Green Pill

But the other remembering

But the other remembering is that human beings, as they go through life, don't just want to know about truth, thirsty for truth, desperate for truth. One of the great Muslim poets has a rather kind of funny poem about a housewife.

And she is a new mother. She doesn't know too much. And her new baby is crying.

So she thinks, hmm, baby is hungry, what do human beings, only Adam, like to eat? So she finds beautiful kebab, kofta and kibbeh and I don't know what. And she offers it to the baby. The baby keeps on crying.

And it's kind of a nuisance. A baby is designed to have a cry that's disturbing, like a smoke alarm. You can't really concentrate on anything when baby is crying.

So she thinks, well, maybe something sweet would be nice. So she goes to the sweet shop and she buys some Turkish delight, lokum. She tries to feed it to this newborn baby.

The baby keeps crying. Not a very good mother. And then finally, fitra kicks in and she realizes what the baby needs, which is milk.

And the baby drinks from her and is quiet. Now the point of this little poem is that that's all of us. In this dunya, we're all kind of crying babies.

Because what we're given by dunya is not what we want deep down. Even if we have a flashy new car, after a day or two, the worries will return. Maybe it's a scratch.

Maybe it's all of that. It never brings you the serenity that you hope for. What we need is the milk of the knowledge of the divine.

That's the nourishment we need. Al-haqq, truth. Human beings need truth.

Without truth, we wander around. Without truth, we find morality difficult. Without truth, everything seems overwhelming, anxiety-inducing.

The second recollection is that we need what is green. This greenery that is the recollection of our primordial home. To the extent that we see nature in its natural state, far from the roar of a motorway or light pollution, to the extent that we see it, we feel something coming across our hearts, which is a yearning, but also a sense that in this nature we are at home.

It's a strange feeling. You step outside your nice, centrally-heated house in Cambridge and you go out into the March winds, but something happens to you. You feel you want to breathe in.

You feel that you're leaving one sort of home and entering a different sort of home, and you can look up. You can see the heavens. This is human nature.

Love and Knowledge

We are nostalgic. Both of these things are forms of love. It's not just a kind of abstract knowledge. I know the answer to this equation. It's not cold like that. It's warm because it's from the heart.

The heart beats with the divine name, Allah, Allah, to hold this recollection constantly. That's what we need if we're to function correctly. So, as human beings, we have not just the need for this knowledge, but the love for that knowledge.

This is part of the learning process. One of the great ulama used to say, gain love for knowledge so that one day you might gain the knowledge of love. In other words, you'll understand what it is about the human being that can love animals, other things in creation.

They can be affectionate, I guess, to each other. But this love business, this mahabba, is proper to human beings. And when we see things that are appropriately lovable, that spiritual capacity in us is starting to wake up.

So that's what we are. We are homo sapiens. We are knowing humans.

But we are also homo amens, you could say. The creature that loves. And through that love, we inhabit our humanity much more fully than we do when we just inhabit knowledge of things.

Hatim al-Assam and the Four Colors

This is important in our religion. So, when we think of Ramadan, we think of this paradox, which is, how is it that we are in nature, and we love nature, and nature is a kind of healing, and yet hands off for a few hours. Well, let's consider a very interesting saying by one of the early Muslims, whose name was Hatim al-Assam, Hatim the Deaf.

Lots of stories about why he is called Hatim the Deaf. And he was the disciple of somebody called Shaqiq al-Balkhi. These are all from the area of Balkh, which is nowadays in Afghanistan.

Shaqiq's teacher was Ibrahim ibn Adham. Famously, he was the prince who made tawbah and went out on the road in order to seek knowledge and to seek Allah. Maybe some of you have heard the story.

He was asleep. He was a man who believed in God, but he was living in his enormous palace in Balkh. And one night he wakes up in his royal bed, and he hears a noise coming from above him, a kind of scratching sound, and he realizes there is somebody on his roof.

