Why is it
that civilizations quarrel? Mainstream Western thinking
rejects the question, treating culture as an arbitrary
existential choice (Martin Heidegger) or a language
sui generis (Ludwig Wittgenstein). In the mind of
the 20th century, cultures, like lifestyles, simply
exist and do not bear comparison. I shall argue, on the
contrary, that common modes of prayer provide a standard
for identifying cultural conflicts. In a recent essay
(Why Islam Baffles
America, Apr 15) I derided American studies
of Islam that ignored the spiritual experience of the
ordinary Muslim, citing some thoughts of Grand Ayatollah
Ali al-Sistani. Since then Muslims, Christians and Jews
have flooded my postbox with pertinent questions
regarding Islamic prayer, which I shall address below.
Not the unexamined life, but rather the
unremembered life is not worth living. Without our
little allotment of eternity, we would be disconsolate,
or what is worse, European. In only one form of human
activity do we entreat directly for our portion of
eternity, and that is prayer. Prescience of mortality
makes devout men pray frequently. The atheist, who
shakes his fist at mortality, prays only when mortality
gets his undivided attention by the usual means. That is
why the common liturgy of communal prayer - as opposed
to individual or esoteric prayer - betrays the inner
secrets of cultures, more than laws or literature. What
is culture but the stuff out of which we weave the
waking dream of immortality?
Culture enables
past generations to speak to the living, and the passing
generation to speak to the future. For us to be
remembered, not merely replaced like the beasts, our
culture must continue. Only in organized congregational
prayer can we link the divine promise of redemption to
our abiding memory by those who will follow us on earth.
Comparative theology is an exercise in frustration, for
it is a slippery matter to apply the toolkit of reason
to another man's revelation. Alain Besancon (Has Islam become the
issue?, May 3, 2004) offers nothing beyond
theological polemic. If we leave aside theology as such,
and restrict our attention to communal prayer as such,
much becomes clear. The mode in which the ordinary
member of the congregation prays in the company of his
fellows takes us directly to the heart of the matter.
Christian, Jewish and Muslim prayer, despite
some surface resemblances, seek to accomplish three
entirely distinct things. Christians through the Lord's
Supper partake of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ either
literally (Catholic) or metaphorically (Protestant).
Only Catholics know how transforming it is first to shed
one's particular sins through confession and absolution,
and then to participate in the atonement of the
collective sin of mankind through the Mass. But the
power of the ritual stands in inverse proportion to the
connection of liturgy to this life, for the Christian's
kingdom is not of this world. Christianity's God-Man is
a promise of ultimate redemption, as well as a link to
life on earth, for Christ walked and preached among us.
Europe's tragedy was to confuse the earthly aspect of
the God-Man with its myriad ethnicities and thus lapse
back into paganism (Why Europe choose
extinction, Apr 8, 2003). America, the great
liquidator of nations, remains Christianity's only real
success. Because its purpose is so clear and its
transforming power so elevated, Christian ritual by its
nature is brief. The most devout endure it once a day.
It can be prolonged with hymns, psalms, instruction and
other devices, but its essence is direct communion with
God, which can be sustained only for a few moments.
Protestants quip that a long-winded preacher provides
not an explanation, but rather a demonstration of
eternity.
The statement applies in all
seriousness to the Jews. In no other religion do the
rank-and-file devote such time and energy to prayer.
While Muslims pray five times daily, the thrice-daily
Jewish service covers more than 10 times the text. The
Sabbath morning service of the Jews endures four hours
without interruption, and covers so much material that
much is chanted in a manner that recalls a tape recorder
on fast forward.
The Jews' Sabbath marathon is
all the more remarkable when one considers that it is an
optional exercise, not a mandatory one as in the case of
Islam. The four hours are taken up with study of the
Pentateuch and Prophets, chanting of innumerable psalms,
assorted hymns, and a sermon. Theological tourists can
learn much from Christian observance, but should avoid
looking in on Jewish liturgy. It is chanted entirely in
Hebrew and flashes by so fast that it is impossible to
keep up with in translation.
My understanding of
Jewish liturgy derives entirely from Franz Rosenzweig,
who observes that its object is to bring eternity into
this world. "Blessed be God who plants eternal life
among us," intones the blessing that follows the Sabbath
reading of each segment of the weekly portion of the
Pentateuch. Like the Protestant joke, Jewish liturgy
offers an experience rather than an explanation of
eternity. The Jew is confident in his portion of
immortality because he believes the Jews to be an
eternal people. Because the Sabbath is a foretaste of
the world to come, the observant Jew revels in devotion
from Friday evening prayers at synagogue until the
concluding ceremony at the next day's dusk. Sin is
death; confident in their eternal life, the Jews do not
sense the waiting sting of death, that is, what the
Christians call original sin, as I have argued
elsewhere. The redemption of the Christians lies in the
future, when Jesus shall return and establish His
Kingdom on earth; of this blessed event the individual
Christian can obtain no more than the briefest glance in
the form of the Lord's Supper. Jewish redemption
consists simply of being Jewish, and the Jew already
spends the seventh day in the World To Come.
