Islam And Tawhid

 

 

11.  ON WHAT ISLAM AND TAWHID MEAN?

 

INTRODUCTION

 

We are told that Islam is based on Tawhid or the belief in the Unity of God and means submitting one’s will to the Will of God or Allah in Arabic.

 

In this lesson we, as serious and sincere Sufi aspirants (in sha Allah) will explore these two closely interconnected concepts and try to penetrate their deepest joint secrets in a practical sense because our courses are meant to be entirely practical and not for mysterious supposed insights or mystical thrills with psychedelic side effects. Above all things we want to be very good persons, so good that even the most evil people may halt and think before they waste their time to do harm to us. For all aggression is motivated by fear whether real or imaginary. Be always kind and polite and accommodating of others as far as physically and morally possible and you do not only contribute to your own safety and peace of mind but also to those of the society. Islam means peace and peace is at least partially fed by good will verified by conduct. Any other factors Allah will take care of in His Kindness, no doubt. 

 

We all are aware that as souls with a freewill we frequently meet dilemmas which we must resolve and choices we must make. Our life contains so many conflicting interests and temptations that the choices we have to make are neither simple nor easy. Most regrets in life come from choices which we subsequently find to be wrong and although we may get some comfort and self-forgiveness from the fact that we did not know enough or better at the time something deeper down sometimes is not silenced and keeps a persistent accusing finger pointing to us. It almost tells us “Come on, you did feel uneasy at the time of making the mistake, didn’t you and something in you was gnawing at you, wasn’t it and you still went ahead and did what you did!”

 

A very interesting story in the Book of Allah could not make this point better and more poignantly. As you know Moses was a true believer in Allah while still an adopted son of the Pharaoh, believer because he was suckled and nannied by his own real mother who was masquerading as a hired nurse. She had passed to him his national culture of Islam as it was at the time which was later corrupted into a racial religion and named after Judah, one of the sons of Jacob, whereby it became Judaism.

 

As you know, after growing up into an adult at home both with the Pagan Egyptian culture and the Unitarian and humanitarian culture of the then Islam he went about and secretly tried to help his Israeli Muslim brothers as much as he could. Because he was not yet a prophet and therefore not matured in spirit under Allah’s direct and sustained guidance he could be a racist or more correctly anti-Egyptian in a racial sense. One day, he came across two men fighting, one from his race and the other an Egyptian. His fellow Israeli called Moses to help him, Moses intervened without investigating who was right and who was wrong and he punched the Egyptian which punch despatched the poor thing for good. At that instant he felt shame and regret and called his act an act of the Satan. From then on he felt very anxious, he felt very guilty and did not know what to make of the situation. Then the next day he again came across the same Israeli fighting with another Egyptian and got the same call for help from the same man. Moses criticised his fellow Israeli for being a habitual trouble-maker yet still wrongly felt duty-bound to help him as his co-religionist. The Egyptian for his part rightly scolded him “Moses are you after killing me as you killed a man yesterday? Apparently you want to be a bully and don’t want to be a peacemaker” (28: 15- 19, partially abridged and rephrased). See how even a future prophet can be at a loss when it comes to decide between right and wrong and remains divided between his better judgment and blind racial or religious prejudices. Perhaps this insight from the Qur’an explains all the future plights of Israel: Our cousins have unfortunately been too racist and self-righteous for their own good: they failed to graduate from the mentality of pre-prophetic Moses to the later Moses as the messenger of God who could only then be necessarily insightful and just.

 

What is even more interesting is what happened next in our story: It was another pagan Egyptian who ran to Moses with the news that the Royal council was in session discussing the arrest and punishment of Moses. What do we see here? We see several very eye-opening things or facts which are:

 

1.  
Being a Muslim is no guarantee that one will not grossly misbehave and commit even serial murders in his religious and even racial zeal. Such ignorance is even possible for future prophets.

 

2.     
From the first instance of a crime the Muslim feels that what he just did is not worthy of a Muslim but it is Satanic.

 

3.    
Still, he cannot always control himself, he does not learn the lesson he should and remains liable to commit the same ignorant crime in the name of religious or racial zeal. Even more interestingly he may be fully aware while repeating the same racist crime but unable to stop. Why? It seems that dogmatic conditioning often overrules rational and more conscientious and fair conduct. This is where Sufism presents the cure: the true Sufi is always aware and discriminating, not an automaton programmed by other automatons or demagogues but a free man with a mind which remains fair at all times. You may protest “But so many Sufis are as dogmatic, fanatical and foul behaving”. Answer “They are not true Sufis. They are cultists which are manufactured by other cultists or cult-founding master demagogues and self-seekers with a view to have and   maintain a state within a state under the cloak of a Sufi order. It is another way of fulfilling political ambition which is all about controlling and taxing others. USA is presently leading the world in this industry as in many others and its cults are mushrooming into other countries just like its other multinational companies like Coca-cola or GM.

