INTRODUCTION
Religion is a different matter.
Other subjects may lend themselves, in varying degree, to objective study, and in some cases personal commitment serves only to distort what should be a clear and balanced picture. Religion is a different matter because here objectivity only skims the surface, missing the essential. The keys to understanding lie within the observer's own being and experience, and without these keys no door will open.
This is particularly true of Islam, a religion which treats the distinction between belief and unbelief as the most fundamental of all possible distinctions, comparable on the physical level to that between the sighted and the blind. Believing and understanding complement and support one another. We do not seek for an adequate description of a landscape from a blind man, even if he has made a scientific study of its topography and has analyzed the nature of its rocks and vegetation.
In Islam every aspect of human life, every thought and every action, is shaped and evaluated in the light of the basic article of faith. Remove this linchpin and the whole structure falls apart.
For the unbeliever this article of faith is meaningless and, in consequence, nothing else in the life of the Muslim makes sense. Even for the faithful Christian the 'sublime' and the 'mundane' relate to different dimensions, and he is disturbed by any confusion between the two. Islam does not recognize this division. For the Muslim, his worship and his manner of dealing with his bodily functions, his search for holiness and his bartering in the market, his work and his play are elements in an indivisible whole which, like creation itself, admits of no fissures. A single key unlocks the single door opening on to the integrated and tight-knit world of the Muslim.
That key is the affirmation of the divine Unity, and of all that follows from this affirmation, down to its most remote echoes on the very periphery of existence, where existence touches on nothingness. Islam is the religion of all or nothing, faith in a Reality which allows nothing to have independent reality outside its orbit; for if there were such a thing, however distant, however hidden, it would impugn the perfection and the totality of that which alone is.
It follows that one cannot speak of Islam without adopting a specific point of view and making that point of view quite explicit. This book is written by a European who became Muslim many years ago, through intellectual conviction and within the framework of a belief in the transcendent unity of all the revealed religions. The word 'convert' implies the rejection of one religion in favour of another, but mine was an act of acceptance which carried with it no corresponding act of rejection other than the rejection of the secular, agnostic world of thought in its entirety.
One who enters the community of Islam by choice rather than by birth sinks roots into the ground of the religion, the Quran and the traditions of the Prophet; but the habits and customs of the Muslim peoples are not his. He lacks their strengths and is immune from their weaknesses; immune, above all, from the psychological 'complexes' which are the result of their recent history. He does not become a mimic Arab, since he knows that Islam, as a world religion, owes both its endurance and its rich fabric to the entry, century after century, of outlanders: Persians, Berbers, Mongols, Turks, Indians, Malays, Africans. These outlanders often broke the mould cherished by the Arabs, but they vivified the religion, and with it the culture and society that are stamped with its mark. Islam has created an immediately recognizable design for human living, but the way in which this design has been filled out and coloured has differed widely from one region of the Dar-ul-lslam (the 'House of Islam') to another; the peacock's tail has been spread over the world.
The European or American who has come to Islam in this way stands astride the oldest frontier in the world, the frontier that has separated Islamic civilization, first from Christendom and later from the post-Christian world, for some thirteen centuries. This is in many ways a strange position to occupy because the frontier runs between two areas of reciprocal incomprehension, and to be at home in both is, in a sense, to commute between different planetary systems. The Westerner's inability to understand the Muslim is matched by the Muslim's incapacity to understand the Westerner. Those who stand astride the frontier find themselves obliged to act as interpreters between two different languages and must themselves speak both with adequate fluency.
The Western Muslim does not change his identity, though he changes his direction. He is dyed with the colour characteristic of the culture into which he was born and which formed him; he asks the questions which this culture asks; he retains a sense of tragedy and of the world's ambiguity, with which the European tradition is imbued but which is strange to the traditional Muslim, and he is still haunted by the ghosts of Europe's past. Ancestral voices familiar to his kind are not silenced, but he has distanced himself from them.
The Semitic mind and temperament are legalistic by nature and a certain literal-mindedness is characteristic of the Muslim. The European, on the other hand, is more concerned with the spirit than with the letter of the law, and he inevitably brings something of this bias with him into Islam. This may even be the most useful contribution he can make to his adopted faith in an age of change and fluidity, in which the outworks of religion are eroded by the times so that it is necessary, as never before, to establish what are the essentials of the Faith and to hold fast to them. To say this is not to suggest that any part of the total structure is unimportant, but only to emphasize that when a castle is under siege, and alien forces have scaled the outer battlements, one must be ready to man the inner defences.
