Abdal Hakim Murad – Abdul Ghani bin Ismail alNablusi Paradigms of Leadership
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The transcript discusses various aspects of the Middle East, including modernity and cultural collapse. It provides insight into figures such as Jesus Christ's importance in the holy Bible and Hanbali school, and discusses the importance of finding the middle way to pursue spiritual transformation. The transcript also touches on the significance of not having any current experiences and not being in a state of stillness to achieve spiritual transformation.
AI: Summary ©
So we're moving through this,
complex galaxy of,
lights that still shine from long ago from
the, almost incomprehensible,
sort of cornucopia
of luminaries
that
has been preserved for us by our historians
from the
long centuries of the Muslim past. And at
every point, we've been trying to
triangulate to our own situation
from the accomplishment
of those past great ones. And we've already
seen
the, remarkable, perhaps even,
baffling diversity
of Muslim types.
We started off by commenting on the,
Quranic celebration
of difference.
Difference in cosmos,
difference in humanity.
The difference of your
tongues and colors.
And also of human types.
Every single human being by the divine decree
has his or her misege
needed according to a particular
set of spiritual
possibilities,
and also according to inheritance factors. We certainly
believe in inheritance.
The
genetic DNA shuffling at the moment of conception
is part of the divine desire that no
two human beings shall be the same.
So when we look at paradigms for ourselves
and we
peruse the
complexity and
the grandeur of
the Islamic story, which is a story of
human beings and their
turning towards the divine. We perceive not just
one way of apprehending
the prophetic excellence,
but a huge range of them. This is
what we should expect, and this is important
because ours is an age of
quite militant homogenization.
Modernity pays lip service to the right of
people to do their own thing and to
be different within
the woolly
confines
of liberal indifferentism.
But at the same time, globalization,
which is its flip side, tends to turn
us into variants of the same sort of
thing.
Real difference, real eccentrics, real misfits, real oddballs
are
less easy to come by than once they
were. Mass communication, the Internet,
Hollywood,
even the invention of printing have served to
homogenize
human beings, which is not what the divine
purpose is for us. We are to be
diverse.
And if you read the Seera, you see
such an extraordinarily
wide,
cast of players.
So many archetypes in a Shakespearean way, bodied
forth by particular personalities
amongst the, Sahaba.
So, the the monochrome nature of modern humanity
is an aspect of this,
the drabness.
And, so, as we begin today's journey looking
at a somewhat more recent figure, though not
as recent as our Muslim cowboy that we
looked at last time, William Williamson,
We will be considering this, the polychrome
nature
of premodern
humanity, the sheer diversity of the world,
the ongoing
luminous
intensity,
of the natural world,
human engagement
with other forms of consciousness in ways that
nowadays has become perfunctory
and hurried.
More opportunities for leisure we have,
the less time we seem to have just
to take a deep breath
and contemplate
the moment.
These are all
usual homilies.
It is our modern condition. But,
in past times, humanity was something very different,
and probably would have regarded us
with horror and pity. Not just as hopeless
materialistic blasphemers, but as people for whom part
of the richness, and the intensity, and the
in the momentness
of humanity has been lost in favor of
a kind of
daydreaming.
So we have these ideas of
what it is to be
an admirable
human being, a hero,
in that kind of Hegelian sense perhaps.
Somebody absolutely
attentive to the unique irreplaceability
of the moment.
Because nowadays, the moment is
not from God, has no particular meaning,
there's no symbolic interpretation possible. It's just another
moment, another random concatenation of atoms in a
meaningless universe. We're kind of in a hurry
to get on to the next one in
case it's more interesting. But in a theistic
cosmos,
where every moment
is full of divine meaning, if only we
would stop,
take a deep breath, and meditate upon it.
Yeah. There were people who were ibn al
Waqd.
People who were sons of the moment and
were,
to use the dreadful borderized
mock Buddhist contemporary category, mindful.
They were in the moment,
Hadarin.
And that led to a certain intensity
of personality and a certain
intensification of the possibilities
of manhood, the possibilities of nobility,
the possibilities of criminality,
the possibilities
of
masculinity and femininity.
All of these things were, as it were,
highly colored,
intensified,
writ large.
So I want to start with an example
of this. It's a passage that's kind of
famous in
travel literature.
This is, Edmondo de Amicis's famous book about
Constantinople,
which he visited when the Ottoman thing was
still kind of visible.
This is in the time of Sultan Abdulaziz.
So,
the beginning of the end, but he could
still see the old world.
The old guys
in splendidly colored clothes and magnificent turbans, and
the color and splendor and havoc of the
east, and then the modernization
with the
black frock coat and the boring turboshe
and the,
efficient time and money men in the modernized
European offices, and the splendor and the extravagance,
the cornucopia of the Levant. It's cosmopolitanism
replaced by efficiency
and moving towards a monocopter. So here's his
reminiscence. He's just been to see the Sultan,
Sultan Abdul Aziz, who is a rather sorry
figure, and he's expecting to see this oriental
pageant.
And instead, it's a very Europeanized kind of
thing. He rides out of Dolmabahce Palace, which
is this very Europeanized rococo thing.
And,
the official Palace officials are there, and the
Sultan is kind of drably dressed and he's
kind of a bit bored. There's a bunch
of French tourists there, goggling.
Nothing. Just another modern spectacle. So he's just
reflected on this,
and then he says this, and I'll read
this in extensor because
it kind of sums up
what we have lost,
and leads us into the remainder of today's
reflections.
As the reader can see,
the spectacle of the Sultan's procession has today
become a rather drab affair.
The sultans of olden times issued forth in
great pomp,
preceded and followed by swarms of horsemen, slaves,
guards, gardeners, eunuchs, and chamberlains,
who seem from a distance, so enthusiastic chroniclers
tell us, look like a sea of tulips.
The sultans of today, on the contrary, seem
to shun pomp and circumstance
as though it were a mere theatrical display
of lost grandeur.
What would one of those early sultans say
were he to rise up from his tomb
at Bursa or Torbe in Istanbul and see
one of his 19th century descendants passing by
dressed in a black frock coat without a
turban, without a sword, without jewels,
surrounded by a crowd of insolent foreigners.
I suspect he would blush with rage and
shame, and as a sign of his supreme
displeasure,
cut off the beard of his unworthy representative,
as Suleiman the first did to Hassan, with
one sweep of his scimitar,
the deadliest insult which can be offered to
an Ottoman.
It is true that there is the same
difference between the Sultans of the past, whose
names alone terrorized Europe between the 12th 16th
century, and those of today as there is
between the Ottoman Empire as it is now
and those of the first centuries.
Those earlier sultans summed up all the youth
and beauty and vigor of their race.
They were not only a living image of
their own people, a beautiful emblem, a precious
pearl upon the sword of Islam,
but in themselves alone, one of its great
strengths. It is impossible not to see in
their personal qualities one of the main reasons
why Ottoman power grew in such an extraordinary
way.
The most glorious period of Ottoman history lies
in the first first use of the dynasty,
lasting a 193 years from Osman to Mehmed
the second. That was indeed a succession of
powerful princes.
With one exception, and taking due account of
the times and of the conditions of the
race, they were austere and wise and loved
by their subjects.
They were often fierce, but rarely unjust, and
frequently even generous and benevolent towards their enemies.
All of them were princes befitting their race,
handsome and imposing in appearance.
True lions, as their mothers call them, whose
roar made the earth tremble.
The Abdul Majids, the Abdul Aziz, the Murads,
the Abdul Hamids are mere shadows of Pardisah's
in comparison with those formidable young men, born
to girls of 15
and youths of 18,
bred from the finest tartar stock and from
the flower of Greek, Persian, and Caucasian beauty.
At 14 years of age, they were commanding
armies and governing provinces, and their mothers were
rewarding them with slave girls as beautiful and
ardent as themselves.
At 16, they were already fathers and at
70 as well.
But love in them did not undermine and
weaken their natural vigor of mind and body.
Their minds were made of iron, as the
poet sang, and their bodies of steel.
They all had certain features that have been
lost in their degenerate descendants.
The high forehead, the arched eyebrows meeting like
those of the Persians, the blue eyes of
the sons of the steppe, the nose curving
above the full red lips like the beak
of a parrot over a cherry,
and the full black beard for which the
Seraglio's poets were ever wracking their brains in
the effort to find charming or striking similes.
They had, quote, the glance of a Taurus
eagle and the strength of the king of
the desert, nicks like a ball, broad shoulders
and wide chest that could contain all the
warlike fury of their people.
Long arms, large joints, short bowed legs that
could make the strongest Turkoman horses neigh with
pain,
and large hairy hands that could wield with
ease the bronze maces and huge bows carried
by their soldiers.
And their epithet worthy of them, The wrestler,
the champion, the thunderbolt, the bone crusher, the
shedder of blood,
and so on. So you get this image,
even in the mid 19th century,
of the modern Muslim representative leader
being a somewhat
milk sop bureaucratized
Europeanized
homogenized
affair,
anxious to comply with the dowdy post sacred,
gray, but efficient norms of Europe.
And contrasted with this no doubt highly colored
and mythologized,
image of the splendor and the color of
the pageantry of the Ottoman past. And also,
of course, the idea of virility,
masculinity,
which is one of the things that has
to come into any
consideration
of leadership
or role modeling.
Because one of the things that we've lost
nowadays is the fertile polarity and complementarity of
gender.
Even our kids in the schools now are
being taught at an early age about gender
fluidity, and it's kind of compulsory.
The state belief is that gender is not
an essence.
This is quite worrying. Well, we saw in
the case of Nana Asma'ul
what femininity
in its Islamic modality can represent.
A queenly,
scholarly,
devout, secluded
perfection.
And this image of kind of stereotypical
Turkish
manhood brandishing the scimitar is also an image
of magnificence.
But nowadays, the phrase or the word masculinity
is more likely to be hyphenated
with the adjective toxic than anything else. Modernity
doesn't really have a very positive way of
identifying gender any longer. Femininity,
perhaps problematic.
Masculinity,
certainly problematic. And instead, everybody is kind of
denatured.
So this is
one of the things that we have lost
and one reason why it's hard for us
to grapple
what made human beings in pre modern, you
might say normative, because they lasted so long
times.
That there were certain ideals which were aesthetic
and magnificent,
which nowadays in our kind of gray everybody
wears kind of black nowadays. It's really
depressing. Go to any hotel
and everything is beige and gray and neutral,
and this is what happens,
when the the light of God is lost
and people no longer have a sense that
cheerfulness,
is an appropriate way of expressing
your sense of the world. Everything becomes,
as dark as atheism itself.
But in those times, massive color and colorful
places today. India is really colorful.
Africa is really colorful. Why? Because they still
believe in the sacred, and that is at
the center of their lives.
