Durs on the Essence

Shaykh Abdalqadir as-Sufi ad-Darqawi

Yesterday we got to a very significant point of approaching understanding of this great central claim of the people of tasawwuf from the Qur’an al-Karim. We found it in the event of Sayyiduna Musa, ‘alayhi salam, in his quest for this ultimate knowledge of Divine reality. In unfolding this we came on uncertain things that we have to clarify in order that there should not be confusion. We also came on certain things which we might say are contrary claims which are true. But we remember that the sufis say that this knowledge cannot be proved by logic. In other words, it is a precarious path which scorns logic in the sense that it leaps over it because we are not anymore concerned with demonstration or proof, we are concerned with confirmation of experience. If someone has something that is beyond their experience, up to that point all that remains is confirmation of the experience.

We find that the people of knowledge of Allah, by the separate paths that they have come to it, all confirm the goal. The Ahl al-Haqiqat in one place will say something and other people of haqiqat without connection with these people confirm the same thing. Those who have examined the matter even more deeply in terms of the human record find confirmation of exactly the same story in the communities before Sayyiduna Muhammad, sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam. Allah has never left a people without a prophet and therefore he has never left them without access to the unitary reality.

Firstly we have to understand the more important thing which is that this realisation, this unveiling of its nature obliterates the one who looks on it. It is like the one who stares at the sun and becomes blind. So also the people of haqiqat claim in the end their knowledge, yet they also claim with it, in this extraordinary position Allah has put them, a total ignorance. They put themselves beneath everybody while they are making the most grandiose claim possible in their ecstasy-folded up in the great claim is the most menial claim. We say it is a talisman sewn up, bounded and sealed in a mundane cloth. But we also saw that at this point of illumination, the opposite attributes clashed together into a point of unification, so that jamal and jalal met at the point of this annihilation. We end saying that the attributes are darknesses because, for example, you can see the act of strength but you cannot see strength itself, you cannot the see the qudra. You can see the effect of will but you cannot see the will.

Attributes are the darkness and therefore the Essence itself is a luminosity, it is an illumination and therefore it is in itself form. So the sourceness of the attributes, which coming into mulk manifest form, is darkness. The core of the darkness is the luminosity of the Essence-the lights, the tajalli, the self-manifestation from the Essence, but the self-manifestation from the Essence is division. Therefore in an inner chamber of the palace, there is a hidden room with a key. We say that there is an inscription in a talisman that is sealed. There is light upon light and there is outline, there is vision, there is identification but the key to all of it is that when this mountain-self disintegrates and dust remains, that is the confirmation of the recognition of what happens in the process of the annihilation, and in the return from the annihilation. Annihilation has, if you like, three phases: it has the ecstasy and the swooning and the passing away. It has the obliteration and it has the return. This is as far as we can go. We cannot take the matter further than this.

We must make the journey back, as it were, from this condition to what we are able to recognise of the cosmology of this situation that is the existence of the world because at this point we have broken the barrier between the self and the cosmos. We have recognised that self-cosmos is one reality. We are now dealing with the whole creation, you as all the creation. The mountain and Sayyiduna Musa have one knowledge between them-he knows what the mountain knows! The dust and the clay know what the dust and the clay know. The secret therefore of the smallest atom is the secret of all existence. What man discovers, the atom already knew! In Qur’an Allah says that every creature invokes Allah, every creature praises Allah, only you do not know.

This situation we must look at more finely. We have said that Allah is One in His acts, His attributes and His Essence. In reference to the unity of the act of Allah we confirm it by the line of the Diwan of Shaykh Muhammad ibn al-Habib, rahimahullah, “The multiplicity of actions do not multiply the Actor.” In other words, there appear to be many actions but in reality, “Allah is the Creator of you and your actions”-Qur’an. This in itself rips away the veil of qudra and the fantasy of the creatures control over the human situation. In every situation he is utterly dependent and in it we see most clearly that the ruler, the monarch, the leader, the tyrant is most at the mercy of the human situation. The man of destiny, the Mao Tse Tung, Napoleon, Ghengis Khan is most at the mercy because Allah raises him up and Allah brings him down as He wants and when He wants. He does not have knowledge-his very frenzy of activity is the evidence of his ignorance. He is trying to set up a kingdom that is other than the kingdom of Allah in knowledge.

We will say of the attributes that the one who goes from act to attribute has already made a tremendous leap because they have gone from outward appearances to what allows the outward appearance to happen. It is a very crucial zone because it is in this zone that the intelligent seeker realises that all the elements by which man makes something happen are not his. We have said of the act, have we not, that all actions are really one action. This in itself removes from man the fantasy of power, kingdom and achievement. It is what places the governments of existence under shari’at and not under the politics of any kingdom. That is the meaning of Madina al-Munawarra and not what people have said it is today.

When we realise the unity of the attributes we already come to this impossible situation where we realise that all the elements and energies of creation are under the command of Allah. Allah says in the Qur’an, “He makes people laugh and He makes people cry.” These are two names of Allah. “He brings to life and He makes die.” In the Qur’an this ayat is followed by that ayat. This is an actual confirmation of the saneness of weeping and the saneness of laughing. We cannot end up with the same view of existence when we understand this. They are different in experience but they are the same in reality. So a real knowledge would be one in which these two experiences would be understood to be the same.

The sufis say that the common people get the sting but they do not get the honey. The elite get the honey and they do not get the sting. But the elect of the elite get the sting and get the honey and they do not care. In other words they experience the sensory in its fullness but the meanings so dominate their experience that it has made them the same for them. Like Sayyiduna Ayyub, ‘alayhi salam, the pain becomes a du’a. At that point worship and suffering are not different and at that point there is no suffering properly speaking. The opposites have met. One of the great awliya said, “I reached Allah by the opposite names.” Meaning that by placing them together and placing them together he finally broke through to understanding what existence was like.

The oneness of the Essence is a secret which contains a secret. Sayyiduna Muhammad, sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam, has warned against contemplation of the Essence because you are not going to decode it. You are going to unlock a lock. You will go into a room, you will go out of a room. You will pass from one phase to another phase. You will join and you will separate. You will extinguish the outline and you will replace the outline but in that chamber, in that secret garden there is only you. There is nothing that is not you, because that is the unitary reality. You, the experiencing slave, will vanish and it will manifest. So you will pass in and out of that secret garden through the gate. You will smell these fragrances and you will smell those fragrances and that is the most that we can say.

This annihilation contains a period of swooning between these realms. What are these realms? Now we come to precisely what designates all of existence. We have designated these by three terms: mulk, malakut and jabarut. There are two systems by which this is explained by the Ahl al-Haqiqat: the first places as it were jabarut at the pinnacle. So they talk about ahadiyya, al-wahdat and wahidiyya. In other words, ahadiyya is pure, uncontaminated unity without form, without distinction, without condition, without definition. Where was Allah, subhanahu wa ta’ala, before the creation of the universe? Sayyiduna Muhammad, sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam, replied, “He was in the great ama, the great mist,” beyond what may be stated. He was inaccessible for there was no-one and no thing to have access. This is ahadiyya.

Then you have wahidiyya as the third of the three. Wahidiyya is the potential of all the elements of the attributes, all the names of Allah, Asma was-Sifa-names and attributes, as this capacity from which all existence will unfold. Their effulgence cascades from the Unseen into the phenomenal universe. Wahdat is between these two. Wahdat is the one form from which all the forms come. It is that primary form from which the forms come. Properly speaking it is not a realm but a barzakh, an interspace between ahadiya and wahidiya. Remember that these are not three realms in reality but in description between because Allah’s Essence cannot be divided. Allah’s unity cannot be separated. It is our way of coming at this subtle, fine matter. But we must be able to recognise these three elements in order to realise the tremendous nature of the Divine Creator. So its essential reality we define as indefinable – the Name that cannot be named, the great name of the Name. The ultimate name, the supreme name.

We come to the barzakh of the wahdat which is Nuri Muhammad, the light of Sayyiduna Muhammad, sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam, taken from the hadith which confirms this primal reality of the meaning of Sayyiduna Muhammad, sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam. We are not talking about the dhat of Sayyiduna Muhammad, sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam, but about his haqiqat, about his ma’nawiya, his meaning, his reality, because his essence is like your essence and my essence in the sense that our essences have no reality in themselves, they are only reflections. The only existent is Allah.

What about the reality, the meaning of him, the light of him? Let us for the moment say that the Nuri Muhammad is this interspace between completely indefinable, inaccessible, inexplicable sublimity and the vast fountain-head of all the energies of all the attributes. He is the first of the lights manifesting from the Essence of Allah because he is the ultimate form. Sayyiduna Adam is the pinnacle of creation and the adamic perfection is completed in the lastness of the adamic which is Sayyiduna Muhammad, sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam. Therefore that is the ultimate form of what maybe form than which there is no higher. Therefore it is by him that the whole thing has meaning.

As Sayyiduna ‘Ali, karamullahu wajhahu, said, “The evidence of tents in the desert, of camels being barbecued, of silken tents, of carpets laid out, of goblets, of trays, of houris, of youths, of armies-all this is evidence that the king has arrived, all this is in order that the king should take his place. So all of existence is in order that Sayyiduna Muhammad, sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam, should manifest. There is a hadith qudsi that says, “If it were not for you I would not have created the universe, oh Muhammad!” Sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam. He is therefore in this picture, this barzakh between the ineffable and the plenitude of all the attributes. There is the mist and the peacock emerges, and then the peacock opens its tail and the tail of the peacock shows all its variegated colours, and all its splendour is unfolded which is the unfolding of the names and the attributes. These are the three stages of ilahiya, of godness, of the divinity. Again, we are not referring to the Prophet of Madina or his essence, but of the nur of Muhammad, the haqiqat al-Muhammadi.

Now let us look at the three creational realms. We have mulk and malakut and, as I say, some people put jabarut at the pinnacle, and then there is the descent to malakut and the descent to mulk. Shaykh al-Akbar, radiyallahu ‘anhu, says–because these are only in description, Allah is One, not dividable-“It is better understood that if between the mulk, the visible realm and the malakut, the invisible realm, you put the jabarut and make jabarut the interspace, you will understand everything.

Before we topple over what can be held in the intellect let us pull back from that and return again to Qur’an. We find in Surat ar-Rahman that there are two seas, one bitter and one sweet, and there is an interspace between them. One does not run into the other. There is a barzakh between them, is that not correct? So they do not mingle but they meet in this interspace and interspace is that which does not take up space. The line between one and another is the barzakh. Just as we say that insanu kamal, the perfect man, is the complete interspace between two seas. He is the barzakh between the knowledge of shari’at of the phenomenal world and the haqiqat, the hidden world, the subtle world, the spiritual reality. He is between the two, and he does not deny the one and he does not deny the other. He obeys the obligations of the one and he confirms the secret of the other. He is outwardly a man of shari’at and inwardly and man of haqiqat.

If we look at these realms, not from the man’s point of view of knowledge but in the creational sense of cosmos, we find a visible world and an invisible world and there is a barzakh between them. Let us go further. In ordinary imagination, if you look out of the window you see a tree. You see tree as solid and around it is nothing, air. It is by that space that you recognise the object. Then of course along comes a scientist and says, “That is solid, and that is a gas.” So in a sense the whole thing is a lie. So it is a mode of perception: I see the tree in its separateness. So you have another dual, you have samawati wal-ard, the heavens and the earth in the physical sense but then we take it further than that-the sky is ard. You go from the simple condition of the bedouin woman whom they wanted to accuse of shirk and was asked by the Prophet, sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam, “Where is Allah?” because he had confirmed that Allah has no where-ness because he cannot be associated with anything and therefore cannot be associated with a place, and yet he asked her this question to see if she was mushrik and she pointed to the sky. But in her intellect that meant no place because the tree is the object, the river is the object, the person is the object but up there is nothing. So that was the purest non-mushrik situation. She was not an idolater. That is the non-idolatry of the common people in which samawat is the space between the object, and that already purifies one from the gross shirk.

