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Chapter Six THE UNIVERSAL HORIZON OF ISLAM There is no world religion that does not claim universality for itself, at least in the sense of its being potentially accepted by all of mankind. Even autochthonous shamanistic traditions, as bound as they may be to a particular people and a particular land by virtue of their spiritual economy being intimately connected to a sense of sacred immanence in the most concrete natural and physical phenomena, presuppose a type of relationship to spirits and the Spirit whose objectivity guarantees the existence of other manifestations in different modes and different languages. Hinduism and Judaism, though undoubtedly grounded in a specific covenant, or a specific revelation that draws the boundaries of a sacred community into which it may be possible to enter only under very exceptional circumstances and on the basis of very strict conditions, envisage their respective traditions like a sacred basis that ultimately calls for a universal entrance into the precinct of Divinity. On more complex and subtle grounds all world religions have tended to develop, especially in the last century, theologoumena allowing for some latitudinarian interpretations of the faith, even though the exclusivist bent of collective mentalities and institutions has also curtailed the limits of such inclusiveness. In Christianity , and particularly in the Catholic Church, the concern for universality has focused primarily on the extent given to the redemptive promise of salvation, since the unicity of the Redeemer generally prevented taking account of a metaphysical unity independent of the Incarnation. Massignon’s student and Dominican priest George Anawati has reminded his Christian readership that the theological position of the Church has been, for many years, that all men have access to supernatural grace through Christ, even outside of baptism and without entry into the Church, through faith and moral conscience.1 There is therefore a distinction to be drawn between baptism as a sacrament giving access to the supernatural life and what Massignon has called the “baptism of desire,” that is, the inner, implicit, and most often unconscious longing for baptism understood as a grace freely given by the Redeemer beyond the confessional boundaries of his Church. 128 PATHWAYS TO AN INNER ISLAM As the last of the major religions on the world stage, Islam has benefited from its historical situation, retrospective identity, and encompassing simplicity in fostering its universal claims, not only in the general terms of the validity of its creed for all people, but also in the more specific sense of an ability to recognize and integrate prior faiths within its own sacred history. In other words, Islam is in a position to claim an eminent degree of universality by reason of being the last revelation and, as such, the synthesis of all previous messages, as indicated by the directness and “transparence” of its emphasis on divine Unity. One of the central tenets of the Prophet’s predication lay in his assertion that his mission did not bring to mankind anything new. Islam is simply the reminder of the original religion, ad-dīn al-qayyīm (Qur’ān 30:30), which has been alternately known and forgotten by mankind since the origin of time. The specificity of Islam as a “new” religion is simply to restate, to correct misrepresentations of the one and only religion that has always been, and to bring the cycle of revelation to a close. This situation is already indicative of two potential hermeneutic poles of Quranic reading, which have in fact been taken as seeds of interpretation of the nature and identity of Islam. The first of these poles is characterized by an insistence on the coincidence of Islam with what has always been known, and it is as such the maximally inclusive horizon of Islam. The other, by contrast, has tended to sharpen the distinctness of Islam by emphasizing the fact that the new religion was indeed needed to restore the pristine authenticity of the primordial religion, without which the very mission of the Prophet would seem utterly superfluous. In the Qur’ān, these two ways of understanding the universal horizon of Islam are expressed in the double meaning of the word muslim, which can be taken most universally as referring to those who acknowledge divine Unity, like Abraham and the prophets, or in a more restrictive manner as pertaining to the disciples and followers of Muhammad. Islam is thereby in its very definition in a position most conducive to acknowledge the...

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