Here’s a truly beautiful exposition of what it means to pray, both in a symbolic sense, as well as looking more deeply into the point of the spiritual practice in itself. Whether you’re a Muslim or not, whether you’re more ‘spiritual’ than religious, there is something profound to be said about a ritual that you dedicate a portion of your life to in perfecting. So watch this, please.
The connection with God is a longstanding commitment – it doesn’t, as far as I’m concerned, generally happen overnight – in the sense that if we wish to reap the benefit of a relationship with the the Essence, there is work to be done on our part.
I often find that life can be overwhelming – this isn’t a phenomenon located in me only. Think about it – living as we do, we are constantly seeking ‘something’, something that is in fact external to us. Whether it is that we seek to clear up our time, and hastily complete our chores…or seek wealth, and rush to work in pursuit of the sustenance that we feel we ‘ought’ to have…or in pursuit of another – whatever it is we seek…have you noticed yet how empty your life feels sometimes? When you are left alone in that silence – when you suddenly, quite rarely perhaps, find yourself awake in the dead of night unable to sleep yet are unable to do much else? Or when you find yourself all alone at home with your chores completed for the day, and there’s nothing good on TV? What is it about our condition that necessitates us being so ‘busy’ all the time?
Shaikh Hamza Yusuf here speaks about the cornerstone, the ‘marrow’, the essence of Islam – the Prayer . But he expresses not in ritualistic terms: it as a profoundly spiritual practice if its disciplines are observed. When the emptiness of life is swept aside in the face of the fullness of the Divine presence. Perhaps the most beautiful point of this talk is when (around minute 18) Shaikh Hamza speaks about prayer as the ‘falah’ – the ‘harvest’. This is a term that is called during the ritual call to prayer – it is often translated as ‘success’ – but it actually means the ‘harvest’ – if you miss this blessed event is to miss the fulfilment of your life. I think that that is beyond profound, and worth thinking about regardless of what faith you belong to.
This is a truly great watch – Prejean, in my view, is revolutionary in her thought. Whatever your thoughts are on the death-penalty (I, for one, am against it for socio-economic reasons, as well as theological ones, i.e. no just jurist exists, as far as I’m concerned), she makes an important link between poverty and crime. This is only 3-minutes in length or so, so it shouldn’t take up too much of your time.
There is a fundamentally astute point made here – that class matters when it comes to conviction rates in the United States when it comes to death-row inmates; why should that be?
And give the relative his right, and [also] the poor and the traveler, and do not spend wastefully. Indeed, the wasteful are brothers of the devils, and ever has Satan been to his Lord ungrateful. (Qur’an 17:26-27)
Think of the images that this verse conjures. What is it that we are being told about being wasteful? What are the social/economic consequences of such thing, or the lack of such thinking in the first place. Wastefulness suggests almost parity between the Devils – what capacity have we to debase ourselves…, eh?…
This about made my week. I have recently taken to reading David Berlinski’s The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions and read this early on, and just had to share:
Because atheism is said to follow from various scientific doctrines, literary atheists, while they are eager to speak their minds, must often express themselves in other men’s voices. Christopher Hitchens is an example. With forthcoming modesty, he has affirmed his willingness to defer to the world’s “smart scientists” on any matter more exigent than finger-counting. Were smart scientists to report that a strain of yeast supported the invasion of Iraq, Hitchens would, no doubt, conceive an increased respect for yeast.*
No, I am not in any way related to the Discovery Institute, nor do I have a personal stake in the books’ sales (and if all three of you buy it, we probably won’t be able to start that literary revolution) – nonetheless, it is worth a read despite the fact that my pockets won’t feel heavier. How’s that for self-effacing…?
*(David Berlinski, The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions; New York, NY: Basic Books; 2008; 4-5).
Though I understand that the likes of Dennett and others aren’t fans, here is a rather thought-provoking interview by a man who I have come to respect rather a lot lately, David Berlinski, a mathematician, philosopher…a thinker. The fact that he seems rooted within the analytic tradition makes his case far more ‘rational’ in the face of science…or dare I say…scientism.
Despite all my qualms with the Hoover Institution and the Discovery Institute, and other ‘think-tanks’ (which often don’t really do much thinking) etc., nonetheless I must give credit to a man who has the guts to attack the scientific consensus on all sorts of things…particularly when it comes to that unquestionable orthodoxy of Darwinian Evolution (which, to be fair, is increasingly anti-Utopian category of modern ‘faith’ with rather apocalyptic visions and with already evident catastrophic consequences).
Worth a watch. Even if you don’t find yourself agreeing with much of it. Broaden your minds, won’t you?
