A Comment on El-Affendi’s Article, "Mahmoud Taha: Heresy and Martyrdom"

Critique & Evaluation

Under the above title, El-affendi honed his mind to put down his main objections against the Republican thought. He wrote, (It is clear from the proceeding that there are many of Taha’s thought which the orthodox will find troubling, beginning with the last point where paradise is not an alternative to earthy life but a continuation of it. Then there is his claim that not only can man become one with God, but he can become God, and therefore become a law unto himself, with no need to observe any religious prohibitions or taboos. Such views were naturally found outrageous by the orthodox, including the Sufis, some of whom could have become his allies). The former statement poses two questions. First, why didn’t El-affendi support his serious allegations with excerpt from Taha’s books? Second, if Taha’s thought is troubling to the orthodox Muslims does that necessarily mean it is not true? Ustadh Mahmoud did not say that paradise is not alternative but continuation to the earthy life, but he explained that it is not the end of the human journey. Our ultimate goal is neither hell nor heaven but God. This is explicitly stated in the Qur’an: “And that the final end is unto thy Lord” (53:42). And because God is infinite He is not confined within space ‘heaven’ or time ‘day of Judgment’. We could only meet Him spiritually beyond earth and heaven. This is why Ustadh Mahmoud did not consider heaven the end as stated in the traditional Islamic thought.
Ustadh Mahmoud never claims that man can become one with God. In fact, he stated the opposite.He said man cannot be unified with God as he is limited and God is unlimited. However, when he stated that man will be God he made that clear as meaning developing towards the perfection of God without stopping. (The goal of the slave in Islam is to achieve the perfection of God, and the perfection of God is infinite. God says, “ Man has nothing except his own achievement. What he achieves he shall meet. Then he shall receive the fullest payment. And to your Lord is the ultimate goal” ’53: 39-42’. This means that God is the purpose of the whole endeavor. As stated above progress to God is not through traveling distances but rather through the longing of the slave to achieve the qualities of the God. God say, “Oh man you are toiling along towards your Lord and you shall meet him” ’84:6’. Whether you want to meet Him or not. And where shall this meeting be? Is it on earth or in heaven? God said, “ I am neither contained in my earth nor in my heavens, but rather contained in the heart of my true slave”. Thus one meets Him within one’s self and such meeting shall be achieved by Him and not be the individual human being. To this effect the prophet said: ‘Adopt the qualities of God, my Lord are on straight path’ God also says, “Be of the Lord because you teach the Book and because you study [it]’ ‘3:39’).
When El-affendi tried to prove that Taha said that man will be God, he translated a quotation as follows (Here, the heart bows, forever, at the threshold of the first stage of servitude. Then the servant is no longer in the complete grip of fate, but with complete free will; that is because complete obedience to God has raised him to status of nobility, handing him over to the freedom of choice ; he has obeyed God until God obeyed him in compensation. He becomes alive though God’s life, and in possession of God’s knowledge, God’s will and God’s power. He becomes God.) El-affendi stopped here, and did not complete the rest of the quotation so as to reach a conclusion that he already believes. So he wrote immediately after that, (When a person ascends to this level, religious laws no longer apply to him/her.) I translated the same text as follows, “Just here the heart prostrates, and forever, at the door of the first stage of servitude. At that time, the slave is no longer dragged by predestination but he is rather free; as determinism has reached him the status of honor and handed him over to the free choice. He has obeyed God until God obeyed him in reciprocity for what he did. He becomes living the life of God, knowing the knowledge of God, willing the will of God, capable the capability of God and becomes God. Yet God has no shape for man to be, nor end for man to reach. His fortune of all that, is continuing to be by renewing his life of feeling and his life of intellect every moment in accordance with God’s description of Himself, “ Every day He is in a new affair”. This is the objective of worship. The prophet summed it up in his advice, ‘ Adopt the morals of God; my God is on the straight path’ and God said, “Be of the Lord because you teach the Book and because you study [it]” (3:39).”
El-affendi wrote: (Taha’s confrontations with the orthodox religious establishment was a straightforward issue: the traditionalists rejected his claim of authority to override accepted dogma and practice on the basis of personal communication with God, for that amounted to declaring oneself a prophet. But his conflict with the Sufis, including the group which masterminded his demise, was more complex. For Sufism does accept the possibility of direct communication with God, and many renowned Sudanese Sufis had regularly challenged the authority of ulama , including a sixteenth century ancestor of Taha, Sheikh Muhammad al-Hamim, who defied the judge of the day by marrying two sisters and exceeding the limit of four wives). This statement is full of mistakes. Taha did not ask the traditionalists to accept his call because he has direct communication with God, but because they failed to refute his argument logically. In addition, if someone claims personal communication with God that does not mean he claims prophecy. God teaches pious people by throwing knowledge into their hearts. God says, “And fear God, God teaches you, and God has knowledge of everything” (1:282). The other mistake is that Muhammad al-Hamim was not one of the ancestor of Taha. So there is no way that, the insinuations of El-affendi that Taha has inherited from him the tendency to defy Islamic laws, could be true. I have corrected this before when Dr. Mahammed Mahmud raised it, but it seems that instead of the correction El-affendi is fond of sticking to the fault.
