Role Model

• When becoming humiliated, remember the Prophet in Ta'if.
• When being starved, remember the Prophet tying two stones to his stomach in the battle of Khandaq.
• When becoming angry, remember the Prophet's control of anger on the martyrdom of his beloved Uncle Hamza R.A.
• When losing a tooth, remember the Prophet's tooth in the battle of Uhud.
• When bleeding from any part of the body, remember the Prophet's body covered in blood on his return from Ta'if.
• When feeling lonely, remember the Prophet's seclusion in Mount Hira .
• When feeling tired in Salaat, remember the Prophet's blessed feet in Tahajjud.
• When being troubled by neighbours, remember the old woman who would empty rubbish on the Prophet.
• When losing a child, remember the Prophet's son, Ibrahim.
• When beginning a long journey, remember the Prophet's long journey to Madinah.
• When going against a Sunnah, remember the Prophet's intercession, (Ummati, Ummati, Ummati) (My Ummah).
• When experiencing less food in the house, remember the Prophet's days of poverty.
• When experiencing poverty, remember the Prophet's advice to Ashaab-e-Suffa (People of Suffa).
• When losing a family member, remember the Prophet's departure from this world.
• When becoming an orphan, remember the Prophet's age at six.
• When fearing an enemy, remember the Prophet's saying to Abu Bakr in Mount Thour

Original Egalitarian Order of Most Religions "Hijacked" by Men: Part 2 (The Eve of Destruction)

Still reeling from last year’s virulent dispute about the foiled appointment of its first gay bishop, the Angelican community is now faced with another potentially irreversible spilt. Forward in Faith, a group opposed to women priests, has proposed the idea of a province separate from but parallel to Canterbury and York, with its own exclusively male hierarchy. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has apparently hinted that he would be prepared to consider this suggestion, designed to prevent a mass exodus from the church when women are consecrated as bishops.

More liberal Anglicans condemn the plan as a form of sexual apartheid, even though the Forward in Faith has 4000 women members. Nevertheless, the new province would represent a male bastion in a world in which women are increasingly entering spheres that were formerly the preserve of men. The fantasy of an all-male enclave is not new in the history of religion. In the ancient world, women often served alongside men as priests. This did not affect their inferior social status, but they were regarded as worthy representatives of the divine. That changed during the axial age, from circa 800 BC to 200 BC, when all the world faiths that have continued to nourish humanity came into being at roughly the same time.

These axial religions hold many values in common, but they all share a fateful flaw. Whatever an axial faith took root, the position of women underwent a downturn. Most of these religions had an egalitarian ethos, but they were and have remained essentially male spiritualities. Confucius, for example, seemed entirely indifferent to women; Socrates was not a family man. In India, the Jain and the Buddhists orders were irenic forms of the ancient Aryan military brotherhoods, and though nuns were permitted to join, in a second-class capacity, many felt that the presence of women is inappropriate. Even the Buddha, who did not usually succumb to this type of prejudice, declared that women would fall upon his order like mildew on a rice field.

Such misogyny damages the integrity of faiths that insist that male and female are both created in God’s image and that all human beings are capable of attaining nirvana, knowledge of Brahman or the Tao. Yeshivas, madarasahs, seminaries, monastic orders and colleges of cardinals are all-male clubs that rigorously exclude women. This chauvinism infects the spirituality of the faithful, male and female alike. Male Jews are supposed to thank God daily for not creating them women; every Christmas, Christians sing “Lo! He abhors not the Virgin’s womb”’ as though Jesus’ tolerance of the female body was an act of extraordinary condescension on his part.

Even when there was an initial attempt to introduce greater sexual equality, men hijacked the faith and dragged it back to the old patriarchy. This happened in both Christianity and Islam, later-day reassertions of axial age monotheism. The Prophet Mohammad, for example, was anxious to emancipate women and they were among his first converts. The Quran teaches that men and women have exactly the same responsibilities and duties, and gives women rights of inheritance and divorce that we would not enjoy in the west until the 19^th century. There is nothing in the Quran about the veiling of all women or their confinements in harems. This practice came into Islam some three to four generations after the Prophet, under the influence of the Greek Christians of Byzantium, who had long covered and secluded their women in this way.

Jesus would have been surprised by the confinement of women. Both he and St Paul had women disciples. They did not ordain them as priests, because there was no Christian priesthood until the third century. The early Christians espoused a revolutionary egalitarianism; a priestly hierarchy was too reminiscent of Judaism and paganism, which they were beginning to leave behind. Those who today condemn women’s ordination should be aware that priesthood and episcopacy are themselves innovations that depart from the practice of the primitive church.

The gospels give women a good press: it is the women who stand by Jesus throughout the crucifixion, while his male disciples are sulking in hiding, and it is women who receives the first news of the resurrection and bring it to the men. They were, it is often said, “apostles to the apostles”. St Paul proclaimed that Christ was neither male nor female. Most of the misogynist passages attributed to Paul are taken from epistles written decades after his death, when Christianity was being to retreat from its radicalism.

Once this had happened, Christianity found issue of sex and gender more difficult than any other faith. Some of the fathers of the church seemed totally unable to deal with women, and attacked them in vicious, immoderate and, indeed unchristian language. Because they believed that celibacy was the prime Christians vocation, they projected their own frustration on to women, whom they castigated as evil temptresses. Tertullian told women to shroud their bodies in veils and make themselves as unattractive as possible. He blamed them for the sin of Eve: “You are devil’s gateway….because of you Son of God had to die!”

Many of the fathers wanted to make the church a male enclave. St Augustine told his priests to shun the company of women, even if they were sick or in trouble. Even mothers were not safe: “It is still Eve the temptress that we must beware of in every woman.” The fathers’ ideal woman was a virgin, who had renounced her sexuality and thereby become an honorary male. Some women, such as John of Arc or Catherine of Siena, exploited their symbolism and used their virginity as an entrée into the male spheres of war and politics, but in general virgins were supposed to retreat from the world and leave it to men. They would eventually be blocked away in enclosed convents.

Later St Thomas Aquinas saw woman as biologically flawed, “defective and misbegotten”, and thus inherently inferior to male sex, to whom it was there duty to submit. Even Luther, who left his monastery to marry, believe that, as punishment to the sin of Eve, women must be driven from the world of men and confined in the home “as a nail driven into the wall”. Protestantism made Christianity more male than ever; by abolishing the cults of the Virgin Mary and the women saints, it banished all female imagery from the Christian consciousness.

Forwards in Faith’s dream of an exclusively male preserve draw its strength form a Christian tradition on denial, frustration and disgust that can by no stretch of the imagination be regarded as spiritually wholesome. In all the world faiths, women are trying to redress the pernicious chauvinism that has tainted their traditions. We are now living in a world that’s perilously torn apart by religious extremism. We can no longer afford faith that feeds in anyway upon hatred, exclusion and disdain. Before we condemn the bigotry of other traditions, we should try to heal the prejudice that has damaged our own.

By: Karen Armstrong

Original Egalitarian Order of Most Religions "Hijacked" by Men: Part 1

Not one of the world religions has, in practice, been good to women and this is one of their major flaws.

They did not set out to be hostile to women, but they developed in patriarchal societies, where masculine skills, such as warfare, had become more highly prized in the newly developed cities than they had been in the villages and rural areas, where women contributed more to the economy.

Thus Confucius, a genial man, seems quite indifferent to women. The same is true of Socrates. Nevertheless, some of these faiths did initially attempt to give women a role. In the early Upanishads, women take part in the abstruse mystical discussions. This is simply taken for granted and there is no need to comment.

In Buddhism, women were allowed, eventually, to become mendicant nuns. Nevertheless, there is a story that the Buddha originally opposed this. But when it was pointed out to him that women were able to attain enlightenment and be proficient yogis, he relented, but commented sadly that they would fall upon the Buddhist order like mildew on a field of rice. Some scholars believe that this was a later story, projected back onto the Buddha by monks, whose lustful thoughts interrupted their meditations and blamed their failure to attain Nirvana on women. In fact, Buddhism gave women an opportunity to have a role other than the domestic that was absolutely unprecedented at that time, even though the nuns were seen as subordinate to the priests.

Both Christianity and Islam were initially very positive towards women. In the gospels, women are the first to receive news of the resurrection of Jesus; St. Paul insists that in Christ there was neither male nor female. He greets women as co-apostles and fellow workers, on the same level as the men. But in later books of the New Testament, notably the epistles of Titus and Timothy, which were not written by Paul, women have lost this equality and are told that they are subject to their husbands. What has happened is that the originally egalitarian gospel has been hijacked by the men and dragged back to the old patriarchy.

