by Ed Husain
I was in Cordoba one day at the home of the judge Abu al-Walid Ibn Rushd [Averroes]. He had been astonished when he heard about the illumination that God had bestowed upon me, and expressed a desire to meet me. Since my father was one of his friends, he found some excuse to send me to his house. At the time, I was a young boy with no hair on my face, not even a moustache. When I was led to him, he [Averroes] stood up, showed his affection and consideration, and kissed me. Then he said to me: ‘Yes.’ I, in turn, said: ‘Yes.’ His joy increased upon seeing that I understood what he was referring to. Thus, upon realising the reason for his joy, I added: ‘No.’ He cringed, lost his colour, and was overcome with doubt. ‘So, what have you found through the lifting of the veil and divine inspiration? Is it identical to what speculative thought gives us?’ I replied: ‘Yes and no; between yes and no, spirits take to flight and necks are detached from their bodies.’1
This meeting of great minds and the incomprehensible exchange between them was the first of many such encounters for Ibn Arabi. Throughout, his life continued to twist and turn to higher planes, and to some low points as well. His regular visions and dreams of the Prophet Mohamed guided him from place to place and role to role, leading Ibn Arabi to claim that he was the ‘supreme heir to Mohamed’.
And yet he had, like many Sufis, a special inclination toward the spiritual Jesus. In al-Futuhat al-Makkiya (The Meccan Revelations), a book of recollections of his metaphysical experiences while spending time in Mecca, Ibn Arabi wrote about Jesus: ‘Jesus was my first master on the way; it was in his hands that I was converted. He watches over me at all hours, not leaving me for a second.’ He stated in all candour that: ‘I often met him in my visions; it was with him that I repented ... He commanded me to practise asceticism and renunciation.’ Ibn Arabi went on to reveal how, step by step on the spiritual path, he took instructions from Jesus on separating himself from worldly concerns, desires and attachments, and threw himself into the fire of divine love – in Rumi’s words, becoming ‘burnt’.
All Muslims see Jesus as a great and beloved prophet of God, but not as God’s son. Ibn Arabi, firmly within this tradition of revering but not worshipping Jesus, claimed direct guidance from Jesus through visions and dreams. To this day, Ibn Arabi’s shrine in Damascus draws Christian visitors. When I lived in Syria, I regularly spent time sitting beside Ibn Arabi’s resting place, and absorbing the energy and presence that still encompass his tomb and mosque. Sometimes Christian friends came with me; at other times they were already there.
In addition to being a lover and follower of Jesus, and receiving guidance from Mohamed at key moments in his life, Ibn Arabi remains famous among Muslims for his miracles and books, and, most of all, for enunciating the controversial creed of Wahdat al-Wujood, ‘Oneness of Being’ – an attempt to explain Ibn Arabi’s highly complex understanding of the relationship between ‘being’ and God. For centuries, scholars have debated furiously what Shaikh Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi meant by this tenet of Oneness of Being, and the debate still rages to this day.
An early Muslim polymath, Ibn Arabi is difficult to comprehend even for the most advanced philosophers. His approach to God was unorthodox, but he articulated what many Sufi Muslims believed and felt. These passages from the Futuhat help explain his thinking:
The universe is neither pure Being nor pure nothingness. It is total magic: it makes you think that it is God and it is not God; it makes you think that it is creation and it is not creation, for in every respect it is neither this nor that.
Regarding the realities of the universe, one cannot say that they are God nor that they are other than Him/God.
If you say regarding the universe that it is real, you are speaking truthfully; if you say that it is illusory, you are not lying.
Everything we perceive is the Being of God in the essences of the possible. From the point of view of ipseity, it is His Being; from the point of view of diversity of forms ...
Many people who followed Ibn Arabi, whose simple minds expected God to be a ‘good guy in the sky’, found it difficult to accept these extraordinary statements as orthodox.
But Ibn Arabi was at a different level of Muslim spirituality – what he saw and perceived, others did not. His was the heart that the Prophet spoke about when quoting God as saying: ‘My heavens and My earth do not contain me, but the heart of My believing servant contains me.’ In another of his sayings the Prophet again quoted God – and Ibn Arabi’s understanding of Islam reflected this Prophetic wisdom – as saying: ‘I am as my servant perceives me to be.’ For those who see God as near and intimate, God is so. For those who see God as far and distant, such is God.
