One of the most promising new realities is
the dialogue taking place on many different levels between Muslims and
Christians. Commenting on Muslim and Christian sources, the author, Islamic
scholar and former Anglican bishop of Jerusalem, sees even greater possibilities
in shared, common prayer. The excerpt is from Common Prayer, A Muslim-Christian
Spiritual Anthology, London: Oneworld Publication, 1999.
Perhaps this book should have been called
A
Part in Common Prayer. That title has five meanings. Only ‘a part’
of either community will be ready and willing participants. Only ‘a part’
of what they comprehend in faith and doctrine will be present. On both
counts there will be no question of ‘the whole’. In sharing, they will
be ‘apart’ from their full identity and – as is always true in praying
– they will have ‘come apart’, as Jesus (sws) often bade his disciples,
into quiet seeking or, as the Qur’an puts it: ‘desiring the face
of God’.
The admitted partiality of the contents
here has to be tested by reference in the postscript to the whole faith-identity
of each religion. However, as partial it will be genuine. In the same context,
we must reckon with the many factors in contemporary life and society which
require mutual response – response which has to reach back into the spiritual
resources any faith can muster.
It should be clear that we are concerned
not with formal ritual worship and the patterns of public liturgies practiced
in mosques and churches, but rather with what Muslims know as Du’a and
Christians as personal devotion. There is no merging here of those formal
aptitudes which will always remain distinctive, with their sundry postures
of kneeling, bowing, prostrating. Nevertheless, what here derives mainly
from individual souls (Biblical and Qur’anic sources apart) may
well serve in school assemblies, civic groups, or where people meet in
– otherwise – only mental dialogue. Items grouped together have a certain
unity and may suggest where independent thought might further go.
The Qur’an will be found more
extensively quoted here than the New Testament. The reason, in part, is
that the Qur’an, for Muslims, is primarily a recital. Memorising
the text, as is the tradition in Islam, means that Muslim mentality rides
with its sequences and cadence. There is an immediacy in the verses, not
merely as part in a whole but part for a whole. Conversely, the index of
authors shows more Christian sources than Muslim. This is because Christians,
in literature and devotion, have taken livelier liberties than Muslims
permit themselves.
Some items derive from non-believing
sources, which is entirely right. Mystics and Sufis are represented, but
this is not an anthology of Sufism. Were it such, it would not be true
to the breadth of Islam. A glance at the index indicates almost thirty
countries. Senegal to Samarkand is no empty claim, thanks to president
Senghor of the one and the Naqshbandi in the other. Each page makes
its own point as users recognise, take, amend and pursue its hints and
measures.
Let a discursive postscript take up
what this brief introduction can well exclude. Demur can be the better
faced when desire has had its way. Let necessary discussion bide its proper
time. When George Herbert, the seventeenth-century English poet included
here, tried to define prayer, he ventured some intriguing definitions,
among them: ‘God’s breath in man returning to his birth’, ‘the soul in
paraphrase’ and ‘a kind of turn’. He ended with the two words: ‘Something
understood’. He was cryptic but profound. Prayer must then mean: ‘Someone
understood’, and there our theologies differ in what they predicate of
Allah. Yet not wholly so. In the ‘something’ that prayer understands, in
the intention and in the act may be the part all praying parties share.
The preface promised occasion to face
the sundry questions that browsers or readers will bring to all the foregoing.
Those who are contented need read no further: the discontented, however,
will be many and will come well promised. There is no Tasliyah here,
the Muslim will say, no salutation on Muhammad, ‘no calling down of blessing’
with mention of his name, as the Qur’an commands. Its omission must
render the whole unusable by Muslims. Further, a Christian will inquire:
Where is the threefold Name here: ‘Father, Son and Holy Spirit? How, lacking
this, can any prayer be ‘Christian’?’ Is there not some conspiracy of silence
that nothing concludes with the due formula: ‘Through Jesus Christ our
Lord?’ How can Christians come to God on any other ground? There must be
something willful, culpable, intolerable in such omission. Does it not
amount to an unwarranted, guilty suppression, an utter disloyalty in no
way to be condoned? The ‘something understood’ to have prayer right for
either of the separate loyalties here in view may be far to seek. There
is no case it can pretend to make which is not condemned in the making.