In any case,
what I want to look at, today or
whom I want to look at, is a
figure who
stands as some of the other figures that
we've mentioned, kind of at the cusp or
the isthmus
between the old and the new.
Shamil was one of those people. William Williamson
certainly saw both worlds.
Then Esmail and the Jihad of Housaland, a
little bit before the British come and improve
everything and ruin everything.
And,
the person I want to talk to today
is a figure of very late
classical Islam. A figure that the, Oriental Studies
Fraternity,
regards as one of the iconic figures of
early modernity in the Middle East. And this
is a very contested category.
Somebody who is linked with the so called
Arab enlightenment
of the 18th
century. An idea that Reinhard Schuler and others
have proposed and is generating a lot of
controversy. Was there even before Napoleon
kicked open the door of the Middle East?
Already a transformation
towards some kind of focus on
nature and humanism that looked a bit like
European romanticism and might be more open to
science.
Well, this is, contested,
problematic. But certainly something was afoot.
But in any case, it's interesting to see
how somebody in the 17th 18th century
is so productive and so unusual and so
vibrant, that he readily confounds the older
stereotype
of an age of decay.
The traditional European way of mapping Islamic civilization
was that it reached its high point
with, Abbasids.
And that's when the great philosophy was written
and when everything seemed to be splendid and
magnificent. And they were starting to rationalize,
how they loved the more, tazilites and the
philosopher,
in ways that were a miraculous prefiguring of
the glory
that was said to be
19th century Europe. And then after that, somehow,
you had Razzali and Razi and everything becomes
very kind of religious and repetitive. And the
age of decline,
conservatism
effiguer,
sclerosis.
These are the oriental stereotypes of the later
Islamic period. But we're now looking
at some of those figures and actually,
disinterring their books from the libraries. And of
course, as you would expect, we find wonders.
One of the big things that's happening in
Islamic Studies nowadays is the collapse of the
old paradigm of a kind of renaissance moment
in the 10th 11th century in Baghdad.
And moving towards the idea that there is
an endless regeneration
and reconfiguration,
based also in the
realization that the European obsession with novelty and
innovation,
may not be the only way of valuing
a civilization.
Maybe there's other ways. Maybe the happiness of
the population
could be a way of valorizing
the intellectual armature of a civilization, rather than
this endless
whiggish idea of everything progressing towards, of course,
ourselves.
In the modern west, when they call something
progressive,
the only thing they ever mean is that
which moves towards the current value set of
secular liberalism. They have no conception of progress
being desired by intelligent human beings towards any
other ideal. That's the great unthought.
But, if we go back to just before
Napoleon turns up and the Ottomans modernize and
you get them wearing these kind of European
frock coats and little fezzies and having big
chandeliers in their palaces, and being kind of,
second best
in Europe, rather than best in the world,
which is how the Ottomans used to be.
You find,
some very interesting lively figures. And the one
I want to talk about today is,
Abdul Ghani, Ben Ismail, and Nablusi.
Now this is a kind of, test case
because if you look at the manuscript libraries,
and you see what Muslims were reading and
copying and buying,
150 years ago, he was one of the
great Imams of the age.
Mufti of Damascus, an author of great commentaries,
and he wrote over 300 books.
I was in Sarajevo a while back. There's
plenty of his manuscripts in the libraries of
Sarajevo. He was from Damascus, but the book
spread very quickly. But nowadays,
not really thought about.
Partly because the Ummah has decided to move
in the direction of another
damascene,
Ibentemia,
who lived 4 centuries earlier, who had a
very different sense of how you deal with
the world and with crisis and with diversity.
And this takes us back to the question
raised by Thomas Bauer in his now
celebrated book, The Culture of Ambiguity.
In the mid 19th century,
the temper of Islamic thought shifted
from,
a culture of ambiguity
to a culture of anxiety.
And this obviously
coincides with
the growth of the European empires,
and Muslim military defeat and a certain crisis
of confidence amongst the elites.
So
in the
18th century in India,
the kind of sectarian disputes that you get
amongst Indian subcontinental
Muslims nowadays, the Deobandis, the Braille, the Adil
Hadith, I know not what, hardly exist,
because there was more of a sense amongst
the olamat that this Ikhilaf,
different opinions, especially about matters of Barzakh and
Raib, were kind of normal
and part of the way things were supposed
to be.
In the 19th century,
everybody is anxious, particularly after
the destruction of the so called Indian Mutiny.
People start to retreat into more exclusive,
propositional,
defensive forms of Islam, and it becomes an
age of sectarianism.
And this is the case fairly ubiquitously,
and Bowersbach, in a very erudite way,
charts this transition. So we're now in an
age of anxiety,
not in the older more normative age of
ambiguity where difference was actively enjoyed
by a scholarly elite that
was at ease with it, because it was
at ease with the situation of the Ummah
in the world. So Abulhanni Nablusi,
1641
to 17/31.
So
lives a long time.
Gets into the 18th century significantly.
He is,
from a very distinguished
family.
Confluence of 2 great families of of Olimat,
the Beni,
Kodama
and, the Beni Jama'ah.
And they produced many great olamat down the
centuries. The,
Jama'ah family are Sheferi Olamat of the city
of Hamat, who produced some of the great,
Shafa'i. This Muftis ibn Jamah'ah himself.
That was from his father's side. From his
father's side, from the Bani Qudama,
who are Hanbalis,
the famous
Muafakaddeen
ibn Qudama, one of the greatest of all
of the Hanbali,
jurists,
died 12/23.
And they are descendants of the second Khalifa,
Omar ibn al Khattab.
And they spend a lot of time in
Jerusalem,
so they become what in Arabic is known
as Maqaddisa,
scholars of Beta Maqaddis or
Jerusalem.
So the the Bani Jama'ah are for a
couple of centuries,
the Imams of Al Aqsa Mosque.
And the Qudanas
settle in,
Damascus, particularly the Salihiyya district, which is on
those kind of lower slopes of Jabal Qasiyun,
which is also where, Mohidin ibn
Araby is,
buried. But Ablohani Nablusi is known as the
man from Nablus,
because the family spends some time in Nablus
after the Ottoman conquest of Jerusalem, which is
15/16.
The Ottomans, of course, build up Jerusalem.
Its present urban form is basically from the
time of Suleiman the Magnificent, who really cherished
the city.
But, many of the family go to Nablus.
If you've been to the West Bank, you've
probably been to Nablus, actually quite a beautiful
place. Founded by the emperor Vespasian
Neapolis,
the new town.
When Jerusalem was destroyed
by the Romans.
They created this new town nearby. And it's
famous for the Samaritan presence on,
Jebelator
nearby. It's a separate religion.
They consider themselves,
to be the true Jews, but they're not
Jews and they're not treated as Jews by
the Israeli operate occupying authorities.
Completely separate religion,
on this mountain. There's only about a1000 of
them left, and they're just left to their
own devices under the Ottoman. So an interesting
place, but also a place that's produced
considerable number of scholars. And it's a holy
place, because the tomb of
Prophet Joseph Yusuf is there,
which to judge from old photographs and sketches
was quite a beautiful place with a lot
of Quranic
calligraphy and Ottoman
tiling. Since 1967,
with the Israeli occupation,
it's been out of bounds to non Jews.
So it's now full of settlers. And even
though Nablus is part of the Palestinian Authority,
it's still illegal for Palestinians to go there.
The entrance is controlled by, the Israeli army,
and you have to show that you're Jewish
before you're allowed in. So an ancient place
that's now
really tense, but it's worth going to. It's
a big Palestinian refugee camp and a very
weird
Romanian priest who's
built a huge church just outside the entrance
to,
Nardola. So I talked to this priest
and I said, you've got the West Bank's
biggest Palestinian refugee camp right opposite your church.
Do you have any problems? He said, the
only problems I've ever had is with the
Jewish settlers.
They keep beating me up and once they
left an axe
in my head,
he went to the hospital like that.
So it's now very kind of sad and
tense, but it was once
a center for Alama. And Abdulhany Nablosi is
from the people of
Mueblos.
Then they move to Damascus, and quite quickly,
they become
hailed as great scholars. His grandfather, Ismail, becomes
the main preacher of the Umayyad mosque
in Damascus, and also head of the Darul
Hadith al Ashrafia, which is one of the
big madrassas of Damascus, which is a Darul
Hadith, obviously,
a college specializing in
Hadith
studies. He becomes the Shefer a Mufti
of
Damascus, like most people in the Levant.
At this time, their their Sherfa is.
And also becomes a successful businessman. So the
family
is always wealthy.
And, Abdul Ghani,
inherits,
quite a lot
of wealth and this becomes
significant.
The father is also a preacher in the,
Umayyad Mosque in
Damascus. And in
16/41,
Abdulhayni Nablusi is born. And
the hagiographers
record all kinds of interesting foretellings
by local saints that this is going to
be a remarkable,
remarkable
star in the Damesine firmament.
And we're told that by the age of
5,
under the very close care of his father,
he became a Hafiz,
and memorized a number of other texts shortly
afterwards, including Alfiya ibn Malik, which is a
basic
thousand line
poem on Arabic grammar.
Rather a dry thing for small kids to
work through. But, he memorized it. The Shatabir,
which is the basic
mnemonic poem, which helps you to understand the
principles
that govern the 7 different variant readings of
the Quran.
The Umar Barahin,
the Aqeeda text of Sanusi and other key
standard text. But he, by the age of
12,
is already well on his way. At the
age of 12, his father dies and his
mother takes over.
And the women are often scholars
in
Cairo and Syria at this time. This follows
the Mamluk tradition when some of the great
scholars were women. And that the Olomat would
insist
that
so that they could be in their children
would be nurtured in a family of learning.
They would marry women who were also known
scholars. So, ibn Hajjar al Asqalani
marries a woman who is also an independent
Hadith teacher in her own right Inas Khartoum.
She's 18, but she's already giving Ijaz as
in Hadith to some of the great scholars
of Cairo. So this is a tradition that
is,
alive. So the teaching of the young Abu
Hanani is now in the hands of his
mother.
He attends some of the big Hadith classes,
particularly
Najmuddin al Ghazi,
who is perhaps the greatest Hadith luminary of
the day.
So his father dies.
And his father has had 2 wives or
2 widows. So the books are divided between
them and most of them are sold off.
And one of the things
Sheikh Abdul Ghani tries to do in later
life is to track down his father's books
to find out where they went and to
see if he can
buy them back. And by the time he
dies, his house is something of an amazing
library
already.
So he is focusing very much on
on Hadith, but also on
the
the Fiqh tradition. There's a very strong Hanbali
tradition in Damascus, more really than anywhere else
in the Islamic world
at the time.
Generally, the olemmah have
historically voted with their feet and not appreciated
very literalist
interpretations
of doctrine and law. So the Han Hanbali
school is the smallest,
but Dalma, which is a suburb of Damascus,
is historically a traditional
Hanbali,
redoubt.
