Abdal Hakim Murad – Becoming Living Things
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Bismillah Alhamdulillah wa salatu salam ala Rasulillah were early he
was the woman where Allah and
Eid Mubarak a little bit late but this is our CMC aid celebration
here in the gardens at the college where we hope one day
many domed
pavilion will insha Allah arise
it's happy that the idol fitter coincides this year more or less
with the beginning of spring Mayday was just about not quite
idle fitter. And since we're surrounded here by these
sycamores, and it's not quite raining upon us, although I do
have a hotspot on the symbolism of rain, which I can segue into
effortlessly. Should the occasion present itself, I thought I'd
reflect a little bit on
something that in the first instance seems to be a sort of
paradox.
But which in fact, makes a whole lot of sense, which is that in the
Holy Quran, which is the narrative manifesto, saga epic
of the way of Islam,
nature figures largely, does it not.
So many of the things that human beings have historically related
to and been moved by and lived amongst are there, sometimes cited
as Gods signs, yet
there are mountains and there is the sea.
fish, whales, lions, donkeys, bees, ants, birds, various kinds,
rivers, trees, it's basically all that all of the Orders of Life and
creation which human beings inhabit, or didn't have it before
we made the dubious decision to move to cities. They are all
there. But something doesn't seem really to be there. And that is
the seasons.
Humanity has always lived with seasons, and it's been fundamental
in determining the patterns of our life.
Everything in the world is cyclical, including ourselves. And
the sun and the moon, also appear to us in cyclical ways.
But the seasons are not they're not really.
And the evident reason for this is the Allamah have always understood
is that the Quran as the nursery Kapha for all mankind needs to
cite those signs of creation, which are recognized by people in
every latitude and longitude.
Some places where the seasons are really different, they're big in
Arabia. If you've lived there, you'll know that the winter is
really not like the summer.
And the rainy season is phenomenal. They have big seasons,
though.
But they're not really there in the Quran. There are these amazing
passages where God sends down torrents of water from the
heavens, and brings up
beautiful green things.
And it's anomalous, and that EMA and the judge early nuclear Gob
locally Jabby he had been one I better send it down from the
heavens, torrential rain, in order thereby to bring up the grain and
the fresh shoots. That's universal.
Even if you're in Antarctica, nobody really with their right
mind would live for long in those extreme places. There's still
seasons and there are still things that grow and
there are the patterns of life reflect that.
But the specifics of springtime, as we understand it, and also
solar calendar are not there. Sometimes we grumble about the
moon is this undeniable principle, half of the hot air generated by
the Ummah at the end of Ramadan is about the moon becomes a little
bit less than captivating after you've heard the argument a few
1000 times. Why not a solar calendar? Well, it's partly to do
with Islam. Primordial ality is something ancient ancient peoples
use lunar calendars and ours is the religion of fitrah. But also
due to the fact that if you have a solar calendar, then you fix your
your festivals according to the seasons and then you have the
strange phenomenon of unseasonal festivals.
Once on Christmas Day I happen to find myself on Bondi Beach in
Sydney
really a sweltering day. But there were Santa's on the beach in his
father and his thing, looking for Bondi bit overdressed but that
kind of incongruity for a universal religion, there's not
going to be appropriate. So we didn't really have seasonal
festivals in local Muslim cultures. Yes, you do in Egypt.
They have shamon, Nasim and other things. And the agricultural
calendar in Egypt is basically the old Coptic calendar, which is the
Ptolemaic which is the ancient calendar to do with the Nile
floods.
But that can't be the calendar of the universal religion, which is
for Java, and Senegal, and Bosnia, and everywhere, so the moon may be
annoyingly unpredictable.
That's is kind of a universal principle, whereas the solar
calendar fixes you do the climatic cycles of a particular latitude
and longitude. So that's fair enough.
No springtime, really in the boron. And we can see why that
isn't necessarily the case. But in our literature, so much of it, a
super abundance of life imagery.
What a shame it is that many Muslims who came to the west, the
last 100 years or so didn't bring much of that literature,
except in kind of tribal shadows where the older generation would
recite it to each other.
