‘Action is the Life of all and if thou dost not Act, thou dost Nothing.’
(Gerrard Winstanley)
Before we consider the life-story of the British Muslim and Koranic translator, Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall, it is as well to recall that aspect of the practice of every believer without which there are only ashes: holiness of life. In the case of Pickthall, this was a luminous, steadily progressing reality which impressed all who came into contact with him. Even his unbelieving first biographer, Anne Fremantle, opined that ‘had he changed from evangelical or even from high church Anglicanism to the Roman faith, doubtless the machinery of sanctification would have by now been set to work.’ He was a man of discreet charity, the extent of whose generosity was only discovered after his death. He turned down lucrative and prestigious speaking tours and the pleasures of travel in favour of his last and, in his eyes, greatest project, acting as headmaster to Muslim boys in Hyderabad. He witnessed the dismemberment of his beloved Ottoman Caliphate while rejecting bitterness and calls for violent revenge, convinced that Allah’s verdict was just, and that in the circumstances of the age, Islam’s victory would come through changing an unjust world from within. Above all, he was a man who constantly kept Allah and His providence in mind.
Pickthall’s humility did not prevent him from taking a rightful pride in his ancestry, which he could trace back to a knight of William the Conqueror’s day, Sir Roger de Poictu, from whom his odd surname derives. The family, long settled in Cumberland, came south in Dutch William’s time, and Pickthall’s father Charles, an Anglican parson, was appointed to a living near Woodbridge in Suffolk. Charles’ wife, whom he married late in life, was Mary O’Brien, who despite her Irish name was a staunchly nonconformist daughter of Admiral Donat Henry O’Brien, a hero of the same Napoleonic war which brought Sheikh Abdullah Quilliam’s grandfather fame as master ofVictory at Trafalgar. O’Brien, immortalised by Marryat in Masterman Ready, passed on some of his heroic impulses to his grandson Marmaduke, who throughout his life championed a rather Shavian ideal of the saint as warrior. It may be no coincidence that Pickthall, Quilliam and, before them, Lord Byron, who all found their vocation as rebellious lovers of the East, were the grandsons of naval heroes.
Marmaduke was born in 1875, and when his father died five years later the family sold the Suffolk rectory and moved to the capital. For the little boy the trauma of the exodus from a country idyll to a cold and cheerless house in London was a deep blow to the soul, and his later delight in the freedom of traditional life in the Middle East may have owed much to that early formative transition. The claustrophobia was only made worse when he entered Harrow, whose arcane rituals and fagging system he was later to send up in his novel Sir Limpidus. Friends were his only consolation: perhaps his closest was Winston Churchill.
Once the sloth and bullying of Harrow were behind him he was able to indulge a growing range of youthful passions. In the Jura he acquired his lifelong love of mountaineering, and in Wales and Ireland he learned Welsh and Gaelic. So remarkable a gift for languages impelled his teachers to put him forward for a Foreign Office vacancy; yet he failed the exam. On the rebound, as it were, he proposed to Muriel Smith, the girl who was to become his wife. She accepted, only to lose her betrothed for several years in one of the sudden picaresque changes of direction which were to mark his later life. Hoping to learn enough Arabic to earn him a consular job in Palestine, and with introductions in Jerusalem, Pickthall had sailed for Port Said. He was not yet eighteen years old.
The Orient came as a revelation. Later in life he wrote: ‘When I read The Arabian Nights I see the daily life of Damascus, Jerusalem, Aleppo, Cairo, and the other cities as I found it in the early nineties of last century. What struck me, even in its decay and poverty, was the joyousness of that life compared with anything that I had seen in Europe. The people seemed quite independent of our cares of life, our anxious clutching after wealth, our fear of death.’ He found a khoja to teach him more Arabic, and armed with a rapidly increasing fluency took ship for Jaffa, where, to the horror of European residents and missionaries, he donned native garb and disappeared into the depths of the Palestinian hinterland.
Some of his experiences in the twilight of that exotic world may be re-read in his travelogue, Oriental Encounters. He had found, as he explains, a world of freedom unimaginable to a public schoolboy raised on an almost idolatrous passion for The State. Most Palestinians never set eyes on a policeman, and lived for decades without engaging with government in any way. Islamic law was administered in its time-honoured fashion, by qadis who, with the exception of the Sahn and Ayasofya graduates in the cities, were local scholars. Villages chose their own headmen, or inherited them, and the same was true for the bedouin tribes. The population revered and loved the Sultan-Caliph in faraway Istanbul, but understood that it was not his place to interfere with their lives.
It was this freedom, as much as intellectual assent, which set Marmaduke on the long pilgrimage which was to lead him to Islam. He saw the Muslim world before Westernisation had contaminated the lives of the masses, and long before it had infected Muslim political thought and produced the modern vision of the Islamic State, with its ‘ideology’, its centralised bureaucracy, its secret police, its Pasdaran and its Basij. That totalitarian nightmare he would not have recognised as Muslim. The deep faith of the Levantine peasantry which so amazed him was sustained by the sincerity that can only come when men are free, not forced, in the practice of religion. For the state to compel compliance is to spread vice and disbelief; as the Arab proverb which he well-knew says: ‘If camel-dung were to be prohibited, people would seek it out.’
Throughout his life Pickthall saw Islam as radical freedom, a freedom from the encroachments of the State as much as from the claws of the ego. It also offered freedom from narrow fanaticism and sectarian bigotry. Late Ottoman Palestine was teeming with missionaries of every Christian sect, each convinced, in those pre-ecumenical days, of its own solitary rightness. He was appalled by the hate-filled rivalry of the sects, which, he thought, should at least be united in the land holy to their faith. But Christian Jerusalem was a maze of rival shrines and liturgies, where punches were frequently thrown in churches, while the Jerusalem of Islam was gloriously united under the Dome, the physical crown of the city, and of her complex history.
1897 found him in Damascus, the silent city of lanes, hidden rose-bowers, and walnut trees. It was in this deep peacefulness, resting from his adventures, that he worked methodically through the mysteries of Arabic grammar. He read poetry and history; but seemed drawn, irresistibly, to the Holy Qur’an. Initially led to it by curiosity, he soon came to suspect that he had unearthed the end of the Englishman’s eternal religious quest. The link was Thomas Traherne and Gerrard Winstanley, who, with their nature mysticism and insistence on personal freedom from an intrusive state or priesthood, had been his inspiration since his early teens. Now their words seemed to be bearing fruit.
Winstanley is an important key to understanding Pickthall’s thought. His 1652 masterpiece, Law of Freedom on a Platform, had been the manifesto of the Digger movement, the most radical offshoot of Leveller Protestantism. In this book, which deeply shaped the soul of the young Pickthall, Winstanley outlined what was to become the essence of Christian Socialism. The Diggers believed in the holiness of labour, coming by their name when, in 1649, Winstanley and a group of friends took over a plot of waste land at Walton-on-Thames, planting corn, beans and parsnips. This gesture was, Pickthall realised in Damascus, illegal in Christendom, but was precisely the Shari‘a principle ofihya al-mawat, gaining entitlement to land by reviving it after its ‘death by neglect’. The Diggers were held together, not by cowed obedience to a religious state, but by love among themselves, fired and purified by the dignity of labour.
It soon became clear to Pickthall that their Dissenting theology, which moved far beyond Calvin in its rejection of original sin and orthodox Trinitarian doctrine, and its emphasis on knowing God through closeness to nature, was precisely the message of Islam. This was a religion for autonomous communities, self-governing under God, each free to elect its own minister.
The God of the Diggers was a god of Reason – not the mechanical dictator whom Blake was to scorn as Urizen, ‘blind ignorance’, but reason as illuminated by God through the practice of the virtues and communion with nature. Superstition and priestcraft were abhorred. The Reason-God was immanent in creation, which, for Winstanley, as for Traherne and the Cambridge Platonists, was a blessed sign of God’s nearness. Winstanley had dipped into the Hermetic wisdom of the age, and, like the Quakers with whom we was for a time associated, absorbed something of the spirit of Islam through the Italian esoterists Ficino, Bruno, and Campanella. It was not for nothing that the first English rendering of the Basmala was made by an enthusiastic Quaker, George Keith, who translated it as ‘In the Name of the Lord the merciful Commiserator.’ Somewhat later, Robert Barclay, the greatest name in English Quaker theology, borrowed extensively from Ibn Tufayl. By all these channels Islam had enriched and uplifted English Dissent.
Another Digger theme which attracted Pickthall was their communitarian optimism. Winstanley had written: ‘In Cobham on the little heath our digging there goes on, And all our friends they live in love, as if they were but one.’ The brotherhood of Muslims which he observed in Syria, the respect between Sunnis and Shi‘is, and their indifference to class distinctions in their places of worship, seemed to be the living realisation of the dreams of English radicals at the time of Cromwell’s Commonwealth. This theme of Muslim brotherhood was to be fundamental in Pickthall’s later writing and preaching. No less important was the Digger rejection of traditional Church exclusivism. Irrespective of creed, they thought, all men were candidates for salvation. Christ’s sacrifice indicated, in its orthodox understanding, a meanness unworthy of a loving God, Who can surely accept the repentance of any faithful monotheist, whether or not he had been bathed in the blood of His son.
Oddly, then, Pickthall came home in Damascus. The picaresque adventures of his days in Palestine had given way to a serious spiritual and intellectual quest. Like Henry Stubbe, another Commonwealth dissident, he saw in Islam the fulfilment of the English dream of a reasonable and just religion, free of superstition and metaphysical mumbo-jumbo, and bearing fruit in a wonderful and joyful fellowship. As the New Statesman put it in 1930, reviewing his Koranic translation: ‘Mr Marmaduke Pickthall was always a great lover of Islam. When he became a Muslim it was regarded less as conversion than as self-discovery.’
If this was his Road to Damascus, why, then, did he hold back? Some have thought that the reason was his concern for the feelings of his aged mother, with her own Christian certainties. This was his later explanation:
‘The man who did not become a Muslim when he was nineteen years old because he was afraid that it would break his mother’s heart does not exist, I am sorry to say. The sad fact is that he was anxious to become a Muslim, forgetting all about his mother. It was his Muslim teacher – the Sheykh-ul-Ulema of the great mosque at Damascus – a noble and benign old man, to whom he one day mentioned his desire to become a Muslim, who reminded him of his duty to his mother and forbade him to profess Islam until he had consulted her. ‘No, my son,’ were his words, ‘wait until you are older, and have seen again your native land. You are alone among us as our boys are alone among the Christians. God knows how I should feel if any Christian teacher dealt with a son of mine otherwise than as I now deal with you.’ […] If he had become a Muslim at that time he would pretty certainly have repented it – quite apart from the unhappiness he would have caused his mother, which would have made him unhappy – because he had not thought and learnt enough about religion to be certain of his faith. It was only the romance and pageant of the East which then attracted him. He became a Muslim in real earnest twenty years after.’
He left Damascus, then, without Islam. But jobs were beckoning. The British Museum offered him a post on the basis of his knowledge of ancient Welsh and Irish, but he declined. He was offered the vice-consulship at the British consulate in Haifa, but this was withdrawn when it was learnt how young he was. His family, and his patient Muriel, summoned him home, and, penniless, he obeyed.
He travelled back slowly, considering the meaning of his steps. As he left the sun behind him, he seemed to leave courtesy and contentment as well. The Muslims were the happiest people on earth, never complaining even when faced with dire threats. The Christians among them were protected and privileged by the Capitulations. The Ottoman Balkans, under the sultans a place of refuge for victims of church wars, had been cruelly diminished by crusade and insurrection, prompted, in every case, from outside. He saw the Morea, the first land of Greek independence, in which a third of a million Muslims had been slaughtered by priests and peasants. The remaining corners of Ottoman Europe seemed overshadowed by a similar fate; but still the people smiled. It was the grace of rida.
Back in London, Pickthall recalled his romantic duties. He paced the pavement outside Muriel’s home in the time-honoured way, and battered down her parents’ resistance. They married in September 1896, the groom having fasted the previous day as a mark of respect for what he still considered a sacrament of the Church. Then he bore her swiftly away to Geneva, partly for the skiing, and partly, too, to associate with the literary circles which Pickthall admired.
