Shaykh Abdul Hadi Palazzi
 
What Do We Want the Other to Teach
About Islamic Prayer and Liturgy?

[From David L. Coppola (ed.), "What Do We Want The Other To Teach About US. Jewish, Christian and Muslim Dialogues", Proceedings of six Conferences held in Jerusalem, Edmonton, Rome, Bamberg and Fairfield from 2000 to 2003, Sacred Heart University Press, Fairfield, Connecticut, 2006] 

In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate: Peace, God's mercy and his blessings be upon all of you. I want to thank the Center for Christian-Jewish Understanding of the Sacred Heart University of Fairfield, Connecticut, for arranging this distinguished interfaith conference, and the Centro Dionysia, Rome, for hosting all of us in this marvelous place.

   What I find particularly significant in our meeting is the idea of focusing our attention on how the other sees and teaches about us, on how the members of other religious traditions understand and interpret the sense of our methodology of worship. The Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, used to say, "Prayer is the cornerstone of Islam," and I think this can also be extended to Judaism and Christianity, and to many other religious traditions. Inside the Catholic tradition, for instance, we find the idea of the deep connection between the way of praying and the contents of belief, between lex orandi and lex credendi, and in general, one can say that prayer is exactly the context in which our belief is changed into action, in which the believer puts himself in touch with the One who is the object of his faith and the inspirer of his actions.

   The first obstacle one finds in trying to explain the role of prayer and liturgy in Islam is connected to language. Normally one translates "prayer" with two concepts in mind which, in Islam, are quite different from each other; i.e., the ritual prayers (salah in Arabic), which must be performed in Arabic, according to detailed rules of purity, at appointed times with fixed formulas and a specific orientation of the body; and spontaneous prayer (du'a'), which is not dependent on particular rules and by which the creature can ask his Lord whatever lawful things he is in need of and in whatever languages he likes. With a certain percentage of approximation, one could translate salah as "service" and du'a' as "supplication." This would permit us to say that by his supplications, a Muslim is offering to God a praise that is human and fallible, while by his daily service he is offering God the praise through which God praised himself in the glorious Qur'an. The recitation of Qur'an, and in particular of its opening chapter (al-Fatihah) is in fact an essential part of each service, while the conditions of purity and the positions which the worshipper takes during the service are also prescribed in it.

   By mentioning this point, we are referring to what is common to the three Abrahamic faiths. The central rites of each of the three religions — tefillah in Judaism, the liturgy in Christianity, and salah in Islam — includes the idea of offering to God not only our actions, our hopes, and our submission, but mainly his own Word, to the point that the service is not exactly a gift to him, but rather a restitution to him of the Word through which he created the whole universe. In Judaism and in Islam, the Word of God is essentially manifested in the form of the Torah and of the Qur'an, and this is the reason why their recitation has such a central point in Jewish and Islamic services, while in Christianity that same Word is not understood as transcendentally manifested in a revealed Book, but rather in the person of Jesus Christ. So, the liturgy of the Word in a Catholic Mass, for example, has a role that is preliminary to the Eucharistic liturgy, which is conceived as the offering of the Word of God on the altar as a sacrifice. The common point between the three religions is in understanding the service as restitution to God of the Word of God, which implies a participation of the creature to the same divine nature, but the manifestation of the Word is not understood by Christianity in the same way as it is understood by Judaism and Islam. Consequently, a Jew and a Muslim find no difficulty to immediately understand the similarities between their respective daily services, but they could find some difficulties in understanding the similarity which nevertheless exists between those services and a Catholic Mass. In the same way, a Catholic could be inclined to see in Jewish and Muslim services the mere repetition of words and prayers, without a palpable nature of offering, and even less of offering to God his own divinity.

