The humanist legal doc. entitled ‘behavioural agreement form’, i.e. no-tolerance policy with regards to racism, sexism, classism, ageism, ableism, homophobia, biphobia, transphobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia or anti-religion or anti-atheism fails to mention manobia or womania, but they’ll sure get it right soon when they carry out another Mandatory Participation Notice, i.e. compulsory gathering of statistics,

When news came to the wali of the car accident in which his 6 kids had died he said ‘al-hamdulillah’.

His colleague’s conviction was rock-hard – when he met and said ‘salaam alaykum, how are you? and how are the kids?’ that he still had them – despite endless attempts in vain to quietly remind him of the treacherous, snowy night, and that he had taken a second wife in the hope of more. He had now given up and merely said ‘al ahamdulillah’ as that was what the other expected of him. But it was not resignation, rather recognition. He then  added ‘Remember Allah if you forget’.

grazie mille a Montalbano, Sapia, p. 221

All lies in its opposite and we thank the Sabur, the Most Patient, for demonstrating to the hausch wa bausch of the globe the impossibility of objectivity in the media and we thank too the polit-primo drump, by the way, for manifesting to the thickest of demokrats that objectivity in the justice dept never was and never will be possible unless by the Adil, the Justest of Judges, and His Umara who rule with the Just Balance

He was never much one for personal individuality so he got his mirrored pictures from those around him, much like someone learns later of his childhood from elder others.

With patience, later in the day or week, he pieced together who he might be for healthy company’s sake – from a word here, a word there

all became clear, until he met a hermes-aphrodite-eating tigris europaeus on the jungle path who spoke of R.W.’s flight from authoriteez, the Walkereez perhaps, and D.H.L.’s recovery of the lost man in Mexico and the living woman in Eastwood,

and he realised he hadn’t been far wrong in giving his self a chaotic reading of the signs – pointing to a clearing of the clearing of the clearing of the final Clearing-House.

The faqir cleaned the carpet of the zawiyya with his bare hands, picking up carefully the traces of past dhikrs, the traces of the fuqara, in quietness, the coloured design filling his gaze unaware anyone had entered with a powerful hoover to work quick, noisy wonders in efficiency from its global socket.

Kein Wunder was in Kemnichts passiert!

If the sheriff’s posse they sent to the people of tasawwuf

had been literate to any degree in the science of the nafs

and the fitra,

they would have transmitted to Berlin – or Munich –  that the cure lies in telling people

about Allah,

mit Goethe, am besten.

Git u’re info from source

Arab girls being mended with hymens of chinese fabrication in the back streets.

‘Don’t you trust me’ she had cried

‘My folk trust more the nuptial red’ he answered

Science of surgery meets quiz tv, high-street banks and the aspirations of a past generation wanting the ‘best’ for their offspring but not for themselves.

He ta’ala chooses the most banale things to enable you to arrive:

‘We created many of the jinn and mankind for Jahannam. They have quloub, hearts, they do not understand with’. The hearts for understanding, the intellect, ‘aql, to contain moments of wildness and ecstasy when things blow.

Is looking at a pretty maiden in the reflection of weekly-cleaned glass allowed?’ said the ‘alim to himself. ‘Yes’ came the reply – when you wish to wife her, and the weekly-cleaned glass of the public building is paid for by unjust taxes.

And death of course explains all: a word here, a word there, from him, from her, now or later in the day or week or year or month –

all explained by the final crunch, meanings unchronological come together

to make the story clear of who he was, she was, where and when.

The non-causal cause becomes.

I.e. keep the company of the flower seller and his perfume shall join the bits and bods and reveal all;

keep the company of the virtual warlord usurers and the whole shall break.

Feuernado Firestorm Firenado

They called it here Feuernado when it happened in the island to the west, and is mentioned in the Quran in the story of the two gardens when it destroyed that of the arrogant one.

