Question
Is it possible that God does not merely save followers of other previously
valid religions besides Islam out of a divine amnesty, but for the truth that
exists in previous religions, including those such as Native American
religions, and others?
Response
Every true religion has been revealed by God through His messengers the
prophets (upon whom be blessings and peace), so all religions were originally
the truth. But how much of this original truth remains is irrelevant once they
have been superseded by a subsequent revelation, since the very fact of their
abrogation shows they are no longer acceptable to God or adequate for men. The
position of Imam Ghazali cited in the Letter to Abd al-Matin entails that
followers of such faiths, if unreached by the new prophet or his message, will
be saved by a general amnesty from Allah regardless of the amount of truth or
falsity in them, as He has said,
We do not punish until We send a Messenger (Quran 17:15).
All salvation, for Muslims or others, is out of divine favor and amnesty, not
because of works, even the work of having true faith, for faith is counted in
Islam among ones works, it being rigorously authenticated that the Prophet
(Allah bless him and give him peace) said,
Shall I not inform you of the best of your works?belief in God . . .
(Bukhari, 3.18889: 2518. S).
And he (Allah bless him and give him peace) also said:
None your works shall enter any of you into paradise. Someone said, Not
even you, O Messenger of Allah? and he said, Not even me, unless Allah
conceals me beneath a mercy from Him.[1] But do what is right (Muslim, 4.2169:
2816. S).
So not even by the truth of ones religious convictions does anyone enter
paradise, but rather only through Allahs favor in accepting ones faith of
them, in which sense all who enter paradise are under the divine amnesty of
Allahs mercy.
The Nature of Religious Truth
In religion, truth is something that engages not only the mind or the body
or the soul separately, but all of these together. Allah sent messengers to
mankind, prophets such as Abraham, Jacob, Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad (upon them
be blessings and peace), first, to reaffirm the divine oneness (tawhid) that is
the very soul of every true revelation; second, to give objective substance to
decent peoples impulse to do good and avoid evil through positive laws
defining these two things in relation to God and to man; and third, to purify
peoples hearts by the grace (baraka) of following the messenger of the time.
All three are truth. For the mind, truth consists in knowing of the oneness of
God and the other eternal verities of faith; for the body, truth is doing what
is right and shunning what is wrong; and for the soul, truth is the closeness
to God that results from sincere application of the first two.
Because of Divine Providence for both the essential sameness and incidental
differences of mankind, the first of these three aspects of truth, the oneness
of God, has never differed in the original revelations at all; the second of
them, the commands and prohibitions of each faith, if more variable than the
other two, reveals a shared moral content among revealed religions that plainly
outweighs their differences; and the third of them, the purity of hearts, has
differed very little in kind from faith to faith. Because of the nature of God
and man, of the absolute and limitary, of life and death, there is a natural
family resemblance between all faithsjust as the earths languages, in their
variety and succession, articulate an essential human nature similar enough to
permit translations between most of their texts and utterances. The unity of
faiths proceeds from the unity of God and the unity of man; their differences
represent either Divine Providence for different
peoples and times, or the altering of the message of God at the hands of men.
The Number of the Saved
In the historical succession of divine revelations, people in every land and
time who accepted Gods messagethe truth in its three aspects that constitutes
religionwere saved, while those who rejected His message were lost, and those
who were unable to do either because of being unreached by His message were
also saved, for Allah does not punish until He sends a messenger. In Islam,
nobody goes to hell on a technicality, a point perhaps not always as well
appreciated by other world faiths. I remember learning in catechism the
position of the Roman Catholic Church, Christianitys largest and oldest
representative, in the form of a question and answer:
Q: Are all obliged to belong to the Catholic Church to be saved?
A: All are obliged to belong to the Catholic Church in order to be saved (A
Catechism of Christian Doctrine: Revised Edition of the Baltimore Catechism,
No. 2. Paterson, New Jersey: St. Anthony Guild Press, 1941, 32).
For those unfamiliar with the terminology, the opposite of saved is
damned. Compare this to the passage referred to earlier in our Letter to Abd
al-Matin from Imam Ghazali in which he says:
Indeed, I hold that most Christians of the present time, whether Europeans
(al-Rum) or Central Asians (al-Turk), are included in the divine mercy, Allah
Most High willing, meaning those in the far lands of Europe and Asia who have
not been reached by the prophetic message. For they fall into three categories:
(1) One group who have never even heard the name of Muhammad (Allah bless him
and give him peace) to begin with, so are excused.
