On Revelation & the “Vital Lie”: A Beckerian Approach to Prophethood

بِسۡمِ ٱللهِ ٱلرَّحۡمَـٰنِ ٱلرَّحِيمِ

Dr. Colin Turner wrote, “I cannot pretend that this is an academic paper, although at some point it may grow into one.  At the moment it is merely an exercise in thinking aloud, so please bear with me. 

In a sense, this paper represents the confluence of two streams of thought.  The first stream, the smaller of the two, concerns the notion of uswatun hasanah or the ‘excellent pattern’, which is an epithet given to both the Prophet Muhammad (s.a.w.) and the Prophet Abraham (a.s.), in the Qur’an.  The second stream, and the more substantial one, concerns an on-going research interest of mine in the concept of the ‘vital lie’, popularised by Ernest Becker, a cultural anthropologist who died some forty years ago now and whose main claim to fame is the Pulitzer Prize-winning book, ‘The Denial of Death’. 

Let me start with the first stream of thought, which concerns this notion of uswatun hasanah – the notion of the Prophet (s.a.w.) as a ‘beautiful pattern’.  The term, ‘uswatun hasanah’, connotes the idea of role model, of someone whose behaviours and approaches deserve to be studied and, if accepted and internalised, are worth emulating.  Someone with the epithet, uswatun hasanah, is clearly possessed of values, virtues and ways of dealing with the problems and challenges of life which are worth following, not least because his or her path is a tried and tested one.  The fact that the term, uswatun hasanah, has its origins in the Qur’an convinces us of the weight that such a role carries.  When one looks at the missions of prophets such as Abraham (a.s.) and Muhammad (s.a.w.) as portrayed by the Qur’an, and as one reads in and between the lines of the revelation of the heavy burden of responsibility that these men carried, it becomes clear that not only is living as a role model a matter of great import and seriousness, but that emulating that role model is by no means a trivial or easy task.  Nor, it would seem, is emulation avoidable, for on a number of occasions the Qur’an Exhorts its listeners not only to follow the teachings Revealed by Muhammad (s.a.w.), but also to follow the example of the Prophet (s.a.w.) as reflected in his role as Divine Messenger, with all that it entailed. 

This issue of emulating the Prophet (s.a.w.), of taking him as a role model – an uswatun hasanah – and following his example is, of course, deeply problematic and the subject of much debate. It is a debate which, in its misrepresented and misunderstood form, is purported to be between the conservative guardians of so-called Islamic orthodoxy and those reforming liberals who, it is claimed, wish to refashion Islam in a manner that dovetails more neatly with their postmodern concerns and their self-professed progressive values.  If it has not already become obvious, we are talking here about the problem of the sunnah and hadits, Prophetic tradition, which constitute one of the battlegrounds on which the aforementioned, diametrically opposed groups, are engaged in combat. 

The basic argument between these two groups concerns the role played by the hadits, Prophetic tradition and, by extension, the sunnah of the Prophet (s.a.w.).  Muslim orthodoxy holds that the hadits play a foundational part in the formulation of Muslim law and the codification of the shari’ah, while emulation of the Prophet’s (s.a.w.) sunnah, is the only appropriate response to the Qur’an’s Exhortation that its listeners should ‘obey the Prophet’.  Furthermore, this group holds that the hadits are there to complement and explain the Qur’an, and that without the hadits, the Qur’an remains, to an extent, inaccessible.  The second group is one which claims that since the Qur’an is complete, it is misguidance to believe that the hadits, Prophetic tradition can play an expository role as a body of inspired teachings that is there to somehow the complement the Qur’an.  After all, the Qur’an is complete: why, then, should it need something that is non-Divine to ‘perfect’ it. 

I do not want to digress here by exploring the arguments of these two groups in detail.  My personal view is that the wholesale rejection of the hadits as both a source of guidance and a source of law is extreme and untenable.  At the same time, as far as the hadits are concerned, there is no avoiding the fact that there are serious issues of authenticity, authority, soundness and applicability which are still unresolved.  We can leave aside the questions of authenticity, authority and soundness here, for they do not concern us.  Let us assume, for argument’s sake, that the corpus of traditions which exist in the six canonical books of hadits are authentic, sound and possessed of legal authority.  Our focus here must be on applicability, particularly in the context of the Prophet (s.a.w.) as uswatun hasanah. 

