspectives, liberal and Marxist, did not alone cause disenchantment with modernity. Rather this was the knowledge revolution of the first half of the twentieth century which dragged the ground away from the edifice of modern knowledge. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to speak of the knowledge revolutions which were sparked by the scientific revolution of the early twentieth century. By overturning the mechanical structure of the world laboriously structured by modern science, the new physics paved the way for the re-examination of the pre-modern non-mechanical structure of the world.
More than this, in their thought they were constructing nature itself as a machine. The lines of explanation that would clear and valid for nature itself must be those that they could see clearly in the working of machines they might construct. Mechanics thus became the basic part of physics, and physics the basis of the whole of science. Nature, when we came ultimately to know it, would be construed as a single vast and interlocking machine – the machine of machines.[14]
Such call or need for the re-opening of the inquiry into the nature of the structure of traditional knowledge systems was further underlined by revolutions in art and across social and human sciences. The Cubist revolution of 1907 led by Picasso, for instance, was driven by a longing and desire to overcome the modernist absolute duality of subject and object, of the visible and the invisible, a unity emphasized by relativity and quantum at the same time. Equally importantly, the discovery of the psychoanalysis and unconscious in the domain of psychology destroyed the monolithic Cartesian subject on which the chief modernist dogma, namely, the separation and duality of man and nature, of mind and matter had been evolved.
It would be argued, in short, that the two leading modernist paradigms or modes of comprehending the world, generated by the knowledge revolution of the 16th-18th centuries, have been rendered out of date by the 20th century knowledge revolutions in various disciplines, from physics[15] and psychology[16] to anthropology,[17] philosophy,[18] history and philosophy of science,[19] sociology of science,[20] religion[21] and art.[22] But if these revolutions have remained largely invisible to the naked eye, there is hardly anything surprising in it, for knowledge revolutions are always slow in coming to the prominence. Indeed, knowledge revolutions in contrast to political revolutions are largely invisible revolutions. This report, then, is in part an attempt to bring to light and connect the grand transformations in knowledge which have taken place in the known history of humankind. The belief underlying this endeavour is that once fully recognized, it would usher in new ways of thought and practice that humanity seeks presently and which would eventually define what we have called as the postcolonial condition.
Natural science does not simply describe and explain nature; it is part of the interplay between nature and ourselves; it describes nature as exposed to our method of questioning. (95.)
Heisenberg, W. (1962, repr.2000) Physics and Philosophy. Penguin Books
Notes
* (Except for those referred to in notes 4 & 9, all the works cited below form the core texts or sources of this report.)
[1] Peet, T. E. (1931) A Comparative Study of the Literatures of Egypt, Palestine and Mesopotamia: Egypt’s Contribution to the Literature of the Ancient world. London: Oxford University Press, pp. 1-2.
[2] Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, in Hume, R.E. Tr. (1990) The Thirteen Principal Upanishads. New Delhi, p. 33.
[3] Phaedo: 63c, 64a. Plato, (1997) Complete Works, ed., J. M. Cooper. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company.
[4] Cited in Holten, G. (1996) Einstein, History, and Other Passions: the Rebellion Against Science at the End of the Twentieth Century. New York: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, p. 114.
[5] 1978 repr. 1995. Penguin Books.
[6] The crisis is well articulated in these words of Giddens’: ‘The disorientation which expresses itself in the feeling that systematic knowledge about social organization cannot be obtained, … results primarily from the sense many of us have of being caught up in a universe of events we do not fully understand, and which seems in large part out of our control.’ Giddens, A. (1991) Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity, p. 36.
[7] ‘We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand.’ Picasso, cited in Berger, J. (1993) The Success and Failure of Picasso. New York: Vintage International, p. 34.
[8] There is a host of postmodernist literature on the subject and which would be cited in due course.
[9] Alhaq, S. (1997) A Forgotten Vision: A study of human spirituality in the light of the Islamic tradition, 2 volumes. New Dlehi: Vikas Publishing House.
[10] Sufism is generally referred to by the term ‘Islamic mysticism’. The question might arise whether we can express the core tradition by the generic word ‘mysticism’. Perhaps yes, but I have avoided to use this term due to its peculiar Western understanding, often far from satisfactory due to varied reasons.
[11] Kuhn, T.S. (1977) The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change,. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
[12] Chandhoke, N. Ed. (1994). Understanding the Post-Colonial World: Theory and Method. New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, pp. 1-2.
[13] Lyotard, J. F. (1984). The Postmodern Condition. A Report on Knowledge. Trans. G. Bennington & B. Massumi. Manchester University Press. Mancehster.
[14] Barrett, W. 1986. Death of the Soul: Philosophical Thought from Descartes to the Computer. Oxford University Press, p. 6.
[15] Einstein, A. & Infeld, L. (1938). The Evolution of Physics : The Growth of Ideas from the Early Concepts to Relativity and Quanta. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Bohr, N. (1958 ) Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge, London: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
[16] Freud, S. (1951)The Interpretation of Dreams. Trans. A. A. Brill. London: Allen & Unwin; Jung, C. G. (1972) Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. Trans R.F.C. Hull. 2nd ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
[17] Levy-Bruhl, L. (1928). The “Soul” of the Primitive. Trans. Lilian A. Clare. London: George Allen & Unwin; Malinowski, B. (1948) Magic, Science and Religion and Other Essays. Illinois: The Free Press; Evans-Pritchard, E. E. (1965) Theories of Primitive Religion. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
[18] Cornford, F. M. (1912, repr. 1991) From Religion to Philosophy: A Study in the Origins of Western Speculation, Princeton: Princeton University Press; Foucault, M. (1980) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977. Edited by C. Gordon. New York: Pantheon.
[19] Burt, E. A. (1932). The Metaphysical Assumptions of Modern Physical Science: A Historical and Critical Essay. 2nd ed. London: Routledge; Popper, K. 1960. The Logic of Scientific Discovery. London: Hutchinson; Kuhn, T. S. (1962, repr. 1996) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd ed., Chicago: The University of Chicago Press; Kuhn, T. S. (1963) ‘The Function of Dogma in Scientific Research,’ in Crombie, A. C., ed., Scientific Change: Historical Studies in the Intellectual, Social and Technical Conditions for Scientific Discovery and Scientific Invention, from Antiquity to the Present, London: Heinemann, , pp. 347-69.
[20] Merton, R. K. (1970) Science, Technology and society in Seventeenth-Century England, 3rd ed., New York: Howard Fertig, (orig, publ. Osiris, 1938:360-632).
[21] Durkeim, Emile. (1912, repr. 2001) The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Trans. Carol Cosman. Oxford University Press.
[22] Berger, John, (1993), op.cit.
A Report on Knowledge
(An outline)
There seems to be a fair measure of agreement among thoughtful and properly equipped students of the Old Testament that there is little in it, save a few fragments of poetry, which took its present form earlier than about 850 B. C. The literatures of Egypt and Babylonia were at that date already hundreds, one might almost say thousands, of years old.
T. E. Peet[1]*
My dear child, it is true that you cannot perceive Being here, but it is equally true that it is here. This finest essence,–– the whole universe has it as its Self: That is the Real: That is the Self: That you are, Svetaketu!
Upanishads[2]
I have good hope that some future awaits men after death, as we have been told for years, a much better future for the good than for the wicked.…I am afraid that other people do not realize that the one aim of those who practice philosophy in the proper manner is to practice for dying and death. Plato[3]
…..it is a magnificent feeling to recognize the unity of a complex of phenomena that to direct observation appear to be quite separate things.
Einstein[4]
Why this report?
The legitimacy of it derives from the hypothesis that in spite of Edward Said’s phenomenal Orientalism[5] and the consequent discipline of postcolonial studies that it initiated, knowledge continues to be manufactured and centered in the West. Such centralization implies that knowledge must be seen and mean the same to a non-Western observer as it does to a Western one. The findings of this report question this assumption by showing a vantage point from where knowledge appears differently than it does from the present, supposedly only position. More importantly, the crisis which has plagued the social sciences since the later decades of the twentieth century seems to be the specific condition of the established perception of knowledge.[6]
Looking from the other, the other’s, or the alternative perspective what we immediately become aware of is that the Western hegemony was imposed on the non-Western world by reducing the latter into an ignorant, almost non-literate entity. The disempowerment of the colonized, that is, was realized by a contempt for and obliteration of its knowledge from the world of being and truth. The postcolonial condition, however, is realized not in turning the wheel of time back but in reconciliation, or creating a new equation between the two apparently contradictory perceptions of knowledge or ways of seeing the world.
In so far as this is a narrative of the knowledge that was banished from the conscious life of the human in the last few centuries, and at the same time it aims to construct a condition that does not yet exist, it may be taken as a work of fiction. Hence it must be an aesthetic project.[7]
In order for the modern, Western theory to be true, a legacy of over four and a half thousand years of knowledge had to be rendered obsolete. For a while (for what is two or three hundred years but a while!), it seemed to work. Not any more though. And it is not we in the periphery who are the first ones to find out that all is not well with it. Rather it is the Westerners themselves who are quarrelling amongst themselves whether the whole project, the so-called Enlightenment project (or the project of modernity)[8] was worth the cost that it is ever demanding, with the Ozone already bleeding and no hope of the ‘most developed societies’ agreeing to cut their consumerist ambitions.
It was the knowledge revolution of the 16th-18th centuries that took place in Europe that proclaimed an absolute discontinuity between what we know as modern knowledge and premodern knowledge, a distinction that ousted the latter from the domain of knowledge and its then possessor from the domain of culture, civilization and freedom. Once we call the legitimacy of this Berlin Wall to question and act to pull it down, as it is already weakened and unable to stand anyway, we find the span and amount of the subject of our investigation extended to nearly five thousand years. It would be pretentious, though, even to suggest that ours is going to be an attempt to give a full review of the knowledge of that enormity. I would rather confine myself to demonstrating that however necessary the Berlin Wall might have been in the first place, it has lost its legitimacy and meaning in the present. Furthermore, the unity of knowledge, of thought, following such dismantling is the precondition of the postcolonial condition.
Sufi tradition is seen as a representation of the tradition, of a way of seeing and living, that formed the core or nucleus of premodern corpus of knowledge. Sufi tradition as a way of thought and practice, then, it should be clear at the outset, is and has been treated in the following pages as a species of a genus and not a genus itself. This tradition, that is, is seen as a manifestation or articulation in Islam or in the Islamic world of a tradition that emerged nearly three millennia before. Though India can be termed as its first home where it became nearly the defining current in both Hinduism and then Buddhism, Upanishads being its first great formulation, it soon appeared universally, China and Greece being the second most powerful centres after India. Subsequently it played major role in the shaping of Christianity and finally found its probably the most powerful expression in Islam, whereby it is known as tassawuf , Sufism, or the Sufi tradition.[9]
The tradition, of which Sufism is the Islamic expression, can be designated variously as oppositional, parallel, critical, inner, core or counter tradition. It can be represented through the help of a picture (figure 1) where there are five (or more) spheres. These spheres represent living religions, preeminently Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in the Abrahamic family of religions and Hinduism and Buddhism from the Indo-Chinese family. Jainism, Confucianism, Taoism, Shintoism and various other and later religions such as Sikhism can be denoted through other spheres. Presently, for brevity’s sake, we would continue to speak of five spheres, which can be distinguished through separate colours such as red, blue, green, orange and yellow. However, within each sphere the core tradition is designated by a single colour, let us say black, of varying shades.
Figure 1
Figure 2
The central idea that this diagram purports to convey is that the critical tradition is one, single, continuous tradition running through various living living religions. For precision’s sake we can simplify this diagram into a single sphere (figure 2) in which the core tradition is represented in black.[10]
Now it needs to be made clear that this report does not aim to take us unto paradisiacal state in which there are no problems to confront. Rather it just intends to say that instead of old problems which Western knowledge has imposed upon us, we need to deal with new ones.
The first problem of course relates to the word tradition. For this word generally refers to, and rightly so, the five spheres as a whole so that the words religion and tradition appear to be synonymous. In this case critical tradition emerges as a tradition within tradition, both forming one whole in a relationship of essential tension, to borrow an elegant phrase from the title of a book of Thomas Kuhn.[11] Thus we would distinguish between them by referring the one as tradition and the other with one of the prefixes related above.
The second problem is that in figure1 there does not appear any representation for the Greek critical tradition that originated there contemporaneously with China or a little later, in the fifth century B.C., to be more precise, and subsequently flourished in Greco-Roman world up to the second-century of the common era. The reason for this omission is that that pagan religion in which it appeared, or of which it was the core tradition, did not survive. And yet the critical tradition, of which Socrates was the founder and Plato the chief expounder, played a titanic role in the formation of the Christian tradition and more specifically of the core tradition within the Abrahamic tradition.
The postcolonial condition, on the other hand, is a hypothesis. It is a condition and an idea waiting to be realized. It may be a reality as a periodizing concept, in so far as colonialism as a form of occupation and total control of the non-Western world by the Western powers has largely come to an end. However, since the control has changed into an indirect, neocolonial mode, the dependency of the non-Western peoples being the continuing condition of the independence of the Western peoples, postcolonial condition as a state of being, or as an experience, both individually and collectively, in which humanity becomes estranged from the estrangement within, awaits for its tenets to be articulated first as a system of knowledge and then translated into an alternative mode of seeing and doing, thinking and behaviour. This report is directed towards that end.
The following words of Neera Chandhoke serve well as a preamble to the starting hypothesis of this report:
A crisis develops in the social sciences when its practitioners become apprehensive that existing epistemologies and modes of cognition are no longer capable of perceiving or grasping the complexities of social phenomena – in other words when realization dawns that a particular way of comprehending the world is inadequate or even faulty. This may be due to the fact that the object of theoretical investigation is seen to have changed, or that the particular mode of inquiry is flawed in its inner logic and structuration. The theorist realizing that the concepts hitherto available for understanding the world are no longer capable of doing so, seeks either to restructure conceptual hierarchies, or to incorporate another theoretical tradition which seems to be more promising. …. Given also the fact that social sciences are characterized by competing frames of knowledge systems, switches or the appropriation of one tradition by another have been possible. Indeed, even when one tradition of knowledge acquires hegemony, others exist as alternatives on the horizon.[12]
It is now commonplace that the state of knowledge since the latter part of the last century is in crisis that prompted Lyotard’s earlier report on knowledge.[13] The main premise of our hypothesis, then, is that the crisis is two-fold, that is, not only ‘the object of theoretical investigation is ….changed,’ but also ‘the particular mode of inquiry [hitherto employed] is flawed in its inner logic and structuration.’ To be more precise, ‘the particular mode of inquiry,’ the ‘existing epistemologies, and modes of cognition’ would refer in the following discussion to modernity, modern epistemology, or modern mode of inquiry which appears to be faulty and flawed due in part to the fact that the object of its investigation or the world for which this epistemology was evolved has undergone phenomenal transformations.
