'And when We said unto the angels: Prostrate yourselves before Adam, then all fell prostrate, except for Iblls. He refused through pride, and was thus among the unbelievers. And We said: O Adam! Dwell thou and thy
182 Islafn and the Destiny of Man
wife in the Garden, and eat freely [of the fruits] thereof where ye will, but approach not this tree lest ye become wrongdoers. But the Satan caused them to depart from this and expelled them from the state in which they w e r e . . / ( Q . 2 . 3 0 - 3 6 ) .
In another Surah we are told that God asked Iblls why he had not prostrated himself when commanded to do so, and he replied: 'I am better than he! Thou didst create me from fire and him from clay' (Q.7.12). And
we are told also that in tempting Adam he whispered to him: *Shall I show thee the tree of immortality and a kingdom that wasteth not away?'
(Q.20.120).
The chroniclers and commentators,^ relying sometimes upon what the Prophet himself said of these matters and sometimes upon inspired imagination, have filled out this narrative framework and coloured it in rich colours. With their love of precise detail they tell us that the colour of Eve's hair was auburn {shahla, a shade in which blue and red are mixed), and her locks were so long that you could actually hear them rustling. She was so plump that her thighs chafed when she walked, and God spoke to Adam saying: T h i s is My handmaiden, and thou art my servant, O Adam!
Nothing I have created is dearer to me than ye twain, so long as ye obey Me.' So much did He love them that He and none other performed the marriage ceremony, the archangel Gabriel acting as the groom's friend and the assembled angels as witnesses, which is why the Muslim is commanded to make public his wedding ceremony, following in the footsteps of our father Adam. All of which reminds us that the first human creation was a dual creation — 'Glory to Him who created the pairs , . . ' (Q.36.36) — but that duality as such is divisive and that two must again be oned in their act of union or in a dynamic unity constantly renewed. Is not marriage 'half the religion'?
The commentators tell us the order of precedence in which the arch-angels came to do obeisance to Adam; they tell us also that he knew not only the names of all things, but every language, even the languages of fish and frogs. They describe how^ the angels bore him on their shoulders, so that he towered above them, and carried him thus through the paths of heaven. Others stood all about, rank upon rank, and as he passed them he greeted them with the greeting of peace, to which they replied: 'And upon thee be peace and the mercy of Allah and His blessing, O Chosen of Allah,
His preferred one, the masterpiece of His creation!'
How to impress the pre-eminence of Adam upon dull human minds?
This is the traditional way: it is said that a pulpit was set up for him and that all the inhabitants of heaven were summoned, rank upon rank, before him and that he was endowed with a voice which reached them all. That day he
r
was clothed in a garment of brocade light as air, with two jewel-encrusted girdles anointed with musk and ambergris. On his head was a golden crown which had four corner-points, each set with a great pearl so
luminous — or so transparent to the divine radiance - that its brightness would have put out the light of the sun and the moon. Around his waist, encircling his very being, was the belt of God's 'Good Pleasure' (ridwdn),
*See in particular the Qi^a^ al-Aftbiya' by aI-Ki<;a'i, extracts translated in A Reader on Islam, cd. Arthur Jeffery (Mouton & Co., 1962).
The Human Paradox 183 and the light which came from it penetrated into every one of the
chambers of Paradise. Adam stood upright before the celestial assembly and greeted them. Then God said: 'O Adam! For this [saying] did I create thee, and this greeting of Peace shall be your greeting and that of your descendants until the end of time.'
When he came down from the pulpit his radiance was even greater than it had been before. A bunch of grapes was brought to him and he ate of it. This was the first celestial food he had tasted, and when he had satisfied himself he said: 'Praise be to Allah!' And his Creator said: ' O Adam! For this [saying] did 1 create thee, and it shall be customary for thee and thy descendants until the end of time.' But when Iblis, the satanic personification, heard that Adam had taken food, he murmured:
'Now I shall be able to seduce him!'
But this shadow had not yet materialized to mar the splendour of the occasion, nor had its consequences — consequences in the midst of which we live out our lives — and a great procession traversed the heavens in unshadowed light, primordial Man mounted on his mighty steed and, beside him, primordial Woman riding her noble she-camel. Even in our twilight world we may glimpse that radiance, for it is timeless, and shadows — when all is said and done — are no more than shadows; but only on condition that we are true to our contract, for a covenant was then made between God and man, sanctioned and witnessed by the hosts of heaven, so that it could never be put aside and so that the descendants of Adam and Eve could never escape from its obligations, to which, as seeds within Adam's loins, they freely assented. By this covenant human-kind acknowledged their Lord with a resounding 'Yes!' and committed themselves to perpetual affirmation.
The fall into relativity — 'the Fall' — could not change this commitment, of which mankind has been reminded by means of consecutive
revela-tions, nor could all trace of Paradise be removed either from human memory or from the earth. It is said that when Adam fell he brought with him a little of the scented air of Paradise, which clung thereafter to the trees and valleys and filled all the place with perfume (the perfumes known to us are derived from that scented air). With him too came the Black Stone, which was then whiter than snow, and Moses' rod of celestial myrtle-wood; and Adam spoke to his Lord, saying: 'O my Lord!
