Muslim Theology and Islamic Mysticism - Part 2 of 2 (Understanding Islam Series: Session 5)

so part two I've been talking about these two basic Quranic virtues these pillars of the spiritual life vicar meditation contemplation reflection confronted with the signs of God in nature and vicar which is remembrance reminding ourselves of divine source and the divine end of our earthly lives now in the Quranic verse I cited few minutes ago we are told of those who remember God vicar whether they be standing sitting or on their sides and who meditate on the creation of the heavens and the earth so these two principles thicker and thicker are actually just juxtaposed in this verse now the basic Muslim technique of remembering of dhikr is of course the five daily prayers in the Quran God tells Moses were optimist so literally dickery and established the Salah the prayer for my remembrance for my vicar an Islamist traditionally seen the formal prayer as a form of worship for beginners as a form of purification for spiritual Wayfarers people who are a bit more advanced and a form of union in some unimaginable inexpressible way for the saints and the high geographies are full of stories that indicate the extraordinary state of absorption which the saints achieve when they're in the state of prostration to God one early saint of Basara for instance is said to have had a gangrene in his foot and he refused to allow it to be amputated so his family told the surgeon to amputate it while he was in prostration and the surgeon did this and when the man finished his prayer he saw that his foot was gone so complete to assist his absorption in his prayer and in his communion with God and through the Siletz and the other five pillars the Muslim life is punctuated by events of dhikr of remembering minimum of five prayers a day one Friday prayer a week month of ramadhan once a year etc in the Hydra course once-in-a-lifetime minimum and pivotal to this system is of course the holy house of Abraham in Mecca itself which functions both as a symbol and itself as a reminder of the divine throne some of the literature it's a metaphor for the divine throne around which the angels turn in adoration like moths circling a flame so the link of human worship to the cosmos is provided in this way by the movement of the Sun you'll recall that I mentioned in my lecture on Islam this fact that Islam is the practices of Islam are intimately related to the unfolding of the the natural order and particularly the progression of the Sun and the moon obviously plays its part as well because it determines the Muslim calendar and hence presides over the timing of Ramadan the annual zakat and of course the Hajj so you could save it because of Islam's unashamed binding of religious practice to the physical world the five prayers as it were follow the passage of our planet through the void and as the Rays of the Setting Sun touch each corner of the planet the Muslims who live there tops their heads to the earth in humility and in reverence in fact if it were possible to observe the earth from afar through a kind of spiritual telescope you might see a constant unceasing progression of five bands of Lights as it were people pray constantly moving around the earth innumerable little points of luminous activity that together make up great bands of the recollection and celebration of God traveling around the planet forever so the first point when you talk about Vicker is that its foundation and foundational practice is these five daily prayers there as it were the framework on which of the rest of the Muslim devotional life is hung but fleshing out this framework there are countless other forms of Vicker there are a number of formulas which were included within the prayer itself that people say silently for instance the Prophet talks that during the prostration which is the culminating moment of the Muslim worship the devotee should say subhanAllah be Allah Allah glorified be my Lord the Most High and there are lot of other formulas that you say inside the prayer each particular point of it and there are a lot of others which used outside it as well there is a great wealth of devotional phrases and which repeated on certain occasions and that importantly can be repeated a specific number of times for instance in the hadith collection of Bukhari we read that the Blessed Prophet said whoever utters the words there is no god but God alone and without partner his is the kingdom and his the praise and he is powerful over all things a hundred times in a day he will receive the reward of liberating ten people from slavery he also taught that one should quietly repeat after each of the five mandatory prayers glory to God and then praise be to God and God is greater thirty-three times each and there are a number of other key formulas that you'll hear Muslims saying almost incessantly estat català for instance I seek God's pardon now how lowlife were to illa billah' there's no power and no ability save in God and so on these coming from the Koran or from the Prophet now the Islamic scholars traditionally believed that each of these formulas possessed an almost incantatory property Garcia a special virtue some of them Muslims who traditionally believed possess healing properties others can possess one protect one from ill fortune or avarice there even some which we're told can protect one from magic still others can even protect one from the Antichrist so it's been very common for scholars since the beginning of Islam to sift through the voluminous hadith literature and tweezer out these little formulas that the Prophet used to punctuate and sanctify his day and serve them up in little manuals prayer manuals of devotion for ordinary Muslims to be recited or be chanted regularly and as the Blessed Prophet himself indicated there is a special merit attaching to reciting some of these a particular number of times now these scholars also particularly those who were of great spiritual achievement commonly strung together these almost natural like formulas to form a whole a whole unit of devotion could take ten minutes could take as much as an hour even longer and one of these was known as a weird where it is the name for perhaps litany is the nearest equivalent in the English language literally the word means a watering place just as the Bedouin in the desert has occasionally to take his his camels down to the waterhole so also human beings need a weird place where they can go regularly to refresh and remind themselves by calling to mind and repeating words about their Creator and as with the five prayers it's believed that there are certain particular times which