Bediuzzaman Said Nursi said, “I will demonstrate to the world that the Qur’an is a spiritual sun that shall never set and shall never be extinguished.” Thus his voluminous work, The Risala-e-Nur Collection, sets out to do just that. It expounds the truths of the Qur’an and shows that they can stand up to the scrutiny of science and logic, which is often used to discredit religion and Said Nursi invites his readers to reflect on the world around.
Bediuzzaman Said Nursi
What is the Risale-i Nur?
The Risale-i Nur collection is a six-thousand-page commentary on the Quran written by Bediuzzaman Said Nursi in accordance with the mentality of the age. Since in our age faith and Islam have been the objects of the attacks launched in the name of so called science and logic, Bediuzaman Said Nursi therefore concentrated in the Risale-i Nur on proving the truths of faith in conformity with modern science through rational proofs and evidence, and by decribing the miraculous aspects of the Quran that relate primarily to our century. This collection now has millions of readers both in and outside of Turkey. Thanks to the Risale-i Nur, the Turks managed to maintain their religion despite the most despotic regimes of the past decades. Although its author faced unbearable persecution, imprisonment, and exile, while no effort was spared to put an end to his service to faith, he was able to complete his writings compromising the Risale-i Nur and raise a vast group of believers who courageously opposed the oppression and preserved the dominance of Islam in the country.
Bediuzzaman understood an essential cause of the decline of the Islamic world to be weakening of the very foundations of belief. This weakening, together with the unprecedented attacks on those foundations in the 19th and 20th centuries carried out by materialists, atheists and others in the name of science and progress, led him to realize that the urgent and over-riding need was to strengthen, and even to save, belief. What was needed was to expend all efforts to reconstruct the edifice of Islam from its foundations, belief, and to answer at that level those attacks with a ‘manevi jihad’ or ‘jihad of the of the word.’
Thus, in exile, Bediuzzaman wrote a body of work, the Risale-i Nur, that would explain and expound the basic tenets of belief, the truths of the Quran, to modern man. His method was to analyse both belief and unbelief and to demonstrate through clearly reasoned arguments that not only is it possible, by following the method of the Quran, to prove rationally all the truths are the only rational explanation of existance, man and the universe.
Bediuzzaman thus demonstrated in the form of easily understood stories, comparisons, explanations, and reasoned proofs that, rather than the truth of religion being incompatible with the findings of modern science, the materialist interpretation of those findings is irrational and absurd. Indeed, Bediuzzaman proved in the Risale-i Nur that science’s breathtaking discoveries of the universe’s functioning corroborate and reinforce the truths of religion.
The imortance of the Risale-i Nur cannot be overestimated, for through it Bediuzzaman Said Nursi played a major role in preserving and revitalizing the Islamic faith in Turkey in the very darkest days of her history. And indeed its role has continued to increase in importance to the present day. But further to this, the Risale-i Nur is uniquely fitted to address not only all Muslims but indeed all mankind for several reasons. First it is written in accordance with modern man’s mentality, a mentality that, whether Muslim or not, has been deeply inbued by materialist philosophy: it specifically answers all the questions, doubts and confusions that this causes. It answers too all the ‘why’s’ that mark the questioning mind of modern man.
Also, it explains the most profound matters of belief, which formerly only advanced scholars studied in detail, in such a way that everyone, even those to whom the subject is new, may understand and gain something without it causing any difficulties or harm.
A further reason is that in explaning the true nature and purposes of man and the universe, the Risale-i Nur shows that true happiness is only to be found in belief and knowledge of God, both in this world and the Hereafter. And it also points out the grevious pain and unhappiness that unbelief causes man’s spirit and conscience, which generally the misguided attempt to block out through heedlessness and escapism, so that anyone with any sense may take refuge in belief.
To conclude
The Holy Quran addresses the intellect as well as man’s other inner faculties. It directs man to consider the universe and functioning in order to learn its true nature and purposes as the creation and thus to learn the attributes of its Single Creator and his own duties as a creature. This, then, is the method that Bediuzzaman employed in the Risale-i Nur. He explained the true nature of the universe as signs of its Creator and demonstrated through clear arguments that when it is read as such all the fundamentals of beliefs may be proved rationally.
When this method is followed, a person attains a true belief that will be sound and firm enough to be withstand any doubts that may arise in the face of the subtle attacks of Materialism, Naturalism and atheism, or the materialist approach to scientific advances. For all scientific and technological advances are merely the uncovering of the workings of the cosmos. When the cosmos is seen to be a vast and infinately complex and meaningful unified book describing its Single Author, rather that causing doubt and bewilderment, all these discoveries and advances reinforce belief, they deepen and expand it.
Man’s most fundamental need is the need for religion, the need to recognize and worship Almighty God with all His Most Beautiful Names and attributes, and to obey His laws; those manifest in the universe and those revealed through his prophets. In explaining the message of the Quran, Almighty God’s final Revealed Book, brought and perfectly expounded by His final Prophet, Muhammad (PBUH), and Islam, the complete and perfected religion for mankind, Bediuzzaman Said Nursi demonstrated in the Risale-i Nur that there is no contradiction or dichotomy between science and religion; rather, true progress and happiness for mankind can, and will, only be achieved in this way, the way of the Quran.
Here is powerful example of the Quran’s centrality in how Prof Jeffrey Lang came to know Islam and ultimately became Muslim.
“You can not simply read the Koran. Not if you take it seriously. You have to surrender to it already or you fight it. It attacks tenaciously, directly, and personally: it debases, criticizes, shames, and challenges. From the onset it draws a line of battle and I was on the other side.”
Why did he become a Muslim? His daughters would one day ask. He did not consider the choice that he made would affect generations to come. He is not a scholar of Islam. He writes about how it is to be Muslim from a Christian background, and being a minority in the Muslim community. He hesitated writing this book, because he felt it was too personal. He grew up catholic. He grew up with a mathematical and scientific mind. He gave up on being Catholic, long before he became Muslim. He became agnostic. He felt that being Catholic that it was not a logical religion. He felt that he alone created his existence. He began to feel mentally very lonely. He studied and received his doctorate in Mathematics, and yet he felt this was not enough.
He met a woman student who came to him for help. She was a Muslim woman, and she was covered head to toe. He felt that Muslim women were oppressed. His perception of Muslim women completely changed. She was a graduate student and teaching assistant and very capable of handling her students. He felt that there was a beauty and calmness about her.
He became very interested in religion and started going back to the Catholic church, but it did not satisfy his soul. Another Muslim student came into his life, His friend gave him a Quran.
He states:
“You can not simply read the Koran. Not if you take it seriously. You have to surrender to it already or you fight it. It attacks tenaciously, directly, and personally: it debases, criticizes, shames, and challenges. From the onset it draws a line of battle and I was on the other side.”
He was greatly affected by the Koran, and decided that he needed to talk to someone. He went to a mosque that was in the basement of a church. He had a great deal of emotional difficulty because the experience was too much for him to handle. He thought maybe he could walk and turn away. There were other men inside the mosque that persuaded him to stay and to embrace Islam. After a very touching moment with the Imam, he decided to convert to Islam. Emotionally, anyone who reads this first chapter, which I can inadequately convey, would very deeply be moved to tears.
His book is very dense reading. Every line is filled with conviction and knowledge which he wishes to convey. One can tell that he is extremely well read and full of self searching. He tells us that he understands what other new converts are struggling through.
He states that the Koran is the integral to the life of a Muslim. To the first Muslims, the language was spellbinding. The Koran sought to reform not to destroy the culture. It brought religion in a novel way. Religion must be more than an exercise in logic. Being a Muslim, there is no division between secular and spiritual, all of life is a sacred experience. The Koran is the revealed word of God.
God is addressing humanity. The Koran represents the mission of Muhammed pbuh as the restoration and the culmination of the Prophets.
The proof of Allah existence in within His signs:
“Do they not travel the land, so their hearts learn wisdom? (26:7)
Do they not examine the earth?(26:7) Do they nor look at the sky above them?”(50:6)
The implication within these questions that the evidence of this the truth of this message is to be found in the study of history, cultures and the nature among them.
“Read in the name of your Lord who created man from a tiny thing that clings….(96:1-5)”
Revealed the Prophet…Gabriel squeezed him and told him to read.
Reading and the ability to do so was considered to be a very divine gift. In reading the Quran, one finds beauty, coherence, transcendence and wisdom.
The Koran cannot be translated. It is only an interpretation when it is translated to another language and has no chronology in it like Bible. Islam also does not divide sacred and secular. Prophet Muhammed (pbuh) is a human instrument of who Allah speaks through.
The Koran is very scientific, for it describes many situations in nature from the fine particles that may be atom, to the development of child in the womb, the discovery how the earth rotates on its axis, to many other natural phenomenon, to the lives of bees and insects, to the expanding of the universe. What is amazing about the Koran that it explains these things in details.
The Koran states:
“He who created the Heavens one above the other. No fault you will see in the creation of the most Merciful. So turn your vision again. Do you see any flaw? Turn your vision and again your vision will turn back to you dazzled and defeated. (67:3-4)
God is more merciful than vindictive. He is more intent on saving more merciful than throwing into Hell fire.
