Maybe it hasn't always been that way (Reith, for example, After Dark, Berlin and Iris Murdoch) and maybe it's unfair to be so harsh given they have to respond to the general 'dumbing down', the competition from other flashier sources of information for our attention, and also the desire to think of Islam in political terms more than anything else-which is wholly understandable given the way in which the religion has been used to stir up and justify all sorts of horrors.
And there's no point, really, harping on about the splendours of the Alhambra etc., etc. Face reality: some of the most regressive views and politics is coming out of the so-called Muslim world.
But Rageh really did miss out on the miraj (I think). The idea, for example, that 'finitude is not a misfortune' could be traced back to it (the Allama); that religion is not a negation of 'the world' , a seeking of 'annihilation' (fana) but, at its best, a return to earth, and the ties of the world, obligations, duties, commitments. On the whole he's been too apologetic. And the stuff on the relations with Jews is likely to reinforce misperceptions. Well, that's the way I see it anyway: the rather common notion that Muslims are anti-jewish (partly re-inforced, of course, by the unmistakable growth in anti-semitism post '67).
There's a tendency to see Sufism as the pluralistic, relatively more tolerant version of Islam, a foil for the severe insistence on transcendence, the regulation of so many aspects of one's life by so many laws. Doubt if that's really been the case, historically speaking. As if any spiritual practice could be without its own form of discipline. In any case, you've always thought that pluralism was the orthodox position-irrespective of its relation with Sufism. Tauhid, unity-in-diversity, is the fundamental approach.
Now that I think of it though, this inclination towards pluralism was never really a philosophical idea but, rather, something more like a set of accumulated feelings and partial insights randomly suggested by loved ones. It did help, for example, being told by Ubo, with some pride, that his father was often called 'the jew' , something that, by a strange quirk of fate, has been repeated with me and my friends. And then there was the swami who really seemed to be more impressed by a sort of Buddhist fatalism than anything to do with Islam; the Dougal? Jesus! She's more Catholic than Muslim (but that may just be down to musical tastes).
2 comments:
what exactly does miraj mean? we have this word in romanian and i have always been in love with it, though i am sure that it must have evolved into something very different. it means a kind of hallucination, a vision one has and becomes obsessed with it, but it is not real.
don't know the history of the word, but in the Islamic literature it is the ascension of the Prophet to God, starting from Jerusalem.
Don't know if it's related to mirage though. so, the word is what? a loan word in romanian? where did it come from? do you know?
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