Openings: From the Qurʻan to the Islamic humanities Author: James Winston Morris Persistent link: http://hdl.handle.net/2345/bc-ir:107288 This work is posted on eScholarship@BC, Boston College University Libraries. Pre-print. These materials are made available for use in research, teaching and private study, pursuant to U.S. Copyright Law. The user must assume full responsibility for any use of the materials, including but not limited to, infringement of copyright and publication rights of reproduced materials. Any materials used for academic research or otherwise should be fully credited with the source. The publisher or original authors may retain copyright to the materials. 1 [Incomplete draft of future publication (World Wisdom Publishers), copyright 2017 James W. Morris] Openings : From the Qur’an to the Islamic Humanities by James Winston Morris 2 Table of Contents Preface: [to complete] ................................................................................................................. 4 Introduction: Connecting the Qur’an, Walaya, and the Qur’an ............................................... 5 Part I: “Seeking God’s Face”: Discovering the Dance of Walāya and Wilāya 16 Part II. Approaches to Religious Understanding: 1. Surrender and Realisation: Imam Ali on the Conditions For Genuine Religious Understanding................................................................ 34 2. Basic Dimensions of Islamic Esotericism: al-Ghazālī’s Explanation...................... 47 3. The Foundation of Spiritual Practice: Ibn ‘Arabi’s Book of the Quintessence, Concerning What Is Indispensable for the Spiritual Seeker ....... 55 4. Imaging Islam: Intellect and Imagination in Islamic Philosophy, Poetry and Painting ............................................................................................ 71 Part III From the Qur’an to the Islamic Humanities: 5. Encountering the Qur'an: Contexts and Approaches ................................................ 98 6. Translating the Qur’an and the Challenge of Communication ............................. 136 7. Dramatizing the Sura of Joseph: An Introduction to the Islamic Humanities. ...... 149 8. The Mysteries of Ihsān: Natural Contemplation and The Spiritual Virtues in the Qur’an ........................................................................................... 198 9. Walāya and the Islamic Humanities: Between Written Traditions and Popular Spirituality ................................................................................... 213 10. Remembrance and Repetition: Qur’anic Dimensions of Islamic Art .................. 261 11. Envisaging the Spirit: The Basic Structure of ‘Attār’s Conference of the Birds ................................................................................... 269 3 12. The “Ascension of the Word”: Rhetoric and Reader Engagement in Rūmī’s Mathnawī.. ..................................................................................... 276 13. Transfiguring Love: Perspective Shifts and the Contextualization of Experience in the Ghazals of Hafiz ............................................................ 322 14. Communication and Spiritual Pedagogy: Exploring the Methods of Investigation in Classical Islamic Thought. ............................................... 350 15. Mapping Islamic Theologies: Contexts and Connections ................................... 359 III. Looking Forward: Prospects and Challenges 16. Islamic Studies in the Perspective of Religious Studies: the Centrality of the Qur’an and the Islamic Humanities .................................................... 378 17. Which Republic? The Public and Private Dimensions of Islamic Esotericism................................................................................... 395 18. Civilisation as Dialogue: the Challenges of Spirituality and Philosophy in Mulla Sadra and Today ............................................................................. 412 19. Pathways to Understanding: Exploring the Intersections of Religious Studies and Islam .......................................................................... 414 20. The Unique Opportunities and Challenges Facing American Muslims in the New Century ......................................................................................... 430 Additional Sources: Related Qur'an and Hadith Selections The Human Condition: Some Representative Qur’anic Verses ................................. 444 Religious Diversity and the Unity of Faith ....................................................................... Spiritual Intelligence and Degrees of Realization ............................................................ Beyond Fires and Gardens: The Goal of Spiritual Perfection ......................................... 4 Awliya' and al-Qawm, Rahimūn and ‘Ibād al-Rahmān… ”Books” as People. [complete list...] ............................................................................ On Disputation and “Making Up” things about God ....................................................... Foundational Hadith in the Islamic Humanities ......................................................... 456 Frequently Cited Hadith on the Vision of God .......................................................... 461 Hadith of the Mi’rāj (from Sahīh of Muslim) ................................................................... List of Works Cited ..................................................................................................................... Acknowledgments (earlier publication details)? 5 PREFACE [2-4 pages...] 6 INTRODUCTION CONNECTING THE QUR’AN AND THE ISLAMIC HUMANITIES Verily We have opened up for you an opening making clear. (Qur’an 48:1) (God said) “For Me, the most blessed of My friends is the person of faith who is unburdened (by cares or possessions), who takes pleasure in prayer, who carries out well his devotion to his Lord and eagerly serves Him in secret. He is concealed among the people; no one points him out. His sustenance is barely sufficient, and he is content with that.... His death comes quickly, there are few 1 mourners, and his estate is small.” The English word “opening”, like the multi-faceted Qur’anic expression it translates here, goes to the very heart of our subject, in several senses. For the Arabic verbal noun fath refers at once to an act—and in the Qur’an, above all to the inherently mysterious, specifically divine action—of opening, beginning, inspiring, introducing, disclosing, inspiring, or of suddenly and unexpectedly (as a divine grace) bestowing triumph, release, or success. Hence in the technical vocabulary of later Islamic spirituality, the same expression normally refers more particularly to the dramatically sudden granting, through grace, of a revealing spiritual insight or inspiration. As such, this familiar, yet always mysterious process of spiritual “opening”—including its essential human preparations, as well as its eventual consequences, obligations and further responsibilities—is at the heart of that most universal human challenge: how do we discover, and then put into practice, the indispensable living connections between the revealed, historically transmitted forms of religious words, symbols and practices, on the one hand, and their actually intended spiritual realities and further creative, practical consequences? At first, of course, we naturally tend to discover 1 This famous “divine saying” (hadíth qudsí) is included, with minor variations, in the major hadith collections of Tirmidhī, Ibn Māja, and Ibn Hanbal. See the full text and explanatory notes in W.A. Graham, Divine Word and Prophetic Word in Early Islam (The Hague, 1977), pp. 120-121. 7 the actual existential reality of such “openings”—as opposed to our own culture’s particular inherited models and examples, religious and otherwise—in the context of life’s unavoidably dramatic trials and learning experiences, whether they take the intrinsically memorable form of suffering, or appear as what the Qur’an calls the “beautiful tests” of unexpectedly positive, welcome, apparently fortunate new circumstances and opportunities. But the dramatic impact of those initial illuminations soon gives way, upon reflection, to a growing recognition of the everyday, indeed constant presence of the deeper processes of spiritual intelligence, and to an ongoing awareness of the constantly unsettling contrast between the largely reflexive parameters of our ordinary life and the presentiment of those deeper spiritual possibilities (and responsibilities) that are awakened and illumined by each successive 2 experience of true openings. Now while each chapter of this book is devoted to various dimensions of that challenge within historically different Islamic contexts, past and present, one cannot approach this problem very adequately without recognizing the full universality of the recurrent dilemmas involved, for example as 3 they are so beautifully and memorably dramatized in Plato’s dialogues. And as we find throughout Plato (or equivalent seminal figures in every spiritual tradition), any real appreciation of the practical spiritual centrality of these “openings”—as of the deeper realms of being, reality and value they gradually reveal and imply—is inseparable from a growing self-conscious awareness of that surrounding social complex of problematically conventional, shifting, taken-for-granted norms, limits and assumptions that intrinsically deny the very possibility of any such opening. That is, the very rarity and unmistakable