Abdal Hakim Murad – Seclusion & Love Session 2 Tahannuth
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Bismillah al Rahman al Rahim Al hamdu lillahi rabbil aalameen or
salat wa salam O Allah Ashrafi, India even more serene Seaton and
Muhammad in wa ala alihi wa sahbihi at Moraine. So welcome to
the second of these somewhat domestic lectures on my topic of
seclusion and love. And it's as we move into the middle third of
Ramadan, the time of knock Farah, it's good to see the response that
CMC has had in this offering that it has for the Ummah, this
lockdown Ramadan, I have a lot of lectures from from from our key
staff for free. So alhamdulillah and we'll be announcing something
I think on social media later this week about a special feature which
will feature some of your feedback and requests. So that is becomes
properly interactive.
The topic
of Oslo one, the hotbar, we've already seen is quite central to
religion and
rather indicative,
particularly of the specific quality of Islamic or Ishmaelites
religion, that particular Israeli way of being Abrahamic. And we
reflected last time on some of the implications of this, and of
Islam's corrective role historically,
we know the famous doctrine of cyclical revelation, which is part
of our teaching, Allah subhanaw taala, sends a messenger
heals humanity sets them, right, Islam is accomplished. And then as
the generations move by,
things start to deteriorate through a kind of process of
natural entropy, human beings get forgetful as well as nostalgic,
and it may come to pass that a new religious dispensation is
required, and a new book revealed. And we saw that the specific
timing of the arrival of Islam was related to the decline of Al
Kitab, and particularly the the Nosara, insofar as a very strongly
world denying movement had grown up.
And obviously, the reasons for the arrival of the new dispensation
were more more than that, and what to do with the need for the
fullness of revelation in the form of the Quran to be to be gifted to
mankind, and also to do with certain doctrinal complexities
that were actually tearing the Middle East apart, largely to do
with the dual nature of Christ, the Trinity issues that were
costing millions of lives. And so Islam comes with the with the
clear sort of towheaded cuts to all of that, and just restores
people to the the Iberia of the One God. So a representative
mission. And the function of the prophets essentially, is just just
to help people to make things easier. And the Holy Prophet said
in a merb, or two more, yes, Sera, I've just been sent to make things
easier for people. And then we looked at the question of whether
actually we can know what we need to know as spiritual, pneumatic
human beings, without access to a revelation to a profit. To what
extent can we work it out through a kind of analogy or deduction or
natural theology from the world and we saw this rather charming
story of a live son of a white hive and the UK was on the idea
being that this youth brought up in the beauty and grandeur and
splendor of nature with wild animals to help him would end up
with a full set of particulars about the nature of life and the
existence of the Creator. And we saw the influence that that that
story has had,
being really at the fountainhead of the English novel, which is, I
guess, the greatest novel that is greater than the German or the
French novel with with Defoe, that there's an Islamic intervention,
though.
And this has to do with the waves of love, which I ended by talking
about, which we'll be looking at a little bit more carefully,
inshallah next time.
But you probably went away from that thinking, well, it's a very
pretty story. But would it really be like that? What would be the
fate of a baby washed up on a desert island?
And this really gets to this the essence of what we're talking
about in these lectures. What is the do balance between solitude
and seclusion on the one hand and rubbing shoulders with our fellow
humans on the other?
Now, the reality is, of course, there have been in the
complexities and the tragedies of human history, plenty of cases of
children left to their own devices of feral children and if you
to look them up, you'll see that in every case it entails a
tragedy.
They're all children, the famous wolf children of hessayon, central
Germany and the Middle Ages, supposedly brought up by wolves
rather like Romulus and Remus, the legendary founders of ancient Rome
who was suckled by a she Wolf. It's very ancient story and
thought, and then a range of others. And even in modern times,
the tragic story of somebody called Oksana Malaya, who was from
Ukraine only a few years ago, whose parents were both extreme
alcoholics, who just left this little girl from a very early age,
basically, to hang out with with the family dogs. And she obviously
grew up socialized by the dogs. And when she was finally taken
into care, 10 years or so later, she barked, and she walked on all
fours. And even today, as an adult, she finds it very difficult
to speak and to engage normally. And you could think of many
examples, and it is common sensical. Because we need to be
socialized. And that's really what Tarbiat and what childhood is
about. It's not about the absorbance of information,
primarily, but about knowing how to engage with other human beings.
And
this has been confirmed by a lot of studies because the modern
world as well as the pre modern world is interested in this idea
of the autodidact, to what extent can we learn without others?
So that the famous or some would say notorious Professor Harry
Harlow, at University of Madison, Wisconsin, earned a rather dark
reputation for himself in the middle of the 20th century. He
himself was the depressive person after the death of his wife. And
basically, he had a lab in which he experimented with parental
deprivation, deprivation on primates. So these are basically
rhesus monkeys plunged into seclusion, Oslo, from their very
earliest days, in a horrible device that he called the pit of
despair, which was a kind of metal box, very uncomfortable in which
these poor baby monkeys would be brought up. And, of course, when
they became mature, they were completely and permanently
dysfunctional. So if they had babies, they would eat their
babies, that kind of thing, just horrendous experience and whether
the experiments are really necessary when it's fairly obvious
that we do need socialization that we do need, parenting is a good
question. So as well as solitude,
which actually sometimes can be good for us. Sometimes we need to
get away from things in order to write that paper and to revise for
exams, and to pray.
