The Lives of the Human Being - Part 1

The Lives of the Human Being - Part 1

Introduction to the Topic

The topic this morning is the lives of man, and it's actually the title of a book by a very famous Yemeni scholar named Sheikh Abdullah Al-Haddad. It's available through Fons Vitae (Kilian Press), and a lot of what I'm going to cover is actually derived from that book, directly out of that book. I'm going to do some other things as well, but the actual topic is this man was a brilliant scholar from the Yemen who lived almost about 200 years ago, but the topic is a very old topic in the Islamic tradition and there are several books in the history of Islam that deal with this tradition of the lives of man. The book is published by Abdal Hakim Murad (T.H. Winter) in England who does not like the politically correct American English and so uses man.

I know some people in America now don't like having man inclusive of women, but it's interesting that the word, the original word which is a Germanic word "mensch" means the male and the female. It's the idea of a human being and the woman is a man with a womb, so the woman is a man who happens to have something that the man doesn't have, which is a womb.

The Five Lives of the Human Being

Having said that, the lives of a human being have been defined as five according to a Quranic presentation. His name is Sheikh Abdullah (A-B-D-A-L-L-A-H) Al-Haddad (A-L-H-A-D-D-A-D), and he was considered a renewer. There's a tradition in Islam that says every 100 years that God sends somebody who revives or renews this deen, this tradition, and he's considered one of them. He had an extraordinary impact on Yemen as well as all over the Muslim world. His books have spread all over.

The Five Periods

So the five periods: the first period is a pre-worldly period. The phenomenal existence and noumenal existence in Islam—there's a dyad here called mulk and malakut. The mulk is what we can see, anything that you can see, feel, touch—the sensory world. Most of our scholars would include in this what we now know of the unseen phenomenal world, which would be the world of x-rays, light waves, sound waves, gamma rays—this world that we can't see but it's palpable, we can measure it, we have access to it.

The malakut is a realm that we cannot see. We do not have access to it. There's some inner penetration because the angelic world can move into—the angelic world is in the malakut and yet they can move into the mulk. So the mulk is impacting—the malakut is impacting the mulk—and the mulk impacts the malakut in that things that are done in the mulk are either pleasing or disturbing to the malakut. That has to do with things that are done with the moral component.

So when people are doing righteous things, the malakut actually is happy and rejoices about it. When they do foul things, then the opposite occurs.

The Importance of Understanding the Unseen World

Now, the importance of knowing about these according to the Islamic tradition is that unlike 20th century man who in a lot of ways has removed him or herself completely from the unseen experience—if you go into traditional cultures, you know, Mircea Eliade would call this the magical realm, the realm of enchantment, the pre-industrial realm—people existed with a sense of magic and they looked at the world. Because it was not understood, they looked at it in a way that caused them to experience an unseen explanation for so much of what was happening around them. So weather, illness—all of these things that happened.

Now, if you look just to take for the example of illness in most cultures, illness was often attributed to evil spirits, attributed to the evil eye. Obviously, as medicine became more advanced—and you can see the Greek attack on this centuries ago—I mean, the Greeks moved into a rationalist mode and many of the Greek philosophers did not like those explanations and they're conspicuously absent from a lot of their texts, which is interesting given that that was a popular belief in their culture.

But if you look at modern man, we have unseen explanations but they're no longer magical. So bacteria is not something that we see—it's an unseen realm. I mean, you can see it on the microscope but most people, the doctor says you've got a virus, it's not something you saw, right? He doesn't bring out a slide, you know, show you a microscope and there it is. But it is something we understand and people have had biology classes so they do have an idea. So we have identified many of the things that are impacting our world and given them material explanations, and those material explanations caused a disenchantment with the world. So we no longer are enchanted by what is around us.

When we look at natural phenomena, many of us have some basic explanations for it. So when weather strikes us, we have scientists that tell us this is El Niño phenomenon. When drought comes, they explain the reasons for that. And yet in the ancient world and still in a lot of places on the earth, these things are seen as coming from the unseen world. In other words, drought is still understood in most parts of the world to be from displeasure. For instance, the Muslims still believe that drought is a sign that blessings have been removed and it's seen as a reminder. That's why the Muslims will go out and do a rain prayer and they bring their animals out, they bring their children out.