Though I understand that he makes no claims to ‘knowledge’ of the Sacred or is a bit hesitant with the term ‘proof’ (or so I gather from this interview), I will cheekily add the following quote from Solzhenitsyn (borrowed from Wikipedia):
“Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.” Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”
Here’s a recent debate at the Cambridge Union featuring some rather interesting big-wigs – Drs. Rowan Williams, Richard Dawkins, Tariq Ramadan, among others! A friend once pointed out to me that sometimes, if not often, a lot of these debates are about rhetorical posturing -but we have come to an age where the only way you can make a systematic case, where people will actually pay attention to you, is if you host a public spectacle and allow charismatic people to speak (I’d say this is the tragedy of modern newscasting – although the latter is far more agenda-driven than most of us actually recognise). So, more power to those who partake and actually give up their precious time to engage with people who seem more interested in point-scoring than with any notion of ‘truth’.
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So, this is perhaps the first (and last) time I might find myself supporting Douglas Murray in anything – I was thoroughly impressed by his talk – at least in part- , despite the fact that on the whole, he has a knack for essentialising religion and religious people; however this was one of those rare occasions where I found, one the whole, that the ‘religious’ seemed to make a much more strong case in favour of their views. Now, despite being of a ‘religious temperament’, I tend to find that arguments from science, for example, as being a little lacking (to say the least), however I’m more convinced by Dr William’s/Ramadan’s/Douglas Murray’s (Lord help me for including Murray…!) arguments about human dignity, opposition to dogmatic humanism, and the search for meaning far more convincing and systematically sound – even if the latter disagreed with both the former Archbishop and the ‘Islamic Martin Luther’!
Anyhow, Rowan Williams – for whom I have a great respect – was on peak form (if only he had been allowed to speak like this regularly, and wasn’t demonised by the press as some sort of archaic despot overseeing an influential but fallacious worldview and dangerous power-structure)… Dr Ramadan made his usual case , polished, refined and I think quite fair (but I wish more people would take it seriously – somehow when hardened humanists face a reasonable ‘believer’, their minds somehow short-circuit and they often ignore what he actually has to say.
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Finally, did anyone spot the slightly sloppy “Nobody denies that correlation doesn’t entail causation, everyone who knows anything about it knows that correlation is evidence for causation…” – I’m no philosopher, and I don’t say this with any sort of polemical glee… but do they really let him teach at Cambridge…?! Or is he some sort of quintessential postcolonial subject whom they keep around for display purposes?
…Okay, that was a cheap-shot, I admit; nonetheless this perhaps demonstrates the fallacy, which Dr Ramadan accurately expressed, of essentialising someone with whom you disagree.
…Just in case you’re wondering what problem I have with it – the speaker cited that in Western countries that ‘more religious’ (however you measure that), there is an increase in all sorts of social problems, etc.; of course one could offer a counter-argument that secular states have historically been responsible for wholesale industrial death, in a greater scale than anything witnessed in history; moreover, tremendous demagoguery existed, nuclear weapons were discharged…hmm, correlation between a secular state and atrocity…ironic, ain’t it? Like I said, who in their right mind would let him teach Logic?
Here is an awesome lecture delivered by a scholar that I admire a great deal – he is perhaps the most important Islamic philosopher (certainly the most prolific, as far as I know) of the last century.
This talk outlines the theological differences between the two schools of thought, and he goes out of his way – and rightly so – to demonstrate that in terms of jurisprudence and for a great deal, theology, the differences in the schools of thought are quite minimal. He clearly demonstrates how the major theme in Islamic Thought today (especially that which is promulgated by certain state with petrodollars) resembles far less traditional Sunni orthodoxy than we in the West might think.
The fact that more books exist today about the Shi’a than traditional ‘orthodox’ Islam (which comprises the largest majority as a percentage from within any major religion today) tells me, at the very least, that our faith is being highjacked in favour of a more ‘puritanical, rationalistic’ Islam. Moreover, his analysis of the modern state that is now Saudi Arabia is very astute – especially in his reference to the transfer of technology from the US to SA.
If you can take an hour out of your day to watch this lecture (and even take notes), I would certainly attest that it would be well-worth your time. We need more people like Dr Nasr who will try to highlight how similar the competing narratives of Islamic thought actually are, and that how historically we, as Muslims, lived in very congenial circumstances – and to a large degree still do. Predominantly, the great cause of this discord within the community is proliferated by the Islam that al-Qaeda tend to promote – not by those very minimal theological and jurisprudential differences orthodox (Sunni) Islam has hen compared to mainstream Shi’ism.
In fact, the major point of this talk is that we as Muslims can continue to coexist despite these differences, and despite the catastrophes and humanitarian disasters being created in the Middle East today; efforts are still ongoing today to build bridges and continue to acknowledge one-another – but I fear that to a large extent these efforts are being undermined by that new, puritanical form of Islam which underpins a tyrannical regime which is actively creating discord in the Muslim world.
