Who isn’t a Muslim?To be is to be a Muslim affirming Muhammad (S.A.W)
To be true to theomorphic nature or divine image in which man is created or to know ourselves (the Self in us) is the demand of scriptures. The Prophet is there not to call us to the person called Muhammad (Islam is not Muhammadenism) but to the Din-i-Hanif and established way – Tradition/Sunnah understood as well established way – that has been, in essence, affirmed by all those who have not forgotten their primordial covenant/true nature and stand praised/sanctified. Our passions, our ego, our tendency to forget or ingratitude make us heedless towards this primordial covenant of the soul with the Divine/Self/Spirit and necessitate Revelation. Saints and Hukama are those who especially guard against these negative tendencies and come to discover the treasure within that is affirmed by the prophets and they in turn become best explicators of the wisdom of the prophets. As such we see prophets, sages/traditional philosophers, saints, first rate theologians/ulama across traditions on the same page on the question of Primacy of Revelation/Intellection/attachment to the Absolute and corresponding theosis/assimilation of divine attributes or perfection of ethics/submission to the Nomosand centrality of the Envoy of the Absolute. Muhammad as both the Centre – the Equilibrium is the kingpin of this posited.
Muslim Sufis have extended the notion of Muhammad the way Pannikar does of Christic principle to embrace without exception the totality of being, reality as a whole and equating like ‘Christophany’ the Light of Muhammadan with universal ontology. And in a well-known hadith of the Prophet (S.A.W) we are told: On the Day of Judgement, a herald angel shall cry out [God's word] from beneath the Throne, saying: 'O nation of Muhammad! All that was due to me from you I forgive you now, and only the rights which you owed one another remain. Thus forgive one another, and enter Heaven through My Mercy.' The British scholar T.J. Winters has noted that the promised intercession of Muhammad on the Day of Judgment may well be effectively inexhaustible and available to all mankind. Noting that the Prophet has been sent to all mankind and such Prophetic statements as “My intercession is for those who testify that there is no god but God, sincerely, their heart true to their tongue and their tongue true to their heart” he argues against imagined limitations on the dominion of mercy that the substance of the Prophet embodies. He also cites the famous Indian-Yemeni scholar al-Zabidi (d. 171) that “it is possible that some of the Prophet ﷺ’s intercession will be for all religious communities.”
The claim of superiority or comprehensiveness is ultimately grounded in/justified at the level of esoterism and it assumes transcendence/embracing of rather than negation of previous religions or exoteric dimension. The Quran consistently emphasizes submission to Reality/Revealed Norm and links felicity to faith and righteous action and castigates ingratitude and pride or arrogance towards the Real. It has nowhere party spirit that recruits followers to a particular person called Muhammad. Incidentally the most fecund intellectual and spiritual current of Sufism in Islam has understood Muhammad as higher existential or life giving Light of Muhammad that informs/embraces or mirrors other prophets/faith communities as well and as such is implicitly affirmed in every tradition that submits to rather than rebels against the Real/Truth/Revealed Norm or Way. One may or mayn’t have come across/known Muhammad – more than two third of humans never had and may never have good opportunity to properly know historical Muhammad but every man, by virtue of human state, encounters the other or is bound to respond to the question of authenticity/openness to Being and thus its saving graces/participation in the Mystery of Being/Love/Freedom or commitment to ultimate concern which constitute saving truths. Islam is not an identity but truth and what saves is truth and not identity and as Soroush put it:
I believe that the Islam of identity should yield to the Islam of truth. The latter can coexist with other truths; the former, however, is, by its very nature, belligerent and bellicose. It is the Islam of war, not the Islam of peace. Two identities would fight each other, while two truths would cooperate.
