A soft spot for Islam?

You may notice if you've read through these posts that Islam takes up a lot of space.  I spend a lot of time defending it in the light of the stereotypes and lack of understanding or willingness to accept any old thing said about it and the unwillingness to investigate any deeper than finding those things that reinforce what we already believe.

But I am not soft on Islam, in general.  In fact, one of my greatest peeves about its missionary work is the ignorance Muslims (intentionally and knowingly or not) spreads about Christianity as viewed through a missionary Muslim's perspective.  The information they often spread is just as bad as the information Christians often spread about Islam. 

Here are some books of this variety.  One is a "Saudi" version of the Qur'an that is given away in mass.  I picked up my copy while contemplating conversion and spending a weekend at a mosque in Falls Church, Virginia.  These are what are given out to those interested because they are readily available and they are free.  This is one particular translation into English from a very particular point of view.

Two of them are reviews about such information as put out in books by Christians who have converted to Islam.  These are books that spread a particular kind of information.  It is "rooted" in other things published but it often borders on the fringe, at best, and conspirational at worst.  Granted, I too am coming from a particular point of view so take these reviews as well formed opinion but opinions nonetheless.

However, I would certainly not base one's eternal salvation upon what these authors say.   But I do recommend reading them, though, if only to understand. 

The Qur'an - translation by by Abdur-Rahmaan Abdul-Khaliq, translated with commentary by Mahmoud Murad.

The Cross & The Crescent - Jerald Dirks

A Muslim Study of the Origins of the Christian Church - Ruqaiyyah Waris Maqsood

They are authors, all entitled to their views.

I am simply defending education.

If you want opinions on some good, balanced works, drop me a line. 

Before and after events...

We all have those moments where we measure time as before and after an event. Some are more significant than others. I'm not really talking about such things as having children, losing your virginity or even getting your driver's license.

No, I'm talking about things like dropping acid for the first time, the first time you heard music that ripped your soul out or various religious or spiritual experiences, perhaps being baptized or taking the shahada, those moments that changed the way you viewed the world.

I was fortunate enough to have one of those moments today, this one of a religious nature. Often they come in the strangest of ways and places. I haven't been doing anything overly "spiritual" as of late though I do believe in the Zen-like idea of being present as a form of spirituality, something I've always struggled with actually doing.

I have, however, been intensely focused on several daily facts of life: budgeting, doing the dishes and work, primarily the latter, the other two primarily focusing or grounding rituals. I currently work in a labor job, not exactly where I thought I'd be at 40 years old. However, the diversity of experience of my career path and, especially, the diversity of duties at my current occupation in a stamping and tool and die facility keeps it from being truly monotonous. And I'm grateful to be employed.

After a 25% wage cut several months ago, being taken from salary to hourly, the pendulum has swung and I've been reaping the benefits of an hourly wage as we've been working 10-hour days, five and six days a week for the past few weeks. Add to that an extra 16 to 24 hours at job two on the weekend, my weekly log has been ranging from 56 to 80 hours at work per week.

Between working, sleeping and eating there isn't time for too much else. It would seem that the most "spiritual" thing I do all week is an hour and a half at church once a week. However, as with most things, it is our attitude that determines what comes of a situation.

Recently, I've been running a laser cutter to make special parts for a project slated to start in the next few weeks. It takes upwards of three minutes per part to cut so after prepping I have roughly two minutes of dead time. I could sit and stare or watch the cutting or do nothing. As I learned a long time ago, always have reading material at your disposal. I often choose the longest line at the grocery store and pick up a magazine to read. Very Zen.

So I have on hand Henry Corbin's The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism. Seriously. I've been on a Henry Corbin kick lately; well, not lately, as I've immersed myself in his works more and more over the years. This isn't your mother's comparative religious studies. When you read his stuff you will really see how religious ideas are transmitted through history. His writing is dense and packs a whallop, ideas and concepts and terms coming at you at rapid speed, the kind of writing where one chapter can take you days to digest. The work is hard and requires effort but when that 'aha!' moment comes it borders on ecstasy.

Ecstasy. At work. So in between parts I'm reading this book and, having begun to make sense of his works after reading Cyclical Time and Ismaili Gnosis for about the fourth or fifth time, it is becoming more and more clear. I've tried to read Man of Light book before but it just didn't make sense. Suddenly, today, at work, running a laser machine, I began having one epiphany after another. Here, in this book, in words, is a clear exposition of where I've been but haven't been able to put into word. It was a moment, though certainly not in as glorious a setting, that paralleled another 'aha!' moment whereby everything changed.

To put it into words, of course, is a struggle. Over the past few years, as I've wrestled with the Jesus question, I've begun to have visions and ideas about who he is, one recurring them being that Jesus is who we are. He is a mirror into which we see ourselves and through which we see who God is. He is, in essence, our truest self. As we journey through life he is there, from the highest highs and the lowest lows, from heaven to hell, he is there, leading us on and up.

I can quote some Scripture that would seem to verify this view but for some reason the "sense" I get in the various churches we have attended is that worship of him is not this. The sense I get in church is that he is "other" than us, even though he lives in us through the Spirit, and our worship of him is because he is the Other. I get that and don't disagree. Yet I can't seem to shake the feeling that he is somehow who we truly are. He is that Figure we all seek.

He is to some degree the repository of all our hopes and dreams and ideas of perfection, of who and what truth is, the best of man accumulated into a corporate view of this Figure of Jesus. Yet he remains somehow objective and reflects back to us the truth of our attempts at projecting onto him our own views of truth.

And as a Figure he continues to grow in me. I can't help but think my trajectory is beginning to leave the traditional bounds of Christianity. This doesn't make me "mystical" (a tag that has become cliche and void of content) or somehow better or different than anyone. My biggest fear is to find myself immersed in the "all relgions are the same" stew of religious gobbledygook where Man is the measure of all things and I sound like I'm shlepping New Age Amway.

This is perhaps the reason why I'm drawn to those religious scholars where the fancy letters after their names, though they certainly have them, are not touted as somehow giving them clout. The intellectual rigor and 'spirit' that bursts forth from their words speaks for itself. Henry Corbin is one of those scholars. Read his works and then read many of modern apologetic or comparative religious works today and you will notice the difference. There really is no comparison.

Perhaps it is my addictive, obsessive self longing for unique, for attention, for "mine". But, truly, I want to know who he is. It is the fundamental question for a Christian. And many of the answers in today's Christian landscape lacks depth. This is perhaps why I have always been drawn to the study of other religious traditions.

I enjoy the church we attend. It's "earthy" and practical and simple. The core focus is love. This is not the wishy washy kind of love but the hard stuff, dying to self. However, while it helps balance out my overly analytical view of the world, it leaves my intellect longing. The simple "Jesus is the only way" approach doesn't mean much to me. If he is the only way, then, as Christians, the issue isn't about being right but displaying why. In the meantime, I still passionately study other faith traditions. It highlights what is unique (and not uniqe) to Christianity yet keeps my spiritual worldview broad. God's light shines in the strangest of places.

In reading Corbin today, it hit me hard. My leanings have become 'gnostic' in nature. My view is not uncommon and shares ground with the gnostics from all traditions through time. Corbin's Man of Light breaks down this Figure I've come to see in stunning detail. It came as a relief. The 'aha'!' moment was that in reading him he is explaining not only where I am but where I am going.

What kind of a Christian?

That's a really tough question. I guess I am "supposed" to be a Christian of the Trintarian variety. To a degree I am though sometimes I feel as if I hold to this as an objective categorization to keep it separate from the "other" variations of the Christian, defined more by what it is not than by what it is, the apophaticism of the mystics.

