the sunna as primordiality - abdal hakim murad
TRANSCRIPT
-
8/2/2019 The Sunna as Primordiality - Abdal Hakim Murad
1/22
The Sunnaas PRIMORDIALITY
ByAbdal Hakim Murad, April 1999
-
8/2/2019 The Sunna as Primordiality - Abdal Hakim Murad
2/22
TWENTIETH-CENTURY WESTERN ART is not a subject for which weMuslims have much time. The alert among us are conscious that it
neatly represents the decline of the Western Christian worldview
and its replacement first with the titanic fantasies of the
Renaissance, those absurd nude figures urging us to consider the
human creature as sufficient unto himself; and then, when two
world wars convinced the Western elite that the human creature
left to his own devices was unlikely to create his own paradise on
earth, the grotesqueries of the modern period. Today, one of the
best-known of British artists is Damien Hurst, famous for exhibiting a
sheep floating in formaldehyde. Hardly less famous are Gilbert
and George, two middle-aged homosexuals in grey Marks and
Spencers suits, who paint vast canvases using their own body
fluids.The winner of the 1998 Turner Prize, the most prestigious gong
in the British art world, was painted with the excrement of an
elephant. Perhaps this is why we Muslims find modern Western artparticularly disagreeable and resistant to our contemplation: if art
is the crystallisation of a civilisation, then to amble along the
corridors of the Tate Gallery is to be confronted with a disturbing
realisation. Christianity, when it was taken seriously by the cultural
elite, produced significant works, which Muslims can recognise as
beautiful, despite the inherent dangers of its love of the graven
image. Christianity was sapped by the so-called enlightenment;
and now that the enlightenment itself has run its course, the
Western soul, as articulated by its most intelligent and most
respected artistic representatives, has shifted its concerns to the
human entrails. From the spirit, to the mind, to the body - and
now to its waste products: a depressing trajectory, and one from
which we avert our gaze. But it is immensely instructive,
nonetheless, to visit art galleries just to observe the consistency of
the decline. It serves as a reminder not only that we dislike themodern world, but also that we dont like disliking it. We would
-
8/2/2019 The Sunna as Primordiality - Abdal Hakim Murad
3/22
rather feel that there existed some authentic connection between
our worldview and that of the Western elite: but such a link
appears no longer to exist. It is not that we are extreme. It is not
we who destroyed the bridge. We are simply holding to the norms
generally recognised by our species for 99% of its history. It is the
West that is extreme, that has grown strange, that seems to have
gone mad.
And yet amidst this hideous visual cacophony, occasional insights
can be observed; and these can be of an almost revelatory
intensity. Almost all 20th century Western artists have been well
aware of their cultural situation, as wreckers of a religious view ofthe world, and as the depictors of its chaotic, formless, ugly
successor. A few, however, have recognised the persuasiveness
of the alternatives. And a very few, those who have escaped the
besetting racism and Islamophobia of European culture, have
acknowledged the beauty and depth of Islam.
One such artist was the Russian, Kasimir Malevich. Malevich lived
and worked around the time of the Russian Revolution, a time ofthe concatenation of the thousands of rival movements, religious,
mystical, atheistic, or aesthetic, which collided in the early 1920s,
only for the satanic force of Josef Stalin to emerge from the ruins.
It was, for a few brief and heady seasons, a time when the dead
weight of the countrys inherited hierarchies, both religious and
royal, seemed to have been removed to make way for a vision
that was not only more just, but also more spiritually sighted.
One manifestation of this was the demand by the young artists of
the Left that the authorities abolish all representational forms of
painting. Figurative art, they rightly pointed out, is inherently
oppressive. It privileges youth over age; wealth over poverty. In its
religious modes it attributes gender and race to the divine. Hence
the revolutionary slogan:
-
8/2/2019 The Sunna as Primordiality - Abdal Hakim Murad
4/22
A White Army officer
when you catch him
you beat him
and what about Raphael
its time to make
museum walls a target
let the mouths of big guns
shoot the old rags of the past!
The Bolsheviks themselves were horrified by this. For them,
representational art provided the foundation for all mass
propaganda. And in due time, Stalin and his successors
patronised and enforced the crude style of Socialist Realism,
images of muscular peasant men and women gazing up at the
new socialist dawn. The titanism and human-worship of the
Renaissance had been restored; only the desire for greater
freedom was removed.