What it means to affirm Muhammad? Nothing in the sense of accepting a new President of world whose currency will now count. Only to consent to be transformed by the Word he brings and as such it is existential response. Opening to love/submission to truth is what delivers one. This can be understood by all. Belief in a prophet is a means to commit oneself to the Message brought by the Prophet. Prophetic function involves participation in saving Logos/readiness to be transformed by certain ethico-spiritual regimen. The Prophet doesn’t bring anything new and as such only affirms the old or just reminds and as such his advent doesn’t alter the scheme or basic logic of salvation itself. Given the fact that there have been multiple prophets simultaneously or in history all delivering salvifically efficacious message implies that it is what the prophets bring or stand for (metaphysically, attachment to truth/Absolute) that is the key to salvation. One doesn’t thereby imply that the Prophet’s presence is not in itself a saving grace but that this presence as such means much for a very small fraction of his audience but the rest are saved by the Word or receptivity to the content or following the Way that religion consists in. As Hick noted, the basis of efficacious salvific process involves “the transformation from self-centeredness to Reality-centeredness” in this life.
The way no community has copyright over the Sun, Muslims don’t have over the Messenger/Mercy for all the worlds and the notion of the best applied to him needs to be understood in proper terms (one must keep in mind the Quranic explicit command not to distinguish between the prophets and special grace or fazl to some of them) to make sense of “outsiders.” The claim of being the best or final is vacuous if it refers to particular form as that would absolutize that form and that contradicts the principle that what is sought by religion transcends forms. It can only refer to an ideality. As Shaykh Isa Nuruddin Schuon explains:
Firstly, this designation of “the best” refers to the Logos, which is the prototype of the cosmos in the Principle, or of the world in God; and in this case the epithet doesn’t refer to any man. Secondly “the best” is Muhammed in as much as he manifests or personifies the Logos, every other Messenger(Rasul) is equally “the best”. Thirdly, “the best” is Muhammad in as much as he alone – in accordance with the framework of perspective – manifests the whole Logos, the other Messengers manifesting it only in part, which amounts to saying that Muhammad is “the best” in as much as he personifies the Islamic perspective, the man who reveals it necessarily the best but as much can be said, of course, of every other Messenger within the framework of his own Message. Fourthly, Muhammad is the best in as much as he represents a quality of Islam by which it surpasses other religions; but every integral religion necessarily possesses such an unequalable quality, lacking which it would not exist.
If all metaphysics is derivable from La Illaha Illallah, as has been maintained and Muhammad-ur-Rasoolullah encompasses all archetypal perfections that are there, we see quintessential expression for every religion’s ideal in twin shahadah (testimonies) of Islam.
AyatullahKhomeni had written to Gurbachov to consider reading Ibn Arabi to appreciate what Islam is truly about. Similarly Muhammad Hameedullah had noted that the best Western minds could be attracted to Islam through the mediation of Ibn Arabi. He has been vindicated in the conversion to Islam of towering metaphysicians/veritable scholars of comparative religion of the traditionalist school including Frithjof Schuon(Shaykh Isa Nuruddin) as it was mediated by Shaykh Alawi who in turn explicated and exuded the fragrance of the school of Ibn Arabi. Let us read Islam’s Shahadah explicated by Schuon and challenge a refutation by anyone and appreciate its irresistible beauty and power for believers and non-believers.
Schuon translates, in his classic work on the meaning of Islam for contemporary audience, Understanding Islam, two testimonies of Islam in a manner that it is hard to see if any one capable of discernment or testifying to the call of intelligence not blinded by passions or ego or hubris can exclude himself/herself from affirming them, especially the later testimony. He writes:
The doctrine of Islam consists of two statements: first "There is no divinity (or reality, or absolute) save the sole Divinity (or Reality, or Absolute)" (La ilahailla 'Llah), and "Muhammad (the Glorified, the Perfect) is the Messenger (the spokesman, the intermediary, the manifestation, the symbol) of the Divinity" (MuhammadunRasulu 'Llah); these are the first and the second Testimonies (Shahadatan) of the faith.
