The Muslims Struggle for Islam is also Their Struggle to Preserve Their Cultures

Excerpts from a paper by Dr. Ejaz Akram

[Do not cite or reproduce from the following paper without permission of author]

A Definition of Culture

[Hence, in the light of the above ] I would like to present a definition of culture as “a realm of shared beliefs, ideas and symbols”. Inasmuch as culture is a medium between human beings, it also plays the part of binding individuals together, or that which binds humans with other humans. Non-material and higher aspects of cultures promote unity and cohesiveness in and across cultures, while the material side of culture such as geography and ethnicity often cause fragmentation.

Religion  AND Culture: Traditional & Modern Culture: Proximity & Distance from God

Traditional cultures are by and large religious cultures. 

It may be possible to find anti-religious or agnostic people and even small scale intellectual movements in the traditional world, but ultimate legitimacy of things in traditional cultures has always come from religion. Modern culture and cultures are exceptional in a sense that for the first time in human history they have managed to produce a secular ‘culture’ whose referent is not God and whose legitimacy comes not from proximity but distance from God. In a worldview that either denies the existence of God or relegates references to God as a backward form of human consciousness, it becomes possible to assert that all human behavior is socially and culturally determined, and culture alone is upheld to be the producer of the values it lives by.

Culture as a medium

Traditionally only religion has had the right to know cultures, inform the medium of culture of religious truth and want to see cultures as a reflection of itself. Only in modern times culture has equipped itself to look at not only itself but also religion. In that sense, it would be safe to assert that religious humans have a say on matters of culture while culture lacked the ability to do the same. This is because culture is a medium, it will carry in itself whatever one puts in it and people will only transmit across generations that which is of value, that what brings happiness, felicity, peace, and that which avoids pain, suffering and anguish. For the traditional man, it is religion that accomplishes the above and for the modern man, it is often the absence of religion that supposedly accomplishes that.

Religions views culture as its repository

Religion views culture as its repository. The ultimate source of religion is God, and God is out of the confines of time and space. The humans on the other hand are bound by time and space. The law, ethics, morality and rituals of religion are meant for those that live in the human abode. God is above humans and God’s knowledge seeks to inform the way people live in their earthly abode. In this sense, religion seeks to inform culture with perennial principles that are a key to leading a good life. 

Religions thus leave their imprints on human cultures. 

History of humanity is also a history of religions. There is nothing in the world that has nothing to do with religion. Religions have always sought to guide humanity towards cultivating cultures that uphold ‘thou must not kill’ and ‘thou must not deceive’. World religions always seek to regulate human behavior so that there is peace among humans.

In religious worldview, the marriage of religion and culture would be like the marriage of Heavens and Earth or the marriage of man and woman. The former representing the absolute and active principle while the latter is the reflection of the former as a receptacle:

“A traditional civilization, such as that of Islam, is dominated by a Divine Norm, by a ‘presiding Idea’ which leaves its profoundest imprint upon its earthly receptacles; yet each receptacle is given the freedom to develop its own innate possibilities within the tradition into which it is integrated and hence to give birth to a particular ‘world’ or ‘zone’ within the general matrix of the tradition in question”.[15]

Traditional religion views traditional cultures as its repository. 


Modern religion (different types of fundamentalisms, especially revisionist Islam in its salafi form) are uncomfortable with the concept of culture because in its worldview religion should be pure and pristine while culture is seen as a polluting agent that has corrupted religion. 

In the Islamic tradition, Muslim scholars have viewed traditional cultures with the terminology of ‘urf.[16] Ibn Khaldun, the famous 14^th century philosopher calls the study of societies (and their cultures) ilm al umran.[17] In the Islamic philosophic tradition, the relationship between traditional religion and traditional cultures was a symbiotic one in which ‘urf was informally considered by many doctors of law as a legitimate source of Islamic law.

The word ‘urf in Arabic means human customs, conventions, practices and social habits.[18] It comes from the same root word as irfan or ilm al ma’arifa which implies higher and Gnostic knowledge. 

Muslims' struggle for Islam is also Their Struggle to Preserve their Cultures

All religions are first and foremost traditions. There is nothing intrinsically modern about religion. Like the institution of family, religion is also a traditional institution. Out of all living religions, Muslims are still arguably closest to their religion and constitute the last remaining frontier that modernism vies to engulf and dissolve. 

The Muslims’ struggle for Islam is also their struggle to preserve their cultures as receptacles of Divine words.

