One of the most promising new realities is the dialogue taking place on many different levels between Muslims and Christians. Commenting on Muslim and Christian sources, the author, Islamic scholar and former Anglican bishop of Jerusalem, sees even greater possibilities in shared, common prayer. The excerpt is from Common Prayer, A Muslim-Christian Spiritual Anthology, London: Oneworld Publication, 1999.
Perhaps this book should have been called A Part in Common Prayer. That title has five meanings. Only ‘a part’ of either community will be ready and willing participants. Only ‘a part’ of what they comprehend in faith and doctrine will be present. On both counts there will be no question of ‘the whole’. In sharing, they will be ‘apart’ from their full identity and – as is always true in praying – they will have ‘come apart’, as Jesus (sws) often bade his disciples, into quiet seeking or, as the Qur’ān puts it: ‘desiring the face of God’.
The admitted partiality of the contents here has to be tested by reference in the postscript to the whole faith-identity of each religion. However, as partial it will be genuine. In the same context, we must reckon with the many factors in contemporary life and society which require mutual response – response which has to reach back into the spiritual resources any faith can muster.
It should be clear that we are concerned not with formal ritual worship and the patterns of public liturgies practiced in mosques and churches, but rather with what Muslims know as Du’ā and Christians as personal devotion. There is no merging here of those formal aptitudes which will always remain distinctive, with their sundry postures of kneeling, bowing, prostrating. Nevertheless, what here derives mainly from individual souls (Biblical and Qur’ānic sources apart) may well serve in school assemblies, civic groups, or where people meet in – otherwise – only mental dialogue. Items grouped together have a certain unity and may suggest where independent thought might further go.
The Qur’ān will be found more extensively quoted here than the New Testament. The reason, in part, is that the Qur’ān, for Muslims, is primarily a recital. Memorising the text, as is the tradition in Islam, means that Muslim mentality rides with its sequences and cadence. There is an immediacy in the verses, not merely as part in a whole but part for a whole. Conversely, the index of authors shows more Christian sources than Muslim. This is because Christians, in literature and devotion, have taken livelier liberties than Muslims permit themselves.
Some items derive from non-believing sources, which is entirely right. Mystics and Sufis are represented, but this is not an anthology of Sufism. Were it such, it would not be true to the breadth of Islam. A glance at the index indicates almost thirty countries. Senegal to Samarkand is no empty claim, thanks to president Senghor of the one and the Naqshbandī in the other. Each page makes its own point as users recognise, take, amend and pursue its hints and measures.
Let a discursive postscript take up what this brief introduction can well exclude. Demur can be the better faced when desire has had its way. Let necessary discussion bide its proper time. When George Herbert, the seventeenth-century English poet included here, tried to define prayer, he ventured some intriguing definitions, among them: ‘God’s breath in man returning to his birth’, ‘the soul in paraphrase’ and ‘a kind of turn’. He ended with the two words: ‘Something understood’. He was cryptic but profound. Prayer must then mean: ‘Someone understood’, and there our theologies differ in what they predicate of Allah. Yet not wholly so. In the ‘something’ that prayer understands, in the intention and in the act may be the part all praying parties share.
The preface promised occasion to face the sundry questions that browsers or readers will bring to all the foregoing. Those who are contented need read no further: the discontented, however, will be many and will come well promised. There is no Tasliyah here, the Muslim will say, no salutation on Muhammad, ‘no calling down of blessing’ with mention of his name, as the Qur’ān commands. Its omission must render the whole unusable by Muslims. Further, a Christian will inquire: Where is the threefold Name here: ‘Father, Son and Holy Spirit? How, lacking this, can any prayer be ‘Christian’?’ Is there not some conspiracy of silence that nothing concludes with the due formula: ‘Through Jesus Christ our Lord?’ How can Christians come to God on any other ground? There must be something willful, culpable, intolerable in such omission. Does it not amount to an unwarranted, guilty suppression, an utter disloyalty in no way to be condoned? The ‘something understood’ to have prayer right for either of the separate loyalties here in view may be far to seek. There is no case it can pretend to make which is not condemned in the making. What is here, might only spell betrayal, either way. True Muslims have as little warrant here as honest Christians. Let them stay apart and only so keep faith.
