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Shaykh Abdalqadir As-Sufi
(Originally published in 1975, Diwan Press)
Preface
Affirmation
The Science of the Self
The Science of the Sunna
The Science of States
The Science of Qur'an
The Science of Bewilderment
The Science of the Moment
The Charts: Introduction
[The Charts] (not included here)
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This Book is dedicated to the Masters of the Habibiyya-
Shadhiliyya Tariqa.
Acknowledgements
My thanks are due to:
Aisha Abdarrahman at-Tarjumana Bewley whose translations of
'Ibn 'Arabi and Moulay al'Arabi ad-Darqawi are used throughout.
Dr. Fritjof Capra for permission to quote him.
Hajj Abdalaziz Redpath, Hajj Abdalhaqq Bewley and Aisha
Bewley for their assistance in drawing up the charts and structuringthe material relevant to them.
My wife, Hajja Zulaikha, and Hajja Rabea Redpath for their
assistance in preparing the manuscript.
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Preface
It was with a certain reluctance that I agreed to a new edition of
this early work of mine, and this only after some minor editing to
remove errors which I can now perceive. The original intention of
the work was to show that it was possible to grasp the meaning of
Islam in terms of the European existential tradition. Indeed, it is of
course the culmination of it. Ironically, the effect of the book was
not in the main to open Europeans to Islam, but to restore to those
who had gone out of the Deen, especially Arabs, a sense of respect
and discovery in relation to Islam. The book is simply a meditation
of the five pillars of Islam as viewed by someone who has taken
them on and is savouring their meanings. However, now with a
lifetime of Islam to contemplate I would want to express the whole
matter differently without denying the basic personal truths I tried
to indicate in this text. Today the enemies of Islam all explain that
the danger of it is that it is not merely a metaphysical construct but
is something that affects the whole of life. Yet, after a quarter of
millennium of western occupation of Muslim lands, first in
colonialism and then by the ethos of technology it can be shown
that, tragically, we have abandoned Deen in its totality.
The irresistible magnetic power of Islam which is now about to
spread its rays over all the world lies in its Shari'at. Properly
speaking the Messenger, blessings and peace of Allah be upon
him, abolished the state as the model of societal order. This does
not mean he established either anarchy or some kind of mystic
individualism, like Buddhism. Where the state was based on canon
law and the imposition of order by force, empowered by taxation,
the new order established in Madinah was altogether different. The
Islamic community is itself a freely chosen social contract of
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believers who agree to live within its parameters. The proper
translation of Shari'at is a road.
The two dimensions of the Shahada confirm worship as belonging
to Allah and obedience being due to His Messenger. The next twopillars, Salat and Zakat, in this sense could also be placed beside
the double-Shahada. The worship of Allah and the pa¹ing of the
only permitted tax, Zakat, go together just as the first and second
Shahada do. It is in between these two pillars that Islam sheds light
on the nature of governance.
Since worship must be according to what we have been ordered, it
is not possible to proceed in 'Ibada beyond a certain point withoutpreviously having appointed an Amir. It is precisely at the point of
Ramadan that governance becomes inescapable to order the
sighting of the moon, to start the fast and to order the collecting of
Zakat, which is not charity but something, in effect, taken by
power. Thus the collection and distribution of Zakat imply the
existence of the Amir. It is because Allah in his glory has shown to
us the means of transacting socially and avoiding corruption that
Islam is called Deen al-Fitr. It is the transaction of original nature,that is, before corrupted by cultural excess. Allah has permitted
trade and forbidden usury. Zakat for this reason cannot be paid in
paper money for it in itself is forbidden, being a promissory note,
and in the majority of cases one against which no material goods
can be matched. The messenger, peace and blessings of Allah be
upon him, said: 'The miser withholds from others the wealth that is
due them.' Therefore banking is revealed as an unthinkable
institution both materially by its usurious nature and morally by itsperversion of people's evaluation of life.
This touches the nub of the question of the self and what we now
call character. The identity is not formed in a psychological non-
spatial zone, but rather it is the pattern and web created by the
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whole series of transactions which form a social nexus. It is in the
exchange of goods, in the holding and the distribution of wealth, in
the giving up and the taking on of possessions that the self
emerges. Therefore, the path to an integrated human identity can
only be established on obedience to the commands of Allah and
His Messenger. When he left Makkah, the city of his encounter
with Allah, glory be to him, to establish the Islamic community, he
renamed the neighbouring city of Yathrib, Madinah. Its mean¹ing
quite simply is 'the place of the Deen'. When he settled there he
established two institutions - the mosque and the market. The
mosque and market were identical inasmuch as it was not
permitted to establish your corner or part of it for your use. With
the foundation of Madinah was established the inevitable abolition
of capitalist and socialist society. The inability to create monopoly
and the impossibility of an elite to separate themselves, in worship
from the people had been assured. Not only papal Rome, but later
the Holy Roman Empire and later the European Union of the
Treaty of Rome, and equally the Soviet Presidium, the English
Parliament, and the American Senate, in the light of Islam were
revealed to be tyrannies, the basis of which was not its regal army,
but its fiscal subjugation of the masses.
The imperial phase of bankism, which sweetly gives itself a
political title, 'constitutional democracy', while still dominating the
world in a manner more ruthless than any ancient warlord now
clearly exposes the truth that systems control does not work, that
the abolition of trade and its reduction to mere distribution does
not work, that the denial of genuine autonomy of peoples at a local
level does not work.
It is for these reasons that the modern man must dig deep into
himself to see if, after the almost complete conditioning to which
he has been submitted, he is able to act at all. The result of a
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The subject of tasawwuf – Sufism – is you.
The subject of tasawwuf is reality.
Let us start from the beginning.
One.
The whole matter begins and ends with an affirmation of One.
But – it will be said – I am another, there is 'two', 'three',
'multiplicity'. John is not Arthur, nor Margaret, Anne. Precisely. It
is because of the experiential multiplicity that the science of Unity
exists. This implies, therefore, that as you are, you are not grasping
the true nature of existence. It is like a perpetual fever, a constant
hallucination. Things are multiple, alien and solid. There is not
even continuity, yet we persist in it. I am the same one who was
here yesterday after a night of dreamless sleep – at least everyone
in today's 'dream' confirms this. Otherwise I would be mad.
Idiotiki, in Greek, means private. My reality is affirmed socially,
so I exist. Unless they are in my dream. Yet when I dream, the
objects seem insubstantial, awake they are solid and therefore
'real'. Real means solid. Yet I have physicists in my 'reality' who
now tell me that solidity has no reality for them. The object is
slipping away from me yet again, and forms are being proved out
of existence and I am left holding onto a 'mental reality' in a
vanishing world of forms which they tell me is merely dynamic
space. The information about my 'real world' has become very odd
and contradictory – at times even ironic. The person this world has
appointed to assuage my inner anxiety, I observe, is in a worse
state than I am. It is to this subject that tasawwuf addresses itself.
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Thus:
If you desire to know reality you must know yourself.
You are the key, the only key to reality.
You are nothing but a mirror of reality.
It is enough to reflect.
But, your anxiety – about what is on the horizon, and in yourself –
stops you from calm and clear reflection. You desire urgent
tranquillising information saying 'it is all proved, everything is
really all right, you exist.' Information has for the moment been set
aside.
Let us, however, examine a possibility.
The possibility is that there is someone to trust about the very
urgent matter of what life is about. Since we are not to be trusted, itmust be some very remarkable sort of person. What would be the
qualifications of a man to trust in this matter? There would be only
one thing that would make him an 'expert' and that is that he knew
how to live his life, utterly fulfilled, in radiant and expansive
serenity that left space around him for his community and space
within him for his own inner peace. Just as in the legend of
Kurosawa's 'Rashomon', we are in a dilemma. In that story a
woman has been raped and killed. Each witness tells whathappened, but each one has given a version of the event from their
own subjectivity. Each story is in the end a contradiction of the one
before it. The lover, the bandit, the wife – each has been trapped in
a private fantasy that insists on interpreting existence in a way that
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allows for their 'self-respect' to continue. Finally, a simple
woodcutter who is 'outside' the event, with nothing to gain or lose,
tells what really happened. But by now the man who sought the
truth dares no longer believe anyone, for he has ample evidence
that people want their own version of events. When the woodcutter
sees the man's dilemma, and what it has done to him – he no longer
believes in existence as a dynamic functioning reality, it has
proved to be a fragmented, subjective, ever-changing lie – the
woodcutter breaks down and weeps. Humanly it is all he can do.
Open himself completely to the man, surrender any idea of
separateness, interest, dissembling – just give up, unresistant to
that moment and its simple truth: his story. Then the man knows
that he too has to give in, he has to shed his doubt and his distrust
and even his own experience. Somehow life cannot have any
continuity again unless there is affirmation of this encounter and its
reality. And the two men weep. The moment has been tasted.
This is essentially the starting point of the science of tasawwuf. It
begins with surrendering any vain concept that you can think or
detector-feel your way out of the contradictions and pains of lived
existence – and the surrender, while actually to the Shaykh, is in
truth to the Messenger, the one who is sent just for that, to tell you
what reality is like, Muhammad, the Messenger of reality.
The necessary qualifications for this acceptance are these same
simple and profound ones of his humanity and his deep sanity and
his disinterestedness.
No, I swear by what you see
and by what you do not see,
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it is the speech of a noble Messenger,
it is not the speech of a poet
(little do you believe)
nor the speech of an occultist
(little do you remember). (Qur'an 69.38-42)
By the pen and what they inscribe,
thou art not, by the blessing of thy Lord,
a man possessed.
Certainly you will always be repaid.
Certainly you are on a vast self-form.
So you shall see and they shall see
which of you is the demented. (Qur'an 68.1-6)
Mu'adh ibn Jabal said, 'The Messenger of Allah commanded me
saying, "Oh, Mu'adh, I command you to fear Allah, to reporttruthfully, to fulfil the oath, to act loyally, to avoid wrong actions,
to care for the neighbour, to have mercy on the orphan, to be soft
spoken, to be generous in extending greetings, to do good acts, to
limit expectation, to cleave to the Way, to study the Qur'an, to love
the life beyond this world, to be anxious in regard to the
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us look more closely at the picture of the man, Muhammad.
His name means the Praiseworthy.
Muhammad was forbearing, honest, just and chaste. His handnever touched the hand of a woman over whom he did not have
rights, with whom he did not have sexual relations, or who was not
lawful for him to marry. He was the most generous of men. Neither
a dinar nor a dirham was left him in the evening. If anything
remained and there was no one to give it to, night having fallen
suddenly, he would not retire to his apartment until he was able to
give this excess to whoever needed it. He was never asked for
anything but that he gave it to the asker. He would prefer theseeker to himself and his family, and so often his store of grain for
the year was used up before the end of the year. He patched his
sandals and clothing, did household chores, and ate with his
women-folk. He was shy and would not stare into people's faces.
He answered the invitation of the slave and the free-born, and he
accepted presents even if they consisted merely of a draught of
milk or a rabbit's leg, while because of hunger he would at times
tie two stones around his stomach.
He ate what was at hand, and did not refrain from any permitted
food. He did not eat reclining. He attended feasts, visited the sick,
attended funerals, and walked among his enemies without a guard.
He was the humblest of men, the most silent without being
insolent, and the most eloquent without being lengthy. He was
always joyful and never awed by the affairs of this world. He rode
a horse, a male camel, a mule, an ass, he walked barefoot andbareheaded at different times.
He loved perfumes and disliked foul smells.
He sat and ate with the poor.
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He tyrannised nobody and accepted the excuse of the one who
begged his pardon.
He joked but he only spoke the truth. He laughed but did not burst
out laughing. He did not eat better food or wear better clothes thanhis servants.
The conduct of this perfect ruler was untaught. He could neither
read nor write, he grew up with shepherds in an ignorant desert
land, and was an orphan without father or mother. He refused to
curse his enemy saying, 'I was sent to forgive not to curse.' When
asked to wish evil on anyone he blessed them instead.
Anas ibn Malik, his servant, said: 'He never said to me about
anything of which he disapproved, ÒWhy did you do it?Ó
Moreover his wives would not rebuke me without his saying, ÒLet
it be. It was meant to happen.Ó'
If there was a bed he slept on it, if not he reclined on the earth. He
was always the first to extend a greeting. In a handshake he was
never the first to release his hand. He preferred his guest overhimself and would offer the cushion on which he reclined until it
was accepted. He called his companions by their kunya (surnames)
so as to show honour to them, and the children so as to soften their
hearts. One did not argue in his presence. He only spoke the truth.
He was the most smiling and laughing of men in the presence of
his companions, admiring what they said and mingling with them.
He never found fault with his food. If he was pleased with it he ate
it and if he disliked it he left it. If he disliked it he did not make ithateful to someone else. He did not eat very hot food, and he ate
what was in front of him on the plate, within his reach, eating with
three fingers. He wiped the dish clean with his fingers saying, 'The
last morsel is very blessed'. He did not wash his hands until he had
licked them clean of food. He quaffed milk but sipped water.
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Sayyedina 'Ali, his closest Companion, said: 'Of all men he was the
most generous, the most open hearted, the most truthful, the most
fulfilling of promise, the gentlest of temper, and the noblest
towards his family. Whoever saw him unexpectedly was awed by
him, and whoever was his intimate loved him.'
He himself said: 'I am al-Qautham,' meaning, 'I am the complete,
perfect man.'
It is to this man that we address ourselves in the acquiring of the
knowledge of tasawwuf, the science of the self. In submitting to
the Shaykh we submit to the man who has himself mastered these
aspects of his behaviour that were not in accord with his 'vastnessof self-form' which is the Messenger's. We are making no mistakes
and we are remaining within the zone of existential recognition.
The Messenger is not being worshipped, deified, or made into a
symbol. He is being accepted as a witness of how-things-are, as
being a completely open person in flowing harmonic accord with
existence so that he knows it inwardly and outwardly. A man came
to him who was over-awed by his presence and became reverential
towards him. He said to him, 'Be at rest. I am not a king. I am onlythe son of a woman of the Quraysh, who eats dried meat.' His
answer to his name was 'At your service.' The Shaykh is simply the
man who has fully surrendered his self-form and filled himself up
with the clear radiance of this perfect behaviour. The Messenger
has said, 'I was sent to complete the noble qualities of character.'
It is essential that this starting point is established. We cannot see
clearly, we don't know what is happening, we are looking for awitness of the event of existence we may trust. Madmen, poets,
occultists we have by our reason rejected: the witness must be
disinterested, and he must manifest the highest social and human
qualities. It is not enough that he be some kind of a superior being
with superior powers, yogic control over the body and the mind,
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what is essential is that he is completely at peace and that with that
peace he can function in the social setting that is man's ordinary
quotidian reality. In the Messenger of Reality, Muhammad, peace
be upon him, we find a man with all these qualities. He has left
behind a book called the Qur'an, and as yet we have not examined
or satisfied ourselves as to the meaning and validity of the book –
for the moment we are persisting in a more direct existential search
for what we seek. We are staying with the man. He has confirmed
our own recognition that we are in no way well enough to
recognise reality but somehow we must trust the validity of this
affirmation of his serenity and human-ness. He has said, 'Man is
asleep, and when he dies he wakes up.' This confirms our initial
experience of being somnambulistic, unawake to the true taste of
life, but it has in it no consolation, and could be a mere Roman
cynicism. However there is another Tradition of his which tells us,
'Die before you die!'
This infers that there is a science of waking up, therefore, while
still in the world of bodies.
But the Messenger died fourteen hundred years ago, and the book he left looks at first glance suspiciously like the others, and we had
got to a point where only a direct experience was going to
convince us. It is here that the essential teaching element of
tasawwuf declares itself.
Transmission.
Our concern is the alteration of the self, the conquest of the self,the peace treaty with our rebel forces – and we have understood
that our self-form is oddly unresponsive to reason, and worse than
that, has a particularly dangerous quality of self-destruction.
Life can, in extremis, be an organised suicide or an endless sleep-
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in.
Structured information then can only become the foil of this self-
destroying, self-deceiving entity – the self. The very knowledge of
what is wrong seems to betray our hopes for it, and instead of releasing us it traps us and paralyses us more, and the very
awfulness of our self-hood which we think we see at last, brings us
grinding to a disastrous self-aware frozen halt. What then is the
method of the Messenger of Peace, or as he prefers to call himself,
the Messenger of Submission?
He simply is there and he asks people to follow him, keep him
company, and to do as he does. That is all, or seems all – but infact this is everything.
He has said that, 'If a man lives with a people he becomes one of
them,' and also, 'A man follows the life-pattern of his friend, so let
each of you look to who he takes as a companion.' We already
know in our barbaric state that if a man is locked up with the
insane he most probably will himself fragment in his self-
experience, and if he keeps the company of junkies he will sooneror later succumb to their habit; more recognisably, a man becomes
a soldier on entering the army. He gets 'beaten into shape', the self-
form is restructured and solidified into something considered
manly, heroic and brutal. A man who keeps the company of
women, and avoids men's company, even if he is sexually
expressed as a man, will take on a subtle feminising of self-form
and behaviour. Or to narrow the field of this phenomenon even
more, if you sit in a room with someone in a rage you will pick upfrom that person the subtle form of their condition. You will either
become 'defensive' or you in turn will attack their anger. If you sit
with a depressive you will in turn be depressed or you will feel
obliged in some subtle manner to put up a resistance to their
swamping all-enveloping low-energy, you will have to become
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either depressed or by contrast resistantly high. In other words,
there is a constant traffic in the energy-forms of the self, and they
do battle as much socially as they do inwardly. If the behaviour is
controlled from outside, at a certain point there will still come an
eruption from within when the outward situation allows it.
Now from the embattled position of the self as it is, we cannot but
be well aware that it is of its nature to continue the struggle, to
sabotage the end of hostilities, for it thrives on struggle and seems
to gain life by its own continued self-destruction. This means that
the self is going to be constantly seeking the very company that
will keep it constantly trapped in a cycle of pain. If you desire to
be punished you will not rest till you find the executioner. Youmay work your way through a whole series in the desperate desire
to prove that you 'want out of it', but see what a cruel fate has
always provided you with a destructive partner. In other words for
the embattled self, the other is fairly certain to turn out to be the
enemy, and hell will, after all, seem to be other people.
Returning now to our point of departure, we have agreed that,
knowing as we do that the self is in an endless loop of repeatedbattles, we must be done with the game of suffering and rediscover
that deep basic sanity which we desire and which we cannot but
recognise in this perfectly balanced and radiant figure of
Muhammad, peace be upon him.
We wish to recover, if you like, our Muhammad-nature. And the
means is transmission.
It is enough to sit with someone for transmission to take place.
Instead of seeking again the partner of battle and further pain, we
now turn to the Shaykh, who is completely at peace, utterly turned
away from all the tremors within us and utterly withholding of
either approval or disapproval, the two drugs on which our
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We still see things this way. So we decide to imitate him. We go to
the master swordsman to learn how to kill, and do not realise that
he is teaching us not to need it.
What does he do? What is the means to this omnipotent end? It is,unsurprisingly, disconcerting. Firstly the Shaykh either does not
sleep at all or minimally, perhaps two or three hours at most.
Putting that aside as the fruit of years of hard work, we cannot
avoid recognising that this awakeness of which the Messenger of
Submission spoke was not some inner consciousness alone, but
consciousness itself.
The whole of his existence is spent in one thing – he is in aconstant state of awareness, of collectedness, or, if you like
recollectedness, for he is there, he does exist before our eyes and
he is recollecting back into himself the plenum. His reality is that
he is in constant and unceasing communication with reality itself.
He has subjugated the self, its struggle is over, and yet there is still
a someone there – a man who eats and sleeps a little, talks, sits.
Yet if his self-form exists it somehow takes in everything, it
excludes nothing, it is all-embracing. We treat him as a Master andshow the utmost respect to him, everyone bows before him and he
sees all this and he does not care. People denounce him and
criticise him and accuse him of fraudulence and he does not care.
He is a Master – yet at the same time he is that by the most
extreme token of opposites – he is a slave.
He is not our slave, or anyone's slave, or any thing's slave. He is
the slave of It, of this very reality we want to know and experience.
He has subjugated his 'I' and he has enthroned the 'He', what the
Arabs call the pronoun of absence. Constantly he addresses reality,
his reality, as 'He'. He is a presence addressing an absence, and yet
we experience him inwardly as an absence expressing a Presence.
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man, he is the summit of what the human creature is in its
potentiality when fully realised.
The thing to be grasped is that the Shaykh is in dialogue with
Reality, he speaks to It and It speaks to him. This is again to beaccepted either as a fantasy or sanity. We recognise that he
functions socially in the world and that he does embody those
noble virtues or good qualities that so appealed to us and so
intrigued us when we discovered that a man could possess them
and live in the world. We also observe that his dialogue rarely
involves direct asking for a specific but is mainly about praising
the endless energy of the Reality and the generosity and
compassion and fullness of its nature – he is busy exalting Realityand honouring it and even glorifying it. Along with this we note
that he seems constantly to be involved in a kind of fine tuning, a
honing away on this smooth surface of his inner reality of any
roughness or blemish. He is with each new day refining and asking
to be refined, he is polishing and asking to be polished. So by this
token he is utterly open to his own activity, he himself is
constantly under review, constantly being renewed, in this dynamic
communication he has with his own reality – the static that seems
to gather around the wave impulse that is his existence is being
cleared and stilled by this rhythmic act of renewal and prostration.
This is just like the Messenger of Submission, Muhammad, peace
be upon him, who when he undertook any matter, entrusted it to
the Reality, and renounced his own strength and power and asked
for guidance in these words: 'Oh Allah, show me the truth as truth,
and I will follow it. Show me what is denied as the denied and
make me shun it. Protect me in case the truth should become
doubtful to me, and I then follow my inclination without guidance
from You. Make it be that my inclination is in obedience to You,
and may You be pleased with my harmonising with You. Guide
me correctly in regard to whatever I am in doubt about as to its
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truth, although that doubt is by your permission. Truly You guide
whoever You want onto the true Way.'
If this is read carefully, a quite astonishingly fine balance may be
observed in the way in which he addresses It as both other-than-he,and at the same time recognises that his whole self-form in its
separateness is Its property. His doubt and the adjusting of his
doubt are from one source that is not the 'I' that asks.
The 'I' that asks is helpless.
The 'You' that is addressed is total.
With the man of Muhammad, peace be upon him, nothing is
outside the process. There is no observer, there is no spectator,
there is no alien creature in an alien world in an alien universe.
That would be fantasy – to imagine one was outside the process.
We are in the process, we are the process – if I was not here, I
would have nothing to worry about. It is this persistent lie of self-
hood that is the very matter of conflict and suffering. I look out at
the forms and get frightened and confused, I become alienated. Itry to make the setting of my exile benign. I choose this mountain
or the edge of that ocean because I like it and hope that it will
harmonise with my inner troubled self. I choose this person and not
that person because I feel between us there is some commonality.
But soon I become irritated with that person, their sameness seems
an empty mockery of my individuality and I long for someone
different, the mountain storm echoes my own turbulence and I long
for a landscape that is the opposite of my inner imagined self. Allthis stems from my seeing myself as outside the process and either
hopelessly trying to fit myself in and harmonise or trying not to be
overwhelmed by the utterly irreconcilable otherness of the creation
and the creatures.
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The man, Muhammad, affirms unity. He says One not two. So he
does not say it, but It says it through him and by him, so that he
says, 'I am only a slave of the Reality, yet I am the Messenger of
the Reality.' In other words I merely tell you what the reality is
like. But it is not from me, for there is no me, there is only a locus
of communication. There is a radio-station on the waveband but
the air itself is nothing but oscillating signals, the waveband and
the signal are one reality. So his gathering together of what is, his
Qur'an, is not by him but by It and from It – and we are forced to
continue – the message is from It to It, for other than It – outside It,
in It, there is not anything. This is not complicated.
Two things are being said at once.
If you say One you cannot say the other.
If you say both you approach a new way of understanding
existence.
The Message from It is this:
In the Name of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate.
Say: He, Allah, is One,
Allah is endless time,
He did not bring anything into being
and nothing brought Him into being,
and no one form is like Him. (Qur'an: 112)
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This is reality. This is what existence is like.
And it is named. It is named so that we may indicate what cannotbe given a name, it is the name of what is not this and not that.
Allah.
Allah – it is named with a personal name for a personal name does
not define, it merely indicates. John does not define John, it merely
indicates that he is there. Allah does not define Allah, it is ourindication that He is present although he is no-place.
There is no god. By the same token, there is no me to reject god,
for that would make me godlike – that is a power, positing this and
that.
Earth is a power but water sweeps over it and destroys it.
Water is a power but air turns it into vapour.
Air is a power but fire consumes it –
and Fire is a power but earth obliterates it.
And so on.
In the world of forms there is no god.
This is not absolutely over that. Allah is not, in this declaration of
the Messenger, presented as the ground of being or as the infra-
structure, nor is It presented as being identical with the totality of
forms.
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What we are presented with is an uncompromising affirmation of
Unity. One reality, of which the forms are but appearances. The
forms are certainly taken seriously and there is a whole science of how to be among forms, how to view them and treat them,
including your own. But in affirming the One reality the forms are
negated.
No god. Only Allah.
This is how the greatest Master Shaykh 'Ibn 'Arabi puts it:
We draw conclusions about Him through ourselves. We do not
describe Him with any quality but that we possess that quality,
with the exception of a special essential autonomy. Since we
know Him by ourselves and from ourselves, we attribute to
Him all that we attribute to ourselves. For that reason, Divine
communications came down on the tongues of our interpreters,and so He described Himself to us through ourselves. When we
witness, He witnesses Himself. We are doubtless numerous as
individuals and types, yet we are based on one reality which
unites us. So we certainly know that there are distinctions
between individuals. If there were not, there would be no
multiplicity in the One.
Likewise we are described in all aspects by what He describes
Himself. There must be a distinction and it is none other than
our need (iftiqar) of Him in existence. Our existence depends
on Him by our possibility. He is independent of that which
makes us dependent on Him. Because of this one can apply
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pre-endless-time and no-time to Him which negates the
firstness which suggests the opening of existence from non-
existence. Although He is the First, firstness is not ascribed to
Him, and for this reason He is called the Last. Had Hisfirstness been the firstness of the existence of determination, it
would not be valid for Him to be the Last to the determined,
because there is no Last to the possible for possibilities are
endless. Rather, He is the Last because the whole affair returns
to Him after its attribution to us. So He is the Last in the
source-form of His firstness and the First in the source-form of
His lastness.
He goes on to say:
So the Universe is its own veil over itself and it cannot perceive
the Reality since it perceives itself. It is continuously under aveil which is not removed since it knows that it is distinct from
its Creator by its need of Him. It has no portion in the essential
necessity which belongs to the existence of Allah, so it can
never perceive Him. In this respect, Allah is always unknown
by the knowledge of direct tasting and witnessing because the
time-forms have no hold on that.
Already we seem flung up against an impossibly forbidding
barrier. It seems then that the Existent is an unknowable
nothing, yet bafflingly a fecund nothing out of which endlessly
pour myriad forms. And here is the Shaykh saying that we
cannot know Him by direct tasting, by direct seeing. What then
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is the point of it – we were not seeking a closed system of
perfect metaphysical design, we started on the quest because
we sought to let our hearts experience the radiant peace of
perfection.
The Shaykh al-Akbar also has said:
Some of us implied ignorance of the matter in their knowledge
and said – 'The incapacity to achieve perception is perception.'Among us are those who know, and who do not utter the like of
this: and it is the highest of words. Knowledge does not give
him incapacity to know as the first said, but rather, knowledge
gives him the silence which incapacity gives. This is the highest
mark of the one who has knowledge of Allah.
And so back we have come to our first perception of the Shaykh
who in his transmission of the Nur-i-Muhammad, presents us with
someone who is utterly helpless.
Sayyedina 'Umar, the second Khalif of the Messenger, said:
'Would that I were the dust upon the road.'
The Perfect Woman, the Messenger's wife, A'isha, said: 'Wouldthat I were a leaf upon that tree.'
The Messenger called himself the Slave of Allah.
Shaykh ibn al-Habib, who used to sign himself the slave of the
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slaves, says in his Diwan:
By slavery I mean being stripped of every power and strength
and capacity and even the act of getting things for yourself.
Now this is such a completely alien idea that it fulfils our worst
suspicions about asceticism and fatalism and all the other labels of
our education, it all ends up with disease-ridden squalor and
beggars swarming idle in city gutters. The work ethic looms up and
struggle takes on its heroic aspect and the militant flags of work
and progress and social contract again surge through us with the
old adrenaline kick of dialectical rage. We have to be patient and
leave this utterly extraordinary point of view aside for the moment,remembering that its confrontation is the whole matter of what has
been called the Hikmat, the Wisdom, the Way from the beginning
of man's story.
We have seen that the basis that sustains the whole Wisdom
method of the Perfected is the affirmation, the uncompromising
affirmation of Oneness. The Unity of existence is the key to the
whole set of sufic sciences. Unity of existence is therefore thefoundation of the Wisdom of the Wise, and their wisdom is in turn
the reality of their slave-hood before the splendour of the Universal
Reality.
The Messenger said, indicating the Way –
'The life-transaction is behaviour.'
And it is this science of the self that we must first discover on our
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journey. We will by the very nature of this unitive approach, come
right back to our starting point, Unity, or as it is called in the
technical language of Sufism, Tawhid.
In the meantime, as the Shaykh al-Akbar put it:
The Universe continues to be in the present tense.
The Science of the Self
If you reflect – there are signs in the nafs – because the
whole macrocosm of existence is contained in it.
By purification the nafs expands by the power of the Reality.
Now do not say: 'How?' or 'Where?' or 'What?'
It expands by the bestowal of the Trust upon it by Allah
– and god-hood has no limitation.
The great men have proved unable to bear this Trust yet still
man has to take it on, and this is the highest task.
-- from the Diwan of the Perfect Shaykh
In the Makkan Revelations of the Shaykh al-Akbar he tells of al-
Junayd, the Imam of the Masters, may Allah be pleased with him,
being asked, 'What did you obtain of what was granted?' And his
reply: 'My sitting beneath this stair for thirty years.' Then he quotes
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Shaykh Abu Yazid, may Allah be pleased with him, as saying:
'You took your knowledge from something dead, and we took our
knowledge from the Living who does not die.' We have already
committed ourselves to a path of learning which rejects
information as a knowledge-process. In the sciences we wish to
acquire nothing less than direct experience can be accepted as
valid. Language does not alter your condition and it is the
condition of anxiety and conflict that has to be healed.
What we have to establish first of all is the nature of the work that
has to be undertaken, and it must not be confused with the
structuralist education we have been forced to abandon. This is
how the Shaykh al-Akbar, again in 'The Makkan Revelations',defines the matter:
So let the possessor of himma be in spiritual retreat with Allah.
His gift and His grace appear to such a man from a knowledge
of which every language-bound person in the world is
ignorant. Moreover, not one speculative thinker or logician can
possess this state. It is beyond the perception of reason.
Knowledges are on three levels:
1. The knowledge of reason ('aql): it is every knowledge which
you acquire by necessity or as a result of speculation in a proof
with the condition of the discovery of that proof and its form
structured in the world of thought. Thought gathers and selects
from that form of knowledge. For this reason, they say inspeculation that this is valid and that is in-valid.
2. The second knowledge is the knowledge of states (ahwal),
and there is no way to it except by direct tasting. A man of
reason cannot limit it nor can he base proof on it, like the
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knowledge of the sweetness of honey, and the bitterness of
aloes and the pleasure of intercourse and passion and ecstasy
and yearning. There is no form of this type in the knowledges.
So these are knowledges which it is impossible for anyone toknow without being characterised by them and experiencing
them.
3. The third knowledge is the knowledge of the secrets (asrar),
and it is the knowledge which is above the condition of reason.
It is a knowledge which the Perfect Dynamic of Existence
blows into the heart. No knowledge is nobler than this
encompassing knowledge which contains all known things.
Know therefore that the Path of Allah, may He be exalted, is
that which the elite of the trusting ones have travelled upon
seeking their liberation and not the masses who occupy
themselves with other than that for which they were created.
There are four paths: search, causes, behaviour-pattern, and
realities.
There are three rights preserved for them which call them to
these paths:
– the right of Allah,
– the right of themselves,
– the right of creation.
The rights which Allah, may He be exalted, has over them is
that they glorify Him and do not associate any thing with Him.
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The right creation has over them is that there is a Road for
creatures to go on, restraining them from harm and limiting
them on the one hand, and on the other bringing them a good
existence by the very act of what is allowed.
There is no way to the harmony of the goal except by the
tongue of the Road (Shari'a).
The right due to themselves is that they do not travel except on
a path that has happiness and liberation in it.
The four paths mentioned by the Master are the four truths by
which we make the approach to our own understanding. But before
the practices can be embarked on it has to be established that all
this is based on our certainty of the Shaykh's approach and a
complete surrender of any kind of opinion or idea or speculation
that one might have about the validity or non-validity of the work.
This surrender demands that even beyond the bounds of reason one
has to be completely acquiescent before the Shaykh's instruction
and injunction. It is something very difficult for so-called educated
people to accept. This confusion comes from two things: firstly,
they are used to the idea that the teacher is as fallible if not more
fallible than they themselves are, and if this were true of the
Shaykh it would be quite fitting to contradict him and defy him in
certain cases. Secondly, the seeker has still held onto some idea or
concept of 'freedom' or 'independence' that sets him outside the
life-situation. As the Shaykh's sole intention is to set him on the
path of his own possibilities and to awaken in him contentment
with the totality that surrounds him, these conflicts that call up our
defiance have no reality for the Shaykh, and merely indicate the
temperature, as it were, of the recovering patient. In other words,
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this surrender is based on the Shaykh being himself a completely
radiant and surrendered slave of Reality. Worse than dissension
over behaviour is dispute with words. There is no debate among
the people of the Path. Different Masters may use different
methods but there is no argument. Assuming that the Master
follows the Shari'a, there can be no questioning him – that is the
only outward criterion for a seeker as he selects his teacher. As the
Shaykh al-Kamil said: 'Even if a man comes to you flying through
the air, if he does not follow the Shari'a – leave him.'
Search is that energy-impulse that rises up in a person and puts
them on the path of awakening and reality out of the sleep of their
previous existence and its fantasies which they mistook for beingawake. At first it expresses itself as a restlessness and a dis-
satisfaction with this world and the reward-structure of material
existence and the reward-offering of so-called inter-personal
relationships. When the illusory relationships begin to be rejected
as lies, and the so-called 'real' world takes on a kind of unreality,
two things can happen – either the person will retreat out of the
unsympathetic life-situation and make their own reality-rules and
rewards – they might even decide to leave the body quite
effectively, cut off all communication through the central nervous
system and station themselves out of reach of the totalitarian
enemy world system, using their body as a kind of colony or
space-station to which they send and from which they receive
occasional signals – this condition is variously described as
madness or schizophrenia (split self) but which for the moment
could merely be looked upon as an extreme and uncompromising
defence-system based on the illusion that the enemy was without,
when in fact the madman who thinks he is deluding you has merely
deluded himself, for the enemy was within. The second possibility
is a kind of collapse from within, a car crash of existence in which
the driver, unlike the subject in the first picture, manages to
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survive, but the whole machine of his life to date cannot be road-
worthy again. He has to abandon all the inner mind pictures and he
is stopped from continuing with the reality game that he has been
so long blackmailed into taking seriously. The aims and goals of
the society have been revealed to him as worthless, the neon-lit
world has been exposed to the splendour of sunlight and all he can
do is turn off the false lights and turn to the natural energy source
that has been manifested. From the society's point of view he could
be labelled many things, politically he is an anarchist,
behaviourally he is an introvert in crisis, a neurotic, socially he
may be a drop-out or a misfit. The important thing is that he is in
motion – where before there was a static and rigid structure, with
its collapse has come energy, movement – quest. The great
example of this condition in tasawwuf is the case of the Imam al-
Ghazzali, called the Proof of Islam, and one of the great Masters of
the Way.
Abu Hamid, as al-Ghazzali is called among the Sufis, died at Tus
in 1111 A.D. Already established as a great teacher at Bagdhad
University under the patronage of the Sultan and with a firmly
established reputation as a philosopher, he was suddenly assailed
by overwhelming doubts about the reality of all that he knew or
thought he knew, and about the very substance of lived existence.
He asked himself:
Do you not see that while asleep you assume your dreams to be
unquestionably real? Once awake, you recognise them for
what they are – fantasies without substance. Who then can
assure you of the reliability of an existence which when awake
you derive from the senses and from reason? In relation to
your present state they may be real, but it is also possible that
you may enter another state of existence which will bear the
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same relation to your present state as this does to your
condition when asleep. In that new zone you will recognise that
the conclusions of reason are mere fantasies.
This possible condition is perhaps what the Sufis call 'hal', that
is to say, according to them, a state in which, absorbed in
themselves, and in the suspension of sense-perception and
thought-forms, they are able to see. Perhaps also death is that
state, according to the Prince of Messengers who said: 'Men
are asleep and when they die they awaken.' Our present life in
relation to that future is perhaps merely a dream, and man,
once dead, will see things in direct opposition to what is nowbefore his eyes: he will then understand the words of Qur'an,
'Today We have removed the veil from your eyes and your
sight is keen.' (50.22) Such thoughts as these threatened to
shake my reason and I sought to find an escape from them. But
how?
The anguish increased until the whole fabric of his domestic life,
his intellectual pursuits and reputation and his formal acts of
devotion became devoid of meaning:
Finally, I saw that the only condition of release was to give up
honour and riches and to sever the ties and attachments of the
life I knew. One day I would decide to leave Bagdhad and give
up everything: the next day I changed my mind.
This tension continued over a period of six months during the year
1096 A.D. The climax came when he got up before his students to
give a discourse and found that he had been struck dumb. The
silence imposed from deep within him by existence shattered what
was left of his coherent life-pattern. He could not eat and he could
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not drink, and the doctors expected him to die. Suddenly the way
opened to him and what had seemed impossible became easy for
him. He publicly announced that he was going on Hajj to Makka
while secretly he planned a departure to Syria. His decision to give
up this most honoured academic post caused a tremendous stir that
reverberated right across the Muslim community beyond Iraq.
People blamed the Khalif, others the Madrassah where he taught,
but nothing now could halt his progress. With a clear and
integrated purpose he settled all his affairs, leaving his wives and
family provided for, so that he could set out for the desert with his
begging bowl and seek the company of the Sufi zawiyyas where he
hoped to begin his new life. There then followed ten years of sufic
practice at the end of which he felt ready to return to the world he
had left behind and at last begin to teach by transmission what he
had gained:
I learned from a sure source that the Sufis are the true
pioneers on the path to Allah, that there is nothing more
beautiful than their lives, nor more praiseworthy than their
rules of conduct, nor purer than their behaviour. Theintelligence of thinkers, the wisdom of philosophers, the
knowledge of the most accomplished intellectuals would in vain
combine their efforts in order to modify or improve their
sciences and their behaviour – it would be impossible. With the
Sufis repose and movement, exterior or interior, are illumined
with light.
So search, which at first manifests as agitation, disorder andmovement, is eventually restructured under the impulse of the sufic
practices just as the iron-filings are patterned according to the
power of the magnet that attracted them. Search is that faculty
which the Master Jalalud-Din Rumi, may Allah be pleased with
him, called congeneity. It is not just the energy impulse of the
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magnetic field, it is the actual susceptibility that the iron has to be
attracted, or the straw has towards the amber. So that we may say
that search is itself the revealing of the nature of the subject. The
appearance of the amber lets us see the straw for what it is, an
attracted substance. Not every element can be magnetised, and not
every person is drawn to the search. Qur'an says: 'Allah guides to
his path who He wills,' (2.213) and 'Allah leads astray who He
wills.' (6.39).
So the search, once it has begun, can then be given a different
name, for it is the same energy form, only it has then taken
direction. Once under the guidance of a Shaykh that impulse is
called himma, meaning yearning, or appetite for knowledge of reality. Himma is a key term in our sciences. It is the faculty we
must awaken, and the energy to be most desired. It is desire itself
and yet it is necessary that it be desired. Himma brings himma. The
need for himma in the seeker runs through the Diwan of the Perfect
Shaykh as a major theme:
And, Oh my companion, himma is the possession tohave,
then if you desire the goal of all the gnostics you can set out for
it.
Elsewhere he indicates that it is the means to unification inexperience:
To the people, His dhikr does in place of what is other-than-
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Him.
If you possess himma there is no opposite to Allah.
Or again, it is seen as the faculty which in its perfection is the
dynamic of the Shaykh's transmission. Describing how to
recognise a true Master he begins:
His signs are: a Light which shines outwardly, and
a Secret which appears inwardly through his himma.
In his 'Lesser Song' he puts it as one of the three essentials the
adept needs for unification of his reality:
Whoever has got dhikr, fikr, and himma will in each moment
transcend otherness.
He will attain gnosis beyond his desire and fast realise the
secrets of existence.
He will see that the purity of the Road is separation, which,
properly speaking, is the source of Reality.
In 'The Buraq of the Tariq' he counsels:
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Awaken your himma with yearning and longing, and do not be
content with less than the Ever-continuing.
