The Psychology of Gratitude in Al-Hamd

To follow up on the excerpt from Hillman's "The Thought of the Heart," it may be useful to ponder some of the ideas mentioned in the Introduction by Robert A. Emmons and Michael E. McCullough, editors of an anthology on "The Psychology of Gratitude":

" A number of contemporary trends have emerged that have helped to make this a propitious time for a volume on gratitude. First, the positive psychology movement (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000) has directed attention toward human strengths and virtues - those inner traits and psychological processes that most cultures, philosophies, and religions have commended as qualities that fit people for living in the world. Gratitude is a virtue, the possession of which enables a person to live well, and therefore must receive a hearing in any comprehensive treatment of the topic. The positive psychology movement has also called increased attention to pleasant emotional states or to what Ben Ze'ev (2000) has referred to as the "sweetest emotions": happiness, joy, love, curiosity, hope, and gratitude. German theologian Dietrich Bonhoffer (1967) wrote, "In ordinary life we hardly realize that we receive a great deal more than we give, and that it is only with gratitude that life becomes rich" (p. 370). Psychologists who have aligned themselves with positive psychology are quite interested in those psychological propensities that lead to a rich life, and several contributors to this volume maintain that gratitude is one of those propensities.

Second, there is a renewed interest among social scientists in people's religious and spiritual lives. The roots of gratitude can be seen in many of the world's religious traditions. Thus, interest in personal manifestations of religion and spirituality may transport the scientist into the realm of gratitude. In the great monotheistic religions of the world, the concept of gratitude permeates texts, prayers, and teachings. The traditional doctrine of God portrays God as the ultimate giver. Upon recognition of God's outpourings of favor, humans respond appropriately with grateful affect, and gratitude is one of the most common emotions that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam seek to evoke and sustain in believers. The Hebrew Bible is replete with the motif that man owes God gratitude for life, health, and sustenance. There are numerous thanksgiving psalms and other prayers in which the person or the community that is praying pours forth expressions of gratitude. In one of the earliest psychological studies of religion, Leuba (1912) characterized gratitude as a religious emotion and a distinguishing mark of religious experience.

Even though gratitude has a clear religious connotation, a distinction can be made between transpersonal gratitude and theistic gratitude. Transpersonal gratitude may be gratefulness to God, or to a higher power, but may also be directed toward the cosmos more generally (Nakhnikian, 1961). It is the gratitude one feels when contemplating a starry sky or a majestic mountain peak. Such a vast thankfulness, Nakhnikian contends, cannot be directed toward a person or even a supernatural agent and occurs in the absence of a belief that a favor has been intentionally conferred upon a person by a benefactor. The spiritual quality of gratitude was aptly conveyed by Streng (1989): "In this attitude people recognize that they are connected to each other in a mysterious and miraculous way that is not fully determined by physical forces, but is part of a wider, or transcendent context" (p.5).

A third factor that makes this a propitious time for gratitude is the resurgent interest in virtue ethics, a subfield of moral philosophy (Hursthouse, 1999; Taylor, 2002). Philosophers have counted gratitude among the most important of the virtues, and as a necessary ingredient for the moral personality. Viewed through the lens of virtue ethics, gratitude is a purely person-to-person phenomena, apart from any reference to the divine. Ingratitude, on the other hand, is seen as a profound moral failure." (2004,pp. 6-7).

~ Excerpted from "The Psychology of Gratitude" Edited by Emmons & McCullough

Al-Hamd and Alhamdulillah

Renowned archetypal psychologist James Hillman, in his monograph entitled "The Thought of the Heart" offers his reflections on the contemplations of Henri Corbin on this topic. With a deeper appreciation for the wisdom of Ibn al-Arabi, Hillman and Corbin may be offering a profound psychological penetration into the mystery of Sura 1:2 of Al-Hamd, which is another descriptor of the Opening Chapter of the Holy Qur'an. Hidden in the experience of Al-Hamd are Love and Beauty:

"If beauty is inherent and essential to soul, then beauty appears wherever soul appears. That revelation of soul's essence, the actual showing forth of Aphrodite in psyche, her smile, is called in mortal language, "beauty". All things as they display their innate nature present Aphrodite's goldenness; they shine forth and as such are aesthetic. Here, I am merely restating what Adolf Portmann has elaborated at Eranos for forty years: the idea of Selbstdarstellung (self-presentation) as the revelation to the senses of Inner-lichkeit (interiority). Visible form is a show of soul. The being of a thing is revealed in the display of its Bild (image).

