Flowing With Allah

 

18.  FLOWING WITH ALLAH

 

“Are they seeking other than the religion of Allah while whoever are in the heavens and the earth submit to Him willingly or unwillingly and to Him shall they return?” (3: 83).

 

What a totally disarming argument from our Creator Almighty, All-Wise, All-Gracious!

I draw your attention to the word ‘submit’ which is a translation of the Arabic original verb ‘aslama’ form which the name of Allah’s religion derives, that is to say, Islam. This consideration makes it immediately clear that all sentient beings, men, demon and angel are in submission to him even when they think that they are rebelling against him! They are aware of their any willing obedience but unaware of their unwilling obedience which appears as rebellion. A rebel thinks that he is fighting against somebody whom he finds oppressive but what if that somebody is just and the rebel is wrong? Additionally, what if the rebelled against ruler is so knowledgeable, wise and good that anticipating the ignorant fool’s rebellion has already taken all precautions to cause the rebel land in eventual punishment despite his initial exhilarations at each intermediate stage of his path to his eventual grief? Is not he unknowingly obeying the ruler’s desires about his acting, that is to say, acting exactly like the ruler planned for him? All of which means no creature can act in a way other than Allah helps and allows it no matter what the creature, in case it is a sentient and intelligent creature, thinks it is doing and expecting.

 

Let us take the enemies of Muhammad sws. His chief enemies were three: the pagans, the Jews and the hypocrites among his companions. Each group had its own idea about how to frustrate the Prophet and they often collaborated in their nefarious aims. The pagans worried about losing their pet superstitions on the basis of which they justified a lot of their barbaric acts like burying alive girl children they did not want or get away with gambling, usury and abuse of slaves.

 

The Jews for their part resented an Ishmaelite’s claim to prophethood which status they thought only Israelites were entitled to and worthy of. Neither the superb, impeccable character of Muhammad sws nor the brilliance of the bible (the Qur’an) he preached they wanted to consider and appreciate. It was the chosen race against the rest, full-stop! What is more, they especially hated the Abrahamic sons of their uncle Ishmael since he was the first-born and natural inheritor of the Abrahamic succession out of which they believed their father Isaac had cheated him (can you imagine the meanness!). In Muslim belief no such meanness was committed by our uncle holy Isaac, otherwise as the holder of a stolen legacy both he and his sons the Israelites could only be sinners. You see, while trying to look the favourites of God they were exposing the opposite, unawares. This is the first example of doing Allah’s bidding on the part of a people while thinking that they are frustrating Allah and preventing Him blessing peoples other than Israel.  Eventually Jesus whom they like Muhammad sws rejected frustrated them by extending spiritual franchise to the gentiles (‘goyim’ as Jews call them) and Muhammad totally frustrated them when he preached to all mankind because Allah said to him that he was sent to all mankind.

Hypocrites resented him because he made man-made class and nobility institutions redundant and declared all men equal both before God and before law.

 

The chief hypocrite of the commonwealth of Medina (which included Muslims, Jews and any people willing to participate in the social and political fabric of Medina) was about to be crowned king when Muhammad had arrived in the town as the overwhelming favourite of the public. He never forgave Muhammad for stealing the show from him as he saw it and he and his followers stooped to every mean act and behaviour they thought could help them to frustrate and bring down the Prophet. All these three opposition groups acted at times independently and at other times in collusion and worked hard and overtime to kill Islam in the bud. Did they succeed? No. On the contrary they played Allah’s game without being aware and only helped Muhammad to grow into more greatness with which increasing greatness he was able to achieve unprecedentedly great ends nobody in history has ever equalled and most probably will ever do so. He is at the present the world’s most popular, revered and treasured leader and there seems no reason why he should not grow more in stature and influence.  Read if you wish:

 

“He (Allah) is Who sent His messenger with guidance and the religion of Truth in order to make it to win over all religion. Allah is enough as a Witness (48: 28)

 

Surely Islam, at present, is the religion with most followers on earth; its chief and far older rival retains fewer believers since atheism and agnosticism claimed a large proportion of people with Christian ancestry. What is more Islam is the fastest growing religion and its converts are coming from all climes and cultures including the Jewish and Marxist. It simply is proving the most irresistible faith.

