Religion and Spirituality in Islam

 16 September 2024

An old friend of mine of some forty years' standing recently objected to my criticisms of some reactions I got on a visit to Morocco as well as my objection to the negative evaluation of dogs in Islam. She accused me of Islamophobia and being against all Muslims.

As I have started losing, in late middle age, old friends like a cat sheds hairs, through open disagreement as much as deaths, there's no point in mincing my words now. 

 Here is a later part of this discussion on Facebook today :

 18 September 2024

Feroza Baldick sent me a video about Sharī'ah law.

I commented:

Sharī'ah contains a great deal of sensible, effective and wise principles of correct behaviour and observance that any intelligent and thoughtful society would wish to adopt. By comparison, modern Western liberal society has more or less lost its grasp of essential principles of justice in public and private life with dire consequences for social stability and cohesion of family and community. A failure to establish ground rules of behaviour is a cardinal weakness of modern Western society, underscored by an outlook influenced by postmodernist relativism.

However, a careful check of Sharī'ah, for me, indicates aspects of serious difficulty.  In summary, it is the outline of hudūd punishments for acts against God's law, contrasted with jināyat offences ( human law) and t'āzir ( judicial interpretation).

According to Wikipedia,  it summarises hudūd as the following :

Under Islamic law, Hudud crimes (apostasy, revolt against the ruler, theft, highway robbery, adultery, slander, and drinking alcohol) carry penalties that include the amputation of hands and feet, flogging, and death.

I personally do not accept any of those listed hudūd crimes as against God's law on the basis of my own personal instinctive judgement using the heart and mind God gave me to discriminate and choose. These hudūd crimes and their listed punishments are not negotiable.  They cannot be fobbed off on Hadīth; they are in the Qur'ān.

Across the Muslim world today there is a disconnect culturally where hudūd punishments are not applied; instead, various principles of Western laws inherited from colonial times are used. But the pressure to apply hudūd sanctions correctly is mounting. In some nations like Iran, Sudan and Saudi Arabia, they arecapplied today.

By contrast, jināyat crimes including murder are rectifiable by sanctions other than capital punishment including payment of fines. Whereas to my thinking, certain types of murder should be punished with death. In that context I am at variance with both Muslim law and Western law ( outside the USA which applies the death penalty in some states, usually with insufficient protocols for establishing guilt).

Therefore on those grounds alone I would not be able to accept Sharī'ah ON MY CONSCIENCE.

Apostasy is probably the most serious objection for me. It stops the right to choose one's faith freely. Those born into the Muslim faith are not allowed to leave it. The principle of freedom of thought and conscience is for me sacred. No system of law that prohibits it would be acceptable to me.

On the hudūd crime of adultery, I could not possibly agree with that. I understand that marriage is not a sacrament in Islamic law ( it is in Catholicism and in Hinduism). To me, adultery is a human failing that hurts the people involved. It cannot hurt God. It is therefore wrongly categorised as hudūd. Again, this is in the Qur'ān so it raises doubts in my mind of a fundamental sort.

Much of my later life has been dedicated to campaigning for Animals. You can see this from my Facebook posts.  

Despite noble principles about respect for animal life in the Qur'ān,  this is widely undermined by Hadīth content that appears to permit neglect, cruelty, exploitation and abuse. In none of the Abrahamic faiths is there any concern with avoiding killing animals for food, or promoting vegetarianism, even though there are noble examples of saints and mystics in all three traditions who adopted it. I, too, aspire to it, and have cut down on meat but failed to eliminate it. Not a single Abrahamic religion satisfies my concern on animals. Hinduism most certainly does not and only Buddhism and Jainism have unequivocal injunctions against hurting animals. Modern Western values are a disaster so I reject the West as well. Anyone who speaks up for animals will be dissatisfied with any established religous or cultural tradition anywhere in the world. So given my concern there it's unlikely that any faith tradition would work for me. Humanist philosopher Peter Singer who described the phenomenon of speciesism in which our feelings and indulgences are elevated above the lives and feelings of other sentient beings, was dissatisfied with most religions on that point and I am inclined to agree.

Overall,  despite many noble principles, points of law and philosophical insights, there feels to me something regressive about Islam to Mosaic Law and its general spirit. Over a thousand years after the severities and prescriptions of Mosaic Law, the evolution of the Abrahamic moral code culminated at a high point in Jesus with his central message of God's mercy and forgiveness. Yet even Jesus said that he had not been sent by his Father to change any part of Mosaic Law but to fulfil it. This pronouncement ( Matthew 5:17) is crucial to the confusion of Christians who have banged their heads between sticking to the Law of the Prophets ( broadly compatible with Orthodox Judaism and Sharī'ah) and Paul's New Dispensation. The New Testament is most unsatisfactory on clearing this up and by comparison Sharī'ah is far clearer but to me, still unsatisfactory.