What I feel that Lang writes in his book, is his experience and his profound amazement of what is in the Koran, from his personal view, with his scientific and mathematical background, that he found a great deal of logic in what impressed him in the Koran, what he could not find in the Catholicism that he grew up with.
Lang writes a great deal about Hadith in his book. Some of the Hadith he feels are more controversial than others. Some are more authentic than others. For new Muslims, this can be very confusing. The Koran does not delve into Prophet Muhammed inner personality. But when Prophet Muhammed feels concern over the Ummah, Allah tells the Prophet, that he is only the messenger. Throughout the Koran and the Hadith, Prophet Muhammed shines through. Lang states that to have had been the elect of God, to have won the love of his disciples so effortlessly, to have changed society and history to the extent that he did, he was surely much greater than merely the Arab ideal. Lang states that he must have possessed the kind of concern, compassion and spirituality that we can poorly approximate in ourselves. He was swift to dispense God’s will impartially, Prophet Muhammed was very concerned about justice. Even if his daughter Fatima were to steal, the same type of justice that was given to others, she would have to face it. The book describes how his early followers greatly loved the Prophet. Lang is very sincere in belief in the Prophet (pbuh). Critics have said of him that he is searching in the dark, about Islam, but I feel that he comes to the conclusion that he greatly believes in Prophet Muhammed’s mission and believes that Prophet Muhammed is a great mercy to mankind. I personally feel that those who become Muslim go through a questioning period and not blind faith. Many with great love and devotion accept Allah and his messenger with strong conviction. It takes time to get rid of all the baggage from the other faith that one has been brought up with.
There is so much inside this book, that it is so densely filled with information, that it is difficult to condense his ideas and thoughts into a short overview as this. In another chapter, he writes about the Ummah, and how Islam is a religion of equality, in everything you do within Hajj, within the prayer, in fasting, and other acts of worship, you do as a group effort. There is a great deal of unity in Islam. There is a great deal of responsibility to one’s parents and toward family. There are roles between husband and wife, although each of them have a different role to play, each are equal in the eyes of God. Each have the same amount of duty and worship towards God. There is a small segment on the relationship between husband and wife, our duties towards each other. Also one can divorce if one is not satisfied in the marriage, but it is something that Allah truly dislikes. He covers many different topics, that he struggles with, and what he has learned upon his journey.
He also talks about how the greater Jihad is not just going to war to fight for human rights but the struggle of righteousness within ourselves, which is the greater Jihad.
By Sr. Stephenie Bushra Khan – MuslimBridges Team
Source: http://www.muslimbridges.org/content/view/860/35/
You can purchase a copy of Jeffrey Lang’s Struggling to Surrender here. Your purchases support our Quran dawah project.
We at Al-Furqaan Foundation would like to wish Eid Mubarak to the Muslims across the globe.
Allahu akbar Allahu akbar Allahu akbar
Laa ilaha illa-llah
Allahu akbar Allahu akbar
Wa li-llahi-l-hamdAllah is Greatest; Allah is Supreme!
There is no absolute reality but Allah
And Allah is Greatest,
And to Him rises up all praise.
In conjunction with Eid ul Fitr, we present to you two new lectures courtesy of our education division, the Furqaan Institute of Quranic Education.
2. Approaching the Subject of the Mahdi
How do we Muslims of the 15th century Hijri understand the Prophet’s (SAW) words when he tells us of the Mahdi and the whole end of times scenario? On a blessed night of the past Ramadan, Shaykh Omar Baloch shared with us the attitude in which we should see this subject.
Watch the lecture here.
To enrich our reading of the Quran in the coming month of Ramadan, Al-Furqaan has embedded the summarized translation of Tafsir Ibn Kathir published by Darussalam on our website. Click here to browse the page. Produced below is a brief description of Tafsir Ibn Kathir:
Tafsîr Ibn Kathîr, by Isma’il bin ‘Amr bin Kathîr al-Dimashqî (d.774/1372) under the title Tafsîr al-Qur’ân al-Azîm, one of the better-known books on tafsîr, perhaps second to Tabarî, with more emphasis on soundness of reports, in particular rejection of all foreign influences such as isrâ’îlîyât, discussing the sanad of various reports often in detail, which makes it one of the more valuable books of tafsîr. Makes much use of tafsîr al-Qur’ân bi’l Qur’ân, referring a reader to other relevant ayat on the topic discussed. This book has been printed on various occasions (in 8 volumes) and an abridged version (mukhtasar) has been edited by Sâbûnî.
No English translation available.This book although of greatest importance to Muslims has been widely ignored by the orientalists. (description taken from islamic-awareness.org)
As Ramadan looms ahead, we would like to give the simple reminder that the Messenger (may Allah bless him and grant him peace) will complain to Allah on the Day of Judgment that his people neglected the Qur’an (Surah al-Furqan 25:30). Neglect of the Qur’an is of different levels, as Ibn al-Qayyim writes:
“The month of Ramadan is the one in which the Quran was sent down, a guidance for mankind, clear proofs for the guidance, the Criterion; so whoever amongst you witnesses this month, let him fast it.” (Surah al-Baqarah 2:185)
Ibn ‘Abbas narrates “that the Messenger of Allah (SAW) was the most generous person, and he would be at his most generous in Ramadan because Jibril would come to him every night and he would rehearse the Qur’an with him.” (Sahih al-Bukhari).
Ramadan is a time to reconnect with the Quran. We leave you with a lecture delivered by Shaykh Omar Baloch titled “Are You a Ramadan Mu’min?”
[pro-player type="mp3"]http://www.al-furqaan.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/omar-baloch_are-you-a-ramadhaan-mumin.mp3[/pro-player]
Courtesy of Columbus Dawah
by Mustafa Masih
We live in a time where many people conciously or subconsciously feel that the idea of hell, jahannam, is unfair. If Allah SWT loves His creation, they argue, why should he create Hellfire? How can a Merciful Creator justify punishing His creation?
To appease the anguish of imagining hellfire underneath our feet on the Day of Judgment, we conjure wishful thoughts of Allah as Al-Ghafur (Most Forgiving) and Al-Rahim (Most Merciful). We should take heed of the perished nations of the past as mentioned in the Quran for their transgressions.
The horrifying torment of Hellfire as depicted in the Quran lends credence to the adage that human beings are much more motivated by the stick than the carrot. How can there be a moral society in which the people have no concept of being accountable for what they do? It is due to the same reason that an average person would not speed on the highway for fear of getting a traffic ticket.
Thus it is pivotal for us to be reminded of hellfire to stay on the straight path. To forget the reality of the stick is like being neglectful of cops waiting to catch a driver speeding.
Fear and Hope
Having said this, it is not to deny that Allah is All Merciful. The believer should always live between fear and hope (bayna al-khauf wa al-raja). When you are blessed with good health, you should instill fear of incurring the wrath of Allah SWT. When you are in hardship, have hope, raja‘, and bear patiently for it is merely a trial from Allah the All Merciful. When you are poor, know that Allah is the one Who provides whom He Wills. When you are rich, do not forget that Allah knows what you spend with your wealth.
This life, this dunya, is no more real than the Hereafter. The human soul, the ruh or nafs, is a most indestructible creation of Allah SWT that no nuclear weapons can annihilate. The great Imam Al-Ghazali, left a poem under his pillow upon his death in which the first lines read “I was a shell. Now the shell is open and I am free.” Know that the real self is not our body. If a person loses his hand, it does not mean the person lost his self. His self is his soul, the ruh.
Just as This Life is Real, the Next Life is Even More Real
As the Prophet SAW said, the bodies of people in Hellfire will be made bigger. Why? So that they can feel more pain. This is the reality of it. Yet we should not understand this as meaning there is no mercy from Allah SWT. His Mercy is everywhere and as Imam Ibn Taymiyyah states, the Mercy of Allah SWT is felt even in hellfire because the person is given the ability to tolerate this punishment.
Punishment in the Grave
This raises the question of why should there also be punishment in the grave. The punishment in the grave is given as a kafarah (atonement) so that perhaps it will put you in a better more pure state before you stand in front of Allah SWT on the Day of Judgment.
Another reason is that it is the angels who will question you in the grave. Whereas in the Hereafter Allah SWT is the one who will question you. The angels can only see what you do externally, the Shari’ah aspect, and question those acts but they do not know what is in your heart. Only Allah will take you into account for that in the Hereafter.
The Hellfire
After the stage of barzakh in the grave, a person proceeds to walk on the sirat, the straight path. Underneath this path is the hellfire, a fire that is alive, constantly trying to reach and grab every single person into its pit. The person’s first test is salat, the obligatory prayers. If its rights were not fulfilled, he goes falls down into hellfire and takes the punishment. Then the person will be brought to the beginning and start again. Then, perhaps the person participated in riba, and that is haram, he falls down again. This cycle is repeated until Jannah is reached.
