Tolstoyan Religiosity: Muridiyya

As Georg Simmel observed, religion is one thing, religiosity another. Religion has to do with established forms and practices: it is the proper subject of historical study. "Religiosity," on the other hand, refers to the aspirational life of particular individuals and what Raymond Williams termed emergent (or even pre-emergent) "structures of feeling." Being future-oriented and focused upon human subjectivities, religiosity is not so much an object of study as a phenomenal unfolding in time. One bears witness to religiosity and suffers it. The traces left behind are the morsels upon which the historian of religion must feed.

In emulation of the master, the Tolstoyan consciously constructs (or, more accurately, actively participates in the construction of) her own religiosity. In that manner, her religiosity is nothing more or less than the individual expression of her aspirational life.

This is the meaning of the term muridiyya: the struggle to merge one's aspirations with one's own way of being-in-the-world.

The murid is engaged in the process of actualizing or realizing the ideal self, al-insan al-kamil (the perfect man or woman).

The pattern that the adepts of this way have left us is multifarious--necessarily so, because of the individual nature of the quest. We trace in outline only one particular manifestation of this way.

Al-insan al-kamil emerges in (and over) time as an ecstatic witness who, through the practice of presence, serves as a nexus of individual grace. As Martin Buber observed, however, there is a mystery here: the persistent mystery of the necessary relations that obtain between our notions of the one and the many. For individuality is meaningless apart from community (the "rugged individual" is an American myth, and not a particularly helpful one). The individual self of al-insan al-kamil emerges, paradoxically, by means of its effacement (Buber's shiflut).

Uniqueness is thus the essential good of man that is given to him to unfold...Only in his own way and not in any other can the one who strives perfect himself. "He who lays hold of the rung of his companion and lets go of his own rung, through him neither the one nor the other will be realized. Many acted like Rabbi Simeon ben Jochai and in their hands it did not turn out well, for they were not of the same nature as he but only acted as they saw him act out of his nature."

Al-Ghazali referred to this aspect of the way as the avoidance of taqlid or, as he referred to it with contempt, "the religion of donkeys."

Buber expressed it this way: Even "as man seeks God in lonely fervor...there is a high service that only the community can fulfill...so the uniqueness of man proves itself in his life with others." He continued:

The individual sees God and embraces Him. The individual redeems the fallen worlds. And yet the individual is not a whole, but a part. And the purer and more perfect he is, so much the more intimately does he know that he is a part and so much the more actively there stirs in him the community of existence. That is the mystery of humility.

In the proper meaning of the word, this is islam (the peace one discovers through surrendering self to that which is beyond self)--not as religion, i.e., "Islam," but as aspirational unfolding.

Such an insight may ramify in a variety of ways. Buber remarks, "He who lives in others according to the mystery of humility can condemn no one. 'He who passes sentence on a man has passed it on himself'...Only living with the other is justice." Here Buber states a fundamental Tolstoyan principle that rules out violence as an acceptable response to human conflict and makes involvement with the law courts and other coercive institutions impossible.

For every judgment is a confession. As an alternative to judgment, Buber proposes "the love of a being who lives in a kingdom greater than the kingdom of the individual and speaks out of a knowing deeper than the knowing of the individual." Such a kingdom "exists in reality between the creatures, that is, it exists in God."

Thy kingdom come, thy will be done; as above, so below.

The aspirational self is realized in the effacement of the ostensive self. He who would save his life must lose it.

And he who knows himself [i.e., his aspirational self], said the Prophet, knows his Lord.

Self-effacement (Buber's shiflut or humility, tasawwuf's fana' or annihilation) is, paradoxically, a key element in the quest to become a nexus of individual grace (tasawwuf's baqa' or subsisting in the divine sakina).

He who lives with others in this way realizes with his deed the truth that all souls are one; for each is a spark from the original soul, and the whole of the original soul is in each.

Thus lives the humble man, who is the loving man and the helper: mixing with all and untouched by all, devoted to the multitude and collected in his uniqueness, fulfilling on the rocky summits of solitude the bond with the infinite and in the valley of life the bond with the earthly, flowering out of deep devotion and withdrawn from all desire of the desiring. He knows that all is in God and greets His messengers as trusted friends. He has no fear of the before and the after, of the above and the below, of this world and the world to come. He is at home [in the world] and never can be cast out. The earth cannot help but be his cradle, and heaven cannot help but be his mirror and his echo.