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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)

http://bewley.virtualave.net/Waypref.html

http://bewley.virtualave.net/way1.html
















http://bewley.virtualave.net/Waypref.html



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 Moulay 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 assistance in drawing up the charts and structuringthe material relevant to them.

My wife, Hajja Zulaikha, and Hajja Rabea Redpath for their

assistance in preparing the manuscript.



Preface

It was with a certain reluctance that I agreed to a new edition of

this early work 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 possible 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 book was

not in the main to open Europeans to Islam, but to restore to those

who had gone out of the Deen, especially Arabs, a sense of respect

and discovery in relation 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. However, 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 indicate 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 Muslim lands, first in

colonialism and then by the ethos of technology it can be shown

that, tragically, we have abandoned Deen in its totality.

The irresistible magnetic power of Islam which is now about to

spread its rays over all the world lies in its Shari'at. Properly

speaking the Messenger, blessings 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

individualism, like Buddhism. Where the state was based on canon

law and the imposition of order by force, empowered by taxation,

the new order established in Madinah 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 obedience being due to His Messenger. The next twopillars, 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 second

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 withoutpreviously having appointed an Amir. It is precisely at the point of

Ramadan that governance becomes inescapable to order the

sighting of the moon, to start the fast and to order the collecting 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. It is because Allah in his glory has shown to

us the means of transacting socially and avoiding corruption that

Islam is called Deen al-Fitr. It is the transaction of original nature,that is, before corrupted by cultural excess. Allah has permitted

trade and forbidden usury. Zakat for this reason cannot be paid in

paper money for it in itself is forbidden, being a promissory note,

and in the majority 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

institution both materially by its usurious nature and morally by itsperversion 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 is the pattern and web created by the



whole series of transactions which form a social 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

emerges. 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, the city of his encounter

with Allah, glory be to him, to establish the Islamic community, 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 institutions - the mosque and the market. The

mosque and market were identical inasmuch 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 capitalist and socialist society. The inability to create monopoly

and the impossibility of an elite to separate themselves, in worship

from the people had been assured. Not only papal Rome, but later

the Holy Roman Empire and later the European Union of the

Treaty of Rome, and equally the Soviet Presidium, the English

Parliament, and the American Senate, in the light of Islam were

revealed to be tyrannies, 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, 'constitutional democracy', while still dominating the

world in a manner more ruthless 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 distribution 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 able to act at all. The result of a



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'. John is not Arthur, nor Margaret, Anne. Precisely. It

is because of the experiential 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 perpetual fever, a constant

hallucination. Things are multiple, alien and solid. There 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 'dream' confirms this. Otherwise I would be mad.

Idiotiki, in Greek, means private. My reality is affirmed socially,

so I exist. Unless they are in my dream. Yet when I dream, the

objects seem insubstantial, awake they are solid and therefore

'real'. Real means solid. Yet I have physicists in my 'reality' who

now tell me that solidity has no reality for them. The object is

slipping away from me yet again, and forms are being proved out

of existence and I am left holding onto a 'mental 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 contradictory – at times even ironic. The person this world has

appointed to assuage my inner anxiety, I observe, is in a worse

state than I am. It is to this subject that 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 from calm and clear reflection. You desire urgent

tranquillising information saying '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 of what life is about. Since we are not to be trusted, itmust be some very remarkable 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 expansive

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 whathappened, but each one has given a version of the event from their

own subjectivity. Each story is in the end a contradiction of the one

before it. The lover, the bandit, the wife – each has been trapped in

a private fantasy that insists on interpreting existence in a way that



allows for their 'self-respect' to continue. 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

truth dares no longer believe anyone, for he has ample evidence

that people want their own version of events. When the woodcutter

sees the man's dilemma, and what it 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

woodcutter breaks down and weeps. Humanly it is all he can do.

Open himself completely to the man, surrender any idea of

separateness, interest, dissembling – just 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 unless 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 with 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 actually to the Shaykh, is in

truth to the Messenger, the one who is sent just for that, to tell you

what reality is like, Muhammad, the Messenger of reality.

The necessary qualifications for this acceptance are these same

simple and profound 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 reporttruthfully, to fulfil the oath, to act loyally, 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 acts, 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



us look more closely at the picture of the man, Muhammad.

His name means the Praiseworthy.

Muhammad was forbearing, honest, just and chaste. His handnever touched the hand 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 men. Neither

a dinar nor a dirham was left him in the evening. If anything

remained and there was no one to give it to, night having fallen

suddenly, he would not retire to his apartment until he was able to

give this excess to whoever needed it. He was never asked for

anything but that he gave it to the asker. He would prefer theseeker to himself and his family, and so often his store of grain for

the year was used up before the end of the year. He patched his

sandals and clothing, 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 free-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 stones 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 walked among his enemies without a guard.

He was the humblest of men, the most silent without being

insolent, and the most eloquent without being lengthy. He was

always joyful and never awed by the affairs of this world. He rode

a horse, a male camel, a mule, an ass, he walked barefoot andbareheaded 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 thanhis 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 always the first to extend a greeting. In a handshake he was

never the first to release his hand. He preferred his guest overhimself 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 what they said and mingling with them.

He never found fault with his food. If he was pleased with it he ate

it and if he disliked it he left it. If he disliked it he did not make ithateful 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 very blessed'. He did not wash his hands until he had

licked them clean of food. He quaffed milk but sipped water.



Sayyedina 'Ali, his closest Companion, said: 'Of all men he was the

most generous, 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 unexpectedly 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 accord with his 'vastnessof self-form' which is the Messenger's. We are making no mistakes

and we are remaining within the zone of existential recognition.

The Messenger is not being worshipped, deified, or made into a

symbol. He is being accepted as a witness of how-things-are, as

being a completely open person in flowing 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

towards him. He said to him, 'Be at rest. I am not a king. I am onlythe son of a woman of the Quraysh, who eats dried meat.' His

answer to his name was 'At your service.' The Shaykh is simply the

man who has fully surrendered his self-form and filled himself up

with the clear radiance of this perfect behaviour. The Messenger

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 awitness of the event of existence 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 human

qualities. It is not enough that he be some kind of a superior being

with superior powers, yogic control over the body and the mind,



what is essential is that he is completely at peace and that with that

peace he can function in the social setting that is man's ordinary

quotidian reality. In the Messenger of Reality, 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 satisfied 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 enough to

recognise reality but somehow we must trust the validity of this

affirmation of his serenity and human-ness. He has said, 'Man is

asleep, and when he dies he wakes up.' This confirms our initial

experience of being somnambulistic, unawake 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 teaching element of

tasawwuf declares itself.

Transmission.

Our concern is the alteration of the self, the conquest of the self,the peace treaty 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 quality 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, self-deceiving entity – the self. The very knowledge of

what is wrong seems to betray our hopes for it, and instead of releasing us it traps us and paralyses us more, and the very

awfulness of our self-hood which we think we see at last, brings us

grinding to a disastrous self-aware frozen halt. What then is the

method of the Messenger of Peace, or as he prefers to call himself,

the Messenger of Submission?

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 infact this is everything.

He has said that, 'If a man lives with a people he becomes one of

them,' and also, '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 is locked up with the

insane he most probably will himself fragment in his self-

experience, and if he keeps the company of junkies he will sooneror later succumb to their habit; more recognisably, a man becomes

a soldier on entering the army. He gets 'beaten into shape', the self-

form is restructured and solidified into 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 will pick upfrom 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 depressive you will in turn be depressed or you will feel

obliged in some subtle manner to put up a resistance to their

swamping all-enveloping low-energy, you will have to become



either depressed or by contrast resistantly high. In other words,

there is a constant traffic in the energy-forms of the self, and they

do battle as much socially as they do inwardly. If the behaviour is

controlled from outside, 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 aware that it is of its nature to continue the struggle, to

sabotage the end of hostilities, 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 desire to

be punished you will not rest till you find the executioner. Youmay work your way through a whole series in the desperate desire

to prove that you 'want out of it', but see what a cruel fate has

always provided you with a destructive partner. In other words for

the embattled self, the other is fairly certain to 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 that the self is in an endless loop of repeatedbattles, we must be done with the game of suffering and rediscover

that deep basic sanity which we desire and which we cannot but

recognise in this perfectly balanced and radiant figure of

Muhammad, peace be upon him.

We wish to recover, if you like, our Muhammad-nature. And the

means is transmission.

It is enough to sit with someone for transmission to take place.

Instead of seeking 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 our



We still see things this way. So we decide to imitate him. We go to

the master swordsman 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, perhaps two or three hours at most.

Putting that aside as the fruit of years of hard work, we cannot

avoid recognising that this awakeness of which the Messenger of

Submission spoke was not some inner consciousness alone, but

consciousness itself.

The whole of his existence is spent in one thing – he is in aconstant state of awareness, of collectedness, or, if you like

recollectedness, for he is there, he 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 still

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 andshow 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 Master – 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 is a presence addressing an absence, and yet

we experience him inwardly as an absence expressing a Presence.



man, he is the summit of what the human creature is in its

potentiality when fully realised.

The thing to be grasped is that the Shaykh is in dialogue with

Reality, he speaks to It and It speaks to him. This is again to beaccepted either as a fantasy or 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

intrigued 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 but is mainly about praising

the endless energy of the Reality and the generosity and

compassion and fullness of its nature – he is busy exalting Realityand honouring it and even glorifying it. Along with this we note

that he seems constantly 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 refining and asking

to be refined, he is polishing and asking to be polished. So by this

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 his existence is being

cleared and stilled by this rhythmic act of renewal and prostration.

This is just like the Messenger of Submission, Muhammad, peace

be upon him, who when he undertook any matter, entrusted it to

the Reality, and renounced 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 that my inclination is in obedience to You,

and may You be pleased with my harmonising 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 recognises 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 asks.

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. There 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

would 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 frightened and confused, I become alienated. Itry to make the setting of my exile benign. I choose this mountain

or the edge of that ocean because I like it and hope that it will

harmonise with my inner troubled self. I choose this person and not

that person because I feel between us there is some commonality.

But soon I become irritated with that person, their sameness seems

an empty mockery of my individuality and I long for someone

different, the mountain storm echoes my own turbulence and I long

for a landscape that is the opposite of my inner imagined self. Allthis stems from my seeing myself as outside the process and either

hopelessly 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, but 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 you 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 one 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 complicated.

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 cannotbe 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 there. Allah does not define Allah, it is ourindication that He is present although 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 Messenger, presented as the ground of being or as the infra-

structure, nor is It presented as being identical with the totality of

forms.



What we are presented with is an uncompromising affirmation of

Unity. One reality, of which the forms are but appearances. The

forms are certainly taken seriously and there is a whole science of how to be among forms, how to view them and treat them,

including your own. But in affirming the One reality the forms are

negated.

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 essential autonomy. Since we

know Him by ourselves and from ourselves, we attribute to

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 numerous 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 were not, there would be no

multiplicity in the One.

Likewise we are described in all aspects by what He describes

Himself. There must be a distinction and it is none other than

our need (iftiqar) of Him in existence. 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 existence from non-

existence. Although He is the First, firstness is not ascribed to

Him, and for this reason He is called the Last. Had Hisfirstness been the firstness of the existence of determination, it

would not be valid for Him to be the Last to the determined,

because there is no Last to the possible for possibilities 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 firstness 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 since it perceives itself. It is continuously under aveil which is not removed since 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 knowledge of direct tasting and witnessing because the

time-forms have no hold on that.

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

cannot 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 incapacity 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 does 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 transmission 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 the dust upon the road.'

The Perfect Woman, the Messenger's wife, A'isha, said: 'Wouldthat 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 his Diwan:

By slavery I mean being stripped of every power and strength

and capacity and even the act of getting things for yourself.

Now this is such a completely alien idea that it fulfils our worst

suspicions about asceticism and fatalism and all the other labels of

our education, it all ends 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 flags 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 utterly extraordinary point of view aside for the moment,remembering that its confrontation 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 Perfected is the affirmation, the uncompromising

affirmation of Oneness. The Unity of existence is the key to the

whole set of sufic sciences. Unity of existence is therefore thefoundation of the Wisdom of the Wise, and their wisdom is in turn

the 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. We will by the very nature of this unitive approach, come

right back to our starting 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: 'How?' 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 obtain 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 saying:

'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 wish to

acquire nothing less than direct experience can be accepted as

valid. Language does not alter your condition and it is the

condition of anxiety and conflict 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 Revelations',defines the matter:

So let the possessor of himma be in spiritual retreat with Allah.

His gift and His grace appear to such a man from a knowledge

of which every language-bound person 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 necessity or as a result of speculation in a proof

with the condition of the discovery of that proof and its form

structured in the world of thought. Thought gathers and selects

from that form of knowledge. For this reason, they say inspeculation 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. There is no form of this type in the knowledges.

So these are knowledges which it is impossible for anyone toknow without being characterised by them and experiencing

them.

3. The third knowledge is the knowledge of the secrets (asrar),

and it is the knowledge which is above the condition of reason.

It is a knowledge which the Perfect 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 elite 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 Him 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 (Shari'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 it 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 surrender demands that even beyond the bounds of reason one

has to be completely acquiescent before the Shaykh's instruction

and injunction. It is something very difficult for so-called educated

people to accept. This confusion comes from two things: firstly,

they are used to the idea that the teacher is as fallible if not more

fallible than they themselves are, and if this were true of the

Shaykh it would be quite fitting to contradict him and defy him in

certain cases. Secondly, the 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

with the totality that surrounds him, these conflicts that call up our

defiance have 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 people of the Path. Different Masters may use different

methods but there is no argument. Assuming that the Master

follows the Shari'a, there can be no questioning him – that is the

only outward criterion for a seeker as he selects his teacher. 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 path of awakening and reality out of the sleep of their

previous existence and its fantasies which they mistook for beingawake. 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

relationships. When the illusory relationships begin to be rejected

as lies, and the so-called '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 own reality-rules and

rewards – they might even decide to leave the body quite

effectively, cut off all communication through the central nervous

system and station 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 or schizophrenia (split self) but which for the moment

could merely be looked upon 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 merely

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 the subject in the first picture, manages to



survive, but the whole machine of his 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 been

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 the 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,

behaviourally 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 was a static and rigid structure, with

its collapse has come energy, movement – quest. 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. Already established as a great teacher at Bagdhad

University under the patronage of the Sultan and with a firmly

established reputation as a philosopher, he was suddenly 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 real? Once awake, you recognise them for

what they are – fantasies without substance. Who then can

assure you of the reliability of an existence which when awake

you derive from the senses and from reason? In relation to

your present state they may be real, but it is also possible that

you may enter another state of existence which will bear the



same relation to your present state as this does to your

condition when asleep. In that new zone you will recognise that

the conclusions of reason are mere fantasies.

This possible condition is perhaps what the Sufis call 'hal', that

is to say, according 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 perhaps merely a dream, and man,

once dead, will see things in direct opposition to what is nowbefore his eyes: he will then understand the words of Qur'an,

'Today We have removed the veil from your eyes and your

sight is keen.' (50.22) Such 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 intellectual pursuits and reputation and his formal acts of

devotion became devoid of meaning:

Finally, I saw that the only condition of release was to give up

honour and riches and to sever the ties and attachments of the

life I knew. One day I would decide 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 that he had been struck dumb. The

silence imposed from deep within him by existence 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 that 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 stir that

reverberated right across the Muslim community beyond Iraq.

People blamed 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, leaving 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 end of which he felt ready to return to the world he

had left behind and at last begin 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 praiseworthy than their

rules of conduct, nor purer than their behaviour. Theintelligence of thinkers, the wisdom of philosophers, the

knowledge of the most accomplished intellectuals would in vain

combine their efforts in order to modify or improve their

sciences and their behaviour – it would be impossible. With the

Sufis repose and movement, exterior or interior, are illumined

with light.

So search, which at first manifests as agitation, disorder andmovement, is eventually restructured under the impulse of the sufic

practices just as the iron-filings are patterned according to the

power of the magnet that attracted them. Search is that faculty

which the Master Jalalud-Din Rumi, may Allah be pleased with

him, called congeneity. It is not just the energy impulse of the



magnetic field, it is the actual susceptibility that the iron has to be

attracted, or the straw 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, and not

every person is drawn to the search. Qur'an says: 'Allah guides to

his path 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 knowledge 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 necessary 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 tohave,

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 inexperience:

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 the 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 for 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 existence.

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 than the Ever-continuing.

So from this we can see that himma is the highest energy impulse

of the human creature, 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 an energy

beyond any other energy they possess to strive not for any formal

achievement but for re-connection with reality itself. It is lifeenergy, it moves counter to the dying arc of the cellular existence,

and it lies outside the self-interest of the social impulse. It is the

failure of the academic to understand this energy, for it is not a

principle but a force, that has led to the mis-understanding about

so-called asceticism. The fasting, the lack of possessions and the

poverty of dress of advanced seekers has been seen as an

expression of masochism and self-punishment, which in itself is

another of those highly subjective projections that is calledobjective 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 express a different reality. As with every aspect of the

self-patterns of the Path, the basic situation is exemplified by the

Messenger, peace be upon him. It is told 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 apoverty devoid of struggle to survive. The Messenger answered

him, saying, 'Poverty is all my glory.' They proceeded on their way

when another man made the same exclamation. 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-

sustaining and all-providing. He then turned to his Companions

and noted that they were confused by the two apparently

contradictory statements. The first man, he explained, 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 things 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 in 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 neurotic pattern. The outcome of the one man's actions will be an

opening into the serenity 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 the 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 the 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 give the title of Bab to their

great Shaykhs – and he had an old wife called Fatima. I went

from Uskand to see him. When I entered his presence he said:

'Why have you come?' I replied: 'In order that I might see theShaykh 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 very day that I took the Path. The



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 with them and they were well-

pleased with Allah,' (5.119). If Allah seeks a man it is notpossible 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 struggle 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 toiling. The seeker is described

in Allah's words: 'But those who fight strenuously for Us, we

will surely guide them into Our Way.' (29.69). Such a man is

sought by Allah, who turns his heart and implants in it a

himma to stir him to work for Him, and to turn to Him and to

seek Him: then He accords him the revelation of the spiritual

states. So it was with Harithath (a Companion of the

Messenger), who said: 'I turned myself from this world andthirsted in the day-time, and watched 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 came to him after he had turned away from this world.



The 'sought' man, on the other hand, is drawn out forcibly by

Reality and accorded the revelation of the states that through

the power of vision he may be stirred to work for Allah and

turn to Him and bear the burdens laid on him by Reality. So itwas with Pharaoh's magicians: 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 two reality-views. The Pharaoh was not

a mere ruler but a heirophant of great knowledge which gave him

yogic power over forms so that he was able to manipulate

existence 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 transmit knowledge anddemonstrate its validity to the Pharaoh's adepts, but the power 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, according to the Messenger

Muhammad, peace be upon him, and that he himself, as he was

engulfed by the Red Sea, affirmed the truth of Musa's doctrine. His

body was preserved, and is, whole, mummified until the world'send, 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 constant 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 opposite, for there is no dialectic

except in description, and no conflict except in imagination. Thus

himma which is a yearning must be yearned for, and the One

yearned for is the initiator, or the yearning impulse, and the Path is

nothing but that 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 is on a straight Path.'

(12.56). The whole matter is a divine event, so that al-Junayd'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 contemplation; 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 nature 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 perspective is deliberate and not a sign of differing

theory. Both this is true and that is true of it – it is in itself a non-

reality and it may be experienced in different ways and approached

in different ways and dismantled in different ways. 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 conflict with another and harming it through its own

inner activity. When used adverbially 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 word 'to shine' and

unsurprisingly in the light of what we have just examined, it can

also indicate 'one who yearns or aspires after' – so that with these

three aspects 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 gratification. It cannot

discriminate a higher nafs. The lower nafs has become the

ideal. They delight in influencing others to like action, and areproud of their own 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 eyes is a covering and there is a great

chastisement for them.' (Qur'an 2.7)

2. AN-NAFS AL-LAWWAMA: the reproachful nafs. It isindecisive 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 between 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 through shared spiritual practice which gives strength to

abandon bad action and alter 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, illuminated consciousness. It has

received An-Nur, Light, thus it acts according to it – it is

reasonable, it is devoid of evil, and good flourishes around it.The discrimination between the two nafs goes, for the lower

one has gone and the true nafs is the master. Man has achieved

perfect freedom.

'Oh self at peace, return to your Lord, well-pleased, well-

pleasing! Enter you among My slaves! Enter you My Garden!'

(Qur'an 89.27-30)

The above description of the nafs in different conditions displays

the only basic 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 clearly 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 observer findsthat 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 scale 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 believe 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, despite themselves. This nafs, nevertheless, cannot possiblyfunction unless it has the setting of the pseudo-adult nafs to play

against, for its destructive activity is directed against the self-image

which is most clearly mirrored in the authority 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 unreality of the nafs' personal battle which in

itself is another fantasy. So the politics 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 existential

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 cunning creates the brilliant diversion of event so that in

extremity it will always 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 necessity of His right – and it is

nothing more than empty phantoms on their empty thrones. 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 phenomena is emotionally very disturbing to people who

have been educated in the effective conditioning of present day

society. At this stage it is dangerous to fall for the kind of

superficial 'realism' of the academic who at worst will blusteringly

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 existence 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 study 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 gained a total view of man's possibilities both creatively and

destructively – for our common-sense fellow has not only been

unable to grasp the sublime possibilities of the human creature, but

he has utterly failed to contain the insane and suicidal tendencies

of his fellow men, allowed genocide to be the mark of his century

on a social level, and crime and madness its private condition. A

true science 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 subjects themselves. It must then be

able to understand the means to transform the self so that it can

replace all the negative energies, bit by bit, with positive creative

energies. It is the former of these that we have called Causes and

the latter, 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 the Noble Way must be grasped. It

has already been quoted from the Diwan of the Perfect 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 one of duality. Tawhid nowhere denies it, as the

Shaykh al-Kamil insists. If we did not experience duality there

would be no need for a science of Unity. It is the mark of the

pseudo-sufi that he refuses to adhere to the practices of separation

and the Road while pretending to union and the Path. There has

been no Sufi who 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 creatureness, 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 ritually wash, he is setting himself above the

Masters and so while outwardly he may 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 followers inevitably are haunted sons desperately

trying to overcome the dominant father by an act of ritual magic,

for that is what they use 'practices' to do – since practices are for

one purpose only, to bring you to the ground, humbled, lowered,

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 being to bow and prostrate and fast, so

much so that he is of all men the most submitted and the most

diligent in performing what is demanded of him. Shaykh al-Akbar,

which means the Greatest Master, at the very opening of his

definitive treatise 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 Messenger Muhammad,



peace be upon him. He describes most vividly the Messenger's last

pilgrimage to Makka and his calling the people around him to

confirm that he had conveyed 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!' He 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 ordinary slave:

I believe in all that has been brought to him, peace be upon

him, from that which I know and do not know of what He gavehim.

Following our Shaykh, who in turn is a follower and inheritor of

the wisdom of the Shaykh al-Akbar, we proceed to set in motion

the practices of the Noble Way hoping for a guidance that will give

us discrimination in this dual world and yet somehow – althoughwe are aware of the open contradiction – will also give us Union.

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 copy him in the first practice of the Way.



WUDU

Shaykh Shibli, the disciple of al-Junayd, and a Shaykh of our

Shaykh, said, 'Wudu 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 unless 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, left arm, head and neck, ears, right foot and then

left foot, accompanied by the appropriate supplication. The act is

outwardly a cleansing and inwardly a purification. The manner of

doing wudu is swiftness and thoroughness, being sure that the

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 anally, 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 washed. 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 is its own explanation,

for the person feels the shock impact of pure water, forcing 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 snaps the nafs away from the false dream

state of that dazedness which hints at an 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. Every 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 thorough execution of wudu for the five ritual

prostrations is the sign of the Mumin (one who trusts reality)

according to the Messenger saying: 'Keep to the straight 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 transmitted it.)

