Domination Over Animals and Self-Defense in The Surah Pilgrimage

In continuing reading surah Pilgrimage (22), two more controversial points are highlighted. First, our dominance over animals, and second, defending oneself when one is persecuted or attacked. In the first case, God says:

“Livestock have been made lawful to you, except for what has been explicitly forbidden. Shun the filth of idolatrous beliefs and practices and shun false utterances. [Dedicating animals to idols.] Devote yourselves to God and assign Him no partners, for the person who does so is like someone who has been hurled down from the skies and snatched up by the birds or flung to a distant place by the wind. All this [is ordained by God]: those who honor God’s rites show the piety of their hearts. Livestock are useful to you until the set time. Then their place of sacrifice is near the Ancient House: We appointed acts of devotion for every community, for them to celebrate God’s name over the livestock He provided for them: your God is One, so devote yourselves to Him. [Prophet], give good news to the humble whose hearts fill with awe whenever God is mentioned, who endure whatever happens to them with patience, who keep up the prayer, who give to others out of Our provision to them.” (22:30-35)

“We have made camels [The term budn can refer to either camels or cows.] part of God’s sacred rites for you. There is much good in them for you, so invoke God’s name over them as they are lined up for sacrifice, then, when they have fallen down dead, feed yourselves and those who do not ask, as well as those who do. We have subjected them to you in this way so that you may be thankful. It is neither their meat nor their blood that reaches God but your piety. He has subjected them to you in this way so that you may glorify God for having guided you.” (22:35-37)

I am a vegetarian and have a strong feeling for animals and even insects and every living being in the organic world, and every living being in the inorganic world, which is not evil. Every dawn, birds sing in front of my window, I can feel their peaceful contentment and intuitive connection to the Source. As God said, “Do you not realize that everything in the heavens and earth submits [literally prostate] to God: the sun, the moon, the stars, the mountains, the trees, and the animals?” (22:18) However, it is obvious we have subjected animals. We have power over them, intellectually and spiritually. This is God’s gift of awareness of our existence in a unique way from animals and trees. So, in the verses above, God acknowledges this power and asks us to bring the name of God when we slaughter them for eating. This is obviously against animal factories which lack any reverence for animals. I assume in conditions that we don’t need really to eat animals to survive or feed the unfortunate and hungry, God as well would be satisfied with vegetarianism. I think the rite holds as long as the meat of sacrificed animals goes to the needy, and unless God changes it, we ought to abide with revelation’s sacrificial rites: “those who honor God’s rites show the piety of their hearts.”

In the next passage, God allows those who are persecuted or attacked to take arm:

“Give good news to those who do good: God will defend the believers; God does not love the unfaithful or the ungrateful. Those who have been attacked are permitted to take up arms because they have been wronged– God has the power to help them– those who have been driven unjustly from their homes only for saying, ‘Our Lord is God.’ If God did not repel some people by means of others, many monasteries, churches, synagogues, and mosques, where God’s name is much invoked, would have been destroyed. God is sure to help those who help His cause– God is strong and mighty– those who, when We establish them in the land, keep up the prayer, pay the prescribed alms, command what is right, and forbid what is wrong: God controls the outcome of all events.” (22: 38-41)

I can’t deny this truth: “If God did not repel some people by means of others, many monasteries, churches, synagogues, and mosques, where God’s name is much invoked, would have been destroyed.” God makes the logic of self-defense, not indiscriminately killing people, clear here. This is the way things happen. We might wishfully take absolute pacific stance in the world. But when it comes to the destruction of churches and monasteries, our houses and cities, if in terms of balances of power we are capable of defending ourselves, Christians, as well as Jews, and in the final analysis even Buddhists, would defend themselves.

A Reflection on Humility as the Key in the Quran, Beatitudes, and Socrates' Apology.

