We have seen that the judgment based upon religious experience fully
satisfies the intellectual test. The more important regions of
experience, examined with an eye on a synthetic view, reveal, as the
ultimate ground of all experience, a rationally directed creative will
which we have found reasons to describe as an ego. In order to
emphasize the individuality of the Ultimate Ego the Qur’an gives Him
the proper name of Allah, and further defines Him as follows:
Say: Allah is One:
All things depend on Him;
He begetteth not, and He is not begotten;
And there is none like unto Him (112: 1-4)
All things depend on Him;
He begetteth not, and He is not begotten;
And there is none like unto Him (112: 1-4)
But it is hard to understand what exactly is an individual. As Bergson has taught us in his Creative Evolution, individuality
is a matter of degrees and is not fully realized even in the case of
the apparently closed off unity of the human being. “In particular, it may be said of individuality”, says Bergson:
that while the tendency to individuate is everywhere
present in the organized world, it is everywhere opposed by the
tendency towards reproduction. For the individuality to be perfect, it
would be necessary that no detached part of the organism could live
separately. But then reproduction would be impossible. For what is
reproduction but the building up of a new organism with a detached
fragment of the old? Individuality, therefore, harbours its own enemy
at home.
In the light of this passage it is clear that the
perfect individual, closed off as an ego, peerless and unique, cannot be
conceived as harbouring its own enemy at home. It must be conceived as
superior to the antagonistic tendency of reproduction. This
characteristic of the perfect ego is one of the most essential elements
in the Qur’anic conception of God; and the Qur’an mentions it over and
over again, not so much with a view to attack the current Christian
conception as to accentuate its own view of a perfect individual.
It may, however, be said that the history of religious thought
discloses various ways of escape from an individualistic conception of
the Ultimate Reality which is conceived as some vague, vast, and
pervasive cosmic element,
such as light. This is the view that Farnell has taken in his Gifford
Lectures on the Attributes of God. I agree that the history of religion
reveals modes of thought that tend towards pantheism; but I venture to
think that in so far as the Qur’anic identification of God with light
is concerned Farnell’s view is incorrect. The full text of the verse of
which he quotes a portion only is as follows:
God is the light of the Heavens and of the earth. His light is like a niche in which is a lamp– the lamp encased in a glass– the glass, as it were, a star (24: 35).
God is the light of the Heavens and of the earth. His light is like a niche in which is a lamp– the lamp encased in a glass– the glass, as it were, a star (24: 35).
No doubt, the opening sentence of the verse gives the impression of
an escape from an individualistic conception of God. But when we follow
the metaphor of light in the rest of the verse, it gives just the
opposite impression. The development of the metaphor is meant rather to
exclude the suggestion of a formless cosmic element by centralizing the
light in a flame which is further individualized by its encasement in a
glass likened unto a well-defined star. Personally, I think the
description of God as light, in the revealed literature of Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam, must now be interpreted differently. The
teaching of modern physics is that the velocity of light cannot be
exceeded and is the same for all observers whatever their own system of
movement. Thus, in the world of change, light is the nearest approach
to the Absolute. The metaphor of light as applied to God, therefore,
must, in view of modern knowledge, be taken to suggest the Absoluteness
of God and not His Omnipresence which easily lends itself to a
pantheistic interpretation.
There is, however, one question which will be raised in this
connexion. Does not individuality imply finitude? If God is an ego and
as such an individual, how can we conceive Him as infinite? The answer
to this question is that God cannot be conceived as infinite in the
sense of spatial infinity. In matters of spiritual valuation mere
immensity counts for nothing. Moreover, as we have seen before,
temporal and spatial infinities are not absolute. Modern science
regards Nature not as something static, situated in an infinite void,
but a structure of interrelated events out of whose mutual relations
arise the concepts of space and time. And this is only another way of
saying that space and time are interpretations which thought puts upon
the creative activity of the Ultimate Ego. Space and time are
possibilities of the Ego, only partially realized in the shape of our
mathematical space and time. Beyond Him and apart from His creative
activity, there is neither time nor space to close Him off in reference
to other egos. The Ultimate Ego is, therefore, neither infinite in the
sense of spatial infinity nor finite in the sense of the space-bound
human ego whose body closes him off in reference to other egos. The
infinity of the Ultimate Ego consists in the infinite inner
possibilities of His creative activity of which the universe, as known
to us, is only a partial expression. In one word God’s infinity is
intensive, not extensive. It involves an infinite series, but is not that series.
The other important elements in the Qur’anic conception of God, from a
purely intellectual point of view, are Creativeness, Knowledge,
Omnipotence, and Eternity. I shall deal with them serially.
Finite minds regard Nature as a confronting “other” existing per se, which
the mind knows but does not make. We are thus apt to regard the act of
creation as a specific past event, and the universe appears to us as a
manufactured article which has no organic relation to the life of its
maker, and of which the maker is nothing more than a mere spectator.
All the meaningless theological controversies about the idea of
creation arise from this narrow vision of the finite mind.
Thus regarded the universe is a mere accident in the life of God and
might not have been created. The real question which we are called upon
to answer is this: Does the universe confront God as His “other”, with
space intervening between Him and it? The answer is that, from the
Divine point of view, there is no creation in the sense of a specific
event having a “before” and an “after”. The universe cannot be regarded
as an independent reality standing in opposition to Him. This view of
the matter will reduce both God and the world to two separate entities
confronting each other in the empty receptacle of an infinite space. We
have seen before that space, time, and matter are interpretations
which thought puts on the free creative energy of God. They are not independent realities existing per se, but
only intellectual modes of apprehending the life of God. The question
of creation once arose among the disciples of the well-known saint Bā
Yazīd of Bistām. One of the disciples very pointedly put the
common-sense view saying: “There was a moment of time when God existed
and nothing else existed beside Him.” The saint’s reply was equally
pointed. “It is just the same now”, said he, “as it was then.” The
world of matter, therefore, is not a stuff co-eternal with God,
operated upon by Him from a distance as it were. It is, in its real
nature, one continuous act which thought breaks up into a plurality of
mutually exclusive things. Professor Eddington has thrown further
light on this important point, and I take the liberty to quote from his
book, Space, Time and Gravitation:
We have a world ofpoint-events with their primary interval-relations.
Out ofthese an unlimited number of more complicated relations and
qualities can be built up mathematically, describing various features
of the state ofthe world. These exist in nature in the same sense as an
unlimited number of walks exist on an open moor. But the existence is,
as it were, latent unless someone gives significance to the walk by
following it; and in the same way the existence of any one of these
qualities ofthe world only acquires significance above its fellows ifa
mind singles it out for recognition. Mind filters out matter from
the meaningless jumble of qualities, as the prism filters out the
colours of the rainbow from the chaotic pulsations of white light.
Mind exalts the permanent and ignores the transitory; and it appears
from the mathematical study ofrelations that the only way in which mind
can achieve her object is by picking out one particular quality as the
permanent substance ofthe perceptual world, partitioning a perceptual
time and space for it to be permanent in, and, as a necessary
consequence of this Hobson’s choice, the laws of gravitation and
mechanics and geometry have to be obeyed. Is it too much to say that
the mind’s search for permanence has created the world of physics?
The last sentence in this passage is one of the deepest things in
Professor Eddington’s book. The physicist has yet to discover by his
own methods that the passing show of the apparently permanent world of
physics which the mind has created in its search for permanence is
rooted in something more permanent, conceivable only as a self which
alone combines the opposite attributes of change and permanence, and
can thus be regarded as both constant and variable.
There is, however, one question which we must answer before we proceed
further. In what manner does the creative activity of God proceed to the
work of creation? The most orthodox and still popular school of Muslim
theology, I mean the Ash‘arite, hold that the creative method of
Divine energy is atomic; and they appear to have based their doctrine
on the following verse of the Qur’an:
And no one thing is here, but with Us are its store-houses; and We send it not down but in fixed quantities. (15: 21).
The rise and growth of atomism in Islam– the first
important indication of an intellectual revolt against the Aristotelian
idea of a fixed universe– forms one of the most interesting chapters in
the history of Muslim thought. The views of the school of Basrah were
first shaped by Abū Hāshim (A. D. 933) and those of the school of Baghdad by that most exact and daring theological thinker, Abū Bakr Bāqillānī
(A. D. 1013). Later in the beginning of the thirteenth century we find a
thoroughly systematic description in a book called the Guide of the Perplexed by Moses Maimonides– a Jewish theologian who was educated in the Muslim universities of Spain.
A French translation of this book was made by Munk in 1866, and
recently Professor Macdonald of America has given an excellent account
of its contents in the Isis from which Dr. Zwemer has reprinted it in The Moslem World of January 1928.