‘Let patience have here perfect work’, James the Apostle once wrote – and he is no stranger to controversy (James 1:4). Let us defer queries for the moment and consider why this book should want to broach such problems as doctrines set for it.
What is clear is that there is a growing awareness of pluralism. Its constraints are recognised on every hand. Our global humanity is compelled by technology and the media revolution to reconcile a ‘one-world’ reality with one which is still, culturally, intensely local, thanks to poverty, disease, privation and the ‘need for roots’. Tourism is a cult of the privileged, yet wherever it alights it creates perceptions of disparity, idly glimpsed or bitterly resented. What is new now about human diversity is the moral challenge it brings, the pervasive malaise and the chronic injustice. No separate religion can enjoy immunity from problems common to them all in society, in the world economy, in the strife of nationalism and the ethnic dimensions of human neighbourhood.
Moreover, the time has passed when any one faith, presuming to be ‘the world’s religion’, can pretend to suffice every culture or dominate the future. This, both Christians and Muslims will want to insist, does not call into question their worldwide relevance. But mission or vocation in such worldwide terms has to know that issues of war and peace, world economics, genetics, ecology, population, space ambitions and international laws of human rights, are in no exclusive competence. They demand the mind and will of religions in the plural. They concern the sundry irreligions of secular humanity.
We do not know that situation for what it is if we do not allow that faiths have to find at least some modest communion in what it demands. The same factors which have conduced to dialogue about beliefs surely point towards something common in responsive prayer to take us beyond mere debate on means and ends. We are all immersed in the same features of contemporary life. Techniques, from medicine to engineering, genetics and statistics, are the same for us all. The sciences are neutral from culture to culture and from faith to faith. Computers, cybernetics, cloning body parts, the Internet – these do not discriminate between religions. For practitioners there is a common community of skill and expertise. It must surely follow that in manipulating the same technology they are invited into similar moral and spiritual liabilities for its guidance and control. Do not such liabilities lead them back into religious frames of reference? How then can these liabilities be exempt from what prompts prayer?
This points away from the traditional segregation of devotional practice. It suggests an obligation to find how the physical bearings of a shared technology belong with personal faith and draw spiritual direction from it. Then there are all the occasions of civic and professional activity in hospitals, schools, universities and local communities where common prayer might have due place in the quest for sanity, discernment and courage. Issues that tax our patience and try our spirits are precisely where prayer is most expedient.
But what of the compromises – if such we see them to be – in which any such commonality on our part will be involved? Are not doctrine, history, loyalty all against the idea? Have we any valid hope of proving legitimate in the venture?
The surest ground for confidence – as already hinted – is that the pages here needed no inventing. They did not have to be researched: they presented themselves even to initially casual notice – notice of such a sort as to grow into conviction. Compatibilities attest themselves, even in the context of things sharply antithetical.
One striking example is the convergence of the opening of the Christian Te Deum Laudamus and Islam’s al-Fātihah, the ‘Opener’ of the Qur’ān: iyyāka nabudu wa iyyāka nasta’īn. Both the grammars, Latin and Arabic, are employing the emphatic pronoun in the same sense and for the same reason. The Fātihah does not say (as it might): na’buduka, ‘we worship thee’ – a normal attached pronoun. It adopts a deliberately insistent shape by employing iyya to which is attached a verb-preceding pronoun: ‘Thee, thee only.’ What the Latin does is precisely the same, though the familiar English forfeits it in the prosaic ‘We praise thee, O God’, rather than: ‘Thee, being God, we praise.’
No conscious case for the Arabic being derived from the Latin is implied. It is simply the coincidence of usage that signifies. Postponing the trouble we are in when we reach ‘the Father Everlasting’, it is fair to say that this profoundly Christian hymn in its first and its final eight verses (‘worship, govern, magnify, keep, have mercy, lighten, trust, -- with ‘the heavens and all the powers therein’) as a fervently Muslim feel. If we must halt at the disparities – as we surely do – we cannot have them in disregard of what conjoins.
