Monday, August 5, 2019

What It Means - Day 140

"Indeed, he prospers who purifies it. And indeed he fails who obscures it."
Quran 91:9-10

This short, but profoundly significant, passage is drawn from the 91st surah, al-Shams, "The Sun." As Nasr tells us, "These two verses have served as the inspiration for extensive literature on the 'purification of the soul' (tazkiyyat al-nafs), which some argue is the entire purpose of the Quran." (Study Quran, p. 1520)  I can't read these words without thinking of Hinduism or Buddhism and the process of purifying the soul stretched over countless lifetimes, which I will often explain to my students by comparing it to a chemistry experiment where you keep running a mixture through multiple filters. In Islam however, as with Judaism and Christianity, the process of purification is bounded by one lifetime, which certainly gets the clock ticking. As part of the Noble Eight-Fold Path of Buddhism its adherents are told to consider every action and statement and thought in regards to the bigger questions of Enlightenment; truthfully, is Islam any different, except that there is only one life to achieve the process. Of course, in Islam you're not born with any Buddhist or Hindu sense of a karmic residue or even Christian sense of original sin that you need to overcome because the default setting is that you're born good, so maybe the pressure is arguably not as bad as it is in other faiths.

Nasr continues, "Nonetheless, there is a subtle reciprocity in every step one takes toward God, for as 13:11 proclaims Truly God alters not what is in a people until they alter what is in themselves. The literal meaning of purify (zakka) is 'to grow,' and according to most the literal meaning of obscure (dassa) is 'to bury.' These verses could thus be translated, 'He prospers who grows it, and he fails to buries it.'" To me, this brings us back to one of my favorite subjects: the active role, if not the complete ownership, of our path to God. Of course, there is doubtless an extraordinary vanity in this view. However, if we are born free of any karmic debt or taint of original sin, and, as Nasr opines, the greatest sin in Islamic is the human tendency to forget the original oneness of God, then this speaks to a sense of spiritual agency. God "cut us loose" for a reason, and if the reason is to purify our soul, then the question becomes what does "purify our soul" mean? Nasr discusses "those who dull the soul by neglecting it through heedlessness and disobedience," and to me that brings us back once again to the notion of the remembrance of God, which, again, to me is about our actions in helping other and making the world a better place.




No comments: