The Way of Muhammad

Shaykh Abdalqadir As-Sufi

(Originally published in 1975, Diwan Press)

Preface
Affirmation
The Science of the Self
The Science of the Sunna
The Science of States
The Science of Qur'an
The Science of Bewilderment
The Science of the Moment
The Charts: Introduction
[The Charts] (not included here)

This Book is dedicated to the Masters of the Habibiyya-Shadhiliyya Tariqa.

Acknowledgements

My thanks are due to:

Aisha Abdarrahman at-Tarjumana Bewley whose translations of 'Ibn 'Arabi and Moul
ay al'Arabi ad-Darqawi are used throughout.
Dr. Fritjof Capra for permission to quote him.
Hajj Abdalaziz Redpath, Hajj Abdalhaqq Bewley and Aisha Bewley for their assista
nce in drawing up the charts and structuring the material relevant to them.
My wife, Hajja Zulaikha, and Hajja Rabea Redpath for their assistance in prepari
ng the manuscript.
Preface

It was with a certain reluctance that I agreed to a new edition of this early wo
rk of mine, and this only after some minor editing to remove errors which I can
now perceive. The original intention of the work was to show that it was possibl
e to grasp the meaning of Islam in terms of the European existential tradition.
Indeed, it is of course the culmination of it. Ironically, the effect of the boo
k was not in the main to open Europeans to Islam, but to restore to those who ha
d gone out of the Deen, especially Arabs, a sense of respect and discovery in re
lation to Islam. The book is simply a meditation of the five pillars of Islam as
viewed by someone who has taken them on and is savouring their meanings. Howeve
r, now with a lifetime of Islam to contemplate I would want to express the whole
matter differently without denying the basic personal truths I tried to indicat
e in this text. Today the enemies of Islam all explain that the danger of it is
that it is not merely a metaphysical construct but is something that affects the
whole of life. Yet, after a quarter of millennium of western occupation of Musl
im lands, first in colonialism and then by the ethos of technology it can be sho
wn that, tragically, we have abandoned Deen in its totality.
The irresistible magnetic power of Islam which is now about to spread its rays o
ver all the world lies in its Shari'at. Properly speaking the Messenger, blessin
gs and peace of Allah be upon him, abolished the state as the model of societal
order. This does not mean he established either anarchy or some kind of mystic i
ndividualism, like Buddhism. Where the state was based on canon law and the impo
sition of order by force, empowered by taxation, the new order established in Ma
dinah was altogether different. The Islamic community is itself a freely chosen
social contract of believers who agree to live within its parameters. The proper
translation of Shari'at is a road.
The two dimensions of the Shahada confirm worship as belonging to Allah and obed
ience being due to His Messenger. The next two pillars, Salat and Zakat, in this
sense could also be placed beside the double-Shahada. The worship of Allah and
the pa¹ing of the only permitted tax, Zakat, go together just as the first and sec
ond Shahada do. It is in between these two pillars that Islam sheds light on the
nature of governance.
Since worship must be according to what we have been ordered, it is not possible
to proceed in 'Ibada beyond a certain point without previously having appointed
an Amir. It is precisely at the point of Ramadan that governance becomes inesca
pable to order the sighting of the moon, to start the fast and to order the coll
ecting of Zakat, which is not charity but something, in effect, taken by power.
Thus the collection and distribution of Zakat imply the existence of the Amir. I
t is because Allah in his glory has shown to us the means of transacting sociall
y and avoiding corruption that Islam is called Deen al-Fitr. It is the transacti
on of original nature, that is, before corrupted by cultural excess. Allah has p
ermitted trade and forbidden usury. Zakat for this reason cannot be paid in pape
r money for it in itself is forbidden, being a promissory note, and in the major
ity of cases one against which no material goods can be matched. The messenger,
peace and blessings of Allah be upon him, said: 'The miser withholds from others
the wealth that is due them.' Therefore banking is revealed as an unthinkable i
nstitution both materially by its usurious nature and morally by its perversion
of people's evaluation of life.
This touches the nub of the question of the self and what we now call character.
The identity is not formed in a psychological non-spatial zone, but rather it i
s the pattern and web created by the whole series of transactions which form a s
ocial nexus. It is in the exchange of goods, in the holding and the distribution
of wealth, in the giving up and the taking on of possessions that the self emer
ges. Therefore, the path to an integrated human identity can only be established
on obedience to the commands of Allah and His Messenger. When he left Makkah, t
he city of his encounter with Allah, glory be to him, to establish the Islamic c
ommunity, he renamed the neighbouring city of Yathrib, Madinah. Its mean¹ing quite
simply is 'the place of the Deen'. When he settled there he established two ins
titutions - the mosque and the market. The mosque and market were identical inas
much as it was not permitted to establish your corner or part of it for your use
. With the foundation of Madinah was established the inevitable abolition of cap
italist and socialist society. The inability to create monopoly and the impossib
ility of an elite to separate themselves, in worship from the people had been as
sured. Not only papal Rome, but later the Holy Roman Empire and later the Europe
an Union of the Treaty of Rome, and equally the Soviet Presidium, the English Pa
rliament, and the American Senate, in the light of Islam were revealed to be tyr
annies, the basis of which was not its regal army, but its fiscal subjugation of
the masses.
The imperial phase of bankism, which sweetly gives itself a political title, 'co
nstitutional democracy', while still dominating the world in a manner more ruthl
ess than any ancient warlord now clearly exposes the truth that systems control
does not work, that the abolition of trade and its reduction to mere distributio
n does not work, that the denial of genuine autonomy of peoples at a local level
does not work.
It is for these reasons that the modern man must dig deep into himself to see if
, after the almost complete conditioning to which he has been submitted, he is a
ble to act at all. The result of a secular liberal education is something akin,
socially, to the general paralysis of the insane. However, there are still those
who will not accept the role allotted them by the oligarchy of banking - to be
helpless and happy members of the faceless consumer mob. After all the progress,
after all the modernity, public arenas of modern life are inescapably identical
to that of the Roman Coliseum and Aztec Temple.
The response of the free-acting people of this age will be to obey the order of
Allah, glory be to him, in Qur'an: "Enter Islam in its totality." (Qur'an 2.206)
. It can also be translated: "Enter Islam all together."

"If you engage upon travel you will arrive -

and may Allah, praise be to Him, guide you and us!"
(The Makkan Revelations)
- Shaykh al-Akbar

Affirmation
There is only one method by which you can approach the sufic sciences and that i
s to start, tabula rasa, by putting away the whole world-picture and value struc
ture which has formed you until now and which is completely the result of your s
ocial and historical imprinting which you share with millions of others, whateve
r particular individuality you may imagine you have over and against those milli
ons of others. You have an idea of how things are, and how you are, how things s
hould be and how you should be. Interposed between you and reality is a function
ing, fluctuating conceptualisation of existence that, mingled with your personal
emotional responses to event and personality, make up what you think is both 'y
ou' and 'your world'.
Any idea of 'god' as an explanation of existence or an arena for your life-exper
ience has to be set aside. 'Religion' (from the Latin - to bind together) as exp
lanation or arena is equally false. Indeed, to mistake the name for the thing na
med, the category for the indicated, is to make tasawwuf impossible of access. N
on-realities that have now crystallised in people's imagination as having some k
ind of dynamic actuality like history or class or individuality have to be set a
side.
The subject of tasawwuf - Sufism - is you.
The subject of tasawwuf is reality.
Let us start from the beginning.
One.
The whole matter begins and ends with an affirmation of One.
But - it will be said - I am another, there is 'two', 'three', 'multiplicity'. J
ohn is not Arthur, nor Margaret, Anne. Precisely. It is because of the experient
ial multiplicity that the science of Unity exists. This implies, therefore, that
as you are, you are not grasping the true nature of existence. It is like a per
petual fever, a constant hallucination. Things are multiple, alien and solid. Th
ere is not even continuity, yet we persist in it. I am the same one who was here
yesterday after a night of dreamless sleep - at least everyone in today's 'drea
m' confirms this. Otherwise I would be mad. Idiotiki, in Greek, means private. M
y reality is affirmed socially, so I exist. Unless they are in my dream. Yet whe
n I dream, the objects seem insubstantial, awake they are solid and therefore 'r
eal'. Real means solid. Yet I have physicists in my 'reality' who now tell me th
at solidity has no reality for them. The object is slipping away from me yet aga
in, and forms are being proved out of existence and I am left holding onto a 'me
ntal reality' in a vanishing world of forms which they tell me is merely dynamic
space. The information about my 'real world' has become very odd and contradict
ory - at times even ironic. The person this world has appointed to assuage my in
ner anxiety, I observe, is in a worse state than I am. It is to this subject tha
t tasawwuf addresses itself.
Thus:
If you desire to know reality you must know yourself.
You are the key, the only key to reality.
You are nothing but a mirror of reality.
It is enough to reflect.
But, your anxiety - about what is on the horizon, and in yourself - stops you fr
om calm and clear reflection. You desire urgent tranquillising information sayin
g 'it is all proved, everything is really all right, you exist.' Information has
for the moment been set aside.
Let us, however, examine a possibility.
The possibility is that there is someone to trust about the very urgent matter o
f what life is about. Since we are not to be trusted, it must be some very remar
kable sort of person. What would be the qualifications of a man to trust in this
matter? There would be only one thing that would make him an 'expert' and that
is that he knew how to live his life, utterly fulfilled, in radiant and expansiv
e serenity that left space around him for his community and space within him for
his own inner peace. Just as in the legend of Kurosawa's 'Rashomon', we are in
a dilemma. In that story a woman has been raped and killed. Each witness tells w
hat happened, but each one has given a version of the event from their own subje
ctivity. Each story is in the end a contradiction of the one before it. The love
r, the bandit, the wife - each has been trapped in a private fantasy that insist
s on interpreting existence in a way that allows for their 'self-respect' to con
tinue. Finally, a simple woodcutter who is 'outside' the event, with nothing to
gain or lose, tells what really happened. But by now the man who sought the trut
h dares no longer believe anyone, for he has ample evidence that people want the
ir own version of events. When the woodcutter sees the man's dilemma, and what i
t has done to him - he no longer believes in existence as a dynamic functioning
reality, it has proved to be a fragmented, subjective, ever-changing lie - the w
oodcutter breaks down and weeps. Humanly it is all he can do. Open himself compl
etely to the man, surrender any idea of separateness, interest, dissembling - ju
st give up, unresistant to that moment and its simple truth: his story. Then the
man knows that he too has to give in, he has to shed his doubt and his distrust
and even his own experience. Somehow life cannot have any continuity again unle
ss there is affirmation of this encounter and its reality. And the two men weep.
The moment has been tasted.
This is essentially the starting point of the science of tasawwuf. It begins wit
h surrendering any vain concept that you can think or detector-feel your way out
of the contradictions and pains of lived existence - and the surrender, while a
ctually to the Shaykh, is in truth to the Messenger, the one who is sent just fo
r that, to tell you what reality is like, Muhammad, the Messenger of reality.
The necessary qualifications for this acceptance are these same simple and profo
und ones of his humanity and his deep sanity and his disinterestedness.
No, I swear by what you see
and by what you do not see,
it is the speech of a noble Messenger,
it is not the speech of a poet
(little do you believe)
nor the speech of an occultist
(little do you remember). (Qur'an 69.38-42)
By the pen and what they inscribe,
thou art not, by the blessing of thy Lord,
a man possessed.
Certainly you will always be repaid.
Certainly you are on a vast self-form.
So you shall see and they shall see
which of you is the demented. (Qur'an 68.1-6)
Mu'adh ibn Jabal said, 'The Messenger of Allah commanded me saying, "Oh, Mu'adh,
I command you to fear Allah, to report truthfully, to fulfil the oath, to act l
oyally, to avoid wrong actions, to care for the neighbour, to have mercy on the
orphan, to be soft spoken, to be generous in extending greetings, to do good act
s, to limit expectation, to cleave to the Way, to study the Qur'an, to love the
life beyond this world, to be anxious in regard to the Reckoning, to act humbly:
I forbid you to abuse the learned, to accuse an honest man of lying, to obey th
e man of wrong actions, to disobey a just man, to put a land in disorder: and I
command you to fear Allah at every stone, tree, or village, and that you show re
gret for every wrong action, secret or public."
'
At this point there are clearly things that do not make sense: fear Allah, to lo
ve the life beyond this world, to be anxious in regard to the Reckoning, and to
show regret for wrong action.
Surely we desire to be rid of fear - and not simply project it into a god-concep
t and call it a name?
What lies beyond this world? So far we do not know.
What Reckoning? Surely this regret sounds like guilt?
It is at this point that we must beware of bringing with us the whole value stru
cture that we were prepared to jettison, and applying it just at the point of pr
etended clarity and lack of pre-conception. If the matter of tasawwuf is sin and
repentance and the whole guilt-mechanism that modern man has so sensibly been d
etermined to throw off then we are back to square one. We are quite clear at thi
s stage of our enquiry that the guilt/redemption language of Christianity is a h
opeless dialectic superimposed on a neurosis and not dismantling it. Let it be,
and let us therefore lay aside these disturbing phrases to see what we make of t
he rest of the injunctions. Apart from these subjective and seemingly 'religious
' ones, all the others are social and benign. A man of these qualities is certai
nly someone to be open to, someone to copy. Let us look more closely at the pict
ure of the man, Muhammad.
His name means the Praiseworthy.
Muhammad was forbearing, honest, just and chaste. His hand never touched the han
d of a woman over whom he did not have rights, with whom he did not have sexual
relations, or who was not lawful for him to marry. He was the most generous of m
en. Neither a dinar nor a dirham was left him in the evening. If anything remain
ed and there was no one to give it to, night having fallen suddenly, he would no
t retire to his apartment until he was able to give this excess to whoever neede
d it. He was never asked for anything but that he gave it to the asker. He would
prefer the seeker to himself and his family, and so often his store of grain fo
r the year was used up before the end of the year. He patched his sandals and cl
othing, did household chores, and ate with his women-folk. He was shy and would
not stare into people's faces. He answered the invitation of the slave and the f
ree-born, and he accepted presents even if they consisted merely of a draught of
milk or a rabbit's leg, while because of hunger he would at times tie two stone
s around his stomach.
He ate what was at hand, and did not refrain from any permitted food. He did not
eat reclining. He attended feasts, visited the sick, attended funerals, and wal
ked among his enemies without a guard. He was the humblest of men, the most sile
nt without being insolent, and the most eloquent without being lengthy. He was a
lways joyful and never awed by the affairs of this world. He rode a horse, a mal
e camel, a mule, an ass, he walked barefoot and bareheaded at different times.
He loved perfumes and disliked foul smells.
He sat and ate with the poor.
He tyrannised nobody and accepted the excuse of the one who begged his pardon.
He joked but he only spoke the truth. He laughed but did not burst out laughing.
He did not eat better food or wear better clothes than his servants.
The conduct of this perfect ruler was untaught. He could neither read nor write,
he grew up with shepherds in an ignorant desert land, and was an orphan without
father or mother. He refused to curse his enemy saying, 'I was sent to forgive
not to curse.' When asked to wish evil on anyone he blessed them instead.
Anas ibn Malik, his servant, said: 'He never said to me about anything of which
he disapproved, ÒWhy did you do it?Ó Moreover his wives would not rebuke me without
his saying, ÒLet it be. It was meant to happen.Ó'
If there was a bed he slept on it, if not he reclined on the earth. He was alway
s the first to extend a greeting. In a handshake he was never the first to relea
se his hand. He preferred his guest over himself and would offer the cushion on
which he reclined until it was accepted. He called his companions by their kunya
(surnames) so as to show honour to them, and the children so as to soften their
hearts. One did not argue in his presence. He only spoke the truth. He was the
most smiling and laughing of men in the presence of his companions, admiring wha
t they said and mingling with them. He never found fault with his food. If he wa
s pleased with it he ate it and if he disliked it he left it. If he disliked it
he did not make it hateful to someone else. He did not eat very hot food, and he
ate what was in front of him on the plate, within his reach, eating with three
fingers. He wiped the dish clean with his fingers saying, 'The last morsel is ve
ry blessed'. He did not wash his hands until he had licked them clean of food. H
e quaffed milk but sipped water.
Sayyedina 'Ali, his closest Companion, said: 'Of all men he was the most generou
s, the most open hearted, the most truthful, the most fulfilling of promise, the
gentlest of temper, and the noblest towards his family. Whoever saw him unexpec
tedly was awed by him, and whoever was his intimate loved him.'
He himself said: 'I am al-Qautham,' meaning, 'I am the complete, perfect man.'
It is to this man that we address ourselves in the acquiring of the knowledge of
tasawwuf, the science of the self. In submitting to the Shaykh we submit to the
man who has himself mastered these aspects of his behaviour that were not in ac
cord with his 'vastness of self-form' which is the Messenger's. We are making no
mistakes and we are remaining within the zone of existential recognition. The M
essenger is not being worshipped, deified, or made into a symbol. He is being ac
cepted as a witness of how-things-are, as being a completely open person in flow
ing harmonic accord with existence so that he knows it inwardly and outwardly. A
 man came to him who was over-awed by his presence and became reverential toward
s him. He said to him, 'Be at rest. I am not a king. I am only the son of a woma
n of the Quraysh, who eats dried meat.' His answer to his name was 'At your serv
ice.' The Shaykh is simply the man who has fully surrendered his self-form and f
illed himself up with the clear radiance of this perfect behaviour. The Messenge
r has said, 'I was sent to complete the noble qualities of character.'
It is essential that this starting point is established. We cannot see clearly,
we don't know what is happening, we are looking for a witness of the event of ex
istence we may trust. Madmen, poets, occultists we have by our reason rejected:
the witness must be disinterested, and he must manifest the highest social and h
uman qualities. It is not enough that he be some kind of a superior being with s
uperior powers, yogic control over the body and the mind, what is essential is t
hat he is completely at peace and that with that peace he can function in the so
cial setting that is man's ordinary quotidian reality. In the Messenger of Reali
ty, Muhammad, peace be upon him, we find a man with all these qualities. He has
left behind a book called the Qur'an, and as yet we have not examined or satisfi
ed ourselves as to the meaning and validity of the book - for the moment we are
persisting in a more direct existential search for what we seek. We are staying
with the man. He has confirmed our own recognition that we are in no way well en
ough to recognise reality but somehow we must trust the validity of this affirma
tion of his serenity and human-ness. He has said, 'Man is asleep, and when he di
es he wakes up.' This confirms our initial experience of being somnambulistic, u
nawake to the true taste of life, but it has in it no consolation, and could be
a mere Roman cynicism. However there is another Tradition of his which tells us,
'Die before you die!'
This infers that there is a science of waking up, therefore, while still in the
world of bodies.
But the Messenger died fourteen hundred years ago, and the book he left looks at
first glance suspiciously like the others, and we had got to a point where only
a direct experience was going to convince us. It is here that the essential tea
ching element of tasawwuf declares itself.
Transmission.
Our concern is the alteration of the self, the conquest of the self, the peace t
reaty with our rebel forces - and we have understood that our self-form is oddly
unresponsive to reason, and worse than that, has a particularly dangerous quali
ty of self-destruction.
Life can, in extremis, be an organised suicide or an endless sleep-in.
Structured information then can only become the foil of this self-destroying, se
lf-deceiving entity - the self. The very knowledge of what is wrong seems to bet
ray our hopes for it, and instead of releasing us it traps us and paralyses us m
ore, and the very awfulness of our self-hood which we think we see at last, brin
gs us grinding to a disastrous self-aware frozen halt. What then is the method o
f the Messenger of Peace, or as he prefers to call himself, the Messenger of Sub
mission?
He simply is there and he asks people to follow him, keep him company, and to do
as he does. That is all, or seems all - but in fact this is everything.
He has said that, 'If a man lives with a people he becomes one of them,' and als
o, 'A man follows the life-pattern of his friend, so let each of you look to who
he takes as a companion.' We already know in our barbaric state that if a man i
s locked up with the insane he most probably will himself fragment in his self-e
xperience, and if he keeps the company of junkies he will sooner or later succum
b to their habit; more recognisably, a man becomes a soldier on entering the arm
y. He gets 'beaten into shape', the self-form is restructured and solidified int
o something considered manly, heroic and brutal. A man who keeps the company of
women, and avoids men's company, even if he is sexually expressed as a man, will
take on a subtle feminising of self-form and behaviour. Or to narrow the field
of this phenomenon even more, if you sit in a room with someone in a rage you wi
ll pick up from that person the subtle form of their condition. You will either
become 'defensive' or you in turn will attack their anger. If you sit with a dep
ressive you will in turn be depressed or you will feel obliged in some subtle ma
nner to put up a resistance to their swamping all-enveloping low-energy, you wil
l have to become either depressed or by contrast resistantly high. In other word
s, there is a constant traffic in the energy-forms of the self, and they do batt
le as much socially as they do inwardly. If the behaviour is controlled from out
side, at a certain point there will still come an eruption from within when the
outward situation allows it.
Now from the embattled position of the self as it is, we cannot but be well awar
e that it is of its nature to continue the struggle, to sabotage the end of host
ilities, for it thrives on struggle and seems to gain life by its own continued
self-destruction. This means that the self is going to be constantly seeking the
very company that will keep it constantly trapped in a cycle of pain. If you de
sire to be punished you will not rest till you find the executioner. You may wor
k your way through a whole series in the desperate desire to prove that you 'wan
t out of it', but see what a cruel fate has always provided you with a destructi
ve partner. In other words for the embattled self, the other is fairly certain t
o turn out to be the enemy, and hell will, after all, seem to be other people.
Returning now to our point of departure, we have agreed that, knowing as we do t
hat the self is in an endless loop of repeated battles, we must be done with the
game of suffering and rediscover that deep basic sanity which we desire and whi
ch we cannot but recognise in this perfectly balanced and radiant figure of Muha
mmad, peace be upon him.
We wish to recover, if you like, our Muhammad-nature. And the means is transmiss
ion.
It is enough to sit with someone for transmission to take place. Instead of seek
ing again the partner of battle and further pain, we now turn to the Shaykh, who
is completely at peace, utterly turned away from all the tremors within us and
utterly withholding of either approval or disapproval, the two drugs on which ou
r continued self-survival depends. 'The shaykh is contagious,' said a follower o
f Shaykh al-Kamil. If you sit in the sun you get sunburned, that is enough. For
the moment we do not know why, we have no science yet to indicate why and how th
is should be so, for it certainly does not accord with the solid mechanistic psy
chology we are with such difficulty trying to leave behind, because it is a psyc
hology based on the very dialectic that traps us.
The Shaykh is simply the living exemplar - he is not a Messenger, for the Messag
e has been delivered - but you could say that he is the Message. He is a Qur'an
and a furqan. He is a gathering-together of forms, a unifier, and he is a separa
tor, a discriminator, one who makes choices and selects and rejects without stru
ggle.
The mind must be cleared of the whole superstitious, authority-projection idea o
f the guru that is so prevalent in our society. He is not, and this must be esta
blished, a super-guide, a powerful figure, an authority. He is not going to tell
you how to live your life, what house to buy and what job to take, although he
may well know these things. He in no way takes on the burden of your problems, p
recisely because from the point of view of his deep sanity these problems do not
exist. He is merely a mirror in which you may, if you are patient enough, see y
ourself at last. He is an openness, and an emptiness. He is fully surrendered to
his creature-state, to advancing age, and to changing seasons, and to the samen
ess of days. And for this reason he is utterly turned away from us; he greets us
and feeds us and counsels us, but he is not caught up, there is no yes to our n
o, and no refusal of our yes. In some exasperating or frightening way he does no
t see us. We could kill him. He really does not care! So what then is happening
inside this man? From our sick point of view it certainly seems to be a super-de
fence system that we can envy. He is unassailable, we are vulnerable. He wins, w
e lose.
We still see things this way. So we decide to imitate him. We go to the master s
wordsman to learn how to kill, and do not realise that he is teaching us not to
need it.
What does he do? What is the means to this omnipotent end? It is, unsurprisingly
, disconcerting. Firstly the Shaykh either does not sleep at all or minimally, p
erhaps two or three hours at most. Putting that aside as the fruit of years of h
ard work, we cannot avoid recognising that this awakeness of which the Messenger
of Submission spoke was not some inner consciousness alone, but consciousness i
tself.
The whole of his existence is spent in one thing - he is in a constant state of
awareness, of collectedness, or, if you like recollectedness, for he is there, h
e does exist before our eyes and he is recollecting back into himself the plenum
. His reality is that he is in constant and unceasing communication with reality
itself. He has subjugated the self, its struggle is over, and yet there is stil
l a someone there - a man who eats and sleeps a little, talks, sits. Yet if his
self-form exists it somehow takes in everything, it excludes nothing, it is all-
embracing. We treat him as a Master and show the utmost respect to him, everyone
bows before him and he sees all this and he does not care. People denounce him
and criticise him and accuse him of fraudulence and he does not care. He is a Ma
ster - yet at the same time he is that by the most extreme token of opposites -
he is a slave.
He is not our slave, or anyone's slave, or any thing's slave. He is the slave of
It, of this very reality we want to know and experience.
He has subjugated his 'I' and he has enthroned the 'He', what the Arabs call the
pronoun of absence. Constantly he addresses reality, his reality, as 'He'. He i
s a presence addressing an absence, and yet we experience him inwardly as an abs
ence expressing a Presence. He is the perfection of slavery. He is bound, utterl
y constrained, without choice, helpless, obedient. He does what he has been comm
anded to do.
He bows and he prostrates before this Reality, he calls on its name morning and
night, he asks and he asks - but never for this or that, never for forms. He ask
s for this no-thing, this effulgent nothingness that has produced the myriad for
ms, he asks It for It and gets whatever 'It' he supplicates for, so we always se
e him satisfied and content. He may be ill and in pain, he may be penniless, but
he is content, he is well-pleased, for it seems that this flow of 'It' never ce
ases through all these apparently negative events. Stranger still we notice that
despite poverty and illness there is in fact a disconcerting and inexplicable f
low of goods and money in to this centre of submission, the Shaykh.
We observe also that everything that comes in to him, goes out from him. He is m
erely a vortex of energy, and the money is distributed and the people are fed an
d clothed, and he goes on bowing and prostrating and praising this Reality with
its endless generosity and compassion and provision, so that we cannot look at h
im without being reminded of It!
Again it is dangerous to interpose those old preconceptions of an ethic that say
s we must struggle and work and compete to be a healthy society, and we recall t
hat the working, competing, struggling society has spent itself in a quite terri
ble frenzy of competition and struggle that has all but destroyed the bio-sphere
in which we work to live. For the moment let us enquire openly into what this s
ystem of address is that the Shaykh employs and what are its effects.
The Shaykh calls himself Nur-i-Muhammad, the Light of Muhammad, that is, he is a
luminous form of that perfection of man, he is the summit of what the human cre
ature is in its potentiality when fully realised.
The thing to be grasped is that the Shaykh is in dialogue with Reality, he speak
s to It and It speaks to him. This is again to be accepted either as a fantasy o
r sanity. We recognise that he functions socially in the world and that he does
embody those noble virtues or good qualities that so appealed to us and so intri
gued us when we discovered that a man could possess them and live in the world.
We also observe that his dialogue rarely involves direct asking for a specific b
ut is mainly about praising the endless energy of the Reality and the generosity
and compassion and fullness of its nature - he is busy exalting Reality and hon
ouring it and even glorifying it. Along with this we note that he seems constant
ly to be involved in a kind of fine tuning, a honing away on this smooth surface
of his inner reality of any roughness or blemish. He is with each new day refin
ing and asking to be refined, he is polishing and asking to be polished. So by t
his token he is utterly open to his own activity, he himself is constantly under
review, constantly being renewed, in this dynamic communication he has with his
 own reality - the static that seems to gather around the wave impulse that is h
is existence is being cleared and stilled by this rhythmic act of renewal and pr
ostration. This is just like the Messenger of Submission, Muhammad, peace be upo
n him, who when he undertook any matter, entrusted it to the Reality, and renoun
ced his own strength and power and asked for guidance in these words: 'Oh Allah,
show me the truth as truth, and I will follow it. Show me what is denied as the
denied and make me shun it. Protect me in case the truth should become doubtful
to me, and I then follow my inclination without guidance from You. Make it be t
hat my inclination is in obedience to You, and may You be pleased with my harmon
ising with You. Guide me correctly in regard to whatever I am in doubt about as
to its truth, although that doubt is by your permission. Truly You guide whoever
You want onto the true Way.'
If this is read carefully, a quite astonishingly fine balance may be observed in
the way in which he addresses It as both other-than-he, and at the same time re
cognises that his whole self-form in its separateness is Its property. His doubt
and the adjusting of his doubt are from one source that is not the 'I' that ask
s.
The 'I' that asks is helpless.
The 'You' that is addressed is total.
With the man of Muhammad, peace be upon him, nothing is outside the process. The
re is no observer, there is no spectator, there is no alien creature in an alien
world in an alien universe. That would be fantasy - to imagine one was outside
the process. We are in the process, we are the process - if I was not here, I wo
uld have nothing to worry about. It is this persistent lie of self-hood that is
the very matter of conflict and suffering. I look out at the forms and get frigh
tened and confused, I become alienated. I try to make the setting of my exile be
nign. I choose this mountain or the edge of that ocean because I like it and hop
e that it will harmonise with my inner troubled self. I choose this person and n
ot that person because I feel between us there is some commonality. But soon I b
ecome irritated with that person, their sameness seems an empty mockery of my in
dividuality and I long for someone different, the mountain storm echoes my own t
urbulence and I long for a landscape that is the opposite of my inner imagined s
elf. All this stems from my seeing myself as outside the process and either hope
lessly trying to fit myself in and harmonise or trying not to be overwhelmed by
the utterly irreconcilable otherness of the creation and the creatures.
The man, Muhammad, affirms unity. He says One not two. So he does not say it, bu
t It says it through him and by him, so that he says, 'I am only a slave of the
Reality, yet I am the Messenger of the Reality.' In other words I merely tell yo
u what the reality is like. But it is not from me, for there is no me, there is
only a locus of communication. There is a radio-station on the waveband but the
air itself is nothing but oscillating signals, the waveband and the signal are o
ne reality. So his gathering together of what is, his Qur'an, is not by him but
by It and from It - and we are forced to continue - the message is from It to It
, for other than It - outside It, in It, there is not anything. This is not comp
licated.
Two things are being said at once.
If you say One you cannot say the other.
If you say both you approach a new way of understanding existence.
The Message from It is this:
In the Name of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate.
Say: He, Allah, is One,
Allah is endless time,
He did not bring anything into being
and nothing brought Him into being,
and no one form is like Him. (Qur'an: 112)
This is reality. This is what existence is like.
And it is named. It is named so that we may indicate what cannot be given a name
, it is the name of what is not this and not that. Allah.
Allah - it is named with a personal name for a personal name does not define, it
merely indicates. John does not define John, it merely indicates that he is the
re. Allah does not define Allah, it is our indication that He is present althoug
h he is no-place.
There is no god. By the same token, there is no me to reject god, for that would
make me godlike - that is a power, positing this and that.
Earth is a power but water sweeps over it and destroys it.
Water is a power but air turns it into vapour.
Air is a power but fire consumes it -
and Fire is a power but earth obliterates it.
And so on.
In the world of forms there is no god.
This is not absolutely over that. Allah is not, in this declaration of the Messe
nger, presented as the ground of being or as the infra-structure, nor is It pres
ented as being identical with the totality of forms.
What we are presented with is an uncompromising affirmation of Unity. One realit
y, of which the forms are but appearances. The forms are certainly taken serious
ly and there is a whole science of how to be among forms, how to view them and t
reat them, including your own. But in affirming the One reality the forms are ne
gated.
No god. Only Allah.
This is how the greatest Master Shaykh 'Ibn 'Arabi puts it:
We draw conclusions about Him through ourselves. We do not describe Him with any
quality but that we possess that quality, with the exception of a special essen
tial autonomy. Since we know Him by ourselves and from ourselves, we attribute t
o Him all that we attribute to ourselves. For that reason, Divine communications
came down on the tongues of our interpreters, and so He described Himself to us
through ourselves. When we witness, He witnesses Himself. We are doubtless nume
rous as individuals and types, yet we are based on one reality which unites us.
So we certainly know that there are distinctions between individuals. If there w
ere not, there would be no multiplicity in the One.
Likewise we are described in all aspects by what He describes Himself. There mus
t be a distinction and it is none other than our need (iftiqar) of Him in existe
nce. Our existence depends on Him by our possibility. He is independent of that
which makes us dependent on Him. Because of this one can apply pre-endless-time
and no-time to Him which negates the firstness which suggests the opening of exi
stence from non-existence. Although He is the First, firstness is not ascribed t
o Him, and for this reason He is called the Last. Had His firstness been the fir
stness of the existence of determination, it would not be valid for Him to be th
e Last to the determined, because there is no Last to the possible for possibili
ties are endless. Rather, He is the Last because the whole affair returns to Him
after its attribution to us. So He is the Last in the source-form of His firstn
ess and the First in the source-form of His lastness.
He goes on to say:
So the Universe is its own veil over itself and it cannot perceive the Reality s
ince it perceives itself. It is continuously under a veil which is not removed s
ince it knows that it is distinct from its Creator by its need of Him. It has no
portion in the essential necessity which belongs to the existence of Allah, so
it can never perceive Him. In this respect, Allah is always unknown by the knowl
edge of direct tasting and witnessing because the time-forms have no hold on tha
t.
Already we seem flung up against an impossibly forbidding barrier. It seems then
that the Existent is an unknowable nothing, yet bafflingly a fecund nothing out
of which endlessly pour myriad forms. And here is the Shaykh saying that we can
not know Him by direct tasting, by direct seeing. What then is the point of it -
we were not seeking a closed system of perfect metaphysical design, we started
on the quest because we sought to let our hearts experience the radiant peace of
perfection.
The Shaykh al-Akbar also has said:
Some of us implied ignorance of the matter in their knowledge and said - 'The in
capacity to achieve perception is perception.' Among us are those who know, and
who do not utter the like of this: and it is the highest of words. Knowledge doe
s not give him incapacity to know as the first said, but rather, knowledge gives
him the silence which incapacity gives. This is the highest mark of the one who
has knowledge of Allah.
And so back we have come to our first perception of the Shaykh who in his transm
ission of the Nur-i-Muhammad, presents us with someone who is utterly helpless.
Sayyedina 'Umar, the second Khalif of the Messenger, said: 'Would that I were th
e dust upon the road.'
The Perfect Woman, the Messenger's wife, A'isha, said: 'Would that I were a leaf
upon that tree.'
The Messenger called himself the Slave of Allah.
Shaykh ibn al-Habib, who used to sign himself the slave of the slaves, says in h
is Diwan:
By slavery I mean being stripped of every power and strength and capacity and ev
en the act of getting things for yourself.
Now this is such a completely alien idea that it fulfils our worst suspicions ab
out asceticism and fatalism and all the other labels of our education, it all en
ds up with disease-ridden squalor and beggars swarming idle in city gutters. The
work ethic looms up and struggle takes on its heroic aspect and the militant fl
ags of work and progress and social contract again surge through us with the old
adrenaline kick of dialectical rage. We have to be patient and leave this utter
ly extraordinary point of view aside for the moment, remembering that its confro
ntation is the whole matter of what has been called the Hikmat, the Wisdom, the
Way from the beginning of man's story.
We have seen that the basis that sustains the whole Wisdom method of the Perfect
ed is the affirmation, the uncompromising affirmation of Oneness. The Unity of e
xistence is the key to the whole set of sufic sciences. Unity of existence is th
erefore the foundation of the Wisdom of the Wise, and their wisdom is in turn th
e reality of their slave-hood before the splendour of the Universal Reality.
The Messenger said, indicating the Way -
'The life-transaction is behaviour.'
And it is this science of the self that we must first discover on our journey. W
e will by the very nature of this unitive approach, come right back to our start
ing point, Unity, or as it is called in the technical language of Sufism, Tawhid
.
In the meantime, as the Shaykh al-Akbar put it:
The Universe continues to be in the present tense.

The Science of the Self

If you reflect - there are signs in the nafs - because the
whole macrocosm of existence is contained in it.
By purification the nafs expands by the power of the Reality. Now do not say: 'H
ow?' or 'Where?' or 'What?'
It expands by the bestowal of the Trust upon it by Allah
- and god-hood has no limitation.
The great men have proved unable to bear this Trust yet still man has to take it
on, and this is the highest task.
-- from the Diwan of the Perfect Shaykh
In the Makkan Revelations of the Shaykh al-Akbar he tells of al-Junayd, the Imam
of the Masters, may Allah be pleased with him, being asked, 'What did you obtai
n of what was granted?' And his reply: 'My sitting beneath this stair for thirty
years.' Then he quotes Shaykh Abu Yazid, may Allah be pleased with him, as sayi
ng: 'You took your knowledge from something dead, and we took our knowledge from
the Living who does not die.' We have already committed ourselves to a path of
learning which rejects information as a knowledge-process. In the sciences we wi
sh to acquire nothing less than direct experience can be accepted as valid. Lang
uage does not alter your condition and it is the condition of anxiety and confli
ct that has to be healed.
What we have to establish first of all is the nature of the work that has to be
undertaken, and it must not be confused with the structuralist education we have
 been forced to abandon. This is how the Shaykh al-Akbar, again in 'The Makkan R
evelations', defines the matter:
So let the possessor of himma be in spiritual retreat with Allah. His gift and H
is grace appear to such a man from a knowledge of which every language-bound per
son in the world is ignorant. Moreover, not one speculative thinker or logician
can possess this state. It is beyond the perception of reason.
Knowledges are on three levels:
1. The knowledge of reason ('aql): it is every knowledge which you acquire by ne
cessity or as a result of speculation in a proof with the condition of the disco
very of that proof and its form structured in the world of thought. Thought gath
ers and selects from that form of knowledge. For this reason, they say in specul
ation that this is valid and that is in-valid.
2. The second knowledge is the knowledge of states (ahwal), and there is no way
to it except by direct tasting. A man of reason cannot limit it nor can he base
proof on it, like the knowledge of the sweetness of honey, and the bitterness of
aloes and the pleasure of intercourse and passion and ecstasy and yearning. The
re is no form of this type in the knowledges. So these are knowledges which it i
s impossible for anyone to know without being characterised by them and experien
cing them.
3. The third knowledge is the knowledge of the secrets (asrar), and it is the kn
owledge which is above the condition of reason. It is a knowledge which the Perf
ect Dynamic of Existence blows into the heart. No knowledge is nobler than this
encompassing knowledge which contains all known things.
Know therefore that the Path of Allah, may He be exalted, is that which the elit
e of the trusting ones have travelled upon seeking their liberation and not the
masses who occupy themselves with other than that for which they were created.
There are four paths: search, causes, behaviour-pattern, and realities.
There are three rights preserved for them which call them to these paths:
- the right of Allah,
- the right of themselves,
- the right of creation.
The rights which Allah, may He be exalted, has over them is that they glorify Hi
m and do not associate any thing with Him.
The right creation has over them is that there is a Road for creatures to go on,
restraining them from harm and limiting them on the one hand, and on the other
bringing them a good existence by the very act of what is allowed.
There is no way to the harmony of the goal except by the tongue of the Road (Sha
ri'a).
The right due to themselves is that they do not travel except on a path that has
happiness and liberation in it.
The four paths mentioned by the Master are the four truths by which we make the
approach to our own understanding. But before the practices can be embarked on i
t has to be established that all this is based on our certainty of the Shaykh's
approach and a complete surrender of any kind of opinion or idea or speculation
that one might have about the validity or non-validity of the work. This surrend
er demands that even beyond the bounds of reason one has to be completely acquie
scent before the Shaykh's instruction and injunction. It is something very diffi
cult for so-called educated people to accept. This confusion comes from two thin
gs: firstly, they are used to the idea that the teacher is as fallible if not mo
re fallible than they themselves are, and if this were true of the Shaykh it wou
ld be quite fitting to contradict him and defy him in certain cases. Secondly, t
he seeker has still held onto some idea or concept of 'freedom' or 'independence
' that sets him outside the life-situation. As the Shaykh's sole intention is to
set him on the path of his own possibilities and to awaken in him contentment w
ith the totality that surrounds him, these conflicts that call up our defiance h
ave no reality for the Shaykh, and merely indicate the temperature, as it were,
of the recovering patient. In other words, this surrender is based on the Shaykh
being himself a completely radiant and surrendered slave of Reality. Worse than
dissension over behaviour is dispute with words. There is no debate among the p
eople of the Path. Different Masters may use different methods but there is no a
rgument. Assuming that the Master follows the Shari'a, there can be no questioni
ng him - that is the only outward criterion for a seeker as he selects his teach
er. As the Shaykh al-Kamil said: 'Even if a man comes to you flying through the
air, if he does not follow the Shari'a - leave him.'
Search is that energy-impulse that rises up in a person and puts them on the pat
h of awakening and reality out of the sleep of their previous existence and its
fantasies which they mistook for being awake. At first it expresses itself as a
restlessness and a dis-satisfaction with this world and the reward-structure of
material existence and the reward-offering of so-called inter-personal relations
hips. When the illusory relationships begin to be rejected as lies, and the so-c
alled 'real' world takes on a kind of unreality, two things can happen - either
the person will retreat out of the unsympathetic life-situation and make their o
wn reality-rules and rewards - they might even decide to leave the body quite ef
fectively, cut off all communication through the central nervous system and stat
ion themselves out of reach of the totalitarian enemy world system, using their
body as a kind of colony or space-station to which they send and from which they
receive occasional signals - this condition is variously described as madness o
r schizophrenia (split self) but which for the moment could merely be looked upo
n as an extreme and uncompromising defence-system based on the illusion that the
enemy was without, when in fact the madman who thinks he is deluding you has me
rely deluded himself, for the enemy was within. The second possibility is a kind
of collapse from within, a car crash of existence in which the driver, unlike t
he subject in the first picture, manages to survive, but the whole machine of hi
s life to date cannot be road-worthy again. He has to abandon all the inner mind
pictures and he is stopped from continuing with the reality game that he has be
en so long blackmailed into taking seriously. The aims and goals of the society
have been revealed to him as worthless, the neon-lit world has been exposed to t
he splendour of sunlight and all he can do is turn off the false lights and turn
to the natural energy source that has been manifested. From the society's point
of view he could be labelled many things, politically he is an anarchist, behav
iourally he is an introvert in crisis, a neurotic, socially he may be a drop-out
or a misfit. The important thing is that he is in motion - where before there w
as a static and rigid structure, with its collapse has come energy, movement - q
uest. The great example of this condition in tasawwuf is the case of the Imam al
-Ghazzali, called the Proof of Islam, and one of the great Masters of the Way.
Abu Hamid, as al-Ghazzali is called among the Sufis, died at Tus in 1111 A.D. Al
ready established as a great teacher at Bagdhad University under the patronage o
f the Sultan and with a firmly established reputation as a philosopher, he was s
uddenly assailed by overwhelming doubts about the reality of all that he knew or
thought he knew, and about the very substance of lived existence.
He asked himself:
Do you not see that while asleep you assume your dreams to be unquestionably rea
l? Once awake, you recognise them for what they are - fantasies without substanc
e. Who then can assure you of the reliability of an existence which when awake y
ou derive from the senses and from reason? In relation to your present state the
y may be real, but it is also possible that you may enter another state of exist
ence which will bear the same relation to your present state as this does to you
r condition when asleep. In that new zone you will recognise that the conclusion
s of reason are mere fantasies.
This possible condition is perhaps what the Sufis call 'hal', that is to say, ac
cording to them, a state in which, absorbed in themselves, and in the suspension
of sense-perception and thought-forms, they are able to see. Perhaps also death
is that state, according to the Prince of Messengers who said: 'Men are asleep
and when they die they awaken.' Our present life in relation to that future is p
erhaps merely a dream, and man, once dead, will see things in direct opposition
to what is now before his eyes: he will then understand the words of Qur'an, 'To
day We have removed the veil from your eyes and your sight is keen.' (50.22) Suc
h thoughts as these threatened to shake my reason and I sought to find an escape
from them. But how?
The anguish increased until the whole fabric of his domestic life, his intellect
ual pursuits and reputation and his formal acts of devotion became devoid of mea
ning:
Finally, I saw that the only condition of release was to give up honour and rich
es and to sever the ties and attachments of the life I knew. One day I would dec
ide to leave Bagdhad and give up everything: the next day I changed my mind.
This tension continued over a period of six months during the year 1096 A.D. The
climax came when he got up before his students to give a discourse and found th
at he had been struck dumb. The silence imposed from deep within him by existenc
e shattered what was left of his coherent life-pattern. He could not eat and he
could not drink, and the doctors expected him to die. Suddenly the way opened to
him and what had seemed impossible became easy for him. He publicly announced t
hat he was going on Hajj to Makka while secretly he planned a departure to Syria
. His decision to give up this most honoured academic post caused a tremendous s
tir that reverberated right across the Muslim community beyond Iraq. People blam
ed the Khalif, others the Madrassah where he taught, but nothing now could halt
his progress. With a clear and integrated purpose he settled all his affairs, le
aving his wives and family provided for, so that he could set out for the desert
with his begging bowl and seek the company of the Sufi zawiyyas where he hoped
to begin his new life. There then followed ten years of sufic practice at the en
d of which he felt ready to return to the world he had left behind and at last b
egin to teach by transmission what he had gained:
I learned from a sure source that the Sufis are the true pioneers on the path to
Allah, that there is nothing more beautiful than their lives, nor more praisewo
rthy than their rules of conduct, nor purer than their behaviour. The intelligen
ce of thinkers, the wisdom of philosophers, the knowledge of the most accomplish
ed intellectuals would in vain combine their efforts in order to modify or impro
ve their sciences and their behaviour - it would be impossible. With the Sufis r
epose and movement, exterior or interior, are illumined with light.
So search, which at first manifests as agitation, disorder and movement, is even
tually restructured under the impulse of the sufic practices just as the iron-fi
lings are patterned according to the power of the magnet that attracted them. Se
arch is that faculty which the Master Jalalud-Din Rumi, may Allah be pleased wit
h him, called congeneity. It is not just the energy impulse of the magnetic fiel
d, it is the actual susceptibility that the iron has to be attracted, or the str
aw has towards the amber. So that we may say that search is itself the revealing
of the nature of the subject. The appearance of the amber lets us see the straw
for what it is, an attracted substance. Not every element can be magnetised, an
d not every person is drawn to the search. Qur'an says: 'Allah guides to his pat
h who He wills,' (2.213) and 'Allah leads astray who He wills.' (6.39).
So the search, once it has begun, can then be given a different name, for it is
the same energy form, only it has then taken direction. Once under the guidance
of a Shaykh that impulse is called himma, meaning yearning, or appetite for know
ledge of reality. Himma is a key term in our sciences. It is the faculty we must
awaken, and the energy to be most desired. It is desire itself and yet it is ne
cessary that it be desired. Himma brings himma. The need for himma in the seeker
runs through the Diwan of the Perfect Shaykh as a major theme:
And, Oh my companion, himma is the possession to have,
then if you desire the goal of all the gnostics you can set out for it.
Elsewhere he indicates that it is the means to unification in experience:
To the people, His dhikr does in place of what is other-than-Him.
If you possess himma there is no opposite to Allah.
Or again, it is seen as the faculty which in its perfection is the dynamic of th
e Shaykh's transmission. Describing how to recognise a true Master he begins:
His signs are: a Light which shines outwardly, and
a Secret which appears inwardly through his himma.
In his 'Lesser Song' he puts it as one of the three essentials the adept needs f
or unification of his reality:
Whoever has got dhikr, fikr, and himma will in each moment transcend otherness.
He will attain gnosis beyond his desire and fast realise the secrets of existenc
e.
He will see that the purity of the Road is separation, which, properly speaking,
is the source of Reality.
In 'The Buraq of the Tariq' he counsels:
Awaken your himma with yearning and longing, and do not be content with less tha
n the Ever-continuing.
So from this we can see that himma is the highest energy impulse of the human cr
eature, it is that motion within a man or woman which rouses them from the whole
running-down process of the organism, which lifts them up and moves them with a
n energy beyond any other energy they possess to strive not for any formal achie
vement but for re-connection with reality itself. It is life energy, it moves co
unter to the dying arc of the cellular existence, and it lies outside the self-i
nterest of the social impulse. It is the failure of the academic to understand t
his energy, for it is not a principle but a force, that has led to the mis-under
standing about so-called asceticism. The fasting, the lack of possessions and th
e poverty of dress of advanced seekers has been seen as an expression of masochi
sm and self-punishment, which in itself is another of those highly subjective pr
ojections that is called objective thinking to veil the built-in value judgment
against what they themselves fear. There are two situations which may arise and
each would outwardly present the same silhouette while inwardly they would expre
ss a different reality. As with every aspect of the self-patterns of the Path, t
he basic situation is exemplified by the Messenger, peace be upon him. It is tol
d that he was walking in Madina with his Companions when a man called out to him
, 'I am miskeen,' which is a Qur'anic term denoting not only poverty but a pover
ty devoid of struggle to survive. The Messenger answered him, saying, 'Poverty i
s all my glory.' They proceeded on their way when another man made the same excl
amation. This time the Messenger frowned and said, 'Poverty is next to covering-
up!' That is, next to covering up the true nature of existence which is all-sust
aining and all-providing. He then turned to his Companions and noted that they w
ere confused by the two apparently contradictory statements. The first man, he e
xplained, had the condition of miskeen inwardly and outwardly, while the second
was 'rich in his poverty,' for he inwardly indulged in it. The man who gives thi
ngs up or submits to what seem harsh disciplines is devoid of any experience or
motive of self-punishment if the source of his actions is his himma, for it is i
n the nature of himma to make any action pleasing to the seeker if it leads him
to the sought. Devoid of himma, the actions could then be seen as part of a neur
otic pattern. The outcome of the one man's actions will be an opening into the s
erenity and wisdom that is the fruit of himma, while the same actions will lead
in the other instance to either crisis or collapse.
The Persian Master al-Hujwiri identifies himma with the act of transmission in t
he same way as the Shaykh al-Kamil in his Diwan, and introduces at the same time
a principle of the Way that follows inevitably from the reality-picture which t
he Wisdom begins to unfold.
In Farghana at a village called Ashlatak there was an old man who was one of the
Four of the earth. His name was Bab 'Umar - all the dervishes in that country g
ive the title of Bab to their great Shaykhs - and he had an old wife called Fati
ma. I went from Uskand to see him. When I entered his presence he said: 'Why hav
e you come?' I replied: 'In order that I might see the Shaykh in person and that
he might look on me with kindness, (i.e. transmission).' He said: 'I have been
seeing you continually since such and such a day, and I wish to see you as long
as you are not removed from my sight.' I computed the day and year: it was the v
ery day that I took the Path. The Shaykh said: 'To traverse distance is child's
play. From now on visit by means of himma. It is not worthwhile to visit any per
son (in this context) - and there is no virtue in bodily presence.' Then he bade
Fatima bring something to eat. She brought a dish of new grapes, although it wa
s not the season for them, and some fresh ripe dates which cannot possibly be pr
ocured in Farghana.
The reality of this experience, where transmission takes place without 'bodily p
resence' is referred to in the opening of 'The Greater Song' of the Shaykh al-Ka
mil:
If you wish to ascend as lovers ascend,
turn to Layla with sincerity in love
- and dismiss all who deny Her love.
Travel to the lovers in every land.
- If your sincerity in love is real, then by it
you will see the lovers without journeying.
So now we can see that himma is the dynamic of love itself, though what love may
be we are not yet in a position to say. Shaykh al-Kalabadhi said:
The seeker is in reality the Sought, and the Sought the Seeker. So Allah says, '
He loves them and they love Him,' (5.54), and again, 'Allah was well-pleased wit
h them and they were well-pleased with Allah,' (5.119). If Allah seeks a man it
is not possible for that man not to seek Allah: so Allah has made the Seeker the
Sought and the Sought the Seeker.
Here is opening up the unitary nature of the dynamic life-energy. He extends it
further in showing that on the Path there are people who far from having to stru
ggle are taken up and opened to knowledge, in a reverse picture of himma-action
- the himma comes to them and illuminates them. In this pattern the Sought is a
man of the Path and the Seeker is Reality itself:
Nevertheless, in the language of the Sufis, the seeker is the man whose toiling
preceded his revelations, while the sought is he whose revelation preceded his t
oiling. The seeker is described in Allah's words: 'But those who fight strenuous
ly for Us, we will surely guide them into Our Way.' (29.69). Such a man is sough
t by Allah, who turns his heart and implants in it a himma to stir him to work f
or Him, and to turn to Him and to seek Him: then He accords him the revelation o
f the spiritual states. So it was with Harithath (a Companion of the Messenger),
who said: 'I turned myself from this world and thirsted in the day-time, and wa
tched at night,' then he said, 'and it was as though I saw the Throne of my Lord
coming out!' With these words he indicated that the revelation of the Unseen ca
me to him after he had turned away from this world. The 'sought' man, on the oth
er hand, is drawn out forcibly by Reality and accorded the revelation of the sta
tes that through the power of vision he may be stirred to work for Allah and tur
n to Him and bear the burdens laid on him by Reality. So it was with Pharaoh's m
agicians: after they had received the revelation it was easy for them to endure
the threat of Pharaoh, for they said: 'We will never prefer you to what has come
to us of manifest signs É decide then what you are able to decide.' (20.72).
(It should here just be explained that in the Qur'anic revelation, the encounter
with Sayyedina Musa, the Messenger of Reality, and Pharaoh is an encounter of t
wo reality-views. The Pharaoh was not a mere ruler but a heirophant of great kno
wledge which gave him yogic power over forms so that he was able to manipulate e
xistence formally. Musa's science was unitary and to do with inner experience of
reality, and so was 'powerless' while Pharaoh had powers. Musa was able to tran
smit knowledge and demonstrate its validity to the Pharaoh's adepts, but the pow
er of Pharaoh blocked his inner ability to recognise that the source of his own
powers came from existence itself, of which he was an infinitesimal part. It is
important to bear in mind that his wife was however a perfected Master, accordin
g to the Messenger Muhammad, peace be upon him, and that he himself, as he was e
ngulfed by the Red Sea, affirmed the truth of Musa's doctrine. His body was pres
erved, and is, whole, mummified until the world's end, as an affirmation of the
power he had over forms, and thus in the end his own self-preservation still had
to be gifted by existence and could not be assured by him.)
So right at the beginning of the Path we encounter something that is to be the c
onstant theme of all our learning. If reality is One then everything leads back
eventually to the One, and in this world of forms everything leads to its opposi
te, for there is no dialectic except in description, and no conflict except in i
magination. Thus himma which is a yearning must be yearned for, and the One year
ned for is the initiator, or the yearning impulse, and the Path is nothing but t
hat energy desire. So, it follows that the goal itself, the existent, the Moment
, has to be right here, right now in this present tense we and creation continue
to be in - and that is one of the meanings of the Qur'anic ayat, 'Truly Allah i
s on a straight Path.' (12.56). The whole matter is a divine event, so that al-J
unayd's answer to the question of what he had gained was nothing other than the
life he had lived, his 'sitting beneath the stair for thirty years' in inner con
templation; he had gained the conscious utterly awake awareness of his own life
- this was the inestimable achievement of the Master.
Causes, or veils, or hindrances, or the whole self-structure whose illusory natu
re stands between you and the clear-sighted seeing of reality as-it-is, without
any fantasy self-centre - if we are to free ourselves from the prison of our own
self-experience we must be free of its traps and its methods in encasing us in
this false situation. The nafs - the term which stands for the experiencing self
- is variously described and defined in sufic terminology, and this shifting pe
rspective is deliberate and not a sign of differing theory. Both this is true an
d that is true of it - it is in itself a non-reality and it may be experienced i
n different ways and approached in different ways and dismantled in different wa
ys. The word derives from NFS - 'to injure by casting an evil eye upon anyone'.
So its very core meaning is that of an energy-form destructively engaged in conf
lict with another and harming it through its own inner activity. When used adver
bially it means: 'willingly', 'of my own accord', 'at my own pleasure'. Here it
is seen as a simple act of self-interest and satisfaction. From it comes the wor
d 'to shine' and unsurprisingly in the light of what we have just examined, it c
an also indicate 'one who yearns or aspires after' - so that with these three as
pects of the word we have already got the basic doctrine of the nafs as outlined
by Imam al-Ghazzali derived from Qur'anic terminology.
1. AN-NAFS AL-AMARA: the insinuating nafs. It is wholly evil. It is overpowered
by passions and obeys their dictates gladly. All energies here are bent on grati
fication. It cannot discriminate a higher nafs. The lower nafs has become the id
eal. They delight in influencing others to like action, and are proud of their o
wn actions. They are not open to encounter and can only be changed by Reality.
'Allah has set a seal upon their hearts and upon their hearing and over their ey
es is a covering and there is a great chastisement for them.' (Qur'an 2.7)
2. AN-NAFS AL-LAWWAMA: the reproachful nafs. It is indecisive in choice between
good and evil - constantly subjected to inner struggle as a result. Sometimes it
is one thing, sometimes another - capable of both. It is able to discriminate b
etween the two nafs, higher and lower, but it is utterly unable to overcome the
impulses of the lower nafs when they burst forth, having knowledge without will.
Change comes through keeping company with one who has passed this stage, and th
rough shared spiritual practice which gives strength to abandon bad action and a
lter the nafs.
'No! I swear by the reproachful self!' (Qur'an 75.2)
3. AN-NAFS AL-MUTMA'INNA: the nafs at peace. The nafs has become fixed, good, il
luminated consciousness. It has received An-Nur, Light, thus it acts according t
o it - it is reasonable, it is devoid of evil, and good flourishes around it. Th
e discrimination between the two nafs goes, for the lower one has gone and the t
rue nafs is the master. Man has achieved perfect freedom.
'Oh self at peace, return to your Lord, well-pleased, well-pleasing! Enter you a
mong My slaves! Enter you My Garden!' (Qur'an 89.27-30)
The above description of the nafs in different conditions displays the only basi
c possibilities within which each individual fantasy history is played out. The
nafs at its most reduced and therefore at its most active is in this pattern cle
arly identifiable with the infant, only the infantile behaviour is ensconced in
an adult situation and so it has the aspect of being monstrous. That is, the obs
erver finds that the behaviour of such a person is like that of a small child -
at the same time the observer is appalled at the power and effectiveness and sca
le of the destructive action which, taken out of the nursery, becomes acted out
in the larger playpen of 'history'. For most people it is almost impossible to b
elieve from the position of their own repression that the actor-out is doing it
and so they stubbornly refuse to confront the mad event they get caught up in, d
espite themselves. This nafs, nevertheless, cannot possibly function unless it h
as the setting of the pseudo-adult nafs to play against, for its destructive act
ivity is directed against the self-image which is most clearly mirrored in the a
uthority figure, be it a parent or pseudo-parent. On a global scale this nafs is
easily identifiable - Napoleon, Churchill, Hitler and so on. They are the very
marrow of what has come to be known as history, which is nothing but the violent
foreground event created to draw attention away from the deeper background unre
ality of the nafs' personal battle which in itself is another fantasy. So the po
litics of a situation from this point of view is a fantasy structure disguising
an inner nafs' conflict that is being acted out in the zone of event - the exist
ential vitality of which obscures the nafs' actual dilemma which is the fantasy
structure that has to be dismantled if 'history' is to stop. The nafs in its cun
ning creates the brilliant diversion of event so that in extremity it will alway
s resort to violence to distract others from recognizing the true inner violence
that it expresses - or, to hold clearly to the reality of things, the illusory
inner violence. So we are presented with a picture of existence where the arena
of activity, the arena of events, is nothing less than an illusion cloaked by an
illusion taking place in an imaginary setting and happening to imagined beings.
Shaykh al-Akbar says:
So He, may He be praised! obeys Himself when He wishes with His creation, and He
is just to Himself in respect to what He appointed to Himself from the necessit
y of His right - and it is nothing more than empty phantoms on their empty thron
es. In the echo lies the secret of what we allude to - to whoever is guided.
There is no doubt that this idea of the illusory nature of event let alone of ph
enomena is emotionally very disturbing to people who have been educated in the e
ffective conditioning of present day society. At this stage it is dangerous to f
all for the kind of superficial 'realism' of the academic who at worst will blus
teringly introduce a common-sense down-to-earth empiricism - the table is there
and I am here and that's an end to it. We are not trying here to negotiate exist
ence to neurotic subjects who are ensconced in their world view and committed to
the resultant madness that is our contemporary situation. The context of our st
udy of the nafs is that we take our picture from men who have transcended these
fantasy experiences which lead to war and crime and insanity and have thus gaine
d a total view of man's possibilities both creatively and destructively - for ou
r common-sense fellow has not only been unable to grasp the sublime possibilitie
s of the human creature, but he has utterly failed to contain the insane and sui
cidal tendencies of his fellow men, allowed genocide to be the mark of his centu
ry on a social level, and crime and madness its private condition. A true scienc
e of the nafs must be able to deal with the bad aspects of the nafs - and by bad
I do not mean what is parentally censured, but what is destructive to the subje
cts themselves. It must then be able to understand the means to transform the se
lf so that it can replace all the negative energies, bit by bit, with positive c
reative energies. It is the former of these that we have called Causes and the l
atter, Behaviour-patterns.
It is understandable that people are afraid of words like 'wrong' and 'right', '
good' and 'bad', for they do lead to words like 'blame' and the whole punishment
syndrome swings into action. It is at this point that a crucial principle of th
e Noble Way must be grasped. It has already been quoted from the Diwan of the Pe
rfect Shaykh:
É the purity of the Road is separation,
which, properly speaking, is the source of Reality.
No one knows better than the Sufis that the zone of experiential existence is on
e of duality. Tawhid nowhere denies it, as the Shaykh al-Kamil insists. If we di
d not experience duality there would be no need for a science of Unity. It is th
e mark of the pseudo-sufi that he refuses to adhere to the practices of separati
on and the Road while pretending to union and the Path. There has been no Sufi w
ho did not approach existence, awed and humbled, a slave approaching his master.
There can be no talk of lover and Beloved until the slave has become obedient,
not through tyranny, but through the submission of the creature to his creaturen
ess, and until the slave's submission opens him up to his true nature as Khalif
of reality. If a man says he does not need to bow and prostrate and fast and rit
ually wash, he is setting himself above the Masters and so while outwardly he ma
y be engaged in all the tasks of sufic practice, inwardly he is deeply engrossed
in the 'monstrous' infantile battle with the parents. The pseudo-sufis are all
of this monstrous nature, paternal, dominant and outwardly benign - their follow
ers inevitably are haunted sons desperately trying to overcome the dominant fath
er by an act of ritual magic, for that is what they use 'practices' to do - sinc
e practices are for one purpose only, to bring you to the ground, humbled, lower
ed, broken, and ultimately surrendered and accepting, finally open and receptive
to the endless riches of the creation, to the endless bounty of the Truth - it
is hardly surprising that their ventures end in schism and collapse.
There is no Master of the Way who has not accepted his obligations as a human be
ing to bow and prostrate and fast, so much so that he is of all men the most sub
mitted and the most diligent in performing what is demanded of him. Shaykh al-Ak
bar, which means the Greatest Master, at the very opening of his definitive trea
tise on the Path, 'The Makkan Revelations', is categoric in affirming that there
can be no possible transmission unless it comes from a follower of the Messenge
r Muhammad, peace be upon him. He describes most vividly the Messenger's last pi
lgrimage to Makka and his calling the people around him to confirm that he had c
onveyed to them the total teaching of how to live on this planet in harmony with
the whole creation and with direct inner knowledge of reality:
Then he said: 'Has it reached you? They said: 'It has, oh Messenger of Allah!' H
e said, may Allah give him peace: 'Oh Allah - I testify.'
And to the Messenger's testimony the Master adds his own like a humble and ordin
ary slave:
I believe in all that has been brought to him, peace be upon him, from that whic
h I know and do not know of what He gave him.
Following our Shaykh, who in turn is a follower and inheritor of the wisdom of t
he Shaykh al-Akbar, we proceed to set in motion the practices of the Noble Way h
oping for a guidance that will give us discrimination in this dual world and yet
somehow - although we are aware of the open contradiction - will also give us U
nion. What then is the foundation of discrimination? Given that we have affirmed
the Messenger as a reliable witness of existence, in accepting our Shaykh we co
py him in the first practice of the Way.
WUDU
Shaykh Shibli, the disciple of al-Junayd, and a Shaykh of our Shaykh, said, 'Wud
u is separation. Salat is joining.' The meaning and effect of wudu underpin the
whole structure of practices that you will undergo, so it is essential to grasp
the profundity of this rite. The ritual prostrations (salat) are not valid unles
s they are either preceded by the wudu or the previous wudu is still valid. The
wudu is a formalised washing of the hands, mouth, nostrils, face, right arm, lef
t arm, head and neck, ears, right foot and then left foot, accompanied by the ap
propriate supplication. The act is outwardly a cleansing and inwardly a purifica
tion. The manner of doing wudu is swiftness and thoroughness, being sure that th
e water touches every part of the members being washed. The Shaykh al-Kamil used
to say, 'Perform wudu like a majdhub (holy madman) and salat like a dying man.'
The effectiveness of the wudu is broken by urination, excretion, passing wind a
nally, and the sexual act - in the last event ritual purity can only be renewed
by ghusl, which is the full act of purification involving the whole body being w
ashed. The act of wudu is followed by a declaration of Shahada, the affirmation
of the Unity and the authority of the Messenger. The experience of the washing i
s its own explanation, for the person feels the shock impact of pure water, forc
ing the nafs from whatever fantasy has been haunting it to the direct reality of
water and body, to the impact of the moment. It brings you to your senses, it s
naps the nafs away from the false dream state of that dazedness which hints at a
n illusory unity while in fact the nafs is simply detaching from the body which
is its own totality. And this brings us to our first encounter with a situation
that will be met with at every stage of the Way, although it has been obliquely
referred to in the story of the two poor men in Madinah meeting the Prophet. Eve
ry condition of balance and harmony and every state and station of knowledge is
accompanied by a shadow-form that is contrary to the science of wisdom and could
be designated as a neurotic situation. For example, and most obviously, the tho
rough execution of wudu for the five ritual prostrations is the sign of the Mumi
n (one who trusts reality) according to the Messenger saying: 'Keep to the strai
ght Path, do not make calculations, know that your best action is salat and that
only a Mumin observes wudu carefully.' (Thauban reported it, and Malik transmit
ted it.)
At the same time it is possible to discover a man involved in performing wudu re
lentlessly so that while outwardly you cannot fault him you are inwardly aware t
hat there is something disturbing in his performance of the rites, something tha
t can be recognised as of an obsessional nature.
Uqba ibn 'Amir reported the Messenger as saying, 'If any submitted one performs
wudu well, then makes two raka's (sets of prostrations), engaging in their perfo
rmance both inwardly and outwardly, he will be guaranteed the Garden.' Muslim tr
ansmitted it. Here the Messenger specifies that without the action being inwardl
y invested with awareness it is of no avail. The implication of this dual situat
ion is that it is possible to see someone apparently ennobled by all the science
of the wisdom-behaviour who is inwardly in a state of conflict and ignorance. T
his to the people of the Way is the vital dividing line between wisdom, which is
the Messenger's Way, and either religion - if you see it as mere adherence to f
orms, or hypocrisy - if you see it as an inner denial of meaningful forms.
Abu Huraira reported the Messenger as saying, 'When a submitted one or a trustin
g one washes his face in the course of wudu every wrong action he contemplated w
ith his eyes will come out from his face along with the water or with the last d
rop of water. When he washes his hands every wrong action they did will come out
from his hands with the water or with the last drop of water. And when he washe
s his feet every wrong action towards which his feet have walked will come out w
ith the water, or with the last drop of water, with the result that he will come
out pure from offences.' Muslim transmitted it.
It is clear from this that what we are dealing with is a process of effective pu
rification that is suited to man. Every creature has its grooming pattern. The c
at's grooming is formal and an essential part of its life. The sign of an animal
in captivity losing its life pattern and becoming ill is when it ceases to groo
m itself. This act of wudu is in quite the same way necessary to man. It is in t
he nature of the human creature that he imagines his actions adhere to him as id
ea-forms which he 'carries about with him' until this imaginary load makes life
intolerable for him and he breaks under it. The man who has cast aside any recog
nition of an Unseen reality, and who has rejected any belief in a unified benign
energy governing the total existence of the cosmos is, unsurprisingly, far from
being liberated from this unfortunate tendency to hold to the idea-form of his
actions and to feel burdened by his own illusory selfhood, which to him is nothi
ng other than this accretion of mistakes and misfortunes on the one hand, and tr
iumphs and pleasures on the other. Wudu by its acting upon the surface of the or
ganism at the same time as upon the experiencing centre repeatedly makes a break
in consciousness between action and the nafs. Actions have no reality. This is
the shock impact of this first ritual action of the Way. The wudu in its turn, a
ccording to the Hadith, is useless unless accompanied by this vital inner awaren
ess. That is why in the execution of the wudu, it is essential that there be voc
alisation of the Supreme Name, for the act of calling on the Reality during the
act is a guide to unifying the outward and the inward aspects of the event. When
someone begins the practice of wudu, they will find that there are two basic te
ndencies of malpractice, one is to be careless and undefined in the separate act
s of each state of the washing, and the other is to go through the whole process
in slow motion, caressingly as if anointing oneself. Either of these extremes m
ust be scrupulously avoided until the mean is discovered, filling the act with b
oth vigour and dignity and remaining somehow anonymous, so that your doing of it
resembles that of the person next to you. There is no individuality in any of t
he basic practices.
We now come to what underpins the practice of wudu, and makes us aware of the pr
ofound importance and effect of the basic practice without which the higher prac
tices would not only be invalidated but their performance would result in seriou
s and damaging effect on the nafs. Invocation without wudu is certainly guarante
ed to bring about a destructive crisis in the higher nafs, and in the behaviour
rhythm and harmony of the person who attempts this. This is the dangerous and qu
ite malicious practice of the pseudo-sufis whose goal is, of course, manipulatio
n and not liberation. Therefore, from their point of view, the gaining of discri
mination is something that has to be precluded from their scheme.
Beneath the wudu - which forms the base of the practices, is the ghusl. It is si
mply an extension of the wudu, only it involves washing the whole body in runnin
g or poured water, thus providing a total ritual purification. This is necessary
at the beginning of the Path for the affirmation of the Unity and the acceptanc
e of the Messenger, and it is the final act done to one before burial when the b
ody is washed before being returned to the earth from where it came - the other
occasion when it is necessary is following the sexual act. This time the act of
separation is again one of being bodily clean and also making a break between th
e energy of intercourse and the energy of prostration, the leisure of love and t
he detachment of spiritual practice. There is no built-in moral censure in this,
on the contrary it is the act of ghusl which validates and affirms the sexual a
ct and seals it and completes it. It is as much a completion of the act of love
as it is a preparation for valid salat. That is why the act of ghusl should not
be delayed but should follow as immediately as possible the termination of the l
ove-making.
Lowest in the chain of ritual washings is the washing of the anus and the sexual
organs after defecation and urination - this is completed by washing away any u
rine stain that should have adhered to the garments. Here we have the basic disc
rimination that defines sane adult behaviour. The basic indiscrimination is the
infant's inability to know shit from food. The whole guilt structure when disman
tled in the modern therapeutic manner reveals this basic guilt, transmitted by t
he already guilty parents to the anxious child who is confused as to what is wha
t. In the adult who has been raised in this society that has not formalised this
discrimination it is significant that they end up treating food like shit and w
astage of food becomes a social habit to them, in the same way that eating every
scrap and not wasting food is part of the wisdom teaching.
Here we have then the basic practice on which the total discrimination of behavi
our and choices is founded. The Messenger said: 'The key to the Garden is salat,
and the key to salat is wudu.' Jabir reported it, Ahmad transmitted it. The Sha