To explicate the premise further, modernity is seen as ‘a particular way of comprehending the world’ which began taking shape in Europe at the beginning of the latter half of the last millennium. The new era began by overturning the traditional or religious knowledge systems which had hitherto governed the millennia old pre-modern civilizations.
The second premise of our hypothesis is that in so far as the modern mode of cognition turns out to be flawed, its rejection or critique of the traditional mode must also be flawed, thus pushing us towards a radical re-evaluation of the epistemology of premodern or traditional knowledge systems. If the prevalent mode of cognition has turned out to be seriously faulty in its perception of the totality of human condition, then its judgment of the preceding mode of cognition of reality must also lose all legitimacy. There is nothing striking in this observation. For the knowledge revolution that ushered in the modern era brought virtually a change of regime, as radical a change of regime as, for instance, was the French Revolution of 1789, or perhaps more appropriately the October Revolution of 1917. However, as this regime collapsed, the fallen regime’s perception of pre-1917 state of affairs was also rendered obsolete.
It would be immediately apparent that the metaphor of regime and regime change is being used advisedly. As Chandhoke has mentioned, the human condition is characterised by a plurality of knowledge systems, or paradigms, if we can say so for heuristic purposes. The crisis in knowledge is usually marked by the fact that the leading, dominant or reigning tradition starts losing its grip on the minds and imagination of the humans as it increasingly manifests its failure in the comprehension of the social and natural reality. The weakening of its grip on reality and on the mind of the human are the two sides of the same coin. In such situations, the alternative or rival conceptual frameworks of reality raise their heads for hegemony and power. This point leads to the third premise of our hypothesis.
As modernity or modern civilization endeavoured to overthrow the traditional regime and marched towards establishing its hegemony, during the nineteenth century a split occurred in its ranks down to the bottom which would have fatal consequences at the end. Henceforth modernity had two faces, or two identities engaged in a mortal combat for the ultimate supremacy. These two modern modes are known variedly as capitalist and communist, liberal and Marxist, rightist and leftist and so forth.
As the conflict between the two modes or forms of modernity entered into the most violent phase of its conflict, or what is known as the Cold War, it soon began to be realized by many that the promise of freedom offered by each party might be a chimera. By the 1970s the Marxist, or what had been the opposing mode in this conflict, especially in its Soviet form, began losing its credibility as a real alternative to the established capitalist, liberal perspective. This led to a questioning of the legitimacy of the modernist perspective itself, a challenge led by what is known as post-structuralism and which in its turn inspired postmodern and postcolonial critiques of the fundamentals and founding premises of modernity.
The third premise of our hypothesis derives from the contention that both postmodern and postcolonial perspectives have never been able to come up to their claim of challenging the fundamental premises of modernity. Indeed, as we would argue, most of the ‘posts’ to date have thought and functioned, in spite of their claims to the contrary, within the larger framework of modernity and historical trajectory of Europe/West. It is for this reason that they have been seen largely as variations of modernity. Not alternatives to modernity, offering a new regime, a new way of thought and action, that is, but merely the revolts within the larger spectrum of modernity, and which seem to employ the categories, or the intellectual weapons of the system which they seek to overthrow.
If, then, they have failed to appeal to the imagination of global people in general and the new generations in particular since the dying days of the Cold War era, it is because they have been unable to locate and confront the epistemological and defining premise of modernity. This premise, this defining character of modern mode of engaging with the world, we would argue, derives from its flawed comprehension of the premodern conception of reality which resulted in its wholesale repudiation of the traditional legacy. The absolute breach, then, that occurred between the past and present, we suggest further, is chiefly responsible for the confusion and malaise in contemporary thought and human condition.
The fourth premise of our hypothesis is that in so far as modernity and colonialism concurred in their rise, to the extent that they became two sides of the same coin, the postcolonial, and in similar vein the postmodern, condition can be defined as that in which the breach between the past and the present has been overcome. Needless to say, time has put the task of creating such condition largely on the shoulders of the intelligentsia and peoples of the non-Western world on whom modern perception of reality was imposed by the might of colonialism. For the fact that this imposition for varied reasons never succeeded in full, the legacy of the predmodern human experience has survived in the non-Western world, though mutilated by colonial, modernist violence and for which reason not always recognizable at first sight.
The final premise of the hypothesis around which the perspective underlying this study endeavours to evolve is that the failure of the two modern perspectives, liberal and Marxist, did not alone cause disenchantment with modernity. Rather this was the knowledge revolution of the first half of the twentieth century which dragged the ground away from the edifice of modern knowledge. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to speak of the knowledge revolutions which were sparked by the scientific revolution of the early twentieth century. By overturning the mechanical structure of the world laboriously structured by modern science, the new physics paved the way for the re-examination of the pre-modern non-mechanical structure of the world.
More than this, in their thought they were constructing nature itself as a machine. The lines of explanation that would clear and valid for nature itself must be those that they could see clearly in the working of machines they might construct. Mechanics thus became the basic part of physics, and physics the basis of the whole of science. Nature, when we came ultimately to know it, would be construed as a single vast and interlocking machine – the machine of machines.[14]
Such call or need for the re-opening of the inquiry into the nature of the structure of traditional knowledge systems was further underlined by revolutions in art and across social and human sciences. The Cubist revolution of 1907 led by Picasso, for instance, was driven by a longing and desire to overcome the modernist absolute duality of subject and object, of the visible and the invisible, a unity emphasized by relativity and quantum at the same time. Equally importantly, the discovery of the psychoanalysis and unconscious in the domain of psychology destroyed the monolithic Cartesian subject on which the chief modernist dogma, namely, the separation and duality of man and nature, of mind and matter had been evolved.
It would be argued, in short, that the two leading modernist paradigms or modes of comprehending the world, generated by the knowledge revolution of the 16th-18th centuries, have been rendered out of date by the 20th century knowledge revolutions in various disciplines, from physics[15] and psychology[16] to anthropology,[17] philosophy,[18] history and philosophy of science,[19] sociology of science,[20] religion[21] and art.[22] But if these revolutions have remained largely invisible to the naked eye, there is hardly anything surprising in it, for knowledge revolutions are always slow in coming to the prominence. Indeed, knowledge revolutions in contrast to political revolutions are largely invisible revolutions. This report, then, is in part an attempt to bring to light and connect the grand transformations in knowledge which have taken place in the known history of humankind. The belief underlying this endeavour is that once fully recognized, it would usher in new ways of thought and practice that humanity seeks presently and which would eventually define what we have called as the postcolonial condition.
Natural science does not simply describe and explain nature; it is part of the interplay between nature and ourselves; it describes nature as exposed to our method of questioning. (95.)
Heisenberg, W. (1962, repr.2000) Physics and Philosophy. Penguin Books
Notes
* (Except for those referred to in notes 4 & 9, all the works cited below form the core texts or sources of this report.)
[1] Peet, T. E. (1931) A Comparative Study of the Literatures of Egypt, Palestine and Mesopotamia: Egypt’s Contribution to the Literature of the Ancient world. London: Oxford University Press, pp. 1-2.
[2] Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, in Hume, R.E. Tr. (1990) The Thirteen Principal Upanishads. New Delhi, p. 33.
[3] Phaedo: 63c, 64a. Plato, (1997) Complete Works, ed., J. M. Cooper. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company.
[4] Cited in Holten, G. (1996) Einstein, History, and Other Passions: the Rebellion Against Science at the End of the Twentieth Century. New York: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, p. 114.
[5] 1978 repr. 1995. Penguin Books.
[6] The crisis is well articulated in these words of Giddens’: ‘The disorientation which expresses itself in the feeling that systematic knowledge about social organization cannot be obtained, … results primarily from the sense many of us have of being caught up in a universe of events we do not fully understand, and which seems in large part out of our control.’ Giddens, A. (1991) Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity, p. 36.
[7] ‘We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand.’ Picasso, cited in Berger, J. (1993) The Success and Failure of Picasso. New York: Vintage International, p. 34.
[8] There is a host of postmodernist literature on the subject and which would be cited in due course.
[9] Alhaq, S. (1997) A Forgotten Vision: A study of human spirituality in the light of the Islamic tradition, 2 volumes. New Dlehi: Vikas Publishing House.
[10] Sufism is generally referred to by the term ‘Islamic mysticism’. The question might arise whether we can express the core tradition by the generic word ‘mysticism’. Perhaps yes, but I have avoided to use this term due to its peculiar Western understanding, often far from satisfactory due to varied reasons.
[11] Kuhn, T.S. (1977) The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change,. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
[12] Chandhoke, N. Ed. (1994). Understanding the Post-Colonial World: Theory and Method. New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, pp. 1-2.
[13] Lyotard, J. F. (1984). The Postmodern Condition. A Report on Knowledge. Trans. G. Bennington & B. Massumi. Manchester University Press. Mancehster.
[14] Barrett, W. 1986. Death of the Soul: Philosophical Thought from Descartes to the Computer. Oxford University Press, p. 6.
[15] Einstein, A. & Infeld, L. (1938). The Evolution of Physics : The Growth of Ideas from the Early Concepts to Relativity and Quanta. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Bohr, N. (1958 ) Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge, London: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
[16] Freud, S. (1951)The Interpretation of Dreams. Trans. A. A. Brill. London: Allen & Unwin; Jung, C. G. (1972) Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. Trans R.F.C. Hull. 2nd ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
[17] Levy-Bruhl, L. (1928). The “Soul” of the Primitive. Trans. Lilian A. Clare. London: George Allen & Unwin; Malinowski, B. (1948) Magic, Science and Religion and Other Essays. Illinois: The Free Press; Evans-Pritchard, E. E. (1965) Theories of Primitive Religion. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
[18] Cornford, F. M. (1912, repr. 1991) From Religion to Philosophy: A Study in the Origins of Western Speculation, Princeton: Princeton University Press; Foucault, M. (1980) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977. Edited by C. Gordon. New York: Pantheon.
[19] Burt, E. A. (1932). The Metaphysical Assumptions of Modern Physical Science: A Historical and Critical Essay. 2nd ed. London: Routledge; Popper, K. 1960. The Logic of Scientific Discovery. London: Hutchinson; Kuhn, T. S. (1962, repr. 1996) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd ed., Chicago: The University of Chicago Press; Kuhn, T. S. (1963) ‘The Function of Dogma in Scientific Research,’ in Crombie, A. C., ed., Scientific Change: Historical Studies in the Intellectual, Social and Technical Conditions for Scientific Discovery and Scientific Invention, from Antiquity to the Present, London: Heinemann, , pp. 347-69.
[20] Merton, R. K. (1970) Science, Technology and society in Seventeenth-Century England, 3rd ed., New York: Howard Fertig, (orig, publ. Osiris, 1938:360-632).
[21] Durkeim, Emile. (1912, repr. 2001) The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Trans. Carol Cosman. Oxford University Press.
[22] Berger, John, (1993), op.cit.
3. Towards the development of the concept of parallel culture
Towards the development of the concept of parallel culture
AN introduction
Abstract
This paper seeks to cast a fresh look on medieval Indo-Muslim culture. Here it is argued that this culture cannot be treated as a single, monolithic phenomenon. The very advent of Islam in India is seen as marked by two distinctly contrasting figures of Mahmud of Ghazna-Uthman b. Hujwiri in the eleventh century and Shahabuddin Ghuri-Muinuddin Chishti in the twelfth-thirteenth centuries. While the former in the two pairs are known for their love of plunder and wealth, the latter are recognized through their cultivation of poverty. These two modes of personalities are seen as representatives of two cultures. While the property culture is most typically reflected in the life of the sultan/king, that of opposing or parallel culture is epitomized in the personality of ascetic/faqir. The two cultures, each recognizing the necessity of the other, yet keep their respective autonomies by offering distinct sets of values and ideals in human life. Whereas the established culture offers man the possibility to seek happiness in appropriation of wealth and property, the parallel culture provides for the principle of freedom and autonomy from the material world. The qualitative difference between the two was universally recognized equally among the rulers as well as the common people. If we are able to do so today, it may lead to some significant repercussions in respect of our understanding of Indo Muslim society in particular and man in general.
Islam penetrated into India in the eleventh century[1] as a composite of two distinct cultures. The one is manifested in the life of Mahumd of Ghazni [d. 1030], whose love for plundering the wealth of India far exceeded his better know passion for the propagation of his faith.[2] The opposing culture is represented in the personality of the famous Sufi, Ali bin Uthman Hujwiri[d. 1072], who, incidentally, also hailed from Ghazni, but settled in Lahore sometime in the fourth decade of the eleventh century at the direction of his sheikh. He considered wealth as a misfortune for a faqir.[3]
In the late twelfth century this pattern was again repeated in a similar fashion. This time we find, on the one hand, Shahabuddin Ghauri [d. 1206], an adventure par excellence, who after repeated invasions of India laid the foundations of the Dehli Sultanate, the first Muslim kingdom of India [1206-1526]. The treasure he left behind, in the words of Firishta, was ‘almost incredible’, with the weight of diamonds of various sizes alone amounting to 500 maunds.[4] On the other side we see the figure of Muinuddin Chishti [d.1236], who settled in Ajmer, in the capital of the Hindu ruler Prithvi Raj, shortly before the defeat of the latter at the hands of Ghauri in 1192.[5] The pride and distinction of Muinduddin was his self-cultured poverty.[6]
Around these two figures of the king and faqir is evolved the whole of medieval Indo-Muslim culture.[7] In other words, medieval Indo-Muslim culture is essentially a pluralist culture, or to be more accurate, a unity of multiple cultures where the established culture, whose arch representative is the king, co-existed with the parallal culture, led by the faqir. The individual and society is permeated with two sets of values and ideals. One is motivated by the acquisition of wealth and physical power over the others while the other is based on the cultivation of personality, detachment from the physical world, and integration with the Whole, the totality of existence. However, the two cultures exist with the consciousness of each other’s necessity for social existence. The term ‘parallel culture’ therefore should by no means imply that it intended to replace or impose its hegemony by ousting the other and vice versa. Thus what we call the medieval Indo-Muslim culture is in fact the unity of two cultures, at once in harmony as well as in opposition to each other.
