Beware Of Confining Yourself To A Particular Belief.......
By
Sumit Paul, New Age Islam
19September
2022
“Beware of
confining yourself to a particular belief and denying all else, for much good
would elude you- indeed, the knowledge of reality would elude you.” The great
scholar, mystic and exegete Ibn Arabi's famous statement is the need of the
hour, precisely, the need for the religiously condescending followers (regardless
of their faiths; not just Muslims) to imbibe its spirit in toto.
Remember,
reality is too vast and tremendous to be restricted to one belief rather than
another. In Firdausi's ' Shahnama ' one comes across a long couplet in
Persian which connotes that sticking to one belief is tantamount to seeing
one's own village only. It's like reading just one book and walking on the same
path till one dies. Once a 'scholar' of Islam came to meet Rumi. The great
mystic asked him how many books and scriptures did he read? “Only Quran, “pat
came the answer. Rumi told him, “Your knowledge is limited, vision is impaired,
perception is flawed and understanding is skewed. Meet me after reading a few
more books and augmenting your mental canvas."
Rumi's
advice applies to all of us. The monomania of one's belief system, the idiocy
in believing that his/her way is the highway, my faith is better than yours, my
god is superior to yours, I'm a Sanatani, you're a Muslim and all that
fiddlesticks must come to an end.
When we
browse through a plethora of beliefs, we comprehend the incompleteness and
limitations of each belief and realize that the Ultimate Truth comprises a
number of partial truths (Poorn Satya Abhipretam Ardha Satyam). It's
akin to six blind men perceiving six different parts of an elephant and
interpreting them. They're all right from their restricted perspective of
reality, known in Logic as Perception of a Fractured Ambit (PFA). But at the
same time, they're all wrong in a larger spectrum of the complete truth.
This is
exactly the problem of Muslims, Christians, Hindus, among others. All these
followers possess just a limb of the whole body of the Truth but erroneously
think that they've the complete and comprehensive wisdom.
Any belief
is a sliced piece of the Whole. In fact, a belief is a mere leaf of the entire
tree. A tree consists of branches, leaves, trunk and roots. Until we assimilate
all its parts, the perception of a tree remains elusive.
Holding on
to only one belief engenders a truckload of negativity and rancour. This makes
us patronising and outright pejorative. If Muslims and Christians understand
that their Islam and Christianity are insignificant particles in the cosmos of
truth, no Christian will ever dare convert others and no Muslim will try to
proselytize a Kafir to ' Allah's Deen. '
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A regular columnist for New Age Islam, Sumit Paul
is a researcher in comparative religions, with special reference to Islam. He
has contributed articles to world's premier publications in several languages
including Persian.
URL: https://newageislam.com/spiritual-meditations/confining-belief-rumi-ibn-arabi/d/127977
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