Spiritual Grammar by F. Dominic Longo

Author:F. Dominic Longo [Longo, F. Dominic]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Religion, Comparative Religion, History, Europe, Medieval, Literary Criticism, Semiotics & Theory
ISBN: 9780823276738
Google: U5WUDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
Published: 2017-07-11T22:16:29+00:00

5 Forming Spiritual Fuṣaḥāʾ

QUSHAYRĪ’S ADVANCED GRAMMAR OF HEARTS

My earth and My heaven do not encompass Me,

but the heart of My servant who has faith does encompass Me.

The heart of the believer is the focus of this famous hadith, which speaks paradoxically of the presence of God in creation. The physical limits of the known world, the heaven and earth, do not delimit the divine. Allāhu akbar: God is greater and grander than the world. Yet somehow, the heart of the believer holds the presence of God. According to this saying, which was related by God to the Prophet Muhammad not as Qur’an but as another kind of divine utterance called by Islamic scholars a “holy saying,” a ḥadīth qudsī, the divine is powerfully and mysteriously enthroned in the Muslim heart. While this ḥadīth qudsī about God’s presence in the heart has been important to Sufis and other Muslims over the centuries, Qushayrī’s “grammatical” exploration of the heart provides a distinctive contribution to Islamic understandings of God’s work within human beings.

There are four kinds of grammatical case: raising [al-rafʿ], rectification [al-naṣb], diminution [al-khafḍ], and curtailing [al-jazm]. Hearts likewise have these categories.…

As for the diminishment [al-khafḍ] of hearts, it is through eliciting embarrassment, seeking unremitting dread, the necessity of lowliness, the preference of lassitude, perseverance in humility, and submitting the self to the sacrifices of righteous struggle.

It could be the diminution of sin—denying anyone who asks you for something that is not legally permitted—without a response or a dispute, or confirmation and aversion.

In this way, the gnostic diminishes the obstacles of the masses by despising his fate and holding himself and his action in disgust now and in his future.1

Qushayrī’s purpose in The Grammar of Hearts is to develop his reader into a spiritual faṣīḥ, eloquent in mystic speech and skillful in spiritual intercourse. He accomplishes this through providing the wayfarer with an account of a great variety of possibilities for the inner life and ways of the heart. Using grammatical topics and terms as starting points for exploring human-divine relations, Qushayrī adopts a spiritual pedagogy akin to that of the mother of all Arabic grammar books, Sībawayhi’s Kitāb.2

The heart in the Sufi tradition is a special place of human-divine intimacy. The heart is where God is most present to us and where our journey to God occurs. The basis for this tradition begins with the 132 occurrences of the word qalb (or its plural, qulūb) in the Qur’an.3 “The Qur’an repeatedly emphasizes God’s extraordinary closeness and proximity to the human heart (e.g., Q 8:24 …) as well as the uniquely all-encompassing divine knowledge of what is in their hearts (4:66, 33:51, etc.).”4 These ideas of intimacy and divine knowledge of human intentions at times go so far in the Qur’an as to speak of the heart in the stead of the entire human person, a part for the whole. By this synecdoche, the heart is “the enduring individual self or ongoing seat of our moral and spiritual responsibility.”5 One example is Q 2:225: “He will call you to account for what your hearts have earned.

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