The White, the Black, the Red, and the Green

Khatam Asam (d. 852) is remembered in Sulami's Tabaqat to have said:"Whoever would embrace our faith must undergo four kinds of death: white death, black death, red death, and green death. The white death is hunger; the black death is to endure the torment caused by other people; the red death is opposition to the lower self; and the green death is the sowing of a cloak from patches."

The Mazeppist remarks: It is by following the demands of our hunger that we find ourselves in society and, within that society, an audience. Once we have obtained an audience, we begin the struggle with the self. The rest is bricolage.

Muslim Devotion to Mary

Citing 'Abbasa Tusi, in his Memoirs of the Saints, Attar has written, "When tomorrow, on Doomsday, the cry goes up: 'O men!' the first person to step forward will be Mary, the mother of Jesus." --Javad Nurbakhsh, Sufi Women, 12.

Not All Orientalist Painting Was Exploitative

Some artists discovered in North Africa a world of elegance and grace and recorded their impressions for posterity.

Duties of the Heart: Bahya ibn Paquda

Bahya ibn Paquda was a rabbinic judge (dayan) in 11th century Muslim Spain who composed, in Arabic, a "guide to inwardness and personal and social ethics" (al-Hidaya ila fara'id al-qulub or The Guide to the Duties of the Heart)--a work that is familiar to traditional Jews to the present day in its Hebrew translation Hovot ha-Levavot. [see Erwin I. J. Rosenthal, Judaism and Islam, 121-128].

"Steeped in Biblical and Rabbinic learning and the philosophy of Saadiah Gaon, Bahya also knows the Greek philosophers and Galen in their Arabic texts. He draws upon kalam and Sufi writers and the Shi'ite group known as the Sincere Brethren of Basra...whose cosmopolitan and humanistic pietism is akin to his own" [Lenn Goodman, "Ibn Paquda, Bahya (fl. early 12th century)" in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 633-636].

Historians of Muslim Spain typically view the late 11th-early 12th century as one of cultural decline, and yet Ibn Paquda's masterpiece is an exemplary work of humanistic prowess--one that draws on a variety of sources (mainly Islamic) and translates them into the author's own religious idiom.

The true genius of humanistic piety lies in its ability to enclose in cosmopolitan embrace wisdom and inspiration wherever it finds them and from whatever source.

Tomás Luis de Victoria- Taedet animam meam

Let Us Dare...

To read, think, speak and write.

--John Adams

Murid Memento Mori

The key texts for today's lesson are Montaigne's essay "That To Think As A Philosopher Is To Learn To Die" and the remarks on death in the Maqalat of Shams-ud-Din-i Tabrizi.

It is uncertain where death awaits us; let us await it everywhere. Prevision of death is prevision of liberty. He who has learned to die has unlearned servitude. To know how to die frees us from all subjection and compulsion. There is nothing evil in life for him who clearly understands that the loss of life is not an evil.

--Montaigne, Essais Bk. I, Ch. XX (tr. George B. Ives).

If the soul were in expectation of the fulfillment of its wishes from the other universe [of Non-existence], he or she would struggle to go there. Then death would not be death; rather, it would be life. Mustafa [the Prophet Muhammad], peace and blessings upon him, said, "The faithful do not die, really they immigrate from one universe to another." According to the individual situation, immigration is one thing; death is another.

--Shams-i Tabrizi, Maqalat, tr. Algan and Helminski, 21.

The Meaning of Sainthood [Veli-hood]

What is the meaning of sainthood? Does it mean having soldiers, a crown, and a throne? Perhaps the one who has sainthood in his nafs is a saint. Sainthood is to have sovereignty over one's self, one's states, one's attributes, one's speech, and one's silence. The one whose wrath or grace is appropriate while he is speaking or silent, is a saint. The people of wisdom (anf) don't say, "We are incapable, and He is the Powerful One." You have to become powerful and strong in every attribute, that you might be silent at the time when silence is called for, respond at the moment for response, and show wrath when it is the moment for wrath, and kindness when kindness is appropriate. Otherwise such a person's attributes become a calamity for him or her, and they cause pain because they are not ruled by him, rather they rule over him. A person becomes a ruler, if he is not a slave. --Rumi's Sun: The Teaching of Shams of Tabriz, tr. by Refik Algan and Camille Adams Helminski, Sandpoint, ID: Morning Light Press (2008), 20.