But in the white-hot heat of the moment, when the old wascrashing down with the Winter Palace and the Kazan Cathedral,
and the new, in the form of Soviet gigantism had not yet had its
triumph, a crack in European culture appeared that for a brief but
remarkable instant admitted the light of Islam.
Most of Russia, of course, is built on the ruins of Muslim civilisations.
More than any other European people, not excepting the Serbs,
the Russians have seen themselves as holy warriors against Islam.In the early 16th century, almost all of what is today Ukraine was
Muslim, ruled by the Kasimov emirs with their splendid capital to
the south of Moscow. The Crimea, one of the most densely
populated and prosperous regions on earth, was a Muslim state in
alliance with the Ottoman caliphate. The steppeland between
the Black and Caspian Seas had been Muslim for centuries,
growing rich on the silk and carpet trade between Iran and
Europe. To the east of Moscow, Muslim cities adorned the banks
-
8/2/2019 The Sunna as Primordiality - Abdal Hakim Murad
5/22
of the Volga river, culminating in their capital Kazan, a city
perhaps twenty times the size of Moscow itself. In 1555 Ivan the
Terrible, taking advantage of divisions between these European
Muslim empires, invaded and sacked Kazan. The great White
Mosque of Kul Sherif, with its eight minarets, was torn down, and its
rubble used to build St Basils Cathedral in Moscow. Although the
Kazan khans had always permitted the practice of Christianity, the
Russian conquerors prohibited Islam, and forcibly baptised the
remaining population. The Cossacks were let loose on the Muslim
countryside, young men from the frozen north who captured and
enslaved Muslim women, breeding from them a new type of
crusading zealot. So strong was the sense of confrontation withthe more civilised world of Islam that until the eighteenth century it
was common for drums in the Russian army to be made from the
skins of captured Muslims.
This legacy of hatred is the bedrock of Russian culture. Before Ivan
the Terrible, about half of the land-mass of Europe was Muslim.
And the Russian tsars saw themselves as the ethnic cleansers
under whose hammer blows the surviving Muslims would bow their
knees at the cross.
The Russian Revolution, and the years immediately preceding and
following it, challenged every assumption of the traditional Russian
mind; including the most fundamental assumption of all: the
unworthiness of Islam. Intellectuals and poets begin to respect
Muslim culture. Architects, bored and disgusted by the
flamboyant rococo splendour of St Petersburg, turned their eyes
to the architecture of Muslim Bukhara and Samarkand. Here, they
thought, was a harmony of man and nature, a celebration of
beauty that was not titanic, but contemplative. The blue tiles of
the Friday Mosque and the Shah-i Zindeh tombs of Samarqand
seemed not to raise up a fist of defiance to the skies, as did the art
of Europe; but to call down something of the peace of heaven
onto the earth. Russian architects such as Melnikov incorporatedUzbek themes into their houses. A spectacular example is
-
8/2/2019 The Sunna as Primordiality - Abdal Hakim Murad
6/22
Melnikovs design for the Soviet pavilion at the 1925 International
Exposition in Paris, which borrows from the design of Central Asian
Islamic tomb towers. Through works such as these, Western
architects such as Le Corbusier introduced Islamic themes into
their own design.
In the visual arts, this influence is also marked. There were other,
often quite demented movements in the air also, of course:
Acmeism, Cubism, Constructivism, and the rest. But among some
artists, those with an eye still on the spiritual, the attractions of the
Islamic sense of beauty proved too radiant to resist. As one
architect, Andrei Burov noted of his generation: There was astrong Mohammedan influence; and orthodox Mohammedanism
at that.
At this point, Kasimir Malevich steps in. Malevich was a
contemplative and a mystic, who found European
representational painting to be little more than a crude and
loathsome conjuring with flabby pink limbs against heroic
landscapes.
Malevichs greatest work is a painting called Black Square. This is
a square, painted completely in black, against a white border.
He called it his absolute symbol of modernity, a modernity which
he hoped would be pure and spiritual, as opposed to the
congealed decadence of 19th-century Western materialism.
He chose the image of a Black Square because it is the totalinversion of the Western tradition of recording the writhing diversity
of the manifest world. He wrote, later, that when painting it he felt
black nights within, and a timidity bordering on fear, but when
he neared completion he experienced a blissful sensation of
being drawn into a desert where nothing is real but feeling, and
feeling became the substance of my life.
