The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Islamic Spirituality Vincent J. Cornell
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The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Islamic Spirituality
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General Introduction
Vincent J. Cornell and Bruce B. Lawrence
Over the last fifty years, and especially since the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran and the terrorist attacks in the US on 11 September 2001, literally hundreds of books on Islam and the Islamic world have appeared in print in European languages, including numerous introductions to Islam. Yet most Americans and Europeans remain largely uninformed about Islam. In the third decade of the twenty-first century, scholars of Islam in the Americas and Europe still feel the need to humanize Muslims, to demonstrate that Muslims are rational human beings, their beliefs worthy of consideration.
The situation is the same—or perhaps even worse—with regard to Islamic spirituality. Apart from the field of Sufism, no aspect of Islamic thought and practice has been more overlooked in studies of Islam than spirituality. Because of creedal and secular prejudices that have persisted for centuries, the religion of Islam (much like Judaism) has been regarded as traditionalistic or legalistic but not deeply spiritual. As such, it is often described as a “nomocentric” or law-centered religion, in which adherence to the Sharī‘a is seen as the central criterion of faith (see Pill 2014). Adding to this problem is the fact that proofs of Islam’s alleged obsession with legalism can be found among today’s Muslims in the doctrines of the Taliban in Afghanistan, among Wahhabiinspired extremist groups such as Al Qaeda and ISIS, and in a political Islam that advocates the creation of a more socially conscious “Sharī‘a state.” As a result, Islam is widely seen to embody three traits that are antithetical to liberal notions of free expression: political authoritarianism, paternalistic traditionalism, and soulless legalism.
As Edward W. Said observed, the view of the Middle East and the Islamic world in the West is based on the notion of exteriority, reducing complex cultural phenomena to stereotypical “essences” (Said 1994, 20–21). Yet the spirituality of Muslims is as much a matter of interiority as exteriority. Because spiritual feelings cannot be seen, they cannot be empirically observed, measured, and subjected to regimes of control. If Islam
The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Islamic Spirituality, First Edition. Edited by Vincent J. Cornell and Bruce B. Lawrence.
© 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
VIncent J. cornell and Bruce B. lawrence
is exteriorized as a set of rules and regulations that determine outward forms of behavior, it becomes easy to separate the interior aspects of Islam, such as different types of theology and spirituality, from Islam’s supposed “essence.” However, as the recent turn toward religious emotivism and identity politics have demonstrated, a religion without theology is a religion without a brain and a religion without spirituality is a religion without a heart.
This collection of essays affirms that far from being a secondary element, spirituality is integral to all that is Islam. Despite the common belief among both modernist and traditionalist Muslims that spirituality is other-worldly, we argue that spirituality is not oppositional or antagonistic to life in this world but instead is part of its larger—indeed, its largest—compass. From our perspective, Islamic spirituality is, above all, about transformation—the transformation of matter into spirit, death into life, sorrow into joy. Spiritual exemplars have underscored that the ultimate goal of spirituality is to transform human consciousness. This may be achieved through many kinds of acts, from specially designed prayers and invocations to the most common daily activities. As the Sufi Abū al-Qāsim al-Junayd of Baghdad (d. 910 CE) stated, those who are grounded in the Truth do not permit their feet to take a single step forward or their limbs to make the slightest movement unless such an act is a point of spiritual departure. They feel this way because they wish to reach a state in which “the name of God is on their lips and their minds are constantly upon God” (Abdel-Kader 1976, 140).
Junayd’s teaching reminds us that spirituality is not only about transformation as a moment of change. It is also about retaining what has been transformed. As the Qur’ān states in regard to its use as a form of dhikr, the spiritual recollection of God, “We have revealed the dhikr, and verily We shall keep it preserved” (Q 15 : 9). Retaining a spiritual orientation means adopting it for oneself, and so to some degree, spirituality has to be involved with matter, just as life is bracketed by death, and joy is paired with sorrow. Seeming opposites do not always become antagonistic contraries; sometimes they announce agonistic dyads that facilitate deeper understanding through conflicts that are discovered upon deeper inspection to be more apparent than real.
From the antagonist to the agonist
Here the language of medicine helps clarify our project. For the medical researcher, an agonist is not the same as an antagonist: rather, an agonist is a substance that is perceived by the body to be another substance and thus stimulates a reaction; as such, it is different from an antagonist, which blocks action on all levels. By contrast, an agonist blocks action only on one level while promoting it on another. Spirituality has a similar function and thus is similarly suffused with agonistic pairs of concepts. “Matter” and “spirit” is such an agonistic pair. Spirit does not always act against matter because sometimes it may also act through matter. In a similar way, life does not erase death; rather, it echoes death as its companion, just as a shadow does with light. Joy and sorrow too, are part of the agonistic spectrum of human emotions; for sorrow can be the harbinger—both a symbol and a catalyst—of ultimate joy.
The legal and spiritual approaches to Islam constitute another such agonistic pair. Among Sufis, the sometimes tense relationship between these approaches is often portrayed as a dialectic between the Law of God as expressed in His rules and regulations (al-Sharī‘a) and the inner truth or spirit of Islam (al-Ḥaqīqa). However, not all Muslims see these two poles as oppositional or antagonistic. For the Andalusian Sufi master ‘Alī Ṣāliḥ al-Andalusī (d. ca. 1508 CE), spirituality and the Sharī‘a are not oppositional but complementary and interdependent. As he explains, “He who is ignorant of God’s spiritual graces (laṭā’if) is ignorant of God Himself. He who is ignorant of God is also ignorant of divine guidance and the laws (aḥkām) of God. He who is ignorant of the laws of God is virtually an unbeliever” (Cornell 1998, 214).