   This also explains how the passage from one language to another does not alter the nature of the Mass, as demonstrated by the Liturgical reformation and the introduction of vernacular languages after the Second Vatican Council, while the attempt to use languages different from Hebrew or from Arabic would necessarily alter the nature of the services in Orthodox Judaism and in Islam. This brings us to another difference: in Orthodox Judaism and Islam, the language of revelation is itself part of the revelation, which involves both the letter and the meaning of the Holy Book. A targum of the Torah in Aramaic or in any other language is not the Torah itself, but rather a human interpretation of the revelation. In the same way, Muslims believe that the Qur'an cannot be translated into another language, and that a so-called "translation of the Qur'an" is not a real translation, but rather an explanation of the meanings in a language that is different from Arabic. Islam also teaches that the Qur'an has seven levels of understanding, each of which is disguised by the level that precedes it. A translation of the meaning necessarily concerns the literal level only, which is the most external of the meanings; i.e., the one that is understood by every person who reads the Qur'an while knowing the Arabic language.

   There have been some cases where the Muslim communities of Europe found some difficulties with non-Muslim editors of the translations of the meanings of the Qur'an in French, German, English, etc. From one point of view, printing an edition of the meanings of the Qur'an with the Arabic text was too expensive, and not conceivable for a publication intended for the general public. But from another point of view, the Muslim communities refused to give the title "the Qur'an" to a book that did not contain the original Arabic text, and insisted on the title, "Translation of the Meanings of the Qur'an," which the editors did not find palatable for the public, and considered it as a sort of eccentric and pedantic fixation. The issue was not so simple. In most of cases, the editors were not able to understand that, according to Muslims, a text including the translation of the meaning of the Qur'an in another language was not "the Qur'an" at all, but only its fallible interpretation. In the same way, the attempt of Mustafa Kemal to compel the Muslims of Turkey to read "the Qur'an in Turkish" during their services was a total failure, since not only the theologians, but also the laypeople understood that by doing so, one would lose the offering to God his Word, of praising God by the praise through which he praised himself.

   This helps us to understand how the same notion of revelation is not identical in Islam and in Christianity. Christianity understands revelation as the divine inspiration of human authors, who wrote in their language, from their culture and with their intellectual background. Translating the contents of Christian revelation into new languages has no tragic consequences, and neither does the introduction of the vernacular into the liturgy. Latin was neither the original language in which the New Testament was written, nor the language spoken by Jesus or by the early Christian community. Latin was not a sacred language but rather, a liturgical language introduced at a certain stage of the development of the Church and in a period in which it was the lingua franca of Europe. At a time when this language is not spoken widely anymore, and the number of those who understand it is limited, the introduction of native languages could sensitively increase the participation of the believers to the liturgy. On the contrary, in Islam (similar to Hebrew in Orthodox Judaism), Arabic is not only a liturgical language, but a sacred language. Revelation is conceived as a communication, not only of the meanings, but also of the grammatical form. It is through the revelation of the Qur'an that one of the many dialects spoken by Arabs became a language that is spoken and understood from Morocco to Iraq. The revelation changed Arabic into the language of a nation, and its nature as language of the revelation of the  Qur'an also prevented Arabic from evolving into different national languages.

   As for the opening chapter of the Qur'an (al-Fatihah), it contains a synthesis of the whole book, and as noted earlier, its recitation marks the beginning of every daily service. It has a role in Islam that is analogous to that of the Shema' in Judaism and of the "Lord's Prayer" in Christianity, and is divided into two parts. The former contains a mention of the divine names, while the latter is a request of guidance and of protection against deviance. Its words mean:

1. In the name of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate
2. Praise be to Allah, Lord of the Worlds,
3. The Merciful, the Compassionate,
4. Master of the Day of Judgment.
5. Thee we worship and Thee we ask for help.
6. Guide us to the straight path,
7. The path of those whom Thou hast favored, not the path of those who earn Thine anger, nor of those who go astray.

   Abu Hurayrah, one of the Companions of the Prophet Muhammad, narrated that he heard him say: "God, mighty and sublime is he, had said:

   I have divided the service between Myself and My servant into two halves, and My servant shall have what he has asked for. When the servant says: "Praise be to Allah, Lord of the Worlds," God says, "My servant has praised Me," and when he says, "The Merciful, the Compassionate," God says, "My servant has extolled Me." When he says, "Master of the Day of Judgment," God says, "My servant has glorified Me." When he says: "Thee we worship and Thee we ask for help," God says: "This is between Me and My servant, and My servant shall have what he has asked for." And when he says: "Guide us to the straight path, the path of those whom Thou hast favored, not the path of those who earn Thine anger, nor of those who stray," God says, "This is for My servant, and My servant shall have what he has asked for."

