Mostly I write to myself and for myself. Sometimes I write because I feel someday Isa, my son, will find himself confused and dissatisfied with what people say about God and revelation and truth and maybe he will find something said in these blogs useful and helpful.
For as long as I remember, the notion that someone can utter something and by so doing ‘become’ something or change into something has made no sense to me. I rememberm some 25 years ago, laughing heartily and also a bit uneasily when i watched a short comedy skit on a program (i think a british sitcom) called Goodness Gracious Me. A man switches between being Hindu by birth to becoming a Christian (by saying ‘ok then, now i am christian’ after someone prosletyizes to him successfully) and then, after a few seconds, declaring, ‘oh, now i am not’ after the same missionary says something the person finds ridiculous. the joke, only mildly funny, raised the issue of the meaning, and meaninglessness, of identities (in this case religious identities). Since then, I have encountered many explanations and apologies on behalf of one or another identity claim – arguments about what a certain term really means (endless iterations of ‘a muslim is someone who submits’ (as if the meaning of that was self-evident) but then the same term used for groups of people, history, knowledge, countries, languages, towns and cities, food, families, children, even civilization and on and on until the inconsistencies became nauseating) – and so I remain utterly unconvinced with assertions that this or that identity term is actually meaningful and justifies its use to refer to all manner of things that, it is clear to me, cannot be given that meaning.
Alas, one turns to one’s maker as I am convinced one should (and not to history and the words of men) to ask what he means by a term like ‘muslim’ and if it makes sense. And what I find in the verse 81 of chapter 27 is quite interesting for me. It is a non-identitarian way of thinking about the term ‘muslim’ that strikes me as utterly helpful. Should you read the verses, you will notice it claims that you (whoever its addressing it seems) “cannot lead the blind out of their error; nor can can you make hear save such as find safety through/with our signs (“believing in our signs” seems always to me to be a meaningless rendering that i can’t make sense of), and these are surrendering”.
What I find intriguing here, and something that I find I am able to witness as true or false, is i) the relation between ‘finding safety with God’s signs or His signs’ and ‘surrendering’ and also ii) the relation between seeing/hearing and safety ( and the relations between not seeing/hearing and, presumably, tarrying in error and feeling lost/unguided).
to state it simply, the verse claims that seeing something (that troubles me and that is therefore an error, a problem, a contradiction, a darkness, a state of insecurity) as a sign revealing and conveying God to me (that is what makes it a sign ‘of’ God), hearing what that thing tells me about God AND feeling safe/secure through (i.e. because of) the meaning (pertaining to God) – lets call it divine meaning – conveyed to me by that thing would involve the surrendering or giving up to God (what, presumably, I witheld from giving to him when I try to find safety/security without seeing/hearing what that thing is telling me about God.
To further break it down for myself, I should test this claim with something important in my life. Let me think of when I find myself “in error” or unsafe and at a loss. So much comes to mind that I find I need to consider one thing at one time. And so you (Isa or whoever may be reading) should think about your life. What I say may not resonate but the principle’s truth (if there is any) should not be a function of how compelling and relatable the example is.
So as I ask myself – what is something I feel really insecure and unsafe about – I answer, life! My life. I see that I am alive, conscious, aware of my existence. And I dread losing this. I dread losing my existence. I dread, moreover, everything else that I love, losing their existence. I dont know how is it that I came to exist and become me. But now that I am me, now that I am here, now that I am aware that i am aging and that I can die and that i WILL die and have no escape from it, I feel devastated and lost. I get distracted from this. And sometimes I distract myself from it. Sometimes i am resigned to it from lack of any escape from it but the dread remains and a deep affliction wounds me – everything i love and cherish (including the past and the gradual increase in successes and accomplishments), everything that I enjoy can vanish any second and is vanishing each second. So I think of this ‘flow’ of everything that I have been and that I am and all that i love and desire, into nothing, to be deeply and pervasively painful, a problem or error that I would do anything to resolve. Whatever could relieve me from this problem would be, for me, a guidance and a truth most welcome and celebrated.
And so if I were to listen to the verse and try to see and hear ‘signs’ of God where I dont see them, I could see that the life that I have is showing me and telling me that it is not my life or a life without an owner or source. I could see it as a life that comes from a Living One, and is telling me that there is someone who is alive and can give life to me (something non-existing and kind of dead before I was alive in the way I find myself now). This will make the life I have ‘a sign’ of God, the Living One, the Giver/Source of Life. I would need to “surrender” or “give up” life to Him – what I saw/heard as “my life” (the one I dread losing) can be now His life, the life of the Living One. I can see myself living in the name (the Livine One) of God. When I thus surrender life to the Living One and see my life as a ‘sign’ or message from the One whose life it is, I find life and existence secured. To the extent and for those moments where I am aware of living (and aware that all else that lives is also living) by the life of the Living One, i permanently secure the existence of everything that matters to me. I now see life arriving from Him and returning to Him (insofar as I see it as a sign of Him as the Living One and thus surrender it to Him. I entrust life to the One I see/hear as the Living One. If i refused to look at my life as a sign of the Living One and claimed it to be either a sourceless thing (just life itself, its own source) or if I saw myself as its source, I find no way of preserving or securing it. I am bound to lose it! There is no safety except through looking at it as His sign, as the verse claims.
And so, in the verse’s perspective, surrendering is what a person would be doing (no identity is needed to describe the one who may do this in some form in their life with regards to something that makes them feel insecure and in need of safety) when they see and/or hear something as a sign telling them about its source and finding safety through/with or on account of that sign. Whoever, wherever, whenever. There is no sense in which surrendering is tied to any kind of identity – birth, conversion, reversion, declaration. nothing of that i see here. a rational human response to seek safety through seeing/hearing things as signs of God.
The Quran as Revelation 