I suppose, continues to be to this day,
despite the the recent
misfortunes.
He's also reading a lot of Sufi texts.
Ibn Arabi,
Afifuddin Nasani,
Abu Karim al Jili,
Ibn al Farid.
Particularly that which is poetic. And what is,
kind of, getting a reputation for as a
teenager in Damascus,
is somebody who really, really knows the Arabic
language.
And to this day, some olamat, when they
think of him, will think of his his
poetry and his works on
literary criticism and rhetoric.
So the first time he really makes a
splash in Damascus, is at the age of
25.
He kind of publishes
a poem
about the holy prophet,
It's in a 150 lines and it's obviously
in the huge
riverine tradition of literature that produces the borda
and other
material. And it rhymes in meme, like the
borda because that's the the letter with which
the name of the holy prophet begins, and
it follows that convention,
very conventionally.
But
it is
also what's called one of the Badiyyat,
and Badiyyah is a particular
tradition of
Arabic literary culture,
which,
doesn't just wish material to be rhetorically correct,
but wishes to make a line of poetry
or a piece of art prose
absolutely
packed with the most complex and brilliant kind
of show stopping displays
of linguistic erudition.
Unusual words, strange internal rhythms,
double entendres,
metaphors, similes,
It's,
Badi'ah, means kind of shining or outstanding.
It's even one of the divine names in
Quran. Badi'ah,
kind of the shining originator of the magnificence
of creation. So the the procreation, the literary
procreation, which is the work of the poet,
is in traditional Arabic culture, something that is
considered to reach its highest point with these
really difficult kind of tour de force
exhibitions, which to us are very difficult to
read now, because
who now knows
there's 70 different Arabic words for wine?
Maybe your average educated Arabic newspaper reader might
know 2 or 3, but the others
could be Chinese.
But back then, they inhabited the language and
the language was something that they kind of
ate and drank every day. And they
experienced the aesthetic of it.
And they appreciated
unusual figures.
And this was what
the elites used to do in the Arab
world before
television and Al Jazeera took over.
They would recite poetry to each other. I
remember seeing that in
some,
households in Cairo
in the eighties.
After the dinner,
they'd sit around
and
play games with poetry.
So
the person whose house it was would recite
a poem and then stop at a particular
point.
And then somebody else present would have to
continue with another poem that was in the
same meter and using the same rhyme.
And then the first person who couldn't do
that, when it's your turn going around the
table, is kind of out and,
it would be a great shame. I didn't
do very well at that kind of Arab
parlor game. But, it was a reminder
of how things used to be that the
language and the cultivation of the fine sounds
and the subtle allusions
of the language, was a kind of almost
sensual
thing. It was like drinking cognac after a
meal.
It was
a refined thing that was very widely
pursued.
So I just caught a glimpse of that.
But in 18th century Damascus, it's what everybody
does and it's part of being
a civilized,
educated
Muslim
human being. So he,
jumps into this ocean and produces this poem
about the Holy Prophet, this mimiyyah.
And it's in a particular kind of tradition.
Now it's it's called
Nafahat al Azhar Fi Madhain Nabi'u Muhtar.
And he's in one of these sessions, and
there are these gray bearded muftis around and
this kind of young squirt is there reciting
his own poetry. He's not quoting from Ibn
al Muwat. This is his own poetry. Alright.
He does a few verses
and then a few more and eventually they
ask him to recite his complete Quesada.
And they're completely amazed.
Some of them don't really believe that it's
his. They think,
it's not possible. Because
as part of this Bedi'at tradition,
one of the things you do
is to incorporate
in every line of your poem, one of
the figures of Arabic rhetoric.
So a particular kind of metaphor, particular kind
of alliteration.
And in some of the poems, you actually
use a word that is cognate with the
technical term for that alliteration.
And a lot of people read the borda
for instance, they think it's just a nice,
sort of, archaizing poem about the holy prophet.
They don't realize that in a lot in
every line,
there are technical allusions to forms of Arabic
grammar and alliteration
that scholars will recognize. It's a kind of
literary
salon piece, a tour de force.
So, somehow this Abdul Ghani has
come up with this shining Qasida
and some people kind of openly say, we
don't really think that you could have done
this, although we haven't heard it before. So
he said, alright in 2 weeks, I'll come
back with a commentary
showing that I understand this and that I
wrote it. And the
Chief Mufti is there. No. The Nakhib al
Ashraf is the head of the guild of
the prophetic
descendants. And he says, alright. We'll give you
3 weeks.
So he comes back in 3 weeks time
with,
something that is still on the shelves of
Arabic book shops everywhere.
And you can see,
it's took a long time
to write.
But he does it in 3 weeks.
And,
He presents this and some of it is
in poetry and some of it is in
prose. And it quotes
the earlier Badia works, the Borda and other
works. And it's clear that this is all
his own work. And he ends
he somehow found time
at the end of it to write
another poem
of the same length.
It's in here somewhere.
Which does the same thing, but which explicitly
names in each line,
the literary form that he's
using
in that line.
And this kind of blows their minds and
they kind of recognize and from this point
onwards, the rather grudging judgmental world of Demosene
professors
recognizes that this is a new phenomenon. Of
course, they're critical, but they're also happy because
they realize that, they're being joined by
somebody who is really worthy of
the tradition. So,
yeah. As the years have gone by, because
one of the things about these late scholars
in Islamic history is that they're inheriting a
lot from the past.
In the 2nd, 3rd century, the libraries are
fairly basic.
A 1000 years later, the libraries in Damascus
are absolutely packed with wonders.
And it's worth noting
that nowadays, we don't actually have access to
the riches of Islamic civilization.
Not just because we don't read, but because
of all of the books that have ever
been written in Islamic languages,
99%
at least remain in manuscript form.
You have to go to the library and
drink tea with the custodian
and give him a gift of some kind,
and then he brings out this miracle
which somebody looked at 150 years ago, but
generally the Ummah is busy with Ibn Taymiyyah
or learning to drive or whatever. It's gathering
dust.
Only 1% has even been
printed in Arabic.
And of that 1%,
only a tiny fraction exists in English. So
where are we in terms of getting even
a drop from this ocean? This is important
to recognize that the Ummah has not served
its literary heritage
terribly well. Of Abdul Ghani's books, maybe
out of 300 books,
only 60 have actually been printed,
which is very extraordinary.
And of those, only 1 or 2 have
been done into English.
And even translations and even additions are problematic.
So we're really guilty of a terrible neglect.
If you go to the National Library in
Cairo
okay. Recently they had to
spruce it up.
King Juan Carlos
of Spain,
actually, because he's Spanish, is interested in the
Arabic heritage. So he goes to Cairo and
the, sort of,
chain smoking generals think, oh, we'll take him
to the pyramids or whatever. He said, I
want to see the National Library in Cairo.
And these generals kind of look at each
other and they say, I think we have
got such a thing.
Right. And so they find out that it's
an absolute physical catastrophe with pages on the
floor
and the windows broken, and birds flying in
and out, and it's a horror. So they
have to pay for it to be painted
and a few cases brought in to make
it look less
shameful, but it's
it's pretty appalling. They have some of the
most beautiful and amazing books in the world,
and then you open the manuscript. Like in
Cambridge,
you open the manuscript and it's kind of
like being
in a surgical theater. You have to wear
white gloves and a particular kind of pencil,
and there's a disapproving librarian looking over her
glasses.
In Cairo,
slap it down in front of you.
You open it up and then they bring
your shay, your tea. And they put it
on the manuscript.
And it leaves a ring.
Anyway, this is the Ummah,
really decadent.
It's,
yeah. What can what can one say? But
the treasures are still there
and people still find the most amazing
riches and beauty, just in terms of the
book binding and the calligraphy and the paper
making.
Anyway, treasures.
Buried treasures. And
so his heritage has been to some extent
neglected
partly because people
find that very high, exalted,
deliberately,
difficult Arabic,
just
hard work.
But it's produced this this thing, and as
I say, it comes late in the evolution
of Arabic literature. So it's already quite almost
baroque, Rococo, you might say, with all of
these
flourishes,
for a very refined
aesthetic sensibility.
And over the centuries,
the tradition of these Badi Ayat
has developed. So that,
Sharafuddin
at Tifersi
had increased the previous record for the number
of literary forms you could get in a
Badier Prasida, which had been held,
by Abu Bakr al Hilli, which was 37.
He ups it to 70,
And the whole Ummur is kind of cheering,
it's got 70. Yeah.
It's like one of those sort of TV
contests. I don't know, you have to get
the high score.
And these are the stars of the age.
And then along comes Zakirdin
ibn Abil Asbah who manages to produce a
Mi'kaw Saida Abadi Aya
that has 90 different literary figures in it.
Great applause from all over the Ummah.
And so the tradition by this time is
that it has to be in a meter
called Bossit and it has to rhyme in
Meme and it becomes a kind of
literary genre. And then
comes up with his which has a 151
figures of speech in it. And if you
know your Arabic literary rhetorical jargon, you can
see how he indicates that
he's putting them in.
But they say, if you include Tejniz, which
is one of these figures, which has lots
of subcategories
as one figure,
then actually he only gets a 140 points.
That's the borda. But it was celebrated in
its time as a kind of literary tour
de force, as much as it was a
kind of devotional
performance.
Okay. So let me see, despite the fact
that this is in, fairly
highfalutin
Arabic, see if we can
read a little bit from his,
amazing text. Not very systematically, but just to
give you a sense of this is in
the,
sort of expressly written commentary. And so he's
giving a history of this Badia
form.
And he's given the early history from ibn
al Mu'taz and Ablaziz al Helli and the
early exponents of this
art poetry.
Dumija about the whole Allama Taqied Din Abu
Bakribin Huch Al Hamawi
So you can see here that he's
being critical. Then after al Haley
comes the great learned scholar Taqiedin Abu Bakr
Al Hamawi. He's from Hamas, so he's also
a Syrian.
May Allah have mercy on him.
And then he said and he opposed him.
So he's writing this Quesada as a kind
of way of debunking the earlier Quesada, taking
it line by line and showing why
his predecessors poem was not much good and
doing something
even better.
But he didn't actually introduce
a large number of literary figures.
But it may even be that he was
less successful. He scored fewer points,
in listing these different literary
figures.
But he certainly didn't go above the
number.
Right.
And then he wrote a commentary on his
own, his
own poem.
And then
But in this,
garment of the commentary,
the garment was made of,
an excessively long tailcoat
of,
verbosity.
And he gave his
Quesada
a robe to wear made of boredom and
repetition.
And in it, he criticized some of the
great ones of earlier times,
So he's kind of suggesting that his poem
was, even though it was popular in Damascus,
an embarrassing piece of
uselessness.
