Printed in the Spring 2023 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Kinney, Jay, "Imagining God Imagining the World: When Either-Or Becomes Both-And" Quest 111:2, pg 33-35
By Jay Kinney
Longtime readers with strong memories may recall that I’ve written here before about my on-again, off-again, love affair with Islam, specifically with its mystical branch of Sufism. As I related previously (see “Losing My Religion” in Quest, summer 2009), in the years after the 9/11 terror attack and the hard-to-ignore rise of violent jihadism, I had real trouble continuing to resonate with a set of religious metaphors and practices that could also birth obscenities such as suicide bombers yelling “!Allahu akbar!” (“Allah is great!”) as they blew themselves up while targeting wedding parties and the like.
I knew, deep down, that such sad souls didn’t so much represent Islam as betray it, but that didn’t prevent me from having a strong emotional revulsion that alienated me from a spiritual path that I had been treading for more than a decade. But time heals all wounds (or at least softens reactive states), and over the last few years, roughly coinciding with the pandemic, I’ve found myself heeding an inner call to get back on track and quit letting a bunch of fundamentalist maniacs cut off my nose to spite my face.
To mix scriptural sources, I felt like the proverbial prodigal son welcomed home again after straying far afield. It’s not that I had stopped sensing that there was One God with a multitude of faces, but my sense of connection had gotten stretched almost to the breaking point. Then, as if I had jumped off a bridge wearing Allah’s bungee cord, I came bouncing back, ready for another round.
All these metaphors would seem to imply an externality to God that I don’t really profess. There is a Qur’anic verse (50:16) where Allah says, “It is We who have created man, and We know what his innermost self whispers within him: for We are closer to him than his jugular vein.” Indeed, when I’ve felt most connected to God, I have experienced it as an interior resonance or state. So, in a way, my sense of alienation or distance from God was deep within myself. Allah might indeed be closer than my jugular vein, but if I wasn’t feeling that or wasn’t encouraging myself to reach out to that hidden presence, I couldn’t exactly blame it on terrorists halfway around the globe, much less on Allah Himself.
* * *
For much of the time that I’ve been engaged with Sufism, my main guide has been Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi, the great mystical shaikh (master) of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, whose philosophy of the Unity of Being teaches that the Absolute, the indescribable intelligence and creative force that sustains all of creation, expresses itself such that all beings are particularizations of the Divine Being, and that God is within us and we are within God, both at the same time. Ibn ‘Arabi scholars note the similarity of this perspective to that of Advaita Vedanta or of Christian mystics such as Meister Eckhart.
However, it is one thing to accept this teaching as a grand abstraction and something else to experience it as our underlying reality. During my period of alienation, I found it beyond my capacity to comprehend that, in some real sense, the violent jihadi terrorist is no less a manifestation of God than anyone or anything else. For many of us, this would seem to be one claim too far. Yet is it really?
If we view the natural world as a core manifestation of divine order, not just a clockwork churning of DNA and survival of the fittest, then we must struggle to accept that the powerful lion taking down the beautiful gazelle to feast upon is not an evil activity, but a manifestation of the chain of being.
Carnivores are acting from their innate instincts, which lead them to kill and eat those further down the food chain. They would seem not to have much of a say in the matter. We humans, however, are said to have free will. While we are answerable to a higher morality, we are quite capable of ignoring God’s presence within ourselves—and within others—and talking ourselves into any number of evil acts under the delusion that we are following God’s will. Sunnis attacking Shi’ites and vice versa would be just one example of this capacity. Allah may be at the core of our own being, but the heart is a muscle that needs to be exercised in order to function properly, and while mercy and compassion are cardinal virtues, they must be consciously practiced.
Of course the Sufi belief in the combined transcendence (tanzih) and immanence (tashbih) of God is not shared by all Muslims, by any means. Many jurists and theologians, as well as common believers, emphasize Allah’s absolute uniqueness and transcendence above all creation. God is thus rendered into an Other who shares no human attributes and is largely unknowable, except through the Qur’an, the hadiths (sayings or traditions of the Prophet Muhammad), and various schools of jurisprudence. At its most extreme, this monotheism rejects any knowledge of or belief in God’s immanence as a form of shirk or idolatry.
Paradoxically, such austere conservatism does not preclude many Muslims from praying for divine intercession or favors in the smallest details of their lives. The common phrase In sha’a-llah (“If God wills”) is invoked in speaking of future events, with the assumption that Allah has the final say on whether some hoped-for outcome will come to pass.
I used to think that this notion of God’s involvement in every aspect of one’s life was that of an Orwellian busybody, but I now think that perhaps I was just running into the limits of my own powers of imagination. If, metaphorically speaking, Allah is (at least in part) the outpouring of love and natural order from the heart of Creation, whose infinite Being sustains all that is, we are not talking about anything that can be fully conceived of, much less described. Exit science and enter poetry.
I’m reminded of the scene in a 1930s Our Gang episode where one of the little rascals is about to purloin a freshly baked cookie from the kitchen when he is brought up short by the juxtaposition of two proverbs framed on the wall: “God helps those who help themselves,” and “Thou shalt not steal.”
Religion in general is full of these contradictions and paradoxes.