The popular tendency however is to trace the socio-historic or cultural pattern of this period from the vantage point of politics and the state. This inevitably leaves the culture of the faqir in the periphery while the major, sometimes even the sole emphasis goes to the lives and culture of the kings and their dynasties. This tendency grows from our perception of the state as the chief embodiment of socio-political and cultural life of the society. This perception also derives from the fact that to the state is dependent the institution of property which we conceive as the primary and objective form of man’s creation, as his supreme self manifestation. However, the faqir’s life and work does not come into the domain of politics, state, and property. To say in more popular terms, he lived outside the world. But we tend very often to perceive his living outside the world too literally and place him at the periphery of the society. The fact is that he only lived outside the established culture and not the culture and society itself. His being was the manifestation of the higher dimension of human consciousness, the consciousness that endeavors not to be tied down to the given and the concrete, that aims to remain free from the actualized, the materialized dimension of human consciousness. Thus in his idealized form the faqir was free from all the given relations of family, state, and property.
The faqir, in other words, represented the other end of the social order and his existence for the survival of society was universally reckoned as necessary a condition as that of the king, or even more than his. While the king was taken to represent the body of human society, the faqir or dervish was the soul, and the superiority of the soul over body was never doubted, for soul represented the eternal dimension of human existence. A medieval Muslim historian writes:
The world is bound by serious law and order, upheld by men of faith. In every country there lives a master-mind, in every region a man of acquirements. Although every country has a king, it is really protected by a dervish. The kings lord over the land, but the dervishes consume its calamities. Were there no autar on the face of the earth, the seven-fold tent of skies would have collapsed. When the Lord of days and nights wills to destroy a land, He first orders the man [of God] to depart from there and then appoints there a tyrant as a ruler.[8]
The tendency to see the king, or the state as the pivot of society signifies the one-sidedness of most evaluations of pre-modern Indian culture, resulting in the enormous deficiency in the understanding of the culture of the faqir. Out of this deficiency emerges an incomplete picture of man in general, an essentially distorted understanding of human nature and consequently a failing in the comprehension of the totality of human culture.
Though the king and the faqir are typified in the character of Ghauri and Chishti, we find the great mass of humanity living with two cultures intricately bound or diffused together. Thus we are in fact confronted with the phenomena of not only two but three cultures. That is, it may be that we find a faqir who manifests deficient understanding of the parallel culture and thus represents a confusion of two cultures. Likewise a king can manifest traits of parallel culture in his character or a deep sympathy and understanding of the role of parallel culture in maintaining balance in the individual and social spheres of human life. But whereas the broad social consensus on the role of the two, the king and the faqir, as the essential ingredients of human culture was never questioned, the relationship between the two was far from being smooth: it ranged from friendship, indifference, suspicion, tension and sometimes hostility.
The tension and hostility between the two cultures grew also from the active role of the ulama on the side of the established culture. Though the state was not run strictly according to the sharia, the Islamic law governing the relation of family, state and property, yet it provided the basic categories on which the identity of the Muslim rule was established. Since the ulama were the ultimate authority, the specialists on sharia, their coalition and association with the royal court was a fact taken far granted. In their capacity as a party in the structure of the given order their relationship towards the leaders of the parallel culture was bound to be tense and fraught with difficulty and suspicion. Here we cannot go into detail over the history of this not too pleasant relationship. Suffice to say that though the ulama had their share of differences with the king but as a class or a party they largely confronted the culture of the faqir which they found too erratic and liberal for the identity and absolute nature of sharia.
The prime features of the established culture are reflected in, firstly, the finitude of human consciousness ascertained in the dogma of the duality of God and man, vigorously expounded by the ulama as the very foundation of sharia, and, secondly, the property-relation with the world. The parallel culture emerged in the context of a conception of man in which he was tied down to the world of matter while his consciousness lacked the content of infinity, the experience of the whole. If by asserting the essential oneness of man and God the parallel culture asserted that man, in his essence, was immortal and infinite; through cultivating the non-possessive relationship with the world, popularly known as renunciation, asceticism, non-detachment, or faqr (voluntary poverty), it also sought to free man from the bondage of the outer world.
Unity with the Whole, i.e. infinity and immortality of consciousness and faqr, i,e., non-property relation with the world go hand in hand and each fails to realize its meaning in isolation from the other. This is because struggle to attain Unity without faqr, which is also defined as the absence of desire, of self, turns out to be hypocrisy, and faqr not directed towards or without the goal of Unity degenerates into destitution and dogmatism. If the latter is the theory of the former, the former is the practice, the methodology for realization of the latter. Abul Qasim Junaid’s remarkable description of the state opf the faqir that ‘when his heart is empty of phenomena he is poor’[9] points to the dialectical nature of Unity and faqr. Emptiness of phenomena indicates freedom at once from property-relation with the world as well as from duality, that is, from everything other than God. This dialectic assures that neither lack of physical objects or apparent destitute condition nor high flying in the realm of mind or metaphysics can lead one to Transcendence.[10]
However it needs to be emphasized that the parallel culture neither arose nor developed in a neat and well marked demarcation from the established, given culture. Within its domain grew different from the established, given culture. Within its domain grew different tendencies or currents. Its core was represented by what may be called the essential Sufism. It stood for ascension, the movement from humanity to divinity; that is, nothing less than essential union between man and God. It perceived sharia as the initiatory discipline that reflected and governed the given condition of man, the condition of duality, of man’s separation from God, of his finitude. This condition is often stated in Sufi writings as human nature or the humanity.[11] As man actively engages himself in the movement of spirit, and sheds his given condition, the state of bondage and duality, the human qualities, he grows out of the domain of sharia since the condition reflecting that domain begins to fade. Sharia, in other words, is the consciousness of the alienation, of separation from the truth, the whole, the totality of existence. This consciousness in turn implies the struggle to move out of separation. And when one moves nearer to the Unity the discipline practiced in the state of separation becomes redundant and its memory a sin. Saadi offered a very apt description of the point when he wrote:
The sinners repent from their sins
The Gnostics implore forgiveness for worshipping.[12]
The arif (gnostic) repents from worshipping since the worshipping represents the duality, the separation of I and thou, worshipper and the worshipped. Ibn Arabi, in a brilliant exposition of the two contrasting positions, remarked:
God is known only by means of God. The scholastic theologian says: “I know God by that which he created” and takes as his guide something that has no real relation to the object sought. He who knows God by means of phenomena, knows as much as these phenomena give to him and no more.[13]
Here Ibn Arabi conceives the knowledge of God essentially as transcendence. The concept, and the corresponding endeavour, remains alien to the alim because he approaches the Creator from the vantage point of the creation, to the Whole from that of the fragment which is as hopeless an endeavour as that of the blind men seeking to know the elephant by touching his different limbs separately in Rumi’s famous story. The knowledge of God on the other hand implies a decisive break from the condition of humanity, of creation, of separateness and fragmentation. In simple words, only through assuming the consciousness of Unity, of the Whole that one becomes Whole and by no other means.
Besides essential Sufism there were also the middle and the orthodox currents within the large domain of Sufism. The moderate tendency did manifest the consciousness of the autonomy of the Sufi culture but remained equally concerned to expound the inner consistency between the sharia and the Sufi path. The orthodox tendency, however, failed to draw the demarcating line between Sufism and orthodoxy, the institutional religion. It visualized Sufism merely as the rigorous fulfillment of ritual and absolute exclusion of initiative and individuality from spiritual life. This current gained ground as the prestige and role of the Sufis in society grew rapidly affecting almost all the domains of social life. It therefore became increasingly apparent that Sufism could only be combated in its essentials; or, in other words, much of its exterior was interiorized by the orthodoxy with the awareness that it could not be dealt with from without. So that with the passage of time it become increasingly difficult for an ordinary man to decipher who was who and what was what? How far essential Sufism lagged behind to allow this development is a vexed question needing a separate treatment.
[11]
When Sufism arrived in India, it had already reached to its highest theoretical development. This development manifested itself both vertically, i.e., in its theory, and, horizontally i.e. in its practice. In theory it represented in almost universal consensus among the major Sufi thinkers in the twelfth and thirteen centuries that the highest destiny of man lay in unity (with God). This unity we can term as Transcendence or even Freedom which implies release from the (individual) self and realization or attainment of the consciousness of the Whole. Its best formulation was offered by Ibn Arabi, in the doctrine of Wahdat al-Wujud, the unity of all being, so much so that he and his doctrine eventually became identified with Sufism itself. Besides Ibn Arabi, Jalaluddin Rumi was the most powerful voice expounding the cause of Transcendence and Freedom.
The horizontal development of Sufism was manifested in the origination and expansion of the great associations of the Sufis, called the silsilahs, (spiritual) ‘chains,’ brotherhoods or orders. These orders, originating from the major Sufi leaders of the twelfth-thirteenth centuries, were the outcome of more than one inter-related developments in the world of Sufism. Mainly among these were, on the theoretical side, a near consensus on essential unity of man and God, and the determination of the goal of spiritual endeavour as the shedding of human nature and assumption of the divine. On the practical side of the development was the emergence of khanaqah as the parallel institution to the mosque and its gradual establishment as the center of not only spiritual but wider public socio-culture activity. Out of the interaction of these two developments grew the powerful figure of the Sheikh, the embodiment as well as the manifestation of the Divine.
But whereas quite a few orders had already come into being in the Islamic world by the turn of the twelfth century, the first to gain roots in India, the Chishtiya, did not have a prior history. However its early history in India in the span of a hundred and fifty years provides a superb illustration of the growth of parallel culture in the Indo-Muslim world from humble beginnings to its zenith when the Chishti centre in Dehli emerged as the parallel center of power in the Sultanate in the first quarter of the fourteenth century, to its dispersion and persecution at the hands of state power in the second quarter.
It is important to remember that the parallel culture had a rich indigenous history in India. Thus when Muinuddin Chishti settled at Ajmer by the end of the twelfth century, the country already had the yogi’s[14] culture firmly established on its soil. Dumont writes:
Is it really to adventurous to say that the agent of development in India religion and speculation, the “creation of values”, has been the renouncer? The Brahman, as scholar, has mainly preserved, aggregated, and combined: he may well have created and developed special branches of knowledge. Not only the founding of sects and their maintenance, but the major ideas, the “inventions” are due to the renouncer whose unique position gave him a sort of monopoly for putting everything in question.[15]
The central figure of this culture was individual, the individual whom society not only allowed to exist but sanctified for having his own mode of existence, i.e., his personal way towards life and truth.[16] It was sanctified because he was occupied with the fundamental questions of freedom and salvation with which the whole society was deeply concerned. The society took responsibility for his living for the reason that the questions and the quest towards their resolution was given a place far higher than earning one’s living. Basically it was this preoccupation with what may be called transcendence that formed the paramount feature of India and newly emerging Indo-Muslim society. And it is only through this context that the pioneer position of faqir/dervish or yogi/sanyasi in the society can be determined.
There were also some other factors which contributed in the growth of tolerant culture in India that most Muslims encountered on their arrival. Of these the paramount factor was diversity in religion and mode of spirituality. Perhaps in no other part of the world can one find the evidence of such great variety of sacred scriptures, sects, deities, and rituals, modes of worship, beliefs, and seers with the caliber of prophets as that which emerged in India in the span of two to three thousand years. This remarkable diversity gave birth to an atmosphere of peaceful co-existence, a generally tolerant attitude towards divergent beliefs. It was due to this liberal environment that the Muslims who settled in India peacefully during the eighth to the ninth-eleventh centuries mainly through the coastal areas did not face hostile attitudes from the local population or rulers and were allowed to build mosques and preach their religion.[17]
The strong presence of the ascetic, the renouncer, in the Indian soil played an important role in Muinuddin Chisti’s settlement at Ajmer, the capital of a strong Hindu state even before its conquest by Shihabuddin Ghauri. For he was well advanced in the discipline of renunciation and had not come into an absolutely alien soil. The importance of discerning the real circumstances of Muinuddin’s integration into a new soil, or, to be more precise, the discernment of the close affinity between the Sufi and Indian spiritual traditions, lies in the fact that failure in doing so has led, consciously or unconsciously, many Muslim writers of the past as well as present to resort to fabulous miracles in order to account for the Sufis’ survival in such ‘hostile’ conditions. Typical is the case of the seventeenth century writer of Jawahar-i Faridi who offers quite a fantastic description of Muinuddin’s arrival and settlement at Ajmer.[18]
[111]
Muinaddin Chishti, born in Sijistan, east Persia, had travelled widely and shared the company of a number of Sufi leaders of Islamic world when he decided to settle in India. He seems to be a man free from dogma and ritual. Besides that his great asset in gaining roots in the new soil must have been his deep faith and practice in the cultivation of voluntary poverty. He was a Unitarian and his thought was characterized by fullness of humanist content. Love could be realized through transcendence from externals and coming into grips with the essence, the oneness, while the highest form of devotion to God was ‘to redress the misery of those in distress, to fulfill the needs of the helpless and to feed the hungry.’[19] The three principles of the life of faqir attributed to him were later to become the epitome of Chishtiya order. These are: River-like generosity, sun-like affection and earth like hospitality.[20]
It may well be pointed out that though knowledge and practice, Unity and faqr are ultimately inseparable in Sufi doctrine, yet in the twelfth-thirteenth centuries we may find individuals in whom one aspect outshined the other. Ibn Arbi for instance is a case of high excellence in the domain of knowledge and theoretical exposition of the doctrine. In Muinuddin Chishti on the other hand is manifested more the domination of ecstasy of faqr and service to humanity as the hallmark of spiritual life. Thus his successors were to offer the model of the individual who lived with minimum needs for himself but lived among the people fulfilling multiple responsibilities: meeting their spiritual needs both by guiding them towards higher goals and soothing and sharing them in their everyday pains and difficulties; he also comforted them in their physical needs from the resources invested in him by the society itself.
