Learning from Bosnia: Approaching Tradition

Chapter 7. The Word Held in Common

7. The Word Held in Common Ten years after the Hegira from Mecca, Muslims and Christians held a debate in Medina, in the presence of the Jews, on the tradition and its different forms.1 During the course of the debate, more than eighty verses of the third sura of the Qur’an were revealed, addressing the relations between different phenomena in the tradition. Here it was stressed that differences in language, meanings, symbols, and their related teachings do not mean disunion from the Word that is common to all these external forms. Disunion from the Word involves denial or indifference , hypocrisy or distortion; and equally, no tradition is free of the potential for such divergence. The core of the tradition is the contact with the Truth, and all temporal forms are its manifestations, but they become lifeless when they are disassociated from that living heart. In that disassociation everything, even the entire content of the tradition, risks becoming adherence to an absolute that is external to the Absolute , or to a god other than God. This is ‘‘association with God,’’ which is an unforgivable human mode because it derives from a will that repudiates the Divine and an adherence that is determined by hatred for the Absolute Plenitude.2 It demands that the openness of the inner human self to the Truth be transformed into the Truth itself, to which everything must be subordinate, whereas it is itself subordinate to nothing. This is a denial of submission; it is its transmutation into self-aggrandizement . The order of things from God, as the highest and greatest, to humankind, whose realization lies in humility, has become inverted into an illusion of progress from nullity to human reason as the consum- The Word Held in Common / 77 mate good; and humankind has transformed itself from the image of God into an actual god. Given its consequences for the human self and the world that is subordinate to humankind, such associationism is unforgivable: ‘‘God forgives not that aught should be with Him associated; less than that He forgives to whomsoever He will.’’3 The most malignant form of associationism is the promotion of individual religious languages, meanings, and symbols, and of the structures connected with them, as the center of affiliation, accompanied by the relativization or forgetting of Unicity and the need for submission to it. Thus even speaking against associationism with God is turned into a god, absolutizing even the understanding and conduct that declares an orientation toward the Truth. In the modern era, such relationships reduce the tradition to ideology, in which the sacredness of the Supreme as the source of reality or the state of Being becomes lost. Therein lies the paradox of the modern secularization of religion. In an Enlightenment understanding of the self as perfectible, language is rooted solely in reason: it derives from the brain as its material source. In the traditional image, by contrast, the heart is the contact between the self and the Intellect/Spirit; the revealed Word is ‘‘brought down by the Faithful Spirit upon thy heart,’’4 and thus all its forms of existence in reason and the material world are but the re- flections of this bond with the Intellect/Spirit. These interpretations lead to two understandings of the self: either as sealed and self-referent or as open. Associationism is a denial of Divine Unicity, and is thus an impediment to humankind’s unshackling from all that does not bear witness that there is no god but God, that is, from falsehood. In an associationist view, the human self is determined at birth, and reason locates the spatial and temporal origins of the self in one’s parents. The worlds are thus reduced to the scope of reason, and origins are reduced to birth. And if one’s parents are seen as the decisive determinants of the self, the parental connection is seen as the most important element in the shaping of the individual and society. From this, in turn, derives subservience to one’s elders, obedience to the clan, the power of the tribe, and the like. There is a clear connection between subservience to one’s parents and violence against one’s children. Holy doctrine, by contrast, points to the need to distinguish between emotional and rational links, on the one hand, and submission to reality, on the other, for absolute submission to one’s parents is also associationism with God. But the [18.216.190.167] Project...