At the same time it is possible to discover a man involved in

performing wudu relentlessly so that while outwardly you cannot

fault him you are inwardly aware that there is something disturbing

in his performance of the rites, something that 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 performance both inwardly and

outwardly, he will be guaranteed the Garden.' Muslim transmitted

it. Here the Messenger specifies that without the action being

inwardly invested with awareness it is of no avail. The implication

of this dual situation 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. This to the people of

the Way is the vital dividing line between wisdom, which is theMessenger's Way, and either religion – if you see it as mere

adherence to forms, 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 trusting one washes his face in the course of

wudu every wrong action he contemplated with his eyes will

come out from his face along with the water or with the last

drop of water. When he washes his hands every wrong actionthey did will come out from his hands with the water or with

the last drop of water. And when he washes his feet every

wrong action towards which his feet have walked will come out

with 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 purification that is suited to man. Every creature has its

grooming pattern. The cat'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 groom itself. This act

of wudu is in quite the same way necessary to man. It is in the

nature of the human creature that he imagines his actions adhere to

him as idea-forms which he 'carries about with him' until this

imaginary load makes life intolerable for him and he breaks underit. The man who has cast aside any recognition 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 nothing other than this accretion of

mistakes and misfortunes on the one hand, and triumphs and

pleasures on the other. Wudu by its acting upon the surface of theorganism 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, according to the



Hadith, is useless unless accompanied by this vital inner

awareness. That is why in the execution of the wudu, it is essential

that there be vocalisation 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

tendencies of malpractice, one is to be careless and undefined in

the separate acts 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 must be scrupulously

avoided until the mean is discovered, filling the act with both

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 the basic practices.

We now come to what underpins the practice of wudu, and makes

us aware of the profound importance and effect of the basic

practice without which the higher practices would not only be

invalidated but their performance would result in serious and

damaging effect on the nafs. Invocation without wudu is certainly

guaranteed 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 quite malicious practice of

the pseudo-sufis whose goal is, of course, manipulation and not

liberation. Therefore, from their point of view, the gaining of

discrimination is something that has to be precluded from their

scheme.

Beneath the wudu – which forms the base of the practices, is theghusl. It is simply an extension of the wudu, only it involves

washing the whole body in running 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



acceptance of the Messenger, and it is the final act done to one

before burial when the body 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 the

energy of intercourse and the energy of prostration, the leisure of

love and the 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 act 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

love-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 urine stain that should have

adhered to the garments. Here we have the basic discrimination

that defines sane adult behaviour. The basic indiscrimination is the

infant's inability to know shit from food. The whole guilt structure

when dismantled in the modern therapeutic manner reveals this

basic guilt, transmitted by the already guilty parents to the anxious

child who is confused as to what is what. 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 wastage 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 totaldiscrimination of behaviour 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 Shaykh

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 anus and the penis in the

lavatory. Thus your whole inner reality is based on the natural 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 bring into the consciousness of the

person an acceptance of themselves as being these 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 events 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 concerned with production and

reproduction, and the higher nafs which demands a complete

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 washing 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 grave. 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 body dries rather than rots,

and is draped in white cloths then laid to rest in the earth. Incense

is burned to awaken the higher self of the mourners, as scent is

worn by the person who has done his wudu and is ready for the actof salat which follows.

'Wudu is separation, salat is joining.' Pseudo-sufic teaching, false

spirituality, bases itself on the Unity and so instructs its followers

that they do not have 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 the 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 pray in this way – surely I am constantly at prayer, surely the

Qur'an tells me that wherever I turn there is the face of Allah? This

is basically the superficial argument of the pseudo-sufi with his

fear of surrender. The Qur'an has said that 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 worship 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 Ancient House built by Sayyedina Ibrahim for

that purpose. Reality addresses the Messenger 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 Mosque and wherever you

are turn your faces towards it. Those who have been given the

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 sign, they will not follow your

direction. You are not a follower of their direction, neither are

they followers of one another's direction. If you follow their

caprices after the knowledge that has come to you, then youwill surely be among the evildoers whom We have given the

Book, and they recognise it as they recognise 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 his 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 overeverything.

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 you 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 signs to you and topurify you and to teach you the Book and the Wisdom, and to

teach 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 distorted 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

reject 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 source.

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 dialogue with Reality that was theMessenger's secret. 'Remember Me and I will remember you,' is

the inevitable result of this discriminatory process – Union is the

fruit of separation.

The taking of a qibla, contrary to the teachings of the pseudo-sufis,

is what makes it possible to grasp the relation between form and

no-form, between the limited body-self reality of the slave and the

unlimited no-body-self reality of the Lord. It is said that the initialformula of the Shaykh al-Akbar when he faced qibla to begin the

salat was, 'I have become kafir, and fastened the belt – Allahu

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 Christian – meaning that he

had fixed himself in one direction rather than another and that he

had engaged in 'locating' reality, the great Christian confusionabout 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 comparison 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 has to turn from the first to the second, from

the second to the third, and from the third to the fourth in

succession. If, in the prescribed salat these stages are 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 everything 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 the pseudo-sufi if

he held to his own argument, but this state demands real ecstasy.

Masud Beg, seeing this, observed to the majdhub's son that his

father was asking protection in the very act of shirk. That is to say,

every time he bowed down he gave reality a 'direction'. The son

replied: 'Do not call him mushrik, he sees everything without the

thing-ness.'

QBL, the root, means 'to admit', 'to accept' – the existence of

forms. Before examining 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 hurt in the small of the back' and 'to have the centre of

the back bent in, as a mare 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 'adoration'. So the

whole thing is an act of humility, and an act of address. The slave

presents himself, he offers himself. It is an opening of the self to

the sublime reality. Its successive movements, standing, bowing,

head on the ground twice, sitting – all deny the nafs and offer up

the humbled nafs to the reality. The standing is the stage where the

self is still assertive, the bowing is the greeting, 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 acceptance

of the reality. It is the head that has to be laid on the ground. It is

the arrogant thought-bound mind that holds the self prisoner in its

dazzling structures, 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 balance – the slave sits

upright and turns his head to the left and right in a salutation of

peace.

That is the outward picture – inwardly there is a pattern also.

Inwardly the beginning 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 as 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 innature has a high 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 fruitfully on the act of

salat. Imam Junayd here draws attention to the collectedness that is



necessary to perform the act. Before performing the takbir, it is

therefore an obligation to make a formal act of niyya, or intention,

which in its outward form means simply saying to oneself, 'I now

intend to pray the salat of sunset,' or whichever it may be. What it

means inwardly is that the whole attention 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 one can make valid salat.

The preliminary conditions are:

1. Outward purification from filth and inward purification fromappetites (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 contamination 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 bowing the head with humility, and

prostrating one's nafs with abasement, and reciting the shahada

with concentration, and saluting with annihilation of one'sattributes.

This is the description of Shaykh al-Hujwiri, and it is a vivid

example of the unification 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 especially, their

words are invalidated by the absence of an inner state which would

give them reality, how their hearts are separate from their destinies,

which is why 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 the great practice – in the

Unseen it is the practice of the angels and the jinn who affirm the

Reality, and they are included in the final salutation, for the adept

still makes the salutation even if he or she is alone. It is unification

because 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 prostrations take place at fixed times that move

throughout the year according to the rising and setting of the sun.

So that while it is inward unification, inevitably it 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 science 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 with the Reality. It is

movement, it is an activity of the most profound and shattering

impact on the nafs.

It is recorded that when the Messenger made his prostrations, therecame from deep within his chest the sound of what seemed like a

boiling cauldron. When his most 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.'



Ibn 'Ata said: 'Do not let your purpose in the prayer be to

perform it without awe 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 prostration is not merely an opening

psychologically, as it were, in terms of an attitude of mind being

changed by the act of putting one's head on the ground. It cannot

be reduced to a mere technique – it cannot be annexed by people as

a means to 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 point laid aside, but which must be grasped if we are to

have any understanding of what 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 atKa'ba, the Garden on their right and 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 state –

there is a Tradition where the Messenger tells of it as being finer

than the 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 that 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 something 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 the 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 know

of what He gave him. It is determined that there is an

appointed time with Allah. When it comes it is not postponed. I

believe in that with an iman (trust) that is without hesitation or

doubt, as I have believed. I am established as a slave. 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 pages 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 group

is true and that another group will not be grieved by the

greatest anxiety. The intercession by the Sent Ones and the

Trusting and the bringing out by the Most Merciful of the

Merciful from the Fire is true. The group of people with

serious wrong actions among the Trustworthy entering the

Fire and leaving it with intercession and indebtedness is true.

The confirmation of the Trusting and the people of Unity in the

Garden is true. Everything which the Books and Messengers

brought from Allah, known or unknown, is true.

So the seeker can either lay aside the book and label this as oldfashioned religion, binding him along with the others in a form of

mental and social slavery which open the way to exploitation and

injustice, or he can reject the prejudicial 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 now 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. Again it is essential to re-iterate the basic step

that is taken on the Path – Shahada – 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

witness 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 the living situation, his Masters

to whom he has transmitted the knowledge and science 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

significant thing about these vast cosmic visions of an unseen

reality, unseen that is to the outward eye, is that the vivid and

precise description is always accompanied 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 display

of fulgurating forms that endlessly unfold with the radiant and

structured perfection of the aurora borealis.

The greatest work of the sufic sciences is the Shaykh al-Akbar's

'Makkan Revelations'. At the opening of this tremendous book

which is incomparable among the works 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, and we will examine that when we come to the

knowledge of the Ka'ba. Here is the Master's description:



Blessings be upon the secret of the knower and his subtle point,

the quest of the 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 and realities. He is the most incredible of

created beings that I witnessed during 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, preserved from goals, sustaining the

vision, confirmed in victory. All the Chosen Messengers 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 station, 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 pureleft. The Seal had dispersed before him to tell him of the tale of

idols. 'Ali, may Allah bless him and give him peace, was

blessing the Seal with his tongue. Dhu'n-Nurayn was wrapped

in the cloak of his shame, occupied in his concern.

The Highest Master, the sweetest fresh spring, the most

revealed and most glorious 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 bear

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 after my sending out in any wayexcept good fortune, and he is among those who give praise of

thanks in the heavenly gathering.'

So the Seal built the mimbar in that most awesome assembly

and on the side of the mimbar was written in the most

resplendent light: 'This is the purest Muhammadan Maqam.

Whoever ascends it has inherited it and the Truth has sent him

as a guardian to the sanctuary of the Shari'a and has delegatedhim.'

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 cosmology 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 very

limited, and from a global point of view, parochial, understanding

of how a man might express himself. Once they defined him as a

philosopher it was simple enough to dismiss him as muddled and

incoherent. The arrogance of the German and English academics

who dismissed him deserves somewhere a study on its own, and

the most ironic aspect of the affair is that these men had no other

genuine qualification to write on 'Ibn 'Arabi than their capacity toread 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 simple vision and

ended up 'preferring' the clear personal testimonies of experience

to the towering structure of 'Ibn 'Arabi's scientific knowledge of



the world of form and no-form. Before attempting to see the world

of experiential reality as a place in which all these barriers of space

and solidity have become fuzzy and 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 vision 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 this

matter. They said to me: 'However is it possible to see the

Messenger when one 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 necessity, he can be seen in the waking state only by one

whose mind – or let us say, whose thoughts – have transported

him from this world of bodies into the world of Spirits: therehe 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 to 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

reply. And then I said: 'There where the world of bodies is,there also is the world 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 kingship: in

the very place where the lower worlds are, there are to be



found the higher worlds and the totality of worlds. It has been

said that there exist ten thousand 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 withouthis being conscious 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

venerable Master and Wali, Sayyid Ibn al-Banna, may Allah

be pleased with him, says in 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 Messengers, and initiations that take place opening him

to a knowledge he has not gained from any 'outer' source and yetapparently did not know up until that initiation, and on the other

hand another Master who says that the creature is compounded 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 finds pleasure or else punished and finds pain.

If the situation becomes extreme, the mental operation relating tothe pain and pleasure takes on a primary importance 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 person'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 structuring of these fantasies in an imagined

'heaven and hell' dichotomy can hold together the inner

fragmentation. Thus the two realms, or imagined realms, inventedby 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 understandably 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 declare that the positive, as it were,

of that negative is true – that is, it is not a simplistic affirmation

that the 'inner' experience of fear is hell after all and synonymous

with it. On the contrary it affirms the clinical neurotic picture 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 than illusion. The illusion is based on the false

assumption that there is some kind of essential reality to the self,

that it is solid and actual and that it is responsible 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

conviction that actions cohere to an experiencing central form as

crystals cluster around a basic salt formation.

The Messenger said that people would be judged not according to

their acts but according to their intentions. He also said that people

would not be saved from the Fire by their works. So this wholepicture that connects the human creature to 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 Divinity itself. To posit for yourself a separate reality

dooms you to positing your 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 they 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 bliss. Reality is not to the gnostic

a one-dimensional but a multi-tiered existence. The forms are

endless, just as in the phenomenal world so in the Unseen – there

are many heavens and many hells.

The two basic images of the Garden and the Fire as the two polarrealities of the Unseen are easy of access to the awake mind. On

the one hand there is the whole energy process of fire which is one

of intensity, enormously powerful energy in 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 star, a metal, into it finally by a kind of ultimate persuasion

of activity, the other element is unified until it becomes fire itself

despite its original density and separateness. It is intolerable, it is

the ultimate in heat and unendurableness, 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 shade,

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 realityof the universe, they are real in a way that your pain or pleasure is

not real. If you fear the Fire of the Unseen you will avoid the

illusory accretions that cause the neurotic fear in experience, but

equally you must desire the Garden or you will yearn in fantasy

and split from the ordinary world of lived existence. Without the

fear and hope that open you to knowledge of Unity, you are

doomed quite inevitably to the anxiety/gratification dialectic that

adheres to the illusory self-form, 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 which showed

how every step of the Way was accompanied by an equivalent in

neurosis 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 science of Unity exists to be

applied to the world and our experience just because they are dual

when Reality itself is One.

It could be suggested that this was a mechanism to cause a transfer

from the urgent existential situation into a condition where the

anxiety was, as it were, deferred out and away from the immediate



crisis and thus rendered harmless. This could only result in a more

fragmented inner experience and would certainly result in making

the inner experience of the person labyrinthine and more acute in

its 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 free 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 Garden,' or 'I abstain from the forbidden not because I

fear the Fire, but I do these things for myself,' is in reality bound to

illusion and the persistence of the self-form as some dense andlasting 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 his Universe, so let him abhor the one and long for the

other, for in these two lie the approach that is pleasing to his Lord.

His intentions will take him to the Garden or the Fire, and so let

him desire a clear heart so that he can the more know his own

intentions, and let him fear and hope in accordance with his

recognition 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 myriad forms of the visible

Unification, and the matter of our sciences. In the chapter relating

to Stations we will examine further aspects of fear and hope, and

then finally we can look at the very stuff of this so deceptively

constructed world 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 circle 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 picture – and that is time. Qur'an specifies that salat is

fixed at appointed times, 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 thread 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 sun'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 movement 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 guidance to all beings. (Qur'an 3.96)

So the focus of this worship and opening to the Universal Reality

is a place that has been celebrated from the beginning of man's

story as a place of meeting between the slave and the Lord. The

whole dynamic of energy emanating from the Ancient 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 unique 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 House. Salat, seen from

this global point of view, from this cosmic point of view, reveals



itself to be the primary and essential rite of any science of gnosis

of the Reality which is everywhere present and nowhere graspable

by intellect or sensory experience. The first act that the seeker

performs is to open himself to this situation where he, in harmony

not only with his fellow creatures, but with the 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 Universe, 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 – one who surrenders his self. The practice is calledIslam. The root form is the same – SLM – 'surrender', 'peace', 'to

be safe and sound'.

As well as the rhythmic pattern of five daily sets of prostration,

there are also times when special sets are performed. These are on



the 'Id days which mark the 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 time is

in the case of eclipse. Here we have an opportunity of seeing the

extraordinary depths and implications of this ritual act – and how it

opened the Messenger to both the cosmic reality of things and the

unseen dimension of these same events. The picture we have is of

a man so in tune, so in harmony with the creation that he blows

with the wind and eclipses with the sun. He tastes and submits to

the whole creational event just as the willow tree yields to the

changing elements 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 Allah, 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 solar eclipse." So I came to him, and he was

standing in prayer, raising his hands, and saying – "Glory toAllah, 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 of Allah, peace be upon him, who said:

'Whenever the wind was stormy, the Messenger of Allah used

to say: "Oh Allah, I ask you for what is good in it, and the good

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 for which it was sent." And when

there was thunder and lightning in the sky, his colour



underwent a change, and he went out and in, backwards and

forwards, and when the rain came he felt relieved, and I

noticed it on his face. A'isha asked him about it and he said:

"It may be as the people of 'Ad said: when they saw a cloudformation 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 Allah, peace be upon him, and he

removed his cloak so that the rain fell on it and we asked,

"Messenger of Allah, why do you do this?" He said: "Because

it has just come from the Exalted Lord."'

Once the knowledge of salat has been acquired in all its outward

detail and practised with its profound and meaningful inner

mathematical structure – for the number 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 seeker has

got hold of the first part of something which in its totality is the

tremendous gift of the Messenger to mankind. Along with hisdelivering the Message of al-Qur'an, he left behind him the Hikma

– the Wisdom. It is this that forms the body of one's inner reality, it

is this that gives flesh and blood to the inner 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 returned to the human race when the Messenger

opened people once again – as had all the Messengers before him,

of whom he indicated there had existed 124,000 since thebeginning of man's story – opened them to the true nature of their

humanity, to the real measure of man, to perfection and Unity. You

must not be surprised to find that this tremendous science of

human behaviour on which the full doctrine of gnosis rests is

effectively unknown to people in the West – partly because word



of it filtered through the same inadequate channel by which

knowledge of Islam came to the academic world, that is, through

people utterly unequipped to examine the anthropology and

metaphysics of Islam, being nothing more than accomplished

linguists – and partly because there was and is a quite conscious

attempt on behalf of the Christian and Jewish academics to

misrepresent the true nature of Islam – but finally because the

Muslims themselves in these long centuries have felt increasingly

uncomfortable with a science that challenged their own wealth.

This science, the Sunna, or Practice, of the Messenger, is properly

speaking 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 say, the one who stands for Him or

represents Him. We have taken hold of the science of the nafs, for

truly the whole science of the nafs – and all you need to know

about it is contained in the two purifications, wudu and salat, and

adherence to these practices – will make clear the working of the

nafs in every situation. We must now try to get a first glimpse of

what the nature of the Sunna is, and then approach the meaning of

this Khalifdom, which is, of course, the Secret we desire.



The Science of the Sunna

The word Sunna, meaning the Practice, derives from the root SNN,

meaning 'to form'. It is nothing less than the form of man, that is,

man as a living social organism, man in his wholeness. Any

mechanistic or legal idea from your Judaic or Christian

background must be removed before you can open to this reality

which is utterly organic, physical and metaphysical, a spontaneous

human creature in harmony 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 Law, 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 recognise him. So involved

were they with the theory, they failed to identify the practice in a

living and perfect exemplar. The error of the Christians was its

counterpart – so determined were they to enshrine the

metaphysical aspect of man's nature, so terrified were they of



losing the secret of man's glory, that they felt obliged 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. These two attitudes are what may be

understood as 'religion', they are the forms that 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 thatone of the stumbling blocks to people 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 transfer 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 post-scientific

vocabulary somehow made us superior or more inaccessible to

some 'ancient wisdom'. The Hikmat, the Wisdom, is not culture

and does not become culture. 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 merely selects and simplifies the cultural situation –

sweeping away the worst excrescences 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 practices –

such as the ancient rites of Hajj. The proof of the Sunna as a

profound and effective anthropological patterning for man is seen



every year at the Hajj where people from the most disparate

cultures come together socially and spiritually unified by their

adherence in recognisable degree to the vast Sunna of Muhammad,

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 whole 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 outer

transformation that takes place as a man begins to absorb the

Sunna, and thus open himself to his humanity and to his

Khalifdom. It is all the more tragic in the light of the situation of the so-called intellectuals in Western society. Despite the top-

heavy structuralist nightmare that collapses on itself, some

anthropologists 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 but 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 wife of the

Messenger, and a Perfect Woman according to the Messenger –

Perfect that 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 other 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

complete 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 discrimination in the dual world

of nature, of night and day, hot and cold, true and false. This is

why in the original and complete science of anthropology, the

study of man, it is enough that you study yourself that you



understand the total cosmic situation of the species. You are the

whole man, but not as you are. Muhammad is the 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 granted that people accepted the Sunna, but

the situation today is such that the Sunna has become a dangerous

and quite terrifying possibility, so that the Muslims, whose

heritage it is, are at pains to assure you that you don't need to do

this and you don't need to do that – a situation which the

Messenger himself foretold 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 –

what 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 prohibited is like what Allah hasprohibited.'

It is Sufism that insists on the total picture of a man both outwardly

and inwardly 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 his 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 thatgives flesh and blood to that inner reality. In a short time he is

using the language of duality – and then he tells you that it does

not matter that you have a beard, 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

prostrate 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 whole 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 that the

sufic tradition insists on the complete social reality of an Islam

which never ceases to extol poverty, simplicity, and measure, in

behaviour and possessions, 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 Islam of the

Companions, that demands a radiant city as the setting for the man

of knowledge to experience his gnosis. The Sufi's place is in the

community – look at 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 (Khalif 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 real glory only began when he came out from

retirement to live in Baghdad: these and the whole line of Shaykhs

testify to the fact that Sufis lived in the world, worked in the

marketplace and the farmyard, because they were the guardians

and are the guardians of this picture of man whose complete

silhouette and whose luminosity 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 perspective to hold to is that the inner reality and the

outer condition must be One. Whatever came to be known as Sufi

was nothing but the condition of the followers of the followers, and



before them of the followers, and before them of the Companions

of the Messenger himself. What concerns us is a social quality of

being whose interiority is gnosis and whose exterior is detachment

from the world. The image of man is the image of Muhammad,

peace be upon him, and he said: 'My Companions 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-Hudaibiyya 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 community that has ever been on the earth, was the

community in Madinah at the time of the Messenger. And it is here

that we are obliged to take on something about the 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 inward capacity as well as their human

capacities with others, was to create a complete and far-reaching

revolution in life-pattern. In an amazingly short time, starting with

a small band of people, he built up a highly educated group of

people who had all been instructed by him, irradiated by his

presence, purified by his 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 remembered, 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, his Wisdom, which he later defined through the use of two

terms, jahiliyya and hilm.

Jahiliyya the Messenger saw as the energy force of the unbridled

nafs, utterly flamboyant and expressed, ruthless in its infantile

determination to experience gratification whether of appetite or

violence. This was the natural flow of destructive energy that came

from the nafs which saw itself as separate from existence and in

conflict with reality. To this basic energy the Messenger taught theacquiring 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 from 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 heartsarrogance, the arrogance of jahiliyya, then Allah sent down

His serenity upon His Messenger and upon the trusting-ones

and imposed on them the word of self-restraint, for they were

worthy of 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 that

token, of unreality and covering-up. The awakening of the



renewed force.

The Messenger was well aware that the light that came from his

presence among them was a great restraint on the natural greed and

lust for power that man is prone to, and that is why he urged mento respect the Companions and the next generation, the Followers.

It must be remembered that Islam is a science that is passed on by

existential transmission and not by books and texts. Once the

people who 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 are 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 havebeen threatened with will come to them. My Companions are a

means of safety for my people, and when my Companions

depart what my people have been threatened with will come to

them.' Muslim transmitted it.

'Imran bin Husain reported Allah's Messenger as saying: 'The

best of my people are my generation, then their immediate

followers, and then their immediate followers. After them therewill be people who give testimony without being asked, who

will be treacherous and not to be trusted, who will make vows

which they do not fulfill, among whom plumpness will appear.'



'Abdallah bin Mughaffal reported Allah's Messenger as

saying: 'Fear Allah regarding my Companions. Fear Allah

regarding my Companions and do not make them a target

after I am gone. He who loves them does so for love of me, andhe who hates them does so from hatred of me. He who injures

them has injured me and he who injures me has injured Allah,

and he who injures Allah will soon be punished by Him.'