His successor in Dehli, Qutbuddin Bukhtiyar Kaki [d.1236] was equally well-versed in faqr. The two had met in Baghdad finding commonness in their character and approach towards Sufism. Qutbuddin came to India probably sometime in the second decade of the thirteenth century during the reign of Shamsuddin Iltutmish [1211-36]. Iltutumish had a high regard for the Sufis and, we are told, himself bore a mystic temperament and sought the company of the saints.[21] Hearing the news of Qutbuddin’s arrival he went out of the city to receive him. He also offered Qutbuddin residence near his palace and later the post of Shaikh ul-Islam. The latter declined both the offers[22] presumably as part of his attempt to safeguard the autonomy of Sufism by keeping it away from the Muslim rulers and the state. In this endeavor he was also helped by another outstanding Chishti leader, Hamiddudin Sufi, also scholar of high repute, for whom spiritual excellence grew predominantly from a critical attitude towards property rather than excessive zeal in the fulfillment of religious duties.[23]
Thus the most important contribution of these Chishti leaders towards the development of parallel culture in the newly emerging Indo-Muslim society lay in their strict adherence to the ideal of distance from property, politics and all the institutions of the state. In a time when Muslims were strongly identified with the state, the symbol of their power, and all the aspirations of the intelligent members of this community were directed towards joining the state institutions, the channels of wealth and power, the Chishtis struggled towards the growth of culture based on altogether different aspirations, that enjoyed autonomy from the state power, property and their associated values of greed, hatred and ruthless competition to jump over the other for a higher prize.
But at same time it should also be noted that the Chishtis were not advocating polarization of the spiritual and material in the society. This is indicated by the fact that high officials of state including princes, and sometimes also the king, for instance Iltutmish, would visit the khanaqah, and occasionally were even accepted as the lay disciples. But spiritual excellence was reckoned an autonomous discipline that required one’s establishment in a centre different from that of the worldly culture. The identity of spiritual realm could only be maintained if its leaders exercised as much autonomy in their thought and behavior as their counterparts did in their sphere.[24]
Chishti leaders also introduced music as the essential component of spiritual life. If their commitment to faqr helped them to distance themselves from the court and the Muslim ruling classes, their devotion to music led them increasingly towards estrangement from the religious establishment and nearer to the common people and the native culture. Music, in the form of sama (musical rendering of poetry in a gathering) accompanied by dance was practiced as means to ecstasy, i.e., freedom from self consciousness. The Chishtis’ immense contribution to the cause of music in India in early Muslim period is epitomized in the person of Amir Khusrau [1254-1325] who was raised in Chishti circles. A composer as well as a theoretician, he is known as the founder of the Indo- Muslim musical tradition.
Sufism in India took a new leap with the coming on the scene of two great Chishti leaders, Fariduddin Shakarganj [d.1265] and Nizamuddin Auliya [d.1325]. Fariduddin hailed from the Punjab while his grandfather was an immigrant from Kabul. Though the greater part of his life passed in Punjab, ‘it was due to his efforts’ ‘observes Nizami, ‘that the Chishti order attained an all-India status and its branches came to be established in many important towns of India.[25] And further that ‘he gave to the Chishti silsilah the momentum of an organized spiritual movement.’[26] He was very conscious of the autonomous character of Sufi culture. So when he was designated by his master as the chief of the Chishti order after his death, the first decision he took was to move the Chishti centre away from Delhi. He found the city unsuitable, being too polluted by the royal presence, for the organization and expansion of the spiritual movement. With it he took another bold decision . He left even Hansi, where he was staying before his master’s death, and chose a deserted place near the town of Ajodhan (now Pakpatten) as his home and the new centre of the order, thus setting a difficult example for his followers.
Fariduddin Shakarganj is also known, particularly in the Punjab, as the ‘father of Punjabi language and literature.’ This title comes from the collection of dohras, rhymed couplets, attributed to him appearing first time in the Guru Granth, the sacred book of the Sikhs compiled in 1603-4.[27]The verses often look like whispers, more to one’s own self. Sometimes they are addressed towards the given condition of man characterised by a conditioning in which even the knowledge of good does not deter him from evil and heedlessness emerges as his dominant trait. When the poet finds himself a member of this species, sharing so much with it, fear comes in. Then he thinks of death and the limited period of time at his disposal. The time seems too short given so much to redress, so long to go. He is forced to visualize the grave. The immobility in the grave terrorizes him;
Faridaa it sarhaana, bhoen son, kiraa lario maas
Ketariaan jug vaapre, ikat piaan paas.[28]
O Farid! A brick under your head, lying on the soil, while the insects eating your flesh; the ages would pass and you would keep lying on one side.
It is this immobility, inability to move, to act, in the death that pushes him towards action, towards overcoming his inner nature and heedlessness. As long there is life, the possibility of freedom of union is alive. There are two other verses in which the indecision, conflict and resolution is portrayed beautifully:
Faridaa galien chikkar dur ghar naal piaare nenh
Turaan taan bhijje kambli rahaan taan tutte nenh
Bhijjo sijjo kambli Allaah verso menh
Jaae Milaan tinhaan sajnaan tutto nahin nenh.[29]
O Farid! The streets are full of mire [with consistent rain], the house of the one I love is far away: if I step out I wet my garments but if I stay home I loose my love.
O let the garments be wet, let God pour rain as much as He
Likes; I must see my beloved so that my love may survive.
The movement that Fariduddin organized found its finest expression in the personality of Nizamuddin Auliya. Born in 1238 in Badayun, a city near Dehli, he was yet in his twenties when Shaikh Farid, as he was then called, chose him as his chief successor of all his older disciples. Such was Farid’s vision that this young successor soon rose to become what was later reckoned to be ‘the greatest Indo-Muslim saint of all time.’[30]
Nizamuddin began his work in the outskirts of Delhi called Ghiyaspur. There he synthesized in himself to the utmost the Chishti emphasis on faqr, on the one hand, while realizing it in the process of disseminating its meanings to humanity, on the other. Expounding the common Sufi theme of renounciation of the world, he observed once that world renunciation by no means implied that one should sit semi naked idly. On the contrary it was to wear clothes and eat. But whatever came to him he should spend and not attach his heart to anything.[31] He emphasized that the world in Sufism signified not the gold, silver or the property itself but it was the relationship with it, of love and possession, which was in question.[32] On another occasion he pointed out the complexity of the concept of world-worship, or the relationship of love with the world as envisioned in Sufism. He said:
One [attitude ] is that of world [worship] in form as well as in content; the other is neither in form nor in content; the third is not in form but in content and the fourth is in form but not in content. And what is world in both form and content? That is having beyond one’s needs. That which is world neither in form nor in content, what is that? That is prayer in poverty. That which is not world in form but is in content is prayer for personal ends. And that which is world in form but not in content is fulfilling one’s wife’s rights, that is, meeting the needs of one’s family with the thought that he is paying to the family what is its due. Apparently this act may appear as worldly but in reality it is not.[33]
Nizamuddin Aliya was the embodiment of Sufi liberality and it should therefore be evident that by prayer he is not implying dogmatic fulfillment of the religious duties as the apparent reading of the passage might have us believe. Once he even suggested that a man too much occupied with the religious duties might have some other guilt to compensate and not fulfillment of prayers. And it was precisely for this reason, he added, that the need for a guide arose on the path of spirituality for it was he who led towards sincerity and purity even if there were not too many prayers.[34]
He would often narrate to his audience, in the assemblies at his khanaqah, the stories of the derwishes and Sufis pertaining to the fact that the formal acts of worship devoid of sincerity were meaningless while inner purity on the other hand was not dependent on the performance of the rituals.[35] He differentiated between devotion that led only to personal benefit and that which was source of comfort for others. The former comprised of the performance of the religious duties like prayer, fasting etc. whereas the latter was derived from spending money on others, showing affection towards people and helping them in their needs.[36] He would even express his dislike for excess in supererogatory prayers. He believed it could lead one farther from God rather than bringing him any nearer.[37] He followed his master’s instructions strictly that fasting covered half the path towards God while the rest, prayers, pilgrimage et al, did the other.[38]And once he endorsed the view that pilgrimage was meant for one who had no pir, the guide (to lead him to the path of spirituality that made the act of physical pilgrimage superfluous).[39]
He was a man of charisma and his presence radiated light and power. His influence grew quickly in the early years of the thirteenth century so that he soon emerged as the paramount leader of the parallel culture among the Indo-Muslim community. In a way the pattern narrated above, that of faqir and king as the twin centres of culture and power, epitomised in his personality at the one side and that of all-powerful sultan, Alauddin Khilji [1296-1316], on the other. However the difference with the previous patterns is too remarkable to be ignored. Whereas previously the figure of the faqir seemed too docile or withdrawn, in Nizamuddin Auliya it emerged as the embodiment of power and grandeur. His khanaqah grew into a great centre of spiritual culture, becoming almost a centre of pilgrimage for all Indian Muslims. Ziauddin Barani, by no means having much to share with what the Shaikh stood for, but nevertheless attracted by his magnetism and authority, observed that ‘people came to see Shaikh Nizamuddin from two thousand and three thousand farsangs, and the young and the old, the literate and the illiterate from the city tried to present themselves before the Shaikh by every means they could.’[40]
It was but natural that doubts began to grow in the royal court that this parallel centre of power might threaten the royal authority. Sultan Alauddin Khiji offered the Shaikh responsibilities in state affairs presumably to test his intentions. When the Shaikh got the message he in a way ridiculed the offer by inviting his audience to raise their hands for the fatiha, which is recited at the death of someone. Then he said sternly to the messenger, who happened to be the son of the Sultan, that if at all he was told to do anything like that again only because he happened to be in the city [same as that of the Sultan], he would simply leave the city, for God’s land was very vast. Khilji was obviously delighted at this but now he asked to be allowed to pay a visit to the saint. The saint declined by saying that there was no need for it since he was already praying for his welfare. When the sultan insisted he was told that the faqir would better leave his house than receive the sultan there.[41]
Thus in the personality of Nizamuddin Auliya was realized the power which brought to the fore the perennial assertion of spirituality that world-renunciation or the cultivation of spirit was not a passive state. It induced in man a certain power that raised him above the material constraints. Hitherto this power had manifested itself in individual transcendence of physical limitations, i.e. in the show of miracles. Now in the early period of Indo-Muslim history it was demonstrated on a larger, social scale. The faq- power equation emerged as a direct opposition to the property-power equation. The power in the former was of course radically varied from the latter. It involved neither coercion nor compulsion. Rather it radiated assertion, an energy that flowed and impressed upon the one it encountered the presence and power of the spirit.
Conversions and preaching of Islam among non-Muslims did not form part of Nizamuddin Auliya’s work. Of the common Hindu folk he thought only a fine example could lead them to change of their heart and therefore preaching was of no use. However he had a great regard for their devotion that they manifested in the worship of their deities, and respected every people’s right to have their own religion.[42] Once he related Hamiduddin Sufi’s observation that a Hindu residing in his area was a Wali Allah, friend of God.[43]
The Chishti attitude towards conversion is important in the evaluation of their contribution to parallel culture. Modern scholars have gone against the exaggerated narratives by some enthusiastic Muslim chroniclers about the Sufi ‘role in conversions.[44] However, of all the Sufis conversion formed the least part of the work of the Chishtis. In this respect again they manifested remarkable distance from the official enthusiasm for conversion displayed by the ulama and a part of the secular intelligentsia. The fundamental difference in the two approaches lay in that whereas the latter considered forcible or otherwise conversion of the non-Muslims as incumbent on every Muslim in the capacity to do so, i.e., as inalienable part of Islamic culture, the Chishtis placed little emphasis on the change of external mould. For them the chief task was transformation (of the individual) rather than conversion.
It was this indifference towards conversion or the so-called propagation of Islam accompanied with their low opinion of the rulers that gradually led to the view among the ulama, and part of the ruling elite that the Chishti Sufis were not interested in the sustenance of the Muslim power in India. This view gained further strength when Qutbuddin Mubarak, the last Khilji Sultan was murdered in 1320 by his newly convert lover, Khusrau Khan, and Nizamuddin Auliya refused to take sides in the power struggle that ensued between Khusrau and the Turk leader Ghazi Malik, who later founded the Tughlaq dynasty.
Closely related to this is the Chishti attitude towards other religions. The Chishtis did not see the Hindu Muslim difference in black and white as was recommended in the ruling Muslim culture. Very often in the history of the period we find the ulama and scholars urging the kings to fulfill their divine duty by slaughtering, or at least humiliating to utmost submission the non-Muslims who were not prepared to submit to the true religion.[45] Even if such exhortations were not all the times meant wholly literally, still the purpose was to emphasize the superior, alien character of Islam in the Hindu, Indian environment. This was part of the efforts undertaken to resist and block the assimilation of the two religious communities. Interestingly enough, ulma, the official ideologues of Islam, while taking pride in the egalitarian character of their religion, manifested same contempt towards non-Muslims which their counterparts in Hinduism, the Brahmans, displayed towards the lower castes and the Muslims. In other words, both were united in a common cause of mutual exclusiveness.[46]
Chishtis, on the other hand, represented those forces in the Indo-Muslim society which were not prepared to live in India as perpetual aliens. They were quick in assimilation and adopted many indigenous practices both from spiritual and mundane realms ranging from the techniques of yoga to vegetarianism. Thus they opened the way for dialogue between the two communities and religions that was to take place in subsequent centuries on quite a significant scale. Nizami writers:
They looked upon all religions as different roads leading to the same destination. They did not approve of any discrimination or destination in human society which was one organism for them. They had free social intercourse with the Hindus and tried to understand their approach towards the basic problems of religion and morality. It was their firm conviction that spiritual greatness could be attained by Hindus in the same way as it could be achieved by the Muslims.[47]
Such recognition of the truth in the other and readiness to assimilate and learn in a spirit of tolerance and openness grew from Chishtis’ dynamic concept of man. For them the most sacred of all things was man’s unity with the totality, the whole, the reality. And his physical environment was never outside of this reality.
To sum up, man in Indo-Muslim culture does live in singular earthly reality. His reality is defined by terrestrial as well as extra-terrestrial dimension. Other than his material concrete world, he also lives in the world of his own, the world of his consciousness, which provides him sense of identity and freedom and thus puts meaning in his life. Theoretically the former is the realm of man while the latter that of God. Yet they are the two ends of man’s world and it is the transition, the movement from the one to the other that not only unites them but also constitutes the realm of human freedom.
Conclusion
This paper is a step towards developing a non-Western historical perspective, that re-examines the sources from human past, and out of this examination constructs a new, non-Western but at the same time non-partisan history. If Western historical perspective excludes the non-Western, the non-partisan nature of non-Western perspective does not exclude the Western, for if it would, it would be essentially Western. Polarity and exclusiveness, one sidedness, partisanship or extremism, is the character of Western historical thought and not of thought and history itself.
Alan Musnslow observed that in the heyday of imperialism, the non-imperialist perspective did not exist, for it was ‘not recognized as a perspective at all in the West until the second half of the twentieth century and the advent of decolonization.’[48] My argument is that such perspective still does not exist. Although modern Western historians and those in their mould in the non-Western world claim to be adhering to non-imperialist perspective, the truth is it is a mere pretension. For the non-imperialist perspective cannot continue to treat the pre-modern past the way modern imperialist perspective did and does. So what I am suggesting is that there is no difference between the modern imperialist and non-imperialist perspectives, for both reject the pre-modern past as fundamentally non-rational or mythical and religious of no historical value, with the exception of a tiny island of Greece.
