Our Troubled Time
Getting Perspective as a Muslim
Farhan Shah, Muslim Process Philosopher
The pandemic is a crisis for all of us: Muslims, Jews, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, and Naturalists. It is also an opportunity to get perspective, reflecting upon how we want to live our lives during and after the pandemic. We will do this in different ways. I offer a way that makes sense to me as a Muslim, trustful that my fellow Muslims and many others are doing the same.
Many of my Muslim sisters and brothers struggle with how to understand God in all of this. To be sure, many among them are deeply shaped by classical theism with its idea that the future is completely known in advance by God and that everything that happens is God's will. They struggle with the implications of this for how we might understand the pandemic. Is it a test from God? Is it punishment? However other Muslims, and I am among them, are influenced by more open and relational perspectives - perspectives that are, to our way of thinking more faithful to the Qur'an with its emphasis on human freedom and the potential for human co-creativity with God. We do not see the pandemic as a test, or as punishment, or even as something foreknown by God. Differences and debates about God will continue in Islam into the foreseeable future, during and after the pandemic. But we all agree that, however we think about God, we have responsibilities to respond with compassion to the plights of the world. I focus on these responsibilities.
In the face of the pandemic, and with the many problems faced by the world at large – it seems to me we have a very high existential calling, itself inescapable: freedom and responsibility. By freedom I mean the ability of decision-making: choosing among diverse possibilities in the immediacy of the moment. As human beings, decision-making is part of our very make-up. From the day we are born, we carry within our bodies potentials for empathy and hatred, creativity and blind repetition, cooperation and cruelty, respect and callousness, good and evil. We feel these potentials within our very being as promptings, impulses and urges, as affective lures.
But, it is we ourselves, not the urges, who actualize the urges – some of them so destructive and others so life enhancing. Indeed, we actualize these potentials, again and again, individually and well as collectively. The future does not come to us as a settled event, inflexible and incapable of change and process. It is a very fact that we, both men and women, help create the future, moment by moment, by the decisions we make, in our private and institutional capacity. Sometimes we make terrible decisions at great cost to others, ourselves, and the earth. And sometimes we make wonderful decisions, adding elements of beauty and love that did not exist beforehand. We can be agents of terror or inclusive love. Either way we are, to a large degree, free, and must assume responsibility. As existentially free agents, living in a dynamic universe, our calling is not simply to be free. Rather, our calling is to create futures that are good for both women and men; that is, to actively and courageously support an ideas and endeavours that might help people create ecological civilizations, that is, multi-cultural, interfaith communities that are creative, compassionate, participatory, ecologically wise, and spiritually enjoyable, with no one left behind. It is these kinds of horizons - horizons of creativity, freedom and compassion - that we need to open, in a spirit of interdependence but without effacing our unique individualities into a Whole.
According to the Muslim philosopher Muhammad Iqbal and the Quranic scripture, this is what it means to be a human being; it is to authentically accept and live from God's future callings and lures to impregnate the world with inclusive love and goodness and expand the range of future possibilities for both human and non-human communities of life. In the endeavour to create a futures where we willingly seek to live lightly on earth and gently with others for the sake of more hospitable world and creative world, we become God's co-workers, regardless of our faith, or no-faith. We may live in Asia, Africa, Latin America, Europe, North America, or Oceania. We may be young or old or in-between. We begin where we can begin, with the only day we have today: today. With the courage to develop a healthy antitode to a kind of reductive anthropocentrism and the dominant model of economy, imagining the earth as a utility, designed for human to use and pleasure - with the rest of the creation as a backdrop - there is indeed ground for realistic hope. As agents of the possible - imagining novel possibilities - and as we seek to fulfill this vocation, we are beckoned by the ideal of Beauty: harmony and intensity of experience. This ideal of Beauty, and its inwardly felt beckoning toward the fullness of life for each and all, is how Deep Listeninig of the universe - God - is present continuously in life on earth and the entirety of the cosmos.
Many of my Muslim sisters and brothers struggle with how to understand God in all of this. To be sure, many among them are deeply shaped by classical theism with its idea that the future is completely known in advance by God and that everything that happens is God's will. They struggle with the implications of this for how we might understand the pandemic. Is it a test from God? Is it punishment? However other Muslims, and I am among them, are influenced by more open and relational perspectives - perspectives that are, to our way of thinking more faithful to the Qur'an with its emphasis on human freedom and the potential for human co-creativity with God. We do not see the pandemic as a test, or as punishment, or even as something foreknown by God. Differences and debates about God will continue in Islam into the foreseeable future, during and after the pandemic. But we all agree that, however we think about God, we have responsibilities to respond with compassion to the plights of the world. I focus on these responsibilities.
In the face of the pandemic, and with the many problems faced by the world at large – it seems to me we have a very high existential calling, itself inescapable: freedom and responsibility. By freedom I mean the ability of decision-making: choosing among diverse possibilities in the immediacy of the moment. As human beings, decision-making is part of our very make-up. From the day we are born, we carry within our bodies potentials for empathy and hatred, creativity and blind repetition, cooperation and cruelty, respect and callousness, good and evil. We feel these potentials within our very being as promptings, impulses and urges, as affective lures.
But, it is we ourselves, not the urges, who actualize the urges – some of them so destructive and others so life enhancing. Indeed, we actualize these potentials, again and again, individually and well as collectively. The future does not come to us as a settled event, inflexible and incapable of change and process. It is a very fact that we, both men and women, help create the future, moment by moment, by the decisions we make, in our private and institutional capacity. Sometimes we make terrible decisions at great cost to others, ourselves, and the earth. And sometimes we make wonderful decisions, adding elements of beauty and love that did not exist beforehand. We can be agents of terror or inclusive love. Either way we are, to a large degree, free, and must assume responsibility. As existentially free agents, living in a dynamic universe, our calling is not simply to be free. Rather, our calling is to create futures that are good for both women and men; that is, to actively and courageously support an ideas and endeavours that might help people create ecological civilizations, that is, multi-cultural, interfaith communities that are creative, compassionate, participatory, ecologically wise, and spiritually enjoyable, with no one left behind. It is these kinds of horizons - horizons of creativity, freedom and compassion - that we need to open, in a spirit of interdependence but without effacing our unique individualities into a Whole.
According to the Muslim philosopher Muhammad Iqbal and the Quranic scripture, this is what it means to be a human being; it is to authentically accept and live from God's future callings and lures to impregnate the world with inclusive love and goodness and expand the range of future possibilities for both human and non-human communities of life. In the endeavour to create a futures where we willingly seek to live lightly on earth and gently with others for the sake of more hospitable world and creative world, we become God's co-workers, regardless of our faith, or no-faith. We may live in Asia, Africa, Latin America, Europe, North America, or Oceania. We may be young or old or in-between. We begin where we can begin, with the only day we have today: today. With the courage to develop a healthy antitode to a kind of reductive anthropocentrism and the dominant model of economy, imagining the earth as a utility, designed for human to use and pleasure - with the rest of the creation as a backdrop - there is indeed ground for realistic hope. As agents of the possible - imagining novel possibilities - and as we seek to fulfill this vocation, we are beckoned by the ideal of Beauty: harmony and intensity of experience. This ideal of Beauty, and its inwardly felt beckoning toward the fullness of life for each and all, is how Deep Listeninig of the universe - God - is present continuously in life on earth and the entirety of the cosmos.