If Freud was the father of psychology,
then William James (1842-1910 CE) was clearly the father of the psychology of religion. His first foray into the
psychology of religion was a lecture on “The Will to Believe” to the Philosophical
Clubs of Yale and Brown Universities, published in 1896, in which he makes the argument that the first step in
the faith journey is the willingness to believe because we want to believe. Andrew
Fuller summarizes James’ concept in Psychology
and Religion: “We believe in truth not because of any defensible
intellectual insight we might have into its discoverability, but because we want it with a passion, because we want
to believe that our investigations must continually advance us toward truth”
(1994, p. 3). In a sense, it is this will to believe that
captures the first religious impulse of a Muslim in reciting the shahada or in taking the hand of a Sufi
teacher.
In the Gifford
lectures delivered in Edinburgh in 1901-2, published as his seminal work, The Varieties of Religious Experience,
James provides a phenomenological study of religious experience. He defines
religion as “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their
solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever
they may consider divine “ (1958, p. 42). He makes the case that institutional
religion is fundamentally an attempt to emulate and learn from the personal
religious experiences of an individual. James focuses his research on personal
religion and identifies the full range of states and stages of consciousness
which derive from the religious experience. James differentiates between the
states of the “blue-sky healthy-minded moralist” and the anhedonia and
melancholy of the sick soul, and the four characteristics of the mystical
experience such as its 1) ineffability, 2) the noetic quality with is
concomitant states of knowledge, 3) the transiency, recurrence and sometimes
sustained development of these states and finally, 4) the passivity of these
states when “the mystic feels as if his
own will were in abeyance, and indeed sometimes as if he were grasped and held
by a superior power” (1958, pp. 319-320).
In his chapter on mysticism, he draws on a
translation of an autobiography of Al-Ghazali (1058-1111 CE), citing how this
former jurist-theologian tested the claims of the Sufis by pursuing an ascetic retreat
for five years after he left Baghdad in 1095 CE:
"During
this solitary state, things were revealed to me, which it is impossible either
to describe or to point out. I recognized for certain that the Sufis are
assuredly walking in the path of God. Both in their acts and in their inaction,
whether internal or external, they are illumined by the light which proceeds
from the prophetic source. The first condition for a Sufi is to purge his heart
entirely of all that is not God. The next key of the contemplative life
consists in the humble prayers which escape from the fervent soul, and in the
meditations on God in which the heart is swallowed up entirely. But in reality,
that is only the beginning of the Sufi life, the end of Sufism being total
absorption in God. The intuitions and all that precede are, so to speak, only
the threshold for those who enter. From the beginning, revelations take place
in so flagrant a shape that the Sufis see before them, whilst wide awake, the
angels and the souls of the prophets. They hear their voices and obtain their
favors. Then the transport rises from the perception of forms and figures to a
degree which escapes all expression, and which no man may seek to give account
of without his words involving sin." (1958, p. 338).
James does not consider the social
implications that flow from these kinds of unitive transpersonal experiences
such as the cultivation of social conscience or the needs of the novice to
create a social support system in the quest for the religious experience, as is
the case with the Sufi orders and brotherhoods, where service to humanity is an
essential aspect of spiritual practice. Nor does James examine the efficacy and
enhanced power of spiritual practices within a group, such as congregational
prayer and meditation, to foster profound religious experiences. He does assert
a depth psychological dimension to the revelatory experiences of the Prophet of
Islam: “If we turn to Islam, we find that Muhammad’s revelations all came from
the subconscious sphere” (1958, p. 398) but he does not touch on the full
significance of the social or civilizational mission of the Prophet of Islam as
an aspect of his religious experiences – the revelatory experiences as well as
his ascension, mi’raj, circa 620 CE – all of which had far-reaching consequences
for the moral, social, cultural and political order of humanity. As we will
recall, the mi’raj itself included
encounters with the angel Gabriel, the mythic white steed, the prior prophets
from Adam and Abraham to Jesus, and a mission to bring to the awareness of
humankind the ontological reality of the life within, and the life beyond this
existence.
In
summing up his conclusions to a series of twenty lectures in his seminal work,
James identified five characteristics of the religious life, one of which bears
repeating because it includes the notion “that prayer or inner communion with
the spirit thereof – be that spirit of ‘God’ or ‘law’ – is a process wherein
work is really done, and spiritual energy flows in and produces effects,
psychological or material, within the phenomenal world” (1936, p. 401). This
finding serves as a premise for this inquiry into the psychological
implications of Islam’s daily ritual prayer, considered as one of its five
pillars.
~ Excerpted from the doctoral dissertation by Jalaledin Ebrahim, Ph.D
