God as Father, Mother and More

G

od as

F

ather-

M

other, and

M

ore

© 2009 Hartford Seminary.Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148 USA.

102

Blackwell Publishing LtdOxford, UKMUWOThe Muslim World0027-49090027-4909© 2009 Hartford SeminaryXXX

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

G

od

as

F

ather

-M

other

,

and

M

ore

T

he

M

uslim

W

orld

• V

olume

99

• J

anuary

2009

God as Father-Mother, and More

Nancy Roberts

Amman, Jordan

“My mercy encompasses all things.”

1

“The Lord is good to all, and His compassion is over all that He has made”

2

I

n his book entitled,

The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Story of Homecoming

, Henri Nouwen presents an extended reflection on Rembrandt’s famous painting by the same name. The painting is a vivid

depiction of “the prodigal son” described by Jesus in Luke 15:11–31 following his repentant return to the father he had so unceremoniously abandoned. Central to the painting is the aged father as he places his hands gently on his kneeling, exhausted son’s back and presses him to his bosom. Nouwen describes the profound effect this painting had on him personally the first time he saw it, as well as the further thoughts and insights that emerged when, about a year after this initial encounter, he had the opportunity to view the original at length in the St. Petersburg Hermitage. He tells us that the painting brought him in touch with “the ongoing yearning of the human spirit, the yearning for a final return, an unambiguous sense of safety, a lasting home.”

3

This ‘coming home’ is one which he describes as a “walking step by step toward the One who awaits me with open arms and wants to hold me in an eternal embrace.”

4

Through this painting, Nouwen hears an invitation to surrender himself unreservedly to the divine patriarch, as it were, emptied of worldly pride and rebellion and willing to receive undeserved grace and forgiveness. “I have to kneel before the Father,” he writes, “put my ears against his chest and listen, without interruption, to the heartbeat of God.”

5

At the same time, he realizes that the true and ultimate goal of the spiritual life, beyond identification with the repentant son in the painting and in the parable related by Jesus, is to emulate “the compassionate mother and father that is God,”

6

that is, to become

G

od as

F

ather-

M

other, and

M

ore

© 2009 Hartford Seminary.

103

one who himself offers solace, compassion and hope to others who are broken, confused and searching.

“What gives Rembrandt’s portrayal of the father such an irresistible power,” he says, “is that the most divine is captured in the most human.”

7

The father has suffered profoundly as a result of his son’s absence, neither able nor willing to coerce obedience, still less love and gratitude, on the part of his wayward offspring, and he waits in the hope of a change of heart and a return. Similarly, he says, “It is precisely the immensity of the divine love that is the source of the divine suffering. God, Creator of heaven and earth, has chosen to be, first and foremost, a Father.”

8

These reflections by Nouwen bring to mind a notable difference in theological predisposition, as it were, between Muslims, on one hand, and Jews and Christians, on the other. Muslims are, for the most part, steeped in the idea of God not being vulnerable to His creatures in any way.

9

As the Qur

’a

n puts it, “God does not stand in need of anything in all the worlds” (3:97), “God is self-sufficient . . .” (2:263), “Thy Sustainer alone is self-sufficient, limitless in His grace” (6:133), “God alone is self-sufficient, the One to whom all praise is due” (31:26). God’s self-sufficiency is affirmed through similar expressions in no less than eighteen different verses of the Qur

’a

n. I suspect that the Qur

’a

nic emphasis on this particular divine attribute is, at least in part, a response to, and check on, human hubris. Lest we be lured into believing that we could possibly put God in our debt in any way or exercise power over the Almighty, we are reminded that we hurt no one but ourselves should we choose to disbelieve God’s messengers and rebel against God’s commands. The first Qur

’a

nic verse quoted above, for example, is addressed to “those who deny the truth” (3:97). Similarly, the Qur

’a

n declares on the lips of Moses, who is addressing the children of Israel, “ ‘If you should ever deny the truth — you and whoever else lives on earth, all of you — [know that,] verily, God is indeed self-sufficient, ever to be praised!’” (14:8).

Christian and Jewish scriptures, by contrast, contain striking imagery suggesting that God is capable of suffering on human beings’ account. We read, for example, in the book of Genesis that when God “saw that the wickedness of men was great on the earth . . . the Lord was sorry that He had made man on the earth, and it grieved Him to His heart” (Genesis 6:6). Addressing the people of Israel, who have been grievously rebellious against His commands, God speaks of a heart-rending struggle within Himself, between the wrath His people have kindled in Him by their waywardness, and the compassion that He longs to demonstrate toward them, saying: “How can I give you up, O Ephraim! How can I hand you over, O Israel! How can I make you like Admah! How can I treat you like Zeboiim! My heart recoils within me, my compassion grows warm and tender. I will not execute my fierce anger,

T

he

M

uslim

W

orld

•

V

olume

99

•

J

anuary

2009

104


I will not again destroy Ephraim. For I am God and not man, the Holy One in your midst. And I will not come to destroy” (Hosea 11:8–9). Elsewhere, in response to the people of Israel’s saying, “My Lord has forgotten me,” God declares emphatically, “Can a woman forget her suckling child, that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you. Behold, I have graven you on the palms of my hands” (Isaiah 49:15–16). Later, speaking on God’s behalf in response to the hardness of heart he has encountered in the people of Israel, Jesus cries out, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, killing the prophets and stoning those who are sent to you! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not!” (Matthew 23:37). And of course, the ultimate image of divine suffering, unique and most precious to Christians, is that of Jesus’ suffering on the cross, which is seen as the suffering of God Himself: “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them” (II Corinthians 5:18).

In passages such as these we have images of a God who is, as Nouwen puts it, “the compassionate mother and father” who, like an earthly parent, is vulnerable to pain and suffering in response to his or her children’s actions, fortunes, and physical, emotional and spiritual states. As I see it, one key to accommodating such images theologically given the conception held in common by Jews, Christians and Muslims of God as omnipotent and self-sufficient, is that of divine freedom, or choice. As Nouwen puts it, “God . . . has chosen to be . . . a Father.” In other words, God’s manifestation as ‘Father’ need not diminish His omnipotence or self-sufficiency, since it is by His own free choice that He has taken on this manifestation with respect to His creatures.

There is a critical perspective which is often lost sight of and which, were it more accessible to people’s consciousness, could relieve untold, and unnecessary, conflict and tension between them, namely, that the Divine Ground of all being, while containing the personal within Itself, may ultimately be transpersonal, or meta-anthropomorphic, if you will. In other words, the personal forms in which the Ultimate manifests itself, although they are genuine manifestations of the Divine, may not contain or fully reveal His/Her/Its infinitude. If not, they need not be seen as mutually exclusive in the sense that, for example, God is either ‘Father’ or He is not. God is Father, and God is more than Father. God is Commander and Prohibiter, and God is more than Commander and Prohibiter.

