Qaseeda "Qad Kafani Ilmu Rabbi" by Abdal-Hakim Murad

Sufis & Change-science

"Changing souls is the ikstisaas/specialization of Sufis."

-Abdal-Hakim Murad

Is disorder is more efficient than order

Have you ever observed that many bsuy, working people, who are really competent and intelligent, have their study rooms, offices, etc., full of disorder, almost as chaotic as Pakistani society? Do you think it is negative and inefficient to have disorder rule over one's living place(s)? i feel this, others may relate to it, that disorder is a good friend of mine. It does not bother me, rather it helps me by saving my time which would have been consumed in establishing the order, which never stops to diminish. Disorder is natural to happen, it'd take place, look what entropy says, but can it be really more productive than having order in 'working places'? But, on the other hand, our environment shapes very much what we do, it affects our 'actual' behavior profoundly. As per Shaykh Abdal-Hakim Murad, a Muslim's soul has to be at ease with its environment. Secondly, if you want not to be distracted with other things while studying a book, for example, you should not have other books lying open on the same table, other distractions (except drugs in this case) must not be easily accessible to you so that you may read the book with focus. I've posted this little post on some other places as well, but I've not been much satisfied with the comments.

I picked up this idea from a review published in DAWN Books & Authors on a book written in praise of disorder.

Qasida Burda Shareef by Muhammad Al-Husyan

Wanted to share this recitation of Burda Shareef by Muhammad Al-Husyan for many days. if you want an introduction to what Burda is all about, and more importantly, its significance for Islamic world, of which many, many Muslims are ignorant, watch the second clip.



Introducing the Burda of Imam Al-Busiri

Muhasaba

Now-a-days, there's a ballyhoo going over in Pakistan over NRO case in high judiciary. NRO is basically, from my understanding, a contract of jhaliyya (ignorance), that Arabs before Prophet's time used to make, which let's rich people in this country do whatever they want and punishes poor people only. But judiciary of ours seems to be no more a judiciary of jhaliyya. It has re-opened all previous cases of rich and powerful people involving all types of corruption which were thought to be buried by NRO contract b/w whoever.

Yet people among our ranks rhetorically say, "Everywhere people are dying in blasts. There's so much fear and poverty, and amongst all this mayhem they've opened NRO cases. What nonsense!" Someone beautifully replied by saying, "Would terminating NRO case bring more peace and security at all?" Obviously not, they'd say. In our opinion, it more necessary than ever to end all kinds of jhaliyya from our society. If we want to move forward, Abdal-Hakim Murad tells us what we really need to be doing:

"Muhasaba: you will not move forwards until you look backwards."

Source.

Switching on TV

"To switch on a television is to acknowledge one’s own lack of refinement."

Abdul-Hakim Murad.

Read more of his contentions here.

Sunna & The condition of Modern Society

"When we take on the Sunna, and reject flawed patterns of behaviour which have been shaped and guided by the ego and by fantasies of self-imagining, we declare to our Creator that we accept and revere the profound revelation of human flourishing exampled by the Best of Creation. Every act of the Sunna which we may successfully emulate declares that our role model is the man who had no ego, and to whom Allah had given a definitive victory over the forces of darkness. Modernity holds out lifestyle options centred on the self, and on the lower, agitated possibilities of the human condition. Every word of every magazine now breathes the message of the nafs: explore yourself, free yourself, be yourself. Buy a Porsche to express your identity; dress in a Cacharel suit to make a statement about yourself; be seen in the right places. The result, of course, is a society which pursues happiness with great technical brilliance but which puzzles over spiralling rates of suicide, drug abuse, failed relationships, and ever more aberrant forms of self-mutilation.It is a society in denial, a society in pain.

"By taking on the Sunna, a human being accepts a deep and total reorientation. For the Sunna is not one lifestyle option among many, simply an exotic addition to the standard menu. The Sunna tears up the existing menu by defying its assumptions. By living in the Prophetic pattern one pursues a paradigm of excellence that demonstrably brings serenity and fulfillment, and hence silences the babble of the style magazines. Living in credit, knowing one’s neighbours, and holding the event of the Mi‘raj constantly in view, confers membership of Adam’s family of khalifas. Living in debt, chasing mirages, and serving the nafs, renders the human being a definitive failure. We can be higher than the angels, or lower than the animals."

Abdal-Hakim Murad, Seeing with Both Eyes (Text of a Lecture given at a Cardiff conference in May 2000).

By modern society I mean modernity that which goes opposite to the sunna of Prophet, for it is not theo-centric, but anthropocentric, where man is the center of everything.

