Paradise - one Muslim’s life of search

Desperately Seeking Paradise: Journeys of A Sceptical Muslim
by Ziauddin Sardar
(London: Granta Books, 2005)

‘Islam is wearing a beard, a trench coat and a turban,’ a Sufi sheikh in Konya, the Turkish city where the incomparable Rumi is buried, tells Ziauddin Sardar and launches into a discourse on the importance of symbols in Islam, particularly the symbols of paradise – gardens, rivers of milk and honey, the Throne, the Lote Tree. ‘You make what you will of these symbols,’ says the sheikh.

Sardar, who describes himself as a sceptical Muslim but who is clearly passionately committed to Islam, can make nothing of these symbols. The sheikh tells him, ‘The Master you seek knows not that he is the Master. And he takes no disciples. You must chalk out your own route to paradise.’

Ziauddin Sardar, an engaging, humorous and intelligent writer, tells the story of his physical, mental and spiritual journeys through the many ways to paradise prescribed by different Muslim groups and sects in search of his paradise of an Islam in which ‘intrinsic values combine with freedom to engender beauty and creativity,’ an Islam ‘expressed as an open system flowering with diversity.’

These journeys take him from the literalism of the Tablighi-Jamaat and the Muslim Brotherhood through the mysticism of various Sufi and pseudo-Sufi groups to modern Islamic states such as Iran, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. What does he find?

‘The world of the Muslim mystic’ says Sardar, ‘is selfish…. The world of literalism is dry, dreadful and totally dead. One drowns in Selfhood, the other fries in a medieval mindset – both are fatally flawed, dangerously drunk.’ Most of the Islamic states are deeply depressing in their narrow-minded ideological approach to Islam and their rejection of plurality.

Sardar concludes that the Muslim paradise is not a destination but a way of travelling. ‘Just as we cannot stop living,’ he says, ‘we cannot stop searching for our paradise. But the search is for a continual kind of becoming.’

Those who think they have arrived in paradise are deluded and dangerous. Deluded because one never arrives, dangerous because ‘People with absolute certainty have an absolute passion for not being forgiving’.

Most Muslims think of paradise as a piece of property one can purchase by accumulating the right amount of Islamic deeds: imposing outmoded concepts of the Shariah, banning all varieties of art, literature and culture, killing and being killed in the name of Islam. The accumulation of this supposed wealth has become an end in itself! So the Qur’anic vision of paradise has been turned into an earthly vision of hell: an enclave of bloodbath and bigotry, suppression and severity, censorship and castration. Evil often thrives in those who constantly proclaim “evil doesn’t live here any more”. What could be further from the spirit of the Qur’an, so far removed from its description of paradise?

Sardar takes seriously Al-Ghazali’s view that travel is an essential component of belief. According to Al-Ghazali, knowledge of one’s Self and knowledge of one’s place in the cosmos are acquired through travel. Desperately Seeking Paradise may be framed as a picaresque series of journeys and encounters but it has deeply serious intellectual and spiritual intentions.

What Sardar yearns for is…

A world where intrinsic values combine with freedom to engender beauty and creativity, where Islam is expressed as an open system flowering with diversity. It is the vision of the “earthly paradise” I set out to discover.

As I read the book I couldn’t help think of Ziauddin Sardar’s spiritual journey from a Baha’i perspective. The paradise he is so desperately seeks is to be found in the teachings of the Baha’i Faith and the life and experience of the Baha’i community worldwide. However, those who seek paradise aren’t always willing to seek away from what is familiar to them. In His Book of Certitude, Baha’u'llah warns…

But, O my brother, when a true seeker determineth to take the step of search in the path leading to the knowledge of the Ancient of Days, he must, before all else, cleanse and purify his heart, which is the seat of the revelation of the inner mysteries of God, from the obscuring dust of all acquired knowledge, and the allusions of the embodiments of satanic fancy. He must purge his breast, which is the sanctuary of the abiding love of the Beloved, of every defilement, and sanctify his soul from all that pertaineth to water and clay, from all shadowy and ephemeral attachments. He must so cleanse his heart that no remnant of either love or hate may linger therein, lest that love blindly incline him to error, or that hate repel him away from the truth. Even as thou dost witness in this day how most of the people, because of such love and hate, are bereft of the immortal Face, have strayed far from the Embodiments of the divine mysteries, and, shepherdless, are roaming through the wilderness of oblivion and error.

Like Ed Husain’s The Islamist, Ziauddin Sardar’s Desperately Seeking Paradise offers us an insider’s view of the contemporary challenges facing Islam. It is a must-read for anyone wanting a nuanced account of one Muslim’s life in the modern world. Needless to say, it is only one Muslim’s account and there are many, Muslims and others, who would object to his take on Islam.

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