What Is True Love

 

 

WHAT IS TRUE LOVE?

 

“Love is a many splendored thing”  / “It is the April rose that only grows in the early spring”  says the famous song in the Hollywood film of 1950s  of the same name  featuring William Holden and Jennifer Jones.  I agree  with the  the first line but not the second line. The kind of love that only grows in the early spring is sexual love on the part of adolescents in the grip of their newly awakening hormon production and often  disappears or at least loses much of its splendor after a hungry and furious climax.   Even if and when it mainly survives the repeated climaxes it must and does wane as the age of the lovers advance and their hormones recede.  You see, such love is based on physiological need and not much else and must therefore be at the mercy of physiological factors.  That some sexual love survives well even unto death indicates something more at play than body chemistry and some spiritual extra is assumed to be the unknown benefactor.  Therefore Sufis are of the opinion that some sexual loves, especially when frustrated,  do lead to illumination and sainthood in suitably endowed individuals. 

 

The famous Arab legend of ‘Laila and Majnoon’ is a good example.  A better precursor of the famous western romance “Romeo and Juliet” so well made into a tragedy by Shakespeare, Laila and Majnoon takes its name from the two main characters who are two childhood lovers of two feuding families who will never contemplate making the lovers happy. The boy Majnoon wanders of into the wilderness in mad desperation and sings the glories and agonies of his love to the desert landscape as well as its gazelles whose lustrous black eyes he compares to Laila’s.  All his attempts to approach Laila is so frustrated that he ultimately gives up without knowing it. His love now has been totally spiritualized and when one day after many years Laila finds her way to him he does not show interest.  He says he had at long last found ‘the true Laila’ who could only be his true self residing with the Holy Spirit.  In another story told in the sufi masterpiece ‘Mathnawi’ by the great master Maulana Rumi we find a prince despairing from the life of his  favourite concubine with whom he is madly in love. When all doctors he consulted could offer no hope he realizes that he has to appeal to the highest authority-   Allah Himself!  

 

He confines himself to his prayer room for ardent prayer of the intensest kind for days hardly remembering food or sleep at the end of which he falls asleep exhausted.   In his dream he is visited by a saint of such shine, benevolence and composure that when asked what was it that he wanted he addresses the sheikh something like as follows “O whose very shining face is the answer to all questions  and satisfaction of all needs”.   His appeal is granted after such enlightenment that his plight and prayers produced.  Yes, those who found the Truth and Reality that is ALLAH realize that they found everything a soul may yearn after and a being ever needs.   It is because yearning and love are based on our missing something as if we are separated from some whole entity and  ended up as only one of the two halves. This is only too well demonstrated in our  sexual yearnings. We are produced from the two halves of our parents genes which merge during conception and are born either as male or female in need of each other for completion and fulfilment.

 

That is what causes the irresistible attraction between man and woman and the euphoria  that accompanies their fusion.  That is why Islam as the only fully True Religion blesses not only marriage as the only lawful medium of union but also the act of union itself in marriage. The Prophet of Allah said felicitiously “when husband and wife gaze at each other with love and compassion they are rewarded with ten rewards from Allah the Most Gracious and Generous. When they hold hands with love they are rewarded a hundred rewards and all their sins fall down from between their clasping fingers.  When lastly they unite in love they are rewarded a thousand rewards and Allah blesses them”. 

 

May Allah grant His choicest blessings and greatest greetings on His Messenger who has such pure and profound inside into man’s heart and Allah’s graciousness and fairness towards us His poor servants. His compassion for and understanding for us is Allah’s gift to him and we are very happy with our beloved prophet who has been sent to correct all the silly and oppressive mistakes introduced into former religions by their unenlightened champions who often demonised even our most lawful and innocent desires and seeked salvation in torturing our vital instincts.  The truth is that we are not supposed to fight the way Allah created and led us but only control instincts to prevent them from lapsing into error. When rightly guided instincts are Divine charters of pure guidance.  Love is one of our best instincts.

 

Yet, love as love itself is above sex and it can exist and bless us even more superbly without sex.  Its truest and most supreme form is love for Allah Whose most  beautiful name (one of His ‘asmaul husna’) most relevant to our practical life is THE TRUTH or AL HAQQ in Arabic.  Therefore as far as our day to day lives and standard of behaviour are concerned what we need to demonstrate most concerning the veracity of our love for Allah can only be our love of the truth in any and every situation.  A supposed mumin and muslim who does or cannot do the following,  for example,  is only deceiving himself and trying to deceive others as well, viz.    1.  Admit that another person deserves something better than him   2.  apologise when clearly in the wrong   3.  Pay up when he owes something to someone  fully and gracefully and not looking for deductions and delays   4. Be just against even people he does not love or have a grievance against   etc. etc.   Now please tell me how many muslims you know are like this even among our scholars? 

 

As for the common people they are usually hardly aware of either truth or their failure at upholding it.  The most heard word in our vocabulary, especially when something is at stake is “I”.  In fact in nursery and primary school grounds the most frequently heard word is “I” as every teacher knows and it appears that we hardly grow up when we finally finish with schooling.  In all public meetings ‘believers’ compete for many attention-getting opportunities and even in mosques we are hardly less attention-seeking in a committee meeting or impressing others  while praying or reciting the Qur’an.  In a gathering of perfect muslims (I mean in theory) each should seek nothing but each should be given what he deserves by the rest with love and appreciation.  It was because both sayyidina Abu Bakr al Siddiq and the companions who had gathered to elect the first khalifa of the Prophet were sincere believers ready to admit the truth that Abu Bakr was elected without putting himself forward and once nominated the companions almost stampeded in their rush to pledge him their allegiance.  Is such a scene possible today among muslims when a high position is at stake?  As the Prophet’s time receded muslims lost more and more of their shine until today they are at each others throats at the drop of a hat!   