-
8/2/2019 The Sunna as Primordiality - Abdal Hakim Murad
7/22
What on earth could this mean? The modern British writer Bruce
Chatwin, who knew Islam well, commented as follows:
This is not the language of a good Marxist, but of Meister
Eckhart - or, for that matter, of Mohammed. Malevichs
Black Square, his absolute symbol of modernity, is the
equivalent
in painting of the black-draped Kaba at Mecca, the shrine
in a valley of sterile soil where all men are equal before God.
Here we have the key to understanding Malevichs achievement.
In this painting, which for Muslims must be the most significant workof 20th century art, a cultured Russian finally breaks through the
carapace of solidified reality, and intuits the nature of truth.
Simplicity is beauty. And it is depth, instilling awe, and an
authentic rather than sentimental emotion.
Malevich, in a moment of cultural turmoil, and of intense, blazing
realisation, had stumbled upon the principle of pure beauty. Only
the Real is real; manifestation and its diversities are chimera. Theline between the two is razor-sharp: Qul ja al-Haqq wa-zahaqal-
batil, innal-batila kana zahuqa. Say: Reality has come, and
falsehood has vanished; falsehood was ever evanescent. This
was, after all, the aya recited by the Prophet (s) as he rode
around the Kaba, pointing with his stick to each of the 360 idols in
turn, upon which they fell over into the dust.
Malevich died, and Socialist Realism ruled triumphant. But for asecond in Europes history, the truth had been glimpsed.
At the centre of the Islamic religion lies the Kaba. Uniting the
aspects of the divine beauty and the divine majesty, it is a place
of resort and safety for human beings. It lies in a city protected
by the prayer of Ibrahim al-Khalil, alayhil-salam: My Lord, make
this land a sanctuary.
-
8/2/2019 The Sunna as Primordiality - Abdal Hakim Murad
8/22
The Kaba has many meanings. One of these pertains to the
Black Stone, which is the point at which the pilgrims come closest
to its mystery.
Ali ibn Abi Talib narrated that when God took the Covenant,
He recorded it in writing and fed it to the Black Stone, and
this is the meaning of the saying of those who touch the
Black Stone during the circumambulation of the Ancient
House: O God! This is believing in You, fulfilling our pledge to
You, and declaring the truth of Your record.
The Kaba therefore, while it is nothing of itself - a cube of stonesand mortar - represents and reminds its pilgrims of the primordial
moment of our kind. Allah speaks of a time before the creation of
the world:
when your Lord brought forth from the Children of Adam,
from their reins, their seed, and made them testify of
themselves, He said: Am I not your Lord? They said, Yea!
We testify! That was lest you should say on the Day of Arising:
Of this we were unaware. (7:171)
When we visit the House, we are therefore invited to remember
the Great Covenant: that forgotten moment when we committed
ourselves to our Maker, acknowleding Him as the source of our
being. The Black Stone itself is, according to a hadith which Imam
Tirmidhi declares to be sound, yaqutatun min yawaqit al-janna -a gemstone from Paradise itself.
The Kaba functions, in the imagination of those who visit it on Hajj,
or turn towards it in Salat, as the centre and point of origin of all
diverse things on earth. It is oriented towards the four cardinal
points of the compass. Its blackness recalls the blackness of the
night sky, of the heavens, and hence the pure presence of the
Creator. Allah tells us that there are signs for us in the heavensand the earth; and recent astronomy affirms that the spiral
-
8/2/2019 The Sunna as Primordiality - Abdal Hakim Murad
9/22
galaxies are revolving around black holes. A powerful symbol,
written into the magnificence of space, of the spiritual vortex
which beckons us to spiral into the unknown, where quantum
mechanics fail, where time and space are no more.
The yearning for the Kaba which sincere Muslims feel whenever
they think of it is therefore not, in fact, a yearning for the building.
In itself it is no less part of the created order than anything else in
creation. The yearning is, instead, a fragment, a breath of the
nostalgia for our point of origin, for that glorious time out of time
when we were in our Makers presence.
That yearning is the central emotion of Islam. It is of the heart: the
heart knows the Kabas splendour; the mind cannot understand
it: it is, after all, only a cube 12 metres high. Hence Jalal al-Din
Rumi says:
The intellect declares: The six directions are limits, and
there is no way out.
Love says: There is a way, and I have travelled it manytimes.
And later he says:
By the time the intellect has found a camel for the hajj,
love has circled the Kaba.
