Khwaja Ubaidullah Ahrar – Abdal Hakim Murad: Paradigms of Leadership

welcome back for the latest in our possibly indefinitely to be extended series of reflections on paradigms of leadership people seem to like the uh the bio-data approach to ideas so with each of these uh often quite dramatic all these moving human stories of people coming from different kind of times and places and spiritual and fairy coordinates in the ummah we try to hang on that pagan particular idea or concept that insha'allah will not be entirely devoid of relevance and interest to ourselves i want to cover a variety of personages today but i'll be focusing for most of my presentation on just one but i'm going to circle in on that revered destination uh by recalling our coordinates in time and place day of the molded probably today but rabbi al-awl has other resonances as well 1441 that's where we are 11th 1441. and we can start with this one russia heart einel hayet one of the great classics of our biographical literature by somebody called maulana ali safi ali ibn hussein safi which again is uh from a nakshbandi world and uh before i finally get to my subject let's just outline what that world was not today in tasmania but uh back then in one of the incredible fountain heads really of that inward as well as the outward productivity of this had never been much before islam touched it a few ancient zoroastrian texts but basically not much and then suddenly it became a great center for all the hadith scholars and the hanafi many share a jurists and some of the great tariqas and the cobra and the bandia most uh evidently and also the yasaviya which we tend not to experience here but which are important in central asia and the turkish world from yes one of the two great disciples of yusuf hamadani so the founder of this tarekha properly speaking because everything is subject to the prophetic and external authority of the religion from the founders of all the holy prophet and you can say the founder of all the sunni mathabs is the holy prophet and his light reflected through the prism of the early generations in a particular way the madhhab of iraq madhhab of medina and geographically because of the dispersal patterns of the sahaba you have what becomes regional schools and something similar happens to the inward life of islam the drinking places but perhaps even more so because even though the recognizes which something which we often neglect the importance of local custom as a component of the sharia the thereby giving the application of islamic law and even the content of islamic law a difference according to time and place similarly the inward life which deals with the human soul which is much more part of a place and the culture of a place than our outward form that there is a certain regional specificity however some tariqas the sudanese that are just really in the sudan but the great tariqas including the targets of the akhtar be arbar we have the four found four imams and the four akhtar and uh mawlana behind the band is kind of everywhere in the ummah it hasn't really touched morocco much although there's no oxbunders in morocco um but there's lots of knocksman is in indonesia and all over central asia it's the tarek default in central asia east africa certainly in turkey certainly in bosnia left this morning to go to uh tend to his father we need to pray for sheikh zayed's father because he's having quite serious heart surgery tomorrow and that's you know lineage everywhere in the ummah the notch very specific to bukhara in its origin that somehow manages to become a part of the universalism of islam so dies 1389 one of the most transformative figures of the umba um from the village of kasri arifan the palace of the nose of god as the village is still called which is half an hour's drive outside bukhara and still an amazing place a place of wonders whatever your relationship to the tariqa or the subwoofer might be is still really beautiful huge area hundreds of acres of lakes and mulberry trees and there's a an old madrasa there and there's an old observatory where they'd work out the times of the prayers a place for travellers uh several mosques and it's a place where people in bukhara which is a kind of sovietised urban space unfortunately tend to go a weekend just in order to enjoy the serenity of of this place and that's where he's buried and when you go to these again in the great masters of notre bundy line in central asia to their tombs you see really simple remember this is and the graves are all basically open to the sky and to the to the rain they have a kind of marble enclosure around them but the tombs themselves uh really simple and you remember the kind of austerity that these people represent so if we can ever visit uzbekistan which is you can see imam buhari and imam tiramiti it's everybody is there uh imam maturity it's a uh an incredible place it's certainly worth visiting and his story is uh one of those almost demoralizingly austere stories of sufi transformation many teachers including amir kholal who saw him as a young man with promise and they got him to take the hard road to sanctity so for seven years he was directed to be a road mender in all his biographers in other words the roads as you can imagine pretty dreadful even worse than they are thanks to the highways agency sort of 10 years after the recession and the cuts nothing but potholes so one of the things medieval sufis like to do was to go out and kind of just fix public utilities just drag some rubble and put them in a pothole so he he did this for seven years and then he was directed uh to look after animals for seven years any book on animal rights in islam is going to love the stories of band and you can imagine medieval cities got a lot of sick animals around and kind of neglected creatures that people have just chucked out and mangy dogs and so forth so as part of their ego surpassing techniques um they would go out to serve the street animal so let me just read his own words as documented in a later hagiography in the beginning of my travel on this way i met a lover of allah and he told me it seems as if you are one of us i told him i hope to be a friend to you one time he asked me how do you treat yourself i said to him if i find something i thank allah and if not i am patient he smiled and says said that is easy the way for you is to burden your ego and to test it if it loses food for one week you must be able to keep it from disobeying you i was very happy with his answer and i asked his support he ordered me to help the needy and to serve the weak and to motivate the heart of the brokenhearted he ordered me to keep humbleness and humility and tolerance i kept his orders and i spent many days of my life in that manner then he ordered me to take care of animals to cure their sicknesses to clean their wounds and to assist them in finding their provision i kept on that way until i reached the state that if i saw an animal in the street i would stop and make way for it then he ordered me to look after the neighborhood dogs with truthfulness and humility and to ask them for support he told me because of your service to one of them you will reach great happiness i took that order in the hope that i would want i would find one dog and through service to that dog i would find that happiness one day i was in the company of one of them and i felt a great state of happiness overcome me i began crying in front of him until he fell on his back and raised his paws in the air i heard a very sad voice or sound emanating from the dog and so i raised my hands in and began to say amin after the dog's kind of groaning it was a sick dog until the dog became silent what then opened for me was a vision which brought me to a state in which i felt that i was part of every human being and part of every creation on this earth so he has his his fate his mystical experience beyond description this is a characteristically nakhbandi story okay they're very sharia compliant but he's making i mean to the door of a kind of stray dog in the streets of buhari and the dog is going i mean i mean everybody's crazy dervish just really lock him up and that's really characteristic of the way that they see things service is absolutely essential in this case service to these kind of pie dogs in the street that no one would give a second glance to normally but usually kick out of the way so a difficult path but uh saadit is the word that's used great happiness when the ego goes really goes rather than just feels proud of itself for