But that's not really something that they shared with the wider
community, partly because it's rather culturally specific. But
there is universalism, though,
that the world needs instead, are big. It's not like that. Well,
conferences tend to be about
Islam and insurance, or Islam inspired the renascence, or
Islamophobia or those things that have to do with our complexes,
rather than the enormous amplitude, and generosity of the
literature of our heritage.
Down the road, the new agers may be doing yoga with a track of
Coleman Barks, reciting Rumi, but not at the Islamic Conference not
any longer, although the older generation certainly know what it
is, this has been one of the fails, I think about community
that we've not brought that luxuriant literature with us.
So
when we do look at it, we find that the principle of springtime
is really as you would expect ginormous. The core of the
literature really is the literature of Persia.
Arabs produce great writers in many areas, but generally, the
Persian spirit seems to have been uplifted to higher literary levels
than the Arab spirits, which is another sign of its universalism.
Not many of the great Allamah of Islam actually have been of Arab
origin, even at the beginning.
The two greatest Arab Arabic grammarians, Al Khalil, and SIBO,
both Persian and then you look at the names of Buhari and Tirmidhi,
and central Asians from Persian culture, Islam's universalism,
established itself with a startling swiftness, is that
happening here? Are we proclaiming ourselves as harbingers of a
universal tradition? Or do we just have these cute cultural things
that make us feel special that we keep to ourselves?
Are we just an archipelago of anthropological curiosities? Well,
good question. Are we proclaiming universals? Or are we just staying
in a comfort zone and what we take to be a hostile cultural climate
that will change inevitably in the new generation has CMCC does want
that to change? Because Islam as a monotheism is something that
endures and survives the trauma of migration much more easily in the
longer term, then do the specifics of reciting Kurdish poetry with
one's fellow members have an older generation that is unlikely to
become part of the mass culture of Muslims in the next few decades?
And that's just
that's what always happens. So the universals Yeah, including this,
these exuberant evocations of nature.
And nature of course, as universal principle is a good language with
which to address people
because we're all suffering from a kind of nature deficit disorder
these days. In you can walk through an airport or a railway
station or a hotel lobby now and there's nothing alive, except sort
of the half alive human beings. Looking listless
slay around them
waiting for the next train but the exuberance, the roar, primitivism,
the
the ecstasy of life, the principle of hate. It's been fought, and
tamed and caged and put in a few planters here and their plants
that won't cause you any trouble things that grow slowly and you
didn't have to dust them very often and somebody on minimum wage
can occasionally water them and then you can forget about them but
under control, wealthy important business of human beings striding
around trying to catch trains to Manchester proceeds unobstructed.
Modernity often looks like a war on nature that sometimes takes
prisoners sometimes kills its defeated victims, who doesn't
really want to collaborate with them interact, be inspired by
them. Just as modernity is not really interested in significantly
learning from other cultures. Although it hopes other cultures
will modernize. There's no reciprocity there. Similarly, our
relationship to the natural world is not reciprocal at all. Can we
make money out of it? If not, do we have to use taxpayers money to
create a national park somewhere where the last few representatives
of a particular butterfly can eke out a precarious existence that
generally is the best that modernity can do?
There's only 50 Wildcats left in Scotland.
The restaurant the dead or intermarried? Shall we say with
people's team domestic Moggies, but only 50. Left and Scotland's a
big place where we're just not very good at biodiversity. The
springtime is this amazing symbol of the riotous appearance, despite
the apparent death of winter of new life.
That's where the Divine Name and Mahi appears
undeniable and extraordinary far litical have be one know. God
calls himself the one who splits the grain and the
stone of the of the fruit.
And this divine name Al Mahi,
which is related to another name Al Hey, Al highest one who is in
himself, life. And a lot he is the one who brings about life refers
to one of the great paradoxes of a purely secular understanding of
reality that religion has the only answer for
what is life wealth?
Scientists don't really know what to do with that question. The big
questions they can't deal with.
Why is there something rather than nothing? Well, they kind of furrow
their brows and hope that some new subatomic particle will be found
that explains that which never does. The Higgs Boson we were told
is going to answer that well. Apparently, it opens up a field
where they're looking for 12 new subatomic particles that and of
course, it's circular. They can't get outside the system. Although
as the poet's say, the most evident thing in the world is that
water does not originate in the well.
