The Destiny of Man, Gai Eaton

I was born in Switzerland of British parents, a child of war. At the
time of my birth the final peace treaty ending the first world war, the
treaty with Turkey, was being signed close by in Lausanne. The greatest
tempest which had changed the face of the world had temporarily
exhausted itself, but its effects were everywhere apparent. Old
certainties and the morality based upon them had been dealt a mortal
blow. But my family background was stained with the blood of conflict.
My father already 67 when I was born, had been born during the wars
against Napoleon Bonaparte. Both had been soldiers....

Even so, I might at least have had a homeland. I had none. Although
born in Switzerland, I was not Swiss. My mother had grown up in France
and loved the French above all others, but I was not French. Was I
English? I never felt so. My mother never tired of reminding me that
the English were cold, stupid, sexless without intellect and without
culture. I did not want to be like them. So where-if anywhere-did I
belong? It seems to me in retrospect, that this strange childhood was a
good preparation for adherence to Islam. Wherever he may have been born
and whatever his race, the Muslim's homeland is the Dar-ul-islam, the
House of Islam. His passport, here and in the Hereafter, is the simple
confession of Faith, La ilaha illa 'Llah. He does not expect - or
should not expect - security or stability in this world and must always
keep in mind the fact that death may take him tomorrow. He has no firm
roots here in this fragile earth. His roots are above in That which
alone endures.

But what of Christianity? If my father had any religious convictions he
never expressed them, although - on his death bed, approaching 90 - he
asked: `Is there a happy place?' My upbringing was left entirely to my
mother. By temperament she was not, I think, irreligious, but she had
grown up within a religious framework and she was hostile to what is
commonly called organised religion. Of one thing she was certain; her
son must be left free to think for himself and never be forced to
accept second-hand opinions. She was determined to protect me from
having religion `crammed down my throat'. She warned a succession of
nursemaids who came and went in the house and accompanied us to France
during the holidays that, if they ever mentioned religion to me, they
would at once be dismissed. When I was five or six, however, her orders
flouted by a young woman whose ambition it was to become a missionary
in Arabia, saving the souls of those benighted people who were - she
told me - lost in a pagan creed called `moslemism'. This was the first
I had heard of Arabia, and she drew me a map of that mysterious land.

One day she took me for a walk past Wandsworth Prison (we were living
in Wandsworth Common at the time). I must have misbehaviour some way
for she gripped me roughly by the arm, pointed to the prison gates and
said: `There's a red?haired man in the sky who will shut you in there
if you're naughty!' This was the first I had heard of `God', and I did
not like what I heard. For some reason I was afraid of men with red
hair (as she must have known), and this particular one ? living above
the clouds and dedicated to punishing naughty boys ? sounded very
frightening. I asked my mother about him as soon as we got home. I do
not remember what she said to comfort me, but the girl was promptly
dismissed.
Eventually, much later than most children, I was sent to school or
rather to a series of schools in England and in Switzerland before
arriving, aged 14, at Charterhouse. Surely, with services in the school
chapel and classes in `Scripture', Christianity should have made some
impact upon me? It made no impact at all, either upon me or upon my
school friends. This does not seem to me surprising. Religion cannot
survive, whole and effective when it is confined to one single
compartment of life and education. Religion is either all or it is
nothing; either it dwarfs all profane studies or it is dwarfed by them.
Once or twice a week we were taught about the Bible just as we were
instructed in other subjects in other classes. Religion, it was assumed
had nothing to do with the more important studies which formed the
backbone of our education.

God did not interfere in historical events, He did not determine the
phenomena we studied in science classes, He played no part in current
events, and the world, governed entirely by chance, and by material
forces, was to be understood without reference to anything that might
-or might not -exist beyond its horizons. God was surplus to
requirements....
And yet I needed to know the meaning of my own existence. Only those
who, at some time in their lives, have been possessed by such a need
can guess at its intensity, comparable to that of physical hunger or
sexual desire. I did not see how I could put one foot in front of the
other unless I understood where I was going and why. I could do nothing
unless I understood what part my action played in the scheme of things.
All I knew I knew was that I knew nothing - nothing, that is to say, of
the slightest importance - and I was paralysed by my ignorance as
though immobilised in a dense fog.