So from this we can see that himma is the highest energy impulse
of the human creature, it is that motion within a man or woman
which rouses them from the whole running-down process of the
organism, which lifts them up and moves them with an energy
beyond any other energy they possess to strive not for any formal
achievement but for re-connection with reality itself. It is lifeenergy, it moves counter to the dying arc of the cellular existence,
and it lies outside the self-interest of the social impulse. It is the
failure of the academic to understand this energy, for it is not a
principle but a force, that has led to the mis-understanding about
so-called asceticism. The fasting, the lack of possessions and the
poverty of dress of advanced seekers has been seen as an
expression of masochism and self-punishment, which in itself is
another of those highly subjective projections that is calledobjective thinking to veil the built-in value judgment against what
they themselves fear. There are two situations which may arise and
each would outwardly present the same silhouette while inwardly
they would express a different reality. As with every aspect of the
self-patterns of the Path, the basic situation is exemplified by the
Messenger, peace be upon him. It is told that he was walking in
Madina with his Companions when a man called out to him, 'I am
miskeen,' which is a Qur'anic term denoting not only poverty but apoverty devoid of struggle to survive. The Messenger answered
him, saying, 'Poverty is all my glory.' They proceeded on their way
when another man made the same exclamation. This time the
Messenger frowned and said, 'Poverty is next to covering-up!' That
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is, next to covering up the true nature of existence which is all-
sustaining and all-providing. He then turned to his Companions
and noted that they were confused by the two apparently
contradictory statements. The first man, he explained, had the
condition of miskeen inwardly and outwardly, while the second
was 'rich in his poverty,' for he inwardly indulged in it. The man
who gives things up or submits to what seem harsh disciplines is
devoid of any experience or motive of self-punishment if the
source of his actions is his himma, for it is in the nature of himma
to make any action pleasing to the seeker if it leads him to the
sought. Devoid of himma, the actions could then be seen as part of
a neurotic pattern. The outcome of the one man's actions will be an
opening into the serenity and wisdom that is the fruit of himma,
while the same actions will lead in the other instance to either
crisis or collapse.
The Persian Master al-Hujwiri identifies himma with the act of
transmission in the same way as the Shaykh al-Kamil in his Diwan,
and introduces at the same time a principle of the Way that follows
inevitably from the reality-picture which the Wisdom begins to
unfold.
In Farghana at a village called Ashlatak there was an old man
who was one of the Four of the earth. His name was Bab 'Umar
– all the dervishes in that country give the title of Bab to their
great Shaykhs – and he had an old wife called Fatima. I went
from Uskand to see him. When I entered his presence he said:
'Why have you come?' I replied: 'In order that I might see theShaykh in person and that he might look on me with kindness,
(i.e. transmission).' He said: 'I have been seeing you
continually since such and such a day, and I wish to see you as
long as you are not removed from my sight.' I computed the
day and year: it was the very day that I took the Path. The
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The seeker is in reality the Sought, and the Sought the Seeker.
So Allah says, 'He loves them and they love Him,' (5.54), and
again, 'Allah was well-pleased with them and they were well-
pleased with Allah,' (5.119). If Allah seeks a man it is notpossible for that man not to seek Allah: so Allah has made the
Seeker the Sought and the Sought the Seeker.
Here is opening up the unitary nature of the dynamic life-energy.
He extends it further in showing that on the Path there are people
who far from having to struggle are taken up and opened to
knowledge, in a reverse picture of himma-action – the himma
comes to them and illuminates them. In this pattern the Sought is a
man of the Path and the Seeker is Reality itself:
Nevertheless, in the language of the Sufis, the seeker is the man
whose toiling preceded his revelations, while the sought is he
whose revelation preceded his toiling. The seeker is described
in Allah's words: 'But those who fight strenuously for Us, we
will surely guide them into Our Way.' (29.69). Such a man is
sought by Allah, who turns his heart and implants in it a
himma to stir him to work for Him, and to turn to Him and to
seek Him: then He accords him the revelation of the spiritual
states. So it was with Harithath (a Companion of the
Messenger), who said: 'I turned myself from this world andthirsted in the day-time, and watched at night,' then he said,
'and it was as though I saw the Throne of my Lord coming
out!' With these words he indicated that the revelation of the
Unseen came to him after he had turned away from this world.
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The 'sought' man, on the other hand, is drawn out forcibly by
Reality and accorded the revelation of the states that through
the power of vision he may be stirred to work for Allah and
turn to Him and bear the burdens laid on him by Reality. So itwas with Pharaoh's magicians: after they had received the
revelation it was easy for them to endure the threat of
Pharaoh, for they said: 'We will never prefer you to what has
come to us of manifest signs É decide then what you are able to
decide.' (20.72).
(It should here just be explained that in the Qur'anic revelation, the
encounter with Sayyedina Musa, the Messenger of Reality, and
Pharaoh is an encounter of two reality-views. The Pharaoh was not
a mere ruler but a heirophant of great knowledge which gave him
yogic power over forms so that he was able to manipulate
existence formally. Musa's science was unitary and to do with
inner experience of reality, and so was 'powerless' while Pharaoh
had powers. Musa was able to transmit knowledge anddemonstrate its validity to the Pharaoh's adepts, but the power of
Pharaoh blocked his inner ability to recognise that the source of his
own powers came from existence itself, of which he was an
infinitesimal part. It is important to bear in mind that his wife was
however a perfected Master, according to the Messenger
Muhammad, peace be upon him, and that he himself, as he was
engulfed by the Red Sea, affirmed the truth of Musa's doctrine. His
body was preserved, and is, whole, mummified until the world'send, as an affirmation of the power he had over forms, and thus in
the end his own self-preservation still had to be gifted by existence
and could not be assured by him.)
So right at the beginning of the Path we encounter something that
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is to be the constant theme of all our learning. If reality is One then
everything leads back eventually to the One, and in this world of
forms everything leads to its opposite, for there is no dialectic
except in description, and no conflict except in imagination. Thus
himma which is a yearning must be yearned for, and the One
yearned for is the initiator, or the yearning impulse, and the Path is
nothing but that energy desire. So, it follows that the goal itself, the
existent, the Moment, has to be right here, right now in this present
tense we and creation continue to be in – and that is one of the
meanings of the Qur'anic ayat, 'Truly Allah is on a straight Path.'
(12.56). The whole matter is a divine event, so that al-Junayd's
answer to the question of what he had gained was nothing other
than the life he had lived, his 'sitting beneath the stair for thirty
years' in inner contemplation; he had gained the conscious utterly
awake awareness of his own life – this was the inestimable
achievement of the Master.
Causes, or veils, or hindrances, or the whole self-structure whose
illusory nature stands between you and the clear-sighted seeing of
reality as-it-is, without any fantasy self-centre – if we are to free
ourselves from the prison of our own self-experience we must be
free of its traps and its methods in encasing us in this false
situation. The nafs – the term which stands for the experiencing
self – is variously described and defined in sufic terminology, and
this shifting perspective is deliberate and not a sign of differing
theory. Both this is true and that is true of it – it is in itself a non-
reality and it may be experienced in different ways and approached
in different ways and dismantled in different ways. The word
derives from NFS – 'to injure by casting an evil eye upon anyone'.
So its very core meaning is that of an energy-form destructively
engaged in conflict with another and harming it through its own
inner activity. When used adverbially it means: 'willingly', 'of my
own accord', 'at my own pleasure'. Here it is seen as a simple act of
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self-interest and satisfaction. From it comes the word 'to shine' and
unsurprisingly in the light of what we have just examined, it can
also indicate 'one who yearns or aspires after' – so that with these
three aspects of the word we have already got the basic doctrine of
the nafs as outlined by Imam al-Ghazzali derived from Qur'anic
terminology.
1. AN-NAFS AL-AMARA: the insinuating nafs. It is wholly
evil. It is overpowered by passions and obeys their dictates
gladly. All energies here are bent on gratification. It cannot
discriminate a higher nafs. The lower nafs has become the
ideal. They delight in influencing others to like action, and areproud of their own actions. They are not open to encounter and
can only be changed by Reality.
'Allah has set a seal upon their hearts and upon their hearing
and over their eyes is a covering and there is a great
chastisement for them.' (Qur'an 2.7)
2. AN-NAFS AL-LAWWAMA: the reproachful nafs. It isindecisive in choice between good and evil – constantly
subjected to inner struggle as a result. Sometimes it is one
thing, sometimes another – capable of both. It is able to
discriminate between the two nafs, higher and lower, but it is
utterly unable to overcome the impulses of the lower nafs when
they burst forth, having knowledge without will. Change comes
through keeping company with one who has passed this stage,
and through shared spiritual practice which gives strength to
abandon bad action and alter the nafs.
'No! I swear by the reproachful self!' (Qur'an 75.2)
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3. AN-NAFS AL-MUTMA'INNA: the nafs at peace. The nafs
has become fixed, good, illuminated consciousness. It has
received An-Nur, Light, thus it acts according to it – it is
reasonable, it is devoid of evil, and good flourishes around it.The discrimination between the two nafs goes, for the lower
one has gone and the true nafs is the master. Man has achieved
perfect freedom.
'Oh self at peace, return to your Lord, well-pleased, well-
pleasing! Enter you among My slaves! Enter you My Garden!'
(Qur'an 89.27-30)
The above description of the nafs in different conditions displays
the only basic possibilities within which each individual fantasy
history is played out. The nafs at its most reduced and therefore at
its most active is in this pattern clearly identifiable with the infant,
only the infantile behaviour is ensconced in an adult situation and
so it has the aspect of being monstrous. That is, the observer findsthat the behaviour of such a person is like that of a small child – at
the same time the observer is appalled at the power and
effectiveness and scale of the destructive action which, taken out
of the nursery, becomes acted out in the larger playpen of 'history'.
For most people it is almost impossible to believe from the
position of their own repression that the actor-out is doing it and so
they stubbornly refuse to confront the mad event they get caught
up in, despite themselves. This nafs, nevertheless, cannot possiblyfunction unless it has the setting of the pseudo-adult nafs to play
against, for its destructive activity is directed against the self-image
which is most clearly mirrored in the authority figure, be it a parent
or pseudo-parent. On a global scale this nafs is easily identifiable –
Napoleon, Churchill, Hitler and so on. They are the very marrow
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of what has come to be known as history, which is nothing but the
violent foreground event created to draw attention away from the
deeper background unreality of the nafs' personal battle which in
itself is another fantasy. So the politics of a situation from this
point of view is a fantasy structure disguising an inner nafs'
conflict that is being acted out in the zone of event – the existential
vitality of which obscures the nafs' actual dilemma which is the
fantasy structure that has to be dismantled if 'history' is to stop. The
nafs in its cunning creates the brilliant diversion of event so that in
extremity it will always resort to violence to distract others from
recognizing the true inner violence that it expresses – or, to hold
clearly to the reality of things, the illusory inner violence. So we
are presented with a picture of existence where the arena of
activity, the arena of events, is nothing less than an illusion
cloaked by an illusion taking place in an imaginary setting and
happening to imagined beings.
Shaykh al-Akbar says:
So He, may He be praised! obeys Himself when He wishes with
His creation, and He is just to Himself in respect to what He
appointed to Himself from the necessity of His right – and it is
nothing more than empty phantoms on their empty thrones. In
the echo lies the secret of what we allude to – to whoever is
guided.
There is no doubt that this idea of the illusory nature of event let
alone of phenomena is emotionally very disturbing to people who
have been educated in the effective conditioning of present day
society. At this stage it is dangerous to fall for the kind of
superficial 'realism' of the academic who at worst will blusteringly
introduce a common-sense down-to-earth empiricism – the table is
there and I am here and that's an end to it. We are not trying here to
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negotiate existence to neurotic subjects who are ensconced in their
world view and committed to the resultant madness that is our
contemporary situation. The context of our study of the nafs is that
we take our picture from men who have transcended these fantasy
experiences which lead to war and crime and insanity and have
thus gained a total view of man's possibilities both creatively and
destructively – for our common-sense fellow has not only been
unable to grasp the sublime possibilities of the human creature, but
he has utterly failed to contain the insane and suicidal tendencies
of his fellow men, allowed genocide to be the mark of his century
on a social level, and crime and madness its private condition. A
true science of the nafs must be able to deal with the bad aspects of
the nafs – and by bad I do not mean what is parentally censured,
but what is destructive to the subjects themselves. It must then be
able to understand the means to transform the self so that it can
replace all the negative energies, bit by bit, with positive creative
energies. It is the former of these that we have called Causes and
the latter, Behaviour-patterns.
It is understandable that people are afraid of words like 'wrong' and
'right', 'good' and 'bad', for they do lead to words like 'blame' and
the whole punishment syndrome swings into action. It is at this
point that a crucial principle of the Noble Way must be grasped. It
has already been quoted from the Diwan of the Perfect Shaykh:
É the purity of the Road is separation,
which, properly speaking, is the source of Reality.
No one knows better than the Sufis that the zone of experiential
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existence is one of duality. Tawhid nowhere denies it, as the
Shaykh al-Kamil insists. If we did not experience duality there
would be no need for a science of Unity. It is the mark of the
pseudo-sufi that he refuses to adhere to the practices of separation
and the Road while pretending to union and the Path. There has
been no Sufi who did not approach existence, awed and humbled, a
slave approaching his master. There can be no talk of lover and
Beloved until the slave has become obedient, not through tyranny,
but through the submission of the creature to his creatureness, and
until the slave's submission opens him up to his true nature as
Khalif of reality. If a man says he does not need to bow and
prostrate and fast and ritually wash, he is setting himself above the
Masters and so while outwardly he may be engaged in all the tasks
of sufic practice, inwardly he is deeply engrossed in the
'monstrous' infantile battle with the parents. The pseudo-sufis are
all of this monstrous nature, paternal, dominant and outwardly
benign – their followers inevitably are haunted sons desperately
trying to overcome the dominant father by an act of ritual magic,
for that is what they use 'practices' to do – since practices are for
one purpose only, to bring you to the ground, humbled, lowered,
broken, and ultimately surrendered and accepting, finally open and
receptive to the endless riches of the creation, to the endless bounty
of the Truth – it is hardly surprising that their ventures end in
schism and collapse.
There is no Master of the Way who has not accepted his
obligations as a human being to bow and prostrate and fast, so
much so that he is of all men the most submitted and the most
diligent in performing what is demanded of him. Shaykh al-Akbar,
which means the Greatest Master, at the very opening of his
definitive treatise on the Path, 'The Makkan Revelations', is
categoric in affirming that there can be no possible transmission
unless it comes from a follower of the Messenger Muhammad,
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peace be upon him. He describes most vividly the Messenger's last
pilgrimage to Makka and his calling the people around him to
confirm that he had conveyed to them the total teaching of how to
live on this planet in harmony with the whole creation and with
direct inner knowledge of reality:
Then he said: 'Has it reached you? They said: 'It has, oh
Messenger of Allah!' He said, may Allah give him peace: 'Oh
Allah – I testify.'
And to the Messenger's testimony the Master adds his own like a
humble and ordinary slave:
I believe in all that has been brought to him, peace be upon
him, from that which I know and do not know of what He gavehim.
Following our Shaykh, who in turn is a follower and inheritor of
the wisdom of the Shaykh al-Akbar, we proceed to set in motion
the practices of the Noble Way hoping for a guidance that will give
us discrimination in this dual world and yet somehow – althoughwe are aware of the open contradiction – will also give us Union.
What then is the foundation of discrimination? Given that we have
affirmed the Messenger as a reliable witness of existence, in
accepting our Shaykh we copy him in the first practice of the Way.
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WUDU
Shaykh Shibli, the disciple of al-Junayd, and a Shaykh of our
Shaykh, said, 'Wudu is separation. Salat is joining.' The meaning
and effect of wudu underpin the whole structure of practices that
you will undergo, so it is essential to grasp the profundity of this
rite. The ritual prostrations (salat) are not valid unless they are
either preceded by the wudu or the previous wudu is still valid.
The wudu is a formalised washing of the hands, mouth, nostrils,face, right arm, left arm, head and neck, ears, right foot and then
left foot, accompanied by the appropriate supplication. The act is
outwardly a cleansing and inwardly a purification. The manner of
doing wudu is swiftness and thoroughness, being sure that the
water touches every part of the members being washed. The
Shaykh al-Kamil used to say, 'Perform wudu like a majdhub (holy
madman) and salat like a dying man.' The effectiveness of the
wudu is broken by urination, excretion, passing wind anally, and
the sexual act – in the last event ritual purity can only be renewed
by ghusl, which is the full act of purification involving the whole
body being washed. The act of wudu is followed by a declaration
of Shahada, the affirmation of the Unity and the authority of the
Messenger. The experience of the washing is its own explanation,
for the person feels the shock impact of pure water, forcing the
nafs from whatever fantasy has been haunting it to the direct
reality of water and body, to the impact of the moment. It brings
you to your senses, it snaps the nafs away from the false dream
state of that dazedness which hints at an illusory unity while in fact
the nafs is simply detaching from the body which is its own
totality. And this brings us to our first encounter with a situation
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that will be met with at every stage of the Way, although it has
been obliquely referred to in the story of the two poor men in
Madinah meeting the Prophet. Every condition of balance and
harmony and every state and station of knowledge is accompanied
by a shadow-form that is contrary to the science of wisdom and
could be designated as a neurotic situation. For example, and most
obviously, the thorough execution of wudu for the five ritual
prostrations is the sign of the Mumin (one who trusts reality)
according to the Messenger saying: 'Keep to the straight Path, do
not make calculations, know that your best action is salat and that
only a Mumin observes wudu carefully.' (Thauban reported it, and
Malik transmitted it.)
At the same time it is possible to discover a man involved in
performing wudu relentlessly so that while outwardly you cannot
fault him you are inwardly aware that there is something disturbing
in his performance of the rites, something that can be recognised as
of an obsessional nature.
Uqba ibn 'Amir reported the Messenger as saying, 'If any
submitted one performs wudu well, then makes two raka's (sets of prostrations), engaging in their performance both inwardly and
outwardly, he will be guaranteed the Garden.' Muslim transmitted
it. Here the Messenger specifies that without the action being
inwardly invested with awareness it is of no avail. The implication
of this dual situation is that it is possible to see someone apparently
ennobled by all the science of the wisdom-behaviour who is
inwardly in a state of conflict and ignorance. This to the people of
the Way is the vital dividing line between wisdom, which is theMessenger's Way, and either religion – if you see it as mere
adherence to forms, or hypocrisy – if you see it as an inner denial
of meaningful forms.
Abu Huraira reported the Messenger as saying, 'When a
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submitted one or a trusting one washes his face in the course of
wudu every wrong action he contemplated with his eyes will
come out from his face along with the water or with the last
drop of water. When he washes his hands every wrong actionthey did will come out from his hands with the water or with
the last drop of water. And when he washes his feet every
wrong action towards which his feet have walked will come out
with the water, or with the last drop of water, with the result
that he will come out pure from offences.' Muslim transmitted
it.
It is clear from this that what we are dealing with is a process of effective purification that is suited to man. Every creature has its
grooming pattern. The cat's grooming is formal and an essential
part of its life. The sign of an animal in captivity losing its life
pattern and becoming ill is when it ceases to groom itself. This act
of wudu is in quite the same way necessary to man. It is in the
nature of the human creature that he imagines his actions adhere to
him as idea-forms which he 'carries about with him' until this
imaginary load makes life intolerable for him and he breaks underit. The man who has cast aside any recognition of an Unseen
reality, and who has rejected any belief in a unified benign energy
governing the total existence of the cosmos is, unsurprisingly, far
from being liberated from this unfortunate tendency to hold to the
idea-form of his actions and to feel burdened by his own illusory
selfhood, which to him is nothing other than this accretion of
mistakes and misfortunes on the one hand, and triumphs and
pleasures on the other. Wudu by its acting upon the surface of theorganism at the same time as upon the experiencing centre
repeatedly makes a break in consciousness between action and the
nafs. Actions have no reality. This is the shock impact of this first
ritual action of the Way. The wudu in its turn, according to the
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Hadith, is useless unless accompanied by this vital inner
awareness. That is why in the execution of the wudu, it is essential
that there be vocalisation of the Supreme Name, for the act of
calling on the Reality during the act is a guide to unifying the
outward and the inward aspects of the event. When someone
begins the practice of wudu, they will find that there are two basic
tendencies of malpractice, one is to be careless and undefined in
the separate acts of each state of the washing, and the other is to go
through the whole process in slow motion, caressingly as if
anointing oneself. Either of these extremes must be scrupulously
avoided until the mean is discovered, filling the act with both
vigour and dignity and remaining somehow anonymous, so that
your doing of it resembles that of the person next to you. There is
no individuality in any of the basic practices.
We now come to what underpins the practice of wudu, and makes
us aware of the profound importance and effect of the basic
practice without which the higher practices would not only be
invalidated but their performance would result in serious and
damaging effect on the nafs. Invocation without wudu is certainly
guaranteed to bring about a destructive crisis in the higher nafs,
and in the behaviour rhythm and harmony of the person who
attempts this. This is the dangerous and quite malicious practice of
the pseudo-sufis whose goal is, of course, manipulation and not
liberation. Therefore, from their point of view, the gaining of
discrimination is something that has to be precluded from their
scheme.
Beneath the wudu – which forms the base of the practices, is theghusl. It is simply an extension of the wudu, only it involves
washing the whole body in running or poured water, thus
providing a total ritual purification. This is necessary at the
beginning of the Path for the affirmation of the Unity and the
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acceptance of the Messenger, and it is the final act done to one
before burial when the body is washed before being returned to the
earth from where it came – the other occasion when it is necessary
is following the sexual act. This time the act of separation is again
one of being bodily clean and also making a break between the
energy of intercourse and the energy of prostration, the leisure of
love and the detachment of spiritual practice. There is no built-in
moral censure in this, on the contrary it is the act of ghusl which
validates and affirms the sexual act and seals it and completes it. It
is as much a completion of the act of love as it is a preparation for
valid salat. That is why the act of ghusl should not be delayed but
should follow as immediately as possible the termination of the
love-making.
Lowest in the chain of ritual washings is the washing of the anus
and the sexual organs after defecation and urination – this is
completed by washing away any urine stain that should have
adhered to the garments. Here we have the basic discrimination
that defines sane adult behaviour. The basic indiscrimination is the
infant's inability to know shit from food. The whole guilt structure
when dismantled in the modern therapeutic manner reveals this
basic guilt, transmitted by the already guilty parents to the anxious
child who is confused as to what is what. In the adult who has been
raised in this society that has not formalised this discrimination it
is significant that they end up treating food like shit and wastage of
food becomes a social habit to them, in the same way that eating
every scrap and not wasting food is part of the wisdom teaching.
Here we have then the basic practice on which the totaldiscrimination of behaviour and choices is founded. The
Messenger said: 'The key to the Garden is salat, and the key to
salat is wudu.' Jabir reported it, Ahmad transmitted it. The Shaykh
al-Kamil said: 'The validity of your salat is based on your having
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performed your wudu. The validity of the wudu is based on the
ghusl which preceded it at its time, and the validity of the ghusl in
turn depends on having washed the anus and the penis in the
lavatory. Thus your whole inner reality is based on the natural act
of washing the anus and the penis.' The wudu is a sealing of the
body in preparation for the act of salat. That is why passing wind
anally, emission, excretion and menstruation break the wudu. Its
effect is, on the one hand to bring into the consciousness of the
person an acceptance of themselves as being these open, flowing
organisms, of intake and giving out – with the obligations of wudu
and ghusl, there is no hiding the process, no guilt, no fantasy –
these events are natural and they have their natural means of
purification: its effect is to make a sharp distinction between these
energetic activities which are all concerned with production and
reproduction, and the higher nafs which demands a complete
separation from them, without a repression either of their activity
or of our awareness of that activity. The final culmination of these
rites is the washing of the dead.
We wash our own dead, the men the men, and the women the
women.
Thus while alive we have the benefit and privilege of preparing
others for the grave. In these rites the body is emptied of waste
matter, the mouth closed, and then the whole corpse is washed and
camphored in a final sealing, so that the body dries rather than rots,
and is draped in white cloths then laid to rest in the earth. Incense
is burned to awaken the higher self of the mourners, as scent is
worn by the person who has done his wudu and is ready for the actof salat which follows.
'Wudu is separation, salat is joining.' Pseudo-sufic teaching, false
spirituality, bases itself on the Unity and so instructs its followers
that they do not have to follow any particular path since they are
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all one. It is a doctrine founded on ignorance which bears little
scrutiny. It is based on the preservation of the central experiencing
nafs and indeed on exalting it and making it powerful and effective
in the world of action and events. Why should I bow in that way,
or pray in this way – surely I am constantly at prayer, surely the
Qur'an tells me that wherever I turn there is the face of Allah? This
is basically the superficial argument of the pseudo-sufi with his
fear of surrender. The Qur'an has said that wherever you turn there
is the face of Allah. It also instructs us to take up a particular
direction for the act of prostration, thus unifying all the worship of
man around a central point, the Ka'ba in Makka, so that an endless
wheel of living glorification of Reality endlessly turns around the
empty four-walled Ancient House built by Sayyedina Ibrahim for
that purpose. Reality addresses the Messenger in the Qur'an
saying:
We have seen you turning your face about in the heavens: now
we will surely turn you to a direction that shall satisfy you.
Turn your face towards the pure Mosque and wherever you
are turn your faces towards it. Those who have been given the
Book know it is the truth from their Lord. Allah is not heedless
of the things they do. Yet if you should bring to those that have
been given the Book every sign, they will not follow your
direction. You are not a follower of their direction, neither are
they followers of one another's direction. If you follow their
caprices after the knowledge that has come to you, then youwill surely be among the evildoers whom We have given the
Book, and they recognise it as they recognise their sons, even
though there is a party of them who conceal the truth – and
that deliberately.
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The truth comes from your Lord, then be not among the
doubters. Every man has his direction to which he turns: so be
you forward in good works. Wherever you may be, Allah will
bring you all together: surely Allah is powerful overeverything.
From whatever place you issue, turn your face towards the
Holy Mosque: it is the truth from your Lord.
Allah is not heedless of the things you do.
From whatever place you issue, turn your face to the Holy
Mosque: and wherever you may be turn your faces towards it,
that the people may not have any argument against you,
excepting the evildoers of them: and fear not them, but fear
Me:
And that I may perfect My blessing upon you, and that haply
so you may be guided, as also We have sent among you, of
yourselves, a Messenger, to recite Our signs to you and topurify you and to teach you the Book and the Wisdom, and to
teach you that you knew not. So remember Me and I will
remember you: and be thankful to Me: and do not be
ungrateful towards Me.
(Qur'an 2.144-152)
This passage of Qur'an is of importance to the whole validity of the
Way. There is a Way, there is a journey, there is a traveller. We are
in the world of forms, and to deny the spiritual forms is to exclude
Allah from creation and relegate Him by a false esotericism to the
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formless. The Qur'an cuts through the distorted reasoning of the
ignorant by pointing out the unreality of their refusal of a 'qibla':
'Every man has his direction to which he turns.' So, they do not
reject direction, what they are in fact rejecting is that one adopted
by the guidance of the spiritual science.
It is transmission and the Messenger that they quite rightly from
their point of view deny, for their teaching is improvised and their
transmission without a source.
This passage also affirms that the taking of direction, that is, the
acceptance of a discriminatory science, is what opens the human
being up to that living dialogue with Reality that was theMessenger's secret. 'Remember Me and I will remember you,' is
the inevitable result of this discriminatory process – Union is the
fruit of separation.
The taking of a qibla, contrary to the teachings of the pseudo-sufis,
is what makes it possible to grasp the relation between form and
no-form, between the limited body-self reality of the slave and the
unlimited no-body-self reality of the Lord. It is said that the initialformula of the Shaykh al-Akbar when he faced qibla to begin the
salat was, 'I have become kafir, and fastened the belt – Allahu
akbar.' This means that he had ceased to be a true Muslim, or one
who submits to a Reality which can be associated with no form,
and become one who covers up how things are, that is, a kafir. He
had fastened the belt, or zunnar, of the Christian – meaning that he
had fixed himself in one direction rather than another and that he
had engaged in 'locating' reality, the great Christian confusionabout the nature of existence. The 'Allahu akbar', being the
opening of the salat itself, indicated that nevertheless he submitted
as a slave to the injunctions of his Messenger and affirmed that
Allah was akbar – greater than any event or comparison or
concept.
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Shaykh Ibrahim Gazur-i-ilahi in his 'Irshadat' says:
The qiblas are four. The qibla of Ka'ba, one's Pir, the heart,
the Truth. One has to turn from the first to the second, from
the second to the third, and from the third to the fourth in
succession. If, in the prescribed salat these stages are attained,
so much the better – you have drunk out of Muhammad's cup,
peace be upon him.
Citing the famous ayat of Qur'an: 'Wherever you turn there is the
face of Allah,' (2.115) he goes on to tell of a majdhub who used to
prostrate before everything he saw and declared: 'Oh Allah, I seek
your protection from shirk (associating any form with Allah) in all
things.' This of course would be the position of the pseudo-sufi if
he held to his own argument, but this state demands real ecstasy.
Masud Beg, seeing this, observed to the majdhub's son that his
father was asking protection in the very act of shirk. That is to say,
every time he bowed down he gave reality a 'direction'. The son
replied: 'Do not call him mushrik, he sees everything without the
thing-ness.'
QBL, the root, means 'to admit', 'to accept' – the existence of
forms. Before examining the details of the ritual act of prostration,
let us examine its meaning as a practice, as the crucial practice of
the Way.
SALAT
What is the salat?
We have established the meaning of its whereness, its direction,
now we must be quite clear as to what it is and what it does to us.
The act of salat as we have said, is prostration. The root word SLA
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means 'to hurt in the small of the back' and 'to have the centre of
the back bent in, as a mare before foaling'. The central movement
of the salat is when the head touches the ground, and this is called
sajda, from SJD, meaning 'to be humble', and 'adoration'. So the
whole thing is an act of humility, and an act of address. The slave
presents himself, he offers himself. It is an opening of the self to
the sublime reality. Its successive movements, standing, bowing,
head on the ground twice, sitting – all deny the nafs and offer up
the humbled nafs to the reality. The standing is the stage where the
self is still assertive, the bowing is the greeting, and the prostration
itself with the head on the ground is the direct act of submission –
one of which is worth a million verbal exclamations of acceptance
of the reality. It is the head that has to be laid on the ground. It is
the arrogant thought-bound mind that holds the self prisoner in its
dazzling structures, that has to be offered up. In the end the final
position is neither the proud nafs nor the nafs in abnegation – but
poised between the two, in ease and in balance – the slave sits
upright and turns his head to the left and right in a salutation of
peace.
That is the outward picture – inwardly there is a pattern also.
Inwardly the beginning is the vital moment, as outwardly it is the
end. The opening of the salat is when the slave raises both hands to
behind the ears and then lowers them, as if putting the world
behind him – the hands, splayed open, are lowered slowly as if
passing through water. With this opening goes a verbal declaration:
'Allahu akbar.' This is called takbir.
Imam Junayd, may Allah be pleased with him, said, 'Everything innature has a high point and then a falling away, and the high point
of the salat is the opening takbir.' The adept must grasp the
significance of this before he can embark fruitfully on the act of
salat. Imam Junayd here draws attention to the collectedness that is
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necessary to perform the act. Before performing the takbir, it is
therefore an obligation to make a formal act of niyya, or intention,
which in its outward form means simply saying to oneself, 'I now
intend to pray the salat of sunset,' or whichever it may be. What it
means inwardly is that the whole attention has to be gathered in to
the experiencing nafs, the whole awareness has to be focused on
the point where the head will fall in sajda, and the heart fixed on
Allah. Look at what is necessary and what has already been
ascertained before one can make valid salat.
The preliminary conditions are:
1. Outward purification from filth and inward purification fromappetites (wudu).
2. One's outward garments should be clean and one's inner
garments undefiled.
3. The place where one purifies oneself should be outwardly free
from contamination and inwardly free from wrong actions.
4. Turning towards qibla, the outward qibla being the Ka'ba and
the inward qibla being the Throne of Allah by which is meant the
mystery of Divine contemplation.5. Standing outwardly in the state of power (qudrat) and inwardly
in the garden of proximity to Allah (qurbat).
6. Sincere intention to approach Allah.
7. Saying 'Allahu akbar' in the station of awe and annihilation, and
standing in the abode of Union and reciting the Qur'an distinctly
and with awareness, and bowing the head with humility, and
prostrating one's nafs with abasement, and reciting the shahada
with concentration, and saluting with annihilation of one'sattributes.
This is the description of Shaykh al-Hujwiri, and it is a vivid
example of the unification of inward experiencing and outward
reality that is the very business of tasawwuf. It is the clarity of this
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unification that permits the Sufi to see through the fragmentation
of other men, how their deeds and, in this age especially, their
words are invalidated by the absence of an inner state which would
give them reality, how their hearts are separate from their destinies,
which is why they do not know where they have been or where
they are going. Unification of the nafs has its beginning and ending
on the prayer mat of prostration. It is the great practice – in the
Unseen it is the practice of the angels and the jinn who affirm the
Reality, and they are included in the final salutation, for the adept
still makes the salutation even if he or she is alone. It is unification
because it is an opening up completely to the moment. It is the
most fitting thing to do. It is the best thing to do at the time. For
the five obligatory prostrations take place at fixed times that move
throughout the year according to the rising and setting of the sun.
So that while it is inward unification, inevitably it is also an act of
unification from the cosmic point of view. Ignorance is not
knowing where you are, knowledge is being aware that you are
where you should be. It is in the nature of the Universe that at the
dawn, mid-day, mid-afternoon, after sunset, and at the first
darkness, the human creature should be prostrate before the
majesty and beauty and unity of Reality. This is harmony,
cosmically and inwardly in the microcosm of the heart – here is the
beginning of the science of unification, here is the opening of the
heart to the discovery of its true nature. Here is the first experience
of the slave as being someone in dialogue with the Reality. It is
movement, it is an activity of the most profound and shattering
impact on the nafs.
It is recorded that when the Messenger made his prostrations, therecame from deep within his chest the sound of what seemed like a
boiling cauldron. When his most beloved Companion, Sayyedina
'Ali, may Allah be pleased with him, was about to do salat his hair
stood up on his head and he used to say: 'The hour has come to
fulfil a trust which the heavens and the earth were unable to bear.'
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Ibn 'Ata said: 'Do not let your purpose in the prayer be to
perform it without awe and reverence for Him who sees you
perform it.'
Maulana Rumi says that if we really knew how to pray we would
begin standing in this world and bow into the next. So it must be
clear that the alchemy of prostration is not merely an opening
psychologically, as it were, in terms of an attitude of mind being
changed by the act of putting one's head on the ground. It cannot
be reduced to a mere technique – it cannot be annexed by people as
a means to inner tranquillity without the inner recognition it brings
of what reality is like.
Now we must look at the whole pattern of ideas that have been up
until this point laid aside, but which must be grasped if we are to
have any understanding of what the sufic Way is.
One Master said that the persons about to pray should see
themselves standing on the Sirat, with their Shaykh before them atKa'ba, the Garden on their right and the Fire on their left, and over
them Azrael, the Angel of Death. The Sirat is the Narrow Bridge
over which the dead person has to pass in the after-death state –
there is a Tradition where the Messenger tells of it as being finer
than the edge between the two sides of the finest swordblade.
What are we to make of this sort of statement? It would be easy to
reassure the modern man that it was merely a symbolic language,some pseudo-sufis pretend that it is for simple folk but not for
clever people like them who know that an All-Merciful Lord will
not punish anyone. Others suggest that it is merely something with
a hidden meaning which again somehow annuls the power and
uncompromising challenge of the other-world picture.
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Firstly let us see what the greatest of the Masters has to say. We
now come to the completion of the passage we examined earlier:
Then he said: 'Has it reached you?' They said: 'It has, Oh
Messenger of Allah.' He said, may Allah give him peace, 'Oh
Allah, I testify.' I believe in all that has been brought to him,
peace be upon him, from that which I know and do not know
of what He gave him. It is determined that there is an
appointed time with Allah. When it comes it is not postponed. I
believe in that with an iman (trust) that is without hesitation or
doubt, as I have believed. I am established as a slave. The
grave is true and the raising of bodies from the grave is true,and the review of the people by Allah, may He be exalted, is
true, the scattering of pages is true. The Sirat is true. The
Garden is true and the Fire is true. A group in the Garden and
a group in the Fire is true. The torment that day on one group
is true and that another group will not be grieved by the
greatest anxiety. The intercession by the Sent Ones and the
Trusting and the bringing out by the Most Merciful of the
Merciful from the Fire is true. The group of people with
serious wrong actions among the Trustworthy entering the
Fire and leaving it with intercession and indebtedness is true.
The confirmation of the Trusting and the people of Unity in the
Garden is true. Everything which the Books and Messengers
brought from Allah, known or unknown, is true.
So the seeker can either lay aside the book and label this as oldfashioned religion, binding him along with the others in a form of
mental and social slavery which open the way to exploitation and
injustice, or he can reject the prejudicial reaction, set aside the
labelling of terms that will to him immediately imply that this is a
belief system – does he not, indeed, talk of belief? It is time now to
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approach the business of the Unseen. It is time to clarify this
essential aspect of existence – that is both visible and invisible,
place and no-place. Again it is essential to re-iterate the basic step
that is taken on the Path – Shahada – witnessing – affirming the
Unity and the Messengership of the one who is sent by Reality,
Muhammad, peace be upon him. The acceptance of the reliable
witness is the extent of one's vision to begin with – we cannot see
the Unseen but we can distinguish the profound humanity and
serenity of the Messenger and, in the living situation, his Masters
to whom he has transmitted the knowledge and science of
existence. So, when we discover that both the Messenger and his
Masters through the ages express themselves in terms of a present
phenomenal existence and a hidden and permanent existence, we
are forced to examine how they come to this. By their description
it is made quite clear that these things are matters of revelation.
They are talking about what they have seen and experienced. The
significant thing about these vast cosmic visions of an unseen
reality, unseen that is to the outward eye, is that the vivid and
precise description is always accompanied by a recognition that
they have no total knowledge of the Unseen, and that their vision is
only a tiny fragment of an inconceivably vast and dynamic display
of fulgurating forms that endlessly unfold with the radiant and
structured perfection of the aurora borealis.
The greatest work of the sufic sciences is the Shaykh al-Akbar's
'Makkan Revelations'. At the opening of this tremendous book
which is incomparable among the works of the Masters, he tells
how he achieved the Station of knowledge from which he wrote all
that is contained in the Revelations. The actual encounter in the
Unseen which is the key to the book comes later and takes place at
the Ka'ba, and we will examine that when we come to the
knowledge of the Ka'ba. Here is the Master's description:
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Blessings be upon the secret of the knower and his subtle point,
the quest of the knower and the object of his desire, the
Veracious Master who set out at night to his Lord, the Night
Visitor who passed the seven paths to Him, in order that he
who made the Night Journey might record what was entrusted
to him of signs and realities. He is the most incredible of
created beings that I witnessed during my writing of this work
in the world, or the realities and mirror-forms in the Presence
of Majesty. It was a revelation of the heart in an Unseen
Presence. I was him, may Allah bless him and grant him peace,a Master in that world, preserved from goals, sustaining the
vision, confirmed in victory. All the Chosen Messengers were
in front of him, and his community, which is the best
community, was clinging to him, and the angels of subjugation
surrounded the Throne of his station, and the angels of the
birth of actions were lined up in front of him. The Siddiq was
on his most precious right, and the Faruq was on his most pureleft. The Seal had dispersed before him to tell him of the tale of
idols. 'Ali, may Allah bless him and give him peace, was
blessing the Seal with his tongue. Dhu'n-Nurayn was wrapped
in the cloak of his shame, occupied in his concern.
The Highest Master, the sweetest fresh spring, the most
revealed and most glorious Light, turned and saw me behind
the Seal, because of a partnership between me and it in decree.The Master said to it: 'This is your like, and your son, and
your boon companion. Raise up the mimbar of tamarisk for
him before me.' Then he pointed to me and said: 'Muhammad,
attend to it and give praise to He who sent me and give praise
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to me. If there is in you a single hair from me it cannot bear
separation from me. It is the ruler in your identity. Thus it will
not return to the meeting. It is not from the world of misery:
there was nothing from me after my sending out in any wayexcept good fortune, and he is among those who give praise of
thanks in the heavenly gathering.'
So the Seal built the mimbar in that most awesome assembly
and on the side of the mimbar was written in the most
resplendent light: 'This is the purest Muhammadan Maqam.
Whoever ascends it has inherited it and the Truth has sent him
as a guardian to the sanctuary of the Shari'a and has delegatedhim.'