Outside matter there is the metaphysical otherwise, it's just
a neuralgic impossibility that water doesn't originate in the
well the world doesn't originate in the world.
So that's one thing. And he is far tell us summer wet you are the
creator of heaven and earth in this falter fitrah this word that
we use at the idol FITARA time, which again is to do with the
miracle of something splitting out of something that apparently was
not very much these trees that emerged from little seeds. Who
woulda guessed that there could be in a purely material Cosmos such
such wonders such improbabilities and a lot of them millions of
species.
And then the emergence of life. That's another headache. What is
life? How did it begin? On the conventional paleo, Paleo logical
perspective world, maybe there was a particular cauldron of amino
acids, that according to laws of probability, once in every few 10s
of millions of years, configured itself in such a way and at such a
temperature that something would emerge, but the first cell
a cell is a complicated thing.
If you look at the YouTube clip, from Harvard University on the
inner life of the cell, if you think that a cell is a kind of
small blob of indistinct, protoplasm, virtually the whole
universe, it's extraordinary. And there's billions of them in each
and every one of them. Maybe you could conceivably imagine how
enough amino acids at the right time
kind of temperature with the right ambient level of radiation could
maybe produce the cell,
the DNA, maybe the, the membrane around the cell, but then that
cell has to be able to divide to produce to other cells, and that
it becomes so improbable that it's silly, silly. So life I act is a
big mystery.
And it bears contemplation.
And then the miracle of the emergence of human beings and the
miracle of the emergence of consciousness puzzle after puzzle.
Well, religion is where you go metaphysics is where you go, if
you want a solution to things that obviously can't be explained from
within the closed system of stuff of matter, radiation, physical
constants, that there has to be something outside, outside.
Anyway, so life is one of these big, extraordinary things. And it
is frequently conjured with in Scripture,
because we do not just look at it,
inhale it, sometimes taste it, eat it, engage with it, interact with
it, to keep ourselves alive, but it is what we are.
We are ourselves representations of the Divine Name, and Mahi.
And all of the extraordinary, improbable wonders of that.
Children have a very healthy understanding of the absurd
improbability of all things which is why they're kind of looking at
everything and completely amazed. That's a very healthy attitude. We
jaded adults have lost sight of it looked at either as a doggy for
the 50th time in the day the child is right. That's extraordinary.
But one of the things children get most amazed about is when they
have a younger sibling. And in their pure brains. They say
something from nothing. This perfect thing. My little sister
thought him or whatever, for mommy's tummy and they're right to
kind of be amazed by that. And part of the wisdom of the Quranic
narrative is that actually spends quite a bit of time on embryology
fairly unusual amongst world scriptures.
The miracle of conception, the miracle of the Aloka scene one of
the first sewers, isn't it, the miracle of the Baroque machina the
safe place settling place for the unborn child, the progressive
stages in which the child
achieves form and then appears in the world sort of Marian was one
place where you see the the July law of childbirth three
respectfully depicted. It seems to be a major theme for the Quran,
another aspect of the Quran as book of life.
And, again, this is another thing that our modernity doesn't really
know how to handle.
Because if you look at the
Sunday Times today, and you go through the supplement, lifestyle,
it's called Lifestyle nerds a way of saying ego, usually lifestyle,
virtue signaling in a material culture.
Homes to die for new recipes, fashions passions this year,
hemlines cool holiday destinations, the best kept secret
in Tuscany, it's all predictable. You know what's going to be there
before you open the wretched thing is always the same thing is
Dunedin is a recycling of a relatively limited number of
sources of human gratification, but less and less. Is there
something about family,
children,
those most fundamental things, which is from a biological point
of view, what we are for
we are on a biological level of self replicators. But the culture
seems to be so smart. That it's not really a major thing.
Sometimes there's an article about schools or nurseries or childcare
or whatever it might be sometimes, but when you consider the
indispensable gigantic significance of our function as
the bearers of new life, it's strangely absent.