Somebody on his roof. So he goes out and up and onto the roof, flat roof, and he sees a man who is kind of wandering around looking for something. He says, what are you doing on my roof? I'm the king of Balkh.

The man said, oh, I've lost my camel. I'm looking for my camel. So Ibrahim ibn Adham says, that's about the stupidest thing I've ever heard in my life. How are you going to find a camel on a roof? And this man looks at him and said, how are you going to find Allah in a palace?

So this was a sign to him, and something fell into his heart. And he realized that he had to leave all of this, and so he went out on the road, and he became a great teacher of Hadith, and a great teacher of the inward sciences of Islam. Ibrahim ibn Adham is a very famous figure in our story.

So his disciple was Shaqiq al-Balkhi. So many stories about these people. Shaqiq al-Balkhi, a famous trader, merchant, quite wealthy.

Maybe some other time we can discuss some of the tales that are told about him, and how he came to his Tawbah, and his falling in love, because Tawbah is about falling in love with Allah, and falling out of love with false loves.

And then Hatim al-Assam, even though he was from this area in Central Asia, and his Arabic wasn't great, he went to Baghdad, and in Baghdad he became a famous debater, defending the teachings of the Ahl al-Sunnah in a city that was full of Moctezalites, and Jibriya, and Ghulat, and Hashwiya, and Baghdad was full of all kinds of things. And he was famous for always winning the argument.

And he was asked, why is it that you argue so well? And he says, I have three principles. Academics should listen to this. I have three principles.

First of all, whenever my adversary makes a good point, I praise him. Secondly, whenever my adversary points to a weakness in my argument, I'm grateful. And thirdly, I always assume that everybody is sincerely seeking the truth.

So evidently, because of this sincerity, his arguments were made powerful, and this is why Imam Ahmad bin Hanbal regarded him as one of the great defenders of the Ahl al-Sunnah in Baghdad in that time.

But in any case, he has a number of interesting things which we might want to reflect on, which lead into this paradox of why hunger is part of fitrah. He used to refer to the development in the life of the believer as having four major elements or stages.

And he used to, and this is part of the Central Asian tradition, describe them as four colors. There's the green stage, there's the red stage, there's the black stage, and the white stage. There's lots of explanations in Islam for why these are the four colors that are associated with the religion and why most flags in Muslim countries have these four colors.

We don't need to go into that, much of it is kind of legendary. But what he's saying is the green stage is to look to what you are wearing. Why is it that Umar ibn al-Khattab, somebody once counted seventeen patches on his thawb? Well, you don't have to be that threadbare.

The sunnah is to be smart, but you must not be attached to that. And this he calls the level of green.

And then the red level, enduring harm or suffering. Red is the color of hell, it's the color of suffering, it's the color of trials, it's the color of the blacksmith's forge, the refiner's fire. You have to graciously endure suffering and reverses and misfortune.

And then the level of black - (مُخَالَفَةُ النَّفْسِ - Going against the ego, the lower self). Blackness, because it's a kind of void. Not following the lovely, colorful, tempting things that dunya is tricking itself out to be.

But instead, a kind of absence. And then the white. Interesting, he says (الجوع - Hunger).

The Significance of Hunger

Well, I suggest it's an important thing. There's a famous hadith which says:

(Sahih al-Bukhari, Hadith 2038)

The shaitan runs in the veins of the son of Adam. Tighten those veins with hunger.

So perhaps here we're looking to something that is a bit of an explanation. That our participation in the world of greenery, of beauty, which reminds us, however distantly, of our Adamic home. Is not just to be (رَغَدًا - in other words, indulgence), the way that animals indulge.

But is sometimes (تَعَبُّدًا). Even Adam and Hawwa in the paradise, they were ordered to fast from that tree. Even before prayers and pilgrimages and other things, it seems, there is this beginning of fasting. And this (تَعَبُّدًا) is what distinguishes fasting from the other kinds of (عِبَادَة) that we have.

