Rod Blackhirst, Astrology, Autochtony and Salvation (note de lectura)

Published at www.religioperennis.com

The moto is: “Not only in the plants that grow from the earth but also for animals that live upon it there is a cycle of bearing and barreness for soul and body as often as the revolutions of their orbs come full circle, in brief courses for the short-lived and oppositely for the opposite. But the laws of prosperous birth or infertility for your race, the men you have bred to be rulers will not for all their wisdom ascertain by reasoning combined with sensation, but they will escape them, and there will be a time when they will beget children out of season.” (Plato, Republic 546A-B)

The Byzantine writer Julius Firmicus Maternus gave us the symbolic horoscope or geniture of the world (the Mundi Thema). Prognostications and diagnoses are made on the basis of the similiarities and differences between the Mundi Thema and the particular geniture in question.

“The therapeutic correlative of this method is that each individual soul must, given the gifts with which they are born, attempt to bring their particular "distorted" horoscope back into a realignment with the primal horoscope. In so doing they participate in or are reunited with the creative cosmic moment and lose, so to speak, their particular nativity and are instead born with the cosmos, with the world, with the earth. In other terms, they reunify microcosm with macrocosm, healing the primal breach between the two.”

Plato, the cosmological treatise Timaeus.

The system of Firmicus Maternus is an astrological extension of the platonician idea that cosmic sphere corresponds with microcosmos.

How the measure practicaly: “In the Mundi Thema, for example, the planet Saturn is located in the (diurnal) zodiacal sign of Capricorn. If the planet Saturn is located in, say, Libra in the nativity of any given person, one judges according to the character of this relationship (or deviation from the ideal), in this case a deviation of ninety degrees. Similiarly, if the Moon, which has its pristine abode in Cancer, is in Capricorn in any given nativity, it stands at 180 deg. or in opposition to the ideal, and so is judged accordingly.”

In the Mundi Thema the planetary "homes" are their places on the day of Creation, the places where they were first placed in the heavens by the Creator.
According to Plato, we can by “assimilations” restore the planets to their homes and our souls to their original state. This is salvation. It is the Pythagorean doctrine of the harmony of the spheres.

In Judeo-Christian and Islamic terms the Mundi Thema is representative of the Edenic state, and the deviation of the planets from their original homes is indicative of post-Edenic deviation.

Mundi Thema is also the horoscope of the primordial being.

“In astrological terms, salvation is to cleave to and identify with the centre-point of the horoscope, no longer tossed around in the to-ing and fro-ing of the periphery. And this is, at the same time, to realise within oneself the primordial man: to make as one's own the horoscope of Adam. To be saved a man must overcome or put aside - make irrelevant - his individual nativity and adopt the nativity (and spiritual anonymity) of Adam, everyman, who, in turn, has the same nativity as the very soil from which he was made.”

The doctrine of autochtony: primordial man was the product of a creation directly from the primordial soil. Transposed to the astrological framework, the great souls of the Golden Age are those primordial beings made at the creation who, therefore, all have the Mundi Thema - the Creation - as their geniture.

“The distinctive Christian development of the themes of autochthony deserve special mention. Like Islam, Christianity takes from Judaism the Adamic autochthony but adds to it Christ as the new and regenerated Adam. In this Christ appears as the primordial plant-man, firstly by being crucified (imposed) upon the Tree of Life which grows from the place where the skull - noting the physiological resonances of this detail - of Adam was buried like a seed, and secondly, and more obviously, in being resurrected from the grave in the Christian adaptation of ancient vegetative mythology.”

The New Year is to the solar cycle what the day of Creation is to the cosmic cycle.
The Western astrological tradition - following Roman models - is accustomed to thinking of the zodiac starting with Aries in Spring. Firmicus Maternus, using a much older arrangement, has the zodiac starting in Cancer in midsummer.

Traditional social and religious orders seek to cling to the state of primordial purity, resisting the inevitable decline of the Ages. One of the ways in which they do this is by the deliberate calculation of conceptions and births to try to give their children horoscopes that deviate as little as possible from the best of horoscopes, the horoscope of the Origin.

Conclusion: “The system of astrology recorded by Firmicus Maternus, with the primordial horoscope, is clearly a key within this broader tradition and illuminates many of the most important but least understood aspects of ancient and esoteric astrology, exposing a fundamental vein of traditional symbolism that is rarely if ever explored in contemporary astrological thinking.”

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Dr. R. Blackhirst, Symbolism of Islamic Prayer, (full text)

In some respects salat or the canonical Islamic prayer ritual is the most important of the five essential observances called the Five Pillars of Islam, for it is the only one to which the believer is required to adhere every day. The Testimony of Faith is the most essential of these pillars in absolute terms - without it one is simply not a Muslim -, but Testimony is only required once in a lifetime, as is the Pilgrimage to Mecca and in the case of the Pilgrimage it is only if circumstances permit. The Fast of Ramadan and the Poor Tax are annual requirements, and for these there are exceptions. The prayer, however, is daily and there are no exceptions except the allowances made for menstruating women. In the practical life of the Muslim, therefore, the salat is the greatest burden of the Law. The Koran, strictly speaking, only petitions believers to practice "regular prayer" (most often, "keep regular prayer and pay the poor tax") but in the codifications of Islamic Law this settled into five canonical times per day: at first light, at noon, midnoon, after sunset and at night. Not only is this cycle a personal discipline and a means by which the believer punctuates the day with worship, it also has a symbolic significance that illuminates the deepest roots of the Islamic faith. So to do the prescribed bodily postures and movements of the prayer ritual which are themselves cyclic in nature - salat is measured in terms of cycles or rakas - and are part of the same symbolism. This symbolism concerns the primordial myth of cyclic regeneration. As the final revelation and at the same time a reiteration of the primordial revelation, Islam has the cosmic cycle – and especially its approaching end - as a central theme. The theme takes symbolic form in the cycles of the daily prayer times and, more explicitly, in the cycles of the prayer gestures and movements.

As far as the cycle of prayer times is concerned, it is based on the daily movements - risings, settings and culminations - of the Sun and provides Islam with its particular development of solar symbolism. In Christianity and other religions solar symbolism is expressed in terms of the Sun's annual cycle - its passage between the equinoxes and the solstices - but in Islam the annual cycle is determined by lunar movements not solar and instead it is the daily cycle of the Sun from east to west and from the heavens to the underworld to which Islamic spirituality is attuned. In this, the daily movements of the Sun repeat, within twenty-four hours, the same cycles it completes in a year so that dawn and dusk are parallel to the equinoxes and noon and midnight to the solstices. Even though Islam assiduously avoids even the impression that the Sun itself is an object of worship and so, for example, forbids prayer during the actual risings and settings of the Sun (noting, however, that, conversely, it provides special prayers to mark an eclipse of the Sun in a directly helio-focused way), the prayer times are nevertheless arranged around the two axes of the Sun's diurnal movement – the horizontal and, in the greater cycle, equinoctial, axis of East-West and the vertical, solstitial axis of Up-Down. In the Christian perspective, the two axes of the equinoxes and the solstices introduces a cruciform symbolism that develops the identification of Christ with the annual death and resurrection of the Sun. Islam, of course, makes no such development but the symbolism of the solar cross is nevertheless marked by the prayer times; opposite to the dawn prayer is the dusk prayer and opposite to noon prayer is the night prayer. The fifth prayer time
in this arrangement, asr, represents a projection of the centre of this cross (the quintessence) and thus is marked for special attention: it is the "middle prayer" that the Koran specifically yet cryptically adjures Muslims not to neglect, the designation "middle" referring to its centrality, not to it being in the "middle of the afternoon" as externalists will commonly explain. Despite there being five prayer times - and this, with the Five Pillars, gives Islam the five-pointed star as one of its emblems – the symbolism of the prayer times is essentially axial and fourfold (and thus is related more to the symbolism of the Kaaba than to the Five Pillars) and marks the cross of the four extremes of the Sun's daily course which, in turn, are the same four extremes marked by equinoxes and solstices in the annual cycle. By extension, both daily and annual solar cycles reiterate the still greater cycles of cosmic time including the cycle of the Four Ages which cycle is near its completion as the very existence of Islam signals. We need only note that the primordial perspective of Islam - in which the duality of night and day is more essential than the quartnerity of the seasons - tends to see the two solar axes as separate rather than developing them together into cruciform symbolism as does Christianity.

