360 Degrees Love
Essence and Perception: Changing the Perception of Islam in the West by Rehabilitating the Practice of Religion
Introduction
The biased perception of Islam, common especially in America, results not only because extremist Muslims resort to reactionary violence and claim that this is Islamic, but because American Muslims do not necessarily understand the essence of Islam as it applies contextually to the contemporary scene and if they do they fail to explain it in ways that Americans can understand.
Biased perceptions about Islam and Muslims result also, especially in Europe, from bias against all religions, because in European history religion has been a cause rather than a cure for conflict.
Changing the perception of Islam in the West requires education about the common essence of all Abrahamic religions, as well as credible demonstration of this essence in practice. Muslims, Christians, Jews and others must join in solidarity to rehabilitate the role of religion in the world, in both essence and practice, by providing a new paradigm of faith-based, compassionate justice for public policy guidance.
The following four questions must be asked and answered.
I. Do Faith and Religion Have a Future?
In a secular world, many people ask whether there is a future for faith and religion. One should distinguish between the two. Faith is belief in the unseen, in transcendent reality, in the ghaib. This is part of human nature and has provided purpose to human life since the first appearance of sentient life on earth. Faith is universal and eternal and therefore has a future. Faith is the essence of religion.
Religion is the response to faith in both individual and community life. Religion is the pursuit of knowledge about higher truth and the translation of knowledge into moral practice.
There are many religious paths in the search for absolute truth, and there are many forms of practice, but all are designed for the same purpose, which is to worship the Absolute in thought, word, and deed, whether we call it God or Gott or Dios or Allah.
God tells us in Surah al Ma’ida 5:48, “Unto every one of you have we appointed a [different] governing system of law (shir’ah) and a [different] way of life (minhaj). If Allah had so willed, all humanity would have been a single community. God’s plan is to test you in what each of you has received [in both scriptures and inspiration]. So strive as in a race in all virtues. The destination of all people is to God”.
Put differently, the future of faith and religion is the difference between essence and appearance. Many scholars distinguish between Christianity in the form of Christ’s teachings as essence and Christendom as what one sees. Christianity is both a faith and an ideal system of practice, whereas Christendom may differ radically from Christianity itself.
The same is true of Islam and Islamdom. Research for a 77-page chapter on “The Spread of Islam” for the 800-page, three-volume textbook, Islam and Muslims, prepared by Mohammad Ali Chaudry and myself for the Center for Understanding Islam, suggested that the faith of Islam spread most rapidly when the Muslim empires were weak and slowly when they were strong. They spread most successfully in places like Indonesia where there were no Muslim empires and where the rulers actually opposed the spread of Islam.
The reason may have been that Islamdom often was un-Islamic, just as it is in many places today. Islam as a faith is spreading in America today precisely because it faces so many obstacles, just as it did 1444 years ago when the Angel Gabriel first revealed to Muhammad, salah Allahu ‘alayhi wa salam, that he was to be a Prophet and Messenger of God.
II. What Is the Core of the Essence?
The future of Islam is up to Allah, but the future of Muslims is up to every person through one’s observance of the first two essentials in the universal Islamic value system. These two, known as taqwa and ‘adl, are the core of the essence of Islam as a religion. Taqwa is loving awe of Allah in response to Allah’s love of every person. Taqwa is also submission to Allah as the source of truth, love, and justice. ‘Adl is love of compassionate justice as a framework for expressing our love for each other. As Cornell West of Tikkun Olam puts it, “Justice is what love looks like in public”.
The Prophet Muhammad emphasized the importance of seeking truth and justice, but he posited the motivation for the search in the constant Qur’anic emphasis on love, as developed in my book published in January, 2010, The Natural Law of Compassionate Justice: An Islamic Perspective. A favorite prayer of Prophet Muhammad, salla Allahu 'alayhi wa salam, and of Imam Ali, 'alayhi al salam, and of millions of Muslims ever afterwards, was Allahumma, asaluka hubbaka wa hubba man yuhibbuka wa hubba kuli ‘amali yuqaribuni ila hubbika, “O Allah, I ask you for your love, and for the love of those who love you, and for the love of everything that can bring me closer to your love.”
The Qur’an uses several different terms for various nuances of love. For example, in Surah Maryam (Mary) 19:96, Allah uses the term wadda. “Verily, those who attain to faith and do righteous deeds will the most Gracious endow with love”, saya’alu wudda, i.e., bestow on them His love and endow them with the capability to love His creation, as well as cause them to be loved by their fellow men. This is immediately followed by 19:97, “and only to this end have we made this [divine scripture] easy to understand and in your own language, O Prophet, so that you might convey thereby a glad tiding to the God-conscious”, thereby indicating that this gift of love is inherent in the guidance offered to humans through divine guidance.