The same happened in Islam. The 7th century Quran gave women rights of inheritance and divorce that women in the West would not get until the 19th century. There is nothing in the Quran to suggest that all women should be veiled or secluded from society. Only the Prophet's wives were to be covered, and this was a security measure. Muhammad's position in Medina was very insecure and his enemies were harassing his wives. But the other Muslim women were not veiled and took a full and lively part in the life of the city. The Quran makes it clear that men and women have equal rights and responsibilities.

But later, the position of women deteriorated. The early Fathers of the Church were sometimes viciously misogynist. In early Christianity, women were blamed for the sin of Eve and, as the cult of celibacy grew, were castigated for being sexual temptresses. Tertullian called women the devil's gateway: they were responsible for Jesus' death. St. Augustine said that all women, even wives and mothers, must be avoided, because they were all associated with Eve, who was responsible for the fall of humanity into sin.

Most religious law codes were devised in the premodern period, when all women in all societies were regarded as second-class citizens. The emancipation of women has been one of the hallmarks of modernity, so that in 'fundamentalist' movements, which rebel against modernity, the traditional inferior status of women is stressed as part of this counter cultural revolt. And people are always reluctant to lose power.

Things are beginning to improve. Buddhist nuns are demanding that the men recognize their status in the Sangha, the Buddhist order. Women are becoming priests in many of the Protestant denominations, and except in Orthodox circles, Jewish women are becoming rabbis. Muslim feminists are developing an Islamic feminism, which looks back to the Quran and the Prophet, pointing out that the emancipation of women was a project dear to Muhammad's heart. In the Roman Catholic Church, there is no chance as yet of women being ordained as priests.

But there is still much work to be done. Historically, when a community feels threatened, the bodies of women come to represent the beleaguered society, and this applies to some Muslim communities, which feel threatened by he West, and to those religious groups that feel threatened by the secular world.

By: Karen Armstrong

The Guy In The Glass

When you get what you want in your struggle for pelf,
And the world makes you King for a day,
Then go to the mirror and look at yourself,
And see what that guy has to say.

For it isn't your Father or Mother or Wife,
Who judgment upon you must pass.
The feller whose verdict counts most in your life
Is the guy staring back from the glass.

He's the feller to please, never mind all the rest,
For he's with you clear up to the end,
And you've passed your most dangerous, difficult test
If the guy in the glass is your friend.

You may be like Jack Horner and "chisel" a plum,
And think you're a wonderful guy,
But the man in the glass says you're only a bum
If you can't look him straight in the eye.

You can fool the whole world down the pathway of years,
And get pats on the back as you pass,
But your final reward will be heartaches and tears
If you've cheated the guy in the glass.

Dale Wimbrow

"IF" by Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master,
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

Fundamental Techniques in Handling People

1. Don't criticize, condemn or complain.
2. Give honest and sincere appreciation.
3. Arouse in the other person an eager want.

---

Six ways to make people like you

1. Become genuinely interested in other people.
2. Smile.
3. Remember that a person's name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.
4. Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves.
5. Talk in terms of the other person's interests.
6. Make the other person feel important - and do it sincerely.

---

Win people to your way of thinking

1. The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it.
2. Show respect for the other person's opinions. Never say, "You're wrong."
3. If you are wrong, admit it quickly and emphatically.
4. Begin in a friendly way.
5. Get the other person saying "yes, yes" immediately.
6. Let the other person do a great deal of the talking.
7. Let the other person feel that the idea is his or hers.
8. Try honestly to see things from the other person's point of view.
9. Be sympathetic with the other person's ideas and desires.
10. Appeal to the nobler motives.
11. Dramatize your ideas.
12. Throw down a challenge.

---

Be a Leader: How to Change People Without Giving Offense or Arousing Resentment

A leader's job often includes changing your people's attitudes and behavior. Some suggestions to accomplish this:

1. Begin with praise and honest appreciation.
2. Call attention to people's mistakes indirectly.
3. Talk about your own mistakes before criticizing the other person.
4. Ask questions instead of giving direct orders.
5. Let the other person save face.
6. Praise the slightest improvement and praise every improvement. Be "hearty in your approbation and lavish in your praise."
7. Give the other person a fine reputation to live up to.
8. Use encouragement. Make the fault seem easy to correct.
9. Make the other person happy about doing the thing you suggest.

Moral 1

Once a boy went to a shop with his mother.The shop keeper looked at the small cute child and showed him a bottle with sweets and said

'Dear Child..u can take the sweets... but the child didnt take.The shop keeper was surprised.. such a small child he is and why is he not taking the sweets from the bottle. Again he said take the sweets.... now mother also heard that and said.. beta take the sweets.. yet he didnt take...

The shopkeeper seeing the child not taking the sweets... he himself took the sweets and gave to the child...... the child was happy to get two hands full of sweets ....

When returned to home Mother asked child...

Why didnt you take the sweets... when shop keeper told you to take...

Child replies... Mom! my hands are very small and if i take the sweets i can only take few.. but now you see when uncle gave with his big hands.... how many more sweets i got!


Moral: When we take we may get little but when ALLAH gives..,HE gives us more beyond our expectations............., more than what we can hold.....

Knowledge and Religious Experience

What is the character and general structure of the universe in which we live? Is there a permanent element in the constitution of this universe? How are we related to it? What place do we occupy in it, and what is the kind of conduct that befits the place we occupy? These questions are common to religion, philosophy, and higher poetry. But the kind of knowledge that poetic inspiration brings is essentially individual in its character; it is figurative, vague, and indefinite. Religion, in its more advanced forms, rises higher than poetry. It moves from individual to society. In its attitude towards the Ultimate Reality it is opposed to the limitations of man; it enlarges his claims and holds out the prospect of nothing less than a direct vision of Reality. Is it then possible to apply the purely rational method of philosophy to religion? The spirit of philosophy is one of free inquiry. It suspects all authority. Its function is to trace the uncritical assumptions of human thought to their hiding places, and in this pursuit it may finally end in denial or a frank admission of the incapacity of pure reason to reach the Ultimate Reality. The essence of religion, on the other hand, is faith; and faith, like the bird, sees its ‘trackless way’ unattended by intellect which, in the words of the great mystic poet of Islam, ‘only waylays the living heart of man and robs it of the invisible wealth of life that lies within’.¹ Yet it cannot be denied that faith is more than mere feeling. It has something like a cognitive content, and the existence of rival parties— scholastics and mystics— in the history of religion shows that idea is a vital element in religion. Apart from this, religion on its doctrinal side, as defined by Professor Whitehead, is ‘a system of general truths which have the effect of transforming character when they are sincerely held and vividly apprehended’.² Now, since the transformation and guidance of man’s inner and outer life is the essential aim of religion, it is obvious that the general truths which it embodies must not remain unsettled. No one would hazard action on the basis of a doubtful principle of conduct. Indeed, in view of its function, religion stands in greater need of a rational foundation of its ultimate principles than even the dogmas of science. Science may ignore a rational metaphysics; indeed, it has ignored it so far. Religion can hardly afford to ignore the search for a reconciliation of the oppositions of experience and a justification of the environment in which humanity finds itself. That is why Professor Whitehead has acutely remarked that ‘the ages of faith are the ages of rationalism’.³ But to rationalize faith is not to admit the superiority of philosophy over religion. Philosophy, no doubt, has jurisdiction to judge religion, but what is to be judged is of such a nature that it will not submit to the jurisdiction of philosophy except on its own terms. While sitting in judgement on religion, philosophy cannot give religion an inferior place among its data. Religion is not a departmental affair; it is neither mere thought, nor mere feeling, nor mere action; it is an expression of the whole man. Thus, in the evaluation of religion, philosophy must recognize the central position of religion and has no other alternative but to admit it as something focal in the process of reflective synthesis. Nor is there any reason to suppose that thought and intuition are essentially opposed to each other. They spring up from the same root and complement each other. The one grasps Reality piecemeal, the other grasps it in its wholeness. The one fixes its gaze on the eternal, the other on the temporal aspect of Reality. The one is present enjoyment of the whole of Reality; the other aims at traversing the whole by slowly specifying and closing up the various regions of the whole for exclusive observation. Both are in need of each other for mutual rejuvenation. Both seek visions of the same Reality which reveals itself to them in accordance with their function in life. In fact, intuition, as Bergson rightly says, is only a higher kind of intellect.⁴