Beauty is not an attribute then, something beautiful, like a fine skin wrapped round a virtue; the aesthetic aspect of appearance itself. Were there no beauty, along with the good and the true and the one, we could never sense them, know them. Beuaty is an epistemological necessity; it is the way in which the Gods touch our senses, reach the heart and attract us into life.

As well, beauty is an ontological neccessity, grounding the sensate particularity of the world. Without Aphrodite, the world of particulars becomes atomic particles. Life's detailed variety is called cahos, multiplicity, amorphous matter, statistical data. Such is the world of sense without Aphrodite. Then sense must be made of appearance by abstract philosophical means - which distorts philosophy itself from its true base.

If, as we said in Part I, philosophy takes rise in philos, it also refers to Aphrodite in another way. For sophia originally means the skill of the craftsman, the carpenter (Iliad: XV, 412) the seafarer (Hesiod, Works: 651), the sculptor (Aristotle, Nic Eth., vi:1141a. Sophia originates in and refers to the aesthetic hands of Daedalus and Hephaistos, who was of course conjoined with Aphrodite and so is inherent to her nature. With Aphrodite informing our philosophy, each event has its own smile on its face and appears in a particular mode, fashion, style. Aphrodite gives an archetypal background to the philosophy of "eachness" and the capacity of the heart to find "intimacy" with each particular event in a pluralistic cosmos (Wm. James).

Now, the organ which perceives these faces is the heart. The thought of the heart is physiognomic. To perceive, it must imagine. It must see shapes, forms, faces - angels, demons, creatures of every sort in things of any kind; thereby the heart's thought personifies, ensouls, and animates the world. Petrarca sees Laura:

...in pathless forest shades,
I see the face I fear, upon the bushes
Or an oaken trunk; or from the stream
she rises; flashes on me from a cloud
Or from clear sky; or issues from a rock,...

The lines are not to Laura, a love lyric, but a description of Laura, the soul personified, the figuration in the heart by means of which aesthetic perception proceeds. It brings to life things as forms that speak.

As we saw above, it was Aristotle's psychology that laid the basis for the connection between aisthesis and the heart. It may be strange to hear me speak in his praise, but there are many Aristotles, and my delight is in Aristotle the biologist who took the world of sense and shape to heart. In Aristotelian psychology, the organ of aisthesis is the heart, passages from all sense organs run to it; there the soul is "set on fire". Its thought is innately aesthetic and sensately linked with the world.

This link between heart and the organs of sense is not simple mechanical sensationalism; it is aesthetic. That is, the activity of perception or sensation in Greek is aisthesis which means at root "taking in" and "breathing in" - a "gasp", that primary aesthetic response.

Translators have turned aisthesis into "sense-percpetion", a British empiricist's notion, John Locke's sensation. But Greek "sense perception" cannot be understood without taking into account the Greek Goddess of the senses or the organ of Greek sensation, the heart, and the root in the word - that sniffing, gasping, breathing in of the world.

What is it to 'take in' or breathe in the world? First it means aspiring and inspiring the literal presentation of things by gasping. The transfiguration of matter occurs through wonder. This aesthetic reaction which precedes intellectual wonder inspires the given beyond itself, letting each thing reveal its particular aspiration within a cosmic arrangement.

Second, 'taking in' means taking to heart, interiorizing, becoming intimate with in an Augustinian sense. Not only my confession of my soul, but hearing the confession of the anima mundi in the speaking of things.