What is here, might only spell betrayal, either way. True Muslims have
as little warrant here as honest Christians. Let them stay apart and only
so keep faith.
‘Let patience have here perfect work’,
James the Apostle once wrote – and he is no stranger to controversy (James
1:4). Let us defer queries for the moment and consider why this book should
want to broach such problems as doctrines set for it.
What is clear is that there is a growing
awareness of pluralism. Its constraints are recognised on every hand. Our
global humanity is compelled by technology and the media revolution to
reconcile a ‘one-world’ reality with one which is still, culturally, intensely
local, thanks to poverty, disease, privation and the ‘need for roots’.
Tourism is a cult of the privileged, yet wherever it alights it creates
perceptions of disparity, idly glimpsed or bitterly resented. What is new
now about human diversity is the moral challenge it brings, the pervasive
malaise and the chronic injustice. No separate religion can enjoy immunity
from problems common to them all in society, in the world economy, in the
strife of nationalism and the ethnic dimensions of human neighbourhood.
Moreover, the time has passed when
any one faith, presuming to be ‘the world’s religion’, can pretend to suffice
every culture or dominate the future. This, both Christians and Muslims
will want to insist, does not call into question their worldwide relevance.
But mission or vocation in such worldwide terms has to know that issues
of war and peace, world economics, genetics, ecology, population, space
ambitions and international laws of human rights, are in no exclusive competence.
They demand the mind and will of religions in the plural. They concern
the sundry irreligions of secular humanity.
We do not know that situation for
what it is if we do not allow that faiths have to find at least some modest
communion in what it demands. The same factors which have conduced to dialogue
about beliefs surely point towards something common in responsive prayer
to take us beyond mere debate on means and ends. We are all immersed in
the same features of contemporary life. Techniques, from medicine to engineering,
genetics and statistics, are the same for us all. The sciences are neutral
from culture to culture and from faith to faith. Computers, cybernetics,
cloning body parts, the Internet – these do not discriminate between religions.
For practitioners there is a common community of skill and expertise. It
must surely follow that in manipulating the same technology they are invited
into similar moral and spiritual liabilities for its guidance and control.
Do not such liabilities lead them back into religious frames of reference?
How then can these liabilities be exempt from what prompts prayer?
This points away from the traditional
segregation of devotional practice. It suggests an obligation to find how
the physical bearings of a shared technology belong with personal faith
and draw spiritual direction from it. Then there are all the occasions
of civic and professional activity in hospitals, schools, universities
and local communities where common prayer might have due place in the quest
for sanity, discernment and courage. Issues that tax our patience and try
our spirits are precisely where prayer is most expedient.
But what of the compromises – if such
we see them to be – in which any such commonality on our part will be involved?
Are not doctrine, history, loyalty all against the idea? Have we any valid
hope of proving legitimate in the venture?
The surest ground for confidence – as already hinted
– is that the pages here needed no inventing. They did not have to be researched:
they presented themselves even to initially casual notice – notice of such
a sort as to grow into conviction. Compatibilities attest themselves, even
in the context of things sharply antithetical.
One striking example is the convergence
of the opening of the Christian Te Deum Laudamus and Islam’s
al-Fatihah, the ‘Opener’ of the Qur’an: iyyaka nabudu wa
iyyaka nasta’in. Both the grammars, Latin and Arabic, are employing
the emphatic pronoun in the same sense and for the same reason. The Fatihah
does
not say (as it might): na’buduka, ‘we worship thee’ – a normal attached
pronoun. It adopts a deliberately insistent shape by employing
iyya
to
which is attached a verb-preceding pronoun: ‘Thee, thee only.’ What the
Latin does is precisely the same, though the familiar English forfeits
it in the prosaic ‘We praise thee, O God’, rather than: ‘Thee, being God,
we praise.’
No conscious case for the Arabic being
derived from the Latin is implied. It is simply the coincidence of usage
that signifies. Postponing the trouble we are in when we reach ‘the Father
Everlasting’, it is fair to say that this profoundly Christian hymn in
its first and its final eight verses (‘worship, govern, magnify, keep,
have mercy, lighten, trust, -- with ‘the heavens and all the powers therein’)
as a fervently Muslim feel. If we must halt at the disparities – as we
surely do – we cannot have them in disregard of what conjoins.