allegedly not being there when it really isn't there there is a liberation and a tajirid and this strange circumstance of saying i mean to the dua of the dog that's how he has launched and becomes this amazing place outside but again i'm not going to focus on him during this lecture but on the disciple of the disciple of his disciple um bukhari is one of his great murids who hands on this light to maulana who hands it on to khawaja obaydollah sometimes called allah who is in uzbekistan that kind of overdose on these again they're everywhere and the places are really full of people and you get people from india turkey the caucuses are visiting them they're really busy and who establishes the eight principles on which the tariqa is later based as the predecessors of sha'a bahad in okra is in the town of devan and amir khalal ramitani baba samasi they're all there and surrounded by rose gardens and they're very serene nice places uzbekistan is nice but is kind of a special case he's buried in a what used to be a village just outside outside samarkand which is itself is kind of miracle city despite the sovietisation you can see the clash between the sacred and the secular maybe more clearly in samarkand than in any other city on the earth because you've got the soviet blocks gray concrete everywhere rational efficient inhuman and in the center of town you've got this registan square has anybody been to rajasthan square samarkand yeah which is like this miracle these three immense madrasas sky blue covered in the world's finest finest ceramics facing each other around this square it's like say the three greatest cathedrals and christendom kind of next to each other and it's kind of aesthetic overload and you can see the tourists kind of looking at this and just not saying anything i guess it's just such a staggeringly serene brilliant statement of the the greatness of our civilization um so there's that and one of the madrasas is open again i remember my on my first visit it was still the museum of atheism depressing so all these little uzbek school children would be taken and shown these kind of wax works of how the mullahs would deceive the people and take their money that's gone now handling that atheism turned out not to be quite as dialectically inevitable as marx and lenin thought and there's mother of the students back then in one of the um uh i think it's the tilikari madrasa one of the three and it's restored to something of its uh its intended function but yeah you shouldn't die without seeing rajasthan square it's one of the great sites on earth so uh is buried in near his house his dervish retreat in kashgir suburb of samarkand and again it's kind of simple there's no sky blue dome or anything just kind of this square of a stone retaining wall and then simple tombstone and a million uzbeks and others they're receiving the blessings uh but uh again characteristic bundy and we'll see this as we progress through his life although i don't mainly want to do bio data but to kind of go to the russia hat and recite the way abdullah used to do some of his his words and incidents in his life but he started off inconceivably poor and put through the sort of refiners fire of deliberate poverty for years and years as part of the process of overcoming his ego but later in his life he becomes one of the richest men in the world at least ostensibly because everybody wants his and all of the landowners and the emirs are giving him huge areas of land so that according to some of the walk documents and the russians when they take over and sort of regularize their central asian colonies in the the 1870s sort of make a register of this maybe 200 villages and their lands and estates are his wakfu and somebody called joanne gross is an american expert on central asia and then oxford is written on the wakfears which is still there in the university library in in tashkent and indicate the enormous amount of stuff that he ostensibly owned finally eliminated nationalized by the soviets of course in the 1920s so they could put up these grey tower blocks and the collective farms where millions of people died not a great uh ending to that story but for five centuries central asia was really economically dominated by these al-kaf which were used uh to support sacred knowledge the mother assassi to build mosques to do things like to build and maintain bridges and also to establish the chanakaars the lodges of uh particularly to the north just call to mind if you can the geography of where we are the eurasian landmass right in the middle of it is what we now call uzbekistan although that's not really a real historical designation it's part of what used to be horizon and then became turkistan but it's so ethnically mixed people of samarkand still basically speak farsi they don't speak uzbek unless there's a policeman around but basically it's thoroughly speaking and this turkistan if you were looking at it from the rest of the umma um or from china which it was closely connected to or mongolia where the mongols came from or from western europe marco polo goes through it's the center of everything but what is there to the north to the south there's persia and india and amazing things to the east is china to the west there's the silk road to the north has anybody seen antonio banderas in that film about ibn fodlan the 13th warrior it's a kind of stupid uh michael crichton horror film but it's based on the life of eben fotland who is this 10th century baghdad traveler who decided to go north what happens if you go north from the um at that time not china india europe africa but north well what happens north of tashken samarkand bukhari is of course enormous stepland flat undulating grass like the american prairie is that seems to go on forever full of wild naked men with sort of feathers through their bald heads who are likely to kidnap you and take you into eternal exile uh difficult nomadic warrior peoples nato you get the kipchaks and the cossacks and people coming from that world on tough step ponies the weather is excruciatingly awful because you're dealing with the center of the land mass so in the summer it's shockingly hot in the winter even in uzbekistan average temperatures in samarkand in january february round about minus 30 centigrade it's kind of uh a deep freeze um and remember these people who are cleaning the roads looking after the street animals that living in that but to the north of it you've got siberia let's go to india instead if you were sort of somebody wanted to do travelling in that part of the world india sounds nice so not many people went up there and the islamizing of those regions which was a big fact of our history comes about uh partly because the mongols who don't mind being cold and sitting on ponies for three months and drinking horse milk and they conquer those areas and after the death of genji's khan you have the fragmentation of the mongol empire and the altern ordo the golden horde takes over much of what's now ukraine the russian steppe the the north caucasus and western siberia and as genjisthan's descendants islamize so the locals become the mongol the mongols become the moguls in india and then the golden horde also become an islamic polity you get significant muslim populations established right up there which is still still the case in northern russia you can find muslim communities there was a khanate of siberia siberia before ivan the terrible crashed through it's a kind of amputated bit of the ummah but back in this period up there to the north problematic if you've seen the 13th warrior you'll see that it's omar sharif is kind of on a horse and antonio banderas and they're going to the north because of some crazy story about vikings zombies that they've been prophetically um chosen to go and combat it's not the real ibbenfod land but anyway they're riding north and you get vikings who are kind of not the kind of people you'd like to bump into on a dark night and then you've got these sort of proto cossacks and it's hard and not a tree in sight so nobody really went up there except the nakshbandiya because one of the usages of the uh uh specifically to try and get the hardier type of murray to settle to the north rather as the cossacks were kind of quasi quasi-church organization were used by the russians several centuries later to colonize the same territories same sort of principle so that was one of the uses of this enormous amount of wealth that came into his coffers which he himself didn't touch because of this nothing tradition of not