Good anger, bad anger and the potential of prophetic healing

Jonas Atlas in conversation with Abdal Hakim Murad

The islamic scholar Abdal Hakim Murad is the dean of the Cambridge Muslim College. In the 2020 edition of The Muslim 500, he’s placed in the top fifty of the most influential muslims in the world once again.

Earlier this year Murad published his book Traveling Home: essays on Islam in Europe, which discusses many pressing issues like Islamophobia, the ecological crisis and the place of religion in a secular world. As always, he succeeds in shedding a new light on such debates. He offers necessary nuances and transcends the ingrained dichotomies. As such, Murad provides a theological basis for many Muslims who would like to rethink the relationship between Islam and contemporary Europe. And for non-Muslims he presents insightful ideas that warrant further reflection and engagement.

Since it had been many years since I first interviewed Professor Murad, I was more than happy to use the publication of his new book as a good opportunity to have another dialogue. (And this time also making a podcast out of it.) This time our conversation focussed predominantly on the search for greater unity in this time of strong polarisation.

One your book’s main themes is the problem of ‘tanfiri Islam’. You use this concept to refer to what others often call ‘extremist Islam’ but you opt for a term that we could perhaps translate as ‘repellent Islam’. It’s more than just a matter of semantics or a play of words, however. It actually sheds a new light on a debate that seems very stuck. In the European and American context, Islam is too often presented as an extremist and dangerous religion that can only be tolerated in so far as Muslims try to adhere to a ‘moderate Islam’ — that is to say, a ‘more modern’ and ‘less religious’ Islam. But your approach twists everything around. In your view, the problem of the ‘tanfiri’s’ isn’t that they’re too religious, the problem is that they’re actually not adhering enough to the advice of the Prophet or the accumulated wisdom of the tradition.

Indeed. The term ‘tanfiri Islam’ is one of my semantic attempts to dodge the very emotive consequences of overused words like ‘extremism’ or ‘radicalism.’ Such terms are relativistic because one man’s extremist is another man’s moderate. It’s entirely perspectival and it doesn’t actually help you to win any arguments. So, I reached for something else, which seemed to have more basis in the Islamic tradition itself: the spiritual insights about the danger of repulsion.

There is a famous hadith, for example, which says: “give people good news, do not repel them, make things easy for them and do not make it difficult for them.” Another Hadith says: “some people go into religion so hard that they come out the other side, like an arrow passing through its target.” These sayings are part of a whole range of prophetic advice to people, not to be too harsh in religious matters. Yet the tanfiri Muslims, as I call them, are trying to uphold their religion with such intensity that they end up being horrible people. Prayer doesn’t seem to have softened their hearts like it should. They have become hard-hearted instead of soft-hearted.

The founder of the religion himself clearly warned us against this. He knew it was a possibility, just like it was a possibility in Christian history or Jewish history. That’s why he said we should make sure not to repel people. If you want to convince people of your religion, you should present it as a healing and a solution, not as just another of the headaches out there in the world.

If the hadiths are so clear on the matter, why then do ‘tanfiri Muslims’, who often claim to strictly adhere to the tenets of their faith, ignore those prophetic advices?

For a lot of young people, who feel oppressed in the ghettos of Western Europe, it simply doesn’t seem like a very attractive or satisfying piece of advice. If you have your back against a wall and you feel marginalized, then sometimes the type of religion or identity that you reach for is the one that seems to be harshest and most narrow, in order to wave a fist of defiance in the face of your oppressor.

And in many Muslim countries, religion has been driven into a corner by the dictatorial regimes or through the devastation of war. Many people are simply furious and they want to exact revenge. Any kind of decent, dialogical form of religion just doesn’t speak to their hearts. Also, some governments have sought to nationalize Islam and created carefully controlled religious hierarchies with state sermons that have too often emphasized the element of Islamic moderation, gentleness and compassion for cynical political reasons. So, that discourse has been discredited in the eyes of a lot of young Muslims.

In this sense, it might sometimes seem like a very unpromising situation. But of course, my religion also teaches me to hope. Eventually these people will recognize that it’s self-defeating to be so narrowly religious that nobody else wants to be religious in the end.