As a Muslim who tends to fall closer to the Shi’i tradition, I still hurt when I read about the highjacking of the faith because no doubt do these people commit a great injustice to the Sunni tradition – I call on the Shi’a (though many already do this) to equally rise up to the challenge of defending the Sunni orthodoxy for all its beauty and contributions, as well as academic integrity and diversity. It is our duty as a community to not let the legacy of or beloved Prophet – the Mercy for all the worlds – to be desecrated in the name of these illegitimate ideologies; we ought not be divided at their hands and their colonial masters. Islam has so much good to contribute to our world – without unity and the acceptance of each other, we will fall short of creating the best possible world. The Shi’a tradition emphasises heavily our duty to the Mahdi – we cannot be fatalists and let our creed, and the dignity of our brothers, be destroyed from within.
I’m intrigued by this piece reported by the BBC; we’re living in a rapidly moving postmodern world where the likes of ‘scientists’ or ‘naturalists’ (or however else they style themselves) seem to be dominating the discourse in the area of pedagogy, science, natural history, politics…
So when you read that schools might lose their funding from the Government because those at the helm do not necessarily favour Evolution by Natural Selection as the sole model for determining how complex biological life came into being (obviously without invoking a higher power/God), is it just me or is this where science gets dangerous?
For the past couple of centuries the ‘secular’ model of governing a state seems to have been the preferred one, especially after the Enlightenment, as it was deemed then that religion would and already had become rather tyrannical and be inept at governing various groups of people fairly and without prejudice.
Yet I find myself living in a world now where the theory of Evolution by Natural Selection seems to have become the basic currency with which any discourse might be exchanged; now I have no problem per se with the theory of Evolution as a process for explaining to some degree of coherence the explanation for how life came to ‘be’ in the world – what troubles me is that Creationism is now being deemed as part of myth – i.e. religion.
(I must add here, of course, that it makes no sense to deem Creationism a mere folly – at its most basic level this lens suggests that there is a cause beyond this universe that at the very least, set our universe in motion. It does not necessarily mean that the world is some six-thousand years old as the Young Earth Creationists believe. I am happy to say that I am a Creationist who thinks life emerged, at least on the physical plane, out of a process of Evolution – remember of course, the gene-centered theory is now a minority position – but does that mean that I think that this is a necessary contradiction? I like the term Intelligent Designto sum this position up – what assumptions you make about my beliefs without questioning them, or by consigning them to meremythshouldn’t be a fault in me – rather it is the judgemental nature of science that we should take issue with (which ironically prides itself on being objective – something which modern studies in hermeneutics suggests is incredibly fallacious).
Moreover, I firmly believe that what defines ‘us’ as sentient beings has roots in something inexplicable by science – our ability to reflect on our own existence rather than be merely dominated by essentialist biological assumptions to me indicates that exists what Islam has always deemed the ‘fitrah’, that innate sense of the sacred essentially.
Is it just me or is science, of Scientism going to be come the new tyranny? I don’t buy that Science can be necessarily a moral agent for world, nor necessarily the prioritised objective lens through which we view it; historically it was the view of science and scientists that the world was created by a God which drove further explorations into His Mystery (forget the whole Galileo episode for a little while). Religion, or a God-oriented view of nature, as Professor Steve Fuller of Warwick University says, has been an instrumental driverof science – I am convinced that the meaning we ascribe to science was hermeneutically born out of the belief in God (just look at the science that came out of the Islamic world or in Europe); if we forget where science actually came from, and to how much it owes to religion, then science fails to have any significant meaning, nay, purpose, which scientists and apologists for Scientism suggest is a necessary agent for their work.
But science – more specifically the theory of Evolution by Natural Selection – shouldn’t have to be the modern meta-narrative of our world – the fact that we one day might be able to explain the physical processes that constitute our existence and the world that we observe around us does nothing to help us actualise in the world. Our purpose to understand or to know, or to create (all things that are certainly valuable things -and as yet science cannot explain the need for our aesthetic agency) did nothing to stop the catastrophes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for example; except to tell us that those that are weak (and now I mean this in a sociological sense) are doomed to perish, either at the hands of the strong or out of the actions of the strong.
Proponents of science today that are trying to systematically reject the normative narrative that religions have to offer fail to see that their commitment to pure, objective science that might some day explain the world is becoming a force that can be just as tyrannical. It is because of philosophy and religion that we endeavour to feed and clothe and heal the hungry, the homeless that exist far enough outside of our communities to have no impact on our own worlds and our abilities to thrive in them; according to science, altruism is merely a biological function and not a end-good, moreover Evolution by Natural Selection has its own normative process and agency – that the strong survive and that the weak shall perish. Though we see it happen in the animal kingdom we do not see it as a moral problem – yet when we see injustices and such cruel realities in our own, we find them morally and normatively abhorrent. Why? As Dr Seyyed Hossein Nasr says – if indeed we are merely composed of atoms banging against one-another then our attempts at being ‘moral agents’ is pure ‘sentimentality’. So far I cannot think of an adequate argument against this.
