Muslim activist takes on his group's critics
By Noreen Ahmed-Ullah
Chicago Tribune staff reporter
Published March 25, 2007
The nation's largest Muslim advocacy group, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, has come under increasingly heated suspicion from critics trying to connect it to a radical Islamist political agenda and even link it to terrorist groups.
The group held a panel discussion in a U.S. Capitol meeting room March 13 over the objections of House Republicans.
Ahmed Rehab, 30, is executive director of the group's Chicago office. He joined CAIR in 2004 as spokesman for the Chicago office and was promoted last year. Following is an edited transcript of a recent e-mail conversation with him.
Q. Why have an advocacy group in the U.S. like CAIR?
A. To accurately inform the American public about Islam and Muslims where misconceptions are rampant; to advocate for the civil rights of Americans who suffer discrimination, hate crimes and other violations for no other reason than being Muslim or being perceived as such ... to encourage Muslims to be active civic participants where they are politically marginalized; and to build coalitions and partnerships with other community organizations.
Q. What are some recent projects launched by the group?
A. Nationally, CAIR projects include the Muslim Care campaign, which encourages Muslims to volunteer in their communities. Local projects include the Employment Discrimination Project, which advises victims on their rights as employees; the Youth Leadership Symposium, which promotes civic responsibility among Muslim students; and the CAIR-Chicago Voter Education Guide 2006...
Q. What is the source of the latest criticism/accusations being launched against CAIR at the national level?
A. Every one of the dozen or so urban legends about CAIR that are circulating out there can be traced back to a single and homogenous source of interlinked individuals and groups with such deceptively benign names as the Investigative Project, the Middle East Forum, Jihad Watch and Americans Against Hate. These groups typically flourish in the unmoderated, chaotic world of the blogosphere; they attempt to sell themselves to political and media circles as experts on Islam and terrorism and as patriots who are looking out for American interests. A second look exposes them as career Islamophobes who are deathly afraid of Muslim-American enfranchisement and its possible effects on the Israeli lobby's interests.
(CAIR put up a document directly addressing all these urban legends at: www.cair.com/urbanlegends.pdf.)
Q. Is CAIR linked with Hamas and Hezbollah?
A. No, CAIR is not associated with Hamas, Hezbollah or any other foreign group. CAIR unequivocally condemns all acts of violence against civilians by any individual, group or state.
Q. Does CAIR pursue an extremist Islamist political agenda?
A. You would have to be living under a rock to buy that. CAIR's contribution to the democratic process of this country is hard to miss. In dozens of American cities, we have helped guide Muslim Americans toward political enfranchisement: voter registration, education and mobilization.
We consistently urge our constituents to funnel political grievances to their elected representatives. Conspiracy theories will be just that, and right now, Muslims make for a convenient lightning rod.
Q. How much money has CAIR accepted from individuals or foundations associated with wealthy Arab governments such as Saudi Arabia? What has the money been used for? Why take such donations when many non-profit Islamic organizations have faced problems post-9/11 because of this?
A. All CAIR chapters, which are independent corporations, solicit contributions only from people residing in the states where they are incorporated. Neither CAIR chapters nor the national office solicits or accepts money from any foreign government.
The CAIR national office does on occasion receive donations from private citizens of foreign countries. Such donations are the exceptions, not the rule, and have to meet three conditions: They come with no strings attached, they go toward supporting existing CAIR projects ... and they come from people who have standing within their societies as upright citizens engaged in legitimate professional pursuits.
Much has been made about a $500,000 donation received by the national office from Alwaleed bin Talal. If CAIR is taken to task for this endowment (which went to buy books for U.S. public libraries), then so should Fox network, Citigroup, Four Seasons Hotels, AOL, Apple Computer, Amazon.com, Donna Karan International and Motorola. Bin Talal owns significant fiduciary interests in each of these American companies.
Q. What do you believe is the key dilemma faced by Muslims in the U.S. today?
A. Like all Americans, we have to worry about the security of our country, our communities and our children in the face of potential terror attacks. At the same time, we have to worry about being cast as scapegoats by some of our very own compatriots whose predicament we share.
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
Sunday, March 25, 2007
An Excellent Well-Researched Essay on the Importance of Following Qualified Scholarship through a School of Jurisprudence (Madhhab)
Get thee behind me, Madhhab!
By the Author of Higher-Criticism Blog http://higher-criticism.blogspot.com
July 28, 2006
There is no current of thought more tragic than the one that says fiqh, or the science of Islamic jurisprudence, is easy. Unfortunately, the idea has gained momentum amongst Muslims, who typically dismiss the notion that in order to master the science, one has to immerse himself in deep study for a number of years and emerge an accredited professional. For a word that literally means "understanding", fiqh is certainly a misunderstood science. It has become a cheap commodity in the marketplace of Islamic ideas, facilitated by online forums where participants debate by quoting directly from both Koran and hadiths (transmitted reports on the words and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad) to prove or disprove one another's positions. If a profession is this easy to master, any man or woman could dole out medical advise by having in their hands a book on common ailments and a compendium of all the drugs that have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). It's a simple matter of cross-referencing sicknesses and medicines. Or is it?
Part of the problem is how superficially (and negatively) Muslims view Madhhabs (schools of thought), from which an epic amount of fiqh rulings emanate. To accuse Muslims of having a superficial understanding of a particular aspect of Islam is of course different from the common ideological view that Muslims are practicing Islam wrongly. The latter has its roots in simple sectarianism, which in turn is fueled by the narcissistic need of all ideological movements to make themselves an exclusive club.
I would instead argue that Muslims today have too much information, but not enough tools to properly interpret, qualify and quantify it. Fiqh, in its most most basic sense, is the science of how rulings are derived from the valid sources of Islamic law, namely, the Koran, the Sunnah (the actions and practices of the Prophet Muhammad), the consensus of scholars (ijma) and analogical deduction (qiyas). Traditionally, it has been scholars aligning themselves to either one of four Madhhabs who have perused the sacred literature and attempted to develop laws from them.
However, three factors have conspired to foster a dramatic reversal. First, the burgeoning literacy amongst Muslims. Second, the enormous explosion in the printing of the Koran and hadiths. Third, the wide range of languages into which these primary sources have been translated.
All three factors in turn promote the belief that an individual has reached, or at least is in the vicinity of, a pinnacle of knowledge. If all this sounds suspiciously like the Enlightenment ideas of eighteenth-century Europe, you wouldn't be that far off the track. Almost the entire Islamic world was once fair game for European colonialist ambitions, whose expansion came in the wake of policies that subjugated people, exploited natural resources and shattered unity. British colonial administrators were shrewd enough to focus on a critical pillar of society, namely education. Thus, one of the first things they did when they conquered a Muslim country was to supplant traditional Islamic education with one that had a western empirical bias. Colonized Muslims learnt from very early on that in order to obtain the best salaries, they had to get themselves employed by the civil service, and the only way to attain that was through schools run with an European setup.
More decisive than the three factors was perhaps the personality that was formed by the European schools. The mind lost its elasticity to think in in the vertical plane, directing itself toward more logical and discursive modes of thought. Instead of looking at physical phenomenon imaginatively, Muslims began to strip an object of all its emotive associations and concentrate on the thing itself. The legitimacy of traditional practices like visiting the Prophet's grave in Medina, for example, began to be questioned, by some groups more than others. On hindsight, it is easy to see how such an environment had been fully anticipated by the colonial agenda. It is therefore no coincidence that the discrediting of Madhhabs and its traditions began in earnest at precisely the same point in time.
The main grouse was not aimed at Madhhabs per se, but the devotion that almost all Muslims had for their respective Madhhabs. Like Zionism was to Orthodox Judaism, this grouse at first belonged to a fringe group that was largely dismissed by the majority. As it became clearer that the traditionalists were unable to deal effectively with modernity's onslaught, the fringe group grew in size and influence. Historical factors were beginning to stack up against the normative practice of Islam transmitted through the Four Schools.
Get thee behind me, Madhhab!
The call to abandon adherence to the Four Schools and instead return to the very sources of Islam is as simple as it is egalitarian. Its defenders do not explicitly disparage the Imams who founded the Madhhabs, but highlight the rhetorical fact they had merely been human beings prone to error. They like to quote the sayings of these Imams which went along the lines of, "If you find a hadith that contradicts my ruling, discard my ruling and follow the better hadith." They also conclude that since Imams Malik, Abu Hanifa, Shafi'ie and Ahmad Hanbal had all formed their schools long after the deaths of the Prophet Muhammad and the al-salaf al-salihin (Pious Predecessors), the potential for error is compounded. Naturally, true religion is to be found from the primary sources and not mere mortals, regardless of their outstanding character, faith and intelligence.
I shall pause here to examine the logic of these arguments, a package I normally call the "prime shakedown" because of its sheer universality amongst anti-Madhhab groups.
Firstly, the rhetorical device that is found in bringing up the Imams' human credentials (and its alleged propensity to err) is itself erroneous. The Madhhabs do not consist of the opinions of only one man, no matter how sterling his reputation and scholarship. Again, I hold up the superficiality of knowledge amongst Muslims as being the chief instigator of this device. Just because a particular Madhhab like Hanbal's is named after an individual Imam named Ahmad Hanbal does not mean Ahmad Hanbal is the exclusive source of all that Madhhab's wisdom. He was not even the first one to codify a set of rules, collectively and more accurately called a methodology, to approach the primary sources. What he did was gather and refine the best methods of his time into a framework that would be internally stable and transparent.
It is in this way that the four Madhhabs is said to exist in an unbroken chain to their origins for more than a thousand years, right up the Prophet himself. The scholars within each Madhhab thus number in the millions.
Naturally, to accuse a particular Madhhab of erring is really to accuse millions of scholars of erring. The implications are of course really quite horrifying and resembles somewhat the debates that early Christian scholars had on the status of men and women who were born before Jesus' apparent crucifixion. Were they saved or not? Entire nations of people would theologically belong in hell if the matter was taken to its logical conclusion.
But the principle of finding a kind of orthodoxy in what the majority believes in was established from very early on. Shaykh Rabi'a, who was Imam Malik's teacher, best summarized the principle in a comment he made on his famous student's method of using the practices of the people of Medina as sources of fiqh rulings,
"A thousand from a thousand is better than one from one."
What you see is what you get (WSIWYG)
This brings us quite nicely to the second facet of the "prime shakedown", which is the implication that Madhhabs occasionally throw up wrong rulings. Putting aside the question of whether such and such a ruling is right or wrong, the logic behind such an implication deserves some scrutiny.
Fiqh rulings are but a tiny part of what makes up a Madhhab. More substantial and ironically more concealed are the methodologies used in deriving rulings. Too often, defenders of the "prime shakedown" pronounce a judgment of "false" or "wrong" on a particular ruling without first saying what is wrong about the methodology that produced the ruling. Since Madhhabs are primarily methodologies, it is more correct to refute the methodology behind the allegedly problematic ruling. After which, rather than swap rulings, proffer a better methodology.
Needless to say, this doesn't happen a lot. Superficiality of knowledge has only intensified the flawed understanding of what a Madhhab really is. If taqleed is defined as "trust in qualified scholarship", then it is not merely a case of 'blindly following' the fatwa, or opinions, coming out of a school, but adhering to the methodology that best avoids innovation in matters of faith. The greatest proof of a Madhhab's ability to stand the rigors of time is its continued use and application through time. In this, more than anything else, nothing comes close to the Madhhabs in preserving the religion in its most pristine condition. Where dynasties and governments have gone, the Four Schools have yet to follow.
Because methodologies differ between schools, it is inevitable that they differ in rulings. What is striking is that this fact is not something that people recently stumbled upon. Differences have always been deemed a source of mercy from God, though this dogma arises from a hadith some scholars have classified as weak. However, a weak hadith does not necessarily mean the Prophet Muhammad did not utter those words. It simply means there is some doubt on either the chain of transmission or the individual quality of the narrators. Needless to say, to differ is human nature. Shaykh Muhammad Zakariyya Kandhlawi (The Differences of the Imams) explains that.
This is one of the reasons why Abu Bakr, in his speech after the death of Allah's Messenger, forbade the people from narrating hadiths, as this would have created differences and contention among the community.
We know that even the al-salaf al-salihin had keen disputes about matters of law. These contentions reached a peak during the lifetimes of many of the Imams who formulated Madhhabs, with only four surviving till this day; that of Imam Malik, Imam Shafi'ie, Imam Abu Hanifa and Imam Ahmad Hanbal.
Most orthodox teachers of Madhhabs teach that it is wrong to exploit these differences because of the potential for sectarianism. This is not saying that Madhhabs have never had their fair share of fanatical partisanship, but that it has never been an industry standard in the collective umbrella of Madhhabs known as Ahle-Sunnah-Waal-Jemaah.
Such an attitude must be contrasted with those who denounce judgments on rulings in the most superficial manner possible. At the heart of such denunciations is nothing but a reckless attempt at sectarianism; an exercise that continues to be unanimously condemned by scholars who teach from a Madhhab's framework.
Who were they talking to?
But what of the Four Imams' constant remonstrations not to take their words as law, and the call to abandon any opinion if it contrasts with a strong hadith? This question has several dimensions. Foremost in the misunderstanding of this scholarly injunction is the belief that Madhhabs are simply fatwa, rulings or opinions. The Four Imams had not intended to leave a legacy of fatwa, as evidenced by their reluctance to put their judgments down on paper, or in the case of Imam Malik, to spread his rulings beyond the borders of his hometown of Medina.
It should be noted that their true legacies lie in the methodologies they formulated in any approach to the primary sources of the Koran and hadith. This is to be differentiated from other kinds of approaches to the sacred literature. Ordinary Muslims read the Koran to obtain not only spiritual blessings, but also inspiration and knowledge. Fiqh scholars read it to obtain fiqh rulings. It is an entirely different enterprise and requires its own system of rules through which the scholars determine law. There are apparently contradictory passages in the vast body of hadith, for example, that need to be resolved through laws of abrogation. That means, a scholar must determine which passage 'replaces' the other passage. For such an activity, the scholar must acquaint himself with the historical background into which each phrase was uttered. He must also be completely proficient in the Arabic language of the Koran and also its colloquial forms, including a mastery of idioms and grammar. Yet, what I have mentioned is merely the tip of the iceberg of what any scholar who hopes to obtain fiqh from the primary sources requires. This intellectual effort- known as ijtihad- used to send the Imams into paroxysms of fear and anxiety. They knew that any judgment they make would be adhered to closely by their students and laymen.
Because Madhhabs are truly methodologies and not merely rulings, there is a certain amount of flexibility in the whole discipline. Opinions change, and should change according to the availability of hadith and the exigencies of various times and places. What remains are the methods through which these factors are subjected to, the tests and criteria. So, when the Imams left instructions to abandon a ruling if a strong hadith contradicts it, they could not have addressed it to people with no mastery of the methodologies. Fiqh is a tripartite relationship between Koran, hadith and methodology.
Actually, it has always been clear that the Imams were really admonishing their own students- who would themselves become scholars- not to abandon the quality of open-mindedness so essential to a sincere seeker of knowledge. Renewal arrives by way of an extraordinary custom that discourages any scholar who has reached the level of a mujtahid (those qualified to make ijtihad) to rely on Madhhabs and instead make his own judgments from the primary sources of the Koran and hadiths himself. However, the fact that towering intellects like Imam Nawawi and Imam Ghazali, who came far after the four Imams, chose to adhere to a Madhhab instead of forming schools of their own suggests that the mantle of the mujtahid is heavy and not often sought after.
A question of age
The last argument that defenders of the "prime shakedown" employ is that Madhhabs came long after the time of the Prophet, and consequently, should not be adhered to in place of the Prophet or the al-salaf-al-salih. The line of reasoning is disingenuous simply because of how many false things it presumes. It indirectly implies, for example, that the scholars of Madhhabs do not receive their religion from the Prophet himself, but from the Four Imams. If we take it a step further, we might even speculate on whether the Four Imams had actually based their whole corpus of rulings entirely on what is found in the Koran and the Sunnah. Again, this device can be traced to the superficial understanding that Madhhabs are just opinions. The device works because it is easy to argue that the Prophet's opinions far outweigh the Four Imams.
Nonetheless, it is predicated on a flawed understanding of Madhhabs. It simply belies all bounds of rationality to say that one has an exclusive conduit to the Prophet and the salaf-al-salih based on an outward rejection of first, a conscious adherence to a Madhhab; and second, the claim that one takes his religion instead from a direct approach to the sacred sources. Why? Because there is no such thing as a direct approach. Which is why labels like Salafi (those who claim to be following the path of the salaf-al-salih) hold no real meaning. There can be no objective reality to calling oneself a Salafi unless it is applied on all Muslims. If however there is a willful attempt to portray both the founders and the scholars of Madhhabs as somehow not being particularly zealous about receiving their knowledge from the salaf-al-salih, then the word Salafi in its cultish sense would hold true.
Nonetheless, I have always found it amusing that Muslims would find the term "Mohammedan" offensive yet accept gladly to be called a "Salafi".
Religion is essentially interpretative, even for those who are not content with just calling themselves Muslims. There can be no purpose in any framework that claims to represent most accurately the views and actions of the Prophet and his Companions without first offering an interpretative methodology.