That aspect of Oslo there is also
loneliness. That's another thing that we need to think about.
There's a distinction between solitude and loneliness. You might
say in the Islamic terminology, water and washer, what is being
alone.
washer is being desolated by solitude, really suffering from
it. And it is a very real source of medical harm, physical as well
as mental harm. It's one of the harshest things that you can do to
a human being like a poor Ukrainian child is worship, which
in the Arabic language has the sense of kind of being reduced to
animal status and to lose all of the finer feelings. So the
dopamine receptors are our hit. There's less pleasure hormone in
the system. There's a lot of cortisol released when we're
feeling really, chronically alone. And there's negative health
impact. And clinically, it's demonstrated that loneliness is a
major factor in stroke, and in heart disease, and in dementia,
high blood pressure, a whole lot of things as well as mental health
issues as well.
So
the notorious supermax prisons in America where you're kept
completely isolated from any human contact for 23 hours a day, and
even for that remaining hour, everything is very kind of formal
and cold and limited and inhuman.
The UN investigated the American supermax prisons and and said that
it was a fundamental, inhuman and degrading principle. But
that, of course, fell on deaf ears and there are 10s of 1000s of
people being subjected to that kind of solitary confinement and
particularly cruel thing and loneliness also, is a major cause
for solitude for suicide amongst the young. So in our
individualistic and atomistic world
Hold, where we're told to be individuals to be ourselves, where
the basic social unit is the individual, the free sovereign
person, released and liberated by the Enlightenment rather than the
family or the church or the congregation or the tribal,
whatever it might be. But the individual society made up of
individuals. So needy Thatcher famously said, There's no such
thing as society. And they've done a lot in the last 20 or 30,
neoliberal years to break down the structures of
social care, and the infrastructure that
society really needs for proper sociality. And the result has been
an epidemic of loneliness. So not solitude, that OSLA that water,
that loneliness washer, as really one of the great epidemics of our
time. So do you enter has a campaign to end loneliness? How
are they going to do it? It's not very clear in the UK, we now have
the world's first minister of loneliness is a Baroness Baron
who's being wheeled out we have a lot of there's a proliferation of
ministries now. And this is one of the latest ones. How to make
people less lonely when it's equivalent. Worse than being
obese. It's worse than smoking 15 cigarettes a day it's regarded as
a public health crisis. It's an epidemic probably kills more
people than the Coronavirus, but it's caused by the fact that our
society is disrupted, and that as well as occasional solitude which
is a good and a healthy thing. There is this loneliness, which is
not a good and a healthy thing, but in fact, a real form of
cruelty. George Monbiot, environmental campaigner and
columnist, says that future generations if there are future
generations after the climate catastrophe, we'll call our age,
the age of loneliness, because it's so widespread, and cities are
full of people, but they're not really engaging with their
neighbors. Families are not really properly engaging the way they
did, the dinner table is abandoned. More than half of
families in England, according to The Daily Telegraph recently
have a family meal together less than once a week. It's it's
fragmented, even on the most sort of fundamental nuclear family
bases. ALS is a society of individuals that is falling apart,
which of course raises interesting questions and I talk about this in
my new book for the requirements that Muslims integrate, there
should be social cohesion, we should integrate into wider
society, we should participate in societies, shared values, etc,
etc. Every government has to say this in order to please
the right wingers and a phobic lobbyists, Muslims need to
integrate certainly the Orthodox Jews and other communities
Plymouth Brethren who are separate, quite innocuous
communities, usually with very high degrees of integration and
sociality, a soft but amongst themselves, but they're being
barked at regularly and told to integrate, but into a society that
is disintegrating.
So we integrate into something that is disintegrating. Whether
you old people are kind of locked away in care homes, where young
people are increasingly basically socialized by school and even
nourished and fed at school because of the disastrous
consequences of the collapse of traditional values. And it's not
clear where this is going to go. But human beings, as
mon Bo said, are designed as pack animals, the human bee, he calls
us we're supposed to live in hives to hum together to make honey,
we're not really supposed to be a society of lots of little atoms
moving around in a kind of Brownian motion. This is This is
horrible.
And one of the features of modernity that really is of
concern to religious people is this enlightenment freeing up of
the human individual turning into a society that isn't really
society any longer. I live in a village, the post offices closed.
The church has a diminishing congregation. The even the
telephone box is now disconnected.
There's no shop and this is normal. So where there was a local
infrastructure and places for neighbors to engage and to chat
and families to get together, even a generation ago, there's hardly
anything and loneliness can be quite acute in in rural areas. And
this has to do with the decline of religion more than anything else.