The Prophet Muhammad said that if a people begin to cheat in their buying and selling and have unjust weights and balances, the rain is withheld from them. And then he said, had it not been for dumb animals, they would have gotten no rain at all. In other words, it's not the humans that are worthy of the rain but it's the animals that aren't doing anything wrong.

So this is still part of the Muslim world and you will find this also within the Indic culture, within the Sinic culture-you're going to find this in many, many cultures, and certainly amongst traditional Christians in American culture. You will still find that many of them, when they read the newspaper, you know, they will see these as signs, right? These are signs from God.

Introduction to the Unseen World in Childhood

So introducing at an early age the unseen world is introduced to Muslim children and they are made aware of the unseen world. And so of the five lives of man, only one of them is what we're going to experience in this realm. The other four are in another realm, and this is an indication that the majority of creation is actually hidden from us.

The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ said that the likeness of this dunya and the other world is like somebody who puts their finger into an ocean and pulls it out. What is on his finger in relation to the ocean is like the unseen world in relation to this world.

He also reported that he saw the angel Gabriel in his original form and he filled the entire horizon of a desert landscape. So if you could imagine looking out towards Santa Fe and seeing an angelic being fill the entire horizon, right? Having an experience that was a spiritual experience that took place for that human being and giving him an insight into the relationships-quantitative relationships of this world to the other world. And there are many examples of that in the tradition.

The Second Life: The Dunya

So the second realm—and I'm going to go into each one more—is the period of life from birth to death. So the first one is the pre-worldly realm and this is called the period Ahd al-Mithaq, which I'll get into in a second, the Mithaq. The second is Dunya.

Now in Arabic, the word Dunya comes from a root word "dana" and it has a few meanings. One of them is reaching out for grapes that will every time you get near them, they move a little further away from you. So the idea there is that the phenomenal world is that as we attempt to grasp it, we're moving away, right? Paul Simon has a song called "Slip Sliding Away," right? "The nearer you are to your destination, the more you're slip sliding away," right? And it's about death, is that you know.

That idea is captured in a wonderful hadith of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ in which he drew in the sand a box and then he drew a line and he drew a line up here—he didn't write it but he drew a line here at the top of this line-and then he drew a line out here. And he said that this was a man's journey in life and these lines were the a'rad-they were the vicissitudes of his journey. At each stage, things will happen to him. If they don't do him in, he moves to the next one until he reaches at this—the ajal is your appointed term and it could be at any point because people are different. It could be at any point along the way, but for people who go all the way through, they reach old age and what gets them is known as haram.

There's a tradition in which the Prophet ﷺ said that the children of Adam-God has given them the ability to do all things except conquer haram—they can't conquer old age. And he also said that anxiety was half of haram, right? That having a lot of anxiety will actually cut your life in half.

So as you're moving up through life, you reach this ajal, but then he had a line outside of the box and he said this was a man's amal, which is his hope. So a man's hope is always beyond his time and this is a really important motif.

There's a verse in the Quran that says:

"Leave them to eat and enjoy themselves and to be entertained, and let hope preoccupy them, and indeed they will come to know." [Quran 15:3] In other words, their ajal will come and then they're going to realize that the ajal preceded the hope.

And he also said that people—two things never grow old in people-desire for life and desire for more. And it means here it doesn't mean all people, it means people that are deluded. So this desire for extended life—and the interesting thing is the longer a person is here, the more accustomed they get. You know, you get up every morning, you have your rituals—your coffee, your breakfast you go to work, you see the same people, you get accustomed to being here. And we're in this very interesting experience of the permanence.

And every once in a while there are things that happen that kind of shake us a little bit, like one day you come to work and so-and-so was in an accident, or you get a phone call and your mother just died or a good friend or something. There are these reminders and they kind of shake people a little bit, but most people brush themselves off and just go along, get on with it, right?

The Metaphor of Life's Journey

So we have this really—and this is all about this lower world, the dunya—because it's like the grapes, we're always reaching for it and it's always moving away because the moment we came into life, into this dunya realm, our death-we're moving inevitably towards our death.

One of my teachers in the desert, when I was leaving and it was a camel journey of about a day, the last thing he said to me, he said: "This journey that you're taking this morning is like your life. You're moving towards a destination and every step that your camel makes takes you a step closer to that destination." And he said, "Every breath you take is a step closer to the termination of your breath, so keep that in mind along the way."

And I was with a West African—we arrived at an airport and he'd never been on one of these moving, not the escalators but the actual sidewalks—and we got on it and we were standing there moving along and he said, "This is amazing. This is just like our lives. We think we're standing still but we're moving towards our deaths."

