DATUK SERI JAMIL KHIR BAHAROM HAS NO LUCUS STANDI TO ISSUE ORDER ON ISLAM

Datuk Seri Jamil Khir Baharom has no Lucus Standi to issue order on Islam. Islam has no country and no borders and no loyalty to anyone or anything but Islam.

There is a lovely story from the life of the Prophet Muhammad, remembering that a mysterious visitor came upon him and his companions. The visitor, later revealed to be the archangel Gabriel, proceeded to sit intimately next to Muhammad and quiz the Prophet. He asked Muhammad about three increasingly higher and deeper levels of religiosity, which the Prophet answered sequentially as Islam (wholehearted submission to God), Faith and, lastly, Loveliness (ihsan). This third quality the Prophet identified as worshipping God as if we could see the Divine, and if we cannot, to always remember that God nevertheless sees us.

The sequence is fascinating, as it reveals that what we think of as Islam (the attestation to Divine Unity, the performance of the prayers, the pilgrimage to Mecca, the paying of the alms tax, the fast of Ramadan) mark only the very first layer — though the foundational layer — of religiosity. Above that is faith, and above faith is the spiritual and mystical layer of spiritual beauty, for ihsan is literally the realm of actualizing and realizing beauty and loveliness (husn), of bringing beauty into this world and connecting it to God, who is the All-Beautiful.

Throughout Islamic history, this realm of ihsan was most emphatically pursued by the mystics of Islam, the Sufis. Historically, this mystical realm of Islam formed a powerful companion to the legal dimension of Islam (sharia). Indeed, many of the mystics of Islam were also masters of legal and theological realms. The cultivation of inward beauty and outward righteous action were linked in many of important Islamic institutions. In comparing Islam with Judaism, the mystical dimension of Islam was much more prominently widespread than Kabbalah. And unlike the Christian tradition, the mysticism of Islam was not cloistered in monasteries. Sufis were — and remain — social and political agents who went about seeking the Divine in the very midst of humanity.

After the Prophet Muhammad, many of the most influential of all Muslims were and remain mystics. Mawlana Jalal al-Din Balkhi, known to Turks as Mevlana and to Americans as Rumi, remains the most beloved of all Sufi poets, whose Masnavi was perhaps the only work ever compared directly with the Quran. Ibn ‘Arabi, the Spanish Muslim sage, remains the most widely read metaphysician, and his school of “Unity of Being” (Wahdat al-wujud) has been both influential and controversial from Spain to Indonesia. The most important Muslim theologian, al-Ghazali, identified the realm of Sufism as the highest Islamic quest for knowledge, one that dealt most directly with other-worldly matters.

Nor was the practice of Islamic mysticism limited to intellectuals and poets. At the level of popular practice, some of the Sufi shrines received as many (if not more) annual visitors that the Mecca does for the Hajj pilgrimage. Entire Muslim-majority regions (Iran, Turkey, South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, etc.) came to develop understandings of Islam that are and remain inseparable from mystical understandings of Islam. Much of the higher dimensions of Islamic aesthetics (calligraphy and poetry) have been inseparable from Sufism.

And yet, today, the word “Sufi” is a highly suspect one for many modern Muslims, and even thinkers and preachers whose frameworks and anecdotes are permeated with those of the mystical dimension of Islam eschew the mere mention of the word Sufi, either not wanting to alienate their suspicious audience or not wishing to “erode” their authority by connecting their teachings to anything other than the Quran and the example of the Prophet. So how did such a powerful and beautiful dimension of Islam come to be viewed with such suspicion by so many Muslims?

The marginalization of Sufism came about through an initially unlikely perfect storm, an alliance of European Orientalists and conservative/modernist Muslims, whose agenda in demarcating Islam from Sufism ironically supports that of certain New-Agey Universalists who sought to extract Sufism out of Islam. Let’s explore this somewhat odd association a bit more closely.