Religion provides us with the best congregation and the best reason
to congregate there's really no substitute for a church community
or a mosque or community or a synagogue.
to the pub can't really supply for that, because the pub is not going
to organize a Women's Institute and go out to help refugees and
the poor of the parish and have a Sunday school, a pub is just a
pub, it may seem to be a center for sociality, and a place where
loneliness can be fought, but it doesn't really have the the benign
social impact that a place of worship is going to have.
So as we move forwards, in our
increasingly fragmented Western societies, and we're invited to
integrate, we have to bear this in mind integrating into what
do your neighbors really want to know your name? Even? Do they want
to get involved in your life? Isn't it easier to just sit in bed
and text somebody in Singapore? This is the reality the way in
which we're going. And I think that in terms of making our Islam
functional in the west and explaining it, we have to bear
this in mind. The Sharia and the Sunnah, and our clock are designed
for a healthy kind of society where people are properly engaging
with each other, with a family and the extended family are a reality
where neighbors know each other, they may hate each other, or they
may cooperate, but people know each other.
I remember that
one of my first trips to the Balkans was to a village. And this
was decades ago now, in the mountains, the middle of nowhere,
where you could really get a sense of how human beings always used to
be before the new generation and the modern kind of Oslo that we
have, not knowing who your neighbor is, and old people dying
in their beds and not being discovered for years and the
other, increasing horrors of our fragmented modernity.
This was a little village in central Bosnia, that actually
taught me a lot because in my modern London upbringing, I hadn't
really seen or experienced anything like it, it was like a
trip to the Middle Ages.
One took this astonishingly slow train from Sarajevo to Zen, it's a
and then a remarkably, creaky bus up into the hills. And this was in
the middle of winter, was really cold. And there were these dark
forests with trees covered in snow, everywhere until we got to
this little village. And the village was kind of an ordinary
Bosnian village. But as I say, it taught me so much about how human
beings really flourish. And why we're so dysfunctional in our
technically enabled modernity.
In those days, you could tell a man's religion by the shape of his
house, this is a tradition in, in Bosnia, the Muslim houses always
square and white. And this was a Muslim village that will the
houses square and white. And in this house, everybody was kind of
extended family would sleep together in a single room,
no seclusion in this village. And you had to develop certain social
skills in order to get along with people in Whose room you would be
for most of your indoor life. So it would be the old people
toothless grin is sort of smiling next to the stove and making
complicated kinds of bread, and there'll be babies yelling all in
this room. And then at night, everybody would sleep and there'll
be these kind of amazing, thick, either downs, which are like
carpets, that would be heavy, but you need them because it was minus
25 outside. And that always wake up, you'd see somebody putting
logs on the fire in the middle of the night, you needed that. That's
why we're all together in a single room. And if you needed the
bathroom in the night, oh, my god, you'd have by the light of the
fire to get to the door, Put on your coat, put on your boots, and
go through this yard. And I knew the two cows in the yard and you
can bump into the cows and feel them breathing on you until you
got to the outhouse. And then you realize
the water is frozen in the outhouse. So you'd have to go back
again to get the water and it was a kind of primordial thing. People
must have lived that way in those mountains for 1000s of years. It
was really a form of time travel. And then Fajr and the men would go
to the mosque, and the mosque was colder than a deep freeze. And
outside the mosque. Along comes the farmer whose son was in with a
hammer. The hammer is so he can break the ice on the water trough
so we can all do our will dock from this water over these pink
face jolly peasant standing around in their bare feet on the ice. I
didn't appreciate that too much. But
it was an interesting insight into a community that was really off
the fitrah they didn't really need the outside world. They produced
their own food. They didn't have horses, they didn't
produce their includes any longer. But it was interesting to see that
they didn't have anything.
There was one
thrown in the village, and a few black and white televisions, you
could watch sort of rather cheesy Yugoslav War dramas or
violinists, that it was not interesting. Human beings were
engaging with each other all the time. That was the richness of
people's lives. That's why they smiled. And that's what was
interesting in the village, the gossip, the scandals,
religious stories, all of that, and it was profoundly healthy. I
found it a very healing experience to be in that the modern eyes,
incredibly congested, claustrophobic, poor environment.
Now, the shitty and the Sunnah are for the fitrah. And of the fitrah,
as we said, last time, and for that environment,
in a modern environment, we'll need to remember this when we try
and explain some of our principles, especially family
principles to the outside world. It's hard for us to envisage a
world in which there's an extended family.
In other words, a woman if she's badly treated by her husband, the
traditional assumption is that the woman's brother will come along
and beat the husband up. And that still happens in traditional parts
of the Muslim world. The assumption is its families,
extended families, when you get into the modern environment of
atomized individuals, and maybe single parent families, and
everything is very broken. A lot of those rules seem harder to
understand the inheritance rules witnessing rules, we need to
understand, understand this and the HD head has to be on that
basis. The Sangha is there as the precious reminder of how we should
live as Fitri human beings. But we may find that as people have been
enculturated into modernity, there's certain things that we
find it harder to understand. But it's still there to protect us.
And it's still about common sense and what's normal.
