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| Sunday, 2 May 2004 |
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On the occasion of the birthday of Prophet Mohammed : The language of religion - an Islamic overview by Nawaz A. Raheem
There can be a question about the means which religion employs to communicate or impart knowledge of the ultimate religious reality. That question we shall take up for discussion shortly. What in important is to realize that the intention of the user of the religious language has never been limited to the arousal of feelings, however, important those feelings be, in the religions experience of the person. Still another function assigned to theological discourse is that it consists of one's declaration or commitment to a way of life, it is so say, a behavioral policy, sanctioned and ordained by a trans-empirical reality. A certain mystic is reported to have said that no one can be a true Muslim unless the Qur'an is revealed to him as it was revealed to the Holy Prophet. It means that the religious way of life as sanctioned by Islam has in a way to be chosen by each if its votary and the commitment made to it as a free conscious human being. What type of language does religion employ? The words that we use about God are drawn from human vocabulary and therefore if these words are taken in the literary sense God would be just another man though very much glorified, exalted and supreme. If on the other hand, God is essentially different from everything which belongs to the earthly plane of existence, then human language utterly fails in His case and we mean nothing when we speak about God. This would result in anthropomorphism and agnosticism respectively. How this dilemma can be overcome is a major problem in present-day theology. This dilemma can be resolved only if we can change our frame of thinking. The language concerning God cannot be taken either in the univocal or in the equivocal sense. But the question is: Is the division of terms into univocal and equivocal mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive or can there be what the ancients call "escaping between the horns of a dilemma", by finding another alternative? The effort to break this impasse has in the main taken three directions, which are analogy, obedience and encounter. Let us take analogy first. It works on the basis of likeness. It maintains that there are more than one or at least one identical abstractable quality in the similars. By means of analogy, it can be asserted that God and man have common qualities, so that man can be wise and God can be wise. But the important question here is not that the use of common language but to determine how analogy works in the case of objects with fundamentally dissimilar natures. To explain this point, theologians usually resort to two types of analogies, namely, those of attribution and proportionality. In analogies of attribution, one of the analogates possesses the attribute in question in a univocal or the actual sense, technically called the "formal", while the other possesses the same attribute in the derivative sense. For example, a man may be healthy and mountain resorts may be healthy. In this example a man is called healthy in the univocal sense of the term "healthy", while the mountain resort is called "healthy" in the derivative and relative sense of the same term. The second variety of analogy, that of proportionality, tries to overcome the distinction of univocal and equivocal as well as that of formal and derivative by holding that words are used always in univocal sense but their meanings are determined proportionately to the nature of the analogates. Example, God is alive and human beings are alive. But in both these cases the meaning of the term "alive" shall be known after considering the nature of the analogates concerned, which is finite in one case and infinite in the other. It can be seen that a great extension comes in the meaning of terms through analogies of attribution and proportionality. Religious literature abounds in the use of metaphorical, mythical and allegorical languages. All these languages work through analogies and personifications. In this connection Sir Seyed Ahmed Khan has made a useful distinction between language of first import and language of secondary import. While explaining the nature of angels and Satan he observers that these two words as well as others of like nature are never employed in the Qur'an as languages of first import. They are taken from the ordinary unlettered and untutored people to whom the Qur'an was addressed in the beginning. Their true purpose was to draw attention to certain religious truths. The point Sir Seyed wants to make is that the Qur'an must perforce speak in the language of the masses but that its true meaning cannot be confined to the symbols which only the common man can understand. Hence the personified symbols should be regarded as language of secondary import while the interpretations which should be put on them can be designated as language of first import. This distinction would emphasize the point that the language of religion is not the language of secondary import; it is rather the language of first import which can be obtained through the allegorical, mythical or metaphorical interpretation of the symbols. As an instance, Ahmed Khan interprets the Fall of Adam allegorically and holds that its purpose was to reveal the real nature of man. The second type of language which religion employs in respect of God is the language of obedience or faith. The advocates of this language very often told hold that even science, despite its high pretensions of objectivity, critical analysis and rationality, depends upon certain assumptions without which its language would be meaningless. These assumptions constitutes the faith of a scientist and no intelligible meaning can be extracted from observations and experiments in their absence. We have already described Sir Seyed Ahamed Khan's distinction between language of first import and language of secondary import. But the position which the defenders of the language of obedience take is not the same as that of Seyed Ahmed. The latter would not say that the language of the Qur'an has no essential role to play in the liberal interpretation of the symbols which it employs. The view associated with the language of obedience would regard the language of the sacred Scripture as a cue which may generate meanings not essentially or vitally connected with the original language. There is no denying the fact that religious language is highly suggestive and rich in meanings. But to hold that language itself is of no account and meanings can emerge from the religious situation quite unconnected with the original text, not only makes a mockery of the religious language, it makes it a redundant vehicle for religious experience. Hence, if the meaning of the theological language descends from the heavens as it were, it does not matter which words are uttered, for any meaning can dawn with any set of words. The defenders of the "obedience" view therefore have not succeeded in solving the mysteries of the theological language although they have emphasized certain important facts about that language. From the language of analogy and obedience. We come to the third type of theological language which is the language encounter. All over the world there have been mystics and all of them have stated in categorical and unambiguous terms that they had a direct experience of or contact with God - it is an experience of I-Thou relationship, an experience in which the warmth and intimacy of direct contact is felt and in which the presence of Thou as another objective reality is perceived. God's knowledge is direct and non-inferential in these experiences. A mystic does not say. "Because I have experience of God, therefore God exists". He does not argue in this fashion; he simply asserts that there is direct Knowledge of God's reality. He merely encounters Him. A sufi saint says "It is not as a result of an inference of any kind, whether explicit, laboriously excogitated or swiftly intuited that the knowledge of God's reality comes to us". No matter how rich and varied our vocabulary become and no matter how frequent and intense our encounters become, the sense of mystery remains; it rather depends and engulfs the whole of one's being. Thus those who think that the ineffability of the religious experience is due to the fact that the language of every day life is poor, do not seem to understand the nature of mystery which is an essential part of the object of religious encounters and cannot therefore be removed by any device. The ascension of the Holy Prophet to heavens is just a means to the encounter of God; it is a personal testimony of the Prophet regarding the certitude and validity of the Ultimate Reality. That such an experience is possible and even desirable, can be deduced from the saying mentioned earlier that none cannot be a true Muslim unless the Holy Qur'an is revealed to him as it was revealed to the Holy Prophet. The revelation of the Holy Qur'an can be interpreted as an encounter of the believer with the Divine source. We have examined three ways in which the meaningfulness of religious discourse can be demonstrated. They are analogy, obedience and encounter. True, taken singly none of them, nor for that matter any other, can stand the test of reason. But this is not important. What is important is to see whether different ways suggested by theologians do or do not illuminate some aspect or religious experience. If each method grants us a peep into some nook of the Ultimate Reality, then the different ways discussed above may present a sufficiently wide enough view to lend significance to the language of religion. |
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When the different chapters of the Holy Qur'an starts with the verse.
"In the name of Allah the Benevolent and the Merciful", the
object is not simply to excite appropriate emotions or to bring solace to
human hearts but to impart certain information about the nature of God.
