Al-Hayā’: The Dignity of Shame

What Is Hayā’?

There are several accessible articles and even a book in English that explore the scope and significance of ĥayā’ in Islamic sources,¹⁰ so I will endeavor to keep this discussion relatively brief. While shallow understandings of ĥayā’ as shyness or mere modesty have recently been used to attempt to silence outspoken women and young people in some Muslim spaces, the Islamic tradition provides a much more profound account, with one hadith recording: “We were with the Messenger of God, peace and blessings be upon him, when modesty [ĥayā’] was mentioned to him. They said, ‘O Messenger of God, is modesty part of the religion?’ The Prophet said, ‘Rather, it is the entire religion.’”¹¹

Derived from the Arabic root ĥā’-yā’-wāw, which it shares with the Divine Name al-Ĥayy (the Living) and the words for life (ĥayāh) and alive (ĥayy), ĥayā’ is considered an essential attribute of living beings, especially human beings, naming a kind of awareness of being the object of moral gaze, as fourteenth-century (eighth-century Hijri) Hanbali scholar and Sufi Ibn al-Qayyim al-Jawziyyah writes:

Ĥayā’ is of the most superior qualities, of the greatest in status, and of the most beneficial. Indeed, it is quintessential to humanness, for whoever carries no ĥayā’ has no share of humanness other than flesh, blood, and outward appearance. Likewise, there is no potential for good in a person [without it]…. Were it not for ĥayā’, many people would not have fulfilled any of their obligations, nor acknowledged the rights of any being, nor kept the ties of kin, nor even shown kindness to parents. The driving element in these acts is either religious, namely hoping for its good outcome [ultimately], or it is worldly, which is the ĥayā’ of its doer from the [eyes of] creation. Therefore, were it not for ĥayā’ from either the Creator or the creation, one would not have engaged in these acts.¹²

The Qur’an describes God as not having ĥayā’, or shame, to “set forth a parable of a gnat or something smaller” (2:26) or “to tell the truth” (33:53) and reveals that “the Prophet has too much ĥayā’ to mention” (33:53) that people lingering to speak with him would bother him. Indeed, the Prophet ﷺ, the epitome of Islamic masculinity (muruwwah), is described as being more intense in ĥayā’ than a virgin girl in her room.¹³ What a difference between his beautiful example (33:21) and that of many promoters of “masculinity” today. Thus, far from being simply a “feminine” virtue, as ¢Alī b. Abī Ţālib, the Prophet’s son-in-law and paragon of Islamic chivalry (futuwwah) said, “ĥayā’ is the key to all goodness.”¹⁴

In the hadith literature, even God is described as having ĥayā’: “Verily, God has ĥayā’ and is generous. He would have ĥayā’, when a man raises his hands to Him, to turn them [the upraised hands] away empty and disappointed.”¹⁵ Al-Qushayrī reports a tradition, popular in later Sufi works, that on the Day of Judgment, God will hand each of his servants a sealed letter containing all of their deeds, and they will be ashamed to read it, but God has also written in this letter, “You did what you did, and I am ashamed to show it to you. Go, for I have forgiven you.”¹⁶ In the same work, al-Qushayrī recounts a related saying from early Central Asian Sufi Yaĥyā b. Mu¢ādh al-Rāzī, “If a man is ashamed before God Most High while being obedient, God will be ashamed of [punishing] him, when he sins.”¹⁷ As Sa¢dī also wrote in his Gulistān, “Look at the generosity of God: the servant sins, and God feels ashamed!”

Angels are also described as having ĥayā’ before God due to their inability to praise Him adequately, and in one narration, the Prophet ﷺ said of his companion ¢Uthmān, “Should I not feel shy [have ĥayā’] before a man before whom the angels feel shy [have ĥayā’]?”¹⁸ The prophets are also described as having ĥayā’ before God and others, as al-Qushayrī writes that after Adam’s slip, “when God asked him, ‘Are you fleeing from Me?’, he answered, ‘No, I am fleeing out of shame before You!’”¹⁹ However, the semantic range of ĥayā’ covers everything from traditional notions of modesty to being considerate and conscientious with people—refraining from doing or saying anything that might cause them discomfort or harm (unless necessary to prevent greater harm)—to remaining clothed even when alone out of awareness of being in the sight of God, the angels, and the natural world.