   This mention of divine answers to the recitation of the creature leads us to understand in which sense the service is considered an intimate colloquium between the creature and his Creator. After completing the reading of al-Fatihah, the worshipper adds other verses from the Qur'an, and then bows, to show that he has not added anything to the praise which Allah gives to himself, but as only manifested by means of his created tongue, the uncreated Word which — according to Islam — is one of the divine attributes. After bowing, the believer stands again, and while coming back to the erect position says what means, "God listens to the one who praises him." This is a further clarification of the intimacy with the Divine Essence that is reached by means of the service, since God is not actually listening to the words of his servant, but rather to his own Word, which descended upon the tongue of his servant. As a consequence of this divine epiphany, the same individuality of the creature is temporarily abolished, and the worshipper prostrates with his forehead to the ground, symbolically coming back to the earth he came from. No individuality can stand in front of God, and the prostration represents a condition of extinction (fana' in Arabic) of the created nature, which is like a temporary mirage, like a contingent shining which made God's light manifested. Even so, extinction in God is not conceived in Islam as a permanent condition, but as the first stage, which in the Islamic terminology is referred as "the journey from the creation toward the Truth." It is immediately followed by subsistence in God (baqa'); i.e., by the "journey from the Truth toward the creation." After being extinguished in God, the creature is sent back to himself, and this is represented by the seated position, which follows the prostration. That subsistence through God, the coming back to one's createdness while remembering the precedent, relative union with God, is itself transitory, and is followed by the stage in which the creature is again extinguished through the "extinction of the extinction" (fanu-l-fana'), which is represented by a second prostration.

   These changes of status are obviously symbolic only for the wide majority of the believers. They represent the spiritual journey from the creation to the Truth and from the Truth through the creation, but this does not mean that each Muslim actually performs a spiritual journey during each of his daily services. Even so, Islam admits that the spiritual journey during the service has an ontological reality for the awliya'; i.e., for that category of beings that basically corresponds to the tzadikim of Judaism and to "saints" of Christianity. The same idea of a magic carpet in the folklore of the Islamic world and in popular Islamic literature (for instance, in "One Thousand and One Nights") hints at this same truth. The carpet stands for the place were the worshipper stands for the daily service, and the notion that someone can fly on a carpet is a sort of materialized transposition of the notion of spiritual journey.

   These hints lead Muslims to seek the "secrets of the service" which should limit the tendency of those orientalists who deal with Islam as a mere "legalistic religion," as a religion which knows no priesthood, no rites and no sacrifice. In reality, by referring to salah as mere "prayer," and not as a Dominical service, its specific ritual depth is greatly undervalued. Probably this undervaluation of the ritual nature of the Islamic service depends on how differently ritual is conceived in Catholicism and in Islam. A Catholic Mass is centered on the Eucharistic sacrifice, but has plenty of accessory elements that concur with its celebration, such as special garments for the priest and for the deacons, incense, hymns, physical postures during the service, etc. From a technical point of view, the Islamic service has complex conditions, prerequisites, rules, etc. Each of the classical treatises of Islamic law opens by a series of chapters dedicated to the water with is used for the ritual washing and for the ablution which precedes the service, to the different daily services, and to their compulsory or optional constituents. On the other hand, Islamic rituality is concentrated in the person of the worshipper himself. His body, his mind, and his heart are all that are necessary for the service, which can take place in a mosque, a room, or even in an open space. Even the carpet is not an essential element of the service, but is only conceived as a means to ensure the ritual cleanness of the place were the worshipper puts his forehead.