I do see how it developed and the need for it. Something was necessary to give a cohesive structure to the Church in order for it to survive as it has for 2,000 years. Given what we have in the Bible - Father, Son, Spirit - and their workings throughout the New Testament writings, it is sensible that the Trinitarian doctrine developed. It is not, as many claim, illogical, as it was logic that built the Trinitarian edifice. There is a limit to this logic, however, and there does come a point where logic is baffled because we recognize the limits of words and language to convey the deeper things of religious experience. This also is not illogical. All religious traditions agree that while words are necessary to take us "there" a point comes where words fail.

But there are times when I view Jesus as universal soul, the "celestial self" of whom Henry Corbin writes, the fravarti, the Daena we will meet on the road to the Cinvat Bridge. This vision is found in Manichaeism, Sufism and Pure Land Buddhism. But it is not foreign to Christianity. In Corbin's view, Jesus was viewed by some (e.g. in the Shepherd of Hermas) as an Angel along the same lines. And the more I understand the idea of the Imam in Shi'ite Islam the more it makes sense. There can be no doubt that there are parallel lines of "seeing" between this vision of Islam and the Christ who is "angelic" in this sense.

So which Jesus?

Then there is the cultural Jesus, the "substitute Jesus" of the cult of celebrity, whether musicians, movie stars, pro athletes, talk show hosts or any other "famous" person in whom we place our trust and allegiance, only to cruficy them when they fail. Why else are the tabloids so popular? It's because we want to know the dirt they do. We prop them up, support their lifestyles so that we can, in a sense, fund them the lives we wish to live, watch them as voyeurs, safely from a distance, and then thrive when they fall.

There is the Islamic Jesus, the Buddhist Jesus, the Jewish Jesus, the Jesus Seminar Jesus, the macho Jesus, the feminist Jesus, even the atheist Jesus. Lots of Jesuses out there. Which Jesus?

Isn't it quite possible that all these views of Jesus actually embrace him? Perhaps Jesus has become nothing more than a collective projection of an innate goodness onto a "figure" named Jesus, whose roots are found in the New Testament but who has become the repository of the collective human consciousness. Perhaps the "New Age" Jesus is in full effect.

I think any vision of Jesus will always develop and change over time. After all, this is theology plain and simple. There is really no theology proper in Islam. Theology implies an independent interpretation and, as such, has been controversial in Islamic history. Judaism also does not place great emphasis on theology. Theology, in these two faiths, are basically the equivalent of what is believed. But there are, in general, no disputations about the "nature" of God.

Theology really developed in answer to the question Jesus poses: "Who do you say that I am?" It is this, when analyzed through independent reason and the adoption of Greek philosophical methods and terms to a Christian paradigm, that drove Christian theology. So while every avenue of who Jesus was/is has been, throughout the great debates in Church history, analyzed and discussed and argued about, there is still a challenge on the individual level to wrestle with this question.

It is this wrestling, and a more independent streak in the post-Enlightenment world, that has led to all the divisions within Christendom and has given rise to the post-denominational world of the Church today. Add to this the Jesus of culture or of other religions and the mystery of who he really was/is increases.

As a Christian to not wrestle with this question requires blind allegiance to a teacher or pastor or blind allegiance to ignorance (i.e. fear). As a thinking Christian, wrestling with this question, while potentially dangerous, can be liberating. This does not mean leaving Christianity or abandoning Jesus or somehow failing God.

No, this means that you, as an individual, take responsibility for finding the answer on your own. Any visionary, anyone who has had an experience with the "risen Christ" has done so when he ventured beyond the confines of familiarity and contentment and journeyed out beyond into the realms of darkness where the soul is on its own, where the soul can find a true and genuine faith.

This is the realm where the "mystic" or the "visionary" who comes back with a tale to tell and a desire to help others. But this is also the realm in which, if not careful, the self-declared mystic and visionary comes back and leads eager and gullible souls to hell (think Jim Jones).

Self-definition is tough. I hate labels and categories. Labels and categories serve as a reference point, a leaping off point, but in the end they too need abandoned. Even the name of Jesus can become a hindrance as we creat an idol out of the imagery we attach to the name.

I am reminded, as is often the case, of the Dao De Jing:

"The Dao that can be told is not the eternal Dao.

The name that can be named, is not the eternal name." DDJ, 1, Feng translation

Yet the question remains: "Who do you say that I am?"

Americanization of Sufism...

Rather than a specifically Americanized version, there is a larger Western scholarly category called Orientalist which is basically the Western study, often biased or with a specific agenda, of things "Oriental" under which Islam falls.

An article from Carl W. Ernst in Brannon Wheeler's compilation of essays pertaining to Teaching Islam goes more deeply into how Sufism has been isolated from its historical roots. Brannon Wheeler, in several articles on Khidr/Khezr (one of my favorite characters of any religion), radically altered my views in "influence/borrowing" in Islam. On this, I'll post more when I get time.

According to Ernst the term and category Sufism was first coined by British Orientalists in India, particularly Sir William Jones. He notes that the "dervishes", the symbol of Sufism, were known but only as exotic curiosities. The term Sufi was given primarily to the literary phase, particularly the poetry, convinced that the elegant poems of Hafiz and Rumi could have nothing to do with the Islamic (then called "Mahometan") religion. The Sufis (whose character was gleaned from within the literature) were free spirits and thus had little in common with the "stern faith" of Muhammad.

Ernst notes that

the term Sufism was invented at the end of the eighteenth century as an appropriation of those portions of "Oriental" culture that Europeans found attractive.

Ernst seeks to make the point that the nonpolitical image of Sufism is illusory. It's a different angle than merely criticizing Sufism's excision from its Islamic roots which has overtones of a strictly "religious" critique. After all, Islam is a worldview and this includes politics under its umbrella.

There is often a polarity posed between Islam and Sufism, as if Sufism is somehow not Islamic or as if it intentionally freed itself from the grasps of a fundamentalist faith. While historically there have been clashes between the fundamentalist variety of Islam and the more "mystical" strain (which Orientalists have coined "Sufi"), the battle has been for the "control of [Islam's] central religious symbols" (113).

Fundamentalists (in any faith or political worldview, for that matter), who fear any alternative interpretation as threatening, have taken the lead of the Orientalist view and have sought to make Sufism into a subject separable from Islam, even hostile to it, as Ernst points out. This makes the fundamentalists the "sole authentic custodians of tradition" even though such groups constitute only 20 percent of any Muslim population. Sufism is thus not included in the "history" of Islam from this paradigm.

However, many a Sufi order has been actively involved in politics even, ironically, active in resiting colonial rule. Hasan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood and Abu al-'Ala' Mawdudi, founder of the Jama'at-i Islami, were admirers of the structure of the Sufi orders. While they may not adopt the spiritual practices, they acted in relation to their followers "with all the charisma of a Sufi master in the company of disciples" (113). So the Sufi "mystique" has a powerful hold over on Muslim society so the fundamentalist reinterpretation of history is a powerful spin.

With differing motives, both Orientalists and fundamentalist have sought, quite successfully, to separate Sufism from its Islamic roots. Those associaetd with that which is now generically called "Sufism" are not called on to make explicit statements regarding their relation to "mainstream" Islam. However, according to Ernst, prior to the nineteenth and twentiety centuries, it was scarcely necessary for a Sufi, "steeped in the Quran and the example of Prophet Muhammad", to have to provide self-definition in terms of Islam. This has been a result of Islam becoming "the eternal other" as opposition to the modern West (115).

Ernst ends his essay discussing mysticism as a category. He notes that it is "often reduced to a bare universalism...and...to the private experience of the individual" (121). In this view, then, military and economic activities inherent in Sufism's past do not fit this picture of mysticism and is disgarded. However, Ernst notes that this is difficult to do with the truth about Sufism's history. Sufis are constantly reminded of this by the model of the Prophet Muhammad, who is, for them, the role of social and political leader, as well as mystical exemplar.

