The Muslim ritual prayer (Salah) has been described as: The Pillar of the Religion; The Discriminator between Faith and Infidelity. The Ascension of the Believer; The “coolness of my eyes”… how is it all these and more?
The Muslim ritual prayer (Salah) has been described as: The Pillar of the Religion; The Discriminator between Faith and Infidelity. The Ascension of the Believer; The “coolness of my eyes”… how is it all these and more?
This lecture is a follow up on the “Why Hijab” lecture. It will address the specific Quranic verses, relevant hadith and scholarly opinions about the issue of women’s public attire. This second event will allow for more directed attention to the ‘fiqh’ isses of hijab and hopefully answer some fo the lingering questions from the ‘Why Hijab’ lecture.
This lecture is a follow up on the “Why Hijab” lecture. It will address the specific Quranic verses, relevant hadith and scholarly opinions about the issue of women’s public attire. This second event will allow for more directed attention to the ‘fiqh’ isses of hijab and hopefully answer some fo the lingering questions from the ‘Why Hijab’ lecture.
The issue of veiling (hijab) is becoming more and more controversial in today’s society. Questions arise on its’ appropriateness in today’s society and the Islamic sources of its requirement. Women who wear the veil are at the frontline of discrimination and misunderstanding. This free event is intended to shed some light on the issue of hijab in Islam, its purpose and wisdom.
All of us are children of modernity and the thought under which it is hinged, a world view fashioned by the most pervasive intellectual and moral influences of recent European history, an outlook in conformity with the Zeitgeist of the times. Seyyed Hossein Nasr has noted that modernist tendencies fall under four general marks:
a) Anthropomorphism (and by extension, secularism), or homocentrism
b) Evolutionist progressivism
c) The absence of any sense of the sacred; and
d) An unrelieved ignorance of meta-physical principles
From these four underlying facets characterizing modernity arise arrays of inter-related “mindsets” and “-isms”: scientism, rationalism, relativism, materialism, positivism, empiricism, evolutionism, psychologism, individualism, humanism, and existentialism.
Behind this bizarre assortment of ideologies which have proliferated in the last few centuries we can discern a growing and persistent ignorance concerning ultimate realities and an indifference, if not always an overt hostility, to the eternal verities conveyed by heavenly tradition. Not without reason did William Blake characterize the modern worldview as “Single Vision,” a horizontal understanding of reality which strips the “outer” world of its mystery, its grandeur and its revelatory function, and denies our human vocation as the “arks of God.”
This is an apt metaphor, it is as the prophetic tradition: “Indeed God has vessels among the people of the earth, the vessels of your Lord are the hearts of His wholesomely, righteous servants; the most beloved to Him are those which are the most clear and most compassionate”.
We, the faith community of Muhammad, are trustees of God in conveying in this time the heavenly tradition, or “Din Samawī”; of “rediscovering” it within our own “dar’l Islam”, and extending it to all the other sons and daughters of Adam beguiled by the wiles of modernity. Unlike Karl Marx, a ‘prophet’ of modernity who said: “Humanism is the denial of God and the total affirmation of man”, we speak from a different cosmological platform.
Every aspect of the “Din” as articulated so eloquently in the Gabriel Hadith is about re-directing those of humanity who respond, to the vertical, heavenly axial reality which defines our Adamic heritage. It is of no insignificance that the concepts of “jiha, tawajjuh and qibla” are so fundamental to the Muhammadan dispensation.
Seminally the prayer of Abraham, “I turn my face to that which created the heavens and the earth, hanifan, submissive; my prayer and sacrifice, my living and dying are for God, Lord of all creation”; lays out the foundation of this divine compass that redirects us homeward, that is heavenly, for his laying the foundation of the Kaaba and Muhammads restoring it to primacy are acts of this redirecting.
Interestingly William Shaddon of Columbia Universities College of Physicians has noticed:
Continued observation in clinical practice leads almost inevitably to the conclusion that deeper and more fundamental than sexuality, deeper than the craving for social power, deeper even than the desire for possessions, there is a still more generalized and universal craving in the human makeup. It is craving for the knowledge of the right direction –for orientation.