Professor Macdonald, however, has made no attempt to discover the
psychological forces that determined the growth of atomistic kalām in
Islam. He admits that there is nothing like the atomism of Islam in
Greek thought, but, unwilling as he is to give any credit for original
thought to Muslim thinkers,
and finding a surface resemblance between the Islamic theory and the
views of a certain sect of Buddhism, he jumps to the conclusion that
the origin of the theory is due to Buddhistic influences on the thought
of Islam.
Unfortunately, a full discussion of the sources of this purely
speculative theory is not possible in this lecture. I propose only to
give you some of its more salient features, indicating at the same time
the lines on which the work of reconstruction in the light of modern
physics ought, in my opinion, to proceed.
According to the Ash‘arite school of thinkers, then, the world is compounded of what they call jawāhir–
infinitely small parts or atoms which cannot be further divided. Since
the creative activity of God is ceaseless the number of the atoms
cannot be finite. Fresh atoms are coming into being every moment, and
the universe is therefore constantly growing. As the Qur’an says: “God adds to His creation what He wills.”
The essence of the atom is independent of its existence. This means
that existence is a quality imposed on the atom by God. Before
receiving this quality the atom lies dormant, as it were, in the
creative energy of God, and its existence means nothing more than
Divine energy become visible. The atom in its essence, therefore, has
no magnitude; it has its position which does not involve space. It is
by their aggregation that atoms become extended and generate space.
Ibn Hazm, the critic of atomism, acutely remarks that the language of
the Qur’an makes no difference in the act of creation and the thing
created. What we call a thing, then, is in its essential nature an
aggregation of atomic acts. Of the concept of “atomic act”, however, it
is difficult to form a mental picture. Modern physics too conceives as
action the actual atom of a certain physical quantity. But, as
Professor Eddington has pointed out, the precise formulation of the
Theory of Quanta of action has not been possible so far; though it is
vaguely believed that the atomicity of action is the general law and
that the appearance of electrons is in some way dependent on it.
Again we have seen that each atom occupies a position which does not
involve space. That being so, what is the nature of motion which we
cannot conceive except as the atom’s passage through space? Since the
Ash‘arites regarded space as generated by the aggregation of atoms,
they could not explain movement as a body’s passage through all the
points of space intervening between the point of its start and
destination. Such an explanation must necessarily assume the existence
of void as an independent reality. In order, therefore, to get over the
difficulty of empty space, Nazzām resorted to the notion of Tafrah orjump;
and imagined the moving body, not as passing through all the discrete
positions in space, but as jumping over the void between one position
and another. Thus, according to him, a quick motion and a slow motion
possess the same speed; but the latter has more points of rest.
I confess I do not quite understand this solution of the difficulty. It
may, however, be pointed out that modern atomism has found a similar
difficulty and a similar solution has been suggested. In view of the
experiments relating to Planck’s Theory of Quanta, we cannot imagine
the moving atom as continuously traversing its path in space. “One of
the most hopeful lines of explanation”, says Professor Whitehead in his
Science and the Modern World,
is to assume that an electron does not continuously
traverse its path in space. The alternative notion as to its mode of
existence is that it appears at a series of discrete positions in space
which it occupies for successive durations of time. It is as though an
automobile, moving at the average rate of thirty miles an hour along a
road, did not traverse the road continuously, but appeared successively
at the successive milestones, remaining for two minutes at each
milestone.
Another feature of this theory of creation is the
doctrine of accident, on the perpetual creation of which depends the
continuity of the atom as an existent. If God ceases to create the
accidents, the atom ceases to exist as an atom.
The atom possesses inseparable positive or negative qualities. These
exist in opposed couples, as life and death, motion and rest, and
possess practically no duration. Two propositions follow from this:
(i)Nothing has a stable nature. (ii)There is a single order of atoms,
i.e. what we call the soul is either a finer kind of matter, or only an
accident.
I am inclined to think that in view of the idea of continuous
creation which the Ash‘arite intended to establish there is an element
of truth in the first proposition. I have said before that in my opinion
the spirit of the Qur’an is on the whole anticlassical.
I regard the Ash‘arite thought on this point as a genuine effort to
develop on the basis of an Ultimate Will or Energy a theory of creation
which, with all its shortcomings, is far more true to the spirit of
the Qur’an than the Aristotelian idea of a fixed universe.
The duty of the future theologians of Islam is to reconstruct this
purely speculative theory, and to bring it into closer contact with
modern science which appears to be moving in the same direction.
The second proposition looks like pure materialism. It is my belief that the Ash‘arite view that the Nafs isan
accident is opposed to the real trend of their own theory which makes
the continuous existence of the atom dependent on the continuous
creation of accidents in it. It is obvious that motion is inconceivable
without time. And since time comes from psychic life, the latter is
more fundamental than motion. No psychic life, no time: no time, no
motion. Thus it is really what the Ash‘arite call the accident which is
responsible for the continuity of the atom as such. The atom becomes
or rather looks spatialized when it receives the quality of existence.
Regarded as a phase of Divine energy, it is essentially spiritual. The Nafs isthe
pure act; the body is only the act become visible and hence measurable.
In fact the Ash‘arite vaguely anticipated the modern notion of
point-instant; but they failed rightly to see the nature of the mutual
relation between the point and the instant. The instant is the more
fundamental of the two; but the point is inseparable from the instant
as being a necessary mode of its manifestation. The point is not a
thing, it is only a sort of looking at the instant. Rūmī: is far more
true to the spirit of Islam than Ghazālī when he says:
پیکر از ماہست شد نے ما ازو
بادہ از مامست شد نے ما ازو
بادہ از مامست شد نے ما ازو
Reality is, therefore, essentially spirit. But, of course, there are
degrees of spirit. In the history of Muslim thought the idea of degrees
of Reality appears in the writings of Shihābuddīn Suhrawardī Maqtūl.
In modern times we find it worked out on a much larger scale in Hegel
and, more recently, in the late Lord Haldane’s Reign of Relativity, which he published shortly before his death.
I have conceived the Ultimate Reality as an Ego; and I must add now
that from the Ultimate Ego only egos proceed. The creative energy of
the Ultimate Ego, in whom deed and thought are identical, functions as
ego-unities. The world, in all its details, from the mechanical movement
of what we call the atom of matter to the free movement of thought in
the human ego, is the self-revelation of the “Great I am”.
Every atom of Divine energy, however low in the scale of existence, is
an ego. But there are degrees in the expression of egohood. Throughout
the entire gamut of being runs the gradually rising note of egohood
until it reaches its perfection in man. That is why the Qur’an declares
the Ultimate Ego to be “nearer to man than his own neck-vein.” Like pearls do we live and move and have our being in the perpetual flow of Divine life.
Thus a criticism, inspired by the best traditions of Muslim thought,
tends to turn the Ash‘arite scheme of atomism into a spiritual
pluralism, the details of which will have to be worked out by the
future theologians of Islam. It may, however, be asked whether atomicity
has a real seat in the creative energy of God, or presents itself to
us as such only because of our finite mode of apprehension. From a
purely scientific point of view I cannot say what the final answer to
this question will be. From the psychological point of view one thing
appears to me to be certain. Only that is, strictly speaking, real
which is directly conscious of its own reality. The degree of reality
varies with the degree of the feeling of egohood. The nature of the ego
is such that, in spite of its capacity to respond to other egos, it is
self-centred and possesses a private circuit of individuality excluding
all egos other than itself.
In this alone consists its reality as an ego. Man, therefore, in whom
egohood has reached its relative perfection, occupies a genuine place
in the heart of Divine creative energy, and thus possesses a much
higher degree of reality than things around him. Of all the creations
of God he alone is capable of consciously participating in the creative
life of his Maker.
Endowed with the power to imagine a better world, and to mould what is
into what ought to be, the ego in him aspires, in the interests of an
increasingly unique and comprehensive individuality, to exploit all the
various environments on which he may be called upon to operate during
the course of an endless career. But I would ask you to wait for a
fuller treatment of this point till my lecture on the Immortality and
Freedom of the Ego. In the meantime, I want to say a few words about
the doctrine of atomic time which I think is the weakest part of the
Ash‘arite theory of creation. It is necessary to do so for a reasonable
view of the Divine attribute of Eternity.