accepting the future gifts to the dervishes but still a reminder of how economically uh and double wise significant these these movements were so uh let's uh just get stuck into this nice text much nicer than my own words what have we got here something okay this is just a reminder and about the sharia compliance of these people let's start with that with that thought uh and this is um ali safi himself writing among the preachers whose khutbas i have greatly enjoyed i must mention mawlana shamsading was delivering a khutba he could not hold back his tears and he wept convulsively in order to understand the reason for his weeping i asked and listen with careful attention he said one of the great mongol rulers is known as the emperor of the muslims according to what i've heard one of his companions was called to account for claiming to have had relations with one of his concubines and he was killed at mirza's command by being thrown down from the minaret this penalty has no connection with the rule of the sacred law the first question is whether or not the alleged crime is actually approved even if it is proved this is not its penalty in the sacred law there is no penalty in the form of execution by being thrown down from the minaret if it's not proved it means the man is definitely innocent and how can this injustice to a muslim be explained from every point of view mirza's every action is inconsistent with the sacred law so this is in his khutba and he's got a mongol ruler breathing down his throat but it's not hesitating to point out that the sacred law is here being violated i understood that the mawlana was weeping for this reason and those so attached to the religion nothing is felt more acutely than anguished concern for the sacred law and the pain caused by disrespect for the sacred law okay here's another one another khutbah story maulana shi habitin sayarami was the teacher of the sheikh zayn khafi and the venerable maulana yakubu when he came to samarkand he was requested to deliver the venerable mawlana muhammad at one of the great masters of wisdom was also there at the time mawlana sheikh abedin accepted the invitation and before mounting the pulpit the minbar he bowed down and kissed the lowest step on its staircase on seeing this site mawlana muhammad atar stood up at once left the congregation and went out of the mosque when mawlana sheikh badeen observed this situation he descended from the minbar without starting his khatpa and followed after mawlana muhammad he caught up with him and asked what impropriety did i commit so that you left my sermon without waiting for me to say a word and he received this answer we are constantly striving to ensure that no bidder remains among the people but what about you from where did you acquire the bidder of kissing the lowest step while mounting the minbar in what aya and what hadith did you see this prescribed which of the great imams did this if such a practice emerges from people of knowledge like you how shall we be able ever to attend so these stories are also part of this this is not some kind of dervish latitudinarian this is um this is sunny sunny very sunnifying emphatic pro sharia islam now maybe one of the interesting paradoxes of our history is this phenomenon that academics and historians are increasingly discussing called the timurid renaissance and one groans and think oh dear here's an attempt by somebody or other to prove that islam was kind of on the track that the west has followed and so rene sauce what a wonderful thing it was in europe so the muslims have done it so it's kind of an apologetic thing but nonetheless the descendants of timur in herat in the 14th 15th centuries did create a civilization that was quite extraordinarily productive and brilliant and what we need to reflect on is the fact that it was also absolutely under the sign of nakshmandi sufism so this tariqa that says i'm not going to hear your khutba if you're kissing the step of the minbar because that's a bidder is also producing the miracle of herat even today in herat you can see ruins of buildings that are kind of miracles you know the lapis lazuli that they have in afghanistan so there's amazing sky blue tiles and the calligraphy and it's like seeing calligraphy in heaven those buildings are incomparable now the timurid dynasty is founded by timur who is buried in uzbekistan gor amir one of the great sites of samarkhand huge dome and underneath it there is his grave under the biggest piece of jade that's ever been discovered anywhere in the world and it's still there kind of chinese mongol idea that jade preserves from corruption thought to be from heaven it's still there and it's a very atmospheric place even when you remember that the guy probably killed millions of people and piled up the skulls of muslims in the great pyramids and was one of the bad mongols really um from the barolos tribe one of the remnants of genji's khan's original bloodletting horde he rules a lot of india central asia his big cities though were kind of in central asia and uh now one of the biggest questions in all of islamic history is how these sort of ax murderers who come from these shamanistic buddhistic regions of mongolia and build these mountains of skulls and kill half the population of hungary and it's kind of a holocaust but ten times worse when they took the city of balch which was a city of 100 000 people only 40 people who hid are supposed to have survived and much of central asia still depopulated they say because because of that everybody died how is it that those people kind of sort of i don't know the mordor of the age some kind of completely dark negativity that they became muslim and end up producing not just the wonders of india the taj mahal blah blah but also in afghanistan in herat the timurid renaissance it's quite a transformation and it's worth reading around that the conversion of the mongols to islam one of the big significant strategic facts of history everybody in europe was praying for them to become catholics some of them did it was kind of touch and go because the early mongols had more or less prohibited the practice of islam and there were now buddhist temples all over iran and the khalifa had been trampled to death 1258 and it was seemed to be the end of the world uh the first mongol ruler to convert was razan razan khan who was brought up by a chinese buddhist monk that converts through processes that you can read about in thomas arnold's book the preaching of islam there's a whole chapter on the conversion of the mongols which uses something called the the taj tawari rasheed which is one of the big medieval persian history books and you can read about the role of the sufis particularly the kubrawi tariqah bahar in particular and the bandi tariqa in converting them and there's a lesson for us in that uh because 1258 mongol sac baghdad maybe they even used the mongol word for shock and awe and then the americans do it but what is the different response of the ummah back then not shouting and terrorism and suicide bombing and stabbing the mongol soldier in the market in baghdad even though the adhan was prohibited and halal slaughter carried the death sentence and islam was kind of prescribed but instead thicker patience and a determination not just to survive and be angry but to convert the mongols in other words to see them as human beings who need something better so pity instead of anger and as a result you have lots of extraordinary stories about the the patience of some of the great sufi sheikhs mawlana rasheed rasheed deen and samarkand summoned to the court of the of one of the pagan khans and his entourage the mongol said we want to have a laugh so please show us how you persians pray so he prays to raqqas and then one of them comes over to him grabs his head and bangs it on the floor in the hope of making him angry so he'll say something that gets him put to death and then amir says you persians look at you down there you're like dogs and he just says but for islam we would be worse than dogs and he's allowed to go through those moments of the extraordinary dignity of these people you find that eventually people like and also all jaitle or jacob becomes first a christian because his mother is a nestorian princess and then he becomes muslim so he's baptized as nicholas great church bells all over europe half the ummah of islam is ruled by king nicholas now and i think the messiah is going to come but he ends up becoming muslim because of the spiritual quality of these people so a vain thought