Introduction to Traditional Islam
FOREWORD
To think that we can understand Islam through current headlines and the conflicting opinions of political pundits is sheer illusion. We might do better to review some bare facts: Islam is a monotheistic religion whose followers believe that it was revealed through the archangel Gabriel in stages to the Prophet Muhammad over the course of a number of years,starting in 610 AD and lasting until his death in 632.The holy book of Islam,the Koran, is a transcription in Arabic of these revelations. The Koran is the basis of Islamic law, belief, and practice, and is supplemented by the accounts of Muhammad’s sayings and actions, and by the interpretations of religious scholars.
Our review of facts tells us that Islam rapidly expanded through conquest and trade,and that a highly developed civilization emerged which has remained a source of culture and pride to Muslims for well over a thousand years.To this day,over 1.5 billion Muslims (about a quarter of the world’s population) share a strong sense of community and identity despite the fact that Islam—the majority religion in countries stretching from West Africa to Indonesia—spans many diverse peoples and lands. Most Muslims are not even Arabs,yet they all turn towards Mecca in prayer and recite the same holy words in Arabic.These bare facts are more helpful in understanding Islam than the acts and words of misguided fanatics; yet even more helpful would be a well qualified personal guide to introduce us to a multitude of ways through which we can approach the inner life of this faith.
It is difficult to imagine a time when the West has been more in need of a good personal guide to the world of Islam. But how will we know when we have found such a guide? With patience he will certainly explain to us the most important concepts that we must know in order to understand the Muslim way of life and thinking. His words will lead us to places where we can experience sights and sounds that broaden and deepen our understanding of that other civilization in a way that is just as powerful as any listing of facts and data. Along the way, our guide might introduce us to some notable people,or point out intriguing paths that lead to some remarkable places we might later explore more fully on our own, or he might pause to direct our attention to the chanting coming from a gathering of dervishes in a room high above the street. Of course, our guide must be fully aware of the gaps that exist between that other way of life and our own; he must tell us only the truth and leave out personal biases; and, finally, he must have the skill and geniality to communicate effectively. Readers of this book certainly have such a guide in Jean-Louis Michon.
It should be a comfort to readers, both Muslim and other, to learn that Dr. Michon’s point of departure is that Islam is “an expression of the Universal Tradition”. By this he means that there is and always has been a single source of Truth in the universe, and that this Truth has chosen to manifest Itself to various times and peoples in forms that are suited to those people. From this perspective, Islam, like other revealed traditions, is precious in and of itself because wherever one looks within its many aspects, the tradition bears the imprint of Providence. What we as outsiders must do is to learn how and where to look for this imprint. It may come as a surprise that such an attitude regarding the validity of other faiths is, in fact, deeply embedded in Islam itself. It is an article of faith for Muslims that there have been many prophets sent by God to many peoples and that these prophets must share the unflagging respect of believing Muslims. This results in a certain kinship between Muslims and other “People of the Book”, primarily Jews and Christians.This, too, may be surprising to readers,
but this book holds many such surprises. It is likely that some followers of other faiths who read these pages with open minds and hearts will,through their own familiarity with the sacred, come to comprehend something of the ancient kinship between Muslims and others who seek to know and to worship the One.
Besides the framework of the Universal Tradition mentioned above, Dr. Michon’s approach in this book is notable in several other ways. First, he intertwines the spirit and development of the Islamic city with the other aspects of the religion. Here, the city is seen as a crystallization of the principles of the faith. From its arts, crafts, and architecture, to its government, to the clothing and assemblies of its citizens, the city demonstrates how a traditional society is steeped in constant reminders of the origin and the end of all bounty,virtue, and beauty—God. It is a reminder to us all of the possibilities of finding almost endless avenues of connecting spiritually to a higher reality, thus ennobling ourselves and paying due respect to the potential of those avenues. A ready example would be the traditional, and thus sacred, ambiance of a home. Dr. Michon makes the case that the role of the traditional city is to be a powerful force for individual and communal salvation. This is a challenging concept for modern people who often limit their religion to specific times and places outside their homes and everyday lives; yet to understand Traditional Islam we must understand that for Muslims it is natural for Islam, because of its sacredness and scope, to permeate all aspects of the individual and communal lives of believers.
This book is also notable in that it focuses a great deal of attention on art and music in Islam. Indeed, the well-chosen and often stunning illustrations that grace the pages of this book contribute greatly to its impact. Few writers have Jean-Louis Michon’s degree of personal experience with Islamic art and music, and even fewer are able to penetrate beneath the forms to the spirituality within them. Although the discussions of art history or musical structures may at first seem peripheral to an introduction to the faith, patient reading will show that once again Dr. Michon uses these as a way to coax the spiritual essence of the forms to reveal themselves to us.The foreign words or ideas,though certainly useful to researchers, should not put off the general reader: One need not know the details of music theory to enjoy a symphony, but when we are alerted to the presence of patterns in a foreign work, new meanings can leap to our consciousness. The in-depth discussions of art and music establish for us one grand pattern, namely, that here, too, the Spirit enters the life of the individual and the community.