Where should I seek for knowledge? By the time I was 15 I had
discovered that there was something called `philosophy' and that the
word meant 'love of wisdom'. Wisdom was what I sought, so the
satisfaction of my need must lie hidden in these heavy books written by
wise men. With a feeling of intense excitement, like an explorer
already in sight of the undiscovered land, I ploughed through
Descartes, Kant, Hume, Spinoza, Schopenhauer and Bertrand Russell, or
else read works which explained their teachings. It was not long before
I realised that something was wrong. I might as well have been eating
sand as seeking nourishment from this quarter. These men knew nothing.
They were only speculating, spinning ideas out of their own poor heads,
and anyone can speculate (including a school boy). How could a 15 or
16-year-old have had the impudence to dismiss the whole of Western
secular philosophy as worthless? One does not have to be mature to
distinguish between what the Quran calls dhann ('opinion') and true
Knowledge. At the same time my mother's constant insistence that I
should take no notice of what others thought or said obliged me to
trust my own judgment. Western culture treated these 'philosophers' as
great men, and students in universities studied their works with
respect. But what was that to me?

Some time later, when I was in the sixth-form, a master who took a
particular interest in me made a strange remark which I did not at
understand. `You are', he said, `the only truly universal sceptic I
have known'. He was not referring specifically to religion. He meant
that I seemed to doubt everything that was taken for granted by
everyone else. I wanted to know why it should be assumed that our
rational powers, so well adapted to finding food, shelter and a mate,
had an applic beyond the mundane realm. I was puzzled by the notion
that the commandment 'Thou shalt not kill' was supposed to be binding
on those who were neither Jews nor Christians, and I was no less
baffled as to why in a world full of beautiful women, the rule of
monogamy should be thought to have a universal application. I even
doubted my own existence. Long afterwards I came across the story of
the Chinese sage, Chuangtzu, who, having dreamed one night that he was
a butterfly, awoke to we whether he was in fact the man Chuangtzu who
had dreamed that he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming that it
was Chuangtzu. I understood his dilemma.

Yet, when my teacher made this remark, I had already discovered a key
to what might be a more certain knowledge. By chance - although there
is no such thing as `chance' -I had come across a book called 'The
Primordial Ocean' by a certain Professor Perry, an Egyptologist. The
professor had a fixed idea that the ancient Egyptians had travelled to
part of the world in their papyrus boats spreading their religion,
mythology, far and wide. To prove his case, he had spent many years
researching ancient mythologies, and also the myths and symbols of
'primitive' peoples in our own time. What he revealed was an
astonishing unanimity of belief, however different the images in which
that belief was expressed. He had not proved his theory about the
papyrus boats; he had, I thought, proved something quite different. It
seemed that, behind the tapestry of forms and images, there were
certain universal truths regarding the nature of reality, the creation
of the world and of mankind, and the meaning of the human experience;
truths which were as much a part as our blood and our bones.

One of the principal causes of unbelief in the modern world is the
plurality of religions which appear mutually contradictory. So long as
the Europeans were convinced of their own racial superiority they had
no reason to doubt that Christianity was the only true Faith. The
notion that they were the crown of the `evolutionary process' made it
easy to assume that all other religions were no more than naive
attempts to answer perennial questions. It was when this racial
self-confidence declined doubts crept in. How was it possible for a
good God to allow the majority of human beings to live and die in the
service of false religions?

Was it any longer possible for the Christian to believe that he alone
was saved? Others made the same claim - Muslims, for example - so how
could anyone be sure who was right and who was wrong? For many people,
including myself until I came to Perry's book, the obvious conclusion
was that, since everyone could not be right, everyone must be wrong.
Religion was an illusion, the product of wishful thinking. Others might
have found it possible to substitute `scientific truth' for religious
`myths'. I could not, since science was founded upon assumptions
regarding the infallibility of reason and the reality of
sense-experience which could never be proved.

When I read Perry's book I knew nothing of the Quran. That came much
later, and what little I had heard of Islam was distorted by prejudices
accumulated during a thousand years of confrontation. And yet, had I
but known it, I had already taken a step in the direction of
Christianity's great rival. The Quran assures us that no people on
earth was ever left without divine guidance and a doctrine of truth,
conveyed through a messenger of God who always spoke to the people in
their own `language', therefore in terms of their particular
circumstances and according to their needs. The fact that such messages
become distorted in the course of time goes without saying, and no one
should be surprised if truth is distorted as it passes from generation
to generation, but it would be astonishing if no vestiges remained
after the passage of the centuries. It now seems to me entirely in
accordance with Islam to believe that these vestiges, clothed in myth
and symbol (the `language' of the people of earlier times), are
directly descended from revealed Truth and confirm the final Message.