During his sojourn in the dour Calvinist capital, Pickthall honed the skills which would make him one of the world’s most distinguished exponents both of novel-writing, and of the still underdeveloped sport of skiing. He began a novel, and kept a diary, in which, despite his youth, his mature descriptive gift is already evident. He wrote of
‘a pearly mist delicately flushed from the sunset, on lake and mountains. The twin sails of a barque and the hull itself seemed motionless, yet were surely slipping past the piers. There was something remote about the whole scene, or so it appeared to me. I was able to separate myself from the landscape: to stand back, as it were, and admire it as one admires a fine painting. I crossed a bridge: starless night on the one hand: dying day on the other. There was a mist about the city: a mist that glowed with a blue spirit light which burned everywhere or nowhere, out of which the yellow lights looked over their dancing semblance in the water watchfully, as from a citadel. The distance of the streets was inundated with stagnant grey light, from which the last warmth of light had just faded. As I penetrated the city it had no other light than that which the street lamps gave it, and the glow from a lamp-lit window here and there. But the sky was still pale and green, with a softness as of velvet. The great round globules of electric light, rising up on the bridge against illimitable space, and their lengthened reflections, caught the eye and blinded it.’
But this landscape concealed a tristesse, the local mood that Byron had dubbed ‘Lemancholy.’ By morning, a thick fog
‘hung over the city, like a veil on the face of a plain woman, hiding blemishes and defects, softening all hardness of outline, soothing with the suggestion of a non-existent beauty. It is a law of nature, as it is of art, that half-revelation is more attractive than nakedness. Unhappily there is another law which forbids a man to rest content until he has stripped his ideal and beheld it naked. Hence the end of most men’s dreams is disappointment. And this disappointment is proportionate to what the world calls success.’
By the shores of Lake Leman, then, the novelist-in-waiting acquired his love of light, which later became one of the strengths and hallmarks of his mature prose. Here, too, he developed that sense of the fragility, even the unreality, of observed nature, and the superficial nature of man’s passage upon it, which enrich his novels, and increased the readiness of his heart for Islam. In all these ways, his writing mirrored the sensitivity of the paintings of his great fellow-converts, Ivan Agueli, and Etienne Dinet. Agueli’s tableaux have a Sibelian sense of misty timelessless; while Dinet’s exuberant Algerian and Meccan paintings recall the Muslim sense that God is present in our daily joys: the utter ubiquity of the qibla. Pickthall’s novels, at their best, resemble a marriage of the two styles, just as he found in Islamic faith the ideal which he had sought in Christianity: a medieval liturgy combined with a low ecclesiology, the hieratic dignity of Laud invigorated by the social passions of Dissent.
On the surface, however, his religious needs seemed to be satisfied by an increasingly high Anglicanism. He frequently fasted and took communion, and insisted (to the annoyance of his chapelbound in-laws) on the truth of the Apostolic Succession. Behind this, however, his notebooks indicate a robust willingness to accept and face doubts, and even a solid cynicism about the ultimate truth of God; he wrestled with these difficulties, seeking help in the secular philosophy of the day, eventually to emerge, as al-Ghazali had done, a stronger man.
Rare is the secular soul that can produce true literature; and Pickthall’s youthful agonies over faith energise the first of his writings to see print: his short stories ‘Monsieur le Président’ and ‘The Word of an Englishman’, both published in 1898. The novel he had begun in Switzerland was never published: it is simple juvenilia, a laboratory experiment that in print would have done him no good at all. Sadly, his first published novel, All Fools, was little better, and contained morally problematic passages which were to saddle him in later years with the reputation of a libertine. Even his mother was disturbed by the most offending passage in the book, which used the word ‘stays’, an unmentionable item of Victorian underwear. The Anglican Bishop of Jerusalem, to whom Pickthall unwisely sent a copy, was similarly agitated, and the young novelist lost many friends. Soon he bought up the unsold copies, and had them destroyed.
But by then he had already written much of the novel that was to catapult him to fame as one of the bestselling English novelists of the day: Said the Fisherman. This was published by Methuen in 1903, to spectacularly favourable reviews. A blizzard of fan-mail settled on his doormat. One especially pleasant letter came from H.G. Wells, who wrote, ‘I wish that I could feel as certain about my own work as I do of yours, that it will be alive and interesting people fifty years from now.’ Academics such as Granville Browne heaped praises upon it for its accurate portrayal of Arab life. In later years, Pickthall acknowledged that the novel’s focus on the less attractive aspects of the Arab personality which he had encountered in Palestine could never make the book popular among Arabs themselves; but even after his conversion, he insisted that the novelist’s mission was not to propagandise, but to tease out every aspect of the human personality, whether good or bad. As with his great harem novel, Veiled Women, he was concerned to be true to his perceptions; he would document English and Oriental life as he found it, not as he or others would wish it to be. The greatness of the Oriental vision would in this way shine through all the brighter.
His next novel returned him to England. Enid is the first of his celebrated Suffolk tales, reminiscent in some respects of the writings of the Powys brothers. It was followed byThe House of Islam, which he wrote while nursing his mother in her final illness, and at a time when his life was saddened by the growing realisation that he would never have children. The novel is unsteady and still immature: still only in his twenties, Pickthall could manage the comic scenes of Said the Fisherman, but could not fully sustain the grave, tragic theme which he chose for The House, which described the anguish of a Muslim compelled to take his sick daughter to a Western Christian doctor when traditional remedies had failed.
This productive but sober period of his life ended in 1907. An invitation to St James’s Palace to meet the wife of Captain Machell, advisor to the Egyptian Prime Minister Mustafa Fahmi Pasha, began with a discussion of his books, and led to an invitation to Alexandria.
Pickthall accepted with alacrity, and soon was back in his beloved East. In native dress again, he travelled through the countryside, marvelling at the mawlid of al-Sayyid al-Badawi in Tanta, and immersing himself in Arab ways. The result was a series of short stories and his novel Children of the Nile. It also offered an opportunity to help his friend James Hanauer, the Anglican chaplain at Damascus, edit his anthology of Muslim, Christian and Jewish tales, Folklore of the Holy Land.
1908 brought intimations of the collapse of the old world. At first, the Young Turk revolution seemed to presage a renewed time of hope for the Empire. Pickthall welcomed the idealistic revolutionaries, imagining that they would hold the empire together better than the old Sultan, with his secretive ways. Here, perhaps, is the essence of his apparent remoteness towards Sheikh Abdullah Quilliam. Quilliam had been a confidant of Abdul Hamid, ‘the Sultan’s Englishman’, his private advisor and his emissary on sensitive missions to the Balkans. Quilliam knew the Sultan as Pickthall never did, and must have felt that his opposition to the Young Turk movement was fully vindicated by the disasters of the Balkan War of 1912, when the Empire lost almost all her remaining European territories to vengeful Christians. More calamitous still was the Unionist decision to cast in its lot with Prussian militarism during the First World War. Pickthall, too, became anxious for Turkey, seeing that the old British policy of upholding the integrity of the Ottoman Empire, which had begun even before Britain intervened on Turkey’s side in the Crimean War, and had been reinforced by Disraeli’s anti-Russian strategy, was steadily disintegrating in the face of Young Turk enthusiasm for Germany.
Coup and counter-coup let much gifted Osmanli blood. The Arabs and the Balkan Muslims, who had previously looked up to the Turks for political and religious leadership, began to wonder whether they should not heed the mermaid calls of the European Powers, and press for autonomy or outright independence from the Porte. Behind the agitation was, on the one hand, the traditional British fear that, in the words of Sir Mark Sykes, ‘the collapse of the Ottoman Empire would be a frightful disaster to us.’ On the other were ranged the powers of bloodsucking French banks, Gladstonian Christian Islamophobia, and a vicious pan-Slavism bankrolled from the darker recesses of Moscow’s bureaucracy.
Sheikh Abdullah Quilliam, that undying Empire loyalist, fired off a hot broadside of polemic:
‘List, ye Czar of “Russia’s all,”
Hark! The sound of Freedom’s call,
Chanting in triumphant staves,
“Perish tyrants! Perish knaves!”’
Like Pickthall, he knew that the integrity of the traditional free lands of Islam was threatened not by internal weakness so much as by the Russian system of government, which, as Pickthall saw, ‘must have war. War is a necessity of its existence, for an era of peace would inevitably bring to pass the revolution which has long been brewing.’ The collapse of the Ottoman Empire, he knew, would plunge the region into disorder for an age. He had no confidence in the ability of Arab or Balkan peoples to recreate the free and stable space which the Ottomans, at their best, had supplied, and he lamented the Foreign Office’s change of heart. ‘An independent Turkey,’ he opined, ‘was regarded by our older, better-educated statesmen as just as necessary […] as a safety-valve is to a steam-engine: do away with it – the thing explodes.’ Lawrence and his Arab allies would soon demonstrate the truth of his predictions.
Pickthall was never fully at ease with the Unionists. In later years, he must frequently have wondered whether Quilliam’s insistent conservatism, now to be manifested in support for the Liberal party of Old Turks, was not the course of a wiser head. Quilliam had lived behind the scenes at Yildiz Palace, and knew Abdul Hamid as few others had done; and he had trusted, even loved the man. The Young Turks promised a new dawn for Islam, the Caliphate and the entire Muslim world; but their Turanian preoccupations were liable to alienate the very minorities that they claimed to emancipate from the dhimma rules. Quilliam had urged the Sultan to allow the Balkan Muslims to retain their arms; the Unionists had disarmed them; and the results were to be seen in the tragic refugee columns that escaped the religious pogroms of 1912 and 1913.
As the dismal news rolled in, it seemed as though Heaven had finally abandoned the Empire to its fate. In England, Pickthall campaigned vigorously on Turkey’s behalf, but could do nothing against the new Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, who was, as Granville Browne commented, ‘russophile, germanophobe, and anti-Islamic.’ He wrote to a Foreign Office official demanding to know whether the new arrangements in the Balkans could be considered to further the cause of peace, and received the following reply: ‘Yes, and I’ll tell you why. It is not generally known. But the Muslim population has been practically wiped out – 240,000 killed in Western Thrace alone – that clears the ground.’
While campaigning for the dying Empire, Pickthall found time for more novels. Larkmeadow, another Suffolk tale, appeared in 1911, and in 1913 he produced one of his masterpieces, Veiled Women. This follows Saïd in its realistic, often Zola-like depiction of Middle Eastern life, but now there is an undercurrent of polemic. Edwardian imperial convictions about the evils of slavery stood little chance against the charming reality of a Cairo harem, where concubinage was an option desired earnestly by many Circassian girls, whose slave-guardians thanked God for the ease of their lot. Lord Cromer, although generally contemptuous of Egyptian ways, made an exception in the case of slavery, an institution whose Islamic expression he was able grudgingly to respect:
‘It may be doubted (Cromer wrote) whether in the majority of cases the lot of slaves in Egypt is, in its material aspects, harder than, or even as hard as that of many domestic servants in Europe. Indeed, from one point of view, the Eastern slave is in a better position than the Western servant. The latter can be thrown out of employment at any moment. […] Cases are frequent of masters who would be glad to get rid of their slaves, but who are unable to do so because the latter will not accept the gift of liberty. A moral obligation, which is universally recognised, rests on all masters to support aged and infirm slaves till they die; this obligation is often onerous in the case of those who have inherited slaves from their parents or other relatives.’ (Lord Cromer, Modern Egypt, New York, 1908, II, 496-7.)
In its portrayal of the positive aspects of polygamy and slavery, Veiled Women was calculated to shock. It was, perhaps for this reason, one of his least popular works.
During the same period Pickthall contributed to the New Age, the fashionable literary magazine supported by Bernard Shaw, sharing its pages, almost weekly, with Ezra Pound, D.H. Lawrence, and G.K. Chesterton. As a literary figure, if not as a political advocate, he had arrived.