And then,
see who he has next. And since nowadays
we're very gender sensitive,
And then after him came the most meritorious
woman of her time,
This is a famous,
Muslim poetess and Fakih Firk scholar of the
16th century. There's a book published about her
recently because her works have
survived. They're in the libraries there. Her house
is still there, in Damascus, they pointed out.
So
And she wrote a poem,
kind of following in the footsteps of his
poem, Ma'adami Tasmyatinnal,
but without mentioning
explicitly the literary figure.
Thomasukan
be talakhatil
alfarz to make the expressions flow more naturally.
And the words to be more appropriate.
And she wrote a short commentary on it,
which I've seen myself written in her own
handwriting.
May
Allah have mercy
on her.
In which she unveiled the beauties of discourse.
And then he says, having seen these 4
great Badiye poems,
and he includes Aisha Bayonias as the most
recent,
which is interesting.
He then explains how he wanted to follow
suit
and create now these 2 poems. 1 of
which doesn't explicitly mention the literary figures, and
the other of which does. So
you can see something of the almost,
the the delectation,
with which, the Damascene elite at the time,
took their their Arabic. It was really
their their their meat and drink. And he's
in this very difficult and demanding
literary world,
already emerged as
a star.
So as I mentioned, many still remember him
as a poet. He has 3 Diwan's of
poetry, which are published
and widely respected.
He also has so this is one of
his kind of novelties and idiosyncrasy,
an entire commentary on the Holy Quran written
in poetry.
It's in 5,000 verses,
which he calls, Bawatin Al Quran.
And as far as anybody knows, this is
the first attempt to create a complete trans
interpretation, tafsir of the Quran, in verse.
Might seem strange, but you have to remember
that these people are so steeped in poetry
that they could compose it. They could just
extemporize.
They didn't need to sit down and sharpen
their pencils and work out what would rhyme
with what. It just came to them naturally.
Like Juletta Dean Rumi, who just
composed, produced it, and people would write it
down as it came. It wasn't our modern
day problem of writer's block and going to
sort of a writer's course with some novelist
in some stately home and then figuring out
how to write chapter 1. It just poured
out of them. And Rumi,
what an enormous pouring.
There's Dewan's
8 volumes of Dewan Shamsi Tebri. And it
was all spontaneous, as far as we can
tell. So
and it's still the case,
that you can find
really old people
in the Arab world who can still do
that easily.
Who can, as it were, switch languages and
start talking poetry.
Once, the person who I knew in Jeddah,
more than 30 years ago, as Sayyid Hamid
al Mehdar,
who had been the hereditary ruler of the
city of Tarim in Hadramaut.
And his family published
his political letters
to other rulers and mayors in Hadramaut.
And they were all in poetry.
That's the a kind of culture it was.
It's like the mayor of Cambridge writing about
Brexit to the mayor of St. Neots or
something, and it's a beautiful poem like something
from Milton.
A different world. But that was just how
one did it and it didn't take any
time. It just came
flowed
naturally. So
he is inhabiting that that, that lost world.
Now,
the Bawatan al Quran, his poetic commentary,
you as the title indicates,
the inwardness is
the hidden parts of the Quran. It's more
tafsir iShari.
In other words, a Sufi type of tafsir.
Because we've already mentioned that as part of
the developed spiritual culture of his time, people
are reading Ibn al Farid,
Ibn 'Arabi. Ibn al Farid is the greatest
Arab Sufi poet,
by most estimations. So he's from Cairo.
And this becomes important for him, as it
was important for just about everybody at the
time.
However, his relationship to Tussalov is an idiosyncratic
one, and we're still trying to figure out
exactly
what was going on.
We know that at a fairly early age,
he does seem to have been initiated into
different toroc in a way that was almost
just a way of being polite.
You went to see such and such a
sheikh, and he could see that you were
learned in this, and that you were pure
hearted, and he gave you beyin, like kind
of giving you a
sort of a gift of some kind. Here's
one of my books, here's my Ijerse, here's
my sizzler, here's my and
it wasn't
a big deal. But actually his own soluk,
coincides
in a strange way with something that we
find
in
other early modern or late classical
Muslim writers, such as Abdelkader Rojizer Iri.
There was another person who settled in Damascus,
a little bit later, exiled from Algeria
by the
French, who
was a great commentator on the tradition of
Ibn Arabi. It was important for Demacines because
that's where he's buried.
But who seems to have taken his formal
initiation at the end of his
spiritual path, rather than the beginning.
This is,
something that
seems to be, an interesting idiosyncrasy
of the age.
But,
Abu Ghani in particular was very against excessive
formalization,
which is one reason why in some of
his works on doctrine, doctrine, on Kalam, his
commentary on the Omar Barahin, for instance,
he doesn't
reject the use of logic,
but he's not happy about the use of
some of the more speculative,
syllogistic
forms of modal logic,
to establish important truths about the divine.
He doesn't go down Ipentania's road. Ipentania thinks
logic is an inappropriate,
unprophetic way of trying to,
work out the real purport of of divine
speech.
But is not really,
one with the
hard line Hanafi Matoridi
speculative theologians who are kind of dominating,
at the time of Kashashi,
Ibrahim al Qurani,
Araf Hikmet, and so forth. So a real
hard line, Motakkali Mour.
He
is taken by his father to see the
Mevlevis, the whirling dervishes in Damascus.
But that's not his particular mashup, which is
interesting because with his
very refined
literary taste, you'd have thought he'd be really
attracted to a tariqa that is very aesthetic.
Beautiful orchestration
and the complex liturgies of
the turning and the symbolism and Rumi. He
knows Persian, so he's,
he can read Rumi and does have a
relationship with him, as we all see. But
that's not actually his mashrub in Sufism, which
turns out to be quite
distinctive.
He takes a journey when he's still young
to Istanbul
and to Adirne, which is on in the
European part of Turkey, which was the capital
of the Ottomans before
Mehmed the second conquers Istanbul and has always
been a major center for Olomar.
Maybe the greatest Ottoman Darul Hadith was in
Edirne. The building is still there.
And on his journey,
he meets a Khalwati he meets a Akadri
Sheikh.
And the Qadiri Sheikh, who is a reputed
Sheikh of Anatolia,
as soon as he comes in,
offers him the bey'ah and also offers him
ceremonial sword, which in some branches the calderia,
is a symbol of a higher degree of
initiation.
The sword has a certain symbolic
significance in the world of Tassarwuf, as in
Exoteric Islam.
It's interesting to note that, the tradition of
giving khutba's in the Hagia Sofia mosque in
Istanbul
until Ataturk stopped it in about 1930.
But it was regarded as the the senior
minbar of Istanbul.
Was that
there
were kind of interesting miracles,
identified with the place. So for instance, it
said that when you stand on the Minbar
there, it's really cold.
They say there's
a cold window, Sauk Penjere, which nobody can
really identify, which keeps the the preacher feeling
really cold, which is a way of
enabling him to overcome his
sort of anger, his temperamental
egotism, and to help him remember that even
though he's on this huge, gigantic
pulpit, he's just a little human being. And
also the tradition of giving Khuppaz there, was
instead of the staff, the khatib would always
preach with a sword,
because the city was taken by the sword.
But in the context of Tassowulf,
the fortorward traditions often had
the investiture with a kind of ritual sword,
often
complexly
enameled and engraved
as a symbol of
the the Greater Jihad.
So this is an oddity and he remarks
on it almost in passing and his biographers
refer to it. So, clearly,
these Sufis have a very high regard for
the young man.
But,
he
is following a fairly,
non ritualized
form of
that relates in many ways to his own
family's tradition, particularly the Kodamas,
who are Hanbalis.
And the Hanbalis have always been very close
to the Kadri Tarika.
Abdul Qadri Gilani was a Qadri.
And his ancestor Muafakkadin
ibn Khodama, the great Fakih, the great jurist
of the family,
had traveled to Baghdad to take the take
the Bey'ah.
But an austere
non philosophical
devotional type of Tassar Wolf,
Khajd Abdullah Ansari, perhaps the best known Sufi
writer of what we now call Afghanistan.
Also
a Qadri Hanbali. It's a well known
connection. So, some of the formal institution like
Erada and Behar and the circles of Vicar
and initiation things,
seem to sit quite likely
on him.
He does, however, take a Beyar much later
in the Nakshbandi
from somebody called Abu Sayed al Balkhi, who's
a central Asian.
And the Beyar seems to have been a
more formal affair next to the the the
makam of John the Baptist,
Saint Na'yar, which is in in in the
middle of the Umayyad Mosque, and which is
a traditional place,
for
investitures,
giving Ijazas and giving beyar
in Damascus.
And he receives this,
this authorization.
And he replies by, again, delivering an extemporized
poem. This time it's in Persian.
Okay. Perfect Persian Azan is coming out just
as act of
gratitude.
So he does know
Persian,
Arabic and also Turkish.
Of course, this is part of the Ottoman
Empire
at the time.
But it's interesting that his biographers,
including Al Ghazi and somebody called Hussain,
Tim Sami, who is
his main biographer, who is his student, don't
actually mention
Sufi sheikh amongst in the long list of
his teachers. It'd be conventional, but it doesn't
really seem to have been very formalized.
And here we find one of the very
unusual aspects of his personality,
which is to do with his own human
individuality
and is in some ways, quite unconventional.
And that in many of his writings, he
insists that his principal
spiritual blessings and guidance came through dreams
of people who were long dead, people from
the Balzakh.
It's not really supposed to be the principal
form of spiritual instruction in Islam, but this
is what he said.
And particularly in the Naqshbandi tradition so it
said that Baha'i ad Din Naqshbandi, who is
the founder of the Naqshbandi, Naqshbandi learned much
of his wisdom from
earlier,
teachers,
including particularly, Abdul Khalekh Rojdavani,
whose
mid 12th century
Central Asia is still a town of Khojdevani.
You can visit the mazaar and the mosque.
It's very
limpid peaceful place.
And accepted from him many of the
inward
orientations.
And these, I would say, are the principle
masharab
that determine,
the spiritual orientation
of Abdul Ghani Nablusim.
As I say, an unusual person in many
ways. So,
Bahad Dinotchband,
is known as somebody who stresses
service.
So famously, he spends 7 years
with,
the laborers who are fixing the roads of
Khorasan,
as part of his process of
breaking the ego.
And he also spends 7 years,
as a servitor
of the stray dogs on the streets of
Bukhara.
And so he says that his first moment
of real spiritual
intimacy with God
came when he was binding up the paw
of a sick dog, and the dog looked
at him in a particular way. And in
the moment of that gaze,
he felt that he knew God.