 

That is hardly love of the truth and therefore love for Allah.    Failing even at this basic, day to day practical level how can we aspire at or argue about loving  Allah?  Another aspect of truly loving Allah is showing mercy towards Allah’s servants simply because it is Allah Who made them. What is the sign of feeling merciful towards fellow creatures be they other people or animals or plants?  It is trying one’s best in understanding their needs and helping them to satisfy it as much as one can.  For example, you may say that you like canaries, they are so lovely little birds with such lovely voices and tunes.  If you then go ahead and capture or buy one and put it in  a cage to sing for you for the price of a handful of seeds a week  while what it actually needs is living a free life among its kind with the horizon as its limit it is not the canary that you love but you love yourself and want to avail yourself the treat of a canary’s lovely singing no matter how the poor bird feels about its life imprisonment and separation from nature which offers so many fulfilments to it. 

 

Which means real love for a fellow creature for Allah’s sake is proven by wishing that creature all the happiness-giving opportunities life offers it and not your enjoyment of its forced company.   A far worse example of such self-love disguised as love for another is the notorious case of a lover who kills the person he professedly loves too much rather than letting that person to belong to another.  Or more bizarrely kills himself rather than see the beloved go to another.  True love is none of such attachments.  As already said it is seeing to it that the beloved is happy on his or her own terms or in terms of his or her own needs and desires.   Even some parents are guilty of false love. If their son or daughter marries the person they want for their own reason they love the son-in-law or sister-in-law no matter how unhappy their own child. Why do they do that? Because they don’t really love their child as much as they love their own prejudices like having rich or powerful in-laws or outright selfish benefits for themselves. 

 

That of course does not mean that children know best whom to marry.  It only means that both parent and child should be more sensitive and respectful towards each others feelings and reasons and try to find a way to create happiness for all with child’s happiness being rather the more important.  That is why the Prophet advised that in marriage a female’s consent should be sought one way or another.  In the case of a divorced woman the consent should be a positive verbal one from the woman while in the case of a virgin, considering her modesty, blushing and non-objection may be taken to mean consent. The Prophet himself was very fond of and sensitive to the needs and feelings of females and is never known to hurt or force any female related to him in any matter.  Which means being very kind and tender to women is SUNNA despite some sahaba not being as successful as the Prophet in this particular sunna.  That was because misogyny (phobia of women) was so ingrained in the then society that the Prophet could not do more about it.  Even today among many muslims this sorry state of affairs is the case and nobody as yet found a way of overcoming it. 

 

So what is that True Love which is “a many splendored thing” and yet is not  confined to “the early spring” for its growth, i.e. physiological self-interest?  It is the love which is directed to the only thing in existence that matters: THE TRUTH!  What is the truth?  It is that all beings including each of us exist in and with our Creator Allah Who is the Real and Unique Source of being and care for the being. Our yearning for air when air is denied us, our yearning for water when we are thirsty, our yearning for love and appreciation when think we don’t have them enough and lastly our love for the company of the opposite sex when we lack it…  all these yearnings and lacks are shadows of our separation from Allah.  Because we ourselves are shadows compared to the incomparable perfect Being we call Allah these shadowy separations called asphyxia, thirst, hunger, social and sexual isolation… hurt us only too badly. 

 

To diminish their power over us we need acquire more reality for ourselves by moving our psychic house nearer Allah.  As one far away from a source of light resides in darkness and sees only shadowy dark and ill-defined objects and cant move without frequently running into and knocking his head into rocks, tree trunks or walls and furniture so does a man or woman who is yet too far away from the Source Light called ALLAH. Read if you want surat al Nur (the chapter of Light) in the Qur’an. It says there that Allah is the Light of the Heavens and the Earth and He is Light upon Light. Yet those who are spiritually distant and veiled from Him cannot see even such universally available and infinitely powerful Light.  To see this Light one must have faith and as the verse of Light translates it must be of “Men whom neither trade nor entertainment prevent him from the contemplation of Allah and the performance of prayer and payment of the purifying tax (zakat) for the relief of the grinding poverty afflicting fellow men.   The truth is that the more one remembers and contemplates Allah under all circumstances and keeps His commandments which cover both bodily and financial sacrifices the closer Allah brings him or her to Himself so that this man and woman becomes more and more drenched in the light coming from Allah. Which means that as Allah is Light and the servant is more and more bathed in this Light he or she acquires more reality and the unrealities called shadow experiences and sufferings drop from him or her like dirt washed from cloth. 

 

The Prophet (sws) prayed thus “O Allah wash my sins  with   water and snow and hail and cleanse me as a piece of white garment is  cleansed from dirt”.     In one verse of the Qur’an  the people of the Paradise are described as “their light run in front and on the right of them” and  the people of hell are described as asking those of the Paradise “give us of your light”.  The saved retort “Go back (to the earthly world) if you can and obtain light for yourselves”.   So you see, this metaphor of Light as Allah and salvation as increasing in light or spiritual enlightenment is a perfect analogy.  And the conclusion from all above should be that to end all suffering once and for all and end up in happiness for all time to come we must move towards the real source of real light ALLAH by means of faith as augmented by keeping His commandments more augmented by keeping the good-manners of His Prophet.

 

Then comes the True Love or rather RAHMAT.  You see, Islam is not so much the religion of love as of rahmat.  Because Islam is the perfect religion and rahmat which means loving and caring compassion is more comprehensive than love as a blessing. Love is a much abused and misused word and at the present covers everything from illicit and pervert sexual acts to real love. It can and has been faked all over the place and caused so much delusion and seduction and exploitation. But rahmat can only be genuine because it involves giving only and not taking.  True love is only an ingredient of rahmat and one who attains rahmat attains love as of necessity.  You love someone only when you hurt as your beloved hurts and you delight as your beloved delights as if you don’t exist for yourself or in your own right.  Only by  attaining the Divine Rahmat you can attain true love which involves no cares for yourself but the wellbeing of the beloved. Then Allah lovingly takes care of you. 

