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SUNY Series in Islam
Islam and the Destiny of Man
Islam and the Destiny of Man is a wide-ranging study of the Muslim religion from a unique point of view. The author, a former member of the British Diplomatic Service, was brought up as an agnostic and embraced Islam at an early age after writing a book (commissioned by T.S. Eliot) on Eastern religions and their influence upon Western thinkers. As a Muslim he has retained his adherence to the perennial philosophy which, he maintains, underlies the teachings of all the great religions.
The aim of this book is to explore what it means to be a Muslim, a member of a community which embraces a quarter of the world's population and to describe the forces which have shaped the hearts and the minds of Islamic people. After considering the historic confrontation between Islam and Christendom and analysing the difference between the three monotheistic faiths (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), the author describes the two poles of Muslim belief in terms of 'Truth' and 'Mercy'--the unitarian truth which is the basis of the Muslim's faith and the mercy inherent in this truth. In the second part of the book he explains the significance of the Qur'an and tells the dramatic story of Muhammad's life and of the early Caliphate. Lastly, the author considers the Muslim view of man's destiny, the social structure of Islam, the role of art and mysticism and the inner meaning of Islamic teaching concerning the hereafter.
Throughout this book the author is concerned not with the religion of Islam in isolation, but with the very nature of religious faith, its spiritual and intellectual foundations, and the light it casts upon the mysteries and paradoxes of the human condition.
The aim of this book is to explore what it means to be a Muslim, a member of a community which embraces a quarter of the world's population and to describe the forces which have shaped the hearts and the minds of Islamic people. After considering the historic confrontation between Islam and Christendom and analysing the difference between the three monotheistic faiths (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), the author describes the two poles of Muslim belief in terms of 'Truth' and 'Mercy'--the unitarian truth which is the basis of the Muslim's faith and the mercy inherent in this truth. In the second part of the book he explains the significance of the Qur'an and tells the dramatic story of Muhammad's life and of the early Caliphate. Lastly, the author considers the Muslim view of man's destiny, the social structure of Islam, the role of art and mysticism and the inner meaning of Islamic teaching concerning the hereafter.
Throughout this book the author is concerned not with the religion of Islam in isolation, but with the very nature of religious faith, its spiritual and intellectual foundations, and the light it casts upon the mysteries and paradoxes of the human condition.
252 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 1985
About the author
Charles Le Gai Eaton
19 books173 followersCharles Le Gai Eaton (Hasan le Gai Eaton or Hassan Abdul Hakeem) (1 January 1921 – 26 February 2010) was born in Lausanne, Switzerland and raised as an agnostic by his parents. He received his education at Charterhouse and at King's College, Cambridge. He worked for many years as a teacher and journalist in Jamaica and Egypt. He then joined the British Diplomatic Service.
Eaton converted to Islam in 1951. He served as a consultant to the Islamic Cultural Centre in London. In 1996 he served on a committee that drafted the constitution of the Muslim Council of Britain
He was however often critical of mainstream British Muslim opinion, and felt that Muslims themselves should have sorted out Saddam Hussain. Regarding the invasion of Iraq, in an interview with emel magazine he said, "I am very torn either way and I cannot quite make up my mind what I think... He was our monster, it should have been for us to deal with him.” In the same article Eaton also called for the creation of a British Islamic identity, "it is time for the Muslims in Britain to settle down, to find their own way, to form a real community and to discover a specifically British way of living Islam... This is no curry-island.”
His books include Islam and the Destiny of Man (listed on Q News' list of "10 books to take to university"), King of the Castle, and Remembering God. Many converts to Islam in the United Kingdom have been inspired by his books, which are also expositions of Islam for Western readers, secular or believing. He also frequently contributed articles to the quarterly journal on comparative religion and traditional studies, Studies in Comparative Religion.
There is a short autobiography at Salaam Books[8]. His last book and autobiography A Bad Beginning and the Path to Islam was published by Archetype in January 2010. He is the father of Leo Eaton, a director and producer of documentary films.[10]
Eaton converted to Islam in 1951. He served as a consultant to the Islamic Cultural Centre in London. In 1996 he served on a committee that drafted the constitution of the Muslim Council of Britain
He was however often critical of mainstream British Muslim opinion, and felt that Muslims themselves should have sorted out Saddam Hussain. Regarding the invasion of Iraq, in an interview with emel magazine he said, "I am very torn either way and I cannot quite make up my mind what I think... He was our monster, it should have been for us to deal with him.” In the same article Eaton also called for the creation of a British Islamic identity, "it is time for the Muslims in Britain to settle down, to find their own way, to form a real community and to discover a specifically British way of living Islam... This is no curry-island.”
His books include Islam and the Destiny of Man (listed on Q News' list of "10 books to take to university"), King of the Castle, and Remembering God. Many converts to Islam in the United Kingdom have been inspired by his books, which are also expositions of Islam for Western readers, secular or believing. He also frequently contributed articles to the quarterly journal on comparative religion and traditional studies, Studies in Comparative Religion.
There is a short autobiography at Salaam Books[8]. His last book and autobiography A Bad Beginning and the Path to Islam was published by Archetype in January 2010. He is the father of Leo Eaton, a director and producer of documentary films.[10]
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 82 reviews
June 5, 2012
this may be the best book I've ever read. the story of Islam, and the story of the Prophet Muhammad, is often impossible for the person reared in modernism and/or secularism to understand. modernism takes for granted that the past was not as good as the present, that human life is continually improving. secularism takes for granted that religion cannot, or should not, govern the minutiae of a person's life, that individual freedom is the most important value.
Islam is a fundamentally different way to view reality... a story of the perennial philosophy, the way that human beings have related to their Creator since time immemorial, and yet, the sound of it always hits the modern ear wrongly. but since he speaks both languages—that of the West, and that of Islam—fluently, it's the best possible chance for the modern reader to "get" Islam, if, indeed, he really wants to. it cannot be overestimated how important this book is. it is a book written by someone who knows how to explain Islam to people who are innately hostile to it, but who do not realize they are hostile, who think they are open-minded, but who in fact stopped listening already. LOVE this book.
Islam is a fundamentally different way to view reality... a story of the perennial philosophy, the way that human beings have related to their Creator since time immemorial, and yet, the sound of it always hits the modern ear wrongly. but since he speaks both languages—that of the West, and that of Islam—fluently, it's the best possible chance for the modern reader to "get" Islam, if, indeed, he really wants to. it cannot be overestimated how important this book is. it is a book written by someone who knows how to explain Islam to people who are innately hostile to it, but who do not realize they are hostile, who think they are open-minded, but who in fact stopped listening already. LOVE this book.
August 18, 2018
There are two books I would recommend to any non-Muslim with an interest in learning about Islam. The first is Major Themes of the Quran by the Pakistani-American scholar Fazlur Rahman, and the second is Islam and the Destiny of Man by the Perennial philosopher Gai Eaton. I read this book many years ago in my youth, but was not really ready to absorb its lessons at the time. I'm glad I revisited it, because this is a beautiful and succinct encapsulation of the Islamic worldview. While many of its themes were familiar to me, Eaton's elegant restatement of Islam as a totality is very worth reading for anyone seeking to learn for the first time, or those simply looking to do zikr (remembrance) through study.
While there is too much of value in this book to restate in a short review, a few key points bear mentioning. As Eaton explains, Islam's relationship to preexisting cultures is one of incorporating and continuing with all that comports with its view of reality, while shearing away that which conflicts. Islam is also in his view a continuation and restatement of the perennial truths contained in previously revealed traditions, rather than being sui generis. Islam's view of nature is that it points towards the divine, though modern man is no longer capable of understanding symbols and thus fails to see this. The beautiful analogy he uses is that of a clock face, which contains vital information, while dissecting and tearing apart the clock itself (as scientism does to nature) would never be able to tell one the time. Eaton also explains the Islamic attitude towards life, both in joy and suffering, which reflects the Muslim attitude that all that is good in the world is a temporal gift from God and that Earth was never intended to be a paradise. Suffering for a Muslim was always understood as constituting a part of God's plan. This makes it bearable for one who is a believer in the unseen, whereas for the profane it remains an unbearable torment since it is essentially meaningless and thus "should" have been otherwise. Eaton also makes a good point that ordinary Muslims understand the concepts of Paradise and Hell on different levels, but it doesn't matter whether they take it literally or not as long as their understanding reflects the underlying true realities. The only real problem is when they cease to believe in anything and spin into a total void of confusion and nihilism, as many have today due to lack of knowledge.
Eaton goes over Islamic history from the period of the Rashidun Caliphs through to the Abbasids. As he describes it, the primordial history of Islam was always intended as a symbolic message to mankind rather than as merely "events." Human beings after all comprise a part of nature and their actions and behaviors contain messages for those who reflect. Nonetheless the apparent chaos of early Islamic history at the elite level was actually quite removed from the lives of ordinary people of the era, reflecting the distance which pre-modern states had from the actual societies that they governed. Those who sought power at the highest levels took a gamble with their lives, whereas ordinary people whose names we will never know relied on grassroots social structures to govern their lives. Their experiences are not recorded in any epic histories yet they are the ones who built the social and ethical scaffolding that comprise the world of Islam, not the many caliphs, kings and princes who came and went with their dramas.
It is fascinating to reflect that for over a thousand years a network of societies were governed under a set of metaphysical tenets which people saw as totally natural, appropriate and useful and that no one felt the need to change until they were (partly) obliterated by the onslaught of Western modernity. Islam still persists today but it seems to do so in an increasingly confused manner for many people, Muslims included, because they have lost sight of its true depth. Perhaps Eaton's most powerful point in the book is that throughout its history the religion of Islam has been repeatedly revived by the arrival of outsiders into its fold. It started with the Arabs, then came the Persians, Indians, Turks, Africans and so forth, with each new wave of converts bringing with them a renewal of understanding and purpose. In recent decades we have had Western converts like Eaton and many others to thank for once again powerfully reminding us of the ultimate truths expressed by the religion, reviving its vital force and powerfully explaining its continued necessity to modern people. This book is an important read for anyone seeking to genuinely understand and it is a potent antidote to the rampant misconceptions which exist about Islam today, both among Muslims and non-Muslims.