Then we are told that the space is also in fact a gas, it is also form, and because we want a pure tawhid, remember that shirk goes through three stages: it goes through worshipping a form, an object, to worshipping an element to worshipping a person. In other words, the mushrik tries to obey tawhid from a crude to a subtle to a mysterious. Worshipping an object-when the jews went off the path they worshipped gold. The worship of the jews is the pure evidence of the shirk because in worshipping the car they in fact bow down to the gold. They were looking beyond the form to its substance. The worship of the element is the very high shirk like the zoroastrians-fire, earth, air or wind, and some believe that running water is inhabited by divine capacity. The tibetans, when they deviated from what they were taught, ended up worshipping the wind power which blew the prayer wheel. They turned the wheels to show that the wind would blow them and they put up flags because they lived under the power of the wind on top of the Himalayas. The zoroastrians worshipped fire and the event of the end of zoroastrianism is the coming of Sayyiduna Muhammad, sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam.

The worship of the present society is not an atheist society but a deeply religious society and it is a zoroastrian society. The guardians of zoroastrian power are the people who are at present the occupiers of the Haramayn because they worship oil which is fire. They take their living by it, their power from it and their importance from it. This is shirk. They depend on it therefore it is their god, therefore the occupiers of the Haramayn today are mushrik because this is open worship, it is not nafs.

This is not leaving our point, it is very germane** to what we are examining-the subtlest shirk is the worship of a person, that someone is a deity, because obviously if you say that someone is a deity you do not mean their body so you have to explain away their body in some crazy doctrine, because if you had just meant the body you could have made it of clay or of wood but you have left that domain, it is primitive. The people who are most wise about these idols of stone and so on are the muslims because they know that it leads to these other ones. When the christian missionaries went to Africa they let them continue with their idols, they never removed the idols, saying, “It is just a step from that idol to this idol of a living person with a history. So you have a black Jesus, a chinese Jesus, a south american indian Jesus, a’udhu billahi min ash-shaytan ir-rajim, because they say that he is a divinity. In other words they have exalted him up and so they have to take his body with him and say that godhood is embodied. They lie who say he is one of two-Qur’an.

Our doctrine can have no taint of these elements. Our tawhid can have no taint of either of these three elements, these conditions of shirk. We have to arrive at something which is devoid of that and this is why in description the Ahl al-Haqiqat have made these three dimensions in speaking of the Divine reality in order to make quite clear that you cannot identify the Prophet Sayyiduna Muhammad, sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam, with the Divinity. We have to deal with the secret and that secret is the secret of Sayyiduna Muhammad, sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam, but that secret is therefore the secret of existence, the secret of the universe, only we are speaking in gradations to get the matter finer and finer so that there is not any taint or shred or shadow of connection so that we have pure tanzih and confirm Sayyiduna Muhammad, sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam, as one who walked in the market place and so on and so on-the qualities of bani Adam.

Let us return then to these three realms of mulk, malakut and jabarut. We say that jabarut is between mulk and malakut. We have then gone one step further, if you recall, which is that mulk on first examination is the outline of the solid form. In other words we have identified ‘out’ (or ard?)** with malakut and samawat with malakut but this is the primitive tawhid of the bedouin woman. We then realise that the whole cosmic reality including the air-because otherwise we will again end up worshipping the air, worshipping the subtle elements-is also form. Air is made of oxygen and nitrogen, so already it is form, just as running water is oxygen and hydrogen. The ocean is apparently limitless but in fact it has form, a distinct viscose silhouette, yet so does the air and so does the volatile fire that is somewhere and is not anywhere. And obviously with the earth as we have seen.

Therefore we avoid this by refining our understanding of it to its furthest limits and the scientist confirms to us that the air is form so we were on the right track before the scientist demonstrated it. We were on the right track from our Prophet, sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam, confirmed by the great awliya and salihun like Muhyiddin Ibn al-’Arabi. He was writing a tawhid for an age that was lying seven hundred years ahead of him because he we preparing people for the discovery that scientists were going to make about matter because the next thing would be that they would make people worship the power of matter. He prepared us for this because the vision of the ‘arif is beyond the knowledge of the constituencies, the nature, the identity of the underlying substance of stuff.

So we now reach this next stage of samawati wal-ard. By ard we mean all that is cosmic and by samawat we mean all that is ghayb, hidden, because properly speaking if we go to the sublime Qur’an, samawati is from asma’. So the heavens is a place of names, a place of meanings, and the earth is a place of sensory. “We have taught Adam all the names,” we have taught him the heavenly realities, we have given him a heavenly dimension in his ‘aql, that Allah asked him to identify and name. Language is between the two kingdoms of mulk and malakut, between the hidden and the visible. So asma’ is the realm of the samawat. So the samawat is the malakut in this higher knowldge. We have a creature who is between the visible world and the invisible world and that is why, right at the beginning of Qur’an, Allah says, “This book is for people who believe in the Unseen.” If you do not believe in the Unseen you are not going to break through to tawhid.

This elevates us up to a state of knowledge. You believe in the Unseen until you see it and then you do not have to believe in it. If you tell me, “There is someone I would like you to meet,” I believe in that person, I believe that they exist. The Prophet, sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam, confirmed the Ghayb and he is a trustworthy person and so you believe him. Once I have met so-and-so I do not have to believe in him, I have the evidence. Madness is when you do not believe yourself-you do not accept what you tell yourself, you cannot bear it, so you say you are someone else and split in two. This is a knowledge. You go from ‘Ilm al-Yaqin to ‘Ayn al-Yaqin. Allah says in Qur’an, “Do not say, ‘I am mumin,’ say, ‘I am muslim.’” Submit! Take the message! Believe in the Ghayb! When you have ‘Ayn al-Yaqin, do not brag, do not boast, because it is based on a subtle moral and spiritual quality. Do not say, “I am mumin, I have iman,” what is iman? Iman is trust. What is trust in? It is in the Books, the Messengers, the Angels-all the elements of the Unseen-the Balance, the Qudra of the destiny, the Last Day, the Garden and the Fire. In other words, malakut.

This brings us to the finest element of all of this which is that between mulk and malakut there is a division, a barzakh has been set up. The nature of a barzakh is that it has one face facing one way and one face facing the other way and yet it is really one and it is not really an existent. It is a non-existent simply by these two coming together but there has to be a barzakh. This barzakh between mulk and malakut is jabarut. Jabarut is from jabr. Allah is Al-Jabaru. This is the tremendous might of Allah. Jabr is what cannot be penetrated, it is like a wall that cannot be breached, it is that kind of power-impenetrable, unbreakable. So then, Qur’an comes into all its fullness because if you read Qur’an with awareness of the description of cosmology of existence, it just pours the information onto you, it floods you. You cannot open the Qur’an but that you will find it. If you open it ten times you will find it seven out of ten as it is so common to the basic news that the Book contains, and it is the secret of the realm of the jabarut, the realm of the lights. We have defined that it is the jabarut that sets up the outlines.

Let us take it again in the simple bedouin sense: between the man and the sky there is a silhouette, an outline, but he is that outline. One is dense and one is subtle. I see his outline by the air and I see the air by his outline. Between the visible and the invisible-between this man and outline, and the Unseen, there is a similar division. Between cosmos, man and sky, and heaven, and the ruh there is a similar outline. That is the mithal of that.

Now let us make it easier. In daytime the earth outlines between man and sky which we are now holding to as both being cosmos are visible. When night comes, sky and man have been gathered. So in another condition which is night, there is no difference. I cannot see the difference, I cannot even see them but they are there and they have been unified by the night. Let us take another example: a landscape with a house, trees, cattle, fences and roads-the snow falls and it all is unified. It is covered over and the outlines are gone, but it is all earth, so the snow had only made true what was true anyway. That is one condition in which all the separate things are gathered, and the night is a condition which makes all the separate things which are still there gathered, undifferentiated.

In malakut there is the same thing only it happens the other way around. In malakut it begins as a darkness, begins as snow, everything is unified, then the form emerges, the outline emerges. Let us take it further. On the earth we see darknesses by light. We see solid forms by the light of the sun, or an artificial sun. So by light you see darknesses. This is our condition on the earth. If you were to go into the depths of the ocean-and we shall take this as our mithal-at first it would be complete darkness. If you were a scuba diver you would at first distinguish absolutely nothing, but as you grow accustomed to this condition there are certain fish in the depths of the ocean that from within themselves have luminosity. Allah has given them an outline of light so that in their darkness they are lights. So you would begin to discern the lights of these creatures of the deep by their darkness. So in malakut, by being annihilated in the darkness of the attributes there begin to emerge the lights of the Essence, which are the subtle forms. From the lights, all the lights come to one light. Nuri Muhammad, sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam.

Make no misunderstanding and imagining that we are saying anything that would permit people to say that we are worshipping Sayyiduna Muhammad, sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam, him, and that we are making any claim for him. We are not making any claim for anyone except Allah. But we want a tawhid that will have the Rabb and marbu-the Lord and the lorded over, and not a tawhid that leaves us with an unexplained universe and an unexplained master of the universe, the human being. Otherwise we have set up the total existence as a god, or we will deviate and become pantheists which all the muslims try to say that the sufis are. ‘God is the cosmos.’ But by this delineation we are not saying so, how could it be so when we are saying that everything perishes except the face of Allah. Nor are we monist, we are not saying that there is only One and nothing exists and there is only Allah and that is the end of it, because we say that the final position of knowledge has to be two. It has to be the Lord with nothing associated with Him, and the dependent, utterly reliant, utterly helpless slave-cosmic slave in slave cosmos obeying His rules. We must remember that this is our final position that we must aim for.

To clarify this last confusion-because if we made a mistake about Sayyiduna Muhammad, sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam, we would then end up making the mistake about ourselves and our own identity-we go back to the statement that the essences of the things have no reality. Let us take the human creature. We have seen that the human creature has the core attributes: speech, hearing, sight, knowledge, will, power and life. These are the mother attributes, umm as-sifat, the source attributes. But we have also confirmed that these belong to Allah. They belong to Allah in perfection and in endless time, in the beyond time, and they belong to the creature in the in-time imperfectly and therefore with living. And also because they do not belong to him independence by dependence while they belong to Allah, subhanahu wa ta’ala, with independence-He is not dependent on any thing or source for these energies.

Therefore this creature with these acts is this creature with His attributes. But attributes are impossible without His Essence. We are a cell-source from which these attributes come. They have to unify up to one source otherwise there would not be identity. Essence means ‘coming from’, attributed to this one or that one, so we attribute to an essence. This essence is not a reality, it does not exist. We have confirmed that there is only one Essence, Allah is One in His Essence, not multiple in His Essence. But Allah has created existence bil-Haqq, with the Truth. To explain this, to clarify this, the people of clear vision have created a technical vocabulary so that we can understand this and arrive at a position where we make sense of the universe and do not attribute specific and identifiable power and reality and divinity to the creature, and return all sublime elements to the Divine Creator-after all, everything in the universe indicates these spectacular attributes. We have to be very clear not to end up in shirk which is what unfortunately the modern muslims have allowed themselves to do, essentially because their political social shari’at behaviour is deeply involved in the shirk of worshipping petrol.