Since only the Divine could be the origin of fatherhood and motherhood, how could they not be manifestations, however partial, of the Divine Being? The ninety-nine names of God scattered throughout the Qur

’a

n, foremost among which are

al-Rahman

and

al-Rahim

(the All Merciful and the All

G

od as

F

ather-

M

other, and

M

ore


105

Beneficent), virtually all reflect personal qualities, and most, if not all, of these, can be and are manifested in human beings to one degree or another.

10

Indeed, in keeping with the Christian notion of sanctification through the imitation of Christ, the great Sufi thinker Ibn

’

Arabi defined the mystical dimension of Islam as none other than ‘assuming the character traits of God . . .’ (

al-takhalluq bi khuluq ALLAH

).

11

In a

hadith qudsi

, that is, a saying communicated by inspiration to the Prophet but as though on the lips of the Divine, God states, “My mercy precedes My wrath.” Indeed, God’s mercy permeates the Qur

’a

n, with every one of its

surahs

(with the exception of one) preceded by the

basmalah

, that is, the formula

bismillah al-rahman al-rahim

, “in the name of God, the All Merciful, the All Beneficent.” The appellation

al-Rahman

for God occurs no fewer than 58 times in the Qur

’a

n,

al-Rahim

96 times, and the word

rahmah

(mercy) as attributed to God, 118 times. In Qur

’a

n 6:12 God instructs the Prophet: “Say, ‘Unto whom belong all that is in the heavens and on earth?’ Say, ‘Unto God, who has willed upon Himself the law of grace and mercy.’” Commenting on this verse, Mu

h

ammad Asad writes:

The expression ‘God has willed upon Himself as a law’ (

kataba

’

ala nafsihi

) occurs in the Qur

’a

n only twice — here and in verse 54 of this

surah

— and in both instances with reference to His grace and mercy (

rahmah

); none of the other divine attributes has been similarly described. This exceptional quality of God’s grace and mercy is further stressed in 7:156 — ‘My grace overspreads everything’ — and finds an echo in the authentic Tradition in which, according to the Prophet, God says of Himself, ‘Verily, My grace and mercy overstrips My wrath’ (Bukh

a

r

i

and Muslim).

12

Hence, given the intimate link between mercy and compassion on one hand, and fatherhood/motherhood on the other, it seems only natural to affirm that the father/mother image is uniquely suited to be one, if not the sole, epitomization of ‘God as Person.’ The widely unrecognized harmony between Islamic thinking about God and the Christian conception of God as Father may be seen in a striking passage from Martin Lings’ book,

A Sufi Saint of the Twentieth Century: Shaykh Ahmad al-

“

Alawi: His Spiritual Heritage and Legacy

, where he summarizes Shaykh al-

‘

Alawi’s thoughts on the symbolism of the Arabic letters. The shaykh states that the first two letters of the Arabic alphabet, namely

alif

and

b

a”

, “hold in the alphabet the place that is held by the

basmalah

in the Qoran, for together they make up

Ab, which is one of the Divine Names. By it would Jesus speak unto His Lord, and he used it when he said, ‘Verily I go unto my Father and your Father,’ that is, unto my Lord and your Lord.”13 In a footnote on the term Ab (that is, ‘Father’) used by the shaykh here, Lings writes:

The Muslim World • Volume 99 • January 2009

106 © 2009 Hartford Seminary.

It may be noted here incidentally how close the Basmalah is in reality to the In Nomine.14 The relationship between the two Names of Mercy in Islam, of which the second only is both Divine and human, is comparable to the relationship between the first two Persons of the Christian Trinity, while the Mercy Itself which is implied in the Basmalah, being from both Ar-Rahman and Ar-Rahim, that is, ‘proceeding from the Father and the Son,’ is none other than the Holy Ghost.15

The question arises, then: Is it not possible for a Muslim, too, to perceive God as Father (Parent)? I personally answer this question in the affirmative. For although, sadly, the vast majority of Muslims would reject such a suggestion out of hand, the fact is that — as affirmed so luminously in the insights offered by Shaykh al-‘Alawi and Lings — this rejection is not in keeping with a true understanding of Islamic thought and piety. A significant thread common to Christianity and Islam in this respect may be found in a prophetic hadith which, like the biblical verses quoted above, likens God’s relationship to human beings to a mother’s relationship to her nursing infant. We read in Ibn Hisham’s biography of the Prophet and in the collections of authentic hadiths compiled by Muslim and al-Bukhari that once, when the Prophet was with his Companions after a battle in which a number of the enemy had been take captive, they saw a woman of the Hawazin tribe running about in search of her infant son. Upon finding him, she took him in her arms and immediately put him to her breast. Turning to his Companions, the Prophet asked, “Can you imagine this woman casting her child into the fire?” “Impossible!” they replied. “Truly I say to you,” he said, “God is more compassionate toward His servants than this mother is toward her son.”16

Noting the centrality of the mother motif in Islam, Annemarie Schimmel draws attention to the fact that the Arabic word rahmah, ‘mercy’ — of which derivatives include the divine names al-Rahman and al-Rahim — is derived from the same root as the word for womb (rahim). Schimmel observes that in an extra-Qur’anic revelation reported by Ghazzali, God declares, “If My servant is sick, I care for him as a loving mother tends her son.”17 In keeping with this image of the divine, Rumi declares that just as a mother is a refuge for her children, so is God a refuge for mankind, and in speaking of death in the divine love he states,

Like a child that dies on its mother’s lap,So will I die on the lap of Mercy.18

In his al-Futuhat al-Makkiyah, or Meccan Revelations, Ibn ‘Arabi draws attention to the fact that just as the Arabic word for soul, nafs, is feminine in gender, so also is the word used to refer to the divine essence or self, namely,


© 2009 Hartford Seminary. 107

dhat. Based on this observation Schimmel states, “This only goes to show that in God is contained the creative masculine as well as the receptive female element, and without a feminine mirror, which is how he defined the created universe, God would not be able to contemplate His own beauty.”19 On this basis she concludes, “It would be completely acceptable, therefore, to speak [within an Islamic context] of the Creator’s ‘maternal love’ in its widest sense.”20

After speaking in a certain passage about a number of the most serious transgressions one could commit (idolatry, adultery and murder) and the terrible chastisement that awaits those who commit such iniquities, the Qur’an declares, “Excepted, however, shall be they who repent and attain to faith and do righteous deeds: for it is they whose bad deeds God will transform into good ones — seeing that God is much-forgiving, a dispenser of grace” (25:68). The father in Jesus’ parable — whose son had squandered his inheritance on the pleasures of the world and, after being reduced to feeding someone else’s pigs and so hungry he would have been willing to eat the pigs’ fare, returned to his father shamed and repentant — was not content merely to forgive. No, he dressed him in royal robes, slaughtered a fatted calf and called for a celebration. Similarly, the God described in this verse of the Qur’an is not content merely to forgive. No, He insists on turning our evil deeds, vile and many though they be, into good ones.