The problem of time has always drawn the attention of Muslim thinkers
and mystics. This seems to be due partly to the fact that, according
to the Qur’an, the alternation of day and night is one of the greatest
signs of God, and partly to the Prophet’s identification of God with Dahr (time) in a well-known tradition referred to before. Indeed, some of the greatest Muslim Sufis believed in the mystic properties of the word Dahr. According to Muhyiddin Ibn al-‘Arabī, Dahr is one
of the beautiful names of God, and Rāzī tells us in his commentary on
the Qur’an that some of the Muslim saints had taught him to repeat the
word Dahr, Daihūr, or Daihār. The Ash‘arite theory of
time is perhaps the first attempt in the history of Muslim thought to
understand it philosophically. Time, according to the Ash‘arite, is a
succession of individual “nows”. From this view it obviously follows
that between every two individual “nows” or moments of time, there is
an unoccupied moment of time, that is to say, a void of time. The
absurdity of this conclusion is due to the fact that they looked at the
subject of their inquiry from a wholly objective point of view. They
took no lesson from the history of Greek thought, which had adopted the
same point of view and had reached no results. In our own time Newton
described time as “something which in itself and from its own nature
flows equally.”
The metaphor of stream implied in this description suggests serious
objections to Newton’s equally objective view of time. We cannot
understand how a thing is affected on its immersion in this stream, and
how it differs from things that do not participate in its flow. Nor
can we form any idea of the beginning, the end, and the boundaries of
time if we try to understand it on the analogy of a stream. Moreover,
if flow, movement, or “passage” is the last word as to the nature of
time, there must be another time to time the movement of the first
time, and another which times the second time, and so on to infinity.
Thus the notion of time as something wholly objective is beset with
difficulties. It must, however, be admitted that the practical Arab
mind could not regard time as something unreal like the Greeks. Nor can
it be denied that, even though we possess no sense-organ to perceive
time, it is a kind of flow and has, as such, a genuine objective, that
is to say, atomic aspect. In fact, the verdict of modern science is
exactly the same as that of the Ash‘arite; for recent discoveries in
physics regarding the nature of time assume the discontinuity of
matter. The following passage from Professor Rougier’s Philosophy and New Physics isnoteworthy in this connexion:
Contrary to the ancient adage, natura nihil facit per saltum (nature
hates all sudden changes. Ed.)it becomes apparent that the universe
varies by sudden jumps and not by imperceptible degrees. A physical
system is capable of only a finite number of distinct states. . . .
Since between two different and immediately consecutive states the
world remains motionless, time is suspended, so that time itself is
discontinuous: there is an atom of time.
The point, however, is that the constructive endeavour of the
Ash‘arite, as of the moderns, was wholly lacking in psychological
analysis, and the result of this shortcoming was that they altogether
failed to perceive the subjective aspect of time. It is due to this
failure that in their theory the systems of material atoms and
time-atoms lie apart, with no organic relation between them. It is
clear that if we look at time from a purely objective point of view
serious difficulties arise; for we cannot apply atomic time to God and
conceive Him as a life in the making, as Professor Alexander appears to
have done in his Lectures on Space, Time, and Deity. Later Muslim theologians fully realized these difficulties. Mullā Jalāluddīn Dawwānī in a passage of his Zaurā, which
reminds the modern student of Professor Royce’s view of time, tells us
that if we take time to be a kind of span which makes possible the
appearance of events as a moving procession and conceive this span to
be a unity, then we cannot but describe it as an original state of
Divine activity, encompassing all the succeeding states of that
activity. But the Mullā takes good care to add that a deeper insight
into the nature of succession reveals its relativity, so that it
disappears in the case of God to Whom all events are present in a
single act of perception. The Sufi poet ‘Irāqī
has a similar way of looking at the matter. He conceives infinite
varieties of time, relative to the varying grades of being, intervening
between materiality and pure spirituality. The time of gross bodies
which arises from the revolution of the heavens is divisible into past,
present, and future; and its nature is such that as long as one day
does not pass away the succeeding day does not come. The time of
immaterial beings is also serial in character, but its passage is such
that a whole year in the time of gross bodies is not more than a day in
the time of an immaterial being. Rising higher and higher in the scale
of immaterial beings we reach Divine time– time which is absolutely
free from the quality of passage, and consequently does not admit of
divisibility, sequence, and change. It is above eternity; it has
neither beginning nor end. The eye of God sees all the visibles, and
His ear hears all the audibles in one indivisible act of perception.
The priority of God is not due to the priority of time; on the other
hand, the priority of time is due to God’s priority. Thus Divine time is what the Qur’an describes as the “Mother of Books”
in which the whole of history, freed from the net of causal sequence,
is gathered up in a single super-eternal “now”. Of all the Muslim
theologians, however, it is Fakhruddīn Rāzī who appears to have given
his most serious attention to the problem of time. In his Eastern Discussions,
Rāzī subjects to a searching examination all the contemporary theories
of time. He too is, in the main, objective in his method and finds
himself unable to reach any definite conclusions. “Until now,” he says,
I have not been able to discover anything really
true with regard to the nature of time; and the main purpose of my book
is to explain what can possibly be said for or against each theory
without any spirit of partisanship, which I generally avoid, especially
in connexion with the problem of time.
The above discussion makes it perfectly clear that a
purely objective point of view is only partially helpful in our
under-standing of the nature of time. The right course is a careful
psychological analysis of our conscious experience which alone reveals
the true nature of time. I suppose you remember the distinction that I
drew in the two aspects of the self, appreciative and efficient. The
appreciative self lives in pure duration, i.e. change without
succession. The life of the self consists in its movement from
appreciation to efficiency, from intuition to intellect, and atomic
time is born out of this movement. Thus the character of our conscious
experience our point of departure in all knowledge– gives us a clue to
the concept which reconciles the opposition of permanence and change,
of time regarded as an organic whole or eternity, and time regarded as
atomic. If then we accept the guidance of our conscious experience, and
conceive the life of the all-inclusive Ego on the analogy of the
finite ego, the time of the Ultimate Ego is revealed as change without
succession, i.e. an organic whole which appears atomic because of the
creative movement of the ego. This is what Mīr Muhammad Bāqir Dāmād
means when they say that time is born with the act of creation by which
the Ultimate Ego realizes and measures, so to speak, the infinite
wealth of His own undetermined creative possibilities. On the one hand,
therefore, the ego lives in eternity, by which term I mean
non-successional change; on the other, it lives in serial time, which I
conceive as organically related to eternity in the sense that it is a
measure of non-successional change. In this sense alone it is possible
to understand the Qur’anic verse: “To God belongs the alternation of day and night.”
But on this difficult side of the problem I have said enough in my
preceding lecture. It is now time to pass on to the Divine attributes
of Knowledge and Omnipotence.
The word “knowledge”, as applied to the finite ego, alwaysmeans
discursive knowledge– a temporal process which moves round a veritable
“other”, supposed to exist per se and confronting the knowing
ego. In this sense knowledge, even if we extend it to the point of
omniscience, must always remain relative to its confronting “other”,
and cannot, therefore, be predicated of the Ultimate Ego who, being
all-inclusive, cannot be conceived as having a perspective like the
finite ego. The universe, as we have seen before, is not an “other”
existing per se in opposition to God. It is only when we look
at the act of creation as a specific event in the life-history of God
that the universe appears as an independent “other”. From the
standpoint of the all-inclusive Ego there is no “other”. In Him thought
and deed, the act of knowing and the act of creating, are identical. It
may be argued that the ego, whether finite or infinite, is
inconceivable without a confronting non-ego, and if there is nothing
outside the Ultimate Ego, the Ultimate Ego cannot be conceived as an
ego. The answer to this argument is that logical negations are of no use
in forming a positive concept which must be based on the character of
Reality as revealed in experience. Our criticism of experience reveals
the Ultimate Reality to be a rationally directed life which, in view of
our experience of life, cannot be conceived except as an organic
whole, a something closely knit together and possessing a central point
of reference.
This being the character of life, the ultimate life can be conceived
only as an ego. Knowledge, in the sense of discursive knowledge,
however infinite, cannot, therefore, be predicated of an ego who knows,
and, at the same time, forms the ground of the object known.
Unfortunately, language does not help us here. We possess no word to
express the kind of knowledge which is also creative of its object. The
alternative concept of Divine knowledge is omniscience in the sense of
a single indivisible act of perception which makes God immediately
aware of the entire sweep of history, regarded as an order of specific
events, in an eternal “now”. This is how Jalāluddīn Dawwānī, ‘Irāqī,
and Professor Royce in our own times conceived God’s knowledge.
There is an element of truth in this conception. But it suggests a
closed universe, a fixed futurity, a predetermined, unalterable order
of specific events which, like a superior fate, has once for all
determined the directions of God’s creative activity. In fact, Divine
knowledge regarded as a kind of passive omniscience is nothing more
than the inert void of pre-Einsteinian physics, which confers a
semblance of unity on things by holding them together, a sort of mirror
passively reflecting the details of an already finished structure of
things which the finite consciousness reflects in fragments only.
