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The Islamic Concept of Human Perfection
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18962 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1991 |
5,403 Words |
| Author
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William C. Chittick
William C. Chittick teaches religious studies at the State
University of New York at Stony Brook; he is author of The
Sufi Path of Love: The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi (SUNY,
1983) and The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al'Arabi's
Metaphysics of Imagination (SUNY, 1989). |
The name "Islam" refers to the religion and civilization based upon the Koran, a scripture revealed to the Prophet Muhammad in the years A.D. 610-632. About one billion human beings are at least nominally Muslim, or followers of the religion of Islam. The modern West, for a wide variety of historical and cultural reasons, has usually been far less interested in the religious dimension of Islamic civilization than in, for example, that of Buddhism or Hinduism. Recent political events have brought Islam into contemporary consciousness, but more as a demon to be feared than a religion to be respected for its sophisticated understanding of the human predicament.
Those few Westerners who have looked beyond the political situation of the countries where Islam is dominant have usually devoted most of their attention to Islamic legal and social teachings. They quickly discover that Islam, like Judaism, is based upon a revealed law, called in Arabic the Shari'a or wide road. Observance of this Law--which covers such domains as ritual practices, marriage relationships, inheritance, diet, and commerce--is incumbent upon every Muslim. But Western scholars have shown far less interest in two other, more inward and hidden dimensions of the Islamic religion, mainly because these have had few repercussions on the contemporary scene. Even in past centuries, when Islam was a healthy and flourishing civilization, only a relatively small number of Muslims made these dimensions their central concern.
The more hidden dimensions of Islam can be called "intellectuality" and "spirituality." The first deals mainly with the conceptual understanding of the human situation and the second with the practical means whereby a full flowering of human potentialities can be achieved. They are important in the present context because they provide clear descriptions of human perfection and set down detailed guidelines for reaching it. If we want to discover how Islam has understood the concept of perfection without reading our own theories into the Koran or imposing alien categories on the beliefs and practices of traditional Muslims, we have to pose our question to the intellectual and spiritual traditions of Islam itself.
Muslims look back to the Koran and the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad as the primary sources for everything authentically their own. These sources provide a number of teachings concerning the nature of reality, which are accepted by all Muslims and, as it were, instill the myth of Islam into the Muslim consciousness. The most succinct expression of these teachings is found in the Islamic testimony of faith: "There is no god but God,
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