In essence, then, Sufism should be studied in its context for understanding. It is much more than Rumi; it is much more than the "mystical" side of Islam; it is much more than the "real" Islam. All of these are subjective, isolated views which, when not taken as part of a larger whole, become private affairs and cease to have any real application in the world at large. Religion as a solely private thing can be just as dangerous as religion at the institutional level.

In other words, "mysticism", a generic category into which Sufism has been lumped, has come to mean "I'm spiritual, not religious" or "I don't like organized religion" or "All religions are the same" or "All religions lead to the same place", well-meaning slogans that really equate to unwillingness to commit to any form of religious or doctrinal affiliation, Man as the measure of all things. Really, it is nothing more than the Great Em Ee desiring to be the center of all things, including the judge of Truth.

The problem isn't whether "Sufism" is "mystical" or Sufism vs. Islam or Sufism devoid of content as much it is the problem of how few of us are really willing to commit, i.e. surrender self, to any Path requiring genuine sacrifice. Believe me, I only recognize it when I see it because I am just as guilty of this as the next person.

Faith is messy because it changes us.

Henry Corbin and Docetism

Trying to further elaborate on the post on Henry Corbin's discussion on Angelology, he delves further into the gnostic idea and its trajectory. As should be pretty clear, Corbin's writings have had a tremendous impact on me. In terms of comparative religion, he puts to shame the superficiality of many so-called comparative religious studies and gets to a genuine "core", the real crux of where relgions meet, not in doctrine and dogma, which are areas where divisions have been drawn, but in those fringe areas where religions truly intersect and interweave.

The Christ of the Acts of Peter and John has been called Docetic. Corbin notes, however, that Docetism is not a set doctrine but a "tendency" (63). He points out that the Christology of the Qur'an is Docetic as is the Imamology particular to Shi'ite Gnosis and that the "Buddhology" of Mahayana Buddhism is Docetic as well. In terms of a Christian Docetism this is in contrast to the hypostatic union which was "a material fact that entered into history" and became an "external and objective datum" 62). In other words, this is not your "orthodox" variety of Christianity.

This Docetic Christology does not view Christ as a "phantasm" or a spook or a ghost but as a "real apparition" which is "proportionate to the theophanic dimension of the soul, that is, its aptitude for being shown a divine Figure". The soul, therefore, is thus not a witness to an external event but "the medium in which the event takes place" (62).

Peculiar to Ebionite Christianity is the idea of the True Prophet or Prophet of Truth, not the God incarnate or God-man of what would become "orthodox" Christianity.

"Running through the ages since the beginning of the world, he hastens toward the place of his repose".

All that matters to the Ebionites is whether or not Jesus is this Prophet. The first Adam was the first epiphanic Form of the True Prophet, what Corbin calls the Christus aeternus, i.e. Adam-Christos. The True Prophet, having in him the breath of the divine nature, cannot sin. In Ebionism, the True Prophet appeared to Moses and Abraham and in Adam and Jesus the True Prophet was present.

In Jesus, then, the True Prophet finds his "final repose." He is not messianic Lord because his death effects redemption; according to Corbin it is because a community was "waiting for the Epiphany of the...Angelos Christos, the return of him who dispenses Knowledge that delivers and who will thereby establish a supraterrestrial kingdom...of Angels." (71) He is an Illuminator, not a Redeemer.

Now if Adam, the initial Prophet, could not sin, what of the "fall" of man? Providing a unique spin of Satan/Iblis, Adam's "fall" was not sin but of divulging the secret of the end of the Cycle of history, the knowledge of the Last Imam of the Cycle, the Resurrector (Qa'im) and the Resurrection. But this may only be divulged in symbols proportionate to the spiritual adept's "degree of dignity and capacity." (84)

This is where Corbin gets into the meat of his essay. He discusses the hadd, the limit, of each spiritual adept. It is the degree of consciousness, the mode of knowledge proportionate to the mode of being realized by the adept. The next higher hadd is, then, the Lord - that is to say, the Self - of its own mahdud ("limited"), the Self of what which it limits, that whose horizon it is." (85)

Our spiritual journey, in this scheme, is a journey through levels, or horizons or, as Corbin calls them, Angels. Each adept must rely upon his imam who is responsible for leading him up to the next level which thus becomes his hadd and the adept too is responsible for leading the one below him up to his former hadd. Each ascent of degrees, or horizon, is called a qiyamat, a "resurrection." So Adam, as True Prophet, is the repository of all souls, each individual soul on its journey toward the Qiyamat al-Qiyamat, or Grand Resurrection. In Shi'ite Islam this is the advent of the Qa'im, the last Imam. This, according to this schema, is the consummation of all religion.

So where does this leave us besides bewildered? Though this is a weak summation of what is truly a dense distilation of comparative religion in Corbin's work, it is leading somewhere.

Several concepts as generally understood in Christianity are tweaked:

1) Docetism is presented in a different form that is stereotypically understood as mere "appearance" or "phantasm"

2) Jesus is not an incarnate God; he is the repository of the True Prophet and is thus, at least according to Ebionite Christianity, messianic in the sense of bringer of Knowledge

3) Each spiritual adept (i.e. all of us) is where he/she us based on the adept's "horizon" or ability to see

4) The Qiyamat al-Qiyamat (Grand Resurrection) is when the Qa'im (the Final Imam), akin to the parousia of traditional Christianity, will appear to "recapitulte" all souls and religion, the Epiphanic Cycle of this Gnostic vision will be complete.

This connects to another of my favorite writers, Vladimir Lossky and his writings on Eastern Orthodox Theology. The connection between Christianity's "eastern" coloring and its influence on Islam is unmistakable. What is surprising is that in a work as "orthodox" as Lossky's there seems to be a connection, no matter how slight, with Corbin's vision of the Christianity almost lost to the paradise of archetypes.

A great blog about Henry Corbin's works

Here is the link to the blog:

The Legacy of Henry Corbin

A new book is due in August of 2009 which looks quite adventurous and tags right along with Corbin's Cyclical Time and Ismaili Gnosis. Norman O. Brown's The Challenge of Islam: The Prophetic Tradition looks to be an interesting read.

Henry Corbin and Angelology

In Henry Corbin's densely packed book on the trajectory of "gnosticism" from Zoroastrianism through Christianity to its final "resting" place of Shi'ism he discusses the theophanic vision, as I've posted elsewhere quoting the Acts of Peter and Acts of John.

This stuff is heady and my summation is not as clean as I'd like but it's a start. Corbin's stuff is the densest thing I've ever read. But the work is worth it for those nuggets, when they come, make it all worth while.

Here's what he has to say about the theophanic vision:

"There is actual perception of an object, of a concrete person: the figure and the features are sharply defined; this person presents all the "appearances" of a sensuous object, and yet it is not given to the perception of the sense organs. This perception is essentially an event of the soul, taking place in the soul and for the soul. As such its reality is essentially individuated for and with each soul; what the soul really sees, it is in each case alone in seeing." (Henry Corbin, Cyclical Time and Ismaili Gnosis, 60).

And here is the key to this entire essay in the book:

"The field of its vision, its horizon, is in every case defined by the capacity, the dimension of its own being: Talem eum vidi qualem capere potui" (60-61)

Quoting Origen's discussion of the Transfiguration he notes that Jesus appeared in the form in which he was normally seen but also in his transfigured form "he appeared to each one according as each man was worthy."

The core of Corbin's book is in essence the transformation of such a "gnosis" in Islamic, specifically Ismaili, soil. Having traced its origins in Zoroastrianism, Corbin goes on to discuss the connection between Zoroastrianism, Christianity (specifically Ebionite Christianity) and Islam (specifically Shi'ite and, more speficially, Ismaili Shi'ite) in a mindbending trip. Corbin has "no wish to debate the question of historical filiation...nor to determine the 'influences'" which, he says, "reads causality into things" (31). The connection between them is not doctrinal: it is a common angelology.