The Prophet continued, still speaking in God’s words: ‘He whom I love, I am the eye with which he sees, the ears with which he listens.’ Ibn Arabi explained that just as water necessarily reflects the colour of its container, so theophanies are conditioned by the container that receives them and whose form they take on. Therefore each individual knows and recognises only that god that she or he contains, the god that Ibn Arabi calls the ‘god created by belief’.
For the Sufi, God is beyond belief. The Quran teaches: ‘Wherever you turn, there is the Face of God’, and for Ibn Arabi, based on these verses and hadiths of the Prophet, ‘all sensible and intelligible forms are His places of manifestation’. To Ibn Arabi and millions of his followers, ‘every reality in the world is a sign that orients us toward a divine reality, which is the basis of its existence and the place of its return’. Ibn Arabi declared: ‘God possesses a face in everything that is worshipped’, and, shocking to some: ‘God is that which is worshipped.’ Whichever religion people follow, and whatever objects they seem to worship, they never worship anything or anybody other than God, whether they are conscious of this or not.
This, then, being his theological background, Ibn Arabi is remembered to this day across the Muslim world for these verses that he wrote in Mecca – for, like Rumi, Ibn Arabi found God in love:
My heart has become capable of all forms:
a prairie for gazelles, a convent for monks,
a temple for idols, a Ka’bah for the pilgrim,
the Tablets of the Torah, the Book of the Quran.
I profess the religion of Love, and regardless of which direction
Its steed may lead, Love is my Religion and my Faith.2
Ibn Arabi’s mystical insights and unveilings led him to utter statements that upset those around him who could not see what he saw, or understand what he perceived. It was this same spiritual power that led to his being stoned and fatally injured for saying: ‘The God you worship is under my feet.’ Like all Sufi masters down the ages, Ibn Arabi saw not just people’s bodies and behaviour but deep into their souls. Like them he looked to what lay within, rather than obsessing over ‘creed’ and ‘practice’ as the literalists do.
And so when Ibn Arabi stood at the door of the mosque, he saw people who had gathered for worldly motives: to be seen at the mosque, to impress others, to network, to earn a reputation for being an upright kind of merchant. Their ultimate aim was not to connect with the Almighty, the Divine, but to increase their profits and their wealth – a false god in Ibn Arabi’s eyes, and a god that Jesus had taught him to renounce.
After his death, Ibn Arabi’s students remembered the steps on which he had been standing when he insulted the gathered Muslims by saying their god was under his feet. They knew their master had spoken a transcendent truth. So they dug up the ground below the steps, and found a chest of gold, buried years previously by a merchant seeking to hide his wealth during imperial raids on Damascus. It was this chest that Ibn Arabi had seen, this wealth being treated as a god that he had spoken out against.
It is significant that today Ibn Arabi’s books, written over 700 years ago, are banned in Salafi-controlled Saudi Arabia. Combined with Rumi’s love for God, Ibn Arabi’s powerful, religiously rooted, scripturally sound interpretation of the meaning of God helps modern Muslims come to terms wi
th the contemporary world and lead lives of greater harmony with our surroundings, free from the burdens of formulaic faith, fear, hypocrisy and conflict.
18
Rights of the Sacred
The Prophet was returning from battle with a large group of his companions. The Muslims had suffered huge losses. As they approached their homes in Medina, the people of the city came out to welcome them. A woman walked toward the soldiers and looked at them intensely. Her son had joined the fight. Others assumed that she had come out to comfort him. The warriors saw her and were afraid to tell her news that her son had fallen in combat. Abruptly, she started to smile, and to raise her hands and face toward the heavens in thanksgiving.
‘The Prophet of God is alive! The Prophet of God is with us!’ she called to the people. When someone whispered to her that her son was not, she replied that she came out for the Prophet, not her son. And her son was now in paradise, and that for the next battle, her other son would join the Prophet.
She was prepared to see her own sons be martyrs rather than see harm befall the Prophet of God. Such was the love imbibed for the sacred within Islam. Muslims grow up reading about and listening to elders and preachers tell us these incidents of our glorious past. Such noble wisdom and living for a higher purpose can be elevating, but extremists can exploit it.
