The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) is once
reported to have said: “There are 71 sects among Jews, and only one of them is
correct. There are 72 sects among Christians, and only one of them is correct.
There are 73 sects among Muslims, and only one of them is correct.” Presumably,
something of a similar nature could be voiced concerning: Buddhism, Taoism,
Hinduism, many kinds of indigenous systems of belief, as well as in relation to
various modalities of the so-called mystery schools.
We all want to think that whatever path we are on
is the right one. However I’m not going to try to claim that my spiritual
journey just happens to be fully compliant with the correct one alluded to in
the foregoing.
I have tried hard to search for the truth, but
Allah knows best what the reality of my situation is. Nonetheless, I can say
with certainty that whatever my shortcomings might still be – and I am sure
that they are many -- my life is better than it otherwise would have been and
become had it continued on the path I was on prior to becoming initiated, by
the Grace of Allah, through my first shaykh.
On the other hand, as the Prophet Muhammad (peace
be upon him) has been reported to indicate: “The movements of nafs are more
difficult to detect than the movements of a black ant on a smooth rock in the
dead of night.” How much does one miss concerning the truth as a result of the
machinations of nafs which through a network of desires, negative emotions,
problematic motivations, and impulsive, ill-considered intentions constantly creates
a variety of emotional, psychological, conceptual, social, and spiritual
blind-spots, if not existential sink holes?
Plus, let’s add to the contributions of an
individual’s nafs, the forces of dunya (which is the chaos generated by the
manner in which the complex dynamics of our collective nafs interact with one
another to generate a dysfunctional society) and, then, mix those dynamics with
the constant entreaties of the shaytans that are urging human beings to pursue
what is not in our best interests. Nafs, dunya, and shaytans are an unholy
alliance constantly seeking to induce us to pursue things other than the truth
concerning the essential nature of our relationship with Being, and if we are
honest with ourselves, there are all too many times when we take a whipping
from that alliance.
Even if we are fortunate enough, by the Grace of
Allah, to win more of the foregoing battles than we lose, it has been said that
the sins of the elect are the virtues of those who are less spiritually
endowed. As a result, even if we believe we are doing well, this belief might
only be because we have become intoxicated with a spiritual orientation which
is nothing more than something which reverberates and resonates with the sins
of the elect.
The foregoing consideration reminds one of the
account that is associated with the life of Hazrat Ra’ bia (may Allah be
pleased with her) who was reported to have been walking with a Sufi of some
accomplishment on the side of a hill overlooking Basra. The latter individual
looked upon the city below them and remarked that most of the people of that
city did not keep their fasts or observe their prayers.
The man went on to indicate that he had never
missed a fast or prayer in his life. Hazrat Ra’bia (may Allah be pleased with
her) is reported to have given the man a hard look and said: “Thy existence is
a sin with which none other can compare.”
There are those who maintain that the Sufi path
is a sort of technology which entails a methodology which, if followed, leads
to spiritual realization concerning, among other things, essential identity.
Hazrat Bayazid Bistami (may Allah be pleased with him) indicates otherwise when
he is reported to have said: “The Thing we tell of can never be found by
seeking, but only seekers find it,” indicating that the sine qua none of the
Sufi path is God’s Grace, for as the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) is
reported to have said: “Many are those among you who fast and, yet, gain
nothing from it except hunger and thirst, and many are those who pray
throughout the night and, yet, gain, nothing from it except wakefulness.”
Presumably, one might add that there are many who give zakat but acquire
nothing but a lessening of their bank account, or who go on Hajj and gain
nothing but a trip, or who utter shahadah and gain only the sound of their own
voice.
Irrespective of what one’s efforts might be, God
is under no obligation to grant one spiritual realization. We are completely dependent
on God’s Mercy for, as the Qur’an indicates: “O people, you are the poor
towards God, and God is the Independent and Praiseworthy.” (35:15)
Whatever our rizq (or provision) might be, it is
from Allah. We should be grateful for what comes to us, including the desire to
seek the truth and worship the truths that are disclosed to us … whether these
truths be simple or profound, and whether these truths come via ease or
hardship.
The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) is reported
to have said: “All people are doomed to perish except those of action, and all
people of action will perish except for the sincere, and the sincere are at
great risk.” As the Qur’an reminds us: “We offered the trust to the heavens and
the earth and the mountains, but they refused to bear it, being afraid thereof,
and man accepted to bear it. He is, indeed, extremely oppressive and ignorant.”