What unites all of these forms of ĥayā’, however, is a sense of conscientious “shame” or “reticence” resulting from the awareness of being the object of the moral gaze of others, whether stones, plants, animals, other people, angels, and God, and even of one’s own gaze. Most of us would be ashamed to do something wrong in front of a small child, someone we respect, or even a mirror, so God is even more deserving of our ĥayā’, and the complete integration and internalization of this awareness is regarded as the loftiest form of ĥayā’. The hadith tradition also distinguishes between “good,” “positive,” or “intelligent” and “bad,” “negative,” or “stupid” ĥayā’, the former resulting from the correct prioritization of these different moral gazes.²⁰ Indeed, much of the modern aversion to shame can be understood as a preponderance of the negative forms of ĥayā’ and the paucity of the positive forms.

In Islamic sources, the highest level of ĥayā’ is usually described as that in which the divine gaze and individual human self-regard coincide. Thus, Imam ¢Alī held that “the most beautiful, lovely, excellent [aĥsan]²¹ form of ĥayā’ is ĥayā’ before one’s own self,” which al-Jawziyyah describes as “the ĥayā’ of a noble soul when it detects its own deficiency, or that it has settled for less. It is almost as if one has two souls, one ashamed of the other. This is the most complete ĥayā’, for if people were to be ashamed of themselves, then by greater virtue, they would become ashamed in front of others.”²²

Thus defined, ĥayā’ is closely related to the central Qur’anic terms of taqwā (reverent, mindful awareness of God) and iĥsān (beauty, loveliness, excellence), defined in the famous Hadith of Jibrīl as “worshiping God as if you see Him, for if you do not see Him, He sees You.”²³ As numerous Sufi commentators have pointed out, the original language of this tradition can also be glossed another way: “for if you are not, [then] you see Him, and He sees you.”²⁴ This realization of one’s nothingness, one’s absolute dependency on or transparency before God, or the perfect polishing of the mirror of the heart reflecting the divine names and attributes (to use another metaphor from the hadith), is known as faqr (poverty) in Sufi literature, in accordance with the Qur’anic verse: “O people, you are the poor towards God, and He is the Rich/Self-Sufficient, the Praised” (35:15). This is one meaning of the Prophet’s statement, “Poverty is my pride [al-faqru fakhrī],”²⁵ symbolized by the crescent moon, whose “horns of glory” come from its hollowness or poverty. Al-Qushayrī records the following saying, “Al-ĥayā’ is the abandoning of all [personal] pretensions before God,”²⁶ and our independent existence is one such pretension; rather, it is the root of all such pretensions.

Thus, ĥayā’ is the humble awareness of our true status before and absolute need of God, even (perhaps especially) in praiseworthy actions and states, as al-Qushayrī relates in the following account of another early Sufi, “Occasionally, I would pray two prayers to God Most High, then come away ashamed as if I have robbed someone.”²⁷ In his celebrated Ĥikam (The aphorisms), Ibn ¢Aţā Allāh al-Iskandarī explains, “An act of disobedience that grants humility and need/poverty is better than an act of obedience that grants pride and arrogance,”²⁸ and,

The source of every disobedience, indifference, and passion is self-satisfaction. The source of every obedience, vigilance, and virtue is dissatisfaction with one’s self. It is better for you to keep company with an ignorant man dissatisfied with himself than to keep company with a learned man satisfied with himself. For what knowledge is there in a self-satisfied scholar? And what ignorance is there in an unlearned man dissatisfied with himself?²⁹