It's a famous moment in the history of
the Nox Bandhir. So it's a way of
it's an austere way of service. And again,
it kind of suits Abdulhany because the Noxbandiya
are not really
very ritualized
by and large. It's quite a
primordial kind of tariqa, which is in many
places helped it to survive.
I remember in the Communist period,
it was actually on Karl Marx's birthday,
and I was really young. I went to
the mazar of,
at Imam al Bukhary,
which is in a village,
Hartank, about
half an hour's drive north of Samarkand.
And,
was hanging out there and the imam came
along,
little Uzbek guy with Uzbek
cap. And, I speak a kind of Arabic
and he speaks a kind of Arabic.
And he says,
yes, we're all of course, we follow the
party here and we love the party and
we keep talking. He said, you know, it's
Ramadan and we are fasting in Ramadan. And
when he got to see that I wasn't
KGB,
He thought as a foreigner, I was probably
fairly safe. And then he said, well, we
keep it going because of tariqat, we're all
nakshbandiya.
And that's the the mashrav, and it's because
the have
as one of their forms, most of them,
the idea of silent thikar.
Parties listening, everything's bugged,
can't hear anything. They're not up to anything.
You got a room with 80 men with
beards, young and old, doing this, not just
can't hear a thing. So,
because of the kind of discursive ideological nature
of Marxism. I think nothing's going on because
there's no teaching being exchanged. So that's how
it
was maintained and,
it's still maintained. It's very interesting studies of
the capacity of the Naxx Bandis, unlike some
other tariqas, to exist in conditions of oppression.
In Ataturk's Turkey as well, it's very difficult
to abolish
something that doesn't really have rituals, doesn't need
paraphernalia,
doesn't need special meeting houses,
people that aren't saying anything in their ceremonies.
So,
and he has this
little nachbandi
thing which and I want to read a
little bit of the teachings
of the
of Khoja Abdul Khaleh Rojdavani, who,
Abdul
Ghani felt he had a particular
unseen
connection to, who was kind of his
teacher from beyond the grave, if you like.
He dies in 11/79.
Now, in Islamic tradition, you can't learn
formally,
from somebody who is no longer in this
world, and you can't get a fatwa from
somebody in a dream.
Instead, it's just general indications
and urgings to the life,
of the akhira.
So the Nasihat Nameh, one of the great
books of our civilization really, of, Abdul Khaleh
Rojdavani,
says this, and it really sums up Abu
Ghani's
Masharab.
Lanfik
and Hadith
Do not mix with illiterate
mystics.
Offer prayers in congregation.
Do not seek after fame.
Do not accept any office.
Do not be a surety for anybody.
Do not go to the court. Do not
mix with rulers or princes. Do not build
a khanakha, a Sufi lodge.
Do not condemn mystic music. Do not hear
too much mystic music. Eat only what is
permitted.
So far as you can, do not marry
a woman who wants material comforts.
Your heart should be full of grief. Your
body as if of an ailing person. Your
eyes wet. Your actions sincere, your prayers earnest,
your dress tattered, your company dervishes,
and your house should be your mosque, and
your friend should be God.
And then the famous principles
of the Noch Bandiyeh, the arkain,
which I think really help us to understand
the
teachings of Abdul Haeni. And it's always because
these
are universal
virtues,
need to be,
born in mind. So here are the principles.
Hosh dardam.
Whenever you inhale or exhale,
remember the presence of God.
Nazar parqadam.
Keep an eye on every step you take,
which means kind of humbly looking down.
But it also means that whatever step you
take is to some
well considered
goal.
Safarodarvathan,
which means traveling back to the homeland,
to the divine,
which means considering what you do in the
light of death and your,
eternal
destiny. Halvatar Anjuman,
being alone
in the crowd.
In other words,
when you're sitting on the Bakerloo line or
something and stuff is going on, you are
inwardly centered, you're not spacing out, you're present
with
the divine. You are alone
with the divine
in every situation.
Yadkart,
being in a state of dhikr.
Bazgart,
watch out for what you're thinking.
Nigahdasht,
think about what you're looking at and where
your mind is wandering.
Yeah, de dashd.
Concentrate and make sure that your thoughts are
not lazy, but are disciplined and directed.
So those are the basic eight
principles of the Maqbandiye,
which become hugely important to
Maulana Abdul Ghani. So we find this
again and again,
and it becomes actually a solace to him
that he even though in many ways is
alienated
from the
the the people of the city of Damascus,
who he often has problems with
and will not associate with, sort of, rulers
and the like.
He feels a little bit of a loner.
But his company and his friends are the
spirits of the departed.
And he says a lot about this, the
the vision of the holy prophet in dreams,
the vision of others in dreams,
and even in waking states. He has books
about this, his own experiences and
what it could mean. And, of course, it's
not part of firk, not part of Sharia,
it's part of the Wijdan
experiential or empirical
Islam.
The the bit of religion that tends
to vanish quite quickly at the hands of
rationalizing
or fundamentalist
reformers.
It's that tender vulnerable bit of Islam.
But it is something that, again, is worth
bearing in mind. One of the things that
I think he teaches us is the need
to be alert to the
enigma and the mystery of
experience in religion.
Nowadays, Islam is
not so
much,
existential
as propositional.
This is one of the changes that happened
in the
19th century. It's not so much about being
with God,
but about being right as much as one
can.
And
for 'Abdu'l Hani, the idea of the divine
presence and proximity, the Korb,
and the unreality,
in the eyes of the Barossa of time
and distance,
does enable him in ways that to the
modern
mind seem
really strange,
to connect with certain realities.
Now, those realities
still happen to people and people have all
kinds of
odd experiences,
scissorges,
odd encounters, premonitions,
and want to know what they mean.
Quite often people email me saying,
you know,
I had this very strong image of my
uncle's name
at 3:30
last week on Wednesday.
And then when I got home, they told
me he died.
That kind of thing. And a lot of
people have stuff like that. And because it's
from the *, it can't be regulated and
it's not clear what you do with it.
It's not part of Aqidah
or part of Sharia.
But it is part of the life of
believers,
particularly if their hearts are
receptive
and not
dusty
and turbulent, as a result of allowing the
heart to be endlessly distracted by the latest
text, and the traffic, and the other stuff
that that veils us.
What has
desacralized
and disenchanted modern man is not so much
Newton and Darwin and that kind of thing,
but rather the fact that people have no
stillness,
and the heart is constantly agitated and can't
really
see anything any longer. We don't have those,
contemplative
experiences. But for him, it's
important and it's part of the general human
experience. I would say most people,
if you really get to know somebody, at
some point they'll tell you something that they
know doesn't really
have an explanation. But that even Islamically doesn't
really seem to make a lot of sense
or to be particularly helpful, but clearly doesn't
have a material
explanation. Even today people will have those things
because we can't be completely
disconnected from the spirit and our true nature.
And often people
remember those things and cherish them and they
become an important prop to them in an
age that insists
that the surface of things is
all that the thing
can possibly be.
I was recently write reading a biography
of somebody who I thought was about the
most kind of
calculating
and profane of people, who was
Air Vice Marshal Hugh Dowding.
He was the head of Fighter Command during
the 2nd World War. So he wins the
Battle of Britain. So I guess, a historically,
really gigantic person.
But nobody really liked him. His nickname in
the War Office was, stuffy.
He didn't have many friends.
He was rather melancholy, because he'd married the
girl of his dreams and then she died
the next year and he was quiet.
But,
after the war, he starts to write about
things that he's already been imprudent enough to
talk about, when he's sort of hanging out
with Churchill and deciding
where to put the squadrons.
Enormously,
cataclysmically
vital decisions when the country really thought it
would be
overrun. My grandmother was given a box of
grenades to keep under her bed, so when
the tanks went by, she could drop grenades
on the heads of the Germans. It was
kind of Brexit, but a trillion times worse.
It was real time of existential panic for
the country. And he was the one who
was responsible for this last line of defense.
And,
he felt,
regularly,
the presence of dead fighter pilots,
and he started to talk about this.
He had dreams,
or he felt they were there in his
office,
and he kept talking about this. Actually, at
the end of the Battle of Britain, even
though he'd, I guess, saved the country, they
sacked him.
Because he kept talking about these sort of
vague things and there was, you know, I
know that that fighter pilot was with that
squadron and he didn't survive.
He felt and it's, I think, to do
or perhaps it's to do with this
Nazar Barukhadam, this
immense attentiveness to the moment, which has to
be the way of the warriors, the samurai,
preternatural awareness of everything or you die. That
he was in that state and these rib
things, who knows,
appeared. And he thought maybe they're not ghosts,
maybe they're spirits that were attached to them.
And he didn't really have the language of
jinn or the way in which we necessarily,
indeterminately,
talk about these things. But it became a
very important thing. So at one point,
he has a dream. He writes about this
after the war.
He has a dream about a fighter pilot
who's died,
And the fighter pilot, who's called Max,
says, you should invite my mother out to
lunch. You'll like her.
So because he's already kind of believing in
this world that's that's become really real, he
looks up the family and he finds the
mother's,
the bereaved mother's address. And he invites her
out to lunch. She was kind of what
is this?
But,
she has also,
according to Air Vice Marshal Dowding,
when she tells him afterwards,
she has had a dream of his name,
Hugh.
So they have this lunch
in wartime London and,
eventually, they end up getting married.
And it becomes a kind of story because
she's very keen on esoteric things.
She makes him a vegetarian,
and she starts
Britain's first
ethical
cosmetics
company. So she's in that world of being
really aware of, without having much to do
with Christianity or any particular religion. But I
thought that was interesting that somebody coming out
of that really
high-tech
conflict,
sitting behind a desk in the
the the the war ministry could have had
those kinds of experiences which which stayed with
them.
We struggle to articulate that. But for so
many people in history, they have had some
sort of
thinning of the veil and an awareness of,
the mysteries of the Balzac, which usually we
don't have words to convey and we come
up with strange ideas
like seances and mediums and ghosts and it's
not like that at all. It's something harder
to put into words, which is why religion
leaves it. In Islam, you're not really supposed
to delve into those things, but
sometimes people have those experiences anyway. So this
seems to have been important for Abdulhamid,
that he communes with the great olema of
the past.
Not giving him fatwas,
but they're somehow a presence,
that supports him. So he has a relationship
with Jalaluddin Rumi, for instance.
It helps, I guess, talking in Persian.
If you see somebody who speaks Persian in
a dream. So,
he's he writes about this and he writes
books about
the many olema in the past who have
had similar experiences. And, the validity of taking
spiritual teachings from people who
are from another plane or another
age. And, this seems to have helped him
with his loneliness.
So at the age of 40, we have
the kind of Ghazali type crisis moment in
his career,
which is kind of enigmatic, rather like Ghazali's
crisis.
Some modern scholars
of a reductionist bent say that he suffered
from depression.
Probably not, because he was actually extremely active.
