Abdal Hakim Murad – Seclusion & Love Session 4 True & Metaphorical Love
AI: Summary ©
The cultural tradition of love in Arabic language is discussed, including the importance of the symbol of love for the divine and the symbol of love for women. The transformation of the spiritual journey is also highlighted, with a brief description of the "beauty of the mind" concept and "beauty of the heart."
AI: Summary ©
Bismillah R Rahman r Rahim Al hamdu Lillahi Rabbil Alameen wa
salatu salam ala cottony NBI even more saline. So you didn't know
Muhammad wa ala alihi wa sahbihi COVID-19
Allah on the indica iPhone Kareem on to head will offer for Annette.
We're coming to the end of our little series of four lectures on
the perhaps startling topic of seclusion and love.
And what I want to talk about today apart from at the end,
Inshallah, answering any questions that might drift in, is to
consider certain questions relating specifically to the
principle of MACBA. And or a SK two terms that we're going to want
to unpack a little bit in the context of our final religion.
Before we do so, however, it is always wise to be aware of the
nature of our minds and our present day modern sensibilities
and subjectivities human beings have changed, the way we perceive
the world and each other is not the way that we perceive the world
and each other, even two or three generations ago, our minds have
been shaped by a completely different experience of reality.
Today, increasingly, this is a digital world, a fast moving
world, a world of fake news and infotainment. This sense it's
bombarded upon us from an early age necessarily shaped the way the
brain develops. It's been shown, for instance, to the extent that a
pregnant mother is busy with a stressful activity, those stress
hormones will affect the way in which the brain forms in the
unborn child. And as a result, shapes that child's perception of
reality. And its ability to engage with sacred and profane matters
really, for the rest of its life. That it reef is one of my favorite
authors here, life among the death works where he talks about the
collapse of the traditional idea of society as being based on the
nobility of duty, and a move towards what he calls the new type
of man or therapeutic man. In other words, everything is about
us. And it's about what makes us feel better. And he looks in
particular at expressions of modern art. And of course, many of
the contemporary social warrior, social justice warrior issues are
related precisely to that is all about me and my grievances.
Christopher lashes another important figure here the culture
of narcissism, as as an age in which really, the self is the
measure of all things. So we live in a very odd world, and it would
be idle to claim that the ALMA has not been influenced by this, we
consume the same entertainment, we log on to the same news websites,
we've been shaped by this culture of narcissism as well. And very
often, when we look at religion, it tends to be in a very
individualistic way.
So
we saw that the story of
seclusion and love in the OMA begins with the aircraft, the
appearance of the Logos word in the world, that extraordinary
moment on the Hill of Harrop, when everything was changed, in the
name of something primordial and unchanging.
And that extra read, we then went on to compare with its equivalents
across the boundary in the Al Kitab. And we spent some time
looking at the rise of this long as a vindication of love, and of
the Divine Mercy in the face of a Christianity that seemed to many
to have gone off the rails and moved in the direction of standing
on pillars. flagellation, celibacy and the radical punishment of the
self, a guilt culture.
It's interesting to reflect that just as our story begins with the
chakra, the story of Western Christianity really begins with
St. Augustine, when he was on the streets of Milan, and he has a
child saying, told the Lega rise and recite, which he takes to be
the trigger for his conversion to Christianity. So I'll recite then
leads on to he goes back to the HUD IJA, and the family life of
Islam and a basically world embracing, and the world loving
and a God loving strategy of engaging with the divine seclusion
being present, but in a minor key. Whereas for Augustine, and hence
he's really the father of Western Christianity. The the recite leads
to renunciation, one of the first things he does after his
conversion to Christianity is to send away the mother of his child
off to Africa. He knows that he's never going to see her again
because now he's dedicated to the new Christianity, he has to be
celibate and the mother is not going to see her child again,
either. So there's a kind of Stark and iconic bifurcation, that
parting of the ways they're one
which is the path really almost a cult of death. mortification is
seeking of death, and the other a path of life and high awareness
through life. And we see this in the Sierra and the super abundance
of the sheer lived vibrancy of the Holy Prophet's life. So, we have
this enormous difference in Islam. We believe in overcoming the
passions in a certain type of Western monastic context. It's
about killing them and neutralizing them. So Clement of
Alexandria says, one of the famous thinkers for the monastic
movement, says the ancients. By him he means Plato, Aristotle that
the pagan Greek philosophers
sought to control the passions, but we, the Christians seek to
destroy the patterns. In other words, through enough agile
flagellation, you can really achieve the kind of stoics of
ataraxia and not be troubled by them anymore. And we saw how this
represents really a kind of symbolic Parting of the Ways
between Western Christianity because Eastern Christianity is
quite muted in this respect, and the way of Islam, way of Islam,
assuming the love of God through Tober loss upon another Tyler,
except October in His love and His compassion, as long as the Toba is
there and it's sincere and the sin is wiped out. Whereas in
Augustine's Christianity, it's very much a sense of our
repentance is not enough, our works are not enough. Instead, God
himself has to suffer horribly, to take upon himself that
consequences of God's anger with Adam, and it becomes in many, in
many perspectives, a kind of punitive and guilt inducing
tradition. We also saw that the rapper near the monks do elicit
some kind of respect and well spoken off in the Quran but but
our path of love our path of the embracing of life and the
acceptance of the possibility of really intuiting Eden in this
world is something that has always knocked us out from from Western
Christianity.
And then we moved on and we looked at Imam Al Ghazali. And last time,
we did the very traditional thing of systematically working through
the text and we saw how systematic treatment of the matter of
friendship and seclusion that Imam is able to offer. And we closed
after dealing with the book of Oslo of isolation, with a brief
dip into the companion book, which is the Kitab deber saga, the book
of the proprieties or the Curtis's of companionship or friendship,
which the late American matar Holland, translated into English
decades ago and has become one of the staples of ethical Muslim
writing in the English language. So just to get back to that and to
indicate the point I was trying to end with.
