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[This article appeared on the newsgroup
soc.religion.islam in April 1995. -ed.]
What follows is a personal
account of a scholar I have been writing to for over a year and had the blessing
of meeting when I invited him to do a lecture tour around England. He is quite
unique in that he seems to be one of the few reverts/converts to have achieved
Islamic scholarship in the fullest sense of the word in traditional and orthodox
Islam, having studied Shafi'i and Hanafi Jurisprudence (fiqh) and tenents of
faith (`aqidah). I hope it will serve as an inspiration to those who have moved
closer to Islam but have not yet taken the Shahadah, and as a reassurance to
those that have taken the Shahadah but are trying to find their feet in the
beautiful ocean of Islam, and also as a reminder and confirmation to those of us
who were blessed with being born into Muslim families, Amin.
Mas`ud
Ahmed Khan
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Born in 1954 in the farm country of the northwestern United States, I
was raised in a religious family as a Roman Catholic. The Church provided a
spiritual world that was unquestionable in my childhood, if anything more real
than the physical world around me, but as I grew older, and especially after I
entered a Catholic university and read more, my relation to the religion became
increasingly called into question, in belief and practice.
One reason
was the frequent changes in Catholic liturgy and ritual that occurred in the
wake of the Second Vatican Council of 1963, suggesting to laymen that the Church
had no firm standards. To one another, the clergy spoke about flexibility and
liturgical relevance, but to ordinary Catholics they seemed to be groping in the
dark. God does not change, nor the needs of the human soul, and there was no new
revelation from heaven. Yet we rang in the changes, week after week, year after
year; adding, subtracting, changing the language from Latin to English, finally
bringing in guitars and folk music. Priests explained and explained as laymen
shook their heads. The search for relevance left large numbers convinced that
there had not been much in the first place.
A second reason was a number
of doctrinal difficulties, such as the doctrine of the Trinity, which no one in
the history of the world, neither priest nor layman, had been able to explain in
a convincing way, and which resolved itself, to the common mind at least, in a
sort of godhead-by-committee, shared between God the Father, who ruled the world
from heaven; His son Jesus Christ, who saved humanity on earth; and the Holy
Ghost, who was pictured as a white dove and appeared to have a considerably
minor role. I remember wanting to make special friends with just one of them so
he could handle my business with the others, and to this end, would sometimes
pray earnestly to this one and sometimes to that; but the other two were always
stubbornly there. I finally decided that God the Father must be in charge of the
other two, and this put the most formidable obstacle in the way of my
Catholicism, the divinity of Christ. Moreover, reflection made it plain that the
nature of man contradicted the nature of God in every particular, the limitary
and finite on the one hand, the absolute and infinite on the other. That Jesus
was God was something I cannot remember having ever really believed, in
childhood or later.
Another point of incredulity was the trading of the
Church in stocks and bonds in the hereafter it called indulgences. Do such and
such and so-and-so many years will be remitted from your sentence in purgatory
that had seemed so false to Martin Luther at the outset of the Reformation.
I also remember a desire for a sacred scripture, something on the order
of a book that could furnish guidance. A Bible was given to me one Christmas, a
handsome edition, but on attempting to read it, I found it so rambling and
devoid of a coherent thread that it was difficult to think of a way to base
one's life upon it. Only later did I learn how Christians solve the difficulty
in practice, Protestants by creating sectarian theologies, each emphasizing the
texts of their sect and downplaying the rest; Catholics by downplaying it all,
except the snippets mentioned in their liturgy. Something seemed lacking in a
sacred book that could not be read as an integral whole.
Moreover, when
I went to the university, I found that the authenticity of the book, especially
the New Testament, had come into considerable doubt as a result of modern
hermeneutical studies by Christians themselves. In a course on contemporary
theology, I read the Norman Perrin translation of The Problem of the Historical
Jesus by Joachim Jeremias, one of the principal New Testament scholars of this
century. A textual critic who was a master of the original languages and had
spent long years with the texts, he had finally agreed with the German
theologian Rudolph Bultmann that without a doubt it is true to say that the
dream of ever writing a biography of Jesus is over, meaning that the life of
Christ as he actually lived it could not be reconstructed from the New Testament
with any degree of confidence. If this were accepted from a friend of
Christianity and one of its foremost textual experts, I reasoned, what was left
for its enemies to say? And what then remained of the Bible except to
acknowledge that it was a record of truths mixed with fictions, conjectures
projected onto Christ by later followers, themselves at odds with each other as
to who the master had been and what he had taught. And if theologians like
Jeremias could reassure themselves that somewhere under the layers of later
accretions to the New Testament there was something called the historical Jesus
and his message, how could the ordinary person hope to find it, or know it,
should it be found?