Farid Esack (The Quran: Liberation and Pluralism) argues that,
A commonly supposed pre-suppositionless or innocent approach to understanding the Quran has no basis in the history of Tafsir or 'ulum al-Quran for all non-Prophetic human experience is essentially interpretative and mediated by culture and personality- factors which cannot be transcended...
Obviously, one of the most important criterion that the methodology must fulfill is consistency.
Consistency is something that most modern groups who operate outside the Madhhabs consistently fail in. This is unsurprising since religion is as much interpretative for the Salafis as it is for the scholar who operates within a Madhhab. The often bitter rivalry between groups who claim themselves to be Salafist in outlook, for example, presents the most elegant defense for the existence of a methodology, and also for it to be internally consistent. In fact, the Salafist bickering is entirely reminiscent of the chaotic era before the Four Imams formulated their schools. It is striking that the Kharajite movement, a secessionist cult that saw themselves as true Muslims and others as false, flourished then as it does now in some respects.
It bears repeating that superficiality of knowledge is one of the most dangerous threats facing the Muslim community today. It endorses a reductionist form of Islam that inevitably takes on a predominantly literalist flavor. How else can a superficial mind deal with the primary sources without a coherent methodology but to reach simple solutions?
Olivier Roy (Globalised Islam) notes that such an attitude typically,
...discards philosophy, literature, Sufism and any sort of sophisticated theology. The scripuralist approach (which says that one must adhere to the word of the Koran and Sunnah) by definition nullifies centuries of interpretation and debates. It justifies the de facto shrinking of religious knowledge in relation to secular knowledge and relegating it to the purely technical sphere. Hence, in order to specialise in the religious sciences, religious schools have abandoned wider learning and left it entirely to secular schools...religious knowledge is based on a technical approach to religion (dos and don'ts) that presents ibadat and fiqh as a sort of code, not based on values and spirituality.
In a very real way, Madhhabs have been too successful for their own good. Not only did they manage to preserve the core tenets of the religion through rigorous methodologies, they have also fostered a unity amongst Muslims that is seldom seen outside Islam. Sectarianism was the exception rather than the rule. Religious inquisition was seldom imposed, with Madhhabs making the religion almost self-regulatory. Madhhabs made the Muslim world into such a coherent and easily-governed force that empires and governments have constantly tried to break down the walls separating the scholars- who traditionally depended on waqf (charitable) stipends- from political concerns. They also became, ironically enough, the first things to go when European powers took control of much of the Muslim world from the eighteenth century onwards. The colonialist agenda is complete in the splintering of the Muslim community. More insidious, perhaps, is the loss of spiritual direction of many of the youths living in ghettos of both Muslim and non-Muslim lands. The consistency and personal stability offered by Madhhabs were taken away, but Muslims today are continually instructed to look for answers elsewhere. Let old ghosts die, they are told. This is where suicidal ideologies like al-Qaida's- breaking almost every single statute of the once self-regulating religion- come into the picture.
In spite of not possessing a central clergy like the Catholic Church, Madhhabs have preserved the ideal of ahle-sunnah-waal-jemaah through their acceptance of diversity. This feature is also its greatest weakness, as far as ideological attacks are concerned. The innate openness of the Madhhabs provide ideologues who want to undermine the position and authority of the Madhhabs with a rather unimaginative weapon. I say unimaginative because it does not take a genius to figure out the apparent "contradiction" of the Madhhabs' position with regards to other Madhhabs, best encapsulated in the question, "...if this ruling on prayer from Imam Shafie is correct, how can the ruling from Imam Abu Hanifa also be correct?"
It is this fact that defenders of the "prime shakedown" constantly harp on. I discussed this charge in a previous post, but no answer can either be complete or satisfactory without examining precisely how the Four Imams derived their opinions from the primary sources, especially from the vast collections of hadiths and the manner in which their chains of transmissions were evaluated. I will deal with this matter in a later article and leave you instead with a story about Imam Abu Hanifa, which helps throw light on the single-most important feature of his methodology, and how easy it is to misunderstand the intentions of even the most brilliant of scholars.
Imam Abu Hanifa explains himself
Imam Abu Hanifa lived in the city of Kufa in Iraq, known as one of the two principal sources of fiqh in the Islamic world; the other being Medina. Because he was surrounded by Muslims from the Shia persuasion, he had a special affection for the family of the Prophet Muhammad, known as the ahle-bayt. One of these was Muhammad al-Baqir, whom Imam Abu Hanifa once met in Medina.
It is reported that al-Baqir remarked to him, "Are you the one who changes the deen of my grandfather and his hadiths by analogy?" Abu Hanifa replied, "I seek refuge with Allah!"
Muhammad (al-Baqir) said, "You have changed it. Abu Hanifa said, "Sit in your place as is your right until I sit by my right. I respect you as your grandfather, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, was respected by his Companions when he was alive." He sat.
Then Abu Hanifa knelt before him and said, "I will present you with three things to answer. Who is weaker: a man of woman?"
"A woman," he (al-Baqir) replied. Abu Hanifa then asked; "What is the share of a woman?"
"A man has two shares and a woman one," he replied. Abu Hanifa said, "This is the statement of your grandfather. If I had changed the deen of your grandfather, by analogy a man would have one share and a woman two because the woman is weaker than the man."
Then he asked, "Which is better: the prayer or fasting?" "The prayer," al-Baqir replied. He said, "This is the statement of your grandfather. If I had changed the deen of your grandfather, my analogy would be that, because the prayer is better, when a woman is free of menstruation she should be commanded to make up the prayer and not make up the fast."
Then he asked, "Which is more impure: urine or sperm?" "Urine is more impure," he replied. He said, "If I had changed the deen of your grandfather by analogy, I would have ordered a ghusl for urine and wudu' for sperm. I seek refuge with Allah from changing the deen of your grandfather by analogy." Muhammad rose and embraced him and kissed his face to honour him.
[source: The Four Imams, by Muhammad Abu Zahra]
By the Author of Higher-Criticism Blog http://higher-criticism.blogspot.com
July 28, 2006
There is no current of thought more tragic than the one that says fiqh, or the science of Islamic jurisprudence, is easy. Unfortunately, the idea has gained momentum amongst Muslims, who typically dismiss the notion that in order to master the science, one has to immerse himself in deep study for a number of years and emerge an accredited professional. For a word that literally means "understanding", fiqh is certainly a misunderstood science. It has become a cheap commodity in the marketplace of Islamic ideas, facilitated by online forums where participants debate by quoting directly from both Koran and hadiths (transmitted reports on the words and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad) to prove or disprove one another's positions. If a profession is this easy to master, any man or woman could dole out medical advise by having in their hands a book on common ailments and a compendium of all the drugs that have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). It's a simple matter of cross-referencing sicknesses and medicines. Or is it?
Part of the problem is how superficially (and negatively) Muslims view Madhhabs (schools of thought), from which an epic amount of fiqh rulings emanate. To accuse Muslims of having a superficial understanding of a particular aspect of Islam is of course different from the common ideological view that Muslims are practicing Islam wrongly. The latter has its roots in simple sectarianism, which in turn is fueled by the narcissistic need of all ideological movements to make themselves an exclusive club.
I would instead argue that Muslims today have too much information, but not enough tools to properly interpret, qualify and quantify it. Fiqh, in its most most basic sense, is the science of how rulings are derived from the valid sources of Islamic law, namely, the Koran, the Sunnah (the actions and practices of the Prophet Muhammad), the consensus of scholars (ijma) and analogical deduction (qiyas). Traditionally, it has been scholars aligning themselves to either one of four Madhhabs who have perused the sacred literature and attempted to develop laws from them.
However, three factors have conspired to foster a dramatic reversal. First, the burgeoning literacy amongst Muslims. Second, the enormous explosion in the printing of the Koran and hadiths. Third, the wide range of languages into which these primary sources have been translated.
All three factors in turn promote the belief that an individual has reached, or at least is in the vicinity of, a pinnacle of knowledge. If all this sounds suspiciously like the Enlightenment ideas of eighteenth-century Europe, you wouldn't be that far off the track. Almost the entire Islamic world was once fair game for European colonialist ambitions, whose expansion came in the wake of policies that subjugated people, exploited natural resources and shattered unity. British colonial administrators were shrewd enough to focus on a critical pillar of society, namely education. Thus, one of the first things they did when they conquered a Muslim country was to supplant traditional Islamic education with one that had a western empirical bias. Colonized Muslims learnt from very early on that in order to obtain the best salaries, they had to get themselves employed by the civil service, and the only way to attain that was through schools run with an European setup.
More decisive than the three factors was perhaps the personality that was formed by the European schools. The mind lost its elasticity to think in in the vertical plane, directing itself toward more logical and discursive modes of thought. Instead of looking at physical phenomenon imaginatively, Muslims began to strip an object of all its emotive associations and concentrate on the thing itself. The legitimacy of traditional practices like visiting the Prophet's grave in Medina, for example, began to be questioned, by some groups more than others. On hindsight, it is easy to see how such an environment had been fully anticipated by the colonial agenda. It is therefore no coincidence that the discrediting of Madhhabs and its traditions began in earnest at precisely the same point in time.
The main grouse was not aimed at Madhhabs per se, but the devotion that almost all Muslims had for their respective Madhhabs. Like Zionism was to Orthodox Judaism, this grouse at first belonged to a fringe group that was largely dismissed by the majority. As it became clearer that the traditionalists were unable to deal effectively with modernity's onslaught, the fringe group grew in size and influence. Historical factors were beginning to stack up against the normative practice of Islam transmitted through the Four Schools.
Get thee behind me, Madhhab!
The call to abandon adherence to the Four Schools and instead return to the very sources of Islam is as simple as it is egalitarian. Its defenders do not explicitly disparage the Imams who founded the Madhhabs, but highlight the rhetorical fact they had merely been human beings prone to error. They like to quote the sayings of these Imams which went along the lines of, "If you find a hadith that contradicts my ruling, discard my ruling and follow the better hadith." They also conclude that since Imams Malik, Abu Hanifa, Shafi'ie and Ahmad Hanbal had all formed their schools long after the deaths of the Prophet Muhammad and the al-salaf al-salihin (Pious Predecessors), the potential for error is compounded. Naturally, true religion is to be found from the primary sources and not mere mortals, regardless of their outstanding character, faith and intelligence.
I shall pause here to examine the logic of these arguments, a package I normally call the "prime shakedown" because of its sheer universality amongst anti-Madhhab groups.
Firstly, the rhetorical device that is found in bringing up the Imams' human credentials (and its alleged propensity to err) is itself erroneous. The Madhhabs do not consist of the opinions of only one man, no matter how sterling his reputation and scholarship. Again, I hold up the superficiality of knowledge amongst Muslims as being the chief instigator of this device. Just because a particular Madhhab like Hanbal's is named after an individual Imam named Ahmad Hanbal does not mean Ahmad Hanbal is the exclusive source of all that Madhhab's wisdom. He was not even the first one to codify a set of rules, collectively and more accurately called a methodology, to approach the primary sources. What he did was gather and refine the best methods of his time into a framework that would be internally stable and transparent.
It is in this way that the four Madhhabs is said to exist in an unbroken chain to their origins for more than a thousand years, right up the Prophet himself. The scholars within each Madhhab thus number in the millions.
Naturally, to accuse a particular Madhhab of erring is really to accuse millions of scholars of erring. The implications are of course really quite horrifying and resembles somewhat the debates that early Christian scholars had on the status of men and women who were born before Jesus' apparent crucifixion. Were they saved or not? Entire nations of people would theologically belong in hell if the matter was taken to its logical conclusion.
But the principle of finding a kind of orthodoxy in what the majority believes in was established from very early on. Shaykh Rabi'a, who was Imam Malik's teacher, best summarized the principle in a comment he made on his famous student's method of using the practices of the people of Medina as sources of fiqh rulings,
"A thousand from a thousand is better than one from one."
What you see is what you get (WSIWYG)
This brings us quite nicely to the second facet of the "prime shakedown", which is the implication that Madhhabs occasionally throw up wrong rulings. Putting aside the question of whether such and such a ruling is right or wrong, the logic behind such an implication deserves some scrutiny.
Fiqh rulings are but a tiny part of what makes up a Madhhab. More substantial and ironically more concealed are the methodologies used in deriving rulings. Too often, defenders of the "prime shakedown" pronounce a judgment of "false" or "wrong" on a particular ruling without first saying what is wrong about the methodology that produced the ruling. Since Madhhabs are primarily methodologies, it is more correct to refute the methodology behind the allegedly problematic ruling. After which, rather than swap rulings, proffer a better methodology.
Needless to say, this doesn't happen a lot. Superficiality of knowledge has only intensified the flawed understanding of what a Madhhab really is. If taqleed is defined as "trust in qualified scholarship", then it is not merely a case of 'blindly following' the fatwa, or opinions, coming out of a school, but adhering to the methodology that best avoids innovation in matters of faith. The greatest proof of a Madhhab's ability to stand the rigors of time is its continued use and application through time. In this, more than anything else, nothing comes close to the Madhhabs in preserving the religion in its most pristine condition. Where dynasties and governments have gone, the Four Schools have yet to follow.
Because methodologies differ between schools, it is inevitable that they differ in rulings. What is striking is that this fact is not something that people recently stumbled upon. Differences have always been deemed a source of mercy from God, though this dogma arises from a hadith some scholars have classified as weak. However, a weak hadith does not necessarily mean the Prophet Muhammad did not utter those words. It simply means there is some doubt on either the chain of transmission or the individual quality of the narrators. Needless to say, to differ is human nature. Shaykh Muhammad Zakariyya Kandhlawi (The Differences of the Imams) explains that.
This is one of the reasons why Abu Bakr, in his speech after the death of Allah's Messenger, forbade the people from narrating hadiths, as this would have created differences and contention among the community.
We know that even the al-salaf al-salihin had keen disputes about matters of law. These contentions reached a peak during the lifetimes of many of the Imams who formulated Madhhabs, with only four surviving till this day; that of Imam Malik, Imam Shafi'ie, Imam Abu Hanifa and Imam Ahmad Hanbal.
Most orthodox teachers of Madhhabs teach that it is wrong to exploit these differences because of the potential for sectarianism. This is not saying that Madhhabs have never had their fair share of fanatical partisanship, but that it has never been an industry standard in the collective umbrella of Madhhabs known as Ahle-Sunnah-Waal-Jemaah.
Such an attitude must be contrasted with those who denounce judgments on rulings in the most superficial manner possible. At the heart of such denunciations is nothing but a reckless attempt at sectarianism; an exercise that continues to be unanimously condemned by scholars who teach from a Madhhab's framework.
Who were they talking to?
But what of the Four Imams' constant remonstrations not to take their words as law, and the call to abandon any opinion if it contrasts with a strong hadith? This question has several dimensions. Foremost in the misunderstanding of this scholarly injunction is the belief that Madhhabs are simply fatwa, rulings or opinions. The Four Imams had not intended to leave a legacy of fatwa, as evidenced by their reluctance to put their judgments down on paper, or in the case of Imam Malik, to spread his rulings beyond the borders of his hometown of Medina.
It should be noted that their true legacies lie in the methodologies they formulated in any approach to the primary sources of the Koran and hadith. This is to be differentiated from other kinds of approaches to the sacred literature. Ordinary Muslims read the Koran to obtain not only spiritual blessings, but also inspiration and knowledge. Fiqh scholars read it to obtain fiqh rulings. It is an entirely different enterprise and requires its own system of rules through which the scholars determine law. There are apparently contradictory passages in the vast body of hadith, for example, that need to be resolved through laws of abrogation. That means, a scholar must determine which passage 'replaces' the other passage. For such an activity, the scholar must acquaint himself with the historical background into which each phrase was uttered. He must also be completely proficient in the Arabic language of the Koran and also its colloquial forms, including a mastery of idioms and grammar. Yet, what I have mentioned is merely the tip of the iceberg of what any scholar who hopes to obtain fiqh from the primary sources requires. This intellectual effort- known as ijtihad- used to send the Imams into paroxysms of fear and anxiety. They knew that any judgment they make would be adhered to closely by their students and laymen.
Because Madhhabs are truly methodologies and not merely rulings, there is a certain amount of flexibility in the whole discipline. Opinions change, and should change according to the availability of hadith and the exigencies of various times and places. What remains are the methods through which these factors are subjected to, the tests and criteria. So, when the Imams left instructions to abandon a ruling if a strong hadith contradicts it, they could not have addressed it to people with no mastery of the methodologies. Fiqh is a tripartite relationship between Koran, hadith and methodology.
Actually, it has always been clear that the Imams were really admonishing their own students- who would themselves become scholars- not to abandon the quality of open-mindedness so essential to a sincere seeker of knowledge. Renewal arrives by way of an extraordinary custom that discourages any scholar who has reached the level of a mujtahid (those qualified to make ijtihad) to rely on Madhhabs and instead make his own judgments from the primary sources of the Koran and hadiths himself. However, the fact that towering intellects like Imam Nawawi and Imam Ghazali, who came far after the four Imams, chose to adhere to a Madhhab instead of forming schools of their own suggests that the mantle of the mujtahid is heavy and not often sought after.
