SPIRITUAL ATTITUDES AND NAMES OF GOD
Muslim thinkers have often divided the names of God into two broad categories by contrasting attributes such as wrath (ghadab) and mercy (rahma), justice (`adl) and bounty (fadl), severity (qahr) and gentleness (lutf), majesty (jalal) and beauty (jamaal), or majesty and munificence (ikram). The `names of wrath' are connected to God's distance and transcendence, while the `names of mercy' are connected to His nearness and immanence. The Shari'a and kalam (dogmatic theology) tend to emphasize God's severity and incomparability (tanzih), while Islamic spirituality and the devotional literature put more stress on His gentleness and similarity (tashbih).
The Shari'a is not particularly concerned with speaking about God, since its function is to set down guidelines for the domain of activity. To the extent that God is taken into account, He is conceived of primarily as the Commander and the Lawgiver. In respect of laying down the Law, He is a monarch who must be obeyed. A monarch - and especially the Eternal King - stands far above his subjects, who are in fact his slaves, and he enforces his edicts by means of scourges, dungeons, and executions. Hence the Shari'a naturally calls to mind the God of transcendence and justice, and the `jurists' (fuqaha'), generally speaking, present Islam with a stern and severe countenance.
The God of the jurists shares many of the attributes of the God described by the proponents of kalam, who concerned themselves mainly with bolstering the authority of the Shari'a while employing the tools of rational thought. Moreover, kalam has never played the same important role in Islam that theology plays in Christianity, since its concerns are far overshadowed by the dedication of all Muslims to the Shari'a. Kalam sets out to defend the Shari'a and the tenets of the faith against rational criticisms, so the theologians have approached their subject by employing reason (`aql or al-nazar al-'aqli). As a result, they singled out for their consideration certain subjects which were of no interest to the community at large. For most people, it makes no difference if the Qur'an is eternal or created, so long as God speaks to them through it. Though kalam performs a necessary function in the Islamic universe, the vast majority of the faithful had no knowledge of the rational criticisms against which kalam was defending them, so they had no use for kalam. It was simply irrelevant to the religious life of most people.
Since the theologians called upon reason to bear witness to their endeavors, they affirmed God's transcendence with great fervour. Reason cannot accept the literal sense of many details of the Qur'an and the hadith, such as God's face, eyes, hand, feet, sitting, laughter, smiling, wavering, yearning, joy at man's repentance, surprise at the lack of sensual desire in a young man of piety, and so on. Hence the theologians felt compelled to explain such descriptions in terms of abstract qualities. Thus, for example, God's `hand' is interpreted as a reference to an impersonal quality such as power. This is not to question the validity of these interpretations, only to point out that the relatively concrete words and images found in the Qur'an and the hadith provide food for the imagination; through them human beings gain the ability to think about God in personal terms and establish an intimate, inward relationship with their Lord. An inconceivable God - or a God who can only be known through abstract creedal statements - is of no use to the vast majority of people.
Imagination feeds upon the concrete, not the abstract. When God speaks in a language that appeals to the imagination, He thereby addresses all the faithful, bypassing reason and appealing to something far more universal in human hearts. But when the theologians employ a disciplined rational methodology, they are addressing intellectuals like themselves. As a result, the faithful found spiritual nourishment not in the dry and abstract depictions of a far-away God provided by kalam but in the warm and concrete imagery of the Qur'an, the hadith, and the spiritual authorities. No one could love the God of the theologians.
In short, by the nature of their disciplines, the jurists and the theologians lay stress on the God of remoteness and transcendence. In contrast, the spiritual authorities speak of the God described in the Qur'an and the hadith as He describes Himself, not neglecting His nearness to all creatures. Since the God of the Qur'an is pre-dominantly a God of mercy and tenderness, a God of intimacy and concern, the spiritual authorities emphasize the personal dimension of the human/divine relationship. They stress God's nearness and immanence, and they often remind us of Qur'anic verses such as, Whithersoever you turn - there is the face of God (2:115); He is with you wherever you are (57:3); We indeed created man; We know what his soul whispers within him; and We are nearer to him than the jugular vein (50:16).