This fundamental emotion of the Islamic religion, which is in fact
part of the fitra - the primordial human nature, the state of grace
into which we were born - is love, mahabba, a painful desire to
return to the beloved. Walladhina amanu ashaddu hubban
liLlah. Those who have faith, as the Qur'an insists, have the
greatest love for God. (2:165) To know ones origin is to love it.
This nostalgic yearning to return, to circle back to the point of
origin, for which the Kaba is no more than the earthly symbol and
reminder, is the most common theme in the splendid and subtle
-
8/2/2019 The Sunna as Primordiality - Abdal Hakim Murad
10/22
poetic tradition of Islam. Here, for instance, is a poem by the 13th
century Turkish poet and lover of Allah, Yunus Emre:
We need to serve a King who never may be driven from His
throneTo rest within a place which we may ever feel to be our own.
A bird we need to be, to fly, to reach the very rim of things,
To drink that cordial whose joy we never may disown.
We need to be a diving bird, to plunge into the waters flow;
We need a gemstone to recover such as jewellers cannot
know.
To enter in a garden, there to dwell in contentments shade;
To pass the summer as a rose - a rose whose petals never fade.
Mankind must lover be, must ever search to find the true
Beloved;
Must burn within the flame of Love - nor burn in any other
flame.
Islam is hence the religion of theAlastu bi-rabbikum: Am I not yourLord?. We follow the Great Covenant, unlike adherents of
previous religions who follow lesser, local, ethnic covenants. The
Kaba represents our way of centring ourselves directly on the
divine presence, the origin of all manifestation.
We need to ponder the divine wisdom in this. Islam appeared in a
time and place where there was no civilisation. If a Quraishite
Arab had travelled five hundred miles north, south, east or west,he would have found a developed culture. But Arabia was a
pocket of primordial simplicity. And Allah subhanahu wa-taala
chose this vacuum for His final message, the one that would end
all previous covenants with Him, and gather the nations of the
earth to the restored Great Covenant itself.
One deep wisdom to be gained from this is the fact of Islams
simplicity. Our doctrine could not be more straightforward. The
-
8/2/2019 The Sunna as Primordiality - Abdal Hakim Murad
11/22
most pure, exalted, uncompromising monotheism: the clearest
idea of God there has ever been. A system of worship that
requires no paraphernalia: no crosses, confessionals, priests or
pews. Just the human creature, and its Lord. The Hajj and Umra
also take us back to an ancient time, as we wear the simplest of
garments, and perform primordial rites that reconnect us with the
symbolic centre, around the purest building there has ever been.
The fast of Ramadan is also timeless: bringing us into contact and
continuity with one of the oldest of all religious devotions. In fact,
some ulema say that fasting is the oldest religious commandment
of all: for in the Garden, the grandfather and grandmother of
humanity were under only one instruction: to refrain from eatingfrom a particular tree.
By stepping inside the protecting circle of Islam, the human
creature is thus reconnected to the ancient simplicity and dignity
of the human condition. Islam allows us to reclaim our status as
khalifas: Allahs deputies on earth.
But this is not limited to the pattern of worship alone. To worshipaccording to one vision of man, and to live according to another,
will inevitably provoke conflict in the soul. Some religions today
allow their followers to live a fully mainstream, 20th century lifestyle
outside the place of worship. But Islam knows that this is absurd.
The focussing on the divine presence during Salat relativises and
transforms our vision of everything else. When we turn away from
the Kaba again, we say, to right and left, al-Salaamu alaykum.
The reconnection with the exquisite and ancient sacred centre
brings a new attitude to the rest of our lives. The salat bars us
from corruption and ugly behaviour. That is, if it is done well, with
hudur- presence of mind and spirit - then the rest of our behaviour
will be refined. Poor manners, crude language, lack of
compassion for others, are all sure signs that we are offeringsalat
incorrectly.
-
8/2/2019 The Sunna as Primordiality - Abdal Hakim Murad
12/22
This means that Islam does not distinguish between our lives of
worship, and anything else in our lifestyle. And it means that the
starting point for putting our communities right, is the establishment
of the prayer, which redirects us to the point on which we are all
united. Not only through public observance in the mosque. It is
possible to go through the motions of the prayer, and pay no
attention; and this is almost worthless. The hadith says, The
worshipper in salat is credited only with that of which he was
conscious. And al-Hasan al-Basri said: Every prayer in which the
heart is not attentive is nearer to punishment than it is to reward.