Third, 'taking in' means interiorizing the object into itself, into its image so that its imagination is activated (rather than ours), so that it shows its heart and reveals its souls, becoming personified and thereby lovable - lovable not only to us and because of us, but because its loveliness increases as its sense and its imagination unfold. Here begins phenomenology: in a world of ensouled phenomena. Phenomena need not be saved by grace or faith or all-embracing theory, or by scientific objectiveness or transcendental subjectivity. They are saved by the anima mundi, by their own souls and our simple gasping at this imaginal loveliness. The ahh of wonder, of recognition, or the Japanese shee-e through the teeth. The aesthetic response saves the phenomenon, the phenomenon which is the face of the world. "Everything shall perish except His face," says the Koran (xxxviii: 88) which Corbin can understand to mean "Every thing...except the Face of that thing" (CI: 244&n; ML:112-13). God, the world, everything can pass into nothingness, victims of nihilistic constructions, metaphysical doubts, despairs of every sort. What remains when all perishes is the face of things as they are. When there is nowhere to turn, turn back to the face before you, face the world. Here is the Goddess who gives a sense to the world that is neither myth nor meaning; instead that immediate thing as image, its smile, a joy, a joy that makes 'forever.'" (1981, pp. 29-33).

~ Excerpted from "The Thought of the Heart" by James Hillman, author of "Revisioning Psychology" and "We've Had A Hundred Years Of Psychotherapy".

British Islamic Scholar issues fatwa condemning terrorism

I have been contemplating the relationship between Jihad and Sirat al Mustaqim. In my view, Jihad is about the spiritual struggle on the path of the direct experience of Allah. So, it was interesting to read the following article on a new 600 page fatwa condemning terrorism in Islam:


Published in: Aljazeera
Tuesday, March 02, 2010
17:07 Mecca time, 14:07 GMT

A leading British Islamic scholar has issued a fatwa condemning "terrorists" as the enemies of Islam, in a bid to deter young Muslims from extremism.

Muhammad Tahir ul-Qadri, head of the Minhaj ul-Quran religious and educational organisation, said suicide bombers were destined for hell as he released his 600-page edict in London on Tuesday.

"They can't claim that their suicide bombings are martyrdom operations and that they become the heroes of the Muslim Umma [the wider Muslim community], no, they become heroes of hellfire, and they are leading towards hellfire," he said.

"There is no place for any martyrdom and their act is never, ever to be considered Jihad," he said.

'No place in Islam'

At a news conference, ul-Qadri said Islam was a religion of peace that promotes beauty, "betterment", goodness and "negates all form of mischief and strife".

"Terrorism is terrorism, violence is violence and it has no place in Islamic teaching and no justification can be provided for it, or any kind of excuses or ifs or buts," he said.

A number of edicts condemning extremism have been made by Islamic groups since the September 11 attacks on the United States, but ul-Qadri insists his is the most wide-reaching.

"This is the first, most comprehensive fatwa on the subject of terrorism ever written," he told the Reuters news agency.

"I have tried to leave not a single stone unturned on this particular subject and I have tried to address every single question relevant to this subject."

Pakistan-born ul-Qadri, 59, has written about 350 books on Islam, and is a scholar of Sufism, a Muslim branch that focuses on peace, tolerance, and moderation.

The Quilliam Foundation, a UK counter-extremism think-tank, said the fatwa was "arguably the most comprehensive" theological refutation of Islamic extremism.

Tim Winter, a lecturer in Islamic studies at Cambridge University, said while ul-Qadri's step of declaring "miscreants as unbelievers" was unusual, it was unlikely extremists would take notice of his edict.

"Those who are already hardliners will pay no attention at all. But 'swing voters' - poorly educated and angry Muslims, who respect mainstream scholars, will probably take note," he told Reuters.

