I who am entirely unqualified to do so had today to make an ijtihad. Fortunately, it was only for myself.
“GOING VIRAL”
CELEBRITY & TECHNOLOGY
One ought to pay attention to the vehicle of the metaphor “going viral”, for this is contagion, infection, and plague, and yet, entranced by media, people lust after it.
Celebrity is as old as history and probably older, but tools change it, the pen for example. Caesar’s pen in writing the Gallic Wars was as devastating in Rome as was his sword against Gallic and Germanic tribes, which is said to have been his intention in wielding the sword: to write his book, and thus to gain absolute power in Rome.
The Collaborative Couple
A lecture entitled delivered in 1990 by Shaykh Abdalqadir at the University of Malaya, Malaysia.
I took the title of “The Collaborative Couple” being moved by where in Qur’an, Allah, telling of people entering into the “garden” says, “They will come singly and in couples”. I felt this contained a great insight for us, if we were to take benefit from it.
Do ‘they’ really ‘live’?
The –onomy of the oikos
–onomy is, of course, from nomos – which, as much as it is law, is custom. Astronomy is thus the observation of the customary behaviour of the heavenly bodies. It became a regular science with Isaac Newton and others who expressed that customary behaviour in terms of the mathematical relations between mass, length and time, and expressed a great many other matters in those terms as well. So far so good. Or not, as the case may be.
Continue reading “Do ‘they’ really ‘live’?”Bits and pieces, parts and wholes
“The piece [das Stück] is something other than the part [der Teil]. The part shares itself with parts in a whole. It takes part in the whole, belongs to it. The piece on the contrary is separated and indeed, as the piece, is even isolated from the other pieces. It never shares itself with these in a whole.”
Martin Heidegger, Bremen and Freiburg Lectures
Capitalist society, an oxymoron, is organised as pieces that aggregate. The pieces periodically have moments of intense activity choosing other bits to represent them. But then the representative pieces find they are owned, if they haven’t simply themselves sold themselves. The aggregate of pieces is called the demos – the people, and the periodic activity of electing representatives democracy. The representatives then make the law, which is thus in constant flux and a matter of contest between ideological parties. Because of that it is not a nomos known to all but a specialism known to lawyers who are trained to fight it in every detail.
Writings and occasional articles
The Opening of Shaykh Abdal-Aziz Ad-Dabbagh
translated by Abdassamad Clarke
Shaykh Abd al-Aziz, may Allah be pleased with him, said:
Three days after the death of Sidi Umar the opening happened to me and praise belongs to Allah. We recognised Allah by the reality of our selves, and praise and thanks belong to Him. That was on Thursday the 8th of Rajab 1125 H. I went out of our house and Allah provided me with four coins, by means of one of His slaves who give sadaqah. I bought fish and went to our house and the woman said to me, “Go to Sidi Ali Ibn Harazim (an area in Fez) and bring us oil so that we can cook the fish.”
I went and when I reached the Bab al-Futuh a trembling came over me and then many shudders. Then my flesh began to creep very much and I began to walk in that condition until I reached the grave of Sidi Yahya ibn ‘Ilal, may Allah benefit us by him, and that is on the way to Sidi Ali ibn Harazim. My state became very extreme and my breast became tremendously troubled, and I said, “This is death without doubt.” Then my body began to extend until it was longer than any length. Things began to unveil themselves to me and to appear as if they were right in front of me. I saw all the villages and towns, everything in this land and the Christian woman breast-feeding her child sitting in her lap. I saw all the oceans, the seven continents and everything in them, the beasts and all creatures. I saw the sky as if I were above it looking at what was in it.
Suddenly there was a tremendous light like dazzling sheet lightning which seemed to come from every direction. That light came from above me and from below me, from my right and left, and from before me and behind me. A tremendous cold from it struck me so much so that I thought I had died. I tried to cover my face so that I would not have to look at that light but I realised that my body was all eyes, the eye seeing, the head seeing, the leg seeing and all of my limbs seeing. I looked at the clothes I was wearing and I found that they did not veil that seeing which pervaded my whole body, so I realised that covering my face made no difference.
That state continued for about an hour and then stopped. I regained the first state that I originally had and returned to town. I was incapable of reaching Sidi Ibn Harazim and was afraid for myself and was busy weeping. That state returned to me for an hour and then stopped again. It began to come upon me for an hour and then vanish for another hour until it was living intimately with me. It began to be absent only for an hour in the day and an hour in the night, until finally it became continuous.
Allah had mercy on me because He made me meet one of the gnostics among His friends. When I woke up from the night after the day of the opening, I went to visit Moulay Idris, may Allah benefit us by him, and there I met the Faqih, Sidi al-Hajj Ahmad Jarandi, the Imam of the Moulay Idris Mosque. So, I mentioned to him what I saw and what had happened to me. He said to me, “Come with me to my home,” so I went with him to the house.
He entered and I with him, and we sat down together and he said, “Repeat to me what you have seen.” I repeated it to him. I looked at him and he was weeping. He said, “There is no god but Allah, these four hundred years we have not heard the like of this.” He gave me many dirhams and said to me, “Take them and meet your needs with them. When you are finished with them do not ask anyone to give you anything. Return to me and I will give you everything you need. And I insist that you go to the grave of Sidi Abdullah at-Tawdi, for there you will see good.”
I left him and I never saw him after that day. The sickness that caused his death came to him and he died, may Allah have mercy on him, but I followed his parting counsel and went to Sidi Abdullah at-Tawdi. When I reached the Bab al-Jaysah there was a black man outside the gate. He began to look at me and I said to myself, “What does he want?” When I reached him he took my hand and greeted me and I returned his greeting. He said to me, “I want you to return with me to the mosque, then we can sit for an hour and talk,” and I said, “With pleasure.”
