The guardian and the friend

Friendship is a form of relationship that begins and is sustained by decision among equal and free people, that must be earned, and for whose earning a price must be paid. That is, it is a form of relationship founded on giving before taking, on being the giving hand rather than the receiving hand.

In fact, there is no concrete, worldly criterion by which to measure the value of what the hand can give. Pine gum is the shepherd's gift, and the exchange between friends does not rest on commercial calculation or a relationship of interest. What matters is that the gift is given by free will, knowingly and willingly, and the difference between the shepherd and people of far higher status in the worldly sense is not a difference that breaks the equality that friendship requires.

For precisely this reason, thinking about the friendship of mortal beings with God, the only being who could possibly say in the absolute sense "there is no friend," a friendship that admits of no comparison whatsoever, makes itself felt as a great necessity. When it is not even possible to think of an equality between God and human beings in the hierarchical sense, how can the friendship that we say can exist between equal beings be possible?

Yet in the Qur'an and in the earlier Scriptures, God often speaks of His friendship with human beings, and of some human beings' friendship with Him. "Surely, for the friends (awliya) of God there is no fear and no grief." "God is the friend of those who believe; He brings them out of the darkness into the light. As for those who disbelieve, their friends are the taghut; they take them out of the light into the darkness." "Surely the people closest to Abraham are those who followed him, and this Prophet (Muhammad) and those who believe. God is the friend (wali) of the believers."

It is not only a friendship that is mentioned, but also the function of friendship: a friendship that rescues from fear and grief, that removes fear and grief, that lights up one's darkness. But of course it is not the only form of friendship. There are also friendships that do exactly the opposite. So friendship itself is not in itself good or bad. Friendship with whom, and what kind of friendship?

The relationship that a human being, who owes even the possibility of freedom to God, establishes with Him as an equal and free being is called worship. When a person takes God out of the picture, he ends up worshipping his friends. For friendship and worship fulfill almost the same function: trust, taking refuge, following a path, following a way (a religion)...

A person's surroundings gradually teach him his religion as well, and strongly determine the frame within which he will fit the world and the place from which he will look at the world. Do ideology analyses not, in the last resort, lead to the same door? Ideology consists of shared delusions, and these are instilled by the friends from whom we are nourished as a model of thought, feeling and action; perhaps at times we contribute to its instilling ourselves. When Michel Foucault speaks, in its most innocent form, of producing power by speaking, or of the power that is spontaneously produced while speaking, he actually describes superbly how this process works. Through their sharing and conversations, through the fears, delusions and ideas they instill in one another, through their common tastes and pleasures, do friends become one another's paradise or one another's hell? Do they remove each other's darkness and bring each other out into the light, or do they destroy each other's light?

That is why believers take one another as friends, so that from there they may set their friendship on a solid foundation and bind it to God. Friendships that do not take God into account are bound to open the doors to servitude of one servant to another. Those who believe in God, in addition to their friendship with God, also become friends, awliya, to one another.

The concept mentioned in the Qur'an for "friend" here, the concept of "wali," is not the only concept used for friendship. There are also concepts such as sadiq, sahib, khalil, rafiq, hawari, nasrani, each of which sheds light on a different dimension and a different experience of friendship. We will touch on each of them later. The concept of wali does not point to a special group who are friends of God. It points to the fact that God too is their friend, but more importantly it points to the fact that all human beings are in some way in a relationship of "walaya." That is, walaya is not a quality belonging only to a certain stratum of people; it is a quality, a path, of all believers. Not only that, walaya is also a quality of those who do not believe, but they are the friends, the awliya, of the gods they have taken for themselves apart from God and the believers, and of one another. The human being is a creature who cannot live his life without establishing a relationship of guardianship. What matters is the choice you make as to with whom you establish this relationship of guardianship.

We know that walaya, another name for friendship, also points to a relationship of power. But here too the importance of with whom, and to what extent, we establish this relationship of power, that is, of walaya, makes itself felt immediately. The way is wide open for the guardianship and the friendship that we display towards people to whom we owe no debt, who are created like us, needy like us, powerless like us, mortal like us, to turn immediately into servitude of one servant to another.

Here we can take walaya as a contract taking place between equal people, as a tacit agreement, as a political model, as far as it can be taken. Walaya, of course, does not point only to a relationship of power that works in one direction; it also requires a friendship, a trust and a love that work reciprocally.

The Greek philosophers thought of friendship as a model for an ideal democracy, as "a political contract among equal and free people." In this model, a figure of a God who has withdrawn from the earth and left human beings to themselves is called upon for help once in a while, perhaps to make up for the possible lack of mortar among these free and equal friends, but rather to rein in the desire for power within each of these equal and free people. For the way is wide open for this desire, which cannot otherwise be reined in, to undermine friendship too through its most ideal definitions and eulogies.