Throughout Islamic symbolism the two axes marked by the Sun are presented as expressions of the fundamental distinction between the notions of "deputy" (khalifah) and "slave" (abd). The Islamic understanding of the human condition is founded upon these two interdependent, indeed axial, ideas. On the one hand, according to the Islamic view, man is a deputy of God on earth. He is appointed as God's representative, and as such he has responsibility for the earth and its resources. The all-important correlary of this, however, is that man is also the slave of God and as such is utterly dependent upon Him and is bound to obey His laws and to exercise the right of deputation according to God's revealed wishes. In his status as khalifah Islam conceives of man as a free, noble and self-responsible agent, but in his slavery to God this freedom is held in check, man is kept from a self-deceiving Prometheanism, and he must confess to himself and to his God his mere creaturehood. This amounts to the distinctive Islamic formulation of the Biblical doctrine of stewardship, for man controls but does not own his earthly habitation. In axial terms, the dignity of God's khalifah denotes a vertical symbolism while the humility of His abd is horizontal by contrast. Prayer in Islam is always conceived as dhikr or "rememberance" and in the cycles of the canonical prayer the worshipper is reminded of exactly the deputy-slave distinction (khalifah-abd) and exactly this understanding of the human place in the Creation. This is not achieved by functional or liturgical differences between the various daily prayers, however. The format and content is the same in every case. There is no special ritual for the dawn prayer or the night prayer or the others. The only thing that distinguishes the two axes is the number of prayer cycles (rakas) to be made at each juncture: in this the prayers of the dawn-dusk axis are comparatively brief (two and three rakas respectively) - while the prayers of the noon-night axis are longer (both four rakas each), which difference reflects the relative velocity of the Sun at the equinoxes compared to the solstices and also the varying lengths of the Four Ages. But there is no difference between one rakas and another. The rakas is the basic unit - one complete cycle of prayer. And so the structure of the rakas is the primary mnemonic by which the believer is reminded that he is both the deputy and the slave of God, and it is in the structure of the rakas, not in distinctions between various prayer times, that the axial symbolism sketched above is most explicit.


There are several worshipful postures of the human body admitted in Islamic ritual practice, but two of them are of fundamental significance: standing (qiyam) and prostration (sajda). The prayer begins in the standing posture. The Muslim faces the direction of the kaaba in Mecca - which is to say the qibla - in an upright but relaxed standing position, with the feet slightly apart and the hands either folded near the navel, over the breast or hanging free naturally, according to minor divergencies between different schools of thought. It is in this position that the Muslim is to be conscious of being God's khalifah. This is clear from the liturgy recited at this point:

...You alone do we worship, and to You alone do we turn for help. Guide us to the straight path...

This is the fatihah or Exordium to the Koran which is conspicuous among the Koranic revelations in being a prayer directed to God which is moreover conspicuous for being in the plural. The Muslim does not pray to God in this context in terms of I, me or mine. Rather, the fatihah is a collective prayer and standing in this position, symbolically facing his Lord, the Muslim represents not only himself but all mankind and even all Creation as khalif. In his capacity as God's deputy, man is also intercessor, and in the standing position of prayer the Muslim stands as intercessor to God on behalf of his fellow creatures. The vertical, standing posture is unique to man and betokens his unique position over and above all creatures: his uprightness confers upon him a distinguished place in creation. It is the physical correlative to the status of man as pole between the various ontological realms, between the earth and the heavens, between God and God's created order. The standing position with which the prayer ritual begins, therefore, fulfills the vertical symbolism of the two axes we are considering.

The prayer then proceeds - via an intermediary bowing posture which itself is highly suggestive of a cross configuration and which is in fact indicative of the Asr or "middle" prayer time – to sajda in which the Muslim drops to hands and knees and presses his forehead to the earth. This is the quintessential gesture of submission and obedience in Islam which at once acknowledges God's supremacy over man and man's subservience under God. It is the gesture of surrender and as the mystics of Islam describe it of fana or annihilation of the ego before the Divine. It thus expresses man's slavery, for in prostrating himself the Muslim acknowledges God's absolute Lordship. The annihilation of the ego is further symbolized in sajda by the fact that the face of the worshipper is hidden from view in this position; the surrendering of all selfhood is expressed, throughout the Islamic tradition, in the veiling of the face. One of the strictures of Islamic art, for instance, is a prohibition on portraying the Holy Prophet's face. This is because the Prophet is submitted to God paradigmatically and is, as it were, always in sajda. Sajda is a direct, physical expression of homage, alliegence, fealty, compliance and service. It is by this posture that the worshipper is reminded of his lowly status as creature and of Islam's demand of man that he relinquish all pretensions to self-sufficiency - pretensions that may too readily accompany the status of deputy - and place himself unreservedly and faithfully, like a dutiful servant, in the hands of his Master. That the head is pressed to the earth brings the Muslim to the horizontal plane, and the symbolism of the second of the axes we are considering comes into play. The horizontal axis is receptive, submissive and passive as opposed to the active and dynamic vertical axis. In prayer, the Muslim moves from the vertical position, signifying man as khalif, to the horizontal, signifying abd. A cycle of prayer or rakas is constituted of sequences of movements from the standing posture, to sajda, and is completed when the worshipper returns to the standing position again.

In Islam's own account of its spiritual heritage the salat is a restoration of the ancient Abrahamic mode of worship. In the Traditions of the Prophet, the Angel of the Koranic revelation, Jibreel, taught the movements of the prayer to Muhammad instructing him that this is the way that his ancestor Abraham prayed. The prayer, therefore, is part of Islam's claim of returning to the pure Abrahamic faith. The symbolism of the prayer,
however, is more primordial than Abraham for it must be remembered that Abraham is the post-deluvian founder of the semitic monotheisms and was himself restoring a former order from the depravity of his father's paganism; the prayer ritual instituted by Abraham was not unique to him but only a new codification - appropriate to the new post-deluvian conditions – of yet older, indeed, primordial modes. In truth, the salat, in its essential aspects, is the prayer of Adam, just as Islam was his religion. This is obvious since Islam acknowledges that there were prophets before Abraham and does not hesitate to say that
these prophets all prayed to the same God in the same manner. In mythological and visionary formulations of Islamic prophetology Muhammad, as the "seal" of the prophets, is imam (prayer-leader) to all previous prophets back to Adam and they pray the salat together. That Islam traces its heritage to Abraham is the specific means by which it situates itself within the semitic family, but beyond the semitic family and before Abraham was Noah and before Noah was Enoch and before Enoch Adam, and all of these were prophets and all prayed the prayer of the prophets. Abraham was responsible for the particular adaptation of the salat after the Flood in the context of his covenant with
God, the emblem of which is, in Islam as in Judaism, circumcision. But Abraham was not the first prophet and the primordialism of Islam is not confined to the semitic family but
extends back to the ante-deluvian prophets and specifically to the first prophet, Adam himself. In any case, while the prayer ritual is ascribed to Abraham its basic symbolism is certainly more primordial and is not, in the first instance, Abrahamic itself. The only explicitly Abrahamic motif in salat comes at the end when, in the canonical liturgy, the worshipper - raising his index finger to the qibla - calls a blessing upon Muhammad and his family and upon Abraham and his. In other respects, the whole symbolism of the prayer is Adamic. As we have seen, the principle movements enact the doctrine of stewardship and the essential relation of man as khalifah and abd to God and the Creation - all of this concerns Adam as primordial man and God's steward, not (at least in the first instance) Abraham as father of the semites. If the particular liturgical formulation of the prayer employed by Islam is Abrahamic, it is nevertheless the Abrahamic formulation of a more primordial, Adamic, symbology, and we have identified its core symbolism, namely the axial contrast of deputy and slave.