if uh our radical friends in baghdad and molson instead of doing what they chose to do with all of that anger had done what the bundys and others had done six centuries before well who knows maybe paul wolfovets would be mahmood or something and the world would look very different this is the power of monotheism that even those monster mongol barbarians they have souls too and they can be transformed so there's a lesson for us in that and it's worth reading about about these people so the timoris by this time they've been muslim for a century and they create this incredible jewel in the crown of islamic civilization one of the great persian painters kamaladin behzad you can see his works at the british library extraordinary refinement is from there the timurid ruler of herat ulochbeg builds about the most famous observatory in the islamic world or maybe anywhere before the invention of galileo and lenses this is done through naked eye observation but you can still see it over there extraordinary ways of calculating the elevation trajectory of the the traveling stars um great works of architecture the shahi zinder in samarkand possibly the world's most beautiful cemetery staggering place the mausoleum of ahmed yasavi which is in turkistan is now in kazakhstan it came from one of those places full of snow and scary men on horseback but they're going up there and he really becomes the patron saint of what is now kazakhstan and a wonderfully beautiful building um so herat becomes uh this huge center and the sultan hussein it's again there's no time to go through his story but it's very dramatic story because it's kind of exiled and in hiding for 10 years and then comes comes to power capturing herat he's timur's great grandson and he's very educated we have his autobiography indicating his nakshbandi sympathies and one of the things that we find in timurid herat is a a great conviviality between sunni and shii which was not the case uh in some parts of iran where there were places like sub-saharan yaz keraman where there was a very strong disputation but the timurids didn't appreciate this uh at all and so you have in sultan hussain bhaikara's account of the atlanta kind of what the arabs used to call before the current ruptures to hassan in other words a good sympathy with athena bait and karbala and imam hussain rather than the kind of extremism and he arranged these extraordinary festivals street festivals um so one modern orientalist calls it the florence of the east you know how the italians love to have these street festivals with flags and and nights on horseback and so forth it was very much a fluorescent kind of place uh abdulrahman jami is there now if you're a mother as a student you'll think uh this is commentary and ibn alhajib it's the most dull arabic book ever mulla jami in turkey now means excruciating arabic syntax but that's just one of his books he's also the author of the haft aurang seven thrones these incredible uh series of stories joseph and zuleika salaman and absalom layla and majnorn in the most exquisite big book length persian couplets and they're some of the the classics of our civilization but morelab rahman jamie also last year i was in turtle in estonia where they happen to have in their little university library one of the world's great copies of the huffed aorang which was a gift from a 18th century persian king to the tsarist ambassador so somehow it survived hitler and stalin and the luftwaffe it's there a staggeringly beautiful thing a jewel and one of the monuments of our civilization and you see the calligraphy the binding the illumination everything perfect and it's from a nakhmandi culture so don't think that this emphasis on poverty is self naughting shadia compliance means you can't have one of the world's great civilizations the it's not like the desert against the city austerity against beauty it's um it's much more sophisticated than that so abdulrahman jamie dies 1492 with his haft aurang and his books on irrigation and his grammar book and his interest in astronomy mathematics the nether height and ons which is one of the big texts which we have on nakshbandi biography basically focusing on 15th century which means something that the breathings or the exhalations of intimacy very nice text another of the the jewels in the crown of the timurid uh renaissance who becomes uh kind of a senior minister at the timurid court and possibly the greatest of all early turkic poets they used a language called chagatai it's the mongol switched over about a century from mongolian to a kind of turkic this chagatai turkish which isn't spoken any longer includes a lot of arabic and persian words it's quite archaic but the main street in tashkent now is named after him and again a great enthusiast for the uh nakshbandis he built 17 mosques just in herats his munajat his book on the benefits of old age which he writes when he's old um and uh also a biographies to biographical sort of notes on the great notre bundy saints kamaladin author of a number of great persian texts including the anvari soheili which was a set text for british india office officials in the 18th century when they wanted to deal with the indian elite so that meant you had to know your persian literature so the first printed edition was in bulldog if you can imagine if you've been to bulldog and hertfordshire uh they did several editions there uh but also uh the raul dr which of course has a little version which we recite here in cambridge which is a commemoration of the sufferings of the anna bait remember this interesting thing that this is a nakshbandi city and you think the band is the only one that goes back through abu bakr and yet they're producing this civilization that is so open to the bait and produces the rao data shohada which even amongst the shia is the preferred recital for muharram they do it in villages in iran it's in 10 chapters one chapter is recited on each of the first 10 days of muharram he's a nakshbandi and the twelver shia i love it they do it in lucknow and places in india as well which is interesting in terms of contemporary ideas of these polarities it's not either or it can be both and so the author of this book ali safi is the son of kashifi who produces the the raw data so very much in the uh bandi uh nakhmandi tradition so we have the band is doing this rather extraordinary thing of being instrumental in converting the mass murdering tribes to islam uh and ushering in a certain way the second half of islamic history when things become very sort of persian and turkic and the moguls are not like the earlier dynasties and the greatness of the golden horde the crimea the ottomans in a sense come out of this uh and in the midst of this sort of nakshmandi revival not just of the spirit but of the civilization arts crafts poetry etc of islam you have who is born in 1403 in what was then called shash which is now tashkent which has become the uzbek capital in earlier times if you were shashi some of the great hanafi it meant you were from tashkent if you look at the map you can see this is kind of further out further away from the middle east then bohara and samarkand it's kind of it's not terribly if it's like an hour's drive from the kazakh border so up there you've got the wild men and the treeless steps and the snakes uh but uh tashkent shash becomes really a major outpost of maturity hanafi and then nakshbandi civilization is from there and we learn all kinds of things about his childhood and we're so used to muslim hey geographies that say who memorized the quran at the age of five and he was stunned all of his teachers in hadith by the age of seven and et cetera et cetera it seems he was a bit of a a non-academic child and his parents kind of despaired sending him to mother and mother who didn't really get into it and we have the account in uh this eyewitness account of how he recalled his childhood if i can find where we start from this is what he himself said i used to go to and from school my heart was always with allah and i assume that everyone else was just like me one cold winter day while passing through the countryside my foot sank into the mud while trying to set it free i also let the hem of my coat get stuck a state of roughly heedlessness overcame me at that moment being so caught up in this business it's got it stuck i was distracted from remembering allah a young villager was busy plowing nearby and i scolded myself saying look even in such agonizing labor that young man is thinking of his maker how can you forget him