ykh al-Kamil said: 'The validity of your salat is based on your having performed
your wudu. The validity of the wudu is based on the ghusl which preceded it at
its time, and the validity of the ghusl in turn depends on having washed the anu
s and the penis in the lavatory. Thus your whole inner reality is based on the n
atural act of washing the anus and the penis.' The wudu is a sealing of the body
in preparation for the act of salat. That is why passing wind anally, emission,
excretion and menstruation break the wudu. Its effect is, on the one hand to br
ing into the consciousness of the person an acceptance of themselves as being th
ese open, flowing organisms, of intake and giving out - with the obligations of
wudu and ghusl, there is no hiding the process, no guilt, no fantasy - these eve
nts are natural and they have their natural means of purification: its effect is
to make a sharp distinction between these energetic activities which are all co
ncerned with production and reproduction, and the higher nafs which demands a co
mplete separation from them, without a repression either of their activity or of
our awareness of that activity. The final culmination of these rites is the was
hing of the dead.
We wash our own dead, the men the men, and the women the women.
Thus while alive we have the benefit and privilege of preparing others for the g
rave. In these rites the body is emptied of waste matter, the mouth closed, and
then the whole corpse is washed and camphored in a final sealing, so that the bo
dy dries rather than rots, and is draped in white cloths then laid to rest in th
e earth. Incense is burned to awaken the higher self of the mourners, as scent i
s worn by the person who has done his wudu and is ready for the act of salat whi
ch follows.
'Wudu is separation, salat is joining.' Pseudo-sufic teaching, false spiritualit
y, bases itself on the Unity and so instructs its followers that they do not hav
e to follow any particular path since they are all one. It is a doctrine founded
on ignorance which bears little scrutiny. It is based on the preservation of th
e central experiencing nafs and indeed on exalting it and making it powerful and
effective in the world of action and events. Why should I bow in that way, or p
ray in this way - surely I am constantly at prayer, surely the Qur'an tells me t
hat wherever I turn there is the face of Allah? This is basically the superficia
l argument of the pseudo-sufi with his fear of surrender. The Qur'an has said th
at wherever you turn there is the face of Allah. It also instructs us to take up
a particular direction for the act of prostration, thus unifying all the worshi
p of man around a central point, the Ka'ba in Makka, so that an endless wheel of
living glorification of Reality endlessly turns around the empty four-walled An
cient House built by Sayyedina Ibrahim for that purpose. Reality addresses the M
essenger in the Qur'an saying:
We have seen you turning your face about in the heavens: now we will surely turn
you to a direction that shall satisfy you. Turn your face towards the pure Mosq
ue and wherever you are turn your faces towards it. Those who have been given th
e Book know it is the truth from their Lord. Allah is not heedless of the things
they do. Yet if you should bring to those that have been given the Book every s
ign, they will not follow your direction. You are not a follower of their direct
ion, neither are they followers of one another's direction. If you follow their
caprices after the knowledge that has come to you, then you will surely be among
the evildoers whom We have given the Book, and they recognise it as they recogn
ise their sons, even though there is a party of them who conceal the truth - and
that deliberately.
The truth comes from your Lord, then be not among the doubters. Every man has hi
s direction to which he turns: so be you forward in good works. Wherever you may
be, Allah will bring you all together: surely Allah is powerful over everything
.
From whatever place you issue, turn your face towards the Holy Mosque: it is the
truth from your Lord.
Allah is not heedless of the things you do.
From whatever place you issue, turn your face to the Holy Mosque: and wherever y
ou may be turn your faces towards it, that the people may not have any argument
against you, excepting the evildoers of them: and fear not them, but fear Me:
And that I may perfect My blessing upon you, and that haply so you may be guided
, as also We have sent among you, of yourselves, a Messenger, to recite Our sign
s to you and to purify you and to teach you the Book and the Wisdom, and to teac
h you that you knew not. So remember Me and I will remember you: and be thankful
to Me: and do not be ungrateful towards Me.
(Qur'an 2.144-152)
This passage of Qur'an is of importance to the whole validity of the Way. There
is a Way, there is a journey, there is a traveller. We are in the world of forms
, and to deny the spiritual forms is to exclude Allah from creation and relegate
Him by a false esotericism to the formless. The Qur'an cuts through the distort
ed reasoning of the ignorant by pointing out the unreality of their refusal of a
'qibla': 'Every man has his direction to which he turns.' So, they do not rejec
t direction, what they are in fact rejecting is that one adopted by the guidance
of the spiritual science.
It is transmission and the Messenger that they quite rightly from their point of
view deny, for their teaching is improvised and their transmission without a so
urce.
This passage also affirms that the taking of direction, that is, the acceptance
of a discriminatory science, is what opens the human being up to that living dia
logue with Reality that was the Messenger's secret. 'Remember Me and I will reme
mber you,' is the inevitable result of this discriminatory process - Union is th
e fruit of separation.
The taking of a qibla, contrary to the teachings of the pseudo-sufis, is what ma
kes it possible to grasp the relation between form and no-form, between the limi
ted body-self reality of the slave and the unlimited no-body-self reality of the
Lord. It is said that the initial formula of the Shaykh al-Akbar when he faced
qibla to begin the salat was, 'I have become kafir, and fastened the belt - Alla
hu akbar.' This means that he had ceased to be a true Muslim, or one who submits
 to a Reality which can be associated with no form, and become one who covers up
how things are, that is, a kafir. He had fastened the belt, or zunnar, of the C
hristian - meaning that he had fixed himself in one direction rather than anothe
r and that he had engaged in 'locating' reality, the great Christian confusion a
bout the nature of existence. The 'Allahu akbar', being the opening of the salat
itself, indicated that nevertheless he submitted as a slave to the injunctions
of his Messenger and affirmed that Allah was akbar - greater than any event or c
omparison or concept.
Shaykh Ibrahim Gazur-i-ilahi in his 'Irshadat' says:
The qiblas are four. The qibla of Ka'ba, one's Pir, the heart, the Truth. One ha
s to turn from the first to the second, from the second to the third, and from t
he third to the fourth in succession. If, in the prescribed salat these stages a
re attained, so much the better - you have drunk out of Muhammad's cup, peace be
upon him.
Citing the famous ayat of Qur'an: 'Wherever you turn there is the face of Allah,
' (2.115) he goes on to tell of a majdhub who used to prostrate before everythin
g he saw and declared: 'Oh Allah, I seek your protection from shirk (associating
any form with Allah) in all things.' This of course would be the position of th
e pseudo-sufi if he held to his own argument, but this state demands real ecstas
y. Masud Beg, seeing this, observed to the majdhub's son that his father was ask
ing protection in the very act of shirk. That is to say, every time he bowed dow
n he gave reality a 'direction'. The son replied: 'Do not call him mushrik, he s
ees everything without the thing-ness.'
QBL, the root, means 'to admit', 'to accept' - the existence of forms. Before ex
amining the details of the ritual act of prostration, let us examine its meaning
as a practice, as the crucial practice of the Way.
SALAT
What is the salat?
We have established the meaning of its whereness, its direction, now we must be
quite clear as to what it is and what it does to us.
The act of salat as we have said, is prostration. The root word SLA means 'to hu
rt in the small of the back' and 'to have the centre of the back bent in, as a m
are before foaling'. The central movement of the salat is when the head touches
the ground, and this is called sajda, from SJD, meaning 'to be humble', and 'ado
ration'. So the whole thing is an act of humility, and an act of address. The sl
ave presents himself, he offers himself. It is an opening of the self to the sub
lime reality. Its successive movements, standing, bowing, head on the ground twi
ce, sitting - all deny the nafs and offer up the humbled nafs to the reality. Th
e standing is the stage where the self is still assertive, the bowing is the gre
eting, and the prostration itself with the head on the ground is the direct act
of submission - one of which is worth a million verbal exclamations of acceptanc
e of the reality. It is the head that has to be laid on the ground. It is the ar
rogant thought-bound mind that holds the self prisoner in its dazzling structure
s, that has to be offered up. In the end the final position is neither the proud
nafs nor the nafs in abnegation - but poised between the two, in ease and in ba
lance - the slave sits upright and turns his head to the left and right in a sal
utation of peace.
That is the outward picture - inwardly there is a pattern also. Inwardly the beg
inning is the vital moment, as outwardly it is the end. The opening of the salat
is when the slave raises both hands to behind the ears and then lowers them, as
if putting the world behind him - the hands, splayed open, are lowered slowly a
s if passing through water. With this opening goes a verbal declaration: 'Allahu
akbar.' This is called takbir.
Imam Junayd, may Allah be pleased with him, said, 'Everything in nature has a hi
gh point and then a falling away, and the high point of the salat is the opening
takbir.' The adept must grasp the significance of this before he can embark fru
itfully on the act of salat. Imam Junayd here draws attention to the collectedne
ss that is necessary to perform the act. Before performing the takbir, it is the
refore an obligation to make a formal act of niyya, or intention, which in its o
utward form means simply saying to oneself, 'I now intend to pray the salat of s
unset,' or whichever it may be. What it means inwardly is that the whole attenti
on has to be gathered in to the experiencing nafs, the whole awareness has to be
focused on the point where the head will fall in sajda, and the heart fixed on
Allah. Look at what is necessary and what has already been ascertained before on
e can make valid salat.
The preliminary conditions are:
1. Outward purification from filth and inward purification from appetites (wudu)
.
2. One's outward garments should be clean and one's inner garments undefiled.
3. The place where one purifies oneself should be outwardly free from contaminat
ion and inwardly free from wrong actions.
4. Turning towards qibla, the outward qibla being the Ka'ba and the inward qibla
being the Throne of Allah by which is meant the mystery of Divine contemplation
.
5. Standing outwardly in the state of power (qudrat) and inwardly in the garden
of proximity to Allah (qurbat).
6. Sincere intention to approach Allah.
7. Saying 'Allahu akbar' in the station of awe and annihilation, and standing in
the abode of Union and reciting the Qur'an distinctly and with awareness, and b
owing the head with humility, and prostrating one's nafs with abasement, and rec
iting the shahada with concentration, and saluting with annihilation of one's at
tributes.
This is the description of Shaykh al-Hujwiri, and it is a vivid example of the u
nification of inward experiencing and outward reality that is the very business
of tasawwuf. It is the clarity of this unification that permits the Sufi to see
through the fragmentation of other men, how their deeds and, in this age especia
lly, their words are invalidated by the absence of an inner state which would gi
ve them reality, how their hearts are separate from their destinies, which is wh
y they do not know where they have been or where they are going. Unification of
the nafs has its beginning and ending on the prayer mat of prostration. It is th
e great practice - in the Unseen it is the practice of the angels and the jinn w
ho affirm the Reality, and they are included in the final salutation, for the ad
ept still makes the salutation even if he or she is alone. It is unification bec
ause it is an opening up completely to the moment. It is the most fitting thing
to do. It is the best thing to do at the time. For the five obligatory prostrati
ons take place at fixed times that move throughout the year according to the ris
ing and setting of the sun. So that while it is inward unification, inevitably i
t is also an act of unification from the cosmic point of view. Ignorance is not
knowing where you are, knowledge is being aware that you are where you should be
. It is in the nature of the Universe that at the dawn, mid-day, mid-afternoon,
after sunset, and at the first darkness, the human creature should be prostrate
before the majesty and beauty and unity of Reality. This is harmony, cosmically
and inwardly in the microcosm of the heart - here is the beginning of the scienc
e of unification, here is the opening of the heart to the discovery of its true
nature. Here is the first experience of the slave as being someone in dialogue w
ith the Reality. It is movement, it is an activity of the most profound and shat
tering impact on the nafs.
It is recorded that when the Messenger made his prostrations, there came from de
ep within his chest the sound of what seemed like a boiling cauldron. When his m
ost beloved Companion, Sayyedina 'Ali, may Allah be pleased with him, was about
to do salat his hair stood up on his head and he used to say: 'The hour has come
to fulfil a trust which the heavens and the earth were unable to bear.' The Mas
ter Sahl at-Tustari, although palsied in his old age, used to recover the use of
his limbs whenever the hour of prayer arrived and after having performed his pr
ostrations was unable to move from his place.
Shaykh al-Hujwiri also recounts:
'Abu'l Khayr Aqta' had a gangrene in his foot. The physicians declared that his
foot must be amputated, but he would not allow this to be done. His disciples sa
id, 'Cut if off while he is doing salat, for at that time he has no consciousnes
s.' The physicians acted on this advice. When Abu'l Khayr finished his prayers h
e found that his foot had been amputated.
The wali, Husayn ibn Mansur al-Hallaj, used to perform four hundred raka's (unit
s of prostration) within a day and night. On being asked why he took so much tro
uble in the light of the high degree which he enjoyed, he replied: 'Pain and ple
asure indicate your feelings, but those whose attributes are annihilated feel no
effect either of pleasure or of pain. Beware lest you call remissness maturity,
and desire of the world search for Allah.' Here we note another example of a co
ndition which outwardly looks like the self-infliction of pain called asceticism
when it is inwardly a reality of being beyond the pleasure/pain dichotomy becau
se the nafs has fallen away and there is no one to experience this discomfort.
The Imam of the shaykhs said:
'Do not let your purpose in the prayer be to perform it. For you have not perfor
med it unless you take pleasure and joy in the union with Him to whom there is n
o means of approach save through Himself.'
Ibn 'Ata said: 'Do not let your purpose in the prayer be to perform it without a
we and reverence for Him who sees you perform it.'
Maulana Rumi says that if we really knew how to pray we would begin standing in
this world and bow into the next. So it must be clear that the alchemy of prostr
ation is not merely an opening psychologically, as it were, in terms of an attit
ude of mind being changed by the act of putting one's head on the ground. It can
not be reduced to a mere technique - it cannot be annexed by people as a means t
o inner tranquillity without the inner recognition it brings of what reality is
like.
Now we must look at the whole pattern of ideas that have been up until this poin
t laid aside, but which must be grasped if we are to have any understanding of w
hat the sufic Way is.
One Master said that the persons about to pray should see themselves standing on
the Sirat, with their Shaykh before them at Ka'ba, the Garden on their right an
d the Fire on their left, and over them Azrael, the Angel of Death. The Sirat is
the Narrow Bridge over which the dead person has to pass in the after-death sta
te - there is a Tradition where the Messenger tells of it as being finer than th
e edge between the two sides of the finest swordblade.
What are we to make of this sort of statement? It would be easy to reassure the
modern man that it was merely a symbolic language, some pseudo-sufis pretend tha
t it is for simple folk but not for clever people like them who know that an All
-Merciful Lord will not punish anyone. Others suggest that it is merely somethin
g with a hidden meaning which again somehow annuls the power and uncompromising
challenge of the other-world picture.
Firstly let us see what the greatest of the Masters has to say. We now come to t
he completion of the passage we examined earlier:
Then he said: 'Has it reached you?' They said: 'It has, Oh Messenger of Allah.'
He said, may Allah give him peace, 'Oh Allah, I testify.' I believe in all that
has been brought to him, peace be upon him, from that which I know and do not kn
ow of what He gave him. It is determined that there is an appointed time with Al
lah. When it comes it is not postponed. I believe in that with an iman (trust) t
hat is without hesitation or doubt, as I have believed. I am established as a sl
ave. The grave is true and the raising of bodies from the grave is true, and the
review of the people by Allah, may He be exalted, is true, the scattering of pa
ges is true. The Sirat is true. The Garden is true and the Fire is true. A group
in the Garden and a group in the Fire is true. The torment that day on one grou
p is true and that another group will not be grieved by the greatest anxiety. Th
e intercession by the Sent Ones and the Trusting and the bringing out by the Mos
t Merciful of the Merciful from the Fire is true. The group of people with serio
us wrong actions among the Trustworthy entering the Fire and leaving it with int
ercession and indebtedness is true. The confirmation of the Trusting and the peo
ple of Unity in the Garden is true. Everything which the Books and Messengers br
ought from Allah, known or unknown, is true.
So the seeker can either lay aside the book and label this as old fashioned reli
gion, binding him along with the others in a form of mental and social slavery w
hich open the way to exploitation and injustice, or he can reject the prejudicia
l reaction, set aside the labelling of terms that will to him immediately imply
that this is a belief system - does he not, indeed, talk of belief? It is time n
ow to approach the business of the Unseen. It is time to clarify this essential
aspect of existence - that is both visible and invisible, place and no-place. Ag
ain it is essential to re-iterate the basic step that is taken on the Path - Sha
hada - witnessing - affirming the Unity and the Messengership of the one who is
sent by Reality, Muhammad, peace be upon him. The acceptance of the reliable wit
ness is the extent of one's vision to begin with - we cannot see the Unseen but
we can distinguish the profound humanity and serenity of the Messenger and, in t
he living situation, his Masters to whom he has transmitted the knowledge and sc
ience of existence. So, when we discover that both the Messenger and his Masters
through the ages express themselves in terms of a present phenomenal existence
and a hidden and permanent existence, we are forced to examine how they come to
this. By their description it is made quite clear that these things are matters
of revelation. They are talking about what they have seen and experienced. The s
ignificant thing about these vast cosmic visions of an unseen reality, unseen th
at is to the outward eye, is that the vivid and precise description is always ac
companied by a recognition that they have no total knowledge of the Unseen, and
that their vision is only a tiny fragment of an inconceivably vast and dynamic d
isplay of fulgurating forms that endlessly unfold with the radiant and structure
d perfection of the aurora borealis.
The greatest work of the sufic sciences is the Shaykh al-Akbar's 'Makkan Revelat
ions'. At the opening of this tremendous book which is incomparable among the wo
rks of the Masters, he tells how he achieved the Station of knowledge from which
he wrote all that is contained in the Revelations. The actual encounter in the
Unseen which is the key to the book comes later and takes place at the Ka'ba, an
d we will examine that when we come to the knowledge of the Ka'ba. Here is the M
aster's description:
Blessings be upon the secret of the knower and his subtle point, the quest of th
e knower and the object of his desire, the Veracious Master who set out at night
to his Lord, the Night Visitor who passed the seven paths to Him, in order that
he who made the Night Journey might record what was entrusted to him of signs a
nd realities. He is the most incredible of created beings that I witnessed durin
g my writing of this work in the world, or the realities and mirror-forms in the
Presence of Majesty. It was a revelation of the heart in an Unseen Presence. I
was him, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, a Master in that world, preser
ved from goals, sustaining the vision, confirmed in victory. All the Chosen Mess
engers were in front of him, and his community, which is the best community, was
clinging to him, and the angels of subjugation surrounded the Throne of his sta
tion, and the angels of the birth of actions were lined up in front of him. The
Siddiq was on his most precious right, and the Faruq was on his most pure left.
The Seal had dispersed before him to tell him of the tale of idols. 'Ali, may Al
lah bless him and give him peace, was blessing the Seal with his tongue. Dhu'n-N
urayn was wrapped in the cloak of his shame, occupied in his concern.
The Highest Master, the sweetest fresh spring, the most revealed and most glorio
us Light, turned and saw me behind the Seal, because of a partnership between me
and it in decree. The Master said to it: 'This is your like, and your son, and
your boon companion. Raise up the mimbar of tamarisk for him before me.' Then he
pointed to me and said: 'Muhammad, attend to it and give praise to He who sent
me and give praise to me. If there is in you a single hair from me it cannot bea
r separation from me. It is the ruler in your identity. Thus it will not return
to the meeting. It is not from the world of misery: there was nothing from me af
ter my sending out in any way except good fortune, and he is among those who giv
e praise of thanks in the heavenly gathering.'
So the Seal built the mimbar in that most awesome assembly and on the side of th
e mimbar was written in the most resplendent light: 'This is the purest Muhammad
an Maqam. Whoever ascends it has inherited it and the Truth has sent him as a gu
ardian to the sanctuary of the Shari'a and has delegated him.'
The whole work is filled with these moments of radiant and moving vision and it
is from these experiences that he unfolds with a crystalline clarity his cosmolo
gy and his tasawwuf. The plain reason why he is virtually unknown in the West is
that the so-called Orientalists stubbornly insisted that he adhere to their ver
y limited, and from a global point of view, parochial, understanding of how a ma
n might express himself. Once they defined him as a philosopher it was simple en
ough to dismiss him as muddled and incoherent. The arrogance of the German and E
nglish academics who dismissed him deserves somewhere a study on its own, and th
e most ironic aspect of the affair is that these men had no other genuine qualif
ication to write on 'Ibn 'Arabi than their capacity to read the Arabic language!
Those who settled for accepting him as a mystic - an intolerable term in Islam
- then had to put aside his science of the self as getting in the way of the sim
ple vision and ended up 'preferring' the clear personal testimonies of experienc
e to the towering structure of 'Ibn 'Arabi's scientific knowledge of the world o
f form and no-form. Before attempting to see the world of experiential reality a
s a place in which all these barriers of space and solidity have become fuzzy an
d fluid, let us examine one more witnessing by the great Moroccan Master, Shaykh
Darqawi, which happened two hundred years ago in Fez:
By Allah, my brothers, I did not believe that a learned man could deny the visio
n of the Messenger, peace be upon him, in the waking state, until the day I met
some learned men in the Qarawiyyin Mosque and had a conversation with them on th
is matter. They said to me: 'However is it possible to see the Messenger when on
e is awake, since he has been dead for over 1,200 years? It is only possible to
see him in a dream, since he himself said: 'He who sees me, that is to say in a
dream, sees me in reality, for Shaytan cannot take my form.' I answered: 'Of nec
essity, he can be seen in the waking state only by one whose mind - or let us sa
y, whose thoughts - have transported him from this world of bodies into the worl
d of Spirits: there he will see the Messenger without the slightest doubt, there
he will see all his friends.' They were silent and said not a word when I added
: 'Indeed, he can be seen in the world of Spirit.' But after a while they said t
o me: 'Explain how this is so?' I answered: 'Tell me yourselves where the world
of Spirits is in relation to the world of bodies.' They did not know what to rep
ly. And then I said: 'There where the world of bodies is, there also is the worl
d of Spirits: there where the world of corruption is, there also is the world of
purity: there where the world of the kingdom is, there also is the world of kin
gship: in the very place where the lower worlds are, there are to be found the h
igher worlds and the totality of worlds. It has been said that there exist ten t
housand worlds, each one like this world, as recounted in the 'Hilyat al-Awliya'
(by Abu Nu'ayam-al-Isbahani) all these are contained in man without his being c
onscious of it. Only he whom Allah purifies by absorbing his qualities into His
own, his attributes into His own, is conscious of this. Now Allah purifies many
of His slaves and does not cease from purifying them until their end.' The vener
able Master and Wali, Sayyid Ibn al-Banna, may Allah be pleased with him, says i
n his 'Inquiries':
Understand, for you are a copy of existence for Allah,
so that nothing of existence is lacking in you.
The Throne and the Footstool, are they not in you?
The higher world and also the lower world?
The Cosmos is but the man on a big scale.
And you - you are the Cosmos in miniature.
And the Venerable Master, the Wali al-Mursi, may Allah be pleased with him, said
:
'Oh you who go astray in the understanding
of your own secret,
Look - you will find in yourself the whole of existence.
You are the infinite, seen as the Way
and seen as the Truth,
Oh synthesis of the Divine Secret in its Totality.'
So here on the one hand we have a Master talking about meeting with all the Mess
engers, and initiations that take place opening him to a knowledge he has not ga
ined from any 'outer' source and yet apparently did not know up until that initi
ation, and on the other hand another Master who says that the creature is compou
nded of all the forms in the Universe.
The kafir, that is, the one who covers up reality, would describe the situation
thus: a human being performs actions in the world and is either gratified and fi
nds pleasure or else punished and finds pain. If the situation becomes extreme,
the mental operation relating to the pain and pleasure takes on a primary import
ance in that the pleasure fantasy and the pain anxiety slip their moorings as it
were and become detached from event and float free, creating a crisis in the pe
rson's experience between their tumultuous inner reality and the down-to-earth '
factual' reality of events. This crisis can become so great that only the struct
uring of these fantasies in an imagined 'heaven and hell' dichotomy can hold tog
ether the inner fragmentation. Thus the two realms, or imagined realms, invented
by the mind to contain the excess material of the fantasy-producing mind. They
have a source in the root fear and the root gratification which is understandabl
y infantile in origin. This picture unfortunately is based on the reality of the
subjective experience, and somehow on the primacy of the solid over and against
the non-spatial. It makes no differentiation between the imagined or let us say
fantasised form in mind and the perception of an existing form by mind. In the
sufic picture, the whole closed world system is blown wide apart. It does not de
clare that the positive, as it were, of that negative is true - that is, it is n
ot a simplistic affirmation that the 'inner' experience of fear is hell after al
l and synonymous with it. On the contrary it affirms the clinical neurotic pictu
re that builds up into an intolerable punishing hell, or the lotus-like fantasy
world of gratification that pulls away from event - all this is nothing more tha
n illusion. The illusion is based on the false assumption that there is some kin
d of essential reality to the self, that it is solid and actual and that it is r
esponsible for its actions and that it is going to pay for what it has done. The
guilt and its opposite energy, the gratification, are a modality based on the c
onviction that actions cohere to an experiencing central form as crystals cluste
r around a basic salt formation.
The Messenger said that people would be judged not according to their acts but a
ccording to their intentions. He also said that people would not be saved from t
he Fire by their works. So this whole picture that connects the human creature t
o the heaven/hell condition is a fantasy. This is not what is put forward as how
things are. Neurosis is to separate yourself from the total process which is Di
vinity itself. To posit for yourself a separate reality dooms you to positing yo
ur own fantasy heaven and your own fantasy hell. People who deny Divine Reality
collapse in inner anguish and experience and fear the hell of the present and an
intolerable future - equally they have ecstatic states in their heads which the
y call heavenly but which are private delusions that they can offer us no access
to, unlike the wali who can make available for his disciple the experience of b
liss. Reality is not to the gnostic a one-dimensional but a multi-tiered existen
ce. The forms are endless, just as in the phenomenal world so in the Unseen - th
ere are many heavens and many hells.
The two basic images of the Garden and the Fire as the two polar realities of th
e Unseen are easy of access to the awake mind. On the one hand there is the whol
e energy process of fire which is one of intensity, enormously powerful energy i
n transmutation, changing and altering everything which enters into it, breaking
it down and recreating it - as in the alchemical picture. From it is born a sta
r, a metal, into it finally by a kind of ultimate persuasion of activity, the ot
her element is unified until it becomes fire itself despite its original density
and separateness. It is intolerable, it is the ultimate in heat and unendurable
ness, it is the present moment as utter anguish, time at its most terrible. The
Garden is space, greenness, time opened out into ease. Water runs, there is shad
e, forms emerge, unfold, plants blossom, bear fruit. Birds sing in the air - the
elements are benign, peaceful. It is a place for living creatures and beauty as
the other is a place for disintegration and power.
The teaching of tasawwuf is that these worlds are part of the reality of the uni
verse, they are real in a way that your pain or pleasure is not real. If you fea
r the Fire of the Unseen you will avoid the illusory accretions that cause the n
eurotic fear in experience, but equally you must desire the Garden or you will y
earn in fantasy and split from the ordinary world of lived existence. Without th
e fear and hope that open you to knowledge of Unity, you are doomed quite inevit
ably to the anxiety/gratification dialectic that adheres to the illusory self-fo
rm, you will live intimidated and at the mercy of your sick fears and hopes. We
come back inevitably to the picture we had earlier in relation to the ascetic wh
ich showed how every step of the Way was accompanied by an equivalent in neurosi
s and ultimately in madness. For this all happens in the world of natural order,
forms, where everything is double. We find throughout our journey that the scie
nce of Unity exists to be applied to the world and our experience just because t
hey are dual when Reality itself is One.
It could be suggested that this was a mechanism to cause a transfer from the urg
ent existential situation into a condition where the anxiety was, as it were, de
ferred out and away from the immediate crisis and thus rendered harmless. This c
ould only result in a more fragmented inner experience and would certainly resul
t in making the inner experience of the person labyrinthine and more acute in it
s tension. What has to be recognised is that this is how the Masters of the Way
see and experience reality. They are utterly fearless in this world, they are fr
ee in all their actions. To experience fear and hope of Allah is to be devoid of
fear of the issue or expectation of the issue. This is the hallmark of Wisdom.
It follows that the man who says, 'I do good things not because I desire the Gar
den,' or 'I abstain from the forbidden not because I fear the Fire, but I do the
se things for myself,' is in reality bound to illusion and the persistence of th
e self-form as some dense and lasting thing - since this is not the case, he has
clung to the realm of gratification and congratulation and serenity will elude
him. These hidden realities were created for him and are an inexorable part of h
is Universe, so let him abhor the one and long for the other, for in these two l
ie the approach that is pleasing to his Lord. His intentions will take him to th
e Garden or the Fire, and so let him desire a clear heart so that he can the mor
e know his own intentions, and let him fear and hope in accordance with his reco
gnition of his inability to know the Seal of his destiny that is in the Balance.
In doing so, he turns away from the giving of reality to actions, and he turns
towards the reality of his own heart, which in turn opens up to him all the myri
ad forms of the visible Unification, and the matter of our sciences. In the chap
ter relating to Stations we will examine further aspects of fear and hope, and t
hen finally we can look at the very stuff of this so deceptively constructed wor
ld of forms.
We had left the adept poised on his prayer mat - we must continue now out beyond
the individual act of salat to see it cosmically as a rite performed five times
a day at prescribed times.
The close view is of a man or a line of men oriented in one direction bowing and
prostrating. The distant view reveals not a line of men, but seen globally, a c
ircle of devotion centring on the point of the Ka'ba. So that what we have is a
series of concentric circles moving towards the Makkan focus of adoration. There
is another dimension that must be considered to make this a moving and living p
icture - and that is time. Qur'an specifies that salat is fixed at appointed tim
es, the times being taken very simply from the sun's position in the sky. There
are five necessary sets of prostration, the first being at dawn when the first t
hread of white light appears on the horizon and lasting until the sun's disc is
about to be visible - the second is at noon immediately following the meridian -
the third is mid-afternoon - the fourth, the sunset, after the descent of the s
un's disc - and the last, the night prayer, when the light leaves the sky. Thus,
in the global picture, it follows that what you have is an endless rippling mov
ement of circle upon circle, in to the centre point of the Ka'ba, that virtually
never ceases, as the sun is constantly rising and setting across the world. At
the centre is the Ancient House, of which the Qur'an says:
The first House established for the people was at Makka, a pure place, and a gui
dance to all beings. (Qur'an 3.96)
So the focus of this worship and opening to the Universal Reality is a place tha
t has been celebrated from the beginning of man's story as a place of meeting be
tween the slave and the Lord. The whole dynamic of energy emanating from the Anc
ient House is so overwhelming that to align oneself with it, anywhere, is to be
in harmony with the Unity of existence, and the patterning of the world as a uni
que and total creation. This is why the Messenger always sat facing the Ancient
House, and slept facing the Ancient House, and did salat facing the Ancient Hous
e. Salat, seen from this global point of view, from this cosmic point of view, r
eveals itself to be the primary and essential rite of any science of gnosis of t
he Reality which is everywhere present and nowhere graspable by intellect or sen
sory experience. The first act that the seeker performs is to open himself to th
is situation where he, in harmony not only with his fellow creatures, but with t
he whole organic creation, submits himself to the process of which he is already
an inexorable part. This is submission, this is peace. The man who has accepted
his place as an infinitesimal particle of a vast dynamic multi-dimensional Univ
erse, and who has submitted to his complete helplessness and weakness in a world
spinning in a sea of endless planets, has also opened himself to the process of
awakening his own inner reality which can swallow up this tremendous Cosmos of
stars. A Persian Master puts it:
I went out by the edge of the ocean
And saw a wonderful sight,
The boat within the sea,
and the sea within the boat.
This is the secret of salat, and the secret of the act of submission of being a
slave of a mighty reality, the secret of peace. Such a man is called Muslim - on
e who surrenders his self. The practice is called Islam. The root form is the sa
me - SLM - 'surrender', 'peace', 'to be safe and sound'.
As well as the rhythmic pattern of five daily sets of prostration, there are als
o times when special sets are performed. These are on the 'Id days which mark th
e end of the Fast of Ramadan and the completion of the rites of Hajj, these two
times being taken precisely according to the position of the moon. The other tim
e is in the case of eclipse. Here we have an opportunity of seeing the extraordi
nary depths and implications of this ritual act - and how it opened the Messenge
r to both the cosmic reality of things and the unseen dimension of these same ev
ents. The picture we have is of a man so in tune, so in harmony with the creatio
n that he blows with the wind and eclipses with the sun. He tastes and submits t
o the whole creational event just as the willow tree yields to the changing elem
ents and is itself both tree and wind that blows through it:
'Abd ar-Rahman bin Samura, who was one of the Companions of the Messenger of All
ah, peace be upon him, said: 'During the lifetime of Allah's Messenger, peace be
upon him, I was at arrow practice in Madinah when the sun eclipsed. I shot the
arrows and said: "By Allah, I must see how the Messenger of Allah acts in a sola
r eclipse." So I came to him, and he was standing in prayer, raising his hands,
and saying - "Glory to Allah, Praise belongs to Allah, there is no divinity but
Allah, Allah is greater!" - until the sun cleared. When the eclipse was over he
recited two suras and prayed two raka's.'
'Ata' bin Rabah reported on the authority of A'isha, the wife of the Messenger o
f Allah, peace be upon him, who said: 'Whenever the wind was stormy, the Messeng
er of Allah used to say: "Oh Allah, I ask you for what is good in it, and the go
od which it contains, and the good of that for which it was sent. I seek refuge
with You from what is evil in it, what evil it contains, and the evil of that fo
r which it was sent." And when there was thunder and lightning in the sky, his c
olour underwent a change, and he went out and in, backwards and forwards, and wh
en the rain came he felt relieved, and I noticed it on his face. A'isha asked hi
m about it and he said: "It may be as the people of 'Ad said: when they saw a cl
oud formation coming to their valley, they said, 'It is a cloud which would give
us rain." (Qur'an 46.24)
Anas bin Malik reported: 'It rained upon us when we were with the Messenger of A
llah, peace be upon him, and he removed his cloak so that the rain fell on it an
d we asked, "Messenger of Allah, why do you do this?" He said: "Because it has j
ust come from the Exalted Lord."'
Once the knowledge of salat has been acquired in all its outward detail and prac
tised with its profound and meaningful inner mathematical structure - for the nu
mber of prostrations at different times of the day, and the degrees of extra non
-obligatory ones, make up the real basis of the spiritual science - then the see
ker has got hold of the first part of something which in its totality is the tre
mendous gift of the Messenger to mankind. Along with his delivering the Message
of al-Qur'an, he left behind him the Hikma - the Wisdom. It is this that forms t
he body of one's inner reality, it is this that gives flesh and blood to the inn
er impulse towards gnosis. Even though there could be a limited inner experience
without this science, with it you have the possibility of that wholeness that r
eturned to the human race when the Messenger opened people once again - as had a
ll the Messengers before him, of whom he indicated there had existed 124,000 sin
ce the beginning of man's story - opened them to the true nature of their humani
ty, to the real measure of man, to perfection and Unity. You must not be surpris
ed to find that this tremendous science of human behaviour on which the full doc
trine of gnosis rests is effectively unknown to people in the West - partly beca
use word of it filtered through the same inadequate channel by which knowledge o
f Islam came to the academic world, that is, through people utterly unequipped t
o examine the anthropology and metaphysics of Islam, being nothing more than acc
omplished linguists - and partly because there was and is a quite conscious atte
mpt on behalf of the Christian and Jewish academics to misrepresent the true nat
ure of Islam - but finally because the Muslims themselves in these long centurie
s have felt increasingly uncomfortable with a science that challenged their own
wealth. This science, the Sunna, or Practice, of the Messenger, is properly spea
king the whole of the science of man. It rests on the principle that man is the
slave of his Lord, and at the same time is the Khalif of his Lord - that is to s
ay, the one who stands for Him or represents Him. We have taken hold of the scie
nce of the nafs, for truly the whole science of the nafs - and all you need to k
now about it is contained in the two purifications, wudu and salat, and adherenc
e to these practices - will make clear the working of the nafs in every situatio
n. We must now try to get a first glimpse of what the nature of the Sunna is, an
d then approach the meaning of this Khalifdom, which is, of course, the Secret w
e desire.

