A Body Unlike Bodies:Transcendent Anthropomorphism, Divine Embodiment and Early

Sunnism

By Wesley Williams, Ph.D.University of Michigan

Presentation at 5th Annual Duke-UNC Graduate IslamicStudies Conference, April 5, 2008

Gerald Hawting, in taking up and elaborating upon John Wansbrough’s insistence that emergent Islam be seen as a continuation of the Near Eastern Semitic monotheistic tradition, makes an important observation:

That Islam is indeed related to Judaism and Christianity as part of the Middle Eastern, Abrahamic or Semitic tradition of monotheism seems so obvious and is so often said that it might be wondered why it was thought necessary to repeat it. The reason is that although it is often said, acceptance of Islam as a representative of the monotheist religious tradition is not always accompanied by willingness to think through the implications of the statement.”

Indeed, rarely are the theological implications of this statement fully reflected upon. Such reflection, however, might highlight some pretty radical discontinuities between Islam, or at least the normative formulation and articulations of Islam, and the pre-Islamic Semitic tradition. Not that one can essentialize with such a diverse tradition that is the Semitic tradition; but there are some common characteristic features that transcend the linguistic and ethnic groups designated ‘Semitic.’ My paper discusses one such feature and its apparent absence in Islam.

Islam is often viewed as the religion par excellence of divine transcendence. God is khilāf ul-#ālam, “the absolute divergence from the world” and this characteristically Islamic doctrine of mukhālafa “(divine) otherness” precludes divine corporeality and anthropomorphism. But such a model is Hellenistic, not Semitic; the very notion of ‘immateriality,’ as well-argued by Robert Renehan, seems to have been the brain-child of Plato. The Semitic and the ancient Near Eastern (ANE) models in general embraced both divine ‘otherness’ and corporeality/anthropomorphism: the gods were ‘transcendently anthropomorphic,’ to use Ronald Hendel’s term. That is to say, while the gods possessed an anthropoid or human-like form, this form was also in a fundamental way unlike that of humans in that it was transcendent, either in size, beauty or maybe in the substance of which it was composed – ruach (spirit) e.g., or lapis lazuli, rather than basar, the fallible flesh that distinguishes mortal bodies.

Ancient Israel stood in linguistic, cultural and religious continuity with her neighbors in the Levant. And as Morton Smith aptly put it in a classic article, Israel participated in

“the common theology of the ancient Near East.” However ill-defined this concept of an ANE ‘common theology’ is, it is clear that the god of Israel and the gods of the ANE actually differed less than has been supposed. Like the gods of the ANE, the god of Israel and biblical tradition was transcendently anthropomorphic. No doubt the signature feature of this Israelite transcendent anthropomorphism is a dazzling radiance, a brilliant luminosity that is the morphic manifestation of God’s signature holiness. It is for this reason, we are given to understand, that humans can’t see God. Not because God isinvisible, but because humans are unholy, and unholy beings are in great danger in the immediate presence of God’s consuming, morphic holiness. This tradition of transcendent anthropomorphism is evident in the HB and is even presupposed in the NT, for example with Paul’s inaugural Christophany experience and the Gospel narrative of the transfiguration of Christ.

This ancient Near Eastern/Semitic transcendent anthropomorphism stands in stark contrast to normative Islamic notions of divine transcendence. But the latter, as Fazlur Rahman pointed out, “does not emerge from the Qur’an, but from later theological development in Islam.” This ‘later theological development’ included the appropriation of Hellenistic concepts and terms in order to interpret the Qur"§n and the Sunna, particularly the statements about God. This disparity between Semitic and Islamic notions of divine transcendence becomes more acute when one considers the insistence, by Islamic tradition and Western scholarship, that the deity is the same in the three monotheistic traditions. As Francis Peters remarks: “The monotheists not only worship one God; he is the same god for all. Whether called Yahweh or Elohim, God the Father or Allah, it is the selfsame deity who created the world out of nothing.” This insistence is of course qur"§nic (29:46; 42:14, 2:130-136). What then is the relation between the transcendently anthropomorphic Yahweh-Elohim and the incorporeal All§h?

