GOOD TIMES BAD TIMES

Whatever happened to the time? Since I found out about Einstein it’s never been quite the same. It used to be that I lived my life with the future before me and the rest just ancient history, but things are not so simple any more. Nothing changed in the universe at large, but someone had walked into the inner sanctum of the ulama of western religion with a challenge to their dogma strong enough to change their point of view. Not that Newtonian inadequacies had never been noticed, but fearful of losing the power that comes from controlling the norms of understanding, these ulama had preferred to ignore such questions, arrogantly consigning them to the realms of the heretical or the unreal. 

All of a sudden it was agreed that time can indeed run backwards for Merlin the magician, or stand obstinately still as tea-time for Mad Hatters and March Hares. You just need to change your point of view. Your point of view is now, and the past and future are, of course, both then – “then we did” and “then we might”. Two kinds of “then” which we approach in very different ways. 

Despite our new found temporal flexibility, many are those prepared to accept the straightjacket of antiquated logic and treat the future as unknowable, the theories of space-time, the dream experiments of J.W.Dunne, and the astrological faith of the masses, all jettisoned into the same science fictional dustbin as they try to contain the universe within their limited understanding and hope that by ignoring the miraculous they can make it go away. But however intangible this future may be, few would not allow it to influence the present. The things we do now are usually done for a later effect, with present effort mostly made in the hope of future reward. Or that non-existent future can have direct consequences in the present, as when fear of future punishment prevents a present act. Few people live without immediate values dependent on their expectations of an unknown “after” life. 

In quite the other way, we usually approach the past in terms of a consensus opinion as to factuality, even though the fact of the matter is more open to interpretation than is generally admitted. History can be herstory, and a new regime will often start by rewriting the history books. We may agree on a few dates, but what happened is questionable, and we treat the past as a library in which we can research, select, and interpret “events” to suit our theories of understanding, with that understanding being a very personal affair. More important than history to me is mystory, though both are conceptual constructs I use to deal with now. It seems that the past is in fact barely more solid than the paten nebulosity of the future. 

So looking out at time from the only place of which we’re certain, do we change our view of Islam as a historical event? Perhaps, it depends how you thought of it in the first place. I suppose most muslims see Islam as beginning with Adam and Abraham, and reaching a peak with the prophet Muhammad, the last of the prophets, and declining ever since. This theory of decline I find hard to reconcile with a religion I might want to embrace, but like most voluntary muslims that didn’t marry in, the decision to be muslim didn’t seem to have much logic and I didn’t have much choice to volunteer. Once inside I had to find a way to make it seem intelligible, questions had to be answered, and a way to think devised, not a problem for your traditional muslim, who never questions and rarely thinks. What is this Islam of history, and what does it mean to me? 

I accept that if I am to learn from something, it is easier if it happened in the past, I’m not such an idealist that I want to spend all my time looking into a crystal ball, and if there were people who had a direct line to the fount of all knowledge, they had to live and form their understandings and communicate them to others in specific space and time. The Truth is One, the forms of expression many, and what I can I will apply to the understanding that is mine. Such variety of guidance from the past, perhaps 124,000 anbiya alone. With my most trusted guide, the Qur’an, naming only a few dozen, that leaves a lot of unnamed prophets midst the peoples of past times. I try to treat all ancient knowledge as if it could have come from them, though trusting it no more than any other unverified rumours. 

But then, who can you trust nowadays? I have always been greatly impressed by advice to “Never trust anyone – especially me”, and having seen how easy it is to dismantle dependence on the spiritual and intellectual traditions of a great world religion once blind faith has been abandoned, I was never again likely to place such faith in any man’s claims to understand the Will of God. Faith becomes a very personal relationship between the self and its concept of divinity, clearly based on personal experience and intellectual exploration. In the journey of experience one is guided by grace, but the redirection of mind requires a pure form around which it can structure itself, as far as possible from the distortions and corruptions inevitable in human interpretation. It is the distinctive character of such a source form that is the heart of Islam, the Qur’an being the unifying thread of Islamic civilisational history, equally capable of being understood in terms of succinctness and simplicity, subtlety and complexity, or grace and beauty, and primal enough to be used in sincerity as a basis for understanding independent of prior systems of thought, muslim and non-muslim alike. 

In the extraordinarily fractured world of Islam, the Qur’an is unique in being the focus of universal trust, and the object of virtually unanimous agreement as to its linguistic form. Of course there are many with an interest in making us believe that we should leave understanding and interpretation of such important matters to them, but there’s not much that they can do about it. The door to the Islamic Holy of Holies never had a lock, and neither did the gates of ijtihad. To suggest that interpretation of the Word of God, revealed for all mankind in all places and all times, be restricted to some self-defined elite is a contradiction in terms. Understanding of such a revelation can only be personal, a constantly changing ongoing experience, with the great visionary minds through the popularity of their thoughts manifesting as spokespersons for the cultural viewpoints of their times. But if I am to look through other times for a man who can show me how to use the Qur’an, then I’ll skip through the centuries of muslims with interest and respect, but not necessarily trust. Indeed some have earned the trust of many men, but I will judge for myself whether I consider them a historical sidetrack in my quest to reach the one who was trusted by God, Muhammad, the most trusted messenger. 