While the legal postures - standing, bowing, prostration - of the prayer ritual obviously enact the gestures of a slave doing obeyance to his Master, at a more profound level they also enact the story of Adam. In the standing posture, facing the universal centre, the qibla, the Muslim is Adam in the sense of everyman and in the liturgy he speaks as Adam for all creatures and all creation. The corresponding symbolism of the sajda then becomes clear. In the prostrate posture, with face occluded and forehead to the earth - the paradigmatic gesture of the whole spirituality of Islam - the Muslim is Adam returned to the passive clay from which he was created. Here we must remember that while Islam, even more than Judaic and Christian cosmogonies, insists on creatio ex nihilo, which the Koran presents in the starkest terms:

Creator of the heavens and earth! When He decrees a thing, He need only say Be! and it is! (Kor. 2:117)

it also absorbs the primordial Adamic mythology in which God fashions, in a demiurgic manner, the primordial man. "We are the clay, You are the potter, we are all the work of Your hand!" said Isaiah (64:8) and similiarly Jeremiah, "As clay is in the potter's hand, so are you in mine, O House of Israel" (18:5) both of which reiterate such passages from Genesis as: "Of dust you are and to dust you shall return." On these matters the Koranic
account is no different:

He is the Mighty One, the Merciful, who exelled in the creation of all things. He first created man from clay... (Kor. 36:7-8)

When the Muslim presses his forehead to the earth in submission, he is making the Adamic confession that he was born of this earth and that he is but as clay in the hands of His creator. The Koran has a persistent fascination with Adam's lowly origins. Although Islam counts Adam as the first of God's Prophets, and although the angels were made to acknowledge him, and although the Islamic perspective absolves Adam from the responsibility of an original sin and presents him as God's appointed deputy, he is nevertheless born of the common clay of the Earth, as the word Adam itself signifies, and the Koran dwells upon his ignoble origins. It is because Adam is born of mere clay that Satan (Iblis) rebels, refusing to acknowledge a creature of such low birth. In the symbolism we are considering, however, the stuff from which Adam was made - earth, clay, dust - is essentially malleable and submissive to the craftsman's will and so is an emblem of submission to God. In the standing position, the Muslim is Adam as God's deputy over creation, but the humility of sajda reminds us of Adam's origins and the primal, submissive state of the earth from which he was crafted. Moreover, the movement of the worshipper from the vertical to the horizontal and back to the vertical, constituting a single rakas, enacts the birth of Adam from the soil. In sajda he is malleable clay. In qiyam he is the upright form Allah has molded from the clay.

The notion that man is earthborn or autochthonous, which is to say made of the very same soil he tills and over which he labours, upon which he lives and in which he is finally buried, is a core tenet of the universal doctrine of cosmic cycles. The story
of Adam is both the Biblical and Islamic autochthony. In the craftsman analogy that underpins it clay is a prima materia that offers no resistance to the shaping hands of the craftsman God. It bends entirely to His will and is shaped entirely according to His design. And just as there is an axial paradox in the human state, given that this lowly slave is also dignified by the title vice-regent and stands over all other creatures, so Adam is given as his domain the very earth from which he was formed. And it is the fate of all the children of Adam - for the Koran also dwells upon his status as "ancestor of all" quite aside from Abraham as "ancestor of Arabs" - to return in death to the Earth and, at the end of time, to re-emerge resurrected. In the myth of cosmic cycles, more explicit in traditions less adapted to the impending climax of a cycle, the primordial man was born from the earth like a plant, and his body is like a seed that shall grow anew, be resurrected, at the commencement of a new cycle. Adam is an earth-man, not explicitly a plant-man, but the plant motif is suggested by the "Tree in the Midst" with which he is associated; this is an important assimiliation made in Jewish mysticism where the body of Adam Kadmon is superimposed upon the Tree of Life and more dramatically in Christianity where Christ is hung on the same Tree. In these traditions primordial man and primordial plant are usually separate, though man is made of the soil in which the tree grows, and there is always an implicit interchangeability between one symbol and the other. In traditions focused upon the climax of the current cycle we find a linear perspective that envisages a single trajectory from creation to Last Judgement. Islam is such a tradition, but more than either Judaism or Christianity, it is aware of the greater cycle, which is again an instance of its inherent primordiality. There are both verses of the Koran and many Hadith that speak of cycles of creation, even if the immediate concern of Islam is this current cycle. Certainly, in Islamic sources, the children of Adam are said to rise from their graves like plants in a vegetative cycle of births, as is explicit in Traditions such as the following:

Abu Hurairah relates that the Holy Prophet, upon whom be peace, said: Everything in the human body disappears except the little bone at the end of the spine from which its second creation is compounded. Then Allah will send down rain from heaven and people will be grown like vegetables.

This is recorded by both Bukhari and Muslim, the two most authoritative editors of the Hadith literature. The resurrection is here presented in terms of the vegatation cycle. Man is made of earth, born of the earth, but is also plant-like in this respect and so at the resurrection rises from the dead like a plant. In other perspectives the primordial plant-man rises from the earth at each new creation in a cycle of creations and resurrections. In particular, it is usual that the Iron Age lays the seeds for a new Golden Age. In the Islamic perspective, the Paradise or Garden that awaits believers is a renewed Eden, a return to the Edenic state, a cyclic return to the primordial garden. In Eden, of course, Adam was truly a native, an aboriginal, an autochthon, born of the soil. His punishment for transgression was to lose his home and to be sent into exile and to have to be naturalized elsewhere. An Adamic homesickness for Paradise is the characteristic mood of all Islamic spirituality. Salvation is a return. The Islamic perspective, finally, is cyclic. And Allah is He to whom the returners return.

Much of the symbolism of the Muslim prayer illustrates these themes, especially by way of the axial, Adamic contrast of khalifah and abd. The cycle of standing and prostration in a single rakas illustrates a vegetative cycle; it enacts the birth of Adam and ritualizes his dual status as deputy and slave, but the same gestures and movements also rehearse the death and rebirth of the resurrection of the sons of Adam. Sajda, then, symbolizes death. By the same symbolism the prayer mat symbolizes the grave and for this reason the traditional and symbolically correct design for the prayer mat is a stylized Eden of four rivers with the Tree of Life, the destination to which the believer aspires and for which his soul yearns. More significantly, it will be noticed that the position of sajda, with forehead to the ground, and arms and legs rounded into the body, is distinctly embyronic or foetal in form and suggests the embryonic seed sleeping in the grave awaiting the Last Judgement when "Allah will send down rain from heaven..." It is far easier to see this when the worshipper is dressed in traditional Islamic costume which is loose fitting and designed to facilitate the movements of the salat, not hinder them as do modern Western clothing. The traditional robes dissolve the specific outlines of the human form - itself indicative of the notion of returning to the malleable passivity of the clay of Adam - and in sajda they make the human form seem foetal, consistent with the order of symbolism we are exploring. The return to the vertical axis in the prayer then enacts birth (and resurrection), the whole movement signifying the cyclic creation/re-creation of the primordial man. In the bowing posture that is between standing and prostration Muslims will typically enlongate their backs so as to create a right-angle with their bodies. This underlines, as we said, the integral cross symbolism, but it should also be noted that, in fact, the consequence of stretching the back and forming such an angle with the back in this way is to mark the bone at the base of the spine - named in the Hadith as the seed of resurrection - as the corner of the right-angle. That this is what is being emphasised is apparent if one witnesses a pious Muslim at prayer straining to perform every gesture in the exact, prescribed manner. The secret to performing the bowing posture correctly is that one shapes the back to emphasise the base of the spine. Other details of the ritual make similiar allusions to the themes of cyclic regeneration.