(2) A second group have heard of his name, his character, and the inimitable
miraculous signs of truth (mujizat) that appeared at his hands; namely, those
adjoining the domains of Islam, and who mix with them, these being the
unbelievers who deny the revelation.
(3) And a third group between the two others, who have heard of the name of
Muhammad (Allah bless him and give him peace), but not of his character and
attributes. Rather, since childhood they have heard that a lying imposter
named Muhammad claimed to be a prophetjust as our children have heard that a
liar called al-Muqaffi was raised up by Allah as a pretender to prophethood.
Such people in my view fall into the same category as the first group above in
respect to knowing the true attributes of the Prophet (Allah bless him and give
him peace), since even though they have heard his name, they have not heard of
how he really was, so how should they respond? (Faysal al-tafriqa, Majmua
rasail al-Imam al-Ghazali, 3.96).
Amnesty is amnesty, and for Ghazalis positionwhich because of the reasoning
behind it plainly applies to other non-Christian faiths, and even atheiststhe
measure of divine truth that remains in a previous faith now superseded has
little bearing on the ultimate salvation of its followers. In other words,
whoever is without the means to believe shall attain unto the mercy of Allah no
matter what they believe.
Works and Paradise
But if ones entering paradise is through the pure mercy of Allah, ones rank
in paradise is nevertheless commensurate with ones spiritual state and works,
as is attested to by many prophetic hadiths and Quranic verses, such as
Each shall have degrees befitting their own works (Quran 6:132);
and
Whoever does the slightest bit of good shall see it; And whoever does the
slightest bit of evil shall see it (Quran 99:78).
Although I have not seen the question dealt with by Islamic scholars, it is
difficult to think of a reason why such verses in their generality should not
apply to everyone who enters paradise, even non-Muslims who do so out of divine
pardon for their ignorance.
But this does not entail that someone given amnesty for his ignorance of the
true revelation of his time, no matter how virtuous he may be, can attain to
the felicity of someone who believes in that revelation, even if he is remiss,
for Allah says:
Shall We deal with Muslims [lit. those who submit] as We do with
criminals? How is it that you judge? (Quran 68:3536).
There are many hadiths of the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace)
which clarify that believing in the message of Islam entails a mighty wage from
Allah that is beyond description or comparison with any other work, or even all
other works together. Tirmidhi, Ahmad, and others relate with a
well-authenticated (hasan) chain of transmission from Abdullah ibn Amr ibn
al-As that the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said,
Allah Mighty and Majestic shall bring forth a man of my Community in front of
everyone on Judgement Day, and shall unroll ninety-nine great scrolls
[recording his sins] against him, each extending as far as the eye can see. He
shall then say to him: Do you deny a single bit of this? Have My recording
scribes wronged you? and he shall say, No my Lord. He shall then say, Do
you have any excuse, or even one good deed? and the man shall be dumbstruck,
then say, No my Lord. To which He will reply, To the contrary, you have done
a single good deed in Our eyes, and this day you shall not be wronged. Then a
single scrap of parchment shall be presented in his favor on which shall be
written I testify there is no god but Allah, and that Muhammad is His slave
and messenger. He shall say, Bring him forth, and the man shall say, My
Lord, what is this scrap of parchment compared to all these immense volumes?
To which He shall say, Truly, you shall not be wronged. Then
the huge scrolls shall be placed on one side of the balance, and be altogether
outweighed by the single scrap, and nothing shall prove weightier than In the
Name of Allah, Most Merciful and Compassionate (Ahmad, 2.213: 6994. H).
This momentous event shows the vast difference of the Testification of Faith
from any other work, something attested to by many other hadiths, among them
the rigorously authenticated words of the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him
peace)
Whoever testifies that there is no god but Allah alone without associate, and
that Muhammad is His slave and messenger, and that Jesus is His slave and
messenger, and His word which He cast unto Mary, and a spirit from Him, and
that paradise is true, and hell is true: Allah shall enter him into paradise no
matter what he has done (Bukhari, 4.201: 3435).
