Dr Muhammad Maroof Shah

Is there an atheist in the sense that he denies not a particular model of the divine but the Sacred as such? No. No sane and intelligent man has ever been one.  An atheist denies God as the Ground of Being or Power to be, as Creativity and as Beauty. Let us try to understand one of the aspects of the Sacred as Beauty that no atheist can afford to deny.  There are degrees of tawhid and the atheist may well be in a lower rung but a degree he does possess. This is what easily follows from comprehending the traditional metaphysical doctrine of God as Reality. Ibn Arabi argued for it. Let us explore less abstruse ways of appreciating impossibility of being an atheist in the sense of denial of Sacred embodied in the Mystery, Wonder and Beauty and especially focus on the last mentioned.       Mircea Eliade, one of the most distinguished scholars of religion, has explained how man is a worshipping animal or Homo sapiens is Homo religiosus: …“sacred” is an element of the structure of conscious

God is, according to a great medieval sage, What is. It would converge with what Ibn Arabi would call the Real and Wittgenstein would phrase as what is the case and from another angle, Simone Weil would call as “attention without distraction,” and another mystic as “choiceless awareness.” The Quranic claim that there can’t be entertained any doubt regarding Allah ( afillahi shakkun ) is echoed in an old Asante proverb stating that “No one needs to show God to a child”–the point is that some things are quite obvious. Stace has identified God with the Mystery that wells up everywhere and in everything – the depth of anything that fails to be penetrated in conceptual terms. Pannikar has identified the divine with the “dimension of more and better” of being or “the infinite inexhaustibility of any real being, its ever-open character, its mystery . . . its freedom.” For him God is a symbol for the whole reality and approvingly quotes a definition stating that “God is a circle whose centre i

If Islam is submission to Truth/Reality who is against it? If this Reality is known or manifest by what is the Praised One, the Embodiment of all perfections that human nature aspires for, who can dare to oppose it? If the beauty of Muhammad known to select saints and sung by such poets as Jami and Iqbal is known by any human, it is impossible to oppose it or ignore it. If we note the distinction between Muhammad as known by Muslims in history and Muhammad as known by Homo religiosus as its own aspiration for transcendence/ideality or the image of perfection one adores, as the Messenger sent not only to all humans but all creation, as the Mercy of the worlds known and unknown, as the Envoy of the Absolute as such and not a person so and so, it needs to be understood if it is possible or feasible to deny Muhammad. If blasphemy against the Sun is impossible or vacuous that is best ignored, doesn’t it call for revisiting the current debate on blasphemy on theological and other grounds?   

Transposing a famous maxim about God to the Devil one could say that if there were no Devil, it would have been necessary to invent one. To the credit of the Devil goes much adventure in the odyssey of life including the first one of leaving the Garden of Eden for earth, sharpening of our faculties and capabilities and unfolding of good as he is the principle of resistance, variety and colour in the drama of life and universal drive or march for excellence or assertion of individual talent  and ten thousand uses of the ego in the struggle and enrichment of life. It is not only the poet-philosophers such as Goethe and Iqbal who have paid rich tributes to it but  great saints and sages of various traditions. In fact the key functions attributed to the Devil such as leading people astray and inflicting loss are in the Muslim Tradition functions of Divine Names ( Al-Mudill, Az-Zar ). Jung in his Answer to Job was not too off the mark in identifying the Devil as the left hand of God and pr

Understanding the meaning of Ibn Arabi’s universalism for contemporary world and its exclusivist ideologies We are living, from centuries in the Muslim world and from around a century in the West, in the times of Ibn Arabi and Rumi as it is they who are at vital for both academic and popular intellectual, spiritual and literary landscapes today. Let us  explore something about Ibn Arabi, the most influential Sufi-metaphysician and the greatest exponent of Divine Love in the history of Islam. About him it has rightly been remarked that the subsequent Muslim thought is largely a footnote on him. And he interests almost everyone who cares to think or practise spirituality as he has ample room for all kinds of outsiders – atheists, sinners etc. His dialogues with previous prophets and saints constitute one of the most profound encounters with transcendence and proof of intimations of the higher life of Spirit. His notion of man is most comprehensive in world history.      Ibn Arabi has sta

Exclusivist view of salvation of Muslims that holds sway amongst the laity and even theologians trained in seminaries has been a source of much debate amongst modern intellectuals and certain theologians influenced by modernity or postmodern hermeneutics. It has also been the Achilles’ heel of Muslim rationalism. Given widespread contacts between different faith communities in the face of globalization, classical attempts of defense of exclusivism need rethinking and certain more inclusive arguments need to be revisited.      Regarding apparently exclusivist verses “ Verily the religion, in the sight of God, is Islam… ” and “ If anyone desires a religion other than Islam never will it be accepted of him; in the hereafter he will be in the ranks of those who have lost, ”  further observations made by several scholars are in order. Several Quran translators including M.A.S. Abdel Haleem insist on using the lowercase “i” suggesting that “islam is being used as a verb, which means submissi

One of the most important problems in history is failure to admit that one doesn’t know or that there remain other options or possibilities besides the one’s chosen one or that one’s position is probable and could be questioned/reviewed by oneself or the other. Islam’s path breaking announcement expressed in its shahadah implied  bracketing all claims to finality/certitude  and recognizing that God alone is reality/truth/knowledge/certitude/beauty. From this metaphysical or ontological openness follow radical consequences including rejections of all absolutisms in the world of contingency. Even if we find certain statements in the canon so clear and unambiguous, the necessity of human filter/interpretation of it and multiplicity of contexts and possibilities of  change in their reception with time/situation introduce element of uncertainty or need to qualify one’s dogmatic absolutism. Without questioning the sovereignty of the Good and the absoluteness of the command and sacrality of