Zaid bin Arqam reported Allah's Messenger as saying of

Sayyedina 'Ali, Fatima, Hassan 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.' Tirmidhitransmitted it.

Yet within only twenty-nine years the Gate of Wisdom, the Amir

of the Trusting Ones, was stabbed in the back in the mosque in

prostration before Allah by a so-called Muslim. Soon after him the

Messenger's two grandsons were murdered. Sayyedina Hassan was

poisoned and Sayyedina Husain was slaughtered on the field of

Kerbala and beheaded in the most horrible massacre that everblighted the Muslim community. These deaths were known to the

Messenger in his lifetime and the Hadiths tell of his weeping for

them while they were still children. Abu Dharr, the most noble

Companion, was humiliated and beaten and finally sent to an

exile's death, also just as the Messenger had told him he would end

his days. It is a tragic and sobering picture, and it is useless to start

to apportion blame these centuries later, as it is to mourn for them.

They died martyrs to Reality and they went from the worst to thebest. What is important is that we are prepared to look at the

complete picture of these events or as complete a picture as we can

piece together. Thousands of the Ansar were slaughtered by so-

called Muslims, although 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 aspect of the whole

story is the Messenger's recognition of what lay ahead and his

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 is an organic life-pattern for men in

society: once roles are imposed and structures are solidified you

return inevitably to the rigid imposition of authority and the

dialectical conflicts of history.

During the lifetime of the Messenger, the Munafiqun or the

Hypocrites, were a constant threat to the spiritual revolution of

Islam. The word derives from the root NFQ which means 'to entera 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 the munafiq wavers between one possibility of Islam and

another, between betrayal and attraction. Nifaq is, itself, the

dynamic to split reality, to separate inner and outer – it is nothing

less than a sickness, and Qur'an indicates that it is 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 early 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 unitary nature of

existence and makes war in order to distract attention by

foreground 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 subject-mind from the

object-body. Fragmentation, once started, continues until the mind

itself breaks up and one part of it opposes another and the conflict



becomes 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!' Qur'an has made clear that if you kill one man

wrongfully you kill the whole of mankind. Here in its entirety is

the Surat al-Munafiqun, The Form of the Hypocrites, in the

Glorious Qur'an:


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 Messenger, 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 will 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 they 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 weaker,' – when might belongs to Allah and

to His Messenger and to the Trusting-Ones, but the hypocrites

do not know.

Oh you who have Trust! Let not your wealth nor your children

distract you from remembrance of Allah. Those who do so,

they are the losers. And spend of that wherewith we have

provided you before death comes to one of you and he says:

'My Lord! If only Thou wouldst reprieve me for a little while,

then I would give sadaqa 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)



That – your thought, which ye did think about your Lord –

hath ruined you: and ye 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 cells do testify against us or for us, depending on how

we have treated the body-form 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 Reality. We cannot

hide ourselves from ourselves, we are convinced that we have

covered up the record – even though we are the record. That is, we

think that the Reality 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 creature. That thought is lostness

itself. Separation is necessary outwardly, as we have 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 have kept in a clear register.

(Qur'an 36.12)

We think because others cannot read us that we cannot be read.

The form is nothing 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 conflicts that tore asunder the first Muslims. Here is the

perspective that the Messenger 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 Khalifate 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 36or 37, then if they perish they will 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 replied 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 was 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 Commander 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 Straight Way.' Ahmad transmitted this.



The bitterness and the distortions that arose from the great initial

schism still 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 crystallisation that both Shi'a and

Sunnis achieved in equating Islam with a Muslim State. There is

no such thing as an Islamic State in the world today. As I have

indicated, 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 and 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, that is a

temporary situation – banks and standing armies are nothing to do

with Islam. 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 Islam.

Islam is the Book and the Wisdom, and the teaching of it is not by

the intake of structured information, it is by the transmission of the

behaviour-form from a man who is himself already to an

acceptable degree a self-form of the Wisdom. 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 formations took place over a period of time and did not

become defined on the minute, 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

through 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 rejoice for him, that he is assured

the fullest life in the Garden. And so it goes on – this and that, until



the animosity is revived. It is not necessary to be part of that

schismatic thinking at this stage of the business of Islam. On the

contrary, 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 start 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 of Islam reduced to a

law-pattern and introducing a punitive legal system along with it –that led to the need for the Followers and the Followers of the

Followers 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 Abbasids. 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 Unseen Reality, filled with awe of Allah, and

sweetness for his brothers, and generosity – above all, with

generosity – this form was in imminent danger of being lost

forever. Generosity and tolerance – the two things the Messenger

most extolled and embodied, had already been swept aside as

weaknesses – and somehow somebody 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 gathered 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,



while it was a tremendous and scholarly achievement of enormous

dimensions calling for both patience and integrity, the living and

essential way was and still is one 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 chain, 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 yourself 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 awakening.

Thus the uncle of Imam Junayd, may Allah be pleased with him,

Sari as-Saqati, once asked him as he left the house to whatassembly he was going. He replied: 'To the majlis of Harith al-

Muhasibi.' His uncle said: 'Good. Accept his learning and 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 reason 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 formally studied

the Hadith, and has not learned Shari'a before embarking on

Sufism, 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 alongwith it the deliberate persecution 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



spiritual courts, the inevitable annexing of the learned men took

place. Despite the many Hadiths warning against so-called learned

men who served rulers, it became the 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 servants, 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 their rulers or were martyred by them and

died rather than surrender what they knew 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 style. 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 his

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 nothing 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 dwelling 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 order 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, Tirmidhi and Ibn Majah.

The Messenger said, peace be upon him: 'Every building is a

misfortune for its owner except what cannot, except whatcannot É' Anas reported it and Abu Dawud transmitted 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 from 'Uthman and

transmitted by Tirmidhi.

Abdallah bin Mughaffal told that a man came to theMessenger and said, 'I love you.' When he had told him to

consider what he was saying, and when the man had declared

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 certainly comes quicker to those who love

me than a flood does to its destination.' Tirmidhi 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-



Khattab 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: ÒThose who have the most property – except those

who say, 'Take this and this and this,' 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 Islam 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 learned men will be the worst people

under heaven, corruption coming forth from them and

returning among them.'

There is no avoiding the uncomfortable fact – uncomfortable for

those who wish to 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 with 'the good

news and the warning' in the Qur'an – and both these concerned a

man'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 Messenger 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 order 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

meditative quietism –

Abu Huraira reported Allah's Messenger, peace be upon him,

as saying: 'There will 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 walks

better than the one who runs. He who contemplates them will

be drawn by them, 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 mountains and the places where

the rain falls, fleeing with his Deen [i.e. the Way, the

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 will be cast into

people's hearts, and harj will be prevalent.' He was asked the

meaning 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 activity, giving and



sharing and guiding to Wisdom as no community has ever done

since 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 Abu 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 full social nexus of the Messenger's

Sunna, but by that time, in precise fulfilment of the Messenger's

prophecy, the Khalifate came to an end, he was martyred, and a

kingdom was established. Ibn 'Abbas said: 'There is no one except

the Messenger whose knowledge is not sometimes followed and

sometimes rejected.' The Companions 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

Qur'an to paper. Transmission, the direct existential exchange of

energy-wisdom, was the Way of Islam. Abu Bakr said, 'How

should we do what the Messengers did not 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 not 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 betrayal of the Wisdom-process. It

was inevitably followed by the quite unnecessary step of codifying

the Hadiths of the Messenger on which the Sunna is built. Now we

have all the documents and cannot find the man. We have thebooks from Allah and we have lost the rijalallah – the men of

Allah. He has become the vanishing man – the imperilled creature

of our polluted planet – the man of inner luminosity who

outwardly is a fountain of generosity and peace and

encouragement to others and guidance and strength, the man



whose whole behaviour and energy is unified and in harmony with

the Divine transaction of existence, the Seen and the Unseen.

When Imam Malik compiled the Muwatta – one of the first

collections of Hadith to be written down – Ahmad Ibn Hanbal

criticised him and said, 'He has originated 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 of

all the Companions and most of the Followers, including Hasan al-

Basra, who was the Shaykh of knowledge following the death of

Sayyedina 'Ali, may Allah be pleased 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

snowballed into abstract 'theology' and scholasticism appeared and

argument and refutation – all of which are merely exaltation of the

nafs – so that by the 4th century 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 also 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 science 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 appearance 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 or as belonging to an Order is in

itself irrelevant – what the reality of the sufic 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 the dhikr and study is the creation of the rijalallah – the

men of Allah – following 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 Messenger of Allah said: 'Blessed is he whose

concern for his own faults keeps him from 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

men. 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

innovations.'

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 compromise.

The rajulullah is who he is because of the perfection, harmony, and

selflessness of his behaviour. It was inevitable that in the culture-



forming, fantasy-involved 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 minarets are so much fantasy and have

nothing to do with Islam. It suited the Christian world to admire

Islamic art and talk of Islamic culture, but these are simply

inventions by Christian intellectuals of a situation that had

nevertheless been 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 be

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 brought Islam and left it with his

people. Where you encounter a true Muslim, you encounter Islam.

That's it. No more. The Qur'an itself had to come through the

Messenger – a Book did not fall out of the sky. It could not be

apprehended unless it came through the form of the man – and

later we shall see how the revelation came, 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 pleased 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 reachedmid-ocean and then their ship foundered until each of them

clung to a plank of the wreckage – in what state are they?' The

man replied: 'In a state of great extremity.' 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 recounts 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 is he?' 'He is in my cell.' They went into the cell but

saw no-one there. Thinking that Habib was making fun of

them, they abused him and called him a liar. He swore that he

had spoken the truth. They returned twice and thrice but

found no-one 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 account 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 made self-styled Muslim hunt down Muslim? How

did State-Islam define itself in such 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 with the Jewish Rabbinical heresy.

Heresy in this instance being simply a designation of that deviant

energy that turns Islam into 'religion', binding-together into a State.

The State-Fantasy is in turn dependent on one thing and one thing

alone. 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 become 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

Islam of the Messenger – the Sufism of the Sufis – for we are

beginning to see that 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 reality –

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 through the

world of 'solid' phenomena is but the briefest, and not even the first

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 unreal. There is no avoiding this issue, and it must be



understood that what is being said is not some simple doctrine by

which it is proposed that this is not here – all this stuff we are

surrounded by – of course it is here – but this 'is-ness' is a seeming,

this solidity is a veiling. To the people of the Path the senses are

not openings onto reality, they are veils from reality. Anyone who

thinks that sensory and thought-experience have some kind of total

structural factuality are living in a world of basic insanity and deep

hallucination which could be shattered by a few easy

demonstrations without even recourse to the zone of extra-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, theconstruction of a super-form, the State, built on the foundation of

the solid forms of 'money' and 'capital' and military 'power'. Once

committed to this first insanity of Statism, there is properly

speaking, only one enemy – the one who will, as in the legend, be

the child who points out the nudity of the Emperor. Such is the true

Muslim, the rajulullah. Call him anything you like – but beware

lest you become hoodwinked 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 Allah?

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 doing dhikr and guiding to peace

and wisdom?



That even today there are such men – there are saliheen – and there

are many sincere Muslims who honour and admire them and turn

regretfully away from the spectacle of State-Islam – is an

overwhelming miracle, and the Hajj is the proof of it. Among the

thousands of pilgrims they stand out – the Muslims, shining,

radiant, and filled with awe of Allah. Nevertheless, we must look

carefully at the picture 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 interpenetrating

terms, for the physical reality has superimposed on it a hidden

form, or rather the hidden reality has imposed upon it the

developed and solidified 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 structuralexistence – 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 following 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, money – 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 folds subtly into its deeper

meaning – 'easier', 'worse', 'viler', as it were, 'more ready to hand'.

Dunya, a crucial Qur'anic term, indicates not the beauty of the

mountains and the ocean – all that is 'ard, earth, the unreality

which is nonetheless reality itself. Dunya is pure illusion, is the

accretion and crystallising that the false-self absorbs and annexes

around it as its reality-giving setting, justifying the anguish and the

struggle and the crimes. It is important to taste the subtlety of this

matter that is existence – for the argument of the enemy 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 Shaykh 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

become 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 Shaytan – 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 Haqq – the Reality –

seem distant – while the truth according to the Truth is that, 'He isnearer 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 its tremendous immediacy – He is Presence, dunya is

essentially an absence. Knowing how to behave in the 'ard/world



surrounded by dunya is like knowing not to panic in the shifting

landscape of a dream while asleep – and that is a science that 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', 'what is put off until later'. It is this life that opposes dunya,

the immediacy or seeming immediacy is followed by another state,

a deferred state which later comes showing the true nature of the

forms. This seeming distance of akhira is part of our veiling, the

immediacy of the akhira is the gift of knowledge, the knowledge

that is the property of the Trusting-Ones in Islam. As dunya is

recognised, by experience not conceptually, to be of its nature ashadow-show, an effect of consciousness-as-it-starts, then of

course the nafs in awakening to the Unseen and the multi-

dimensional nature of existence begins to open up, and

consciousness-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 others – 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 theman of Allah. For his world 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 reveals the illusory

power-structure to be sheer fantasy, and his achievements mere



dreams. The political animal has no inner reality, he is still

experientially trapped 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 violence to distract from the

realities of existence – faced with the rajulullah he finally comes

face to face not with his fantasies and not with his action-dramas,

but with himself. He sees his own paltry form in the mirror, in the

clear mirror 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 recognise 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 distracted 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 see 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 refusal to see his nafs – for

it has no real existence – would produce intolerable anguish – the

result of which could only be either surrender to the truth of how-

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 the persecution of the awliya – the friends of

Allah. 'Abu Bakr 'recognised' the Messenger immediately withouthesitation – for all he did was recognise his own nafs as mirrored

in the Messenger – for 'Abu Bakr was Muslim, and the Messenger

was the 'first of the Muslims'. Abu Lahab rejected him because he

was busily engaged in rejecting himself and bringing about his

own destruction. Statism makes safe 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

source, for they are in harmony with a compassionate reality.

Statism means to divide the body politic up – one man a

policeman, another a lawyer, another a helpless 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 again:

Usama bin Zaid told that the Messenger looked down on one of the

fortresses of Madinah and asked: 'Do you see what I see?' When

his hearers replied that they did not, he said: 'I see civil wars

occurring among your houses like falling rain.' This is transmittedby 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 generosity and obligatory self-taxation –

every man is a judge, he is his own policeman. 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 established in a science which does not oppose the Sufis to

Muslims to faqirs to anything – 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 to the person who bows and prostrates with their whole being,

body and consciousness – this is the process and the practice thatbegins the alchemy of the nafs.

One shaykh was asked who his first Master was and he replied: 'A

dog.' He told that 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 fear taking the image to be

that of another dog. Again and again he advanced snarling only to

retreat in terror at the ferocious image that menaced him, until

finally, driven mad with thirst, the dog dived into the pool and the

reflected image 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 that 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, identifiablepoint. 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, the life situation. If the States are imagined to

be something happening to someone 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 describe 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 solid-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 which has been saved for one year. The first is an act of separation from the world-reality, for one's immediate environment

is the extension of one's body experience. People become 'attached'

to their possessions, and this experience is nothing less than an

extension of their attachment to the world-as-food. The Maulana

Rumi, may Allah be pleased with him, said, 'The whole world is

the breast.' This is the meaning of Ramadan and Zakat. It is the

inner experience of the fast that awakens the Salik, the Wayfarer,

to this moving, fluid nature of the self. Let us first get a picture of

what the Sunna of food is, and how the Messenger saw it as

experience and Wisdom-source.

Abu Huraira told that when they were struck by hunger

Allah's Messenger, peace be upon him, gave them each a date.

Tirmidhi transmitted it.

Abu Darda' reports the Messenger, peace be upon him as

saying: 'Provision searches 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 people's food is enough for three and three

people's food is enough for four.' This is transmitted both by

Bukhari and Muslim.

A'isha said that the Messenger, peace be upon him, fasted on

Mondays and Thursdays. 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, fourteenth, andfifteen.' 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 up at night for prayer?'

When he replied that was so, he said: 'Do not do it. Fast 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 never 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 every

seven nights, but do not do more than that.' Bukhari andMuslim both transmitted it.

Abu Huraira said that the Messenger of Allah told him, 'Many

a one who fasts gets 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 are some mouthfuls

which keep his back straight, but if there is no escape he

should fill it a third with food, a third with drink, and leave a

third empty.' Tirmidhi 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 evening.' 'Umar ibnAl'Khattab reported the Messenger as saying this and it is

transmitted by Tirmidhi and Ibn Majah.

A'isha told that Allah's Messenger, peace be upon him, wanted

to buy a young slave, so he threw some dates in front of him,

but when the youth ate greedily he said: 'Voracious eating is

ominous!' and ordered him to be sent back. Baihaqi

transmitted 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

have kept him away from sleep by night, so accept my

intercession for him.² Then their 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 the gates of the Garden are

opened, the gates of the Fire are locked, and the rebelliousshaytans are chained. In it Allah has a night which is better

than a thousand months. He who is deprived of its good has

indeed suffered deprivation.' Ahmad and Nasa'i transmitted it.

It is clear that fasting plays an important part in the human science.

Also it has a structure. There is the obligatory Ramadan fast whichis annual and dated by a lunar calendar so that it swings through

the years with a lunar orbit. The opening 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

horizon. 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 whose end was freedom from

the Fire. Its climax comes with the Night of Power – Laylat al-Qadr, during which the Messenger received the Qur'anic

revelation. That night is hidden, and the seeker must watch for it,

knowing that it is one of the last uneven-dated nights of the fast.

There is never any doubt when it comes which night it has been.

There is no more open night in the year for direct experience, or

rather, for awakening.

The fast is from dawn to sunset and is broken immediately the sunhas gone down. The fast is total and is also an abstention during

the same hours from sexual intercourse. 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 should 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 is extreme. What it does, of course, is affect the whole basis of

the separate-self illusion by breaking the established adult feeding

pattern which in turn opens up the memory of the infantile feed.

The resonance of any imbalance and fear that 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 to shudder to silence. It is an opening therefore to the

whole substructure of the nafs, whose otherness has emerged in the

infantile phase where feeding both implies a unity of self and

environment on the one hand, and, when the feed is removed,

delayed, or given with anxiety, on the other implies separateness,

isolation and fear. To the person setting out on the Path, Ramadan

inevitably proves the most difficult time of their new life, and if

they see it through, for the same reasons, the most rewarding. The

voluntary fasts which are mentioned in the Hadiths 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. There 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 eating. The human being

experiences an inner emptiness which first expresses itself as

hunger or thirst: when it is satisfied, the experiencing self in its

dynamic form-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 the milk, then the mother. Once

the nafs moves out into the whole world picture, the appetite

moves outwards from food and emotional encounter to every

stratum of experience. Conquest and war are nothing but the

continued devouring of the unsatisfied 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-experience. 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 safety in the Divine process,

and if it is poisoned, will transmit the mother's fears 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 well-being will panic and seek in the food itself for

the compassion that 'goes along with' the food, but in its case was

missing. So a person's expectation of the 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 reputation, popularity, punishment, power, land, wealth,

anything – would never be anything else than a futile expectation

of the missed infantile wisdom-transaction. This is a pattern with

no blame – for this is nothing else than the Seal of the destiny. Nor

can we ever know what we imbibed in the first child-feast until the

whole picture of the life is complete. There may be a memory of

great love in that first transmission and it may be covered over andits uncovering is the Path, or one of the vital dimensions of the

Path, for the wisdom-transaction is one that involves the whole

transmutation of the nafs which exists by virtue of 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.



month being the month cosmically intended for fasting, resonates

deeply into the pseudo-solidity of the nafs and awakens the basic

response that the nafs has to the feed-experience, and with that the

whole self-pattern is opened up for the faster to see. 'Every day we

are on a new creation – take provision from it,' said the Messenger

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, melting,

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 the veils lift the Light becomes clearer. The

seeker begins to awaken. It is in this condition that the murid

recognises that he is constantly passing from one State to another.

It is then that the practice begins to reveal its effect with startling

results.

Before a man had taken the Path he would take every experience as

it came: he might 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 extreme – demanding a close-

up reaction which forbids detachment or makes it well-nigh

impossible – would stop him seeing life as anything but a myriad

of different possibilities and actualities chaotically following one

on another. Once that man takes the Path he begins the practice of

unifying existence. He affirms the One. He bows before the One.

He praises the One. He addresses the One. He sees One. 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 whatever the agent, he cuts through the deception

of forms and recognises always in every case One Reality at work.

So, with his nafs, he learns not to say I am this and I am that, but



rather, I am neither this nor that, but what comes over me 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 ability 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 only

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 revelation of Allah-ta-ala to the

Messenger Dawud, peace be upon him, 'Fear Me as you 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 device 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 explained 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 powerful passages in his great work:

As for the person who falls into the claws of the lion, if his

knowledge were perfect, 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

Attributes. Am I not going to say that fear of the lion is a

parable of fear of Allah? No. When the veil is lifted, it will beknown that fear of the lion is the very 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 oneness of existence, is the simplest thing in the world.

What makes it seem difficult is not that the act itself is difficult,

but that we run in fear from the very 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 – all 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 tosomewhere safe like the moon, abandon the central nervous

system, refuse to react as if there was anyone 'at home' inside the

body. Courteously the slave 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 Universal. 'I' speak to 'Him'.

'I' am present, 'He' is absent – the third person singular is, as the

Shaykh al-Akbar points out, the pronoun of absence, and a formal

dialogue 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 language.

'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 is a fire in the forest. Second – you see

with your own eyes there is a fire in the 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 Allah-ta-ala. This is the meaning of the great saying of

the Sufis – the Sufi is uncreated. From the depths of the awesome

forests of the Tawhid, the reality is that 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'

saying:

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 Divinity 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-Darqawi, a Shaykh of our Shaykh, said: 'The slave is the slave and the Lord is the Lord.'

As we will later see, this is the only thing we are able to say while

affirming 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 wiping out of this

illusory central experiencing self, for in order that 'He' the absent

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 time 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 nafs 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 scattered 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 great science that the Prophets transmit

to their people. It is called in the language of the desert Messenger,

dhikr'Allah.

Now when we examine the root of the word, we as usual uncover

its true existential impact. The meaning of this word – which is thescience of tasawwuf – is in its 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 not far from

Him, He is not hiding from you, and there is no complex secret

esoteric tantra that has to be practised. If you want to know, if you

really want Oneness, if you really want to be taken out of your

neurotic mind-games and made aware of the immediate and

vibrant Presence of the Lord of the Universe – what you need is akick in the balls. It is offensive? Then what offends you is your

sickness, the marad that separates you from the tremendous and

overwhelming immediacy of reality in all its present-tense

awareness. It is that shock – that instant focussing of the nafs on



the actuality of existence, that halts the form-making 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 called 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, weare being forced by our pursuit 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 situations 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 Trusting-Ones. (Qur'an 17.82)

In the language of the Shaykh al-Akbar:

'The Qur'an is laden with quality. Qualities are states Š its

quality is the source-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, neither other than it nor

extra to it, so understand! Allah speaks the Truth and guides



coming 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 praise, gives praise. It is

related of the Mu'adhdhin that, of wet and dry, to the extent

that his voice carries, everything testifies for him. Thus we

have heard 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 gnostics of

the glory of Allah which not every man perceives. So each sort

from the creation of Allah is one of the communities which

Allah formed on a worship particular to them. So He inspired

them with it from within themselves. So their 'messenger' is

from their essences. There are outstanding ones from Allahwhere a particular inner awareness on which they have been

formed gives certain creatures a knowledge which the adept

technician cannot grasp. They even know what is of 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 with 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, making wise men seem ignorant Š He, may Allah

bless him and grant him peace, had complete unveiling, so he



saw what we do not see. He spoke, peace be upon him, of the

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 would have seen whatI 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, used to do dhikr constantly, at all times.' Wehave 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' andits means is dhikr. Speech in its pure and original state is nothing

but dhikr, and the accretions of speech that come with abandoning

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 nature. For speech to be basically sane,

it must stem from the 'speech' of the revelation, which in its turn is

the fruit of silence. Quintessential speech is not pure dhikr but

rather the state from which wisdom-speech comes and all thesepatternings are the ayats of the Qur'an. From this viewpoint, 'there

is nothing but 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'llah, and there is firewood in the

house, it burns it up and it becomes fire. If there 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 does not touch it, so theharmful elements are burned up and the good elements

remain. 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 trumpets and

glasses because dhikr is opposed to all that is other-than-the-

Reality, 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

when it is kindled, the sound of riding beasts, the thunder of

horses, and the sound 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 fromevery source and element of these substances. Whoever has

heard these sounds in dhikr has praised Allah and glorified

Him with every tongue. This is the result of the dhikr of the

tongue with the force of absorption. Perhaps the slave will



reach the state where, when he is silent from the dhikr, the

heart will move in his breast like 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 Truth arises from it with a

voice, and inevitable swooning then blows on it a craving for

dhikr and the One invoked. The dhikr of the heart is like the

sound of the 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 onewho 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 nafs 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

annihilated in respect to himself altogether, then that is ablemish and troubledness. Perfection is that he be annihilated

to himself and to annihilation, and the annihilation of

annihilation is the goal of annihilation, and annihilation is the

foremost 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, blessings and peace be upon

him: 'I am going to my Lord and He will guide me.' This

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 celestial world. Then the purest real

existence emerges and the inscription of the invisible 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 angels' essences and the spirits of the

prophets and awliya in a beautiful form which flows on him

through some of the realities. That is the beginning until hisdegree is elevated from forms and he encounters the Truth in

everything with clarity.