While there is too much of value in this book to restate in a short review, a few key points bear mentioning. As Eaton explains, Islam's relationship to preexisting cultures is one of incorporating and continuing with all that comports with its view of reality, while shearing away that which conflicts. Islam is also in his view a continuation and restatement of the perennial truths contained in previously revealed traditions, rather than being sui generis. Islam's view of nature is that it points towards the divine, though modern man is no longer capable of understanding symbols and thus fails to see this. The beautiful analogy he uses is that of a clock face, which contains vital information, while dissecting and tearing apart the clock itself (as scientism does to nature) would never be able to tell one the time. Eaton also explains the Islamic attitude towards life, both in joy and suffering, which reflects the Muslim attitude that all that is good in the world is a temporal gift from God and that Earth was never intended to be a paradise. Suffering for a Muslim was always understood as constituting a part of God's plan. This makes it bearable for one who is a believer in the unseen, whereas for the profane it remains an unbearable torment since it is essentially meaningless and thus "should" have been otherwise. Eaton also makes a good point that ordinary Muslims understand the concepts of Paradise and Hell on different levels, but it doesn't matter whether they take it literally or not as long as their understanding reflects the underlying true realities. The only real problem is when they cease to believe in anything and spin into a total void of confusion and nihilism, as many have today due to lack of knowledge.
Eaton goes over Islamic history from the period of the Rashidun Caliphs through to the Abbasids. As he describes it, the primordial history of Islam was always intended as a symbolic message to mankind rather than as merely "events." Human beings after all comprise a part of nature and their actions and behaviors contain messages for those who reflect. Nonetheless the apparent chaos of early Islamic history at the elite level was actually quite removed from the lives of ordinary people of the era, reflecting the distance which pre-modern states had from the actual societies that they governed. Those who sought power at the highest levels took a gamble with their lives, whereas ordinary people whose names we will never know relied on grassroots social structures to govern their lives. Their experiences are not recorded in any epic histories yet they are the ones who built the social and ethical scaffolding that comprise the world of Islam, not the many caliphs, kings and princes who came and went with their dramas.
It is fascinating to reflect that for over a thousand years a network of societies were governed under a set of metaphysical tenets which people saw as totally natural, appropriate and useful and that no one felt the need to change until they were (partly) obliterated by the onslaught of Western modernity. Islam still persists today but it seems to do so in an increasingly confused manner for many people, Muslims included, because they have lost sight of its true depth. Perhaps Eaton's most powerful point in the book is that throughout its history the religion of Islam has been repeatedly revived by the arrival of outsiders into its fold. It started with the Arabs, then came the Persians, Indians, Turks, Africans and so forth, with each new wave of converts bringing with them a renewal of understanding and purpose. In recent decades we have had Western converts like Eaton and many others to thank for once again powerfully reminding us of the ultimate truths expressed by the religion, reviving its vital force and powerfully explaining its continued necessity to modern people. This book is an important read for anyone seeking to genuinely understand and it is a potent antidote to the rampant misconceptions which exist about Islam today, both among Muslims and non-Muslims.
August 17, 2024
Eaton describes himself in a way that was immediately identifiable, as a Muslim who came to the faith "through intellectual conviction and with a belief in the transcendent unity of all revealed religions". This transcendent unity in Islam, which is known through the principle of Tawhid, is a natural extension of the Oneness of Allah. To state this principle as an article of faith and worldview is one thing, to realize its full implications is quite another - particularly for the Western mind.
"Islam is the religion of all or nothing, faith in a Reality which allows nothing to have independent reality outside its orbit; for if there were such a thing, however distant, however hidden, it would impugn the perfection and the totality of that which alone is." This is a fundamental re-thinking of identity structures, an entirely new paradigm from a Western mindset. Islam identifies through religion, as nothing is outside of religion. Practice and belief are all part of one coherent structure. Everything we see, everything we think, everything we do is a reflection of our Creator, and therefore nothing is outside of the Creator's domain. As humans, our independence is there in that we are created with free will, but not there in that we are dependent upon the Creator for that free will.
Nonetheless, we are still human, and therefore subject to imperfections as humans. These imperfections are seen in how we follow the divine "law" (which is at base simply a recognition of the nature of "being"). The law is as fundamental to Islam as is belief in the ONE. The law is not a separate sphere, it is life itself. It is how the perfected life operates. It is congruent to the term "the laws of nature". There is no separation.
This can be difficult for the Western mind to grasp, as Western culture is fundamentally built on Christendom, as much as we may or may not want to admit that. Christianity has over the centuries created separate compartments for the spiritual and the mundane. This world here and now is separated - in a sense - from the spiritual in a way that doesn't make sense to the Muslim. Tawhid does not allow separation, everything is intertwined. It might be said that Western culture is only recently starting to realize this by acknowledging that "we are all one" or "we are all connected at base". Islam has long realized this, even if certain Muslims don't always live out this belief in relation to other human beings.
Eaton is not only a Western Muslim, but has a vision of where that places him in the world. He has an incredible grasp of both (generalized) the West and Islam, and knows how to communicate through both to both in a way that is crucial for understanding.
"Islam is the religion of all or nothing, faith in a Reality which allows nothing to have independent reality outside its orbit; for if there were such a thing, however distant, however hidden, it would impugn the perfection and the totality of that which alone is." This is a fundamental re-thinking of identity structures, an entirely new paradigm from a Western mindset. Islam identifies through religion, as nothing is outside of religion. Practice and belief are all part of one coherent structure. Everything we see, everything we think, everything we do is a reflection of our Creator, and therefore nothing is outside of the Creator's domain. As humans, our independence is there in that we are created with free will, but not there in that we are dependent upon the Creator for that free will.
Nonetheless, we are still human, and therefore subject to imperfections as humans. These imperfections are seen in how we follow the divine "law" (which is at base simply a recognition of the nature of "being"). The law is as fundamental to Islam as is belief in the ONE. The law is not a separate sphere, it is life itself. It is how the perfected life operates. It is congruent to the term "the laws of nature". There is no separation.
This can be difficult for the Western mind to grasp, as Western culture is fundamentally built on Christendom, as much as we may or may not want to admit that. Christianity has over the centuries created separate compartments for the spiritual and the mundane. This world here and now is separated - in a sense - from the spiritual in a way that doesn't make sense to the Muslim. Tawhid does not allow separation, everything is intertwined. It might be said that Western culture is only recently starting to realize this by acknowledging that "we are all one" or "we are all connected at base". Islam has long realized this, even if certain Muslims don't always live out this belief in relation to other human beings.
Eaton is not only a Western Muslim, but has a vision of where that places him in the world. He has an incredible grasp of both (generalized) the West and Islam, and knows how to communicate through both to both in a way that is crucial for understanding.
June 10, 2011
I have never read such surreal walk-through of Islamic history, law, society and arts before. In my view, this is characteristic of most perennialist literature (for instance, Frithjof Schuon, Rene Guenon and Syeh Hussain Nasr) that it drags the reader into deep and novel meanings of common concepts and cliches otherwise taken for granted. But by any means, this is not an easy read, and though these are just about 250 odd pages, the narrative requires an extraordinary attention and careful reading.
The book may fail to make much impression upon post-modernist legal mind who is adamant to seek an almost Utopian authenticity in historical and social narratives; but then one wishes while reading the book that Eaton should have provided references for all the hadith and incidents that he makes use of to build an excellent exposition of what it really means to be a Muslim.
The book may fail to make much impression upon post-modernist legal mind who is adamant to seek an almost Utopian authenticity in historical and social narratives; but then one wishes while reading the book that Eaton should have provided references for all the hadith and incidents that he makes use of to build an excellent exposition of what it really means to be a Muslim.
September 16, 2011
This perhaps one of the most well written, insightful and captivating books that I have had the good pleasure to have read. In sum, it is an advanced introduction to Islam with a Perennialist Philosophical outlook (he probably references Schuon and Nasr more than anyone else). It is at times a novel, a metaphysical treatise and cultural critique. I was initially disturbed by the philosophical underpinnings of the author, particularly the "universal validity of religions" of which the first quarter of the book is laden, but he won me back over with an affectionate narrative of Umar ibn al-Khattab's rule and from that point on, the few perceived flaws of the book faded away into the background.
This book is not without its flaws, however. In addition to the perennial philosophy, he makes mention of the "closure of the gates of ijtihad" (which is more of an annoyance than a serious flaw - though he manages gives a decent philosophical defense of it), his characterization of "intoxicated" Sufism is problematic AND he argues for the temporality of Hell (something which in less confusing times was considered a blatant act of kufr). But all o this more or less is what Perennialism is typically known for, so there is nothing new here.
Be that as it may, I strongly feel that anyone who appreciates philosophy and a critiqued defense of traditionalism (in juxtaposition to modernism) will fall in love with this book.
I initially selected this book because my referral (King of the Castle: Choice and Responsibility in the Modern World) wasn't readily on hand and after reading this, it only makes me want to read that title that much more. All that being said, I would not necessarily feel comfortable with simply handing this book over to a new convert or non-Muslim and walk away before for the reasons stated above. It is not an easy read (though it isn't obtuse either) and someone who doesn't have a strong background in orthodox theology may be convinced by some of his more unorthodox views. But considering what else is out there, a person could do a lot worse. In spite of its flaws, the eloquence and insightfulness of this book alone makes is worth reading.
This book is not without its flaws, however. In addition to the perennial philosophy, he makes mention of the "closure of the gates of ijtihad" (which is more of an annoyance than a serious flaw - though he manages gives a decent philosophical defense of it), his characterization of "intoxicated" Sufism is problematic AND he argues for the temporality of Hell (something which in less confusing times was considered a blatant act of kufr). But all o this more or less is what Perennialism is typically known for, so there is nothing new here.
Be that as it may, I strongly feel that anyone who appreciates philosophy and a critiqued defense of traditionalism (in juxtaposition to modernism) will fall in love with this book.
I initially selected this book because my referral (King of the Castle: Choice and Responsibility in the Modern World) wasn't readily on hand and after reading this, it only makes me want to read that title that much more. All that being said, I would not necessarily feel comfortable with simply handing this book over to a new convert or non-Muslim and walk away before for the reasons stated above. It is not an easy read (though it isn't obtuse either) and someone who doesn't have a strong background in orthodox theology may be convinced by some of his more unorthodox views. But considering what else is out there, a person could do a lot worse. In spite of its flaws, the eloquence and insightfulness of this book alone makes is worth reading.
April 21, 2012
I want to give it more than 5 stars!
This book is a simple journey not about the author biography himself (part of his bio was already in the book introduction), but it describe the Islamic history since its beginning & its impact on the human being now.
The first chapters are so equivalent to an Arabic "Seera" books just written in English with Gai Eaton comments and his own understanding (from a Western point of view). The last two chapters are so beautiful talking about Art, Mysticism in Islam &other dimensions.
The language could be a barrier a bit, specially to get the exact Quran verse or Hadith and translate them from English to Arabic to know what he is referring to.
Worth all the time invested in it.
This book is a simple journey not about the author biography himself (part of his bio was already in the book introduction), but it describe the Islamic history since its beginning & its impact on the human being now.
The first chapters are so equivalent to an Arabic "Seera" books just written in English with Gai Eaton comments and his own understanding (from a Western point of view). The last two chapters are so beautiful talking about Art, Mysticism in Islam &other dimensions.