And the surprising point, just to cite a couple of Hadith from the
beginning of the Kitab deber saga
Rahu Abu Huraira Tierra de la one
in the whole Arshi manorbier Ami Nora in LA her Omondi basil, who
knows what we'll do who who knows, lace will be NBS a wala shahada of
bitumen Nebby universe Shahada. So the Holy Prophet sallallahu alayhi
wa sallam around the throne there shall be pulpits of light upon
which are people dressed in light, and their faces are full of light.
They are not prophets, they are not martyrs. But they are
interviewed by the prophets and the martyrs for Apollo era Salman
loved and they said O Messenger of Allah, Allah him Lenna
tell tell us who they are. For call Holman moto hub buena Fila,
well moto jelly, solar feeler, well motors are we gonna fill up?
And he says, they are the ones who loved one another in God sat with
one another in God visited one another in God. And then another
Hadith which is a famous Hadith in Bukhari, allah sallallahu alayhi
wa sallam met to have both nanny Villa Illa can, Boomer Ilahi Aisha
Tahoma, hood Valley Sahibi. He says that Allahu alayhi wa sallam,
never the two people love each other in God, this phrase that we
looked at, but that the most beloved of them to God is the one
who loves his friend the most. And there's a whole tranche of Hadith
along similar lines. And this is the note which Imam have as he
chooses in order to begin his book of friendship and companionship.
It's about not just some kind of social contract or psychological
ease, but it's about love this to have filler. It's the reflexive
sixth form of the route, loving one another in God.
An issue that comes up here is that very often in it
In these formulations One wonders, what do you love? Some so do you
hate others? Are you just kind of neutral towards them? Or do you
have to love everyone?
And there's a hadith which which speaks of a horrible filler? Well,
bold or filler,
loving for God, hating for God. Some people might say, well, it's
never very nice to hate other human beings is it? Well, think
about it. If people are inseparably associated with
hateful things,
mass murderers and the like. tyrants, torturous
to say, I love them. I just don't like some of the stuff they do is
actually to assume that you can separate them from their
intentions, which is probably unrealistic. It's like saying, Oh,
the Jews should
love Rudolf Hess the commandment of outfits, we Christians, we love
everybody love thy enemy.
Asking the Jews to love the perpetrators of the Holocaust
actually is a kind of moral outrage in itself. It just won't
do if people are deeply intertwined with hateful act than
hating them as the only appropriate and natural human
response. So we need we need to be clear about that there are certain
people who do deserve the divine hatred, and does not deserve the
human beings hatred as well. But it must be not an emotional but a
cold, and kind of axiomatic hatred.
So
and Emmanuel has only talks about this a little bit. But this
principle of love in God, not just lead, but filler becomes something
that is absolutely characteristic of the new religious dispensation,
which is dislodging the old death cult of the extreme fasters and
modifiers. Of late anti Christianity, and it's part of the
Bush era, the good news that Islam brings an embracing of life.
So we find many of the early Zoho had ascetics, we call them
aesthetics, but actually, they were absolutely full of love of
Allah subhanaw taala. And so non, for instance, is one of the early
ones so known and Morehead whose biography we often see, who says
every one of the degrees of spiritual advancement is actually
a degree of love. subber is a form of love, to work on is a form of
love. Reader is a form of love, etc, etc. They're all just
different ways of loving the Creator. And so we have in our
spiritual tradition, pretty unanimously the idea that the
progress towards the divine, which is the source and essence of all
beauty is necessarily a kind of falling in love,
and a falling out of love with self and ego.
So, this is an aspect of the religion, which it is fair to say
has been neglected.
Since the mid 19th century, things really have changed in the Muslim
conversation. And instead of Islam being about these things, and
these mahkamah act of love, love, and this being the orthok, oral
inand, the feminist handhold of faith loving for the sake of God,
we find that increasingly, there is a focus on formalism, more and
more focusing on fatwah collections and the formal meaning
of Hadith and snad, and folk, and kind of lopsided neglect of these
inward things of the affective states, but inwardly that religion
is most reliably to be found, because religion begins not with
actions, but intentions and an intention is an inward state. And
the intention comes spontaneously, you can't really control it comes
spontaneously, as a reflection of what's within yourself. So before
you begin any of your outward actions, you have to make the
intention. But it can't just be a kind of formalistic recitation,
because that's not really an intention at all. That's just
another action, something that precedes actions, which is that I
wish to do this, I love to do it, I know that it's right, God is
beautiful, I wish to do these beautiful things, so proceeds
spontaneously from the soul. And that's that's the reality of, of
Nia. So, if these this principle, the whole advent of the Holy
Prophet salAllahu alayhi wasallam of Habibollah is to restore to the
world the principle of love, and to push away these sort of
mortifications and these rather drastic underestimations of God's
good intentions towards humanity in creating the world, this world
hating ethos,
we need to resuscitate this and to reestablish its centrality. So a
book that was published recently is by William Chittick. And he
calls it divine love Islamic literature and the path to God. He
has spent his life looking at our literature
and it's been
inclusion is quite clear. So what kind of religion is Islam? Is it a
religion of knowledge? Is it a religion of law? Is it a religion
of theology? What how would you characterize it? Well, Chittick is
quite clear, this is his conclusion. Those familiar with
the histories and literature's of the Islamic peoples know that love
has been the preoccupation of 1000s of Muslim scholars and
saints. It's so central to the overall ethos of the religion,
that if any single word can sum up Islamic spirituality, by which I
mean, the very heart of the Quranic message, it should surely
be love. I used to think that knowledge deserve this honor. And
that the Orientis friends, Rosenthal had it right in the
title of his book, knowledge triumphant. Now, I think love does
a better job of conveying the nature of the Quest for God that
lies at the traditions heart is what is found, having looked
through all of those books and sources, and this is something
that as I say, certainly to our non Muslim nature, neighbors often
comes as a surprise. But it is the reality and hence we find so
powerful is this principle of love. inaugurated by the message
of the Holy Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam in our tradition,
that even the boundaries of the Dar Al Islam can't quite contain
it. And it's over spills those boundaries, and we spoke of the
Three Waves of love the Troubadour revival, in which the idea of
chivalric love starts to move into Europe, in the High Middle Ages.