Divine knowledge must be conceived as a living creative activity to
which the objects that appear to exist in their own right are
organically related. By conceiving God’s knowledge as a kind of
reflecting mirror, we no doubt save His fore-knowledge of future events;
but it is obvious that we do so at the expense of His freedom. The
future certainly pre-exists in the organic whole of God’s creative
life, but it pre-exists as an open possibility, not as a fixed order of
events with definite outlines. An illustration will perhaps help us in
understanding what I mean. Suppose, as sometimes happens in the history
of human thought, a fruitful idea with a great inner wealth of
applications emerges into the light of your consciousness. You are
immediately aware of the idea as a complex whole; but the intellectual
working out of its numerous bearings is a matter of time. Intuitively
all the possibilities of the idea are present in your mind. If a
specific possibility, as such, is not intellectually known to you at a
certain moment of time, it is not because your knowledge is defective,
but because there is yet no possibility to become known. The idea
reveals the possibilities of its application with advancing experience,
and sometimes it takes more than one generation of thinkers before
these possibilities are exhausted. Nor is it possible, on the view of
Divine knowledge as a kind of passive omniscience, to reach the idea of
a creator. If history is regarded merely as a gradually revealed photo
of a predetermined order of events, then there is no room in it for
novelty and initiation. Consequently, we can attach no meaning to the
word “creation”, which has a meaning for us only in view of our own
capacity for original action. The truth is that the whole theological
controversy relating to predestination is due to pure speculation with
no eye on the spontaneity of life, which is a fact of actual
experience. No doubt, the emergence of egos endowed with the power of
spontaneous and hence unforeseeable action is, in a sense, a limitation
on the freedom of the all-inclusive Ego. But this limitation is not
externally imposed. It is born out of His own creative freedom whereby
He has chosen finite egos to be participators of His life, power, and
freedom.
But how, it may be asked, is it possible to reconcile limitation with
Omnipotence? The word “limitation” needs not frighten us. The Qur’an
has no liking for abstract universals. It always fixes its gaze on the
concrete which the theory of Relativity has only recently taught modern
philosophy to see. All activity, creational or otherwise, is a kind of
limitation without which it is impossible to conceive God as a
concrete operative Ego.
Omnipotence, abstractly conceived, is merely a blind, capricious
power without limits. The Qur’an has a clear and definite conception of
Nature as a cosmos of mutually related forces.
It, therefore, views Divine omnipotence as intimately related to Divine
wisdom, and finds the infinite power of God revealed, not in the
arbitrary and the capricious, but in the recurrent, the regular, and
the orderly. At the same time, the Qur’an conceives God as “holding all goodness in His hands.”
If, then, the rationally directed Divine will is good, a very serious
problem arises. The course of evolution, as revealed by modern science,
involves almost universal suffering and wrongdoing. No doubt,
wrongdoing is confined to man only. But the fact of pain is almost
universal, though it is equally true that men can suffer and have
suffered the most excruciating pain for the sake of what they have
believed to be good. Thus the two facts of moral and physical evil
stand out prominent in the life of Nature. Nor can the relativity of
evil and the presence of forces that tend to transmute it be a source
of consolation to us; for, in spite of all this relativity and
transmutation, there is something terribly positive about it. How is
it, then, possible to reconcile the goodness and omnipotence of God
with the immense volume of evil in His creation? This painful problem
is really the crux of Theism. No modern writer has put it more
accurately than Naümann in his Briefe überg Religion. “We possess”, he says:
a knowledge of the world which teaches us a God of power and strength,
who sends out life and death as simultaneously as shadow and light,
and a revelation, a faith as to salvation which declares the same God
to be father. The following of the world-God produces the morality of
the struggle for existence, and the service of the Father of Jesus
Christ produces the morality of compassion. And yet they are not two
gods, but one God. Somehow or other, their arms intertwine. Only no
mortal can say where and how this occurs.
To the optimist Browning all is well with the world;
to the pessimist Schopenhauer the world is one perpetual winter wherein
a blind will expresses itself in an infinite variety of living things
which bemoan their emergence for a moment and then disappear forever.
The issue thus raised between optimism and pessimism cannot be finally
decided at the present stage of our knowledge of the universe. Our
intellectual constitution is such that we can take only a piecemeal
view of things. We cannot understand the full import of the great
cosmic forces which work havoc, and at the same time sustain and
amplify life. The teaching of the Qur’an, which believes in the
possibility of improvement in the behaviour of man and his control over
natural forces, is neither optimism nor pessimism. It is meliorism,
which recognizes a growing universe and is animated by the hope of
man’s eventual victory over evil.
But the clue to a better understanding of our difficulty is given in
the legend relating to what is called the Fall of Man. In this legend
the Qur’an partly retains the ancient symbols, but the legend is
materially transformed with a view to put an entirely fresh meaning
into it. The Qur’anic method of complete or partial transformation of
legends in order to besoul them with new ideas, and thus to adapt them
to the advancing spirit of time, is an important point which has nearly
always been overlooked both by Muslim and non-Muslim students of
Islam. The object of the Qur’an in dealing with these legends is seldom
historical; it nearly always aims at giving them a universal moral or
philosophical import. And it achieves this object by omitting the names
of persons and localities which tend to limit the meaning of a legend
by giving it the colour of a specific historical event, and also by
deleting details which appear to belong to a different order of
feeling. This is not an uncommon method of dealing with legends. It is
common in non-religious literature. An instance in point is the legend
of Faust, to which the touch of Goethe’s genius has given a wholly new meaning.
Turning to the legend of the Fall we find it in a variety of forms in
the literatures of the ancient world. It is, indeed, impossible to
demarcate the stages of its growth, and to set out clearly the various
human motives which must have worked in its slow transformation. But
confining ourselves to the Semitic form of the myth, it is highly
probable that it arose out of the primitive man’s desire to explain to
himself the infinite misery of his plight in an uncongenial
environment, which abounded in disease and death and obstructed him on
all sides in his endeavour to maintain himself. Having no control over
the forces of Nature, a pessimistic view of life was perfectly natural
to him. Thus, in an old Babylonian inscription, we find the serpent
(phallic symbol), the tree, and the woman offering an apple (symbol of
virginity) to the man. The meaning of the myth is clear– the fall of man
from a supposed state of bliss was due to the original sexual act of
the human pair. The way in which the Qur’an handles this legend becomes
clear when we compare it with the narration of the Book of Genesis.
The remarkable points of difference between the Qur’anic and the
Biblical narrations suggest unmistakably the purpose of the Qur’anic
narration.
1. The Qur’an omits the serpent and the rib-story altogether. The
former omission is obviously meant to free the story from its phallic
setting and its original suggestion of a pessimistic view of life. The
latter omission is meant to suggest that the purpose of the Qur’anic
narration is not historical, as in the case of the Old Testament, which
gives us an account of the origin of the first human pair by way of a
prelude to the history of Israel. Indeed, in the verses which deal with
the origin of man as a living being, the Qur’an uses the words Bashar or Insān, not Adam, which it reserves for man in his capacity of God’s vicegerent on earth.
The purpose of the Qur’an is further secured by the omission of proper
names mentioned in the Biblical narration– Adam and Eve.
The word Adam is retained and used more as a concept than as the name
of a concrete human individual. This use of the word is not without
authority in the Qur’an itself. The following verse is clear on the
point:
We created you; then fashioned you; then said We to the angels, ‘prostrate yourself unto Adam’ (7: 11).
2. The Qur’an splits up the legend into two distinct episodes– the one relating to what it describes simply as “the tree” and the other relating to the “tree of eternity” and the “kingdom that faileth not.”
The first episode is mentioned in the 7th and the second in the 20th
Sūrah of the Qur’an. According to the Qur’an, Adam and his wife, led
astray by Satan whose function is to create doubts in the minds of men,
tasted the fruit of both the trees, whereas according to the Old
Testament man was driven out of the Garden of Eden immediately after
his first act of disobedience, and God placed, at the eastern side of
the garden, angels and a flaming sword, turning on all sides, to keep
the way to the tree of life.
3. The Old Testament curses the earth for Adam’s act of disobedience; the Qur’an declares the earth to be the “dwelling place” of man and a “source of profit” to him for the possession of which he ought to be grateful to God.
And We have established you on the earth and given you therein the supports of life. How little do ye give thanks! (7: 10).
And We have established you on the earth and given you therein the supports of life. How little do ye give thanks! (7: 10).
Nor is there any reason to suppose that the word Jannat (garden)
as used here means the supersensual paradise from which man is
supposed to have fallen on this earth. According to the Qur’an, man is
not a stranger on this earth. “And We have caused you to grow from the earth”, says the Qur’an. The Jannat, mentioned in the legend, cannot mean the eternal abode of the righteous. In the sense of the eternal abode of the righteous, Jannat isdescribed by the Qur’an to be the place “wherein the righteous will pass to one another the cup which shall engender no light discourse, no motive to sin.” It is further described to be the place “wherein no weariness shall reach the righteous, nor forth from it shall they be cast.” In the Jannat mentioned
in the legend, however, the very first event that took place was man’s
sin of disobedience followed by his expulsion. In fact, the Qur’an
itself explains the meaning of the word as used in its own narration.
