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 SHAYKH HAMZA YUSUF |
SHAYKH HAMZA YUSUF TALKED TO NAZIM BAKSH ABOUT THE SEARCH FOR VIRTUE, BEAUTY AND LOVE IN AN AGE OF HATE, ANIMOSITY AND RESENTMENT.
NAZIM BAKSH
The convenient response to those who revile
your religion is to return the favour. The more virtuous position however
is to forgive. Forgiveness as you know, while less in virtue when compared
to love, nevertheless, can result in love. Love, by definition, does not
require forgiveness. What many Muslims today seem to forget is that ours
is a religion of love and our Prophet, upon him be peace and blessings,
was the Habib, the Beloved. How did love, the defining virtue of
our community, come to be replaced by an urge to redress wrongs, to punish
instead of to forgive?
HAMZA YUSUF
It is the result of Muslims seeing themselves
as victims. Victimization is a defeatist mentality. It's the mentality
of the powerless.
The word victim is
from the Latin “victima” which carries with it the idea of the one
who suffers injury, loss, or death due to a voluntary undertaking. In other
words, victims of one’s own actions. Muslims never really had a mentality
of victimization. From a metaphysical perspective, which is always the
first and primary perspective of a Muslim, there can be no victims.
We believe that all
suffering has a redemptive value.
NAZIM BAKSH
If the tendency among Muslims is to view
themselves as victims which appears to me as a fall from grace, what virtue
must we then cultivate to dispense with this mental and physical state
that we now find ourselves in?
HAMZA YUSUF
The virtue of patience is missing.
Patience is the first virtue after tawba or repentance. Early Muslim
scholars considered patience as the first maqam or station in the
realm of virtues that a person entered into.
Patience in Islam means
patience in the midst of adversity. A person should be patient in what
has harmed or afflicted him. Patience means that you don’t lose your comportment
or your composure. If you look at the life of the Prophet Muhammad, upon
him be peace and blessings, you will never ever find him losing his composure.
Patience was a hallmark
of his character. He was ‘the unperturbed one’ which is one
of the meanings of halim: wa kaana ahlaman-naas. He
was the most unperturbed of humanity. Nothing phased him either inwardly
or outwardly because he was with Allah in all his states.
NAZIM BAKSH
Patience is a beautiful virtue
the cry
of Prophet Yaqub.... "fa sabran jamil." Patience, it appears, is
not an isolated virtue but rather it is connected to a network of virtues.
Should Muslims focus on this virtue at the expense of the other virtues?
HAMZA YUSUF
The traditional virtues of a human being
were four and Qadi Ibn Al-Arabi considered them to be the foundational
virtues or the ummahatul fadaa'il of all of humanity. They are:
prudence,
courage, temperance, and justice.
Prudence, or rather
practical wisdom, and courage, are defining qualities of the Prophet. He,
upon him be peace and blessings, said that God
loves courage even in the killing of a harmful snake.
Temperance is the ability
to control oneself. Incontinence, the hallmark of intemperance, is said
to occur when a person is unable to control himself. In modern medicine
it is used for someone who can’t control his urine or feces. But not so
long ago the word incontinence meant a person who was unable to control
his temper, appetite or sexual desire. Temperance is the moral virtue that
moderates one’s appetite in accordance with prudence. In early Muslim scholarship
on Islamic ethics, justice was considered impossible without the virtues
of prudence, courage and temperance.
Generosity as a virtue
is derived from courage because a generous person is required to be courageous
in the face of poverty. Similarly, humility is a derivative from temperance
because the humble person will often restrain the urge to brag and be a
‘show-off’ because he or she sees their talents and achievements as a gift
from Allah and not from themselves.
Patience as a virtue
is attached to the virtue of courage because the patient person has the
courage to endure difficulties.
So 'hilm' (from
which you get 'halim'), often translated as forbearance or meekness
if you wish, is frown[ed] upon in our society. Yet it is the virtue we
require to stem the powerful emotion of anger. Unrestrained anger often
leads to rage and rage can lead to violence in its various shades.