A question of age
The last argument that defenders of the "prime shakedown" employ is that Madhhabs came long after the time of the Prophet, and consequently, should not be adhered to in place of the Prophet or the al-salaf-al-salih. The line of reasoning is disingenuous simply because of how many false things it presumes. It indirectly implies, for example, that the scholars of Madhhabs do not receive their religion from the Prophet himself, but from the Four Imams. If we take it a step further, we might even speculate on whether the Four Imams had actually based their whole corpus of rulings entirely on what is found in the Koran and the Sunnah. Again, this device can be traced to the superficial understanding that Madhhabs are just opinions. The device works because it is easy to argue that the Prophet's opinions far outweigh the Four Imams.
Nonetheless, it is predicated on a flawed understanding of Madhhabs. It simply belies all bounds of rationality to say that one has an exclusive conduit to the Prophet and the salaf-al-salih based on an outward rejection of first, a conscious adherence to a Madhhab; and second, the claim that one takes his religion instead from a direct approach to the sacred sources. Why? Because there is no such thing as a direct approach. Which is why labels like Salafi (those who claim to be following the path of the salaf-al-salih) hold no real meaning. There can be no objective reality to calling oneself a Salafi unless it is applied on all Muslims. If however there is a willful attempt to portray both the founders and the scholars of Madhhabs as somehow not being particularly zealous about receiving their knowledge from the salaf-al-salih, then the word Salafi in its cultish sense would hold true.
Nonetheless, I have always found it amusing that Muslims would find the term "Mohammedan" offensive yet accept gladly to be called a "Salafi".
Religion is essentially interpretative, even for those who are not content with just calling themselves Muslims. There can be no purpose in any framework that claims to represent most accurately the views and actions of the Prophet and his Companions without first offering an interpretative methodology.
Farid Esack (The Quran: Liberation and Pluralism) argues that,
A commonly supposed pre-suppositionless or innocent approach to understanding the Quran has no basis in the history of Tafsir or 'ulum al-Quran for all non-Prophetic human experience is essentially interpretative and mediated by culture and personality- factors which cannot be transcended...
Obviously, one of the most important criterion that the methodology must fulfill is consistency.
Consistency is something that most modern groups who operate outside the Madhhabs consistently fail in. This is unsurprising since religion is as much interpretative for the Salafis as it is for the scholar who operates within a Madhhab. The often bitter rivalry between groups who claim themselves to be Salafist in outlook, for example, presents the most elegant defense for the existence of a methodology, and also for it to be internally consistent. In fact, the Salafist bickering is entirely reminiscent of the chaotic era before the Four Imams formulated their schools. It is striking that the Kharajite movement, a secessionist cult that saw themselves as true Muslims and others as false, flourished then as it does now in some respects.
It bears repeating that superficiality of knowledge is one of the most dangerous threats facing the Muslim community today. It endorses a reductionist form of Islam that inevitably takes on a predominantly literalist flavor. How else can a superficial mind deal with the primary sources without a coherent methodology but to reach simple solutions?
Olivier Roy (Globalised Islam) notes that such an attitude typically,
...discards philosophy, literature, Sufism and any sort of sophisticated theology. The scripuralist approach (which says that one must adhere to the word of the Koran and Sunnah) by definition nullifies centuries of interpretation and debates. It justifies the de facto shrinking of religious knowledge in relation to secular knowledge and relegating it to the purely technical sphere. Hence, in order to specialise in the religious sciences, religious schools have abandoned wider learning and left it entirely to secular schools...religious knowledge is based on a technical approach to religion (dos and don'ts) that presents ibadat and fiqh as a sort of code, not based on values and spirituality.
In a very real way, Madhhabs have been too successful for their own good. Not only did they manage to preserve the core tenets of the religion through rigorous methodologies, they have also fostered a unity amongst Muslims that is seldom seen outside Islam. Sectarianism was the exception rather than the rule. Religious inquisition was seldom imposed, with Madhhabs making the religion almost self-regulatory. Madhhabs made the Muslim world into such a coherent and easily-governed force that empires and governments have constantly tried to break down the walls separating the scholars- who traditionally depended on waqf (charitable) stipends- from political concerns. They also became, ironically enough, the first things to go when European powers took control of much of the Muslim world from the eighteenth century onwards. The colonialist agenda is complete in the splintering of the Muslim community. More insidious, perhaps, is the loss of spiritual direction of many of the youths living in ghettos of both Muslim and non-Muslim lands. The consistency and personal stability offered by Madhhabs were taken away, but Muslims today are continually instructed to look for answers elsewhere. Let old ghosts die, they are told. This is where suicidal ideologies like al-Qaida's- breaking almost every single statute of the once self-regulating religion- come into the picture.
In spite of not possessing a central clergy like the Catholic Church, Madhhabs have preserved the ideal of ahle-sunnah-waal-jemaah through their acceptance of diversity. This feature is also its greatest weakness, as far as ideological attacks are concerned. The innate openness of the Madhhabs provide ideologues who want to undermine the position and authority of the Madhhabs with a rather unimaginative weapon. I say unimaginative because it does not take a genius to figure out the apparent "contradiction" of the Madhhabs' position with regards to other Madhhabs, best encapsulated in the question, "...if this ruling on prayer from Imam Shafie is correct, how can the ruling from Imam Abu Hanifa also be correct?"
It is this fact that defenders of the "prime shakedown" constantly harp on. I discussed this charge in a previous post, but no answer can either be complete or satisfactory without examining precisely how the Four Imams derived their opinions from the primary sources, especially from the vast collections of hadiths and the manner in which their chains of transmissions were evaluated. I will deal with this matter in a later article and leave you instead with a story about Imam Abu Hanifa, which helps throw light on the single-most important feature of his methodology, and how easy it is to misunderstand the intentions of even the most brilliant of scholars.
Imam Abu Hanifa explains himself
Imam Abu Hanifa lived in the city of Kufa in Iraq, known as one of the two principal sources of fiqh in the Islamic world; the other being Medina. Because he was surrounded by Muslims from the Shia persuasion, he had a special affection for the family of the Prophet Muhammad, known as the ahle-bayt. One of these was Muhammad al-Baqir, whom Imam Abu Hanifa once met in Medina.
It is reported that al-Baqir remarked to him, "Are you the one who changes the deen of my grandfather and his hadiths by analogy?" Abu Hanifa replied, "I seek refuge with Allah!"
Muhammad (al-Baqir) said, "You have changed it. Abu Hanifa said, "Sit in your place as is your right until I sit by my right. I respect you as your grandfather, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, was respected by his Companions when he was alive." He sat.
Then Abu Hanifa knelt before him and said, "I will present you with three things to answer. Who is weaker: a man of woman?"
"A woman," he (al-Baqir) replied. Abu Hanifa then asked; "What is the share of a woman?"
"A man has two shares and a woman one," he replied. Abu Hanifa said, "This is the statement of your grandfather. If I had changed the deen of your grandfather, by analogy a man would have one share and a woman two because the woman is weaker than the man."
Then he asked, "Which is better: the prayer or fasting?" "The prayer," al-Baqir replied. He said, "This is the statement of your grandfather. If I had changed the deen of your grandfather, my analogy would be that, because the prayer is better, when a woman is free of menstruation she should be commanded to make up the prayer and not make up the fast."
Then he asked, "Which is more impure: urine or sperm?" "Urine is more impure," he replied. He said, "If I had changed the deen of your grandfather by analogy, I would have ordered a ghusl for urine and wudu' for sperm. I seek refuge with Allah from changing the deen of your grandfather by analogy." Muhammad rose and embraced him and kissed his face to honour him.
[source: The Four Imams, by Muhammad Abu Zahra]
Thursday, March 22, 2007
In Search for a Non-Silk Tie
In the religion of Islam, men are not permitted to wear clothing items made of silk unless in special circumstances (i.e. one develops a bad rash and is given a medical necessity to wear silk). Working in an enviroment that requires one to be professional in dress and demeanor at all times (i.e. suit and tie), I started looking for non-silk ties. I went to big places that one might expect to find high quality ties for the business/professional minded person. Everywhere I went the ties of quality were all made of silk and the sales reps that helped me look for ties thought I was insane for not wearing a silk tie.
Dismayed and weary from hopping to shopping center to shopping center all around San Diego County, I decided to look online. I have always been a big fan of shopping online especially when looking for hard to find books. I went to a website that actually sold polyester ties. The ties from the picture looked pretty nice and they were priced very cheap. I decided to order a couple for my job and eagerly waited for them to come in the mail.
When I got them in the mail, they didn't turn out the way I expected. They looked very poorly constructed and a matter of fact, after a month and half of wearing my black polyester tie, the filling and stitching of the tie started falling apart! For $5.00 I guess you can't expect anymore. My other polyester ties started becoming undone as the black one I owned. This was becoming a problem and I didn't feel like spending another 30 bucks on ties that only fall apart.
I recently learned about a new company that catered toward my religious requirements and fit the quality standards that lacked in my previous polyester ties. The company is called Jaan J which has high-quality ties at a reasonable price! It was unbelievable that it could feel like a top of the notch tie and not be made of silk. I looked in the back of the tie and it said it was made of microfiber satin. Well whatever its made of, its not silk and it feels like a tie you got from some expensive store.
Another good thing about this new tie company is it also caters toward the vegan and these ties were not made in some sweatshop. Jaan J also has nice cufflinks and lapel pins that are in the shape of the Sandal of the Prophet (salla llahu alayhi wa sallam). For all my Muslim associates and friends who wear ties for their work, I recommend going to Jaan J.
The website is Jaan J. - The Home of Non Silk Vegan Ties
Dismayed and weary from hopping to shopping center to shopping center all around San Diego County, I decided to look online. I have always been a big fan of shopping online especially when looking for hard to find books. I went to a website that actually sold polyester ties. The ties from the picture looked pretty nice and they were priced very cheap. I decided to order a couple for my job and eagerly waited for them to come in the mail.
When I got them in the mail, they didn't turn out the way I expected. They looked very poorly constructed and a matter of fact, after a month and half of wearing my black polyester tie, the filling and stitching of the tie started falling apart! For $5.00 I guess you can't expect anymore. My other polyester ties started becoming undone as the black one I owned. This was becoming a problem and I didn't feel like spending another 30 bucks on ties that only fall apart.
I recently learned about a new company that catered toward my religious requirements and fit the quality standards that lacked in my previous polyester ties. The company is called Jaan J which has high-quality ties at a reasonable price! It was unbelievable that it could feel like a top of the notch tie and not be made of silk. I looked in the back of the tie and it said it was made of microfiber satin. Well whatever its made of, its not silk and it feels like a tie you got from some expensive store.
Another good thing about this new tie company is it also caters toward the vegan and these ties were not made in some sweatshop. Jaan J also has nice cufflinks and lapel pins that are in the shape of the Sandal of the Prophet (salla llahu alayhi wa sallam). For all my Muslim associates and friends who wear ties for their work, I recommend going to Jaan J.
The website is Jaan J. - The Home of Non Silk Vegan Ties
Monday, March 19, 2007
Israeli Author, Peace Activist Tanya Reinhart Dies at 63
Not too long ago, I bought a copy of Professor Tanya Reinhart's long awaited sequel to her book Israel/Palestine: How to End the War of 1948 entitled, Roadmap to Nowhere: Israel/Palestine Since 2003 . Like her earlier book, she sheds through the popular myths about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. She starts at where she lefts off in her previous book devoting a special chapter to the "Gaza Pull-Out," in which then Prime Minister Sharon evacuated thousands of Israeli settlers from the occupied Gaza Strip. I enjoyed both of her works immensely and only added to my vast library on the topic of the Israeli/Palestinian Conflict.
While I was watching Democracy now, one of the headlines was that Dr Reinhart died from a stroke at age 63 in NY. The loss of this great peace activist and scholar reminds of another loss a couple years back of the Palestinian activist Professor Edward Said. Both were jewels in the Israel/Palestine Conflict literature. I thank both of them for their contribution to the subject and helping me understand the conflict a lot better.
To God we belong, and to God we will return.
To see the segment on Democracy Now! go to http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/19/1354224
I recommend you pick up both her books as well as the works of Edward Said.
While I was watching Democracy now, one of the headlines was that Dr Reinhart died from a stroke at age 63 in NY. The loss of this great peace activist and scholar reminds of another loss a couple years back of the Palestinian activist Professor Edward Said. Both were jewels in the Israel/Palestine Conflict literature. I thank both of them for their contribution to the subject and helping me understand the conflict a lot better.
To God we belong, and to God we will return.
To see the segment on Democracy Now! go to http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/19/1354224
I recommend you pick up both her books as well as the works of Edward Said.
Friday, March 16, 2007
Is Tasawwuf (Sufism) part of Islam?
Place of Tasawwuf (Sufism) in Traditional Islam
By Shaykh Nuh Ha Mim Keller
(This was from a lecture in 1995 and was subsequently published in the appendix section of the English translation of Imam Nawawi's Manual of Islam (al Maqasid)
Perhaps the biggest challenge in learning Islam correctly today is the scarcity of traditional ‘ulama. In this meaning, Bukhari relates the sahih, rigorously authenticated hadith that the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said,
"Truly, Allah does not remove Sacred Knowedge by taking it out of servants, but rather by taking back the souls of Islamic scholars [in death], until, when He has not left a single scholar, the people take the ignorant as leaders, who are asked for and who give Islamic legal opinion without knowledge, misguided and misguiding" (Fath al-Bari, 1.194, hadith 100).
The process described by the hadith is not yet completed, but has certainly begun, and in our times, the lack of traditional scholars—whether in Islamic law, in hadith, in tafsir ‘Qur'anic exegesis’—has given rise to an understanding of the religion that is far from scholarly, and sometimes far from the truth. For example, in the course of my own studies in Islamic law, my first impression from orientalist and Muslim-reformer literature, was that the Imams of the madhhabs or ‘schools of jurisprudence’ had brought a set of rules from completely outside the Islamic tradition and somehow imposed them upon the Muslims. But when I sat with traditional scholars in the Middle East and asked them about the details, I came away with a different point of view, having learned the bases for deriving the law from the Qur'an and sunna.
And similarly with Tasawwuf—which is the word I will use tonight for the English Sufism, since our context is traditional Islam—quite a different picture emerged from talking with scholars of Tasawwuf than what I had been exposed to in the West. My talk tonight, In Sha’ Allah, will present knowledge taken from the Qur'an and sahih hadith, and from actual teachers of Tasawwuf in Syria and Jordan, in view of the need for all of us to get beyond clichés, the need for factual information from Islamic sources, the need to answer such questions as: Where did Tasawwuf come from? What role does it play in the din or religion of Islam? and most importantly, What is the command of Allah about it?
As for the origin of the term Tasawwuf, like many other Islamic discliplines, its name was not known to the first generation of Muslims. The historian Ibn Khaldun notes in his Muqaddima:
This knowledge is a branch of the sciences of Sacred Law that originated within the Umma. From the first, the way of such people had also been considered the path of truth and guidance by the early Muslim community and its notables, of the Companions of the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace), those who were taught by them, and those who came after them.
It basically consists of dedication to worship, total dedication to Allah Most High, disregard for the finery and ornament of the world, abstinence from the pleasure, wealth, and prestige sought by most men, and retiring from others to worship alone. This was the general rule among the Companions of the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) and the early Muslims, but when involvement in this-worldly things became widespread from the second Islamic century onwards and people became absorbed in worldliness, those devoted to worship came to be called Sufiyya or People of Tasawwuf (Ibn Khaldun, al-Muqaddima [N.d. Reprint. Mecca: Dar al-Baz, 1397/1978], 467).
In Ibn Khaldun’s words, the content of Tasawwuf, "total dedication to Allah Most High," was, "the general rule among the Companions of the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) and the early Muslims." So if the word did not exist in earliest times, we should not forget that this is also the case with many other Islamic disciplines, such as tafsir, ‘Qur'anic exegesis,’ or ‘ilm al-jarh wa ta‘dil, ‘the science of the positive and negative factors that affect hadith narrators acceptability,’ or ‘ilm al-tawhid, the science of belief in Islamic tenets of faith,’ all of which proved to be of the utmost importance to the correct preservation and transmission of the religion.
As for the origin of the word Tasawwuf, it may well be from Sufi, the person who does Tasawwuf, which seems to be etymologically prior to it, for the earliest mention of either term was by Hasan al-Basri who died 110 years after the Hijra, and is reported to have said, "I saw a Sufi circumambulating the Kaaba, and offered him a dirham, but he would not accept it." It therefore seems better to understand Tasawwuf by first asking what a Sufi is; and perhaps the best definition of both the Sufi and his way, certainly one of the most frequently quoted by masters of the discipline, is from the sunna of the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) who said:
Allah Most High says: "He who is hostile to a friend of Mine I declare war against. My slave approaches Me with nothing more beloved to Me than what I have made obligatory upon him, and My slave keeps drawing nearer to Me with voluntary works until I love him. And when I love him, I am his hearing with which he hears, his sight with which he sees, his hand with which he seizes, and his foot with which he walks. If he asks me, I will surely give to him, and if he seeks refuge in Me, I will surely protect him" (Fath al-Bari, 11.340–41, hadith 6502);
This hadith was related by Imam Bukhari, Ahmad ibn Hanbal, al-Bayhaqi, and others with multiple contiguous chains of transmission, and is sahih. It discloses the central reality of Tasawwuf, which is precisely change, while describing the path to this change, in conformity with a traditional definition used by masters in the Middle East, who define a Sufi as Faqihun ‘amila bi ‘ilmihi fa awrathahu Llahu ‘ilma ma lam ya‘lam,‘A man of religious learning who applied what he knew, so Allah bequeathed him knowledge of what he did not know.’