The principle of springtime is also enormous in
the botany as it were, of the Islamic spiritual repertory
because
basically all of that poetry
takes its cue from is catalyzed by galvanized by the Quranic
insights, which is that we are not living in a broken world, damaged
and twisted and made perverse by original sin. We are in a garden,
that is genuine though pale reflection of the garden of our
origin and which is an inviting anticipation of the garden to
which we are summoned to Daraa Salaam. The world is paradisal
even though it contains aspects of what the purpose will take autumn
as well as spring because this is the world of change dunya is the
world of cycles. Spring is the Jamala
Bihar
is the Janelle And autumn has an is the manifestation of the July,
the incipient tightness, and coldness and apparent sterility of
the winter.
It is a robust, welcomed in the Sufi vocabulary expansion.
Everything's opening up and dancing.
The poet's all say that the rose opens, like a dervish tearing off
his robes and ecstasy, all of that language. Yeah, it's an exuberant
thing, springtime,
it springs.
And that's the Jamal and the beauty that is there in creation
is at this time of year and those evidently manifest and then in the
winter kind of comes together again, get squeezed.
The apples are picked, the leaves fall and it goes back to that, as
it were creative or procreative point of origin. Again, it's like
inhaling and exhaling the natural world is a process of cycles.
And that's how we have to understand
the nature of the cycle.
That there has to be a full manifestation of all the divine
qualities.
Because we're weak little maggots and we like our comforts we wish
it could be springtime all the time. Always to hear the cuckoo
singing and to see the frogs leaping in the village pond and
life hopping and jumping and everything looks cute as what we
like and that's understandable. But the divine plenitude
incorporates not just as sparingly principles, but also the
principles of bobde of the July Allah.
And when you think about it, the universe as far as we can tell
from these orbiting space telescopes.
There's another one that's just be
is actually mostly it seems, gel Allah.
Most of the stuff that they see through the Hubble Space Telescope
is exploding X ray galaxies and other inconceivable manifestations
of the absolute divine God, or power.
This is the sort of to look territory, majestic and
magnificent, but kind of if you've got there on your starship, you
soon miss the springtime.
of this world, which is our natural habitat. Yeah, is full of
inconceivable as far as we can tell unique exhibitions of the
Divine
determination that in this world, gravity gets us in the end. But
there's new growth
just as we see in our children, just as we see in these bluebells
just as it's something fundamentally healthy it for us to
perceive ourselves as being just part of the biological order. To
the extent that we can see that biological order as being
secularly, inexplicable, but theologically self evident.
So there is the GLL as well, the leaves fall, the flowers die,
the wind sets in
animals die.
Things seem to become congealed, especially in these latitudes, but
also you have to remember somebody like Rumi, half as the Persian
poets, they're living in the UP lands, and things get really cold
that they really do have seasons.
So
in the midst of this world of growth and decay, and
improbability, in the amazement, which children see, we have the
responsibility to attune ourselves
and that's something that we lack as moderns.
And that's perhaps the most important thing that we lack we
are natural or cognizes of beauty
and natural lovers of beauty and dis poetry is all about the issue
and the intoxication of things. But we're kind of
looking for the next Starbucks or whatever it is. We've been, our
minds have been scrambled and programmed to do things that make
money for somebody rather than the things that actually you sit in
the park and you think that it's actually nicer than hanging out in
Cafe Nero or something. It's kind of nice, but nobody can make money
from you doing that anyway.
So, we need to start this attentiveness to the life
principle
to being in the world seeing it as Golestan, the Rose Garden
to recognize that although we are part of this, this world bespeaks
another garden, which is more real, which is in the pre past and
the future future.
Tall bull bully musty
booty tall bull bully must deep they all know you joke Don Rossi
boy, you're gonna stone the gold standard off T.
You are
an intoxicated Nightingale is the third theme of all of the Persian
poetry flying around, intoxicated by the fragrance of the roses
singing tweeting, beautiful song that should be what human beings
is intoxicated by the moment, ideally by every moment.
Amongst the owls. Owls are creatures of the Knights and
they're not really ecstatic about anything. Not very joyful
creatures. Most human beings are like that. benighted and then
Rossi boy or girl Istanbul, Istanbul of tea, but then the
fragrance of the Rose Garden comes and you go to the Rose Garden.
That's what religion does. When you inhale, and you internalize
that painful but ecstatic improbability of being you think,
yes, I remember that.
Yeah, that's there's reality that this is not just an emotional
high. This is a recollection, and nostalgia. Yeah, the original
garden, the garden to come out through homeland.