This is the fruit of the core of dhikr, and its beginning is the

dhikr of the tongue, 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 tograze in the Gardens of Paradise, let him invoke Allah much,'

and the secret of his word: 'Hidden 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 both from the dhikr and the One invoked,

and the dhikr of the Secret is being madly thirsty and

drowning in it. Among its signs is that when you leave off the

dhikr it does not leave you, and the flight of dhikr in you is to

awaken you from absence to presence.

Among its signs is that dhikr tightens your head and limbs, as

if they were bound 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 firesaround you are untroubled, being aflame and brightly

burning. When dhikr reaches the Secret, the dhikr is the

silence of the one who invokes, as if 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'llah', 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 persevere 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 praiseworthy 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 except for the illusion of multiplicity.

Multiplicity is only Oneness multiplied in accordance with the



Names and the traces of Divine Power.

In 'The Greater Song', the Shaykh al-Kamil says of the one startingout on the journey:

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 nothing 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 unresponsive and speaking from opinion.

Love with the love of Allah and hate with His hate.This is the

Road, so be aware of it, my friend!

Be an isthmus between the two oceans – the Reality and the

Road – and you will attain the rank of Recognition in every

assembly.

In every mosque, guide the slaves of Allah by Allah openly, by

showing the beauty of the Paths of Allah.

And if you wish to go swiftly into the Presence of our Lord,

then have a good opinion of Allah's creation and speak well of

Him.

Persevere in the Sublime and Mighty Name with a good heart,

sincerity and concentration.

Recognise the beauty of the Essence in every Manifestation.

Were it not for it the existence of the Existent would not have

been established.

All the attributes of the nafs are annihilated by His Invocation,

and all that remains is tranquillity of heart, sweeter than

honey.

Every inner state along with the Stations arises frominvocation of the Mighty Name with gravity.

So from it comes the Opening for every Wayfarer and from it

comes the Overflowing for every Murshid.



From it is the state of intoxication and fana, and from it, too,

the states of sobriety and ecstasy.

Power is only given to the one who has isolated himself with

Him, and who, through much praise, is adorned with what

pleases Him.

Thus he will continue to ascend in the deserts of His Essence

until he is utterly 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 proclaims His Wilaya (being a Wali) and glory.

So be a slave and servant to the One whose description this is,

and fulfil the contract 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 ProphetMuhammad.

So his outward form is a Light and his inner form is a Secret.

His perfections are beyond numbering.

May the blessings of Allah be upon him and his family and

Companions, and give us 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 kaleidoscope 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

fragment 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 seeker opened up to his qualities, his higher

nafs-states – in that middle condition of conflict and development

that Al-Ghazzali defined – then that is illuminated until the climax

of Light comes which annihilates the whole nafs as an

experiencing locus both mentally and biologically.

So what are these states – what is the dhikr activity working upon,

what is it that goes through this tremendous upheaval of energy

caused by the invocation? Let us go directly to the Shaykh al-

Akbar for a definition. In a poem on the knowledge of phenomenalbeing 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'ala?

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 be 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 earthmoves from state to state. 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 thoughts inhis 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 particular tajalli to that source-form. So

his foundation is from that tajalli according 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 human creatures who have unveiling of

forms from the Unseen. The Shaykh says that these self-

experiences that pass over the experiencing centre of the nafs are

not outward intrusions, are not random, are not unpredictably

chaotic, but all inevitable in their patterning from the basic source-

form of the self in the Unseen, of which the life-story is merely thephenomenal chapter – there having preceded it a chapter in the

world of Spirits before birth and coming-into-solidity, and 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 the 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 the thirst and

longing that the true self experiences in its illusory trapped

situation 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 they are moved from nor

moved to,' which is the case of the majority of human beings, and

he presents this as a basically ignorant situation. He is not

suggesting that one knows the future in any occultistic manner, but

something much subtler and more profound – he is suggesting that

real knowledge begins by a recognition of this moving time-flux

creature as being an utterly structured and inevitable series of life-

patternings all stemming from its original self-form dynamic in the

Unseen before it is manifested. He sees knowledge as beginning

when we grasp that this time-setting is not separable from the time-

set individual, the event 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 revealed in a Persian

carpet, but with all the ravishing, sweeping movement and

apparent 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 'state' and mistaken it for an

inner condition like 'depression' or confusion or excitement 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 Š It is like saying, 'So and so is still walking



today, and did not sit.' There is no doubt that walking is many

different movements. Each movement is not the same as the

other, rather it is its like. Your knowledge moves by its moving

and it is said: 'His state has not changed!' How many stateshave 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 utterly illusory. And just as the walking-

image indicates that there is obviously something constant over a

brief period that suggests such a solid specificity of self-form, it is

in itself illusory, in flux, made up of tiny separate dynamic utterlyopen 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 these forms which they have.

The picture then is of one person having different states, and a

form is made for 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 create an imaginary 'situation'. So states vary in the imagination

on which ordinary human experience is based, despite the

inescapable fact that this so-called reality is utterly fictional. Theyvary in the imagination, but they do not vary in knowledge – and

knowledge is achieved by the act of dhikr unveiling the states and

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 foot 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 much. Its door is

wide. The knowledge of dreams, the Interspace and Divine

Ascriptions relate to this.

Thus the fluctuating endless states express themselves throughout

the whole organism, cellularly, electro-magnetically, in synaptic

brain-signalling, in energy-flow, in endocrinal release, digestive

function, blood rhythm, and all these various patternings are but

the flowering of one original self-form or rather source-form of

which this solid-body human creature is the time-bound

manifestation outwardly and whose reality is with Allah from

before-endless-time. Thus my 'movement' is all movement, and my

space-occupying is all space-occupying, and the Universe and I arenot two but container-contained, and this itself is nothing for He is

as He was before the creation of the Universe. 'Everything perishes

except the Face of Allah!' – as He Himself triumphantly declares in

the Qur'an. (55.26-27).

When the Shaykh al-Akbar declares that only the Sufis under-stand

the true nature of the nafs, he means by this that no-one else

possesses a total picture of the life-situation except the people of

unveiling, for this whole dimension of self-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 odd ghost inhabiting a delicate house of tissue and nerve-

endings. It is an odd ghost, for, according to their picture, it is



enough that the delicate fibre-furniture be damaged for the

occupant somehow, mysteriously, to be affected. This dualistic

frame on which the pathetic crumbling structure of our hastily put-

together modern psychology is erected, leaves us with a picture of

something called 'behaviour' 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 time 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 equally crude and massively administered chemical drug

treatment. Although some modern therapists have recognised a

quite profound and clinically identifiable picture 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 that they again try to contain man within a bio-energy

definition reducing the human being by that token simply to the

sum of his energies. Utterly closed to the nature of an Unseen

reality, because still essentially trapped in this basic duality which

they quite rightly observe to exist in the world of forms, they

relentlessly avoid the metaphysical question which in other

sciences insists on attention. Now that we have uncovered the

chromosomic level of patterning, and glimpsed 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 us, 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 refrains from'being' the brain, and yet so lovingly and seductively is its shadow-

reality. I now do not refer to 'your' mind or 'my' mind, for in this

picture I would 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 with any Jungian or gestalt picture of archetypes.

Two pieces of labelling have managed to keep the Orientalists

away from any serious coming to grips with the metaphysics of

Islam – the use of the term 'archetypes' and 'neo-platonic'. That

these men were, one and all (if there had been an exception he

would have had to be 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 terms – 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 insisted from the beginning, is not just a

matter of epistemology, but of self-transformation, and without

submitting to the transformation-practice of Islam there 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 individual as he experiences reality. The Wisdom-view is

dependent on recognising that there is no out-there to examine and

understand. Reality is One. The so-called knowledge 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 chemistry, the sciences continue to split into

micro, and bio, intra, and supra, and what emerges becomes more

and more a knowledge which for the needs of the life-process is

recognisably useless. Bernard Shaw used to lament the millions of

mice and monkeys slaughtered in the name of that pursuit of

useless knowledge – had he lived today he would have furtherbeen 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 underlying Unity that links all these, because basically unable

to grasp the Unity of each person's self-experience, which remains



the essential clue to grasping the Unity which is the very nature of

existence itself.

Here is a paraphrasing of the position of a modern geneticist,

Richard Goldschmidt:

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 even

chromosomes, as we always have. Something bigger controls

the whole system. That is why I speak of systemic mutations.

The collapse of the post-Darwinian picture of evolution revealed

not only the incredible double-think that many biologists were

indulging in, and the extraordinary 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 unfoldings, and gradual-change mutations, there was an

assumed Power at work which they, 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 according to

vastly sophisticated and complex laws and patterns which they

could neither codify nor decode. They slithered from the use of a

term 'Nature' which they invested with Divine Intellect and Plan

only to disrobe it on their next calculation 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

effective as serious epistemology. It was enough that bit by bit the

actual field work 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-view. 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 provide Islam

with something it did not in the first place possess, thus

demonstrating that Islam was a pseudo-religion and not to be taken

with any intellectual seriousness. 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 is something that the earlier 'Islams' of the

Messengers before the Seal of the Messengers, Muhammad, peace

be upon him, already knew about. It is assumed by Muslim

scholars that the platonic knowledge was an inherited reality-

picture from the 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 sufic point of view, it would

be more useful to label Plato neo-Islamic than to label the Sufis as

neo-platonic.

The matter of archetypes is even more dangerous for a person

desirous of grasping the Wisdom-picture. The accepted post-

Jungian picture of archetypes reduces these to a subjective, yet

mysteriously shared set of symbol pictures that exist on 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 with a set of coded meanings which take on their

reality when applied to the historic 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 far

from the original Goethean picture of Ur-forms from which it was



borrowed, only 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 of its validity and

certainly the Jungian clinical record convinced one of nothing but

the fact that the people who unleashed that empire of archetypal

forms during analysis had undoubtedly been analysed by Jung. The

sufic picture of existence is sustained, and has been systematically

over a period of fourteen hundred years, 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

cannot 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 seeker

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 return to it when we come to

the point that is being forced upon us where we ask about 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 unceasing movement of states in a locuswhich is nothing other than the states, and 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 changed' and 'to pass by' or 'go between'. By

extension it relates to the adverb meaning 'round about' and to the

nouns 'a power', 'a plan', 'a year'. Also 'a turning off'.

Thus state/situation is the basic condition of all forms, according tothe sufic science, and it is the action-process which the nafs

experiences on the Path, whose culminating and ultimate condition

is to be 'turned off', obliterated in the face of the Essence of the

multitudinous forms. The sufic science further claims that the

Qur'an is a revelation from the source of Reality, indicating not

only 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' thatprevents unitary experience. It is not a matter of little mind

(myself) being swallowed up in the Big Mind after all, as some of

the inadequate systems formed on the archeology of previous

Islams suggest (like Zen), but rather of the total being emerging

from separate pulsing and form-dynamic 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

illusory 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 creation, 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.

'Ali ibn Abi Talib, may Allah be pleased with him, said:

'Revelation was cut off after the Messenger of Allah, may Allah

bless him and grant him peace. What remains 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 transmission 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, ahidden 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 with 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 time 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 onthe Night of Power it is read 'shabina' – in one night. It is indicated

within its text by many 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 sent 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 intervals, 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 designation 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 difficulty 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 exalted': '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.



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 came to him. And when hecompleted 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

seven times or as often as it pleased Allah: then he would go back

to his house until, in the year when Allah sent him, in the month of

Ramadan in which Allah willed 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 brocade whereon was some writing, and said,

'Read!' I said, 'What shall I read?' He pressed me with it so

tightly that I thought it was death: then He let me go and said,

'Read!' I said, 'What shall I read?' He pressed me with it the

third time so that I thought it was death and said, 'Read!' I

said, 'What shall I read?' – and this only to deliver myself fromHim, lest He should do the same to me again.

'"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)



Hanifa as it was called, had a continuing thread of followers who

passed on and practised the Ibrahimic (brahminical) Tawhid

(yoga). Hanifa derives from HNF, 'to incline'. It means therefore

not only 'to incline toward the Truth', but 'to be responsive', to open

oneself and yield to the Truth. The essential mark of the Hanif and

later, for it was no different, the Muslim, 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

derives 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 theinitiates of Wisdom that they must not only practise it, but

establish it. The very first declaration of who Qur'an is for in the

opening main Form 'Al-Baqara' puts it thus:


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, the 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 find 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 experience', the complete flowing openness of theChosen One, Muhammad – chosen by inevitable destiny, for he

has so utterly abnegated his own self-choice that chosenness 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 hurried across Makka to the house of her cousin Waraqa

bin Naufal bin Asad bin Abdu'l-'Uzza bin Qusayy, who had

become a Christian but had come through the tradition of theHanifa. When she told him what had happened, he affirmed the

authenticity of the event and went to the Messenger and made him

retell the story. He also 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 Sayyedina Musa (Moses). You will be called a liar,

they will humiliate you, and they will cast you out and they will

fight with you. Surely, you are the Messenger of this people.' And

he kissed him on his forehead and left.



Khadija was determined to complete her proofs of authenticity to

convince her husband that he was neither poet nor possessed.

When the angelic manifestation happened in their own house, she

prepared a test. She instructed her husband to move towards her,

continually asking if the Vision remained. She moved him to sit on

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 jinn who use the heat/energies of fire,

and not angelic which use air/energy. This is why ghusl separates

the sexual act and salat. The water rite follows the fire/act to purify

the self for the other act of union which is dependent on the air

element, breath.

The people of the Quraysh were determined in their rejection of

the new Messenger, 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 possibilities 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 blessing for him

if he could heal this man. He went to the Chosen One and said: 'Ipractise 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 one whom

Allah leads astray. I affirm that there is no Divinity except Allah,



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 accounts that one could take

these descriptions as evidence that he was indeed 'a man

possessed'. This raises something that we have already touched on,

which is that it is in the nature of the spiritual Path that its stages

are marked by stages 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, thecentre or locus from which the endless flowing states manifest in

such a manner as to suggest the self's reality and historicity. The

goal is to loosen these form-shadows and allow the Light which is

the source-form of the locus in the Unseen to manifest. 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

person 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 still, no signals going out or

being taken in. Both madnesses imply, by this condition, a break in

behaviour with the accepted behaviour of the community. An

essential part of this break is the refusal to adhere to the commonly

shared 'naming' process, and either an arcane language will be

introduced or unstructured changes 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 protect and

isolate the non-existent 'core', but to open oneself to the Secret of

Totality. The peeling of the onion-layers, in the image of Peer

Gynt, is an act of glorious release and opening to the Reality, for

not only is there no core but there was no onion. Nothing has been

gained, but nothing has been lost. At the different 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 madman is himself 'shedding the skins' – he is conducting

an operation of self-destruction 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 not two hearts within

the breast' as Qur'an says. (33.4). The Prophet takes his Path under

direct guidance from the Unseen Master, the Angel, while those

who follow 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 in 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 prophets do not struggle in the same way that the

awliya, the Perfected Ones, do. They are the 'perfect exemplars',they are the original man-form in all its perfection. 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 destiny being mortal, the form has to be brought to an end in

accordance with nature, outside and inside from another



perspective of course being identical. Nevertheless, this perfection

contains within it all the stages of the Way and all the Stations of

the awliya. The goal of the journey of the awliya lies over the

mountains of madness and they have to be traversed. The

beginning of the Messenger'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 it in the deep sanity

of his prophetic condition.

While the mad person behaves in a self-obsessed way, the

Messenger was the embodiment of the generous, socially balanced

and active human being. This was the baffling 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

find it?' He said: 'I am the first of the sons of Adam, and I say this

without boasting.' He was simply there to show himself to his age

as the exemplar, and offer his life-pattern as the Sunna for

existence throughout the whole world from that day to the end of

time for people of every culture and climate. He was the

culmination of the human situation, the Seal of the Perfection of

Prophethood. When studying the aspect of revelation, one must not

lose sight of the human fineness 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 act of

homage and acceptance of Islam at 'Aqaba from the women, he

had a jug of water placed between himself and the women and he

plunged his hand into it, and then they did, thus the transmission

took place through contact yet through a purifying element. It

distressed the Messenger when Sidi Abu Bakr brought his white-

haired and venerable father to him. Immediately the Messenger

expressed his concern 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 the

Affirmation. It is this man, of endless fineness to appreciate the

living moment, who is the man laying claim to prophethood, and

over whom pass these shuddering and powerful states out of which

the Qur'anic message comes. There was never 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 this '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 whole society and affect thedestiny 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, 'You give us your opinion

about him.' He said, 'No, you speak and I will listen.' They

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, spasmodic

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 sorcerer.' – 'No, we have seen sorcerers

and their sorcery, and here is no spitting and no knots.' –

'Then what are we to say, Oh Abu 'Abdu Shams?' they asked.



He replied: 'By God, his speech is sweet, his root is a palm-tree

whose branches are fruitful and everything you have said

would be seen to be false. The nearest thing to the truth is your

saying that he is a sorcerer, who has brought a message bywhich he separates a man from his father, or from his brother,

or from his wife, or from his family.'

The first revelation which we have documented in detail was sent

down on what the Qur'an calls the Night of Power. It is of such

importance that there is a Power Form in the Qur'an describing it.

It is the general view that on that night the whole of the Qur'an was

sent down, to emerge fragment by fragment in living situationsthroughout the life of the Messenger, but Allah knows best. Here is

the Power Form:


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 whole night until dawn.



From that night onwards the revelation came, sometimes an ayat at

a time, sometimes 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 Hajj 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 it 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 news 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 unfolding

pattern of man's history from the beginning of his time on earth

and showing 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 situations, teaching him, consoling him, correcting him.

2. The story of mankind's global destiny since the beginning, and

the role of the earlier prophets and their Books in this cyclic story

of man's being given guidance, and its being corrupted and lost,

and a new guidance being sent down, culminating 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, abrogating earlier Roads that were sent for particular

nations and races by earlier prophets.

4. The nature of Reality. Tawhid, the declaration of the Unity –

that is the essential 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 Book warns that this life is a zone of

action and that man is responsible to his Creator and will have to

answer, in the next phase of existence when he has dropped 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 Qur'an in Islam have, understandably limited the



meaning of this ayat to infer simply that the Book rests on the

factual 'law' ayats. Ironically it is the 'law' in all its tremendous

simplicity that they have made subtle, ambiguous and top-heavy

until a completely rabbinical invention called Qur'anic Law has

emerged to buoy up the pseudo-Islamic State they have erected in

their own image and in defiance of the community-form outlined

in the Sunna of the Messenger. The 'clear-signs' refer to all the

great declarations about Divine Unity that stem from the Book's

repeated commands to examine creation itself for all the clear-

signs within 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 Book. The Book 'comes out of'

this, the organic life-laws come out of this, and not the other way

round. The clear-signs are those that call to justice and compassion

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 Sleepers in the Cave, but

rather they are those which relate basically to the central teaching

in the Book. The behaviour-teaching on which all the Wisdom-

practice is based lies in the clear-sign passages which insist on a

recognition of Unity 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 compassion in the

Way of Allah. The Divine-teaching is based on the likeness-signs.

Now it is significant that in this ayat Allah-ta-ala uses the physical

term for likeness in preference to the imagistic term.

'Mutashabihat' derives from the root ShBH – 'a likeness', 'mutually

resembling one 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 another. 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, properly speaking, this is the only way in which the

Reality-situation can be conveyed to human beings, and it has been

the Way of all the Prophets and all the Books. 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 punishment 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 existence can be conveyed to the

human mind except by mithal – this is a mithal of that. 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-process 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 – and let

the illumination come as He wills. It is one of His means of access

to you and of your means of access to Him. Thus this ayat warns

against discoursing and 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, was 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 secrets of the Qur'an is the

set of letters that are used throughout the Book marking the

opening of certain Suras. They are not some kind of early scribe's

cataloguing as some rather desperate Christian commentators have

tried to suggest in their attempts to invalidate the authority of the

Book. There are many Hadith that refer to these letters, and two

Suras actually bear the letters as their names, '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

whole 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 revelation process we have just examined, but also that

the language should be prepared for the revelation and pure enough

to express the revelation – thus a Book comes where and when the

language can 'bear' it. What we have observed is that the meanings

spill out beyond the word and into single letters. Thus it is clear

that before we can understand with profundity the nature of the

human situation and 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 something foisted onto Islam by wayward



scholars borrowing either from India or Greece. As we have

already pointed out, however, it was understandable that Muslim

scholars would be moved and fascinated to see the earlier

'archeologies' of their own knowledge in the ruined Wisdom-

teaching of earlier Islams, whether Pythagorean or Brahminic. Al-

Biruni, when he went to India, had no need to borrow from 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 going 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 embarking on a journey into the realm of letters it will

inevitably encroach on our next 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 illusions take on a 'reality'

which the cosmic picture constantly denies. In place 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, melting, altering, vanishing. Yet what moves

and changes is structured and restructured according to the most

delicate and vibrant order. We are beginning to recognise 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 and 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 puts it:

Know, may Allah support us and you, that when existence was

absolute without limitation, it contained the Obligator, and He

is the Reality, may He be exalted, and 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 sensory experience checked by the

inadequate tools of logic, but in a world that, as 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, only the instrument that replaces the 'measuring' telescope

and the destructive reactor, 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 letters he calls

'dotted', as all letters come from the 'dot'. The 'dot' we may take to

be the manifestation of phenomena. And phenomenal being is

itself manifested from letters.

Now, there are 29 letters in the Arabic alphabet, that is, in the

language created specifically for the Wisdom-revelation or 'abode'.

Two letters have a particular significance which we will look at

later. These two are also very related. These 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 examine. The 29 gives us the

lunar month. The 29 x 9 gives us the 261 of the Heavens. 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 distinction which is made the reality is not

split but merely looked at from one point of view. When another

'rank' or 'reality' is invoked, the previous one vanishes, for these

separatenesses are in description only and not in truth. For

example, if referring to the Divine Attributes, you talk of Him as

being the One who Creates and then the One who Destroys, youare not saying He is now one and then 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' however 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

Muslim, 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 point 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 sketch 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 not 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 key 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 merely an

interspace between two other zones. This means that the Seen

World is an Interspace in itself, but so also is the World of Source-

Forms in the Unseen and the Jabrut where Lordship comes out to

Creation from the Essence.

In our first picture we see the three ranks in their 'descent' intoforms. Taking into account that these ranks intersect each other, let

us place the ruling rank of the Jabrut in the centre for it shares a

face on one side with the Mulk and on the other with the Malakut.