By angel he is not talking about the winged variety or the Touched By An Angel variety or any of those other media caricatures. For Corbin the "angel" is the "celestial Idea" of all human beings. Writing on Ibn Arabi, he says:

"...that which a human being regains in the mystical experience, is the "celestial pole" of his being, which is to say his "person" whereby and as which, the Divine Being from the very beginning in the origin of origins in the world of Mystery, manifested himself to himself, and made himself known to it in this Form [its own form, the form it was given to assume] which is equally the Form in which he knew himself in it. It is the Idea, or rather the "Angel" of his person whose present self is no more than the terrestrial pole."

And again:

"I am your own Daênâ", -which means: I am, in person, the faith that you professed and that which inspired it in you, she for whom you have answered and she who guided you, she who comforted you and she who now judges you, for I am, in person, the Image proposed to you from the birth of your being and the Image which finally you have yourself wished for ("I was beautiful, you have made me still more beautiful").

These paragraphs draw out the distinctions behind Corbin's aversion to traditional Christianity and its teaching of the singular event of the Incarnation of Christ. Rather than a universal, singular Christ, this Angel of which Corbin speaks is personal, unique to each soul, and is the Image to which the soul longs to unite.

He further breaks down this angelology. Rather than being a "metaphorical luxury" the Angel's significance is twofold, theophanic and soteriological ("salvific"). It can be thought about in several ways. There are angels who have remained in the celestial world, the intermediary between heaven and earth, and other angels who have fallen to Earth. The angels in the celestial world (the pleroma) are "angels in actu" and the angels who are on earth are the "angels in potentia".

Another way of looking at it is that this division may refer to a single being, an unus ambo. The Spirit is the person or Angel who has remained in heaven, the "celestial twin", while the soul is his companion who has fallen to Earth, to whose help he comes and with whom he will be reunited if he issues victorious from the cosmic battle between good and evil. (103)

The human lot is thus, quoting Nasir Khusraw, a transitory status, the "horizon" of which Corbin speaks. Man is a "not-yet": an angel (or demon) in potentia awaiting reunion with his celestial twin, the angel in actu.

Heady? Yeah. And I can't do it justice. But there is a certain logic to it that is quite appealing. Rather than a heavenly Jesus to whom we turn, we all have inherent in us this "Idea" of perfection, this idea of the "Divine" and it is this "Idea" that Corbin terms the Angel with whom we seek union or re-union. It has been placed in us from the very beginning; it is this that guides us and it is to this we seek to return.

Corbin's main thrust is this:

"Man is called, by right of his origin and if he consents, to an angelomorphosis, his acceptance of which precisely regulates his aptitude for theophanic visions." (64)

It is this angelomorphosis (Corbin invents mroe than a few terms in this work) that is the key. Ismailian Gnosis, according to Corbin, in a sense saves a Christianity, specifically of the Ebionite variety, that had long ago been lost to the "paradise of archetypes" (65).

My journey through Islam...

In 1999, having been a "born again" Christian at a Oneness Pentecostal church in the heart of the inner city in Youngstown, I was journeying toward Islam. That is a story in itself. In 2005, having just been interviewed for the CBS Saturday Evening News, I contributed an article to my local newspaper about my experience as a "Muslim" for a weekend.

At some point I will rewrite it through the lens of time and experience. It's pretty airy but if you read between the lines you can get a real point of view. Though it's pretty much as I wrote it, I hated the title and found it interesting to see what was edited ("conflated" in the original was changed to "blended" which completely changed what I was saying).

Even more interesting was the interview on the CBS Saturday Evening News. I was interviewed in my home for about fifteen minutes by an interviewer from New York via phone. The camera man was in my house and I had to look as if I was talking to the interviewer as if he were in front of me. Fascinating the prep and posing we see on the news. Though a great experience, it reinforced my skepticism of the news as selling a point of view.

The questions got to be pretty in depth and the interviewer was genuinely curious as to how a Christian firm in his faith could genuinely study and participate in Islam without feeling threatened and without, in the end, losing faith.

But this wasn't the topic of the piece on the news.

CAIR was giving away a free copy of the Qur'an to anyone who was interested and the news piece covered this. A professor of Islam at my local university who I had gotten fairly well had been contacted by CBS News and asked if he knew of anyone who was a non-Muslim and a non-scholar who had read the Qur'an in its entirety. He gave them my name. Imagine the surprise when CBS News called my house for an interview. I didn't really care so much about that. I was more honored that he thought of me.

Here's a copy of the transcript:

Thousands of Americans Seek Copies of Qur'an

Out of everything I said, they took one snippet, out of context, and highlighted it. I learned a lot about media and how they "sell" a point of view. Though I meant what I said, without the context it is easy to see how soundbytes get misconstrued. Requests for the videotaped interview were denied and the video of the clip from the news (June 5 or 12, 2005) have disappeared from the Web.

The copies they were giving away was the Yusuf Ali translation (which is the "safest" translation to give away to an American audience). They ran out and sent me a copy of Muhammad Asad's translation, The Message of the Qur'an.

I already had a copy of his so kept the one sent from CAIR (it's beautiful) and listed the other copy online. Were I to become a Muslim it would have been Islam as presented in Asad's translation. In fact, Islam as I had come to understand it aligned with his view even before I had found his translation.

I hold an "if only..." nostalgia for his translation and Islam as presented by the Traditionalist school. On occasion I do read it though certainly not as much as during the period of time in which I lived and breathed Islam.

This period of time radically altered my view of both Christianity and Islam for the better.

It comes down to choice...

It is a choice, certainly and I think that is the key. You might say it's a choice to choose. But then commitment to that choice is just as important. In my case, after the initial choice, my sincere desire to know the answers led me down many a winding path. But it always came back to Jesus. Always.

And the Jesus of Islam wasn't the answer (as I've noted in various places in my blog), nor was it the Jesus of the scholars, the Jesus of the Jesus Seminar, the Jesus of the New Age or the Jesus of historians. I gorged myself on these works, studying them in great depth and detail, trying to justify and prove that the whole thing was a myth, a charade, a lie. In the end I found, by and large, that the Jesus of these methods turned out to look a lot like the scholars the scholars themselves. In the end, ironically enough, it enhanced my faith.

I had some "visions" that were a turning point for me. I've written about them in the blog. We got away from the circus style church and found a place where true and genuine preaching was heard weekly. Practical, earthly, relevant stuff that, when applied, revealed the Truth greater than any studying could ever do.

And, lately, the healing of my soul. I sourced mine to events when I was around ten years old.

Strangely enough, this healing led to and coincided with intellectual rest and freedom. My intellect was a defense, protection of a wounded soul. Rather than be open and honest, I filtered it through analysis and intellect first. It was just another method of numbing the pain I was hiding. Once my soul began to heal, my intellect, though still on hyperdrive, was no longer my idol. It balanced my soul.

In hindsight, by hiding the pain, I learned that it was more painful to hide it than to feel the actual pain of the pain I was hiding...if that makes sense.

Make a choice and watch that party in your head come along and even support you in your choice. Rather than a cacophony make it a symphony. Start exploring the reasons for not being able to make a choice, to what degree addiction and depression are a front for selfishness and what part of the soul is in need of healing.

I'm not all the way there yet. Sometimes my writing is the conceptual grasp that I have yet to achieve but it's a goal. And I do slip back into depression and self-pity and addictive tendencies are always lurking. But I have a consistent hope these days.

But it's taken me over ten long and adventurous years after "accepting Christ" to begin to find it. I do believe, however, that the wisdom I found in diving into other traditions provided fertile soil and I cherish the wisdom and experiences. I remain open to listening to the whisper of the Spirit from wherever it may come.

Americanization of Rumi...Part Two

As El-Zein notes, one of the major feature of the 'New Sufism' is the fact that the majority of the translations of Rumi's verse comes from English, not the original Persian. The name Jonathan Star, who has also "translated" the Dao De Jing, is listed in the article as one of these adepts. Star is among a seemingly endless group of English speaking authors (e.g. Stephen Mitchell et al) who render a multitude of works from different faith traditions.

