Abdul Ghani bin Ismail al-Nablusi – Abdal Hakim Murad: Paradigms of Leadership

complex galaxy of uh lights that still shine from long ago from the almost incomprehensible cornucopia of luminaries that has been preserved for us by our historians from the long centuries of the muslim past and at every point we've been trying to triangulate to our own situation from the accomplishment of those past great ones and we've already seen the remarkable perhaps even baffling diversity of muslim types we started off by commenting on the quranic celebration of difference difference in cosmos difference in humanity the difference of your tongues and colors and also of human types every single human being by the divine decree has his or her mised needed according to a particular set of spiritual possibilities and also according to inheritance factors we certainly believe in inheritance the uh genetic dna shuffling at the moment of conception is part of the divine desire that no two human beings shall be the same so when we look at paradigms for ourselves and we uh peruse the complexity and the grandeur of the islamic story which is a story of human beings and they're turning towards the divine we perceive not just one way of apprehending the prophetic excellence but a huge range of them and this is what we should expect and this is important because ours is an age of quite militant homogenization modernity pays lip service to the right of people to do their own thing and to be different within the woolly conflict confines of liberal indifferentism but at the same time globalization which is its flip side tends to turn us into variants of the same sort of thing real difference real eccentrics real misfits real oddballs are less easy to come by than once they were mass communication the internet hollywood uh even the invention of printing have served to homogenize human beings which is not what the divine purpose is for us we are to be diverse and if you read the seerah you see such an extraordinarily wide caste of players so many archetypes in a shakespearean way bodied forth by particular personalities amongst the sahaba so the the monochrome nature of modern humanity is an aspect of this the drabness and so as we begin today's journey looking at uh somewhat more recent figure they're not as recent as our muslim cowboy that we looked at last time william williamson we will be considering this the polychrome nature of pre-modern humanity the sheer diversity of the world the ongoing luminous intensity of the natural world human engagement with other forms of consciousness in ways that nowadays has become perfunctory and hurried more opportunities for leisure we have the less time we seem to have just to take a deep breath and contemplate the moment is all usual homilies it is our modern condition but in past times humanity was something very different and probably would have regarded us with horror and pity not just as hopeless materialistic blasphemers but as people for whom part of the richness and the intensity and the in the movementness of humanity has been lost in favor of a kind of daydreaming so we have these ideas of what it is to be an admirable human being a hero in that kind of hegelian sense perhaps somebody absolutely attentive to the unique irreplaceability of the moment because nowadays the moment is not from god has no particular meaning there's no symbolic interpretation possible it's just another moment another random concatenation of atoms in a meaningless universe we're kind of in a hurry to get on to the next one in case it's more interesting but in a theistic cosmos where every moment is full of divine meaning if only we would stop take a deep breath and meditate upon it yeah they were people who were ibn al-wakt people who were sons of the moment and were to use the dreadful borderized mock buddhist contemporary category mindful they were in the moment hardirin and that led to a certain intensity of personality and a certain intensification of the possibilities of manhood the possibilities of nobility the possibilities of criminality the possibilities of masculinity and femininity all of these things were as it were highly colored um intensified writ large so i want to start with an example of this it's a passage that's kind of famous in travel literature um this is um edmond amici's famous book about constantinople istanbul which he visited when the ottoman thing was still kind of visible this is in the time of sultan abdulaziz so the beginning of the end but he could still see the old world the old guys in splendidly colored clothes and magnificent turbans and the color and splendor and havoc of the east and then the modernization with the black frog coat and the boring taro bush and the efficient time and money men in the modernized european offices and the decline of the splendor the extravagance the cornucopia of the levant is cosmopolitanism replaced by efficiency and moving towards monoculture so here's his reminiscence he's just been to see the sultan sultan abdul aziz who is rather sorry figure and he's expecting to see this oriental pageant and instead it's a very europeanized kind of thing he rides out of dormabatre palace which is this very europeanized rococo thing uh and um the official palace officials are there and the sultan is kind of drably duress and he's kind of a bit bored there's a bunch of french tourists there goggling nothing just another modern spectacle so he's just reflected on this and then he says this and i'll read this in extenso because it it kind of sums up what we have lost and leads us into the remainder of today's reflections as the reader can see the spectacle of the sultan's procession has today become a rather drab affair the sultans of olden times issued forth in great pomp proceeded and followed by swarms of horsemen slaves guards gardeners eunuchs and chamberlains who seemed from a distance so enthusiastic chroniclers tell us looked like a sea of tulips the sultans of today on the contrary seemed to shun pomp and circumstance as though it were a mere theatrical display of lost grandeur what would one of those early sultans say were he to rise up from his tomb at bolsa or in istanbul and see one of his 19th century descendants passing by dressed in a black frock coat without a turban without a sword without jewels surrounded by a crowd of insolent foreigners i suspect he would blush with rage and shame and as a sign of his supreme displeasure cut off the beard of his unworthy representative a solemn the first did to hassan with one sweep of his scimitar the deadliest insult which can be offered to an ottoman it is true that there is the same difference between the sultans of the past whose names alone terrorized europe between the 12th and 16th century and those of today as there is between the ottoman empire as it is now and those of the first centuries those earlier sultans summed up all the youth and beauty and vigor of their race they were not only a living image of their own people a beautiful emblem a precious pearl upon upon the sword of islam but in themselves alone one of its great strengths it is impossible not to see in their personal qualities one of the main reasons why ottoman power grew in such an extraordinary way the most glorious period of ottoman history lies in the first youth of the dynasty lasting 193 years from osman to mehmet ii that was indeed a succession of powerful princes with one exception and taking due account of the times and of the conditions of the race they were austere and wise and loved by their subjects they were often fierce but rarely unjust and frequently even generous and benevolent towards their enemies all of them were princes befitting their race handsome and imposing an appearance true lions as their mothers called them whose raw may the earth tremble the abdul majeeds the abdul aziz the murads the abdul hamids are mere shadows of padisha's in comparison with those formidable young men born to girls of 15 and youths of 18 bred from the finest tata stock and from the flower of greek persian and caucasian beauty at 14 years of age they were commanding armies and governing provinces and their mothers were rewarding them with slave girls as beautiful and ardent as themselves at 16 they were already fathers and at 70 as well but love in them did not undermine and weaken their natural vigor of mind and body their minds were made of iron as the poets sang and their bodies of steel they all had certain features that have been lost in their degenerate descendants the high forehead the arched eyebrows meeting like those of the persians the blue eyes of the suns of the step the nose curving above the full red lips like the beak of a parrot over a cherry and the full black beard for which the seraglio's poets were ever racking their brains in the effort to find charming or striking similes they had quote the glance of a taurus eagle and the strength of the king of the desert necks like a ball broad shoulders and wide chests that could contain all the warlike fury of their people long arms large joints short bowed legs that could make the strongest turkmen horses nay with pain and large hairy hands that could wield with ease of bronze maces and huge bows carried by their soldiers and their epithets were worthy of them the wrestler the champion the thunderbolt the bone crusher the shedder of blood and so on so you get this image even in the mid 19th century of the modern muslim representative leader being a somewhat milk sop bureaucratized europeanized homogenized affair anxious to comply with the dowdy post-sacred gray but efficient norms of europe and contrasted with this no doubt highly coloured and mythologized image of the splendor and the color of the the pageantry of the ottoman past and also of course the idea of virility masculinity which is one of the things that has to come into any uh consideration of leadership or role modelling because one of the things that we've lost nowadays is the fertile polarity and complementarity of gender even our kids in the schools now are being taught at an early age about gender fluidity and it's kind of compulsory the state belief is that gender is not an essence this is quite worrying well we saw in the case of nana asmat or what femininity in its islamic modality can represent a queenly scholarly devout secluded perfection and this image of kind of stereotypical turkish manhood brandishing the scimitar is also an image of magnificence but nowadays the phrase or the word masculinity is more likely to be hyphenated with the adjective toxic than anything else modernity doesn't really have a very positive way of identifying gender any longer femininity perhaps problematic masculinity certainly problematic and instead everybody is kind of denatured so this is one of the things that we have lost and one reason why it's hard for us to grapple what made human beings in pre-modern you might say normative because they lasted so long times that there were certain ideals which were aesthetic and magnificent which nowadays in our kind of grey everybody wears kind of black nowadays it's really depressing go to any hotel and everything is beige and gray and neutral and this is what happens when the light of god is lost and people no longer have a sense that cheerfulness is an appropriate way of expressing your sense of the world everything becomes as dark as atheism itself but in those times a massive color and colorful places today india is really colorful africa is really colorful why because they still believe in the sacred and that is at the center of their lives in any case um what i want to look at today or whom i want to