are especially suitable for reciting a weird and the Quran itself says mention your Lord abundantly and glorify Him in the evening and when the Sun rises so very typically spiritually minded Muslims after the dawn prayer is finished or after the sunset prayer is finished will stay in the mosque perhaps for 10 minutes perhaps for longer and will reflect one of these weirds as a very common practice sometimes they will do so individually and silently sometimes in some mosques you'll see people doing them all together there's a famous hadith that tells us people will not sit making dhikr of God without the Angels surrounding them mercy covering them peace descending upon them and God mentioning them among those who are with him one of the meanings of this is dhikr in the sense of reminding oneself of the outward laws and rules of Islam scholarly activity but it's also applied by the medieval scholars to indicating invoking God which is the fundamental meaning of the word the current now is recognize that while it's possible in some circumstance is necessary to make a vicar or to recite a weird in private it's generally recognized that human psychology being what it is and for certain less easily express spiritual reasons it's preferable for these things to be done collectively one of the first to do this was a famous Princess zubeida of Baghdad who is said to have assembled all 300 the first servant girls in sumptuous palace she had in the method capital and everyday all 300 of them would recite the Koran together so that to passersby the palace sounded like a great beehive as they put its inhabitants garnering the sweet honey of divine remembrance now I'm not able to record the servant maids of Princess to Bader but what I have got here with any luck is a recording of a contemporary recitation of the Quran this is from Algeria which gives you some idea of what you can expect to hear as a form of dhikr after the dawn and sunset prayers in a mosque and ba-baby obviously in order to hold the collected reciters together they do it in a very strongly rhythmical way in fact listening to the chronic that is one of the easiest ways of hearing the very strong and complex rhythmic patterns that exist in in the Muslim scripture so that's a very common sight that you'll see in mosques particularly in North Africa in Morocco in fact every mosque that has a government-appointed Imam is required to recite the Quran collectively in this way one thirtieth of the Quran every day after the dawn and after the the sunset prayers so this is a form of collective Vicker reminding one cells in this case through the Quran of the divine but once is not enough and the Muslim Saints constantly emphasize that the spiritualizing effects of Vicker are slow but they are sure and they recall the hadith of the Prophet everything has a Polish and the Polish four hearts is the dhikr the remembrance of God and the prophets son-in-law Ali remarked that when anybody sins a black spot appears in the heart and as they sin further the spot becomes larger and larger until the whole heart becomes black and it covers the heart completely vicar has a kind of almost detergent quality it has the effect of softening and cleansing the heart rendering it able to perform its true function which as the Quran explains is the knowledge of God and Muslim poets often like to compare the heart to a tree which slay which sways in the wind of love and is watered by thicker so it has to be done regularly so the beginner in the spiritual path reciting these formulas of dhikr that he might have just inherited from his family or from his society or perhaps received from a spiritual guide the first problem he will encounter is that he falls into a kind of boredom this is a concomitant of any regularly repeated religious practice but we are told that we should not be dismayed this is an obstacle that we simply have to pass through the great Central Asian saint a broth manuhiri was once asked by a novice who said I remember God with my tongue but my heart finds no intimacy with the recollection with the vicar and the Saint replied you should rejoice for at least one of your parts obeys and is rightly guided perhaps in due course your heart as well will come into harmony with it as the Muslim persevere and tries to focus his mind and heart on the words he is repeating God sees his struggle and brings an accord between his words and his state you'll find something very close to this in a certain tradition of Eastern Christian spirituality those of you who have studied the hazy caste movement will know that there is something called the Jesus Prayer which is a prayer about Jesus and invocation which is repeated again and again and it is said by some pretty authoritative Byzantine ists that this was actually the reflection of the time that the founder of the hesychast movement Gregory Palamas had spent at the Ottoman Court he spent about a year there discourse in with the Divine's and it's thought that the introduction of this practice almost the mantra light like repetition of a sacred phrase came into Eastern Orthodox piety from this root what happens next depends very much under devotional tradition of the aspirant I'll be talking about those traditions in more detail and due course and I have a quote here from Imam al-ghazali it was certainly the greatest systematic Muslim writer on the the practical aspects of Muslim spiritual life in which he describes the more advanced conditions that can come to a spiritual traveller as he practices dhikr does anybody want to read this for me and give my vocal cords a break for a bit you want to jump yeah the spiritual wave here should sit and say for example Allah Allah or glory to God glory to God or such other phrases as his guide needs appropriate and persistent head until his tongue ceases to move and a phrase remains as though pronounced by it but without the tongue moving at all then should continue until even the effect of the phrase disappears from the tongue and its form alone abides and heart he should next persevere until the form and letters of the phrase or erased from sorry while the reality of its meaning remains therein is present with it and prevails in it entirely the heart will then be empty of all else since whenever it is preoccupied with some it will be void all others whatever these may be therefore when it is occupied with remembrance of God which is its true function will it needs full empty of all other things when the horn finally comes into God's presence the glory of the Lord the proximity will stand on the altar for it and the true God will become manifest to it and from the subtle effusions