To understand the full import of this, one should note that in Islam, the
highest rank of good deeds is reserved for that which Allah has made personally
obligatory (wajib), which includes the category of refraining from every sin.
In each of these hadiths, the Testification of Faith outweighs a lifetime of
remissness in performing this personal obligation, the instances of which in
the first hadith fill ninety-nine great scrolls, each extending as far as the
eye can see. This means that the Testification of Faith is weightier than an
entire lifetime of the highest rank of good deeds, the obligatory, without such
a Testification. Thus the highest possible works that anyone without the
Testification of Faith could fill his life with, the most saintly of all of
them, could not reach the rank of someone with the Testification of Faith, the
believer, no matter what he has done. So someone who knows and believes in
Allah and His messenger (Allah bless him and give him
peace) cannot be compared to someone who does not, no matter how great their
works, a truth which Allah expresses with the words
Say: Are those who know equal with those who do not know? (Quran 39:9).
Clearly, as the thirteenth-century mystic Ibn Ata' Illah has said:
Those reprieved for committing a crime are not like the elect who are the
concern of the Divine.
Mystics of Abrogated Faiths
What has just been said of the followers of different faiths is even more
patent in their mystics. Despite the abrogation of their religions, we do not
doubt the possibility of mystics of other faiths reaching a higher spiritual
plane, for when the lower soul is negated and sublimated by spiritual
disciplines, the powers of the higher soul seldom fail to appear, and it is not
impossible that in such a condition it might behold Ultimate Reality, which is,
after all, as real and objective as Detroit or anything else in the physical
world.
But what a difference between the few hundred Jewish, Christian, or even
American Indian mystics of the Western tradition who left any record of their
experiencesmen and women such as Catherine of Siena, Mechthild of Magdeburg,
Francis of Assisi, Moses Cordovero, Meister Eckhart, Teresa of Avila, John
Tauler, Henry Suso, Jakob Böhme, Handsome Lake, Isaac Luria, Julian of Norwich,
John of the Crossand the literally thousands of Sufi masters of the Islamic
tradition who founded the great mystical orders, had immense influence for
centuries at all levels of society, produced an unparalleled and monumental
body of mystic literature in poetry and prose, and left countless adepts in the
beatitude of the Divine Presence, a living tradition that continues to this
day. What other religion has ever seen a Mathnawi like Rumis? There is a
tremendous difference between a few outstanding spiritual personalities that
appeared at times and places in the West, like occasional watering
places scattered across a hinterland, and the throngs of mystics of the
Islamic milieu, on a sea of the Divine whose tides flooded regularly.
Not only in the numbers of contemplatives, but in the abidingness of their
personal experiences, there is a great difference between the mystics of Islam,
who proceeded from the light of true monotheism to a state of perpetual
illumination, men such as Sahl al-Tustari, al-Ghawth Abu Madyan, Shams
al-Tabrizi, Ibn Arabi, Abul Hasan al-Shadhili, and others whose testimony is
unambiguous, and those of other faiths, who through self-mortification caught
momentary glimpses of the Godhead in experiences they then translated to
others in spiritual depositions.
Finally, there is vast difference between someone who experiences the One and
knows it as such at all levels of his beingbody, mind, and souland someone
who discerns the One through a miasma of priestly dogma. Where Ibn al-Farid saw
clearness without water, gentleness without breeze, light without fire, and
soul without body, Ignatius Loyola saw the most Holy Trinity, as it were, in
the likeness of a triple plectrum or of three spinet keys. The former was
freed from the shadows of his own finitude by the sun of pure Being, while the
latters mystic insight remained indelibly colored by received doctrine. The
distinction between form and content avails nothing here, and what should
rather be said is that even an object of numinous knowledge can be refracted
through the prism of a sufficiently insidious interpretation. The color of the
water, as Junayd once said of those who know Allah, is the color of its
vessel.
The veracity of the revelation that one follows is a necessary condition for
genuine knowledge of the Divine. East is not farther from West than someone who
returns from encountering Allah, lost forever to anyone or anything besides, is
from someone who returns from a state of unitive vision to worship another
human being. The two are not alike. For most mystics in a sense return, if
profoundly changed, to where they began. The Sufis of Islam proceeded from
unconditional monotheism to the One whom they found at every level of their
being at the end of the path; whereas mystics of other faiths had to begin with
a heroic struggle to rise above the historical accretions of their faithsthe
man-worship of Christianity, the anthropomorphism of Judaism, the pantheon of
Hinduism, the nature-worship of shamanism, or the atheism of Buddhismthat each
had to return to, at least in principle and personal narrative, after their
experiences.