This book is written for those whose minds have been shaped Western culture. Given that the contemporary world, as it now exists almost universally, is entirely a product of that culture, I write as much for those of my co-religionists who have received a 'modern' education as I do for non-Muslims. Among the former there are already quite a number who have rediscovered the religion into which they were born as a result of seeing it through foreign eyes; no longer convinced by the traditional arguments of their Faith, which sufficed while Islam was a closed system, they have had to dive deep and travel far in order to return to their origin. They will assess this book in the light of their knowledge of the religion. But the non-Muslim who has an interest in understanding Islam, but who lacks the time and the inclination to read and compare a number of books, has every right to ask whether what he is told is authentic and, in a general sense, 'orthodox'.
No simple answer can be given to this question. It is difficult to provide a universally acceptable definition of Muslim 'orthodoxy', a term for which there is no precise equivalent in the Arabic language. There is no ecclesiastical hierarchy in Islam (whatever may be the appearances in Shi'a Islam as we find it in Iran), no ultimate doctrinal authority other than that of the Book itself, the Quran. What I believe or what the next man believes, provided we stay within the framework of the religious Law, is largely a matter of personal insight, so long as we do not depart too far from the consensus of the community (assuming that such a consensus exists, and this is an open question today).
If, however, we borrow what is essentially a Christian term, it can be said that Sunni orthodoxy emerged in the tenth century AD, taking shape over the next two hundred years; and that it emerged as a consensus following a middle way between conflicting points of view, which threat-ened to tear the community apart. Leaving room for wide variations of opinion, it was achieved in reaction against narrow and exclusive views of what constituted orthodoxy and of what entitled a man or woman to belong to the Ummah, the sacred community of Islam. A Muslim, by this definition, is anyone who is able to make the confession of faith in sincerity; to say seven words, and to mean them. Lā ilāhā illa ’Llāh; Muhammadun rasūlu’ Llāh: 'There is no divinity but (or 'if not') Allah: Muhammad is the messenger of Allah'. And since human beings cannot read the secrets of hearts, the judgement as to sincerity rests only with Allah.
In practice few would accept that this suffices, unless it is taken to include all the consequences which flow from the simple affirmation of faith. The Muslim believes in One God, who is all-powerful and has no partner; believes in His messengers, sent to mankind for their guidance from the beginning of time; believes that Muhammad closed the cycle of messengers and that there can be no further revelation of the divine Law after him; believes that the Quran is the Word of God, unaltered and unalterable, and believes in the obligation to conform to the 'Five Pillars', which are the confession of faith, the five daily prayers, payment of the poor-due, the fast of Ramadan, and performance of the Pilgrimage to Mecca by those physically and financially able to undertake it. A Muslim may neglect one or more of the pillars (except the first) and still be counted as a believer, but if he denies their necessity he has placed himself outside the community.
The Quran itself offers a broad definition: The messenger believes in that which has been revealed to him from his Lord, as do the believers. Each believes in Allah and His angels and His scriptures and His messengers — We make no distinction between any of His messengers — and they say "We hear and we obey. Forgive us, O Lord. Unto Thee is the journeying". A further condition, however, follows from this. If member-ship of the community of believers requires acceptance of the Quran as the revealed Word of God, then denial of any part of the Quran or of any statement made in the Book may be assumed to call belief into doubt. This is so, and yet we have here an area of ambiguity. Certain verses, particularly those relating to matters of law, are plain enough, but there are many parts of the Quran which lend themselves to a variety of interpretations; and indeed it is said that, in principle, every single verse contains layer upon layer of meaning. It is natural that there should have been wide variations in interpretation, variations which have, on the whole, been accepted, provided they did not contradict the literal meaning.
