A selection from the translated Nahjul-Balaghah with commentary by Martyr Ayatollah Murtaza Mutahhari and edited by Yasin T. Al-Jibouri.
Our discussion of the meaning of “worldliness” in Nahjul Balagha has become somewhat drawn out. However, one issue, which cannot be omitted, remains unanswered. We raised it earlier in the form of a question which we had promised to answer later. The question was this: If attachment and bondage to anything is a kind of unhealthy condition that leads to abandonment of human values and causes stagnation, inertness and inertia of the human personality, what difference does it make whether that thing is something material or spiritual, this worldly or otherworldly, or, as goes the saying, “the Master or the apple”?
It may be said that if the aim of Islam, by prohibiting attachment and by warning against bondage to temporal things, is to safeguard the human being’s identity, to rescue him from servitude and to protect him from stagnating and vegetating in life, it should have encouraged man to acquire absolute freedom and to consider everything that compromises and confines it as kufr, for such is the standpoint of some modern schools of philosophy which consider freedom to be the essence of man’s human identity.
These schools of thought equate man’s human identity with his capacity to rebel, disobey every form of servitude and assert his absolute freedom.Accordingly, every manner of bondage, confinement and submission is, according to them, inconsistent with man’s real identity and leads to self alienation.
They say that man realizes his true humanity only by refusing to submit and surrender. It is characteristic of attachment that the object of love absorbs man’s attention and compromises his self-awareness. This results in his forgetting his own self and, subsequently, this aware and free being called man, whose identity is summarized in his awareness and freedom, becomes a slavish creature devoid of freedom and self awareness. In forgetting his own identity, man also becomes oblivious of his human values. In such a state of bondage and servitude, he ceases to progress, edifying himself and becoming stagnant, frozen at some point.
If Islam’s philosophy of struggle against worldliness aims at the resurrection of the human identity and personality, it should oppose every form of servitude and liberate man from every form of bondage. Such, however, is not the case for Islam, undeniably, advocates the liberation from materialism for the sake of spiritual servitude. Freedom from the world is acquired for the sake of the fetters of the Hereafter and the apple is renounced for the sake of the Master.
The `Urafa’ who advise absolute freedom from attachments, however, do allow an exception. Hafiz says the following:
I am the slave of the magnanimity of Him
Who is free of the taint of attachment to anything under the blue sky
Except the love of the moon-cheeked one,
The joy of whose love redeems all sorrows and woes.
Openly do I declare and am delighted to proclaim:
I am the slave of Love and am free from both the worlds
Except for the Beloved’s Name inscribed on the slate of my heart,
The teacher did not teach me another word.
From the viewpoint of irfan, one must be free of both worlds but should surrender totally to love. As Hafiz says, the tablet of the heart must be clean of every name except that of the Beloved One. The heart should
be cleansed of every attachment except the love of Allah Whose love brings redemption from all sorrows and woes.
However, from the viewpoint of the so-called humanistic philosophy, the freedom of the arif, being only relative, does not take us anywhere because it is freedom from everything for the sake of a total surrender and servitude to One Being. Servitude is, after all, servitude, and bondage is bondage, regardless of the agent towards which it is directed.
This is the objection raised by the followers of modern humanistic philosophies. In order that the issues involved may be further illuminated, we are compelled to refer to certain philosophical issues.
First of all, one may point out that to assume that there exists a kind of human selfhood and identity and to insist that this identity should be safeguarded in itself amounts to the negation of movement, progress and development of this selfhood because, motion and change necessarily result in alienation from this selfhood. This is so because movement means becoming: that is, becoming something one is not; it implies a continuous transcendence of selfhood and the embracing of otherness.
Obviously, if we accept this view, it is only by the means of immobility and stagnation that one can preserve his identity. The development necessitates self-alienation. For this reason, some ancient philosophers defined motion in terms of otherness and self-estrangement. Accordingly, to assume that there exists a certain kind of human Aself and to insist that this self should be safeguarded and protected from becoming Anon-self and to speak of movement, progress and evolution in the same breath involves an unresolvable contradiction.