The whole work is filled with these moments of radiant and
moving vision and it is from these experiences that he unfolds with
a crystalline clarity his cosmology and his tasawwuf. The plain
reason why he is virtually unknown in the West is that the so-called Orientalists stubbornly insisted that he adhere to their very
limited, and from a global point of view, parochial, understanding
of how a man might express himself. Once they defined him as a
philosopher it was simple enough to dismiss him as muddled and
incoherent. The arrogance of the German and English academics
who dismissed him deserves somewhere a study on its own, and
the most ironic aspect of the affair is that these men had no other
genuine qualification to write on 'Ibn 'Arabi than their capacity toread the Arabic language! Those who settled for accepting him as a
mystic – an intolerable term in Islam – then had to put aside his
science of the self as getting in the way of the simple vision and
ended up 'preferring' the clear personal testimonies of experience
to the towering structure of 'Ibn 'Arabi's scientific knowledge of
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the world of form and no-form. Before attempting to see the world
of experiential reality as a place in which all these barriers of space
and solidity have become fuzzy and fluid, let us examine one more
witnessing by the great Moroccan Master, Shaykh Darqawi, which
happened two hundred years ago in Fez:
By Allah, my brothers, I did not believe that a learned man
could deny the vision of the Messenger, peace be upon him, in
the waking state, until the day I met some learned men in the
Qarawiyyin Mosque and had a conversation with them on this
matter. They said to me: 'However is it possible to see the
Messenger when one is awake, since he has been dead for over
1,200 years? It is only possible to see him in a dream, since he
himself said: 'He who sees me, that is to say in a dream, sees
me in reality, for Shaytan cannot take my form.' I answered:
'Of necessity, he can be seen in the waking state only by one
whose mind – or let us say, whose thoughts – have transported
him from this world of bodies into the world of Spirits: therehe will see the Messenger without the slightest doubt, there he
will see all his friends.' They were silent and said not a word
when I added: 'Indeed, he can be seen in the world of Spirit.'
But after a while they said to me: 'Explain how this is so?' I
answered: 'Tell me yourselves where the world of Spirits is in
relation to the world of bodies.' They did not know what to
reply. And then I said: 'There where the world of bodies is,there also is the world of Spirits: there where the world of
corruption is, there also is the world of purity: there where the
world of the kingdom is, there also is the world of kingship: in
the very place where the lower worlds are, there are to be
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found the higher worlds and the totality of worlds. It has been
said that there exist ten thousand worlds, each one like this
world, as recounted in the 'Hilyat al-Awliya' (by Abu
Nu'ayam-al-Isbahani) all these are contained in man withouthis being conscious of it. Only he whom Allah purifies by
absorbing his qualities into His own, his attributes into His
own, is conscious of this. Now Allah purifies many of His slaves
and does not cease from purifying them until their end.' The
venerable Master and Wali, Sayyid Ibn al-Banna, may Allah
be pleased with him, says in his 'Inquiries':
Understand, for you are a copy of existence for Allah,so that nothing of existence is lacking in you.
The Throne and the Footstool, are they not in you?
The higher world and also the lower world?
The Cosmos is but the man on a big scale.
And you – you are the Cosmos in miniature.
And the Venerable Master, the Wali al-Mursi, may Allah be
pleased with him, said:
'Oh you who go astray in the understanding
of your own secret,
Look – you will find in yourself the whole of existence.
You are the infinite, seen as the Way
and seen as the Truth,
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Oh synthesis of the Divine Secret in its Totality.'
So here on the one hand we have a Master talking about meeting
with all the Messengers, and initiations that take place opening him
to a knowledge he has not gained from any 'outer' source and yetapparently did not know up until that initiation, and on the other
hand another Master who says that the creature is compounded of
all the forms in the Universe.
The kafir, that is, the one who covers up reality, would describe the
situation thus: a human being performs actions in the world and is
either gratified and finds pleasure or else punished and finds pain.
If the situation becomes extreme, the mental operation relating tothe pain and pleasure takes on a primary importance in that the
pleasure fantasy and the pain anxiety slip their moorings as it were
and become detached from event and float free, creating a crisis in
the person's experience between their tumultuous inner reality and
the down-to-earth 'factual' reality of events. This crisis can become
so great that only the structuring of these fantasies in an imagined
'heaven and hell' dichotomy can hold together the inner
fragmentation. Thus the two realms, or imagined realms, inventedby the mind to contain the excess material of the fantasy-producing
mind. They have a source in the root fear and the root gratification
which is understandably infantile in origin. This picture
unfortunately is based on the reality of the subjective experience,
and somehow on the primacy of the solid over and against the non-
spatial. It makes no differentiation between the imagined or let us
say fantasised form in mind and the perception of an existing form
by mind. In the sufic picture, the whole closed world system is
blown wide apart. It does not declare that the positive, as it were,
of that negative is true – that is, it is not a simplistic affirmation
that the 'inner' experience of fear is hell after all and synonymous
with it. On the contrary it affirms the clinical neurotic picture that
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builds up into an intolerable punishing hell, or the lotus-like
fantasy world of gratification that pulls away from event – all this
is nothing more than illusion. The illusion is based on the false
assumption that there is some kind of essential reality to the self,
that it is solid and actual and that it is responsible for its actions
and that it is going to pay for what it has done. The guilt and its
opposite energy, the gratification, are a modality based on the
conviction that actions cohere to an experiencing central form as
crystals cluster around a basic salt formation.
The Messenger said that people would be judged not according to
their acts but according to their intentions. He also said that people
would not be saved from the Fire by their works. So this wholepicture that connects the human creature to the heaven/hell
condition is a fantasy. This is not what is put forward as how
things are. Neurosis is to separate yourself from the total process
which is Divinity itself. To posit for yourself a separate reality
dooms you to positing your own fantasy heaven and your own
fantasy hell. People who deny Divine Reality collapse in inner
anguish and experience and fear the hell of the present and an
intolerable future – equally they have ecstatic states in their heads
which they call heavenly but which are private delusions that they
can offer us no access to, unlike the wali who can make available
for his disciple the experience of bliss. Reality is not to the gnostic
a one-dimensional but a multi-tiered existence. The forms are
endless, just as in the phenomenal world so in the Unseen – there
are many heavens and many hells.
The two basic images of the Garden and the Fire as the two polarrealities of the Unseen are easy of access to the awake mind. On
the one hand there is the whole energy process of fire which is one
of intensity, enormously powerful energy in transmutation,
changing and altering everything which enters into it, breaking it
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down and recreating it – as in the alchemical picture. From it is
born a star, a metal, into it finally by a kind of ultimate persuasion
of activity, the other element is unified until it becomes fire itself
despite its original density and separateness. It is intolerable, it is
the ultimate in heat and unendurableness, it is the present moment
as utter anguish, time at its most terrible. The Garden is space,
greenness, time opened out into ease. Water runs, there is shade,
forms emerge, unfold, plants blossom, bear fruit. Birds sing in the
air – the elements are benign, peaceful. It is a place for living
creatures and beauty as the other is a place for disintegration and
power.
The teaching of tasawwuf is that these worlds are part of the realityof the universe, they are real in a way that your pain or pleasure is
not real. If you fear the Fire of the Unseen you will avoid the
illusory accretions that cause the neurotic fear in experience, but
equally you must desire the Garden or you will yearn in fantasy
and split from the ordinary world of lived existence. Without the
fear and hope that open you to knowledge of Unity, you are
doomed quite inevitably to the anxiety/gratification dialectic that
adheres to the illusory self-form, you will live intimidated and at
the mercy of your sick fears and hopes. We come back inevitably
to the picture we had earlier in relation to the ascetic which showed
how every step of the Way was accompanied by an equivalent in
neurosis and ultimately in madness. For this all happens in the
world of natural order, forms, where everything is double. We find
throughout our journey that the science of Unity exists to be
applied to the world and our experience just because they are dual
when Reality itself is One.
It could be suggested that this was a mechanism to cause a transfer
from the urgent existential situation into a condition where the
anxiety was, as it were, deferred out and away from the immediate
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crisis and thus rendered harmless. This could only result in a more
fragmented inner experience and would certainly result in making
the inner experience of the person labyrinthine and more acute in
its tension. What has to be recognised is that this is how the
Masters of the Way see and experience reality. They are utterly
fearless in this world, they are free in all their actions. To
experience fear and hope of Allah is to be devoid of fear of the
issue or expectation of the issue. This is the hallmark of Wisdom.
It follows that the man who says, 'I do good things not because I
desire the Garden,' or 'I abstain from the forbidden not because I
fear the Fire, but I do these things for myself,' is in reality bound to
illusion and the persistence of the self-form as some dense andlasting thing – since this is not the case, he has clung to the realm
of gratification and congratulation and serenity will elude him.
These hidden realities were created for him and are an inexorable
part of his Universe, so let him abhor the one and long for the
other, for in these two lie the approach that is pleasing to his Lord.
His intentions will take him to the Garden or the Fire, and so let
him desire a clear heart so that he can the more know his own
intentions, and let him fear and hope in accordance with his
recognition of his inability to know the Seal of his destiny that is in
the Balance. In doing so, he turns away from the giving of reality
to actions, and he turns towards the reality of his own heart, which
in turn opens up to him all the myriad forms of the visible
Unification, and the matter of our sciences. In the chapter relating
to Stations we will examine further aspects of fear and hope, and
then finally we can look at the very stuff of this so deceptively
constructed world of forms.
We had left the adept poised on his prayer mat – we must continue
now out beyond the individual act of salat to see it cosmically as a
rite performed five times a day at prescribed times.
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The close view is of a man or a line of men oriented in one
direction bowing and prostrating. The distant view reveals not a
line of men, but seen globally, a circle of devotion centring on the
point of the Ka'ba. So that what we have is a series of concentric
circles moving towards the Makkan focus of adoration. There is
another dimension that must be considered to make this a moving
and living picture – and that is time. Qur'an specifies that salat is
fixed at appointed times, the times being taken very simply from
the sun's position in the sky. There are five necessary sets of
prostration, the first being at dawn when the first thread of white
light appears on the horizon and lasting until the sun's disc is about
to be visible – the second is at noon immediately following the
meridian – the third is mid-afternoon – the fourth, the sunset, after
the descent of the sun's disc – and the last, the night prayer, when
the light leaves the sky. Thus, in the global picture, it follows that
what you have is an endless rippling movement of circle upon
circle, in to the centre point of the Ka'ba, that virtually never
ceases, as the sun is constantly rising and setting across the world.
At the centre is the Ancient House, of which the Qur'an says:
The first House established for the people was at Makka, a
pure place, and a guidance to all beings. (Qur'an 3.96)
So the focus of this worship and opening to the Universal Reality
is a place that has been celebrated from the beginning of man's
story as a place of meeting between the slave and the Lord. The
whole dynamic of energy emanating from the Ancient House is so
overwhelming that to align oneself with it, anywhere, is to be in
harmony with the Unity of existence, and the patterning of the
world as a unique and total creation. This is why the Messenger
always sat facing the Ancient House, and slept facing the Ancient
House, and did salat facing the Ancient House. Salat, seen from
this global point of view, from this cosmic point of view, reveals
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itself to be the primary and essential rite of any science of gnosis
of the Reality which is everywhere present and nowhere graspable
by intellect or sensory experience. The first act that the seeker
performs is to open himself to this situation where he, in harmony
not only with his fellow creatures, but with the whole organic
creation, submits himself to the process of which he is already an
inexorable part. This is submission, this is peace. The man who has
accepted his place as an infinitesimal particle of a vast dynamic
multi-dimensional Universe, and who has submitted to his
complete helplessness and weakness in a world spinning in a sea of
endless planets, has also opened himself to the process of
awakening his own inner reality which can swallow up this
tremendous Cosmos of stars. A Persian Master puts it:
I went out by the edge of the ocean
And saw a wonderful sight,
The boat within the sea,
and the sea within the boat.
This is the secret of salat, and the secret of the act of submission of
being a slave of a mighty reality, the secret of peace. Such a man is
called Muslim – one who surrenders his self. The practice is calledIslam. The root form is the same – SLM – 'surrender', 'peace', 'to
be safe and sound'.
As well as the rhythmic pattern of five daily sets of prostration,
there are also times when special sets are performed. These are on
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the 'Id days which mark the end of the Fast of Ramadan and the
completion of the rites of Hajj, these two times being taken
precisely according to the position of the moon. The other time is
in the case of eclipse. Here we have an opportunity of seeing the
extraordinary depths and implications of this ritual act – and how it
opened the Messenger to both the cosmic reality of things and the
unseen dimension of these same events. The picture we have is of
a man so in tune, so in harmony with the creation that he blows
with the wind and eclipses with the sun. He tastes and submits to
the whole creational event just as the willow tree yields to the
changing elements and is itself both tree and wind that blows
through it:
'Abd ar-Rahman bin Samura, who was one of the Companions
of the Messenger of Allah, peace be upon him, said: 'During
the lifetime of Allah's Messenger, peace be upon him, I was at
arrow practice in Madinah when the sun eclipsed. I shot the
arrows and said: "By Allah, I must see how the Messenger of
Allah acts in a solar eclipse." So I came to him, and he was
standing in prayer, raising his hands, and saying – "Glory toAllah, Praise belongs to Allah, there is no divinity but Allah,
Allah is greater!" – until the sun cleared. When the eclipse was
over he recited two suras and prayed two raka's.'
'Ata' bin Rabah reported on the authority of A'isha, the wife of
the Messenger of Allah, peace be upon him, who said:
'Whenever the wind was stormy, the Messenger of Allah used
to say: "Oh Allah, I ask you for what is good in it, and the good
which it contains, and the good of that for which it was sent. I
seek refuge with You from what is evil in it, what evil it
contains, and the evil of that for which it was sent." And when
there was thunder and lightning in the sky, his colour
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underwent a change, and he went out and in, backwards and
forwards, and when the rain came he felt relieved, and I
noticed it on his face. A'isha asked him about it and he said:
"It may be as the people of 'Ad said: when they saw a cloudformation coming to their valley, they said, 'It is a cloud which
would give us rain." (Qur'an 46.24)
Anas bin Malik reported: 'It rained upon us when we were
with the Messenger of Allah, peace be upon him, and he
removed his cloak so that the rain fell on it and we asked,
"Messenger of Allah, why do you do this?" He said: "Because
it has just come from the Exalted Lord."'
Once the knowledge of salat has been acquired in all its outward
detail and practised with its profound and meaningful inner
mathematical structure – for the number of prostrations at different
times of the day, and the degrees of extra non-obligatory ones,
make up the real basis of the spiritual science – then the seeker has
got hold of the first part of something which in its totality is the
tremendous gift of the Messenger to mankind. Along with hisdelivering the Message of al-Qur'an, he left behind him the Hikma
– the Wisdom. It is this that forms the body of one's inner reality, it
is this that gives flesh and blood to the inner impulse towards
gnosis. Even though there could be a limited inner experience
without this science, with it you have the possibility of that
wholeness that returned to the human race when the Messenger
opened people once again – as had all the Messengers before him,
of whom he indicated there had existed 124,000 since thebeginning of man's story – opened them to the true nature of their
humanity, to the real measure of man, to perfection and Unity. You
must not be surprised to find that this tremendous science of
human behaviour on which the full doctrine of gnosis rests is
effectively unknown to people in the West – partly because word
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of it filtered through the same inadequate channel by which
knowledge of Islam came to the academic world, that is, through
people utterly unequipped to examine the anthropology and
metaphysics of Islam, being nothing more than accomplished
linguists – and partly because there was and is a quite conscious
attempt on behalf of the Christian and Jewish academics to
misrepresent the true nature of Islam – but finally because the
Muslims themselves in these long centuries have felt increasingly
uncomfortable with a science that challenged their own wealth.
This science, the Sunna, or Practice, of the Messenger, is properly
speaking the whole of the science of man. It rests on the principle
that man is the slave of his Lord, and at the same time is the Khalif
of his Lord – that is to say, the one who stands for Him or
represents Him. We have taken hold of the science of the nafs, for
truly the whole science of the nafs – and all you need to know
about it is contained in the two purifications, wudu and salat, and
adherence to these practices – will make clear the working of the
nafs in every situation. We must now try to get a first glimpse of
what the nature of the Sunna is, and then approach the meaning of
this Khalifdom, which is, of course, the Secret we desire.
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The Science of the Sunna
The word Sunna, meaning the Practice, derives from the root SNN,
meaning 'to form'. It is nothing less than the form of man, that is,
man as a living social organism, man in his wholeness. Any
mechanistic or legal idea from your Judaic or Christian
background must be removed before you can open to this reality
which is utterly organic, physical and metaphysical, a spontaneous
human creature in harmony with his creation being the end result,
and not an inhibited and outwardly controlled animal. The error of
the Jews was not that they failed to obey the Law, but that they
turned what was a scientific Law about man – that is, if you do
this, that happens – into a legalistic structure exterior to and
imposed on man. The error of the Jews made it inevitable that
when the existential reality of lawfulness, in its organic sense, the
Messiah, appeared, they could not recognise him. So involved
were they with the theory, they failed to identify the practice in a
living and perfect exemplar. The error of the Christians was its
counterpart – so determined were they to enshrine the
metaphysical aspect of man's nature, so terrified were they of
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losing the secret of man's glory, that they felt obliged to enshrine it
in a Mystery, in symbol and ritual, letting its protectors be an elite
whose raison d'etre was to guard the Secret, until in the end these
men did not feel obliged to respond to the social obligations of the
teaching, so that they became immoral and corrupt in the name of
the perfect Teacher. These two attitudes are what may be
understood as 'religion', they are the forms that bind together
(religio) a people in an exploitation that must inevitably lead to
tyranny.
Islam is based on the reality and primacy of this Sunna, this self-
form of man, that indicates that there is a behaviour pattern for the
human species wherever it may exist on earth. It is significant thatone of the stumbling blocks to people approaching the experience
of Islam is that they feel that it is indigenous to a desert culture, or
that it is the desert culture, and therefore does not transfer to other
societies. Most ironically, the pseudo-sufis always refer to 'we in
the West', as if for cultural reasons we were in some special
situation that somehow made us different, and by implication,
superior to other peoples. As if the complexity of our social modes
and the glutted density of our noun-packed post-scientific
vocabulary somehow made us superior or more inaccessible to
some 'ancient wisdom'. The Hikmat, the Wisdom, is not culture
and does not become culture. Culture is simply the illusory reality
you bestow on the dynamic forms of your society's transitory
activity and achievement and the shadows of the mental forms you
become hypnotised by – culture changes and decays and renews.
Islam merely selects and simplifies the cultural situation –
sweeping away the worst excrescences of fantasy, such as the
burning of widows on their husband's pyres in the decadent phase
of Hindu spiritual culture – and purifying the nobler practices –
such as the ancient rites of Hajj. The proof of the Sunna as a
profound and effective anthropological patterning for man is seen
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every year at the Hajj where people from the most disparate
cultures come together socially and spiritually unified by their
adherence in recognisable degree to the vast Sunna of Muhammad,
peace be upon him.
The proof of the ignorance of our epoch and the barbarism that is
enveloping our society can be found in the modern Muslim state's
urgent desire to shelve the whole patterning of the Sunna and
reduce Islam to a kind of Party with membership, dependent only
on the five ritual prayers and not on the complete inner and outer
transformation that takes place as a man begins to absorb the
Sunna, and thus open himself to his humanity and to his
Khalifdom. It is all the more tragic in the light of the situation of the so-called intellectuals in Western society. Despite the top-
heavy structuralist nightmare that collapses on itself, some
anthropologists have begun to recognise that there must be what
they call a 'canon' of knowledge, that they realise man once had
access to and which we have all but lost. It is of course the sufic
point of view that we are the canon, for if it were not in us, how
could we know it when we saw it outside us. A'isha, the wife of the
Messenger, and a Perfect Woman according to the Messenger –
Perfect that is in this total metaphysical understanding of what a
human creature is – was asked what her husband was like and she
replied: 'He was Qur'an walking!' In other words, he was the Book.
He was his Book. The two names of the Book, al-Qur'an and al-
Furqan, mean the gathering-together and the discrimination. So the
complete man is a gathering-together of that whole canon of
knowledge that tells man his place in the Universe of stars and also
opens him inwardly to Union with the reality of the Cosmos, and at
the same time he is a separation, a discrimination in the dual world
of nature, of night and day, hot and cold, true and false. This is
why in the original and complete science of anthropology, the
study of man, it is enough that you study yourself that you
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understand the total cosmic situation of the species. You are the
whole man, but not as you are. Muhammad is the measure of man.
He is al-Qautham, the completely perfect man, or as the Sufis call
him, al-Insanu'l-Kamil. This is the Station of the one who has
achieved the goal, who knows himself. Now in earlier treatises on
Sufism it was taken for granted that people accepted the Sunna, but
the situation today is such that the Sunna has become a dangerous
and quite terrifying possibility, so that the Muslims, whose
heritage it is, are at pains to assure you that you don't need to do
this and you don't need to do that – a situation which the
Messenger himself foretold as preceding the last phase of the
human condition:
Al-Miqdam bin Ma'Dikarib said that he heard the Messenger
say, peace be upon him: 'I have indeed brought the Qur'an and
something like it along with it, yet the time is coming when a
man replete on his couch will say: ÒKeep to this Qur'an –
what you find in it to be permissible treat as permissible, and
what you find in it to be prohibited treat as prohibited.Ó But
what Allah's Messenger has prohibited is like what Allah hasprohibited.'
It is Sufism that insists on the total picture of a man both outwardly
and inwardly in a state of transformation. Once the Muslim denies
the inner realities of the states and Stations we will examine
shortly, he then does not have to have his own motives examined.
Once he has denied the inner reality, he has denied his own and
yours, then it is a step to his dismantling the Sunna-pattern thatgives flesh and blood to that inner reality. In a short time he is
using the language of duality – and then he tells you that it does
not matter that you have a beard, that you sit on the ground and
sleep on the level surface of the floor, and eat with three fingers
from one plate, and greet the stranger and feed the guest, and so it
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goes on until in the end why should you bow and why should you
prostrate and why should you fast, and where is the Garden and
where is the Fire, and what is an angel, and what is a Messenger,
and what reality has any of the whole business when you live a
bourgeois life utterly enclosed in the insane rituals of consumerism
and reputation-tokens? It is in the beginning of this process that the
sufic tradition insists on the complete social reality of an Islam
which never ceases to extol poverty, simplicity, and measure, in
behaviour and possessions, and which calls for kindness and good
words between men, respect for women, and affection for the
young and the old. It is Sufism, as guardian of the Islam of the
Companions, that demands a radiant city as the setting for the man
of knowledge to experience his gnosis. The Sufi's place is in the
community – look at them from the beginning:
Hasan of Basra, may Allah be pleased with him, said: 'I saw
seventy comrades who fought at Badr: all of them had woollen
garments: and the greatest Siddiq (Khalif Abu Bakr) wore a
garment of wool in his detachment from the world.'
Al-Hallaj, the carder: Attar, the scent-merchant: Moulay Abd al-
Qadir, whose real glory only began when he came out from
retirement to live in Baghdad: these and the whole line of Shaykhs
testify to the fact that Sufis lived in the world, worked in the
marketplace and the farmyard, because they were the guardians
and are the guardians of this picture of man whose complete
silhouette and whose luminosity is from the same source,
Muhammad, peace be upon him.
Sufi, however, is a word – Muslim is a word – faqir is a word. The
essential perspective to hold to is that the inner reality and the
outer condition must be One. Whatever came to be known as Sufi
was nothing but the condition of the followers of the followers, and
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before them of the followers, and before them of the Companions
of the Messenger himself. What concerns us is a social quality of
being whose interiority is gnosis and whose exterior is detachment
from the world. The image of man is the image of Muhammad,
peace be upon him, and he said: 'My Companions are like the stars.
So whichever of them you follow you will be guided.' This Hadith
is from 'Umar ibn al-Khattab, Razin transmitted it.
Bukhari and Muslim both transmit a Hadith from Jabir saying
on the day of al-Hudaibiyya our numbers were one thousand
four hundred, and the Messenger said to us: 'Today you are
the best people on the earth.'
There are many Hadith which affirm the fact that the best people,
the best community that has ever been on the earth, was the
community in Madinah at the time of the Messenger. And it is here
that we are obliged to take on something about the nature of Islam,
and clarify for ourselves something that is essential to an
understanding of Islam and the reality of the sufic phenomenon.
The social achievement of the Messenger, and for the Sufis a social
achievement is a total human reality which implies that people
were able to realise their inward capacity as well as their human
capacities with others, was to create a complete and far-reaching
revolution in life-pattern. In an amazingly short time, starting with
a small band of people, he built up a highly educated group of
people who had all been instructed by him, irradiated by his
presence, purified by his practices and guided by his revelations.
Completely non-violent, they were a savagely persecuted minority
who stubbornly persisted in their practices despite the humiliations
and tortures they were subjected to, and their impact began to
resonate throughout the whole community. All they were doing, it
must be remembered, was rhythmically bowing and prostrating
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and glorifying the Creator of the Universe and praising Him for the
wonder of existence. Socially, they called for an end to the girl-
child murder that was an accepted cultural practice, and an end to
blood feuds. What was being introduced by the Messenger was his
Hikmat, his Wisdom, which he later defined through the use of two
terms, jahiliyya and hilm.
Jahiliyya the Messenger saw as the energy force of the unbridled
nafs, utterly flamboyant and expressed, ruthless in its infantile
determination to experience gratification whether of appetite or
violence. This was the natural flow of destructive energy that came
from the nafs which saw itself as separate from existence and in
conflict with reality. To this basic energy the Messenger taught theacquiring of the truly human faculty, hilm. Hilm can be defined as
a state of calm serenity which is not overthrown by anger from
within or violence threatening from without. Hilm implies that the
nafs has been tamed and is under the subject's control while jahl
defines a nafs that is in such urgent flux that the subject is too
identified with his action to be able to avoid conflict.
When those who cover up had placed in their heartsarrogance, the arrogance of jahiliyya, then Allah sent down
His serenity upon His Messenger and upon the trusting-ones
and imposed on them the word of self-restraint, for they were
worthy of it and suited to it. And Allah is aware of all things.
(Qur'an 48.26)
In the Qur'an, the Messengers Nuh, Hud, and Sayyedina Musa all
denounce jahl as being the enemy of reality, and the impulse of
violence in man which imposes on him a primary excuse for
denying the Unity in the name of his dualistic conflict. Jahl is,
therefore, the very stuff of history, of event, of conflict, and by that
token, of unreality and covering-up. The awakening of the
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renewed force.
The Messenger was well aware that the light that came from his
presence among them was a great restraint on the natural greed and
lust for power that man is prone to, and that is why he urged mento respect the Companions and the next generation, the Followers.
It must be remembered that Islam is a science that is passed on by
existential transmission and not by books and texts. Once the
people who embodied hilm were removed from authority and from
a place of influence it was all too easy to set up the dynasties of
luxury and imperialism which were what Muslim history so
rapidly became. He himself, peace be upon him, had this to say
about the future generations and Islam:
Abu Burda told on his father's authority that he, meaning the
Messenger, raised his head to the sky, which was a common
practice of his, and said: 'The stars are a means of safety for
the sky, and when the stars depart what the sky has been
threatened with will come to it. I am a means of safety for my
Companions, and when I depart what my Companions havebeen threatened with will come to them. My Companions are a
means of safety for my people, and when my Companions
depart what my people have been threatened with will come to
them.' Muslim transmitted it.
'Imran bin Husain reported Allah's Messenger as saying: 'The
best of my people are my generation, then their immediate
followers, and then their immediate followers. After them therewill be people who give testimony without being asked, who
will be treacherous and not to be trusted, who will make vows
which they do not fulfill, among whom plumpness will appear.'
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'Abdallah bin Mughaffal reported Allah's Messenger as
saying: 'Fear Allah regarding my Companions. Fear Allah
regarding my Companions and do not make them a target
after I am gone. He who loves them does so for love of me, andhe who hates them does so from hatred of me. He who injures
them has injured me and he who injures me has injured Allah,
and he who injures Allah will soon be punished by Him.'
Zaid bin Arqam reported Allah's Messenger as saying of
Sayyedina 'Ali, Fatima, Hassan and Husain, may Allah be
pleased with them: 'I am war to him who makes war on them,
and peace to him who makes peace with them.' Tirmidhitransmitted it.
Yet within only twenty-nine years the Gate of Wisdom, the Amir
of the Trusting Ones, was stabbed in the back in the mosque in
prostration before Allah by a so-called Muslim. Soon after him the
Messenger's two grandsons were murdered. Sayyedina Hassan was
poisoned and Sayyedina Husain was slaughtered on the field of
Kerbala and beheaded in the most horrible massacre that everblighted the Muslim community. These deaths were known to the
Messenger in his lifetime and the Hadiths tell of his weeping for
them while they were still children. Abu Dharr, the most noble
Companion, was humiliated and beaten and finally sent to an
exile's death, also just as the Messenger had told him he would end
his days. It is a tragic and sobering picture, and it is useless to start
to apportion blame these centuries later, as it is to mourn for them.
They died martyrs to Reality and they went from the worst to thebest. What is important is that we are prepared to look at the
complete picture of these events or as complete a picture as we can
piece together. Thousands of the Ansar were slaughtered by so-
called Muslims, although the Messenger said of them: 'You are the
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most beloved people to me.' Again, from the Hadith it is clear that
he foresaw their end. Indeed, the most moving aspect of the whole
story is the Messenger's recognition of what lay ahead and his
acceptance of what was to be. As a Messenger he could not
appoint a successor, for there is no succession in Messengership.
Islam is not a state concept, it is an organic life-pattern for men in
society: once roles are imposed and structures are solidified you
return inevitably to the rigid imposition of authority and the
dialectical conflicts of history.
During the lifetime of the Messenger, the Munafiqun or the
Hypocrites, were a constant threat to the spiritual revolution of
Islam. The word derives from the root NFQ which means 'to entera hole from which there are several ways out'. The inner condition
of the munafiq is marked by a split between his outer behaviour
and speech and his inner way of experiencing reality. Its nature is
such that the munafiq wavers between one possibility of Islam and
another, between betrayal and attraction. Nifaq is, itself, the
dynamic to split reality, to separate inner and outer – it is nothing
less than a sickness, and Qur'an indicates that it is the basic
sickness of the human mind, 'marad'. Let us look at the astonishing
description of these people in the Qur'an and it will be immediately
apparent to us that the munafiq is not just one of those who turned
against Islam in the early days of the Madinan community, but that
the munafiq is the person who on the threshold of awakening to the
true nature of reality takes flight from the unitary nature of
existence and makes war in order to distract attention by
foreground violence, from the vast detached majesty of peace that
is the Cosmic Reality. This marad, this basic illness of the human
species, is nothing other than the splitting of the inner and the outer
experiencing self, the separation of the subject-mind from the
object-body. Fragmentation, once started, continues until the mind
itself breaks up and one part of it opposes another and the conflict
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becomes internalised. 'I did not mean to do it.' 'I was not myself,' is
the process that starts with, 'They are other than I,' and 'I am other
than the Universe!' Qur'an has made clear that if you kill one man
wrongfully you kill the whole of mankind. Here in its entirety is
the Surat al-Munafiqun, The Form of the Hypocrites, in the
Glorious Qur'an:
In the Name of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate.
When the hypocrites come unto thee (Oh Muhammad) they
say: 'We bear witness that you are indeed Allah's Messenger.'And Allah knows that you are indeed His Messenger, and
Allah bears witness that the hypocrites are all liars.
They make their trusting a covering so that they may turn
from the Way of Allah. Truly evil is that which they have been
doing.
That is because they trusted then covered-up, therefore their
hearts are sealed so that they understand not.
And when thou seest them their outward forms please thee:
and if they speak thou listeneth to what they say.
They are like propped up blocks of wood.
They deem every shout to be against them.
They are the enemy, so beware of them!
Allah confound them. How perverted they are.
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And when it is said to them: 'Come! The Messenger of Allah
will ask forgiveness for you!' they avert their faces and thou
seest them turning away, disdainful.
Whether thou ask forgiveness for them or ask not forgiveness
for them, Allah will not forgive them.
Lo! Allah guides not the people who go against the Way [i.e.
people who come out from the human transaction, from the
root FSQ, meaning 'to emerge from the husk of the datestone'.]
They it is who say: 'Spend not on behalf of those with Allah's
Messenger that they may disperse,' – when Allah's are the
treasures of the heavens and the earth: but the hypocrites do
not understand.
They say: 'Surely if we return to Madinah the mightier will
soon drive out the weaker,' – when might belongs to Allah and
to His Messenger and to the Trusting-Ones, but the hypocrites
do not know.
Oh you who have Trust! Let not your wealth nor your children
distract you from remembrance of Allah. Those who do so,
they are the losers. And spend of that wherewith we have
provided you before death comes to one of you and he says:
'My Lord! If only Thou wouldst reprieve me for a little while,
then I would give sadaqa and be among the Salihin.'
But Allah does not reprieve any self when its term comes, and
Allah is aware of what you do. (Qur'an 63)
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That – your thought, which ye did think about your Lord –
hath ruined you: and ye find yourselves among the lost.
(Qur'an 41.20-23)
It is so clear, the picture. We are our own record. We are our own
Book. Our cells do testify against us or for us, depending on how
we have treated the body-form that has been loaned to us. Then the
Qur'an touches on the particular nature of the ordinary separateness
of phenomenal existence from the total Divine Reality. We cannot
hide ourselves from ourselves, we are convinced that we have
covered up the record – even though we are the record. That is, we
think that the Reality does not see what we ourselves are aware of
in our split inwardness. It is the thought – the illusion of otherness
– that has 'ruined' the lost human creature. That thought is lostness
itself. Separation is necessary outwardly, as we have said,
according to the science of Wisdom, but joining is necessary
inwardly by the same token. In Surat Ya-Sin:
Lo! We it is who bring the dead to life.
We record that which they send before, and their footprints.
And all things we have kept in a clear register.
(Qur'an 36.12)
We think because others cannot read us that we cannot be read.
The form is nothing other than the meaning. Our form is our
record. The cell is the story. As the Shaykh al-Kamil says in his
Song 'Withdrawal into the Perception of the Essence':
Truly, created beings are meanings set up in images.
All who grasp this are among the people of discrimination.
Let us now return to our picture of the split Madinah community
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and the conflicts that tore asunder the first Muslims. Here is the
perspective that the Messenger gave of the situation:
Abu 'Ubaida and Mu'adh bin Jabal both reported the
Messenger, peace be upon him, as saying: 'This matter began
as prophecy and a mercy, then it will become a Khalifate and a
mercy, then a tyrannical kingdom, then how much
haughtiness, pride and corruption there will be on the earth!'
This was transmitted by Baihaqi in 'Shu'ab al'Iman'.
Abd-Allah bin Ma'sud told that the Messenger, peace be upon
him, said: 'The mill of Islam will go round till the year 35 or 36or 37, then if they perish they will have followed the Path of
those who perished before them, but if their Deen is
maintained for them it will be maintained for them for seventy
years.'
He asked if that meant seventy years more or altogether and
the Messenger replied that it meant seventy years altogether.
This was transmitted by Abu Dawud.
Sayyedina 'Ali, may Allah have mercy on him, said that when
Allah's Messenger was asked who should be appointed
Commander after he had gone, he replied: 'If you appoint Abu
Bakr as Commander you will find him trustworthy, with little
desire for worldly goods but eager for the next world: if you
appoint 'Umar as Commander you will find him trustworthy
and strong, fearing for Allah's sake and no-one's blame. If you
appoint 'Ali as Commander – but I cannot see you doing so –
you will find him a guide who is rightly guided and who will
lead you on the Straight Way.' Ahmad transmitted this.
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The bitterness and the distortions that arose from the great initial
schism still resonate today among the Muslim community, what is
left of it as a functioning reality – but that reality is blurred because
of the successful and false crystallisation that both Shi'a and
Sunnis achieved in equating Islam with a Muslim State. There is
no such thing as an Islamic State in the world today. As I have
indicated, the two terms are mutually irreconcilable. If it is Islam,
it is not a state, rather it is a community functioning organically
according to the Book and the Wisdom, that means Amir and
Fuqahah but not a canon Law with a judiciary and a power elite.
Police, prisons – although prisoners may be taken in war, that is a
temporary situation – banks and standing armies are nothing to do
with Islam. They are the stuff of Statism. In Islam, every man is a
policeman, the bank of Zakat is emptied annually, every man is a
soldier ready and trained to fight in self-defence when necessary.
The long history of the Muslim conquest despite the many energies
that it brought along in its wake, must not be equated with Islam.
Islam is the Book and the Wisdom, and the teaching of it is not by
the intake of structured information, it is by the transmission of the
behaviour-form from a man who is himself already to an
acceptable degree a self-form of the Wisdom. This man – the
rajulullah – the man of Allah – is Islam, is the transmission, is the
copy of the Muhammadan original self-form.
It is not that the Sunni were wrong, or that the Shi'a were right. For
these formations took place over a period of time and did not
become defined on the minute, as it were. The dramatisation and
mourning for the death of Sayyedina Husain, may Allah have
mercy on him, was an innovation, and a solidifying of the nafs
through ritualised mourning, and a culture token of the Shi'a
counter-society in conflict with the Sunnis. He was a martyr, so
properly speaking we can only rejoice for him, that he is assured
the fullest life in the Garden. And so it goes on – this and that, until
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the animosity is revived. It is not necessary to be part of that
schismatic thinking at this stage of the business of Islam. On the
contrary, we have an opportunity now to detach ourselves and look
at the picture as wholly as we can, sifting the evidence without
prejudice, fitting together the pieces, the better to understand these
extraordinary men, and their moving story.
The reason, however, that this has been brought up is not, as I have
said, to start the schismatic energy flowing, but to get to this point
where we can see why there is such a thing as Sufism at all! It was
this picture of the formation of a new style of expansionist and
imperialist State founded on the basic tenets of Islam reduced to a
law-pattern and introducing a punitive legal system along with it –that led to the need for the Followers and the Followers of the
Followers to redefine what the original picture was. The great
Companions had all gone, martyred in battle or murdered by the
monarchic Islam of the Umayyads and the Abbasids. This form of
man as a completely renewed being, inwardly awake, turned away
from the world and worldly obsession, radiant through an
awareness of the Unseen Reality, filled with awe of Allah, and
sweetness for his brothers, and generosity – above all, with
generosity – this form was in imminent danger of being lost
forever. Generosity and tolerance – the two things the Messenger
most extolled and embodied, had already been swept aside as
weaknesses – and somehow somebody had to recover them before
it was too late.
It is easy to understand why the Traditionists finally made their
collections in despair lest the whole picture of the Sunna got lost.The Qur'an had been gathered and written down as a Book for the
same reason – there was the terrible risk that the slaughter would
engulf the Muslim as a human record. Yet the books do not create
the man. Transmission is from man to man. Even with the Hadiths,
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while it was a tremendous and scholarly achievement of enormous
dimensions calling for both patience and integrity, the living and
essential way was and still is one of personal transmission. Still
today, for example, at the Qarawwiyin in Fez, the Master of Hadith
will instruct you in the exact Hadith and its Isnad or chain, back
person by person, to the Messenger himself. You may not transmit
them in turn until he is satisfied that you have fulfilled the learning
task and yourself been purified to such a stage that you too have
absorbed them as he has done. That picture of transmission is the
basis of a man's Islam and his inner awakening.
Thus the uncle of Imam Junayd, may Allah be pleased with him,
Sari as-Saqati, once asked him as he left the house to whatassembly he was going. He replied: 'To the majlis of Harith al-
Muhasibi.' His uncle said: 'Good. Accept his learning and his
discipline but beware of his speculative reasoning.' Al-Junayd
recounts: 'É and as I left I heard Sari say: ÒMay Allah make you a
traditionist who is a Sufi and not a Sufi who is a traditionist.Ó
Indeed, I studied the Shari'a according to the schools of such
masters of Hadith as 'Abu 'Ubayd and Abu Thawr, and later I was
taught by Harith al-Muhasabi and Sari ibn Mughallas. That has
been the reason for my success, because our knowledge must be
controlled by going back to the Qur'an and the Sunna. Whoever
has not learned the Qur'an by heart and has not formally studied
the Hadith, and has not learned Shari'a before embarking on
Sufism, is a man who has no right to lead.'
So right at the beginning of Islam, immediately following the
Messenger's death, we see the establishment of a State and alongwith it the deliberate persecution of the Messenger's Companions
and Followers, and worst of all, his own family and grandchildren.
With the closest family isolated from the State structure on the one
hand, and the coalescing of the ruler's courts with the civic and
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spiritual courts, the inevitable annexing of the learned men took
place. Despite the many Hadiths warning against so-called learned
men who served rulers, it became the inevitable result of the State
structure:
The Messenger said, peace be upon him: 'As long as the
learned men associate not with the rulers, they are the deputies
of the Messengers of Allah over His servants, but when they
associate with rulers they betray the Messengers. Beware of
them and avoid them.'
Of course, just as there were men who succumbed to the flatteries
of the Sultans and Khalifs, there were many who stuck steadfastly
to their Islam and defied their rulers or were martyred by them and
died rather than surrender what they knew to be the Way. What a
state-religion had to do was banish the whole concept of Sunna
except as an outward aesthetic – a social aesthetic if you like, a
deep style. The profound and vital nature of the Sunna was
however something else. It was that every action and every thought
solidified the experiencing reality of a man and separated him,
gave him the illusion of a kind of permanence, removed his
awareness that he passed fleetingly through the world, and that
things had no lasting value, only the heart's intentions had a reality
because they contained the life dynamic of his existence. All the
rest was illusion. Man carried nothing with him. He was his own
record of his life and after death he had to answer for what he had
done in the zone of action called the world.
Aisha reported the Messenger, peace be upon him, as saying:
'The world is the dwelling of him who has no dwelling, and the
property of him who has no property.' This has been
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transmitted by Ahmad and by Baihaqi.
