Karen Armstrong - A History of God--The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam

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and the constant reminders that God is incomparable on the other. Others have looked back to the Sufis for insight into
God's relationship with the world. The Swiss Sufi Frithjof Schuon revived Ibn al-Arabi's doctrine of the Oneness of Being
(Wahdat al-Wujud) to show that since God is the only reality, nothing exists but he and the world itself is properly divine.
He qualifies this with the reminder that this is an esoteric truth and can only be understood in the context of the mystical
disciplines of Sufism.
Others have made God more accessible to the people and relevant to the political challenge of the time. In the years leading
up to the Iranian revolution, the young lay philosopher Dr Ali Shariati drew enormous crowds from among the educated
middle classes. He was largely responsible for recruiting them against the Shah, even though the mullahs disapproved of a
good deal of his religious message. During demonstrations, the crowds used to carry his portrait alongside those of the
Ayatollah Khomeini, even though it is not clear how he would have fared in Khomeini's Iran. Shariati was convinced that
Westernisation had alienated Muslims from their cultural roots and that to heal this disorder they must re-interpret the old
symbols of their faith. Muhammad had done the same when he had given the ancient pagan rites of the hajj a monotheistic
relevance. In his own book Hajj, Shariati took his readers through the pilgrimage to Mecca, gradually articulating a dynamic
conception of God which each pilgrim had to create imaginatively for him or herself. Thus, on reaching the Kabah, pilgrims
would realise how suitable it was that the shrine is empty: 'This is not your final destination; the Kabah is a sign so that the
way is not lost; it only shows you the direction.' {10} The Kabah witnessed to the importance of transcending all human
expressions of the divine, which must not become ends in themselves. Why is the Kabah a simple cube, without decoration
or ornament? Because it represents 'the secret of God in the universe: God is shapeless, colourless, without similarity,
whatever form or condition mankind selects, sees or imagines, it is not God'. {11} The hajj itself was the antithesis of the
alienation experienced by so many Iranians in the post-colonial period. It represents the existential course of each human
being who turns his or her life around and directs it towards the ineffable God. Shariati's activist faith was dangerous: the
Shah's secret police tortured and deported him and may even have been responsible for his death in London in 1977.
Martin Buber (1878-1965) had an equally dynamic vision of Judaism as a spiritual process and a striving for elemental
unity. Religion consisted entirely of an encounter with a personal God, which nearly always took place in our meetings with
other human beings. There were two spheres: one the realm of space and time where we relate to other beings as subject
and object, as I-It. In the second realm, we relate to others as they truly are, seeing them as ends in themselves. This is the
I-Thou realm, which reveals the presence of God. Life was an endless dialogue with God, which does not endanger our
freedom or creativity since God never tells us what he is asking of us. We experience him simply as a presence and an
imperative and have to work out the meaning for ourselves. This meant a break with much Jewish tradition and Buber's
exegesis of traditional texts is sometimes strained. As a Kantian, Buber had no time for Torah, which he found alienating:
God was not a lawgiver! The I-Thou encounter meant freedom and spontaneity not the weight of a past tradition. Yet the
mitzvot are central to much Jewish spirituality and this may explain why Buber has been more popular with Christians than
with Jews.
Buber realised that the term 'God' had been soiled and degraded but he refused to relinquish it. 'Where would I find a word
to equal it, to describe the same reality?' It bears too great and complex a meaning, has too many sacred associations.
Those who do reject the word 'God' must be respected, since so many appalling things have been done in its name.
It is easy to understand why there are some who propose a period of silence about 'the last things' so that
the misused words may be redeemed. But this is not the way to redeem them. We cannot cleanup the term
'God' and we cannot make it whole; but, stained and mauled as it is, we can raise it from the ground and set
it above an hour of great sorrow. {12}
Unlike the other rationalists, Buber was not opposed to myth: he found Lurianic myth of the divine sparks trapped in the
world to be of crucial symbolic significance. The separation of the sparks from the Godhead represent the human
experience of alienation. When we relate to others, we will restore the primal unity and reduce the alienation in the world.
Where Buber looked back to the Bible and Hasidism, Abraham Joshua Heschel returned to the spirit of the Rabbis and the
Talmud. Unlike Buber, he believed that the mitzvot would help Jews to counter the dehumanising aspects of modernity.
They were actions that fulfilled God's need rather than our own. Modern life was characterised by depersonalisation and
exploitation: even God was reduced to a thing to be manipulated and made to serve our turn. Consequently religion became
dull and insipid; we needed a 'depth theology' to delve below the structures and recover the original awe, mystery and
wonder. It was no use trying to prove God's existence logically. Faith in God sprang from an immediate apprehension that
had nothing to do with concepts and rationality. The Bible must be read metaphorically like poetry if it is to yield that sense
of the sacred. The mitzvot should also be seen as symbolic gestures that train us to live in God's presence. Each mitzvah is a