El-affendi wrote (However, his vision suffers from three main problems: theoretical, ethical and spiritual. Theoretically, his views are based on a hotchpotch of amateur physics, amateur anthropology, amateur philosophy and amateur economics among others. In his writings, he makes sweeping claims about the findings of whole disciplines without quoting a single reference or even mentioning a name). Then he said (This is deeply problematic since he often builds the whole edifice of his theory on such causal claims “as in his 1960 book Al-Islam, where his proposed ‘spiritual experimentation’ is entirely premised on the claim that the whole physical universe is reducible to –and could be explained in reference to- energy”).
Like many intellectuals, El-affendi has separated locked rooms in his mind for physics, anthropology, philosophy and other disciplines. When he saw all of them unified in one scientific discourse he was astonished. Instead of admiring the new knowledge, and trying to comprehending it, he considered that like a mutton stew with different mixed vegetables. If El-Affendi had worship God properly enough he would have achieved part of the internal unification that enables him to approach seeing the existence as a unity. What El-affendi said about Ustadh Mahmoud not quoting a single reference or mentioning a single name is completely false. We need no other evidence, than the same example brought up by El-affendi himself. In the book Al-Islam Ustadh Mahmoud mentioned the name of the Egyptian Scientist Dr. Ahmed Zaki and quoted a long paragraph from his book Maa Allah Fi Allsamaand in that quotation a statement of Einstein was put under his name. If El-affendi had read and perceived that paragraph, he would have known that everything in the universe is composed of electrons, protons and neutrons. If a nuclear fission erupted in any of these atoms the result would only be energy. So the conclusion that reduced the entire universe to energy which El-affendi ignorantly denied is scientifically and religiously correct.
El-affendi said ( Ethically, Taha faces the dilemma of all modern Muslims ‘liberals’ who cannot accept the right of Muslims societies to govern themselves, and advocate what I have elsewhere called ‘guardianship of liberal’ “in contrast to wilayat al-faqih –the guardianship of the religious scholars”. This leads to stark self-contradiction. For example, Taha rightly and courageously challenged the decision by Parliament to ban the Communist Party in 1965, and cited this in supporting Nimeiri’s coup against what he termed ‘civilian dictatorship’. However, when Nimeiri banned all political parties, including the Communist Party and Taha’s own party the archliberal did not utter a single word of protest).
Taha does not face any dilemma, as he never said that Muslims cannot rule themselves or they need the guardianship of the liberal elites. He has been always against any kind of guardianship even if it comes within the package of Shari’a laws such as the rule of the Caliphate. Nevertheless, the dilemma is facing El-affendi and many intellectuals within the MBs party as they claim democracy and liberalism, and at the same time, they call for the rule of Shari’a laws that state the guardianship of an individual who is the Caliphate. Taha challenged the decision of dissolution of the SCP under a democratic state, which by that and other deeds, was transferring into civilian dictatorship. In addition, it was trying to impose by force a false Islamic constitution to combine between the temporal and religious authorities. When May conducted a coup it was expected to ban all the parties but it was still, at the beginning, better than those who delude people in the name of God. When May adopted the same discourse of its opponents and tries to make Islamic state Taha opposed it. So who is the consistent and who is the inconsistent?!
El-affendi wrote (Spiritually and theologically, Taha’s position posed the most serious problem. His notion that the believer, by immersing himself in the Qur’an and engaging in spiritual exercises of fasting and seclusion, could receive ‘revelation’ poses a serious challenge about what happens if different individuals receive conflicting revelations. More fundamentally, what is the mechanism of determining when a revelation is authentic as opposed to a mere hallucination? This is not just a theoretical problem, since throughout Islamic ‘and Sudanese’ history, many claimants of ‘Mahadist’ and other missions have emerged).
El-affendi would have made it easy to himself if he defined the word, ‘revelation’. Basically revelation means God reveals knowledge to the heart of the pious believer. This is the essence of our contact with Him. By denying it, El-affendi is denying the relation between the human being and His creator. What is what El-affendi is refusing is for anyone to claim prophecy. Prophecy is another type of revelation, in which knowledge is carried through the angel Gabriel to the chosen prophets. This type of revelation had been concluded with Prophet Mohammed –peace be upon him-but other ways of revelation such as knowing by direct God’s inspiration are still going on. God’s revelation can also be for other creatures. God says, “And the Lord revealed unto the bees, saying: Take unto yourselves of the mountains, houses and of the trees, and of what they are building” (16:68). Revelations cannot be contradictory, as El-affendi wrongly mentioned, as they are from the same source. But some people can lie about them. Because of these liars El-affendi wants us to decline those with genuine revelations. Jesus Christ –peace be upon him- said, ‘Beware of the lying prophets! They said: how can we know them? He said: by their fruits you know them’.