People who suffer from depression tend to be
a bit kind of listless and unfocused.
But some of his great works were written
during this
period. At the age of 40,
he
goes into a kind of halwa,
a retreat.
He'd never been particularly sociable.
So
when he's still in his twenties, Damascus
is excited because the Imam of the Haram
and Medina, Abdul Rahman Al Qiyari, who's a
great Kalam scholar and Sufi, is visiting.
And, of course, there's a big reception
to honor him.
And,
Al Qiyari has heard of Abdulkarni, looks around,
but he's not there.
And he asks about him and say, well,
he's he's at home as usual. So he
has to have a a special
audience with him. They converse
privately, which indicates, I guess, that already in
his twenties, Abduhanni is kind of known internationally.
And we're also told that when they had
the conversation, it was carried out entirely in
poetry,
of course.
So Kheri later writes that
Sheikh Abdul Ghani is one who saw mixing
with people as a waste of time.
With a path of happiness and expansion, bust
being the worship of God in the privacy
of one's own home, and avoiding public life.
And he said he actually prefers associating with
books than with people.
So this,
Halwa, when he kind of formally disappears, and
he really disappears for 7 years, happens in
year 16/80.
Modern scholars say, well, maybe it's because of
academic rivalries or maybe because of abuse,
roughness of street life and is very refined
and can't take it. So he just stays
at home. Well,
we know that he's written poetry in which
he's critical of the city. So he says
things like this. Oh, you that intends to
enter this city, enter not, for in Damascus
devils dwell.
Take care that the darkness which you will
behold may not extinguish your light.
From this garden city, you should run and
flee,
not thinking them to be roses and narcissi.
So at this time, he writes a book
to explain
the, practice of seclusion.
And it's basically a Hadith collection,
because there are plenty of Hadith that indicate
that
solitude and avoiding the crowd are appropriate in
times of fitna and particularly in the end
times.
So this is his book, Tecmila no'aut filosome
al boy'aut,
which is
basically
you translate the title as something like,
the perfection of discourse on
remaining at home, which he publishes in
16/85.
So he writes
things like this, because obviously people are criticizing
him. He's not even coming out for the
5 daily prayers. He's praying at home.
Whosoever is certain that the harms he will
receive through mixing with people when attending the
prayer,
and so on, are greater than the harms
he will receive through leaving those things,
then he will have a valid excuse in
leaving them.
While in Mecca, I saw a Sheikh from
the people of knowledge who had secluded himself
and did not attend the sacred mosque for
the congregational prayers,
despite his proximity to it and despite the
purity of his wealth.
Because scholars would not regard it as valid,
for instance, to pay for a horse to
take you to the mosque if the wealth
you were spending on the horse was from
a dubious
source. I spoke with him about that one
day as I was visiting him, and he
told me that the divine rewards that you
would find in attending
Sacred Mosque could not outweigh the sins and
misdeeds he would accrue as a result of
going to the mosque and meeting people.
Actually, Imam Malik, if you remember, does the
same thing. He's in Medina for years, and
even though he's next to the Haram, he
sees certain things that disturb his heart, and
so he finds it better for him to
pray at home with his family and with
his
students.
People nowadays find this
an oddity, but this was the state he
was in. He would find more
intimacy and more closeness with God with his
prayers at home than,
in the city's mosques.
So
one of his students
later describes
this period as follows.
Nobody was able to meet him, may Allah
be pleased with him.
A tray of food used to be prepared
for him, but he rarely ate anything.
And when he did, he only ate very
little.
I was told by someone I trust that
every night, his family used to bring it
to his room a tray of food and
drink, put it in front of him, and
leave without any verbal exchange or eye contact,
shutting the door behind them.
And when they returned after an hour to
take back the tray, they would find it
unchanged,
nothing having been consumed.
In his seclusion he also rarely slept
and he did not leave except for the
call of nature and for evolution
and without being noticed, if possible.
In that time he stopped cutting his hair
and beard.
So he was reading the books of earlier
generations whom he felt he could relate to
in this time of disturbance and spiritual decline.
And he said they the the dead are
like the living, whereas the living are like
the dead.
And he writes this in the same book.
In this our age, I have witnessed a
people from all the peoples, the Arabs, the
Persians, the Indians, the Turks, and others also,
who attained
by reading books of Haqqaiq,
spiritual realities,
the degrees of the great sages, and who
gained from those volumes the object of all
of their aspirations.
If after reading, one supports one's knowledge with
nafila practices and mujhada,
spiritual sacrifice and effort. One becomes one of
the people of perfection.
This is, again, something of contemporary
relevance, because people often ask, well, where is
the, the man of God preferably
only a few stops away on the underground.
So I can visit
with the white turban and the twinkling eyes
and the flowing beard. Who will see into
my soul and take me up to the
divine. That's a legitimate aspiration and then people
find, well,
if they're there, they're not unveiling themselves.
Is this whole spiritual dimension of Islam, which
depends so much on personal
effusion,
no longer part of the religion, and we
are just people of rules and doctrines?
Is that all that Islam has become?
Propositional
rather than existential.
Abu Ghani is giving us a kind of
way forward by saying,
well, the Barzakh is a reality. You can
be connected to those people through humbly reading
their books.
But the upshot of it all has to
be that you intensify your outward practices
and you overcome the ego,
rather than falling into some kind of
personalized
bespoke religion.
You read Rumi and then you end up
doing
God knows what. No. It's about
intensification
of outward normativity, and that's the sign of
its validity.
So, this is something that can be done
at any time by anybody by respectfully picking
up the books of the ancient
ancient ones,
and helps us to overcome that
excuse within us that says, well, I can't
do all of this
exotic spiritual stuff because, I I need a
teacher.
Famous Turkish
couplet.
Do not say lying around, who is going
to guide me to the path?
Stand up at this moment because Allah is
the Waleel Tawfiq. He is the guarantor of
success.
Don't think that he can't open the most
amazing inward doors for you and make your
life
easy and beautiful,
just because Sheikh X is not conveniently on
the horizon.
Sheikh X is just a suburb, but ultimately,
spiritual growth is a divine gift. And he
can offer you that gift,
whenever he chooses. He's not subject to the
rules of any institutionalized
spirituality.
So this is important.
Let us not fall into lassitude
and apathy and cynicism,
because the man with the flowing white beard
is not taking our hand,
in a convenient way. But remember that the
divine nature is always close. He is Kareeb,
He is Waleel Tawfiq, and he can open
doors to us, as he did for Sheikh
Abdulhane, with his eccentric relationship to official to
Sarwar,
in a way of his choosing.
God always acts on his terms, not on
ours.
So
in this period, when he's kind of letting
his hair grow and not going out much,
he's actually very productive.
Some of his greatest books emerge in this
period. Remember, this is somebody who
writes over 300 books and counting.
10 years
ago, we used to think it was 208
280. But new books are coming to light
all the time.
Quite an extraordinary output and some of them,
as we saw with this poetic commentary, are
very dense.
So he writes a major commentary on Ibn
Arabi's Fosus Al Hikam.
And that's one of the toughest books in
Islamic metaphysics.
And he's writing a commentary specifically focusing on
some of the difficult, most controversial aspects within
it. And this is something many scholars have
done this before.
And in Damascus, Avrokhandeluzar,
he was to write his kind of commentary
on Fossoosun, at Hikam Kitab al Muwakif,
which has been translated, I think, recently.
Really difficult.
He also writes a book that becomes much
more widespread and
Pir Ali al Birgavi,
who's an Ottoman scholar
and preacher in Istanbul called Atariqa al Muhammadiyyah,
the Mohammedan way.
And this,
Tariq al Muhammediyah is a major work. It's
in Arabic,
and is endlessly reprinted pre printed. And you
can pick up cheap editions. And it's a
very worthwhile,
sincere,
Hussalian practical, non theoretical kind of set of
advices. There's an English translation of it now.
And it's about following the middle way in
all things.
Not because that's a compromise,
but because that is the most rigorous and
authentic way of following the prophet.
The zealot or the bigot or the
libertine
thinks that he, through the intensity
of his indulgence or austerity,
is being authentic
and is finding some real existential
experience of the world.
The real
effort is to find the middle way.
Extremes
of any kind are an indulgence.
The middle way requires
a lot of self discipline
and paring away of the turbulences of the
ego. So it's definitely a book worth reading.
It's early
16th century, I guess.
One of the things that he talks about
is the need to give people easier fatwas.
He says whatever you do, whatever you do,
give pea do not give people
the more difficult
of the possible fatwas,
the more precautionary.
Why? Because the people at this age are
weak,
and if you give them difficult fatwas, they
will collapse under the weight and start to
dislike
the Sharia.
Give them the easiest,
as long as it's halal, and this, of
course, is a prophetic counsel.
The ego doesn't always like
giving people easy options because we assume it's
because of our laziness or some kind of
liberal Islam. But for Birgivi, no,
for Birgivi, it is taqwa
to give the ordinary Muslims the easier interpretations.
And it is usually the ego
that wants the harder interpretation, because it's a
form of self praise.
It's a kind of Sufi understanding of
fatwa policy, and it represents the usual
fiqh,
position. But nowadays,
we tend to assume that the narrower you
are, the less compromises you make, the more
the West will be angry, and therefore, the
better a Muslim you must you must be.
The kind of psychological,
way of doing fatwa. Whatever is most extreme
shows how
authentic I am.
So every group of the extreme groups become
more extreme than the one before.
So al Qaeda was really bad, but they
weren't extreme enough for dash.
And then dash, and there's even worse things
happening, and that's the nature of because the
extreme is a downward
process, because it's governed by the ego. So
it's easier for it to slip
more and more towards its own nature. Whereas
the golden mean is kind of a summit
and it's a struggle to get that. Because
the ego doesn't want balance because you have
to think and make sacrifices.
In any case, Birgave is is one of
the the best places to go to for
this
traditional,
wisdom. So he writes it in this period.
Another book he writes in his,
7 years of seclusion
is really another best seller,
which is called,
Perfuming humanity
through the interpretation of dreams.
It's obviously important for him because much of
his inward life is to do with
Barzakh experiences and visions and dreams.
So he writes what is actually the most
popular book ever in Islamic history on dream
interpretation.
Now, the scholars who are experts in these
things would say, well, you really need, this
is a kind of manual
for somebody who's an expert.
It's like,
you don't really necessarily want to give
a GPS
as a gift to somebody who can't even
drive.
You have to know what the discipline is
before you need the literature and the equipment
that that goes with it. So you can
look up things in it and sometimes it'll
help, but sometimes it won't.
So once when I was living in Macca,
this guy came to me and said, I
had a dream of 7 flying turtles.
I know there's a lot of hashi shit
and then
I looked it up in this book, and,
yeah, there's a dream of 7 flying turtles
and it means this. And I said, well,
according to Nablusi, it means this. Yes. Yes.
