Breaking The Two Desires Part 1

The Modern Challenge

Islam has always been balanced, but balanced in favor of (صُحْبَة - sohbah) and against (خَلْوَة - khalwah). (خلوة - Khalwah) for kind of exceptional individual circumstances, the Mongols are invading, it's the end of time, it's unusual, but generally, we work in the (أَنْدَرْمان - Androman) in society, with others, we get married, we do business, we're surgeons, that's the Muslim way.

But in our time, things have been pushed a bit because the (أَنْدَرْمان - Androman), the society, is so difficult to maintain an even keel in, because it finds it is not interested in providing forms of sacred behavior.

Historically, if you had a job, even if it was just being a potter, you would be part of a guild, one of the (أصناف - asnaf), you would be making (ذِكْر - dhikr) as you threw your pot and as you did it, and it would be (بِسْمِ اللهِ - bismillah) (الْفَاتِحَة - al-fatihah) as you sold the thing, everything would be a form of (ذِكْر - dhikr). It was not a profane activity, even if all you were doing was pushing around a lump of clay. And all of the traditional crafts and activities and medicine and being an (عالم - alim) and all of those things were part of a vision of remembrance, a society that was (ذِكْر - dhikr).

The Modern Secularization

Nowadays, we have to work hard in order to look at our daily round and to see how we can turn things into forms of (ذكر - dhikr) rather than forms of (غَفْلَة - ghaflah). I'm running around so fast that I hardly find time to squeeze the prayers in, we might say. I hardly have time to make this (ذكر - dhikr) or that (ذكر - dhikr), or it feels anachronistic, it's not at one with the other things that I do, and as a result, it becomes secularizing.

Cause and effect, utility become the rule of thumb, and the (ذكر - dhikr) of Allah سُبْحَانَهُ وَتَعَالَى becomes a kind of extraneous principle, and therefore we become moderns. Religion, rather than dunya, becomes what is dispensable to us. And we fuss more if we lose something from dunya than if we miss something of (دین - deen) and once we're into that, then we're part of the modern world.

But this principle of (خَلْوَةٌ دَرْ أَنْجُمَن - khalwat dar anjuman), solitude in the crowd, offers us the possibility of something else.

The Question of Sacralization

So the question presents itself as follows. Is it still possible for us to sacralize our quotidian tasks, or are we beyond that? Can accountancy be a spiritually uplifting activity? You have to think carefully about that.

Can being a banker, being a property speculator, being a soldier, being an engineer, all of these things, can they be things that are not just the (متاع - matah) that we do and then we get home and we do our prayers and we get back into a (ديني - dini) mode, turn on the Quran as we get back into the car and forget the cause and effect utilitarian world?

Are there ways in which we can sacralize these apparently profane things? And if you think about it a little bit, then of course the answer is yes, because (ذكر - dhikr) is the remembrance of the one who is (حاضر - hadir) (لا يغيب - la yaghib), present, and is present axiomatically. There is no situation of divine absence. (هُوَ مَعَكُمْ - Huwa ma'akum) - He is with you.

This is the essence of (إيمان - iman). (إيمان - iman) is not so much the affirmation of a list of beliefs as the awareness that Allah is with you, the consciousness that he is (رقيب - raqib), that he is present, that whatever you see is just another thing that he is doing.

The Spiritual Path in Daily Life

So the spiritual path in a sense has to be, whether at the beginning or not at the beginning, about increasing the number of things that we see and experiences that we pass through that are religiously improving, even if they seem unpromising.

And we can start with the obvious place, which is the ethical. You take ethical decisions. You let somebody in front of you in the queue in the canteen because they're carrying something obvious like that.

Your boss asks you to be economical with the truth in filing the company's annual returns to the inland revenue, and you resist that. And there are many chances of doing that. Even serious moral decisions tend to come our way quite frequently in our lives.

And if they seem not to, that's because we're cutting too many corners. This is part of (وَرَع - waraq). Scrupulousness is an aspect of awareness, self-awareness and (تَقْوَى - taqwa), awareness of the divine.

The Reality of Modern Moral Choices

If we think everything is going just fine and I don't need to make a whole load of serious moral decisions, that's not because the world is so finely tuned that everything is moral. Evidently it isn't. It's just because

you are not paying sufficient attention to the kind of things that you ought to be doing, the kind of inward attitudes that you ought to be having, and instead you're just letting things pass.