look at is a figure who stands as some of the other figures that we've mentioned kind of at the cusp or the ithmus between the old and the new chamill was one of those people william williamson certainly saw both worlds then asmr and the jihad of houseland a little bit before the british come and improve everything and ruin everything and the person i want to talk to today is a figure a very late classical islam a figure that the uh oriental studies fraternity uh regards as one of the iconic figures of early modernity in the middle east and this is a very contested category somebody who is linked with the so-called arab enlightenment of the 18th century an idea that reinhard schuller and others have proposed and is generating a lot of controversy was there even before napoleon kicked open the door of the middle east already a transformation towards some kind of focus on nature and humanism that looked a bit like european romanticism and might be more open to science well this is uh contested problematic but certainly something was afoot but in any case it's interesting to see how somebody in the 17th and 18th century is so productive and so unusual and so vibrant that he readily confounds the older stereotype of an age of decay the traditional european way of mapping islamic civilization was that it reached its high point with abbasids and that's when the great philosophy was written and when everything seemed to be splendid magnificent and they were starting to rationalize how they loved the mortezalites and the philosopher in ways that were a miraculous prefiguring of the glory that was said to be 19th century europe and then after that somehow you had ghazali and razi and everything becomes very kind of religious and repetitive and the age of decline conservatism sclerosis these are the oriental stereotypes of the later islamic period but we're now looking at some of those figures and actually disinterring their books from the libraries and of course as you would expect we find wonders one of the big things that's happening in islamic studies nowadays is the collapse of the old paradigm of a kind of renaissance moment in the 10th 11th century in baghdad and moving towards the idea that there is an endless regeneration and reconfiguration based also in the uh realization that the european obsession with novelty and innovation may not be the only way of valuing a civilization maybe there's other ways maybe the happiness of the population could be a way of valorizing the intellectual armature of a civilization rather than this endless wiggish idea of everything progressing towards of course ourselves in the modern west when they call something progressive the only thing they ever mean is that which moves towards the current value set of secular liberalism they have no conception of progress being desired by intelligent human beings towards any other ideal that's the great unthought but if we go back to just before napoleon turns up and the ottomans modernize and you get them wearing these kind of european frock coats and little fezzies and having big chandeliers in their palaces and being kind of second best in europe rather than best in the world which is how the ottomans used to be you find some very interesting lively figures and the one i want to talk about today is now this is a kind of test case because if you look at the manuscript libraries and you see what muslims were reading and copying and buying 150 years ago he was one of the great imams of the age mufti of damascus an author of great commentaries and he wrote over 300 books i was in sarajevo a while back there's plenty of his manuscripts in the libraries of sarajevo he was from damascus but the book spread very quickly but nowadays not really thought about partly because the ummah has decided to move in the direction of another democian ibentamiya you lived four centuries earlier who had a very different sense of how you deal with the world and with crisis and with diversity and this takes us back to the question raised by thomas bauer in his now celebrated book the culture of ambiguity in the mid-19th century the temper of islamic thought shifted from uh a culture of ambiguity to a culture of anxiety and this obviously coincides with the growth of the european empires and muslim military defeat and a certain crisis of confidence amongst the elites so in the 18th century in india the kind of sectarian disputes that you get amongst indian subcontinental muslims nowadays the day of anders the braves hadith i know not what hardly exists because there was more of a sense amongst the holy ma that this different opinions especially about matters of baal but kind of normal and part of the way things were supposed to be the mid-19th century everybody is anxious particularly after the destruction of the so-called indian mutiny and people start to retreat into more exclusive propositional defensive forms of islam and it becomes an age of sectarianism and this is the case fairly ubiquitously and bauer's book very in a very erudite way charts this transition so we're now in an age of anxiety not in the older more normative age of ambiguity where difference was actively enjoyed by a scholarly elite that was at ease with it because it was at ease with the situation of the ummah in the world so 1641 to 1731. so lives a long time gets into the 18th century significantly he is from a very distinguished family confluence of two great families of of the banima and the veni jamaa and they've produced many great down the centuries the uh jamar our family are chef of the city of hama who produced some of the great chef himself that was from his father's side from his father's side from the bani kodama who are hanbales the vegas one of the greatest of all of the hanbali jurists died 1223 and they are descendants of the second khalifa omar ibn al-khattab and they spend a lot of time in jerusalem so they become what in arabic is known as makadisa scholars of baton motifs or jerusalem um so the the bani jamaa are for a couple of centuries uh the imams of al-aqsa mosque and the cordanas settle in damascus particularly the salehia district which is on those kind of lower slopes of jabal garcia which is also where um arabi is buried but abdulhanee nablasi is known as the man from nablus because the family spends some time in nablus after the ottoman conquest of jerusalem which is 1516. the ottomans of course build up jerusalem its present urban form is basically from the time of solemn the magnificent to really cherish the city but many of the family go to nablus if you've been to the west bank you probably interned was actually quite a beautiful place founded by the emperor vespasian neapolis the new town when jerusalem was destroyed by the romans um they created this new town nearby and it's famous for the samaritan presence on um jabal tor nearby it's a separate religion they consider themselves to be the true jews but they're not jews and they're not treated as jews by the israeli opera occupying authorities completely separate religion um on this mountain there's only about a thousand of them left and they're just left to their own devices under the ottomans so an interesting place but also a place that's produced a considerable number of scholars and it's a holy place because the tomb of uh prophet joseph youssef is there which to judge from old photographs and sketches was quite a beautiful place with a lot of quranic calligraphy and ottoman tiling since 1967 with the israeli occupation it's been out of bounds to non-jews so it's now full of settlers and even though nablus is part of the palestinian authority it's still illegal for palestinians to go that the entrance is controlled by the israeli army and you have to show that you're jewish before you're allowed in so an ancient place that's now really tense but it's worth going to this big palestinian refugee camp and a very weird romanian priest who's built a huge church just outside the entrance to uh nablus so i talked to this priest and i said you've got the west bank's biggest palestinian refugee camp right opposite your church do you have any problems so the only problems i've ever had is with the jewish settlers they keep beating me up and once they left an axe in my head he went to the hospital like that so it's now very kind of sad and tense but it was once a center for olimar and abdul ghani nablusi is from the people of nebulos then they move to damascus and quite quickly they become hailed as great scholars his grandfather ismail becomes the main preacher of the umayyad mosque in damascus and also head of the hadith which is one of the big madrasas of damascus which is a hadith obviously a college specializing in hadith studies he becomes the chef mufti of damascus like most people in the levant at this time their chef and also becomes a successful businessman so the family is always wealthy abdulhani inherits quite a lot of wealth and this becomes significant the father is also a preacher in the umayyad mosque in damascus and in 1641 abdulhani nabul si is born and the geographers record all kinds of interesting foretellings by local saints that this is going to be a remarkable remarkable star in the damascene firmament and we're told that by the age of five under the very close care of his father he became a hafiz and memorized a number of other texts shortly afterwards including alfie of malik which is a basic thousand line uh poem on arabic grammar rather a dry thing for small kids to work through but um he memorized it the shatter beer which is the basic mnemonic poem which helps you to understand the principles that govern the seven different variant readings of the quran the umber barahin the akida and other key standard texts but he by the age of 12 is already well on his way at the age of 12 his father dies and his mother takes over and the women are often scholars uh in uh cairo and syria at this time uh this follows the manuka tradition when some of the great scholars were women and the the olomat would insist that uh so that they could be in their children would be nurtured in a family of learning they would marry women who were also known scholars so even hadith uh marries a woman who is also an independent hadith teacher in her own right in asshaton she's 18 but she's already giving hijaz in hadith to some of the great scholars of cairo so this is a tradition that is alive so the teaching of the young abdulhani is now in the hands of his mother he attends some of the big hadith classes particularly najmadine al-razi who is perhaps the greatest hadith luminary of the day so his father dies and his father has had two wives so two widows so the books are divided between them and most of them are sold off and one of the things sheikh abdullahi tries to do in later life is to track down his father's books to find out where they went and to see if he can buy them back and by the time he dies his house is something of an amazing library already so he's focusing very much on on hadith but also on the uh the tradition there's a very strong hanbali tradition in damascus more really than anywhere else in the islamic world at the time generally the olimar have historically voted with their feet and not appreciated very literalist interpretations of doctrine and law so the hanbali school is the smallest um but delma which is the suburb of damascus is historically a traditional hanbali redoubt i suppose continues to be to this day despite the the recent misfortunes he's also reading a lot of sufi texts particularly that which is poetic and what is kind of getting a reputation for as a teenager in damascus is somebody who really really knows