Reflection is Remedy

We used this text in class: http://themathesontrust.org/papers/islam/ibnataallah-hikam.pdf

Some select Hikam I would like to post:

Hikam 14:
The Cosmos is all darkness.
It is illumined only by the manifestation of God in it.
Whoever sees the Cosmos and does not contemplate Him
in it or by it or before it or after it is in need of light
and is veiled from the sun of gnosis
by the clouds of created things.

Hikam 48:
A sign of the heart’s death
is the absence of sadness
over the acts of obedience you have neglected
and the abandonment of regret
over the mistakes you have made.

Hikam 56:
Light is the army of the heart,
just as darkness is the army of the soul.
So when God wishes to come to the help of His servant,
He furnishes him with armies of lights
and cuts off from him the reinforcements
of darkness and alterities.

77:
The gnostic is not one who,
when making a symbolic allusion,
finds God nearer to himself than his symbolic allusion.
Rather, the gnostic is the one who,
because of his self-extinction in His Being
and self-absorption in contemplating Him,
has no symbolic allusion.

85:
Outwardly, creatures are an illusion;
but, inwardly, they are an admonition.
Thus, the soul looks at the illusory exterior
while the heart looks at the admonitory interior

104 (excerpt):
“The daytime sun goes down at night,
But the sun of gnostic hearts never goes down.”

115:
The devotees and ascetics are alienated from everything
only because of their absence from God in everything.
Had they contemplated Him in everything,
they would not have been alienated from anything.

120:
Ritual prayer is the place of intimate conversations
and a mine of reciprocal acts of purity
wherein the regions of the innermost being are expanded
and the rising gleams of light shine forth.
He knows of the existence of weakness in you,
so He made the number of ritual prayers small;
and He knew of your need of His grace,
so He multiplied their fruitful results

144:
The most ignorant of all people
is the one who abandons the certitude he has
for an opinion people have

161
Your wanting people to know your specialness
is a proof for your lack of truthfulness in
your slavehood.

205:
Sometimes Spiritual lights descend but finds
the heart filled with images of physical things
and thus goes back to where it came.

245
He placed you in the middle realm between His physical world
and metaphysical one to inform you of the loftiness
of your rank among His creatures.
You are a gem enclosed by the shells of created forms.

259
Sometimes a long life is fruitless.
And sometimes a short life is extremely fruitful.

My heart cries tears of joy to see my teacher. :)

Gem # 1:
“We were created to receive Divine light. A person who does not live up their potential in this world will regret it in the next…you are the extraterrestrial of this world, this is not your real home.”
-Shaykh Muhammad Mendes

Gem # 2
“That which proves ones humility to the self is when one is content when he is not given preference over others in a place where he deserves it.”
-Notes from Ustadha Nagebah Hayel’s class

Gem # 3
“How many of you have a garden?

It’s very important to grow some of your own food, even if you live in a NYC apartment it is possible to grow herbs such as mint and lemongrass.

Remember that every plant has its own dhikr. Every food, like human personality, has its own temperament (hot, cold, moist, dry). Every color has its own vibration. The attitude and mood we prepare our food in will manifest itself in the meal. The way our food has been raised and then transported to your fridge will impact and may degrade the nutritional content. Grow what you can, and increase the nutritional content of your food.

Eliminate soda from your diet.
Red meat is NOT the 6th pillar of Islam! (Lol)
The prophet (pbuh) said: ‘The meat of the cow is poison, and the milk is a cure.’
Embrace herbs and super foods such as spirulina and mint tea.
Use air purifiers in your home.

Overall, have an intense consciousness of your home environment and the food you place into your body. You become a reflection of what you eat.”
-Short Recap from Holistic Healing Workshop with Salahuddin Tauhidi and Sh. Muhammad Mendes

Gem # 4
The priority of the Shariah is the prevention of harm, which is defined as ‘a pain and the means to it, and anxiety and its causes’. This is a sophisticated system because it includes mental suffering as a priority to prevent.
After prevention of harm comes the procurement of benefit, which is defined as ‘a joy/pleasure, and the means to it’.
…
La ilaha illa Allah is a covenant between you and God, but that covenant has a ‘fine print’, and that fine print is fiqh (sacred law).
-Notes from Shaykh Jihad Brown’s class

Gem #5
“Every human being is a kabah that must destroy the idols within.”