All of this in fact does not only apply to tanfiri Muslims. It can make us reflect on any type of political activism. I say so, because for quite some years I’ve been involved in several types of activism that were oriented on antiracism and geopolitical justice. So, I perfectly well know how difficult it is to maintain the right balance between healing mildness on the one hand and speaking truth to power on the other. Even though the prophets often urged us to pursue the former, the latter also has to happen. The immense injustices we see around us shouldn’t be brushed under the carpet. But once you speak truth to power, those in power often resort to violent suppression, which then creates a vicious circle of hard against hard. And because of this vicious circle, well-intended activists sometimes also wind up deterring people instead of presenting the possibility of a changed world. So, how can we keep the balance between healing mildness and speaking painful truths?

In all of our traditions, one of the lifestyle options of the saints was to maintain rigorous sternness with themselves in their devotional and moral lives, but gentleness with the weak and a prophetic attitude towards the powerful. One of my favourite figures in Islamic history is Sidi Lahcen Lyusi, a Berber saint of about 400 years ago who was famous for healing animals, loving the poor and so forth. The sultan of his day was engaged in building the walls of the city of Meknes and basically enslaved the population in order to do this. Many of them were dying in the process and their bodies were thrown into the wall. However, the sultan invited Sidi Lahcen for dinner at the palace. He tried to get out of it, but in the end, he couldn’t refuse any longer. So, he sits down at the sultan’s palatial table, picks up the crockery and smashes it on the table. He breaks one plate after another. Naturally the sultan gets angry and asks the saint: “Why would you be so insolent to smash my plates?” To which Sidi Lahcen replies: “Well, I’m just smashing clay that’s made out of earth while you are smashing the human clay that God Himself has made.” Because of everybody’s love for the saint and because of his total sincerity and fearlessness, he was allowed to go his way. But from the foundations of the religions themselves, the prophetic voice, which speaks against power, has always risked itself.

The point of religion is to try and point to a better world. We should call out the outrageousness of the situation in Palestine, we should speak frankly about global warming, we should speak out against the narcissism of the governing discourses, and so on. The real sermon is the one that pulls no punches. And the one that prevaricates and begins with a “however” won’t fill the mosques or the churches with young people. In that sense, a lot of religions have become too establishment. They’re so anxious to please everybody that nobody bothers any longer. Yet religion is prophetic, or it is nothing.

This of course also relates to your division between ‘good anger’ and ‘bad anger’.

Indeed. Often when we become angry, because of our lack of self-awareness we don’t have a good conversation with ourselves about the legitimacy of our anger. But the Abrahamic monotheisms offer a particular stance on the matter. They warn us about the dangers of anger, but also recognize its potential righteous place. As such, the great saints and the prophets could sometimes become angry. Jesus, for example, overturned the tables in the temple and chased out the money changers.

This contrasts with other traditions like many forms of Buddhism which seek to overcome all emotions in order to exist in a state of virtuous indifference that isn’t subject to the turbulences of the self, because one realizes the self is an illusion. Some Western philosophies such as the stoics also tried to overcome anger in a similar way. But the moral greatness of the monotheism is predicated on the very fine balance that has to exist between the legitimation of the full palette of human emotions, since it is part of the way in which God created human beings. The Islamic tradition, just like a lot of Christian and Jewish ethics, open us up to fully inhabiting our humanity rather than trying to turn us into some abstract, spiritual nothing. Anger thus occupies a legitimate part of our creative nature. But of course, it has to be purified, so that we get to God, as the Sufis say, by going through the world rather than going around it.

Most of the time when we become angry, we become angry because our own pride has been bruised, or because we feel our rights have been infringed. So, we’re angry for ourselves. And that’s what the monotheisms warn against. If somebody steps on your toe, don’t get angry. What’s the point? If somebody cheats you of your inheritance, perhaps try to do something about it, but don’t get angry. Yet, if somebody else gets abused, well, then you have the right to be angry. So, the hadiths say that the Prophet got angry, but never for himself. If he himself was infringed or mistreated, he was forgiving. But when somebody else’s rights were violated, he would grow angry. And that speaks to our human intuition that it’s in fact inhuman not to be angry about inequality, poverty or global warming. We can’t just sit back and meditate when we see these things. Anger is a legitimate response. It’s a prophetic response.

But how do we differentiate between the anger that’s of the spirit and the anger that’s of the ego?

That requires spiritual discernment. It requires the external hand of a guide and it requires maturation through human experience. My teachers used to say that the rarest of all human emotions is anger for the sake of God. Usually when we’re angry, even if we think it’s because of something unethical happening, it’s partly also about some wrinkles in our ego. So, it doesn’t often happen that people are only angry because of God’s glory and because his servants have been violated.