So far I have found no reason to move away from the religion of the heart,  to stick with Rūmī, al-Ghazāli, Srī Caitanya, Srī Aurobindo, and modern Western idealist philosopher's like Kastrup, explore Vedānta, ponder the Buddhist śūnyatā, consider what quantum philosophy is telling us about the nature of Reality and NDEs about our initial encounters with God and his Helpers before a final passing over : from all this a new understanding will emerge. We have no need of old law books and authoritative texts any more.

 

Feroza Baldick ( widow of Dr Julian Baldick, a great Sūfī scholar of Oxford University, now sadly passed away.  I studied there and knew him slightly. He was a very kindly but retiring man: 

 

 Whatever brought on these very anti-Islamic posts and I was surprised as you have always been nuanced before. I wondered if it was a scam Arjun.
But your words are pretty offensive to me and to fellow Muslims who are decent,gentle, kind people.
The Messenger was very concerned about animals and their welfare and wanted Tayyib, rather than just Hallal. High welfare of animals. One surah talks about animals forming their own community.I am tired of fighting on all fronts.
Extremists on all fronts. One extreme leads to the opposite extreme.And words are dangerous!

Myself : 

Words are dangerous. I agree. But I have never been constrained by any system if thought. Let us say that for me my condition of rootlessness started as a burden and ended as a path to freedom.

Why do you take my critique of Islam to be an attack on Muslim people? This is the standard defence taken by so many Muslims and I expected you to be more nuanced than that. Were all Christians mean and hateful because of the Spanish Inquisition or the Crusades, because of Christian doctrines of heresy and blasphemy?  Conflation of religious criticism with alleged hatred of people is precisely the kind of spurious and dangerous misthinking that is used to deflect valid critiques and you are falling into the same standard trap that keeps Islam from examining itself. A critique of the religious tradition is automatically - and spuriously - translated as an attack upon the people.  It is THOSE thoughts and words that are wrong and dangerous, that lead to wars over ideas and affiliations instead of fruitful illumination of understanding.

Did you actually read my commentaries about my little trip to Morocco ? Did you miss the references to the kind people I met or only picked up on the references to the ones I didn't like ?

Let me give you an anecdote.  Many years ago, I went on a car trip from Delhi to Agra to see the Taj Mahal again. Our driver was a man from a Muslim shanty town. He was poor. He asked if he could bring along his wife and daughters.  We said yes of course.

What a happy family they were ! As soon as they left the Muslim area they took off their veils. They smiled, they laughed, they were happy. The man was so proud of his beautiful wife and daughters. I want my daughters to be educated, he said humbly but proudly. I want them to be somebody.  

On the way back at the end of the day, as we approached the shanty town, he turned back to us and asked us embarrassed not to speak to his wife and daughters.  They put their veils on and fell silent. We had re entered the world of prescriptive Islam.

I never forgot that Muslim man. He knew what God wanted in his heart, just as Rūmī of old described in his poetry.  He was a real Muslim to me. As millions are who want education and freedom with responsibility got their loved ones, not the iron rule of the book and the fatwa.

If you think I dislike all Muslims you do not know anything about me. I do not CONFLATE a religion with people as you have been taught to do.

 I do not single out Islam for my criticism but all religions including my own faith. You take no account of any faith other than yours, from what I can see, and have not taken account of my general criticism  of faith based dogmatic traditions but singled out my criticism of Islam apart from the others which is not reasonable. But I expect no less from anyone based in a particular faith. My Hindu friends criticise me in the same way, failing to see that I extend my critique in all directions.

What does it avail Islam that the Qur'ān talks about the community of animals ? I know the surah, it is 6:38. Quoting the Qur'ān out of the general context of Hadīth and fiqh is exactly the kind of diversionary response that doesnt progress the discussion. I've already gone into all that and won't repeat it. And I'm no Hindu: my criticisms of the gap between Vedānta and polytheistic superstitions and the Hindu philosophical contortions to justify it are just as severe as anything I might say about Islam - but that wouldn't interest you because as an irthodox Muslim, any religous trsdition outside the framework of the Abrahamic faiths is probably wholly irrelevant except as an impediment to faith. This limits the possibilities of fruitful intellectual exchange.