>>From Charterhouse I went on to Cambridge, where I neglected my official
studies, which seemed trivial and boring, in favour of the only study
that mattered. The year was 1939. War had broken out just before I had
went up to the University and, in two years time, I would be in the
army. It seemed likely, after all, that the Germans would succeed in
killing me as I had always thought they would. I had only a little time
in which to find answers to the questions which still obsessed me, but
this did not draw me to any organized religion. Like most of my
friends, I was contemptuous of the Churches and of all who paid
lip-service to a God they did not know; but I was soon obliged to
moderate this hostility. I remember the scene clearly after more than
half-a-century. A few of us lingered on, drinking coffee, after the
evening meal in the Hall of King's College. The conversation turned to
religion. At the head of the table sat an undergraduate who was
universally admired for his brilliance, his wit and his sophistication.
Hoping to impress him and taking advantage of a brief silence, I said:
`No intelligent person nowadays believes in the God of religion!' He
looked at me rather sadly before answering: `On the contrary, nowadays
intelligent people are the only ones who do believe in God', I would
willingly have sunk out of sight under the table.

I had, however, a wise friend, a man forty years my senior, whom I
found totally convincing. This was the writer L. H. Myers, described at
that time as `the only philosophical novelist England has produced'.
Not only did his major work, 'The Root and the Flower', answer many of
these questions that gnawed at me, but they conveyed a marvellous sense
of serenity united with compassion. It seemed to me that serenity was
the greatest treasure that one could possess in this life and that
compassion was the greatest virtue. Here, surely, was a man whom no
tempest shake and who surveyed the turmoil of human existence with the
eye of wisdom. I wrote to him, and he replied promptly. For the next
three years we wrote to each other at least twice every month. I poured
my heart out to him, while he, convinced that he had at last found in
this young admirer someone who truly understood him, replied in the
same vein. Eventually we met, and this cemented our friendship.

Yet everything was not as it seemed. I began to detect in his letters a
note of inner torment, sadness and disillusionment. When 1 asked him if
he put all his serenity into his books, leaving nothing for himself, he
replied: 'I think your comment was shrewd and probably true'. He had
given his whole life to the pursuit of pleasure and of `experiences'
(both sublime and sordid, so he said). Few women, in high society or
low, had been able to resist his astonishing combination of wealth,
charm and good look, He, for his part, had no reason to resist their
seductions. Fascinated by spirituality and mysticism, he adhered to no
religion and obeyed no conventional moral law. Now he felt that he was
growing old, and he could not face the prospect. He had tried to change
himself and even repent his past, but it was too late. Little more than
three years after our correspondence had begun, he committed suicide.

My affection for him endured and, in due course, I named my eldest son
after him, but Leo Myers death taught me more than I could ever learned
from his books, although it required some years for me to understand
its full significance. His wisdom had been only in his head. It had
never penetrated his human substance. A man might spend a life reading
spiritual books and studying the writings of the great mystics. He
might feel that he had penetrated the secrets of the heavens and the
earth, but unless this knowledge was incorporated into his very nature
and transformed him, it was sterile. I began to suspect that a simple
man of faith, praying to God with little understanding but with a full
heart, might be worth more than the most learned student of the
spiritual sciences.

Myers had been profoundly influenced by a study of Hindu Vedanta, the
metaphysical doctrine at the core of Hinduism. My mother's interest
Raja Yoga had already pointed me in this direction. Vedanta now became
my principal interest and, ultimately, the path that led me to Islam.
This would seem shocking to most Muslims and astonishing to anyone who
is aware that the very basis of Islam is an uncompromising condemnation
of idolatry, and yet my case is by no means unique. Whatever may be the
beliefs of the Hindu masses, Vedanta is a doctrine of pure unity, of
the unique Reality, and therefore of what, in Islam, is called Tawhid.
Muslims more than others, should have little difficulty in
understanding that a doctrine of Unity underlies all the religions
which have nourished mankind since the beginning, whatever idolatrous
illusions may have overlaid `the jewel in the lotus' just as, in the
individual, personal idolatry overlays the heart's core. How could it
be otherwise, since Tawhid is Truth and, in the words of a great
Christian mystic, `Truth is native to man'?