The language could be a barrier a bit, specially to get the exact Quran verse or Hadith and translate them from English to Arabic to know what he is referring to.
Worth all the time invested in it.
January 9, 2008
This book is one of the most influential and genuine works of the century. The book is as unique as its author. although the book is originally in essence an introduction to Islam, I feel it manages to do much more and definitely, without a shadow of doubt qualifies in the "Book of the books" list. This book is a legacy for posterity and an example of how magnificent British Islam can get. If past Muslim scholars would refresh and polish their intellects with Ibn Khaldun's "Muqaddimah" and Shah Wali Allah's "Hujjat", English speaking students have no excuse in doing the same with this book. A must read for the serious minded. Absolutely timeless.
October 14, 2016
حين يبادرنا احدهم بالحديث فاننا لا نتعرف فقط على الكلمات او معناها المتبادر سنعرف ما يضمره الشخص وراء الكلمات او ما يحاول ان يضمره ، الاشكال الخارجية دائما تحتاج الى فراغات داخلية ، هذه الثنائية الخارج / الداخل ، جزء من وعينا بالعالم ، حين تناقشت مع صديق سلفي كيف أنه يختزل الدين في اشياء خارجية ولا يلج الى العمق أخبرني أن الدين ليس به خارج أو باطن الدين كل ويجب أخذه ككل و حين احسست انه مال الى العاطفية في اسلوبه رددت عليه ليس هذا هو الدين وانما فهمك للدين ، وان كان جزء من كلامه صحيحا فهو لم يطرحه بصورة صحيحة ، و هنا ستجد مفهوم ان الدين كل هو شئ مهم كما يشير لنا غايتون ليس معنى ذلك أن لا ثنائية بين الظاهر والباطن بل أن الاسلام له فلسفته المكتملة بداخله ، كيف يرتبط الايمان بنظرتنا نحو العالم وكيف نرى عبر هذا المنظار وجودنا ، غايتون وان لم يتحدث عن كل شئ فانه يعطيك فكرة عن كيف تستطيع النظر الى الدين بصورة لم تعتد عليها ، ورغم انه يصنف على انه ارثوذكسي اسلامي او لنقل تقليدي ولا يميل للتجديد الحاصل بين ايدينا اليوم الا انه يبحر بك في فلسفة الروحانية و يعطيك نظرة كيف ان الاسلام يختلف عن غيره بالاخص الاديان التوحيدية وبالاخص المسيحية العالم الذي نشأ فيه الكاتب ، أحببت هذا الكتاب وقرأته على مهل خشية أن ينتهي وها قد إنتهى :(
May 18, 2019
A beautiful introduction to the Islamic worldview, this is especially beneficial for Non-Muslims who don't understand how Muslims think and why we believe what we believe.
March 31, 2013
A powerful and beautiful read. My full reflection/review on the book can be found on my blog Immersing in the Sea here: http://shaguftaseeks.wordpress.com/20...
April 7, 2016
Often listed as one of the best introductory books on Islam for the seeker, I'm probably approaching Gai Eaton's Islam and the Destiny of Man 20 years too late, but I wanted to read it before I recommend it to anyone. There was plenty to enjoy. The book is split into three parts, beginning with a civilizational overview of Islam and the Christian West, coming into its own in the middle third with the life and times of Prophet Muhammad, and hitting an emotional high point with the Caliphate of Sayyidina Umar. One story is too great not to share. He relates an argument between Umar and his General Amr ibn al-As. Umar had confiscated for the Baitul Mal half the wealth Amr had gained from conquering Egypt. Amr
May Allah bless Sayyidina Umar!
The sequence of topics and their treatment is charmingly idiosyncratic, with surprising points of reference, and unique metaphors and similes piled high: the Shariah functioning as a great shoal of fish for us minnows; the Sunnah as a trellis and Man as a climbing shrub. It builds to great effect, and at the end I marvelled at this wonderful man who found his home in Islam.
Islam and the Destiny of Man is a classic, and was a rare and important book when it was published in 1985. Well into the 90's, introductory books in English for the new or prospective Western muslim were often limited to titles like "Vhat Islam Is?", published in Lahore with the best of intentions. Reading the book today it is easier to pick out flaws. In particular, the author is committed to a binary of a harmonious, God-centered traditional existence as opposed to corrupted secular modernity commencing somewhere around the Enlightenment (see King of the Castle for a lot more of this). That commitment sometimes manifests as a kind of reverse orientalism, conjuring a static, unchanging golden Islamic past that then must be defended with strenuous apologetics; and sees nothing of value in the constant godless upheavals of the present, as in the image of young Muslims being corrupted by Western higher education ("passport Muslims", he sighs). I'm sympathetic to and see a lot of religious support for the idea of human spiritual decline from the point of Revelation to the End of Time, but the line graph of that would be a pretty messy seven-dimensional spiral chute and not a simple linear function from the Good Ole Days Plateau to the Trench of the Horrid Present. Strategies for adapting as a muslim to the challenges of the modern or post-modern age are needed much more right now than harkening back to the way things were before humanity left the farm, moved to the city and went to colllege.
Written 35 years after the author embraced Islam, the book is in some part a record of a convert situating himself within the faith. The dialog with Christianity throughout the book is fascinating, and I got a strong sense of how his Christian origins have lingered with him, if only as doubts to have overcome or questions to have answered. The thorough grounding in Christian theology and the tenderness and grace in highlighting similarities and differences between the faiths are great strengths of the book. The sensitivity and respect he shows the Christian outlook is a great example to other converts in how to come to grips with their origins. Who we were is part of who we are, and being comfortable in yourself means coming to terms with that. Only with our muslim children will that background attenuate or transform or dissappear, and for that reason I am so curious to hear and read the voices of the children of our celebrated convert scholars, convert imams and convert da'ees, may I live long enough to do so.
Islam and the Destiny of Man is available for borrowing at the Islamic Information Centre lending library in Kuching. Contact Ms Dayang Dahlia at 082-418562 for details.
complained of the 'evil age' in which an honorable man could be so ill treated. Umar replied, "Were it not for this age which you hate you would now be kneeling in the courtyard of your house at the feet of a goat whose abundance of milk would please you or its scarcity dismay you."
May Allah bless Sayyidina Umar!
The sequence of topics and their treatment is charmingly idiosyncratic, with surprising points of reference, and unique metaphors and similes piled high: the Shariah functioning as a great shoal of fish for us minnows; the Sunnah as a trellis and Man as a climbing shrub. It builds to great effect, and at the end I marvelled at this wonderful man who found his home in Islam.
Islam and the Destiny of Man is a classic, and was a rare and important book when it was published in 1985. Well into the 90's, introductory books in English for the new or prospective Western muslim were often limited to titles like "Vhat Islam Is?", published in Lahore with the best of intentions. Reading the book today it is easier to pick out flaws. In particular, the author is committed to a binary of a harmonious, God-centered traditional existence as opposed to corrupted secular modernity commencing somewhere around the Enlightenment (see King of the Castle for a lot more of this). That commitment sometimes manifests as a kind of reverse orientalism, conjuring a static, unchanging golden Islamic past that then must be defended with strenuous apologetics; and sees nothing of value in the constant godless upheavals of the present, as in the image of young Muslims being corrupted by Western higher education ("passport Muslims", he sighs). I'm sympathetic to and see a lot of religious support for the idea of human spiritual decline from the point of Revelation to the End of Time, but the line graph of that would be a pretty messy seven-dimensional spiral chute and not a simple linear function from the Good Ole Days Plateau to the Trench of the Horrid Present. Strategies for adapting as a muslim to the challenges of the modern or post-modern age are needed much more right now than harkening back to the way things were before humanity left the farm, moved to the city and went to colllege.
Written 35 years after the author embraced Islam, the book is in some part a record of a convert situating himself within the faith. The dialog with Christianity throughout the book is fascinating, and I got a strong sense of how his Christian origins have lingered with him, if only as doubts to have overcome or questions to have answered. The thorough grounding in Christian theology and the tenderness and grace in highlighting similarities and differences between the faiths are great strengths of the book. The sensitivity and respect he shows the Christian outlook is a great example to other converts in how to come to grips with their origins. Who we were is part of who we are, and being comfortable in yourself means coming to terms with that. Only with our muslim children will that background attenuate or transform or dissappear, and for that reason I am so curious to hear and read the voices of the children of our celebrated convert scholars, convert imams and convert da'ees, may I live long enough to do so.
Islam and the Destiny of Man is available for borrowing at the Islamic Information Centre lending library in Kuching. Contact Ms Dayang Dahlia at 082-418562 for details.
May 23, 2013
Most of the great works relating to Islam and Muslims that I've come across so far are mostly translated works. And the few that were written originally in English are mostly very simple or cover the political side of Islam written either by orientalists or Westerners who write about Islam as they're approaching something alien that needs to be handled with as much skepticism and cynicism as possible. As such in my opinion at-least Islam has not fully come to the English language as of yet (but over the last 30-40 years a lot of great stuff is coming through) so to come across any great original non-translated piece of writing on Islam in English is always great to find.
In short, the book is as brilliant as it gets. Eaton is a master of English. The way he articulates his arguments, his thoughts and his ideas is nothing short of brilliant. The book as such starts of with a rather academic feel and the subject matter is serious and thought provoking. But credit to Eaton's writing he makes it seem like the reader is reading a story book. The book as such takes all your conceptions and ideas about Islam whether you're a Muslim or not and throws them out the window. It makes you re-examine and look at the Divine Majesty in a beautiful way. The book questions every act of worship you do and shows you the hidden meaning behind these acts. Or in other words it shows you the Divine mercy. Overall I would recommend this book to everyone whether interested in religion or not, hopefully in the end it will get you thinking about a lot of things and will end up becoming a book that you re-visit often to find more and more hidden gems. For me really grateful to have come across this and it goes straight into my Top 10 books shelf and can't personally wait to read all his other books.
In short, the book is as brilliant as it gets. Eaton is a master of English. The way he articulates his arguments, his thoughts and his ideas is nothing short of brilliant. The book as such starts of with a rather academic feel and the subject matter is serious and thought provoking. But credit to Eaton's writing he makes it seem like the reader is reading a story book. The book as such takes all your conceptions and ideas about Islam whether you're a Muslim or not and throws them out the window. It makes you re-examine and look at the Divine Majesty in a beautiful way. The book questions every act of worship you do and shows you the hidden meaning behind these acts. Or in other words it shows you the Divine mercy. Overall I would recommend this book to everyone whether interested in religion or not, hopefully in the end it will get you thinking about a lot of things and will end up becoming a book that you re-visit often to find more and more hidden gems. For me really grateful to have come across this and it goes straight into my Top 10 books shelf and can't personally wait to read all his other books.
