Askari seems to be saying that any acceptance of Western thinking in any way would not do; in fact it would involve us further with the West, and indeed dissolve our identity into that of the West.
This is a very untenable position. Rationalism, even in its inductive form, is by no means a peculiarity of the West, nor is social organization on the democratic basis which respects the rights of the individual, nor for that matter humanism—the supreme position of Man in the creation. All these, as Iqbal proved, were the original and fundamental parts of the Islamic tradition from which the West has taken its cue. Askari's answer to that is that seeking such parallels between Islam and the West is a form of acceptance of the West's domination and superiority. It is a trap, invented by the Western orientalists, to engulf Islam and the Muslims into their modernistic and humanistic perversions.
Askari's difficulty, in his stage of pure negation, is essentially philosophical. It arises out of a misunderstanding about the objectives of Sufism as purely transcendental. Askari*s violent affirmation of abstract reason, in an absolute sense, as opposed to human sensuousness and the ordinary, maybe lower-practical—levels of reason, is at fault. From a negation of European humanism, i.e., Man-centrality of Being, he has gone to the negation of the human altogether, forgetting that man is also spirit, and that God has called him "His secret" (al-lnsanu sirri}. From a negation of materialism he has gone to the negation of matter and the material level of being, forgetting that spirit lives in matter, and that the spirit-matter dichotomy is no part of Islam, and that the denigration of the material and the contingent in the West is merely a continuation of the doctrine of original sin.
Above all Askari forgets that the quest for the absolute which is the object of abstract reason, does not begin with the absolute, but with the contingent and the concrete. One cannot transcend the wasut and the Malakut and jump up to the Jabarut and the La hut without going through the stages proper and necessary to man. He also forgets that human love can be rarified and transformed into the divine, but there is no possibility of love with the pure abstract reason devoid of emotion.
The purity of thought which Askari has tried is empty and emotionless. It is love and not an intellectual exercise which is the basis of all human experience, including that of God.
Reprinted from The Muslim (Islamabad), September 2, 1979.
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