The Orientalist scholars (whose approach began in Europe and dominated much of the American scholarly engagement with Islam) based their approach on a study of Islam that privileged “classical” legal and theological Arabic texts from 800-1100 C.E. Of all those texts, the most important ones were held to be the ones closest historically to the “foundational” period. The Orientalists became interested in Sufism very early on, almost as early as their translations of the Quran. They found themselves attracted to the deep beauty and wisdom of Sufi poetry, particularly from Persian. Quite inconveniently for them, they were also committed to a bifurcated view that divided the world into Semitic (Arabs and Jews, characterized primarily by law, monotheism, and dry deserts) and Indo-Europeans (Hindus, Europeans and Iranians, who lived through philosophy, art, mysticism and logic). The Orientalists had no problem thinking that entire blocks of humanity share certain “mentalities” and “temperaments” connected to their languages. Even though they admired the poetry of mystics like Sa’di, Hafez and Rumi, they could not admit that Muslims (who were “Semitic” after all) could come up with such beauty, mysticism and poetry. Therefore, the Orientalists decreed that Sufism must be “un-Islamic” and due to Christian, Persian, Hindu or Neoplatonic “influences” — anything but Islam, anything but the experience of Prophet Muhammad in encountering God, which is what the Sufis have always claimed as the primary source of their inspiration!

The Muslim conservative/modernists (what we broadly refer to as the Salafi tradtion) came to have a profound distrust of what might be termed “the tradition(s) of Islam,” believing that the historical tradition of Islamic scholarship — and the scholars who had been the authoritative interpreters of Islam — were increasingly irrelevant to the historical trials and tribulations through which 19th and 20th century Muslims were suffering. They wanted to remain pious and observant Muslims, but believed that the way to return to the “glory days” of Islam was to “return” to the original spirit of vitality and authenticity of Islam, before the influence of “foreign ideas” crept into Islam, sapping its authenticity. These foreign ideas they equated both culturally (the contribution of Persians, Indians, Turks, etc.) and intellectually (the traditions of philosophy, mysticism and all non-scriptural sciences).

The idea for the Muslim modernists was that the remedy for Islam consisted of a textual return “away from the blemishes … of the later phases” back to “yearning for truth” of the founders of Islam. In this, they found themselves oddly in full-agreement with the orientalists. They came to be suspicious of many traditions of Islamic thought and practice that developed through time, including that of Sufism. Perhaps most polemically, they identified Sufism as having contributed to a corrupt and inward-looking mentality that allowed the colonial powers to dominate Muslims. Throughout Islamic history, particular Sufi ideas and practices (such as the “Unity of Being,” certain meditation techniques and commemoration of the Prophet’s birthday) had always been contested by other Muslims. It was in this modern and modernist context that the whole of Islamic mysticism came to be viewed with great suspicion as being un-Islamic if not outright anti-Islamic.

So where do the New Agers come into play? It was only in the 20th century that human beings became capable of uttering a sentence like “I’m not religious, I’m spiritual.” Historically all religious traditions have had mystical dimensions, and their mystical traditions have arisen within the very depth of each tradition, partaking of its key symbols and emulating the spiritual experiences of its main exemplars. It was in this modern context that a deep and new suspicion of the outward forms and institutions of religion was cultivated, with people who believed that they were on the edge (or already inside) a “New Age” of human consciousness. It was these new Agers who, dissatisfied with their own experiences of Judaism and Christianity, turned “East” to the mystical traditions of Buddhism, Hindu traditions and Islam to obtain the mystical truth that they so yearned for — without necessarily wanting to adopt the legal and institutional aspects of those traditions. In many cases, the engagements were complicated by colonial politics, as the “eastern” traditions of wisdom were connected to colonized countries that many of the same Westerners looked down upon, even as they were fascinated by them.

So what we have had for the last few decades is a situation of Orientalists and Salafi Muslims seeking to construct a “real Islam” that is untainted by Sufi dimensions, and many new agers seek to extract a mysticism that stands above and disconnected from wider, broader and deeper aspects of Islam.

Yes we have learned that the human yearning for the Divine, for beauty, for love and for loveliness is too deeply engrained in the human spirit to be partitioned off or exiled. Today, many Muslims world-wide are increasingly dissatisfied with what they see as dry as stale bread interpretations and practices of Islam, and want — and demand — something more spiritual and more beautiful. They know about the deep spiritual experience of the Prophet Muhammad, who came face to face with God, and they too yearn for their own spiritual experiences.

