Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

246 t CHAPTER TEN
treme suffering. But the magnanimous person who has submitted
his will to God and committed her goods to the needy and the
downtrodden will be rewarded in a garden Paradise of luxurious
ease and splendor. Indeed, this is why the Prophet was sent, to be a
“warner” to humankind that the reckoning was close at hand.
The Beginnings of Muslim Asceticism
How and why the world that seemed so pristinely good in Genesis
became so dangerous and even so evil a place was variously explained.
Genesis offered its own reasons, humankind’s moral delinquency chief
among them, a theme elaborately glossed by the Christians into the
doctrine of Original Sin. However it was parsed, the view that this
world was morally dangerous settled deep into the religious sensibilities
of Christians, Muslims, and, to a somewhat lesser extent, Jews.
Christians and Muslims could contrast the toils and dangers of this
world with both the rewards and punishments of the next world,
whereas for the Israelites generally, and for many Jews thereafter, the
perfect justice of the Afterlife was simply not available.
What prompted the first Muslims to separate themselves from the
world and their fellow Muslims by practicing asceticism (zuhd), that
is, a lifestyle with a notable degree of self-denial, appears to have
been a sense of contradiction between the increasingly successful
and extravagant ways of many Muslims and the general simplicity
and otherworldliness of the quranic message. That disparity did not
appear to bother Muhammad himself, who suffered neither pangs
nor nostalgia over his Meccan poverty, though the prosperity enjoyed
by him and his companions at Medina was merely a thin
shadow of what followed in the first century of Islam. There appear,
in any event, here and there among the persons known to us in that
first century, some few individuals who “withdrew” from contemporary
society, not in the manner of the Christians’ headlong flight
into the wastes of Egypt, but more cautiously and circumstantially.
A number of them bore the title of Sufi.
Certain devotional practices characterized those early Muslim
pietists, but the virtue that was their principal goal is best resumed