And then the translation movements 17th 18th century where the great
Islamic classics, literary classics was done into European
languages and triggered a revival, and in many cases, actually
triggered the Romantic Movement itself. And Jeff unburdens book,
which I mentioned, is a good, a good record of that. And then in
our time, the wave of love that's coming from the ALMA from
Afghanistan. No less, is of course, that the Rumi phenomenon,
the extraordinary omnipresence of the poems of Rumi has become
America's best selling poet. It's one of the ironies of the age
surely, that the poet tomb Americans most loved to read, is
actually imam of the mosque from Afghanistan. Nobody tells them
that, but it's a sign of how powerful our civilization is and
how it can overcome all of the stereotypes and Islamophobia and
the Lahab ism and the rest that is held against us. Even in Trump is
Stan the land of the Muslim ban, they can't keep out that
principle, that third wave of love, we may not be surfing on the
crest of that wave, but it's there anyone it's unlocked countless
hearts to the message of Islam when they realize how close to the
heart of Mowlana rumours message is the Holy Prophet and the love
of the Holy Prophet. But we somehow are not
surfing that wave. And it's worth asking ourselves why, when we're
growing, grumbling about Islamophobia, why don't they love
us? Well, maybe one reason is that we are no longer ourselves. And
that to look at the armor today, makes one a little puzzled when
you read critics, conclusion, after a lifetime, in the library,
saying this is a religion of love, looks like something else,
increasingly a religion of vengeance, of anger, or
fundamentalism of various things of modernism of liberalism. But
that principle, which he says is the essence of this whole
tradition, is often not very conspicuous, which is a shame,
because the best way of overcoming Islamophobia and hatred is to
respond in the most beautiful way it for our ability, here, axon,
push back with something better.
But unfortunately, we've neglected this dimension of the tradition.
One of the things that we try and do at the Cambridge Muslim college
is to present Islam in its traditional fullness, not in the
kind of rather shriveled and edited version, that it's come
down to us to various reformist movement in the 19th and 20th
centuries, people who are looking for strategies of overcoming
colonial discourse, or missionary discourse, or a kind of idea that
we have to modernize ourselves, all of these apologetic exercises
have really reduced our access,
the balance of our access to the fullness of our tradition, which
is a great loss, and as a result is become externalized and
ideologized. But what happens if we go back to the traditional we
can do that by just stepping inside the libraries, those
immense the world's best libraries of the libraries of the Islamic
heritage 80,000 books just in Timbuktu, but extraordinary
oceanic, the productiveness and the beauty of our civilization,
but those libraries are not very well looked after.
All of those beauties, most of those books have not even been
edited, little and translated into English. What's been edited of our
heritage.
Maybe 1% of what was written. And if that 1% That's been edited.
Maybe point 1% has ever gone into a Western language, so we really
don't have access to it. And the books have their magnificently
beautiful texts, gathering dust.
There was an episode A while back, when the Egyptian national library
was kind of unveiled to the world nurses, a very old library. But
neglected, of course, and I've been there, and you would see,
windows would be broken pigeons would be flying in and out,
there'd be pages of manuscripts on the floor, the guy would bring you
a cup of tea and plunk it on the page of the manuscript. Not even
next to it leave a ring. It was just extreme third world
decadence. Nobody in the elites there seem to care.
And then King Juan Carlos of Spain, came on a visit to Egypt,
the Egyptian diplomat say yes, your your, your highness, what
would you like to see in Egypt?
And he said, I'd really like to go to your National Library.
consternation amongst the Egyptian elites, National Library, where is
it exactly that all caught up? doesn't even want to see tooten
Commons mask? Doesn't he want to be posing in front of the Sphinx?
What do you mean the National Library, manuscripts panic. And so
in a very short space of time, they had to give the police a
facelift and it was repainted and the windows were refitted so that
the royal prisons wouldn't say how in the modern Muslim world, these
treasures are actually maltreated and abused. very tragically,
that's unfortunately, the sad state of our own. Well, we no
longer know what our heritage is. The old ways are vanished. And as
a result, we have this very truncated and limited view of
Islam now that tends to externalize things and rejects the
spiritual core, which was always the essence of the religion. But
if you go to those places, you'll see shelf after shelf, room after
room of these majestically, beautiful calligraphic books, some
of them illuminated. And that's what Chittick is looking at. This
is a religion that has focused on the principle of love.
So what's happened is that
not only have the elites been uninterested or embarrassed by the
fact that they have a heritage, but also the fundamentalists don't
like those books anyway. Because they develop things they
interpret, they unveil amazing things. And it's a kind of
evolution that they won't accept because they just want this norm
of the first three generations.
So traditional Islam is like a great, beautiful tree,
shatter it in tayyiba
the roots of which, of course, the unarguable, immaculate scriptures
are and Hadith, and which then as it grows over time, and space
produces these branches and these fruits, and it's a magnificently
beautiful tree bigger, more beautiful, more productive than
the tree of any other Alma, it's extraordinary. We have more books,
than we have a deeper heritage than anybody else.