Islam is known as a religion of peace, salam, which comes from submission to the only Being worthy of human submission, namely, God. In classical Islamic thought, as developed from the third through sixth Islamic centuries, peace as the essence of Islam results from justice, and justice is merely the expression of truth and love in a communal context.
The most profound verse in the Qur’an as a source of faith-based justice is Surah al An’am 6:115, wa tammat kalimatu rabbika sidqan wa ‘adlan, “The Message of your Lord is completed and perfected in truth and in justice.” This teaches that justice is an expression of truth and that truth originates in the transcendent order of reality, indeed from the Being of God, not in man-made law.
Perhaps the second most profound verse is Surah al Shura 42:17, which emphasizes the concept of balance, known as mizan. This is central to all classical Islamic thought in every aspect of both personal and social life. “It is God Who has bestowed revelation from on high, setting forth the truth, and [thus given man] a balance [wherewith to weigh right and wrong].” This verse of the Qur’an teaches that divine revelation through the various prophets in human history is considered to be a balance, an instrument placed by God in our hands by which we can weigh all issues of conscience.
A third profound teaching of the Qur’an is the importance and power of choice, of which the most important instance is freedom of religion and the freedom to interpret divine guidance in the practice of justice. The concept of choice is central, because, without freedom to choose, neither balance nor justice would have any meaning. The power to choose between good and bad is the greatest gift from the Creator to the created, but it is also a profound test for every person, every community, and nation, every civilization, and humanity itself.
The Qur’an emphasizes the importance of the basic power to choose between purposes or higher paradigms of thought, because the choice shapes the governing agendas of both persons and communities and thereby controls action. According to the Qur’an, the choice that has determined the rise and fall of entire civilizations throughout human history is between the pursuit of transcendent justice and the pursuit of material power as an ultimate goal in life.
The balance to be maintained in every civilization as embodied in every world religion is among order, justice, and freedom. This paradigm of balance teaches that order, justice, and freedom are interdependent. When freedom is construed to be independent of justice, there can be no justice and the result will be anarchy. When order is thought to be possible without justice, there will be no order, because injustice is the principal cause of disorder. When justice is thought to be possible without order and freedom, then the pursuit or order, justice, and freedom are snares of the ignorant.
A key to traditionalist American thought, based on the spiritually-based Scottish Enlightenment, which was the opposite of the secularist “Enlightenment” in Europe, is the distinction, now almost forgotten, between freedom and liberty. This fundamental distinction in thought, symbols, and action is portrayed in David Hackett Fischer’s monumental 851-page tome, Liberty and Freedom: A Visual History of America’s Founding Ideas, Oxford University Press, 2005. In classical or traditionalist American thought, freedom implies positive action to pursue higher values as the essence of justice, as distinct from mere liberty, which refers negatively to rejection of restraints on freedom of action. The Preamble to the American Constitution lists and prioritizes five purposes. Justice comes first, followed by domestic order, the common defense, and prosperity, and lastly comes liberty, which is merely the result of the first four.
Without consensus on the proper nature of order, and of justice and freedom as essential parts of a single whole, rather than as independent pursuits, no civilization can continue to exist. The twin roles of religion in all of its traditionalist manifestations, including the monotheistic and “revealed religions”, and especially Islam, are the spiritual well-being or happiness of every person and the maintenance of consensus on the responsibilities and rights necessary to live in an ordered society.
Students of comparative legal systems differ on whether there is an essence to any particular religion and to any given legal system, or whether each religion is an accumulation of human practices and every legal system is a composite of accidentals developed in response to changing exigencies. Relativists, including even self-styled progressivist Muslims, would like to contextualize Islam out of existence.
Islam is by far the best example of a religion that has very self-consciously developed a sense of its own essence and sharply distinguished this from any perverted interpretation and practice by self-professed Muslims. Whereas in Christianity the essence is considered to be love, in Islam the essence is considered to be justice as a derivative of love.
III. What is the Role of Normative Jurisprudence in the Essence of Islam
In Western positivist law, which by definition is entirely manmade, law exists only to the extent that it is enforced. In Islam, if the law has to be enforced it has failed, because the purpose of Islamic law is primarily educational as a set of guidelines for action.