just because of a little effort to retrieve your foot from the mire sobbing and blubbering i burst into tears at that stage i still suppose that everyone was the same as myself and i assumed it was normal obvious to remember allah at every moment until i reached the age of puberty i could not understand that there were people heedless of allah i thought that allah had created everyone to be aware of himself in fact as i later came to realize not to be heedless of allah can be a divine favor peculiar to only a few of his servants or it is a divine favor peculiar to only a few of his servants it can only be obtained through spiritual exercise and struggle with the lower self though it's a property that few seem able to acquire even by those means according to the charges nephew while i and the other children were playing games we would try to get the variable to join us but we could not persuade him in spite of our most persistent efforts he would stand in a corner happy as if playing by himself and he would remain in his own special state yup and then we have some information about how he was when he became a little older the venerable khwaji himself relates in a dream during the early stage of my spiritual development i saw the venerable baha'i nakshband he exerted such power of dispensation on my inner being that no strength was left in my legs then he suddenly turned and started walking away making my utmost effort i ran after him and caught up with him he turned back and said may you be blessed sometime later i also saw the venerable muhammad parsa in a dream he tried to affect me with his power of dispensation but he could not succeed the venerable khadgar again relates this in the palace of unluck bay mirza remember he's the one who's built this amazing observatory there was an officer charged with the enforcement of penalties he used to administer the penalty of flogging the officer sent word to tashkent announcing that the sons of the sheikhs were to assemble in a gathering and that he wished to see them duly gathered together 17 young men of whom i was the youngest each time that officer shook someone's hand the person was seen to enter a state of rapture when my turn came i decided to resist that state if it started to overtake me too and i was successful in my resistance the officer was very pleased with my resistance he brought me to the front and heaped all kinds of favors upon me for my part i wondered how someone could be endowed with such inner strength and yet be engaged in political and policy administration in the service of the bay i was utterly baffled by this but he read my thoughts and he said i was a pupil of the venerable kharja hassan atar i spent a long time at his side and i strove to enrich my inner being but success eluded me when i expressed my pain to the venerable harja he instructed me to work at the sultan's command and to attend once again to my inner being by secretly helping the oppressed he also wrote a letter to those concerned declaring me free to follow my own guidance with the help of the shock i received from this action and from realizing that the venerable hwaja expected me to succeed i finally attained my goal through performing the duty that he had imposed upon me since i patiently endured the agony i suffered whenever i could not help the muslims in trouble the poor and the unfortunate those whose rights were being violated i was able to obtain the degree you now witness so that's another kind of tribulation that leads to an unexpected sort of high spiritual state that is telling him go and work as a policeman for the of for the government secretly trying to help the the poor and the oppressed and the suffering that you'll experience whenever you're not successful in that will be an overcoming of your ego and you'll achieve this enlightenment as a result of that i was in the early stage of my career my mother owned a farm she sent me a quantity of wheat which was brought by me by a nomadic turk which means basically one of these kind of half shamanistic rough guys from the north turk is basically a rude word in this culture while i was busy storing the wheat that turk went off with his sacks it was unclear where he had gone and which road he had taken at that moment a dreadfully disturbing question took root inside me why did i put myself at fault by failing to seek spiritual grace from this simple fellow it seemed that i had missed an opportunity that was important leaving the wheat unattended i set out after that turk i caught up with him halfway along the city road and i begged take notice of me cast a caring glance on my condition perhaps allah will put me in contact with the blessing of your spiritual influence and my thus may be protected and my naughty problems may be solved the man looked at me with astonishment and he said presumably you're practicing the teaching of the turkish sheikhs whomever you see assume that he is assumed that every night is the laila trokada as myself i'm a turk who lives in the desert and i hardly know how to wash my face correctly how can the things you seek exist in me that turk was deeply affected by my plea but so much that he raised his hands and offered a dua on my behalf through the blessed grace of that supplication i experienced revelations and disclosures within my inner being no one knows what prayer of supplication allah will accept and under what conditions that is a secret and there's again characteristically nakhrobandi teaching that you assume the best of everybody such and such a person maybe already he may be the kind of smelly guy who's bringing you wheat on his bullock cart but he may be the one who can help you to overcome ego and and reconnect with with roh during my childhood the power of imagination at my disposal was beyond my understanding to the point where i could not even conceive of going outside the house on my own then one night i experienced the state in which involuntarily i felt compelled to visit the tomb of the venerable abu bakushi i jumped up and left the house i went to the tomb i sat facing the tomb of the venerable sheikh no trace of fear affected me i stayed like that for an hour from there i moved over to the tomb of sheikh and tahur i was still unafraid i've also visited the other tombs but none of them did i feel afraid despite my young age and my wild imagination in the shade of the spirituality of the saints not one atom of fear was inspired in me by those awesome tombs in the darkness of night when the state of mind began to captivate me i made a nightly habit of wandering around all the tombs of tashkent the tombs were situated quite far from one another but i used to visit them all in one night at that time i just set foot in the age of puberty the people of my household soon became worried about these nightly wanderings of mine so they set my foster brother on my tail and tried to find out whether or not i was doing something bad one night when i was next to the tomb of sheikhav and tahor along came my foster brother as soon as he reached my side he laid his hand on mine and began began to shudder he said that he could see strange and mysterious things i sent him home when he got there he told my relatives you need not be suspicious of him any longer you must realize that he has fallen into a different state from ours in the dark night at the head of tombs into which ten men could not be inserted at the same time he stays all alone until morning after learning this the people of the household understood that i had been endowed with a spiritual state of divine origin and they wiped their bad suspicions from their minds one other night i was sitting at the tomb of sheikh zayn abdin the tomb was on the outskirts of the city and in a lonely spot there was a madman in tashkent a fellow with a huge body like a statue and he had killed someone in the city in recent days people were afraid of him and they kept their distance from any place where he had been seen suddenly while i was at the head of the tomb he appeared and screamed get up get out of here go away i gave him no response and did not interrupt my vigil the man went on shouting but i still took no notice he sprang forward plucked some dry herbs from the head of the tomb and made them into a bouquet then he opened the lantern burning at the head of the tomb and ignited the herbs his purpose was to set the burning herbs on top of my head as he was approaching me in order to do this a sudden gust of wind extinguished the flaming herbs in his hand the madman was utterly enraged this