A little reflection on ancient Greek thought, of its philosophy and history, reveals that this attempt to take Greece out of her historical context is a modern construction. All Greeks and non-Greeks alike, so Plato observed, believe in the existence of gods.[49] Even a cursory reading of Greek thought clearly reveals that the Greeks as the precursor of modern rational perspective is a fabrication by modernity for its own legitimation. Whole of Plato’s work is studded with the belief in the reality of the invisible world, this being not Plato’s or Socrates’ personal belief but as the very foundation of Greek thought.
A detailed re-evaluation of Greek thought we will leave from some other occasion. In the present paper, which is based on a larger work ,[50] we limit ourselves largely to medieval Indo-Muslim history and attempt to show that modern perception of pre-modern man is essentially flawed. The problem, that is, is not with the non-Western man who ostensibly for his religious orientation is outside history. Rather it is with the modern man whose attempt to construct history of the past with the fabricated evidence of Greece only points to the fact that he has no history. That is, if ancient Greece belongs to the pre-modern world, to which Homer, Plato, Buddha and their likes belonged, modern man has no past. It was perhaps J. H. Plumb[51] who first came to the brilliant apprehension that the modern Western attempt to construct history at the burial site of the past might not succeed. Our present attempt aims to demonstrate that it has indeed failed. Modern man has no history.
The implications of the findings and hypothesis presented above can be consequential in our understanding of the nature of man, and of human culture in general.[52]
Modern age, or modernity, to be more precise, as we know, began in the sixteenth-seventeenth centuries in Europe,[53] and which is now a universal perspective. It sought its legitimacy in a wholesale repudiation of the pre-modern civilizations and their achievements. It was a colossal operation of destruction of the past and its replacement by a reconstruction of what we know as history.[54] The concept of man and his culture developed out of this operation was the model with reference to which pre-modern man and his age had to be evaluated. Obviously he was found seriously wanting, for he turned out to be a lesser man; except for the ancient Greeks, though, who somehow, presumably by some great miracle of nature, escaped the misfortunes of pre-modern, lesser man, and thus emerged as the worthy ancestors of modern man.
Perhaps the chief charge against the pre-modern man is that his commitment to the life and world was half-hearted, if not hypocritical, for he was more occupied to the illusory world of beyond. From this occupation what followed almost naturally was a culture which was monolithic, authoritarian, and absolutist. What could be the greater indication of its poverty than the fact that the idea of pluralism was foreign to it!
However, the idea of modern pluralism, we may note, is wholly political on which is based the structure of modern democracy. While it is true that political pluralism was foreign to a monarchical setting, we have drawn attention to cultural pluralism of pre-modern civilizations, a concept foreign to modern civilization. For modernity visualizes man as essentially a material, physical being who is enthralled to material needs and which propel him to realize himself in the acquisition of material goods. The net result of this concept of man is not hard to see presently, when the specter of global warming and depletion of the planet’s resources haunts us as billions of non-Western peoples enter into the reckless drive to modernize themselves, i.e., to match the material affluence of the modern West.[55]
The pre-modern man, or, to be more precise, the civilizations that arose in the first millennium BC and afterwards, had developed a keen awareness that if man were to be conceived solely as a being enslaved by material ideals, he would sooner or later destroy himself, for there was after all no end to his desire for material affluence. This awareness came from the simple observation that not all men were by disposition given to material pursuits. For there are also men and women who aspire for knowledge and a life, or a life-style, if you like, devoted to this end. This life-style, epitomized in the life of the saint, of a sufi, a Socrates, sant, faqir, derwish, yogi, or sadhu, they thought, was the pre-condition of knowledge of reality, which is a concept foreign to modernity.
In short, the pre-modern thought perceived man as a unity of dual or opposite natures, and on which were raised the opposite ideals of the king and the ascetic, and their respective cultures. The pre-modern or medieval culture, then, was truly a pluralist culture in which human beings had the freedom to live their lives according to their varied, opposing dispositions. This freedom has been taken away from us by the cultural despotism of modernity. Perhaps only the re-claiming of that freedom can avert the disaster as foreseen in the NIC report and many others besides it.
Notes
[1]Until the invasions of Mahmud of Ghazni Islam in India was a peripheral phenomenon contained mainly to Sind, Multan and some coastal areas.
[2] For details of Mahmud’s love for wealth see M. K. Firishta, History of the Rise of the Mohemdan Power in India, Trans.J. Briggs, Vol. 1 (London, 1908), pp. 84-5.
[3] Ali b. Uthman Hujwiri, Kashf al-Mahjub, Trans. R. A. Nicholson (Lahore: 1976), p. 20.
[4] ‘We shall only mention,’ writers Firishta, ‘as an instance of his wealth, that he had in diamonds alone, of variation sizes, 500muns. ‘[Mun appr. 38kg], Firishta, 1908, p. 187.
[5] Abdul Haq, Akhbar al-Akhyar, Urdu trans. M. Fazil, (Karachi, n.d.), p. 55; B. B. Lawrence, Notes from a Distant Flute: The Extant Literature of Pre-Mughal Indian Sufism (Tehran, 1978), p. 20. However some hold that Muinuddin Chishti’s arrival coincided with or followed the conquest of Ghauri.
[6] Kinberg, in a very instructive article in respect of our present argument, has observed that poverty was a crucial idea in Islam right from its origin. He argues that the Traditions of the Prophet praising poverty and the poor appeared before those favoring the wealth and the property. He goes on to conclude that the ‘renunciation of worldly goods was always the main current in Islam.’ L. Kinberg, ‘Commerce and Compromise: A study of early traditions concerning poverty and wealth’, Der Islam, Band 66, Heft 2, 1989, p. 152.
[7] This in no way implies that the two figures were absent from the pre- Muslim Indian culture. For a fuller treatment see Shuja Alhaq, A Forgotten Vision: A Study of Human Spirituality in the Light of Islamic Tradition, 2 vols. (New Delhi, 1997). Also published in single volume by Vanguard Books, Lahore, 1997.
[8] Isami, quoted by Aziz Ahamd, ‘The Sufi and the Sultan in Pre-Mughal India,’ Der Islam, 1963, p. 152.
[9] Hujwiri, p. 27.
[10] The role of cultivation of faqr in Sufism can be gauged by the fact that sometimes it is equated with the very state of Godhead, as that of absolute independence from need. It was for instance observed by a Sufi that ‘the faqir is one who has no need of God.’ J. Nurbakhsh, Spiritual Poverty in Sufism (London, 1984) p. 21. For a comprehensive selection of the descriptions concerning faqr, faqir, dervish, and Sufi in the Sufi literature see ibid, pp.1-62.
[11] See, e.g., Hujwiri, p. 18.
[12] Shaikh Saadi, Gulistan, Hertford, 1863, p.47.
[13] Ibn Arabi, Turjuman al-Ashwaq, ed. & trans. R. A. Nicholson, Beruit, 1966, p . 115.
[14] Yogi here also implies sanyasi, bhikshu, sadhu etc.
[15] Louis Dumont, ‘World Renunciation in Indian Religions,’ Contributions to Indian Sociology,, No. 4, 1960, p. 47.
[16] Cf. ibid. pp. 46-7.
[17] Cf. Tara Chand, Influence of Islam on Indian Culture (Allahabad, 1976), pp. 26 & 35-7. Ali Hujwari, the patriarch of Indian Sufism, it may be recalled, settled in Lahore during this period.
[18] S. A. A Rizvi, A History of Sufism in India, Vol. ! (New Delhi, 1978), p. 117; Yusuf Husain, Glimpses of Medieval Indian Culture (Bombay, 1962) p.37
[19] K. A. Nizami, Some Aspects of Religion and Politics in India During the Thirteenth Century (Bombay, 1961), p. 184-5.
[20] Ibid.
[21] Ibid., ‘Iltutmush the Mystic,’ Islamic Culture, Vol. XX, 1946, p. , 173.
[22] Ibid p .175.
[23] See his correspondence with Bahauddin Zakariya in Abdul Haq, op.cit.
[24] The autonomy of faqr viz-a-viz the kingship was illustrated by Saadi in an anecdote. A certain pious one saw in a dream certain king in heaven while a dervish in hell. When he inquired about it he was told that king was in paradise for his proximity to the dervish, and the dervish was in hell for his closeness with the king. Saadi, op. cit., p. 54.
[25] Nizami, 1961, p. 190.
[26] Ibid. p. 191.
[27] For the discussion of the controversy over the authorship of the verses attributed to Farid see Akhlaq Hussain Dehlawi, ‘The Poetical Work of Baba Farid,’ Journal of Sikh Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1, 1978, and B. S. Anand, Baba Farid (New Delhi, 1975), pp. 34-43.
[28] H. Singh Shan, So Said Sheikh Farid (Chandigarh, 1974), p. 53.
[29] Ibid. p. 56-7.
[30] Lawrence, op. cit., p. 24.
[31] A. H. Sijzi, Fawaid ul-Fuad, Urdu trans. M. Sarwar. (Lahore, 1973), p. 56.
[32] Ibid., p. 56-7.
[33] Ibid., p. 169.
[34] Ibid., p.111
[35] Cf., e.g., ibid., pp.111, 339, 419.
[36] Ibid., p. 78.
[37] Nizami, 1985, p. 80.
[38] Haq, p. 125.
[39] Sijzi, p. 309.
[40] Quoted by M. Habib in The political theory of the Delhi Sultanante, including a translation of Ziauddin Barani's Fatawa-i Jahandari, circa 1358-9 A.D. (Allahabad, 1960), p. 134.
[41] Nizami, op. cit., p. 80.
[42]Sijzi, p. 165.
[43] Ibid.
[44] For a brief discussion of the subject see Z. H. Zaidi, ‘Conversion to Islam in South Asia: Problems in Analysis’, The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences, Vol. 6, No. 1, September 1989, pp. 102-15.
[45] See for instance Elliot & Dowson, The History of India as Told by its Historians, Vol. 11, London, 1873, p. 184; Barani, in M. Habib, pp. 5-6, 46-7.
[46] Cf. R. Thapar, A History of India, Vol. 1 (Penguin Books, 1966), p. 302.
[47] Nizami, 1961, p. 318.
[48] A. Munslow, Deconstructing History. 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 28.
[49] Plato, Laws: 886a, in his Complete Works, ed, by J. M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hacket Publishing Co, 1997) In Timaeus Greeks are characterised as ‘those whose begetting and nurture were divine.’ (24d) In Phaedo, Socrates says that ‘the one aim of those who practice philosophy in the proper manner is to practice for dying and death.’ (Ibid., 64) Later he declares: ‘No one may join the company of the gods who has not practiced philosophy. [Ibid., 82c)
So Xenophon, the other important contemporary source for Socrates besides Plato, in a brilliant exposition of Greek mind, wrote in The Dinner-Party (Plato’s Symposium):
Well, its quite plain that both Greeks and non-Greeks believe that the gods know everything that is, and will be; at any rate all states and all peoples inquire of the gods by means of divination what they ought and ought not to do.. Next, its also clear that we believe they can do us both good and harm; at least, everyone asks the gods to avert what is evil and grant what is good. Well, these omniscient and omnipotent gods are such good friends to me that, because of their concern for me, I am never beyond their notice night or day, wherever I am bound and whatever I intend to do. And because of their foreknowledge, that indicate to me the result of every action, sending me messages by utterances, dreams and omens to tell me what I ought to do and what I ought not; and when I obey these, I am never sorry for it, but when I have sometimes disobeyed in the past, I have been punished for it.
Most instructively, this is not Socrates who is saying this, but one of his interlocutors, Hermogenes. Socrates responds by saying: “Well, there is nothing incredible in this. [This is because Socrates himself was guided by his god through his voice whose approval he sought in all his actions]. But I would be glad to know what sort of service you render them to keep them so friendly to you.” Xenophon, Conversations of Socrates (Penguin, 1990), p. 248.
[50] Shuja Alhaq, op.cit.
[51] J. H. Plumb, The Death of the Past (New York: Palgrave, 2004 [1969]).
[52] The findings, with reference to both Islamic and Hindu pre-modern civilizations, are presented on a larger canvas in Shuja Alhaq, op.cit.
[53] For a brief treatment of the rise of modernity see Shuja Alhaq, ‘Islam and Modernity: Towards a New Paradigm,’ The Historian, Vol. 4, No. 1, 2006, pp. 50-64.
[54] For the substitution of past with history though in European, Christian context, see J. H. Plumb, op.cit.
[55] See, for instance, the just issued report by US National Intelligence Council, ‘Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World,’ on www.dni.gov/nic/NIC_2025_project.html
AN introduction
Abstract
This paper seeks to cast a fresh look on medieval Indo-Muslim culture. Here it is argued that this culture cannot be treated as a single, monolithic phenomenon. The very advent of Islam in India is seen as marked by two distinctly contrasting figures of Mahmud of Ghazna-Uthman b. Hujwiri in the eleventh century and Shahabuddin Ghuri-Muinuddin Chishti in the twelfth-thirteenth centuries. While the former in the two pairs are known for their love of plunder and wealth, the latter are recognized through their cultivation of poverty. These two modes of personalities are seen as representatives of two cultures. While the property culture is most typically reflected in the life of the sultan/king, that of opposing or parallel culture is epitomized in the personality of ascetic/faqir. The two cultures, each recognizing the necessity of the other, yet keep their respective autonomies by offering distinct sets of values and ideals in human life. Whereas the established culture offers man the possibility to seek happiness in appropriation of wealth and property, the parallel culture provides for the principle of freedom and autonomy from the material world. The qualitative difference between the two was universally recognized equally among the rulers as well as the common people. If we are able to do so today, it may lead to some significant repercussions in respect of our understanding of Indo Muslim society in particular and man in general.