Truth and Salvation
To answer the question of whether God does not merely save followers of
other previously valid religions besides Islam out of a divine amnesty, but for
the truth that exists in previous religions, Ghazalis position entails
separate consequences for each kind of truth distinguished above.
For the first type of truth, that of orthodox belief, we have seen that
Ghazalis position entails that those unreached by the true message are saved
no matter what they believe, so the amount of truth that remains in their
religion is inconsequential before the divine amnesty. This is also clear from
passages in Ghazalis Maqsad al-asna [The noblest aim] and other works which
show he knows that Christians have confounded the nature of God and man, and
ended up worshipping a man, Jesus, instead of God, and that this is shirk or
associating others with God, the most complete corruption of faith possible;
yet he still says in the passage previously cited: I hold that most Christians
of the present time, whether Europeans (al-Rum) or Central Asians (al-Turk) are
included in the divine mercy, Allah Most High willing, meaning those in the far
lands of Europe and Asia who have not been reached by the prophetic message,
the latter including those who since childhood have
[only] heard that a lying imposter name Muhammad claimed to be a prophet
(ibid. 3.96). For Allah only ladens each soul according to its capacity.
As for the salvational role of the second type of truth, the practice of good
works, for those unreached by Islam, though we have not found anything explicit
by Ghazali or others about it, one may infer from the above-quoted Quranic
verses that Allahs justice for all those who do good entails a distinction
above and beyond His divine amnesty for their ignorance of evil. That is, they
shall benefit from what they know and follow of morality.
This would also seem to apply to the third type of truth, the truth of
being of personal sanctity and purity of heart produced by following the
message and example of ones prophet, typified by the experiences of the
mystics, and described by the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) as
to worship Allah as though you see Him. Here too, though the excellences of
Western mystics are not lost, they are not really comparable to the mysticism
of traditional Islam, whether in sheer numbers of illuminates, in the proven
and systematic training of the great orders that ensured and passed on their
experience to future generations, in the abidingness and clarity of their
experience of the Divine Beatitude, or in the way their minds construed this
experience when they endeavored upon their return to make what they could of it
comprehensible to others. The divine question Are those who know equal with
those who do not know? (Quran 39:9) is even more telling in mysticism
as than in the previous two types of truth.
Conclusion
To summarize, religious truth consists in faith, works, and sanctity for the
very good reason that man is mind, body, and heart. As such, the truth that
exists in previous religions, including those such as Native American religions
and others may indeed play a role in their salvation: not truth in the sense
of their religious faith, which when altered or misunderstood is irrelevant to
the supreme amnesty mentioned in the Quran, but rather in the degree of their
felicity once their salvation is granted through this amnesty. While according
to the above-mentioned hadiths such people can never reach the degree of the
least of believers in the prophet of the time, their degrees in paradise on the
general basis of the Quranic verses about good and evil we have cited may well
be influenced by their own moral choices in this world to do good and avoid
evil as understood from their own revelations, indeed as common to most
religions and even most consciences, and followed
by them in the measure of their sincerity. And Allah knows best.
MMVII © N. Keller
[1] Nawawi writes: The ostensive purport of such hadiths attests to the
position of Muslim orthodoxy that no one deserves reward or paradise for his
acts of obedience. As for the word of Allah Most High Enter paradise for that
which you used to do (Quran 7:43), and His saying, That is paradise, which
you have inherited for what you did before (Quran 16:32), and similar verses
that show that paradise is entered through of works, they do not contradict
these hadiths, but rather the meaning of such verses is that entering paradise
is by means of spiritual works, though the success to do the works, the
guidance to have sincerity in them, and their being accepted of one are through
the mercy and favor of Allah Most High. So while it is true that one does not
enter paradise through mere works, it is also true that one enters it through
works, that is, by reason of works, which are of the divine mercy (Sharh Sahih
Muslim, 17:16061).
saiyed shahbazi
www.shahbazcenter.org
