dimension would in any way invalidate the Quran’s ‘exoteric’ sharia.
This is clear enough from the passage’s own exhortation to follow
all of the foundational ‘clear verses’ rather than being perversely
driven to obscure interpretation based on the mysterious ones. In
conclusion, we see that there is no “true and limitless meaning of the Quran” to be fathomed by Muslims, as Ayoub describes the Shiite
batin.17 If there is an ‘essence’ of Islam at al , it is concerned with a profound inner faith characterized by holy dread of Judgment and
perpetual remembrance of God, one that does not challenge the
exoteric dogmas or laws of the Quran but underlies their sincere observance. There is no evidence for any other kind of esoteric
understanding of Islam in the Quran revealed through Muhammad.
Now let us lay to rest the belief that Muhammad secretly
initiated his cousin and son-in-law Ali ibn Abu Talib (4th Caliph)
into a gnostic wisdom that is passed on in a silsila or “chain” from Imam to Imam and down onto the Sufi masters and founders of
orders. The only way, if any, that this belief would be verified is if the vast corpus of sermons of Ali testified to his mystical understanding.
Quite to the contrary Ali’s Nahjul Balagha shows just how literal y he subscribes to all of the most ridiculous and barbaric dogmas of
the Quran.
In Sermon 1 Ali describes how Al ah kneaded and molded
Adam from different kinds of clay, dried him and blew into him to
animate his mind and limbs. He then describes how all of the angels
bowed to Adam at Al ah’s command, except for Iblis (Satan) – at
17 Ayoub, “The Speaking Qur’an and the Silent Qur’an”, 182.
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which point he explicitly quotes the Quran. Ali then continues to describe Adam’s temptation by Iblis and his fall from Paradise, in
which Al ah “sent him down to the place of trial and procreation of
progeny” and promised him an ultimate return to the garden by way
of pious action. There is nothing mystical about this at al . Neither
is there anything mystical about Ali’s literal belief in the Quranic
vision of Judgment Day and the resurrection. In Sermon 82 he says that “Al ah would bring them [people] out from the corners of the
graves”, whereupon the resurrected will “run towards the place fixed
for their final return, group by group, quiet, standing and arrayed
in rows.” Final y, their “…ears would resound with the thundering
voice of the announcer calling towards the final judgment, award of
recompense, striking of punishment and paying of reward.” Later in
the same sermon Ali emphasizes perpetual fear of God (rather than
divine love) as the proper state of the true believer: “O’ creatures of Al ah, fear Al ah, like the fearing of the wise man whom the thought
(of the next world) has turned away from other matters, fear (of
Al ah) has afflicted his body with trouble and pain, his engagement
in the night prayer has turned even his short sleep into awakening,
hope of eternal recompense keeps him thirsty in the day…” Ali adds:
“Certainly paradise is the best reward and achievement, and hell is
appropriate punishment and suffering.”
Hope of paradise and detailed descriptions of it that seduce the
believer into earthly piety are just as much part and parcel of Ali’s
teaching as of Muhammad’s. In Sermon 164 Ali says in light of the beauty of paradise this world and its desires and pleasures should
seem cheap to the believer, whereupon he describes in detail “the
rustling of the trees whose roots lie hidden in the mounds of musk
on the banks of the rivers in Paradise and in the attraction of the
bunches of fresh pearls in the twigs and branches of those trees, and
in the appearance of different fruits from under the cover of their
leaves. These fruits can be picked without difficulty as they come
down at the desire of their pickers. Pure honey and fermented wine
will be handed round to those who settle down in the courtyards of
its palaces.”
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Ali concludes with a statement that betrays the basis of Muslim
piety is striving for the above described delights of paradise, a desire so intense that it makes one long to leave this world and go straight
to the next: “O’ listener! If you busy yourself in advancing towards
these wonderful scenes which will rush towards you, then your heart
will certainly die due to eagerness for them, and you will be prepared to seek the company of those in the graves straight away from my
audience here and hasten towards them.” In reading such passages
we can easily understand the psychology of Muslim martyrdom, it
being the only means to in fact go straight from this cheap world
into the delights of the heavenly garden.
Ali’s views on half of humanity are most un-mystical and in line
with the barbarity of the Quran’s dark Surah on women. In Sermon 152 Ali speaks contemptuously of beasts, carnivores and women in the same breath when he says:
“Beasts are concerned with their bellies. Carnivores are
concerned with assaulting others. Women are concerned with
the adornments of this ignoble life and the creation of mischief
herein. On the other hand, believers are humble, believers are
admonishers and believers are afraid of Al ah.”