And then it was really interesting because at the end of the sidewalk there, there was a sign that said "Caution: the end comes abruptly." So that is the metaphor, right? And this is the point, that unlike that escalator where you know where it's going to end, the, you know, this walkway of life that we're on, the end can come at any point. And so keeping this in mind is something that's really important. I'm going to go a little bit into that.

The Third Stage: The Barzakh

And then the third stage is known as the Barzakh. And a Barzakh is a space between two places. Like in the

The Concept of Fitra (Natural Disposition)

Now the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ said that every child is born on fitra, and this is an important concept in Islam. Fitra is the inherent nature of the human being. It's his aboriginal nature. It is believed in Islam that human beings are good in their nature and it is diseased societies that will affect the nature in a diseased way.

Now this obviously is not congruous with the traditional Christian belief of the corrupt nature, but there is a similarity between the Islamic and the Christian belief in that there is a hadith that says that every child is born with a black seed in the heart, and this is similar but not the same as the understanding of original sin.

How would you describe the historic tragedy in Vietnam? Yeah, this is going to be—the actions of the parents affect their children. And there are, like in the Bible, the idea of visiting on seven generations, which is, you know, it's a lot—you're dealing with 64 parents. There is that concept in Islam that your actions do affect your offspring, but there is no accountability of the offspring. In other words, nobody bears the burden of—you do not—like in some of the Chinese traditions you have the idea of inherited curses, you know, that a family gets cursed for doing wrong in one generation and their offspring will suffer the fate of that curse.

But there is a belief in Islam that righteousness will affect your offspring and also wrongs will affect your offspring. You don't think that it has anything to bear upon the concept of inherited nature, because a grandbaby in a sense starts out with an addiction, right? And the mother is responsible for that, not the baby. So the mother has affected the—and that's—we have that ability to completely destroy the fitrah. The parents can do that to the

child. They can ruin it, and that's what happens. Fitrah is not—you know, children will not be—if they are nurtured properly.

Now there is a bad seed—there is a concept of bad seed in Islam. There is definitely a concept. In other words, there is a belief that there are shayatin al-ins, which are demonic humans. And this results—one, that demons will actually partake in the insemination, that there is hadiths that indicate that people that are like in fornication—and it's interesting because Islam accepts marriage in every tradition, you know, even though it doesn't accept the Buddhist as a people of the book. They are accepted as a tradition in that they can pay the jizya tax according to Imam Malik, but their books are not accepted as revealed books. They are not rejected but they are not accepted. It's not in the articles of faith like the Bible and the Gospel.

But Buddhist marriage is accepted. If two Buddhists become Muslim, their marriage is valid. They don't have to renew that marriage because marriage is believed to be a divine institution, that it was through revelation that marriage came about. So marriage in any tradition is accepted and therefore children that are born of legitimate marriage in any tradition, those children have the protection of the sanctity of the union.

Children Born Out of Wedlock

Children born out of wedlock do not have that protection and there can be effects on the children because of that. And one of the things that the Prophet ﷺ said is: "Beware the wrath of bastard children. Beware the wrath of bastard children." That if you do that to children, they will be angry and their wrath will come back to you. And he said: "If illegitimacy spreads amongst the people, then they are spreading the wrath of God amongst themselves." And the wrath is in the children because that was a right that you have deprived them of. They have a right to legitimacy, and if you do not give them that, you have oppressed them. And oppression engenders anger, and they are often—they don't know why they are angry. They don't know why they are angry, but they are angry.

And for our country, when you are looking at 70% illegitimacy rates amongst certain communities, and the dominant community it's in the 40% range, which a lot of you grew up in an age where girls disappeared in high school. I mean, it's really amazing how much has changed in our generation, right? I mean, in 1968 a woman was kicked out of Vassar for living with a man in an apartment—'68. And it's really interesting how that's happened in this culture.

So this fitra nature is this inherent nature and it is that the potential for good and evil exist, but the inclination is to good if it's nurtured. But the seed of evil can be nurtured also, and if that's done then you get people that will—they're inclined to doing bad stuff, not good stuff.