Here we take three aspects: Apparent: Interspace: Hidden. Thus the

Hidden of the Mulk is the Apparent of the Jabrut, and the Hidden

of the Jabrut is the Apparent of the Malakut. This count gives us 7

conditions within the 3 ranks. Therefore the 9 ranks are in fact 7

conditions. So we can 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 composed 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 displaying and giving of form-energy from

the Truth, and 9 Heavens for reception in 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 the 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 Universe of Stars, and

another 1 for the 'Arsh – the starless heaven 'beyond' the stars 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 Kursi, 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 isadded no fifth. It is untenable that there be more than 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 is in them, plus these 7 is 9, and the 1 which is



in the 4 plus these 9 is 10. After 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, because in it are 1/2, 1/6 , and 1/3 . So hot and dry weremixed and it was fire. Hot 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

the formation of the air from heat and moisture, it was the

breath which is the sensory life and it is the mover of

everything by its breath. It moved water, earth, 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 same 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 compounded of heat and dryness as we said. So by theheat which is in it, water is heated, 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

makes 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 which 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, articulation, and sense, and

realities which are found by the existence of compounding, 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 appears? – I reply that here is a

wondrous secret and a great complexity. Its unveiling would bea wrong action since the intellect cannot reason it. But

unveiling sees it Š

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 incontradiction to the scientific picture, he asserts that it is ignorance

to lay at his door a charge of giving an 'unscientific' view of

reality. He accepts the scientific picture, but 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

the people of the Path, while the knowers are several and 'know'

differently – knowledge itself is One and thus all they are

experiencing is a private unveiling of a tiny part of One Reality,and this knowledge must come out from the knower and 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 opening-experience( i.e. that you are not a separate knower at all). It is He who

gives us the matter at its source without summation or

confusion. So we know the realities for what they are based on

– it is the same whether they were isolated 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 things as within the phenomenal world or we see them as

the Divine unfoldings, the description in each instance is not thething. There is no scientific fact, there are only the limited view-

pictures. These are our doing. He is concerned with unveiling,

which comes from Reality to the slave. He quotes the ayat of the

Qur'an which says of the Messenger: 'We have not taught him

poetry, it is not seemly 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 haveappeared from the 'alif. It is their Heaven in spirit and in sense.

There is a Heaven from which Earth exists: a Heaven from which

Water exists: a Heaven from which Air exists: and 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 othercompounds, the 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 the 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 extension. It does not have a Heaven so its cycle

comes to an end. Life in pre-endless-time in itself belongs to the

Living, and so ending is not true for it. So post-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, that death is not valid for them? When life was in

physical bodies by accident, death 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 the

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 which it came, the lifediffused from it in the living body follows it, and the body

remains in the form of the inanimate to our eye. So it is said:

'So-and-so has 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 time.' (20.55)

The Spirit likewise returns to its source until the Day of Rising,

and the Gathering 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 setting in motion

of the members to formation is acquired by the turning of the

spirit. 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 horn. So a life goes into its limbs

and it becomes a shaped individual as on the first time. 'Then

he blows into it again, so that they stand looking while theEarth is illuminated by the Light of their Lord.' (39.68-69) 'As

He created you, you return.' (7.29) 'Say: "He will quicken

them, who originated them the first time."' (36.79) 'Either

happy Š 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 regrettable result of the study of Muslim writershaving filtered through the Orientalists that this study of letters

which lies at the base of Sufism has been so long ignored, or

worse, dismissed as some kind of superstitious magic. The

reduction 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 ethos

surrounding them, had little chance of appreciating it either, sobusy were they 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 serious and

precise description of the life-process and does not mean that the

Shaykh with his towering intellect is naively suggesting that the

beginning of things is some kind of cosmic children's party with a

lot of alphabet letters falling out of the sky. It is we who mustmake the effort to grasp the meaning and Wisdom of the secrets of

existence which he lays before us, bearing in mind his continual

warnings which I can but re-iterate:

We travel on a different path in the understanding of these



words, and that is that 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 beexalted, until the Truth, may He be exalted, takes possession of

our instruction by unveiling and realisation by what you heard

Him say: 'Fear Allah, Allah teaches you.' (2.282). He says: '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.' (18.65).

Fortunately, the intellectual situation is much more open to theWisdom-teaching than it was in the first arrogant days when

scientific methodology seemed adequate 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-linguistics and structural linguistics and so on,

we find that it is not the vision that is lacking as much as the

willingness to shed an epistemology which they inherited from thescientists and which they are terrified to leave behind. The story is

the same wherever research has taken men to the limits of logic

and language and measurement and where the microcosmic

structure planes out into the macrocosmic 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

physicists are taking them to a point where they are being

challenged to recognise – not the invalidity of their findings – butthe 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 business.

Here are George and Muriel Beadle, for example, coming from the



realm of molecular biology:

The deciphering of the DNA code has revealed our possession of a

language much older than hieroglyphics, a language as old as life

itself, a language that is the 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 Jakobson, the linguist, observes:

We actually learn that all the detailed and specific genetic

information is contained in molecular coded messages, namely

in their linear sequences of 'code words' or 'codons'. Eachword comprises three coding sub-units termed 'nucleotide

bases' or 'letters' of the code 'alphabet'. This alphabet consists

of four differing letters 'used to spell out the genetic message'.

The 'dictionary' of the genetic code encompasses 64 distinct

words which, in regard to their components, are defined as

'triplets', for each of them forms a sequence of three letters. 61

of these triplets carry an individual meaning, while three areapparently used merely 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 the

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 appears the only logical one. How otherwise couldsuch 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 projection of theirown existential situation onto the so-called object-of-observation.

The Shaykh al-Akbar insists that if anyone makes a model he will

in the end 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 courage to look clearly, at every stage

of the Way, is meaning. The sentence is structured. 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 argumentsabout watches and watchmakers, but astonishingly they still go on.

We are not dealing with a machine-world. We are dealing with a

Reality which, first of all, is dealing with us. Secondly, it is not a

mechanistic, inside-outside, mind/body duality. Thirdly, at every

stage it is structured and the unfolding of the organic 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.

Form is something that is both connected to and separate from thediscrete components, 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 happen 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 world which is nothing but 'meanings'.

Meaning – MA'NA – is a key word in sufic study. Here is its root:

'Meaning'; 'mind-image'; 'considered as having a word applied to

denote it'; 'being intended by 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.



Books that we have, which is in turn merely the manifest version

of the Hidden Book, states that everything is written in a manifest

Book, 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 destiny which is written in the

cells, but the record of the cells which was written in the destiny

before it took place.

Roman Jakobson, a linguist who is profoundly aware of the

metaphysical implications of his science, states:

How should one interpret all these salient homologies between

the genetic code which 'appears to be essentially the same in allorganisms' (J.D. Watson: 'Molecular Biology of the Genes')

and the architectonic model underlying the verbal codes of all

human languages, and, nota bene, shared by no semiotic

systems other than natural language or its substitutes. The

questions of these isomorphic features become particularly

instructive when we realise that they find no analogue in any

system of animal communication.

We must emphasise that there is no suggestion that the scientists

are proving anything, but one can valuably assimilate their

observations when they are made with such clarity of vision – but

from our point of view it is the scientist who has to come to terms

with the basic problems underlying his position of fantasy-

objectivity and dualistic language with all its pitfalls of teleology

and so on which only have meaning while the whole thing remains'a problem' that they arrogantly imagine they are 'solving'.

Our picture of language – of the letters – is that they are the very

creation process – 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

orbit, therefore movement and activity. Within the creation the

letters unfold their messages of form until man himself emerges in

the 'solid' world. When Sayyedina 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, once 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 the

molecular level, so it comes out from man in his molecular totality.

That is why when we examine the Arabic language, which is,

remember, the oldest of the semitic group, we find that in its root

condition, everything connects to a specific 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 and a disastrous annexation of the mercantile

coding of the bourgeois society which 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 – simply that men have abandoned it and

corrupted it enough to allow the other its supremacy.



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 before 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 already 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

encoding 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 being'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 Conformable-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 compounded of the stuff of existence, it

is dynamic, active and effective – as well as containing the

discrimination-practice about such existential matters as marriage,

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, takes on an alchemical power which transmutes the

situation into which it manifests its letters and sounds into the air

and into the hearts of the listeners in the 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 underlying, 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 communities, 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

know this. They have divisions in practice Š They have a

Shari'a which they worship by, and they have both subtletiesand 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 letter, they say that by way of metaphorin expression. The dot of the circle encompassment, 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 difference in calculation depending on its specific role in that

particular picture, is 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 striking of a mithal.



The appended charts will give you a first outline of the letters and

their Heavens, 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 enter into the letters after their shaping. So then:

There is another growth called a word, as the bringing-together in a person makes man. Thus the world of words and

phrases grows from the world of letters. So the letters belong to

the words in affection like water, earth, fire and air belong 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 language we enter a further complexification of the

different patterns of existence. Realities arise due to this

organisation of letter units.

These realities which are from organisation exist by its

existence and vanish with its non-existence. So the reality of



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/source: 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', khandaris.

So we now find ourselves with language which is here to tell us

about the reality of our existence.

The Qur'an, when we examine it, instructs us in two means of

approach to the Reality. 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

contradiction to this – we read of His hand, and that He settled on

the Throne, and so on. We now have to extend this picture we have

of existence in its intricate inter-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

'connected', and the nature of the connection, given that we can

connect nothing to Him.

We have reached a point where we must ask questions about the

nature of knowledge, and the nature of the creational realities, in

order to understand the meaning of the Tawhid, the Unity itself.



The Science of Bewilderment

We have slowly been dismantling the dualistic machine-idea of existence which we were taught, and begun to replace it with a

living and moving picture of a reality which descends in cascading

expansion from a Hidden Source, which had its essence in a

powerful Unseen Waterfall that is hidden from us by its

tremendous spray, until it becomes the visible river of flowing and

vital forms that further spread out into the vast ocean of

multiplicity called the phenomenal world.

Before we could grasp how the Book of Forms, the Qur'an,

manifested, we had to look first at a description of creation as this

unfolding out of the Divine Reality – we then saw that it was the

Book of the Book of Existence itself. In the light of this

knowledge, we must again look at that description of the descent

from the sublime and Unknowable Essence to the myriad forms.

This time we will complexify the descent further so that every

stage of this unfolding is clear. Remember that the 'descent' is notspatial and the hierarchy is in description but not in reality, for we

can never abandon the position of affirmation of Unity which,

although we may leave it, we are bound to return to it.

This descent is called, in the language of the Sufis,



TANAZZULAT.

Here it is:

1. AHADIYYAT. Here Reality is unlimited and total – in thephrase of the great Sufi Abd al-Karim Jili, there is 'no

manifestation, no name, no quality, no relation, no adjunct or

anything else.' It is the great Darkness to which the Messenger

referred when he was asked, peace and blessings of Allah be upon

him, 'Where was Allah before the creation of the world?': Now this

language which implies whereness and time in relation to Allah we

will examine at the next stage of our journey, but for the moment

let it be emphasised that while the Messenger, in accordance withthe Book and the Wisdom he had received, did express himself in

this way, it was by description only and not through any idea that

Allah had 'whereness', as when he spoke with the ignorant Bedouin

woman. His answer to the question of whereness was, 'He was in

the great 'Ama,' meaning a dark mist. In other words, before the

manifestation of His Names and the event of His Lordship as

Creator, He is hidden and Inaccessible. It was of this reality that

the Messenger warned when he forbade contemplation of theEssence. It is inaccessible to thought or expression. Its name to the

Sufis is GHAYB AL-GHAYB – the Hidden of the Hidden. It is to

this sublime reality that the Messenger also referred when he said,

'Allah was and there was nothing with Him.' This is the 'AYNI-

MUTLAQ – the Absolute Source. It is 'AYN AL-KAFUR – the

Fountain of Camphor, for whatever enters camphor becomes

camphor.

From this stage there is descent to the next stage of the Divine

Ranks:

2. WAHDAT. Here what was hidden comes out. Here the Reality

knows itself, its potentialities and its totality. Here there are four



aspects which are not yet differentiated: Existence, Light,

Knowledge, and Self-manifesting. Here, He is Himself. This is still

in the Essence, for we must re-affirm that there is no break or split

in these stages. Here are all the Names of Divinity and of the

Universe, but they are for and to the Essence, and have not yet

moved into specificity. This is called the TAJALLI-AWWAL – the

first self-manifestation. It is also called the Haqiqata'l

Muhammadiyya, or the Reality of Muhammad. To this refers the

Hadith: 'The first thing which Allah created was the Light of the

Messenger.' Also: 'I am from the Light of Allah and the whole

world is from my light.' This stage is also called, therefore, An-

Nuri-Muhammadiyya. This must not be misunderstood. Here is not

the essence of the Messenger, for as we shall see, the dhat or

essence of the creatures manifests at a lower stage. Rather, it is the

secret of form itself.

From here there is descent to the next stage:

3. WAHIDIYYAT. This is the third and last of the Divine Ranks.

Here the Names separate and display themselves. The Peacock

opens its tail. Here, every aspect of the Creator, the Actor, isparticularised, and its inter-relationship with every other is

specified. In Wahdat everything is 'there' but implicit, now in

Wahidiyyat, everything is there and explicit. Together these last

two stages are one, they are a veil, with one side facing to the

hidden and the other facing out to the phenomenal world. So these

two together form the BARZAKH-I-KUBRA – the Great

Interspace.

Again, before descent to the world of forms in the Universe, let us

affirm the identical nature of the Divine Ranks – Reality is never

now this and now that. His knowledge is not implicit and then

explicit. He is never without consciousness of Himself, nor without

Light, nor without the Names. The Attributes are identical with the



Essence. 'He is now as He was before.'

The cosmic ranks are two:

1. The 'Ayn ath-thabitah, the permanent source-forms of all theindividual things, descend from their permanence in the Divine

Names into the Unseen.

2. The 'Ayn ath-thabitah become the things in the world of sensible

experience. Here they come into the world of solidity/duration.

This is the Universe. But we affirm again our first condition. 'And

He is as He was before,' before, that is, the creation of theUniverse.

This descent is by its nature a movement, an energy-process, and

this will be the last aspect of the Reality which we will examine.

For the moment let us stay with the pattern that the movement

shows.

Here is another description that helps clarify the picture of how

existence comes into being, and let us be open now to the

implications of what is being presented, which is inevitably that

there is a triplicity of Reality in the Universe. That the things come

into being and go out of existence. That they are permanent and

endless. That they do not and never have had any existence. These

matters must be approached step by step, and it must be said again,

that if we hold to one picture we lose the others, and that if we hold

to the other we lose the former. Yet all are true.

The descent through the Divine Ranks in this new picture is seen

as an emanation from the Essence to the Source-forms. This is the

realm of the possible things – they are not yet actualised. Here the

potter has conceived the idea of the pot-form but has not yet made



it. This image is still to do with our form-bound situation and not

to do with a Reality which is utterly beyond dependence on forms.

There is no watch/watchmaker duality. This emanation is called

AL-FAYD AL-AQDAS, or the Most Pure-emanation. That is to

say, from Reality uncontaminated with form comes the form-idea.

This is also called TAJALLI DHATIY, Manifestation of the

Essence. This is the descent into the Names when the forms appear

to Allah but not to the world. Once the form becomes the source-

form in the Unseen, it then takes on existence and so manifests in

the visible world. This is: AL-FAYD AL-MUQADDAS, the Pure-

emanation. This is also called TAJALLI-WUJUDIY, the self-

manifestation of the existent.

In the Qur'an the Divinity expresses Itself by different pronouns.

He and We. 'He' indicates the Essence, beyond all association of

form. 'Say: He Allah is One.' (112.1). 'We' is used in the realm of

Kingship, it is the 'We' of Royal Command. The Command is the

bringing of things into existence from the Names. This is

Rububiyyat, Lordship, the rule of the Creator over His creation.

In the 'Seals of Wisdom', the Shaykh al-Akbar says:

Abu'l-Qasim ibn Qasi said in his book, 'The Removal of the

Sandals', 'Each Divine Name is qualified by all the Divine

Names, and described by their description.' It is so. Each Name

indicates the Essence according to the meaning which is set

forth for it and which demonstrates it. In respect to its

indication of the Essence, it possesses all the Names: and in

respect to the meaning which is singular to it, it distinguishes

itself from others, such as the Lord, the Creator, the

Fashioner-of-forms, and so on. So the Name is the same as the

named in respect to the Essence, and the Name is other than

the named in respect to the meaning which is particular to it.



Elsewhere he says:

Know that the One called Allah is one by essence and by all His

Names, and every existent thing is only attached to Allah by his

own Lord (Name) exclusively, for it is impossible that it possess

the whole. As for Divine Unity – Ahadiyya, none is in it at all,

for one cannot designate any aspect of it, and it does not admit

of distinction. So His Unity integrates all of Him by

potentiality.

The happy one is the one 'who was pleasing to his Lord.' There

is no-one who is not pleasing to his Lord because it is by himthat rububiyya, Lordship, subsists. So He is pleased with Him,

so he is happy. For this reason Sahl at-Tustari said, 'Lordship

has a secret, and this secret is you.' He was addressing every

source-form. 'Had it been manifested, Lordship would have

been invalidated.' He used the word 'law' which is the

participle of impossibility, for it is never manifested, so

Lordship is never invalidated, FOR THERE IS NO

EXISTENCE TO A SOURCE-FORM, except by its Lord. The

source is always existent, so sovereignty is never invalidated.

And:

Every existent thing is pleasing to its Lord (Name), that does

not necessitate that each existent thing which is pleasing to its

Lord is also pleasing to the Lord of another, because Lordship

is only obtained from each one of the Names, not from the one

of Unity. So what is specific to it from the whole is only what is

attributed to it. So He is its Lord. None is attached to Him in

respect to His Unity. For this reason the people of Allah are

forbidden manifestation of His Unity (Ahadiyya). If you look at



Him by Him, He is the one who is looking at Himself. He

continues to be Himself looking at Himself by Himself. If you

look at Him by yourself, Unity vanishes because of you. If you

look at Him both through Him and through you, Unity alsovanishes because the pronoun of the second person implies that

there is something else besides that which is regarded. So there

must be some relationship which necessitates the duality of the

Regarder and the regarded, and so Unity vanishes, even

though there only exists the One who sees Himself by Himself.

It is known that in this description He is the Regarder and the

Regarded.

And:

So distinction occurred among the slaves, and distinction

occurred among the Lords. Had distinction not occurred, One

Divine Name would have been interpreted in all its aspects by

what another Name is interpreted by: the elucidation of the

Exalter is not that of the Abaser, and so on, except from the

aspect of Unity. It is as we said of every Name, that it indicates

the Essence and also its reality in respect to what it is. So the

One named is but One and therefore the Exalter IS the Abaser

in respect to the Named. It is not the Abaser in respect to itself

and its reality.

Do not look at the Real and free Him from creation.

Do not look at creation and garb it in other-than-the-Real.

Disconnect Him and connect Him



and you will stand in the goal of sincerity.

Stay in gatheredness if you wish,

stay in separation if you wish.

You will win all even if all set out to carry the day.

You are not annihilated and you do not have going-on.

And the forms are not annihilated and do not have going-on.

Revelation will not be given to you in respect to another,

and you will not give it.

We will shortly examine the two terms Connection and

Disconnection – for the moment it is enough to recognise that they

are two utterly contradictory methods of approach. What we mustnote now is our recognition that the Divine Names are no other

than the named. The realities which the Names require to embody

their Lordship are nothing but the Universe itself. To affirm this

unified situation, the Shaykh uses a very daring phrase, but do not

lose sight of what he has outlined in the poem above.

Thus Divinity [uluhiyya – god-ness] requires the object to

which it is god-ed [ma'luh], as Lordship requires its own objectLorded [marbub]. Otherwise the Divine Names have no real

existence of their own. What is absolutely free from any need

of the Universe is solely the Reality as Essence. The Lordship

has no such property. So the Reality is ultimately possessed of

two aspects: on the one hand what is required by the Lordship,



and on the other the complete independence of the Essence

from the world which it rightly claims. BUT IN REALITY

THE LORDSHIP IS THE ESSENCE ITSELF.

Let us go back from these two aspects to our previous picture

which delineated in particular this connecting element, between the

two. Let us go back to the triplicity of the Truth, the World, and

the connecting term, the Source-forms. It is essential that we have

a clear grasp of the nature of this 'connection'.

The 'ayn ath-thabitah are not qualified by existence and yet they

are not qualified by non-existence, neither can they be said to be

in-time nor in endless-time. Yet these source-forms have been with

the Endless-time since endless-time. So here is something which is

neither existent nor non-existent that is, nevertheless, the root of

the world, that from which the world comes into being. It is the

form of all the world-forms. It appears as the endless-time in the

endless-time, and it appears as in-time in the in-time. If you say it

is the world, you are right, declares the Master – and if you say it is

Reality, the Endless-time, you are also right. But you are equally

right if you say that it is neither the world nor the Truth, but it is

something different from both. Each of these statements is true. It

is other-than-Allah and it is not other-than-Allah.

Let us recall the varying perspectives we have gone through in our

examination of the Divine emanation into solid world forms. We

have seen that the individual letters brought the forms into being,

but from the letters – WORDS WERE INTENDED, from the

emergent words groupings arose which gave phrases, and we could

not but recognise that from the words, from the beginning, phrases

were intended. In our Qur'anic picture we saw that from the ayats,

the signs, came Suras or forms. Thus from the beginning of the

unfolding it was forms that were intended. We have also seen how



by complexification, form-combination, something new enters into

the experience picture. A reality sweeps over the form in all its

discreet architectural patterning. It cannot be separated from it and

yet is not it, for it remains discreet, separate, letters in joined and

inter-related tension. We have seen how when any aspect of the

complexity is dropped away, it leaves another 'reality' in its place.

Another ma'na, or meaning. The scientist rejects the source-forms

for they are not accessible to him by his methodology, and the

esotericists reject the particularised description of the creation-

situation when it is broken down into its discreet components,

whether they are nucleic acids or particles. To the Sufi there are

two approaches to existence – he may look at the world and see the

forms, or he may turn to the Reality itself and the forms will fall

away. In the great Hadith on creation's secret, the Messenger,

blessings and peace be upon him, said:

Allah hides himself behind 70,000 veils of light and darkness. If

He took away these veils, the fulgurating Lights of His Face

would at once destroy the sight of any creature who dared to

look at it.

The Shaykh al-Akbar comments that the veils of darkness are the

natural bodies and the veils of Light are subtle spirits, for the

Universe is composed of the gross and the subtle. He goes on:

So the Universe is its own veil of itself, and it cannot perceive

the Reality since it perceives itself. It is continuously in a veil

which is not removed since it knows that it is distinct from its

Creator by its need for Him. It has no part 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 knowledge of tasting and direct-seeing, because the in-

time has no access to that.



So here we come up against another baffling negation. We had set

out determined to follow a path that would give us experience of

Reality, precisely that direct-tasting which we now discover the

Greatest Master denies is possible. Are we merely left with some

negative intellectual position, and if so what is the point of the

journey? It is at this point that the connecting term, the 'ayn ath-

thabitah takes on its vital and unavoidable significance.

The 'ayn ath-thabitah we directly experience in the phenomenal

realm by an inbuilt faculty we have to structure and the discreet

information-picture we construct when we scan our world. Out of

the separate cellular units we 'construct' a man, a cat, a horse. Out

of our 'readings' of the behaviour and energy-waves from the cat,we interpret its 'anger-state' and that it is going to spring. We make

sense of existence. We pattern the patterns. This is ordinary

experience. It is based on a direct and continual recognition of the

'outward' aspect of the 'ayn ath-thabitah as they manifest.

The Shaykh al-Akbar uses the mithal of a mirror to express the

nature of what the source-form is, this non-existent

possibility/form in the Divine Name which displays itself as anevent/form. We have indicated that we are not what we seem – just

as there is the phenomenal manifesting reality of the source-form

which may be recognised in its subtle aspect by someone else, so

there is the true reality of that hidden form in the Unseen, and that

form is from the Names, and the Names are from the Essence.

Now I may see something of the hidden reality of the man who

comes towards me, but I will never be able to see his source-form

in its Divine Nature. I cannot know that of any creature – exceptone.

Myself.