Islam’s two axiomatic certainties, Schuon notes, are that "God alone is" and the second that "all things are attached to God." In other words: "nothing is absolutely evident save the Absolute"; then, following from this truth "All manifestation, and so all that is relative, is attached to the Absolute." And “All metaphysical truths are comprised in the first of these Testimonies and all eschatological truths in the second.” The first Shahadah includes “the second in an eminent degree.” Realizing the second Shahiidah means first of all
becoming fully conscious that the world - or manifestation - is "not other" than God or the Principle, since to the degree that it has reality it can only be that which alone "is," or in other words it can only be divine; realizing this Shahadah thus means seeing God everywhere and everything in Him. "He who has seen me," said the Prophet, "has seen God"; now everything is the "Prophet," on the one hand in respect of the perfection of existence and on the other in respect of the perfections of mode or expression.
This may be read to imply that whosoever truly speaks of God, speaks of Muhammad as “all things are charged with the grandeur of God.” In the final analysis, as Schuon notes, the second Shahadah, being like the first a divine Word or "Name," “ in the end actualizes the same knowledge as the first by virtue of the oneness of essence of the Word or Names of God.” “Islam recalls to man not so much what he should know, do and say, as what intelligence, will and speech are, by definition. The Revelation does not super add new elements but unveils the fundamental nature of the receptacle.” He further notes that the texture and course of our salvation are “prefigured by our theomorphism: since we are transcendent intelligence and free will, it is this intelligence and this will, or it is transcendence and freedom, which will save us.”
In Unitarian metaphysics that Sufis expound, all the joys, all the graces, all the beauties, all the wonders that there are owe ultimately to the effect of different divine names which derive their power to express by what we call Haqiqat-i-Muhammadayi. In simple terms what we call Sifat as distinguished from Zat is called Muhammad by Sufis. To quote a succinct formulation of Sufi doctrine regarding Muhammad by well-known Indian Sufi teacher Inayat Khan:
According to Sufi tenets the two aspects of the supreme Being are termed Zá t and Sifat, the Knower and the Known. The former is Allah and the latter Mohammed. Zát being only one in its existence, cannot be called by more than one name, which is Allah; and Sifat, being manifold in four different involutions, has numerous names, the sum of them all being termed Mohammed. Zát projects Sifat from its own self and absorbs it within itself. The positive has no independent existence, yet it is real because projected from the real, and it may not be regarded as an illusion. Human ignorance persists in considering Zát to be separate from Sifat, and Sifat independent of Zát.
Now those who might object to this account on the grounds of theology or aqeeda need to keep in view difference between Muhammad of history and Muhammad of Esotericism. One may drop the term Muhammad and call the Principle of Manifestation by any other name. In its simplest terms Sufis call that which we perceive as an aspect of Muhammad. You might call it by any other name or simple Manifesting Reality. There is only a linguistic and not real difference between those (like IbnTaymiyah) who have apprehensions regarding such usage and those who have none (like IbnArabi).
Sufi celebration of the Beauty that is smiling in every beautiful form is to be understood in this light. To illustrate few verses of Kashmiri Sufi poet Hubbi:
Love of God the Freedom
The summons of Love no escaping
Let us go celebrating
It is the time of festivity
In the lovers house wine shall be served
The secret of Union disclosing
Let us go celebrating
Unveiled is the Beauty
Named Muhammad
In Names and Forms manifesting
Let us go celebrating
Sufi poets of all hues sing of losing the ego for the sake of love/God/Self/Joy of Unity. For Sufis Islam means, in the language of aesthetics, transcendence of self will that separates us from God the Reality and thus getting absorbed in contemplating Divine Beauty, getting drunk in contemplating It and dancing out of joy. “There is no beauty but Beauty” is how Unitarians translate shahadah.
According to Sufi metaphysics all experiences partake of the reality of Muhammad. The Light of Muhammad illumines everything. In fact we see because of the borrowed light. Muhammad as the be all and end all of all our endeavours as Iqbal says. The “Praised One” is praised in every form by all those who praise.
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