The search for rational foundations in Islam may be regarded to have begun with the Prophet himself. His constant prayer was: ‘God! grant me knowledge of the ultimate nature of things!’⁵ The work of later mystics and non-mystic rationalists forms an exceedingly instructive chapter in the history of our culture, inasmuch as it reveals a longing for a coherent system of ideas, a spirit of whole-hearted devotion to truth, as well as the limitations of the age, which rendered the various theological movements in Islam less fruitful than they might have been in a different age. As we all know, Greek philosophy has been a great cultural force in the history of Islam. Yet a careful study of the Qur’«n and the various schools of scholastic theology that arose under the inspiration of Greek thought disclose the remarkable fact that while Greek philosophy very much broadened the outlook of Muslim thinkers, it, on the whole, obscured their vision of the Qur’«n. Socrates concentrated his attention on the human world alone. To him the proper study of man was man and not the world of plants, insects, and stars. How unlike the spirit of the Qur’«n, which sees in the humble bee a recipient of Divine inspiration⁶ and constantly calls upon the reader to observe the perpetual change of the winds, the alternation of day and night, the clouds,⁷ the starry heavens,⁸ and the planets swimming through infinite space!⁹ As a true disciple of Socrates, Plato despised sense– perception which, in his view, yielded mere opinion and no real knowledge.¹⁰ How unlike the Qur’«n, which regards ‘hearing’ and ‘sight’ as the most valuable Divine gifts¹¹ and declares them to be accountable to God for their activity in this world.¹² This is what the earlier Muslim students of the Qur’«n completely missed under the spell of classical speculation. They read the Qur’«n in the light of Greek thought. It took them over two hundred years to perceive - though not quite clearly - that the spirit of the Qur’«n was essentially anti-classical,¹³ and the result of this perception was a kind of intellectual revolt, the full significance of which has not been realized even up to the present day. It was partly owing to this revolt and partly to his personal history that Ghaz«lâ based religion on philosophical scepticism - a rather unsafe basis for religion and not wholly justified by the spirit of the Qur’«n. Ghaz«lâ’s chief opponent, Ibn Rushd, who defended Greek philosophy against the rebels, was led, through Aristotle, to what is known as the doctrine of Immortality of Active Intellect,¹⁴ a doctrine which once wielded enormous influence on the intellectual life of France and Italy,¹⁵ but which, to my mind, is entirely opposed to the view that the Qur’«n takes of the value and destiny of the human ego.¹⁶ Thus Ibn Rushd lost sight of a great and fruitful idea in Islam and unwittingly helped the growth of that enervating philosophy of life which obscures man’s vision of himself, his God, and his world. The more constructive among the Ash‘arite thinkers were no doubt on the right path and anticipated some of the more modern forms of Idealism; yet, on the whole, the object of the Ash‘arite movement was simply to defend orthodox opinion with the weapons of Greek dialectic. The Mu‘tazilah, conceiving religion merely as a body of doctrines and ignoring it as a vital fact, took no notice of non-conceptual modes of approaching Reality and reduced religion to a mere system of logical concepts ending in a purely negative attitude. They failed to see that in the domain of knowledge - scientific or religious - complete independence of thought from concrete experience is not possible.

It cannot, however, be denied that Ghaz«lâ’s mission was almost apostolic like that of Kant in Germany of the eighteenth century. In Germany rationalism appeared as an ally of religion, but she soon realized that the dogmatic side of religion was incapable of demonstration. The only course open to her was to eliminate dogma from the sacred record. With the elimination of dogma came the utilitarian view of morality, and thus rationalism completed the reign of unbelief. Such was the state of theological thought in Germany when Kant appeared. His Critique of Pure Reason revealed the limitations of human reason and reduced the whole work of the rationalists to a heap of ruins. And justly has he been described as God’s greatest gift to his country. Ghaz«lâ’s philosophical scepticism which, however, went a little too far, virtually did the same kind of work in the world of Islam in breaking the back of that proud but shallow rationalism which moved in the same direction as pre-Kantian rationalism in Germany. There is, however, one important difference between Ghaz«lâ’s and Kant. Kant, consistently with his principles, could not affirm the possibility of a knowledge of God. Ghaz«lâ’s, finding no hope in analytic thought, moved to mystic experience, and there found an independent content for religion. In this way he succeeded in securing for religion the right to exist independently of science and metaphysics. But the revelation of the total Infinite in mystic experience convinced him of the finitude and inconclusiveness of thought and drove him to draw a line of cleavage between thought and intuition. He failed to see that thought and intuition are organically related and that thought must necessarily simulate finitude and inconclusiveness because of its alliance with serial time. The idea that thought is essentially finite, and for this reason unable to capture the Infinite, is based on a mistaken notion of the movement of thought in knowledge. It is the inadequacy of the logical understanding which finds a multiplicity of mutually repellent individualities with no prospect of their ultimate reduction to a unity that makes us sceptical about the conclusiveness of thought. In fact, the logical understanding is incapable of seeing this multiplicity as a coherent universe. Its only method is generalization based on resemblances, but its generalizations are only fictitious unities which do not affect the reality of concrete things. In its deeper movement, however, thought is capable of reaching an immanent Infinite in whose self-unfolding movement the various finite concepts are merely moments. In its essential nature, then, thought is not static; it is dynamic and unfolds its internal infinitude in time like the seed which, from the very beginning, carries within itself the organic unity of the tree as a present fact. Thought is, therefore, the whole in its dynamic self-expression, appearing to the temporal vision as a series of definite specifications which cannot be understood except by a reciprocal reference. Their meaning lies not in their self-identity, but in the larger whole of which they are the specific aspects. This larger whole is to use a Qur’anic metaphor, a kind of ‘Preserved Tablet’,¹⁷ which holds up the entire undetermined possibilities of knowledge as a present reality, revealing itself in serial time as a succession of finite concepts appearing to reach a unity which is already present in them. It is in fact the presence of the total Infinite in the movement of knowledge that makes finite thinking possible. Both Kant and Ghaz«lâ’s failed to see that thought, in the very act of knowledge, passes beyond its own finitude. The finitudes of Nature are reciprocally exclusive. Not so the finitudes of thought which is, in its essential nature, incapable of limitation and cannot remain imprisoned in the narrow circuit of its own individuality. In the wide world beyond itself nothing is alien to it. It is in its progressive participation in the life of the apparently alien that thought demolishes the walls of its finitude and enjoys its potential infinitude. Its movement becomes possible only because of the implicit presence in its finite individuality of the infinite, which keeps alive within it the flame of aspiration and sustains it in its endless pursuit. It is a mistake to regard thought as inconclusive, for it too, in its own way, is a greeting of the finite with the infinite.

During the last five hundred years religious thought in Islam has been practically stationary. There was a time when European thought received inspiration from the world of Islam. The most remarkable phenomenon of modern history, however, is the enormous rapidity with which the world of Islam is spiritually moving towards the West. There is nothing wrong in this movement, for European culture, on its intellectual side, is only a further development of some of the most important phases of the culture of Islam. Our only fear is that the dazzling exterior of European culture may arrest our movement and we may fail to reach the true inwardness of that culture. During all the centuries of our intellectual stupor Europe has been seriously thinking on the great problems in which the philosophers and scientists of Islam were so keenly interested. Since the Middle Ages, when the schools of Muslim theology were completed, infinite advance has taken place in the domain of human thought and experience. The extension of man’s power over Nature has given him a new faith and a fresh sense of superiority over the forces that constitute his environment. New points of view have been suggested, old problems have been re-stated in the light of fresh experience, and new problems have arisen. It seems as if the intellect of man is outgrowing its own most fundamental categories - time, space, and causality. With the advance of scientific thought even our concept of intelligibility is undergoing a change.¹⁸ The theory of Einstein has brought a new vision of the universe and suggests new ways of looking at the problems common to both religion and philosophy. No wonder then that the younger generation of Islam in Asia and Africa demand a fresh orientation of their faith. With the reawakening of Islam, therefore, it is necessary to examine, in an independent spirit, what Europe has thought and how far the conclusions reached by her can help us in the revision and, if necessary, reconstruction, of theological thought in Islam. Besides this it is not possible to ignore generally anti-religious and especially anti-Islamic propaganda in Central Asia which has already crossed the Indian frontier. Some of the apostles of this movement are born Muslims, and one of them, Tewfâk Fikret, the Turkish poet, who died only a short time ago,¹⁹ has gone to the extent of using our great poet-thinker, Mirz« ‘Abd al-Q«dir Bedil of Akbar«b«d, for the purposes of this movement. Surely, it is high time to look to the essentials of Islam. In these lectures I propose to undertake a philosophical discussion of some of the basic of ideas of Islam, in the hope that this may, at least, be helpful towards a proper understanding of the meaning of Islam as a message to humanity. Also with a view to give a kind of ground-outline for further discussion, I propose, in this preliminary lecture, to consider the character of knowledge and religious experience.