According to S. H. Nasr:

“Islamic culture displays an undeniable unity which is the result of the spirit and form of the Islamic revelation and ultimately of Divine Unity itself. In the same way that the whole created order is the theophanic reflection of the One in the mirror of multiplicity, so are the various ‘faces’ of Islamic culture so many human echoes of the one Message which is itself beyond the human and which alone bestows upon the activity of a human collectivity the purposes and values which make it worthy of being called a culture in conformity with the noble destiny of man”.[28]

Read full paper: http://baytunur.blogspot.com/2009/08/religion-culture-contours-of-debate.html

Read more by and about Dr. Ejaz Akram http://baytunur.blogspot.com/2010/06/modernism-secularism-evolution-culture.html

Dîn, Modernism, Evolution, Science & Transcendence

Omar K N

1.1 Definition of tradition

Therefore according to how we understand the concept from its etymological root: tradere (deliver, transmit) - Tradition has nothing to do with peoples' usages or customs from old, but is understood as *revealed* tradition, that is truths and principles of divine order revealed or unveiled to mankind.

“Tradition is essentially of "super-human" origin, which is quite exactly also its correct definition and nothing traditional cannot be qualified as such without the presence of this vital and axial* foundational element, which defines its own authentic character.”

“Nothing which is purely human can be considered traditional, that is why it is wrong - as René Guénon rightly says - to talk about a "philosophic tradition" or a "scientific tradition"... because only the heritery forms of an uninterrupted chain of transmission (silsilah) deserve the qualification "traditional" for they will guarantee the reality and permanence of the "vital element", ie. that of non-human origin, inside a particular tradition.” DRG

Or to put in another way: Tradition is the light with which the human kind has been endowed with from the beginning of times to the end of it; it is the light of meaning in an otherwise meaningsless void, it is the light of spiritual guidance in a materialistic and hedonistic era, it is the light of the Logos shining upon the contingent entities. This Light is from God, the light of the heavens and earth.

In the case of Islam, which is the most recent - and the last of traditions, the concept of tradition, the dîn, is seen as being twofold:

• in its general meaning the transmission of an element of the suprahuman level - the Qur'an,
• and in its specific sense the words and sayings reported from Prophet Muhammad  may Allah bless him and grant him peace, which have been recorded in the hadith collections together with the entire Islamic religion.

2.1 Modernism & postmodernism

In modernism it was believed that materiality or phenomena was everything there is and that it is superiour to anything else. This philosophy of science is called positivism - it is a rejection of metaphysics, as it holds that the goal of knowledge is simply to describe the phenomena that we experience, which we can observe and measure and nothing beyond that. 

In some quarters there was still an underlying, dormant longing for the construction or discovery of the Grand Design (4*), meaning a new unity of being, of what reality really is, but a unity which had to do without religion and metaphysics. ( 2.3ff  )

(4*) Probing the "Grand Design, in posing the greatest questions: How vast is the Universe, the entirety of existence? Was there a beginning? Will there be an end? What is the origin and fate of the Universe?" 
< From "Cosmology: A Cosmic Perspective" >

However, as Charles Upton has shown ( SAC-33 ) 
in postmodernism it is always held (as a conviction or belief ?!) that:
(1) there is no Grand Design,
(2) truth is plural and ultimately subjective,
(3) reality is only as it is configured,
(4) there is nothing out there but chaotic potential.
So much for the quest for truth! ( 2.2  )

Furthermore, with today's "celebration of diversity", normal logical thinking seems to have evaporated from many a contemporary mind, as modernism and postmodernism even can work together, or so it seems, in the mind of a single individual, confounding it and neutralizing any attempt toward a traditional or metaphysical view of reality! SAC 

____So much so that by now "modernism has become nothing more than a sub-set, one more disrelated item in the postmodern spectrum of "diversity" ." SAC-34/5

2.5.5 Man did not 'evolve'

As long as man has lived on this earth he has had a traditional outlook or perspective on life, which is proven by the many old cultural remnants, not the least his holy scriptures. It was then that he relied on the Higher Being, God, Allah and lived under His protection and guidance. Man has never only been an individual with a brain without heart, nor just a heap of molecules in a DNA-structure, meaning that the mind is luckily more than nerve-threads and electrical signals. Instead man has a potential for knowing God and his soul and for choosing what is better in any given situation, or creative of the most beautiful, - as God's viceregent.

The traditional outlook on life is opposed to the modern or postmodern way of seeing reality, in fact the two are irreconcilable. Man has always been man, he did not have to evolve from some lower being, from an ape or a fish ... The idea of bringing out the higher from the lesser is a modern myth, it is both illogical and unscientific! 

____Imagine a piece of computer evolving - by accident - from its integrated IC-circuits, from its bits and zeros into the practical machine which it is - without the mind to design it and programme it! How much less is this conceivable in the - much more complex - biological domain of life itself !