Veiled Women gave him the fare to Istanbul. Lodged with a German lady (Miss Kate, Turkicised to Misket Hanum) in a house in the quiet suburb of Erenköy, he gathered material for his dramatic but sad With the Turk in Wartime, and his The Early Hours, perhaps the greatest of his novels. He also penned a series of passionate essays, The Black Crusade. During this time, despite the Balkan massacres, Christians went unmolested in the great city. He recorded a familiar scene at the Orthodox church in Pera one Easter Friday: ‘four different factions fighting which was to carry the big Cross, and the Bishop hitting out right and left upon their craniums with his crozier; many people wounded, women in fits. The Turkish mounted police had to come in force to stop further bloodshed.’ It was a perfect image of the classical Ottoman self-understanding: without the Sultan-Caliph, the minorities would murder each other. The Second Balkan War, which saw the victorious Orthodox powers squabbling over the amputated limbs of Turkey, looked like a full vindication of this.
Pickthall returned to an England full of glee at the Christian victories. As a lover of Turkey, he was shattered by the mood of triumph. The Bishop of London held a service of intercession to pray for the victory of the Bulgarian army as it marched on Istanbul. Where, in all this, was Pickthall’s high Anglicanism?
It was the English mood of holy war which finally drove him from the faith of his fathers. He had always felt uncomfortable with those English hymns that curse the infidel. One particular source of irritation was Bishop Cleveland Coxe’s merry song:
‘Trump of the Lord! I hear it blow!
Forward the Cross; the world shall know
Jehovah’s arms against the foe;
Down shall the cursed Crescent go!
To arms! To arms!
God wills it so.’
And now, in a small Sussex village church, Pickthall heard a vicar hurling imprecations against the devilish Turk. The last straw was Charles Wesley’s hymn ‘For the Mahometans’:
‘O, may thy blood once sprinkled cry
For those who spurn Thy sprinkled blood:
Assert thy glorious Deity
Stretch out thine arm thou triune God
The Unitarian fiend expel
And chase his doctrines back to Hell.’
Pickthall thought of the Carnegie Report, which declared, of the Greek attack on Valona, that ‘in a century of repentance they could not expiate it.’ He thought of the forced conversions of the Pomaks in Bulgaria. He remembered the refugees in Istanbul, their lips removed as trophies by Christian soldiers. He remembered that no Muslim would ever sing a hymn against Jesus. He could stand no more. He left the church before the end of the service, and never again considered himself a Christian.
The political situation continued to worsen. Horrified by the new British policy, which seemed hell-bent on plunging the Balkans and the Middle East into chaos, the Young Turks strengthened their ties with Berlin. Meanwhile, the British government, driven by the same men who had allowed the destruction of Macedonia and Thrace, marched headlong towards war with the Central Powers. In August 1914, Winston Churchill seized two Turkish dreadnoughts, the Sultan Osman and the Reshadiye, which were under construction in a British yard. The outrage in Turkey was intense. Millions of pounds had been subscribed by ordinary Turks: women had even sold their hair for a few coppers and schoolboys made do with dry bread in order to add to the fund. But the ships were gone, and with them went Pickthall’s last hopes for a peaceful settlement. The hubris of nationalistic Europe, the tribal vanity which she pressed on the rest of the world as the sole path to human progress, was about to send millions of young men to their deaths. The trigger was the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a Serbian nationalist, on the streets of Sarajevo.
The war had broken Europe’s ideals, and the machines of Krupp lent new efficiency to her patriotic hatreds. The Hun reached the Marne, and English dowagers strangled their dachshunds with their own hands. It was no time to be a Turcophile. But Pickthall had found a new source of strength. The pride of human autonomy had been shown a lethal fantasy; and only God could provide succour. But where could He be found?
In 1913, Lady Evelyn Cobbold, the Sutherland heiress and traveller, tried to convert him during a dinner at Claridges, explaining that the waiters would do perfectly well as witnesses. He politely demurred; but he could marshal no argument against hers. What he had seen and described, she had lived. As an English Muslim woman familiar with the heart of Asia, she knew that his love for Islam was grounded in much more than a Pierre Loti style enjoyment of exotica. And so, on 29 November 1914, during a lecture on ‘Islam and Progress’, he took the plunge, joining countless others of his kind. From now on, his life would be lived in the light of the One God of Islam. Muriel followed him soon afterwards.
The war ground on, and Pickthall watched as the Turks trounced the assembled British and colonial troops at Gallipoli, only to be betrayed by the Arab uprising under Lawrence. Like Evelyn Cobbold, Pickthall despised Lawrence as a shallow romantic, given to unnatural passions and wild misjudgements. As he later wrote, reviewing theSeven Pillars of Wisdom:
‘He really thought the Arabs a more virile people than the Turks. He really thought them better qualified to govern. He really believed that the British Government would fulfil punctually all the promises made on its behalf. He really thought that it was love of freedom and his personal effort and example rather than the huge sums paid by the British authorities and the idea of looting Damascus, which made the Arabs zealous in rebellion.’
While Europeans bloodied each others’ noses, and encouraged the same behaviour in others, Pickthall began to define his position in the British Muslim community. The Liverpool congregation had lost its mosque in 1908, and Sheikh Abdullah had gone to ground in the Turkish town of Bostancik, to return as the mysterious Dr Henri Marcel Leon, translator of Mevlevi ghazals and author of a work on influenza. There was a prayer-room in Notting Hill, and an Islam Society, a Muslim Literary Society, and also the eccentric Anglo-Moghul mosque in Woking. In all these institutions Pickthall assumed the role of a natural leader. He had no patience with the Qadiani sect (‘I call myself a Sunni Muslim of the Hanafi school’, he said in self-definition), but when Khwaja Kamaluddin, suspected by many even then of Qadiani sympathies, returned to India in 1919, Pickthall preached the Friday sermons in Woking. ‘If there is one thing that turns your hair grey, it is preaching in Arabic’, he later remarked, perhaps recalling the caliph Umar II’s words that ‘mounting the pulpits, and fear of solecisms, have turned my hair grey.’ He preached in London as well, and in due course some of his khutbas found their way into print, drawing the attention of others in the Muslim world. In addition, he spent a year running an Islamic Information Bureau in Palace Street, London, which issued a weekly paper, The Muslim Outlook.
The Outlook was funded by Indian Muslims loyal to the Caliphate. The Khilafatist movement represented a dire threat to British rule in India, which had previously found the Muslims to be less inclined to the independence party than the Hindus. But the government’s policy was too much to bear. On January 18, 1918, Lloyd George had promised Istanbul and the Turkish-speaking areas of Thrace to post-war Turkey; but the reality turned out rather differently. Istanbul was placed under Allied occupation, and the bulk of Muslim Thrace was awarded to Greece. This latest case of Albion’s perfidy intensified Indian Muslim mistrust of British rule. Gandhi, too, encouraged many Hindus to support the Khilafat movement, and few Indians participated in the Raj’s official celebration of the end of the First World War. Instead, a million telegrams of complaint arrived at the Viceroy’s residence.
Pickthall was now at his most passionate:
‘Objectivity is much more common in the East than in the West; nations, like individuals, are there judged by their words, not by their own idea of their intentions or beliefs; and these inconsistencies, which no doubt look very trifling to a British politician, impress the Oriental as a foul injustice and the outcome of fanaticism. The East preserves our record, and reviews it as a whole. There is no end visible to the absurdities into which this mental deficiency of our rulers may lead us. […] Nothing is too extravagant to be believed in this connection, when flustered mediocrities are in the place of genius.’
This bitter alienation from British policy, which now placed him at the opposite pole from his erstwhile friend Churchill, opened the next chapter in Pickthall’s life. Passionate Khilafatists invited him to become editor of a great Indian newspaper, the Bombay Chronicle, and he accepted. In September 1919 he reached the Apollo Bunder, and immediately found himself carried away in the maelstrom of Indian life and politics. When he arrived, most of the Chronicle’s staff were on strike; within six months he had turned it around and doubled its circulation, through a judicious but firm advocacy of Indian evolution towards independence. The Government was incandescent, but could do little. However Pickthall, who became a close associate of Gandhi, supported the ulema’s rejection of violent resistance to British rule, and their opposition to the growing migration of Indian Muslims to independent Afghanistan. Non-violence and non-co-operation seemed the most promising means by which India would emerge as a strong and free nation. When the Muslim League made its appearance under the very secular figure of Jinnah, Pickthall joined the great bulk of India’s ulema in rejecting the idea of partition. India’s great Muslim millions were one family, and must never be divided. Only together could they complete the millennial work of converting the whole country to Islam.
So the Englishman became an Indian nationalist leader, fluent in Urdu, and attending dawn prayers in the mosque, dressed in Gandhian homespun adorned with the purple crescent of the Khilafatists. He wrote to a friend: ‘They expect me to be a sort of political leader as well as a newspaper editor. I have grown quite used to haranguing multitudes of anything from 5 to 30,000 people in the open air, although I hate it still as much as ever and inwardly am just as miserably shy.’ He also continued his Friday sermons, preaching at the great mosque of Bijapur and elsewhere.
In 1924, the Raj authorities found the Chronicle guilty of misreporting an incident in which Indian protesters had been killed. Crushing fines were imposed on the newspaper, and Pickthall resigned. His beloved Khilafatist movement folded in the same year, following Atatürk’s abolition of the ancient title. Although he effectively left political life, he was always remembered gratefully by Gandhi, who was later to write these words to his widow:
‘Your husband and I met often enough to grow to love each other and I found Mr. Pickthall a most amiable and deeply religious man. And although he was a convert he had nothing of the fanatic in him that most converts, no matter to what faith they are converted, betray in their speech and act. Mr. Pickthall seemed to me to live his faith unobtrusively.’
His job was gone, but Pickthall’s desire to serve Islam burned brighter than ever. He accepted the headmastership of a boy’s school in the domains of the Nizam of Hyderabad, outside the authority of British India. This princely state boasted a long association with British Muslims, and had been many years earlier the home of one of the most colourful characters in India: William Linnaeus Gardner (1770-1835), a convert who fought in the Nizam’s forces against the French in 1798 before setting up his own regiment of irregulars, Gardner’s Horse, and marrying his son to a niece of the Moghul emperor Akbar Shah.
In the 1920s, Hyderabad resembled a surviving fragment of Moghul brilliance, and the Nizam, the richest man in the world, was busy turning his capital into an oasis of culture and art. The appointment of the celebrated Pickthall would add a further jewel to his crown. Pickthall’s monarchist sympathies were aroused by the Nizam, who had made his lands the pride of India. ‘He lives like a dervish’, Pickthall reported, ‘and devotes his time to every detail of the Government.’ It was his enthusiasm and generosity that enabled Pickthall to launch the journal Islamic Culture, which he edited for ten years, and which continues to be published in the city as one of the Muslim world’s leading academic journals. Under his editorship, a wide range of Muslim and non-Muslim scholars published on a huge variety of topics. A regular contributor was Josef Horowitz, the great German orientalist. Another was Henri Leon, now writing as Harun Mustafa Leon, who contributed learned articles on early Arabic poetry and rhetoric, on Abbasid medical institutions, and a piece on ‘The Languages of Afghanistan.’
Pickthall also directed the school for Hyderabadi civil servants, encouraging their attendance at prayer, and teaching them the protocols to observe when moving among the burra sahibs of British India. Prayer featured largely in all his activities: as he wrote to a friend, after attending a conference on eduction:
‘I attended prayers at Tellycherry. The masjids are all built like Hindu temples. There are no minarets, and the azan is called from the ground, as the Wahhabis call it. When I mentioned this fact, the reforming party were much amused because the maulvis of Malabar are very far from being Wahhabis. I stopped the Conference proceedings at each hour of prayer, and everyone went to the adjacent mosque. I impressed upon the young leaders the necessity of being particularly strict in observance of the essential discipline of Islam.’
In the midst of this educational activity, he managed to find time to write. He wrote a (never to be published) Moghul novel, Dust and the Peacock Throne, in 1926, and the following year he composed his Madras lectures, published as The Cultural Side of Islam, which are still widely read in the Subcontinent. But from 1929 until 1931 the Nizam gave him leave-of-absence to enable him to complete his Koranic translation. As he noted: ‘All Muslim India seems to be possessed with the idea that I ought to translate the Qur’an into real English.’ He was anxious that this should be the most accurate, as well as the most literate, version of the Scripture. As well as mastering the classical Islamic sources, he travelled to Germany to consult with leading Orientalists, and studied the groundbreaking work of Nöldeke and Schwally, the Geschichte des Qorans, to which his notes frequently refer.
