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Common Ground - Islam and Buddhism

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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

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