In the name of God All-Compassionate Most Merciful
Why the Qur’an is the way it is: an approach to study
We have been concerning ourselves intensively with story. Story is powerful. Telling our stories, especially when we have not been able to tell them before, can be an emotionally purging and spiritually liberating experience. My story is my definition of who I am, and when you hear my story, you accept me into a common world with you, and therefore into the common undertaking of human beings. Your world (and therefore the world) has received what I have to give: the knowledge of life I have achieved so far; the meaning of my existence. This is true of personal stories, and it is also true of the collective stories we tell. Story is how human beings, on any scale, organize their experience in time. It is also how we transmit our living experience beyond ourselves. People are always acting in the midst of some kind of story. If we are not conscious of our own presence in a set of stories, that only means we are living out unconscious stories.
There are some moments in any lifetime when finding our stories, and telling our stories, is particularly urgent. Adolescence and young adulthood is one of those times. It’s the moment when we discover some of the fundamentals of identity that we will work with for the rest of our lives. Because of this developmental imperative, young adults are frequently bursting with story.
I know that I was. Having passed through a series of crises into the astonishing surprise of a sense of calling and the priceless gift of a path forward into life, at 25 I was euphoric about my story and eagerly wanted to share it. But at just that moment, I was gently pruned by the Gardener.
Have you ever pruned a flowering plant? (Some plants profit from pruning. Others don’t. I am talking about the first kind.) You take your shears to the green tops of the shoots, and you cut them off. It stops the forward motion of the plant rather abruptly, and if you’re tender-hearted, the process is hard to watch. But what happens is that the plant pauses, considers, and a few days later puts out twice as many shoots. And if you repeat the process a few times, you can end up with a very bushy specimen, full of flowers, that really shows what that kind of plant can be.
Many painful life events can be usefully understood as pruning operations. The intervention I am talking about, however, was the gentlest of prunings. My spiritual teacher had taken our group to visit a very reverend and very famous holy person, Shaykh Bawa Muhaiyadeen. He was an ancient Sri Lankan, a classical Indic forest ascetic who had emerged from the jungle and started feeding people in a village. The operation around him became very substantial. An American tourist came across him one day and remarked that he ought to come to the United States. So he did. When I met him, he was guiding an active spiritual community in Philadelphia. The year was 1978.
Bawa used to give regular teachings to a room full of people. He spoke Tamil, and a simultaneous translator transmitted what he said. I sat among the other listeners with awe, but full of private celebration, overwhelmed by my own story euphoria. Lucky me, to have come to such a remarkable place!
Bawa looked straight at me. “We cannot know our stories in this world,” he said. “All we can know in this world is God’s story. We will only know our own stories on the Day of Judgment.”
I was astounded. It stopped me cold. I cannot say it hurt. But suddenly my wonderful story was much less important to me. And as I have pondered Bawa’s statement over the years, I have grown a far more complex attitude toward the whole business of story than I had when I sat in front of him on that long-ago afternoon.
So let me call your attention to something that often happens when we tell our stories. We tend to tell them again and again. There are lots of reasons why that might be. One reason is that I haven’t told the story thoroughly enough, or you haven’t received it thoroughly enough, to communicate its meaning, so that the pressure to transmit its meaning keeps pushing me to try another time. A related reason is that the story might be too rich to be exhausted in a single telling to a single person: it needs different hearings to bring out its different dimensions so that new audiences, or new circumstances, produce new pressures to transmit. Another reason is that people simply take pleasure in recognizing the familiar contours of a well-told story – little children will often beg the bedtime-story reader, “Say it again!” The arc of a story stakes out a space full of meaning that we can inhabit. The more we repeat it, the more familiar it feels, and familiarity is reassuring: the more familiar the story, the safer the place in which we are.
We may also repeat the stories we have because we don’t know how to form others, or because we are afraid to form them. If story creates meaning, then changing stories is changing meanings. And that is something not everyone wants to do.
Whenever we tell our story, we define ourselves with a closed definition. “This is me: this is the meaning of things.” This act has real uses, but it also has real limitations. When we close a story, we own it. We have a sense of having encircled something precious, and so we become protective of what we have enclosed. Every entity seeks to preserve its form. There’s nothing wrong with this – it’s necessary to life. No life functions are possible without a preliminary enclosure of space: that’s why cell walls are essential. (There are cells without nuclei, but there are no cells without cell walls.) Yet the act of closing the boundary of meaning imposes a limit to engagement, and imposing that limit in an absolute way rules out any engagement with whatever is going on outside.