Gem #6 & 7
“Women are inherently generous, which is why it is mandated for men to provide for them, so that men can learn to become more generous.”

“Rabiah al-Adawiyah was the fourth daughter in her family. Her father was so tired of having daughters that he wanted to name her ‘Number 4′. Little did he know that she would grow up to be one of the most influential and spiritual women in Islamic History, where her writings are widely read and stored in thousands of masajid, and that she would become known for her asceticism and deep love of God.”
-Notes from Shaykh Mendes’ Class

Gem # 8
“Children are the sirr (secret) of their parents. They are the outward manifestations of the latent possibilities in their parents.”

Gem # 9
“Just like how we look up at the night sky and view the stars with awe and fascination and say, ‘SubhanAllah’, the angels look down and see gatherings of dhikr (remembrance) as stars glittering the earth.”

Gem # 10:
“The more you are in touch with the spirit, the more you will connect with people on the level of the spirit.”

Lastly, here is a beautiful rendition of Qasidah Ya Imam Ar-Rusuli that I recorded;
Sung by Munshid Ghuydar Bashmaf, Sidi Nader Khan, and most of the teachers at the retreat:

“Beauty is not the random concatenation of dull essence in a source-less and direction-less universe: Beauty is something that calls us to a higher vocation, that reminds us of our source, and invites us to the beauty of the Eternal Abode.

The Holy Prophet… turned these people outward: instead of the introspection of the self and the tribe and the family, there was instead a radical extroversion and an affirmation of the other. And not only an affirmation of the Arabian other: there is no tribalism in the Qur’an, neither is there an affirmation of any particular Arabness. The universalism of Islam is there from the beginning… we must try to follow in the footsteps of this breathtaking universalism.”
-Sh. Abdul Hakim Murad

Taken from http://themathesontrust.org/library/beauty-and-the-sunna

A letter from a friend in Dubai…

“I am glad you are looking at this as a character building opportunity insha Allah (God-willing). Do not fret over something that you did not get, it was not written for you. At the end of the day it is all about whether you became a better person out of it or a worse person and if you become worse person then you are dealing with it entirely incorrectly and have to revamp your character traits and behavior. Life is about living for others and not for yourself.  In some areas of the West, you are taught to be self centered and selfish and you really do not grow out of it until you have your own kids, and for some people that is only when the kids are younger. Later on they morph back into their selfish, self centered selves. The key is to think about others before yourself or “serving the creation” combined with serving he Creator. You serve the creation because of love of Allah SWT and for the sake of Allah SWT, not expecting any reward from anyone but Allah SWT and that is what Allah SWT asks you: your selflessness. and this is a little secret in achieving spiritual height.  It is not just with adhkaar (remembrances) but with patience, sacrifice of your desires, your wishes, and sometimes your rights.”

Here is a powerful article written by John Powell regarding Spirituality and Suffering. I got it from a friend who attended an event on Social Justice and Spirituality.
http://ir.stthomas.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1006&context=ustlj

The author discusses two types of suffering that humans experience:
1. Existential suffering- innate to the human experience, trying to address meaning or meaningless in life
2. Social suffering-not innate to human experience and comes from structural violence.

Some profound quotes from the article that I liked:

“If spirituality is the engagement with the deeper sense of self, the divine or God, the narrow engagement with the egoistic self is the lack of spirituality. The suffering then that is caused by the separation cannot be healed by this small self. And it is this same self and the institutional arrangement that it collectively bring into being that cause suffering in the social world.”