September 21, 2019
سچ کہیں تو ہم اپنی افتاد طبع کے اسیر ہیں ، چاہیں بھی تو اس سے نکل نہیں پاتے۔ صبح سے شام بنا کسی مقصد و معنی کے بوریت مٹانے میں کٹتے ہیں۔ کتابیں، موسیقی، فلمیں، تصویریرں، علمی گفتگو، ایکسرسائز،سفر یا نت نئے تجربات یہ سب صرف زندگی کے خالی پن کو بھرنے کی ہی تو کوشش ہے۔ وہ خالی پن جو کم ہونے کے بجائے بڑھتا ہی جاتا ہے۔ زندگی کو کوئی ایسا مرکز نہیں جس کے ساتھ جڑ کر سکون حاصل کیا جاسکے۔ کبھی خدا اور مذہب زندگی کا مرکز تھے پھر علمی کوڑوں نے جذبات کو اتنا پیٹا کہ خدا اور مذہب کو صرف عقل کی نگاہ سے ہی دیکھتے ہیں۔خود کو سمجھاتے ہیں ہم مسلمان ہی ہیں، عوام سے بہت بہتر جو بنا دلیل کے مانتے ہیں۔عب��دا�� و رسومات کو فروعی سمجھ کر صرف علمی طور پر مذہب قبول کر رکھا ہے۔ زندگی میں خوشی انھی کاموں سے ملتی ہے جو مذہب میں ممنوع ہیں۔ اندر کہیں یہ خیال گہرائی پکڑ چکا ہے کہ مذہب جدید زندگی سے ہم آہنگ نہیں ہوسکتا ، اور ایسی تمام کوششیں ماضی میں ناکام ہوچکی ہیں ۔ زندگی کا خالی پن ایک حقیقت ہے جس سے فرار ممکن نہیں۔
مگر پھر ایک کتاب خیالات کے سمندر میں طوفان برپا کرتی ہے۔ ایسے سوالات اٹھاتی ہے جو مدت سے گہرائی میں دفن ہوچکے تھے۔ ایک نومسلم اسلامی عقائد، تاریخ، فلسفہ، تہذیب، تصوف اور آرٹ کو بنا کسی تعصب اور مرعوبیت کے اس انداز سے پیشن کرتا ہے کہ آپ ہل جاتے ہو، سوچتے ہو تم صرف نام کے مسلمان ہو، زہنی و قلبی سطح پر تم جدیدت سے مرعوب ہو۔ تمھیں خدا اور مذہب بھی ایسا چاہیے جو جدیدت کے پیمانوں پر پورا اترے۔تمھارا خدا تمھارے زہن کا بنایا ہوا ایک بت ہے جسے بنانے کا تمام میٹیریل اور آلات ادھار لیے ہوئے ہیں۔یہ خدا تمھاری مرضی کا ہے ، تم اسے بڑے فخر سے لوگوں کے سامنے پیش کرسکتے ہو۔ یہ خدا صرف وہی حکم دیتا ہے جو تمھارے مرعوب زہن اور دل کو بھائے۔ ایک مدت سے تم اسی خدا کو پوجنے میں مصروف ہو۔
وہ کہتا ہے خدا کو ماننا ہے تو ویسے بھی مانو جیسا اسے ماننے کا حق ہے ورنہ نہ مانو۔ خدا کو کسی سائنسی تھیوری کی طرح ماننا کوئی ماننا نہیں ۔مذہب کو جدید زندگی کے مطابق بنانا مرعوبیت کی انتہا ہے۔ اسلام کا مطلب تسلیم کرنا ہے ، عبدیت اسکا مقصود ہے۔ خدا سے سوال نہیں کیے جاتے اسکو بنا کسی شرط اور دلیل کے مانا جاتا ہے۔ بالکل ایسے ہی جیسے اس نے اپنی آخری کتاب میں ماننے کا حکم دیا ہے۔ یہی بے معنویت و بے مرکزیت کا علاج ہے۔ خدا کو ہماری ضرورت نہیں ہمیں خدا کی ضرورت ہے۔
جو بھی خدا، اسلام، قرآن پاک، اسلامی تاریخ ، آرٹ اور تہذیب پر شرمندگی محسوس کرتا ہے وہ معذرت خواہانہ وضاحتیں دینے کے بجائے کھلم کھلا انکار کرے۔
خاموشی اچھی نہیں انکار ہونا چاہیے
اور یہ تماشا اب سربازار ہونا چاہیے
مگر پھر ایک کتاب خیالات کے سمندر میں طوفان برپا کرتی ہے۔ ایسے سوالات اٹھاتی ہے جو مدت سے گہرائی میں دفن ہوچکے تھے۔ ایک نومسلم اسلامی عقائد، تاریخ، فلسفہ، تہذیب، تصوف اور آرٹ کو بنا کسی تعصب اور مرعوبیت کے اس انداز سے پیشن کرتا ہے کہ آپ ہل جاتے ہو، سوچتے ہو تم صرف نام کے مسلمان ہو، زہنی و قلبی سطح پر تم جدیدت سے مرعوب ہو۔ تمھیں خدا اور مذہب بھی ایسا چاہیے جو جدیدت کے پیمانوں پر پورا اترے۔تمھارا خدا تمھارے زہن کا بنایا ہوا ایک بت ہے جسے بنانے کا تمام میٹیریل اور آلات ادھار لیے ہوئے ہیں۔یہ خدا تمھاری مرضی کا ہے ، تم اسے بڑے فخر سے لوگوں کے سامنے پیش کرسکتے ہو۔ یہ خدا صرف وہی حکم دیتا ہے جو تمھارے مرعوب زہن اور دل کو بھائے۔ ایک مدت سے تم اسی خدا کو پوجنے میں مصروف ہو۔
وہ کہتا ہے خدا کو ماننا ہے تو ویسے بھی مانو جیسا اسے ماننے کا حق ہے ورنہ نہ مانو۔ خدا کو کسی سائنسی تھیوری کی طرح ماننا کوئی ماننا نہیں ۔مذہب کو جدید زندگی کے مطابق بنانا مرعوبیت کی انتہا ہے۔ اسلام کا مطلب تسلیم کرنا ہے ، عبدیت اسکا مقصود ہے۔ خدا سے سوال نہیں کیے جاتے اسکو بنا کسی شرط اور دلیل کے مانا جاتا ہے۔ بالکل ایسے ہی جیسے اس نے اپنی آخری کتاب میں ماننے کا حکم دیا ہے۔ یہی بے معنویت و بے مرکزیت کا علاج ہے۔ خدا کو ہماری ضرورت نہیں ہمیں خدا کی ضرورت ہے۔
جو بھی خدا، اسلام، قرآن پاک، اسلامی تاریخ ، آرٹ اور تہذیب پر شرمندگی محسوس کرتا ہے وہ معذرت خواہانہ وضاحتیں دینے کے بجائے کھلم کھلا انکار کرے۔
خاموشی اچھی نہیں انکار ہونا چاہیے
اور یہ تماشا اب سربازار ہونا چاہیے
February 16, 2022
DNF
But I will get back to this, the half of the book I did get through, has been an excellent read so far.
Feb 2022
But I will get back to this, the half of the book I did get through, has been an excellent read so far.
Feb 2022
December 25, 2022
According to Wikipedia, the author of this book was a former British diplomat in India and a teacher and editor in Cairo. At some point in this career he converted to Islam, and spent the latter half of his life as a scholar and public intellectual specializing in Islamic civilizations. He approaches Islam from the perspective of the "perennial philosophy,” which I associate most closely with figures like Aldous Huxley, who are disposed toward the discovery and explication of telling commonalities between the world’s faiths, revealing them to be culturally embedded and therefore superficially variable manifestations of a universal or near-universal set of human spiritual preoccupations and yearnings.
The danger in such an approach is the soupy conflation of disparate and possibly contradictory ideas and traditions. The spirit of structuralism can sometimes overbear the material and reduce complex phenomena to fit prescribed patterns. And, because the commonalities in question are so often about mysticism, a related risk is the prioritization of a faith’s intellectual and esoteric features rather than its sociological ones. In a faith as socially and behaviorally grounded as Islam (in Eaton’s telling here), this would be a serious deficiency.
Luckily, Eaton’s passion for his subject matter is matched by a depth of scholarly knowledge. The book appears to be frequently recommended as a primer on Islam for people like me, who are interested in learning more about the faith (especially comparatively), but who lack much serious prior knowledge. I’d further these recommendations, with a few qualifications.
This short but dense book is divided into three sections. The first outlines Eaton’s view of Islam in the world today, as a political agent and in relation to post-Christendom Eurasia and the US. Eaton deliberately avoids describing these lands as “the West.” Partly this choice is motivated by a desire to distance himself from the provincialism of past orientalists, whom he reads as so often falling prey, wittingly or no, to sensationalism and maximizing perceived differences between the Muslim world and the “civilized” West.
This is a valid enough reason, but a more specific and interesting one stems from the book’s era (pub. 1985), and Eaton’s wish to acknowledge the cultural continuity between Western Europe and the US on the one hand, and the Soviet Union on the other, the latter being structured at least nominally on Marxist principles which are as “Western” as any others. For these reasons he contrasts “the orient” with its more old-fashioned opposite, “the occident,” and uses this noun and the adjective “occidental” throughout when making comparisons.
Another facet of this first section is Eaton’s emphasis on the independence of his own views from the politics of the Arab world. As a Sufi who seems to relate to his faith in scholarly and historical terms, he views much of contemporary Islam among Arabs as politicized and ethnicized to the detriment of spirituality and of what for Eaton is the purpose of religion, the cultivation of a constant awareness of God’s presence (the Arabic term for this is taqwa). He argues that the form of Arab Islam which wears its anti-Westernism on the sleeve – one assumes he has figures like Sayyid Qutb in mind – and which sells itself as a much-needed radical (as in the Latin radix) return to origins is in fact, ironically, highly Western in its revolutionary structure and goals, and, because of this as well as its explicitly mass-political nature, highly modern as well. He further argues that an understandable but spiritually corrosive postcolonial resentment and insecurity is a major fuel for this form of Islamic politics. Although Eaton’s tone on these matters is occasionally paternalistic and head-patting, especially coming from a former official of an insidious empire, a lot of this seems hard to argue with.
The book’s lengthy middle section covers the early history of Islam, beginning with the pre-Islamic status quo of a monotheism that had grown increasingly polytheistic over the years through syncretism – Eaton vividly describes a “thick forest” of lesser gods surrounding the Kaaba – and proceeding through the life and death of the Prophet, the rule of the four “rightly guided” caliphs (the Rashidun) immediately following upon the Prophet’s death, from thence to the splendor and decadence of the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad, and to the improbable establishment of Islam in Spain.