The main purpose of the Qur’«n is to awaken in man the higher consciousness of his manifold relations with God and the universe. It is in view of this essential aspect of the Quranic teaching that Goethe, while making a general review of Islam as an educational force, said to Eckermann: ‘You see this teaching never fails; with all our systems, we cannot go, and generally speaking no man can go, farther than that.’²⁰ The problem of Islam was really suggested by the mutual conflict, and at the same time mutual attraction, presented by the two forces of religion and civilization. The same problem confronted early Christianity. The great point in Christianity is the search for an independent content for spiritual life which, according to the insight of its founder, could be elevated, not by the forces of a world external to the soul of man, but by the revelation of a new world within his soul. Islam fully agrees with this insight and supplements it by the further insight that the illumination of the new world thus revealed is not something foreign to the world of matter but permeates it through and through.

Thus the affirmation of spirit sought by Christianity would come not by the renunciation of external forces which are already permeated by the illumination of spirit, but by a proper adjustment of man’s relation to these forces in view of the light received from the world within. It is the mysterious touch of the ideal that animates and sustains the real, and through it alone we can discover and affirm the ideal. With Islam the ideal and the real are not two opposing forces which cannot be reconciled. The life of the ideal consists, not in a total breach with the real which would tend to shatter the organic wholeness of life into painful oppositions, but in the perpetual endeavour of the ideal to appropriate the real with a view eventually to absorb it, to convert it into itself and illuminate its whole being. It is the sharp opposition between the subject and the object, the mathematical without and the biological within, that impressed Christianity. Islam, however, faces the opposition with a view to overcome it. This essential difference in looking at a fundamental relation determines the respective attitudes of these great religions towards the problem of human life in its present surroundings. Both demand the affirmation of the spiritual self in man, with this difference only that Islam, recognizing the contact of the ideal with the real, says ‘yes’ to the world of matter²¹ and points the way to master it with a view to discover a basis for a realistic regulation of life.

What, then, according to the Qur’«n, is the character of the universe which we inhabit? In the first place, it is not the result of a mere creative sport:

‘We have not created the Heavens and the earth and whatever is between them in sport. We have not created them but for a serious end: but the greater part of them understand it not’ (44:38-39).²²

It is a reality to be reckoned with:

‘Verily in the creation of the Heavens and of the earth, and in the succession of the night and of the day, are signs for men of understanding; who, standing and sitting and reclining, bear God in mind and reflect on the creation of the Heavens and of the earth, and say: "Oh, our Lord! Thou hast not created this in vain" (3:190-91).

Again the universe is so constituted that it is capable of extension:

‘He (God) adds to His creation what He wills’ (35:1).²³

It is not a block universe, a finished product, immobile and incapable of change. Deep in its inner being lies, perhaps, the dream of a new birth:

‘Say - go through the earth and see how God hath brought forth all creation; hereafter will He give it another birth’ (29:20).

In fact, this mysterious swing and impulse of the universe, this noiseless swim of time which appears to us, human beings, as the movement of day and night, is regarded by the Qur’«n as one of the greatest signs of God:

‘God causeth the day and the night to take their turn. Verily in this is teaching for men of insight’ (24:44).

This is why the Prophet said: ‘Do not vilify time, for time is God.’²⁴ And this immensity of time and space carries in it the promise of a complete subjugation by man whose duty is to reflect on the signs of God, and thus discover the means of realizing his conquest of Nature as an actual fact:

‘See ye not how God hath put under you all that is in the Heavens, and all that is on the earth, and hath been bounteous to you of His favours both in relation to the seen and the unseen?’ (31:20).

‘And He hath subjected to you the night and the day, the sun and the moon, and the stars too are subject to you by His behest; verily in this are signs for those who understand’ (16:12).

Such being the nature and promise of the universe, what is the nature of man whom it confronts on all sides? Endowed with a most suitable mutual adjustment of faculties he discovers himself down below in the scale of life, surrounded on all sides by the forces of obstruction:

‘That of goodliest fabric We created man, then brought him down to the lowest of the low’ (95:4-5).

And how do we find him in this environment? A ‘restless’²⁵ being engrossed in his ideals to the point of forgetting everything else, capable of inflicting pain on himself in his ceaseless quest after fresh scopes for self-expression. With all his failings he is superior to Nature, inasmuch as he carries within him a great trust which, in the words of the Qur’«n, the heavens and the earth and the mountains refused to carry:

‘Verily We proposed to the Heavens and to the earth and to the mountains to receive the trust (of personality), but they refused the burden and they feared to receive it. Man alone undertook to bear it, but hath proved unjust, senseless!’ (33:72).

His career, no doubt, has a beginning, but he is destined, perhaps, to become a permanent element in the constitution of being.

‘Thinketh man that he shall be thrown away as an object of no use? Was he not a mere embryo? Then he became thick blood of which God formed him and fashioned him, and made him twain, male and female. Is not He powerful enough to quicken the dead?’ (75:36-40).

When attracted by the forces around him, man has the power to shape and direct them; when thwarted by them, he has the capacity to build a much vaster world in the depths of his own inner being, wherein he discovers sources of infinite joy and inspiration. Hard his lot and frail his being, like a rose-leaf, yet no form of reality is so powerful, so inspiring, and so beautiful as the spirit of man! Thus in his inmost being man, as conceived by the Qur’«n, is a creative activity, an ascending spirit who, in his onward march, rises from one state of being to another:

‘But Nay! I swear by the sunset’s redness and by the night and its gatherings and by the moon when at her full, that from state to state shall ye be surely carried onward’ (84:16-19).

It is the lot of man to share in the deeper aspirations of the universe around him and to shape his own destiny as well as that of the universe, now by adjusting himself to its forces, now by putting the whole of his energy to mould its forces to his own ends and purposes. And in this process of progressive change God becomes a co-worker with him, provided man takes the initiative:

‘Verily God will not change the condition of men, till they change what is in themselves’ (13:11).

If he does not take the initiative, if he does not evolve the inner richness of his being, if he ceases to feel the inward push of advancing life, then the spirit within him hardens into stone and he is reduced to the level of dead matter. But his life and the onward march of his spirit depend on the establishment of connexions with the reality that confronts him.²⁶ It is knowledge that establishes these connexions, and knowledge is sense-perception elaborated by understanding.

‘When thy Lord said to the Angels, "Verily I am about to place one in my stead on earth," they said, "Wilt Thou place there one who will do ill and shed blood, when we celebrate Thy praise and extol Thy holiness?" God said, "Verily I know what ye know not!" And He taught Adam the names of all things, and then set them before the Angels, and said, "Tell me the names of these if ye are endowed with wisdom." They said, "Praise be to Thee! We have no knowledge but what Thou hast given us to know. Thou art the Knowing, the Wise". He said, "O Adam, inform them of the names." And when he had informed them of the names, God said, "Did I not say to you that I know the hidden things of the Heavens and of the earth, and that I know what ye bring to light and what ye hide?" (2:30-33).

The point of these verses is that man is endowed with the faculty of naming things, that is to say, forming concepts of them, and forming concepts of them is capturing them. Thus the character of man’s knowledge is conceptual, and it is with the weapon of this conceptual knowledge that man approaches the observable aspect of Reality. The one noteworthy feature of the Qur’«n is the emphasis that it lays on this observable aspect of Reality. Let me quote here a few verses:

‘Assuredly, in the creation of the Heavens and of the earth; and in the alternation of night and day; and in the ships which pass through the sea with what is useful to man; and in the rain which God sendeth down from Heaven, giving life to the earth after its death, and scattering over it all kinds of cattle; and in the change of the winds, and in the clouds that are made to do service between the Heavens and the earth - are signs for those who understand’ (2:164).

‘And it is He Who hath ordained for you that ye may be guided thereby in the darkness of the land and of the sea! Clear have We made Our signs to men of knowledge. And it is He Who hath created you of one breath, and hath provided you an abode and resting place (in the womb). Clear have We made Our signs for men of insight! And it is He Who sendeth down rain from Heaven: and We bring forth by it the buds of all the plants and from them bring We forth the green foliage, and the close-growing grain, and palm trees with sheaths of clustering dates, and gardens of grapes, and the olive, and the pomegranate, like and unlike. Look you on their fruits when they ripen. Truly herein are signs unto people who believe’ (6:97-99).