Responsibility and Accountability

Absolutely, and there is no responsibility until puberty of the child—it all falls on the parents. After puberty, according to the hadith, the parents are taken into account in the next life but not in this life. Once the child—

you know, like if you've got children that were raised brutalized, right, by their father, you know, or a crack cocaine mother who doesn't do anything for a child, these type things, the responsibility—this is why you can't judge people in this world in any absolute sense.

The Prophet ﷺ said: "I was commanded to judge outwardly but not inwardly." We do not have the authority to make inward judgments against people. We can only judge outwardly, and those outward judgments in Sharia are related to transgressions. But you cannot condemn people to hell, you can't—none of that. That's all inward judgment and we have no authority in that realm. The variables that are involved in any human action are so vast that no individual can grasp them. We can't.

But responsibility lies on the adult. Once you reach adulthood, you are responsible. And in Sharia, it's not going to hold up in court to have a psychologist in there explaining what happened when they were children and why they're doing that. That does not hold up in Sharia court, although Sharia laws are often contextualized in that a qadi might not decide to implement a hadd punishment, one of the penal punishments, because of contextual circumstances. That does exist, so there is that realm. It's very organic, the Islamic legal system. It's not black and white at all, that in Sharia, if they're adult, they're responsible.

Islamic Law and Social Context

Although this culture—you cannot apply Islamic law in the United States. You can't. It would be completely unacceptable because Islamic law is organic. It's a holistic system. You cannot have, like, let's chop off the hands of thieves, and you have a consumer culture where the whole society is locked in to the system of creating consumption as an addiction. You have to change—the Islamic legal system, the first chapter of Islamic law books is called the Chapter of Purity. It's a spiritual tradition before it's a legal tradition. And so you cannot impose the legal laws on a materialistic society. You have to introduce—and this is why the Meccan stage precedes the Medinan stage.

The Meccan stage had no legal rulings. It was a stage of changing the perceptions of the people. And once that shift took place, this radical paradigm shift, once that took place, then the rules begin to make sense. But to apply the rules without that would be injustice, which is what, you know, this is the kind of conservative approach—let's just make harsher laws, right? See, the problem is the laws aren't harsh enough.

Well, you know, why are people doing what they're doing? And why is it that our prisons, you know, are over 60%—in fact, in most places it's more like 75, 80%—minority? Why is that? Well, that's more evidence, you know, that these are inferior type people. I mean, there's a lot of—that's an unspoken belief amongst a lot of people in this country, you know. I mean, there's a lot of people that are politically correct in their public discourse, not in their private discourse. There's a lot of people that say, well, you know, these people, you know, they're different from us. They have different values, whatever, or no values.

Whereas the Islamic situation is saying, look what's going on, right? That these situations are being produced. What's engendering this? Because this is alien. You see, if you go to black African—if you go to a Gambian

village where there's no crime, right? I mean, is it true or not true? And isn't it a large percentage of the African Americans in this country are from Senegambia, right? This is their genetic inheritance. So why is it that a Gambian African in his village is not stealing, raping, and pillaging, right? And their 12-year-olds aren't going around doing gangbanging, and yet the same genetic bank in the inner cities of New York or Chicago are doing that? You see what's going on?

Well, from the Islamic perspective, you have a diseased society and therefore you have symptomatic pathology. And the pathology is manifesting in children that are being raised in a disease-engendering culture.

The First Seven Years: Natural Learning

So during these seven years, it's not encouraged to teach children either, because they're learning—they have their own learning schedule. And in traditional cultures, you did not begin to train children until they reached seven, which is consistent also with the Waldorf, right? Rudolf Steiner felt back in the '20s that if we begin to educate children at the age of five, we are going to see precocious sexual development occurring. And the reason he said that is because you're dealing with a divine programming that's designed—if you bring programming that's not meant to be introduced earlier, then you're going to pull the whole process down.

So instead of the sexual maturation occurring like in this culture, when people who here might have grown up in the '50s, at the age of 14 most boys and girls were not thinking about sexual experimentation, right? Really, they weren't. And you can talk to your parents if you're not that old, right? I mean, this is not─I'm not making this up. This is—even the menarche has, you know, the period now—we have early onset periods. We've got girls now at seven and eight that are beginning to menstruate in certain areas, right? So something's going on, right?

Now, if you introduce—it's actually considered damaging. Now this is not true of all children. There will be—because you're going to have children that want to read at the age of three or four, but the vast majority of children are not going to be like that. And so they're doing their work between one and seven. They know exactly what they're supposed to be doing and you let them do that. They're developing their minds and they're actually—they are, according to Islam and according to a lot of our neurological research, it's confirming these ancient beliefs because this is not just Islam. This is congruous with many traditions.