Look at this, me to movement that has gone viral in America
recently. All of those women, quite rightly, who've been
harassed and abused, standing up and asking for justice and calling
those men usually men to account
and you see the absurdity of the modern liberal individualism in
that situation.
The teenage girl who goes for an interview in Harvey Weinstein's
hotel room, at a Waldorf Astoria, late at night, and the modern
liberal thing was he is equal, of course, equal they're equal Well,
yes, equal.
But that's not the only thing that can be said about that's about
that situation. Where's the brother? Where's the Matra?
Where's the Father. And as a result, the society really is torn
between on the one hand, the desire for individualism and on
the other hand, the reality the bene Adam, and how we actually our
lot actually works in the summer, there Shetty. Even if we find
certain things, patriarchal is still there to protect us. And we
should always have respect for it and see what it has to offer. So
we're in a profoundly individualistic and therefore
dysfunctional environment, where solitude is not something that
people will occasionally savor, the shepherd in the hills got away
from the village for a while, not listening to the old lady's gossip
any longer, and he can decompress up on the mountain site. But
loneliness, which is the modern plague, likely to get worse. And
with the growth of automation, which is likely to progress after
the end of the corona crisis, it's going to get worse, the gossip in
the shop is less likely because you're ordering things online. Or
you're just paying a robot that barks out instructions to you in
an inhuman voice and that human contact has been lost. And one by
one, the traditional forms of human sociality have been
confiscated by modernity
basically, because it's cheaper to find digital alternatives. So
there's
different types of loneliness of this washer is to wash.
There is
and psychologists talk about social loneliness. In other words,
you haven't got people around you, you might be in an American
supermax, banging your head against the wall after 10 years.
But there's also emotional loneliness, which is another
problem in our society that even if you're with people a lot, there
may not be a very good bonding with those people. It may be
formulaic, and a classic example of this is the Royal Navy sea
captain who is figure of such or that the other officers in the
ship and suddenly the ratings can't really be friendly with him
because
He's the captain. That's the loneliness of command. And
sometimes rulers experience that they see some of the Ottomans,
sometimes very lonely people. There's also family loneliness,
which is particularly acute and the one that actually leads to the
larger number of
buying biomedical negative outcomes. And as we increasingly
forget, even the names of our cousins, let alone stay in regular
touch with them. This is more and more common.
We might also say from an Islamic perspective that we don't to add a
fourth category, which we might call natural loneliness.
And by this I mean that if you're in the Bosnian village, you see
that people have an engagement with other human consciousnesses,
but also an engagement with animals. In this village, where
everything was so richly experienced, every field would
have a name, every corner of the woods would be associated in the
local mind with a particular event, you'd know where to get the
mushrooms that profoundly inhabited the land, something that
has largely been denied us that also all of the animals would have
names, sometimes quite comical names. It wasn't just cows called
Daisy, but it was sort of amusing.
And people had a real relationship with animals, which is part of pre
modern normalcy. Even the hunter and the prey have a certain
understanding that he empathizes with the prey and what it's likely
to do next, and where it's likely to be found in the forest.
Traditional life is about sociality is about engaging with
human tumors, but also the animal illness. We saw this last time
that creatures are defined Quranic Lee, as Oman and Thurlow, come
nations like yourselves. And our engagement with them is
particularly important. We know that the Holy Prophet salallahu
Alaihe, salam, in those extraordinary Hadith had ways of
communicating with animals, and saying that the world had this
facility as well. And that's a kind of mysterious thing. But it's
something real, an animal is clearly a sentient being, which is
why in Sharia, it has rights. So that's another thing that we've
lost. And so the National Health Service has a big pet therapy,
animal assisted therapy, they call it, and it's well known that the
presence of animals is very beneficial in certain
cases of anxiety and depression, again, unless you've got a captive
stroke in the evening, which isn't really the same thing as grazing
sheep. That's another form of sociality that has driven us into
a modern state of, of extreme
loneliness.
Now,
an interesting aspect of this, when you think about it is that
human life
actually begins
in a state of seclusion.
So if you think about what you remember, her dad calls the lives
of man, first of all, we are with all of humanity with everybody the
Big Jim our, the day of Alice to be Rob become a no, not your Lord.
And we all say it's the first person plural. Bala Shahidullah.
Yes, we bear witness, not as individuals, citizens, but as many
Adam, we all say that together.
And then we're separated out into the Durham
that ain't Angel breathes the rule into the fetus
in a unimaginable process,
and then the fetus is alone.
Although there is a particularly profound relationship with the
mother,
we need to think about this as well as so much in our heritage
about how to treat mothers how to honor mothers, what to feed
mothers with. And motherhood is one of the great signs of allow,
which is why sort of Meriam is this sort of astoundingly
beautiful celebration of woman in her
Quintessence.
And this miracle that she alone experiences of the insufflation of
the spirit within her is the introduction of a new soul.
infinitely precious that to which the angels can bow down within
this gararion McKean. The Quran speaks quite a lot of embryology
and the stages of the development of the fetus. And then this
insufflation does breathing in of the spirit, this humanizing
moment, but then, a fetus is alone.