Huston Smith has noted that one of the characteristics of the now post modern age is one where direction is lost, he has written:
If we think of contemporary Westerners from all walks of life and the numberless directions in which their hopes and thoughts extend, we can only conclude what has become a truism: no comprehensive vision, no concerted sense of reality, informs our age. The opening lines of Dante’s Divine Comedy could have been written for our twenty-first-century’s Everyman:
Midway this way of life we’re bound upon
I woke to find myself in a dark wood,
Where the right road was wholly lost and gone.
The orienting affect of Heavenly Prophetic Religion, “Din”, is of crucial significance in our time, a time of where the voice of Nietzsche’s madman cries out “I seek God”! When amused bystanders asked if he had imagined that God had emigrated or taken a holiday, the madman glared. “Where has God gone?” he demanded. “We have killed him–you and I! We are all his murderers!” In a sense he is right, for when ritual and prayer that have their origin in heavenly realms is stripped from humanity, then mankind’s connectedness to their paradisial origin is severed, their vision is limited to the horizontal, the flat, and the vertically ascending is undone. The reality of “Ritual prayer is the ascension of the believer”is lost.
Every aspect of Islam as enumerated by the Messenger of God when Gabriel asked him: “Inform me as to Islam”; is about redirecting those who emulate him in one aspect or another of something which is of the Garden. Two are of particular significance: ritual prayer and pilgrimage.
In ritual prayer we enter into angelic, heavenly realms. The practitioner of ritual prayer clothes his or herself in angelic acts. The Messenger of Allah said, “Should you not array yourselves in prayer as the angels are arrayed before their Lord?” We asked, “O Messenger of Allah, how do the angels array themselves before their Lord?” He said, “They complete the first rows, packing themselves therein.” [Muslim] Every constituent act in the prayer: the standing and bowing, prostrating and sitting are each angelic, for the angels are thus before their Lord. It was Gabriel who taught the Messenger of Allah the prayer and it was during the Ascension where he received while in intimate proximity to his Lord the divine ordinance for their time specific collective performance.
Beginning at the center of the world, the Kaaba, where the heavenly and earthly realms join, and radiating outwardly there from the community of faith direct their faces “tawajjuh” towards that structure whose significance for many has become blurred. For it is an earthly manifestation of something more real and enduring, the “Bait l’Mamur” located in the seventh ‘tabaqa’ in the paradisial hierarchies. Each practitioner of the prayer, whether collectively or individually, aligns his or herself towards that point where the heavenly axis intersects the horizontal earthly reality. This is a profound act breaking William Bakes “Single Vision”.
Significantly on the Night of the Ascension, or Layla l’M’iraj, the Messenger of Allah meets his father Abraham leaning next to the “Bait l’Mamur”. He described the frequently visited house as one in which in a day and night numerous angels enter into it not to enter into it again and that they circumambulate it, a paradisial manifestation with definite earthly parallels.
The Muhammadan ascension is the corrective, or “islah” to the Adamic decent, or “Hubut” into the world. His ascension transcends his father Adam whom he meets in the first “tabaqa” of the paradisial hierarchies; he ascends through those hierarchies, past Moses and Abraham until his final arrival is to the Sidrat l’Muntaha, the place where angelic knowledge ends, but he goes beyond this, to a place where he is privy to intimate divine discourse.
With his return to the “dunya” Muhammad has set in place a means by which any individual who practices “i’tiba” of him will acquire through prophetic inheritance ultimate restoration to his or her final “ma’wa”, or arrival point.
Though the Night of Ascension was a time specific, fully bodily and real experience for the Messenger of Allah, each individual who enters into the “haram sharif” approaching the Kaaba, either in the season of the Hajj or during an act of ‘umra, can experience a ‘shadowy’ something of that heavenly event by passing the station of Abraham, Maqam Ibrahīm, and proceeding on into the time honored flow of the unsegregated bodies of believers, men and women in their participation with the angels in “tawwawf”. Thus in these acts again humanity is invited to have a ‘taste’ of the lofty, heavenly truths which await them in their true ‘home’ to which God calls them. “Indeed God invites to the abode of peace”!