Autochthony is also a theme of Abrahamic religion, but adapted to the conditions after the Flood. Like Adam, Abraham is bound to leave his actual ancestral home - the land to which he has a connection by birth - and to find a home elsewhere. There, in the Promised Land, he must form a legitimate connection with a new home, a new soil. The immigrant cannot enjoy true and natural autochthony but in order to be naturalized they must acquire an autochthony of sorts, and this is what happens in the story of Abraham. Thereafter, the claim of being son of Abraham becomes synonymous with a claim to the (acquired) autochthony of the patriarch. The equation expressing the autochthony becomes:

"I will make your descendants like the dust on the ground: when men succeed in counting the specks of dust on the ground, then they will be able to count your descendants. Come, travel through the length and breadth of the land, for I mean to give it to you."

by which the descendants of Abraham are identified with the dust and soil of the land, each descendant like a speck of dust, a speck of the land itself. Circumcision, which is the outward sign by which the promise and covenant are made, is here, as in other traditions, directly emblematic of autochthony by way of primordial serpent symbolism, for the penis is serpentine (an Edenic symbolism) and the serpent is reborn from its hibernation in the earth each year and the foreskin represents the skin it sheds each spring: to remove the foreskin is a mark of the new-born, the serpent in spring, and so also an emblem of the Golden Race who are the new-born of the great cycle. This motif, when adopted as a racial extension from an illustrious ancestor, is appropriately marked on the organs of generation and in Judaism at least becomes the mark of a "Chosen People". We see then the full sense of why the salat is attributed to Abraham in Islam, namely that the story of Abraham is about the acquisition of autochthony and so reiterates exactly these otherwise Adamic themes.

A further important symbolism emerges in the story of Abraham, too, for the revelation of the equation of his desendants with the specks of dust on the ground occurs in a dream, before which, we are told, Abraham "fell into a deep sleep". This is of great importance in Islamic prophetology, for the deep sleep state is the ground of prophecy, even in the case of Muhammad who - according to the Hadith - would suddenly drop into deep slumber (and even snore) when receiving the Koranic revelation. Deep sleep is analogous to the prophetic state - to the Unlettered purity of Muhammad, in Islam - in its pure passivity. By this analogy we return again to the axial symbolism of khalifah and abd, for the waking, conscious mind of man accompanies his uprightness of posture, while he returns to the horizontal plane to sleep, and the waking mind is indicative of his dignity as khalif while the opposite to the waking mind, the mind in deep sleep, is perfectly passive, abd. The standing posture of the prayer therefore symbolizes the waking consciousness, the bowing posture the dreaming mind, and sajda the mind in deep sleep. Further, the mind in deep sleep is, by this chain of associations, equivalent to the clay, the prima materia, from which the primordial man was made. In the Abrahamic autochthony it is the sleep of Abraham that is actually the soil from which his descendants spring. In salat, sajda is the point at which the worshipper seeks to utterly submit to his Lord, to annhiliate the false ego, to be perfectly submissive to Allah's every impression, like clay, like a prophet, like the sleeping mind, like an obedient slave to God.

This finally brings us to a point that needs to be made concerning not just the postures of prayer but also the prayer times. The Koran adjures the faithful to maintain vigils of prayer throughout the night and in Islamic symbology in general the dark night and not sunlit day is spiritually fertile and significant. This is consistent with Islam's general lunar symbolism. In practise, even the dawn and dusk prayers are made in darkness because dawn is really first light (defined by a piece of black cotton distinguished from the night, which occurs well before sunrise, and which allows for only shadowy forms) and dusk is really after the full appearance of the stars and the end of solar shadows. In the voluntary prayers given in the Muslim canon there are long cycles of rakas through the night and throughout the holy month of Ramadan the pious pray through the night, amongst other ways the fast reverses the normal flow of diurnal and noctural life. This is because the so-called "dark sun", the "sun at midnight", is central to Islam's core. By this we mean the
union of waking consciousness with the sleeping mind, or in other terms, conscious submission. This is the very essence of Islam's lunar symbolism. The moon is nothing less than the sun of the night and a symbol of the waking mind united with the complete passivity of the sleeping mind. This again is what is enacted in the salat. Time and time again, cycle after cycle, in five sets per day, the believer, standing in qiyam, falls to the floor in sajda, which movement enacts carrying the waking state to the sleeping state. The Muslim's life is punctuated with this dhikr. Time and again the believer, in sajda, face occluded and forehead to the passive earth, foetal-like, - more often than not praying in darkness because of the organisation of the prayer times - is, as it were, an image of one conscious in deep sleep. With the formulaic cry of "God is Most Great" - the takbir, "Allahu akbar" - which expresses the transcendent, incomparability of the Divine and as a ritual formula dissolves the created, relative world before the Absolute, the worshipper, plunges, as it were, into the depths of the sleeping mind, namely that part of ourselves that is perpetually in submission to Allah and offers no resistance whatsoever to His Will. The method of Muslim prayer is just this: to consciously identify oneself with this deepest stratum of oneself that is, by nature, in perennial submission, to find in ourselves again the very "clay" of which we are made. This is the deeper and a specifically Abrahamic dimension of the Muslim rite.

To recap: we have here sketched a series a parallelisms all of which are active in the symbolism of Islamic prayer. Both the prayer times and the rakas of the canonical prayer ritual rehearse both astronomical and cosmic cycles. The essential organisation of the prayer times is fourfold, but in other respects Islam resists cruciform developments, emphasizing axial contrast instead. The essential contrast is between khalifah and abd, deputy and slave, which contrast is enacted in the two primary postures of prayer, standing and prostration. While the salat is ostensibly a restoration of the ancient Abrahamic prayer, these postures enact primordial and Edenic, Adamic themes. Specifically, the position of sajda - the fullest expression of submission - by placing the forehead to the earth, symbolically equates with the prima materia from which Adam was made. Further, the prayer ritual becomes, in certain of its movements, a symbolic enactment of the birth of Adam, and in this we find the particular Biblical and Islamic expression of the creation of the primordial, earthborn man. In other autochthonies the primordial man is explicitly a plant-man in a vegatative cycle of Ages, but in this tradition man is clay to God the Divine Potter, although the dead shall still rise from their graves like plants and the idea of the plant-man is implicit. Autochthony is also the concern of the Abrahamic dimensions of the prayer, but then by extension to the "clay" of the sleeping mind. This in turn reveals the profound (lunar) theme of the "sun at midnight" in which the conscious mind seeks to embrace the primeval submission of the deep sleep state. In the specific linear perspective of the monotheisms, it is usual to speak of one Creation and one Judgement, but Islam is finally cyclic, for the resurrected return to the Edenic Paradise. Certain of the movements of the ritual also enact the embryonic dead in their graves and their resurrection into the after-life, the new cycle, growing up out of the earth like plants. When the Muslim prays, all of these parallels of symbolism are activated, and by constant repetition, day after day, cycle after cycle, Islam hopes to actualize these symbols in the believer's soul.