 حادثه
The Event
                                           

گفتم تو چرا دور تر از خواب و سرابی                                                                                               I asked, “Why are you farther than dream and mirage?”
گفتی که منم با تو ولیکن تو نقابی                                                                                                    You said, “I am with you but you are the mask.”
فریاد کشیدم تو کجایی تو کجایی                                                                                                         I cried, “Where are you?  Where are you?”
گفتی که طلب کن تو مرا تا که بیابی                                                                                              You said, “Yearn and call me to find me.”
چون همسفر عشق شدی مرد سفر باش                                                                                              When you are the sojourner of love, be the man of journey.
هم منتظر حادثه هم فکر خطر باش                                                                                                   Be prepared for both the event and danger.
هر منزل این راه بیابان هلاک است                                                                                            Every station of this path is a fatal desert.
هر چشمه سرابیست که بر سینه خاک است                                                                                          Every spring is a mirage in the chest of soil.
در سایه هر سنگ اگر گل به زمین است                                                                                             If there is a flower in the shade of a rock,
نقش تن ماریست که در خواب کمین است                                                                                           It is the pattern of a snake coiled up to bite.
در هر قدمت خار هر شاخه سر دار                                                                                                  In each step there is thorn and every branch is a hanging noose.
در هر نفس آزار هر ثانیه صد بار                                                                                                      Agony in each breath, hundreds in each second.
گفتم که عطش می کشدم در تب صحرا                                                                                                I said, “thirst is killing me in the fever of desert.”
گفتی که مجوی آب و عطش باش سراپا                                                                                              You said, “Don’t seek water and be all thirst.”
گفتم که نشانم بده گر چمشه ای انجا ست                                                                                              I said, “Show me, if there is a spring over there.”
گفتی چو شدی تشنه ترین قلب تو دریاست                                                                                     You said, “When you become the thirstiest, your heart is the ocean.”
گفتم که در این راه کو نقطه ی آغاز                                                                                                    I asked, “Where is the starting point in this path?”
گفتی که تویی تو خود پاسخ این راز                                                                                               You said, “You yourself are the answer to this mystery.”

(The Event, by Ardalan Sarfaraz)

Everything Will Perish But the Face of God

When I was blind to God, when I was an atheist—my attention was directed at the void as I assumed there was nothing permanent within me and without me but atoms and the law of conservation of energy.   I was in agony, I was in darkness, because this picture didn’t and doesn’t quell anyone’s existential angst—why am I here and why do I die?  I compensated for this loss with the principle of pleasure.  Thus, I fell and hurt myself and my family.  Years of studying philosophy couldn’t satisfy me either, as I got lost into the nihilism of atheism, moral relativism, and contingency of existence.  So, I turned to God and asked for help and received help and guidance.  I can’t be more grateful to God for coming to guide a broken nothing.  This is pure divine Mercy and nothing else. We can’t fathom it but its seed is already within us.  

“Do not call out to any other god beside God, for there is no god but Him.  Everything will perish except His Face. His is the Judgement and to Him you shall all be brought back.” (28:88) The most real and permanent is God.  When I was blind to God, this notion was alien to me.  I couldn’t connect with or understand those who believed in God, to me an illusory and human made notion.  The illusory turned into the most real for me, in my pleadings and receiving—when I turned my face to God.   When I turned to God, everything around me turned and the only real things—atoms, conservation of energy, electromagnetic fields, quantum vibrations, and dark energy -  became a shadow, signs of the most Real and Lasting.  After years of inquiry and being careful not to deceive myself, I found my way.  The void within me was not fully removed but shattered.  Now it was time to step on the path.  The seed of faith grows and the shattered void will gradually be removed.  God entered my heart, whose longing was set by God, and God will occupy the whole space of my being—this is my wish.  And if God so wills, my wish will come true.  Am I ready now to enter the Room of Wishes?

The Room of Wishes is here and now and always inside my heart.  I ought to be able to see, endure, and integrate all my pain and weaknesses within my strength and faith.  Seeing myself as is, rather than fashioning myself to my delusion and vanity, will teach me love.  When I become capable to meet myself and see the depth of my depravity and flaws and introduce them to my strength and faith, then the satanic ghost of Dionysian despair and pride will depart in the name of God.   

This humbles me.  The key seems so clear and accessible to me now.  I woke up from my narcissistic slumber and the delusion of absolute autonomy, which oxymoronically drowns itself in the wine and weed of contingency of existence.  I woke up from sleeping all my life with the snake of pride and sad pleasure.  And the light is too strong to let me fall back asleep into the darkness of ego. 