Similarly, for another Andalusian spiritual master, the philosopher and mystic ‘Abd al-Ḥaqq ibn Sab‘īn (d. 1271 CE)—a contemporary of St Thomas Aquinas—the recollection of God through remembrance (dhikr) is both the subject of God’s Law (mawḍū‘ al-Sharī‘a) and a predicate of the Divine Reality (ma‘mūl al-Ḥaqīqa). He goes on to explain: “The essence of remembrance depends on nearness to God, yet it is also the means of intimacy with Him, as well as spiritual bliss and the worship of both the heart and the body. In sum, all types of it are good; transaction in it is a delight and effort for its sake is its own reward. Allāh is the beginning and the end of it. Its outer aspect (ẓāhir) is the search for God, and its inner aspect (bāṭin) is the glory of divine selfhood” (Badawī 1956, 151, Arabic text).
Among the conceptual challenges that we have faced in putting together the present volume, nearly all relate to clarifying the agonistic rather than the antagonistic relationship between seeming contraries. Consider space and time. Space is not just out there, in the vast cosmos expanding billions of light years from earth; it is also within us, intrinsic to the smallest gene or chromosome of each person’s DNA. Nor is time neatly divisible into past or future. Between yesterday and tomorrow there is a today that is so full of promise that the spiritual person must become, in the words of a well-known Sufi metaphor, the “owner” or “master” of her time (ṣāḥib al-waqt). Here, the concept of time refers to the moment that fulfills the person, not only dividing past from future but also combining the two. To call on Abū al-Qāsim al-Junayd once again for explanation, in this state of agonistic time, the person “is wholly present. In other words, he existed and then was lost, and was lost and then existed. He was as if he had never been and never was as he used to be. Then he was not as he had been before. Now he is himself, after he was not truly himself. He now exists in another existence, after first having existed lost to himself” (Abdel-Kader 1976, 51–52, Arabic text).
The agonistic notion of time described by Junayd was also understood by the American philosopher George Herbert Mead (1863–1931), the “father” of the discipline of social psychology. At the end of his career he formulated a radical “Philosophy of the Present,” which denied the objective reality of the past and the future for the sake of an agonistic here-and-now. For Mead, past and future have no real existence; rather, they are imagined projections of what he termed the “specious present,” which we constantly revise (in respect to the past) and “provise” (in respect to the future), as we attempt to respond to the demands of the time in which we actually live. Mead’s description of the specious present is so congruent with Islamic thought that it could almost have been written by a Sufi like Junayd:
VIncent J. cornell and Bruce B. lawrence
That which marks a present is its becoming and disappearing. While the flash of the meteor is passing in our own specious present, it is all there, if only for a fraction of a minute …. Existence involves non-existence; it does take place. The [actual] world is a world of events (Mead 2001, 35).
The touchstone of reality in Mead’s philosophy of the present is the “emergent,” the immediate experience of the present that governs how a person revises the imagined past and “provises” an imagined future. Similarly, for Muslim mystics such as Junayd or Ibn Sab‘īn, the “emergent” or key experience that governs how we view the past and shape the future is similarly immediate; however, it does not arise through our agency but is realized through the working of the Divine Presence within us. After we return to the fullness of the present, says Junayd, “contemplation [of past and future] is once more restored…so that one can understand the true nature of one’s attributes through the permanence of [divine] manifestation” (Abdel-Kader 1976, 52, Arabic text).
the Plan of this work
The essayists in these chapters use an agonistic approach to fulfill our vision for the volume as a whole. The mandate is to “think outside of the box” in the analysis of particular terms, groups, or issues. The goal is to avoid manipulating the evidence in order to privilege one view over its rivals, and at the same time to escape clandestine dogmas, whether silent orthodoxies or overt heterodoxies. Through open inquiry, we strive to maintain respect for all who explore or expound Islam as a spiritual trajectory in the human search for meaning and value.
This collection of essays approaches Islamic spirituality from two related perspectives: one is expressive and transactional, whereas the other is performative and transformative. By “transactional” we mean the passing on of information about the texts, people, and places that have played a major role in producing the spirituality of Islam. The transactional perspective especially informs Part I of this volume, “Expressive Dimensions of Islamic Spirituality.” This part begins with a section on “The Spirituality of Words and Letters.” Words and letters both make up and inform a variety of Islamic discourses, beginning with the Qur’ān and the traditions of the Prophet Muḥammad (Hadith), but also include prayers, histories, and hagiographies. Though seemingly different, these varied forms of expression approach spirituality in interrelated ways. The next section covers “The Spirituality of Places and Spaces.” The texts covered in the previous section often allude to the importance of holy sites, with a focus on Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem. At the same time, they relate to multiple actors and holy figures, whether they are prophets, Shī‘ī Imams, or Sufi masters. This diversity is reflected in the title of the third section, “The Spirituality of People and Human Relations.” Since questions of gender and justice also suffuse these texts, places, and actors, a chapter on each of them concludes this part of the volume. Part I of our introduction to Islamic spirituality thus offers an approach to the subject that is simultaneously rational, sequential, and accumulative. Part I moves between the basic elements of Islamic
spirituality in relating the unknown to the known, and by attempting to make sense of texts, people, and places in discrete yet interconnected ways.