So a term has been created for the sources of the created beings and that is Ayan ath-thabita-the source-form, the source-outline. Ayan ath-thabita are the essences of the individual creatures, but it exists in description but not in reality. It exists from one point of view and not from another point of view. As Shaykh al-Akbar puts it, “If you say it exists, it exists, if you say it does not exist, it does not exist.” Then to make this clear, the people of unveiling take a very spectacular proof of demonstration-I say proof because it is a proof that there are signs in the self and on the horizon if you only knew-so they take from the horizon something that will explain the self. They let the one explain the other because these are two signs of one Lord. We will come back to this expression ‘the signs of the Lord’ inshallah.

They say that the source of the creature, the essence of the creature is like a mirror. If you think about the mirror, there is nothing in it, it is a barzakh, it is glass with silver and black on it. What happens is that if this mirror is placed before something it reflects it. In front of the light it reflects the light. In that sense it is a receptacle of the light but it is not the light. There is no fusion, no incarnation, no joining. It is not that and that is not this. Yet if you look there, you will say that there is light there, and this is that light. Equally you might say that in the eclipse if I look at the sun I will be blinded but if I look through the smoked glass I will not be blinded. So we say that I cannot look on the shamsul-haqiqat, I cannot look on the Essence but I can look on the Nuri Muhammad because its meaning is to filter this to allow it to be reflected. Or if you like, the Reality is a sun and Sayyiduna Muhammad, sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam, is a moon. From the Divine the light issues, and this planet takes its reflected light from it. We are on the earth and we look up and we can see the moon. We can look at the moon but we cannot look at the sun. If we look at the moon we are seeing the light of the sun by the moon, but we are not saying that the moon is the sun. In fact, the moon is a bit of the earth.

So we will say something further: each mirror will show what it shows according to its shape and its density. One mirror will be very wide and clear and will show a wide, clear reflection. Another will show a long image, another will show a short image, another will show a curved image, another will show convex, another will show concave-in other words, according to the shape of the mirror there will be a different encapturing of this light, but reflected. That is the most that can be said about the essences of the individual creatures. But all the mirrors are taking from one light.

To change the metaphor: the sufis say ‘Many flowers from one water.’ The source is one, the manifestations are many. This is the way in which we encompass speaking about the final, uttermost limit of what may be said. This understanding the nature of this barzakh that makes this mirror this and that mirror that-because it is by barzakh that each mirror has its form-this is the limit to which the intellect can go, in knowing that between mulk and malakut the lights make the differences, outline the differences, outline the outlines. This is called the place of the sidrat al-muntahar. Sidrat al-muntahar is a desert plant of spikes which, when you see it against the horizon, breaks up the sky so that the sky is all outlines. Sidrat al-muntahar is all outlines, it is like a line drawing on a blank page. That is its silhouette. So arriving at sidrat al-muntahar is arriving at that place where the outlines emerge in the clarity and finality beyond which there is only obliteration. Sidrat al-muntahar also has a fruit and if you take it it creates ecstasy and yearning for the homeland. In other words it creates a drunkenness, it creates an intoxication and it creates a yearning for the homeland, and the homeland of the bani Adam is Alastu bi-Rabbikum-“Am I not your Lord?” The homeland of the bani Adam is the Dhar** which is referred to in the Qur’an, when you reach the ultimate abode, when you reach the last home, which is the vision of your Lord.

Then we go to the description in Qur’an of the highest gnostic experience which was Sayyiduna Muhammad, sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam-his vision, his passing from his adamic, non-existent essence of reflected light to this barzakh reality of his own ma’nawiya, of his own meaning, of his own nur. He, therefore, had the gnosis that is the highest gnosis and Allah says a very significant thing in Qur’an: “He did not waver.” In other words, his ecstasy did not stop him having access to the knowledges that came from it. You see, a man can have a drunkeness that obliterates him so that he does not remember anything. We say that a drunkenness that has forgetfulness in it is not the same as a drunkenness that has remembering in it. So Sayyiduna Muhammad, sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam, did not waver. Allah says, “You certainly saw him on the furthest horizon.” So whom did he see? Whom did he see!

Surat an-Najm: “‘Indaha Jannatu ma’wa”-Near it is the Garden of Refuge. Allah says that the lote-tree, the sidrat al-muntahar was misted over, but his eye did not waver nor did he look away.” Then Allah says, “Laqad raa min ayati Rabbihil-kubra.” ‘He saw some of the Greatest Signs of his Lord.’ So we would say that this vision of the Essence-this is not Allah, because you can never, never say that this is Allah because we are agnostics and this is the secret of gnosis-indicates Him. So he saw the greatest sign of his Lord, and what is the greatest sign of his Lord? Himself. But not Sayyiduna Muhammad, sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam, who is buried in Madina, or his identity, but his secret, his meaning.

So then we go from there to the core of the matter which is of course the famous Ayat an-Nur, the Sign of light. The greatest sign of the Lord. Allah says, “Allahu nuru samawati wal-ard.” Now we have explicated that in detail and we now take it in its highest meaning.

“The metaphor of His Light is that of a niche
in which there is a lamp, the lamp inside a glass,
the glass like a brilliant star, najm…”

I say najm to remind you of the surat we have just been looking at. Now here we have already that the secret is an enfolded secret. There is a niche, in it is a lamp and in the lamp there is a glass, and the glass itself is like a star. So this knowledge is a knowledge enfolded and enfolded. Allah’s light is like a niche, and if you like you could say that the niche is like the universe in which there is a lamp, which you could say is man, and then there is a glass which is like a star, which is his secret.

“…lit from a blessed tree, an olive, neither of the east nor of the west,”

in other words it is a ruhani light. We have said that the niche we could say is the world, the lamp we have said is the person, the glass is the ruh and the light is the secret of the secret because that light is not lit from a olive tree from the east or the west, that light is a secret. If you consider the olive, the secret of the olive is that out of impossible material this extraordinary thing happens. From the driest, driest, driest tree on the driest, driest, driest land comes a fruit which is basically of no use unless you transform it from what it was into something else. Then to get its secret you have to crush it until there is nothing left of it and when you have obliterated it, then you get the oil. So this very secret is based on the obliteration of its sources in the physical and the intellectual world. Our meeting with him is based on our abandoning on what we have come from. Sayyiduna Muhammad, sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam, says in a famous hadith, “The search for the haqq is an exile.” So to reach this gnosis this crushing has to happen, this rejection of everything we possess has to happen to get to this oil, to this essence that is the light from which the light comes.

“…its oil all but giving off light even if no fire touches it.”

It is light in itself before the fire has even touched it. The human being’s secret is light before it is even ignited. Man is the khalif of Allah, if he only knew! “Truly man is in loss,” Qur’an says. Why is he is loss? Because he does not know his own secret. Shaykh Muhammad ibn al-Habib, radiyallahu ‘anhu, says in his Diwan, “Truly if a man knew the secret of his own heart he would never speak again, he would shed a tear with every breath he took.” It is already luminous before it is even lit and the gnosis lights it.

“Light upon Light.”

In other words, once this point is reached of illumination then it is Nurun ’ala Nur. Then all the effulgence of the lights of Allah manifest and, again, everything is turned around the other way-from the blinding illumination of the sun is the clear outline of the Nuri Muhammad. From the Nuri Muhammad all the attributes which were darknesses show their face, show their power, show their qualities-unveil them to the seeker. He sees the power of Allah in the witnessing of what he sees and in the amr of Allah in the creation of the universe, whether it is the chromosomes or the crystals or the stars.

“Allah guides to His Light whomever He wills…”

He guides them to this knowledge. He does not guide everybody so whomever denies it is denying Qur’an. If what they say is true, Allah is not guiding anybody because that is the claim of the people who deny the Ahl as-Sufiya. And here it says that Allah guides whom He wants to this ruhani knowledge that speaks of Nurun ‘ala Nur. If they are denying that man can be guided to this knowledge they are denying Qur’an.

“…and Allah makes metaphors for mankind…”

in other words Allah gives access to this knowledge. The mithal is to take you to the knowledge. What I am saying indicates for you the whole of the way. There only remains for you after this the khalwa. There only remains for you after this the tasting, the experience.

“…and Allah has knowledge of all things.”

That is the situation of the human being. That is why he is called khalif. And it is this tremendous power that has kept Islam alive for over fourteen hundred years despite the ignorance and darkness of people who claim to be ‘ulama in this day and age and despite the ignorance and darkness of the people who rule over the muslims when they are in clear, open shirk in the worship of powers that do not return authority to Allah, subhanahu wa ta’ala.

Love of the Prophet

Shaykh Abdalqadir as-Sufi
Ihsan Mosque, Norwich 19.8.81

Surat al-Ahzab: 55
Certainly Allah and His angels pray on the Prophet. Oh you who believe! Pray on him and ask for much peace on him.

We will look at this ayat that has been recited. In it is permission and in it is a command to pray on Sayyiduna Muhammad, sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam. Everything in Islam has two aspects because Allah, subhanahu wa ta’ala, is the Lord of the outward and the Lord of the inward. This is referred to in Qur’an: “We have shown you the two paths.” The Qur’an is divided into surats from Makka and surats from Madina. The surats of Makka are essentially surats of haqiqat, the Last Day and unseen matters. The surats of Makka speak about the attributes and qualities of Allah, subhanahu wa ta’ala. The surats of Madina lay down the basic principles of shari’at, the basic outward concerns of an Islamic community. This is in general but each overlaps the other. There is a Madinan element in the Makkan ayats and there is a Makkan element in the Madinan ayats. It says in Qur’an: “Huwadh-Dhahir wal-Batin”—He is the Outwardly Manifest and the Inwardly Hidden.

Shahada is double: Ash-hadu an la ilaha illallah wa ash-hadu anna Muhammad ar-Rasulullah. In the Shahada Allah has placed Sayyiduna Muhammad, sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam, next to Him in this statement. He has exalted the Prophet with this high position and it is an outward exaltation because when Allah, subhanahu wa ta’ala, raises Sayyiduna Muhammad, sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam, to the Maqam al-Mahmud, to the chosen station in the batin He says, “He took His slave.” He calls him by the word ‘slave’ in the Qur’an—for his batini exaltation he is called by his low name. For his outward presence he is given the exalted name of Rasulullah. It is this that takes him to this position of being part of the Shahada.

You are not in the shari’at of Islam until you say, “Muhammad ar-Rasulullah.” Confirmation of Allah is not enough. You must also confirm Sayyiduna Muhammad, sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam, because all the knowledge of Allah we get from the Prophet. If you look on him as a military commander, as a great statesman, as a leader of his people—and he is all of these things—you are not understanding the nature and quality of Sayyiduna Muhammad, sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam. When we look at the sira—at the story of the Prophet’s life, sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam, what is this element that is so important? It is quite clear that he engendered in his people a complete and unconditional love of him, and by this love these people fell in love with Allah. If you are drawn to someone you take on their pattern, you take on their form, and Allah says about sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam in Qur’an, “We have made you in the best form.” This meant that these people around him were aspiring to him and they were taking on a portion of him.

The traditional judgment of our ‘ulama, for example, says that Mu’awiya is higher than the Khalif ‘Abdal’aziz II because he was one of the Companions, because he had this close contact with the Prophet, sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam, because he had the honour of writing down these ayats of Qur’an for the first time in history. Also from among the Sahaba we see transformation from how they were before they knew him, once they had become his companion, and even becoming greater after his death. The great example that we all know and that we all like is the example of Sayyiduna ‘Umar, radiyallahu ‘anhu. He was terrible! He was a dreadful man, but look what happened to him by his contact with the Prophet, sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam. People pushed their descriptions of him to the limit to praise him, and before everything they praise his zuhud and his self-criticism. They talk about the two lines running down the side of his face which were like the bed of the river where his tears flowed. Then after sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam had gone, look how he made Islam burst out on the whole world. Imagine all that energy without the hudud of Islam, it is frightening!