 

Please don’t say you have such rahmat and love as yet. Had you had them you shouldn’t be reading this but humbly unaware of your worth  would be dispensing love and compassion to all with no demands on anybody in return. Read the verse in the surat al Insan if you wish “They feed the poor and the orphan and the slave for the love of Allah. They say ‘we are only feeding you for Allah’s Face (to see His face  smiling at us) and we do not want from you either reward or thanks’”.   SUCH LOVERS ARE GOD-OBSESSED WHICH IS “THE MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION” to quote another film title featuring Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman. Try to attain this Magnificent Obsession with your Most Magnificent and Majestic Lord and see for yourself what LOVE is!

 

 

WHAT WE MAY BECOME

 

INTRODUCTION AND SUMMARY

 

As far as we know, man is mentally the most well-equipped animal with both the highest intelligence and highest potential.  He is the only animal who can criticise and improve himself and his conditions and pass most of the improvements to future generations. He can change the usual courses of natural events and build both new material conditions and social and moral systems.  But there is more.  Provided he learns how to do it HE CAN TRANSFORM HIMSELF from another competitive self-seeking beast always ready to fight his selfish and often unjust corner to a level of spiritual improvement where he can see the point of justice in every situation and readily judge against his party or personally himself. In the first case he remains just another actor in the field of battle where men kill and rob each other as beasts would while in the second he becomes one of the contributors to mutual understanding, accommodation and universal justice without prejudice or discrimination.

 

To me that should be most important aim of all teachings about man’s emancipation and the result of all civilising endeavours.  All true and great religions have this aim and message at their core and in the mouth of their founders as distinct from the blind literalism, formalism and institutionalism introduced and accepted by their later generations.  The original teachers emphasised the outgrowing bestial nature and the worldly greeds unreformed man is slave of and they successfully acted out the role to demonstate its viability and prove its possibility.  One only has to read the Gospel or the Hadith literature telling about the Prophet sws to realise that it was so.  True saints in the footsteps of true prophets also repeated the demonstration and the proving by becoming individual images of the Divine filled with spiritual pure, sweet honey inside and oozing it in all their relations with fellow men. It is a honey which will never go bad or fail nurturing the man of God and keeping him in both a  peaceful and powerful presence of mind which will cast around itself a light of saving benevolence as the sun casts its light to give life to all.  As a result the true man of God, the man who discovers and develops his spiritual potential and becomes what he may potentially be attains a depth of insight and a level of moral objectivity and universal benevolence that he must be regarded as the most civilised man only whose emulation can save the world. 

 

His is the very highest success a man’s or woman can attain in life simply because only that presence of mind makes lasting happiness possible for the individual and transmissible to others. No amount of wealth and exterior power can give one similar satisfaction with life and with oneself and no comparable sense of safety and security is available to those without such personal improvement.  A self-found and self-saved man or woman is the epitome of ultimate human success and all success can only flow from there safely which means without causing fights and wars.  This is what most people in the world unaware of and the root cause of all their troubles. Even the most of most the so-called religious men are ignorant of it and lead a life or false and failed dreams wondering why they are unable to attain the peace of mind they hoped their faith could deliver or why they cannot stop offending others and being offended by them. 

 

Their problem is this: They failed but have to discover WHAT THEY MAY BECOME and learn how they may become it.  An ordinarily religious man perceives God as a distant Total Power to fear first and possibly love second and at that level that serves him well. What he often fails to register, despite it being in both the Scripture and on the tongue of the Prophet sws as well as all true saints following, that God is nearer and should be dearer to man than man is to himself.  Only the higher level believers experience this sort of elevated consciousness and only for them true piety, true compassion and true universal love and benevolence are possible.   It is so sad that the words of God’s messengers  often fall on deaf ears and their examples on blind eyes and their teachings are quickly  distorted into misguided zeals with shallow as well as oppressive formalities.  With or without religion, the killing and robbing goes on as before and people keep failing to become what they may be.
  

 

BACKGOUND REMINISCENCES AND OBSERVATIONS

 

Years ago I had read an inspiring book by the great Italian psychiatrist Pierro Ferrucci titled “What We May Be”.   Recently the title and its subject is haunting me.  In the book the professor tries to explain to us that as human beings each of us have a far higher and worthier a potential in a rather neglected and unexpected field:  Self-discovery and realisation. Which is our spiritual potential as distinct from the bodily and material-   today’s obsessions.
I can only agree very much.  Which shows how important it is to apply some brakes to our present policies of educating and training young generations exclusively for success in the material arena and instead to expose our children from the earliest age to spiritual conditioning as well, in fact as seriously and thoroughly as possible. That means inculcating them with true faith and equipping them with love, justice, compassion, respect and responsibility inspiring values. Unfortunately at the present Godlessness is the medium created and selfish indulgence and social strife of all kinds are its inhabitants.  If we fail in adding sturdy and healthy doses of spiritual inculcation and conditioning our children do not remain tabulae rasae (wiped clean writing tablets).  Others write on their minds their graffiti as passers through subways do on the walls. Instead of our organised and harmonised conditioning they become like the dirty,  peeling walls of a seedy urban subway  messed up with grafitti by all sorts of mad people, the misfit and the dirty-minded. Modern society is such a multi-levelled, anarchic and cacophonous cultural landscape that a youngster not spiritually educated, tidied up and consolidated at home is at the mercy of the myriads of crazy ideologies, perversions, addictions and zany practices and may well find himself or herself on the wrong side of the law and even a throwaway on one of the heaps for the lost and wasted people , like the drugs or prostitution victims or in a mafia or terrorist gang.   In society gripped by an anarchy of cacophonic ideologies and dissolute lifestyles so MANY CULTURAL AS WELL AS PHYSICAL AVVIDENTS MAY HIT US THAT WE MAY BE WRECKED IN MANY IRREVERSIBLE WAYS.  