Unless of course
There's a twin.
And this is another of the great mysteries that remind us of how
profoundly we need each other. In the case of twins, it's very often
in a very intensified form. Identical twins in particular, and
everybody has strange stories that they've heard of twins. I know a
woman that went into labor and her unmarried sister was woken up in
the middle of the night by contractions.
Other people and a girl I know in Cambridge who converted to Islam,
called her identical twin who was in America at the time, I said,
Guess what, there's this thing called Islam. And I've just taken
something called my Shahada. And the identical twin had also taken
her shahada, lots of stories like that. And this is not particularly
from Sharia, or from our doctrine. It's just from kind of human folk
wisdom, almost just part of the experience of living in bodies as
human beings. And there is a particular bond between two
fetuses, two souls in the womb. Three, if it's triplets, which is
a particularly profound thing, which should indicate to us that
sibling hood is important.
And the fact that siblings are so often driven apart in modernity is
another tragedy, another aspect of human richness that is being lost.
The Turkish language does this very nicely. A sibling, a brother
or a sister in Turkish is Kadesh, which means somebody who has
shared a womb with you. That's a very beautiful way of talking
about their sibling. It's a very profound
concept. And a pregnant woman is called iki janela, which means to
sold because she's this miraculous, revered phenomenon in
Allah's creation that contains within herself not just one rock,
but two.
I guess she's three sold if it's, if it's twins.
So
this also indicates that even before we enter the world, and
start getting brought up, hopefully by caring parents, and
engaging with society, in that order, there can also be an
engagement and that this is a subtle and a spiritual thing that
needs respected, that Ebola had let eat us alone to be He, while
our ham, Fear God, concerning whom you question each other, and the
wounds,
most fundamental tie,
the family, basic unit of society, the family, the basic unit of
sociality is the family and our religion stands or falls on that
the Holy Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam was a family man.
So we've made this distinction so far. And hopefully this clears up
some confusion between seclusion and loneliness.
We now need to think about the religious dimensions of seclusion.
Loneliness is just a bad thing.
Has nothing positive about it really, except in certain other
religious traditions, but not an answer, we might look at this the
idea of sacred loneliness as being a blessing but does not and
Islamic concept.
So, seclusion can have certain benefits, unlike loneliness, it
can even have medical benefits is seen to enhance cognitive ability
under certain circumstances and the memory. Now, remember what I
was trying to say last time about Islam coming in this reparative
way to restore the principle of love, human love for each other,
human love for God. At a time when things have become very austere
and ascetical and punitive and dry, laden with guilt,
particularly in the Western tradition.
Islam comes along and the earlier dispensation dispensation of Satan
Eisah alayhis, salam, and mercy had moved in the direction of this
era Baniya
is monasticism
and some quite acute forms of asceticism.
The neglect of the body.
People like St. Simeon. If you go to Orthodox churches today, very
likely, you'll see an icon image of St. Simeon
sitting on his
Syrian column. Right at the top. He spent 39 years on top of a
column, eating sleeping, mainly praying there in order to be in a
state of seclusion and away from the temptations of the world away
from women away from fitna.
And there were 1000s upon 1000s of people who are doing similar
things like that in that era.
And
the idea of the * for instance, that is to say a kind of
monastery where the monks live, individually and in little huts
and come together maybe once a week, you can still see that in
the wedding not from originally the skaters Valley, which is to
the north of Cairo, there's still hundreds of monks, they're living
in caves and little huts. hermitage is
and this is one of the things that Islam did not continue
and does not really approve Simeon on his pillar, even spending a
year standing on one leg, according to the historians tying
himself up so that he wouldn't fall off in the night and the rope
bit into his flesh, which rotted away and he was happy when he saw
the worms eating the flesh. And when the worms are drop off, he
would pick them up and put them back into the womb, saying, return
to your to your dinner, and really revered these secret athletes.
Were at the heart of
Christian party for so long.
So just to give you a bit of
Tennyson friend of mine yesterday said that I mustn't neglect tennis
and he has a poem on St. Simeon. This is part of it.
Let us avail just dreadful Mighty God, this not be all in vain, that
thrice 10 years thrice multiplied by superhuman pangs, in hungers
and thirsts fevers and colds and coughs, aches, stitches, ulcers,
throws and cramps, a sign bitwixe, the meadow and the cloud patient
on this tool pillar, I have borne rain, wind, frost, hate, heat,
hail, damp, and sleet and snow. Well, that's a kind of heroic
piety, you get to God by self torture.
But this is not our way. And one of the blessings that the new
Israelite dispensation brought was that that was swept away.