Look at Abu Dharr, he was a mouse. But he was the mouse of Allah. When sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam was alive he was so completely enthralled by him—he was the miskin of the masakin. He was intoxicated with the Prophet. If dogs were not unacceptable to us we would say that he went after him like a little dog! On the ghazwa, there was Abu Dharr beside the Prophet. At the Yemeni corner of the Ka’ba there was Abu Dharr beside the Prophet. Going with the caravan, there he was beside the Prophet, and he was so pathetic that he would always lag behind the caravan and almost get lost and everyone would be saying, “Where is Abu Dharr, where is Abu Dharr?” and there he was trailing away behind, he could not catch up with them. Sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam would stop the caravan and then he came up to him and the Prophet’s love welled up in him and he said, “Oh Abu Dharr! You were born alone, you come on the caravan alone, and you will die alone!” Look at the purity of the man, he did not worry about dying alone he just said, “Oh Rasulullah! Please make du’a to Allah because I do not want to be buried like a kafir I want to be buried a muslim.”

This is the man who, after the death of the Prophet, sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam, became this lion of Allah. He stood in the streets of Madina calling out the ayats about hoarding gold and silver and denouncing corrupt government. First he was exiled from Madina, then he was exiled a limit of miles outside Madina, then he was exiled to Syria. So the mouse became a lion. He found this courage inside him because his love of Sayyiduna Muhammad, sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam, had interiorised, it had gone into his heart, and he had taken on a portion of the courage of the Prophet, sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam, so he was totally transformed. But the highest transformation is in ‘ibada. That is why the Sahaba have this transformed quality, not by any virtue of theirs but by this love that had awakened in them for God that came from their love of the Prophet, sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam.

Mistaken people nowadays who want to present what they think is pure Islam say, “Between you and Allah there is nobody.” But it is not true, because there is still Sayyiduna Muhammad, sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam. Prayer is commanded on us. Ibn al-Mashish said, “If it were not for the means, the end would have escaped us.”—We would not have got to the goal without the means. Our relationship with sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam is closer than the relationship that the Sahaba had with him because, again from Abu Dharr, we have this hadith which recounts their sitting together at the Ka’ba and something came up from the depths of the Prophet’s being and he sighed and he said, “Oh Abu Dharr, I yearn for them.” Abu Dharr said, “Who do you yearn for?” And the Prophet, sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam, said, “I yearn for my brothers.” He said, “Are we not your brothers?” And he said, “No, you are only my companions.” Only. Abu Dharr said, “Who are your brothers?” He said, “They are those people who will love me without ever having seen me.” Look at the maqam that you have. Look at your spiritual condition at the point when in your heart there is love of Sayyiduna Muhammad, sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam.

We say that Islam is founded on Kitab wa Sunna. The Book we know and recognise, but the Sunna is not something dead, it is not a collection of hadith. ‘Sunna’ is the word, not hadith, not sira, but Sunna—the living practice, the living form of Sayyiduna Muhammad, sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam. Look at how he was with his people, and everything he did was spontaneous. Whatever came up in his heart he would never hide it, so if you took all the hadiths about this behaviour and went around doing it saying, “Look, I am doing it!”—you would not be doing it because the highest moral quality is modesty. Modesty means you do not see your own actions. Sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam was not aware of his own actions, they were natural to him. He was the flowering of the fitra, the completion of fitra, he was fitra illuminated by wahy, so when the moment came he knew what to do from his heart. On the moment of the taking of the oath at Al-Hudaybiya he took the oath of the men by their hand, but he wanted to get everybody close together so he said, “Bring me a jug of water!” The women of the camp were called forward and he put his hand into the water and he took it out, and they put their hand into the water and they took it out. His heart just gave him the right thing to do so that everybody’s heart was sealed in that oath and yet it was halal because he had not touched them, the women.

When he got to Madina everybody wanted him to live in their house. If he picked a house it was already political trouble so he struck his camel and said, “Where he stops, I will live there.” If that was cunning that would be even worse but it was not cunning. He knew in an instant the way that it should happen, how Allah had decreed where he should stay. On the instant he knew what to do. When he was dying he put Abu Bakr forward, he knew by his heart what was the right thing to do. He would not dictate who would follow him because he was a prophet and nobody followed him.

In event after event you see this perfect behaviour. So your having the beard is not some rule of Deen, it is copying and copying is part of love. I have just heard of a great majdhoub in Algeria who knows everything about the beard in Islam! He knows all the hadith about it and he praises the beard and they say that he leaves behind him a trail of beards wherever he goes! He awakens the hearts to that love of the Prophet so that they sprout on the faces! When our brother Ya’qub came to us there was not a hair on his chin, and now I have to say, “Take a little bit off, you look too old!” But it is by love of the Prophet that it came and I have never known anyone who desired the beard of the Prophet but did not get it, even if he is Chinese!

It is this that makes the muslims come alive. He was the guide then and he is the guide now. If you do not believe me, go to the Hajj and ask the hajjis how many of them have met with him on the Hajj. You will meet ten people who on that night at that moment all saw him in different places and had a different vision of him, and we know the famous hadith that shaytan cannot take the form of sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam. The light of Sayyiduna Muhammad, sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam comes in the hearts of the muslims. There are things we cannot talk about, secret things that we should not talk about in the mosque, which happen between the muslim and his Prophet. Open guidance takes place between the muslim and sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam. Discourse takes place between him and his people, warnings come from him to the people he loves. Lives have been saved by the vision of Sayyiduna Muhammad, sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam. Even one of the excesses of the Wahhabis was stopped because sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam ordered the leader of the Wahhabis not to do the action the night before the battle. We have a living relationship with Sayyiduna Muhammad, sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam, and it is in the heart. There is no worship in it. It is revealed in the Qur’an that he was a man and spoke of his death and he is Banu Adam. The light of Sayyiduna Muhammad, sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam, is in the hearts of the muminun. The love of the Prophet is in the hearts of the muminun and it is this love that changes the characters of people.

Summing up we say that all Islam is a little imitation of his great character. He said Shahada and one of the Sahaba came to Sayyiduna Muhammad, sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam, and said, “My iman is weak what should I do?” He said, “Repeat the Shahada.” He received the Salat, made Salat and the nawafil. He paid the Zakat and paid more sadaqa than any living person ever has done. He fasted and he said, “I have been given a fasting that no man has.” He made the complete, perfect, pure Hajj as the final important act of his whole life, and because it was the first, pure, perfect Hajj it is over all the millions of Hajjs that have followed it because they are following him. We are all followers. We all come after him because we are tabi’in, tabi’in, tabi’in and tabi’in, and so on by generation.

All the muslims are followers and he is the first of the muslims. Is that not one of his names in the Qur’an? He is the first of the muslims and the first of the muminun. Therefore with that picture you are aligning yourself with him psychologically and physically in every aspect. You would want to have the most of things like him, outward and inward: as much dhikr as you can perform, as much behaviour as you can take on, truly to the limit of wives and wars, because we are allowed four, and he had ten or eleven at one time. Everything, he had more. He had one fifth of the booty, nobody else had this and why? Because he did not keep it, he gave it away. If he gave it to the prisoners they ended up richer than before the war.

The muslim should desire the wives, desire the war and desire the booty and by the same token he should desire the presence of Lordship—hadrat ar-Rabbani. He should desire knowledge of Allah by His name ‘the Near’. He should yearn for one bit of his saying, “I have a time with my Lord that no man has.” He said, “He gives me to eat and drink”, so you desire a bit of that and this is your portion, it is what is due you. This is the Deen of Islam. This copying of sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam is the Deen of Islam—to the degree that you can, knowing that you can never reach his level. It is that which transforms people and changes history, and it is what we have lost and what we have to find again. The more you love the Prophet the more you love Allah.

You are in the presence of Allah. Always. But there is a knowledge that you are always in the presence and that comes in the heart. It is what sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam had all the time no matter how tremendous the tajalliyat from Allah was. When he had the Ayat al-’Aliyu in Surat an-Najm, Allah says that he did not waver, he did not shake. You should want your portion of that. This is the Deen of Islam. “Allah has bought from the muminun their selves and their wealth in return for the Garden.” This is your contract—signed, sealed and delivered. “Alastu bi-Rabbikum?” They replied, “Yes.” This is your condition. You are not in this world to gather things unless you are stupid. You are in this world to distribute things, that is the Sunna of the Prophet, sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam. He took as a gift even the leg of a rabbit to show that taking was a blessing. He gave to beyond the limits of giving that anybody knew. He used to give to people and wept with shame that they had asked. He himself said, “the hand of the giver is over the hand of the receiver.” He also said, “Allah’s hand is between the giver and the receiver.” So the giver’s hand is in the hand of Allah, without shirk, in the ma’nawiya, because this is the contract, the giving is the contract. He gave us Shahada, Salat, Sawm, Zakat and Hajj from Allah and we received it from Allah. Finally he said, “If you do not thank people you do not thank Allah.” Our thanking of Sayyiduna Muhammad, sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam is salat an-Nabiy. Allahumma salli ‘ala Sayyiduna Muhammadin ‘abdika wa Rasulika Nabiyyil-’umiyyi wa ‘ala, alihi wa Sahbihi wa salim taslima. Subhana Rabbika Rabbil-’izzati ‘amma yasifun, wa salamun ‘alal-mursalin, wal-hamdulillahiRabbil-’alamin.

The Nafs

Shaykh AbdalQadir As Sufi
Tucson Discourses

Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim

We start right at the beginning, trying to make a definition of nafs in its totality. So the first thing to understand is that inner science in the Sufic science of the self, and we must grasp Ibn ‘Arabi’s statement that nobody knows the nafs except the sufis. No one understands the nafs except the sufis - no one is able to understand and there is no way they can understand - except the sufis.

Now, it is terribly important in our technical vocabulary that we have no fixed terms. For example, one shaykh says, “There are a hundred stages to Allah,” and designates what the hundred stages are, and another shaykh says, “There are a thousand stages to Allah,” and has written down what the thousand stages are. Shaykh al-Ansari has written what the thousand stages are. Another shaykh has said there are ten thousand stages to Allah and every one of them divides into a hundred recognisable stages, depending on his insights and recognitions. All this is not poetry because they specify what they’re talking about. Having said that, you must realise that each of these is true. They are by perception different ways of seeing, but they are all true, and you can take any of these ways and you will go through it step by step and recognises everything in it. Our terms are interchangeable.

The other thing is that we are quite happy to allow one term to plane into another term in talking about the self. We can be talking about the self and you can go out of the room and come back and we have not changed the subject and it has become qalb, the heart. So we are talking about the heart and you go out of the room and come back and we are talking about the ruh and we have not changed the subject of conversation. We changed the viewpoint. We’re talking about it in another way. You go out of the room another time and we’re talking about ‘aql, intellect. We have not changed the subject of conversation each time. We are looking at the same reality from a different aspect or from a different function.

Now we say nafs, then again someone might say embattled nafs, rebellious nafs, tranquil nafs – the three nafs of Imam al-Ghazali’s system. The nafs that is wild, the nafs that is rebellious, and then is quiescent. It is fighting, and then it accepts. It is in process. The first nafs is the wild horse on the hill; the second nafs is the one with a bit in the mouth and you jump on it and it throws you off. The third nafs is saddle, bridle and rider. These are the three stages of the nafs.

In another way, we take nafs, leaving out the top one, the highest one. We take two and say that is nafs. Then we go from nafs to qalb, from nafs to heart. We then make two separate things. We jump from one to the other depending on what we are dealing with. If we are dealing with nafs in the active, nafs in the passive, nafs in the historic, nafs in the developing, nafs in the situation whatever.

