The Muslim Difference by Youshaa Patel

Author:Youshaa Patel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2022-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

POEISIS

Buried deep within The Virtue of Awakening, in the section on imitating the devil under the subheading “Dressing Like Someone Else to Disguise One’s Identity,” Ghazzī transmits a strange story about Satan’s attempt to impersonate Jesus.118 One day, Satan visits the home of an unsuspecting Christian monk. He knocks on the door and proclaims, “Receive me, for I am Jesus!” Skeptical that Jesus has returned to earth in this form, the monk tartly replies, “If you are Jesus, then I have no need of you. Did you not command that we devote our time to worship, and did you not warn us to prepare for the Day of Judgment? Leave and take care of your affair.” Outwitted by the monk, who sees through his ruse, Satan departs.

In his commentary on the encounter, Ghazzī takes us from the magically real to the ordinary—from an anecdote about satanic deception to the apparently unrelated task of debt collection. Ghazzī describes a scene where a debt collector visits the home of an insolvent debtor seeking to reclaim his money. The debt collector knocks on the door and the debtor asks, “Who is it?” The debt collector responds, “I am so and so,” changing his name in order to conceal his true identity. Ghazzī explains that the debt collector (and those who imitate him) commits a satanic deception by disguising his identity just to enrich himself at the expense of someone else. Here a reader may wonder: is Ghazzī taking aim at corrupt state-administered tax-collection practices?

While Ghazzī avoids mentioning actual events or people, he may nonetheless have obliquely delivered a sharp critique of widespread government corruption and exploitation. Although Ghazzī kept aloof from direct political activism, through his scholarship he creatively interprets the Islamic past to shape the contemporary moral and social well-being of the Muslim present, voicing his opinion on new cultural developments such as the consumption of pleasure-inducing substances—coffee, tobacco, and cannabis.

But Ghazzī’s quest to restore order amid crisis and corruption did not turn him into a curmudgeon whose view of Islamic orthodoxy was limited to stark oppositions between lawful and prohibited. Ghazzī’s normative commitment to the letter of the law was balanced by his Sufi sensibilities, which remained bound to the spirit of the law. Although he remained within the boundaries of orthodox Sunni Islam, and the Shāfiʿī madhhab in particular, he also had to consider scenarios when orthodoxy broke down, such as the limit case of the disobedient Muslim who loves God, where outward appearances fail to reflect inner truth. At such moments, formal legal reasoning gives way to poeisis, what Ebrahim Moosa describes as “the craft of imagination and inventive making and creating.”119 By means of this “making,” Ghazzī’s mind crossed vast historical and discursive horizons: past and present, legal and mystical, imagined and real. Although Ghazzī’s nuanced discourses on mimesis and coffee cannot be easily summarized, we may nonetheless conclude that, on the whole, they bend toward expansion and inclusion, not restriction and exclusion.

Ghazzī’s poeisis is most clearly expressed through his poetry.

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