The New Criterion

Jul 05, 2007 10:05 AM

The Meaning of Suffering: Part II

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Roundtable Index: Introduction | Part I: Roth | Part II: Palazzi | Part III: Pearl | Part IV: Yellin | Part V: Guimond | Part VI: Glazov | Part VII: Evanier | Part VIII: Kimball | Part IX: Roth | Part X: Palazzi | Part XI: Pearl | Part XII: Yellin | Part XIII: Guimond | Part XIV: Glazov | Part XV: Evanier | Part XVI: Kimball (Conclusion) |

Sheikh Prof. Abdul Hadi Palazzi, Director of the Cultural Institute of the Italian Islamic Community.

Glazov: Sheikh Palazzi, welcome to our discussion.

As a Muslim cleric and thinker, what would your contribution be to our discussion?

Abdul Hadi Palazzi: When suffering touches us in our most intimate affects, our faith in God is put to trial, and we are compelled to realize that God’s ways are not always easily understandable from a human point of view. We are ready to accept joy as a gift coming from God, but learning to taste sufferance as another kind of gift coming from the same Source means developing our faith and raising ourselves over contingent happenings which touch us in our deep being. From this point of view, sufferance is a mean of Divine pedagogy, an instrument through which God purifies our limited souls; it destroys our ego and help us to learn to say "Thine will, not mine, but always done!". From an Islamic perspective, suffering is not appreciate as such, but for this role in developing our skills. That is the reason why in Islam - differently from what happens in other beliefs - sufferance can always be attributed to created beings, and not to God. God is considered immune from suffering, but He nevertheless extends His compassion to those who suffer, and is close to those who learn to suffer for His sake.

Glazov: Thank you Sheik Palazzi. Let me follow up with you for a moment.

I am of the Christian faith, but I am not sure if I necessarily represent the faith in my own thoughts on this. God gave us free will, so he therefore cannot involve Himself in our affairs. If he did, we wouldn’t be free.

In other words, therefore, when we suffer, it is not because God wants us to suffer, but because He cannot interfere due to His gift of freedom. At the same time, He suffers with us; He feels our pain. This reality is exemplified by the fact that He sent His son to suffer for us. Thus, in terms of innocent suffering, God Himself is innocent yet He also suffered and suffers out of love for us.

Therefore, when we suffer as Christians we also feel empathy from God in the sense that we know that He is with us in our pain because he Himself experienced it for us and with us.

I think my question here is, in the Muslim view, does God also feel pain with us and for us? Does He suffer alongside us? Or did He cause our suffering? Does the reality of free will apply here as well?

In terms of God’s own suffering, in Islam – and correct me if I am wrong -- Jesus is considered to be a Messiah – but not the one us Christians believe Him to be. Islam does not share the belief in the crucifixion. In part, they reject Christ’s death on the cross because they reject that God would ever make Himself powerless to suffer and to be hurt by humans -- which, for us, is one of the most meaningful and inspiring realities of our redemption. Can you touch on this?

Also, Frimet Roth points out that in Orthodox Judaism, questioning God is not only permitted, but encouraged. Is questioning Allah permitted or encouraged in Islam?

Palazzi: In Islam we believe that free will must be balanced with Divine predestination, i.e. with God’s preventive knowledge of everything which happens in good and bad. Moreover, we believe God to be the only Creator, not only of the beginning of creation, but of every change which takes place in His creation. The Prophet Muhammad explained this by saying that "God is the Creator of every agent and of every action." Creation is not - in Islam - something with took place once, at the beginning, but a continuous process. Every creature is annihilated every time it exhales, and created again every time it inhales. One can intend to perform a good or a bad deed, but his deed only comes to existence when God decrees so. Were God not willing to create that deed, no creature could actually do it.

That is the reason why early Muslim scholars explained our belief by saying "God does not compel His creatures to act, and does not permit them to act against His decree."

As about suffering, we do not believe that God can suffer since sufferance itself is the consequence of the presence of what causes harm or of the absence of what is missed, and none of this can apply to the One Who is Self-Sufficient. However, we believe that God can have compassion of those who suffer, and that He is toward His creatures most merciful than a mother is toward her little child.

We also believe that Jesus was a human being and a Prophet, and also that he was the Messiah sent to the Children of Israel. We do not believe neither in his Divine nature, nor in his crucifixion. We abide by a docetist position: the one who was crucified was a person who resembled him, and this created the illusion that the Messiah himself was crucified. This is surely one of the most relevant discrepancies between Christianity and Islam.

Questioning God is encouraged in Islam, since it can become a mean to improve one’s faith.

In the Glorious Qur’an we have the example of two different approaches to the knowledge of God.

In the case of Moses, he is not reflecting upon God or involved in metaphysical reflections. He is simply living his life, travelling with his family thorough the desert when - all of a sudden - he sees a burning fire-brand. Even after seeing it, Moses is not aware of watching a Divine epiphany, but only supposes that its light can help to identify the way to follow, or that fire can be useful for warning. It is only when he approaches the fire-brand that He realizes that God his revealing Himself to Him through it, and this happens without a human contribute, without a preventive search for God.

In the case of Abraham - on the contrary - since his childhood he is fond of metaphysics. Abraham understands that worshipping idols built by human hands cannot be the path of Truth, and goes on searching for the real God. He questions whether his Lord can peradventure be a star, the moon, or the sun, and ends understanding - through his rational faculty - that his Lord is none but the Creator of heaven and earth.

We can distinguish those respective paths by saying that in the case of Moses, God searches for and finds man, while in the case of Abraham the human being searches for and reaches God.

After that, Abraham does not stop questioning the God he found. He reaches the point of asking Him, "Show me how You give life to the dead." When God objects "Do you not believe?" Abraham confirms that he does believe, but wants to see the miracle of resurrection with his own eyes in order to put his heart to rest, i.e. to make his faith stronger."

Glazov: Thank you Sheikh Palazzi.

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