For such a horrifying punishment, keep in mind that Allah SWT does not put us in a situation that is unfair for us. We are between His Justice and His Mercy. For the people in Hellfire, the mercy of Allah SWT is that they can bear the punishment. In fact, we don’t even deserve Jannah for it is only by the Mercy of Allah that He grants us Jannah insha Allah. Therefore, we ask for Allah’s Forgiveness because He is Al-Ghafurur Rahim.
In the hellfire, we will neither be dead nor alive. This is mentioned in Surah Al-A’la, “Wherein he will neither die nor remain alive.” The reality of hell fire and jannah is something no human being has full comprehension, not even the Prophet SAW.
Our knowledge of the Hereafter is merely a taste of its reality. It is analogous to the guest who is first given an appetizer as he enters the host’s home. Everything we know of the hereafter, is like this appetizer. The real delight of Jannah and torment of Jahannam cannot be comprehended in this physical world. For example, the people in the hellfire will have their skin burnt and then the skin comes back. This is only something we can imagine. The point you should understand is that Allah is saying verily His punishment is severe indeed.
Note that when Allah mentions in the Qur’an the delight of Jannah, it is matched by mentioning the opposite, Jahannam. Both of these realities have to be kept in mind.
What About Those Who Do Not Know the Truth?
In the aqidah of Ahlus Sunnah Wal Jamaah, we believe that Allah will not punish anyone until He sends them a messenger. It is the justice of Allah SWT to not punish who the message did not reach them. This is mentioned in the beginning of Surah Yasin for example. We cannot say anything about the people that did not receive the message in our aqidah. What is clear is the warning for those who the message reached.
The condition of those who did not receive the message is like the narrative of Luqman Al-Hakim. No messenger reached and no book of Allah reached Luqman The Wise. It was from his own fitrah, his human nature, to come to the conclusion that there must be Allah. We believe it is the natural predisposition of human beings to know of a Supreme Being just like we feel hungry when we don’t eat. A person with good fitrah knows thath this whole vast gigantic universe did not come by accident. It is in this light how Luqman advised his son, “O my dear son, do not associate partners with Allah, because this is the greatest oppression.” It is the ultimate denial of your master.
There is no way to determine who the message did not reach. For these people, there has to be some element of tauhid, some belief in their hearts of the Lord of the heavens and the earth. However this should not be our preoccupation. We should be concerned about our own state of iman. It is sufficient to know that Allah will not punish whom the message did not reach. We can merely say that as far the Shariah is concerned, the person died as a non-Muslim. Whether he believes in Allah in his heart, that is a matter for Allah to judge.
Injustice
Let’s say a Muslim is in hellfire for stealing. And some non-muslim is also there for committing the exact crime. In this case, the punishment for both of us is the same. The treatment from Allah for the same sin is the same punishment.
Is this unjust? How do human beings know what is just and unjust? We know justice not by experiencing justice, but through experiencing injustice and vice versa. Since we have established above that everyone is treated with the same punishment for the same crime,.the issue of justice versus injustice is a false dichotomy.
In surah al-Bayyinah, Allah SWT says we are created to be exclusive servants of Him. In addition, we are to establish regular prayer and give zakat. This is the pure servant. After that, Allah SWT mentions hellfire for the people who do deny His signs. For hellfire, the description is khalidina fiha (they will dwell therein). In the next ayah, Allah describes jannah as khalidina fiha abada (they will dwell therein forever). So Allah does not attribute hellfire with “abada” (forever) as is attributed to for jannah. In addition, the Prophet SAW says whoever has a mustard seed of iman, he will come out of hellfire and will enter jannah.
The common denominator of people in hellfire is that they have lost their humanity. Allah SWT describes in Surah Al-Maun the characteristics of those who denied the impending judgment. “Have you considered him who calls the judgment a lie?” When these people feel accountable to no one, their fitrah dies.
Fitrah and Gratitude
Talking about fitrah, there is a very subtle point in surah Luqman where Allah says “We gave Luqman al-hikmah (wisdom) so that he gives shukr (gratitude). This is how you tell whether a person has good fitrah. He does shukr to whoever does good to him. We observe that among the non-muslims, one of the qualities of those who convert to Islam is that they had good feelings towards their parents. Likewise for Luqman, he advises his son to have gratitude to his parents. This is human fitrah. People who have lost fitrah lose the feeling of gratitude to repay people’s kindness.
So as you grow older, your knowledge increases. However, if your fitrah is diluted, you cannot see the world as it is supposed to be seen despite the knowledge that you gain. If you have a clean heart, and you get the knowledge around you, you will see it in its reality.
Hence people with a corrupted fitrah cannot undertand tauhid (monotheism). Only with a pure fitrah can you see the Oneness of Allah. The urge of shukr is like how a child’s sense of shukr towards the mother. As he grows, he starts to have friends, relatives. and know the universe. When the urge of shukr is there, some of them start thanking the monkey, the cow, the sun and so on. This is all incomplete until the person recognizes that this whole universe is created by one Being. When we do things to filth our fitrah, we become deaf, dumb and blind as Allah mentions in Surah al-Baqarah. These people will not return because their fitrah is dead. Thus Allah says He seals their hearts (khatam Allahu ala qulubihim). They have hearts, but they can’t see with their heart.
The Heart is Dominant Over the Brain
If the brain is smart but the heart is jealous, the brain interprets everything according to that jealousy. The brain merely calculates what the hearts see. “They have hearts that have no understanding”. For them, good and bad is measured in terms of pleasure and pain. This is hedonism. The pop culture around us promulgates such an ethic of pain as bad and happiness as good.
When Allah says they have eyes that cannot see, it is referring to their hearts. Abu Jahl had clear eyesight, but his heart is the one that was blind. They are like animals. Rather, they are worse than animals. They have reached a point of no return. We have to be vigilant that we do not corrupt our soul with sin to the point of no return. This is the state of the soul of people in the global corridors of power to utter such statements as the lives of innocent Palestinians being akin to coackroaches who “we should just step on.” How can there be no hellfire for such people as these whose hearts cannot see? Clearly, Allah has set hellfire for such people of inhumanity.
The Punishment of Hellfire Purifies Your Sins
As for those who have not reached perfection that Allah SWT wanted, the hellfire for them is a source of purification. Even in fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence), we know that fire purifies. You take the skin of an animal, tan it, and it becomes pure. Thus, we are tormented in hellfire so that when we enter jannah, our hearts are like the purified ones. For example, there will be no idle talk in jannah, this is such a pure state of fitrah the average Muslim will attain after the “purification” of hellfire. Note, however, that hellfire is a most severe punishment that nobody can bear for even a moment.
Some ahadith point to the fact that the hellfire will ask when people are thrown in it, “Is there any more humans?” Jahannam will never be full. It will constantly ask Allah, “Is there more?” Then Allah puts His Foot in the hellfire, and the hellfire will say enough. Some ulama like Ibn Taymiyyah says this is the justice of Allah. Ibn Arabi has a similar opinion.
At that moment, the hellfire will be made full by this act of Allah. People with no iman will go into a state of non-existence. After all that punishment, like what Ibn Arabi says, maybe because of Allah’s mercy, he will put them in jannah. This is however not the popular opinion but so we know there is also this opinion and Allah knows best. Most ulama say the people of hellfire will be put into a state of non existence. There is also a third opinion which says hellfire is forever and jannah is forever. What is meant in this opinion is that the abodes of hellfire and paradise is forever but the people will either end up in Jannah or, as for the ones who still deny Allah, will cease to exist.
However, the essential message is that nobody will want to be in hellfire. The Hereafter is such that somebody who is suffering so much in this world, when Allah puts them in jannah, he will forget all of that suffering. When Allah puts a rich person in hellfire, he forgets all the luxury he had in this world.
Surah Al-Mulk begins with tabarakal lazi biyadihil mulk. So blessed is in whose hand is kingship. He has the ability to do all things. Here, qadr also means measurement. So Allah has measured everything, the qudrah of everything. The one who created death and created life. He created death before he created life. Because death is not a state of non-existence. Death is a state of existence in a different form. Like water heated into vapor.
He made life and death, to see who amongst you does the best deeds. The One who created the seven heavens one above another. You will never find in the creation of Allah any faults. Then Allah says, look into space, do you see any faults? And Allah says look again. Your eyes will come back tired, but you will not find fault in Allah’s creation.
The sky is dunya, these galaxies are all as-sama ad-dunya. Adna means closest, worthlest, smallest. Masabih is the bright starts etc. We made the starts hit the shaitan. Then Allah says those who deny their rabb, their caretaker, for them is the punishment of the hellfire. and what a bad returning place to go.
As they go down into the pit of the hellfire, you will be hearing the hellfire as if snatching you in. Why? Has no one come to warn you about this hellfire? You ignored, pretended it did not exist? Yes of course.
All it takes to get out of hellfire is only if we actually listened. If only we used our brain, we would have not been of the people of the hellfire. You did not listen to sincere advice. What Islam has to say is simply common sense. It is so much common sense, its like the analogy of when you are in a great palace, and you are sitting, waiting for your food. Someone is coming serving your food, everything is provided, would you deny there is a great owner of that palace?