And then the fundamentalists come along and say, we don't really
like this tree. It's all a bit overwhelming. These books are
really complicated. And this logic is very strange, And the grammar
is difficult. And the Tafseer works are too many. So what they
do is they will take away this, we don't really want the theology the
kalam and we'll take away the spirituality, the soul thing, we
don't really want that and it's a bit challenging. And all these
Tafseer works that are based on the method so we'll get rid of
those and the fact that they chop everything down, branch after
branch until all you've got left of the tree is a stump. And they
say up now we've preserved and we have intact Kitab and Sunnah
because those are the roots, the roots are still there.
And out of that route, they're grown little shoots, not new,
beautiful tree, but little kind of shoots and miniature saplings. Not
one but many because of course fundamentalism divides the Ummah
into lots of little, fragmentary groups. So increasingly, this is
the spectacle that we have of Islam, where there was once this
beautiful tree,
we have a stump, and these sort of angry fundamentalist shoots
emerging from it to a certain height, and that's what's left.
Well, it's no surprise then that we're not really doing terribly
well, that those movements have not really reestablished the glory
of our civilization. We've cut the tree down, and we're all kind of
stumpy. We're all stump people. But all is not lost. Because the
automap still have the Jazz's, that connects us to the beauty of
that tree. The books are still there, even though they're
gathering dust in this pigeon sitting on them, and nobody even
knows their names any longer but they're still there. And Al
Hamdulillah
You can revisit that tradition because the Senate is still
connected, the books are still there. And you can see the
extraordinary beauty and the profound compassion and wisdom of
the Sharia, and the brilliance of the kalam and the depth and the
humanity of the two soul Wolf and it's majestic. It's incomparable.
So the tree seems to have been torn down and cut down. And
they're all the stumpy Muslims around. But actually the tree is
still there. Because those texts are still available and still
being taught and I suppose is the philosophy of CMC. One of the
reasons why we have that kind of vegetal motif in the
logo of CMC is that, you know, we believe that the fruits are still
accessible, the flowers still grow Alhamdulillah and we want the
fullness of Islam, not not stumpy Islam, but it's a tragedy, the
depth and the breadth of traditional Islam, removed in
favor of some kind of ideology.
In any case, if we do go back to those libraries, we do find that
Chittick is right is principle of muhabba divine love and love
amongst human beings because Allien image is normal in our
civilization, and is the binding principle.
One of the books that we have in the Arabic library at CMC, even
though the book is in Farsi, not an Arabic is a copy of Rashid
Rashid did in May, but is Cashville. Assad
said to be the first tafsir in the Persian language,
Rashida DHIN me booty was a humbly scholar
from somewhere and more or less what's now central Iran. And he
produces this majestic Tafseer, the first bit of which when he
deals with each verses a kind of translation, so Farsi speakers can
understand what the original means. And then he talks about the
outward meanings and the Hadith connected to to the verses. And
then he talks about the inward states which are unlocked by the
power of the Quran. The Quran is God's banquet, that the metal lion
has this extraordinary ability to unlock things and to point us to
the unseen world. And we saw the two things in this world that are
not of this world. Firstly, is the law which has been AMRI rugby,
it's read by Allah subhanaw taala into the fetus. That extraordinary
moment of insufflation nuff, hurrah. But it's not really of
this world, to Divine Spark, however hard maybe to conceive,
when that will teach them in alignment Illa kalila.
Acknowledged you've been given over only a little bit still, it's
been unreal, Robbie. And it's the basis of the angels authorization
to bow down to Adam Alayhis Salam so it's clearly not a dunya thing.
Is the Quran allows uncreated speech. And when we look for a
little color, of course, we remember the extraordinary mystery
of the sending down of the Quran. And the shattering effect of that
had on the Holy Prophet salAllahu alayhi wasallam in this and
opening Alika colon Takeda, we shall send down upon you a heavy
word.
And
the fact that the Quran is sent down but it's not written or
created on that night or any night it's Kalam, Allah, he'll Kadima is
part of us only doctrine that operand is an aspect of the Divine
speech which is uncreated. So here again, when we deal with a Quran
the Quran therefore has to be at the center of all of our
spirituality in our recitals and in our learning and in our opening
of our hearts in the Quran is inexhaustible. And this is the
month of the Quran, we find also a point of access to that which is
metaphysical and not just physical. So proceeded in May
booty calls this tafsir cashflow Sr.
revealing the secrets and there's a very nice book by my colleague,
Zane Akela, about
Rashid an inmate may booty and his Tafseer and it's a work of really
enormous, gigantic importance and it's important to remember that he
was a humbly we tend to have this stereotypical view of the husband
is it's kind of strict literalist, almost as if that kind of like the
certain selfies of today, but the humbly School of the medieval
schools tended to be the one that was most productive of
spiritual literature. And you think of quite Abdullah Ansari and
aplicado Gilani, these will called caring humbleness in that film,
and in that doctrine, there's a close link between a literal
understanding of the Quran and the richness of the spiritual life and
this has always been the case so maybe God looks at
This principle of love as being the great axiom of the religion,
and one of the places where he talks about this is in the famous
verse in Surah seven. What are the Rabbu? Coming Benny Adam means
OHare him Glorietta home what I said at home Allah and foresee him
allow us to be rabbinical.
And when your Lord took from Benny Adam, from their backs or their
reins their seeds and caused them to bear witness about or against
themselves, and he says, allow us to be robbed become, Am I not your
Lord? Our Lord Belorussia Hytner who said yes, we bear witness and
Taco Yamaki Amity inner corner another affiliate that was less
you should say on the last day, we didn't know anything about this,
we will hopefully we were heedless. So clearly what the
verse means is that humanity was gathered to this day of Alaska
Bureau become an oil affirmed God.