He said, Alhamdulillah.
I don't know. 1 hour of
so
kind of there is wisdom there, but generally
the olamat will say, okay, to somebody who
understands this strange balustach science of the spirit,
because it's like looking in a
through the the the looking glass
and the world of dreams, the world of
Laochenars,
is something that can't really be captured on
the 2 dimensional
pages of a book. But he writes this,
and
it's
still all over the place. So he bases
it not just on
hadiths
and Athar,
dream experiences of the early Muslims, and Ibn
Sirin in particular, time of the Salaf, the
great dream interpreter.
Of course, it comes ultimately from
Yusuf alaihis salam, the the validity of it,
but often from his own experience
of dreams.
So he has
dreams of Ibn Arabi. He sees himself as
a baby
suckling from Ibn Arabi, who is like a
mother.
But then, after these 7 years really austere
times of prayer, not seeing anybody
writing these masterpieces,
suddenly something happens and he bursts out into
public life again. And not just into Damascus,
but he then becomes,
early modernity's,
most respected
writer of travel literature.
He leaves Damascus. He's had his early journey
up to Edirne and those places near Bulgaria,
but doesn't write about that much. But he
produces these,
narratives of how he went out with some
friends, to travel alone, in order to see
God's Earth.
So between 16/89/1700,
he is basically
traveling,
and he travels
as a Sufi. This is a Sufi tradition
of Siyaha,
and it's organically mandated.
So his biographer again says, when he left
Damascus,
he did so almost without anything.
Together with his students and his close friends,
only about 7 people, he energetically traveled from
country to country without money or any of
the other necessities a traveler needs, except only
a coffee jug and the horses they were
riding.
De Sheikh roved with them all over Syria
to visit the places of the prophets and
saints that were there and kept journeying with
them until they reached Al Arish in Egypt,
from which he traveled by land to Cairo.
And
even though you get the impression of somebody
who is a bit kind of quiet and
maybe a bit stuffy.
But actually, in these travelogues, you see him
as being really kind of fun loving and
inquisitive. He wants he wants up this mountain,
and who lives in that village, and let's
meet so and so.
There's basically spiritual and human travelogues.
It's not like, say, the earlier generation of
Arab travel writers, ibn Jubeir and ibn Batut,
or where it's more kind of descriptive of
we went here, we went there, and this
is the ruler of this place. He's interested
in meeting
people.
So he goes to Baalbek, which is in
Lebanon, of course,
and he produces a book.
He goes to a lot of mazaars and
holy places,
and he spends a lot of time reflecting
on nature.
So the Sufi Siaha principle of going out
defenseless, as it were, to inhabit virgin nature
is about the Qur'anic practice of tafakkur
and imbibing
the presence of God through the vision of
beauty
in nature, but also other people. So he
gives some very beautiful descriptions of the landscape
of the Lebanese mountains and the cedars and
the desert.
But he also talks a lot about the
extraordinary people that he meets because as we
said at the beginning,
back then, the human spectrum was much wider.
He did meet a much wider range of
people, some of them
eccentric, and some of them
profound. He doesn't say much about Sufi lodges
and ceremonies,
unlike say, Evliyat Celebi, more or less in
the same period, the great Ottoman traveler who's
visiting Sufi Lodge after Sufi Lodge and says,
well, this sheikh wears a turban with a
little thing in it, and he's not really
so interested in that. He's interested in people
rather than the labels, I guess.
And he always trying to see what he
can learn about God and his intentions in
every human encounter.
So like Ibn Arabi, he interprets the famous
hadith ad Din Muamala,
religion is engagement.
Not as meaning just that religion teaches you
how ethically to engage with other people,
but rather that religion
comes from that engagement.
In other words, if you're
an island entire of yourself, not engaging with
the orders of nature and the orders of
other human beings, your religion is going to
be a rather puny thing, which seems strange
considering the 7 years that he's just been
through. But now he's in the state of
bast after kabd, and he's in every person
that he meets,
even Jews and Christians and Jews,
he's meeting all kinds of people and very
respectful.
Some of his correspondence is with a Christian
patriarch in in Syria, and the letters have
been preserved. They're kind of fraternal, respectful
messages. He's interested in what he can learn
about the divine intention in creating the uniqueness
of every individual soul.
This has to do with the Sufi idea
of the shahhid.
Every human being is a recollection of that
moment
still within each one of us that divine
spark that is uniquely interesting and he wants
to see what he can find. So this
Sufi principle of adab is a way of
drawing out from other people what God intends
by the creation of that person,
in every case. So it's a kind of
human,
travelogue
rather than a geographical one.
So he describes a lot of the
Awliya and Olomna. He meets the upper mountain
in the Lebanon.
He meets a Khaluati Sheikh,
who
has already mystically been informed that he's coming.
So a meal, a gathering is already ready,
even though
they haven't announced themselves and
couldn't send a a text in advance to
say
they would be there. But and after the
banquet, he tells him about a local
sheikh, a mystic who people used to go
to for prayers and so forth, who lived
on a mountain, who was able to jump,
he says, during his travelogue from mountain to
mountain.
He was famous for miracles,
but he neglected his prayers.
So eventually, the shaytan,
took
over him, and he ended his days as
a sinner and his
rep and as a reprobate.
He goes to Jerusalem as well and has
a very interesting poem and relationship with Akhobat
Asakhra,
the the site of the Isra'ah that becomes
important
to him. Academic discussions as well. And then
in 16/93,
his longest trip,
388 days,
which he writes about again in a book
called, Al Hakil kawal Majez firekhnatibileidichermi
wamoswal hijez.
He calls it interestingly,
truth and metaphor
in traveling to the lands of Syria and
Egypt and the Hejaz.
So,
he's traveling and engaging with his companions and
meeting all of these people, but he said,
I actually traveled alone.
The only one I encountered,
the only one I was with was Allah
subhanahu wa ta'ala.
Seeing the divine in nature, seeing the divine
in other people, and this exalted Maqam, and
he does his Hajj while he's on this
journey.
So he is
then back in Damascus and returns to his
father's professorial
chair at the,
the Umayyad Mosque, which is the place of
the Nablus' is opposite the the mazar of
Hazratihyah.
And in the morning, he lectures on exoteric
disciplines, including literature.
And at evening, he talks about spiritual things
and Barton.
He also starts teaching in
Ibn Arabi's
Mazar, which,
the Ottomans have renovated and turned into rather
a splendid place.
Sultan Selim.
Selim the Grim.
One of the most uncompromising
and unindulgent
of Ottoman sultans has come through Damascus on
his way to conquer
Egypt
and the Hejaz. And, of course, ibn Arabi's
tomb is there, and he gets a fatwa
from the Sheikh al Islam, chief Mufti of
the Ottoman Empire,
asking him about Ibn Arab. And he says,
this is one of the great men of
Allah, and you should renovate and restore,
the tomb. So when you go there today,
it's more or less in the form that
Sultan
Yevoz Selim
renovated. And if you go to
Selim's tomb, which is on one of the
seven hills of Istanbul, you can
see things about Ibn Arabi and the connection
that existed between the sultan and the saint.
So, Abu Ghani is teaching that and kind
of surprising people, because the tradition of the
olema is not really to talk much about
metaphysical, speculative,
difficult Sufism,
and particularly doctrines about the relationship between the
creator and the created worlds.
For the masses, there is the creator, there
is there is the creatures, the divine names
are the effulgence
of the divine creative purpose, and everything exists
in a fixed reality of time and space.
If an Arabi is looking beyond that in
complex ways, the olema generally disapprove of exposing
the, say,
falafel vendor on the street corner to this
idea of everything being just the interplay of
the divine qualities,
a fully sacred view of nature.
But he believes that he has authorization,
and he teaches it. And this becomes a
little bit problematic for some of the olema
of Damascus, that he is divulging these haqqaiq,
to the masses. So one of his disciples,
Beitamani,
says, a man once told me Sheikh Abdul
Ghani should not have disclosed those holy forms
of knowledge to the vulgar masses, ought not
to have opened the doors for the public
to hear his words.
For he is the imam of the age,
and the masses would follow him in matters
they cannot understand.
Because of his teaching, they might stumble into
forbidden
things.
So again,
unconventional,
but the way he teaches and this is
expanded also in his various
writings on Ibn Arabi and his commentaries on
Ibn al Farid as well, who in many
ways shares Ibn Arabi's
ontology,
is to,
diffuse
some of the easily misunderstood
aspects of Ibn Arabi's conception of being.
It's intricate. We don't have time to go
into it now.
But what is really important, I would say,
in the fusion of the austere and non
ritual Nakshbandi tradition of presence in every moment
with Ibn Arabi's ontology
is
that, after his Khallwa,
after his seclusion,
Abu Ghani comes out as an extremely
expansive and joyful person. And his journeys are
really kind of they're about the happiest
travel writing
you'll ever find,
unlike a lot of modern travel writers who
just look for things that are wrong with
those sculptures or complain about
the croissants of the hotel in Beirut or
whatever. And it's all very self serving. But
it's just a joyful,
thing. And this is because of his understanding
that the world, from a certain perspective, is
nothing other than the interplay of the divine
names.
And therefore, whereas on the surface of the
world, those incrustation of things that are fallible
perceptions
take to be things we really don't like
or approve of, the reality is that the
divine command always
prevails.
Everything is subject to the same, and
nothing escapes
the divine command and does things
according to some way that the divine did
not decree.
So when you look below the surface of
things and to the reality of things,
you see the Rahmah of God,
you see the power of God, you see
the presence of God.
It's a doctrine of imminence as well as
a doctrine of transcendence.
Yes.
Nothing resembles him. And Abu Ghani will be
the first to say Amin, of course.
But Allah has also said that he is
Qarib, near.
And this Korrib is expressed in everything,
And interest of human beings, and the interest
of the natural world, and your experience of
the mule that you're riding, and the cedars
of Lebanon, whatever.
There is the divine interaction of qualities,
there to be feasted upon
the world as banquet. So
from this Akbarian perspective, there's something very life
affirming,
which is why some of these modern scholars
think this is the birth of modern
Arab humanism.
It's
problematic, but it's a kind of humanistic vision,
but it's much higher than any secular interpretation
of human beings could be. Because from a
secular perspective,
we exist randomly and we end randomly and
there's nothing intrinsically noble.
But if you're following the Quranic, karannabani
Adam, we have ennobled the descendants of Adam.
You get into this idea of human beings
as Khalifa and really worthy of respect,
really possessed of intrinsic rights.
Rights that are not conjured up by some
jurisprudential
wishful thinking
and invested in the dull meaninglessness of secular
matter. Something that is there because God himself
has ennobled the descendants of Adam. And in
the Hanafi Matoridi tradition in particular, they talk
a lot about innate rights.