All too soon my time at Cambridge was ended and I was sent to The Royal
Military College, Sandhurst, emerging after five months as a young
officer supposedly ready to kill or be killed. To learn more about the
arts of war I was then despatched on what was called `attachment' to a
regiment in the north of Scotland. Here I was left to my own devices
and occupied my time either reading or walking on the granite cliffs
above the raging northern sea. This was a stormy place, but I felt at
peace as I had never done before. The more I read of Vedanta and also
of the ancient Chinese doctrine of Taoism, the more certain I was that
I at last had some understanding of the nature of things and had
glimpsed, if only in thought and imagination, the ultimate Reality
beside which all else was little more than a dream. As yet I was not
prepared to call this Reality `God', let alone Allah.

When I left the army I began to write, needing to express my thoughts
as a way of putting them in order. I wrote about Vedanta, Taoism and
Zen Buddhism, but also about certain Western writers (including Leo
Myers) who had been influenced by these doctrines. Through a chance
meeting with the poet T. S. Eliot, who was at that time head of a
publishing firm, these essays were published under the title 'The
Richest Vein', a quotation taken from Thoreau: `My instinct tells me
that my head is an organ for burrowing, as some creatures use their
snouts or forepaws, and with it I would burrow my way through these
hills. I think that the richest vein is somewhere hereabout . . ..' But
by now I had a new guide through the hills. I had discovered Rene
Guenon, a Frenchman who had lived the greater part of his life in Cairo
as the Sheikh Abdul Wahed.

Guenon undermined and then; with uncompromising intellectual rigour,
demolished all the assumptions taken for granted by modern man, that is
to say Western or westernised man. Many others had been critical of the
direction taken by European civilization since the so-called
`Renaissance', but none had dared to be as radical as he was or to
re-assert with such force the principles and values which Western
culture had consigned to the rubbish tip of history. His theme was the
`primordial tradition' or Sofia perennis, expressed-so he
maintained-both in ancient mythologies and in the metaphysical doctrine
at the root of the great religions. The language of this Tradition was
the language of symbolism, and he had no equal in his interpretation of
this symbolism. Moreover he turned the idea of human progress upside
down, replacing it with the belief almost universal before the modern
age, that humanity declines in spiritual excellence with the passage of
time and that we are now in the Dark Age which precedes the End, an age
in which all the possibilities rejected by earlier cultures have been
spewed out into the world, quantity replaces quality and decadence
approaches its final limit. No one who read him and understood him
could ever be quite the same again.
Like others whose outlook had been transformed by reading Guenon, I was
now a stranger in the world of the twentieth century. He had been led
by the logic of his convictions to accept Islam, the final Revelation
and, as it were, the summing-up of all that came before. I was not yet
ready for this, but I soon learned to conceal my opinions or at least
to veil them. No one can live happily in constant disagreement with his
fellow men women, nor can he engage in argument with them since he does
not share their basic, unspoken assumptions. Argument and discussion
pre-supposes some common ground shared by those involved. When no
common ground exists, confusion and misunderstanding are unavoidable,
if not anger. The beliefs which are the very basis of contemporary
culture are held no less passionately than unquestioning religious
faith, as was illustrated during the conflict over Salman Rushdie's
novel, 'The Satanic Verses'.

Occasionally I forgot my resolve not to become involved in fruitless
argument. Some years ago I was a guest at a diplomatic dinner party in
Trinidad. The young woman beside me was talking with a Christian
Minister, an Englishman, seated opposite. I was only half attending to
their conversation when I heard her say that she was not sure she
believed in human progress. The Minister answered her so rudely and
with such contempt that I could not resist the temptation to say:
`She's quite right - there's no such thing as progress!' He turned on
me, his face contorted with fury, and said: `If I thought that I would
commit suicide this very night!' Since suicide is as great a sin for
Christians as it is for Muslims, I understood for the first time the
extent to which faith in progress, in a `better future' and, by
implication, in the possibility of a paradise on earth has replaced
faith in God and in the hereafter. In the writings of the renegade
priest Teilhard de Chardin Christianity itself was reduced to a
religion of progress. Deprive the modern Westerner of this faith and he
is lost in a wilderness without signposts.

