From time to time I engage with a subject that creates some unrest with a cohort of Muslims who feel like I’m attacking them. As Allah ﷻ is my witness, I only mean to benefit my Muslim brothers and sisters, strengthen our community and prevent harm from entering our practices.
At the last Al-Madina Institute’s Pearls of the Quran conference I was blessed to be a part of before Allah manifested His Jalal over the past 18+ months, Imam Dawud Walid related to me a statement he heard from one of the mashayekh that perfectly captures some of the endeavours Muslims engage in nowadays across various disciplines without careful consideration for where they can lead to: “You can be sincere, but you can also be sincerely wrong.”
There’s something attractive about spiritual discourse. It speaks to our innate, i.e. Fitra, directive to nourish our souls just as we nourish our bodies. This discourse is especially powerful when it comes to addressing our physical well being. One of my earlier podcast episodes is titled “The Road to Spiritual is Physical”. We engage is physical movements in our acts of worship, the most demanding of which is the Hajj and, depending on where you are on this planet, Ramadan. Most of us have a palatable sense of the impact physical strain has during these blessed times on our spiritual states. When it comes to the power of the breath and how it can impact the spiritual dimension of your being, consider the mudūd rules of Tajwīd in the way the Quran is meant to be recited. You can even consider the Name of Majesty, Allah, which begins with a constriction followed by an expansion that ends with the Arabic letter هـ. The nafas is indeed precious and powerful.
I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to state that most Muslims today don’t realize the impact perennialist philosophy has had on their reading of traditional texts. This is generally more pronounced in circles identifying as traditional in their orientation, i.e., those following a maḏ’hab and emphasizing Taṣawwuf, the reason being they are especially concerned with spiritual development. The extent of perennialist influence is understandable. Naturalist philosophy permeates everything. It guides our education systems, directs our public policy, and orients our moral compass towards materialist utilitarianism. Of the most powerful critiques of this modernity are those from perennialist philosophers (or the Traditionalist School as they’ve termed it). René Guénon, Frithjof Schuon, Huston Smith, Ananda Coomaraswamy, Martin Lings, and Seyyed Hossein Nasr are some of the notable figures some of you have heard the names of if not read and readily admit being influenced by. The critiques of modernity by Guénon and Nasr are undoubtedly a tour de force in exposing the façade of a progress that attempts to hide its destruction of nature and denying human beings the pursuit of what they were created for, which is to know Allah ﷻ.
Any critique depends on a basis of ontology and epistemology from which that critique is launched. The problem for Muslims taking on the approach of the above mentioned authors wholeheartedly lies in the fact that the overwhelming influence guiding their critique comes from a pantheistic metaphysics. Regardless of their proclaimed religious affiliation, whether it’s Wolfgang Smith on the Catholic side or Seyyed Hossein Nasr on the Muslim side, for example, the common thread you find among them is they base *their* interpretation of the Bible or the Quran on *their* reading of the Vedas. The cosmological perspective of Guénon is to explain the state of the world through the Yuga Cycles, with ours being in the Kali Yuga, the worst one. When Nasr cites verses of the Quran in his cosmological reflections, they serve as commentary on his reflections instead of the other way around. This issue stretches into their reading of history as well. The last book I covered in Al-Andalus Book Club for this year was Nasr’s Science & Civilization in Islam, where he presents Muslim scholars as syncretic figures apparently eager to synthesize the various Indian, Persian, and Greek works they were translating. Granted, he does offer the symbol of Islam as the Ka’ba, a cube representing the immutable principles of Islam that anything absorbed must be made consistent with, as opposed to a river that simply takes the shape of its path. But in practice, he leaves the reader with the impression that, for instance, the major astrological influence on Greek medicine was uncritically imported by Muslim physicians who took it on as part of Islamic medicine because it maintained the “grand unity and harmony of creation”. In reality, Muslim physicians represented the first time there was a qualitative historical shift from the Greek preference for theoretical constructs over empirical evidence. No matter how “beautiful” a theory sounded, the likes of ibn Ridwān and ar-Rāzī required empirical demonstration of facts that were consistent with that theory. If the facts didn’t match the theory, they didn’t shy away from proclaiming it to be false, even if it was the dominant “traditional” view held for thousands of years by the Greeks or the Indians. How long something has been around is not evidence for its “Truth”.
Allah ﷻ tells us in the Quran:
ۚ ٱلْيَوْمَ أَكْمَلْتُ لَكُمْ دِينَكُمْ وَأَتْمَمْتُ عَلَيْكُمْ نِعْمَتِى وَرَضِيتُ لَكُمُ ٱلْإِسْلَـٰمَ دِينًا ۚ
Today I have perfected your faith for you, completed My favour upon you, and chosen Islam as your way [5:3]
While it’s true the modern world is mostly directed towards the material and denies the spiritual, the Muslim response should not be the extreme opposite. Our religion is a religion of balance. We affirm the Unseen, but we don’t speak about it without a basis in the Quran and Sunnah. We also affirm the material, and recognize that Allah ﷻ is the Wise and He created the world with patterns intelligible to us to investigate and repeatedly demonstrate. It’s unbecoming for a Muslim carrying the Light that came from Allah ﷻ and through the Beloved ﷺ to find spiritual nourishment in anything other than that. When it comes to medicine, we must not be swayed by rhetoric that employs cosmological language alien to us to push us to drop our own epistemological criteria and deny demonstrable facts on the ground, risking harm to ourselves as individuals and collectively as a community in this world before the next.
I have a dua I make in my morning adhkar I want to share with you all:
اللهم أجعل آيات كتابك وسنة نبيك ﷺ أول ما يتبادر إلى ذهني في كل مسألة تعرض علي وفي كل موقف أقفه وفي كل حدث يحدث لي
O Allah, make the verses of Your Book and the Sunnah of Your Prophet ﷺ the first thing to come up in my mind in every matter that’s presented to me, and in every station I stop at, and during every occurrence that happens to me.
May Allah ﷻ make the verses of His Book and the Sunnah of His Prophet ﷺ the first thing to come up in our minds in every matter that’s presented to us, and in every station we stop at, and during every occurrence that happens to us.