Another parallel between the God-revealed-as-father in Luke’s parable and the Divine revealed to us in Islam may be seen in the following. We read in Luke 15:17–20 that when the rebellious son had been reduced to feeding swine on someone’s farm, so hungry he “would gladly have fed on the pods that the swine ate,” he suddenly “came to himself.” In other words, he woke up to the utter folly and evil of what he had done and the true distance he had wandered from home. At the same time, he woke up to the hope of some semblance of a return to his former dignity.

. . . and he said, “How many of my father’s hired servants have bread enough and to spare, but I perish here with hunger! I will arise and go to my father, and I will say to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me as one of your hired servants.’ ” And he arose and came to his father. But while he was yet at a distance, his father saw him and had compassion, and ran and embraced him and kissed him.

From within the Islamic tradition we have a depiction of God which bears an uncanny resemblance to that near-bereaved father who, when he saw his errant son approaching in the distance, ran and fell upon him with kisses. In a hadith qudsi God declares, “If my servant approaches me by a hand span, I will approach him by an arm span, and if he approaches me by an arm span,



I will approach him by a fathom, and if he comes to me walking, I will come to him running!”21

True, God is not likened explicitly to a father, whether here or elsewhere in the Islamic tradition, the reason for which is not difficult to discern. The Christianity that prevailed in the Arabian Peninsula during the days of the Prophet Muhammad was marked by some unfortunate misconceptions of the Trinity, including the notion of the Trinity as God, Mary and their son Jesus. One writer notes that certain heretical Christian sects of the Prophet’s day “held the Almighty to be three, namely, God, and Mary and Jesus.”22 Geoffrey Parrinder notes that the objection to the term ‘Son of God’ in Islam needs to be seen “against the background of Arabian paganism, to which it ‘could only mean one thing, namely, the son of God by cohabitation with a woman.’”23 Similarly, W. Montgomery Watt notes in this connection that “in passages denying that God has off-spring the presumption is that the primary reference is to paganism unless there is a clear mention of Jesus.”24 The Qur’an’s rejection of trinitarian thinking may likewise have found a basis in the spread of the notion of Mary as Co-redemptress and the resulting Mariolatry which, as “a partial usurpation of the worship due to God,”25 bore a close resemblance to paganism. Given this sort of gross anthropomorphism reminiscent of Greek mythology, as well as the prevailing idolatry of the time (the Ka“bah prior to Muhammad’s conquering of Mecca was home to a pantheon of approximately three hundred idols), the Qur’anic shunning of trinitarian thinking might be seen as a corrective to fuzzy theological thinking on the part of the Qur’an’s hearers.

However, as we have seen, there are profoundly devoted Muslims who, like Shaykh Ahmad al-‘Alawi and others, have penetrated to, and appreciated, the spiritual symbolism of God as Father without in any way seeing this as an affront to their faith. After all, the Master-servant (rabb-“abd ) conceptualization of God’s relationship with His creatures is, in essence, no less anthropomorphic than that of Father-child, and a Muslim, no less than a Christian, can speak of God’s nearness to us as “the embrace of the Beloved.”26 Hence, although the Qur’anic emphasis on God’s self-sufficiency stands as a reminder of the divine majesty, the imagery suggestive of ‘God as loving parent’ is by no means foreign to Islam. On the contrary, it is part and parcel of Islam’s message, though not always so apparent on the surface as it is in Christianity.

We find, for example, that in the Qur’an God is referred to as rabb — traditionally rendered simply as “Lord” with all that is associated with this term by way of power, authority and transcendence — more times than He is by any other name.27 The divine appellation rabb is derived from the Arabic root r-b-b, which has a range of significations. One of these is to own or have



proprietorship over; hence, the derivative noun rabb refers to an owner or proprietor as in the phrase rabb al-bayt, the owner of the house. A second, related, meaning of the verb r-b-b is to exercise authority or lordship over something or someone; hence, the derivative noun rabb takes on the meaning of lord or master. When used in this sense, the aforementioned phrase rabb al-bayt bears the sense not only of owner of the house, but, in addition, the head of the household, that is, one with authority to command and be obeyed. And a third meaning of r-b-b, of direct relevance to our concerns here, is to raise, bring up, nurture and preserve, as one does a son or daughter.28

Yet, despite the richness and breadth of meaning to be found in the name rabb for God, we find that in his translation of the Qur’an, Pickthall renders the term rabb simply as “Lord” virtually without exception.29 Similarly, Abdullah Yusuf Ali renders rabb almost exclusively as “Lord”, though he occasionally adds qualifiers which help to bring out the sense of ‘God as Parent’, as, for example, in 1:2, where he renders the phrase rabb al-“alamin as ‘Cherisher and Sustainer of the Worlds’ and 2:21, where he renders rabbakum as ‘your Guardian-Lord.’30 As for Muhammad Asad, a more recent translator of the Qur’an, he consistently renders rabb as ‘Sustainer.’31 Hence, Yusuf Ali and Asad do more than Pickthall to bring out the nurturing facet of the Divine Being alluded to in the designation rabb which, given the fact that it occurs in the Qur’an upwards of 800 times, is an eloquent, albeit little recognized, affirmation of what might be termed God’s parental qualities.

As can be seen from the foregoing, the theme of God’s mercy, which is inseparable from that of God as Father/Mother, has a powerful presence in Islamic teaching and spirituality. Granted, the emphasis given to this theme varies from one Muslim community to another, and from one Muslim generation to another. Speaking of the difference between Sufi and non-Sufi Islam, William Chittick offers the following insight:

It is fair to say that the roots of the divergence between Sufi and non-Sufi Islam lie in different perceptions of the fundamental thrust of the Koran and the Sunnah of Muhammad. When Muslims understand religion to be something that pertains primarily to activity, they stress the Shariah — the revealed law of Islam — and they emphasize individual and social responsibilities toward God. Theologically, this leads to a vision of God that emphasizes His transcendence and rigor. Most non-Sufi Muslims fit into this category, and the general Western perception of Islam as rigid and severe is not unrelated to the exclusive focus of many Muslims on this domain of social and legal teachings. In contrast, when Muslims see their religion as rooted in inner attitudes such as love and compassion, they place greater stress on the qualities that establish bonds between lovers. Theologically, this leads to an emphasis on the principle enunciated in the famous hadith, ‘God’s mercy takes



precedence over His wrath.’ The loving and gentle face of God is put forward rather than the stern and severe face. This softer and gentler form of Islam tends to be stressed by those Muslims who are inclined toward Sufi teachings.32

When I first read the Qur’an many years ago, one of my first impressions was that it had — at least from my Christian-colored perspective — an undue emphasis on promises of heavenly reward and warnings of chastisement in the life to come. This, in turn, made it hard for me to perceive “God as Father” in the Muslims’ holy book. What I wasn’t able to see at that time was the intimate, indeed, vital connection between what we would term chastening or chastisement (which is what the hellfire is described as being) and parental love. The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews states it thus:

. . . have you forgotten the exhortation which addresses you as sons? ‘My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, nor lose courage when you are punished by him. For the Lord disciplines him whom he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives.’ It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons; for what son is there whom his father does not discipline? If you are left without discipline, in which all have participated, then you are illegitimate children and not sons. Besides this, we have had earthly fathers to discipline us and we respected them. Shall we not much more be subject to the Father of spirits and live? For they disciplined us for a short time at their pleasure, but he disciplines us for our good, that we may share his holiness. For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant; later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.33

We find, in fact, that this theme repeats itself emphatically throughout the Jewish and Christian scriptures: “Know then in your heart that as a man disciplines his son, the Lord your God disciplines you” (Deut. 8:5). Speaking of David, God says, “I will be his father, and he shall be my son. When he commits iniquity, I will chasten him with the rod of men, with the stripes of the sons of men; but I will not take my steadfast love from him . . .” (II Sam. 7:14–15). “My son, do not despise the Lord’s discipline or be weary of his reproof, for the Lord reproves him whom he loves, as a father the son in whom he delights” (Prov. 3:11–12).34 “Behold, happy is the man whom God reproves; therefore despise not the chastening of the Almighty” (Job 5:17). “Those whom I love I reprove and chasten; so be zealous and repent” (Rev. 3:19).

