God Alone Is Really a Witness

By Dr. M. Maroof Shah - Greater Kashmir - Srinagar, India
Wednesday, 21 Rabi-Us-Sani 1428 AH / May 9, 2007

Silence not speech is the medium by which or through which we can experience the reality

It is acute awareness of God’s death that distinguishes postmodernity from modernity. God’s death means Truth is dead. Meaning is lost. Centre doesn’t hold. With the disappearance of true world which is the unseen world, the visible word also dies so to speak. It loses its meaning. Alienations, absurdism is the logical outcome Immanentism takes over. Finitude now suffocates man, Spirit dies.

The question is how can this God be reborn? Not the rhetoric or sophistry of theologian for the reign of conventional theology is almost over. Postmodern age saw the birth of negative theology and the death of God theology. When grand narrative of theology has become incredible how God as the Ground of Being can be still felt as living reality, as the Ground of our being? We are living in post-religious though post-secular age. Personal Godism doesn’t work. Nietzsche’s reading of recent history isn’t easily dismissible. God is really felt as dead (Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus) absent (Heidegger), on leave (Kafka), irrelevant (Sartre), absent (postmodern theologians).

This has culminated in the death of man as a logical corollary in postmdoernity. Meaninglessness, absurdism, relativism, scepticism – these are more characteristically post-modern phenomena.

It is Sufism that recovers Meaning, Truth, knowledge, certainty by denying all of them at the relative, phenomenal plane. It is interpretation of la illa all the way.

Ordinary Muslims or average believers of other religions that post a personal God have hardly ever realized the depth and significance of denial of gods. It is only through kufr that one can reach iman. One has to encounter darkness at the heart of existence, encounter the dark night of the soul and then only will the phase of affirmation come. Ahad Zagar has beautifully put it “kafir sapdith karum aqrar” (I believed after first disbelieving).

Iqbal has also emphasised this point. Those who don’t know darkness of doubt can’t fully appreciate God who is the Light of the World. God is realized after one realizes one’s nothingness, fana. Seeker of God, or subject must be extinguished in fana to reach baqa (subsistence in God).

God’s utter transcendence or even transcendence of transcendence demands rejection of all idolatry-idolatry of all words, all signifers or symbols, or subjects, of even God as Being who isn’t Absolute. Tawhid is so difficult for realization and that is why most people don’t believe or are kafirs and thus in hell in the Quranic parlance. Tawhid, especially the tawhid of the Elect or tawhid of Elect of the Elect is so rare and so hard to come by. “There is no god but God”, this statement of Islamic shahadah could be translated as “ There is no truth or reality but Truth or Reality.” There is no beauty but Beauty”.

Thus all relative truths are denied/ transcended in tawhidic perspective as it centres on the Absolute. God has to be seen as Absolute and non-God as relative so that one rightly understands Islamic shahadah. Sufi reading of tawhid also makes one subtle point which states that God alone is really a witness, shahid i.e., alone can say shahadah.

In Unitarian perspective since only one exists absolutely to and all else is strictly nothing and there is no duality of knower and knower, subject and object, I and thou so affirmation in the deepest sense of the word can come only from God Himself. It is Spirit in us which recognizes and thus becomes witness to the Spirit that is the essence of everything, that alone is absolute (it being Pure Consciousness).

For Nietzsche, the forefather of postmodernity there can’t be two gods – man and God. So either of them has to go, has to be killed. And he opted for the latter (killed God) so that man may live, so that his freedom his sovereignty could be affirmed. He said that man can’t afford not to be God and mangod has to be there when God is gone. And he posited the conception of Superman. And history is witness (history of postmodernism especially) that by killing God he paved the way of death of man. No Superman has arrived on the scene but only the devil or Superdevil. If God isn’t there who is the Ground of our being now can being be there?

Sufism squarely faces nihilism that is implied in the rejection of idolatry, in denying all relative truths, in denial of self or ego that exists in its own right. It denies the world. It denies all knowledge of the world. It denies self. It denies speech. It denies that there is any meaning in the world, any bliss in things finite, any beauty in the phenomenal or the perishable.

Vanity of vanities, all is Vanity in Sufi perspective. Everything perishes. All relative meanings, relative truths are denied as only Absolute is absolute. The Sufi transcends all the worlds all time and infected thought constructions. Postmodernism can’t go any farther. The Sufi denies that both God and non-God (man as self as ego) as independent “I” can) exist simultaneously.

It too recognizes the fact that Freedom and Knowledge are attributes of God only. But it proceeds beyond nihilism. It proceeds beyond God-man duality. It proceeds beyond the realm of the phenomena finitude or immanence or relativity to rest in Infinite transcendence, Absolute. He proceeds beyond all thought constructions to see Truth face to face, to live truth and be truth, Intellect perceives things without any distortion, any filtering medium in between because it is identical with Universal Intellect. Spirit getting purified from all that is not Spirit. Spirit perceives Spirit that alone really is.

All gods are denied but then the only God is affirmed. Indeed gods don’t exist. It is only our ignorance that posits them. When our perception is cleansed of all conditionings the truth of God appears with dazzling brilliance. In fact everything, all phenomena partake of the Truth, manifest Truth. God is the Light of the World and as Ghazali said the light of our eyes that perceives the world. The Aarif sees none but God. Thus he basks in the Truth. He finds only Beloved’s face everywhere. All creation, every atom, every leaf of grass praises Him. Cosmos becomes theophany, a revelation. Truth of that Supernal Sun gives truth and meaning to everything. There really exists nothing but Self and universe in its exteriorization.