Now the traditional understanding of the sunnah is that it relates to the words, acts, statements and decisions of Muhammad (s.a.w.), as they appear in the hadits.  Traditional understanding has it that Muslims should emulate the Prophet (s.a.w.) as thoroughly and rigidly as possible in their daily conduct.  Traditional understanding interprets uswatun hasanah almost exclusively in this way.  Traditional understanding defines Muhammad’s (s.a.w.) being a role model in terms of how Muslims should dress, eat, drink, sleep, talk and so on.  While scriptural sources clearly do not indicate that emulation of the Prophet (s.a.w.) is confined only to the sunnah of his which emerges from the hadits, traditionally it has been the acts and utterances of the Prophet (s.a.w.) which have informed the ‘beautiful pattern’ that is to serve as an example.  In short, when one thinks of the Prophetic sunnah, one thinks almost automatically of the Prophet’s (s.a.w.) behaviours as reflected in the Traditions.  And while technically speaking the Traditions are not synonymous with the Prophetic sunnah, it is more often than not this vast corpus of sayings which people turn to for information on what and how to emulate. 

Now for some there can be no doubt that the sunnah is the basis upon which this notion of uswatun hasanah, a righteous pattern worthy of emulation, has been founded.  Yet to confine the notion of the uswatun hasanah to the sunnah, and to see the ‘beautiful example’ as inhering solely in the behaviours of the Prophet (s.a.w.) as recorded in the Traditions is, I believe, to overlook a far richer and, from the point of view of authenticity, a far less contentious source of information, namely the Qur’an Itself.  The notion of uswatun hasanah is, of course, Qur’anic, and the verses in which it appears are, like all other verses, best seen through the hermeneutical prism of the Qur’an Itself.  Furthermore, I believe there is a serious mismatch between the notion of uswatun hasanah, as Expounded in the Qur’an, and the idea that by emulating the mundane, quotidian behaviours of the Prophet (s.a.w.), one is actually living up to the Qur’anic Ideal.  In short, it seems highly improbable in my opinion that when the Qur’an Talks about uswatun hasanah, It is Talking about emulation of the Prophet’s (s.a.w.) day-to-day behaviours – how he walked, talked, ate, bathed, sat, slept and so on. 

The reasons why I find this improbable will hopefully become clear shortly.  But first, I propose that we embark on a thought experiment and imagine that the hadits do not exist.  Let us imagine that we know nothing about the trivial details of Muhammad’s (s.a.w.) life, about how he dressed, ate, drank, slept, bathed or talked.  How would the complete absence of information regarding his day-to-day life impact on our understanding of the Prophet (s.a.w.) as uswatun hasanah. an exemplar?  Would it make him any less a role model without the hadits than he is with them?  To understand who the Prophet (s.a.w.) was, and what he did, without relying on the hadits, is not as unrealistic a proposition as it may sound.  We must remember that the books of hadits did not appear until the middle of the 9^th century, and that for many people in the first two centuries after the Prophet’s (s.a.w.) death who were living in the furthest corners of the growing Muslim world, the Qur’an would have been their main and possibly only source of information about the Prophet (s.a.w.) and the prophetic mission.  How, then, are we to understand, without the secondary source of the Traditions, what the Qur’an means by uswatun hasanah? 

To answer this, I believe we need to look at exactly what a prophet does and what a prophetic mission entails.  I will take it as given that the main duty of the Prophet (s.a.w.) is to deliver the overarching message of Divine Unity.  To understand what this means on a practical level, and why in this context the Prophet (s.a.w.) is an uswatun hasanah, a ‘beautiful pattern’, a role model – to understand this we need to look at the communities into which the prophets were born, and to which they directed the messages they received. 

This is where Ernest Becker comes in.  The central theory expounded by Becker in his work is that all human endeavour – be it social, cultural, economic, political, religious, emotional and so on – is underpinned by man’s acute awareness of his own mortality and the death anxiety that accompanies it.  All of human culture, Becker believes, is driven by a collective attempt on the part of mankind to deny death through the continuous pursuit of self-affirming, death-denying acts, behaviours and projects that perpetuate the illusion of immortality – the ‘vital lie’, so to speak. 