To clarify, a Sufi is a man of religious learning,because the hadith says, "My slave approaches Me with nothing more beloved to Me than what I have made obligatory upon him," and only through learning can the Sufi know the command of Allah, or what has been made obligatory for him. He has applied what he knew, because the hadith says he not only approaches Allah with the obligatory, but "keeps drawing nearer to Me with voluntary works until I love him." And in turn, Allah bequeathed him knowledge of what he did not know, because the hadith says, "And when I love him, I am his hearing with which he hears, his sight with which he sees, his hand with which he seizes, and his foot with which he walks," which is a metaphor for the consummate awareness of tawhid, or the ‘unity of Allah,’ which in the context of human actions such as hearing, sight, seizing, and walking, consists of realizing the words of the Qur'an about Allah that,
"It is He who created you and what you do" (Qur'an 37:96).
The origin of the way of the Sufi thus lies in the prophetic sunna. The sincerity to Allah that it entails was the rule among the earliest Muslims, to whom this was simply a state of being without a name, while it only became a distinct discipline when the majority of the Community had drifted away and changed from this state. Muslims of subsequent generations required systematic effort to attain it, and it was because of the change in the Islamic environment after the earliest generations, that a discipline by the name of Tasawwuf came to exist.
But if this is true of origins, the more significant question is: How central is Tasawwuf to the religion, and: Where does it fit into Islam as a whole? Perhaps the best answer is the hadith of Muslim, that ‘Umar ibn al-Khattab said:
As we sat one day with the Messenger of Allah (Allah bless him and give him peace), a man in pure white clothing and jet black hair came to us, without a trace of travelling upon him, though none of us knew him.
He sat down before the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) bracing his knees against his, resting his hands on his legs, and said: "Muhammad, tell me about Islam." The Messenger of Allah (Allah bless him and give him peace) said: "Islam is to testify that there is no god but Allah and that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah, and to perform the prayer, give zakat, fast in Ramadan, and perform the pilgrimage to the House if you can find a way."
He said: "You have spoken the truth," and we were surprised that he should ask and then confirm the answer. Then he said: "Tell me about true faith (iman)," and the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) answered: "It is to believe in Allah, His angels, His inspired Books, His messengers, the Last Day, and in destiny, its good and evil."
"You have spoken the truth," he said, "Now tell me about the perfection of faith (ihsan)," and the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) answered: "It is to worship Allah as if you see Him, and if you see Him not, He nevertheless sees you."
The hadith continues to where ‘Umar said:
Then the visitor left. I waited a long while, and the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said to me, "Do you know, ‘Umar, who was the questioner?" and I replied, "Allah and His messenger know best." He said,
"It was Gabriel, who came to you to teach you your religion" (Sahih Muslim, 1.37: hadith 8).
This is a sahih hadith, described by Imam Nawawi as one of the hadiths upon which the Islamic religion turns. The use of din in the last words of it, Atakum yu‘allimukum dinakum, "came to you to teach you your religion" entails that the religion of Islam is composed of the three fundamentals mentioned in the hadith: Islam, or external compliance with what Allah asks of us; Iman, or the belief in the unseen that the prophets have informed us of; and Ihsan, or to worship Allah as though one sees Him. The Qur'an says, in Surat Maryam,
"Surely We have revealed the Remembrance, and surely We shall preserve it" (Qur'an 15:9),
and if we reflect how Allah, in His wisdom, has accomplished this, we see that it is by human beings, the traditional scholars He has sent at each level of the religion. The level of Islam has been preserved and conveyed to us by the Imams of Shari‘a or ‘Sacred Law’ and its ancillary disciplines; the level of Iman, by the Imams of ‘Aqida or ‘tenets of faith’; and the level of Ihsan, "to worship Allah as though you see Him," by the Imams of Tasawwuf.
The hadith’s very words "to worship Allah" show us the interrelation of these three fundamentals, for the how of "worship" is only known through the external prescriptions of Islam, while the validity of this worship in turn presupposes Iman or faith in Allah and the Islamic revelation, without which worship would be but empty motions; while the words, "as if you see Him," show that Ihsan implies a human change, for it entails the experience of what, for most of us, is not experienced. So to understand Tasawwuf, we must look at the nature of this change in relation to both Islam and Iman, and this is the main focus of my talk tonight.
At the level of Islam, we said that Tasawwuf requires Islam,through ‘submission to the rules of Sacred Law.’ But Islam, for its part, equally requires Tasawwuf. Why? For the very good reason that the sunna which Muslims have been commanded to follow is not just the words and actions of the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace), but also his states, states of the heart such as taqwa ‘godfearingness,’ ikhlas ‘sincerity,’ tawakkul ‘reliance on Allah,’ rahma ‘mercy,’ tawadu‘ ‘humility,’ and so on.
Now, it is characteristic of the Islamic ethic that human actions are not simply divided into two shades of morality, right or wrong; but rather five, arranged in order of their consequences in the next world. The obligatory (wajib) is that whose performance is rewarded by Allah in the next life and whose nonperformance is punished. The recommended (mandub) is that whose performance is rewarded, but whose nonperformance is not punished. The permissible (mubah) is indifferent, unconnected with either reward or punishment. The offensive (makruh) is that whose nonperformance is rewarded but whose performance is not punished. The unlawful (haram) is that whose nonperformance is rewarded and whose performance is punished, if one dies unrepentant.
Human states of the heart, the Qur'an and sunna make plain to us, come under each of these headings. Yet they are not dealt with in books of fiqh or ‘Islamic jurisprudence,’ because unlike the prayer, zakat, or fasting, they are not quantifiable in terms of the specific amount of them that must be done. But though they are not countable, they are of the utmost importance to every Muslim. Let’s look at a few examples.
(1) Love of Allah. In Surat al-Baqara of the Qur'an, Allah blames those who ascribe associates to Allah whom they love as much as they love Allah. Then He says,
"And those who believe are greater in love for Allah" (Qur'an 2:165), making being a believer conditional upon having greater love for Allah than any other.
(2) Mercy. Bukhari and Muslim relate that the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said, "Whomever is not merciful to people, Allah will show no mercy" (Sahih Muslim, 4.1809: hadith 2319), and Tirmidhi relates the well authenticated (hasan) hadith "Mercy is not taken out of anyone except the damned" (al-Jami‘ al-sahih, 4.323: hadith 1923).
(3) Love of each other. Muslim relates in his Sahih that the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said, "By Him in whose hand is my soul, none of you shall enter paradise until you believe, and none of you shall believe until you love one another . . . ." (Sahih Muslim, 1.74: hadith 54).
(4) Presence of mind in the prayer (salat). Abu Dawud relates in his Sunan that ‘Ammar ibn Yasir heard the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) say, "Truly, a man leaves, and none of his prayer has been recorded for him except a tenth of it, a ninth of it, eighth of it, seventh of it, sixth of it, fifth of it, fourth of it, third of it, a half of it" (Sunan Abi Dawud, 1.211: hadith 796)—meaning that none of a person’s prayer counts for him except that in which he is present in his heart with Allah.
(5) Love of the Prophet. Bukhari relates in his Sahih that the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said, "None of you believes until I am more beloved to him than his father, his son, and all people" (Fath al-Bari, 1.58, hadith 15).
It is plain from these texts that none of the states mentioned—whether mercy, love, or presence of heart—are quantifiable, for the Shari‘a cannot specify that one must "do two units of mercy" or "have three units of presence of mind" in the way that the number of rak‘as of prayer can be specified, yet each of them is personally obligatory for the Muslim. Let us complete the picture by looking at a few examples of states that are haram or ‘strictly unlawful’:
(1) Fear of anyone besides Allah. Allah Most High says in Surat al-Baqara of the Qur'an,
"And fulfill My covenant: I will fulfill your covenant—And fear Me alone" (Qur'an 2:40), the last phrase of which, according to Imam Fakhr al-Din al-Razi, "establishes that a human being is obliged to fear no one besides Allah Most High" (Tafsir al-Fakhr al-Razi, 3.42).
(2) Despair. Allah Most High says,
"None despairs of Allah’s mercy except the people who disbelieve" (Qur'an 12:87), indicating the unlawfulness of this inward state by coupling it with the worst human condition possible, that of unbelief.
(3) Arrogance. Muslim relates in his Sahih that the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said, "No one shall enter paradise who has a particle of arrogance in his heart" (Sahih Muslim, 1.93: hadith 91).
(4) Envy,meaning to wish for another to lose the blessings he enjoys. Abu Dawud relates that the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said, "Beware of envy, for envy consumes good works as flames consume firewood" (Sunan Abi Dawud, 4.276: hadith 4903).
(5) Showing off in acts of worship. Al-Hakim relates with a sahih chain of transmission that the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said, "The slightest bit of showing off in good works is as if worshipping others with Allah . . . ." (al-Mustadrak ‘ala al-Sahihayn, 1.4).
These and similar haram inward states are not found in books of fiqh or ‘jurisprudence,’ because fiqh can only deal with quantifiable descriptions of rulings. Rather, they are examined in their causes and remedies by the scholars of the ‘inner fiqh’ of Tasawwuf, men such as Imam al-Ghazali in his Ihya’ ‘ulum al-din [The reviving of the religious sciences], Imam al-Rabbani in his Maktubat [Letters], al-Suhrawardi in his ‘Awarif al-Ma‘arif [The knowledges of the illuminates], Abu Talib al-Makki in Qut al-qulub [The sustenance of hearts], and similar classic works, which discuss and solve hundreds of ethical questions about the inner life. These are books of Shari‘a and their questions are questions of Sacred Law, of how it is lawful or unlawful for a Muslim to be; and they preserve the part of the prophetic sunna dealing with states.
Who needs such information? All Muslims, for the Qur'anic verses and authenticated hadiths all point to the fact that a Muslim must not only do certain things and say certain things, but also must be something, must attain certain states of the heart and eliminate others. Do we ever fear someone besides Allah? Do we have a particle of arrogance in our hearts? Is our love for the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) greater than our love for any other human being? Is there the slightest bit of showing off in our good works?
Half a minute’s reflection will show the Muslim where he stands on these aspects of his din, and why in classical times, helping Muslims to attain these states was not left to amateurs, but rather delegated to ‘ulama of the heart, the scholars of Islamic Tasawwuf. For most people, these are not easy transformations to make, because of the force of habit, because of the subtlety with which we can deceive ourselves, but most of all because each of us has an ego, the self, the Me, which is called in Arabic al-nafs, about which Allah testifies in Surat Yusuf:
"Verily the self ever commands to do evil" (Qur'an 12:53).
If you do not believe it, consider the hadith related by Muslim in his Sahih, that:
The first person judged on Resurrection Day will be a man martyred in battle.
He will be brought forth, Allah will reacquaint him with His blessings upon him and the man will acknowledge them, whereupon Allah will say, "What have you done with them?" to which the man will respond, "I fought to the death for You."
Allah will reply, "You lie. You fought in order to be called a hero, and it has already been said." Then he will be sentenced and dragged away on his face and flung into the fire.
Then a man will be brought forward who learned Sacred Knowledge, taught it to others, and who recited the Qur'an. Allah will remind him of His gifts to him and the man will acknowledge them, and then Allah will say, "What have you done with them?" The man will answer, "I acquired Sacred Knowledge, taught it, and recited the Qur'an, for Your sake."
Allah will say, "You lie. You learned so as to be called a scholar, and read the Qur'an so as to be called a reciter, and it has already been said." Then the man will be sentenced and dragged away on his face to be flung into the fire.
Then a man will be brought forward whom Allah generously provided for, giving him various kinds of wealth, and Allah will recall to him the benefits given, and the man will acknowledge them, to which Allah will say, "And what have you done with them?" The man will answer, "I have not left a single kind of expenditure You love to see made, except that I have spent on it for Your sake."
Allah will say, "You lie. You did it so as to be called generous, and it has already been said." Then he will be sentenced and dragged away on his face to be flung into the fire (Sahih Muslim, 3.1514: hadith 1905).
We should not fool ourselves about this, because our fate depends on it: in our childhood, our parents taught us how to behave through praise or blame, and for most of us, this permeated and colored our whole motivation for doing things. But when childhood ends, and we come of age in Islam, the religion makes it clear to us, both by the above hadith and by the words of the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) "The slightest bit of showing off in good works is as if worshipping others with Allah" that being motivated by what others think is no longer good enough, and that we must change our motives entirely, and henceforth be motivated by nothing but desire for Allah Himself. The Islamic revelation thus tells the Muslim that it is obligatory to break his habits of thinking and motivation, but it does not tell him how. For that, he must go to the scholars of these states, in accordance with the Qur'anic imperative,
"Ask those who know if you know not" (Qur'an 16:43),
There is no doubt that bringing about this change, purifying the Muslims by bringing them to spiritual sincerity, was one of the central duties of the Prophet Muhammad (Allah bless him and give him peace), for Allah says in the Surat Al ‘Imran of the Qur'an,
"Allah has truly blessed the believers, for He has sent them a messenger of themselves, who recites His signs to them and purifies them, and teaches them the Book and the Wisdom" (Qur'an 3:164),
which explicitly lists four tasks of the prophetic mission, the second of which, yuzakkihim means precisely to ‘purify them’ and has no other lexical sense. Now, it is plain that this teaching function cannot, as part of an eternal revelation, have ended with the passing of the first generation, a fact that Allah explictly confirms in His injunction in Surat Luqman,
"And follow the path of him who turns unto Me" (Qur'an 31:15).
These verses indicate the teaching and transformative role of those who convey the Islamic revelation to Muslims, and the choice of the word ittiba‘ in the second verse, which is more general, implies both keeping the company of and following the example of a teacher. This is why in the history of Tasawwuf, we find that though there were many methods and schools of thought, these two things never changed: keeping the company of a teacher, and following his example—in exactly the same way that the Sahaba were uplifted and purified by keeping the company of the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) and following his example.
And this is why the discipline of Tasawwuf has been preserved and transmitted by Tariqas or groups of students under a particular master. First, because this was the sunna of the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) in his purifying function described by the Qur'an. Secondly, Islamic knowledge has never been transmitted by writings alone, but rather from ‘ulama to students. Thirdly, the nature of the knowledge in question is of hal or ‘state of being,’ not just knowing, and hence requires it be taken from a succession of living masters back to the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace), for the sheer range and number of the states of heart required by the revelation effectively make imitation of the personal example of a teacher the only effective means of transmission.
So far we have spoken about Tasawwuf in respect to Islam, as a Shari‘a science necessary to fully realize the Sacred Law in one’s life, to attain the states of the heart demanded by the Qur'an and hadith. This close connection between Shari‘a and Tasawwuf is expressed by the statement of Imam Malik, founder of the Maliki school, that "he who practices Tasawwuf without learning Sacred Law corrupts his faith, while he who learns Sacred Law without practicing Tasawwuf corrupts himself. Only he who combines the two proves true." This is why Tasawwuf was taught as part of the traditional curriculum in madrasas across the Muslim world from Malaysia to Morocco, why many of the greatest Shari‘a scholars of this Umma have been Sufis, and why until the end of the Islamic caliphate at the beginning of this century and the subsequent Western control and cultural dominance of Muslim lands, there were teachers of Tasawwuf in Islamic institutions of higher learning from Lucknow to Istanbul to Cairo.
But there is a second aspect of Tasawwuf that we have not yet talked about; namely, its relation to Iman or ‘True Faith,’ the second pillar of the Islamic religion, which in the context of the Islamic sciences consists of ‘Aqida or ‘orthodox belief.’
All Muslims believe in Allah, and that He is transcendently beyond anything conceivable to the minds of men, for the human intellect is imprisoned within its own sense impressions and the categories of thought derived from them, such as number, directionality, spatial extention, place, time, and so forth. Allah is beyond all of that; in His own words,
"There is nothing whatesover like unto Him" (Qur'an 42:11)
If we reflect for a moment on this verse, in the light of the hadith of Muslim about Ihsan that "it is to worship Allah as though you see Him," we realize that the means of seeing here is not the eye, which can only behold physical things like itself; nor yet the mind, which cannot transcend its own impressions to reach the Divine, but rather certitude, the light of Iman, whose locus is not the eye or the brain, but rather the ruh, a subtle faculty Allah has created within each of us called the soul, whose knowledge is unobstructed by the bounds of the created universe. Allah Most High says, by way of exalting the nature of this faculty by leaving it a mystery,
"Say: ‘The soul is of the affair of my Lord’" (Qur'an 17:85).
The food of this ruh is dhikr or the ‘remembrance of Allah.’ Why? Because acts of obedience increase the light of certainty and Iman in the soul, and dhikr is among the greatest of them, as is attested to by the sahih hadith related by al-Hakim that the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said,
"Shall I not tell you of the best of your works, the purest of them in the eyes of your Master, the highest in raising your rank, better than giving gold and silver, and better for you than to meet your enemy and smite their necks, and they smite yours?" They said, "This—what is it, O Messenger of Allah?" and he said: Dhikru Llahi ‘azza wa jall, "The remembrance of Allah Mighty and Majestic." (al-Mustadrak ‘ala al-Sahihayn, 1.496).