(رخصة - Rukhsah), (رخصة - rukhsah) (رخصة - rukhsah), and (الله أَعْلَم - Allahu a'lam) and (اللهُ غَفُورٌ رَحِيمٌ - Allah ghafoorul rahim), all day long. In that situation, there aren't going to be too many serious moral crises that will really force you to confront what you're supposed to be doing.

So morality is part of it, and it's to do with that ancient differentiation of Adam, humanity, from the rest of the created order, that we can know right from wrong, and even more miraculously, we can choose the right even when the ego is shouting for something else.

The Principle of Sunnah

We can do that in the context of work, and one reason why our way, your way is the way of (صُحْبَة - sohbah), is precisely that to perfect ourselves as human beings, to be perfected by Allah's leave, to put it more correctly, we need to be in moral situations, which means other human beings.

But on top of that, we need to develop other ways of remembering in situations that seem to be (مباح - mubah). Am I going to choose the chicken or the lamb? Nobody cares very much. How do we make situations like that, which occupy most of our waking hours, how do we transform a situation like that into an opportunity for (ذكر - dhikr)?

This is where something that is very distinctively Islamic kicks in. We need to think about why it is that the religion that is divinely gifted for this end-time situation, and even from a secular point of view, we can see the earth is really in bad shape, why this end-time dispensation includes this apparently unique principle of sunnah.

What's that got to do with being in these difficult times? Other religions, as far as I know, don't have something that really looks like the principle of (سُنّة - sunnah). Christians will say, ah, we have the imitatio Christi, we have to be like Christ, but that doesn't mean how long was his hair and how did he step and what did he say to his wife, because that's not their way.

It means a kind of general, global, ethical conformity to his altruism. It's not the same as the (سُنّة - sunnah) at all. We have that ethical conformity to the Holy Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم, but we also have this detailed compliance, which is something characteristically Islamic.

The Uniqueness of Islamic Sunnah

You might say, but the Jews have the (הֲלָכָה - halakhah), they have their law. But then we would say, but it's not really specific to the person of (سَيِّدِنَا مُوسَى عليه السلام - Sayyidina Musa, alayhi salam). Most of it was evolved later on. It's the oral Torah, the Talmud, and the rabbis continue to argue, and it's not resolved

frequently, and it's certainly not the (سُنّة - sunnah) of (سَیّدِنَا مُوسَى عليه السلام - Sayyidina Musa, alayhi salam).

The rabbi wears a particular hat, not because he thinks that (سَيِّدِنَا مُوسَى عليه السلام - Sayyidina Musa, alayhi salam), wore a particular hat, but because he has his own particular traditions of human behavior and human becoming.

So this is something that seems to be particularly Islamic, this idea of:

"There was ever for you in the Holy Prophet an excellent example"

And it really means (جُمْلَةً وَتَفْصِيلًا - jumlatan wa tafsila), in a general, global way, but in detail as well. That is one of the secrets of Islam's strategy for coping with the time in which people have no time any longer for anything important.

Conformity as Connection to Heaven

Conformity itisam is a way of connecting oneself to Heaven through the outward form of the Holy Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم. And we can see quite easily how that works, because many of the things that the (سُنّة - sunnah) prescribes are universal. How you go through a door, how you eat something, how you sit down, how you drink water, all of these are basic human functions that don't change on the basis of the cultural atmosphere because they're bodily, and the basis of the (سُنّة - sunnah) is the human body.

That doesn't change, any Adam's outward form, unless the genetic scientists finally get their way, in which case we'll have to think again about this, but for the moment, the (سُنّة - sunnah) is a universal, immutable thing for men and for women, rooting us in our specifically gendered, primordial (فري - fitri) form.

The Twofold Function of Sunnah

So what the (سُنّة - sunnah) does is twofold in this context. First of all, it links us to an ancient pattern of being human, that reflects a time and a place and a spiritual way of being that was focused entirely on the sacred and the transcendent.

