Saltimbalque symbolique des animaux
Frosch: ‘It’s been a long time rising from the swamp of the nafs’. ‘O the nafs again’ responded brightly Frogin. ‘Then lets play leapy leapy, en marche, forwards, upwards, to clear water, from one divine indication to another, for there’s no time for complacency. Perhaps the bush is His joke at the ape-ists, and we’ve not yet found our place in the muslimo-cretio-judeo Zivilisation’.
While Abu Hamama washed away
people’s passions from without and within
his self
he understood why Nabucco built such magnificent baths
and kept the vast vessels of King Sulaiman ibn Daud.
The joining of opposites
O you who move with firm intent
to join the orchestral chorus:
spontanéité killed the kat
of future plans
kovering too well the quiver of meanings
of the moment of submission
to ineluctubility and the breeze of freiheit.
O Shaykh of Shaykhs
O Gaelic King
O leader of nations
O mujaddid ad-deen
O reviver of tongues
O light of Mustafa, sallallahu alayhi wa sallam!
We ask by him of You, ash-Shaafi, for shifaa for you
and by the awliya
and salihun
and muminun.
And we ask of You, al Qaahir fawqa ‘ibaadihi
that the other King of the West may see his way
to seeing you.
O Shaykh of Shaykhs
O Gaelic King
O leader of nations
O mujaddid ad-deen
O reviver of tongues
O light of Mustafa, sallallahu alayhi wa sallam!
We ask by him of You, ash-Shaafi, for shifaa for you
and by the awliya
and salihun
and muminun.
And we ask of You, al Qaahir fawqa ‘ibaadihi
that the other King of the West may see his way
to seeing you.
Have no fear! Absorption of Islamic terminology into European languages
There is no need to be afraid, as is the case for most university educated academics, of the entry of ‘wudu’ for example into the English language. The textual term ‘ablution’ sounds most bizarre to Muslims on the ground who have probably never heard their companion say to them on hearing the adhan ‘I have to make ablution first’. The ‘call to prayer’ which recurs in orientalist-coloured translations is likewise not used by those Muslims who actually answer and fulfill the call. The word adhan is used.
Islam in specific respects has made a comeback in Europe and so will inevitably increase its colouring of the various european languages just as it once coloured Spanish – over three thousand words derive from the Arabic, tendency increasing – Castillian, Sicilian, and all of the Balkan languages; just as it profoundly altered the Turkic and Tifinagh languages, Urdu, Persian, Hausa, Wolof, Mandinka, Bambara, Zenaga, Somali, Malay, Bahasa Indonesia and Swahili to name just a few; indeed they are, or were – before the onslaught of the missionary academics, written in the Arabic script.
This colouring shall continue to happen and all academic attempts to stop this natural linguistic transformation, as history has demonstrated, are futile. Resistance to this transformation is however ferocious. Muslims who live in a christianised-linguistic milieu are relatively ignorant with regard to Muslims who express their world in Islamic, un-translated terms. The missionaries – as did later their spiritual inheritors, the orientalists – knew that whoever established the form in which Islam was purveyed to the West could determine its course. But it is clear that once the Muslims of newly established Muslim areas become aware of the way they are in the world and how they may freely express themselves they are no longer burdened with the linguistic porte-manteaus of religion, i.e. christianity. They would realize they had deen and that this required its own particular language. This is not a belittling of the importance of European languages but a realization that for certain concepts and actions only the original terms can be used – modified, if necessary or naturally, by the demands, rhythms and intonations of the language in question. A well-meaning but ignorant Muslim of the West subject to the linguistic influence of the christian or orientalist terms ‘poor due’ or worse ‘alms’ believes erroneously that by giving in charity when the mood takes him he is fulfilling the obligation of Zakat; while the person who uses the word zakat understands it existentially as a purification of his self and his wealth, as a recognition of the person in authority responsible for the collection and distribution and an affirmation of bimetal currencies of gold and silver sanctioned by the book and the sunna. The same applies to the world pilgrimage: if one lives in the linguistic realm of pilgrimage there is a danger that the person becomes merely a pilgrim with all that this implies; an aware Muslim however makes the hajj and then becomes a hajji. The same applies to ‘prayer’ which strictly speaking is a dua, a supplication, and which often implies a spiritual meditative state, often done alone when one ‘feels like it’; the sala on the other hand is a very physical, chronologically determined, event established in the company of others. It is true the word ‘prayer’ is in general use amongst Muslims and although most understand it as this very physical event many non-Muslims continue to think it is a meditative state akin to a christian supplication, performed alone; some Muslims are influenced by the very term however – they automatically go into a ‘pious’ state. This is not the nature of the sala. It is done wide awake with the eyes open and the form of it is very specifically determined and varies according to the time of the day. The faatiha and the qunout are indeed supplications but the main emphasis is on the recitation and understanding of the qur’anic ayas and the physical bowing and prostration to the Lord of the worlds. In fact the one minute standing of the humanists to honour the dead is physically closer to the sala of the Muslims
‘Belief’ which once meant trust in God has now become a mental concept in European languages. By using the word iman one ensures that one does not fall into this mental trap. According to one etymological dictionary the slide from trust which is of the highest existential reality to mere conceptual, fleeting impulses of the brain occurred in the following manner:
late 12c., bileave, replacing Old English geleafa “belief, faith,” from West Germanic *ga-laubon “to hold dear, esteem, trust” (source also of Old Saxon gilobo, Middle Dutch gelove, Old High German giloubo, German Glaube), from *galaub- “dear, esteemed,” from intensive prefix *ga- + *leubh- “to care, desire, like, love”. The prefix was altered on analogy of the verb believe….
