This culture...

This culture, on the whole Magian in its origin and development, has a structurally dualistic soul-picture which we find more or less reflected in the theological thought of Islam.4 Devotional Sufism alone tried to understand the meaning of the unity of inner experience which the Qur’an declares to be one of the three sources of knowledge,5 the other two being History and Nature.

The development of this experience in the religious life of Islam reached its culmination in the well-known words of Hall«j - ‘I am the creative truth.’ The contemporaries of Hall«j, as well as his successors, interpreted these words pantheistically; but the fragments of Hall«j, collected and published by the French Orientalist, L.

Massignon, leave no doubt that the martyr-saint could not have meant to deny the transcendence of God.6 The true interpretation of his experience, therefore, is not the drop slipping into the sea, but the realization and bold affirmation in an undying phrase of the reality and permanence of the human ego in a profounder personality. The phrase of Hall«j seems almost a challenge flung against the Mutakallimën .

The difficulty of modern students of religion, however, is that this type of experience, though perhaps perfectly normal in its beginnings, points, in its maturity, to unknown levels of consciousness.

Ibn Khaldën, long ago, felt the necessity of an effective scientific method to investigate these levels.7 Modern psychology has only recently realized the necessity of such a method, but has not yet been able to go beyond the discovery of the characteristic features of the mystic levels of consciousness.8 Not being yet in possession of a scientific method to deal with the type of experience on which such judgements as that of Hall«j are based, we cannot avail ourselves of its possible capacity as a knowledge-yielding experience.

Nor can the concepts of theological systems, draped in the terminology of a practically dead metaphysics, be of any help to those who happen to possess a different intellectual background. The task before the modern Muslim is, therefore, immense. He has to rethink the whole system of Islam without completely breaking with the past. Perhaps the first Muslim who felt the urge of a new spirit in him was Sh«h WalâAll«h of Delhi.