 

At this point we have to add that not long after the demise of the Prophet, Islam had a fourth enemy; it has been the bigots, those narrow- and literal-minded sick souls who can only see trees and not the forest as the saying goes. Taking single issues and observations, like a single verse or group of verses or a single act on the part of somebody whom they cannot understand, they jump to fantastic conclusions about either the crime or greatness of somebody and then treat him accordingly. The first term used to describe such a group was ‘khariji’, designated to those who walked out on our master Ali (may Allah be pleased with him) and who eventually assassinated him on the charges of blasphemy. If such people could find verses in the Qur’an and reasons in their sick minds to accuse Ali the great hero of Islam we are not surprised that nowadays their spiritual descendants, today’s armed and conspiratorial so-called Islamist militants, are acting true to their poisonous genes and may kill any and everybody whether Muslim or non-Muslim in any numbers and by however brutal methods: witness the civil slaughter in Iraq today and elsewhere among the Muslims!

 

This fourth enemy has never left Muslims alone since our master’s Ali’s time and is nowadays going from horrible strength to horrible strength. Squeezed between their inner and outer enemies humble and peaceable Muslims can only pray and hope for help from Allah- may He All-Gracious help them!

 

Now we may move from this dark and pessimistic end of the Muslim experiential spectrum to the light and optimistic end: that of a conscious, aware Muslim.

 

Conscious of what? Conscious of Allah’s never failing Presence next to and indeed inside the true believer. Aware of what? Aware that Allah is all good and those servants of His who want to follow Him in goodness can do so to a fault!

 

Such believers see Allah’s Will behind everything that ever happens and try and can often decipher what each event means in terms of Allah’s Wise and eventually Gracious Will. Let us take a very ordinary example all saints (true and loving believers of Allah) can daily witness.  You are going somewhere and go to take a bus. You miss it at the last minute. If you are one of the unaware Muslims you feel let down by Allah, you feel a bit bitter. Taking the next bus you arrive at the train station where again you miss a train by a whisker. You think you have another grievance. After boarding the next train you attempt to board another bus which again leaves without you. Now you must be fuming! But see what comes next: When you arrive at your ultimate destination, say your office, you learn that you have been saved from meeting a violent person who had just been removed by the police minutes before you arrived: your office block is in a mess, destruction is everywhere as the police are: There are quite a few wounded while a number of others are in shock etc. This is just a simple example of what one can gain from a sequence of events which he found frustrating him. Or the reverse may happen: you think you arrived at a place prematurely only to rejoice to meet a long-standing and long-absent dear friend about to depart. The two of you hug in tears and kisses and thank God that He treated the two of you to such joy. What if your friend makes an offer to you which had been your dream offer?

 

Now when we look at the life of our beloved and surely Allah’s beloved Muhammad we see all such trying coincidences defining his holy life. He loses both parents and moves from house to house as an orphan, grows up a destitute young man with no high hopes from life whatsoever. Suddenly he is picked up by a rich and beautiful widow 15 years his senior and lo and behold it proves to be the happiest marriage in history! He then has all the leisure he needs since he is relieved of all burdens of working for a livelihood and joins the other prosperous nobles of his tribe the Quraish where he enjoys full respect. But this idyll does not last more than 15 years. A few years before he turns 40 he begins to become pensive and withdrawn- which he could afford. Influenced by the Hanif movement which was a spiritual path tracing its origins in the common father of Arabs and Jews, namely Abraham he becomes a Hanif and practices their rituals like prayer, fasting and contemplation. For days he could withdraw to a cave on a mountain top and search his Creator in his soul. Please note: by the repeated evidence of the Qur’an he never expects to be picked up as a prophet and revealed a new bible.  Let my Muslim brothers not misunderstand the word bible: it is a full and square translation of the Arabic word ‘kitab’ into Greek- nothing more nothing less! The English word bible has its origin in the Greek word ‘biblio’ pronounced as ‘vivlio’, because the B sign of the Greek alphabet stands for ‘v’ sound and it was the Romans who pronounced the same character as ‘b’.