It is believed here that this affinity
in a classic case may symbolise a certain kinship in praise, penitence
and petition, as here made articulate from both sources, and that its significance
may avail for common prayer. Has the searching self-reproach of a Ghazali
altogether
have no kinship with the mental turmoil of a Franics Thompson, or the public
conscience of the cordwainer Hallaj no converse with the private
self of a Dag Hammarskjold? What is not in doubt here is that the numerous
citations from the Qur’an – with which most Christians are not conversant
– kindle sympathies of heart around gratitude, awareness of nature, and
the precarious mysteries of our human environment, our sexuality, parenthood
and sense perceptions.
Only when so much is conceded do we
really come to what might give us a pause. To have no place for empathy
would be to have no occasion for misgiving, for we would simply be imprisoned
in exclusivism and ignoring those situations of common responsiveness in
daily life.
But, with all the will in the world,
are not the irreconcilables of Islam and Christ quite insuperable, quite
nugatory of common spirituality, void of all but a fantasy of shared devotion?
There will be those, in either camp, who hold so. The faiths are too far
apart for any to have anything in common with one another. Things contrary
are too massive between them. That is claimed to be the verdict of the
centuries. Islam is too tenacious of its identity, its finality, its utter
suitedness – by divine decree – to forgetful human nature to accept the
implications that wait on ‘common prayer’. Some Christians, likewise, will
be strenuously repudiating Islam even while protesting that they must ‘love
Muslims’. Such will not let the ‘love’ interrogate the ‘repudiation’. Others
will not even stay for the scruples of ‘love’ but make their anathemas
complete. Surely, they will say, the finality of ‘God in Christ’ is decisively
against any positive significance in a subsequent religion. Moreover, Muslims
see the Incarnation as utterly derogatory to the exaltedness of Allah,
while the Qur’an seems to disavow conclusively the cross of Jesus
as actual or redemptive. It must follow that all else distinctively Christian
– the Holy Spirit, the Church, the sacraments and the New Testament writings
– are vetoed. What remains from which extend the ventures of a self-cancelling
quest for community?
Taking due measures of how formidable
the dissuasives are, perhaps we can focus what is at stake about any ‘part
in common prayer’ by noting the absence throughout this anthology of the
familiar words: ‘through Jesus Christ our Lord’. What of such a conspiracy
of silence? Is not that formula crucial for any and every loyal Christian
at prayer? How and why ever forsake it?
But is it forsaken in alternatives like: ‘for thy Name’s
sake,’ or ‘In thy merciful Name’? Formally, yes, but essentially, no. Christians
come to God always on the ground of whom they believe God to be. ‘He who
has the Son has the Father also,’ seeing that ‘from the Father’s being-in-giving
we have the son’: so the Johannine Letters are in line with the New Testament
Gospels. On Christian lips, those alternative phrases carry that Christic
trust. Why not, then, have it articulate and explicit? In order to make
viable a community of potential prayer with others who lack yet, or always,
that Christ-clue, but nevertheless instinctively invoke ‘the Name of God.’
What perhaps we may – for the time being – think of as the elasticity of
the Name of God carries us both, while for the Christian, the Christian
dimensions of that name are for ever in control. Others, however, have
not been made passengers in an act of prayer whose explicitness excluded
them from being party.
All respect to those who insist the
gesture here is wrong: all hope from those who find it rightly mediatorial
if it enables them to be part of something common. Is there a proper patience
in having a form of words in conscious abeyance, given that there is no
foregoing of their meaning? What of – as we term it – ‘the Lord’s Prayer’
itself in relation to the Creed’s Christology? The parties will be tacitly
‘apart’ from their separate completeness in bringing together what is partial
for them both. Does a faith always have to assert its own recognizances
before it will relate beyond itself or may there be a right humility in
a certain self-abnegation as the very form of ministry?
Clearly there will always be those
who think not. They will be right unless the vocation is perceived as such.
The place for dogma is not always prior in the things of the Spirit. Nor
are faiths necessarily most loyal when they are most assertive. What matters
is to read ‘the mind of Christ’, the Christ who was no stranger to controversy
yet perceived potential where the right credentials were hidden from normal
sight.
