Universal Dimensions of Islam: Studies in Comparative Religion by Patrick Laude

Author:Patrick Laude
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Universality, Relations, General, Comparative Religion, Religion, Attributes, Theology, God (Islam), Islam
ISBN: 1935493574
Publisher: World Wisdom
Published: 2011-02-16T18:01:06+00:00

Beware of being bound up by a particular creed and rejecting others as unbelief! If you do that you will fail to obtain a great benefit. Nay, you will fail to obtain the true knowledge of the reality. Try to make yourself a Prime Matter for all forms of religious belief. God is greater and wider than to be confined to one particular creed to the exclusion of others. For He says: “To whichever direction you turn, there surely is the Face of God” (2:115).32

One should note that this counsel resonates with a Qur’ānic warning to the same effect. This verse comes just before 2:115, quoted in the previous citation from Ibn al-‘Arabī. Here, the attitude of religious exclusivism is censured, and the Muslim is told transcend the level of inter-confessional polemics and focus on the essential pre-requisites of salvation: not belonging to such and such a religion, but submitting to God through one’s religion, and manifesting the sincerity of that submission through virtue:

And they say: None entereth Paradise unless he be a Jew or a Christian. These are their own desires. Say: Bring your proof if ye are truthful.

Nay, but whosoever surrendereth his purpose to God while being virtuous, his reward is with his Lord; and there shall be no fear upon them, neither shall they grieve. (2:112)

The Qur’ān excludes this kind of chauvinistic exclusivism by virtue of an implicit, and occasionally explicit, inclusivism; but it also includes its own mode of exclusivism, both implicitly and explicitly, in affirming the need to follow the particular religion of Islam. The Akbarī principle of paradoxical synthesis of two apparently contradictory principles can clearly be seen at this level of revelation, and is indeed the ultimate source of Ibn al-‘Arabī’s elaborate metaphysics. In keeping with the spirit of this metaphysical perspective, one must assert: it is only on the basis of the vision of the religion of love that one can be “liberated” from the limitations of one’s own faith, for then, the escape is upwards, towards the essence of one’s own, and every, faith; any attempt to loosen the bonds of one’s own belief system, in the absence of this upwardly and inwardly essentializing movement of consciousness, is tantamount to simply dissolving the roots of one’s religious identity, and leaving nothing in its place on the level where one cannot do without a sense of identity, that is, the human personality. The consciousness which is alone capable of transcending the formal limitations of religion is supra-personal: it has nothing to do with the empirical ego.

In passing, one might note that it is this dissolution which postmodern deconstruction engenders, deliberately or otherwise; one aspires to be liberated from the “constructions” of belief, language, history, tradition, etc. by systematic demolition of these elements. But, in stark contrast to the spiritual “deconstruction” of an Ibn al-‘Arabī, there is no reconstruction of thought, belief and identity on a higher plane of being.33 Here it would be appropriate to return to the spiritual ascent, or mi‘rāj of Ibn al-‘Arabī mentioned earlier.

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