Another goal of this work is to evoke different aspects of Islamic spirituality through its performative and transformative dimensions. Part II of the volume, “Performative Dimensions of Islamic Spirituality,” moves the discussion from the transactional to the transformative by putting stress on the performative dimension. Our pedagogical aim is to provide comprehensive information that is authoritative as well as accessible to both academics and non-academics. Here the accent on performative language is intentional and decisive: language itself becomes the act. That which is spoken expresses but also performs the meaning of what it is to be a spiritually motivated Muslim in a particular time and place.
The performative and transformative aspects of spirituality include both inward and outward expressions. Hence, the chapters in Part II focus on the performative, narrative, and emotive aspects of Islamic spirituality, thus completing the second half of the circle that was begun in Part I. In Part II, the main concern is how spirituality is manifested in affect and experience. The four sections that make up this part of the volume include the following: (1) “Devotional Practices in Islam;” (2) “Spirituality in Literature, Poetry, and the Visual Arts;” (3) “Spirituality in Music, Song, and Cinema.” Of special note is the conclusion. Part II concludes with a section that heralds a new beginning: (4) “Islamic Spirituality in the Anthropocene Age.” The “Anthropocene Age” is a term that has recently been introduced by John Green, whose book The Anthropocene Reviewed (Green 2021), uses the term to designate the present age of ecological time, in which human beings have profoundly reshaped our planet and its biodiversity. Since the concept of the Anthropocene is agonistic rather than antagonistic, we deem it a more useful concept for this volume than “modernity,” which for more than a century has been used by critics both inside and outside of Islam to characterize the contemporary epistemological challenge to religious belief in general (see for example, Cornell 2014; MacIntyre 1988, 361–362).
the limits of reason and “Binary Faith”
What is often forgotten by both critics and defenders of modernity is how unspecific and ethnocentric this concept really is. In fact, the idea of the “modern” was not unknown in the past and is not only a product of the West. For many centuries and in different cultural contexts, concepts analogous to the “modern” have been used as synonyms for the “contemporary.” Advocates of change in many periods have contrasted the “modern” or present period with a more “traditional” past. This attitude can even be observed in the following passage of the Qur’ān: “When it is said to them: ‘Follow what Allāh has revealed,’ [the unbelievers] say: ‘Nay, we shall follow the ways of our fathers.’ What? Even though their fathers were devoid of wisdom and guidance?” (Q 2 : 170)
Peter Coates, a British essayist and culture-critic who is influenced by Sufi thought, has argued that a crucial difference between today’s conception of modernity and the concept of the modern in medieval Islam is that today’s concept is based on a linear and
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progressive view of time, whereas the premodern notion of time was occasionalistic. In other words, because most Muslims believed that God recreated the world at every moment, every era could be seen to provide a new opportunity to contemplate and understand the process of divine self-disclosure. In such a perspective, “modernity” becomes just another name for the present, and today’s present is no more significant to a timeless God than yesterday’s present. The upshot of this is that each period of time— as Coates puts it—is merely another “theatre of manifestation in the infinity of world process.” Paraphrasing the Sufi Muḥyiddīn Ibn ‘Arabī (d. 1240 CE), he explains the metaphysical implications of this worldview in the following way: “God appears in the era, and He appears as the era. According to the Hadith, ‘God is called Time,’ we are advised not to be disappointed by time, or to curse time, for God is time. In another rendering, we are cautioned to ‘Revile not the era for I [God] am the era’” (Coates 2002, 82–83).
Both pairs of approaches to spirituality covered in this volume also link the personal and emotive aspects of religious experience to reason or intellect, which is expressed in Arabic by the term ‘aql. In other words, each of these concepts depends on using the powers of the mind—both the human mind and the divine intellect—to increase personal awareness. Both sets of approaches also seek to transcend the conventionally rational by exploring the supra-rational and metacognitive aspects of the faith experience, connecting mind and body in a way that Maurice Merleau Ponty (1908–1961), Michael Polanyi (1891–1976), and other anti-Cartesian philosophers of the twentieth century tried to elaborate. Thus, when we combine transaction and expression with transformation and performance in this collection of essays, we do not make them divergent but rather convergent. In spiritual life, both inward and outward forms of belief and action are conjoined in practice, even though they may remain separate analytically. This crossing of conceptual boundaries is an exercise in what the Azeri scientist Lotfi Zadeh has termed “fuzzy logic” (Zadeh 1965).
Fuzzy logic is a multivalent form of logic that seeks to overcome the limitations of what Zadeh calls “binary faith.” Binary faith, which can be found in both religious and secular contexts (such as materialist philosophies), is based on an “either/or” logic that relies on the Aristotelian concepts of the Law of the Excluded Middle and the Principle of Non-Contradiction. As a centerpiece of both religious dogmatism and religious rationalism, the effect of this logic has been to limit the scope of spirituality by constraining its expression in the artificially imposed worlds of human reason and conventional experience. By contrast, fuzzy logic breaks down these barriers by describing a world of inner and outer experience that is gray instead of black and white. Neither dualistic nor binary but triadic, it both affirms and denies, while neither affirming nor denying anything conclusively. As Bruce Lawrence states in a recently published manifesto elaborating Marshall Hodgson’s (1922–1968) concept of the “Islamicate,” the point of fuzzy logic is “not to accept binary divisions but to look for in-between spaces, alternative players, and dimly lit options that herald a new methodology” (Lawrence 2021, 26).
Perhaps the most instructive example of binary faith in Islamic thought was the rationalistic theology of Mu‘tazilism, which based its system of belief on a credo known as the “Five Principles” (al-uṣūl al-khamsa). Most of the Five Principles of Mu‘tazilism are acceptable to all Muslims, and are included in mainstream Sunni and Shī‘ī doctrines
even today. This is especially true for the first and most important principle, divine unity (tawḥīd). According to the Mu‘tazilī theologian Qāḍī ‘Abd al-Jabbār (d. 1025 CE), knowledge of divine unity depends on the rational understanding that God must exist (Martin et al. 1997, 90–115).