Increasing the strength of Iman through good actions, and particularly through the medium of dhikr has tremendous implications for the Islamic religion and traditional spirituality. A non-Muslim once asked me, "If God exists, then why all this beating around the bush? Why doesn’t He just come out and say so?"
The answer is that taklif or ‘moral responsibility’ in this life is not only concerned with outward actions, but with what we believe, our ‘Aqida—and the strength with which we believe it. If belief in God and other eternal truths were effortless in this world, there would be no point in Allah making us responsible for it, it would be automatic, involuntary, like our belief, say, that London is in England. There would no point in making someone responsible for something impossible not to believe.
But the responsibility Allah has place upon us is belief in the Unseen, as a test for us in this world to choose between kufr and Iman, to distinguish believer from unbeliever, and some believers above others.
This why strengthening Iman through dhikr is of such methodological importance for Tasawwuf: we have not only been commanded as Muslims to believe in certain things, but have been commanded to have absolute certainty in them. The world we see around us is composed of veils of light and darkness: events come that knock the Iman out of some of us, and Allah tests each of us as to the degree of certainty with which we believe the eternal truths of the religion. It was in this sense that ‘Umar ibn al-Khattab said, "If the Iman of Abu Bakr were weighed against the Iman of the entire Umma, it would outweigh it."
Now, in traditional ‘Aqida one of the most important tenets is the wahdaniyya or ‘oneness and uniqueness’ of Allah Most High. This means He is without any sharik or associate in His being, in His attributes, or in His acts. But the ability to hold this insight in mind in the rough and tumble of daily life is a function of the strength of certainty (yaqin) in one’s heart. Allah tells the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) in Surat al-A‘raf of the Qur'an,
"Say: ‘I do not possess benefit for myself or harm, except as Allah wills’" (Qur'an 7:188),
yet we tend to rely on ourselves and our plans, in obliviousness to the facts of ‘Aqida that ourselves and our plans have no effect, that Allah alone brings about effects.
If you want to test yourself on this, the next time you contact someone with good connections whose help is critical to you, take a look at your heart at the moment you ask him to put in a good word for you with someone, and see whom you are relying upon. If you are like most of us, Allah is not at the forefront of your thoughts, despite the fact that He alone is controlling the outcome. Isn’t this a lapse in your ‘Aqida, or, at the very least, in your certainty?
Tasawwuf corrects such shortcomings by step-by-step increasing the Muslim’s certainty in Allah. The two central means of Tasawwuf in attaining the conviction demanded by ‘Aqida are mudhakara, or learning the traditional tenets of Islamic faith, and dhikr, deepening one’s certainty in them by remembrance of Allah. It is part of our faith that, in the words of the Qur'an in Surat al-Saffat,
"Allah has created you and what you do" (Qur'an 37:96);
yet for how many of us is this day to day experience? Because Tasawwuf remedies this and other shortcomings of Iman, by increasing the Muslim’s certainty through a systematic way of teaching and dhikr, it has traditionally been regarded as personally obligatory to this pillar of the religion also, and from the earliest centuries of Islam, has proved its worth.
The last question we will deal with tonight is: What about the bad Sufis we read about, who contravene the teachings of Islam?
The answer is that there are two meanings of Sufi: the first is "Anyone who considers himself a Sufi," which is the rule of thumb of orientalist historians of Sufism and popular writers, who would oppose the "Sufis" to the "Ulama." I think the Qur'anic verses and hadiths we have mentioned tonight about the scope and method of true Tasawwuf show why we must insist on the primacy of the definition of a Sufi as "a man of religious learning who applied what he knew, so Allah bequeathed him knowledge of what he did not know."
The very first thing a Sufi, as a man of religious learning knows is that the Shari‘a and ‘Aqida of Islam are above every human being. Whoever does not know this will never be a Sufi, except in the orientalist sense of the word—like someone standing in front of the stock exchange in an expensive suit with a briefcase to convince people he is a stockbroker. A real stockbroker is something else.
Because this distinction is ignored today by otherwise well-meaning Muslims, it is often forgotten that the ‘ulama who have criticized Sufis, such as Ibn al-Jawzi in his Talbis Iblis [The Devil’s deception], or Ibn Taymiya in places in his Fatawa, or Ibn al-Qayyim al-Jawziyya, were not criticizing Tasawwuf as an ancillary discipline to the Shari‘a. The proof of this is Ibn al-Jawzi’s five-volume Sifat al-safwa, which contains the biographies of the very same Sufis mentioned in al-Qushayri’s famous Tasawwuf manual al-Risala al-Qushayriyya. Ibn Taymiya considered himself a Sufi of the Qadiri order, and volumes ten and eleven of his thirty-seven-volume Majmu‘ al-fatawa are devoted to Tasawwuf. And Ibn al-Qayyim al-Jawziyya wrote his three-volume Madarij al-salikin, a detailed commentary on ‘Abdullah al-Ansari al-Harawi’s tract on the spiritual stations of the Sufi path, Manazil al-sa’irin. These works show that their authors’ criticisms were not directed at Tasawwuf as such, but rather at specific groups of their times, and they should be understood for what they are.
As in other Islamic sciences, mistakes historically did occur in Tasawwuf, most of them stemming from not recognizing the primacy of Shari‘a and ‘Aqida above all else. But these mistakes were not different in principle from, for example, the Isra’iliyyat (baseless tales of Bani Isra’il) that crept into tafsir literature, or the mawdu‘at (hadith forgeries) that crept into the hadith. These were not taken as proof that tafsir was bad, or hadith was deviance, but rather, in each discipline, the errors were identified and warned against by Imams of the field, because the Umma needed the rest. And such corrections are precisely what we find in books like Qushayri’s Risala,Ghazali’s Ihya’ and other works of Sufism.
For all of the reasons we have mentioned, Tasawwuf was accepted as an essential part of the Islamic religion by the ‘ulama of this Umma. The proof of this is all the famous scholars of Shari‘a sciences who had the higher education of Tasawwuf, among them Ibn ‘Abidin, al-Razi, Ahmad Sirhindi, Zakariyya al-Ansari, al-‘Izz ibn ‘Abd al-Salam, Ibn Daqiq al-‘Eid, Ibn Hajar al-Haytami, Shah Wali Allah, Ahmad Dardir, Ibrahim al-Bajuri, ‘Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulsi, Imam al-Nawawi, Taqi al-Din al-Subki, and al-Suyuti.
Among the Sufis who aided Islam with the sword as well as the pen, to quote Reliance of the Traveller, were:
such men as the Naqshbandi sheikh Shamil al-Daghestani, who fought a prolonged war against the Russians in the Caucasus in the nineteenth century; Sayyid Muhammad ‘Abdullah al-Somali, a sheikh of the Salihiyya order who led Muslims against the British and Italians in Somalia from 1899 to 1920; the Qadiri sheikh ‘Uthman ibn Fodi, who led jihad in Northern Nigeria from 1804 to 1808 to establish Islamic rule; the Qadiri sheikh ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Jaza’iri, who led the Algerians against the French from 1832 to 1847; the Darqawi faqir al-Hajj Muhammad al-Ahrash, who fought the French in Egypt in 1799; the Tijani sheikh al-Hajj ‘Umar Tal, who led Islamic Jihad in Guinea, Senegal, and Mali from 1852 to 1864; and the Qadiri sheikh Ma’ al-‘Aynayn al-Qalqami, who helped marshal Muslim resistance to the French in northern Mauritania and southern Morocco from 1905 to 1909.
Among the Sufis whose missionary work Islamized entire regions are such men as the founder of the Sanusiyya order, Muhammad ‘Ali Sanusi, whose efforts and jihad from 1807 to 1859 consolidated Islam as the religion of peoples from the Libyan Desert to sub-Saharan Africa; [and] the Shadhili sheikh Muhammad Ma‘ruf and Qadiri sheikh Uways al-Barawi, whose efforts spread Islam westward and inland from the East African Coast . . . . (Reliance of the Traveller,863).
It is plain from the examples of such men what kind of Muslims have been Sufis; namely, all kinds, right across the board—and that Tasawwuf did not prevent them from serving Islam in any way they could.
To summarize everything I have said tonight: In looking first at Tasawwuf and Shari‘a, we found that many Qur'anic verses and sahih hadiths oblige the Muslim to eliminate haram inner states as arrogance, envy, and fear of anyone besides Allah; and on the other hand, to acquire such obligatory inner states as mercy, love of one’s fellow Muslims, presence of mind in prayer, and love of the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace). We found that these inward states could not be dealt with in books of fiqh, whose purpose is to specify the outward, quantifiable aspects of the Shari‘a. The knowledge of these states is nevertheless of the utmost importance to every Muslim, and this is why it was studied under the ‘ulama of Ihsan, the teachers of Tasawwuf, in all periods of Islamic history until the beginning of the present century.
We then turned to the level of Iman, and found that though the ‘Aqida of Muslims is that Allah alone has any effect in this world, keeping this in mind in everhday life is not a given of human consciousness, but rather a function of a Muslim’s yaqin, his certainty. And we found that Tasawwuf, as an ancillary discipline to ‘Aqida, emphasizes the systematic increase of this certainty through both mudhakara, ‘teaching tenets of faith’ and dhikr, ‘the remembrance of Allah,’ in accordance with the words of the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) about Ihsan that "it is worship Allah as though you see Him."
Lastly, we found that accusations against Tasawwuf made by scholars such as Ibn al-Jawzi, and Ibn Taymiya were not directed against Tasawwuf in principle, but to specific groups and individuals in the times of these authors, the proof for which is the other books by the same authors that showed their understanding of Tasawwuf as a Shari‘a science.
To return to the starting point of my talk this evening, with the disappearance of traditional Islamic scholars from the Umma, two very different pictures of Tasawwuf emerge today. If we read books written after the dismantling of the traditional fabric of Islam by colonial powers in the last century, we find the big hoax: Islam without spirituality and Shari‘a without Tasawwuf. But if we read the classical works of Islamic scholarship, we learn that Tasawwuf has been a Shari‘a science like tafsir, hadith, or any other, throughout the history of Islam. The Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said,
"Truly, Allah does not look at your outward forms and wealth, but rather at your hearts and your works" (Sahih Muslim, 4.1389: hadith 2564).
And this is the brightest hope that Islam can offer a modern world darkened by materialism and nihilism: Islam as it truly is; the hope of eternal salvation through a religion of brotherhood and social and economic justice outwardly, and the direct experience of divine love and illumination inwardly.
By Shaykh Nuh Ha Mim Keller
(This was from a lecture in 1995 and was subsequently published in the appendix section of the English translation of Imam Nawawi's Manual of Islam (al Maqasid)
Perhaps the biggest challenge in learning Islam correctly today is the scarcity of traditional ‘ulama. In this meaning, Bukhari relates the sahih, rigorously authenticated hadith that the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said,
"Truly, Allah does not remove Sacred Knowedge by taking it out of servants, but rather by taking back the souls of Islamic scholars [in death], until, when He has not left a single scholar, the people take the ignorant as leaders, who are asked for and who give Islamic legal opinion without knowledge, misguided and misguiding" (Fath al-Bari, 1.194, hadith 100).
The process described by the hadith is not yet completed, but has certainly begun, and in our times, the lack of traditional scholars—whether in Islamic law, in hadith, in tafsir ‘Qur'anic exegesis’—has given rise to an understanding of the religion that is far from scholarly, and sometimes far from the truth. For example, in the course of my own studies in Islamic law, my first impression from orientalist and Muslim-reformer literature, was that the Imams of the madhhabs or ‘schools of jurisprudence’ had brought a set of rules from completely outside the Islamic tradition and somehow imposed them upon the Muslims. But when I sat with traditional scholars in the Middle East and asked them about the details, I came away with a different point of view, having learned the bases for deriving the law from the Qur'an and sunna.
And similarly with Tasawwuf—which is the word I will use tonight for the English Sufism, since our context is traditional Islam—quite a different picture emerged from talking with scholars of Tasawwuf than what I had been exposed to in the West. My talk tonight, In Sha’ Allah, will present knowledge taken from the Qur'an and sahih hadith, and from actual teachers of Tasawwuf in Syria and Jordan, in view of the need for all of us to get beyond clichés, the need for factual information from Islamic sources, the need to answer such questions as: Where did Tasawwuf come from? What role does it play in the din or religion of Islam? and most importantly, What is the command of Allah about it?
As for the origin of the term Tasawwuf, like many other Islamic discliplines, its name was not known to the first generation of Muslims. The historian Ibn Khaldun notes in his Muqaddima:
This knowledge is a branch of the sciences of Sacred Law that originated within the Umma. From the first, the way of such people had also been considered the path of truth and guidance by the early Muslim community and its notables, of the Companions of the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace), those who were taught by them, and those who came after them.
It basically consists of dedication to worship, total dedication to Allah Most High, disregard for the finery and ornament of the world, abstinence from the pleasure, wealth, and prestige sought by most men, and retiring from others to worship alone. This was the general rule among the Companions of the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) and the early Muslims, but when involvement in this-worldly things became widespread from the second Islamic century onwards and people became absorbed in worldliness, those devoted to worship came to be called Sufiyya or People of Tasawwuf (Ibn Khaldun, al-Muqaddima [N.d. Reprint. Mecca: Dar al-Baz, 1397/1978], 467).
In Ibn Khaldun’s words, the content of Tasawwuf, "total dedication to Allah Most High," was, "the general rule among the Companions of the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) and the early Muslims." So if the word did not exist in earliest times, we should not forget that this is also the case with many other Islamic disciplines, such as tafsir, ‘Qur'anic exegesis,’ or ‘ilm al-jarh wa ta‘dil, ‘the science of the positive and negative factors that affect hadith narrators acceptability,’ or ‘ilm al-tawhid, the science of belief in Islamic tenets of faith,’ all of which proved to be of the utmost importance to the correct preservation and transmission of the religion.
As for the origin of the word Tasawwuf, it may well be from Sufi, the person who does Tasawwuf, which seems to be etymologically prior to it, for the earliest mention of either term was by Hasan al-Basri who died 110 years after the Hijra, and is reported to have said, "I saw a Sufi circumambulating the Kaaba, and offered him a dirham, but he would not accept it." It therefore seems better to understand Tasawwuf by first asking what a Sufi is; and perhaps the best definition of both the Sufi and his way, certainly one of the most frequently quoted by masters of the discipline, is from the sunna of the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) who said:
Allah Most High says: "He who is hostile to a friend of Mine I declare war against. My slave approaches Me with nothing more beloved to Me than what I have made obligatory upon him, and My slave keeps drawing nearer to Me with voluntary works until I love him. And when I love him, I am his hearing with which he hears, his sight with which he sees, his hand with which he seizes, and his foot with which he walks. If he asks me, I will surely give to him, and if he seeks refuge in Me, I will surely protect him" (Fath al-Bari, 11.340–41, hadith 6502);
This hadith was related by Imam Bukhari, Ahmad ibn Hanbal, al-Bayhaqi, and others with multiple contiguous chains of transmission, and is sahih. It discloses the central reality of Tasawwuf, which is precisely change, while describing the path to this change, in conformity with a traditional definition used by masters in the Middle East, who define a Sufi as Faqihun ‘amila bi ‘ilmihi fa awrathahu Llahu ‘ilma ma lam ya‘lam,‘A man of religious learning who applied what he knew, so Allah bequeathed him knowledge of what he did not know.’
To clarify, a Sufi is a man of religious learning,because the hadith says, "My slave approaches Me with nothing more beloved to Me than what I have made obligatory upon him," and only through learning can the Sufi know the command of Allah, or what has been made obligatory for him. He has applied what he knew, because the hadith says he not only approaches Allah with the obligatory, but "keeps drawing nearer to Me with voluntary works until I love him." And in turn, Allah bequeathed him knowledge of what he did not know, because the hadith says, "And when I love him, I am his hearing with which he hears, his sight with which he sees, his hand with which he seizes, and his foot with which he walks," which is a metaphor for the consummate awareness of tawhid, or the ‘unity of Allah,’ which in the context of human actions such as hearing, sight, seizing, and walking, consists of realizing the words of the Qur'an about Allah that,
"It is He who created you and what you do" (Qur'an 37:96).
The origin of the way of the Sufi thus lies in the prophetic sunna. The sincerity to Allah that it entails was the rule among the earliest Muslims, to whom this was simply a state of being without a name, while it only became a distinct discipline when the majority of the Community had drifted away and changed from this state. Muslims of subsequent generations required systematic effort to attain it, and it was because of the change in the Islamic environment after the earliest generations, that a discipline by the name of Tasawwuf came to exist.
But if this is true of origins, the more significant question is: How central is Tasawwuf to the religion, and: Where does it fit into Islam as a whole? Perhaps the best answer is the hadith of Muslim, that ‘Umar ibn al-Khattab said:
As we sat one day with the Messenger of Allah (Allah bless him and give him peace), a man in pure white clothing and jet black hair came to us, without a trace of travelling upon him, though none of us knew him.
He sat down before the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) bracing his knees against his, resting his hands on his legs, and said: "Muhammad, tell me about Islam." The Messenger of Allah (Allah bless him and give him peace) said: "Islam is to testify that there is no god but Allah and that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah, and to perform the prayer, give zakat, fast in Ramadan, and perform the pilgrimage to the House if you can find a way."
