Revisiting the Debate on Islam vis-à-vis Religious Pluralism

For someone baffled by diversity of religions and comparable zeal and commitment shown by believers to their respective traditions and almost universal fact of someone born in some faith choosing to die in that faith, a few points call for attention.

    Our situation resembles that of pilgrims travelling in the night to some unknown destination. Pilgrims are divided into different groups, holding different flags distinct identity of which is not clear during night hours. Pilgrims hold fast to their own groups imagining that others have misidentified the road to the destination. It is not quite clear if the destination is one or how to describe it for many pilgrims. Pilgrims are mostly mistrustful of one another’s travel documents. Many, however, imagine that they are following the well-trodden path of pious ancestors first lit by respective founders. During the dark hours it is not clear if the paths of different pilgrims criss cross. There are some pilgrims who stick to their own regimen of journey and don’t comment upon destination or travel documents of others while others are desperate to convert others to the path they have been travelling themselves for reasons mostly hereditary.  There are others who think that one’s path is best lit by oneself following diligently what the Prophets/Masters have told. A few daring souls choose to travel along different paths to experience first-hand the difference if any. A minority of pilgrims take the trouble of participating in/reading about living ways of different pilgrims. They argue that the light shown by the Prophets/Avatars/Masters must be and is accessible to them so that they confidently travel with that borrowed/revealed light.

    Religions can either be all false or all true in certain sense and the attempt to reserve truth, especially saving truth or whole truth to one religion, breaks under its own weight as religions fall or stand together. No religion invokes its own authority alone but the Tradition of which it is the most recent expression. The question of historical preservation of certain scriptural texts is not insignificant but the Quran doesn’t make much of it if it does make anything of it (that has been hotly debated and remains controversial amongst both traditional and modern scholars) and one could also ask if the historical preservation or corruption could affect the most basic salvific truths as well.

    For the Quran, it is clear that God has sent only a reminder of what has already been revealed and thus no new/alternative religion that competes or supersedes/formats but affirms previous revelations and that God has appointed different ways (sharaya/manahij) for people, that God will resolve differences of doctrines in the otherworld, that different revealed religions are de facto recognized and accordingly dealt with, that certain arrangements in marriages between believers of different revealed religions are solemnized, that God doesn’t want one path/minhaj (as distinguished from Ad-Din – the Tradition – that grounds, at deeper levels, all revealed/authentic/sanctified paths) to be imposed. The Quranic paradigm is dialogue amongst religions not to the end of proving one alone in the right or any competitive elimination/domination of anyone of them. Islam it upholds as saving common universal truth from Adam/Noah to Muhammad (PBUH) is not a religion that can be compared to other religions but the Religion, the primordial religion, Ad-Din al-qayyim. Simplistic bland denial of salvation to righteous believers of other religions disposes four fifth or at least two third of humankind to eternal hell for purely accidental reasons of not being born in particular religion/land and contravenes arguments from the canon that point to immediate or ultimate salvation of vast majority of people.

    For Islam that requires affirming all revealed traditions/scriptures, known and unknown, as a condition for being a Muslim and has nurtured a civilization that assimilated/engaged with diverse religious/cultural forms and has, relatively, better record of peaceful coexistence with other traditions and great textual and other resources for building impressive non-exclusivist approaches as in Sufis, poets and Muslim sages, certain pluralistic ideas in the air today present an opportunity and not an embarrassment.

    There are a number of both scriptural and rational arguments against exclusivism and for a perspectivism of sorts (noted and emphasized and elaborated by Sufi sages) which allows multiple paths to coexist. This explain why Mu’tazilıte theologians regarded the ‘People of the Book’ as responsible for acting upon their revelation whose substance has remained recognisable despite the neglect and alteration (tahrıf)it has suffered” and Reza Shah Kazemi notes that for Islam, the plurality of religious paths to the One is integral to it and is perceived as “a reflection of the spiritual infinity of the One” while as a galaxy of modern scholars from divergent backgrounds and points of view including FazlurRahman, FaridEssack, Abdul KarimSuorush, Muhammad Sharur, Abu Nasr Zayd, Asghar Ali Engineer, Javed Ahmed Ghamidi, FarhadShafti– to name only a few – have advanced a battery of arguments that cumulatively serve to question the perception that exclusivist reading is more orthodox, uncontested within emergent Muslim community and classical exegetes, rational and literal or supported by mass of prophetic traditions,  actual practice of the State and creedal statements that have had great influences in Muslim communities 

    For the Quran, as IbnArabi noted, the only recognized binary is those who know and those who don’t know. One may unfold this by noting that the often used terminology islam vs. kufr/shirk(and please note not Islam vs. other religions) is really rooted in those who know/pay heed/observe awe before truth and those who don’t know/are heedless/defiant towards truth. Keeping this in mind, one may eschew the whole framework of approaching the question of which religion/wisdom tradition saves and which doesn’t save or taking traditions as alternative mobile companies recruiting customers for providing mobile services. 

    This may be done by turning to Ibn Arabi who though uses popular theological or religious idiom employs deeper metaphysical idiom that grounds theological or religious one. He attempts to solve all eschatological problems by inviting our attention to the dialectics of the Divine Names that constitutes the whole of history, sacred and profane or other-worldly and this-worldly. For him the Real alone is and what we see as need to save is imaginary imposition of bondage by some who fail to see that it is all the time the Real playing or displaying its treasures. It is Mercy that constitutes the gift of being and this gift can’t be squandered by anyone - “there is a divinity that shapes our ends. Rough hew them how we will.” Life drives us to taste its own treasures or joys and willy nilly we move forward, even at the cost of great pain or struggle. This drive is itself a form or manifestation of Mercy. Hell is imaginary opposition or veil between us and the divine and this veil is rent asunder by what is called experience. The loss of innocence that constitutes the drama of Fall constitutes, on the deeper analysis, a projected game plan to secure access to treasures of the Spirit that aren’t otherwise accessible. The affirmation of the world is in its own a salvific programme. Every moment, every experience conceals a salvific dimension. All actions are owned by God and blessed when seen from the eyes of God though this may cost a great deal from the perspective of man. For IbnArabi man doesn’t exist in his own right apart from the Real and as such his salvation lies in recognizing his own nothingness or becoming the mirror of the Real. The Real  above – within and without, all pervading, the Origin and the End, the Essence, the Knower or only Knower in us – is what is to realized as already the case and thus the recognition that we are always on a blessed ground and all is our own creation, our own play staged for manifesting our own joy. It is then that Hafiz’s point about owning the sin out of courtesy and the talk of sin as childish is comprehended and we are able to appreciate how art is an ally in salvation and how, in Islamic Tradition, art has been a preeminent means of saving people.

    Given Islam’s commitment to the Absolute and saving function of intelligence it can’t allow any pluralism that eschews this Absolute or degenerates into relativism of sorts that has no foundation in Truth and it upholds supraformal transcendent unity of religions and not a unity of dogmatic creeds/rituals or forms. Traditional Islam concedes wahdat-i-din (unity of religion) instead of wahdat-i-adyan (unity of religions) and opposes shallow syncretism and monochromatic uniformitarianism that fails to respect both the difference and the uniqueness of every tradition. It is in this light we can comprehend Ibn Arabi’s batting for special character – comprehensiveness – of the path of Muhammad (S.A.W) and his critical remarks on other traditions such as Christianity that was framed by the organizers of Crusades against Islam in both political and theological terms.