The Science of the Sunna

The word Sunna, meaning the Practice, derives from the root SNN, meaning 'to for
m'. It is nothing less than the form of man, that is, man as a living social org
anism, man in his wholeness. Any mechanistic or legal idea from your Judaic or C
hristian background must be removed before you can open to this reality which is
utterly organic, physical and metaphysical, a spontaneous human creature in har
mony with his creation being the end result, and not an inhibited and outwardly
controlled animal. The error of the Jews was not that they failed to obey the La
w, but that they turned what was a scientific Law about man - that is, if you do
this, that happens - into a legalistic structure exterior to and imposed on man
. The error of the Jews made it inevitable that when the existential reality of
lawfulness, in its organic sense, the Messiah, appeared, they could not recognis
e him. So involved were they with the theory, they failed to identify the practi
ce in a living and perfect exemplar. The error of the Christians was its counter
part - so determined were they to enshrine the metaphysical aspect of man's natu
re, so terrified were they of losing the secret of man's glory, that they felt o
bliged to enshrine it in a Mystery, in symbol and ritual, letting its protectors
be an elite whose raison d'etre was to guard the Secret, until in the end these
men did not feel obliged to respond to the social obligations of the teaching,
so that they became immoral and corrupt in the name of the perfect Teacher. Thes
e two attitudes are what may be understood as 'religion', they are the forms tha
t bind together (religio) a people in an exploitation that must inevitably lead
to tyranny.
Islam is based on the reality and primacy of this Sunna, this self-form of man,
that indicates that there is a behaviour pattern for the human species wherever
it may exist on earth. It is significant that one of the stumbling blocks to peo
ple approaching the experience of Islam is that they feel that it is indigenous
to a desert culture, or that it is the desert culture, and therefore does not tr
ansfer to other societies. Most ironically, the pseudo-sufis always refer to 'we
in the West', as if for cultural reasons we were in some special situation that
somehow made us different, and by implication, superior to other peoples. As if
the complexity of our social modes and the glutted density of our noun-packed p
ost-scientific vocabulary somehow made us superior or more inaccessible to some
'ancient wisdom'. The Hikmat, the Wisdom, is not culture and does not become cul
ture. Culture is simply the illusory reality you bestow on the dynamic forms of
your society's transitory activity and achievement and the shadows of the mental
forms you become hypnotised by - culture changes and decays and renews. Islam m
erely selects and simplifies the cultural situation - sweeping away the worst ex
crescences of fantasy, such as the burning of widows on their husband's pyres in
the decadent phase of Hindu spiritual culture - and purifying the nobler practi
ces - such as the ancient rites of Hajj. The proof of the Sunna as a profound an
d effective anthropological patterning for man is seen every year at the Hajj wh
ere people from the most disparate cultures come together socially and spiritual
ly unified by their adherence in recognisable degree to the vast Sunna of Muhamm
ad, peace be upon him.
The proof of the ignorance of our epoch and the barbarism that is enveloping our
society can be found in the modern Muslim state's urgent desire to shelve the w
hole patterning of the Sunna and reduce Islam to a kind of Party with membership
, dependent only on the five ritual prayers and not on the complete inner and ou
ter transformation that takes place as a man begins to absorb the Sunna, and thu
s open himself to his humanity and to his Khalifdom. It is all the more tragic i
n the light of the situation of the so-called intellectuals in Western society.
Despite the top-heavy structuralist nightmare that collapses on itself, some ant
hropologists have begun to recognise that there must be what they call a 'canon'
of knowledge, that they realise man once had access to and which we have all bu
t lost. It is of course the sufic point of view that we are the canon, for if it
were not in us, how could we know it when we saw it outside us. A'isha, the wif
e of the Messenger, and a Perfect Woman according to the Messenger - Perfect tha
t is in this total metaphysical understanding of what a human creature is - was
asked what her husband was like and she replied: 'He was Qur'an walking!' In oth
er words, he was the Book. He was his Book. The two names of the Book, al-Qur'an
and al-Furqan, mean the gathering-together and the discrimination. So the compl
ete man is a gathering-together of that whole canon of knowledge that tells man
his place in the Universe of stars and also opens him inwardly to Union with the
reality of the Cosmos, and at the same time he is a separation, a discriminatio
n in the dual world of nature, of night and day, hot and cold, true and false. T
his is why in the original and complete science of anthropology, the study of ma
n, it is enough that you study yourself that you understand the total cosmic sit
uation of the species. You are the whole man, but not as you are. Muhammad is th
e measure of man. He is al-Qautham, the completely perfect man, or as the Sufis
call him, al-Insanu'l-Kamil. This is the Station of the one who has achieved the
goal, who knows himself. Now in earlier treatises on Sufism it was taken for gr
anted that people accepted the Sunna, but the situation today is such that the S
unna has become a dangerous and quite terrifying possibility, so that the Muslim
s, whose heritage it is, are at pains to assure you that you don't need to do th
is and you don't need to do that - a situation which the Messenger himself foret
old as preceding the last phase of the human condition:
Al-Miqdam bin Ma'Dikarib said that he heard the Messenger say, peace be upon him
: 'I have indeed brought the Qur'an and something like it along with it, yet the
time is coming when a man replete on his couch will say: ÒKeep to this Qur'an - w
hat you find in it to be permissible treat as permissible, and what you find in
it to be prohibited treat as prohibited.Ó But what Allah's Messenger has prohibite
d is like what Allah has prohibited.'
It is Sufism that insists on the total picture of a man both outwardly and inwar
dly in a state of transformation. Once the Muslim denies the inner realities of
the states and Stations we will examine shortly, he then does not have to have h
is own motives examined. Once he has denied the inner reality, he has denied his
 own and yours, then it is a step to his dismantling the Sunna-pattern that give
s flesh and blood to that inner reality. In a short time he is using the languag
e of duality - and then he tells you that it does not matter that you have a bea
rd, that you sit on the ground and sleep on the level surface of the floor, and
eat with three fingers from one plate, and greet the stranger and feed the guest
, and so it goes on until in the end why should you bow and why should you prost
rate and why should you fast, and where is the Garden and where is the Fire, and
what is an angel, and what is a Messenger, and what reality has any of the whol
e business when you live a bourgeois life utterly enclosed in the insane rituals
of consumerism and reputation-tokens? It is in the beginning of this process th
at the sufic tradition insists on the complete social reality of an Islam which
never ceases to extol poverty, simplicity, and measure, in behaviour and possess
ions, and which calls for kindness and good words between men, respect for women
, and affection for the young and the old. It is Sufism, as guardian of the Isla
m of the Companions, that demands a radiant city as the setting for the man of k
nowledge to experience his gnosis. The Sufi's place is in the community - look a
t them from the beginning:
Hasan of Basra, may Allah be pleased with him, said: 'I saw seventy comrades who
fought at Badr: all of them had woollen garments: and the greatest Siddiq (Khal
if Abu Bakr) wore a garment of wool in his detachment from the world.'
Al-Hallaj, the carder: Attar, the scent-merchant: Moulay Abd al-Qadir, whose rea
l glory only began when he came out from retirement to live in Baghdad: these an
d the whole line of Shaykhs testify to the fact that Sufis lived in the world, w
orked in the marketplace and the farmyard, because they were the guardians and a
re the guardians of this picture of man whose complete silhouette and whose lumi
nosity is from the same source, Muhammad, peace be upon him.
Sufi, however, is a word - Muslim is a word - faqir is a word. The essential per
spective to hold to is that the inner reality and the outer condition must be On
e. Whatever came to be known as Sufi was nothing but the condition of the follow
ers of the followers, and before them of the followers, and before them of the C
ompanions of the Messenger himself. What concerns us is a social quality of bein
g whose interiority is gnosis and whose exterior is detachment from the world. T
he image of man is the image of Muhammad, peace be upon him, and he said: 'My Co
mpanions are like the stars. So whichever of them you follow you will be guided.
' This Hadith is from 'Umar ibn al-Khattab, Razin transmitted it.
Bukhari and Muslim both transmit a Hadith from Jabir saying on the day of al-Hud
aibiyya our numbers were one thousand four hundred, and the Messenger said to us
: 'Today you are the best people on the earth.'
There are many Hadith which affirm the fact that the best people, the best commu
nity that has ever been on the earth, was the community in Madinah at the time o
f the Messenger. And it is here that we are obliged to take on something about t
he nature of Islam, and clarify for ourselves something that is essential to an
understanding of Islam and the reality of the sufic phenomenon.
The social achievement of the Messenger, and for the Sufis a social achievement
is a total human reality which implies that people were able to realise their in
ward capacity as well as their human capacities with others, was to create a com
plete and far-reaching revolution in life-pattern. In an amazingly short time, s
tarting with a small band of people, he built up a highly educated group of peop
le who had all been instructed by him, irradiated by his presence, purified by h
is practices and guided by his revelations. Completely non-violent, they were a
savagely persecuted minority who stubbornly persisted in their practices despite
the humiliations and tortures they were subjected to, and their impact began to
resonate throughout the whole community. All they were doing, it must be rememb
ered, was rhythmically bowing and prostrating and glorifying the Creator of the
Universe and praising Him for the wonder of existence. Socially, they called for
an end to the girl-child murder that was an accepted cultural practice, and an
end to blood feuds. What was being introduced by the Messenger was his Hikmat, h
is Wisdom, which he later defined through the use of two terms, jahiliyya and hi
lm.
Jahiliyya the Messenger saw as the energy force of the unbridled nafs, utterly f
lamboyant and expressed, ruthless in its infantile determination to experience g
ratification whether of appetite or violence. This was the natural flow of destr
uctive energy that came from the nafs which saw itself as separate from existenc
e and in conflict with reality. To this basic energy the Messenger taught the ac
quiring of the truly human faculty, hilm. Hilm can be defined as a state of calm
serenity which is not overthrown by anger from within or violence threatening f
rom without. Hilm implies that the nafs has been tamed and is under the subject'
s control while jahl defines a nafs that is in such urgent flux that the subject
is too identified with his action to be able to avoid conflict.
When those who cover up had placed in their hearts arrogance, the arrogance of j
ahiliyya, then Allah sent down His serenity upon His Messenger and upon the trus
ting-ones and imposed on them the word of self-restraint, for they were worthy o
f it and suited to it. And Allah is aware of all things. (Qur'an 48.26)
In the Qur'an, the Messengers Nuh, Hud, and Sayyedina Musa all denounce jahl as
being the enemy of reality, and the impulse of violence in man which imposes on
him a primary excuse for denying the Unity in the name of his dualistic conflict
. Jahl is, therefore, the very stuff of history, of event, of conflict, and by t
hat token, of unreality and covering-up. The awakening of the Messenger's Compan
ions to the tremendous power of hilm within themselves as a social dynamic was,
inevitably, a challenge to the existing community of his day, as it remains to t
he power structures of the world fourteen hundred years after the establishment
of his community in the Illuminated City, as he renamed Yathrib when he called i
t Al-Madinah al-Munawarra. That small group of people who gathered around the Me
ssenger in Makka, with an electric force shook the whole foundation of the triba
l society which had survived for so long virtually unaffected by its wars and fe
uds. What brute force was unable to do, and what cunning and treachery failed to
achieve, was to halt the flowering of Wisdom in an apparently ordinary world-or
iented society, until within a few years they had become an illuminated and radi
ant group of people, men, women and children, who taught peace and practised hos
pitality and generosity as no social group had ever done before or after them in
the world's history.
Of his closest Companion, Sayyedina 'Ali, Amir al-Mu'mineen, he said, peace be u
pon him: 'I am the house of Wisdom and 'Ali is its door.' Of his Companion Abu D
harr he said: 'The sky has not covered and the earth has not carried anyone more
truthful than Abu Dharr. He is like 'Isa, son of Mary.' Yet along with the Hadi
th that praise the Companions of the Messenger are disturbing ones that indicate
the trouble that was to come. A trouble utterly inevitable in the light of what
the Messenger had brought among people, for the Deen, or transaction, that he c
alled them to not only was one that overthrew the old values and powers, but it
was one which had such a dynamic that by its energy they stood to gain a much gr
eater fame and glory than they had known before. So tremendous were the rewards
that came to the victorious Muslim forces that they soon found that the obligati
ons of Islam were a hindrance to tasting the fruits of their victory and the old
values of jahl which had never completely vanished appeared again with renewed
force.
The Messenger was well aware that the light that came from his presence among th
em was a great restraint on the natural greed and lust for power that man is pro
ne to, and that is why he urged men to respect the Companions and the next gener
ation, the Followers. It must be remembered that Islam is a science that is pass
ed on by existential transmission and not by books and texts. Once the people wh
o embodied hilm were removed from authority and from a place of influence it was
all too easy to set up the dynasties of luxury and imperialism which were what
Muslim history so rapidly became. He himself, peace be upon him, had this to say
about the future generations and Islam:
Abu Burda told on his father's authority that he, meaning the Messenger, raised
his head to the sky, which was a common practice of his, and said: 'The stars ar
e a means of safety for the sky, and when the stars depart what the sky has been
threatened with will come to it. I am a means of safety for my Companions, and
when I depart what my Companions have been threatened with will come to them. My
Companions are a means of safety for my people, and when my Companions depart w
hat my people have been threatened with will come to them.' Muslim transmitted i
t.
'Imran bin Husain reported Allah's Messenger as saying: 'The best of my people a
re my generation, then their immediate followers, and then their immediate follo
wers. After them there will be people who give testimony without being asked, wh
o will be treacherous and not to be trusted, who will make vows which they do no
t fulfill, among whom plumpness will appear.'
'Abdallah bin Mughaffal reported Allah's Messenger as saying: 'Fear Allah regard
ing my Companions. Fear Allah regarding my Companions and do not make them a tar
get after I am gone. He who loves them does so for love of me, and he who hates
them does so from hatred of me. He who injures them has injured me and he who in
jures me has injured Allah, and he who injures Allah will soon be punished by Hi
m.'
Zaid bin Arqam reported Allah's Messenger as saying of Sayyedina 'Ali, Fatima, H
assan and Husain, may Allah be pleased with them: 'I am war to him who makes war
on them, and peace to him who makes peace with them.' Tirmidhi transmitted it.
Yet within only twenty-nine years the Gate of Wisdom, the Amir of the Trusting O
nes, was stabbed in the back in the mosque in prostration before Allah by a so-c
alled Muslim. Soon after him the Messenger's two grandsons were murdered. Sayyed
ina Hassan was poisoned and Sayyedina Husain was slaughtered on the field of Ker
bala and beheaded in the most horrible massacre that ever blighted the Muslim co
mmunity. These deaths were known to the Messenger in his lifetime and the Hadith
s tell of his weeping for them while they were still children. Abu Dharr, the mo
st noble Companion, was humiliated and beaten and finally sent to an exile's dea
th, also just as the Messenger had told him he would end his days. It is a tragi
c and sobering picture, and it is useless to start to apportion blame these cent
uries later, as it is to mourn for them. They died martyrs to Reality and they w
ent from the worst to the best. What is important is that we are prepared to loo
k at the complete picture of these events or as complete a picture as we can pie
ce together. Thousands of the Ansar were slaughtered by so-called Muslims, altho
ugh the Messenger said of them: 'You are the most beloved people to me.' Again,
from the Hadith it is clear that he foresaw their end. Indeed, the most moving a
spect of the whole story is the Messenger's recognition of what lay ahead and hi
s acceptance of what was to be. As a Messenger he could not appoint a successor,
for there is no succession in Messengership. Islam is not a state concept, it i
s an organic life-pattern for men in society: once roles are imposed and structu
res are solidified you return inevitably to the rigid imposition of authority an
d the dialectical conflicts of history.
During the lifetime of the Messenger, the Munafiqun or the Hypocrites, were a co
nstant threat to the spiritual revolution of Islam. The word derives from the ro
ot NFQ which means 'to enter a hole from which there are several ways out'. The
inner condition of the munafiq is marked by a split between his outer behaviour
and speech and his inner way of experiencing reality. Its nature is such that th
e munafiq wavers between one possibility of Islam and another, between betrayal
and attraction. Nifaq is, itself, the dynamic to split reality, to separate inne
r and outer - it is nothing less than a sickness, and Qur'an indicates that it i
s the basic sickness of the human mind, 'marad'. Let us look at the astonishing
description of these people in the Qur'an and it will be immediately apparent to
us that the munafiq is not just one of those who turned against Islam in the ea
rly days of the Madinan community, but that the munafiq is the person who on the
threshold of awakening to the true nature of reality takes flight from the unit
ary nature of existence and makes war in order to distract attention by foregrou
nd violence, from the vast detached majesty of peace that is the Cosmic Reality.
This marad, this basic illness of the human species, is nothing other than the
splitting of the inner and the outer experiencing self, the separation of the su
bject-mind from the object-body. Fragmentation, once started, continues until th
e mind itself breaks up and one part of it opposes another and the conflict beco
mes internalised. 'I did not mean to do it.' 'I was not myself,' is the process
that starts with, 'They are other than I,' and 'I am other than the Universe!' Q
ur'an has made clear that if you kill one man wrongfully you kill the whole of m
ankind. Here in its entirety is the Surat al-Munafiqun, The Form of the Hypocrit
es, in the Glorious Qur'an:
In the Name of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate.
When the hypocrites come unto thee (Oh Muhammad) they say: 'We bear witness that
you are indeed Allah's Messenger.' And Allah knows that you are indeed His Mess
enger, and Allah bears witness that the hypocrites are all liars.
They make their trusting a covering so that they may turn from the Way of Allah.
Truly evil is that which they have been doing.
That is because they trusted then covered-up, therefore their hearts are sealed
so that they understand not.
And when thou seest them their outward forms please thee: and if they speak thou
listeneth to what they say.
They are like propped up blocks of wood.
They deem every shout to be against them.
They are the enemy, so beware of them!
Allah confound them. How perverted they are.
And when it is said to them: 'Come! The Messenger of Allah will ask forgiveness
for you!' they avert their faces and thou seest them turning away, disdainful.
Whether thou ask forgiveness for them or ask not forgiveness for them, Allah wil
l not forgive them.
Lo! Allah guides not the people who go against the Way [i.e. people who come out
from the human transaction, from the root FSQ, meaning 'to emerge from the husk
of the datestone'.]
They it is who say: 'Spend not on behalf of those with Allah's Messenger that th
ey may disperse,' - when Allah's are the treasures of the heavens and the earth:
but the hypocrites do not understand.
They say: 'Surely if we return to Madinah the mightier will soon drive out the w
eaker,' - when might belongs to Allah and to His Messenger and to the Trusting-O
nes, but the hypocrites do not know.
Oh you who have Trust! Let not your wealth nor your children distract you from r
emembrance of Allah. Those who do so, they are the losers. And spend of that whe
rewith we have provided you before death comes to one of you and he says: 'My Lo
rd! If only Thou wouldst reprieve me for a little while, then I would give sadaq
a and be among the Salihin.'
But Allah does not reprieve any self when its term comes, and Allah is aware of
what you do. (Qur'an 63)
The first thing we discover in the Surat is that the munafiq is a Muslim. He has
affirmed the authority of Muhammad, peace be upon him. What follows is the esse
ntial affirmation of the oneness of reality by which Qur'an acknowledges that Al
lah - the Truth - knows who the munafiqin are, but that their affirmation itself
is a lie. Thus a discrimination is made between them and the Trusting-Ones, so
that the 'Muhammad rasulullah' of the latter is not the same as the 'Muhammad ra
sulullah' of the former. The next ayat (sign) says that they trusted then covere
d over reality. At this point they are 'split' in a false way from existence, th
ey are 'cut off' from their own inner nature. The clinical picture builds up: th
ey are pleasing of aspect, therefore they are outwardly sculpted according to th
e Deen, they are coherent. But then we are told: they are like propped up blocks
of wood. This is the key - instead of having that suppleness and transparency o
f the Trusting-One who is aware of the real nature of the Unseen, they are solid
ified, opaque, become objects, alienated. They deem every shout to be against th
em. They are at war with existence, with the other, because of themselves - they
cannot get at their own hearts having made this act of splitting inwardly. For
the Truth is the other way around. They are the enemy - their own enemy, and the
enemy of the basically sane Muslim.
They reject forgiveness with pride because they desire conflict, and therefore t
heir reality is conflict, that is, they are by definition unforgiven by reality.
They take as their reality the myth of event and see themselves as the activato
rs of existence. They call on people not to spend their wealth on others, i.e. t
he Muslims, and they define existence as being a struggle in which the stronger
will triumph. This, then, is the nature of human illness, this is neurosis. This
 is the fantasy structure of life as seen through the eyes of those who have cov
ered up the reality of life on a planet which is a garden and where everyone may
be provided for in every way.
Qur'an goes on to affirm that real strength lies in being in harmony with Realit
y, and therefore the proof of this is that the Messenger, as the perfect exempla
r of humanity, is assisted and made strong through his submission. The things th
at trap man into the neurotic process of nifaq are nothing other than his wealth
and his children. It is these that create for him the illusion of a separate ki
ngdom of selfdom if he fails to see them along with the whole cosmic situation a
s a gift of the Creator to His slave. It is this close-up view of the personal e
xistence as 'belonging' to one that makes for forgetfulness of how-things-are. S
uch are the people who, when they come to the end of their life-span, try to bar
gain with existence, and when they do they know that the correct transaction is
to give gifts to the needy and to keep the company of the noble pure ones who ha
ve knowledge of Reality, that is the Shaykhs and the awliya - the Saliheen. But
the transaction is not magical and there is no escaping the organic destiny of o
ne's life pattern. It is here that the legalistic image of a day of judgment is
shattered in the light of a quite vivid cosmic reality, which is that the creatu
re is himself a record of his life. The cells of the body are the record of the
life.
Qur'an puts it vividly: 'They-are-demonstrated Form':
'Till when they reach it, their ears and their eyes and their skins testify agai
nst them as to what they used to do. And they say unto their skins: 'Why testify
ye against us?' They say: 'Allah hath given us speech Who giveth speech to all
things, and Who created you at first, and unto Whom you are returned.'
Ye did not hide yourselves lest your ears and your eyes and your skins should te
stify against you but ye deemed that Allah knew not much of what ye did!
That - your thought, which ye did think about your Lord - hath ruined you: and y
e find yourselves among the lost. (Qur'an 41.20-23)
It is so clear, the picture. We are our own record. We are our own Book. Our cel
ls do testify against us or for us, depending on how we have treated the body-fo
rm that has been loaned to us. Then the Qur'an touches on the particular nature
of the ordinary separateness of phenomenal existence from the total Divine Reali
ty. We cannot hide ourselves from ourselves, we are convinced that we have cover
ed up the record - even though we are the record. That is, we think that the Rea
lity does not see what we ourselves are aware of in our split inwardness. It is
the thought - the illusion of otherness - that has 'ruined' the lost human creat
ure. That thought is lostness itself. Separation is necessary outwardly, as we h
ave said, according to the science of Wisdom, but joining is necessary inwardly
by the same token. In Surat Ya-Sin:
Lo! We it is who bring the dead to life.
We record that which they send before, and their footprints. And all things we h
ave kept in a clear register.
(Qur'an 36.12)
We think because others cannot read us that we cannot be read. The form is nothi
ng other than the meaning. Our form is our record. The cell is the story. As the
Shaykh al-Kamil says in his Song 'Withdrawal into the Perception of the Essence
':
Truly, created beings are meanings set up in images.
All who grasp this are among the people of discrimination.
Let us now return to our picture of the split Madinah community and the conflict
s that tore asunder the first Muslims. Here is the perspective that the Messenge
r gave of the situation:
Abu 'Ubaida and Mu'adh bin Jabal both reported the Messenger, peace be upon him,
as saying: 'This matter began as prophecy and a mercy, then it will become a Kh
alifate and a mercy, then a tyrannical kingdom, then how much haughtiness, pride
and corruption there will be on the earth!' This was transmitted by Baihaqi in
'Shu'ab al'Iman'.
Abd-Allah bin Ma'sud told that the Messenger, peace be upon him, said: 'The mill
of Islam will go round till the year 35 or 36 or 37, then if they perish they w
ill have followed the Path of those who perished before them, but if their Deen
is maintained for them it will be maintained for them for seventy years.'
He asked if that meant seventy years more or altogether and the Messenger replie
d that it meant seventy years altogether. This was transmitted by Abu Dawud.
Sayyedina 'Ali, may Allah have mercy on him, said that when Allah's Messenger wa
s asked who should be appointed Commander after he had gone, he replied: 'If you
appoint Abu Bakr as Commander you will find him trustworthy, with little desire
for worldly goods but eager for the next world: if you appoint 'Umar as Command
er you will find him trustworthy and strong, fearing for Allah's sake and no-one
's blame. If you appoint 'Ali as Commander - but I cannot see you doing so - you
will find him a guide who is rightly guided and who will lead you on the Straig
ht Way.' Ahmad transmitted this.
The bitterness and the distortions that arose from the great initial schism stil
l resonate today among the Muslim community, what is left of it as a functioning
reality - but that reality is blurred because of the successful and false cryst
allisation that both Shi'a and Sunnis achieved in equating Islam with a Muslim S
tate. There is no such thing as an Islamic State in the world today. As I have i
ndicated, the two terms are mutually irreconcilable. If it is Islam, it is not a
state, rather it is a community functioning organically according to the Book a
nd the Wisdom, that means Amir and Fuqahah but not a canon Law with a judiciary
and a power elite. Police, prisons - although prisoners may be taken in war, tha
t is a temporary situation - banks and standing armies are nothing to do with Is
lam. They are the stuff of Statism. In Islam, every man is a policeman, the bank
of Zakat is emptied annually, every man is a soldier ready and trained to fight
in self-defence when necessary. The long history of the Muslim conquest despite
the many energies that it brought along in its wake, must not be equated with I
slam. Islam is the Book and the Wisdom, and the teaching of it is not by the int
ake of structured information, it is by the transmission of the behaviour-form f
rom a man who is himself already to an acceptable degree a self-form of the Wisd
om. This man - the rajulullah - the man of Allah - is Islam, is the transmission
, is the copy of the Muhammadan original self-form.
It is not that the Sunni were wrong, or that the Shi'a were right. For these for
mations took place over a period of time and did not become defined on the minut
e, as it were. The dramatisation and mourning for the death of Sayyedina Husain,
may Allah have mercy on him, was an innovation, and a solidifying of the nafs t
hrough ritualised mourning, and a culture token of the Shi'a counter-society in
conflict with the Sunnis. He was a martyr, so properly speaking we can only rejo
ice for him, that he is assured the fullest life in the Garden. And so it goes o
n - this and that, until the animosity is revived. It is not necessary to be par
t of that schismatic thinking at this stage of the business of Islam. On the con
trary, we have an opportunity now to detach ourselves and look at the picture as
wholly as we can, sifting the evidence without prejudice, fitting together the
pieces, the better to understand these extraordinary men, and their moving story
.
The reason, however, that this has been brought up is not, as I have said, to st
art the schismatic energy flowing, but to get to this point where we can see why
there is such a thing as Sufism at all! It was this picture of the formation of
a new style of expansionist and imperialist State founded on the basic tenets o
f Islam reduced to a law-pattern and introducing a punitive legal system along w
ith it - that led to the need for the Followers and the Followers of the Followe
