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satyagraha/i'tisaam

It is often mistakenly assumed that Mahatma Gandhi's notion of satyagraha is indigenous to Hinduism. It is not. Gandhiji was a disciple and interpreter of Leo Tolstoy; instead of deriving his commitment to non-violence from his inherited religious tradition, the Mahatma attempted to introduce the Tolstoyan doctrine into Hinduism by "domesticating" it with a newly coined Sanskrit term.

According to Gandhi, "satyagraha is literally holding on to Truth and it means, therefore, Truth-force. Truth is soul or spirit. It is, therefore, known as soul-force. It excludes the use of violence because man is not capable of knowing the absolute truth and, therefore, not competent to punish [--this is a variation on a Tolstoyan argument]. The word was coined in South Africa to distinguish the non-violent resistance of the Indians of South Africa from the contemporary 'passive resistance' of the suffragettes and others. It is not conceived as a weapon of the weak" [M. K. Gandhi, Non-Violent Resistance (Satyagraha), Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc. (2001), 3].

This explanation is quite interesting because it calls to mind a famous passage from the Qur'an that Gandhi may well have had in mind when he coined the term. It must be recalled that many of the South Asians living and working in South Africa and subject to the voting rights curb enacted into law by the Natal Legislative Assembly were Muslim.

The Qur'anic passage that the term "satyagraha" calls to mind is this:

Hold tight the rope of God and be united; do not split up into factions but recall the blessings of God upon you. When you were enemies, God bound your hearts together and you became brothers by His grace. You were poised on the edge of the pit of Hell but God drew you back from it. Thus did He make clear to you his Signs; so perhaps you may be guided [Q. 3: 103, my translation].

The Arabic imperative in the passage that translates as "hold tight" comes from the triliteral root '/s/m. This root has come down to modern standard Arabic with a variety of meanings: to hold back, restrain, curb, check, prevent, hinder; preserve, guard, safeguard, defend. The particular form that the Qur'an employs in this instance is VIII, which has the sense of clinging onto something (such as, in verse 103, "the rope of God"). It also retains the sense of taking shelter or refuge, to guard or preserve and, in modern usage, may signify the occupation of a building as occurs in a work stoppage or sit-in strike--important "weapons" in the Gandhian arsenal. It may also be used in the sense of resisting temptation.

The Qur'anic i'tisaam therefore conveys a sense of strenuous effort as opposed to the passivity that Gandhi wished to avoid when he coined satyagraha and attempted to persuade his Muslim admirers to adopt it. It also imports the sense of a united front against oppression and the conversion of enemies into friends.

i'tisaam is therefore a cardinal Tolstoyan principle of the ascetic lovers of humankind who embrace the Islamic vision of Nizami Ganjavi: the Majnuniyya.

The Islamic Vision of Nizami Ganjavi

Qays ibn al-Mulawwah (d. 688) was a poet of Najd--a region of the Arabian Peninsula renowned for its Bedouin poets. It is not as an historical figure, however, that ibn al-Mulawwah arrests our attention, but as the legendary unrequited lover of the equally legendary Layla: the poet has come down to us as the Mad One, al-Majnun.

"In the rhapsodies of oral traditionists and storytellers (rawis) from Umayyad times to the present day," writes Zia Inayat Khan, "Majnun features as an endearingly pathetic antihero crushed between the claims of society and the claims of the heart" (Preface to the 1997 edition of R. Gelpke's translation of Nizami Ganjavi's epic of Islamic pietism, The Story of Layla and Majnun, xx).

Nizami collected the oral traditions about the star-crossed lovers that were in current circulation during his lifetime and committed them to the immortality of Persian verse in the year 1188 C.E. In so doing, he brought to the fore the religious character that the tales had acquired through their long phase of oral elaboration and refinement in Muslim societies. In Nizami's hands, Majnun's "madness" is, in fact, the piercing sanity of one who refuses to accept the world as it is: a violent place, riven by the Satanic exigencies of fear and greed. Instead, Majnun embraces compassion for all living things: friend and foe, human and non-human alike.

Contemporary American culture, predicated on a life-style littered with cheap luxury goods obtained through the systematic impoverishment of foreign others and given over to base amusements of violence and sexual exploitation is incapable of absorbing the wisdom and religious insight with which Nizami endowed his telling of this traditional tale. Majnun the ascetic, Majnun the pacifist, Majnun the pietist--all present in Nizami's epic--are repressed in the cultural memory. What remains is the distorted image of Majnun overcome with desire: the typical American consumer incapable of saying "no" to his own insatiable wants for creature comforts.

The Islamic vision of Nizami Ganjavi is nothing less than a litmus test for the spiritual estate of the reader. Few bother to approach it and fewer still can read it with profit. By rights, Nizami's epic ought to be the central text of our time; instead, the central text remains T. S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men"--though, despite its centrality, Eliot's poem amounts to little more than social commentary.

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

Liberalism and Imperialism

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