Heroes of Muridiyya: Ayoub (Job)

The Biblical book of Job may be based upon an Arabic original (see Harold Bloom, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?, pp. 14-18). Towards the close of the book, God, from the whirlwind, answers Job's persistent questioning of Divine justice. As usual, Walter Kaufmann's remarks are insightful:

Far from insisting that there is some hidden justice in the world after all, or from claiming that everything is really rational if we only look at it intelligently, God goes out of his way to point out how utterly weird ever so many things are. He says in effect: the problem of suffering is no isolated problem; it fits a pattern; the world is not so rational as Job's comforters suppose; it is uncanny. God does not claim to be good and Job in his final reply does not change his mind on this point: he reaffirms that God can do all things.

Kaufmann, The Faith of a Heretic, New York: Doubleday (Anchor Books, 1963), 153.

Job's unflinching honesty and acceptance of what Kaufmann termed "the weirdness of the ways of this world, which is nothing less than grotesque" [ibid.] makes him a particular hero of Muridiyya. Kaufmann adds: "Those who believe in God because their experience of life and the facts of nature prove his existence must have led sheltered lives and closed their hearts to the voice of their brothers' blood" [ibid., 167].

Jobean piety is of the disillusioned variety. Kaufmann praises his "profound detachment...not being wedded to the things of this world, being able to let them go--and yet not repudiating them in the first place like the great Christian ascetics and the Buddha and his followers...to be able to give up what life takes away, without being unable to enjoy what life gives us in the first place; to remember that we came naked from the womb and we shall return naked; to accept what life gives us as if it were God's own gift, full of wonders beyond price; and to be able to part with everything. To try to fashion something from suffering, to relish our triumphs, and to endure defeats without resentment: all that is compatible with the faith of a heretic" [ibid., 168-169].