Ibn Ma'sud told that the Messenger slept on a reed mat and
got up with the mark of it on his body, so Ibn Ma'sud said,
'Messenger of Allah, I wish you would order us to spread
something out for you.' He replied: 'What have I to do with the
world? In relation to the world, I am just like a rider who
shades himself under a tree, then goes off and leaves it.' This
has been transmitted by Ahmad, Tirmidhi and Ibn Majah.
The Messenger said, peace be upon him: 'Every building is a
misfortune for its owner except what cannot, except whatcannot É' Anas reported it and Abu Dawud transmitted it.
'The son of Adam has a right only to the following: a house in
which he lives; a garment with which he covers his private
parts; dry bread and water.' This is from 'Uthman and
transmitted by Tirmidhi.
Abdallah bin Mughaffal told that a man came to theMessenger and said, 'I love you.' When he had told him to
consider what he was saying, and when the man had declared
three times, 'I swear by Allah that I love you,' he replied: 'If
you are speaking the truth, prepare a complete armoury for
poverty, for poverty certainly comes quicker to those who love
me than a flood does to its destination.' Tirmidhi transmitted
this.
The Messenger said, peace be upon him: 'If you were to trust
in Allah genuinely, He would give you provision as He does for
the birds which go out hungry in the morning and come back
full in the evening.' This was narrated by 'Umar ibn al-
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Khattab and transmitted by both Tirmidhi and Ibn Majah.
Abu Dharr, may Allah be pleased with him, said: 'I came to the
Messenger when he was sitting in the shade of the Ka'ba and
when he saw me he said: "By the Lord of the Ka'ba, they are
the ones who suffer the greatest loss." I asked, "Who are they,
you for whom I would give my father and mother as ransom?"
He replied: ÒThose who have the most property – except those
who say, 'Take this and this and this,' before them and behind
them, on their right and on their left: but they are few!Ó' This
was transmitted by Bukhari and Muslim.
Sayyedina 'Ali, may Allah be pleased with him, said in a
transmission by Baihaqi, that the Messenger said: 'A time is
soon coming to mankind when nothing of Islam but its name
will remain and only the written form of the Qur'an will
remain. Their mosques will be in fine condition but will be
devoid of guidance, their learned men will be the worst people
under heaven, corruption coming forth from them and
returning among them.'
There is no avoiding the uncomfortable fact – uncomfortable for
those who wish to use Islam to buoy up a secular State – that the
Messenger came with a message that was a guidance as to how
they should prepare for the next world. He came with 'the good
news and the warning' in the Qur'an – and both these concerned a
man's cosmic place in the two worlds. This is not to say that Islam
is the Way of avoiding the human situation, of going off into the
hills, although the Messenger makes it quite clear that at the end of
the planet Earth's history, the man of the Way will have no option
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but to leave the barbaric society of the time in order to survive.
Indeed, so intense will be the inner agitation of the last days that it
will be essential for the Muslim to adopt the most reflective and
meditative quietism –
Abu Huraira reported Allah's Messenger, peace be upon him,
as saying: 'There will be periods of turbulence in which the one
who sits will be better than the one who stands, the one who
stands better than the one who walks, and the one who walks
better than the one who runs. He who contemplates them will
be drawn by them, so he who finds a refuge or shelter should
go to it.'
Abu Sa'id reported Allah's Messenger, peace be upon him, as
saying: 'A Muslim's best property will soon be his sheep which
he will take to the tops of the mountains and the places where
the rain falls, fleeing with his Deen [i.e. the Way, the
transaction] from civil strife.' Bukhari transmitted this.
Abu Huraira reported Allah's Messenger, peace be upon him,
as saying: 'When time is contracted, knowledge will be
withdrawn, civil war will appear, meanness will be cast into
people's hearts, and harj will be prevalent.' He was asked the
meaning of harj and said it meant rioting.
The first Community of Madinah al-Munawarra, the Illuminated
City, were men who lived in the world but were not servants of the
world, they worked in the city, and on the battlefield they defended
themselves. They lived lives of luminous activity, giving and
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sharing and guiding to Wisdom as no community has ever done
since the human race began. Yet among them were those who
loathed generosity and praise of the Creator, who scorned lack of
reputation and desired return to the Jahiliyya. In the end these men
achieved their desire. After the Khalifates of Abu Bakr, 'Umar, and
'Uthman, may Allah be merciful to them, each of whom did his
best to maintain the life-pattern of the Sunna in Madinah, came the
tragic and final attempt of Sayyedina 'Ali, may Allah be pleased
with him, to recover the full social nexus of the Messenger's
Sunna, but by that time, in precise fulfilment of the Messenger's
prophecy, the Khalifate came to an end, he was martyred, and a
kingdom was established. Ibn 'Abbas said: 'There is no one except
the Messenger whose knowledge is not sometimes followed and
sometimes rejected.' The Companions advised their people,
'Commit to memory as we have committed.' The first Khalif, Abu
Bakr, and the Companions disliked the idea of even submitting the
Qur'an to paper. Transmission, the direct existential exchange of
energy-wisdom, was the Way of Islam. Abu Bakr said, 'How
should we do what the Messengers did not do?' The rationalisation
was that the Companions had all but been slaughtered and the risk
was that there would be no-one to transmit the Message. Yet this is
the very anxiety situation that real Islam had come to dispel. The
matter was not and could not be in the hands of 'Uthman and the
others. It was in the hands of Reality itself. The act of putting it in
writing was the first step in the betrayal of the Wisdom-process. It
was inevitably followed by the quite unnecessary step of codifying
the Hadiths of the Messenger on which the Sunna is built. Now we
have all the documents and cannot find the man. We have thebooks from Allah and we have lost the rijalallah – the men of
Allah. He has become the vanishing man – the imperilled creature
of our polluted planet – the man of inner luminosity who
outwardly is a fountain of generosity and peace and
encouragement to others and guidance and strength, the man
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whose whole behaviour and energy is unified and in harmony with
the Divine transaction of existence, the Seen and the Unseen.
When Imam Malik compiled the Muwatta – one of the first
collections of Hadith to be written down – Ahmad Ibn Hanbal
criticised him and said, 'He has originated an innovation (from the
Wisdom-practice) by doing what the Companions did not do.' The
first books all appeared after the year 120 Hijra after the death of
all the Companions and most of the Followers, including Hasan al-
Basra, who was the Shaykh of knowledge following the death of
Sayyedina 'Ali, may Allah be pleased with them both. Once the
process had begun, the Muslim community began to develop a
Rabbinical tradition, and it was a matter of time before the thing
snowballed into abstract 'theology' and scholasticism appeared and
argument and refutation – all of which are merely exaltation of the
nafs – so that by the 4th century Hijra, the game element of
corrupted teaching had begun. Imam al-Ghazzali, may Allah be
pleased with him, says in his great work – which is nothing but a
vast and scholarly attempt to have done with scholarship and return
to Wisdom: 'The Science of Certainty – 'Ilm al-Yakin (that is,
knowing by inner experience) began to disappear and the science
of the heart, research into the qualities of the nafs, and the study of
the stratagems of Shaytan became rare and unknown.'
He goes on to say that the acts of the Companions were concealed
from men and also their learning, so that the Muslims could not get
a clear picture of what in fact this vast matter of Islam was about!
He goes on, 'At the same time the science of the Other World
became forgotten and the difference between knowledge and
argument no longer known except to a select few. Thus did the
Deen wane during those early centuries: but how about its
condition at the present time? [600 A.H.] Things have come to a
point where anyone who would dare show his disapproval of the
present state of affairs would run the risk of being called insane.'
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It is against this changing and increasingly difficult situation that
the appearance of what is called Sufism took place. It must also be
understood without any doubt that it follows from all that has been
said that naming oneself as Sufi or as belonging to an Order is in
itself irrelevant – what the reality of the sufic phenomenon is
cannot be compromised by evolving and proposing a special 'role'
for the sufic brotherhoods. The reason and end of all the practices
and all the dhikr and study is the creation of the rijalallah – the
men of Allah – following the original picture of the Messenger, as
he was described in a Hadith quoted by Imam al-Ghazzali:
In the course of a khutba [Friday address to the people in the
Mosque], the Messenger of Allah said: 'Blessed is he whose
concern for his own faults keeps him from meddling with the
faults of others, lives on money which he obtained without
wrong action, associates with the learned and the wise, and
shuns the people of evil and wrong action. Blessed is he who
humbles himself, whose nature has been refined and whose
heart has been altered, and who avoids inflicting harm upon
men. Blessed is he who acts in accordance with his knowledge,who gives away the surplus of his substance and who witholds
whatever is superfluous when he speaks, who lives within the
Shari'a and does not overstep its bounds by introducing
innovations.'
The Messenger has said: 'The Deen is behaviour.' The word Deen
derives from 'to be indebted' and 'to judge', so that its meaning is
the transaction, the debt – between you and your Creator, the
judgment – how things are, what must be done – and so the Way
itself. Thus, the transaction is behaviour. There is no compromise.
The rajulullah is who he is because of the perfection, harmony, and
selflessness of his behaviour. It was inevitable that in the culture-
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forming, fantasy-involved state structures that became known as
the Muslim world, such a man would be at different times and in
different degrees either endangered and martyred or, and this
rarely, honoured and listened to as a guide. Thus there is no history
of Sufism, or development of a movement within Islam called
Sufism, all that is of the fantasy pattern, just as much as the pottery
and the archways and the minarets are so much fantasy and have
nothing to do with Islam. It suited the Christian world to admire
Islamic art and talk of Islamic culture, but these are simply
inventions by Christian intellectuals of a situation that had
nevertheless been created by so-called Muslim societies. Islam,
however, is not and cannot be equated with any Muslim society. It
is a non-reality that is its own reality. No-one owns it and no-one
can put it in a book – it is the Way, and the Way must be
embodied. It is the Wisdom and the Wisdom is dynamic, a
practice, it cannot be encapsulated in formulae or in information
retrieval units. The Messenger brought Islam and left it with his
people. Where you encounter a true Muslim, you encounter Islam.
That's it. No more. The Qur'an itself had to come through the
Messenger – a Book did not fall out of the sky. It could not be
apprehended unless it came through the form of the man – and
later we shall see how the revelation came, and recognise the way
in which the whole Book was integrated into the lived experience
and reality of the desert Messenger.
The transmission that went from the Messenger to Sayyedina 'Ali,
may Allah be pleased with him, was passed on to Hassan of Basra,
who is therefore the first of the Shaykhs.
He said: 'Islam is going into the books and the Muslims into
the graves.'
In Al-Ghazzali's great work, he recounts this of Shaykh Hassan:
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A man said to Hassan: 'Oh Abu Sa'id, how do you fare?' He
said: 'Well.' The man then said: 'How is your state?' So
Hassan smiled and said: 'You ask me about my state? What do
you say about people who have sailed in a ship till they reachedmid-ocean and then their ship foundered until each of them
clung to a plank of the wreckage – in what state are they?' The
man replied: 'In a state of great extremity.' Hassan said: 'É
then my state is one of greater extremity than theirs.'
Hassan of Basra transmitted his knowledge to Shaykh Habib al-
Ajami. Al-Hujwiri recounts this of the Master:
It is well known among the sufis that when Hassan of Basra
fled from Hajjaj, he entered the cell of Habib [fleeing,
remember, from 'Muslims']. The soldiers came and said to
Habib: 'Have you seen Hassan anywhere?' Habib said: 'Yes.'
'Where is he?' 'He is in my cell.' They went into the cell but
saw no-one there. Thinking that Habib was making fun of
them, they abused him and called him a liar. He swore that he
had spoken the truth. They returned twice and thrice but
found no-one and at last departed. Hassan immediately came
out and said to Habib: 'I know it was owing to your baraka
that Allah did not reveal me to these evil men, but why did you
tell them I was there?' Habib replied: 'Oh Master, it was not
on account of my baraka that they failed to see you, but
through the blessedness of my speaking the truth. Had I told a
lie, we both would have been shamed.'
What – we now have to ask and discover – was this fundamental
difference that made self-styled Muslim hunt down Muslim? How
did State-Islam define itself in such a way that it was not
challenged by, nor able to recognise, the nature of the lovers of
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Allah? State-Islam is, strictly speaking, the Christian heresy of the
Church in the protestant sense of a priesthood of believers. It is
sustained by an elite of scholars and priests – now called 'ulama
and Imams – in accordance with the Jewish Rabbinical heresy.
Heresy in this instance being simply a designation of that deviant
energy that turns Islam into 'religion', binding-together into a State.
The State-Fantasy is in turn dependent on one thing and one thing
alone. Not the police and not the army and not the bank – Statism
depends on the prevention of the people from seeing the nature of
their rulers. Authority has become outer and ceased to be inner,
knowledge is informational and an instrument of manipulation, not
illuminative and an instrument of liberation. This is the basis of
Statism, whether it be called Islamic or any other name. Islam – the
Islam of the Messenger – the Sufism of the Sufis – for we are
beginning to see that the two are identical in all terms of reference
– is based on one premise and one premise alone. Life is a journey
towards death, and after death there is the grave, and after the
grave the form is restored and its 'meaning' becomes its reality –
the life-form which is recorded in the cellular record unfolds and
the true form is revealed, and according to the nature of the 'inner'
form the self goes on to another form-state where it experiences
the garden-serenity of Wisdom or the fire-anguish of imagining
one is separate from the totality that is the Divine situation. In the
whole journey through the worlds of form, the passage through the
world of 'solid' phenomena is but the briefest, and not even the first
of the great journey. It is the zone of action – and ALL that matters
is what you achieve in terms of an existence demanding mercy and
generosity and humility and above all, gratitude – that is to say,centring not on the false-self, but on the existence-form which is
all-sustaining and all-giving. The Islam that the desert Messenger
brought cannot exist unless you are open to the nature of life as
being multi-dimensional and to the nature of phenomena as being
basically unreal. There is no avoiding this issue, and it must be
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understood that what is being said is not some simple doctrine by
which it is proposed that this is not here – all this stuff we are
surrounded by – of course it is here – but this 'is-ness' is a seeming,
this solidity is a veiling. To the people of the Path the senses are
not openings onto reality, they are veils from reality. Anyone who
thinks that sensory and thought-experience have some kind of total
structural factuality are living in a world of basic insanity and deep
hallucination which could be shattered by a few easy
demonstrations without even recourse to the zone of extra-sensory
perception or the sub-atomic world of vanishing forms.
Yet it is precisely on this lie about existence that the State-Fantasy
is built, for it is nothing more than a fantasy on a fantasy, theconstruction of a super-form, the State, built on the foundation of
the solid forms of 'money' and 'capital' and military 'power'. Once
committed to this first insanity of Statism, there is properly
speaking, only one enemy – the one who will, as in the legend, be
the child who points out the nudity of the Emperor. Such is the true
Muslim, the rajulullah. Call him anything you like – but beware
lest you become hoodwinked into denouncing him along with his
name. If the name Sufi is anathema, drop it – but recognise the
reality. Muslim is a word, not a reality. Look at the man!
Who does he honour – the salih? The pure radiant self who is
turned towards Allah?
Or the people of jahil – the Ambassadors, the Ministers, the
Presidents?
Does he admire the Kings who drive to the Mosque in their bullet-
proof cars with machinegun-armed outriders, or the poor and
contented man behind the pillar doing dhikr and guiding to peace
and wisdom?
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That even today there are such men – there are saliheen – and there
are many sincere Muslims who honour and admire them and turn
regretfully away from the spectacle of State-Islam – is an
overwhelming miracle, and the Hajj is the proof of it. Among the
thousands of pilgrims they stand out – the Muslims, shining,
radiant, and filled with awe of Allah. Nevertheless, we must look
carefully at the picture the world gives us at this time and to help
us grasp this view of the true Muslim we must examine briefly four
terms that are used in Qur'an to give us our spatial sense in the
science of Islam. This spatiality is a dual picture of interpenetrating
terms, for the physical reality has superimposed on it a hidden
form, or rather the hidden reality has imposed upon it the
developed and solidified world-picture. It is very simple.
Samawati – 'Ard.
Here is the double picture of the phenomenal reality. Samawati is
the plural of SMA, a root meaning 'to be lofty' or 'on high'. The
word for 'name' derives from the same cluster, so that the existence
of the phenomenal heaven, the up which gives us down, the high
which gives us low, is the basic duality of the whole structuralexistence – without it there is no universe, no time/space and no
need for naming. It is the 'higher' which calls for names, and the
lower is the following negative.
It is the spiritual picture of discrimination.
'Ard is the polar opposite – the Earth, and therefore land, country.
Our other duality is:
Dunya – Akhira.
Dunya – is the world as structured fantasy – family and wealth,
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reputation, money – the culture illusion, the State illusion. It
derives from a root meaning 'to be near or low' – like fruit hanging
low and near at hand. The meaning then folds subtly into its deeper
meaning – 'easier', 'worse', 'viler', as it were, 'more ready to hand'.
Dunya, a crucial Qur'anic term, indicates not the beauty of the
mountains and the ocean – all that is 'ard, earth, the unreality
which is nonetheless reality itself. Dunya is pure illusion, is the
accretion and crystallising that the false-self absorbs and annexes
around it as its reality-giving setting, justifying the anguish and the
struggle and the crimes. It is important to taste the subtlety of this
matter that is existence – for the argument of the enemy of Islam is
that this is a false asceticism and you are invited to partake of
dunya in the name of the Messenger. Yet here is the picture as seen
by the Shaykh al-Kamil: 'Dunya is good! Dunya is wonderful!'
In other words, the problem is not that we desire something we
should flee from, but that this fantasy-palace can be lived in, as
long as you do not imagine it is permanent. The good things of the
dunya are there for you – but you must know that while they are
the gift of a generous Lord, they are NOT existence itself, they are
merely aids to the journey. If the journey is not taken and the aids
become the end, then the palace becomes a prison and man is
trapped.
That seeming nearness is in fact distance. This is the secret of
Shaytan, for Shaytan – the devil – derives from ShTN, meaning 'to
be distant'. In other words, Shaytan when he takes form in 'things'
makes dunya seem near in order to make Haqq – the Reality –
seem distant – while the truth according to the Truth is that, 'He isnearer than the jugular vein.' (50.16) He is that nearness that is the
presence of the things themselves. Thus the forms manifest the
Reality in all its tremendous immediacy – He is Presence, dunya is
essentially an absence. Knowing how to behave in the 'ard/world
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surrounded by dunya is like knowing not to panic in the shifting
landscape of a dream while asleep – and that is a science that must
be learned – and the science is Islam, the Islam of our desert
Messenger, peace be upon him.
Akhira has no root but indicates 'the last', 'the latter', 'what comes
next', 'what is put off until later'. It is this life that opposes dunya,
the immediacy or seeming immediacy is followed by another state,
a deferred state which later comes showing the true nature of the
forms. This seeming distance of akhira is part of our veiling, the
immediacy of the akhira is the gift of knowledge, the knowledge
that is the property of the Trusting-Ones in Islam. As dunya is
recognised, by experience not conceptually, to be of its nature ashadow-show, an effect of consciousness-as-it-starts, then of
course the nafs in awakening to the Unseen and the multi-
dimensional nature of existence begins to open up, and
consciousness-as-it-ends begins to emerge. To the sleeper in the
cave of his body/world, dunya is present and akhira is later or not
at all – to the awakened, akhira is immediate and all-surrounding,
and dunya a vanishing dream.
To return to our political man immersed in his State-fantasy – we
are faced with a fascinating situation. The truth of the matter is not
that he is dealing with a 'real world' and you are some crank with
an illusion about how things are and therefore should be merely
rendered socially ineffective so as not to confuse others – the truth
is that the political man dare not allow his fantasy structure to be
seen in the light of the rajulullah. He can argue dialectically all
day, but his world crumbles when he is in the PRESENCE of theman of Allah. For his world is not there, it is dunya, and when he
reaches for it there is nothing, and the sheer inner radiance of the
rajulullah floods over him and that Light reveals the illusory
power-structure to be sheer fantasy, and his achievements mere
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dreams. The political animal has no inner reality, he is still
experientially trapped in his animality, and his animal-nafs will be
all that can manifest in any confrontation with the saliheen. The
political animal thrives on conflict and violence to distract from the
realities of existence – faced with the rajulullah he finally comes
face to face not with his fantasies and not with his action-dramas,
but with himself. He sees his own paltry form in the mirror, in the
clear mirror of the polished and reflective self of the Salih. Most
men on being shown a mirror express astonishment, as the saying
goes, many flee in terror, a few recognise the reflection. Man is
frightened only of himself, he is terrified by his 'thing-ness' – he
knows in his own being that Reality is One, and therefore he
cannot be 'two'. That fact is the unbearable fact of existence, that
illusion of otherness. Faced with the rajulullah, the man of
personality/event is horrified because he cannot 'see' him as other
and finds himself looking into the mirror at his own reflection, at
that which he most fears. The rijalullah cannot be distracted by the
false battle and violence in the foreground, they see beyond the
shadow-show to the luminous reality. The political man in that
situation would see his own nafs reflected in the mirror, but the
Salih would see only Reality in all the nafs-mirrors. Thus the man's
seeing himself together with the Salih's refusal to see his nafs – for
it has no real existence – would produce intolerable anguish – the
result of which could only be either surrender to the truth of how-
things-are and thus surrender to the Wisdom of the Shaykh, or else
to turn on the offending mirror and smash it. This is the battle
against Islam, this is the persecution of the awliya – the friends of
Allah. 'Abu Bakr 'recognised' the Messenger immediately withouthesitation – for all he did was recognise his own nafs as mirrored
in the Messenger – for 'Abu Bakr was Muslim, and the Messenger
was the 'first of the Muslims'. Abu Lahab rejected him because he
was busily engaged in rejecting himself and bringing about his
own destruction. Statism makes safe the outer structure and the
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society collapses from within. Islam makes safe the inner
experiencing of reality and the people are not in danger from any
source, for they are in harmony with a compassionate reality.
Statism means to divide the body politic up – one man a
policeman, another a lawyer, another a helpless citizen-worker,
inevitably it makes one man a policeman and another a criminal –
and civil war is the outcome of Statism as the Messenger warned
again and again:
Usama bin Zaid told that the Messenger looked down on one of the
fortresses of Madinah and asked: 'Do you see what I see?' When
his hearers replied that they did not, he said: 'I see civil wars
occurring among your houses like falling rain.' This is transmittedby both Bukhari and Muslim.
Islam means to unify the body politic in harmony, so that every
man is a soldier, every man is the bank – through sadaqa and zakat,
that is, acts of personal generosity and obligatory self-taxation –
every man is a judge, he is his own policeman. It means to Unify
and Surrender – to the true nature of existence.
We are now ready to look more closely into the mirror of the nafs,
clearly established in a science which does not oppose the Sufis to
Muslims to faqirs to anything – but avoiding the names, keeping
one's eyes fixed on the actual nature of things, on the behaviour of
the human creature, on the courtesy and the humanity and the
humility of the man – not on his label. This is the Way that opens
up to the person who bows and prostrates with their whole being,
body and consciousness – this is the process and the practice thatbegins the alchemy of the nafs.
One shaykh was asked who his first Master was and he replied: 'A
dog.' He told that he had seen a dog desperately thirsty come upon
a clear pool of water. When the dog advanced it saw itself clearly
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reflected in the pool and retreated in fear taking the image to be
that of another dog. Again and again he advanced snarling only to
retreat in terror at the ferocious image that menaced him, until
finally, driven mad with thirst, the dog dived into the pool and the
reflected image vanished.
We are now about to approach the science of States.
The Science of States
Before we can approach the matter of the ahwal, the States, it is
vital that we have some idea of this illusory experiencing centre
that is the nafs, an idea that is, which is not based on claiming for it
a kind of crystalline reality, but rather on seeing it as a moving and
dynamic, fluctuating energy source – we have used the image of a
radio station giving out varying waves from a focal, identifiablepoint. The locus is identifiable but only as long as signals go out
from it. When death comes the station goes 'off the air' yet the
waveband remains, the life situation. If the States are imagined to
be something happening to someone then the true perspective is
lost. That, from the experiential point of view, there is a radio
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station and there is a programme, signals are coming and going, is
never the question, otherwise it would not matter what happened to
us. What is important is that we begin to think about these matters
with a more fluid and less definitive imagery, the 'fuzzy
mathematics' of the biologist trying to describe dynamic organisms
rather than the fixed and rigid arithmetic that measures solid forms.
The key to an understanding of our movement-reality and the
dismantling of the solid-state 'I' rests in the next obligatory
practices of Islam. They go together both in the structure of the
year and in their meaning. They are the sawm, the fast of
Ramadan: and zakat, the obligatory taxing of that part of one's
wealth which has been saved for one year. The first is an act of separation from the world-reality, for one's immediate environment
is the extension of one's body experience. People become 'attached'
to their possessions, and this experience is nothing less than an
extension of their attachment to the world-as-food. The Maulana
Rumi, may Allah be pleased with him, said, 'The whole world is
the breast.' This is the meaning of Ramadan and Zakat. It is the
inner experience of the fast that awakens the Salik, the Wayfarer,
to this moving, fluid nature of the self. Let us first get a picture of
what the Sunna of food is, and how the Messenger saw it as
experience and Wisdom-source.
Abu Huraira told that when they were struck by hunger
Allah's Messenger, peace be upon him, gave them each a date.
Tirmidhi transmitted it.
Abu Darda' reports the Messenger, peace be upon him as
saying: 'Provision searches for a man in the same way as his
appointed period.' Abu Nu'aim transmitted it.
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Abu Huraira also reported the Messenger, on whom be peace,
as saying: 'Two people's food is enough for three and three
people's food is enough for four.' This is transmitted both by
Bukhari and Muslim.
A'isha said that the Messenger, peace be upon him, fasted on
Mondays and Thursdays. Tirmidhi and Nasa'i have
transmitted this.
Abu Dharr, may Allah be pleased with him, said that the
Messenger said to him: 'When you fast three days in the
month, Abu Dharr, fast on the thirteenth, fourteenth, andfifteen.' Tirmidhi and Nasa'i have transmitted this.
Abdallah bin 'Amr bin al-As told of the Messenger, peace be
upon him, saying to him: 'Have I not been informed, Abdallah,
that you fast during the day and get up at night for prayer?'
When he replied that was so, he said: 'Do not do it. Fast and
break your fast. Get up for prayer and sleep, for you have a
duty to your body, your eye, your wife, and your guests. He
who observes a perpetual fast never fasts. Fasting three days
every month is equivalent to a perpetual fast. Fast three days
every month and recite the Qur'an every month.' When he
replied that he was able to do more than that, he told
Abdallah, 'Observe the most excellent fast, the fast of David,
fasting every second day, and recite the Qur'an once every
seven nights, but do not do more than that.' Bukhari andMuslim both transmitted it.
Abu Huraira said that the Messenger of Allah told him, 'Many
a one who fasts gets nothing from his fasting but thirst and
many a one who prays during the night gets nothing from his
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night prayers but sleeplessness.' Tirmidhi transmitted it.
Al-Miqdam bin Ma'Dikarab recounted hearing the Messenger
say: 'A human being has not filled any vessel which is worse
than a belly. Enough for the son of Adam are some mouthfuls
which keep his back straight, but if there is no escape he
should fill it a third with food, a third with drink, and leave a
third empty.' Tirmidhi and Ibn Majah transmitted it.
'If you were to trust in Allah genuinely, He would give you
provision as He does for the birds which go out hungry in the
morning and come back full in the evening.' 'Umar ibnAl'Khattab reported the Messenger as saying this and it is
transmitted by Tirmidhi and Ibn Majah.
A'isha told that Allah's Messenger, peace be upon him, wanted
to buy a young slave, so he threw some dates in front of him,
but when the youth ate greedily he said: 'Voracious eating is
ominous!' and ordered him to be sent back. Baihaqi
transmitted it.
Abdallah bin 'Amr reported Allah's Messenger as saying:
'Fasting and the Qur'an intercede for a man. Fasting says, ³Oh
my Lord, I have kept him away from his food and his passions
by day, so accept my intercession for him.² The Qur'an says, ³I
have kept him away from sleep by night, so accept my
intercession for him.² Then their intercession is accepted.'
Baihaqi transmitted it.
Ibn 'Abbas said that when the month of Ramadan began
Allah's Messenger set every prisoner free and gave to every
beggar.
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Abu Huraira reported Allah's Messenger as saying: 'Ramadan,
a blessed month, has come to you during which Allah has made
it obligatory for you to fast. In it the gates of the Garden are
opened, the gates of the Fire are locked, and the rebelliousshaytans are chained. In it Allah has a night which is better
than a thousand months. He who is deprived of its good has
indeed suffered deprivation.' Ahmad and Nasa'i transmitted it.
It is clear that fasting plays an important part in the human science.
Also it has a structure. There is the obligatory Ramadan fast whichis annual and dated by a lunar calendar so that it swings through
the years with a lunar orbit. The opening of the fast is dependent
on sighting the new moon of the holy month just as the dawn
prostrations must co-incide with the white thread of light on the
horizon. The fasting month itself has an inner structure. The
Messenger said that it was a month whose beginning was mercy,
whose middle was forgiveness, and whose end was freedom from
the Fire. Its climax comes with the Night of Power – Laylat al-Qadr, during which the Messenger received the Qur'anic
revelation. That night is hidden, and the seeker must watch for it,
knowing that it is one of the last uneven-dated nights of the fast.
There is never any doubt when it comes which night it has been.
There is no more open night in the year for direct experience, or
rather, for awakening.
The fast is from dawn to sunset and is broken immediately the sunhas gone down. The fast is total and is also an abstention during
the same hours from sexual intercourse. It is also understood that
fasting implies a control of one's temper and one's tongue. The eye
should fast with the other members, and the ear should refrain from
listening to what is not pleasing. The total impact of the month's
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fast is quite shattering and its effects on the solidity fantasy of the
nafs is extreme. What it does, of course, is affect the whole basis of
the separate-self illusion by breaking the established adult feeding
pattern which in turn opens up the memory of the infantile feed.
The resonance of any imbalance and fear that was contained in that
held basic memory structure is released and sounded as it were like
a gong whose reverberation had been smothered and is now
allowed to shudder to silence. It is an opening therefore to the
whole substructure of the nafs, whose otherness has emerged in the
infantile phase where feeding both implies a unity of self and
environment on the one hand, and, when the feed is removed,
delayed, or given with anxiety, on the other implies separateness,
isolation and fear. To the person setting out on the Path, Ramadan
inevitably proves the most difficult time of their new life, and if
they see it through, for the same reasons, the most rewarding. The
voluntary fasts which are mentioned in the Hadiths above follow
the same pattern, certain days and dates of the months being the
most in harmony cosmically with the act of fasting. The highest
fast is the one which most drastically breaks the feed-order, the fast
of David, which both liberates the self from the dependency
picture of imagining that the food comes from 'outside' and opens
the awakening mind to the reality of the Unity through the Qur'an.
The fast opens one to the Divine Compassion and the Attributes –
Ar-Razzaq, the Provider, and Al-Wahhab, the Generous.
We should not avoid seeing into what the nature of the fasting
experience is. There is no use expecting it to be the basis of some
'higher' experience, when the wisdom of the fast lies in the very act
of separation which is simply not eating. The human being
experiences an inner emptiness which first expresses itself as
hunger or thirst: when it is satisfied, the experiencing self in its
dynamic form-making energy goes on to place this emptiness out
into the emotional sphere. The person then becomes greedy for the
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'other'. The other is eaten up. First the milk, then the mother. Once
the nafs moves out into the whole world picture, the appetite
moves outwards from food and emotional encounter to every
stratum of experience. Conquest and war are nothing but the
continued devouring of the unsatisfied child. The Messenger,
peace be upon him, has said that the mother gives the child milk,
and something along with the milk which is Wisdom. There should
be no symbolising, or abstracting of this crucial statement. It is the
heart of the wisdom picture. Milk/Wisdom. Compassion is the
nature of the life-experience. The reality is that we are fed – but the
true feed contains 'something along with it' – an energy that, if it is
healthy, gives the child a sense of its safety in the Divine process,
and if it is poisoned, will transmit the mother's fears and anger into
the child. So that the woman is the first teacher of the child, and it
is the child who has been well nourished – in that complete sense –
who more readily feels 'full': while the child who has not received
that sense of well-being will panic and seek in the food itself for
the compassion that 'goes along with' the food, but in its case was
missing. So a person's expectation of the world – of dunya – of
those grapes hanging so near and yet always out of reach – no
matter how the form may change in the appetite-picture – it could
be for reputation, popularity, punishment, power, land, wealth,
anything – would never be anything else than a futile expectation
of the missed infantile wisdom-transaction. This is a pattern with
no blame – for this is nothing else than the Seal of the destiny. Nor
can we ever know what we imbibed in the first child-feast until the
whole picture of the life is complete. There may be a memory of
great love in that first transmission and it may be covered over andits uncovering is the Path, or one of the vital dimensions of the
Path, for the wisdom-transaction is one that involves the whole
transmutation of the nafs which exists by virtue of our experience
of the body as a separate phenomenal form. We cannot pretend to a
mental unity when we are entrenched in the solid body.
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month being the month cosmically intended for fasting, resonates
deeply into the pseudo-solidity of the nafs and awakens the basic
response that the nafs has to the feed-experience, and with that the
whole self-pattern is opened up for the faster to see. 'Every day we
are on a new creation – take provision from it,' said the Messenger
in a well-known Hadith, and this is the experience of the person on
a fast. He is aware that any constancy of self he imagined he had
was merely a surface illusion buoyed up by habit pattern and
behaviour structure designed to give an illusion of solidity. He
begins to know himself as a shuddering, evanescent, melting,
moving reality, layers fall from him, and he is aware therefore that
what remains of him, while already more fragile, still has no
absolute reality. As the veils lift the Light becomes clearer. The
seeker begins to awaken. It is in this condition that the murid
recognises that he is constantly passing from one State to another.
It is then that the practice begins to reveal its effect with startling
results.
Before a man had taken the Path he would take every experience as
it came: he might occasionally discern a 'pattern', but depending on
how things were, the kind of close-up impact of event, of which
violence as we have seen is the most extreme – demanding a close-
up reaction which forbids detachment or makes it well-nigh
impossible – would stop him seeing life as anything but a myriad
of different possibilities and actualities chaotically following one
on another. Once that man takes the Path he begins the practice of
unifying existence. He affirms the One. He bows before the One.
He praises the One. He addresses the One. He sees One. He hears
One. He eventually knows One. He learns not to fear now this and
now that. He looks for his provision, for his needs to come from
One source, and whatever the agent, he cuts through the deception
of forms and recognises always in every case One Reality at work.
So, with his nafs, he learns not to say I am this and I am that, but
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rather, I am neither this nor that, but what comes over me is the
nafs' rejection of what comes from the Compassionate Lord.
Contentment with one's lot becomes not a painful business but a
sweet business, and the ability to see the Unity at work eases the
pains that were once intolerable. In this view there is nothing to
hold onto, no illusory safety – the safety lies in the recognition that
the need is not for safety from the world, but from Him, and only
He can save you from Him. If you flee from the One you can only
flee to the One. This is the basis of fear and hope. Imam al-
Ghazzali, commenting on the revelation of Allah-ta-ala to the
Messenger Dawud, peace be upon him, 'Fear Me as you fear the
harmful lion,' says:
And there is no device for inducing fear of the harmful lion
except knowledge of the lion and knowledge of falling into its
claws, and there is no need of any device beside that. So
whoever knows Allah knows that He does what He will and He
does not care and rules as He desires and is not afraid. As His
saying has explained it: 'These are in the Garden and I do not
care – and these are in the Fire and I do not care.'
After a profound exposition of this theme, he sums up in one of the
most powerful passages in his great work:
As for the person who falls into the claws of the lion, if his
knowledge were perfect, he would not be afraid of the lion,
since the lion is coerced. If hunger dominates it, it will maul,
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and if heedlessness dominates it, it will ignore and leave alone.
So he would be afraid only of the Creator of the lion and His
Attributes. Am I not going to say that fear of the lion is a
parable of fear of Allah? No. When the veil is lifted, it will beknown that fear of the lion is the very fear of Allah, because
the One who kills by means of the lion is Allah.
Now the way to opening the self to this inescapable and terrifying
fact, the oneness of existence, is the simplest thing in the world.
What makes it seem difficult is not that the act itself is difficult,
but that we run in fear from the very nature of a situation which by
its nature forbids our escape. Madness is the radical ruse of the
ordinary person on the run from how things are. Madness – all its
brilliantly constructed escape routes – leads to a hopeless act of
impasse. Man cannot separate himself from reality, his own reality
lies deep within him, therefore he cannot separate from his own
being any more than he can jump out of his skin, yet this is
precisely what the madman tries to do – get out of the body tosomewhere safe like the moon, abandon the central nervous
system, refuse to react as if there was anyone 'at home' inside the
body. Courteously the slave addresses the Lord. You, the 'I' – open
yourself to the totality of the One – to the Universal. The 'I' speaks
– the little Universe speaks to the Big Universal. 'I' speak to 'Him'.
'I' am present, 'He' is absent – the third person singular is, as the
Shaykh al-Akbar points out, the pronoun of absence, and a formal
dialogue begins. I – He. This is the beginning of the real journey,whose phases are: I – He: I – You: I. There are three stages of
knowledge in the Qur'anic language.
'Ilm al-yakin.' 'Ayn al-yakin.' 'Haqq al-yakin.'
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Knowledge of certainty. Source of certainty. Truth of certainty. Or
as the Rajah of Mahmudabad, may Allah have mercy on him, said:
'First – you are told there is a fire in the forest. Second – you see
with your own eyes there is a fire in the forest. Third – you become
the fire in the forest.'
Thus, in the end, 'I' have become an absent he, and only the 'I'
remains of Allah-ta-ala. This is the meaning of the great saying of
the Sufis – the Sufi is uncreated. From the depths of the awesome
forests of the Tawhid, the reality is that there never was any 'other'
to become absorbed or annihilated or unified. The Reality is One.
Mansur Al-Hallaj ends his great song of Unity, the 'Tawasin'
saying:
Allah is Allah. Creation is creation.
And it does not matter.
This is not an affirmation of duality or some kind of total
separation of the Divinity from His realm, rather it is the essential
starting point, and therefore also the end point, of the man of
knowledge. As Shaykh Moulay al-Arabi ad-Darqawi, a Shaykh of our Shaykh, said: 'The slave is the slave and the Lord is the Lord.'
As we will later see, this is the only thing we are able to say while
affirming the two great statements of the Messenger – 'Allah was
and there was nothing with Him,' – i.e. before the Universe: and,
'He is now as He was before.' Thus the goal of the seeker of
Reality is nothing less than his own undoing, the wiping out of this
illusory central experiencing self, for in order that 'He' the absent
One should remain as the only Presence, the 'I' must be annihilated.
We now come to the Way in all its fullness, for we have glimpsed
for the first time what the goal might be. We have seen that the
true nature of the nafs as it is experienced is not that of a solid
object accreting qualities and faults in a more and more solid lump,
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but rather we have seen that the non-existent nafs is experienced
by us as being solid-state, and that the acts of salat and fasting and
zakat shudder and move this seeming solidity until we recognise
that the nafs is in constant movement, constant flux, it is cloud-
form and not mountain. The goal is that the mountain should be
blown away with all the ease with which the wind disperses the
cloud, as in the superb Form from Qur'an which describes the Last
Day of the world – macrocosm and microcosm being utterly
identical in our picture of oneness –
They will ask you of the mountains – say: 'My Lord will break
them into scattered dust, and leave it as an empty plain.'
The means by which we set in motion the mountain solidity of
forms in experience in order to open ourselves to the transparent
cloud-nature of stuff is the great science that the Prophets transmit
to their people. It is called in the language of the desert Messenger,
dhikr'Allah.
Now when we examine the root of the word, we as usual uncover
its true existential impact. The meaning of this word – which is thescience of tasawwuf – is in its root: DhKR – 'to be kicked in the
groin'. There it is. It is as everything in Qur'anic language – self-
explanatory. The Divine Reality is Presence. You are not far from
Him, He is not hiding from you, and there is no complex secret
esoteric tantra that has to be practised. If you want to know, if you
really want Oneness, if you really want to be taken out of your
neurotic mind-games and made aware of the immediate and
vibrant Presence of the Lord of the Universe – what you need is akick in the balls. It is offensive? Then what offends you is your
sickness, the marad that separates you from the tremendous and
overwhelming immediacy of reality in all its present-tense
awareness. It is that shock – that instant focussing of the nafs on
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the actuality of existence, that halts the form-making mind and
therefore opens in one instant the whole being to the total-mind, to
the non-mind, to the Presence itself. From this root the formal
meanings follow in obvious succession, but all deeply connected in
meaning to their root:
Dhikr – 'to remember', 'to make mention of', 'to fill the mind with',
'a making plain', 'a shock-warning', 'a plain statement' (of how
things are), 'to be called to attention', 'the means of knowing', 'to
remind one's self' – therefore, 'to be reminded'.
Now, the affirmation – la ilaha ila'llah Muhammadun rasulallah –
is dhikr. Salat is dhikr. Fasting and zakat are dhikr. However, weare being forced by our pursuit of the meaning of existence to go
beyond these time-points, to join them up, to string the pearls, to
open our experience to a continuity that takes us from one
prostration-time to another, from one Ramadan to the next.