Nothing contrasts more than Jewish and Christian
liturgy, but a close parallel links the Lord's Supper to
the Jews' prayer. As a substitute for the sacrifices
that no longer can be performed at the Temple (destroyed
in AD 70), Jews are required to recite the so-called
Eighteen Benedictions, a matter of a few minutes. The
rabbinical authorities of the first century drew on the
51st psalm, attributed to King David, to justify the
substitution ("For thou desirest not sacrifice; or else
I would give it: thou delightest not in burnt offering.
The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and
a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise"). First
to be humbled and then to be raised up with God the
Father is the common essence of Jewish and Christian
experience in worship.
What precisely is it that
Muslims seek to accomplish when they pray five times
daily? Thirty-two times a day they recite the Fatihah,
the first seven lines of the Koran, which Maulana
Muhammad Ali renders as follows:
In the name
of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful Praise be to
Allah, the Lord of the worlds, The Beneficent, the
Merciful, Master of the Day of Requital, Thee do
we serve and Thee do we beseech for help, Guide us
on the right path, The path of those upon whom Thou
hast bestowed favors, Not those upon whom wrath is
brought down, nor those who go astray.
Not
much else need be said. But what distinguishes Muslim
prayer is not what is said but rather how it is said.
Assuming the correct physical position in Muslim prayer
cannot be separated from uttering the right words.
Prayer is measured in a basic unit, the rak'a,
which consists of stylized gestures (raising hands to
ears, placing hands over the breast, bowing, touching
the forehead to the ground) as well as specific phrases.
Photographic examples and a clear explanation are found
in The Muslim Prayer Book by Maulana Muhammad Ali
(Lahore, 1938), widely available through Internet
booksellers. Physical manifestations of submission are
the sine qua non of Muslim congregational prayer.
Praying in a mosque is an experience entirely different
from attending Mass; curious Christians should try it
for themselves.
There is a great deal more to
Muslim prayer, as my bulging postbox reminds me. Muslims
pray as often as they wish for private matters. There
exists a set of "Muslim Psalms", the al-Sahifat
al-Sajjadiyya attributed to the Prophet Mohammed's
grandson Ali ibn al-Husayn and favored by Shi'ites.
Sufism encompasses an ancient mystical tradition. All
this is well and good and entirely beside the point. No
group or individual has a monopoly on prayer. God if He
so wishes may reveal Himself to Grand Ayatollah
al-Sistani or to my accountant. Our identity stems from
our need for continuity, however, and this depends on a
common culture through which we propose to propagate our
memory. It is the common practice, not the exceptional
ones, that defines our culture, religious or otherwise.
Christian liturgy re-enacts Jesus' sacrifice in
which the Christian takes vicarious part. The Jew who no
longer can sacrifice an animal on the temple altar
instead offers his broken and contrite heart. But the
Muslim offers himself whole to the ummah
(community). Allah need not humiliate Himself on the
cross, like Jesus; there is no covenant between the
deity and His people. Submission is unconditional.
As noted, the Christian risks mistaking the
unique, individual God-Man, Jesus of Nazareth, for the
representative of a particular ethnicity, and thus slide
back into paganism. Only American Christianity, as
noted, has evaded this precipice. The Muslim submits
himself unconditionally - to what? In the case of the
Iraqi Shi'ites, it is the all-embracing grip of
traditional society over which such men as Sistani
preside.
Critics of Islam - in past essays I
have cited Rosenzweig and Besancon - portray the
religion as a throwback, a "monistic paganism"
(Rosenzweig) or an "idolatry of the God of Israel"
(Besancon). That cannot be quite right, for pagan
religions express the aspirations for immortality of
individual ethnic groups. The pagan knows not only that
he will die, but that his people will die, that his
language will be shut up in dusty books, and that a
different people some day will occupy the hills and
valleys where his people now live. "The love of the
gentiles for their own ethnicity," said Rosenzweig, "is
sweet and pregnant with the presentiment of death."
Islam acknowledges no ethnicity (whether or not
one believes that it favors Arabs). The Muslim submits -
to what particular people? Not the old Israel of the
Jews, nor the "New Israel" of the Christians, but to
precisely what? Pagans fight for their own group's
survival and care not at all whom their neighbor
worships. A universalized paganism is a contradiction in
terms; it could only exist by externalizing the
defensive posture of the pagan, that is, as a conquering
movement that marches across the world crushing out the
pagan practices of the nations and subjugating them to a
single discipline.
If the individual Muslim does
not submit to traditional society as it surrounds him in
its present circumstances, he submits to the
expansionist movement. In that sense the standard
communal prayer of Islam may be considered an expression
of jihad. Again Rosenzweig: "Walking in the way of Allah
means, in the strictest sense, the spread of Islam by
means of the holy war. The piety of the Muslim finds its
way into the world by obediently walking this way, by
assuming its inherent dangers, by adhering to the laws
prescribed for it."
What threatens the
ummah today is not the invasion of territory, but
creative destruction: social mobility, equality of the
sexes, global communications, and all the other
pallbearers of traditional society. The encounter of
mainstream Islamic practice with the creative
destruction of the West is tragic. There can be found in
parts of Islamic tradition many other things than this,
as numerous readers observe, but it is a matter for
Muslims alone to define their own mainstream.
(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication policies.)