It is believed here that this affinity in a classic case may symbolise a certain kinship in praise, penitence and petition, as here made articulate from both sources, and that its significance may avail for common prayer. Has the searching self-reproach of a Ghazālī altogether have no kinship with the mental turmoil of a Franics Thompson, or the public conscience of the cordwainer Hallāj no converse with the private self of a Dag Hammarskjold? What is not in doubt here is that the numerous citations from the Qur’ān – with which most Christians are not conversant – kindle sympathies of heart around gratitude, awareness of nature, and the precarious mysteries of our human environment, our sexuality, parenthood and sense perceptions.
Only when so much is conceded do we really come to what might give us a pause. To have no place for empathy would be to have no occasion for misgiving, for we would simply be imprisoned in exclusivism and ignoring those situations of common responsiveness in daily life.
But, with all the will in the world, are not the irreconcilables of Islam and Christ quite insuperable, quite nugatory of common spirituality, void of all but a fantasy of shared devotion? There will be those, in either camp, who hold so. The faiths are too far apart for any to have anything in common with one another. Things contrary are too massive between them. That is claimed to be the verdict of the centuries. Islam is too tenacious of its identity, its finality, its utter suitedness – by divine decree – to forgetful human nature to accept the implications that wait on ‘common prayer’. Some Christians, likewise, will be strenuously repudiating Islam even while protesting that they must ‘love Muslims’. Such will not let the ‘love’ interrogate the ‘repudiation’. Others will not even stay for the scruples of ‘love’ but make their anathemas complete. Surely, they will say, the finality of ‘God in Christ’ is decisively against any positive significance in a subsequent religion. Moreover, Muslims see the Incarnation as utterly derogatory to the exaltedness of Allah, while the Qur’ān seems to disavow conclusively the cross of Jesus as actual or redemptive. It must follow that all else distinctively Christian – the Holy Spirit, the Church, the sacraments and the New Testament writings – are vetoed. What remains from which extend the ventures of a self-cancelling quest for community?
Taking due measures of how formidable the dissuasives are, perhaps we can focus what is at stake about any ‘part in common prayer’ by noting the absence throughout this anthology of the familiar words: ‘through Jesus Christ our Lord’. What of such a conspiracy of silence? Is not that formula crucial for any and every loyal Christian at prayer? How and why ever forsake it?
But is it forsaken in alternatives like: ‘for thy Name’s sake,’ or ‘In thy merciful Name’? Formally, yes, but essentially, no. Christians come to God always on the ground of whom they believe God to be. ‘He who has the Son has the Father also,’ seeing that ‘from the Father’s being-in-giving we have the son’: so the Johannine Letters are in line with the New Testament Gospels. On Christian lips, those alternative phrases carry that Christic trust. Why not, then, have it articulate and explicit? In order to make viable a community of potential prayer with others who lack yet, or always, that Christ-clue, but nevertheless instinctively invoke ‘the Name of God.’ What perhaps we may – for the time being – think of as the elasticity of the Name of God carries us both, while for the Christian, the Christian dimensions of that name are for ever in control. Others, however, have not been made passengers in an act of prayer whose explicitness excluded them from being party.
All respect to those who insist the gesture here is wrong: all hope from those who find it rightly mediatorial if it enables them to be part of something common. Is there a proper patience in having a form of words in conscious abeyance, given that there is no foregoing of their meaning? What of – as we term it – ‘the Lord’s Prayer’ itself in relation to the Creed’s Christology? The parties will be tacitly ‘apart’ from their separate completeness in bringing together what is partial for them both. Does a faith always have to assert its own recognizances before it will relate beyond itself or may there be a right humility in a certain self-abnegation as the very form of ministry?
Clearly there will always be those who think not. They will be right unless the vocation is perceived as such. The place for dogma is not always prior in the things of the Spirit. Nor are faiths necessarily most loyal when they are most assertive. What matters is to read ‘the mind of Christ’, the Christ who was no stranger to controversy yet perceived potential where the right credentials were hidden from normal sight.