The Islamic historians say that the origins of monasticism were
when the Romans were persecuting the early Christians, Romans being
pagan at the time, and they fled into the hills. And this is a song
that in Islam as well, particularly in the end times, and
they fled to hermitage is so we find Abu Bakr Siddiq saying to his
army, when they were going into Syria, you will find people who
have shot themselves up in cells, leave them alone, because it's for
the sake of Allah that they have shut themselves up. And generally,
we find the center for the early Muslims treating these people with
very considerable respect. We know that the Holy Prophet treated by
Hera the monk with very considerable respect, and that's
an important moment the recognition of his future prophecy
in the Sierra. And if you've been watching Cambridge mosques,
Ramadan TV, you may have seen the documentary on on the blessing
tree and you see the ruined mastic cell, it's still there, and it's
next to the tree. It's very extraordinary place, place to
visit.
And the early Muslims encountered these people, and were quite
amazed by them. So
one of the self said this is an English translation, I met a raw
hip once Rob is a monk one of these anchorites and asked him, Do
you never fear being alone? Are you not afraid of solitude?
And he replied, If you've tasted the delight of solitude long for
it away from yourself, solitude is the beginning of the worship of
God. What is the first thing you find in solitude? Peace, far from
human interaction and safety far from those evils which accompany
it? When May the servant taste the bliss of intimacy with God, when
his love for God becomes purely communion with Him with a sincere
heart? When is his love pure when all his desires are concentrated
in one to obey God, lots of stories in early Islam about the
tablet I mean, and others, people like Apple, Solomon, a Dharani,
settler to study and others engaging with those ahead. And we
find in the Quran, even these people who are choosing sacred
solitude mentioned
where the Christians are praised it says nearly gonna be under fee
him because see, seen our abandon. We're in the homeless tech bureau
that is because there are amongst them, priests and more
And because they are not proud and then the verse aura Bernie yet and
if teda Oh Ha. Mercator Vanessa I lay him elaborate ya read one on
Ridwan Illa for not allow her hackery IoT Hub and monasticism
that they invented, we did not prescribe it upon them, but
seeking the pleasure of God, but they did not uphold it correctly.
So
what we would say then, looking at those early spiritual athletes,
and they still exist,
if you go to Mount Athos, in Greece, which until 1912, was part
of the Ottoman Empire.
And that period, actually, in many ways was the flourishing of, of
Athens, Republican Greece has tended not to treat it so well. 20
monasteries, but it's a day maybe 15,000. Monks, huge population
like cities. In this whole area, which is a peninsula of Greece,
quite a large area. No women are allowed.
No female animals are allowed. Until 1932. You could have hens
and so egg with your breakfast, and then the strip, the monks
decided that this was outrageous as well. And so they killed all
the female hens. And it's It's hardcore monasticism.
And there's different forms of it. But it's an interesting insight
into the kind of extreme penitential attitudes that
characterized early Christianity, if you wanted to get to God, you
mortified the flesh war has shut you flagellated. And perhaps he
went alone into the wilderness.
I was once with a group of Christian pilgrims in Palestine.
And we visited a monastery on the road between Jerusalem and Jericho
area.
And, of course, it's a very stressed and tormented landscape.
So you see the wells that are only allowed to be used by the Israeli
settlers, the nice roads for the Israelis and the miserable roads
for the Palestinians, which includes the local Christians and
it's a very, for a serene Holy Land. It's appalling the way it's
been scratched and, and and violated. It's a tragedy, but the
monastic thing is, gets away from that. So St. George's why
difficult? You have to walk to that down the valley is a little
stream, you can see rock hyraxes in the hills, it's real desert.
And the monks welcomed us although they thought all of these western
questions were outrageous heretics, and they told them that
at one point,
and we were shooting into the chapel, and very proudly, they
showed us the body of one of their brothers, the Romanian monk, who
had died five years earlier, the young man, and they just dug him
up and put his body in the chancel of the church with a kind of cloth
over him because he his sneakers sticking up at the end. And they
were going to render him down and put his bones in the Oscar in the
scar would be on the shelf with all of the other skulls and the
monastery has been there since before the rise of Islam. Muslims
never touched it, they hardly noticed the rise of Islam.
And the monks took us out and pointed up to the cliff saying
we have anchorites here as well.
The really serious hardcore monks, when they're young, they go up
into one of those caves. And they stay there for the rest of their
life. They might be there for 550 6070 years, the hoist up a
basket of food every day, when it comes down, untouched. They know
that the guy has died or send up the successor and the body is
invented down at the skull goes on the shelf. So that still goes on
but it not ethosce It still goes on. The only Muslims were seeing
this. And this is really what the Quran is saying when it says for
murder, oh huckberry iOttie ha they didn't. They didn't maintain
it correctly. This is too extreme.
The the normative paradisal blessed human state is eaten the
place of plenty, and a place of companionship. It's not some kind
of eternal cave.
But this is the view that they took St. Augustine when he had his
conversion, immediately dropped his girlfriend and his child and
that was normal for the time. So the difference then is there can
be a sacred seclusion. But there can also be a kind of cultivation
of the torment of loneliness, which is perverse. Simone vile who
was very strange but brilliant.
Think of the mid 20th century said the extreme greatness of
Christianity lies in the fact that it does not seek a supernatural
realm
Ready for suffering, but a supernatural use for it.