And secondly, it enables us to remember. What is it that makes us conscious human beings? The most terrible prospect for anybody is to go through life just conforming to the crowd, talking about Calvin Klein T-shirts or the latest car or the latest fashionable holiday destination and just seeing what's in the papers as the latest fashionable thing and wanting that, and not really thinking independently at all, not activating the miracle of one's consciousness, the only thing that really differentiates us from the other

orders of creation that stops us just following the rest of the sheep, munching and munching and munching until we fall over and start to decompose.

That which genuinely makes us human is the ability to reflect and to have a certain independence of judgment, however circumscribed that might be and however theologically problematic it has to be.

Still, that's the basis for the (أَحْسَنِ تقويم - Ahsani Taqweem), the noblest of forms. Adam, the choice maker عليه السلام closely linked to the paradox of his being able to be the (قبلة - Qibla) of the angels. Those two inconceivable theological puzzles are closely linked.

The Spirit of the Modern Age

So to be Adamic we are to be choice makers. Often the choices are ambiguous and only Allah knows whether they are benign or not for us because we're so complex and because we understand ourselves and the world so little but we are choice makers with all the theological apparatus that has to accompany that.

The spirit of the modern age is that those who wish to make money out of us, who are the prevalent force in global culture, economics, politics, everything, don't really want us to think in a way that might encourage us to choose something that isn't so expensive or prestigious.

What they want us to do is to buy their products and to buy more and more expensive products every year. They make money out of it. If we get into a situation where, because we have, at a profound level, opted out of the modern pattern of engaging our bodies with the economic system so that the body itself becomes a kind of economic sign, if we can genuinely, profoundly, inwardly opt out, even if outwardly we seem to be working, studying, being more or less part of the crowd, if we have that ability inwardly to opt out, there has to be a spiritual technology that tells us what that opt out is.

The Alternative of Sunnah

Everybody nowadays is saying, I'm a very spiritual person, but they don't really know what the spirit is and they don't know how to act upon that, even if they do. Many people are troubled by the way the modern world is going, going faster and faster towards a destination that nobody cares to describe to us.

Acceleration is usually a sign of moving downhill, not uphill, but every decade seems to combine in itself the changes that took the previous two decades and it gets faster and faster. We're in a state that would have been unimaginable just a few short years ago, and it's going faster and faster.

Stepping outside that requires something very profound that is not just a general sense of unease or a desire to join some new age eco-friendly commune or the usual forms of alternative cultural opting out, which has been with us, I guess, since the 50s and the 60s, the beatniks, the hippies, all these other ways

of tuning in and dropping out. That hasn't created a counterculture that has actually made the slightest difference to them as human beings or to the world as a globe in crisis.

It's been tried, often by sincere people. It hasn't really ended up being very much, and that's because the key to it, which is the nature of the human being that is in a state of crisis, is not grasped because they have no access to any kind of prophetic wisdom. They replace one kind of egotism with another kind of egotism.

The Miracle of Sunnah

But if you have this additional thing, this truly strange thing in the modern world, which is the (سُنّة - summa), you have a form into which you can move that gives your unease about the modern situation a genuine direction in which to move and a door through which to pass.

It's an actual alternative. What's the point of protesting if you don't have any kind of alternative way of being human? We Muslims, despite the endless mess that we make of everything, still have that alternative. People practice the (سُنّة - summa) very often for all kinds of perverse, egomaniac reasons, but still the (سُنّة - summa) itself is accessible.

You want to live the way (سَيِّدِنَا مُوسَى - Sayyidina Musa) lived or the way the Buddha lived or any other ancient sage and it's really hard to figure it out and to find it in an intact way amongst significant groups of people with significant text that is still being transmitted in an uninterrupted form. Essentially, you won't find it. Essentially, you will not find it.

The (سُنّة - sunnah) of the Holy Prophet (صلى الله عليه وسلم) is the very last chip of human normalcy that is still afloat. And those who are kind of fed up of the heaving ocean and want to be saved still have access to it if it's what they want.

The Unique Preservation

In fact, it's what we all want because nobody really likes being a wage slave and being part of a civilization that hasn't really got a point. Everybody is looking for it but we Muslims do a pretty good job of turning it into a badge of identity, turning it into a stick with which to beat other Muslims, turning it into ways of feeling good about ourselves, all kinds of things that we use the (سُنّة - summa) for but to use it as a human form that represents liberation from the modern prison is generally not the way that we consider it, unfortunately.