The key seems so clear and accessible to me now: it is to exorcise the evil spirit of will-to-power, the venom of separation and desperate pride in my vices and devices, in my sciences and technology or my self-made spirituality.  This pride is desperate as this all-knowing groundlessness is a manifestation of despair and will end in the same.  The venom is not only a mode of understanding but also a state of being, a ghostly presence with the glassy eyes of vanity.  When I come down from the delusional dizzy heights of ‘as if I am somebody’, the evil spirit departs.  When I prostate myself with understanding, the door will open.  Then I will understand what God means by “Do you not realize [Prophet] that everything in the heavens and earth submits [literally prostate] to God: the sun, the moon, the stars, the mountains, the trees, and the animals?” (22:18) and the fact that "[t]he seven heavens and the earth and everyone in them glorify God. There is not a single thing that does not celebrate His praise, though you do not understand their praise: God is most forbearing, most forgiving." (17:44).  Then I am attuned to understand the simplicity and clarity of God’s words that: “[Prophet], give good news to the humble whose hearts fill with awe whenever God is mentioned, who endure whatever happens to them with patience, who keep up the prayer, who give to others out of Our provision to them.” (22:34-35)

Socrates' Apology

It is an absolute awareness of the poverty of my existence that opens my eyes to God.  However, this understanding is also a venue to understanding my essential connection to God.  So, this “poverty” does not imply “contingency and nihilism”.  I won’t be lost and blind in seeing my life as an accidental conglomeration of atoms and particles.  In this state of humility in front of God, my philosophy, sciences, and technology can find their footings on firm ground and will reveal the divine ground more clearly.  Spiritual striving and pleading to God, with knowledge and understanding, bring me back to what Socrates said in his Apology (defense in the court before taking the hemlock in 399BC):

“[T]he truth is, O men of Athens, that God only is wise; and in this oracle [God inspired the Delphi Temple oracle to say, “Socrates is the wisest man in Athens.”] he means to say that the wisdom of men is little or nothing; he is not speaking of Socrates, he is only using my name as an illustration, as if he said, He, O men, is the wisest, who, like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing. And so I go my way, obedient to the God, and make inquisition into the wisdom of anyone, whether citizen or stranger, who appears to be wise; and if he is not wise, then in vindication of the oracle I show him that he is not wise; and this occupation quite absorbs me, and I have no time to give either to any public matter of interest or to any concern of my own, but I am in utter poverty by reason of my devotion to the God.”

And again these words of Socrates, after his death verdict was issued, are consistent with that knowledge of poverty of our existence:

“Men of Athens, I honor and love you; but I shall obey God rather than you, and while I have life and strength I shall never cease from the practice and teaching of philosophy, exhorting anyone whom I meet after my manner, and convincing him, saying: O my friend, why do you who are a citizen of the great and mighty and wise city of Athens, care so much about laying up the greatest amount of money and honor and reputation, and so little about wisdom and truth and the greatest improvement of the soul, which you never regard or heed at all? Are you not ashamed of this?  And if the person with whom I am arguing says: Yes, but I do care; I do not depart or let him go at once; I interrogate and examine and cross-examine him, and if I think that he has no virtue, but only says that he has, I reproach him with undervaluing the greater, and overvaluing the less.  And this I should say to everyone whom I meet, young and old, citizen and alien, but especially to the citizens, inasmuch as they are my brethren. For this is the command of God, as I would have you know; and I believe that to this day no greater good has ever happened in the state than my service to the God. For I do nothing but go about persuading you all, old and young alike, not to take thought for your persons and your properties, but first and chiefly to care about the greatest improvement of the soul. I tell you that virtue is not given by money, but that from virtue come money and every other good of man, public as well as private.”

And Socrates ends his defense this way:

"Wherefore, O judges, be of good cheer about death, and know this of a truth - that no evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death. He and his are not neglected by the gods; nor has my own approaching end happened by mere chance. But I see clearly that to die and be released was better for me; and therefore the oracle gave no sign [Socrates’ daemon (spirit) used to give him signs of what not to do]. For which reason also, I am not angry with my accusers, or my condemners; they have done me no harm, although neither of them meant to do me any good; and for this I may gently blame them.

Still I have a favor to ask of them. When my sons are grown up, I would ask you, O my friends, to punish them; and I would have you trouble them, as I have troubled you, if they seem to care about riches, or anything, more than about virtue; or if they pretend to be something when they are really nothing, - then reprove them, as I have reproved you, for not caring about that for which they ought to care, and thinking that they are something when they are really nothing. And if you do this, I and my sons will have received justice at your hands. 

The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways - I to die, and you to live. Which is better God only knows.”