In the second episode of the legend the garden is described as a place “where there is neither hunger, nor thirst, neither heat nor nakedness.” I am, therefore, inclined to think that the Jannat in
the Qur’anic narration is the conception of a primitive state in which
man is practically unrelated to his environment and consequently does
not feel the sting of human wants the birth of which alone marks the
beginning of human culture.
Thus we see that the Qur’anic legend of the Fall has nothing to do
with the first appearance of man on this planet. Its purpose is rather
to indicate man’s rise from a primitive state of instinctive appetite to
the conscious possession of a free self, capable of doubt and
disobedience. The Fall does not mean any moral depravity; it is man’s
transition from simple consciousness to the first flash of
self-consciousness, a kind of waking from the dream of nature with a
throb of personal causality in one’s own being. Nor does the Qur’an
regard the earth as a torture-hall where an elementally wicked humanity
is imprisoned for an original act of sin. Man’s first act of
disobedience was also his first act of free choice; and that is why,
according to the Qur’anic narration, Adam’s first transgression was
forgiven.
Now goodness is not a matter of compulsion; it is the self’s free
surrender to the moral ideal and arises out of a willing co-operation
of free egos. A being whose movements are wholly determined like a
machine cannot produce goodness. Freedom is thus a condition of
goodness. But to permit the emergence of a finite ego who has the power
to choose, after considering the relative values of several courses of
action open to him, is really to take a great risk; for the freedom to
choose good involves also the freedom to choose what is the opposite
of good. That God has taken this risk shows His immense faith in man;
it is for man now to justify this faith. Perhaps such a risk alone makes
it possible to test and develop the potentialities of a being who was
created of the “goodliest fabric” and then “brought down to be the lowest of the low.” As the Qur’an says: “And for trial will We test you with evil and with good” (21: 35).
Good and evil, therefore, though opposites, must fall within the same
whole. There is no such thing as an isolated fact; for facts are
systematic wholes the elements of which must be understood by mutual
reference. Logical judgement separates the elements of a fact only to
reveal their interdependence.
Further, it is the nature of the self to maintain itself as a self.
For this purpose it seeks knowledge, self-multiplication, and power,
or, in the words of the Qur’an, “the kingdom that never faileth.”
The first episode in the Qur’anic legend relates to man’s desire for
knowledge, the second to his desire for self-multiplication and power.
In connexion with the first episode it is necessary to point out two
things. Firstly, the episode is mentioned immediately after the verses
describing Adam’s superiority over the angels in remembering and
reproducing the names of things. The purpose of these verses, as I have shown before, is to bring out the conceptual character of human knowledge. Secondly, Madame Blavatsky who possessed a remarkable knowledge of ancient symbolism, tells us in her book, called Secret Doctrine, that
with the ancients the tree was a cryptic symbol for occult knowledge.
Adam was forbidden to taste the fruit of this tree obviously because
his finitude as a self, his sense-equipment, and his intellectual
faculties were, on the whole, attuned to a different type of knowledge,
i.e. the type of knowledge which necessitates the toil of patient
observation and admits only of slow accumulation. Satan, however,
persuaded him to eat the forbidden fruit of occult knowledge and Adam
yielded, not because he was elementally wicked, but because being “asty” (‘Ajūl)
by nature he sought a short cut to knowledge. The only way to correct
this tendency was to place him in an environment which, however
painful, was better suited to the unfolding of his intellectual
faculties. Thus Adam’s insertion into a painful physical environment
was not meant as a punishment; it was meant rather to defeat the object
of Satan who, as an enemy of man, diplomatically tried to keep him
ignorant of the joy of perpetual growth and expansion. But the life of a
finite ego in an obstructing environment depends on the perpetual
expansion of knowledge based on actual experience. And the experience of
a finite ego to whom several possibilities are open expands only by
method of trial and error. Therefore, error which may be described as a
kind of intellectual evil is an indispensable factor in the building
up of experience.
The second episode of the Qur’anic legend is as follows:
But Satan whispered him (Adam): said he, O Adam!
shall I show thee the tree of Eternity and the Kingdom that faileth
not? And they both ate thereof, and their nakedness appeared to them,
and they began to sew of the leaves of the garden to cover them, and
Adam disobeyed his Lord, and went astray. Afterwards his Lord chose him
for Himself, and was turned towards him, and guided him. (20: 120-22).
The central idea here is to suggest life’s
irresistible desire for a lasting dominion, an infinite career as a
concrete individual. As a temporal being, fearing the termination of
its career by death, the only course open to it is to achieve a kind of
collective immortality by self-multiplication. The eating of the
forbidden fruit of the tree of eternity is life’s resort to
sex-differentiation by which it multiplies itself with a view to
circumvent total extinction. It is as if life says to death: “If you
sweep away one generation of living things, I will produce another”.
The Qur’an rejects the phallic symbolism of ancient art, but suggests
the original sexual act by the birth of the sense of shame disclosed in
Adam’s anxiety to cover the nakedness of his body. Now to live is to
possess a definite outline, a concrete individuality. It is in the
concrete individuality, manifested in the countless varieties of living
forms that the Ultimate Ego reveals the infinite wealth of His Being.
Yet the emergence and multiplication of individualities, each fixing
its gaze on the revelation of its own possibilities and seeking its own
dominion, inevitably brings in its wake the awful struggle of ages. “Descend ye as enemies of one another”, says the Qur’an.
This mutual conflict of opposing individualities is the world-pain
which both illuminates and darkens the temporal career of life. In the
case of man in whom individuality deepens into personality, opening up
possibilities of wrongdoing, the sense of the tragedy of life becomes
much more acute. But the acceptance of selfhood as a form of life
involves the acceptance of all the imperfections that flow from the
finitude of selfhood. The Qur’an represents man as having accepted at
his peril the trust of personality which the heavens, the earth, and
the mountains refused to bear:
Verily We proposed to the heavens and to the
earth and to the mountains to receive the “trust” but they refused the
burden and they feared to receive it. Man undertook to bear it, but
hath proved unjust, senseless! (33: 72).
Shall we, then, say no or yes to the trust of
personality with all its attendant ills? True manhood, according to the
Qur’an, consists in “patience under ills and hardships.”
At the present stage of the evolution of selfhood, however, we cannot
understand the full import of the discipline which the driving power of
pain brings. Perhaps it hardens the self against a possible
dissolution. But in asking the above question we are passing the
boundaries of pure thought. This is the point where faith in the
eventual triumph of goodness emerges as a religious doctrine. “God is equal to His purpose, but most men know it not.” (12: 2 1).
I have now explained to you how it is possible philosophically to
justify the Islamic conception of God. But as I have said before,
religious ambition soars higher than the ambition of philosophy.
Religion is not satisfied with mere conception; it seeks a more
intimate knowledge of and association with the object of its pursuit.
The agency through which this association is achieved is the act of
worship or prayer ending in spiritual illumination. The act of worship,
however, affects different varieties of consciousness differently. In
the case of the prophetic consciousness it is in the main creative,
i.e. it tends to create a fresh ethical world wherein the Prophet, so
to speak, applies the pragmatic test to his revelations. I shall
further develop this point in my lecture on the meaning of Muslim
Culture.
In the case of the mystic consciousness it is in the main cognitive. It
is from this cognitive point of view that I will try to discover the
meaning of prayer. And this point of view is perfectly justifiable in
view of the ultimate motive of prayer. I would draw your attention to
the following passage from the great American psychologist, Professor
William James:
It seems probable that in spite of all that
“science” may do to the contrary, men will continue to pray to the end
of time, unless their mental nature changes in a manner which nothing
we know should lead us to expect. The impulse to pray is a necessary
consequence of the fact that whilst the innermost of the empirical
selves of a man is a Self of the social sort, it yet can find its only adequate Socius [its “great companion”] in an ideal world.
....most men, either continually or occasionally, carry a reference
to it in their breast. The humblest outcast on this earth can feel
himself to be real and valid by means of this higher recognition. And,
on the other hand, for most of us, a world with no such inner refuge
when the outer social self failed and dropped from us would be the
abyss of horror. I say “for most of us”, because it is probable that
individuals differ a good deal in the degree in which they are haunted
by this sense of an ideal spectator. It is a much more essential part
of the consciousness of some men than of others. Those who have the
most of it are possibly the most religious men. But I am sure
that even those who say they are altogether without it deceive
themselves, and really have it in some degree.
