General Introduction

Vincent J. Cornell and Bruce B. Lawrence

Over the last fifty years, and especially since the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran and the terrorist attacks in the US on 11 September 2001, literally hundreds of books on Islam and the Islamic world have appeared in print in European languages, including numerous introductions to Islam. Yet most Americans and Europeans remain largely uninformed about Islam. In the third decade of the twenty-first century, scholars of Islam in the Americas and Europe still feel the need to humanize Muslims, to demonstrate that Muslims are rational human beings, their beliefs worthy of consideration.

The situation is the same-or perhaps even worse-with regard to Islamic spirituality. Apart from the field of Sufism, no aspect of Islamic thought and practice has been more overlooked in studies of Islam than spirituality. Because of creedal and secular prejudices that have persisted for centuries, the religion of Islam (much like Judaism) has been regarded as traditionalistic or legalistic but not deeply spiritual. As such, it is often described as a "nomocentric" or law-centered religion, in which adherence to the Shari'a is seen as the central criterion of faith (see Pill 2014). Adding to this problem is the fact that proofs of Islam's alleged obsession with legalism can be found among today's Muslims in the doctrines of the Taliban in Afghanistan, among Wahhabi-inspired extremist groups such as Al Qaeda and ISIS, and in a political Islam that advocates the creation of a more socially conscious "Shari'a state." As a result, Islam is widely seen to embody three traits that are antithetical to liberal notions of free expression: political authoritarianism, paternalistic traditionalism, and soulless legalism.

As Edward W. Said observed, the view of the Middle East and the Islamic world in the West is based on the notion of exteriority, reducing complex cultural phenomena to stereotypical "essences" (Said 1994, 20-21). Yet the spirituality of Muslims is as much a matter of interiority as exteriority. Because spiritual feelings cannot be seen, they cannot be empirically observed, measured, and subjected to regimes of control. If Islam is exteriorized as a set of rules and regulations that determine outward forms of behavior, it becomes easy to separate the interior aspects of Islam, such as different types of theology and spirituality, from Islam's supposed "essence." However, as the recent turn toward religious emotivism and identity politics have demonstrated, a religion without theology is a religion without a brain and a religion without spirituality is a religion without a heart.

This collection of essays affirms that far from being a secondary element, spirituality is integral to all that is Islam. Despite the common belief among both modernist and traditionalist Muslims that spirituality is other-worldly, we argue that spirituality is not oppositional or antagonistic to life in this world but instead is part of its larger-indeed, its largest-compass. From our perspective, Islamic spirituality is, above all, about transformation-the transformation of matter into spirit, death into life, sorrow into joy. Spiritual exemplars have underscored that the ultimate goal of spirituality is to transform human consciousness. This may be achieved through many kinds of acts, from specially designed prayers and invocations to the most common daily activities. As the Sufi Abu al-Qasim al-Junayd of Baghdad (d. 910 CE) stated, those who are grounded in the Truth do not permit their feet to take a single step forward or their limbs to make the slightest movement unless such an act is a point of spiritual departure. They feel this way because they wish to reach a state in which "the name of God is on their lips and their minds are constantly upon God" (Abdel-Kader 1976, 140).

Junayd's teaching reminds us that spirituality is not only about transformation as a moment of change. It is also about retaining what has been transformed. As the Qur'an states in regard to its use as a form of dhikr, the spiritual recollection of God, "We have revealed the dhikr, and verily We shall keep it preserved" (Q 15 : 9). Retaining a spiritual orientation means adopting it for oneself, and so to some degree, spirituality has to be involved with matter, just as life is bracketed by death, and joy is paired with sorrow. Seeming opposites do not always become antagonistic contraries; sometimes they announce agonistic dyads that facilitate deeper understanding through conflicts that are discovered upon deeper inspection to be more apparent than real.

From the Antagonist to the Agonist

Here the language of medicine helps clarify our project. For the medical researcher, an agonist is not the same as an antagonist: rather, an agonist is a substance that is perceived by the body to be another substance and thus stimulates a reaction; as such, it is different from an antagonist, which blocks action on all levels. By contrast, an agonist blocks action only on one level while promoting it on another. Spirituality has a similar function and thus is similarly suffused with agonistic pairs of concepts. "Matter" and "spirit" is such an agonistic pair. Spirit does not always act against matter because sometimes it may also act through matter. In a similar way, life does not erase death; rather, it echoes death as its companion, just as a shadow does with light. Joy and sorrow too, are part of the agonistic spectrum of human emotions; for sorrow can be the harbinger-both a symbol and a catalyst-of ultimate joy.

The legal and spiritual approaches to Islam constitute another such agonistic pair. Among Sufis, the sometimes tense relationship between these approaches is often portrayed as a dialectic between the Law of God as expressed in His rules and regulations (al-Shari'a) and the inner truth or spirit of Islam (al-?aqiqa). However, not all Muslims see these two poles as oppositional or antagonistic. For the Andalusian Sufi master 'Ali ?ali? al-Andalusi (d. ca. 1508 CE), spirituality and the Shari'a are not oppositional but complementary and interdependent. As he explains, "He who is ignorant of God's spiritual graces (la?a'if) is ignorant of God Himself. He who is ignorant of God is also ignorant of divine guidance and the laws (a?kam) of God. He who is ignorant of the laws of God is virtually an unbeliever" (Cornell 1998, 214).

Similarly, for another Andalusian spiritual master, the philosopher and mystic 'Abd al-?aqq ibn Sab'in (d. 1271 CE)-a contemporary of St Thomas Aquinas-the recollection of God through remembrance (dhikr) is both the subject of God's Law (maw?u' al-Shari'a) and a predicate of the Divine Reality (ma'mul al-?aqiqa). He goes on to explain: "The essence of remembrance depends on nearness to God, yet it is also the means of intimacy with Him, as well as spiritual bliss and the worship of both the heart and the body. In sum, all types of it are good; transaction in it is a delight and effort for its sake is its own reward. Allah is the beginning and the end of it. Its outer aspect (?ahir) is the search for God, and its inner aspect (ba?in) is the glory of divine selfhood" (Badawi 1956, 151, Arabic text).

Among the conceptual challenges that we have faced in putting together the present volume, nearly all relate to clarifying the agonistic rather than the antagonistic relationship between seeming contraries. Consider space and time. Space is not just out there, in the vast cosmos expanding billions of light years from earth; it is also within us, intrinsic to the smallest gene or chromosome of each person's DNA. Nor is time neatly divisible into past or future. Between yesterday and tomorrow there is a today that is so full of promise that the spiritual person must become, in the words of a well-known Sufi metaphor, the "owner" or "master" of her time (?a?ib al-waqt). Here, the concept of time refers to the moment that fulfills the person, not only dividing past from future but also combining the two. To call on Abu al-Qasim al-Junayd once again for explanation, in this state of agonistic time, the person "is wholly present. In other words, he existed and then was lost, and was lost and then existed. He was as if he had never been and never was as he used to be. Then he was not as he had been before. Now he is himself, after he was not truly himself. He now exists in another existence, after first having existed lost to himself" (Abdel-Kader 1976, 51-52, Arabic text).

The agonistic notion of time described by Junayd was also understood by the American philosopher George Herbert Mead (1863-1931), the "father" of the discipline of social psychology. At the end of his career he formulated a radical "Philosophy of the Present," which denied the objective reality of the past and the future for the sake of an agonistic here-and-now. For Mead, past and future have no real existence; rather, they are imagined projections of what he termed the "specious present," which we constantly revise (in respect to the past) and "provise" (in respect to the future), as we attempt to respond to the demands of...