the arabic language and to this day some olimar when they think of him will think of his his poetry and his works on literary criticism and rhetoric so the first time he really makes a splash in damascus is at the age of 25 he kind of publishes a poem about the holy prophet ali it's in 150 lines and it's obviously in the huge riverine tradition of literature that produces the border and other material and it rhymes in meme like the border because that's the letter with which the name of the holy prophet begins and it follows that convention very conventionally but it is also what's called one of the badi ayat and badiya is a particular tradition of arabic literary culture which doesn't just wish material to be rhetorically correct but wishes to make a line of poetry or a piece of art prose absolutely packed with the most complex and brilliant kind of show-stopping displays of linguistic eradication unusual words strange internal rhythms double entendres metaphors similars it's badiya means kind of shining or outstanding it's even one of the divine names is kind of the shining originator the magnificence of creation so that the procreation the literary procreation which is the work of the poet is in traditional arabic culture something that is considered to reach its highest point with these really difficult kind of tour de force uh exhibitions which to us is very difficult to read now because who now knows there's 70 different arabic words for wine maybe your average educated arabic newspaper reader might know two or three but the others could be chinese but back then they inhabited the language and the language was something that they kind of met and drank every day and they experienced the aesthetic of it and they appreciated unusual figures and this was what the elites used to do in the arab world before television and al jazeera took over they would recite poetry to each other i remember seeing that in some households in cairo in the 80s after the dinner they'd sit around [Music] and so play games with poetry so the person whose house it was would recite a poem and then stop at a particular point and then somebody else present would have to continue with another poem that was in the same meter and using the same rhyme and then the first person who couldn't do that when it was your turn going around the table is kind of out and it would be a great shame i didn't do very well at that kind of arab parlor game but it was a reminder of how things used to be that the language and the cultivation of the fine sounds and the subtle illusions of the language was a kind of almost sensual thing it was like drinking cognac after a meal it was a refined thing that was very widely pursued so i just caught a glimpse of that but in 18th century damascus it's what everybody does and it's part of being a a civilized educated muslim human being so he uh jumps into this ocean and produces this poem about the holy prophet this meemia and it's in a particular kind of tradition now it's it's called al-azhar and he's in one of these sessions and there are these grey bearded mufti's around and this kind of young squirt is there and reciting his own poetry he's not quoting from eben omar this is his own poetry all right he does a few verses and then a few more and eventually they ask him to recite his complete procedure and they're completely amazed uh some of them don't really believe that it's his i think it's not possible because as part of this bediya tradition one of the things you do is to incorporate in every line of your poem one of the figures of arabic rhetoric so a particular kind of metaphor particular kind of alliteration and in some of the poems you actually use a word that is cognate with the technical term for that alliteration and a lot of people read the border for instance i think it's just a nice sort of archaizing poem about the holy prophet they don't realize that in a lot in every line there are technical allusions to forms of arabic grammar and alliteration that scholars will recognize it's a kind of literary salon piece a tour de force so somehow this abdulghani has come up with this shining cosida and some people kind of openly say we don't really think that you could have done this although we haven't heard it before so he says all right in two weeks i'll come back with a commentary showing that i understand this and that i wrote it and the uh chief mufti is there now the ashraf is the head of the guild of the prophetic descendants and he says well i will give you three weeks so it comes back in three weeks time with something that is still on the shelves of arabic bookshops everywhere and you can see it took a long time to write but he does it in three weeks and he presents this and some of it is in poetry and some of it is in prose and it quotes the earlier badiya works the bolder and other works and it's clear that this is all his own work and he ends he somehow found time at the end of it to write another poem of the same length it's in here somewhere which does the same thing but which explicitly names in each line the literary form that he's using in that line and this kind of blows their minds and they kind of recognize and from this point onwards the rather grudging judgmental world of democene professors recognizes that this is a new phenomenon of course they're critical but they're also happy because they realize that they're being joined by somebody who is really worthy of the tradition so um yeah as the years have gone by because one of the things about these late scholars in islamic history is that they're inheriting a lot from the past the second third century the libraries are fairly basic a thousand years later the libraries in damascus are absolutely packed with wonders and it's worth noting that nowadays we don't actually have access to the riches of islamic civilization not just because we don't read but because of all of the books that have ever been written in islamic languages 99 at least remain in manuscript form you have to go to the library and drink tea with the custodian and give him a gift of some kind and then he brings out this miracle which somebody looked at 150 years ago but generally the umar is busy with ibn tamiya or learning to drive or whatever it's gathering dust uh only one percent has even been printed in arabic and of that one percent only a tiny fraction exists in english so where are we in terms of getting even a drop from this ocean and this is important to recognize that the ummah has not served its literary heritage terribly well if abdullah's books may be out of 300 books only 60 have actually been printed which is very extraordinary and if those only one or two have been done into english and even translations and even additions of problematic so we're really guilty of a terrible neglect if you go to the national library in cairo okay recently they had to spruce it up king juan carlos of spain actually because his spanish is interested in the arabic heritage so he goes to cairo and the sort of chain smoking generals think we'll take him to the pyramids or whatever he said i want to see the national library in cairo and these generals kind of look at each other and they say i think we have got such a thing right and so they find out that it's an absolute physical catastrophe with pages on the floor and the windows broken and birds flying in and out and it's horror so they have to pay for it to be painted and a few cases brought in to make it look less shameful but it's it's pretty appalling they have some of the most beautiful and amazing books in the world and then you open the manuscript like in cambridge you open the manuscript and it's kind of like being in a surgical theater you have to wear white gloves and a particular kind of pencil and there's a disapproving librarian looking over her glasses in cairo slap it down in front of you and you open it up and then they bring your shay your tea and they put it on the manuscript and it leaves the ring anyway this is the ummah really decadent it's uh yeah what can what can one say but the treasures are still there and people still find the most amazing riches and beauty just in terms of the book binding and the calligraphy and the paper making it anyway treasures buried treasures and so his heritage has been to some extent neglected partly because people find that very high exalted deliberately difficult arabic just hard work but it's produced this this thing and as i say it comes late in the evolution of arabic literature so it's already quite almost baroque rococo you might say with all of these flourishes for a very refined aesthetic sensibility and over the centuries the tradition of these badi ayat has developed so that um had increased the previous record for the number of literary forms you could get in a baddie which had been held by abu bakr al-hilli which was 37 he upset to 70 and the whole ummah is kind of cheering he's got to 70. yeah it's like one of those sort of tv contests i don't know you have to get the high score and these are the stars of the age and then along comes zakir dean ibn abil azbah who manages to produce a mimia that has 90 different literary figures in it great applause from all over the ummah and so the tradition by this time is that it has to be in the meter called baseet and it has to rhyme in meme and it becomes a kind of literary genre and then bossieri comes up with his borata which has 151 figures of speech in it and if you know your arabic literary rhetorical jargon you can see how he indicates that he's putting them in but they say if you include tejnis which is one of these figures which has lots of subcategories as one figure then actually he only gets 140 points that's the border but it was celebrated in its time as a kind of literary tour de force as much as it was a kind of devotional performance um okay so let me see despite the fact that this is in uh fairly high for looting arabic see if we can read a little bit from his uh amazing text not very systematically but just to give you a sense of this is in the uh sort of expressly written commentary and so he's giving a history of this badia form and he's given the early history from ibn mortez so you can see here that he's being critical then after al-hilli comes the great learning scholar in abu bakr al-hamad is from hamas he's also a syrian may allah have mercy on him and then and he opposed him so he's writing this crusader as a kind of way of debunking the earlier quesada taking it line by line and showing why his predecessor's poem was not much good and doing something even better but he didn't actually introduce a larger number of literary figures but it may even be that he was less successful he scored fewer points in listing these different literary figures but he certainly didn't go above the number right and then he wrote a commentary on his own crusades but in this garment of the commentary the garment was made of an excessively long tail coat of verbosity and he gave his casida a robe to wear made of boredom and repetition and in it he criticized some of the great ones of earlier times etc so he's kind of suggesting that his poem was even though it was popular in damascus an embarrassing piece of uselessness and then see who he has next um since nowadays we're very gender sensitive and then after him came the most meritorious woman of her time this is the famous uh muslim poetess and scholar of the 16th century there's a book published about recently because her works have survived the libraries there her house is still there in damascus they pointed out and she wrote a poem kind of following in the footsteps of his poem adami test meeting