As you can imagine, this is a whirlwind tour despite the relative length of the section, and if much of the history is new to you (as it was to me) this will require a slower pace of reading. I also get the sense that Eaton is less at home narrating battles and assessing the administrative competence of this or that caliph than he is talking about “Big Ideas.” Indeed, Eaton’s literary flair when discussing Islam’s theological and philosophical dimensions, and in his preferred terms, the religion’s affective ‘feel’ or ‘climate’ as generalized across its practice, is probably the main reason for the ongoing healthy readership of a decades-old monograph in the “SUNY Series on Islam.”
At any rate, it’s definitely my biggest reason for recommending the book: there are plenty of other places you can get a rundown on the 101 of Islamic history and thought, but no place else will render them quite like Eaton. This is especially true of the book’s third section, which discusses Sufism, the relationship of Islam to art (especially architecture and calligraphy), and views of the afterlife. The syntax throughout is refreshingly rich, layered, and twisty-turny. This is in service of an allusive and poetic style. If you overlooked the dates of his citations and the occasional obviously modern allusion (e.g. a tangential and disgusted description of a nude by Lucian Freud), you could easily think that you are reading prose of the 19th century. I mean this as a fine compliment, though of course some others will not read it this way. A quick scan of the first five pages will likely help each reader decide for herself.
As an example of Eaton’s poetic disposition, I was struck by Eaton’s statement that in terms of affect and the ‘lived experience’ of religious life, Christianity is to fire as Islam is to snow. Knowing a bit more about Christianity, the first half of this rings completely true to me: it is a religion grounded in passionate love of a Person, and mystic after mystic has represented this burning devotion as a fire of the heart, or in Eliot’s adaptation of this motif in the Four Quartets, with a shirt of fire, with salvific dance to the motions of holy fire, and the famous unity in “Little Gidding” of “the fire and rose.”
Given Islam’s desert origins, the analogy to snowfall may seem strained, but Eaton convincingly argues that as far as psychological reality goes, the absence of snow in the Quran is a matter of geographical happenstance. Were it available as a meaningful point of reference for the Quran’s original readers, it would have made for a perfect contrast with fiery Christianity: Eaton evokes a spirit of Islam marked by love but also by the virtues of sobriety, practicality (embodied in the priority of jurisprudence over “theology” per se), and the acquisition of clarity of understanding through the free and creative exercise of gifted intelligence. All this is captured for Eaton in the “cool luminescence” of the whitened post-snowfall world. Walking around the block between chapters of this book, late at night in subzero temperatures witnessing exactly the picture Eaton describes, I felt there was something true and moving about this imagery.
I also have some criticisms. Eaton is viciously anti-atheist and anti-Marxist, and he doesn’t really back up his broadsides on these topics with argumentation. To do so would likely be beyond the scope of the book, but then so is the original vitriol. His line on the relationship of Marxism to faith reminded me of Joseph Ratzinger’s denunciation of liberation theology in the 1980s, before he became pope. His view was that liberation theologians’ utilitarian use of Marxist thought as a tool for social analysis in Latin America was doomed to corrode the faith. The idea was that Marxism is both intrinsically atheist and a totalizing system of thought; consequently, if you tried to import any part of it, now matter how seemingly irrelevant to matters of religion, you were somehow inevitably importing the atheism as well, making liberation theology a Trojan horse in need of stern admonishment.
Eaton’s disdain for “left-wing Islamic movements” is almost identical, except for the added observation that Islam itself is a totalizing system of thought and behavior, in addition to Marxism. The presence of not one, but two self-contained and intricately intra-dependent thought-systems makes the possibility of their dynamic interrelation seem all the more ludicrous. Neither Ratzinger nor Eaton explains to my satisfaction why, exactly, Marxian critiques of capitalism or imperialism are always necessarily the atheistic camel’s nose under the Ummah’s tent. To the contrary, the concept of commodity fetishism has obvious parallels to that of idolatry, a concern of all the Abrahamic faiths but especially of Islam, as Eaton himself believes. (Eugene McCarraher explores these parallels in Christian terms in his own recent book, The Enchantments of Mammon.)
Eaton’s apparent ambivalence toward science also struck me as strange and unnecessary. In the book’s last chapter he discusses Ash’arite theology, whose doctrine of “occasionalism” asserts that there are no “natural causes” of events per se, because all changes are ultimately caused not by immediately preceding physical events, but by God’s will. Elephants could birth antelopes and gravity could reverse itself at any moment, should God see fit. It is important to understand this, because if physical and temporal occurrences are treated as causes in their own rights, then they are effectively treated as ‘creators’ of scenarios; hence as ‘gods’; and hence as objects of idolatry.
Furthermore, creation did not just happen once, it is always and ongoingly happening. At every infinitesimally small instant of time, God has decided to allow the universe to exist for another moment. Eaton introduces the thrilling comparison of this cosmology to the technology of film and film editing, in which each frame seems to the viewer to ��cause’ the subsequent frame but in which, in actual fact, each frame is a discrete image, a blip of reality independent of any causational chain with the images surrounding it, and which therefore can be spliced, shuffled around, or destroyed as the editor-God sees fit.
This is all well and good, even fascinating. But Eaton then declares, as though it were obvious, that these views are incompatible with the scientific method and that Muslims would do better to simply fess up to the fact that their worldview could not in principle produce “occidental” technology. In Eaton’s view, this is so because the production of advanced technology requires the adoption of “scientific” (which he conflates with “atheist” and “materialist”) assumptions about the feasibility of analyses which account only for material actors, and which are useful not despite, but because of their exclusion of everything that is immaterial. In other words, to be a scientist is inherently to treat physical events as causes, in the fashion that is problematic to Ash’arite thought.
This simply isn’t so, however. Even an atheist scientist would recognize that there is no one ‘cause’ of any event, except as a matter of contextual convenience; the spatial and temporal scope of the diagnosed ‘cause’ can always be expanded or contracted. Moreover, a Muslim scientist can operate, in their capacity as a scientist, within the confines of a material analysis, while also, in their capacity as a Muslim, believing that (a) the proximate causes of physical events are only local or apparent, and are ultimately derived from God, and (b) God could and very well may flout physical principles if he wants to, but that this doesn’t exclude the possible study of God-derived physical principles in situations where God does not flout or alter them. To me, the radical contingency of the Ash’arite view of creation seems if anything to be complementary with David Hume’s famous skepticism-in-principle about the knowability of causation, which is generally considered a bedrock of modern science. In short, maybe Eaton elaborates on his view of science elsewhere, but in the absence of that elaboration here I find that his terse discussion does a disservice to his subject and to science.
Despite the detail in which I’ve gone into them, these complaints are essentially about blemishes of rhetoric. The book as a whole is detailed and compelling. I can even imagine it being life-changing. If you relish the pace of slow prose and are looking for a Sufist and Perennialist overview of Islam from a Western convert, this is not just an option, it’s the option. There is a hadith (quoted in the book) in which the Prophet acts as Messenger of Allah, and Allah is quoted as saying that “whoever comes to Me walking, I will come to him running.” If the beauty of this idea stirs you even a little, run, don’t walk, to grab this book.
The danger in such an approach is the soupy conflation of disparate and possibly contradictory ideas and traditions. The spirit of structuralism can sometimes overbear the material and reduce complex phenomena to fit prescribed patterns. And, because the commonalities in question are so often about mysticism, a related risk is the prioritization of a faith’s intellectual and esoteric features rather than its sociological ones. In a faith as socially and behaviorally grounded as Islam (in Eaton’s telling here), this would be a serious deficiency.
Luckily, Eaton’s passion for his subject matter is matched by a depth of scholarly knowledge. The book appears to be frequently recommended as a primer on Islam for people like me, who are interested in learning more about the faith (especially comparatively), but who lack much serious prior knowledge. I’d further these recommendations, with a few qualifications.
This short but dense book is divided into three sections. The first outlines Eaton’s view of Islam in the world today, as a political agent and in relation to post-Christendom Eurasia and the US. Eaton deliberately avoids describing these lands as “the West.” Partly this choice is motivated by a desire to distance himself from the provincialism of past orientalists, whom he reads as so often falling prey, wittingly or no, to sensationalism and maximizing perceived differences between the Muslim world and the “civilized” West.
This is a valid enough reason, but a more specific and interesting one stems from the book’s era (pub. 1985), and Eaton’s wish to acknowledge the cultural continuity between Western Europe and the US on the one hand, and the Soviet Union on the other, the latter being structured at least nominally on Marxist principles which are as “Western” as any others. For these reasons he contrasts “the orient” with its more old-fashioned opposite, “the occident,” and uses this noun and the adjective “occidental” throughout when making comparisons.
Another facet of this first section is Eaton’s emphasis on the independence of his own views from the politics of the Arab world. As a Sufi who seems to relate to his faith in scholarly and historical terms, he views much of contemporary Islam among Arabs as politicized and ethnicized to the detriment of spirituality and of what for Eaton is the purpose of religion, the cultivation of a constant awareness of God’s presence (the Arabic term for this is taqwa). He argues that the form of Arab Islam which wears its anti-Westernism on the sleeve – one assumes he has figures like Sayyid Qutb in mind – and which sells itself as a much-needed radical (as in the Latin radix) return to origins is in fact, ironically, highly Western in its revolutionary structure and goals, and, because of this as well as its explicitly mass-political nature, highly modern as well. He further argues that an understandable but spiritually corrosive postcolonial resentment and insecurity is a major fuel for this form of Islamic politics. Although Eaton’s tone on these matters is occasionally paternalistic and head-patting, especially coming from a former official of an insidious empire, a lot of this seems hard to argue with.
The book’s lengthy middle section covers the early history of Islam, beginning with the pre-Islamic status quo of a monotheism that had grown increasingly polytheistic over the years through syncretism – Eaton vividly describes a “thick forest” of lesser gods surrounding the Kaaba – and proceeding through the life and death of the Prophet, the rule of the four “rightly guided” caliphs (the Rashidun) immediately following upon the Prophet’s death, from thence to the splendor and decadence of the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad, and to the improbable establishment of Islam in Spain.
As you can imagine, this is a whirlwind tour despite the relative length of the section, and if much of the history is new to you (as it was to me) this will require a slower pace of reading. I also get the sense that Eaton is less at home narrating battles and assessing the administrative competence of this or that caliph than he is talking about “Big Ideas.” Indeed, Eaton’s literary flair when discussing Islam’s theological and philosophical dimensions, and in his preferred terms, the religion’s affective ‘feel’ or ‘climate’ as generalized across its practice, is probably the main reason for the ongoing healthy readership of a decades-old monograph in the “SUNY Series on Islam.”