   Strangely enough, those same orientalists who tend to reduce the role of the daily service to "prayer" and who, in general, completely ignore those symbolic aspects of the service to which we have referred, are nevertheless inclined to describe Islam as a "legalistic religion," and tend to limit Islam to its legal system, the Shari'ah. On the contrary, the Shari'ah is only one aspect of Islam. It is a religion that is formed by Shari'ah (law), Tariqah (path), and Haqiqah (truth). While the Shari'ah deals with those external deeds that a believer performs with his body, the Tariqah deals with the inner disposition in performing those same deeds, and the Haqiqah deals with that knowledge of God that is the goal of both Shari'ah and Tariqah. Tariqah is also known as Tasawwuf, i.e., Sufism, which is, in respect to the Shari'ah, the kernel of a nut in relation to its nutshell. Shari'ah without Sufism is incomplete and muti¬ated, in the same way that Sufism without Shari'ah is. None of them — if isolated — represents the totality of Islam. One can say that all the deviations which historically took place inside the Islamic world arose from attempts to isolate one of those elements from its necessary complement. One of the early jurists of Islam, Imam Malik Ibn Anas, used to explain this reality by saying, "Whoever abides by Sufism without Law becomes a libertine, and whoever abides by Law without Sufism becomes corrupted, while whoever studies Sufism and Law together finds the Truth."

   Another of the early jurists, Imam Muhammad Ibn Idris as-Shafi'i, clarified this same principle in one of his quatrains:

"Don't be exclusively a jurist or exclusively a Sufi:
For God's sake, I am giving you sincere advice.
The Law-only man lacks sincerity, while the Sufism-only one is ignorant.
How is it possible for someone who is ignorant to prosper?"

   The Shari'ah without Sufism is like a corpse without a soul, and Sufism without the Shari'ah is like a disincarnated soul which suffers from its separation from the body. The one who knows the Shari'ah without knowing Sufism will only perform void rituals, whose significance is inaccessible to him, while the one who knows Sufism without knowing the Shari'ah will not even know how the daily service must be correctly performed. That is the reason why, from the beginning of Islam until today, Islamic scholars have repeatedly dealt with the complement between "the science of the exteriority" and "the science of the interiority." In many cases — the most famous of which was Imam al-Ghazali — those whose authority was in matters of Law were also among the most outstanding representatives of Sufism.

   At the beginning of the eighteenth century, a region of Arabia called Najd saw the emergence of Wahhabism, a puritanical and literalist sect which considered Islam "degenerated," and proposed a "reform" to be imposed on Muslims by means of coercion, terrorism and indiscriminate massacres. One of the goals or the Wahhabi movement was to reduce Islam to a mere formalism, bereft on any spiritual depth. The alliance of the Wahhabis, originally a gang of semi-illiterate desert marauders, with the British Empire in its war against the Ottoman Sultanate, led to the creation of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and to the appointment of the descendants of those marauders, the royal House of Sa'ud. The belief of the Wahhabis' official religion of the Saudi Kingdom was so primitive and narrow-minded that it did not spread outside of Arabia. The situation started to change with the discovery of oil, which made the House of Sa'ud one of the richest families of the world and a financial power in the worldwide economy. Saudis massively invested in Wahhabi propaganda, first in the Arab world, then in the Indian subcontinent, and finally, in the West. Paradoxically, the existence of the Soviet Union prevented the spread of Wahhabism to Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan, to the point that in the Arab world of today, the influence of Wahhabism and modernism has considerably spread while Islam in the Soviet Muslim Republic survives in its pristine form.

   Wahhabism has many of the features of Islam as conceived by the orientalists: is literalist, legalistic, rejects every form of Sufism, and reduces the practice of religion to the passive assimilation and mechanical application of rules. Nevertheless, in the eyes of Muslims it has a main defect: it is not "Islam" but rather an anthropomorphic cult which started three hundred years ago, and was rejected by the most eminent Muslim theologians. The orientalistic prejudices associated with the Wahhabi propaganda are preventing many Westerners from understanding traditional Sunni Islam, and from realizing the role Sufism has played in Islam since its beginnings. The consequence is that, apart from a very restricted group of specialists, most Westerners completely confuse Islam with Wahhabism and attribute to Islam those attributes that are notions of the Wahhabi belief.