Some people, in order to free themselves from this contradiction, have said that man’s identity lies in being devoid of any kind of self whatsoever. Man, they say, is a creature absolutely undefined in his essence and free from any kind of limit, form or essence. His essence lies in his being without any defined essence. Man is a creature devoid of a fixed nature and essential necessity. Any attempt to define, limit or confine him amounts to depriving him of his real self and identity.
Such a view may be aptly considered poetry and a flight of imagination rather than a philosophy. The absolute absence of a fixed form and essence is possible in one of two cases: Firstly, such a being should possess infinite perfection, pure and unlimited actuality; that is, it should be a being unlimited and unconfined, encompassing all times and places and predominant over all things and beings in existence, such as the Being of the Creator. For such a Being, movement and growth are impossible because motion and development involve overcoming of defects and imperfections, whereas such a being cannot possibly be supposed to possess any imperfection. Secondly, it may apply to a being devoid of every kind of actuality and merit. That is, it should be a pure possibility and sheer potentiality, a neighbor of nothingness, existing only on the remotest frontiers of existence. It should be devoid of any innate reality and essence though capable of assuming any form or essence.
Such a being, which itself absolutely undefined, is always associated with a definite being; though shapeless and colorless in itself, it exists in the protective shadow of a being possessing form, shape and color. Such a being is what the philosophers call Athe primal matter. It occupies the lowest status in the hierarchy of existence and stands on the extremity of being, even as the Divine Essence, being the absolute perfection, stands on the other extremity of existence__with the difference that the extremity occupied by the Divine Essence circumscribes all the contents of being.
Man, like all other creatures, is situated somewhere between these two extremes and cannot lack any defined essence. Admittedly, he is different from other creatures but, unlike them, there is no limit to his movement towards perfection. Whereas other creatures remain confined to certain definite limits which they cannot transcend, there is no end to the possibilities of the human development.
Man possesses a special kind of being. But contrary to the view of the philosophers who believe in the precedence of essence and reduce the being of everything to its quiddity and who deny the possibility of
transcendence and essential change as being self-contradictory and consider all changes to occur at the level of accidents, the existential nature of man, like that of any other material thing, is fluid, with the difference that its movement and fluidity know no final limits.
Some commentators of the Holy Quran, in their explanations of the verse: “O people of Yathrib! There is no abiding here for you (Quran, 33: 13), have generalized it to cover all humanity. They hold that man is a creature which does not move to a certain and definite stage or halt; the further he moves the greater are the possibilities open to him.
Here we do not wish to indulge in discussing the legitimacy of imposing such interpretations on Quranic verses; we only intend to demonstrate that Muslim scholars have thought about man in such terms.
In the hadith about the Prophet’s Ascension (al-mi`raj), Gabriel, who accompanies the Prophet (PBUH), at a certain point gives up his journey declaring: “I will get burnt if I move an inch further, while the Prophet (PBUH) leaves him behind and moves further.”This is an allusion to the truth mentioned above.
Also, as we know, there is a debate among Muslim scholars about the salawat (Benedictions) upon the Holy Prophet (PBUH) and Ahl al-Bayt (AS), which we make as a prayer to Allah to shower greater blessings upon them. Now the debate is whether the salawat is of any benefit to the Holy Prophet (PBUH), who is the most perfect man. In other words, is there any possibility of ascension in the Prophet’s station? Or does the salawat benefit only the person who pronounces it and beseeches Allah to bless the Prophet (PBUH), a favor that has already been granted?
The late Sayyid Ali Khan opened this debate in his commentary on Al-Sahifa Al-Kamila. A group of theologians believe that the Holy Prophet (PBUH) is always ascending and climbing higher and higher in his
station and this movement is never halted.
Yes, such is the station of man. That which makes man as such is not the absolute absence of a defined essence but a certain kind of essence which is ordinarily referred to as the human nature and other such
expressions.
Man does not have any ultimate limits, but he has a path. The Holy Quran lays a great emphasis on what it calls the Straight Path, which is an unambiguous path before man. Man is not constrained by stages so as to be forced to stop at every stage in his journey. Instead, there is an orbit in which he should move. This is the orbit of human perfection which is different from those of the animals. This means the movement in a specified orbit is orderly, not haphazard.
Part of a series: Nahjul-Balaghah with Commentary by Martyr Ayatollah Murtaza Mutahhari
Source: Shafaqna English