The essential nature of true heavenly religion is that it is ever fresh, and always germane to both our immediate condition and to our ultimate destiny. But it can affectively only be so when a properly grounded understanding or “fiqh” of it exists for us. Did not the Messenger of God say, “When God desires good for a person He gives him a comprehensive knowledge of the din?”
This knowledge though is not from the myriad “isms” and “mindsets” which were listed at the beginning of our discussion. The “din” articulated by Gabriel is comprehensive: bodily, intellectually and experientially; respectively, islam, iman and ihsan. Unless these three are brought into union, or “tawhīd”, then the “Din” can not ameliorate the malaise which afflicts both Muslims and non-Muslims. Striving to recover an authentic Islamic intellectual as well as spiritual tradition is essential for us.
As humankind has exhibited a tendency to be heedless of tawhīd and to forget and ignore its implications, the Quran states that God has sent messengers to remind them of this essential truth. It is in this spirit that the Quran tells us, “Verily this is a reminder” (73:19, 76:29). This reminder is the truth of tawhīd, a truth expressed in the first testimony of faith, “There is no god but God” (la ilaha illa Lah). It is to remind humankind of this truth that every prophet has been sent. In the Quran, God specifically addresses Moses: “I am God! There is no god but I. So worship Me” (20:14). The seventh chapter of the Quran tells us that the Prophets Noah, Hud, Salih, and Shu’ayb all said to their people in different lands and in different ages, “O my people! Worship God! You have no other god but Him” (7:59, 65, 73, and 85). In another passage we are told, “Ask those of Our messengers We sent before thee: Have We appointed gods to be worshiped apart from the Merciful? (43:45) But the answer to this has already been given:”And we never sent a messenger before thee except that We revealed to him, saying, ‘There is no god but I, so serve Me’” (21:25). It is a fundamental principle of the Quran that every human collectivity has been sent a prophet: “And we have sent to every people a messenger that they may worship God” (16:36). Every human collectivity has thus been sent a reminder of tawhīd and its consequences. From this perspective, the purpose of revelation is not to bring a new truth, but to reaffirm the one truth, the only truth that is, the only truth that has ever been.
From another perspective the central message of the Quran finds expression in the verse: “Truth has come and falsehood has vanished. Falsehood is ever bound to vanish!” (18:81). In this spirit the text reads, “And we have made the book descend as a clarification for all things” (16:89). The emphasis in this Quranic rubric is to experience this clarification and thus to know; as is revealed, “We have made it descent as an Arabic Quran that you may now” (12:2). Such verses do not refer to a knowledge experienced through transmission from one generation to the next; rather, they call humankind to an immediate knowledge of things as they are in themselves (kama hiya). To posses such knowledge is the human norm, the fitra. The function of the Islamic intellectual tradition is therefore not only to transmit and preserve textual authority which clarifies tawhīd form one generation to the next, but moreover to cultivate God-centered intellect and authentic spiritual awareness by which one is able to aver this basic truth through one’s own experience and consciousness.
We need in these days a new metanoia, or ‘change of mind’. It is as the renowned renewer of the faith of seventeenth century India, Ahmad Sirhindi noted in that one must be of either an ‘aqal ma’ash’ or ‘aqal ma’ad’, either with a ‘mindset for this world’ or a ‘mindset of everlastingness’. This requires therefore a re-orientation of ourselves a shift in our direction, a tawba, a return back, ruju’. Ours is a tradition of sacredness that rests upon generational transmission, as Ibn Sirin one of the foremost companions of the Sahaba noted, “Indeed this knowledge is the Din, so be aware from whom you take your din”. The knowledge he was speaking of specifically was of transmitted prophetic narratives, hadith, but for us it can be extended to all the categories and types of sacred knowledge which through sanad, or transmission have generationally sustained this sacred community who are the heirs to prophetic knowledge. When we with conscious and diligent effort restore this knowledge to our local communities we will be able to begin to replace the anthropomorphic, homo-centric and secular world view with a theocentric heavenly oriented one and the sacred, meta-physical realities of which heavenly tradition and religion affirm can be restored to the sons and daughters of Adam as is their birthright.
is a popular statement we quote to delineate that in Islam there is no withdrawal from the world. There is no unnaturalness and synthetic in Islam but only the organic and primordial. True, in the Christian and Buddhist expressions, indeed this may be so, but what this statement does mean is that contemplatives (dhakirun/dhakirat) must not withdraw from the world, but that the world must be withdrawn from them, the intrinsic idea of asceticism and meditative contemplation upon Allah is in no way affected.
