Remembrance

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'Alā bi dhikri llāhi tatma'in al-qulūb'
'Surely, is it not through remembrance of Allah that hearts feel at peace?'

Recently in Karachi  I was blessed with the opportunity to join with a women's halaqa where I met with close friends and others for a dhikr. At the beginning I shared with everyone a message from my father, Shaykh Fadhlalla Haeri. The transcript follows:

"Our life on earth is a transition; it is a work in progress. It is for that reason nothing whatsoever will be enough for us. There is no situation or state in which anyone can say they are fully content. It is not true.

Nothing will ever be fully done or completed, either in terms of rationality or otherwise, unless you are at all times connecting to your soul, connecting your mind, memory, rationality and intentions with your soul - which is the nur of Allah. Your soul is the nur of Allah.

So until this resonance takes place you will be in a constant state of guilt, error, and self-reproach. If you remember that which is from beyond memory, from before memory - the Qur'anic ayah tells us 'Was there not a time where you were a thing not to be mentioned?'

There was a time when your ruh preceded the manifestation of your physical body. and this is who we are: we are a ruh. And this ruh is in exile within the body for a while.  And the purpose is for the so-called individual who is a mixture between past, mind, biography and the nur of Allah is to go back to world of lights.  If it is ready, it goes straight to the lights. If it is not it goes through a little bit of turbulence, whether it be hell or paradise.

So the purpose of salat, of dhikr,  of 'ibada, mostly come to the same point: of being completely - by will - thoughtless [without wandering thoughts], neutral, but present, light in the moment. Whatever we practise, even reading Qur'an, will take us along a terrain that goes up and down, and then into a zone where anything can happen anytime in an instant. It means the ruh is not caught in space and time. It is only the body that is caught in space and time, and the mind, and the memory - your biography.

So if you are not doing this work on yourself then you are not fulfilling the purpose for which you were created. And if you are doing it then you will reach a point where it is perpetual -  as the Qur'an describes, those who are constantly in their prayers ('al-ladhīna fī salātihim dā'imūn')."

Alhamdulillah!

Ramadan Closing In

Ramadan is closing in. This year this month has sped by. For the first time in years I've been away from home base, though in homes away from home - how blessed am I? The pekoras and samosas have followed me, however, as I've tried to ensure my son gets his daily quotas of desi iftar fare. The open plan layout of the house we are in reeks of fried food for hours afterwards, uncorrected even by wafts of cloying incense. After years of resistance to the semiotic symbolism of food, I have yielded to the perceived reality that food frames culture (or culture frames food?) and that culinary culture is one hugely influential anchorage of religion. If savoury spicy treats help keep my boy connected to his Deen, then so be it!

Shorter days and clement weather of a southern hemisphere's winter have reduced Ramadan wipeouts. I felt for my UK friends - heatwaves and long 18 hour days. May the reward be commensurate with the difficulty! No Ramadan rage threatened here. The dry, high atmosphere introduced me to a new form of 'Ramadan brain': the suction cup effect where your grey matter feels like its dessicating and sticking to your skull interior.

That most delicious gift of Ramadan, the fleecy blanket of inner silence, has also been gratefully received. At times the white noise percolates and penetrates the precariously porous and amorphous presence of consciousness - and peppers my vocabulary with purple passages (so who cares?) - but the sheer weight of the fast makes it easy to relocate the mute button on the inner monologue function. Can it really be so simple a matter of blood sugar? That its dilution beings inner peace? There's a hadith that alludes to this (sic., 'Shaytan flows through the sons of Adam as blood flows through his veins")... Or is it the special grace that comes from the sacralized intention of the fast ('Fasting is for Me and I am its reward'  - hadith qudsi)? After all, of all the obligatory ritual obligations due from a Muslim, fasting is the most invisible. Allah alone knows whether you are fulfilling its tenets or not.