My understanding was that your sister Zuleika, who sadly passed away converted to Catholicism. Is that correct ? If not, I apologise for any mistake. But if it is true, how do you view an apostasy like that ? Do you think it Islam you can separate the vaguer pronouncements on apostasy in the Qur'ān from the severely and concrete alternative punishments in the sahih Hadīth? You cannot divide up a religion into component parts and cherry pick what suits a point of argument because it works for a particular sub topic of discussion. One has to join up the dots and see where that leads. This us especially true for Islam. Dogmatic unreason in Christianity can always be opposed by invoking the compassionate and forgiving spirit of the synoptic Gospels. In Islam, the Qur'ān's often relatively vague or generalised injunctions are concretised by Hadīth which in effect supersedes the Qur'ān in spirit if not in letter many times. What, then, is the point of invoking the Qur'ān indeoendently of the Hadīth that rules the lives of Muslims and animals ? That line only works for people who know nothing of Islam.

Ijtihād has been squashed by the jurists since the beginning. So has Sūfī "apostasy." The last victim of great note to fall was Baha'ullah in the mid nineteenth century. Would I be seen as "anti Muslim" by expressing my admiration for him? Probably.

In the final analysis, we all stand alone with our thoughts. God gave us the faculty to reason, compare,  discriminate, analyse and judge. There was a purpose to that. I am following God's law by doing just that and it leads me away from any given revelation, any given framework. The Truth is ineffable.

Here's are more lines from Rūmī :

Jesus, change my brass to gold, Take the gold that’s already within my heart and turn it into pearls. And if You find any pearls already in my heart, make them more beautiful than the moon.

How does that sit with Qur'ānic injunctions or Hadīth. But THERE, in the heart of the Sūfī tradition, is the Truth,  the golden thread in the God given heart of humankind,  that sees beyond creed and dogma, book and rule.

As the widow of Julian Baldick, one of the world's great authorities on the Sūfī heritage of humankind, YOU of all Muslims should be able to see what lies beyond the book of rules to what the heart knows is true.

 Feroza then sent me a video explaining Sharī'ah law from the Cambridge Mosque which is of course a soohisticated and nuanced exposition.  My reply :

 

Sharī'ah contains a great deal of sensible, effective and wise principles of correct behaviour and observance that any intelligent and thoughtful society would wish to adopt. By comparison, modern Western liberal society has more or less lost its grasp of essential principles of justice in public and private life with dire consequences for social stability and cohesion of family and community. A failure to establish ground rules of behaviour is a cardinal weakness of modern Western society, underscored by an outlook influenced by postmodernist relativism.

However, a careful check of Sharī'ah, for me, indicates aspects of serious difficulty.  In summary, it is the outline of hudūd punishments for acts against God's law, contrasted with jināyat offences ( human law) and t'āzir ( judicial interpretation).

According to Wikipedia,  it summarises hudūd as the following :

Under Islamic law, Hudud crimes (apostasy, revolt against the ruler, theft, highway robbery, adultery, slander, and drinking alcohol) carry penalties that include the amputation of hands and feet, flogging, and death.

I personally do not accept any of those listed hudūd crimes as against God's law on the basis of my own personal instinctive judgement using the heart and mind God gave me to discriminate and choose. These hudūd crimes and their listed punishments are not negotiable.  They cannot be fobbed off on Hadīth; they are in the Qur'ān.

Across the Muslim world today there is a disconnect culturally where hudūd punishments are not applied; instead, various principles of Western laws inherited from colonial times are used. But the pressure to apply hudūd sanctions correctly is mounting. In some nations like Iran, Sudan and Saudi Arabia, they arecapplied today.

By contrast, jināyat crimes including murder are rectifiable by sanctions other than capital punishment including payment of fines. Whereas to my thinking, certain types of murder should be punished with death. In that context I am at variance with both Muslim law and Western law ( outside the USA which applies the death penalty in some states, usually with insufficient protocols for establishing guilt).

Therefore on those grounds alone I would not be able to accept Sharī'ah ON MY CONSCIENCE.

Apostasy is probably the most serious objection for me. It stops the right to choose one's faith freely. Those born into the Muslim faith are not allowed to leave it. The principle of freedom of thought and conscience is for me sacred. No system of law that prohibits it would be acceptable to me.

