The Islamic Space
A few days ago I felt an urge to read a book that I have not read for about 20 years. This was a bit odd because I have thousands of books and I didn’t really ever like this book so I hadn’t thought so much about it - although at the time I read it I was very into ‘ecstatic’ aspects of Sufism and felt in the over-imaginative way that one sometimes can that it had engendered some sort of ‘mystical experience’.
Anyway, this book, The Islamic Space
On one level the book is a commentary on Farid al-Din Attar’s classic Mantiq-ut Tair, The Conference of the Birds
As an example of how this works, Corlett and Moore cite the following passage from the Qur’an, Surah 14:
...But Allah leaves in error whom He will and guides whom He pleases.....
In the past I have pondered this deeply and had many heated discussions with people about the meaning - even developing a quasi-untarian philosophy around it. Of course on a literalist level the meaning is that God can do whatever He wishes (or else He would not have the attributes of God) but this impinges on the hoary old chestnut of free-will and pre-destination. In the absence of belief in an equal power to God (ie the Devil, in the sense of a representative of an equal and opposite force ‘sin’ - albeit one which will eventually be defeated) I always leaned to the interpretation that it is indicative that everything that happens is the will of God and so this statement would be true but we cannot understand the reasons why.
Of course, this involves a certain amount of mental exercise (if not gymnastics) but it fits and I have no doubt that it is true. But there are other truths and some are so simple and obvious we never see them. Sometimes (always?) our own mental bias and conditioning is a block and a filter - a ‘veil’ as Attar would put it. We cannot step back and see things ‘in the round’. Well, stepping back is what Moore and Corlett’s book is all about and here they come up with a simple and beautiful conception: God guides those to Him who are pleased by God.
The book is full of such insights - not explanations, just starting points for thought - and the message (such as it is) is to question. Question and look. It is one of a series that encompasses six different religions but I haven’t read the others.
Strangely, as I finished the book today, I did a search for Corlett and Moore on Google and I found Corlett’s obituary He died a couple of days ago.
