The Trial Of The Man Who Said He Was God (36 page)

MYSELF: Listen carefully then, if you please. This jumped-up polliwog or tadpole in the dock is standing on its newly acquired hind legs, and opening its big mouth, and telling you that, at a range of zero angstroms from itself, it’s wider awake than wide-awake, wider than the wide world, clearer than the clear and empty sky - yet full to overflowing with all the furniture of heaven and earth. And that this isn’t the inside story of a ‘tadpole’ only or a human being only, but equally of all the orders of being that go to their making. And that, like it or lump it, these are hard and readily verifiable facts, to neglect which is to be deplorably unscientific.

WITNESS: Well, I hold down my job all right, but am none too sure what it is to be scientific, or how good a scientist I am. But I’ll say this much: the more I find out, the more there is to find out. Every question answered spawns two new questions. I’m scarcely scratching the surface of things.

MYSELF: Scratch them hard till you draw blood, and you’ll never expose their Secret. Scratch yourself easy, and at once you’ll see and you’ll be their Secret.
I don’t care how primitive or how advanced your specimen, look out and you have its appearance, look in and you are its Reality.

And here, finally, are six prestigious Defence witnesses (excuse me - testifiers) who, between them, sum up the points I’ve been making:

Man is like a mirage in the desert that the thirsty man takes to be water, until he comes up to it and finds it to be nothing, and where he thought it to be, there he finds God.

The Koran

When the Self is seen, heard, thought of known, everything is known.

Brihadaranyaka Upanishad

If I knew myself as intimately as I ought, I should have perfect knowledge of all creatures.

Eckhart

Every creature is an appearance of God.

Erigena

He who sees the supreme Lord dwelling alike in all beings, and never perishing when they perish, he sees indeed.

Bhagavad Gita

Man is the one in whom all creatures end, in whom all multitudinous things have been reduced to one in Christ: man is then one in God with Christ’s humanity. Thus all creatures are one man and that man is God in Christ’s Person.

Eckhart

When you have broken and destroyed your own form, you have learned to break the form of everything.

Rumi

Prosecution Witness No. 23

THE MULLAH

COUNSEL, to Jury: Our next Witness is a distinguished member of the large Muslim community in this country. As such, his interest in the effectiveness of the Blasphemy Act is as keen as that of any Christian or Jewish leader. Or keener. You might suppose, however, that his concern with this particular Trial must be marginal, since the Accused isn’t a Muslim. Not so. He’s thoroughly involved. The Prosecution have called him to testify today - and he’s eager to do so - for three excellent reasons. The first is to warn nascent or would-be Muslim blasphemers (and he assures me there are some around) of their criminal folly and the danger they’re in. The second reason is that the Accused trespasses deep into Muslim territory when he invokes the support - as he often does - of such Islamic mystics as Rumi, and of the Holy Koran itself. Trespassers expose themselves to prosecution. The third reason for the Reverend Mullah’s presence in the witness-box is that he may show us how close is the parallel between the blasphemy committed by John a-Nokes and that committed by certain Muslim heretics. In this way - by demonstrating that his offence isn’t only anti-Judaeo-Christian but anti-religious in the general Western sense - the Crown’s case against him is established on a still broader base.

I think it would be helpful if the Witness began by telling the court about the most notorious blasphemer in the history of Islam.

WITNESS: Mansur, also known as Al Hallaj, was a Persian mystic of the third century of the Islamic era. He publicly declared, and persisted in declaring, ‘In my cloak is none but God.’ He called himself Al Haq, which means ‘the Truth that is Allah’ - sacred be His Name. There was a great scandal and uproar among the Faithful of his time.

COUNSEL: What happened to him?

WITNESS: He was condemned and executed.

COUNSEL: How?

WITNESS: He was flayed, then crucified.

COUNSEL: Earlier in this Trial the Accused quoted that well-known text from the Holy Koran about Allah being nearer to a man than his own neck-vein. Was Mansur relying on this and similar teachings of the Prophet? If so, please explain to the Jury why his contemporaries were nevertheless so shocked that they treated him the way they did.

WITNESS: The substance - the heart and soul - of Islam is the transcendence and majesty and power of God, His absolute uniqueness and otherness. These attributes call for the absolute submission of the Faithful. Given this submission, to recognize that God is in all His creation - and not least in men and women - is in order. Indeed it follows from His greatness that He is present everywhere. The sin of Mansur, and of all so-called mystics of his stamp, was that he sacrificed the transcendence of God to His immanence. He dragged God down to his own level, shrank the Almighty to his own dimensions, took possession of Him.

There are (you see) three sorts of Muslims: the vast majority who put God infinitely
above
themselves; a much smaller number of more spiritually mature souls who put God
above and within
themselves; and a (fortunately) very small number who put God
within
themselves, and either forget about or deny His unapproachable holiness. Of these three types, the first is following the safe way; though somewhat narrow, it’s wonderfully conducive to living the true Muslim life. The second is ideal, and can be even more effective, but it’s liable to wander off into dangerous country. The third runs counter to Islam, and is notorious for leading to wild and immoral conduct. For the individual, it’s spiritual ruin. For the community, it’s a dreadful disease which - because it can spread so far and so fast - calls for the most drastic surgery.