As for promises of reward, these also have their place in the Bible, most notably in the New Testament: “Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so men persecuted the prophets who were before you” (Matt. 5:11–12). “Truly I say to you,



whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you bear the name of Christ, will by no means lose his reward” (Mark 9:41). “But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return; and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the selfish” (Luke 6:35).

Clearly, then, and contrary to my earlier perception, divine promises of reward and warnings of chastisement are not in the least inconsistent with the image of God as Father/Mother. For the more spiritually mature, it may be possible to move beyond the fear of punishment or hope of reward in one’s relationship with God. This is certainly what we as parents want for our own children in their relationships with us; rather than their doing what we ask for some reward or out of fear of punishment, our greatest joy is for them to do what is good and right because this would make us happy, or, even better, simply for its own sake. It is said of the fourth-century AH Muslim mystic Rabi“ah al-‘Adawiyah, who had once been a woman of loose morals, that once as she was leaving the city with a pail of water in one hand and a bundle of firewood in the other, she met up with one of the most prominent shaykhs of that day. When the shaykh asked her where she was going, Rabi‘a replied, “With the water I shall put out the flames of hell, and with the firewood, I shall set Paradise ablaze so that thenceforth, there will be no one on the face of the earth who serves God for fear of hellfire or out of a desire for Paradise! Instead, everyone will serve Him out of love alone.”35 To such a cloudless, untainted vision of the Beloved, who wouldn’t aspire?

As for those of us who, apart from our more exalted and spiritually lucid moments, tend still to think in terms of divine reward and punishment rather than the Beatific Vision, those passages from the Scriptures, whether they be from the Bible or the Qur’an, that speak in terms of reward and punishment, heaven and hell in the life to come are designed to spur us on to greater purity, selflessness and dedication to truth when the lures of this worldly life and our human selfishness and weakness threaten to take us off track, blinding us to our true purpose on earth. When seen from this perspective, it isn’t difficult to discern the parental divine love, if you will, uttering a needed stern word to us lest we miss the mark. A difficulty arises, however, when the suffering spoken of in passages relating to divine chastisement in the life to come — from Jesus’ grim reference to “the outer darkness” (or “the furnace of fire”) where “men will weep and gnash their teeth” (Matt. 8:12; 13:42) to the Qur’an’s innumerable and graphic descriptions of the torments that await those who deliberately pay no heed to God’s messages — go beyond what we, from our human perspective, are able to perceive as being consonant with a God of infinite compassion and love: either because of the magnitude and intensity of the torment, or its duration.



Apart from references to “outer darkness,” “fire” and “weeping and gnashing of teeth,” the New Testament offers very little detail regarding the nature of the suffering that awaits those who have rejected faith in the life to come. The Qur’an, by contrast, is replete with the most explicit descriptions of such torments. We read, for example, that “as for those who are bent on denying the truth36 — garments of fire shall be cut out for them [in the life to come]; burning despair37 will be poured over their heads, causing all that is within their bodies, as well as the skins, to melt away. And they shall be held [in this state as if ] by iron grips; and every time they try in their anguish to come out of it, they shall be returned thereto and [be told]: ‘Taste suffering through fire [to the full]!’ ” (Qur’an 22:20–22). Similarly we read, “. . . for verily, those who are bent on denying the truth of Our messages We shall, in time, cause to endure fire: [and] every time their skins are burnt off, We shall replace them with new skins, so that they may taste suffering [in full]” (Qur’an 4:56).

With regard to the duration of suffering in the afterlife, there are a number of references in the New Testament which suggest that, at least for some transgressors, such torment will be unending: There are those who, having rejected God’s communications through the Holy Spirit, are in danger of eternal damnation (Mark 3:29). Similarly, Jesus speaks of “the eternal fire” (Matt. 18:8) and “eternal punishment” (Matt. 25:46). Other New Testament passages speak of “the punishment of eternal destruction and exclusion from the presence of the Lord” (II Thess. 1:9) and “a punishment of eternal fire” (Jude 7). Similarly, the Qur’an speaks in numerous places of the suffering of the afterlife as ‘abiding’: “Yea! Those who earn evil and by their sinfulness are engulfed — they are destined for the fire, therein to abide” (Qur’an 2:81).38

However, with regard to the Qur’anic depiction of the suffering that awaits those who reject God’s messages in the life to come — on the levels of both magnitude and duration — more needs to be said. First of all, one needs to bear in mind that, as noted by Muhammad Asad in his commentary on Qur’an 6:70, “all Qur’anic references to life after death are, necessarily, allegorical.” This principle is illustrated clearly by his rather lengthy note on Qur’an 73:12–13, which reads, “[God declares:] And leave Me alone [to deal] with those who give the lie to the truth — those who enjoy the blessings of life [without any thought of God] — and bear thou with them for a little while: for, behold, heavy fetters [await them] with Us, and a blazing fire, and food that chokes, and grievous suffering on the Day when the earth and the mountains will be convulsed, and the mountains will [crumble and] become like a sand-dune on the move!” Quoting al-Razi’s commentary on these verses, Asad writes:

These four conditions may well be understood as denoting the spiritual consequences [of one’s doings in life]. As regards the ‘heavy fetters’, they are a symbol of the soul’s remaining shackled to its [erstwhile] physical



attachments and bodily pleasures . . . : and now that their realization has become impossible, those fetters and shackles prevent the [resurrected] human personality (al-nafs) from attaining to the realm of the spirit and of purity. Subsequently, those spiritual shackles generate spiritual ‘fires’, inasmuch as one’s strong inclination towards bodily concerns, together with the impossibility of attaining to them, give rise, spiritually, to [a sensation of ] severe burning . . . : and this is [the meaning of] ‘the blazing fire’ (al-jahim). Thereupon [the sinner] tries to swallow the choking agony of deprivation and the pain of separation [from the objects of his desire]: and this is the meaning of the words, ‘and food that chokes’. And, finally, because of these circumstances, he remains deprived of all illumination by the light of God, and of all communion with the blessed ones; and this is the meaning of the words ‘and grievous suffering’. . . . But [withal,] know that I do not claim to have exhausted the meaning of these verses by what I have stated. . . 39