now but without mentioning explicitly the literary figure tamasu can be talaka till al fars to make the expressions flow more naturally when see jamie kelly met and the words to be more appropriate and she wrote a short commentary on it which i've seen myself written in her own handwriting may allah have mercy on her asvarath in which he unveiled the beauties of discourse and then he says having seen these four great badi poems and he includes aisha baronias is the most recent which is interesting he then explains how he wanted to follow suit and create now these two poems one of which doesn't explicitly mention the literary figures and the other of which does so you can see something of the almost uh that the delectation uh with which uh the damascene elite at the time um uh took their their arabic it was really the the their meat and drink and his in this very difficult and demanding literary world um already emerged as a star so as i mentioned many still remember him as a poet he has three dewans of poetry which are published and widely respected he also has so this is one of his kind of novelties in idiosyncrasy an entire commentary on the holy quran written in poetry it's in five thousand verses which he calls and as far as anybody knows this is the first attempt to create a complete trans uh interpretation tafsir quran in verse might seem strange but you have to remember that these people are so steeped in poetry that they could compose it they could just extemporize they didn't need to sit down and sharpen their pencils and work out what would rhyme with what it just came to them naturally like jalaladin rumi who just composed produced it and people would write it down as it came it wasn't our modern day problem of writer's block and going to sort of a writer's course with some novelists in some stately home and figuring out how to write chapter one just poured out of them and rumi what an enormous pouring there's d1s eight volumes of divine champions and it was all spontaneous as far as we can tell so and it's still the case um that you can find really old people in the arab world who can still do that easily who can as well switch languages and start talking poetry one the person who i knew in jeddah more than 30 years ago was saying who had been the hereditary ruler of the city of tarim in hadramat and his family published his political letters to other rulers and mayors in hadramalt and they were all in poetry that's the kind of culture it was it's like the mayor of cambridge writing about brexit to the mayor of saint nietz or something and it's a beautiful poem like something from milton a different world but that was just how one did it and it didn't take any time it just came flowed naturally so he is inhabiting that his poetic commentary you as the title indicates that inwardness is the hidden parts of the quran it's more tafsir ishari in other words a sufi type of tafsir because we've already mentioned that as part of the developed spiritual culture of his time uh people are reading ibn al-farid ibn arabi ign is the greatest arab sufi poet by most estimations so it's from cairo and this becomes important for him as it was important for just about everybody at the time however his relationship to tasawaf is an idiosyncratic one and we're still trying to figure out exactly what was going on um we know that at a fairly early age he does seem to have been initiated into different torok in a way that was almost just a way of being polite you went to see such from such a shaykh and you could see that you were learned in this and that you were pure-hearted and you gave you bayern like kind of giving you a sort of a gift of some kind here's one of my books here's my jersey he's my sister he's my bail and it wasn't a big deal but actually his own solute coincides in a strange way with something that we find in other early modern or late classical muslim writers such as abdul khan it was another person who settled in damascus a little bit later exiled from algeria by the french who was a great commentator on the tradition of ibn arabi who is important for democrines because that's where he's buried but who seems to have taken his formal initiation at the end of his spiritual path rather than the beginning this is something that seems to be an interesting idiosyncrasy of the age but in particular was very against excessive formalization which is one reason why in some of his works on doctrine on kalam his commentary on the um for instance he doesn't reject the use of logic but is not happy about the use of some of the more speculative syllogistic forms of modal logic to establish important truths about the divine he doesn't go down ebentania's road and tamiya thinks logic is an inappropriate unprophetic way of trying to work out the real purport of divine speech but is not really one with the hardline hanafi maturity speculative theologians who are kind of dominating at the time of khashoggi ibrahimovic arif hickman and so forth so a real hard line water candy moon he uh is taken by his father to see the medal of his the whirling dervishes in damascus um but that's not his particular mushroom which is interesting because with his very refined literary taste you'd have thought he'd be really attracted to a tariqa that is very aesthetic beautiful orchestration and the complex liturgies of the turning and symbolism and rumi he knows persian so he's he can read rumi and does have a relationship with him as we will see but that's not actually his mashrab in sufism which turns out to be quite distinctive he takes a journey when he's still young to istanbul and to adirene which is on the european part of turkey which was the capital of the ottomans before mehmed ii conquers istanbul and uh has always been a major center for onomat alama maybe the greatest ottoman darul hadith was in adiran the building is still there and on his journey he meets he meets a acadery sheikh and the qadhari who is a reputed sheikh of anatolia as soon as he comes in offers him the bayer and also offers him ceremonial sword which in some branches of the corderia is a symbol of a higher degree of initiation the sword has a certain symbolic significance in the world of tasawaf as in exoteric islam it's interesting to note that the tradition of giving hotbars in the aya sofia mosque in istanbul until ataturk stopped it in about 1930 that it was regarded as the the senior minbar of istanbul was that uh the kind of interesting miracles uh identified with the place so for instance it said that when you stand on the minbar of that it's really cold they say there's a uh a cold window salk penge which nobody can really identify which keeps the the preacher feeling really cold which is a way of uh enabling him to overcome his sort of anger his temperamental egotism and to help him remember that even though he's on this huge gigantic pulpit he's just a little human being and also the tradition of giving hoppers that was instead of the staff the khatib would always uh preach with a sword because the city was taken by the sword um but in the context of tusaw the fatal word traditions often had the investiture with a kind of ritual sword often complexly enameled and engraved as a symbol of the the greater jihad so this is an oddity and he remarks on it almost in passing and his biographers refer to it so clearly these sufis have a very high regard for the young man but he uh is following a fairly uh non-ritualized form of the sun wolf that relates in many ways to his own family's tradition particularly the kodamas who are hanbalis uh and the humbles have always been very close to the qadhari tariqah abracadabra and he was uh cordary and his ancestor muafa qadin ibn kodama the great fakhe the great jurist of the family had traveled to baghdad to take the take the bayer but an austere non-philosophical uh devotional type of abdullah ansari perhaps the best-known sufi writer of what we now call afghanistan it's also hanbali it's a well-known connection so some of the formal institutions like irada and bayar and the circles of vikka and initiation things seem to sit quite likely on him he does however take abaya much later in the bandit from somebody called balche who's a central asian and the bail seems to have been a more formal affair next to the the makam of john the baptist which is in in the middle of the umayyad mosque and which is a traditional place for investitures uh giving a jazzers and giving bayer in damascus and he receives this uh this authorization and he replies by again delivering an extemporized poem this time it's in persian okay perfect persian other is coming out just as an act of gratitude so he does know persian arabic and also turkish of course this is part of the ottoman empire at the time but it's interesting that his biographers including al ghazi and somebody called hussain who is his main biographer who is a student don't actually mention sufi amongst in the long lists of his teachers it would be conventional but doesn't really seem to have been very formalized and here we find one of the very unusual aspects of his personality which is to do with his own human individuality and is in some ways quite unconventional in that in many of his writings he insists that his principle spiritual blessings and guidance came through dreams of people who were long dead people from the bars it's not really supposed to be the principal form of spiritual instruction in islam but this is what he said and particularly in the bandi tradition so it said that baha'i nakshbando is the founder of the nakshpandia learnt much of his wisdom from earlier teachers including particularly whose mid 12th century central asia is still a town you can visit the mazar and the mosque it's very limited peaceful place and accepted from him many of the inward orientations and these i would say are the principal mashrab that determine [Music] the spiritual orientation of as i say an unusual person in many ways so baha'i not band is known as somebody who stresses service so famously he spends seven years with the labourers who are fixing the roads of horus and as part of his process of breaking the ego and he also spends seven years as a servitor of the stray dogs on the streets of buhari and so he says that his first moment of real spiritual intimacy with god came when he was binding up the pore of a sick dog and the dog looked at him in a particular way and in the moment of that gaze he felt that he knew god it's a famous moment in the history of the knoxvandia so it's a way of it's an austere way of service and again it kind of suits abdullhani because bandia not really very ritualized by and large it's quite a primordial kind of tariqa which is in many places helped it to survive i remember in the communist period it was actually on karl marx's birthday when i was really young i went to the mazar of um which is in a village um tank about half an hour's drive north of samarkand uh and uh i was hanging out there and the imam came along little uzbek guy was back cap and i speak a kind of arabic and he speaks a kind of arabic and he says yes we're all of course we follow the party here and we love the party and we keep talking he said you know it's ramadan and we are fasting in ramadan and when he got to see that i wasn't kgb um he thought as a foreigner i was probably fairly safe and then he said well we keep it going because of tariqat we'll and that's the mashrav and it's because the nakshmandia have as one of their forms most of them the idea of silent thicker party is listening everything's bugged can't do anything they're not up to anything you've got to run with 80 men with beards young