Our dominant global culture is that of liberal humanism, where we advance individual human rights as supreme. But other societies, particularly the Muslim world, retain and treasure a worldview that is different. Nowhere is the contrast sharper and more violent than on rights to blaspheme and insult God, the prophets and the scriptures. Muslims still place the divine above the human. When Imam Ali, the fourth caliph, was in a battle and he had subdued his enemy and was about to kill him, the angry combatant spat in his face. The affronted Imam Ali raised his sword higher for the death blow, and then all at once he stopped, and withdrew.
‘What happened?’ asked his opponent, getting up from under Imam Ali. ‘You could kill me, but you walk away?’
Imam Ali, wiping away the foe’s saliva, replied: ‘I came to war to defend the honour of God. You oppose Him, not me. I was killing you as an enemy of the Creator, but when you spat at me my anger was no longer for God, but for myself. You had insulted me, and for that I cannot kill you.’
Touched by Imam Ali’s sincerity, selflessness and spiritual clarity, his adversary became his ally and became a Muslim. This incident has been known and taught among Muslims for fifteen centuries. It is this same chivalry that formed the moral character of Saladin when he sent his own doctors to help Richard I. Their fight was about the sacred, not the egos of men. And in our own time, at an ugly and indefensible level, the same fight continues.
It is ugly because now there is no restraint on Imam Ali’s kind, but the impulse to preserve and defend the divine remains alive. When the Prophet Mohamed built his life and city with the mosque at its epicentre, a Bedouin entered and urinated in this most sacred of places. The Prophet’s companions were angered by this violation and wanted to punish the nomad, but the Prophet’s response was to clean the mosque and show compassion to the Bedouin. The Prophet possessed an inner confidence in his conviction in the sacred purpose that allowed for such magnanimity. Today’s Muslim world has the conviction, but lacks the confidence. How is this inner confidence to return?
Salman Rushdie’s book The Satanic Verses did not warrant mass protests, the killing of his translators, or his going into hiding for years. The Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh deserved to live, despite his anti-Islam films. Muslims should have ignored the Danish cartoons by Jyllands-Posten. The Charlie Hebdo journalists gunned down in 2015 by terrorists for its caricatures of the Prophet were offensive, hurtful even to believers, but they had not earned death.
During the lifetime of the Prophet he faced worse insults than cartoons, accusations of witchery, forgery, lies, torture and attacks on him and his followers. When he negotiated the treaty of Hudaybiyyah with the Meccan pagans, a ten-year period of respite from their attacks, the Prophet’s scribe introduced the covenant with: ‘In the name of God, most compassionate, most merciful. This is an agreement between Mohamed, the Emissary of God, and the leaders of Mecca ...’ The Meccans accepted reference to God, but rejected ‘most compassionate, most merciful’ and Mohamed as ‘Emissary of Allah’. They rejected, in short, his entire raison d’être. His response was to accept their rejection because he sought peace in society, and not fighting and killing.
Again, he had the confidence of his convictions: he did not require constant validation from his enemies. Today, Muslim activists feel slighted when their perceived enemies among the unbelieving Danes, Dutch or Americans reject and mock the Prophet. In the past, it was the caliphate or Muslim leadership that responded to, or mostly ignored, these assaults. In modern times, it was Voltaire who initiated this tradition with his play Mahomet. Interestingly, it was Napoleon who defended the Prophet and Omar, the second caliph. Muslims did not send assassins to kill Voltaire because they had the confidence to ignore him and knew that the Quran forbids such vigilante violence. Now, the absence of leadership and decline has increased the sensitivity to protecting the sacred, even by going to extremes and violating the verdicts of scripture.
Muslims cling on to the kernel of their worldly identity, their treasure of faith. They have seen the successes and failures of Europe: the outcome of enlightenment and renaissance is a secularism distant from the divine, a culture that places modern man as sovereign at the centre of society. That sort of spiritual emptiness, when contrasted with the richness of religious meaning, is seen to be a life not worth living, devoid of greater purpose, but maintaining mere materialism. Amidst this, when in Muslim societies voices rise to promote atheism, mock the Muslim faith, or denigrate the Prophet, the response is fast and often violent because religious leaders fear that unless blasphemy is punished, then eventually French-style laïcité and godlessness may creep into the Muslim world. Worse, advocates of religious freedom are seen as agents of godlessness.