Allah the Exalted says:
O my people, indeed this life, the lower world, is a temporary delight, the life to come; it is the abode of perpetual abiding.
Allah the exalted used in this verse a derivative of the verb mataa’ which has the lexical meaning of ‘to carry away, to take away’, while also having the meaning of ‘to make joyful, to give joy’. So there is the combined meaning implied in the usage of this word of a joy given temporarily, one that is to be withdrawn eventually.
The Messenger of Allah (alayhis salam) was asked how one could gain the love of Allah and simultaneously the love of people. He answered:
Be abstinent in the world, and Allah will love you. Abstain from what is in the people’s hands and they will love you. [Ibn Majah]
Allah the Exalted in speaking of the peoples of previous dispensations says:
You shall find the closest to you in love/kindness shown to the believers those who say we are Christians, for among them are priests and monastists, and they are not arrogant. [5:86]
As for the verses which dispraise monastists, scholars such as Suyuti say it is due to their celibacy primarily, not due to their being contemplative nor due to the service orientation their orders dedicate themselves.
If monasticism is defined as ‘withdrawal for God’, then indeed it exists in the Islamic tradition, yet in a form that may be described as ‘monasterial-society’. For the traditional monastic orders are based upon:
Firstly, contemplation of the Divine, for the monk aspires to preserve a solitude wherein the divine is not forgotten but constantly remembered. The Quran enjoins upon the believers constant reflection and contemplation of the Divine by His statement:
Those who remember Allah standing, sitting, and reclining upon their sides; and reflect upon the creation of the heavens and the earth (saying),’Our Lord, You have not created this in vain, exalted are You, guard us from the fire’! [3:191]
When the Messenger of Allah (alayhis salam) was asked about a deed one could do when it seemed that the demands of the Sacred Law were overwhelming, he said:
Let your tongue be constantly moistened by the remembrance of Allah. [Tirmadhi, Ibn Maja]
Secondly, most orders have an embodiment of an ideal by which they base their outward practices: their daily prayers, litanies, vigils, etc. For the believers it is the Messenger of Allah (alayhis salam) . There is no need to cite relevant Quranic verses which substantiate this. The Messenger of Allah (alayhis salam) said:
Allah is pure and only accepts that which is pure, indeed Allah the Exalted has commanded the believers that to which He has commanded the Messengers. [Muslim]
He said: The one who abandons my way, is not from me.
Herein he was speaking specifically of celibacy and extreme excessiveness in the practice of austerities. He described himself as:
What am I and what is the world, indeed the similitude of myself and that of the world is as a rider who takes rest in the shade of a tree then continues his journey leaving it behind. [Tirmadhi, Ahmad: Hasan Sahih]
Here clearly showing his reality of being dis-attached from the world that would imply any permanence in it. For he advised his companions, such as Salman al-Farsi and Abdullah ibn Umar when he said to them:
Be in the world as if you are a foreigner, or a sojourner.
Man was created alone and he dies alone; the Islamic aspiration is to preserve this solitude in its metaphysically irreplaceable aspects. It aims to restore to man his primordial solitude before God, or said differently, it wants to bring man back to his spiritual integrity and to his totality. Islam is in a sense an organized eremitism.
In the temporal dimension that stretches ahead of us there are only three certitudes: that of death, that of judgment, and that of everlasting life or death i.e., the life of the Garden or the ‘death’ that is the separation from the divine grace found in the Fire. We have no power over the past, except in seeking Allah’s forgiveness for errors committed and His divine acceptance of good attained, and we do not know the future. As far as the future is concerned we have but these three certitudes, yet, be we possess a fourth in this very moment, and that fourth is all: it is that of our actuality, of our present liberty to choose Allah and thus to choose our whole destiny. In this instant, this present, we hold our whole life, our whole existence. All is good if this instant is good if we know how to fix our life in this hallowed instant; for the secret of spiritual faithfulness lies in dwelling in this instant, in renewing it and perpetuating it by comprehensive dhikr, in holding on to it be means of spiritual rhythm, in enclosing wholly within it the time that floods over us and threatens to drag us far away from this “divine moment”. It is as the words of Hasan Basri:
O son of Adam, you are but a number of days and when a day is gone part of you is gone.