 

4.     
Back to our story and surprise surprise another ‘infidel’ can be so noble and non-racist and non-fanatic that he may come to this guilty Muslim and inform him of the danger he is facing and advise him to take flight.

 

And when Moses, as a messenger of Allah, eventually comes to meet the Pharaoh the latter rightly criticises him for being ungrateful (kafir) to his benefactor (the Pharaoh), having committed an unspeakable crime and fled and then returning as a champion of godliness. Moses admits the charge but explains it as due to his ignorance at the time and also as a providential retribution for the Pharaoh who himself committed a far greater wrong- that of enslaving and oppressing a whole race, namely Israel.

 

Here we are, a future great prophet at least partially shamed in front of the chief priest of Egyptian idolatry! There is no doubt that Moses regretted his killing an innocent Egyptian to defend the unjust interests of a Muslim and also that he was saved from the consequences of his crime by another Egyptian.

 

Do not these mean that in every reasonable man, whatever his apparent faith or way of thinking, there is a deep centre of Truth put there by Allah which centre cannot be entirely obliterated or silenced. This is the Spirit Allah blew into him and if correctly probed and prodded this man may awake to the Islam and Tawhid in him. It may take a lot of lecturing and sermonising, a lot of kind acts to ingratiate him and sometimes also some beating. In the end the Spirit may wake up from its slumber and shine up to brighten the whole man once and for all. That was how our Prophet (S) had won most of his converts later in his prophetic career: he first preached to them kindly then used some threats and promises and for some time he had also to fight minimally and on occasion to apply sweeteners.

 

 

ISLAM, TAWHID AND SPIRIT OF ALLAH BLOWN INTO MAN ARE INEXTRICABLY RELATED

 

What does the Word of Allah the Most High “I blew into him (man) of My Spirit” mean, did you ever consider?

 

Before we probe and answer this perhaps the greatest of questions and mysteries we must briefly review some opinions about what ‘spirit’/’ruh’ means.

 

The most popular idea among both philosophers and religious believers is that the human spirit is a very fine essence or principle which, when added to the human body animates it and  when taken away from or leaves the body, the body dies. I think this only amounts to a metaphor as everything in the simple discussions of spirituality does: because our minds wrongly equates real existence with the property of occupying a place in space, having some material substance however subtle and being subject to time passing on it (or it changing over time) human spirit or ruh is also conceived like this. So, some scientists who believe in ruh allege that they measured its weight even: they say that when a body dies it becomes 25 grams lighter and that must be the weight of the ruh which vacated it. Whether such a weight loss happens let scientists investigate but frankly I think this claim is one of those interminable claims by the material-like ruh believers have been notorious in making and in clinging to over time. From the mid-nineteenth century to the late mid- twentieth Western minds were hotly and sometimes bitterly debating the existence and form of the human spirit or soul. One party, called the spiritualists deployed ‘mediums’ who were alleged to be able to see and contact souls both of the dead and the living human beings while the deniers of such a soul were adamant that all such spiritualist and mediumistic claims were shams and that the human being was just another machine produced by the natural evolution of matter which was the only substance underlying everything from specks of dust to the most distant galaxies.

 

One funny remark by a cheeky critic of claims of seeing a recently dead person may show how the two camps are poles apart: One spirit-believer reports the story of a woman whose naval officer husband was killed in action; she said “One night I had a queer feeling that somebody was in my bedroom looking at me. I turned around and saw my deceased husband standing near the bed and looking at me, dressed in his naval uniform...” To begin with, this experience may well be true whatever its ontological cause and meaning. The critic, bitterly unbelieving remarks, “I would understand the claim that a man’s soul survives death, but does his clothes like his naval uniform also survive death?”  Apparently the soul should be naked. 

 

What made men to look so special was, according to the materialists, because men were complicated, sophisticated enough material aggregations which had enough mechanical, chemical, electrical and electronic sophistications which caused in them a consciousness, a high level of intelligence and a sense of will and purpose and a range of emotions. They challenged the spiritualists to demonstrate the human soul scientifically. Sometimes the phenomena asked for were displayed which, when inspected too closely proved to be either innocently illusory or technical fakery or more shamefully, plain fraud, like telling of lies on the part of coached witnesses.  Among the technical tricks ‘photographing’ ‘detached’ human souls whether of dead or living people and ‘photographing’ angels or fairies were very popular once. At closer inspection all proved to be crude frauds only found believable by those who thirsted after a proof that they are not going to really die or that their loved ones had not really died but lived in another form. Of course this is what most religions teach and I personally believe it to be so. But this is one thing and believing plainly fraudulent ‘evidence’ is quite another.