Thus you will see that, psychologically speaking,
prayer is instinctive in its origin. The act of prayer as aiming at
knowledge resembles reflection. Yet prayer at its highest is much more
than abstract reflection. Like reflection it too is a process of
assimilation, but the assimilative process in the case of prayer draws
itself closely together and thereby acquires a power unknown to pure
thought. In thought the mind observes and follows the working of
Reality; in the act of prayer it gives up its career as a seeker of
slow-footed universality and rises higher than thought to capture
Reality itself with a view to become a conscious participator in its
life. There is nothing mystical about it. Prayer as a means of
spiritual illumination is a normal vital act by which the little island
of our personality suddenly discovers its situation in a larger whole
of life. Do not think I am talking of auto-suggestion. Auto-suggestion
has nothing to do with the opening up of the sources of life that lie
in the depths of the human ego. Unlike spiritual illumination which
brings fresh power by shaping human personality, it leaves no permanent
life-effects behind. Nor am I speaking of some occult and special way
of knowledge. All that I mean is to fix your attention on a real human
experience which has a history behind it and a future before it.
Mysticism has, no doubt, revealed fresh regions of the self by making a
special study of this experience. Its literature is illuminating; yet
its set phraseology shaped by the thought-forms of a worn-out
metaphysics has rather a deadening effect on the modern mind. The quest
after a nameless nothing, as disclosed in Neo-Platonic mysticism– be
it Christian or Muslim– cannot satisfy the modern mind which, with its
habits of concrete thinking, demands a concrete living experience of
God. And the history of the race shows that the attitude of the mind
embodied in the act of worship is a condition for such an experience. In
fact, prayer must be regarded as a necessary complement to the
intellectual activity of the observer of Nature. The scientific
observation of Nature keeps us in close contact with the behaviour of
Reality, and thus sharpens our inner perception for a deeper vision of
it. I cannot help quoting here a beautiful passage from the mystic poet
Rūmi in which he describes the mystic quest after Reality:
|
دفتر صوفیسوادوحرفنیست
زاد دانشمند؟ آثار قلم |
جزدل اسپید مثل برف نیست
زاد صوفی چیست؟ آثار قدم |
The Sufi’s book is not composed of ink and letters
it is not but a heart white as snow.
The scholar’s possession is pen-marks
What is the Sufi’s possession?– foot-marks.
it is not but a heart white as snow.
The scholar’s possession is pen-marks
What is the Sufi’s possession?– foot-marks.
|
ہمچو صیادے سوے اشکار شد
چند گاہش گام آہو درخور است راہ رفتن یک نفس بر بوئے ناف |
گام آہو دید و بر آثار شد
بعد ازان خود ناف آہو رہبر است خوشتر از صد منزل گام و طواف |
The Sufi stalks the game like a hunter
he sees the musk-deer’s track and follows the footprints.
For some while the track of the deer is the proper clue for him
but afterwards it is the musk-gland of the deer that is his guide.
To go one stage guided by the scent of the musk-gland
is better than a hundred stages of following the track and roaming about.
he sees the musk-deer’s track and follows the footprints.
For some while the track of the deer is the proper clue for him
but afterwards it is the musk-gland of the deer that is his guide.
To go one stage guided by the scent of the musk-gland
is better than a hundred stages of following the track and roaming about.
The truth is that all search for knowledge is essentially a form of
prayer. The scientific observer of Nature is a kind of mystic seeker in
the act of prayer. Although at present he follows only the footprints
of the musk-deer, and thus modestly limits the method of his quest, his
thirst for knowledge is eventually sure to lead him to the point where
the scent of the musk-gland is a better guide than the footprints of
the deer. This alone will add to his power over Nature and give him
that vision of the total-infinite which philosophy seeks but cannot
find. Vision without power does bring moral elevation but cannot give a
lasting culture. Power without vision tends to become destructive and
inhuman. Both must combine for the spiritual expansion of humanity.
The real object of prayer, however, is better achieved when the act
of prayer becomes congregational. The spirit of all true prayer is
social. Even the hermit abandons the society of men in the hope of
finding, in a solitary abode, the fellowship of God. A congregation is
an association of men who, animated by the same aspiration, concentrate
themselves on a single object and open up their inner selves to the
working of a single impulse. It is a psychological truth that
association multiplies the normal man’s power of perception, deepens
his emotion, and dynamizes his will to a degree unknown to him in the
privacy of his individuality. Indeed, regarded as a psychological
phenomenon, prayer is still a mystery; for psychology has not yet
discovered the laws relating to the enhancement of human sensibility in a
state of association. With Islam, however, this socialization of
spiritual illumination through associative prayer is a special
point of interest. As we pass from the daily congregational
prayer to the annual ceremony round the central mosque of
Mecca, you can easily see how the Islamic institution of worship
gradually enlarges the sphere of human association.
Prayer, then, whether individual or associative, is an expression of
man’s inner yearning for a response in the awful silence of the
universe. It is a unique process of discovery whereby the searching ego
affirms itself in the very moment of self-negation, and thus discovers
its own worth and justification as a dynamic factor in the life of the
universe. True to the psychology of mental attitude in prayer, the
form of worship in Islam symbolizes both affirmation and negation. Yet,
in view of the fact borne out by the experience of the race that
prayer, as an inner act, has found expression in a variety of forms,
the Qur’an says:
To every people have we appointed ways of
worship which they observe. Therefore let them not dispute this matter
with thee, but bid them to thy Lord for thou art on the right way: but
if they debate with thee, then say: God best knoweth what ye do! He
will judge between you on the Day of Resurrection, as to the matters
wherein ye differ (22: 67-69).
The form of prayer ought not to become a matter of dispute. Which side you turn your face is certainly not essential to the spirit of prayer. The Qur’an is perfectly clear on this point:
The East and West is God’s: therefore whichever way ye turn, there is the face of God. (2: 115).
There is no piety in turning your faces towards
the East or the West, but he is pious who believeth in God, and the
Last Day, and the angels, and the scriptures, and the prophets; who for
the love of God disburseth his wealth to his kindred, and to the
orphans, and the needy, and the wayfarer, and those who ask, and for
ransoming; who observeth prayer, and payeth the legal alms, and who is
of those who are faithful to their engagements when they have engaged
in them; and patient under ills and hardships, in time of trouble:
those are they who are just, and those are they who fear the Lord (2: 177).
Yet we cannot ignore the important consideration
that the posture of the body is a real factor in determining the
attitude of the mind. The choice of one particular direction in Islamic
worship is meant to secure the unity of feeling in the congergation,
and its form in general creates and fosters the sense of social
equality inasmuch as it tends to destroy the feeling of rank or race
superiority in the worshippers. What a tremendous spiritual revolution
will take place, practically in no time, if the proud aristocratic
Brahmin of South India is daily made to stand shoulder to shoulder with
the untouchable! From the unity of the all-inclusive Ego who creates
and sustains all egos follows the essential unity of all mankind. The division of mankind into races, nations, and tribes, according to the Qur’an, is for purposes of identification only.
The Islamic form of association in prayer, therefore, besides its
cognitive value, is further indicative of the aspiration to realize
this essential unity of mankind as a fact in life by demolishing all
barriers which stand between man and man.
For the long-drawn controversy on the issue of the creation of the universe, see, for instance, Ghazālī, Tahāfatu al-Falāsifah, English translation by S. A. Kamālī: Incoherence of the Philosophers, pp. 13-53 and Ibn Rushd, Tahāfatu al-Tahāfah, English translation by Simon van den Bergh: The Incoherence of the Incoherence, pp. 1-69. A more accurate and annotated translation with the critical text of the Tahāfatu al-Falāsifah wsa made by Michael E. Marmura in his Incoherence of the Philosophers,
Bagham University Press, Rep. Suhail Academy, Lahore, 2007. Cf. also
G. F. Hourani, ‘Alghazālī and the Philosophers on the Origin of the
World’, The Muslim World, XLVII/2(1958), 183-91, 308-14 and M. Saeed Sheikh, ‘Al-Ghazalī: Metaphysics’, A History of Muslim Philosophy, ed. M. M. Sharif, pp. 598-608.
Cf. Ibn Khaldūn, Muqaddimah, English translation by F. Rosenthal, III, 50-51, where Bāqillānī is said to have introduced the conceptions of atom (al-jawhar al fard), vacuum and accidents into the Ash‘artie Kalām. R.
J. McCarthy, who has edited and also translated some of Bāqillānī’s
texts, however, considers this to be unwarranted; see his article
‘al-Bākillānī’, in the Encyclopaedia of Islam (New edition), I, 959. From the account of Muslim atomism given in Al-Ash‘arī’s Maqālāt al-Islāmiyīn. This much has to be conceded that atomism was keenly discussed by the Muslim scholastic theologians long before Bāqillānī.