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Dr. R. Blackhirst, Islam & Secularism: Divergent Understandings of Law, Rights and Government, (full text)

"All the beasts that roam the earth and all the birds that wing their flight are but communities like your own." (Koran 6:38)

"In reality it is the Real Who governs." - Ibn Arabi

"In the traditional societies, which changed little from one century to the next, the individual was protected by immemorial customs and by a social pattern which was thought to be inalterable. His rulers were equally bound by custom, their powers strictly limited... There was no need for 'democracy' as it is now understood..." - Gai Eaton

Few issues in the contemporary world are as crucial or as misunderstood as that of secularism and Islam. As is typical in the modern world, though, the lines that have been drawn in this important debate are false and misleading and systematically obscure the real dimensions of all that is at stake. In Western minds (and today many Muslims may have Western minds it should be remembered) the lines of division are between the ideal of the modern, secular, liberal-democractic, (and above all capitalist) state and hard core “Islamism", the reactionary imposition of a backward medieval theocracy. This division is therefore contextualized by the assumptions of the ideology of "progress", a pervasive historical theme in Western political discourse, with "secularism" as the force of progress and "Islamism" here an obstacle to it. Moreover, part of the ideology of progress is its presumed "inevitability". The historical trajectory of the West led, or seemed to lead, to the establishment of secular institutions: it is assumed that other civilizations are or should be following the same trajectory. In this view secularism was the solution that the West found to centuries of religious strife; secularists assume that it is a universal solution to a universal problem. In many quarters, the two camps are understood to be so starkly opposed that there is ultimately no choice between the two points of view: secularism is sane, Islamism is simply mad. But this assumes that "Islamism" speaks for Islam and that a state like Saudi Arabia is the alternative being offered to Western secularism. The debate takes the shape it does largely because the secularist camp constructs "Islamism" as a straw man. It is conspicuous, but historically consistent, that a cogent, intelligent, meaningful, critique of the Western secularist path and a forceful, accurate and worthy account of the Islamic alternative is never heard formulated in the West. It is simply not on the map. It is not allowed to be on the map. The West habitually stereotypes the Muslim world, only listens to the Muslim world's worst representatives, and then conducts its "debate" with those stereotypes. The purpose of the present paper, therefore, is to look beyond the false boundaries that are being drawn and to present the Muslim point of view - the traditional Muslim point of view - in simple and straightforward terms. It is hoped that this will provide both breadth and some new clarity to the debate.

In Western political theory, developing out of a quite unique history, governments make laws and weild sovereign authority. The history of the West is of powerful governments with sovereign authority to enact laws. The primordial model of this type of government is kingship, ultimately based, of course, in the notion of Divine right. Western political theory is a series of modifications and developments away from of that idea. In some cases the power of kings has been gradually restrained into constitutional monarchy in various forms, but only after great struggle and with great sacrifice. In other cases, also requiring wars and revolutions, the sovereign power of a king has been transferred to a President - the Republican model - but even this departure amounts to what is effectively an elected kingship with limited tenure. The spectacle of virtually all recent US Presidents systematically abusing the power of pardon - a royal perogative - illustrates this point. The history of the West is of absolute powers being gradually brought under the constraints of constitutional law. The Western narrative says that God gave kings the right to weild sovereign power. By extension God permits government and endows government with the right to legislate. This is what we might call the "Legislative" model of government. The main issue in Western political theory is what type of government weilds such extensive and potent authority and under what framework of "checks and balances".

But in Islamic political theory, and indeed in that of other civilizations too, government is not empowered to legislate in this way and the historical trajectory is not one of gradually restraining absolute power. Instead, there is a bedrock of Law (Shariah), itself sovereign and immutable, that is not subject to the whims of government. This body of Law protects ordinary people and their ordinary lives from government in a far more comprehensive way than the merely constitutional restraints of the Western systems. In this model, governments are merely empowered to judge, interpret and administer, but they do not enjoy sovereign power. Governments are as bound to the body of Law as are individuals and other institutions and therefore have, by definition, a more limited role than in all Western models. In some cases, such as that of Islam, this body of Law takes the form of, or more accureately has as its heart, a prophetic revelation. That is, it is received from God. More commonly, in other cases, this body of Law receives its authority from Ancestors and is then more what we understand as "custom" or "lore", but nevertheless a body of authoritative rules and social norms to which all, including governments, are subject. Of course, if we mean by "Law" something broader than formal law and include certain categories of "convention", then Western polities depend upon unwritten or implied conventions as do all societies. Yet in traditional Islamic life, in the Islamic ideal, and in other civilizations besides, the matrix of "convention" has an exalted and more defined role: it is considered inviolable in the same way that constitutions are considered inviolable in Western legal structures. Put simply, Muslims feel about the Shariah as Americans feel about the Constitution of the United States. Unlike constitutions, though, the Shariah embraces the whole of human social life within its scope, and has as its intention the shaping of Muslim social life down to its roots. It legislates on all things. It creates and sustains the common patterns of Muslim life: the removal of shoes at the door, the eating with the right hand, the prohibition of wine, the order of inheritance, the rules of divorce, and so on. It is comprehensive in its scope. Other civilizations, such as the Chinese, achieve the
same degree of cohesion and the same atmosphere of common encoded symbols more organically and by reference to tradition (ancestors). Islam entered history abruptly, and its manner has been to impose order upon chaos as Muhammad (the rasu'l = lawgiver) did to the Arab tribes, archetypally. It therefore takes a more formal structure - a developed jurisprudence that establishes a bedrock of Law governing all the patterns of life. To a large degree this bedrock of Law is, in theory, beyond the influence of government. The traditional Islamic view of government is pessimistic. Even the rule of the Four Rightly Guided Caliphs at the very outset of Islam is understood as a rapid falling away from the ideal. Most government is and always has been bad. Government is an arena of manipulation. Power corrupts. Muslims pray for the salvation of their rulers because they pity them - rulership entails grave spiritual dangers for even strong souls. The best ruler rules reluctantly. In the Islamic view man is entirely given to thinking of himself as a demigod and assuming what are properly Divine powers. Traditional Islamic political doctrine is opposed in principle to royalty - and to forms of government devolved from royalty - because sovereignty resides with Allah: there is no conferring of Divine right. The Islamic notion of khalifa is not legislative. A khalif is merely "deputy" and administers for God Who is Lawmaker. In Western political and legal life we speak of an "act" of Parliament. In Islamic thought only God "acts" in the sovereign sense.

The practical difference between the two conceptions is well-illustrated by the recent controversies concerning same-sex marriage. Leaving aside the rights or wrongs of the issue, the issue makes obvious the fact that in Western political systems governments have the power to extend marriage to same-sex couples. In Islam this is unthinkable. Again, leaving aside the rights or wrongs of the issue, governments, by definition, simply do not have that power. God created and defined and legislated upon the institution of marriage - the Koran clarified the whole matter - and it is beyond the scope of government to change it.
Government may make different judgements, interpretations and administrative arrangements according to changing circumstances, - and in this there is often a great deal of leyway allowed in the name of wise government - but it cannot legislate on the issue. Consequently, in Islamic political theory it is far less important what type of government there is because the rule of Law allows only limited government. This is what is so utterly incomprehensible to the Muslim world about something like gay marriage - apart from the issue itself, it is incomprehensible (and undesireable) that government, per se, should assume that it has such a power. Can a government legislate that a Muslim can have five wives or six? This would exceed the very notion of government. Liberals in the West must appreciate that the historical response of the oppressed and downtrodden in the Muslim world, when they have been subject to despotic government, has not been to clamour for their despots to be subject to quite meager constitutional restraints but to cling to and insist upon - from "grassroots" as liberals say - the broad layer of Law that insulates most of the people from most of the governments most of the time.