of his mercy will appear a thing which is itself forbidden to describe or which rather cannot be encompassed by any description at all thank you you'll see that he closes with the customary reticence of the mystic he's only going to describe the path to God he's not going to talk about or attempt to frame in human language the experience to which that path leads so in this passage we find the great ghazali explaining that the formula of dhikr itself should actually vanish as the aspirant progresses to be replaced with simply the concept that lies behind the formula and finally the reality that lies behind the concept with which it's connected now in the Islamic conception it's important to remember that there is a close link between the names of things given in the Arabic language which is a language of Revelation and a language of God and their metaphysical reality when human beings name something that's just a convention but when God does so the word he uses is objectively correct it is itself a perfect mystical incantation sometimes and people make the slightly extravagant comparison between reciting the Quran in Islam and taking communion in the Christian churches just as the Christian imbibes the Word of God made flesh through the Eucharist so the Muslim vibrates with the word of God made book in the Islamic practice there's a parallel there which is interesting although obviously these things should be treated with some caution but essentially this is how its viewed it's a kind of resonating with the Word of God and with the realities that God's Word is pointing to so each word in Revelation is itself linked and as it were cross-referenced two phenomena in this world or in the unseen the Koran is a kind of great web almost an Internet that links together everything else in in creation and and the unseen world so the Muslims believe that to invoke to do dhikr using a Quranic phrase thus sets up some kind of vibration by which the invoker's heart vibrates with the thing that is signified so the saint as he sits apparently quietly on his prayer carpet with his prayer beads in hand is in reality at the center of some unimaginable cosmic symphony estates known only to himself and to God and holy and communicable save in the usual ecstatic expressions of rapture and union now when Muslims have a particular devotional tradition assembled together to recite a particular weird in company they may do this in the mosque which is still common in many Muslim countries more usually it will be in a private home or a special meeting house called as there we are this is the usual Arab word literally means a corner could be translated as a lodge or a retreat the common Persian equivalent which you'll often see is Hanukkah and this just means a place which is set aside for mystical aspirants of a particular tradition followers of a particular spiritual guide and in these environments where they are amongst their own and they develop these traditions and it provides a safe context for the expression of the more often ecstatic aspects of religion of those who have been carried away on the ocean of divine love if you've looked at some of the medieval Persian which have fun fact similes in the library here you'll see that very often medieval Muslim mystics are standing up and in apparently ecstatic postures when you see the real thing it's not a kind of uncontrollable bubbling over it's still a fairly sober phenomenon that people are really wrapped and almost overtaken by the electricity of the Divine Love the best known form of this upward movement which sometimes referred to not very accurately as a form of spiritual dance it isn't really is that which was founded by the great Rumi himself as I been in the West one of the best known of all Sufi mystics who founded the Sufi right known as the Delrin or at least adapted it in a particular form for the use of his own followers occasionally members of roommate Ramiz order which is known as the meddler via visit the west and it's possible to see a ceremonial public performances of this Rite which is actually very beautiful these are the people referred to in say Victorian European literature as the whirling dervishes decadent world at all they move around a very slow and dignified way and the person who is doing this wears a long white robe a long beige felt cap and he will hold up his right hand like this which is to receive the mercy from heaven and holds his left hand down like this which is to distribute it to earth so here's the representative of man in this sense of Pontifex as bridge-builder as as khalifa between heaven and earth and as he does this he turns around which mirrors that the turning movement which exists in the cosmos generally and also calls to mind the the ecstasy of the saint it said that the origin of this ceremony which is probably the most spectacular and best-known mystical ceremony in the Muslim world is an incident in the life of Rumi himself the famous 13th century mystic who lived in Turkey that once when he was dis coursing with his students he was walking through the Goldsmith's bazaar in the city of Chania where he and he heard the hammer of a goldsmith a little thing and the goldsmith himself was a saint and the hammer was going tap tap tap tap and Rumi in some in communicable Way picked up that the saint was actually expressing even in his work a disc craft the divine name Allah Allah and he immediately started to turn like this in a state of ecstasy and subsequently his followers have emulated him that's the origin of the whirling dervishes and so-called usually only six or seven of them will actually do this in a group directed by a guide very often you'll find that it's accompanied by a small Orchestra come Islamic music is a very diverse phenomenon in the in roomers tradition there'll be perhaps five or six musicians including things like these an equivalent of lutes and mandolins as if a couple of drums and the ceremony begins with the invocation of blessings on to the Prophet and then the dancers rise to their feet they take off black robes which symbolize attachment to the world and also symbolize the grave and underneath there these pure white robes which symbolise the purified human being had also our state at the resurrection and then as the music goes they begin to turn I've actually got a recording made in the 30s of some of their music quality is not very good but it will give you some idea of the sophistication of this tradition it's actually after this I'll pay you this one first this is an Algerian form of thicker it's quite beautiful ah this is very characteristic what you'll hear in one of these Zawiya is