Until relatively recently, this terror of mortality and the avoidance of the inevitable has been a largely unexamined element of human psychology and cultural meaning.  Even among those who believe that ‘death is not the end’, direct engagement with death is for the most part avoided.  The fact is that death is taboo.  In his book, ‘Denial of Death’, Becker contended that mortality terror is informed mainly by the symbolisation of our childhood fears.  These fears become any number of representations that mask their origins.  Symbolisation is a mystifying process: one thing - unconsciously - comes to stand for another thing, but we take that thing as the true object and have no idea we have fooled ourselves.  Those infantile fears become components of transference: they are disguised and projected upon the present, which means people do not understand what or why they really fear. 

Becker describes the existential anxieties that mask deeper psychological phenomena, undermining any conscious and subjective knowledge of what we fear.  Part of this symbolising process involves the ‘self’ that develops with the unconsciously aim to deny manifestations of mortality, such as physical weakness, decay, finitude, creatureliness and, of course, death itself.  For Becker, fear of death is more than the loss of the actual self; it also focusses on the loss of the symbolic self.  In this regard, fear of mortality is also a fear of death in life, a fear of loss of self-esteem, reputation, social standing, loss of one’s own sense of power and meaningfulness. 

Our natural survival instincts, our natural, animal sense of separation anxiety, joined with the symbolisation of infantile fears and the childhood knowledge of mortality, means that in seriously contemplating death we feel terrified by it.  This terror is characterised by the Becker as death anxiety. 

Death anxiety is key to Becker’s overall theory of how the awareness of mortality impacts the psychology and culture of the living.  For Becker, the unbearable terror of death that self-aware mortal beings would normally experience in understanding death is ‘managed by the construction and maintenance of cultural worldviews: humanly constructed beliefs about the nature of reality that infuse individuals with a sense that they are persons of value in a world of meaning, different than and superior to corporeal and mortal nature, and thus capable of transcending the natural boundaries of time and space, and in so doing, elude death.’ 

But, Becker said, it is not sufficient simply to maintain a worldview: that worldview must also succeed and be seen to succeed.  The most obvious results of success are the feelings of self-esteem and self-worth.  Esteem is accorded to individuals as a result of success within the culture by attaining expected goals, by structuring their lives around cultural values, by upholding the prescribed world-view – usually the dominant worldview of the culture within which they are embedded - and so on.  Esteem provides an individual with a sense of personal attainment, self-worth and value within a system of shared meaning, which is essential to individual health and psychological well-being. 

These shared meanings are not actually experienced or articulated explicitly as ways of suppressing death anxiety; rather, they have a mundane, real-life significance for people who accept them and live in accordance with them.  Because cultural meaning is so important for reducing anxiety – remember, it banishes the terror of death – then one can understand why investment in particular worldviews are usually so great.  Consequently, group values are often asserted to the detriment of outsiders, whose alien worldviews offer the threat of contradiction and critique.  If an individual's worldview – his method of controlling and understanding existence - is shown to be flawed, then a pointless life and meaningless death will threaten the individual with existential angst, feelings of utter impotence and absolute, despair-inducing powerlessness. 

This is why cultural meanings and beliefs are defended zealously by the those who sustain them.  As Becker put it. ‘No wonder men go into a rage over fine points of belief: if your adversary wins the argument about truth, you die.  Your immortality system has been shown to be fallible, your life becomes fallible.’  The personal investment that individuals make in their group’s cultural values can be so all-consuming that they are willing to sacrifice their lives to preserve the world-view – the ‘vital lie’ - that sustains their meaning in life.  And yes, to be ready to embrace death in order to preserve those values which seek actively to deny death is, indeed, the ultimate irony.  But then there is much that is ironic about the ‘vital lie’, not least the fact that it is cherished as the absolute truth by those who are in active denial of the truth. 

Okay, so now the question is this: how is the ‘vital lie’ paradigm related to prophethood, and in particular the Qur’anic narratives which concern the delivery of Divine Messages by human Messengers?  While a detailed exposition of the links between Becker’s theory of dominant immortality ideologies is beyond the scope of this paper, even a cursory look at the ‘prophetic mission narratives’ in the Qur’an Reveals what I believe is a very strong connection between the notions surrounding Becker’s ‘vital lie’ and the missions undertaken by the various messengers in question. 