Allah in His generosity has not given us just one way to express our obedience and our love for Him, but many, several.

Allah knew that you were capable of fatigue, He made a variety of forms of worship for you.

And this one is very special. It is paradisal, if you like. Before the so-called fall, there was fasting.

Let's think about a well-known hadith which says that Allah rewards the actions of Bani Adam tenfold, up to 700 (سَبْعِمِائَةِ ضِعْفِ - fold):

Except for fasting, for it is Mine and I reward for it.

(Sahih al-Bukhari, Hadith 1904)

That's a curious way of expressing it. Allah rewards us for the prayer and the other things we do, the sadaqa and the smile in the face of somebody tenfold, 700 fold. And then He says that fasting is different I reward from it.

How does that work? And there's other hadiths of the same kind that the believer:

The believer only renounces his desire and his food and his drink for My sake.

(Sahih al-Bukhari, Hadith 1894)

The fasting (إِنَّهُ لِي وَأَنَا أَجْزِي بِهِ - Fasting is Mine and I reward it). He hasn't said this of another form of ibadah.

He says that the Kaaba is His house. But the fasting is the ibadah that He describes as being His.

The ulama say this has much to do with the fact that the other ibadat in Islam are all about doing things. So you pray or you don't pray, but it's an action. The hajj is an action. Zakat is an action.

But fasting is a non-action. It's not doing something. It's a tark.

Fasting and Divine Independence

It's holding back the hand from the shajaratul khuld, the tree of eternity. And this relates it particularly to the divine nature. Because Allah is in a state of (غَنِيٌّ عَنِ الْعَالَمِينَ - Independent of everything).

We are the independent and you are the needy to Allah. (الْغَنِيُّ الْحَمِيدُ - The independent, the praiseworthy, the owner of praise).

We need things, as we discover when we're fasting, can't go for very long without some kind of energy gel. We are needy beings.

Allah has no needs. He is (غَنِيٌّ - This is part of His يومية) And it's part particularly of His name (الصَّمَدُ)

So, there's a quality called (الصَّمَدَانِيَّة - Samadness, or independent difference). Again, how are you going to translate this mighty divine name (الصَّمَدٌ - The eternal, the independent, the absolute, the free of all wants, everything that is not like ourselves).

But when we step into the fasting space, and we hear the adhan in the morning, we also become independent to some degree. To a greater or lesser degree. To a lesser degree, to the extent that we're just thinking about iftar and rubbing our bellies and feeling sorry for ourselves.

That is still an attachment. But the fasting teaches you that actually you can do pretty well for a few hours without food. This is intermittent fasting.

Human beings are actually designed for it. If you look at the BBC food and drink website, they'll talk about intermittent fasting and how it's associated with positive health outcomes. There's something about us biomedically which responds positively to fasting.

In other words, this tark, this non-consumption for a while, for eight hours a day, for twelve hours a day, whatever it is, is actually part of partaking in the natural world. In other words, our full membership of this creation, which is a dim reflection or memory or shadow of the garden but in which we're very needy, our partaking in this is not damaged by but is actually confirmed by the fact that sometimes we hold our hands back.

This is probably something that was intuited by very ancient peoples, peoples who lived very close to nature but had certain ideas of boundaries and certain places and certain times which were sacred.

Fitrah and Human Nature

This is part of the fitrah. Fitrah doesn't mean that you just live like a chimpanzee. Fitrah means that you live in a way that's appropriate to Bani Adam as a full member of the natural order but not really animalistically.

So your capacity to follow these virtues, the black and the red and the others, is not something that makes you alien to nature but is something that actually affirms your full belongingness to it. Because in our theology the world is not subject to original sin. The world is not even really fallen.

Adam was guilty of a zalla. It's like a slip. But he was also one of the great prophets and the prophets are ma'sum, divinely secured from significant sinning.

This was some kind of enigmatic slip. And some ulama say that by going down from the garden he enabled the possibility of human beings going up to the garden. And therefore this was actually a gift because it's only through going through those four colours that you can experience your full humanity, exercise your will, show the nobility of Bani Adam.

