Wow, what a fantastic number of responses! Thanks to everyone for taking the time to read what I wrote and formulate a response. It looks like I will get some milage out of this forum after all, in terms of satisfying my desire for discussion
I'd like to respond to several posters at the same time.
To Cheetah:
If a certain kind of Muslim prays to a God that advocates death and destruction, an angry, fearsome God: he is creating an image. An "imaginary friend", but one who is quite unpleasant. And if you pray to a loving God, you are likewise creating an image.
I couldn't agree more. I never expected to hear that admission from a theist though.
Sorry about the initial rude response, btw. We've had a lot of trolls recently, I thought you might be another one.
No need to apologise: I was looking to provoke
You should have seen what happened when this writing was posted up on the Russian language Salafi forum: those brothers are seriously hardcore!
The "imaginary friend" term comes from Richard Dawkins in a recent tv interview, where he used it when talking to an Anglican bishop. But you should not be suprised to hear this from a theist: I think one of the most important theologians of the 20th century was Carl Jung, and this is precisely how he characterises our relationship to the Divine. But it is not to deny the Divine: it is simply to accept that we create the world around us, everything from the chair I sit on, to the God I think I am praying to in the prayer house. See Jung's writings on Mandalas, for an introduction: if you are very interested, I can dig out a reference for you.
To Tialoc:
Encoded truth = failure at being clear
Why would a God be baroque and use intricate metaphors with encoded truth and deep meaning instead of being plain clear and strait to the point... especially since your supposed eternal fate is at stake? :S
I can't give a one line answer to that, and I've probably posted enough
But obviously,
all use of language is from a human. The prophet is human, and prophecy is human. Ordinary speech, that does not reflect the light of God, has no trouble being clear and straight to the point. But "Divine Speech" (which is a kind of oxymoron) is at what the philosopher Wittgenstein called the limits of language. Hence it sounds all scrambled and baroque to us mere mortals.
The exact problem with salafism as it stands today is that its exponents WANT the Divine Speech to be like ordinary speech, clear and straight to the point.
To which I say: 1) as God is outside of language, you can't expect a prophet to channel God through ordinary speech in ordinary ways 2) a God that speaks to us clearly and straight to the point? How dull is that?!
To IsLame:
Have you got any evidence or proof of Islam being the true religion, or of Gods existance?
Yes.
To ned:
Tailor, you've got some interesting ideas and I admit I'm intrigued and will keep reading the things you're writing.
Thanks very much! I look forward to what I hope will be an ongoing engagement on these topics. If you return to my blog (and you don't mind a Sufi/mystical types reading), any comments on the blog itself would also be welcome.
Moreover, I feel that in the case of Islam imho the problem is a bit more serious because the core texts are really not very enlightened ... i.e. the Quran and the hadiths. I have read the Bhagavad-Gita, the Tao te Ching, the Dhammapada, even the Christian Beatitudes, non-canonical Gospels, etc. and all these other texts are light-years ahead of the Quran in terms of profoundly philosophical and spiritual content. Even a secular humanist could read these texts as literature or philosophy and benefit from them but I really can't say the same for the Quran, although every now and then it does have a few more contemplative verses (some of which Lex Hixon reinterpreted in his book "The Heart of the Quran"). To me it is obvious that many of the later Sufis and Sufi texts were vastly ethically superior to Muhammad, his sayings and the Quran.
It's a standard mystical practice to take human follies, disgusting practices and cruelty and try to raise them to a more sublime level through a kind of "poetic alchemy" -- mystics of all religions do this as a means of invoking forgiveness, redemption and salvation for the human condition. It reminds me of a Christian doctrine called "entire sanctification" according to which God seeks to love, heal and redeem the whole of creation, bearing its evil, divisions, limitations and so on. So I do encourage your attempts at metaphorical interpretations of Islam -- and I think even others on this forum who are atheists or agnostics might also find themselves being more encouraging from a literary or artistic viewpoint -- but I think you'll have to be a bit more sophisticated than what I see on the blog so far.
I want to just reiterate one point: I don't believe the Prophet ever used metaphors. He just arranged signs. This is the conclusion of
http://thegoodgarment.wordpress.com/2009/03/06/the-prophetic-voice-madness-and-the-brother-of-lying/However, we, ordinary readers, can't help taking a metaphoric interpretation, because we are not prophetic. I use Lacan's (and Derrida's) understanding of "metaphor" here: substituting one sign for another to explain the former sign. So in this very wide sense of metaphor, a straight up Salafi Muslim is also being metaphoric: when he reads "wife" he is understanding "wife" to mean "someone who is married to a husband according to a nika ceremony".
It's still substituting one sign for another, to explain. Any reading is metaphoric, so they all occupy the same epistemological status, for me anyway.
But some readings display more light than others (see end of my post here).
Regarding your opinion that "these other [spiritual] texts are light-years ahead of the Quran in terms of profoundly philosophical and spiritual content," it is certainly a view that I understand.
I suppose it does come down to a feeling: some people like coffee and others prefer tea.