By the time 'The Richest Vein' was published I had left England for
Jamaica where I had a school friend who would, I knew, find me work of
some kind. I had been described on the book's cover as `a mature
thinker'. The adjective `mature' was singularly inappropriate: as a
man, as a personality, I had barely emerged from adolescence, and
Jamaica was an ideal place to work out adolescent fantasies. Only those
with some experience of West Indian life in the immediate post-war
years could understand the delights and temptations which it offered to
those seeking `experience' and sexual adventure. Like Myers, I had no
moral print such as might have restrained me. I was embarrassed when I
began to receive letters from people who had read my book and imagined
that I was an old man -`with a long white beard', as one of them wrote
- full of wisdom and compassion. I wished I could disillusion them as
quickly as possible and be rid of the responsibility they were putting
upon me. One day a Catholic priest arrived in the Island to stay with
friends; he had, he told them, just been reading a `fascinating book'
by someone called Gai Eaton. He was astonished to hear that the author
was actually in Jamaica and asked how he could meet me. His friends
took him to a party at which they were told I might be found. He was
introduced and, seeing before him such a foolish young man, gave me a
long hard look. Then he shook his head in amazement and said quietly:
`You couldn't have written that book!'

He was right, and I faced, as I had done in Leo Myers' case and have
done on many occasions since then, the extraordinary contradictions in
human nature and, above all, the gulf that often separates the writer
setting down his ideas on paper from the same man in his personal life.
Whereas the aim in Islam is to achieve a perfect balance between
different elements in the personality so that they work harmoniously
together, point in the same direction and follow the same straight
path, it is common enough in the West to find people who are completely
unbalanced, having developed one side of themselves at the expense of
all the others. I have sometimes wondered whether writing or speaking
about wisdom may not be a substitute for achieving it. This is not
exactly a case of hypocrisy (although the saying, `Physician, heal
thyself!' applies) since such people are entirely sincere in what they
write or say, indeed this may express what is best in them; but they
cannot live up to it.

After two-and-a-half years I returned to England for family reasons.
Among those who had written to me after reading my book were two men
deeply versed in Guenon's writings who had followed him into Islam in
its Sufi dimension. I met them. They told me that I might find what I
was obviously seeking, not in India or China but closer to home and
within the Abrahamic tradition; that is to say in the Sufi dimension of
Islam. They asked when I intended to start practising what I preached
and seek a `spiritual path'. It was time, they suggested gently but
firmly, for me to think about incorporating into my own life what I
already knew theoretically. I answered politely but evasively, having
no intention of following their advice until I was much older and had
exhausted the possibilities of worldly adventure. I did however begin
to read about Islam with growing interest.

This interest aroused the disapproval of my closest friend who had been
working in the Middle East and had developed a strong prejudice against
Islam. The notion that this harsh religion had a spiritual dimension
seemed to him absurd. It was, he assured me, nothing more than outward
formalism, blind obedience to irrational prohibitions, repetitive
prayers, narrow bigotry and hypocrisy. He told me stories of Muslim
practices which, he thought, would convince me. I remember in
particular the case he mentioned of a young woman dying painfully in
hospital who had summoned the strength to get to her feet and move her
iron bedstead so that she could die facing Mecca. My friend was
sickened by the thought that she had added to her own suffering for the
sake of a `stupid superstition'. To me, on the contrary, this seemed a
wonderful story. I marvelled at this young woman's faith, distant as it
was from any state of mind that I could imagine.

Meanwhile, I could not find work and was living in poverty. I applied
for almost every job that I saw advertised, including the post of
Assistant Lecturer in English Literature at Cairo University. This was
foolish or so I thought. I had taken my degree at Cambridge in History
and knew nothing of literature before the nineteenth century. How could
they consider employing someone so unqualified? But they did consider
it and the employ me. In October of 1950, at the age of 29, I set off
for Cairo the very moment when my interest in Islam was taking root.
Among my colleagues was an English Muslim, Martin Lings, who made his
home in Egypt. He was a friend of Guenon, a friend also of the two men
with whom I had talked in London, and he was unlike any I had ever met
before. He was the living embodiment of what, until then, had been no
more than theories in my mind, and I knew that I had finally met
someone who was all of a piece, whole and consistent. He lived in a
traditional home just outside the city and to visit him and his wife,
as I did almost every week, was to step out of the noisy bustle of
modern Cairo and enter a timeless refuge in which the inward and the
outward were undivided and in which the supposed realities of the world
to which I was accustomed had but a shadowy existence.