As opposed to the Legislative mode of government developed as the norm in the West, and extended globally through Western colonialism and imperialism, traditional Islam proposes a model of Judicial government. The contrast is in fact a Biblical theme and has very deep roots. After the revelation of Mosaic
Law the Israelites enjoyed Judicial government - Deborah was a judge. Eventually, and inevitably, the Israelites clamoured to be like "other nations" - against God's wishes. The establishment of the kingship was morally and spiritually dangerous from the outset, and inevitably the kings grew corrupt, the prophets (as Islam notes) denouncing them. Biblically, Legislative government is a decline and a fall from Judicial government which is deemed superior. Historically, and anthropologically, most forms of government - consider the governance of Aboriginal tribal life, for instance - have been Judicial rather than Legislative. Islam has become the voice of this viewpoint because its historical mission was to globalize this viewpoint, absorbing the tribal (also nomadic) traditions into a "world" (the House of Islam) that, contrary to common Western understandings, often spread at "ground level" rather than "by the sword" from above. The spread of Islam in modern Africa is a contemporary illustration of the religion's continuing ability to absorb and integrate locally traditional and tribal structures at "ground level" through a common understanding of this broader notion of Law. This is not a role that Islam has only recently taken upon itself - this viewpoint was inherent in Islam from the outset and is integral to its most characteristic motifs and themes.

In this respect it is important to understand, further, that Islam and this viewpoint go yet deeper into the Biblical tradition, and not only in the Old Testament, for what became Islam is at its roots the prolongation of a judicial perspective in primitive Christianity, namely the so-called Ebionite or "Jewish-Christian"
point of view associated in the Christian tradition with the name of James the Righteous. The question of Law was the most primitive point of departure between the two perspectives that solidified into Christianity and Islam respectively. The Pauline settlement proposed liberation from Mosaic Law, while ironically (so it seemed to its opponents) advocating obedience to Roman law - the motif in Christianity promoted by the Protestants at the dawn of modern secularism and the theological basis of a secular order. The Jamesean point of view is that Christ mitigates the severities of Mosaic Law, but the more ancient covenants remain. This theological perspective in the Semitic religious environment was thwarted in Christianity but eventually took shape as the religion Islam. It is rarely appreciated that this divide has its basis in the primitive disputes recorded in the New Testament and in early Christian literature. There is clearly a connection between the secularizing historical outcomes of Western Christian civilization and the antinominal theological posture and rendering unto Caesar of Pauline Christianity. There is less obviously, but no less importantly, a deep connection between the Islamic advocacy of Judicial government and the Ebionitic viewpoint that opposed Paul. These issues are not superficial ones; they are expressions of fundamental, bedrock temperaments within the complex of Semitic monotheism and it is merely wishful thinking to suppose that one of them might simply go away.

The contrast between the Western Legislative notion of government and the Islamic Judicial model also exposes misconceptions underpinning the centuries-old Western critique of Islamic society: that it failed to develop a viable and enduring mode of government (unlike the Europeans, as the argument goes). Indeed, when the Islamic world was deprived of its own legal systems during colonial domination, there was no indigenous Islamic "model of legislative government" that could compete with imported European models, and there is not still. Attempts to reconstruct historical Islamic examples as proto-liberal democracies are forced and utterly unconvincing. The pristine commonwealth of the Holy Prophet was not a "government" of this type but, strictly speaking, a nomocracy. This indeed was the Prophet's political mission; not to establish a system of government but a system of Law to constrain all government. Attempts to "modernise" Islam, which here means forcing it to adopt models of Legislative government, are impoverished by the fact that the whole Islamic tradition offers no prototypes: its best historical examples are nomocratic. This is why popular resistance in Islamic countries tends to take the
form of pro-Shariah movements. It is, in the first instance, the wish that an historical disadvantage be removed. In fact, it must be admitted that most Muslims do not like or would not care to live under the severities of old-style, ossified Shariah - certainly not under the Shariah as it has been practised in Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia. It is not a particular application of Shariah but Shariah itself, the very idea of a layer of Law with constitutional force, that they want. And therefore an entirely different conception of government. In the first instance popular contemporary Muslim resistance to Westernization takes the
form of an urge for the Shariah. Then comes the struggle to reconfigure the principles of Koranic Law to the realities of modernity, a struggle which is and ought to be on-going in a living civilization and that cannot be avoided in any case. This would constitute a distinctly Islamic road to modernity which - as
all the evidence of what is now nearly two hundred years of violence overwhelmingly indicates - is what Muslims want - their own way, their own choice. Despite the immense pressure (backed by truly titanesque violence) the West has imposed upon the Muslim world in the modern era, the Muslim insistence on another way continues unbroken and unbeaten, persisting as if it grows out of the very soil of their lands. This is an expression of confidence in the very concept of Law. No intelligent Muslim supposes that the medieval codification of the Shariah is fully equipped to deal with the complexities of modern existence, but it remains a widespread intelligent Muslim position that the idea of Shariah itself is sufficiently rich - and flexible - to meet the challenge if it was allowed to be true to its own deepest principles. The notion of Shariah, that is, is capable of meeting the constitutional needs of the modern Islamic world.

But there is no avoiding the fact that this must entail a comprehensive legal reform in Islam itself. The contemporary reality is that, as a consequence of modern European domination and interference in Islamic society, Islamic law became ossified and literalist legalism has prevailed. The Wahabi movement (which financially dominates modern Islam) was exactly that: a complete ossification of Islamic Law in response to "modernity". Wahabism is a perverse, superstitious, calcified Islam, with an uncritical and unintelligent idolization of the Hadith literature and a fiercely anti-mystical, externalist ethos that betrays the spiritual treasures and saints of Islamic civilization. At a juncture where the Islamic world needed to reach for the wisdom of its best representatives and richest traditions, its holiest places were taken hostage by Wahabi fundamentalists gathered around a pseudo-monarchy. This type of Islam - earlier we called it "Islamism" - is not remotely what in this present paper we are calling "traditional Islam"; it should be considered a radical deviation from traditional Islam. The slogan "Islam needs a Reformation" is true in this application. Reformation is the only answer to ossification. It is necessary, for example, that those schools of jurisprudence that endorse reasoning and analogical thinking as methods of legal interpretation assert themselves in the contemporary context. This is not a gesture to Westernization - where reasoning is
plainly over-valued at the expense of more profound values - but a legitimate correction to a long period of paralysis. The paralysis cannot even be called "medieval" in the usual perjorative way. In almost all respects living medieval Islam was far better. It is most apparent in attitudes to other religions and in attitudes to women and sexuality - both cases where modern Wahabist legalism has hardened into forms far less flexible and tolerant and liberal than those that usually prevailed in medieval Islam. It is quite wrong to suppose that the Muslim world's desire to rediscover its own heritage rather than being forever a
second-rate imitation of European civilization will reinstate a vanquished barbarism. Muslims can have confidence in the humanity, wisdom and depth of their own heritage, which heritage has expressed its social and political genius throughout its whole history not in Legislative government but in Law.