Meanwhile, beyond our boundaries of meaning, the unfolding of the greater story never ends. Just because I have now put my self-definition out there, and repeatedly assert it, doesn’t mean that new things won’t keep happening. They even insist on happening to me. Change is thefundamental reality of existence because there’s always more going on than just my story. Trying to hold out against this truth is, in my opinion, the major cause of unnecessary suffering in life.
Now, as activists, we are people who want to change the world. The suffering we see around us upsets us deeply. It seems so enormous, so persistent, so relentless, and often so pointless and stupid. We agonize over how to go about removing this awfulness when we are very small, the world is very large, and the mess has been building up for a very long time. Frequently we ask ourselves, “How can I possibly undertake an action that would be effective?” Occasionally we also ask ourselves, “Am I really up to this? Am I the right person for this?” And if we take the work on anyway, with all its heartbreaks, after awhile we may urgently ask, “How can I stand it?”
The fundamental principle for unlocking the secrets of social action in Islam is: ONLY GOD CHANGES THE WORLD. Transformation depends on that which is beyond us. We can rely, permanently, upon that.
Does this mean we should just throw up our hands and not do anything? Not at all. But it does suggest that we should proceed very carefully, and with close attention, because the work to which we are aspiring is a divine work. And it is not up to us to accomplish it. We can only do whatever we do with greater or lesser awareness, either with or against the grain of what’s really going on.
When we forget this attitude of mindfulness, or taqwa, all kinds of bad things can happen. The stories that we tell ourselves, our wonderful stories, can devour everything. Consider that the great tyrants of history were all activists. They were all attempting to turn a beautiful vision into reality. Hitler, Stalin, and Mao all aimed to make the world a better place. They thought it was their job. They thought it was up to them. When their work was done, everyone would live happily ever after. Nothing outside that story could be allowed to exist.
They produced plenty of change, all right, but none of the beauty they envisioned. They broke things rather than fixed them. Their stories have dried up and blown away, because they left no space for that which is beyond.
It’s a repeating pattern. You can see it all around.
What I have called to mind here is not the sort of change that you and I are hoping to produce. On the contrary, we are hoping to intervene in this kind of change process by invoking another kind of change process. Our work is based on the hope of reversing the damage inflicted by the imposition of tyrannical stories.
We have reason for our hope. The possibility of such a reversal is a promise made by God in the Qur’an. (How intelligent people might take seriously the claim that God speaks is a topic for another day. I take it seriously, and I hope you will bear with me as we talk together.)
At Surah 25, ayat 70, we read that if people stop moving in the wrong direction, keep faith with what is beyond themselves, and take a step toward repair, “God will change their evil into good.”
Not merely to have our evils forgiven, but actually to have them changed into good! This is a spectacular promise, and it makes it possible for us to move forward with heart. It suggests that things are never doomed to a downward course, that nothing’s over till it’s over, and that if we start moving in the right direction, something invincible will carry us along.
Effective activism must struggle to stay aligned with that something. Our alignment isn’t a state of affairs that can be taken for granted. To keep ourselves on course, we must constantly be mindful of the integrity of the whole of life, to what is going on outside our own particular concerns, our own favorite formulas. Not just to change things to suit our own vision, but to change general harm into general benefit, is the challenge before us.
The Qur’an teaches that to serve such change is the responsibility of people of faith. To keep faith means to commit ourselves to aligning with the intrinsic nature of reality. Islam suggests that the universe is built, not just on physical mechanisms, but on what our tradition refers to as the character of God. Another way to say this is that the universe is not a morally neutral entity, but that it has principles, and that those principles hold just as surely as do gravity and the speed of light.
One of the greatest contemporary expressions of this spiritual position is Martin Luther King’s famous quotation, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Justice, of course, is a central attribute of the character of God. Dr. King’s life is an excellent example of what can happen when a person founds his work upon the position that the universe is intrinsically just. The life of Muhammad (s) is another such excellent example.
The point is very simple, but it is hard to grasp. The Qur’an proposes that if we act with the moral grain of the universe, then in the long run our cause will prevail, and everything will prosper. But if we act against the moral grain of the universe, then in the long run our cause is lost: we will injure first others, and ultimately ourselves.
A relevant question, then, is how we might discern the moral grain of the universe. Here, if we happen to believe in the transmission of divine speech, our scriptures can help us a lot. But there are other points of access. The Qur’an suggests that the characteristics of divine action can also be observed in the harmony and diversity and dynamic processes of the natural world. Nature is where it is easiest to observe divine principles at work.