 

One proof that our master Muhammad did not expect to be picked up as Allah’s agent is the verse “Thus we revealed to thee a Spirit from Our Affair (of Divine Dispensation) You used not to realise what book/bible or faith was but We made it a Light with which We guide whom We want from among our servants (42: 52). No wonder the Prophet was in shock, turmoil and even doubt for about three years after the first Revelation of a few verses beginning with “Read in the Name of thy Lord Who created” (96: 1). He was that innocent!

 

During those painful years he was unhappiest of men: “Why me?” he must have been wondering, that is to say “Why me to be picked up as the new madman, the odd man out of my tribe?”  His wife’s assurances that he was not mad nor was he deluded went some way to console and assure him but never enough. Only the arrival of new and more detailed and explicit verses began to increase his certainty and give him the power to preach them. His fellow Arabs had to abandon idols and come to Allah as their sole Lord. They had to purify their hearts and ennoble their characters if they wanted salvation with the Lord. They had to humanise their conduct and treat the weak among them with kindness etc. Although being a messenger of Allah had its incomparable satisfactions it also had its almost unbearable trials and tribulations. Almost throughout his mission in and around Mecca the Prophet was a very badly suffering figure followed mostly by the weakest among the people and that in very small numbers and persecuted only too badly by the rest. Did he abandon his mission because of his sufferings, frustrations and humiliations? Not quite; only occasionally he was too depressed to want to go on more. At one point he had to be rescued from his doubt and depression by a Reveation, the Surat al Duha or the Chapter of Morning shine.  It reads:

 

“By the Morning shine, and by the night when it falls, your Lord did not abandon you nor has He been angry with you. Indeed the later times will be better than the earlier times for you (you will gradually arrive in great success and satisfaction, so be patient). Your Lord will give you and you will be pleasantly satisfied. Did He not find you an orphan and accommodated you? Did He not find you lost and guided you? Did He not find you poor and enriched you? Therefore the orphan do not oppress, the beggar to not castigate and the gift of thy Lord keep telling about” (93: whole chapter)

 

At another point he could not help complaining to Allah about his frustration and dejection. He was on his way back from an abortive visit to neighbouring town Taif in the hope of winning them over to Islam instead of the unwinnable-looking Mecca. He was in for a shock: They would not hear him at all and could not make more haste to pelter with stones and send him out running for his life. Once he reached a safe distance, bloodied and exhausted he could do nothing but put his case, his grievance to Allah:

 

“O Allah, to Thee I complain about the weakness of my power and smallness of my skills and my lowliness in the sight of people! O the Most Merciful of the Merciful, to whom art Thou abandoning me? To an enemy angry with and biased towards me or a relation to whose hand Thou hast put my affairs? Still, if Thou art not angry with me I do not mind except that Thy indulgence would be more comfortable for me. I take refuge in the Light of Thy Gracious Face with which is illuminated the heavens and light up the layers of darkness and improves on it the affairs of this world and the next- lest Thy wrath descends on me. Thou art entitled to all apologies until Thou art satisfied, there is no power for change and no force except with Thee. O Allah protect me like the protection due to a baby!”

 

In this probably the most splendid prayer ever submitted to Allah the Most Splendid we find almost genetically coded the most and best guided beautiful heart of Allah’s Beloved. He only complains when he is at the end of his wits and means and under the darkest of circumstances yet he hastens to add that he needs Allah’s forgiveness more than anything else, declares himself bankrupt, cannot apologise more, fully believing that he should apologise to Allah for ‘apparently’ failing to advance his cause and still not losing hope (as it should be) asks his Lord to forgive and accommodate him and in view of his utter weakness begs for being taken care of like a baby would!

 

This holiest of prayers ever by any human being was the turning points for our beloved master Muhammad: Soon a string of frequent favours of help began to flow his way because he had submitted himself to Allah like the submission of a yet legless and speechless baby to a parent- in other words he had begun to flow with Allah!

