6. Friends and social milieu For the average person in modern Western culture, including most professionals whose careers are at stake if they take positions that are regarded by their peers as silly, God is little more than an embarrassment and a conversation-killer. The pain of being mocked, stared at, scorned, or shunned is too great for most people.
From Abi Hurairah, [who said] that the Prophet (may GOD bless him and give him peace) said, “A man follows the religion of his friend, so let each of you consider whom he befriends.” (Sunanu Abi Dawud, Book 43, Hadith 61)
عَنْ أَبِي هُرَيْرَةَ، أَنَّ النَّبِيَّ صلى الله عليه وسلم قَالَ ” الرَّجُلُ عَلَى دِينِ خَلِيلِهِ فَلْيَنْظُرْ أَحَدُكُمْ مَنْ يُخَالِلُ ”
7. The synthetic self If one’s self-image or personal identity is constructed in such a way that there is no opening to the Infinite, then it can actually feel as if God is a suffocating presence or hostile force, and that to succumb to Him is to die. The answer to this threat is to first relegate God to the realm of concepts and then to quietly expunge Him from one’s thoughts, since concepts are more disposable than the Living. After that, declaring Him to be in hiding is a formality, a polite way of announcing His death. There follows a period of exhilaration, and ‘freedom’ – that sauce slathered over every moral discourse, regardless of taste – becomes one’s vacuous standard and slogan for life.
8. Actions and inactions We tend to think that actions are shaped by beliefs, but the reverse is also at least as true. Our unreflecting impulses, reactions to events, and habits both mental and practical become an identity that we feel honour-bound to justify, and so an improvised faith in what we are, one that was never thought through thoroughly but only cobbled together after the fact, becomes our creed and raison d’être. If we have acted heedlessly of GOD and somehow succeeded in reaching an advanced age, we feel both confirmed and heavily invested in continuing the way we began. This, by the way, is why religions mandate not only doctrines and attitudes but also practices; what we do (or omit doing) often determines our structure of belief more than what we say or think.
9. Character and motivation Probably the biggest blind spot in the character of the West, where demands to see God are commonplace, is the gaping chasm between we claim to know (almost everything) and what we actually know (almost nothing), particularly with regard to who we are and who GOD is. We construct a metaphysical framework around the strictures of physical science, where visual confirmation is paramount, and then accept or reject a whole universe of supersensory realities on this flimsy basis. Again, this supposedly scientific approach is nothing new.
Those who do not hope to meet Us say, “If only angels were sent down to us, or we could see our Lord.” Indeed they think too highly of themselves and manifest the greatest insolence. (Q25:21)
وَقَالَ الَّذِينَ لاَ يَرْجُونَ لِقَاءَنَا لَوْلاَ أُنزِلَ عَلَيْنَا الْمَلاَئِكَةُ أَوْ نَرَى رَبَّنَا لَقَدْ اسْتَكْبَرُوا فِي أَنفُسِهِمْ وَعَتَوْا عُتُوًّا كَبِيرًا
Why is this condemnation so harsh? Is it not human nature to want to know more? Should we not be eager to come face to face with an angel? Were not the prophets always yearning to see their Lord? Are we not promised that vision in the Everafter as the greatest bliss possible in Paradise?
The key to this apparent paradox is not so much what is said but rather the attitude underlying it, delineated in the phrase, who do not hope to meet Us. In other words, their wish is not so much a prayer as a statement of their criteria for accepting the existence of God and His angels. When we affirm them as real, i.e. have faith in them, we have already begun to meet them. But if, in our arrogance, we demand that they first conform to our ‘scientific’ frame of what we think is real, they most certainly will not conform. The demand to see under such conditions is being made only to prove a point, not to improve one’s faith. GOD forgives ignorance when followed by repentance, but He will never obey it, nor will His angels. They appear only to those who humbly wait, in fear and hope, for any spark of truth that comes, which is known by how it fills the heart and makes it tremble.
All spiritual traditions seek to open this channel to the Divine. Each tradition designates and interprets it differently, according to the various doctrines and teachings that flesh out that ineffable experience. The Source, however, is One Whom the Qur’an names AL-LAH.
10. Looking out for God A scientist who demands evidence for God’s existence may be said to be on the look-out for God. Being ‘out there’ is how we normally visualize Him in our mind’s eye, and corresponds to our naïve conception of transcendence. This is one way of framing Him – as an external, separate being, analogous to objects that occupy space. Hence we develop – believers and non-believers alike – an expectation of seeing God ‘out there’ somewhere.
In the Qur’an, this exoteric representation of transcendence is condescended to by means of spatial and physical metaphors, such as His Footstool, His “sending down” rain and revelation, and so on, as discussed earlier. I would like to suggest, however, that the Qur’an prefers His immanence, despite its esoteric undertones, as a more accurate mode of expressing GOD’s transcendence.
Why do I say so? Consider the names of AL-LAH most frequently mentioned in the Qur’an (other than “AL-LAH” itself). Are they characteristic of an external object or of an inwardly experienced personality? The names most often repeated are also the ones mentioned first in the Qur’an and the ones most recited in every Muslim prayer cycle, for which al-Fatihah (the Opening) is mandatory reading. They are Ar-Rahman (The Gracious) and Ar-Rahim (The Compassionate). These names portray what we can only feel in terms of an inner life; they mean nothing without the ‘who-ness’ of One Who Loves. And if love is not inherently ‘in here’, I do not know what is.
Given the education, training, and cultural perspective of the modern adherent of scientism, it is only natural that his first question regarding God will be ‘Why can’t I see Him?’ (instead of, for example, ‘Why can’t I love Him?’) He will go on insisting that this type of question is intrinsically reasonable for as long as he fails to see the built-in bias of posing ‘out there’ criteria for a reality that must also be revisualized as ‘in here’. Owing to his object-oriented belief system, he may never subject himself to a ‘look-in’ for God.
Many believers are likewise stuck in their adherence to a spatially framed ‘out there’ type of transcendence, and consequently suffer from various forms of spiritual aridity, legalism, and literalism. Scientists may be excused for their ignorance of this inner spiritual domain, but how can the faithful forget that GOD comes in between the human being and his heart, and that to Him you will be gathered (Q8:24)?
The GOD You Already Know 