Common Ground - Islam and Buddhism
Common Ground - Islam and Buddhism
Common Ground - Islam and Buddhism
You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles
YUMPU automatically turns print PDFs into web optimized ePapers that Google loves.
Oneness: The Highest <strong>Common</strong> Denominator<br />
Face of the Absolute. In the case of Prophets <strong>and</strong> saints, by contrast,<br />
given their effacement in the Face of the Absolute—their concrete<br />
realization that their own existence is, in Buddhist terms, ‘empty’—<br />
this Face of the Absolute shines through their individuality. Thus,<br />
God is seen or remembered ‘through’ such saintly beings; for to<br />
use Buddhist terms again, it is the Absolute which ‘exalts the holy<br />
persons’ (asamskrtaprabhāvitā hy āryā-pudgalā).<br />
This exalted spiritual station is referred to in the famous holy<br />
utterance (hadīth qudsī) in which God speaks in the first person on<br />
the tongue of the Prophet. Here, God declares ‘war’ on whosoever<br />
opposes one of His saints or more literally, ‘friends’ (walī, pl.<br />
awliyā’). Then follows this implicit description of the saint, who has<br />
devoted himself or herself entirely to God through supererogatory<br />
practices:<br />
My slave draws near to Me through nothing I love more<br />
than that which I have made obligatory for him. My slave<br />
never ceases to draw near to Me through supererogatory<br />
acts until I love him. And when I love him, I am his hearing<br />
by which he hears, his sight by which he sees, his h<strong>and</strong> by<br />
which he grasps, <strong>and</strong> his foot by which he walks. 86<br />
This passage of divine reality through the saint implies no compromise<br />
as regards divine transcendence. Quite to the contrary, for we<br />
are in the presence of the most radical manifestation of unsullied<br />
tawhīd, that oneness predicated upon complete integration: the saint,<br />
being one whose existence is effaced before God, allows free passage<br />
for divine transcendence to manifest through him/her as divine<br />
immanence; the sole reality of God, at once transcendent <strong>and</strong> immanent,<br />
inaccessible <strong>and</strong> yet inescapable, is affirmed in <strong>and</strong> through<br />
sanctity. The phenomenon of sanctity thus yields one of the most<br />
irrefutable proofs of tawhīd.<br />
Allusion to this principle can be discerned in much of the devotional<br />
literature on the Prophet. 87 To take but one example, from the<br />
famous poem entitled al-Burda, of Imam al-Būsīrī: ‘Truly, the bounty<br />
86. See An-Nawawī’s Forty Hadith, p. 118, no.38. It is cited there from Bukhārī,<br />
Kitāb al-riqāq, p. 992, no.2117.<br />
87. One should always bear in mind that, in <strong>Islam</strong>, every prophet (nabī) is by<br />
definition a saint (walī), but not every saint is a prophet. Whatever is said about<br />
a saint applies equally to a prophet, who has all that the saint has, in addition to<br />
the specific function of prophecy. It should also be noted that the sanctity of the<br />
Prophet Muhammad is greater than that of any saint.<br />
71