 

uch experiences are so sordid and damaging that we cannot not regard them as experiences worth having in the interests of personal growth. Because some bad modernists advocate a freely drifting social experience as the most conducive to personal fulfilment our children shouldn’t be made their guinea pigs.  Your child needs only one AIDS infection to die a protracted miserable death or one rape to end up with a bastard baby and the great cost of looking after it. Or only one chance dying from a drug overdose on a squalid street corner. Although it is common knowledge that the almost universal pastime of weekend dancing clubs are little less than dens of heavy underhand drug trafficking and ready opportunities for casual promiscuous sex the adult society, thanks to constant pseudo-liberal/ true libertinist brainwashing  has so much lost control that even the police has little stomach as well as little chance of preventing the evils being routinely perpetuated in them and elsewhere. Such lifestyles are advocated by moral rebels who themselves are lost souls and are knowing or unknowing accomplices of the satanical drug and prostitution or terrorist masterminds. Having brainwashed the people they accuse us the spiritually-minded that our proposed educating the youth in spiritual matters will be an attempt at brainwashing them. It is as in the saying that “a quick-witted burglar will deliver the owner to the police persuading the police that he is  the real culprit and himself leave the house afterwards loaded with the goods he stole”.

 

Advance CORRECT religious conditioning is not brainwashing as they would have it. A child’s brain is already clean and needs no washing. It only needs the best possible education to equip it with the beliefs, values and skills which will help it preside over a decent, humane and constructive life- his own. All professions need a training in advance of as well as throughout its duration and  a person’s life is his or her longest lasting and most important career.   It needs the best and most intense training to succeed.   Neglect his or her education and he will be educated by the streets to become a menace or an aimless drifter or both. Educate him or her as you should and he or she may become a wise and powerful angel and agent of good, the envy of his or her peers and a social asset worth thousands of other less-well educated contemporaries.  As you know, there has been especially well-educated elites in both UK and US,  the Oxbridge breed here and the Harvard and Yale in the US.  We are told that they occupy more than half of all top positions in their respective countries, like the elected politicians, the chairmen of the biggest companies and wealthiest lawyers and other public greats.  Yet, morally most of them may not be better than the average citizen and may even be devils in disguise. 
And sure enough sometimes they are exposed as such. What we are talking about aren’t elites only well-educated enough to climb high social positions but remain inside as bad as the rest- selfish, greedy, conspiring and cheating.   The elites we are talking about are those who discover themselves and attain the potentials they identify in themselves as much as they can.  What does this mean?  Let me explain.

 

Suppose you intend to be one of them, because you are very interested. First you have to EXPLORE your inner geography or cosmology. You know, as from the late fifteenth century some Western European  sailors began to venture into the Atlantic in serious, first westward which resulted in the discovery of the Americas and their conquest, colonisation and the exploitation of the potentials they contained, like mines and other natural resources.  Then the captains took to south and then west around Africa which took them to the Indian and  the Pacific Oceans and all the lands bordering them.   They obtained incalculable amounts of knowledge and gained astronomical wealth and power for their countries.  Other nations who did not similarly venture out but sat content in their traditional small and static world (like the once similarly adventurous and prosperous muslims)  found themselves in the position of captured and caged wildlife in the hands of the Western adventurous nations.  Except for Turkey and Persia they fell into subjection like dominoes before the advancing and encroaching Western powers.  To big to be swallowed outright and easily, Turkey and Persia nevertheless lost out to this enemy at their doorstep and eventually domiciled by them into docile allies tied down in a net of bad debts and other dependencies.  Now the same is true for the spiritually adventurous and non-adventurous.  Those who dare to navigate their inner oceans and discover and exploit lands rising from them discover and develop potentials unimaginable by the sitters. 

 

Like what? They discover, for example that,  happiness is a state of mind and not the inevitable result of possessing this or consuming that.  As a result they reduce their dependence on material and social assets so much  that they can feel happy almost at any level of material provision or popularity. They become almost self-sufficient and satisfied with self-popularity-  they just enjoy being themselves and befriending themselves.  Because they are full of delightful ideas, stirring discoveries and ever-deepening, expanding and  variegating vistas.  To understand the reason for such satisfaction and joy we may consider the inventor who passes long periods of time so absorbed in his experiments and speculations that he almost loses his sense of date and time and his meals become irregular quick fixes and sleep equally irregular snaps and slumbers. Yet all the while he couldn’t be happier ad more self-satisfied.  The crowning of his happiness comes when he makes his prayed for breakthrough and can cry “eureka” (I found it)! 

 

This of course is in the field of objective science.   The man doing his speculations, explorations and experiments in his inner laboratory in the inner universe is even happier and has even worthier discoveries to make.  He maps his inner geography where the mental processes like thinking, hoping, suspecting, believing and emotions like love, hate, greed or contentment yield their secrets to him and he becomes able to manipulate them in ways conducive to constructive, saving  actions.  As a result we find genuine saints quite capable of giving away any amount of wealth for a good cause or sacrificing even themselves for noble reasons.  Equally they become able to stand up to injustice without fearing the consequences and win battles against evil thanks to their new-found spiritual resourcefulness who enables them to identify the psychological causes behing winning and losing streaks.  They understand for example that losing one’s conviction in one’s cause is more effective a defeat factor than losing half of one’s material fighting assets. Similarly enhancing one’s faith in and commitment to one’s cause are more helpful in producing victory than adding as much to one’s material fighting assets. 

 

That is why that  greatest masterpiece of spiritual science the Qur’an is so busy demoralising the worshippers of this world of material assets and carnal pleasures and encouraging and ensuring the worshippers of God Who represents the most inclusive very best in possible spiritual values system. True worshipers of God are true lovers of all creation and kindest and most helpful of men.  Their aim is to save themselves thus and teach others the spiritual DIY they correctly learned and successfully used.  The more Godly men and women we have of the higher quality the more peaceful and happy place this world becomes.  Here we must dispel a common anxiety among the non-initiated that saintly qualities work against worldly success.  Nothing can be more wrong. 