 

Belief equals faith as far as religion is concerned and the value of faith, that is to say, believing in something very valuable or important beyond measure is such an inseparable essence of religion that proving the veracity of the things religiously believed in scientifically (which I believe to be impossible because the two fields of religion and science are entirely unlike each other) will rob religion of its potency and bring to zero the religious believer’s moral worth.  There is such a moral force in faith that no other mental state can be its equal in motivating people towards a desired objective; we dare say that the worth of a given belief is measured by the nobility of its aims and not its scientific probability which can be anything or nil. Believing in, rather than knowing spiritual realities like Ruh is so especially important in religion that  Allah refused to reveal its secret, closing the subject with the verse “They ask you (o Muhammad) about Ruh: Say “Ruh is an affair of my Lord; you have been given little knowledge of it” (17: 85). Let me explain:

 

We have already reiterated many times that God has an ontological meaning or reality which is ultimately unknowable and also a psychological reality or meaning which is eminently clear to at least His believers. Believers simply experience God in all His Majesty and often His Sweetness which experience can lead them to any heroic and charitable act. From the highest heavens with their most distant galaxies to the fluttering delicate and ornate wings of a butterfly feeding on equally gorgeous flowers the believer feels  he or she is getting ontological intimations from a Creator Who is so powerful, magnificent and beneficent as to be beyond and above all categories of existence and yet psychologically so akin to him or her . I am underlining these last few words with a purpose: often without analysing or realising it the believer identifies with this Lord of All Existence thereby identifying with all creation which is under the control and jurisdiction of the Lord. This surely is imaginary but imaginary does not always mean false; in the case of God it means a will, on the part of the believer, based on both love and fear to realise one’s hoped-for highest potential for knowing and understanding, embracing and enjoying all the infinite joys newer and higher realisations of existence can bring. Hence the terrible descriptions of a Hell symbolising what is the worst and most evil in man and the Paradise which symbolises what is the best and noblest. Because all behaviour proceeds from how the believer feels the existence of God, God’s Hell and God’s Paradise ideally should motivate him to shun what is morally the worst and the meanest in him and seek what is the best and the noblest. Although many apparent believers often fail dismally in this while some frank atheists behave quite decently and charitably most of the time I believe this does not invalidate the above premise: the atheist also has the psychological need for containing a great hero in himself as the symbol of his highest ideal and worthiest serviceability-  this is exactly God in a psychological sense but not so named for unconscious reasons; perhaps the atheist in question was either raised on a cultural diet of materialism or had very bad experience with some ‘religious’ people.

 

Overall, I regard all those who are intensely interested with a prospect of life largely based on a desire for material and sensual gains as infidels even when they protest greatly their fervour for God  while those who, despite confessing to unbelief and yet behave like saints I regard as highly religious, truly Godly. For God needs not always to be created in the imagination to help the man concerned to shun the worst and meanest in him and pursue the best and the noblest; in good- and noble-natured men God still occupies the Throne in their deepest soul but exercises His benevolent and beneficent influence unobserved and unnamed. The mark of such a conscious atheist yet unconscious theist is this: he will not disparage or fight religious believers for fighting’s sake; instead he will benevolently tolerate their innocent ‘superstition’ as he sees it while approving and enjoying their any good behaviour as enough justification for that useful superstition and forgiving less good religious behaviour as inevitable results of human fallibility.

 