Often it's just another of the (حظوظ - huzuz) and (نَفْس - nafs), what the ego desires. And beware of others or beware of yourself when the energy that moves you in life is actually the ego's energy but has found a religious form of expression.

That's the most dangerous thing of all. Self-righteousness that can lead to you eventually blowing yourself up in public. That's the kind of ultimate triumph of the ego using the forms of piety in order to magnify the turbulences within.

The True Purpose of Sunnah

The (سُنّة - summa) is not to be used as a megaphone for our own internal traumas. The (سُنّة - summa) is a way of moving away from our own rubbish and to mould ourselves outwardly in the form of somebody who is serene, who despite all of the threats was always smiling, never had any difficulty sleeping, never had ego issues, was always smiling, was at ease. That's what the (سُنّة - summa) gives you.

The outward form. The inward form is harder but the outward form is the first step. So one of the unique qualities and the privileges of being Muslim in this age if we care to notice these things is that whatever our egos may desire the alternative and the path back is still available and (الْحَمْدُ لِلَّهِ - alhamdulillah) thanks to the efforts of the (عُلَمَاء - ulema) who would rather die a thousand deaths than lose one tiny part of the way of the chosen one (صلى الله عليه وسلم) the future generations.

All of those generations who have preserved it for us from the time of the (صحابة - sahaba) to (الإِمَامِ الْبُخَارِي - Imam al-Bukhari) to (الإمام مالك - Imam Malik) to all of those ones who were preserving nothing other than a form of human perfection that could be an alternative to the rubbish that we desire. Thanks to them (رَضِيَ اللهُ عَنْهُمْ - radhi allahu anhum), we still have it.

The Documentation of Perfection

If you want to know how the holy prophet sat or how he cut his hair or how he was with other people or with women or with the world you can still find it. There is no analogous level of documentation and detail for any other historical figure, even recent ones. You have to do a lot of research to find out how Winston Churchill sat down, for instance.

But such was the love of the (صحابة - sahaba) for the holy prophet and the inward, this is not some kind of hair-splitting, legalistic thing we have to have every particular piece of information. It comes from love. They see a form of perfection and they know this is the alternative to the form of the ego. That has been preserved in a unique way.

The Atmosphere of Sacred Learning

And those who have studied with scholars who have not been modified by modern definitions of the (سُنّة - sunnah), it's our identity as Muslims to do this, but instead we do this because this is a form of liberation, will see some very strange things going on in their circles and they will detect an atmosphere, even in classes of tough, obscure aspects of (شريعة - sharia), that is exactly not what you expect when you're studying law.

That's why I don't even like this idea of Islamic law as a translation for (شريعة - sharia) or for part of (شريعة - sharia). Go to a law lesson, a law lecture in Cambridge, and it's always deathly dull and people are only there because they know they can make money from knowing this dull stuff, usually out of other people's suffering.

But you go to a (حلقة - halka) of (فِقْه - fiqh), even on a similar subject, and kind of the sheikh is often smiling, there are jokes, there's a beautiful (أدب - adab), everybody's kind of uplifted, everybody loves it. They love the (فقه - fiqh). And if you love the (فِقْه - fiqh), then you've really started to understand something of what Islam is, which is the transmission of a form of life which represents a liberated, ego- less human archetype, which is available for later generations, and through which countless millions of men and women found their liberation, liberation from the self, which is the only meaningful liberation, and which is always applicable and can never be taken away from you.

The Connection to Prophetic Perfection

If you're in prison, you're in Guantanamo, or you're whatever, it's still available. Nobody can take it away from you. So it's a connection to that perfection, and it is no slight perfection, because it was upon the prophetic perfection that the final word was sent down.

"Had we sent this Quran down upon a mountain, you would have seen it shattered from the fear of Allah عَزَّ وَجَلٌ ."

How shattered? Just a book pages. (كلام اللهِ الْقَدِيمِ - kalamu Allah al-qadeem) - Allah's uncreated speech, and therefore not really of this world of compass points and time and space. Something of it is of the beyond, of the transcendent (بِالْقِدَمِ - bil-qadam).