rs to redefine what the original picture was. The great Companions had all gone,
martyred in battle or murdered by the monarchic Islam of the Umayyads and the A
bbasids. This form of man as a completely renewed being, inwardly awake, turned
away from the world and worldly obsession, radiant through an awareness of the U
nseen Reality, filled with awe of Allah, and sweetness for his brothers, and gen
erosity - above all, with generosity - this form was in imminent danger of being
lost forever. Generosity and tolerance - the two things the Messenger most exto
lled and embodied, had already been swept aside as weaknesses - and somehow some
body had to recover them before it was too late.
It is easy to understand why the Traditionists finally made their collections in
 despair lest the whole picture of the Sunna got lost. The Qur'an had been gathe
red and written down as a Book for the same reason - there was the terrible risk
that the slaughter would engulf the Muslim as a human record. Yet the books do
not create the man. Transmission is from man to man. Even with the Hadiths, whil
e it was a tremendous and scholarly achievement of enormous dimensions calling f
or both patience and integrity, the living and essential way was and still is on
e of personal transmission. Still today, for example, at the Qarawwiyin in Fez,
the Master of Hadith will instruct you in the exact Hadith and its Isnad or chai
n, back person by person, to the Messenger himself. You may not transmit them in
turn until he is satisfied that you have fulfilled the learning task and yourse
lf been purified to such a stage that you too have absorbed them as he has done.
That picture of transmission is the basis of a man's Islam and his inner awaken
ing.
Thus the uncle of Imam Junayd, may Allah be pleased with him, Sari as-Saqati, on
ce asked him as he left the house to what assembly he was going. He replied: 'To
the majlis of Harith al-Muhasibi.' His uncle said: 'Good. Accept his learning a
nd his discipline but beware of his speculative reasoning.' Al-Junayd recounts:
'É and as I left I heard Sari say: ÒMay Allah make you a traditionist who is a Sufi
and not a Sufi who is a traditionist.Ó Indeed, I studied the Shari'a according to
the schools of such masters of Hadith as 'Abu 'Ubayd and Abu Thawr, and later I
was taught by Harith al-Muhasabi and Sari ibn Mughallas. That has been the reaso
n for my success, because our knowledge must be controlled by going back to the
Qur'an and the Sunna. Whoever has not learned the Qur'an by heart and has not fo
rmally studied the Hadith, and has not learned Shari'a before embarking on Sufis
m, is a man who has no right to lead.'
So right at the beginning of Islam, immediately following the Messenger's death,
we see the establishment of a State and along with it the deliberate persecutio
n of the Messenger's Companions and Followers, and worst of all, his own family
and grandchildren. With the closest family isolated from the State structure on
the one hand, and the coalescing of the ruler's courts with the civic and spirit
ual courts, the inevitable annexing of the learned men took place. Despite the m
any Hadiths warning against so-called learned men who served rulers, it became t
he inevitable result of the State structure:
The Messenger said, peace be upon him: 'As long as the learned men associate not
with the rulers, they are the deputies of the Messengers of Allah over His serv
ants, but when they associate with rulers they betray the Messengers. Beware of
them and avoid them.'
Of course, just as there were men who succumbed to the flatteries of the Sultans
and Khalifs, there were many who stuck steadfastly to their Islam and defied th
eir rulers or were martyred by them and died rather than surrender what they kne
w to be the Way. What a state-religion had to do was banish the whole concept of
Sunna except as an outward aesthetic - a social aesthetic if you like, a deep s
tyle. The profound and vital nature of the Sunna was however something else. It
was that every action and every thought solidified the experiencing reality of a
man and separated him, gave him the illusion of a kind of permanence, removed h
is awareness that he passed fleetingly through the world, and that things had no
lasting value, only the heart's intentions had a reality because they contained
the life dynamic of his existence. All the rest was illusion. Man carried nothi
ng with him. He was his own record of his life and after death he had to answer
for what he had done in the zone of action called the world.
Aisha reported the Messenger, peace be upon him, as saying: 'The world is the dw
elling of him who has no dwelling, and the property of him who has no property.'
This has been transmitted by Ahmad and by Baihaqi.
Ibn Ma'sud told that the Messenger slept on a reed mat and got up with the mark
of it on his body, so Ibn Ma'sud said, 'Messenger of Allah, I wish you would ord
er us to spread something out for you.' He replied: 'What have I to do with the
world? In relation to the world, I am just like a rider who shades himself under
a tree, then goes off and leaves it.' This has been transmitted by Ahmad, Tirmi
dhi and Ibn Majah.
The Messenger said, peace be upon him: 'Every building is a misfortune for its o
wner except what cannot, except what cannot É' Anas reported it and Abu Dawud tran
smitted it.
'The son of Adam has a right only to the following: a house in which he lives; a
garment with which he covers his private parts; dry bread and water.' This is f
rom 'Uthman and transmitted by Tirmidhi.
Abdallah bin Mughaffal told that a man came to the Messenger and said, 'I love y
ou.' When he had told him to consider what he was saying, and when the man had d
eclared three times, 'I swear by Allah that I love you,' he replied: 'If you are
speaking the truth, prepare a complete armoury for poverty, for poverty certain
ly comes quicker to those who love me than a flood does to its destination.' Tir
midhi transmitted this.
The Messenger said, peace be upon him: 'If you were to trust in Allah genuinely,
He would give you provision as He does for the birds which go out hungry in the
morning and come back full in the evening.' This was narrated by 'Umar ibn al-K
hattab and transmitted by both Tirmidhi and Ibn Majah.
Abu Dharr, may Allah be pleased with him, said: 'I came to the Messenger when he
was sitting in the shade of the Ka'ba and when he saw me he said: "By the Lord
of the Ka'ba, they are the ones who suffer the greatest loss." I asked, "Who are
they, you for whom I would give my father and mother as ransom?" He replied: ÒTho
se who have the most property - except those who say, 'Take this and this and th
is,' before them and behind them, on their right and on their left: but they are
few!Ó' This was transmitted by Bukhari and Muslim.
Sayyedina 'Ali, may Allah be pleased with him, said in a transmission by Baihaqi
, that the Messenger said: 'A time is soon coming to mankind when nothing of Isl
am but its name will remain and only the written form of the Qur'an will remain.
Their mosques will be in fine condition but will be devoid of guidance, their l
earned men will be the worst people under heaven, corruption coming forth from t
hem and returning among them.'
There is no avoiding the uncomfortable fact - uncomfortable for those who wish t
o use Islam to buoy up a secular State - that the Messenger came with a message
that was a guidance as to how they should prepare for the next world. He came wi
th 'the good news and the warning' in the Qur'an - and both these concerned a ma
n's cosmic place in the two worlds. This is not to say that Islam is the Way of
avoiding the human situation, of going off into the hills, although the Messenge
r makes it quite clear that at the end of the planet Earth's history, the man of
the Way will have no option but to leave the barbaric society of the time in or
der to survive. Indeed, so intense will be the inner agitation of the last days
that it will be essential for the Muslim to adopt the most reflective and medita
tive quietism -
Abu Huraira reported Allah's Messenger, peace be upon him, as saying: 'There wil
l be periods of turbulence in which the one who sits will be better than the one
who stands, the one who stands better than the one who walks, and the one who w
alks better than the one who runs. He who contemplates them will be drawn by the
m, so he who finds a refuge or shelter should go to it.'
Abu Sa'id reported Allah's Messenger, peace be upon him, as saying: 'A Muslim's
best property will soon be his sheep which he will take to the tops of the mount
ains and the places where the rain falls, fleeing with his Deen [i.e. the Way, t
he transaction] from civil strife.' Bukhari transmitted this.
Abu Huraira reported Allah's Messenger, peace be upon him, as saying: 'When time
is contracted, knowledge will be withdrawn, civil war will appear, meanness wil
l be cast into people's hearts, and harj will be prevalent.' He was asked the me
aning of harj and said it meant rioting.
The first Community of Madinah al-Munawarra, the Illuminated City, were men who
lived in the world but were not servants of the world, they worked in the city,
and on the battlefield they defended themselves. They lived lives of luminous ac
tivity, giving and sharing and guiding to Wisdom as no community has ever done s
ince the human race began. Yet among them were those who loathed generosity and
praise of the Creator, who scorned lack of reputation and desired return to the
Jahiliyya. In the end these men achieved their desire. After the Khalifates of A
bu Bakr, 'Umar, and 'Uthman, may Allah be merciful to them, each of whom did his
 best to maintain the life-pattern of the Sunna in Madinah, came the tragic and
final attempt of Sayyedina 'Ali, may Allah be pleased with him, to recover the f
ull social nexus of the Messenger's Sunna, but by that time, in precise fulfilme
nt of the Messenger's prophecy, the Khalifate came to an end, he was martyred, a
nd a kingdom was established. Ibn 'Abbas said: 'There is no one except the Messe
nger whose knowledge is not sometimes followed and sometimes rejected.' The Comp
anions advised their people, 'Commit to memory as we have committed.' The first
Khalif, Abu Bakr, and the Companions disliked the idea of even submitting the Qu
r'an to paper. Transmission, the direct existential exchange of energy-wisdom, w
as the Way of Islam. Abu Bakr said, 'How should we do what the Messengers did no
t do?' The rationalisation was that the Companions had all but been slaughtered
and the risk was that there would be no-one to transmit the Message. Yet this is
the very anxiety situation that real Islam had come to dispel. The matter was n
ot and could not be in the hands of 'Uthman and the others. It was in the hands
of Reality itself. The act of putting it in writing was the first step in the be
trayal of the Wisdom-process. It was inevitably followed by the quite unnecessar
y step of codifying the Hadiths of the Messenger on which the Sunna is built. No
w we have all the documents and cannot find the man. We have the books from Alla
h and we have lost the rijalallah - the men of Allah. He has become the vanishin
g man - the imperilled creature of our polluted planet - the man of inner lumino
sity who outwardly is a fountain of generosity and peace and encouragement to ot
hers and guidance and strength, the man whose whole behaviour and energy is unif
ied and in harmony with the Divine transaction of existence, the Seen and the Un
seen. When Imam Malik compiled the Muwatta - one of the first collections of Had
ith to be written down - Ahmad Ibn Hanbal criticised him and said, 'He has origi
nated an innovation (from the Wisdom-practice) by doing what the Companions did
not do.' The first books all appeared after the year 120 Hijra after the death o
f all the Companions and most of the Followers, including Hasan al-Basra, who wa
s the Shaykh of knowledge following the death of Sayyedina 'Ali, may Allah be pl
eased with them both. Once the process had begun, the Muslim community began to
develop a Rabbinical tradition, and it was a matter of time before the thing sno
wballed into abstract 'theology' and scholasticism appeared and argument and ref
utation - all of which are merely exaltation of the nafs - so that by the 4th ce
ntury Hijra, the game element of corrupted teaching had begun. Imam al-Ghazzali,
may Allah be pleased with him, says in his great work - which is nothing but a
vast and scholarly attempt to have done with scholarship and return to Wisdom: '
The Science of Certainty - 'Ilm al-Yakin (that is, knowing by inner experience)
began to disappear and the science of the heart, research into the qualities of
the nafs, and the study of the stratagems of Shaytan became rare and unknown.'
He goes on to say that the acts of the Companions were concealed from men and al
so their learning, so that the Muslims could not get a clear picture of what in
fact this vast matter of Islam was about! He goes on, 'At the same time the scie
nce of the Other World became forgotten and the difference between knowledge and
argument no longer known except to a select few. Thus did the Deen wane during
those early centuries: but how about its condition at the present time? [600 A.H
.] Things have come to a point where anyone who would dare show his disapproval
of the present state of affairs would run the risk of being called insane.'
It is against this changing and increasingly difficult situation that the appear
ance of what is called Sufism took place. It must also be understood without any
doubt that it follows from all that has been said that naming oneself as Sufi o
r as belonging to an Order is in itself irrelevant - what the reality of the suf
ic phenomenon is cannot be compromised by evolving and proposing a special 'role
' for the sufic brotherhoods. The reason and end of all the practices and all th
e dhikr and study is the creation of the rijalallah - the men of Allah - followi
ng the original picture of the Messenger, as he was described in a Hadith quoted
by Imam al-Ghazzali:
In the course of a khutba [Friday address to the people in the Mosque], the Mess
enger of Allah said: 'Blessed is he whose concern for his own faults keeps him f
rom meddling with the faults of others, lives on money which he obtained without
wrong action, associates with the learned and the wise, and shuns the people of
 evil and wrong action. Blessed is he who humbles himself, whose nature has been
refined and whose heart has been altered, and who avoids inflicting harm upon m
en. Blessed is he who acts in accordance with his knowledge, who gives away the
surplus of his substance and who witholds whatever is superfluous when he speaks
, who lives within the Shari'a and does not overstep its bounds by introducing i
nnovations.'
The Messenger has said: 'The Deen is behaviour.' The word Deen derives from 'to
be indebted' and 'to judge', so that its meaning is the transaction, the debt -
between you and your Creator, the judgment - how things are, what must be done -
and so the Way itself. Thus, the transaction is behaviour. There is no compromi
se. The rajulullah is who he is because of the perfection, harmony, and selfless
ness of his behaviour. It was inevitable that in the culture-forming, fantasy-in
volved state structures that became known as the Muslim world, such a man would
be at different times and in different degrees either endangered and martyred or
, and this rarely, honoured and listened to as a guide. Thus there is no history
of Sufism, or development of a movement within Islam called Sufism, all that is
of the fantasy pattern, just as much as the pottery and the archways and the mi
narets are so much fantasy and have nothing to do with Islam. It suited the Chri
stian world to admire Islamic art and talk of Islamic culture, but these are sim
ply inventions by Christian intellectuals of a situation that had nevertheless b
een created by so-called Muslim societies. Islam, however, is not and cannot be
equated with any Muslim society. It is a non-reality that is its own reality. No
-one owns it and no-one can put it in a book - it is the Way, and the Way must b
e embodied. It is the Wisdom and the Wisdom is dynamic, a practice, it cannot be
encapsulated in formulae or in information retrieval units. The Messenger broug
ht Islam and left it with his people. Where you encounter a true Muslim, you enc
ounter Islam. That's it. No more. The Qur'an itself had to come through the Mess
enger - a Book did not fall out of the sky. It could not be apprehended unless i
t came through the form of the man - and later we shall see how the revelation c
ame, and recognise the way in which the whole Book was integrated into the lived
experience and reality of the desert Messenger.
The transmission that went from the Messenger to Sayyedina 'Ali, may Allah be pl
eased with him, was passed on to Hassan of Basra, who is therefore the first of
the Shaykhs.
He said: 'Islam is going into the books and the Muslims into the graves.'
In Al-Ghazzali's great work, he recounts this of Shaykh Hassan:
A man said to Hassan: 'Oh Abu Sa'id, how do you fare?' He said: 'Well.' The man
then said: 'How is your state?' So Hassan smiled and said: 'You ask me about my
state? What do you say about people who have sailed in a ship till they reached
mid-ocean and then their ship foundered until each of them clung to a plank of t
he wreckage - in what state are they?' The man replied: 'In a state of great ext
remity.' Hassan said: 'É then my state is one of greater extremity than theirs.'
Hassan of Basra transmitted his knowledge to Shaykh Habib al-Ajami. Al-Hujwiri r
ecounts this of the Master:
It is well known among the sufis that when Hassan of Basra fled from Hajjaj, he
entered the cell of Habib [fleeing, remember, from 'Muslims']. The soldiers came
and said to Habib: 'Have you seen Hassan anywhere?' Habib said: 'Yes.' 'Where i
s he?' 'He is in my cell.' They went into the cell but saw no-one there. Thinkin
g that Habib was making fun of them, they abused him and called him a liar. He s
wore that he had spoken the truth. They returned twice and thrice but found no-o
ne and at last departed. Hassan immediately came out and said to Habib: 'I know
it was owing to your baraka that Allah did not reveal me to these evil men, but
why did you tell them I was there?' Habib replied: 'Oh Master, it was not on acc
ount of my baraka that they failed to see you, but through the blessedness of my
speaking the truth. Had I told a lie, we both would have been shamed.'
What - we now have to ask and discover - was this fundamental difference that ma
de self-styled Muslim hunt down Muslim? How did State-Islam define itself in suc
h a way that it was not challenged by, nor able to recognise, the nature of the
lovers of Allah? State-Islam is, strictly speaking, the Christian heresy of the
Church in the protestant sense of a priesthood of believers. It is sustained by
an elite of scholars and priests - now called 'ulama and Imams - in accordance w
ith the Jewish Rabbinical heresy. Heresy in this instance being simply a designa
tion of that deviant energy that turns Islam into 'religion', binding-together i
nto a State. The State-Fantasy is in turn dependent on one thing and one thing a
lone. Not the police and not the army and not the bank - Statism depends on the
prevention of the people from seeing the nature of their rulers. Authority has b
ecome outer and ceased to be inner, knowledge is informational and an instrument
of manipulation, not illuminative and an instrument of liberation. This is the
basis of Statism, whether it be called Islamic or any other name. Islam - the Is
lam of the Messenger - the Sufism of the Sufis - for we are beginning to see tha
t the two are identical in all terms of reference - is based on one premise and
one premise alone. Life is a journey towards death, and after death there is the
grave, and after the grave the form is restored and its 'meaning' becomes its r
eality - the life-form which is recorded in the cellular record unfolds and the
true form is revealed, and according to the nature of the 'inner' form the self
goes on to another form-state where it experiences the garden-serenity of Wisdom
or the fire-anguish of imagining one is separate from the totality that is the
Divine situation. In the whole journey through the worlds of form, the passage t
hrough the world of 'solid' phenomena is but the briefest, and not even the firs
t of the great journey. It is the zone of action - and ALL that matters is what
you achieve in terms of an existence demanding mercy and generosity and humility
and above all, gratitude - that is to say, centring not on the false-self, but
on the existence-form which is all-sustaining and all-giving. The Islam that the
desert Messenger brought cannot exist unless you are open to the nature of life
as being multi-dimensional and to the nature of phenomena as being basically un
real. There is no avoiding this issue, and it must be understood that what is be
ing said is not some simple doctrine by which it is proposed that this is not he
re - all this stuff we are surrounded by - of course it is here - but this 'is-n
ess' is a seeming, this solidity is a veiling. To the people of the Path the sen
ses are not openings onto reality, they are veils from reality. Anyone who think
s that sensory and thought-experience have some kind of total structural factual
ity are living in a world of basic insanity and deep hallucination which could b
e shattered by a few easy demonstrations without even recourse to the zone of ex
tra-sensory perception or the sub-atomic world of vanishing forms.
Yet it is precisely on this lie about existence that the State-Fantasy is built,
for it is nothing more than a fantasy on a fantasy, the construction of a super
-form, the State, built on the foundation of the solid forms of 'money' and 'cap
ital' and military 'power'. Once committed to this first insanity of Statism, th
ere is properly speaking, only one enemy - the one who will, as in the legend, b
e the child who points out the nudity of the Emperor. Such is the true Muslim, t
he rajulullah. Call him anything you like - but beware lest you become hoodwinke
d into denouncing him along with his name. If the name Sufi is anathema, drop it
- but recognise the reality. Muslim is a word, not a reality. Look at the man!
Who does he honour - the salih? The pure radiant self who is turned towards Alla
h?
Or the people of jahil - the Ambassadors, the Ministers, the Presidents?
Does he admire the Kings who drive to the Mosque in their bullet-proof cars with
machinegun-armed outriders, or the poor and contented man behind the pillar doi
ng dhikr and guiding to peace and wisdom?
That even today there are such men - there are saliheen - and there are many sin
cere Muslims who honour and admire them and turn regretfully away from the spect
acle of State-Islam - is an overwhelming miracle, and the Hajj is the proof of i
t. Among the thousands of pilgrims they stand out - the Muslims, shining, radian
t, and filled with awe of Allah. Nevertheless, we must look carefully at the pic
ture the world gives us at this time and to help us grasp this view of the true
Muslim we must examine briefly four terms that are used in Qur'an to give us our
spatial sense in the science of Islam. This spatiality is a dual picture of int
erpenetrating terms, for the physical reality has superimposed on it a hidden fo
rm, or rather the hidden reality has imposed upon it the developed and solidifie
d world-picture. It is very simple.
Samawati - 'Ard.
Here is the double picture of the phenomenal reality. Samawati is the plural of
SMA, a root meaning 'to be lofty' or 'on high'. The word for 'name' derives from
the same cluster, so that the existence of the phenomenal heaven, the up which
gives us down, the high which gives us low, is the basic duality of the whole st
ructural existence - without it there is no universe, no time/space and no need
for naming. It is the 'higher' which calls for names, and the lower is the follo
wing negative.
It is the spiritual picture of discrimination.
'Ard is the polar opposite - the Earth, and therefore land, country.
Our other duality is:
Dunya - Akhira.
Dunya - is the world as structured fantasy - family and wealth, reputation, mone
y - the culture illusion, the State illusion. It derives from a root meaning 'to
be near or low' - like fruit hanging low and near at hand. The meaning then fol
ds subtly into its deeper meaning - 'easier', 'worse', 'viler', as it were, 'mor
e ready to hand'. Dunya, a crucial Qur'anic term, indicates not the beauty of th
e mountains and the ocean - all that is 'ard, earth, the unreality which is none
theless reality itself. Dunya is pure illusion, is the accretion and crystallisi
ng that the false-self absorbs and annexes around it as its reality-giving setti
ng, justifying the anguish and the struggle and the crimes. It is important to t
aste the subtlety of this matter that is existence - for the argument of the ene
my of Islam is that this is a false asceticism and you are invited to partake of
dunya in the name of the Messenger. Yet here is the picture as seen by the Shay
kh al-Kamil: 'Dunya is good! Dunya is wonderful!'
In other words, the problem is not that we desire something we should flee from,
but that this fantasy-palace can be lived in, as long as you do not imagine it
is permanent. The good things of the dunya are there for you - but you must know
that while they are the gift of a generous Lord, they are NOT existence itself,
they are merely aids to the journey. If the journey is not taken and the aids b
ecome the end, then the palace becomes a prison and man is trapped.
That seeming nearness is in fact distance. This is the secret of Shaytan, for Sh
aytan - the devil - derives from ShTN, meaning 'to be distant'. In other words,
Shaytan when he takes form in 'things' makes dunya seem near in order to make Ha
qq - the Reality - seem distant - while the truth according to the Truth is that
, 'He is nearer than the jugular vein.' (50.16) He is that nearness that is the
presence of the things themselves. Thus the forms manifest the Reality in all it
s tremendous immediacy - He is Presence, dunya is essentially an absence. Knowin
g how to behave in the 'ard/world surrounded by dunya is like knowing not to pan
ic in the shifting landscape of a dream while asleep - and that is a science tha
t must be learned - and the science is Islam, the Islam of our desert Messenger,
peace be upon him.
Akhira has no root but indicates 'the last', 'the latter', 'what comes next', 'w
hat is put off until later'. It is this life that opposes dunya, the immediacy o
r seeming immediacy is followed by another state, a deferred state which later c
omes showing the true nature of the forms. This seeming distance of akhira is pa
rt of our veiling, the immediacy of the akhira is the gift of knowledge, the kno
wledge that is the property of the Trusting-Ones in Islam. As dunya is recognise
d, by experience not conceptually, to be of its nature a shadow-show, an effect
of consciousness-as-it-starts, then of course the nafs in awakening to the Unsee
n and the multi-dimensional nature of existence begins to open up, and conscious
ness-as-it-ends begins to emerge. To the sleeper in the cave of his body/world,
dunya is present and akhira is later or not at all - to the awakened, akhira is
immediate and all-surrounding, and dunya a vanishing dream.
To return to our political man immersed in his State-fantasy - we are faced with
a fascinating situation. The truth of the matter is not that he is dealing with
a 'real world' and you are some crank with an illusion about how things are and
therefore should be merely rendered socially ineffective so as not to confuse o
thers - the truth is that the political man dare not allow his fantasy structure
to be seen in the light of the rajulullah. He can argue dialectically all day,
but his world crumbles when he is in the PRESENCE of the man of Allah. For his w
orld is not there, it is dunya, and when he reaches for it there is nothing, and
the sheer inner radiance of the rajulullah floods over him and that Light revea
ls the illusory power-structure to be sheer fantasy, and his achievements mere d
reams. The political animal has no inner reality, he is still experientially tra
pped in his animality, and his animal-nafs will be all that can manifest in any
confrontation with the saliheen. The political animal thrives on conflict and vi
olence to distract from the realities of existence - faced with the rajulullah h
e finally comes face to face not with his fantasies and not with his action-dram
as, but with himself. He sees his own paltry form in the mirror, in the clear mi
rror of the polished and reflective self of the Salih. Most men on being shown a
mirror express astonishment, as the saying goes, many flee in terror, a few rec
ognise the reflection. Man is frightened only of himself, he is terrified by his
'thing-ness' - he knows in his own being that Reality is One, and therefore he
cannot be 'two'. That fact is the unbearable fact of existence, that illusion of
otherness. Faced with the rajulullah, the man of personality/event is horrified
because he cannot 'see' him as other and finds himself looking into the mirror
at his own reflection, at that which he most fears. The rijalullah cannot be dis
tracted by the false battle and violence in the foreground, they see beyond the
shadow-show to the luminous reality. The political man in that situation would s
ee his own nafs reflected in the mirror, but the Salih would see only Reality in
all the nafs-mirrors. Thus the man's seeing himself together with the Salih's r
efusal to see his nafs - for it has no real existence - would produce intolerabl
e anguish - the result of which could only be either surrender to the truth of h
ow-things-are and thus surrender to the Wisdom of the Shaykh, or else to turn on
the offending mirror and smash it. This is the battle against Islam, this is th
e persecution of the awliya - the friends of Allah. 'Abu Bakr 'recognised' the M
essenger immediately without hesitation - for all he did was recognise his own n
afs as mirrored in the Messenger - for 'Abu Bakr was Muslim, and the Messenger w
as the 'first of the Muslims'. Abu Lahab rejected him because he was busily enga
ged in rejecting himself and bringing about his own destruction. Statism makes s
afe the outer structure and the society collapses from within. Islam makes safe
the inner experiencing of reality and the people are not in danger from any sour
ce, for they are in harmony with a compassionate reality. Statism means to divid
e the body politic up - one man a policeman, another a lawyer, another a helples
s citizen-worker, inevitably it makes one man a policeman and another a criminal
- and civil war is the outcome of Statism as the Messenger warned again and aga
in:
Usama bin Zaid told that the Messenger looked down on one of the fortresses of M
adinah and asked: 'Do you see what I see?' When his hearers replied that they di
d not, he said: 'I see civil wars occurring among your houses like falling rain.
' This is transmitted by both Bukhari and Muslim.
Islam means to unify the body politic in harmony, so that every man is a soldier
, every man is the bank - through sadaqa and zakat, that is, acts of personal ge
nerosity and obligatory self-taxation - every man is a judge, he is his own poli
ceman. It means to Unify and Surrender - to the true nature of existence.
We are now ready to look more closely into the mirror of the nafs, clearly estab
lished in a science which does not oppose the Sufis to Muslims to faqirs to anyt
hing - but avoiding the names, keeping one's eyes fixed on the actual nature of
things, on the behaviour of the human creature, on the courtesy and the humanity
and the humility of the man - not on his label. This is the Way that opens up t
o the person who bows and prostrates with their whole being, body and consciousn
ess - this is the process and the practice that begins the alchemy of the nafs.
One shaykh was asked who his first Master was and he replied: 'A dog.' He told t
hat he had seen a dog desperately thirsty come upon a clear pool of water. When
the dog advanced it saw itself clearly reflected in the pool and retreated in fe
ar taking the image to be that of another dog. Again and again he advanced snarl
ing only to retreat in terror at the ferocious image that menaced him, until fin
ally, driven mad with thirst, the dog dived into the pool and the reflected imag
e vanished.
We are now about to approach the science of States.