Allah says, we've ennobled the descendants of Adam. And that doesn't mean swinging through the rainforest like an orangutan looking for the next fruit. That's not really nobility, that's that being in its state of nature, in its state of nature, in its state of tasbih.

It's entirely right for it. But we are the ones to whom the angels bowed down. We are the ones who are taught the names.

So even though we're fully in this garden-like world, we have a way of being in it which is to be Khulafa. We're kind of responsible for it. Put in modern language, if there's millions of species on earth, there is only one species that can think about and try and find a solution to climate change, for instance.

It's one of the key meanings of Khalifa. Custodians, guardians, carers, caretakers. And it is through humanity's slip away from normality, into kufr, into the shadows over the last two or three hundred years that has not coincidentally come at the same time as this new fall where humanity has gone out of the natural state which was sustainable in which he lived for a hundred thousand years or whatever it was and enters this world which is increasingly becoming hell-like with global warming.

The Essence of Religion: Love

But Bani Adam, because of this karamna, has the capacity to think, has the capacity to name, to recognize names, and has, and this is the greatest gift, not only to intuit in beautiful things the presence of the divine names, but to love those names. This love. This is really the essence of the religion.

It's one reason why the title of the Holy Prophet ﷺ is Habibullah, God's Beloved, why his intercession is accepted. This is a particular qasla, particular quality of his religion that it's about love.

Those who have iman are greater in love for Allah.

The divine essence beyond our imagining (لَيْسَ كَمِثْلِهِ شَيْءٌ) but the divine names, the divine qualities which are magnificently displayed in the cornucopia of a polychromatic creation. Very lovable. Can't help but love beauty, unless you're very strange, very damaged, very perverse.

**Reference for "Laysa kamithlihi shay'': Quran 42:11

Who doesn't love something? Who doesn't love beauty? An inversion can make you love what's not natural. An inversion can make you love concrete rather than wood. Yeah, that's possible.

That's the Iblis upending you and inverting you. But that's not what we truly are. And it's not what will bring this tomah nina, this settledness to the heart.

It will bring depression and anxiety and all of those things which are so widespread in this age which has so many material things, but has so many psychological disturbances. We have more and more, but we see and perceive less and less. That's why we're endlessly hungry.

Learning to See with Love

So, what this means is that the most important task in this process is to learn how to see correctly and to see with love. Love is the perception of beauty and rightness and symmetry and goodness.

When we said (بَلَىٰ شَهِدْنَا) to the Divine, at the day of (أَلَسْتُ بِرَبِّكُمْ) it was with hearts full of love.

How could that not have been a moment of absolute and unconditional love? Where we see reminders, Allah's ayat, wherever they may be:

Wherever you turn, there is Allah's face. Then we are reminded and we love.

So the believer is the one who loves a lot. That's the measure of his iman. To the extent that the believer is always looking for Allah's signs, which are always lovable, then the believer is true and sincere in his Islam.

But the weak believer or the munafiq may well be inclined to look for the shadows and not for the light. To look for people's defects. To like discussing people's defects rather than their good qualities.

To feel jealous and anxious when we meet people who seem to be better or richer than ourselves. And that's from the lower self. That's from the asfala safileen.

Animals. Nothing else in creation is capable of that, but we are capable of things like envy and backbiting and slander and harbouring a bad opinion of people. Unlike Hatim al-Assam, who had a good opinion, even of people who were heretics.

Taking the Green Pill

Acquiring this love. So you might say, if you remember the movie The Matrix, different coloured pills, which one do we take? The shahada is taking the green pill. Is to be green-pilled.

Because you see the world and you see beyond the surface of the world. And to the extent that you are a mu'min, you will have this mushahada. You will have this ability to see the light behind the form.

You will see things in three dimensions, not just in two.

Allah's is the East and the West. Wherever you turn, there is Allah's face.