And that's the miracle and the big theological puzzle of Islam. Uncreated, spoken but unspoken, and all of those arguments, they have to be there because this is the central miracle of Allah's signs in the Islamic context. An uncreated, unmade book. Couldn't be sent down because of this infinity, partaking in the infinite (قذر - qadr) of Allah سُبْحَانَهُ وَتَعَالَى on Mount Uludagh would have been shattered.

But where did it come down?

"He sent it upon your heart." (Quran 2:97)

And we know that even that was difficult. (سَيِّدَتِنَا عَائِشَة - Sayyidatina Aisha), who had more chance to observe the process than anyone, pointed this out.

"I saw it coming upon him on a very cold day and his forehead would be pouring forth sweat." (Sahih al- Bukhari)

We can't imagine receiving the uncreated. We kind of get scared when we hear thunder.

The Heart That Receives the Infinite

But upon his heart. So that's one reason why we have this extraordinary veneration for the Holy Prophet (صلى الله عليه وسلم). Of course (مَخْلُوق - makhluq), created. But the prime principle of all created beings.

The first to be created and the one upon whose pure heart the uncreated can descend in a way that we certainly can't figure out. But we say:

"We believe in it." (Quran 3:7)

And therefore, the form of behavior that comes from that has to be a form of behavior that links us to the absolute.

The Three Aspects of Sunnah

And this is the next aspect of the (سُنّة - sunnah) that we need to consider. We've said, linking us to an ancient form of human sacred perfection before the rubbish that is the modern perception of human men and women came about. And also, the reminder.

Constantly there's a (سُنّة - sunnah) way of doing things and therefore it's hard for us to get completely lost in dunya because there's so much of the (سُنّة - sunnah). But the third thing is the (أَحْسَنُ تَقْوِيمٍ - ahsanu taqweem) - the best of forms is for us, and ultimately, to do with the form of the Holy Prophet (صلى الله عليه وسلم)

In a traditional Turkish home you'll see that the thing they most often have on their wall is what they call (حلية شريفة - hilyah shareefah) which is a famous hadith about the appearance of the Prophet (صلى الله عليه وسلم)

In the main panel, they call it the Göbek of the (حِلْيَة - hilyah). They have the famous hadith of (سَيِّدِنَا عَلِيٌّ كَرَّمَ اللهُ وَجْهَ - Sayyidina Ali karramallahu wajhahu) describing the (نَعْت - na'at) of the Prophet - that's the most sacred thing, almost an icon in the house of traditional people in this part of the world. Not a picture, of course.

And we know how inadequate pictures have to be. But words are a more sacred thing than an image because words and sounds to do with breath evoke something deeper in us than the retina can ever do. And reading about the Holy Prophet in beautiful calligraphy, hearing it is something that evokes in us some kind of presence.

The Mystery of the Perfect Human

So here we're getting into fairly mysterious territory but we can see that this is inevitably where logic has to lead us. If he is the one upon whose heart the infinite word of the Divine can be sent down. That he is a human being but extraordinary.

Or we might say a human being in the fullest sense. In other words, the human being in the form to which the angels could bow. Which is why we have as the most common form of our literature the (نعت - Naat).

And non-Muslims often say this is very strange. Yours is a religion of law. The religion of monotheism. Why is it that nine out of ten Muslim poems or songs that you hear is songs about the Holy Prophet (صلى الله عليه وسلم). Isn't he just a kind of, as somebody said, a telephone. A message comes through the telephone and who cares about the telephone.

Well, they've really misunderstood. Understanding Islam is the same as understanding the Holy Prophet. If you don't understand the role of the Holy Prophet as the unique and supreme mediator and final intercessor, you won't really understand anything else and you're likely to get into a type of religion that differentiates infinite from finite in such an absolute way that the finite ends up having no access to the infinite.

The Central Theophany

There has to be this theologically very difficult point in the middle. God's uncreated speech, the one upon whom God's uncreated speech descends. There it is, the book.

It's of this world but it's from beyond. Unless you have that central point which is the great theophany, the manifestation of the divine in Islam, then you will end up having a form of Islam that is just another form of dunya and the (سُنّة - sunnah) becomes just another expression of identity politics which is diabolical. To turn something sacred into something that is vindicating how you feel about yourself is blasphemous.