The repository of dhikr is, of course, the Qur'an, and it is the mine
of all the dhikr we practise. We also find that in the science of
dhikr different situations have different dhikr. Qur'an says of itself:
And we sent down of the Qur'an that which is a healing and a
mercy to the Trusting-Ones. (Qur'an 17.82)
In the language of the Shaykh al-Akbar:
'The Qur'an is laden with quality. Qualities are states Š its
quality is the source-form of its essence, and the essence does
not require other-than-it because it is it, by itself. So its quality
is like that because of its source-form, neither other than it nor
extra to it, so understand! Allah speaks the Truth and guides
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coming out from the original Reality which is itself beyond all
ascription, grasp, or definition.
In the 'Makkan Revelations' he says:
He said, may He be exalted: 'There is nothing but that it
proclaims His praise.' (17.44). 'Thing' is indefinite, and only
the living intellect, knowing of His praise, gives praise. It is
related of the Mu'adhdhin that, of wet and dry, to the extent
that his voice carries, everything testifies for him. Thus we
have heard the rocks doing dhikr'Allah with the sight of the
eye and our ears heard from them with the tongue of
articulation. They spoke to us with the speech of the gnostics of
the glory of Allah which not every man perceives. So each sort
from the creation of Allah is one of the communities which
Allah formed on a worship particular to them. So He inspired
them with it from within themselves. So their 'messenger' is
from their essences. There are outstanding ones from Allahwhere a particular inner awareness on which they have been
formed gives certain creatures a knowledge which the adept
technician cannot grasp. They even know what is of use to
them in what they receive of insects and edibles and how to
avoid what is harmful to them. All that is from their natural
disposition. It is the same with inanimates and plants. Allah
has taken our eyes and ears from what they have of articulation.
The hour will not come until man speaks and his people take it
for his deed, making wise men seem ignorant Š He, may Allah
bless him and grant him peace, had complete unveiling, so he
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saw what we do not see. He spoke, peace be upon him, of the
command upon which the People of Allah act, so they found
his word to be true: 'Had it not been for increase in your
speech and disorder in your hearts, you would have seen whatI see and you would have heard what I hear.' So he was given
the rank of perfection of slavedom, so he was a pure slave. He
did not stand by his sovereign essence over anyone. That is
what mastery necessitated and it is a constant proof of his
honour.
A'isha said: 'The Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and
grant him peace, used to do dhikr constantly, at all times.' Wehave an ample legacy from him, and it is a matter particular to
the inward part of man.
Here, the communication and awareness of the lower organisms is
connected to the act of speech and the nature of Wisdom. The
Wisdom-transmission is 'particular to the inward part of man' andits means is dhikr. Speech in its pure and original state is nothing
but dhikr, and the accretions of speech that come with abandoning
the Wisdom-practice are means of tyranny and domination and
chaos, social and private. The babble of the ignorant man and the
insane man are of the same nature. For speech to be basically sane,
it must stem from the 'speech' of the revelation, which in its turn is
the fruit of silence. Quintessential speech is not pure dhikr but
rather the state from which wisdom-speech comes and all thesepatternings are the ayats of the Qur'an. From this viewpoint, 'there
is nothing but that it proclaims His praise.'
Elsewhere the Shaykh Ibn 'Ata-illah said about dhikr:
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Dhikr is a fire which does not stay or remain – so if it enters a
house saying: 'Me and nothing other than me' – which is from
the meanings of la ilaha illa'llah, and there is firewood in the
house, it burns it up and it becomes fire. If there is darkness in
the house, it becomes Light, its Light. If there is Light in the
house, it becomes Light upon Light.
Dhikr drives away from the body extra elements produced by
excess in eating and from the consumption of Haram food: as
for what is derived from Halal food, it does not touch it, so theharmful elements are burned up and the good elements
remain. Dhikr is heard by every part as if it were blowing on a
trumpet, and when dhikr first falls into the head, the sound of
the trumpet and glasses are found there. Dhikr is a sultan –
when it descends into a place it descends with its trumpets and
glasses because dhikr is opposed to all that is other-than-the-
Reality, so when it does descend it occupies itself with negating
what is contrary, as we found with the union of water and fire.
After these sounds, different sounds are heard: like the
murmur of water, the sound of the wind, the sound of fire
when it is kindled, the sound of riding beasts, the thunder of
horses, and the sound of the leaves of the trees when the wind
blows on them. This is because man is a combination of every
noble and low substance of dust, water, fire, air, and earth and
heaven and what is between them. These sounds are fromevery source and element of these substances. Whoever has
heard these sounds in dhikr has praised Allah and glorified
Him with every tongue. This is the result of the dhikr of the
tongue with the force of absorption. Perhaps the slave will
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reach the state where, when he is silent from the dhikr, the
heart will move in his breast like the movement of the child in
the womb, demanding dhikr.
They said: 'Indeed, the heart is like 'Isa the son of Maryam,
peace be upon them, and dhikr is its milk. When it grows and
becomes strong, a yearning for the Truth arises from it with a
voice, and inevitable swooning then blows on it a craving for
dhikr and the One invoked. The dhikr of the heart is like the
sound of the bee, neither a confused high sound, nor a very low
hidden sound. Then the One invoked takes possession of the
heart and the dhikr is obliterated and vanishes, and the onewho invokes turns neither to the heart nor to the dhikr. If
during this, a glance at the dhikr or the heart appears to him,
that is a distracting veil. This state is fana – which is that man
is annihilated in respect to his nafs and that he feels nothing
from his outward limbs, nor things outside of him, nor spells
inside of him. If, during that, it occurs to him that he is
annihilated in respect to himself altogether, then that is ablemish and troubledness. Perfection is that he be annihilated
to himself and to annihilation, and the annihilation of
annihilation is the goal of annihilation, and annihilation is the
foremost part of the Path, since it is going towards Allah, may
He be exalted, and then guidance follows. By guidance, I mean
the guidance of Allah, as he said, blessings and peace be upon
him: 'I am going to my Lord and He will guide me.' This
absorption is rarely established and rarely continues. If it does
continue it becomes a fixed habit and a lasting condition by
which he ascends to the celestial world. Then the purest real
existence emerges and the inscription of the invisible world
(malakut) is stamped on him, and the purity of the Divinity
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(lahut) appears to him. The first of what is represented to him
from that world is the angels' essences and the spirits of the
prophets and awliya in a beautiful form which flows on him
through some of the realities. That is the beginning until hisdegree is elevated from forms and he encounters the Truth in
everything with clarity.
This is the fruit of the core of dhikr, and its beginning is the
dhikr of the tongue, then the dhikr of the heart is stimulated,
then the dhikr becomes nature, and then the One invoked
takes possession and the dhikr is obliterated, and this is the
secret of his word, peace be upon him: 'Whoever wishes tograze in the Gardens of Paradise, let him invoke Allah much,'
and the secret of his word: 'Hidden dhikr is seventy times
preferable to dhikr which is heard by listeners.'
The signs of dhikr moving to the Secret is the absence of the
one who invokes both from the dhikr and the One invoked,
and the dhikr of the Secret is being madly thirsty and
drowning in it. Among its signs is that when you leave off the
dhikr it does not leave you, and the flight of dhikr in you is to
awaken you from absence to presence.
Among its signs is that dhikr tightens your head and limbs, as
if they were bound with bonds and chains. Among its signs is
that its fires do not abate, and its Lights do not depart, rather
its Lights are always seen rising and descending, and the firesaround you are untroubled, being aflame and brightly
burning. When dhikr reaches the Secret, the dhikr is the
silence of the one who invokes, as if needles had been thrust
through his tongue invoking with Light flowing from it.
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The Shaykh al-Kamil in one of the most renowned songs in his
Diwan, 'Fana-Fi'llah', says:
Oh seeker of annihilation in Allah –
say all the time: Allah! Allah!
And withdraw into Him from other-than-Him
and with your heart – see Allah!
In his song, 'The Commentary on the Wird' he says:
If you wish to hasten to an understanding of the Reality then
with himma persevere in repeating the Mighty Name.
Always mirror the letters of the Name in your heart and repeat
it unconsciously at every moment.
Do not turn to otherness – for it is indeed a barrier. Even when
it is praiseworthy it is still more suitable to darkness.
To the People, His dhikr does in place of what is other-than-
Him. If you possess himma there is no opposite to Allah.
Fear Him in dhikr and be annihilated to other-than-Him: and
there is no other except for the illusion of multiplicity.
Multiplicity is only Oneness multiplied in accordance with the
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Names and the traces of Divine Power.
In 'The Greater Song', the Shaykh al-Kamil says of the one startingout on the journey:
He should busy himself with dhikr of Allah, may His Majesty
be glorified, for in that lies the remedy for every fault and ill.
In 'The Minor Song' he says:
To anyone who withdraws into the Lights of the dhikr of the
Truth, Creation is nothing but particles of dust in space.
Here is 'The Virtues of the Mighty Name':
Free yourself from others and you will attain His proximity
and you will ascend to the ranks of the People of every
assembly.
Fill your every breath with dhikr'Allah for each breath has to
be accounted for on the Day of Gathering and Promise.
Exalt all phenomena because it is formed from the Light of the
Prophet Muhammad.
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Regard it as Lights from the Names of our Lord and withdraw
from being unresponsive and speaking from opinion.
Love with the love of Allah and hate with His hate.This is the
Road, so be aware of it, my friend!
Be an isthmus between the two oceans – the Reality and the
Road – and you will attain the rank of Recognition in every
assembly.
In every mosque, guide the slaves of Allah by Allah openly, by
showing the beauty of the Paths of Allah.
And if you wish to go swiftly into the Presence of our Lord,
then have a good opinion of Allah's creation and speak well of
Him.
Persevere in the Sublime and Mighty Name with a good heart,
sincerity and concentration.
Recognise the beauty of the Essence in every Manifestation.
Were it not for it the existence of the Existent would not have
been established.
All the attributes of the nafs are annihilated by His Invocation,
and all that remains is tranquillity of heart, sweeter than
honey.
Every inner state along with the Stations arises frominvocation of the Mighty Name with gravity.
So from it comes the Opening for every Wayfarer and from it
comes the Overflowing for every Murshid.
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From it is the state of intoxication and fana, and from it, too,
the states of sobriety and ecstasy.
Power is only given to the one who has isolated himself with
Him, and who, through much praise, is adorned with what
pleases Him.
Thus he will continue to ascend in the deserts of His Essence
until he is utterly annihilated in an annihilation that has
nothing in it but loss.
If he returns to the traces of existence, He brings a Robe of
Honour which proclaims His Wilaya (being a Wali) and glory.
So be a slave and servant to the One whose description this is,
and fulfil the contract of Allah, and He will give you what He
has promised.
The greatest of Allah's creation in this matter are His
Messengers and the most perfect of them in it is the ProphetMuhammad.
So his outward form is a Light and his inner form is a Secret.
His perfections are beyond numbering.
May the blessings of Allah be upon him and his family and
Companions, and give us limitless Lutf (Divine Favour).
In this qasida the Shaykh describes the whole transformation
process that is set in motion by the act of dhikr. This shimmering
form-making machine, this kaleidoscope that makes endless
patterns from a few varied set experience-pieces, the nafs – once it
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is submitted to the fire and lights of dhikr – is fragment by
fragment annihilated, until all that remains is tranquillity of heart
sweeter than honey. The nafs-states having been annihilated by the
fire of dhikr leave the seeker opened up to his qualities, his higher
nafs-states – in that middle condition of conflict and development
that Al-Ghazzali defined – then that is illuminated until the climax
of Light comes which annihilates the whole nafs as an
experiencing locus both mentally and biologically.
So what are these states – what is the dhikr activity working upon,
what is it that goes through this tremendous upheaval of energy
caused by the invocation? Let us go directly to the Shaykh al-
Akbar for a definition. In a poem on the knowledge of phenomenalbeing he declares:
The knowledges of phenomenal being move a great deal,
knowledge of the Face does not move.
We affirm and negate all of them, we separate and find them
state by state.
My God! How can other-than-You know You when Your like
is from tabarak and ta'ala?
My God! How can other-than-You know You? Can other be a
mithal to You?
Whoever seeks the Path without a guide, my God! He seeks the
impossible.
My God! How can hearts desire You and they do not hope for
intimacy and union?
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My God! How can other-than-You have gnosis of You? No,
and again, no.
My God! How can eyes see you when You are neither lights
nor darknesses?
My God! I do not see myself as other-than-You! How can I see
the impossible or be astray?
My God! You are You! And I let the gift be sought from Your
I-ness.
By a poverty established with me from my existence, which
was produced from Your richness, so it is a state.
He informed me that He might manifest me to Him, and He
did not see me as other-than-Him, so I was a mirage.
Whoever seeks the mirage, wants water.
He sees the source of life for him as cold water.
I am phenomenal being, and there is nothing like me!
Who am I, like Him, before mithal (likeness)?
That is one of the most wondrous things, so look!
Perhaps you will see its like changing state.
There is not in phenomenal being other than individual
existence which is above being equalled or obtained.
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He adds in prose:
Know, may Allah support you, that all that is in the earthmoves from state to state. So the world of time moves in every
thing, and the world of breaths moves in every breath, and the
world of tajalli moves in every tajalli. The reason for that is
His word, may He be exalted, 'Every day He is upon some
labour', (55.29) and He supports it by His word: 'We shall
surely attend to you at leisure, you weight and you weight.'
(55.31) Every man finds in himself types of passing thoughts inhis heart, in his movements, and stillnesses. So no-one moves
who is in the celestial and terrestial worlds but that it is from a
Divine turning by a particular tajalli to that source-form. So
his foundation is from that tajalli according to what his reality
accords him.
Here, the Shaykh indicates three degrees of existence. The forms
that are devoid of organic life, the organic forms which have the
'breath' of life, and the human creatures who have unveiling of
forms from the Unseen. The Shaykh says that these self-
experiences that pass over the experiencing centre of the nafs are
not outward intrusions, are not random, are not unpredictably
chaotic, but all inevitable in their patterning from the basic source-
form of the self in the Unseen, of which the life-story is merely thephenomenal chapter – there having preceded it a chapter in the
world of Spirits before birth and coming-into-solidity, and a
chapter after it, the after-death state in the grave, and then another,
the rising and the meaning-form of the life manifesting in the non-
solid World of the Unseen, and so on as the journey to Allah
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continues. Thus the self as a solid reality is an untenable idea, a
mirage, and its restless movement is caused by the thirst and
longing that the true self experiences in its illusory trapped
situation of having a 'history'. It is this thirst that in the crucible of
dhikr as described above becomes a sublime drowning as the
illusion falls away. In this important passage the Shaykh goes on to
talk about those who 'do not know what they are moved from nor
moved to,' which is the case of the majority of human beings, and
he presents this as a basically ignorant situation. He is not
suggesting that one knows the future in any occultistic manner, but
something much subtler and more profound – he is suggesting that
real knowledge begins by a recognition of this moving time-flux
creature as being an utterly structured and inevitable series of life-
patternings all stemming from its original self-form dynamic in the
Unseen before it is manifested. He sees knowledge as beginning
when we grasp that this time-setting is not separable from the time-
set individual, the event and the person and the zone of the
experience all being one reality with all the intricate intertwining
of individual forms into a pattern such as that revealed in a Persian
carpet, but with all the ravishing, sweeping movement and
apparent freedom that is in the miracle of organic nature at the
microscopic level.
He goes on to speak of one of the people of the Path who erred in
saying: 'When you see a man staying in one state for forty days,
know that he is a strange man.' He is here indicating that the man
had abandoned the true perspective of 'state' and mistaken it for an
inner condition like 'depression' or confusion or excitement or
anger. He goes on:
Do realities allow that someone could remain in one state for
two breaths or two 'times'? He is moving with breaths from the
thing to its like Š It is like saying, 'So and so is still walking
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today, and did not sit.' There is no doubt that walking is many
different movements. Each movement is not the same as the
other, rather it is its like. Your knowledge moves by its moving
and it is said: 'His state has not changed!' How many stateshave changed on him!
Thus any picture of the self-form as being of a kind of 'nature' or
pattern that can be defined as having some kind of durability or
permanence in time is utterly illusory. And just as the walking-
image indicates that there is obviously something constant over a
brief period that suggests such a solid specificity of self-form, it is
in itself illusory, in flux, made up of tiny separate dynamic utterlyopen moments that each has in it the possibility of alteration,
recreation, and end. Again he re-iterates the basic proposition:
Things with Allah are witnessed and known source-forms,
states are based on these forms which they have.
The picture then is of one person having different states, and a
form is made for him in each state he has. A certain experience
habit suggests to us a certain illusory continuity on which we erect
the myth of historicity of self, but this is not the case, merely the
mistaken viewpoint. So the creature is veiled in the condition of an
'existence' which is nothing but a clothing of state upon state, as
the moving film is built up of individual-frame shots run together
to create an imaginary 'situation'. So states vary in the imagination
on which ordinary human experience is based, despite the
inescapable fact that this so-called reality is utterly fictional. Theyvary in the imagination, but they do not vary in knowledge – and
knowledge is achieved by the act of dhikr unveiling the states and
opening up the whole experience-illusion. Then the human being
'sees with His eye and hears with His ear. His becomes the hand
with which he grasps and the foot with which he walks,' as in the
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famous Hadith that indicates the true state of knowledge that
comes upon the Mumin after advancing through the practices of
dhikr. The Shaykh al-Akbar's final clue to this matter is succinct:
As for the secret of state, it is duration, and it does not have
first or last. It is the source-form of the existence of every
existent. So I have informed you of some of what the rijal of
enigmas know of secrets. I have been silent on much. Its door is
wide. The knowledge of dreams, the Interspace and Divine
Ascriptions relate to this.
Thus the fluctuating endless states express themselves throughout
the whole organism, cellularly, electro-magnetically, in synaptic
brain-signalling, in energy-flow, in endocrinal release, digestive
function, blood rhythm, and all these various patternings are but
the flowering of one original self-form or rather source-form of
which this solid-body human creature is the time-bound
manifestation outwardly and whose reality is with Allah from
before-endless-time. Thus my 'movement' is all movement, and my
space-occupying is all space-occupying, and the Universe and I arenot two but container-contained, and this itself is nothing for He is
as He was before the creation of the Universe. 'Everything perishes
except the Face of Allah!' – as He Himself triumphantly declares in
the Qur'an. (55.26-27).
When the Shaykh al-Akbar declares that only the Sufis under-stand
the true nature of the nafs, he means by this that no-one else
possesses a total picture of the life-situation except the people of
unveiling, for this whole dimension of self-experience is hidden
from any but them. Some people are only able to perceive the
crudest machine-structure in man, and can only recognise the mind
as some odd ghost inhabiting a delicate house of tissue and nerve-
endings. It is an odd ghost, for, according to their picture, it is
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enough that the delicate fibre-furniture be damaged for the
occupant somehow, mysteriously, to be affected. This dualistic
frame on which the pathetic crumbling structure of our hastily put-
together modern psychology is erected, leaves us with a picture of
something called 'behaviour' which ends up being classified into
'types' and the crude mechanistic picture soon bogs down in a
welter of sub-types. It is inevitable that in our time the accepted
cure for mal-function of this non-existent ghost in its bizarre house
(electrocute the house and thus wipe out the house-keeper) should
be an equally crude and massively administered chemical drug
treatment. Although some modern therapists have recognised a
quite profound and clinically identifiable picture of much greater
subtlety which opens to the streaming, sub-electric energy-fields of
the body, they in turn become so hypnotised by their own
discovery that they again try to contain man within a bio-energy
definition reducing the human being by that token simply to the
sum of his energies. Utterly closed to the nature of an Unseen
reality, because still essentially trapped in this basic duality which
they quite rightly observe to exist in the world of forms, they
relentlessly avoid the metaphysical question which in other
sciences insists on attention. Now that we have uncovered the
chromosomic level of patterning, and glimpsed the beauty of form-
manifestation and recognised also our profound ignorance of these
processes at the very point that certain key designs open
themselves to us, we are forced to a threshold of activity which is,
if you like, the 'edge of the Unseen', or more correctly, in the
language of the Master Jalalud'din Rumi, the Non-spatial, the
realm of mind itself, which so delicately and purely refrains from'being' the brain, and yet so lovingly and seductively is its shadow-
reality. I now do not refer to 'your' mind or 'my' mind, for in this
picture I would have to italicise out of existence thus – 'your mind'
and 'my mind'.
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Before proceeding further, it must be made clear that this has
nothing to do with any Jungian or gestalt picture of archetypes.
Two pieces of labelling have managed to keep the Orientalists
away from any serious coming to grips with the metaphysics of
Islam – the use of the term 'archetypes' and 'neo-platonic'. That
these men were, one and all (if there had been an exception he
would have had to be a Sufi himself), unequipped to examine these
issues, can be easily verified by an examination of their
unscholarly refusal to accept the Sufis on their own terms – as if
one were to approach quantum physics with a basic refusal to
abandon the Newtonian classical picture of how things were. This
approach, as we have insisted from the beginning, is not just a
matter of epistemology, but of self-transformation, and without
submitting to the transformation-practice of Islam there is no valid
knowledge available in any way that allows one to penetrate these
matters apart from the sporadic and separate possible insights of
the individual as he experiences reality. The Wisdom-view is
dependent on recognising that there is no out-there to examine and
understand. Reality is One. The so-called knowledge of the
technological society is informational and split from the knower.
Despite all the ludicrous attempts at gluing together the separate
and isolated 'disciplines' of psychology and biology and linguistics
and physics and chemistry, the sciences continue to split into
micro, and bio, intra, and supra, and what emerges becomes more
and more a knowledge which for the needs of the life-process is
recognisably useless. Bernard Shaw used to lament the millions of
mice and monkeys slaughtered in the name of that pursuit of
useless knowledge – had he lived today he would have furtherbeen able to lament the destruction of the bio-sphere in which
whole vanishing species lived, rivers and oceans and lands and
skies all gorged of their energies in an age that is unable to grasp
the underlying Unity that links all these, because basically unable
to grasp the Unity of each person's self-experience, which remains
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the essential clue to grasping the Unity which is the very nature of
existence itself.
Here is a paraphrasing of the position of a modern geneticist,
Richard Goldschmidt:
The time has come to reshape all genetic theory anyhow. The
classical theory of the gene as an actually existing unit, lying on
the chromosome like a bead in a string of beads, is no longer
tenable. We cannot focus on genes and loci, or even
chromosomes, as we always have. Something bigger controls
the whole system. That is why I speak of systemic mutations.
The collapse of the post-Darwinian picture of evolution revealed
not only the incredible double-think that many biologists were
indulging in, and the extraordinary degree of subjectivity involved
in their so-called scientific or verifiable picture of whatever the
process they seemed to imagine they were describing, it also
revealed that underlying their biological trees and simple-to-
complex unfoldings, and gradual-change mutations, there was an
assumed Power at work which they, at the same time as assuming
it, denied. There could be no Power outside the 'things' which they
saw as closed systems which complexified themselves according to
vastly sophisticated and complex laws and patterns which they
could neither codify nor decode. They slithered from the use of a
term 'Nature' which they invested with Divine Intellect and Plan
only to disrobe it on their next calculation in place of the plan-
itself, in their case, natural selection, which in turn was deified
after being reified. An absorbing sleight of hand, but hardly
effective as serious epistemology. It was enough that bit by bit the
actual field work of biology and the neighbouring sub-science of
palaeontology and micro-biology revealed a picture that left
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Let us go back to our superficial Orientalists desperately doing
their labelling of Islamic Masters with the tags of the collapsing
dualistic Christian world-view. If the sufic description of reality
was neo-platonic then that meant it had been borrowed from a
previous culture and stuck on in a syncretist move to provide Islam
with something it did not in the first place possess, thus
demonstrating that Islam was a pseudo-religion and not to be taken
with any intellectual seriousness. Unfortunately their confusion is
double. Islam does not claim to be a religion, rather it claims
religion to be the decadence of a previously existing and now
degraded form of Islam. Secondly, they refuse to grasp that what
Islam describes in its totality from within the structure of the
Qur'anic revelation is something that the earlier 'Islams' of the
Messengers before the Seal of the Messengers, Muhammad, peace
be upon him, already knew about. It is assumed by Muslim
scholars that the platonic knowledge was an inherited reality-
picture from the remnant of their unitary science which survived as
a thread among the broken threads of pantheonic theism. If you are
dependent on labels, certainly from a sufic point of view, it would
be more useful to label Plato neo-Islamic than to label the Sufis as
neo-platonic.
The matter of archetypes is even more dangerous for a person
desirous of grasping the Wisdom-picture. The accepted post-
Jungian picture of archetypes reduces these to a subjective, yet
mysteriously shared set of symbol pictures that exist on a mental
'plane' which reveal apparently incomprehensible conflicts and
crises in the actual history of the subject. Thus a real and solid
world is loaded with a set of coded meanings which take on their
reality when applied to the historic present and used to illuminate
it. Always in this picture our phenomenal and solid existence is
given primacy over the explanatory code systems. It is very far
from the original Goethean picture of Ur-forms from which it was
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borrowed, only to be inverted with this primacy of situational
existence over and against a floating repository of basic forms. We
remain in a dual system of mind pictures displaying themselves in
a solid reality. It is a concept that offers no proof of its validity and
certainly the Jungian clinical record convinced one of nothing but
the fact that the people who unleashed that empire of archetypal
forms during analysis had undoubtedly been analysed by Jung. The
sufic picture of existence is sustained, and has been systematically
over a period of fourteen hundred years, by direct experience, by
dhawq, tasting, which illuminates the seeker with his or her own
knowledge of how-it-is. This awesome knowledge of how-it-is
cannot be reduced to a therapeutic technique or submitted to crude
mechanistic tests to ascertain its validity. It is outside the realm of
science, or if you like, it is its own science. Certainly it is
systematised, verifiable, and not a faith-system. Doubt and
certainty are the two energies whose polar forces drive the seeker
on to his discoveries.
The sufic term that has been so mistranslated is 'ayn ath-thabita,
which we may call the source-forms, the word 'ayn meaning not
just 'source' in the sense of 'origin', but with the physicality and
actuality of a spring of water. We will return to it when we come to
the point that is being forced upon us where we ask about the
nature of this 'stuff' of the Universe, the 'how', 'what', and 'why' of
forms.
What we have so far established is a picture of reality as being
utterly alive, in flux, with particular forms subtly shedding pulse
after pulse through this unceasing movement of states in a locuswhich is nothing other than the states, and yet these states when
unveiled open up to a hidden source-form in the world of non-
space-time, inseparable from this.
The key term: HAL, which we call 'state' derives from a root
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meaning 'to be changed' and 'to pass by' or 'go between'. By
extension it relates to the adverb meaning 'round about' and to the
nouns 'a power', 'a plan', 'a year'. Also 'a turning off'.
Thus state/situation is the basic condition of all forms, according tothe sufic science, and it is the action-process which the nafs
experiences on the Path, whose culminating and ultimate condition
is to be 'turned off', obliterated in the face of the Essence of the
multitudinous forms. The sufic science further claims that the
Qur'an is a revelation from the source of Reality, indicating not
only the science of how to live among the multiple forms but also
how to surrender (Islam) to the One, which in its fullness means
the giving up of the nafs which is the intolerable 'other' thatprevents unitary experience. It is not a matter of little mind
(myself) being swallowed up in the Big Mind after all, as some of
the inadequate systems formed on the archeology of previous
Islams suggest (like Zen), but rather of the total being emerging
from separate pulsing and form-dynamic into a complete
obliteration. The cells have to 'stop', for they are not separable
from the 'mind'. That we continue to 'see' the form is based on our
illusory sense-veiling on which the world and 'history' is based. To
the people of fana 'everything perishes except His Face.' (55.26).
The Shaykh al-Akbar says:
When Allah, glory be to Him, closed the door of prophecy, and
the message to creation, he left to them the door of
understanding from Allah in what He revealed to His Prophet,
may Allah bless him and grant him peace, in His mighty Book.
'Ali ibn Abi Talib, may Allah be pleased with him, said:
'Revelation was cut off after the Messenger of Allah, may Allah
bless him and grant him peace. What remains is in our hands.
Allah provisions the slave with understanding in this Qur'an.'
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Our companions, the people of unveiling, agreed on the
soundness of a transmission from the Prophet, may Allah bless
him and grant him peace, that he said of the ayats of the
Qur'an: 'There is no ayat but that it has a manifest part, ahidden part, a limit, and an ascent.'
Before we can proceed further on our journey, we must examine
what the Qur'an is, and what is the meaning of 'revelation'. It is the
Book of Changes, abrogating all those Books which went before,
keeping some 'forms' from the ancient books and changing others
and replacing those abrogated with better, in accordance with the
overflowing generosity of the Form-giver, may He be exalted.
The Science of Qur'an
The Generous Qur'an, the Book of Islam, was revealed to the
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Messenger Muhammad, blessings and peace be upon him, over a
period of twenty-three years from the time of the first revelation
which came when the Messenger was forty years old.
In the month of Ramadan it is read through in its entirety and onthe Night of Power it is read 'shabina' – in one night. It is indicated
within its text by many names, among them being: The Book, The
Discrimination, The Judgment, The Mercy, The Spirit, The
Explanation, The Light, The Truth, The Argument, The Warning,
The Wisdom, The Clarification.
In these ayats, Reality addresses the Messenger saying:
With truth have We sent it down, and with truth has it
descended. And We have sent you as nothing else than a
bringer of good news and a warning.
And a Qur'an that we have divided, that you may recite it to all
mankind at intervals, and we have revealed it, revelation by
revelation. (Qur'an 17.105-6)
Before examining what its themes are we first must come to terms
with this designation of the Book as a 'revelation', for if we are
honest this has no specific meaning as a psychological term and is
outside our experience unless one admits into it the category of the
premonitory dream. Part of modern people's difficulty in
approaching Islam realistically lies in their prejudice about the
nature of a 'prophet'. The word in Arabic derives from a root NB'A,
meaning 'to be exalted': 'to announce': 'to make one acquainted
with': so the picture is quite clear. The Nabeyi is the Announcer
who brings the news, who makes one acquainted with how-it-is,
the reality-process.
The word for revelation is specific.
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Firstly let us examine the straight narrative:
Wahb bin Kaisan told me that 'Ubayd said to him: 'Every year
during the month of Ramadan, the Messenger would pray in
seclusion and give food to the poor that came to him. And when hecompleted the month and returned from his retreat, first of all he
would, before entering his house, go to the Ka'ba and walk round it
seven times or as often as it pleased Allah: then he would go back
to his house until, in the year when Allah sent him, in the month of
Ramadan in which Allah willed concerning him what He willed,
the Messenger set out for Hira, the Mountain of Light, and there
Allah honoured him with his task.
'"He came to me," said the Messenger, "while I was asleep,
with a coverlet of brocade whereon was some writing, and said,
'Read!' I said, 'What shall I read?' He pressed me with it so
tightly that I thought it was death: then He let me go and said,
'Read!' I said, 'What shall I read?' He pressed me with it the
third time so that I thought it was death and said, 'Read!' I
said, 'What shall I read?' – and this only to deliver myself fromHim, lest He should do the same to me again.
'"He said:
'Read: In the Name of the Lord, who createth,
Createth man from a clot.
Read: and thy Lord is the Most Generous.
Who teacheth by the Pen,
Teacheth man that which he knew not.' (96.1-5)
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Hanifa as it was called, had a continuing thread of followers who
passed on and practised the Ibrahimic (brahminical) Tawhid
(yoga). Hanifa derives from HNF, 'to incline'. It means therefore
not only 'to incline toward the Truth', but 'to be responsive', to open
oneself and yield to the Truth. The essential mark of the Hanif and
later, for it was no different, the Muslim, was that he was supple
and yielding and not rigid and unbending. They were known as the
people of the Huda, the people of Right Guidance. This word Huda
derives from HDA, meaning 'to lead in the right way', 'to follow a
right course', 'a victim of sacrifice', 'an offering', 'to be a direction',
'one who directs'.
Thus they were the Wisdom-tradition, for it is the role of theinitiates of Wisdom that they must not only practise it, but
establish it. The very first declaration of who Qur'an is for in the
opening main Form 'Al-Baqara' puts it thus:
In the Name of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate.
Alif. Lam. Mim.
This Book in which there is no doubt,
a guidance to those who ward off:
who believe in the Unseen, and establish salat,
and spend of what We have bestowed on them.
And who trust in what is revealed to you (Muhammad) and
what was revealed before you, and are certain of
the Akhira.
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These depend on Huda from their Lord.
These are the successful. (Qur'an 2.1-5)
The man of Wisdom offers himself up to Reality, opens himself, as
did Isma'il, the son of Ibrahim, peace be upon them both. They risk
destruction even of their life-experience in an act that is an
abandonment of the self-illusion only to find that Reality has
opened itself to them, that Huda comes to them. Here is the secret
of the transaction we have begun to examine in the so-called
'prophetic experience', the complete flowing openness of theChosen One, Muhammad – chosen by inevitable destiny, for he
has so utterly abnegated his own self-choice that chosenness floods
in to fill the gap of his surrendered self-form. This is how-it-is.
Khadija, aware of the implications of his vision, knew exactly what
to do. She hurried across Makka to the house of her cousin Waraqa
bin Naufal bin Asad bin Abdu'l-'Uzza bin Qusayy, who had
become a Christian but had come through the tradition of theHanifa. When she told him what had happened, he affirmed the
authenticity of the event and went to the Messenger and made him
retell the story. He also confirmed physically what he had
ascertained by his secret knowledge, for he asked the Messenger to
bare his back. There he found what he has looking for – the Seal of
Messengership on his back, the outward genetic proof in the cells
of his being inwardly the one to 'receive' the Message of Reality.
Waraqa confirmed: 'There has come to you the greatest Namus
who came to Sayyedina Musa (Moses). You will be called a liar,
they will humiliate you, and they will cast you out and they will
fight with you. Surely, you are the Messenger of this people.' And
he kissed him on his forehead and left.
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Khadija was determined to complete her proofs of authenticity to
convince her husband that he was neither poet nor possessed.
When the angelic manifestation happened in their own house, she
prepared a test. She instructed her husband to move towards her,
continually asking if the Vision remained. She moved him to sit on
her lap, and then when she exposed herself the Vision vanished. If
the vision had remained during any sexual act it would have
followed that it was from the jinn who use the heat/energies of fire,
and not angelic which use air/energy. This is why ghusl separates
the sexual act and salat. The water rite follows the fire/act to purify
the self for the other act of union which is dependent on the air
element, breath.
The people of the Quraysh were determined in their rejection of
the new Messenger, and the three main charges they brought
against him were three which the text of the Book itself analysed
and demonstrated to be false. These three possibilities were:
1) that he was a poet.
2) that he was a magician.
3) that he was mad, or possessed by jinn.
While the charge that he was possessed swept through Makka, a
man of Azd Shanu'a who had a great reputation at casting out jinn
came to the Messenger. His name was Dimad. Dimad, when he
heard of the Messenger, thought that it would be a blessing for him
if he could heal this man. He went to the Chosen One and said: 'Ipractise the science of casting out jinn, Muhammad, would you
like me to do so?' The Messenger replied: 'Praise belongs to Allah
whom we praise and from whom we seek help. No-one can lead
astray one whom Allah guides, and no-one can guide one whom
Allah leads astray. I affirm that there is no Divinity except Allah,
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With two of the most tremendous revelations in the Qur'an, the 'Ya
Sin' Form and the 'Hud' Form, the impact was so shattering on the
Messenger that some of his hair turned white when the descent
took place. It is quite clear from these accounts that one could take
these descriptions as evidence that he was indeed 'a man
possessed'. This raises something that we have already touched on,
which is that it is in the nature of the spiritual Path that its stages
are marked by stages similar to the identity-fragmentation that we
call madness. Let us re-iterate it, for there has to be a re-focussing
of our self-form understanding if we are to grasp the truth of these
matters.
The goal of the Path is the annihilation of the experiencing self, thecentre or locus from which the endless flowing states manifest in
such a manner as to suggest the self's reality and historicity. The
goal is to loosen these form-shadows and allow the Light which is
the source-form of the locus in the Unseen to manifest. Thus the
result is properly speaking 'the destruction of the personality'.
Madness is a fragmentation of experience rendering the solid
world unreal and the inner existence over-real, or vice-versa, so
that inner experience is either terrible and intolerable or glorious
and elated, on the one hand, or barren and desolate on the other.
Insanity is based on a basic split between the 'centre' and the outer
world of behaviour, event, people and objects. Either the mad
person will 'get out' and leave the body – you may prick it and it
will give no sign of being 'inhabited' – they will station themselves
in a safe place, the moon, high up; or else, they will 'go in' – shut
all the doors of the senses, become still, no signals going out or
being taken in. Both madnesses imply, by this condition, a break in
behaviour with the accepted behaviour of the community. An
essential part of this break is the refusal to adhere to the commonly
shared 'naming' process, and either an arcane language will be
introduced or unstructured changes will be made with random
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shifting of nouns so that 'this' is called 'that'. The Wisdom-path is
to dismantle the self systematically not as a ruse to protect and
isolate the non-existent 'core', but to open oneself to the Secret of
Totality. The peeling of the onion-layers, in the image of Peer
Gynt, is an act of glorious release and opening to the Reality, for
not only is there no core but there was no onion. Nothing has been
gained, but nothing has been lost. At the different stages of the
Way, the shedding of the 'skins' may have the appearance of the
madman in his getting out or coming in. The difference is only
one. The madman is himself 'shedding the skins' – he is conducting
an operation of self-destruction based on the false and doomed
premise that there is a 'he' to dismantle his 'he-ness'. Thus he splits
reality, he breaks his own heart, for 'there are not two hearts within
the breast' as Qur'an says. (33.4). The Prophet takes his Path under
direct guidance from the Unseen Master, the Angel, while those
who follow in his footsteps take theirs from a Shaykh, a visible
Master. He undoes them.
This is the meaning of the sufic saying which is quoted by the
Shaykh al-Kamil in his Diwan:
He who does not take the Shaykh as his Master
will have Shaytan as his Master.
According to the sufic picture of the nature of the nafs, the
Messengers and prophets do not struggle in the same way that the
awliya, the Perfected Ones, do. They are the 'perfect exemplars',they are the original man-form in all its perfection. This is why
they do not die of disease from within but have to be killed from
without – the form being perfect, it would not of its nature end, but
the destiny being mortal, the form has to be brought to an end in
accordance with nature, outside and inside from another
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perspective of course being identical. Nevertheless, this perfection
contains within it all the stages of the Way and all the Stations of
the awliya. The goal of the journey of the awliya lies over the
mountains of madness and they have to be traversed. The
beginning of the Messenger's time of revelation was that period for
him, only he tasted every state with the inner perfection of his 'vast
self-form' which encompassed it and grounded it in the deep sanity
of his prophetic condition.
While the mad person behaves in a self-obsessed way, the
Messenger was the embodiment of the generous, socially balanced
and active human being. This was the baffling and unarguable
condition of the man they wanted to brand as a lunatic. He said of himself: 'If justice is not to be found with me, then where will you
find it?' He said: 'I am the first of the sons of Adam, and I say this
without boasting.' He was simply there to show himself to his age
as the exemplar, and offer his life-pattern as the Sunna for
existence throughout the whole world from that day to the end of
time for people of every culture and climate. He was the
culmination of the human situation, the Seal of the Perfection of
Prophethood. When studying the aspect of revelation, one must not
lose sight of the human fineness and delicacy and courage of the
desert Messenger. He would not, for example, ever touch a woman
who was not his wife or of his household. When he took the act of
homage and acceptance of Islam at 'Aqaba from the women, he
had a jug of water placed between himself and the women and he
plunged his hand into it, and then they did, thus the transmission
took place through contact yet through a purifying element. It
distressed the Messenger when Sidi Abu Bakr brought his white-
haired and venerable father to him. Immediately the Messenger
expressed his concern that he had not been able to go to the old
man. The Siddiq insisted that it would not have been fitting, so
then the Messenger, blessings and peace be upon him, knelt beside
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the old man, stroked his chest, smiled and asked him to make the
Affirmation. It is this man, of endless fineness to appreciate the
living moment, who is the man laying claim to prophethood, and
over whom pass these shuddering and powerful states out of which
the Qur'anic message comes. There was never any doubt what was
part of the Message and what was simply a revelation, even though
the revelation came directly through the Angel, it had to come
through this 'filter' which annihilated him during its transmission
before it became part of the great Book.
Here is another contemporary record of how the Arabs tried to
come to grips with this unique event that took place among them
and which was to overturn their whole society and affect thedestiny of every one of them:
When the Fair was due, a number of the Quraysh came to
Walid bin al-Mughira, who was a man of some standing, and
he addressed them in these words: 'The time of the Fair has
come round again and representatives of the Arabs will come
to you and they will have heard about this man of yours, so let
us agree on one opinion without dispute so that none will give
the lie to the other.' They replied, 'You give us your opinion
about him.' He said, 'No, you speak and I will listen.' They
said, 'He is a kahin.' Walid said, 'By God, he is not a
soothsayer. He does not mutter or speak in rhymed prose.' –
'Then he is possessed,' they said. 'No, he is not that,' he said,
'we have seen the possessed and here is no choking, spasmodic
movements and whispering.' – 'Then he is a poet,' they said.