By the mere fact that you're a descendant
of Adam, you have certain inviolabilities.
These are the 5 values of the Sharia.
The right to life, the right to property,
etcetera.
So in this Hanafi tradition
And remember, he switches from the Shefei to
the Hanafi madhab.
You find this
It's not really a proto humanism, but it's
a it's a Quranic humanism,
that is about the nobility of the creature
to whom alone the angels can be legitimately
asked
to prostrate.
So, Ibn Arabi, looking at this, sees the
world as divine names. And when you see
the world as divine names,
you receive ahuwal, spiritual state that lead to
aishq, to love and ecstasy.
And this aishq,
this perception of the beauty of the divine
agency,
is purifying.
Is it the idea of ecstatic love of
God,
purifying the self,
and taking us away from the contemplation of
our own dark impulses and weaknesses.
And this is one reason for
the cultivation of the prophetic memory as as
an expression of beauty,
which is why, you know, the holy prophet
is the center of Muslim poetry, and all
of these Badi ayat focus on not
Haruna Rashid,
but on the holy prophet because
he is already
the the human,
mirror of of heavenly perfection.
So
by drawing out and by making visible to
half blind human beings the beauty of things
and most eminently the beauty of the holy
prophet in whom all of the divine names
are reflected in a perfectly symmetrical and appropriate
way. Human beings are drawn to God because
they realize that they've never been away from
God.
So it's really kind of an ecstatic and
an aesthetic
beauty
focused spirituality.
So
let's before we close, because we've gone on
a bit.
Looking at
one quote from Abdul Ghani.
Know that all things
are matters of great subtlety,
and that they are of the rank of
illusion,
or of the mirage that is seen from
afar,
and which is in fact nothing, including all
solid things such as rock stones, inanimate objects,
and trees.
They only appear solid through the prevailing of
their innate nature.
The vision of them exists through the discernment
of the intellect and sensory perception is predicated
on the discernment of the intellect.
As for their real nature, this is of
the rank of subtle meanings. Lataif, perceived by
the intellect of the discerning person,
in terms of their foundation on and firmness
in, al wudjudul haqq,
the absolute true
being.
And a lot of his
poetry is kind of focusing on nature and
the transcendent, translucent
beauty of nature,
as
a way of human
access to,
the proximity of the name. So this is
one of his poems. A face multiplies in
many mirrors and every viewer is baffled by
it. It's a lot easier in English than
in Arabic, by the way. All existence, by
his command,
are waves on the surface of water.
Truly, all the worlds are in their appearance
and disappearance, in speed and alteration, like writing
in the air.
Sun and all creation in its lights, like
floating dust moats.
So the beauty of the world
is a subtle thing, motif, that indicates
its,
reality, which is
a mirage,
waves on the sea,
flux
in
comparison with the absoluteness and the inclusiveness of
the divine being,
Outside the infinity of God,
by definition, there isn't room for anything.
So these are just modalities of being, the
endless flux and reflux of the operation of
the divine
nature. So nature is celebrating God and this
is Quranic.
Ibn Arabi is getting all of these things
from some often neglected Quranic passages.
All of those celebrations of nature.
Everything in nature praises God.
Everything in the world knows its way of
praising praising God.
So hear and understand or you're
missing something pretty beautiful.
Saudi says,
Khurram as Aanum.
I am happy and joyful in the world
because the world is happy and joyful in
him.
This is a particular Muqam of Bast that
you just see, the beauty and the majesty
and the perfection of the divine agency. So
how can you
not be joyful?
So,
in many ways, his life
then reflects this practice of just inclusion and
happiness. So,
he,
builds himself quite a
a nice house in Salehiya, and it's still
there. You can visit it, and they point
out the room where he used to stay.
But when he left the old town of
Damascus,
he made himself a kind of hut out
of
clay.
He lived there for a bit,
just as happy. And then, with his considerable
family wealth, he built this nice house on
the hill, where he lived,
comfortably.
He like used to like giving banquets.
He had a kind of mobile
pulpit made on wheels that had to be
taken apart and carried on the backs of
10 mules,
and he would go to different parts of
Damascus, particularly the countryside or by the river,
public parks, and preach and talk about poetry
in that public context. So he could be
preaching in nature rather than just in the
mosques and
known for
his joyful
demeanor.
And some of his poetry reflects this,
including some poetry, which to the rather pinched
modern
anxiety
focus
of modern Islam seems a bit scandalous.
And some of these fatwas as well. So
there's a big argument in the Ottoman Empire
about
tobacco
and about coffee. These are 2 new things.
And the sultans for a while have prohibited
both.
And there's a puritanical movement
led by somebody called Cardizadeh,
who was a disciple of Birgiri, but become
became really quite narrow and extreme. He said
these things are not sanctioned in Revelation,
they must be haram.
And,
Nadolsi wrote 2 fatwas
as Mufti of Damascus.
He finds time for that as well. In
which he says, there's no basis for prohibition
and the Hanafi tradition assumes that everything is
lawful unless definitely proven otherwise.
What's wrong with coffee? It doesn't intoxicate, doesn't
cause violence like alcohol, so there's no PS
there. It's fine. That really becomes the decisive
fatwa subsequently in the Ottoman Empire. Where would
the Turks be without Turkish coffee?
And then smoking,
like all good things, it comes from North
America and it becomes
popular in the Muslim world, where it becomes
really kind of
a cultivated thing, the shisha
and the like.
And some of the olema are banning tobacco
and he issues a fatwa saying, it's permissible.
Now back then, we simply weren't aware of
the health implications.
So nowadays, the fatwa, of course, has legitimately
changed.
Sheikh Shaltut, I think it was, at the
Al Sarraf in the 19 fifties issued
fatwa that said it was,
Makru Khara Hatahrimia,
almost haram, but on the basis of modern
medical knowledge. But Ablugani Nablusi doesn't really have
a problem with it. There's
there's no
Delhi that indicates that, God is against it.
So, avoid
the Cadizar Deli's
insistence that piety consists in making things prohibited
wherever you can. This is part of a
sickness which he
deplored.
And his battle with Alcaldesartes
was a well known one. And they were
very active, you know. They were smashing up
taverns
and,
demolishing Sufi lodges, and they were like kind
of proto Wahhabis in some way.
Low lower cast preachers usually, the ezan,
not the senior Muftis and the olamat who
regarded them as kind of a vulgar embarrassment.
But this is part of his
battle.
So he's in this state of bust and
he spends
time
composing poetry and sometimes in
kind of picnics with the olema of Damascus,
which are it seems exclusively
male only.
Because he follows the usual
austere Syrian practice. You know, something like this
gathering would have been quite
shocking to him.
He was not lax,
but simply didn't like unnecessary prohibitions.
So he went on a lot of these
picnics and
invited people to his house and that's where
a lot of his poetry originates.
There's 3 big collections of poetry, all of
which are in print, none of which are
in English. One is kind of literary,
one is mystical, and the third one is
kind of hedonistic.
It's hamrat babil, the wine of Babylon,
which seems like an odd kind of thing
to come from the pen of the Mufti
of Damascus, because it's kind of about the
beauties of nature and the beauty of women
and it's often he combines the 2 and
compares a particular
Syrian mountain to a Beloved shoulder or something
like that. And it's kind of it's not
where Olamat tend to go nowadays.
But in that world,
that was also part of the what the
Sufis would call Shahid Bazi,
gazing upon the beauties of the human form,
in order to learn about the creative
magnificence of the compassionate God.
The practice that Sufis were often
reprehended for. Now he's not actually got
girls around in these gatherings,
but this this literary tradition
means that he's one of the, sort of,
major amateury and erotic poets of the Arabic
language.
It's another aspect of his
of his,
identity. And he writes a book about love.
The utmost
desire in,
loving the
beloved, something like that,
in which he talks about
romantic love as being a divine gift that
is a prophetic
state that helps us to transcend
more earthly
passions, focuses us on contemplating,
the the the Imago Dei,
the
the presence of the sacred in another human
being,
the sacrality of of of marriage. It's an
interesting book. About half of it is hadith.
It's the kind of literature that can't really
exist over the border in Christianity. There's plenty
of rabbinical equivalents to this.
But,
Christianity with its
emphasis on saintly celibacy has never been able
to go into that space. Of course, the
Catholic church is now falling apart as a
result
of trying to defy something that Abul Ghani
would regard as a as an incredible sign
of the divine
compassion and wisdom.
So
yeah. An aesthet as well, for him beauty
is really
really
important, because it is, as Plato said, the
splendor of the truth.
So somebody who embraces the world in a
fully Sharia compliant and actually very devotional
to the Tahajjud
oriented lifestyle,
who loves the beauty of nature,
who is interested in meeting a wide variety
of human beings and seeing what God intends
by their creation.
The love of marriage, of
women,
it's part of the kind of classical
late classical flowering of Arab Islam.
I've given just a kind of drop from
the ocean,
but it's, I think, enough to give a
sense of
how different things were back then.
When
the great olamat considered Islam to be a
kind of
joyful
style of life, rather than what we often
hear from the preachers nowadays, which is that
God has created the world to catch us
out. The world is a minefield, and you
have to be really anxious.
Oh, that's haram. That's haram.
This
penitential
style of preaching
that is yelled at us from the minbar's
nowadays, particularly in some parts of the Islamic
Islamic world where they think the only way
of making people good is to tell them
how bad it is to be bad. And
everybody leaves the mosque after Jum'ah feeling.
I had to do it. It's like going
to the dentist. You have to hear the
chutta, but it's it was painful.
It was a painful one.
This is not his world.
This is the Islam of the age of
the empirical
experience of God and his compassion and his
justice in the world.
And, an experience of religion
and the world and God's creation as something
infinitely lovable.
So he was somebody who focused as Ibn
Arabi did, as the Quran does, and the
holy prophet who is Rahmatullil Alamin,
mercy to the world's
own mercy and forgiveness and love as being
the preeminent qualities of the believer,
rather than a penitential anxiety
and a policing of boundaries, which is what
it seems to have been reduced to for
most of our contemporaries. So, yes, another leader
even though he didn't really want
to lead anybody
and tended to prefer his own company. But,
when he got out and about, he was
somebody the quality of whose soul expressed itself
in,
not an extroversion,
but simply in a sheer joy of being
alive in God's world.
So may Allah
replace our darkness with light, replace our disunity
with unity,
replace our illusions with truth,
replace our focusing on the faults of others
with the delight in seeing what is best
about others, and make us people of sincerity
and true
saluk attached to the great ones of Islam
with reverence for their memory,
living and dead inshallah, that he may unite
us inshallah
in both worlds
in the religion of Rahmah and following the
way of he who was Habibullah,
God's beloved.
Cambridge Muslim College,
training the next generation of Muslim thinkers.