This is the secret of so much of the poetry of Hafez and other great Sufi poets who condemn self-admiration (¢ujb), ostentation (riyā’), and other forms of “self-seeing” (khūd bīnī) as the most dangerous and deadly of faults, constituting the hidden idolatry (al-shirk al-khafī) against which the Prophet ﷺ warned.³⁰ Hafez writes,

As long as you are proud of learning and intellect, you have no real knowledge [ma¢rifat]
Let me tell you a subtle point, see not the self and be saved.³¹

And even more powerfully:

There is no obstacle between the lover and beloved
You are your own veil, Hafez. Get out of the way!³²

Shame makes us want to vanish or disappear from view and, according to many Sufi exegetes, it is precisely this ability to “get out of the way” of God, to realize our own nothingness before the divine reality and be transparent before or reflective of the divine qualities, that makes us capable of being God’s vicegerents (khulafā’), those behind whom God acts.³³ From this perspective, shame (ĥayā’) and poverty (faqr) are the very life (ĥayāh) and spine (faqār) of human dignity.

Moreover, perspectives based on this rigorous cultivation of ĥayā’³⁴ can paradoxically have profoundly egalitarian social consequences. For example, al-Qusharyī approvingly quotes the saying of another early Sufi, “Whoever thinks that his soul is better than the soul of Pharaoh has shown pride,”³⁵ and, according to a hadith, “None shall enter the garden who has in his heart a mustard seed’s worth of pride.”³⁶ Similarly, the great eighteenth-century North African Sufi master and scholar Shaykh Aĥmad al-Tijānī declared, “There is no difference between a believer and an infidel [kāfir] in terms of humanity [fī l-ādamiyy].”³⁷ The same shaykh related a prophetic tradition of warning: “Do not exalt yourselves over God by exalting yourselves over His lands and His servants. Whoever exalts himself over the servants (of God), exalts himself over God, thinking himself greater (than God).”³⁸ As another hadith warns, “Al-ĥayā’ and faith (al-īmān) are together. If one of them is removed, the other is removed.”³⁹

The Loss of Hayā’, the Crises of Modernity, and the Deformations of Dignity

While many would see the signs of the loss of ĥayā’ in the proliferation of online pornography and the perennial complaint about the poor manners of the youth, these are but symptoms of a deeper spiritual crisis whose more profound and prior consequences, namely the degradation of the environment and exploitation and extermination of traditional peoples and ways of life, are far more dangerous and worthy of our attention.

But what could ĥayā’ possibly have to do with these global catastrophes? Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad provides a clue in the sixty-sixth contention of his fourteenth collection of aphorisms: “The monoculture annihilates difference for fear that the Other might show it what it truly is.”⁴⁰ If ĥayā’ is the humble, reticent awareness of being the object of another’s moral gaze, then the present homogenizing, hegemonic world-system is completely without ĥayā’ and must consume and destroy all other ways of life and perspectives on itself lest it suffer the shame of being seen for what it truly is.⁴¹

The Qur’an repeatedly criticizes the shameless behavior of those who amass and consume wealth and oppress others, such as in Sura Al-Balad: “Does he suppose that none will ever have power over him? He says, ‘I have squandered vast wealth!’ Does he suppose that no one sees him?” (90:5–7); in Sura Al-¢Alaq: “Does he not know that God sees?” (96:14); and in Sura Al-¢Ādiyāt: “Truly man is ungrateful to his Lord, and truly he is a witness to that, and truly he is violent in his love for good things. Does he not know that when what lies within graves is turned inside out and what lies within breasts is made known, truly on that Day their Lord shall be aware of them?” (100:6–11).

