The Essence of Unity Among Muslims
Every bird does not receive nature’s training;
Few indeed are the fowl who profit from the snare of the cage.
For the past few days the meeting of the European Fatwā Council had been in session. So intense were the academic pre-occupations that even drawing breath felt like an unforeseen blessing. Questions of fiqh, requests for sharʿī verdicts and scholarly symposia so filled the atmosphere that time itself seemed to flee with feet upon its head. Yesterday, however, our cup of joy overflowed when we were taken round the historic sites and marvels of Vienna. It felt as though, after bending over the arid pages of fiqh and fatwā, we had set foot in the verdant meadows of history, and after the scorching sun of scholarly debate we had found repose in the cool shade of civilisation and culture.
This morning at the breakfast table the people of fiqh and fatwā were gathered. Bread and cheese, tea and other requisites had their appointed places upon the cloth, but the real curry of the conversation was the sects, schools and mutual disputes among Muslims. In every man’s tone was a hurt as though the unity of the umma were being torn before his very eyes and he, with trembling fingers, was making a forlorn attempt to stitch together each scattered thread of that sundered collar.
The complaint was that the ignorant and the short-sighted had turned the garden of the single umma into a thorn-filled valley of seventy-three factions. Afterwards, every faction itself had split into seventy-three sub-factions. It seems that boils of discord have appeared upon the body of the umma in such profusion that no physician now needs a microscope to diagnose the disease; yet, when it comes to prescribing the remedy, each physician regards the other physician as part of the ailment.
The further injustice is that each of these factions has already allotted to itself an estate in Paradise. Paradise appears to be an ancestral property, the title-deeds of which lie securely preserved with the leader of every faction; whereas Hell is a shared pasture into which all the other Muslims have been driven. Every group is certain that the key to Paradise rests in its own pocket, and if, by mistake, another Muslim were to step towards that gate, the angels would, rather than admit him, first demand to see his sectarian identity-card.
One gentleman, in a voice full of pain, declared that even the mosques and the prayers are no longer safe from the assault of factionalism. Someone’s qamīṣ, shalwār or pāyjāma does not meet the sharʿī standard; someone’s moustache is objectionable; someone’s beard is shorter or longer than the required measure; another’s cap has no mesh, and someone else’s turban is not tied according to the prescribed design. It is as though a Muslim’s salvation now depends less upon īmān, taqwā and ikhlāṣ than upon which objects are present upon his head, face and body and at what angle they sit.
The places of worship, which were once erected to join hearts together, have in some spots become courts for scrutinising faces, clothes and outward forms. The man coming for ṣalāh first looks not for a place in the row, but examines whether his appearance might fall under the fire of some fatwā. If the cap upon his head lacks a mesh, it is as though one of the vital pillars of the edifice of his faith is missing; and if his beard fails to correspond with the local standard, the metre of his taqwā at once crosses the red line.
For the slightest of reasons people are driven out of mosques, verdicts are issued against them and imāms are declared unfit. The door of the mosque, which ought to be a gate of tawba for the sinner and of tranquillity for the distressed, sometimes turns into a sieve through which, before faith itself, a certificate of sectarian conformity is required to pass. One cannot tell whether these gentlemen regard the miḥrāb and minbar as houses of worship or rather as outposts established upon the frontier of their respective sects, where searching every newcomer is considered a religious duty.
A gentleman remarked with great astonishment: I cannot understand how, with such narrow-mindedness, short-sightedness and inner prejudice, these people remain alive. Each of these maladies is no less than a deadly poison. Indeed, bigotry is a strange venom: a man nurtures it within his breast and directs it against another, yet its effects are first manifested upon his own heart and mind. He imagines that he has severed the life-vein of his opponent, whereas in truth he has cut the vein of his own insight.
Upon this another gentleman delivered such a thundering address against the devotees of stagnation and the worshippers of the elders that it was as though the clouds heaped upon the intellectual sky for years had suddenly burst. In his words there was both the clap of lightning and the downpour of rain. He said that some people have made love for their elders a permanent article of creed in such a manner that even the light of evidence has become intolerable to their eyes. The statements of the venerable are for them lines cut into stone, no matter how many question-marks the changing times, the turning circumstances and the new forms of problems raise around that line. Respect for the elders has its own place, yet there is a difference between respect and captivity. To take light from the lamp is one thing; to bind the lamp upon the eyes and walk is another. By the first method the road is illumined; by the second a man falls into a pit and thereafter begins to search for proofs to establish that pit as the sunna of his elders.
During this conversation I was asked: what is the state of Nadwat al-ʿUlamāʾ? I submitted that Nadwat al-ʿUlamāʾ came into being precisely to bring an end to these sectarian divisions and to kindle the lamp of affection and love among Muslims. Its foundation was laid upon the notion that all Muslims are brothers. Whatever a person’s madhhab or school, whatever his dress or outward appearance, if he is a Muslim the door of another Muslim’s mosque cannot be closed upon him. No one may be prevented from entering Nadwa merely on account of his sect, nor may any Muslim be deprived of praying behind another Muslim.
The conception of religion in Nadwat al-ʿUlamāʾ is not confined within sectarian fortresses; rather, it breathes beneath the vast sky of Islamic brotherhood. Its objective is not that all people should erase their scholarly and intellectual identities and don a single-coloured uniform, but that, despite difference, breadth should remain in the hearts, gentleness upon the tongues and courtesy within conduct. The beauty of a garden does not lie in all its flowers being of a single colour; its charm arises from the assembly of many-coloured blooms. If each flower insists on dyeing the other in its own hue, what will remain is not a garden but the shop of a colour-seller.