So Chittick talks a lot about maybe his understanding of this.
So let's take, quote a little bit from
me, buddy.
Book came to them, and what a book, for it was the Lord's
reminder to his lovers. It was a book whose title was The eternal
love, a book whose purport is the story of love and loves. It was a
book that provides security from being cut off, the remedy for
unsettled breast health for ailing hearts and ease for grieving
spirits, a mercy from God, to the folk of the world.
How does this book this book of love, come about? And what is the
beginning of its story? Well, it traces the whole story of humanity
which is the story of love, from the time when wrapped in divine
love seeing the perfection of the Divine, seeing the beauty of the
Divine and in love with God, we all said balharshah hidden, yes,
we bear witness.
So maybe he also says this when he talks about this, this this idea.
This thirst has another intimation and another tasting. it alludes to
the beginning of the states of friends and the binding of the
compact and covenant of love with them on the first day in the era
of the beginningless, when the real was present, and the reality
was there.
And then some poetry. How blessed were Leila and those nights when
we were meeting with Leila.
What a fine day was the day of laying the foundation of love.
What an exalted time was the time of making the compact of love.
Those who desire on the first day will never forget their desire.
Those who yearned at the time of union with the beloved know the
crown of life, and the Qibla of the days. How bless it was the
time of your covenant. Without that my heart would have had no
place for other.
The command came Oh master, a Hajah. With a kid home by a yam in
lair reminds them of the days of Allah. The servants of Ours have
forgotten our covenant, and have busied themselves with others.
Remind them of the day when their pure spirits made a covenant of
love with us, and we were anointing their yearning eyes with
this Cottle. Am I not your Lord, or lest of Europe become,
oh, poor, indigent man. Remember the day when the spirits and the
very persons of the lovers were drinking the wine of passion for
me, from the cup of love in the assembly of intimacy.
The proximate angels of the higher plenum and Milan Allah was saying,
these indeed are people with high aspiration. As for us, we have
never tasted this wine, nor have we found a sense of it. But the
roaring and shouting of these beggars has risen to the star
Capella Is there any more.
So that's a taste of me, Buddha's tafsir, the one that was left
behind by modernity, gathering dust in those libraries, but
celebrated and loved by, by so many, and it's about this verse of
the Quran, which indicates that the human story is a time of, of
is a narrative of love, loving God and then getting distracted. And
the reminders the vicar is just falling in love with the divine
again.
Now, something to reflect on here is that the day of LS to be Robbie
Cohn was the day of Bizen Bazmee Alas, the assembly, the kind of
party the gathering the assembly of the covenant. Everybody was
there, all humanity.
So the human story if we're thinking about seclusion and
companionship begins not with seclusion, but with everybody
being present, their social distancing, everybody is there on
that prehistoric day and
And saying Belorussia hidden if they're honest thing it. So the
human story or Emmanuel, her dad calls the lives of man begins with
everybody being together in soccer.
And then our next experience is the mysterious interspace of the
womb, the Rahim.
The angel breeds in the Spirit, and the spirit is quickened and
full humanity begins after most all on that's 120 days. And in the
womb, we are solitary, we're alone or less, maybe there's a twin, but
we're alone.
And then we come forth from the womb, and we're in dunya. And we
really need the help and support of our parents. And we need
society to keep us going. We're social animals. As we mature, we
need the kind of life support system of parents and other human
beings a little bit less, but it's still part of what we need. And
then at the end of that life of man, we descend again into the
kind of other womb which is the grave that cover when we're alone.
And we will come to God alone are como te yo mo piano T federal that
everybody will come as individuals to God. But the last day is the
day of a national hasha yo Mia como Nestle, Robin Alameen. All
humanity has gathered and stands for the Lord of the Worlds. So
after the solitude in the grave, and that washer, that solitariness
that loneliness, suddenly everybody's present again. It's
like the first day except this time we've had our opportunity to
go it alone and to make moral choices and we now see the
consequence of what we did. So after that there is heaven or
*, and Heaven, of course, is characterized in the Holy Quran as
a place of companionship. If one and Allah Surin Otakar billion
brothers, feeding each other on on benches, reclining, it's a time of
soccer. For the people have * companionship is meaningless.
Theirs is the ultimate washer, the ultimate solitude.
So it's a very the way the Creator has designed the human story is,
we begin with companionship, and then we're alone. And then there's
companionship again. And then we're alone. And then there's
companionship again. And then there's the post history of of
Jana, and now it's completely symmetrical. And this is the way
the Creator wishes us to be. We alternate between SAPA and and
Oslo rather than being naturally in one of them. But again, the
narrative throughout and Mabel D and his whole tradition,
especially the handle is say this, this is about man being in love.
And then the lover and the beloved being separated.
And then the struggle to seek the beloved again. And that's why our
favorite story and the one that's used by our poets, more than any
other is the story of Leila and MetroNorth. There was the union
and remembering the story of Leila and motional. They were kind of
childhood friends. And then they were separated, having fallen in
love. And metronome goes crazy because nothing in dunya is of
interest to him at all. All he cares about is getting back to his
last beloved, Laila, the mysterious maiden.
And so many of our parts have been Kamal for Zoli. Nizami and others
have have used this story and have turned it into one of the great
masterpieces of our literature and remember, again, these
masterpieces are about muhabba or about love.
So all of this comes out of this Quranic story. And the Quran
therefore is called by somebody like MC Tabriz as economic.
Everything he says is a little bit edgy. He says, The Quran is the
book of passionate love. That's his name for it.