And as for traditional controversy between mosque and church, the Qur’ān and Gospel, need it be as obdurate as we have long supposed? A mere postscript is not place for an exhaustive exploration of what sunders. The task has been attempted elsewhere. Let it suffice here to ponder a vital clue in Islamic Du‘ā and join it to be central implication of the Bismillāh, or Invocation of Al-Rahmān Al-Rahīm, ‘the merciful Lord of mercy.’ The clue is the way in which Muslim devotion can make the plea of ‘the Name’ the entire gist of the prayer. Saying: Yā Latīf, ‘O thou kindly One,’ intending this or that circumstance yearning for ‘kindliness’, needs no elaboration, no further wordage. God is being invoked to be who He is by virtue of that Name. This calls for no tedious elaboration. He knows well enough how to be himself, and so vis-à-vis what the pleader has in view.
Hence the admirable brevity of Islamic Du‘ā. It has a certain kinship with the brevity of the most chaste Prayer Book collects, where the theme of adoration is the requisite of the petition so that ascription of praise and plea of soul are in unison. Examples are here, notably from Hirz al-Jawshan. The praying self is cast wholly on divine resources. To these the very ‘Nameability’ of God is the key.
Here we come upon a significance that surely embraces both the Muslim approach to Allah and a Christian’s Christology. This Nameability entails, in some vital sense a divine-human relation. God is known, describable and addressable in human terms. To be sure, the orthodox Muslim theologians had great unease in conceding this, thanks to their intense preoccupation (for the sake of excluding idolatry) with exalting Allah far beyond all human language and the human characterisation it implied. ‘Exalted be He above all that you associate’ was their incessant cry. Thus, in naming Allah they needed to deny that they were significantly doing so.
The dilemma can only be overcome by perceiving that the very transcendence of God admits, contains, includes, this describability. Doubtless the transcendent transcends all that connotes, but does so without cancelling that connotation. Otherwise, it is not only all theology and all faith that are annulled: it is also all worship and all prayer. For if we cannot veritably ‘call’ God we cannot ‘call upon’ Him. Worship has to go – with theology – into the impenetrable silences and that is the end of Islam.
‘His (literally, ‘to him’) are the adorable Names: so call upon Him by them,’ says Sūrah (17:110). That is – in one – the trust of faith and the urge of worship, the affirmative/imperative of Muslim life. God, is His grace, condescends to the realm of human language and – doing so – underwrites a theology in the very contest of enjoining and evoking worship. Such condescending into humanness in that compassionate sense is not such as to be somehow vetoed, queried or disavowed, as if to safeguard a divine unity that it put in jeopardy. For it was that very unity from within which the compassion came, which was – in any and every event – its own safeguard.
Through the divine Names in Islam, Allah is invoked as the One who condescends to human language. How near, then, by these lights, to ‘the word made flesh’ to ‘dwell among us that we might behold glory’? What is Christology but the Self-naming of God presented in human history as ‘truth through personality’ – and that personality in inclusively relevant human situations of dark suffering and redemptive love? To understand the Incarnation in its real dimensions is to learn the ‘Nameability’ of God as having stooped (as in ‘the adorable Names’) not only into human adjectives but into human ‘life-in-writing.’ Unyielding minds may protest it cannot be so, Allah being too remotely great, though the divine Names insist that only in not being remote is the greatness ever known. It might follow that to ‘magnify’ God truly is to find remoteness ever more disqualified. Both happen in ‘the acknowledgement of God in Christ’. This must be the sufficient rationale for any present will to bring into some active and mutual expression the Muslim practice of the divine Names and the Christian measure of ‘the Word made flesh’.
The most frequent pairing of the divine Names – the two in the Islamic Bismillāh – may be seem to enshrine the same clue. For the words Al-Rahmān Al-Rahīm have one RHM root but they are not mere repetition. There is a clear progression quality-in-being qua essential nature, while Al-Rahīm indicates that quality in action, at work in fulfilling operation. If we English-wise – reverse the order we have ‘the merciful (Al-Rahīm) Lord of mercy (Al-Rahmān): the frequent English Translation: ‘The Merciful, the compassionate’ only partly captures the progressive idea of the grammar.
