Muridiyya: A Peasant Faith

Think of Tolstoy's "wise peasant" character, Platon Karataev, in War and Peace, Book 12: Karataev "could not understand the meaning of words apart from their context. Every word and action of his was the manifestation of an activity unknown to him, which was his life. But his life, as he regarded it, had no meaning as a separate thing. It had meaning only as part of a whole of which he was always conscious. His words and actions flowed from him as evenly, inevitably, and spontaneously as fragrance exhales from a flower. He could not understand the value or significance of any word or deed taken separately" [emphasis added].

Whether or not he ever read Qur'an 8:17, Tolstoy understood it implicitly: "You did not throw when you threw, but God threw."

Karataev understood himself as a moment in what Shaykh al-Akbar Ibn 'Arabi asserted was the nature of Reality: the self-disclosure of the merciful God.

The faith of the murid does not consist of cognitive assent to dogmatic propositions beyond that: and even with that single (and singular) proposition, it is difficult to say precisely what is its content. It is more akin to a passional attunement, or an expectation that, in the grand scheme of things, "My mercy defeats My wrath" (a popular hadith qudsi or extra-Qur'anic Divine statement included in the canonical literature of the Islamic tradition). It amounts to a willed conviction that Reality is more benign than hostile. That conviction provides the blessed assurance that Wittgenstein longed for; the confidence that prompts one to say, "Now I know how to go on."

The character of Karataev reappears in Tolstoy's late novel Resurrection under the name "Nabatov" [Book 3, Chapter 12]:

He [Nabatov] was also a typical peasant in his views on religion: never thinking about metaphysical questions, about the origin of all origins, or about the future life. God was to him (as to Arago) an hypothesis which he had as yet not needed. He was not concerned about the origin of the world, and did not care whether Moses or Darwin were right. Darwinism which seemed so important to his companions was to him only the same kind of plaything of the mind as the creation in six days. The question how the world originated did not interest him, just because the question how best to live in this world was ever before him. He never thought about a future life, always bearing in the depth of his soul the firm and quiet conviction, inherited from his forefathers and common to all laborers on the land, that just as in the world of plants and animals nothing ceases to exist, but each thing continually changes its form--the manure into grain, the grain into food, the tadpole into a frog, the caterpillar into a butterfly, the acorn into an oak--so man also does not perish, but only undergoes change. He believed in this, and therefore always looked death straight in the face and bravely bore the sufferings that led towards it, but did not care and did not know how to speak about it. He loved work and was always employed on some practical business, and he spurred on his comrades in the same direction.

The peasant faith of the muridiyya consists of an instinctual organicism that reflects the wisdom acquired through lived experience--suffering life--and not metaphysical speculation. It is not Panglossian but, rather, positive: bearing up under life's difficulties, pragmatic, choosing gratitude over bitterness and, with expectations tempered by life's disappointments, choosing, in Pindar's phrase, "to exhaust the limits of the possible."