And as for traditional controversy
between mosque and church, the Qur’an and Gospel, need it be as
obdurate as we have long supposed? A mere postscript is not place for an
exhaustive exploration of what sunders. The task has been attempted elsewhere.
Let it suffice here to ponder a vital clue in Islamic Du‘a and join
it to be central implication of the Bismillah, or Invocation of
Al-Rahman
Al-Rahim, ‘the merciful Lord of mercy.’ The clue is the way in which
Muslim devotion can make the plea of ‘the Name’ the entire gist of the
prayer. Saying: Ya Latif, ‘O thou kindly One,’ intending this or
that circumstance yearning for ‘kindliness’, needs no elaboration, no further
wordage. God is being invoked to be who He is by virtue of that Name. This
calls for no tedious elaboration. He knows well enough how to be himself,
and so vis-à-vis what the pleader has in view.
Hence the admirable brevity of Islamic
Du‘a.
It has a certain kinship with the brevity of the most chaste Prayer Book
collects, where the theme of adoration is the requisite of the petition
so that ascription of praise and plea of soul are in unison. Examples are
here, notably from Hirz al-Jawshan. The praying self is cast wholly on
divine resources. To these the very ‘Nameability’ of God is the key.
Here we come upon a significance that
surely embraces both the Muslim approach to Allah and a Christian’s Christology.
This Nameability entails, in some vital sense a divine-human relation.
God is known, describable and addressable in human terms. To be sure, the
orthodox Muslim theologians had great unease in conceding this, thanks
to their intense preoccupation (for the sake of excluding idolatry) with
exalting Allah far beyond all human language and the human characterisation
it implied. ‘Exalted be He above all that you associate’ was their incessant
cry. Thus, in naming Allah they needed to deny that they were significantly
doing so.
The dilemma can only be overcome by
perceiving that the very transcendence of God admits, contains, includes,
this describability. Doubtless the transcendent transcends all that connotes,
but does so without cancelling that connotation. Otherwise, it is not only
all theology and all faith that are annulled: it is also all worship and
all prayer. For if we cannot veritably ‘call’ God we cannot ‘call upon’
Him. Worship has to go – with theology – into the impenetrable silences
and that is the end of Islam.
‘His (literally, ‘to him’) are the
adorable Names: so call upon Him by them,’ says Surah (17:110).
That is – in one – the trust of faith and the urge of worship, the affirmative/imperative
of Muslim life. God, is His grace, condescends to the realm of human language
and – doing so – underwrites a theology in the very contest of enjoining
and evoking worship. Such condescending into humanness in that compassionate
sense is not such as to be somehow vetoed, queried or disavowed, as if
to safeguard a divine unity that it put in jeopardy. For it was that very
unity from within which the compassion came, which was – in any and every
event – its own safeguard.
Through the divine Names in Islam,
Allah is invoked as the One who condescends to human language. How near,
then, by these lights, to ‘the word made flesh’ to ‘dwell among us that
we might behold glory’? What is Christology but the Self-naming of God
presented in human history as ‘truth through personality’ – and that personality
in inclusively relevant human situations of dark suffering and redemptive
love? To understand the Incarnation in its real dimensions is to learn
the ‘Nameability’ of God as having stooped (as in ‘the adorable Names’)
not only into human adjectives but into human ‘life-in-writing.’ Unyielding
minds may protest it cannot be so, Allah being too remotely great, though
the divine Names insist that only in not being remote is the greatness
ever known. It might follow that to ‘magnify’ God truly is to find remoteness
ever more disqualified. Both happen in ‘the acknowledgement of God in Christ’.
This must be the sufficient rationale for any present will to bring into
some active and mutual expression the Muslim practice of the divine Names
and the Christian measure of ‘the Word made flesh’.
The most frequent pairing of the divine
Names – the two in the Islamic Bismillah – may be seem to enshrine
the same clue. For the words Al-Rahman Al-Rahim have one RHM root
but they are not mere repetition. There is a clear progression quality-in-being
qua essential nature, while Al-Rahim indicates that quality in action,
at work in fulfilling operation. If we English-wise – reverse the order
we have ‘the merciful (Al-Rahim) Lord of mercy (Al-Rahman):
the frequent English Translation: ‘The Merciful, the compassionate’ only
partly captures the progressive idea of the grammar.