In brief here, the vital point is that ‘who Allah is’ and ‘how Allah relates’ belongs in one. For Christians, it is in ‘God in Christ’ that this oneness in ‘being-in-doing’ most inclusively happens. For their own reasons (which we need to share as issues), Muslims will not normally allow this. Even so, in the ‘space’ of their own Bismillāh, it is possible to set the whole significance of what Christians know as Christology – the theme, central to faith, of that about God which is told in that about Christ and these, like the Bismillah, in the inner sequence prompting us to ‘the knowledge and love of God’. All else in these pages may be said to follow from this.
‘From Senegal to Samarkand’ is no more than a poetic way of saying ‘from West to East’. Extracts here from Leopold Senghor, Senegal’s Christian president for a quarter-century, may serve for a West as far westwards as the Caribbean. The prayers of Dirīnī and of the Naqshbandī devout certainly reached beyond the famed city of Samarkand, a name to join Asia with the Atlantic and the Moroccan Atlas mountains where fellow Sufis had their kindred Zāwiyahs (devotional groups at prayer).
Sources that are so evidently personal will lend themselves more readily to private than to corporate. The intention is rather meditative than liturgical. Even so, the anthology may prove useful in school assemblies or on occasions of shared worship elsewhere, or in the context of informal dialogue where a concluding (or opening) focus of worship is desired.
The Christian tradition of ‘biddings’, whether in gratitude or intercession, finds ready parallel with the Muslim practice of Dhikr, or ‘recollecting’ the divine presence in context. A ‘bidding’ can ‘do’ precisely what ‘recall’ of a ‘Name’ intends – the thought of God and the plea from the soul, in either order. Hirz al-Jawshan, for example, with a ‘O Thou encompassing all’, is phrasing both devotion and desire. God is being sought for his own sake and for the sake of his own power and grace. If we have the will to greet it, we can surely sense the affinity that can exist between Du‘ā and litany.
The sections of Praise, Penitence and Petition justify themselves. All three terms are central to both religions. The sundry Qur’ānic doxologies and celebrations of mercy in external nature and human society are apt enough for Christian use. The Qur’ān’s urging on Muslims of ‘seeking forgiveness from God’ is in line with that scripture’s realism about the reach of human wrong, the callous inhumanity of humans, despite those aspects of the human scene being seen as more sanguine than a radical Christianity can allow. Where – as often – Muslim repentance is overly couched in ‘fear of the Fire’ and minatory ‘frowns’ in that scripture, these have been omitted, the better to concentrate on the inwardness and sincerity of self-reproach – qualities in no way lacking among Sufis, in a riper sense of ‘the fear of the Lord’.
The pages of Petition are meant to kindle a sense of things for which prayer becomes inwardly alerted by imagination as minds in art and literature might shape it. Thus the epistolary greetings of Abu’l ‘Alā al-Ma‘arrī suggest a temper of recollection that translates into taking our own absent friends into the divine presence. If the prayer is well defined as ‘joining with the work of love in the world’, then what that work entails and where it is being pursued in public affairs and private realms become its liability. Where literature has drawn the scene, whether in wistfulness or despair, the will to pray can take its impetus.
The Qur’ān, for example, shows a persistent interest in the womb, in birth as the threshold of temporal being, and in human intercourse as the crowning instance of divine trust. That register around the human embryo, its mystery and crisis, bears strongly on our responding solicitude concerning infidelity, contrived miscarriage, the psychic trauma of the aborting, the reproach and the redemption. All these belong with ‘caring about love in the world’ and we cannot do so without both the accusation and the overcoming in grace.
Petition, too, has to dwell where the needs press – the injustice of ‘law’s delays’ and denials, the homelessness of the refugee, the anxieties of poverty and the blandishments of power. In all the spheres of human urgency, we must find the aspiration that disallows indifference and ventures active expectation. All these the psalmist meant by his ‘waiting on the Lord.’ The ‘waiting’ words suggests not only the hopeful on the lookout but the servant at the ready. In that sense petitionary prayer can energise its cares towards their due fulfillment so that to pray is not to indulge – as otherwise it might be – in a ritual of exoneration, an escape into mere words.