For example, Coleman Barks, whose publishing career is Rumi, worked with John Moyne to render the Essential Rumi (of which I have a copy) from A.J. Arberry's scholarly translation. El-Zein quotes Barks:

"John Moyne and I try to be faithful to the images, the tone as we hear it, and the spiritual information coming through. We have not tried to reproduce any of the dense musicality of the Persian originals. It has seemed appropriate to place Rumi in the strong tradition of American free verse." (75)

I've heard his poems expressed in the original Persian. A respected scholar of Islam who teaches where I obtained my BA in Religious Studies, fluent in Persian, recited some of his poems. American free verse melts like butter in comparison. Granted, not everyone can learn or understand Persian. Just as plastic can only be recycled so many times before it loses its strength completely, so too these renderings being removed from their original context one too many times loses any tie to its original and becomes eisegesis, proof-texting to sell the particular viewpoint of the one wielding the words.

El-Zein quotes Deepak Chopra following suit:

"They, (the poems) are not direct translations but 'moods' that we have captured as certain phrases radiated from the original Farsi, giving life to a new creation but retaining the essence of its source." (75)

Rumi has been Americanized. El-Zein states that the basic Islamic element in Rumi's work "has been diluted in the soup of 'New Sufism' to the extent that Islam appears as mainly folkloric" and Rumi himself nothing more than a product for spiritual consumption (76).

Here are some shortcomings of the New Sufism when compared to its Islamic context. The modern renderings do not stress, as in the scholarly works, the idea that human love is transformed into love of the Divine. Rumi's works are filled with allusions to Islamic themes. Without these themes there is no context, no ground, and one can say just about anything. Similarity in comparative religion does not mean sameness. Only by removing context can one sell a viewpoint that all "mysticism" looks the same, "superficial and vulgar" (78), to use El-Zein's expression. Such comparisons become nothing more than generalizations.

As an example, El-Zein takes Andrew Harvey to task. From Rumi's point of view the conception of silence, of emptiness, is interpreted through the first and most important aspsect of the shahadah, la ilaha illa allah (There is no god but God), the silence yielding to listening to the Qur'an. For Harvey, silence is related to the dance of Kali, to 'Shiva Shakti who is peace and energy in One' thus making it seem as if Rumi's verse belongs to the Tao which is not, El-Zein points out, the Tao as spoken of in the I Ching. Rumi's beloved, Shams, is even compared to a Zen master. (80)

If we pay careful attention to these New Agey interpretations, the agenda becomes clear. All bearings are lost and these comparative religions are cast adrift in a sea of endless meaninglessness, the ground of seemingly finding a "spirituality" that conforms to what is already believed, to confirm some utopian vision of the way things should be. This is not necessarily the fault of the listener/reader who is dependent upon the work of the authors nor is it to say that the authors are somehow being deceitful.

But if one really does any in-depth analysis of religious traditions the shallowness of such comparisons become abundantly clear and disconcerting. El-Zein calls this "spiritual elusiveness" (81). When everyone knows good as good, this is not good.

To drive the point home, El-Zein points out that Rumi was deeply rooted in Islamic tradition. Quoting Arberry:

"Before everything, he (Rumi) was a learned theologian after the firmest pattern of medieval Islam, very familiar with the Koran and its exegesis, the traditional sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, the sacred law and its erudite exposition." (81)

Seyyed Hussein Nasr, himself a member of the Traditionalist school, quotes Hadi Ha'iri, a renowned scholar of Rumi in Persia, as saying that some 6,000 verses of Rumi's Diwan and the Mathnawi are practically direct translations of Qur'anic verse into Persian poetry. In other words, "a different Rumi [is] created by Barks and Harvey and other interpreters, a Rumi for the American market." (81-2) To cut, isolate and dissect Rumi from his Islamic roots is to do an injustice not only to Rumi and his faith tradition but to the American public as well who are, in essence, being fed junk food.

Here are Rumi's words as rendered by Harvey:

"I do not know who I am
I am in astounding confusion.
I am not a Christian, I am not a Jew, I am not a Zoroastrian,
And I am not even a Muslim. (82)

To quote Rumi himself (as translated by Shems Friedlander):

I am the slave of the Koran
While I still have life.
I am the dust on the path of the Prophet Muhammad,
The chosen one,
If anyone interprets my words
in any other way,
I deplore that person,
And I deplore his words. (82)

What more is there to say?

The Americanization of Rumi...Part One

Religion, like most things in America, is a commodity. When someone finds a market for something, it grows and grows as others jump on the bandwagon. Context means little when it comes to the commodification of religion. As with anything "popular" it's about filtering it down to its basic marketing essence and stripping it of anything that may limit its saleability. Popular, in my opinion, is a derogatory term.

A prime example of this commodification is the fascination with Rumi. Look at any bookshelf in Barnes & Noble or Borders under Islam or Eastern Religions. There will be some translations of the Qur'an, a few books dealing with historical Islam, a few works taking Islam to task (which is par for the course as works taking Christianity to task have become quite popular in their own right), a few books on Sufism (frequently Americanized) and the majority of the space filled with books on or about Rumi.

So who is Rumi? Rumi is marketed as the poet of love. To market him in an Islamic context would certainly hinder sales related to his name. Some speak of his universality and present him as a mystical poet who transcends religious bounds.

I searched for God among the Christians and on the Cross and therein I found Him not.
I went into the ancient temples of idolatry; no trace of Him was there.
I entered the mountain cave of Hira and then went as far as Qandhar but God I found not.
With set purpose I fared to the summit of Mount Caucasus and found there only 'anqa's habitation.
Then I directed my search to the Kaaba, the resort of old and young; God was not here even.
Turning to philosophy I inquired about him from ibn Sina but found Him not within his range.
I fared then to the scene of the Prophet's experience of a great divine manifestation only a "two bow-lengths' distance from him" but God was not there even in that exalted court.
Finally, I looked into my own heart and there I saw Him; He was nowhere else.

I first saw this poem on the liner notes of the cassette (not the CD for some reason) of Enigma's 1990 album MCMXC A.D.. Here is the version contained there:

I tried to find Him on the Christian cross,but He was not there;
I went to the Temple of the Hindus and to the old pagodas, but I could not find a trace of Him anywhere.
I searched on the moutains and in the valleys but neither in the hights nor in the depths was I able to find Him.
I went to the Caaba in Mecca, but He was not there either.
I questioned the scholars and philosophers but He was beyond thair understanding.
I then looked into my heart and it was there where He dwelled that I saw him; he was nowhere else to be found.

I haven't sourced either translation (the second I'm guessing is from Coleman Barks) but which do you think would sell to a popular market, primarily in the U.S.? This is representative of how he is viewed in popular culture. He has been accosted, reinterpreted, sanitized and repackaged as happens in consumer culture.

This doesn't have to be a bad thing. His works are popular for a reason and they certainly spark something positive in people. And the power of his words, even in translation/interpretation, are powerful and deep. There is obviously a hunger in people for truth.

While in the throes of my journey into Islam I picked up a free copy of the March 2000 issue of Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations journal published through the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding out of Georgetown University. In it is an article by Amira El-Zein called "Spiritual Consumption in the United States: the Rumi phenomenon" which discusses how Rumi's work is "taken nowadays out of the Muslim Sufi tradition into an elusive spiritual movement [called] the 'New Sufism'" (p. 71).

El-Zein calls those who seek to recontextualize Rumi's works as the "new interpreters" and refers to translations of his works by those involved in this movement as "renderings" of his verse. El-Zein points out that his popularity has resulted in Coleman Barks' plethora of Rumi works selling over a quarter of a million copies, recordings of the works of Rumi entering Billboard's Top Twenty, a compact disc of Rumi's works being produced for a New York fashion show with participating artists including Madonna, Rosa Parks, Goldie Hawn and the one man who truly knows no boundaries when it comes to marketing religion, Deepak Chopra. Poetry readings have even been held at a Disney Store in Glendale, California.