Ul-Qadri said he felt compelled to issue the edict because of concerns about the radicalisation of British Muslims at university campuses and because there had been a lack of condemnation of extremism by Muslim clerics and scholars.

The Minhaj-ul-Quran movement, founded in Pakistan in 1980, works around the globe to promote peace and interfaith dialogue.

Scapegoating in Tafsir Al-Jalalayn & Shahrastani

Both the late 15th century Tafsir Al-Jalalayn and the earlier 12th century exegesis by Shahrastani of the verse in al-Fatiha:

Ghayr al-maghdubi 'alayhim wa lal'-dallin

reference various sources which claim that those against whom is wrath implies
the Jews and those who have gone astray implies the Christians. Without correcting these limited interpretations with Shahrastani's esoteric commentary which claims that those against whom is wrath implies those who oppose the ones who know and guide such as the Prophets and the Saints, while those who go astray implies the adversaries of those who have received instruction and the believers, it is useful to examine the more restricted interpretations from a psychological perspective. Why would these two groups have been identified specifically by the commentators when the verses do not specifically mention these groups. The answer is best articulated by Ann Belford Ulanov, Professor of Psychiatry and Religion at Union Theological Seminary in New York in her book entitled

"Religion and the Spiritual in Carl Jung:"

"What then is scapegoating, psychologically? This mechanism is well known to us. It forms a distinct chain of reactions that leads from personal repression to social oppression. Its defined sequence begins when we repress contents we dislike and dread. We disown them. We keep consciousness from such contents, and we eject such contents from consciousness. Our ego recoils from connection to contents we feel are destructive to our ego position and from the disordered chaos from which such contents spring. We refuse consciousness to the annihilating forces we call evil. We either throw such contents out of consciousness into unconsciousness, or we leave them blocked in unconsciousness, refusing them admittance to our awareness. Such refusal brings relief to our egos; we get rid of, we think, disturbing contents.

But such contents do not go away. They go unconscious. They remain in us as live bits of being, as volatile forces now out of reach of our ego and its restraining, civilizing effects. These contents regress and achieve still more powerful form, as a hungry dog we lock in a closet becomes a savage beast bent on killing to satisfy its hunger. A repressed content is like a tiny alligator we bring back from a Florida vacation that becomes increasingly inconvenient as it keeps on growing. We flush it down the toilet into our sewers. There it not only continues to grow, but now, out of sight and out of reach, it joins all the other alligators flushed away by the neighbors. What we repress accumulates more life to itself, growing stronger, bigger, contaminating whatever else is in the unconscious. pressure builds up that demands release into conscious life. Such contents burst out finally in projections onto others - usually those different from us, alien, because of physical appearance or sex or background, or distant from us because deem them inferior or superior to us. All that our egos judge unacceptable hurls itself in projection onto our alien or distant neighbors. We identify our neighbors with that bit of ourselves we put onto and into them. Thus we inaugurate a relationship of projective identification with our neighbors. We feel we must control them because we carry a feared bit of ourselves, and we fear them because we cannot control them. They carry the package of unconscious contents we dread in ourselves. Rather we want to see ourselves as identified with the values and ideals we hold most precious. We contrast our good to our alien neighbors' bad. We draw a boundary around the good with which our egos identify, outlawing the bad with which we identify our neighbors.

We can understand that the initial function of such repression and projection is to differentiate good from bad, to become conscious of what we hold as good and to bind our group into a community, distinguished from other groups. Such initial differentiation and group consciousness might be all right, even furthering consciousness, if it did not go further, but it always does. For the repressed material, the howling dogs and snapping alligators, press to get out, press for contact. What begins as differentiation only too soon leads to a wide gap between our conscious ego identification with the good and our projective identification of our alien neighbor with the bad.