On the hudūd crime of adultery, I could not possibly agree with that. I understand that marriage is not a sacrament in Islamic law ( it is in Catholicism and in Hinduism). To me, adultery is a human failing that hurts the people involved. It cannot hurt God. It is therefore wrongly categorised as hudūd. Again, this is in the Qur'ān so it raises doubts in my mind of a fundamental sort.

Much of my later life has been dedicated to campaigning for Animals. You can see this from my Facebook posts.  

Despite noble principles about respect for animal life in the Qur'ān,  this is widely undermined by Hadīth content that appears to permit neglect, cruelty, exploitation and abuse. In none of the Abrahamic faiths is there any concern with avoiding killing animals for food, or promoting vegetarianism, even though there are noble examples of saints and mystics in all three traditions who adopted it. I, too, aspire to it, and have cut down on meat but failed to eliminate it. Not a single Abrahamic religion satisfies my concern on animals. Hinduism most certainly does not and only Buddhism and Jainism have unequivocal injunctions against hurting animals. Modern Western values are a disaster so I reject the West as well. Anyone who speaks up for animals will be dissatisfied with any established religous or cultural tradition anywhere in the world. So given my concern there it's unlikely that any faith tradition would work for me. Humanist philosopher Peter Singer who described the phenomenon of speciesism in which our feelings and indulgences are elevated above the lives and feelings of other sentient beings, was dissatisfied with most religions on that point and I am inclined to agree.

Overall,  despite many noble principles, points of law and philosophical insights, there feels to me something regressive about Islam to Mosaic Law and its general spirit. Over a thousand years after the severities and prescriptions of Mosaic Law, the evolution of the Abrahamic moral code culminated at a high point in Jesus with his central message of God's mercy and forgiveness. Yet even Jesus said that he had not been sent by his Father to change any part of Mosaic Law but to fulfil it. This pronouncement ( Matthew 5:17) is crucial to the confusion of Christians who have banged their heads between sticking to the Law of the Prophets ( broadly compatible with Orthodox Judaism and Sharī'ah) and Paul's New Dispensation. The New Testament is most unsatisfactory on clearing this up and by comparison Sharī'ah is far clearer but to me, still unsatisfactory.

So far I have found no reason to move away from the religion of the heart,  to stick with Rūmī, al-Ghazāli, Srī Caitanya, Srī Aurobindo, and modern Western idealist philosopher's like Kastrup, explore Vedānta, ponder the Buddhist śūnyatā, consider what quantum philosophy is telling us about the nature of Reality and NDEs about our initial encounters with God and his Helpers before a final passing over : from all this a new understanding will emerge. We have no need of old law books and authoritative texts any more.

https://youtu.be/xk7Aw1VDcd4?si=gPzg5tEJa5pRGETY

Watch this debate about what is essential.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, born Muslim, turned atheist, turned again to Christianity, is one of Britain's most famous public intellectuals. So is, of course, Richard Dawkins.
Watch Dawkins' characteristic sledgehammer approach to points of doctrine he doesn't like or think is absurd. Listen to Ayaan going right past all that - all issues of interpretation - to the heart of the matter- God is Love. She's really saying that you can argue all day about points of doctrine or even religious law, but if you understand the core message that God is Love then that helps you negotiate a correctly judged path among all the points of doctrine and law.

Surely that is what Rūmī says, what al-Ghazāli says, and what Jesus meant about coming not to change the Law but to fulfil it.

In the Abrahamic history of the relationship with God and the evolution of morality and the emergence of human conscience over prescription, Jesus is by far the most interesting figure and his point about coming to fulfil the [Mosaic] law, not overturn it, requires the most careful and profitable scrutiny
 Yet Islam,  which inherited all this tradition and could reflect on it, did virtually nothing with the life of Jesus except to acknowledge him as a great Prophet and move on.
We have no compulsion to take on the deification of Jesus which starts in the Gospel of John and not in the Synoptic Gospels. But his importance as the One who comes to "fulfill the Law" surely cannot be bypassed by yet a new revelation that does not deal with or elucidate that claim - which I would claim is the application of the Law with Love and mercy.

With such a principle acknowledged in Islam I would applaud highly but there still remains my reservations about hudūd and elements of Hadīth as you know from my previous comments. You would no doubt say that I cannot cherry pick what I like and I would have to agree but could also say that I choose not to opt in at all.  And as for metaphysics and ontology,  there is nothing in any of the Abrahamic traditions that is so far developed as in Vedānta or even Buddhism. Therefore no tradition seems quite complete to me and it would profit us to study them all with due care and attention.