Modernity, nevertheless, entails enormous dangers by its very nature. It is really the new barbarisms of technology, science, industrialization, beaurocracy, affluence, not the old agrarian barbarisms of a hungry past, that pose the greatest threats to contemporary mankind in the Muslim world as much as elsewhere. It is in this context that the whole question of "Tradition" becomes profoundly problematic. As the history of Europe in the twentieth century demonstrates, the greatest of monstrosities can be born from the idea of using the modern state as an instrument of reinstating or restoring "Tradition". The great temptation and pitfall for the modern Islamic world is the concoction of some combination of the traditional modes with the empowered nation state. This is a recipe for a type of Islamic totalitarianism, as we already know from numerous examples. We must remember that in the past the state did not have the means to oversee all of its citizens or to enforce even the holiest of laws upon all and sundry. By comparison the modern state has extraordinary policing powers and the technological and organisational means to impose a high degree of regulation. The harsh punishments and strictures of traditional Shariah codes must be understood in this context. In traditional societies, before the modern state, authorities only had the means and the will to prosecute the most flagrant and socially disruptive breaches of Law. To a large measure such traditional codes work by mutual and communal self-regulation rather than by means of an overseeing state with religious police. The religious police introduced to some modern "Islamic" states and polities to supposedly enforce "traditional" ways - some of the provinces of Malaysia, for instance - are profoundly non-traditional. In Western terms they represent the prime characteristic of "fascism", namely the use of the sovereign modern state, with all its hitherto unknown technological and beaurocratic muscle, to enforce traditional or traditional-seeming ideas. A fascist, by definition, is a "traditionalist" who fails to appreciate that the modern state is not in any way a traditional institution and so is incapable of "restoring" a traditional order - as if the imposition of "sanctity" by diabolical weaponry is not itself diabolical. Real sanctity, of course, grows and lives within a community and is largely self-regulating once the norms of Law are established. Traditional Islam, which yielded the brilliantly fertile civilization of the Middle Ages, has nothing in common with modern so-called "Muslim" states that turn the Shariah into a regime of stifling oppression. While history books are full of empires and kingdoms, in fact for most of human history most people have proven perfectly able to go about their own affairs with little or no institutional government - they were governed instead by Law. The modern Western model of government and law, in contrast, invades all dimensions of life. Increasingly, modern life in such societies is institutionalized from birth to grave. Compared to "such functions as were considered [the] proper business [of government] a century or more ago," as Gai Eaton writes, "government... in our time is omnipresent," and moreover, as he says, "it has adopted a fundamantally revolutionary role, arrogating to itself the right to change the very structure of society." This applies to all Western models, totalitarian to moderate, since what is called "government" also includes all the operations of the state on behalf of "corporations", legal entities born out of the quite sinister extension of "human rights" to so-called "corporate persons" - which (after "privatization") is quite blatently the residual function of government in the West now. Needless to say, under Shariah comes the Islamic financial and banking codes and the prohibition of - and the promise of freedom from - usury, an invasive disease against which the Muslim world offers almost the last pocket of systematic resistance.

Another historical and temperamental difference between the Islam and Western Christianity should be noted here. Put simply, religion in the Islamic world is primarily a social matter. In the West, it has become primarily an individual matter. This contrast has deep historical and theological roots as well. When the agents of the Spanish Inquisition interogated their suspects, it was not their social observance of Catholicism that was at issue - the Inquisitors wanted to know what was in the suspects' "heart of hearts". The context of this was the forced conversion of Spanish Muslims to the Catholic faith during the Reconquista. The Inquisition (the apparatus of which paved the way for many features of the modern state, by the way) was concerned to identify those "Moriscos" for whom conversion was only a show and who, while they attended Mass and baptised their children, continued to harbour Islamic sympathies in their hearts and homes. Christ said that whomsoever commits adultery in his heart commits it in fact. While this may express a spiritual truth, it is monstrous to demand such purity of heart in a social order. The Islamic tradition has taken quite a different approach to such matters. The important thing has been the maintenance of Islamic society. In general, so long as a man did nothing to upset the Islamic social order, the content of his heart was entirely between he and God. Significantly, medieval Christian sources are often scandalized by this fact. This is the source of the long-standing Christian characterization of Islam as a hypocritical body of empty praxis: if a man does his prayers, goes to mosque and governs his family well, it matters not at all what he believes. The accusation is that Islam condones works without faith. This indeed was a crucial factor in the counter-Islamic dimensions of the Protestant revolt. There are no instances in Islamic history - at least before the modern era - where Muslims were systematically interogated regarding their innermost beliefs; only actual transgressions of the social code were prosecuted and even then usually only in cases that threatened social equilibrium. There is a stark contrast between public and private life in Islam that provides, in a way, the Islamic counter-position to "secularism"; it is like an inverse "secularism" where public life is dominated by religion (Diin) but where private life is a distinct realm in which the individual and family abide unmolested by intrusive institutions. The removal of shoes at the door ritualizes this distinction, as does the veiling of women when they move beyond the veil of the private world. It is a distinction integral to Islam. It is notable that the drift of Western societies in recent times has been towards the obliteration of any such distinction. Since we have already raised the issue of "gay rights", let us note the phenomenon of "outing", for instance. A mentality has taken hold in the West whereby whatever exists in the private world must be either legitimized or eradicated by the state, depending on whether it is deemed good or bad. Any activity left "veiled" beyond the public gaze is denounced as an instance of "hypocrisy". Even where this mentality purports to be "progressive" and to be "liberalizing" and to be extending "inclusiveness" it is furthering the world-view of the Inquisition.


PART TWO (continued)


The right of a person (or a thing) is that which he deserves on the basis of his nature and in keeping with the Law. - Chittick W. C.

Turning now to even broader issues, we must first give proper acknowledgement to the fact that the Islamic World in general feels that it has been systematically excluded from the development of modern international institutions and norms. It is felt that these institutions reflect the ideology and history of
European Christian civilization and are largely a continuation of the imperialist colonialist period. This is to say nothing of the imposition of the idea of the "nation state" and "citizenship" very often, it would seem, calculated from London or Paris to obliterate other (real) allegiences at the same time as entrenching dissension among the Muslim peoples. Islam was disabled by such devices. Its whole life was strangled. As the modern world took shape the House of Islam was in a position of inferiority and subjugation - a whole third of humanity was disenfranchised. This injustice remains. If the coming century is to be more peaceful than the last, it is an injustice that must be addressed. As it stands, all acceptable norms of government in international law are Legislative. The whole tradition of Judicial Law in the Islamic world - that entire viewpoint - has been treated with outright contempt (it is demonized) and a global monoculture of Legislative government is enforced. The only exceptions seem to be "First Nations" which have some claim to their own bodies of Law but this is largely token and sentimental - aborigines can appeal to tribal law in some instances in Australian courts now, but Muslims have no right to their own legal heritage though it is indeed as sacred to them.