The elimination of ĥayā’, this restraining awareness of the divine gaze, especially among those in positions of power and influence, has led to the unprecedented levels and kinds of violence, oppression, and consumption of wealth that have characterized the modern era.⁴² As argued by figures as diverse as Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Sylvia Wynter, W. E. B. DuBois, and Gilbert Durand, the philosophical and spiritual roots of these crises lie in the transformations that took place between the late medieval and early modern periods (approximately 1300–1700 CE) in the area that would come to be known as Western Europe. During this period, the model of existence known as “the great chain of being” was secularized and the transcendent, universal, divine ideal was replaced by an immanent, particular, human ideal of the rational, European (what later was termed white) man, who became the “measure of all things.”⁴³ As a result, new racial hierarchies of human beings emerged based on their perceived differences in rationality and appearance from the new ideal of the modern European man, replacing the more spiritual hierarchies of angels, saints, believers, and heathens that characterized medieval European thought. As DuBois observed, “The medieval European world… knew the black man chiefly as a legend or occasional curiosity, but still as a fellow man.… The modern world in contrast knows the Negro chiefly as a bond slave in the West Indies and America.”⁴⁴

Like DuBois before him, Nasr characterizes this new humanist project as a Promethean revolt against heaven in contrast to the traditional “pontifical” conception of humanity as that which connects heaven and earth. This new Promethean conception had a profound effect on the understanding of human identity and difference, as human identity no longer primarily came from relationships to the transcendent sacred, mediated through spiritual/family traditions and sacred lands, but from being defined over and against other people and beings, mediated by the forces of nation-state and the invisible hand of the market.⁴⁵ Such an immanent ideal has to overrepresent itself as universal and thus define itself over and against other immanent forms, whereas a transcendent ideal can admit equal participation by different forms. The colors of the rainbow are all equally light, but not equally red; the points on the surface of a sphere are all equidistant from the sphere’s center, but not from its north pole.⁴⁶

This dynamic of the overrepresentation of a particular as a universal and the subsequent denigration and elimination of other particulars served as a philosophical foundation and justification of many modern genocidal projects around the world, from the attempted ethnic cleansing of the Americas, to King Leopold’s atrocities in the Congo Free State, the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, the long Nakba in Palestine, the ethnic cleansing of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, the Circassian genocide, and even Stalin’s brutal purges,⁴⁷ among others. In his 1920 essay, “The Souls of White Folk,” DuBois coined the term “the religion of whiteness”⁴⁸ to describe this overrepresentation of a particular kind of humanity as a pseudo-divine universal and its associated violent rituals of colonial capitalism⁴⁹ that forcefully subordinated the natural world and racialized peoples to the ever-expanding appetites of these newly divinized, dominant populations.⁵⁰ For DuBois, whiteness here does not refer to skin color but rather to a set of power relations, a positioning atop the great chain of being over other kinds of human beings.⁵¹ In this ideological context, purportedly universal notions of human dignity and morality (what some now call “development”) tend to be profoundly deformed by the implicit and unacknowledged exclusion of large swaths of the human race (the poor, the “non-white,” the “underdeveloped”) from dignity and humanity. But as James Baldwin poignantly explains, this degradation of dignity cuts both ways, degrading those who fail to recognize others’ humanity:

What slavery and white supremacy did to White Southerners was worse than what it did to African-Americans in the South…. [T]his cowardice, this necessity of justifying a totally false identity and of justifying what must be called a genocidal history, has placed everyone now living into the hands of the most ignorant and powerful people the world has ever seen. And how did they get that way? By deciding that they were white. By opting for safety instead of life. By persuading themselves that a black child’s life meant nothing compared with a white child’s life.… And in this debasement and definition of black people, they debased and defined themselves.⁵²

While some might be tempted to think of this as an issue of the past, one need only consider the difference in the global response to tragedies and deaths of different kinds of people: it takes the deaths of hundreds or even thousands of poor Africans or Asians to elicit the same outcry produced by the deaths of a dozen Europeans, Americans, or Australians. The Western media’s coverage of the war in Gaza that began in 2023 clearly demonstrated this dehumanizing dynamic. As Baldwin notes, this dynamic was exemplified in the modern institutions of European colonization and chattel slavery whose “thing-ification” and “commodification” of people, even in the accounts of the era, were widely acknowledged as the source of massive accumulation of wealth and resources that led to the Industrial Revolution and modern capitalism.⁵³