In Pakistan’s Punjab in 2011, the governor of the largest region, Salman Taseer, was shot dead by his own bodyguard for supporting a Christian woman and agreeing to reverse Pakistan’s murderous blasphemy laws. In 2012, a YouTube film denigrating Islam and the Prophet Mohamed led to mob attacks and arson on US embassies in Egypt and Tunisia, and deaths in Afghanistan. Turkish and Indonesian political leaders lobbied the UN with support from a fifty-seven-member bloc of countries, the Organisation of Islamic Co-operation (OIC), to create a global law forbidding criticism of religion, similar to Pakistan’s blasphemy laws. A 2013 Pew poll of thirty-eight Muslim countries showed that 88 per cent of Muslims in Egypt and 76 per cent in Pakistan favour the death penalty for those who leave Islam. The number was 17 per cent in Turkey. Only 6 per cent of Russian Muslims, in contrast, felt that ex-Muslims should be killed. In Egypt in 2014, for Facebook posts criticising Islam an activist was arrested for atheism. In Saudi Arabia, a blogger was arrested and whipped. In Bangladesh, at least five bloggers have been hacked to death in 2015. In 2016, eight people were burned to death in Zamfara in Nigeria after a student made unwelcome remarks about Islam and the Prophet Mohamed.
This practice of confronting critics violently will continue unless we in the wider world disown it both intellectually and legally. Muslim activists, and particularly Islamist extremists among them, feel that this global fight for their faith is worth every drop of their blood. They wish to use the law to suppress choice. Even if there was something Haram or forbidden in asking questions and seeking a new or different faith, it is not the business of government bureaucrats to assist extremists by making Haram and Halal equate to legal and illegal. Those of us that oppose them must advance better arguments (see below). Currently, Islam seems strong and muscular in public life because of the real fear of death and destruction awaiting Muslim dissenters, but for how much longer can this be sustained? Without freedom, not long. The attraction of Islam lies in
the simplicity of its message of worship of one God, a preserved Quran, an honoured Prophet, a celebrated family life, and emphasis on the soul’s journey to a next life: these are all threatened by the brutality of the blasphemy laws.
This is not an academic argument for me. Aged thirteen, I marched against Salman Rushdie’s book The Satanic Verses in central London, and thereby supported the Iranian fatwa calling for his death. Today, almost thirty years later, my view has changed for the following six reasons.
First, the Prophet Mohamed was the subject of the most slanderous poetry in his own lifetime – the seventh-century Arabian equivalent of today’s YouTube videos, newspaper cartoons and bestselling fiction. Almost always, he ignored the popular hatred. In Medina, when he was the head of a small city-state, not only did he forgive the Bedouin who urinated in his mosque, he showed compassion to those who betrayed him. Among his greatest enemies was Abdullah bin Ubayy, a leader of factions pitted against the Prophet, and yet when Ubayy died a natural death, the Prophet mourned and offered to lead the funeral prayers. After thirteen years of oppression and eight years of war, the Prophet pardoned his adversaries, among them Wahshi, a hired spearman in war, who killed the Prophet’s beloved maternal uncle, Hamza. He forgave Hind, a maddened woman who chewed the dead Hamza’s liver to show public vengeance for the death of her husband in a previous battle. Among the bloodthirsty ancient Arabs, the compassion of the Prophet stemmed from a conviction and a confidence in his faith. Little wonder, then, that the Quran describes him as ‘a mercy unto the worlds’.
Second, several early companions of the Prophet left Islam and Medina, and returned to Mecca to the worship of their old ways; the Prophet left them alone. A prominent example of this leaving Islam and returning to Mecca was Abdullah Ibn Abi Sarh. There were neither angry sermons, nor calls for his death. Unless there was active treachery or betrayal of state secrets, early Muslims were free to enter or leave Islam. There is no Quranic punishment for apostasy. Now, it is true that all four schools of Muslim jurisprudence, the Madhabs, prescribe death as punishment for apostasy; but in the medieval period in which the schools were developed they interpreted treason and apostasy as being the same. They intended to confront active subversion of early Islam and public enmity toward Muslims. In today’s world, many who leave Islam do not wish it harm – they simply leave in peace. So just as the Prophet left many apostates alone, contemporary Muslims should learn to accept that people can and will leave Islam and become former Muslims, and that freedom to do so does not warrant their death.