I needed a refuge. I had fallen in love with Jamaica, if it is possible
to fall in love with a place, and I hated Egypt simply because it was
not Jamaica. Where were my Blue Mountains, my tropical sea, my
beautiful West Indian girls? How could I ever have left the only place
that had ever felt like home to me? But that was not all, far from it;
I had left not only a place also a person, a young woman without whom
life now seemed empty and hardly worth living. I learned then what the
word `obsession' really means; a painful lesson but a useful one for
those who try to understand themselves and others. Nothing in my
previous life had any value; the reality was my need for the one person
who occupied my thoughts morning to night and stepped into my dreams.
When, in the course of my duties, I read love poetry aloud to my
students, tears ran down my cheeks and they told each other: `Here is
an Englishman with a heart. We thought all Englishmen were cold as
ice!'

These students, particularly a small senior group of five or six, were
also a refuge. I might hate Egypt for being 8,000 miles from where I
wanted to be, but I loved these young Egyptians. I rejoiced in their
warmth, openness and the trust they placed in me to teach them what
they needed to know; and soon I began to love their faith, for these
young people were good Muslims. I had no more doubts. If I ever found
it possible to commit myself to a religion - to imprison myself in a
religion - this could only be Islam. But not yet! I thought of St.
Augustine's prayer: `Lord, make me chaste, but not yet', knowing that
throughout the ages other young men, thinking that they had an ocean of
time before them, had prayed for chastity or piety or a better way of
life, but with the same reservation; and many had been taken by death
in this same state.

All things being equal, I might never have overcome my hesitations.
Intending eventually to accept Islam, I might have postponed the
decisive act year after year and still been saying `Not yet!' when age
crept up me. But all things were not equal. The longing for Jamaica and
for that person grew instead of diminishing as the months passed, as
though feeding upon itself. I awoke one morning to the realisation that
only lack of money prevented me from returning to the Island. I made
enquiries and found that, if I travelled on the deck of a steamer, I
could make the journey for £70. I was sure I could save this sum by
the end of the university term, and my life was at once transformed.
Knowing that escape was close, I could even begin to enjoy Cairo. But
one question now demanded a firm answer, and the answer could no longer
be postponed. The opportunity to enter Islam might never come again.
Before me was an open door. I thought that, if I did not walk through
it, that door might close forever. Yet I knew what kind of life I would
be living in Jamaica and doubted whether I would have the strength of
character to live as a Muslim in that environment.

I made a decision that must, with good reason, seem shocking to most
people, and not only to my fellow Muslims. I decided-as I put it to
myself -to `sow a seed' in my heart, to accept Islam at once in the
hope that the seed would one day germinate and grow into a healthy
plant. I will offer no excuses for this, and I would blame no one for
accusing me of insincerity and a false intention. But it is possible
that they may be underestimating God's readiness to forgive human
weakness and His power to bring forth plant and fruit from a seed sown
in barren ground. In any case, I was under a kind of compulsion and
knew what I had to do. I went to Martin Lings, poured out my story and
asked him to give me the Shahada, in other words to accept my Testimony
of Faith. Although hesitant at first, he did so. Full of fear and yet
joyful, I prayed for the first time in my life. Next day, for this was
Ramadan, I fasted, something that I could never have imagined myself
doing. Soon afterwards I told my senior students the news and their
delight was like a warm embrace. I had thought previously that I was
close to them, but now I understood that there had always been a
barrier between us. Now the barrier was down, and I was accepted as
their brother. In the six weeks that remained before my secret
departure (I had not told my Head of Department that I was leaving) one
of them came every day to teach me Quran. I looked at my reflection in
the mirror. The face was the same, but it masked a different person. I
am a Muslim! Still in a state of amazement I boarded ship in Alexandria
and sailed away to an uncertain future.
________________________________________
(Source: Islam and the Destiny of Man, Gai Eaton or Hassan Abdul
Hakeem)

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