He said: "You have spoken the truth," and we were surprised that he should ask and then confirm the answer. Then he said: "Tell me about true faith (iman)," and the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) answered: "It is to believe in Allah, His angels, His inspired Books, His messengers, the Last Day, and in destiny, its good and evil."
"You have spoken the truth," he said, "Now tell me about the perfection of faith (ihsan)," and the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) answered: "It is to worship Allah as if you see Him, and if you see Him not, He nevertheless sees you."
The hadith continues to where ‘Umar said:
Then the visitor left. I waited a long while, and the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said to me, "Do you know, ‘Umar, who was the questioner?" and I replied, "Allah and His messenger know best." He said,
"It was Gabriel, who came to you to teach you your religion" (Sahih Muslim, 1.37: hadith 8).
This is a sahih hadith, described by Imam Nawawi as one of the hadiths upon which the Islamic religion turns. The use of din in the last words of it, Atakum yu‘allimukum dinakum, "came to you to teach you your religion" entails that the religion of Islam is composed of the three fundamentals mentioned in the hadith: Islam, or external compliance with what Allah asks of us; Iman, or the belief in the unseen that the prophets have informed us of; and Ihsan, or to worship Allah as though one sees Him. The Qur'an says, in Surat Maryam,
"Surely We have revealed the Remembrance, and surely We shall preserve it" (Qur'an 15:9),
and if we reflect how Allah, in His wisdom, has accomplished this, we see that it is by human beings, the traditional scholars He has sent at each level of the religion. The level of Islam has been preserved and conveyed to us by the Imams of Shari‘a or ‘Sacred Law’ and its ancillary disciplines; the level of Iman, by the Imams of ‘Aqida or ‘tenets of faith’; and the level of Ihsan, "to worship Allah as though you see Him," by the Imams of Tasawwuf.
The hadith’s very words "to worship Allah" show us the interrelation of these three fundamentals, for the how of "worship" is only known through the external prescriptions of Islam, while the validity of this worship in turn presupposes Iman or faith in Allah and the Islamic revelation, without which worship would be but empty motions; while the words, "as if you see Him," show that Ihsan implies a human change, for it entails the experience of what, for most of us, is not experienced. So to understand Tasawwuf, we must look at the nature of this change in relation to both Islam and Iman, and this is the main focus of my talk tonight.
At the level of Islam, we said that Tasawwuf requires Islam,through ‘submission to the rules of Sacred Law.’ But Islam, for its part, equally requires Tasawwuf. Why? For the very good reason that the sunna which Muslims have been commanded to follow is not just the words and actions of the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace), but also his states, states of the heart such as taqwa ‘godfearingness,’ ikhlas ‘sincerity,’ tawakkul ‘reliance on Allah,’ rahma ‘mercy,’ tawadu‘ ‘humility,’ and so on.
Now, it is characteristic of the Islamic ethic that human actions are not simply divided into two shades of morality, right or wrong; but rather five, arranged in order of their consequences in the next world. The obligatory (wajib) is that whose performance is rewarded by Allah in the next life and whose nonperformance is punished. The recommended (mandub) is that whose performance is rewarded, but whose nonperformance is not punished. The permissible (mubah) is indifferent, unconnected with either reward or punishment. The offensive (makruh) is that whose nonperformance is rewarded but whose performance is not punished. The unlawful (haram) is that whose nonperformance is rewarded and whose performance is punished, if one dies unrepentant.
Human states of the heart, the Qur'an and sunna make plain to us, come under each of these headings. Yet they are not dealt with in books of fiqh or ‘Islamic jurisprudence,’ because unlike the prayer, zakat, or fasting, they are not quantifiable in terms of the specific amount of them that must be done. But though they are not countable, they are of the utmost importance to every Muslim. Let’s look at a few examples.
(1) Love of Allah. In Surat al-Baqara of the Qur'an, Allah blames those who ascribe associates to Allah whom they love as much as they love Allah. Then He says,
"And those who believe are greater in love for Allah" (Qur'an 2:165), making being a believer conditional upon having greater love for Allah than any other.
(2) Mercy. Bukhari and Muslim relate that the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said, "Whomever is not merciful to people, Allah will show no mercy" (Sahih Muslim, 4.1809: hadith 2319), and Tirmidhi relates the well authenticated (hasan) hadith "Mercy is not taken out of anyone except the damned" (al-Jami‘ al-sahih, 4.323: hadith 1923).
(3) Love of each other. Muslim relates in his Sahih that the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said, "By Him in whose hand is my soul, none of you shall enter paradise until you believe, and none of you shall believe until you love one another . . . ." (Sahih Muslim, 1.74: hadith 54).
(4) Presence of mind in the prayer (salat). Abu Dawud relates in his Sunan that ‘Ammar ibn Yasir heard the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) say, "Truly, a man leaves, and none of his prayer has been recorded for him except a tenth of it, a ninth of it, eighth of it, seventh of it, sixth of it, fifth of it, fourth of it, third of it, a half of it" (Sunan Abi Dawud, 1.211: hadith 796)—meaning that none of a person’s prayer counts for him except that in which he is present in his heart with Allah.
(5) Love of the Prophet. Bukhari relates in his Sahih that the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said, "None of you believes until I am more beloved to him than his father, his son, and all people" (Fath al-Bari, 1.58, hadith 15).
It is plain from these texts that none of the states mentioned—whether mercy, love, or presence of heart—are quantifiable, for the Shari‘a cannot specify that one must "do two units of mercy" or "have three units of presence of mind" in the way that the number of rak‘as of prayer can be specified, yet each of them is personally obligatory for the Muslim. Let us complete the picture by looking at a few examples of states that are haram or ‘strictly unlawful’:
(1) Fear of anyone besides Allah. Allah Most High says in Surat al-Baqara of the Qur'an,
"And fulfill My covenant: I will fulfill your covenant—And fear Me alone" (Qur'an 2:40), the last phrase of which, according to Imam Fakhr al-Din al-Razi, "establishes that a human being is obliged to fear no one besides Allah Most High" (Tafsir al-Fakhr al-Razi, 3.42).
(2) Despair. Allah Most High says,
"None despairs of Allah’s mercy except the people who disbelieve" (Qur'an 12:87), indicating the unlawfulness of this inward state by coupling it with the worst human condition possible, that of unbelief.
(3) Arrogance. Muslim relates in his Sahih that the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said, "No one shall enter paradise who has a particle of arrogance in his heart" (Sahih Muslim, 1.93: hadith 91).
(4) Envy,meaning to wish for another to lose the blessings he enjoys. Abu Dawud relates that the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said, "Beware of envy, for envy consumes good works as flames consume firewood" (Sunan Abi Dawud, 4.276: hadith 4903).
(5) Showing off in acts of worship. Al-Hakim relates with a sahih chain of transmission that the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said, "The slightest bit of showing off in good works is as if worshipping others with Allah . . . ." (al-Mustadrak ‘ala al-Sahihayn, 1.4).
These and similar haram inward states are not found in books of fiqh or ‘jurisprudence,’ because fiqh can only deal with quantifiable descriptions of rulings. Rather, they are examined in their causes and remedies by the scholars of the ‘inner fiqh’ of Tasawwuf, men such as Imam al-Ghazali in his Ihya’ ‘ulum al-din [The reviving of the religious sciences], Imam al-Rabbani in his Maktubat [Letters], al-Suhrawardi in his ‘Awarif al-Ma‘arif [The knowledges of the illuminates], Abu Talib al-Makki in Qut al-qulub [The sustenance of hearts], and similar classic works, which discuss and solve hundreds of ethical questions about the inner life. These are books of Shari‘a and their questions are questions of Sacred Law, of how it is lawful or unlawful for a Muslim to be; and they preserve the part of the prophetic sunna dealing with states.
Who needs such information? All Muslims, for the Qur'anic verses and authenticated hadiths all point to the fact that a Muslim must not only do certain things and say certain things, but also must be something, must attain certain states of the heart and eliminate others. Do we ever fear someone besides Allah? Do we have a particle of arrogance in our hearts? Is our love for the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) greater than our love for any other human being? Is there the slightest bit of showing off in our good works?
Half a minute’s reflection will show the Muslim where he stands on these aspects of his din, and why in classical times, helping Muslims to attain these states was not left to amateurs, but rather delegated to ‘ulama of the heart, the scholars of Islamic Tasawwuf. For most people, these are not easy transformations to make, because of the force of habit, because of the subtlety with which we can deceive ourselves, but most of all because each of us has an ego, the self, the Me, which is called in Arabic al-nafs, about which Allah testifies in Surat Yusuf:
"Verily the self ever commands to do evil" (Qur'an 12:53).
If you do not believe it, consider the hadith related by Muslim in his Sahih, that:
The first person judged on Resurrection Day will be a man martyred in battle.
He will be brought forth, Allah will reacquaint him with His blessings upon him and the man will acknowledge them, whereupon Allah will say, "What have you done with them?" to which the man will respond, "I fought to the death for You."
Allah will reply, "You lie. You fought in order to be called a hero, and it has already been said." Then he will be sentenced and dragged away on his face and flung into the fire.
Then a man will be brought forward who learned Sacred Knowledge, taught it to others, and who recited the Qur'an. Allah will remind him of His gifts to him and the man will acknowledge them, and then Allah will say, "What have you done with them?" The man will answer, "I acquired Sacred Knowledge, taught it, and recited the Qur'an, for Your sake."
Allah will say, "You lie. You learned so as to be called a scholar, and read the Qur'an so as to be called a reciter, and it has already been said." Then the man will be sentenced and dragged away on his face to be flung into the fire.
Then a man will be brought forward whom Allah generously provided for, giving him various kinds of wealth, and Allah will recall to him the benefits given, and the man will acknowledge them, to which Allah will say, "And what have you done with them?" The man will answer, "I have not left a single kind of expenditure You love to see made, except that I have spent on it for Your sake."
Allah will say, "You lie. You did it so as to be called generous, and it has already been said." Then he will be sentenced and dragged away on his face to be flung into the fire (Sahih Muslim, 3.1514: hadith 1905).
We should not fool ourselves about this, because our fate depends on it: in our childhood, our parents taught us how to behave through praise or blame, and for most of us, this permeated and colored our whole motivation for doing things. But when childhood ends, and we come of age in Islam, the religion makes it clear to us, both by the above hadith and by the words of the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) "The slightest bit of showing off in good works is as if worshipping others with Allah" that being motivated by what others think is no longer good enough, and that we must change our motives entirely, and henceforth be motivated by nothing but desire for Allah Himself. The Islamic revelation thus tells the Muslim that it is obligatory to break his habits of thinking and motivation, but it does not tell him how. For that, he must go to the scholars of these states, in accordance with the Qur'anic imperative,
"Ask those who know if you know not" (Qur'an 16:43),
There is no doubt that bringing about this change, purifying the Muslims by bringing them to spiritual sincerity, was one of the central duties of the Prophet Muhammad (Allah bless him and give him peace), for Allah says in the Surat Al ‘Imran of the Qur'an,
"Allah has truly blessed the believers, for He has sent them a messenger of themselves, who recites His signs to them and purifies them, and teaches them the Book and the Wisdom" (Qur'an 3:164),
which explicitly lists four tasks of the prophetic mission, the second of which, yuzakkihim means precisely to ‘purify them’ and has no other lexical sense. Now, it is plain that this teaching function cannot, as part of an eternal revelation, have ended with the passing of the first generation, a fact that Allah explictly confirms in His injunction in Surat Luqman,
"And follow the path of him who turns unto Me" (Qur'an 31:15).
These verses indicate the teaching and transformative role of those who convey the Islamic revelation to Muslims, and the choice of the word ittiba‘ in the second verse, which is more general, implies both keeping the company of and following the example of a teacher. This is why in the history of Tasawwuf, we find that though there were many methods and schools of thought, these two things never changed: keeping the company of a teacher, and following his example—in exactly the same way that the Sahaba were uplifted and purified by keeping the company of the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) and following his example.
And this is why the discipline of Tasawwuf has been preserved and transmitted by Tariqas or groups of students under a particular master. First, because this was the sunna of the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) in his purifying function described by the Qur'an. Secondly, Islamic knowledge has never been transmitted by writings alone, but rather from ‘ulama to students. Thirdly, the nature of the knowledge in question is of hal or ‘state of being,’ not just knowing, and hence requires it be taken from a succession of living masters back to the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace), for the sheer range and number of the states of heart required by the revelation effectively make imitation of the personal example of a teacher the only effective means of transmission.
So far we have spoken about Tasawwuf in respect to Islam, as a Shari‘a science necessary to fully realize the Sacred Law in one’s life, to attain the states of the heart demanded by the Qur'an and hadith. This close connection between Shari‘a and Tasawwuf is expressed by the statement of Imam Malik, founder of the Maliki school, that "he who practices Tasawwuf without learning Sacred Law corrupts his faith, while he who learns Sacred Law without practicing Tasawwuf corrupts himself. Only he who combines the two proves true." This is why Tasawwuf was taught as part of the traditional curriculum in madrasas across the Muslim world from Malaysia to Morocco, why many of the greatest Shari‘a scholars of this Umma have been Sufis, and why until the end of the Islamic caliphate at the beginning of this century and the subsequent Western control and cultural dominance of Muslim lands, there were teachers of Tasawwuf in Islamic institutions of higher learning from Lucknow to Istanbul to Cairo.
But there is a second aspect of Tasawwuf that we have not yet talked about; namely, its relation to Iman or ‘True Faith,’ the second pillar of the Islamic religion, which in the context of the Islamic sciences consists of ‘Aqida or ‘orthodox belief.’
All Muslims believe in Allah, and that He is transcendently beyond anything conceivable to the minds of men, for the human intellect is imprisoned within its own sense impressions and the categories of thought derived from them, such as number, directionality, spatial extention, place, time, and so forth. Allah is beyond all of that; in His own words,
"There is nothing whatesover like unto Him" (Qur'an 42:11)
If we reflect for a moment on this verse, in the light of the hadith of Muslim about Ihsan that "it is to worship Allah as though you see Him," we realize that the means of seeing here is not the eye, which can only behold physical things like itself; nor yet the mind, which cannot transcend its own impressions to reach the Divine, but rather certitude, the light of Iman, whose locus is not the eye or the brain, but rather the ruh, a subtle faculty Allah has created within each of us called the soul, whose knowledge is unobstructed by the bounds of the created universe. Allah Most High says, by way of exalting the nature of this faculty by leaving it a mystery,
"Say: ‘The soul is of the affair of my Lord’" (Qur'an 17:85).
The food of this ruh is dhikr or the ‘remembrance of Allah.’ Why? Because acts of obedience increase the light of certainty and Iman in the soul, and dhikr is among the greatest of them, as is attested to by the sahih hadith related by al-Hakim that the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said,
"Shall I not tell you of the best of your works, the purest of them in the eyes of your Master, the highest in raising your rank, better than giving gold and silver, and better for you than to meet your enemy and smite their necks, and they smite yours?" They said, "This—what is it, O Messenger of Allah?" and he said: Dhikru Llahi ‘azza wa jall, "The remembrance of Allah Mighty and Majestic." (al-Mustadrak ‘ala al-Sahihayn, 1.496).
Increasing the strength of Iman through good actions, and particularly through the medium of dhikr has tremendous implications for the Islamic religion and traditional spirituality. A non-Muslim once asked me, "If God exists, then why all this beating around the bush? Why doesn’t He just come out and say so?"
The answer is that taklif or ‘moral responsibility’ in this life is not only concerned with outward actions, but with what we believe, our ‘Aqida—and the strength with which we believe it. If belief in God and other eternal truths were effortless in this world, there would be no point in Allah making us responsible for it, it would be automatic, involuntary, like our belief, say, that London is in England. There would no point in making someone responsible for something impossible not to believe.
But the responsibility Allah has place upon us is belief in the Unseen, as a test for us in this world to choose between kufr and Iman, to distinguish believer from unbeliever, and some believers above others.
This why strengthening Iman through dhikr is of such methodological importance for Tasawwuf: we have not only been commanded as Muslims to believe in certain things, but have been commanded to have absolute certainty in them. The world we see around us is composed of veils of light and darkness: events come that knock the Iman out of some of us, and Allah tests each of us as to the degree of certainty with which we believe the eternal truths of the religion. It was in this sense that ‘Umar ibn al-Khattab said, "If the Iman of Abu Bakr were weighed against the Iman of the entire Umma, it would outweigh it."
Now, in traditional ‘Aqida one of the most important tenets is the wahdaniyya or ‘oneness and uniqueness’ of Allah Most High. This means He is without any sharik or associate in His being, in His attributes, or in His acts. But the ability to hold this insight in mind in the rough and tumble of daily life is a function of the strength of certainty (yaqin) in one’s heart. Allah tells the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) in Surat al-A‘raf of the Qur'an,
"Say: ‘I do not possess benefit for myself or harm, except as Allah wills’" (Qur'an 7:188),
yet we tend to rely on ourselves and our plans, in obliviousness to the facts of ‘Aqida that ourselves and our plans have no effect, that Allah alone brings about effects.
If you want to test yourself on this, the next time you contact someone with good connections whose help is critical to you, take a look at your heart at the moment you ask him to put in a good word for you with someone, and see whom you are relying upon. If you are like most of us, Allah is not at the forefront of your thoughts, despite the fact that He alone is controlling the outcome. Isn’t this a lapse in your ‘Aqida, or, at the very least, in your certainty?
