Islam

I’ve just been reading some writings of Rumi (I grabbed a volume from my son’s stored books in the garage when I needed something to read in a hurry!)

He often evokes mixed feelings in me: on one hand – “wow, this is amazing!” On the other hand – “but this is hopelessly far from where I am, spiritually.” It evokes a faint, unfulfillable yearning. But later today, I realised that, in a way that’s hard to put my finger on, it’s not so far from me. In Rumi’s language, the “heart”, those very inner feelings of desire, warmth and longing, is very close to me and it constantly prompts … “yes, this is the right way” or “no, you’re getting colder”.

The above was written a week or more ago, since when I’ve been grappling with maybe the biggest obstacle that the Koran poses for the liberal Christian -  the constant repetition of rewards and punishment at the day of judgement (which I’ve blogged about before). Two points came to me that helped with this. The first is based on the what Seyyed Hossein Nasr once wrote: that the whole of the Koran is contained in the first chapter (al fatihah). This means that the Koran is not a narrative, but rather there is only one chapter which is repeatedly enlarged upon in different ways. The day of judgment is a part of this one chapter, as is the mercy of God, and so both these are invariably repeated.

The second point that came was this: the crux of the idea of judgment is the fact that life is finite (which might seem different from the tenor of many Eastern religions with their stress on reincarnation). One the Christian and Islamic view, we only have one bite at the cherry, one chance to wake up, so don’t blow this chance. And if there is an eternal dimension to our life (meaning: a timeless dimension, not a dimension going on and on and on and boringly on) then this dimension must logically reflect the content of the temporal part. And that, mythically expressed, is judgement.

Actually, the difference between “only one life” and reincarnation may be superficial. After all, you could say that we have 30000 bites at the cherry, one for each day of this life. So having more lives doesn’t much alter the largeness of the opportunity. Thus, “now is the acceptable time”: how about waking up today? It’s easy to say that, though. As the Beatles said, leave me where I am, I’m only sleeping.

Which brings me back to Rumi and the heart. The path to waking up is following the heart, Rumi says. Through the heart I can read where I need to be heading. Rumi writes
“A human being is a great thing: everything is inscribed within him, but ‘veils’ and ‘obfuscations’ prevent him from reading the knowledge he has within himself. …
despite all these things that lie hidden in the ‘darkness’ beghind the ‘veils’ a human being does manage to read something and be aware of what he reads.” (Fihi ma fihi #11, translated Kabir Helminski, “The Rumi Collection” pp 78-9)