The line is drawn, from repression to regression and contamination of unconscious contents to projection and projective identification onto our alien neighbor, to attitudes of prejudice from which grow acts of oppression, persecution, and finally, scapegoating. Like one or the other of the original scapegoats, the alien neighbor is seen as the carrier of sins we must get rid of to keep intact our commitment to the good. In the ironies of opposing consciousness and unconsciousness, we can indulge, even act out in frenzy, all the badness we disown in the name of defending the good. The disease attacks those who attack the disease. In the name of our ideal we attack, violate, persecute, and kill those on whom we have projected our badness." (1999, pp. 44-45).

~ Excerpted from "Religion and the Spiritual in Carl Jung" by Ann Belford Ulanov

Sura 1:7 in the Islamic Republic of Iran

Reading Azar Nafisi's book "Reading Lolita in Tehran," I was disturbed to find that the superiority/inferiority complex of the guardians of the revolution representing the Shia faith in Iran extends to its Armenian population, at least as late as the late 1980s:

"Another urgent meeting was set up, for late afternoon in a favorite coffee shop. It was a tiny place, a bar in its pre-revolution days, now reincarnated as a cafe. It belonged to an Armenian, and forever shall I see on the glass door next to the name of the restaurant, which was in small letters, the compulsory sign in large black letters: RELIGIOUS MINORITY. All restaurants run by non-Muslims had to carry this sign on their doors so that good Muslims, who considered all non-Muslims dirty and did not eat from the same dishes, were forewarned." (2004, p. 180).

~ Excerpted from "Reading Lolita in Tehran" by Professor Azar Nafisi of John Hopkins University.

The Feminine in Islam - Arkoun

Mohammed Arkoun's book "The Unthought in Contemporary Islamic Thought" challenges Muslims to think about many aspects of our faith. His comment on the feminine is poignant:

"Women represent a particularly disadvantaged social body; it is they who have to suffer the oppression of regimes that instrumentalize religion to compensate for their own lack of political legitimacy; the resistance of the popular mentality to any questioning of the status of women as fixed by God Himself in the Qur'an; and the weight of beliefs and customs they have themselves internalized through the rearing process handed down by their mothers and grandmothers in the lineage of an ancient feminine memory. I was able to verify all these mechanisms recently in a broad debate taking place in Morocco around the 'Plan for the integration of women in the development process' launched by the present government (April 2000). The fault line dividing society on the plan is not easy to trace; the simplistic terminology of opposition between progressives and conservatives, left and right, modernists and traditionalists, secular and religious, etc., is unsatisfactory. The use of these trivial, obsolete categorizations in political sociology is both an unavoidable ideological necessity and a backward conceptualisation damaging to proper critical thought: in politics, one has to be effective manipulating the social imagination with words and slogans that elicit immediate adhesion or rejection, while this manipulation avoids the intellectual need to introduce a more relevant emancipating critical discourse." (2002, pp. 22-23).

~ Excerpted from "The Unthought in Contemporary Islamic Thought" by Mohammed Arkoun, the renowned scholar of Islam in France of Algerian descent.

Religious sanction for female circumcision in Islam?

As part of my doctoral research on the place of the feminine in the psychology of Islam, I was shocked to find a religious sanction for female circumcision in "Women and the Fatimids in the World of Islam:"


"The fact that, on the imams' authority, Fatimid Law defined sex as the 'meeting of two circumcised parts', where by 'two circumcised' the early imams meant the penis and vulva, makes us infer that, by Fatimid law, women were expected to be circumcised. On the matter of female circumcision, al-Qadi al-Nu'man thus reported a tradition ascribed to 'Ali b. Abi Talib:

'O women, when you circumcise your daughters, leave part (of the labia or clitoris). For this will be chaster for their character, and it will make them more beloved by their husbands.' Finally, not unlike Islamic law in general, Fatimid Law permitted love play with a ritually impure or menstruating woman, provided that she wore an undergarment below the navel down to the knee.'" (2006, p. 222).

~ Excerpted from "Women and the Fatimids in the World of Islam" by Delia Cortese (Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies at Middlesex University, London) and Simonetta Calderini (Senior Lecturer in Islamic Studies at Roehampton University, London).