At any rate, it’s definitely my biggest reason for recommending the book: there are plenty of other places you can get a rundown on the 101 of Islamic history and thought, but no place else will render them quite like Eaton. This is especially true of the book’s third section, which discusses Sufism, the relationship of Islam to art (especially architecture and calligraphy), and views of the afterlife. The syntax throughout is refreshingly rich, layered, and twisty-turny. This is in service of an allusive and poetic style. If you overlooked the dates of his citations and the occasional obviously modern allusion (e.g. a tangential and disgusted description of a nude by Lucian Freud), you could easily think that you are reading prose of the 19th century. I mean this as a fine compliment, though of course some others will not read it this way. A quick scan of the first five pages will likely help each reader decide for herself.
As an example of Eaton’s poetic disposition, I was struck by Eaton’s statement that in terms of affect and the ‘lived experience’ of religious life, Christianity is to fire as Islam is to snow. Knowing a bit more about Christianity, the first half of this rings completely true to me: it is a religion grounded in passionate love of a Person, and mystic after mystic has represented this burning devotion as a fire of the heart, or in Eliot’s adaptation of this motif in the Four Quartets, with a shirt of fire, with salvific dance to the motions of holy fire, and the famous unity in “Little Gidding” of “the fire and rose.”
Given Islam’s desert origins, the analogy to snowfall may seem strained, but Eaton convincingly argues that as far as psychological reality goes, the absence of snow in the Quran is a matter of geographical happenstance. Were it available as a meaningful point of reference for the Quran’s original readers, it would have made for a perfect contrast with fiery Christianity: Eaton evokes a spirit of Islam marked by love but also by the virtues of sobriety, practicality (embodied in the priority of jurisprudence over “theology” per se), and the acquisition of clarity of understanding through the free and creative exercise of gifted intelligence. All this is captured for Eaton in the “cool luminescence” of the whitened post-snowfall world. Walking around the block between chapters of this book, late at night in subzero temperatures witnessing exactly the picture Eaton describes, I felt there was something true and moving about this imagery.
I also have some criticisms. Eaton is viciously anti-atheist and anti-Marxist, and he doesn’t really back up his broadsides on these topics with argumentation. To do so would likely be beyond the scope of the book, but then so is the original vitriol. His line on the relationship of Marxism to faith reminded me of Joseph Ratzinger’s denunciation of liberation theology in the 1980s, before he became pope. His view was that liberation theologians’ utilitarian use of Marxist thought as a tool for social analysis in Latin America was doomed to corrode the faith. The idea was that Marxism is both intrinsically atheist and a totalizing system of thought; consequently, if you tried to import any part of it, now matter how seemingly irrelevant to matters of religion, you were somehow inevitably importing the atheism as well, making liberation theology a Trojan horse in need of stern admonishment.
Eaton’s disdain for “left-wing Islamic movements” is almost identical, except for the added observation that Islam itself is a totalizing system of thought and behavior, in addition to Marxism. The presence of not one, but two self-contained and intricately intra-dependent thought-systems makes the possibility of their dynamic interrelation seem all the more ludicrous. Neither Ratzinger nor Eaton explains to my satisfaction why, exactly, Marxian critiques of capitalism or imperialism are always necessarily the atheistic camel’s nose under the Ummah’s tent. To the contrary, the concept of commodity fetishism has obvious parallels to that of idolatry, a concern of all the Abrahamic faiths but especially of Islam, as Eaton himself believes. (Eugene McCarraher explores these parallels in Christian terms in his own recent book, The Enchantments of Mammon.)
Eaton’s apparent ambivalence toward science also struck me as strange and unnecessary. In the book’s last chapter he discusses Ash’arite theology, whose doctrine of “occasionalism” asserts that there are no “natural causes” of events per se, because all changes are ultimately caused not by immediately preceding physical events, but by God’s will. Elephants could birth antelopes and gravity could reverse itself at any moment, should God see fit. It is important to understand this, because if physical and temporal occurrences are treated as causes in their own rights, then they are effectively treated as ‘creators’ of scenarios; hence as ‘gods’; and hence as objects of idolatry.
Furthermore, creation did not just happen once, it is always and ongoingly happening. At every infinitesimally small instant of time, God has decided to allow the universe to exist for another moment. Eaton introduces the thrilling comparison of this cosmology to the technology of film and film editing, in which each frame seems to the viewer to ��cause’ the subsequent frame but in which, in actual fact, each frame is a discrete image, a blip of reality independent of any causational chain with the images surrounding it, and which therefore can be spliced, shuffled around, or destroyed as the editor-God sees fit.
This is all well and good, even fascinating. But Eaton then declares, as though it were obvious, that these views are incompatible with the scientific method and that Muslims would do better to simply fess up to the fact that their worldview could not in principle produce “occidental” technology. In Eaton’s view, this is so because the production of advanced technology requires the adoption of “scientific” (which he conflates with “atheist” and “materialist”) assumptions about the feasibility of analyses which account only for material actors, and which are useful not despite, but because of their exclusion of everything that is immaterial. In other words, to be a scientist is inherently to treat physical events as causes, in the fashion that is problematic to Ash’arite thought.
This simply isn’t so, however. Even an atheist scientist would recognize that there is no one ‘cause’ of any event, except as a matter of contextual convenience; the spatial and temporal scope of the diagnosed ‘cause’ can always be expanded or contracted. Moreover, a Muslim scientist can operate, in their capacity as a scientist, within the confines of a material analysis, while also, in their capacity as a Muslim, believing that (a) the proximate causes of physical events are only local or apparent, and are ultimately derived from God, and (b) God could and very well may flout physical principles if he wants to, but that this doesn’t exclude the possible study of God-derived physical principles in situations where God does not flout or alter them. To me, the radical contingency of the Ash’arite view of creation seems if anything to be complementary with David Hume’s famous skepticism-in-principle about the knowability of causation, which is generally considered a bedrock of modern science. In short, maybe Eaton elaborates on his view of science elsewhere, but in the absence of that elaboration here I find that his terse discussion does a disservice to his subject and to science.
Despite the detail in which I’ve gone into them, these complaints are essentially about blemishes of rhetoric. The book as a whole is detailed and compelling. I can even imagine it being life-changing. If you relish the pace of slow prose and are looking for a Sufist and Perennialist overview of Islam from a Western convert, this is not just an option, it’s the option. There is a hadith (quoted in the book) in which the Prophet acts as Messenger of Allah, and Allah is quoted as saying that “whoever comes to Me walking, I will come to him running.” If the beauty of this idea stirs you even a little, run, don’t walk, to grab this book.
August 4, 2021
Disappointingly mistitled
A more accurate title would have been Islam through perennialist eyes (perennialism being the view that all religions are based on and are paths to the same universal truth).
Why is this an issue? As poetic and as beautiful as this idea can be expressed its simply an extremely niche viewpoint within Islam that’s overwhelmingly on the fringe if not outside the bounds of the faith.
Accordingly Islam gets dissolved into abstract metaphysical constructs that play second fiddle to a distinct perennial religion. Likewise history and theology are heavily sanitised and cherry picked to point where its made to seem as though historical Muslim societies viewed Christianity as equally valid religion.
Finally there was a bit fun in that though the author stresses the ancient and universal nature of this viewpoint the figures quoted to support this are overwhelming modern figures - as in literally alive (for instance Schuon) with one even writing a review for the blurb.
DNF
A more accurate title would have been Islam through perennialist eyes (perennialism being the view that all religions are based on and are paths to the same universal truth).
Why is this an issue? As poetic and as beautiful as this idea can be expressed its simply an extremely niche viewpoint within Islam that’s overwhelmingly on the fringe if not outside the bounds of the faith.
Accordingly Islam gets dissolved into abstract metaphysical constructs that play second fiddle to a distinct perennial religion. Likewise history and theology are heavily sanitised and cherry picked to point where its made to seem as though historical Muslim societies viewed Christianity as equally valid religion.
Finally there was a bit fun in that though the author stresses the ancient and universal nature of this viewpoint the figures quoted to support this are overwhelming modern figures - as in literally alive (for instance Schuon) with one even writing a review for the blurb.
DNF
April 27, 2020
غالبا ما نحتاج نحن المسلمون "التقليديون" أن يأتي أحد من الخارج ويضرب رؤوسنا ليخبرنا بعظمة هذا الدين الذي نعتنقه، أظن هذه من أحد مميزات قراءة كتابات المسلمين الجدد أو حتى مشاهدتها (بالقرآن اهتديت)، هذا غير أن المؤلف رحمه الله خاض في بعض المعاني والمشاهدات التي من خلالها تستطيع أن تركب عدسة جديدة لتستقبل وتفهم بها الإسلام بشكل أعمق.
تعليقات الشيخ عبدالله الشهري جميلة وفي غاية الأهمية، وكاد الكتاب أن يفقد كثيرا من هدفه لولا "السياج" التي تضعه تعليقات الشيخ على كلام الكاتب، خصوصا أن المؤلف غفر الله له متأثر بقدر ما ببعض المعتقدات الصوفية التي قد تشكل على من ليس له استفاضة في كتب العقيدة، فجزاه الله خيرا.
أظنها بداية جيدة للقراءة الرمضانية هذا العام.
تعليقات الشيخ عبدالله الشهري جميلة وفي غاية الأهمية، وكاد الكتاب أن يفقد كثيرا من هدفه لولا "السياج" التي تضعه تعليقات الشيخ على كلام الكاتب، خصوصا أن المؤلف غفر الله له متأثر بقدر ما ببعض المعتقدات الصوفية التي قد تشكل على من ليس له استفاضة في كتب العقيدة، فجزاه الله خيرا.
أظنها بداية جيدة للقراءة الرمضانية هذا العام.
September 13, 2015
The author writes a magnificent work on Islam, for Muslims and non-Muslims alike. He writes with clarity, warmth, authority, musicality. He is able to transmit the message of Islam as he sees it, using the historical events of early Islam to present his insight and understanding.
He writes with intellectual understanding and human warmth.
He writes with intellectual understanding and human warmth.
December 22, 2010
A must Read book
April 23, 2022
•Gai Eaton was raised as an agnostic, before embracing Islam in 1951, and also later became a British diplomat. This book is essentially an exploration of what it means to be Muslim. He covers a wide variety of topics in reference to Islam, from the fundamentals of the religion to the history of the faith, comparisons with Western ideologies, and art inspired by spirituality.