Islam penetrated into India in the eleventh century[1] as a composite of two distinct cultures. The one is manifested in the life of Mahumd of Ghazni [d. 1030], whose love for plundering the wealth of India far exceeded his better know passion for the propagation of his faith.[2] The opposing culture is represented in the personality of the famous Sufi, Ali bin Uthman Hujwiri[d. 1072], who, incidentally, also hailed from Ghazni, but settled in Lahore sometime in the fourth decade of the eleventh century at the direction of his sheikh. He considered wealth as a misfortune for a faqir.[3]
In the late twelfth century this pattern was again repeated in a similar fashion. This time we find, on the one hand, Shahabuddin Ghauri [d. 1206], an adventure par excellence, who after repeated invasions of India laid the foundations of the Dehli Sultanate, the first Muslim kingdom of India [1206-1526]. The treasure he left behind, in the words of Firishta, was ‘almost incredible’, with the weight of diamonds of various sizes alone amounting to 500 maunds.[4] On the other side we see the figure of Muinuddin Chishti [d.1236], who settled in Ajmer, in the capital of the Hindu ruler Prithvi Raj, shortly before the defeat of the latter at the hands of Ghauri in 1192.[5] The pride and distinction of Muinduddin was his self-cultured poverty.[6]
Around these two figures of the king and faqir is evolved the whole of medieval Indo-Muslim culture.[7] In other words, medieval Indo-Muslim culture is essentially a pluralist culture, or to be more accurate, a unity of multiple cultures where the established culture, whose arch representative is the king, co-existed with the parallal culture, led by the faqir. The individual and society is permeated with two sets of values and ideals. One is motivated by the acquisition of wealth and physical power over the others while the other is based on the cultivation of personality, detachment from the physical world, and integration with the Whole, the totality of existence. However, the two cultures exist with the consciousness of each other’s necessity for social existence. The term ‘parallel culture’ therefore should by no means imply that it intended to replace or impose its hegemony by ousting the other and vice versa. Thus what we call the medieval Indo-Muslim culture is in fact the unity of two cultures, at once in harmony as well as in opposition to each other.
The popular tendency however is to trace the socio-historic or cultural pattern of this period from the vantage point of politics and the state. This inevitably leaves the culture of the faqir in the periphery while the major, sometimes even the sole emphasis goes to the lives and culture of the kings and their dynasties. This tendency grows from our perception of the state as the chief embodiment of socio-political and cultural life of the society. This perception also derives from the fact that to the state is dependent the institution of property which we conceive as the primary and objective form of man’s creation, as his supreme self manifestation. However, the faqir’s life and work does not come into the domain of politics, state, and property. To say in more popular terms, he lived outside the world. But we tend very often to perceive his living outside the world too literally and place him at the periphery of the society. The fact is that he only lived outside the established culture and not the culture and society itself. His being was the manifestation of the higher dimension of human consciousness, the consciousness that endeavors not to be tied down to the given and the concrete, that aims to remain free from the actualized, the materialized dimension of human consciousness. Thus in his idealized form the faqir was free from all the given relations of family, state, and property.
The faqir, in other words, represented the other end of the social order and his existence for the survival of society was universally reckoned as necessary a condition as that of the king, or even more than his. While the king was taken to represent the body of human society, the faqir or dervish was the soul, and the superiority of the soul over body was never doubted, for soul represented the eternal dimension of human existence. A medieval Muslim historian writes:
The world is bound by serious law and order, upheld by men of faith. In every country there lives a master-mind, in every region a man of acquirements. Although every country has a king, it is really protected by a dervish. The kings lord over the land, but the dervishes consume its calamities. Were there no autar on the face of the earth, the seven-fold tent of skies would have collapsed. When the Lord of days and nights wills to destroy a land, He first orders the man [of God] to depart from there and then appoints there a tyrant as a ruler.[8]
The tendency to see the king, or the state as the pivot of society signifies the one-sidedness of most evaluations of pre-modern Indian culture, resulting in the enormous deficiency in the understanding of the culture of the faqir. Out of this deficiency emerges an incomplete picture of man in general, an essentially distorted understanding of human nature and consequently a failing in the comprehension of the totality of human culture.
Though the king and the faqir are typified in the character of Ghauri and Chishti, we find the great mass of humanity living with two cultures intricately bound or diffused together. Thus we are in fact confronted with the phenomena of not only two but three cultures. That is, it may be that we find a faqir who manifests deficient understanding of the parallel culture and thus represents a confusion of two cultures. Likewise a king can manifest traits of parallel culture in his character or a deep sympathy and understanding of the role of parallel culture in maintaining balance in the individual and social spheres of human life. But whereas the broad social consensus on the role of the two, the king and the faqir, as the essential ingredients of human culture was never questioned, the relationship between the two was far from being smooth: it ranged from friendship, indifference, suspicion, tension and sometimes hostility.
The tension and hostility between the two cultures grew also from the active role of the ulama on the side of the established culture. Though the state was not run strictly according to the sharia, the Islamic law governing the relation of family, state and property, yet it provided the basic categories on which the identity of the Muslim rule was established. Since the ulama were the ultimate authority, the specialists on sharia, their coalition and association with the royal court was a fact taken far granted. In their capacity as a party in the structure of the given order their relationship towards the leaders of the parallel culture was bound to be tense and fraught with difficulty and suspicion. Here we cannot go into detail over the history of this not too pleasant relationship. Suffice to say that though the ulama had their share of differences with the king but as a class or a party they largely confronted the culture of the faqir which they found too erratic and liberal for the identity and absolute nature of sharia.
The prime features of the established culture are reflected in, firstly, the finitude of human consciousness ascertained in the dogma of the duality of God and man, vigorously expounded by the ulama as the very foundation of sharia, and, secondly, the property-relation with the world. The parallel culture emerged in the context of a conception of man in which he was tied down to the world of matter while his consciousness lacked the content of infinity, the experience of the whole. If by asserting the essential oneness of man and God the parallel culture asserted that man, in his essence, was immortal and infinite; through cultivating the non-possessive relationship with the world, popularly known as renunciation, asceticism, non-detachment, or faqr (voluntary poverty), it also sought to free man from the bondage of the outer world.
Unity with the Whole, i.e. infinity and immortality of consciousness and faqr, i,e., non-property relation with the world go hand in hand and each fails to realize its meaning in isolation from the other. This is because struggle to attain Unity without faqr, which is also defined as the absence of desire, of self, turns out to be hypocrisy, and faqr not directed towards or without the goal of Unity degenerates into destitution and dogmatism. If the latter is the theory of the former, the former is the practice, the methodology for realization of the latter. Abul Qasim Junaid’s remarkable description of the state opf the faqir that ‘when his heart is empty of phenomena he is poor’[9] points to the dialectical nature of Unity and faqr. Emptiness of phenomena indicates freedom at once from property-relation with the world as well as from duality, that is, from everything other than God. This dialectic assures that neither lack of physical objects or apparent destitute condition nor high flying in the realm of mind or metaphysics can lead one to Transcendence.[10]
However it needs to be emphasized that the parallel culture neither arose nor developed in a neat and well marked demarcation from the established, given culture. Within its domain grew different from the established, given culture. Within its domain grew different tendencies or currents. Its core was represented by what may be called the essential Sufism. It stood for ascension, the movement from humanity to divinity; that is, nothing less than essential union between man and God. It perceived sharia as the initiatory discipline that reflected and governed the given condition of man, the condition of duality, of man’s separation from God, of his finitude. This condition is often stated in Sufi writings as human nature or the humanity.[11] As man actively engages himself in the movement of spirit, and sheds his given condition, the state of bondage and duality, the human qualities, he grows out of the domain of sharia since the condition reflecting that domain begins to fade. Sharia, in other words, is the consciousness of the alienation, of separation from the truth, the whole, the totality of existence. This consciousness in turn implies the struggle to move out of separation. And when one moves nearer to the Unity the discipline practiced in the state of separation becomes redundant and its memory a sin. Saadi offered a very apt description of the point when he wrote:
The sinners repent from their sins
The Gnostics implore forgiveness for worshipping.[12]
The arif (gnostic) repents from worshipping since the worshipping represents the duality, the separation of I and thou, worshipper and the worshipped. Ibn Arabi, in a brilliant exposition of the two contrasting positions, remarked:
God is known only by means of God. The scholastic theologian says: “I know God by that which he created” and takes as his guide something that has no real relation to the object sought. He who knows God by means of phenomena, knows as much as these phenomena give to him and no more.[13]
Here Ibn Arabi conceives the knowledge of God essentially as transcendence. The concept, and the corresponding endeavour, remains alien to the alim because he approaches the Creator from the vantage point of the creation, to the Whole from that of the fragment which is as hopeless an endeavour as that of the blind men seeking to know the elephant by touching his different limbs separately in Rumi’s famous story. The knowledge of God on the other hand implies a decisive break from the condition of humanity, of creation, of separateness and fragmentation. In simple words, only through assuming the consciousness of Unity, of the Whole that one becomes Whole and by no other means.
Besides essential Sufism there were also the middle and the orthodox currents within the large domain of Sufism. The moderate tendency did manifest the consciousness of the autonomy of the Sufi culture but remained equally concerned to expound the inner consistency between the sharia and the Sufi path. The orthodox tendency, however, failed to draw the demarcating line between Sufism and orthodoxy, the institutional religion. It visualized Sufism merely as the rigorous fulfillment of ritual and absolute exclusion of initiative and individuality from spiritual life. This current gained ground as the prestige and role of the Sufis in society grew rapidly affecting almost all the domains of social life. It therefore became increasingly apparent that Sufism could only be combated in its essentials; or, in other words, much of its exterior was interiorized by the orthodoxy with the awareness that it could not be dealt with from without. So that with the passage of time it become increasingly difficult for an ordinary man to decipher who was who and what was what? How far essential Sufism lagged behind to allow this development is a vexed question needing a separate treatment.
[11]
When Sufism arrived in India, it had already reached to its highest theoretical development. This development manifested itself both vertically, i.e., in its theory, and, horizontally i.e. in its practice. In theory it represented in almost universal consensus among the major Sufi thinkers in the twelfth and thirteen centuries that the highest destiny of man lay in unity (with God). This unity we can term as Transcendence or even Freedom which implies release from the (individual) self and realization or attainment of the consciousness of the Whole. Its best formulation was offered by Ibn Arabi, in the doctrine of Wahdat al-Wujud, the unity of all being, so much so that he and his doctrine eventually became identified with Sufism itself. Besides Ibn Arabi, Jalaluddin Rumi was the most powerful voice expounding the cause of Transcendence and Freedom.
The horizontal development of Sufism was manifested in the origination and expansion of the great associations of the Sufis, called the silsilahs, (spiritual) ‘chains,’ brotherhoods or orders. These orders, originating from the major Sufi leaders of the twelfth-thirteenth centuries, were the outcome of more than one inter-related developments in the world of Sufism. Mainly among these were, on the theoretical side, a near consensus on essential unity of man and God, and the determination of the goal of spiritual endeavour as the shedding of human nature and assumption of the divine. On the practical side of the development was the emergence of khanaqah as the parallel institution to the mosque and its gradual establishment as the center of not only spiritual but wider public socio-culture activity. Out of the interaction of these two developments grew the powerful figure of the Sheikh, the embodiment as well as the manifestation of the Divine.
But whereas quite a few orders had already come into being in the Islamic world by the turn of the twelfth century, the first to gain roots in India, the Chishtiya, did not have a prior history. However its early history in India in the span of a hundred and fifty years provides a superb illustration of the growth of parallel culture in the Indo-Muslim world from humble beginnings to its zenith when the Chishti centre in Dehli emerged as the parallel center of power in the Sultanate in the first quarter of the fourteenth century, to its dispersion and persecution at the hands of state power in the second quarter.
It is important to remember that the parallel culture had a rich indigenous history in India. Thus when Muinuddin Chishti settled at Ajmer by the end of the twelfth century, the country already had the yogi’s[14] culture firmly established on its soil. Dumont writes:
Is it really to adventurous to say that the agent of development in India religion and speculation, the “creation of values”, has been the renouncer? The Brahman, as scholar, has mainly preserved, aggregated, and combined: he may well have created and developed special branches of knowledge. Not only the founding of sects and their maintenance, but the major ideas, the “inventions” are due to the renouncer whose unique position gave him a sort of monopoly for putting everything in question.[15]
The central figure of this culture was individual, the individual whom society not only allowed to exist but sanctified for having his own mode of existence, i.e., his personal way towards life and truth.[16] It was sanctified because he was occupied with the fundamental questions of freedom and salvation with which the whole society was deeply concerned. The society took responsibility for his living for the reason that the questions and the quest towards their resolution was given a place far higher than earning one’s living. Basically it was this preoccupation with what may be called transcendence that formed the paramount feature of India and newly emerging Indo-Muslim society. And it is only through this context that the pioneer position of faqir/dervish or yogi/sanyasi in the society can be determined.
There were also some other factors which contributed in the growth of tolerant culture in India that most Muslims encountered on their arrival. Of these the paramount factor was diversity in religion and mode of spirituality. Perhaps in no other part of the world can one find the evidence of such great variety of sacred scriptures, sects, deities, and rituals, modes of worship, beliefs, and seers with the caliber of prophets as that which emerged in India in the span of two to three thousand years. This remarkable diversity gave birth to an atmosphere of peaceful co-existence, a generally tolerant attitude towards divergent beliefs. It was due to this liberal environment that the Muslims who settled in India peacefully during the eighth to the ninth-eleventh centuries mainly through the coastal areas did not face hostile attitudes from the local population or rulers and were allowed to build mosques and preach their religion.[17]
The strong presence of the ascetic, the renouncer, in the Indian soil played an important role in Muinuddin Chisti’s settlement at Ajmer, the capital of a strong Hindu state even before its conquest by Shihabuddin Ghauri. For he was well advanced in the discipline of renunciation and had not come into an absolutely alien soil. The importance of discerning the real circumstances of Muinuddin’s integration into a new soil, or, to be more precise, the discernment of the close affinity between the Sufi and Indian spiritual traditions, lies in the fact that failure in doing so has led, consciously or unconsciously, many Muslim writers of the past as well as present to resort to fabulous miracles in order to account for the Sufis’ survival in such ‘hostile’ conditions. Typical is the case of the seventeenth century writer of Jawahar-i Faridi who offers quite a fantastic description of Muinuddin’s arrival and settlement at Ajmer.[18]
[111]
Muinaddin Chishti, born in Sijistan, east Persia, had travelled widely and shared the company of a number of Sufi leaders of Islamic world when he decided to settle in India. He seems to be a man free from dogma and ritual. Besides that his great asset in gaining roots in the new soil must have been his deep faith and practice in the cultivation of voluntary poverty. He was a Unitarian and his thought was characterized by fullness of humanist content. Love could be realized through transcendence from externals and coming into grips with the essence, the oneness, while the highest form of devotion to God was ‘to redress the misery of those in distress, to fulfill the needs of the helpless and to feed the hungry.’[19] The three principles of the life of faqir attributed to him were later to become the epitome of Chishtiya order. These are: River-like generosity, sun-like affection and earth like hospitality.[20]
It may well be pointed out that though knowledge and practice, Unity and faqr are ultimately inseparable in Sufi doctrine, yet in the twelfth-thirteenth centuries we may find individuals in whom one aspect outshined the other. Ibn Arbi for instance is a case of high excellence in the domain of knowledge and theoretical exposition of the doctrine. In Muinuddin Chishti on the other hand is manifested more the domination of ecstasy of faqr and service to humanity as the hallmark of spiritual life. Thus his successors were to offer the model of the individual who lived with minimum needs for himself but lived among the people fulfilling multiple responsibilities: meeting their spiritual needs both by guiding them towards higher goals and soothing and sharing them in their everyday pains and difficulties; he also comforted them in their physical needs from the resources invested in him by the society itself.