Another thing we say is the nafs and the ruh. The ruh is the spirit, pure light. The ruh and the nafs are fighting over qalb, the heart. The heart is the Beloved and they are two suitors, two lovers trying to have possession of the heart. The light of the Ruh wants the heart and the darkness of the nafs wants the heart. The heart is, in that sense, an arena that these two are trying to take over. You see, all of these depends on what you want to indicate. These are descriptive terms.

We now go on and say when we talk of nafs in its lower senses, in its embattled sense, in the wild sense. We say that nafs does not exist at all. It is not there. We are talking about a non-existent. An identifiable non-existent. It does not exist. It seems to exist, but I mean it not in a mad way and not in an esoteric way, not in a kind of Hindu way. I mean it in the sense that the physicist tells me that the wall is not there: it’s space, ripples in space from the binding of the nucleus of the atom. That the atom is the Albert Hall and there is one chair in it - this is the solid matter. And that is a ripple, an impulse, a charge of energy. So the whole thing is energy charge in vast space, emptiness. So when looked at from the viewpoint of the Khayal - now this is where you must hang on and fasten your safety belts. We are coming to some bitter turbulence.

The Khayal is turbulent. The Khayal is a faculty in us that solidifies objects. What the physicist tells us is not there in some other funny realm. It is there. That there is a solid wall. That there are solid objects is entirely due to a divinely designed apparent flaw that does not let us see that is the secret of existence. We will come to the Khayal later.

The objects are not solid, the faculty of the khayal solidifies them. This is a most important thing in understanding the nafs. So the nafs is a non-existent that we talk about while, let us say because there is a wall and there is a stage and this awful play goes on and we’re all in this play… I want a million dollars; I want four wives; I want to be President and I want to conquer that country over there, and I want to kill that one and get my own back on that one. This is the play. This is the Shakespeare. It is Aeschylus, Thomas Mann, George Lucas, horrible. Because this is apparently urgently real to people.

All people dealing with the nafs as of this minute in the dominant culture will only consider the nafs within the framework of the existing theatre. They are not prepared to look, and this is where we immediately jump back to the principle under which the IWF is created. They are not prepared to look at the biological principle underlying the self. They are not prepared to look at the physicist’s description of the same arena. The people dealing with the self as experts will not look at its biological character. Those who have been challenged to look at its biological character in a crude mechanistic way are not prepared to in a deep genetic way. They are not prepared to look at it in terms of physics. They are simply not prepared to square the two pictures.

The physicist is not prepared to look at the physical matter as he has grasped its constituent parts to be in terms of his own nafs within the sense of the arena. Do you follow? When I said that to Frithjof Capra, who is the level below the Nobel Prize, “But, Frithjof, my argument with you is that Heisenberg said there is a relationship between the observer and the observed. The observer is in the experiment. So I am not satisfied with your mathematical statement of matter because it does not include in it that when Zulaikha’s apple pie arrived on the table, a glazed look came over the eyes of this rational, brilliant scientist - a film passed over his face of sheer intoxicating enchantment. His two hands plunged forward, picked up the apple pie and wiped it off the face of the earth and everybody had a little piece and he had about four. And he didn’t even know. He said, “Emm -ahh-emm” and his eyes were glazed and shining, and he ate all the apple pie. “Emm, yum yum, good apple pie.” All the intellectual conversation finished - everything - atoms, nuclear black holes, everything.

I said, “Now I want that in your picture of the nature of man, Otherwise you have non’t got a complete picture.” It is the apple pie scoffer who smashing the atoms in the Cerne Laboratory at 60 million dollars a go. It is this one who doing this with the atoms. A nursery, and out of due season. In the nursery it is beautiful. In you it is horrific. I am frightened of you, Really frightened of you. I am frightened of the way you ate that pie. Do you understand?

So obviously apart from the inside, you have to allow the scientist - in the same way you have to allow each individual science to plane in to the meeting point which is man, on this side, and plane out to the divine Creator of the forms at that source. So if you are speaking from separation, you still have to connect with the scientists to the science to the sciences. If you’re speaking from gatheredness, you have to connect the manifestation to the manifester … the one who manifests. Do you understand it?

We jump back now to the nafs. First we’ll take the three terms -the wild nafs, the nafs in conflict , and the nafs serene. That is easy to understand because it has a certain ethical case. So we will get it out of the way first. That is simply that these three terms are from the subject’s own point of view. According to us, it is the human experience of the one who desires knowledge.

We are not talking about the savages unless they take this in question, which is why the sick person in that society is more interesting than the healthy person because he has put himself in question. The one who comes to a psychologist is a higher being than the one who is sitting governing a place, saying everything is fine. He is the madman. The real mad people don’t get locked up in an asylum. They get locked up in history. They get locked up in history because history is fantasy in process. Rumi said this. Rumi said the whole existence in culture is based on forgetfulness. Wherever you find remembrance, all that is gone. You simplify your architecture. You simply your social project, and inwardness dominates outwardness. Health dominates sickness, inwardly. Sickness dominates health outwardly but the science of healing dominates ignorance to deal with it.

So then there are three terms - one of them and then another. We will now look at these three terms. Let us say that there is the person in motion and the person asleep. The person who is static and the person is dynamic. So we will drop all these categories because we’ve already put our lolly on the person who says they are on the moon: who comes along to the Muslim psychologist rather than the heads of the corporation in terms of potential. We put our money on him because he is moving and this one is stuck.

The man who gave this doctrine got to this doctrine because he was the head of the corporation and he flipped. Imam al-Ghazali was the greatest ‘alim. He was like the dean of the faculty of theology at Yale University. And he got more and more in crisis. He said, “What does this mean? It all means nothing. What is this thing? I’m not anything. I don’t believe any of it. I’m not the dean of this. I don’t want to have dinner with the sultan and I don’t believe in any of it. What am I talking about? Why am I teaching these people when I know nothing?” And he got up to speak one day and he could not speak. He had 2000 students in front of him every day and he got up and said, “Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim,” and ran out the door, He went home, packed his bags, handed out the money to his servants, called his family, gave out the money for the running of his family affairs and went to the desert to find the Sufis.” To find the doctor of the heart.

And from him comes this theory, this description of the three nafs. What we find out about existence gives him regret at leaving it. What we find out about existence gives us desire to pass to the next stage of it. So this first thing is really simple: we will find it so simple that there is no difficulty with it.

This describes the person who has a path as opposed to the person who has no path in terms of knowledge. Although everyone has a path, we are talking about those who know it. And that first stage of knowing has to be not knowing, So there are some people, although they’re destined for knowing, they have to be given naturally a not-knowing.

So you have the kafir beginning - you have outward wildness. And the one who is in outward wildness has no constraint. “I can do what I like.” It is, to the Sufis, the maqam of the child. Not only does it do what it likes but it does not know that it is doing it. The child pees and shits. It does not know. It is time. It is not, “I am doing this thing” that we have to clean up. It is time. There is this stuff and then it goes. It does not know it’s doing it. It only finds out by this fuss that goes on every time it does it.

So it is that maqam in the adult about existence. Total ignorance is to do wrong and not know you are doing it. Not so anything, Why shouldn’t I do it? I’m totally gratified. Total gratification: Do what I want. Real wildness is a wonder thing. The wild horse is wonderful, Wild nafs is not wonderful because it is out of due season.

The kafir society encourages the wild adult and punishes the wild child. Punishes the child who defecates and pees instead of learning to stop it before even the biological structure of the body and the sphincter muscle is working to stop. So it is inhibited and punished when it should be wild and free. The training of the body should come with the biological growth of the body. Leave them uncovered, let them drop everything and hose it down afterwards. That is the traditional Muslim way. So then the deep underpinning of the self are based on that and not on guilt about this. This is the traditional Islam, Now, of course, we have modern Egyptians, Muslims who are very proud of the fact that they know how to use the lavatory. They are proud of it.

So this wild nafs is out of due season. This adult doing what it wants, this person who says “I”. You know the little boy or girl who shows its belly. Everybody laughs - it is beautiful. When you see adults doing it in Golden Gate Park, when you see them expressing an abandon - it wearies people. Why? Because it’s out of due season, It’s not that maqam. That maqam is there and they did not have it there and they are doing it and it is too late. It is too late. It’s gone. When you had no teeth you drank liquids. When the teeth came .. are you going to eat pop always? Are you going to be this person or are you going to find out what the next is? The four year old, the three year old or the two year old sees a stair, climbs it once it knows there’s a stair -hump, hump, hump. How thrilling!

And they are not at that maqam. They see the staircase of knowledge and meanings and it’s awful because there’s no beauty. Their beauty is elsewhere. There is a beauty but it is not there. If we’re talking about knowledges, then we see people who are out of harmony with existence. The wild nafs first of all does not know it is wild. Then there is a wild nafs which does it knowing that is not it. Too wild. There is a wild nafs which does it knowing that it is not it. To them the party is no longer fun. The yields of the society are no longer gratifying. The goals are no longer satisfying. And this immediately expresses itself, of course, in that the pleasures are not pleasurable. And put alongside that the bitternesses are intolerable. Until you turn into a battle with them.

We move into this second realm which is the embattled nafs. They start to wrestle with themselves. They are discontented with themselves. This is the gift of Allah. This is the most wonderful thing. This is the ploughing of the field. It is a knife that cuts, but that knife turns over new soil. This trouble is wonderful. It is the most wonderful thing that can happen.

Out of this comes flight, turning over. Rejection, contrariness, doing the opposite in any sphere of action. Punk. It’s punk rock. It is a high mental plane in relation to the directors of Coca Cola. It is a high mental activity in relation to the Prime Minister of England the President of France: a high, high mental plane. Punk rock is Shakespeare, Aeschylus, genius in relation to them because they have tried to get at the meaning by the secret of the law of existence which is that everything is hidden in its opposite. Only there is no one to explain to them they have done it. So in the kafir society, so beauty-ugliness is to cut their face down like that. One half is one thing, one is the other. They have a razor blade down there, a safety pin in there and everyone says it’s horrible. It is ugly. It is beautiful. It’s outwardly ugly because they want a meaning that is beautiful. A spiritual search. Every age, that is why we go back to the park.

Every age expresses that in a different way because this search among people has to happen and no society can censure it unless they actually alter their hypothalamus which they are prepared to do to the already so-called sane person. You would not use the term sane. We say there is a complete person, structurally. You put them in any situation, then they could be the free one. Once, of course, you put in the chemicals, then they are in the shopping mall forever.

These are the people whose nafs is in trouble. This trouble is a gift of Allah. Now I am not yet talking about repair. I am talking about the sign of life, the sign that there is actually something happening. I’m not talking about what is the way this is healed. We will come to that later. If this person is not destroyed by the act of going to the opposite. Because it is dangerous. It can shatter the personality. It can destroy it beyond help by the action or by the station of shame, of disgrace to which they arrive. If they, in their search, by their intention for self over beauty of the ugliness, break through, then that person will begin precisely to try to discover the meaning of existence. The meaning of existence is discovered inside the self and this is achieved by your conquering you. The enemy is you! In the rebellion you think that the enemy is society, the class.

However, the language of the culture has described it, the king, the president, women, men, everybody. The creation, existence itself, The way is recognition that existence is perfect, flawless. The flaw is in the eye You cannot see. You are seeing trouble. From where is the trouble? Is it out there? No, because this is a mirror. What a horrible mirror! It has got a nose and it has got ears. It is you. Can’t smash the mirror. It is you. There is nothing wrong. Everything that is wrong is here. It is fascinating, is it not? It is enthralling that human beings could participate in this, not 100%, but 99.99999%. I mean everybody is participating in this lie. Society is built on it. History is built on it.

