Al Muqaddimah, or: An Introduction

The seeker's journey to attain the Supreme

Islamic Theologian With Quran (1902), by Ottoman painter Osman Hamdi Bey (1842-1910)

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﷽

O’er the clouds, he

In his youth was cradled

By good spirits,

’Neath the bushes in the cliffs.

[…]

Bear their glorious prince aloft!

On he rolls triumphantly,

Giving names to countries. Cities

Spring to being ’neath his foot.

[…]

And so bears he all his brothers,

And his treasures, and his children,

To their Sire, all joyous roaring,

Pressing to his mighty heart.

These are the sanguine words of “Mahomet’s Song,” written by German poet and littérateur Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832).¹ Goethe’s praiseful poem draws inspiration from the Prophet Muhammad’s (ﷺ) divine journey towards enlightenment, wisdom, and his becoming a sage of the Supreme. The Holy Prophet (ﷺ) of Islam is depicted, indeed quite uniquely and even unusually for the time and social milieu by this great early European Romantic, as a man of great wisdom and humility guided by his own inner voice and intuition — his natural disposition (fitrah) — and by the gentle nudge of the Divine. Goethe relates to us a song about a humble seeker, searching for the truth and wisdom of the universe through a constant cycle of ascent and descent between Heaven and Earth, between nature and Divine. Indeed, Goethe relates to us a universal tale of man’s search for meaning, and the placid mysticism of nature. Man is therefore bound by his nature, his disposition— that of curiosity, awe, and wonder in the presence of the Divine. Here lies faith.

And yet, the nature of faith, revelation, and truth is not as serene an illustration as Goethe paints. And while it is indeed serene, in that there exists inexplicable beauty within the search for truth, there is also great pain, turmoil, and heartbreak. What is our disposition towards truth, when we go about searching for it, only to stare into the abyss? What is the mark of uncertainty on the soul? Here lies doubt.

But after a few days […] the Divine Inspiration was also paused for a while and the Prophet became so sad as we have heard that he intended several times to throw himself from the tops of high mountains and every time he went up the top of a mountain in order to throw himself down, Gabriel would appear before him and say, “O Muhammad! You are indeed Allah's Apostle in truth,” whereupon his heart would become quiet and he would calm down and would return home.²

It is perhaps, one of the most shocking narrations, that the Prophet (ﷺ) would supposedly think to hurl himself from atop a mountain, purely out of desperation, over his grief and reproach in the absence of God’s presence during the several periods devoid of revelation after his first experience with the Divine.³ It is important to note that this narration is graded as daif (weak) by the majority of scholars such as Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, and can not be taken at face value within the orthodox framework, and its matn (text) is in contradiction with the attributes of Prophethood such as infallibility, soundness of mind, and the presence of Divine protection of their person.

Thematically and subtextually however, there is something that can be learned about the nature of Godlessness and the lack of Divine Presence. Here, we understand that a true and believing servant of God can not bear to exist in the shadow of the Divine. Without revelation, and without truth, there is nothing but a void of uncertainty. Without the divine inspiration of God, the Prophet (ﷺ) surely endured fear and loneliness (although perhaps not to the extent as described in the above narration), which indeed, is a feeling of universal relatability for the doubtful believer. While there exists a plethora of commentary on this hadith, what is most important thematically in the meaning of this narration is the circular and contradicting nature of faith and uncertainty, the burden of truth upon the believer.

Even in my own personal spiritual development towards the Supreme, I have no doubt encountered these uncertainties. From madrassa to madrassa, teacher to teacher, and book to book, I have found it burdensome to balance the faith with the uncertainties and noisiness of the world. It is when the material strips from us the spiritual, the cleavage between man and God leaves one lost in an oasis of doubt. A noisy world distracts one from his spiritual duties, but it is also burdensome to detach entirely from the material in favor of the spiritual. It is hardly practical to simply drop everything and live the lifestyle of a monk or an ascetic, which already very few possess an ability to commit to. But beyond possessing the ability to commit to such devotion, it is hardly the sole mark of faith and faithfulness. Our body is not merely a shell for the soul to overcome, nor is the matter in it innately sinful as many philosophers and theologians have suggested. Instead, it is more so that the body — dominated by desire — must be tamed, not destroyed or neglected, in order to fine tune that spiritual kernel which lay deep and dormant inside the heart of man, veiled by the clouding noise of the world’s motion. Indeed, faith is also motion. It is not to stand still as the sea of doubt washes over one’s heart, again burying that spiritual kernel deep below the surface. Faith is the re-direction of motion. To act as a filtration system, a conduit between the natural and the Divine.