The creed of Nadwa and its intellectual spirit are summed up in these principles: ‘Every Muslim may lead and be led in prayer, and every Muslim is to be prayed over at his death’; ‘The blood, honour and sanctities of the Muslims are equal’; ‘Indeed the believers are but brothers’; ‘The Muslim is he from whose tongue and hand the Muslims are safe.’
Within these principles lie brotherhood, equality, mutual respect and the sanctity of human life and honour. Their demand is not that differences of opinion should cease to exist, but that difference should not be allowed to turn into enmity. The task of knowledge is to illumine the roads, not to erect barbed fences upon them; the role of fiqh is to untie the knots of life, not to place ten new knots around every old one; and the purpose of fatwā is to guide human beings, not to render them strangers at the very door of their own religion.
In sum, within the Nadwīs there is such grace and attractiveness that one is moved to say:
Whichever spot one casts one’s gaze upon is entirely his;
This very place, my heart says, would I spend my life.
The breadth of taste that marks Nadwa is in truth the very soul of its scholarly temperament. That breadth is not namedlessness in principles, nor is it a call to erase the distinction between truth and falsehood. It is rather the awareness that difference of opinion among seekers of truth is a natural reality, and that tolerating this reality requires a vessel that narrow hearts do not possess. The ocean, because of its vastness, receives the river; the small pool imagines every new ripple to be transgressing its limits.
Someone asked: are all Nadwīs upon this school? I replied: spaciousness is the mother-tongue of the Nadwīs.
In this sentence lies not merely a pleasing turn of phrase; it is the summary of the entire intellectual history of Nadwa. The mother-tongue is that language in which a person speaks his heart without affectation, in which his emotions breathe, whose words are the natural extension of his disposition. For the Nadwīs, breadth of outlook is something similar; it should not need to be separately learnt, donned or displayed. It is the natural part of their scholarly training, religious insight and human relations.
Wherever a Nadwī may be in the world, his identity ought to be known through his capacious heart, lofty aspiration and high-mindedness. He should stand to save humanity, not to raise higher the ramparts of sectarian forts. His heart should be so expansive that Muslims of diverse tendencies can come to him with their differences intact, and when they rise from his gathering they should feel that rather than being searched in their ʿaqīda someone took the trouble to listen to what lay within their hearts.
To save humanity is itself no insignificant task. It is that trust which at times is buried beneath piles of religious terminology; its voice is drowned in the clamour of juridical hairsplitting; and in the throng of sectarian loyalties its face becomes lost. A man becomes so occupied in casting down his opponent that he forgets that the one he is felling is also a member of the same umma, a declarer of the same kalima and a seeker of salvation before the same Lord.
When anyone meets a Nadwī, his heart should involuntarily cry out: ‘O face of the arena of the world!’ And if he beholds him from afar, he should proclaim aloud: ‘From this dust rises the fragrance of the heart!’ That is, within this person’s personality there should be such charm, such freshness and such human beauty that intimacy with him perfumes the heart like fragrance. He should not be a mere walking repository of books; rather, he should be a living human being illumined by the light of knowledge: in his speech the strength of evidence yet the softness of affection, in his stance firmness yet space for the other, and in his religious consciousness maturity yet refinement within human relations.
One gentleman said that this was likewise the path of Shaykh Qarḍāwī, and for that reason he loved the Nadwīs.
I replied that this love was not only the result of a personal relationship but also the product of a shared intellectual temperament. Those who understand dīn as the guidance of life are not willing to confine it within the cage of group identity. In their sight the greatness of a scholar lies not in how many followers he has, but in how many hearts are illumined by his knowledge, how many minds become expansive and how many human beings are brought closer to one another.
If knowledge does not make a person humble, the turban upon his head remains but a piece of cloth. If fiqh does not create breadth in the heart, its subtleties at times add to the complexities of the mind. If fatwā does not show the path of raḥma, it may, instead of guidance, erect yet another wall. And if love for the elders is stripped of justice, investigation and ḥusn al-ẓann, it begins to turn from a lamp of guidance into an idol-house.
I submitted that my yearning is that every Muslim become a pure-hearted servant, that he appreciate the worth of īmān and islām, that he learn to respect humanity, that he step outside the prison of sectarianism, elder-worship and school-loyalty, and that, instead of turning his heart into a warehouse of hatreds, he make it a garden of loves.
Our tragedy is that, at times in the name of protecting religion, we have strengthened our individual tents, yet have paid no heed to the cracks appearing in the common roof of the umma. Every party is busy trimming the edge of its own cloak, even though the cloak of its neighbour be torn to shreds. Every group pours oil into the lamp of its own school, yet has no concern whether the smoke of that lamp is filling the eyes of another Muslim. We have raised the minarets of mosques, but the distances between hearts have risen higher still; we have filled cupboards with fatwās, yet could not find the leisure to populate the empty chambers of love.
It is precisely at this point that the real responsibility of Nadwa begins. It must become not merely an educational institution, but a symbol of such an intellectual and moral disposition that tolerates difference, holds prejudice to account, connects knowledge with life and views the human being together with his human sanctity. Affiliation to Nadwa is not just a name; it is a trust, and the right of a trust is not discharged by repeating its name, but by fulfilling its demands.
If being a Nadwī comes to mean only an association with an institution, that association is worth little more than an identity card. The true Nadwiyyat is that in a man’s knowledge there be breadth, in his character gentleness, in his heart brotherhood and upon his tongue goodwill. Even at the time of disagreement he should not let go the hem of justice; despite opposition he should keep the honour of the opponent secure, and while considering his own opinion to be right he should still leave room for the possibility that some aspect of the other’s word may merit reflection. Our yearning is precisely this: that every Muslim’s breast be as clear as a mirror:
Our rule is to have a breast like a mirror;
To bear rancour upon our path is disbelief.