When the work was completed, Pickthall realised that it was unlikely to gain wide acceptance among Muslims unless approved by Al-Azhar, which, with the abolition of the Ottoman post of Shaykh al-Islam, had become the leading religious authority in the Muslim world. So to Egypt he went, only to discover that powerful sections of the ulema considered unlawful any attempt to render ‘the meanings of the Book’ into a language other than Arabic. The controversy soon broke, as Shaykh Muhammad Shakir wrote in the newspaper Al-Ahram that all who aided such a project would burn in Hell for evermore. The Shaykh recommended that Pickthall translate Tabari’s commentary instead, a work that would amount to at least one hundred volumes in English. Other ulema demanded that his translation be retranslated into Arabic, to see if it differed from the original in any respect, however small.
Pickthall published, in Islamic Culture, a long account of his battle with the Shaykh and the mentality which he represented. He included this reflection:
‘Many Egyptian Muslims were as surprised as I was at the extraordinary ignorance of present world conditions of men who claimed to be the thinking heads of the Islamic world – men who think that the Arabs are still ‘the patrons,’ and the non-Arabs their ‘freedmen’; who cannot see that the positions have become reversed, that the Arabs are no longer the fighters and the non-Arabs the stay-at-homes but it is the non-Arabs who at present bear the brunt of the Jihâd; that the problems of the non-Arabs are not identical with those of the Arabs; that translation of the Qur’ân is for the non-Arabs a necessity, which, of course, it is not for Arabs; men who cannot conceive that there are Muslims in India as learned and devout, as capable as judgment and as careful for the safety of Islam, as any to be found in Egypt.’
The battle was won when Pickthall addressed, in Arabic, a large gathering of the ulema, including Rashid Rida, explaining the current situation of Islam in the world, and the enormous possibilities for the spread of Islam among the English-speaking people. He won the argument entirely. The wiser heads of al-Azhar, recognising their inability to understand the situation of English speakers and the subtle urgencies of da‘wa, accepted his translation. The former Shaykh al-Azhar, al-Maraghi, who could see his sincerity and his erudition, offered him these parting words: ‘If you feel so strongly convinced that you are right, go on in God’s name in the way that is clear to you, and pay no heed to what any of us say.’
The translation duly appeared, in 1930, and was hailed by the Times Literary Supplement as ‘a great literary achievement.’ Avoiding both the Jacobean archaisms of Sale, and the baroque flourishes and expansions of Yusuf Ali (whose translation Pickthall regarded as too free), it was recognised as the best translation ever of the Book, and, indeed, as a monument in the history of translation. Unusually for a translation, it was further translated into several other languages, including Tagalog, Turkish and Portuguese.
Pickthall, now a revered religious leader in his own right, was often asked for Hanafi fatwas on difficult issues, and continued to preach. As such, he was asked by the Nizam to arrange the marriage of the heir to his throne to the daughter of the last Ottoman caliph, Princess Dürrüsehvar. The Ottoman exiles lived in France as pensioners of the Nizam, and thither Pickthall and the Hyderabad suite travelled. His knowledge of Ottoman and Moghul protocol allowed Pickthall to bring off this brilliant match, which was to be followed by an umra visit, his private hope being that the Caliphate, which he regarded as still by right vested in the House of Osman, might now pass to a Hyderabadi prince yet to be born, who would use the wealth of India and the prestige and holiness of the Caliphate to initiate a new dawn of independence and success for Islam. Delhi’s decision to absorb the Nizam’s domains into independent India made that impossible; but the princess devoted her life to good works, which continue today, even after her ninetieth birthday, which she celebrated in January 2004.
In 1935 Pickthall left Hyderabad. His school was flourishing, and he had forever to deny that he was the Fielding of E.M. Forster’s novel A Passage to India. (He knew Forster well, and the charge may not be without foundation.) He handed over Islamic Culture to the new editor, the Galician convert Muhammad Asad. He then returned to England, where he set up a new society for Islamic work, and delivered a series of lectures.
Despite this new activity, however, his health was failing, and he must have felt as Winstanley felt:
‘And here I end, having put my arm as far as my strength will go to advance righteousness. I have writ, I have acted, I have peace: and now I must wait to see the Spirit do his own work in the hearts of others and whether England shall be the first land, or some other, wherein truth shall sit down in triumph.’ (Gerrard Winstanley, A New Year’s Gift for the Parliament and Army, 1650.)
He died in a cottage in the West Country on May 19 1936, of coronary thrombosis, and was laid to rest in the Muslim cemetery at Brookwood. After his death, his wife cleared his desk, where he had been revising his Madras lectures the night before he died, and she found that the last lines he had written were from the Qur’an:
‘Whosoever surrendereth his purpose to Allah, while doing good, his reward is with his Lord, and there shall no fear come upon them, neither shall they grieve.’
BIBLIOGRAPHY
In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful.
By Him we seek Assistance.
Some people, of the Salafi persuation, consider that it is lawful to handle the Holy Qur’an when not in the state of wudu. As we shall see, this view is contrary to the practices of the real Salaf as-Salihin.
In Summary
It is unlawful (haraam) for someone not in the state of wudu to carry a Qur’an, even by a trap or in a box , or touch it, whether its writing, the spaces between its lines, its margins, binding, the carrying strap attached to it, or the bag or box it is in.
The opinion expressed in Fiqh al-Sunnah that it is permissible to touch the Qur’an without ritual purity is a deviant (shadh) view contrary to all four schools of jurisprudence (fiqh) that is Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi’i and Hanbali and is impermissible to teach (except to teach that it is deviant).
It is permissible to carry books of Sacred Law (Shari’ah), hadith, or Qur’anic tafsir, provided that most of their text is not Qur’an.
One should not use saliva on the fingers to turn the pages of the Qur’an.
When one fears that a Qur’an may burn, get soaked, that a non-Muslim may touch it, or that it may come into contact with some filth, then one must pick it up if there is no safe place for it, even if one is not in the state of wudu or is in need of the obligatory bath, though performing the dry ablution (tayummum) is wajib if possible.
It is haraam to use the Qur’an or any book of Islamic knowledge as a pillow.
Imam Muhammad ibn Ahmad Qurtubi says in al-Jami’ li ahkam al-Qur’an [Taken from Reliance of the Traveller]
It is the inviolability of the Qur’an:
1. not to touch the Qur’an except in the state of ritual purity in wudu, and to recite it when in a state of ritual purity;
2. to brush one’s teeth with a toothstick (siwak), remove food particles from between the them, and to freshen one’s mouth before reciting, since it is the way through which the Qur’an passes;
3. to sit up straight if not in prayer, and not lean back;
4. to dress for reciting as if intending to visit a prince, for the reciter is engaged in an intimate discourse;
5. to face the direction of prayer (qiblah) to recite;
6. to rinse the mouth out with water if one coughs up mucus or phlegm;
7. to stop reciting when one yawns, for when reciting , one is addressing one’s Lord in intimate conversation, while yawning is from the Devil;
8. when begining to recite, to take refuge from in Allah from the accursed Devil and say the Basmala, whether one has begun at the first surah or some other part one has reached;
9. once one has begun, not to interrupt one’s recital from moment to moment with human words, unless absolutely necessary;
10. to be alone when reciting it, so that no one interrupts one, forcing one to mix the words of the Qur’an with replying, for this nullifies the effectivness of having taken refuge in Allah from the Devil at the beginning;
11. to recite it leisurely and without haste, distinctly pronouncing each letter;
12. to use one’s mind and understanding in order to comprehend what is being said to one;
13. to pause at verses that promise Allah’s favour, to long for Allah Most High and ask of His bounty; and at verses that warn of His punishment to ask Him to save one from it;
14. to pause at the accounts of bygone peoples and individuals to heed and benefit from their example;
15. to find out the meanings of the Qur’an’s unusual lexical usages;
16. to give each letter its due so as to clearly and fuLly pronounce every word, for each letter counts as ten good deeds;
17. whenever one finishes reciting, to attest to the veracity of ones’s Lord, and that His messenger (Allah bless him and grant him peace) has delivered his message, and to testify to this, saying: “Our Lord, You have spoken the truth, Your messengers have delivered their tidings, and bear witness to this. O Allah, make us of those who bear witness to the truth and who act with justice“: after which one supplicates Allah with prayers.
18. not to select certain verses from each surah to recite, but rather the recite the whole surah;
19. if one puts down the Qur’an, not to leave it open;
20. not to place other books upon the Qur’an, which should always be higher than all other books, whether they are books of Sacred Knowledge or something else;
21. to place the Qur’an on one’s lap when reading; or on something in front of one, not on the floor;
22. not to wipe it from a slate with spittle, but rather wash it off with water; and if one washes it off with water, to avoid putting the water where there are unclean substances (najasa) or where people walk. Such water has its own inviolability, and there were those of the early Muslims before us who used water that washed away Qur’an to effect cures.
23. not to use sheets upon which it has been written as bookcovers, which is extremely rude, but rather to erase the Qur’an from them with water;
24. not to let a day go by without looking at least once at the pages of the Qur’an;
25. to give one’s eyes their share of looking at it, for the eyes lead to the soul (nafs), whereas there is a veil between the breast and the soul, and the Qur’an is in the breast.
26. not to trivially quote the Qur’an at the occurrence of everyday events, as by saying, for example, when someone comes, “You have come hither according to a decree, O Moses” [Qur’an 69:24],
or, “Eat and drink heartily for what you have done aforetimes, in days gone by” [Qur’an 69:24], when food is brought out, and so forth;
27. not to recite it to songs tunes like those of the corrupt, or with the tremulous tones of Christians or the plaintiveness of monkery, all of which is misguidance;
28. when writing the Qur’an to do so in a clear, elegant hand;
29. not to recite it out aloud over another’s reciting of it, so as to spoil it for him or make him resent what he hears, making it as if it were some kind of competition;
30. not to recite it in marketplaces, places of clamour and frivolity, or where fools gather;
31. not to use the Qur’an as pillow, or lean upon it;
32. not to toss it when one wants to hand it to another;
33. not to miniaturize the Qur’an, mix into it what is not of it, or mingle this worldly adornment with it by embellishing or writing it with gold;
34. not to write it on the ground or on walls, as is done in some new mosques;
35. not to write an amulet with it and enter the lavatory, unless it is encased in leather, silver, or other, for then it is as if kept in the heart;
36. if one writes it and then drinks it (for cure or other purpose), one should say the Basmala at every breath and make a noble and worthy intention, for Allah only gives to one according to one’s intention;
37. and if one finishes reciting the entire Qur’an, to begin it anew, that it may not resemble something that has been abandoned.
This means pure from both states of ritual impurity. This was narrated by Ibn ‘Umar, al-Hasan, ‘Ataa’, Tawus, Sh’abi, and al-Qasim bin Muhammad, and it is the opinion of Malik, al-Shafi’i, and the people of opinion.[1]i.e. The school of Kufa, including Abdullah Ibn Mas’ud, Anas ibn Malik and Imam Abu Hanifa and his school. We do not know of anybody who differs with them other than Dawud.[2]Dawud al-Dhahiri{/ref] and he used as an evidence the fact that the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, wrote an ayah in his letter to the Caesar. Al-Hakam and Hammad permit the touching [of the mushaf] with the outside of the hand, because it is the inside of the hand that is normally used for touching, so the prohibition applies to it and nothing else.
We have the saying of Allah, Exalted is He: “Nobody touches it except the purified.”[ref]al-Waqi’a 56: 79 We also have what the Prophet (Allah bless him and grant him peace) said in his letter to ‘Amr bin Hazm: ‘That nobody touches the Qur’an except for the pure.’[3]Narrated by Imam Malik in his Muwatta, in the chapter ‘The command to have wudu for the one who touches the Qur’an’ from the Book of Qur’an (1/199) and by Imam al-Daraqutni (1/459) This is a well-known letter, narrated by Abu ‘Ubeed in ‘Fadaail al-Qur’an’[4]Virtues of the Qur’an and others. It was also narrated by al-Athram. As for the ayah that the Prophet (Allah bless him and grant him peace) wrote [in his letter to the Caesar], this was done with the intention of correspondence, and an ayah that is included in a letter or a book of fiqh,[5]Jurisprudence or the like, is not forbidden to touch, and the book does not become a mushaf because of it, nor is any sanctity established for it. If it is established then it is impermissible to touch it with any part of the body, because any part of the body is similar to the hand. As for the opinion that the act of touching is restricted to the inside of the hand, this is incorrect. If any object comes into contact with another object this is considered touching.