I, among the creatures, and only I have access to my own



immutable source-form. I am capable of knowing myself. And that

is the limit of what may be known. Here is how the Shaykh

expresses it, again in a passage from 'The Seals of Wisdom':

As for the favours, gifts, and overflowings from the Essence,

they only come from Divine Tajalli (self-manifestation). Tajalli

only comes from the Essence by means of the forms of the

predisposition of the one whom tajalli is made. It never occurs

otherwise. So the one who receives the tajalli will see his form

only, in the mirror of the Truth, and he will not see the Truth

for it is not possible to see Him. At the same time he knows that

he sees only his own form in it. It is like the mirror in thevisible world – in-as-much as you see forms in it or your own

form, you do not see the mirror. At the same time, you know

that you see the forms or your form only by virtue of the

mirror. So Allah manifests that as a mithal appropriate to His

essential tajalli, so that the one receiving the tajalli knows that

he does not see Him. There is no mithal nearer and more

appropriate to vision and tajalli than this. So try yourself when

you see the form in the mirror to see the body of the mirror as

well – you will never see it. It is true, some people who

recognise this mithal of the form of the mirror say that the

reflected form is between the vision of the seer and the mirror.

That is as far as the mind can go, and the matter is as we have

said. If you wish to taste this, then experience the limit beyond

which there is no higher limit in respect to the creature. Do not

exhaust yourself in going beyond this degree, for in principle,

there is only pure non-existence after it.

This is what is meant by the Shaykh al-Kamil in his Diwan in the

song, 'The Buraq of the Tariq':



The adab of looking at the creature is that you see

the Creator – no second face!

So you see the Creator in the created and

the Provider in the provision.

The Truth is only seen in manifestation,

whether by Angel or a mortal man.

The first manifestation is the Light of Ahmad, may the mostexcellent of blessings

be upon him in endless-time.

By him the Truth has filled every creature

and all that is or was.

So one door remains open to the seeker – his own door. Beyond

that there is nothing. Reality is One. The slave is the slave and the

Lord is the Lord. But his Lord, the source of his own existence, the

mirror-image of the perfection of the Essence he may contemplate

– in short, he may have knowledge of himself. On the other side of

this knowledge is obliteration, and it is the Wisdom of the Wise.This is the meaning of the famous saying attributed to Yahya ibn

Ma'ad ar-Razi: 'He who knows his nafs, truly, he knows his Lord.'

The Shaykh al-Akbar counsels:



So know your source-form, and who you are, what is your he-

ness, and what your relation to Allah is, and by what you are

the Truth and by what you are the Universe and the other, and

whatever resembles these expressions.

So here is the conclusion:

So know that you are an imagination, and that which you

perceive and of which you say, 'This is not me!' is imagination.

So all our existence is imagination within imagination.

The world of being and becoming is an imagination – but it is,

in truth, the Reality itself.

His word is: 'Say: if you love Allah, follow me and Allah will

love you.' (3.31). So, he called to a Divinity to whom one has

recourse and who is known in respect to the whole and is not

seen, 'Nor do the eyes perceive Him, but He perceives the eyes,'

(6.103), by His lutf and His diffusion in the source-forms of

things. The eyes do not perceive Him as they do not perceivetheir arwah which govern their shapes and their outward

forms. 'And He is the All-Latif, the All-Aware.' (6.103).

EXPERIENCE IS THE TASTE AND TASTE IS TAJALLI.

Tajalli occurs in forms. So they must be and it must be and the

one who sees Him by his passion must worship Him, if you but

understand! On Allah is the goal of the Path.

Another contradictory aspect of the teaching emerged as the

Shaykh guided to what was best for the seeker. He had said, we

noted: 'Use both tanzih and tashbih in relation to Him and you will

stand in the goal of sincerity.' Again we have to learn not an

ambiguous approach to existence but a contrary one which clashes



one approach against another, irreconcilable forces. As usual, we

will begin with their root form which is quite uncomplicated and

direct: Tanzih is from NZH, which means: 'to keep something

away from anything contaminating or impure'. Tashbih is from

ShBH, meaning: 'to make or consider something similar to some

other thing'. This second root we have already encountered! And it

was in an ayat informing us that certain ayats contained a likeness-

sign Wisdom that should not be approached through our mental

activity, but should be accepted and made the basis of

remembering. The key to that knowledge was by dhikr, and not

fikr. Therefore these ayats obviously contain the most profound

Wisdom – and despite this we should not perform this act but keep

ourselves aloof from it. Tanzih is to disconnect – tashbih is to

connect. The truth of the matter is that one can neither hold to one

nor the other, these two opposites – connecting forms to the

Reality and disconnecting the Reality from forms are two truths

which must be held in balanced and dynamic tension at the same

time. The perfection of this paradoxical Wisdom is stated most

clearly in the ayat which declares:

There is nothing like Him – and He is the All-Hearing, the All-

Seeing. (Qur'an 42.11)

In the first part Allah declares His reality to be beyond any

association with forms, and thus disconnects. In the second part He

affirms that He participates in the form-world, seeing is His and

hearing is His, and thus connects. In the view of the People of

Reality, merely to practise disconnection is to limit and restrict

Allah, and also to defy the nabiyyic teaching method of mithal-

wisdom. The Qur'an is full of images which express the transaction

Allah has with His creatures. He is assigned 'hands' and 'feet', He

'sits upon the Throne', He 'rolls up the Universe like a scroll'. This

is not some Blakean vision of a patriarchal being in the heavens



suspended over our heads, and it would be a sign of ignorance to

take it as such. The Wisdom-teaching of Islam is categoric: He

does not engender forms, and He was not engendered by a form,

that is to say that the coming out of forms does not diminish His

totality. He has no form, or if you were to practise tashbih it would

be based on the understanding that if He is not the forms, He is

form-itself, from which all forms come, but that is in the zone of

the Names, not the Essence. In other words, to talk of Him in

connection with the forms is to be held to the structural framework

we have used, in the Essence He is as He was before the creation

of the myriad forms. The language of 'likeness' which involves the

imagery of 'His fingers' and so on, is the mithal-method which

simply shows us how-it-is in the realm to which we have no access

without using form language. In the realm of realities we need a

form language, for these realities are not the forms, but the forms

pass over them, as it were. So when we come to the realm of

Essence, the great 'Ama in its impenetrable nature, we have to be

prepared to abandon all connection. For Allah in His splendour,

there must be disconnection, for Allah, the Lord of the Myriad

Form Universe, we must have recourse to form – mithals to grasp

the realities of existence, the meanings of the phenomenal events.

The means is connection.

Particular essences are not changed nor do realities change.

Fire therefore burns by its reality, not by its form. So His

statement, may He be exalted, to the fire: 'Oh fire, be cold and

be peace,' (21.16) – was not spoken to a form. The form is live

coals and bodies of live coals which are being burned by thefire. When the fire stood over them, the fire heard, and so it

accepted cold as it accepts heat.

Here we see described the governing reality in relation to the form,

in the same way we approach His relation to what is manifested of



the forms of the world. Therefore we can never know Allah by

definition, for to do so we would have to know the definite reality

of every form in the Universe throughout the time experience, and

this is impossible. Be careful not to fall into the pit of the Christian

Orientalists who mistook the Sufis for pantheists. There is

absolutely no equating of Allah with the forms, for we have

already indicated the structural and dynamic process which permits

us to make even this subtle connection, and it only has reality if

alongside it we utterly deny the reality of the forms before His

unassailable uniqueness and purity from forms. Allah is the

Manifest. The Universe therefore is His form, in the framework

which we have declared of 'ayn ath-thabitah, but at the same time,

the Universe is also His He-ness. He is the meaning, the spirit of

all that is manifest, and so He is the Hidden. So you are His form

and He is your reality. 'You are to Him as your corporeal form is to

you, and He is to you as the spirit which governs the body.' Let us

re-affirm the basic teaching: if you practise connection alone, you

are a dualist: if you practise disconnection alone, you are a

separator.

We have arrived at a point where we must both affirm that all the

source-forms, which are manifestations of the Names, are by that

token all of one source-form, for all the Names come together in

the Name of the Rahman, the Mercy, on which the Universe is

sustained, and it is the same, according to Qur'an, as the Supreme

Name, Allah. You know Him from yourself. All the myriad

millions of things are not other than the He-ness of the Essence.

And we have arrived at a point where we must negate. All the

world of manifestation, you yourself, are a shadow of a reality, you

are the mirror-image in which Allah contemplates His Names. You

are non-existent, a meaning projected into space/time, an

imagining. Yet these two, inexorably, are one, and Tawhid is

affirmed. Tawhid does not just mean Unity, it means to unify. You



have to 'one' reality, and when it is 'one-d' experientially the goal is

achieved. All this is but the framework. Unification is our business

on the Path: the knower, the knowledge, and the known.

This brings us to the method of approach. Clearly it cannot be doneby thinking, for we have been warned that in this zone of

understanding we have to allow the knowledge to come from the

Knower without our intervention. The means is to reflect up to that

point where reason and intellect can no longer function. The

practice is to allow the mind to be halted. We have to get to the

limit of the mind. The edge of the cliff. This practice is called

HAYRAH – bewilderment.

We had reached an already baffling situation, that the Reality in

disconnection was the creatures by connection. Even though we

distinguished between creature and Creator, we recognised that the

many essences were nothing but One Unique Essence. The Hayrah

arises because, in the language of the Shaykh al-Akbar, the mind

becomes polarised. This is the re-iterated exclamation of the

Master Rumi in his great wisdom book 'The Mathnawi' – again and

again he calls out: 'The mind stops!' We experience and depend onduality for our existence – day/night, hot/cold, wet/dry, and the

series we have examined of the matrices good/bad, and so on. This

is the realm of nature where every one thing comes out from two.

Now we desire knowledge of the One whose reality manifests as

the numbers, which are of course, in the view of the Shaykh al-

Akbar, themselves unitary. Each number is made up of ones, thus

every number both has its own identity, two being unlike three and

four being unlike five, while at the same time they have incommon their being based on one. Yet another mithal of the

relation of the essences to Essence.

Having seen in nature the primacy of the two, these have to be

unified if we wish to achieve our goal. Yet they cannot of their



nature be unified, for hot and cold do not mix, as we have seen, nor

wet and dry. The same is true when we go to the Names

themselves. We have already examined the clash between He who

Exalts and He who Abases. What we have to recognise is that He

is AT THE SAME TIME the Exalter and the Abaser. He is the

Outwardly Manifest and the Inwardly Hidden at the same time, but

one face of the Names is turned to the form and another face is

turned to the Essence.

Shaykh al-Kashani commenting on this Hayrah says:

This ocean of Hayrah is the Unity pervading all and

manifesting itself in multiple forms. It is bewildering becauseof the Unity appearing in a concrete determined form in every

single thing and yet remaining non-determined in the whole. It

is bewildering because it is non-limitation and limitation.

The Master Abu Sa'id al-Kharraz of Baghdad said: 'I reached

gnosis of Allah through joining the contrary Names.' Shaykh

Moulay al-'Arabi ad-Darqawi, may Allah have mercy upon him, a

Shaykh of our Shaykh, and a great Master of sufic Wisdom, who

died a hundred and fifty years ago, near Fez in Morocco, describes

in detail in his Letters how this experience was the final one on his

Path before achieving his Tawhid. After expounding on the

doctrine of fana, annihilation of the experiencing nafs, and

reaffirming what we have been studying here, that is, that it is only

illusion – wahm – which veils man from reality, that illusion of

course lying in our capacity to solidify the manifest objects into

multiplicity, he goes on:

We observe – but Allah knows best – that this annihilation

takes place, if Allah wills it, in the least possible time, by means

of a certain method of invoking the Name of Majesty: Allah. I



came upon this method in the work of the Venerable Master,

the Wali Abu'l Hasan ash-Shadhili, may Allah be pleased with

him. It is mentioned in certain books owned by a scholar

among our brothers of the Bani Zarwal, and I also received itfrom my noble Master Abu'l Hasan 'Ali, may Allah be pleased

with him, in a slightly different, simpler, and more direct form.

It consists of visualising the five letters of the Name – while

saying Allah – Allah – Allah. Each time the letters dissolved in

my imagination I revisualised them, and if they dissolved a

thousand times during the day and a thousand times during

the night, I continued a thousand times a day and a thousand

times a night to revisualise them. This method gave me

moments of immense inner vision when I practised it for a little

more than a month at the beginning of my spiritual Path. It

brought me a great knowledge as well as intense awe, but I

paid no heed to it, occupied as I was in calling upon the Name

and visualising the letters until the month ended. Then a

thought forced itself on my attention: 'Allah-ta-'ala says that

He is the First and the Last and the Outwardly Manifest andthe Inwardly Hidden.' (57.3). To begin with I turned away

from this thought that crept in, resolved not to listen to it, and

I continued with my practice. But this voice did not leave me

alone, it insisted, and would not accept my refusal to listen to

it, just as I would not accept its way of acting and did not listen

to it. But finally since it would not leave me in peace I

answered it: 'As for His words saying that He is the First andthe Last and that He is the Inwardly Hidden, I understand

them quite well: but I do not understand His affirmation that

He is the Outwardly Manifest, because all I see on the outside

are created things.' To this the voice answered: 'If by His

expression the Outwardly Manifest he had meant something



other than the phenomenal world which we see, it would not be

outward but inward. And so I say to you – He is the Outwardly

Manifest.' Then I perceived that there is no reality except

Allah and nothing in the Universe except Him, praise andthanks be to Allah.

Annihilation in the Essence of our Lord comes about quickly, if

Allah wills, by the method just described, for by this method,

reflection bears fruit from the morning to the evening,

provided that suspension of thought has been practised long

enough. In my case it bore fruit after just a month and a few

days, but Allah knows best. Certainly if someone were topractise suspension of thought for a year or two, or even three,

the thought which would then appear would grant a great

Wisdom and a dazzling secret.

This is the Path of our Shaykh and Master, the Qutb, Muhammad

ibn al-Habib, may Allah have mercy upon him, and what was true

then is true today if a seeker is earnest in his or her quest and

simply submits to the practices and dhikrs of the Order. But this

tremendous matter, which is our concern, does not exist in a

vacuum and cannot simply be grafted onto a life that is led by

Christian bourgeois standards, for all the Sunna-practice which we

have examined, all the ordinary activity of the slave in leading a

life that is in harmony with the laws of existence, is what grounds

the seeker in the deep sanity of the Sunna of our beloved

Messenger, may Allah bless him and give him peace. If someone

were to regard this, in the manner of the culture in which we were

so disastrously mis-educated, as some mental or 'inner' exercise

that they could practise as a therapy from the ills of their

unstructured existence, they would meet with disaster. The Way

harmonises the Sunna and the acts of dhikr into a pattern that is the



whole life picture, and it is to that that we are called by the

Shaykhs of the Way. Just as the dhikr of the Master described

above is the focal point of the Tariq's work, this Hayrah which

precedes the final stages of the Way is embodied in the final and

highest task that the Muslim can fulfil in this world. And that is the

Hajj. The root, HJJ means: 'to struggle with'; 'to make a spiritual

journey'; it means 'Hajj' for it is its own root; 'an argument'; 'a

single Hajj, a year'.

It can therefore immediately be recognised as being a difficult

journey, and at the same time it is an argument. What argument?

From the point of view of the slave, it is, from its beginning when

he is forced to don the ihram, the obligatory robes of pilgrimagewhich consist of two seamless white pieces of cloth, the argument

of his nafs which has continued all his life in the continual

rebellion of the self against the very submission-act that is his

Islam. The pared down rituals of the difficult journey crystallise

the nafs' battle with existence and its perpetually renewed attempts

to throw off the chains of submission and regain the illusion of

freedom. This of course means to reject the fact of mortality and

return to the fantasy that one is going to live for ever without being

responsible after death for one's acts in the world. From the point

of view of the Lord it is also 'the conclusive argument' that the

slave is the slave and the Lord is the Lord. In its profoundly

structured set of mathematically precise movements and stoppings,

it displays for the seeker a theorem of the whole existence activity

which in the ordinary life situation may seem chaotic and random.

In the Hajj, a man or woman experiences life and the self within

such a determined and patterned geometric activity that though

there may be near to two million people, outwardly all engaged in

the same practice at the same time, inwardly each has his own

unique struggle with the nafs to surrender once and for all the

fantasy of selfhood, and the fantasy of otherness on which the



world and all its ravishingly beautiful and terrible commotion is

based. The Hajj is 'a year', a complete cycle of existence.

To take the matter of 'dispute' one degree further, let us note that

the whole experience of life seems to suggest to people that life isa struggle and that the enemy is without. The other, be it man or

woman or child or environment or the moment and the event – it is

this otherness of the world that makes life a struggle. Out there is

the cause for my anguish in here. The Hajj is the rite of unveiling

which reveals that from one point of view you are identical with all

these others, for are you not surrounded with hundreds of

thousands of people identical to you, robed as you are, troubled as

you are, and is not existence at that time the same for all of you? Itis tawaf of the Ka'ba and walking down to Muzdalifa that tires and

shatters you all. The Master Rumi has said that the world is a

mountain and all you ever get back from it is the sound of your

own voice. This is one of the secrets of the Hajj. Nowhere is one

more alone than in the surging crowd of 'Arafat, and circling the

Sublime House. Nowhere, therefore is one more constrained to

follow the counsel of the Shaykh Sidi 'Ali al-Jamal:

'Relax the mind and learn to swim.'

Qur'an says:

Allah has appointed the Ka'ba, the Pure House, as a standard

for mankind, and the pure month, the offering, and the

necklaces – that you may know that Allah knows all that is in

the heavens and in the earth, and that Allah has knowledge of everything. Know – Allah is terrible in retribution, and Allah

is All-Forgiving, All-Compassionate. (Qur'an 5.97-98)



And when we settled for Ibrahim the place of the House: 'You

shall not associate with Me anything. And so purify My house

for those that shall go about it, and those that stand, for those

that bow and prostrate themselves: and proclaim among menthe Hajj, and they shall come to you on foot, and upon every

lean beast, they shall come from every deep ravine that they

may see things from which they will profit, and mention

Allah's Name on days well-known over such beasts of the

flocks as He has provided them – so eat from them, and feed

the bereft.'

(Qur'an 22.26-28)

And take provision: but the best provision is awe-of-Reality, so

fear you Me, men possessed of minds.

(Qur'an 2.197)

As with the basic practice of salat, we find there is one aspect of

the rites which is purification or separation and another aspectwhich is an act of Tawhid and joining. Just as wudu and ghusl

prepare the way for the act of prostration, and just as salat has a

base of minimal obligatory daily practice which then expands

through the nawafil, or extra acts of prostration, until a climax is

reached in Ramadan with the act of tarawih, which literally means

'to become spirit', or to spiritualise yourself – and that act

intensifies in the climax of the through-the-night recitation of the

whole of Qur'an on the Night of Power – so the Hajj takes the hajjithrough a series of practices that intensify, exhaust and shatter him

or her outwardly as they also inwardly illuminate. For these trying

and difficult acts, the separation needed is more acute than for the

simple act of prostration. The hajjis must bathe and then don the

ihram robes at the beginning of the rites, and from that moment on



they fall under the obligations of the Hajj. These are: not to cut the

nails, or remove a single hair from the head or body: not to kill or

even dislodge any living creature that comes onto the body: not to

have sexual intercourse: not to dispute or lose one's temper: not to

trade: not to hunt while within the purified zone of the Hajj: to

perform all the rites of Hajj within the time limits specified for

each act.

What the shahadah or Affirmation of Islam is for the moment:

what salat is for the day: what Ramadan and Zakat are for the year:

Hajj is for the lifetime. It is a summing up of all the acts of dhikr

which the Muslim has been fulfilling all his or her life, and it is a

ritualising of the act of living itself. It is movement and struggleand exhaustion, dust-covered and weary – the more the pilgrim is

shattered, the more the heart becomes illuminated and filled with

ecstasy. At the beginning of the rites people are fresh and elated

and rather pleased with themselves for being hajjis, at the end as

they stumble and drag themselves back to their starting point of

Ka'ba, they are dazed, awed, sobered, and illuminated.

The three great acts of the Hajj are the circling of the House of Ka'ba, the Running between Safa and Marwa, and the Standing on

'Arafat. The circling of the House may be done as much as the

pilgrim desires, although certain tawaf, as they are called, are

obligatory. Qur'an designates the House as the first place of

worship used by the human race. On the earth there is no more

purified spot, no more illuminated building. 'The Ka'ba,' said the

Messenger, blessings and peace be upon him, 'is one of the jewels

of the Garden.' It is the mithal of the 'Arsh, the starless Heavenwhich encompasses the Universe of the galaxies. Just as the

Angels of Light encircle the Throne, so do the pilgrims encircle the

Ka'ba. To circle the Ka'ba is, in the phrase of the Greatest Master,

'to be at the heart of the existence of the world.' One tawaf is



completed by doing seven circlings of the House – it is followed

by the performance of the two rak'as at the Station of Ibrahim

which is set near the Ka'ba at the Black Stone Corner.

The other important act performed at Makka is the Sa'ee, the goingbetween the two rocks of Safa and Marwa. This is a re-enactment

of Hagar's desperate search for water for her son Ishmael, who

later helped his father Ibrahim build the House to the One. It is said

that she ran between these two rocks in vain looking for a watering

place. When she gave up and sank to the ground, there burst out of

it before her the well of Zam-zam. Drinking this water is also one

of the practices of Hajj. It is one of the miracles of the Hajj that

this small desert well rises every Hajj time and sinks again after theHajj period is over, and during that time it gives water to over a

million people each year, and all the more extraordinary since the

Hajj time moves throughout the year with the movement of the

lunar calendar. This rite is performed moving at a firm pace which

increases in the middle stretch of the distance to a formalised

jogging run that in turn breaks down again to a swift walk. There is

a 'stop' when you get to Marwa from Safa, and a stop when you get

back to Safa from Marwa, and each time you hail the other hajjis

with the call 'Allahu akbar', as if to remind them in their flight.

When the hajji begins his Sa'ee, he joins an already moving bank

of people between the two rocks, so that the stream of people

between the two Way-marks is endless. As you fall into that sea of

activity rushing from here to there and from there to here, and the

ocean of faces washes past you, some seen again and again, others

seen once and for all, the rhythmic running from a place to a place

takes on the impulse of activity that has governed all one's life of

forgetfulness. All the struggle and fretfulness of existence, all the

coming and going, becomes condensed into these seven terrible

flights from A to B and from B to A. Seven times is enough for the

whole series in the life of one to be exposed to one's palpitating



heart.

It can be seen how simple and profound the rites of the Hajj are.

There are the first two in outline: a circle and a straight line. It is

also clear to the Hajji that the Sa'ee is about his existence and theTawaf is about Allah's reality and the slave's non-existence. The

Shaykh al-Akbar expresses it thus:

The man whose vision is veiled draws a straight line.

The man in Hayrah draws a circle.