So what is wrong with all this talk about love, trying to break free of the fetters of religion that often divide? If Rumi gives expression to such love, why is it so wrong to quote him? Why can't all religions be one? Why can't we heed the words of John Lennon? Why can't we pick and choose, recontextualize and make the world a better place?

El-Zein does not criticize this notion, as such. El-Zein is simply pointing out that Rumi has been eisegetically interpreted based on the beliefs of the 'New Sufism' movement.

There are academic translations which provide accurate translations and provide the context which is essential in understanding the symbolism of Rumi's poems. These scholarly works are certainly not popular in a mass marketed sense. Works such as Mathnawi of Jalaluddin Rumi (6 Volume Set) and Look! This Is Love (Shambhala Centaur Editions) are examples.

The context is essential to truly grasping and appreciating what Rumi is saying. In the two examples above, the second version has, with the exception of the Caaba, been sanitized of all Islamic references. It is safe and fluid enough to be framed and hung on the wall in the most religious of homes and the most non-religious of homes. This is the essence of New Age thinking. Man is the measure of all things.

The 'New Sufism' renderings follow similar patterns, though those in this movement are often quite critical of the New Age movement. Sufism is thus poised as being the face of "true" Islam while the media version of screaming maniacal gun totin' bearded rebels wrapped in turbans with their woman in burqas the face of the "hijacked" Islam.

It's all about spin, positioning and marketing.

Can you be Chrislamic?

Can you be a Christian and a Muslim? I suppose you can to a point. I tried it for many years and was good at it. So good, in fact, that it enabled me to discern the real differences between them. Rather than be both, which, in the end, was indecision, I was able to see the differences more clearly. Indecision is really being self-centered. How? We want things to be our way.

But can you be an imam or minister as both? Not really, unless you create your own rules, kind of a religion of one.

The issue isn't Ann Holmes Redding personally choosing to be both. That is her choice. None of us can really judge. But with a position such as minister the radical nature of her choice becomes the focus (or self-promotion) and would most likely cause issues with her "flock" being able to see her true spirituality. Unless those who follow her truly understand her choice, the duality would be a distraction, a denial of one or the other. By choosing both, she isn't either.

Not that it's so cut and dry. We all have dualities raging in us due to our common humanity. Perhaps there is a continuum from Christianity to Islam on which Ms. Holmes is riding. Or is this simply Zeno's paradox? At some point, it would seem, there is a clear break.

The big question I would ask her is why she cannot let go of Christianity.

But her honesty and boldness is refreshing and could possibly open up avenues of dialogue.

Ann Holmes Redding...

How fitting:

Episcopal minister is a Muslim

I remember when this story first broke. I was just emerging from calling myself Chrislamic. I was truly a Christian in the sense of having Jesus as my measure at truth but was enamored with Islam as in many ways I found it balanced what I felt (and still do feel are) the extremes of Christianity.

So I attended church and, for quite some time, I attended my local mosque (as a matter of fact it was pre and post 9/11 when I attended). Islam provided my soul a true sense of grounding especially, as Ms. Holmes has stressed, the power and beauty of the recitation of the Qur'an. I can truly understand Islam's appeal to her.

However, I am not convinced she took long enough to study it. To make such a life altering decision within a ten day period seems quite impulsive. I would compare it to the beginning days of a dating relationship. How many of us would get married after ten days?

I can also understand her claim to being a Christian as well. Her arguments are valid as to the ability to remain both. However, she has, in essence, forged her own version of each, stripping away some of those things that demarcate any similarities between the two faiths.

Christian belief has no compromise on the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus.

Islam refutes this entirely. Most Muslims believe he was saved from being crucified and was raised alive to God. There are some who postulate he did live a full life on earth and some believe he is buried in India but these are minority beliefs. Muslims do believe in the resurrection and most believe that Jesus will, on that day, renounce the beliefs held by Christians and proclaim Islam to be the true faith.

The vast majority of the Christian world teaches that Jesus is divine/deity/God. How that is understood is often debated but the fact itself is not. Exceptions would be Unitarians, Christadelphians and Jehovah's Witnesses (I don't believe Episcopals compromise on this point).

Islam refutes this entirely. Jesus, though a Prophet, is only human.

Father, Son and Holy Spirit are seen, by the majority of 

Christendom, as the Trinity, in doctrinal terms. Even if there is no belief in the Trinity, there is still a "trinitarian" economy to God's operation in these three.

Islam does not refer to God as "Father" and the Holy Spirit is considered to be the angel Gabriel. There are no "sons" of God.

For Christianity, God reveals His nature. His nature is revealed in His Son, through the Holy Spirit. While the depths of this nature are infinite, God's nature is revealed.

In Islam, God's nature is impenetrable. While He reveals Himself through His Word in the form of attributes, His revelation is not relational. There is little talk of God's nature and no talk of "person" when it comes to God which is why Islam, in general, has little to do with theology, as such.

Jesus, according to Christianity, is the Word of God (contrary to popular belief, the Bible is not the Word of God).

Jesus, while called a word from God by the Qur'an, is not the Word of God according to Islam. If a parallel is to be drawn, though lacking in many respects, the Qur'an would be considered the Word of God.

So while Ms. Holmes can hold these two faiths in her person in a delicate balance, the tension between the two helping deepen her faith in many respects, it also shortchanges her as there are many compromises she must make.

In the end, what, or who, is the Truth against which she measures her faith? Is it truly God? Or is she the measure of all Truth?

I think, in terms of faith, a choice must be made. While we can, and should, respect other faiths and can even participate in other faiths to a degree, there comes a point where we must choose.

I had been a fence straddler for a long time. It took me almost ten years to "leave" Islam. I took it as far as I could on the inside without making the leap. The leap was the last thing I needed to do. But, after the initial buzz has worn off and I entrenched myself in the deep things of the tradition, I was able to gather perspective.

It was only after making a clear decision that I began to see the "light" of the Christian path. While I often wonder what this "light" may have appeared as had I chosen to take the shahadah, I realize that I am where I am supposed to be.

My Qur'an...

This is my copy of the Qur'an. It is one of several translations I now own but his was the first. I bought it brand new in 1996. Had the receipt but have since misplaced it. This is well used and well worn, the back held together with a piece of cardboard and some packing tape.

Muslims do not do this with their Arabic versions. The Qur'an is held in such high esteem that it is not marked up, it is well protected and the hands must be clean to even touch the book.

A well worn and well marked Bible is a banner of sorts for the Christian. While the Bible is called and even revered as the word of God, it is not quite the same as the word of God as Muslims see it. The Qur'an is the word of God to a Muslim. It contains God's words as dictated to Muhammad via the angel Gabriel. Verbatim. This doesn't mean that God spoke Arabic, as such, but that in the original Arabic is the language in which God contained His message for mankind. The Qur'an, in its written form, contains these very words.

On the other hand, though there are some Christians who believe the same about the Bible, most Christians understand that though the Bible is referred to as the word of God it is in the sense that it is through the Bible we come to know God. It is through the word of God that we come to know the Word of God, the Logos, incarnate in Jesus Christ.

There is a certain equivalency to comparing the Qur'an and Jesus as the Word of God in each respective faith. Even the Qur'an calls Jesus the Word of God, or a Word from God, but this does not have the same meaning as the Christian understanding of the phrase.

For the Muslim, to say Jesus is a Word from God is to say that he is a Prophet and bears the message; but he himself is not that word. Granted, no other Prophet is called the/a word from God in the Qur'an (most likely due to the influence or awareness of the fact that the Christians with whom Muhammad came in contact referenced Jesus as 'word' in some fashion) but in terms of the overall message of the Qur'an it doesn't change the fact that he is the messenger, not the message. For the Christian, while Jesus may be the messenger, he is in fact the message.