Section: It is permitted to carry it with an attachment, and this is the opinion of Abu Hanifa, narrated from al-Hasan, ‘Ataa’, Tawus, Sh’abi, and al-Qasim, Abu Wa’il,[6]Abu Wa’il Shaqiq ibn Salma al-Asadi al-Kufi, knew of the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, but did not see him. This was narrated from Abu Bakr, ‘Umar, ‘Uthman, ‘Ali and many of the Companions and Successors, and it is reliable. Khalifah bin Khayyat said: “He died after the Jamajim in the year 82 AH. Al-Waqidi said: “He died during the caliphate of ‘Umar bin Abdul-‘Aziz. Tahdhib al-Tahdhib (4/361-363) al-Hakam and Hammad. Al-Awzai’i, Malik and ash-Shafi’i prohibit it. Malik said: ‘The best of what I have heard is that one does not carry a mushaf with an attachment or in a cover except that he is pure, and this is not because he will dirty it, but rather in order to exalt the Qur’an.’ They argue that the mukallaf,[ref]Legally accountable by Shari’ah, and this is from the onset of puberty.[/ref] muhdith[7]In a state of minor ritual impurity, intending to carry the mushaf, is not permitted to do so, as though he is carrying it with touching it. Our[8]i.e the Hanbali school: “Our Imam is Abu Abdullah Ahmad bin Hanbal.” (al-Mughni I, p.5) opinion is that he is not touching it, so it is not prohibited, as though he is carrying it in his luggage. This is because the prohibition only deals with touching, and carrying is not touching, so the prohibition does not concern it. Their analogy is wrong. The fundamental pretext is in regards to touching, and there is no derivative. There is also no narration concerning carrying, so it is not correct to use such an argument. Therefore, if one carries it with an attachment or with a barrier between him and it from what does not pertain to it in selling, it is permissible, as we have mentioned. Their opinion is that it is not permissible, and the standpoint of the two madhabs has been mentioned prior. It is also permissible to study [the Qur’an] with a stick and touch it with it, as it is to write the mushaf with one’s hand without touching it. With regard to studying it with a cover, there are two narrations. One narration, deduced by al-Qadi[9]al-Qadi Abu Ya’la al-Baghdadi, one of the teachers of Shaikh-ul-Islam Ibn al-Jawzi, a giant of Hanbali fiqh. (RAH), concerning touching [the mushaf] with a cover and carrying it with an attachment, is that it is impermissible, because one is touching with a cover. The correctview is that it is permissible, because the prohibition applies to touching, and carrying is not touching.
Section: It is permissible to touch books of tafsir[10]Exegesis and fiqh and so forth, and also letters, if they contain ayahs from the Qur’an. The evidence for this is that the Prophet (Allah bless him and grant him peace) included an ayah in his letter to the Caesar, and it was not called a mushaf nor was any sanctity established for it. Regarding youths in Qur’an schools and the tablets they use, there are two opinions. One states that it is permissible. This is because there is a need. If we stipulated purification it would make them averse to memorising [the Qur’an]. The other opinion is that it is impermissible because of the general application of the ayah. As for money that has Qur’anic ayahs written on it, there are two opinions. One is that it is prohibited, and this is the madhab of Abu Hanifa. It is makruh[11]Reprehensible according to ‘Ataa’, al-Qasim and ash-Sha’bi, because the Qur’an is written on it and it resembles paper. The other opinion is that it is permissible, because it is not called a mushaf and therefore it is similar to a book of fiqh. Also, it is difficult to avoid it, as is the case with the tablets that children use.
Section: If one in a state of minor ritual impurity wishes to touch the mushaf and there is no water, it is permissible for him to touch it after making tayyammum.[12]Dry ablution If the muhdith washes some parts of the body that are part of making wudu, it is not permissible for him to touch [the mushaf] until he completes his wudu, because he is not purified until he has completed it.
Section: It is not permissible to travel with the mushaf to Dar-al-Harb, as narrated by Ibn ‘Umar: The Prophet (Allah bless him and grant him peace) said: “Do not travel with the Qur’an to the lands of the enemy, out of fear that they may harm it with their hands.”[13]Narrated by Bukhari in the chapter on travelling with musahif to the lands of the enemy, in the Book of Jihad, Sahih Bukhari (4/78), and Muslim, in the chapter on the prohibition to travel with the mushaf to the land of the disbelievers if it is feared that it will fall into their hands, from the Book of Authority, Sahih Muslim (3/1490,1491), and Abu Dawud, in the chapter on the mushaf; travelling with it to the land of the enemy, from the Book of Jihad, Sunan Abi Dawud (2/35), and Ibn Majah, in the chapter on the prohibition to travel with the Qur’an to the land of the enemy, Sunan Ibn Majah (2/961), and Imam Malik in the chapter on the prohibition to travel with the Qur’an to the land of the enemy, al-Muwatta (2/336), and Imam Ahmad in the Musnad (2/6,7,10,55,63,76,128)
By Abu Ja’far al-Hanbali (www.htspub.com)
What may not have been considered in regard to this issue is the fact that allowing someone to touch the Qur’an without wudu purposely actually touches on theological issues. It has been said by some that as long as someone is a Muslim, touching the Qur’an with or without purification (i.e. wudu, ghusl) is acceptable and valid. However, the orthodox theologians and jurists have made ample mention that one is not to do this for the Qur’an is the Speech of Allah: “Say: O Humanity! Indeed I am the Messenger of Allah sent to all of you. By Allah Who has the dominion of the skies and the earth, there is no god but He. He gives life and death so believe in Allah and His Messenger, the unlettered Prophet, who believes in Allah and His Speech.” [al-‘A’raaf 7:158] and the Knowledge of Allah: “So whoever disputes with you about it, after the Knowledge has come to you.” [Aal Imran 3:61] So because of these verses we would understand that what we have in our hands is the Word of Allah as quoted by ‘Aisha, may Allah be pleased with her, Mother of the Believers: “What is between the two covers of the mushaf is the Speech of Allah.”[14]al-Mughni v. 8 p.414, al-Musawada p.14, al-Furu’ v.5 p.383, al-Qawaid p.162, al-Muharrar v.2 p.54. All of them classify it as sahih.[ref]al-Mughni v. 8 p.414, al-Musawada p.14, al-Furu’ v.5 p.383, al-Qawaid p.162, al-Muharrar v.2 p.54. All of them classify it as sahih.
Imam Muwaffaq ud-Din ibn Qudamah t has mentioned regarding this most serious of fundamental theological beliefs of Muslim Orthodoxy: “Those who say that the book form of the Qur’an is only ink and documented pages, our answer would be: Then what is the use of the ayah: “Nobody touches it except the purified.”[al-Waqi’ah 56:79] while we are believing that the one who is forbidden from touching it is merely being told to abstain from touching merely ink and documented pages?!! And why is it that the one who swears by the mushaf must make expiation for doing so when he fails in his oath if it is only ink and documented pages. Whoever says that the mushaf is only ink and documented pages has made the mushaf and the diwan of ibn al-Hajjaj equal in status, so then both of them are merely ink and pages, making them equal, and whatever is equal in form is equal in judgement.[15]Meaning that the respect for the Qur’an would be no more than the respect given to a book of poetry, or any other book.
“The Muslims in totality have made consensus on exalting the mushaf and they have forbidden the one without wudu to touch it and that whoever should swear by it and break his oath must make an expiation. An expiation is not made on a mere created thing. So then respecting the Qur’an is a dominant feature. Its respect is to be given even in front of people and it may be that they stand up when it is brought and kiss it, and place it on their heads, as is the respect due to the Qur’an.”[16]Al-Munadhira fil-Qur’an al-‘Adheem (Maktaba Ibn Taymiyyah, Kuwait, 1410 AH, 1990 AD) pp.84-86
Therefore, in understanding all of this, it should be known that touching the Qur’an while not being in a state of ritual purity is impermissible and disrespectful. Those who purposely advocate touching it without ritual purity have opted for a position more dangerous than the Mu’tazilah, for while they believed in the blasphemy of the Qur’an being created they were nonetheless consistent in demanding that it not be touched except in a state of ritual purity.
[from the Muwatta of Imam Malik]
15 – The Book of the Qur’an
The Chapter on the command to have wudu’ for the one who touches the Qur’an
Yahya related to me from Malik, from ‘Abdullah ibn Abi Bakr ibn Hazm, that in the letter that the Messenger of Allah (Allah bless him and grant him peace) wrote to ‘Amr ibn Hazm: “That nobody but the purified touches the Qur’an.”
Malik said: “And one does not carry the mushaf with an attachment, nor on a pillow, except that he is purified. If that was permissible it could be carried in something that is hidden. This is not disliked due to the fact that the one carrying it may have something on his hands that will dirty the mushaf, but rather it is only disliked because the one carrying it is not purified, out of respect for the Qur’an and glorification of it.
Malik said: “The best of what I have heard regarding this ayah: “Nobody touches it except the purified”[17] al-Waqi’a 56:79 is that it is of the same rank as the ayaat in ‘abasa wa tawallaa,[18]80: 11-16 the words of Allah, Exalted and Majestic is He: “By no means, it is indeed a reminder and an admonition, whoever wills let him take heed and remember it, in honourable pages, exalted and purified from every error,[19]This ayah is used as evidence by the Hanafis and other scholars that the mushaf should be kept in a high place in the hands of pious righteous scribes.”[20]This refers to the Companions as well as the angels. It should be remembered that angels are always pure.
References
↑1 | i.e. The school of Kufa, including Abdullah Ibn Mas’ud, Anas ibn Malik and Imam Abu Hanifa and his school. |
---|---|
↑2 | Dawud al-Dhahiri{/ref] and he used as an evidence the fact that the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, wrote an ayah in his letter to the Caesar. Al-Hakam and Hammad permit the touching [of the mushaf] with the outside of the hand, because it is the inside of the hand that is normally used for touching, so the prohibition applies to it and nothing else.
We have the saying of Allah, Exalted is He: “Nobody touches it except the purified.”[ref]al-Waqi’a 56: 79 |
↑3 | Narrated by Imam Malik in his Muwatta, in the chapter ‘The command to have wudu for the one who touches the Qur’an’ from the Book of Qur’an (1/199) and by Imam al-Daraqutni (1/459) |
↑4 | Virtues of the Qur’an |
↑5 | Jurisprudence |
↑6 | Abu Wa’il Shaqiq ibn Salma al-Asadi al-Kufi, knew of the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, but did not see him. This was narrated from Abu Bakr, ‘Umar, ‘Uthman, ‘Ali and many of the Companions and Successors, and it is reliable. Khalifah bin Khayyat said: “He died after the Jamajim in the year 82 AH. Al-Waqidi said: “He died during the caliphate of ‘Umar bin Abdul-‘Aziz. Tahdhib al-Tahdhib (4/361-363) |
↑7 | In a state of minor ritual impurity |
↑8 | i.e the Hanbali school: “Our Imam is Abu Abdullah Ahmad bin Hanbal.” (al-Mughni I, p.5) |
↑9 | al-Qadi Abu Ya’la al-Baghdadi, one of the teachers of Shaikh-ul-Islam Ibn al-Jawzi, a giant of Hanbali fiqh. (RAH) |
↑10 | Exegesis |
↑11 | Reprehensible |
↑12 | Dry ablution |
↑13 | Narrated by Bukhari in the chapter on travelling with musahif to the lands of the enemy, in the Book of Jihad, Sahih Bukhari (4/78), and Muslim, in the chapter on the prohibition to travel with the mushaf to the land of the disbelievers if it is feared that it will fall into their hands, from the Book of Authority, Sahih Muslim (3/1490,1491), and Abu Dawud, in the chapter on the mushaf; travelling with it to the land of the enemy, from the Book of Jihad, Sunan Abi Dawud (2/35), and Ibn Majah, in the chapter on the prohibition to travel with the Qur’an to the land of the enemy, Sunan Ibn Majah (2/961), and Imam Malik in the chapter on the prohibition to travel with the Qur’an to the land of the enemy, al-Muwatta (2/336), and Imam Ahmad in the Musnad (2/6,7,10,55,63,76,128) |
↑14 | al-Mughni v. 8 p.414, al-Musawada p.14, al-Furu’ v.5 p.383, al-Qawaid p.162, al-Muharrar v.2 p.54. All of them classify it as sahih.[ref]al-Mughni v. 8 p.414, al-Musawada p.14, al-Furu’ v.5 p.383, al-Qawaid p.162, al-Muharrar v.2 p.54. All of them classify it as sahih. |
↑15 | Meaning that the respect for the Qur’an would be no more than the respect given to a book of poetry, or any other book. |
↑16 | Al-Munadhira fil-Qur’an al-‘Adheem (Maktaba Ibn Taymiyyah, Kuwait, 1410 AH, 1990 AD) pp.84-86 |
↑17 | al-Waqi’a 56:79 |
↑18 | 80: 11-16 |
↑19 | This ayah is used as evidence by the Hanafis and other scholars that the mushaf should be kept in a high place |
↑20 | This refers to the Companions as well as the angels. It should be remembered that angels are always pure. |
In the name of Allah, Most Merciful and Compassionate
14 July 1995
Dear Suleman ‘Ali:
Thank you for your fax of 27 June 1995 which said, in part:
“Recently a pamphlet has been circulated around Oxford saying that evolution is synonymous with kufr and shirk. I myself am a biologist and am convinced by the evidence which supports the theory of evolution. I am writing to ask whether the Quranic account of Creation is incompatible with man having evolved. Are there any books which you would recommend on the subject?”