Reason, at once a divine gift and a human responsibility, tells us that we cannot live forever and that we are limited in our powers and abilities. As contingent beings, we must depend on something outside of ourselves for our creation and support. This non-contingent and totally necessary being is God, who must be unlike us in every way. We die, but God is the Living; God alone and unassisted is the Creator of all things; God is the Powerful, but we are constantly confronted by our powerlessness. This binary view of divine and human power is supported by four sources of evidence: the Qur’ān, the Sunna of the Prophet Muḥammad, the consensus of the Muslim community, and reason itself, which leads us to investigate God’s rationale for His laws in the world around us.
Another of the Five Principles of Mu‘tazilism is the concept of divine promise and threat (al-wa‘d wa-l-wa‘īẓ). This absolutist view of divine justice is based on the premise that whatever God promises in the Qur’ān is bound to come to pass. For some Mu‘tazilī thinkers, God’s promise even included a predetermined date for the end of a person’s life. They were so convinced that a person’s days were numbered that they argued that if a murdered man were spared from being killed, he would die on the same day from another cause. As this example demonstrates, their “either/or” logic caused them to box in their thinking. For his part, Qāḍī ‘Abd al-Jabbār’s dogmatic belief in the divine promise and threat caused him to reject the notion that a person could have access to salvation through the intercession of God’s prophets and saints. Though in theory he did not deny the concept of intercession, he drastically reduced its meaning by arguing that it only increases the degree of virtue that a person innately possesses. Intercession cannot save a sinner from ultimate accountability. The same type of “either/or” logic was also applied to another of the Five Principles, commanding virtue and forbidding evil (al-amr bi-l-ma‘rūf wa-l-nahy ‘an al-munkar). This principle was so strictly applied by the Mu‘tazila that it inhibited the notion of divine grace. It is the same principle prominent today in the doctrines of Wahhabism and the Taliban, even though both groups condemn the Mu‘tazila as heretics.
For Sunni scholars, the principle of the Mu‘tazila that caused the greatest problem from the standpoint of binary faith was the doctrine of the created Qur’ān (khalq al-Qur’ān). This principle was related logically to the dogmatic rejection of eternal divine attributes. The Mu‘tazila argued that God’s transcendence meant that no attributes shared by human beings are sufficient to describe Him. However, the Qur’ān describes itself as an “Arabic Qur’ān … in the Mother of the Book” (Q 43: 3–4); a “Noble Qur’ān, in a Hidden Book” (Q 56: 77–78); and a “Glorious Qur’ān on a Preserved Tablet” (Q 85: 21–22). For the Mu‘tazila, these passages meant that an eternal Qur’ān was created by God as an ideal model or paradigm of divine scripture before the creation of the world. The Qur’ān that was revealed to the Prophet Muḥammad was a facsimile of this everlasting Qur’ān and was sent down mainly to confirm Muḥammad’s role as the Seal of the Prophets.
Sunni scholars realized that the doctrine of the created Qur’ān potentially contained a serious theological shortcoming. If the Qur’ān as we know it could be dated to the time
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of the Prophet Muḥammad, this would mean that the text of the Qur’ān was fixed in historical time, and thus the relevance of its teachings might be limited to the era in which it appeared. In other words, if the Qur’ān were viewed historically as a product of seventh-century Arabia, it would follow that its moral and social injunctions in particular would be related to seventh-century concerns. This would imply that God’s injunctions in the Qur’ān could be superseded if the conditions that gave rise to them were to change. For this reason, Sunni scholars advocated an uncreated Qur’ān, one that was not fixed in time and space. Such a Qur’ān would be truly universal. Being free of the limitations of both culture and history, its injunctions would be valid for all peoples and all historical periods, whether in seventh-century Arabia or in twenty-first century Indonesia.
The problem is that both of these approaches to the Qur’ān—the Mu‘tazilī version and the Sunni response—are products of “either/or” logic and binary faith. Insofar as they embody rational thinking, they both suffer from the inevitable conundrum of either/or logic: because their conclusions follow validly from their premises, it is impossible to deduce which alternative is better. If one starts from the premise that the Qur’ān revealed to Muḥammad is a derivative of a created archetype, it is reasonable to say that it was created in time. If, on the other hand, one fears the consequences of treating the Qur’ān revealed to Muḥammad as a time-bound derivative, it is reasonable to believe in a pre-eternal Qur’ān. The consequence of this is that many of the same controversies that raged between Sunnis and the Mu‘tazila for centuries continue and remain unresolved today, even though the Mu‘tazila no longer exist as a formal school of theology. Is there no way of dealing with differences in the spiritual and theological approaches to Islam without being caught in the dead end of binary faith?
the “third way” of Barzakh logic
We believe that a way out of this dead end can be found in Lotfi Zadeh’s concept of “fuzzy logic.” This “third-way” form of logic provides a useful means of transcending the limits of either/or approaches to the knowledge of God. In dealing with a similar logical problem, the French philosopher Michel Serres (1930–2019) observed that “knowledge functions elliptically” (Serres 1997, 37). Whereas a circle has a single center in the middle, an ellipse has two possible centers, one at each end. The only way to solve the problem, “What is the center of the ellipse?” is to find a new center—a hidden or previously unnoticed in-between solution—which Serres called the “third instruction” or “thirdinstructed” (le tiers-instruit): “a third between two poles, shining and dark, the center, from nowhere goes everywhere, in space and time, and from nothing, becomes multiple” (Ibid., 41). This newly emergent “mid-place” (Fr. mi-lieu) between dialectically opposed centers is a useful metaphor for the fuzzy logic conveyed by spiritual experience because it reminds us of the unpredictability of what we may find.
