Skip to main content

God Speaks with Many 'Tongues'

God speaks, according to Shah Wali Allah, in the ‘tongue of imagery’ and the ‘tongue of factuality’. When He commands Ibrahim (pbuh) to sacrifice his one and only son, Isma’il, this is a far cry from the teleological suspension of the ethical, but rather that in reality, God actually did ask him to sacrifice a ram, but because of his state at that moment, it appeared to him in the form of Ismail. Likewise with the commandment to Muhammad (pbuh) to pray fifty times a day, which was in reality five times a day given the circumstances of the community. But precisely because at that level the terrestrial contingencies of the material world were transcended, it actually appeared as fifty times a day. So too, with our supplication to Him; that we often don’t realize what exactly we have in mind. Allah reminds us of this in the Qur’an that we may think something is good (or bad) for us but the reverse is actually the case. We trust too much in ourselves, no thanks to the character of our times that always uphold impious glorification of the self as the hallmark of ‘confidence’ and ‘self-esteem’. To even think that we don’t know what’s best for us is an occasion for contempt and regret. Sometimes, for example, we ask Allah to give us wealth, when in reality what we want is love, but because at that particular time, our mind conventionally associate love with wealth, as for example, when we think that rich people always have many friends. This mere convention of the mind soon translates into conflation such that the boundaries between the two are obliterated. We think we want the one but in reality we want the other. This relates to how we perceive the efficacy of our prayers. Perhaps Allah has granted or fulfilled our prayer, but just that we don’t realize it, simply because we think what we ask for really represents what we actually want in the innermost recesses of our heart and deepest of our desires. But the truth can be quite something else.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Conscience of the Market

When we say that the market should be restrained by ethical norms we don’t by default mean that the state should carry that responsibility. Critics typically take as axiomatic that the market is the root of all evil that any instance of irregularity, deficiency or oppressive practices that occur in commercial contexts is taken to warrant immediate outside intervention; and by that is often meant the state. Such an assumption about the market seriously underestimates the possibility of the market itself in restraining its own excesses. The misplaced emphasis on developing measures external to the market to rectify the latter’s shortcomings has only the result of treating the symptom rather than the real disease.
Post a Comment
Read more

Al-Attas on 'Islamic civilization'

Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas’s definition of ‘Islamic civilization’: “I define Islamic civilization as a civilization that emerges among the diversity of cultures of Muslim peoples of the world as a result of the permeation of the basic elements of the religion of Islam which those peoples have caused to emerge from within themselves. The process by which such emergence comes about is called Islamization, which is the liberation first from magical, mythical, animistic and ethnic cultural tradition incompatible with Islam, and then from secular control over one’s reason and one’s language. Whatever basic and praiseworthy elements of the pre-Islamic civilization that bind people together and are accepted as compatible with Islam become part of Islamic civilization. It is a living civilization whose pulse describes a process of Islamization, not in the dialectical sense of an evolutionary ‘development’, but in the sense of a progress involving every generation of Muslim towards r...
Post a Comment
Read more

Liberalism's flaw - the 'contingency' of freedom

One serious error in liberal articulation of freedom and human rights lies in its contingent theory of freedom. That is to say, liberalism posits freedom as the absence of state intrusion into the private lives of individuals: freedom is contingent on such omission by the state, barring which the individual is denied his freedom. At its basic and most fundamental level, it is a recognition that the state has the ability to undermine the freedom of the individual. The state is thus unduly given the power to decide and determine the freedom of the individual. This is grotesquely false for freedom is ultimately secured deep within the soul and it is so powerful that no one save God is able to take it away from the individual. In conceiving of freedom in the socio-political sense, liberal philosophers have practically mutilated it and truncated it beyond recognition such that ‘freedom’ is now given an exclusively narrow and limited province, robbing it off the vastness and richness that ...
Post a Comment
Read more