The Beshara Lecture 2016

Ultimately, few things are perhaps more responsible for human misery and strife in the modern world than the embattled state of mistrust and mutual antipathy between three traditions that coexist in the Middle East and which each claim to be direct recipients of divine revelations from God. By the same token, few things could be more important than bringing a reconciliation of mutual understanding and peace between these embattled ‘Abrahamic’ faiths. It can be argued that geo-political, diplomatic and economic solutions will have no lasting effect until old tribalistic rivalries and mutual exclusivities are abandoned and replaced by a realisation of the unity of the truths these traditions hold sacred.

Zionist, Wahhabist and Christian exclusivist fundamentalisms have reached their boiling point lately in catastrophic acts of suicidal terrorist extremism. In this Beshara Lecture I rewind to an era 750 years ago, when the Abbasid Caliphate was brought to an end by the Mongol conquerors of Baghdad, and when Christians were engaged for several centuries slaughtering Muslims and Jews in quest of possession of their scriptural epicentre. In the middle of this period, in the early 13th century, two of the greatest and most prolific visionaries whoever lived appeared at opposite ends of the Islamic world – Muhyiddin Ibn ʿArabi (1165-1240) in Andalusia in the West, and Mowlana Jalaluddin Rumi (1207-1273), on the far borders of Afghanistan in the East. These two towering figures, who around the same time moved towards the heartlands of Islam, may even have met one another in Damascus. They are the greatest exemplars of the mystical, Sufi tradition of Islam. For centuries since, they have been hailed in the Islamic world as the most brilliant mirrors and magnifiers of the inmost truths of the revealed books of Muslim scriptures, and hence of the line of biblical prophecy too. They taught a unitive, inclusive Islam founded on knowledge and love and the perfectibility of human nature by spiritual purification and abandonment of selfishness. It is the ‘other Islam’ little known to the West.

Rumi, Ibn ‘Arabi and other great masters of Jewish and Christian mystical traditions, reconcile the outward differences between the faiths and speak of the unifying and creative power of love that lies deep within human nature. The birth of the potency of transformative love in the form of Jesus is announced in the Gospel of Luke 2:10 and as the Messiah Isa in the Quran 3:45. Almost in the same words the angel of the Lord gives Mary /Maryam the good news. In Luke εὐαγγελίζομαι ὑμῖν χαρὰν μεγάλην ‘I bring you tidings of great joy’ is translated into Arabic by the same verb that is used in the corresponding text of Quran 3:45‘God gives you glad tidings of a word from Him’, namely bashara. In the subtle and poetic teachings of both Christian and Sufi Muslim mystics the birth of divine love in the human heart is magnified and celebrated as something to be known and realised among all humankind.

In this lecture an attempt is made to show how Rumi, of all spiritual teachers, gives perhaps the greatest emphasis to this teaching of the transformative and healing power of love as a divine ‘incarnation’ or self-revelation (tajalli) of God in the human heart. It is a message from a master of the heart to a world that suffers chronic spiritual heart disease.