For life and works of Maimonides and his relationship with Muslim philosophy, cf. S. Pines, The Guide of the Perplexed (new
English translation, Chicago University Press, 1963), ‘Introduction’
by the translator and an ‘Introductory Essay’ by L. Strauss; also
Sarton, Introduction to the History of Science, II, 369-70, and 376-77.
Viscount Richard Burton Haldane, the elder brother of John Scott
Haldane, from whose Symposium Paper Allama Iqbal has quoted at length
in Lecture II p. 35, was a leading neo-Hegelian British philosopher and
a distinguished statesman who died on 19 August 1928. Allama’s using
the expression ‘the late Lord Haldane’ is indicative of the possible
time of his writing the present Lecture which together with the first
two Lectures was delivered in Madras (5-8 Jan. 1929). The ‘idea of
degrees of reality and knowledge is very vigorously expounded by
Haldane in The Reign of Relativity (1921) as also in his earlier two-volume Gifford Lectures: The Pathway to Reality (1903-04)
in which he also expounded the Principle of Relativity on purely
philosophical grounds even before the publication of Einstein’s theory;
cf. Rudolf Metz, A Hundred Years of British Philosophy, p. 315.
Cf. Louis Rougier, Philosophy and the New Physics (An
Essay on the Relativity Theory and the Theory of Quanta), p. 143.The
work belongs to the earlier phase of Rougier’s philosophical output, a
phase in which he was seized by the new discoveries of physicists and
mathematicians such as Henry Poincare (celestial mechanics and new
geometry), Max Planck (quantum theory) Nicolas L. Carnot
(thermodynamics), Madame Curie (radium and its compounds) and Einstein
(principle of relativity). This was followed by his critical study of
theories of knowledge: rationalism and scholasticism, ending in his
thesis of the diversity of ‘metaphysical temperaments’ and the
‘infinite plasticity’ of the human mind whereby it takes delight in
‘quite varied forms of intelligibility’. To the final phase of
Rougier’s philosophical productivity belongs La Métaphysique et le langage (1960)in
which he elaborated the conception of plurality of language in
philosophical discourse. Rougier also wrote on history of ideas
(scientific, philosophical, religious) and on contemporary political
and economical problems– his Les Mystiques politiques et leurs incidences internationales (1935) and Les Mystiques économiques (1949)are noteworthy.
It is to be noted that both the name ‘Louis Rougier’ and the title of his book ‘Philosophy and the New Physics’ cited in the passage quoted by Allama Iqbal are given puzzlingly incorrectly in the previous editions of Reconstruction including the one by Oxford University Press (London, 1934); and these were not noticed even by Madame Eva Meyerovitch in her French translation: Reconstruire la pensée religieuse de l’ Islam (Paris, 1955, p. 83).It would have been well-nigh impossible for me to find out the author’s name and title of the book correctly had I not received the very kind help of the Dutch scholar the Reverend Dr. Jan Slomp and Mlle Mauricette Levasseur of Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, who also supplied me with many useful particulars about the life and works of Rougier. The last thing that I heard was that this French philosopher who taught in various universities including the ones in Cairo and New York and who participated in various Congresses and was the President of the Paris International Congress of Scientific Philosophy in 1935, passed away on 14 October 1982at the age of ninety-three.
It is to be noted that both the name ‘Louis Rougier’ and the title of his book ‘Philosophy and the New Physics’ cited in the passage quoted by Allama Iqbal are given puzzlingly incorrectly in the previous editions of Reconstruction including the one by Oxford University Press (London, 1934); and these were not noticed even by Madame Eva Meyerovitch in her French translation: Reconstruire la pensée religieuse de l’ Islam (Paris, 1955, p. 83).It would have been well-nigh impossible for me to find out the author’s name and title of the book correctly had I not received the very kind help of the Dutch scholar the Reverend Dr. Jan Slomp and Mlle Mauricette Levasseur of Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, who also supplied me with many useful particulars about the life and works of Rougier. The last thing that I heard was that this French philosopher who taught in various universities including the ones in Cairo and New York and who participated in various Congresses and was the President of the Paris International Congress of Scientific Philosophy in 1935, passed away on 14 October 1982at the age of ninety-three.
Cf. Space, Time and Deity, II, 396.98;also Allama Iqbal’s letter dated 24January 1921 addressed to R. A. Nicholson (Letters of Iqbal, ed.
B. A. Dar, pp. 141-42)where, while disagreeing with Alexander’s view
of God, he observes: ‘I believe there is a Divine tendency in the
universe, but this tendency will eventually find its complete
expression in a higher man, not in a God subject to Time, as Alexander
implies in his discussion of the subject.’
TheSufi poet named here as well as in Lectures V and VII as (Fakhr
al-Dīn) ‘Irāqī, we are told, is really ‘Ain al-Qudāt Abū ’l-Ma‘ālī
‘Abdullāh b. Muhammad b. ‘Alī b. al-Hasan b. ‘Alī al-Miyānjī
al-Hamadānī (492-525/1098-1131) whose tractate on space and time: Ghāyat al-Imkān fi Dirāyat al-Makān (54
pp.)has been edited by Rahīm Farmanish (Tehran, 1338 S/1959); cf.
English translation of the tractate by A. H. Kamali, section captioned:
‘Observations’, pp. i-v; also B. A. Dar, ‘Iqbal aur Mas’alah-i Zamān-o-Makān’in Fikr-i Iqbal ke Munawwar Goshay, ed.
Salim Akhtar, pp. 149-51. Nadhr Sābirī, however, strongly pleads that
the real author of the tractate was Shaikh Tāj al-Dīn Mahmūd b.
Khudādād Ashnawī (d. c. 619/1222),as also hinted by Allama Iqbal in his
Presidential Address delivered at the Fifth Indian Oriental Conference
(1928) (Speeches, Writings and Statements of Iqbal, p. 137). Cf. Shaikh Mahmūd Ashnawī’s tractate: Ghāyat al-Imkān fi Ma‘rifat al-Zamān wa ’l-Makān (42
pp.)edited by Nadhr Sābirī (Campbellpur, 1401/1981), ‘Introduction’
embodying the editor’s research about the MSS of the tractate and the
available data of its author; also Hājī Khalifah, Kashf al-Zunūn, II, 1190, and A. Monzavi, A Catalogue of Persian Manuscripts, Vol.
II, Part I, MSS 7556-72. Cf. also Maulānā Imtiāz ‘Alī Khān ‘Arshī,
‘Zamān-o-Makān kī Bahth ke Muta‘alliq Allāmah Iqbāl kā aik Makhadh:
‘Irāqī ya Ashnawī’, Maqālāt: Iqbāl Alamī Kāngras (Iqbal Centenary Papers Presented at the International Congress on Allama Mohammad Iqbal: 2-8December
1977),IV, 1-10 wherein Maulānā ‘Arshī traces a new MS of the tractate
in the Rida Library, Rampur, and suggests the possibility of its being
the one used by Allama Iqbal in these Lectures as well as in his
Address: ‘A Plea for Deeper Study of Muslim Scientists’.
It may be added that there remains now no doubt as to the particular MS of this unique Sufi tractate on ‘Space and Time’ used by Allama Iqbal, for fortunately it is well preserved in the Allama Iqbal Museum, Lahore (inaugurated by the President of Pakistan on 26September 1984). The MS, according to a note in Allama’s own hand dated 21October 1935, was transcribed for him by the celebrated religious scholar Sayyid Anwar Shāh Kāshmīrī, Cf. Dr. Ahmad Nabi Khan, Relics of Allama Iqbal (Catalogue),p. 12.
For purposes of present annotation we have referred to Rahīm Farmanish’s edition of Hamadānī’s Ghāyat al-Imkān fi Dirāyat al-Makān (Tehran, 1338/1959) and to A. H. Kamali’s English translation of it (Karachi, 1971) where needed. This translation, however, is to be used with caution.
It may be added that there remains now no doubt as to the particular MS of this unique Sufi tractate on ‘Space and Time’ used by Allama Iqbal, for fortunately it is well preserved in the Allama Iqbal Museum, Lahore (inaugurated by the President of Pakistan on 26September 1984). The MS, according to a note in Allama’s own hand dated 21October 1935, was transcribed for him by the celebrated religious scholar Sayyid Anwar Shāh Kāshmīrī, Cf. Dr. Ahmad Nabi Khan, Relics of Allama Iqbal (Catalogue),p. 12.
For purposes of present annotation we have referred to Rahīm Farmanish’s edition of Hamadānī’s Ghāyat al-Imkān fi Dirāyat al-Makān (Tehran, 1338/1959) and to A. H. Kamali’s English translation of it (Karachi, 1971) where needed. This translation, however, is to be used with caution.