Allah has said it. Are we following that? What does it mean? Wherever we turn, there is Allah's face. Not His essence, which has no place.

But everything that exists is simply the working out in that moment of the actions of the divine names. Because there is nothing else that is capable of doing anything.

The one who is in the grip of shadows doesn't see anything except form. And a lot of form, so his life is likely to be pretty anxious.

But the one who doesn't see the shadows but sees the light cast by the shadows, is going to be the person who is at peace.

On that day, neither wealth nor family will be of any benefit to us except him who comes to Allah with a sound heart.

That's what we need. (قَلْبُ سَلِيمٌ) So we need to green-pill ourselves and green-pill everybody to wake them up out of their false consciousness and to see things properly as they really are. To see things simply as the endless coruscating unfolding of the infinitely beautiful and wise and perfect divine names.

To the extent that you can see that, you're a happy person. To the extent that you just see the mystery of stuff, you're going to be fairly stressed. However many Mercedes cars you might have in your garage, because nothing is going to come together.

The Two Forms of Nostalgia Unite

So this is where the two forms of nostalgia come together. The nostalgia for Al-Haqq and the nostalgia for the garden, which is like the two shahadahs.

(لَا إِلَٰهَ إِلَّا ٱللَّهُ) is the absoluteness of the one who is beyond any description.

(مُحَمَّدٌ رَسُولُ ٱللَّهِ) is the one who explains how we engage with that in the horizontal realm.

And sharia, whose holy law is nothing other than a way of helping us poor stubborn human beings to see things and to behave properly in creation, in a balanced way. In a way that is from the fitrah.

And there's fasting, absolutely a part of that. Absolutely a part of that. Primordial form of worship.

A form of somehow recalling Allah's needlessness, His Samadaniyya. A form of learning that we can say no to the lower self. That we can engage in (تَحَمُّلُ الْأَذَىٰ) - carrying suffering.

That we can engage in (مُخَالَفَةُ النَّفْسِ) going against the cravings of the nafs. It's an important lesson. It's good news.

So often we say, oh I can't resist my urges. Well Ramadan teaches you that actually you can. Some of the most basic ones, you can say no to for hour upon hour.

That's one of the great gifts of Ramadan, is that it teaches us this rather important lesson. So for the rest of the year, when we think, oh I'm going to succumb to that temptation, we remember, actually I know that I'm capable of saying no, because I've done Ramadan. That's a very great blessing.

Conclusion

So in this time, this very extraordinary time, when everything is different and the Shaytan is not flowing quite so much in our veins, let us try and recall what we are created to be. Worshippers. Worshippers who are in a state of loving servitude to the source of all meaning.

Worshippers who recognize the true Qibla and refuse to make their Sajdah to anything or anyone else. Worshippers who know that in worship is freedom and in the following of anything else there is just enslavement to the lower self.

Worshippers who rise up towards the light, not those who live their lives confused, rancorous, amongst the shadows.

This is important. So we ask Allah to give us a blessed Ramadan to help us to keep the rulings of the Shariah correctly, for this is a way of honoring their forms and their divine source and the prophetic bearer, who gifted us with these forms.

And may we also have an inward transformation, so that as we take a step back from the usual routine of following our cravings and start to recover our true Fitrah, our Iman can become a more natural and a sweet thing.

That we hear the Quran more fully. That we participate in the prayer more sincerely. That we remember the Qibla more absolutely.

And that at the end of Ramadan, when we step out of our front doors and hear the birds sing, we say Alhamdulillah, I know what all this means. And it is good. And it is beautiful.

And our Lord is Kareem. And I'm so fortunate to have the Quran, which tells me what all of this is about.

May Allah accept your fasting, and give you great strength, and bring your families together.

Closing Dua

"And accept our repentance, indeed You are the Accepting of repentance, the Merciful."

"And may Allah send blessings upon our master Muhammad, and upon his family and all his companions."

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

End of Khutbah