Savouring the Essence of Religion

Savouring the Essence of Religion

1989 4 April 8-9 Savouring the Essence of Religion (480) “Islam began as a stranger and it will return to the state in which it began. Glad tidings, then, to the strangers.”

There is a famous hadith, transmitted by Imam Muslim, according to which the Prophet said:

“Islam began as a stranger and it will return to the state in which it began. Glad tidings, then, to the strangers.”

According to Imam Tirmidhi’s version, the Prophet went on to specify who these “strangers” would be: “They will be the ones who rectify those aspects of my Sunnah which have been corrupted after my passing.”

The savouring of the true essence of religion very much depends on the intellectual apparatus of the individuals concerned and the degree of prior familiarity with the subject. It is rather like savouring food. One cannot appreciate its true flavour unless one’s taste buds (sensitive parts of the tongue which convey information about taste to the brain) are healthy, that is, they are unimpaired by ill-health or old age. Sometimes when a new food is tried out for the first time, the taste buds become disoriented, and the true flavour is not registered by the brain. Sometimes it takes time to ‘acquire a taste’, i.e. the taste buds have to be allowed to recover from their temporary disorientation. Similarly, in the ‘savouring’ of a new religion, one’s mental apparatus may be temporarily thrown out of gear due to the unfamiliar ‘flavour’ of the subject; the ‘brain may thus register a false impression, or even no impression at all. This is what happened in the beginning with Islam. Even after a religion has gained acceptance, it may fall into a state of degradation or distortion, because the quality of the intellect applied to it is sadly inferior, or in some way wrongly oriented. It is again like offering gourmet food to insensitive or atrophied taste buds.

When the human approach is wrong, the religion revealed by God and taught by the Prophet, loses its distinctive essence, and its place is taken by other forms of ‘religion’ such as nationalism or ancestor worship. Sometimes it is reduced to being a mere collection of customs and ceremonies, and sometimes it becomes hidden behind a veil of mystery, with all sorts of unlikely things and people being viewed as possessing supernatural qualities and sacred powers of benediction. It is only the high calibre mentality which realizes that these forms of religion are the concoctions of mere human beings, and have nothing divinely inspired about them.

When a man rejects God’s religion out of hand, it is generally because it is a ‘stranger’ to him, just as Islam was in the beginning to early Arab society, but it should only be a question of time and patience on the part of himself and the already converted for this new ‘flavour’ to become familiar to a palate which was only momentarily mislead.