A while back now, I rejected Islam for a long period of time and trained in a Buddhist Therevada monastery. Almost ended up being a monk! So I know quite a bit of the Buddhist scripture. It's esoteric, but explicitly esoteric, so engagement is easy (for people who are into that kind of thing).
The Gnostic literature and, for example, Lurianic Kabbalah or the Sufi poetry of Rumi, is caged in middle eastern mystical terminology and so is likewise explicitly esoteric. So the reward is there instantly (for people who are into that kind of thing).
But that stuff is written by people who are not prophets and so the use of metaphor is
one of careful negotiation (rather like my humble little blog
)
The Torah and Quran are quite different in style, I completely agree. Engagement with Prophecy is difficult if you have not engaged before. But that's the nature of Prophecy.
I can only speak from personal experience here, but if the veil is lifted, if the code is cracked so to speak, then engagement with Prophecy becomes very rewarding: in my personal experience, infinitely more rewarding than the other texts you cite, even though they contain
more Wisdom than I could ever understand.
Tailor: I'm reading your posts here and your blog, and again I sympathize with the attempt -- also I am a big fan of mythology, archetypal imagery, symbolic poetry, etc., as transformational tools, but I would urge you not to be so literal yourself. All these symbols and myths are metaphors that are simply meant to aid humanity to transform itself -- but you can never equate them with reality itself. Alfred North Whitehead called this confusion of metaphor and reality "a misplaced sense of concreteness".
For instance, I note that you are using a lot of gendered metaphors. That's fine -- just keep in mind that whenever humanity has faced the ineffable mystery of reality it has had no choice but to use human metaphors, and human language, to describe it. Human beings experience sexual dimorphism, so we project it onto everything we see. That doesn't mean reality itself has a gender in any literal sense.
Certainly: from one perspective, it is a little like how we anthropomorphize plants in biology.
But as I said, everything we do in life is metaphor. I know Whitehead quite well. But I follow poststructuralists like Deleuze and Derrida, precisely because Whitehead's project failed (althougn Deleuze's materialism acknowledges Whitehead in a strange reinterpretation).
In this understanding: EVERYTHING we do is an attempt at metaphor, that doesn't quite work. If I say "take a chair", and you say "what do you mean", then
I will <<interpret>> the meaning of chair by substituting the sign for "chair" by "object that one sits on" and "take" by the sign "sit". This process is still one of metaphor: substituting one sign for another to attempt to clarify. In the philosophy of Derrida, this process occurs whenever we read, even if it <<appears>> like we are not being metaphoric.
All interpretation is metaphoric. As I think a lot of people here are literalists, they would simply reject my views at this point.
But assuming you accept that all interpretations are metaphoric, then your question (and very sensible caution!) about how I negotate metaphors becomes important. Not just important for me on my blog, but for everyone, reading anything ("literally" or otherwise), because all reading is metaphoric.
[Brief philosophical ramble: please skip if you dislike such things.]
My day job is that I teach logic and philosophy at university, and so have a lot to do
ways of avoiding the problems he encountered with Russell in their Principia Mathematica.
I use the system of Martin-Lof, which basically is an approach to logic where there is no
"semantics", with origins in the philosophy of Wittgenstein (who, in turn, was reacting to his previous pro-Russellian view). That is, there is no system of "meaning" outside of the signs of logic and their application. Of course, such a semantics was what Russell and Whitehead attempted to do to mathematics: but they ran into problems. In the Martin-Lof/Wittgenstein view, we necessarily sometimes substitute one sign for another to explain its meaning: this
is exactly what a "metaphor" is. But such a thing is not a totality: in fact, following Wittgenstein (and later postmodern thinkers such as Derrida), no total explanation of a sign is
possible.
I believe all that: it's my bread and butter, so to speak.
So what am I doing using all these signs as "metaphors" for our mystical relationship
to Creation and the Creator? That's difficult to answer. Obviously it requires some SERIOUSLY careful negotiation, but I know what I'm doing
If you (or anyone else here) is interested, send me a private email and I can send you a detailed exegesis (but it's really philosophically dense, unfortunately, so it is not blogworthy yet).
Briefly, the answer lies in the notion of Martin-Lof's notion of a "constructive judgement": what you "do" with the signs you employ. There are spiritual, enlightened judgements and unilluminated judgements. An example of a judgement is a pronouncement of a hadith, or the reading of a hadith. In my exegesis, spiritual judgements are necessarily self-referential, in the sense that they refer back to ourselves, making them. An example would be the hadith I use here:
http://thegoodgarment.wordpress.com/2009/04/19/ijtihad/My judgement of this hadith refers directly back to my judgement, and through this I make a little bit more progress toward the Divine.
It's a technique of negotiating the "metaphors" that the Sufis and great Rabbis used to call "reaping the field". But I've couched it in the language of poststructural continental philosophy,
Martin-Lof constructive logic and psychoanalysis: just to make things simple for everyone who likes their religion simple
[End of ramble]
Topic: Hyper-Salafism: the True Meaning of Islam