 

A true saint is a true expert on human mentation, motivation and behaviour and could not appreciate more the necessity of a varying degree of some worldly power in putting right this world’s affairs and leading an honourable existence.  He knows only too well that to influence people towards  good  he must not be in their debt or need them in a humiliating and mortifying way. The least he must project is an image of self-sufficiency as if he has access to a secret source of wealth and power.  He should not beg but others must find themselves begging from him one way or another.  They may not need or get anything by begging him for material things but they must need begging him for ‘goods’ that are not producible by any known machinery or labour.  He may provide them with morale, with a capacity for love and a capacity of forgiveness.  He may inspire in them previously unthinkable hope and open up to them a spiritual means to any worldly or other-worldly success provided it will be morally  justifiable.  It is just as they are knowledgeable and skilful in the mechanics of their hearts they are equally so in the handling of the hearts of others and through that can lead them to needed, deserved, justified and happy results in their lives’ affairs.

 

He represents Allah swt and His Messenger sws and inshaallah and alhamdulilah can deliver good in their name. They live and see from a level of insight, understanding and gnosis which could make the most worldly powerful man go green with envy and submit meekly as the blessings the true saints  preside over becomes discernible to the worldly greats. 
Which explains the famous sufi saying, viz., “Had kings known the kingdom we are enjoying they would come to wrest it from us”.

 

It is a kingdom in which the king has nothing to own but also no enemies to fear, in which the king rules over such intangibles that all tangibles are umtimately subject to them.  It is a kingdom in which the king is king only by being the bondman of the REAL AND ONLY KING Who kindly lets His such servants have all the joys of kingdom showered on them from the loving-kindness of the Only King. 

 

That is what we may be:  Self-discovered, self-perfected, totally understanding, loving and helping men and women whose presence inspires the presence of God and whose benevolence raises them to a universal  parent status of the whole mankind to whom they can turn to for loving embrace and saving guidance. What is more this achievement is open to all who really want it and in this profession overcrowding and fall of business aren’t possible. Had all men and women become saints so much the better! Amen.   

 

 

SPIRITUALITY AND THE WORLD

 

There seems to be a confusion as to how compatiple is a life of spirituality with worldly activities. Many religions and spiritual traditions before Islam strongly decried worldly concerns and activities and advised varying degrees of withdrawal from the human society. At the extreme end we find ascetic recluses who took refuge in caves at mountain tops, or gloomy monasteries,  never married, made no friends and shouldered no social responsibilities in the (to my humble self steeped in Islamic beliefs) vain hope that they were dedicating their lives to God.

 

It is on record in a few hadiths that the Messenger of Allah strongly disliked too much evasion of social responsibilities and too ascetic practices and reprimanded some companions who wanted to keep to such a path. In one case he sws said "I both sleep and pray at night, I  fast some days, I eat some days ad I marry women. This is my Sunna.  Whoever follows me is from me, whoever takes another road is not from me". Sadaqa Rasulullah sws!  We also know that he sws and almost all his ashab took their social obligations and worldly affairs seriously and participated in social life in full within the vast limits of piety. He sws said "The best among you is one who does not abandon his world for the sake of his hereafter nor does he abandon his hereafter for the sake of his world". Sadaqa Habibullah sws.

 

Why is this so?  It is because Allah sent us to this world for testing us and  what better and fuller testing of a man's metal and character than exposing him to the temptations of this world and letting him prove his worth as a promise-keeper with Allah swt. Read if you wish:

 

"It is He swt Who created life and death in order to test you to expose which of you will act more creditably" (S. Mulk 2).  He swt also said "Consider when thy Lord had taken from the backs of the sons of Adam their offspring and making them witnesses against themselves had asked them "Am I not your Lord?". They said "Indeed! We did witness". That was for them not to say on the Day of Resurrection"We have been unaware of this" (S. Araf 172). Accepting the Lord should lead to pious and righteous behavior and behavior is only towards Allah's other servants. If you do not mix and shoulder social responsibilities towards whom will you behave righteously and piously? Lastly the Messenger of Allah sws declared most unequivocally why he was sent:

 

"Innama buithtu liutimma makarim al akhlaq" which squarely means "I have not been sent but for me to build up to completion the noblest character traits and most graceful manners". If you do not participate in social life but withdraw to a cave and live on charity or on nature what opportunity will you have to develop and ACT OUT the noblest character traits and display the most graceful manners towards others? In  fact you need not one, two, or three opportunities to bless both others and yourself with your moral emulation of Allah's Messenger sws to to prove your metal and to save yourself from the Fire; you need thousands of them if not millions.  For that you must fully participate in social life.
You see, no spiritual master other than the Messenger of Allah sws could come up with such masterful prescriptions for the betterment of humankind and for its more integrated and successful socialization and fraternization and all prescriptions outside his suffer from cowardice, selfishness and pride masquerading as sacrifice or self-control.  From yogis eternally meditating on mountaintops to Christian monks rotting in filth and destroying their sacred parental potential through celibacy the wages for their labours is eventual regret while a pious and righteous member of the nation (umma) of Muhammad sws, by daring and braving all the challenges and temptations the world can throw at him in the course of his  full participation in social life hoards into his life a million victories against the Devil and with Allah's help soars into highest spiritual ranks and stations available to Allah's close friends- al muqarrabun.

 

 

SHIAISM AND QADIANISM

 

Humbly I think that we can prove the wrongness of both the Shia and Qadiyani positions by taking the Qur'an in a general sense as our yardstick.

 

If the Shia are saying that the present Qur'an is not the full version or is corrupted they stand accused of denying the verse 9 in Surat al Hijr which assures us:
"It is Us (Allah) Who sent down al Zikra (the Supreme Reminder, al Qur'an) and We are its Preservers".
Did He fail in His promise?  

 

Read from cover to cover, the Qur'an presents us with a full and uniform impression of completeness and consistency no other scripture can. It simply is there looking at one in  the face- Allah is speaking to us as never before and so shall it remain.