Since the Shari'a concerns itself basically with activity, it is directed toward the outward affairs which are governed by the laws of the remote King. Kalam is polemical and rational, concerning itself mainly with the divine attributes of the transcendent God, not with the human dimensions of the relationship with a God who is also immanent. The Qur'an and the hadith provide the seeds from which the Shari'a and kalam grew up, but they also provide the seeds for the subsequent attention that was paid by the spiritual authorities to all the dimensions of the soul. Devotional literature addresses this inward domain in an eminently practical way, attempting to shape the soul according to the revealed models.
There is, of course, no contradiction between thinking of God as transcendent and perceiving Him as immanent, any more than there is a contradiction between perceiving Him as Merciful and as Wrathful. God reveals Himself under a variety of guises, and these in turn demand different rational perceptions and psychological responses. One cannot think in exactly the same terms about the Glorified (al-subbuh), who transcends everything that man can conceive, and the Near (al-qarib), who is closer than the jugular vein; nor can one feel the same toward the Gentle, the Kind, and the Compassionate as one feels toward the Vengeful and the Severe in Punishment. Once codified and institutionalized, the human responses to God's self-revelations in the Qur'an came to emphasize certain divine attributes rather than others. One response was called `jurisprudence', another `kalam', another `Sufism', and so on. All of these points of view coexist in the great representatives of Islam, just as they coexist in the Qur'an and in the soul of the Prophet. But in the early period, it is difficult to disentangle the different strands, since the institutional forms which highlight them have not yet come into existence. However, it is easy to see that certain manifestations of early Islam tend in one direction or another. The particular characteristic of the devotional literature such as the Sahifa is to emphasize the personal quality of God's relationship with His servants and His all-pervading love.
THE PREDOMINANCE OF MERCY
Some modern day Muslims and many Western scholars have looked at the Qur'an wearing the eyeglasses of the jurists and theologians. As a result, they see a God who is a just and stern Commander, concerned only with beating His servants into shape so that they will follow His Law. They tend to ignore the fact that practically every chapter of the Qur'an begins with the words, In the name of God, the All-merciful, the All-compassionate, and that the Qur'an mentions God's names of mercy, compassion, kindness, generosity, forgiveness, and love about ten times as often as it mentions His names of wrath and severity. The overwhelming Qur'anic picture is that of a God deeply concerned with the well-being of His creatures and ready to forgive almost anything, if only they will repent and acknowledge His sovereignty.
Faced with the reality of both mercy and wrath, the worshiper seeks out the one and does everything he can to avoid the other. This is a constant theme in the devotional literature in general and the Sahifa in particular. The Prophet set the pattern in his well-known supplication: `I seek refuge in Thy good pleasure from Thy displeasure and in Thy pardon from Thy punishment. I seek refuge in Thee from Thee.' God is both He who becomes pleased and He who becomes displeased, He who pardons and He who punishes. Hence the worshiper prays to God for protection against God Himself, since there is no other significant threat. Moreover, the servant can be confident that God's mercy will in fact overcome His wrath, since God is essentially merciful and only accidentally wrathful. The Qur'an tells us in two verses that God's mercy embraces all things (7:156, 40:7), but it never suggests that His wrath is so universal. According to a famous hadith qudsi, God says: `My mercy precedes My wrath', or `has precedence over My wrath', or `predominates over My wrath.' God appears to His creatures as harsh and domineering only in certain circumstances and for specific purposes - purposes which themselves are defined by mercy. The Prophet expressed this point with his remark: `Hellfire is a whip with which God drives His servants to Paradise.' God's mercy is so overwhelmingly real that He will certainly overlook the sins of those who open themselves up to it.
Padwick refers to the `mosaic' quality of Muslim supplications. She writes: `While the prayers of some of the great saints show a spiritual individuality, the great mass of these devotions is built up of well-tried small items arranged in ever new patterns - traditional prayers of the Prophet, Qur'an verses, blessings of the Prophet, forgiveness-seekings, cries of praise, all on known and authorized forms.' The Sahifa is strongly marked by the individuality of the Imam, while also displaying this mosaic quality. But this quality itself reflects the Qur'an, which is a mosaic of God's names and activities, stories of the prophets, legal injunctions, and promises and warnings about the Last Day.
