RITUAL MUST ARISE FROM THE SPIRIT
ALL religions give, through rituals and ceremonies, a defi nite form to the act of worship. Islam, too, has specifi c rites but emphasises the spirit in which these are to be carried out. Form is an external manifestation of the spirit. The latter is the vital and indispensable element of every sincere religious act, while the former is a mere ancillary.
A hadith on fasting shows how this act must be illumined by spirit: “One who did not forsake telling lies while on a fast, God has no need of such a person forsaking food and water.” Numerous statements in the Quran and hadith make it clear that in Islam the form of ritual practices and their spirit are not equal constituents of worship. In relation to one another, one is the crucial and the other, a sub-ordinate element. Each act of worship may or may not — depending upon its nature and circumstances — have an external form, but, whether ritualised or formless, what is truly important is the spirit that underlies it.
Form is an external manifestation of the spirit which is the vital and indispensable element of every sincere religious act.
While rituals serve partly as palpable identifi ers of religious acts or acts of worship and partly as physical reinforcements of or prompters to religious ardour, the essence of Islam is the inner spirit, eternal and unassailable, unlike its outer forms. Whenever this reality is lodged in the recesses of the individual psyche, its eff ects are outwardly refl ected. Sincerely performed ceremonial acts are but concrete expressions of the incontrovertible inner truth.
When, near the end of his life, Prophet Muhammad went on his pilgrimage, he laid down specifi c ways of performing Haj. More than 100,000 of his companions went with him. Then the Prophet seated himself in the courtyard of the Kabah and his companions queried him on the procedures of this important part of worship, especially concerning rites and their proper forms. (Haj involves the performance of a series of rites, and since this was the fi rst proper Haj, there was uncertainty about their correct order.) The Prophet allayed their fears, saying: “There is no harm. There is no harm. Real harm lies in the dishonouring of a person.” This saying throws light on how form relates to spirit in Islam: the spirit is the essential factor, while the form or ritual is a matter of externals. If the believer is not lacking in spirit, any defi ciency in the form of his worship is tolerable.
The converse of this is illustrated by a tradition set down in the books of hadith. Once, the Prophet was seated in the mosque in Medina when a worshipper came to meet him after performing his ablutions and saying his prayers with full observance of their form. The Prophet sent him back to say his prayers again as, he said, he had not said his prayers.
Here, a distinction was made between form and spirit. The Prophet sensed that this worshipper’s performance of the rituals of prayer had been mechanical and not imbued with religious spirit. Indeed, the true spirit of salath is modesty. But this individual’s behaviour showed that while he was praying, modesty was far from his mind. The Prophet told him to go back and say his prayers so that he should concern himself with the kernel of prayer, not its outer shell.
However punctilious the worship in form, without the true spirit the performance of the ritual is invalid. The mere observance of the form of worship does not make worship acceptable in the eyes of God. The word 'ritual', in fact, has the same connotation as 'form'. The only diff erence is that 'form' is a term of general application, and 'ritual' has become a religious term.
A hadith report tells us that the value of an act depends upon the doer’s intention. That is, a practice must be evaluated on the basis of the motivation behind it. Here is an example from the Prophet’s migration from Makkah to Medina, known as the Hijrah. This emigration was for the sake of Islam, wherein people abandoned hearth and home for God. It was an act of great religious signifi cance. One of the emigrants, however was not pure in intent. He left Makkah for Medina with the ulterior motive of marrying a girl from Medina, who had agreed to marry him only if he came to Medina as she could not go to Makkah. The Prophet told his companions that, since this individual had migrated not for the sake of God but for his own private benefi t, he would not be rewarded.
This makes it clear that rituals are of relative value in Islam. The true value of an act in Islam depends entirely upon the spirit in which it is carried out, and not on the trappings of its outward form.