'No, he is no poet, for we know poetry in all its forms and
meters.' – 'Then he is a sorcerer.' – 'No, we have seen sorcerers
and their sorcery, and here is no spitting and no knots.' –
'Then what are we to say, Oh Abu 'Abdu Shams?' they asked.
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He replied: 'By God, his speech is sweet, his root is a palm-tree
whose branches are fruitful and everything you have said
would be seen to be false. The nearest thing to the truth is your
saying that he is a sorcerer, who has brought a message bywhich he separates a man from his father, or from his brother,
or from his wife, or from his family.'
The first revelation which we have documented in detail was sent
down on what the Qur'an calls the Night of Power. It is of such
importance that there is a Power Form in the Qur'an describing it.
It is the general view that on that night the whole of the Qur'an was
sent down, to emerge fragment by fragment in living situationsthroughout the life of the Messenger, but Allah knows best. Here is
the Power Form:
In the Name of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate.
Behold, we revealed it on the Night of Power.
Ah! What will convey to you what the Night of Power is?
The Night of Power is better than a thousand months.
The angels and the Spirit descend therein, by the permission of
their Lord, with all decrees.
Peace it is, until the rising of the dawn. (Qur'an 97)
It is this Night of Power that forms the climax of the Ramadan fast
and in which the Qur'an is recited from beginning to end, and when
the Mumin watches the whole night until dawn.
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From that night onwards the revelation came, sometimes an ayat at
a time, sometimes a long passage or whole Sura depending on the
situation, for the rest of the Messenger's lifetime, the final
revelation coming on 'Arafat during his last Hajj when he taught
them the final and purified form of the ancient rites of Hajj. Each
time a revelation came it emerged out of a particular life-situation
and it came as an illumination of that moment opening up the truth
of that situation and guiding the Messenger's actions as well as
continually unfolding the 'good news and the warning' which are
one of the re-iterated themes of the Book. Piece by piece alongside
the specific guidance it gave to life-situations came an unfolding
pattern of man's history from the beginning of his time on earth
and showing the meaning of the various meta-cycles he had lived
through. Five themes are orchestrated throughout the Book and
they can be summarised thus:
1. Particular guidance to the Messenger telling him what to do in
specific situations, teaching him, consoling him, correcting him.
2. The story of mankind's global destiny since the beginning, and
the role of the earlier prophets and their Books in this cyclic story
of man's being given guidance, and its being corrupted and lost,
and a new guidance being sent down, culminating in the final cycle
of the Messenger's rule.
3. The new Shari'a or Road that Allah lays down for the whole of
mankind, abrogating earlier Roads that were sent for particular
nations and races by earlier prophets.
4. The nature of Reality. Tawhid, the declaration of the Unity –
that is the essential message of all the prophets – reaffirmed.
5. The good news and the warning', (41.4), the direct existential
confrontation with each human being who reads it: 'Where then are
you going?' (81.26). The Book warns that this life is a zone of
action and that man is responsible to his Creator and will have to
answer, in the next phase of existence when he has dropped the
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phenomenal body, for what he did on earth. There is complete
continuity of experience between the life-state, the so-called death-
state, and the next-life-state. This is the event world, and that is the
meaning-world.
Within these basic themes the Qur'an expresses itself in two
particular manners which it defines with great precision, saying:
He it is who sent down to you (Muhammad)
the Book in which are clear-signs – they are
the Mother of the Book –
and others are likeness-signs.
But those in whose hearts is doubt follow what is
the likeness
desiring dissension by desiring its interpretation.
None knows its interpretation except Allah.
And those firmly rooted in knowledge say:
'We trust in it: it is all from our Lord.'
Yet none remembers but men possessed of minds.
(Qur'an 3.7)
The scholars who have tried to create a rabbinical tradition of
commentary of Qur'an in Islam have, understandably limited the
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meaning of this ayat to infer simply that the Book rests on the
factual 'law' ayats. Ironically it is the 'law' in all its tremendous
simplicity that they have made subtle, ambiguous and top-heavy
until a completely rabbinical invention called Qur'anic Law has
emerged to buoy up the pseudo-Islamic State they have erected in
their own image and in defiance of the community-form outlined
in the Sunna of the Messenger. The 'clear-signs' refer to all the
great declarations about Divine Unity that stem from the Book's
repeated commands to examine creation itself for all the clear-
signs within it, and to examine the nafs and observe there these
same confirmatory signs of Unity. It is precisely this declaration of
Tawhid that is the 'Mother' of the Book. The Book 'comes out of'
this, the organic life-laws come out of this, and not the other way
round. The clear-signs are those that call to justice and compassion
and generosity and peace-making, to feeding the hungry and
protecting the orphan. The likeness-signs are not simply, as the
'rabbis' would make out, those ayats which relate to secret things
like the journey of Dhu'l Qarnayn or the Sleepers in the Cave, but
rather they are those which relate basically to the central teaching
in the Book. The behaviour-teaching on which all the Wisdom-
practice is based lies in the clear-sign passages which insist on a
recognition of Unity in the self and creation and which call to
correct and compassionate behaviour – i.e. both a following of the
Shari'a – the Road – and a clinging to acts of compassion in the
Way of Allah. The Divine-teaching is based on the likeness-signs.
Now it is significant that in this ayat Allah-ta-ala uses the physical
term for likeness in preference to the imagistic term.
'Mutashabihat' derives from the root ShBH – 'a likeness', 'mutually
resembling one another'. It is the word used in Qur'an to indicate
the 'likeness' placed on the Cross when Sayyedina 'Isa was taken
away from his followers. In the Cow Form of the Qur'an, it is the
word used to indicate the similarity of one cow to another. So there
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is no doubt here! The Divine-teaching is based on these likeness-
signs. Real learning about reality lies within these likeness-signs.
In fact, properly speaking, this is the only way in which the
Reality-situation can be conveyed to human beings, and it has been
the Way of all the Prophets and all the Books. The word that is
elsewhere used to refer to this teaching-method in the Qur'an is
MITHAL. MThL is the root, meaning: 'to be like', 'a comparison',
'a punishment to be taken as an example', 'appear before the eye',
'represent', 'to mean something', 'a pattern or image'. There is no
other way that the nature of existence can be conveyed to the
human mind except by mithal – this is a mithal of that. It is an
image, a form, of the other. It is not 'the same' and it is not a
definition. You cannot pin down any aspect of this dynamic and
self-renewing-process except fleetingly, on the wing – one can see
the connections – if you hold the connection and try to reify it, then
the matter will elude you. This mithal opens its nature to you by
the quality of your reflection. You cannot capture it nor physicalise
it nor use it objectively. You must surrender to the mithal – and let
the illumination come as He wills. It is one of His means of access
to you and of your means of access to Him. Thus this ayat warns
against discoursing and interpreting where reflecting and
remaining open in humility and watchfulness are required. The
people of Wisdom 'remember' – and the knowledge that comes is
the fruit of dhikr. In the language of the Sufis: the clear-sign
Wisdom demands fikr (thinking); the likeness-sign Wisdom
demands dhikr (shock-awakening).
In Qur'anic language, this gives us both the Furqan (the
discrimination) and the Qur'an (the gathering-together).
The Messenger, blessings and peace be upon him, said in a famous
Hadith: 'I have been given all the words.' With this Wisdom-saying
he places himself alongside the Original Man, Sayyedina Adam,
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peace be upon him, who, according to Qur'an, was given all the
names. This naming capacity was the distinguishing mark of the
human creature. Qur'an itself, as we have already pointed out,
consists of large form-units, short sign-units, words, letters and
silences. The silences are an essential part of the reading, otherwise
there would be ambiguity. One of the secrets of the Qur'an is the
set of letters that are used throughout the Book marking the
opening of certain Suras. They are not some kind of early scribe's
cataloguing as some rather desperate Christian commentators have
tried to suggest in their attempts to invalidate the authority of the
Book. There are many Hadith that refer to these letters, and two
Suras actually bear the letters as their names, 'Ya-Sin' and 'Ta-Ha'.
It is inevitable that we should now come to this point where we
have to examine the nature of language itself when we find that the
whole source of the Wisdom-way is and always has been through
revealed Books.
The nature of a revealed Book is not merely that it should come
through the revelation process we have just examined, but also that
the language should be prepared for the revelation and pure enough
to express the revelation – thus a Book comes where and when the
language can 'bear' it. What we have observed is that the meanings
spill out beyond the word and into single letters. Thus it is clear
that before we can understand with profundity the nature of the
human situation and the value of the Book, we must understand not
only the words but the letters themselves. If we do not know what
letters are, and therefore what language is, we are not going to
grasp something central to the whole understanding of what a
human being is, and the Wisdom-way will be closed to us.
What we are about to examine, and it is a profound matter, must be
understood to be one of the many fruits of the Qur'anic revelation.
We are not dealing with something foisted onto Islam by wayward
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scholars borrowing either from India or Greece. As we have
already pointed out, however, it was understandable that Muslim
scholars would be moved and fascinated to see the earlier
'archeologies' of their own knowledge in the ruined Wisdom-
teaching of earlier Islams, whether Pythagorean or Brahminic. Al-
Biruni, when he went to India, had no need to borrow from the
decayed Shiva-ite cults he saw, but he was intrigued to perceive
elements of the sufic Wisdom he already knew so profoundly. The
knowledge we are now going to examine in barest outline is one
that has been and is common coin among the people of the Path
since the time of the Messenger, peace be upon him.
It is in the nature of this learning, and we must re-iterate this here,that it will continually spiral back to its departure point. So while
we are now embarking on a journey into the realm of letters it will
inevitably encroach on our next subject of study, the nature of
'stuff' itself. We are now beginning to grasp a different picture of
existence from the dualistic frame we had worked with in our
ignorant 'educational' orientation. Now we are moving into a world
where we recognise that everything is dynamic and in motion,
patternings are transecting other patternings and giving the illusion
of solidities and permanences, these illusions take on a 'reality'
which the cosmic picture constantly denies. In place of the
body/mind duality, we are confronted with an organic and multi-
element reality of experiential flux. We are in a world where
everything is moving, melting, altering, vanishing. Yet what moves
and changes is structured and restructured according to the most
delicate and vibrant order. We are beginning to recognise the Act
of the One in manifesting His Universe of endless forms.
As always, we begin with the affirmation of a Unity which is both
indivisible and independent of forms. Not a 'ground' underlying, or
a power standing over and beyond, but a Reality without
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whereness which is total. As the Shaykh al-Akbar puts it:
Know, may Allah support us and you, that when existence was
absolute without limitation, it contained the Obligator, and He
is the Reality, may He be exalted, and the obligated, and they
are the world and the letters altogether.
We now must open ourselves to the picture of reality that is
experienced by 'the people of unveiling'. Here we are no longer
trapped in the limiting zone of sensory experience checked by the
inadequate tools of logic, but in a world that, as we will eventually
recognise, is like the world described – but not known – by the
astro-physicist on the one hand, and the nuclear physicist on the
other, only the instrument that replaces the 'measuring' telescope
and the destructive reactor, is the experiencing inner-sight of the
heart.
According to the Shaykh al-Akbar, there are 261 Heavens which
revolve around the letters and which are contained in His Heaven –
the Malakut. The station of the letters is derived from Elements
from which the letters are composed. All the letters he calls
'dotted', as all letters come from the 'dot'. The 'dot' we may take to
be the manifestation of phenomena. And phenomenal being is
itself manifested from letters.
Now, there are 29 letters in the Arabic alphabet, that is, in the
language created specifically for the Wisdom-revelation or 'abode'.
Two letters have a particular significance which we will look at
later. These two are also very related. These are Hamza and 'Alif.'Alif in certain computations is seen not as a letter at all, but as the
gate of letters, the source of letters, the original letter. Hamza as
we know from the language itself usually is dependent on the 'alif
for its appearance. This gives us 28 letters when we omit one of
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these, and 27 if we omit both. The 27 gives us 9 x 3, the
significance of which we will shortly examine. The 29 gives us the
lunar month. The 29 x 9 gives us the 261 of the Heavens. Firstly
we must establish the value of 9 in the sufic computation of reality.
It is essential to bear in mind that we are now seeing reality as
unitary, with heavens intersecting heavens, the Unseen intersecting
the Seen, and with any distinction which is made the reality is not
split but merely looked at from one point of view. When another
'rank' or 'reality' is invoked, the previous one vanishes, for these
separatenesses are in description only and not in truth. For
example, if referring to the Divine Attributes, you talk of Him as
being the One who Creates and then the One who Destroys, youare not saying He is now one and then the other. We may examine
Him as the Creator of matter but at the same time He is destroying
it – not 'later'. His Mercy and His Wrath are not separate, they are
not different, yet they are not the same. We may only approach
from one side at a time, at least in the zone of thinking. In the
experience of 'tasting' however we must join them. In the realm of
the slave, if we say one is a Muslim and one is a kafir we make a
valid distinction, but if we talk of the Judgment and the Weighing
we can conceive of mercy for the kafir and punishment for the
Muslim, for we are approaching their situation in relation to
another Divine Name or aspect. From one point of view we are the
actors and responsible, from another point of view He is the Actor
and He does what He wills. There is no negation but if you adhere
to one you lose the other.
We will now go to the second step from the basic affirmation of Unity. We will sketch here the most simple necessary framework
of our cosmology, utterly derived from the Qur'an and the Hadith.
Creation is composed of three ranks. The creation of forms is in
descent from 1 through to 2 through to 3, that 'descent' being, of
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course, in description but not in reality.
1. JABRUT: The Divine Names(Almightiness)
2. MALAKUT: The World of Source-forms
(Dominion)
3. MULK: The world of Apparent forms
(Kingdom)
Each of these three ranks consists of three ranks. Each has an
apparent reality and a hidden reality. It, itself, is an Interspace.This term – Barzakh – is a key term which we will have constant
recourse to, and it is essential to our view that every phenomenal
zone of existence, whether seen or unseen, is in itself merely an
interspace between two other zones. This means that the Seen
World is an Interspace in itself, but so also is the World of Source-
Forms in the Unseen and the Jabrut where Lordship comes out to
Creation from the Essence.
In our first picture we see the three ranks in their 'descent' intoforms. Taking into account that these ranks intersect each other, let
us place the ruling rank of the Jabrut in the centre for it shares a
face on one side with the Mulk and on the other with the Malakut.
Here we take three aspects: Apparent: Interspace: Hidden. Thus the
Hidden of the Mulk is the Apparent of the Jabrut, and the Hidden
of the Jabrut is the Apparent of the Malakut. This count gives us 7
conditions within the 3 ranks. Therefore the 9 ranks are in fact 7
conditions. So we can approach by the 7 or the 9, it is the same.This 9 Reality is common to the Lord and the slave, for it is the
Creation, the zone of forms, seen and unseen. Thus from the 9 this
gives us 18.
Since the human presence, like the Divine Presence, or rather its
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source, is composed of these three ranks, we multiply this 7:
Therefore: 7 x 3 = 21
If from the Divine aspect we subtract 3
______
This gives us: 18.
The same from the human aspect. This gives us 18 Stations of the
Kingdom.
Change perspective and we recognise the Divine interplay between
the Reality and the Creation. There are 9 Heavens for casting out –
that is, the fulgurating displaying and giving of form-energy from
the Truth, and 9 Heavens for reception in the form-world. The
meeting place is the Kingdom. This 'meeting point' of the Kingdom
is the point of revelation where, from Casting-out, the Truth sent
down Jibril with the Message, and where the Creation, in
receiving, took it through the Messenger.
The Truth has created 9 Heavens. There are the seven of the skies,
that is the 'sky' of each of the 7 visible planets ( the other two
planets of our galaxy are only considered to exert an influence
under certain very particular conditions, for this gives us a 9), and
to this we add 1 for the Kursi – that is, the Universe of Stars, and
another 1 for the 'Arsh – the starless heaven 'beyond' the stars or,
as in our new language, 'intersecting' it. The likeness of the
Universe to the 'Arsh is that of a small ring flung onto a vast
desert. The Heavens, the Kursi, and the 'Arsh make the basic 9.
The next crucial step in our abandonment of the false mind/matter
duality is in the recognition of the basic nature of phenomenal
existence, which is founded on 4. Phenomenal existence is based
on the primal four conditions of hot / cold / wet / dry, and to this isadded no fifth. It is untenable that there be more than four bases.
The Shaykh al-Akbar states:
So 4 are the bases of number. 3, which is in the 4 added to 4
gives 7. 2 which is in them, plus these 7 is 9, and the 1 which is
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in the 4 plus these 9 is 10. After this the arrangement is as you
wish. You do not find a number which give you other than
these 4, just as you do not find a complete number other than
6, because in it are 1/2, 1/6 , and 1/3 . So hot and dry weremixed and it was fire. Hot and wet were mixed and it was air
(i.e. heat and moisture). Cold and wet were mixed and it was
water. Cold and dry were mixed and it was earth. So look at
the formation of the air from heat and moisture, it was the
breath which is the sensory life and it is the mover of
everything by its breath. It moved water, earth, and fire, and
by its movement things move because it is life. These 4 are the
pillars engendered by the first matrices.
Then learn that these first matrices accord their realities to
compounds solely without mixture. So the heating from heat is
not from other than it. It is the same with drying up and
shrivelling from dryness. When you see fire has dried up the
place from water, do not imagine that heat dried it up, because
fire is compounded of heat and dryness as we said. So by theheat which is in it, water is heated, and by the dryness drying
up occurred. It is thus with pliability – which is only from
moisture: and becoming cold which is only from coldness. Heat
makes warm: coldness makes cold: moisture makes pliable:
and dryness dries up. Thus the matrices are incompatible, and
are only joined in a form, but the extent which their realities
accorded, and 1 is never found from them in a form. However
2 are found, either like heat and dryness as we said, in their
compound, or heat existed alone. There is only it, from it, in its
isolation. Realities are in two sections: realities found isolated
in the intellect like life, knowledge, articulation, and sense, and
realities which are found by the existence of compounding, like
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the sky, the world, man and stone. If you say: 'What is the
cause which joins these incompatible sources so that from their
mixture appears that which appears? – I reply that here is a
wondrous secret and a great complexity. Its unveiling would bea wrong action since the intellect cannot reason it. But
unveiling sees it Š
So realities grant that these matrices do not have existence in
their essence at all before the existence of complex forms from
them.
Well aware that this description of things seems to be incontradiction to the scientific picture, he asserts that it is ignorance
to lay at his door a charge of giving an 'unscientific' view of
reality. He accepts the scientific picture, but questions its ability to
unfold the nature of how things are, since it starts off with a basic
division between knowledge and the knower and the known. To
the people of the Path, while the knowers are several and 'know'
differently – knowledge itself is One and thus all they are
experiencing is a private unveiling of a tiny part of One Reality,and this knowledge must come out from the knower and not his
thoughts.
He says:
So the Reality, may He be exalted, is the One from whom we
take our knowledges, with the retreat of the heart from
thought, and with the inclination to accept opening-experience( i.e. that you are not a separate knower at all). It is He who
gives us the matter at its source without summation or
confusion. So we know the realities for what they are based on
– it is the same whether they were isolated or occurred with the
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time-structure of the formations, or Divine Realities.
Again he is indicating that you can say it this way or that way, we
either see things as within the phenomenal world or we see them as
the Divine unfoldings, the description in each instance is not thething. There is no scientific fact, there are only the limited view-
pictures. These are our doing. He is concerned with unveiling,
which comes from Reality to the slave. He quotes the ayat of the
Qur'an which says of the Messenger: 'We have not taught him
poetry, it is not seemly for him.' (36.69).
He comments:
Poetry is the place of summation, symbols, and riddles.
This teaching, he insists, comes through the Qur'anic revelation
and through his own Station of being Wali, it is through his direct-
experience of Reality, and therefore superior to, and other than, the
human knowledges.
To return to our picture of the Cosmos: all the letters haveappeared from the 'alif. It is their Heaven in spirit and in sense.
There is a Heaven from which Earth exists: a Heaven from which
Water exists: a Heaven from which Air exists: and a Heaven from
which Fire exists. This gives 5 existent Heavens in this picture.
Each of these Heavens revolves around certain letters and
sometimes even parts of letters.
In specifying a particular difference in the hot/wet from the othercompounds, the Master makes a very illuminating comment. Its
Heaven is not, apparently, like that of the other combinations, but
is another encircling Heaven. Had it been the same, he observes,
that Heaven would have come to an end and its power would have
vanished as it appears in incidental life. For the hot/wet is
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vanishing or moving, and its reality ends even though it does not
vanish. For this reason the Creator, may He be exalted, related to
us that 'the Last Abode is Life,' (40.39), and 'everything proclaims
His praise.' (17.44).
He continues:
So the Heaven of life in pre-endless-time began pre-endless-
time life in its extension. It does not have a Heaven so its cycle
comes to an end. Life in pre-endless-time in itself belongs to the
Living, and so ending is not true for it. So post-endless-time life
is caused by pre-endless-time life and it does not accept end.
Don't you see, that when the life of the spirits is essentially
theirs, that death is not valid for them? When life was in
physical bodies by accident, death and annihilation was based
on it. So the life of the apparent body comes from the traces of
the life of the spirit even as the light of the sun which is on the
earth comes from the sun. When the sun passes, its light
follows it, and the earth becomes dark. Thus when the spirit
goes from the body to its Heaven from which it came, the lifediffused from it in the living body follows it, and the body
remains in the form of the inanimate to our eye. So it is said:
'So-and-so has died,' but in reality you say that he has
returned to his source. 'Out of it We created you, and We shall
restore you to it, and bring You forth a second time.' (20.55)
The Spirit likewise returns to its source until the Day of Rising,
and the Gathering will be a manifestation of the spirit to the
body by means of love. So its parts will be united and its
members organised in a subtle life again. The setting in motion
of the members to formation is acquired by the turning of the
spirit. So when its formation is established and the formation
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of dust is set up, the spirit manifests itself to it by the gentle
Israfilian call in the encircled horn. So a life goes into its limbs
and it becomes a shaped individual as on the first time. 'Then
he blows into it again, so that they stand looking while theEarth is illuminated by the Light of their Lord.' (39.68-69) 'As
He created you, you return.' (7.29) 'Say: "He will quicken
them, who originated them the first time."' (36.79) 'Either
happy Š or wretched.' (11.05).
It is clear from this picture that the existence of the letters and the
meaning of their activity has to do with the whole creation process.
It is another regrettable result of the study of Muslim writershaving filtered through the Orientalists that this study of letters
which lies at the base of Sufism has been so long ignored, or
worse, dismissed as some kind of superstitious magic. The
reduction of the science of letters to an arcane esotericism has
completely barred the way to any serious study of Islamic
Cosmology. The modern Muslims, on their part, brought up and
educated in a colonial situation with a Christian bourgeois ethos
surrounding them, had little chance of appreciating it either, sobusy were they grovelling before the idols of technology with
which they are still, many of them, so deeply awed. It is no use
examining this picture of a world where the forms 'come out' of the
letters unless it is clearly understood that this is a serious and
precise description of the life-process and does not mean that the
Shaykh with his towering intellect is naively suggesting that the
beginning of things is some kind of cosmic children's party with a
lot of alphabet letters falling out of the sky. It is we who mustmake the effort to grasp the meaning and Wisdom of the secrets of
existence which he lays before us, bearing in mind his continual
warnings which I can but re-iterate:
We travel on a different path in the understanding of these
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words, and that is that we free our hearts from meditative
speculation and we sit with the Truth by dhikr on the carpet of
courtesy, watching, with presence and preparation for the
acceptance of what He wills to us from Him, may He beexalted, until the Truth, may He be exalted, takes possession of
our instruction by unveiling and realisation by what you heard
Him say: 'Fear Allah, Allah teaches you.' (2.282). He says: 'If
you fear Allah, He will assign you a furqan,' (8.29), and 'Lord,
increase me in knowledge,' (20.114), and 'We taught him
knowledge from Our Presence.' (18.65).
Fortunately, the intellectual situation is much more open to theWisdom-teaching than it was in the first arrogant days when
scientific methodology seemed adequate to deal with any problem.
In his Inaugural Address to the College de France, the biologist
Jacques Monod said: 'It is language which created humans, rather
than humans language.' When one examines the interconnecting
systems of psycho-linguistics and structural linguistics and so on,
we find that it is not the vision that is lacking as much as the
willingness to shed an epistemology which they inherited from thescientists and which they are terrified to leave behind. The story is
the same wherever research has taken men to the limits of logic
and language and measurement and where the microcosmic
structure planes out into the macrocosmic or vice-versa, or where
the forms themselves emerge out of the fecund Nothing they
imagine they observe. Many of the findings of the biologists and
physicists are taking them to a point where they are being
challenged to recognise – not the invalidity of their findings – butthe underlying psychosis of their approach. Indeed, much of what
they have to say is germane to our study – that they are trapped in
a blind-alley is of their own doing, and also their own business.
Here are George and Muriel Beadle, for example, coming from the
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realm of molecular biology:
The deciphering of the DNA code has revealed our possession of a
language much older than hieroglyphics, a language as old as life
itself, a language that is the most living of all.
Commenting on the findings of Crick and Yanofsky in their
analysis of what they call 'the four-letter language embodied in
molecules of nucleic acid', Roman Jakobson, the linguist, observes:
We actually learn that all the detailed and specific genetic
information is contained in molecular coded messages, namely
in their linear sequences of 'code words' or 'codons'. Eachword comprises three coding sub-units termed 'nucleotide
bases' or 'letters' of the code 'alphabet'. This alphabet consists
of four differing letters 'used to spell out the genetic message'.
The 'dictionary' of the genetic code encompasses 64 distinct
words which, in regard to their components, are defined as
'triplets', for each of them forms a sequence of three letters. 61
of these triplets carry an individual meaning, while three areapparently used merely to signal the end of the genetic
message.
Again a biologist addressing the College de France, this time
Jacob, who says:
To the old notion of the gene, an integral structure that one
used to compare to the bead on a rosary, has succeeded that of a series of four elements repeated in permutations. Heredity is
determined by a chemical message inscribed along the
chromosomes. The surprising thing is that genetic specificity is
written, not in ideograms as in Chinese, but in an alphabet as
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in French, or rather, in Morse. The meaning of the message
comes from the combination of signs into words, and from the
arrangement of words into sentences – a posteriori, this
solution appears the only logical one. How otherwise couldsuch a scarcity of means secure a similar diversity of
architectural forms?
It is a sad condition of the blindness of these 'observers' of the life-
process – do not ask how they got 'outside' existence – that they are
so trapped by the role they have assigned themselves they are
forced to conclude that the discrete components are in themselves
devoid of meaning. Here again is that subjective projection of theirown existential situation onto the so-called object-of-observation.
The Shaykh al-Akbar insists that if anyone makes a model he will
in the end only be making a model of himself. To deny meaning to
the 'letter' is to deny meaning to the 'sentence' – which is life. Yet
what we see, if we have the courage to look clearly, at every stage
of the Way, is meaning. The sentence is structured. There is, in the
mechanistic language of the scientist, 'architecture'. It is absurd to
hear re-iterated at this stage of man's existence the old argumentsabout watches and watchmakers, but astonishingly they still go on.
We are not dealing with a machine-world. We are dealing with a
Reality which, first of all, is dealing with us. Secondly, it is not a
mechanistic, inside-outside, mind/body duality. Thirdly, at every
stage it is structured and the unfolding of the organic form-patterns
comes from 'within' to outside, when it is a matter of life-forms,
and from outside to the centre when it reaches the crystalline level.
Form is something that is both connected to and separate from thediscrete components, as we have observed in ourselves, or should
have if we have maintained our courage to look at both ourselves
and the horizon as Qur'an commands. Dependent on a rich
complex of impulses from without in the environment of
place/event and from within the inner environment of self/energies,
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the human face, the 'form' of man himself changes and alters with
such rapidity we can actually see it happen at times. Both in the
immediate change of 'state' and in the long-term build-up of altered
'states' we observe the form of man change across the discrete or
apparently discrete matter of his biological structure. We are
dealing with a world which is nothing but 'meanings'.
Meaning – MA'NA – is a key word in sufic study. Here is its root:
'Meaning'; 'mind-image'; 'considered as having a word applied to
denote it'; 'being intended by a word'; 'what the word indicates.'
In the Diwan of the Shaykh al-Kamil he says:
Oh you who desire the presence of being an eyewitness,
you must rise above the spirit and the forms –
and cling to the original Void – and be as if
you were not, oh annihilated!
Truly, you will see existence by a secret
whose meanings have spread in every age.
None of the images of action and entity
multiply the Actor in any way.
So whoever rises above every vanishing thing
will be shown existence without duality.
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Books that we have, which is in turn merely the manifest version
of the Hidden Book, states that everything is written in a manifest
Book, we recognise that the record is the Reality itself in its
unfolding. When it says that 'everyone has their Book,' we
recognise not only the record of the destiny which is written in the
cells, but the record of the cells which was written in the destiny
before it took place.
Roman Jakobson, a linguist who is profoundly aware of the
metaphysical implications of his science, states:
How should one interpret all these salient homologies between
the genetic code which 'appears to be essentially the same in allorganisms' (J.D. Watson: 'Molecular Biology of the Genes')
and the architectonic model underlying the verbal codes of all
human languages, and, nota bene, shared by no semiotic
systems other than natural language or its substitutes. The
questions of these isomorphic features become particularly
instructive when we realise that they find no analogue in any
system of animal communication.
We must emphasise that there is no suggestion that the scientists
are proving anything, but one can valuably assimilate their
observations when they are made with such clarity of vision – but
from our point of view it is the scientist who has to come to terms
with the basic problems underlying his position of fantasy-
objectivity and dualistic language with all its pitfalls of teleology
and so on which only have meaning while the whole thing remains'a problem' that they arrogantly imagine they are 'solving'.
Our picture of language – of the letters – is that they are the very
creation process – the appearance of the phenomenal forms. The
letters which appear at the very beginning of the form-situation
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(when the four basic conditions – hot, cold, wet, dry, mix – and the
four basic elements emerge – air, earth, fire, water, which give us
the creation) are surrounded by Heavens, by angelic activity, by
orbit, therefore movement and activity. Within the creation the
letters unfold their messages of form until man himself emerges in
the 'solid' world. When Sayyedina Adam manifests, he is given, in
the Qur'anic expression, 'all the names.' It is this that marks him
out as man, the Khalif of Allah in His creation. For, once there are
forms – once there is a creation – then Allah is Hidden because He
is Manifest everywhere. Once He is Hidden, He leaves His Khalif
– for the Khalif is the one who stands in during the absence of the
King. The language of Adam, and the languages of the adamic
peoples, are nothing other than the 'knowing' of the creational
original letters. Just as language is built into the cells at the
molecular level, so it comes out from man in his molecular totality.
That is why when we examine the Arabic language, which is,
remember, the oldest of the semitic group, we find that in its root
condition, everything connects to a specific existential or
phenomenal reality, as we have seen throughout this work.
Part of the blindness of the modern Muslims to their own spiritual
heritage has been their deep lack of understanding of the Arabic
language. They have reduced the language which was created for
the Wisdom-transaction to nothing more than a mercantile
exchange transaction. A modern Arabic dictionary reveals a
complete break in the language from its roots, an abstracting from
the root-specificity and a disastrous annexation of the mercantile
coding of the bourgeois society which has so successfully
conquered them by its supremacy of values over the Wisdom-Way
which always yields to the force of greed and power and ambition.
It is not that the Christian bourgeois society is superior to the
Wisdom-transaction – simply that men have abandoned it and
corrupted it enough to allow the other its supremacy.
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This creation-picture of reality as a Book which unfolds its
meanings and story is emerging in a profounder light than the
original idea that we entertained of it being merely some primitive
myth. Qur'an says:
Nought of disaster befalls in the earth or in yourselves but it is
in a Book before We bring it into being – Lo! that is easy for
Allah. (Qur'an 57.22)
Our last task will be to look at the time-picture and the time/space
reality in which we find ourselves in the light of this Wisdom-
teaching. For we have already arrived at a position where we are
forced to recognise the illusory nature of time. We cannot
understand the meaning of the forms coming-into existence, the
encoding of the organism, unless we grasp the constancy of the
creation-situation. Look again at the description that the Shaykh al-
Akbar gives of the human being's life, death and continuation
(pages 171-2) and you are opening to a totally new vision of how-
it-is. In this picture of existence, the Qur'an is not merely the Book
of Changes, but it is the Source-Book of Forms, al-Mutashabih,
The Conformable-in-all-its-parts, for that is the nature of the great
cosmic reality of the Universe. By extension, it is not merely the
Book of Forms, it is itself compounded of the stuff of existence, it
is dynamic, active and effective – as well as containing the
discrimination-practice about such existential matters as marriage,
divorce and weaning and war, and the unitary teaching about the
Truth, it is itself a living and activating energy-process which, once
read or recited, takes on an alchemical power which transmutes the
situation into which it manifests its letters and sounds into the air
and into the hearts of the listeners in the Seen and the Unseen
realities.
'The letters,' says the Shaykh al-Akbar, 'are the Imams of
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preservation.' It is they which 'uphold' the space/time reality of the
organism, it is their underlying, hidden reality at the genetic level
that sustains the being in its existence of duration/state. It is they
which act in the bringing into existence from the Names the
myriad forms of creation. The Master explains further:
Know, may Allah give us and you success, that the letters are
one of the communities, speaking and obligated. There are
Messengers in them from themselves, and they have names in
respect to them. Only the people of unveiling from our Path
know this. They have divisions in practice Š They have a
Shari'a which they worship by, and they have both subtletiesand densities.
The Interspace between the letters and the Names, the source of all
letters, is the 'Alif, whose numerical value is 1. Of it he says:
The 'Alif is not from the letters with whoever smells a scent of
the realities, but the common folk call it a letter. So when the
Realised say that it is a letter, they say that by way of metaphorin expression. The dot of the circle encompassment, the simple
and complex of the worlds, are neither in it nor out of it.
Another letter that moves about in its significance, and thus makes
for a difference in calculation depending on its specific role in that
particular picture, is Hamza. He explains its particular function
thus:
The Hamza intersects time and unites whatever it is near to,
from separation.
It is time (dahr) and its power is great. It is beyond being
contained in the striking of a mithal.
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The appended charts will give you a first outline of the letters and
their Heavens, their inter-relatedness, and their elemental nature.
Chart 1 : The Four Matrices of hot / dry / cold / wet.
Chart 2 : The Movement of the Heavens which create the four
matrices which give the four elements.
Chart 3 : The Creation as a 7 / 9 unfolding: manifesting the
elements.
Chart 4 : The Creation showing the zones of the letters.
Chart 5 : The Heavens of the Four Elements.
This is followed by individual charts of each of the 29 letters of the
alphabet.
After the letters come the vowels, and the vowels of the letters are
6. They enter into the letters after their shaping. So then:
There is another growth called a word, as the bringing-together in a person makes man. Thus the world of words and
phrases grows from the world of letters. So the letters belong to
the words in affection like water, earth, fire and air belong to
the setting up of the growth of bodies.
With the zone of word-to-phrase, or word-to-sign, if we stick to the
Qur'anic language we enter a further complexification of the
different patterns of existence. Realities arise due to this
organisation of letter units.
These realities which are from organisation exist by its
existence and vanish with its non-existence. So the reality of
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2) Understood phrases: which have an accepted designation of
type: like man and woman.
3) Homonyms: phrases of one form with differences of meaning,
like 'ayn – eye/source: mushtari – seller/buyer: insan – man/pupil
of the eye.
4) Synonyms: words with different forms which indicate one
meaning: lion – asad, hizabr, ghadanfar: sword – sayf, husam,
sarim: wine – khamr, rahiq, sahba', khandaris.
So we now find ourselves with language which is here to tell us
about the reality of our existence.
The Qur'an, when we examine it, instructs us in two means of
approach to the Reality. At first glance they are utterly
contradictory. One tells us that no form or concept may describe or
circumscribe the Reality, that is beyond association. On the other
hand, we find the Book full of phrases which seem in blatant
contradiction to this – we read of His hand, and that He settled on
the Throne, and so on. We now have to extend this picture we have
of existence in its intricate inter-relatedness, the cosmic reality in
all its vastness and complexity crowned by this self-aware creation,
Man, and recognise him as both Khalif of the Divine Reality and
slave. We have to examine how the exalted Lord and the slave are
'connected', and the nature of the connection, given that we can
connect nothing to Him.
We have reached a point where we must ask questions about the
nature of knowledge, and the nature of the creational realities, in
order to understand the meaning of the Tawhid, the Unity itself.
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The Science of Bewilderment
We have slowly been dismantling the dualistic machine-idea of existence which we were taught, and begun to replace it with a
living and moving picture of a reality which descends in cascading
expansion from a Hidden Source, which had its essence in a
powerful Unseen Waterfall that is hidden from us by its
tremendous spray, until it becomes the visible river of flowing and
vital forms that further spread out into the vast ocean of
multiplicity called the phenomenal world.
Before we could grasp how the Book of Forms, the Qur'an,
manifested, we had to look first at a description of creation as this
unfolding out of the Divine Reality – we then saw that it was the
Book of the Book of Existence itself. In the light of this
knowledge, we must again look at that description of the descent
from the sublime and Unknowable Essence to the myriad forms.
This time we will complexify the descent further so that every
stage of this unfolding is clear. Remember that the 'descent' is notspatial and the hierarchy is in description but not in reality, for we
can never abandon the position of affirmation of Unity which,
although we may leave it, we are bound to return to it.
This descent is called, in the language of the Sufis,
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TANAZZULAT.
Here it is:
1. AHADIYYAT. Here Reality is unlimited and total – in thephrase of the great Sufi Abd al-Karim Jili, there is 'no
manifestation, no name, no quality, no relation, no adjunct or
anything else.' It is the great Darkness to which the Messenger
referred when he was asked, peace and blessings of Allah be upon
him, 'Where was Allah before the creation of the world?': Now this
language which implies whereness and time in relation to Allah we
will examine at the next stage of our journey, but for the moment
let it be emphasised that while the Messenger, in accordance withthe Book and the Wisdom he had received, did express himself in
this way, it was by description only and not through any idea that
Allah had 'whereness', as when he spoke with the ignorant Bedouin
woman. His answer to the question of whereness was, 'He was in
the great 'Ama,' meaning a dark mist. In other words, before the
manifestation of His Names and the event of His Lordship as
Creator, He is hidden and Inaccessible. It was of this reality that
the Messenger warned when he forbade contemplation of theEssence. It is inaccessible to thought or expression. Its name to the
Sufis is GHAYB AL-GHAYB – the Hidden of the Hidden. It is to
this sublime reality that the Messenger also referred when he said,
'Allah was and there was nothing with Him.' This is the 'AYNI-
MUTLAQ – the Absolute Source. It is 'AYN AL-KAFUR – the
Fountain of Camphor, for whatever enters camphor becomes
camphor.
From this stage there is descent to the next stage of the Divine
Ranks:
2. WAHDAT. Here what was hidden comes out. Here the Reality
knows itself, its potentialities and its totality. Here there are four
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aspects which are not yet differentiated: Existence, Light,
Knowledge, and Self-manifesting. Here, He is Himself. This is still
in the Essence, for we must re-affirm that there is no break or split
in these stages. Here are all the Names of Divinity and of the
Universe, but they are for and to the Essence, and have not yet
moved into specificity. This is called the TAJALLI-AWWAL – the
first self-manifestation. It is also called the Haqiqata'l
Muhammadiyya, or the Reality of Muhammad. To this refers the
Hadith: 'The first thing which Allah created was the Light of the
Messenger.' Also: 'I am from the Light of Allah and the whole
world is from my light.' This stage is also called, therefore, An-
Nuri-Muhammadiyya. This must not be misunderstood. Here is not
the essence of the Messenger, for as we shall see, the dhat or
essence of the creatures manifests at a lower stage. Rather, it is the
secret of form itself.
From here there is descent to the next stage:
3. WAHIDIYYAT. This is the third and last of the Divine Ranks.
Here the Names separate and display themselves. The Peacock
opens its tail. Here, every aspect of the Creator, the Actor, isparticularised, and its inter-relationship with every other is
specified. In Wahdat everything is 'there' but implicit, now in
Wahidiyyat, everything is there and explicit. Together these last
two stages are one, they are a veil, with one side facing to the
hidden and the other facing out to the phenomenal world. So these
two together form the BARZAKH-I-KUBRA – the Great
Interspace.
Again, before descent to the world of forms in the Universe, let us
affirm the identical nature of the Divine Ranks – Reality is never
now this and now that. His knowledge is not implicit and then
explicit. He is never without consciousness of Himself, nor without
Light, nor without the Names. The Attributes are identical with the
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Essence. 'He is now as He was before.'
The cosmic ranks are two:
1. The 'Ayn ath-thabitah, the permanent source-forms of all theindividual things, descend from their permanence in the Divine
Names into the Unseen.
2. The 'Ayn ath-thabitah become the things in the world of sensible
experience. Here they come into the world of solidity/duration.
This is the Universe. But we affirm again our first condition. 'And
He is as He was before,' before, that is, the creation of theUniverse.
This descent is by its nature a movement, an energy-process, and
this will be the last aspect of the Reality which we will examine.
