26. Stepping Back from the Picture (1)

The material in this blog is now available at amazon.com under the title: Ideas Inspired by the Qur’an.

Previous page

Imagine yourself within a place of worship. You are surrounded by all the elements that could enhance its atmosphere of sanctity – other worshippers, the lighting, the grandeur of the architecture, and whatever objects are commonly found in your place of prayer. Now close your eyes and remove them, one by one. Discard the flowers. Put out the candles. Take down the pictures. Block out all the shiny surfaces and ornaments. Efface the inscriptions. Hide the books. Eliminate every religious symbol. Then set to work upon the seats, the carpets, the walls, the windows, the lights, and even the other worshippers; delete them all. Now open your mind’s eye and look around at who remains. Is GOD still there, or did you lose Him in the midst of all that subtraction?

Ideally, without all the trappings and accessories that typically clutter our idea of what faith means, you should be left with a clear, still serenity of Endless Presence. And if, moreover, you were able to subtract your own self from that scene, then the clarity of His Absolute Here-and-Nowness should be that much more immediate and lasting. Anyone who has truly experienced this Presence knows that He is not an object in our minds; rather it is our minds that rise as objects within the luminescent field of His Transcendent Intellect as it shines through us, illuminating what we see before us as we stand before him, gazing where He gazes.

I say this by way of preamble to bringing back the topic of framing. Whatever frame we may devise to explain what we believe, the final frame, the one that determines how all our frames will be encompassed and judged, belongs to the One Who comes at us from behind, i.e., where we can neither see Him nor frame Him.

The conditions for understanding this Absolute Frame are presented in the Qur’an. No frame that negates its expansive and forceful message will be allowed to stand on the Day of Resurrection. For that reason, a reader of this work of mine, and in particular the previous Chapter, may question why I do not simply declare the Qur’an to be my frame, and dispense with all these “Ideas”.

When ancient mariners observed the night sky, they affirmed the reality of what they saw. Attributing them to God’s handiwork would make them His signs, and thus provide them a rudimentary frame, but other physical or polytheistic explanations were also prevalent, both then and now. Mere sighting, however, would not suffice if they wanted to navigate by the stars. They would have to differentiate between the planets and the ‘fixed’ stars, record the regularities and discrepancies in their motions, and develop practical guidelines to account for changes related to the time of year and their own location on the surface of the Earth. In all these ways, therefore, the signs, i.e., the stars, required a conceptual framework if they were to be meaningful for navigators.

Modern astronomers, likewise, do not stop with merely noting the presence of the stars in the sky; their main concern is to compile detailed observations that lead to theories and comprehensive accounts of what the stars can tell us about, say, their physical and chemical composition, the age of the universe, or how planets such as ours are formed.

Acceptance of a sign is, therefore, only the first step in a process of multiple framings that, one after another, enhance its scope and explanatory power. This process is the very heart of the scientific enterprise, and each stage in it is essential to its increasing capacity to link the phenomenon or sign, whatever it is, to its ultimate Origin, namely GOD. What suffices for a believer, that the stars were created by God, and to glorify Him, should be honoured for having identified the true origin and purpose of the whole enterprise, even if it fails to fill in the cognitive gaps between what we see and what we claim to believe. The work of science is to patiently bridge those chasms in our understanding, and thus should be honoured by the believer even if scientists refuse to admit that GOD is their final goal. The signs, by themselves, do not suffice to guide us to God or any other understanding of reality; it is by GOD’s guidance in having us interpret them that they acquire the power to point us toward the particular absolute that constitutes our framing principle and purpose.

I consider the verses of the Qur’an to be analogous to stars that can be admired for their beauty and brilliance, but nonetheless do not provide the same illumination as the blaze of ultimate Revelation on the Day of Judgement. They bear enough information for us to construct a coherent frame from their scintillating points, but that work can be accomplished, and has been accomplished, in many different ways. They can, moreover, be forced into a framework that construes them, as many unbelievers have done, to be the exhalations of a madman, the contrivances of a poet, or the distillation of various narratives and traditions endemic to 6th-century Arabia and its environs. In other words, the same signs that underlie a vibrant faith in AL-LAH can also serve as the material for arguments against faith, for ridicule, distortion, and outright rejection.

The Qur’an is not – and was not intended to be – a systematic text of the type we would publish as a textbook nowadays. Just as an ancient mariner interpreted the stars quite otherwise than a modern astronomer does, so do the traditional frameworks of jurisprudence (fiqh), history (sirah), exegesis (tafsir), and dogmatics (‘aqidah) offer frames of interpretation that sufficed for the intellectual demands of those times but may not be particularly relevant or convincing for these latter days of ours. Most of us, myself included, have grown up and been educated in a zeitgeist that is sceptical or dismissive of religious truth and continues to intellectually, culturally, economically, and technologically dominate the entire planet. This Western, technical, materialistic, and secular outlook has embedded its framing mechanisms so deeply in our collective and individual psyche, and in our practical, day-to-day lives, that we have immense difficulty absorbing, let alone comprehending, alternative pictures of reality, such as those of the Qur’an.

Next page