Six Waves that Transformed the Religion of Peace into Islamism: Genealogy of Militant Islam

Muslims tending to Sufism expressed relief that the revivification of religious thought "saved" the Muslim ummah from the fate of the Western world: worldliness and the bane of empiricism. This feeling of assurance was based upon the assumption of a false dichotomy, an antagonism between reason and revelation. According to the Sufi "reasoning," reason is ill-equipped to grasp ultimate truth, which is religious. This requires a form of awareness that utilizes mystical awareness that transcends mere reason. Few appear to be aware, however, that the "revival" of religious knowledge in Islam took place by jettisoning reasoning. This may appear paradoxical, as the attainment of knowledge requires recourse to reasoning. Revelation reminds us to "use our reason." The effort revived religious knowledge by foregoing empirical knowledge.

The inconsistency in this position may be resolved by recognizing that awareness of reality is attained by spiritual experience that transcends reason if it does not reject it altogether. The challenge is to attain a "balance" between intuition and intellection. If the process of reflection is tilted too far towards intellection or intuition, knowledge may be compromised accordingly. For according to the Sufi explanation, the revivification of religious knowledge is achieved by renouncing the faculty believed to be essential for the attainment of knowledge, reason. If knowledge were to be found across a river, access to knowledge would be provided by reason the way a bridge or a boat provides access to the far bank of the river. There is no reaching knowledge without reason, as there is no getting across a river without a bridge or a boat.

In different words, the revival of religious knowledge in the Sufi sense transpired by discrediting reason using reason and then and abandoning reason itself. But the abandonment of reason proved problematic. How great is the difference between the person that willingly refrains from using his mind in matters of religion from the person that "loses" it? For the sacrifice of reason, entailed by the revivification of knowledge in the Sufi sense consigned the Muslim ummah to an intellectual backwater, from which it is still recovering. The rejection of reason comprised the rejection of the principle of cause and effect, referred to in revelation as the sunna of Allah. Hence, the rejection of causality amounted to a rejection of the sunna of Allah. This is ironic, as rationalists are not infrequently reproached for rejecting the ahadith, allegedly the foundation for the tradition of the prophet. It appears that, by rejecting the principle of causality, Sufis reject a part of what is greater: the sunna of Allah. The followers of tradition appear unaware of the "ripple effects" of the association of the use of reason to understand revelation with kufr. These may be termed the "six waves of folly" in the deterioration of Muslim thought.