What are these guidelines? Some of the best minds in human history developed this set of guidelines over a period of many centuries. These guidelines are known as maqasid al shari’ah or the ultimate purposes of the shari’ah, or as the kulliyat or universal principles, or as the dururiyat or essentials.
Very briefly, these may be categorized as eight irreducible purposes, about each of which a separate chapter was written in the unpublished book, Rehabilitating the Role of Religion in the World: Laying a New foundation on Faith-Based, Compassionate Justice, most of which was posted in the ezine, www.theamericanmuslim.org, on May 30 through June 7, 2009 . The first is haqq al din (the right to freedom of religion), haqq al nafs (respect for the human person and human life), haqq al nasl (respect for marriage and human community), haqq al mahid (respect for the physical environment), haqq al mal (respect for the universal right to economic opportunity and ownership of productive property), haqq al hurriyah (respect for the universal right of self determination or political freedom), haqq al karama (respect for human dignity, especially gender equity), and haqq al‘ilm (respect for the rights to free speech, publication, and association).
These maqasid or purposes and their subordinate levels of specificity are portrayed graphically as follows in Chapter 5, “Universal Principles of Human Responsibilities and Rights in the Shari’ah” from the textbook, Islam and Muslims, by Drs. Muhammad Ali Chaudry and Robert Dickson Crane, The Center for Understanding Islam, 2011:
Guide to the Detailed Charts on the Maqasid al Shari’ah
Chart No.
Maqasid al Shari’ah Covered
Additional Reference
Chart 5.1 I. Respect for Divine Revelation
(Haqq al Din) Chapters 1 and 2
Chart 5.2 II. Respect for the Human Person
(Haqq al Nafs) Chapter 18: Interfaith Cooperation
Chart 5.3 III. Respect for Family & Community
(Haqq al Nasl) Chapter 15: Democracy
Chart 5.4 IV. Respect for the Environment
(Haqq al mahid) Chapter 16: Islam and Ecology
Chart 5.5 V. Respect for Economic Justice
(Haqq al Mal) Chapter 5: Social & Economic Justice
Chart 5.6 VI. Respect for Political Justice
(Haqq al Hurriyyah) Chapter 15: Democracy
Chart 5.7 VII. Respect for Human Dignity
(Haqq al Karamah) Chapter 14: Gender Equity
Chart 5.8 VIII. Respect for Knowledge
(Haqq al ‘Ilm) Chapter 17: Education
The biased perception of Islam, common especially in America, results not only because extremist Muslims resort to reactionary violence and claim that this is Islamic, but because American Muslims do not necessarily understand the essence of Islam as it applies contextually to the contemporary scene and if they do they fail to explain it in ways that Americans can understand.
Biased perceptions about Islam and Muslims result also, especially in Europe, from bias against all religions, because in European history religion has been a cause rather than a cure for conflict.
Changing the perception of Islam in the West requires education about the common essence of all Abrahamic religions, as well as credible demonstration of this essence in practice. Muslims, Christians, Jews and others must join in solidarity to rehabilitate the role of religion in the world, in both essence and practice, by providing a new paradigm of faith-based, compassionate justice for public policy guidance.
The following four questions must be asked and answered.
I. Do Faith and Religion Have a Future?
In a secular world, many people ask whether there is a future for faith and religion. One should distinguish between the two. Faith is belief in the unseen, in transcendent reality, in the ghaib. This is part of human nature and has provided purpose to human life since the first appearance of sentient life on earth. Faith is universal and eternal and therefore has a future. Faith is the essence of religion.
Religion is the response to faith in both individual and community life. Religion is the pursuit of knowledge about higher truth and the translation of knowledge into moral practice.
There are many religious paths in the search for absolute truth, and there are many forms of practice, but all are designed for the same purpose, which is to worship the Absolute in thought, word, and deed, whether we call it God or Gott or Dios or Allah.
God tells us in Surah al Ma’ida 5:48, “Unto every one of you have we appointed a [different] governing system of law (shir’ah) and a [different] way of life (minhaj). If Allah had so willed, all humanity would have been a single community. God’s plan is to test you in what each of you has received [in both scriptures and inspiration]. So strive as in a race in all virtues. The destination of all people is to God”.
Put differently, the future of faith and religion is the difference between essence and appearance. Many scholars distinguish between Christianity in the form of Christ’s teachings as essence and Christendom as what one sees. Christianity is both a faith and an ideal system of practice, whereas Christendom may differ radically from Christianity itself.