and old doing this knocks but can't hear a thing so uh because of the kind of discursive ideological nature of marxism i think nothing's going on because there's no teaching being exchanged so that's how it was maintained and it's still maintained it's very interesting studies of the capacity of the nox band is unlike some other tariffs to exist in conditions of oppression in atatorics turkey as well it's very difficult to abolish abolish something that doesn't really have rituals doesn't need paraphernalia it doesn't need special meeting houses people that aren't saying anything in their ceremonies so and he has this sort of bandi thing which and i want to read a little bit of the teachings of the of hoja abdul khali who abdul rani felt he had a particular unseen connection to who is kind of his teacher from beyond the grave if you like he dies in 1179 now in islamic tradition you can't learn formally from somebody who is no longer in this world and you can't get a fatwa from somebody in a dream instead it's just general indications and urgings to the life of the akhirah so the nasir name one of the great books of our civilization really of abu khali says this and it really sums up learn and hadith do not mix with illiterate mystics offer prayers in congregation do not seek after fame do not accept any office do not be a surety for anybody do not go to the court do not mix with rulers or princes do not build a chanukah a sufi lodge do not condemn mystic music do not hear too much mystic music eat only what is permitted so far as you can do not marry a woman who wants material comforts your heart should be full of grief your body as if an ailing person your eyes went to action sincere your prayers earnest your dress tatted your company dervishes and your house should be your mosque and your friend should be god uh and then the the famous principles of the nox bandia the arkhan which i think really help us to understand uh the teachings of abdul ghani and it's always because these are universal virtues need to be born in mind so here are the principles whenever you inhale or exhale remember the presence of god keep an eye on every step you take which means kind of humbly looking down but it also means that whatever step you takes is to some well-considered goal safar which means traveling back to the homeland to the divine which means considering what you do in the light of death and your eternal destiny being alone in the crowd in other words when you're sitting on the bakerloo line or something and stuff is going on you are inwardly centered you're not spacing out you're present with the divine you are alone with the divine in every situation yet current being in a state of vicar bears guard watch out for what you're thinking think about what you're looking at and where your mind is wandering yeah concentrate and make sure that your thoughts are not lazy but are disciplined and directed um so those are the basic eight principles of the nakhdandir which become hugely important to maulana abdul ghani so we find this again and again and it becomes actually a solace to him uh that he even though in many ways is alienated from the the people of the city of damascus who he often has problems with and will not associate with sort of rulers and the like he feels a little bit of a luna but his company and his friends are the spirits of the departed and he says a lot about this the the vision of the holy prophet in dreams the vision of others in dreams uh and even in waking states he has books about this his own experiences and what it could mean and of course it's not part of not part of sharia it's part of the wijdan experiential or empirical islam the bit of religion that tends to vanish quite quickly at the hands of rationalizing or fundamentalist reformers it's that tender vulnerable bit of islam but it is something that again is worth bearing in mind one of the things that i think he teaches us is the need to be alert to the enigma and the mystery of experience in religion nowadays islam is not so much existential as propositional this is one of the changes that happened in the 19th century it's not so much about being with god but about being right as much as one can and for uplani the idea of the divine presence and proximity the quran and the unreality in the eyes of the barosach of time and distance does enable him in ways that the modern mind seem um really strange to connect with certain realities now those realities still happen to people and people have all kinds of odd experiences sizages odd encounters premonitions and want to know what they mean quite often people email me saying oh you know i had this very strong image of my uncle's name at 3 30 last week on wednesday and then when i got home they told me he'd died that kind of thing and a lot of people have stuff like that and because it's from the rape it can't be regulated and it's not clear what you do with it it's not part of akrida or part of sharia but it is part of the life of believers particularly if their hearts are receptive and not dusty and turbulent as a result of allowing the heart to be endlessly distracted by the latest text and the traffic and the other stuff that that veils us what has de-sacralized and disenchanted modern man is not so much newton and darwin and that kind of thing but rather the fact that people have no stillness and the heart is constantly agitated and can't really see anything any longer we don't have those contemplative experiences but for him it's uh important and it's part of the general human experience i'd say most people if you really get to know somebody at some point they'll tell you something that they know doesn't really have an explanation but that even islamically doesn't really seem to make a lot of sense or to be particularly helpful but clearly doesn't have a material explanation even today people will have those things because we can't be completely disconnected from the spirit and our true nature and often people remember those things and cherish them and they become an important prop to them in an age that insists that the surface of things is all that the thing can possibly be um i was recently right reading a biography of somebody who i thought was about the most kind of uh calculating and profane of people who was air vice marshal hugh dowding he was the head of fighter command during the second world war so he wins the battle of britain so i guess a historically really gigantic person but nobody really liked him uh his nickname in the war office was stuffy uh he didn't have many friends um he was rather melancholy because it married the girl of his dreams and then she died the next year and he was quiet but um after the war he starts to write about things that he's already been imprudent enough to talk about when he's sort of hanging out with churchill and deciding where to put the squadrons enormously cataclysmically vital decisions when the country really thought it would be overrun and my grandmother was given a box of grenades to keep under her bed so when the tanks went by she could drop graves on the heads of the germans it was kind of brexit but a trillion times worse it was real time of existential panic for the country and he was the one who was responsible for this last line of defense and he felt uh regularly uh the presence of dead fighter pilots and he started to talk about this he had dreams or he felt they were there in his office and he kept talking about actually at the end of the battle of britain even though he i guess saved the country they sacked him because he kept talking about these sort of labe things and there was i know that that fighter pilot was with that squadron and he didn't survive he felt and it's i think to do or perhaps it's to do with this [Music] immense attentiveness to the moment which has to be the way of the warriors the samurai preternatural awareness of everything or you die that he was in that state and these rape things who knows appeared and he thought maybe they're not ghosts maybe they're spirits that were attached to them and he didn't really have the language of jinn or the way in which we necessarily indeterminately talk about these things but it became a very important thing so at one point he has a dream he writes about this after the war he has a dream about a fighter pilot who's died and the fighter pilot who's called max says you should invite my mother out to lunch you'll like her so because he's already kind of believing in this world that's become really real he looks up the family and he finds the mother's the bereaved mother's address and he invites her to lunch what is this but she has also according to heir vice marshall doubting uh when she tells him afterwards she has had a dream of his name hugh so they have this lunch in wartime london and eventually they end up getting married and it becomes a kind of story because she's very keen on esoteric things she makes him a vegetarian and she starts britain's first ethical cosmetics company so she's in that world of being really aware of without having much to do with christianity or any particular relation but i thought that was interesting that somebody coming out of that really kind of high-tech conflict uh sitting behind a desk in the uh the the war ministry could have had those kinds of experiences which stayed with them we struggled to articulate that but for so many people in history they have had some sort of thinning of the veil and an awareness of the mysteries of the balsa which usually we don't have words to convey and we come up with strange ideas like seances and mediums and ghosts and it's not like that at all it's something harder to put into words which is why religion leaves it kind of in islam you're not really supposed to delve into those things but sometimes people have those experiences anyway so this seems to have been important for abdulhani that he communes with the great olimar of the past not giving him fatwas but they're somehow a presence uh that supports him so he has a relationship with jalaladin rumi for instance it helps i guess talking in persian if you see somebody who speaks persian and a dream so he's he writes about this and he writes books about um the many olimar in the past who have had similar experiences and the validity of taking spiritual teachings from people who are from another plane or another age and this seems to have helped him with his loneliness so at the age of 40 we have the kind of khazali type crisis moment in his career which is kind of enigmatic rather like khazali's crisis um some modern scholars of a reductionist bent say that he suffered from depression probably not because he was actually extremely active people who suffer from depression tend to be a bit kind of listless and unfocused but some of his great works were written during this period so at the age of 40 he goes into a kind of halwa a retreat and he'd never been particularly sociable so when he's still in his 20s damascus is excited because the imam of the haram and medina abraham is a great kalam scholar and sufi is visiting and of course there's a big reception to honor him and has heard of he looks around but he's not there and he asks about him and say well he's he's at home as usual so he has to have a special audience with him they converse privately which indicates i guess that already in his twenties afterline is kind of known internationally and we're also told that when they had the conversation it was carried out entirely in poetry of course and so hiyari later writes that sheikha dulhani is one who saw mixing with people as a waste of time with a path of happiness and expansion bust