Here he describes the tawaf that opened him to the knowledge of his 'Makkan Revelations':

When I reached Makka of the blessings and the source of

dwellings spiritual and physical, I was constantly engaged in

doing tawaf of His Ancient House. While I practised the tawaf

I said: 'Subhan'Allah, Al-hamdulillah, Allahu akbar and La

ilaha ila'llah.' Sometimes I kissed it and sometimes I touched

it, and sometimes I did only what was required. When I was atthe Black Stone I unexpectedly came upon an evanescent

youth, a silent speaker, neither alive nor dead, composite-

simple, enveloped-enveloping. When I saw him doing tawaf of

the House with the tawaf of the living around the dead, I

realised its reality and its metaphor, and I knew that the tawaf

of the House is like the prayer on the funeral corpse. Suddenly

he snatched me from myself and overpowered me. He spoke tome and said: 'Look at the secret of the House before it escapes

and you will see what pride it derives from those who have

been guided and do tawaf of its stones.' As I watched them I

saw it glowing as he said. Then he informed me of the degree of



that youth and his freedom from where and when. Once I

knew his degree and his stopping-place and saw his place in

existence and his state, I kissed his right hand and wiped the

sweat of inspiration from his brow and said to him: 'Look atone who wishes to live in your company and desires to be close

to you.' So he indicated to me with gesture and riddle that he

preferred not to speak to anyone except by sign Š

So I fainted and he took hold of me – when I recovered from

swooning and my flesh was still trembling from fear, he knew

that the knowledge had arrived Š so I said to him: 'Tell me

about some of your secrets so that I may be among yourscribes,' and he said: 'Look at the articulations of my nature

and in the organisation of my form, and you will find what you

asked about engraved on me. For I am not one who speaks nor

is addressed. My knowledge extends only to myself, and my

essence is not other than my names. I am the knowledge and

the known and the knower. I am Wisdom, the work of

Wisdom, and the Wise.' Then he said to me: 'Do tawaf aroundmy footsteps and contemplate me with the light of my moon in

such a way as to find from my nature what you will write

about in your book Š'

Had it not been that He did not bid farewell to what my reality

necessitated and that my Path had reached Him, I would not

have found obtainment of His spring, nor inclination to His

knowledge. For that reason I returned to the end, and for this

reason, He returns. So put the compass at the opening of the

circle with the union of the end of its existence to the dot of

beginning, and so connect the last matter to the first. Its after-

endless-time is attached to its before-endless-time. So there is



nothing but continuous existence and established going-on

witnessing Š

The goal is not obtained except by going on the Path Š

Then He said to me: 'This is My House here which signifies the

Essence, and the courses of the tawaf are in the degree of the

seven Attributes, the Attributes of Perfection, not the

Attributes of Majesty, because they are the Attributes of union

to you and interaction. So there are seven courses for seven

Attributes, and the Ancient House indicates the Essence. Look

at the angel with you doing tawaf, and who is standing at yourside Š This Ka'ba of Mine is the heart of existence, and My

Throne is the defined body of this heart, and neither of them is

wide enough for Me. Do not say about Me what you say about

them. My House which does contain Me is your indicated

heart, lodged in your witnessed body. The circlers of your

heart are the secrets. They have the degree of your bodies in

their tawaf of these stones... I am the Great, the Self-Exalted!

Limit does not limit Me, and neither the master nor the slave

know Me. Divinity is purified, so it is transcendent beyond

comprehension, and so it may be ranked with nothing. You are

the I! I am the I! So do not seek Me in yourself for you will

only gain weariness! So do not seek Me outside of yourself, or

you will end Me! Do not leave off My Quest, or else you will be

untouched. Seek Me until you Meet Me, and you will be

exalted! But have courtesy in the quest. Distinguish between

Me and you, for you do not see Me, but you only see your own

nature, so remain in the quality of communication. Be a slave!

Say it is impossible to perceive – beyond the obtainment of

perception. In that you will be freed, and you will be ennobled,



and true.'

So I entered the House of the Hijr with the Angel and he put

his hand on my chest and said: I am of the seventh degree of

capacity to embrace the secrets of being and the secrets of

existence, of particular essences and place. The Truth created

me as a piece of the Light of Hawwa (Eve) in her pure state Š

He revealed through myself a rider of high station on a three-

legged mount. He bent his head towards me and lights and

darknesses expanded and he inspired in my heart all beings,

and he rent my earth and my sky, and informed me of all my

names. So I knew myself and other-than-me distinguishedbetween my good and my evil, and differentiated between my

Creator and my realities. Then the Angel went from me,

saying: 'You know now that you are the presence of the Angel,

so prepare for revelation and the arrival of the Messenger.'

We have arrived at the final phase of the matter. We have

examined the existence of the Universe as a Divine self-

manifestation, a series of endless tajalliyat, filled with manifest and

hidden wonder and majesty, all of it beauty. There remains one

more dimension to our picture if it is to be complete. So far we

have examined the creation-picture in terms of structure as if it

were static, but now we must reconnect this creation-patterning to

what we had discovered about the vibrant and dynamic nature of

existence in its shimmering and moving activity. We are at the

door of the secret of creation, the breath of life – the breath of the

Merciful.



The Science of the Moment

The Companion, Abu Huraira, may Allah have mercy upon

him, said: 'I carried two bags from the Messenger, may Allah

bless him and grant him peace – I have unfolded one of them to

you – had I unfolded the other, this throat would have been

severed from me.'

Before we examine the dynamic nature of the Universe, let us look

at the description of the coming into existence of the myriad forms

that is used in the Wisdom-teaching from the Messenger

Muhammad, peace be upon him. What we will have to grasp in

this picture is the relation between the realities and the forms – as

we have already indicated, the former is dependent on the latter,

but the latter implies the former. To talk of one preceding the other

is valid in description and in the realm of meaning and

clarification, but not otherwise. Up until recently, all the revealed

teachings, that is, all the earlier 'Islams', which, although decayed

and without centre, still held to a vision of how the Universe came

into being, were dismissed as 'pre-scientific' as if we now had a

'factual' picture of how-it-is. While the best scientists have never

suggested or accepted this mythology by which they have

'explained' existence, the mass-education view, and that of many of

the true scientists' less intelligent followers, has been to look on

existence as a thing explained. Our own time has seen a complete

collapse of the evolutionary theory and in its collapse, even before

the rubble has been cleared, we recognise just how much personal



projection was going on under the guise of an illusory objectivity.

Men were describing existence as how they thought it should be

rather than as it was. That they had observed an undoubted

hierarchical fanning out of structural forms so bedazzled them they

insisted on its taking place in a step-by-step process of minute

change over millennia. That life-forms were not processed in the

same way as the early horse and cart, giving way to faster and

more efficient kinds of transport through steam to electric mono-

rail system, was outside their own personal and parochial view of

reality at the end of the 19th Christian century.

It had always been to those pseudo-scientists, and more so to the

people they 'educated' in the rather forbidding and authoritarianedifices they built to honour their own knowledge, a matter of

some scorn that these 'mythological' descriptions of how things

came into being began with the creation of the human being and

then everything fell into place around it. They smiled at worlds on

elephants which stood on tortoises, and they shrugged away as

primitive a world of Angels and Celestial Pens and Preserved

Tablets. They were so clever – they 'knew' that there was no large

cosmic pen in the sky and that the air was not populated with lots

of feathered creatures with wings looking like the imaginings of

the simple-minded Giotto. Of course, the people of the Path never

imagined this either and would have been enormously amused that

these gentlemen should spend such a lot of time disputing a picture

that they had never held. Yet precisely the kind of inner seeing that

this language of Angels and Pens demands was to be the kind of

understanding that the serious scientists were more and more being

called upon to make in the formulation of their models and

theories. The knowledge they gained forced them to a language of

paradox and bewilderment that prompted one modern physicist to

find parallels to their new thinking in the Zen Masters' use of the

'ungraspable' koan, or riddle. The Shaykh al-Akbar has indicated in



his writings that enigma and riddle are essential when talking about

the reality of things coming into being.

The important matching we will find in this description is between

the microcosm of man and the macrocosm of the Universe. Theinter-connectedness of man's place in the Universe to the basic

structure of forms and events which make up our world, this is the

pivot of our doctrine of wahdat al-wujud, oneness of existence.

In a Hadith-Qudsi, Allah-ta-ala addressed the Messenger saying:

'Oh Muhammad, were it not for you, I would not have created the

heaven nor the earth, nor the Garden nor the Fire.' In the beautiful

phrase of the Shaykh al-Akbar, 'In the Universe, it is man that isintended.'

We have already said that the first created thing was the Light of

Muhammad, blessings and peace be upon him. This is the meaning

of the Messenger saying: 'I was a Prophet while Adam was

between water and clay.' It must be remembered that the

perspective of the Wisdom-teaching sees him, blessings of Allah

and peace be upon him, as being the Seal of the Messengers, andtherefore the perfection and totality of what man is, for while he is

the First Manifestation from the Lights of the Essence, he is also

the last to manifest his perfection among the prophets. So he has

firstness and lastness. He is the perfect image of image, and the

meaning of form. Now another name for this Light that we call the

Nuri-Muhammad is the Universal Self, and another is the Pen. The

Pen is a mithal for the dynamic of the creative process. The first

existent thing in emanation was the Preserved Tablet of Forms.Thus the Pen 'wrote' on the Tablet all the forms and form/events of

all creation from the beginning to the end, these two things,

beginningness and endness, only coming into being with the

manifestation of form which implies space and therefore in our

understanding, also time.



The mithal of the Pen's writing on the Tablet is that of semen

activating in the womb. From this come the six genera, six being

the perfect number, as we saw in the science of the letters. This is

the meaning of the creation-process taking six 'days'. The six

genera are Angels: Jinn: Inanimates: Plants: Animals – and the

setting and ordering of the Kingdom: Man, the Khalif of the

Reality. When the world is manifest, Allah is hidden. And so man

is put on earth as His Khalif, the one who stands in, during the

absence of the King. Man himself, by this meaning, is a barzakh.

Allah created the seven heavens and the seven earths. Then in the

manifest he gave each heaven a planet, 'each swimming in its

sphere.' (36.40). With the manifestation of the spheres, and thatmeans matter, time comes into being. So time is designated by the

first sphere, and also by the movement from the first sphere to the

second, for time is itself the movement of the space, or vice-versa.

With this creation of the spheres came the manifestation of the four

matrices air, earth, fire and water. In our system the sun's

movement gave us 'night' and 'day'. The night is a father and the

day is a mother – each father connects to a planet and each mother

connects to an element, as the elements connect to the planets in

influence and identity. The movements of the spheres and the

swimming of the Lights accord with the swirling movements of the

waters in the womb. The four matrices of air, earth, fire and water,

correspond to the four wives a man is permitted in the Shari'a –

thus a balanced and fully developed man would be held in perfect

harmony by his purification through these unions.

Time, starting with the first sphere, begins with the whole creation-

process and so time in its movement is the emergence of the Light

of Muhammad, peace and blessings of Allah be upon him. Of time

he said: 'Time revolves like its form on the day that Allah created



it.' With this Light comes the Balance. AL-MIZAN. Its meaning is

the justice and harmony of all creation and, therefore, of

time/space and therefore of us and events. It is the meaning of the

Garden and the Fire, of the balance between the matrices. It is what

was called in the ancient Tao-form of Islam in China, yin/yang. It

is the secret of the contrary Names. It is what we are born and die

on, and which turns our acts and intentions into realities to be

weighed on the Day of the Balance. The Messenger's nature, being

the embodiment of the creation principle, is hot/wet, for that is

from the power of the other world. Thus knowledge is greater in

Islam in its final form than in its previous forms which were under

the dominance of cold/dry. That is why this community comes last

and translates all the knowledges of previous communities. This is

the meaning of the laughter of the Buddhist Masters, for they have

dry/cold but do not have hot/wet which would give them the

wisdom of tears. The Messenger's du'a was, 'Oh Lord, reward me

with a weeping eye,' and his warning was, 'If you knew what I

knew, you would laugh little and weep much.' Weeping is the

outward sign of freedom from fear, and the indication of inward

balance and complete serenity.

Man himself stands at the heart of this cosmic activity by virtue of

his being both gatheredness of all the forms, a summing up of the

creational process, and the highest complexification of the life-

energy. He is the perfection of the Balance in his form when it is

perfect, that is, in the Messengers and Prophets, of whom as we

noted there have been 124,000 since the beginning of creation. He

is – in his complete form – the pivot of existence. There remains

on the Earth always the embodiment of the Nuri-Muhammadiyya –

the first of the awliya, and while prophecy is closed and finished

with the Last Messenger, he nevertheless is the embodiment and

the transmitter of the Light of the Messenger. For the whole

Wisdom-process is nothing but this transmission. This Light is



poured out in a descending cascade through a series of perfected

ones and they are to the organism of the Earth as the breath-system

is to the purification of the blood in the body. The disappearance of

these living men, these awakened men, would mean the death of

the planet. And what man is to the Earth, the Earth is to the Galaxy

and size has nothing to do with these matters.

From among the Salihin of the submitted-ones, there are 300 elect

in perfection of humility, poverty, love and awe – the Nuqaba, or

chieftains. From these there are 40 Masters, men who have

achieved the goal and are most complete in knowledges and

Stations – the Nujaba, or nobles. From these there are the Highest

and most unified degree of the human species: the 7 Abdal, orsubstitutes. This word has various implications, but one of them is

the essential spiritual capacity of these men to manifest both in

their actual place and elsewhere at the same time by recreating 'a

substitute' manifestation, which is not in any manner ghostly, but

simply a being in two places at the same time. The Messenger,

who embodied and surpassed all the stages of the awliya, by that

token 'contained' all the stages of the Way in himself. He

manifested this capacity on the night of the Miraj, when he was

both in his bed in Madinah, and at the Rock in Jerusalem. The

Shaykh al-Kamil says of them in his Diwan:

The path of the Abdal, dedicated to Allah, is:

hunger, sleeplessness, silence, isolation and dhikr.

From the Abdal come the 4 Awtad or pillars, and from them are

the 2 Imams, and one of these is the Qutb, the pivot of existence,the stillness at the heart of the vast cosmic activity.

In the science of states we saw how everything in the earth is

moving from state to state. In the words of the Shaykh al-Akbar:



So the world of time moves in everything, and the world of

breath moves in every breath, and the world of tajalli moves in

every tajalli. The reason for that is His word: 'Every day He is

upon some activity.' (Qur'an 55.29).

All this restless cosmic activity we experience as the interaction of

solid forms, existence to us is viscous, opaque, and we imagine

'real' because solid. The forms are 'kathif', thick, dense, while

Allah, may He be exalted, describes Himself as Latif, subtle,

gracious, sparse, delicate. As we understand it, the Latif is in all

things, so that while we specify 'dog' and 'cat' and 'stone' and so on,

we are aware that the essences of the existent things are in reality

one essence. While this is not that in regard to form, we claim that

this is the same as that in regard to substance. Now we must see

that in a unitary picture this insideness and outsideness of things is

no longer tenable. It must mean that the substance itself is nothing

other than the Absolute Reality. We are now also in a position to

say that the substance is not kathif but on the contrary is sparse,

subtle, and latif itself.

Have we then, despite ourselves, arrived at the pantheism the

Masters of the Way so categorically deny? It is at this point that we

must examine the last doctrine that completes the creation view of

the Sufis.

It is called AN-NAFAS AR-RAHMANIY, the Breath of the

Merciful. There is a Hadith Qudsi, where Allah-ta-'ala declared: 'I

was a hidden treasure, and I longed to be known. So I created the

Universe in order to be known.' In the Qur'an the Name of the Lord

of the Universe is Allah, and equated with it is the Name the

Merciful. This connects the Mercy explicitly with the Essence.

This Hadith Qudsi indicates the movement that comes from the

overflowing Mercy of the Divinity in its utterly Hidden Perfection



out into the creation of manifest energies. This overflowing of

Light from the Essence, which is the movement of Mercy, is

likened to a held breath which then bursts out and flows over

everything. It is as if the held breath were the Names in the Divine

Ranks before manifestation, and the breathing-out were the coming

into existence of the multiple forms:

His Command, when He desires a thing, is to say to it, 'Be! – it

is.' (Qur'an 36.84)

Note that this is not some magical fiat from some exterior Being.

We have established that He cannot be associated with the universe

of forms, and that at the same time He governs the world from theinside of the world, through the source-forms. He says 'Be' to it. It

is there in the realm of source-form. It brings itself into being and

actuality according to the potentiality of the locus and the source-

form unity. We then say that the 'breathing out' of the Command is

the coming into phenomenal reality of the thing, from the Hidden

to the Manifest. It follows that the breath itself is a substance.

Nature precedes what comes from her, but Nature is no other than

the Breath of the Merciful. So, as the breath spreads through all the

forms both physical and luminous, its life-giving, form-giving

activity takes place. So everything in Nature is of the Breath, and

this includes not only the physical, but the Angelic, for the

creational reality is dependent on the four matrices for existence.

So knowledge of the world is knowledge of this Divine Breath.

The coming into existence of the Universe from non-existence into

existence is an action, through the Divine Command there is a

movement from repose into the activity of creation. This

movement, this outflowing – we call love. This is the longing

referred to by Allah-ta-'ala in the Hadith Qudsi which describes the

Creation. Since the movement is love itself, the world also loves to

regard itself in existence, for its very existence is a love activity.



Now just to make more vivid in our minds what this activity is –

and also to establish the truth of what is being described, let us

look at how the nuclear physicists themselves regard the process of

existence within the disciplines and limits of their science. Again,

this is not to 'prove' anything – Wisdom-teaching has no proofs but

experience – but simply to clarify what is being said by the

vividness of the physicists' grasp of the baffling nature of the

creational process. Here is a description of the constant movement

of matter by high-energy physicist, Fritjof Capra:

The 'restlessness' of matter implied by the uncertainty

principle is a fundamental feature of the atomic and subatomic

world. In this world, matter is never completely quiescent, but

always in a state of motion. The molecules in solids move and

vibrate due to their thermal energy. The nuclei of the atoms

inside the molecular structure vibrate because they are

confined to this structure. The electrons in the atomic shells

are bound to a region of similar size, but being much lighter

than the nuclei they move much faster and we have seen that

they achieve, in fact, enormous velocities. And finally, as weshall see, the protons and neutrons inside the nucleus are

confined to an extremely small volume by the strong nuclear

forces and consequently they race about with fantastic

velocities.

We see that modern physics pictures matter not at all as inert,

but as being in a continuous dancing and vibrating motion

whose rhythmic patterns are determined by the molecular,

atomic and nuclear structure.

Addressing the I.C.A. in London the same physicist said:



At the beginning of our century, the experimental investigation

of atoms gave sensational and totally unexpected results. Far

from being the hard and solid particles they were believed to

be since antiquity, the atoms turned out to consist of vastregions of empty space in which extremely small particles – the

electrons – moved around the nucleus. With quantum

mechanics – the theoretical foundation of atomic physics – as

worked out in the 1920's, it became clear that even the sub-

atomic particles, i.e. the electrons and the protons and

neutrons in the nucleus, were nothing like the solid objects of

classical physics. The sub-atomic units of matter are very

abstract entities. Depending on how we look at them, they

appear sometimes as particles, sometimes as waves.

This dual aspect of matter was extremely puzzling and gave

rise to most of the koan-like paradoxes which led to the

formulation of quantum mechanics. The picture of a wave

which is always spread out in space is fundamentally different

from the particle picture which implies a sharp location. Theapparent contradiction between these two pictures was solved

in a completely unexpected way which gave a blow to the very

foundation of the mechanistic world-view, to the concept of the

reality of matter. At the sub-atomic level, matter does not exist

with certainty at definite places, but rather shows 'tendencies

to exist'. These tendencies are expressed, in quantum

mechanics, as probabilities, and the corresponding

mathematical quantities take the form of waves. This is why

particles can be waves at the same time. They are not 'real'

three-dimensional waves like sound or water waves. They are

'probability waves', abstract mathematical quantities with all

the characteristic properties of waves which are related to the



probabilities of finding the particles at particular points in

space and at particular times.

At the sub-atomic level, then, the solid material objects of

classical physics dissolve into wave-like patterns of

probabilities. But this again seems paradoxical. How can the

physical world consist of mere probabilities? Well, it turns out

that the patterns, ultimately, do not represent probabilities of

things, but rather, probabilities of correlations. A careful

analysis of the process of observation in atomic physics has

shown that the sub-atomic particles have no meaning as

isolated entities, but can only be understood as correlationsbetween the preparation of an experiment and the subsequent

measurement. This implies, however, that the Cartesian

division between the I and the world, between the observer and

the observed, cannot be made while dealing with atomic

matter. In atomic physics we can never speak about nature

without, at the same time, speaking about ourselves, or – as

Heisenberg has put it – 'Natural Science does not simplydescribe and explain nature, it is a part of the interplay

between nature and ourselves.'

Quantum mechanics thus reveals a basic oneness of the

Universe. It shows that we cannot decompose the world into

independently existing smallest units. As we penetrate into

matter, nature does not show us any isolated basic building

blocks, but rather appears as a complicated web of relations

between the various parts of the whole, and these relations

always include the observer in an essential way.

Fritjof Capra goes on to expound the Relativity Theory of Einstein



relating it to the picture he had given of Quantum Mechanics:

Relativity theory, so to speak, has made these patterns come

alive by revealing their intrinsically dynamic character. In a

'relativistic' description of the sub-nuclear world, i.e. in a

description which takes relativity theory into account, space

and time are fused in a four-dimensional continuum, and this

means that we have to visualise the particles as four-

dimensional entities in space/time. Their forms are thus forms

in space and time. The particles are dynamic patterns which

have a space aspect and a time aspect. Their space aspect

makes them appear as objects with a certain mass, their timeaspect makes them appear as processes involving a certain

energy, and the two are related by Einstein's famous equation

E=mc2.

Relativity theory thus gives the constituents of matter an

intrinsic dynamic aspect. It shows that the activity of matter is

the very essence of its being. The objects of the sub-nuclear

world are not only active by moving around very fast, they

themselves are processes. The being of matter and its activity

cannot be separated. They are but different aspects of the sub-

nuclear space-time reality.

Before continuing this beautifully lucid description of existence,

let us return to our sufic perspective of the Breaths of the Merciful.

In one chapter of the Shaykh al-Akbar's 'Seals of Wisdom', he

makes a long analysis of a passage in Qur'an that recounts the

meeting of the Prophet Sulayman, peace be upon him, and the

Queen Bilqis, or Sheba. It is presented as the meeting between a

woman who was a great heirophant of knowledge coming to her



goal in encountering the Prophet who could complete her

knowledge by opening to her the secret of Unitary teaching. The

Prophet had sent a letter to Bilqis saying: 'In the Name of Allah,

the Merciful, the Compassionate, rise not up against me, but come

to me in surrender.' (27.30-31). Her followers suggested to her that

they should fight, but she declared, 'Kings, when they enter a city,

lay waste to it.' (27.34). To the People this means in one of its

meanings, the annihilation of the nafs on the arrival of the King of

Creation, but Allah knows best.

The Prophet, on hearing that the Queen was coming to visit him,

asked that her throne be brought to him so that on her arrival he

could show it to her and thus demonstrate the superior nature of hisknowledge.

An Ifrit of the jinn said: 'I will bring it to you before you rise

from your place: I have strength for it and I am to be trusted.'

Said he who possessed knowledge of the Book, 'I will bring it to

you, before even your glance returns to you.'

...

He said: 'Disguise her throne for her, and we shall behold

whether she is guided or if she is of those who are not guided.'

So when she came it was said: 'Is your throne like this?' She

said: 'It seems the same.' And we were given the knowledge

before her, and we were in surrender, but what she served

apart from Allah barred her, for she was of a people whocovered-up. It was said to her: 'Enter the pavilion.' But when

she saw it, she supposed it was a spreading water, and she

bared her legs. He said: 'It is a pavilion smoothed of crystal.'

She said: 'My Lord, indeed I have wronged myself, and I



surrender with Sulayman to Allah, the Lord of the worlds.'

(Qur'an 27.39-44)

Commenting on the superiority of the sage over the jinn, the

Master says:

This superiority is by the degree of time. For the return of the

glance to the looker is quicker than rising from one's place

because the movement of the eye in perceiving what it

perceives is quicker than the movement of the body when it

moves. So the time in which the eye moves is the same time

which connects it to the object in spite of the distance betweenthe viewer and the object. So the time of the opening of the eyes

is the time of its connection to the heaven of the fixed stars. The

time of the return of its glance is the same as the absence of its

perception. Rising from one's place is not like that. It does not

have this speed. So Asaf ibn Barkhiya was more perfect in act

than the jinn. The source-form of the word that Asaf ibn

Barkhiya spoke was the source-form of the action at one and

the same time. So Sulayman, peace be upon him, saw at the

same time the throne of Bilqis 'settled before him' so that one

must not imagine that he perceived it while it was in its place

without moving. With us, displacement does not exist by the

unity of time, but it is a going into non-existence and return to

existence, inasmuch as the only one conscious of that is the one

who has gnosis of it. It is His word, may He be exalted, 'But

they are in uncertainty as to the new creation.' (50.15). Not amoment passes them but that they see what they saw. Since it is

as we have mentioned, the time of its non-existence, i.e. the

absence of the throne from its place, is the same as its existence

with Sulayman from the renewal of creation by breaths. No-



one knows this power, rather, man is not aware of it from

himself, that it is in each breath. It was not, then it was. Do not

say that and imply a delay, for that is not true. This demands a

real knowledge of Arabic, – for example, the poet says: 'Hebrandished the Rudaini spear and it shook.' The time of

brandishing of the spear is undoubtedly the same as the time of

the shaking of the thing brandished. There is no gap. It is the

same with the renewal of the creation with breaths. The time of

the non-existence is the same as the time of the existence of the

mithal. So the question of the moving of the throne of Bilqis is

one of the most difficult of problems except for the one who has

gnosis of what we have mentioned. So Asaf did not have any

merit in the matter except for the transposition of the renewal

of the assembly of Sulayman, peace be upon him. So the throne

was not moved from a place to a place, nor did it rise above the

earth, nor break the laws of space, for the one who

understands what we have mentioned ...