A besetting problem we face, which symbolises all our otherspiritual problems, is that of the mechanical prayer: we proclaim
Allahu akbar, but immediately show that we dont know what
Allahu akbarmeans. We turn on a kind of autopilot, awakening
from a vague somnolence some minutes later with the salaam.
This is no good. Moving the body, and letting the tongue dance
cleverly around the palate, are of no help to us. The very word
salat signifies connection. There is little point in having a lamp ifwe dont switch on the electricity: and the electricity comes
through khushu - attentive humility, an awareness of the majesty
and nearness of our Lord, and all the divine beauty and rigour of
which the Holy Kaba is the emblem.
The act ofsalat brings us home: to the earth. The name of Adam,
alayhissalaam, is said to be derived from adim - earth, dust. And
Allah says that He created him of dust. By pressing the foreheadto the ground we recall our created and fleeting lives. From it did
We create you, to it do We return you, and from it shall We bring
you out one more time. Three encounters with the earth - and we
can escape none of them.
The slave is closest to his Lord while he prostrates. This is a hadith.
We are truly Allahs khulafa - His deputies and representatives on
this earth - when our foreheads, the symbol of Pharaonic pride
-
8/2/2019 The Sunna as Primordiality - Abdal Hakim Murad
13/22
and defiance, are pressed firmly down; when the heart is higher
than the head.
No umma on the planet has a more intimate relationship with
Allahs creation than do we Muslims. We know it as a universe of
signs, which revelation teaches us to read.
Truly in the creation of the heavens and the earth and the
succession of night and day are signs for people of inner
understanding. Those who make dhikr, who recall, Allah
standing, and sitting, and upon their sides, and think about
the way in which the heavens and the earth have been
made. (3:190, 191)
Salat is a form of dhikr. Allah commands sayyidina Musa
alayhisalam, And establish the Prayer for My dhikr, My
remembrance. (20:14) And remembrance of Allah is the
recollection of that original source and direction of humanity, at
the Great Covenant, and the Assembly of Am I Not your Lord - the
bezm-i alast. Hence our physical turning to the Kaba, which ispure beauty, represents and recalls our acknowledgement of our
primordial home, and our affirmation, again, of our loyalty to that
promise which we all have made.
Hence the beauty, and the dignity, and the timeless poise of the
Salat. By thesalat, we affirm the glory of our Lord, through tasbih
and bowing and prostrating. By the salat we affirm the pledge
which we have made to Him. And by thesalat we acknowledgethat we do this only because sayyidina Muhammad, sallallahu
alayhi wa-sallam, taught us how to pray. The prayer thus
becomes the culmination of the sunna. It is the pillar of religion -
whoever tears it down, has demolished the religion. Without it our
recollection of our primordial source and origin has no meaning,
and no sign.
-
8/2/2019 The Sunna as Primordiality - Abdal Hakim Murad
14/22
The prayer, of course, was gifted to humanity on the Night of the
Miraj. This was the culminating event of Rasulullahs prophetic
story: his greatest glory, as he rose into the very presence of his
Lord in order to behold His greatest signs.
In the divine presence, the Prophet (s.w.s.) was offered a choice.
He was brought wine, and he was brought milk. As he chooses
the milk, Gabriel, upon him be peace, says, Hudiyta lil-fitra - you
have been guided to the fitra - the primordial, pure, natural
disposition of man.
This extraordinary event deserves careful consideration. At the
summit of his prophetic career, and hence at the summit of
humanitys history of relating to Allah, a lesson is given about the
fitra; and we are shown that this is part of, and indeed the
essence of, the Sunna.
The choice between wine and milk is the choice between
corruption and purity. Milk is described in the Quran as khalisan -
pure. Wine, by the very process which produces it, is at oneremove from nature. It is a natural fluid, but in a state of
corruption. It is interesting that in the modern world, consumers
are very reluctant to eat food that has rotted, but are only too
happy to consume fluids that are rotted and corrupt. And the
process of fermentation is nothing other than a process of rotting.
Bottles of wine rarely advertise a sell-by date.
So: hudiyta lil-fitra. The prophetic figure of the Miraj is told by theangel that the fitra is one of his traits. And this, by extension,
becomes the nature of his sunna, in which we must all try to
partake.