•What i like the most about this book is that The aim of it is to explore what it means to be a Muslim, a member of a community which embraces a quarter of the world's population and to describe the forces which have shaped the hearts and the minds of Islamic people after considering the historic confrontation between İslam and Christendom and analysing the difference between the three monotheistic faiths ( Judaism , Christianity, and Islam) , the author describes the two poles of Muslim belief in terms of "truth" and "mercy " .. the Unitarian truth which is the basis of the Muslim's faith and the mercy inherent in this truth . In the second part of the book he explains the significance of The Qur'an and tells the dramatic story of the prophet Muhammad's "peace be upon him " life and of the early caliphate. Lastly, the author considers the Muslim view of man's destiny, the social structure of Islam, the role of art and mysticism and the inner meaning of Islamic teaching concerning the hereafter.
• I feel incredibly lucky for this book to have come across my radar . I feel like I was in desperate need of looking at the faith, and the world, from a different perspective -a sort of bird's eye view- just as Gai Eaton has presented it in this book.
•I would recommend it for :
- non-Muslims looking to know more about Islam
- Muslims who are looking to reignite their relationship with their faith but don't know where to start
- Literally anyone and everyone else.
•What i like the most about this book is that The aim of it is to explore what it means to be a Muslim, a member of a community which embraces a quarter of the world's population and to describe the forces which have shaped the hearts and the minds of Islamic people after considering the historic confrontation between İslam and Christendom and analysing the difference between the three monotheistic faiths ( Judaism , Christianity, and Islam) , the author describes the two poles of Muslim belief in terms of "truth" and "mercy " .. the Unitarian truth which is the basis of the Muslim's faith and the mercy inherent in this truth . In the second part of the book he explains the significance of The Qur'an and tells the dramatic story of the prophet Muhammad's "peace be upon him " life and of the early caliphate. Lastly, the author considers the Muslim view of man's destiny, the social structure of Islam, the role of art and mysticism and the inner meaning of Islamic teaching concerning the hereafter.
• I feel incredibly lucky for this book to have come across my radar . I feel like I was in desperate need of looking at the faith, and the world, from a different perspective -a sort of bird's eye view- just as Gai Eaton has presented it in this book.
•I would recommend it for :
- non-Muslims looking to know more about Islam
- Muslims who are looking to reignite their relationship with their faith but don't know where to start
- Literally anyone and everyone else.
September 25, 2024
‘Existence is pure gift. Consciousness is pure gift. Our eyes and ears, our
hands and our feet are gifts, as are our sexual organs. Mountains and rivers and the blue sea are gifts, as is the air we breathe; so too is light, and the
darkness given us for rest. The nourishment which comes from the earth,
or which - by a very special concession to our weakness - we are permitted
to take from the bodies of the animal creation and from the fish of the sea,
is a gift. But above all, the awareness which brings these together in
consciousness and in enjoyment, and the power we are given to acknowledge their source and to give praise, are divine gifts.’
-
4.5/5
-
This book accompanied me on my very turbulent move and month and I love it deeply and love its author. I felt like I learned a lot, even though I used to be immersed in Islamic history lessons weekly as a kid. There were a few parts I don’t agree with (views on revolutions and some of what he said on Sufism) but I could still see where he was coming from.
The author’s way of writing is impeccable, I couldn’t recommend reading his work enough. I like Reflections more and think it’s the best of his work, but I still really recommend reading this as well.
hands and our feet are gifts, as are our sexual organs. Mountains and rivers and the blue sea are gifts, as is the air we breathe; so too is light, and the
darkness given us for rest. The nourishment which comes from the earth,
or which - by a very special concession to our weakness - we are permitted
to take from the bodies of the animal creation and from the fish of the sea,
is a gift. But above all, the awareness which brings these together in
consciousness and in enjoyment, and the power we are given to acknowledge their source and to give praise, are divine gifts.’
-
4.5/5
-
This book accompanied me on my very turbulent move and month and I love it deeply and love its author. I felt like I learned a lot, even though I used to be immersed in Islamic history lessons weekly as a kid. There were a few parts I don’t agree with (views on revolutions and some of what he said on Sufism) but I could still see where he was coming from.
The author’s way of writing is impeccable, I couldn’t recommend reading his work enough. I like Reflections more and think it’s the best of his work, but I still really recommend reading this as well.
October 2, 2021
متميز جدًا في أسلوبه وجوهره، وذلك لطرحه الذي يستهدف قارئ "الزمن المعلمن" الذي نعيش فيه، لا مجرد أنباء "الأديان/الطوائف" الأخرى، فهو ينطلق وينتهي عند عمليات الفهم والمعايشة والكونية. أعتقد أنه حالة تستحق الدراسة أيضًا في عوالم التلقي والسيميائيات بخصوص الترجمة وشروحها وتبيان مقاصد الكاتب ونقد الأحاديث التي فيه.
May 7, 2023
If you enjoy literature, I would advise you to read it. This book can be read by non-Muslims who have a basic understanding of Islam and are drawn to it. The beauty of Islam described in this book might readily impress a reader.
I couldn't, however, recommend this book to Muslim readers. The author only had a superficial understanding of Islam, took his information from several questionable historical sources, and frequently came to erroneous conclusions. Being a Sufi, he portrayed Islam as a mystic religion for most of this work and criticized various aspects that went against his ideology. He also frequently mentioned Frithjof Schuon, who strongly influences him.
Thus, I'll rate it 2/5.
I couldn't, however, recommend this book to Muslim readers. The author only had a superficial understanding of Islam, took his information from several questionable historical sources, and frequently came to erroneous conclusions. Being a Sufi, he portrayed Islam as a mystic religion for most of this work and criticized various aspects that went against his ideology. He also frequently mentioned Frithjof Schuon, who strongly influences him.
Thus, I'll rate it 2/5.
February 26, 2021
I wish I knew where to begin...
Before reading this book I didn't realize how much had the current times and the current culture or the current 'dominant' culture of the 'West' had affected my thought about Islam. I, myself a Muslim, would sometimes feel called out when Gai Eaton mentions the apologist Muslim.
To borrow the allegory of there being many different factions within a man, this book set some people of those factions free.
One of the aspects that really appealed to me was how since God loves beauty, early Muslim civilizations, and even current Islamic art, calligraphy, and architecture has a strong emphasis on beauty. The so-called 'utility' of something is not enough. What is not beautiful, is in some sense, un-Islamic.
This is one of the very few books I would consider re-reading. Most other books I like, I would probably just search for a line or some paragraph in a chapter.
Since everybody in our times is influenced by Western/Occidental thought, to me this is the book I'd recommend for knowing a bit about Islam if somebody, Muslim or non-Muslim, asks. Merely being born in an Islamic country does not mean we are free from the influence of colonial past, or the imperial present, or that our scholars are, or that scholars of the past were.
God bless Gai Eaton for writing this book.
Before reading this book I didn't realize how much had the current times and the current culture or the current 'dominant' culture of the 'West' had affected my thought about Islam. I, myself a Muslim, would sometimes feel called out when Gai Eaton mentions the apologist Muslim.
To borrow the allegory of there being many different factions within a man, this book set some people of those factions free.
One of the aspects that really appealed to me was how since God loves beauty, early Muslim civilizations, and even current Islamic art, calligraphy, and architecture has a strong emphasis on beauty. The so-called 'utility' of something is not enough. What is not beautiful, is in some sense, un-Islamic.
This is one of the very few books I would consider re-reading. Most other books I like, I would probably just search for a line or some paragraph in a chapter.
Since everybody in our times is influenced by Western/Occidental thought, to me this is the book I'd recommend for knowing a bit about Islam if somebody, Muslim or non-Muslim, asks. Merely being born in an Islamic country does not mean we are free from the influence of colonial past, or the imperial present, or that our scholars are, or that scholars of the past were.
God bless Gai Eaton for writing this book.
May 29, 2014
It's good thing when you read about islam -even if you were a muslim- by those who recognize islam and know its real essence by their efforts without any partiality to specific country or doctrine. It's a knowledge based on a clear mind, that's what we can believe in, what take it's way to the mind and the heart strightly, a logistic knowladge!
Good book. Muslim or non-muslim you have to read this book.
It gives a new view on islam to the muslims, valuable and usefull gift to give to non-muslim!
Good book. Muslim or non-muslim you have to read this book.
It gives a new view on islam to the muslims, valuable and usefull gift to give to non-muslim!
December 25, 2014
One of the very few books I couldn't continue reading. The author is rather naive in his analysis, very much affected by "metaphysical" concepts from Guenon. His concepts about the so called "Islamic arts" and the "Islamic crafts" and the idea that Islam would not have lead to technological developments because a Muslim was asked to walk humbly on earth and not "rip it out with a bulldozer" made me think the author's ideas are completely silly and naive. I couldn't read the rest of the book.
January 7, 2011
If you're curious about Islam or anyone with a modicum of a spark of curiosity in Islam. this is the best book I could direct you to.
February 10, 2013
An excellent read. Provides a comprehensive overview of Islam and its principles.
October 24, 2021
Very good overview of this religious community. The central tenets and worldview of the community seem rather strikingly different from those expressed by 'modern' Western society after the Renaissance. The author also dissects a lot of the harmful stereotypes and misunderstandings that are often appealed to, and explained how they make internal sense in the worldview, not being as crude as often expressed to be by detractors. The continuity and timelessness of the Islamic worldview, and the holistic 'interlaced' perception of nature that gives it strength, is rather compelling.
The second part of the book delves into Islamic history, from the pre-Islamic social make-up of Arabia, to the Prophet himself, to the Rashidun Caliphs, the Umayyads, the Abbasids, the Islamic Golden Age etc. The author also explains how despite the various political turmoil at the level of governments, the socio-religious community (the Ummah) remained relatively stable. The rulers were not expected to be 'good', but strong to maintain stability (in the age of weak governments), to leave the Ummah free to live. The importance of Shariah (right living) as opposed to the Western precedence given to theology is also explained, as theology is held to be a secondary art, as was the basics of the four schools of Fiqh (Jurisprudence). Uniquely, being a ruler or a judge is held to be a thankless affair as it renders them no opportunity to be spiritually pure or meditative.
The five pillars, the importance of the Arabic language, the sense of continuity with the Abrahamic tradition, and the unique sense of personal dignity of every Muslim which gives rise to a different form of egalitarianism, believers as Viceroys of God, yet dust are further features of the faith. The author contrasts the 'warm' and heartfelt love of the Prophet and attempts to live up to his his principles, with the 'cool' and calming holistic worldview that Islam offers. This anti-Promethean attitude and sense of gratitude, and the conquering of the ego (Fanaa), sense of fatalism (with a compatibilist proviso for human freedom of choice) are also important, as is Zikr (remembrance), the giving of alms, fasting to control the ego etc. Unlike Christianity, humans are not born into sin, as that would not concur with God's fundamental sense of Mercy, and all sins are washed away with prayer. The tendency to deride innovation is because of the sense that man and the world's functions have already been determined for the followers of this timeless faith.