All Muslims seek to emulate the Prophet Muhammad. The Quran reminds them that if you love God, follow Muhammad. The mystically oriented among Muslims take the emulation a bit more literally: If Muhammad arose to have his own face-to-face encounter with the Divine, they too aspire to rise in the footsteps of the Prophet, to have their own meeting with God. As it was said of the great Rumi, they too want to be “off-springs of the soul of Muhammad.”

Omid Safi is a Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina. He is the Co-Chair of the Islamic Mysticism Group at the American Academy of Religion, and the author of ‘Memories of Muhammad: Why the Prophet Matters’ (HarperOne, 2009).

Sorry, Maya. Just when peculiar apocalyptic interpretations of the ancient Mayan calendar were about to thrust you into the media frenzy sure to come in 2012, some knuckleheads cut in front of you by predicting the return of Jesus on May 21, 2011.

They insist the world will end a few months after that, unfortunately ruling out the possibility of my San Francisco Giants repeating as World Series champions.

Of course, Christians have been proclaiming the nearness of Jesus’ return ever since there have been Christians. The New Testament reflects this, even as it gives evidence of a growing acknowledgment, as the first century transitioned into the second, that the “imminence” of this hope need not imply its “immediacy.” The church learned it would be in it for the long haul.

Yet some of the more fringe members of the Christian family have never stopped casting out predictions of a specific day on which human history will dramatically change forever, usually accompanied by fire and brimstone. So far, one might conclude, Jesus has been uninterested in taking the bait.

Despite the history of failed speculation about a precise advent of this new future, some Christians keep going with exuberant talk about the end of days. Whatever their motives, the results are sometimes good for the bottom line: numbers of butts in pews, as well as authors’ bank accounts.

By Art Harun

The poco-poco dance has apparently been decreed as haram in Perak. The Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department, Datuk Seri Jamil Khir Baharom, has asked everybody not to question such decree.

Well, knowing how hyper-sensitive all of us are when it comes to everything religion lately – and this applies to ALL of us, regardless of our religion – nobody in his or her right mind would be questioning such decree, Datuk Seri Minister, rest assured.

You will note that I am not even using inverted comas for the word haram anymore. That is because haram has become a generic word in Malaysia. It is already accepted as a Malay word as well as an English, Tamil and Chinese (all dialects) word. If you mention the word haram in Malaysia, everybody, regardless of his or her race or faith understands the word.

This propensity to decree anything and everything with the slightest connection with different faith or religion as haram in Islam is however a very interesting trend, if not a cause for concern.

As a citizen, I am horrified – and fearful – at the prospect of the State trying to regulate my private life. Laws should regulate actions which threaten the society as a whole. Laws should never be an instrument to govern private life or to foist upon anybody any moral value or any code of moral behaviours, unless such behaviours threaten the society as a whole.

In Malaysia, all sorts of decrees have been made and imposed on Muslims lately. These decrees run from the most trivial – such as the prohibition against wearing Manchester United and England football jerseys – to that which smirks of institutional xenophobia – such as that which prohibits Muslims from “celebrating” other religion’s celebrations or festivals.

Almost invariably, the reasons proffered for such prohibitions would be that such act, if done by Muslims, would affect their faith, or the preferred word, “akan merosakkan akidah mereka” (loosely translated, “such acts would affect their faith”).

Malaysians Muslims cannot therefore wear England and Manchester United jerseys because the logo on the former has a crucifix and on the later has the depiction of the devil (although of course, nobody in Malaysia could seriously testify how the devil looks like, as yet). As the rationale goes, if I wear the jerseys, my faith might be affected and I would convert to Christianity after I take three steps forward and turn to the left to the left while wearing the jersey.

Velentine’s day is a no no. Because it may lead to sex. Wearing Santa Claus apparels is also a no no because apparently Santa Claus is a Christian thing. Now the poco-poco dance is also a no no in Perak. Why? Of course it is because the dance has elements of other religions/faiths.

