God as Peace

[ابوالوليد المسلم]

God as Peace

Dr. Ibrahim Kalin



The conditions that are conducive to a state of peace mentioned above are primarily spiritual and have larger implications for the cosmos, the individual, and society. Here I shall focus on three premises that are directly relevant to our discussion. The first pertains to peace as a Divine name (Al-Salam) (Surah Al-Hashr, 59:23). The Qur’anic concept of God is founded upon a robust monotheism, and God’s transcendence (tanzih) is emphasized in both the canonical sources and in the intellectual tradition. To this absolutely one and transcendent God belong “all the beautiful names ” (Surah Al-A’raf, 7:180, Surah Al-Hashr, 59:24), i.e., the names of beauty (Jamal), majesty (Jalal), and perfection (Kamal). It is these names that prevent God from becoming an utterly unreachable and “wholly other” deity. Divine names represent God’s face turned towards the world and are the vessels of finding God in and through his creation.

The names of beauty take precedence over the names of majesty because God says that “my mercy has encompassed everything” (Al-A’raf, 7: 156) and “God has written mercy upon Himself” (Surah Al-An’am, 6:12, 54). This is also supported by a famous hadith of the Prophet according to which “God is beautiful and loves beauty” in this sense, God is as much transcendent, incomparable and beyond as he is immanent, comparable (tashbih) and close.[1] As the ultimate source of peace, God transcends all opposites and tensions, is the permanent state of repose and tranquility, and calls his ser- vants to the “abode of peace (dar al-salam)” (Surah Yunus, 10:25).

“It is He who from high on has sent [sends] down inner peace and repose (sakinah) upon the hearts of the believers”, says the Qur’an (Surah Al-Fath, 48:4). The proper abode of peace is the hearts (qulub), which are “satisfied only by the remembrance of God (dhikr Allah)” (Surah Al-Ra’d, 13:28). By linking the heart, man’s center, to God’s remembrance, the Qur’an establishes a strong link between theology and spiritual psychology.

in addition to the Qur’anic exegetes, the sufis in particular are fond of explaining the ‘mystery of creation’ by referring to a ‘sacred saying’ (hadith qudsi) attributed to the Prophet of Islam: “I was a hidden treasure. I wanted (lit. ‘loved’) to be known and created the universe (lit. ‘creation’ [2])”. The key words ‘love’ (hubb, mahabbah) and ‘know’ (ma’rifah) underlie a fundamental aspect of the sufi ****physics of creation: Divine love and desire to be known is the raison d’etre of all existence. Ibn al-‘Arabi says that God’s “love for his servants is identical with the origination of their engendered existence … the relation of God’s love to them is the same as the fact that he is with them wherever they are (Surah Al-Hadid, 57:4), whether in the state of their nonexistence or the state of their wujud … they are the objects of his knowledge. He witnesses them and loves them never-endingly”. [3] Commenting on the above saying, Dawud al-Qaysari, the 14th century turkish sufi-philosopher and the first university president of the newly established Ottoman state, says that “God has written love upon himself. There is no doubt that the kind of love that is related to the manifestation of [his] perfections follows from the love of his essence, which is the source of the love of [his names and] Qualities that have become the reason for the unveiling of all existents and the connection of the species of spiritual and corporeal bodies”.[4]

The second premise is related to what traditional philosophy calls ‘the great chain of being’ (da’irat al-wujud). In the cosmic scale of things, the universe is the ‘best of all possible worlds’ because, first, it is actual, which implies completion and plenitude over and against potentiality, and, second, its built-in order derives its sustenance from the Creator. The natural world is in a constant state of peace because according to the Qur’an it is ‘muslim’ (with a small m) in that it surrenders (taslim) itself to the will of God and thus rises above all tension and discord (Surah Aal ‘Imran, 3:83, Surah At-Tawbah, 9:53, Surah Al-Ra’d, 13:15, Surah Fussilat, 41:11). in its normative depiction of natural phenomena, the Qur’an talks about stars and trees as “prostrating before God” (Surah Al-Rahman, 55:6) and says that “all that is in the heavens and on earth extols His Glory” (Surah Al-Hashr, 59:24). By acknowledging God’s unity and praising his name, man joins the natural world in a substantive way – a process that underscores the essential link between the anthropos and the cosmos or the microcosm and the macrocosm. The intrinsic commonality and unity between the human as ‘subject’ and the universe as ‘object’ has been called the “anthropocosmic vision”.[5] The thrust of this view is that the anthropos and the cosmos cannot be disjoined from one another and that the man-versus-nature dichotomy is a false one. Moreover, the world has been given to the children of Adam as a ‘trust’ (amanah) as they are charged with the responsibility of standing witness to God’s creation, mercy, and justice on earth. Conceiving nature in terms of harmony, measure, order, and balance points to a common and persistent attitude towards the non-human world in Islamic thought, and has profound implications for the construction of peace as a principle of the cosmos.[6]