Montaignean Taqiyya

Taqiyya is a term associated most often with Shi'ism, and essentially involves the exercise of prudence when it comes to the disclosure of one's religious identity or positions in an environment where such disclosure could endanger one's life, friends, family, livelihood, etc. Leo Strauss famously explored aspects of this topic in his little book Persecution and the Art of Writing. Strauss makes no mention of Montaigne, but his observation that persecution is a danger that is "coeval with philosophy" [Strauss, 21] should alert us to its threat where Montaigne was concerned. And, indeed, successive editions of the Essais conclusively demonstrate that Montaigne was sensitive to the dangers he incurred by publishing his candid thoughts, and also the extent to which he was willing to comply with the demands of ecclesiastical censorship.

Perhaps among the most poignant examples of Montaigne's sensitivity to this danger is the essay "Of Prayers" (Bk. I, Ch. LVI). Grace Norton commented on this essay thus:

It is an Essay not remarkable in thought or expression, but of great personal interest as showing (to my mind) the entire simplicity and sincerity of Montaigne's feeling about matters of religion. He writes as a respectful and obedient son of the Church, on a matter which lies not outside, but, one may say, beneath, the prescriptions of the Church,--a matter intimately concerning every human soul,--the meaning and use of Prayer.

Montaigne knew only too well that, as he famously quipped, though his knees were made for bending, the Church must be satisfied that his understanding was equally flexible. He chose to speak his mind with considerable candor, but always did so with the added caveat that he "set forth ideas which are human and my own, simply as human ideas, considered by themselves, and not as if decreed and ordained by divine edict, incapable of doubt or debate; matters of opinion, not matters of faith; what I judge from my own faculties, not what I believe from God..." ["Of Prayers"].

It was a strategy that worked, but I submit that it worked because Montaigne meant it in all sincerity. Montaigne had little difficulty with St. Paul's admonition to "pray without ceasing" [1 Thess. 5:17]--and he tells us that his favorite prayer was the Paternoster. He prayed not from a place of certainty, however, but from a place of doubt and desire.

Montaigne's taqiyya was an apt expression of his muridiyya.

Montaignean Muridiyya

Few readers of Montaigne have ever managed to come to grips with his relationship to religion. It is disappointing, indeed, to read commentators who consider his remarks on religion insincere; equally disappointing are those commentators who think him fervent in belief. For my money, Maurice Merleau-Ponty has demonstrated, to date, the most sensitive feel for Montaigne's religiosity. I excerpt from Richard McCleary's translation of Merleau-Ponty's essay "Reading Montaigne" in the collection Signs (Northwestern University Press, 1964), 198-210.

Having set out in this way, attentive to all that is fortuitous and unfinished in man, he is at the opposite pole from religion, if religion is an explanation of and key to the world. Although he often puts it outside the range of his inquiries and beyond his reach, nothing he says is a preparation for belief. (202)

What he retains of Christianity is the vow of ignorance. Why assume hypocrisy in the places where he puts religion above criticism? Religion is valuable in that it saves a place for what is strange and knows our lot is enigmatic. All the solutions it gives to the enigma are incompatible with our monstrous condition. As a questioning, it is justified on the condition that it remains answerless. It is one of the modes of our folly, and our folly is essential to us. When we put not self-satisfied understanding but a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence, we can neither obliterate the dream of an other side of things nor repress the wordless invocation of this beyond. What is certain is that if there is some universal Reason we are not in on its secrets, and are in any case required to guide our lives according to our own lights... (203)

It is from doubt that certainty will come. So we must measure the extent of it. Let us repeat that all belief is passion and makes us beside ourselves, that we can believe only by ceasing to think, that wisdom is a resolution to be irresolute, that it condemns friendship, love, and public life. And so here we are back to ourselves again. And we find chaos still, with death, the emblem of all disorders, on the horizon. Cut off from others, cut off from the world, incapable of finding in himself (like the Stoic wise man) and in an inner relationship to God the means of justifying the world's comedy, Montaigne's wise man, it would seem, no longer has any conversation except with that life he perceives welling madly within him for a little while longer, any resource except the most general derision, any motive except despising himself and all things. In this disorder, why not give up? Why not take animals for a model...[o]r to invent, against the feeling of death, some natural religion...This movement is to be found in Montaigne. But there is another one too, which appears just as often. For after all the doubts, there remains to be explained...why we believed to begin with that we held truths, and why doubt needs to be learned. (205-206)

The critique of human understanding destroys it only if we cling to the idea of a complete or absolute understanding. If on the contrary we rid ourselves of this idea, then thought in act, as the only possible thought, becomes the measure of all things and the equivalent of an absolute. (206)

