Guardian

In the Name of Allah, the Beneficent the Merciful

“… and they say, “Indeed, he is mad. But it (the Quran) is nothing except a reminder to the worlds.” (Quran 68:51-52)

 BRETHREN, one of my teachers once told this story to us: a man once passed by a psychiatric hospital. He contemplated the serenity of the exterior of the hospital and imagined the hubbub and the bedlam that would characterise its interiority. He soon saw one of the patients who was peering out through one of the windows of the hospital.

Then the thought occurred to him to engage the mad man in a conversation. He then shouted on top of his voice and asked him as follows: “how many madmen are there in your hospital?” The inmate looked the questioner up and down as if in search of the best response to his question. Then he (the inmate) responded saying: “tell me, how many sane people remain out there!

Brethren, sometimes when I contemplate the contrarieties in our national life, the brazen display and misuse of power and authority, the wanton destruction of innocent lives and property by those who see violence as an end in itself, the indulgence in corruption by those whose brief is to prevent its perpetration, the suggestion that there are no sane men left up there becomes irresistible. One gets a sense of a clime populated by men and women suffering from lunacy; it feels as if we are in a season of anomie.

Brethren, the subject of mental illness has occupied the attention of thinkers and philosophers across ages and climes. In fact before Islam, the Greeks had explored the phenomenon of mental illness and sought to engage its multifarious perspectives. Aristotle is quoted to have said that no great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness. In Hamlet, it is deemed to be a necessary ingredient in creativity. It gains mention not just because it is an aspect of life but also because there is a method to it. In other words, if you must go mad, let yours be with and in style. If you must run naked in the market, ensure it is in pursuit of something noble, not ignoble.

Brethren, when Prophet Muhammad emerged on the rigid landscape of Arabia and began to call on his people to forsake idol worship, sexual oppression of women and perpetration of injustice against the weak, he was dismissed as a mad man. He was accused of being in communion with the Jinns who were teaching him verses of the Quran. The Quran, it must be remembered, represents, aside from its eternal universal and holistic messages, the acme and the apotheosis of literary erudition for which the Makkans were renowned.

Since they could not match its inimitable structure and content, they therefore dismissed it as the ministrations of the one who is suffering from insanity. Al-Rasul was consequently declaimed for his choice to be honest in a season of dishonesty; he was harangued for choosing to stand by the poor and the orphans. He was accused of suffering from dementia when he called for an end to graft, bribery, round-tripping and backbiting.

Though Arabia was in dire need of a man like al-Rasul for it to be redeemed from imminent implosion, the emergence of al-Rasul, the expected, from an unexpected quarter of the city was, however, deemed an indulgence in lunacy by the powers-that be. Makkah, like the world today, needed the emergence of al-Rasul and his companions so that it could occupy the lofty position it presently enjoys in human history. But once that happened, the Makkans decided to go to war against its own redeemer. One wonders who, between the two, was actually ‘mad’?

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, great European thinkers were accused of suffering from dementia. Van Gogh was deemed to be suffering from schizophrenia, Nietzsche was thought be affected by paranoid disorder then general paresis of the insane. What about Dostoevski, the great Russian writer? He, too, was said to have been afflicted with epilepsy. Brethren, to choose to be sane in a society with predilections for insanity is to be enrobed with dementia.

But the subject of dementia, which is of interest to us in our sermon today, is different from the ‘madness” which men whose memory is interred on the lofty pages of human history. Rather, the mad men of interest to us are “un-official companions” of those men and women who are in a permanent state of dementia. In other words, two types of images of madness could be seen in our cities today: voluntary and involuntary madness. The first, voluntary madness (VM) is consciously ‘acquired’, while the second, involuntary madness (IM) is surreptitiously inflicted; the first is socio-cultural, while the second is spiritual-medical; the first is sometimes incurable, the second is usually redeemable.

Brethren, let us pause a moment to ponder this question: what usually lead to involuntary madness? Two revered scholars in Islamic annals have refreshing perspectives. First, let us consider that of Ibn Qayyim. According to him, “evil spirits usually take possession of those having little religious inclinations and those whose hearts and tongues faith has deserted; those whose souls are dissolute of the remembrance of the Almighty…when evil spirits meets a man who is isolated, weaponless and naked they are easily able to attack and overcome him”.

Now Ibn Taimiyyah adds a different but equally useful perspective. He says a man may become a victim of demonic possession if he falls in the track of a Jinn, which has excessive sensual or sexual desire. In other words, just as we have humans who engage in debauchery and bestiality, just as we have humans who seek pleasures in animals and other species outside their own, there are Jinns that equally seek pleasures from creatures other than their own. Once they find some among humans who catch their fancies, they possess such individuals. Jinns equally possess humans out of mischief or out of anger.

Let us side-step this in order to get to the subject of today’s sermon. Brethren, when we contemplate the two states of madness I mentioned above, namely, voluntary and involuntary madness, we find uncanny similarities and lessons. For example, when you look around our cities, you would see men and women suffering dementia; men suffering involuntary madness. They parade the streets and pathways of our villages on a daily basis. In fact they are the real occupiers of our nation. They usually bask in an unusual state of happiness. You remember that mad guy in the market square. He dances round the city. He runs and walks without aim or goal. But is that really true? Is the madman’s movement actually aimless and useless? Is his happiness futile and banal? I am of the opinion the answer may actually be in the affirmative: that there are pleasures in being mad which none but the madman and woman can explain.

An evidence to show that there are pleasures in madness probably lies in the vocation of the madmen and women. An ordinary madman and woman is a busy-body. Both strive, on a daily basis, to create an “empire” for themselves, for their world - an empire of garbage, debris and detritus. Pause a moment in front of the palace of the sick man in your neighbourhood and he would remind you of your humanity. He is surrounded by his world: a world of pleasure and of material acquisitions: of disused television sets, of brooms and pans, mats and mattresses, pots and utensils, of homes that are actually homeless.

• Continues next week.