His successor in Dehli, Qutbuddin Bukhtiyar Kaki [d.1236] was equally well-versed in faqr. The two had met in Baghdad finding commonness in their character and approach towards Sufism. Qutbuddin came to India probably sometime in the second decade of the thirteenth century during the reign of Shamsuddin Iltutmish [1211-36]. Iltutumish had a high regard for the Sufis and, we are told, himself bore a mystic temperament and sought the company of the saints.[21] Hearing the news of Qutbuddin’s arrival he went out of the city to receive him. He also offered Qutbuddin residence near his palace and later the post of Shaikh ul-Islam. The latter declined both the offers[22] presumably as part of his attempt to safeguard the autonomy of Sufism by keeping it away from the Muslim rulers and the state. In this endeavor he was also helped by another outstanding Chishti leader, Hamiddudin Sufi, also scholar of high repute, for whom spiritual excellence grew predominantly from a critical attitude towards property rather than excessive zeal in the fulfillment of religious duties.[23]
Thus the most important contribution of these Chishti leaders towards the development of parallel culture in the newly emerging Indo-Muslim society lay in their strict adherence to the ideal of distance from property, politics and all the institutions of the state. In a time when Muslims were strongly identified with the state, the symbol of their power, and all the aspirations of the intelligent members of this community were directed towards joining the state institutions, the channels of wealth and power, the Chishtis struggled towards the growth of culture based on altogether different aspirations, that enjoyed autonomy from the state power, property and their associated values of greed, hatred and ruthless competition to jump over the other for a higher prize.
But at same time it should also be noted that the Chishtis were not advocating polarization of the spiritual and material in the society. This is indicated by the fact that high officials of state including princes, and sometimes also the king, for instance Iltutmish, would visit the khanaqah, and occasionally were even accepted as the lay disciples. But spiritual excellence was reckoned an autonomous discipline that required one’s establishment in a centre different from that of the worldly culture. The identity of spiritual realm could only be maintained if its leaders exercised as much autonomy in their thought and behavior as their counterparts did in their sphere.[24]
Chishti leaders also introduced music as the essential component of spiritual life. If their commitment to faqr helped them to distance themselves from the court and the Muslim ruling classes, their devotion to music led them increasingly towards estrangement from the religious establishment and nearer to the common people and the native culture. Music, in the form of sama (musical rendering of poetry in a gathering) accompanied by dance was practiced as means to ecstasy, i.e., freedom from self consciousness. The Chishtis’ immense contribution to the cause of music in India in early Muslim period is epitomized in the person of Amir Khusrau [1254-1325] who was raised in Chishti circles. A composer as well as a theoretician, he is known as the founder of the Indo- Muslim musical tradition.
Sufism in India took a new leap with the coming on the scene of two great Chishti leaders, Fariduddin Shakarganj [d.1265] and Nizamuddin Auliya [d.1325]. Fariduddin hailed from the Punjab while his grandfather was an immigrant from Kabul. Though the greater part of his life passed in Punjab, ‘it was due to his efforts’ ‘observes Nizami, ‘that the Chishti order attained an all-India status and its branches came to be established in many important towns of India.[25] And further that ‘he gave to the Chishti silsilah the momentum of an organized spiritual movement.’[26] He was very conscious of the autonomous character of Sufi culture. So when he was designated by his master as the chief of the Chishti order after his death, the first decision he took was to move the Chishti centre away from Delhi. He found the city unsuitable, being too polluted by the royal presence, for the organization and expansion of the spiritual movement. With it he took another bold decision . He left even Hansi, where he was staying before his master’s death, and chose a deserted place near the town of Ajodhan (now Pakpatten) as his home and the new centre of the order, thus setting a difficult example for his followers.
Fariduddin Shakarganj is also known, particularly in the Punjab, as the ‘father of Punjabi language and literature.’ This title comes from the collection of dohras, rhymed couplets, attributed to him appearing first time in the Guru Granth, the sacred book of the Sikhs compiled in 1603-4.[27]The verses often look like whispers, more to one’s own self. Sometimes they are addressed towards the given condition of man characterised by a conditioning in which even the knowledge of good does not deter him from evil and heedlessness emerges as his dominant trait. When the poet finds himself a member of this species, sharing so much with it, fear comes in. Then he thinks of death and the limited period of time at his disposal. The time seems too short given so much to redress, so long to go. He is forced to visualize the grave. The immobility in the grave terrorizes him;
Faridaa it sarhaana, bhoen son, kiraa lario maas
Ketariaan jug vaapre, ikat piaan paas.[28]
O Farid! A brick under your head, lying on the soil, while the insects eating your flesh; the ages would pass and you would keep lying on one side.
It is this immobility, inability to move, to act, in the death that pushes him towards action, towards overcoming his inner nature and heedlessness. As long there is life, the possibility of freedom of union is alive. There are two other verses in which the indecision, conflict and resolution is portrayed beautifully:
Faridaa galien chikkar dur ghar naal piaare nenh
Turaan taan bhijje kambli rahaan taan tutte nenh
Bhijjo sijjo kambli Allaah verso menh
Jaae Milaan tinhaan sajnaan tutto nahin nenh.[29]
O Farid! The streets are full of mire [with consistent rain], the house of the one I love is far away: if I step out I wet my garments but if I stay home I loose my love.
O let the garments be wet, let God pour rain as much as He
Likes; I must see my beloved so that my love may survive.
The movement that Fariduddin organized found its finest expression in the personality of Nizamuddin Auliya. Born in 1238 in Badayun, a city near Dehli, he was yet in his twenties when Shaikh Farid, as he was then called, chose him as his chief successor of all his older disciples. Such was Farid’s vision that this young successor soon rose to become what was later reckoned to be ‘the greatest Indo-Muslim saint of all time.’[30]
Nizamuddin began his work in the outskirts of Delhi called Ghiyaspur. There he synthesized in himself to the utmost the Chishti emphasis on faqr, on the one hand, while realizing it in the process of disseminating its meanings to humanity, on the other. Expounding the common Sufi theme of renounciation of the world, he observed once that world renunciation by no means implied that one should sit semi naked idly. On the contrary it was to wear clothes and eat. But whatever came to him he should spend and not attach his heart to anything.[31] He emphasized that the world in Sufism signified not the gold, silver or the property itself but it was the relationship with it, of love and possession, which was in question.[32] On another occasion he pointed out the complexity of the concept of world-worship, or the relationship of love with the world as envisioned in Sufism. He said:
One [attitude ] is that of world [worship] in form as well as in content; the other is neither in form nor in content; the third is not in form but in content and the fourth is in form but not in content. And what is world in both form and content? That is having beyond one’s needs. That which is world neither in form nor in content, what is that? That is prayer in poverty. That which is not world in form but is in content is prayer for personal ends. And that which is world in form but not in content is fulfilling one’s wife’s rights, that is, meeting the needs of one’s family with the thought that he is paying to the family what is its due. Apparently this act may appear as worldly but in reality it is not.[33]
Nizamuddin Aliya was the embodiment of Sufi liberality and it should therefore be evident that by prayer he is not implying dogmatic fulfillment of the religious duties as the apparent reading of the passage might have us believe. Once he even suggested that a man too much occupied with the religious duties might have some other guilt to compensate and not fulfillment of prayers. And it was precisely for this reason, he added, that the need for a guide arose on the path of spirituality for it was he who led towards sincerity and purity even if there were not too many prayers.[34]
He would often narrate to his audience, in the assemblies at his khanaqah, the stories of the derwishes and Sufis pertaining to the fact that the formal acts of worship devoid of sincerity were meaningless while inner purity on the other hand was not dependent on the performance of the rituals.[35] He differentiated between devotion that led only to personal benefit and that which was source of comfort for others. The former comprised of the performance of the religious duties like prayer, fasting etc. whereas the latter was derived from spending money on others, showing affection towards people and helping them in their needs.[36] He would even express his dislike for excess in supererogatory prayers. He believed it could lead one farther from God rather than bringing him any nearer.[37] He followed his master’s instructions strictly that fasting covered half the path towards God while the rest, prayers, pilgrimage et al, did the other.[38]And once he endorsed the view that pilgrimage was meant for one who had no pir, the guide (to lead him to the path of spirituality that made the act of physical pilgrimage superfluous).[39]
He was a man of charisma and his presence radiated light and power. His influence grew quickly in the early years of the thirteenth century so that he soon emerged as the paramount leader of the parallel culture among the Indo-Muslim community. In a way the pattern narrated above, that of faqir and king as the twin centres of culture and power, epitomised in his personality at the one side and that of all-powerful sultan, Alauddin Khilji [1296-1316], on the other. However the difference with the previous patterns is too remarkable to be ignored. Whereas previously the figure of the faqir seemed too docile or withdrawn, in Nizamuddin Auliya it emerged as the embodiment of power and grandeur. His khanaqah grew into a great centre of spiritual culture, becoming almost a centre of pilgrimage for all Indian Muslims. Ziauddin Barani, by no means having much to share with what the Shaikh stood for, but nevertheless attracted by his magnetism and authority, observed that ‘people came to see Shaikh Nizamuddin from two thousand and three thousand farsangs, and the young and the old, the literate and the illiterate from the city tried to present themselves before the Shaikh by every means they could.’[40]
It was but natural that doubts began to grow in the royal court that this parallel centre of power might threaten the royal authority. Sultan Alauddin Khiji offered the Shaikh responsibilities in state affairs presumably to test his intentions. When the Shaikh got the message he in a way ridiculed the offer by inviting his audience to raise their hands for the fatiha, which is recited at the death of someone. Then he said sternly to the messenger, who happened to be the son of the Sultan, that if at all he was told to do anything like that again only because he happened to be in the city [same as that of the Sultan], he would simply leave the city, for God’s land was very vast. Khilji was obviously delighted at this but now he asked to be allowed to pay a visit to the saint. The saint declined by saying that there was no need for it since he was already praying for his welfare. When the sultan insisted he was told that the faqir would better leave his house than receive the sultan there.[41]
Thus in the personality of Nizamuddin Auliya was realized the power which brought to the fore the perennial assertion of spirituality that world-renunciation or the cultivation of spirit was not a passive state. It induced in man a certain power that raised him above the material constraints. Hitherto this power had manifested itself in individual transcendence of physical limitations, i.e. in the show of miracles. Now in the early period of Indo-Muslim history it was demonstrated on a larger, social scale. The faq- power equation emerged as a direct opposition to the property-power equation. The power in the former was of course radically varied from the latter. It involved neither coercion nor compulsion. Rather it radiated assertion, an energy that flowed and impressed upon the one it encountered the presence and power of the spirit.
Conversions and preaching of Islam among non-Muslims did not form part of Nizamuddin Auliya’s work. Of the common Hindu folk he thought only a fine example could lead them to change of their heart and therefore preaching was of no use. However he had a great regard for their devotion that they manifested in the worship of their deities, and respected every people’s right to have their own religion.[42] Once he related Hamiduddin Sufi’s observation that a Hindu residing in his area was a Wali Allah, friend of God.[43]
The Chishti attitude towards conversion is important in the evaluation of their contribution to parallel culture. Modern scholars have gone against the exaggerated narratives by some enthusiastic Muslim chroniclers about the Sufi ‘role in conversions.[44] However, of all the Sufis conversion formed the least part of the work of the Chishtis. In this respect again they manifested remarkable distance from the official enthusiasm for conversion displayed by the ulama and a part of the secular intelligentsia. The fundamental difference in the two approaches lay in that whereas the latter considered forcible or otherwise conversion of the non-Muslims as incumbent on every Muslim in the capacity to do so, i.e., as inalienable part of Islamic culture, the Chishtis placed little emphasis on the change of external mould. For them the chief task was transformation (of the individual) rather than conversion.
It was this indifference towards conversion or the so-called propagation of Islam accompanied with their low opinion of the rulers that gradually led to the view among the ulama, and part of the ruling elite that the Chishti Sufis were not interested in the sustenance of the Muslim power in India. This view gained further strength when Qutbuddin Mubarak, the last Khilji Sultan was murdered in 1320 by his newly convert lover, Khusrau Khan, and Nizamuddin Auliya refused to take sides in the power struggle that ensued between Khusrau and the Turk leader Ghazi Malik, who later founded the Tughlaq dynasty.
Closely related to this is the Chishti attitude towards other religions. The Chishtis did not see the Hindu Muslim difference in black and white as was recommended in the ruling Muslim culture. Very often in the history of the period we find the ulama and scholars urging the kings to fulfill their divine duty by slaughtering, or at least humiliating to utmost submission the non-Muslims who were not prepared to submit to the true religion.[45] Even if such exhortations were not all the times meant wholly literally, still the purpose was to emphasize the superior, alien character of Islam in the Hindu, Indian environment. This was part of the efforts undertaken to resist and block the assimilation of the two religious communities. Interestingly enough, ulma, the official ideologues of Islam, while taking pride in the egalitarian character of their religion, manifested same contempt towards non-Muslims which their counterparts in Hinduism, the Brahmans, displayed towards the lower castes and the Muslims. In other words, both were united in a common cause of mutual exclusiveness.[46]
Chishtis, on the other hand, represented those forces in the Indo-Muslim society which were not prepared to live in India as perpetual aliens. They were quick in assimilation and adopted many indigenous practices both from spiritual and mundane realms ranging from the techniques of yoga to vegetarianism. Thus they opened the way for dialogue between the two communities and religions that was to take place in subsequent centuries on quite a significant scale. Nizami writers:
They looked upon all religions as different roads leading to the same destination. They did not approve of any discrimination or destination in human society which was one organism for them. They had free social intercourse with the Hindus and tried to understand their approach towards the basic problems of religion and morality. It was their firm conviction that spiritual greatness could be attained by Hindus in the same way as it could be achieved by the Muslims.[47]
Such recognition of the truth in the other and readiness to assimilate and learn in a spirit of tolerance and openness grew from Chishtis’ dynamic concept of man. For them the most sacred of all things was man’s unity with the totality, the whole, the reality. And his physical environment was never outside of this reality.