I studied philosophy at the university and it taught
me to ask two things of whoever claimed to have the truth: What do you mean, and
how do you know? When I asked these questions of my own religious tradition, I
found no answers, and realized that Christianity had slipped from my hands. I
then embarked on a search that is perhaps not unfamiliar to many young people in
the West, a quest for meaning in a meaningless world.
I began where I
had lost my previous belief, with the philosophers, yet wanting to believe,
seeking not philosophy, but rather a philosophy.
I read the essays of
the great pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer, which taught about the phenomenon of
the ages of life, and that money, fame, physical strength, and intelligence all
passed from one with the passage of years, but only moral excellence remained. I
took this lesson to heart and remembered it in after years. His essays also drew
attention to the fact that a person was wont to repudiate in later years what he
fervently espouses in the heat of youth. With a prescient wish to find the
Divine, I decided to imbue myself with the most cogent arguments of atheism that
I could find, that perhaps I might find a way out of them later. So I read the
Walter Kaufmann translations of the works of the immoralist Friedrich Nietzsche.
The many-faceted genius dissected the moral judgments and beliefs of mankind
with brilliant philological and psychological arguments that ended in accusing
human language itself, and the language of nineteenth-century science in
particular, of being so inherently determined and mediated by concepts inherited
from the language of morality that in their present form they could never hope
to uncover reality. Aside from their immunological value against total
skepticism, Nietzsches works explained why the West was post-Christian, and
accurately predicted the unprecedented savagery of the twentieth century,
debunking the myth that science could function as a moral replacement for the
now dead religion.
At a personal level, his tirades against
Christianity, particularly in The Genealogy of Morals, gave me the benefit of
distilling the beliefs of the monotheistic tradition into a small number of
analyzable forms. He separated unessential concepts (such as the bizarre
spectacle of an omnipotent deitys suicide on the cross) from essential ones,
which I now, though without believing in them, apprehended to be but three
alone: that God existed; that He created man in the world and defined the
conduct expected of him in it; and that He would judge man accordingly in the
hereafter and send him to eternal reward or punishment.
It was during
this time that I read an early translation of the Koran which I grudgingly
admired, between agnostic reservations, for the purity with which it presented
these fundamental concepts. Even if false, I thought, there could not be a more
essential expression of religion. As a literary work, the translation, perhaps
it was Sales, was uninspired and openly hostile to its subject matter, whereas I
knew the Arabic original was widely acknowledged for its beauty and eloquence
among the religious books of mankind. I felt a desire to learn Arabic to read
the original.
On a vacation home from school, I was walking upon a dirt
road between some fields of wheat, and it happened that the sun went down. By
some inspiration, I realized that it was a time of worship, a time to bow and
pray to the one God. But it was not something one could rely on oneself to
provide the details of, but rather a passing fancy, or perhaps the beginning of
an awareness that atheism was an inauthentic way of being.
I carried
something of this disquiet with me when I transferred to the University of
Chicago, where I studied the epistemology of ethical theory how moral judgments
were reached reading and searching among the books of the philosophers for
something to shed light on the question of meaninglessness, which was both a
personal concern and one of the central philosophical problems of our age.
According to some, scientific observation could only yield description
statements of the form X is Y, for example, The object is red, Its weight is two
kilos, Its height is ten centimeters, and so on, in each of which the functional
was a scientifically verifiable is, whereas in moral judgments the functional
element was an ought, a description statement which no amount of scientific
observation could measure or verify. It appeared that ought was logically
meaningless, and with it all morality whatsoever, a position that reminded me of
those described by Lucian in his advice that whoever sees a moral philosopher
coming down the road should flee from him as from a mad dog. For such a person,
expediency ruled, and nothing checked his behavior but convention.