The beauty of Muslims' prayer

"Last Friday, after the dawn prayer, I stood outside a mosque on a remote mountain in New Mexico. The planet Mars shone like an aircraft coming in to land. But silence reigned: the dawn was, as the Koran puts it, breathing. The trees and stars were, in its words, prostrate before God.

The Muslim life is shaped by acts of prayer which, in turn, are shaped by the movements of the solar system, and the rolling of the planet beneath our feet. A sense of harmony, we hope, is the result. Science can alienate us from the holiness of nature. It can teach us how to destroy nature. But we should thank it too, for giving us more reasons to feel awe, humility, and even gratitude."

Abdal-Hakim Murad

Bashing religion with Marxism

Today we made an advancement in our search of truth, which in reality is anything but truth :) :: We bashed religion through the Marxists, only to prove its (i.e., Marxism's) true worth on which we are still working in our Sociology of Religion course. here i want to distract from the theme of the post as religion has distracted humanity from the achievement of a Communist society it has been eternally destined to achieve - i don't know if there is any merit for a seeker of truth to approach Religion from sociological perspective other than to equip oneself with the weapon to defend religion from Satan (for its de-merit, although we are not the one to propose it, however, it is enough to point out the lack of beauty in its angle of vision). Nonetheless, let's allow a few quotations to battle with each other and we would deserve a leave:

Karl Marx:

"Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature. Heart of heartless; just as it is a spirit of the spiritless situation. It is the opium of the masses." (Perhaps you can appreciate why I have left the last part un-bold for the whole quote is least mentioned but the last part only. And there are certain minds among the ranks of Marxism who say that Marx did not say that we should discard religion. It may be, but there are many who say religion should be discarded. We have to know the difference between what Marx said and what Marxism says.)

Shaykh Abdul-Hakim Murad:

"Opium is the religion of masses."

(Wait a second! What on earth does opium look like, i was wondering?)

Hakim Murad on Ka'ba & Malevich's "Black Square"

Image source

This majestic and serene painting above is known as the Black Square by Kazimir Malevich, a Russian painter (who died in 1935). It is a very fascinating painting i have seen for years. Abdul Hakim Murad writes about it at length: "Malevich’s greatest work is a painting called Black Square. This is a square, painted completely in black, against a white border. He called it his ‘absolute symbol of modernity’, a modernity which he hoped would be pure and spiritual, as opposed to the congealed decadence of 19th-century Western materialism.

He chose the image of a Black Square because it is the total inversion of the Western tradition of recording the writhing diversity of the manifest world. He wrote, later, that when painting it he felt ‘black nights within’, and ‘a timidity bordering on fear’, but when he neared completion he experienced a ‘blissful sensation of being drawn into a desert where nothing is real but feeling, and feeling became the substance of my life.’

What on earth could this mean? The modern British writer Bruce Chatwin, who knew Islam well, commented as follows:

‘This is not the language of a good Marxist, but of Meister Eckhart - or, for that matter, of Mohammed. Malevich’s Black Square, his ‘absolute symbol of modernity’, is the equivalent
in painting of the black-draped Ka‘ba at Mecca, the shrine in a valley of sterile soil where
all men are equal before God.’ [...]

At the centre of the Islamic religion lies the Ka‘ba. Uniting the aspects of the divine beauty and the divine majesty, it is ‘a place of resort and safety for human beings’. It lies in a city protected by the prayer of Ibrahim al-Khalil, alayhi’l-salam: ‘My Lord, make this land a sanctuary.’

The Ka‘ba has many meanings. One of these pertains to the Black Stone, which is the point at which the pilgrims come closest to its mystery.

‘Ali ibn Abi Talib narrated that when God took the Covenant, He recorded it in writing
and fed it to the Black Stone, and this is the meaning of the saying of those who touch
the Black Stone during the circumambulation of the Ancient House: ‘O God! This is
believing in You, fulfilling our pledge to You, and declaring the truth of Your record.’’ The Ka‘ba therefore, while it is nothing of itself - a cube of stones and mortar - represents and reminds its pilgrims of the primordial moment of our kind. Allah speaks of a time before the creation of the world: ‘when your Lord brought forth from the Children of Adam, from their reins, their seed,
and made them testify of themselves, He said: ‘Am I not your Lord?’ They said, ‘Yea!
We testify!’ That was lest you should say on the Day of Arising: ‘Of this we were
unaware.’’ (7:171) When we visit the House, we are therefore invited to remember the Great Covenant: that forgotten moment when we committed ourselves to our Maker, acknowleding Him as the source of our being. The Black Stone itself is, according to a hadith which Imam Tirmidhi declares to be sound, ‘yaqutatun min yawaqit al-janna’ - a gemstone from Paradise itself.