This condensation of the existential dimensions—insofar as they are indefinite and arbitrary—into a hallowed unity is at the same time the very thing that constitutes the essence of man; the rest is contingency and accident. This a truth that concerns every human being; the believer too is not a being apart, but simply a prototype or a model, or a spiritual specification, a landmark: every man, because he is a man, should realize in one way or another this victory over a world that disperses and over life that enslaves. Too many people think that they have not time to meditate on Allah, to worship Him sincerely, to draw near to Him, but this is an illusion due to indifference (ghafla) which is the worst sickness of the soul. The many moments we fill with our habitual dreams, including our all too often useless reflections, are moments we take away from Allah and ultimately from ourselves.
The great mission before us as believers is to show to the world that contentment does not lie somewhere far away in a treasure to be sought or in a world to be built, but here where we belong to Allah. The believer represents, in the face of a dehumanized world, what our true standards are; the believers mission is to remind men and women what it means to be human.
Thoughts on Quran
©2005
“If you would trust in God as is His right to be trusted He would give you your provision as He gives it to the birds, they leave their roosts hungry and return satiated”, said the final universal Messenger, Muhammad. Similarly the author of the Gospel of Mathew has his closest brother, Jesus saying to the crowds around him, “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?” A little later he addressed them as, “O you of little faith?”
The word faith originally meant something akin to placing one’s trust in someone as when we say we have ‘faith’ in a friend or in an ideal. As Karen Armstrong said, “Faith was not an intellectual position but a virtue: it was the careful cultivation, by means of rituals and myths of religion, of the conviction that despite all the dispiriting evidence to the contrary, life had some ultimate meaning and value”.
It is the dis-ease of the modern age that this understanding of faith being something inherently holistic that renders the heavenly dispensations perplexing to the children of modernity. The Quran states, “It is not piety that you turn your faces to the east or west, but piety is a person who believes in God… These words are quite significant in their Arabic original, unfortunately their fecundity being lost in the English translations. For clearly they indicate that their must be an engendered personification of an abstraction, an idea of ‘piety’, or bir, and that the locus of this accident is man. Bir, piety as the great Quranic exegete as-Suyuti said: “is the doing of good, in all its manifest realities”. Reflexively the author of Acts has Peter saying when asked to describe Jesus as, “…he went around doing good and healing all who were under the power of the devil, because God was with him”. This is of the prophetic legacy and largesse.
The Prophet Muhammad said once, “Mankind are the dependents, or family of God, and the most beloved of them to God are those who are the most excellent to His dependents”. It is in loving our brothers that true anchoring faith is manifested, for he said, “Not one of you believes until he loves for his brother what he loves for himself”. Great Muslim scholars of prophetic tradition such as Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani and Sharafuddin an_Nawawi have said that the words ‘his brother’, or akheehee, mean any person irrespective of faith. Similarly, the author of the Gospel of Luke has written concerning Jesus: On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher”, he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” “What is written in the Law?” He replied, “How do you read it?” He answered: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and with all your strength and with your entire mind’, and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’” Of course this the parable of the Good Samaritan, someone outside the orthodox Jewish tradition, yet a man manifesting the doing of good which characterizes the people of God. Seeing beyond ourselves, to others is quintessential to true heavenly religion, something inherently antithetical to modernity.
Individualism uniquely characterizes modernity; in the language of classical Islamic spirituality it is called annaaniyya. It impedes us from being able to walk in the footsteps of Jesus and Muhammad. As Huston Smith rightly says when speaking of it: Modernity induces us to believe that there is no right higher than the right to choose what one believes, wants, needs or must posses. This gives us ‘the culture of narcissism’. Yet, heavenly dispensations seek from us the setting aside of our ‘annaniyya’, our ‘I-ness’. This is the prophetic norm, demanding of us emulation.
