Spiritual Jihad with Myself and for Others: Islam within an Interfaith World
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.66362/iji.v1i2.6Keywords:
Gulen, hizmet, hosgoru, jihad, Ibn ‘Arabi, muslim/Muslim, mysticism, Original Sin, RumiAbstract
Religion is an edifice built of interpretations superimposed on the foundations of revelation. This truth pertains both to the question of which texts are considered revealed and how one understands them. It extends to terms and concepts of which none offers more significant implications across history than the Arabic term, jihad, meaning “struggle.” The key form of such struggle is to make oneself as obedient to God as possible—how and when through the word and how and when through the sword?—and while some view this challenge in narrow terms, others, notably mystics, view it broadly. We see the word and its use to express a breadth of love for humanity expressed in the words of Sufi writers like Ibn ‘Arabi and Rumi, and in the writings and action inspired in the contemporary world by M. Fethullah Gulen that has yielded the Hizmet Movement. Gulen and his followers offer arguably the most significant Muslim contribution to the process of a vole-laden jihad to repair our strife-ridden world.
References
A slightly different, more abbreviated version of this article appeared embedded in the larger article, “God, Religion, and War: Language, Concept, and the Problem of Definition from Genesis to Jihad to Levinas,” in War and Peace in Religious Culture; special issue (13) of Religions, Douglas Allen, ed., (MDPI, 2022).
Note the convenience of contemporary English-language orthography that permits a distinction between “Muslim”—one who follows the specific spiritual lead of Muhammad—and “muslim”: anyone, in particular pre- Muhammad figures like Abraham, Moses, and Jesus, who submit to God’s will.
One of the ways in which Islam underscores the ineffability of God is with reference to the complication of God’s Name: that there are 99 “Names” to reference God—and certain types of individuals, such as mystics and, above all, the Prophet Muhammad, know/knew many more than 99 such Names.
Shari’a is what I referred to earlier as “jurisprudence.” The word comes from the root, “shar,” which refers to the sort of path that leads one to water in the wilderness—in other words a path essential for one’s survival.
Sema is a word, together with dhikr, typically used to refer to the initiation of the mystical process. Where most Sufi tariqas use a word or phrase as a starting point, Rumi came to use the physical act of spinning about. The tariqa that evolved included, among other things, whirling round one’s own axis while whirling, as a group, around an empty center, with the eyes closed and the head tilted at a 28-degree angle, (which happens to be the angle at which the earth spins on its axis) and with one hand pointing slightly upward, toward heaven and the other downward, toward the earth.
Tariq(a) is another Arabic word meaning path or trajectory; it is specifically used in Sufism to refer to the specific Sufi orders (each of which is its own uniquely and specifically contoured path or trajectory).
The story of the mystic Muhammad al-Hallaj (d. 922) presents him as returning from his condition of absolute oneness with God and unable to regain himself—to disentangle himself from God—so that he came out (or partially out) of ek-stasis yelling, “Ana al Haqq!”: “I am the Truth (one of the 99 names of God—in other words: “I am God!”). Of course, the “I” was not the ordinary self; this was not some exclamation of profound egotism; on the contrary, it reflected a complete elimination of self, buried within God. But the authorities misunderstood, of course, and executed him as an apostate. His is the consummate cautionary tale regarding the dangers of the mystical
enterprise.
The two particular books by Gulen that I am referencing here—there are many more books and essays in which he expresses these sorts of ideas—are Love and Tolerance, (Somerset, NJ: The Light, 2006); and Criteria or the Lights of the Way, Vol 1, (London: Truestar, 1996).
There is considerable discussion as to which, beyond the four Sunni madhabs, and the first two of the noted Shi’i madhabs, constitute “major” madhabs. Gibril Fouad Haddad’s The Four Imams and Their Schools (London: Muslim Academic Trust, 2007) offers a dense yet concise discussion of the Sunni schools and there is a plethora of works on each of these and on the various non-Sunni madhabs.
There are many discussions of what mysticism is, from that in Henry James and Evelyn Underhill to a plethora of recent volumes. A concise and accessible definition is found in Ori Z Soltes, Mysticism in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: Searching for Oneness, (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008), 1-10.
There are Christian and Jewish mystics, such as St Francis of Assisi and Abraham Abulafia, who manifest particularly interesting and/or strong expressions of this sensibility, as well. See Soltes, Searching for Oneness, 1- 10, 124-30, 135-9.
This will happen in all three Abrahamic traditions, but in slightly different ways. Thus, for example, Jews fast for a 25-hour period known as the Day of Atonement—adding an hour to the 24-hour cycle in order to be absolutely certain that some slip of the mind did not cause less than the full day to be foodless. Muslims fast from sunrise to sundown during the entire month of Ramadan, and there are prescriptions of how to determine absolutely that the sun has set before consuming food; traditional Catholics don’t consume meat on Fridays and deprive themselves of something significant during the 40 days of Lent—and in the monastic tradition a host of physical needs are suppressed.
This does not disobligate Christians from good as opposed to evil deeds as essential religious values: an evil-doer who is baptized does not automatically get into heaven thanks to that sacrament. My point (in the following paragraph) is that neither Islam nor Judaism carry within them the idea of Original Sin and its consequences—a function of difference of interpretation of the identical revealed narrative in Judaism and Christianity and an analogous one in Islam.
Two Hebrew words are eventually pressed into service by Jews for “Hell.” One is she’ol, which originally, however, really only meant “grave”—or at any rate a dark and still place where those who are dead go. See Robert Rainwater, “She’ol,” in Watson E. Mills, ed., Mercer Dictionary of the Bible (Mercer University Press, 1990), among other discussions. The other, gehenna, is a corruption of the phrase gei ben Hinnom—the “Valley of Hinnom,” just south by southwest of Jerusalem, with an at worst horrifying and at best ugly history: this is the “Valley of the Shadow of Death” through which the psalmist walks, “fear[ing] no evil, for Thou art with me” (Ps 23:4).
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