I am looking at this object and what’s wrong with it? The biologists say that the bird could not survive. There i’s something wrong with it, so it died. What is this? It’s complete, absolute lunacy. These law of forms have to be swept aside by natural selection in the calm march to higher forms. It ended with me. It is extraordinary. He is a bag of worms. He is a virus of typhoid and he got all this waster and stuff inside him, blood and phlegm.

What is this? It is in the eye that cannot see. It is like the television. I must give you this physical picture because we all forget just how mad the world has become. The children were on the television and they had this popular sportsman interviewing the children, this idiot. He had this little boy who collected beetles. He had a collection of these black things with these pincers and they were all crawling about and this awful lout was trying to emphasise with this child. He said, “Oh, but aren’t you frightened of the beetles. I mean, don’t you find them ugly?” He was using this sort of child talk, “Don’t you find them all very creepy, crawly, ugh, don’t like beetles.” And the boy looked at him like he was demented. He said, “But they’re beautiful. Beetles are beautiful.” And he said, “They may be to you, but they give me the creeps.” And you saw him like the beetle. Isn’t it wonderful? Allah ta’ala says in Qur’an, “You will not find any flaw in creation.”

So back to where we were. The nafs sees creation by its station. You see creation by your station. Sitting with the Salihun and the awliya’ is the science of the Sufis because you want to see with their eye. You want to see with a clear eye. If I walk with him, he will show me this plant and that plant in the dhahir because he knows them, If I want to know meanings, I sit with the people of meanings and they show the meaning, And then I see with an inner eye. My eye is trained and then I will do what they do and practise what they practise and so it is my eye.

But you understand I have taken it from them. All meaning is hidden. I take it from you. If I Am in your company, I can take from you and I do not then, in the end, need words to be spoken. The murid wills peak the wisdom of the shaykh from things he has not been told by the shaykh. He will take it from it. In one glance volumes are transmitted, and this is not metaphor. This has been categorically demonstrated. You speak of the sciences of the shaykh because he has transmitted everything to you in one glance, in one instant. These knowledges do not take time to transmit. You put a camera in front and click, that is enough. You have got the picture. We are camera. We go click and we are finished, done. IBM is child’s play. Computers are cake mixers to this knowledge, child’s play in relation to it.

So now we come to repair our friend, the troubled nafs. We assuming that the creature wants out of this dilemma and wants to arrive, and now sees that the goal of the nafs is not total abandon, not total outward freedom, but complete inner freedom, serenity, tranquillity. And so not serenity in serenity, serenity in serenity and serenity in turbulence. Stillness in movement and movement in stillness. Outwardly still, inwardly moving. Outwardly moving and inwardly still. This is the goal of perfection; the ikhlas of liberation.

Now we come to what is the repair job. Now this is so enthralling I have to do a commercial for it. It is so intriguing. You see how stupid people can be and what a nuisance the Christian mess of theology has brought and the bother it has been to true teaching. They use words like sin and repentance. The words are so dishonoured by false transaction. Do you understand? Let us take the words sin and repentance. These terms have been poisoned by the Christian mess. Why? Because it is not based on tawhid, it’s based only on the arena. It is supposed to be a religion, but its only reality is the theatre arena of the middle self, of actions, the psychodrama. So then they say, imposing from this higher sphere that you can’t get into… “We have this information that it’s wrong for you to do that.” So you go, “Ooh, you see, I’ve done this terrible thing. I don’t know what to do.” They go, “Repent, repent.” So you go and calm it down, put a layer of cement over it, put a wreath on it, lots of flowers, have a fiesta, light some candles, then you go on and there you go again, la même chose.

So naturally we, all people of ‘aql, have kicked this out, but they have all ended up in the park showing their bellies. That sin and rebellion and they’re back to these idiots. Now here is the ironic (depending on how you look it) extraordinary, ravishing fact: that, in these two terms, in fact, should be understood in their reality not as ethics at all, but as basic biology of the function of the human self in the arena of it species is how the self develops and transforms.

We jump back to my discourse on the oneness of the action of Allah and how action adheres to self. Do you follow? We said in that discourse that action adheres to the self. It sticks to the self.

So let us now jump to bring in another term – the heart. Let us call the heart that inner arena in which all these impressions and experiences are impacted, are recorded, are held. They go in there and they come out from there. So the heart makes wrong action, so the nafs makes wrong action, and it is recorded, it is imprinted, it is rusted onto the heart. Now the ethical way, both of these Christian shaytans and the humanists - the christian shaytans are the same as the humanists because it’s a false transaction. It is a lie, nothing has happened You have just repressed it, as the analysts will say. In both of these instances you have held on to the previous acts, they are still in there. They say repress - it is there, it is written, it is stuck on you. The rust is there. Do you see what I am taking you to?

Therefore they say then you do it. You are still this one, you are still that one - only you are now on tour. You were in the capital and now you’re in the provinces. But it is the same play, the same dialogue, with a different touring cast. You are the great actor and they are all your extras. Strindberg drama. It happens here. They all go away and thus person ages and finds a new lot and does it all again. The basis of modern psychiatry is in that situation. Even my looking at the script, my looking at the parts does not remove it. I’m still carrying it. So it’s not a knowledge to know if the psychodrama reveals the oedipal pattern you’re still carrying, imprinting, and the event of the previous traumatic experience inside you.

Now, Sufiyya says turn to Allah. Allah is the Ever-Returning. We are not dealing with Allah, Allah is dealing with us. We are not dealing with the process called creation, the process is dealing with us. Whose? By Allah’s process.

So there comes into the heart of this seeker, recognising the wrong action that he is given an indication of how to be free of it, which is tawba. Tawba means to turns back, turn around, turn away. So you turn away, you turn away from the wrong action to the source of all action. If I do not see where the action comes from, I am weighed down because it all comes from me and I cannot deal with it. If I know that the action comes from Allah then the decree of Allah has been. “You are in wrong action.” If you are the fly, you are the filth.

At this point in comes only this one dimension in which everything matters, which is awareness. Which says, “If that is a fly, I do not want to be a fly. I would rather be a bee. I would like to carry pollen on my legs and make honey. I do not want to carry filth and make infection and sickness. It is not interesting.” Some people do and find it rather nice. “I like dirt, filth and bzzz.” But some people say, “I do not like it. I really rather like these flowers over there. I’d like to have these legs with pollen on them and make honey in the honeycomb.” If you are a bee you will be a bee. You will not be a fly. You are just a bee that gone over the filth and buzzed past it. It is already decided. You do not suddenly turn from a fly into a bee. You were a bee in the wrong place. And you say, “Bzzz, I don’t want that.”

The Sufis say that the bees scent the honey, scent the nectar and they arrive at it. They get there. The bees get to the flowers. You will only be who you are designed to be. The horse is not going to be a fish. Excuse me giving you this surprising information.

But it is the same with the self. It is under the decree. But it is constantly volatile, discovering who you are. If you say, “I am a reptile,” you see, and you slither along in the mud. He must look like a reptile and he is certainly behaving like one. He does not look like it but he is certainly behaving like it. Maybe he is. I guess he is. Look, he has got fangs, and, in fact, you were and we had not noticed. If the man says, “I am reptile and I am disgusting,” and a voice of creation which is him says, “No, you are a lover of Allah,” he says, “That sounds nice.”

It is what I told you about earlier, “There’s a wali on the mountain.” But you will not be unless you go. Whatever you want. You have possibilities and you will actualise them. Qur’an, the whole Book of Qur’an: “It is for those who spend of what We have given them.” Your potentialities, your capacities. If you use them this book is for you. Then you cannot stop. Wisdom on wisdom on wisdom. And power on power from Allah.

How is it that the modern child knows how to clean its teeth every day in order that it can go on putting food into its belly in a satisfactory manner? It is not taught every day to make tawba in preparation for being an adult when it is of use because it is no use to him as a child. But he knows how to clean his teeth as a child so he always does it. If you didn’t learn as a child, you have to be very strong to teach yourself to clean your teeth.

Why can you not clean your heart? If you make tawba the heart is clean. You do not change, you discover you. You do not change yourself. You cannot change yourself. You discover who you’ve always been from the beginning. If you take someone in the night and kidnap them and fling them into a dark place and it is all cold and they are huddling on the floor, they think, “I’m in a cellar. How terrible. I’ve been flung into a cellar. I’ve been kidnapped.” If that passes, “I must know my position. I must know why,” and they put on the light and they are in a palace. Do you understand?

Rumi says this knowledge is like a peasant and his wife living in rags, covered with lice, and all the creepy crawly things that we were talking about; living in degradation, eating bits of crusts and roots of radishes and drinking brackish water in a hovel with the spiders coming and earth falling on their heads while they sleep. And a man, a traveller, comes and says, “You do not need to live like this. Over these mountains is Baghdad. There are mosques with tiles and mosaics and every house has water running through it. There is work for everybody. There are beautiful clothes. There are silks. There is a whole life there, beautiful food, fresh vegetables and meat for everybody. Come with me. I am going.” and they say, “No, I do not believe. I’m staying here.”

We call this the kafir. The mumin says, “I believe you. I trust you. Why should you lie to me? You have nothing. You cannot. There’s nothing to take from us. There is no gain in it for you. It must be true. I trust you. I am mumin. I trust you.” The Messenger comes and gives you this news … I trust you.

The unseen reality is more terrible and more wonderful than the visible reality. The world is the hovel. The experiential zone of phenomenal existence is that hovel. The cosmos is that hovel. The Baghdad of that picture is ‘alam al-mithal, ‘alam al-Malakut, ‘alam al-Jabarut. The world of the Unseen and the world of the Lights from the Essence of Allah.

So any doctrine of the self has to take in everything in the hovel to everything in the Jabarut. Do you understand? Because we have only looked at the lower self. We are now at the bottom bit of this troubled self. And already we’re into unseen dimensions, Already we are into another element of the self. We have not got to the third thing at all. We are still dealing with the sick, troubled self.

Only I insist that the sick one is not the one who would go to the doctor. It is the one who is ruling in the world, highly placed in the world and honoured by the world. All your professors. All your leaders of industry. All your military. All your paraphernalia of society. All these turned upside down. In the realm of knowledge everything is turned upside down.

So we are still in the embattled nafs and I say the first step to this transformation is by your wanting it, but you later discover that it is not you wanting it. It is Allah wanting it. Because you are not the willer. Allah is the willer. But we have not got to attributes yet. We are trapped in action, I am in wrong action. I do not know about attributes yet. I do not seen know that I am doing it by the decree of Allah and even by the power of Allah. The hand that strikes is Allah striking. And the one who gets struck, it is Allah who had them struck by my wrong action, In truth, in reality, in Haqiqa. By Shari’a, I have to answer for everything I do.

Do you follow? So we’re still in the zone of action. Tawba, therefore, I say, is the first step to the transformation of the self. There is no other first step. There is no other means to transformation of the self except, first, to act of tawba. This is the basis therapy that you must teach people to transform them and you will find a very interesting thing. There will be one person who goes away and one person who draws near. The medicine of Tawba is for the mumin, not for the kafir. And you will not get them to take that medicine. They will not take it. You do not feed a fish with the food of a land creature. Its food is its wrong action.