Emulation is cardinal in the divine economy. The author of the Gospel of Matthew has Jesus saying: A student is not above his teacher, nor a servant above his master. It is enough for the student to be like his teacher, and the servant like his master. Muhammad in speaking of ritual prayer said to his companions: “Pray as you have seen me pray”. And God in speaking to the community of Muhammad says: If you love Me, then follow me and God will love you. For God situates between the sons and daughters of Adam prophets, that their faith is known in their setting aside themselves in preference to the prophet if their community. Again the author of the Gospel of Mathew has Jesus say: Anyone who loves his father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves his son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Anyone who does not take hsi cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake shall find it. Muhammad said: Not one of you truly believes until I am more beloved to him than his parent, child and all mankind!
When Moses asks God as to whom will he say has sent him to Pharaoh, the 2nd Century BCE Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible known as the Septuagint has God saying ‘ego eimi ho On’, or ‘I am that which is’. Similarly God through the Quran in speaking to Moses says at the burning bush, “Indeed it is I, your Lord, remove your sandals, for you are in the sacred valley of Tuwa, I have chosen you, so listen carefully to what is revealed, ‘Indeed I, I am God, there is no deity save for Me, worship Me and establish ritual prayer for My remembrance.” For Moses is to be sent to a man who transgresses, ‘God to Pharaoh for indeed he has transgressed’, but when Moses confronts him Pharaoh’s response is to address his own people and say , “I am your lord most high”. It is this pharonic self description of the divine prerogative of true ‘I-ness’ that was his down fall and the bane of modern man.
Willaim Shaddon of Columbia University’s College of Physicians when reflecting back on his career remarked: “Continued observation in clinical practices leads almost inevitably to the conclusion that deeper and more fundamental than sexuality, deeper than the craving for social power, deeper even than the desire for possessions, there is a still more generalized and universal craving in the human makeup. It is craving for the knowledge of the right direction—for orientation”.
Muhammad and Jesus both came into the world, as the prophets before them, to keep God-centeredness the Reality which supersedes all other realities. That the axis about which individuals, communities and ultimately civilizations pivot themselves upon is the vertical heavenly axis, not the horizontal ‘forward’ that is of modernity as Archibald MacLeith said, “a world ends when its metaphor dies, and modernity’s metaphor—endless progress through science-powered technology—is dead”. Both Jesus and Muhammad had their ascensions, for the Christians, Jesus’ return is an expectation; for the Muslims, Muhammad’s return brought them heavenly provision that restores mankind, that first and foremost engendered in ritual prayer. The standing towards the qibla, the physical act direction of ‘turning’ one’s face towards the Kaaba, itself an earthy reflection of a paradisial, heavenly structure, the Bait l’M’amur, is about finding orientation. So when man can not immediately ascend to heaven, God facilitates by manifesting something of it in the here and now of his earthly existence. Thus, in the upwardness of these ascensions points the prophetic compass; an indication, or ayat, for the people of God.
In 1882 Nietzsche in his The Gay Science declared that God was dead. He told the parable of a madman running one morning into the marketplace crying out ‘I seek god!’ When the amused bystanders asked if he imagined that God had emigrated or taken a holiday, the madman glared. “Where has God gone?” he demanded. “We have killed him—you and I! We are all his murderers!” Nietzsche’s madman believed that the death of God had torn humanity from its roots, thrown the earth off course, and cast it adrift in a pathless universe. Everything that had once given human beings a sense of ultimate direction had vanished. “Is there still an above and below?” he had asked. “Do we not stray, as though through an infinite nothingness?” Without the compass of prophetic inheritance, the whole dynamic of our future-oriented, forward thinking, progressive culture renders us unable to orient ourselves. Perhaps it was the bitter fruit of this that William Shaddon had observed in the years of his clinical practice. The paths laid out by Jesus and Muhammad become impossible to discern, and we become as the jurists of Islamic sacred law in describing a drunken man as being one who can not discriminate between up from down.