As for the matter of the duration of such people’s suffering in the hereafter, there is clear evidence from within the Qur’an itself as well as from a number of authentic Prophetic hadiths that such suffering is not without end. Qur’an 78:21–23 reads, “[On that Day,] verily, hell will lie in wait [for those who deny the truth] — a goal for all who are wont to transgress the bounds of what is right! In it they shall remain a long time (ahqaban).” Commenting on this verse, Muhammad Asad writes, “I.e., not forever, since the term huqb or hiqbah (of which ahqab is the plural) denotes no more than ‘a period of time’ or ‘a long time’ ( Jawhari). . . . however one defines this term, it is obvious that it signifies a limited period of time, and not eternity.”40 Addressing those who, during their lifetimes, ensnared others in evil ways, God says, “The fire will be your abode, therein to abide — unless God wills it otherwise. Verily, thy Sustainer is wise, all-knowing” (Qur’an 6:128). This, then, is further evidence from the Qur’an itself that the suffering of hell is not endless. Asad explains the phrase, “unless God will it otherwise” as meaning, “unless He graces them with His mercy . . .”41 Asad goes on to say that based on this and a similar phrase in Qur’an 11:107, it has been concluded by a number of great Muslim thinkers that unlike the bliss of paradise, which is truly unending, the suffering endured by human beings as chastisement in the life to come “will be limited by God’s mercy.”42

In a description of a dialogue on the Day of Judgment between God and those who, during their lifetimes, refused to heed the call to faith, Qur’an 40:10–12 reads:

Behold, as for those who are bent on denying the truth — a voice will call out unto them: ‘Indeed, greater than your [present] loathing of yourselves was God’s loathing of you when you were called unto faith but went on denying the truth!’



[Whereupon] they will exclaim, ‘O our Sustainer! Twice hast Thou caused us to die, just as twice Thou hast brought us to life! But now that we have acknowledged our sins, is there any way out [of this second death]?’

[And they will be told,] ‘This [has befallen you] because, whenever the One God was invoked, you denied this truth; whereas, when divinity was ascribed to aught beside Him, you believed [in it]! But all judgment rests with God, the Exalted, the Great!’

Here again, rather than declaring unequivocally that such people’s painful fate is sealed for all eternity, the final verdict is left open, subject to the judgment and mercy of God. Asad notes in this connection that an answer to the question posed at the end of verse 11 may be found in a certain well-authenticated saying of the Prophet in which he states,

[On the Day of Judgment,] those who deserve paradise will enter paradise, and those who deserve the fire, the fire. Thereupon God, the Sublimely Exalted, will say, ‘Take out [of the fire] everyone in whose heart there was as much of faith [or, in some versions, “as much of good”] as a grain of mustard seed!’ And so they will be taken out of it, already blackened, and will be thrown into the River of Life; and then they will come to life [lit., ‘sprout’] as an herb sprouts by the side of a stream; and didst thou not see how it comes out, yellow and budding?43

Taken together, it is easy to see how such texts bear witness to that Divine Mercy which “encompasses all things,” or, put in terms of Christian theology, the compassion of the heavenly Father “who . . . makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good . . . .”44 A vision of this divine mercy as embodied in the Islamic revelation, and particularly as it relates to the question of people’s fates in the afterlife, was developed at some length by the great Sufi thinker, Ibn ‘Arabi (1165–1240). Writing in The Meccan Revelations, Ibn ‘Arabi states, “The Fire seeks only those human beings whose divine form has not become manifest, outwardly and inwardly.”45 Similarly, he declares, “If anyone enters the Fire, it will only be so that his loathsomeness can be annihilated and his goodness subsist.”46 Commenting on this passage, William Chittick writes, “This helps explain why the Shaykh says repeatedly that even the Fire is rooted in God’s mercy, and its goal is to purify (tathir) those who fall into it. Purification of human beings amounts to burning away from them everything opposed to their fitrah,” that is, that pristine human nature created in the divine image.47

As we have seen, there are numerous Qur’anic verses in which it is stated that sinners will remain in the hell fire. So, how does Ibn ‘Arabi square this fact with his assertion that hell’s chastisement is not eternal? After all, there are those of whom the Qur’an states that they will remain forever within the fire. It speaks, for example, of “those who are bent on denying the truth . . . : it is



they who are destined for the fire, therein to abide (hum fiha khalidun).”48 However, Ibn ‘Arabi points out that the pronoun used in the Qur’anic phrase ‘therein’ (fiha) is feminine. In other words, the pronoun ha refers to the Fire (al-nar), which is feminine, but not to chastisement (“adhab), which is masculine. Chittick states,

Nothing was revealed in the Koran and the Hadith that would indicate that chastisement lasts forever, although this is hardly the case with the bliss of the Garden. Moreover, God forgives all sins (39:53),49 so nothing can make the chastisement eternal. In addition, punishment can only be an appropriate recompense (78:26), so a limited sin cannot warrant unlimited punishment.50

According to Ibn ‘Arabi, chastisement will thus eventually end even for those who must remain in the Fire. However, unlike those in the Garden, who will be given a vision of God (ru”ya), those remaining in the Fire will be veiled (mahjub) from Him.51 This is because, were they granted a vision of God, this vision would cause them nothing but shame, which would mean further torment.

Hence they will not know the joy of witnessing and vision, so they will have bliss while being veiled. The goal is bliss, and it has been achieved with the veil — but for whom? How can the bliss of the vision of God be compared to bliss with the veil! ‘For on that day they are veiled from their Lord’ [Qur’an 83:15].52

In the end, states Ibn ‘Arabi, bliss is simply that which is agreeable to a person’s constitution. Speaking once again of the inhabitants of the fire, Ibn ‘Arabi states,

After the mercy has embraced them, the people of the Fire will find their joy from being in the Fire, and they will praise God for their not being in the Garden. That is because of what is demanded by their constitution in that state: If they were to enter the Garden with that constitution, pain would overcome them and they would suffer. So . . . . The abodes have been made agreeable to their inhabitants.53

Amazingly, then, one finds that the Islamic conception of divine chastisement in the afterlife — at least as it was elaborated by Ibn ‘Arabi’s understanding of the Qur’anic message — reveals a God who is more merciful, and more fatherly, if you will, than many of us could ever have imagined.

Someone might question why it matters that the conception of God as Mother-Father be acceptable to a Muslim. After all, Muslims have their own means of grace, including the conceptualizations of the Divine peculiar to their own tradition. So what do they need with God the Father/Mother? There are several reasons for my concern with this theme. The first reason is my



conviction that increased empathy by followers of the different religious traditions — my particular focus being on Christianity and Islam — with the perspectives and understandings of other traditions offers blessing to all: the blessing that comes upon us when we “catch a glimpse of glory as seen by another.”54 The second reason is that Muslims, like Christians, may find that to be able to conceive of, and address, God as Parent, if you will, meets a profoundly felt need. And the third reason is that, inspired by the thinking of the great shaykh of Islam, Ibn ‘Arabi, I believe that the more ‘forms’ in which we can recognize God, the more whole, happy and alive we will be.

