Muslim Woman

Broadly speaking religious life may be divided into three periods. These may be described as the periods of ‘Faith’, ‘Thought’, and ‘Discovery.’ In the first period religious life appears as a form of discipline which the individual or a whole people must accept as an unconditional command without any rational understanding of the ultimate meaning and purpose of that command. This attitude may be of great consequence in the social and political history of a people, but is not of much consequence in so far as the individual’s inner growth and expansion are concerned. Perfect submission to discipline is followed by a rational understanding of the discipline and the ultimate source of its authority. In this period religious life seeks its foundation in a kind of metaphysics - a logically consistent view of the world with God as a part of that view. In the third period metaphysics is displaced by psychology, and religious life develops the ambition to come into direct contact with the Ultimate Reality. It is here that religion becomes a matter of personal assimilation of life and power; and the individual achieves a free personality, not by releasing himself from the fetters of the law, but by discovering the ultimate source of the law within the depths of his own consciousness. As in the words of a Muslim Sufi - ‘no understanding of the Holy Book is possible until it is actually revealed to the believer just as it was revealed to the Prophet.’1 It is, then, in the sense of this last phase in the development of religious life that I use the word religion in the question that I now propose to raise. Religion in this sense is known by the unfortunate name of Mysticism, which is supposed to be a life-denying, fact-avoiding attitude of mind directly opposed to the radically empirical outlook of our times. Yet higher religion, which is only a search for a larger life, is essentially experience and recognized the necessity of experience as its foundation long before science learnt to do so. It is a genuine effort to clarify human consciousness, and is, as such, as critical of its level of experience as Naturalism is of its own level.

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Once I have read the article which asked religious scholars of different Muslim sects, how would they define a Muslim? This report has been published and is available. Some of these scholars refused to answer the question saying that they would need a lot of time and pages to answer it. The report said the following about them; "Amongst these scholars even two did not have the same answer."

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Religion is as old as the rise of self consciousness in men but its origin, as that of man is shrouded in obscurity. A man has probably lived on earth for about a million years. During the greater part of this period, he had no civilization and has not left his impress on any durable material. All we know about him is based on his fossilized remains and while they tell us a good deal about his physical shape and structure, they tell us little about the man in him. Men acquired some rudiments of civilization when he began to work on stone and metal and to shape for himself tools, which hitherto he had taken ready made from nature. The remains of his artifacts, however shed valuable light on his developing needs and beliefs.

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