The same is true of Islam and Islamdom. Research for a 77-page chapter on “The Spread of Islam” for the 800-page, three-volume textbook, Islam and Muslims, prepared by Mohammad Ali Chaudry and myself for the Center for Understanding Islam, suggested that the faith of Islam spread most rapidly when the Muslim empires were weak and slowly when they were strong. They spread most successfully in places like Indonesia where there were no Muslim empires and where the rulers actually opposed the spread of Islam.
The reason may have been that Islamdom often was un-Islamic, just as it is in many places today. Islam as a faith is spreading in America today precisely because it faces so many obstacles, just as it did 1444 years ago when the Angel Gabriel first revealed to Muhammad, salah Allahu ‘alayhi wa salam, that he was to be a Prophet and Messenger of God.
II. What Is the Core of the Essence?
The future of Islam is up to Allah, but the future of Muslims is up to every person through one’s observance of the first two essentials in the universal Islamic value system. These two, known as taqwa and ‘adl, are the core of the essence of Islam as a religion. Taqwa is loving awe of Allah in response to Allah’s love of every person. Taqwa is also submission to Allah as the source of truth, love, and justice. ‘Adl is love of compassionate justice as a framework for expressing our love for each other. As Cornell West of Tikkun Olam puts it, “Justice is what love looks like in public”.
The Prophet Muhammad emphasized the importance of seeking truth and justice, but he posited the motivation for the search in the constant Qur’anic emphasis on love, as developed in my book published in January, 2010, The Natural Law of Compassionate Justice: An Islamic Perspective. A favorite prayer of Prophet Muhammad, salla Allahu 'alayhi wa salam, and of Imam Ali, 'alayhi al salam, and of millions of Muslims ever afterwards, was Allahumma, asaluka hubbaka wa hubba man yuhibbuka wa hubba kuli ‘amali yuqaribuni ila hubbika, “O Allah, I ask you for your love, and for the love of those who love you, and for the love of everything that can bring me closer to your love.”
The Qur’an uses several different terms for various nuances of love. For example, in Surah Maryam (Mary) 19:96, Allah uses the term wadda. “Verily, those who attain to faith and do righteous deeds will the most Gracious endow with love”, saya’alu wudda, i.e., bestow on them His love and endow them with the capability to love His creation, as well as cause them to be loved by their fellow men. This is immediately followed by 19:97, “and only to this end have we made this [divine scripture] easy to understand and in your own language, O Prophet, so that you might convey thereby a glad tiding to the God-conscious”, thereby indicating that this gift of love is inherent in the guidance offered to humans through divine guidance.
Islam is known as a religion of peace, salam, which comes from submission to the only Being worthy of human submission, namely, God. In classical Islamic thought, as developed from the third through sixth Islamic centuries, peace as the essence of Islam results from justice, and justice is merely the expression of truth and love in a communal context.
The most profound verse in the Qur’an as a source of faith-based justice is Surah al An’am 6:115, wa tammat kalimatu rabbika sidqan wa ‘adlan, “The Message of your Lord is completed and perfected in truth and in justice.” This teaches that justice is an expression of truth and that truth originates in the transcendent order of reality, indeed from the Being of God, not in man-made law.
Perhaps the second most profound verse is Surah al Shura 42:17, which emphasizes the concept of balance, known as mizan. This is central to all classical Islamic thought in every aspect of both personal and social life. “It is God Who has bestowed revelation from on high, setting forth the truth, and [thus given man] a balance [wherewith to weigh right and wrong].” This verse of the Qur’an teaches that divine revelation through the various prophets in human history is considered to be a balance, an instrument placed by God in our hands by which we can weigh all issues of conscience.
A third profound teaching of the Qur’an is the importance and power of choice, of which the most important instance is freedom of religion and the freedom to interpret divine guidance in the practice of justice. The concept of choice is central, because, without freedom to choose, neither balance nor justice would have any meaning. The power to choose between good and bad is the greatest gift from the Creator to the created, but it is also a profound test for every person, every community, and nation, every civilization, and humanity itself.
The Qur’an emphasizes the importance of the basic power to choose between purposes or higher paradigms of thought, because the choice shapes the governing agendas of both persons and communities and thereby controls action. According to the Qur’an, the choice that has determined the rise and fall of entire civilizations throughout human history is between the pursuit of transcendent justice and the pursuit of material power as an ultimate goal in life.
The balance to be maintained in every civilization as embodied in every world religion is among order, justice, and freedom. This paradigm of balance teaches that order, justice, and freedom are interdependent. When freedom is construed to be independent of justice, there can be no justice and the result will be anarchy. When order is thought to be possible without justice, there will be no order, because injustice is the principal cause of disorder. When justice is thought to be possible without order and freedom, then the pursuit or order, justice, and freedom are snares of the ignorant.