It's a story of love. The first covenant, Adam and Eve, the
commandments. The first Tober Allah's Toba towards Adam and Eve
is just a sign of His love. That slipped, but his forgiving and
Allah's love for humanity precedes humanity's love for God and is
infinitely greater.
So all of the NBN are sent out of the Divine Love of God doesn't
need to do anything for us. But because he loves us, He sends the
prophets, extraordinary, miraculous beautiful human beings
in order to wake us up in order to guide us back towards our Leila.
Once again. Everything is this journey back towards that
summation. And the culmination of everything is of course Habibollah
The one who is the Israelite Prophet unites the Abrahamic
family, and also the messengers who are not cited in the Abrahamic
tradition. He is the final messenger and his intercession on
the Yamaki. Ama will be for everybody. And the Hadith
explicitly states that people from other owners will come to him
asking for his intercession, sal Allahu alayhi wa sallam because he
is Habibollah in his hand is the banner of praise. And with him,
the true lovingness of the story is finally disclosed.
The combination of his career in dunya, of course, is really the
middle Raj,
which again, our tradition likes to see in terms of
that loving ascent to the transcendent and livable one. So I
want to read
a poem.
If you've got my little book, Turkey sacred song, y'all have
seen it in the
on the state of love, God's prophet rose to the blazing
heavens. The messengers of old rose to salute him. Noble Brown,
he blessed them all.
Gabriel himself holding the reins flew with Mohammed, like two
stars, all other stars out shining through the dark of trackless
void.
Then that emissary sublime call to Mohammed, go alone die alone me
witness where my sight would flinch and fail.
Since his I unfaltering gazed he was called the witness clarium
capital from have we not dilated alumna Shara made his vision clear
and true.
All the stations of Allah slaves by that I witnessed gone the veil
of self and dissipation he saw which solves for heightened bass.
Hence, his intercession is sought. For he has Mohamed a Falken knows
all land that lies beneath it thus the Prophet descends, solves. So
there's a lot going on in this and it's not just the narrative of the
mirage in its familiar formal sense. But it's a story of love.
He is ascending on the Baroque of love and His Shiva is seen in this
poem as a culmination, and a confirmation of that mirage.
Because he has written he has, as it were a better view a bird's eye
view of of humanity, and can discern spirits.
But because love is in his name, Habibollah it is necessarily to
him that the banner of play praise will be given and the greatest
intercession, a Shiva Atul Cobra will be vouchsafed because of his
extraordinary love, not just for his Alma, but for all mankind.
It's an incredible scene of absolute and out pouring, love.
So this is
what do you find if you go to the libraries, and you set aside the
modern, withered ideologized versions of Islam, but look for
the fullness of Islam and admire the tree. And yes, by now, some
branches of the tree have become withered. And some bits of it
aren't really giving very sweet fruits and about the tree is still
the tree and you can see what it's meant to be And Alhamdulillah the
Alannah are still pruning and fertilizing and the tree continues
to grow and shed its its shade.
But
one term that comes up again and again in these texts that we've
been looking at is the idea of witnessing. For edge had our home
Allah unfortunetly him, Allah brought the people at the
primordial covenant to bear witness against or to themselves
is witnessing this shahada, this will shahada and the witnessing
unimaginably that the Holy Prophet experience behind the Macondo
Kaaba cow sign beyond any attempted human description. But
Mirka Bell who add to narrow, the hearts did not deny what it saw.
There is a witnessing here.
Now the witnessing of the Divine is completely beyond the capacity
of our minds to know what we're thinking about. It's beyond the
net of words. It's just words. But we witness aspects of the Divine
when we look around ourselves, because in our own comprehensive
and full monotheism, we know that everything is the work of the
divine and the compassionate artwork of the Divine fingers. So
this takes us back to the principle of difficult meditation,
which is a fundamental organic commandment, thicker and thicker.
Remember, remember, the God who created you, and whom you were
with on the day of Alice to be Rob become vicar remember? That forget
the once the Orphelins remember
that
also thicker think, contemplate, look around yourself where to find
Corona, if you help me so my word you will art. And this is what we
usually mean when we speak of the idea of the shear head. That is to
say something in creation bearing witness to the divine. And this
isn't just theological. This isn't a kind of argument from design,
even though that's present in our Kalam that the idea of the order
of creation coming from a principle that is disordered is a
complete absurdity.
That we're talking here about something that is less
philosophical and therefore closer to the beating faith inducing
heart of the Quranic text, which is a text for the for the heart
more than it is even for the mind.
We have in our heritage, so many books about love,
including some quite profound stories about love. The Lila
metronome legend wasn't always conceived as of as a metaphor for
the spiritual quest.
And we have again, and it's interesting, in the humbly
tradition, and in the zaharie tradition, there's a particular
emphasis on this the first book on love in the Arabic language was by
dled xiety, the founder of desire eSchool, Taka hermana. Another
book on Love was by Eben hasn't the great exponent of desire at
school this seems to be a recurrent connection between the
idea of a literal reading of Scripture and a celebration of the
Divine Love, which is quite, quite startling. One of the books which
I happen to like a lot is by somebody called Abdur Rahman Ibn
at the bar,
if not, the bath died in 696 of the Islamic calendar, who was a
historian of the town of Erawan, which is, of course in Tunisia and
one of the great, I'm sorry, one of the greater Garrison towns in
early Islam and a great center of Maliki fit Kunti was indeed a
Maliki and the whole walk here, which he calls Musharraf, Anwar al
Calobra.
So kind of Maliki jurists attempt to say something about the miracle
of love that appears in the heart which is not just an emotion
amongst emotions, but the recognition of perfection and
beauty and therefore the most important human motivation and
impulse and experience. Nothing compares with love. And he has a
whole theoretical book in which he talks about, about love, what it
is where it comes from, what are the character characteristics of
love? Why do we love what do we love? So let me just dip into this
briefly.