a super lodge ecstatic poems of love for God and His Prophet ah Oh same things like the people of liquor of divine remembrance are completely annihilated completely lost in their beloved Oh so you'll hear some songs like this is a preliminary and then in the middle of a tradition there will be some instrumental music and these people will stand up and they will begin to turn this is the instrumental tradition coming up you the medal of is in particular famously Hughes music and their ceremonies most Muslim religious orders in fact don't and there is even a debate in Islamic law concerning the religious permissibility of music generally it's been assumed in Islamic civilization that if music demonstrably conduces to a noble end then it is to be judged according to the nobility of that end so we find for instance in classical Islamic medicine there's a developed theory of music that can be used with the treating of mental illnesses and if you travel in Turkey you can still see in some remote places some very beautiful 14th and 15th century hospitals in which they're actually concert halls attached and these that ill would be brought in and the musicians would play after the sickness was diagnosed and then the next person would be brought on music therapy is also increasingly being used in in the Western tradition of course and similarly spiritual disorders even more common could also many medieval Muslim thinkers thought be remedied through the use of music because of its extraordinary capacity to to inspire or even to engineer States in the soul and classical medieval medieval Muslim music which is itself a very intricate theoretical tradition also had a frankly religious philosophy lying behind it and almost Pythagorean theory of the effect of certain harmonies on the soul now very often in such sessions of Vicar in the Zawiya the spiritual seeker will use as a form of firm invocation one or all of the 99 names of God taught by the Prophet and most of which appear in the Quran some of these are known as the names of beauty while others are known as the name of majesty they divide more or less into these two which corresponds also to the earlier distinction between the divine front sentence the divine jemelle means beauty Jalali means majesty two different aspects of divinity so the names of beauty include things like goddess the loving kind the source of peace the generous and so forth and the Jalal are named such as the overwhelming the omnipotent the judge names such as that now medieval Muslims looked at these 99 names and they saw that each of them or the invocation of each of them could have a demonstrably spiritual effect on those who use them as formulas of Vicar so for instance they said that rapine reciting the divine name a lot leaf which means like that the subtle of the the kind will help to stabilize the Seekers spiritual faculties so if somebody's in a very unsteady spiritual state commonly the prescription will be to recite this particular divine name we're also told that reciting the divine name Alki young Quranic name of God meaning the self-subsistent attaches one to the protection and universal Providence of God so if your sense of God's providence seems to be attenuated God seems unnecessarily or strangely distant the recitation of this word can help to chant al hafi is the preserver or the protector will help to preserve any spiritual state that you might have been granted and so on very elaborate theory about the spiritual properties of each of the divine names they also said that some very powerful names particularly the names some of the names of majesty simply should not be used by beginners because they're simply too hot too powerful although it's said that some very advanced state advanced Saints can recite them under certain and closely determined conditions now Cazale continues after the passage which we we just heard by suggesting that the formulas of dhikr whether they be quranic or the 99 names or whatever that the formulas of dhikr which bring us up to exalted states of awareness of God's present have to be chosen with great care and by an expert the soul he says is a vulnerable thing it's a tender thing in man and the higher one attains in one spiritual life the more dangerous will be a fall each formula has been given a particular property or a power by God so there has to be a spiritual guide who is like a trained heart surgeon who carefully chooses from the various surgical instruments that these formulas of dhikr represents each one he will recognize this for a particular task suited to a particular individual perhaps suitable for a particular time of day or time of the year again a sophisticated science the mystic hippin car thief for instance sendeth 4th century you find him saying the recollected one is one but the forms of recollection are many and the conditions of the hearts of those who recollect are legion so because of the complexity of the states of the human soul far more complex in fact under states and disorders that can overcome the human body because of this complexity there has to be a sophisticated spiritual guide as there isn't any tradition of mysticism so islamic spirituality affirms the importance of what it calls arrow shared spiritual guidance by a living individual so we find Rumi telling us whoever travels without a guide needs two hundred years for two days journey and once one has found the guide one has to treat him with obedience except his insights and his instructions concerning one's spiritual life as Ali even says let the aspirant hold fast to his teacher in the way that a blind man might clutch his guide on a riverbank putting himself entirely in his hands and never disobeying his instructions so those Muslims who are within the inner circle of the concentric circles I drew few earlier the people who aspire to FSN must as a condition for their spiritual progress submit to a qualified guide a perfected Saint who has himself traversed the distance and knows the dangers of the route and a famous Persian writer Abdul Rahman Jami put it in these terms all the prophets came to open people's eyes to their own faults to enter God's perfection their own weaknesses and God's power their own injustice and God's justice and the spiritual guide is also there for the purpose of opening the eyes of his disciples so in a sense the the saint although the spiritual guide is filling in for the prophet who is no longer with us just as the Prophet was not just the political leader but also the spiritual guide of the Companions many of whom became saints of extraordinary luminosity and generosity so also the saint will emulate the Prophet and