Unlike Christianity, for whom it is the church that is sacred and a secular world exists- for Islam it is the entire world that is sacred. Christianity strives in a state of dynamic tension, while Islam is at peace. Islam is also unique in its acceptance and embrace of the sensual side of human life, not seeking to repress it like the Christian worldview. Some social functions like the provisos for appropriate clothing are made to keep it within a boundary, but these sensual functions are not repressed within the boundary (e.g. in the descriptions of paradise). These provisos are also to maintain a social structure conducive to faith and prayer, for it is the make-up of the society that surrounds us that influences us. Also, to stick to correct morals is not held to be a Promethean endeavour (as it is in the West), but a simple removal of temptations. One notes how the capitalist cult of constant attainment and success, where failure is held to be a personal failing with a constant 'fear of falling'- is a development of this Promethean worldview itself.
The anti-idolatry in Islamic art is also understandable as a 'precautionary measure against human pretension' and miniatures portray the essences of things as opposed to the phenomena themselves. It is this quality of detached harmony (instead of Western tendencies to realism or humanism) and the indescribable presence of God everywhere that suffuse these images. The primary aesthetic of Islamic art is unbounded, vast horizons, desert and steppe- as befits the nomadic people that originally embraced the religion. Converts to Islam are often described as 'reverts' as they embraced back the 'original faith' of monotheism, whereas for Muslims, it is decadence that gives rise to polytheism.
The author opines that unlike the West, where nature is an object for control by the grand subject, Islam provides a more holistic version of nature as threads in the eternal cosmic fabric. Not 'Man vs. Nature', as much as 'Man in and part of Nature'. Instead of a devotion to empirical 'Truth', the criterion for truth is what is more life-affirming, strangely Nietzschian.
Sufism as a historical spiritual practice for the intellectual elite, and the masses is also discussed (The acquisitive middle classes tend to be more sceptical). It is a common part of the entire religion, with an outsize influence, and not just a sect as commonly believed. The differences between one Tariqah and the other- are expressed, some outwardly 'ecstatic' and some insisting on outward soberness with inner ecstasy. This was however, shocking to the general establishment, as Sufism often interprets doctrines allegorically- which have led to heterodox practices. Islam lacks a priest class, or a monastic tradition- but it is within these Sufi orders that spirituality finds full flower. Al-Hallaj and Rumi are perhaps the two most famous in this tradition. Al-Ghazali bridged the divide between 'orthodoxy' and Sufism for a while; and ibn Arabi is another of these great proponents of Tawhid (oneness of all). It is striking that modernizers in Islam often oppose Sufism for its 'stagnant' meditative tradition, opposed to action.
The afterlife and paradise is as important for Islam, as it was for Christianity, and life is indeed oriented to the next world. Unlike the modernist tradition, beauty is held to be in a way 'more real' than ugliness, as it brings us closer to God. Asharite theology is the orthodoxy in Sunni Islam, with its doctrines of Compatibilist 'acquisition of God's actions by a responsible man' and a pervasive occasionalism. The Judgement will occur, where everyone's souls will be judged for their purity, but even after stints in hell for the 'hard of heart', the vast majority will be raised up to Paradise (the original 'home' of mankind).
Would have appreciated some sections on Islamic festivals and their significance, the differences between the sects (Sunni, Shia, Ismaili etc), the Islamic interaction with other cultures like Hinduism, and a summary of the great philosophers and their contributions. This book was however, a good and enlightening introductory read, from the poetic standpoint of a Perennialist- as well as an injunction against taking the values of our own society to be universal. For there is certainly a marked and striking difference in outlook between current 'modern' Western-influenced society; and the timeless beliefs of the Ummah, stable over the past centuries- a cautionary tale against excessive moral certitude. The poetic and mystical side of Islam is also very well explored.
The second part of the book delves into Islamic history, from the pre-Islamic social make-up of Arabia, to the Prophet himself, to the Rashidun Caliphs, the Umayyads, the Abbasids, the Islamic Golden Age etc. The author also explains how despite the various political turmoil at the level of governments, the socio-religious community (the Ummah) remained relatively stable. The rulers were not expected to be 'good', but strong to maintain stability (in the age of weak governments), to leave the Ummah free to live. The importance of Shariah (right living) as opposed to the Western precedence given to theology is also explained, as theology is held to be a secondary art, as was the basics of the four schools of Fiqh (Jurisprudence). Uniquely, being a ruler or a judge is held to be a thankless affair as it renders them no opportunity to be spiritually pure or meditative.
The five pillars, the importance of the Arabic language, the sense of continuity with the Abrahamic tradition, and the unique sense of personal dignity of every Muslim which gives rise to a different form of egalitarianism, believers as Viceroys of God, yet dust are further features of the faith. The author contrasts the 'warm' and heartfelt love of the Prophet and attempts to live up to his his principles, with the 'cool' and calming holistic worldview that Islam offers. This anti-Promethean attitude and sense of gratitude, and the conquering of the ego (Fanaa), sense of fatalism (with a compatibilist proviso for human freedom of choice) are also important, as is Zikr (remembrance), the giving of alms, fasting to control the ego etc. Unlike Christianity, humans are not born into sin, as that would not concur with God's fundamental sense of Mercy, and all sins are washed away with prayer. The tendency to deride innovation is because of the sense that man and the world's functions have already been determined for the followers of this timeless faith.
Unlike Christianity, for whom it is the church that is sacred and a secular world exists- for Islam it is the entire world that is sacred. Christianity strives in a state of dynamic tension, while Islam is at peace. Islam is also unique in its acceptance and embrace of the sensual side of human life, not seeking to repress it like the Christian worldview. Some social functions like the provisos for appropriate clothing are made to keep it within a boundary, but these sensual functions are not repressed within the boundary (e.g. in the descriptions of paradise). These provisos are also to maintain a social structure conducive to faith and prayer, for it is the make-up of the society that surrounds us that influences us. Also, to stick to correct morals is not held to be a Promethean endeavour (as it is in the West), but a simple removal of temptations. One notes how the capitalist cult of constant attainment and success, where failure is held to be a personal failing with a constant 'fear of falling'- is a development of this Promethean worldview itself.
The anti-idolatry in Islamic art is also understandable as a 'precautionary measure against human pretension' and miniatures portray the essences of things as opposed to the phenomena themselves. It is this quality of detached harmony (instead of Western tendencies to realism or humanism) and the indescribable presence of God everywhere that suffuse these images. The primary aesthetic of Islamic art is unbounded, vast horizons, desert and steppe- as befits the nomadic people that originally embraced the religion. Converts to Islam are often described as 'reverts' as they embraced back the 'original faith' of monotheism, whereas for Muslims, it is decadence that gives rise to polytheism.
The author opines that unlike the West, where nature is an object for control by the grand subject, Islam provides a more holistic version of nature as threads in the eternal cosmic fabric. Not 'Man vs. Nature', as much as 'Man in and part of Nature'. Instead of a devotion to empirical 'Truth', the criterion for truth is what is more life-affirming, strangely Nietzschian.
Sufism as a historical spiritual practice for the intellectual elite, and the masses is also discussed (The acquisitive middle classes tend to be more sceptical). It is a common part of the entire religion, with an outsize influence, and not just a sect as commonly believed. The differences between one Tariqah and the other- are expressed, some outwardly 'ecstatic' and some insisting on outward soberness with inner ecstasy. This was however, shocking to the general establishment, as Sufism often interprets doctrines allegorically- which have led to heterodox practices. Islam lacks a priest class, or a monastic tradition- but it is within these Sufi orders that spirituality finds full flower. Al-Hallaj and Rumi are perhaps the two most famous in this tradition. Al-Ghazali bridged the divide between 'orthodoxy' and Sufism for a while; and ibn Arabi is another of these great proponents of Tawhid (oneness of all). It is striking that modernizers in Islam often oppose Sufism for its 'stagnant' meditative tradition, opposed to action.
The afterlife and paradise is as important for Islam, as it was for Christianity, and life is indeed oriented to the next world. Unlike the modernist tradition, beauty is held to be in a way 'more real' than ugliness, as it brings us closer to God. Asharite theology is the orthodoxy in Sunni Islam, with its doctrines of Compatibilist 'acquisition of God's actions by a responsible man' and a pervasive occasionalism. The Judgement will occur, where everyone's souls will be judged for their purity, but even after stints in hell for the 'hard of heart', the vast majority will be raised up to Paradise (the original 'home' of mankind).
Would have appreciated some sections on Islamic festivals and their significance, the differences between the sects (Sunni, Shia, Ismaili etc), the Islamic interaction with other cultures like Hinduism, and a summary of the great philosophers and their contributions. This book was however, a good and enlightening introductory read, from the poetic standpoint of a Perennialist- as well as an injunction against taking the values of our own society to be universal. For there is certainly a marked and striking difference in outlook between current 'modern' Western-influenced society; and the timeless beliefs of the Ummah, stable over the past centuries- a cautionary tale against excessive moral certitude. The poetic and mystical side of Islam is also very well explored.
July 14, 2020
كتاب مهم جدا تعرض فيه الكاتب لقضايا وجودية و معرفية من زاوية نظر مختلفة عن التي عهدتها من قبل، ربما لاختلاف الحاضنة الثقافية و التاريخية بيننا و بينهم.
مقاربة جميلة أبرزت - ضمن رحلة فكرية ماتعة - "الصفات الجوهرية للإسلام كنظام تفكير و حياة معا" بطريقة قد يعجز عنها المسلم العربي! ولعل هذا الذي ذكرت هو ما جعل لهذا الكتاب أثرا بارزا على الوسط الثقافي البريطاني و الغربي عموما و دخل بسببه أناس كثر في سلك السائرين الناهجين لدرب الفطرة، المنضوين تحت راية الإسلام .
و رغم ما شاب الكتاب من تصورات صوفية فلسفية (التي تداركها المترجم الدكتور عبد الله الشهري بتعليقاته المحكمة)، إلا أن ذلك لا يقدح في جمال و أهمية لوحته الفكرية هذه.
أنصح به بشدة.
مقاربة جميلة أبرزت - ضمن رحلة فكرية ماتعة - "الصفات الجوهرية للإسلام كنظام تفكير و حياة معا" بطريقة قد يعجز عنها المسلم العربي! ولعل هذا الذي ذكرت هو ما جعل لهذا الكتاب أثرا بارزا على الوسط الثقافي البريطاني و الغربي عموما و دخل بسببه أناس كثر في سلك السائرين الناهجين لدرب الفطرة، المنضوين تحت راية الإسلام .
و رغم ما شاب الكتاب من تصورات صوفية فلسفية (التي تداركها المترجم الدكتور عبد الله الشهري بتعليقاته المحكمة)، إلا أن ذلك لا يقدح في جمال و أهمية لوحته الفكرية هذه.
أنصح به بشدة.
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