time he launched a verbal tirade and this state of affairs continued until the morning suddenly just as the day was dawning he disappeared like a bat that had seen the light he had gone to tashkent and there in the early morning hour he turned the market upside down he also killed a man the people gang together and beat him to death with sticks as the venerableharja himself relates people tell of certain things having appeared to them from the tombs nothing of the kind had ever shown itself to me so he's there but in a state of sobriety while the venerable abdul khaled and his affiliates were strolling through the market quarter and the bazaar the noise and hubbub of the people and the merchants reached their ears as the sound of remembrance thicker they never heard anything other than the remembrance in the early stage of my own development the remembrance had become so predominant and preponderant for me that i heard the remembrance in every sound and whisper of the wind one day a rich man from samarkand held a wedding feast at the invitation of a friend i had gone to a spot near the site of the feast all the shouting and calling of the wedding guests as well as all the sounds of music came to my ears like the thicker like the remembrance i neither heard nor listened to anything else at that time i was 18 years of age then it moves on to his adult life i was in herat at the time of mirza shahrukh mr prince as far as money was concerned i did not have a bean this is the idiomatic translation the turbine on my head was in tatters as soon as i knotted one part of it the rest would come undone and dangle loose one day as i was passing through the marketplace a beggar asked me for something i had no money to give him so i approached a cook removed the turbine from my head and said this turbine is old but it is clean it could be used for drying and wiping when you are washing the pots and pans take it and give this poor beggar a dish of food after giving the beggar enough to satisfy his hunger the cook set the turban before me with great politeness but i did not accept it and i went on my way the venerable charger relates i worked in the service of many different people but i had nothing not even a horse or a donkey to call my own i changed my cuff turn once a year because it's cotton cotton padding wore out every three years i managed to get by with one fur coat and one jacket one winter season together with molan and musever i was sitting in a room with a view of the street the floor of the room was below the street level rain water and mud leaked into our room in the mornings we used to go and perform the ritual prayer in the congregational mosques my clothes and my undergarments were so flimsy that half of my body never got warm in all the time i spent away from home i could never easily obtain a couple of jugs of warm water for my ritual ablution when i needed to restore my ritual purity i would sometimes leave my sheikh's company and go all the way into town i remember this is probably a places completely frozen the thought occurred to me if only the venerable sheikh would consider letting the spiritual paupers the fukurat daravishan have a drop of warm water so that they could perform their ablutions here in the icy winter alas that fable was never granted here we are ready to make proper use of a cubicle a lamplight water steam bath and a bite to eat yet we're all caught up in wrangling unaware of the priceless opportunity we are missing in the time of merza shahrukh there was a rich man the chief of the moneylenders who showed great respect for the path of the gun in particular he recognized the special grace of the venerable muhammad i would not eat at the table of anyone in the city and i refused all the invitations of this notable individual ramadan finally arrived the man came to me and said during this ramadan you will break your fast every evening at my place i asked to be excused he insisted and insisted when i repeated my request to be excused he said if you did not break fast every evening at my place let my wife be divorced with a triple repudiation reluctantly i was thus obliged to act in accordance with the man's insistent demand i experienced much help and positive interest from this man in those times i did not have the means to repeat to reciprocate i did have the means later on but the man had died by that time i was at least in a position to give his son 10 000 dinars as well as providing him with some other services throughout his entire life the venerable kharja obeyed allah never once accepted a present from anyone one of the great masters stitched a kaftan for him out of white lamb's wool with his own hand and sent it to him he took every care to ensure that the present was made of lawful material when the venerable khadra saw it he said this kaftan is permissible to wear because the scent of rectitude and lawfulness drifts from it not once in my whole life however have i accepted a gift from anyone convey our apology to the venerable master and present this to him as our gift this time so lots of stories about sharia scrupulousness when you accept a gift you can never be entirely sure of its origin at the age of 24 he moved to herat where he stayed for five years establishing fellowship with the sufi sheikhs then at the age of 29 he returned to his native land after that in order to obtain lawful sustenance he embarked on a farming venture in partnership with an associate in a short space of time due to the great blessing allah bestowed on his venture he was incapable of managing it himself so he appointed an agent in his stead the venerable hajj's wealth and property increased at such a rate that the accounting office could hardly keep pace with it on the second occasion when this poor creature that's alisafi rubbed his face on the venerable hwaja's doorstep persian hyperbole one of his agents informed me that his fields numbered more than thirteen hundred in those days he was engaged in the purchase of many additional fields in just one part of his farmlands an area called droibar which means irrigated lots of streams three thousand workmen were employed as the himself relates my tithe to the court granary of sultan ahmed mirza amounts to hundreds of thousands of measures per annum whenever produce was stored in the venerable charges granary its quantity had always increased by the time it was taken out as for those who witnessed this supernatural wonder they totally reinforced their bond of connection with the venerable khawaja when giving his own explanation of this marvel he would say my wealth is for the benefit of the poor that is why it has this particular quality from the beginning to the end of his path of perfection there were no limits to the venerable khadra's help and kindness bestowed in the highest degree on acquaintances and strangers on friends and foes alike his service to one and all without distinction became a legend on everybody's tongue as he himself relates i took it upon myself to care for three invalids who were lying in maulana kotbadin's mother in samarkand because their disease was getting worse they were making their beds filthy i washed them by hand and changed their under clothes by hand since the service of mine was very frequent their disease infected me too i also became bedridden despite this condition of mine i continued to fetch a few jugs of water and wash the invalids clean on the spiritual path of the masters of wisdom whatever the moment demands one must act accordingly remembrance and vigil can only be practiced when the situation does not call for service to the muslims it's a priority is service since a service may be the means of winning the heart it takes precedence over dikkar and murakaba some consider the performance of nawaphin optional acts of worship to be more important than service as a matter of fact however the prosperity of the heart is the product of service if not and his affiliates seem not to have accepted anyone's service this is simply because of their preference for performing service themselves and practicing modest humility it is essential to love the doer of good and the strength of attachment corresponds to the measure of affection those committed to this pathos sacrifice themselves the benefit of their fellow creatures and they are distinguished by the fact that they expect nothing in return it is not in books that i discovered sufism but through serving my fellow creatures everyone has a road to follow and mine has been the road of service i try to be of service