In brief here, the vital point is
that ‘who Allah is’ and ‘how Allah relates’ belongs in one. For Christians,
it is in ‘God in Christ’ that this oneness in ‘being-in-doing’ most inclusively
happens. For their own reasons (which we need to share as issues), Muslims
will not normally allow this. Even so, in the ‘space’ of their own Bismillah,
it is possible to set the whole significance of what Christians know as
Christology – the theme, central to faith, of that about God which is told
in that about Christ and these, like the Bismillah, in the inner sequence
prompting us to ‘the knowledge and love of God’. All else in these pages
may be said to follow from this.
‘From Senegal to Samarkand’ is no
more than a poetic way of saying ‘from West to East’. Extracts here from
Leopold Senghor, Senegal’s Christian president for a quarter-century, may
serve for a West as far westwards as the Caribbean. The prayers of Dirini
and
of the Naqshbandi devout certainly reached beyond the famed city
of Samarkand, a name to join Asia with the Atlantic and the Moroccan Atlas
mountains where fellow Sufis had their kindred Zawiyahs (devotional
groups at prayer).
Sources that are so evidently personal
will lend themselves more readily to private than to corporate. The intention
is rather meditative than liturgical. Even so, the anthology may prove
useful in school assemblies or on occasions of shared worship elsewhere,
or in the context of informal dialogue where a concluding (or opening)
focus of worship is desired.
The Christian tradition of ‘biddings’,
whether in gratitude or intercession, finds ready parallel with the Muslim
practice of Dhikr, or ‘recollecting’ the divine presence in context.
A ‘bidding’ can ‘do’ precisely what ‘recall’ of a ‘Name’ intends – the
thought of God and the plea from the soul, in either order. Hirz al-Jawshan,
for example, with a ‘O Thou encompassing all’, is phrasing both devotion
and desire. God is being sought for his own sake and for the sake of his
own power and grace. If we have the will to greet it, we can surely sense
the affinity that can exist between Du‘a and litany.
The sections of Praise, Penitence
and Petition justify themselves. All three terms are central to both religions.
The sundry Qur’anic doxologies and celebrations of mercy in external
nature and human society are apt enough for Christian use. The Qur’an’s
urging
on Muslims of ‘seeking forgiveness from God’ is in line with that scripture’s
realism about the reach of human wrong, the callous inhumanity of humans,
despite those aspects of the human scene being seen as more sanguine than
a radical Christianity can allow. Where – as often – Muslim repentance
is overly couched in ‘fear of the Fire’ and minatory ‘frowns’ in that scripture,
these have been omitted, the better to concentrate on the inwardness and
sincerity of self-reproach – qualities in no way lacking among Sufis, in
a riper sense of ‘the fear of the Lord’.
The pages of Petition are meant to
kindle a sense of things for which prayer becomes inwardly alerted by imagination
as minds in art and literature might shape it. Thus the epistolary greetings
of Abu’l ‘Ala al-Ma‘arri suggest a temper of recollection that translates
into taking our own absent friends into the divine presence. If the prayer
is well defined as ‘joining with the work of love in the world’, then what
that work entails and where it is being pursued in public affairs and private
realms become its liability. Where literature has drawn the scene, whether
in wistfulness or despair, the will to pray can take its impetus.
The Qur’an, for example, shows
a persistent interest in the womb, in birth as the threshold of temporal
being, and in human intercourse as the crowning instance of divine trust.
That register around the human embryo, its mystery and crisis, bears strongly
on our responding solicitude concerning infidelity, contrived miscarriage,
the psychic trauma of the aborting, the reproach and the redemption. All
these belong with ‘caring about love in the world’ and we cannot do so
without both the accusation and the overcoming in grace.
Petition, too, has to dwell where
the needs press – the injustice of ‘law’s delays’ and denials, the homelessness
of the refugee, the anxieties of poverty and the blandishments of power.
In all the spheres of human urgency, we must find the aspiration that disallows
indifference and ventures active expectation. All these the psalmist meant
by his ‘waiting on the Lord.’ The ‘waiting’ words suggests not only the
hopeful on the lookout but the servant at the ready. In that sense petitionary
prayer can energise its cares towards their due fulfillment so that to
pray is not to indulge – as otherwise it might be – in a ritual of exoneration,
an escape into mere words.