The picture is a little clearer now. Rasulullah (s.w.s.) is born in
Makka, a city of ancient desert simplicity. He migrates to Madina,
a city of ancient agricultural, peasant simplicity. The rites of his
religion, culminating in thesalat, breathe something of that purity
-
8/2/2019 The Sunna as Primordiality - Abdal Hakim Murad
15/22
and ancient humanity. They are not of our time: they make the
habits of our time seem puny and undignified.
The modern world is in a panic about its departure from nature.
The seas, air and rivers are rendered impure by industries which
are the expression of human greed and the hatred of simplicity.
Alzheimers disease, asthma, AIDS and male infertility are spiralling
hints of the collapse of the species. The Rio conference urged a
reduction in emissions, and hence of certain forms of production,
but failed to explain how the forgotten virtue of zuhd might be
made attractive again to people whose religion has lost its
appeal, and who hence worship their pleasures and themselves.Ordinary people indicate their unease by buying organic
produce, using aloe-vera shampoo, and shunning the synthetic
wherever they can. And yet this is a return to form, not to content.
It is idle to recommend a natural lifestyle if one adopts it only as
a style rather than as a significant affirmation of a cosmos that has
a source and a destiny, and has been created to support
humanity in its life of worship and affirmation of the Real. As
Muslims, we affirm a natural lifestyle: and this is no mere pose. The
retrieval of the Great Covenant demands that we live in
accordance with the created norm of our kind. Shah WaliAllah
observes that God has appointed a sharia for every species. And
every species, when not oppressed by modern man, remains
faithful to that sharia. But humanity is capable of forgetting, and
of violating the message of his genes, his hormones, his gender,
and his innate yearning for his source. This dysfunctionality is theessence of kufr, the process by which we hide our true natures
from ourselves.
The road to the reclamation of our natural norm is open only in the
form of the Sunna. Only the Muslims worship as did the founder of
their religion. Prophetic Madina was a primordial city; and by
following the pattern of life exampled by its luminous inhabitants
we can genuinely retrieve our essence. The sunna is hence alifeboat which allows us to move safely through the toxic sea of
-
8/2/2019 The Sunna as Primordiality - Abdal Hakim Murad
16/22
modernity, while sustaining ourselves from provisions which were
laid down in an age before such pollution occurred.
Let us remind ourselves of the lifestyle of the Prophet (s). We live in
a time of lifestyle choices; but for us, in fact, there is only one
appealing lifestyle choice. Modernity holds up to us a range of
ideal types to imitate: we can be like Peter Tatchell, or Monica
Lewinsky, or Alan Clarke, or Michael Jackson. There is a long
menu of alternatives. But when set beside the radiant humanity of
Rasulullah (s.w.s.), there is no contest at all. For the Prophet is
humanity itself, in its Adamic perfection. In him, and in his style of
life, the highest possibilities of our condition are realised andrevealed. And this is beauty itself: the wordjamil, beautiful, which
is one of his names, refers also to virtue. Ihsan, the Prophetic state
of harmony with God, means the engendering of husn, or beauty.
Here is a condensed recollection, a kind of verbal icon, of that
Prophetic beauty. It is paraphrased from a passage by Imam al-
Ghazali, in Book 19 of his Revival of the Religious Sciences, Ihya
Ulum al-Din.
The Messenger of God (s) was the mildest of men, but also the
bravest and most just of men. He was the most restrained of
people; never touching the hand of a woman over whom he did
not have rights, or who was not his mahram. He was the most
generous of men, so that never did a gold or silver coin spend the
night in his house. If something remained at the end of the day,
because he had not found someone to give it to, and nightdescended, he would go out, and not return home until he had
given it to someone in need. From what Allah gave him [...] he
would take only the simplest and easiest foods: dates and barley,
giving anything else away in the path of Allah. Never did he
refuse a gift for which he was asked. He used to mend his own
sandals, and patch his own clothes, and serve his family, and help
them to cut meat. He was the shyest of men, so that his gazewould never remain long in the face of anyone else. He would
-
8/2/2019 The Sunna as Primordiality - Abdal Hakim Murad
17/22
accept the invitation of a freeman or a slave, and accept a gift,
even if it were no more than a gulp of milk, or the thigh of a rabbit,
and offer something in return. He never consumed anything given
in sadaqa. He was not too proud to reply to a slave-girl, or a
pauper in rags. He would become angered for his Lord, never for
himself; he would cause truth and justice to prevail even if this led
to discomfort to himself or to his companions.