I argue in this paper that at an earlier period Islam possessed a tradition of ‘transcendent anthropomorphism’ similar in many ways to that articulated in ANE,Classical, and Biblical sources. Through the mediation of hellenistically influenced schools like the Mu#tazila Greek-inspired notions of divine transcendence would eventually characterize all of Islam, SunnÊ and Shi#Ê alike. But while this triumph in Shi#ism was achieved by the fourth Islamic century, Sunnism held out for considerably longer. Sherman Jackson has recently emphasized that in early Muslim debates over the divine attributes Rationalist groups like the Mu#tazila privileged Aristotelian-Neoplatonic logic and motifs while Traditionalists rejected their authority, at least ostensibly. It thus should come as no surprise that it was in traditionalist Sunnism that this ancient Semitic transcendent anthropomorphism survived well into the fifth Islamic century.

Now ‘transcendent anthropomorphism’ presupposes, of course, anthropomorphism and we are assured by the overwhelming majority of Muslim scholars that there is no anthropomorphism is Islam. Western scholars, on the hand, cant seem to agree in their assessments of the place of anthropomorphism in the historical development of Islamic theology and views range, for example, from the extremes of Helmut Ritter who claimed that for Muslim Orthodoxy the idea of an anthropomorphic deity was an ‘abomination,’ to the view of Ignaz Goldzeihr who claimed that this orthodoxy would accept nothing but a crude anthropomorphism. This scholarly ambivalence towards Islamic anthropomorphism is partly the problem of semantics, particularly a much too imprecise use of the term ‘anthropomorphism’ coupled with an uncritical conflation of this term

and the Arabic tashbīh. While the former term literally refers to man’s ‘form,’ it more often than not is made to bear the burden of signifying all ascriptions of human likeness to God. Thus, human emotions, thoughts, and actions, properly anthropopathisms and anthropopoiesis, are subsumed under the designation anthropomorphism. Because Homeric anthropomorphism with its repugnant acting deities is usually the standard and no consideration is given to the idea of an ‘ethical anthropomorphism,’ the net effect of this subsumption, if you will, is that discussion of the alleged “form” of God, the main point of the term ‘anthropomorphism,’ is often de-emphasized or assumed to be a non-issue. But at least the biblical tradition of transcendent anthropomorphism, articulated as it is in the context of an ethical monotheism, should caution us with regard to this line of reasoning. As Robert Dentan observed in his discussion of the Knowledge of God in Ancient Israel, this ‘paradox of an anthropomorphic deity who is nevertheless utterly different from man,’ is ‘a paradox of which Israel was fully aware.’ It is my view that awareness of the belief in such a paradox is critical to an adequate comprehension and appreciation of the medieval Muslim debates over the Divine Attributes and the dangers of tashbīh. This latter term connotes likening the Creator to his creatures, a theological indiscretion in the eyes of Muslims in all eras, from all areas, and of all schools of thought. But a close reading of the relevant Arabic materials, I think, makes it clear that for many Muslim scholars, particularly but not exclusively Traditionalists, affirming divine anthropomorphism was not the same as affirming tashbīh. Take for example MuÈammad b. Khuzayma (d. 311/924), the most prominent Sh§fi#Ê in Nishapur at the time. In his Kit§b ut-tawÈÊd Ibn Khuzayma takes up the charge that the ahl al-ÈadÊth were “likeners (mushabbiha)” because they affirmed the literal meaning of the Divine Attributes. Discussing their affirmation that God truly has a face (wajh), against those who claimed that God’s face in the Qur"§n is really His essence (dh§t), Ibn Khuzayma writes:

God has affirmed for Himself a Splendid and Venerable face, which He declares is eternal and non-perishable. We and all scholars of our madhhab from the Hijaz, the Tihama, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, and Egypt affirm for God (the) face, which He has affirmed for Himself. We profess it with our tongues and believe it in our hearts, without likening (qhayr an nashabbiha) His face to one from His creatures. May our Lord be exalted above our likening Him to His creatures… We and all our scholars in all our lands say that the one we worship has a face…And we say that the face of our Lord (radiates) a brilliant, radiant light (al-når wa al-∙iy§" wa-bah§") which, if His veil is removed the glory of His face will scorch everything that sees it. His eyes are veiled from the people of this world who will never see Him during this life...The face of our Lord is eternal… Now God has decreed for human faces destruction and denied them splendor and venerability. They are not attributed the light, brilliance or splendor (al-når wa al-∙iy§" wa-bah§") that He described His face with. Eyes in this world may catch human faces without the latter scorching so much as a single hair...Human faces are rooted in time (muÈdatha) and created...Every human face perishes…Oh you possessors of reason (dhaw§ al-Èijan), could it ever really occur to any one with sense and who knows Arabic and knows what tashbÊh (means) that this (transient and dull human) face is like that (splendidly brilliant face of God)?