As
Chicago was a more expensive school, and I had to raise tuition money, I found
summer work on the West Coast with a seining boat fishing in Alaska. The sea
proved a school in its own right, one I was to return to for a space of eight
seasons, for the money. I met many people on boats, and saw something of the
power and greatness of the wind, water, storms, and rain; and the smallness of
man. These things lay before us like an immense book, but my fellow fishermen
and I could only discern the letters of it that were within our context: to
catch as many fish as possible within the specified time to sell to the tenders.
Few knew how to read the book as a whole. Sometimes, in a blow, the waves rose
like great hills, and the captain would hold the wheel with white knuckles, our
bow one minute plunging gigantically down into a valley of green water, the next
moment reaching the bottom of the trough and soaring upwards towards the sky
before topping the next crest and starting down again.
Early in my
career as a deck hand, I had read the Hazel Barnes translation of Jean Paul
Sartres "Being and Nothingness", in which he argued that phenomena only arose
for consciousness in the existential context of human projects, a theme that
recalled Marxs 1844 manuscripts, where nature was produced by man, meaning, for
example, that when the mystic sees a stand of trees, his consciousness
hypostatizes an entirely different phenomenal object than a poet does, for
example, or a capitalist. To the mystic, it is a manifestation; to the poet, a
forest; to the capitalist, lumber. According to such a perspective, a mountain
only appears as tall in the context of the project of climbing it, and so on,
according to the instrumental relations involved in various human interests. But
the great natural events of the sea surrounding us seemed to defy, with their
stubborn, irreducible facticity, our uncomprehending attempts to come to terms
with them. Suddenly, we were just there, shaken by the forces around us without
making sense of them, wondering if we would make it through. Some, it was true,
would ask Gods help at such moments, but when we returned safely to shore, we
behaved like men who knew little of Him, as if those moments had been a lapse
into insanity, embarrassing to think of at happier times. It was one of the
lessons of the sea that in fact, such events not only existed but perhaps even
preponderated in our life. Man was small and weak, the forces around him were
large, and he did not control them.
Sometimes a boat would sink and men
would die. I remember a fisherman from another boat who was working near us one
opening, doing the same job as I did, piling web. He smiled across the water as
he pulled the net from the hydraulic block overhead, stacking it neatly on the
stern to ready it for the next set. Some weeks later, his boat overturned while
fishing in a storm, and he got caught in the web and drowned. I saw him only
once again, in a dream, beckoning to me from the stern of his boat.
The
tremendousness of the scenes we lived in, the storms, the towering sheer cliffs
rising vertically out of the water for hundreds of feet, the cold and rain and
fatigue, the occasional injuries and deaths of workers these made little
impression on most of us. Fishermen were, after all, supposed to be tough. On
one boat, the family that worked it was said to lose an occasional crew member
while running at sea at the end of the season, invariably the sole non-family
member who worked with them, his loss saving them the wages they would have
otherwise had to pay him.
The captain of another was a
twenty-seven-year-old who delivered millions of dollars worth of crab each year
in the Bering Sea. When I first heard of him, we were in Kodiak, his boat at the
city dock they had tied up to after a lengthy run some days before. The captain
was presently indisposed in his bunk in the stateroom, where he had been
vomiting up blood from having eaten a glass uptown the previous night to prove
how tough he was.
He was in somewhat better condition when I later saw
him in the Bering Sea at the end of a long winter king crab season. He worked in
his wheelhouse up top, surrounded by radios that could pull in a signal from
just about anywhere, computers, Loran, sonar, depth-finders, radar. His panels
of lights and switches were set below the 180-degree sweep of shatterproof
windows that overlooked the sea and the men on deck below, to whom he
communicated by loudspeaker. They often worked round the clock, pulling their
gear up from the icy water under watchful batteries of enormous electric lights
attached to the masts that turned the perpetual night of the winter months into
day. The captain had a reputation as a screamer, and had once locked his crew
out on deck in the rain for eleven hours because one of them had gone inside to
have a cup of coffee without permission. Few crewmen lasted longer than a season
with him, though they made nearly twice the yearly income of, say, a lawyer or
an advertising executive, and in only six months. Fortunes were made in the
Bering Sea in those years, before overfishing wiped out the crab.