 

The first help came in the form of Mi’raj, his invitation and ascension to heavens, a spiritual experience of the highest order. In there Garbriel was his escort-servant and Allah his Host- a privilege not granted to anybody before nor to be granted anybody after, at least at the level granted to Muhammad. He reached the very end of created knowables beyond which only Allah’s greatest Signs lied, Signs related to His Divine Essence. Read if you wish:

 

“When what was covering the Terminal Lotus Tree (root and branch network of utmost spiritual puzzlement) his (Muhammad’s) vision did not go awry nor did it go overboard-  He saw the greatest of the Signs of his Lord”   (53: 16- 18)

 

Although some commentators love to interpret this verse as proof that the Prophet actually saw Allah as one would see another object the wording of the verse could not be more prohibitive of such daring intoxication. Allah stresses the puzzlement engulfing His Prophet (the word ‘sidra’ for lotus derives from the root-verb ‘sadara’ and means to be puzzled, dazzled). The ultimate experience lived by the Beloved was reaching the limiting experience of the created order when puzzlement and dazzlement blots out everything (hence the lotus was covered by what it was covered by) and the Beloved’s vision, remaining in its creaturely limits, did not slip away from the puzzling wonders it was seeing and yet also would not exceed its limits and look and see beyond. That is only too clear from the verses above. What he saw is not kept a secret for us to speculate about. It is bluntly stated that he had seen the greatest Sign of Allah from among His Signs (ayat). Repeat: Sign. Allah told the truth!

 

Incidentally we find in no less a Hadith collection than that of Bukhari a hadith in which our mother Aisha not only denies that the Prophet did see his Lord in Mi’raj but she bases this on the Prophet’s answers to her specific question on the matter and then goes on to quote explicit verses discounting the possibility of seeing Allah. Since those who believe that Allah can be visible to man also quote hadiths and not verses of the Qur’an, the matter boils down to a stark choice which is this: shall we believe ambiguous or literally explicit verses about the matter; similarly shall we believe a hadith reported in the Bukhari from no less an authority than brilliant favourite wife of the Prophet whose intelligence the Prophet frequently admitted and praised or others far less than her reporting in less reliable collections?

 

What is wrong with ‘visionists’ if we may call them so is their lack of spiritual depth. Allah can be seen perfectly clearly in ALL of His creatures when form and spirit can be distinguished and form is not taken at face value. Who with a grain of intelligence and faith will fail to see Allah in His Messenger on the one end and in the tender beauty of a windflower? Scientists do not see the laws and mechanisms of gravitation in the shape of visible objects alongside the bodies subject to them but in the very behaviour of those bodies which obey the gravitation. Only when seen in the context of the entire observable universe we discern and discover the laws of nature as we call Allah’s material laws and not see the said laws as separate objects attached to or hovering around material objects like ghosts! Allah can be seen in His creations with the heart’s eyes and shall be seen in the Hereafter with then even sharper heart’s eyes which vision is incomparably more glorious and satisfactory than anything animal eyes see or expect to see. Visionists only expose their poverty of imagination and naivety of their conception.

 

Soon after this unprecedented and unsurpassable boosting Gift, other happy arrivals queued up to be released to the Beloved, the owner of the most splendid supplication to Allah Almighty All-Gracious ever. During the next hajj season a group of men and women pilgrims from the town Yathrib (later renamed Medina) arrived at Mecca’s suburbs and were hit upon by the Prophet. After a brief exchange of introductions the Prophet told them about his mission and recited them something from the Qur’an. The guests were instantly impressed and visibly moved. Coming from a settled and mainly agricultural background and living alongside local Jewish communities these pilgrims, despite being pagans like the Meccans were reasonably well-acquainted with Biblical matters- from a distance of course.

 

Additionally, there was a long story of being taunted by their Jewish compatriots with the prospect of defeat and expulsion from Yathrib once an expected Messiah, a prophet, was sent by Allah to these Jews who would lead them to victory over all other peoples. So, when they became aware that Muhammad was a prophet ‘he must be him’ they concluded and decided to claim him as their own so as to pre-empt the Jews and beat them at their own game. They therefore paid allegiance to the Prophet who looked the part perfectly both by his noblest possible deportment and most magnificent possible message and revelation and converting some others back in Yathrib took them along to the next years hajj where they again met the Prophet as agreed. Now, altogether seventy souls these new converts returned to Yathrib happily taking with them a companion of the Prophet, namely Musab to act as their teacher in their new faith. Musab’s missionary work was so succesfull that within a few months most of the Yathribites embraced Islam. Back at Mecca the life was getting harder and more dangerous by the day; the Prophet therefore, as agreed between himself and the Yathribite converts sent over his existing companions to Yathrib as emigrants and himself followed them soon afterwards. That proved to be the most important turning point in human history.