Our predecessors were
known for having an incredible degree of patience while an increasing number
of us are marked with an extreme degree of anger, resentment, hate, rancor
and rage. These are negative emotions which present themselves as roadblocks
to living a virtuous life.
A patient human being
will endure tribulations, trials, difficulties, hardships, if confronted
with them. The patient person will not be depressed or distraught and whatever
confronts him will certainly not lead to a loss of comportment or adab.
Adab, as you know, is everything.
Allah says in the Quran:
‘Isbiru was-sabiru.' “Have patience and enjoin each other to
patience.” The beauty of patience is that ‘inallaha ma'as-sabirin’
Allah
is with the patient ones. If God is on your side you will always be
victorious. Allah says in the Quran "Ista`inu bi-sabiri was-salat.'"
Isti'aana
is a reflexive of the Arabic verb `aana which is “to help oneself.”
Allah is telling us to help ourselves with patience and prayer.
This is amazing because
the Prophet, peace be upon him, said “if you take
help, take help from God alone.” And so in the Quran Allah says:
ista`inu
bi-sabiri was-salaat.
This means taking help
from patience and prayer because that is the
means by which Allah has given you to take help from Him alone. How is
it then that a person sees himself as a victim when all calamities, difficulties
and trials, are ultimately tests from Allah.
This does not mean
the world is free of aggression and that victims have suddenly vanished.
What I’m talking about [here] is a person’s psychology in dealing with
hardship.
The sacred law has
two perspectives when looking at acts of aggression that are committed
by one party against another. When it is viewed by those in authority the
imperative is to seek justice. However, from the perspective of the wronged,
it is not to seek justice but instead to forgive.
Forgiveness, `afwa,
pardon, is not a quality of authority. A court is not set up to forgive.
It’s the plaintiff that’s required to forgive if there is going to be any
forgiveness at all. Forgiveness will not come from the Qadi or the
judge. The court is set up to give justice but Islam cautions us not to
go there in the first place because ‘by the standard which you judge
so too shall you be judged.’
That's the point.
If you want justice, if you want God, the Supreme Judge of all affairs,
to be just to others on your behalf, then you should know that your Lord
will use the same standard with you.
Nobody on the ‘Day
of Arafat’ [a special day during Hajj] will pray: “Oh God, be just
with me.” Instead you will hear them crying: O Allah, forgive me, have
mercy on me, have compassion on me, overlook my wrongs. Yet, these same
people are not willing to forgive, have compassion and mercy on other creatures
of God.
We are not a people
that are required to love wrongdoers. I must loath wrong actions, but at
the same time we should love for the wrongdoers guidance because they are
creatures of God and they were put here by the same God that put us here.
And Allah says in the Quran “We made some of you a tribulation for others,
will you then not show patience.” In other words, God set up the scenario,
and then asked the question: ‘will you then not show patience?’
Will you subdue the inordinate desire for vengeance to achieve a higher
station that is based on a conviction that you will be forgiven by God
if only you can bring yourself to forgive others?
NAZIM BAKSH
Imam Al-Ghazali and earlier Miskawayh
in his Tahdhib al-akhlaq, argued that for these virtues to be effective,
they had to be in harmony. Otherwise, they said, virtues would quickly
degenerate into vice. Do you think that these virtues exist today among
Muslims but that they are out of balance? For example, the Arabs in the
time of the Prophet had courage, but without justice it was bravado. Prudence
without justice is merely shrewdness. Do you think that Muslims are clamoring
for justice but have subsumed the virtues of temperance and prudence?
HAMZA YUSUF
Yes. Muslims want courage and justice
but they don't want temperance and prudence.
The four virtues relate
to the four humors in the body. Physical sickness is related to spiritual
sickness and when these four are out of balance, spiritual and moral sickness
occurs. So when courage is the sole virtue, you no longer have prudence.
You are acting courageously
but imprudently and it's no longer courage but impetuousness.
It appears as courage
but it is not. A person who is morally incapable of controlling his appetite
has incontinence and thus he cannot be prudent nor courageous because part
of courage is to constrain oneself when it is appropriate. Imam al Ghazali
says that courage is a mean between impetuousness and cowardice.
The same is true for
incontinence.