The last part of this statement takes the degradation of women even
further than the Quran by shockingly suggesting that only men
are spiritual y and intellectual y fit to be ‘believers’. Like a beast, a woman is also incapable of true faith. In Sermon 79 Ali employs a ridiculously circular argument that condemns women for the very
strictures that the Quran binds them with in the first place:
“O’ ye peoples! Women are deficient in Faith, deficient in shares
and deficient in intelligence. As regards the deficiency in their
Faith, it is their abstention from prayers and fasting during their
menstrual period. As regards deficiency in their intelligence, it is
because the evidence of two women is equal to that of one man.
As for the deficiency of their shares that is because of their share
in inheritance being half of men.”
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Ali concludes this statement with a warning to believers never to
listen to a woman or heed to her wishes, even if it seems that she
is right. This verse offers the perfect compliment to the Quran’s
infamous verse (quoted above) concerning women’s duty to obey
men because of the latter’s superiority:
“So beware of the evils of women. Be on your guard even from
those of them who are (reportedly) good. Do not obey them
even in good things so that they may not attract you to evils.”
Not only does Ali literal y reiterate and uphold every major dogma
of the Quran, he also believes that the Quran is such a perfect and complete guide that any and every bit of “innovation” outside of its
sharia is heresy and blasphemy. In Sermon 175 he writes:
…know that this Quran is an adviser who never deceives, a
leader who never misleads and a narrator who never speaks a
lie…You should also know that no one will need anything after
(gu
idance from) the Quran… Know, O’ creatures of Al ah, that a believer should regard lawful this year what he regarded lawful
in the previous year and should consider unlawful this year what
he considered unlawful in the previous year. Certainly people’s
innovation cannot make lawful for you what has been declared
unlawful; rather, lawful is that which Al ah has made lawful and
unlawful is that which Al ah has made unlawful…People are of
two categories – the follower of the shariah (religious laws), and the follower of the innovations to whom Al ah has not given any
testimony by way of sunnah or the light of any plea.
Therefore the notion that the Quran was an exoteric message of discipline for the ignorant rabble and that there is an esoteric
mystical Islam for a spiritual elite, would have been considered
total y heretical by Ali himself – never mind the preposterous and
total y unsubstantiated claim that he himself was the first initiate of this mystical tradition! After thoroughly examining the sermons of
Ali we see that beyond a shadow of a doubt he was no mystic at al .
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Not only did he subscribe completely to the dogma of Muhammad’s
Quranic revelation, he also fervently reaffirmed the eternal validity
of all its decrees. Thus the silsilat al-Irfan (chain of gnosis) breaks at its very first link, and the tradition of ‘Islamic Mysticism’ is severed from Muhammad and his Quran, in other words, from Islam itself.
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SPINOZA, THE UNTIMELY ONE
More than any other philosopher before him, Friedrich
Nietzsche considered himself a visionary and
revolutionary thinker, a man born outside of time, an
“untimely one.” In the last half-century, much scholarship
has questioned this Promethean image of Nietzsche. His debts
to Schopenhauer were well known even in his own time, and the
influence of such figures as Dostoyevsky and Emerson have since
been discerned. By comparison, the affinity of Nietzsche’s thought
with the much earlier work of Baruch Spinoza has been neglected.
This despite a number of strong indications, in Nietzsche’s published
works and private notebooks,1 that Spinoza is the one figure who by
far holds the greatest title to being Nietzsche’s predecessor.
In section 475 of Human, All-too-Human, Nietzsche is arguing
against anti-Semitism.2 He claims that it is the Jews “to whom we
owe the noblest human being (Christ), the purest philosopher
(Spinoza), the mightiest book, and the most effective moral code in
the world.” This is all the more remarkable because the Jews are “a
people which, not without guilt on all our parts, has had the most
sorrowful history of all people,” persecuted by all nations on account of their being perceived as threatening because of “their energy and
higher intelligence, their capital of spirit and wil .”
1 Friedrich Nietzsche, Writings from the Late Notebooks (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
2 Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (University of Nebraska Press, 1984).
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In section 408 of Mixed Opinions and Maxims, Nietzsche lists
Spinoza as one of eight thinkers in terms of which his own thinking
unfolds and who have the right to judge his work from beyond the
grave. He writes:
“With these I must come to terms when I have long wandered
alone; they may call me right and wrong; to them will I listen
when in the process they call each other right and wrong.