It is completely appropriate that the book should culminate in a section on Sufism,the personal quest for a “taste” of God’s Presence. It is for this same goal, though with less exalted horizons, that all the other laws, practices, arts, and institutions of Islam primarily exist. Once again, we have a uniquely qualified guide in Dr. Michon. After his survey of Sufism, we are compelled to reflect that the source, namely Traditional Islam, which fed this kind of inwardness, peace, and virtue, could not be the same source that feeds the strident, militant version of the “religion” which claims the same name. For that realization,and much more, we owe our guide our heartfelt thanks.
PREFACE
More often than not a civilization will be pieced together starting from the material traces it has left. This is the way the archaeologists work when, their interest aroused by vestiges whose meaning remains partly obscure, they try to reconstitute the context in which objects that have been found assume their real importance. In the case of Islam, such traces abound, and many a traveler has been fascinated by them, from Marco Polo to Orientalist painters of the romantic and colonial periods,and modern tourists: auditive and visual traces, human encounters of a particular quality, ranging from the call to prayer of the muezzin heard at the first dawn spent in a Muslim land to the serene geometry of arabesques, and the warm and dignified welcome given by the artisan in his shop or the Bedouin in his tent.
It is not through such external signs,however,that I and others of my generation, who were students during the Second World War and had nothing but books by which to discover the world, became acquainted with Islam. We had to follow a very different course, starting from the inside, and it was through philosophers and mystics that Islam was revealed to us. From the outside, all what we had previously perceived about Islam had been forbidding, with a few strong images inherited from our “lay and compulsory” education: Roland at Roncevaux,Charles Martel at Poitiers, the Barbaresques, the conquest of Algeria and the “revolt” of Abdelkader, the only human impressions being those received during our provincial childhood, reduced to the chance encounters,all distances being carefully observed,with the “sidi”vendor of balloons and carpets.
In spite of what lay between us in the way of social and ideological prejudices, however, Islam brought an answer to our queries. This occurred at a crucial moment in contemporary history when, for many,the tragedy of the planetary conflict raised a new question about a number of acquired beliefs and values, such as the paternal ideals of social success, of the sovereign motherland—“State, what crimes have been committed in thy name!”—, and even those of a certain Christian moralism reduced to interdicts that had never been properly explained or justified. We felt an urge to find a raison d’être beyond these upheavals, to restructure a world that was on the verge of dislocation.
Already at that time, in the mid-forties, a few providentially gifted interpreters, such as René Guénon and other contributors to the journal Études traditionnelles, including Frithjof Schuon and Titus Burckhardt, had given the public access to the “lights of Islam” and other expressions of the Universal Tradition, the Religio perennis or, for Hindus, sanātana dharma, “The Eternal Law”: through their writings,their clear expositions of Vedanta metaphysics and the existential monism of Islam, we acquired a certitude that there is a Supreme Principle, a non-manifest Absolute from which all manifestation, all creation derives without assuming a separate, independent existence.We also came to recognize degrees in this manifestation, each with its own rank and features. Once this need for causality had been satisfied,some of us felt eager to embark on what Lanza del Vasto had called in a contemporary narrative “The pilgrimage to the sources”.
Sidi Halaoui minaret,Tlemcen, Morocco
Carved calligraphy from the mihrāb of the Friday Mosque of Isfahan, Iran
In 1946 I moved to Damascus where I stayed for three years, immersing myself in the Islamic culture as deeply as was compatible,without creating too much scandal, with my teaching position at the Lycée Franco-Arabe. I sought the company of students and teachers of religious science, took lessons in Koranic recitation and the Oriental lute, scoured the alleys of the old city and the slopes of Jabal Qāsiūn to visit sanctuaries and meet with saintly persons. Years later, I visited other parts of the Muslim world, from Morocco to India and the “Moros” communities of Mindanao, without ever feeling during these journeys that I was trespassing on foreign soil. It was as if the very first approach, based on ratiocination, had provided a key which, at the right moment, opened the doors of the “concrete” Islam with its faithful, its rites, its social etiquette, its art and craft productions; and as if no dichotomy had ever existed between the two paths that gave access to the world of Islam: the path of written teachings and the progression on the roads of the Orient.
It is the results of this double quest that I have attempted to assemble here, repeating by necessity a number of notions that are already familiar to readers conversant with Orientalist works, but hoping that these notions, cemented by a life’s experience, will have acquired the backing of some persuasive evidence.
At a time when Islam often occupies the front pages of newspapers and when its image, bound up with political and other interests, is distorted, or even caricatured, by its detractors as well as by blinded zealots, I felt it might be worthwhile to evoke its original and lasting features, those which belong to a true civilization, construed to remind man of his mission as a caliph, or lieutenant of God on earth, and to help him fulfill this mission while actualizing the fulfillment of his noblest qualities.
5. Entrance from the central courtyard to the prayer room of the Qarawiyyin Mosque, Fez, Morocco