The person who has
no appetite is not a temperate person but an impotent person and that's
also a disease. Someone may have immense business acumen but uses it to
accumulate massive amounts of wealth. That is not a prudent person but
a crafty or clever person. Prudence is a mean between the extremes of stupidity
and craftiness or what the Arabs call
makr.
The maakir is
the one who is afflicted with the same condition that has afflicted Iblis
the maakir, the clever.
The interesting point
to note about the four virtues is that you either take them all or you
don’t take them at all. It’s a packaged deal. There is a strong argument
among moral ethicists that justice is the result of the first three being
in perfect balance.
NAZIM BAKSH
That's Miskawayh?
HAMZA YUSUF
Yes, Miskawayh and Aristotle as well.
What I've realized
is that people who don't have patience are often ridden with anxiety and
tend to behave as if they can control the outcome of events in their lives.
They even think that
destiny is in their hands.
They argue that if
you do this and this you will achieve power, as if we have the ability
to empower ourselves. Most of the contemporary Islamic movements seem to
think that without state-power a moral or an ethical Islamic society is
impossible to achieve. Why do you think that is the case?
I think victimization
is the result of powerlessness.
The point is that powerlessness
is our state. Powerlessness is a good state, not a bad one because all
power is with God alone and He will make you powerful or powerless.
I'll give you an example.
If you go into the
Alhambra Palace in Granada you will see written everywhere al `izu-lillah
which means that strength, dignity and power is with God alone. By the
time you get to the end of the last room it is changed to al` izu li
maulana Abi
`Abdillah or
power and authority is with the protector Abu Abdallah, the last Caliph
of Andalus or what is now southern Spain. So it begins with power and strength
is for God alone and it ends with power, strength, and dignity is for our
master Abu Abdillah.
The point here is that
if you want power, God won’t give it to you, but if you want to be powerless
for the sake of God, God will empower you. That's just the way it works
and here I am talking about the people of God.
Allah has divided the
world into two types of people -- those who are God-focused and those who
are focused on other than God.
The people that are
focused on God will always follow certain principles and God will always
give them the same results. The people who think that they are focused
on God, but in fact are focused on other than God will never get success
from God. The reason is that if they did indeed get success from God they
would end up disgracing the religion of God by claiming to be people of
God.
There are many outwardly
religious people on the planet that think they are the people of God and
they get frustrated when they are denied victory.
This causes them often
to get angry and you see their methods becoming more and more desperate.
They fail to recognize
that authority is not given to them because they’re not truly focused on
God. They are instead focused on worldly power and they are self-righteous
and self-centered in their arrogance, thinking that they are right while
everyone else is wrong.
The verse in the Quran
that sums this up is in Sura Baqarah. Allah says, “They say no
one will enter paradise unless they be a Jew or a Christian, These are
vain wishes. Say to them, bring your evidence if you are speaking the truth.
“Balaa man aslama wajhahu lillahi wa huwa muhsinun.” “No, rather
the one who resigns his entire being to God is the one.”
Ibn Juzay al Kalbi
says: aslama wajhahu means he who submits his entire being to God
which is Ihsan or excellence in one’s worship. When the human being
is in a state of submission - wa huwa muhsinun - everything that
comes from him is beautiful and virtuous. Ihsan - ethics, virtuous,
beauty, excellence - indicates that a human being will have his reward
from his Lord. This is not from the God of a religion, but the God of the
individual in a state of absolute submission. “Upon them there is no
fear nor will they grieve.”
To me, this is the
greatest testimony that Islam is not about identity politics. Some among
us want to reduce Islam to identity politics. They label themselves and
point accusing fingers at each other. Allah says “indeed the one who has
resigned his entire being to God and is virtuous, that is the one whose
reward is with his Lord and upon them shall come no fear nor will they
grieve.
Replace the Jew and
the Christian for some modern-day Muslims and you end up with the same
phenomenon described above. The hadith says you will follow the Jews and
the Christians to the extent that if they go down a lizard’s hole you'll
go down with them. This is an authentic hadith.
The hadith says every
child is born with an inherent nature. The Prophet, upon him be peace and
blessings, didn't say every child is born a Muslim as a sociological identity.