It is intriguing that the Islamic call to Salah,
the summons to the ritual prayer-rite, uses the verbal imperative Hayya,
which might be translated: ‘Look alive’ or ‘Liven ye!’ It is precisely
this sense of life, in all its vagaries and imponderables, its tragedies
and its benedictions, that petition as its truest is obeying. Penitence
is thus bound to be its correlative. For all wrongs in society need to
be, in some sense, acknowledged as our own, if we can understand how a
presumed innocence can be itself a guilty haven. This is not to be morbidly
inauthentic; it is rather to realise that there can be a will to vicariousness
when we perceive the devious workings of the inhumanity to which we belong
and – in the Qur’anic words – ‘what the bosoms of men conceal.’
Comparably, the themes of gratefulness
are so evidently shareable. When the Qur’an - reader celebrates
the dawn and the fall of night, the rising of the moon and its crescent
beauty; the freshening rains and the enduring oasis, there is something
participatory as human and not only Islamic. The Biblical text, in psalm
and prophet, is not less busy with doxology. There is always something
reciprocal between meeting and meaning. To will the former is mutually
to embrace the latter. The formula is reversible in that shared meaning
fuses relationship. All the more crucial is this possibility, given the
sharp and deep dissonance that echo in our histories. Where necessary controversy
has fostered alienation, there is the great reason to allow affinities
also to assert themselves.
That case is strengthened when we
realize that the range of religious vocabulary, the language of prayer,
is not limitless. For the fecundity of nature and society in yielding imagery
and metaphor by which words work, rich and inventive as it is, admits of
no cultural monopoly. Thus it follows that many words and themes recur
between religions – light, door, tree, water, lamp, bosom, glory – so that
a certain literal kinship exists through all the range of meaning they
intend. If not always community, at least elucidation, will relate the
users.
Furthermore, inside the broad denominators
‘Muslim’ and ‘Christian’, there are wide differences as to how their terms
are read, their vocabularies received. In neither faith are believers unanimous
about how they take their confessional meanings. Even, from time to time,
within their own individual experience and privacy of mind, they have unresolved
issues of integrity. May not that situation suggest a livelier, more open,
patience with each other? When ‘congregation’ – Muslim or Christian – means
a certain mental ‘segregation’ (and no faith-system is unanimous), miscellaneous
‘wholes,’ as Islam and Christianity purport to be, may the better reckon
with each other in the issues their diversities acknowledge. So long as
we are cognisant of tension and scrupulous about honesty of mind, the conscious
sharing of vocabulary may itself stimulate these qualities. To find a partial
consensus in prayer is to give what continues to divide a different temper
and a wiser reckoning.
In the words of the title suggested
in the preface, ‘A Part in Common Prayer’, the, ‘apart’ – as all prayer
must be – is the sense of a shut door and a hallowed space. Here it has
only been part of a consciously larger realm of worship, doctrine, tradition
and liturgy. It can only be ‘apart’, too, of the historical and contemporary
communities that are heir to those antecedent determinants by which they
have endured. ‘Parts,’ whether in drama or in life, are only so by dint
of ‘wholes’. Yet parts have not seldom been on behalf of wholes in ways
that were vicarious towards the future. Initiative does not have to be
unanimous in order to be salutary. This wholes have other ‘parts’ and ‘parties’,
the more raucous the more ambitious to be monopolist. In being forebearing
with one another, we also have to be wisely forebearing in our practice
of authority and our discipline of belief.
‘New room for others to turn about
in’ was how Eldridge Cleaver of the Back Panther party in the USA described
the impact on him of the conversion of Malcolm X, after pilgrimage to Makkah.
He turned from the hate-philosophy of the original Black Islam to hope
of human community transcending racism. He greeted the uprising of white
youth against social forms of white supremacy. It was only, as he said,
‘a ‘tiny place,’ but it was one in which he could ‘attempt a manoeurve
of my own’. Such examples can be contagious. ‘Room to turn in’ – the inner
meaning
of metanoia – is what ‘parties to common prayer’ may afford to one another.
(Courtesy: Focus Vol. 19, Nos 1-2, 1999)
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