At
present, he was at anchor, and was amiable enough when we tied up to him and he
came aboard to sit and talk with our own captain. They spoke at length, at times
gazing thoughtfully out at the sea through the door or windows, at times looking
at each other sharply when something animated them, as the topic of what his
competitors thought of him. "They wonder why I have a few bucks", he said. "Well
I slept in my own home one night last year."
He later had his crew throw
off the lines and pick the anchor, his eyes flickering warily over the water
from the windows of the house as he pulled away with a blast of smoke from the
stack. His watchfulness, his walrus-like physique, his endless voyages after
game and markets, reminded me of other predatory hunter-animals of the sea. Such
people, good at making money but heedless of any ultimate end or purpose, made
an impression on me, and I increasingly began to wonder if men didn't need
principles to guide them and tell them why they were there. Without such
principles, nothing seemed to distinguish us above our prey except being more
thorough, and technologically capable of preying longer, on a vaster scale, and
with greater devastation than the animals we hunted.
These
considerations were in my mind the second year I studied at Chicago, where I
became aware through studies of philosophical moral systems that philosophy had
not been successful in the past at significantly influencing peoples morals and
preventing injustice, and I came to realize that there was little hope for it to
do so in the future. I found that comparing human cultural systems and societies
in their historical succession and multiplicity had led many intellectuals to
moral relativism, since no moral value could be discovered which on its own
merits was transculturally valid, a reflection leading to nihilism, the
perspective that sees human civilizations as plants that grow out of the earth,
springing from their various seeds and soils, thriving for a time, and then
dying away.
Some heralded this as intellectual liberation, among them
Emile Durkheim in his "Elementary Forms of the Religious Life", or Sigmund Freud
in his "Totem and Taboo", which discussed mankind as if it were a patient and
diagnosed its religious traditions as a form of a collective neurosis that we
could now hope to cure, by applying to them a thorough scientific atheism, a
sort of salvation through pure science.
On this subject, I bought the
Jeremy Shapiro translation of "Knowledge and Human Interests" by Jurgen
Habermas, who argued that there was no such thing as pure science that could be
depended upon to forge boldly ahead in a steady improvement of itself and the
world. He called such a misunderstanding scientism, not science. Science in the
real world, he said, was not free of values, still less of interests. The kinds
of research that obtain funding, for example, were a function of what their
society deemed meaningful, expedient, profitable, or important. Habermas had
been of a generation of German academics who, during the thirties and forties,
knew what was happening in their country, but insisted they were simply engaged
in intellectual production, that they were living in the realm of scholarship,
and need not concern themselves with whatever the state might choose to do with
their research. The horrible question mark that was attached to German
intellectuals when the Nazi atrocities became public after the war made Habermas
think deeply about the ideology of pure science. If anything was obvious, it was
that the nineteenth-century optimism of thinkers like Freud and Durkheim was no
longer tenable.
I began to reassess the intellectual life around me.
Like Schopenhauer, I felt that higher education must produce higher human
beings. But at the university, I found lab people talking to each other about
forging research data to secure funding for the coming year; luminaries who
wouldn't permit tape recorders at their lectures for fear that competitors in
the same field would go one step further with their research and beat them to
publication; professors vying with each other in the length of their courses
syllabuses. The moral qualities I was accustomed to associate with ordinary,
unregenerate humanity seemed as frequently met with in sophisticated academics
as they had been in fishermen. If one could laugh at fishermen who, after
getting a boatload of fish in a big catch, would cruise back and forth in front
of the others to let them see how laden down in the water they were, ostensibly
looking for more fish; what could one say about the Ph.D.s who behaved the same
way about their books and articles? I felt that their knowledge had not
developed their persons, that the secret of higher man did not lie in their
sophistication.