The believer worships by choice, but even the unbeliever is bound by his fitrah. As must all things lead back to a single truth, so too are all things bound by their disposition. As above so below. Even the atoms of one’s body, and everything within him, are in constant motion— worship and praise of the Divine, no matter how alienated he may be from God. The macrocosm of the universe is in constant dialogue with the microcosm of man, but our limited perception hinders us from hearing it. Worship, is therefore not a choice. It is the default, the nature of all things. The sun, moon, and stars are all bound by their natures, subject to the laws of nature and physics. Trees, birds, and all the creatures of land and sea are also constantly singing their praises, in the universal language of motion that man has forgotten. “Do you not see that Allah is glorified by all those in the heavens and the earth, even the birds as they soar? Each ˹instinctively˺ knows their manner of prayer and glorification. And Allah has ˹perfect˺ knowledge of all they do” (Quran 24:31).⁴

Faith, then, is the realization of this natural disposition. It is the recognition of the universal truth and Supreme Reality, whereby in order to attain it, one must find balance between his spiritual and material duties in taming his desires. The nature of all things, including the universe, is a reflection of the inner world of the individual, and the individual is a reflection of the universe. In other words, what happens on a grand scale in the universe can also be observed on a smaller scale in individual human experience. Motion

Franz Rosenthal (1946) wrote of the nature of existence in islam⁵ saying:

People are dominated by bodily desires which lead them to destruction. If they would subdue their passions and aspire to goodness, they would achieve spiritual and intellectual perfection and be eternally happy. But man is inclined to follow his natural volition rather than the intellect. Therefore, perfection is rarely encountered among men and it is very exceptional to find in human beings such qualities as charity (al-ihsan), kindness (al-jamil), justice (al-’adl) and moderation (al-’iffah).⁶

It is here that the poetry of Goethe again finds relevancy. “Mahomet’s Song” is not merely praise towards a mystical figure, but it is in fact the divine hymn that is sung by all things. This is the true, and subtle mysticism behind Goethe’s praiseful words. But we must now ask ourselves, if all things are connected, and all things are aware of this truth by disposition, constantly in worship of Him, what then is the nature of faith?

And so bears he for all his brothers

As Goethe so poetically tells us, faith is burden. Zeal. Fanaticism — unwavering love for the Divine and total submission of oneself to truth. To bear for all of one’s brothers. To have faith, is to take on the burdens of the material world, and those of one’s tribe, nation, and congregation, and to devote oneself towards the Divine in sacrifice of desire, like a sunflower turning towards the sun even if its roots are grounded in poor soil. It is the ever-longing thirst for the Supreme, which can not be quenched by simple logics nor conceded to emotionalism. Neither can it be conceded to modernity, nor left to rot in antiquity. Faith like tradition, as said by another great Romantic, “is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.”⁷ A fire that burns deep even in the most cruel of conditions. Ultimately, it is total trust in the divine, and total submission to that which is above all.

The existence of doubt and uncertainty are simply the natural product of human intellectual inquiry. The rational mind must then process doubt, when confronted with challenging questions and new ideas, and seek what is true. Al-Ghazali wrote that if the believer is to become a righteous proponent of truth, then he must “dive daringly into the depths of this profound sea and wade into its deep water like a bold man, not like a cautious coward.”⁸ Al-Ghazali narrated his descent into doubt and development towards righteousness as an ever-questioning and skeptical, yet ever-searching seeker of truth and insight, as a process of great burden: to destroy the ego and its uncertainties, and to foster the spiritual kernel in the heart of man. The rational mind allows one to process doubt as a method of truth seeking. He continues, “I felt an inner urge to seek the true meaning of the original fitrah, and the true meaning of the beliefs arising through slavish aping of parents and teachers. I wanted to sift out these uncritical beliefs, the beginnings of which are suggestions imposed from without, since there are differences of opinion in the discernment of those that are true from those that are false.”⁹

There is no contradiction between reason and faith, for the inquiry of the rational mind and its desire to uncover uncertainties is the conduit of faith, and leads towards belief. The Divine can not be unveiled through mere observation and ‘rationalism’ in order to alleviate ones own doubt towards truth, as the supposed objectivity of observation — of which rationalism is its product — is in fact a subjective process of interpretation. To view with one’s eyes only in order to reach an intellectual conclusion, is limited in scope. Reason can never be absolute, as all reason is situated in its context, shaped and molded by the material nature and noise of a time and place.