In other words, the pain, the torment, the scratching of the
soul caused by just terrible loneliness breaks you and hence
opens you up to the transcendent. Now, Islam
doesn't appreciate that the Islamic way is very different. So,
if we still got time, let's get some of the Bearcat of the Sierra
and the Sunnah. And the amazing thing about these stories is that
you can listen to them a billion times and they're always new
right at the beginning of sahih al Bukhari.
I will omad wouldn't be here Rasulullah sallallahu alayhi wa
sallam Ninawa he wrote here Salafi gnome
and then HobbyBoss LA who have that. This is a Ramadan Story Of
course.
Before the Holy Prophet became a prophet, solitude seclusion was
made beloved to him. Well Can they can all be Hari Hara, and used to
go into solitude into retreat, the Cave of the mount head up, theater
Han nettle Fie, he,
he would engage in to handoff
now that's a strange word and may even be Syriac in its origin. So
memorable Harry or the narrator says, an explanation. Whoa, a
taboo delay earlier the word he added means to worship for a
specific number of nights
is the 100th solitary in the cave in this kind of monk like
devotion,
gobbler and yen Xia Isla Li Wei, it is a word really VALIC before
he go back to his family, and take provision for a single similar
period of time.
Her third year I will hop over Hua Vihari Hara until the truth.
Capital T came to him when he was in the cave of hair up for jet I
will mela Kufa ka la cara and the angel came to him and said, recite
Allah Myrna Bukhari, he said, I am not a reciter or I'm not a reader
call for aka Neva Thani, bellava Mini al jihad, jihad. So he took
me and squeezed me until I came to the end of my endurance film The
Other 70 Then he let me go for ConAgra and said, Read or recite
all tuna and avocado, I said, I am not a reader of reciter for aka
Danny, and this happens three times.
And then the third time we get the first words of the miracle of
God's book will cover up this Mira beacon lady HELOC, HELOC, I'll
insert them in Alok, Accra, whare Bukal kromm Zero 96 Isn't it
recite in the Name of your Lord who created created man from a
clot of blood? Recite and your Lord is the Most Generous?
That's not the end for Raja Ebihara Rasulullah sallallahu
alayhi wa sallam Yara to fulfill Aadil the Holy Prophet went back
with them with the verses that his heart was palpitating.
For duckula Allah Khadija taburiente Hadith Radi Allahu
Allah. So he came in upon Khadija, his wife and said some below Nizam
below me cover me up, cover me up. So he's been covered in this
blanket, this cape whatever it is, had the hubba unhulled route.
Okay, and then we know the story that had eaten her then reassures
him, confirms in she is the first believer and takes him to her
uncle Wakaba NOFA in order to find out more about this angelic
visitation.
So, here we see a difference. What is the difference? He is in his
cave and experiences this extraordinary experience and then
goes to his family.
The seclusion is not permanent, the halwa is not eternal. The monk
just dies in the cave, whether he's experienced God or whether
he's gone mad, both are said to happen, dies in the cave. The
scholar is put on the shelf
in the Islamic way, the new way. He goes to Khadija and she helps
him she consults him she does what a wife does for her husband. She
supports him. Radi Allahu Anhu.
So a difference is coming right at the beginning of this new
dispensation. Something more cheerful. God is bringing
something new that affirms family that affirms gender that affirms
womanhood that affirms a life, life itself, and hence the
principle of marhaba this love that we're going to talk about a
bit more in the next session in sha Allah, another thought
a few weeks ago, we marked the
The commemoration of Israel one miraj
the probably culminating event of the Holy Prophets Korea, the night
journey and the ascension.
Now,
one thing that nobody ever talks about in that is that when does it
begin and when does it end? The first great moment that extra
shattering experience of the devil of the angel
and then
that is that will Mirage this next combination
the night before he has been invited to spend the night with
his cousin
on Haneke, Muslims call her on the hairnet. She's 32 bint
Abu Talib
and her husband is home Eric is staying in their family so she is
been a bit taller. So she's Imam Ali's sister so she's kinswoman.
Close, close relation a cousin.
State and I placed it with my family she says so he spends the
first part of his night with with on hernias family following her
invitation. Then he goes up in the middle of the night to the hedger
sleeps next to the Kaaba.
And then it happens.
goes to Jerusalem. There's the Barak and then Sidra, turned on to
her for Ken Acaba, cow Saini Oh Edna, and then the return, having
led all of the NBA in prayer in that wonderful affirming,
inclusive Ishmaelites moment. And then he comes back. And
that's usually when we stop the story, but the Syrah writers go
on. He goes back after that shattering experience, the most
important experience in human prophetic history. He's been in
the sight of God, Mirza basato Mata, he's I did not swerve. The
angels couldn't go there. He then goes back to the house of Romanic.
And he tells her what's happened.
Some of the theater writers aren't even clear that she's a Muslim by
that point, but she does a Muslim.
And she says, Don't tell anybody about this, because they already
laugh at you. Now, this is during the marking period, and
everybody's persecuting them and laughing at Apple Talibs. Often.
And he gets up in his I'm going to tell them, and she pulls out his
garment, but he insists.