COUNSEL: Do you link the Accused with this third and perverted type?

WITNESS: If it were not for his incursions into Islam, I would hesitate to pronounce on a non-Muslim. However, they entitle me - they oblige me - to reply to your question. My answer is: yes. Examining, in preparation for my testimony today, the writings of Mr John a-Nokes, I found them to be blasphemous. The comments I’ve just made about Mansur would seem to apply to him.

COUNSEL: What about his frequent invocations of Jelaluddin Rumi, and other Sufi masters, in support of his teachings?

WITNESS: Rumi was an eminent and inspired Muslim poet, but - like most poets - given to fantasy and exaggeration. This makes it easy to extract from his voluminous works many passages which seem to proclaim God’s immanence at the expense of His transcendence. The same is true of other famous Sufis, such as Attar and Hafiz. Also I believe that some Sufis did go (and still go) much too far in Mansur’s direction. Sufism is a hazardous province of their own country for native Muslims to venture into, let alone foreigners.

We particularly deplore the bad name given to the Faith when aspects of it are torn from their context, misunderstood and misapplied in the service of blasphemy as defined by non-Muslims.

COUNSEL, to Jury: Need I stress the importance of this extra-mural testimony confirming the guilt of the Accused? As I say, it does much to establish the Crown’s case upon a wider than Judaeo-Christian basis.

Defence:
Far is High

MYSELF, to Witness: My first question may seem irrelevant, but it isn’t. It’s about the prayers with which every true Muslim punctuates his day - at dawn, noon, mid-afternoon, sunset and bedtime; prayers which are as physical as they are mental, as much the body at worship as the mind at worship. No half-measures in Islam’s adoration of Allah! At one point the worshipper’s eyes are turned heavenwards and his hands are held high. At another, his forehead’s on the ground. In between are a variety of gestures appropriate to the words being recited. Am I right so far, Reverend Sir?

WITNESS: Right enough.

MYSELF: My point is that these truly energetic prayers include, and elaborate on, the bowing exercise which - you Jurors will remember - I’ve been trying to get you to do. In fact, I go so far as to call this bowing my Defence posture, my Defence in action. My intention is that, in this cosmic down-sweep, the words shall come to life - to a Life that’s larger than life.

Back to you, Reverend Sir. I take it that, in making this deepest of bows, Muslims are re-awaking to the presence of God in God’s world, which is truly a vertical world. Here’s a lofty and profound experience which, repeated so frequently and so regularly, is a large ingredient of Islam’s genius. In these prayers can be found the secret of its social cohesion and its spectacular success in world history. Do you agree?

WITNESS: I would rather say that our prayers prevent us from forgetting Almighty God for more than a few hours at a time; neglecting them, we would degenerate into virtual atheists. And of course they do have far-reaching social consequences.

MYSELF: In traditional Christianity, as distinct from the modern sort, we paint much the same picture of God in His world - again an essentially vertical world. Take for example that magnificent hymn of Cardinal Newman’s:

Praise to the Holiest in the height

And in the depth be praise;

In all His words most wonderful,

Most sure in all His ways.

We have it again in the song of the angels at the Nativity: ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.’ Notably also, of course, in the Lord’s Prayer: ‘Our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.’ And in many Psalms which speak of our help coming from above. When very young I sang, with enthusiasm and high conviction, ‘There’s a home for little children, above the bright blue sky.’ It made up for some of the more unheavenly features of one’s earthly home. Yes, indeed: the traditional Judaeo-Christian universe is as truly a vertical one as the Muslim universe. God’s at the very apex of it, and beneath Him are descending layers - each darker and heavier and less divine than the last - with man fairly near the base. At the same time God is present throughout, from top to bottom.

That’s the way Christians
felt and thought
about God’s vertical world. But we did little to translate our thoughts and feelings into bodily actions. We stood and we sat at worship, and at intervals we condescended to kneel. Occasionally we nodded, but preferred not to bow. We had stiff backs - a handicap that Islam’s wonderfully free of. From its explosive beginnings some fourteen centuries ago it has made full use of the law that, to the extent that feeling and thinking are given bodily expression, they are no longer vague, sentimental, variable and half-hearted.

Reverend Sir, what do you say to this?

WITNESS: There’s much truth in it. But I’m not quite clear about its relevance to the crime you’re charged with.

COUNSEL: Nor are the Jury, I’m sure. If this is your cross-examination of the Prosecution’s Witness, it’s taking a cumbersome and long-winded form, and the point of it all is obscure.

MYSELF: I’ve finished with the Mullah for the moment, but ask him not to leave the courtroom - I may have one or two further questions for him later on. As for our exchange on the verticality - which means divinity - of the traditional world-picture in all Western religion, its importance for the Defence is about to become very clear indeed.

The modern, pseudo-scientific - and, yes, virtually atheistic - picture is of a world that has lost its vertical dimension. It was an upright world, lively, in good nick. Now it has fallen flat on its back. If you Jury members will please turn to Diagram No. 22, you will follow me easily.

Diagram No. 22