Another way of expressing this third-way logic is to use the term barzakh logic. Barzakh is a word of Persian origin that appears three times in the Qur’ān. As miriam cooke observes in Chapter 18: Narrating Transcendence in the Moden Novel, two of these references depict the barzakh as both a barrier and a bridge between sweet and
salty waters: “The confluence of the two seas (maraj al-baḥrayn), the one potable and sweet, the other salty and bitter; and between them [God] placed a barzakh” (Q 25 : 53); “[God] mixed the two seas so that they meet, yet between them was a barzakh that they could not overpass” (Q 55: 19–22). Cooke goes on to draw the important conclusion that this barzakh is “an isthmus that is both sweet and salty and neither—without overpassing.” By contrast, the third reference to the barzakh in the Qur’ān refers to the afterlife: “When death comes to one of them, he says: My Lord! Send me back, so that I may do good in that which I have left behind. No! It is a useless word that he speaks; and behind them is a barzakh until the Day of Resurrection” (Q 23: 99–100).
In eschatological terms, the concept of the barzakh evokes the division between this life and the next, between our present life in this world and a future life beyond knowing; but barzakh is also the divide between salty and fresh water, found in the Gulf off the coast of Bahrain. Thus, expressed most simply, the barzakh is a barrier, but at the same time it is also a bridge. It is a barrier/bridge that moves beyond the dyad of “either/or” or mind/body. Instead, barzakh logic confirms the deeper truth of both/and or mindbody, as a metaphor of spiritual engagement. It might also be defined as a non-reductive, undiluted connection linking two realities—whether eschatological realms or bodies of water—without reducing or diluting either. Seen in this way, barzakh is at once a concept and a method. In our view, this concept/method is central to understanding the multiple dimensions of Islamic spirituality. Each element of Islamic spirituality embodies, then projects an arc of hope that is both barrier and bridge, gap and gift.
Michel Serres personifies what we have termed barzakh logic with the figure of Hermes, who appeared in Classical times as a divine messenger and in late antiquity as any one of a number of sages who were collectively known by the Greek epithet Trismegistos, “Thrice-Great.” Serres also calls this figure the “Third Man,” and stresses the importance of third-person discourse in conveying what barzakh logic represents. Unlike the second-person pronouns, you, we, and us, which designate insiders to our group, third-person, and demonstrative pronouns such as he, she, that, and they, designate outsiders, those who are beyond or excluded from our group. However, when speaking to outsiders, these terms could also be used to refer to those who are within our group. Thus, third-person terms both exclude and include. As a demonstrative, the third person can potentially include almost anything; hence, it has a unique potential for transcending the limitations of first- and second-person discourses because it can create as many “thirds” as one wants. This is the point at which Serres’ concept of the third person can best be compared to the concept of barzakh logic: when expressed in language, the third person has the unique ability to combine the objective and the intersubjective, just as we have described how barzakh logic combines both mind and body when used as a metaphor of spiritual engagement. For Serres, “the third person… indexes the full circuit or the synthesis of knowledge and its objects” (Serres 1997, 47). At its furthest point, the connection provided by third-person or barzakh logic points directly to the Logos. This unique connection to the source of Being itself is the underlying meaning of Serres’ maxim, “Love the one who begets spirit in you” (Ibid., 50).
As noted above, the conjunction or reconnection of the mind versus body dichotomy is an important aspect of barzakh logic, both enclosing and projecting a paradox. There is no hyphen in the newly created term, “mindbody.” Once conjoined, it is no longer two
VIncent J. cornell and Bruce B. lawrence
parts but one phenomenon, a single existent: mindbody. Mindbody relies on the conjunction of seeming opposites: this is also how the concept of the barzakh is expressed in the Qur’ān. What is crucial is the irreducibility of the barzakh itself. It cannot be triangulated to produce yet another form of disembodied abstractionism. If barzakh logic is to prevail, it requires constant vigilance against the reflex back to either/or logic, and in its place, a commitment to a more restrained, patient engagement with dyadic logic, twos combined or elided, as in the concept of mindbody.
This is where the importance of barzakh logic to the promotion of new paradigms in science or new directions in scholarship is revealed. As Bruce Lawrence states in his book Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit, “A theorist does not eliminate but rather tries to recover the ground preceding and undergirding all true science… Barzakh logic… does not destroy or deny reason, but instead probes its frontiers, which are internal and sentient as much as external and cognitive” (Lawrence 2021, 26–27).