If we look at the passages in the Qur’an which Talk about how the prophets were treated by their communities, the nature of the challenges they faced becomes clear immediately.  The overarching ‘vital lie’ which the Qur’an challenges is, of course, the illusion that God has partners: the Qur’an was Revealed not to establish the Existence of God but, rather, the Oneness of God, and all of the prophetic missions focus on the need that man has to affirm Divine Unity rather than bow down to innumerable ‘gods’ and thus compromise his own position as khalifah, vicegerent of God on Earth.  All of the prophets Mentioned in the Qur’an come to challenge the henotheistic claims of their addressee communities.  You know the examples better than I do: the blatant idolatry of the community of Abraham (a.s.), challenged by a man who was not willing to love ‘those things which set’; the cult of the god-king in Pharaonic Egypt, where the ‘vital lie’ of human self-sufficiency was propped up by magicians – in much the same way, one might add, that post-Enlightenment secular humanism has been propped up by scientific materialists; and the crude tribal humanism of the desert Arabs to whom Muhammad (s.a.w.) was Sent with his iconoclastic message.  Each prophet, then, faced the most intractable of problems in his prophetic mission: the problem posed by the ‘vital lie’ dominant in his community. 

It is clear, then, that at the heart of the mission of each prophet lay the imperative to challenge the status quo, to expose the ‘vital lie’ that propped up his community for what it was: a trick of the mind, a deception, an enduring, convenient falsehood.  The bigger the lie, it would seem, the more it will be believed.  Whole communities, whole societies, even, had bought themselves into these vital lies with such dedicated and sincere self-deception, that to strike at the vital lie was to strike at the very lifeblood of the community.  And to challenge someone’s vital lie was to attempt to drive a stake through the heart of that person’s identity.  We can see in the responses of the recipient communities the sheer terror that such challenges must have posed.  Prophets were mocked, harassed, oppressed and marginalised.  Muhammad (s.a.w.) was called a madman, a poet and a liar, and his followers faced all manner of vilification and persecution.  To challenge the ‘way of the forefathers’ was to call into question the ‘dominant immortality ideology’ of the group; it was to expose the ‘vital lie’ for what it was.  Little wonder that Muhammad (s.a.w.) was often on the point of despair.  He had come not to change the way people ate or drank, dressed, bathed, walked or talked; he had come to challenge the very raison d’etre of his community’s values and belief system.  Little wonder that he and his message were met with such vituperation and hostility. 

To launch such challenges, then, as would strike at the very heart of the ‘vital lie’ clearly calls for very special individuals, with clearly delineated strategies and methodologies and objectives, with firm belief, patience, perseverance and hope. 

To challenge the vital lie which feeds our own societies and communities, we stand in need of people who can do today what the prophets of the past did then.  The vital lies which support our societies are no less pernicious, no less of a challenge than the vital lies which supported the societies of Abraham (a.s.), of Moses (a.s.), of Muhammad (s.a.w.).  And these vital lies are not something that can be combatted simply by eating, dressing, sleeping or walking in the same way that Muhammad (s.a.w.) ate, dressed, slept and walked.  While there is undoubtedly much to be admired in the everyday behaviours of the Prophet (s.a.w.) as described in the hadits, his being a ‘beautiful pattern’ cannot surely be reduced to these trivial details of his day-to-day life – details which reflect the fact that he was an Arab living at a particular juncture in time, a man who, in his words, ‘was the son of a woman from the Quraysh who ate dried meat’ – presumably like everyone else.  To follow the ‘beautiful’ pattern of Abraham (a.s.) and Muhammad (s.a.w.), we need to increase our own awareness of the seriousness and significance of their missions, to understand as we read the Qur’anic accounts of their careers the enormity of the challenges they faced and the kind of values and character traits they needed to nurture within themselves in order to face those challenges.  They were tasked with the incredibly difficult goal of subjecting to rigorous scrutiny and questioning the very foundations of their host communities.  Emulation of such ‘beautiful patterns’, then, surely cannot be reduced to copying the Prophet’s (s.a.w.) day to day life habits. 

Again, my intention here is not to cast doubt on the Traditions per se.  What I feel is open to doubt is the efficacy of the approach to the issue of uswatun hasanah that sees ‘following the Prophet’ as consisting for the most part in emulating his dress sense, how long he kept his beard or whether he urinated standing up or sitting down.  Firstly, none of these behaviours is binding on us, and secondly, emulation of these behaviours will not contribute in any way, shape or form to the mission that believers are entrusted with, namely the imperative to challenge and expose the vital lies which we have woven around ourselves like a thick cocoon to shield ourselves from the terror of finitude, of mortality, of ultimate accountability.”