It was said above that one of the purposes of supplication is to shape the imagination of the worshiper in accordance with Islamic norms. A well-known hadith tells us that Muslims can know the `character' (khuluq) of the Prophet through studying the Qur'an. By following the Prophet's sunna the worshiper absorbs the Qur'an on all levels of his being, and in turn he is absorbed by the Qur'an, the Divine Word and the divine model of his own soul. If some early authorities referred to the Sahifa as the `Sister of the Qur'an', part of the reason for this may lie in the fact that its mosaic quality expresses a variety of spiritual attitudes that reflect accurately the Qur'anic and prophetic model for human perfection. Every element in the Sahifa's mosaic corresponds to elements of the Qur'anic text and the Prophet's soul.
The connection between the spiritual attitudes expressed in the Sahifa and the Qur'anic statements about God and His relationship to His servants can most clearly be perceived in the Imam's constant recourse to God's names and his always appropriate expression of the corresponding human attitude. On the one hand the Imam places great emphasis upon his own inadequacy and sinfulness, acknowledging that he deserves nothing but God's wrath. On the other, he repeatedly takes refuge in God's mercy and in God's own Qur'anic statements concerning the primacy of forgiveness, asking God to do with him as is worthy of such a merciful Being, not as he himself deserves.
Act toward me with the forgiveness and mercy of which Thou art worthy! Act not toward me with the chastisement and vengeance of which I am worthy! (73.3)
In short, through the mosaic of the supplication, the worshiper moves from viewpoint to viewpoint in keeping with the different relationships which exist between himself and God as described in the Qur'an. Man's point of view changes because each of the divine names points to a different face of God turned toward him. Yet all are faces of God, and `There is no god but God', so the apparent multiplicity of names and faces dissolves into the divine Unity.
Human inadequacy and sin are real enough on their own level, and the Sahifa among others shows a remarkable awareness of the depth of human imperfection. But the great spiritual authorities of Islam hold that in responding to human weakness, God's overwhelming mercy takes charge and the divine wrath pales by comparison. The more that human beings admit to their own inadequacy, the more they call down upon themselves God's pity and commiseration. Supplication and pleading are the natural human response to the shahada the fact that man is nothing compared to God, and that God - who is fundamentally mercy - is the only true reality. Supplication responds to God's command, Despair not of God's mercy! Surely God forgives all sins (39:53).
A hadith is related concerning Imam Zayn al-'Abidin which is worth recounting because it is so completely in character with the Sahifa's emphasis upon God's mercy and forgiveness. One day he was told that Hasan al-Basri (d. 110/728), the famous ascetic, had said: `It is not strange if a person perishes as he perishes. It is only strange that a person is saved as he is saved.' The Imam replied, `But I say that it is not strange if a person is saved as he is saved; it is only strange that a person perishes as he perishes, given the scope of God's mercy.'
The supplicant who responds to the God of the Qur'an never forgets the wrath of God, but he remains confident that God's essential nature will show itself, in spite of his own weaknesses. Padwick was so struck with the devaluation of human sins that seems to result from this attitude that she displays a rare instance of Christian bias, objecting that it `leads to a certain moral shallowness in some forgiveness-seeking prayers' and is unable `to attribute any moral cost to God's forgiveness', alluding here and in the rest of the passage to the Christian doctrine of atonement. Among three examples of `moral shallowness' she cites the following lines from Imam Zayn al-'Abidin, found in Al-Sahifat al-khamisa:
My God my sins do not harm Thee and Thy pardon does not impoverish Thee. Then forgive me what does not harm Thee and give me what Thou wilt not miss.
In order to understand the attitude expressed here, one needs to put it into its larger context. The specific attitude expressed by the Imam corresponds precisely to the reality of God's infinite mercy and forgiveness as revealed in various Qur'anic verses. Many passages from the Sahifa present the same point of view. Moreover, when the Imam says: `Thou art the Generous Lord for whom the forgiveness of great sins is nothing great' (31.10), or `Pardoning great sin is nothing great for Thee, overlooking enormous misdeeds is not difficult for Thee, putting up with indecent crimes does not trouble Thee' (12.13), he is merely echoing the command of the Prophet mentioned above: The worshiper `should be firm and make his desire great, for what God gives is nothing great for Him.'
In any case, the context of these prayers shows that the accompanying moral attitude is hardly shallow, since it demands `refraining from arrogance, pulling aside from persistence [in sin], and holding fast to praying forgiveness' (12.13). Moral shallowness could only follow if the worshiper remembered God's mercy and forgot His wrath, but both are always kept in view.