With regard to the second reason for my focus on the concept of God as Father, namely, a personally felt need (or, at least, desire) to conceive of God in this way, let me begin by returning to Henri Nouwen’s reflections on Rembrandt’s painting, “The Return of the Prodigal Son.” After talking about God as the Father who allows his children the freedom to choose whether to love him in return or not, who “let[s] the sins of his children pierce his heart” and whose hands radiate inner light, seeking only to heal, he says,

Here is the God I want to believe in: a Father who, from the beginning of creation, has stretched out his arms in merciful blessing, never forcing himself on anyone, but always waiting, never letting his arms drop down in despair, but always hoping that his children will return so that he can speak words of love to them and let his tired arms rest on their shoulders. His only desire is to bless.55

One day a few years ago, I went downstairs to where my husband was about to take his afternoon nap and, feeling a need for verbal affirmation that seems to be typical of me and a periodic source of some consternation to us both, I asked him to tell me some reasons that he loves me. As I had anticipated, he resisted, but apparently my felt need had been too great to keep me quiet on this particular occasion. I may have asked him to explain his resistance, to which he replied, “I just can’t think that way. It’s not easy for me to talk about the details. I love you just because you’re mine. And if I told you it was because you did this or that, it would imply that if you didn’t do this or that, I wouldn’t love you.” As I struggled with my disappointment, I could see that, at least in part, it was a struggle between my ego, which wants to be loved on its merits, and the realization that what my partner was describing was, whether I fancied it or not, the closest thing, humanly speaking, to the Divine Love that I could possibly imagine. On the one hand, though I may resist hearing that I’m loved for no reason but that I happen to be his, I can see the profound truth and wisdom in what he was saying. After all, God may be more or less pleased with us human beings based on what we are or do, yet His love for us is grounded, ultimately, in the simple fact that



we are, as my husband put it, ‘His.’ And beyond my struggle on the personal level with my longing, whether rightly or wrongly, to be loved for some sort of merit I happen to possess, I perceived the wondrous fact that even though, as a Muslim, my spouse may not consciously conceive of God as ‘Father,’ he nevertheless, even without this conscious conceptualization, loves me with that kind of ‘father love’ that I long to experience in God and which, by receiving it from one His creatures, I do receive from Him.

In his book The Perennial Philosophy,56 Aldous Huxley observes that when God is regarded not only as “the transcendent, omnipotent, personal God” but, in addition, as “a loving Father,” worship takes on power for the transformation of character and not of conduct only.57 He insists that “the complete transformation of consciousness, which is ‘enlightenment’, ‘deliverance’, ‘salvation’, comes only when God is thought of as. . . immanent as well as transcendent, supra-personal as well as personal. . . .”58

The perennial philosophy thus offers a way of beginning to see beyond the divergences between Christian and Islamic modes of perceiving the Divine. Huxley states in this connection that,

. . . the Godhead is never, for the exponent of the perennial philosophy, the mere Absolute of academic metaphysics, but something more purely perfect, more reverently to be adored than even the personal God or his human incarnation — a Being towards whom it is possible to feel the most intense devotion and in relation to whom it is necessary (if one is to come to that unitive knowledge which is man’s final end) to practice a discipline more arduous and unremitting than any imposed by ecclesiastical authority.59

Jan van Ruysbroeck, a Christian mystic of the fourteenth century, penetrated to an awareness that took him beyond what one might term the pseudo-dichotomy of trinitarianism vs. pure monotheism. Speaking of the Divine as known by the mystic, Ruysbroeck states that “we can speak no more of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, nor of any creature, but only one Being, which is the very substance of the Divine Persons. There were we all one before our creation, for this is our super-essence. There the Godhead is in simple essence without activity.”60 J. J. Olier, a devout seventeenth-century Catholic of the Counter-Reformation, makes the following startling declaration: “The holy light of faith is so pure that, compared with it, particular lights are but impurities; and even ideas of the saints, of the Blessed Virgin, and the sight of Jesus Christ in his humanity are impediments in the way of the sight of God in His purity.”61 It was the fifth-century Christian theologian who wrote under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite who spoke of the Divine as revealing Itself in a “super-luminous darkness.” He declared,



We long exceedingly to dwell in this translucent darkness and, through not seeing and not knowing, to see Him who is beyond both vision and knowledge. . . . For this is truly to see and to know, and through the abandonment of all things to praise Him who is beyond and above all things.62

On pondering such statements, one begins to glimpse a perspective that supersedes and — if one will allow it to — may even sweep away the whole basis for interreligious rivalry and conflict and which, in so doing, invites each of us to strive, from whatever particular religious tradition we feel most at home in, for that communion with the Divine for which we were made, and to encourage others to do so from within whatever religious tradition they call home.

It bears noting here that this same Olier, who was a teacher of great influence, did not expect everyone to be capable of, or at least ready for, the abstracted state of consciousness to which he himself had attained and to which the mystics quoted here allude. Hence, he advised one of his penitents to read, “as a corrective to St. John of the Cross and other exponents of pure mystical theology, St. Gertrude’s revelations of the incarnate and even physiological aspects of the deity.”63 This was based on Olier’s realization that it would be useless to urge “the worship of God-without-form” upon individuals whose spiritual condition will only allow them to understand the Divine in more concrete, personal terms. Granting the potential danger of the more down-to-earth approach, that is, the danger of forgetting that the Divine is, ultimately, beyond all form or human comprehension, one can see Olier’s attitude and approach as an affirmation of the perfect Divine Compassion, which is pleased to reveal itself to us according to our own capacities and needs.

As the mystic Junayd once stated, “The water takes on the color of the cup.”64 Or, as Ibn ‘Arabi put it, “He who discloses Himself, in respect to what He is in Himself, is One in Entity, but the self-disclosures — I mean their forms — are diverse because of the preparedness of the loci of self-disclosure.”65 Junayd’s ‘cups’ and Ibn ‘Arabi’s ‘loci of self-disclosure’ are you and I, the individual human beings that populate the world, and none of whom is created exactly like any other. And it is this reality, says Ibn ‘Arabi, which “explains why religions must be different, and why the beliefs of the followers of the same religion diverge.”66

Al-Hallaj, the ninth-century Muslim mystic, declared,

I have meditated on the various religions, forcing myself to understand them, and I have found that they arise from a unique principle having numerous ramifications. So do not ask of a man that he should adopt this or that religion, for that would take him away from the fundamental



principle; it is this principle itself which has come to seek him; in this principle are elucidated all heights and all meanings; then he [the man] will understand them.67

Ibn ‘Arabi offered his readers similar advice, saying:

Beware of becoming delimited by a specific knotting and disbelieving in everything else, lest great good escape you. Or rather, knowledge of the situation as it really is will escape you. Be in yourself a hyle for the forms of all beliefs, for God is wider and more tremendous than that He should be constricted by one knotting rather than another. For He says, “Whithersoever you turn, there is the Face of God” (2:115) . . . .