We have here the affirmation of anthropomorphism and the concomitant disavowal of tashbÊh. Ibn Khuzayma here adamantly argues for God’s possession of a true face, but one dangerously radiant and non-perishable, in contrast to man’s perishable and dull face: transcendent anthropomorphism. God’s is a face, unlike faces for he has a body, unlike bodies, as it was said in these circles.

Let me cite another 10th century example, and then I will go backwards in time. In at-Tabari’s famous commentary on the Qur’an, in discussing the creation of Adam as narrated in surat ul-Baqarah, at-Tabari narrated the following tradition: After God molded the human body of Adam from clay the body was left standing as a hollow, lifeless statue for forty years. During this time, the angels saw Adam and were terrified at the sight, none more than Iblīs, the devil. Iblīs would strike Adam’s body, making a hollow ring. He then went into Adam’s body through his mouth, exiting through his rear. Iblīs then said to the frightened angels: “Do not be afraid of this: your Lord is solid (ßamad), but this is hollow (ajwaf). Indeed, if I am given power over it, I shall utterly destroy it.” This last statement no doubt gives us the reason the angels were terrified: they thought the Adam statue was God. “God created Adam in His image,” we are told in a prophetic Èadīth found in the ßaÈīÈ collections. This idea has a Jewish precedent. In Genesis Rabbah, e.g. we read from one rabbi: “When the Holy One, blessed be He, came to create the first man, the ministering angels mistook him (viz. Adam) [for God, since man was in God’s image,] and wanted to say before him, ‘Holy, [holy, holy is the Lord of hosts].’” In the Islamic version, the angels are disabused of this belief once it was learned that Adam’s body was hollow; Allah, the angels well knew, has a compact and solid (samad) body. How did they know this? Well, they probably, and many Muslims certainly, would say that God himself says it in the Qur’an. That enigmatic divine predicate found in surat ul-Iklas, al-samad, is here equated with musmat, which word means “solid, of even composition, massive, compact, or not hollow (i.e. without a stomach cavity.” According to al-Ashari who died in 935 CE, in his Maqal§t ul-Isl§mÊyÊn, this was the interpretation of a good many Muslims in his day and we have reason to believed this was the common view in Umayyad Syria. So here we have a different articulation of transcendent anthropomorphism. The difference between God’s body and man’s is that the latter’s is hollow, whereas God’s is massive and compact.

There were thus different articulations of transcendent anthropomorphism in early Islam, from the margins as well as from the center, for example Ahmad b. Hanbal was an enthusiastic advocate of transcendent anthropomorphism and it was among his followers, in Baghdad in particular, that this tradition continued for centuries to a have an important influence on the articulation of traditionalist Sunnism. Here, however, the characteristic feature of God’s morphic transcendence is his divine beauty. The God of MuÈammad is beautiful, we are told in ÈadÊth, and he loves beauty. In other reports that were quite important for the articulation of traditionalist Sunnism during the 3-6th

centuries we learn that this divine beauty includes morphic beauty as well. In fact, these reports tell us, the Prophet saw God in the most beautiful form, young, beardless, and wavy-haired. Yes, most of those adverse to anthropomorphism severely criticized these reports and judged them inauthentic. But this fact must be acknowledged along side another, well-documented fact: that is that the traditionalists generally accepted one or another version of these reports as authentic and the divine imagery found in these reports therefore had an impressive influence on the Sunni view of God.

In conclusion, the popular view that the premodern Muslim discussions of God’s attributes are to be understood only in the context of the opposition between divine transcendence on the one hand and anthropomorphism on the other must be amended. We have shown that these two are mutually exclusive neither in a history-of-religions context generally nor in the Islamic context specifically. Some important early Muslims found no problem affirming both anthropomorphism and divine transcendence. This characteristically ancient Near Eastern and Semitic tradition of transcendent anthropomorphism, while replaced by the Mu#tazila and the Shi#a with the incorporeal transcendence of Hellenism, survived in traditionalist Sunnism through traditions describing God’s paramount morphic beauty. This tradition was not marginal. Ahmad b. Hanbal centralized it within nascent Sunnism and it continued to characterize, and caricaturize, traditionalist Sunnism through the eleventh century common era. The god of this orthodoxy was clearly embodied, but his was a body unlike bodies.