Here,
middle maloom and Ireland will help you and casino Isla de la 30
Oxfam. It's well known that creation subdivided into three
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mineral, vegetable and animal.
Well, hi Ionian casumo Isla notic while in San Jose aeronautical
hall behind him and the animals also subdivide into rational which
is human beings and non rational which is the animals. Felicia
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Build Gemma that and it's undoubtedly the case that to find
a reference from to make deductions from plants is better
than to make deductions from mineral things. In other words,
you get to hire more sophisticated results by looking at living
things. Lee Murphy in Liberty middle camera alert in my DOMA
feature my dad because there are forms of perfection and intricacy
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No more wait yeah, tidel Auto lead, because the living thing in
its life can grow, can find a kind of point of balance, and could
also generate other living things.
Whatever Hola. Jota Allah min Mahalia doodle Isla he lives in
Nevada yet an alcohol alZahra surah Taha Jamila Allah subhanaw
taala from the Divine Generosity bestowed upon it vegetable life,
which reveals its beautiful form.
For men actually barely considered inner heat obtained universal
insomnia. People thought that it Lazzara in America and because of
this divine secret, the human soul finds joy when looking at
beautiful flowers. Well husband and her daughter to reorder Aretha
and the third year of well cultivated gardens for 10 Jelly be
her hormonal Howerton, sorry for unhealthy shall draw know her, and
by this contemplation, the human suffering and stress is
diminished.
Well ASA Delica in early May be having authority hurdle Jamel
Allah de Wahab Ah ha ha lipo Ha, what a father who Allah yummy,
Mahalia Jamel hill all the way.
And there's no reason for this. Other than that it contains the
sign of the beauty which its creator poured upon it from the
higher beauty itself. This beauty that is in plants comes from a
higher place than either though or to Canada, or so with a typical
Fedora in Saraswati, natural insomnia and the habit is over in
about a year. So when a plant dies and dries out, human love for
these vegetable forms diminishes sensibly. Were in bucket edges
that will just smear even if its formal parts continue as they
were. So it's desiccated. You don't really feel the same
delight, something has gone. And it's this principle of life which
the Divine Generosity has bestowed upon it.
And then he goes on to say, Well can only go east Hillel Bill
Haiwan acmella Middle East Denali Binda bet. So just as finding an
indication for the divine nature and love from plants is easier
than it is for minerals. When you're dealing with animals, it
becomes easier still, the higher order of creation, the mirfield
Higher One minute kimberleigh Till model Murfin about because there
forms of perfection present in animals, which are absent from
plant life,
and so on. And he goes on, and you can see what he's getting at,
there's a hierarchy in Abu shahada in our witnessing of things in the
world, which is very clear. So we're not quite so inspired by
about pile of rocks, as we are, when that pile of rocks is covered
with flowers or grass, or trees. And if in those trees, there are
animals, and the beauty of say, a lynx, or a puma, were inspired
even more. So there's a hierarchy to do with the introduction of the
principle of life and the bestowal of the divine beauty. And then, as
you can imagine, he says, the greatest beauty that you'll see is
the beauty of the human form Surah to incent incomparable, so the
world is full of show ahead of indications of testimonies to the
Divine existence and presence and creative power. But the more you
get into the human realm, the more overwhelming it becomes and this
is where a score real passionate love really becomes a reality in
the Quran is ultimately focusing us not just on looking at the
beauty of the world and it's the great scripture for celebrating
the Indicative unity of nature but human beings
in our self, there are even greater miracles and this is why
we have this strong tradition of escuela jersey and H copy which
comes from Imam Al Ghazali. His brother Armadyl has Ali who is
slightly neglected figure from whose tradition come people like
Sadruddin Conaway, Fakhruddin, heirarchy and others are medicals,
earliest pupil I know CODATA Hamadani with his great book at
10, he that all of these theorists of love,
sometimes what they say is quite ecstatic and strange and
difficult. They were lovers themselves. And in this tradition,
you have this division between true love and metaphorical love.
When we see something that is a shahid in the world, a beautiful
person, a beautiful tree, the sunset, whatever it might be. Our
love for that is metaphorical insofar as what we are loving. And
the beauty of those things is the divine creativity in them. Not
just a massive atoms, but something extraordinary that
inspires amazement and love.
But I should look at the real love is love for the divine, not love
for the divine through these manifestations. These buckle or
cut, but love directly for the Harlock and this distinction
between Ash Kochi and ash Brahma Josie is enormously common and
standard in our tradition.
You also find a distinction between Ashley Sawyer
and Ashley Kabir there is the little love which is man's love
for God. And there is the great love, which is God's love for men.
And also they add in Persian I should play me on there, which is
the middle love which is the love that human beings have for each
other.
Not for the cat or a rock or a house or a car but love for each
other which is different. A love for another love for another human
being is different qualitatively and Deeper Than Love for any
animal or any object and most of human literature is about
celebrating that great mystery. So that love again, Habib Ullah
sallallahu alayhi wa sallam demonstrates this and the Allamah
even though As is the tradition of hijab and modesty Liqua leading in
HELOC will hold local Islamic higher he says sallallahu alayhi
wa
Salam, every religion has a particular value which is
important to it. And the value of Islam, or the the virtue of Islam
is modesty. So with Alma of modest comportment between men and women,
the amount of hijab, niqab and so forth more than the other woman.