During my “logic of scientific explanation” period at the University of Chicago, I used to think that scientific theories had to have coherence, logicality, applicability, and adequacy, and I was accustomed to examine theory statements by looking at these things in turn. Perhaps they furnish a reasonable point of departure to give your question an answer which, if cursory and somewhat personal, may yet shed some light on the issues you are asking about.
It seems to me that the very absoluteness of the theory’s conclusions tends to compromise its “objective” character. It is all very well to speak of the “evidence of evolution,” but if the theory is thorough- going, then human consciousness itself is also governed by evolution. This means that the categories that allow observation statements to arise as “facts”, categories such as number, space, time, event, measurement, logic, causality, and so forth are mere physiological accidents of random mutation and natural selection in a particular species, Homo sapiens. They have not come from any scientific considerations, but rather have arbitrarily arisen in man by blind and fortuitous evolution for the purpose of preserving the species. They need not reflect external reality, “the way nature is”, objectively, but only to the degree useful in preserving the species. That is, nothing guarantees the primacy, the objectivity, of these categories over others that would have presumably have arisen had our consciousness evolved along different lines, such as those of more distant, say, aquatic or subterranean species. The cognitive basis of every statement within the theory thus proceeds from the unreflective, unexamined historical forces that produced “consciousness” in one species, a cognitive basis that the theory nevertheless generalizes to the whole universe of theory statements (the explanation of the origin of species) without explaining what permits this generalization. The pretences of the theory to correspond to an objective order of reality, applicable in an absolute sense to all species, are simply not compatible with the consequences of a thoroughly evolutionary viewpoint, which entails that the human cognitive categories that underpin the theory are purely relative and species-specific. The absolutism of random mutation and natural selection as explanative principles ends in eating the theory. With all its statements simultaneously absolute and relative, objective and subjective, generalizable and ungeneralizable, scientific and species-specific, the theory runs up on a reef of methodological incoherence.
Speaking for myself, I was convinced that the evolution of man was an unchallengeable “given” of modern knowledge until I read Charles Darwin’s “Origin of Species“. The ninth chapter (The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Ed. J.W. Burrow. London: Penguin Books, 1979, 291-317) made it clear, from what Darwin modestly calls the “great imperfection of the geological record” that the theory was not in principle falsifiable, though the possibility that some kind of evidence or another should be able in principle to disprove a theory is a condition (if we can believe logicians like Karl Popper) for it to be considered scientific. By its nature, fossil evidence of intermediate forms that could prove or disprove the theory remained unfound and unfindable. When I read this, it was not clear to me how such an theory could be called “scientific”.
If evolution is not scientific, then what is it? It seems to me that it is a human interpretation, an endeavor, an industry, a literature, based on what the American philosopher Charles Peirce called abductive reasoning, which functions in the following way:
(1) Suprising fact A.
(2) If theory B were the case, then A would naturally follow.
(3) Therefore B.
Here, (1) alone is certain, (2) is merely probable (as it explains the facts, though does not preclude other possible theories), while (3) has only the same probability as (2). If you want to see how ironclad the case for the evolution of man is, make a list of all the fossils discovered so far that “prove” the evolution of man from lower life forms, date them, and then ask yourself if abductive reasoning is not what urges it, and if it really precludes the possibility of quite a different (2) in place of the theory of evolution.
Is the analogy from micro-evolution within a species (which is fairly well-attested to by breeding horses, pigeons, useful plant hybrids, and so on) applicable to macro-evolution, from one species to another? That is, is there a single example of one species actually evolving into another, with the intermediate forms represented in the fossil record?
In the 1970s, Peter Williamson of Harvard University, under the direction of Richard Leakey, examined 3,300 fossils from digs around Lake Turkana, Kenya, spanning several million years of the history of thirteen species of mollusks, that seemed to provide clear evidence of evolution from one species to another. He published his findings five years later in Nature magazine, and Newsweek picked up the story:
“Though their existence provides the basis for paleontology, fossils have always been something of an embarrassment to evolutionists. The problem is one of ‘missing links’: the fossil record is so littered with gaps that it takes a truly expert and imaginative eye to discern how one species could have evolved into another…. But now, for the first time, excavations at Kenya’s Lake Turkana have provided clear fossil evidence of evolution from one species to another. The rock strata there contain a series of fossils that show every small step of an evolutionary journey that seems to have proceeded in fits and starts” (Sharon Begley and John Carey, “Evolution: Change at a Snail’s Pace.” Newsweek, 7 December 1981).
Without dwelling on the facticity of scientific hypotheses raised under logic above, or that 3,300 fossils of thirteen species only “cover” several million years if we already acknowledge that evolution is happening and are merely trying to see where the fossils fit in, or that we are back to Peirce’s abductive reasoning here, although with a more probable minor premise because of the fuller geological record–that is, even if we grant that evolution is the “given” which the fossils prove, an interesting point about the fossils (for a theist) is that the change was much more rapid than the traditional Darwinian mechanisms of random mutation and natural selection would warrant:
What the record indicated was that the animals stayed much the same for immensely long stretches of time. But twice, about 2 million years ago and and then again 700,000 years ago, the pool of life seemed to explode–set off, apparently, by a drop in the lake’s water level. In an instant of geologic time, as the changing lake environment allowed new types of mollusks to win the race for survival, all of the species evolved into varieties sharply different from their ancestors. Such sudden evolution had been observed before. What made the Lake Turkana fossil record unique, says Williamson, is that “for the first time we see intermediate forms” between the old species and the new.
That intermediate forms appeared so quickly, with new species suddenly evolving in 5,000 to 50,000 years after millions of years of constancy, challenges the traditional theories of Darwin’s disciples. Most scientists describe evolution as a gradual process, in which random genetic mutations slowly produce new species. But the fossils of Lake Turkana don’t record any gradual change; rather, they seem to reflect eons of stasis interrupted by brief evolutionary “revolutions” (ibid.).
Of what significance is this to Muslims? In point of religion, if we put our scientific scruples aside for a moment and grant that evolution is applicable to something in the real world; namely, the mollusks of Lake Turkana, does this constitute unbelief (kufr) by the standards of Islam? I don’t think so. Classic works of Islamic ‘aqida or “tenets of faith” such as al-Matan al-Sanusiyya tell us, “As for what is possible in relation to Allah, it consists of His doing or not doing anything that is possible” (al-Sanusi, Hashiya al-Dasuqi ‘ala Umm al-barahin. Cairo n.d. Reprint. Beirut: Dar al-Fikr, n.d, 145-46). That is, the omnipotent power of Allah can do anything that is not impossible, meaning either:
(a) intrinsically impossible (mustahil dhati), such as–creating a five-sided triangle–which is a mere confusion of words, and not something in any sense possible, such that we could ask whether Allah could do it;(b) or else impossible because of Allah having informed us that it shall not occur (mustahil ‘aradi), whether He does so in the Qur’an, or through the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) in a mutawatir hadith, meaning one that has reached us through so many means of transmission that it is impossible its transmitters could have all conspired to forge it. This category of the impossible is not impossible to begin with, but becomes so by the revelation from Allah, who is truthful and veracious. For example, it is impossible that Abu Lahab should be of the people of paradise, because the Qur’an tells us he is of the people of hell (Qur’an 111).
With respect to evolution, the knowledge claim that Allah has brought one sort of being out of another is not intrinsically impossible ((a) above) because it is not self-contradictory. And as to whether it is (b), “impossible because of Allah having informed us that it cannot occur”, it would seem to me that we have two different cases, that of man, and that of the rest of creation.
Regarding your question whether the Qur’anic account of creation is incompatible with man having evolved; if evolution entails, as Darwin believed, that “probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from one primordial form, into which life was first breathed” (The Origin of Species, 455), I apprehend that this is incompatible with the Qur’anic account of creation. Our first ancestor was the prophet Adam (upon whom be peace), who was created by Allah in janna, or “paradise” and not on earth, but also created in a particular way that He describes to us:
“And [mention] when your Lord said to the angels, ‘Truly, I will create a man from clay. So when I have completed him, and breathed into him of My spirit, then fall down prostrate to him.’ And the angels prostrated, one and all. Save for Satan, who was too proud to, and disbelieved. He said to him, ‘O Satan, what prevented you from prostrating to what I have created with My two hands? Are you arrogant, or too exalted?’ He said,’I am better than he; You created me from fire and created him from clay'” (Qur’an 38:71-76).
Now, the God of Islam is transcendently above any suggestion of anthropomorphism, and Qur’anic exegetes like Fakhr al-Din al-Razi explain the above words created with My two hands as a figurative expression of Allah’s special concern for this particular creation, the first human, since a sovereign of immense majesty does not undertake any work “with his two hands” unless it is of the greatest importance (Tafsir al-Fakhr al-Razi. 32 vols. Beirut 1401/1981. Reprint (32 vols. in 16). Beirut: Dar al-Fikr, 1405/1985, 26.231-32). I say “the first human,” because the Arabic term bashar used in the verse “Truly, I will create a man from clay” means precisely a human being and has no other lexical significance.
The same interpretive considerations (of Allah’s transcendance above the attributes of created things) apply to the words and breathed into him of My spirit. Because the Qur’an unequivocally establishes that Allah is Ahad or “One,” not an entity divisible into parts, exegetes say this “spirit” was a created one, and that its attribution to Allah (“My spirit”) is what is called in Arabic idafat al-tashrif “an attribution of honor,” showing that the ruh or “spirit” within this first human being and his descendants was “a sacred, exalted, and noble substance” (ibid., 228)–not that there was a “part of Allah” such as could enter into Adam’s body, which is unbelief. Similar attributions are not infrequent in Arabic, just as the Kaaba is called bayt Allah, or “the House of Allah,” meaning “Allah’s honored house,” not that it is His address; or such as the she-camel sent to the people of Thamud, which was called naqat Allah, or “the she-camel of Allah,” meaning “Allah’s honored she-camel,” signifying its inviolability in the shari’a of the time, not that He rode it; and so on.
All of which shows that, according to the Qur’an, human beings are intrinsically–by their celestial provenance in janna, by their specially created nature, and by the ruh or soul within them–at a quite different level in Allah’s eyes than other terrestrial life, whether or not their bodies have certain physiological affinities with it, which are the prerogative of their Maker to create. Darwin says:
“I believe that animals have descended from at most only four or five progenitors, and plants from an equal or lesser number. Analogy would lead me one step further, namely, to the belief that all animals and plants have descended from some one prototype. But analogy may be a deceitful guide” (The Origin of Species, 454-55).