The point again, with this little insight is that just as the story
of the bed lie, the beginning of the revelation, kind of leads to
human engagement with family had EDA, the wife, the first believer,
so also the ranch begins and ends also with family, the extended
family, the cousin,
Avatar limbs, daughter on hand it the female cousin, family life.
And this is the meaning of what he says. And this has to be our last
point, when his
extraordinary moment of the Mirage and the angel offers him to
chalices one of wine, and one of milk
that he chooses the milk. And the angel says to him who detail it
fitrah you've been guided to the fitrah.
Now, it's fairly clear that the symbolism here is that of course
the wine in the chalice represents the sacramental
traditions of Christianity, the Eucharist,
the milk,
milk is of nature, wine has been denatured fermented, turned into
something that is not itself through the process of
fermentation, which is a kind of corruption rarely,
liquid corruption. Although in some earlier shadow wine was
permissible for us. parodic medically not the Holy Prophet
chooses the milk, which is from nature directly,
therefore, from the fitrah.
And so this is a sign it seems that he is to be the one who
brings the religion of nature that affirms nature to natural
sociality, his engagement with animals, his engagement with
women, his status as a parent, fully embedded in the reality of
life and enjoying the sociality of human life, which is a beautiful
thing and part of healthy human existence. So
that's one of the amazing things that you can learn when you look
at these Syrah stories again, and you notice something Well, that's
interesting, and particularly against the backdrop of this
hugely punitive war of the body that Christianity had launched by
that time.
Yeah, better, more human.
more humanistic, more humane, more life affirming, less guilt ridden,
we can't really escape the body, there has to be a legitimate
outlet for desire. Eve was not created to be pushed away. The
garden is a sign of Allah's gift and try and make the world a
garden, the garden will be your place of return. So yes, better,
better than the rock band here, even though we always protected
them. We protected the monks of Mount Athos, and St. Catharines
and all of those places for so many centuries, but we didn't
follow them.
So, the to get back to the point that we raised at the beginning.
Yes to seclusion, but the seclusion leads back to family
members so he goes back to his wife when he's done the purgation
that was necessary for him. No matter honey nebula see returns to
family life and becomes a very sociable person after his years of
seclusion.
The Holy Prophet salallahu alayhi wa sallam after his great times of
seclusion in the wilderness returns to his family does not
stay in the wilderness. And this
balance, yes to seclusion sometimes. Sometimes there's a RT
calf but we go back to our families due to loneliness, and
therefore no really to the age of loneliness, which, as George
Monbiot points out is a good way of characterizing our fractured
and tragic modern reality. We see again, the blessing of this theory
and its applicability and appropriateness to our
circumstances. And again, to pick up on something I was trying to
say last time, we need to change our modality as Muslims in the
west from being grumblers to being healers. And I have a chapter in
my new book, which is about that Western Muslims from complainant
to therapists, instead of endlessly grumbling about we want
halal meat in the prisons, and we want this and we want you to stop
Islamophobia and give us this give us that and being beggars really
for these these things. We need to see how we can heal society. What
can we do about the people who die abandoned by their families alone?
What can we do about the children who arrive hungry at school every
morning? What can we do about all of those single parents, the
spiraling rates of anxiety, depression, mental illness in the
society, people are hurting? Instead of getting judgmental and
just blaming everybody and feeling superior, which is not really a
proper, humble religious response. Let's see what we can do to help.
And the Sharia that we have the Sunnah that we have is exactly
crafted to recreate sociality because we know yet Allah He
maldron Our last hand is with the congregation. This is a religion
of standing shoulder to shoulder can't do that at the moment, but
inshallah it will happen again. And we need to be presenting the
sunnah to our neighbors as a kind of medicine, chest, a set of
remedies, rather than something that makes us
engaged in special pleading, please tolerate our identity or
something like that. No, we should be proud and more confident. So
100 that we've moved through this territory, and I've done it in
quite a historical way to indicate one reason why Islam was necessary
and why it came as a kind of wave of love and pushing away of
something that by that time was very kind of punitive, guilt
inducing, unhappy caused, I think a lot of human happiness,
unhappiness and in some ways, even tried to do that. So
in short, a lot as we move through the month of Ramadan, and we're in
the third of Ramadan, which is about knock Farah. We ask Allah's
forgiveness at this time, and inshallah we'll also be thinking
about how to lose some of the excess pounds in the other sense.
We're losing some weight physically Insha Allah, but we
need to lose those, that that fat that is in our bank balances. And
Ramadan is always the best time of year to do that. The Holy Prophet
was at his Most Generous like the free wind as the Hadith said in
Ramadan would give and give and it's the thing that you spend
money on that you tend not to regret. You can regret buying your
new phone or car or whatever, but people tend not to regret money
that they've given for a good cause. So inshallah we know the
CMC community. Now friends, brothers, sisters will be generous
and our staff have been very generous with their time this
time, say Insha Allah, give generously to CMC, our little
institution shuttler with a big heart and help us to carry on
Salam Alaikum wa rahmatullah wa barakato.