I wondered if I hadn't gone down the road of philosophy
as far as one could go. While it had debunked my Christianity and provided some
genuine insights, it had not yet answered the big questions. Moreover, I felt
that this was somehow connected I didn't know whether as cause or effect to the
fact that our intellectual tradition no longer seemed to seriously comprehend
itself. What were any of us, whether philosophers, fishermen, garbagemen, or
kings, except bit players in a drama we did not understand, diligently playing
out our roles until our replacements were sent, and we gave our last
performance? But could one legitimately hope for more than this? I read "Kojves
Introduction to the Reading of Hegel", in which he explained that for Hegel,
philosophy did not culminate in the system, but rather in the Wise Man, someone
able to answer any possible question on the ethical implications of human
actions. This made me consider our own plight in the twentieth century, which
could no longer answer a single ethical question.
It was thus as if this
centurys unparalleled mastery of concrete things had somehow ended by making us
things. I contrasted this with Hegels concept of the concrete in his
"Phenomenology of Mind". An example of the abstract, in his terms, was the
limitary physical reality of the book now held in your hands, while the concrete
was its interconnection with the larger realities it presupposed, the modes of
production that determined the kind of ink and paper in it, the aesthetic
standards that dictated its color and design, the systems of marketing and
distribution that had carried it to the reader, the historical circumstances
that had brought about the readers literacy and taste; the cultural events that
had mediated its style and usage; in short, the bigger picture in which it was
articulated and had its being. For Hegel, the movement of philosophical
investigation always led from the abstract to the concrete, to the more real. He
was therefore able to say that philosophy necessarily led to theology, whose
object was the ultimately real, the Deity. This seemed to me to point up an
irreducible lack in our century. I began to wonder if, by materializing our
culture and our past, we had not somehow abstracted ourselves from our wider
humanity, from our true nature in relation to a higher reality.
At this
juncture, I read a number of works on Islam, among them the books of Seyyed
Hossein Nasr, who believed that many of the problems of western man, especially
those of the environment, were from his having left the divine wisdom of
revealed religion, which taught him his true place as a creature of God in the
natural world and to understand and respect it. Without it, he burned up and
consumed nature with ever more effective technological styles of commercial
exploitation that ruined his world from without while leaving him increasingly
empty within, because he did not know why he existed or to what end he should
act.
I reflected that this might be true as far as it went, but it
begged the question as to the truth of revealed religion. Everything on the face
of the earth, all moral and religious systems, were on the same plane, unless
one could gain certainty that one of them was from a higher source, the sole
guarantee of the objectivity, the whole force, of moral law. Otherwise, one mans
opinion was as good as anothers, and we remained in an undifferentiated sea of
conflicting individual interests, in which no valid objection could be raised to
the strong eating the weak.
I read other books on Islam, and came across
some passages translated by W. Montgomery Watt from "That Which Delivers from
Error" by the theologian and mystic Ghazali, who, after a mid-life crises of
questioning and doubt, realized that beyond the light of prophetic revelation
there is no other light on the face of the earth from which illumination may be
received, the very point to which my philosophical inquiries had led. Here was,
in Hegels terms, the Wise Man, in the person of a divinely inspired messenger
who alone had the authority to answer questions of good and evil.
I also
read A.J. Arberrys translation "The Koran Interpreted", and I recalled my early
wish for a sacred book. Even in translation, the superiority of the Muslim
scripture over the Bible was evident in every line, as if the reality of divine
revelation, dimly heard of all my life, had now been placed before my eyes. In
its exalted style, its power, its inexorable finality, its uncanny way of
anticipating the arguments of the atheistic heart in advance and answering them;
it was a clear exposition of God as God and man as man, the revelation of the
awe-inspiring Divine Unity being the identical revelation of social and economic
justice among men.
I began to learn Arabic at Chicago, and after
studying the grammar for a year with a fair degree of success, decided to take a
leave of absence to try to advance in the language in a year of private study in
Cairo. Too, a desire for new horizons drew me, and after a third season of
fishing, I went to the Middle East.
In Egypt, I found something I
believe brings many to Islam, namely, the mark of pure monotheism upon its
followers, which struck me as more profound than anything I had previously
encountered. I met many Muslims in Egypt, good and bad, but all influenced by
the teachings of their Book to a greater extent than I had ever seen elsewhere.
It has been some fifteen years since then, and I cannot remember them all, or
even most of them, but perhaps the ones I can recall will serve to illustrate
the impressions made.