And if we would like to consider what happens when people deny the working principles of the cosmos, the Qur’an recommends history. We can take lessons from societies that disappeared before us. The Qur’an proposes that they all made a similar fundamental mistake. Our present societies are scarcely exempt.
Over and over in the Qur’an we are reminded of one town or another that was committing some egregious injustice. In every case somebody came to them and said, “Don’t do that. Stop! It’s bad for you!” And in all those cases, the response was, “No, we like doing our thing. We mean to keep on doing it. Shut up, or we’ll shut you up ourselves!” The Qur’an also tells us that every society that ignored its warners was overthrown by God.
Now, how we understand this notion of being overthrown by God depends on what we personally are talking about when we talk about God. But there’s no question that the Qur’an references a God whose action is evident in the universe as it is. In the Qur’an, when Abraham stands before his destined tyrant (all the prophets, in our tradition, face down some kind of tyrant) that king asks him, “Who is your Lord?” Abraham replies, “My Lord gives life, and bestows death.” That skeptical and self-confident king remarks, “Ha. So do I. I too give life and bestow death!” Abraham responds, “My Lord makes the sun rise in the east. Why don’t you go ahead and make it rise in the west?” The point is not that God is just a bigger variety of tyrant – as some of us are inclined to believe – but that the divine action is already worked so deeply into the nature of things that the narrow self-glorification of tyrannical stories should be obviously absurd. Unfortunately, the absurd can seem very attractive when the call of self-interest is strong. Who on earth wants to give up an immediate advantage for the sake of an invisible consequence at an unspecified time?
We are still having big problems with the denial of the obvious. This morning I read in The New Yorker that the measurable carbon in the atmosphere is now greater that it has been at any time since the Pliocene, when the temperature at the poles was 14 degrees warmer and sea level was 75 feet higher that it is today. But no, we like doing our thing, and we mean to keep doing it. Just shut up and go away.
The good news is, it’s not over till it’s over – and if we care deeply about the people around us, then we have two responsibilities with regard to a sign like this. One of them is to keep making a racket about it, and the other is to provide an attractive example of a better way to be. We must find a way to live more beautifully than the opposition.
In the Qur’an, the people who warned the self-endangered cities of old, speaking in the name of God, are called prophets – anbiya’. We are told that in their different ways, they were all beautiful. In Islamic usage, the category of prophet includes all those known as prophets in the Hebrew scriptures, and also all those known as patriarchs, and also several named figures not mentioned in the Hebrew scriptures, and also Jesus (s). The Qur’an further informs us that there are prophets it has not specifically mentioned — that every people has been sent a prophet. A saying of Muhammad (s) sets the figure at 124,000. Muslims are asked to affirm the veracity of all prophets, so a figure like that suggests a pretty broad horizon of spiritual inclusion. We are also asked to affirm that Muhammad, as the Qur’an declares, is the Seal of the Prophets – that he represents the culmination of a particular phase of divine grace. But we are by no means obliged to accept the notion that therefore the action of God is over, that the story of guidance is closed. The story of God cannot possibly be closed. As the Qur’an often shouts out to awaken us, far exalted is God above that. The guidance of God was once sent to certain individuals, directly. It is now is sent to the whole of humanity, indirectly. The task that once was special is now held in common. The burden is distributed among us all.
The prophets were sent as bringers of good news as well as warners, and their efforts opened the paths of human possibility. People who see the state of the world, and care about it, and hope to change it without breaking it, are among their heirs. All of us here in this room are heirs of the prophets. I can easily imagine them aching for us to stand up and claim our inheritance, since there is so much work to be done.
The great mystical teacher Ibn `Arabi compared the prophets to physicians. Traditional physicians were understood as attentive servants of nature. It is not the physician who cures bodily ills, but the action of nature, working according to its intrinsic character to restore the natural balance of bodies. The physician merely facilitates the process. Similarly, the prophets are attentive servants of God. It is not the prophet who cures social ills, but the action of God, working according to its intrinsic character to restore the natural balance of hearts. The prophet merely facilitates the process. Of course in all cases, for best results, the patient needs to be mindful of the advice of the physician!
Ibn `Arabi points out that the physician is not the servant of nature in an absolute sense. Nature, after all, is the source of illness too, but the doctor is not interested in furthering the ongoing disintegration of the body: the physician serves only the healing powers of nature. Similarly, the prophet is not the servant of God in an absolute sense. No prophet was ever sent to further any community’s progressive self-destruction: they were all sent exclusively to serve the healing powers of the divine. And as their heirs, it is our great honor, and great responsibility, to carry forward that mission.