take upon himself this responsibility of guiding bearing humanity now everybody recognized that the path to God is difficult narrow and hazardous progress is unlikely unless you take the hand of a master who's made the journey himself or herself because it's worth acknowledging that in the tradition a perfected saint or perfected guide can be a woman and we know that the medieval saint even Arabi for example regarded by many as the supreme or slow mystical writer his first three spiritual teachers or actually women and it's not not an uncommon thing and the function of the guide is not to take anything for himself he doesn't claim remuneration or any honor or anything for this he is simply there to liberate us from the lower possibilities of the human condition and to do this he may have to be very patient with us and the process may take a lot of time and his function is simply to inculcate in us this virtue of vicar not to turn us into something that we are not but to remind us and to reorient ourselves back towards that primordial nature of orientation towards God with which we are born there's a nice medieval Persian story I have here somebody would like to read it up perhaps a lady the Mystics of Islam tell the story of a lion striding through the mountains who one day saw a ridiculous spectacle a lion cub was chuffing along and dying like a sheep with a great roar the lion ran down the hillsides scattered the flock of sheep grab the lion cub dragged it into a pond and forced it to look into the pond look it said you are not a sheep you're like me you are lying you're lying and you have the truth the sincerity the passion and the generosity of the lion when the lion gave an immense glorious roar the cub found himself both terrified and strangely excited by this the lion turned to the cub and said now you roar becomes first tense or pathetic viewings somewhere between a BA and the yell but slowly by submitting to the teaching of the Lamb the cub grew into claiming his line hood and began over me years to learn how to roar thank you so that's a kind of simple metaphor of the function of the spiritual guide he is there to bring us to our true selves the Theia morphic primordial condition in which we were when we work with God before our birth now the usual term for a spiritual guide in Islam is the familiar one of shape feminine is Shaker Arabic like many languages likes to form feminine by adding an A and the disciple is known as a murid again plural feminine Marida and the term which means something like a seeker or an aspirant and which is usually said to derive from a Quranic verse which is cirrus 6 verse 52 do not repel those who call upon their Lord morning and night aspiring to his face now following the prototype of all Islamic spiritual initiation which was the pledging of the Companions allegiance to the Prophet the aspiring novice on the Muslim spiritual path requests beta which is the initiative pledge of allegiance to his or her shape and the shape may accept him or her as a disciple or if he decides that the disciple is does not suffer from the kind of spiritual sicknesses that he or she knows how to deal with may well send the aspirant off to somebody else who may be more qualified to deal with those particular ailments once the murid has accepted the guidance of the shape he or she will be set certain duties which will help to grind down the coarseness --is of the ego the most elementary of these duties most important is of course the recitation of a regular weird which will be selected for him on the basis of his spiritual needs by the shape but certainly until very recent years there were also other duties incumbent upon the murid particularly those who existed within this framework of the Zawiya the physical space where spiritual aspirants would exist and practice typically for instance there will be three initial years of service the first would be in the service of others sweeping cleaning cooking or whatever the second would be devoted to worship and invocation and the third would be in meditation and scrutinizing oneself in each of these different stages the aspirant would be taught different forms of formulas of Vicker to practice both on his own and in the presence of others in the regular gatherings of the shaykhs disciples most commonly you'll find that these are held on Thursday nights that's very typical throughout the Muslim world but after saying the night prayer in the mosque Muslims those of them who are interested in spirituality and have a shake will leave the mosque and will go off to the Zarya and then they will have some of the songs and the ceremonies which we heard earlier and in some places this is a very spectacular phenomenon indeed particularly at certain sacred times of the year if you go to the ceremonies of dhikr that are held to commemorate the birthday of the prophet's grand sine alpha sane in Cairo you will see perhaps a million people attending these ceremonies later it's quite a spectacular event all of the different spiritual orders will put up brightly coloured tents in the streets of Cairo the old city will be completely clogged up with these tents that have chairs or those who sit on the ground and in each of the tents they'll be reciting their own tradition of Psalms or whatever and they're all plugged into the to the mains electricity and usually a lot of Cairo's suffers power cuts there is points in the night because there's so many people there they come from all over the country so it can be just two or three people doing there we're together or it can be a million people one of the duties that may well be laid upon the murid is the duty of what you might describe is apostolic poverty or as with Christian monastic piety spiritual divestment from worldly ties is often accelerated or at least represented by physical poverty buckler simply means poverty so this shake may well ask him if he sees that is attached to worldly things to divest himself of some or even temporarily all of his worldly goods once he has done this and achieved the inward state of detachment that it entails he is known as a here again female form by adding an A at the end for Kiara just meaning a poor person the more familiar Persian version of this is that wish which gives us our English word dervish it simply means somebody who is poor ie someone who emulated the prophet's own poverty throughout his life he lived in a single room without even a door it has set a piece of sackcloth over the entrance and himself when he died he was just wearing a piece of woodland woollen cloth so later pietistic whant li went to great lengths to emulate his example of poverty