It says every child is born in a state of fitra and it’s the parents
who determine its sociological category, to give it a modern interpretation.
NAZIM BAKSH
You have painted a very interesting landscape
in terms of Muslim behaviour in the contemporary period but we are seeing
evidence of resentment among some Muslims today which is very strange indeed.
I am wondering how this might be related to a sense of victimization?
HAMZA YUSUF
Of course it is. Look for example at the
word injury. It comes from injuria, a Latin word that
means unjust. So if I perceive my condition as unjust it
is contrary to the message of the Quran. Whatever circumstances we find
ourselves in we hold ourselves as responsible. It gets tricky to navigate
especially when it comes to the oppressor and the oppressed.
The Prophet, upon him
be peace and blessings, along with the early Muslim community, spent 13
years purifying themselves in Mecca. These were years of oppression and
thus serious self-purification accompanied by an ethic of nonviolence,
forbearance, meekness, and humility.
They were then given
permission to migrate and to defend themselves. At this point they were
not a people out to get vengeance and they were certainly not filled with
resentment because they saw everything as coming from God. I’m not talking
about being pleased with injustice because that's prohibited. At
the same time we accept the world our Lord has put us into and we see everything
as being here purposefully, not without purpose, whether we understand
it or not.
We believe evil is
from the Qadr (decree) of Allah and it's for a purpose, but there are two
sides to choose from - the side of good and the side of evil. In order
for you not to fall into the Manichean fallacy, God reminds you that not
only is the struggle an external struggle but evil is an internal struggle
as well. Therefore, those very things that you see on the outside they
are also on the inside and to make it even clearer, the struggle inside
is the greater Jihad because if you are not involved in the internal struggle
you are not going to be able to fight the external one.
Maulana Rumi said whenever
you read Pharaoh in the Quran don’t think that he is some character that
lived in the past, but seek him out in your own heart.
So, if we've got all
these negatives, vices, not virtues active in our hearts, love, it appears
is an impossible task.
The modern Christian
fundamentalists always talk about Islam as a religion devoid of love. It’s
a very common motif in these religious fundamentalist books that attack
Islam. They say “our religion is the religion of love and Islam is the
religion of hate, animosity, and resentment.” Unfortunately, many Muslims
have adopted it as their religion, but that doesn’t mean resentment has
anything to do with Islam.
Love (Mahabba)
is the highest religious virtue in Islam. Imam Ghazali said that it is
the highest maqam or spiritual station. It is so because trust,
zhud
(doing
without), fear, and hope are stations of this world and so long as you
are in this world these stations are relevant, but once you die they can
no longer serve you. Love is eternal because love is the reason you were
created.
You were created to
adore
God. That’s why in Latin the word adore which is used for
worship
in
English is also a word for love, adoration. You were created
to worship God, in other words, to love Him because you can't
truly adore something or
worship something that you don't
love. If you are worshipping out of fear, like Imam al Ghazali says, it's
not the highest level of worship, but its lowest.
In other words, if
you are worshipping God out of fear, if the reason that you are doings
things is because you are afraid of Him, that he is going to punish you,
that’s the lowest level of worship. That’s why it was said about the Prophet’s
companion Suhaib al Rumi that had there been no fire or paradise he still
would have worshipped Allah.
NAZIM BAKSH
A vast number of young Muslims today who
have the energy to run down the road of hate do so thinking that it is
a display of their Iman [faith]. What do you say to help them understand
that hating wrongs has to be balanced with the virtues of mercy, justice,
forgiveness, generosity, etc.?
HAMZA YUSUF
I think one has to recognize that there
are definitely things out there to hate but we have to be clear about hating
the right things for the right reasons in the right amount.
The challenge is to
get your object of hate right and hate it for the right reason. In other
words, there are things that we should hate for the sake of God.
Oppression is something
that you should hate. Its not haram to hate the oppressor, but don’t
hate them to the degree that it prevents you from being just because that
is closer to Taqwa (awe of Allah).
The higher position
is to forgive for the sake of God. God gives you two choices -- the high
road or the low road -- both of them will get you to paradise. We should
strive for the highest.