 

In Medina a lot of dangers came and went and difficulties were never absent- never absent to the day when the Prophet died eleven years after the emigration, but the improvement in the fortunes of Islam and Muslims far outweighed all these.

 

The Prophet had to fight on several fronts simultaneously, but now, unlike in Mecca, all fighting he was making was being made from a position which was increasingly a position of strength. He was now flowing with Allah for all- friend and foe- to see.

Now please consider the verses below to understand what I mean.

 

At the first military engagement of his career as a prophet-political leader he defeated an enemy at least three times stronger than his band of fighters. What he threw at the enemy was described as “When you threw it was not you who threw but Allah threw” (8: 17). Also, Allah explained the inexplicable victory as facilitated by heavenly hosts He sent down for the purpose “Remember that you were asking for Allah’s help and He responding to you had said ‘I will be helping you with a thousand angels arriving in a row” (8: 9).  Yet He continues and breaks the ultimate secret:

 

“Allah had done that in order to boost you with good-news and thereby pacify your hearts. In actual fact help is from nowhere but from Allah the Dear-Powerful and Wise-Dominant (8: 10).

 

Allah’s taking direct responsibility for all pious and victorious acts of His prophet and believers do not end in these verses. When much later the forcible eviction of Jews from their forbidding strongholds in Medina was the case Allah explained:

 

“It was He (Almighty) Who expelled those unbelievers of the People of the Bible in the first exile (Banu Nadr Jews). You were not thinking that they could come out while they thought that their fortifications could protect them from Allah. But Allah came to them from where they did not expect and dropped fear in their hearts so that they began to demolish their houses with their own hands and with the hands of the believers. O men of wisdom, take the lesson!” (59: 2)

 

What was the direction Allah had come to them from? Again, as in the case of Badr when Allah had come through His angels, i.e. spiritual/heavenly hosts, in the case of Banu Nadr Jews He came in the spiritual garb of fear in the hearts of His enemies. These Jews were spoilt by the setback they had inflicted on the Prophet at the battle of Uhud where and when the pagan Quraish hosts had done the dirty and the Jews the diplomatic and funding job.

 

The same patterns repeated themselves to the end of the Prophet’s days he being always able to pull a hat trick so-to-speak out of all situations which found him in a disadvantage. Obviously Allah was doing the invisible side of the fighting and the Prophet, becoming wiser by the day was flowing with Allah.

 

One of the last and most poignant examples of how the Prophet flowed with Allah was his conduct at Hudaibia: risking almost his discredit in the eyes of both his companions and enemies he gave in to almost all the demands of the pagans and signed an apparently very disadvantageous and risky truce with them: only his closest companion Abu Bakr al Siddiq could see what the Prophet knew and could therefore remain unperturbed; he explained to Umar, for example that, the Prophet was not being a coward or something but was just obeying his Lord. For the generality of the companions not as perfect as al Siddiq it was a day of grief and dejection. Again, there was nothing wrong but all were correct: the Prophet was flowing with Allah and since Allah always wins the Prophet flowing with Allah won again. By ‘giving-in’ the Prophet got a truce which enabled him to bring down the power of Arab Jewry then centred at Khaibar and in the next year he bloodlessly subdued Mecca itself and cleansed it of both idols and soon afterwards idolaters. That is the reward for flowing with Allah and is available to all of us who are prepared to flow with Allah, to obey Allah in all outward acts and be connected to him inside our hearts to where He will surely send His intimate guidance from moment to moment.

 

May Allah feed us the gnosis he fed to His Beloved with the intercession of His Beloved so that we are also in the know, we also flow with Allah and we also triumph. Amen.