now the purpose of was the the whittling away of the incrustations of worldliness which have rather like a cataract grown over the spiritual eye with which we are meant to see God and this process through these faculties of vicar a vicar and the other mystical virtues are inescapably difficult and painful if you go into the Zarya of one particular religious order in Istanbul you will see that there's a beautiful calligraphic plaque on the wall traditionally rather as in say New Mexican Catholic party people will donate statues the Santos to a sanctuary you'll find an equivalent in a lot of Muslim traditions but they won't give statues they will give calligraphic plaques which will be all over the wall with Quranic verses beautifully inscribe now one of these in this particular place in Istanbul has the Turkish word Tesla Miette written on it which means submission and you'll see that the dots in this word are picked out in red and if you ask them why on earth are these topped in red they will tell you that that's because the submission to God is so difficult that you cry tears of blood and the traditional assumes that this is a difficult path it is the Via pergurt even but the hardships must be endured just as the hardships and sadnesses of childhood and education have to be endured if one is to become a full adult spiritual education even more then physical or moral education has to be difficult Rumi has a beautiful poem which I've actually included in the handouts I'll just read through it for you The Grapes of my body can only become wine after the winemaker tramples me I surrender my spirit like grapes to his trampling so my inmost heart can blaze and dance with joy although the grape goes on weeping blood and sobbing I can bear no more anguish no more of your cruelty the trampled our stuffs cotton in his ears saying I am not working in ignorance you can deny me if you wish have every excuse that it is I who am the master of this work and when through me you reach perfection you will never be done praising my name so it's difficult submission to a spiritual guide is a difficult thing in fact in medieval times no longer the spiritual aspirant the murid in order to emphasise this crushing of the ego might well be encouraged to go out into the streets and actually beg the money then being donated to the Zarya which would use it for the feeding of the poor and the function of this was to break the pride of the aspirant and familiar sites in traditional Muslim societies whilst the wandering dervish wandering through the streets with his heart shaped begging bowl and perhaps also in Persia or Turkey carrying a kind of ceremonial hatchet with two blades which would symbolize the fight outward as well as spiritual enemies and going from door to door and begging perhaps singing religious songs and so forth it was really an everyday sight in Islamic towns until two or three generations ago so characteristically there might be three years of initiatory purgative practice and after this the initiative invested as an outward sign of what the Shaykh perceives and knows to be his inward progress with a robe known as the fear of often this will be a patched robe as a symbol of the state of apostolic poverty and often this will be a formal robe worn by the shape himself which is hence redundant with his blessings and over the course of one's spiritual way thering might one might well acquire several such robes from the various spiritual teachers from whose presence one has benefited from all of this clearly stands within a tradition of renunciation that does seem to recall certain recurrent themes in medieval Christian piety while think for instance of the wandering friars in Christendom perhaps they're quite similar to these wandering dervishes that were such a common feature of life in medieval Muslim cities but there is a fundamental difference to bear in mind between Christian and classical Muslim understandings of renunciation the word by the way for renunciation is xored literally mean just not having something famous story about some how one has to renounce the world and one's attachment to the world from the famous Ibrahim even Adam the Prince of the city of bulk in Central Asia one night we are told he heard a strange sound on the roof of his palace the servants found a man who claimed to be looking for his lost camel on the palace roof blamed by the prince for having undertaken such an impossible task the man answered that ibrahim is attempt at maintaining a true religious life in the midst of luxury was no less absurd as the search for a camel on top of a roof so ibrahim of course duly repents and gives up his kingdom and here in muslim piety is the archetype of the wandering poor man who is the lover of God but the distinction between this and medieval Christian conceptions of renunciation has to bear in mind the fact that the Quran has its own very distinctive understanding of the nature of the world the world is ultimately a manifestation of divine love and the various Christian interpretations of the fallenness of the world were not carried over into Islam so we find that Muslim asceticism has in practice been rather more muted than versions of asceticism that you will find say amongst the Desert Fathers of the Church or in some forms of Hindu piety the great feats of renunciation that one associates with them note also that there's no real monastic tradition in Islam these places the zowie as for in Persia the phone cause meeting places for the brethren of a particular spiritual tradition people may live in them temporarily nonetheless they are not monasteries in as much as Islam assumes that following a spiritual life is not ultimately incompatible with also making one's way through the world earning a living supporting a family so to be a religious person simply dependent upon the charity of others or on the the largesse of an institution is something that is frowned on in Islam now perhaps the sharpest distinction is of course the attitude to sexuality celibacy in Muslim piety is particularly frowned upon and here we see a big distinction between medieval Muslim and medieval Christian understandings of the ideal pious life as is well known Christian piety until very recently it was very cautious about the sex drive of fallen humanity virginity was prized as the normal attribute of a saint and one of the most characteristic features in traditional Catholic hagiography particularly is the person who renounces sexuality renounces the body lives a purified spiritual non physical existence so for instance grigory have nicer stated that if the life which is promised to the just by the Lord