And just as belief used to mean “trust in God,” faith meant “loyalty to a person based on promise or duty” (a sense preserved in keep one’s faith, in good (or bad) faith and in common usage of faithful, faithless, which contain no notion of divinity). But faith, as cognate of Latin fides, took on the religious sense beginning in 14c. translations, and belief had by 16c. become limited to “mental acceptance of something as true,” from the religious use in the sense of “things held to be true as a matter of religious doctrine”.
So when we read in journalistic or touristic explanations that ‘believing moslems make the hajj’ [i.e. ‘normal’ Muslims do not normally do so] we enter the surreal realm of linguistic dysfunction. The word Muslim means, as Goethe understood, to submit, submit to the Lord of the worlds. Belief does not really enter into the matter. It is a matter of submission, of iman – trust, and action, both of which are implicit in the word. Allah defines a Muslim as someone who has iman – trust:
‘The Messenger has iman in what has been sent down to him from his Lord, and so do the Muminun. Each one has iman in Allah and His angels and His Books and His Messengers. We do not differentiate between any of His Messengers. They say, ‘We hear and we obey’ [from the Bewley translation].
Have no fear! Endangered democracy
According to many media commentators the people are endangering democracy nowadays by choosing the wrong candidates. Oxymoronic? An implication that the people cannot be left to vote but rather the politicians must be chosen for them? By whom? By the media? An insult to the intelligence of the people? A refutation of the validity of democracy? Media’s reflection of itself as financial guardians of democracy? i.e. help! if the people are not with us, readership shall fall, influence reduced, banks shall not support us. Damage limitation and media’s implicit confession of failure to influence the course of voting in the usual successful manner? Media can fool most of the people most of the time?
Have no fear! Hadd, hudud, limits
The most extreme limits of the road upon which we are moving towards death are clear: they are the infamous hudud. Islam, as sane people know, is more than this and headscarves. All of lived life is limits, edging, stopping short, transgressing, pushing the boundaries. The descendents of those who massacred the indigenous Navaho, Cherokee and Cree civilisations still have their hudud and insist on the excruciating frying of their victims with electricity or subjecting them to a thirty minute torture through chemical poisoning. Every moment of daily actions are hedged in with limits – or expanding to the infinite, depending on the situation. The hudud implemented by the Khawaarij at the moment are not the hudud of a just and fully established non-ribawi society and there is no danger of their illegal implemention by Muslims as Muslim society no longer exists on the face of the earth. All so called ‘Muslim countries’ or ‘states’ live within the constraints of humanist thought – without exception – and all Muslim communities within fully functioning humanist societies are completely subject to democratic rules with the result that Islam necessarily loses at least 99% of its legal, social, economic, medicinal and moral patterns. Should one day Dar al-Islam be reestablished, then any occasional legal implementation of the hudud – after of course the merciful establishment of the zakat and the gold and silver currency – would be for the humanists a minor irritant or embarrassment on a par with their capitalist, economic starving of millions in Africa, the torture of thousands of Uighurs, the global enslavement of 30 millions in emerging states or the world-wide enrefugeeing of 60 million [both fully accepted humanist statistics of last year], and on a par with their responsibility for aids and sexually-licensed diseases, alcoholism, drug abuse, debt-related illnesses – affecting as a whole a quarter of all society [again humanist statistics], and on a par with the millions killed, tortured and displaced in Sham in the war between the humanist coalition and Russia, i.e. minor blips on the way to the ideal capitalist-totalitarian global state in which renegades no longer have the right to an implanted bank-chip.
‘How about some christian music’ he asked of the Naga masseur called Andrew.
‘Excuse me sir?’
‘Some Mozart, Beethoven or Wagner perhaps.
‘Sir?’