He who counsels his own soul should investigate, during his life in this world, all doctrines concerning God. He should learn from whence each possessor of a doctrine affirms the validity of his doctrine. Once its validity has been affirmed for him in the specific mode in which it is correct for him who holds it, then he should support it in the case of him who believes in it. He should not deny it or reject it, for he will gather its fruit on the Day of Visitation, whatever that belief might be. This is the all-embracing knowledge of God.68

Thus it can be seen that in Ibn Arabi’s view, as in Hallaj’s, as in Junayd’s, human perfection entails a broadening, rather than a constriction, of one’s vision of God which, being the Absolute, defies all human attempts to limit Him to one conceptualization to the exclusion of all others. Hence, let him, or her, who finds God as Father, rejoice. Let him, or her, who finds God as Master and Sovereign of the Universe, rejoice. And let him or her who encounters someone else who has found God in a form which he or she can’t fully comprehend or relate to, rejoice! This spirit of ‘ecumenical appreciation’, if one may call it that, is expressed by Thomas Merton when he asks, “How can one be in contact with the great thinkers and men of prayer of the various religions without recognizing that these men have known God and have loved Him because they recognized themselves [as] loved by Him?”69 Similarly, responding to a book on Sufism by Titus Burckhardt,70 Merton wrote,

There is no question but that here is a living and convincing truth, a deep mystical experience of the mystery of God our Creator Who watches over us at every moment with infinite love and mercy. I am stirred to the depths of my heart by the intensity of Moslem piety toward His names, and the reverence with which He is invoked as the ‘Compassionate and the Merciful.’ May He be praised and adored everywhere forever.71

I confess myself to be someone for whom the down-to-earth, concrete manifestation of the divine nature in the person of Jesus Christ, who bade us come to God as “Our Father,” is a vital source of strength and comfort. And I



hold that this, rather than being what many Muslims would think of as shirk, or the association of partners with the One God, is a valid means of coming to know the one Divine Being. In his book entitled Something Beautiful for God on the life and work of Mother Theresa, Malcolm Muggeridge notes that something Mother Teresa stressed frequently was that

‘What the poor need . . . even more than food and clothing and shelter (though they need these, too, desperately), is to be wanted.’ . . . To her, they are all children of God for whom Christ died, and so deserving of all love . . . . Her love for them, reflecting God’s love, makes them equal, as brothers and sisters within a family are equal, however widely they differ in intellectual and other attainments, in physical beauty and grace.72

Similarly, in speaking of the value of diversity, or what he terms “the dignity of difference,” Rabbi Jonathan Sacks notes that the Bible “values our differences, just as loving parents love all their children not for what makes them the same but for what makes each of them unique. That is what the Bible means when it calls God a parent.”73

God as Parent: A concept conducive to human wholeness and healing, if there ever was one.

Endnotes1. Qur’an 7:156.2. Psalm 145:9.3. Nouwen, Henri J. M., The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Story of Homecoming

(New York: Doubleday, 1994), 5.4. Ibid., 6.5. Ibid., 17.6. Ibid., 23.7. Ibid., 93.8. Ibid., 95.9. In a rare but significant exception to this trend, Persian mystic Jalal al-Din al-Rumi

(1207–1273) expressed a profound awareness of God’s ability to enter into human suffering when he wrote, “God said, ‘A favourite and chosen servant of mine fell sick. I am he. Consider well: his infirmity is My infirmity, his sickness is My sickness.’ ” (Nicholson, R. E., Rumi, Poet and Mystic (London and Boston: Unwin and Mandala, 1978), 65; quoted in John Hick, The Metaphor of God Incarnate: Christology in a Pluralistic Age (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993), 156.

10. For a simple and edifying exposition of the ninety-nine names of God, see Sheikh Tosun Bayrak al-Jerrahi al-Halveti, The Most Beautiful Names (Putney, Vermont: Threshold Books/Amana Books, 1985).

11. William Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-“Arabi’s Metaphysics of Imagination (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), 283, quoting Meccan Revelations, II 257.11.



12. Muhammad Asad, The Message of the Qur”an (Gibraltar: Dar al-Andalus, 1984), 173.

13. Martin Lings, A Sufi Saint of the Twentieth Century: Shaykh Ahmad al-“Alawi: His Spiritual Heritage and Legacy (Cambridge: The Islamic Texts Society, 1993), 150.

14. That is, the formula, “In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.”15. Lings, A Sufi Saint, 150.16. The longing to address God as Father/Mother has been so effectively repressed in

mainstream Islamic thinking that, as has been noted, the overwhelming majority of Muslims would consider it anathema to do so. Among Muslim mystics, however, this need has occasionally been recognized and given verbal expression. In speaking of his intimate communion with God, Persian mystic Husayn Mansur ibn al-Hallaj (857–922) wrote, “For me, an orphan, I have a Father, in whom I take refuge.” Le Diwan d”al-Hallaj, trs. L. Massignon (1955), 17; quoted in Geoffrey Parrinder, Avatar and Incarnation: The Divine in Human Form in the World’s Religions (Oxford: Oneworld, 1970, 1997), 199.

17. Annemarie Schimmel, My Soul Is a Woman: The Feminine in Islam, translated by Susan H. Ray (New York/London: The Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd., 1995), 21. In this connection she cites the oft-quoted saying of the Prophet, “Paradise lies at mothers’ feet”, and his insistence on the unconditional care and support which mothers deserve from their offspring.

18. Ibid., 94, quoting Mathnawi IV, 2923.19. Ibid., 23.20. Ibid., 93. Taking a step beyond the acknowledgement of both the masculine and

the feminine in the Divine, Wilfred Cantwell Smith states his preference for referring to God as ‘He/She/It’, thereby including the neuter as well. He attributes this attitude to a combination of influences, including his familiarity with and appreciation for the Hindu Goddess tradition, his appreciation for the Hindu Brahman tradition “and the unrivalled philosophy of religion that India classically produced,” as well as a personal conviction “that truth, justice, and other such ‘things’ are divine, if one is to use theist language at all” (Wilfred Cantwell Smith, What is Scripture? A Comparative Approach, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993, 11).

21. An agreed-upon hadith, passed down on the authority of Abu Hurayrah.22. W. St. Clair-Tisdall, The Sources of Islam: A Persian Treatise, translated and

abridged by Sir William Muir (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, no date), 61.23. Geoffrey Parrinder, Jesus in the Qur”an (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 1965, 1995),

128, quoting in part from Hans Cullman, The Christology of the New Testament, 282, 290.24. Ibid., 127, quoting Muhammad at Medina, p. 318. It bears noting in this

connection that all Qur’anic rejections of the reference to Jesus as the son of God use the Arabic word walad, which is associated with physical procreation, rather than the word ibn, which can be used in a spiritual or metaphorical sense. See, for example, Qur’an 4:171; 6:101; 19:35; 23:91; 2:116; 19:88.