after the resurrection is similar to that of angels and released from marriage is a particular characteristic of the angelic nature then the virgin has already received some of the beauties of the promise if you look at Peter Browns book the body and society you'll see a very large number of examples of the patristic and early medieval Christian and desire to distance themselves from the from the sexual drive Islam's understanding however is that the celestial life of the Blessed can't entail the deprivation of any of the god-given sources of delight which existed in this world provided that they brought no harm upon others the qur'anic heaven in fact is strongly eroticized hence celibacy on this earth can be no more than some kind of provisional strategy for the spiritual warrior there's no long term ideal of celibacy anywhere in Muslim piety and of course this received further confirmation from the example of the Prophet himself he said marriage is my way my son nun and whoever diverges from my way is not of me and in another even more explicit hadith we find the Prophet saying in the sexual act of each of you there is a charity even that is regarded as a good and benign expression of from the religious and moral life rather than something that is is problematic and in fact one of the most consistent assumptions of Muslim writers on the spiritual life has been that the path to God more or less requires an active marital life the Muslim Saints characteristically are married they are not celibate and lust as such doesn't appear in the usual Muslim lists of deadly sins in fact we even find a very lively tradition of medieval scholars both kalam scholars and jurists and Sufis writing what would nowadays be described as as as pillar books explaining for instance the importance of such supposedly recent discoveries as contraception and female sexual satisfaction and provides very much in the hadith it's very substantial literature now some even more adventurous Souls even went so far as to weave this very positive view of human sexuality into their cosmology seeing the sexual act as a kind of sacramental reminder of the reconciliation and harmony of the beautiful and the majestic aspects of the divine so in this view that Jamal and the Jalal can be seen as a very broad parallel of the female and the male principles in the divine so Islam zat attune to sexuality is consistent with the religions underlying conviction that the world itself is fundamentally good nonetheless the spiritual writers do acknowledge that since the spiritual path requires the strict renunciation of the inward vices such as covetousness avarice love of status etc then the treatment of these sicknesses may well require this kind of temporary abstinence from some of the things of the world hence this principle of so one can renounce wealth Rams property property and so forth although the renunciation of sexuality is very rarely a theme in in mainstream medieval Muslim piety so we find that the medieval spiritual directors will say that to rid oneself of the vice of avarice you have to give away your worldly goods as much as you can without of course compromising or your family responsibilities until you become indifferent to property seeing it only as a means to an end love of status has to be combatted by wearing simple clothes avoiding positions of public esteem or prominence and in general leaving leading a pretty inconspicuous sort of life and common advices be espero among birds but the world itself is not condemned it is worldliness that is the snare not the world itself so we find a lot of cases of religious Muslims who rise to stations of considerable success by the standards even of worldly people but to spiritual life remains vibrant an early book third mystic called ldren aid said asceticism is for the hearts to be empty of what the hand is empty of so renunciation of the world may be a temporary state but it is not necessarily a condition for a saint that he be poor or rich because he has actually transcended any love of the world and a sense indifferent of what might be set before him or what might not and in fact it's part of the Muslim ethos that begging as a permanent condition of life is something that is very much looked down upon to beg for yourself and your plan in particular begging so that you can give money to the poor as in that the Sufi tradition is it's actually encouraged it suggests that God simply cannot provide for his servants in a more honorable fashion so by begging you or somehow insulting God and this famous hadith in which the Prophet said it's better that one of you should take a rope and go to the mountains and return with a load of firewood on his back which he then sells to become self-sufficient than that he should beg from others so implicit in this is the next of the great spiritual virtues of Islam again the Quranic virtue which is known in Arabic as tawakkal which means reliance upon God it's a nuanced principle dr. Muir yesterday reminded us of the hadith in which the Blessed prophet told people to tie up your camels then rely on God and it excludes any idea of lazily giving up one's worldly responsibilities on the argument that God will provide in fact one of the divine names is at all adds up the provider and the Quran gives the story of Abraham who was saved from Nimrods furnace simply because he trusted in divine providence nonetheless although we find occasionally early Muslim mystics wandering in the deserts for instance wrapped in the love of God and confident that God will preserve them from the wild beasts the lions and so forth lurked in the deserts at that time nonetheless this was ultimately regarded as an eccentric non mainstream form of piety that represent the usual Muslim understanding of TOEIC well so we find again Junaid saying I should write his name down because it's one of the great figures in the development of Muslim mysticism Junaid of Baghdad third century Junaid said the proper method of earning a living is to engage in one's activities in the same spirit as with works of optional religious devotion not with the idea that they are a means of sustenance or advantage God is going to provide for you nonetheless he has commanded you to work for a living to live honorably to provide for your dependents and so forth and this is in fact a form of worship and very often we find even quite simple and almost apparently profane crafts in the traditional world become formalized as guilds and those goals themselves exist as spiritual orders in themselves for their own traditions of prayer their own words and so forth the gills in particular in the Muslim world essentially