In surah Ibrahim, in the last scene of the hellfire, when everyone is finally in hellfire, they will ask angels how to get out, they will try to escape, but not able to. They will then plead Allah, though that will not help. they will all gather together and see iblis (known as Lucifer in the Biblical tradition) in the hellfire. They say to iblis you are the one who’s the real culprit. This happens because when you are tormented in hellfire, you want to have someone to blame for such a punishment. So everyone assembles in front of iblis, and after everyone’s done everything, pleaded all they can, Iblis says, “Allah promised you a true promise, I also promised you but I can’t keep my promise. I had no power and control over you. I called you and you answered. I gave you waswasa. a thought. and you answered me. i have no control over you and you have no control over me. I do kufr, I deny you, reject you for all sins you did before.” Then Allah says “Indeed for the wrongdoers is a very severe punishment.” When all that it takes for you to avoid this is common sense.
You see everything has distance with Allah. Angels have fixed ranks before Allah. The sun can’t get closer to Allah. But Adam was given the choice. This is statement of Ibn Abbas, that Adam was given choice to come as close as he wanted with Allah. But it comes with a danger. That if you don’t struggle to get as close as you can to Allah, there is the danger of the opposite, Hellfire. This is the ni’mah that is given to no one. So you have this blessing, and you will be punished if you dont use this blessing right.
And at the end of the day, we are His property. To Him will we all return.
A group of brothers and sisters in Chicago, IL clean up the streets and call people to Islam in the process, but not without some struggles along the way.
Credit to WasatStudios
Artistic Imagery of the Qur’an: A Visual Translation of Surah Al-Fil (The Chapter of the Elephant)
by Khurram Murad
One: One member, should, first, make a presentation of the results of his study.
Two: The rest should then join in, further elaborating, correcting, modifying, raising questions, or providing answers.
Three: If all the members are required to study, then you may either designate beforehand who will do the presentation; this will result in better standards of presentation; this will keep everyone alert and working hard.
Four: It will always be useful if at least one member of the circle is more knowledgeable and has access to sources. He would, then, during the discussion, overcome any deficiencies and shortcomings in the original presentation. He may also set and steer the tone and direction of discussion.
Five: If one member who is learned in the Quran participates, he should not intervene from the beginning. Rather he should let the participants say what they want to say, and only then, gently correct them if they are wrong, or add to their knowledge. His method should be suggestive and interrogative rather than discursive.
Six: Towards the end, one member, preferably the leader or teacher, should always sum up the broad message of the passage, its main themes, its call to action.
By Abdal Hakim Murad
‘Action is the Life of all and if thou dost not Act, thou dost Nothing.’
(Gerrard Winstanley)
Before we consider the life-story of the British Muslim and Koranic translator, Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall, it is as well to recall that aspect of the practice of every believer without which there are only ashes: holiness of life. In the case of Pickthall, this was a luminous, steadily progressing reality which impressed all who came into contact with him. Even his unbelieving first biographer, Anne Fremantle, opined that ‘had he changed from evangelical or even from high church Anglicanism to the Roman faith, doubtless the machinery of sanctification would have by now been set to work.’ He was a man of discreet charity, the extent of whose generosity was only discovered after his death. He turned down lucrative and prestigious speaking tours and the pleasures of travel in favour of his last and, in his eyes, greatest project, acting as headmaster to Muslim boys in Hyderabad. He witnessed the dismemberment of his beloved Ottoman Caliphate while rejecting bitterness and calls for violent revenge, convinced that Allah’s verdict was just, and that in the circumstances of the age, Islam’s victory would come through changing an unjust world from within. Above all, he was a man who constantly kept Allah and His providence in mind.
Pickthall’s humility did not prevent him from taking a rightful pride in his ancestry, which he could trace back to a knight of William the Conqueror’s day, Sir Roger de Poictu, from whom his odd surname derives. The family, long settled in Cumberland, came south in Dutch William’s time, and Pickthall’s father Charles, an Anglican parson, was appointed to a living near Woodbridge in Suffolk. Charles’ wife, whom he married late in life, was Mary O’Brien, who despite her Irish name was a staunchly nonconformist daughter of Admiral Donat Henry O’Brien, a hero of the same Napoleonic war which brought Sheikh Abdullah Quilliam’s grandfather fame as master of Victory at Trafalgar. O’Brien, immortalised by Marryat in Masterman Ready, passed on some of his heroic impulses to his grandson Marmaduke, who throughout his life championed a rather Shavian ideal of the saint as warrior. It may be no coincidence that Pickthall, Quilliam and, before them, Lord Byron, who all found their vocation as rebellious lovers of the East, were the grandsons of naval heroes.
Marmaduke was born in 1875, and when his father died five years later the family sold the Suffolk rectory and moved to the capital. For the little boy the trauma of the exodus from a country idyll to a cold and cheerless house in London was a deep blow to the soul, and his later delight in the freedom of traditional life in the Middle East may have owed much to that early formative transition. The claustrophobia was only made worse when he entered Harrow, whose arcane rituals and fagging system he was later to send up in his novel Sir Limpidus. Friends were his only consolation: perhaps his closest was Winston Churchill.
Once the sloth and bullying of Harrow were behind him he was able to indulge a growing range of youthful passions. In the Jura he acquired his lifelong love of mountaineering, and in Wales and Ireland he learned Welsh and Gaelic. So remarkable a gift for languages impelled his teachers to put him forward for a Foreign Office vacancy; yet he failed the exam. On the rebound, as it were, he proposed to Muriel Smith, the girl who was to become his wife. She accepted, only to lose her betrothed for several years in one of the sudden picaresque changes of direction which were to mark his later life. Hoping to learn enough Arabic to earn him a consular job in Palestine, and with introductions in Jerusalem, Pickthall had sailed for Port Said. He was not yet eighteen years old.
The Orient came as a revelation. Later in life he wrote: ‘When I read The Arabian Nights I see the daily life of Damascus, Jerusalem, Aleppo, Cairo, and the other cities as I found it in the early nineties of last century. What struck me, even in its decay and poverty, was the joyousness of that life compared with anything that I had seen in Europe. The people seemed quite independent of our cares of life, our anxious clutching after wealth, our fear of death.’ He found a khoja to teach him more Arabic, and armed with a rapidly increasing fluency took ship for Jaffa, where, to the horror of European residents and missionaries, he donned native garb and disappeared into the depths of the Palestinian hinterland.
Some of his experiences in the twilight of that exotic world may be re-read in his travelogue, Oriental Encounters. He had found, as he explains, a world of freedom unimaginable to a public schoolboy raised on an almost idolatrous passion for The State. Most Palestinians never set eyes on a policeman, and lived for decades without engaging with government in any way. Islamic law was administered in its time-honoured fashion, by qadis who, with the exception of the Sahn and Ayasofya graduates in the cities, were local scholars. Villages chose their own headmen, or inherited them, and the same was true for the bedouin tribes. The population revered and loved the Sultan-Caliph in faraway Istanbul, but understood that it was not his place to interfere with their lives.
It was this freedom, as much as intellectual assent, which set Marmaduke on the long pilgrimage which was to lead him to Islam. He saw the Muslim world before Westernisation had contaminated the lives of the masses, and long before it had infected Muslim political thought and produced the modern vision of the Islamic State, with its ‘ideology’, its centralised bureaucracy, its secret police, its Pasdaran and its Basij. That totalitarian nightmare he would not have recognised as Muslim. The deep faith of the Levantine peasantry which so amazed him was sustained by the sincerity that can only come when men are free, not forced, in the practice of religion. For the state to compel compliance is to spread vice and disbelief; as the Arab proverb which he well-knew says: ‘If camel-dung were to be prohibited, people would seek it out.’
Throughout his life Pickthall saw Islam as radical freedom, a freedom from the encroachments of the State as much as from the claws of the ego. It also offered freedom from narrow fanaticism and sectarian bigotry. Late Ottoman Palestine was teeming with missionaries of every Christian sect, each convinced, in those pre-ecumenical days, of its own solitary rightness. He was appalled by the hate-filled rivalry of the sects, which, he thought, should at least be united in the land holy to their faith. But Christian Jerusalem was a maze of rival shrines and liturgies, where punches were frequently thrown in churches, while the Jerusalem of Islam was gloriously united under the Dome, the physical crown of the city, and of her complex history.
1897 found him in Damascus, the silent city of lanes, hidden rose-bowers, and walnut trees. It was in this deep peacefulness, resting from his adventures, that he worked methodically through the mysteries of Arabic grammar. He read poetry and history; but seemed drawn, irresistibly, to the Holy Qur’an. Initially led to it by curiosity, he soon came to suspect that he had unearthed the end of the Englishman’s eternal religious quest. The link was Thomas Traherne and Gerrard Winstanley, who, with their nature mysticism and insistence on personal freedom from an intrusive state or priesthood, had been his inspiration since his early teens. Now their words seemed to be bearing fruit.