* * *
In my youth, I was raised in a sincerely Christian home, so the Ten Commandments were drummed into me in Sunday school. “Thou shalt not kill” received considerable emphasis. I was fine with that, as I had no plans to kill anyone—even to the point of initially registering as a conscientious objector when I reached military draft age.
But as I took an interest in history, I discovered that while the Sixth Commandment seemed fairly straightforward, over time it had acquired a great many loopholes, including that it was OK to kill heretics, witches, heathen, other Christians who disagreed with you (such as Catholics versus Protestants in the Thirty Years’ War).
So it has been with Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, and nearly every other expression of faith in the global village. Spiritual precepts or scriptural interpretations often find themselves in conflict, enabling those searching for scapegoats to do their dirty work while posturing as defenders of the faith.
If God is indeed personal, one might be led to think that He is dozing off at the wheel while the car is hurtling over the cliff. Yet another portion of Ibn ‘Arabi’s teachings eases us back from such a conclusion.
This is his doctrine that each of us has a unique interface with our Lord (Rabb). This says that Allah has a great number of attributes and that they all come into play as life continually unfolds. These attributes are called the Divine Names, symbolized by the Ninety-nine Names of Allah (though there is nothing ironclad about that number). For each of us, our Rabb displays or manifests as a unique and appropriate combination of Allah’s names. Through familiarizing ourselves with these names, through meditating upon them or chanting them (dhkir), we can begin to sense those which are especially acting upon us or through us.
Similarly, through our relations with others in daily life, we can begin to see their manifestation of the divine names interacting with ours. This can hopefully expand our awareness of Allah as our Rabb relating with theirs. As ‘Abd al-Razzaq Lahiji, a noted student of Ibn ‘Arabi, put it bluntly: “In reality, there is no knowledge of God by another than God; for another than God is not.”
The traditional goal of such shifts in awareness and identity is for the Sufi to be absorbed or “annihilated” in God (fana), a state that is often accompanied by a feeling of great release from one’s ego, and over time being able to reside in a state of subsistence (baqa), where one can function in the daily world in this dual awareness. This is often referred to as “dying before you die.”
Not all of the divine names and attributes are comforting, although some Sufis tend to focus on just the beautiful ones. As a Sufi friend put it recently, “Allah isn’t only a teddy bear.” Allah is both the Expander (Al-Basit) and the Abaser (Al-Khafid); both the Honorer (Al-Mu’izz) and the Dishonorer (Al-Muzill). For every “beautiful” name, it is said, there is a contrasting “majestic” name, —one that exhibits Allah’s power and judgment. The more names we learn and are able to see as operative in our lives or in those of others, the wider our acceptance of What Is.
This is not to say that the blowing up of innocent people is something to be accepted or excused. I still find it horrifying and deeply disturbing. But I no longer wish to grant cruel and ignorant sociopaths the power to drive me away from a spiritual path that has nurtured me for a good portion of my adult life or from an intuition of a God both within and without who is closer to me than my jugular vein.
* * *
Everyone is born with different talents and capacities, and the circumstances and challenges of our lives may enable us to flourish or might cause us to strike out in bitterness and anger. A hadith qudsi (a direct message from Allah through Muhammad) says, “My earth and My heavens cannot encompass Me, but the heart of My believing servant encompasses Me.” That may be true, but of course it is no guarantee that the heart will realize what is hidden within itself.
In describing my renewed connection with Islam and Sufism, I do not intend to imply that the path I am on is the correct or appropriate one for everyone. It does resonate for me, however. Interestingly, Ibn ‘Arabi, in explicating his philosophy of the Unity of Being, pointed out that every country or culture has its own god and religion, and that if the Absolute is truly the ground of all Being, then all these gods and religions are manifestations of the same Source. As the great mystic described his experience of this reality, he confessed the following: “My heart has become receptive of all forms: it is a pasture for gazelles, and a monastery for Christian monks, and a temple for idols and the pilgrim’s Kaaba and the tables of the Torah and the book of the Qurʾan.”
May we all strive for such a realization.
Jay Kinney was the founder and publisher of Gnosis: A Journal of the Western Inner Traditions. His lifelong studies in mysticism and esotericism were nourished by his contacts with the TSA dating back over fifty years ago.
This issue of Quest magazine discusses belief in a personal god versus an impersonal god. So much has been written on this topic that it is daunting to address it in just a couple of pages.
It is said that a sign of the turning of the age is that the old gods are mocked.
During the last decade of his life, “having fully burned” (in his own words) in the ecstasy of life, love and poetry, Rumi, the thirteenth-century Persian Sufi poet, composed a seven-volume book of parables in verse. He called it Masnavi Maa’navi: “Rhyming Couplets on Spiritual Matters.” In the second volume of this book, Rumi narrates the story of Moses and the shepherd, consisting of 192 lines. I first read this story in my Persian literature book in the 1970s as a young boy growing up in Iran. The story is simple, but its practical understanding takes on a life of its own as one lives long enough to encounter various cultures, faiths, and peoples. Seven centuries after its composition, in our age of globalization, the parable of Moses and the shepherd illuminates more than before the question of how (or perhaps how-less) to approach God. What makes it more significant is that unlike many of the parables in the Masnavi, which Rumi borrowed from other literary sources before him, this story appears to come from the creative imagination of Rumi himself. This story must have had a special significance in his mind.