For the moment let us stay with the pattern that the movement
shows.
Here is another description that helps clarify the picture of how
existence comes into being, and let us be open now to the
implications of what is being presented, which is inevitably that
there is a triplicity of Reality in the Universe. That the things come
into being and go out of existence. That they are permanent and
endless. That they do not and never have had any existence. These
matters must be approached step by step, and it must be said again,
that if we hold to one picture we lose the others, and that if we hold
to the other we lose the former. Yet all are true.
The descent through the Divine Ranks in this new picture is seen
as an emanation from the Essence to the Source-forms. This is the
realm of the possible things – they are not yet actualised. Here the
potter has conceived the idea of the pot-form but has not yet made
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it. This image is still to do with our form-bound situation and not
to do with a Reality which is utterly beyond dependence on forms.
There is no watch/watchmaker duality. This emanation is called
AL-FAYD AL-AQDAS, or the Most Pure-emanation. That is to
say, from Reality uncontaminated with form comes the form-idea.
This is also called TAJALLI DHATIY, Manifestation of the
Essence. This is the descent into the Names when the forms appear
to Allah but not to the world. Once the form becomes the source-
form in the Unseen, it then takes on existence and so manifests in
the visible world. This is: AL-FAYD AL-MUQADDAS, the Pure-
emanation. This is also called TAJALLI-WUJUDIY, the self-
manifestation of the existent.
In the Qur'an the Divinity expresses Itself by different pronouns.
He and We. 'He' indicates the Essence, beyond all association of
form. 'Say: He Allah is One.' (112.1). 'We' is used in the realm of
Kingship, it is the 'We' of Royal Command. The Command is the
bringing of things into existence from the Names. This is
Rububiyyat, Lordship, the rule of the Creator over His creation.
In the 'Seals of Wisdom', the Shaykh al-Akbar says:
Abu'l-Qasim ibn Qasi said in his book, 'The Removal of the
Sandals', 'Each Divine Name is qualified by all the Divine
Names, and described by their description.' It is so. Each Name
indicates the Essence according to the meaning which is set
forth for it and which demonstrates it. In respect to its
indication of the Essence, it possesses all the Names: and in
respect to the meaning which is singular to it, it distinguishes
itself from others, such as the Lord, the Creator, the
Fashioner-of-forms, and so on. So the Name is the same as the
named in respect to the Essence, and the Name is other than
the named in respect to the meaning which is particular to it.
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Elsewhere he says:
Know that the One called Allah is one by essence and by all His
Names, and every existent thing is only attached to Allah by his
own Lord (Name) exclusively, for it is impossible that it possess
the whole. As for Divine Unity – Ahadiyya, none is in it at all,
for one cannot designate any aspect of it, and it does not admit
of distinction. So His Unity integrates all of Him by
potentiality.
The happy one is the one 'who was pleasing to his Lord.' There
is no-one who is not pleasing to his Lord because it is by himthat rububiyya, Lordship, subsists. So He is pleased with Him,
so he is happy. For this reason Sahl at-Tustari said, 'Lordship
has a secret, and this secret is you.' He was addressing every
source-form. 'Had it been manifested, Lordship would have
been invalidated.' He used the word 'law' which is the
participle of impossibility, for it is never manifested, so
Lordship is never invalidated, FOR THERE IS NO
EXISTENCE TO A SOURCE-FORM, except by its Lord. The
source is always existent, so sovereignty is never invalidated.
And:
Every existent thing is pleasing to its Lord (Name), that does
not necessitate that each existent thing which is pleasing to its
Lord is also pleasing to the Lord of another, because Lordship
is only obtained from each one of the Names, not from the one
of Unity. So what is specific to it from the whole is only what is
attributed to it. So He is its Lord. None is attached to Him in
respect to His Unity. For this reason the people of Allah are
forbidden manifestation of His Unity (Ahadiyya). If you look at
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Him by Him, He is the one who is looking at Himself. He
continues to be Himself looking at Himself by Himself. If you
look at Him by yourself, Unity vanishes because of you. If you
look at Him both through Him and through you, Unity alsovanishes because the pronoun of the second person implies that
there is something else besides that which is regarded. So there
must be some relationship which necessitates the duality of the
Regarder and the regarded, and so Unity vanishes, even
though there only exists the One who sees Himself by Himself.
It is known that in this description He is the Regarder and the
Regarded.
And:
So distinction occurred among the slaves, and distinction
occurred among the Lords. Had distinction not occurred, One
Divine Name would have been interpreted in all its aspects by
what another Name is interpreted by: the elucidation of the
Exalter is not that of the Abaser, and so on, except from the
aspect of Unity. It is as we said of every Name, that it indicates
the Essence and also its reality in respect to what it is. So the
One named is but One and therefore the Exalter IS the Abaser
in respect to the Named. It is not the Abaser in respect to itself
and its reality.
Do not look at the Real and free Him from creation.
Do not look at creation and garb it in other-than-the-Real.
Disconnect Him and connect Him
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and you will stand in the goal of sincerity.
Stay in gatheredness if you wish,
stay in separation if you wish.
You will win all even if all set out to carry the day.
You are not annihilated and you do not have going-on.
And the forms are not annihilated and do not have going-on.
Revelation will not be given to you in respect to another,
and you will not give it.
We will shortly examine the two terms Connection and
Disconnection – for the moment it is enough to recognise that they
are two utterly contradictory methods of approach. What we mustnote now is our recognition that the Divine Names are no other
than the named. The realities which the Names require to embody
their Lordship are nothing but the Universe itself. To affirm this
unified situation, the Shaykh uses a very daring phrase, but do not
lose sight of what he has outlined in the poem above.
Thus Divinity [uluhiyya – god-ness] requires the object to
which it is god-ed [ma'luh], as Lordship requires its own objectLorded [marbub]. Otherwise the Divine Names have no real
existence of their own. What is absolutely free from any need
of the Universe is solely the Reality as Essence. The Lordship
has no such property. So the Reality is ultimately possessed of
two aspects: on the one hand what is required by the Lordship,
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and on the other the complete independence of the Essence
from the world which it rightly claims. BUT IN REALITY
THE LORDSHIP IS THE ESSENCE ITSELF.
Let us go back from these two aspects to our previous picture
which delineated in particular this connecting element, between the
two. Let us go back to the triplicity of the Truth, the World, and
the connecting term, the Source-forms. It is essential that we have
a clear grasp of the nature of this 'connection'.
The 'ayn ath-thabitah are not qualified by existence and yet they
are not qualified by non-existence, neither can they be said to be
in-time nor in endless-time. Yet these source-forms have been with
the Endless-time since endless-time. So here is something which is
neither existent nor non-existent that is, nevertheless, the root of
the world, that from which the world comes into being. It is the
form of all the world-forms. It appears as the endless-time in the
endless-time, and it appears as in-time in the in-time. If you say it
is the world, you are right, declares the Master – and if you say it is
Reality, the Endless-time, you are also right. But you are equally
right if you say that it is neither the world nor the Truth, but it is
something different from both. Each of these statements is true. It
is other-than-Allah and it is not other-than-Allah.
Let us recall the varying perspectives we have gone through in our
examination of the Divine emanation into solid world forms. We
have seen that the individual letters brought the forms into being,
but from the letters – WORDS WERE INTENDED, from the
emergent words groupings arose which gave phrases, and we could
not but recognise that from the words, from the beginning, phrases
were intended. In our Qur'anic picture we saw that from the ayats,
the signs, came Suras or forms. Thus from the beginning of the
unfolding it was forms that were intended. We have also seen how
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by complexification, form-combination, something new enters into
the experience picture. A reality sweeps over the form in all its
discreet architectural patterning. It cannot be separated from it and
yet is not it, for it remains discreet, separate, letters in joined and
inter-related tension. We have seen how when any aspect of the
complexity is dropped away, it leaves another 'reality' in its place.
Another ma'na, or meaning. The scientist rejects the source-forms
for they are not accessible to him by his methodology, and the
esotericists reject the particularised description of the creation-
situation when it is broken down into its discreet components,
whether they are nucleic acids or particles. To the Sufi there are
two approaches to existence – he may look at the world and see the
forms, or he may turn to the Reality itself and the forms will fall
away. In the great Hadith on creation's secret, the Messenger,
blessings and peace be upon him, said:
Allah hides himself behind 70,000 veils of light and darkness. If
He took away these veils, the fulgurating Lights of His Face
would at once destroy the sight of any creature who dared to
look at it.
The Shaykh al-Akbar comments that the veils of darkness are the
natural bodies and the veils of Light are subtle spirits, for the
Universe is composed of the gross and the subtle. He goes on:
So the Universe is its own veil of itself, and it cannot perceive
the Reality since it perceives itself. It is continuously in a veil
which is not removed since it knows that it is distinct from its
Creator by its need for Him. It has no part in the essential
necessity which belongs to the existence of Allah, so it can
never perceive Him. In this respect Allah is always unknown
by the knowledge of tasting and direct-seeing, because the in-
time has no access to that.
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So here we come up against another baffling negation. We had set
out determined to follow a path that would give us experience of
Reality, precisely that direct-tasting which we now discover the
Greatest Master denies is possible. Are we merely left with some
negative intellectual position, and if so what is the point of the
journey? It is at this point that the connecting term, the 'ayn ath-
thabitah takes on its vital and unavoidable significance.
The 'ayn ath-thabitah we directly experience in the phenomenal
realm by an inbuilt faculty we have to structure and the discreet
information-picture we construct when we scan our world. Out of
the separate cellular units we 'construct' a man, a cat, a horse. Out
of our 'readings' of the behaviour and energy-waves from the cat,we interpret its 'anger-state' and that it is going to spring. We make
sense of existence. We pattern the patterns. This is ordinary
experience. It is based on a direct and continual recognition of the
'outward' aspect of the 'ayn ath-thabitah as they manifest.
The Shaykh al-Akbar uses the mithal of a mirror to express the
nature of what the source-form is, this non-existent
possibility/form in the Divine Name which displays itself as anevent/form. We have indicated that we are not what we seem – just
as there is the phenomenal manifesting reality of the source-form
which may be recognised in its subtle aspect by someone else, so
there is the true reality of that hidden form in the Unseen, and that
form is from the Names, and the Names are from the Essence.
Now I may see something of the hidden reality of the man who
comes towards me, but I will never be able to see his source-form
in its Divine Nature. I cannot know that of any creature – exceptone.
Myself.
I, among the creatures, and only I have access to my own
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immutable source-form. I am capable of knowing myself. And that
is the limit of what may be known. Here is how the Shaykh
expresses it, again in a passage from 'The Seals of Wisdom':
As for the favours, gifts, and overflowings from the Essence,
they only come from Divine Tajalli (self-manifestation). Tajalli
only comes from the Essence by means of the forms of the
predisposition of the one whom tajalli is made. It never occurs
otherwise. So the one who receives the tajalli will see his form
only, in the mirror of the Truth, and he will not see the Truth
for it is not possible to see Him. At the same time he knows that
he sees only his own form in it. It is like the mirror in thevisible world – in-as-much as you see forms in it or your own
form, you do not see the mirror. At the same time, you know
that you see the forms or your form only by virtue of the
mirror. So Allah manifests that as a mithal appropriate to His
essential tajalli, so that the one receiving the tajalli knows that
he does not see Him. There is no mithal nearer and more
appropriate to vision and tajalli than this. So try yourself when
you see the form in the mirror to see the body of the mirror as
well – you will never see it. It is true, some people who
recognise this mithal of the form of the mirror say that the
reflected form is between the vision of the seer and the mirror.
That is as far as the mind can go, and the matter is as we have
said. If you wish to taste this, then experience the limit beyond
which there is no higher limit in respect to the creature. Do not
exhaust yourself in going beyond this degree, for in principle,
there is only pure non-existence after it.
This is what is meant by the Shaykh al-Kamil in his Diwan in the
song, 'The Buraq of the Tariq':
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The adab of looking at the creature is that you see
the Creator – no second face!
So you see the Creator in the created and
the Provider in the provision.
The Truth is only seen in manifestation,
whether by Angel or a mortal man.
The first manifestation is the Light of Ahmad, may the mostexcellent of blessings
be upon him in endless-time.
By him the Truth has filled every creature
and all that is or was.
So one door remains open to the seeker – his own door. Beyond
that there is nothing. Reality is One. The slave is the slave and the
Lord is the Lord. But his Lord, the source of his own existence, the
mirror-image of the perfection of the Essence he may contemplate
– in short, he may have knowledge of himself. On the other side of
this knowledge is obliteration, and it is the Wisdom of the Wise.This is the meaning of the famous saying attributed to Yahya ibn
Ma'ad ar-Razi: 'He who knows his nafs, truly, he knows his Lord.'
The Shaykh al-Akbar counsels:
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So know your source-form, and who you are, what is your he-
ness, and what your relation to Allah is, and by what you are
the Truth and by what you are the Universe and the other, and
whatever resembles these expressions.
So here is the conclusion:
So know that you are an imagination, and that which you
perceive and of which you say, 'This is not me!' is imagination.
So all our existence is imagination within imagination.
The world of being and becoming is an imagination – but it is,
in truth, the Reality itself.
His word is: 'Say: if you love Allah, follow me and Allah will
love you.' (3.31). So, he called to a Divinity to whom one has
recourse and who is known in respect to the whole and is not
seen, 'Nor do the eyes perceive Him, but He perceives the eyes,'
(6.103), by His lutf and His diffusion in the source-forms of
things. The eyes do not perceive Him as they do not perceivetheir arwah which govern their shapes and their outward
forms. 'And He is the All-Latif, the All-Aware.' (6.103).
EXPERIENCE IS THE TASTE AND TASTE IS TAJALLI.
Tajalli occurs in forms. So they must be and it must be and the
one who sees Him by his passion must worship Him, if you but
understand! On Allah is the goal of the Path.
Another contradictory aspect of the teaching emerged as the
Shaykh guided to what was best for the seeker. He had said, we
noted: 'Use both tanzih and tashbih in relation to Him and you will
stand in the goal of sincerity.' Again we have to learn not an
ambiguous approach to existence but a contrary one which clashes
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one approach against another, irreconcilable forces. As usual, we
will begin with their root form which is quite uncomplicated and
direct: Tanzih is from NZH, which means: 'to keep something
away from anything contaminating or impure'. Tashbih is from
ShBH, meaning: 'to make or consider something similar to some
other thing'. This second root we have already encountered! And it
was in an ayat informing us that certain ayats contained a likeness-
sign Wisdom that should not be approached through our mental
activity, but should be accepted and made the basis of
remembering. The key to that knowledge was by dhikr, and not
fikr. Therefore these ayats obviously contain the most profound
Wisdom – and despite this we should not perform this act but keep
ourselves aloof from it. Tanzih is to disconnect – tashbih is to
connect. The truth of the matter is that one can neither hold to one
nor the other, these two opposites – connecting forms to the
Reality and disconnecting the Reality from forms are two truths
which must be held in balanced and dynamic tension at the same
time. The perfection of this paradoxical Wisdom is stated most
clearly in the ayat which declares:
There is nothing like Him – and He is the All-Hearing, the All-
Seeing. (Qur'an 42.11)
In the first part Allah declares His reality to be beyond any
association with forms, and thus disconnects. In the second part He
affirms that He participates in the form-world, seeing is His and
hearing is His, and thus connects. In the view of the People of
Reality, merely to practise disconnection is to limit and restrict
Allah, and also to defy the nabiyyic teaching method of mithal-
wisdom. The Qur'an is full of images which express the transaction
Allah has with His creatures. He is assigned 'hands' and 'feet', He
'sits upon the Throne', He 'rolls up the Universe like a scroll'. This
is not some Blakean vision of a patriarchal being in the heavens
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suspended over our heads, and it would be a sign of ignorance to
take it as such. The Wisdom-teaching of Islam is categoric: He
does not engender forms, and He was not engendered by a form,
that is to say that the coming out of forms does not diminish His
totality. He has no form, or if you were to practise tashbih it would
be based on the understanding that if He is not the forms, He is
form-itself, from which all forms come, but that is in the zone of
the Names, not the Essence. In other words, to talk of Him in
connection with the forms is to be held to the structural framework
we have used, in the Essence He is as He was before the creation
of the myriad forms. The language of 'likeness' which involves the
imagery of 'His fingers' and so on, is the mithal-method which
simply shows us how-it-is in the realm to which we have no access
without using form language. In the realm of realities we need a
form language, for these realities are not the forms, but the forms
pass over them, as it were. So when we come to the realm of
Essence, the great 'Ama in its impenetrable nature, we have to be
prepared to abandon all connection. For Allah in His splendour,
there must be disconnection, for Allah, the Lord of the Myriad
Form Universe, we must have recourse to form – mithals to grasp
the realities of existence, the meanings of the phenomenal events.
The means is connection.
Particular essences are not changed nor do realities change.
Fire therefore burns by its reality, not by its form. So His
statement, may He be exalted, to the fire: 'Oh fire, be cold and
be peace,' (21.16) – was not spoken to a form. The form is live
coals and bodies of live coals which are being burned by thefire. When the fire stood over them, the fire heard, and so it
accepted cold as it accepts heat.
Here we see described the governing reality in relation to the form,
in the same way we approach His relation to what is manifested of
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the forms of the world. Therefore we can never know Allah by
definition, for to do so we would have to know the definite reality
of every form in the Universe throughout the time experience, and
this is impossible. Be careful not to fall into the pit of the Christian
Orientalists who mistook the Sufis for pantheists. There is
absolutely no equating of Allah with the forms, for we have
already indicated the structural and dynamic process which permits
us to make even this subtle connection, and it only has reality if
alongside it we utterly deny the reality of the forms before His
unassailable uniqueness and purity from forms. Allah is the
Manifest. The Universe therefore is His form, in the framework
which we have declared of 'ayn ath-thabitah, but at the same time,
the Universe is also His He-ness. He is the meaning, the spirit of
all that is manifest, and so He is the Hidden. So you are His form
and He is your reality. 'You are to Him as your corporeal form is to
you, and He is to you as the spirit which governs the body.' Let us
re-affirm the basic teaching: if you practise connection alone, you
are a dualist: if you practise disconnection alone, you are a
separator.
We have arrived at a point where we must both affirm that all the
source-forms, which are manifestations of the Names, are by that
token all of one source-form, for all the Names come together in
the Name of the Rahman, the Mercy, on which the Universe is
sustained, and it is the same, according to Qur'an, as the Supreme
Name, Allah. You know Him from yourself. All the myriad
millions of things are not other than the He-ness of the Essence.
And we have arrived at a point where we must negate. All the
world of manifestation, you yourself, are a shadow of a reality, you
are the mirror-image in which Allah contemplates His Names. You
are non-existent, a meaning projected into space/time, an
imagining. Yet these two, inexorably, are one, and Tawhid is
affirmed. Tawhid does not just mean Unity, it means to unify. You
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have to 'one' reality, and when it is 'one-d' experientially the goal is
achieved. All this is but the framework. Unification is our business
on the Path: the knower, the knowledge, and the known.
This brings us to the method of approach. Clearly it cannot be doneby thinking, for we have been warned that in this zone of
understanding we have to allow the knowledge to come from the
Knower without our intervention. The means is to reflect up to that
point where reason and intellect can no longer function. The
practice is to allow the mind to be halted. We have to get to the
limit of the mind. The edge of the cliff. This practice is called
HAYRAH – bewilderment.
We had reached an already baffling situation, that the Reality in
disconnection was the creatures by connection. Even though we
distinguished between creature and Creator, we recognised that the
many essences were nothing but One Unique Essence. The Hayrah
arises because, in the language of the Shaykh al-Akbar, the mind
becomes polarised. This is the re-iterated exclamation of the
Master Rumi in his great wisdom book 'The Mathnawi' – again and
again he calls out: 'The mind stops!' We experience and depend onduality for our existence – day/night, hot/cold, wet/dry, and the
series we have examined of the matrices good/bad, and so on. This
is the realm of nature where every one thing comes out from two.
Now we desire knowledge of the One whose reality manifests as
the numbers, which are of course, in the view of the Shaykh al-
Akbar, themselves unitary. Each number is made up of ones, thus
every number both has its own identity, two being unlike three and
four being unlike five, while at the same time they have incommon their being based on one. Yet another mithal of the
relation of the essences to Essence.
Having seen in nature the primacy of the two, these have to be
unified if we wish to achieve our goal. Yet they cannot of their
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nature be unified, for hot and cold do not mix, as we have seen, nor
wet and dry. The same is true when we go to the Names
themselves. We have already examined the clash between He who
Exalts and He who Abases. What we have to recognise is that He
is AT THE SAME TIME the Exalter and the Abaser. He is the
Outwardly Manifest and the Inwardly Hidden at the same time, but
one face of the Names is turned to the form and another face is
turned to the Essence.
Shaykh al-Kashani commenting on this Hayrah says:
This ocean of Hayrah is the Unity pervading all and
manifesting itself in multiple forms. It is bewildering becauseof the Unity appearing in a concrete determined form in every
single thing and yet remaining non-determined in the whole. It
is bewildering because it is non-limitation and limitation.
The Master Abu Sa'id al-Kharraz of Baghdad said: 'I reached
gnosis of Allah through joining the contrary Names.' Shaykh
Moulay al-'Arabi ad-Darqawi, may Allah have mercy upon him, a
Shaykh of our Shaykh, and a great Master of sufic Wisdom, who
died a hundred and fifty years ago, near Fez in Morocco, describes
in detail in his Letters how this experience was the final one on his
Path before achieving his Tawhid. After expounding on the
doctrine of fana, annihilation of the experiencing nafs, and
reaffirming what we have been studying here, that is, that it is only
illusion – wahm – which veils man from reality, that illusion of
course lying in our capacity to solidify the manifest objects into
multiplicity, he goes on:
We observe – but Allah knows best – that this annihilation
takes place, if Allah wills it, in the least possible time, by means
of a certain method of invoking the Name of Majesty: Allah. I
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came upon this method in the work of the Venerable Master,
the Wali Abu'l Hasan ash-Shadhili, may Allah be pleased with
him. It is mentioned in certain books owned by a scholar
among our brothers of the Bani Zarwal, and I also received itfrom my noble Master Abu'l Hasan 'Ali, may Allah be pleased
with him, in a slightly different, simpler, and more direct form.
It consists of visualising the five letters of the Name – while
saying Allah – Allah – Allah. Each time the letters dissolved in
my imagination I revisualised them, and if they dissolved a
thousand times during the day and a thousand times during
the night, I continued a thousand times a day and a thousand
times a night to revisualise them. This method gave me
moments of immense inner vision when I practised it for a little
more than a month at the beginning of my spiritual Path. It
brought me a great knowledge as well as intense awe, but I
paid no heed to it, occupied as I was in calling upon the Name
and visualising the letters until the month ended. Then a
thought forced itself on my attention: 'Allah-ta-'ala says that
He is the First and the Last and the Outwardly Manifest andthe Inwardly Hidden.' (57.3). To begin with I turned away
from this thought that crept in, resolved not to listen to it, and
I continued with my practice. But this voice did not leave me
alone, it insisted, and would not accept my refusal to listen to
it, just as I would not accept its way of acting and did not listen
to it. But finally since it would not leave me in peace I
answered it: 'As for His words saying that He is the First andthe Last and that He is the Inwardly Hidden, I understand
them quite well: but I do not understand His affirmation that
He is the Outwardly Manifest, because all I see on the outside
are created things.' To this the voice answered: 'If by His
expression the Outwardly Manifest he had meant something
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other than the phenomenal world which we see, it would not be
outward but inward. And so I say to you – He is the Outwardly
Manifest.' Then I perceived that there is no reality except
Allah and nothing in the Universe except Him, praise andthanks be to Allah.
Annihilation in the Essence of our Lord comes about quickly, if
Allah wills, by the method just described, for by this method,
reflection bears fruit from the morning to the evening,
provided that suspension of thought has been practised long
enough. In my case it bore fruit after just a month and a few
days, but Allah knows best. Certainly if someone were topractise suspension of thought for a year or two, or even three,
the thought which would then appear would grant a great
Wisdom and a dazzling secret.
This is the Path of our Shaykh and Master, the Qutb, Muhammad
ibn al-Habib, may Allah have mercy upon him, and what was true
then is true today if a seeker is earnest in his or her quest and
simply submits to the practices and dhikrs of the Order. But this
tremendous matter, which is our concern, does not exist in a
vacuum and cannot simply be grafted onto a life that is led by
Christian bourgeois standards, for all the Sunna-practice which we
have examined, all the ordinary activity of the slave in leading a
life that is in harmony with the laws of existence, is what grounds
the seeker in the deep sanity of the Sunna of our beloved
Messenger, may Allah bless him and give him peace. If someone
were to regard this, in the manner of the culture in which we were
so disastrously mis-educated, as some mental or 'inner' exercise
that they could practise as a therapy from the ills of their
unstructured existence, they would meet with disaster. The Way
harmonises the Sunna and the acts of dhikr into a pattern that is the
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whole life picture, and it is to that that we are called by the
Shaykhs of the Way. Just as the dhikr of the Master described
above is the focal point of the Tariq's work, this Hayrah which
precedes the final stages of the Way is embodied in the final and
highest task that the Muslim can fulfil in this world. And that is the
Hajj. The root, HJJ means: 'to struggle with'; 'to make a spiritual
journey'; it means 'Hajj' for it is its own root; 'an argument'; 'a
single Hajj, a year'.
It can therefore immediately be recognised as being a difficult
journey, and at the same time it is an argument. What argument?
From the point of view of the slave, it is, from its beginning when
he is forced to don the ihram, the obligatory robes of pilgrimagewhich consist of two seamless white pieces of cloth, the argument
of his nafs which has continued all his life in the continual
rebellion of the self against the very submission-act that is his
Islam. The pared down rituals of the difficult journey crystallise
the nafs' battle with existence and its perpetually renewed attempts
to throw off the chains of submission and regain the illusion of
freedom. This of course means to reject the fact of mortality and
return to the fantasy that one is going to live for ever without being
responsible after death for one's acts in the world. From the point
of view of the Lord it is also 'the conclusive argument' that the
slave is the slave and the Lord is the Lord. In its profoundly
structured set of mathematically precise movements and stoppings,
it displays for the seeker a theorem of the whole existence activity
which in the ordinary life situation may seem chaotic and random.
In the Hajj, a man or woman experiences life and the self within
such a determined and patterned geometric activity that though
there may be near to two million people, outwardly all engaged in
the same practice at the same time, inwardly each has his own
unique struggle with the nafs to surrender once and for all the
fantasy of selfhood, and the fantasy of otherness on which the
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world and all its ravishingly beautiful and terrible commotion is
based. The Hajj is 'a year', a complete cycle of existence.
To take the matter of 'dispute' one degree further, let us note that
the whole experience of life seems to suggest to people that life isa struggle and that the enemy is without. The other, be it man or
woman or child or environment or the moment and the event – it is
this otherness of the world that makes life a struggle. Out there is
the cause for my anguish in here. The Hajj is the rite of unveiling
which reveals that from one point of view you are identical with all
these others, for are you not surrounded with hundreds of
thousands of people identical to you, robed as you are, troubled as
you are, and is not existence at that time the same for all of you? Itis tawaf of the Ka'ba and walking down to Muzdalifa that tires and
shatters you all. The Master Rumi has said that the world is a
mountain and all you ever get back from it is the sound of your
own voice. This is one of the secrets of the Hajj. Nowhere is one
more alone than in the surging crowd of 'Arafat, and circling the
Sublime House. Nowhere, therefore is one more constrained to
follow the counsel of the Shaykh Sidi 'Ali al-Jamal:
'Relax the mind and learn to swim.'
Qur'an says:
Allah has appointed the Ka'ba, the Pure House, as a standard
for mankind, and the pure month, the offering, and the
necklaces – that you may know that Allah knows all that is in
the heavens and in the earth, and that Allah has knowledge of everything. Know – Allah is terrible in retribution, and Allah
is All-Forgiving, All-Compassionate. (Qur'an 5.97-98)
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And when we settled for Ibrahim the place of the House: 'You
shall not associate with Me anything. And so purify My house
for those that shall go about it, and those that stand, for those
that bow and prostrate themselves: and proclaim among menthe Hajj, and they shall come to you on foot, and upon every
lean beast, they shall come from every deep ravine that they
may see things from which they will profit, and mention
Allah's Name on days well-known over such beasts of the
flocks as He has provided them – so eat from them, and feed
the bereft.'
(Qur'an 22.26-28)
And take provision: but the best provision is awe-of-Reality, so
fear you Me, men possessed of minds.
(Qur'an 2.197)
As with the basic practice of salat, we find there is one aspect of
the rites which is purification or separation and another aspectwhich is an act of Tawhid and joining. Just as wudu and ghusl
prepare the way for the act of prostration, and just as salat has a
base of minimal obligatory daily practice which then expands
through the nawafil, or extra acts of prostration, until a climax is
reached in Ramadan with the act of tarawih, which literally means
'to become spirit', or to spiritualise yourself – and that act
intensifies in the climax of the through-the-night recitation of the
whole of Qur'an on the Night of Power – so the Hajj takes the hajjithrough a series of practices that intensify, exhaust and shatter him
or her outwardly as they also inwardly illuminate. For these trying
and difficult acts, the separation needed is more acute than for the
simple act of prostration. The hajjis must bathe and then don the
ihram robes at the beginning of the rites, and from that moment on
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they fall under the obligations of the Hajj. These are: not to cut the
nails, or remove a single hair from the head or body: not to kill or
even dislodge any living creature that comes onto the body: not to
have sexual intercourse: not to dispute or lose one's temper: not to
trade: not to hunt while within the purified zone of the Hajj: to
perform all the rites of Hajj within the time limits specified for
each act.
What the shahadah or Affirmation of Islam is for the moment:
what salat is for the day: what Ramadan and Zakat are for the year:
Hajj is for the lifetime. It is a summing up of all the acts of dhikr
which the Muslim has been fulfilling all his or her life, and it is a
ritualising of the act of living itself. It is movement and struggleand exhaustion, dust-covered and weary – the more the pilgrim is
shattered, the more the heart becomes illuminated and filled with
ecstasy. At the beginning of the rites people are fresh and elated
and rather pleased with themselves for being hajjis, at the end as
they stumble and drag themselves back to their starting point of
Ka'ba, they are dazed, awed, sobered, and illuminated.
The three great acts of the Hajj are the circling of the House of Ka'ba, the Running between Safa and Marwa, and the Standing on
'Arafat. The circling of the House may be done as much as the
pilgrim desires, although certain tawaf, as they are called, are
obligatory. Qur'an designates the House as the first place of
worship used by the human race. On the earth there is no more
purified spot, no more illuminated building. 'The Ka'ba,' said the
Messenger, blessings and peace be upon him, 'is one of the jewels
of the Garden.' It is the mithal of the 'Arsh, the starless Heavenwhich encompasses the Universe of the galaxies. Just as the
Angels of Light encircle the Throne, so do the pilgrims encircle the
Ka'ba. To circle the Ka'ba is, in the phrase of the Greatest Master,
'to be at the heart of the existence of the world.' One tawaf is
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completed by doing seven circlings of the House – it is followed
by the performance of the two rak'as at the Station of Ibrahim
which is set near the Ka'ba at the Black Stone Corner.
The other important act performed at Makka is the Sa'ee, the goingbetween the two rocks of Safa and Marwa. This is a re-enactment
of Hagar's desperate search for water for her son Ishmael, who
later helped his father Ibrahim build the House to the One. It is said
that she ran between these two rocks in vain looking for a watering
place. When she gave up and sank to the ground, there burst out of
it before her the well of Zam-zam. Drinking this water is also one
of the practices of Hajj. It is one of the miracles of the Hajj that
this small desert well rises every Hajj time and sinks again after theHajj period is over, and during that time it gives water to over a
million people each year, and all the more extraordinary since the
Hajj time moves throughout the year with the movement of the
lunar calendar. This rite is performed moving at a firm pace which
increases in the middle stretch of the distance to a formalised
jogging run that in turn breaks down again to a swift walk. There is
a 'stop' when you get to Marwa from Safa, and a stop when you get
back to Safa from Marwa, and each time you hail the other hajjis
with the call 'Allahu akbar', as if to remind them in their flight.
When the hajji begins his Sa'ee, he joins an already moving bank
of people between the two rocks, so that the stream of people
between the two Way-marks is endless. As you fall into that sea of
activity rushing from here to there and from there to here, and the
ocean of faces washes past you, some seen again and again, others
seen once and for all, the rhythmic running from a place to a place
takes on the impulse of activity that has governed all one's life of
forgetfulness. All the struggle and fretfulness of existence, all the
coming and going, becomes condensed into these seven terrible
flights from A to B and from B to A. Seven times is enough for the
whole series in the life of one to be exposed to one's palpitating
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heart.
It can be seen how simple and profound the rites of the Hajj are.
There are the first two in outline: a circle and a straight line. It is
also clear to the Hajji that the Sa'ee is about his existence and theTawaf is about Allah's reality and the slave's non-existence. The
Shaykh al-Akbar expresses it thus:
The man whose vision is veiled draws a straight line.
The man in Hayrah draws a circle.
Here he describes the tawaf that opened him to the knowledge of his 'Makkan Revelations':
When I reached Makka of the blessings and the source of
dwellings spiritual and physical, I was constantly engaged in
doing tawaf of His Ancient House. While I practised the tawaf
I said: 'Subhan'Allah, Al-hamdulillah, Allahu akbar and La
ilaha ila'llah.' Sometimes I kissed it and sometimes I touched
it, and sometimes I did only what was required. When I was atthe Black Stone I unexpectedly came upon an evanescent
youth, a silent speaker, neither alive nor dead, composite-
simple, enveloped-enveloping. When I saw him doing tawaf of
the House with the tawaf of the living around the dead, I
realised its reality and its metaphor, and I knew that the tawaf
of the House is like the prayer on the funeral corpse. Suddenly
he snatched me from myself and overpowered me. He spoke tome and said: 'Look at the secret of the House before it escapes
and you will see what pride it derives from those who have
been guided and do tawaf of its stones.' As I watched them I
saw it glowing as he said. Then he informed me of the degree of
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that youth and his freedom from where and when. Once I
knew his degree and his stopping-place and saw his place in
existence and his state, I kissed his right hand and wiped the
sweat of inspiration from his brow and said to him: 'Look atone who wishes to live in your company and desires to be close
to you.' So he indicated to me with gesture and riddle that he
preferred not to speak to anyone except by sign Š
So I fainted and he took hold of me – when I recovered from
swooning and my flesh was still trembling from fear, he knew
that the knowledge had arrived Š so I said to him: 'Tell me
about some of your secrets so that I may be among yourscribes,' and he said: 'Look at the articulations of my nature
and in the organisation of my form, and you will find what you
asked about engraved on me. For I am not one who speaks nor
is addressed. My knowledge extends only to myself, and my
essence is not other than my names. I am the knowledge and
the known and the knower. I am Wisdom, the work of
Wisdom, and the Wise.' Then he said to me: 'Do tawaf aroundmy footsteps and contemplate me with the light of my moon in
such a way as to find from my nature what you will write
about in your book Š'
Had it not been that He did not bid farewell to what my reality
necessitated and that my Path had reached Him, I would not
have found obtainment of His spring, nor inclination to His
knowledge. For that reason I returned to the end, and for this
reason, He returns. So put the compass at the opening of the
circle with the union of the end of its existence to the dot of
beginning, and so connect the last matter to the first. Its after-
endless-time is attached to its before-endless-time. So there is
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nothing but continuous existence and established going-on
witnessing Š
The goal is not obtained except by going on the Path Š
Then He said to me: 'This is My House here which signifies the
Essence, and the courses of the tawaf are in the degree of the
seven Attributes, the Attributes of Perfection, not the
Attributes of Majesty, because they are the Attributes of union
to you and interaction. So there are seven courses for seven
Attributes, and the Ancient House indicates the Essence. Look
at the angel with you doing tawaf, and who is standing at yourside Š This Ka'ba of Mine is the heart of existence, and My
Throne is the defined body of this heart, and neither of them is
wide enough for Me. Do not say about Me what you say about
them. My House which does contain Me is your indicated
heart, lodged in your witnessed body. The circlers of your
heart are the secrets. They have the degree of your bodies in
their tawaf of these stones... I am the Great, the Self-Exalted!
Limit does not limit Me, and neither the master nor the slave
know Me. Divinity is purified, so it is transcendent beyond
comprehension, and so it may be ranked with nothing. You are
the I! I am the I! So do not seek Me in yourself for you will
only gain weariness! So do not seek Me outside of yourself, or
you will end Me! Do not leave off My Quest, or else you will be
untouched. Seek Me until you Meet Me, and you will be
exalted! But have courtesy in the quest. Distinguish between
Me and you, for you do not see Me, but you only see your own
nature, so remain in the quality of communication. Be a slave!
Say it is impossible to perceive – beyond the obtainment of
perception. In that you will be freed, and you will be ennobled,
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and true.'
So I entered the House of the Hijr with the Angel and he put
his hand on my chest and said: I am of the seventh degree of
capacity to embrace the secrets of being and the secrets of
existence, of particular essences and place. The Truth created
me as a piece of the Light of Hawwa (Eve) in her pure state Š
He revealed through myself a rider of high station on a three-
legged mount. He bent his head towards me and lights and
darknesses expanded and he inspired in my heart all beings,
and he rent my earth and my sky, and informed me of all my
names. So I knew myself and other-than-me distinguishedbetween my good and my evil, and differentiated between my
Creator and my realities. Then the Angel went from me,
saying: 'You know now that you are the presence of the Angel,
so prepare for revelation and the arrival of the Messenger.'
We have arrived at the final phase of the matter. We have
examined the existence of the Universe as a Divine self-
manifestation, a series of endless tajalliyat, filled with manifest and
hidden wonder and majesty, all of it beauty. There remains one
more dimension to our picture if it is to be complete. So far we
have examined the creation-picture in terms of structure as if it
were static, but now we must reconnect this creation-patterning to
what we had discovered about the vibrant and dynamic nature of
existence in its shimmering and moving activity. We are at the
door of the secret of creation, the breath of life – the breath of the
Merciful.
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The Science of the Moment
The Companion, Abu Huraira, may Allah have mercy upon
him, said: 'I carried two bags from the Messenger, may Allah
bless him and grant him peace – I have unfolded one of them to
you – had I unfolded the other, this throat would have been
severed from me.'
Before we examine the dynamic nature of the Universe, let us look
at the description of the coming into existence of the myriad forms
that is used in the Wisdom-teaching from the Messenger
Muhammad, peace be upon him. What we will have to grasp in
this picture is the relation between the realities and the forms – as
we have already indicated, the former is dependent on the latter,
but the latter implies the former. To talk of one preceding the other
is valid in description and in the realm of meaning and
clarification, but not otherwise. Up until recently, all the revealed
teachings, that is, all the earlier 'Islams', which, although decayed
and without centre, still held to a vision of how the Universe came
into being, were dismissed as 'pre-scientific' as if we now had a
'factual' picture of how-it-is. While the best scientists have never
suggested or accepted this mythology by which they have
'explained' existence, the mass-education view, and that of many of
the true scientists' less intelligent followers, has been to look on
existence as a thing explained. Our own time has seen a complete
collapse of the evolutionary theory and in its collapse, even before
the rubble has been cleared, we recognise just how much personal
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projection was going on under the guise of an illusory objectivity.
Men were describing existence as how they thought it should be
rather than as it was. That they had observed an undoubted
hierarchical fanning out of structural forms so bedazzled them they
insisted on its taking place in a step-by-step process of minute
change over millennia. That life-forms were not processed in the
same way as the early horse and cart, giving way to faster and
more efficient kinds of transport through steam to electric mono-
rail system, was outside their own personal and parochial view of
reality at the end of the 19th Christian century.
It had always been to those pseudo-scientists, and more so to the
people they 'educated' in the rather forbidding and authoritarianedifices they built to honour their own knowledge, a matter of
some scorn that these 'mythological' descriptions of how things
came into being began with the creation of the human being and
then everything fell into place around it. They smiled at worlds on
elephants which stood on tortoises, and they shrugged away as
primitive a world of Angels and Celestial Pens and Preserved
Tablets. They were so clever – they 'knew' that there was no large
cosmic pen in the sky and that the air was not populated with lots
of feathered creatures with wings looking like the imaginings of
the simple-minded Giotto. Of course, the people of the Path never
imagined this either and would have been enormously amused that
these gentlemen should spend such a lot of time disputing a picture
that they had never held. Yet precisely the kind of inner seeing that
this language of Angels and Pens demands was to be the kind of
understanding that the serious scientists were more and more being
called upon to make in the formulation of their models and
theories. The knowledge they gained forced them to a language of
paradox and bewilderment that prompted one modern physicist to
find parallels to their new thinking in the Zen Masters' use of the
'ungraspable' koan, or riddle. The Shaykh al-Akbar has indicated in
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his writings that enigma and riddle are essential when talking about
the reality of things coming into being.
The important matching we will find in this description is between
the microcosm of man and the macrocosm of the Universe. Theinter-connectedness of man's place in the Universe to the basic
structure of forms and events which make up our world, this is the
pivot of our doctrine of wahdat al-wujud, oneness of existence.