being the worship of god in the privacy of one's own home and avoiding public life and he said he actually prefers associating with books than with people so this uh when he kind of formally disappears and he really disappears for seven years happens in the year 1680. modern scholars say well maybe it's because of academic rivalries or maybe because of abuse the roughness of street life and it's very refined and can't take it so he just stays at home well we know that he's written poetry and which is critical of the city so he says things like this oh you that intends to enter this city enter not from damascus devil's dwell take care that the darkness which you will behold may not extinguish your light from this garden city you should run and flee not thinking them to be roses and narcissism so at this time he writes a book to explain the practice of seclusion and it's basically a hadith collection uh because there are plenty of hadees that indicate that solitude and avoiding the crowd are appropriate in times of fitness particularly in the end times so this is his book tech milan philosophy which is basically you translate the title as something like the perfection of discourse on remaining at home would you publish it in 1685 so he writes things like this because obviously people are criticizing him he's not even coming up for the five daily prayers he's praying at home whosoever is certain that the harms he will receive through mixing with people when attending the prayer and so on are greater than the harms he will receive through leaving those things then he will have a valid excuse in leaving them while in makkah i saw a sheikh from the people of knowledge who had secluded himself and did not attend sacred mosque for the congregational prayers despite his proximity to it and despite the purity of his wealth because scholars would not regard it as valid for instance to pay for a horse to take you to the mosque if the wealth you were spending on the horse was from a dubious source i spoke with him about that one day as i was visiting him and he told me that the divine rewards that he would find in attending sacred mosque could not outweigh the sins and misdeeds he would accrue as a result of going to the mosque and meeting people actually imam malik if you remember does the same thing he's in medina for years and even though he's next to the haram he sees certain things that disturb his heart and so he finds it better for him to pray at home with his family and with his students and people nowadays find this an oddity but this was the state he was in he would find more intimacy and more closeness with god with his prayers at home than um in the city's mosques so one of his students later describes this period as follows nobody was able to meet him may allah be pleased with him a tray of food used to be prepared for him but he rarely ate anything and when he did he only ate very little i was told by someone i trust that every night his family used to bring into his room a tray of food and drink put it in front of him and leave without any verbal exchange or eye contact shutting the door behind them and when they returned after an hour to take back the tray they would find it unchanged nothing having been consumed in his occlusion he also rarely slept and he did not leave except for the call of nature and for ablution and without being noticed if possible in that time he stopped cutting his hair and beard so he was reading the books of earlier generations whom he felt he could relate to in this time of disturbance and spiritual decline and he said they the the dead are like the living whereas the living are like the dead and he writes this in the same book in this our age i have witnessed the people from all the peoples the arabs the persians the indians the turks and others also who attained by reading books of hakka spiritual realities the degrees of the great sages and who gained from those volumes the object of all of their aspirations if after reading one supports one's knowledge with nafila practices and mujahada spiritual sacrifice and effort one becomes one of the people of perfection this is again something of contemporary relevance because people often ask well where is the man of god preferably only a few stops away on the underground i can visit with the white turban and the twinkling eyes and the flowing beard who will see into my soul and take me up to the divine that's a legitimate aspiration and then people find well if they're there they're not unveiling themselves is this whole spiritual dimension of islam which depends so much on personal effusion no longer part of the religion and we are just people of rules and doctrines is that all that islam has become propositional rather than existential abu ghani is giving us a kind of way forward by saying well the balzac is a reality you can be connected to those people through humbly reading their books but the upshot of it all has to be that you intensify your outward practices and you overcome the ego rather than falling into some kind of uh personalized bespoke religion you read rumi and then you end up doing god knows what no it's about intensification of outward normativity and that's the sign of its validity so this is something that can be done at any time by anybody by respectfully picking up the books of the ancient ancient ones and helps us to overcome that excuse within us that says well i can't do all of this exotic spiritual stuff because i need a teacher famous turkish couplet do not say lying around who is going to guide me to the path stand up at this moment because allah is the waliot he is the guarantor of success don't think that he can't open the most amazing inward doors for you and make your life easy and beautiful just because sheikh x is not conveniently on the horizon if ultimately spiritual growth is a divine gift and he can offer you that gift whenever he chooses he's not subject to the rules of any institutionalized spirituality so this is important let us not fall into latitude and apathy and cynicism because the man with the flowing white beard is not taking our hand in a convenient way but remember that the divine nature is always close he is kareem he is and he can open doors to us as he did for sheikh abdul hani with his eccentric relationship to official tasawaf in a way of his choosing god always acts on his terms not on ours so in this period when he is kind of letting his hair grow and not going out much he's actually very productive some of his greatest books emerge in this period remember this is somebody who writes over 300 books and counting 10 years ago we used to think it was 208 280 but new books are coming to light all the time quite an extraordinary output and some of them as we saw with this poetic commentary are very dense so he writes a major commentary on ibn arabi's for so so that's one of the toughest books in islamic metaphysics and he's writing a commentary specifically focusing on some of the difficult most controversial aspects within it and this is something many scholars have done this before and in damascus to which has been translated i think recently really difficult he also writes a book that becomes much more widespread and is still quite widely read which is a commentary on a book by somebody called muhammad bin pir ali al-birgavi who's an ottoman scholar and preacher in istanbul called atarika al-muhammadiyah the muhammadan way and this is a major work uh it's in arabic and is endlessly repented printed and you can pick up cheap editions and it's a very worthwhile uh sincere brazalian practical non-theoretical kind of set of advices there's an english translation of it now and it's about following the middle way in all things not because that's a compromise but because that is the most rigorous and authentic way of following the prophet the zealot or the bigot or the libertine thinks that he through the intensity of his indulgence or austerity is being authentic and is finding some real existential experience of the world no the real effort is to find the middle way extremes of any kind are an indulgence the middle way requires a lot of self-discipline and pairing away of the turbulences of the ego so it's definitely a book worth reading it's early 16th century i guess one of the things that he talks about is the need to give people easier fatwas he says whatever you do whatever you do give p do not give people the more difficult of the possible fatwas the more precautionary why because the people of this age are weak and if you give them difficult fatwas they will collapse under the weight and start to dislike the sharia give them the easiest as long as it's halal and this of course is a prophetic council the ego doesn't always like giving people easy options because we assume it's because of our laziness or some kind of liberal islam but um it is taqwa to give the ordinary muslims the easier interpretations and it is usually the ego that wants the harder interpretation because it's a form of self-praise it's a kind of sufi understanding of fatwa policy and it represents the usual position but nowadays we tend to assume that the narrower you are the less compromises you make the more the west will be angry and therefore the better a muslim universe you must be the kind of psychological way of doing fatwa whatever is most extreme shows how authentic i am so every group of the extreme groups become more extreme than the one before so al-qaeda was really bad but they weren't extreme enough for daesh and then dash and there's even worse things happening and that's the nature of because the extreme is a downward process because it's governed by the ego so it's easier for it to slip more and more towards its own nature whereas the golden mean is kind of a summit and it's a struggle to get that because the ego doesn't want balance because you have to think and make sacrifices in any case is one of the the best places to go to for this traditional wisdom so he writes it in this period another book he writes in his seven years of seclusion is really another bestseller which is called al-manam perfuming humanity through the interpretation of dreams this is obviously important for him because much of his inward life is to do with balazar experiences and visions and dreams so he writes what is actually the most popular book ever in islamic history on dream interpretation now the scholars who are experts in these things would say well you really need this is a kind of manual for somebody who's an expert it's like you don't really necessarily want to give a gps as a gift to somebody you can't even drive you have to know what the discipline is before you need the literature and the equipment that goes with it so you can look up things in it and sometimes it'll help but sometimes it won't so once when i was living in makkah this guy came to me said i had a dream of seven flying turtles i know there's a lot of hashish at the moment i looked it up in this book and yeah there's a dream of seven flying turtles and it means this and i said well according to nablus it means he says yes yes he said alhamdulillah i don't know so kind of there is wisdom there but generally the olimar will say okay to somebody who understands this strange balazar science of the spirit because it's like looking in a through the the the looking glass and the world of dreams the world of laurenthals is something that can't really be captured on the two-dimensional pages of a book but he writes this and it's still all over the place so he bases it not just on hadiths and athar dream experiences of the early muslims and ibn sirin in particular time of the salaf