Crucial to the task of acting as a catalyst for the creation of new paradigms is the irreducibility of the barzakh itself. Above all, it is not coopted by either of its two extremities: one end does not, and cannot, absorb and so erase the other. At the same time, however, these two extremities are not necessarily combined in some new third form that utilizes them while exceeding their boundaries and setting new limits. A true barzakh cannot be triangulated to produce yet another form of disembodied abstractionism. If barzakh logic is to prevail, it requires vigilance against the reflex back to both either/ or logic and the conventional dialectic. The two parts that are conjoined do not become one. Rather, as in the concept of mindbody, they are one, while at the same time remaining two. Crucially, a sense of distinction persists even in the most intimate, ecstatic moments of convergence.
coextensiveness, transactionality, and transcendence
As is often the case, we find that the mystical thinkers of premodern Islam were already aware of such seemingly “postmodern” concepts as barzakh logic. The “two/one-one/ two” notion of difference within unity discussed above actually goes back as far as the “theology of arithmetic” of Pythagorean philosophy (see Iamblichus 1988). In the Islamic Middle Period, the Iranian Sufi ‘Ayn al-Quḍāt al-Hamadānī (d. 1131 CE) expressed much the same concept through the term al-ma‘iyya (literally, “withness”), and in the following century Ibn Sab‘īn expressed it through what he called “dual subjectivity” (al-huwa huwa). Both thinkers were faced with the same conceptual problem. As ‘Ayn al-Quḍāt put it: “God is existent, and there is nothing with Him, nor can it be conceived that something will be with Him. For nothing shares the rank of withness with His existence. Thus, nothing is with God, but He is with each thing” (‘Ayn al-Quḍāt 2022, 121). ‘Ayn al-Quḍāt solved this problem by conceiving of God as coextensive with everything, even though created things cannot be said to be coextensive with Him; in other words, we can say that He is “with” everything yet everything cannot be said to be “with” him. Ontologically, God’s “withness” in regard to what He creates ensures not only the coextensiveness of existence, but also its transactionality, which ‘Ayn al-Quḍāt
designated by the term taswīq al-wujūd (Ibid., 204 n. 127 and 133). Both of these concepts can be seen as examples of what we call barzakh logic: both “withness” and the transactional coextensiveness of existence amount to alternative ways of expressing the logic of both/and or mindbody.
By way of contrast, Ibn Sab‘īn’s answer to the conceptual problem posed by ‘Ayn al-Quḍāt is based on the concept of the dual subject (al-huwa huwa) in Arabic grammar. An “accidental dual subject” is said to occur when a single noun or pronoun can refer to two different things, such that they share a twin identity. Most commonly, this can be seen in proverbs, similes, and semiotic analogies in literature. For example, in the Hindu epic
The Bhagavad-Gita, the figure of Krishna is an avatar of the god Vishnu. Thus, one can say of this figure, “He is both Krishna and Vishnu.” As Ibn Sab‘īn describes the dual subject, “it is [actually] a single subject in its essence… because everything that makes up its constituent elements are one, either in number or in form. Thus, the dual form of the plural can be signified by a singular pronoun. This is similar to things that can be described as ‘one in form,’ because the dual subject appears in this situation as if it were one thing in one respect and a second thing in another respect” (Badawī 1956, 9, Arabic text).
The concept of the dual subject is another example of barzakh logic because two different referents or identities are made coextensive with each other, while at the same time remaining separate conceptually. In applying this logic to spirituality and the feeling of God being “with” the believer in one’s soul, Ibn Sab‘īn instructs his followers to think in the following way:
Separate [your notion of] Him from His signs [in the world]; confirm Him in His Essence as the Necessarily Existent and relate this to the dual subject (al-huwa huwa). [That is to say,] think of Him as the [Prime] Mover, who moves [other things] but is not moved Himself; then [think of] the mover that moves [things] in one sense but is also moved in another; then [think of] something that moves [other things] but does not move what is other than it in a certain sense, because it is [logically] impossible for it to do so. Then [reflect] on what is necessitated for everything, for [God] appears in it. Then [consider] what is necessarily “with” (ma‘a) everything and how He [also] appears in it. So, understand! (Ibid., 10, Arabic text)
In both of the above examples, there looms an important signpost on the road to a panoramic view of Islamic spirituality: not to erase difference but rather to acknowledge its positionality. Not only is the distinction between the human self and Divine Self pivotal for understanding the meaning of revelation, but each human self always and everywhere exists in an ontologically subordinate yet coextensive and transactional relationship with the Divine Self/the Ultimate/the Other/the Unseen. The notions of both hierarchy and transactionality, which are crucial to Islamic spirituality, have recently been framed by Shahab Ahmed in his signature work, What is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic. Toward the end of the book, Ahmed draws a distinction between the human concept of social hierarchy and the more transactional notion of divine/human epistemology in a way that is significant for both the philosophical and the Hermetic sciences. In the concept of hierarchy, “the cosmological notion of higher and lower Truths transposes itself logically into the corresponding social notion that
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humanity and human society is composed of a hierarchy of more- and less-Truth proficient human souls, a class hierarchy constituted not by material wealth or political power, but relative to the capacity to know Truth” (Ahmed 2015, 368).
One could say that Ahmed’s thesis expresses the way that Islamic spirituality is broached in the essays that are included in this volume. Central to his argument is the need to both contrast and make transactional and coextensive the concepts of the Sharī‘a as the Law of God and the Ṭarīqa as the Way of God. (In Arabic, the terms sharī‘a and ṭarīqa are closely related in meaning.) In Ahmed’s view, one must “conceptualize the law in terms beyond the law itself… within a larger perspective of social and discursive truth, meaning and value” (Ibid., 455). In order to accomplish this task, he suggests the application of a Persianate idiom: madhhab-i ‘ishq, the religion/way/methodology of Love (Ibid., 398). With this concept, we once again come face-to-face with its original founder, ‘Ayn al-Quḍāt al-Hamadānī (‘Ayn al-Quḍāt 2022, n. 99). As ‘Ayn al-Quḍāt indicated, because the Sharī‘a has been overvalued throughout much of Islamic history in respect to the Ṭarīqa, there needs to be recourse to a more universal notion of the Law, a more lyrical and inclusive notion of Islam, a way of moving, going, and traveling that is both prompted and informed by a deep passion or love for the Truth that is transcendent on the one hand, yet transactional and immanent on the other.