Somehow it has come in vogue that invoking a deity seems to be something that is unscientific – as if to say that by invoking God one has just filled an empty space with an explanation, which in itself cannot be explained; yet the trouble is that within the philosophy of science, no-one can seriously claim that all explanations require further explanations for them to become true – in our cause and effect universe within which we find ourselves, that is tantamount to invoking an infinite regress.
Remember, Newton didn’t know what gravity actually was, rather, he was able to explain the effects of gravity were – does that mean that gravity itself doesn’t exist or is an inadequate explanation for what he observed? Of course not.
If indeed we emerged out of a slow process of biological evolution which by some miraculous chance allowed us to exist despite tremendous odds against that chance, does that mean that because we cannot explain the origins of the universe within which we are found, that same universe in which evolution could actually occur, does that mean necessarily that it is an unscientific explanation? Certainly not on this account too.
Now whether you favour a ‘naturalistic’ explanation to the cause of our universe, or whether you think that it is better explained by an uncaused cause – surely you should be allowed to offer both, or other explanations, as part of a scientific education. Moreover, surely educators should be allowed to express which of those theories they actually believe in.
In my experience it was those teachers that expressed their opinions in the classroom that had the most profound impact on my education, those who spoke out, who weren’t afraid to challenge the conventional wisdom (recall, this is constantly being redefined – not a hundred years ago were women considered cattle or the expendable commodities of men, not a few centuries was it certain that the world was flat, not a month ago was it believed that a supermassive black hole could ‘exist’ at the centre of a small galaxy etc). Today, science tells us that biological life for a given individual begins at the point when two gametes meet, yet that same science cannot tell us whether it is actually ethical to terminate that life, even though it increasingly provides us the means to do it.
As a student of history and politics at university, or as someone who has an interest in religion and philosophy – the theory of Evolution has done very little to change my approach to these disciplines; the notion of the survival of the fittest as a model for perpetuating life has very little to do with my studies of the past, or my ability to grasp theological positions. Moreover, having studied both the theories of Evolution and the case for ‘Creationism’ (argh I hate that term), I have come to a conclusion for myself. I do not think that scientists have the right to tell me what to believe – knowledge has to come from a perspective of reflection. The obsession with purity or an arrogance of superiority is/are what were traditionally ascribed to organised religion; today as religion is increasingly dying in our society we see science filling that space. Nature does indeed abhor a vacuum, after all. But scientists cannot agree to it because they refuse to recognise their own fallacies.
We have thrived for millennia without understanding Evolution in the way science explains it – I do not see it as the theory that will be our Saving Grace. For that, we need to look within ourselves, not merely at ourselves.
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Finally – it’s worth watching Steve Fullers short interview on Intelligent Design – it’s about 7 minutes long and worth every second, in my humble opinion.
A brilliant edition of ‘The Stream’ speaking of the cartoons and the rage that followed it; is such a shame that more voices of moderation aren’t given this kind of exposure.
That said, I think the discourse lets-off too easily the greater power-play here – I read it as classical orientalism – a way of subduing the Eastern man because he is quick to murderous rage, necessitating condemnation from Western Governments and schooling in what it is to live in the ‘modern world’ (thank you President Clinton, you very wicked man).
Nouman Ali Khan was particularly excellent – speaking of the moral imperatives as opposed to the legislative ones which are important. And I think that that moral space should be recognised; as a person of ‘belief’, I wonder if it is a failing on the part of the faithful that this has been allowed to be perpetrated; our world today seems to be blinded by the notion of rights that extend even to the bigoted (which is fine in principle), the only problem being that we are so individualistic that we block out moral voices and moral instruction as soon as it interferes with our whims and desires – isn’t the point of morality (and I speak of universals here) that it should be able to shape or control our impulses for wickedness?
It’s an unpopular view to have, no-doubt, in today’s world. What do you think?
Great conversation on Al Jazeera’s The Stream yesterday: I was with Lisa Fletcher and Anushay Hossain in the studio — I love her blog Anushay’s Point — and Omid Safi, Nouman Ali Khan, and Michael Muhammad Knight joined in on Skype. Plus an excellent video comment from Hind Makki in Chicago, which led to a lively post-show discussion, starting at the 25.15 mark, on reclaiming the narrative from both ‘Islamist’ extremists and Islamophobic bigots.
It’s a good thing Nouman Ali Khan wasn’t in the studio, because I’d only have totally embarrassed him by leaping up to give him a huge hug. I really do have to figure out how to be cool on TV…
Like I say, hang around for the post-show segment — the silent majority is silent no longer!
Heightened Senses 