 

It also praises all the Sahaba and absolves them and promises them all the happiness.  That Allah has been pleased with all who fought at the Badr and forgave those who made mistakes at the Uhud are undeniable. That he has been pleased by those Ashab who made the bey'at under the tree at Hudaibia is certain. That He Almighty, declared Aisha RA innocent of all charges in the matter of ‘ifk’ is clearly in the Qur'an. That the Prophet sws loved Aisha very much is in the Hadith. That Allah forgave the three Sahaba who had not joined the expedition of Tabuk is in the Qur'an. So, unlike what the Shia claim many Sahaba did make mistakes but Allah DID forgive them!  If the Shia don't like Allah's forgiving His servants despite their any sins then their problem is with Allah, not so much with the rest of Muslims. After all Allah says:

 

"Were it not for Allah's generosity and mercy not a single one from among you could ever become pure but Allah purifies whom He will" (S. al Nur, 21).

 

You see, not even the prophets let alone the supposedly infallible Shia imams could purify themselves unless Allah chose to purify them OUT OF HIS GENEROSITY AND MERCY-  all of us are such helpless beggars in front of Him. Read if you wish:

 

"O people, you are needy beggars (al fuqara) in front of Allah. It is only Allah Who is Needless, All-Rich and Worthy of all praise (and NOT ANY OF YOU, clear?- S. al Fatr, 15)

May I remind my readers that Allah holds back no criticism from even His prophets and even sometimes PUNISHED them for their mistakes, like Yunus A.S. being swallowed up by the whale? So who is any imam to be beyond Allah's censure. All of us, prophet or not, may make mistakes- this is AXIOMATIC and plentifully stated in the Qur'an. Prophets are innocent only in the sense of not deliberately meaning evil, and not in the sense of practicality . Because they always mean well Allah always forgives them albeit sometimes after a good pull at the ear. THAT IS ALLAH'S MAJESTY OVER ALL OF US AND NON-NEGOTIABLE! 

 

We similarly find:

 

"Was Allah to take people for their wrongs (too fully) HE WOULD LEAVE NO LIVING THING ON EARTH but He delays them until a named term..." (S. al Nahl, 61)
Why do we think the Prophet sws said:

 

"I am the most fearful of Allah among you because I know Him most"?

 

So, whatever the Shia say, Allah is very clear that HE BOTH KNOWS OF THE MISTAKES MUSLIMS MAKE AND FORGIVES THEM AS HE PLEASES. The Shia cannot impose on Allah about whom to forgive and whom to punish. If punish he must, then I am afraid He would have to begin with the Shia who are so desirous of seeing Allah send most of the first Muslims to hell despite so much sacrifices to their credit.  Allah is kinder than that.  What a shame for those who want blood!

 

If Allah will not forgive 90% of the first embracers and helpers of His deen and His prophet sws can the Shia explain the BLANK prospect of forgiveness He the Most Merciful declares to ALL:

 

"Say: O My servants who exceeded all bounds in abusing themselves (with so very many sins)-  NEVER DESPAIR OF ALLAH'S MERCY!  Indeed Allah FORGIVES ALL SINS WITHOUT EXCEPTION; He indeed is the Mercifully Indulgent Pardoner" (S. al Zumar, 53).

 

Those who lust and salivate after the damnation of their Muslim brothers and especially their greatest benefactors the companions of the Messenger of Allah are only pleasing the Satan instead of  Allah;  what the Satan and his fans desire so much will not come to pass but what the Most Merciful Allah and His merciful servants desire will prevail! If Allah's filling the paradise with Rasulllulah's Ashab and those who love all the Ashab is such a detestable thing to the Shia then let them consider their association with the Devil who desires the same thing. Actually Shiaism is not about siding with the real Ali RA which should be totally legitimate provided it also took a lenient and respectful view of Ali's dissenters from among the ashab; it is originally is about  POLITICS cleverly spiritualised to found a tax-collecting and masses-controlling priestly caste of mullahs, a concealed return to pagan exploitative system. It is built on a pagan idolisation if not implied deification of Ali (some Shia even went down that road) and augmented by a hatred of Abu Bakr, Umar etc. They ignore the fact that Ali faithfully served on all three caliphs and never accused them of kufr or advised war against them. Was Ali a coward? Was he a hypocrite?

 

Since he was 'infallible' why did he not correct that wrong world with his infinite knowledge and miraculous powers? Shias resentment of Ali’s delay in coming to the caliphate is a very ignorant act.  It was the case that Allah facilitated things for these three while sparing Ali from an earlier trouble. I suggest that the Shia read the story of Khidr and Musa AS in the Qur'an and see that EVENTS ARE NOT ALWAYS WHAT THEY SEEM TO any Musa-like categorical, literal and legalistic thinkers. Allah did not put that most strange of stories in the VERY MIDDLE of the Qur'an for nothing.  Come back to the fold o Shia, it is never too late to repent. We are all weak, we all make mistakes and that includes all Sahaba and among them our dear master Ali RA. Both his cousin ibn Abbas and his son Hasan RA had warned Ali RA about some of his wrong steps taken in good faith, with good intentions. Ali always meant well but prophets also always meant well yet they sometimes did mistakes. We love Ali RA more than the Shia do; but the Ali we love is the REAL historical flesh and blood Ali who is even lovelier for being fallible at times as a human being and not a ‘does-no-wrong’ mythical, almost plastic divine Ali like the mythical divine Jesus of Christians. Enough with clandestine Christianity in Islam! When myth replaces fact, faith degenerates into delusion and actions into attrocity, OK?