A key to traditionalist American thought, based on the spiritually-based Scottish Enlightenment, which was the opposite of the secularist “Enlightenment” in Europe, is the distinction, now almost forgotten, between freedom and liberty. This fundamental distinction in thought, symbols, and action is portrayed in David Hackett Fischer’s monumental 851-page tome, Liberty and Freedom: A Visual History of America’s Founding Ideas, Oxford University Press, 2005. In classical or traditionalist American thought, freedom implies positive action to pursue higher values as the essence of justice, as distinct from mere liberty, which refers negatively to rejection of restraints on freedom of action. The Preamble to the American Constitution lists and prioritizes five purposes. Justice comes first, followed by domestic order, the common defense, and prosperity, and lastly comes liberty, which is merely the result of the first four.
Without consensus on the proper nature of order, and of justice and freedom as essential parts of a single whole, rather than as independent pursuits, no civilization can continue to exist. The twin roles of religion in all of its traditionalist manifestations, including the monotheistic and “revealed religions”, and especially Islam, are the spiritual well-being or happiness of every person and the maintenance of consensus on the responsibilities and rights necessary to live in an ordered society.
Students of comparative legal systems differ on whether there is an essence to any particular religion and to any given legal system, or whether each religion is an accumulation of human practices and every legal system is a composite of accidentals developed in response to changing exigencies. Relativists, including even self-styled progressivist Muslims, would like to contextualize Islam out of existence.
Islam is by far the best example of a religion that has very self-consciously developed a sense of its own essence and sharply distinguished this from any perverted interpretation and practice by self-professed Muslims. Whereas in Christianity the essence is considered to be love, in Islam the essence is considered to be justice as a derivative of love.
III. What is the Role of Normative Jurisprudence in the Essence of Islam
In Western positivist law, which by definition is entirely manmade, law exists only to the extent that it is enforced. In Islam, if the law has to be enforced it has failed, because the purpose of Islamic law is primarily educational as a set of guidelines for action.
What are these guidelines? Some of the best minds in human history developed this set of guidelines over a period of many centuries. These guidelines are known as maqasid al shari’ah or the ultimate purposes of the shari’ah, or as the kulliyat or universal principles, or as the dururiyat or essentials.
Very briefly, these may be categorized as eight irreducible purposes, about each of which a separate chapter was written in the unpublished book, Rehabilitating the Role of Religion in the World: Laying a New foundation on Faith-Based, Compassionate Justice, most of which was posted in the ezine, www.theamericanmuslim.org, on May 30 through June 7, 2009 . The first is haqq al din (the right to freedom of religion), haqq al nafs (respect for the human person and human life), haqq al nasl (respect for marriage and human community), haqq al mahid (respect for the physical environment), haqq al mal (respect for the universal right to economic opportunity and ownership of productive property), haqq al hurriyah (respect for the universal right of self determination or political freedom), haqq al karama (respect for human dignity, especially gender equity), and haqq al‘ilm (respect for the rights to free speech, publication, and association).
These maqasid or purposes and their subordinate levels of specificity are portrayed graphically as follows in Chapter 5, “Universal Principles of Human Responsibilities and Rights in the Shari’ah” from the textbook, Islam and Muslims, by Drs. Muhammad Ali Chaudry and Robert Dickson Crane, The Center for Understanding Islam, 2011:
Guide to the Detailed Charts on the Maqasid al Shari’ah
Chart No.
Maqasid al Shari’ah Covered
Additional Reference
Chart 5.1 I. Respect for Divine Revelation
(Haqq al Din) Chapters 1 and 2
Chart 5.2 II. Respect for the Human Person
(Haqq al Nafs) Chapter 18: Interfaith Cooperation
Chart 5.3 III. Respect for Family & Community
(Haqq al Nasl) Chapter 15: Democracy
Chart 5.4 IV. Respect for the Environment
(Haqq al mahid) Chapter 16: Islam and Ecology
Chart 5.5 V. Respect for Economic Justice
(Haqq al Mal) Chapter 5: Social & Economic Justice
Chart 5.6 VI. Respect for Political Justice
(Haqq al Hurriyyah) Chapter 15: Democracy
Chart 5.7 VII. Respect for Human Dignity
(Haqq al Karamah) Chapter 14: Gender Equity
Chart 5.8 VIII. Respect for Knowledge
(Haqq al ‘Ilm) Chapter 17: Education
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