the great dream interpreter of course comes ultimately from yusuf alaihissalam the the validity of it but often from his own experience of dreams so he has uh dreams of hip and arabi he sees himself as a baby suckling from ibn arabi who is like a mother but then after these seven years really austere times of prayer not seeing anybody writing these masterpieces suddenly something happens and he bursts out into public life again and not just into damascus but he then becomes early modernity's uh most respected writer of travel literature he leaves damascus he's had his early journey up to ediron in those places near bulgaria but doesn't write about that much but he produces these uh narratives of how he went out with some friends to travel alone in order to see god's earth so between 1689 and 1700 he is basically traveling and he travels as a sufi this is a sufi tradition of siaja and it's organically mandated so his biographer again says when he left damascus he did so almost without anything together with his students and his close friends only about seven people he energetically traveled from country to country without money or any of the other necessities a traveler needs except only a coffee jug and the horses they were riding the sheikh road with them all over syria to visit the places of the prophets and saints that were there and kept journeying with them until they reached al-arish in egypt from which he traveled by land to cairo and even though you get the impression of somebody who is a bit kind of quiet and maybe a bit stuffy but actually in these travelogues you see him as being really kind of fun-loving and inquisitive he wants to see what's up this mountain and who lives in that village and let's meet so and so uh there's basically spiritual and human travelogues it's not like say the earlier generation of arab travel writers where it's more kind of descriptive if we went here and went there and this is the ruler of this place he's interested in meeting people so he goes to balabak which is in lebanon of course and he produces a book he goes to a lot of mazars and holy places and he spends a lot of time reflecting on nature so the sufi principle of going out defenseless as it were to inhabit virgin nature is about the quranic practice of and imbibing the presence of god through the vision of beauty in nature but also other people so he gives some very beautiful descriptions of the landscape of the lebanese mountains and the cedars and the desert but he also talks a lot about the extraordinary people that he meets because as we said at the beginning back then the human spectrum was much wider you meet a much wider range of people some of them eccentric some of them profound he doesn't say much about sufi lodges and ceremonies unlike say every archelaby more or less in the same period the great ottoman traveler who's visiting sufi lodge after sufi lodge and says well this sheikh was a turban with a little thing in it and he's not really so interested in that he's interested in people rather than the labels i guess and he's always trying to see what he can learn about god and his intentions in every human encounter so like ibn arabi he interprets the famous hadith religion is engagement not as meaning just that religion teaches you how ethically to engage with other people but rather that religion comes from that engagement in other words if you're an island in tower of yourself not engaging with the orders of nature and the orders of other human beings your religion is going to be a rather puny thing which seems strange considering the seven years that he's just been through but now he's in the state of bost after cobbled and his in every person that he meets even drews and christians and jews um he's meeting all kinds of people and very respectful um some of his correspondences with a a christian patriarch in in syria and the letters have been preserved and kind of fraternal respectful messages he's interested in what he can learn about the divine intention in creating the uniqueness of every individual soul this has to do with the sufi idea of the shahid every human being is a recollection of that moment when the angels were commanded to bow down to adam and even though our clay rots and our souls rocked and we are not what the angels bowed down to there is still within each one of us that divine spark that is uniquely interesting and he wants to see what he can find so this sufi principle of adam is a way of drawing out from other people what god intends by the creation of that person in every case so it's a kind of human uh travelogue rather than a geographical one so he describes a lot of the olia and on that he meets the upper mountain in the lebanon he meets a khalwa sheikh who has already mystically been informed that he's coming so a meal a gathering is already ready even though they hadn't announced themselves and couldn't send a text in advance to say they would be there but and after the banquet he tells him about a local a mystic who people used to go to for prayers and so forth who lived on a mountain who was able to jump he says it's in his travelogue from mountain to mountain he was famous for miracles but he neglected his prayers so eventually the shaytan took over him and he ended his days as a sinner and his rep and as a reprobate he goes to jerusalem as well and has a very interesting poem and relationship with the sacra the the site of the israel that becomes important to him uh academic discussions as well and then in 1693 his longest trip 388 days which he writes about again in a book called he calls it interestingly truth and metaphor in traveling to the lands of syria and egypt and the hijas so he's traveling and engaging with his companions and meeting all of these people but he said i actually traveled alone the only one i encountered the only one i was with was allah subhanahu wa ta'ala seeing the divine in nature seeing the divine in other people and this exalted mohammed and he does his hajj while he's on this journey so he is then back in damascus and returns to his father's professorial chair at the uh um the umayyad mosque which is the place of the nablus is opposite the mazar of hazurati yahya and in the morning he lectures on exoteric disciplines including literature and that evening he talks about spiritual things and barton he also starts teaching in ibn arabi's mazar which the ottomans have renovated and turned into rather a splendid place sultan saleem saleem the grim one of the most uncompromising and unindulgent of ottoman sultans has come through damascus on his way to conquer egypt and the hijas and of course ibn arabi's tomb is there and he gets a fatwa from the islam chief mufti of the ottoman empire asking him about ibn arab and he says this is one of the great men of allah and you should renovate and restore the tomb so when you go there today it's more or less in the form that sultan yavos renovated and if you go to selim's tomb which is on one of the seven hills of istanbul you can see things about ibn arubi and the connection that existed between the sultan and the saint so abdul ghani is teaching there and kind of surprising people because the tradition of the ulama is not really to talk much about metaphysical speculative difficult sufism and particularly doctrines about the relationship between the creator and the created worlds for the masses there is the creator there is there are the creatures the divine names are the effulgence of the divine creative purpose and everything exists in a fixed reality of time and space if an arab is looking beyond that in complex ways and the generally disapprove of exposing the say falafel vendor on the street corner to this idea of everything being just the interplay of the divine qualities a fully sacred view of nature but he believes that he has authorization and he teaches it and this becomes a little bit problematic for some of the olimar of damascus that he is divulging these um to the masses so one of his disciples al-baitamani says a man once told me should not have disclosed those holy forms of knowledge to the vulgar masses ought not to have opened the doors for the public to hear his words for he is the imam of the age and the masses would follow him in matters they cannot understand because of his teaching they might stumble into forbidden things so again unconventional but the way he teaches and this is expounded also in his various writings on ibn arabi and his commentaries on ibn al-farid as well in many ways shares in arabia's ontology is to defuse some of the easily misunderstood aspects of ibn arabia's conception of being it's intricate we don't have time to go into it now um but what is really important i would say and the fusion of the austere and non-ritual nakshvandi tradition of presence in every moment with ibn arabis arabi's ontology is that uh after his halwa after his seclusion abdul ghani comes out as an extremely expansive and joyful person and his journeys are really kind of there's about the happiest travel writing you'll ever find um unlike a lot of modern travel writers who just look for things that are wrong with those cultures or complain about the quasars of the hotel in beirut or whatever and it's all very self-serving but it's just a joyful thing and this is because of his understanding that the world from a certain perspective is nothing other than the interplay of the divine names and therefore whereas on the surface of the world those encrustation of things that are fallible perceptions take to be things we really don't like or approve of the reality is that the divine command always prevails everything is subject to the same corn feyer and nothing escapes the divine command and does things according to some way that the divine did not decree so when you look below the surface of things and to the reality of things you see the rahma of god you see the power of god you see the presence of god it's a doctrine of imminence as well as a doctrine of transcendence yes laser committee shape nothing resembles him and abu hani will be the first to say amin of course but allah has also said that he is kareem near and this korup is expressed in everything and the interest of human beings and the interests of the natural world in your experience of the mule that you're riding in the cedars of lebanon whatever there is the divine interaction of qualities there to be feasted upon the world as banquet so from this akbarian perspective there's something very life affirming which is why some of these modern scholars think this is the birth of modern arab humanism um it's problematic but it's a kind of humanistic vision but it's much higher than any secular interpretation of human beings could be because from a secular perspective we exist randomly and we end randomly and there's nothing intrinsically noble but if you're following the quranic adam we have ennobled the descendants of adam how you get into this idea of human beings as khalifa and really worthy of respect really possessed of intrinsic rights rights that are not conjured up by some jurisprudential wishful thinking and invested in the dull meaninglessness of secular matter as something that is there because god himself has enabled the descendants of adam and in the hanafi matari tradition in particular they talk a lot about innate rights um ismata adamiya by the mere fact that you're a descendant of adam you have certain inviolabilities and these are the five values of the shariah the right to life the right property etc so in this hanafi tradition and remember he switches from the chef to the hanafi madhhab you find this it's not really a proto-humanism but it's