We had a public meeting, You must allow another one of these crude vulgar examples. We had a public meeting in London two years ago in Hampstead and a man came to me and he had all these theological questions all about why in the world of suffering. How can there be an absolute if there is so much suffering in the world? What you do at school in the debating society. All these theological questions - Why this? Why that? I said, “I have one question, why are you here? Why did you come here?” He said, “Ah, because I want to know God.” “Please now, answer me, may I ask you one more question?” “Yes.” I said, “I do not believe that. What do you really want?” He said, “What I really want is to own a lot of real estate. I want to own Centre Point. I want to be a rich man. I want to let it out to people and make massive amounts of money. I want to have big ears and I want very beautiful women. And to buy them jewels and hang them on their necks and go to all the discotheques in London and have a good time.” This is wonderful,” I said. “Now,” I said, “I am so glad you came. Go out tomorrow. Get it.” And I said, “Get it. Get every single one of these things. And when you are sitting at the top of Centre Point in the penthouse with your car down below and your beautiful woman with her Cartier diamonds and you are sipping your champagne and they say, ‘How did you do it?’ say, ‘All this is from the Sufis.’ And you will have what you want and we will have want we want. Leave us alone and go. You are in the wrong place.” Now I guarantee you that he will get it.

So one patient you will send to his goal once you’ve given him the news - you have to give him the news. The good news is that if you take the way of Allah you will have a garden in the unseen. If you go against the way of Allah, you will be on fire in the unseen. I gave you that example because there are two people who will come to you with the same complaint. One person you can help and one person you cannot help, and if you try to give them that medicine you will kill them. One person will come and if you gave it to them you would make them mad, majnun. And if you gave it to the other person you would make them wali. So you have to know who to give this medicine to and who not to give it to. It is not the same for everybody. There must be some medicine that should do it but it would destroy the person. The same with the nafs. One person you can give it to. The same condition, but a different decree on them, a different seal on them, and you have travelled enough to know when to speak and when to say, “Go and get your dunya, Don’t worry us.” This is the question.

So we were examining the stage of tawba. This is the first stage. And I say it is the necessary first stage of transformation of the self. Let me give you the definition of tawba according to the elite and according to the elect of the elite. According to the elite, tawba is to say, “I have made wrong action,” and to not let yourself get away with it. Do you understand? But keep remembering it. “Now I have done it. I have got to watch.” So you hold down the self.

This is not our way, The Junaydi way is not to make tawba with remembering, but to make tawba with forgetfulness. In other words, you say sincerely to Allah, “I am tired of it. I am finished with it. Help me. Return, come back, give me mercy. I am tired of it, I am finished with it.” Having done that you get up. “Allahu Allahu, Hayy, Hayy,” and you have a good time, clear in the conviction that it will be removed from you and that you will not return to it. Because you know the operation works.

These are the two ways. The first way we do not accept - it is too difficult. Only great men can do it. We are rubbish, extras, mere walk-ons. So we do this other way. So naive, childish, and it works. It works and it takes the person to the source, the Forgiver, the Lover. And you are the beloved. Who is forgiven but the beloved, not the lover? The beloved is forgiven.

So the second element after tawba. Then, of course, life becomes interesting. Tawba is difficult, and after hardship comes ease, and there is the true fact of the matter: that for the Sufi is the transformation of the self is easy. And it’s sweet.

But the thing that everyone else has this terrible struggle. These awful Christians trying to do good works from a solid based nafs. This is disgusting, obscene. “I am doing good” - you spit it out, vomit it out. You see, like some of our brothers in Islam who say “I am greeting you because you are my brother.” You say, “Oh, don’t be. Be my enemy. You’re so good at it!” Do you understand? It is not that. It is from here. It;’s telling people it’s sunna to do this - we are brothers, we are all the same. Like when I was in the mosque in London and one of the Imams came to me and said, “I’d like you to come and meet someone to show you that in Islam we are all brothers. We are all the same, there’s no difference between the common person (looking at me) and the great rulers of society.” He said, “We are all one. All the same. And I’d to present to you the mufti of Sudan,” and the man punched him with his elbow and said “the grand mufti.” But it is so beautiful, it is so charming how strong they are. It is so wonderful. That is putting right action without tawba underneath it.

The next stage is to replace bad qualities with good qualities. That’s not difficult, is it? To replace bad qualities with good qualities. It’s not difficult if it’s preceded by tawba. The tawba is difficult. But if you’ve made tawba, it is fine. You were mean, now be generous. You ate too much, now eat little, You envied people, why should you? You are on a path to Allah. Who could be better than you? You’re going to your goal. How can you envy anybody anything? You are the highest. Move from it whatever it is.

You become angry now. You know what, you must replace anger with sweetness. “Anger is fire,” the Prophet said, and it is put out by water. If you are angry, do wudu’. He said, “Have you not seen the anger when veins stand out on the neck and temples? This is fire. Do wudu’ and you put out the fire.” And the meaning of the act of wudu’ is purification. And you do wudu’ and it is a tawba and the anger is gone.

What a wonderful thing. You see, anger is not to be removed from you. It must not leave. It must be under your control. If you did not have these volatile energies you would be dead. If you do not have the sexual drive, if you do not have the drive of anger, if you do not have all these energies, there would be no creation. But they must be in their place. You are arriving not at some kind of emptied shell - we are arriving at a balanced being. We are bringing everything to the middle. We bring appetite to the middle; belly appetite, sex appetite, possession appetite, reputation appetite. We bring everything to middle.

Now we look at the middle zone of the nafs. We will jump to three new terms, which is what is going on in this thing: Nafs, Hawa, Shaytan. Let us now look at what these three terms are in the arena of action. This is very interesting and will help a lot in your understanding of the process of behaviour. What is the experiencing self? It’s very simple. It’s you experiencing what’s there. So someone comes in. Wrong action. Nafs. Something appears, appetite, you take it. Hawa. What is front of you. It’s yours. You acquire what is there. You are acquisitive. You take what is yours. The belly, sex, head, reputation, study, being a scholar. You take, you acquire. You are possessed by appetites.

Now shaytan, shaytan with a tail and a samsonite briefcase. Shaytan has form. Shaytan has the form of many things. It changes form. Shaytan is a subtle energy of jinn in the unseen and he has a job to do. He is like the man who does the swamp cooler. When it breaks down, he turns up. When the nafs leaves a crack, he can come. He answers the call. We say, “Please come, the swamp cooler has broken down,” and the swamp cooler man comes and fixes it. Shaytan: whenever your nafs gets something wrong, there’s a crack in it, he’s got a complete service. He gets the message on his CB and he’s out the door. “Right, here I am.” Now shaytan is the volative activator at your already existent wrong action. Shaytan is when the creation comes back to inviting you. Suddenly your wrong action from you that was passive becomes active where the creation calls you to it. This is the meeting with shaytan. This is what is called shaytan. This is the identity of Iblis. That is why one day he is tall and thin, the next day he is small and fat, depending on what the situation is. In other words, if passively your intention is bad, then from intention to action, he is the action dimension of the wrong intention.

But you are judged. His job is that. Like the other man’s job is to clean the … He is under strict orders from Allah. You have wrong intention now, then give them up. You see. He says, “I will.” In Qur’an shaytan says, “I will not cease to try men until the last day.” That energy is persistent in man. When he has wrong intention, shaytan then comes in on his jet plane. “Come on, do this. There’s the trouble, make that one.” He pauses for breath. You jump in with the interrogation. Shaytan. The attack. The Shaytan. From the passive to the active. Nafs to shaytan through our old friend Hawa. Nafs, shaytan, hawa. Got that? So to cheer people up because they think, “How awful, what a mess. Allah, what a mess.”

We now look at it another way to cheer us - give us himma, yearning to get past it. We now take three more pictures: the dog, the pig and the sage. These are the three elements of nafs from another picture of what’s in there. Here are three creatures. Inside is a dog. This is nafs. What is nafs? Nafs and hawa.

How now, we are now going to look at it in another way. As a dog. One of the characteristics of the dog is this picture. In this picture it is the dog returns to its brother. You do it and you still do it. You go back to it. The dog plays a double game with the master, wagging tail, but it is not all friendly. Friendly, friendly, and then you go and cringe, tail shuddering, it’s awful. The dog chases round the side when it is terrified. There is all that cringing and slobbering. You are this you. You are this to you.

And what is the other characteristic of the dog? It is that the dog is treacherous to its own master. The dog will defend you as much as you defend yourself against the world. But at a certain point, you turn around and you savage yourself. Like the person we were talking about the other day. That has to happen. They will turn on themselves and savage themselves. They will do everything against their own interest - to the edge of suicide. And, of course, some people are torn to shreds.

The pig is appetite. What is this aspect of appetite? The aspect of appetite is if you allow it, if you feed it, it won’t stop feeding. The pig will not stop the feed. What is interesting is that the pig is abhorred in Islam and the dog is technically abhorred except as a hunter when you use its high qualities and ignore its low qualities. The dog in Islam is not allowed in the house because we will get all that and pick it up from it. It would rule us. But its higher qualities are something else. It hunts and guards.

The pig is haram because the character of the pig is appetite itself and if you feed it, it won’t stop feeding until it kills itself. It stuffs. Appetite feeds, “Grows by what it feeds on,” Shakespeare said. Appetite grows by what it feeds on. It keeps on and on and on. So it is a pig. And it gets fatter and fatter and fatter until it even will cannibalise. It will eat its own. Appetite will eventually eat its own, Devour everything, en famille. The child will devour the parent. The parents will devour the children and so on and so on. Devour by appetite.

These are two aspects of the nafs. Now, the Sufis say: if you kill these two the sage will die. We have not come to the sage yet. If you kill them the sage will die. They are these medieval chairs. When you sit on a chair and there are beasts under the chair that hold it up. In Spain they have wooden chairs that have an animal underneath and it’s sitting on it. This is their proper place, You do not kill them. If you kill them, you’re finished. The zahid may kill them and lose the day. The one who is an ascetic may destroy everything. We are not ascetic in this way. We say you subdue the pig, but you need the nourishment. You need the appetite. You need eating, but you subdue it. If you give the pig enough, it is all right.

The other aspect of the pig, its negative qualities is that it wallows in its own dirt. Its filth becomes its scent. It turns in on itself and wallows. Subdue the appetite, and it will carry you. Control the dog and it will guard you. You will get from it what its task it. It will guard you It will hunt for you. It will retrieve for you. It’s used for that in its place. If these two are subdued, they are, as it were, the chariot on which rides the sage. The sage is the raw insaniyya in its highest level. Then the true high aspect of the nafs emerges. These two are necessary in their place and onto this comes the sage, the man of wisdom, the creature of knowledge. He rides on a conquered appetite and a subdued anger and all the dog in us. Another picture of man.

So now we say that this, we come back to the first thing of the middle nafs. The embattled nafs is then busily involved in replacing wrong action with right action. This is, as it were, this middle part of the journey, once you get past its first stage from tawba, has two stages to go on to the third one. The first stage is to remove wrong action. The next stage is to acquire qualities.

The first of these qualities has to be – otherwise the journey cannot be made – sabr. Sabr means patience. But it means something more in Arabic. It’s a wonderful language. Sabr means something much more than this. Let us say it is an aspect of patience. Sabr is also strength in Arabic, fortitude, being able to deal with, staying power. That when you get knocked down, you do not go to pieces. Sabr means that you have staying power, that when the first hit comes, the first negative signal, the first trouble, you do not go to pieces. You just keep going. You have power. Sabr is the first thing to acquire.

Sabr, the Sufis say, is patience. It is a medicine. All of its taste is bitter and all of its results are sweet. It is wonderful. This is the position of the elite. Sabr, patience, is a medicine which is bitter, the results of which are sweet. This is why, seen from the view of the elite, the elect of the elite, patience has to be that in bitterness and sweetness are the same to them. So when al-Junayd was asked, “What is patience?” he said something tremendous. He said, “Patience is being patient with patience.” So its bitterness is sweet, and its sweetness is sweet. This is beautiful.