When Bilqis saw her throne, and she knew the distance and theimpossibility of moving it in that space of time, she said: 'It

seems the same,' and she spoke truly through what we have

mentioned of the renewal of creation by amthal [pl. of mithal].

It is it. It was true, just as you are the same at the time of your

renewal as you were in 'past time'.

The Master notes that in her surrender to how-it-is, she surrendered

to the Lord of the Universe, placing herself along with Sulayman,peace be upon him, as part of the creation. So their Islam was the

same:

This is how we are on the Straight Path which the Lord, may

He be exalted, is on, for our forelocks are in His hand, and it is



impossible for us to separate from Him. So we are with Him

implicitly and He is with us by open declaration. He said, may

He be exalted, 'He is with you wherever you are,' (57.4), and

we are with Him as He takes us by our forelocks. So He, mayHe be exalted, is with Himself wherever He goes with us on the

Path. So everyone in the world is on a Straight Path, and it is

the Path of the Lord, may He be praised and exalted. It is this

that Bilqis learned from Sulayman, so she said: 'To Allah, the

Lord of the Worlds,' without referring to a particular world.

This teaching of the Breaths opens to us the dynamic nature of

existence. The creation is constantly in renewal – AL-KHALQAL-JADID – the ever-new-creation. This overwhelming vision of

creation as endlessly being destroyed and endlessly being renewed,

as never existing and never ceasing, is the vision of the seekers

before they in turn experience their own annihilation. The Shaykh

says:

This fire is the fire of love for the Light of the splendour of His

Face, which consumes all the determined forms and individualessences in the very midst of the ocean of knowledge of Allah

and true life. And this true life is of such a nature that

everything comes to life with it and yet is destroyed by it at the

same time. There can be no greater bewilderment than the

hayrah caused by the sight of drowning and burning with life

and knowledge, and simultaneous self-annihilation and self-

continuance.

Let us return to the description of the physicist. He had outlined

the new classical theory of how-it-is. He continued with a new

model of particular interest to us for the features which we will

immediately recognise. This is not offered as a proof, but as a



clarification. The model about to be described is known as the

Hedron bootstrap model.

The basis of the bootstrap model is the idea that nature cannot

be reduced to fundamental entities, like fundamental building

blocks of matter, but has to be understood entirely through

self-consistency. All of physics has to follow uniquely from the

requirement that its components be consistent with one

another and with themselves.

This idea constitutes a radical departure from the traditional

spirit of basic research in physics which had always been benton finding the fundamental constituents of matter. At the same

time it is the culmination of the quantum mechanical

conception of particles as an interconnected web of relations.

But the bootstrap philosophy goes even further. It abandons

not only the idea of fundamental building blocks of matter, but

accepts no fundamental entities whatsoever – no fundamental

laws, equation, or principles. The only requirement is that

everything has to be self-consistentÉ

The idea of the bootstrap model is that everything in the

Universe is connected to everything else and no part of it is

fundamental. The properties of any part are determined, not

by some fundamental law, but by the properties of all the other

parts. Therefore, in order to really understand any

phenomenon we have to understand all the others. This isobviously impossible, and here physics and Eastern philosophy

take different attitudes.

The teaching of the Way is simple. It is enough that a man

understand himself to have understanding of all. He cannot have



discreet knowledge of all the forms in the space/time continuum

since the 'beginning' to the 'end' as we already had noted, which is

what Dr. Capra is saying. What is intriguing is that it is here being

suggested that there are no discreet parts to know. However since

what follows remains the context of the model, there can be no

argument between us, for our concern is our own, and his is that of

the model. We nevertheless recall that the Shaykh al-Akbar had

said that if you make a model in the Universe you can in the end

only make a model of yourself. To continue:

What then is the picture of particles in the bootstrap model?

Well, it can be summed up in the provocative phrase: every

particle consists of all other particles. Like all other scientific

models, the bootstrap model can only be approximate, and its

main approximation consists of the fact that it describes only

certain kinds of particles, the so-called 'hedrons' or 'strongly

interacting particles'. These are particles like the proton and

the neutron which interact through strong nuclear force. In the

bootstrap model, then, all hedrons are composite structures

whose components are again hedrons. The essential feature of the model is the picture of the binding forces holding these

structures together. The forces between the constituent

particles are pictured as the exchange of other particles. This is

a general feature of sub-nuclear physics: the forces between

particles – i.e. their mutual attraction or repulsion – manifest

themselves as the exchange of other particles. This concept is

extremely hard to visualise. It is a consequence of the four-dimensional space/time character of the sub-nuclear world and

neither our intuition nor our language can deal with this image

very well, but it is crucial to the picture of the particles in the

bootstrap model. The constituents which make up, for



example, a proton, are particles, but the forces which hold

them together are also particles, and therefore the distinction

between the constituent particles and the particles representing

the binding forces becomes blurred. The whole notion of anobject consisting of constituent parts breaks down.

Each hedron therefore plays three roles: it is a composite

structure, it may be a constituent of another hedron, and it

may be exchanged between constituents and thus constitute

part of the forces holding the structure together. Each particle

thus helps to generate other particles which in turn generate it.

The whole set of hedrons generates itself this way, or 'pullsitself up by its own bootstraps', which is the origin of the

model's name.

You will realise that this concept of every particle containing

all other particles is extremely hard to visualise. This is

because it is a relativistic concept. The hedrons are dynamic

space/time patterns which do not contain one another, but

rather 'involve' one another in a certain way which can be

given a precise mathematical meaning, but cannot easily be

expressed in words. The bootstrap model is a relativistic model

of the inter-connected web of relations which I have mentioned

before in connection with quantum mechanics.

At one point in 'The Makkan Revelations' the Shaykh refers to one

of the Qutbs of the world in ancient times, and of his knowledge of how things come into being. His name was the Qutb Mudawi'l-

Kulum and he said about matter:

The universe exists on what is between the circumference and

the dot, on ranks, and the smallness and greatness of their



spheres. The one nearer to the circumference is wider than the

one which is inside it, and so its day is larger, its place wider,

and its tongue more eloquent. All things look at the point of

their essences: and the point, despite its smallness, looks atevery section of the circumference by its essence. So the

epitome is the circumference, and its epitome is the point, and

the opposite, so look!

In 'The Seals of Wisdom' the Master is even more explicit. He

says:

Every particle of the world is from the whole of the world.That is – every single particle is capable of receiving into itself

all the realities of all the single particles of the world.

The Qutb Mudawi'l-Kulum also said:

Man is the sum of all the 'flakes' of the world. And from man

to everything in the world is a flake extending from that flake.

There is nothing in the universe but that it has an effect inman, and man has an effect in it. And these flakes are light-

rays-of-light.

The focal point of this universal reality which is nothing else than

an endless fulgurating display of light upon light is man, not just

the species man, but man at his apogee, the Perfect Man, himself

Light and knowing himself to be Light, Al-Insanu'l-Kamil. The

word for man has a root NAS, meaning: 'to be shaken to and fro','to hang suspended': INSAN has a parallel meaning which is: 'the

pupil of the eye'. Man himself is a vibrating whirling activity of

energy in endless movement – he hangs suspended in the cosmos

on his small planet, and in the Unseen he hangs suspended between

the tremendous efflorations of form that make up the Fire and the



Garden. At the same time he is the eye of the universe with which

his Creator contemplates His creation. He is a gathering-together

of all the forms, a resumé of the whole creational process from the

basic matrices up through the elements and plants to the highest

complexification of aspects. And so he is also a small universe,

just as the universe from what the Qutb said above, is nothing else

but Al-Insanu'l-Kabir, the Big Man. We are of course speaking

here in the language of the Sufis and not in the language of

ignorance and literalism. This does not lessen the veracity of the

assigning to the cosmos the name of the Big Man, it is simply that

literalist thinking is too primitive a method of reflection to grasp

these matters. The Perfect Man is utterly aware and awake,

permeated by all the Names and all the perfections of the Divine

Attributes.

The Shaykh al-Akbar said that the Prophet Ibrahim, peace be upon

him, is called al-Khalil, meaning the dear friend, because the word

derives from a root meaning 'permeated', and so the Divinity

permeates the existence of the form of Ibrahim – since this is what

He does with all His creation, it must mean that the special rank is

due to that penetration utterly absorbing his consciousness as well.

It is his awareness, knowledge, and direct taste of permeation

which marks him out as al-Khalil.

So he is man, both in-time and before-endless-time, a perpetual

and after-endless-time organism. He is the word which

discriminates and unites. The universe was completed through

his existence. He is to the universe what the face of the seal is to

the seal itself, for that is the place of the seal and thus the

signature which the King seals on his treasures. He named him

the Khalifa because of this, since he guards His creation as one

guards treasures with the seal. As long as the seal of the King is

on them, no one dares to open them without His permission. So



He made him a Khalifa in safeguarding the universe, and it

continues to be guarded as long as this Perfect Man is in it. Do

you not see then, that when he disappears and is removed from

the treasury of this world, nothing of what Allah stored in itwill remain? What was in it will go out and each part will

return to its own part, and everything will be transferred to the

next world. Then he will be the seal on the treasury of the next

world for endless-time and after-endless-time.

To achieve this perfection is the meaning and goal of our journey –

fisabilillah – on the Way of Allah. 'The Way' is from the cluster

SBL – and it has no verbal root, but it indicates 'the road': 'a way':'a traveller': 'the Way of Allah': 'a necessity': – but its real meaning

is 'rain'. There is no more perfect mithal than this of true

submission and what it brings.

The goal we have said again and again is the annihilation of this

illusory particularity that limits and encases one in the shell of the

nafs. The opening of awareness expands the nafs until it recognises

that it is indeed the whole Universe, then beyond that is theshattering, destroying power of the Divine Majesty revealing that

all this splendour that is creation is of itself nothing, and there is

annihilation, the seeker is uncreated. He is undone. He was a knot

and the knot is untied, only the string remains, One, Timeless. The

three stages of awakening to the Unity and being snuffed out are

described in the 'Fanafillah' of the Diwan of the Shaykh al-Kamil:

Constantly cut through your illusion with a pure Tawhid to

Allah.

So the oneness of action appears at the beginning of dhikr of

Allah.



And the oneness of Attributes comes from love of Allah.

And the oneness of His Essence gives going-on with Allah.

He describes the Unitary experience in his 'Minor Song':

My beloved gave me a drink of the purity of love,

and so I became the Beloved in every way.

He made me blind to myself so that I saw only Him,

and He destroyed my secret in themanifestations of the

Presence.

I shattered what was structured in me

and joined what was separate: by the isolation of Unity I

realised my Tawhid.

I attained my desires – directly to see His perfection and

to experience His reality in every meaning and form.

I tore down the illusion of my self's existence,

which is the greatest screen, and then I found Him, timeless,in every atom.

I made the Road my Wisdom-Guide as I approached

His Attributes, and my Lord revealed to methe secret of my



wisdom.

So sometimes I see creatures as the manifestation of

Ahmad, and sometimes I see them as direct manifestations of Divine Power.

Sometimes my act of existing is obliterated by the sight of His

Active Existence,

and sometimesI see the Attributes appearing from Him,

And sometimes I withdraw from this metaphorical

existence (the world) into the Unity of a Truth unconnected

by shirk.

To anyone who withdraws into the Lights of the dhikr

of the Truth, creation is nothing but particles of dust in

space.

Sufism is not focussed on the goal of annihilation, for that is a gift

from the Lord to the slave. What is longed for is something even

more ravishing, hidden where fana is revealed, lasting where fana

is a lightning that strikes. If you like, it is beyond the goal, for

properly speaking, it cannot be a goal but merely what its nameimplies, BAQA, a going-on. Before we examine this final

condition of the seeker, let us look at the journey to the goal of

fana in its mithal-form in the Hajj. We have already spoken about

the rites of tawaf and sa'ee, but after these the pilgrim moves on to

the act of Hajj itself, 'Arafat. The Messenger said, 'Hajj IS 'Arafat.'



It is a rite that takes man back to his origin, for 'Arafat is the

meeting point, the point of the reunion on earth of Adam and

Hawwa, peace be upon them. It is the source-point of the human

situation. And when the pilgrim arrives there what is the rite?

'Amr bin 'Abdallah bin Safwan quoted a maternal uncle of his

called Yazid bin Shaiban who said: 'We were in a place of

standing of ours at 'Arafat,' which 'Amr indicated was very far

away from where the Imam was standing, when Ibn Mirba' al-

Ansari came to us and told us he had brought this message for

us from Allah's Messenger: "Stand where you are, performing

your devotions, for you are conforming to an ancient practiceof your father, Ibrahim."' This is transmitted by Tirmidhi,

Abu Dawud Nasa'i, and Ibn Majah.

So the meaning of the Hajj and its reality lies in this 'moment', this

time at the source of life itself, and what the pilgrim does is stop.

Stand on 'Arafat – it was for this that the journey was undertaken.

Alone on a wide desert plain surrounded by a throng of others,

identical to yourself, bare-headed and draped in two white cloths –many there will be buried in these same cloths – you just come to a

halt – quite simply, exhausted, dazed, you stop. At that moment

there is absolutely nowhere to go.

You are there.

With Allah.

The journey is accomplished.

After that everything is purification and supplication.

You move down again to Makka performing a series of rites which

culminate in the return to Ka'ba for the farewell tawaf and the



farewell stopping, the two raka's at the Maqam Al-Ibrahim, the

Station of Ibrahim. The three great rites of the Hajj are simply to

describe a circle, a straight line, and finally, a point. The Station of

Ibrahim, al-Khalil, is the Station of qurb, nearness: uns, intimacy.

The goal.

Shaykh al-Akbar describes the difficult journey of which Hajj is

the mithal:

The first degree is Islam, submission, and the last degree is

fana, annihilation in the ascent, and baqa, continuation in the

going-on. Between them is what remains. It is iman, ihsan,knowledge, pure oneness, tanzih, richness, poverty, humility,

might, colouring, establishment in colouring, and fana if you

are going-out, and baqa if you are going-on.

Dhu'n-Nun al-Misri, may Allah be pleased with him, was asked,

'What is the end of the gnostic?' He replied: 'When he is as he was

where he was before he was.'

Abu 'Abdallah an-Nibaji said:

Sufism is like the disease of cancer: in the first stages the

patient raves, but when the disease takes hold of him, it makes

him dumb.

Describing this return from fana to baqa in 'The Robe of Nearness'

(qurb) in his Diwan, Shaykh al-Kamil says:



Invocation of the Beloved clothed us in beauty,

radiance, exaltation and joy.

In drawing near we threw off all restraint

and proclaimed the One we love to glorify.

The Beloved gave us a draught of love to drink

which forced all but the Beloved to vanish.

We saw created beings as pure particles of dust:

we saw the Lights openly appear.

After having been obliterated and annihilated in a

light-giving wine, we returned to the creation.

By an overflowing from Allah we were given going-on

and with patience we concealed the One we love.

How often have we looked on a Wayfarer so that

he has risen to the Stations of those whohave plunged into

the seas!

We have healed the hearts of what had taken possession

of them by sciences subtle in taste.

We concerned ourselves with something secretly,

and so it was, and the One we have chosen to love has come



to us.

We heard a secret from the Presence of the Unseen:

'With us you are beloved, so be thankful.'

We have been given Idhn to quench the thirst of

whoever comes to us longing for the encounterand not

seeking for information.

If gifts are plentiful, still, avoid them and be poor.

Humble yourself to the People – and they will give you

the drink. Draw near to them and have no fear of disgrace.

Strip yourself of every knowledge and understanding in

order that you may obtain what the Great have obtained.

Offer up the nafs, oh lover of union,

and follow the Shaykh in what he has advised.

Witness the Truth in him, in essence and heart, annihilate

yourself in him, and you will be victorious through him.

He is the Light of the Messenger in every aspect,

and he is the medicine of hearts, openly and in secret.

So look to him and exalt him greatly.



Go to him and be abject.

Blessings be upon the Prophet and his Companions

and whoever has directed people to follow him.

And peace, fragrant with musk and every scent,

and beauty and unrivalled sublimity.

So fana, although it is itself neither light nor darkness, but the basisof these, having no opposite, in its tremendous annihilating power,

releases a flood of lights and ecstasy. It is surrounded with

miracles and bliss, and often when it occurs people are drawn to

the recipient from the other side of the earth. It is so total in its

impact that a man must be guarded and guided, and insulated in

case the force of the experience, or let us say the cessation of

experience, is too much for him, and he remain forever afterwards

majdhub, drunk, mad-in-Allah. The science of our tariqa ishowever what our beloved Shaykh described in 'The Robe of

Nearness' – it is also the way of Shaykh Junayd, may Allah be

merciful to them both. For where the fana gives light, affirmation

and joy, the going-on is hidden, humble and obscure. The going-on

returns a man to creation for the service of his Lord. He is the last

man, not the first. He is the least of men and not the ruler. Our

Shaykh, may Allah cover him in mercy, signed himself, 'the slave

of the slaves', as we noted at the start of our journey, and theanswer of our Messenger, may Allah bless him and give him

peace, when he was called, was: 'Labbayk!' – 'At your service!' –

the call of the pilgrims on Hajj to their Creator.

Going-on – it is total and complete submission: it is in the words of



the Shaykh Abu-Su'ud: 'What is it except for the five salat and

waiting for death?' It is outwardly to be dust and inwardly to be

gold. It is as Imam Junayd put it: 'To possess nothing and to be

possessed by nothing.' When you get to such a man there is

nothing to see. They are the Sadiqin, the Truthful Ones, for they

know how-it-is. Qur'an commands: 'Be with the Truthful Ones.'

(9.119). Asked how one would recognise them, the Messenger,

blessings and peace of Allah be upon him, replied: 'When you see

them they remind you of Allah.'

When you finally get to such a man, you have only arrived at your

own self. You have come to a mirror, for he has been polished

away – all that remains is a clear surface in which you mayrecognise your own light beyond all the illusory darkness that so

troubles you which so persistently seems to keep you from being at

peace. You get to him, the slave of your own nafs, your desires,

your fears, your past which you long to escape from, and your

future to which you long to escape, and you find yourself facing a

man who is both the slave of the instant – 'Abd al-Waqt', and the

worshipper of the instant – 'Abid al-Waqt', for that is all there is,

and it is Reality. 'Do not curse Time,' said the Messenger, blessings

and peace of Allah be upon him, 'for it is Allah.'

The Shaykh al-Akbar, the Reviver of the Din, and the illumination

of our tariqa, said:

Whoever knows that Allah is the same as the Path, knows the

matter for what it is. Then He, may He be glorified and

exalted, is travelling on it since there is no known except Him,

and He is the source-form of the Wayfarer and the Traveller,

so there is no knower except Him. He is you. So know your

reality and your Tariqa. The matter has been made clear to

you on the tongue of the interpreter if you but understand. It is



the true tongue, so the only one who will understand is the one

whose understanding is Allah.

The End

Allah, bless and give peace to Muhammad and his family

according to the number of all created things.

Introduction to the Charts

The Charts which follow were prepared by me in 1975 while at

Berkeley, California. They were laid out with the help of Hajj

'Abdalaziz Redpath and the distinguished translators Hajj

'Abdalhaqq Bewley and his wife A'isha. They are quite simply and

somewhat crudely a graphic gloss of one chapter of the 'Futuhat al-

Makkiya' of the Shaykh al-Akbar Muhyid-din ibn al-'Arabi. Thesechapters have always been interpreted by that lamentable group of

orientalists who have had the arrogant illusion that they could

colonise the Shaykh al-Akbar in the same way that their political

counterparts had colonised the Islamic homelands. They have

made the same mistakes as those half-crazed rabbis who fell upon

these writings convinced that this was the esoteric heart of that

Muslim power which was so potent that it extracted from them a

slightly higher rate of taxation than the Zakat of the Muslims. Theysearched among the meanings of the letters, in vain, to escape what

was for them life's greatest punishment – to have money taken

from them – which was the opposite of their own philosophy.

From this they invented the Kabbala pretending it had ancient

levitical roots. Primitive esotericism of a cabbalistic nature was



never the intention of this, the greatest of the Sufi Masters.

According to Ibn al-'Arabi there were two ways to apprehend the

universe. He had said: 'To understand Allah is easy, to understand

the universe is difficult.' He identified two basic ways in whichmodern human beings tried to make sense of the world. One was

by mathematics and the other by language, it must be remembered,

this was when mathematical evolution was in full spate and in the

hands of the great Muslim intellectuals, many of whom were his

contemporaries. From this it follows that there are two instruments

of comprehension. One is numbers and the other is letters. He saw

that while the equation or the calculation could have enormous

complexity, it in the end was dependent on a simple mathematicalmode. And so, in the same way, however complex the sentence, it

was dependent on the phoneme.

The Pythagoreans had stated that the numbers themselves had

meaning. The end result of that extraordinary imaging was nothing

less than to have created the foundation of the whole western

polyphonic musical tradition. Under the Pythagoreans numbers

became music. Shaykh al-Akbar declared in the same way that thesentence could not have meaning if the letter itself did not have

meaning. The effect of this was to map out an extraordinary pattern

of spiritual states and stations. Therefore we could say that the

study of the letters as having meaning led to complex Sufism,

which is the science of states and stations. That in itself would

seem an overwhelming achievement yet the matter goes much

further.

As a fruit of his visions Ibn al-'Arabi had stated: 'If you make a

model of the universe you will only arrive at making a model of

yourself.' One could clarify this by a modern reference. One of

today's most distinguished scientists and astrophysicists evolved a

theory of the universe dependent on the concept of the Black Hole,



the Black Hole being an astral zone of anti-matter which sucked up

cosmic material into itself, thus making it non-existent. The author

of this vision of the universe himself suffered from an incurable

motor-neurone disease which involved the slow loss of peripheral

power and function in the limbs which inexorably moved in

towards the vital centres of life, rendering him speechless,

immobile and eventually dead. However persuasive the

mathematics, he had made a model of himself.

It was on this sufic understanding that Ibn al-'Arabi conceived, or

more correctly, perceived that the correct language for

understanding the cosmos was not mathematics but linguistics, that

the only understanding of the universal possibility was one whichbonded the slave into the cosmic process. Allah, glory be to Him,

in Qur'an, referring to the human self, states: 'The creation of the

worlds is greater, if you only knew.' (40.57) Put in crude modern

language he considered a cosmology or a cosmogony more

important than an astronomy. What he is recognising is that the

cosmic heavens are heavens, therefore they are an unseen

immediate reality as well as a distant perceived reality. While the

miserable Christian philosopher, Pascal, said that the infinite

spaces of the heavens frightened him, the radiant sufic master

understood that fear belonged to Allah, for his creation of the

worlds, and not to the worlds themselves. In his vision, all the

worlds are harmonic in the Pythagorean sense but are shot through

with meanings of the one who perceives them. Thus the first stage

of the journey of the seeker is to internalise the total cosmic

phenomenon inside himself.

'Abdalqadir al-Jilani, may Allah be pleased with him, said: 'Here is

a strange thing. The boat within the ocean! Look! The ocean is

within the boat!' False mysticism tries to eliminate the self. The

path of Tawhid is this, in the words of Moulay al-'Arabi ad-



Darqawi: 'If the world disappears Allah has to appear'. In this

matter the universe is before the self as mirror – whatever is in the

self must appear in the universe. Thus the universe disappearing is

both a swallowing up of the world and at the same time the

i hi f th i Thi i th d t th i hi f th

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