Musicians of another woof than the buddhist world music of now’.
Silence is gold beneath the wastling sheets of silk and oil glidened hands.
La Forteresse of Mount Mgouna
Sensing, diving, swimming and drowning – open to all with courage
The nafs, the self, this thing which tends to congeal and harden into a pseudo-reality through habit, had been shaken up. This self, born of two and a half decades of European democratic culture and the structural propaganda of school, university and the media. Shaken by poverty, by the exotic character of Morocco, by the reputedly ‘difficult’, ‘foreign’ language of Arabic, by illness, by the super-chlorinated water, by hashish, by opium and the occasional chemical trip, and by the changes inherent in physical travel. Shaken to the point of disintegration, to the point of no longer ordering one’s affair, to the point of seeing the moment, reading the moment and being only in the moment. The moment was ripe. An awareness of the heart and something other than the world of the sensory made its entry. A need for meaning. A readiness. A surrender of the self despite one’s self.
A shabby town-square perhaps Zagora, perhaps Ouzarzate, perhaps somewhere nearby, mint tea in the café when an English registered car drew up.
In it were Shaykh Abdal Qadir as-Sufi and Dr Abdalkhabir al-Amirki. I went over and asked the latter, the driver, if we could continue down the road with them. With great majesty and force the former said ‘get in’. I mentioned my companionne in the café. ‘Get her!’
We stopped after leaving the town. F. and Mason’s with toast on a gas primus in the desert. They were westerners no doubt, and surely interesting in their relationship to each other – most polite and crisp.
Almond blossom in the ochre qasbah of Qalaat Mgouna, against blue, with pomegranate trees, apricots, and rivulets running to the side of our sufra, our table cloth, spread on the ground, served by a black man, ex-slave but by preference still around after the voices’ decree of ‘liberté‘, the booming thumping around us of the workers pounding the moist adobe earth between the shuttering to make the new walls, accompanied by Allah, Allah, Allah
Sight of veiled girls and woman half hiding as they look on at us from an outbuilding. When I asked Shaykh Abdal Qadir why, he said you will understand later. Shaykh Muhammad al Basri asks for a room with reed matting to be prepared for the night for both of us. With hindsight, most accommodating.
A realisation that everything was beginning to make sense, that the turbulence of the past was just a shake up for this. Meanings rushed in to every scene, every conversation, every movement. I was moving now into something written, destined, I had no choice. It was only afterwards that I came upon the rational explanation for what was happening – in the Quran where Allah ta’ala says ‘When Allah desires to guide someone, He expands his breast to Islam.’ Despite the overwhelming changes in existential perception, I was to know later that it was quite normal.
Shower, purity afterwards, without knowing formally that a ghusl is necessary before becoming Muslim. It had happened despite my self, my heart had recognized the truth in those men from Qalaat Mgouna and those who had called me in. This I realized later was called fitra, that natural awareness of each of us of what is right. My fitra could dominate after the structures of childhood dissolved. I began to perceive that Islam was not a religion but a way of being, a way of right acting, and an ever present awareness of the Truth which was not out there, foreign, but rather already contained within oneself – and covered variously by the fantasies and structures crystalized by the self into a personal history which one worships to a greater or lesser degree. This worship of personality yields unwillingly to this fitra also residing in the self. The colour, the joie de vivre, the affirmation of life, the social reality of Qalaat Mgouna was the deen, was a way of living far from the christian stereotypes of being in the world. So this becoming Muslim was not a sudden conversion but a gradual uncovering to myself of the veils of the self. The initial uncoverings were mind-blowing, as the term went then, i.e. the mind or the usual parameters of thinking were blown upon to be able to receive the – as I later understood – the nafahaat of the Lord, the breezes of mercy and knowledge; wave upon wave of new seeings engulfed my conscious self. They became less reduced in size but continued and still continue to this day for the self, the veil, is vast, as vast as the universe itself.
I was aware that my companionne was not subject to the same, I was losing her or she was losing me. A break ensued. Painful. Kataba Allah ma kataba.
The real sixth sense
is far from the mystic, esoteric, intuition
of those who have lost their Way;
rather a sensing-sensory of the beloved prey,
sometimes increasing to the fever pitch and
banned from the klosters and vatikan
but free to roam with us.
Not however for the full-time rationalist
with a light snow-covering of religious islam.