To cure an illness, it is necessary to address it at its origins. A symptomatic approach may relieve discomfort, but it never touches the root of the disease. The fundamental error into which people fall, time after time, is: it’s all about ME. The fact of the matter is: it’s all about REALITY. And yet, that sense of me-ness never goes away. It’s part of reality too. So the vital question for heirs of the prophets turns out to be, how can my awareness of who I am acknowledge and serve the healing powers of reality?
Now the problem of ego – yay me! – links directly to the problem of tribalism – yay us! – which in Arabic is called `asabiyya. And I am proposing to you that `asabiyya, a purely natural phenomenon sprung from the 98% of our genetics that is identical to chimpanzees’, lies at the root of most of the political and social problems that we are called upon to face, and are hoping to change. `ASABIYYA IS A PROBLEM OF RIGID BOUNDARIES, and at the level of human awareness, problems of rigid boundaries are diseases of narrative. Immersed in the anxiety of attempting to guarantee our own survival, we desperately want the stories we have told ourselves about the meaning of our lives to be absolutely sufficient, and absolutely right. They are all the security we have…or so it seems. Some of us will fight to the death to preserve them.
We as activists are not immune to diseases of narrative. We too want our ideologies, our stories of the world – the assumptions on which we base our lives – to be absolutely sufficient and absolutely right. Most so-called “organized religions”, including what often passes for Islam, began as prophetic attempts to heal the world, but got bogged down when their communities of practice became overly attached to certain existing stories.
The Qur’an repeatedly warns us about this danger. Now I’m not going to tell you the whole history of the Qur’an and the mission of Muhammad (s) at this point, but it’s important for you to know that the Qur’anic revelation came in response to the profound concern of one marginalized person for the welfare of his community. It was the answer to a loving heart’s deep yearning for justice. That yearning was answered in an extraordinary social transformation that unfolded over 23 years. The Qur’an was at the center of it all, manifesting in stages, and bits and pieces, over all of that time.
If you pick up the Qur’an having only encountered the Bible you will almost certainly be totally bewildered. The Qur’an is not a narrative. It is not a collection of adages. It is not a book of laws. It has no discernible linear order. It is very repetitive. It is sometimes contradictory. There often seem to be no logical connections between its verses.
This is very disconcerting for non-Muslims. It’s disconcerting for Muslims, too. Muslims all too often try to get around acknowledging their puzzlement by either radically reducing the number of passages they deal with, or else by declaring that large categories of thinking about the whole topic are simply taboo. That is spiritual cowardice, and it will not do. But merely to dismiss the thing altogether is blind arrogance, and that will not do either. So I would like to present you with another means of approach, a very different idea. I am proposing to you that the Qur’an is what it is because it came into the world as a medicine for diseases of narrative.
Whoever you are, if you take this thing seriously, it is going to mess with your story.
The Qur’an is not an edited text, or a tale that was passed down for generations before being recorded. The Qur’an is revelation raw. There is a wonderful Islamic tradition that it is alive. And everything that is alive, breathes.
A cell that is alive has a process going on. It needs inputs from what is outside itself, and it sends outputs to what is outside itself. It participates in what is beyond it, and that participation produces changes, inside and out. The cell walls of living cells let information travel in both directions. That is what breathing is.
I am going to encourage you to meet the Qur’an as a living, breathing conversation partner that has something to say to you. It also has something to hear from you. It’s important to know that Muhammad (s) was known for his listening, and that one of the Beautiful Names of Allah is the Listener.
I am proposing to you that God loves questions. Questions are the business of this world. Answers are for later. “God is on my side” is not acceptable. “Am I on God’s side?” leads to celebration in the heavens.
When we let our lives speak, what do they say? And when our whole lifespan is completed, what will our precious instant of living testify before the originator of time, the sustainer of all the worlds?
And if our activism is not undertaken in this spirit, then what, exactly, does our struggle serve?
It’s good to have a beautiful thing to to take home with us on this Islamic Ascension Day. So I will close by giving you a gift – the prayer of Rabia al-`Adawiyya, who was founder (after our Prophet, and his family) of the transformational conversation in Islam. I learned this prayer from my own teacher, and I am passing it to you now. “O Lord,” (Rabia would say) make our imitations real!”
I find it helps.
May the best of our work be accepted. And may peace be upon us all.
Rabia Terri Harris
Stony Point Summer Institute for Young Adults
Stony Point Center, Stony Point, NY
Laylat al-Mi`raj, 1434