‘Hast thou not seen how thy Lord lengthens out the shadow? Had He pleased He had made it motionless. But We made the sun to be its guide; then draw it in unto Us with easy in drawing’ (25:45-46).

‘Can they not look up to the clouds, how they are created; and to the Heaven how it is upraised; and to the mountains how they are rooted, and to the earth how it is outspread?’ (88:17-20).

‘And among His signs are the creation of the Heavens and of the earth, and your variety of tongues and colours. Herein truly are signs for all men’ (30:22).

No doubt, the immediate purpose of the Qur’«n in this reflective observation of Nature is to awaken in man the consciousness of that of which Nature is regarded a symbol. But the point to note is the general empirical attitude of the Qur’«n which engendered in its followers a feeling of reverence for the actual and ultimately made them the founders of modern science. It was a great point to awaken the empirical spirit in an age which renounced the visible as of no value in men’s search after God. According to the Qur’«n, as we have seen before, the universe has a serious end. Its shifting actualities force our being into fresh formations. The intellectual effort to overcome the obstruction offered by it, besides enriching and amplifying our life, sharpens our insight, and thus prepares us for a more masterful insertion into subtler aspects of human experience. It is our reflective contact with the temporal flux of things which trains us for an intellectual vision of the non-temporal. Reality lives in its own appearances; and such a being as man, who has to maintain his life in an obstructing environment, cannot afford to ignore the visible. The Qur’«n opens our eyes to the great fact of change, through the appreciation and control of which alone it is possible to build a durable civilization. The cultures of Asia and, in fact, of the whole ancient world failed, because they approached Reality exclusively from within and moved from within outwards. This procedure gave them theory without power, and on mere theory no durable civilization can be based.

There is no doubt that the treatment of religious experience, as a source of Divine knowledge, is historically prior to the treatment of other regions of human experience for the same purpose. The Qur’«n, recognizing that the empirical attitude is an indispensable stage in the spiritual life of humanity, attaches equal importance to all the regions of human experience as yielding knowledge of the Ultimate Reality which reveals its symbols both within and without.²⁷ One indirect way of establishing connexions with the reality that confronts us is reflective observation and control of its symbols as they reveal themselves to sense-perception; the other way is direct association with that reality as it reveals itself within. The naturalism of the Qur’«n is only a recognition of the fact that man is related to nature, and this relation, in view of its possibility as a means of controlling her forces, must be exploited not in the interest of unrighteous desire for domination, but in the nobler interest of a free upward movement of spiritual life. In the interests of securing a complete vision of Reality, therefore, sense-perception must be supplemented by the perception of what the Qur’«n describes as Fu’«d or Qalb, i.e. heart:

‘God hath made everything which He hath created most good; and began the creation of man with clay; then ordained his progeny from germs of life, from sorry water; then shaped him, and breathed of His spirit unto him, and gave you hearing and seeing and heart: what little thanks do ye return?’ (32:7-9).

The ‘heart’ is a kind of inner intuition or insight which, in the beautiful words of Rëmâ, feeds on the rays of the sun and brings us into contact with aspects of Reality other than those open to sense-perception.²⁸ It is, according to the Qur’«n, something which ‘sees’, and its reports, if properly interpreted, are never false.²⁹ We must not, however, regard it as a mysterious special faculty; it is rather a mode of dealing with Reality in which sensation, in the physiological sense of the word, does not play any part.³⁰ Yet the vista of experience thus opened to us is as real and concrete as any other experience. To describe it as psychic, mystical, or super-natural does not detract from its value as experience. To the primitive man all experience was super-natural. Prompted by the immediate necessities of life he was driven to interpret his experience, and out of this interpretation gradually emerged ‘Nature’ in our sense of the word. The total-Reality, which enters our awareness and appears on interpretation as an empirical fact, has other ways of invading our consciousness and offers further opportunities of interpretation. The revealed and mystic literature of mankind bears ample testimony to the fact that religious experience has been too enduring and dominant in the history of mankind to be rejected as mere illusion. There seems to be no reason, then, to accept the normal level of human experience as fact and reject its other levels as mystical and emotional. The fact of religious experience are facts among other facts of human experience and, in the capacity of yielding knowledge by interpretation, one fact is as good as another. Nor is there anything irreverent in critically examining this region of human experience. The Prophet of Islam was the first critical observer of psychic phenomena. Bukha`ri`and other traditionists have given us a full account of his observation of the psychic Jewish youth, Ibn Sayy«d, whose ecstatic moods attracted the Prophet’s notice.³¹ He tested him, questioned him, and examined him in his various moods. Once he hid himself behind the stem of a tree to listen to his mutterings. The boy’s mother, however, warned him of the approach of the Prophet. Thereupon the boy immediately shook off his mood and the Prophet remarked: ‘If she had let him alone the thing would have been cleared up.’³² The Prophet’s companions, some of whom were present during the course of this first psychological observation in the history of Islam, and even later traditionists, who took good care to record this important fact, entirely misunderstood the significance of his attitude and interpreted it in their own innocent manner. Professor Macdonald, who seems to have no idea of the fundamental psychological difference between the mystic and the prophetic consciousness, finds ‘humour enough in this picture of one prophet trying to investigate another after the method of the Society for Psychical Research.³³ A better appreciation of the spirit of the Qur’«n which, as I will show in a subsequent lecture,³⁴ initiated the cultural movement terminating in the birth of the modern empirical attitude, would have led the Professor to see something remarkably suggestive in the Prophet’s observation of the psychic Jew. However, the first Muslim to see the meaning and value of the Prophet’s attitude was Ibn Khaldën, who approached the contents of mystic consciousness in a more critical spirit and very nearly reached the modern hypothesis of subliminal selves.³⁵ As Professor Macdonald says, Ibn Khaldën ‘had some most interesting psychological ideas, and that he would probably have been in close sympathy with Mr. William James's Varieties of Religious Experience’.³⁶ Modern psychology has only recently begun to realize the importance of a careful study of the contents of mystic consciousness, and we are not yet in possession of a really effective scientific method to analyse the contents of non-rational modes of consciousness. With the time at my disposal it is not possible to undertake an extensive inquiry into the history and the various degrees of mystic consciousness in point of richness and vividness. All that I can do is to offer a few general observations only on the main characteristics of mystic experience.

1. The first point to note is the immediacy of this experience. In this respect it does not differ from other levels of human experience which supply data for knowledge. All experience is immediate. As regions of normal experience are subject to interpretation of sense-data for our knowledge of the external world, so the region of mystic experience is subject to interpretation for our knowledge of God. The immediacy of mystic experience simply means that we know God just as we know other objects. God is not a mathematical entity or a system of concepts mutually related to one another and having no reference to experience.³⁷

2. The second point is the unanalysable wholeness of mystic experience. When I experience the table before me, innumerable data of experience merge into the single experience of the table. Out of this wealth of data I select those that fall into a certain order of space and time and round them off in reference to the table. In the mystic state, however, vivid and rich it may be, thought is reduced to a minimum and such an analysis is not possible. But this difference of the mystic state from the ordinary rational consciousness does not mean discontinuance with the normal consciousness, as Professor William James erroneously thought. In either case it is the same Reality which is operating on us. The ordinary rational consciousness, in view of our practical need of adaptation to our environment, takes that Reality piecemeal, selecting successively isolated sets of stimuli for response. The mystic state brings us into contact with the total passage of Reality in which all the diverse stimuli merge into one another and form a single unanalysable unity in which the ordinary distinction of subject and object does not exist.

3. The third point to note is that to the mystic the mystic state is a moment of intimate association with a Unique Other Self, transcending, encompassing, and momentarily suppressing the private personality of the subject of experience. Considering its content the mystic state is highly objective and cannot be regarded as a mere retirement into the mists of pure subjectivity. But you will ask me how immediate experience of God, as an Independent Other Self, is at all possible. The mere fact that the mystic state is passive does not finally prove the veritable ‘otherness’ of the Self experienced. This question arises in the mind because we assume, without criticism, that our knowledge of the external world through sense-perception is the type of all knowledge. If this were so, we could never be sure of the reality of our own self. However, in reply to it I suggest the analogy of our daily social experience. How do we know other minds in our social intercourse? It is obvious that we know our own self and Nature by inner reflection and sense-perception respectively. We possess no sense for the experience of other minds. The only ground of my knowledge of a conscious being before me is the physical movements similar to my own from which I infer the presence of another conscious being. Or we may say, after Professor Royce, that our fellows are known to be real because they respond to our signals and thus constantly supply the necessary supplement to our own fragmentary meanings. Response, no doubt, is the test of the presence of a conscious self, and the Qur’«n also takes the same view:

‘And your Lord saith, call Me and I respond to your call’ (40:60).