Without God as the center, the heart of a man does not, however, remain a void, but is filled with something else, namely himself, as Karl Marx a ‘prophet’ of the new age said: “Humanism is the denial of God and the total affirmation of man.” The author of Luke has Jesus in the Parable of the Sower saying: “But the seed on good soil stands for those with a noble and good heart, who hear the word, retain it and by persevering produce a crop.” Muhammad five centuries later affirms his brothers teaching by saying, “Indeed God has vessels among the people of the Earth, the vessels of your Lord are the hearts of His wholesomely righteous servants, the most beloved to Him are those which are most clear and gentle.” He also said, “Is there not a morsel of flesh in the body that if it is healthy the whole body is healthy and if it is corrupted the whole body is corrupted? Is it not the heart?” We must ask ourselves, what does modern man know of the heart as spoken of by Yeshua and Muhammad, for it has become peripheral and the mind has taken center stage. As the Quran teaches it is not the eyes of the head that are blind but the eye of the heart, it is the eyes of the head that are from the gateways to the intellects understanding of reality, again horizontal, but it is the heart that receives what it does from the divine from the heavenly, or vertical.
Jesus in speaking of the heart spoke of persevering and thus ‘produce a good crop’. God uses similar language in the Quran when He affirms, “Indeed the believers are successful!”, again the English misses the strength of the original Arabic. The word ‘falaah’, translated as success, linguistically means to cultivate the land and produce an abundant crop, the word ‘fallaah’ meaning farmer and husbandman of the soil. Speaking of the soul God says, “Indeed acquiring abundance is for the one who purifies it, and laid to waste is the one who debases it!” Acquiring of this ‘abundance’ is in knowing how this is done not that it is to be done. The alchemists of old searched for a tincture that would turn all metals into gold, it seems modern man with all his material based advancements fails to have the skill to undertake this let alone knowledge of the alchemy of the heart.
Muhammad said: “Every heavenly dispensation [deen] has a unique character trait, the character trait of Islam is modesty, or haya”. Haya is a derivative of the word hayya, which means to live. Every prophetic message is about life-givingness, the author of the Gospel of John has Jesus saying: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life”. This biblical verse indicates a universal, life-givingness at the same time it particularizes the unique character trait of Jesus’ call as being centered on love; the universal is confirmed by the Quran: “O you who believe, respond to the call of God and the Messenger when he calls you to that which gives you life.” Muhammad one day while speaking to his companions said: “Show God modesty as is His right to be shown modesty”. In the Arabic he said, “istahyuu” an intensive of the verb ‘hayy’, it’s primary lexical meaning to ‘give life’ or ‘cause to live’. The prophetic demand than implies that there is a divine desire through the agency of the Muhammad for mankind to have life.
The Muhammadan differentiating characteristic though is mercy. “We have not sent you except as a mercy to all creation”. A divine prophetic utterance, hadith qudsi, where God speaks through the Muhammad, not by revelation but inspiration has God saying: “I am God, I am the All-Merciful (Rahman), I created the womb (rahim) and derived it from My name.” It is in the wombing quality of prophetic religion that life is ensured. All that Muhammad brought from his Lord to mankind is about the means of making sacred life in this world, for it is merely a place of reflection of the reality of life which occurs in the Garden. The act of revelation or ‘re- velum’ is a pealing back of the layers to expose the Truth.
Modern man in his secular, homo-centric existence has lost the scent of Paradise. Before Anas ibn Nadhir was martyred he said to Sa’d ibn Muadh, “How wonderful the scent of paradise, O Sa’d, I find it coming from the other side of Uhud!” That was the reality of men and women who sat at the blessed foot of a prophet; such is the loss of children of modernity. For us to recapture that reality will only possible by holding on the rope of God: revelation and prophetic precedent as handed to us by the chain of prophetic inheritors, for the Muslims the Saints and Scholars of the Islamic Sacred tradition. God has not left us bereft of guidance, and as Sayyid Hossein Nasr said: “In accordance with the real nature of things it is the human that must conform to the Divine and not the Divine to the human”.
“O mankind! Verily, there has come to you the Messenger with the truth from your Lord. So believe in him, it is better for you. But if you disbelieve, then certainly to God belongs all that is in the heavens and the earth. God is all-knowing, all-wise.” [Nisa: 170]