But there's plenty of that going on amongst us Muslims right now. But instead, what the Holy Prophet (صلى الله عليه وسلم) represents to us is a form of (أخلاق - ikhlaq), your Lord, the way of release, liberation. Why are the (علماء - ulama) smiling when they're studying some weird thing in (فقه - fiqh)? Because they know that through this they can escape from their own egos and their own stuff.

They can get away from what they want to do and get towards something that is from the perfection of the one upon whom the revelation was sent. Because that's their (يَقِين - yaqeen), that's delightful, (مُجْدَة - mujdeh), incredible good news.

The Three Points of Sunnah

So we need to remember these three points about the (سُنَّة - sunnah) and those who neglect them, neglect the Holy Prophet, neglect the fact that he is important enough to be half of the (شَهَادَة - shahada), and they've really messed up.

Religion for them is a kind of intensified, abstract unitarianism that has no warmth because it has no conception of a human representation of the beyond. And hence all it can do is deal with stuff and it will be devoid of the (رَحْمَة - rahma) that comes precisely through having an exemplar who is (رَحْمَةً لِّلْعَالَمِينَ - rahmatan lil alameen). That's how he's sent, as a mercy.

What mercy is greater than the mercy of showing us how to be serene and whole human beings in an age in which everybody is broken and wounded and jealous and greedy and relationships are a mess and the modern junkyard of human beings that is only bearable because there's just so much money that people find ways of amusing themselves so as not to have to confront the reality of the junkyard that they're living in.

The Final Choice

So this all seems significant. So to get back finally to our original question, the flock of sheep somewhere in these nice mountains or the nine to five job or nowadays the eight to six job in an accountant's office, what's the option?

No doubt one reason for our not being told is that the two options are open. And there are some who have taken the option of the (شِعَاب الْجِبَال - sha'ab al-jibal) and in my experience they're usually certainly very happy and don't regret that decision. They're away from the rubbish. But that can't be everybody's option.

It can't be the option of every Muslim in America or England or Germany just to up sticks and find sheep because there isn't enough market for fresh organic lamb I'm afraid. Some of us have to work in the hospitals and the hospitals need us too.

So this is where the other principle comes in the, (خَلْوَت دَرْ أَنْجُمَن - khalwat dar anjuman), the being alone in the crowd.

The Challenge for Western Muslims

And this I think is one of the big challenges for us Muslims living in the West, figuring out how to

sacralize lives that are the consequence of an industrial vision of human collectivity that emerged as a reaction against the sacred.

But because we have these principles, the principle of being ethical, the principle of remembrance, the principle of the (سُنّة - sunnah), we stand a reasonably good chance of at least pulling some sort of partial suit of armor around ourselves so that we won't get too badly hurt. But it is an ongoing challenge because even one chink in your suit of armor can be enough to let in a fatal blow from a determined opponent and we should never be complacent.

And ultimately, the protection that we have is from Allah (سُبْحَانَهُ وَتَعَالَى)

Conclusion: The Need for New Forms

We need to create professional associations that can help new graduates in medicine for instance or in engineering or in accountancy who are Muslims and they've been active in Islamic society in their local university whatever and they're keen to do something for Islam and they're now in this extremely pressurized modern profane environment can help them to explore with like minded people practices and habits of mind forms of behavior that can enable their careers to be places of spiritual advancement.

We haven't yet done that. There is an Islamic Medical Association and other such things but they don't really conceive of themselves as workshops as crucibles for spiritual improvement.

We need to be thinking seriously about how we can sacralize our working day. Focusing on the cycle of the salah most evidently but focusing on eating issues obviously there are issues of (حَلَال - halal) and (حَرَام - haram) that need to come first but also these more subtle things.

And Islam allows us I believe to counter attack and to offer ways of sacralizing the workplace in a way that no other surviving (أُمّة - ummah) has attempted particularly those that believe in a sharp differentiation between (دِين - deen) and (دُنْيَا - dunya).

They've never really considered those things but for us I think it's a matter of urgency that unless we're prepared to buy some sheep and head off into the mountains we need to be thinking seriously about how we can sacralize our working day.

And Allah knows best.

All praise is due to Allah, Lord of all the worlds.

May the peace, mercy, and blessings of Allah be upon you.