   With the constitution of al-Qa'idah, of the Taliban regime and of Hamas, Wahhabism has returned to its primitive methodology. Like terrorism and indiscriminate carnages permitted the Wahhabis of old to occupy the Holy Places of Islam in Mecca and Medina, so the neo-Wahhabis of today are conceiving the idea of conquering the whole world by the same means. And they invest in the international network of terror by applying their profits derived from oil trade. If the Wahhabism of old was a menace for the Muslim inhabitants of Arabia, contemporary Wahhabism has become a menace for humanity as a whole. In front of that menace, in front of pseudo-religious legitimization of violence, bloodshed and terror, an increase in interfaith dialogue — especially among the Abrahamic faiths — is the best answer which can be given to those who plan to abuse the truth of Islam and to legitimize murder and terrorism "in the name of God." An interfaith dialogue that does not include the need for a joint defense of a common front against the menace of the pseudo-religious legitimation of terrorism is destined to be reduced to a mere scholastic debate; and the serious risk is that representatives of pro-terror extremism may find a way to get involved, even in interfaith dialogue, thus getting legitimized as authentic "religious representatives."

   While I have dedicated most of this paper to clarify the distinction which exists in Islam between service and supplication, between ritual prayer and spontaneous prayer, I want to conclude by hinting at another form of prayer, dhikr, the continuous mention of the Divine Names. Dhikr in Arabic has the sense of "remembrance," and remembering God, being aware of his presence in all the circumstances of our life is what Islam considers to be the goal toward which all the acts of worship and all the religious practices are finalized. In this sense, one can say that the dhikr of God is the quintessence of worship: the daily service is not prescribed because of the positions which the body assumes, because of its fixed times but because of the remembrance of God which it causes. The same applies to fasting or to the pilgrimage to Mecca and to every other Islamic prescription. When a Muslim walks, sits or lies down, and then starts remembering God by mentioning his names in a low or in a soft tone, he abides by the ritual which includes and substantiates all the other possible forms of worship. Every other form of worship is subjected to rules and limitations, but the dhikr is not. One can go on making dhikr while walking, working, while performing any other of his daily activities, and without any need to stop them. This excellence of dhikr in respect to other forms of worship — even in respect to the service — is clarified by the Quranic words which mean:

   Recite what is revealed to thee of the Book and raise the service. Verily the service restrains from shameful and unjust deeds, but nevertheless the remembrance of God is surely the greatest form of worship, and God knows what ye do. And dispute ye not with the People of the Book except for the best, unless it be with those of them who inflict wrong. Say to them: 'We believe in what was revealed to us and in what was revealed to you. Our God and your God is One; and to Him we submit.' (29: 45-46)

Significantly enough, this proclamation of the excellence of the remembrance of God upon all other forms of worship is immediately followed by instructions concerning the Abrahamic dialogue. Useless disputes and diatribes must be avoided, and emphasis must be put on what unites us, our common faith in the Divine revelation, on the awareness that the God of the Jews, of the Christians, and of the Muslims is One God. Thus remembering God immediately means remembering the deep link which unites us. Moreover, remembering God also means to remember that he is a God of peace, and that He is peace. As-Salam, peace, in Arabic is both the common greeting and one of the ninety-nine Beautiful Names of God. When we great each other by saying "peace be upon you," this does not simply mean wishing that the other lives safely and is safeguarded from war, but also wishes that God be upon him, inspire peace into his heart and make his milieu an abode of peace. In this spirit, I would like to end by reciting one of those supplications which the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, used to repeat after each of his daily services, and which many Muslims go on repeating after their services until today:

O God,
Thou art Peace and Peace comes from Thee,
And Peace cometh back to Thee.
Let us enter,
Our Lord,
In the abode of Peace
And grant us access to Heaven.
Thy abode is an abode of Peace,
May Thou be blessed and exalted,
Thou art the Owner of Majesty and Generosity.
Amen.