Indeed it may. It is the nature of the place in which Allah has created us, this world (dunya), that the possibility exists to deny the existence of Allah, His angels, His Books, His messengers, the Last Day, and destiny, its good and evil. If these things were not hidden by a veil, there would be no point in Allah’s making us responsible for believing them. Belief would be involuntary, like the belief, say, that France is in Europe.
But what He has made us responsible for is precisely belief in the unseen. Why? In order that the divine names–such as al-Rafi’ or “He Who Raises,” al-Khafidh “He Who Abases,” al-Mu’ti “He Who Gives,” al-Mani’ “He Who Withholds,” al-Rahim “the Merciful,” al-Muntaqim “the Avenger,” al-Latif “the Subtlely Kind,” and so on–may be manifest.
How are they manifest? Only through the levels of human felicity and perdition, of salvation and damnation, by the disparity of human spiritual attainment in all its degrees: from the profound certitude of the prophets (upon whom be peace), to the faith of the ordinary believer, to the doubts of the waverer or hypocrite, to the denials of the damned. Also, the veil for its part has a seamless quality. To some, it is a seamless veil of light manifesting the Divine through the perfection of creation; while to others, it is a seamless veil of darkness, a perfect nexus of interpenetrating causal relations in which there is no place for anything that is not material. Allah says,
“Exalted in Grace is He in whose hand is dominion, and He has power over everything. Who created death and life to try you, as to which of you is better in works, and He is the All-powerful, the Oft-forgiving. And who created the seven heavens in layers; you see no disparity in the creation of the All-merciful. Return your glance: do you see any fissures?” (Qur’an 67:1-3).
The last time I checked, the university scene was an atheistic subculture, of professors and students actively or passively convinced that God was created by man. In bastions of liberalism like the University of California at Berkeley, for example, which still forbids the establishment of a Religions Department, only this attitude will do; anything else is immature, is primitivism. The reduction of human behavior to evolutionary biology is a major journalistic missionary outreach of this movement. I am pleased with this, in as much as Allah has created it to try us, to distinguish the good from the bad, the bad from the worse. But I don’t see why Muslims should accept it as an explanation of the origin of man, especially when it contradicts what we know from the Creator of Man.
As for other cases, change from one sort of thing to another does not seem to contradict revelation, for Allah says,
“O people: Fear your Lord, who created you from one soul [Adam, upon whom be peace] and created from it its mate [his wife Hawa], and spread forth from them many men and women” (Qur’an 4:1),
and also says, concerning the metamorphosis of a disobedient group of Bani Isra’il into apes,
“When they were too arrogant to [desist from] what they had been forbidden, We said to them, ‘Be you apes, humiliated'” (Qur’an 7:166).
and in a hadith, “There shall be groups of people from my community who shall consider fornication, silk, wine, and musical instruments to be lawful: groups shall camp beside a high mountain, whom a shepherd returning to in the evening with one of their herds shall approach for something he needs, and they shall tell him, ‘Come back tomorrow.’ Allah shall destroy them in the night, bringing down the mountain upon them, and transforming others into apes and swine until the Day of Judgement.” (Sahih al-Bukhari. 9 vols. Cairo 1313/1895. Reprint (9 vols. in 3). Beirut: Dar al-Jil, n.d., 7.138: 5590). Most Islamic scholars have understood these transformations literally, which shows that Allah’s changing one thing into another (again, in other than the origin of man) has not been traditionally considered to be contrary to the teachings of Islam. Indeed, the daily miracle of nutrition, the sustenance Allah provides for His creatures, in which one creature is transformed into another by being eaten, may be seen in the food chains that make up the economy of our natural world, as well as our own plates.
If, as in the theory of evolution, we conjoin with this possibility the factors of causality, gradualism, mutation, and adaptation, it does not seem to me to add anything radically different to these other forms of change. For Islamic tenets of faith do not deny causal relations as such, but rather that causes have effects in and of themselves, for to believe this is to ascribe a co-sharer to Allah in His actions. Whoever believes in this latter causality (as virtually all evolutionists do) is an unbeliever (kafir) without any doubt, as “whoever denies the existence of ordinary causes has made the Wisdom of Allah Most High inoperative, while whoever attributes effects to them has associated co-sharers (shirk) to Allah Most High” (al-Hashimi: Miftah al-janna fi sharh ‘aqida Ahl al-Sunna. Damascus: Matba’a al-taraqi, 1379/1960, 33). As for Muslims, they believe that Allah alone creates causes, Allah alone creates effects, and Allah alone conjoins the two. In the words of the Qur’an, “Allah is the Creator of everything” (Qur’an 13:16).
A Muslim should pay careful attention to this point, and distance himself from believing either that causes (a) bring about effects in and of themselves; or (b) bring about effects in and of themselves through a capacity Allah has placed in them. Both of these negate the oneness and soleness (wahdaniyya) of Allah, which entails that Allah has no co-sharer in:
(1) His entity (dhat);
(2) His attributes (sifat);
(3) or in His acts (af’al), which include the creation of the universe and everything in it, including all its cause and effect relationships.
This third point is negated by both (a) and (b) above, and perhaps this is what your pamphleteer at Oxford had in mind when he spoke about the shirk (ascribing a co-sharer to Allah) of evolution.
In this connection, evolution as a knowledge claim about a causal relation does not seem to me intrinsically different from other similar knowledge claims, such as the statement “The president died from an assassin’s bullet.” Here, though in reality Allah alone gives life or makes to die, we find a dispensation in Sacred Law to speak in this way, provided that we know and believe that Allah alone brought about this effect. As for someone who literally believes that the bullet gave the president death, such a person is a kafir. In reality he knows no more about the world than a man taking a bath who, when the water is cut off from the municipality, gets angry at the tap.
To summarize the answer to your question thus far, belief in macro-evolutionary transformation and variation of non-human species does not seem to me to entail kufr (unbelief) or shirk (ascribing co-sharers to Allah) unless one also believes that such transformation came about by random mutation and natural selection, understanding these adjectives as meaning causal independence from the will of Allah. You have to look in your heart and ask yourself what you believe. From the point of view of tawhid, Islamic theism, nothing happens “at random,” there is no “autonomous nature,” and anyone who believes in either of these is necessarily beyond the pale of Islam.
Unfortunately, this seems to be exactly what most evolutionists think. In America and England, they are the ones who write the textbooks, which raises weighty moral questions about sending Muslim students to schools to be taught these atheistic premises as if they were “givens of modern science.” Teaching unbelief (kufr) to Muslims as though it were a fact is unquestionably unlawful. Is this unlawfulness mitigated (made legally permissible by shari’a standards) by the need (darura) of upcoming generations of Muslims for scientific education? If so, the absence of textbooks and teachers in most schools who are conversant and concerned enough with the difficulties of the theory of evolution to accurately present its hypothetical character, places a moral obligation upon all Muslim parents. They are obliged to monitor their children’s Islamic beliefs and to explain to them (by means of themselves, or someone else who can) the divine revelation of Islam, together with the difficulties of the theory of evolution that will enable the children to make sense of it from an Islamic perspective and understand which aspects of the theory are rejected by Islamic theism (tawhid) and which are acceptable. The question of the theory’s adequacy, meaning its generalizability to all species, will necessarily be one of the important aspects of this explanation.
Of all the premises of evolution, the two that we have characterized above as unbelief (kufr); namely, random mutation and natural selection, interpreted in a materialistic sense, are what most strongly urge its generalization to man. Why must we accept that man came from a common ancestor with animal primates, particularly since a fossil record of intermediate forms is not there? The answer of our age seems to be: “Where else should he have come from?”
It is only if we accept the premise that there is no God that this answer acquires any cogency. The Qur’an answers this premise in detail and with authority. But evolutionary theory is not only ungeneralizable because of Allah informing us of His own existence and man’s special creation, but because of what we discern in ourselves of the uniqueness of man, as the Qur’an says,
“We shall show them Our signs on the horizons and in themselves, until it is plain to them that it is the Truth” (Qur’an 41:53).
Among the greatest of these signs in man’s self is his birthright as Khalifat al-Rahman, “the successor of the All-merciful.” If it be wondered what this successorship consists in, the ulama of tasawwuf, the scholars of Islamic spirituality, have traditionally answered that it is to be looked for in the ma’rifa bi Llah or “knowledge of Allah” that is the prerogative of no other being in creation besides the believer, and which is attained through following the path of inward purification, of strengthening the heart’s attachment to Allah through acts of obedience specified by Sacred Law, particularly that of dhikr.
The locus of this attachment and this knowledge is not the mind, but rather the subtle faculty within one that is sometimes called the heart, sometimes the ruh or spirit. Allah’s special creation of this faculty has been mentioned above in connection with the Qur’anic words and breathed into him of My spirit. According to masters of the spiritual path, this subtle body is knowledgeable, aware, and cognizant, and when fully awakened, capable of transcending the opacity of the created universe to know Allah. The Qur’an says about it, by way of exalting its true nature through its very unfathomability:
“Say: The spirit is of the matter of my Lord” (Qur’an 17:85).
How does it know Allah? I once asked this question of one of the ulama of tasawwuf in Damascus, and recorded his answer in an unpublished manuscript. He told me:
“Beholding the Divine (mushahada) is of two sorts, that of the eye and that of the heart. In this world, the beholding of the heart is had by many of the ‘arifin (knowers of Allah), and consists of looking at contingent things, created beings, that they do not exist through themselves, but rather exist through Allah, and when the greatness of Allah occurs to one, contingent things dwindle to nothing in one’s view, and are erased from one’s thought, and the Real (al-Haqq) dawns upon one’s heart, and it is as if one beholds. This is termed ‘the beholding of the heart.’ The beholding of the eye [in this world] is for the Chosen, the Prophet alone, Muhammad (Allah bless him and give him peace). As for the next world, it shall be for all believers. Allah Most High says,
‘On that day faces shall be radiant, gazing upon their Lord’ (Qur’an 75:22).”
[I wrote of the above:] If it be observed that the term heart as used above does not seem to conform to its customary usage among speakers of the language, I must grant this. In the context, the term denotes not the mind, but rather the faculty that perceives what is beyond created things, in the world of the spirit, which is a realm unto itself. If one demands that the existence of this faculty be demonstrated, the answer–however legitimate the request–cannot exceed, “Go to masters of the discipline, train, and you will be shown.” Unsatisfying though this reply may be, it does not seem to me to differ in principle from answers that would be given, for example, to a non-specialist regarding the proof for a particular proposition in theoretical physics or symbolic logic. Nor are such answers an objection to the in-principle “publicly observable” character of observation statements in these disciplines, but rather a limitation pertaining to the nature of the case and the questioner, one that he may accept, reject, or do something about (Keller, Interpreter’s Log. Manuscript Draft, 1993, 1-2).
Mere imagination? On the contrary, everything besides this knowledge is imagination, for the object of this knowledge is Allah, true reality, which cannot be transient but is unchanging, while other facts are precisely imaginary. The child you used to be, for example, exists now only in your imagination; the person who ate your breakfast this morning no longer exists except in your imagination; your yesterday, your tomorrow, your today (except, perhaps, for the moment you are presently in, which has now fled): all is imaginary, and only hypostatized as phenomenal reality, as unity, as facticity, as real–through imagination. Every moment that comes is different, winking in and out of existence, preserved in its relational continuum by pure imagination, which constitutes it as “world.” What we notice of this world is thus imaginary, like what a sleeper sees. In this connection, Ali ibn Abi Talib (Allah ennoble his countenance) has said, “People are asleep, and when they die, they awaken” (al-Sakhawi, al-Maqasid al-hasana. Cairo 1375/1956. Reprint. Beirut: Dar al-kutub al-‘ilmiyya, 1399/1979, 442: 1240).
This is not to denigrate the power of imagination; indeed, if not for imagination, we could not believe in the truths of the afterlife, paradise, hell, and everything that our eternal salvation depends upon. Rather, I mention this in the context of the question of evolution as a cautionary note against a sort of “fallacy of misplaced concrescence,” an unwarranted epistemological overconfidence, that exists in many people who work in what they term “the hard sciences.”
