Common Nightingale
Embodied ideas and divine love
I believe that being a woman has significantly helped me be a better seeker of truth. That’s not because women are somehow more capable of distinguishing between right and wrong or getting down to the heart of any matter. It is simply because, historically, most books were written by men, and therefore, as a woman, it is now easier to realize that any truth expressed by a human author is always embodied. Similar to how it is easier to recognize something as an opinion as opposed to a fact when you hold a different opinion yourself, it is easier to recognize ideas as embodied when they are expressed by a body that is very different from your own.
Take the example of a text of the beloved and influential Islamic scholar Abu Hamid ibn Muhammad al-Ghazali, The Alchemy of Happiness. An uncritical male reader might easily mistake the truth claims expressed in this work as universal and forget that there was ever a body connected to these ideas. But any woman would have to be willfully ignorant not to realize that the text is clearly written by a mortal and unmistakably male body.
For al-Ghazali, it is mostly the chapter on marriage that gives it away. There it becomes clear that, really, when the book speaks of ‘mankind’, the author means mankind. In the chapter on marriage, al-Ghazali describes women as the divinely decreed servants of men and states that a wise man consults women only to do the opposite of what they advise. “In truth,” he says, “there is something perverse in women, and if they are allowed even a little license, they get out of control altogether, and it is difficult to reduce them to order again.” (Claud Field translation, p. 100-101). He claims that the prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, has said that if only polytheism were allowed, women ought to worship their husbands. Wait - what?! The chapter made me feel sick, and in that sickness hid a great blessing: the blessing of a critical eye.
Too often in contemporary Islamic education, we read the works of famed scholars as though their ideas were not embodied; as though their specific historical and cultural context, personal circumstances, gender, class, race, and communities did not shape their texts as much as their specific language did. We detach their person from their words, which we uncritically consume, memorize, and give the label ‘Islamic’. In doing so, it is almost as if we put them on an equal footing with God, as we place their revelations next to the Qur’an on our bookshelves.
Al-Ghazali himself would, I think, have strongly disliked this type of engagement with his ideas. In his works, he repeatedly calls for critical engagement with any truth claims made by human beings, and he himself was very critical of the works of many of his contemporaries and respected predecessors. It seems only fair that we honor his ideas with the same treatment. In that way, when after critical and serious engagement, certain of his words remain insightful, helpful, and truthful to our modern eyes, we truly get to appreciate their message rather than just worship their ink.
After stumbling upon al-Ghazali’s chapter on marriage, I was blessed with a critical eye, and I was reminded that the words I read were far from unquestionably true. It made my engagement with the text much more interesting and genuine. Of course, there is the risk of a critical eye actually being an uncritically hateful eye in disguise. After reading what al-Ghazali had to say about women and our role in the world, it was tempting to simply uncritically disagree with all else he had to say; to cancel all of his authority on the charge of misogyny, and ban his book to the lowest shelf of my bookcase, or worse, my closet. But a critical eye does not disagree for the sake of disagreeing. A critical eye provides insight for a mind engaged in an embodied search for truth. A critical eye recognizes that sometimes lessons may be true, even when a teacher is still learning them himself. And other times, words may be dark, even when their author is luminous.
And so my eye found lots of beauty and truth in al-Ghazali’s words. I learned much from the engagement with his text and in many ways it made me feel like a small, little reader in the presence of a wise giant. But there were also parts that my critical eye simply disagreed with.
In the last chapter of The Alchemy of Happiness, al-Ghazali discusses the topic of the love of God. He writes, “The love of God cannot take possession of a man’s heart till it be purified from love of the world, which purification can only be effected by abstinence and austerity.” (p. 113). He goes on to cite a story from the time of the prophet David, peace be upon him. In it, we are told of a man from the Israelites who prayed every night. One night, he noticed a bird singing beautifully in a tree. He then decided to pray under that tree to have the pleasure of listening to that bird during his prayers. As a result, God instructed David to tell him, “You have mingled the love of a melodious bird with the love of Me; your rank among the saints is lowered.”
The story reminded me of the story of the Nightingale in The Conference of the Birds, a 12th-century narrative poem by the famous Persian Muslim poet Farid ud-Din Attar. In The Conference of the Birds, thirty birds set out on a journey to meet the King of Birds, a mysterious being called the Simorgh. The journey of the birds is a beautifully constructed metaphor for the spiritual path to God. In the beginning of the story, we are told that the Nightingale refuses to set out on the quest, because he is too deeply in love with his beloved rose to ever be parted from it.
“My love is for the rose; I bow to her;
From her dear presence I could never stir.