‘And when My servants ask thee concerning Me, then I am nigh unto them and answer the cry of him that crieth unto Me’ (2:186).

It is clear that whether we apply the physical criterion or the non-physical and more adequate criterion of Royce, in either case our knowledge of other minds remains something like inferential only. Yet we feel that our experience of other minds is immediate and never entertain any doubt as to the reality of our social experience. I do not, however, mean, at the present stage of our inquiry, to build on the implications of our knowledge of other minds, an idealistic argument in favour of the reality of a Comprehensive Self. All that I mean to suggest is that the immediacy of our experience in the mystic state is not without a parallel. It has some sort of resemblance to our normal experience and probably belongs to the same category.

4. Since the quality of mystic experience is to be directly experienced, it is obvious that it cannot be communicated.³⁸ Mystic states are more like feeling than thought. The interpretation which the mystic or the prophet puts on the content of his religious consciousness can be conveyed to others in the form of propositions, but the content itself cannot be so transmitted. Thus in the following verses of the Qur’«n it is the psychology and not the content of the experience that is given:

‘It is not for man that God should speak to him, but by vision or from behind a veil; or He sendeth a messenger to reveal by His permission what He will: for He is Exalted, Wise’ (42:51).

‘By the star when it setteth,

Your compatriot erreth not, nor is he led astray.

Neither speaketh he from mere impulse.

The Qur’«n is no other than the revelation revealed to him:

One strong in power taught it him,

Endowed with wisdom with even balance stood he

In the highest part of the horizon:

Then came he nearer and approached,

And was at the distance of two bows or even closer -

And he revealed to the servant of God what he revealed:

His heart falsified not what he saw:

What! will ye then dispute with him as to what he saw?

He had seen him also another time

Near the Sidrah tree which marks the boundary:

Near which is the garden of repose:

When the Sidrah tree was covered with what covered it:

His eye turned not aside, nor did it wander:

For he saw the greatest of the signs of the Lord’ (53:1-18).

The incommunicability of mystic experience is due to the fact that it is essentially a matter of inarticulate feeling, untouched by discursive intellect. It must, however, be noted that mystic feeling, like all feeling, has a cognitive element also; and it is, I believe, because of this cognitive element that it lends itself to the form of idea. In fact, it is the nature of feeling to seek expression in thought. It would seem that the two - feeling and idea - are the non-temporal and temporal aspects of the same unit of inner experience. But on this point I cannot do better than quote Professor Hocking who has made a remarkably keen study of feeling in justification of an intellectual view of the content of religious consciousness:

‘What is that other-than-feeling in which feeling may end? I answer, consciousness of an object. Feeling is instability of an entire conscious self: and that which will restore the stability of this self lies not within its own border but beyond it. Feeling is outward-pushing, as idea is outward-reporting: and no feeling is so blind as to have no idea of its own object. As a feeling possesses the mind, there also possesses the mind, as an integral part of that feeling, some idea of the kind of thing which will bring it to rest. A feeling without a direction is as impossible as an activity without a direction: and a direction implies some objective. There are vague states of consciousness in which we seem to be wholly without direction; but in such cases it is remarkable that feeling is likewise in abeyance. For example, I may be dazed by a blow, neither realizing what has happened nor suffering any pain, and yet quite conscious that something has occurred: the experience waits an instant in the vestibule of consciousness, not as feeling but purely as fact, until idea has touched it and defined a course of response. At that same moment, it is felt as painful. If we are right, feeling is quite as much an objective consciousness as is idea: it refers always to something beyond the present self and has no existence save in directing the self toward that object in whose presence its own career must end!’³⁹

Thus you will see that it is because of this essential nature of feeling that while religion starts with feeling, it has never, in its history, taken itself as a matter of feeling alone and has constantly striven after metaphysics. The mystic’s condemnation of intellect as an organ of knowledge does not really find any justification in the history of religion. But Professor Hocking’s passage just quoted has a wider scope than mere justification of idea in religion. The organic relation of feeling and idea throws light on the old theological controversy about verbal revelation which once gave so much trouble to Muslim religious thinkers.⁴⁰ Inarticulate feeling seeks to fulfil its destiny in idea which, in its turn, tends to develop out of itself its own visible garment. It is no mere metaphor to say that idea and word both simultaneously emerge out of the womb of feeling, though logical understanding cannot but take them in a temporal order and thus create its own difficulty by regarding them as mutually isolated. There is a sense in which the word is also revealed.

5. The mystic’s intimate association with the eternal which gives him a sense of the unreality of serial time does not mean a complete break with serial time. The mystic state in respect of its uniqueness remains in some way related to common experience. This is clear from the fact that the mystic state soon fades away, though it leaves a deep sense of authority after it has passed away. Both the mystic and the prophet return to the normal levels of experience, but with this difference that the return of the prophet, as I will show later, may be fraught with infinite meaning for mankind.

For the purposes of knowledge, then, the region of mystic experience is as real as any other region of human experience and cannot be ignored merely because it cannot be traced back to sense-perception. Nor is it possible to undo the spiritual value of the mystic state by specifying the organic conditions which appear to determine it. Even if the postulate of modern psychology as to the interrelation of body and mind is assumed to be true, it is illogical to discredit the value of the mystic state as a revelation of truth. Psychologically speaking, all states, whether their content is religious or non-religious, are organically determined.⁴¹ The scientific form of mind is as much organically determined as the religious. Our judgement as to the creations of genius is not at all determined or even remotely affected by what our psychologists may say regarding its organic conditions. A certain kind of temperament may be a necessary condition for a certain kind of receptivity; but the antecedent condition cannot be regarded as the whole truth about the character of what is received. The truth is that the organic causation of our mental states has nothing to do with the criteria by which we judge them to be superior or inferior in point of value. ‘Among the visions and messages’, says Professor William James,

‘some have always been too patently silly, among the trances and convulsive seizures some have been too fruitless for conduct and character, to pass themselves off as significant, still less as divine. In the history of Christian mysticism the problem how to discriminate between such messages and experiences as were really divine miracles, and such others as the demon in his malice was able to counterfeit, thus making the religious person twofold more the child of hell he was before, has always been a difficult one to solve, needing all the sagacity and experience of the best directors of conscience. In the end it had come to our empiricist criterion: By their fruits ye shall know them, not by their roots’.⁴²

The problem of Christian mysticism alluded to by Professor James has been in fact the problem of all mysticism. The demon in his malice does counterfeit experiences which creep into the circuit of the mystic state. As we read in the Qur’«n:

‘We have not sent any Apostle or Prophet⁴³ before thee among whose desires Satan injected not some wrong desire, but God shall bring to nought that which Satan had suggested. Thus shall God affirm His revelations, for God is Knowing and Wise’ (22:52).

And it is in the elimination of the satanic from the Divine that the followers of Freud have done inestimable service to religion; though I cannot help saying that the main theory of this newer psychology does not appear to me to be supported by any adequate evidence. If our vagrant impulses assert themselves in our dreams, or at other times we are not strictly ourselves, it does not follow that they remain imprisoned in a kind of lumber room behind the normal self. The occasional invasion of these suppressed impulses on the region of our normal self tends more to show the temporary disruption of our habitual system of responses rather than their perpetual presence in some dark corner of the mind. However, the theory is briefly this. During the process of our adjustment to our environment we are exposed to all sorts of stimuli. Our habitual responses to these stimuli gradually fall into a relatively fixed system, constantly growing in complexity by absorbing some and rejecting other impulses which do not fit in with our permanent system of responses. The rejected impulses recede into what is called the ‘unconscious region’ of the mind, and there wait for a suitable opportunity to assert themselves and take their revenge on the focal self. They may disturb our plans of action, distort our thought, build our dreams and phantasies, or carry us back to forms of primitive behaviour which the evolutionary process has left far behind. Religion, it is said, is a pure fiction created by these repudiated impulses of mankind with a view to find a kind of fairyland for free unobstructed movement. Religious beliefs and dogmas, according to the theory, are no more than merely primitive theories of Nature, whereby mankind has tried to redeem Reality from its elemental ugliness and to show it off as something nearer to the heart’s desire than the facts of life would warrant. That there are religions and forms of art, which provide a kind of cowardly escape from the facts of life, I do not deny. All that I contend is that this is not true of all religions. No doubt, religious beliefs and dogmas have a metaphysical significance; but it is obvious that they are not interpretations of those data of experience which are the subject of the science of Nature. Religion is not physics or chemistry seeking an explanation of Nature in terms of causation; it really aims at interpreting a totally different region of human experience - religious experience - the data of which cannot be reduced to the data of any other science. In fact, it must be said in justice to religion that it insisted on the necessity of concrete experience in religious life long before science learnt to do so.⁴⁴ The conflict between the two is due not to the fact that the one is, and the other is not, based on concrete experience. Both seek concrete experience as a point of departure. Their conflict is due to the misapprehension that both interpret the same data of experience. We forget that religion aims at reaching the real significance of a special variety of human experience.

