​Chapter 23. Islam

There is another way a religion can handle a nature it no longer trusts, and Islam at its most rigorous took it: it left the nature in place and drained its power, so that nothing in the world holds any force of its own. The question that opens is where the law lives. Fire meets cotton and the cotton burns, every time. The Ash'arite theologians looked at that regularity and refused to lodge it in the fire. A fire that burned by its own nature would be a force standing on its own beside God, and to grant the fire that much is to fence God off from one corner of his creation. So the burning belongs to God. The constancy is the custom of God, his habit of acting the same way at the same juncture.

This is occasionalism. The fire does not burn the cotton. At the touching of fire to cotton, God creates the burning. What looks like one thing causing another is a steady pairing of events, a reliable sequence with no rod of force running between the two terms — the cotton chars when the flame nears it because that is the order God keeps, and on the day he keeps another order the flame will leave the cotton cold. The kalam carried this argument far, against philosophers who wanted real created causes, and at its sharpest it dissolves the inner power of things as cleanly as anything in the literature. Nature, as a stock of forces things own, is gone.

Stripping nature from things is the first half of the move we made, and Islam makes that half too. Then it does the opposite of the second half. The power pulled out of the fire is gathered into one sovereign will above the world. The fire is emptied so that God may be the one who burns. The world becomes a field of divine command, every event a fresh decree, and the creature stands in it stripped of any power. Nature has been centralized.

Occasionalism says the world is made new at every instant, and that has the ring of the acausal act, the deed unbound by what came before. The break comes at ownership. The Ash'arite fresh creation belongs to someone: a God who is a person, with stable will and knowledge, who decrees this and not that and stays the same decreer through every instant. The act here is the act of a who that is firmly a what. The act we mean belongs to no one standing behind it, no person with a nature who owns the willing.

So where the last theology leaned on a saved nature, this one leans on law. When nature carries no guarantee inside it, something has to carry the world's regularity, and here it is the will of the commander and the law that will issues. For this account that law is residue like any other except that it is filed as the legislation of God. The deposit has only been signed by a different hand and posted above the world.

Islam guards the names of God with great seriousness: the ninety-nine names, the long labor over how to speak of God without making him one more thing among things. The Merciful, the Knowing, the Mighty, the Living. Look at the list and every name on it is an attribute. Each one says what God is and reaches him as a bearer of these, a who behind a roster of whats. The whole care of the tradition goes into holding the attributes real without letting them divide him or liken him to the creatures who have such qualities in lesser measure. The real name does none of that work. It carries no attribute and tells you nothing of what God is; it opens his gesture and lets you enter it.

Dhikr is the repetition of the divine name, said and said again, made fresh in the mouth of the one reciting, and that runs nearer to what we described. Here the name is a thing done, returned to over and over as an act, with no entry in any list of what God is. The instrument is almost the same. The aim turns it the other way. Dhikr is repeated toward fana, the passing-away of the self in God, the reciter worn down by the name until the one reciting is gone and only the named remains. The mechanism shows once the name is read as a pointing. The who is held by self-naming, the act that points at itself as this one's. In its most rigorous form, dhikr recites only the divine name, and the reciter's own name is never spoken. The pointing goes outward and never returns.

The same gesture stands in Christian dress. The Hesychasts repeat the Jesus Prayer, the name of Christ carried on the breath until the saying runs on by itself and the one reciting goes quiet, the prayer praying itself toward "no longer I, but Christ who lives in me." To say only Christ, and never this one here, is the renunciation of the self by the plainest route, the release the Buddhist finds, performed through a name. We repeat the name for the opposite end, to hold the who, to keep the one who acts, answering and unmerged.

The Sufi path of faqr reaches the same threshold from inside. Strip the worldly, strip the will itself, until nothing of the servant remains and only God acts through the emptied vessel. The stripping removes residue in the plain sense — attachment, habit, the self's claim on its own deposit. But faqr strips the will so that the divine will may fill the space vacated. The emptying serves a destination: fana, the annihilation of the self in God, the deepest submission there is.

The quarrel over the Qur'an shows the same pull at the level of God's own speech. The Mu'tazila held the Qur'an created, unwilling to set a second eternal thing beside God; the Sunni orthodoxy that won out held God's word uncreated, eternal with him. Take it gently, because the dispute is intricate and not the business here, but mark the shape of it. A name or a speech can be many things — a deposit, a sign, an utterance, an act made fresh in the saying. The argument over the Qur'an is a tradition feeling this pressure and answering it by fixing the word in an eternal status, lodging the speech of God as a standing thing rather than letting it be the act it is in the saying. Even God's word gets pulled toward the permanence of a what.

The mystic carried the same move, and Ibn Arabi built the deepest form. Beneath every existing thing he set its fixed entity, its ayn thabita, the eternal reality of that thing as an object of God's knowledge, present in the divine knowing before it ever enters the world and unchanged by entering. The cosmos is these fixed essences given outward existence, each creature the showing-forth of its own immutable archetype. Seen from our perspective, it comes close to the truth: what a thing is taken to be is a settled deposit and existence is that deposit displayed.

Then he lodged the forms in God and made them eternal, and there it becomes nature in the fullest degree the word can carry. The ayn thabita does not change. A thing receives, even from God, only what its fixed entity is ready to receive; the divine outpouring meets each essence according to a readiness the essence already holds, and grants nothing the archetype does not already contain. So the creature can only ever manifest its fixed reality and can never break from it. This is the falling stone seen before, raised to its highest station: the creature answering with its whole essence and no remainder, the what now held in the knowledge of God. Where we find a deposit that an act laid down and could in principle refuse, Ibn Arabi discovers an essence with no act behind it and no refusing it, eternal and given and exhaustive.

The figure is older than Ibn Arabi and wider than Islam. The fixed essence is Plato's form, the eternal model a thing must answer to, set before it and untouched by anything it does. Christianity holds the same concept in Maximus's logoi, the divine principles of each creature kept in the Logos, settling what a thing is.

So the God of Islam is no natureless god, for all the force of his willing. The will here is enormous, and it is will as absolute lordship. That is not will as naturelessness from inside, the free gesture that no nature reaches. It is will as total mastery, and its whole work is to make everything else depend. Things lose their natures here for the opposite of freedom. The world is remade as a field of obedience, and we are unmaking the field for the other reason entirely — to act outside it, not to be held inside it by a strong hand.