Where we depart from Ahmed is in attempting to take account of the depth of convergence and coextensiveness that is part of Islamic spirituality across all of its history, and not merely in the 1300–1850 period highlighted by Ahmed. Beyond the Sharī‘a versus Ṭarīqa dyad we can add the constant reminder of mindbody, a recognition via barzakh logic, that two seeming opposites can and should be coextensive and transactional, each qualifying the other without collapsing into its neighbor and putative rival. Far from being rigid or reified, this is a movable order. It oscillates between what is evident and can readily be seen on the one hand (known in Arabic as al-ẓāhir), and what is occluded, secret, and often hidden on the other (al-bāṭin). These reciprocal dyads, like the public and private spaces they signal, become twin centers of the ellipse within which Islamic spirituality flourishes. If the expressive dimension veers toward the outer word or discourse of the tongue, the performative dimension tries to harness and channel inner experience, the range of emotions, and the heart. Neither can exist without the other; their tandem interplay is the stuff of Divine Presence in the drama of human and cosmic existence that we call “the world.” As the reader enters this book, this drama will unfold in a series of vignettes, each penned by an author adroit at listening, looking, hearing, and telling about a certain feature of Islamic spirituality as she or he understands it.
references
Abdel-Kader, Ali Hassan (1976). The Life, Personality, and Writings of al-Junayd. London: Luzac & Co., Ltd.
Ahmed, Shahab (2015). What is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
‘Ayn al-Quḍāt (2022). The Essence of Reality: A Defense of Philosophical Sufism. (Edited and Translated by Mohammed Rustom). New York: New York University Press.
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Badawī, ‘Abd al-Raḥmān (1956). Rasā'il Ibn Sab‘īn. Cairo: al-Dār al-Miṣriyya li-l-Ta’līf wa-l-Tarjama.
Coates, Peter (2002). Ibn ‘Arabi and Modern Thought: The History of Taking Metaphysics Seriously Oxford: Anqa Publishing.
Cornell, Vincent J. (1998). Realm of the Saint: Power and Authority in Moroccan Sufism. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
Cornell, Vincent J. (2014). Islam. In: The Crisis of the Holy: Challenges and Transformations in World Religions (ed. Alon Goshen-Gottstein), 125–149. Lanham, MA: Lexington Books.
Green, John (2021). The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet. New York: Dutton.
Iamblichus (1988). The Theology of Arithmetic: On the Mystical, Mathematical, and Cosmological Symbolism of the First Ten Numbers. (Translated by Robin Waterfield). Grand Rapids, MI: Phanes Press.
Lawrence, Bruce B. (2021). Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell. MacIntyre, Alasdaire. (1988). Whose Justice? Which Rationality? Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.
Martin, Richard C., Woodward, Mark R., and Atmaja, Dwi S. (1997). Defenders of Reason in Islam: Mu‘tazilism from Medieval School to Modern Symbol. Oxford: Oneworld Publications.
Mead, George Herbert (2001). The Philosophy of the Present. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, reprint of 1932 first edition.
Pill, Shlomo (2014). Law as Faith, Faith as Law: The Legalization of Theology in Islam and Judaism in the Thought of al-Ghazali and Maimonides. Berkeley Journal of Middle Eastern and Islamic Law 6: 1–25.
Said, Edward W. (1994). Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books/Random House anniversary edition of 1978 original.
Serres, Michel (1997). The Troubadour of Knowledge. (Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser and William Paulson). Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
Zadeh, Lotfi (1965). Fuzzy Sets. Information and Control 8 (3): 338–353.
INTRODUCTION TO PART I
Vincent J. Cornell
Human beings cannot help but speak. We always speak. Even when we cannot speak, we invent ways to act as if we are speaking. Think of writing, think of sign language. Even computer code is a way of speaking. What is the purpose of social media if not a way to keep speaking to each other across space and time? The air waves are filled with talk radio, TV talk shows, political commentary, and twenty-four-hour news channels. Anthropologists consider speech and language as important for human development as the ability to reason. So crucial to us is language that we pattern the genetic code on our alphabet in order to show that it is a form of communication. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) considered speech and language fundamental to human nature: “We encounter language everywhere. Hence, it cannot surprise us that as soon as man looks thoughtfully about himself at what he is, he quickly hits upon language” (Heidegger 1971, 189).
Because speech is so reflexively part of human existence, our God or gods must speak too. The first verse of the Gospel of John in the New Testament states, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). In the Hebrew Bible, God says to the Israelites, “If you obey My speech/words (Heb. qaval) and keep My commandments, you will be a special treasure unto Me above all the people, for all the earth is mine” (Exodus 19:5). In the Qur’ān, God’s creation of the world is portrayed as an act of divine speech: “Verily His command, if He wants something [to exist], is to say to it (an yaqūla lahu), ‘Be!’ and it is” (Q 36: 82). The Qur’ān also affirms that everything in the world—whether human or non-human—has a way of “speaking” or proclaiming God’s praise: “There is not a thing that does not proclaim (yusabbiḥu) His praise” (Q 17: 44).
