Cultivating Faithful Enthusiasm: How the Qur’an Creates Transformative Willpower
بِسْمِ اللهِ الرَّحْمٰنِ الرَّحِيْمِ
The moral and spiritual providence of God
What is exceptional about the mission of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, even in a history of prophetic missions that spanned millennia, is that the early Muslims not only believed and joined the mission, they did so with unparalleled enthusiasm and total self-surrender. Against a culture that not only tolerated but valorized the pursuit of physical and sexual conquest, intoxication, and fulfillment of other base human instincts, Islamic society embodied faith-based solidarity, discipline, sobriety, sexual chastity, and altruism without expectation of worldly reward. Under the leadership of its exemplary leader, this Islamic community was committed to the pursuit of individual and communal virtue, standing as a just and balanced witness against all nations.
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Note that the Qur’an’s high praise for the Prophet ﷺ as a perfect role model (uswah ḥasanah) is revealed in the context of a battle, the highest form of struggle and sacrifice.
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The Qur’an, after all, declares all of life an arena for probation, trial, and struggle. Armed with the Word of God, the Prophet ﷺ trained believers to outdo their enemies in endurance and grit: “O you who have believed, persevere and endure and remain stationed and fear Allah that you may be successful.”
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In the crucible of the earliest struggles for the establishment of Islam, the Revelation called on the men who were about to be martyred at the battle of Uḥud to “fear God in a manner that is rightly His due.”
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Similarly, even as death approached Prophets Abraham and Jacob (peace be on them both) as they bequeathed their people, alone among the pagans, the precarious inheritance of true faith, they issued the beautifully complex command: “Certainly do not die—unless you are in total self-surrender.”
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How did the Qur’an motivate people to prioritize the eternal next life over the immediate pleasures of this ephemeral world? What are the resources the Qur’an offers us to cultivate the correct kind of motivation, if not zeal, in matters of faithful striving? These are the questions that this essay sets out to answer.
To this end, we must analyze not only the concept of the intellect but also the often-neglected concept of will: the scope and capacity of intention, the primal reality of fear, and the biologically implanted instincts to pursue pleasure and eschew pain—as these relate to the life of faithful conviction and the virtuous action it ought to produce. The insights into the pitfalls of human nature and their cures that adorn the pages of the Qur’an offer us a moral anthropology—one opposed to the materialist (biological, constitutional, and physiological) anthropology that dominates the modern perspective. In Section I, we look at the significance of religious enthusiasm at the origins of Islam. In Section II, we deepen our understanding of the link between reflective reason and the demands of the decisive actions of religious commitment. In Section III, we examine the moral problem of the sincerity of motivation in the life of committed faith and virtue. In Section IV, we return to the reasoning (jadal) strand. In Section V, we note the distractions of this world, including family life, that may sabotage the life of faith. In Section VI, we discuss how the Qur’an, through commanding daily worship and a month of fasting, demands constant spiritual caution and moral self-surveillance at all times, including self-restraint in matters of bodily appetites.
As we will see, we all need God but often rebel and think we do not—and reckon without His grace, “Because he [man] sees himself as self-sufficient.”
6 This pride (takabbur), the proclivity to reckon one is intrinsically better than others, the primordial sin committed by the Devil when he refused to prostrate, is our greatest liability. Our ultimate purpose is to align our wills with the divine will, the very meaning of islām (self-surrender), as we learn to place a spontaneous, even effortless, trust in the divine plan for us. However, what is ostensibly effortless trust requires much effort—the paradox of trust in God (tawakkul). Anxiety about one’s future, as opposed to merely planning prudently for provisions, is incompatible with true faith and trust in divine providence.
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