One was a man on the side of the Nile near the
Miqyas Gardens, where I used to walk. I came upon him praying on a piece of
cardboard, facing across the water. I started to pass in front of him, but
suddenly checked myself and walked around behind, not wanting to disturb him. As
I watched a moment before going my way, I beheld a man absorbed in his relation
to God, oblivious to my presence, much less my opinions about him or his
religion. To my mind, there was something magnificently detached about this,
altogether strange for someone coming from the West, where praying in public was
virtually the only thing that remained obscene.
Another was a young boy
from secondary school who greeted me near Khan al-Khalili, and because I spoke
some Arabic and he spoke some English and wanted to tell me about Islam, he
walked with me several miles across town to Giza, explaining as much as he
could. When we parted, I think he said a prayer that I might become Muslim.
Another was a Yemeni friend living in Cairo who brought me a copy of the
Koran at my request to help me learn Arabic. I did not have a table beside the
chair where I used to sit and read in my hotel room, and it was my custom to
stack the books on the floor. When I set the Koran by the others there, he
silently stooped and picked it up, out of respect for it. This impressed me
because I knew he was not religious, but here was the effect of Islam upon him.
Another was a woman I met while walking beside a bicycle on an unpaved
road on the opposite side of the Nile from Luxor. I was dusty, and somewhat
shabbily clothed, and she was an old woman dressed in black from head to toe who
walked up, and without a word or glance at me, pressed a coin into my hand so
suddenly that in my surprise I dropped it. By the time I picked it up, she had
hurried away. Because she thought I was poor, even if obviously non-Muslim, she
gave me some money without any expectation for it except what was between her
and her God. This act made me think a lot about Islam, because nothing seemed to
have motivated her but that.
Many other things passed through my mind
during the months I stayed in Egypt to learn Arabic. I found myself thinking
that a man must have some sort of religion, and I was more impressed by the
effect of Islam on the lives of Muslims, a certain nobility of purpose and
largesse of soul, than I had ever been by any other religions or even atheisms
effect on its followers. The Muslims seemed to have more than we did.
Christianity had its good points to be sure, but they seemed mixed with
confusions, and I found myself more and more inclined to look to Islam for their
fullest and most perfect expression. The first question we had memorized from
our early catechism had been Why were you created? to which the correct answer
was To know, love, and serve God. When I reflected on those around me, I
realized that Islam seemed to furnish the most comprehensive and understandable
way to practice this on a daily basis.
As for the inglorious political
fortunes of the Muslims today, I did not feel these to be a reproach against
Islam, or to relegate it to an inferior position in a natural order of world
ideologies, but rather saw them as a low phase in a larger cycle of history.
Foreign hegemony over Muslim lands had been witnessed before in the thorough
going destruction of Islamic civilization in the thirteenth century by the
Mongol horde, who razed cities and built pyramids of human heads from the
steppes of Central Asia to the Muslim heartlands, after which the fullness of
destiny brought forth the Ottoman Empire to raise the Word of Allah and make it
a vibrant political reality that endured for centuries. It was now, I reflected,
merely the turn of contemporary Muslims to strive for a new historic
crystallization of Islam, something one might well aspire to share in.
When a friend in Cairo one day asked me, Why dont you become a Muslim, I
found that Allah had created within me a desire to belong to this religion,
which so enriches its followers, from the simplest hearts to the most
magisterial intellects. It is not through an act of the mind or will that anyone
becomes a Muslim, but rather through the mercy of Allah, and this, in the final
analysis, was what brought me to Islam in Cairo in 1977.
"Is it not time that the hearts of those who
believe should be humbled to the Remembrance of God and the Truth which He has
sent down, and that they should not be as those to whom the Book was given
aforetime, and the term seemed over long to them, so that their hearts have
become hard, and many of them are ungodly? Know that God revives the earth after
it was dead. We have indeed made clear for you the signs, that haply you will
understand."
[Qur'an 57:16-17]
Nuh Ha
Mim Keller is the translator of "The Reliance of the Traveller" [`Umdat
as-Salik] by Ahmed Ibn Naqib al-Misri
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