So my Qur'an is beat up. I do have an Arabic version and several English translation/transliterations with the Arabic and English side by side but never got beyond a very basic familiarity with Arabic. Though there are concordances for the Qur'anic Arabic, there is no comparative Strong's or Thayer's concordance/lexicon with such mass appeal.

But I studied and studied and studied my translation as shown in the photo above. Over time, I got better at finding a suitable translation and found this translation to be a bit verbose, almost Old English in its diction. It's a bit stuffy. But it was the one I cut my teeth on and is sentimental for that reason.

I have, over time, read it completely, maybe not cover to cover like a novel (which isn't how it is to be read anyhow) but, though it's faded somewhat, I had a good grasp on its overall worldview as I sought to understand from a Muslim point of view, not from a polemical point of view.

And I have great respect for it. I believe it to be inspired and a viable spiritual path on its own. It will not show the Jesus of the Christian church but it most certainly has a consistent view of Jesus within in its own worldview.

And, as noted before, it does capture a certain "spirit" that I find lacking in Christianity and in this can glean inspiration from it. As Jesus said, the Spirit blows where it will. Who are we to deny the Spirit's presence, no matter how faint it may seem to us, in any other tradition?

Zen Christian connection...

Just musing on this at work today. I have plenty of time. Imagine putting a part on a machine press, pushing a button, taking the part off and putting it in a box and doing it over and over again for eight hours. The mind tends to drift. Fortunately, it drifts toward positive things.

My epiphany at the top of Yosemite Falls was in the context of immersion in the Dao De Jing. Not exactly Zen but I was well on my way.

I have healed in the context of the Christian path and was thinking about the similarity/difference. From my Christian point of view, I think of it as the light shining in darkness and exposing it, a bright light yielding insight and clarity that comes in a flash. Though I can't process the entirety of it, I "see" it.

In the context of the Dao or Zen, it isn't a light, as such, but a moment of insight and clarity that comes "in a flash." No light. It just is.

In Zen we find there is no "thing" there. It is a stripping away of the layers and layers and years and years of accumulation, of attachment and desires.

In Christianity there is some "thing" there and that "thing" is a Person. We might say we find some "one" there.

But is this 'person' merely a projection of our deepest needs and desires collectively? Is it personalizing the impersonal? Or is there a real person there to whom we conform?

Is this what makes people uncomfortable (or comfortable)?

In Christ, our nature is replaced, admittedly broken.

In Zen, there is no new nature, merely dusting off the original one. There is no admittance of broken. There is nothing to be separated from. There is no relationship.

So there is a point in which experience, at the depths of two traditions, seem to bare similarities. And yet there are differences. The two opposing poles of similarity and difference swirling around the strange attractor beyond which can only be experienced.

Henry Corbin and Hakim Bey

Seems that traditional religion isn't cutting it. Not knocking traditional religion but I am bored by it. Sure you get out of it what you put into it. Fine. But the muttness approach to religion has led me to this middle ground, the interstitial, that place where they all merge yet are all very much different, both the same and not the same. It was here where I stumbled across Henry Corbin's works via Peter Lamborn Wilson's Sacred Drift. I found this book in a second hand bookstore (now closed thanks to B&N moving in...) and picked it up because it had "Essays on the Margins of Islam" as the secondary title. It has since become one of my favorite books, with pages dog eared, passage after passage underlined, so much so that most passages are underlined. I began seeing religion in a different light.

Wilson references Corbin's works in regards Ismailism, y'know, the Assassins (which, he notes, does not come from the same word as 'hashish' but from...). Corbin's Cyclical Time and Ismaili Gnosis, placing three very dense articles into one book, is a mind blower. It is so dense that I continue to revisit it and my brain is still turned to mush trying to tackle it. It's usually only after I quit thinking that it begins to sink in.

But Corbin's work takes those interstitial regions where I find myself and he breaks them open, like the physicist in search of the Higgs boson (the so-called 'God' particle) zipping particles around a particle accelerator, bursting them apart into smaller and smaller bits, deeper and deeper into areas that border on the fringe of non-existence, ethereal, almost mystical in nature.

I'm not talking about the Dancing Wu Li Masters hippy-dippy stuff. I'm talking about that place where it is elusive yet you can almost feel it but the senses fail, the intellect fails and some other form of 'knowing' takes over. It is perhaps intuitive in the sense that years and years of deep seeking have provided a heightened sensitivity to answers that the ordinary mind will miss.

You can't just intuit such things (though you may get temporary glimpses unrecognizable to the unprepared mind/soul). No there is much training, much disicpline, much to build up and, at the same time, lay aside in order to make the mind/soul fertile for such experience when it comes. And it will come.

Corbin's work and, to a lesser degree, Wilson's work (his is much more fun as he embraces those acts of faith deemed hertical with reckless abandon), provides fertile soil to help prepare one's mind/soul for these experiences, even within traditional religious practice but, in general, at that place where mere religion fails to satisfy, when one must journey on alone, beyond the bounds of those things that have traditionally kept us both safe and bound.

Surah 4:157 (Part II)

So how to reconcile Christian belief with that of Islam? It can't be done, though the tales in Islamic tradition of Jesus being raised are actually the closest we can come. But these traditions are non-sensical and require more faith to believe than those of the Christian claims.

No, what the Qur'an says is that the Jewish boasts are false. The crucifixion never happened. Crucifixions happened (and the Qur'an claims this happened during Egyptian's heyday which is another story altogether) according to the Qur'an. But not to Jesus. The Jews falsely believed this and their bragging of it is false.

If in fact the Qur'an is speaking about Christians in this verse, it could only be if Christians were calling the Jews of the region "Christ-killers" (something easily found in the Christian historical record) and the Qur'an is refuting this claim.

But the verse is not a historical account of what happened. It is apparent that Jesus was persecuted, as Muhammad was persecuted, as all Prophets have been persecuted, but there is no interest in validating Christian claims that Jesus was crucified. The Qur'an does not answer what happened to him. It does not answer what happened to any of the Prophets prior to Muhammad. He thus died (cf. Surah 3:55). The 'raising' in question (rafa'nahu, phrases also used in 19:57, 4:158 and 4:172) is exaltation of status which Muhammad Asad renders as "whom We exalted."

So what happened to Jesus? The Qur'an does not say. The question remains unanswered. All answers to the question come from outside the Qur'an and/or are interpretations of what the Qur'an says. But the Qur'an itself is essentially silent on the matter.

The Qur'an does not speak of a Docetic/Gnostic Jesus. It does not speak of another person dying on the cross for Jesus. It does not speak of Jesus being raised alive to heaven. No. The crucifixion did not happen. Period. Jesus, as all Prophets before him, spoke his message, was persecuted for it, and kept a gathering of disciples (i.e. muslims) true to his word who carried the message forth.

This is perfectly consistent with the Qur'anic ideal. Any paths to dialogue begin here.

This idea troubles Christians greatly. How can there be such little interest in the Jesus of the Christian faith? One verse lays aside the crux of the Christian faith? One verse? That's it? It's maddening to the Christian. So Christians read back into the verse the aberrant theologies floating around in regions of Persia/Arabia as an explanation of the verse, Muslims retort, developing elaborate stories influenced by and in response to these Chrisitans claims and the convoluted Islamic Jesus develops.

On the flip side, Muhammad begins to take on the characteristics attributed to Jesus. This shows not only the influence of Christianity on the traditions that would develop about Muhammad but also show the phenomenology of how a tradition about someone developes.

It can be argued, and often is, that a similar process occurred in the deification of Jesus though Christianity did not have the safeguards preventing this from occurring and thus the development of the Trinity in order to maintain monotheism. But that is another story.