Nor is it possible to explain away the content of religious consciousness by attributing the whole thing to the working of the sex-impulse. The two forms of consciousness - sexual and religious - are often hostile or, at any rate, completely different to each other in point of their character, their aim, and the kind of conduct they generate. The truth is that in a state of religious passion we know a factual reality in some sense outside the narrow circuit of our personality. To the psychologist religious passion necessarily appears as the work of the subconscious because of the intensity with which it shakes up the depths of our being. In all knowledge there is an element of passion, and the object of knowledge gains or loses in objectivity with the rise and fall in the intensity of passion. That is most real to us which stirs up the entire fabric of our personality. As Professor Hocking pointedly puts it:

‘If ever upon the stupid day-length time-span of any self or saint either, some vision breaks to roll his life and ours into new channels, it can only be because that vision admits into his soul some trooping invasion of the concrete fullness of eternity. Such vision doubtless means subconscious readiness and subconscious resonance too, - but the expansion of the unused air-cells does not argue that we have ceased to breathe the outer air: - the very opposite!’⁴⁵

A purely psychological method, therefore, cannot explain religious passion as a form of knowledge. It is bound to fail in the case of our newer psychologists as it did fail in the case of Locke and Hume.

The foregoing discussion, however, is sure to raise an important question in your mind. Religious experience, I have tried to maintain, is essentially a state of feeling with a cognitive aspect, the content of which cannot be communicated to others, except in the form of a judgement. Now when a judgement which claims to be the interpretation of a certain region of human experience, not accessible to me, is placed before me for my assent, I am entitled to ask, what is the guarantee of its truth? Are we in possession of a test which would reveal its validity? If personal experience had been the only ground for acceptance of a judgement of this kind, religion would have been the possession of a few individuals only. Happily we are in possession of tests which do not differ from those applicable to other forms of knowledge. These I call the intellectual test and the pragmatic test. By the intellectual test I mean critical interpretation, without any presuppositions of human experience, generally with a view to discover whether our interpretation leads us ultimately to a reality of the same character as is revealed by religious experience. The pragmatic test judges it by its fruits. The former is applied by the philosopher, the latter by the prophet. In the lecture that follows, I will apply the intellectual test.

NOTES:

1. Reference here is to the following verse from the mystical allegorical work: ManÇiq al-ñair (p. 243, v. 5), generally considered the magnum opus, of one of the greatest sufi poets and thinkers Farâd al-Dân ‘AÇÇ«r’ (d.c. 618/1220):

2. A. N. Whitehead, Religion in the Making, p. 5.

3. Ibid., p. 73.

4. Cf. H. L. Bergson, Creative Evolution, pp. 187-88; on this intuition-intellect relation see also Allama Iqbal’s essay: Bedil in the light of Bergson, ed. Dr Tehsin Firaqi, pp. 22-23.

5. Allahumm«arin« haq«’iq al-ashy«kam«hâya, a tradition, in one form or other, to be found in well-known Sufistic works, for example, ‘Alâb. ‘Uthm«n al-Hujwayrâ, Kashf al-MaÁjëb, p. 166; Mawl«n« Jal«l al-Dân Rëmâ, Mathnawâ-i Ma’nawâ, ii, 466-67; iv, 3567-68; v, 1765; MaÁmëd Shabistarâ (d. 720/1320), Gulshan-i R«z, verse 200, and ‘Abd al-RaÁm«n J«mâ (d. 898/1492), Law«’ih, p. 3.

6. Qur’«n, 16:68-69.

7. Ibid., 2:164; 24:43-44; 30:48; 35:9; 45:5.

8. Ibid., 15:16; 25:6; 37:6; 41:12; 50:6; 67:5; 85:1.

9. Ibid., 21:33; 36:40.

10. Cf. F. M. Cornford: Plato’s Theory of Knowledge, pp. 29;109; also Bertrand Russell: History of Western Philosophy, chapter: ‘Knowledge and Perception in Plato’.

11. Qur’«n, 16:78; 23:78; 32:9; 67:23.

12. Ibid., 17:36. References here, as also at other places in the Lectures, to a dozen Quranic verses in two sentences bespeak of what is uppermost in Allama Iqbal’s mind, i.e. Quranic empiricism which by its very nature gives rise to a Weltanschauung of the highest religious order. He tells us, for example, that the general empirical attitude of the Qur’a`n engenders a feeling of reverence for the actual and that one way of entering into relation with Reality is through reflective observation and control of its perceptually revealed symbols (cf. below, pp. 11-12, italics mine; also Lecture V, p. 102, not 9).

13. For anti-classicism of the Qur’«n cf. Mazheruddân Âiddiqâ, Concept of Muslim Culture in Iqbal, pp. 13-25; also Lecture V, note 21.

14. See R. A. Tsanoff, The Problem of Immortality (a work listed at S. No. 37 in the Descriptive Catalogue of Allama Iqbal’s Personal Library), pp. 75-77; cf. also B. H. Zedler, ‘Averroes and Immortality’, New Scholasticism (1954), pp. 436-53. It is to be noted that Tsanoff marshals the views of S. Munk (Mé langes de philosophie, pp. 454 ff.), E. Renan (Averroes et I’averroisme, pp. 152, 158), A Stockl (Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters, 11, 117, 119), de Boer (Geschichte der Philosophie, p. 173) and M. Horten (Die Hauptlehren des Averroes, pp. 244 ff.) as against those of Carra de Vaux as presented by him in his work Avicenne, pp. 233 ff., as well as in the article: ‘Averroes’ in Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, II, 264-65, and clinches the matter thus: ‘certainly - and this is more significant for our purpose - it was as a denier of personal immortality that scholasticism received and criticised Averroes’ (p. 77, II, 16-19). For a recent and more balanced view of ‘Ibn Rushd’s doctrine of immortality, cf. Roger Arnaldez and A. Z. Iskander, ‘Ibn Rushd’, Dictionary of Scientific Biography, XII, 7a-7b. It is to be noted, however, that M. E. Marmura in his article on ‘Soul: Islamic Concepts’ in The Encyclopedia of Religion, XIII, 465 clearly avers that Ibn Rushd’s commentaries on Aristotle leave no room for a doctrine of individual immortality.

15. Cf. Tsanoff, op. cit., pp. 77-84, and M. Yënus Farangi Mahallâ, Ibn Rushd (Urdu; partly based on Renan’s Averroes et l’averroisme), pp. 347-59.

16. See Lecture IV, pp. 93-98, and Lecture VII, pp. 156-57.

17. Reference is to the expression lawÁ-in mahfëzin used in the Quranic verse 85:22. For the interpretation this unique expression of the Qur’«n see M. Asad, The Message of the Qur’«n, p. 943, note; and Fazlur Rahman, Major Themes of the Qur’a`n, p. 98 - the latter seems to come quite close to Allama Iqbal’s generally very keen perception of the meanings of the Qur’«n.

18. This comes quite close to the contemporary French philosopher Louis Rougier’s statement in his Philosophy and the New Physics p. 146, II, 17-21. This work, listed at S. No. 15 in the Descriptive Catalogue of Allama Iqbal’s Personal Library, is cited in Lecture III, p. 59.

19. Reference here is to Tevfâk Fikret, pseudonym of Mehmed Tevfik, also known as Tevfik Nazmâ, and not to Tawfik Fitrat as it got printed in the previous editions of the present work. Fikret, widely considered the founder of the modern school of Turkish poetry and remembered among other works for his collection of poems: Rub«b-i Shikeste (‘The Broken Lute’), died in Istanbul on 18 August 1915 at the age of forty-eight. For an account of Fikret’s literary career and his anti-religious views, cf. Niyazi Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey, pp. 300-02 and 338-39; also Haydar Ali Dirioz’s brief paper in Turkish on Fikret’s birth-centenary translated by Dr M. H. Notqi in Journal of the Regional Cultural Institute, 1/4 (Autumn 1968), 12-15.