Tasawwuf corrects such shortcomings by step-by-step increasing the Muslim’s certainty in Allah. The two central means of Tasawwuf in attaining the conviction demanded by ‘Aqida are mudhakara, or learning the traditional tenets of Islamic faith, and dhikr, deepening one’s certainty in them by remembrance of Allah. It is part of our faith that, in the words of the Qur'an in Surat al-Saffat,
"Allah has created you and what you do" (Qur'an 37:96);
yet for how many of us is this day to day experience? Because Tasawwuf remedies this and other shortcomings of Iman, by increasing the Muslim’s certainty through a systematic way of teaching and dhikr, it has traditionally been regarded as personally obligatory to this pillar of the religion also, and from the earliest centuries of Islam, has proved its worth.
The last question we will deal with tonight is: What about the bad Sufis we read about, who contravene the teachings of Islam?
The answer is that there are two meanings of Sufi: the first is "Anyone who considers himself a Sufi," which is the rule of thumb of orientalist historians of Sufism and popular writers, who would oppose the "Sufis" to the "Ulama." I think the Qur'anic verses and hadiths we have mentioned tonight about the scope and method of true Tasawwuf show why we must insist on the primacy of the definition of a Sufi as "a man of religious learning who applied what he knew, so Allah bequeathed him knowledge of what he did not know."
The very first thing a Sufi, as a man of religious learning knows is that the Shari‘a and ‘Aqida of Islam are above every human being. Whoever does not know this will never be a Sufi, except in the orientalist sense of the word—like someone standing in front of the stock exchange in an expensive suit with a briefcase to convince people he is a stockbroker. A real stockbroker is something else.
Because this distinction is ignored today by otherwise well-meaning Muslims, it is often forgotten that the ‘ulama who have criticized Sufis, such as Ibn al-Jawzi in his Talbis Iblis [The Devil’s deception], or Ibn Taymiya in places in his Fatawa, or Ibn al-Qayyim al-Jawziyya, were not criticizing Tasawwuf as an ancillary discipline to the Shari‘a. The proof of this is Ibn al-Jawzi’s five-volume Sifat al-safwa, which contains the biographies of the very same Sufis mentioned in al-Qushayri’s famous Tasawwuf manual al-Risala al-Qushayriyya. Ibn Taymiya considered himself a Sufi of the Qadiri order, and volumes ten and eleven of his thirty-seven-volume Majmu‘ al-fatawa are devoted to Tasawwuf. And Ibn al-Qayyim al-Jawziyya wrote his three-volume Madarij al-salikin, a detailed commentary on ‘Abdullah al-Ansari al-Harawi’s tract on the spiritual stations of the Sufi path, Manazil al-sa’irin. These works show that their authors’ criticisms were not directed at Tasawwuf as such, but rather at specific groups of their times, and they should be understood for what they are.
As in other Islamic sciences, mistakes historically did occur in Tasawwuf, most of them stemming from not recognizing the primacy of Shari‘a and ‘Aqida above all else. But these mistakes were not different in principle from, for example, the Isra’iliyyat (baseless tales of Bani Isra’il) that crept into tafsir literature, or the mawdu‘at (hadith forgeries) that crept into the hadith. These were not taken as proof that tafsir was bad, or hadith was deviance, but rather, in each discipline, the errors were identified and warned against by Imams of the field, because the Umma needed the rest. And such corrections are precisely what we find in books like Qushayri’s Risala,Ghazali’s Ihya’ and other works of Sufism.
For all of the reasons we have mentioned, Tasawwuf was accepted as an essential part of the Islamic religion by the ‘ulama of this Umma. The proof of this is all the famous scholars of Shari‘a sciences who had the higher education of Tasawwuf, among them Ibn ‘Abidin, al-Razi, Ahmad Sirhindi, Zakariyya al-Ansari, al-‘Izz ibn ‘Abd al-Salam, Ibn Daqiq al-‘Eid, Ibn Hajar al-Haytami, Shah Wali Allah, Ahmad Dardir, Ibrahim al-Bajuri, ‘Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulsi, Imam al-Nawawi, Taqi al-Din al-Subki, and al-Suyuti.
Among the Sufis who aided Islam with the sword as well as the pen, to quote Reliance of the Traveller, were:
such men as the Naqshbandi sheikh Shamil al-Daghestani, who fought a prolonged war against the Russians in the Caucasus in the nineteenth century; Sayyid Muhammad ‘Abdullah al-Somali, a sheikh of the Salihiyya order who led Muslims against the British and Italians in Somalia from 1899 to 1920; the Qadiri sheikh ‘Uthman ibn Fodi, who led jihad in Northern Nigeria from 1804 to 1808 to establish Islamic rule; the Qadiri sheikh ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Jaza’iri, who led the Algerians against the French from 1832 to 1847; the Darqawi faqir al-Hajj Muhammad al-Ahrash, who fought the French in Egypt in 1799; the Tijani sheikh al-Hajj ‘Umar Tal, who led Islamic Jihad in Guinea, Senegal, and Mali from 1852 to 1864; and the Qadiri sheikh Ma’ al-‘Aynayn al-Qalqami, who helped marshal Muslim resistance to the French in northern Mauritania and southern Morocco from 1905 to 1909.
Among the Sufis whose missionary work Islamized entire regions are such men as the founder of the Sanusiyya order, Muhammad ‘Ali Sanusi, whose efforts and jihad from 1807 to 1859 consolidated Islam as the religion of peoples from the Libyan Desert to sub-Saharan Africa; [and] the Shadhili sheikh Muhammad Ma‘ruf and Qadiri sheikh Uways al-Barawi, whose efforts spread Islam westward and inland from the East African Coast . . . . (Reliance of the Traveller,863).
It is plain from the examples of such men what kind of Muslims have been Sufis; namely, all kinds, right across the board—and that Tasawwuf did not prevent them from serving Islam in any way they could.
To summarize everything I have said tonight: In looking first at Tasawwuf and Shari‘a, we found that many Qur'anic verses and sahih hadiths oblige the Muslim to eliminate haram inner states as arrogance, envy, and fear of anyone besides Allah; and on the other hand, to acquire such obligatory inner states as mercy, love of one’s fellow Muslims, presence of mind in prayer, and love of the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace). We found that these inward states could not be dealt with in books of fiqh, whose purpose is to specify the outward, quantifiable aspects of the Shari‘a. The knowledge of these states is nevertheless of the utmost importance to every Muslim, and this is why it was studied under the ‘ulama of Ihsan, the teachers of Tasawwuf, in all periods of Islamic history until the beginning of the present century.
We then turned to the level of Iman, and found that though the ‘Aqida of Muslims is that Allah alone has any effect in this world, keeping this in mind in everhday life is not a given of human consciousness, but rather a function of a Muslim’s yaqin, his certainty. And we found that Tasawwuf, as an ancillary discipline to ‘Aqida, emphasizes the systematic increase of this certainty through both mudhakara, ‘teaching tenets of faith’ and dhikr, ‘the remembrance of Allah,’ in accordance with the words of the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) about Ihsan that "it is worship Allah as though you see Him."
Lastly, we found that accusations against Tasawwuf made by scholars such as Ibn al-Jawzi, and Ibn Taymiya were not directed against Tasawwuf in principle, but to specific groups and individuals in the times of these authors, the proof for which is the other books by the same authors that showed their understanding of Tasawwuf as a Shari‘a science.
To return to the starting point of my talk this evening, with the disappearance of traditional Islamic scholars from the Umma, two very different pictures of Tasawwuf emerge today. If we read books written after the dismantling of the traditional fabric of Islam by colonial powers in the last century, we find the big hoax: Islam without spirituality and Shari‘a without Tasawwuf. But if we read the classical works of Islamic scholarship, we learn that Tasawwuf has been a Shari‘a science like tafsir, hadith, or any other, throughout the history of Islam. The Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said,
"Truly, Allah does not look at your outward forms and wealth, but rather at your hearts and your works" (Sahih Muslim, 4.1389: hadith 2564).
And this is the brightest hope that Islam can offer a modern world darkened by materialism and nihilism: Islam as it truly is; the hope of eternal salvation through a religion of brotherhood and social and economic justice outwardly, and the direct experience of divine love and illumination inwardly.
Thursday, March 15, 2007
Israel/Palestine Conflict: U.S. Debate is way overdue
Israel/Palestine Conflict: US Debate is way overdue
By Edgar Hopida
(Unpublished Opinion Editorial)
Recently, well respected figures in our country have critically questioned our policy towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Professors Mearsheimer and Walt presented a well documented academic paper on the negative influence of the Israeli Lobby on our Middle East policy and former President Jimmy Carter’s new book on the mistakes of Israel and US policy and how to move forward, are the more notable of those critics.
There is a long history in support of these critics which our media unfortunately ignores, deliberately avoids, or in same cases distorts. Since the start of the conflict when early Jewish immigrants escaping the Nazi persecution started flocking to what was known Palestine (now Israel and the Occupied Territories), the international community tried to intervene by giving a part to Israel and leaving the rest to Palestinians in resolution 181. The United Nations since then issued over 60 Security Council resolutions condemning Israel (http://www.action-for-un-renewal.org.uk/pages/isreal_un_resolutions.htm) of which 42 of them were vetoed by the US. The UN also attempted to solve this conflict peacefully on many occasions including the drafting of Security Council Resolution 242 which required Israel to withdraw from all Arab territories captured in the June 1967 war. In fact the preambular paragraph of that same resolution stated that, “emphasizing the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war.”
The international consensus in support of Israeli withdrawal from occupied territories captured in 1967 has remained strong for more than 25 years only to be opposed by United States, Israel, and occasionally a U.S. client state.
In 2002 a General Assembly resolution which sought a peaceful settlement of the question of Palestine, affirming Israel’s right to secure and recognized borders as well as the Palestinians right to an independent state in West Bank and Gaza had a vote of 160-4, with Israel, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, and U.S. opposing. Israeli practices affecting the human rights of the Palestinians which the vote was 141-5, with Israel, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, and U.S. opposing.
The Oslo accords basically forced the Palestinian leadership to accept occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and Israel made the PLO a surrogate to its control of these territories. As far as the territorial make-up, it was fragmented into non-connecting cantons similar to the Bantustan of South Africa and buffered by Israeli only access roads, Israeli settlements, and check points.
B’Tselem (Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories) put out a comprehensive report back in 2002 called Land Grab which details the official Israeli policy of settlements in the Occupied Territories. Nearly half of the land surface of West Bank is made up of illegal Israeli settlements. This is in fact deemed illegal under international law to build on land taken illegally from Palestinians. The irony is that during the years of Oslo, the Israeli settlers increased from 250,000 to 380,000. In addition, the settlements were considered inaccessible to Palestinians unless they have special authorization from the Israeli government. This has effectively prevented any kind of significant Palestinian development. Another issue rarely brought up is water. The 5,000 Israeli settlers of the Jordan Valley consume more than 75% of the water. This is comparable to the amount of water consumed by 2 million Palestinians in West Bank.
Despite the claims made, not one settlement was dismantled during the Oslo period and in fact there was more than a 50 percent increase in settlements not including the ones built in East Jerusalem. The growth spurt of these settlements occurred not during the more hawkish Netanyahu, but during the dovish regime of Ehud Barak. During Sharon’s first few months as Prime Minister, over 44 new settlements were built.
Camp David accord which was touted as the “generous offer” was in fact no offer at all other than accepting the reality that the settlements were there to stay and Arafat had to accept it. Arafat tried desperately to cling to the international consensus on the issue and even compromised to accept settlements in the West Bank for the exchange of land swap of equal size and value. This however was not what the United States and Israel wanted. Their ultimatum was clear: either accept the dysfunctional Bantustan Palestinian state or be labeled the solely responsible for the collapse of the peace process.
The Saudi peace plan in 2002 was also rejected by the Israelis despite the fact it offered more than generous concessions: In exchange for full Israeli withdrawal and a just solution to the refugee problem, the plan offered full recognition and normal relations with Israel. This was a major concession because the Saudi plan did not ask for the right of return of Palestinians who were made refugees. If Israel in fact wanted normal relations with the Arab world and a stable peace, they would have jumped up at such an opportunity. This however, was not the case.
Sharon’s “big sacrifice” of dismantling all the settlements in Gaza in 2004 was in fact a smoke screen in building up the so called “security fence” which is deemed illegal in international law and condemned by just about every human rights organization, and the expansion of settlements in West Bank. Gaza’s airspace and sea lanes also continued to be under the control of the Israeli government. Professor Tanya Reinhart of Tel Aviv University said, “In other words, the Palestinians will be imprisoned from all sides, with no connection to the world, except through Israel. Israel also reserves for itself the right to act militarily inside the Gaza strip.” Tanya Reinhart even published a recent book entitled, Road Map to Nowhere-Israel/Palestine Since 2003 which destroys the Quartet led “Roadmap” plan which offers no viable solution to the problem.
The U.S. government has unfortunately protected Israel from all international pressure and has made it immune to typical international sanctions for similar actions done by other countries. This can easily be seen by looking at the veto record of the U.S. when it comes to any issue that criticizes the actions of Israel. The U.S. also gives Israel over $6 billion annually in weapons and loans. As Mearsheimer and Walt had written in their report on the Israel lobby in the U.S., “neither strategic nor moral arguments can account for America’s support for Israel.”
This kind of uncritical support has only led to resentment all throughout the world especially in the Middle East, and has only fueled extremism and terrorism. The United States cannot be considered an honest broker between the two parties if such support for Israel continues. If we are seriously considering making genuine peace in the region, it starts with solving this problem that benefits both Israelis and Palestinians equally. If we, as a nation, decide to keep the status quo, we will certainly be dragged in never ending conflicts that will incur huge financial burdens and more importantly more loss of innocent human lives.
Edgar D. Hopida is the Director of Public Relations for the San Diego Chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-San Diego). He may be contacted at ehopida@cair.com
By Edgar Hopida
(Unpublished Opinion Editorial)
Recently, well respected figures in our country have critically questioned our policy towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Professors Mearsheimer and Walt presented a well documented academic paper on the negative influence of the Israeli Lobby on our Middle East policy and former President Jimmy Carter’s new book on the mistakes of Israel and US policy and how to move forward, are the more notable of those critics.
There is a long history in support of these critics which our media unfortunately ignores, deliberately avoids, or in same cases distorts. Since the start of the conflict when early Jewish immigrants escaping the Nazi persecution started flocking to what was known Palestine (now Israel and the Occupied Territories), the international community tried to intervene by giving a part to Israel and leaving the rest to Palestinians in resolution 181. The United Nations since then issued over 60 Security Council resolutions condemning Israel (http://www.action-for-un-renewal.org.uk/pages/isreal_un_resolutions.htm) of which 42 of them were vetoed by the US. The UN also attempted to solve this conflict peacefully on many occasions including the drafting of Security Council Resolution 242 which required Israel to withdraw from all Arab territories captured in the June 1967 war. In fact the preambular paragraph of that same resolution stated that, “emphasizing the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war.”
The international consensus in support of Israeli withdrawal from occupied territories captured in 1967 has remained strong for more than 25 years only to be opposed by United States, Israel, and occasionally a U.S. client state.
In 2002 a General Assembly resolution which sought a peaceful settlement of the question of Palestine, affirming Israel’s right to secure and recognized borders as well as the Palestinians right to an independent state in West Bank and Gaza had a vote of 160-4, with Israel, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, and U.S. opposing. Israeli practices affecting the human rights of the Palestinians which the vote was 141-5, with Israel, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, and U.S. opposing.
The Oslo accords basically forced the Palestinian leadership to accept occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and Israel made the PLO a surrogate to its control of these territories. As far as the territorial make-up, it was fragmented into non-connecting cantons similar to the Bantustan of South Africa and buffered by Israeli only access roads, Israeli settlements, and check points.
B’Tselem (Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories) put out a comprehensive report back in 2002 called Land Grab which details the official Israeli policy of settlements in the Occupied Territories. Nearly half of the land surface of West Bank is made up of illegal Israeli settlements. This is in fact deemed illegal under international law to build on land taken illegally from Palestinians. The irony is that during the years of Oslo, the Israeli settlers increased from 250,000 to 380,000. In addition, the settlements were considered inaccessible to Palestinians unless they have special authorization from the Israeli government. This has effectively prevented any kind of significant Palestinian development. Another issue rarely brought up is water. The 5,000 Israeli settlers of the Jordan Valley consume more than 75% of the water. This is comparable to the amount of water consumed by 2 million Palestinians in West Bank.
Despite the claims made, not one settlement was dismantled during the Oslo period and in fact there was more than a 50 percent increase in settlements not including the ones built in East Jerusalem. The growth spurt of these settlements occurred not during the more hawkish Netanyahu, but during the dovish regime of Ehud Barak. During Sharon’s first few months as Prime Minister, over 44 new settlements were built.
Camp David accord which was touted as the “generous offer” was in fact no offer at all other than accepting the reality that the settlements were there to stay and Arafat had to accept it. Arafat tried desperately to cling to the international consensus on the issue and even compromised to accept settlements in the West Bank for the exchange of land swap of equal size and value. This however was not what the United States and Israel wanted. Their ultimatum was clear: either accept the dysfunctional Bantustan Palestinian state or be labeled the solely responsible for the collapse of the peace process.