Winstanley is an important key to understanding Pickthall’s thought. His 1652 masterpiece, Law of Freedom on a Platform, had been the manifesto of the Digger movement, the most radical offshoot of Leveller Protestantism. In this book, which deeply shaped the soul of the young Pickthall, Winstanley outlined what was to become the essence of Christian Socialism. The Diggers believed in the holiness of labour, coming by their name when, in 1649, Winstanley and a group of friends took over a plot of waste land at Walton-on-Thames, planting corn, beans and parsnips. This gesture was, Pickthall realised in Damascus, illegal in Christendom, but was precisely the Shari‘a principle of ihya al-mawat, gaining entitlement to land by reviving it after its ‘death by neglect’. The Diggers were held together, not by cowed obedience to a religious state, but by love among themselves, fired and purified by the dignity of labour.
It soon became clear to Pickthall that their Dissenting theology, which moved far beyond Calvin in its rejection of original sin and orthodox Trinitarian doctrine, and its emphasis on knowing God through closeness to nature, was precisely the message of Islam. This was a religion for autonomous communities, self-governing under God, each free to elect its own minister.
The God of the Diggers was a god of Reason – not the mechanical dictator whom Blake was to scorn as Urizen, ‘blind ignorance’, but reason as illuminated by God through the practice of the virtues and communion with nature. Superstition and priestcraft were abhorred. The Reason-God was immanent in creation, which, for Winstanley, as for Traherne and the Cambridge Platonists, was a blessed sign of God’s nearness. Winstanley had dipped into the Hermetic wisdom of the age, and, like the Quakers with whom we was for a time associated, absorbed something of the spirit of Islam through the Italian esoterists Ficino, Bruno, and Campanella. It was not for nothing that the first English rendering of the Basmala was made by an enthusiastic Quaker, George Keith, who translated it as ‘In the Name of the Lord the merciful Commiserator.’ Somewhat later, Robert Barclay, the greatest name in English Quaker theology, borrowed extensively from Ibn Tufayl. By all these channels Islam had enriched and uplifted English Dissent.
Another Digger theme which attracted Pickthall was their communitarian optimism. Winstanley had written: ‘In Cobham on the little heath our digging there goes on, And all our friends they live in love, as if they were but one.’ The brotherhood of Muslims which he observed in Syria, the respect between Sunnis and Shi‘is, and their indifference to class distinctions in their places of worship, seemed to be the living realisation of the dreams of English radicals at the time of Cromwell’s Commonwealth. This theme of Muslim brotherhood was to be fundamental in Pickthall’s later writing and preaching. No less important was the Digger rejection of traditional Church exclusivism. Irrespective of creed, they thought, all men were candidates for salvation. Christ’s sacrifice indicated, in its orthodox understanding, a meanness unworthy of a loving God, Who can surely accept the repentance of any faithful monotheist, whether or not he had been bathed in the blood of His son.
Oddly, then, Pickthall came home in Damascus. The picaresque adventures of his days in Palestine had given way to a serious spiritual and intellectual quest. Like Henry Stubbe, another Commonwealth dissident, he saw in Islam the fulfilment of the English dream of a reasonable and just religion, free of superstition and metaphysical mumbo-jumbo, and bearing fruit in a wonderful and joyful fellowship. As the New Statesman put it in 1930, reviewing his Koranic translation: ‘Mr Marmaduke Pickthall was always a great lover of Islam. When he became a Muslim it was regarded less as conversion than as self-discovery.’
If this was his Road to Damascus, why, then, did he hold back? Some have thought that the reason was his concern for the feelings of his aged mother, with her own Christian certainties. This was his later explanation:
‘The man who did not become a Muslim when he was nineteen years old because he was afraid that it would break his mother’s heart does not exist, I am sorry to say. The sad fact is that he was anxious to become a Muslim, forgetting all about his mother. It was his Muslim teacher – the Sheykh-ul-Ulema of the great mosque at Damascus – a noble and benign old man, to whom he one day mentioned his desire to become a Muslim, who reminded him of his duty to his mother and forbade him to profess Islam until he had consulted her. ‘No, my son,’ were his words, ‘wait until you are older, and have seen again your native land. You are alone among us as our boys are alone among the Christians. God knows how I should feel if any Christian teacher dealt with a son of mine otherwise than as I now deal with you.’ […] If he had become a Muslim at that time he would pretty certainly have repented it – quite apart from the unhappiness he would have caused his mother, which would have made him unhappy – because he had not thought and learnt enough about religion to be certain of his faith. It was only the romance and pageant of the East which then attracted him. He became a Muslim in real earnest twenty years after.’
He left Damascus, then, without Islam. But jobs were beckoning. The British Museum offered him a post on the basis of his knowledge of ancient Welsh and Irish, but he declined. He was offered the vice-consulship at the British consulate in Haifa, but this was withdrawn when it was learnt how young he was. His family, and his patient Muriel, summoned him home, and, penniless, he obeyed.
He travelled back slowly, considering the meaning of his steps. As he left the sun behind him, he seemed to leave courtesy and contentment as well. The Muslims were the happiest people on earth, never complaining even when faced with dire threats. The Christians among them were protected and privileged by the Capitulations. The Ottoman Balkans, under the sultans a place of refuge for victims of church wars, had been cruelly diminished by crusade and insurrection, prompted, in every case, from outside. He saw the Morea, the first land of Greek independence, in which a third of a million Muslims had been slaughtered by priests and peasants. The remaining corners of Ottoman Europe seemed overshadowed by a similar fate; but still the people smiled. It was the grace of rida.
Back in London, Pickthall recalled his romantic duties. He paced the pavement outside Muriel’s home in the time-honoured way, and battered down her parents’ resistance. They married in September 1896, the groom having fasted the previous day as a mark of respect for what he still considered a sacrament of the Church. Then he bore her swiftly away to Geneva, partly for the skiing, and partly, too, to associate with the literary circles which Pickthall admired.
During his sojourn in the dour Calvinist capital, Pickthall honed the skills which would make him one of the world’s most distinguished exponents both of novel-writing, and of the still underdeveloped sport of skiing. He began a novel, and kept a diary, in which, despite his youth, his mature descriptive gift is already evident. He wrote of
‘a pearly mist delicately flushed from the sunset, on lake and mountains. The twin sails of a barque and the hull itself seemed motionless, yet were surely slipping past the piers. There was something remote about the whole scene, or so it appeared to me. I was able to separate myself from the landscape: to stand back, as it were, and admire it as one admires a fine painting. I crossed a bridge: starless night on the one hand: dying day on the other. There was a mist about the city: a mist that glowed with a blue spirit light which burned everywhere or nowhere, out of which the yellow lights looked over their dancing semblance in the water watchfully, as from a citadel. The distance of the streets was inundated with stagnant grey light, from which the last warmth of light had just faded. As I penetrated the city it had no other light than that which the street lamps gave it, and the glow from a lamp-lit window here and there. But the sky was still pale and green, with a softness as of velvet. The great round globules of electric light, rising up on the bridge against illimitable space, and their lengthened reflections, caught the eye and blinded it.’
But this landscape concealed a tristesse, the local mood that Byron had dubbed ‘Lemancholy.’ By morning, a thick fog
‘hung over the city, like a veil on the face of a plain woman, hiding blemishes and defects, softening all hardness of outline, soothing with the suggestion of a non-existent beauty. It is a law of nature, as it is of art, that half-revelation is more attractive than nakedness. Unhappily there is another law which forbids a man to rest content until he has stripped his ideal and beheld it naked. Hence the end of most men’s dreams is disappointment. And this disappointment is proportionate to what the world calls success.’
By the shores of Lake Leman, then, the novelist-in-waiting acquired his love of light, which later became one of the strengths and hallmarks of his mature prose. Here, too, he developed that sense of the fragility, even the unreality, of observed nature, and the superficial nature of man’s passage upon it, which enrich his novels, and increased the readiness of his heart for Islam. In all these ways, his writing mirrored the sensitivity of the paintings of his great fellow-converts, Ivan Agueli, and Etienne Dinet. Agueli’s tableaux have a Sibelian sense of misty timelessless; while Dinet’s exuberant Algerian and Meccan paintings recall the Muslim sense that God is present in our daily joys: the utter ubiquity of the qibla. Pickthall’s novels, at their best, resemble a marriage of the two styles, just as he found in Islamic faith the ideal which he had sought in Christianity: a medieval liturgy combined with a low ecclesiology, the hieratic dignity of Laud invigorated by the social passions of Dissent.
On the surface, however, his religious needs seemed to be satisfied by an increasingly high Anglicanism. He frequently fasted and took communion, and insisted (to the annoyance of his chapelbound in-laws) on the truth of the Apostolic Succession. Behind this, however, his notebooks indicate a robust willingness to accept and face doubts, and even a solid cynicism about the ultimate truth of God; he wrestled with these difficulties, seeking help in the secular philosophy of the day, eventually to emerge, as al-Ghazali had done, a stronger man.
Rare is the secular soul that can produce true literature; and Pickthall’s youthful agonies over faith energise the first of his writings to see print: his short stories ‘Monsieur le Président’ and ‘The Word of an Englishman’, both published in 1898. The novel he had begun in Switzerland was never published: it is simple juvenilia, a laboratory experiment that in print would have done him no good at all. Sadly, his first published novel, All Fools, was little better, and contained morally problematic passages which were to saddle him in later years with the reputation of a libertine. Even his mother was disturbed by the most offending passage in the book, which used the word ‘stays’, an unmentionable item of Victorian underwear. The Anglican Bishop of Jerusalem, to whom Pickthall unwisely sent a copy, was similarly agitated, and the young novelist lost many friends. Soon he bought up the unsold copies, and had them destroyed.