It is for Turkish-Persian scholars to determine the extent to which Fikret made use of the great poet-thinker Bedil (d. 1133/1721) for ‘the anti-religious and especially anti-Islamic propaganda in Central Asia’. Among very many works on both Bedil and Fikret that have appeared since Allama’s days and are likely to receive the scholars’ attention, mention must be made of Allama’s own short perceptive study: ‘Bedil in the Light of Bergson’, and unpublished essay in Allama’s hand (20 folios) preserved in the Allama Iqbal Museum (Lahore); cf. Dr Ahmad Nabi Khan, Relics of Allama Iqbal (Catalogue) , 1, 25, with photographic reproduction of the first sheet.

20. Cf. John Oxenford (tr.), Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann and Sorret , p. 41.

21. The Qur’«n condemns monkery; see 57:27; 2:201; and 28:77. Cf. also Speeches, Writings and Statements of Iqbal, ed. A. L. Sherwani, p. 7, for Allama Iqbal’s observations on the respective attitudes of Christianity and Islam towards the problems of life, leading to his keenly profound pronouncement: ‘The religious ideal of Islam, therefore, is organically related to the social order which it has created’.

22. There are many verses of the Qur’«n wherein it has been maintained that the universe has not been created in sport (l«’ibân) or in vain (b«Çil-an) but for a serious end or with truth (bi’l-Áhaqq). These are respectively: (a) 21:16; 44:38; (b) 3:191; 38:27; (c) 6:73; 10:5; 14:19; 15:85; 16:3; 29:44; 30:8; 39:5; 44:39; 45:22; 46:3; and 64:3.

23. See also the Quranic verse 51:47 wherein the phrase inna la-mu`si’u`n has been interpreted to clearly foreshadow the modern notion of the ‘expanding universe’ (cf. M. Asad, The Message of the Qur’a`n, p. 805, note 31).

24. Reference here is in particular to the Prophetic tradition worded as: l«tasubbëal-dahra fa inn All«h huwa’l-dahru, (AÁmad Àanbal, Musnad, V, 299 and 311). Cf. also Bukh«râ, Tafsâr: 45; TauÁâd: 35; Adab`: 101; and Muslim, Alf«z 2-4; for other variants of the Áadâth SaÁâfa Hamm«m-Bin-Munabbih (ed. Dr. M. Hamidullah) Áadâth 117, gives one of its earliest recorded texts.

In an exceedingly important section captioned Al-Waqtu Saif-un (Time is Sword) of his celebrated Asr«r-i-Khudâ, Allama Iqbal has referred to the above hadit`h thus:

Life is of Time and Time is of Life;

Do not abuse Time!’ was the command of the Prophet. (trans. Nicholson)

25. Reference is to the Quranic verse 70:19 which says: ‘Man has been created restless (halë’an).’

26. This is very close to the language of the Qur’«n which speaks of the hardening of the hearts, so that they were like rocks: see 2:74; 5:13; 6:43; 39:22; and 57:16.

This shows that Allama Iqbal, through his keenly perceptive study of the Qur’«n, had psychically assimilated both its meanings and its diction so much so that many of his visions, very largely found in his poetical works, may be said to be born of this rare assimilation; cf. Dr Ghul«m Mustaf« Kh«n’s voluminous Iqb«l aur Qur’«n (in Urdu).

27. Qur’«n, 41:35; also 51:20-21.

28. Reference here is to the Mathnawâ, ii, 52:

The bodily sense is eating the food of darkness

The spiritual sense is feeding from a sun (trans. Nicholson).

29. Qur’«n, 53:11-12.

30. Ibid., 22:46.

31. Cf. Bukh«râ, Jan«’iz, 79; Shah«dah 3; Jih«d: 160, 178; and Muslim, Fitan: 95-96. D. J. Halperin’s article: ‘The Ibn Âayy«d Traditions and the Legend of al-Dajj«l’, Journal of the American Oriental Society, XCII/ii (1976), 213-25, gives an atomistic analytic account of the ah«dâth listed by him.

32. In Arabic: lau tarakathu bayyana, an invariable part of the text of a number of ah«dâth about Ibn Âayy«d; cf. D. B. Macdonald, The Religious Attitude and Life in Islam, pp. 35 ff.; this book, which represents Macdonald’s reputed Haskell Lectures on Comparative Religion at Chicago University in 1906, seems to have received Allama’s close attention in the present discussion.

33. Ibid., p. 36.

34. Cf. Lecture V, pp. 100 ff.

35. The term ‘subliminal self’ was coined by F. W. H. Myers in the 1890’s which soon became popular in ‘religious psychology’ to designate what was believed to be the larger portion of the self lying beyond the level of consciousness, yet constantly influencing thought and behaviour as in parapsychic phenomena. With William James the concept of subliminal self came to stand for the area of human experience in which contact with the Divine Life may occur (cf. The Varieties of Religious Experience, pp. 511-15).

36. Macdonald, op. cit., p. 42.

37. Cf. MuÁyuddân Ibn al-‘Arabâ’s observation that ‘God is a precept, the world is a concept’, referred to in Lecture VII, p. 144, note 4.

38. Ibid., p. 145, where it is observed: ‘Indeed the incommunicability of religious experience gives us a clue to the ultimate nature of the human ego’.

39. W. E. Hocking, The Meaning of God in Human Experience, p. 66. It is important to note here that according to Richard C. Gilman this concept of the inextricable union of idea and feeling is the source of strong strain of mysticism is Hocking’s philosophy, but it is a mysticism which does not abandon the role of intellect in clarifying and correcting intuition; cf. his article: ‘Hocking, William Ernest’, Encyclopedia of Philosophy, IV, 47 (italics mine).

40. Reference here perhaps is to the hot and long-drawn controversy between the Mu‘tazilites (early Muslim rationalists) and the Ash’arties (the orthodox scholastics) on the issue of Khalq al-Qur’«n, i.e. the createdness or the eternity of the Qur’«n; for which see Lecture VI, note 9. The context of the passage, however, strongly suggests that Allama Iqbal means to refer here to the common orthodox belief that the text of the Qur’«n is verbally revealed, i.e. the ‘word’ is as much revealed as the ‘meaning’. This has perhaps never been controverted and rarely if ever discussed in the history of Muslim theology - one notable instance of its discussion is that by Sh«h Walâ All«h in Sata’«t and Fuyëz al-Àaramain. Nevertheless, it is significant to note that there is some analogical empirical evidence in Allama’s personal life in support of the orthodox belief in verbal revelation. Once asked by Professor Lucas, Principal of a local college, in a private discourse, whether, despite his vast learning, he too subscribed to belief in verbal revelation, Allama immediately replied that it was not a matter of belief with him but a veritable personal experience for it was thus, he added, he composed his poems under the spells of poetic inspiration - surely, Prophetic revelations are far more exalted. Cf. ‘Abdul Majâd S«lik, Dhikr-i Iqb«l, pp. 244-45 and Faqir Sayyid WaÁâd-ud-Dân, Rëzg«r-i Faqâr, pp. 38-39. After Allama’s epoch-making mathnawi: Asr«r-i Khudâ was published in 1915 and it had given rise to some bitter controversy because of his critique of ‘ajami tasawwuf, and of the great À«fiz, he in a letter dated 14 April 1916 addressed to Mah«r«ja Kishen Parsh«d confided strictly in a personal way: ‘I did not compose the mathnawâ myself; I was made to (guided to), to do so’; cf. M. ‘Abdull«h Quraishâ’ Naw«dir-i Iqb«l (Ghair MaÇbu’ah Khutët)’, Sahâfah, Lahore, ‘Iqb«l Nambar’ (October 1973), Letter No. 41, p. 168.

41. Cf. William James, op. cit., p. 15.

42. Ibid., p. 21.

43. The designation ‘apostle’ (rasël) is applied to bearers of divine revelations which embody a new doctrinal system or dispensation; a ‘prophet’ (nabâ), on the other hand, is said to be one whom God has entrusted with enunciation of ethical principles on the basis of an already existing dispensation, or of principles common to all dispensations. Hence, every apostle is a prophet as well, but every prophet is not an apostle.

44. Cf. Lecture VII, pp. 143-144, where this point is reiterated.

45. E. W. Hocking, op. cit., pp.106-107.