The third principle pertains to man’s natural state and his place within the larger context of existence. even though the Qur’an occasionally describes the fallen nature of man in gruesome terms and presents man as weak, forgetful, treacherous, hasty, ignorant, ungrateful, hostile, and egotistic (cf., inter alia, Surah Ibrahim, 14:34, Surah Al-Isra', 17:11, Surah Al-Kahf, 18:54, Surah Al-Hajj, 22:66, Surah Al-Ahzab, 33:72, Surah Al-Zukhruf, 43:15, and Surah Al-’Adiyat, 100:6), these qualities are eventually considered deviations from man’s essential nature (fitrah), who has been created in the “most beautiful form (ahsan taqwim)” (Surah At-Tin, 95:4), both physically and spiritually. This ****- physical optimism defines human beings as “God’s vicegerent on earth (khalifat Allah fi’l-ard)” as the Qur’an says, or, to use a ****phor from Christianity, as the “pontifex”, the bridge between heaven and earth.[7] The “fitrah” (Al-Rum, 30: 30), the primordial nature according to which God has created all humanity, is essentially a moral and spiritual substance drawn to the good and “God-consciousness (taqwa)” whereas its imperfections and “excessiveness (fujur)” (Ash-Shams, 91:8) are ‘accidental’ qualities to be subsumed un- der the soul’s struggle to do good (al-birr) and transcend its subliminal desires through his intelligence and moral will.

[1] 1. Like other Sufis, Ghazali subscribes to the notion of what Ibn al-‘Arabi would later call the “possessor of the two eyes” (dhu’l-‘aynayn), viz., seeing God with the two eyes of transcendence (tanzih) and immanence (tashbih). Cf. Fadlou Shehadi, Ghazali’s Unique Unknowable God (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1964), pp. 8-10 and 51-5. For Ibn al-‘Arabi’s expression of the “possessor of the two eyes”, see William Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge (Albany, State University of New York Press, 1989), pp. 361-
2. The Mutazilite and Ash’arite theologians have a long history of con- troversy over the three major views of Divine names and qualities, i.e., tanzih, tashbih, and ta’til (‘suspension’). Cf. Michel Allard, Le problème des attributes divins dans la doctrine d’al-Aš’ari et des ses premiers grands disciples (Beyrouth: Editions De L’Impirimerie Catholique, 1965), pp. 354-364.

[2] ‘Ali b. Sultan Muhammad al-Harawi al-Qari, al-Masnu’ fi Ma’rifat al- hadith al-Mawdu’ (Al-Riyad: Maktabat al-Rushd, 1404 AH), 1:141.

[3] Quoted in William Chittick, The Self-Disclosure of God: Principles of Ibn al-‘Arabi’s Cosmology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), p. 22.

[4] Dawud al-Qaysari, Risalah fi ma’rifat al-mahabbat al-haqiqiyyah in al-Rasa’il ed. by Mehmet Bayraktar (Kayseri: Kayseri Metropolitan Mu- nicipality, 1997), p. 138.

[5] The term has first been used by Mircea Eliade and adopted by Tu Weiming to describe the philosophical outlook of the Chinese tradi- tions. For an application of the term to Islamic thought, see William Chittick, “The Anthropocosmic Vision in Islamic Thought” in Ted Pe- ters, Muzaffar Iqbal, Syed Nomanul Haq (eds.), God, Life, and the Cos- mos (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002). pp. 125-152

[6] Cf. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Religion and the Order of Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 60-63.

[7] The classical Quran commentaries are almost unanimous on inter- preting this ‘khalifah’ as Adam, i.e., humans in the generic sense. Cf. Jalal al-Din al-Mahalli and Jalal al-Din al-Suyuti, Tafsir al-Jalalayn (Bei- rut: Mu’assasat al-Risalah, 1995), p. 6 and Ibn al-‘Arabi, al-Futuhat al- makkiyyah, ed. by M. ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Mar‘ashli, (Beirut: Dar Ihya’ al-Turath al-‘Arabi, 1997), Vol. I, p. 169.