Or the words of Charles Upton:
"The projection of this false myth of progress on biology results in the ideology known as 'evolutionism', the doctrin that the less is the causal origin of the greater, that the higher and more complex life forms, including man, have developed incrementally from simpler forms. The Traditionalists, on the other hand, teach that the advent of new life forms, which the fossil record shows to be more discontinuous than continuous - thus calling Darwin's 'natural selection of random mutations' into serious question - actually represents the descent of matter-organizing spiritual archetypes from the higher planes of Being, in response to God's creative word. These 'Platonic Ideas' of species then draw themselves the matter they need in order to construct physical vehicles for their life in space and time." SAC-105

2.4.2 Principles Are Necessary to Transcend the Human Level

However, doctrines and principles are necessary to gain meaning from empirical sense-data and to gain meaning is proof of perfection and permanency, and giving up on the quest for meaning leads to ignorance and despair. As one of the ancient savants, Aristotle, declared:

"The things which are most knowable are first principles and causes; for it is through these and from these that other things come to be known, and not these through the particulars which fall under them." AM I.ii.6

Man has therefore to prepare himself to a way of life concerning thought and practice, which will enable him to transcend the materialistic, and only psychological levels of understanding.

2.4.3 The Validity of the Modern Sciences

Transcending the materialistic and psychologic levels of understanding is neither intended nor envisaged by modern science. Obviously can neither empiricism, nor validification through induction, nor "reliance upon the data of the senses as confirmed by reason, serve as principles in the metaphysical sense." TIM These scientific methods are valid on their own restricted levels leading to results and applications of the sciences which created them, but they are neither able to answer our existential questions nor improve our normal human condition. (normal: how man was meant to be, ...  )

____What is worse, modern science has with all its inventions brought about a serious disequilibrium in this world - despite their partial benefits - , precisely because of it being divorced from - and its inability of taking account of - the higher principles, even if this may not always have been the intention of the individual scientist.

4. True science is based on the Intellect

In modernism reason is conceived as a purely human activity, also cut off from the Transcendant and in postmodernism one is set to deconstruct reason by taking hold of and referring to the irrational levels of the human psyche, whereas in traditional sciences the human mind is understood as being a mirror of the Divine Mind. The picture produced on the mirror is the product of the Picture-maker reflecting Itself on it. 

Thus tradition has always held that the organ ''and container of knowledge is not the human mind but ultimately the Divine Intellect.'' Therefore ''true science is not based on purely human reason but on the Intellect which belongs to the supra-human level of reality, yet illuminates the human mind.'' TIM p.100. 

"When Descartes uttered, 'I think, therefore I am (cogito ergo sum), he placed his individual awareness of his own limited self as the criterion of existence, for certainly the 'I' in Descartes' assertion was not the Divine 'I' who, through Hallâj, exclaimed, 'I am the Truth' (ana'l Haqq): The Divine 'I' which alone, according to traditional sources has the right to say 'I'. Until Descartes, it was Pure Being, the Being of God, which determined human existence and the various levels of reality. But with Cartesian rationalism, individual human existence became the criterion of reality and also the truth." TIM p.100

   And what could be of more success to earthly man than to relate his intellect to the higher Intellect which is not of his own and which is unrestricted and independant of place and time. ( Quran 24-19 )

Read full: http://www.livingislam.org/mmt_e.html

References:

TIM: Traditional Islam In The Modern World; Seyyed Hossein Nasr;

SAC: The System Of Antichrist; Truth And Falsehood In Postmodernism & New Age; Charles Upton; Sophia Perennis, NY 2001

DRG: Dictionnaire de René Guénon, Jean-Marc Vivenza; Éditions Le Mercure Dauphinois, Grenoble 2005

ISLAM, IMAN & IHSAN: "Surrender" "Faith" & "Virtue"

Seyyed Hossein Nasr

"O thou soul which are at peace, return unto thy Lord, with gladness that is thine in Him and His in thee. Enter thou among My slaves. Enter thou My Paradise." (Quran - LXXXIX; 27-30 (trans. by M. Lings.) 


The function of religion is to bestow order upon human life and to establish an "outward" harmony upon whose basis man can return inwardly to his Origin by means of the journey toward the "interior" direction. This universal function is especially true of Islam, this last religion of humanity, which is at once a Divine injunction to establish order in human society and within the human soul and at the same time to make possible the interior life, to prepare the soul to return unto its Lord and enter the Paradise which is none other than the Divine Beatitude.


God is at once the First (al-awwal) and the Last (al-akhir), the Outward (al-zahir) and the Inward (al-batin). [1] By function of His outwardness He creates a world of separation and otherness and through His inwardness He brings men back to their Origin.