To take but one example, the Dutch East India Company (VOC)—the wealthiest company in human history, worth more than Amazon, Apple, and ExxonMobil combined—made its fortune by wiping out and enslaving the people on and surrounding the Banda Islands (in present-day Indonesia) to corner the market on nutmeg production. In Amitav Ghosh’s 2021 book, The Nutmeg’s Curse, he argues that the VOC’s rapacious brutality and approach to nature and other people simply as resources to be used for profit rather than as living beings full of agency and meaning set the tone for our current economies of extraction, ultimately leading to our contemporary climate crisis.⁵⁴ As Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò explains in his review of Ghosh’s book,

In a world created by corporations such as the V.O.C. and colonial sponsors such as the imperial Dutch, everything, including the planet, is considered a resource to be exchanged or exploited, and progress and “rationality” are measured in impersonal dollars and cents. Profit and security are reserved for those at the top of the world’s hierarchies, and are achieved by shifting the risks and the burdens toward those at the bottom. Some people get a storm-surge barrier—a specialty of certain Dutch multinationals—and exquisitely climate-controlled interiors; others watch their villages be swallowed by the sea.⁵⁵

While Ghosh’s book was published in 2021, Nasr made a similar argument in his 1966 Rockefeller lectures, later published as Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis in Modern Man. At a time when most were unaware of the ecological crisis, Nasr demonstrated its origins in the spiritual and philosophical shifts of the late medieval and early modern periods in Western Europe (closely related to those described above), culminating in a Cartesian science that completely separated the “subjective” spirit/mind from “objective” matter, rendering the world of nature an inanimate “thing” whose qualitative attributes were reduced to mere quantities. Thus “de-natured,” the natural world lost its real symbolic and sacred quality and became mere raw material for human consumption and use. Nasr explains,

In fact, it might be said that the main reason why modern science never arose in China or Islam is precisely because of the presence of metaphysical doctrine and a traditional religious structure which refused to make a profane thing of nature. The most basic reason is that neither in Islam, nor India nor the Far East was the substance and stuff of nature so depleted of a sacramental and spiritual character, nor was the intellectual dimension of these traditions so enfeebled as to enable a purely secular science of nature and a secular philosophy to develop outside the matrix of the traditional intellectual orthodoxy. Islam, which resembles Christianity in so many ways, is a perfect example of this truth, and the fact that modern science did not develop in its bosom is not the sign of decadence as some have claimed but of the refusal of Islam to consider any form of knowledge as purely secular and divorced from what it considers as the ultimate goal of human existence.⁵⁶

So whereas a medieval European Christian could see a symbol of the cross and Christ, the axis mundi, in a tree, or a traditional Muslim could experience the tree as a living tajallī, a theophanic sign (ayāh) of God, which hymns His praises in its own way (17:44), modernized people of most faiths see only a potential chair or firewood, a worker of photosynthesis, or giver of shade, and “the something more” they sense in the tree is relegated to the realm of poetry and fantasy. In the words of William Blake, “The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others, a mere thing that stands in the way. Some see Nature all ridicule and deformation… some scarce see Nature at all…. As a man is, so he sees.”⁵⁷ Thus, Nasr presciently concludes,

The ecological crisis is only an externalization of an inner malaise and cannot be solved without a spiritual rebirth of Western man.… It is still our hope that as the crisis created by man’s forgetfulness of who he really is grows and that as the idols of his own making crumble one by one before his eyes, he will begin a true reform of himself, which always means a spiritual rebirth and through this rebirth attain a new harmony with the world of nature around him. Otherwise, it is hopeless to expect to live in harmony with that grand theophany which is virgin nature, while remaining oblivious and indifferent to the Source of that theophany both beyond nature and at the centre of man’s being.⁵⁸

Real human dignity is not possible in such a degraded and degrading context of desacralization. If only profit, power, and certain human lives are recognized as sacred, then to return to Sa¢dī’s poem, we do not deserve the name of “human.” Without ĥayā’, you have to look down and trample upon others in order to feel tall; with ĥayā’, your dignity comes directly from feeling small before the divine life you perceive in everyone and everything around you.