As someone from the West, I was raised from early school years as a believer not only in science, the practical project of discovery that aims at exploiting more and more of the universe by identification, classification, and description of micro- and macro-causal relations; but also in scientism, the belief that this enterprise constitutes absolute knowledge. As one philosopher whom I read at the University of Chicago put it,
Scientism is science’s belief in itself: that is, the conviction that we can no longer understand science as one form of possible knowledge, but rather must identify knowledge with science” (Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests. Tr. Jeremy J. Shapiro. Boston: Beacon Press, 1971, 4).
It seems to me that this view, in respect to evolution but also in respect to the nature of science as a contemporary religion, represents a sort of defeat of knowledge by an absolutism of pure methodology. As I mentioned at the outset, the categories of understanding that underly every observation statement in the theory of evolution arise from human consciousness, and as such cannot be distinguished by the theory from other transient survival devices: its explanative method, from first to last, is necessarily only another survival mechanism that has evolved in the animal kingdom. By its own measure, it is not necessary that it be true, but only necessary that it be powerful in the struggle for survival. Presumably, any other theory–even if illusory–that had better implications for survival could displace evolution as a mode of explanation. Or perhaps the theory itself is an illusion.
These considerations went through my mind at the University of Chicago during my “logic of scientific explanation” days. They made me realize that my faith in scientism and evolutionism had something magical as its basis, the magic of an influential interpretation supported by a vast human enterprise. I do not propose that science should seriously try to comprehend itself, which it is not equipped to do anyway, but I have come to think that, for the sake of its consumers, it might have the epistemological modesty to “get back,” from its current scientistic pretentions to its true nature, as one area of human interpretation among others. From being the “grand balance scale” on which one may weigh and judge the “reality” of all matters, large and small–subsuming “the concept of God,” for example, under the study of religions, religions under anthropology, anthropology under human behavioral institutions, human behavioral institutions under evolutionary biology, evolutionary biology under organic chemistry, organic chemistry (ultimately) under cosmology, cosmology under chaos theory, and so on–I have hopes that science will someday get back to its true role, the production of technically exploitable knowledge for human life. That is, from pretentions to ‘ilm or “knowledge,” to its true role as “fann” or “technique.”
In view of the above considerations of its coherence, logicality, applicability, and adequacy, the theory of the evolution of man from lower forms does not seem to show enough scientific rigor to raise it from being merely an influential interpretation. To show the evolution’s adequacy, for everything it is trying to explain would be to give valid grounds to generalize it to man. In this respect, it is a little like Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, in which he describes examples of dreams that are wish fulfillments, and then concludes that “all dreams are wish fulfillments.” We still wait to be convinced.
Allah alone is Master of Existence. He alone causes all that is to be and not to be. Causes are without effect in themselves, but rather both cause and effect are created by Him. The causes and the effects of all processes, including those through which plant and animal species are individuated, are His work alone. To ascribe efficacy to anything but His action, whether believing that causes (a) bring about effects in and of themselves; or (b) bring about effects in and of themselves through a capacity Allah has placed in them, is to ascribe associates to Allah (shirk). Such beliefs seem to be entailed in the literal understanding of “natural selection” and “random mutation,” and other evolutionary concepts, unless we understand these processes as figurative causes, while realizing that Allah alone is the agent. This is apart from the consideration of whether they are true or not.
As for claim that man has evolved from a non-human species, this is unbelief (kufr) no matter if we ascribe the process to Allah or to “nature,” because it negates the truth of Adam’s special creation that Allah has revealed in the Qur’an. Man is of special origin, attested to not only by revelation, but also by the divine secret within him, the capacity for ma’rifa or knowledge of the Divine that he alone of all things possesses. By his God-given nature, man stands before a door opening onto infinitude that no other creature in the universe can aspire to. Man is something else.
I realized after writing the above that I had not talked much about the literature on the theory of evolution. Books that have been recommended to me are:
Thank you for asking me this question, which made me think about my own beliefs. I remain at your service,
Nuh Ha Mim Keller.
Allah says in the Qur’an,
Men are caretakers (qawwamuna) of women, because of that through which Allah has favored one over another, and because of what they spend of their property (Qur’an 4:34).
Before trying to understand this in a knowledge-based way, it is worth remembering that the Qur’an severely blames whoever would speak on religious matters without knowledge, as Allah says in surat al-Najm,
They have no knowledge of it whatsoever: they but follow opinion, and opinion avails nothing in place of the Truth (Qur’an 53:28).
Although originally revealed about unbelievers who gave the angels names, this verses concluding note is a cogent reminder until the end of time that we must make sure of what we say about religion. For this reason, my advice, to myself and to every Muslim, is that when seeking knowledge on any question in Islam, one should rely on the top scholars in the field that deals with the question; in this case, the Imams of tafsir or Qur’anic exegesis.
This is more necessary today than ever, when so much Islamic thought abounds and so little of what in previous centuries of Islamic learning was called ilm or “knowledge”. The good news reaches us that some academic celebrity or other has become a Muslim, only to be followed a few months later by the bad news: that he has written a new book about Islam. The knowledge of Islam, encompassing the entire ethical range of human experience, this world and the next, has never been considered attainable without learning it from those who have a working familiarity with it, the traditional ulama. It was once said to Imam Abu Hanifa, “In such and such a mosque there is a circle that discusses fiqh (lit. the “understanding of fine points of the religion”)”. He asked, “Do they have a master over them?” and they said no. He said, “They will never understand” (Ibn Muflih, al-Adab al-shariyya wa al-minah al-mariyya. 3 vols. Cairo n.d. Reprint. Cairo: Maktaba Ibn Taymiya, 1398/1978, 3.374).
It is true that if such a celebrity confines himself to description of some particular Islamic phenomenon in ways he has been previously trained to, there is perhaps no harm in it. But when he tries an ethical analysis of what the Qur’an (or hadith) tells Muslims to do, he has passed into explaining the command of Allah, and in such a case, if he does not know the interpretive dimensions of that command–the aspects of Arabic, the figurative, the literal, the types of metaphor, the context in which various verses were revealed, which verses supersede others and which are superseded, the points on which there is scholarly consensus (ijma) and the points on which there is not, the tenets of faith of Ahl al-Sunna, and a great deal more–he will fail.
Interpreting the word qawwamuna in the above verse is just such an ethical analysis, with human implications too tremendous to be left to amateurs. We will therefore turn to what some of the principle Imams of tafsir or Qur’anic exegesis have said about it. One of the earliest tafsirs in print is by Imam Ibn Jarir al-Tabari (d. 310/923), who says:
Allah, majestic be His praise, means by Men are caretakers of women that they are in charge of their womenfolk, in disciplining and guidance, respecting the rights that they [women] owe to Allah and to them. Because of that by which Allah has favored one over another means because of that through which Allah has favored men over their wives, since men must give them their marriage payment (mahr) and spend of their wealth to support them, and save them their pains and effort: that is the favoring of Allah Most Blessed and Exalted of men over women, and is why they have become caretakers of them who have authority over them regarding those of their affairs that Allah has given them charge of … (Jami al-bayan an tawil ay al-Qur’an. 30 vols. Cairo n.d. Reprint (30 vols. in 15). Beirut: Dar al-Fikr, 1405/1984, 5.57).
Al-Tabari then mentions the chains of narrators that transmit the above exegesis from some of the earliest scholars, such as Ibn Abbas (d. 68/ 687), al-Dahhak (d. A.H. 102), al-Suddi (d. A.H. 127), and Sufyan al-Thawri (d. 161/778). Then he mentions, with a chain of transmission that ends with Hasan al-Basri (d. 110/728) that a man slapped his wife, and she went to the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace), who wanted to let her take retaliation (qisas) against her husband [by striking him back in reprisal], but Allah revealed Men are caretakers qawwamuna) of women, because of that through which Allah has favored one over another, and because of what they spend of their property, so the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) summoned the man, recited the verse to him and said, “I wanted one thing, but Allah wanted another” (ibid., 58).
In fact, although the hadith scholar Imam al-Baghawi (d. 510/1117) also mentions this event in his Maalim al-Tanzil, neither he nor al-Tabari can produce an acceptable chain of transmission of it back to the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace), so for religious purposes, it is not well-documented enough to rely on for the verses interpretation, and al-Tabari’s first interpretation is sounder.
But whatever the sabab al-nuzul or “original occasion of revelation” of the verse, the intended meaning is not confined to that alone. As the Yemeni shari’a scholar and judge Abdullah Mahfuz Baalawi says, “The interpretive principle established by the scholarly consensus (ijma) of specialists in methodological bases (usul) of Sacred Law is that the point of primary texts [of the Qur’an and sunna] lies in the generality of their lexical significance, not the specificity pf their historical context [emphasis mine] (al-Sunna wa al-bid’a. Kuwait: Matabi al-Wazzan, 1404/1984, 33).
In light of this important principle, the exegetes we will now examine adduce the significance of this verses placement in the Qur’an (for the order is also divinely revealed), coming as it does after the provisions for Islamic estate division (irth) in surat al-Nisa. The Arabic grammarian and exegete Abu Hayyan al-Nahwi (d. 754/1353) says of the verse “Men are caretakers of women”:
Because Allah Most High has mentioned [in preceding verses] the matter of men and women acquiring their appointed share and their estate-division inheritance, He [here] apprises them that men are in charge of the interests of women. Caretakers (qawwamuna) is an intensive form [indicating something done much]. Because Allah has favored one over another means “because of Allah’s favoring some men over others, this man having been given more sustenance (rizq) than that man, this man being better off than that one”. And because they spend of their property means “upon women”. The word ma [lit. what, translated above in the citation of al-Tabari as “because of that through which Allah has favored,” and secondly, “because of what they spend”] is [rather] ma masdariyya or “the indefinite pronoun signifying a verbal noun” in both instances. [Thus meaning “because of Allah’s favoring the one,” and “because of their spending of their property,”] (Tafsir al-nahr al-madd min al-Bahr al-muhit. 2 vols. in 3. Beirut: Dar al-Janan and Mu’assasa al-Kutub al-Thaqafiyya, 1407/1987, 1.45758).
Imam Fakhr al-Din al-Razi is another exegete who considers the relation of the verse “Men are caretakers of women” to other verses: Know that Allah Most High has said [two verses previously], “. . . and not to long for that with which Allah has preferred some of you above others” (Qur’an 4:32), a verse that we said was revealed because some women made remarks about Allah’s favoring men over them in estate division inheritance [by certain male heirs receiving twice the share of their female counterparts]. So Allah mentions in this verse that He only favored men over women in estate division because men are the caretakers of women. For although both spouses enjoy the usufruct of each others person, Allah has ordered men to pay women their marriage portion, and to daily provide them with their support, so that the increase on one side is met with an increase on the other–and so it is as though there is no favoring at all. This clarifies the verses arrangement and order (Tafsir al-Fakhr al-Razi. 32 vols. Beirut 1401/1981. Reprint (32 vols. in 16). Beirut: Dar al-Fikr, 1405/1985, 10.90).
Finally, the more fiqh-oriented exegesis of al-Kaya al-Harrasi notes that while Allah has mentioned men’s support of women in verses such as the one in surat al-Tahrim “Let him who possesses plenty spend of his plenty; and let him whose provision is straitened spend of what Allah has given him” (Qur’an 65:7), in this verse [Men are caretakers (qawwamuna) of women], He mentions the necessary cause (`illa) for this support, so scholars have naturally inferred from the two verses taken together that whenever a husband is unable to support his wife, he is no longer her caretaker: she is not obliged to remain at home [should he request it] in any school of jurisprudence, and according to the school of al-Shafi’i (Allah be well pleased with him), she is entitled to have the marriage annulled. He is no longer a caretaker or entitled to oblige her to remain at home because he has vitiated the objective of protecting her by marriage, for the aim of marriage is her security (Ahkam al-Qur’an. 4 vols. Cairo n.d. Reprint (4 vols. in 2). Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-Ilmiyya, 1405/1985, 2.449).
In answer to your question then, our exegetes clarify how the meaning of qawwamuna or “caretakers” involves legal rights and obligations on the part of both men and women. It entails that women have the right to security, protection, and to be free from the thought of having to support themselves. Even if a woman has millions, she is entitled to be completely supported by her husband and can have her marriage annulled if he is unable to. And it entails that a man has charge of his wife’s interests, supervision, and discipline. And Allah knows best.
©Nuh Ha Mim Keller 1995