The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Islamic Spirituality, First Edition. Edited by Vincent J. Cornell and Bruce B. Lawrence. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
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However, the praise of God can be—and perhaps should be—parsed. As stated in the General Introduction, The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Islamic Spirituality approaches spirituality from two perspectives: the expressive and transactional and the performative and transformative. Speech and language—including their symbolic or semiotic aspects—are the chief means through which the expressive and transactional aspects of Islamic spirituality are articulated. Part I of this volume is titled, “Expressive Dimensions of Islamic Spirituality,” because speech and language are central to the texts, places, and people that have played major roles in expressing the spirituality of Islam. Yet we must not lose sight of the fact that speech and language are major aspects of the performative dimension of spirituality as well. In the Introduction to Part II, Bruce Lawrence will touch repeatedly on how important speech and language are to performative aspects of Islamic spirituality such as prayer, Qur’ān recitation, poetry, the spiritually-oriented novel, calligraphy, musical lyrics, the Internet, and Islamic hip hop.
Part I is divided into three sections, totaling thirteen chapters. These chapters trace the expressive dimension of Islamic spirituality by looking at three lodestones of the spiritual quest: The Spirituality of Words and Letters, The Spirituality of Places and Spaces, and The Spirituality of People and Human Relations. In our approach to this subject, the expressive does not exclude the performative but instead accents the role of both textual and non-textual speech and language in channeling the spiritual quest within Islam. Instead of one dimension or the other—the expressive or the performative—both dimensions of Islamic spirituality are explored in tandem, evincing a spectrum of connections best understood through the concept of barzakh logic, eliding yet not collapsing or prioritizing one part over the other. Like a barzakh, the two parts of this volume are meant to project the notion of “withness,” embracing difference without erasing distinctiveness.
As so often happens in the essays contained in this work, an account related by Ibn ‘Arabī, who is considered the “Greatest Master” (al-Shaykh al-Akbar) of the Sufi tradition, illustrates the paradox of barzakh logic as we have described it. In al-Fuṭūḥāt alMakkiyya (The Meccan “Openings” or Revelations), Ibn ʿArabī states that when he was young, his father took him to meet the famous Islamic philosopher Ibn Rushd (Lat., Averroës, d. 1198 CE). When the boy entered his presence, Ibn Rushd rose from his seat and received him with great affection. According to Ibn ‘Arabī’s account,
He said to me, “Yes.” And I said, yes. It pleased him immensely that I should understand him. Taking cognizance of what pleased him so, however, I told him, “No.” Immediately he winced. His color changed and he doubted himself. “What do you make of the matter of mystical unveiling [kashf] and divine emanation [fayḍ ilāhī]?” he asked. “Is it identical to what intellectual inquiry [naẓar] offers us?” I replied, “Yes, no. Between yes and no, spirits take flight from their matter, and heads fly from their bodies.” He turned pale, deep in thought and trembling. He took to murmuring… for he understood my allusion. (Shaker 2012, 15)
The barzakh relationship between the speech of reason and mystical unveiling described by Ibn ‘Arabī applies equally well to the relationship between divine and human speech and the divine and human word. In the following chapters, we will see how words and
letters are central to Islamic spiritual expression, from the Qur’ān and the traditions of the Prophet Muḥammad, to prayers, litanies, histories, and hagiographies. However, in Islamic spirituality the concept of the Divine Word goes to the core of our being, the foundation of our humanity. For the Andalusian philosopher and mystical theologian Ibn Sabʿīn, Divine Speech is essential for the maintenance of all existence. Because Divine Being cannot be separated from the Divine Word, God’s presence can be discerned even in “material being (al-mādda) by virtue of the fact that He is the First Subject… In addition, He is the ‘Book’ and the ‘Sunna,’ for everything goes back to its essential meaning” (Badawī 1957, 34. My translation). This theological position is called panentheism, meaning that a trace of God can be found in everything. By stating that God is the “Book,” Ibn Sab’īn means that He is the ultimate source of being, just as the Qur’ān is the source of the rulings that make up the Sharī’a and the creedal understanding of Islam. By stating that God is the “Sunna,” he means that God is the ultimate source of existence, through which being is actualized in the world, just as the Prophetic Sunna actualizes the teachings of the Qur’ān.
According to the Sufi Abū al-Qāsim al-Junayd, when one crosses over the barzakh that connects the discourses of reason and spiritual unveiling, one is no longer limited to rules laid down by reason’s edicts. Junayd describes this state as a spiritual trial (balā’), for the seeker becomes aware that she bears the burden of two types of knowledge that subsist together in an agonistic relationship. These are theoretical or outer knowledge and transcendent or inner knowledge. The more the seeker develops her inner and transcendent knowledge, the pain of the trial eases; her natural desires become elevated such that the need for outward affirmation diminishes. Eventually, the seeker “opens [herself] to the indications of the Truth through the Divine Realities and through the state of affairs in their true colors, without need for intermediary means of understanding” (Abdel-Kader 1976, 52–53, Arabic text, my translation).
Throughout the chapters of Part I, there looms an important signpost on the road to a panoramic view of Islamic spirituality: not to erase the differences between modes of spiritual expression but rather to acknowledge their positionality. Not only is the distinction between the human self and Divine Self pivotal for understanding the meaning of spiritual inspiration, but the human self always and everywhere exists in a subordinate yet coextensive and transactional relationship with the Divine Self/the Ultimate/the Other/the Unseen. In this regard, the three sections of Part I highlight three concepts as particularly important to the expressive dimension of Islamic spirituality. These are the Word (kalima), the Place (mawḍiʿ/ maḥall/ makān), and the Person (insān).
The Spirituality of Words and Letters
Word, Place, Person. Among these concepts, the Word comes before everything else. In the view of Ibn Sab‘īn, everything created by God is a statement of His remembrance because it is a “word” in God’s Book of Creation. However, in Islamic spirituality, the universal presence of the Word is not only part of mystical experience; it pervades all existence. In regard to this, the Qur’ān states: “Say: ‘Truth has come and falsehood has