The critique of passions does not deprive them of their value if it is carried to the point of showing that we are never in possession of ourselves and that passion is ourselves. At this moment, reasons for doubting become reasons for believing. The only effect of our whole critique is to make our passions and opinions more precious by making us see that they are our only recourse, and that we do not understand our own selves by dreaming of something different. Then we find the fixed point we need (if we want to bring our versatility to a stop) not in the bitter religion of nature (that somber divinity who multiplies his works for nothing), but in the fact that there is opinion, the appearance of the good and true. Then regaining nature, naivete, and ignorance means regaining the grace of our first certainties in the doubt which rings them round and makes them visible. (206, emphasis added)

The fact of the matter is that true skepticism is movement toward the truth, that the critique of passions is hatred of false passions, and finally, that in some circumstances Montaigne recognized outside himself men and things he never dreamed of refusing himself to, because they were like the emblem of his outward freedom, and because in loving them he was himself and regained himself in them as he regained them in himself. (207)

It is unconditional freedom which makes us capable of absolute attachment. Montaigne says of himself: I have been so sparing in promises that I think I have kept more than I have promised or owed. (210)

Il a cherché et peut-être trouvé le secret d'être, dans le même temps, ironique et grave, libre et fidèle.

(from the French edition, Paris: Les Éditions Gallimard, 1960, 208).

Flesh Made Word

As Eric Auerbach noted in Mimesis, Montaigne rejected the Johannine myth of the "Word made flesh." His corrective: "I am myself the matter of my book," i.e., the flesh made word.

Even so, he did not endorse his literary art for art's sake. In "Of Experience," Montaigne averred that "to compose our character is our duty, not to compose books...Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately." Had Montaigne never written a word but, rather, led a life consistent with his discourse, he would have been what Donald Frame called "the Whole Man"--and that would have been enough.

Montaigne wrote because he was a humanist--a devotee of the word (a "philologist" in the old-fashioned sense). But such devotion is not sufficient, nor is it even necessary for a life of "wholeness." That said, because his wordiness manifested itself as a mode of self-translation, we, his readers, are the richer. His Essais model for us humanistic practice as a humanizing practice, where "humanization" is a process by which we learn to discover ourselves through others and others through ourselves. Put another way, in meditating upon his words, we trace the steps along the horizontal path of Montaigne's humanistic muridiyya.

The stations along this path include [1] the cognizance of human contingency, [2] the cultivation, in response, of an ironized sensibility, and [3] a commitment to human solidarity. In the end, Montaigne was not only Tolstoy's true master (see post of 09.04.13), but Rorty's as well.

The Essais constitute an enchiridion of humanizing humanism: a manhaj for those who would attend to Montaigne's voice and, illuminated by his discourse, find themselves "at home," at last, within their own skin.

The Montaignean Epiphany

Some time around the year 1580 C.E., Montaigne's writing project--the project of "essaying" himself--bore unexpected fruit: he decided that he had to stop looking to others for guidance and, instead, build his own Golgonooza (Murid House). Looking back on what he had written to that point, it occurred to him that, in fact, building his own Golgonooza is what he had been up to from the start. Its magnificent structure stood in the pages of his book: brick upon word-worn brick.

Disillusioned Piety: A Murid Lineage

Montaigne was Tolstoy's true master, though it is possible that Tolstoy himself did not know it. He certainly read Montaigne and was impressed with his views on education. But he also imbibed Montaigne indirectly through close readings of other authors. As a consequence, he may have been unaware that, when he took Rousseau as his first intellectual hero, he was drinking at the well of Montaigne. When he read and was radicalized by de la Boetie's Discourse of Voluntary Servitude, he could hardly have escaped knowing about Montaigne's deep friendship with the author of that work, though he may not have been acquainted with scholarly speculation about Montaigne's potential role in its production. And when he read Pascal, did he appreciate the degree to which the Jansenist was indebted to Montaigne, even at the level of the sentence?

In Emerson, Thoreau, and Voltaire, Tolstoy likewise "read" Montaigne. Montaigne was as inescapable for Tolstoy as he was virtually invisible. For the way of Montaigne into the heart is rarely the front door. He prefers a side entrance and the possibility of loitering about a vestibule. He can wait there indefinitely, for he disdains hurry. His method is to gain your trust through familiarity. And, before you know it, you are a Montaignean.

Montaigne's skeptical religiosity runs in the veins of the Tolstoyan murid, whether she knows it or not, and those veins run parallel to the arteries of al-Ghazalian skeptical religiosity. Either way (or both ways) disillusioned piety is the result (see post of July 30, 2013 below).

Where Montaigne Practiced His "Muridiyya"

Muridiyya is the Never Ending Search for the Sublime

Muridiyya is the never ending search for the sublime in the silences, and in the wide open spaces, of the solitary self.

In solitude, the self is free to confront itself with its inevitable duplicity and plurality.

The Murid never forgets that the kaaba, like the Holy of Holies, is empty.

What is emptiness but room to move?