“Throughout this article, I have been using concepts that might appear to be outside of the domain of secular society and even utopian. I have asserted that the work to bridge the spiritual and the secular has to be informed by suffering and love. I have also asserted that spirituality calls us to move beyond the egoistic self to something deeper, more intimate, and authentic, but less private. Finally, I have asserted the need for recognition of our interconnectedness and our interbeing. It would be easy to assume that this call is otherworldly and idealistic; but properly understood it is neither. The call for having this project be informed by love requires a love that is engaged in our situatedness with all its imperfections. It is not calling for an idealistic love. Instead this is a call for what Habermas refers to as a regulative idea, which is an idea that orients the vision and the direction of this project but is grounded in concrete reality. This idea can save us from being lost in a means without a sense of an end. But we must hold these ideas or ends open to revision. This requires that we create our structures necessary to support these ideas. It also requires that the ideas are recursively related to the reality we are co-creating. We have not created much space to recognize our interbeing.”

“If one rejects the first part of my assertion that the suffering of an individual is a cause for concern and engagement, then there is no reason to engage the role of institutions and structures in producing suffering. I have been asserting that the issue of suffering, even in the secular space, is a fundamental spiritual concern. And therefore one must be cognizant of the source of that suffering. It is particularly troublesome when one is actively or passively the beneficiary of such suffering. What does owning a slave do to the spiritual development of the slave master as well as the slave?

This has been explored by Hegel and Fanon, who address the relationship between the master and the servant.  But the question needs to be enlarged. To focus on the relationship between the master and the slave still looks at the relationship in individualistic terms. Slavery in the United States was a peculiar institution that affected the entire society including non-slave holding whites and free blacks. What I am asserting is that this institutional arrangement affects the spirit of the nation and all those in it.”

“I have talked about the need to address suffering that is both ontologically based as wel as socially based. But there is another important dimension to spirituality. We are not only pushed by suffering to something deeper and larger than the egoistic self, we are also pulled. What pulls us is love. Love gives us the hope and reality of reconnecting. It heals the sense of loss and separation that haunts the egoistic self. And for love to be realized, the ego is called beyond self. The very self-containment of the ego limits it to a narcissistic love that can never move beyond itself and is therefore always trapped in separation. It is for this reason that virtually all spiritual practices require one moving beyond the self. We are pushed out of the prison of separation by the suffering of isolation. We are pulled out by the hope of love. It is no wonder that love plays such an important role in major religions. In a world that is unjust, hard, and rigid, there is not only a great deal of surplus suffering; there is also little space for love.”

“There is reason to suggest that as we deny the other or use structure to do the work of social distancing and denial, which we deny ourselves and our spiritual lives suffer. Then what is our spiritual relationship to these self-denying structures when they are already in place? …The engagement with the suffering of others is not just a matter of service for an always otherwise spiritual being but a way to know and claim our own spirituality. “

Today I debated to myself whether it was worth walking to my mom’s office just to pick up some bags of sugar for coffee. We work in the same university, and it takes me about 10 minutes to get to her office. I resolved to go.  On my way back to my own office, I noticed a woman who seemed to be lost.  She spoke out loud to the people passing her by, “Does anyone know how to get to the bioengineering building?” I immediately responded to her and said “I am going there right now so you can follow me!” She quickly struck up a conversation with me and I noticed that she was a very friendly and social person.  It turned out that she had a meeting with one of my co-workers.  Beneath the layers of our conversation I couldn’t help but wonder how fortunate it was that we bumped into each other so that she could make it in good time for her meeting.  It further made me realize that God is a wise controller of every atom of activity and time, and works in mysterious ways to facilitate His grand plan.  I began to contemplate on how the most mundane, random, and quite ordinary actions we do on a daily basis are probably a part of a much greater, purposeful, meaningful network of interactions.

Let the future unfold itself!

“Imam Ali said that a man lies hidden under his tonque, because the tonque expresses what’s in his heart. Whoever loves a thing, does much remembrance of it. If you love God, God is on your tonque. If you love the world, the world is on your tongue.

The heart belongs to Allah, it is God’s…so the question is, where is your heart?”

-Shaykh Hamza Yusuf