to everyone of everyone i have high hopes yeah and then the russia hat turns to some of his remarks commenting on some quranic passages and some hadith so we might briefly look at these just to indicate again the tariqa is very focused on a due reverent contemplative attitude towards scripture moving from the outward meaning into the living text beneath and some of the great esoteric tafsirs have come from this from this tradition this is what he says praise humd has its inception and its consummation praise has its inception when the servant is thankful for the blessing bestowed upon him because he realizes that praise increases that blessing as for the consummation of praise it comes at the point where thankfulness is the expression of gratitude for strict fulfillment of the duty of servitude which allah has imposed upon his servant praise also reaches its consummation when the servant realizes that he is but the point of manifestation where allah the exalted praises himself as for the servant's perfection it requires him to recognize his own non-existence and the true existence of allah and to acknowledge that neither essence nor attributes nor actions belong to him at all so this is the sort of ashari or to really understanding that everything is actually the consequence of the direct divine agency which is not how we see things but at a non-egotistic higher level of perception we see that everything is through the divine agency and then he comments on min a few of my servants are thankful thankfulness in reality is the servant's recognition in the blessing of the bestowa of the blessing according to the venerable imam al-ghazali to savor and enjoy the blessing is not at odds with thankfulness to enjoy the blessing is a means of access to the lord of truth so despite the difficult beginnings this is not necessarily an aesthetical tradition it's all about the attitude to the things that one possesses so we might have to fast forward o mankind you are the poor or the needy towards god the human being is needy allah knows through his eternal knowledge that the human being by virtue of his human condition is in the state of needing water bread and other means of worldly subsistence whatever he needs therefore the reality of this need is nothing other than his dependence on god to emphasize this point one day the venerable charger provided those present at his meeting with various warnings and admonitions he said you wander in the streets and stand there to no good purpose you must at least try and do some useful work so that your fellow creatures may benefit by you you must also make the effort required to attain the perception of oneness in multiplicity this is the seeing not just the outward manifestation of objects in creation but seeing the source and the unifying principle which underlies them and gives them sense all right and then some of his comments on hadith remember this is an aksh bhandi lineage siv sila and therefore traces its the reception of its spiritual fragrance back to abu bakr so a text that he likes is one of the last things that the holy prophet says when he's too sick to lead the prayer aliyama to sadducee today all the doors of the mosque are closed except the door of abu bakr the one through which he comes because he is to lead the prayer in the absence of the prophet and this idea of abu bakr as a siddhik which is also related to friendship truthfulness being real with somebody sadik is a friend siddique is this persistent holy truthfulness that this is inseparable from the principle of of of mahabharat or love and much of this tradition is about the relationship of the tawajo between sheikh and disciple being a relationship of love in perceiving the perfection the nobility the sacrifice of the shaykh inevitably the mureed loves the sheikh and the sheikh automatically through his love of everything which he sees as being manifestations of the divine plenitude in every moment is full of love for for creation uh despite the difficulty of his personal circumstances so he he links this to this saying towards the end of the seerah closed the doors of the mosque except abu bakr is door and this is what he says the mosque of the prophet allah give him bless him and give him peace has many doors during the death sickness of allah's messenger when he was in his final moments he gave orders for all the other doors to be closed and for the door belonging to the venerable abu bakr to be left open the masters of truth and reality have had many things to say on this subject for instance the connection of destiny is superior to all other connections so the day will come when the doors of all other connections are closed and the door of love's link will be left open apart from love and affection there is no connection that leads to allah and results in attainment of the goal so it's the holy prophet's love for abu bakr he's thanith name remember when the two uh hiding from the quraysh together make the hijra together that's that's friendship the love that existed between them is taken to be a characteristic of almost seems to be end time expectation the day will come when the doors of all other connections are closed so as the ummah moves into times when things are harder and austerities become harder to practice this principle of sort of magnetism the jab of love is going to become more salient in people's spirituality and you see this as the discourse of our spirituality moves through its literary history the early period is quite aesthetical hell-fearing penitential and then it moves through rumi and ibn arabi to to discourse of love for god and love for creation love for each other not because that's something different it's just a different emphasis because this is the the process by which people can still relate to the truth since the venerable abu bakr this is safi here commenting since the venerable abu bakr is the starting point of the way of the hajjagon the masters of wisdom love and affection constitute the distinctive feature and emblem of their connection after explaining this point allah went on to say the whole endeavor is not to lose this connection so this principle of love is uh really essential to the entire the internment so this other very interesting things that pertain really to the specifics of adap in the the uh the importance that everything in the spiritual space should be from halal origins and even if somebody comes in wearing something that has not been attained obtained lawfully or on which there might be any impurity then the spiritual atmosphere is dissipated he has a number of explanations of that but time is moving on let's just look at some of the other statements here's a nice one one day when the venerable bayazid bistami who is in the sincila of the khadragan although his much earlier was passing by a certain place a wet dog came out and shook itself to keep the spattering drops of water from touching his clothes the venerable baazid pulled his coattails together and stepped back the dog acquired the faculty of speech and it said if a single drop from me had touched the hem of your garment you could have washed it with a small amount of water and restored it to the state of purity as for the dirt you've dropped into your inner being by folding your coattails and considering yourself pure and superior to me where can you find enough water to purge that filth away it is necessary to lift the burden from one's fellow creatures and this can only be done through lawful earning on the path of the masters of wisdom the hand dust is applied to making lawful profit while the heart is always devoted directly to the beloved remember this principle that we we noted that the heart is with the beloved the hand is with with with the work and we saw this in the uh sort of craftsmanship of uh abdullah ross now this is such a rich book and there's so much here um some things i think we've probably uh got one of these uh beads of dew quite clear from the einel hayet sprinklings sophie is telling us uh and the inaudible the wellspring of life is itself it's everything that washes us from the contaminations of the ego this is classic spirituality the ego nafs self is a contamination that actually despite all of its promises obstructs our happiness by transcending it by drawing the dagger of mujahide as imam junaid says trying to stab it recurrently in all of those moments where it's ego against service recurrently we become habituated to something else and become different human beings and start to function as human beings as supposed