Cf. Al-Mabāhith al-Mashriqīyah, 1, 647; the Arabic text of the passage quoted in English is as under:
(واعلم) انی الی الان ما وصلت الی حقيقة الحق فی الزمان فليکن طمعک من هذا الکتاب استقصاء القول فيما يمکن ان يقال من کل جانب و اما تکلف الاجوبة الضّعيفة تعصّبا لقوم دون قوم و لمذهب دون مذهب فذلک مما لا افعله فی کثير من المواضع و خصوصا فی هذہ المسئلة۔
(واعلم) انی الی الان ما وصلت الی حقيقة الحق فی الزمان فليکن طمعک من هذا الکتاب استقصاء القول فيما يمکن ان يقال من کل جانب و اما تکلف الاجوبة الضّعيفة تعصّبا لقوم دون قوم و لمذهب دون مذهب فذلک مما لا افعله فی کثير من المواضع و خصوصا فی هذہ المسئلة۔
Cf. Joseph Friedrich Naumann, Briefe über Religion, p. 68; also Lecture VI, note 38. The German text of the passage quoted in English is as under:
‘Wir haben eine Welterkenntnis, wie uns einen Gott der Macht and Starke lehrt, der Tod und Leben wie Schatten und Licht gleichzeitig versendet, und eine Offenbarung, einen Heilsglauben, der von demselben Gott sagt, dass er Vater sei. Die Nachfolge des Weltgottes ergibt die Sittlichkeit des Kampfes ums Dasn, und der Dienst des Vaters Jesu Christi ergibt die Sittlichkeit der Barmherzigkeit. Es sind aber nicht zwei Gotter, sondern einer. Irgendwie greifen ihre Arme imeinander. Nur kann kein Sterblicher sagen, wo and wie das geschicht.
‘Wir haben eine Welterkenntnis, wie uns einen Gott der Macht and Starke lehrt, der Tod und Leben wie Schatten und Licht gleichzeitig versendet, und eine Offenbarung, einen Heilsglauben, der von demselben Gott sagt, dass er Vater sei. Die Nachfolge des Weltgottes ergibt die Sittlichkeit des Kampfes ums Dasn, und der Dienst des Vaters Jesu Christi ergibt die Sittlichkeit der Barmherzigkeit. Es sind aber nicht zwei Gotter, sondern einer. Irgendwie greifen ihre Arme imeinander. Nur kann kein Sterblicher sagen, wo and wie das geschicht.
Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-1891) is a noted spiritualist
and theosophist of Russian birth, who in collaboration with Col. H. S.
Olcott and W. A. Judge founded Theosophical Society in New York in
November 1873. Later she transferred her activities to India where in
1879 she established the office of the Society in Bombay and in 1883 in
Adyar near Madras with the following three objects: (i) to form a
nucleus of the universal brotherhood of humanity; (ii) to promote the
study of comparative religion, philosophy and science, and (iii) to
investigate the unexplained laws of nature and powers latent in man. The Secret Doctrine (1888)
deals, broadly speaking, with ‘Cosmogenesis’ and ‘Anthropogenesis’ in a
ponderous way; though largely based on Vedantic thought the ‘secret
doctrine’ is claimed to carry in it the essence of all religions.
For the mention of tree as ‘a cryptic symbol for occult knowledge’ in The Secret Doctrine, cf. I, 187: ‘The Symbol for Sacred and Secret knowledge in antiquity was universally a Tree, by which a scripture or a Record was also meant’; III, 384: ‘Ormzad ... is also the creator of the Tree’ (of Occult and Spiritual Knowledge and Wisdom) from which the mystic and the mysterious Baresma is taken’, and IV, 159: ‘To the Eastern Occultist the Tree of Knowledge (leads) to the light of the eternal present Reality’.
It may be added that Allama Iqbal seems to have a little more than a mere passing interest in the Theosophical Society and its activities for, as reported by Dr. M. ‘Abdullāh Chaghata’i (Iqbal ki Suhbat Men, p. 330), he, during his quite busy stay in Madras (5-8 Jan. 1929) in connection with the present Lectures, found time to pay a visit to the head office of the Society at Adyar. One may also note in Development of Metaphysics in Persia (p. 10, note 2) reference to a small work Reincarnation by the famous Annie Besant (President of the Theosophical Society, 1907-1933, and the first and the only English woman who served as President of the Indian National Congress in 1917) and added to this are the two books published by the Theosophical Society in Allama’s personal library (cf. Descriptive Catalogue of Allama Iqbal’s Personal Library, No. 81 and Relics of Allama Iqbal; Catalogue IV. 11). All this, however, does not enable one to determine the nature of Allama Iqbal’s interest in the Theosophical Society.
For the mention of tree as ‘a cryptic symbol for occult knowledge’ in The Secret Doctrine, cf. I, 187: ‘The Symbol for Sacred and Secret knowledge in antiquity was universally a Tree, by which a scripture or a Record was also meant’; III, 384: ‘Ormzad ... is also the creator of the Tree’ (of Occult and Spiritual Knowledge and Wisdom) from which the mystic and the mysterious Baresma is taken’, and IV, 159: ‘To the Eastern Occultist the Tree of Knowledge (leads) to the light of the eternal present Reality’.
It may be added that Allama Iqbal seems to have a little more than a mere passing interest in the Theosophical Society and its activities for, as reported by Dr. M. ‘Abdullāh Chaghata’i (Iqbal ki Suhbat Men, p. 330), he, during his quite busy stay in Madras (5-8 Jan. 1929) in connection with the present Lectures, found time to pay a visit to the head office of the Society at Adyar. One may also note in Development of Metaphysics in Persia (p. 10, note 2) reference to a small work Reincarnation by the famous Annie Besant (President of the Theosophical Society, 1907-1933, and the first and the only English woman who served as President of the Indian National Congress in 1917) and added to this are the two books published by the Theosophical Society in Allama’s personal library (cf. Descriptive Catalogue of Allama Iqbal’s Personal Library, No. 81 and Relics of Allama Iqbal; Catalogue IV. 11). All this, however, does not enable one to determine the nature of Allama Iqbal’s interest in the Theosophical Society.
Qur’an, 17: 11; also 21: 37. The tree which Adam was forbidden to
approach (2: 35 and 7: 19), according to Allama Iqbal’s remarkably
profound and rare understanding of the Qur’an, is the tree of ‘occult
knowledge’, to which man in all ages has been tempted to resort in
unfruitful haste. This, in Allama’s view, is opposed to the inductive
knowledge ‘which is most characteristic of Islamic teachings.’ He
indeed tells us in Lecture V (p. 101) that ‘the birth of Islam is the
birth of Inductive intellect.’ True, this second kind of knowledge is
so toilsome and painfully slow: yet this knowledge alone unfolds man’s
creative intellectual faculties and makes him the master of his
environment and thus God’s true vicegerent on earth. If this is the
true approach to knowledge, there is little place in it for Mme
Blavatsky’s occult spiritualism or theosophism. Allama Iqbal was in
fact opposed to all kinds of occultism. In one of his dialogues, he is
reported to have said that ‘the forbidden tree’ (shajr-i mamnū‘ah)of the Qur’an is no other than the occultistic tasawwuf which prompts the patient to seek some charm or spell rather than take the advice of a physician. The tasawwuf, he
added, which urges us to close our eyes and ears and instead to
concentrate on the inner vision and which teaches us to leave the
arduous ways of conquering Nature and instead take to some easier
spiritual ways, has done the greatest harm to science. [Cf. Dr. Abu
’l-Laith Siddīqī (ed.), Malfūzāt-i Iqbāl, pp. 138-39].It must, however, be added that Allama Iqbal does speak of a genuine or higher kind of tasawwuf which
soars higher than all sciences and all philosophies. In it the human
ego so to say discovers himself as an individual deeper than his
conceptually describable habitual selfhood. This happens in the ego’s
contact with the Most Real which brings about in it a kind of
‘biological transformation’, the description of which surpasses all
ordinary language and all usual categories of thought. ‘This experience
can embody itself only in a world-making or world-shaking act, and in
this form alone’, we are told, ‘can this timeless experience .... make
itself visible to the eye of history’ (Lecture VII, p. 145).
Cf. ibid., Vol. IV, 2(Books i and ii– translation), p. 230. It is to
be noted that quite a few minor changes made by Allama Iqbal in
Nicholson’s English translation of the verses quoted here from the Mathnawī are
due to his dropping Nicholson’s parentheses used by him for keeping
his translation literally as close to the text as it was possible.
Happily, Allama’s personal copies of Volumes 2-5 and 7of Nicholson’s
edition of the Mathnawī are preserved in Allama Iqbal Museum
(Lahore) and it would be rewarding to study his usual marginal marks
and jottings on these volumes.
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