The Science of States

Before we can approach the matter of the ahwal, the States, it is vital that we
have some idea of this illusory experiencing centre that is the nafs, an idea th
at is, which is not based on claiming for it a kind of crystalline reality, but
rather on seeing it as a moving and dynamic, fluctuating energy source - we have
used the image of a radio station giving out varying waves from a focal, identi
fiable point. The locus is identifiable but only as long as signals go out from
it. When death comes the station goes 'off the air' yet the waveband remains, th
e life situation. If the States are imagined to be something happening to someon
e then the true perspective is lost. That, from the experiential point of view,
there is a radio station and there is a programme, signals are coming and going,
is never the question, otherwise it would not matter what happened to us. What
is important is that we begin to think about these matters with a more fluid and
less definitive imagery, the 'fuzzy mathematics' of the biologist trying to des
cribe dynamic organisms rather than the fixed and rigid arithmetic that measures
solid forms.
The key to an understanding of our movement-reality and the dismantling of the s
olid-state 'I' rests in the next obligatory practices of Islam. They go together
both in the structure of the year and in their meaning. They are the sawm, the
fast of Ramadan: and zakat, the obligatory taxing of that part of one's wealth w
hich has been saved for one year. The first is an act of separation from the wor
ld-reality, for one's immediate environment is the extension of one's body exper
ience. People become 'attached' to their possessions, and this experience is not
hing less than an extension of their attachment to the world-as-food. The Maulan
a Rumi, may Allah be pleased with him, said, 'The whole world is the breast.' Th
is is the meaning of Ramadan and Zakat. It is the inner experience of the fast t
hat awakens the Salik, the Wayfarer, to this moving, fluid nature of the self. L
et us first get a picture of what the Sunna of food is, and how the Messenger sa
w it as experience and Wisdom-source.
Abu Huraira told that when they were struck by hunger Allah's Messenger, peace b
e upon him, gave them each a date. Tirmidhi transmitted it.
Abu Darda' reports the Messenger, peace be upon him as saying: 'Provision search
es for a man in the same way as his appointed period.' Abu Nu'aim transmitted it
.
Abu Huraira also reported the Messenger, on whom be peace, as saying: 'Two peopl
e's food is enough for three and three people's food is enough for four.' This i
s transmitted both by Bukhari and Muslim.
A'isha said that the Messenger, peace be upon him, fasted on Mondays and Thursda
ys. Tirmidhi and Nasa'i have transmitted this.
Abu Dharr, may Allah be pleased with him, said that the Messenger said to him: '
When you fast three days in the month, Abu Dharr, fast on the thirteenth, fourte
enth, and fifteen.' Tirmidhi and Nasa'i have transmitted this.
Abdallah bin 'Amr bin al-As told of the Messenger, peace be upon him, saying to
him: 'Have I not been informed, Abdallah, that you fast during the day and get u
p at night for prayer?' When he replied that was so, he said: 'Do not do it. Fas
t and break your fast. Get up for prayer and sleep, for you have a duty to your
body, your eye, your wife, and your guests. He who observes a perpetual fast nev
er fasts. Fasting three days every month is equivalent to a perpetual fast. Fast
three days every month and recite the Qur'an every month.' When he replied that
he was able to do more than that, he told Abdallah, 'Observe the most excellent
fast, the fast of David, fasting every second day, and recite the Qur'an once e
very seven nights, but do not do more than that.' Bukhari and Muslim both transm
itted it.
Abu Huraira said that the Messenger of Allah told him, 'Many a one who fasts get
s nothing from his fasting but thirst and many a one who prays during the night
gets nothing from his night prayers but sleeplessness.' Tirmidhi transmitted it.
Al-Miqdam bin Ma'Dikarab recounted hearing the Messenger say: 'A human being has
not filled any vessel which is worse than a belly. Enough for the son of Adam a
re some mouthfuls which keep his back straight, but if there is no escape he sho
uld fill it a third with food, a third with drink, and leave a third empty.' Tir
midhi and Ibn Majah transmitted it.
'If you were to trust in Allah genuinely, He would give you provision as He does
for the birds which go out hungry in the morning and come back full in the even
ing.' 'Umar ibn Al'Khattab reported the Messenger as saying this and it is trans
mitted by Tirmidhi and Ibn Majah.
A'isha told that Allah's Messenger, peace be upon him, wanted to buy a young sla
ve, so he threw some dates in front of him, but when the youth ate greedily he s
aid: 'Voracious eating is ominous!' and ordered him to be sent back. Baihaqi tra
nsmitted it.
Abdallah bin 'Amr reported Allah's Messenger as saying: 'Fasting and the Qur'an
intercede for a man. Fasting says, ³Oh my Lord, I have kept him away from his food
and his passions by day, so accept my intercession for him.² The Qur'an says, ³I ha
ve kept him away from sleep by night, so accept my intercession for him.² Then the
ir intercession is accepted.' Baihaqi transmitted it.
Ibn 'Abbas said that when the month of Ramadan began Allah's Messenger set every
prisoner free and gave to every beggar.
Abu Huraira reported Allah's Messenger as saying: 'Ramadan, a blessed month, has
come to you during which Allah has made it obligatory for you to fast. In it th
e gates of the Garden are opened, the gates of the Fire are locked, and the rebe
llious shaytans are chained. In it Allah has a night which is better than a thou
sand months. He who is deprived of its good has indeed suffered deprivation.' Ah
mad and Nasa'i transmitted it.
It is clear that fasting plays an important part in the human science. Also it h
as a structure. There is the obligatory Ramadan fast which is annual and dated b
y a lunar calendar so that it swings through the years with a lunar orbit. The o
pening of the fast is dependent on sighting the new moon of the holy month just
as the dawn prostrations must co-incide with the white thread of light on the ho
rizon. The fasting month itself has an inner structure. The Messenger said that
it was a month whose beginning was mercy, whose middle was forgiveness, and whos
e end was freedom from the Fire. Its climax comes with the Night of Power - Layl
at al-Qadr, during which the Messenger received the Qur'anic revelation. That ni
ght is hidden, and the seeker must watch for it, knowing that it is one of the l
ast uneven-dated nights of the fast. There is never any doubt when it comes whic
h night it has been. There is no more open night in the year for direct experien
ce, or rather, for awakening.
The fast is from dawn to sunset and is broken immediately the sun has gone down.
The fast is total and is also an abstention during the same hours from sexual i
ntercourse. It is also understood that fasting implies a control of one's temper
and one's tongue. The eye should fast with the other members, and the ear shoul
d refrain from listening to what is not pleasing. The total impact of the month'
s fast is quite shattering and its effects on the solidity fantasy of the nafs i
s extreme. What it does, of course, is affect the whole basis of the separate-se
lf illusion by breaking the established adult feeding pattern which in turn open
s up the memory of the infantile feed. The resonance of any imbalance and fear t
hat was contained in that held basic memory structure is released and sounded as
it were like a gong whose reverberation had been smothered and is now allowed t
o shudder to silence. It is an opening therefore to the whole substructure of th
e nafs, whose otherness has emerged in the infantile phase where feeding both im
plies a unity of self and environment on the one hand, and, when the feed is rem
oved, delayed, or given with anxiety, on the other implies separateness, isolati
on and fear. To the person setting out on the Path, Ramadan inevitably proves th
e most difficult time of their new life, and if they see it through, for the sam
e reasons, the most rewarding. The voluntary fasts which are mentioned in the Ha
diths above follow the same pattern, certain days and dates of the months being
the most in harmony cosmically with the act of fasting. The highest fast is the
one which most drastically breaks the feed-order, the fast of David, which both
liberates the self from the dependency picture of imagining that the food comes
from 'outside' and opens the awakening mind to the reality of the Unity through
the Qur'an. The fast opens one to the Divine Compassion and the Attributes - Ar-
Razzaq, the Provider, and Al-Wahhab, the Generous.
We should not avoid seeing into what the nature of the fasting experience is. Th
ere is no use expecting it to be the basis of some 'higher' experience, when the
wisdom of the fast lies in the very act of separation which is simply not eatin
g. The human being experiences an inner emptiness which first expresses itself a
s hunger or thirst: when it is satisfied, the experiencing self in its dynamic f
orm-making energy goes on to place this emptiness out into the emotional sphere.
The person then becomes greedy for the 'other'. The other is eaten up. First th
e milk, then the mother. Once the nafs moves out into the whole world picture, t
he appetite moves outwards from food and emotional encounter to every stratum of
experience. Conquest and war are nothing but the continued devouring of the uns
atisfied child. The Messenger, peace be upon him, has said that the mother gives
the child milk, and something along with the milk which is Wisdom. There should
be no symbolising, or abstracting of this crucial statement. It is the heart of
the wisdom picture. Milk/Wisdom. Compassion is the nature of the life-experienc
e. The reality is that we are fed - but the true feed contains 'something along
with it' - an energy that, if it is healthy, gives the child a sense of its safe
ty in the Divine process, and if it is poisoned, will transmit the mother's fear
s and anger into the child. So that the woman is the first teacher of the child,
and it is the child who has been well nourished - in that complete sense - who
more readily feels 'full': while the child who has not received that sense of we
ll-being will panic and seek in the food itself for the compassion that 'goes al
ong with' the food, but in its case was missing. So a person's expectation of th
e world - of dunya - of those grapes hanging so near and yet always out of reach
- no matter how the form may change in the appetite-picture - it could be for r
eputation, popularity, punishment, power, land, wealth, anything - would never b
e anything else than a futile expectation of the missed infantile wisdom-transac
tion. This is a pattern with no blame - for this is nothing else than the Seal o
f the destiny. Nor can we ever know what we imbibed in the first child-feast unt
il the whole picture of the life is complete. There may be a memory of great lov
e in that first transmission and it may be covered over and its uncovering is th
e Path, or one of the vital dimensions of the Path, for the wisdom-transaction i
s one that involves the whole transmutation of the nafs which exists by virtue o
f our experience of the body as a separate phenomenal form. We cannot pretend to
a mental unity when we are entrenched in the solid body.
Here the whole pattern of Halal food, permitted food, takes on a profound meanin
g. The cells themselves must be pure as the outline-form must be made pure by th
e wudu. Shaykh al-Akbar, quoting the Qur'anic ayat: 'And amongst them is one who
walks on his belly,' (24.45), says: 'He refers to those Saliheen who scrupulous
ly examine their food, for by means of pure food which produces strength for the
practice of dhikr, the heart is illuminated and becomes the abode of these form
s of Divine Wisdom.' It must not be forgotten that every vessel has a capacity a
nd that capacity is determined cellularly by the destiny of parentage and time a
nd place of birth both from a planetary and cosmic point of view. That event whi
ch conditions these factors is no different and is part of the same Divine proce
ss which is the life, of which the first part is the feeding-wisdom experience,
and of which the last is the fasting-wisdom experience. Just as we once came out
from the womb, so we must now come out from the world-breast and experience the
Unseen, in order that, by the grace of Allah, we will then come out from the co
mpany of the Messengers and awliya in the Gardens of the Unseen worlds, until we
are finally desirous of Unity itself, then we are complete and the great feast
of forms is over. There is a Hadith-qudsi - where Allah-ta-ala speaks through th
e Messenger in the first person - in which He says: 'Fasting is mine.' Fasting i
s the opening onto the Reality, it is the melting away of the solid, the dispers
al of the cloud-body and the appearance of the sun-spirit. You diminish - He mag
nifies. It is a process that reduces one, in a quite real way, cellularly and ex
perientially until the fasting person becomes conscious of their existence as fl
uid and wavelike rather than fixed and delineated. Whatever the illusory self ha
s defined itself as and crystallised itself as, the fast of Islam immediately sh
atters that form and opening up begins.
The obligatory fast, lasting as it does for a whole month, and that month being
the month cosmically intended for fasting, resonates deeply into the pseudo-soli
dity of the nafs and awakens the basic response that the nafs has to the feed-ex
perience, and with that the whole self-pattern is opened up for the faster to se
e. 'Every day we are on a new creation - take provision from it,' said the Messe
nger in a well-known Hadith, and this is the experience of the person on a fast.
He is aware that any constancy of self he imagined he had was merely a surface
illusion buoyed up by habit pattern and behaviour structure designed to give an
illusion of solidity. He begins to know himself as a shuddering, evanescent, mel
ting, moving reality, layers fall from him, and he is aware therefore that what
remains of him, while already more fragile, still has no absolute reality. As th
e veils lift the Light becomes clearer. The seeker begins to awaken. It is in th
is condition that the murid recognises that he is constantly passing from one St
ate to another. It is then that the practice begins to reveal its effect with st
artling results.
Before a man had taken the Path he would take every experience as it came: he mi
ght occasionally discern a 'pattern', but depending on how things were, the kind
of close-up impact of event, of which violence as we have seen is the most extr
eme - demanding a close-up reaction which forbids detachment or makes it well-ni
gh impossible - would stop him seeing life as anything but a myriad of different
possibilities and actualities chaotically following one on another. Once that m
an takes the Path he begins the practice of unifying existence. He affirms the O
ne. He bows before the One. He praises the One. He addresses the One. He sees On
e. He hears One. He eventually knows One. He learns not to fear now this and now
that. He looks for his provision, for his needs to come from One source, and wh
atever the agent, he cuts through the deception of forms and recognises always i
n every case One Reality at work. So, with his nafs, he learns not to say I am t
his and I am that, but rather, I am neither this nor that, but what comes over m
e is the nafs' rejection of what comes from the Compassionate Lord. Contentment
with one's lot becomes not a painful business but a sweet business, and the abil
ity to see the Unity at work eases the pains that were once intolerable. In this
view there is nothing to hold onto, no illusory safety - the safety lies in the
recognition that the need is not for safety from the world, but from Him, and o
nly He can save you from Him. If you flee from the One you can only flee to the
One. This is the basis of fear and hope. Imam al-Ghazzali, commenting on the rev
elation of Allah-ta-ala to the Messenger Dawud, peace be upon him, 'Fear Me as y
ou fear the harmful lion,' says:
And there is no device for inducing fear of the harmful lion except knowledge of
the lion and knowledge of falling into its claws, and there is no need of any d
evice beside that. So whoever knows Allah knows that He does what He will and He
does not care and rules as He desires and is not afraid. As His saying has expl
ained it: 'These are in the Garden and I do not care - and these are in the Fire
and I do not care.'
After a profound exposition of this theme, he sums up in one of the most powerfu
l passages in his great work:
As for the person who falls into the claws of the lion, if his knowledge were pe
rfect, he would not be afraid of the lion, since the lion is coerced. If hunger
dominates it, it will maul, and if heedlessness dominates it, it will ignore and
leave alone. So he would be afraid only of the Creator of the lion and His Attr
ibutes. Am I not going to say that fear of the lion is a parable of fear of Alla
h? No. When the veil is lifted, it will be known that fear of the lion is the ve
ry fear of Allah, because the One who kills by means of the lion is Allah.
Now the way to opening the self to this inescapable and terrifying fact, the one
ness of existence, is the simplest thing in the world. What makes it seem diffic
ult is not that the act itself is difficult, but that we run in fear from the ve
ry nature of a situation which by its nature forbids our escape. Madness is the
radical ruse of the ordinary person on the run from how things are. Madness - al
l its brilliantly constructed escape routes - leads to a hopeless act of impasse
. Man cannot separate himself from reality, his own reality lies deep within him
, therefore he cannot separate from his own being any more than he can jump out
of his skin, yet this is precisely what the madman tries to do - get out of the
body to somewhere safe like the moon, abandon the central nervous system, refuse
to react as if there was anyone 'at home' inside the body. Courteously the slav
e addresses the Lord. You, the 'I' - open yourself to the totality of the One -
to the Universal. The 'I' speaks - the little Universe speaks to the Big Univers
al. 'I' speak to 'Him'. 'I' am present, 'He' is absent - the third person singul
ar is, as the Shaykh al-Akbar points out, the pronoun of absence, and a formal d
ialogue begins. I - He. This is the beginning of the real journey, whose phases
are: I - He: I - You: I. There are three stages of knowledge in the Qur'anic lan
guage.
'Ilm al-yakin.' 'Ayn al-yakin.' 'Haqq al-yakin.'
Knowledge of certainty. Source of certainty. Truth of certainty. Or as the Rajah
of Mahmudabad, may Allah have mercy on him, said: 'First - you are told there i
s a fire in the forest. Second - you see with your own eyes there is a fire in t
he forest. Third - you become the fire in the forest.'
Thus, in the end, 'I' have become an absent he, and only the 'I' remains of Alla
h-ta-ala. This is the meaning of the great saying of the Sufis - the Sufi is unc
reated. From the depths of the awesome forests of the Tawhid, the reality is tha
t there never was any 'other' to become absorbed or annihilated or unified. The
Reality is One. Mansur Al-Hallaj ends his great song of Unity, the 'Tawasin' say
ing:
Allah is Allah. Creation is creation.
And it does not matter.
This is not an affirmation of duality or some kind of total separation of the Di
vinity from His realm, rather it is the essential starting point, and therefore
also the end point, of the man of knowledge. As Shaykh Moulay al-Arabi ad-Darqaw
i, a Shaykh of our Shaykh, said: 'The slave is the slave and the Lord is the Lor
d.' As we will later see, this is the only thing we are able to say while affirm
ing the two great statements of the Messenger - 'Allah was and there was nothing
with Him,' - i.e. before the Universe: and, 'He is now as He was before.' Thus
the goal of the seeker of Reality is nothing less than his own undoing, the wipi
ng out of this illusory central experiencing self, for in order that 'He' the ab
sent One should remain as the only Presence, the 'I' must be annihilated.
We now come to the Way in all its fullness, for we have glimpsed for the first t
ime what the goal might be. We have seen that the true nature of the nafs as it
is experienced is not that of a solid object accreting qualities and faults in a
more and more solid lump, but rather we have seen that the non-existent nafs is
experienced by us as being solid-state, and that the acts of salat and fasting
and zakat shudder and move this seeming solidity until we recognise that the naf
s is in constant movement, constant flux, it is cloud-form and not mountain. The
goal is that the mountain should be blown away with all the ease with which the
wind disperses the cloud, as in the superb Form from Qur'an which describes the
Last Day of the world - macrocosm and microcosm being utterly identical in our
picture of oneness -
They will ask you of the mountains - say: 'My Lord will break them into scattere
d dust, and leave it as an empty plain.'
The means by which we set in motion the mountain solidity of forms in experience
in order to open ourselves to the transparent cloud-nature of stuff is the grea
t science that the Prophets transmit to their people. It is called in the langua
ge of the desert Messenger, dhikr'Allah.
Now when we examine the root of the word, we as usual uncover its true existenti
al impact. The meaning of this word - which is the science of tasawwuf - is in i
ts root: DhKR - 'to be kicked in the groin'. There it is. It is as everything in
Qur'anic language - self-explanatory. The Divine Reality is Presence. You are n
ot far from Him, He is not hiding from you, and there is no complex secret esote
ric tantra that has to be practised. If you want to know, if you really want One
ness, if you really want to be taken out of your neurotic mind-games and made aw
are of the immediate and vibrant Presence of the Lord of the Universe - what you
need is a kick in the balls. It is offensive? Then what offends you is your sic
kness, the marad that separates you from the tremendous and overwhelming immedia
cy of reality in all its present-tense awareness. It is that shock - that instan
t focussing of the nafs on the actuality of existence, that halts the form-makin
g mind and therefore opens in one instant the whole being to the total-mind, to
the non-mind, to the Presence itself. From this root the formal meanings follow
in obvious succession, but all deeply connected in meaning to their root:
Dhikr - 'to remember', 'to make mention of', 'to fill the mind with', 'a making
plain', 'a shock-warning', 'a plain statement' (of how things are), 'to be calle
d to attention', 'the means of knowing', 'to remind one's self' - therefore, 'to
be reminded'.
Now, the affirmation - la ilaha ila'llah Muhammadun rasulallah - is dhikr. Salat
is dhikr. Fasting and zakat are dhikr. However, we are being forced by our purs
uit of the meaning of existence to go beyond these time-points, to join them up,
to string the pearls, to open our experience to a continuity that takes us from
one prostration-time to another, from one Ramadan to the next.
The repository of dhikr is, of course, the Qur'an, and it is the mine of all the
dhikr we practise. We also find that in the science of dhikr different situatio
ns have different dhikr. Qur'an says of itself:
And we sent down of the Qur'an that which is a healing and a mercy to the Trusti
ng-Ones. (Qur'an 17.82)
In the language of the Shaykh al-Akbar:
'The Qur'an is laden with quality. Qualities are states its quality is the sourc
e-form of its essence, and the essence does not require other-than-it because it
is it, by itself. So its quality is like that because of its source-form, neith
er other than it nor extra to it, so understand! Allah speaks the Truth and guid
es to the Path.'
It is clear that a deep understanding of what Qur'an is as a phenomenon is essen
tial to a knowledge of the Way and indeed, of knowledge itself. The Qur'an must
be examined and seen not just as some odd text that somehow came to be recited a
nd eventually written down. It is only with the advent of this Book that we are
able to examine the nature of revelation as a historic event, since it occurred
only fifteen hundred years ago and the whole matter was closely recorded and is
also explained within the text itself. What the Master is here saying is that -
whatever the Qur'an may be - it isn't just a Book, but a dynamic thing 'laden wi
th quality'. The Book is a collection of these life-textured realities and these
energy patterns are equivalents, that is to say not indicators, but the same as
States. Thus the Qur'an is a source-book of all the 'States' that the human bei
ng may experience. So the dhikr is a key which opens the patterning of the nafs,
uncovering layer upon layer of experiential solidification and allowing the Lig
ht of the self to come through in its original source-form condition.
Let us now explore this quite simple but tremendous picture that is the basis of
Ibn 'Arabi's picture of the self. First we must see what dhikr is, then move on
to a clearer idea of what hal is and finally return to our starting point, movi
ng from the nafs to the Qur'an as the key to the creation situation.
The electrifying, mind-stopping reality that is put forward as the nature of exi
stence by the Shaykh al-Akbar, is one in which every form is consciously partici
pating in the glory and beauty of the Divine Reality at every instant and/or non
-instant, and these forms are only variegated versions of their source-forms in
the Unseen, and these source-forms are only Light from aspects of the Essence co
ming out from the original Reality which is itself beyond all ascription, grasp,
or definition.
In the 'Makkan Revelations' he says:
He said, may He be exalted: 'There is nothing but that it proclaims His praise.'
(17.44). 'Thing' is indefinite, and only the living intellect, knowing of His p
raise, gives praise. It is related of the Mu'adhdhin that, of wet and dry, to th
e extent that his voice carries, everything testifies for him. Thus we have hear
d the rocks doing dhikr'Allah with the sight of the eye and our ears heard from
them with the tongue of articulation. They spoke to us with the speech of the gn
ostics of the glory of Allah which not every man perceives. So each sort from th
e creation of Allah is one of the communities which Allah formed on a worship pa
rticular to them. So He inspired them with it from within themselves. So their '
messenger' is from their essences. There are outstanding ones from Allah where a
particular inner awareness on which they have been formed gives certain creatur
es a knowledge which the adept technician cannot grasp. They even know what is o
f use to them in what they receive of insects and edibles and how to avoid what
is harmful to them. All that is from their natural disposition. It is the same w
ith inanimates and plants. Allah has taken our eyes and ears from what they have
of articulation.
The hour will not come until man speaks and his people take it for his deed, mak
ing wise men seem ignorant He, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, had comp
lete unveiling, so he saw what we do not see. He spoke, peace be upon him, of th
e command upon which the People of Allah act, so they found his word to be true:
'Had it not been for increase in your speech and disorder in your hearts, you w
ould have seen what I see and you would have heard what I hear.' So he was given
the rank of perfection of slavedom, so he was a pure slave. He did not stand by
his sovereign essence over anyone. That is what mastery necessitated and it is
a constant proof of his honour.
A'isha said: 'The Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, u
sed to do dhikr constantly, at all times.' We have an ample legacy from him, and
it is a matter particular to the inward part of man.
Here, the communication and awareness of the lower organisms is connected to the
act of speech and the nature of Wisdom. The Wisdom-transmission is 'particular
to the inward part of man' and its means is dhikr. Speech in its pure and origin
al state is nothing but dhikr, and the accretions of speech that come with aband
oning the Wisdom-practice are means of tyranny and domination and chaos, social
and private. The babble of the ignorant man and the insane man are of the same n
ature. For speech to be basically sane, it must stem from the 'speech' of the re
velation, which in its turn is the fruit of silence. Quintessential speech is no
t pure dhikr but rather the state from which wisdom-speech comes and all these p
atternings are the ayats of the Qur'an. From this viewpoint, 'there is nothing b
ut that it proclaims His praise.'
Elsewhere the Shaykh Ibn 'Ata-illah said about dhikr:
Dhikr is a fire which does not stay or remain - so if it enters a house saying:
'Me and nothing other than me' - which is from the meanings of la ilaha illa'lla
h, and there is firewood in the house, it burns it up and it becomes fire. If th
ere is darkness in the house, it becomes Light, its Light. If there is Light in
the house, it becomes Light upon Light.
Dhikr drives away from the body extra elements produced by excess in eating and
from the consumption of Haram food: as for what is derived from Halal food, it d
oes not touch it, so the harmful elements are burned up and the good elements re
main. Dhikr is heard by every part as if it were blowing on a trumpet, and when
dhikr first falls into the head, the sound of the trumpet and glasses are found
there. Dhikr is a sultan - when it descends into a place it descends with its tr
umpets and glasses because dhikr is opposed to all that is other-than-the-Realit
y, so when it does descend it occupies itself with negating what is contrary, as
we found with the union of water and fire. After these sounds, different sounds
are heard: like the murmur of water, the sound of the wind, the sound of fire w
hen it is kindled, the sound of riding beasts, the thunder of horses, and the so
und of the leaves of the trees when the wind blows on them. This is because man
is a combination of every noble and low substance of dust, water, fire, air, and
earth and heaven and what is between them. These sounds are from every source a
nd element of these substances. Whoever has heard these sounds in dhikr has prai
sed Allah and glorified Him with every tongue. This is the result of the dhikr o
f the tongue with the force of absorption. Perhaps the slave will reach the stat
e where, when he is silent from the dhikr, the heart will move in his breast lik
e the movement of the child in the womb, demanding dhikr.
They said: 'Indeed, the heart is like 'Isa the son of Maryam, peace be upon them
, and dhikr is its milk. When it grows and becomes strong, a yearning for the Tr
uth arises from it with a voice, and inevitable swooning then blows on it a crav
ing for dhikr and the One invoked. The dhikr of the heart is like the sound of t
he bee, neither a confused high sound, nor a very low hidden sound. Then the One
invoked takes possession of the heart and the dhikr is obliterated and vanishes
, and the one who invokes turns neither to the heart nor to the dhikr. If during
this, a glance at the dhikr or the heart appears to him, that is a distracting
veil. This state is fana - which is that man is annihilated in respect to his na
fs and that he feels nothing from his outward limbs, nor things outside of him,
nor spells inside of him. If, during that, it occurs to him that he is annihilat
ed in respect to himself altogether, then that is a blemish and troubledness. Pe
rfection is that he be annihilated to himself and to annihilation, and the annih
ilation of annihilation is the goal of annihilation, and annihilation is the for
emost part of the Path, since it is going towards Allah, may He be exalted, and
then guidance follows. By guidance, I mean the guidance of Allah, as he said, bl
essings and peace be upon him: 'I am going to my Lord and He will guide me.' Thi
s absorption is rarely established and rarely continues. If it does continue it
becomes a fixed habit and a lasting condition by which he ascends to the celesti
al world. Then the purest real existence emerges and the inscription of the invi
sible world (malakut) is stamped on him, and the purity of the Divinity (lahut)
appears to him. The first of what is represented to him from that world is the a
ngels' essences and the spirits of the prophets and awliya in a beautiful form w
hich flows on him through some of the realities. That is the beginning until his
degree is elevated from forms and he encounters the Truth in everything with cl
arity.
This is the fruit of the core of dhikr, and its beginning is the dhikr of the to
ngue, then the dhikr of the heart is stimulated, then the dhikr becomes nature,
and then the One invoked takes possession and the dhikr is obliterated, and this
is the secret of his word, peace be upon him: 'Whoever wishes to graze in the G
ardens of Paradise, let him invoke Allah much,' and the secret of his word: 'Hid
den dhikr is seventy times preferable to dhikr which is heard by listeners.'
The signs of dhikr moving to the Secret is the absence of the one who invokes bo
th from the dhikr and the One invoked, and the dhikr of the Secret is being madl
y thirsty and drowning in it. Among its signs is that when you leave off the dhi
kr it does not leave you, and the flight of dhikr in you is to awaken you from a
bsence to presence.
Among its signs is that dhikr tightens your head and limbs, as if they were boun
d with bonds and chains. Among its signs is that its fires do not abate, and its
Lights do not depart, rather its Lights are always seen rising and descending,
and the fires around you are untroubled, being aflame and brightly burning. When
dhikr reaches the Secret, the dhikr is the silence of the one who invokes, as i
f needles had been thrust through his tongue invoking with Light flowing from it
.
The Shaykh al-Kamil in one of the most renowned songs in his Diwan, 'Fana-Fi'lla
h', says:
Oh seeker of annihilation in Allah -
say all the time: Allah! Allah!
And withdraw into Him from other-than-Him
and with your heart - see Allah!
In his song, 'The Commentary on the Wird' he says:
If you wish to hasten to an understanding of the Reality then with himma perseve
re in repeating the Mighty Name.
Always mirror the letters of the Name in your heart and repeat it unconsciously
at every moment.
Do not turn to otherness - for it is indeed a barrier. Even when it is praisewor
thy it is still more suitable to darkness.
To the People, His dhikr does in place of what is other-than-Him. If you possess
himma there is no opposite to Allah.
Fear Him in dhikr and be annihilated to other-than-Him: and there is no other ex
cept for the illusion of multiplicity.
Multiplicity is only Oneness multiplied in accordance with the Names and the tra
ces of Divine Power.
In 'The Greater Song', the Shaykh al-Kamil says of the one starting out on the j
ourney:
He should busy himself with dhikr of Allah, may His Majesty be glorified, for in
that lies the remedy for every fault and ill.
In 'The Minor Song' he says:
To anyone who withdraws into the Lights of the dhikr of the Truth, Creation is n
othing but particles of dust in space.
Here is 'The Virtues of the Mighty Name':
Free yourself from others and you will attain His proximity and you will ascend
to the ranks of the People of every assembly.
Fill your every breath with dhikr'Allah for each breath has to be accounted for
on the Day of Gathering and Promise.
Exalt all phenomena because it is formed from the Light of the Prophet Muhammad.
Regard it as Lights from the Names of our Lord and withdraw from being unrespons
ive and speaking from opinion.
Love with the love of Allah and hate with His hate. This is the Road, so be awar
e of it, my friend!
Be an isthmus between the two oceans - the Reality and the Road - and you will a
ttain the rank of Recognition in every assembly.
In every mosque, guide the slaves of Allah by Allah openly, by showing the beaut
y of the Paths of Allah.
And if you wish to go swiftly into the Presence of our Lord, then have a good op
inion of Allah's creation and speak well of Him.
Persevere in the Sublime and Mighty Name with a good heart, sincerity and concen
tration.
Recognise the beauty of the Essence in every Manifestation. Were it not for it t
he existence of the Existent would not have been established.
All the attributes of the nafs are annihilated by His Invocation, and all that r
emains is tranquillity of heart, sweeter than honey.
Every inner state along with the Stations arises from invocation of the Mighty N
ame with gravity.
So from it comes the Opening for every Wayfarer and from it comes the Overflowin
g for every Murshid.
From it is the state of intoxication and fana, and from it, too, the states of s
obriety and ecstasy.
Power is only given to the one who has isolated himself with Him, and who, throu
gh much praise, is adorned with what pleases Him.
Thus he will continue to ascend in the deserts of His Essence until he is utterl
y annihilated in an annihilation that has nothing in it but loss.
If he returns to the traces of existence, He brings a Robe of Honour which procl
aims His Wilaya (being a Wali) and glory.
So be a slave and servant to the One whose description this is, and fulfil the c
ontract of Allah, and He will give you what He has promised.
The greatest of Allah's creation in this matter are His Messengers and the most
perfect of them in it is the Prophet Muhammad.
So his outward form is a Light and his inner form is a Secret. His perfections a
re beyond numbering.
May the blessings of Allah be upon him and his family and Companions, and give u
s limitless Lutf (Divine Favour).
In this qasida the Shaykh describes the whole transformation process that is set
in motion by the act of dhikr. This shimmering form-making machine, this kaleid
oscope that makes endless patterns from a few varied set experience-pieces, the
nafs - once it is submitted to the fire and lights of dhikr - is fragment by fra
gment annihilated, until all that remains is tranquillity of heart sweeter than
honey. The nafs-states having been annihilated by the fire of dhikr leave the se
eker opened up to his qualities, his higher nafs-states - in that middle conditi
on of conflict and development that Al-Ghazzali defined - then that is illuminat
ed until the climax of Light comes which annihilates the whole nafs as an experi
encing locus both mentally and biologically.
So what are these states - what is the dhikr activity working upon, what is it t
hat goes through this tremendous upheaval of energy caused by the invocation? Le
t us go directly to the Shaykh al-Akbar for a definition. In a poem on the knowl
edge of phenomenal being he declares:
The knowledges of phenomenal being move a great deal, knowledge of the Face does
not move.
We affirm and negate all of them, we separate and find them state by state.
My God! How can other-than-You know You when Your like is from tabarak and ta'al
a?
My God! How can other-than-You know You? Can other be a mithal to You?
Whoever seeks the Path without a guide, my God! He seeks the impossible.
My God! How can hearts desire You and they do not hope for intimacy and union?
My God! How can other-than-You have gnosis of You? No, and again, no.
My God! How can eyes see you when You are neither lights nor darknesses?
My God! I do not see myself as other-than-You! How can I see the impossible or b
e astray?
My God! You are You! And I let the gift be sought from Your I-ness.
By a poverty established with me from my existence, which was produced from Your
richness, so it is a state.
He informed me that He might manifest me to Him, and He did not see me as other-
than-Him, so I was a mirage.
Whoever seeks the mirage, wants water.
He sees the source of life for him as cold water.
I am phenomenal being, and there is nothing like me!
Who am I, like Him, before mithal (likeness)?
That is one of the most wondrous things, so look!
Perhaps you will see its like changing state.
There is not in phenomenal being other than individual existence which is above
being equalled or obtained.
He adds in prose:
Know, may Allah support you, that all that is in the earth moves from state to s
tate. So the world of time moves in every thing, and the world of breaths moves
in every breath, and the world of tajalli moves in every tajalli. The reason for
that is His word, may He be exalted, 'Every day He is upon some labour', (55.29
) and He supports it by His word: 'We shall surely attend to you at leisure, you
weight and you weight.' (55.31) Every man finds in himself types of passing tho
ughts in his heart, in his movements, and stillnesses. So no-one moves who is in
the celestial and terrestial worlds but that it is from a Divine turning by a p
articular tajalli to that source-form. So his foundation is from that tajalli ac
cording to what his reality accords him.
Here, the Shaykh indicates three degrees of existence. The forms that are devoid
of organic life, the organic forms which have the 'breath' of life, and the hum
an creatures who have unveiling of forms from the Unseen. The Shaykh says that t
hese self-experiences that pass over the experiencing centre of the nafs are not
outward intrusions, are not random, are not unpredictably chaotic, but all inev
itable in their patterning from the basic source-form of the self in the Unseen,
of which the life-story is merely the phenomenal chapter - there having precede
d it a chapter in the world of Spirits before birth and coming-into-solidity, an
d a chapter after it, the after-death state in the grave, and then another, the
rising and the meaning-form of the life manifesting in the non-solid World of th
e Unseen, and so on as the journey to Allah continues. Thus the self as a solid
reality is an untenable idea, a mirage, and its restless movement is caused by t
he thirst and longing that the true self experiences in its illusory trapped sit
uation of having a 'history'. It is this thirst that in the crucible of dhikr as
described above becomes a sublime drowning as the illusion falls away. In this
important passage the Shaykh goes on to talk about those who 'do not know what t
hey are moved from nor moved to,' which is the case of the majority of human bei
ngs, and he presents this as a basically ignorant situation. He is not suggestin
g that one knows the future in any occultistic manner, but something much subtle
r and more profound - he is suggesting that real knowledge begins by a recogniti
on of this moving time-flux creature as being an utterly structured and inevitab
le series of life-patternings all stemming from its original self-form dynamic i
n the Unseen before it is manifested. He sees knowledge as beginning when we gra
sp that this time-setting is not separable from the time-set individual, the eve
nt and the person and the zone of the experience all being one reality with all
the intricate intertwining of individual forms into a pattern such as that revea
led in a Persian carpet, but with all the ravishing, sweeping movement and appar
ent freedom that is in the miracle of organic nature at the microscopic level.
He goes on to speak of one of the people of the Path who erred in saying: 'When
you see a man staying in one state for forty days, know that he is a strange man
.' He is here indicating that the man had abandoned the true perspective of 'sta
te' and mistaken it for an inner condition like 'depression' or confusion or exc
itement or anger. He goes on:
Do realities allow that someone could remain in one state for two breaths or two
'times'? He is moving with breaths from the thing to its like It is like saying
, 'So and so is still walking today, and did not sit.' There is no doubt that wa
lking is many different movements. Each movement is not the same as the other, r
ather it is its like. Your knowledge moves by its moving and it is said: 'His st
ate has not changed!' How many states have changed on him!
Thus any picture of the self-form as being of a kind of 'nature' or pattern that
can be defined as having some kind of durability or permanence in time is utter
ly illusory. And just as the walking-image indicates that there is obviously som
ething constant over a brief period that suggests such a solid specificity of se
lf-form, it is in itself illusory, in flux, made up of tiny separate dynamic utt
erly open moments that each has in it the possibility of alteration, recreation,
and end. Again he re-iterates the basic proposition:
Things with Allah are witnessed and known source-forms, states are based on thes
e forms which they have.
The picture then is of one person having different states, and a form is made fo
r him in each state he has. A certain experience habit suggests to us a certain
illusory continuity on which we erect the myth of historicity of self, but this
is not the case, merely the mistaken viewpoint. So the creature is veiled in the
condition of an 'existence' which is nothing but a clothing of state upon state
, as the moving film is built up of individual-frame shots run together to creat
e an imaginary 'situation'. So states vary in the imagination on which ordinary
human experience is based, despite the inescapable fact that this so-called real
ity is utterly fictional. They vary in the imagination, but they do not vary in
knowledge - and knowledge is achieved by the act of dhikr unveiling the states a
nd opening up the whole experience-illusion. Then the human being 'sees with His
eye and hears with His ear. His becomes the hand with which he grasps and the f
oot with which he walks,' as in the famous Hadith that indicates the true state
of knowledge that comes upon the Mumin after advancing through the practices of
dhikr. The Shaykh al-Akbar's final clue to this matter is succinct:
As for the secret of state, it is duration, and it does not have first or last.
It is the source-form of the existence of every existent. So I have informed you
of some of what the rijal of enigmas know of secrets. I have been silent on muc
h. Its door is wide. The knowledge of dreams, the Interspace and Divine Ascripti
ons relate to this.
Thus the fluctuating endless states express themselves throughout the whole orga
nism, cellularly, electro-magnetically, in synaptic brain-signalling, in energy-
flow, in endocrinal release, digestive function, blood rhythm, and all these var
ious patternings are but the flowering of one original self-form or rather sourc
e-form of which this solid-body human creature is the time-bound manifestation o
utwardly and whose reality is with Allah from before-endless-time. Thus my 'move
ment' is all movement, and my space-occupying is all space-occupying, and the Un
iverse and I are not two but container-contained, and this itself is nothing for
He is as He was before the creation of the Universe. 'Everything perishes excep
t the Face of Allah!' - as He Himself triumphantly declares in the Qur'an. (55.2
6-27).
When the Shaykh al-Akbar declares that only the Sufis under-stand the true natur
e of the nafs, he means by this that no-one else possesses a total picture of th
e life-situation except the people of unveiling, for this whole dimension of sel
f-experience is hidden from any but them. Some people are only able to perceive
the crudest machine-structure in man, and can only recognise the mind as some od
d ghost inhabiting a delicate house of tissue and nerve-endings. It is an odd gh
ost, for, according to their picture, it is enough that the delicate fibre-furni
ture be damaged for the occupant somehow, mysteriously, to be affected. This dua
listic frame on which the pathetic crumbling structure of our hastily put-togeth
er modern psychology is erected, leaves us with a picture of something called 'b
ehaviour' which ends up being classified into 'types' and the crude mechanistic
picture soon bogs down in a welter of sub-types. It is inevitable that in our ti
me the accepted cure for mal-function of this non-existent ghost in its bizarre
house (electrocute the house and thus wipe out the house-keeper) should be an eq
ually crude and massively administered chemical drug treatment. Although some mo
dern therapists have recognised a quite profound and clinically identifiable pic
ture of much greater subtlety which opens to the streaming, sub-electric energy-
fields of the body, they in turn become so hypnotised by their own discovery tha
t they again try to contain man within a bio-energy definition reducing the huma
n being by that token simply to the sum of his energies. Utterly closed to the n
ature of an Unseen reality, because still essentially trapped in this basic dual
ity which they quite rightly observe to exist in the world of forms, they relent
lessly avoid the metaphysical question which in other sciences insists on attent
ion. Now that we have uncovered the chromosomic level of patterning, and glimpse
d the beauty of form-manifestation and recognised also our profound ignorance of
these processes at the very point that certain key designs open themselves to u
s, we are forced to a threshold of activity which is, if you like, the 'edge of
the Unseen', or more correctly, in the language of the Master Jalalud'din Rumi,
the Non-spatial, the realm of mind itself, which so delicately and purely refrai
ns from 'being' the brain, and yet so lovingly and seductively is its shadow-rea
lity. I now do not refer to 'your' mind or 'my' mind, for in this picture I woul
d have to italicise out of existence thus - 'your mind' and 'my mind'.
Before proceeding further, it must be made clear that this has nothing to do wit
h any Jungian or gestalt picture of archetypes. Two pieces of labelling have man
aged to keep the Orientalists away from any serious coming to grips with the met
aphysics of Islam - the use of the term 'archetypes' and 'neo-platonic'. That th
ese men were, one and all (if there had been an exception he would have had to b
e a Sufi himself), unequipped to examine these issues, can be easily verified by
an examination of their unscholarly refusal to accept the Sufis on their own te
rms - as if one were to approach quantum physics with a basic refusal to abandon
the Newtonian classical picture of how things were. This approach, as we have i
nsisted from the beginning, is not just a matter of epistemology, but of self-tr
ansformation, and without submitting to the transformation-practice of Islam the
re is no valid knowledge available in any way that allows one to penetrate these
matters apart from the sporadic and separate possible insights of the individua
l as he experiences reality. The Wisdom-view is dependent on recognising that th
ere is no out-there to examine and understand. Reality is One. The so-called kno
wledge of the technological society is informational and split from the knower.
Despite all the ludicrous attempts at gluing together the separate and isolated
'disciplines' of psychology and biology and linguistics and physics and chemistr
y, the sciences continue to split into micro, and bio, intra, and supra, and wha
t emerges becomes more and more a knowledge which for the needs of the life-proc
ess is recognisably useless. Bernard Shaw used to lament the millions of mice an
d monkeys slaughtered in the name of that pursuit of useless knowledge - had he
lived today he would have further been able to lament the destruction of the bio
-sphere in which whole vanishing species lived, rivers and oceans and lands and
skies all gorged of their energies in an age that is unable to grasp the underly
ing Unity that links all these, because basically unable to grasp the Unity of e
ach person's self-experience, which remains the essential clue to grasping the U
nity which is the very nature of existence itself.
Here is a paraphrasing of the position of a modern geneticist, Richard Goldschmi
dt:
The time has come to reshape all genetic theory anyhow. The classical theory of
the gene as an actually existing unit, lying on the chromosome like a bead in a
string of beads, is no longer tenable. We cannot focus on genes and loci, or eve
n chromosomes, as we always have. Something bigger controls the whole system. Th
at is why I speak of systemic mutations.
The collapse of the post-Darwinian picture of evolution revealed not only the in
credible double-think that many biologists were indulging in, and the extraordin
ary degree of subjectivity involved in their so-called scientific or verifiable
picture of whatever the process they seemed to imagine they were describing, it
also revealed that underlying their biological trees and simple-to-complex unfol
dings, and gradual-change mutations, there was an assumed Power at work which th
ey, at the same time as assuming it, denied. There could be no Power outside the
'things' which they saw as closed systems which complexified themselves accordi
ng to vastly sophisticated and complex laws and patterns which they could neithe
r codify nor decode. They slithered from the use of a term 'Nature' which they i
nvested with Divine Intellect and Plan only to disrobe it on their next calculat
ion in place of the plan-itself, in their case, natural selection, which in turn
was deified after being reified. An absorbing sleight of hand, but hardly effec
tive as serious epistemology. It was enough that bit by bit the actual field wor
k of biology and the neighbouring sub-science of palaeontology and micro-biology
revealed a picture that left
Let us go back to our superficial Orientalists desperately doing their labelling
of Islamic Masters with the tags of the collapsing dualistic Christian world-vi
ew. If the sufic description of reality was neo-platonic then that meant it had
been borrowed from a previous culture and stuck on in a syncretist move to provi
de Islam with something it did not in the first place possess, thus demonstratin
g that Islam was a pseudo-religion and not to be taken with any intellectual ser
iousness. Unfortunately their confusion is double. Islam does not claim to be a
religion, rather it claims religion to be the decadence of a previously existing
and now degraded form of Islam. Secondly, they refuse to grasp that what Islam
describes in its totality from within the structure of the Qur'anic revelation i
s something that the earlier 'Islams' of the Messengers before the Seal of the M
essengers, Muhammad, peace be upon him, already knew about. It is assumed by Mus
lim scholars that the platonic knowledge was an inherited reality-picture from t
he remnant of their unitary science which survived as a thread among the broken
threads of pantheonic theism. If you are dependent on labels, certainly from a s
ufic point of view, it would be more useful to label Plato neo-Islamic than to l
abel the Sufis as neo-platonic.
The matter of archetypes is even more dangerous for a person desirous of graspin
g the Wisdom-picture. The accepted post-Jungian picture of archetypes reduces th
ese to a subjective, yet mysteriously shared set of symbol pictures that exist o
n a mental 'plane' which reveal apparently incomprehensible conflicts and crises
in the actual history of the subject. Thus a real and solid world is loaded wit
h a set of coded meanings which take on their reality when applied to the histor
ic present and used to illuminate it. Always in this picture our phenomenal and
solid existence is given primacy over the explanatory code systems. It is very f
ar from the original Goethean picture of Ur-forms from which it was borrowed, on
ly to be inverted with this primacy of situational existence over and against a
floating repository of basic forms. We remain in a dual system of mind pictures
displaying themselves in a solid reality. It is a concept that offers no proof o
f its validity and certainly the Jungian clinical record convinced one of nothin
g but the fact that the people who unleashed that empire of archetypal forms dur
ing analysis had undoubtedly been analysed by Jung. The sufic picture of existen
ce is sustained, and has been systematically over a period of fourteen hundred y
ears, by direct experience, by dhawq, tasting, which illuminates the seeker with
his or her own knowledge of how-it-is. This awesome knowledge of how-it-is cann
ot be reduced to a therapeutic technique or submitted to crude mechanistic tests
to ascertain its validity. It is outside the realm of science, or if you like,
it is its own science. Certainly it is systematised, verifiable, and not a faith
-system. Doubt and certainty are the two energies whose polar forces drive the s
eeker on to his discoveries.
The sufic term that has been so mistranslated is 'ayn ath-thabita, which we may
call the source-forms, the word 'ayn meaning not just 'source' in the sense of '
origin', but with the physicality and actuality of a spring of water. We will re
turn to it when we come to the point that is being forced upon us where we ask a
bout the nature of this 'stuff' of the Universe, the 'how', 'what', and 'why' of
forms.
What we have so far established is a picture of reality as being utterly alive,
in flux, with particular forms subtly shedding pulse after pulse through this un
ceasing movement of states in a locus which is nothing other than the states, an
d yet these states when unveiled open up to a hidden source-form in the world of
non-space-time, inseparable from this.
The key term: HAL, which we call 'state' derives from a root meaning 'to be chan
ged' and 'to pass by' or 'go between'. By extension it relates to the adverb mea
ning 'round about' and to the nouns 'a power', 'a plan', 'a year'. Also 'a turni
ng off'.
Thus state/situation is the basic condition of all forms, according to the sufic
science, and it is the action-process which the nafs experiences on the Path, w
hose culminating and ultimate condition is to be 'turned off', obliterated in th
e face of the Essence of the multitudinous forms. The sufic science further clai
ms that the Qur'an is a revelation from the source of Reality, indicating not on
ly the science of how to live among the multiple forms but also how to surrender
(Islam) to the One, which in its fullness means the giving up of the nafs which
is the intolerable 'other' that prevents unitary experience. It is not a matter
of little mind (myself) being swallowed up in the Big Mind after all, as some o
f the inadequate systems formed on the archeology of previous Islams suggest (li
ke Zen), but rather of the total being emerging from separate pulsing and form-d
ynamic into a complete obliteration. The cells have to 'stop', for they are not
separable from the 'mind'. That we continue to 'see' the form is based on our il
lusory sense-veiling on which the world and 'history' is based. To the people of
fana 'everything perishes except His Face.' (55.26).
The Shaykh al-Akbar says:
When Allah, glory be to Him, closed the door of prophecy, and the message to cre
ation, he left to them the door of understanding from Allah in what He revealed
to His Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, in His mighty Book. 'Al
i ibn Abi Talib, may Allah be pleased with him, said: 'Revelation was cut off af
ter the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace. What remain
s is in our hands. Allah provisions the slave with understanding in this Qur'an.
' Our companions, the people of unveiling, agreed on the soundness of a transmis
sion from the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, that he said of
the ayats of the Qur'an: 'There is no ayat but that it has a manifest part, a hi
dden part, a limit, and an ascent.'
Before we can proceed further on our journey, we must examine what the Qur'an is
, and what is the meaning of 'revelation'. It is the Book of Changes, abrogating
all those Books which went before, keeping some 'forms' from the ancient books
and changing others and replacing those abrogated with better, in accordance wit
h the overflowing generosity of the Form-giver, may He be exalted.