When the Hearts Go Blind

In a reversal of the hadith, “If you feel no ĥayā’, then do as you wish,”⁵⁹ in doing whatever we wish to whomever or whatever we wish, modern, Promethean humanity has lost all sense of ĥayā’. This inability to perceive and value divine life in any but a small group of people has made a mockery of any talk of human equality or dignity. Paradoxically, in seeking to divinize itself, modernized humanity has debased itself, becoming a slave of its own desires and the brutal systems that cater to and incite them. The Qur’an admonishes us: “Have you considered one who takes his caprice as his god, God having led him astray knowingly, and sealed his hearing and his heart and placed a cover upon his sight? Who, then, will guide him after God?” (45:23).

Describing these deformations of the great chain of being, political theologian Marika Rose writes, 

Disenchantment [and secularization] is not so much about the disappearance of magic and mystery so much as their transformation. It is about the violent destruction of old social and metaphysical bonds which tied people to one another and to the world around them in order to bind them to new masters who were appropriating for themselves both legal and sovereign power—to nation states and imperial powers and ideals.⁶⁰

These new ideals often transform or deform the old “metaphysical bonds” of religion (which in St. Augustine’s poetic etymology comes from re-ligare: re-bind or reconnect). Hence the heretical abominations of genocidal manifest destiny, Sunday church lynchings, the prosperity gospel, and the long-standing marriage of white nationalism, American exceptionalism, and Christianity in the context of the United States.⁶¹ As Eugene McCarraher argues in his magisterial Enchantments of Mammon, “Under capitalism, money occupies the ontological throne from which God has been evicted.”⁶²

Unfortunately, far too many Muslim societies have suffered a similar fate, “following their caprices away from the truth” (5:48) down the lizard holes of modernity, vying more with Euro-American models in piling up wealth, exploiting the vulnerable, and degrading the environment than in “good deeds” (5:48). And to paraphrase Lady Macbeth, without serious repentance, “all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten these greedy hands!” By contrast, Prophet Muhammad ﷺ declared, “He is not a believer whose stomach is filled while his neighbor is hungry,”⁶³ and, “Seek out the vulnerable for me, for you are only given provision and divine support due to your care for the vulnerable.”⁶⁴ The Companion Bilāl b. Rabāĥ recounted that Muhammad ﷺ would spend all of his money every single day, and even borrow money, in order to clothe and feed those around him.⁶⁵ Before such an example, most of us can only be ashamed.

For many of us spiritually burdened with wealth, instead of “walking humbly upon the earth” (25:63), our large collective ecological footprint and the unsustainable environmental and human costs of “everyday” luxuries have us “selling the signs of God” (9:9), the precious gift of the wondrous diversity and harmony of our natural world, and the various human and nonhuman languages and cultures therein (30:22) “for a paltry price” (9:9) of material comforts. This tragic and conjoined loss of īmān (faith) and ĥayā’ is also summarized in Sura Yā-Sīn: “The word has indeed come due for most of them, for they have no faith. Truly We have put shackles upon their necks, and they are up to their chins, so that they are stiff-necked. And We placed a barrier before them and a barrier behind them and veiled them; so they see not” (36:7–9). We cause “corruption on the earth” (2:11) and the “land and sea” (30:41) and call it “righteousness” (2:11). As explained above, the loss of faith of the perception of or even belief in that which is unseen by the senses and reason (al-ghayb) resulted in the “stiff-necked” loss of humility and shame, or ĥayā’, veiling the heart that can perceive the signs of God and recognize the living moral gaze in all creation, both human and nonhuman. For “truly it is not the eyes that go blind, but it is hearts within breasts that go blind” (22:46). When the mirror of ĥayā’ is removed, we cannot even see ourselves, let alone others. The corruption of the best is the worst, and anyone questioning our role as God’s vicegerents need only consider our track record of killing off other species and our destabilizing effects on the planet’s balance and harmony. The only things that could perhaps compete with us when we’re not living up to our dignity are the asteroids and volcanoes that wiped out the dinosaurs. As Rumi wrote,