If muslims in fact agree on the external form of the words revealed by God, it seems strange that they have any need of the word of man, but from the messenger we obtain understanding, and an example of a man who lived the words, though always distinguishing his own guidance from that of the Divine Recitation. The Qur’an is beyond time, a reflection equally valid for all times other than the specific moments of its revelation, but the prophet lived in history, and could only communicate his message within the bounds of his companions’ comprehensions, varying his language to suit his listener. From their own understanding these listeners passed on what they considered important, and the most reliable of these traditions gathered together form a few slim volumes, a great deal of information about one person, perhaps, but insufficient to provide other than a rather simplistic summary of more than twenty years of any human life, let alone a life as complex and incident packed as was Muhammad’s, and even without probing very deeply into the intellectual, emotional, and spiritual subtleties of his being. Not to be trusted in the same way as Qur’an therefore, but nonetheless a treasure trove to be researched for the Prophet of God’s example. 

So to understand the Qur’an we need the messenger, and to approach the messenger we need the traditions, and even though from the earliest of years his followers were fighting amongst themselves, some things demand to be trusted. The essential five pillars are clearly defined, and general motivational principles underlying all the Prophet’s actions are recognisable in any age by those who care to look. But those who look are still constrained by the limits of their experience and understanding, and sincere opinions from the past may well be not just irrelevant but unintelligible within a present context. To treat such historical commentary as somehow inviolable opinion and in inseparable adjunct to the messenger and the Qur’an is no more than the creation of an intellectual priesthood. In the same way that some devotees attach themselves to the tombs of dead saints, other devotees attach themselves to the theories of dead academics, but understanding can only be based on a total life experience. 

I find it easier to talk of Islam with non-muslim friends of my own place and time, people with whom I have shared a similar life from which we have similar referents and understandings, than I do to talk with most born muslims, whose mind-sets tend to be discomfortingly alien, keeping their faces reverentially turned towards antiquity, unquestioning of authority, and equally incapable of recognising either hypocrites or muslim asses carrying books. Such a backward looking philosophy goes hand in hand with the view of Islam as in continuous decline, and can only assist in the fulfilment of that vision. If Islam is truly for all mankind, then its fruition is surely when all mankind are muslim. For life to have hope, it is necessary to be able to see history as a progression towards optimum conditions for the fulfilment of Allah’s purpose for mankind. The lifetime of the Prophet was the perfect situation for the revelation and demonstration of the pure form of the message, but for it to spread around the world it needed the contribution of man with all his unavoidable egotistic corruptions. The precision of the message as it related to the time of its revelation is never again attainable, but myriad people took that message and with varying degrees of sincerity and understanding tried to pass it on to others. The interaction between the original message and those who were to embrace it, from whatever background and for whatever motive, formed the Islamic civilisation with its many and varied cultures. Over the years worldly power waxed and waned, and as is usual in history, the great achievers wanted general acceptance that God was on their side. Thus corrupt men have ruled, the ignorant have taught, and the benign and saintly have been put to death, all in the name of Islam. This is our history. We have to learn from it, not mindlessly apply its judgements to our lives today. 

The western cultural separation between science and theology came about through the Christian churches trying to constrain man’s quest for understanding truth within the bounds of their own understanding, and justifying this by reference to Revelation. But soldiers are very fond of science and technology, using their magic tricks and labour saving devices to achieve power, so when it came to a choice between unintelligible faith and comprehensible practicality, most other people thought it was a good idea too. Thus began the decline of the temporal power of the churches before the might of scientific humanism, and as this power colonised its global neighbours, so declined the power of other “faiths” too rigid to accommodate the frontiers of understanding without altering their dimensions. If intellectual change is not part of the Divine plan, then we must treat its rational scientific magic like illusory snakes from the high priests’ rods, but no one will believe in the power of your God if you don’t have the power to occlude Pharaoh’s magic, yet whoever wants to borrow the magic of Pharaoh, even with the best of intentions, can no longer complain about the impropriety of its cultural manifestations. 

On the other hand, it may be preferable to embrace new expression of knowledge, confident that the word of God and the example of the Prophet must inevitable prove stronger in the end, embracing areas of knowledge impossible to acquire from rationality alone and offering immeasurable guidance on ethics and value systems, the relationship being an integrative one as opposed to restrictive and exclusive. The search for truth and understanding need not be treated as something automatically suspect of being anti-islamic. The physical sciences can be used not just for exploitation and the rape of the planet, but also in the service of our custodianship of the ecosystem. Information technology may yet be used to communicate an understanding of Islam to all men, and could even bring muslims closer to their faith as they try to find a way of expressing it that might make others want to choose it. 

What made the companions choose to be muslim? I think it unlikely to have been the ubiquitous sense of unquestioning obligation and guilt that one meets amongst mosque-going muslims today. Was it not more likely to have been that they were given an intelligible way of understanding truth in their world, the psychological value of which they could feel within themselves, and the social and political manifestation of which thy could see around them. Faith does not preclude understanding. Trusting in God, they found they could see the workings of God in their own daily experience of history. Is it not time that we tried to find something similar to offer the non-muslims of the western world. Now that the science of weaponry has moved into philosophical realms beyond the ability to end life on earth, it is ever more urgently essential to come up with a credible practicable Islamic alternative. The way things seem to be going, we do not have a lot of time.