Anger is a useful emotion.
God created anger in order that we could act and respond to circumstances
that need to be changed.
Indignation is a beautiful
word. Righteous indignation is a good quality and even though it is misused
in modern English it’s actually a good thing. It means to be angry for
the right reasons and then it is to be angry to the right degree because
Allah says, “Do not let the loathing of a people prevent you from being
just.”
In other words get
angry but don’t let that anger get the best of you, don’t allow it to overcome
you to the point where you want vengeance because vengeance is God’s alone.
Allah is al-Muntaqim, The Avenger of wrongs. Human beings are not
here to avenge wrongs they are here to redress wrong, not to avenge them.
The ideal of loving
those who revile you is the station of the Prophet, peace and blessings
be upon him.
In the midst of the
worst battle of his career, the battle of Uhud, he prayed, “Oh
God guide my people for they do not know what they are doing.” He
could not have uttered that if he had hatred in his heart. He could not
have embraced Wahshi as his brother, the man who killed his most beloved
uncle, if he had hatred in his heart. He could not have taken the oath
of allegiance from Hind who ordered and paid for the assassination of Hamza
and then bit into his liver to spite the Blessed Prophet if he had hatred
in his heart. He took her oath of allegiance and she became a sister in
faith. The Messenger of Allah is the best example.
He is the paragon who
said: “None of you truly believes until he loves
for his fellow man what he loves for himself.”
And the reason why
I say fellow man is that I think it’s a very accurate translation because
Imam an Nawawi said that he is your brother because we are all children
of Adam and Eve. So we should want for our fellow man guidance, a good
life, and a good afterlife. None of you truly believes, in other words
our Iman is not complete until we love for others what we love for
ourselves and that includes the Jews, Christians, Buddhists and the Hindus.
NAZIM BAKSH
That breaks down the 'us versus them'
paradigm that tends to inform the way Muslims see the world and themselves
in it. That has been taken to a new level now in some of our mosques where
the kuffar is a degree under and we don't have to pay attention
to anything they say either about us or to us. Did our Prophet, upon him
be peace and blessing, behave like this at all? I mean was he dismissive
of anyone who wasn't from his community? It seems preposterous to convince
anyone that we care about their welfare when we deride them.
HAMZA YUSUF
The point is that if you want to guide
them then you have to be concerned with the way they perceive you. You
have to be concerned with how they feel.
The reason the Prophet
upon him be peace and blessings, did not kill hypocrites was because he
did not want the non-Muslims to say Muhammad kills his companions as a
way of scaring people from entering into Islam. So he preferred an action
that will cause non-Muslims to look at Islam as a religion they would prefer
to enter.
The Prophet, peace be upon him was concerned to such an extent with what
others thought that when one of his companions said that the Persians and
Byzantines did not take letters seriously unless they had a seal on them,
he told his companion to make him a seal.
He was concerned about
how he presented himself to the people. Once he was combing his hair and
Aisha, his blessed wife, asked him why he did that before he went out and
he said my Lord commanded me to do this. In other words, to go out looking
presentable to people is not vanity.
Some Muslims get caught
up in clothes and they get upset when others wear a tie and suit. They
think it’s hypocrisy and that it is inappropriate. On the contrary, if
one’s intention is correct, it’s actually an act of worship because you
are doing it in order to present Islam, not yourself. You are, like the
Prophet, recognizing that you are an ambassador of a religion and it becomes
like the seal that the Prophet, upon him be peace and blessing, pressed
onto the letters.
Many Muslims have divided
the world into two groups -- us and them. They will support Saddam Hussein
because he’s a Muslim. In other words, they will support a man who may
have killed more Muslims than any Muslim leader in the history of Islam
or perhaps all of them put together.
The argument from this
segment of our Muslim community is that “I will back a mass murderer and
go to a demonstration with his picture because he’s a Muslim and other
people are Kuffar.” On the other hand, many Americans will back
unjust American intervention simply because they believe “my country right
or wrong.” Both sentiments [are] a form of tribalism and we are people
of faith in God Almighty, not people of tribal allegiance.
|
SHAYKH HAMZA YUSUF |
