If Answer to Job brings Judaeo-Christianity into a life focus through God’s need to create the historicity of Jesus as a Prophet, who became Judaism’s greatest spiritual gift to the outside religious world as a whole, it also brings issues and concepts forward of comparative interest to Islam.
Jung demonstrates throughout Answer to Job a Protestant Christian position in that Job sees and faces God alone without a mediator or priest. Islamic learned men in religious matters, the ulama, have an advisory position associated particularly with religious law which they have earned in their community, but they do not act as a direct intermediary between those who worship and their God, Allah. However fierce their religious law-making may become within certain Muslim groupings, they are not like intermediary priests. Like Protestant Christians, Muslims are their own priests using faith, loyalty to religion and its service in the community as essential precepts.
Islam, however, does not recognize a secular world as does Christianity, but considers all areas of life sacred and a part of the divine. Allah is AlMuhit, the All-Embracing, a name God has given Himself.
Man’s centrality is essential in Islam. The human heart is asserted to reflect the names and attributes of God.
Man alone of all created beings and things is situated directly beneath the Divine Axis. It is for this reason and only for this reason that he can be said to reflect totality in the mirror of his innermost heart, and it is for this reason and only for this reason that he qualifies as the viceroy of God on earth and according to a hadith [a saying directly attributed to the Prophet Muhammad, blessings and peace be upon Him], ‘Allah and His angels, together with the inhabitants of the heavens and the earth—even the ant in its hole, even the fish—invoke blessings upon whomsoever teaches what is good.’
(Eaton 1985:369)
Islam sees man as both vicegerent and slave to Allah, however. Man may be vicegerent in that he has a gift of knowledge sufficient to know aspects of the Reality, and with the power of speech man stands alone as Allah’s interlocutor. Thus Islam believes man to be a synthesis from which no element is excluded; man is a mirror of God.
But where Islam understands so well the position of Job during his extreme difficulties is that for the Muslim he is not only Allah’s potential viceroy but
also his submitting slave, and here, with the latter attribute, Islam teaches the other side of man’s condition.
Islam sees man as a creature of dust or clay, a nothingness before the overwhelming splendour of the Real—impotent before Omnipotence, a little thing (brother to the ant) who walks briefly upon the earth from which he was moulded, vulnerable to a pinprick and destined soon to be seized upon and taken to Judgment. He is a slave whose highest achievement is to obey without question his Master’s Will or (in more esoteric terms) to rid himself of everything that might appear to be ‘his’, so that the Divine Will may operate through him without impediment. Any good that he may do comes from elsewhere. He can take no credit for it since it did not originate with him. Only the evil that he does is his to claim and possess as his own. Knowledge and virtue, if they are reflected in his being, are a loan from his Creator. So too are the senses, through which he perceives the theatre of his experience but which may be taken from him at any moment.
(Eaton 1985:359)
These two sides of man interpenetrate in the Muslim view. Mastery is dependent on the clear mirror of the slave. The theologian al-Ghazzali (d. 1111) believed that everything, including the human being, has ‘a face of its own and a face of its Lord; in respect of its own face it is nothingness, and in respect of the face of its Lord it is Being’ (al- Ghazzali 1983:64–5).
This two-sided way of human seeing makes man a bridge as meetingpoint. The human heart is seen by Islam as the barzakh (isthmus) which both unites and separates the divine and the earthly, the ‘two seas’.
Job learns through his destiny that any good he has done has come from a Higher Source. Everything is on loan from his Creator. Job’s example teaches the Jews this lesson in the Old Testament and makes Christ as Prophet an essential historical happening, to bring God to man again, the task each prophet carries for God. If Job presages a logos between God and man that demands a Christ, so, too, the earlier prophets beginning with Adam were to give divine guidance to mankind on its journey, as was Muhammad, blessings and peace be upon Him, to culminate, seal and complete as Final Messenger the circle of historical prophets in the Islamic view.
In Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious, each person carries primordial and archaic pre-structural psychological potentials which when raised to ego consciousness connect the primordial image of ancient man to the whole of selfhood in contemporary man. So, too, in Islamic belief there is a similar awareness and importance given to the primordial. In discussing the particular way Islam sees its Prophet, Muhammad, blessings and peace be upon Him, Schuon (1979:102) explains this with mastery:
The Prophet as Norm is not only the Whole man (al-insan al-kamil) but also the Ancient Man (al-insan al-gadim). Here there is a sort of combination of a spatial with a temporal symbolism; to realize the ‘Whole’ or ‘Universal’ man means to come out from oneself, to project one’s will into the absolutely ‘Other’, to extend oneself into the universal life which is that of all things; while to realize the ‘Ancient’ or ‘Primordial’ man means to return to the origin which we bear within us; it means to return to eternal childhood, to rest in our archetype, in our primordial and normative form, or in our theomorphic substance.
There is an interesting comparative realization when considering the Prophet of Islam and the Prophet of Christianity. Islam submits to its Prophet, while Christians believe in their Prophet. In Islam it is the submission of Muhammad, blessings and peace be upon Him, as he was unlettered and without education that guarantees he added nothing to the authenticity of the Holy Qur’an in terms of human knowledge. ‘But the perfect scribe, who misses no syllable of what is dictated to him and who is, so to speak, all ear, is also habib Allah (the beloved of God), just as Adam was most dear to God’ (Eaton 1985:362). Muhammad, blessings and peace be upon Him, is thus a perfect receptacle and also a model of perfect receptivity to Allah.
The imitation of the Prophet of Islam is different from the spiritual imitation of Christ. This is because Muhammad’s life is known in great detail and is humanized by every archetypal experience natural man may encounter. Christians must imagine what Jesus might have done in certain circumstances, as the historical record of His life is so sparse. With Muhammad, blessings and peace be upon Him, often a description of a similar situation to the believer’s will exist in Muhammad’s life which can be imitated more or less directly. If Islam exhibits a passivity or ‘slavehood’ to what is above, the complement to this is full activity within the world below as each can receive it. This implies effort and struggle (jihad) wherever the obligation is perceived to require this.
Both Christianity and Islam agree that in the imitation of the Prophets, it is the inner incorporation within a person’s central religious concept of man that achieves the sacred as seen in the Prophet’s mould of personality. There is here a potential understanding of deep complementary consistencies within aspects of the Christ and of Muhammad, widely contrasting but historically related as models of perfection in Prophethood.
In Islam to attempt to enter into the mould of the Prophet is to enter the very essence of the Holy Qur’an; the Prophet’s nature was the nature of the Holy Qur’an. It could not be stated that all of the New Testament of the Holy Bible directly describes or reveals the exact nature of the Christ. Therefore piety in the face of ‘unknowingness’ of Christ’s actual nature is the choice of many Christians.
In Jung’s Protestant Christianity, as in Muslim Islamic belief, man and woman represent God in the dimension of the world even as they show the
world before God to be partly as human beings are. In the sense of one example, Job fulfilled this task of speaking to God, revealing himself honestly in carrying the worship of one God to a fullness of heart and of intention. With suffering, Job became a prototype of the God-fearing, Godserving, God-loving man and a model for every person.
In Islam, the heart and the intellect become divinized in the love of Allah and potentially one in Unity.
When we speak of the Heart-Intellect we mean the universal faculty which has the human heart for its symbolical seat but which, while being ‘crystallised’ according to different planes of reflection, is none the less ‘divine’ in its single essence.
(Schuon 1959:95)
The single essence of monotheism is the final and only Essence of God. To aspire towards God with fervent intent is to become what one is in Reality. ‘Wa ma tawfigi illa bi’ Llah’—our success comes only through God. This is the essence of Job’s experience, and it harmonizes profoundly with Jung’s concept of the Self as the unknowable totality of the unconscious as it gradually becomes more conscious to man, to woman and to child.
REFERENCES
Eaton, C.G. (1985) ‘Man’, in Islamic Spirituality ed. S.H.Nasr, London: SCM Press Ltd. al-Ghazzali, Abu Hamid (1983) The Jewels of the Quran, trans. M.Abul Quasem, London
and Boston: Kegan Paul International.
Goodman, L.E. (trans.) (1977) Rambam—Readings in the Philosophy of Moses
Maimonides, New York: Schocken Books.
Jung, C.G. (1952) Answer to Job, London: Ark Paperbacks. Schuon, F. (1959) Gnosis: Divine Wisdom, London: John Murray. ——– (1979) Understanding Islam, London: Allen & Unwin. Winnicott, D.W. (1971) Playing and Reality, London: Tavistock.