We should really think more about these issues, given the fact that everybody nowadays is really angry. The media is angry. The politicians are angry with each other. We’re angry with the politicians. And all of us are angry with the virus. The world’s exploding with anger. I think religion should be proactive in reminding people that we need to self-diagnose ourselves. We should be a little less proud and make sure that we’re only angry in ways that are going to bring about human flourishing rather than mutual destruction.

One of the self-diagnoses you propose in your book is to honestly reflect on whether we think we are in charge of history or whether our faith is still of that level that we recognize God as the eventual author of history. In a way, this is exactly the problem of tanfiri Muslims. Even though they constantly invoke the name of God, eventually they believe they themselves will have to determine the fate of the world. They stopped submitting to Gods providence. So, if we want to differentiate between good anger and bad anger, we shouldn’t make the same mistake. We should check whether we still trust God to eventually bring the balance we crave for. But of course, some people might find this type of reasoning opens the gate to fatalism. So, how do we make sure that it doesn’t lead us into some sort of “Oh, well it’s not up to in any case. I’ll just sit back and let God take of everything”?

In a complex way, we act on two levels. There’s a surface level where existentially we have to proceed on the assumption that cause and effect, time and space are real. But at a deeper level, there’s this awareness that the divine omnipotence cannot be countermanded by any human force. So, the serenity or the self-control that exists on the surface level, wells up from a deeper level. In the Lord’s prayer for example, Christians pray: “Thy will be done.” And ultimately, we will indeed return to the one who is supremely just and every injustice will one day be righted. There’s a provision of sanity that comes from that. For example, one of the things we’re seeing in this corona crisis is a sudden spike in mental health problems, particularly amongst the young. They’ve become three times worse in the UK, according to the most recent figures. But not for religious people. It seems that across the religions, people with faith are dealing with this much better than people who think this world is all there is. Even if the faithful aren’t really articulating it, deep down they have this feeling that eventually there’s a loving God, who takes care of us.

At the deepest level of our soul then, as religious people, we have this certainty that everything is in God’s hands. And therefore, basically everything is rightness, appropriateness, compassion, mercy, justice. But on the surface where we, as limited humans, have our conscious being, of course, the world is kind of a pinball machine. We’re bouncing around and it’s it’s very frantic. But the deep wisdom should enable us to remain sane, while we’re bouncing around in life from crisis to crisis.

Of course, these two levels are not completely separated modes of consciousness. So, in a psychological and existential sense, how can we connect them?

By remembering — what we call ‘dhikr’ in the Islamic tradition. And this is not necessarily a conscious thing. It’s not just the devotional repetition of a divine name or a prayer verse. I remember when I was teaching English at the British Council in Cairo, and I would invigilate exams. It was a big thing for the Egyptian students because they had paid a lot and it was a stressful writing test against the clock. And then I noticed that every 10 minutes or so one of them would softly murmur: “Allah…” You could see how the body language of everyone in the class would change and relax for a second. It made them remember that what they were doing wasn’t the most important thing after all.

But sometimes there’s simply something that comes to the surface unbidden, from a realm of the spirit that we are not really given to understand correctly. Such moments have more to do with the realm of imagination or dreams and direct communication with unseen worlds. This is beyond the reach of human language but it’s also where, eventually, we have our real being. I don’t mean a kind of private thing that we have locked away in our psyche and our memories. I mean being itself with a capital B. And to the extent that we’re connected to being with a capital B, we’re completely transformed by the sight of something beautiful in the world, for example. When we witness beauty, it’s the inward that somehow comes to the surface and gives us a sense of nostalgia for our true Being. And this Being can sometimes burst through like a volcano or invigorate us like a current of fresh air.

In this lies one of the mysteries of religion. We have our theological chitchat that tries to make everything very clear cut, but the reality of our experience of ourselves, others and the world, eventually resides very deep down in us. And that’s not the Freudian answer, because Freud is saying that what’s deep down is something low, base and visceral which has to do with horrific, primal traumas, while we are saying that what’s down there is luminous — and that that luminosity is what we truly are. We just have to keep remembering this.

This interview is part of a longer podcast conversation and has been redacted to suit a textual format. You can listen to the full episode below or in your favorite podcast app under ‘Re-visioning Religion’.