The Science of Qur'an

The Generous Qur'an, the Book of Islam, was revealed to the Messenger Muhammad,
blessings and peace be upon him, over a period of twenty-three years from the ti
me of the first revelation which came when the Messenger was forty years old.
In the month of Ramadan it is read through in its entirety and on the Night of P
ower it is read 'shabina' - in one night. It is indicated within its text by man
y names, among them being: The Book, The Discrimination, The Judgment, The Mercy
, The Spirit, The Explanation, The Light, The Truth, The Argument, The Warning,
The Wisdom, The Clarification.
In these ayats, Reality addresses the Messenger saying:
With truth have We sent it down, and with truth has it descended. And We have se
nt you as nothing else than a bringer of good news and a warning.
And a Qur'an that we have divided, that you may recite it to all mankind at inte
rvals, and we have revealed it, revelation by revelation. (Qur'an 17.105-6)
Before examining what its themes are we first must come to terms with this desig
nation of the Book as a 'revelation', for if we are honest this has no specific
meaning as a psychological term and is outside our experience unless one admits
into it the category of the premonitory dream. Part of modern people's difficult
y in approaching Islam realistically lies in their prejudice about the nature of
a 'prophet'. The word in Arabic derives from a root NB'A, meaning 'to be exalte
d': 'to announce': 'to make one acquainted with': so the picture is quite clear.
The Nabeyi is the Announcer who brings the news, who makes one acquainted with
how-it-is, the reality-process.
The word for revelation is specific.
Its root is: NZL, meaning: 'to descend': 'that which is prepared for a guest': '
an entertainment': 'a gift': 'an abode'. It is also the noun of 'unity' and thus
literally means 'one descent'. The preparation of something for the guest is pe
rhaps its most weighty meaning in the root's effloration from the basic cluster.
The Qur'an is, if you like, the gift of the host to his guests, the creatures, w
hose brief stay is in the abode of Earth. And again, it is itself an abode of Wi
sdom. It is an 'entertainment' that lifts the heart and diverts it from this wor
ld with the beauties and rewards of the Unseen. Its means of manifesting was tha
t it 'came down'. Now, in the Wisdom-picture there are only the four directions
and there is no fifth. That is, there is only right/left: in front/behind. This
'above' from which Qur'an 'came down' can only be the 'within' whose opposite is
not 'without'.
What does this mean?
We have already seen how the SAMAWATI which we name the 'heavens' indicates esse
ntially not another dimension to existence, but rather that non-spatial zone whi
ch is no-place. The heavens are a reality of the Unseen, not cosmically, but sin
ce reality consists only of the four elements, this no-place is also the 'up' of
the phenomenal heaven. When the bedouin woman was brought to the Messenger as a
kafir he asked her, 'Where is Allah?' Now the answer that he inhabits place is,
correctly, unthinkable to a Muslim, yet when she unhesitatingly pointed skyward
s, the Messenger commanded that she be freed at once. Samawati, we recall, is wh
at gives us the names. It is the basic dyad: samawati/'ard. These are One Realit
y, and so the Qur'an in coming down properly speaking, came out. What happened?
How did it 'get in' in the first place?
Firstly let us examine the straight narrative:
Wahb bin Kaisan told me that 'Ubayd said to him: 'Every year during the month of
Ramadan, the Messenger would pray in seclusion and give food to the poor that c
ame to him. And when he completed the month and returned from his retreat, first
of all he would, before entering his house, go to the Ka'ba and walk round it s
even times or as often as it pleased Allah: then he would go back to his house u
ntil, in the year when Allah sent him, in the month of Ramadan in which Allah wi
lled concerning him what He willed, the Messenger set out for Hira, the Mountain
of Light, and there Allah honoured him with his task.
'"He came to me," said the Messenger, "while I was asleep, with a coverlet of br
ocade whereon was some writing, and said, 'Read!' I said, 'What shall I read?' H
e pressed me with it so tightly that I thought it was death: then He let me go a
nd said, 'Read!' I said, 'What shall I read?' He pressed me with it the third ti
me so that I thought it was death and said, 'Read!' I said, 'What shall I read?'
- and this only to deliver myself from Him, lest He should do the same to me ag
ain.
'"He said:
'Read: In the Name of the Lord, who createth,
Createth man from a clot.
Read: and thy Lord is the Most Generous.
Who teacheth by the Pen,
Teacheth man that which he knew not.' (96.1-5)
'"So I read it and He departed from me. And I awoke from my sleep and it was as
though these words were engraved on my heart. Now none of Allah's creatures was
more hateful to me than an ecstatic poet or a man possessed: I could not even lo
ok at them. I thought, 'Woe is me, poet or possessed - never shall the Quraysh s
ay this of me! I will go to the top of the mountain and throw myself down that I
may kill myself and gain rest.'
'"When I was midway on the mountain, I heard a voice from heaven saying, 'Oh Muh
ammad! Thou art the Messenger of Allah, and I am Jibril!'
'"I raised my head towards heaven to see, and there was Jibril in the form of a
man with feet astride the horizon saying, 'Oh Muhammad, you are the Messenger of
Allah and I am Jibril.' I stood gazing at him moving neither forward nor backwa
rd: then I began to turn my face away from him, but toward whatever region of th
e sky I looked, I saw him as before. And I continued standing there until Khadij
a sent her servants in search of me and they gained the high ground above Makka
and returned to her while I was standing in the same place."'
The narrative continues with the Messenger confiding his fear of insanity to his
wife. She argues that he cannot be since his qualities are those of sanity itse
lf, trustworthiness, kindness, balance. Khadija's whole way of dealing with this
disturbing event not only speaks vividly of her fine intellect and love for the
Messenger, but shows that she and her family were people already acquainted wit
h the Wisdom-tradition of their people. Crucial to any understanding of the mani
festation of what we now call Islam is a grasp of the fact that there continued
from the time of Ibrahim, peace be upon him, a living spiritual thread of unitar
y doctrine - this science, the Hanifa as it was called, had a continuing thread
of followers who passed on and practised the Ibrahimic (brahminical) Tawhid (yog
a). Hanifa derives from HNF, 'to incline'. It means therefore not only 'to incli
ne toward the Truth', but 'to be responsive', to open oneself and yield to the T
ruth. The essential mark of the Hanif and later, for it was no different, the Mu
slim, was that he was supple and yielding and not rigid and unbending. They were
known as the people of the Huda, the people of Right Guidance. This word Huda d
erives from HDA, meaning 'to lead in the right way', 'to follow a right course',
'a victim of sacrifice', 'an offering', 'to be a direction', 'one who directs'.
Thus they were the Wisdom-tradition, for it is the role of the initiates of Wisd
om that they must not only practise it, but establish it. The very first declara
tion of who Qur'an is for in the opening main Form 'Al-Baqara' puts it thus:
In the Name of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate.
Alif. Lam. Mim.
This Book in which there is no doubt,
a guidance to those who ward off:
who believe in the Unseen, and establish salat,
and spend of what We have bestowed on them.
And who trust in what is revealed to you (Muhammad) and what was revealed before
you, and are certain of
the Akhira.
These depend on Huda from their Lord.
These are the successful. (Qur'an 2.1-5)
The man of Wisdom offers himself up to Reality, opens himself, as did Isma'il, t
he son of Ibrahim, peace be upon them both. They risk destruction even of their
life-experience in an act that is an abandonment of the self-illusion only to fi
nd that Reality has opened itself to them, that Huda comes to them. Here is the
secret of the transaction we have begun to examine in the so-called 'prophetic e
xperience', the complete flowing openness of the Chosen One, Muhammad - chosen b
y inevitable destiny, for he has so utterly abnegated his own self-choice that c
hosenness floods in to fill the gap of his surrendered self-form. This is how-it
-is.
Khadija, aware of the implications of his vision, knew exactly what to do. She h
urried across Makka to the house of her cousin Waraqa bin Naufal bin Asad bin Ab
du'l-'Uzza bin Qusayy, who had become a Christian but had come through the tradi
tion of the Hanifa. When she told him what had happened, he affirmed the authent
icity of the event and went to the Messenger and made him retell the story. He a
lso confirmed physically what he had ascertained by his secret knowledge, for he
asked the Messenger to bare his back. There he found what he has looking for -
the Seal of Messengership on his back, the outward genetic proof in the cells of
his being inwardly the one to 'receive' the Message of Reality.
Waraqa confirmed: 'There has come to you the greatest Namus who came to Sayyedin
a Musa (Moses). You will be called a liar, they will humiliate you, and they wil
l cast you out and they will fight with you. Surely, you are the Messenger of th
is people.' And he kissed him on his forehead and left.
Khadija was determined to complete her proofs of authenticity to convince her hu
sband that he was neither poet nor possessed. When the angelic manifestation hap
pened in their own house, she prepared a test. She instructed her husband to mov
e towards her, continually asking if the Vision remained. She moved him to sit o
n her lap, and then when she exposed herself the Vision vanished. If the vision
had remained during any sexual act it would have followed that it was from the j
inn who use the heat/energies of fire, and not angelic which use air/energy. Thi
s is why ghusl separates the sexual act and salat. The water rite follows the fi
re/act to purify the self for the other act of union which is dependent on the a
ir element, breath.
The people of the Quraysh were determined in their rejection of the new Messenge
r, and the three main charges they brought against him were three which the text
of the Book itself analysed and demonstrated to be false. These three possibili
ties were:
1) that he was a poet.
2) that he was a magician.
3) that he was mad, or possessed by jinn.
While the charge that he was possessed swept through Makka, a man of Azd Shanu'a
who had a great reputation at casting out jinn came to the Messenger. His name
was Dimad. Dimad, when he heard of the Messenger, thought that it would be a ble
ssing for him if he could heal this man. He went to the Chosen One and said: 'I
practise the science of casting out jinn, Muhammad, would you like me to do so?'
The Messenger replied: 'Praise belongs to Allah whom we praise and from whom we
seek help. No-one can lead astray one whom Allah guides, and no-one can guide o
ne whom Allah leads astray. I affirm that there is no Divinity except Allah, alo
ne, without association, and I affirm that Muhammad is His slave and Messenger.
Go ahead!' Dimad was unable to continue and said: 'Repeat what you have just sai
d.' After the Messenger had said the words three times, Dimad said: 'I have hear
d what the kahins say, what the sorcerers say and what the poets say, but I have
never heard anything like these words of yours which have reached a depth in me
like that of the sea. If you give me your hand I will swear allegiance to you b
y accepting Islam.' This is in a tradition from Ibn 'Abbas and is transmitted by
Muslim.
The Hadith give a clear picture of whatever the outward aspects of the times of
revelation were:
A'isha told that Harith bin Hisham asked Allah's Messenger, 'How does the experi
ence come to you, Messenger of Allah?' to which he replied: 'It comes to me at t
imes like the clanging of a bell, and that is the type which is most severe for
me. It then leaves me, I having retained of it what the angel said. At times the
angel appears to me in human form and speaks to me and I retain what he says.'
A'isha said she had seen the event happen on a very cold day and his forehead po
ured sweat when it left him. This is transmitted in both Bukhari and Muslim.
Ubada bin as-Samit said that when the revelation descended on the Prophet he was
distressed on account of it and his face altered to a dark hue. A version says
that he lowered his head and his Companions lowered their heads, then when it wa
s removed from him he raised his head. Muslim transmitted it.
With two of the most tremendous revelations in the Qur'an, the 'Ya Sin' Form and
the 'Hud' Form, the impact was so shattering on the Messenger that some of his
hair turned white when the descent took place. It is quite clear from these acco
unts that one could take these descriptions as evidence that he was indeed 'a ma
n possessed'. This raises something that we have already touched on, which is th
at it is in the nature of the spiritual Path that its stages are marked by stage
s similar to the identity-fragmentation that we call madness. Let us re-iterate
it, for there has to be a re-focussing of our self-form understanding if we are
to grasp the truth of these matters.
The goal of the Path is the annihilation of the experiencing self, the centre or
locus from which the endless flowing states manifest in such a manner as to sug
gest the self's reality and historicity. The goal is to loosen these form-shadow
s and allow the Light which is the source-form of the locus in the Unseen to man
ifest. Thus the result is properly speaking 'the destruction of the personality'
. Madness is a fragmentation of experience rendering the solid world unreal and
the inner existence over-real, or vice-versa, so that inner experience is either
terrible and intolerable or glorious and elated, on the one hand, or barren and
desolate on the other. Insanity is based on a basic split between the 'centre'
and the outer world of behaviour, event, people and objects. Either the mad pers
on will 'get out' and leave the body - you may prick it and it will give no sign
of being 'inhabited' - they will station themselves in a safe place, the moon,
high up; or else, they will 'go in' - shut all the doors of the senses, become s
till, no signals going out or being taken in. Both madnesses imply, by this cond
ition, a break in behaviour with the accepted behaviour of the community. An ess
ential part of this break is the refusal to adhere to the commonly shared 'namin
g' process, and either an arcane language will be introduced or unstructured cha
nges will be made with random shifting of nouns so that 'this' is called 'that'.
The Wisdom-path is to dismantle the self systematically not as a ruse to protec
t and isolate the non-existent 'core', but to open oneself to the Secret of Tota
lity. The peeling of the onion-layers, in the image of Peer Gynt, is an act of g
lorious release and opening to the Reality, for not only is there no core but th
ere was no onion. Nothing has been gained, but nothing has been lost. At the dif
ferent stages of the Way, the shedding of the 'skins' may have the appearance of
the madman in his getting out or coming in. The difference is only one. The mad
man is himself 'shedding the skins' - he is conducting an operation of self-dest
ruction based on the false and doomed premise that there is a 'he' to dismantle
his 'he-ness'. Thus he splits reality, he breaks his own heart, for 'there are n
ot two hearts within the breast' as Qur'an says. (33.4). The Prophet takes his P
ath under direct guidance from the Unseen Master, the Angel, while those who fol
low in his footsteps take theirs from a Shaykh, a visible Master. He undoes them
.
This is the meaning of the sufic saying which is quoted by the Shaykh al-Kamil i
n his Diwan:
He who does not take the Shaykh as his Master
will have Shaytan as his Master.
According to the sufic picture of the nature of the nafs, the Messengers and pro
phets do not struggle in the same way that the awliya, the Perfected Ones, do. T
hey are the 'perfect exemplars', they are the original man-form in all its perfe
ction. This is why they do not die of disease from within but have to be killed
from without - the form being perfect, it would not of its nature end, but the d
estiny being mortal, the form has to be brought to an end in accordance with nat
ure, outside and inside from another perspective of course being identical. Neve
rtheless, this perfection contains within it all the stages of the Way and all t
he Stations of the awliya. The goal of the journey of the awliya lies over the m
ountains of madness and they have to be traversed. The beginning of the Messenge
r's time of revelation was that period for him, only he tasted every state with
the inner perfection of his 'vast self-form' which encompassed it and grounded i
t in the deep sanity of his prophetic condition.
While the mad person behaves in a self-obsessed way, the Messenger was the embod
iment of the generous, socially balanced and active human being. This was the ba
ffling and unarguable condition of the man they wanted to brand as a lunatic. He
said of himself: 'If justice is not to be found with me, then where will you fi
nd it?' He said: 'I am the first of the sons of Adam, and I say this without boa
sting.' He was simply there to show himself to his age as the exemplar, and offe
r his life-pattern as the Sunna for existence throughout the whole world from th
at day to the end of time for people of every culture and climate. He was the cu
lmination of the human situation, the Seal of the Perfection of Prophethood. Whe
n studying the aspect of revelation, one must not lose sight of the human finene
ss and delicacy and courage of the desert Messenger. He would not, for example,
ever touch a woman who was not his wife or of his household. When he took the ac
t of homage and acceptance of Islam at 'Aqaba from the women, he had a jug of wa
ter placed between himself and the women and he plunged his hand into it, and th
en they did, thus the transmission took place through contact yet through a puri
fying element. It distressed the Messenger when Sidi Abu Bakr brought his white-
haired and venerable father to him. Immediately the Messenger expressed his conc
ern that he had not been able to go to the old man. The Siddiq insisted that it
would not have been fitting, so then the Messenger, blessings and peace be upon
him, knelt beside the old man, stroked his chest, smiled and asked him to make t
he Affirmation. It is this man, of endless fineness to appreciate the living mom
ent, who is the man laying claim to prophethood, and over whom pass these shudde
ring and powerful states out of which the Qur'anic message comes. There was neve
r any doubt what was part of the Message and what was simply a revelation, even
though the revelation came directly through the Angel, it had to come through th
is 'filter' which annihilated him during its transmission before it became part
of the great Book.
Here is another contemporary record of how the Arabs tried to come to grips with
this unique event that took place among them and which was to overturn their wh
ole society and affect the destiny of every one of them:
When the Fair was due, a number of the Quraysh came to Walid bin al-Mughira, who
was a man of some standing, and he addressed them in these words: 'The time of
the Fair has come round again and representatives of the Arabs will come to you
and they will have heard about this man of yours, so let us agree on one opinion
without dispute so that none will give the lie to the other.' They replied, 'Yo
u give us your opinion about him.' He said, 'No, you speak and I will listen.' T
hey said, 'He is a kahin.' Walid said, 'By God, he is not a soothsayer. He does
not mutter or speak in rhymed prose.' - 'Then he is possessed,' they said. 'No,
he is not that,' he said, 'we have seen the possessed and here is no choking, sp
asmodic movements and whispering.' - 'Then he is a poet,' they said. 'No, he is
no poet, for we know poetry in all its forms and meters.' - 'Then he is a sorcer
er.' - 'No, we have seen sorcerers and their sorcery, and here is no spitting an
d no knots.' - 'Then what are we to say, Oh Abu 'Abdu Shams?' they asked. He rep
lied: 'By God, his speech is sweet, his root is a palm-tree whose branches are f
ruitful and everything you have said would be seen to be false. The nearest thin
g to the truth is your saying that he is a sorcerer, who has brought a message b
y which he separates a man from his father, or from his brother, or from his wif
e, or from his family.'
The first revelation which we have documented in detail was sent down on what th
e Qur'an calls the Night of Power. It is of such importance that there is a Powe
r Form in the Qur'an describing it. It is the general view that on that night th
e whole of the Qur'an was sent down, to emerge fragment by fragment in living si
tuations throughout the life of the Messenger, but Allah knows best. Here is the
Power Form:
In the Name of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate.
Behold, we revealed it on the Night of Power.
Ah! What will convey to you what the Night of Power is?
The Night of Power is better than a thousand months.
The angels and the Spirit descend therein, by the permission of their Lord, with
all decrees.
Peace it is, until the rising of the dawn. (Qur'an 97)
It is this Night of Power that forms the climax of the Ramadan fast and in which
the Qur'an is recited from beginning to end, and when the Mumin watches the who
le night until dawn.
From that night onwards the revelation came, sometimes an ayat at a time, someti
mes a long passage or whole Sura depending on the situation, for the rest of the
Messenger's lifetime, the final revelation coming on 'Arafat during his last Ha
jj when he taught them the final and purified form of the ancient rites of Hajj.
Each time a revelation came it emerged out of a particular life-situation and i
t came as an illumination of that moment opening up the truth of that situation
and guiding the Messenger's actions as well as continually unfolding the 'good n
ews and the warning' which are one of the re-iterated themes of the Book. Piece
by piece alongside the specific guidance it gave to life-situations came an unfo
lding pattern of man's history from the beginning of his time on earth and showi
ng the meaning of the various meta-cycles he had lived through. Five themes are
orchestrated throughout the Book and they can be summarised thus:
1. Particular guidance to the Messenger telling him what to do in specific situa
tions, teaching him, consoling him, correcting him.
2. The story of mankind's global destiny since the beginning, and the role of th
e earlier prophets and their Books in this cyclic story of man's being given gui
dance, and its being corrupted and lost, and a new guidance being sent down, cul
minating in the final cycle of the Messenger's rule.
3. The new Shari'a or Road that Allah lays down for the whole of mankind, abroga
ting earlier Roads that were sent for particular nations and races by earlier pr
ophets.
4. The nature of Reality. Tawhid, the declaration of the Unity - that is the ess
ential message of all the prophets - reaffirmed.
5. The good news and the warning', (41.4), the direct existential confrontation
with each human being who reads it: 'Where then are you going?' (81.26). The Boo
k warns that this life is a zone of action and that man is responsible to his Cr
eator and will have to answer, in the next phase of existence when he has droppe
d the phenomenal body, for what he did on earth. There is complete continuity of
experience between the life-state, the so-called death-state, and the next-life
-state. This is the event world, and that is the meaning-world.
Within these basic themes the Qur'an expresses itself in two particular manners
which it defines with great precision, saying:
He it is who sent down to you (Muhammad)
the Book in which are clear-signs - they are
the Mother of the Book -
and others are likeness-signs.
But those in whose hearts is doubt follow what is
the likeness
desiring dissension by desiring its interpretation.
None knows its interpretation except Allah.
And those firmly rooted in knowledge say:
'We trust in it: it is all from our Lord.'
Yet none remembers but men possessed of minds.
(Qur'an 3.7)
The scholars who have tried to create a rabbinical tradition of commentary of Qu
r'an in Islam have, understandably limited the meaning of this ayat to infer sim
ply that the Book rests on the factual 'law' ayats. Ironically it is the 'law' i
n all its tremendous simplicity that they have made subtle, ambiguous and top-he
avy until a completely rabbinical invention called Qur'anic Law has emerged to b
uoy up the pseudo-Islamic State they have erected in their own image and in defi
ance of the community-form outlined in the Sunna of the Messenger. The 'clear-si
gns' refer to all the great declarations about Divine Unity that stem from the B
ook's repeated commands to examine creation itself for all the clear-signs withi
n it, and to examine the nafs and observe there these same confirmatory signs of
Unity. It is precisely this declaration of Tawhid that is the 'Mother' of the B
ook. The Book 'comes out of' this, the organic life-laws come out of this, and n
ot the other way round. The clear-signs are those that call to justice and compa
ssion and generosity and peace-making, to feeding the hungry and protecting the
orphan. The likeness-signs are not simply, as the 'rabbis' would make out, those
ayats which relate to secret things like the journey of Dhu'l Qarnayn or the Sl
eepers in the Cave, but rather they are those which relate basically to the cent
ral teaching in the Book. The behaviour-teaching on which all the Wisdom-practic
e is based lies in the clear-sign passages which insist on a recognition of Unit
y in the self and creation and which call to correct and compassionate behaviour
- i.e. both a following of the Shari'a - the Road - and a clinging to acts of c
ompassion in the Way of Allah. The Divine-teaching is based on the likeness-sign
s. Now it is significant that in this ayat Allah-ta-ala uses the physical term f
or likeness in preference to the imagistic term.
'Mutashabihat' derives from the root ShBH - 'a likeness', 'mutually resembling o
ne another'. It is the word used in Qur'an to indicate the 'likeness' placed on
the Cross when Sayyedina 'Isa was taken away from his followers. In the Cow Form
of the Qur'an, it is the word used to indicate the similarity of one cow to ano
ther. So there is no doubt here! The Divine-teaching is based on these likeness-
signs. Real learning about reality lies within these likeness-signs. In fact, pr
operly speaking, this is the only way in which the Reality-situation can be conv
eyed to human beings, and it has been the Way of all the Prophets and all the Bo
oks. The word that is elsewhere used to refer to this teaching-method in the Qur
'an is MITHAL. MThL is the root, meaning: 'to be like', 'a comparison', 'a punis
hment to be taken as an example', 'appear before the eye', 'represent', 'to mean
something', 'a pattern or image'. There is no other way that the nature of exis
tence can be conveyed to the human mind except by mithal - this is a mithal of t
hat. It is an image, a form, of the other. It is not 'the same' and it is not a
definition. You cannot pin down any aspect of this dynamic and self-renewing-pro
cess except fleetingly, on the wing - one can see the connections - if you hold
the connection and try to reify it, then the matter will elude you. This mithal
opens its nature to you by the quality of your reflection. You cannot capture it
nor physicalise it nor use it objectively. You must surrender to the mithal - a
nd let the illumination come as He wills. It is one of His means of access to yo
u and of your means of access to Him. Thus this ayat warns against discoursing a
nd interpreting where reflecting and remaining open in humility and watchfulness
are required. The people of Wisdom 'remember' - and the knowledge that comes is
the fruit of dhikr. In the language of the Sufis: the clear-sign Wisdom demands
fikr (thinking); the likeness-sign Wisdom demands dhikr (shock-awakening).
In Qur'anic language, this gives us both the Furqan (the discrimination) and the
Qur'an (the gathering-together).
The Messenger, blessings and peace be upon him, said in a famous Hadith: 'I have
been given all the words.' With this Wisdom-saying he places himself alongside
the Original Man, Sayyedina Adam, peace be upon him, who, according to Qur'an, w
as given all the names. This naming capacity was the distinguishing mark of the
human creature. Qur'an itself, as we have already pointed out, consists of large
form-units, short sign-units, words, letters and silences. The silences are an
essential part of the reading, otherwise there would be ambiguity. One of the se
crets of the Qur'an is the set of letters that are used throughout the Book mark
ing the opening of certain Suras. They are not some kind of early scribe's catal
oguing as some rather desperate Christian commentators have tried to suggest in
their attempts to invalidate the authority of the Book. There are many Hadith th
at refer to these letters, and two Suras actually bear the letters as their name
s, 'Ya-Sin' and 'Ta-Ha'. It is inevitable that we should now come to this point
where we have to examine the nature of language itself when we find that the who
le source of the Wisdom-way is and always has been through revealed Books.
The nature of a revealed Book is not merely that it should come through the reve
lation process we have just examined, but also that the language should be prepa
red for the revelation and pure enough to express the revelation - thus a Book c
omes where and when the language can 'bear' it. What we have observed is that th
e meanings spill out beyond the word and into single letters. Thus it is clear t
hat before we can understand with profundity the nature of the human situation a
nd the value of the Book, we must understand not only the words but the letters
themselves. If we do not know what letters are, and therefore what language is,
we are not going to grasp something central to the whole understanding of what a
human being is, and the Wisdom-way will be closed to us.
What we are about to examine, and it is a profound matter, must be understood to
 be one of the many fruits of the Qur'anic revelation. We are not dealing with s
omething foisted onto Islam by wayward scholars borrowing either from India or G
reece. As we have already pointed out, however, it was understandable that Musli
m scholars would be moved and fascinated to see the earlier 'archeologies' of th
eir own knowledge in the ruined Wisdom-teaching of earlier Islams, whether Pytha
gorean or Brahminic. Al-Biruni, when he went to India, had no need to borrow fro
m the decayed Shiva-ite cults he saw, but he was intrigued to perceive elements
of the sufic Wisdom he already knew so profoundly. The knowledge we are now goin
g to examine in barest outline is one that has been and is common coin among the
people of the Path since the time of the Messenger, peace be upon him.
It is in the nature of this learning, and we must re-iterate this here, that it
will continually spiral back to its departure point. So while we are now embarki
ng on a journey into the realm of letters it will inevitably encroach on our nex
t subject of study, the nature of 'stuff' itself. We are now beginning to grasp
a different picture of existence from the dualistic frame we had worked with in
our ignorant 'educational' orientation. Now we are moving into a world where we
recognise that everything is dynamic and in motion, patternings are transecting
other patternings and giving the illusion of solidities and permanences, these i
llusions take on a 'reality' which the cosmic picture constantly denies. In plac
e of the body/mind duality, we are confronted with an organic and multi-element
reality of experiential flux. We are in a world where everything is moving, melt
ing, altering, vanishing. Yet what moves and changes is structured and restructu
red according to the most delicate and vibrant order. We are beginning to recogn
ise the Act of the One in manifesting His Universe of endless forms.
As always, we begin with the affirmation of a Unity which is both indivisible an
d independent of forms. Not a 'ground' underlying, or a power standing over and
beyond, but a Reality without whereness which is total. As the Shaykh al-Akbar p
uts it:
Know, may Allah support us and you, that when existence was absolute without lim
itation, it contained the Obligator, and He is the Reality, may He be exalted, a
nd the obligated, and they are the world and the letters altogether.
We now must open ourselves to the picture of reality that is experienced by 'the
people of unveiling'. Here we are no longer trapped in the limiting zone of sen
sory experience checked by the inadequate tools of logic, but in a world that, a
s we will eventually recognise, is like the world described - but not known - by
the astro-physicist on the one hand, and the nuclear physicist on the other, on
ly the instrument that replaces the 'measuring' telescope and the destructive re
actor, is the experiencing inner-sight of the heart.
According to the Shaykh al-Akbar, there are 261 Heavens which revolve around the
letters and which are contained in His Heaven - the Malakut. The station of the
letters is derived from Elements from which the letters are composed. All the l
etters he calls 'dotted', as all letters come from the 'dot'. The 'dot' we may t
ake to be the manifestation of phenomena. And phenomenal being is itself manifes
