Our Thanking Responsibilities Towards God
OUR VARIOUS THANKING RESPONSIBILITIES TOWARDS GOD AND UNDER GOD TOWARDS VARIOUS PERSONS IN OUR LIFE
No doubt our first responsibility towards anybody is towards Allah Whom we are required to praise and thank, which two terms the Arabic word ‘hamd’ includes. Praise addresses the issue of respect and thanks addresses the issue of gratitude we must show to Him All-Gracious. It must not be for nothing that the first verse of the first surah of Allah’s Book, namely ‘al Fatiha’ begins with “Alhamdu lillahi Rabbil Alamin”, that is to say “Praises and thanks to Allah” although it is controversial whether or not the basmala is the first verse instead. Even so, ‘al hamd’ is still early enough.
Praising and thanking Allah to have any real content must come from the bottom of one’s heart with such sincerity and constancy that it must rule one’s whole states of mind and behaviours. While this hamd to Allah is the worthiest of all states of mind the utterances from one’s tongue finding fault and resenting Allah is the blackest and purest of blasphemies. Accordingly we are told that the first word our father Adam uttered when he was enlivened by the blowing into him of Allah’s Spirit was ‘al hamdu lillah’ while the first word Iblis Satan uttered when ordered to bow to Adam alongside all the angels was “No!”. When asked to explain himself he went on “I am better than him” and when rebuked for that he added, in summary paraphrase, “Because You let me down (o Allah) I will pursue and trap him until I prove you that he is a thankless creature” to which Allah retorted “Whoever among men follow you then I shall fill the Hell with all such and you and your offspring the jinn”. Which means the Devil saw man’s fall in man not thanking Allah. This fits perfectly with the verse we quoted at the head of this article, namely
“What use it is to Allah to punish you while you thank and believe? (4:147)
Then much use it will be to Allah to punish man if he is ungrateful and disbelieves! That is because by punishing him enough a moment shall come when man can no longer challenge Allah, realizes his weakness and error and offer his fullest apologies and promises of self-correction.
Surely the best and most good productive way of thanking Allah is obeying Him and therefore conducting oneself with justice and charity at all times and under all circumstances. But Allah is not a purely abstract idea; on the contrary He is also Immanent in all creation beginning with fellow men of ours and at the head of the list are our Prophet and our parents, our relations and in general our fellow Muslims and all mankind and living beings in that order as context and circumstance requires.
A special category of people we are indebted to and must therefore honour and treasure are those noble and luminous souls who represent a prophetic and parental beneficence, like our teachers and especially religious-spiritual masters who in the case of Sufis are their sheikhs. Alongside treasuring all mentioned above big or small our sheikhs, catering for our eternal needs and salvation deserve a very distinguished place. Read if you wish “Consider when Luqman was saying to his son ‘O my son, do not take anything or anybody as equals of Allah, such equalization is the grossest offence’. We bade man to treat his parents well.., therefore thank Me first then your parents, your return shall eventually be to Me (your honouring and treasuring of people entitled to it shall count as part of your honouring and treasuring Me). If however any of those force you to take others as equals of Allah then do not obey them in that. All the same get along well with them in this world. Otherwise follow the path of those who orient themselves to Me...” (31: 13- 15).
Certainly, those who orient themselves to Allah are true and most well-behaved believers drenched in spiritual gnosis and religious knowledge as a result of which they conduct themselves superbly at all times. These surely can only be most pious ulema whether called or recognised as Sufis or not. Our standing with Allah is not by titles let alone pretentions but by an almost infallible constancy in and patience with the moral and ritual requirements of Islam- all of them and not only some.
Since we are Sufis we need to focus on our relationship with our masters which we call our sheikhs. We should treat them- as far as possible and proper of course- as we would a very good father and also as a representative of no less a figure than the Messenger of Allah except that we and our sheikhs jointly admit that a sheikh cannot be an equal to the Messenger of Allah even by the farthest of margins. But the fact remains that honouring and treasuring your sheikhs big or small (i.e, deputy sheikhs) is, like honouring and treasuring your parents, part and parcel of honouring and treasuring Allah and therefore should not be taken lightly. All the above honourings and treasurings actually come in one piece and its artificial breaking into fragments and departments and then picking and choosing which part to serve and which to discard is pure ignorance and will amount to certain failure and rejection.
THE SUPREME IGNORANCE
The supreme ignorance a Muslim/Sufi can leak is taking and making exceptions among the above obligations, like thinking that because his parents are not practicing Muslims or no Muslims at all that releases him from honouring and treasuring them. Of equally supreme importance is stopping an obligation due to one of the above, be it respect or obedience, charity or defence, is seeing from them something one does not like. So, a parent of yours may hurt you and you respond by a counter hurt, your sheikh tries you with some treatment designed to test your stability in your trust in and attitude towards him and you resent it and begin to bear a grudge and the like. Now listen to this: Allah Himself is too busy as well to hurt your feelings by afflicting all departments of your existence from thirsting and hungering you to making you very ill at times and taking away your loved ones or things and many more hurtful experiences too numerous and prolific to catalogue. Will you then resent your Lord and turn away from Him?