The remembrance of God heightens, as with each breath conscious awareness of one's inner state increases. In Ramadan it becomes easier to give up and give in as one notices the degree of dependency one has on means - food, water, indulging desires, loose talk. Its quite humbling to see what a hold habits have on us. One evening, during some frisky dinner time banter, I got my hands slapped for wittering on in what really amounted to gossip, the type of gossip where irrelevant news about someone amounts to frivolous talk, even though no malice had been intended. What had been the purpose of my verbal drivel? Was I conscious of every word? No. Blood sugar had begun to rise once again and those satanic impulses started slithering around in me too. Shudder!

Ramadan is commonly thought of by Muslims as the month par excellence to devote to the Qur'an. Our Noble Book gets a thorough dusting as tradition encourages us to read a juz' a day. For me, quality over quantity is my preference - I can bask for hours in commentary and etymology, entering into an imaginarium of endless and deepening delight. The beauty and majesty of the Word of God once again thrills me with its multi-dimensionality, speaking in time, beyond time, allegorically, emphatically. All signs point to the one underlying truth: la ilaha illa'llah - there is no god but Allah. And it is the fast that enables us see this Oneness better than at any other time of the year. Day after day the ego-self's hold is weakened as a new strength starts to beam through. The soul's light starts to illuminate our beingness, and states of grace descend, moments of deep tranquillity stretching in all directions through one's innermost.

The last ten nights - according to an Islamic tradition offering us freedom from the fires of hell - coincide with the Night of Determination, or Destiny, or Power, the Laylat ul-Qadr. We are protected from knowing exactly which night it might have been that the Qur'an in its entirety was revealed to our beloved prophet Muhammad (S), merely that it is one of the odd numbered. Because of various traditions, the Shi'as prefer one of the earlier odd nights, the Sunnis preferring one of the latter ones. Those who would hedge bets try to observe them all. Regardless, the importance of this night is indicated in the chapter in the Qur'an by the same name, in which it is declared that it is 'better than a a thousand months'. One night...better than a thousand months?! However unfathomable, who isn't going to want to try to witness this event? The moment in time it alludes to is a deep and unending mystery.

The traditions of night vigil practised by Muslims in different ways helps push us out of our comfort zone. Even if it is but a portion of the night, the baraka of Ramadan ensures a benefit is gained. In Karachi those fortunate to belong to distinct communities have ready made opportunities to gather and pray together, whether to read 10 raka'at, or 100, whether to recite 99 Names of God or the 1000 of the incrementally intoxicating beautiful litany of Jawshan al-Kabir.

Already stripped and polished by the fast, staying up in prayer and contemplation loosens the subtle rust on the heart's mirror. Our sense of time is ruptured, and small portals into timelessness start to shiver into the landscape of consciousness. Through fasting of the senses, we can taste the feast of what lies beyond the limitations of these senses, an infinite, expanding universe that encapsulates time and space, precedes it and follows it and rolls it all up in its Presence.

Being & Belonging

I belong nowhere, therefore I belong everywhere. Smatterings of chattering in several languages help me shape-shift at will. I have a saffron-clad Swami to thank for learning as a child the taste of the company of the enlightened. I have the awliya' (awakened beings) of Islam to thank for compass-points on this journey. My heart is a light-detector - it works brilliantly if I keep it tarnish-free. So many relationships have helped me learn this art: my father (he is my 'country'), my mother, my grandmother, my husband, my kids, my siblings, my precious friends, the shayukh & the fuqara, strangers on a plane, the blind beggar two streets away, my saintly helpmates, my cat Sushi. Above all, the irresistible gravity of the soul's light is pulling, inviting me to fall...into oblivion's bliss.*

So much human endeavour is fraught with and fueled by the search for belonging and the need to belong. Books, films, poems, songs, art, buildings… thousands of items reek of this quest. We are all busy fulfilling this impulse and its sister impulse: the need to express this belonging.