a it's a quranic humanism that is about the nobility of the creature to whom alone the angels can be legitimately asked to prostrate so ibn arabi looking at this sees the world as divine names and when you see the world as divine names you receive spiritual states that lead to love and ecstasy and this this perception of the beauty of the divine agency is purifying is it the idea of ecstatic love of god purifying the self and taking us away from the contemplation of our own dark impulses and weaknesses and this is one reason for the cultivation of the prophetic memory as as an expression of beauty which is why you know the holy prophet is the center of muslim poetry and all of these bodhi ayat focus on not haruna rasheed but on the holy prophet ali salad slam because he is already the human uh mirror of of heavenly perfection so by drawing out and by making visible to half-blind human beings the beauty of things and most eminently the beauty of the holy prophet in whom all of the divine names are reflected in a perfectly symmetrical and appropriate way human beings are drawn to god because they realize that they've never been away from god so it's really kind of an ecstatic and an aesthetic beauty focused spirituality so let's before we close because we've gone on a bit um looking at one quote from abdul ghani know that all things are matters of great subtlety in that they are of the rank of illusion or of the mirage that is seen from afar and which is in fact nothing including all solid things such as rock stones inanimate objects and trees they only appear solid through the prevailing of their innate nature the vision of them exists through the discernment of the intellect and sensory perception is predicated on the discernment of the intellect as for their real nature this is of the rank of subtle meanings perceived by the intellect of the discerning person in terms of their foundation on and firmness in the absolute true being and a lot of his poetry is kind of focusing on nature and the transcendent translucent beauty of nature uh as a way of human access to the proximity of the name so this is one of his poems a face multiplies in many mirrors and every viewer is baffled by it it's a lot easier in english than in arabic by the way all existence by his command are waves on the surface of water truly all the worlds are in their appearance and disappearance in speed and alteration like writing in the air sun and all creation in its lights like floating dust moats so the beauty of the world is a subtle thing latif that indicates its reality which is a mirage waves on a sea flux in comparison with the absoluteness and the inclusiveness of the divine being outside the infinity of god by definition there isn't room for anything so these are just modalities of being the endless flocks and reflux of the operation of the divine nature so nature is celebrating god and this is quranic ibn arabi is getting all of these things from some often neglected quranic passages all of their celebrations of nature everything in nature praises god kunlun everything in the world knows its way of praising praising god so hear and understand or you're missing something pretty beautiful saudi says i am happy and joyful in the world because the world is happy and joyful in him this is a particular makham of bastar you just see the beauty and the majesty and the perfection of the divine agency so how can you not be joyful so in many ways his life then reflects this practice of just inclusion and happiness so uh he uh builds himself quite a uh a nice house in salihe and it's still there you can visit it and they point out the room where he used to stay but when he left the old town of damascus he made himself a kind of hut out of clay he lived there for a bit just as happy and then with his uh considerable family wealth he built this nice house on the hill where he lived uh comfortably he like used to like giving banquets he had a kind of mobile pulpit made on wheels that had to be taken apart and carried on the backs of ten mules and he would go to different parts of damascus particularly the countryside or by the river public parks and preach and talk about poetry in that public context so he could be preaching in nature rather just in the mosques and known for his joyful demeanor and some of his poetry reflects this including some poetry which to the rather pinched modern anxiety folks focus of modern islam seems a bit scandalous and some of his fatwas as well so there's a big argument in the ottoman empire about tobacco and about coffee these are two new things uh and the sultans for a while have prohibited both and there's a puritanical movement led by somebody called cardi zade uh who was a disciple of birgevi but become became really quite narrow and extreme which said these things are not sanctioned in revelation they must be haram and nablusi wrote two fatwas as mufti of damascus he finds time for that as well in which he says there's no basis for prohibition and the hanafi tradition assumes that everything is lawful unless definitely proven otherwise what's wrong with coffee it doesn't intoxicate doesn't cause violence like alcohol so there's no piece there it's fine that really becomes the decisive fatwa subsequently in the ottoman empire where would the turks be without turkish coffee and then smoke like all good things it comes from north america and it becomes popular in the muslim world where it becomes really kind of a cultivated thing the shisha and the like and some of the olimar are banning tobacco and he issues a fatwa saying it's permissible now back then we simply weren't aware of the health implications uh so nowadays the fatwa of course has legitimately changed sheikh shelton i think it was at the azar in the 1950s issued fatwa that said it was almost haram but on the basis of modern medical knowledge but he doesn't really have a problem with it because there's no dali that indicates that god is against it so avoid the god is insistence that piety consists in making things prohibited wherever you can this is part of a sickness which he deplored um and his battle with the goddess was a well-known one and they were very active you know they were smashing up taverns and uh demolishing sufi lodges and they were like kind of protest lower caste preachers usually the izan not the senior muftis and the holoman who regarded them as kind of a vulgar embarrassment but this is part of his battle so he's in this state of bust and he spends uh time composing poetry and sometimes in kind of picnics with olimar of damascus which are it seems exclusively male only because he follows the usual austere syrian practice something like this gathering would have been quite shocking to him um he was not lax but simply didn't like unnecessary prohibitions so he went on a lot of these picnics and uh invited people to his house and that's where a lot of his poetry originates there's three big collections of poetry all of which were in print none of which were in english one is kind of literary one is mystical and the third one is kind of hedonistic it's khamrat babil the wine of babylon which seems like an odd kind of thing to come from the pen of the mufti of damascus because it's kind of about the beauties of nature and the beauty of women and it's often he combines the two and compares a particular syrian mountain to a beloved shoulder or something like that and it's kind of it's not where allah tend to go nowadays but in that world that was also part of the what the sufi is called shahid bazi gazing upon the beauties of the human form in order to learn about the creative magnificence of the compassionate god a practice that sufis were often reprehended for now he's not actually got girls around in these gatherings but this this literary tradition means that is one of the sort of major amateur and erotic poets of the arabic language uh another aspect of his of his identity and he writes a book about love the utmost desire in loving the beloved something like that in which he talks about uh romantic love as being a divine gift that is a prophetic state that helps us to transcend more earthly passions focuses us on contemplating uh the the the imago dei the the the uh the presence of the sacred in another human being uh the secularity of of marriage it's an interesting book about half of it is hadiths it's the kind of literature that can't really exist over the border in christianity there's plenty of rabbinical equivalence to this but christianity with its uh emphasis on saintly celibacy has never been able to go into that space of course the catholic church is now falling apart as a result of trying to defy something that abu ghani would regard as a as an incredible sign of the divine compassion and wisdom so yeah an east eat as well for him beauty is really really important because it is as plato said the splendor of the truth so somebody who embraces the world in a fully shady compliant and actually very devotional sort of tahajjud oriented lifestyle who loves the beauty of nature who is interested in meeting a wide variety of human beings and seeing what god intends by their creation the love of marriage of women it's part of the kind of classical late classical flowering of arab islam i've given just a kind of drop from the ocean but it's i think enough to give a sense of how different things were back then uh when uh the great olympia considered islam to be a kind of uh joyful style of life rather than what we often hear from the preachers nowadays which is that god has created the world to catch us out the world is a minefield and you have to be really anxious oh that's haram this penitential style of preaching that is yelled at us from the minbars nowadays particularly in some parts of the islamic world where they think the only way of making people good is to tell them how bad it is to be bad and everybody leaves the mosque after july feeling oh i had to do it so i came to the dentist you have to hear the hotbar but it's it was painful it was a painful one um this is not his world this is the islam of the age of the empirical experience of god and his compassion and his justice in the world and an experience of religion and the world and god's creation as something infinitely lovable so he was somebody who focused as ibn arabi did as the quran does and the holy prophet who is mercy to the world on mercy and forgiveness and love as being the preeminent qualities of the believer rather than a penitential anxiety and a policing of boundaries which is what it seems to have been reduced to for most of our contemporaries so yes another leader even though he didn't really want to lead anybody and tended to prefer his own company but when he got out and about he was somebody the quality of whose soul expressed itself in not an extroversion but simply in a sheer joy of being alive in god's world so may allah subhanahu wa ta'ala replace our darkness with light replace our disunity with unity replace our illusions with truth replace our focusing on the faults of others with the delight in seeing what is best about others and make us people of sincerity and true salak attached to the great ones of islam with reverence for their memory living and dead insha allah that he may unite us inshallah in both worlds in the religion of rahma and following the way of he who was habibullah god's beloved cambridge muslim college training the next generation of muslim thinkers

Channel: Cambridge Muslim College

Views: 19,369

Keywords: 20190323_s6_abdul-ghani-al-nab, finals, media

Id: BonYltAN7n8

Length: 119min 19sec (7159 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 20 2021