March 2, 2003

TO many people, Dr Martin Lings is known for producing an unusually structured account of the life of the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) in his most celebrated of books, Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources. It has become a point of bibliographical reference for anyone researching on the Prophet’s life. Others who have read his transcendental work on the esoteric facets of Islam would know that Dr Martin Lings’ primary concern is to get prepared for that ‘other world’; for life in the hereafter. In his preparation to take that final journey to meet his Creator, he has sought help from the mystical world of sufism.

Unlike the abstractions of universalism, based on reaching a common destination through ‘different routes’, Dr Lings’ idea of sufism is interchangeable with Islam. In his book What is Sufism? he calls ‘sufism... nothing other than Islamic mysticism, which means that it is the... most powerful current of that tidal wave which constitutes the Revelation of Islam...’ His mystical writings, along with those of such sufi scholars as Rene Guenon, Frithjof Schuon and Seyyed Hossein Nasr, are to a great degree responsible for introducing sufism to the West.

Dr Lings now stands as a leading figure in the perennialist school of comparative religion. He was deeply influenced by Sheikh Ahmed al-’Alawi, the Algerian sufi scholar and renewer of the Shadhili tariqa, who died in 1934. Dr Lings’ book, A Muslim Saint of the 20th Century (1961) is entirely devoted to Sheikh al-’Alawi. It was he who changed Dr Lings name to Abu Bakr Siraj Ad-Din. Such was sufism’s impact on him that he was prompted into saying: “I found God while I was searching for a ‘guiding leader’.”

At the invitation of the National College of Arts in Lahore, in collaboration with the Iqbal Academy, the sufi scholar and former Keeper of Oriental Manuscripts and Printed Books at the British Museum, came on a brief visit to deliver a lecture on “The Quranic Art of Calligraphy and Illumination”.

As Dr Lings approached the dimly lit podium of the Shakir Ali Auditorium, people stood up to applaud the presence of a man who had spent a major part of his life researching the spiritual mysticism of the Book revealed to the Messenger of Allah. His own person, draped in an Arabian long white dress, head covered in a Maghreb-style turban, transcended the present to take the audience on a journey to a time of great learning in Muslim history.

When his authoritative voice began the commentary on the significance of the ornamentation of the Holy Quran, it overshadowed the physical frailty of the 94-year-old sufi scholar, bringing to life the grandeur of the Holy Quran in script, illumination and style. He began by showing the various forms of calligraphy and illumination on slides, giving details of the difference between the Kufic and the Maghreb script of the Quran.

He showed a slide, written in Kufic on vellum, 200 years after the times of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH). He said “It was not a paradox that the civilization of ‘the unlettered Prophet’ should have been destined to excel in the art of lettering.” The first calligraphic perfection of Islam was to be found in the monumental script, which was believed to have reached its fullness in the last half of the second century AH, ending in AD 815.

Describing Islamic art of calligraphy and illumination as one of the most beautiful forms of abstract art, Dr Lings showed a handwritten manuscript of the Quran by Hazrat Ali, preserved to date in Nurosmaniye Mosque Library, in Istanbul. He added that some of the scholars of the Quranic script were not certain whether Ali ibn Abi Talib genuinely wrote the manuscript or not. But he refuted the skeptics by saying, “In a way it would not be incorrect to say that the art of calligraphy can be traced to Hazrat Ali.”

The Kufic script is the ancestor of all the calligraphic styles of Andalusia and North-West Africa. Apart from describing the aesthetics of the Quranic script and other decorative symbols of illumination, Dr Lings went deeper into the symbolism of beauty. He said that “one of the great purposes of Quran’s calligraphy was to provide a visual sacrament because gazing transfixedly at the Quran was a wide-spread practice in Islam.”

He explained that the Quranic calligraphy started on a sacred note, dominated primarily by the fear of Allah and the reservation applied to the sacred text. The practice of illumination revolved around purity. Purity of writing meant purity of soul, which was why 80 per cent of the calligraphers at that time were sufis. The fear of intruding the sanctity of the Quranic text prevented a liberal attitude towards illumination. Dr Lings called it reverential awe (haybah), which was responsible for the wonderfully natural flow of illumination in the coming years.

Wary of the media’s intrusion, it was next to impossible to get a five-minute audience with Dr Lings. He had recently turned down the BBC and a few other networks. It was unbelievable when Dr Martin Lings conceded to give an exclusive and rare interview to Books & Authors. He spoke briefly about the depths of sufism and how it was the only way for the purification of the soul.

B&A: Do you think that the original spirit of Islam is degenerating?

Martin Lings: Every religion is liable to decadence. But at the same time, God promised the holy Prophet he would send, in every century, a mujaddid to renew the religion. Every 100 years God sends someone or some people to renew the religion and it is not always known who that mujaddid is because sometimes there’s more than one person. It is God Himself who protects the religion. Sometimes, a religion reaches a state when it has to be replaced.

In the modern world as we see it, some of the older religions have been replaced except for Hinduism, which is the oldest living religion. The reason is that it has been protected by the caste system. The highest caste, that is the Brahmins, protects it. Though the temporal power is in the hands of the Kashatriyas, the castes don’t intermarry. That means the hereditary degeneration is slower. That’s why Hinduism still exists.

There are three world religions. Buddhism in the East, Christianity in the West, making the Muslims, as the Quran says, the middle people between the East and the West. Unlike Islam, Christianity and Buddhism, others are not world religions. Even Judaism and Hinduism are not world religions.

But, according to Hinduism, we are nearing the end of, what they call, a Mahayug (great age) in Sanskrit. There are four ages in each ‘great age’, and the present one is referred to as the Kalyug, the dark age. We are nearing its end. All religions are in agreement that we are nearing the end of this age. This age will be followed by a new golden age.

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