A Morality of Discrimination
In order to understand morality in an Islamic sense one has to accept that Islam is not a concept-based reality located in the minds of the Muslims but rather – in the first instance – a way of life based on that of a Messenger and formulated in legal terms. One of the names of Allah ta’ala is al-Haqq which means ‘Truth’, ‘Reality’ as well as having connotations of ‘Law’ – i.e. He, ta’ala, is the ‘court of the last instance’ with respect to haq/huqouq, all the various rulings with regard to Himself and His slaves on earth; in this respect one may examine the ayat in sura al-Ma’ida, The Table: 48, ‘And We have sent down the Book to you with truth, confirming and conserving the previous Books. So judge between them by what Allah has sent down and do not follow their whims and desires deviating from the Truth that has come to you. We have appointed a law and a practice for every one of you.’ A translation of the famous hadith of Muhammad, may the peace and blessings of Allah be upon him ‘I have been commanded to judge by the outward’ is a further indication that our reality is visible, tangible and subject to assessment, unlike the very loose, ever-changing and quasi-mystical reality of the christians. Thus we have justice expressed outwardly in law, and they have concepts expressed inwardly in the intellect. We have clear outward limits and they have indefinite – often idealistic – ideas which have little relation to reality. This is where a danger lies: when Muslims adopt a moral – in a christian sense – attitude to Islam the tendency is to formulate an idealistic, pious, Islamic world in their heads. This of course has little to do with the reality of everyday life and a frustration and ultimately anger forms which leads certain of the weak to blow themselves up. This moralistic approach, this living out of a perfect iman in one’s head is often to be experienced at the hand of the false salafis.
We can witness and we know from the Quran that christianity is not the deen of ‘Isa, ‘alayhi salaam: trace elements of it remain, like charity, humility and compassion, and a vague recognition of the Unseen. Instead we have a ‘religion’, i.e. a ‘faith of concepts’ in the head – but no outward behavioural pattern or rulings governing real life, i.e. trade, contracts and finance. This ‘religion’ is in turn controlled by the church and a priestly class who have made of it a spiritual business: ‘If you take us as your representatives, we shall take care of your concepts.’
Nietzsche understood this with la ilaha illallah, i.e. by his triumphant declaration of the end of the christian god, the idols, the sacrament, the concept of original sin, the tyranny of the church and priests, and his strident refusal to feel guilty about it. In short he purified himself of the superstructure of toxic, christian language and emerged free.
European translations of the Quran and the sunna were first made – and still are to a large extent – using this christian terminology. But it did not correspond to what was meant. Instead of zakat, people were reading of ‘alms’ and ‘poor tax’, instead of wudu, ‘ablution’, instead of salat, ‘prayer’, instead of Allah, ‘god’, instead of hajj ‘pilgrimage’. So the Muslims with no access to the Arabic became imprisoned in the intellectual structure of christianity: they became ‘sinners’ and at times felt ‘guilty’, etc. etc, because this was the only language available to them. The truth is however that there is no ‘sin’. If we commit a wrong action, then we turn in tawba and basta! the matter is finished, the heart is purified – and without any priestly intervention. The Arabs had to invent a word for guilt: shu’our al-dhanb, i.e. a sensation, a consciousness or a perception that one has committed a wrong action, that is, a feeling that lingers and weighs one down. But this is not our deen: at any given moment we can free ourselves, purify ourselves of our past actions.
We are of course instructed in many translations of the Quran to ‘command to the good and forbid evil’ which sounds somewhat moral and christian in tone. But a closer examination of the prophetic language reveals that in fact we are instructed to ‘command to what is ma’rouf, i.e. known [to be socially sane, healthy and just] and forbid what is munkar, i.e. unknown [or unrecognized by sane healthy and just members of society] – as is clear from the non-christian translation of the Bewleys: ‘command to what is right and forbid what is wrong’. We are commanded to the right and wrong of the fitra which corresponds to our natural being, to a balanced way of living rather than mere moral, intellectual concepts. And this commanding or forbidding is not a finger-wagging whine of passive incapacity, but rather – in the first instance – an active involvement in the situation one finds oneself in, an embodiment of the words of the Rasoul sallalah alayhi was salam ‘if you see something wrong then change it with your hand’.
There is then no christian guilt with us – and by extension no collective or personal feelings of guilt. Any such tendency to such things is merely the residue of christian terminology in the language we use. Rid oneself of this terminology and one frees oneself of such feelings or concepts. At the height of its power and glory the Osmanli dawlat expressed itself with up to sixty percent of Islamic terminology and Arabic words ; Urdu is permeated with the same – up to thirty or forty percent, as is Swahili, Malaysian, Hausa, Bahasa Indonesie, Persian, Tamazight etc. Indeed we may judge the degree to which Islam is present in any given territory by the penetration of its language. Europe is in the early stages of such a transformation and as such many Muslims resident here live under the shadow of priestly morality. This is why Nietzsche is required reading for many. He can help to a return to the original meaning of ‘morality’, i.e. a quality of character and behaviour based on healthy discrimination.