were religious orders closely related to this virtue of Torah Cole is another Quranic virtue of sub 1 which means patient endurance steadfastness displayed in the Quran for instance sender the lives of job and of Jacob the Koran says give good news to the patient who say when a misfortune strikes them truly we are gods and truly under him we shall return and as one early mystic said Saburo is to remain unmoved before the arrows of the divine decrees whatever comes you accepted equanimity and with endurance steadfastness because you know that whatever comes to you is from God we're coming to an end of this and as I forewarned there is more to this subject than can be squeezed into a couple of hours let me just briefly say that the end of the spiritual life in Islam is two conditions both conventionally inexpressible and human language the first known as the nap literally annihilation once the corsa attributes of the ego are ground away and the heart is purified the divine light starts to shine through the heart which becomes like a a perfected mirror in which the divine Sun is reflected and at that stage the selfness the Annis of the saint is annihilated and all that remains is God himself this is known as the nat annihilation or passing away but this condition is conventionally not permanent it can be a flash it can be it can endure for a little but the perfected saint is actually in the state of buck hop which comes after the state of fanat buck art means continuance subsistence going on because once the saint has passed through this final purification experience annihilation in the divine he or she returns to the world and continues to exist as a member of society now the saints who have achieved this have traditionally been accorded very great reverence in Muslim societies much more than the reverence or respect which is CERN for instance just at the imam of a mosque the saint which the islamic term is Whaley which literally means a friend are you a friend of God is regarded as being in this state of a gnat or bucket and hence as being a living sign of God the classical image again is that of the mirror of the heart being so cleansed that the divine Sun blazes therein and by being simply in the presence of such a person one can be transformed and it is these people called welly who are fit to act as shapes or spiritual guides it's extremely dangerous to accept as a spiritual guide somebody who is not properly has not properly completed the various spiritual degrees and we find in Islam as in Christianity a very luxuriant tradition of miracle stories one of the attributes of these people is that God works miracles through them not the great evidentiary miracles that are given to the prophets but lesser charismatic events which are almost a byproduct of the this extraordinary state of the divine refraction in the human heart I have a story here from Rumi who like all of the classical writers on Islamic mysticism knew that God can give such people miraculous charismatic powers to heal the sick and to show all kinds of things to show the relative nature of the laws of creation which the which God can Justice he instituted the law break the law just as easily and the story is of Rumi who was once walking in his garden where he taught in Konya he used to teach in a rose garden and he was being pestered by a rather small-minded theological student it was very stubborn and very skeptical about brumis ideas of the past God and he was very brilliant nonetheless and one day Rumi despite his generosity had really had enough of the students endless displays of his own brilliance and so Rumi said let's go for a walk so they walked through this garden in the Twilight Rumi walks quietly and the student who's baffled just rattles on talking about clever points of metaphysics waiting for him to say something particularly clever which would answer his questions after a while the Saint raised his right hand and just pointed at that moment the student saw that all the trees and all the laden rose bushes in the park were bowing to Rumi and then in an in communicable flash of realization he understood so it is the nurturing and the celebration of such people that is the ultimate function of SN and ultimately the function of Muslim society everything in a traditional Muslim society is designed to point to the sacred and the function of the sacred in society is to raise up human beings to turn them into these extraordinary inexpressible bridges between heaven and earth perfected human being and this tradition is traditionally it's classically known as Sufism the proper derivation of this term is from the Arabic word wolf which means wool because of the woolen garb which the early Sufis used to wear in order to denote and express the renunciation of passion all dimensions of the world so Sufism is this inner circle within Islam and it is not possible to be a Sufi without being a Muslim the Sufis traditionally have been the most concerned of all Muslims to uphold the classical forms of Muslim orthodoxy even though they recognize that the theological points I was trying to set for you earlier can only grow towards realities that ultimately inexpressible through rationalistic and human forms of expression and every Sufi also has to be a Muslim because the model of the Sufi ultimately is the perfected human man himself who is the prophet sallallahu alayhi wasallam and he went my apologies for this necessarily condensed presentation I've done no more as I say them to skate over the surface but there are many books which have been written and one of the great things about Islamic studies nowadays is that the books are infinitely an incomparably better more sympathetic more scholarly more profound than they were say fifty years ago and if you're interested I can recommend other books which will take you further in this extraordinary discovery of Muslim theology and Muslim mysticism thank you very much

Channel: Islam On Demand

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Keywords: Abdal, Hakim, Murad, Abdul, Hakeem, Abdullah, Understanding, Islam, Cordoba, Dar, al, Teachers, Institute, Abiquiu, New, Mexico, Introduction, Basic, Beliefs, Basics, 101, Qur'an, Quran, Koran, Muslim, Moslem, Intro, Religion, Misconception, Misunderstanding, Stereotypes, Islamophobia, Facts, Clarify, Truth, Non-Muslims, Da'wah, Dawah, MeccaCentric, On, Demand, Islaam, Winter, Mystic, Wird, Music, Sufi, Sufism, Biddah, Bida, Bidda, Bid'ah, Bid'a, Innovation, Deviant, Haraam, Haram, Whirling, Dervish, Allah, God, Prophet, Muhammad

Id: ylx7bDbEA3U

Length: 69min 25sec (4165 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 21 2011