This in fact is a junior version of the realisation top Sufis attain: While such top Sufi masters believe and in a sense witness God and can therefore behave most excellently at all times and also feel great (joyous and jubilant with an accompanying peace of mind and contentment of heart) they also excuse the lesser believers’ belief in the lesser believers’ far less glorious and therefore far less effective god and would like if possible to help them graduate to theirs. That is why Sufi masters define an ‘arif billah’ (one with an effective gnosis of God) or for short an ‘arif’ which term is roughly synonymous with ‘waliuyyullah’ (a friend of Allah) or for short a ‘wali’. Roughly equivalent to the English term ‘saint’ the term wali implies all three: a caring friend whether superior or inferior to whom he cares about, a guardian or governor and a saint.  A Sufi wali means all three rolled into one but the guardianship being only spiritual with no governorship. In other words he is the best of men in whatever capacity he may possess under whatever circumstances: I can see no other personality type to better this.
Incidentally and contrary to the usual wali concept of usual Sufis, ‘waliyullah’, as far as Allah’s Own Qur’anic description of wali, is none other than a good and sincere believer whose goodness and sincerity can always be objectivised, that is to say, he or she can consistently behave his or her best when it comes to circumstances under which one’s humanity is tested. Otherwise he or she may look as ordinary as anybody else: and that is the beauty of it. A person who broadcasts the impression of being a wali by pompous role-acting, calculating generosity and miraculous pretensions or implications of sanctity while in critical situations calling for sacrifice and charity with no favours expected or possible in return is no wali but an ambitious pretender talented in theatrical and political skills. Most sheikhs are like this by the testimony of all great awliya, like our master Rumi: he said “In our age, can you imagine, almost a thousand years ago) finding a true sheikh is as difficult as finding the philosopher’s stone”. Mind you, in the lore of alchemy this mysterious and extremely rare stone is believed to convert every metal it touches into gold! If true sheikhs were so rare that long ago one would not expect them to be easier to find today. As a rule of thumb however watch for through and through but unadvertised humility, through and through good manners and charity and above all honesty and non-claiming of miraculous powers on his part or on the part of others he claims to have learned from. A true and sincere believer, who can only be humble, produces the real, lasting and teaching miracle of exceptionally high morality and equally exceptional good manners, living a life of non-luxury without appearing destitute and without being a beggar even by implication. Too much popularity and a carnival atmosphere of tumultuous and drunken assemblies and almost institutionalised association with the high and the mighty among the society are usually counter-indications because the high and the mighty in every society are described by Allah as the top criminals of them (6: 123).

 

Lastly, the more miracle-mongering the less reliability. In fact reported profusion of almost obscenely materialistic miracles (which are always sham) and popularity with the high and the mighty including social and artistic celebrities are the two best diagnostic symptoms of spiritual pretension and fraud. In fact the Antichrist is depicted as such! Perceived sainthood or divinity has been one of the most lucrative arts and business enterprises. It is also one of the safest of frauds: the culprits are rarely exposed or caught and still less likely to be punished in this world: this is a very ominous symptom- for Allah postpones the punishment of His rivals to Hell, allowing them to spend their paradise here and now. We take refuge in Allah.      

              

Before we move on to discuss this top grade of a human being we may remind our dear readers of our explanations in our earlier articles that the spirit and the spiritual are associated with matter one way or another but neither the spirit’s association with matter is simple nor the spirit in any way comparable to matter. As great Rumi explains, one cannot reduce fire to a mere spoken or written word or to a drawn and painted representation of it. Although all these forms are read or identified as representing fire they neither give light nor heat. That is to say, by writing the word ‘fire’ on a piece of paper the paper will not be burnt. Neither drawing a fire scene on the paper will burn it. Matter is like that in relation to spirit: although the spirit can only be represented through the medium of material bodies it is ultimately independent of matter just like fire is independent of the word for it or the picture representing it. It is not in the same category as atoms, molecules or photons but like the relation of meaning to word it has its own and more important existence in an entirely different category. Or they may be the two different aspects of the one and the same thing which in itself is unknowable given the nature of our minds. It may be like the dualities of matter and energy or time and space in modern physics: each couple is inseparable as well as interconvertible; matter partially converts into energy in the splitting of the atom while the energy from sunlight becomes mass in plants when it is absorbed in the context of a snythesis like water and carbon dioxide becoming a carbohydrate, such as fruit sugar or fructose. When fructose is metabolised in our bodies it disintegrates back into water and carbon dioxide and the energy from the sun dematerialises back into another form of energy, namely heat which when used to power our muscles converts partially into mechanical and electrical energies. Yet our minds can never reconcile the concepts of energy which more relates to movement and the concepts of matter or mass which relates to a static state like a stone sitting somewhere for eternity. In other words the (allegedly alleged) matter-spirit duality is not an exceptional case but has many sisters in the real world of science. One is the matter and energy duality and the other the time and space duality- this last is reduced to a single if too mysterious concept called space-time.