I returned with him and we sat in the mosque. He began to speak to me, saying, “I am sick with such and such, I saw such and such, and such and such happened to me,” mentioning everything that had happened to me. He threw off the burden I carried by his words, by Allah, and I realised that he was one of the friends of Allah, a gnostic. He said that his name was Abdullah al-Barnawi from Barno and that he had only come to Fez because of me. I rejoiced and realised the blessing in the words of the Faqih Sidi al-Hajj Ahmad al-Jarandi, may Allah be merciful to him, for he was one of the people of right action.
Sidi Abdullah al-Barnawi remained with me, guiding me, directing me and strengthening me and removing fear of what I witnessed from my heart for the rest of the months of Rajab, Sha’ban, Ramadan, and ten days from Dhu’l-Hijjah.
When it was the third day of the Eid festival I saw the Master of Existence (the Prophet Muhammad), may Allah bless him and grant him peace. Sidi Abdullah al-Barnawi said, “O Sidi AbdulAziz, before today I was afraid for you but today when Allah the Exalted has made you meet the Master of Existence, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, my heart is secure and tranquil, and I entrust you to Allah the Mighty and Majestic.” Then he went to his land and left me. His stay with me was only to protect me from darkness entering upon me in this opening and until the opening in witnessing the Prophet happened to me, may Allah bless him and give him peace, because there is no fear for the one who has the opening then. It is only feared for him before that.
From Al-Ibriz “Pure Gold” by Sayyidi Ahmad ibn al-Mubarak, a pupil of the Shaykh.
Envy – Ibn Juzayy al-Kalbi
“From the evil of an envier when he envies”. Envy is a disapproved characteristic both constitutionally [in the human] and in the shari‘ah. The Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, said: “Al-Hasad eats up good deeds as the fire eats up firewood.”1 One of the men of knowledge2 said, “Al-Hasad is the first act by which Allah was disobeyed both in heaven and on the earth. As for in heaven, Iblis envied Adam, and as for in the earth, Qabil killed his brother, Habil3, because of envy.”
Learning Communities
The modern age is rooted in the ‘People of the Book’. Ibrahim Lawson has used the term ‘learning community’ for any formal or informal, gathering and configuration of people for the sake of learning together, in person or online, not necessarily led by a charismatic figure or ‘teacher’, but on a model of shared or distributive leadership, and whether for a brief or longer period of time. The monastery is possibly an example of that, although because of its monasticism and celibacy it is not a suitable model for us. In the Middle Ages the monasteries were the noisiest of places because of reading. Then something happened:
“Silent reading is a recent invention. Augustine was already a great author and the Bishop of Hippo when he found that it could be done. In his Confessions he describes the discovery. During the night, charity forbade him to disturb his fellow monks with noises he made while reading. But curiosity impelled him to pick up a book. So, he learned to read in silence, an art that he had observed in only one man, his teacher, Ambrose of Milan. Ambrose practised the art of silent reading because otherwise people would have gathered around him and would have interrupted him with their queries on the text. Loud reading was the link between classical learning and popular culture.”
(Ivan Illich, Vernacular Values)
A new relationship to text was born, as well as a new kind of ambitious individual, someone who wanted knowledge for himself not for his brethren, whose questions on the text were experienced as an intrusion and an interruption.
More than a millennium later it was Luther (1483 – 1546) who began an utterly new age, and we say this admitting the fundamental corruption of Catholicsm, but, with all its failings, it was a tradition and a transmission. For Luther it was about text. In that sense he prefigures the wahhabis and salafis. Gadamer said:
“Luther’s position is more or less the following: Scripture is sui ipsius interpres (its own interpreter). We do not need tradition to achieve the proper understanding of Scripture, nor do we need an art of interpretation in the style of the ancient doctrine of the fourfold meaning of Scripture, but the Scripture has a univocal sense that can be derived from the text: the sensus literalis.”
(Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method)
That was inevitable given the false foundations of Catholicism in Hellenic Pauline Christianity. The Reformation was bound to happen, but it never came to grapple with the real foundational cracks.
The Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, had already brought what moved everything forward. A Book indeed, but a Qur’?n-recitation that is sung – “He is not one of us who does not sing the Qur’?n”. “Sing – yataghanna” is a wonderful word with the sense also of ‘enriching oneself’ or ‘freeing oneself of need’. And the Book/Recitation is paired with Sunnah, which saves it from becoming merely a text. It was transmitted in Companionship, the distinctive mark of our Messenger, peace be upon him. Other Prophets had followers or even disciples, but he had Companions. Not only did they accompany him, but they accompanied each other. And the tradition has been transmitted by companionship generation to generation, from that day to ours, not purely by texts and the enormous hermeneutical strategies that are then needed to deal with them, and not merely in learned institutions such as the madrasah, however noble.
Nevertheless, the world we are in is as it is, and it proves necessary not just to unlearn the mess of the modern technological world but first to learn what it is we have to unlearn. Heidegger observed:
“Especially we moderns can learn only if we always unlearn at the same time. Applied to the matter before us: we can learn thinking only if we radically unlearn what thinking has been traditionally. To do that, we must at the same time come to know it.”
(Heidegger, What is Called Thinking)
Perhaps we can modify our original thought thus: the way forward is in learning/unlearning communities.
Equity
One hesitates to posit a basic principle of a just non-usurious economy since the history of ‘principles’ and most particularly ‘Islamic principles’ as interpreted by modernists, has been a dismal one. Thus, in their view, very wide principles, both usul and qawa’id, over-rule actual fiqh judgments. Bearing that in mind, one principle we might mention is equity, most often symbolised by the scales of justice. Usury and injustice occur when the scales are out of balance and one party takes more than the other. Riba is simply an increment.