What, though, is this "Muslim alternative" in practice? How would the world order be different if the Muslim world was not so disenfranchised? What alternative vision is on offer? A useful example of the ideological barriers ever-present in this debate is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which one might think would be a document that is beyond dispute. While this is largely a list of uncontroversial motherhood statements with which the Islamic tradition is in wholehearted agreement, the document nevertheless does not reflect the historical, intellectual, spiritual or cultural values of the Islamic world. The first article of a Universal Declaration of Human Rights that enshrined distinctly Islamic values would state that "human beings have the right to live within a system of meaningful symbols" or such, and that other rights, such as the right to nationality (a European but not at all an Islamic value), are
particular instances of this much broader and deeper principle. This need not even be a religious doctrine. This principle merely insists that man is a social animal and that an authoritative and stable system of norms (Law) is therefore a necessity for the individual's development and well-being. An Islamic drafting of such a document - quite apart from a greater insistence upon spiritual values - would stress the nurture of a meaningful and not merely utilitarian social world. And it would enshrine, as the common heritage of a great mass of humanity, a different and fuller notion of Law than what Western languages mean by the
word. In Islamic thought Law is an altogether cosmological idea. Animals have instincts. They obey laws that are built in. Human beings are largely removed from animal instinct and form social relations instead. Law (Shariah) is to man what instinct is to the honey bee, to use the Koranic analogy. To deprive man of Law is to denature him. And just as the nature of the honey bee doesn't change, nor do the deepest needs of Man and nor should his Laws. Islam specifically envisages the social world in terms of "recollection" - social institutions are not conveniences to be changed whenever governments submit to the will of armies or capital but realities that are symbols serving to nurture the total human creature. The Islamic critique of Western social life is that it is almost entirely devoted not to "recollection" but to spiritual amnesia, an endless distraction of new trivia, and that governments are bought and sold and electorates manipulated
and laws changed to accomodate it. Social institutions are not neutral. We may make them but in turn they shape us. Of course, this total human creature - homo islamicus - is understood as having a theomorphic dignity and to be inherently spiritual and religious in character, but that is not the main issue here. The
issue is a conception of "human rights" based on the fuller idea of Law, one that emphasises the need for meaningful social nurture - the right not to be raised in a society where a dehumanizing materialist wasteland is the norm - and the role of Law as an enduring shield against poor or despotic government.
The issue is simply the recognition that nomocracy is a valid way of organising a society or a civilization. Attempts to depict Muslim history as uniformly barbaric rub salt into the wound: the achievements of traditional Islamic civilization - we need only mention eight hundred years of Moorish Spain - speak for
themselves against the malodorous rabble who first called themselves Crusaders. Again, Muslims have confidence that their own history is fertile (it is also diverse, not monolithic) but its expression in modernity has been crippled and thwarted. It is a travesty that Islam has become synonymous with religious intolerance and the oppression of women. In fact, no religion has a more univeralist perspective and such a deep concern for the welfare and dignity of women than Islam. The sorry, retarded state of modern Islam is in stark contrast to its noble principles and its proud history.

One of the consequences of the right to live within a framework of meaningful symbols is that we must recognize and permit a high degree of local autonomy and often, in many lands, a high degree of social fragmentation in the wider sense. This right encompasses ethnic and linguistic symbolic orders too -
custom, blood, heritage, ancestory, traditional medicines - and so permits diversity rather than promoting global homogeneity. This, of course, has obvious dangers - although they are far less threatening than the horrors and perversities that have accompanied a global system of empowered nation states and that would surely multiply under any "World government". Properly considered, it is the role of Shariah, in traditional Islamic civilization, to form the over-arching framework that gives cohesion to a very organic array of peoples and their distinct ways. In its most prosperous periods it was also a very mobile civilization that employed devices - the most notable being the Pilgrimage to Mecca - to maintain a remarkable unity of spirit in lands from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The model here is one of a high degree of local diversity and local autonomy according to natural and traditional boundaries - not the bizarre boundaries of modern nation states - interwoven with a unifying body of Law - the Islamic "way of life". Government, modes of administration, are a secondary matter. This would in many cases involve the
devolution of nation states into smaller and more locally cohesive entities loosely confederated under their pan-Islamic heritage. Could there be any more graphic example of these exact issues than the modern state of Iraq? This nation-state is an entirely artificial entity, deliberately designed by European
powers to land-lock the richest of Muslim lands, binding together three distinct peoples, Kurds, Sunnis, Shia, none of whom care to be so bound together but who would rather retain their distinct identities. Only a brutal, murderous Western-style dictatorship (unrestrained Legislative government) such as that of the Western-endorsed Baathist Saddam Hussein - or an occupying US military machine weilding "shock and awe" - could possibly bind such elements together into a single three-headed monster posing as a modern European-style state. The alternative for Mesopotamia would be a confederation of three small states, each secure in their own cultural identities, with their shared religion, Islam, and the common body of Islamic Law and custom, - the Sunni/Shia divide notwithstanding - binding them together in a postive way. A neutral secularism has bound diverse elements together into meaningful nation states in some cases in European experience - actually there have been more failures than successes, and one must also take into account all the grotesque excesses of European nationalism - but it amounts to insane arrogance to suppose that this one solution to religious and ethnic strife will work everywhere. The enduring disarray of so-called "nation states" in the African and South American continents, in the Pacific and elsewhere, is on-going proof of this tragic historical folly. The very fact that the United Nations unites nations, at the expense of what are often more real and enduring identities, compounds the problem at a global, institutional level.

Finally, we cannot help but remark that secularists routinely under-play the consequences of secularism and, worse, very often have no idea of what it is that a secular society lacks. Muslims in many parts of the world still live with an aroma of sanctity, or have it within memory, while thoroughly secular societies no longer even remember what it is. In many Western societies the capitulation to the ideology of science is so far advanced that the first steps are being made towards classifying religious belief as a mental disease, an identifiable configuration of brain chemicals. The real problem here is that a secular world, even while posing as neutral, is intrinsically hostile to spirituality even where it permits "religion". Religion and spirituality are not at all the same thing. The Soviets allowed churches to operate as long as they were totally bankrupt of all genuine spirituality. Sufis in Turkey can perform their rituals and dances for the tourists, as long as they leave out the Divine invocations that give them any spiritual authority. Secularism such as we find it in Western nations is to a large extent just a more sophisticated (friendly) way of achieving the same end as the Soviets, namely emptying religion of any real spiritual content, surrounding it with social forms that make it seem silly, so that it poses no real challenge to the prevailing materialist, consumerist values and no real obstacle to social and economic atomization and the steady industrialization of man. Religion was the bogey, the enemy of human realization, in the progressive Western historical narrative; the solution was to divorce it from the State so that the State could be the vehicle of progress. Other than the half-baked ideas of anarchists and libertarians the West has conspicuously failed to form any real critique of or alternative to the Legislative state and its army of social engineers. Traditional Muslims want to live in a world, and a social order, where religious belief is still the norm and where the very concept of the human being is of a spiritual creature with fundamental spiritual needs, and where the spiritual heritage of mankind - all the People of the Book - is acknowledged as the most basic birthright of all. Western political discourse is only recently turning to so-called "meaning of life" issues, with depression and suicide and existential meaningless, modern acidia, the erosion of traditional family networks and its true cost, alienation, belatedly acknowledged as the endemic problems they are. Muslims have been pointing to and articulating such failings of the West for over a century and insist that in their scale of values such problems - spiritual in nature - are a cost that outweighs the material seductions of the Western way. This is not to say Muslims choose poverty. Islam is not an otherworldly faith indifferent to human physical needs. But the Muslim road to modernity, unlike the road taken by the West, does not entail the reduction of religion to a barren and mute sentimentality devoid of any true spiritual nourishment. The question in any given society is: what is the norm? In many, or most, parts of the Islamic world the religious mentality (which gives priority to salvation over all things) prevails and secularism can only be imposed by brutal force, as it is in Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Turkey, Pakistan - the list goes on. Today, the people of Islam languish under Western-style and/or Western supported secularizing regimes with corrupt and parasitic Western-educated elites. The people elect Islamic governments and secularist elites and their khakhi armies - represented as "moderate" in the West - over-turn the elections time after time. The reaction is even worse: the tragic spectacle of frustrated fanatics, Wahabi mad-dogs, behaving as a man does when he has a boot pressed into his face, speaking as the voice of the religion of the Holy Koran on the global stage.

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