Come then summer sun! and penetrate in this northern clime with your myriad midges around the beach fire for their blood to mix with ours as we roast the freshy slaughtered lamb on which those words so difficult to say of bismillah allahu akbar in these times of ignorance and war in so many places of the Muslim territoriies

for their blood causes irritation and scratches and awakens to the night watch and tahajjud, recited aloud according to our way, that of Madina and the Imam Malik.

Come sun! and cause the vermillion little wild plums and the yellow and blue ones so wee before the soopermaakit ones of kemical dung and pollooschiun

and cause the blue algae to blossom in the warm bodden waters where the pike roam to ginormous sizes for such modest waters.

Come inject your smoke of beach fire with the rays of midges to drive us swimming in the protecting waters laden with the weed where the pike lurks preyingly.

Inject your fragrant woody vapours, almost poison to the lungs but sustenance enough to call the sleeping masses to the Haqq

of sobriety and drunken wisdom.

Influx of the juices of wild pears and apples, also smaller and tarter than their basterd cousins on the shelves of air conditioned halls

after their trunks absorbed the scudding rains between the monkey’s birthday weather prevalent NOW,

bringing to the fore the fire storm, electrifying tire winter systems

and hearts of those who know.

Taqwa is akshun

and no mere idea of py-ess-ness in the faith-soaked brain of those who seek answers in their ideal world

to questions via dubious germanium or silicon:

the action of shielding your self by actions.

If you have it, says the King, He will give you knowledge

directly from Himself.

The Secret Garden by Mahmud Shabistari, Cambridge Publications, 1435, Stralsund

This work is essential for people of ihsaan for it contains all the principles of the science of tasawwuf in a concise form. Further it is the first translation freed of the centuries-old baggage of christian and orientalist vocabulary which has often obscured the teachings of Islam. Thus, instead of the ‘mystic’ statements of a ‘Sufi Doctor’, we have Shaykh Mahmud Shabistari’s lucid exposition of the deen of Islam. He demonstrates in his analysis of the lower self how a man or woman can gain access to his or her reality: the step by step description of the method of purification leads to a spirituality and light which issues from the normal actions of everyday life, in other words a spirituality which is not‘ascetic’ but rather the product of right living. As the Shaykh himself comments within the text, his ‘work is the fruit of experience – not mere information heard from others’ and again ‘an action that comes from the secret of one’s spiritual states is much better than an action based on a knowledge one has heard, yet not experienced’ and yet again ‘realize… how actions proceed from different spiritual states and what the relationship is between informative and experiential knowledge’. In the words of another great Sufi, Shaykh ad-Darqawi it is the science of how to live the spirituality of the really great, those ‘whose candles do not go out when the wind starts to blow’.

Significant too is that Shaykh Mahmud Shabistari lived in the Mughal capital of Tabriz from where issued the great flowering of the last period of Islam in which the balanced shariat – rather than the mongrel European law [applicable to the realm of ‘real life’ and trade] cum‘religious’ additions regarding births and deaths, and family law] – was still the norm.

Extensive use has been made of the commentary Mufaateeh al-A’ jaaz fi Sharhi Gulshani Raz of Shaykh Muhammad Lahiji in this work of translation from the Persian original.

This work shall only be understood by those unversed in ‘critical analysis’ – for as the Shakyh says at the end of The Secret Garden: ‘Examine the knowledges arrived at by intellect and the knowledges of Islamic tradition

– examine them in a clear order and with precision. Do not look with the eye of negation and criticism for then the flowers will turn to thorns before your eyes’.

N.B. Despite one popular encyclopaedic classification of Shabistari, al-Ghazali, al-Hallaj, Junayd, Attar, Jami, Ansari, Shibli, Abdalqadir al-Gilani, Sa’di, Maruf Kharkhi, Rumi and Shams at-Tabrizi, for example, as ‘Iranian sufis’ they were in fact all Persian speaking and lived prior to the Safavid conversion of Iran to another religion.