He used to bind a stone around his waist out of hunger. He would
eat what was brought, and would not refuse any permissible food.
If there was dates without bread, he would eat, if there was roast
meat, he would eat; if there was rough barley bread, he wouldeat it; if there was honey or something sweet, he would eat it; if
there was only yogurt without even bread, he would be quite
satisfied with that.
He was not sated, even with barley-bread, for three consecutive
days, until the day he met his Lord, not because of poverty, or
avarice, but because he always preferred others over himself.
He would attend weddings, and visit the sick, and attend
funerals, and would often walk among his enemies without a
guard. He was the most humble of men, and the most serene,
without arrogance. He was the most eloquent of men, without
ever speaking for too long. He was the most cheerful of men. He
was afraid of nothing in the dunya. He would wear a rough
Yemeni cloak, or a woollen tunic; whatever was lawful and was to
hand, that he would wear. He would ride whatever was to hand:sometimes a horse, sometimes a camel, sometimes a mule,
sometimes a donkey. And at times he would walk barefoot,
without an upper garment or a turban or a cap. He would visit
the sick even if they were in the furthest part of Madina. He loved
perfumes, and disliked foul smells.
He maintained affectionate and loyal ties with his relatives, but
without preferring them to anyone who was superior to them. He
-
8/2/2019 The Sunna as Primordiality - Abdal Hakim Murad
18/22
never snubbed anyone. He accepted the excuse of anyone who
made an excuse. He would joke, but would never say anything
that was not true. He would laugh, but not uproarously. He would
watch permissible games and sports, and would not criticise them.
He ran races with his wives. Voices would be raised around him,
and he would be patient. He kept a sheep, from which he would
draw milk for his family. He would walk among the fields of his
companions. He never despised any pauper for his poverty or
illness; neither did he hold any king in awe simply because he was
a king. He would call rich and poor to Allah, without distinction.
In him, Allah combined all noble traits of character; although heneither read nor wrote, having grown up in a land of ignorance
and deserts in poverty, as a shepherd, and as an orphan with
neither father nor mother. But Allah Himself taught him all the
excellent qualities of character, and praiseworthy ways, and the
stories of the early and the later prophets, and the way to
salvation and triumph in the Akhira, and to joy and detachment in
the dunya, and how to hold fast to duty, and to avoid the
unnecessary. May Allah give us success in obeying him, and in
following his sunna. Amin ya rabb al-alamin.
This moving portrait by Imam al-Ghazali depicts our role model,
and simultaneously our ideal of humanity lived in the form of
absolute beauty. His was a life lived in fullness. There was no
aspect of human perfection that he did not know and manifest.
And his perfection also indicates the nature of specifically
masculine perfection. He was a great warrior; a sound hadith
narrated by Imam al-Darimi tells us, on the authority of Ali, that
On the day of Badr I was present, and we sought refuge in
the Prophet (s.w.s.), who was the closest of us all to the
enemy. On that day he was the most powerful of all the
combatants who fought.
-
8/2/2019 The Sunna as Primordiality - Abdal Hakim Murad
19/22
One of the Companions described him riding his horse, wearing a
red turban and holding his sword, and said later that never in his
life had he seen a sight more beautiful.
In 23 years he became undisputed ruler of Arabia. Through his
genius and charisma, and the attractive force of his personality,
he united the Arabian tribes for the first time in their history. He
took his people from the depths of idolatry into the purest form of
monotheism. He gave them a law for the first time. He laid down,
in his mosque in Madina, a system of worship, self-restraint and
spiritual fruitfulness that provided the inspiration and the
precedent for countless generations of later worshippers andsaints. In affirming the Kaba, he affirmed beauty; so that all else
that he did was beautiful.
And in all this, he attributed his success only to Allah. He was, as
Imam al-Ghazali records, the most humble of men. He was
forbearing, polite, courteous, and mild. He paid no attention to
peoples outward form, but assessed and responded to their
spirits. He forgave constantly. He was indulgent with the simpleBedouin of Central Arabia, the roughest people on earth. When
one of them. who wanted money, pulled his cloak so violently
that it left a mark, he merely smiled, and ordered that the man be
given what he wanted.
