The material in this blog is now available at amazon.com under the title: Ideas Inspired by the Qur’an.
Being free, as in ‘free will’, is undoubtedly an absolute, one of those irresistible ideals we are so eager to attribute to ourselves. Indeed, one of GOD’s Names, Al-Ghani, can be translated as the Wealthy, the Independent, or the Free (from want). Invoking freedom, therefore, reverberates in our souls like something divine, which ultimately it is. The uncanny feeling we have that our acts are freely chosen – that the proof of our having free will is as obvious as moving, or not moving, a finger when we intend to – may actually be an immediate echo of GOD’s work inside us. It is as if we are constantly being reminded, through our illusion of self-governance, of how it feels to be GOD.
Why do I say “illusion”? To start with, no one but GOD can claim this degree of liberty:
Verily AL-LAH performs what He desires.
إِنَّ اللَّهَ يَفْعَلُ مَا يُرِيدُ
We cannot, even if we wanted to, alter the basic constitution of the universe, the simple facts of life that provide a stable environment and keep us dependent on air, liquids, energy, and nourishment, or the composition and functioning of our bodies. We may be able to ruin the surface of the planet, and we can commit suicide individually as well, but in both cases not without the help of particular materials and laws of nature. We can improve our physical health, but only marginally and temporarily, and work on our character and attitudes to a certain extent, but even replacing one mental habit with another or changing one memory for another is usually beyond our capabilities. If we are honest with ourselves, we will admit that though there are a million things we could do differently, that range does not begin to even scratch the surface of absolute freedom. Nothing in this universe is absolutely free, i.e. uncaused, unless it is an expression of the Uncaused Cause, or GOD.
Whatever we do, our work is ‘cut out for us’ from His infinitely powerful One Will:
You do not will except AL-LAH has willed it. Truly GOD has ever been Cognizant, Wise. (Q76:30)
وَمَا تَشَاءُونَ إِلاَّ أَنْ يَشَاءَ اللَّهُ إِنَّ اللَّهَ كَانَ عَلِيمًا حَكِيمًا
You do not will except AL-LAH, the Master of the worlds, has willed it. (Q81:29)
وَمَا تَشَاءُونَ إِلاَّ أَنْ يَشَاءَ اللَّهُ رَبُّ الْعَالَمِينَ
In other words, the Will of GOD precedes and subsumes all other wills, just as a general ‘What Happens’ includes every individual happening. There is no conflict, no clash of wills between GOD and man, no more than between the flow of history and one person’s life course, or between the sum of all knowledge and what is known individually by me, or between your particular love and the Divine Love that animates the universe.
And [remember] when We said to you, “Indeed your Lord encompasses mankind.” (Q17:60)
وَإِذْ قُلْنَا لَكَ إِنَّ رَبَّكَ أَحَاطَ بِالنَّاسِ
Insofar as what we do feels like freedom, like one of the million things we could have done differently, we deem ourselves free. Just like our relative knowledge and our relative love, borrowed from GOD the Absolutely Knowing and Absolutely Loving, our relative freedom is borrowed from Him, based on our feeling it, confirmed by our faith in it, and helping us to act as if it were absolute. Yet all our acts fit snugly within the flow of destiny, which appears to us as GOD’s irrevocable decree with the benefit of hindsight. From GOD’s vantage point, however, it is all one happening, a singular Being Here and Now:
Truly His affair is that when He intends a thing He tells it “Be!” and so it is. (Q36:82)
إِنَّمَا أَمْرُهُ إِذَا أَرَادَ شَيْئًا أَنْ يَقُولَ لَهُ كُنْ فَيَكُونُ
Athletes, artists, and mystics yearn to participate in this Divine Freedom, and occasionally get a taste of it. Nowadays we call it ‘flow’ or ‘in the zone’ – a state of action or awareness through us but not altogether by us, at a level clearly beyond our ordinary capabilities and sense of control. AL-LAH describes it this way:
Theirs is what they will together with their Master. That is the reward of those who do their best (Q39:34)
لَهُمْ مَا يَشَاءُونَ عِنْدَ رَبِّهِمْ ذَلِكَ جَزَاءُ الْمُحْسِنِينَ
The GOD You Already Know 
I wonder where ‘providence’ fits in all this.
LikeLike
Providence (from the Latin ‘foresight’) is Divine Care and Guidance, manifested in either GOD’s constant governance or specific cases of His intervention in ‘our’ (actually His) affairs. So rather than fitting providence into our version of events, we need to learn how to ‘make do’ with what has already been seen and decided by Him. As we discover what His Ethical Will is (what He wants us to choose), we can either agree to conform to that, or we can try to oppose it, in which case we are still conforming . . . to His Predominant Will (what He has already chosen). See Q41:11 – And He said to it [the heavens] and to the earth, “Come dutifully or forcibly.” They replied, “We come obedient.”
LikeLike