Gnostic traces everything to Source. God is perceived also as Al-Zahir. So life becomes celebration, a feast as it is dance, play of God. There is no other but Self perceiving Self. To be true to Self is to be true to God. Sufism substitutes perfect man or Godman for Superman. And perfect man appropriates God/or is appropriated by God. So dualism disappears (though not the duality at the Creator/created axis which however is itself situated in the Divine Relativity rather than the Absolute doesn’t and can’t disappear at that plane. Man remains man and God remains God; they can’t become one. But this duality needn’t be absolutizes as dualism that subsists even in the Suptraformal Essence).

One can easily declare (though it isn’t declaration of self or man but really God who is declaring this as He alone is ) “I Am,” “I am the Truth,” “Glory to Me.”

One discovers God within Self in its own beloved. God perceives Himself in the mirror, Love celebrates itself. Nothing exists save Self. The Aarif sees with the eye of certainty. As realm of time and thought is transcended only pure perception, pure awareness, awareness of what is remains.

Infinite appears, Unknown dawns. Everything becomes blissful.

One is joyous with the whole of existence. Every beautiful thing expresses Beauty of the Beloved. By surrendering our self we get liberated by the Infinite. By overcoming subject-object duality knower known duality utter certainty is achieved.

One becomes what one knows. So postmodern critique of knowledge obtained by a subject through reason is bypassed though acknowledged at its own level. The Sufi agrees with postmodernist in his distrust of reason (aql-i-juzyi) and thought or language. But the Sufi sees everything in the light of Eternity, Time thus becomes moving image of Eternity. Meaning and purpose can be only in Eternity, not in time.

Postmodernist can’t step outside time. Time is the unceasing haemorrhage of existence in postmodern world of Beckett. If Eternity doesn’t appropriate/ground time it becomes intolerable, meaningless. Time couldn’t be vilified if it is from God. The question of meaning and purpose doesn’t arise from the perceiver of Absolute and Eternity. The Sufi is ibn al waqt [son of the moment].

But thereby he is also outside time. He is innocent of becoming. Question of future doesn’t arise for him. All he sees is God or Truth because he has disappeared as a seer; only God sees through him.

He lets Reality overcome reality and thus gets dealienated. Grounded in the infinite he can’t be other than Infinite. Part of the infinite is also infinite. Infinite is Truth as seeker of Truth has disappeared and truth isn’t something out there but our very subjectivity, our deepest Self. So scepticism has no room in the Sufi perspective.

The Sufi grants that one can’t know the Truth in its absoluteness by the signs. He denies the seeker so only Truth remains. Both knower and known disappear and only the pure experience of knowing remains. The Sufi is a watcher or pure witness. He allows existence or Reality or Truth (Real is equated with Truth in East and Islam though not in West and Truth isn’t reduced to property of propositions also in the East) to speak, having surrendered/transcended himself. He becomes a hollow bamboo, a flute on which God plays the notes.

In silence is revealed the treasure that God is. He becomes void, (kahyni) to live the Void (negative divine or transcendence appears as void or nothingness to conceptual intellect though not to the intuition for which it is Zahir, the most Real) This silence is because one can’t speak with human tongue of the Ineffable, of the Unconditioned. “Absolute has never been defiled by human speech”. How could it be?

Since nothing answers the question what is It as al-Jili says one has to be silent. One has to let the sound go, the mind go, the imagination go as Lalla says.( At the level where speech comes without words sectarian denominations are denied by both Saivism and Reshism, so Lalla’s theological position need not here concern our argument). Of what one can’t speak one should be silent.

We will focus on the Reshi/Sufi perspective (if one could at all say perspective in case of Sufism because Sufi vision) which transcends all seeing, all imagining, all visualising, all constructions of thought and thus all perspectives on Reality. The Sufi doesn’t talk about Reality or God but talks Reality or God. He transcends the realm of “about” which theology is unable to do. That is why the Sufi doesn’t need to interpret and wrangle about the question of interpretation. He isn’t caught up in textual world at all. He lives truth, is truth.

He doesn’t need mediation of language. He is pure awareness, prereflective prelinguistic awareness.

He has become a mirror as mind and separating principle of thought has disappeared. Seer and seen has disappeared and only seeing is there. Language doesn’t enter. No metaphysics of presence is there. No centralism.

The Sufi is cantered in God and thus in Nothingness or Void. God being not the name of a thing, a person, an entity and substance, a being, among other beings. God is Reality, Is-ness in wahdatul wajudi (which is not synonymous with pantheism pace what certain shuhudi critics and orientalists think as it emphasises transcendence of God unequivocally) perspective. He is Pure Consciousness. He eludes all apprehension.

One can well say He is not because Nothing is naught, blank, void to the conceptual intellect.

Nothing is like Him. He signifies, in a way, impossibility of all signification. Nothing can describe Him.

We shall elaborate this theme of unknowability of Absolute and vanity of all reasoning to show how Sufism escapes (and corrects in turn) postmodern agnosticism and critique.

II--To be concluded