Religion is the means whereby this journey is made possible, and it recapitulates in its structure the creation itself which issues from God and returns unto Him. Religion consists of a dimension which is outward and another which, upon the basis of this outwardness, leads to the inward. These dimensions of the Islamic revelation are called the Shariah (the Sacred Law), the Tariqah (the Path) and the Haqiqah (the Truth), [2] or from another point of view they correspond to islam, iman, and ihsan, or "surrender", "faith" and "virtue".[3] 

No man has the right to approach the Imminent without surrendering himself to the Transcendent, and it is only in possessing faith in the Transcendent that man is able to experience the Imminent. Or from another point of view, it is only in accepting the Shari'ah that man is able to travel upon the Path (tariqah) and finally to reach the Truth (haqiqah) which lies at the heart of all things and yet is beyond all determination and limitation. 

To interiorize life itself and to become aware of the inward dimension, man must have recourse to rites whose very nature it is to cast a sacred form upon the waves of the ocean of multiplicity in order to save man and bring him back to the shores of Unity. The major rites or pillars (arkan) of Islam, namely the daily prayers (salat), fasting (sawm), the pilgrimage (hajj), the religious tax (zakat) and holy war (jihad), are all means of sanctifying man's terrestrial life and enabling him to live and to die as a central being destined for beatitude. But these rites themselves are not limited to their outer forms. Rather they possess inward dimensions and levels of meaning which man can reach in function of the degree of his faith (iman) and the intensity and quality of his virtue or inner beauty (ihsan). 


Although the whole of the Quranic revelation is called "islam", from the perspective in question here it can be said that not all those who follow the tradition on the level of islam are mu'mins, namely those who possess iman, nor do all those who are mu'mins possess ihsan, which is at once virtue and beauty and by function of which man is able to penetrate into the inner meaning of religion. The Islamic revelation is meant for all human beings destined to follow this tradition. 


But not all men are meant to follow the interior path. It is enough for a man to have lived according to the Shariah and in surrender (islam) to the Divine Will to die in grace and to enter into Paradise. But there are those who yearn for the Divine here and now and whose love for God and propensity for the contemplation of the Divine Realities (al-haqaiq) compel them to seek the path of inwardness. The revelation also provides a path for such men, for men who through their iman and ihsan "return unto their Lord with gladness" while still walking upon the earth.


Read full paper:
http://www.al-islam.org/al-serat/interior-nasr.htm

Allah Almighty and Exalted has said, “And there are servants of God the Compassionate who walk on the earth with humility, and when they are addressed by the illiterate (in a manner unbecoming to them) they say, “Peace (be on you)”. In these times, however, God Almighty and Exalted has kept most of the people veiled from these people (sufis) and their affairs, and the mysteries of this persuasion have been hidden from their hearts. Hence a group thinks that this (Sufism) is no more than a formal custom with no reality and substance. " Kashful Mahjub, Hazrat Usman Ali Hajveri Data Ganj Bakhsh

SEYYED HOSSEIN NASR

Professor Seyyed Hossein Nasr is University Professor of Islamic Studies at George Washington University and the author of numerous books including Man and Nature: the Spiritual Crisis of Modern Man (Kazi Publications, 1998), Religion and the Order of Nature (Oxford, 1996) and Knowledge and the Sacred (SUNY, 1989). He has trained different generations of students over the years since 1958 when he was a professor at Tehran University and then, in America since the Iranian revolution in 1979, specifically at Temple University in Philadelphia from 1979 to 1984 and at the George Washington University since 1984 to the present day.

Born in Tehran into a family of distinguished scholars and physicians, Nasr also comes from a family of Sufis. One of his ancestors was Mulla Seyyed Muhammad Taqi Poshtmashhad, who was a famous saint of Kashan, and his mausoleum which is located next to the tomb of the Safavid King Shah Abbas, is still visited by pilgrims to this day.

He traveled to Morocco in North Africa, which had great spiritual significance for Nasr who embraced Sufism in the form taught and practiced by the great Sufi saint of the Maghrib, Shaykh Ahmad al-Alawi.

For Professor Seyyed Hossein Nasr, the quest for knowledge, specifically knowledge which enables man to understand the true nature of things and which furthermore, "liberates and delivers him from the fetters and limitations of earthly existence," has been and continues to be the central concern and determinant of his intellectual life. According to Nasr, it was the discovery of traditional metaphysics and the philosophia perennis which settled the intellectual crisis he had experienced. 

From then on, he was certain that there was such a thing as the Truth and that it could be attained through knowledge by means of the intellect which is guided and illuminated by divine revelation. Nasr was soon recognized in American academic circles as a traditionalist and a major expositor and advocate of the perennialist perspective. Much of his intellectual activities and writing since being in exile in America, are related to this function and also in the fields of comparative religion, philosophy and religious dialogue.

Read full: 

http://www.nasrfoundation.org/bios.html