But by then he had already written much of the novel that was to catapult him to fame as one of the bestselling English novelists of the day: Said the Fisherman. This was published by Methuen in 1903, to spectacularly favourable reviews. A blizzard of fan-mail settled on his doormat. One especially pleasant letter came from H.G. Wells, who wrote, ‘I wish that I could feel as certain about my own work as I do of yours, that it will be alive and interesting people fifty years from now.’ Academics such as Granville Browne heaped praises upon it for its accurate portrayal of Arab life. In later years, Pickthall acknowledged that the novel’s focus on the less attractive aspects of the Arab personality which he had encountered in Palestine could never make the book popular among Arabs themselves; but even after his conversion, he insisted that the novelist’s mission was not to propagandise, but to tease out every aspect of the human personality, whether good or bad. As with his great harem novel, Veiled Women, he was concerned to be true to his perceptions; he would document English and Oriental life as he found it, not as he or others would wish it to be. The greatness of the Oriental vision would in this way shine through all the brighter.
His next novel returned him to England. Enid is the first of his celebrated Suffolk tales, reminiscent in some respects of the writings of the Powys brothers. It was followed by The House of Islam, which he wrote while nursing his mother in her final illness, and at a time when his life was saddened by the growing realisation that he would never have children. The novel is unsteady and still immature: still only in his twenties, Pickthall could manage the comic scenes of Said the Fisherman, but could not fully sustain the grave, tragic theme which he chose for The House, which described the anguish of a Muslim compelled to take his sick daughter to a Western Christian doctor when traditional remedies had failed.
This productive but sober period of his life ended in 1907. An invitation to St James’s Palace to meet the wife of Captain Machell, advisor to the Egyptian Prime Minister Mustafa Fahmi Pasha, began with a discussion of his books, and led to an invitation to Alexandria.
Pickthall accepted with alacrity, and soon was back in his beloved East. In native dress again, he travelled through the countryside, marvelling at the mawlid of al-Sayyid al-Badawi in Tanta, and immersing himself in Arab ways. The result was a series of short stories and his novel Children of the Nile. It also offered an opportunity to help his friend James Hanauer, the Anglican chaplain at Damascus, edit his anthology of Muslim, Christian and Jewish tales, Folklore of the Holy Land.
1908 brought intimations of the collapse of the old world. At first, the Young Turk revolution seemed to presage a renewed time of hope for the Empire. Pickthall welcomed the idealistic revolutionaries, imagining that they would hold the empire together better than the old Sultan, with his secretive ways. Here, perhaps, is the essence of his apparent remoteness towards Sheikh Abdullah Quilliam. Quilliam had been a confidant of Abdul Hamid, ‘the Sultan’s Englishman’, his private advisor and his emissary on sensitive missions to the Balkans. Quilliam knew the Sultan as Pickthall never did, and must have felt that his opposition to the Young Turk movement was fully vindicated by the disasters of the Balkan War of 1912, when the Empire lost almost all her remaining European territories to vengeful Christians. More calamitous still was the Unionist decision to cast in its lot with Prussian militarism during the First World War. Pickthall, too, became anxious for Turkey, seeing that the old British policy of upholding the integrity of the Ottoman Empire, which had begun even before Britain intervened on Turkey’s side in the Crimean War, and had been reinforced by Disraeli’s anti-Russian strategy, was steadily disintegrating in the face of Young Turk enthusiasm for Germany.
Coup and counter-coup let much gifted Osmanli blood. The Arabs and the Balkan Muslims, who had previously looked up to the Turks for political and religious leadership, began to wonder whether they should not heed the mermaid calls of the European Powers, and press for autonomy or outright independence from the Porte. Behind the agitation was, on the one hand, the traditional British fear that, in the words of Sir Mark Sykes, ‘the collapse of the Ottoman Empire would be a frightful disaster to us.’ On the other were ranged the powers of bloodsucking French banks, Gladstonian Christian Islamophobia, and a vicious pan-Slavism bankrolled from the darker recesses of Moscow’s bureaucracy.
Sheikh Abdullah Quilliam, that undying Empire loyalist, fired off a hot broadside of polemic:
‘List, ye Czar of “Russia’s all,”
Hark! The sound of Freedom’s call,
Chanting in triumphant staves,
“Perish tyrants! Perish knaves!”’
Like Pickthall, he knew that the integrity of the traditional free lands of Islam was threatened not by internal weakness so much as by the Russian system of government, which, as Pickthall saw, ‘must have war. War is a necessity of its existence, for an era of peace would inevitably bring to pass the revolution which has long been brewing.’ The collapse of the Ottoman Empire, he knew, would plunge the region into disorder for an age. He had no confidence in the ability of Arab or Balkan peoples to recreate the free and stable space which the Ottomans, at their best, had supplied, and he lamented the Foreign Office’s change of heart. ‘An independent Turkey,’ he opined, ‘was regarded by our older, better-educated statesmen as just as necessary […] as a safety-valve is to a steam-engine: do away with it – the thing explodes.’ Lawrence and his Arab allies would soon demonstrate the truth of his predictions.
Pickthall was never fully at ease with the Unionists. In later years, he must frequently have wondered whether Quilliam’s insistent conservatism, now to be manifested in support for the Liberal party of Old Turks, was not the course of a wiser head. Quilliam had lived behind the scenes at Yildiz Palace, and knew Abdul Hamid as few others had done; and he had trusted, even loved the man. The Young Turks promised a new dawn for Islam, the Caliphate and the entire Muslim world; but their Turanian preoccupations were liable to alienate the very minorities that they claimed to emancipate from the dhimma rules. Quilliam had urged the Sultan to allow the Balkan Muslims to retain their arms; the Unionists had disarmed them; and the results were to be seen in the tragic refugee columns that escaped the religious pogroms of 1912 and 1913.
As the dismal news rolled in, it seemed as though Heaven had finally abandoned the Empire to its fate. In England, Pickthall campaigned vigorously on Turkey’s behalf, but could do nothing against the new Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, who was, as Granville Browne commented, ‘russophile, germanophobe, and anti-Islamic.’ He wrote to a Foreign Office official demanding to know whether the new arrangements in the Balkans could be considered to further the cause of peace, and received the following reply: ‘Yes, and I’ll tell you why. It is not generally known. But the Muslim population has been practically wiped out – 240,000 killed in Western Thrace alone – that clears the ground.’
While campaigning for the dying Empire, Pickthall found time for more novels. Larkmeadow, another Suffolk tale, appeared in 1911, and in 1913 he produced one of his masterpieces, Veiled Women. This follows Saïd in its realistic, often Zola-like depiction of Middle Eastern life, but now there is an undercurrent of polemic. Edwardian imperial convictions about the evils of slavery stood little chance against the charming reality of a Cairo harem, where concubinage was an option desired earnestly by many Circassian girls, whose slave-guardians thanked God for the ease of their lot. Lord Cromer, although generally contemptuous of Egyptian ways, made an exception in the case of slavery, an institution whose Islamic expression he was able grudgingly to respect:
‘It may be doubted (Cromer wrote) whether in the majority of cases the lot of slaves in Egypt is, in its material aspects, harder than, or even as hard as that of many domestic servants in Europe. Indeed, from one point of view, the Eastern slave is in a better position than the Western servant. The latter can be thrown out of employment at any moment. […] Cases are frequent of masters who would be glad to get rid of their slaves, but who are unable to do so because the latter will not accept the gift of liberty. A moral obligation, which is universally recognised, rests on all masters to support aged and infirm slaves till they die; this obligation is often onerous in the case of those who have inherited slaves from their parents or other relatives.’ (Lord Cromer, Modern Egypt, New York, 1908, II, 496-7.)
In its portrayal of the positive aspects of polygamy and slavery, Veiled Women was calculated to shock. It was, perhaps for this reason, one of his least popular works.
During the same period Pickthall contributed to the New Age, the fashionable literary magazine supported by Bernard Shaw, sharing its pages, almost weekly, with Ezra Pound, D.H. Lawrence, and G.K. Chesterton. As a literary figure, if not as a political advocate, he had arrived.
Veiled Women gave him the fare to Istanbul. Lodged with a German lady (Miss Kate, Turkicised to Misket Hanum) in a house in the quiet suburb of Erenköy, he gathered material for his dramatic but sad With the Turk in Wartime, and his The Early Hours, perhaps the greatest of his novels. He also penned a series of passionate essays, The Black Crusade. During this time, despite the Balkan massacres, Christians went unmolested in the great city. He recorded a familiar scene at the Orthodox church in Pera one Easter Friday: ‘four different factions fighting which was to carry the big Cross, and the Bishop hitting out right and left upon their craniums with his crozier; many people wounded, women in fits. The Turkish mounted police had to come in force to stop further bloodshed.’ It was a perfect image of the classical Ottoman self-understanding: without the Sultan-Caliph, the minorities would murder each other. The Second Balkan War, which saw the victorious Orthodox powers squabbling over the amputated limbs of Turkey, looked like a full vindication of this.