Surah 4:157 (Part I)

So how do I reconcile the cross with this Surah from the Qur'an? In reality, it's not possible. The Qur'an categorically denies that Jesus died on the cross; thus there is no resurrection.

However, the curious thing about this is that resurrection, prior to Christianity, at the latest, and perhaps during the time in which Daniel was written (accepting the belief that at least part of Daniel was written during the Hasmonean period) at the earliest, there was no belief in the resurrection in Judaism. Perhaps it existed in other religious traditions in some form or other but that did not become manifest, and this differently, until around the time of, and explicitly after, Jesus.

So if in fact this was the message of all those who came before Muhammad, it makes me wonder how it is that the resurrection has always been taught yet is completely absent from the earliest layers of Judaism. And does this mean the Qur'an validates other religious traditions that had a similr belief, such as that of Zoroastrianism and even Buddhism with its belief in reincarnation (arguably, on this premise, a distorted version of the idea of resurrection)?

Anyhow, back to the question at hand. Christian polemicists see in verse 157 a historical account of the events at the cross. It is implying that, no matter how skewed from the main body of Christian belief (i.e. a 'Docetic' gnosticism), the Qur'an actually validates Christian belief, on some level.

This isn't to deny the influence of a 'gnostic' type of Christianity on the Qur'an's view of Jesus (there can be no doubting that whatever Christianity was present in the Hijaz region, Jesus giving life to the birds is found in the Qur'an and in the gnostic writings). But verse 157 is not giving a historical account of what happened.

And Muslim commentators have fallen prey to the same thing, thus their elaborate explanations as to what happened to Jesus. There are many views of what happened to him, the most commonly promoted one being that Judas was placed on the cross in his stead which thus makes Judas a type of hero, a martyr, willingly laying down his life for Jesus.

But this is false also. The influence of Christianity really shows in the commentaries. It is through the commentaries that the idea of Judas being substituted enters in. It is not inherent in the Qur'anic text itself. It is read into the verse and is almost impossible to extract a different meaning once this view is held.

But look at the context of the passage. Beginning in verse 153, it is the Jews about whom the Qur'an speaks. It is not addressed to the Jews (as the Qur'an is for the hearers of Muhammad) but is speaking about the Jews. This continues to verse 162. Verse 157 falls right in the middle of this. It is speaking of wrong views and actions of the Jews; it does not speak of Christian belief. In other words, it simply says they (i.e. the Jews) did not kill Jesus though they brag that they did so, killing him as they had killed other Messengers before. This is the claim the Qur'an refutes.

What "appeared to them" was the event that Jesus was crucified. The Qur'an is silent on what actually happened. When verse 158 says God raised Jesus to himself, this is not a physical raising. That idea is more absurd than the Christian claim as Jesus would physically be alive somewhere in space. This is not the new "glorified" body of which Christians speak but a flesh and bones, earthly Jesus physically residing somewhere in the universe.

And even if, as some claim, the raising was of his soul, that would mean his body died which begins to sound like the Christian claim that his body died on the cross and he was raised alive. It radiates the influence of Christian theology and thus the Muslim scholars' attempted response to these claims.

Surah 19:57 uses the same phrase in regards to Idris (believed to be Elijah). So if Jesus was raised bodily (or even soulically) to heaven, so too was Idris. This, of cousre, is not believed. So why is it believed this is what happened to Jesus? Christian influence.

And of course this opens the door to all the other traditions that are derived from this idea, from the second coming of Jesus (coincidence?), the Dajjal, Gog and Magog, and Jesus dying after a certain period of time when re comes again. That would mean he is 2,000 years old.

Muttness

I did a Google on the term "spiritual mutt" and found very few hits. However, one of the pages was selling t-shirts with the term "spiritual mutt" on it. They trumpeted that a spiritual mutt is one who believes all religions are equally valid as the way to Truth. I balk at that notion.

A "spiritual mutt" is a matter of pedigree. It is one's DNA, if you will, not in one's current outlook or belief system. It is what it is; it is not what we wish it to be. Perhaps the t-shirt above should be read "spiritual wayfarer" or "spiritual voyeur" or "spiritual fondue" but certainly not "spiritual mutt".

My outlook is not what makes me a mutt. My DNA, all that which has come before me to make me as I am today, is what makes me a mutt. In that regard, perhaps, most of us are spiritual mutts. But my "muttness" is not that I believe all religions are the same. That is a discredit to these religions and takes something away from them; there is an undertone of hubris in that statement. There may be a "perennial philosophy" that we can extract but this is not the same thing as saying they are all the same.

To truly understand what it is that a particular religion unfolds, one must commit to it. One must take that one path deep. Taking the surface aspects of whatever religion looks good is of no benefit. It is safe but not transformative. The self (i.e. the ego) is still the Judge of Truth which is the antithesis of all religions. The Truth is independent of us, no matter how much we partake in it.

Take, for example, the poet Rumi. Everyone loves Rumi. About half of the Islam section of Barnes & Noble contains various works by him. But he has been removed from his context. He would have considered himself a Muslim, honoring the Five Pillars, bound by the Shari'ah. Most people who enjoy Rumi would not go that far. So he has been extracted from his context, recontextualized in the light of some vague definition of love and sold to a gullible public. But to understand his notion of love it is vital to understand the context in which he lived and moved and breathed. His notion of love, while bearing similarity to that of, say, the Christian idea of love, would be quite different in essence and this is lost in the desublimation of his works.

This happens all the time. Quotes are taken out of context, tossed into a book of quotes from the various world religions seeking to show their similarities and his quotes are attributed to him as a "Muslim" thus giving the appearance that the religions are the same. It's a nice gesture and it is certainly an improvement of trashing one another's religious beliefs but it is misleading, at best, dangerous, at worst.

I would compare it to what happens to many people who move in to my hometown. People who consider moving here from out of the area are shown our glorious Mill Creek Park. It is one of the finest parks I've ever seen. Then they are taken to the historical parts of town with big mansions from the steel mill heyday, well kept and well preserved. A spin through downtown and the city looks pretty good.

Until they move here. And get to know the area. And learn about the crime, the poverty, the difficult employment picture, the political infighting and the corruption. Had they known what was at the core, a different choice may have been made. No matter how much they wish it to be something else, no matter how much they make the most of it, at its core it is not what they were shown. Had they never moved here in the first place and had only the knowledge of what they had seen, they would probably have a pretty good image of it. And they might compare it to other cities in a positive light. They might even say it reminds them of another city that they have toured.

Such is the nature of the statement that all religions are the same.

Though I share the above views on my hometown and all its ugly (and all towns have ugly because all towns are made up of real people), I have actually found this to be advantageous. When the downtown are was delapidated and all but abandoned during the 90s, I had the complete freedom to roam at leisure through the abandoned buildings of downtown, walking leisurely through the abandoned lots of the former steel mills. It became my refuge, my sanctuary. I could pretty much go where I please unimpeded. The only people I would meet were the small community of homeless people utilizing these areas. Some of my fondest memories are from this period. I could go downtown and disappear and walk for hours on the train tracks without being bothered, take meditative shelter in buildings without hassle, or sit by the river for hours in some of the finest natural preserves in the area without trace of human habitation.

I have roughly 1,000 or so photos from this period. It wasn't until there was a resurgence of sorts in the downtown, the cheesification of it by tossing up a convention center (the architecture of which looks remarkably similar to the empty steel mill just across the bridge, pure function, its only character the lack or imitation of character) and looking to make an entertainment district. We do like to be entertained. It's another word of distracted. Distracted from dealing with reality as it is.

So even in the bleakness there was something positive to be found. But I sought it out, by accident originally, then willfully after a while. Rather than avoid it, I faced it. And was transformed because of it.

Perhaps religions are like that. All religions have a dark side. Perhaps in working through the dark side we find the traces of what was good before it and can learn from it. Perhaps in the darkness we can find light. And we can only work through this apparent darkness by facing it head on, alone.