Beatitudes

And now the eight Beatitudes of Jesus in the Sermon of the Mount make sense to me:

"Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are they who mourn,
for they shall be comforted.

Blessed are the meek,
for they shall inherit the earth.

Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
for they shall be satisfied.

Blessed are the merciful,
for they shall obtain mercy.

Blessed are the pure of heart,
for they shall see God.

Blessed are the peacemakers,
for they shall be called children of God.

Blessed are they who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven."

(Gospel of St. Matthew 5:3-10)

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“There are also some who serve God with unsteady faith: if something good comes their way, they are satisfied, but if they are tested, they revert to their old ways, losing both this world and the next– that is the clearest loss.  Instead of God, they call upon what can neither harm nor help them– that is straying far away– or invoke one whose harm is closer than his help: an evil master and an evil companion.  But God will admit those who believe and do good deeds to Gardens graced with flowing streams. God does whatever He wishes.  Anyone who thinks that God will not support him in this world and the next should stretch a rope up to the sky, climb all the way up it, and see whether this strategy removes the cause of his anger.  In this way, We send the Quran down as clear messages, and God guides whoever He will.” (22:11-15)

“As for the believers, those who follow the Jewish faith, the Sabians, the Christians, the Magians [Zoroastrians], and the idolaters, God will judge between them on the Day of Resurrection; God witnesses all things.  Do you not realize [Prophet] that everything in the heavens and earth submits [prostate] to God: the sun, the moon, the stars, the mountains, the trees, and the animals? So do many human beings, though for many others punishment is well deserved. Anyone disgraced by God will have no one to honor him: God does whatever He will.” (22:17-18)

“We showed Abraham the site of the House, saying, ‘Do not assign partners to Me. Purify My House for those who circle around it, those who stand to pray, and those who bow and prostrate themselves.  Proclaim the Pilgrimage to all people. They will come to you on foot and on every kind of swift mount, emerging from every deep mountain pass to attain benefits and celebrate God’s name, on specified days, over the livestock He has provided for them– feed yourselves and the poor and unfortunate– so let the pilgrims perform their acts of cleansing, fulfill their vows, and circle around the Ancient House.’  All this [is ordained by God]: anyone who honors the sacred ordinances of God will have good rewards from his Lord.” (22:26-30)

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گفتم تو چرا دور تر از خواب و سرابی                                                                                               I asked, “Why are you farther than dream and mirage?”
گفتی که منم با تو ولیکن تو نقابی اما تو نقابی                                                                                   You said, “I am with you but you are the mask.”
فریاد کشیدم تو کجایی تو کجایی                                                                                                         I cried, “Where are you?  Where are you?”
گفتی که طلب کن تو مرا تا که بیابی                                                                                              You said, “Yearn and call me to find me.”
چون همسفر عشق شدی مرد سفر باش                                                                                              When you are the sojourner of love be the man of journey.
هم منتظر حادثه هم فکر خطر باش                                                                                                   Be prepared for both the event and danger.
هر منزل این راه بیابان هلاک است                                                                                            Every station of this path is a fatal desert.
هر چشمه سرابیست که بر سینه خاک است                                                                                          Every spring is a mirage in the chest of soil.
در سایه هر سنگ اگر گل به زمین است                                                                                             If there is a flower in the shade of a rock,
نقش تن ماریست که در خواب کمین است                                                                                           It is the pattern of a snake coiled up to bite.
در هر قدمت خار هر شاخه سر دار                                                                                                  In each step there is thorn and every branch is a hanging noose.
در هر نفس آزار هر ثانیه صد بار                                                                                                      Agony in each breath, hundreds in each second.
گفتم که عطش می کشدم در تب صحرا                                                                                                I said, “thirst is killing me in the fever of desert.”
گفتی که مجوی آب و عطش باش سراپا                                                                                              You said, “Don’t seek water and be all thirst.”
گفتم که نشانم بده گر چمشه ای انجا ست                                                                                              I said, “Show me, if there is a spring over there.”
گفتی چو شدی تشنه ترین قلب تو دریاست                                                                                      You said, “When you become the thirstiest, your heart is the ocean.”
گفتم که در این راه کو نقطه ی آغاز                                                                                                    I said, “Where is the starting point in this path?”
گفتی که تویی تو خود پاسخ این راز                                                                                               You said, “You yourself are the answer to this mystery.”

(The Event, by Ardalan Sarfaraz. Singer: Dariush)