Pickthall returned to an England full of glee at the Christian victories. As a lover of Turkey, he was shattered by the mood of triumph. The Bishop of London held a service of intercession to pray for the victory of the Bulgarian army as it marched on Istanbul. Where, in all this, was Pickthall’s high Anglicanism?
It was the English mood of holy war which finally drove him from the faith of his fathers. He had always felt uncomfortable with those English hymns that curse the infidel. One particular source of irritation was Bishop Cleveland Coxe’s merry song:
‘Trump of the Lord! I hear it blow!
Forward the Cross; the world shall know
Jehovah’s arms against the foe;
Down shall the cursed Crescent go!
To arms! To arms!
God wills it so.’
And now, in a small Sussex village church, Pickthall heard a vicar hurling imprecations against the devilish Turk. The last straw was Charles Wesley’s hymn ‘For the Mahometans’:
‘O, may thy blood once sprinkled cry
For those who spurn Thy sprinkled blood:
Assert thy glorious Deity
Stretch out thine arm thou triune God
The Unitarian fiend expel
And chase his doctrines back to Hell.’
Pickthall thought of the Carnegie Report, which declared, of the Greek attack on Valona, that ‘in a century of repentance they could not expiate it.’ He thought of the forced conversions of the Pomaks in Bulgaria. He remembered the refugees in Istanbul, their lips removed as trophies by Christian soldiers. He remembered that no Muslim would ever sing a hymn against Jesus. He could stand no more. He left the church before the end of the service, and never again considered himself a Christian.
The political situation continued to worsen. Horrified by the new British policy, which seemed hell-bent on plunging the Balkans and the Middle East into chaos, the Young Turks strengthened their ties with Berlin. Meanwhile, the British government, driven by the same men who had allowed the destruction of Macedonia and Thrace, marched headlong towards war with the Central Powers. In August 1914, Winston Churchill seized two Turkish dreadnoughts, the Sultan Osman and the Reshadiye, which were under construction in a British yard. The outrage in Turkey was intense. Millions of pounds had been subscribed by ordinary Turks: women had even sold their hair for a few coppers and schoolboys made do with dry bread in order to add to the fund. But the ships were gone, and with them went Pickthall’s last hopes for a peaceful settlement. The hubris of nationalistic Europe, the tribal vanity which she pressed on the rest of the world as the sole path to human progress, was about to send millions of young men to their deaths. The trigger was the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a Serbian nationalist, on the streets of Sarajevo.
The war had broken Europe’s ideals, and the machines of Krupp lent new efficiency to her patriotic hatreds. The Hun reached the Marne, and English dowagers strangled their dachshunds with their own hands. It was no time to be a Turcophile. But Pickthall had found a new source of strength. The pride of human autonomy had been shown a lethal fantasy; and only God could provide succour. But where could He be found?
In 1913, Lady Evelyn Cobbold, the Sutherland heiress and traveller, tried to convert him during a dinner at Claridges, explaining that the waiters would do perfectly well as witnesses. He politely demurred; but he could marshal no argument against hers. What he had seen and described, she had lived. As an English Muslim woman familiar with the heart of Asia, she knew that his love for Islam was grounded in much more than a Pierre Loti style enjoyment of exotica. And so, on 29 November 1914, during a lecture on ‘Islam and Progress’, he took the plunge, joining countless others of his kind. From now on, his life would be lived in the light of the One God of Islam. Muriel followed him soon afterwards.
The war ground on, and Pickthall watched as the Turks trounced the assembled British and colonial troops at Gallipoli, only to be betrayed by the Arab uprising under Lawrence. Like Evelyn Cobbold, Pickthall despised Lawrence as a shallow romantic, given to unnatural passions and wild misjudgements. As he later wrote, reviewing the Seven Pillars of Wisdom:
‘He really thought the Arabs a more virile people than the Turks. He really thought them better qualified to govern. He really believed that the British Government would fulfil punctually all the promises made on its behalf. He really thought that it was love of freedom and his personal effort and example rather than the huge sums paid by the British authorities and the idea of looting Damascus, which made the Arabs zealous in rebellion.’
While Europeans bloodied each others’ noses, and encouraged the same behaviour in others, Pickthall began to define his position in the British Muslim community. The Liverpool congregation had lost its mosque in 1908, and Sheikh Abdullah had gone to ground in the Turkish town of Bostancik, to return as the mysterious Dr Henri Marcel Leon, translator of Mevlevi ghazals and author of a work on influenza. There was a prayer-room in Notting Hill, and an Islam Society, a Muslim Literary Society, and also the eccentric Anglo-Moghul mosque in Woking. In all these institutions Pickthall assumed the role of a natural leader. He had no patience with the Qadiani sect (‘I call myself a Sunni Muslim of the Hanafi school’, he said in self-definition), but when Khwaja Kamaluddin, suspected by many even then of Qadiani sympathies, returned to India in 1919, Pickthall preached the Friday sermons in Woking. ‘If there is one thing that turns your hair grey, it is preaching in Arabic’, he later remarked, perhaps recalling the caliph Umar II’s words that ‘mounting the pulpits, and fear of solecisms, have turned my hair grey.’ He preached in London as well, and in due course some of his khutbas found their way into print, drawing the attention of others in the Muslim world. In addition, he spent a year running an Islamic Information Bureau in Palace Street, London, which issued a weekly paper, The Muslim Outlook.
The Outlook was funded by Indian Muslims loyal to the Caliphate. The Khilafatist movement represented a dire threat to British rule in India, which had previously found the Muslims to be less inclined to the independence party than the Hindus. But the government’s policy was too much to bear. On January 18, 1918, Lloyd George had promised Istanbul and the Turkish-speaking areas of Thrace to post-war Turkey; but the reality turned out rather differently. Istanbul was placed under Allied occupation, and the bulk of Muslim Thrace was awarded to Greece. This latest case of Albion’s perfidy intensified Indian Muslim mistrust of British rule. Gandhi, too, encouraged many Hindus to support the Khilafat movement, and few Indians participated in the Raj’s official celebration of the end of the First World War. Instead, a million telegrams of complaint arrived at the Viceroy’s residence.
Pickthall was now at his most passionate:
‘Objectivity is much more common in the East than in the West; nations, like individuals, are there judged by their words, not by their own idea of their intentions or beliefs; and these inconsistencies, which no doubt look very trifling to a British politician, impress the Oriental as a foul injustice and the outcome of fanaticism. The East preserves our record, and reviews it as a whole. There is no end visible to the absurdities into which this mental deficiency of our rulers may lead us. […] Nothing is too extravagant to be believed in this connection, when flustered mediocrities are in the place of genius.’
This bitter alienation from British policy, which now placed him at the opposite pole from his erstwhile friend Churchill, opened the next chapter in Pickthall’s life. Passionate Khilafatists invited him to become editor of a great Indian newspaper, the Bombay Chronicle, and he accepted. In September 1919 he reached the Apollo Bunder, and immediately found himself carried away in the maelstrom of Indian life and politics. When he arrived, most of the Chronicle’s staff were on strike; within six months he had turned it around and doubled its circulation, through a judicious but firm advocacy of Indian evolution towards independence. The Government was incandescent, but could do little. However Pickthall, who became a close associate of Gandhi, supported the ulema’s rejection of violent resistance to British rule, and their opposition to the growing migration of Indian Muslims to independent Afghanistan. Non-violence and non-co-operation seemed the most promising means by which India would emerge as a strong and free nation. When the Muslim League made its appearance under the very secular figure of Jinnah, Pickthall joined the great bulk of India’s ulema in rejecting the idea of partition. India’s great Muslim millions were one family, and must never be divided. Only together could they complete the millennial work of converting the whole country to Islam.
So the Englishman became an Indian nationalist leader, fluent in Urdu, and attending dawn prayers in the mosque, dressed in Gandhian homespun adorned with the purple crescent of the Khilafatists. He wrote to a friend: ‘They expect me to be a sort of political leader as well as a newspaper editor. I have grown quite used to haranguing multitudes of anything from 5 to 30,000 people in the open air, although I hate it still as much as ever and inwardly am just as miserably shy.’ He also continued his Friday sermons, preaching at the great mosque of Bijapur and elsewhere.
In 1924, the Raj authorities found the Chronicle guilty of misreporting an incident in which Indian protesters had been killed. Crushing fines were imposed on the newspaper, and Pickthall resigned. His beloved Khilafatist movement folded in the same year, following Atatürk’s abolition of the ancient title. Although he effectively left political life, he was always remembered gratefully by Gandhi, who was later to write these words to his widow:
‘Your husband and I met often enough to grow to love each other and I found Mr. Pickthall a most amiable and deeply religious man. And although he was a convert he had nothing of the fanatic in him that most converts, no matter to what faith they are converted, betray in their speech and act. Mr. Pickthall seemed to me to live his faith unobtrusively.’