To top it up, according to the Home Ministry, Malays are not to read the Bible in Bahasa Malaysia.

Witness the Left Behind franchise, which has made millions promulgating a theology based on the notion of a “Rapture,” in which living Christians are snatched away to an otherworldly existence while the rest of earth slides fearfully into political and moral chaos. This theology comes from a very idiosyncratic view of the Bible that is popular in fundamentalist circles but has also infiltrated wider Christian discourse. Yet it represents a way of thinking about God and history that possesses, at best, dubious biblical support. Its retribution fantasies hardly align with notions of divine love and justice found in many other parts of the Bible.

There are, of course, many passages in the New Testament that steer attention toward the dawn of a new era — begun in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, but also finally to be fulfilled in his future “appearing” and the expectation of a coming judgment. These themes remain a key feature of Jesus’ teachings. We can’t evade those texts if we hope to understand the New Testament, as a whole. Serious, thoughtful Bible-readers ignore them at their own peril, for doing so allows the distortions of the Left Behind juggernaut to fill the void.

Christians, and those who observe Christianity from a distance, need to be aware of what these texts describe and the functions they should fulfill.

(There is not space in this post to delve into the Bible’s thoughts about the end of the world or the possibility of an afterlife. Although they are tempting, those related topics will have to wait for another day, assuming I make it.)

So, how should we read?

First, we have to note how context matters. Future hopes are given greatest attention in the New Testament usually when two other things are in view: the corrosive effects of religious hypocrisy and early Christians’ experience of persecution. Biblical passages about Jesus’ return therefore reiterate that God’s commitment to the world is not warmly embraced by the world’s business-as-usual religious, social, and political routines.

Second, biblical images associated with Jesus’ return are highly symbolic. Clouds, trumpets, stars falling from the skies, angelic shouts — these are familiar tropes in the Bible and its related literature. They became staple symbols, ways of signaling the divine presence. They are more theologically evocative than physically descriptive.

Third, “symbolic language” does not mean “not to be taken seriously.” These texts are important in their ability to communicate that we don’t live in the best of all possible worlds. They point toward the promise of a better future. New Testament scholar Dale Allison likens the Bible’s visions of the end to its visions of the beginning:

“Genesis is no historical record of the primordial past, and the New Testament offers no precognitive history of the eschatological future … We must interpret them not literally but as religious poetry, which means with our theologically-informed imaginations.” (page 97)Therefore, these passages prompt us to let the dimensions of our “longed-for future” be creatively informed by our “present religious experience and faith and theological reflection” (page 98). What Christians say, then, is the state of affairs Jesus promised the world has yet to come to full fruition. New Testament talk about the future issues vivid reminders that God still has work to do among us. The specifics about the future remain wholly mysterious. Still, the dominant emphasis is on promoting hope, not inciting fear.

All this could leave Christianity vulnerable to charges of escapism, but only if it leads people to ethical and social passivity. Or to paint motor homes like this.

A fourth observation pushes against passivity, however. Biblical images about Jesus’ return evoke the sights and sounds of Roman propaganda. For example, caution expressed in 1 Thessalonians 5:3 concerning seductive reassurances spoken about “peace and security” in the world refers to an imperial slogan. Also, as one might expect given Christians’ occasional status as a marginalized group in the first century, these images sometimes also imitate Roman propaganda. The description of Jesus’ return in 1 Thessalonians 4 depicts him with language recalling Roman dignitaries’ official visits to cities.

These passages’ subtle connections to imperial rhetoric allow them to subvert it, too. They thus can commit Christians to an unwillingness to rest content with the status quo of human political existence. They portray the future that God will inaugurate as showing up our inferior ideals — exposing all that humankind settles for (and gets oppressed by) as false substitutes for true peace and true security. They speak about a world that is sick, about people who abuse power. At the same time, they call people of faith not to shun or denigrate human society but to work for the world’s redemption.

And so I’m already making plans for May 22. In fact, I’m predicting the Giants will beat the Oakland Athletics that afternoon.