 

As for the pathetic Qadianis. A new prophet to be necessary a religion must have been corrupted in a way that no alim can discover the true version and therefore only a new revelation will do. That the Qur'an is perfect and intact is beyond all doubt. That the Shariah is fully and correctly systematised and developed and can develop more when faced with new challenges is again beyond doubt. So, one wonders, in what sense and for what reason a new prophet with a new revelation was necessary so that Ghulam Ahmad was to be sent? And what did he achieve? If gaining converts was a sign of correctness then Christianity should be the most correct religion. The true followers of the Christ were his disciples and those who joined them at the Jerusalem Church and testified to Allah's unity and the validity of the Law of Moses as slightly modified by Jesus.  Yet it was not this true form of the religion which won. It was the liar PAUL's spurious and invented version of Christianity that won. And after almost two centuries what did Ahmadis win compared to Islam's oceanic body which is absorbing more converts than all other religions put together. Has Ahmad any revelation to compare with the Qur'an?

 

If he has we never saw it and as far as I am aware his revelations are kept secret and never reached us. Why? What about the Bahais? You see, that cursed 19th century was the great junction of both atheism and false religions industry. All religions were subverted from inside. Christianity was subverted by Jehovah Witnesses, Mormonism, Christian Science and many other silly cults while Islam was attempted a highjack by the likes of Abdul Bahas and Ghulam Ahmads. Can you imagine? One claims to be all things to all men: Krishna, Messiah, Mahdi and Muhammad! And what is more, there is not a single prophecy in Islamic sources about all these people  coming and be one person in Ghulam. What he has to show for all these claims that remains to be seen. You know what?  -even if Ahmadism had some merits it still would be superfluous; there is no defect in the Qur'an and the Islam it teaches; it is us Muslims who make any mistakes and it is not the matter of a new prophet to correct anything or anybody but the same Muslims to just look at the Qur'an (and its extension genuine Sunna) and adjust themselves accordingly. Had boastful multiple saints like a Krishna-Messiah-Mahdi chimera been necessary and useful Ahmadism could solve all problems.  All Ahmadis are as bad as ourselves and anybody else. All need self-inspection and correction in the light of the Qur’an.

 

The fact is that it is just proselytising in the same arenas of spiritual marketing and is lingering on the same shelves as imitation religions like Mormonism etc. Conviction or enthusiasm is no guarantee of truth, nor is sacrifice. Nationalists, Communists or Fascists propagandists and militants have been as convinced and sacrificial as all religionists have ever been and committed all their atrocities in the same euphoric air of martyrdom. Both Nazis and Bolsheviks, Mao and Pol Pot fought with as much zeal, ferocity and sacrifice as religious zealots. They similarly boast of heroes and martyrs. When any of them was persecuted for their beliefs they bore them with grear courage and went to gallows or the firing squad chanting revolutionary songs. So let us stop using silly emotional claims as proofs of the truth of any belief. Beliefs stand and fall on their intrinsic ontological merits and not by the amount of delusion they cause in their votaries. The criterion of religious truth is, subjectively speaking, love and compassion in Allah's Name, while and objectively its truth is the social happy improvements it causes.

 

The Qur'an is the singe most truthful and comprehensive manual of that on both counts. It is a terrible shame to claim that anything like the Qur'an could be brought by any subsequent man from Allah or that Islam needed a new prophet who could do what that most excellent and favoured messengers of Allah, namely our beloved Muhammad could not. The fact is that Allah protected from corruption both His Qur'an and the Sunna of His Messenger sws and as such the two need neither correcting nor improving on. The only thing necessary is for Muslims, especially the ulema and mashayikh to keep reminding Muslims their obligations (amr bil ma'ruf, nahy an il munkar) and especially setting a good example and NOT a futile new prophet.  THERE IS NO WAY KNOWN OR GUARANTEES GIVABLE to the effect that any bible or any prophet or sheikh will guide everybody to every level of improvement. Neither Moses, nor Jesus, nor Muhammad sws could do that nor any Shia imams or Ghulam Ahmads can guide all they would like to.

 

Read if you wish" You cannot (o Prophet sws) guide whom you like but it is only Allah Who guides whom he will" (S. al Qasas, 56). 

 

Lastly there is another and very worrying element in all false religions growing from the trunk of true or truer religions.  It is the invariable habit of establishing a cultic government which is staffed by 'infallibles' and at that sometimes also dynastic in nature. Sons or sons-in-law inherit offices from fathers or fathers-in-law which system goes back to royal or imperial paganisms like old Indian or the Egyptian, that is to say, a priestly class and their temple establishment are created-  both of which Islam discarded. The priests of these new religions TAX their subjects at exorbiant rates on top of secular government taxation and from the proceeds live royal and dynastic lives on the one hand while on the other concentrate on the conquest of new tax-paying subjects through the building of more and more palatial temples and more activities of proselysation through  both written and oral means and recently through special TV stations and websites. Growth DOES happen IRRESPECTIVE of any real merits or demerits, simply because there always are enough suggestible or gullible souls to lap up or buy up anything on offer with a spiritual label. Scientolgy is selling like hot potaoes as Moonism or Jehovah's Witnessism are.  So are feminism, gay liberation and even Devil worship. You see, all sell!

 

So let us come to a consensus: ISLAM as believed and practiced by the great majority of Muslims is the true and original version as the Qur'an and creditable Hadith envisaged altough some variants and mistakes may be found here and there. Variants may be intractable but mistakes are not. By constant cooperation our ulema can identify and declare many mistakes fallen into, like the continuation of pre-Islamic (jahiliyya) traditions about sexual matters, from forcible selling women in the name of marriage to killing small virgins for taking an interest in the wrong man or even being just forcibly raped by a man. Islam is clear that such practices are not of it.

 

Not everybody can be saved, no matter what prophet or sheikh is in charge.  We can only try. We should stop founding new sects or new movements in the vain hope that we an do better than others in reforming people. Schools for education we may have, but sects differing so much in creed and law are wrong as well as vain.  May Allah unite us in humble conformity within the body of mainstream Islam. Amen.