What assurance have you that your reliance on rational data is not like your reliance on sense-data? Indeed, you used to have confidence in me [sense data]. Then the reason-judge came along and gave me the lie. But were it not for the reason-judge, you would still accept me [sense-data] as true. So there may be, beyond the perception of reason, another judge.¹⁰

As faith is not without works, reason is not without its noise. A noise that is alleviated by undertaking the burdens of faith, and the inner turmoil towards salvation. From this we can deduce, that to seek the truth through doubt rather than to alleviate it, is in itself a kind of innate truth which speaks to our disposition (fitrah). It is through faith in God and His salvation, that truth is unveiled. We again find this kind of mystical and cosmological thinking in the works of Hegel, who contends that the total alleviation of idealism (via Kant) is insufficient, in which an image of ‘pure rationalism’ is constructed towards absolute empiricism — a view which distorts the nature of reality by separating man’s disposition (or human need) with the material nature of the world. In this, he mirrors Al-Ghazali greatly.

Reason will not even give us an adequate empirical understanding of the self—the sort of understanding promised by empirical psychology…transcendental idealism leads to absolute empiricism. To get any filling—to get hold of difference, multiplicity, a world—will require an extraneous impulse. It must come from an outside source—an unknown thing-in-itself.¹¹

Returning to Al-Ghazali, faith (iman) is indeed a matter of the heart and is acquired through the grace and guidance of God. Faith cannot be attained through reason alone, requiring the illumination of the heart through spiritual praxis and through works. Faith, as a means to attain salvation, is not contrary to reason, but is in fact beyond the limitations of human reason, and requires the completeness and wholeness of the human spirit and the rational mind. It is the doubts and uncertainties of the world that give rise to faith, superseding the crude and incomplete observations of the empirical mind.

To transform oneself through faith, practice, works, and moral responsibility is indeed a burden, but it is a burden the believer must undertake in order to speak to the very nature that lay hidden within him, obstructed by the temporary and superficial desires and uncertainties fabricated by the ego (nafs).

It is from this understanding of man’s nature, and of the nature of the world, that the namesake of this blog is taken directly from the impassioned words of Goethe. As a seeker of truth, it is incumbent that I, and all other seekers alike, must bear for ourselves and for our brothers. In other words, I seek what that which is true, not in the fashion of David Hume who posited reason as a means of negating these universal truths, but in the fashion of another great littérateur, who sought salvation in the cracks between the bricks of prison walls in Siberia, and whose conception of faith is defined as such¹²:

To study the meaning of man and of life — I am making significant progress here. I have faith in myself. Man is a mystery: if you spend your entire life trying to puzzle it out, then do not say that you have wasted your time. I occupy myself with this mystery, because I want to be a man

1. Translated by J. S. Dwight and quoted from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Poems of Places: An Anthology in 31 Volumes. Asia: Vols. XXI–XXIII. 1876–79. Bartleby

2. Sahih al-Bukhari, Volume 9, Book 87, Number 111

3. As characterized by Franz Rosenthal in “Suicide in Islam” in the Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 66, No. 3 (Jul. - Sep., 1946), pp. 239-259

4. Surah An-Nur, Verse 41. Ibn Kathir in his tafsir interprets this verse writing, “Everything glorifies Allah, may He be exalted, and to Him belongs the Sovereignty… Allah tells us that whosoever is in the heavens and on the earth, i.e., the angels, mankind, Jinn, animals and even inanimate objects, all glorify Him. This is like the Ayah 17:44 (Surah Al-Isra) and Ayah 53:51 (Surah An-Najm).”

5. What I mean here is not Islam, the religion as preached by Muhammad Ibn Abdullah (ﷺ) of the 7th century, but the Arabic word islam, or the state of total submission and devotion to God, which requires one to live in accordance with their fitrah

6. Rosenthal, pp. 248-249

7. A quote attributed to the German-Jewish (and later Catholic) composer Gustav Mahler (1860-1911), and possibly paraphrased from the French socialist politician Jean Jaurès (1859-1914)

8. Quoted from al-Munqidh min al Dalāl (Deliverance From Error), p. 5. Translated by R. J. McCarthy S. J.

9. Ibid, p. 6

10. Ibid, p. 12

11. Kain, P. J. “Hegel, Reason, and Idealism,” Idealistic Studies, 27 (1997): 97-112.

12. Fyodor Dostoevsky in a personal correspondence (1839), from Dostoevsky: His Life and Work by Konstantin Mochulsky (1971) , as translated by Michael A. Minihan, p. 17