to as remember us in his early life as a small child just assumed of course everybody sees reality and remembers god um the world is calling out with his name and it was hard for him to understand that there would be some people who are not in that condition but it's the ego that gets in our way so let's just close by reading just the story of his demise we've only done about five percent of the book according to the author of the russia hat who was there safi when this poor creature obtained the honor for the second time uh of encountering the venerable khawaja it was the 24th day of the month in the year ah 1488 when i was in his company he made his age known saying after three years and four months my age will be 90. in the month of muharram he felt sick with the illness that would transport him to the realm of perpetuity since he survived until rabi al-awwal of that same year it can be reckoned that he had reached the age of 89. on wednesday the 20th of muharram the venubauhaj left his place in kafshir and set out on the road to the village of kamangaran along the way he alighted to spend the night in kojanan then on the thursday morning he took the highway in the direction of kamangaran he was so weak that he could not pass beyond the town so he spent that night there too on the friday morning he again attempted to travel he made frequent stops along the road and tried to catch some rest on the saturday night at the time of the evening prayer he finally reached kamangaran where he stayed for seven days still able to stand in spite of his weakness on the seventh day a friday his infirmity became intense and he collapsed into bed though confined to his bed he duly performed his ritual prayers for three months and he was guilty of no omission despite the fact that he could not stand on his feet the month of rabbi al-awl finally arrived his illness had reached its ultimate stage one evening he asked has the evening prayer maharib been announced yes we replied it has been announced only by nods and signs could he perform that day's evening prayer shortly after the prayer he suddenly stopped breathing and attained to the mercy of the lord of truth but there's more information about the last hours of uh so how do we engage with this somebody born and raised and disciplined at an age in which there were great teachers and great possibilities for stepping outside tedious dusty soul contaminating worldliness into a space where one could clearly see what our task is which is the nakshbandi masters say is awareness with every breath nowadays in a new agey way we might say mindfulness but this is the bundy way attentiveness with every breath in other words every moment uh be aware of the unique brilliance and divine irreplaceability of the disposition of creation in that second even if you're just putting a splint on the pore of a dog in the street be aware of the irreplaceable excellence in irosan of that moment don't just space out and let it pass away because it is what it is but also be aware of the possibilities for service and service in this way takes priority over dhikr bundies do a lot of zikr mostly the silent thicker but service is is their way as we've seen eminently in the life of the great raja and the life of abdullah ross but through not ego but what they call another abdullah in particular followed this principle second of their principles means to look at your feet to look down not to kind of ostentatiously check your tie in front of the microphone and to look at the boris johnson thing look at me it doesn't matter what i'm going to say i've got no idea but here i am just ego in all of its best mediocrity uh but uh you know the the real one is not the one who's looking to the cameras but the one who is looking down so humility is such an essential principle safar darvatan the journey to the homeland we're all heading back to the ma'ab back to the place of return the ma'ad in our tradition in the quran often what is after death is referred to as the place of return we speak of the ma'ayad so is a reality we have to be aware that that's the journey that we're taking you're on a plane to dusseldorf or something but much more certainly than that you're on the journey to the next world the plane can be diverted or there can be a catering strike or something and who knows but this journey the destination is one that you will definitely reach and remembering that is indispensable is another of their principles the gun solitude in the crowd in other words when with others you don't have to step outside their company but do not be swept up by the kind of herd instinct of the crowd by the kind of endorphin inducing mass emotion or thoughtlessness of a party culture or a football supporting culture whatever else it might be be alone in that crowd because not because of your awareness of superiority but because of your awareness that you have important things to do at that time so that's andrew and the other uh of ones of the eight principles that we need to recall and reflect on how they are articulated in the lives of people like allah make the remembrance whatever the circumstance even if it seems to be hitmates rather than you're doing your wazifa or your hutton remembrance is not an alternative to remembering god it is an opportunity uh to remember him that's important for those who are in modern high pressure careers i think where they think i don't really have time for god at work because there's so much in my entry you have to think carefully about your daily life and figure out how you can use its features its rhythms uh as a means for service and as a means for service also as a means for uh remembrance even if the service is just so you can put food on your family's table at the end of the day that also is a noble service and should not be underestimated but try and find ways of sanctifying even the profane things that you do there's garage restraining your thoughts be conscious of the jumping of the monkey thoughts and the random stream of consciousness in the head which never takes you anywhere particularly helpful only disciplined thinking is going to improve you and improve your life so that inward restraint is important which takes them on to what they call nega which is developing techniques for scrutinizing uh the flow of consciousness consciousness in your mind so that you are making use of every moment this how can you be attentive in every every breath uh only through some kind of inward discipline not through spacing out uh the strange things that the brain does when watching television kind of consciousness who knows where one is comatose or almost dead no what is required is to be aware of the tendency of the thoughts to stray which is one of the advantages of religious duty you know if you are used to disciplining your thoughts during your five daily nomads prayers that is going to be a helpful exercise that will assist you in being a disciplined person at other times as well because it's the same kind of muscular aspect of the brain in your consciousness that's being developed get into the habit of resisting wool gathering spacing out and you will find everything else comes more easily for you in your life and then dasht concentrate on god the vikar is not just upon the subhanallah in certain qualities but focus on the divine reality as al-kharib the near the only true reality everything else is just kind of contingently or provisionally real but the absolute uh hak is the lord tabaraka ta'ala and engrave that upon the heart which is really the meaning of the divine name is ingrained is engraved upon the heart be aware of that what does the heart say the moment the fetus's heart starts to beat which is said to be the time of the insolvent of the spirit allah allah most of the time we're not listening all those patient with us but to focus on that to realize that the divine name is inscribed upon our hearts bund will enable us to open our eyes and start to become living human beings rather than just consumers on autopilot until we end up drugged in some retirement home may allah save us all from that prospect and make us people who benefit from the richness and the irreplaceability and the the giftedness of every moment in child with his help because without his help we can do nothing at all cambridge muslim college training the next generation of muslim thinkers

Channel: Cambridge Muslim College

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Length: 88min 50sec (5330 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 27 2021