Do you see? They are the same to the man who has achieved, they are both the same. And this is the man of perfection who, remember, is a man of action. The one who has arrived is the one of action. Because action follows knowledge. Knowledge is the journey. Action is the proof. So this is the stage where this sabr becomes this - what a wonderful thing! It is the most interesting thing.

And the thing is we know everything about the nafs. So the first news of the Sufi is that there is nothing to be afraid about in the nafs. You see in the current way of looking at the nafs it actually quite frightening, because they bring these myths, like the Oedipal myth and these great Greek myths to dramatise this little arena which they are all so worried about. It is frightening. People see themselves pitted against these vast destructive figures. It is awful. They cringe before it.

Now the Sufi view is not this. The self. First of all, it’s very reassuring. There isn’t any aspect of the self that we do not know. You cannot bring a mystery self to the Sufi. You bring one you cannot do anything with, but never one that you do not know what it is. It is totally plotted, it is all as clear as daylight. It is very simple. It is all within the parameters that I have described. Even before I came among the Sufis I used to say to people, “Well, you can only do what a human being can do.” Because one of things of the nafs is to say, “You do not realise the un-nameable, unspeakable things that I have in my heart.” They make themselves into dreadfulkings. They make themselves into these mythological figures. They say, “You do not realise. It may be all very well for you if you do not know the terrible things that there are, these serpents that all squishing around in me. A’udhu billah min ash-shaytan ar-rajim. Really you can only do what a human being can do, What is there else that you can do? The worst you can do is to destroy everything and everything, yourself included. It is quite human. There is nothing unexpected in it. So again the attitude if the Sufis to the nafs is not that it is a sickness, not as this dreadful thing. But that we are, it is a simply necessary ingredient of the recipe of what may turn out to be a very good dish, a very good cake, a very good morsel of nourishment for everybody. Of course, if you botched it, you can burn the cakes. But it’s basically the ingredients from which something tremendous can be made.

Sharh of the Diwan of Abu Madyan al-Ghawth

Sharh of the Diwan of Abu Madyan al-Ghawth

Shaykh Abdalqadir as-Sufi al-Murabit ad-Darqawi
(Weimar, German, 199

The pleasure of life is only in the company of the fuqara. They are the sultans, the masters, the princes.
There is no higher company. As they are the least of men and make no claims, they are the elite and the two worlds are their property. With them is the Maqam al-Mahmud, for the Messenger, blessings and peace of Allah be upon him, has said, ‘Look for me among the poor, for I was only sent among you because of them,’ and ‘Poverty is all my glory,’ and “Allah loves the poor.”

Therefore keep their company and have adab in their assemblies. Leave your portion behind you whenever they send you forward.
Keep their company - in this is half the science of knowledge. Our knowledge is not informational, it is transmitted. The company of the fuqara is like a developing fluid in which the murid is soaked, until by its properties, the self emerges and is recognised. As we see later in the poem, the imprinting of the image is due to being exposed to the light of the Shaykh.

Spiritual courtesy has three levels:
1) adab to Allah
2) adab to the Shaykh
3) adab to creation

Adab to Allah has three parts:
a) Performance of the obligatory
b) Nawafil (extra) acts of ‘ubudiyya - night prayers, recitation of Qur’an, wirds, wazifas, diwan, Asma’ al-Husna.
c) Muraqaba. The invocation of the Supreme Name with deep contemplation and stillness until the falling away of the attributes and the secret is revealed. The secret of muraqaba is mushahada (That is, the secret of watching is witnessing.)

Adab to the Shaykh has three parts:
a) Action. That is service without judgement.
b) State. Taste the states of the Shaykh in three conditions:
i) dhikr - follow him in concentration on his Lord.
ii) fikr - follow his exposition of the glories of his Lord.
iii) himma - follow him in his yearning for his Lord.
c) Station. Recall that his maqam is the ayat of YaSin:
‘And there came a man, running, from the furthest part of the city saying, “Follow the Messengers.”‘

Love of the Shaykh vanishes in love of the Messenger.
Love of the Messenger vanishes in love of Allah.

Adab to the fuqara has three parts:
a) This is contained in the last phrase of this line: ‘Leave your portion behind you whenever they send you forward.’
b) See their faults as your mirror in which you discover what is wrong with you.
c) When you look at the fuqara, see the Shaykh.

Seize the moment and always be present with them. Know that rida is bestowed on those who are present.
Do not think that learning comes only from the discourse. It comes in the ‘keeping company’. Keeping company is an intellectual activity. Discourse is an ecstatic activity. Sama’a is a serene activity. All three are the conditions of ‘being present’, This is the transformative process that we call alchemy.

Cling to silence unless you are questioned. Then say, ‘I have no knowledge’ and be concealed by ignorance.
Silence must not be to draw attention, but to ward off attention. Do not be afraid among the fuqara. No one should notice your silence. Your reticence is your victory, and by it your ignorance will rapidly be transformed into knowledge.

Do not look at fault unless you see a clear fault appear in you, but it is concealed.
The fuqara are flawless. When you see them as flawless you have become flawless. When you are flawless, you have reached your Shaykh.

‘You will not find any flaw in the creation of the Merciful.’
Until you can understand this to be true of the lovers of Allah, how will you grasp it among the people of suffering and the people of wrong action?

Lower your head and ask for forgiveness without cause. Stand apologising in just treatment.
No blame. This is the rule of the zawiyya and the maqam of the awliya. It is the station of the ‘the stranger will cast out the weaker’ and the defeat of hypocrisy (nifaq).

If a fault appears from you, then apologise and lift the face of your apology for what has flowed in you from you.
Do not cling to wrong action. Do not nurse any bad feeling. Let everything go. The fuqara must have hearts like children of whom the Messenger of Allah, blessings and the peace of Allah be upon him, said, ‘Allah loves them for three things.

One, they cry easily, Two, they hold no rancour. Three, if you take away a gold toy and give them a clay one it is the same for them.

Say, ‘Your insignificant slave is more entitled to your pardon. Act kindly in forgiveness and adhere to gentleness, O fuqara!’
The progress of the seeker lies in this verse. Here is the quick ascent and the victory over the nafs.

They are not entitled to condescension, and it is their practice. Fear neither overtaking nor harm from them.
Until you taste this ease in the company of the fuqara, you can never taste ease in your own company. Until you taste ease in your own company, you cannot reach the stage of entering the ahwal (states) of the Shaykh. Once you trust the fuqara you can trust yourself. When you trust yourself, you meet the shaykh at last, not as a guide or a teacher, or a leader, but as a light calling to a light.

Always be generous in singing the praises of the brothers in the senses and the meaning. Lower the eye if someone slips.
Praising the fuqara has expansion in it, and release, and freedom from fear, and the end of loneliness. It has compassion for the sick in it, patience with the old, and generosity with the young.

In it faqirat learn to honour their husbands and fuqara to be sweet to their wives. Lower the eye if someone slips. This is a high prophetic sunnah - covering the faults of the brothers. It is the effect of the dhikr of astaghfirullah. It is the cause of the dhikr - tabaraka’llah. From it comes the Shaykh’s love of the murid. The Shaykh rejoices in two things - when his murid is spoken against and when his murid refrains from speaking against.

Watch the Shaykh carefully in his states, perhaps a trace of his approval will be seen on you.
The Shaykh has three states in public.
i) Meeting. Like a host with his guests or a father with his children. Here all is hidden under the light of welcome, attention, news, and the exchange of courtesies. This is the most difficult ground for the new murid. Levity is for the nursery and where there is play there is no work.
ii) Guidance. When the Shaykh speaks to one person, take it as meant for you. The Shaykh conceals his serious admonition and hides his target both in reproach and in love. When the Shaykh speaks to you consider it is cross-roads - do not turn back on your path. If he is pleased with you, resolve to strengthen your purpose. If he is displeased, delight in his noticing it. When he speaks of Allah - take it in - all his words will become realities for you.
iii) Absence. When the Shaykh withdraws from the company inwardly during sama or in a meeting, go with him. It was for this that you set out. It was for this that you et out. This draws you into the audience chamber of the heart.

‘Perhaps a trace of his approval will be seen on you.’
This is a light from Allah and without intermediary. The Shaykh does not ‘do’ anything. He recognises those Allah loves. This recognition has wisdom in it for him and for you. Shaykh Ahmad al-Badawi of Fes, may Allah be merciful to him, said, ‘One glance from the Shaykh wipes out a thousand wrong actions.’ This is very difficult for the people of thought-forms to understand and easy for the people of states. This concerns the inner zone of the lubb, or core of the human self’s awareness. Its mithal is the sun’s rays. If you sit in the sun you become sunburned. If you sit with the Shaykh you become purified, later intoxicated, and finally annihilated. As the one who is first warmed, then burned, and at the end finally blinded by the rays of the sun. In this zone is the innermost reality and the secrets of ‘keeping company’.

Advance with seriousness and leap to serve him. Perhaps he will be pleased, and beware lest you become irritated.
Your service to the shaykh is a tremendous thing. Greater than it is his service to you. Wrong feelings against the Shaykh endanger the murid by confusion and the illusion that the nafs is other, and there is no other… Abu’l-’Abbas al-Mursi, Allah’s mercy be upon him, said, “The one who says, ‘why?’ to his Shaykh will never be happy.’ Never forget the contract with the Shaykh is to move you from ‘ilmi nafsika to ‘ilmi rabbika, from knowledge of yourself to knowledge of your Lord.

The pleasure of the Creator is in his pleasure and his obedience. He will be pleased with you. Beware of the one who leaves it.
There is no shirk here. It is the secret of the people of the path. Without a Shaykh a man cannot defeat his nafs. The more he fights himself the more powerful the elf becomes. Attention confirms the nafs. The activator of the nafs will be either outside or inside the nafs. If it is activated from inside, this is the work of Shaytan, the whisperer, who instigates wrong action. That is why, following the word of Moulay ‘Abdalqadir al-Jilani, the murid must make himself like the dead body in the hands of the washer in relations with the Shaykh. Abu Yazid, Allah’s mercy on these great awliya, said, ‘He who does not have a Shaykh as a master will have Shaytan as a master.’ This is why keeping company is a necessary condition of the path. How can the doctor heal the patient unless the patient is brought before him? At the heart of the matter, however, there is no rule over the murid. The murid must want what the Shaykh wants, in that is his cure. The murid is the one who has handed over his irada - his will - to the Shaykh in order to come quickly out of the fantasies of the khayal, (the faculty investing solid objects with their reality) and the kufr, the covering that is the self.

‘Fear Allah and He will give you discrimination.’
That means not by you but by Him. Then separation does not veil you from gatheredness and gatheredness does not veil you from separation.

Know that the path of the People is study, and the state of the one who claims it today is as you see.
The homeland of the People is ma’nawiyya. In this realm the bird of the secret flies freely into the open space of open space. The intellect must be trained to move in the realm of ishara, indication, that is the subtle zone of meanings arrived at by hints and coded signs, inaccessible by the lower faculty of reason. The faculty of ishara only emerges by the practice of dhikr, not by the practice of fikr. It in return is dependent on himma - constant yearning that increases and becomes more intense. There is no end to this except in the Beloved.

When will I see them, where will I see them? When will my ear hear some news of them?
Shaykh Ahmad al-Badawi of Fes, may Allah be merciful to him, said, ‘If you have seen the fuqara, then you have seen Allah.’ Once some ignorant scholars denounced the fuqara for performing the hadra. They asked what happened when the fuqara danced. The reply was, ‘We see Allah.’ The scholars exclaimed that this was just as they had thought. It was shirk. ‘Why?’ asked the fuqara, ‘Do you see other-than-Allah?’

Who is mine and where will my like compete with them in wells about which I do not recognise impurity?
Once love of Allah becomes established in the heart, the faqir becomes a means of