A Brief Reflection on What We Can Know/Do and What We Can't in the Surah Night Journey (17)

We can understand God, the ineffable, as we can understand Being, unsurmountable.  Our capacity in understanding God as the source of Being is the inner light granted to us, but it can easily be covered up by arrogance.  When I didn’t believe in God, and studied different philosophies and scientific discourses, I found them all insufficient: it came so obvious to me that Russell, Wittgenstein, Gödel, Goodman, Popper, Kuhn, Heidegger, Foucault,…were all saying that we can’t fathom it, but it never meant to me that reason or sciences and philosophy were vain.  On the contrary, in the spirit of Socrates, we approximate truth but never achieve it: “this never achieving Truth” is the condition of possibility of humanly understanding the “truth”, for us truth is always partial, not complete. 

When I started reading scriptures and especially the Quran, I realized that revelation is an essential part of truth that we can’t achieve on our own.  Our arrogance, our delusion that we CAN achieve the whole truth by our own reason alone, leads us astray.  Nonetheless, we can use our reason, if directed by God’s grace, to the straight path, without getting lost.

When I was disconnected from God’s revelations, I was considering ideologies and sciences for the way out, but these ideologies can never tell us what course of action to take ethically.  Their ethics is always groundless and this is the place that our whims, desires, and arrogance take hold in us.

The Quran, first and foremost, reminds us of God—take no other god: science, any ideology, or any idol as one’s god.  I didn’t understand this point, and so, I easily disconnected from the Quran.  It seemed to me God is too demanding and authoritative to remind us again and again that if we worship any other god but God, we will be punished and suffer.  My arrogance was a hindrance.  I assume the arrogance of Russell and Chomsky, Marx, Sartre, and Foucault, and the like was the major obstacle for them.  The arrogance comes from a deep disbelief that draws a veil on our heart not to connect to revelations.  We needed historical proof, we needed “evidence”—that why if we worship any god-idol-ideology-science but God, we will fall.  In both ontogenetic (my individual) and phylogenetic (our species) senses—if these terms are applicable to our self-understanding—we can potentially see now why, if we are willing and our arrogance again doesn’t draw a veil on our eyes and hearts.  

Without revelations, we can’t find our way about.  We end up in canceric growth, quantification of the world based on utility, and hedonism.  We see ourselves as random events on this planet, who has no ontogenetic spiritual path but to increase itself in phylogenetic sense: survival.  We shall die from inside (our essence) and simultaneously we shall disconnect from outside (the universe and God)—the arrogance will appropriate everything for the self and pleasure.  In almost two centuries we have seen the ramification of secular ideology.

In reading the surah “Night Journey”, I am now in a different mindset.  I hear the message differently.  Revelations don’t tell us the mystery of the scientific working of the world, it is our tasks to look for proximate and ultimate causes---with constant remembrance of and asking guidance from the ineffable God and unsurmountable Being.  What we CAN know for sure is what course of action to take based on spiritual-ethical directions given to us by revelations: 

“Set up no other god beside God, or you will end up disgraced and forsaken.  Your Lord has commanded that you should worship none but God, and that you be kind to your parents. If either or both of them reach old age with you, say no word that shows impatience with them, and do not be harsh with them, but speak to them respectfully and lower your wing in humility towards them in kindness and say, ‘Lord, have mercy on them, just as they cared for me when I was little.’  Your Lord knows best what is in your heart. If you are good, God is most forgiving to those who return to Him.  Give relatives their due, and the needy, and travellers– do not squander your wealth wastefully: those who squander are the brothers of Satan, and Satan is most ungrateful to his Lord– but if, while seeking some bounty that you expect from your Lord, you turn them down, then at least speak some word of comfort to them.  Do not be tight-fisted, nor so open-handed that you end up blamed and overwhelmed with regret.  Your Lord gives abundantly to whoever He will, and sparingly to whoever He will: He knows and observes His servants thoroughly.

Do not kill your children for fear of poverty (a) ––We shall provide for them and for you––killing them is a great sin.  And do not go anywhere near adultery: it is an outrage, and an evil path.  Do not take life, which God has made sacred, except by right: if anyone is killed wrongfully, We have given authority to the defender of his rights, but he should not be excessive in taking life, for he is already aided [by God].  Do not go near the orphan’s property, except with the best [intentions], until he reaches the age of maturity. Honor your pledges: you will be questioned about your pledges.  Give full measure when you measure, and weigh with accurate scales: that is better and fairer in the end.  Do not follow blindly what you do not know to be true: ears, eyes, and heart, you will be questioned about all these.   Do not strut arrogantly about the earth: you cannot break it open, nor match the mountains in height.  The evil of all these actions is hateful to your Lord.” (17:22-38)

(a): “When the sun is shrouded in darkness, when the stars are dimmed, when the mountains are set in motion, when pregnant camels are abandoned, when wild beasts are herded together, when the seas boil over, when souls are sorted into classes, when the baby girl buried alive is asked for what sin she was killed, when the records of deeds are spread open, when the sky is stripped away, when Hell is made to blaze and Paradise brought near: then every soul will know what it has brought about.” (81:1-14)