It's just how we are at the same time. That which we are veiling is
understood unmistakeably to be a great manifestation of the divine
creative power and has that has that significance, which is why
one good way of explaining hijab or niqab to non Muslims is to say,
it's not because we don't approve, on the contrary, we don't veil the
Kaaba because we don't approve of it. It's because of the majesty
and glory of that the manifestation, kava unveiled would
represent is out of courtesy that we veil it. And that's the real
meaning. That's the doctrine of the showerhead, that beautiful
human faces is, is overwhelming as a disclosure of the One who
created Adam and her work. So we often find that the ALA mat, in
this joyful tradition of the harbor and good humor,
have
emphasized this spousal love, not just I'm marrying her because
she's got an inheritance coming. And because my parents say this
and those worldly reasons, but because in the other of the most
significant other, there is one who has said Bella Asha Hytner,
somebody who has been at that place of more shahada, and is
trying to remember that place, and the mystery of proximity to
another human soul. That strangest thing in the world a point of
consciousness, the oddest thing in creation, our perception of
creation, another one, and you have to be united to that, and in
that, in your proximity to that roof, in your contemplation of her
or his created form. If you're a woman, it's going to be a his,
you find also a pastor God. And this again is part of the miracle
of our crop, which leads to his encounter with Khadija and not to
his divorcing of his is his partner in August incense. So I'd
like to read a bit from a poem by a mammal had dead dies in 1132 of
the hijra, and we should all know none of her dead lives of man the
book of assistants resell it and more I wanna one of the great
wonders of the path under the chef. And here in his Deewan he
includes a lament for his wife,
Khadija Miller, her dad was blind.
And his wife was a tremendous support for him. And because of
our principle of hijab and modesty, in Islam, generally we
don't talk much about our women folk, that here in his poem, he is
lamenting her and forget not that among the graves Xin belt, is a
grave his memory will never be a raised. It contains a close
friend, righteous full of blessings, and noble grave, it is
a noble place of rest. I buried in it, the one in whom I found my
refreshment and my rest, after she was gone, I bit into life as
though it dried out bread. Hence, you find in me not but grief for
the loss of her, the voices that consoled me for her absence are
dumb. It's nice poem, if you can look up the divine and read it in
the original Arabic it's very heartfelt. And there you have,
they are lifted a little bit, you see the great love that the Imam
had for his wife, and this is basically me on there. The middle
love the love that exists between human beings by loving something
temporal and temporary, our love for the eternity of God is
increased. And we need this mediation because the
transcendence of God makes straightforward, absolute love for
him. quite ambitious, at first, although it grows, so we find in
the hands, invitation to us to see the beauty of creation and you
can't separate beauty from the principle of love.
Which is why it's called the astronomic, the Book of Love.
A kind of existential appeal to our sense of the inherent, bizarre
improbability of things. The default in the universe should be
that there is no universe. There shouldn't be anything at all. But
instead, not only are there a few things, but there's an
extraordinary cornucopia of things. Look at what the Hubble
Space Telescope has shown us. Look at what the Large Hadron Collider
has shown us on the macro scale, the microscale just more and more
of it, complying with extraordinarily complex and
sophisticated physical constants, constants, and the majestic beauty
of it. Hubble Space Telescope just celebrated his 30th Birthday
Extraordinary Science. Send him a Tina fill Alpha copy of the
unfussy him
We should show them our science on the horizons and within themselves
and every baby was born according to the fitrah can see the amazing
improbability of the world the sheer unlikelihood, which is
almost kind of comedic. It's so improbable that there should be
space and time and cats and dogs and ducks on the pond. And maybe
it's really interested in this. And as we go on, we become jaded.
And we think we know better and that's really where secularity
begins where we're no longer able, in this simple hearted way,
without the ego supervening and muddying the mirror of the heart.
If we can truly get back to that childlike state and say, yes, the
world is still extremely improbable, interestingly
improbable that this world that Allah subhanaw taala has created
is just, it's not just gray sludge, but it's a peacocks tail.
It's a miracle Subhanak market after her bottler glory, btw,
you've not created this in vain. That's the message of the Quran.
Look at the improbability of creation, and use your mind and
your heart to conclude that Subhanak that should be our motto.
And it's all because Allah's desire is that everything should
be beautiful, it's all lovable.
So we ask Allah subhanaw taala, to restore to us that non egotistic
ability to see the world with a real capacity for more shahada,
witnessing the extraordinary beauty and diversity of what Allah
has made. And in this month of Ramadan in its dying days, and
hours in sha Allah, to feel a purity in our hearts, so that I
bad becomes clear, and we taste the sweetness of it better rather
than just experiencing it as a duty. And that sweetness, of
course, is lovable. The journey of faith is a journey of love.
This whole discourse of Islam, from seclusion, to companionship,
to Falkor, all of the things that we've looked at can all as
synonymous, said, be summed up as expressions of the Divine Love for
humanity. Without Him His love and His Rama, that he created things
not because he needed anything. And it's out of His love and His
Rama that has given us the extraordinary gifts that we enjoy.
And we ask Allah subhanaw taala to give us the best of this lockdown
Ramadan, and in sha Allah to open us up to great gifts, in sha Allah
to be people who tend and respect the tree of Islam, respect its
diversity, and insha. Allah are purified inwardly as well as
outwardly, a good detox Ramadan, so that we can see things
properly, so that we can take time to see things that we're not
rushing and galloping all the time, but we can stop and listen
to the birds. And look at the miracle of God's creation. And
say, and then be, we believe in it. It's all from Allah. And
that's the gift of Eman and it's the only normal and rational state
for a human being to be in. Everything else is a kind of
illness and we seek Allah's protection from that darkness
hamdulillah I've come to the end of this very brief dip in the
ocean of love. Ours is the armor of love and our texts and our
libraries have always confirmed that and Insha Allah, I wish you
all a blessing and a joyful and loving aid. However, you might be
able to celebrate it this year.