That is not simply on, that is not an option. Now, know that all apparent hurts arriving from your parents., your parent figures like teachers and sheikhs and your friends who are otherwise basically good come under the category of probing and testing trials from Allah Himself. For Allah never acts as Allah in isolation but always and always through His servants be they men or stones. If you fail to see Allah behind all that happen to you, you fail the test thrown at you.
The only if a frequent exception is an invitation to or an opportunity for sin. In that case you should consider it from the Satan the enemy of Allah and shun it as hell. Which means a man or woman you trust suddenly offers you some way of action which you know to be wrong only too well you are not to obey him or her. This refusal to go further applies to those friends whom we take to be our sheikhs- these cannot simply offer you to give up your shame or big chunks of your wealth as wealth itself with no realistic or defined purpose. That is because false if very skilfully acting spiritual pretenders or turncoats are everywhere and if we are not careful against being naive we may end up submitting to every Musailaima, Ghulam or Baha and even worse, shoot off Islam like an arrow shoots off a bow.
CONCLUSION
Allah and His Messenger and Muslim believers make up the party of salvation in which all favours issue from the top where Allah is and are transmitted by the Messenger and then his deputies the true ulema and sheikhs all of whom are worthy of our respect, obedience and devotion so long those ulema and sheikhs live up to their promises and potentials. For none other than the God-confirmed prophets are infallible in their duties towards their charges while ulema and sheikhs are never safe as prophets are.
This however does not mean that we would take our masters lightly and tentatively cautiously. In fact unless they propose something which wholly fly in the face of Allah’s and His Messenger’s instructions and also their ethos we need take all their words seriously and act accordingly. The only exception is when the sheikh overreaches himself without realizing or meaning harm and asks for something which is banned or will amount to bad practice. For example if the sheikh asks for a certain medicine to be tried on a patient on whom its effects are known to be risky from medical experience it can be explained to him that medical expertise and legal licence are against it and it cannot therefore be implemented. This attitude is verified by the hadith about the fertilization of date palms of Medina. The Prophet wondered why on earth his farmer companions took the trouble to climb those high trees and shake their branches to make pollen fly around. It was explained to him that the practice helped the production of more crop but he trustingly remarked that only what Allah wanted to be produced could be produced no matter who did what with the trees. That year the crop failed. The Prophet was embarrassed and remarked that his companions knew their worldly affairs best and that they should revert to artificial pollination the next time. Was the Prophet being silly? No! Was he playing games? No. On the contrary he sincerely believed in his mode of action and was embarrassed to be proven wrong but as Allah’s worthy chosen messenger Allah was employing him, unbeknown to him, to serve a very valuable and enduring lesson to his companions and through them to us- and guess what- to himself!
After all, all but Allah is subject to some harmless humbling at times. So, we may politely object and explain to our sheikh a mistake they may be making in suggesting some way of action and true sheikhs being the true emulators of the Prophet can only appreciate that and do appreciate. What we cannot do to our sheikhs is resenting their any remarks which touch upon our vanities like over-valuing ourselves or beginning to look down on our sheikh and arguing with him with a view to sow of our supposed superiority. This of course does not mean that a pupil can never excel his master in something shared between them, but it does not follow that the pupil can begin to show off and challenge. What is more, knowledge as commonly understood may not be the only and even the main asset determining the standing of a servant with Allah the Most High; there are other secret merits the top of which is a golden heart which only Allah knows whom has got it. It may be that an illiterate juvenile is Allah’s dearest servant on earth at a given time and nobody but Allah knows that this is so. Is not a lion cub the dearest member of a zoo simply because when it grows us it shall be the top attraction, for example? Forgiving the zoo metaphor cannot we say that, each and every prophet of Allah were his dearest servants on earth since their birth and throughout their junior years? Read if you wish about the Moses when he was yet a baby:
“Once we had inspired your mother (o Moses) thus: Put him in a box and release him into the water so as the water take it to the bank and an enemy of Mine and his pick him up in order that you are raised under my Eye and be cast love from Me” (20: 39).
With such arcane secrets and plots around we should regard practically all treatment we receive from our masters as well indicated for us and trust that they are designed to try, test and reinforce us as we bear with them and keep our high opinon of our masters like all good apprentices of a capable and competent artisan must do. Allah will then reward us on the account of our good intentions and well-meaning obedience. Lastly, a totally well-meaning disciple has Allah’s protection over him which no false or fallen master can defeat and breach. May Allah guide and protect us at all times and under all circumstances. Amen.
MASTERS LEVEL QUESTION:
Please write about the length of half a page summarising each of the 20 chapters. They don’t necessarily have to be summaries of the entire chapter but of some key part of it, or a particularly ‘pertinent to your thesis’ subject. With half a page’s worth for an introduction to your mini version of the Textbook of Spiritual Enlightenment and Refinement and a fitting conclusion, 11 pages is the total page-count for your dissertation.
Your title may either be ‘A commentary on the Textbook of Spiritual Enlightenment and Refinement’ or an original one which more fits the trajectory you have chosen.