The crown of We have honoured [the children of Adam] is on your head;
  the necklace of We have given you [al-Kawthar] hangs on your breast….
Man is the substance, and the celestial sphere is his accident;
  all things are the branch or the step of a ladder: he is the goal.
O you whose slaves are reason and intelligence
  how can you sell yourself so cheaply?⁶⁶

In contrast to this blind callousness that has made us sell our dignity so cheaply, Ibn al-¢Arabī articulates a radically different way of life characterized by a ĥayā’ that stems from the awareness of the divine life of the Alive (al-Ĥayy) pervading all things:

Even though the rational thinkers and the common people say that something in the cosmos is neither alive nor an animal, in our view God gave every such thing, when He created it, the innate disposition to recognize and know Him. Each is alive and speaks rationally in glorifying its Lord. The faithful perceive this through their faith, and the folk of unveiling perceive it in its actual reality…. Someone may come to know that there is no existent thing that is not alive and speaking. In other words, there is nothing that is not a rational/speaking animal, whether it is called inanimate, plant, or dead. This is because there is nothing, whether or not it stands by itself, that does not glorify its Lord in praise, and this attribute belongs only to something that is described as alive.⁶⁷

Ibn al-¢Arabī concludes that whoever witnesses the reality of the life of all things will thus be full of shame at all times, whether around other people or in seclusion, for it is impossible to be alone. Even if you could escape other things by floating in empty space, you would have shame before your bodily members, since you know that they witness whatever you do and will testify before God on the Day of Judgment as to how you used them. Connecting this intense level of ĥayā’ before all living things (which is all things, including one’s own body parts) with the profound realization of one’s own humility and abasement before God, and therefore awareness of God, Ibn al-¢Arabi writes of one who has realized this that “there is no one among God’s servants more felicitous than he, and no one with more knowledge of God’s mysteries through unveiling.”⁶⁸ Thus the fullness of human flourishing and dignity for Ibn al-¢Arabī lies in the humble and “ĥayā’-ful” recognition of divine life (al-ĥayyāh) all around oneself.

This kind of spiritual realization and renewal, the methods of which are eloquently described in the writings of the exemplars of Sufi and other “mystical” traditions, must be the foundation for any attempt to restore true dignity to humanity. Sociopolitical and economic reform efforts are certainly necessary, but they are not sufficient to deal with the tremendous consequences of desacralization, since they address only the symptoms but not the metaphysical and spiritual roots of our current crises. I believe only a revival of ĥayā’ in its most profound sense can lead to the revival and preservation of a sacred and truly dignified mode of living, as expressed beautifully in the following poem quoted in al-Qushayrī’s Al-Risālah:

[It is] as if one watchman stands guard over my thoughts,
  While another watches over my sight and my tongue.
Since I saw you, whenever my eyes see something that displeases you, I say [to myself]:
  “They [the watchmen] must have spotted me.”
Not a single word addressed to someone other than you has come out of my mouth
  without me saying to myself: “They must have overheard me.”
And not a single thought about anyone other than you has occurred to me
  Without them restraining me from it.
The speeches of sincere friends have wearied me,
  And I have withheld from them my sight and my tongue.
It is not renunciation that turns me away from them,
  Rather, I see only you wherever I turn.⁶⁹

“And wheresoever you turn, there is the face of God” (2:115).

The artwork above is by the American visual artist Askia Bilal (askiabilal.art), whose work is inspired by a variety of intellectual and aesthetic traditions, from Sufi poetry to Greek and Roman mythology, from Platonic philosophy to hip hop.