And that's where we spread our wings and we start to fly around,
like intoxicated nightingales, which is the Prophetic way which
is the way of the Alia which is absolutely normal in our always
ecstatic poetry. There are there but Baridi the dog Nihon rough T,
RJ, RJ because Amin ra Oz, J Honda of T.
Finally,
you spread your wings
and went to the beyond.
What an extraordinary way you followed when he went to the
beyond. It's not really a physical journey. It's a journey within
which is to do with the mystery of consciousness. The sea by the sea
is the parable of us storage capacity have all got 50 the soya
Jahan the genre of tea, you broke the bars of the cage and you
spread your wings and your feathers and you shook them at
last. And then you flew up to the place which isn't a place the
place which is below me calm, which has no place
and
toolbars the hospital the total dollar WSR the pewters on the true
tabular evolve, Shani de Bellami corner of tea.
You were a royal Falken
in the grip of a kroner an old woman.
But then you heard the falconers drum.
And then you went all Simone to the heavens.
Another of our themes when this garden in this world, but we're
trapped by the old woman which is the world and its worldliness, the
world of as her and Elon Musk and the world of stuff.
And then you hear the full conundrum and then you go to
the sky where you belong. Naturally we're birds we're not
really ground hugging creatures, nor are we plants exalted angelic
beings. So the basic lesson of springtime then in this literature
and it goes on this Bihar language is
first of all, don't waste your time.
drink the wine of intoxication by beauty and love. While you can
solve the Army song toolkit a yami Bihar l then get our cup bearer
pour the wine quickly because the days of spring will come to an end
Don't just postpone things until you're retired or something. But
seize the moment, be attentive to the amazingness of things, be
amazed by as many things as possible. Be present in the moment
future is not real, the past no longer exists, the present is
reality.
And to intuit in the miracle of living things and to be in living
things, to recognize that you are yourself a living things, and in
your gender itself to recognize that you engender, most of us in
gender living things, to be in that and to be part of it
indicative quality.
In other words, the sheer amazingness of stuff, this
hierarchy, this bewilderment of which the Sufis speak, that's what
we need to be completely amazed by everything.
Faith consists in maximizing the number of situations in which you
find yourself amazed.
And unbelief is thinking, seeing the extraordinariness of
everything and thinking that it's kind of ordinary. Yeah, that's
cough, covering up the beauty of the lovability and the amazingness
of things. So yeah, we need to be like the dervish that takes off
his rose petals and dances like a calendar in the whereabouts, the
Tavern of intoxication, which is what the world is designed to the
unnatural matrix matrix is a beautiful and ecstasy inducing
place, and to also see the beauty of awesome time, and to see the
beauty of the occult, and to see the necessity of the shadows as
well as the light as part of the necessary multiplication, of
being, we need all of that. And then we really become living
things.
We don't have dead hearts surrounded by this living
universe, we actually start to come alive and give a test be and
perform that function which human beings for 100,000 years have
always performed, which is to be alert to the sacred in and through
nature,
through primordial people has recognized the sanctity and the
indicative of it of nature. So we need to get into that space, and
returned to it. And sort of moral at the end of the story is to
preserve it. Because the secular madness is destroying even the
organic
reality of the planet, which is quite an achievement, but they're
doing it. And so people have this ecstasy, need to be defending this
life support system, which is not just the life support system of
our physical form, but also the life support system of that the
higher the higher the spiritual life, the reality of being human
and of seeing beauty and of being ecstatic which is within
ourselves. So insha, Allah,
at CMC will be a place not just of
mentation, but also of heart.
place not just of logic, but of love, a place where we teach
people and teach ourselves this fundamental Quranic lesson, which
is this TED abour. This contemplating the miracle of
things, contemplating the beauty of things, the love ability of
things and then however, poor we may be, in material terms will
have ecstatic lives in sha Allah.
So Allah subhanaw taala is always calling us to what is beautiful,
to what is loving, to what is amazing in every situation. That's
the gift of the deen. So may Allah subhanaw taala bring together the
people of CMC and the well wishes of CMC and we hope for their
prayers insha Allah and support this year and for many years to
come in sha Allah, Allah bless your bring you safely to the next
aid salam o aleikum wa rahmatullah wa barakato.