It is intriguing that the Islamic call to Salāh, the summons to the ritual prayer-rite, uses the verbal imperative Hayyā, which might be translated: ‘Look alive’ or ‘Liven ye!’ It is precisely this sense of life, in all its vagaries and imponderables, its tragedies and its benedictions, that petition as its truest is obeying. Penitence is thus bound to be its correlative. For all wrongs in society need to be, in some sense, acknowledged as our own, if we can understand how a presumed innocence can be itself a guilty haven. This is not to be morbidly inauthentic; it is rather to realise that there can be a will to vicariousness when we perceive the devious workings of the inhumanity to which we belong and – in the Qur’ānic words – ‘what the bosoms of men conceal.’
Comparably, the themes of gratefulness are so evidently shareable. When the Qur’ān - reader celebrates the dawn and the fall of night, the rising of the moon and its crescent beauty; the freshening rains and the enduring oasis, there is something participatory as human and not only Islamic. The Biblical text, in psalm and prophet, is not less busy with doxology. There is always something reciprocal between meeting and meaning. To will the former is mutually to embrace the latter. The formula is reversible in that shared meaning fuses relationship. All the more crucial is this possibility, given the sharp and deep dissonance that echo in our histories. Where necessary controversy has fostered alienation, there is the great reason to allow affinities also to assert themselves.
That case is strengthened when we realize that the range of religious vocabulary, the language of prayer, is not limitless. For the fecundity of nature and society in yielding imagery and metaphor by which words work, rich and inventive as it is, admits of no cultural monopoly. Thus it follows that many words and themes recur between religions – light, door, tree, water, lamp, bosom, glory – so that a certain literal kinship exists through all the range of meaning they intend. If not always community, at least elucidation, will relate the users.
Furthermore, inside the broad denominators ‘Muslim’ and ‘Christian’, there are wide differences as to how their terms are read, their vocabularies received. In neither faith are believers unanimous about how they take their confessional meanings. Even, from time to time, within their own individual experience and privacy of mind, they have unresolved issues of integrity. May not that situation suggest a livelier, more open, patience with each other? When ‘congregation’ – Muslim or Christian – means a certain mental ‘segregation’ (and no faith-system is unanimous), miscellaneous ‘wholes,’ as Islam and Christianity purport to be, may the better reckon with each other in the issues their diversities acknowledge. So long as we are cognisant of tension and scrupulous about honesty of mind, the conscious sharing of vocabulary may itself stimulate these qualities. To find a partial consensus in prayer is to give what continues to divide a different temper and a wiser reckoning.
In the words of the title suggested in the preface, ‘A Part in Common Prayer’, the, ‘apart’ – as all prayer must be – is the sense of a shut door and a hallowed space. Here it has only been part of a consciously larger realm of worship, doctrine, tradition and liturgy. It can only be ‘apart’, too, of the historical and contemporary communities that are heir to those antecedent determinants by which they have endured. ‘Parts,’ whether in drama or in life, are only so by dint of ‘wholes’. Yet parts have not seldom been on behalf of wholes in ways that were vicarious towards the future. Initiative does not have to be unanimous in order to be salutary. This wholes have other ‘parts’ and ‘parties’, the more raucous the more ambitious to be monopolist. In being forebearing with one another, we also have to be wisely forebearing in our practice of authority and our discipline of belief.
‘New room for others to turn about in’ was how Eldridge Cleaver of the Back Panther party in the USA described the impact on him of the conversion of Malcolm X, after pilgrimage to Makkah. He turned from the hate-philosophy of the original Black Islam to hope of human community transcending racism. He greeted the uprising of white youth against social forms of white supremacy. It was only, as he said, ‘a ‘tiny place,’ but it was one in which he could ‘attempt a manoeurve of my own’. Such examples can be contagious. ‘Room to turn in’ – the inner meaning of metanoia – is what ‘parties to common prayer’ may afford to one another.
(Courtesy: Focus Vol. 19, Nos 1-2, 1999)