25. Frithjof Schuon, The Transcendent Unity of Religions (Wheaton: The Theosophical Publishing House, 1993), 24.

26. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Sufi Essays, Third Edition (Chicago: ABC International Group, Inc., 1999), 10.

27. With the exception, of course, of Allah, which is considered to encompass all the other divine names and attributes.

28. See Ibn Manzum, Lisan al-“Arab (Beirut: Dar Ihya’ al-Turath al-‘Arabi, 1997), Second Edition, Part V.

29. Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall, The Meaning of the Glorious Qur”an (New York: A. A. Knop, 1930).



30. Abdullah Yusuf Ali, The Meaning of the Holy Qur ”an, Amana Publications, 11th Edition, 2004; the first edition was published in 1938 as The Holy Qur ”an: Text, Translation and Commentary.

31. Asad, The Message of the Qur ”an.32. William C. Chittick, Imaginal Worlds: Ibn al-“Arabi and the Problem of Religious

Diversity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), 3.33. Hebrews 12:5–11.34. See also Proverbs 13:24 and 19:18.35. Cited in Shaykh Khalid Ben Tounis, Al-Tasawwuf: Qalb al-Islam, translated into

Arabic from the French (Beirut: Dar al-Jil, 2005), 81–82.36. “I.e., in distinction from those who err out of ignorance” (Asad, on Qur’an 22:20).37. The Arabic word rendered as ‘burning despair’ here is hamim. Commenting

on its use in Qur’an 6:70, Muhammad Asad notes that “among the various meanings attributable to the word hamim are the concepts of intense heat as well as of painful cold (Taj al-Arus). In the eschatology of the Qur’an it invariably refers to the suffering of the sinners in the life to come; and since all Qur’anic references to life after death are, necessarily, allegorical, the term hamim may be rendered as ‘burning despair.’ ” (Asad, Note 62, p. 182)

38. See also 2:217, 257, 275; 3:116, 5:80; 7:36; 9:17; 10:27; 13:5; 23:103; 43:74; 58:17; 64:10; 98:6.

39. Asad, Note 7, page 904.40. Ibid., Note 12, page 923.41. Ibid., Note 114, page 193.42. Ibid.43. Ibid., Note 10, page 719, quoting from Bukhari, Kitab al-Iman and Kitab Bad ”

al-Khalq; the same tradition is likewise cited by Muslim, Nasa’i and Ibn Hanbal.44. Matthew 5:45.45. Chittick, Imaginal Worlds, 109, quoting from The Meccan Revelations, III 387.10.46. Ibid., 114, quoting MR, III 417.35.47. Chittick, Imaginal Worlds, 109.48. Qur’an 2:257; see other references in Note 38 above.49. “Say: ‘[Thus speaks God:] ‘O you servants of Mine who have transgressed against

your own selves! Despair not of God’s mercy: behold, God forgives all sins — for, verily, He alone is much-forgiving, a dispenser of grace!’ ” Not surprisingly, as in Christianity, such forgiveness is tied in Islam to repentance; hence, we read, “Your Sustainer has willed upon Himself the law of grace and mercy — so that if any of you does a bad deed out of ignorance, and thereafter repents and lives righteously, He shall be [found] much-forgiving, a dispenser of grace” (Qur’an 6:54; see also 4:110).

50. Chittick, Imaginal Worlds, 113.51. Ibid., 116, quoting MR II, 335.18.52. Ibid., quoting MR, III 119.7.53. Ibid., 117–118, quoting MR, IV 14.34.54. Diana L. Eck, “Is Our God Listening? Exclusivism, Inclusivism and Pluralism,” in

Boase, Roger, ed. Islam and Global Dialogue: Religious Pluralism and the Pursuit of Peace (London: Ashgate, 2005), 37–38. Someone who embodied the ability to glimpse God’s “glory as seen by another” to a heightened degree was Trappist monk Thomas Merton, who, in response to Martin Ling’s book on Shaykh Ahmad al-‘Alawi, A Sufi Saint of the Twentieth Century, wrote glowingly: “The book was an inspiration to me and I often think of this great man with veneration. He was so perfectly right in his spirituality. Certainly a great saint and a man full of the Holy Spirit. May God be praised for having given us one such, in a time



when we need many saints” (Rob Baker and Gray Henry, eds., Merton & Sufism: The Untold Story. A Complete Compendium, Louisville: Fons Vitae, 1999, 236).

55. Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son, 95–96.56. According to Huxley, the term philosophia perennis was first termed by Leibniz;

however, he notes, “the thing — the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds . . . the ethic that places man’s final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being — the thing is immemorial and universal.” (Ibid., vii) As such, the term ‘perennial philosophy’ refers to the eternal wisdom conveyed by and embodied in the traditional religions of the world, albeit in different forms. For a helpful exposition of the essential aspects of the perennial philosophy, see Lings, Martin and Clinton Minnaar, eds, The Underlying Religion: An Introduction to the Perennial Philosohpy (Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom, Inc., 2007). In his Introduction to this anthology, Clinton Minnaar is careful to distinguish the perennial philosophy from syncretistic and new age cults, which are all too ready to dispense with religious forms in the service of certain postmodern or sentimental agendas. The perennial philosophy, by contrast, recognizes the revealed forms of the world’s traditional religions “as inalienable symbols of the essence” which are “dispensed with at great spiritual peril” (The Underlying Religion, xix). Hence, rather than chafing at his or her particular religion’s symbols, rites and forms of expression as restrictive, the individual who has grasped the perennial philosophy becomes able to transcend such forms from within even while adhering to them, since he or he now sees both their limitations and their necessity as God-given means of grace.

57. Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy (New York: HarperCollins Publishers Inc., 1990), 23.

58. Ibid.59. Ibid., 30–31.60. Ibid., 31.61. Ibid.62. Ibid., 34.63. Ibid., 31.64. Quoted by Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-“Arabi’s Metaphysics of

Imagination (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), 229.65. Chittick, Imaginal Worlds, 141, quoting from MR II 85.14.66. Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge, 229.67. Fritjof Schuon, Understanding Islam (Bloomington: World Wisdom Books, Inc.,

1994), 173, quoting from al-Hallaj’s Diwan, or collection of poems.68. Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge, 355, quoting MR, II 85.10,20.69. Baker and Henry, Merton & Sufism, 113, quoting from Thomas Merton, The

Hidden Ground of Love (ed. William H. Shannon, New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1985), 58.

70. Titus Burckhardt, Introduction to Sufi Doctrine (Lahore, 1959).71. Baker and Henry, Merton & Sufism , 115–116, quoting from The Hidden Ground

of Love, 48.72. Malcolm Muggeridge, Something Beautiful for God: The Classic Account of

Mother Theresa’s Journey Into Compassion (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1971), 22–23.73. “The Dignity of Difference: Avoiding the Clash of Civilizations,” in Boase, ed.,

Islam and Global Dialogue, 135.

God as Father, Mother and More

Documents

Transcript of God as Father, Mother and More