This is why the common sense which has constantly re-asserted itself against the passions and follies of fanaticism throughout the history of Islam inclines towards the broad definition of ‘orthodoxy’, leaving the final word with the consensus of the community. But the battle for tolerance and the broad definition has never been finally won, and this is particularly clear at the present time when for various reasons, including what may be called an identity crisis*, many Muslims have taken refuge in narrowness and literalism. Since each particular group holds to its own narrow corridor, the Ummah as a whole is troubled by bitter and unnecessary conflicts of opinion. The Muslim who writes or speaks about Islam today may expect to be accused of kufr (unbelief) or bid'a (innovation) by one group or another, not unlike the Christian who, in former times (when religion was still a matter of life or death, salvation or damnation), walked a tightrope over the abyss of 'heresy'. He accepts these accusations with as good a grace as he can muster, detecting in them symptoms of weakness rather than strength.
So far as 'innovation' is concerned, it would in fact be very difficult to introduce any new element into Muslim thought — even supposing that one wished to do so - but it is easy to re-introduce much that has been forgotten or overlooked in the course of time. It happens often enough that, flushed with what we take for some new insight into the religion, we find that this very idea was put forward by such-and-such a Muslim thinker a thousand years ago; and this is as it should be.
While on the one hand the Western Muslim's 'orthodoxy' may be questioned by the more hidebound among his co-religionists, he is likely, on the other, to be accused by non-Muslims who have had some contact with the Islamic world of 'idealizing' Islam and presenting a view of the Faith which is contradicted by the perceived facts. These facts, however, relate to practice not to principles, and he is under no obligation to defend or to attempt to justify the manner in which the religion is practised in a particular period of history by those of its adherents who catch the light and attract attention. Where human beings are concerned, good men and good women are by no means thick on the ground, but vice always pays its tribute to virtue by masquerading behind the mask of religion or — more recently — of some political ideology, and both wickedness and stupidity walk the streets more confidently when decently clothed.
It would be foolish and, to say the least, counter-productive to seek arguments to excuse divisions within the Ummah, wars between Muslim states, the brutality and hypocrisy of certain national leaders, the corrupt practices of the rich or the hysteria of zealots who have forgotten the fundamental law of Mercy and the binding obligation to make use of the gift of Intelligence. We live in an age of fitnah. This term is usually translated as 'civil commotion'. An alternative translation might be 'fermentation', and it is a characteristic of the process of fermentation that the scum rises to the surface.
At the same time it must be borne in mind that, despite the fairly recent division of the Ummah of Islam into nation states, Muslims still tend to identify a man in terms of the religion into which he was born rather than in terms of his nationality or racial origin. Since they find it difficult to grasp the fact that there are people in this world who do not even profess to believe in God — any God - they habitually refer to all Europeans and Americans as 'Christians' (it is quite common to hear the late Adolf Hitler cited as an example of how wickedly Christians can behave). By the same token, everyone who happens to have been born into the Islamic world calls himself a 'Muslim'. Westerners take this designation at its face value, and shabby little tyrants who are as distant from Islam as was Hitler from Christianity are seen as 'Muslims'; the religion as such is judged — or misjudged — in terms of their behaviour.
Beneath the surface, however, and invisible to the casual observer, there exist a vast number of simple men and women who remain exemplary Muslims and who redeem Islam today as they did in the past, as do the mystics, whose selfless thirst for God reduces the sins of the mighty to little more than a rude irrelevance. Islam is not always discoverable in the hands or the hearts of its leaders or of its official spokesmen, but those who seek it will find it.
They will find it expressed in many different forms. The central theme of any serious study of Islam must be unity in diversity. Muhammad was an Arab and the Quran is quintessentially an Arabic scripture, expressed in a language which contains within its own structure an implicit view of reality. From this point of view every Muslim is in a certain sense Arabized', but although this has created a recognizable pattern in the various textures of Islamic civilization, it has not extinguished a rich cultural diversity shaped by racial and historical differences. The principles of the religion and of the law derived from it are simple, but no limit can be set to the variety of their applications.
In what follows I hope, God willing, to show what it means to be a Muslim, and to consider doctrine, history and social life in the light of the Revelation which is the source of the Faith, as it is of the civilization and culture constructed by human beings, good and bad, wise and foolish, out of the materials crystallized from that source. But the whole, which reflects the divine Plenitude, cannot be caught in any net of words. To every statement I would gladly add a formula of great significance in the Islamic context, a formula which means that God knows best, that He alone knows, and that those who speak or write must always keep in mind their relative ignorance and the limitations of their perspective, just as the living must always keep death in mind. Wa Alldhu d'lam.
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