ted from letters.
Now, there are 29 letters in the Arabic alphabet, that is, in the language creat
ed specifically for the Wisdom-revelation or 'abode'. Two letters have a particu
lar significance which we will look at later. These two are also very related. T
hese are Hamza and 'Alif. 'Alif in certain computations is seen not as a letter
at all, but as the gate of letters, the source of letters, the original letter.
Hamza as we know from the language itself usually is dependent on the 'alif for
its appearance. This gives us 28 letters when we omit one of these, and 27 if we
omit both. The 27 gives us 9 x 3, the significance of which we will shortly exa
mine. The 29 gives us the lunar month. The 29 x 9 gives us the 261 of the Heaven
s. Firstly we must establish the value of 9 in the sufic computation of reality.
It is essential to bear in mind that we are now seeing reality as unitary, with
heavens intersecting heavens, the Unseen intersecting the Seen, and with any dis
tinction which is made the reality is not split but merely looked at from one po
int of view. When another 'rank' or 'reality' is invoked, the previous one vanis
hes, for these separatenesses are in description only and not in truth. For exam
ple, if referring to the Divine Attributes, you talk of Him as being the One who
Creates and then the One who Destroys, you are not saying He is now one and the
n the other. We may examine Him as the Creator of matter but at the same time He
is destroying it - not 'later'. His Mercy and His Wrath are not separate, they
are not different, yet they are not the same. We may only approach from one side
at a time, at least in the zone of thinking. In the experience of 'tasting' how
ever we must join them. In the realm of the slave, if we say one is a Muslim and
one is a kafir we make a valid distinction, but if we talk of the Judgment and
the Weighing we can conceive of mercy for the kafir and punishment for the Musli
m, for we are approaching their situation in relation to another Divine Name or
aspect. From one point of view we are the actors and responsible, from another p
oint of view He is the Actor and He does what He wills. There is no negation but
if you adhere to one you lose the other.
We will now go to the second step from the basic affirmation of Unity. We will s
ketch here the most simple necessary framework of our cosmology, utterly derived
from the Qur'an and the Hadith.
Creation is composed of three ranks. The creation of forms is in descent from 1
through to 2 through to 3, that 'descent' being, of course, in description but n
ot in reality.
1. JABRUT: The Divine Names
(Almightiness)
2. MALAKUT: The World of Source-forms
(Dominion)
3. MULK: The world of Apparent forms
(Kingdom)
Each of these three ranks consists of three ranks. Each has an apparent reality
and a hidden reality. It, itself, is an Interspace. This term - Barzakh - is a k
ey term which we will have constant recourse to, and it is essential to our view
that every phenomenal zone of existence, whether seen or unseen, is in itself m
erely an interspace between two other zones. This means that the Seen World is a
n Interspace in itself, but so also is the World of Source-Forms in the Unseen a
nd the Jabrut where Lordship comes out to Creation from the Essence.
In our first picture we see the three ranks in their 'descent' into forms. Takin
g into account that these ranks intersect each other, let us place the ruling ra
nk of the Jabrut in the centre for it shares a face on one side with the Mulk an
d on the other with the Malakut. Here we take three aspects: Apparent: Interspac
e: Hidden. Thus the Hidden of the Mulk is the Apparent of the Jabrut, and the Hi
dden of the Jabrut is the Apparent of the Malakut. This count gives us 7 conditi
ons within the 3 ranks. Therefore the 9 ranks are in fact 7 conditions. So we ca
n approach by the 7 or the 9, it is the same.
This 9 Reality is common to the Lord and the slave, for it is the Creation, the
zone of forms, seen and unseen. Thus from the 9 this gives us 18.
Since the human presence, like the Divine Presence, or rather its source, is com
posed of these three ranks, we multiply this 7:
Therefore: 7 x 3 = 21
If from the Divine aspect we subtract 3
______
This gives us: 18.
The same from the human aspect. This gives us 18 Stations of the Kingdom.
Change perspective and we recognise the Divine interplay between the Reality and
the Creation. There are 9 Heavens for casting out - that is, the fulgurating di
splaying and giving of form-energy from the Truth, and 9 Heavens for reception i
n the form-world. The meeting place is the Kingdom. This 'meeting point' of the
Kingdom is the point of revelation where, from Casting-out, the Truth sent down
Jibril with the Message, and where the Creation, in receiving, took it through t
he Messenger.
The Truth has created 9 Heavens. There are the seven of the skies, that is the '
sky' of each of the 7 visible planets ( the other two planets of our galaxy are
only considered to exert an influence under certain very particular conditions,
for this gives us a 9), and to this we add 1 for the Kursi - that is, the Univer
se of Stars, and another 1 for the 'Arsh - the starless heaven 'beyond' the star
s or, as in our new language, 'intersecting' it. The likeness of the Universe to
the 'Arsh is that of a small ring flung onto a vast desert. The Heavens, the Ku
rsi, and the 'Arsh make the basic 9.
The next crucial step in our abandonment of the false mind/matter duality is in
the recognition of the basic nature of phenomenal existence, which is founded on
4. Phenomenal existence is based on the primal four conditions of hot / cold /
wet / dry, and to this is added no fifth. It is untenable that there be more tha
n four bases. The Shaykh al-Akbar states:
So 4 are the bases of number. 3, which is in the 4 added to 4 gives 7. 2 which i
s in them, plus these 7 is 9, and the 1 which is in the 4 plus these 9 is 10. Af
ter this the arrangement is as you wish. You do not find a number which give you
other than these 4, just as you do not find a complete number other than 6, bec
ause in it are 1/2, 1/6 , and 1/3 . So hot and dry were mixed and it was fire. H
ot and wet were mixed and it was air (i.e. heat and moisture). Cold and wet were
mixed and it was water. Cold and dry were mixed and it was earth. So look at th
e formation of the air from heat and moisture, it was the breath which is the se
nsory life and it is the mover of everything by its breath. It moved water, eart
h, and fire, and by its movement things move because it is life. These 4 are the
pillars engendered by the first matrices.
Then learn that these first matrices accord their realities to compounds solely
without mixture. So the heating from heat is not from other than it. It is the s
ame with drying up and shrivelling from dryness. When you see fire has dried up
the place from water, do not imagine that heat dried it up, because fire is comp
ounded of heat and dryness as we said. So by the heat which is in it, water is h
eated, and by the dryness drying up occurred. It is thus with pliability - which
is only from moisture: and becoming cold which is only from coldness. Heat make
s warm: coldness makes cold: moisture makes pliable: and dryness dries up. Thus
the matrices are incompatible, and are only joined in a form, but the extent whi
ch their realities accorded, and 1 is never found from them in a form. However 2
are found, either like heat and dryness as we said, in their compound, or heat
existed alone. There is only it, from it, in its isolation. Realities are in two
sections: realities found isolated in the intellect like life, knowledge, artic
ulation, and sense, and realities which are found by the existence of compoundin
g, like the sky, the world, man and stone. If you say: 'What is the cause which
joins these incompatible sources so that from their mixture appears that which a
ppears? - I reply that here is a wondrous secret and a great complexity. Its unv
eiling would be a wrong action since the intellect cannot reason it. But unveili
ng sees it
So realities grant that these matrices do not have existence in their essence at
all before the existence of complex forms from them.
Well aware that this description of things seems to be in contradiction to the s
cientific picture, he asserts that it is ignorance to lay at his door a charge o
f giving an 'unscientific' view of reality. He accepts the scientific picture, b
ut questions its ability to unfold the nature of how things are, since it starts
off with a basic division between knowledge and the knower and the known. To th
e people of the Path, while the knowers are several and 'know' differently - kno
wledge itself is One and thus all they are experiencing is a private unveiling o
f a tiny part of One Reality, and this knowledge must come out from the knower a
nd not his thoughts.
He says:
So the Reality, may He be exalted, is the One from whom we take our knowledges,
with the retreat of the heart from thought, and with the inclination to accept o
pening-experience ( i.e. that you are not a separate knower at all). It is He wh
o gives us the matter at its source without summation or confusion. So we know t
he realities for what they are based on - it is the same whether they were isola
ted or occurred with the time-structure of the formations, or Divine Realities.
Again he is indicating that you can say it this way or that way, we either see t
hings as within the phenomenal world or we see them as the Divine unfoldings, th
e description in each instance is not the thing. There is no scientific fact, th
ere are only the limited view-pictures. These are our doing. He is concerned wit
h unveiling, which comes from Reality to the slave. He quotes the ayat of the Qu
r'an which says of the Messenger: 'We have not taught him poetry, it is not seem
ly for him.' (36.69).
He comments:
Poetry is the place of summation, symbols, and riddles.
This teaching, he insists, comes through the Qur'anic revelation and through his
own Station of being Wali, it is through his direct-experience of Reality, and
therefore superior to, and other than, the human knowledges.
To return to our picture of the Cosmos: all the letters have appeared from the '
alif. It is their Heaven in spirit and in sense. There is a Heaven from which Ea
rth exists: a Heaven from which Water exists: a Heaven from which Air exists: an
d a Heaven from which Fire exists. This gives 5 existent Heavens in this picture
. Each of these Heavens revolves around certain letters and sometimes even parts
of letters.
In specifying a particular difference in the hot/wet from the other compounds, t
he Master makes a very illuminating comment. Its Heaven is not, apparently, like
that of the other combinations, but is another encircling Heaven. Had it been t
he same, he observes, that Heaven would have come to an end and its power would
have vanished as it appears in incidental life. For the hot/wet is vanishing or
moving, and its reality ends even though it does not vanish. For this reason the
Creator, may He be exalted, related to us that 'the Last Abode is Life,' (40.39
), and 'everything proclaims His praise.' (17.44).
He continues:
So the Heaven of life in pre-endless-time began pre-endless-time life in its ext
ension. It does not have a Heaven so its cycle comes to an end. Life in pre-endl
ess-time in itself belongs to the Living, and so ending is not true for it. So p
ost-endless-time life is caused by pre-endless-time life and it does not accept
end. Don't you see, that when the life of the spirits is essentially theirs, tha
t death is not valid for them? When life was in physical bodies by accident, dea
th and annihilation was based on it. So the life of the apparent body comes from
the traces of the life of the spirit even as the light of the sun which is on t
he earth comes from the sun. When the sun passes, its light follows it, and the
earth becomes dark. Thus when the spirit goes from the body to its Heaven from w
hich it came, the life diffused from it in the living body follows it, and the b
ody remains in the form of the inanimate to our eye. So it is said: 'So-and-so h
as died,' but in reality you say that he has returned to his source. 'Out of it
We created you, and We shall restore you to it, and bring You forth a second tim
e.' (20.55)
The Spirit likewise returns to its source until the Day of Rising, and the Gathe
ring will be a manifestation of the spirit to the body by means of love. So its
parts will be united and its members organised in a subtle life again. The setti
ng in motion of the members to formation is acquired by the turning of the spiri
t. So when its formation is established and the formation of dust is set up, the
spirit manifests itself to it by the gentle Israfilian call in the encircled ho
rn. So a life goes into its limbs and it becomes a shaped individual as on the f
irst time. 'Then he blows into it again, so that they stand looking while the Ea
rth is illuminated by the Light of their Lord.' (39.68-69) 'As He created you, y
ou return.' (7.29) 'Say: "He will quicken them, who originated them the first ti
me."' (36.79) 'Either happy or wretched.' (11.05).
It is clear from this picture that the existence of the letters and the meaning
of their activity has to do with the whole creation process. It is another regre
ttable result of the study of Muslim writers having filtered through the Orienta
lists that this study of letters which lies at the base of Sufism has been so lo
ng ignored, or worse, dismissed as some kind of superstitious magic. The reducti
on of the science of letters to an arcane esotericism has completely barred the
way to any serious study of Islamic Cosmology. The modern Muslims, on their part
, brought up and educated in a colonial situation with a Christian bourgeois eth
os surrounding them, had little chance of appreciating it either, so busy were t
hey grovelling before the idols of technology with which they are still, many of
 them, so deeply awed. It is no use examining this picture of a world where the
forms 'come out' of the letters unless it is clearly understood that this is a s
erious and precise description of the life-process and does not mean that the Sh
aykh with his towering intellect is naively suggesting that the beginning of thi
ngs is some kind of cosmic children's party with a lot of alphabet letters falli
ng out of the sky. It is we who must make the effort to grasp the meaning and Wi
sdom of the secrets of existence which he lays before us, bearing in mind his co
ntinual warnings which I can but re-iterate:
We travel on a different path in the understanding of these words, and that is t
hat we free our hearts from meditative speculation and we sit with the Truth by
dhikr on the carpet of courtesy, watching, with presence and preparation for the
acceptance of what He wills to us from Him, may He be exalted, until the Truth,
may He be exalted, takes possession of our instruction by unveiling and realisa
tion by what you heard Him say: 'Fear Allah, Allah teaches you.' (2.282). He say
s: 'If you fear Allah, He will assign you a furqan,' (8.29), and 'Lord, increase
me in knowledge,' (20.114), and 'We taught him knowledge from Our Presence.' (1
8.65).
Fortunately, the intellectual situation is much more open to the Wisdom-teaching
than it was in the first arrogant days when scientific methodology seemed adequ
ate to deal with any problem. In his Inaugural Address to the College de France,
the biologist Jacques Monod said: 'It is language which created humans, rather
than humans language.' When one examines the interconnecting systems of psycho-l
inguistics and structural linguistics and so on, we find that it is not the visi
on that is lacking as much as the willingness to shed an epistemology which they
inherited from the scientists and which they are terrified to leave behind. The
story is the same wherever research has taken men to the limits of logic and la
nguage and measurement and where the microcosmic structure planes out into the m
acrocosmic or vice-versa, or where the forms themselves emerge out of the fecund
Nothing they imagine they observe. Many of the findings of the biologists and p
hysicists are taking them to a point where they are being challenged to recognis
e - not the invalidity of their findings - but the underlying psychosis of their
approach. Indeed, much of what they have to say is germane to our study - that
they are trapped in a blind-alley is of their own doing, and also their own busi
ness. Here are George and Muriel Beadle, for example, coming from the realm of m
olecular biology:
The deciphering of the DNA code has revealed our possession of a language much o
lder than hieroglyphics, a language as old as life itself, a language that is th
e most living of all.
Commenting on the findings of Crick and Yanofsky in their analysis of what they
call 'the four-letter language embodied in molecules of nucleic acid', Roman Jak
obson, the linguist, observes:
We actually learn that all the detailed and specific genetic information is cont
ained in molecular coded messages, namely in their linear sequences of 'code wor
ds' or 'codons'. Each word comprises three coding sub-units termed 'nucleotide b
ases' or 'letters' of the code 'alphabet'. This alphabet consists of four differ
ing letters 'used to spell out the genetic message'. The 'dictionary' of the gen
etic code encompasses 64 distinct words which, in regard to their components, ar
e defined as 'triplets', for each of them forms a sequence of three letters. 61
of these triplets carry an individual meaning, while three are apparently used m
erely to signal the end of the genetic message.
Again a biologist addressing the College de France, this time Jacob, who says:
To the old notion of the gene, an integral structure that one used to compare to
the bead on a rosary, has succeeded that of a series of four elements repeated
in permutations. Heredity is determined by a chemical message inscribed along th
e chromosomes. The surprising thing is that genetic specificity is written, not
in ideograms as in Chinese, but in an alphabet as in French, or rather, in Morse
. The meaning of the message comes from the combination of signs into words, and
from the arrangement of words into sentences - a posteriori, this solution appe
ars the only logical one. How otherwise could such a scarcity of means secure a
similar diversity of architectural forms?
It is a sad condition of the blindness of these 'observers' of the life-process
- do not ask how they got 'outside' existence - that they are so trapped by the
role they have assigned themselves they are forced to conclude that the discrete
components are in themselves devoid of meaning. Here again is that subjective p
rojection of their own existential situation onto the so-called object-of-observ
ation. The Shaykh al-Akbar insists that if anyone makes a model he will in the e
nd only be making a model of himself. To deny meaning to the 'letter' is to deny
meaning to the 'sentence' - which is life. Yet what we see, if we have the cour
age to look clearly, at every stage of the Way, is meaning. The sentence is stru
ctured. There is, in the mechanistic language of the scientist, 'architecture'.
It is absurd to hear re-iterated at this stage of man's existence the old argume
nts about watches and watchmakers, but astonishingly they still go on. We are no
t dealing with a machine-world. We are dealing with a Reality which, first of al
l, is dealing with us. Secondly, it is not a mechanistic, inside-outside, mind/b
ody duality. Thirdly, at every stage it is structured and the unfolding of the o
rganic form-patterns comes from 'within' to outside, when it is a matter of life
-forms, and from outside to the centre when it reaches the crystalline level. Fo
rm is something that is both connected to and separate from the discrete compone
nts, as we have observed in ourselves, or should have if we have maintained our
courage to look at both ourselves and the horizon as Qur'an commands. Dependent
on a rich complex of impulses from without in the environment of place/event and
from within the inner environment of self/energies, the human face, the 'form'
of man himself changes and alters with such rapidity we can actually see it happ
en at times. Both in the immediate change of 'state' and in the long-term build-
up of altered 'states' we observe the form of man change across the discrete or
apparently discrete matter of his biological structure. We are dealing with a wo
rld which is nothing but 'meanings'.
Meaning - MA'NA - is a key word in sufic study. Here is its root: 'Meaning'; 'mi
nd-image'; 'considered as having a word applied to denote it'; 'being intended b
y a word'; 'what the word indicates.'
In the Diwan of the Shaykh al-Kamil he says:
Oh you who desire the presence of being an eyewitness,
you must rise above the spirit and the forms -
and cling to the original Void - and be as if
you were not, oh annihilated!
Truly, you will see existence by a secret
whose meanings have spread in every age.
None of the images of action and entity
multiply the Actor in any way.
So whoever rises above every vanishing thing
will be shown existence without duality.
In his song, 'Withdrawal into the Perception of the Essence', Allah speaks:
The Attributes of My Essence were hidden,
and they were manifested in the existence-traces.
Truly, created beings are meanings set up in images.
All who grasp this are among the people of discrimination.
In the root definition of ma'na we come back to the pivotal balance between lett
ers and the appearance of forms. It is what is intended by the word. At the core
of this we have the sufic teaching about the Name itself from which all the nam
es come.
On this teaching Shaykh al-Kalabadhi says:
Some of the Masters maintain that the Names of Allah are neither Allah nor other
-than-Allah: this is parallel to their doctrine concerning the Attributes. Other
s hold the view that the names of Allah are Allah.
Both of these are two ways of saying the same thing, only one makes a distinctio
n in description. The teaching of Harith al-Muhasibi is the most pure, which tea
ches that Allah's speech consists of the letters and the sounds and that these a
re Attributes of Allah uncreated in His Essence.
We note the scientists use the word 'dictionary' to denote the source-book of th
e coding - to the people of the Path such a projective image is inadequate. When
 Qur'an, the Book of the Books that we have, which is in turn merely the manifes
t version of the Hidden Book, states that everything is written in a manifest Bo
ok, we recognise that the record is the Reality itself in its unfolding. When it
says that 'everyone has their Book,' we recognise not only the record of the de
stiny which is written in the cells, but the record of the cells which was writt
en in the destiny before it took place.
Roman Jakobson, a linguist who is profoundly aware of the metaphysical implicati
ons of his science, states:
How should one interpret all these salient homologies between the genetic code w
hich 'appears to be essentially the same in all organisms' (J.D. Watson: 'Molecu
lar Biology of the Genes') and the architectonic model underlying the verbal cod
es of all human languages, and, nota bene, shared by no semiotic systems other t
han natural language or its substitutes. The questions of these isomorphic featu
res become particularly instructive when we realise that they find no analogue i
n any system of animal communication.
We must emphasise that there is no suggestion that the scientists are proving an
ything, but one can valuably assimilate their observations when they are made wi
th such clarity of vision - but from our point of view it is the scientist who h
as to come to terms with the basic problems underlying his position of fantasy-o
bjectivity and dualistic language with all its pitfalls of teleology and so on w
hich only have meaning while the whole thing remains 'a problem' that they arrog
antly imagine they are 'solving'.
Our picture of language - of the letters - is that they are the very creation pr
ocess - the appearance of the phenomenal forms. The letters which appear at the
very beginning of the form-situation (when the four basic conditions - hot, cold
, wet, dry, mix - and the four basic elements emerge - air, earth, fire, water,
which give us the creation) are surrounded by Heavens, by angelic activity, by o
rbit, therefore movement and activity. Within the creation the letters unfold th
eir messages of form until man himself emerges in the 'solid' world. When Sayyed
ina Adam manifests, he is given, in the Qur'anic expression, 'all the names.' It
is this that marks him out as man, the Khalif of Allah in His creation. For, on
ce there are forms - once there is a creation - then Allah is Hidden because He
is Manifest everywhere. Once He is Hidden, He leaves His Khalif - for the Khalif
is the one who stands in during the absence of the King. The language of Adam,
and the languages of the adamic peoples, are nothing other than the 'knowing' of
the creational original letters. Just as language is built into the cells at th
e molecular level, so it comes out from man in his molecular totality. That is w
hy when we examine the Arabic language, which is, remember, the oldest of the se
mitic group, we find that in its root condition, everything connects to a specif
ic existential or phenomenal reality, as we have seen throughout this work.
Part of the blindness of the modern Muslims to their own spiritual heritage has
been their deep lack of understanding of the Arabic language. They have reduced
the language which was created for the Wisdom-transaction to nothing more than a
mercantile exchange transaction. A modern Arabic dictionary reveals a complete
break in the language from its roots, an abstracting from the root-specificity a
nd a disastrous annexation of the mercantile coding of the bourgeois society whi
ch has so successfully conquered them by its supremacy of values over the Wisdom
-Way which always yields to the force of greed and power and ambition. It is not
that the Christian bourgeois society is superior to the Wisdom-transaction - si
mply that men have abandoned it and corrupted it enough to allow the other its s
upremacy.
This creation-picture of reality as a Book which unfolds its meanings and story
is emerging in a profounder light than the original idea that we entertained of
it being merely some primitive myth. Qur'an says:
Nought of disaster befalls in the earth or in yourselves but it is in a Book bef
ore We bring it into being - Lo! that is easy for Allah. (Qur'an 57.22)
Our last task will be to look at the time-picture and the time/space reality in
which we find ourselves in the light of this Wisdom-teaching. For we have alread
y arrived at a position where we are forced to recognise the illusory nature of
time. We cannot understand the meaning of the forms coming-into existence, the e
ncoding of the organism, unless we grasp the constancy of the creation-situation
. Look again at the description that the Shaykh al-Akbar gives of the human bein
g's life, death and continuation (pages 171-2) and you are opening to a totally
new vision of how-it-is. In this picture of existence, the Qur'an is not merely
the Book of Changes, but it is the Source-Book of Forms, al-Mutashabih, The Conf
ormable-in-all-its-parts, for that is the nature of the great cosmic reality of
the Universe. By extension, it is not merely the Book of Forms, it is itself com
pounded of the stuff of existence, it is dynamic, active and effective - as well
as containing the discrimination-practice about such existential matters as mar
riage, divorce and weaning and war, and the unitary teaching about the Truth, it
is itself a living and activating energy-process which, once read or recited, t
akes on an alchemical power which transmutes the situation into which it manifes
ts its letters and sounds into the air and into the hearts of the listeners in t
he Seen and the Unseen realities.
'The letters,' says the Shaykh al-Akbar, 'are the Imams of preservation.' It is
they which 'uphold' the space/time reality of the organism, it is their underlyi
ng, hidden reality at the genetic level that sustains the being in its existence
of duration/state. It is they which act in the bringing into existence from the
Names the myriad forms of creation. The Master explains further:
Know, may Allah give us and you success, that the letters are one of the communi
ties, speaking and obligated. There are Messengers in them from themselves, and
they have names in respect to them. Only the people of unveiling from our Path k
now this. They have divisions in practice They have a Shari'a which they worship
by, and they have both subtleties and densities.
The Interspace between the letters and the Names, the source of all letters, is
the 'Alif, whose numerical value is 1. Of it he says:
The 'Alif is not from the letters with whoever smells a scent of the realities,
but the common folk call it a letter. So when the Realised say that it is a lett
er, they say that by way of metaphor in expression. The dot of the circle encomp
assment, the simple and complex of the worlds, are neither in it nor out of it.
Another letter that moves about in its significance, and thus makes for a differ
ence in calculation depending on its specific role in that particular picture, i
s Hamza. He explains its particular function thus:
The Hamza intersects time and unites whatever it is near to, from separation.
It is time (dahr) and its power is great. It is beyond being contained in the st
riking of a mithal.
The appended charts will give you a first outline of the letters and their Heave
ns, their inter-relatedness, and their elemental nature.
Chart 1 : The Four Matrices of hot / dry / cold / wet.
Chart 2 : The Movement of the Heavens which create the four matrices which give
the four elements.
Chart 3 : The Creation as a 7 / 9 unfolding: manifesting the elements.
Chart 4 : The Creation showing the zones of the letters.
Chart 5 : The Heavens of the Four Elements.
This is followed by individual charts of each of the 29 letters of the alphabet.
After the letters come the vowels, and the vowels of the letters are 6. They ent
er into the letters after their shaping. So then:
There is another growth called a word, as the bringing-together in a person make
s man. Thus the world of words and phrases grows from the world of letters. So t
he letters belong to the words in affection like water, earth, fire and air belo
ng to the setting up of the growth of bodies.
With the zone of word-to-phrase, or word-to-sign, if we stick to the Qur'anic la
nguage we enter a further complexification of the different patterns of existenc
e. Realities arise due to this organisation of letter units.
These realities which are from organisation exist by its existence and vanish wi
th its non-existence. So the reality of 'animal' only exists with the authorship
of vocable intelligible realities in their essence, and they are body, nutritio
n and sense. When body, nutrition and sense are combined then the reality of 'an
imal' appears. It is not the body alone, nor the nutrition alone, nor the sense
alone. If the reality of feeling falls away while body and nutrition remain, the
n you say 'plant', a reality which is not the first one.
The Shaykh al-Akbar outlines three vital aspects that make up existence. He call
s these: the Wealthy Independent Essence - the Sufficiency: a poor essence that
is dependent upon the former: a third essence that is the connecting essence by
which the second is dependent. He links these three aspects of Lord: slave: sour
ce-form: to the very nature of language itself. So we then define language as be
ing contained also in three realities, the same three - essence: occurrence: con
nection.
This gives us: Noun / Essence -
Verb / Occurrence -
Preposition / Connection.
This third connecting term we will examine in full in the next stage of our sear
ch. It is enough for the moment to observe the unifying principle of the teachin
g as it follows the structuring of language and relates it to the complexificati
on of existence itself.
A further aspect of language comes when we go from the separate words to the phr
ases, the signs. Here phrases are seen to be on four divisions which are the mat
rices, like coldness, heat, dryness, and wetness in the elements. These are:
1) Clear phrases: nouns, intransitives like ocean, key, scissors.
2) Understood phrases: which have an accepted designation of type: like man and
woman.
3) Homonyms: phrases of one form with differences of meaning, like 'ayn - eye/so
urce: mushtari - seller/buyer: insan - man/pupil of the eye.
4) Synonyms: words with different forms which indicate one meaning: lion - asad,
hizabr, ghadanfar: sword - sayf, husam, sarim: wine - khamr, rahiq, sahba', kha
ndaris.
So we now find ourselves with language which is here to tell us about the realit
y of our existence.
The Qur'an, when we examine it, instructs us in two means of approach to the Rea
lity. At first glance they are utterly contradictory. One tells us that no form
or concept may describe or circumscribe the Reality, that is beyond association.
On the other hand, we find the Book full of phrases which seem in blatant contr
adiction to this - we read of His hand, and that He settled on the Throne, and s
o on. We now have to extend this picture we have of existence in its intricate i
nter-relatedness, the cosmic reality in all its vastness and complexity crowned
by this self-aware creation, Man, and recognise him as both Khalif of the Divine
Reality and slave. We have to examine how the exalted Lord and the slave are 'c
onnected', and the nature of the connection, given that we can connect nothing t
o Him.
We have reached a point where we must ask questions about the nature of knowledg
e, and the nature of the creational realities, in order to understand the meanin
g of the Tawhid, the Unity itself.