Belonging is like a pendulum. It sweeps along an arc that is marked by many shades and textures that render each process of identification unique. Sometimes the markers that stick out are to do with place: the country of birth or childhood or chosen country of residence. Sometimes they are to do with profession: public service, creative arts, medicine etc. Other times they are to do with social constructs: class, tribe; or religious affiliation, or disability, or personality traits, or... The mind boggles at all the DNA permutations of how we envision our belonging.

As someone who has had her sense of belonging challenged by a peripatetic upbringing and lifestyle, I’ve been forced to look beyond static markers. Increasingly as I grow older, the signposts of belonging are becoming unmoored from time and place and circumstance. Even as the markers become more rarified – to do with beliefs, outlooks, affinities, self-deconstruction – they are still morphing ahead into undefined, fluid zones where the markers almost cease to have any form or relevance.

The Qur’an tells us ‘inna lillah wa inna ilayhi raj’iun’ —‘Surely we are Allah's and unto Him we return.' Often the only time we invoke this verse is when someone we know dies. Then it’s like, ‘Ah yes, there was nothing permanent or possessed about this life at all…’, and we sigh wistfully as the  hollowness of a life attached is revealed for the mirage it is. We keep forgetting, so we keep needing to remember.

When I read this verse I am reminded that we are more connected to the Unseen – the ‘alam al-ghayb – than we like to admit or realize. There’s a practical veiling of our consciousness that falls into place – a necessary one for without it likely as not we would unravel and lie there in a pulsating heap of cells, electrical impulses, whimsical fancies and viscera. The power of sight greedily gobbles up the chiaroscuro of waking life to persuade us that everything around us is real and huge and is filling us and our lives to bursting point. And this illusion is shored up further by the conditioned consciousness, individual and shared – all those neural pathways etched and grooved with commonly held truths and facts and factoids about our lives. But the blind lead the way in showing us that an immense world exists that cannot be ‘seen’. Through their other senses – often sharpened beyond the norm – they become more adept at perceiving nuances in tone, alterations in the vibrational energy of a room, maybe more prescient even.

When the power of insight starts to develop we can start to bridge the link between the Seen and the Unseen.  Not everything that we can feel has a form. Not every marker of identity can define us fully. We need to belong, but equally, we need to escape the confines of that belongingness.  We can begin to sense that belonging is not a goal with fixed goalposts. Through refinement of our inner senses we can tap into subtle resources that will begin to reveal to us a deeper awareness of belonging and identity. That can only come through switching off the outer senses. Quietening the mind. Turning inward. Becoming silent. Still. Plumbing the depths of invocation to a zone where no sound is recognized, though indeed a sound may be emitting. 

The Qur’an indicates the methodology or refining the inner senses in numerous places and ways: through reflection (tafakkur), through witnessing (tashahhud), through intellecting (ta’aqqul), and above all through remembering (tadhakkur).  ‘Ala bi dhikri’llah tatma’in al-qulub'  – ‘Is it not by the remembrance of Allah hearts are assured and made tranquil?’ This is the supreme technique to reach inner peace: remembrance of Source, of the One and Only Being. 

This by implication means abandoning attachment to any idea of belonging, certainly to any place or time, and more importantly, to the sway of the egotized self. Such invocation leads to an emptying of the small ‘self’, a stripping, a denuding of those illusory veils that enable us to play our part in the theatre of life. With the self made transparent, the soul’s light cannot but shine through.  If that itmi’nan is located – that reassurance, tranquility and peacefulness – then we return to Source as the Qur’an describes, ‘ya ayyatuha’n-nafsal-mutma’innah, irja’i ila rabbika radiyatan, mardiyyah’ – ‘Oh soul that is in inner peace, return to your Lord, pleased and well-pleasing.’

*After I had submitted this paragraph as a background story for IMOW, I was inspired to write the rest of this blog entry. Click here to find out more about this cool project International Museum of Muslim Women