In a Hadith-Qudsi, Allah-ta-ala addressed the Messenger saying:
'Oh Muhammad, were it not for you, I would not have created the
heaven nor the earth, nor the Garden nor the Fire.' In the beautiful
phrase of the Shaykh al-Akbar, 'In the Universe, it is man that isintended.'
We have already said that the first created thing was the Light of
Muhammad, blessings and peace be upon him. This is the meaning
of the Messenger saying: 'I was a Prophet while Adam was
between water and clay.' It must be remembered that the
perspective of the Wisdom-teaching sees him, blessings of Allah
and peace be upon him, as being the Seal of the Messengers, andtherefore the perfection and totality of what man is, for while he is
the First Manifestation from the Lights of the Essence, he is also
the last to manifest his perfection among the prophets. So he has
firstness and lastness. He is the perfect image of image, and the
meaning of form. Now another name for this Light that we call the
Nuri-Muhammad is the Universal Self, and another is the Pen. The
Pen is a mithal for the dynamic of the creative process. The first
existent thing in emanation was the Preserved Tablet of Forms.Thus the Pen 'wrote' on the Tablet all the forms and form/events of
all creation from the beginning to the end, these two things,
beginningness and endness, only coming into being with the
manifestation of form which implies space and therefore in our
understanding, also time.
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The mithal of the Pen's writing on the Tablet is that of semen
activating in the womb. From this come the six genera, six being
the perfect number, as we saw in the science of the letters. This is
the meaning of the creation-process taking six 'days'. The six
genera are Angels: Jinn: Inanimates: Plants: Animals – and the
setting and ordering of the Kingdom: Man, the Khalif of the
Reality. When the world is manifest, Allah is hidden. And so man
is put on earth as His Khalif, the one who stands in, during the
absence of the King. Man himself, by this meaning, is a barzakh.
Allah created the seven heavens and the seven earths. Then in the
manifest he gave each heaven a planet, 'each swimming in its
sphere.' (36.40). With the manifestation of the spheres, and thatmeans matter, time comes into being. So time is designated by the
first sphere, and also by the movement from the first sphere to the
second, for time is itself the movement of the space, or vice-versa.
With this creation of the spheres came the manifestation of the four
matrices air, earth, fire and water. In our system the sun's
movement gave us 'night' and 'day'. The night is a father and the
day is a mother – each father connects to a planet and each mother
connects to an element, as the elements connect to the planets in
influence and identity. The movements of the spheres and the
swimming of the Lights accord with the swirling movements of the
waters in the womb. The four matrices of air, earth, fire and water,
correspond to the four wives a man is permitted in the Shari'a –
thus a balanced and fully developed man would be held in perfect
harmony by his purification through these unions.
Time, starting with the first sphere, begins with the whole creation-
process and so time in its movement is the emergence of the Light
of Muhammad, peace and blessings of Allah be upon him. Of time
he said: 'Time revolves like its form on the day that Allah created
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it.' With this Light comes the Balance. AL-MIZAN. Its meaning is
the justice and harmony of all creation and, therefore, of
time/space and therefore of us and events. It is the meaning of the
Garden and the Fire, of the balance between the matrices. It is what
was called in the ancient Tao-form of Islam in China, yin/yang. It
is the secret of the contrary Names. It is what we are born and die
on, and which turns our acts and intentions into realities to be
weighed on the Day of the Balance. The Messenger's nature, being
the embodiment of the creation principle, is hot/wet, for that is
from the power of the other world. Thus knowledge is greater in
Islam in its final form than in its previous forms which were under
the dominance of cold/dry. That is why this community comes last
and translates all the knowledges of previous communities. This is
the meaning of the laughter of the Buddhist Masters, for they have
dry/cold but do not have hot/wet which would give them the
wisdom of tears. The Messenger's du'a was, 'Oh Lord, reward me
with a weeping eye,' and his warning was, 'If you knew what I
knew, you would laugh little and weep much.' Weeping is the
outward sign of freedom from fear, and the indication of inward
balance and complete serenity.
Man himself stands at the heart of this cosmic activity by virtue of
his being both gatheredness of all the forms, a summing up of the
creational process, and the highest complexification of the life-
energy. He is the perfection of the Balance in his form when it is
perfect, that is, in the Messengers and Prophets, of whom as we
noted there have been 124,000 since the beginning of creation. He
is – in his complete form – the pivot of existence. There remains
on the Earth always the embodiment of the Nuri-Muhammadiyya –
the first of the awliya, and while prophecy is closed and finished
with the Last Messenger, he nevertheless is the embodiment and
the transmitter of the Light of the Messenger. For the whole
Wisdom-process is nothing but this transmission. This Light is
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poured out in a descending cascade through a series of perfected
ones and they are to the organism of the Earth as the breath-system
is to the purification of the blood in the body. The disappearance of
these living men, these awakened men, would mean the death of
the planet. And what man is to the Earth, the Earth is to the Galaxy
and size has nothing to do with these matters.
From among the Salihin of the submitted-ones, there are 300 elect
in perfection of humility, poverty, love and awe – the Nuqaba, or
chieftains. From these there are 40 Masters, men who have
achieved the goal and are most complete in knowledges and
Stations – the Nujaba, or nobles. From these there are the Highest
and most unified degree of the human species: the 7 Abdal, orsubstitutes. This word has various implications, but one of them is
the essential spiritual capacity of these men to manifest both in
their actual place and elsewhere at the same time by recreating 'a
substitute' manifestation, which is not in any manner ghostly, but
simply a being in two places at the same time. The Messenger,
who embodied and surpassed all the stages of the awliya, by that
token 'contained' all the stages of the Way in himself. He
manifested this capacity on the night of the Miraj, when he was
both in his bed in Madinah, and at the Rock in Jerusalem. The
Shaykh al-Kamil says of them in his Diwan:
The path of the Abdal, dedicated to Allah, is:
hunger, sleeplessness, silence, isolation and dhikr.
From the Abdal come the 4 Awtad or pillars, and from them are
the 2 Imams, and one of these is the Qutb, the pivot of existence,the stillness at the heart of the vast cosmic activity.
In the science of states we saw how everything in the earth is
moving from state to state. In the words of the Shaykh al-Akbar:
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So the world of time moves in everything, and the world of
breath moves in every breath, and the world of tajalli moves in
every tajalli. The reason for that is His word: 'Every day He is
upon some activity.' (Qur'an 55.29).
All this restless cosmic activity we experience as the interaction of
solid forms, existence to us is viscous, opaque, and we imagine
'real' because solid. The forms are 'kathif', thick, dense, while
Allah, may He be exalted, describes Himself as Latif, subtle,
gracious, sparse, delicate. As we understand it, the Latif is in all
things, so that while we specify 'dog' and 'cat' and 'stone' and so on,
we are aware that the essences of the existent things are in reality
one essence. While this is not that in regard to form, we claim that
this is the same as that in regard to substance. Now we must see
that in a unitary picture this insideness and outsideness of things is
no longer tenable. It must mean that the substance itself is nothing
other than the Absolute Reality. We are now also in a position to
say that the substance is not kathif but on the contrary is sparse,
subtle, and latif itself.
Have we then, despite ourselves, arrived at the pantheism the
Masters of the Way so categorically deny? It is at this point that we
must examine the last doctrine that completes the creation view of
the Sufis.
It is called AN-NAFAS AR-RAHMANIY, the Breath of the
Merciful. There is a Hadith Qudsi, where Allah-ta-'ala declared: 'I
was a hidden treasure, and I longed to be known. So I created the
Universe in order to be known.' In the Qur'an the Name of the Lord
of the Universe is Allah, and equated with it is the Name the
Merciful. This connects the Mercy explicitly with the Essence.
This Hadith Qudsi indicates the movement that comes from the
overflowing Mercy of the Divinity in its utterly Hidden Perfection
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out into the creation of manifest energies. This overflowing of
Light from the Essence, which is the movement of Mercy, is
likened to a held breath which then bursts out and flows over
everything. It is as if the held breath were the Names in the Divine
Ranks before manifestation, and the breathing-out were the coming
into existence of the multiple forms:
His Command, when He desires a thing, is to say to it, 'Be! – it
is.' (Qur'an 36.84)
Note that this is not some magical fiat from some exterior Being.
We have established that He cannot be associated with the universe
of forms, and that at the same time He governs the world from theinside of the world, through the source-forms. He says 'Be' to it. It
is there in the realm of source-form. It brings itself into being and
actuality according to the potentiality of the locus and the source-
form unity. We then say that the 'breathing out' of the Command is
the coming into phenomenal reality of the thing, from the Hidden
to the Manifest. It follows that the breath itself is a substance.
Nature precedes what comes from her, but Nature is no other than
the Breath of the Merciful. So, as the breath spreads through all the
forms both physical and luminous, its life-giving, form-giving
activity takes place. So everything in Nature is of the Breath, and
this includes not only the physical, but the Angelic, for the
creational reality is dependent on the four matrices for existence.
So knowledge of the world is knowledge of this Divine Breath.
The coming into existence of the Universe from non-existence into
existence is an action, through the Divine Command there is a
movement from repose into the activity of creation. This
movement, this outflowing – we call love. This is the longing
referred to by Allah-ta-'ala in the Hadith Qudsi which describes the
Creation. Since the movement is love itself, the world also loves to
regard itself in existence, for its very existence is a love activity.
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Now just to make more vivid in our minds what this activity is –
and also to establish the truth of what is being described, let us
look at how the nuclear physicists themselves regard the process of
existence within the disciplines and limits of their science. Again,
this is not to 'prove' anything – Wisdom-teaching has no proofs but
experience – but simply to clarify what is being said by the
vividness of the physicists' grasp of the baffling nature of the
creational process. Here is a description of the constant movement
of matter by high-energy physicist, Fritjof Capra:
The 'restlessness' of matter implied by the uncertainty
principle is a fundamental feature of the atomic and subatomic
world. In this world, matter is never completely quiescent, but
always in a state of motion. The molecules in solids move and
vibrate due to their thermal energy. The nuclei of the atoms
inside the molecular structure vibrate because they are
confined to this structure. The electrons in the atomic shells
are bound to a region of similar size, but being much lighter
than the nuclei they move much faster and we have seen that
they achieve, in fact, enormous velocities. And finally, as weshall see, the protons and neutrons inside the nucleus are
confined to an extremely small volume by the strong nuclear
forces and consequently they race about with fantastic
velocities.
We see that modern physics pictures matter not at all as inert,
but as being in a continuous dancing and vibrating motion
whose rhythmic patterns are determined by the molecular,
atomic and nuclear structure.
Addressing the I.C.A. in London the same physicist said:
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At the beginning of our century, the experimental investigation
of atoms gave sensational and totally unexpected results. Far
from being the hard and solid particles they were believed to
be since antiquity, the atoms turned out to consist of vastregions of empty space in which extremely small particles – the
electrons – moved around the nucleus. With quantum
mechanics – the theoretical foundation of atomic physics – as
worked out in the 1920's, it became clear that even the sub-
atomic particles, i.e. the electrons and the protons and
neutrons in the nucleus, were nothing like the solid objects of
classical physics. The sub-atomic units of matter are very
abstract entities. Depending on how we look at them, they
appear sometimes as particles, sometimes as waves.
This dual aspect of matter was extremely puzzling and gave
rise to most of the koan-like paradoxes which led to the
formulation of quantum mechanics. The picture of a wave
which is always spread out in space is fundamentally different
from the particle picture which implies a sharp location. Theapparent contradiction between these two pictures was solved
in a completely unexpected way which gave a blow to the very
foundation of the mechanistic world-view, to the concept of the
reality of matter. At the sub-atomic level, matter does not exist
with certainty at definite places, but rather shows 'tendencies
to exist'. These tendencies are expressed, in quantum
mechanics, as probabilities, and the corresponding
mathematical quantities take the form of waves. This is why
particles can be waves at the same time. They are not 'real'
three-dimensional waves like sound or water waves. They are
'probability waves', abstract mathematical quantities with all
the characteristic properties of waves which are related to the
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probabilities of finding the particles at particular points in
space and at particular times.
At the sub-atomic level, then, the solid material objects of
classical physics dissolve into wave-like patterns of
probabilities. But this again seems paradoxical. How can the
physical world consist of mere probabilities? Well, it turns out
that the patterns, ultimately, do not represent probabilities of
things, but rather, probabilities of correlations. A careful
analysis of the process of observation in atomic physics has
shown that the sub-atomic particles have no meaning as
isolated entities, but can only be understood as correlationsbetween the preparation of an experiment and the subsequent
measurement. This implies, however, that the Cartesian
division between the I and the world, between the observer and
the observed, cannot be made while dealing with atomic
matter. In atomic physics we can never speak about nature
without, at the same time, speaking about ourselves, or – as
Heisenberg has put it – 'Natural Science does not simplydescribe and explain nature, it is a part of the interplay
between nature and ourselves.'
Quantum mechanics thus reveals a basic oneness of the
Universe. It shows that we cannot decompose the world into
independently existing smallest units. As we penetrate into
matter, nature does not show us any isolated basic building
blocks, but rather appears as a complicated web of relations
between the various parts of the whole, and these relations
always include the observer in an essential way.
Fritjof Capra goes on to expound the Relativity Theory of Einstein
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relating it to the picture he had given of Quantum Mechanics:
Relativity theory, so to speak, has made these patterns come
alive by revealing their intrinsically dynamic character. In a
'relativistic' description of the sub-nuclear world, i.e. in a
description which takes relativity theory into account, space
and time are fused in a four-dimensional continuum, and this
means that we have to visualise the particles as four-
dimensional entities in space/time. Their forms are thus forms
in space and time. The particles are dynamic patterns which
have a space aspect and a time aspect. Their space aspect
makes them appear as objects with a certain mass, their timeaspect makes them appear as processes involving a certain
energy, and the two are related by Einstein's famous equation
E=mc2.
Relativity theory thus gives the constituents of matter an
intrinsic dynamic aspect. It shows that the activity of matter is
the very essence of its being. The objects of the sub-nuclear
world are not only active by moving around very fast, they
themselves are processes. The being of matter and its activity
cannot be separated. They are but different aspects of the sub-
nuclear space-time reality.
Before continuing this beautifully lucid description of existence,
let us return to our sufic perspective of the Breaths of the Merciful.
In one chapter of the Shaykh al-Akbar's 'Seals of Wisdom', he
makes a long analysis of a passage in Qur'an that recounts the
meeting of the Prophet Sulayman, peace be upon him, and the
Queen Bilqis, or Sheba. It is presented as the meeting between a
woman who was a great heirophant of knowledge coming to her
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goal in encountering the Prophet who could complete her
knowledge by opening to her the secret of Unitary teaching. The
Prophet had sent a letter to Bilqis saying: 'In the Name of Allah,
the Merciful, the Compassionate, rise not up against me, but come
to me in surrender.' (27.30-31). Her followers suggested to her that
they should fight, but she declared, 'Kings, when they enter a city,
lay waste to it.' (27.34). To the People this means in one of its
meanings, the annihilation of the nafs on the arrival of the King of
Creation, but Allah knows best.
The Prophet, on hearing that the Queen was coming to visit him,
asked that her throne be brought to him so that on her arrival he
could show it to her and thus demonstrate the superior nature of hisknowledge.
An Ifrit of the jinn said: 'I will bring it to you before you rise
from your place: I have strength for it and I am to be trusted.'
Said he who possessed knowledge of the Book, 'I will bring it to
you, before even your glance returns to you.'
...
He said: 'Disguise her throne for her, and we shall behold
whether she is guided or if she is of those who are not guided.'
So when she came it was said: 'Is your throne like this?' She
said: 'It seems the same.' And we were given the knowledge
before her, and we were in surrender, but what she served
apart from Allah barred her, for she was of a people whocovered-up. It was said to her: 'Enter the pavilion.' But when
she saw it, she supposed it was a spreading water, and she
bared her legs. He said: 'It is a pavilion smoothed of crystal.'
She said: 'My Lord, indeed I have wronged myself, and I
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surrender with Sulayman to Allah, the Lord of the worlds.'
(Qur'an 27.39-44)
Commenting on the superiority of the sage over the jinn, the
Master says:
This superiority is by the degree of time. For the return of the
glance to the looker is quicker than rising from one's place
because the movement of the eye in perceiving what it
perceives is quicker than the movement of the body when it
moves. So the time in which the eye moves is the same time
which connects it to the object in spite of the distance betweenthe viewer and the object. So the time of the opening of the eyes
is the time of its connection to the heaven of the fixed stars. The
time of the return of its glance is the same as the absence of its
perception. Rising from one's place is not like that. It does not
have this speed. So Asaf ibn Barkhiya was more perfect in act
than the jinn. The source-form of the word that Asaf ibn
Barkhiya spoke was the source-form of the action at one and
the same time. So Sulayman, peace be upon him, saw at the
same time the throne of Bilqis 'settled before him' so that one
must not imagine that he perceived it while it was in its place
without moving. With us, displacement does not exist by the
unity of time, but it is a going into non-existence and return to
existence, inasmuch as the only one conscious of that is the one
who has gnosis of it. It is His word, may He be exalted, 'But
they are in uncertainty as to the new creation.' (50.15). Not amoment passes them but that they see what they saw. Since it is
as we have mentioned, the time of its non-existence, i.e. the
absence of the throne from its place, is the same as its existence
with Sulayman from the renewal of creation by breaths. No-
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one knows this power, rather, man is not aware of it from
himself, that it is in each breath. It was not, then it was. Do not
say that and imply a delay, for that is not true. This demands a
real knowledge of Arabic, – for example, the poet says: 'Hebrandished the Rudaini spear and it shook.' The time of
brandishing of the spear is undoubtedly the same as the time of
the shaking of the thing brandished. There is no gap. It is the
same with the renewal of the creation with breaths. The time of
the non-existence is the same as the time of the existence of the
mithal. So the question of the moving of the throne of Bilqis is
one of the most difficult of problems except for the one who has
gnosis of what we have mentioned. So Asaf did not have any
merit in the matter except for the transposition of the renewal
of the assembly of Sulayman, peace be upon him. So the throne
was not moved from a place to a place, nor did it rise above the
earth, nor break the laws of space, for the one who
understands what we have mentioned ...
When Bilqis saw her throne, and she knew the distance and theimpossibility of moving it in that space of time, she said: 'It
seems the same,' and she spoke truly through what we have
mentioned of the renewal of creation by amthal [pl. of mithal].
It is it. It was true, just as you are the same at the time of your
renewal as you were in 'past time'.
The Master notes that in her surrender to how-it-is, she surrendered
to the Lord of the Universe, placing herself along with Sulayman,peace be upon him, as part of the creation. So their Islam was the
same:
This is how we are on the Straight Path which the Lord, may
He be exalted, is on, for our forelocks are in His hand, and it is
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impossible for us to separate from Him. So we are with Him
implicitly and He is with us by open declaration. He said, may
He be exalted, 'He is with you wherever you are,' (57.4), and
we are with Him as He takes us by our forelocks. So He, mayHe be exalted, is with Himself wherever He goes with us on the
Path. So everyone in the world is on a Straight Path, and it is
the Path of the Lord, may He be praised and exalted. It is this
that Bilqis learned from Sulayman, so she said: 'To Allah, the
Lord of the Worlds,' without referring to a particular world.
This teaching of the Breaths opens to us the dynamic nature of
existence. The creation is constantly in renewal – AL-KHALQAL-JADID – the ever-new-creation. This overwhelming vision of
creation as endlessly being destroyed and endlessly being renewed,
as never existing and never ceasing, is the vision of the seekers
before they in turn experience their own annihilation. The Shaykh
says:
This fire is the fire of love for the Light of the splendour of His
Face, which consumes all the determined forms and individualessences in the very midst of the ocean of knowledge of Allah
and true life. And this true life is of such a nature that
everything comes to life with it and yet is destroyed by it at the
same time. There can be no greater bewilderment than the
hayrah caused by the sight of drowning and burning with life
and knowledge, and simultaneous self-annihilation and self-
continuance.
Let us return to the description of the physicist. He had outlined
the new classical theory of how-it-is. He continued with a new
model of particular interest to us for the features which we will
immediately recognise. This is not offered as a proof, but as a
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clarification. The model about to be described is known as the
Hedron bootstrap model.
The basis of the bootstrap model is the idea that nature cannot
be reduced to fundamental entities, like fundamental building
blocks of matter, but has to be understood entirely through
self-consistency. All of physics has to follow uniquely from the
requirement that its components be consistent with one
another and with themselves.
This idea constitutes a radical departure from the traditional
spirit of basic research in physics which had always been benton finding the fundamental constituents of matter. At the same
time it is the culmination of the quantum mechanical
conception of particles as an interconnected web of relations.
But the bootstrap philosophy goes even further. It abandons
not only the idea of fundamental building blocks of matter, but
accepts no fundamental entities whatsoever – no fundamental
laws, equation, or principles. The only requirement is that
everything has to be self-consistentÉ
The idea of the bootstrap model is that everything in the
Universe is connected to everything else and no part of it is
fundamental. The properties of any part are determined, not
by some fundamental law, but by the properties of all the other
parts. Therefore, in order to really understand any
phenomenon we have to understand all the others. This isobviously impossible, and here physics and Eastern philosophy
take different attitudes.
The teaching of the Way is simple. It is enough that a man
understand himself to have understanding of all. He cannot have
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discreet knowledge of all the forms in the space/time continuum
since the 'beginning' to the 'end' as we already had noted, which is
what Dr. Capra is saying. What is intriguing is that it is here being
suggested that there are no discreet parts to know. However since
what follows remains the context of the model, there can be no
argument between us, for our concern is our own, and his is that of
the model. We nevertheless recall that the Shaykh al-Akbar had
said that if you make a model in the Universe you can in the end
only make a model of yourself. To continue:
What then is the picture of particles in the bootstrap model?
Well, it can be summed up in the provocative phrase: every
particle consists of all other particles. Like all other scientific
models, the bootstrap model can only be approximate, and its
main approximation consists of the fact that it describes only
certain kinds of particles, the so-called 'hedrons' or 'strongly
interacting particles'. These are particles like the proton and
the neutron which interact through strong nuclear force. In the
bootstrap model, then, all hedrons are composite structures
whose components are again hedrons. The essential feature of the model is the picture of the binding forces holding these
structures together. The forces between the constituent
particles are pictured as the exchange of other particles. This is
a general feature of sub-nuclear physics: the forces between
particles – i.e. their mutual attraction or repulsion – manifest
themselves as the exchange of other particles. This concept is
extremely hard to visualise. It is a consequence of the four-dimensional space/time character of the sub-nuclear world and
neither our intuition nor our language can deal with this image
very well, but it is crucial to the picture of the particles in the
bootstrap model. The constituents which make up, for
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example, a proton, are particles, but the forces which hold
them together are also particles, and therefore the distinction
between the constituent particles and the particles representing
the binding forces becomes blurred. The whole notion of anobject consisting of constituent parts breaks down.
Each hedron therefore plays three roles: it is a composite
structure, it may be a constituent of another hedron, and it
may be exchanged between constituents and thus constitute
part of the forces holding the structure together. Each particle
thus helps to generate other particles which in turn generate it.
The whole set of hedrons generates itself this way, or 'pullsitself up by its own bootstraps', which is the origin of the
model's name.
You will realise that this concept of every particle containing
all other particles is extremely hard to visualise. This is
because it is a relativistic concept. The hedrons are dynamic
space/time patterns which do not contain one another, but
rather 'involve' one another in a certain way which can be
given a precise mathematical meaning, but cannot easily be
expressed in words. The bootstrap model is a relativistic model
of the inter-connected web of relations which I have mentioned
before in connection with quantum mechanics.
At one point in 'The Makkan Revelations' the Shaykh refers to one
of the Qutbs of the world in ancient times, and of his knowledge of how things come into being. His name was the Qutb Mudawi'l-
Kulum and he said about matter:
The universe exists on what is between the circumference and
the dot, on ranks, and the smallness and greatness of their
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spheres. The one nearer to the circumference is wider than the
one which is inside it, and so its day is larger, its place wider,
and its tongue more eloquent. All things look at the point of
their essences: and the point, despite its smallness, looks atevery section of the circumference by its essence. So the
epitome is the circumference, and its epitome is the point, and
the opposite, so look!
In 'The Seals of Wisdom' the Master is even more explicit. He
says:
Every particle of the world is from the whole of the world.That is – every single particle is capable of receiving into itself
all the realities of all the single particles of the world.
The Qutb Mudawi'l-Kulum also said:
Man is the sum of all the 'flakes' of the world. And from man
to everything in the world is a flake extending from that flake.
There is nothing in the universe but that it has an effect inman, and man has an effect in it. And these flakes are light-
rays-of-light.
The focal point of this universal reality which is nothing else than
an endless fulgurating display of light upon light is man, not just
the species man, but man at his apogee, the Perfect Man, himself
Light and knowing himself to be Light, Al-Insanu'l-Kamil. The
word for man has a root NAS, meaning: 'to be shaken to and fro','to hang suspended': INSAN has a parallel meaning which is: 'the
pupil of the eye'. Man himself is a vibrating whirling activity of
energy in endless movement – he hangs suspended in the cosmos
on his small planet, and in the Unseen he hangs suspended between
the tremendous efflorations of form that make up the Fire and the
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Garden. At the same time he is the eye of the universe with which
his Creator contemplates His creation. He is a gathering-together
of all the forms, a resumé of the whole creational process from the
basic matrices up through the elements and plants to the highest
complexification of aspects. And so he is also a small universe,
just as the universe from what the Qutb said above, is nothing else
but Al-Insanu'l-Kabir, the Big Man. We are of course speaking
here in the language of the Sufis and not in the language of
ignorance and literalism. This does not lessen the veracity of the
assigning to the cosmos the name of the Big Man, it is simply that
literalist thinking is too primitive a method of reflection to grasp
these matters. The Perfect Man is utterly aware and awake,
permeated by all the Names and all the perfections of the Divine
Attributes.
The Shaykh al-Akbar said that the Prophet Ibrahim, peace be upon
him, is called al-Khalil, meaning the dear friend, because the word
derives from a root meaning 'permeated', and so the Divinity
permeates the existence of the form of Ibrahim – since this is what
He does with all His creation, it must mean that the special rank is
due to that penetration utterly absorbing his consciousness as well.
It is his awareness, knowledge, and direct taste of permeation
which marks him out as al-Khalil.
So he is man, both in-time and before-endless-time, a perpetual
and after-endless-time organism. He is the word which
discriminates and unites. The universe was completed through
his existence. He is to the universe what the face of the seal is to
the seal itself, for that is the place of the seal and thus the
signature which the King seals on his treasures. He named him
the Khalifa because of this, since he guards His creation as one
guards treasures with the seal. As long as the seal of the King is
on them, no one dares to open them without His permission. So
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He made him a Khalifa in safeguarding the universe, and it
continues to be guarded as long as this Perfect Man is in it. Do
you not see then, that when he disappears and is removed from
the treasury of this world, nothing of what Allah stored in itwill remain? What was in it will go out and each part will
return to its own part, and everything will be transferred to the
next world. Then he will be the seal on the treasury of the next
world for endless-time and after-endless-time.
To achieve this perfection is the meaning and goal of our journey –
fisabilillah – on the Way of Allah. 'The Way' is from the cluster
SBL – and it has no verbal root, but it indicates 'the road': 'a way':'a traveller': 'the Way of Allah': 'a necessity': – but its real meaning
is 'rain'. There is no more perfect mithal than this of true
submission and what it brings.
The goal we have said again and again is the annihilation of this
illusory particularity that limits and encases one in the shell of the
nafs. The opening of awareness expands the nafs until it recognises
that it is indeed the whole Universe, then beyond that is theshattering, destroying power of the Divine Majesty revealing that
all this splendour that is creation is of itself nothing, and there is
annihilation, the seeker is uncreated. He is undone. He was a knot
and the knot is untied, only the string remains, One, Timeless. The
three stages of awakening to the Unity and being snuffed out are
described in the 'Fanafillah' of the Diwan of the Shaykh al-Kamil:
Constantly cut through your illusion with a pure Tawhid to
Allah.
So the oneness of action appears at the beginning of dhikr of
Allah.
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And the oneness of Attributes comes from love of Allah.
And the oneness of His Essence gives going-on with Allah.
He describes the Unitary experience in his 'Minor Song':
My beloved gave me a drink of the purity of love,
and so I became the Beloved in every way.
He made me blind to myself so that I saw only Him,
and He destroyed my secret in themanifestations of the
Presence.
I shattered what was structured in me
and joined what was separate: by the isolation of Unity I
realised my Tawhid.
I attained my desires – directly to see His perfection and
to experience His reality in every meaning and form.
I tore down the illusion of my self's existence,
which is the greatest screen, and then I found Him, timeless,in every atom.
I made the Road my Wisdom-Guide as I approached
His Attributes, and my Lord revealed to methe secret of my
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wisdom.
So sometimes I see creatures as the manifestation of
Ahmad, and sometimes I see them as direct manifestations of Divine Power.
Sometimes my act of existing is obliterated by the sight of His
Active Existence,
and sometimesI see the Attributes appearing from Him,
And sometimes I withdraw from this metaphorical
existence (the world) into the Unity of a Truth unconnected
by shirk.
To anyone who withdraws into the Lights of the dhikr
of the Truth, creation is nothing but particles of dust in
space.
Sufism is not focussed on the goal of annihilation, for that is a gift
from the Lord to the slave. What is longed for is something even
more ravishing, hidden where fana is revealed, lasting where fana
is a lightning that strikes. If you like, it is beyond the goal, for
properly speaking, it cannot be a goal but merely what its nameimplies, BAQA, a going-on. Before we examine this final
condition of the seeker, let us look at the journey to the goal of
fana in its mithal-form in the Hajj. We have already spoken about
the rites of tawaf and sa'ee, but after these the pilgrim moves on to
the act of Hajj itself, 'Arafat. The Messenger said, 'Hajj IS 'Arafat.'
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It is a rite that takes man back to his origin, for 'Arafat is the
meeting point, the point of the reunion on earth of Adam and
Hawwa, peace be upon them. It is the source-point of the human
situation. And when the pilgrim arrives there what is the rite?
'Amr bin 'Abdallah bin Safwan quoted a maternal uncle of his
called Yazid bin Shaiban who said: 'We were in a place of
standing of ours at 'Arafat,' which 'Amr indicated was very far
away from where the Imam was standing, when Ibn Mirba' al-
Ansari came to us and told us he had brought this message for
us from Allah's Messenger: "Stand where you are, performing
your devotions, for you are conforming to an ancient practiceof your father, Ibrahim."' This is transmitted by Tirmidhi,
Abu Dawud Nasa'i, and Ibn Majah.
So the meaning of the Hajj and its reality lies in this 'moment', this
time at the source of life itself, and what the pilgrim does is stop.
Stand on 'Arafat – it was for this that the journey was undertaken.
Alone on a wide desert plain surrounded by a throng of others,
identical to yourself, bare-headed and draped in two white cloths –many there will be buried in these same cloths – you just come to a
halt – quite simply, exhausted, dazed, you stop. At that moment
there is absolutely nowhere to go.
You are there.
With Allah.
The journey is accomplished.
After that everything is purification and supplication.
You move down again to Makka performing a series of rites which
culminate in the return to Ka'ba for the farewell tawaf and the
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farewell stopping, the two raka's at the Maqam Al-Ibrahim, the
Station of Ibrahim. The three great rites of the Hajj are simply to
describe a circle, a straight line, and finally, a point. The Station of
Ibrahim, al-Khalil, is the Station of qurb, nearness: uns, intimacy.
The goal.
Shaykh al-Akbar describes the difficult journey of which Hajj is
the mithal:
The first degree is Islam, submission, and the last degree is
fana, annihilation in the ascent, and baqa, continuation in the
going-on. Between them is what remains. It is iman, ihsan,knowledge, pure oneness, tanzih, richness, poverty, humility,
might, colouring, establishment in colouring, and fana if you
are going-out, and baqa if you are going-on.
Dhu'n-Nun al-Misri, may Allah be pleased with him, was asked,
'What is the end of the gnostic?' He replied: 'When he is as he was
where he was before he was.'
Abu 'Abdallah an-Nibaji said:
Sufism is like the disease of cancer: in the first stages the
patient raves, but when the disease takes hold of him, it makes
him dumb.
Describing this return from fana to baqa in 'The Robe of Nearness'
(qurb) in his Diwan, Shaykh al-Kamil says:
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Invocation of the Beloved clothed us in beauty,
radiance, exaltation and joy.
In drawing near we threw off all restraint
and proclaimed the One we love to glorify.
The Beloved gave us a draught of love to drink
which forced all but the Beloved to vanish.
We saw created beings as pure particles of dust:
we saw the Lights openly appear.
After having been obliterated and annihilated in a
light-giving wine, we returned to the creation.
By an overflowing from Allah we were given going-on
and with patience we concealed the One we love.
How often have we looked on a Wayfarer so that
he has risen to the Stations of those whohave plunged into
the seas!
We have healed the hearts of what had taken possession
of them by sciences subtle in taste.
We concerned ourselves with something secretly,
and so it was, and the One we have chosen to love has come
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to us.
We heard a secret from the Presence of the Unseen:
'With us you are beloved, so be thankful.'
We have been given Idhn to quench the thirst of
whoever comes to us longing for the encounterand not
seeking for information.
If gifts are plentiful, still, avoid them and be poor.
Humble yourself to the People – and they will give you
the drink. Draw near to them and have no fear of disgrace.
Strip yourself of every knowledge and understanding in
order that you may obtain what the Great have obtained.
Offer up the nafs, oh lover of union,
and follow the Shaykh in what he has advised.
Witness the Truth in him, in essence and heart, annihilate
yourself in him, and you will be victorious through him.
He is the Light of the Messenger in every aspect,
and he is the medicine of hearts, openly and in secret.
So look to him and exalt him greatly.
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Go to him and be abject.
Blessings be upon the Prophet and his Companions
and whoever has directed people to follow him.
And peace, fragrant with musk and every scent,
and beauty and unrivalled sublimity.
So fana, although it is itself neither light nor darkness, but the basisof these, having no opposite, in its tremendous annihilating power,
releases a flood of lights and ecstasy. It is surrounded with
miracles and bliss, and often when it occurs people are drawn to
the recipient from the other side of the earth. It is so total in its
impact that a man must be guarded and guided, and insulated in
case the force of the experience, or let us say the cessation of
experience, is too much for him, and he remain forever afterwards
majdhub, drunk, mad-in-Allah. The science of our tariqa ishowever what our beloved Shaykh described in 'The Robe of
Nearness' – it is also the way of Shaykh Junayd, may Allah be
merciful to them both. For where the fana gives light, affirmation
and joy, the going-on is hidden, humble and obscure. The going-on
returns a man to creation for the service of his Lord. He is the last
man, not the first. He is the least of men and not the ruler. Our
Shaykh, may Allah cover him in mercy, signed himself, 'the slave
of the slaves', as we noted at the start of our journey, and theanswer of our Messenger, may Allah bless him and give him
peace, when he was called, was: 'Labbayk!' – 'At your service!' –
the call of the pilgrims on Hajj to their Creator.
Going-on – it is total and complete submission: it is in the words of
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the Shaykh Abu-Su'ud: 'What is it except for the five salat and
waiting for death?' It is outwardly to be dust and inwardly to be
gold. It is as Imam Junayd put it: 'To possess nothing and to be
possessed by nothing.' When you get to such a man there is
nothing to see. They are the Sadiqin, the Truthful Ones, for they
know how-it-is. Qur'an commands: 'Be with the Truthful Ones.'
(9.119). Asked how one would recognise them, the Messenger,
blessings and peace of Allah be upon him, replied: 'When you see
them they remind you of Allah.'
When you finally get to such a man, you have only arrived at your
own self. You have come to a mirror, for he has been polished
away – all that remains is a clear surface in which you mayrecognise your own light beyond all the illusory darkness that so
troubles you which so persistently seems to keep you from being at
peace. You get to him, the slave of your own nafs, your desires,
your fears, your past which you long to escape from, and your
future to which you long to escape, and you find yourself facing a
man who is both the slave of the instant – 'Abd al-Waqt', and the
worshipper of the instant – 'Abid al-Waqt', for that is all there is,
and it is Reality. 'Do not curse Time,' said the Messenger, blessings
and peace of Allah be upon him, 'for it is Allah.'
The Shaykh al-Akbar, the Reviver of the Din, and the illumination
of our tariqa, said:
Whoever knows that Allah is the same as the Path, knows the
matter for what it is. Then He, may He be glorified and
exalted, is travelling on it since there is no known except Him,
and He is the source-form of the Wayfarer and the Traveller,
so there is no knower except Him. He is you. So know your
reality and your Tariqa. The matter has been made clear to
you on the tongue of the interpreter if you but understand. It is
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the true tongue, so the only one who will understand is the one
whose understanding is Allah.
The End
Allah, bless and give peace to Muhammad and his family
according to the number of all created things.
Introduction to the Charts
The Charts which follow were prepared by me in 1975 while at
Berkeley, California. They were laid out with the help of Hajj
'Abdalaziz Redpath and the distinguished translators Hajj
'Abdalhaqq Bewley and his wife A'isha. They are quite simply and
somewhat crudely a graphic gloss of one chapter of the 'Futuhat al-
Makkiya' of the Shaykh al-Akbar Muhyid-din ibn al-'Arabi. Thesechapters have always been interpreted by that lamentable group of
orientalists who have had the arrogant illusion that they could
colonise the Shaykh al-Akbar in the same way that their political
counterparts had colonised the Islamic homelands. They have
made the same mistakes as those half-crazed rabbis who fell upon
these writings convinced that this was the esoteric heart of that
Muslim power which was so potent that it extracted from them a
slightly higher rate of taxation than the Zakat of the Muslims. Theysearched among the meanings of the letters, in vain, to escape what
was for them life's greatest punishment – to have money taken
from them – which was the opposite of their own philosophy.
From this they invented the Kabbala pretending it had ancient
levitical roots. Primitive esotericism of a cabbalistic nature was
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never the intention of this, the greatest of the Sufi Masters.
According to Ibn al-'Arabi there were two ways to apprehend the
universe. He had said: 'To understand Allah is easy, to understand
the universe is difficult.' He identified two basic ways in whichmodern human beings tried to make sense of the world. One was
by mathematics and the other by language, it must be remembered,
this was when mathematical evolution was in full spate and in the
hands of the great Muslim intellectuals, many of whom were his
contemporaries. From this it follows that there are two instruments
of comprehension. One is numbers and the other is letters. He saw
that while the equation or the calculation could have enormous
complexity, it in the end was dependent on a simple mathematicalmode. And so, in the same way, however complex the sentence, it
was dependent on the phoneme.
The Pythagoreans had stated that the numbers themselves had
meaning. The end result of that extraordinary imaging was nothing
less than to have created the foundation of the whole western
polyphonic musical tradition. Under the Pythagoreans numbers
became music. Shaykh al-Akbar declared in the same way that thesentence could not have meaning if the letter itself did not have
meaning. The effect of this was to map out an extraordinary pattern
of spiritual states and stations. Therefore we could say that the
study of the letters as having meaning led to complex Sufism,
which is the science of states and stations. That in itself would
seem an overwhelming achievement yet the matter goes much
further.
As a fruit of his visions Ibn al-'Arabi had stated: 'If you make a
model of the universe you will only arrive at making a model of
yourself.' One could clarify this by a modern reference. One of
today's most distinguished scientists and astrophysicists evolved a
theory of the universe dependent on the concept of the Black Hole,
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the Black Hole being an astral zone of anti-matter which sucked up
cosmic material into itself, thus making it non-existent. The author
of this vision of the universe himself suffered from an incurable
motor-neurone disease which involved the slow loss of peripheral
power and function in the limbs which inexorably moved in
towards the vital centres of life, rendering him speechless,
immobile and eventually dead. However persuasive the
mathematics, he had made a model of himself.
It was on this sufic understanding that Ibn al-'Arabi conceived, or
more correctly, perceived that the correct language for
understanding the cosmos was not mathematics but linguistics, that
the only understanding of the universal possibility was one whichbonded the slave into the cosmic process. Allah, glory be to Him,
in Qur'an, referring to the human self, states: 'The creation of the
worlds is greater, if you only knew.' (40.57) Put in crude modern
language he considered a cosmology or a cosmogony more
important than an astronomy. What he is recognising is that the
cosmic heavens are heavens, therefore they are an unseen
immediate reality as well as a distant perceived reality. While the
miserable Christian philosopher, Pascal, said that the infinite
spaces of the heavens frightened him, the radiant sufic master
understood that fear belonged to Allah, for his creation of the
worlds, and not to the worlds themselves. In his vision, all the
worlds are harmonic in the Pythagorean sense but are shot through
with meanings of the one who perceives them. Thus the first stage
of the journey of the seeker is to internalise the total cosmic
phenomenon inside himself.
'Abdalqadir al-Jilani, may Allah be pleased with him, said: 'Here is
a strange thing. The boat within the ocean! Look! The ocean is
within the boat!' False mysticism tries to eliminate the self. The
path of Tawhid is this, in the words of Moulay al-'Arabi ad-
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Darqawi: 'If the world disappears Allah has to appear'. In this
matter the universe is before the self as mirror – whatever is in the
self must appear in the universe. Thus the universe disappearing is
both a swallowing up of the world and at the same time the
i hi f th i Thi i th d t th i hi f th
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