Books and Documents
Lecture 4: The Human Ego – His Freedom and ImmortalityYet it is surprising to see that the unity of human consciousness which constitutes the centre of human personality never really became a point of interest in the history of Muslim thought. The Mutakallimënregarded the soul as a finer kind of matter or a mere accident which dies with the body and is re-created on the Day of Judgement. The philosophers of Islam received inspiration from Greek thought. In the case of other schools, it must be remembered that the expansion of Islam brought within its fold peoples belonging to different creed-communities, such as Nestorians, Jews, Zoroastrians, whose intellectual outlook had been formed by the concepts of a culture which had long dominated the whole of middle and western Asia. This culture, on the whole Magian in its origin and development, has a structurally dualistic soul-picture which we find more or less reflected in the theological thought of Islam.4 Devotional Sufism alone tried to understand the meaning of the unity of inner experience which the Qur’«n declares to be one of the three sources of knowledge,5 the other two being History and Nature. The development of this experience in the religious life of Islam reached its culmination in the well-known words of Hall«j - ‘I am the creative truth.’ The contemporaries of Hall«j, as well as his successors, interpreted these words pantheistically; but the fragments of Hall«j, collected and published by the French Orientalist, L. Massignon, leave no doubt that the martyr-saint could not have meant to deny the transcendence of God.6 The true interpretation of his experience, therefore, is not the drop slipping into the sea, but the realization and bold affirmation in an undying phrase of the reality and permanence of the human ego in a profounder personality.
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5:24 AM
Moderate Islamist here
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