 

 

GLOBAL WARMING - THE SLOW-DEVELOPING HELL

 

Supposedly worried but hardly hurried, world leaders have been deliberating about the now almost certain fact that our world is warming up and climate patterns are changing for the worse. Polar ice-caps are visibly melting like blobs of ice-cream and formerly cool countries like Britain is now growing vines and olives which were unthinkable only half a century ago. Deserts are spreading, forests disappearing, species are going extinct, rivers drying up and freak weather patterns playing havoc with regions from the south Pacific to the Amazon.

 

The reason given is that we are producing too much carbon dioxide which is causing an increased absorption of the heat coming from the sun as well as that produced on the earth, from both industrial activity and animal economy; added to the emissions from motor vehicles are the emissions from cows and other industrially raised animals whose meats grace our tables and cover our most luxurious clothing and provide our most sumptuous drapery. Air travel is booming and so is therefore both heat and carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere. Are any cures being proposed? They are and let us see.
Switch to non-carbon emitting energy production methods. Recycle all refuse more effectively. Export the refuse to the outer space!

 

So far we have not heard anybody to pronounce the most reasonable option: reducing consumption and thereby production! Apparently our vaunted and hallowed ‘high living standards’ are non-negotiable. We have to eat from disposable plastics and paper containers which will need be recycling (as if this will not need energy and therefore produce carbon dioxide or other pollutants like radioactive emissions),  we have to discard perfectly new garments simply because fashion is changing fast (and recycle the old again), we have to drive cards and fly in the air almost daily because we want to be in control of our interminable transport itineraries and enjoy our frequent ‘holydays’ at the other end of the world. So, our problem, if we listen to the unrepentant modern consumption society addicts is not how much we produce and consume but about how to continue on the same bandwagon and merry-go-round of high consumption. Since carbon emissions must be reduced then energy sources other than the fossil fuels (petroleum, natural gas and coal) must be developed. They are the nuclear, the winds, the waves and the tides: all may be harnessed to keep our non-negotiable high consumption- high waste lifestyle habit in place.

 

I am surprised to hear many fellow scientists discuss and negotiate these options with apparently little awareness of the laws of nature whose contemplation will expose such ideas as useless in the longer term. Let us take wind-power for example: Aren’t winds part of the weather regulation system of our world? What long term benefit may come from arresting winds in their tracts, generate electricity from them and then release more heat to the atmosphere by using this electricity to heat and cook and move things? Are we not forgetting that our enemy is not so much the carbon dioxide per se but the ever-increasing amount of heat in our environment? If we continue to convert all available sources of energy like wind, tide and waves into electricity and then use this electricity to heat and move things in our buildings and produce things in our factories we will still be returning this heat into the atmosphere. Laws of nature cannot be cheated; we have the Second Law of Thermodynamic which says that, put at its simplest, all physical processes heat up the environment and the heat so produced can never be fully recycled into other forms of energy: a net accumulation of heat energy shall occur no matter what we do. From this law physicists predict a dismal fate for our universe- the Heat Death of the universe!

 

Only the living organisms have a moderating effect on the progress of this inexorable heat death process: for example, plants absorb both the heat and the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and convert them into organic matter a lot of which become food for the animals. This is the most viable recycling method devised by the Nature and the more we adapt and adjust ourselves to it the slower and later will our self-destruction happen. Cheating this natural order is impossible and exporting our sins and poisons to the outer space both a very expensive and eventually futile attempt. So what is the cure if any?
The most realistic and feasible cure is adjusting our living habits to the capacity of the self-renewal of our eco-system. In order to just begin doing this we must realise that our production and consumption levels of all items must be cut and remain cut. Let us take our cars: don’t we have a speed limit of 70mph on our roads? In some countries this limit is even lower. Will not a car with space for five adults attain this speed with a motor with a cylinder capacity of just 1000 cc? So why on earth we are producing cars for five adults with up to 4000 cc engine capacity and up to 200 mph acceleration capacity if not for vanity at its most childish? Imagine all motor vehicles being downsized and slowed to basic passenger and speed capacity: will not people travel only at legally permitted and therefore safe speed while at the same time cutting their fuel consumption drastically?

 

Who will be harmed by travelling at safe speeds and saving money on a car in all respects, the cost of the car and its replaceable parts on top of the cost of fuel? Cars built for research or competitions as well as for emergency and law-enforcement needs will be a very small percentage of our whole national fleet and the saving in all respects would be mind-boggling. What about less air travel? What about less obsession with the hedonistic cravings of the flesh (like drink, drugs, sex, frequent and expensive fads and fashions) which whip up economic consumption and waste and what not more joys of the mind and the soul which sane and sober cultural, artistic and spiritual pursuits furnish at negligible cost? Why should every woman work at gainful employments and not employ themselves with the care of their children to the profit and delight of all concerned? In this connection, what merit is in abandoning our children to the impossible to control environment of streets and bad habits and substituting our natural parental responsibilities towards them with more pocket money, toys and junk food.

 

The overall case for the checking of the environmental deterioration should now be clear enough: The present ever-increasing economic production and consumption pattern is unsustainable; it is causing too much waste and the worst wasted are our children. Brakes should be applied to our economies so as to reduce all: production, consumption, material and lastly and most importantly human waste, that is to say, the wasting our youth by badly under-parenting them. At least one parent should have enough time with his or her children to help them pick up good enough moral convictions and social manners as well as avoid picking up wrong values and bad habits. Globally speaking all too luxurious products and habits should be curbed and the human interests liberated from such misguided and wasteful preoccupations should be channelled into healthier and both ecologically and socially more realistic and responsible conduits like cheap to maintain cultural, spiritual and artistic studies and diversion as well as healthy sports and games.

 

All above gives us one message: economic growth, that is to say a constant rise in production and consumption of goods and services should stop being our obsession and competition and healthy if humbler lifestyles and more leisure with nobler aims and pursuits should replace our present culture of bird-brained, soul and body destroying hedonism which is fit for fools only.

 

 

Web design by Surge Solutions