The Saudi peace plan in 2002 was also rejected by the Israelis despite the fact it offered more than generous concessions: In exchange for full Israeli withdrawal and a just solution to the refugee problem, the plan offered full recognition and normal relations with Israel. This was a major concession because the Saudi plan did not ask for the right of return of Palestinians who were made refugees. If Israel in fact wanted normal relations with the Arab world and a stable peace, they would have jumped up at such an opportunity. This however, was not the case.
Sharon’s “big sacrifice” of dismantling all the settlements in Gaza in 2004 was in fact a smoke screen in building up the so called “security fence” which is deemed illegal in international law and condemned by just about every human rights organization, and the expansion of settlements in West Bank. Gaza’s airspace and sea lanes also continued to be under the control of the Israeli government. Professor Tanya Reinhart of Tel Aviv University said, “In other words, the Palestinians will be imprisoned from all sides, with no connection to the world, except through Israel. Israel also reserves for itself the right to act militarily inside the Gaza strip.” Tanya Reinhart even published a recent book entitled, Road Map to Nowhere-Israel/Palestine Since 2003 which destroys the Quartet led “Roadmap” plan which offers no viable solution to the problem.
The U.S. government has unfortunately protected Israel from all international pressure and has made it immune to typical international sanctions for similar actions done by other countries. This can easily be seen by looking at the veto record of the U.S. when it comes to any issue that criticizes the actions of Israel. The U.S. also gives Israel over $6 billion annually in weapons and loans. As Mearsheimer and Walt had written in their report on the Israel lobby in the U.S., “neither strategic nor moral arguments can account for America’s support for Israel.”
This kind of uncritical support has only led to resentment all throughout the world especially in the Middle East, and has only fueled extremism and terrorism. The United States cannot be considered an honest broker between the two parties if such support for Israel continues. If we are seriously considering making genuine peace in the region, it starts with solving this problem that benefits both Israelis and Palestinians equally. If we, as a nation, decide to keep the status quo, we will certainly be dragged in never ending conflicts that will incur huge financial burdens and more importantly more loss of innocent human lives.
Edgar D. Hopida is the Director of Public Relations for the San Diego Chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-San Diego). He may be contacted at ehopida@cair.com
Traditional Islam for the hip-hop generation
Traditional Islam for the hip-hop generation
By Zaid Shakur, Staff Writer
Southern California InFocus
March 2007
http://www.infocusnews.net/content/view/4013/135/
SAN DIEGO -- In the heart of San Diego’s inner-city, just blocks away from "the Four Corners of Death," (an intersection so nick-named by locals in the 1980s because of its notoriety for gang violence), nestled unceremoniously between a martial arts dojo and a neighborhood grocery store is the Logan Islamic Community Center (LICC). Situated in a working-class neighborhood that is overwhelmingly Latino, LICC serves a Muslim congregation that is small yet incredibly diverse. Within its 27 founding members there are Filipinos, Africans, African-Americans, Caucasians, and of course, Latinos.The most striking characteristics of this up-and-coming community is the fact that it is made up entirely of reverts to Islam—and though some regular attendees are anywhere from 40 years of age well into their 70s, the average age of LICC’s members is a tender 26 years old. It is precisely this youthful energy that one feels pulsating through the masjid and fueling its impressive list of programs, activities, and services.Mohammed Zaki Abdul-Latif, 26, is a local music DJ and active member of LICC. When the youth of the jama’at or congregation is mentioned, he is resolute. "Traditional Islam for the hip-hop generationAll praise is due to Allah, we’ve been received pretty warmly by children of immigrants who connect with us because we share common values. The elders and leaders of other Masajid have welcomed us. One of our members is the public relations director for Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)-San Diego and another is on the board of the Southern California Shura Council. We are first and foremost an indigenous, homegrown community of mostly young Muslims, but we’ve sat with and learned from traditional Ulama (scholars), many of them having a connection going back to the Prophet (saw) himself through either transmission of knowledge or lineage or both."One of the most dynamic and successful ways that LICC is serving this emerging young adult demographic is through its monthly poetry and spoken word contest, known as "Manual 4 Existence" held on the second Saturday of each month at Voz Alta, a downtown venue for the arts. It is a hip and high-energy function that allows members of the masjid to give strong daw’ah, or Islamic education to youth that would otherwise be enthralled by the usually immoral lyrics and rhythms of popular rap music. Abdul-Latif explains that "many of the traditional Ulama used to teach using poetry and qasidas. This is what gave us the idea to reach out in this manner."During the contest intermission, one of the members gives a dars (short talk) on topical issues such as gangs or drugs and relates it to Islamic solutions. The effect is palpable and non-Muslim attendees have converted to Islam as a result of this effort. Abdul-Latif often DJ’s during the event. "In my previous life before Islam I used to be a professional DJ, focusing more on the art itself. Now I don’t play in clubs, of course, and have branched out into world music and traditional Islamic music," he says.Tariq Ali, a Puerto Rican revert and Amir of LICC, came to San Diego in 1999 from New York. He and several others were part of the Jama’at of Shehu Uthman Ibn Fodio, an international group that studies and follows the methodology of that West African Islamic Scholar. That same year Ali and members of the Filipino Islamic community joined forces to create the "UMA of San Diego" (UMA stands for United Muslim Association). They began seeking knowledge from Amir Mohammad Shareef and Shaikh Hamza Yusuf Hanson.They opened a small school in 1999 in San Diego’s largely Mexican, low-income Logan Heights area."We felt that there was a need in San Diego for traditional Islamic knowledge to be taught--knowledge that was based on the Qur’an, the Sunnah and the work of the great Ulama," says Ali. "There was no other masjid in the area that we felt was doing this." The school, or "the Building" as it was known, was opened to all Muslims and offered a wide array of classes including Hadith studies, Arabic courses, Fiqh classes and the study of classical Islamic texts by the likes of Shaikh Uthman Ibn Fodio, as well as some contemporary Islamic thinkers like Dr. Sherman Jackson.There is wonderful irony in the fact that these young reverts, themselves a product of ‘hip-hop’ culture and modernity, have become qualified to teach Islam. Several of the brothers have in the past eight years traveled extensively to places such as Yemen and Mauritania to study for years at a time with scholars like Shaikh Mohammed Al-Yacoubi and Shaikh Habib Umar in order to pass on what they’ve learned, becoming fluent in the Arabic language and receiving Ijazah (license) in several Islamic sciences.By 2006 the needs of the jama’at had grown and the small one room school was no longer sufficient. A search for a larger location proved fruitful when a local storefront Masjid closed, allowing for the jama’at to take over the site. With only minor adjustments in structure, such as the erection of curtains for the privacy of the women and the addition of traditional wudoo or ablution stations, the congregation was able to transform it into the thriving center of learning and worship that it is today.The current class schedule consists of 6 courses held 4 days a week that include in-depth study of Islamic Jurisprudence from the Risala of ibn Abi-Zaid, Shafi’ Fiqh, Maliki Fiqh from the Umdat l’ Bayyan of Shehu Uthman Ibn Fodio, Biblical Sources & Dawa’ah Strategies with Special Emphasis on Refutations/Rebuttals, and Women’s Arabic.LICC is also home to a very strong and vibrant women’s program known as "Yan Taru." Yan Taru was a Fulani word used in the Sokoto Caliphate to refer to women under the age of 14 and over the age of 45 who were the backbone of an educational movement established by Nana Asma’u during the reign of her brother Caliph Muhammad Bello (1817 - 1837). The Yan Taru was a group of female student-teachers. These women and girls left their homes and made the long arduous journey to Sokoto, primarily on foot. They were led by knowledgeable women called Jaji’s. The Jaji would prepare the Yan Taru for study, asking them to purify their intentions. The Jaji would accept sadaqa or charity for the journey from the women who could not make the trip and then teach them upon their return. Women, the sustainers of the home and society would thus have access to knowledge without having to leave their homes. Yan Taru is an international program but Najiyya Ali is the Jaji of LICC’s division. "Women are the foundation of the Muslim community. They are the first educators," explans Najiyya. "If you have ignorant women you’ll have an ignorant community. If you have knowledgeable women you’ll have a knowledgeable community."Presently the sisters sponsor each other to attend "Deen Intensives" around the country and hold classes for the other sisters when they come home. The women of LICC also perform charitable work for the community, recently holding a community sponsored rummage sale with the proceeds going to buy food vouchers that were given to the needy.The community of LICC is also making an impression throughout the broader Muslim community with its lectures at masjids, college campuses and public libraries. Among the highest priorities is working with youth for gang prevention and intervention, especially poignant since many in the community were once affiliated with gangs themselves until Islam entered their lives.Abdul-Latif remembers a particularly successful event. "We called it ‘non-Muslim family gratitude night’ where we held a banquet and seminar for our non-Muslim parents, brothers, sisters, etc, where we honored them, and Imam Zaid gave a talk on understanding Islam."Abdul-Latif and others at LICC have recently put their musical and rhetorical talents to use online by hosting "Discourse," an internet radio show on Earthbound radio (www.twelvez.com), which airs every Sunday afternoon from 12-2pm. It is a mixture of clean hip hop and conscious discussion.Abdul-Latif is excited about the show. "The inspiration for the title "Discourse" came from a lecture by Shaikh Hamza Yusuf who once said that ‘Islam was not allowed in this discourse…,’ referring to national and societal discourse. Our mission statement is ‘raising the standard of intellectual discussion in all arenas of life amongst hip hop aficionados and people who just want to think.’ We insert Islamic themes into our discussions while keeping it objective and trying to share information with people of different backgrounds, while always maintaining our Islamic identity. There’s a hint of comedy and seriousness without nonsense or Jahilliyya (ignorance)."With an active congregation, LICC has its own unique "flavor" and a rich atmosphere of family and connectedness. Sitting firmly on the edge of Islamic teachings and creative programs, the masjid has succeeded in reaching out to a hip-hop generation.
By Zaid Shakur, Staff Writer
Southern California InFocus
March 2007
http://www.infocusnews.net/content/view/4013/135/
SAN DIEGO -- In the heart of San Diego’s inner-city, just blocks away from "the Four Corners of Death," (an intersection so nick-named by locals in the 1980s because of its notoriety for gang violence), nestled unceremoniously between a martial arts dojo and a neighborhood grocery store is the Logan Islamic Community Center (LICC). Situated in a working-class neighborhood that is overwhelmingly Latino, LICC serves a Muslim congregation that is small yet incredibly diverse. Within its 27 founding members there are Filipinos, Africans, African-Americans, Caucasians, and of course, Latinos.The most striking characteristics of this up-and-coming community is the fact that it is made up entirely of reverts to Islam—and though some regular attendees are anywhere from 40 years of age well into their 70s, the average age of LICC’s members is a tender 26 years old. It is precisely this youthful energy that one feels pulsating through the masjid and fueling its impressive list of programs, activities, and services.Mohammed Zaki Abdul-Latif, 26, is a local music DJ and active member of LICC. When the youth of the jama’at or congregation is mentioned, he is resolute. "Traditional Islam for the hip-hop generationAll praise is due to Allah, we’ve been received pretty warmly by children of immigrants who connect with us because we share common values. The elders and leaders of other Masajid have welcomed us. One of our members is the public relations director for Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)-San Diego and another is on the board of the Southern California Shura Council. We are first and foremost an indigenous, homegrown community of mostly young Muslims, but we’ve sat with and learned from traditional Ulama (scholars), many of them having a connection going back to the Prophet (saw) himself through either transmission of knowledge or lineage or both."One of the most dynamic and successful ways that LICC is serving this emerging young adult demographic is through its monthly poetry and spoken word contest, known as "Manual 4 Existence" held on the second Saturday of each month at Voz Alta, a downtown venue for the arts. It is a hip and high-energy function that allows members of the masjid to give strong daw’ah, or Islamic education to youth that would otherwise be enthralled by the usually immoral lyrics and rhythms of popular rap music. Abdul-Latif explains that "many of the traditional Ulama used to teach using poetry and qasidas. This is what gave us the idea to reach out in this manner."During the contest intermission, one of the members gives a dars (short talk) on topical issues such as gangs or drugs and relates it to Islamic solutions. The effect is palpable and non-Muslim attendees have converted to Islam as a result of this effort. Abdul-Latif often DJ’s during the event. "In my previous life before Islam I used to be a professional DJ, focusing more on the art itself. Now I don’t play in clubs, of course, and have branched out into world music and traditional Islamic music," he says.Tariq Ali, a Puerto Rican revert and Amir of LICC, came to San Diego in 1999 from New York. He and several others were part of the Jama’at of Shehu Uthman Ibn Fodio, an international group that studies and follows the methodology of that West African Islamic Scholar. That same year Ali and members of the Filipino Islamic community joined forces to create the "UMA of San Diego" (UMA stands for United Muslim Association). They began seeking knowledge from Amir Mohammad Shareef and Shaikh Hamza Yusuf Hanson.They opened a small school in 1999 in San Diego’s largely Mexican, low-income Logan Heights area."We felt that there was a need in San Diego for traditional Islamic knowledge to be taught--knowledge that was based on the Qur’an, the Sunnah and the work of the great Ulama," says Ali. "There was no other masjid in the area that we felt was doing this." The school, or "the Building" as it was known, was opened to all Muslims and offered a wide array of classes including Hadith studies, Arabic courses, Fiqh classes and the study of classical Islamic texts by the likes of Shaikh Uthman Ibn Fodio, as well as some contemporary Islamic thinkers like Dr. Sherman Jackson.There is wonderful irony in the fact that these young reverts, themselves a product of ‘hip-hop’ culture and modernity, have become qualified to teach Islam. Several of the brothers have in the past eight years traveled extensively to places such as Yemen and Mauritania to study for years at a time with scholars like Shaikh Mohammed Al-Yacoubi and Shaikh Habib Umar in order to pass on what they’ve learned, becoming fluent in the Arabic language and receiving Ijazah (license) in several Islamic sciences.By 2006 the needs of the jama’at had grown and the small one room school was no longer sufficient. A search for a larger location proved fruitful when a local storefront Masjid closed, allowing for the jama’at to take over the site. With only minor adjustments in structure, such as the erection of curtains for the privacy of the women and the addition of traditional wudoo or ablution stations, the congregation was able to transform it into the thriving center of learning and worship that it is today.The current class schedule consists of 6 courses held 4 days a week that include in-depth study of Islamic Jurisprudence from the Risala of ibn Abi-Zaid, Shafi’ Fiqh, Maliki Fiqh from the Umdat l’ Bayyan of Shehu Uthman Ibn Fodio, Biblical Sources & Dawa’ah Strategies with Special Emphasis on Refutations/Rebuttals, and Women’s Arabic.LICC is also home to a very strong and vibrant women’s program known as "Yan Taru." Yan Taru was a Fulani word used in the Sokoto Caliphate to refer to women under the age of 14 and over the age of 45 who were the backbone of an educational movement established by Nana Asma’u during the reign of her brother Caliph Muhammad Bello (1817 - 1837). The Yan Taru was a group of female student-teachers. These women and girls left their homes and made the long arduous journey to Sokoto, primarily on foot. They were led by knowledgeable women called Jaji’s. The Jaji would prepare the Yan Taru for study, asking them to purify their intentions. The Jaji would accept sadaqa or charity for the journey from the women who could not make the trip and then teach them upon their return. Women, the sustainers of the home and society would thus have access to knowledge without having to leave their homes. Yan Taru is an international program but Najiyya Ali is the Jaji of LICC’s division. "Women are the foundation of the Muslim community. They are the first educators," explans Najiyya. "If you have ignorant women you’ll have an ignorant community. If you have knowledgeable women you’ll have a knowledgeable community."Presently the sisters sponsor each other to attend "Deen Intensives" around the country and hold classes for the other sisters when they come home. The women of LICC also perform charitable work for the community, recently holding a community sponsored rummage sale with the proceeds going to buy food vouchers that were given to the needy.The community of LICC is also making an impression throughout the broader Muslim community with its lectures at masjids, college campuses and public libraries. Among the highest priorities is working with youth for gang prevention and intervention, especially poignant since many in the community were once affiliated with gangs themselves until Islam entered their lives.Abdul-Latif remembers a particularly successful event. "We called it ‘non-Muslim family gratitude night’ where we held a banquet and seminar for our non-Muslim parents, brothers, sisters, etc, where we honored them, and Imam Zaid gave a talk on understanding Islam."Abdul-Latif and others at LICC have recently put their musical and rhetorical talents to use online by hosting "Discourse," an internet radio show on Earthbound radio (www.twelvez.com), which airs every Sunday afternoon from 12-2pm. It is a mixture of clean hip hop and conscious discussion.Abdul-Latif is excited about the show. "The inspiration for the title "Discourse" came from a lecture by Shaikh Hamza Yusuf who once said that ‘Islam was not allowed in this discourse…,’ referring to national and societal discourse. Our mission statement is ‘raising the standard of intellectual discussion in all arenas of life amongst hip hop aficionados and people who just want to think.’ We insert Islamic themes into our discussions while keeping it objective and trying to share information with people of different backgrounds, while always maintaining our Islamic identity. There’s a hint of comedy and seriousness without nonsense or Jahilliyya (ignorance)."With an active congregation, LICC has its own unique "flavor" and a rich atmosphere of family and connectedness. Sitting firmly on the edge of Islamic teachings and creative programs, the masjid has succeeded in reaching out to a hip-hop generation.
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