Seven was an age of initiation in many, many traditions. And in the classical European oral culture before Christianity literized that area, seven was actually—you were an adult at seven. You went from childhood to adulthood at the age of seven, because in oral cultures, seven-year-olds speak like adults. And you'll notice a radical change in the ability of a child to articulate at about the age of seven and eight. There's a real change in their ability to express themselves.

And this is why even in England, you know, in the 8th, 9th century, seven-year-olds and eight-year-olds were being hung for horse theft, which I mean obviously that's horrific, but it's indicative of an oral culture and how they view. And this is why you will find marriage occurred in oral cultures at early ages also. It was not uncommon in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Africa, for an eight or a nine-year-old girl to be married—not

uncommon at all—because they were considered to have already reached the age of maturation in the oral understanding.

The Age of Discrimination (Tamyiz)

So at the age of seven, they enter into what's called—which is the age of discrimination. They can't—now they're beginning to understand certain things. Imam Al-Ghazali said you can introduce to them now the concept of time in a real way, so they can understand things like that—they're in time, they're in creatures—and also the responsibility of actions, although they're not fully responsible yet because they don't have all of the hard-wiring yet. So this—

And it's in the chapter called the Chapter of the Byzantines or the Europeans. Rum means Europe. It also means the Byzantines. It says that: "Set your face to the religion which is the religion of nature, the fitra given by God." And then it says: "And do not change that nature," which is an indication that we can alter the fitra of people.

And we have thousands of years of anthropological evidence that most cultures were benign cultures. I mean, we have a great deal of evidence, you know. We would like—those people who make weapons would like us to believe that we are aggressive by nature. In other words, that by nature we like to inflict violence and aggression. There are many people that—there's a vested interest in having that. The truth is that most of the evidence that we have from aboriginal cultures is contrary to that.

The Shoshone Indians, you know, this is a good example of a culture that really rejected violence as an option, right? And there are many, many other—many African cultures where this is very clearly the case, that violence was seen as surgery, you know, that you did not use that route unless there was no other alternative. Whereas in our culture, it's primary care, right? It's lines in the sand.

And anybody who knows Arab psychology knows that you don't draw lines in the sand if you want to stay at the table of dialogue, right? If you want to reach—and you know, it's really fun—I don't want to get into politics, but that what happened in 1991 was an act of madness, complete act of madness. And we were as a culture collectively drawn into something that had nothing to do with our vested interests, right? And unfortunately, it's still going on.

But Arab posturing is—anybody who knows the Arabs is that they're people that posture. This is part of their nature. And Saddam Hussein, you know, was literally doing a classic Arab posturing because the OPEC countries reneged on a promise that they made that they would help him with his war debts that were incurred during the Iranian-Iraqi war, and they reneged on it. And he put his troops there at the border as a—to force their hand. And they were told by our foreign policy here, you know, we're going to stand behind you, you can stand up to him. And that was a very easily—not an intractable problem at all. But unfortunately, there are people that have vested interests in using the violent option before the diplomatic options, right? There's a lot of money to be made in war.

Bechtel was already—was already before that war began—had contracts with the Kuwaiti government to rebuild their infrastructure, right? So I mean, Thoreau said an educated soldier is usually called a deserter, right? If you really know what the fight is about, you know, sorry, count me out on this one, right?

What a wonderful world it would be, they say, if somebody called a war and nobody showed up, right? And you know, the ancient peoples when they used to fight, they had these war bonnets—if it rained they'd call off the battle. And they used to do, you know, the Prophet Muhammad is seen as this violent person—over 23 years, less than 1,200 people were killed in all of the engagements that took place. Less than 1,200. It's recorded—every battle, how many people died. And they actually preferred to have, you know, the heroes would go out and they'd duke it out, and then they'd you win, and they'd all go home, right?

And that's—I mean, it would be a great way, right? It's like, you know, Lindbergh said "America First" during World War II. He said it's not their sons that are going to die in this war, right? The warmongers—they never send their sons, right? And that's why the Iroquois Nation—in the Iroquois Nation it was the women that were the war council. The women decided whether the nation would go to war with another tribe, with the belief that it was the women who sent their sons to die, right? And there's the great Greek play—yeah, thank you—about the women all going on strike. Okay, fine.