Whatsoever I say, resolve, or think up for myself and others – on
these eight I fix my eyes and see their eyes fixed on me. May the
living forgive me that occasional y they appear to me as shades, so pale and somber, so restless and, alas, so lusting for life – while those men then seem so alive to me…”
In a later notebook entry Nietzsche revises the list, writing: “My
ancestors: Heraclitus, Empedocles, Spinoza, Goethe”.3 Heraclitus and
Schopenhauer are usual y cited as the two philosophers who had
the greatest impact on Nietzsche, and who might be considered his
predecessors. Interestingly, Heraclitus fails to appear on the first list, while Schopenhauer, who does appear on the first list, is dropped
in the second. Nietzsche never seriously engages with Epicurus,
Montaigne or Pascal (from the first list), nor with Empedocles (from
the second), and his extensive comments about Plato and Rousseau
(cited in the first list) are almost completely critical and negative.
The only two thinkers present in both lists are Spinoza and Goethe.
Goethe is not a philosopher in the strictest sense, so this leaves us
with Nietzsche suggesting that, of all philosophers, Spinoza is the
most intimately related to him.
In a third list of greatest thinkers and kindred spirits, which
appears in Nietzsche’s notebooks from the period of the Gay
Science, Spinoza alone appears of the figures from the first and second lists and is now equated with the likes of the founders of the
world-religions (and of Nietzsche himself!): “In that which moved
3 Walter Kaufmann, Basic Works of Friedrich Nietzsche (New York: The Modern Library, 1992), 159.
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Zarathustra, Moses, Mohammed, Jesus, Plato, Brutus, Spinoza,
Mirabeau – I live too.”4
A letter of July 30, 1881, written by Nietzsche to Franz Overbeck,
may be the clearest single piece of evidence for his debt to Spinoza,
or at least proof of a strong affinity with this predecessor. Here
Nietzsche clearly states that he and Spinoza are in agreement on five
main points, the denial of: 1) free-will; 2) purpose; 3) the moral world order; 4); the un-egoistic; and 5) the existence of evil. Nietzsche
writes:
I am real y amazed, real y delighted! I have a precursor! I hardly
knew Spinoza: what brought me to him now was the guidance
of instinct. Not only is his whole tendency like my own…in five
main points of his doctrine I find myself; this most abnormal
and lonely thinker is the closest to me in these points precisely:
he denies free wil , purposes, the moral world order, the
nonegoistical, evil; of course the differences are enormous, but
they are differences more of period, culture, field of knowledge.
As we shall see, this is no exaggeration. Spinoza anticipates nearly
every major aspect of Nietzsche’s thought. There are more than
25 significant references to Spinoza in the course of Nietzsche’s
published works and private notes. I will focus on those of them that
underline the affinity of Nietzsche and Spinoza, as the majority of
critical remarks on Spinoza antedate Nietzsche’s own claim (in 1881)
that the differences between the two thinkers are superficial and are
far outweighed by the fundamental similarities.
Let us begin with a comparison of the respective views of
Spinoza and Nietzsche on the relationship between the Mind and
Body. Spinoza believes that the Mind is an idea of the Body.5 It is not a simple idea representing a coherently unified body, but a complex
4 Walter Kaufmann, The Gay Science (New York: Random House, 1974), 151.
5 Benedict de Spinoza, A Spinoza Reader: The Ethics
and Other Works (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), Ethics 2:13.
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of ideas whose ‘objects’ ( ideatum) are diverse bodily processes.6
Thus the relationship between Mind and Body is more intimate
than a mere causality, wherein either the movements of the Body
would depend on the ideas of the Mind, or bodily processes would
determine these mental ideas. Instead, forging beyond both idealist
and materialist reductionism, while at the same time avoiding
Cartesian dualism, Spinoza holds that: “the mind and the body are
one and the same thing, which is conceived now under the attribute
of thought, now under the attribute of extension.”7
This is essential y the same way that Nietzsche conceives of
the relationship between mind and body, though in very different
language. It is often assumed that Nietzsche reduced the Mind to
an effect of bodily drives. This is the sense that we get from passages like the following, from sections 489 and 491 of the Will to Power:
“Thinking is for us a means not of ‘knowing’ but of describing an
event, ordering it, making it available for our use… [and] belief in the body is more fundamental than belief in the soul… the body is the richer, clearer, more comprehensible phenomenon: to be
placed first methodological y.”8 Such passages can be very deceptive,
because Nietzsche’s use of the language of the body is polemical and
is not indicative of biological reductionism. This becomes clear in
the following passage from section 552 in the Will to Power:
There are no opposites: only from those of logic do we derive
the concept of opposites – and falsely transfer it to things… If
we give up the concept “subject” and “object”, then also the
concept “substance” – and as a consequence also the various
modifications of it, e.g., “matter”, “spirit”, and other hypothetical
entities, “the eternity and immutability of matter,” etc. We have
got rid of materiality.”
Here we see Nietzsche reject both a spiritual and a materialistic
interpretation of the world, going beyond both idealism and
6 Ibid.,
Ethics 2:15.
7 Ibid.,
Ethics 2:21, Scholium.
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