His job was gone, but Pickthall’s desire to serve Islam burned brighter than ever. He accepted the headmastership of a boy’s school in the domains of the Nizam of Hyderabad, outside the authority of British India. This princely state boasted a long association with British Muslims, and had been many years earlier the home of one of the most colourful characters in India: William Linnaeus Gardner (1770-1835), a convert who fought in the Nizam’s forces against the French in 1798 before setting up his own regiment of irregulars, Gardner’s Horse, and marrying his son to a niece of the Moghul emperor Akbar Shah.
In the 1920s, Hyderabad resembled a surviving fragment of Moghul brilliance, and the Nizam, the richest man in the world, was busy turning his capital into an oasis of culture and art. The appointment of the celebrated Pickthall would add a further jewel to his crown. Pickthall’s monarchist sympathies were aroused by the Nizam, who had made his lands the pride of India. ‘He lives like a dervish’, Pickthall reported, ‘and devotes his time to every detail of the Government.’ It was his enthusiasm and generosity that enabled Pickthall to launch the journal Islamic Culture, which he edited for ten years, and which continues to be published in the city as one of the Muslim world’s leading academic journals. Under his editorship, a wide range of Muslim and non-Muslim scholars published on a huge variety of topics. A regular contributor was Josef Horowitz, the great German orientalist. Another was Henri Leon, now writing as Harun Mustafa Leon, who contributed learned articles on early Arabic poetry and rhetoric, on Abbasid medical institutions, and a piece on ‘The Languages of Afghanistan.’
Pickthall also directed the school for Hyderabadi civil servants, encouraging their attendance at prayer, and teaching them the protocols to observe when moving among the burra sahibs of British India. Prayer featured largely in all his activities: as he wrote to a friend, after attending a conference on eduction:
‘I attended prayers at Tellycherry. The masjids are all built like Hindu temples. There are no minarets, and the azan is called from the ground, as the Wahhabis call it. When I mentioned this fact, the reforming party were much amused because the maulvis of Malabar are very far from being Wahhabis. I stopped the Conference proceedings at each hour of prayer, and everyone went to the adjacent mosque. I impressed upon the young leaders the necessity of being particularly strict in observance of the essential discipline of Islam.’
In the midst of this educational activity, he managed to find time to write. He wrote a (never to be published) Moghul novel, Dust and the Peacock Throne, in 1926, and the following year he composed his Madras lectures, published as The Cultural Side of Islam, which are still widely read in the Subcontinent. But from 1929 until 1931 the Nizam gave him leave-of-absence to enable him to complete his Koranic translation. As he noted: ‘All Muslim India seems to be possessed with the idea that I ought to translate the Qur’an into real English.’ He was anxious that this should be the most accurate, as well as the most literate, version of the Scripture. As well as mastering the classical Islamic sources, he travelled to Germany to consult with leading Orientalists, and studied the groundbreaking work of Nöldeke and Schwally, the Geschichte des Qorans, to which his notes frequently refer.
When the work was completed, Pickthall realised that it was unlikely to gain wide acceptance among Muslims unless approved by Al-Azhar, which, with the abolition of the Ottoman post of Shaykh al-Islam, had become the leading religious authority in the Muslim world. So to Egypt he went, only to discover that powerful sections of the ulema considered unlawful any attempt to render ‘the meanings of the Book’ into a language other than Arabic. The controversy soon broke, as Shaykh Muhammad Shakir wrote in the newspaper Al-Ahram that all who aided such a project would burn in Hell for evermore. The Shaykh recommended that Pickthall translate Tabari’s commentary instead, a work that would amount to at least one hundred volumes in English. Other ulema demanded that his translation be retranslated into Arabic, to see if it differed from the original in any respect, however small.
Pickthall published, in Islamic Culture, a long account of his battle with the Shaykh and the mentality which he represented. He included this reflection:
‘Many Egyptian Muslims were as surprised as I was at the extraordinary ignorance of present world conditions of men who claimed to be the thinking heads of the Islamic world – men who think that the Arabs are still ‘the patrons,’ and the non-Arabs their ‘freedmen’; who cannot see that the positions have become reversed, that the Arabs are no longer the fighters and the non-Arabs the stay-at-homes but it is the non-Arabs who at present bear the brunt of the Jihâd; that the problems of the non-Arabs are not identical with those of the Arabs; that translation of the Qur’ân is for the non-Arabs a necessity, which, of course, it is not for Arabs; men who cannot conceive that there are Muslims in India as learned and devout, as capable as judgment and as careful for the safety of Islam, as any to be found in Egypt.’
The battle was won when Pickthall addressed, in Arabic, a large gathering of the ulema, including Rashid Rida, explaining the current situation of Islam in the world, and the enormous possibilities for the spread of Islam among the English-speaking people. He won the argument entirely. The wiser heads of al-Azhar, recognising their inability to understand the situation of English speakers and the subtle urgencies of da‘wa, accepted his translation. The former Shaykh al-Azhar, al-Maraghi, who could see his sincerity and his erudition, offered him these parting words: ‘If you feel so strongly convinced that you are right, go on in God’s name in the way that is clear to you, and pay no heed to what any of us say.’
The translation duly appeared, in 1930, and was hailed by the Times Literary Supplement as ‘a great literary achievement.’ Avoiding both the Jacobean archaisms of Sale, and the baroque flourishes and expansions of Yusuf Ali (whose translation Pickthall regarded as too free), it was recognised as the best translation ever of the Book, and, indeed, as a monument in the history of translation. Unusually for a translation, it was further translated into several other languages, including Tagalog, Turkish and Portuguese.
Pickthall, now a revered religious leader in his own right, was often asked for Hanafi fatwas on difficult issues, and continued to preach. As such, he was asked by the Nizam to arrange the marriage of the heir to his throne to the daughter of the last Ottoman caliph, Princess Dürrüsehvar. The Ottoman exiles lived in France as pensioners of the Nizam, and thither Pickthall and the Hyderabad suite travelled. His knowledge of Ottoman and Moghul protocol allowed Pickthall to bring off this brilliant match, which was to be followed by an umra visit, his private hope being that the Caliphate, which he regarded as still by right vested in the House of Osman, might now pass to a Hyderabadi prince yet to be born, who would use the wealth of India and the prestige and holiness of the Caliphate to initiate a new dawn of independence and success for Islam. Delhi’s decision to absorb the Nizam’s domains into independent India made that impossible; but the princess devoted her life to good works, which continue today, even after her ninetieth birthday, which she celebrated in January 2004.
In 1935 Pickthall left Hyderabad. His school was flourishing, and he had forever to deny that he was the Fielding of E.M. Forster’s novel A Passage to India. (He knew Forster well, and the charge may not be without foundation.) He handed over Islamic Culture to the new editor, the Galician convert Muhammad Asad. He then returned to England, where he set up a new society for Islamic work, and delivered a series of lectures.
Despite this new activity, however, his health was failing, and he must have felt as Winstanley felt:
‘And here I end, having put my arm as far as my strength will go to advance righteousness. I have writ, I have acted, I have peace: and now I must wait to see the Spirit do his own work in the hearts of others and whether England shall be the first land, or some other, wherein truth shall sit down in triumph.’ (Gerrard Winstanley, A New Year’s Gift for the Parliament and Army, 1650.)
He died in a cottage in the West Country on May 19 1936, of coronary thrombosis, and was laid to rest in the Muslim cemetery at Brookwood. After his death, his wife cleared his desk, where he had been revising his Madras lectures the night before he died, and she found that the last lines he had written were from the Qur’an:
‘Whosoever surrendereth his purpose to Allah, while doing good, his reward is with his Lord, and there shall no fear come upon them, neither shall they grieve.’
BIBLIOGRAPHY
· Anne Jackson Fremantle, Loyal Enemy. London: Hutchinson, 1938.
· William Dalrymple, White Moghuls: Love and Betrayal in 18th century India. London: Viking, 2003.
· Peter Clark, Marmaduke Pickthall: British Muslim, London: Quartet, 1986.
· Peter Clark, ‘A man of two cities: Pickthall, Damascus, Hyderabad.’ Asian Affairs 25/iii (1994), 281-292.
· Marmaduke Pickthall, ‘In Memory of British Statesmanship’, The Muslim Outlook, Jan 22, 1920, pp.3-4.
· Marmaduke Pickthall, ‘Muslim Education’, Islamic Culture 1 (1927), 100-9.
· Marmaduke Pickthall, ‘Mr Yusuf Ali’s Translation of the Qur’an’, Islamic Culture IX (1935), 519-21.
· Marmaduke Pickthall, ‘Letters from Turkey,’ Islamic Culture XI (1937), 419-32.
· E.E. Speight, “Marmaduke Pickthall’, Islamic Culture X (July 1936), iii-vi.
· Muriel Pickthall, ‘A Great English Muslim.’ Islamic Culture XI (1937), 138-42.
· Omar Khalidi, ‘The Caliph’s Daughter’, Cornucopia 31 (2004), 34-38.
· Earl of Cromer, Modern Egypt, New York: Macmillan 1908.
· Andrew Bradstock (ed.), Winstanley and the Diggers. London: Frank Cass, 2000.
· Nabil Matar, Islam in Britain 1558-1685. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
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