If she should disappear the Nightingale
Would lose his reason and his song would fail,” (Davis and Darbandi translation, p. 46)
It is true that sometimes we come to adore the spectacle of shadows of this world in such a way that we forget to seek the light that produces them. But why must we cease to love the shadows in order to seek the light? Instead, I would argue that if we truly love the shadows, they will inevitably lead us to the light. After all, isn’t it the light that grants us our sight and creates the play of shadows to begin with?
It is not love that is dangerous to the seeker of truth, it is idolization. The Nightingale was not prevented from seeking the King by his love for the rose but by his idolization of it. The man in the story would have had a problem not if he was praying with a bird but rather if he was praying to a bird.
My problem with the idea that “the love of God cannot take possession of a man’s heart till it be purified from love of the world” is that it separates God from His own creation. It echoes Christian rhetoric in which “the flesh” is seen as inherently bad. But as we turn away from this inherently evil world and turn towards God, what is it we are turning to? The world is all around us, wherever we turn, and our bodies do not disappear when we pretend they are not there. How can we rid ourselves of our bodies without also losing our minds? Without hearts, how are we to love God? How are we to praise Him without our tongues?
In my first post on this platform, I wrote that I started birdwatching because I was taught that I cannot love what I do not know. This teaching poses a real problem, because there is no way that I can ever truly know God. The act of knowing necessitates two entities: a knower and a known. The Qur’an teaches us that God is uniquely one, beyond all duality, and as such, inherently beyond my knowledge (Qur’an 112:1). God is incomparable to anything I know (Qur’an 112:4). As such, I cannot love God like I can love a person or love a Nightingale unless I objectify God. Unless I reduce the Oneness that is God into the duality that is His creation. Unless I turn ‘God’ into an idol.
What, then, does it mean to love God? I think it simply means to love. To be filled with gratitude and overflowing kindness, with morality and light. To be consumed by a love that does not have a beginning or end and overflows into a love of all, into patience and care. A kind of love that does not exclusively limit itself to an idolized object, objectified person, or idolized objectification of ‘God’, but simply is.
To love ‘God’ is human. To simply love is divine.
Seen as such, the love of God cannot take possession of a heart that is not filled with love of the world as God intended it to be. Not with a desire to subjugate the world or to possess it, but with a deep gratitude for it and a wish to see it thrive as it was meant to. In that way, the rose becomes not the obstacle of the Nightingale, but rather its guide. In that way, the one who prays in harmony with the songs of the birds becomes not “lower in rank amongst the saints,” but rather knows that any true saint could not care less about ranks.
We need to re-examine what we mean when we say ‘love’. Do we mean objectification? Desire? Control? Idolization? In that case, I am inclined to agree with al-Ghazali’s words.
But if we have any intention to love divinely, I think we should aim to reach closer to James Baldwin’s definition of love. He said, “The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love - whether we call it friendship or family or romance - is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light. Gentle work. Steadfast work. Life-saving work in those moments when life and shame and sorrow occlude our own light from our view, but there is still a clear-eyed loving person to beam it back. In our best moments, we are that person for another.”
In line with his definition, love is the search for light and the attempt to reflect and magnify it wherever we find it. It is this kind of love that inspired the thirty birds of Attar’s poem to seek their King, the Simorgh. And it is this kind of love with which they were fulfilled when they met the Simorgh. After a long and strenuous journey, they finally saw the Simorgh at a lake, as they were faced with their own reflection. In a masterful play of language, the word ‘Simorgh’ means nothing more than thirty (si) birds (morgh). The Divine Sovereign these birds had been searching for, had all this time been in their midst, searching along with them. The Divine had been closer to them than they themselves had been. As the Qur’an teaches us in Surah Qaf, the fiftieth chapter, “Indeed, We created humankind and know what their souls whisper to them. We are closer to them than their jugular vein” (Qur’an 50:16).
God is unlike anything we know, but we are also taught that God sustains all that we know (Qur’an 112:2). It is God Who teaches the birds their songs, and grants us the ears to hear them. It is God Who creates love in our families, relationships, and communities. Those things we love in our beloveds are but reflections of the Divine. It is even God Who created our forgetfulness so we may remember, and Who created darkness so there may be light. It is God Who created injustice, so justice may be known, and God Who created falsehood, so we may know the truth.
So I sit with sincere gratitude for al-Ghazali’s chapter about marriage. I hate the chapter, don’t get me wrong. But I love it, for it shows me what I love, like a lie can point you towards the truth, and the night sky is the birthplace of the light of the stars.
May we always be mindful of our bodies and of the fact that all knowledge is embodied. May our love for God show not as arrogance, ingratitude, or harshness, but simply as love. And may we always love the Nightingale, for if the Qur’an tells us the prophet David sang his hymns with the birds (Qur’an 21:79), how could we but wish to follow in his footsteps?