I was a near neighbour to Thee in Thy dwelling-place. I had no other Lord but Thee. There did 1 feed in luxury and there did I dwell where-soever I pleased, but Thou didst cast me down . . . Even then 1 still heard the voices of the angels and saw how they went around Thy throne, and I still perceived the breezes and scent of the Garden. But Thou hast cast me to the earth and reduced me to a height of sixty cubits, cutting me off from that hearing and that seeing .. .'^ And it was then, so we are told, that God made to Adam and to his progeny the promise that they would never be left without guidance through the darkness of the land and the sea.
Quoted from the Kitab at-Jabaqat al-Kuhra of Ibn Sa'd {d. AD 845).
184 Islam and the Destiny of Man
Such was Adam's rank and stature and that of Eve, his wife. Yet 'Adam was dusr\ Man, as such, is the 'Viceregent of Allah on earth\ but when he forgets that he is only dust he loses this function and becomes the iowest of the low' (Q.95.5). As creature he is all and nothing; in practice he is obliged to choose between being all or nothing. Created, according to a saying of the Prophet, in the image of God — a theomorphic being, his nature reflecting as in a mirror the 'Names' or attributes of his Lord — he is none the less a creature of flesh and blood, fashioned out of the earth upon which, for a short while, he walks, and condemned to fall back into it; a wayward creature filled with unappeasable longings and constantly
tempted to satisfy them at the lowest level, to live beneath himself. Thisj^
the paradox which underlies the human situation.
ere^re'TlTumber oT^lfferent ways inwEIcITthe Quranic insistence upon Adam's superiority to the angels may be explained, and none of them exhausts its full significance. So fundamental a truth could not be confined
to one revelation — one religion only — and the Christians are familiar with it; according to St Gregory Palamas, 'Though in many thmgs the angels are
superior to us, yet in a certain way they are none the less inferior . . . they are so, for example, in respect of existence according to the image of the Creator, for in this sense we are created more perfectly conformable to the image of God . . . '
This explanation, familiar also to a number of Muslim philosophers, turns upon the fact that the angels, for all their splendour, are 'peripheral*
beings, in the sense that each represents a particular aspect of the divine Plenitude; no single one among them reflects in his nature the totality of God's attributes. The Perfect Man, on the other hand, though far distant from the Light of heaven, stands, asit were, directly beneath the divine axis and mirrors Totalitv. This is whv man, w^hen his nature is fullv developed and perfectly balanced, is described as a "central' being, and this is why it is
possible for him to be the ^Khaltfah of Allah on earth', the Viceregent.
Moreover, the angels are incapable of disobedience and therefore of 'sin' in any sense of the term; as passive tools of the divine Will they are without responsibility or the power of choice. We have then a further paradox: the fact that only a bemg capable of choice and, for that very reason, capable of sin can 'represent' God in His earthly domain. Neither the angels nor the animals are able to disobey their Creator; man has that option, for it is a necessary aspect of his delegated responsibility and his privileged situation.
It is precisely this situation - man's 'centrality' — that offers him the possibility of committing monstrous crimes (it is absurd to speak of a criminal as 'behaving like an animal'; animals do not commit crimes). The more exalted the creature, the deeper the abyss into which he is capable of falling. The teaching of certain Muslim philosophers that all the divine Names (or 'attributes') are reflected in the human heart offers a ke)- to this paradox. A generous man is so because he reflects the qualities expressed m the divine Name al-Karhn^ 'the Generous'. The man who has beauty of character or the woman who has physical beauty reflects something of al-}amJl, and the strong man would have no strength were it not for al-Qawi, 'the Strong', and al-Qahhdr, 'the All-Compelling'. But Allah is
The Human Paradox 185 also and, indeed, essentially al-Ahad, 'the One'; One alone, One who has
no partner, the unique, the incomparable. From this Name is derived the relative uniqueness of each human being and the fact that each is — at least potentially - a microcosm, a totality.
It is commonplace in England to remind a child who is too demanding that he is 'not the only pebble on the beach'. The problem is that every one of us, in his innermost identity, is - though in an entirely relative sense — the *only pebble'. Each is, in virtuality, not only a man or a woman, but Man, Woman. When this spiritual quality is appropriated by the mortal ego, man makes himself a god beside God; the Viceregent usurps the place of the King. He is then alone in creation and all other creatures are either toys to play with or obstructions blocking his way; at the same time, he feels that they have no real existence apart from him; for, indeed, creatures have no existence apart from God. Man is the only creature who kills his own kind as a matter of course,^ who punishes them because they do not fit the pattern of righteousness which seems to him unquestionable, and vvho lusts for a power and a dominion which will prove that he is truly one alone, without equal, totally himself. The greatest sin, in other words, is simply the obverse side of the supreme privilege which man enjoys; and lesser vices also are the shadows of the virtues which reflect the divine Perfection, bearing witness, in a perverse way, to the grandeur of our state.