To sum up, man in Indo-Muslim culture does live in singular earthly reality. His reality is defined by terrestrial as well as extra-terrestrial dimension. Other than his material concrete world, he also lives in the world of his own, the world of his consciousness, which provides him sense of identity and freedom and thus puts meaning in his life. Theoretically the former is the realm of man while the latter that of God. Yet they are the two ends of man’s world and it is the transition, the movement from the one to the other that not only unites them but also constitutes the realm of human freedom.
Conclusion
This paper is a step towards developing a non-Western historical perspective, that re-examines the sources from human past, and out of this examination constructs a new, non-Western but at the same time non-partisan history. If Western historical perspective excludes the non-Western, the non-partisan nature of non-Western perspective does not exclude the Western, for if it would, it would be essentially Western. Polarity and exclusiveness, one sidedness, partisanship or extremism, is the character of Western historical thought and not of thought and history itself.
Alan Musnslow observed that in the heyday of imperialism, the non-imperialist perspective did not exist, for it was ‘not recognized as a perspective at all in the West until the second half of the twentieth century and the advent of decolonization.’[48] My argument is that such perspective still does not exist. Although modern Western historians and those in their mould in the non-Western world claim to be adhering to non-imperialist perspective, the truth is it is a mere pretension. For the non-imperialist perspective cannot continue to treat the pre-modern past the way modern imperialist perspective did and does. So what I am suggesting is that there is no difference between the modern imperialist and non-imperialist perspectives, for both reject the pre-modern past as fundamentally non-rational or mythical and religious of no historical value, with the exception of a tiny island of Greece.
A little reflection on ancient Greek thought, of its philosophy and history, reveals that this attempt to take Greece out of her historical context is a modern construction. All Greeks and non-Greeks alike, so Plato observed, believe in the existence of gods.[49] Even a cursory reading of Greek thought clearly reveals that the Greeks as the precursor of modern rational perspective is a fabrication by modernity for its own legitimation. Whole of Plato’s work is studded with the belief in the reality of the invisible world, this being not Plato’s or Socrates’ personal belief but as the very foundation of Greek thought.
A detailed re-evaluation of Greek thought we will leave from some other occasion. In the present paper, which is based on a larger work ,[50] we limit ourselves largely to medieval Indo-Muslim history and attempt to show that modern perception of pre-modern man is essentially flawed. The problem, that is, is not with the non-Western man who ostensibly for his religious orientation is outside history. Rather it is with the modern man whose attempt to construct history of the past with the fabricated evidence of Greece only points to the fact that he has no history. That is, if ancient Greece belongs to the pre-modern world, to which Homer, Plato, Buddha and their likes belonged, modern man has no past. It was perhaps J. H. Plumb[51] who first came to the brilliant apprehension that the modern Western attempt to construct history at the burial site of the past might not succeed. Our present attempt aims to demonstrate that it has indeed failed. Modern man has no history.
The implications of the findings and hypothesis presented above can be consequential in our understanding of the nature of man, and of human culture in general.[52]
Modern age, or modernity, to be more precise, as we know, began in the sixteenth-seventeenth centuries in Europe,[53] and which is now a universal perspective. It sought its legitimacy in a wholesale repudiation of the pre-modern civilizations and their achievements. It was a colossal operation of destruction of the past and its replacement by a reconstruction of what we know as history.[54] The concept of man and his culture developed out of this operation was the model with reference to which pre-modern man and his age had to be evaluated. Obviously he was found seriously wanting, for he turned out to be a lesser man; except for the ancient Greeks, though, who somehow, presumably by some great miracle of nature, escaped the misfortunes of pre-modern, lesser man, and thus emerged as the worthy ancestors of modern man.
Perhaps the chief charge against the pre-modern man is that his commitment to the life and world was half-hearted, if not hypocritical, for he was more occupied to the illusory world of beyond. From this occupation what followed almost naturally was a culture which was monolithic, authoritarian, and absolutist. What could be the greater indication of its poverty than the fact that the idea of pluralism was foreign to it!
However, the idea of modern pluralism, we may note, is wholly political on which is based the structure of modern democracy. While it is true that political pluralism was foreign to a monarchical setting, we have drawn attention to cultural pluralism of pre-modern civilizations, a concept foreign to modern civilization. For modernity visualizes man as essentially a material, physical being who is enthralled to material needs and which propel him to realize himself in the acquisition of material goods. The net result of this concept of man is not hard to see presently, when the specter of global warming and depletion of the planet’s resources haunts us as billions of non-Western peoples enter into the reckless drive to modernize themselves, i.e., to match the material affluence of the modern West.[55]
The pre-modern man, or, to be more precise, the civilizations that arose in the first millennium BC and afterwards, had developed a keen awareness that if man were to be conceived solely as a being enslaved by material ideals, he would sooner or later destroy himself, for there was after all no end to his desire for material affluence. This awareness came from the simple observation that not all men were by disposition given to material pursuits. For there are also men and women who aspire for knowledge and a life, or a life-style, if you like, devoted to this end. This life-style, epitomized in the life of the saint, of a sufi, a Socrates, sant, faqir, derwish, yogi, or sadhu, they thought, was the pre-condition of knowledge of reality, which is a concept foreign to modernity.
In short, the pre-modern thought perceived man as a unity of dual or opposite natures, and on which were raised the opposite ideals of the king and the ascetic, and their respective cultures. The pre-modern or medieval culture, then, was truly a pluralist culture in which human beings had the freedom to live their lives according to their varied, opposing dispositions. This freedom has been taken away from us by the cultural despotism of modernity. Perhaps only the re-claiming of that freedom can avert the disaster as foreseen in the NIC report and many others besides it.
Notes
[1]Until the invasions of Mahmud of Ghazni Islam in India was a peripheral phenomenon contained mainly to Sind, Multan and some coastal areas.
[2] For details of Mahmud’s love for wealth see M. K. Firishta, History of the Rise of the Mohemdan Power in India, Trans.J. Briggs, Vol. 1 (London, 1908), pp. 84-5.
[3] Ali b. Uthman Hujwiri, Kashf al-Mahjub, Trans. R. A. Nicholson (Lahore: 1976), p. 20.
[4] ‘We shall only mention,’ writers Firishta, ‘as an instance of his wealth, that he had in diamonds alone, of variation sizes, 500muns. ‘[Mun appr. 38kg], Firishta, 1908, p. 187.
[5] Abdul Haq, Akhbar al-Akhyar, Urdu trans. M. Fazil, (Karachi, n.d.), p. 55; B. B. Lawrence, Notes from a Distant Flute: The Extant Literature of Pre-Mughal Indian Sufism (Tehran, 1978), p. 20. However some hold that Muinuddin Chishti’s arrival coincided with or followed the conquest of Ghauri.
[6] Kinberg, in a very instructive article in respect of our present argument, has observed that poverty was a crucial idea in Islam right from its origin. He argues that the Traditions of the Prophet praising poverty and the poor appeared before those favoring the wealth and the property. He goes on to conclude that the ‘renunciation of worldly goods was always the main current in Islam.’ L. Kinberg, ‘Commerce and Compromise: A study of early traditions concerning poverty and wealth’, Der Islam, Band 66, Heft 2, 1989, p. 152.
[7] This in no way implies that the two figures were absent from the pre- Muslim Indian culture. For a fuller treatment see Shuja Alhaq, A Forgotten Vision: A Study of Human Spirituality in the Light of Islamic Tradition, 2 vols. (New Delhi, 1997). Also published in single volume by Vanguard Books, Lahore, 1997.
[8] Isami, quoted by Aziz Ahamd, ‘The Sufi and the Sultan in Pre-Mughal India,’ Der Islam, 1963, p. 152.
[9] Hujwiri, p. 27.
[10] The role of cultivation of faqr in Sufism can be gauged by the fact that sometimes it is equated with the very state of Godhead, as that of absolute independence from need. It was for instance observed by a Sufi that ‘the faqir is one who has no need of God.’ J. Nurbakhsh, Spiritual Poverty in Sufism (London, 1984) p. 21. For a comprehensive selection of the descriptions concerning faqr, faqir, dervish, and Sufi in the Sufi literature see ibid, pp.1-62.
[11] See, e.g., Hujwiri, p. 18.
[12] Shaikh Saadi, Gulistan, Hertford, 1863, p.47.
[13] Ibn Arabi, Turjuman al-Ashwaq, ed. & trans. R. A. Nicholson, Beruit, 1966, p . 115.
[14] Yogi here also implies sanyasi, bhikshu, sadhu etc.
[15] Louis Dumont, ‘World Renunciation in Indian Religions,’ Contributions to Indian Sociology,, No. 4, 1960, p. 47.
[16] Cf. ibid. pp. 46-7.
[17] Cf. Tara Chand, Influence of Islam on Indian Culture (Allahabad, 1976), pp. 26 & 35-7. Ali Hujwari, the patriarch of Indian Sufism, it may be recalled, settled in Lahore during this period.
[18] S. A. A Rizvi, A History of Sufism in India, Vol. ! (New Delhi, 1978), p. 117; Yusuf Husain, Glimpses of Medieval Indian Culture (Bombay, 1962) p.37
[19] K. A. Nizami, Some Aspects of Religion and Politics in India During the Thirteenth Century (Bombay, 1961), p. 184-5.
[20] Ibid.
[21] Ibid., ‘Iltutmush the Mystic,’ Islamic Culture, Vol. XX, 1946, p. , 173.
[22] Ibid p .175.
[23] See his correspondence with Bahauddin Zakariya in Abdul Haq, op.cit.
[24] The autonomy of faqr viz-a-viz the kingship was illustrated by Saadi in an anecdote. A certain pious one saw in a dream certain king in heaven while a dervish in hell. When he inquired about it he was told that king was in paradise for his proximity to the dervish, and the dervish was in hell for his closeness with the king. Saadi, op. cit., p. 54.
[25] Nizami, 1961, p. 190.
[26] Ibid. p. 191.
[27] For the discussion of the controversy over the authorship of the verses attributed to Farid see Akhlaq Hussain Dehlawi, ‘The Poetical Work of Baba Farid,’ Journal of Sikh Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1, 1978, and B. S. Anand, Baba Farid (New Delhi, 1975), pp. 34-43.
[28] H. Singh Shan, So Said Sheikh Farid (Chandigarh, 1974), p. 53.
[29] Ibid. p. 56-7.
[30] Lawrence, op. cit., p. 24.
[31] A. H. Sijzi, Fawaid ul-Fuad, Urdu trans. M. Sarwar. (Lahore, 1973), p. 56.
[32] Ibid., p. 56-7.
[33] Ibid., p. 169.
[34] Ibid., p.111
[35] Cf., e.g., ibid., pp.111, 339, 419.
[36] Ibid., p. 78.
[37] Nizami, 1985, p. 80.
[38] Haq, p. 125.
[39] Sijzi, p. 309.
[40] Quoted by M. Habib in The political theory of the Delhi Sultanante, including a translation of Ziauddin Barani's Fatawa-i Jahandari, circa 1358-9 A.D. (Allahabad, 1960), p. 134.
[41] Nizami, op. cit., p. 80.
[42]Sijzi, p. 165.
[43] Ibid.
[44] For a brief discussion of the subject see Z. H. Zaidi, ‘Conversion to Islam in South Asia: Problems in Analysis’, The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences, Vol. 6, No. 1, September 1989, pp. 102-15.
[45] See for instance Elliot & Dowson, The History of India as Told by its Historians, Vol. 11, London, 1873, p. 184; Barani, in M. Habib, pp. 5-6, 46-7.
[46] Cf. R. Thapar, A History of India, Vol. 1 (Penguin Books, 1966), p. 302.
[47] Nizami, 1961, p. 318.
[48] A. Munslow, Deconstructing History. 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 28.
[49] Plato, Laws: 886a, in his Complete Works, ed, by J. M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hacket Publishing Co, 1997) In Timaeus Greeks are characterised as ‘those whose begetting and nurture were divine.’ (24d) In Phaedo, Socrates says that ‘the one aim of those who practice philosophy in the proper manner is to practice for dying and death.’ (Ibid., 64) Later he declares: ‘No one may join the company of the gods who has not practiced philosophy. [Ibid., 82c)
So Xenophon, the other important contemporary source for Socrates besides Plato, in a brilliant exposition of Greek mind, wrote in The Dinner-Party (Plato’s Symposium):
Well, its quite plain that both Greeks and non-Greeks believe that the gods know everything that is, and will be; at any rate all states and all peoples inquire of the gods by means of divination what they ought and ought not to do.. Next, its also clear that we believe they can do us both good and harm; at least, everyone asks the gods to avert what is evil and grant what is good. Well, these omniscient and omnipotent gods are such good friends to me that, because of their concern for me, I am never beyond their notice night or day, wherever I am bound and whatever I intend to do. And because of their foreknowledge, that indicate to me the result of every action, sending me messages by utterances, dreams and omens to tell me what I ought to do and what I ought not; and when I obey these, I am never sorry for it, but when I have sometimes disobeyed in the past, I have been punished for it.
Most instructively, this is not Socrates who is saying this, but one of his interlocutors, Hermogenes. Socrates responds by saying: “Well, there is nothing incredible in this. [This is because Socrates himself was guided by his god through his voice whose approval he sought in all his actions]. But I would be glad to know what sort of service you render them to keep them so friendly to you.” Xenophon, Conversations of Socrates (Penguin, 1990), p. 248.
[50] Shuja Alhaq, op.cit.
[51] J. H. Plumb, The Death of the Past (New York: Palgrave, 2004 [1969]).
[52] The findings, with reference to both Islamic and Hindu pre-modern civilizations, are presented on a larger canvas in Shuja Alhaq, op.cit.
[53] For a brief treatment of the rise of modernity see Shuja Alhaq, ‘Islam and Modernity: Towards a New Paradigm,’ The Historian, Vol. 4, No. 1, 2006, pp. 50-64.
[54] For the substitution of past with history though in European, Christian context, see J. H. Plumb, op.cit.
[55] See, for instance, the just issued report by US National Intelligence Council, ‘Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World,’ on www.dni.gov/nic/NIC_2025_project.html
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)