All of this came about through his detachment. The veil of self
and distraction was gone: he saw by the Truth. He knew his own
prophetic status, but was not made proud by this. He said: I amthe first around whom the earth shall split open at the Resurrection
- and I do not boast. He knew his worth, but because he knew his
Lord, he was not proud.
His sunna entailed living in the world, not running away from it.
After the overwhelming experience of revelation on Mount Hira,
facing the Kaba, he went down again into Meccan society. He
had his solitary times with his Lord, in the long watches of the night,
-
8/2/2019 The Sunna as Primordiality - Abdal Hakim Murad
20/22
forms of tahajjud so long and exacting that he forbade his
companions to imitate him. He fasted in rigourous ways that he
would not allow to others. He was detached, and yet in his world,
and, in the end, commanding his world. He was truly the khalifa:
the one who has no ego, and hence speaks, and acts, and rules,
by and for Allah alone.
Living the sunna therefore means emulating his inner as well as his
outer perfection. The sunna has to come easily and naturally to
us, as the normal lifestyle of our species. Not one of you has
iman, he insisted, until his desire, his personal preference, his
hawa, is in accordance with what I have brought.
Today, among our Muslim communities, there are many who have
not learnt this lesson. There are some misguided fools who
imagine that one can achieve spiritual excellence without
adhering to the Sunna. This notion, that there can be ihsan
without islam, is a falsehood, repudiated by all the Muslims and
the Sufis, since the beginning of Islam. For instance, Imam Jalal al-
Din Rumi says:
I am the servant of the Quran, for as long as I have a soul.
I am the dust on the road of Muhammad, the Chosen One.
If someone interprets my words in any other way,
That person I deplore, and I deplore his words.
Conversely, we can make no claim to be following the outward
sunna, unless we have some share in emulating his innerperfection also. There are many Muslims whose body language
and manners betray their ignorance of this insight. To pray, fast,
eat halal, and observe the other aspects of the outward sunna,
will produce only a lopsided, partial type of Muslim, unless we
have been working on our inward lives. We need to watch the
nafs, the ego, like a cat watching a mousehole. We need to grind
it down, so that we become like light.
-
8/2/2019 The Sunna as Primordiality - Abdal Hakim Murad
21/22
The Sahaba converted millions of men and women, most of them
devout Christians, Buddhists, Jews and Zoroastrians, even without
speaking to them. The Quran was not translated, and few of
them learnt the local languages. But the sheer radiance of their
presence, and the natural beauty of the sunna, with its
graciousness, dignity and poise, won over the hearts of those who
saw them.
Today it is possible to meet Muslims who follow the outward
aspects of the Sunna, and yet do not cause hearts to incline
towards them; but to be repelled. Had you been rough and hard
of heart, they would have scattered from around you. (3:159) Weseem to have edited that verse out of the Holy Quran. If some of
our activists, with their flak jackets, their Doc Marten boots, and
their aggressive demeanour, could be taken back to the seventh
century, it is unlikely that the Christians, Buddhists and others would
have found them very impressive. They, and the Sahaba
themselves, would have regarded them as religious failures, driven
by anger and a sense of marginalisation into a religious form
marked by aggressiveness, not the hilm, the gracious clemency
which was the hallmark of the Prophet (s.w.s.), and without which
he could never have won so many hearts.
The conclusion, then, is very simple. Islam is very simple. It is the
religion which reunites us to nature and to God. It celebrates
rather than represses human nature. It discloses the splendour of
our Adamic potential.
Those of us who have lived far from nature, and far from beauty,
and far from the saints, often have anger, and darkness, and
confusion in our hearts. But this is not the Sunna. The sunna is
about detachment, about the confidence that however
seemingly black the situation of the world, however great the
oppression, no leaf falls without the will of Allah. Ultimately, all is
well. The cosmos, and history, are in good hands.
-
8/2/2019 The Sunna as Primordiality - Abdal Hakim Murad
22/22
That was the confidence of Rasulullah (s.w.s.). It has to be our
confidence as well. There is too much depression among us,
which leads either to demoralisation and immorality, or to panic,
and meaningless, ugly forms of extremism, which have nothing to
do with the serenity and beauty to which the Kaba summons us.
But Islam commands wisdom, and balance. It is the middle way.
And for us, whatever our situation, it is always available, and can
always be put into practice. We are the fortunate umma in
todays world. Fortunate, because unlike Westerners, we are still
centred on beauty. In other words, we still know what we are,
and what we are called to be.