Animals have a safe passage through this world, but man is always balancing on the edge of an abyss, and it is little wonder that the angels should have foreseen that this new creation would 'make mischief in the earth'.
But the Quranic account of the creation of Adam and the command to the angels to prostrate themselves before him singles out one particular point for emphasis. He had been given a knowledge which the angels do not possess. He had been taught 'the names of all things'. This too is an
aspect of his theomorphic nature, for as al-Khdliq, 'the Creator', God definesor singles out —by 'naming'them —the possibilities which have it in them to appear outside the divine treasury in the theatre {ma:^har) of this world. As al-Bdrt He produces them and as al-Musawwir He shapes their earthly form, but the first step is the supreme creative act of 'naming'.
Islam is commonly regarded as the religion of Law, but it is above all the religion of Knowledge; not that there is any contradiction here. As was mentioned earlier, the Arabic word for 'Law' has the primary meaning of 'understanding' and therefore relates to knowledge. To know the 'name' of something is to possess it in our understanding and to perceive it wath the eyes of our intelligence. The Prophet said that 'Allah has created nothing more noble than intelligence'; and he said also that 'the superio-rity of the learned man over the ordinary worshipper is like the superiosuperio-rity of the full moon over the stars'. According to the Quran, He who is the All-Knowing 'grants wisdom to whom He pleases, and whomsoever has been granted wisdom has indeed been given abundant wealth' (Q.2.269).
'Are those who know and those who are ignorant to be deemed equal?' (Q.39.9). For Islam, knowledge, intelligence and understanding define
'One of the 'ninety-nine Names' of God is al-Mumn, 'He who slays'.
186 Islam and the Destiny of Man
man as such. We cannot define him as a creature who is good or who is strong, or even as one who is loving; but we can define him as one who understands — or is capable of understanding.
Lest wc should suppose, even for one moment, that knowledge can be ours to possess and to hoard, the Quran reminds us that *He knoweth; ye know not' (Q.24.19). Adam was taught the names of all things by God, and Adam w^as — according to the Islamic perspective — a Prophet;
Muhammad received the Quran from the same source, the only source from which true knowledge may be derived, and he was the last of the Prophets to follow in Adam's footsteps. If the Muslim is to tap that same source and become 'one who understands', he has no choice but to model himself upon this 'perfect exemplar', imitating Muhammad so far as he is able, both in his character and in his mode of action. Since the Prophet is 'closer to the behevers than their [own] selves' {Q.33,6), it can be said that
he is the believer's alter ego or — to take this a step further — more truly 'oneself than the collection of fragments and contrary impulses which we
commonly identify as the 'self.
This is why the fp^dith literature is of such immense importance in the everyday life of the Muslim; and the record is so extensive that it is always possible, even among learned people, for someone to astonish and delight his friends by quoting to them a 'Prophet story', or a saying of which they had not previously heard. The intimate knowledge we have of Muham-mad's life (much of which we owe to 'A'isha) is, from a practical point of view, just as important as his religious teaching and the example he set in affairs of greater consequence. The believer feels close to him in life and hopes to be closer still after death, loving him not only as master and as guide but also as brother-man. It is in the light of this relationship that we
may understand parts of the record which often appear trivial to the occidental, such as 'A'isha's meticulous account of the manner in which they washed from a single bowl after making love, and her added comment, 'he would get ahead of me and I used to say, "Give me a chance, give me a chance!"'
It is often from quite minor incidents that we get the clearest impression of his style, particularly of his unfailing common sense. A woman who had barely escaped with her life from some raiders by making off on one of the Prophet's camels told him: 'I vowed that I would sacrifice the camel to Allah if he saved me by means of her.' 'That is a poor reward,' he said.
'Allah saved you by means of her and now you want to kill her. Leave the
animal alone!' adding — one supposes as an afterthought — 'Besides, she happens to be my property.' One is immediately warned against a certain
kind of 'piety' which readily sacrifices other people's interests to prove itself. His dislike for interfering in private matters was also an essential aspect of his style as leader of the community. A woman who had developed a dislike for her husband drove him out of the house, although he loved her deeply ('1 can still picture him,' said Jbn 'Abbas, who told the story, 'following behind her in the streets of Medina with the tears running down his beard)'. The Prophet asked her if she would not take her husband back. She inquired whether he was giving her a command, and he said he was simply interceding for the man. 'In that case,' she said, 'I have no need
The Human Paradox Igy of him!' In the Muslim perspective such incidents are not necessarily
different in essence, or any less wonderful, than Adam's preaching to the multitude of angels; and this is something that the occidental has par-ticular difficulty in grasping.
different in essence, or any less wonderful, than Adam's preaching to the multitude of angels; and this is something that the occidental has par-ticular difficulty in grasping.