The Ka‘ba functions, in the imagination of those who visit it on Hajj, or turn towards it in Salat, as the centre and point of origin of all diverse things on earth. It is oriented towards the four cardinal points of the compass. Its blackness recalls the blackness of the night sky, of the heavens, and hence the pure presence of the Creator. Allah tells us that there are signs for us in the heavens and the earth; and recent astronomy affirms that the spiral galaxies are revolving around black holes. A powerful symbol, written into the magnificence of space, of the spiritual vortex which beckons us to spiral into the unknown, where quantum mechanics fail, where time and space are no more.

The yearning for the Ka‘ba which sincere Muslims feel whenever they think of it is therefore not, in fact, a yearning for the building. In itself it is no less part of the created order than anything else in creation. The yearning is, instead, a fragment, a breath of the nostalgia for our point of origin, for that glorious time out of time when we were in our Maker’s presence."

Read the rest of the article here.

About the "grey" thing

"Beware the darkness in the grey areas."

-Abdul Hakim Murad

What I think this aphorism of Shaykh Abdul-Hakim Murad refers to really is what Islam is all about. According to a hadith, it's Islam to abandon things of doubtful nature (of which we have no certainty of its being either halal or haram). It, on another plane, may be a criticism on the general notion of the Muslims that many things lie in the "grey," implying ,as I have observed in my society, that all such things that lie in the grey area between clear Truth and clear Falsehood are things too much complicated to decode that easily, and hence should be left to the 'reason' to suggest the final answer. Practically, the obedience to reason here is by and large nothing but the obedience to our lower self/desires. I have generalized this mental attitude on the basis of observation of only a handful of the brightest people of my society, who are most literate of worldly and religious affairs, well only knowers of the later domain, and may not be the doers necessarily. 'Masses follow the brightest'. (That's a principle I a brilliant friend of mine told me, who is a president of a student organization called ESEF.) Therefore, when truth is obscure we should not tend to overlook that it is darkness that veils light from our sight, which is not a positive element in the equation.

Muslims' Epistemology

image source

The other we were discussing in our Sociology of Religion class a term called epistemology.. I confess every time I look up its meaning in the dictionary, which I have been doing for some years now, I get more confused than ever, especially because of its fairly repetitive mention in books and philosophical articles. Now I have no confusion about it, since when i came to know:

"The sunna is our epistemology."

-Abdul hakim Murad.
Source.

"Boys will be Boys"

Theory of liberation of women and equality of sexes really needs to be revised today. i become more and more convinced of its fallibility the more i study and analyze the nature of the sexes in the light of scientific and anthropological data, and the aftermaths of the so-called liberation movement of women in West. It seems quite clear to me, the result has been more of another kind of enslavement of the female sex with catastrophic consequences for the society at large, a crisis which humanity may never have witnessed before. Shaykh Abdul-Hakim provides a candid, objective analysis of these issues, while also providing Ummah with the critique of Islam on gender-based issues, which if misunderstood at the hands of Western education/prophets of modern education who are storming the lecture rooms iof our "up-to-date," "INTERNATIONAL STANDARD" universities and colleges, can have severe consequences for Muslim community. Shaykh Abdul-Hakim Murad writes:

"I have been asked to offer some comments on gender identity issues as these impact on Muslims living in post-traditional contexts in the West, and particularly as they affect people who have traded up to the Great Covenant of Islam after an upbringing in Judaism or Christianity. The usual way of doing this is by examining issues in the classical fiqh, and explaining how Islam’s discourse of equality functions globally, not on the micro-level of each fiqh ruling. That method is legitimate enough (although as we shall see the concept of ‘equality’ may raise considerable problems), but in general my experience of Muslim talk on gender is that there is too much apologetic abroad, apologetic, that is, in the sense not only of polemical defence, but also of pleas entered in mitigation. What I want to do today is to bypass this recurrent and often tiresome approach, which reveals so much about the low serotonin levels of its advocates, and suggest how as Western Muslims we can construct a language of gender which offers not a defence or mitigation of current Muslim attitudes and establishments, but a credible strategy for resolving dilemmas which the Western thinkers and commentators around us are now meticulously examining.

Let me begin, then, by trying to capture in a few words the current crisis in Western gender discourse. As good a place as any to do this is Germaine Greer’s book The Whole Woman, released in 1999 to an interesting mix of befuddled anger and encomia from the press."

Read the rest of the article here. Its really interesting and eye-opening.