 

Obviously the reality is so mysterious that our imagination fails to conceive it and abstract mathematics must be relied on to quantitatively calculate the relationships between the various more simple concepts like mass and energy, time and space which our sense organs hallucinate for us out of the absolutely unique unknowable called existence. That must be why the far more elusive spirit or soul can only be slightly known by us and its full knowledge is with God because it is a Divine affair of His as the verse we quoted above states. What is more we know first-hand, in fact infinitely more first hand than knowing matter, time or space that we have something in us which makes us conscious as well as conscientious unlike any other being we know of. It is sheer stupidity not to admit the existence of this unique and fundamental something in ourselves and yet use it to argue the case that we don’t have it. Saying that our spirit is an illusion and that only matter and space and time etc. are real is like denying the existence of numbers and yet using them to make calculations. Yes, physically numbers don’t exist, only tangible things like oranges or pebbles exist yet we ascribe groups of them numbers to express the size of the group. No animal we know of counts things but simply deal with them instinctively; numbers are constructs of our minds and may become so utterly unrelated to physical objects that they come to be called ‘imaginary numbers’ for example. Square root of -1 is one such imaginary number. Nothing objective can be counted using it but it still works such mathematical wonders that without it we could never produce high science like theoretical physics or computers.

 

Even medicine needs an intangible principle to base many discoveries and cures on: Psychiatry postulates a psyche in us and then proceeds to debate human behaviour and treat human misbehaviour.  It can never succeed as mere neurotherapy using only chemical and physical means: it takes man’s soul for granted and achieves incomparably more than it could achieve without it. Its sister psychology is entirely at the mercy of a postulated soul in man: you see it works only too well and if soul does not exist (like the square root of -1) it should still be accepted as an indispensable hypothesis. Lastly, what may be a mere hypothesis to a blind science may well be such a reality that to it science is a mere hypothesis. After all the scientifically definable and quantifiable concepts like gravity, electrical charge and field, entropy etc. are all imaginary constructs which may afterwards be replaced by others even more useful than them. Our belief is that soul or spirit is  at least as real as matter or both are equally myths. We should not be so stupid as shoot ourselves in the foot by denying our very essence: our consciousness. It is scientifically as unprovable as the soul yet all our life and work depend on and flourish in it. In fact it is our soul. Death may send it into an abyss but that does not mean that it may not rise into another medium of existence like the sun rising from behind a hill. There may be more things under the sun than we may ever suspect. After all consciousness is the most wonderful and mysterious existent in the universe and dismissing it so cheaply may be the greatest mistake. How can one dismiss the thing that is used in the dismissing? Will it not be like dismissing the existence of our eye simply because it cannot see itself except indirectly?  Or the ear because it cannot hear itself or the skin becaue it cannot feel itself.      

 

As a fully trained and experienced scientist I believe I must be taken seriously and in fact all that I have so far said about the hypotheticality of concepts like gravity or inter-convertibility of time and space or matters and energy can be verified from advanced textbooks of modern science.  Soul is only as hypothetical as matter. Not bad, isn’t it?

 

Enough of such silly denials of most glaring and first-hand realities and going back to man’s soul and its salvation therefore even more legitimate and useful subjects than those of physical sciences. Ours is about that most precious of possessions- happiness. Materialists’ are about anything and everything except happiness, especially the happiness of less sophisticated and more innocent fellow humans or those both dazzled and troubled by science, troubled because they have starved themselves of such human values and experiences which cater for our most fundamental and thirsted after needs, like dizzying love and exhilarating friendship and tender mutual care and reassuring trust. If these are not the very top prizes of life let me know what are? True religion is about these. Sufism is its top form. True Sufis are the realest, most self-enjoying, most loving and for the perceptive observers the most lovable men. They just found God where nobody could expect, live with and from Him All-Gracious and offer the same to all who want, for free.

 

You see, they are already advance-paid by God so handsomely that they are already too rich to ask for anything more from anybody in a real sense. In fact they enjoy being net givers, just like their Lord does.  Kind acts are their own rewards: what a gift it is to be able to act kindly at all times without straining or resenting? What is happier than being a kind person because one is aware of good God Who is enough for everything in an all-enveloping and underpinning and underwriting way? What imparts more innocence than being consistently kind because God softened and warmed one’s heart as nothing else could? What more joy than that derived from relieving the suffering of another soul and seeing it happy again in the awareness that the Soul and Creator of the whole existence is watching and smiling? How wonderful to have such an Infallible, inseparable Friend! Imaginary? All life is imaginary or it will amount to nothing more than a robotic interaction of unconscious processes. The fact is that God is Consciousness at its fullest and in command of all creation and our human consciousness is the ruh blown into us from His; it is the primary reality without which there can be found no other reality- in fact there is no reality whatsoever without consciousness perceiving it, for even the concept of reality needs consciousness to unconsciously create and perceive it. This is the supreme paradox as well as the only real substance of life. Ruh exists as nothing else can.

 


 

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