(33:72) Again from the Qur’an: “And
surely we shall test you with some fear and hunger and loss of wealth and lives
and crops, but give glad tidings to the steadfast, who say when misfortune
strikes them: surely to Allah we belong and to Allah we are returning.” (2:
155-156). Claims to sincerity will always be tested.
There are many people today – both within the
Muslim and Christian communities – who talk about human beings having been
created in the image of God. One should ask what the nature of an “image” is
for it is neither God, nor other than God.
In one Hadith Qudsi – that is words which are
uttered through the mouth of the Prophet, but which are said to be the words of
God rather than those of a man and, yet, what is said does not constitute
revelation – the following statement is reported to have been said: “In the
beginning, I was alone, and I am now as I was in the beginning.” In another
Hadith Qudsi, the following words were reported to have been said: “I am Ahmad
without meem (m).“ In other words, God is Ahad.
Reflect on the foregoing. God is saying that God
was alone in the beginning, and God is now as God was in the beginning. God is
Ahad – the One, the Singular, the Only, the Alone.
The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) is said
to have cautioned people to: “Reflect upon all things but reflect not on God’s
Essence.” The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) is also reported to have
said: “I have been given all the Names and have been sent to perfect good
behavior.”
We can reflect on the Names – that is, we can
reflect on all of the different levels of manifestation that are made possible
by the way in which Nur, Divine Light, is defracted through the prism of the
Names of Allah -- but we cannot reflect on the Essence or Dhat of God. The
image of God is to be found in the Names and not in the Divine Essence for
although in essence we human beings might be Divine, we are not Divinity in
Essence. Indeed, as the Qur’an indicates: “God appointed for you stars that you
might be guided in the darkness of the land and the sea.” (6:97) The Qur’an
also states: “And God taught Adam all of the Names, then, showed them to the
angels, saying: Inform me of the names of these, if ye are truthful. They said:
Be glorified! We have no knowledge saving that which Thou hast taught us. Lo!
Thou, only Thou, art the Knower, The Wise. God said: O Adam! Inform them of
their names. God said: Did I not tell you that I know the secret of the heavens
and the earth?” (2:31-33).
The Names of Divinity give active expression to
the Divine Presence. Nonetheless, one cannot reduce the latter to the former,
for if this were the case – that is, if the Names and Essence were identical --
then, to reflect on the Names (which is encouraged by God throughout the
Qur’an) would be forbidden since, as stipulated earlier, the Prophet Muhammad
(peace be upon him) is reported to have said that one should not reflect on the
Divine Essence.
The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) is
reported to have said: “All of the Revealed Books are contained in the Qur’an.
And, the meaning of the Qur’an is contained within Surah al-Fatihah. And, the
meaning of Surah al-Fatiha is contained in Bismillah ir Rahman ir Raheem, and
the meaning of Bismillah ir Rahman ir Raheem is contained in Bimillah, and the
meaning of Bismillah is contained in the dot beneath bey (b).” Look for the
image that gives expression to the fitra or essential nature of human beings in
the dot beneath bey in Bismillah. Names are Names, but Essence is beyond all
Names even as Names give testimony to the Presence of Essence or Dhat.
Earlier in this commentary, reference was made to
my first shaykh. I have had two shaykhs – the first one was authentic and the
second individual was a spiritual charlatan, and while the second “guide” might
have been an imposter, nonetheless, he taught me some valuable lessons.
When my first shaykh passed away in 1988 I knew
that I needed more guidance, and I knew that such an understanding of my
unfinished spiritual condition was a sincere assessment of my condition.
However, as indicated previously, the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) has
indicated that “the sincere are at great risk.” Part of that risk is that one’s
intentions will be rigorously tested.
Although, by the Grace of Allah, this unworthy
individual had been permitted to spend considerable time in the company of a true
saint of the 20th century and, thereby, had been provided with
numerous opportunities to serve God through him, nonetheless, following the
passing away of my guide, I was prepared to start all over again if I were to
be fortunate enough to find another shaykh. There were no expectations on my
part that I would be entitled to be given some sort of spiritual intimacy with another
shaykh as had been the case with my first spiritual guide. I was just ready to
learn whatever I could.
After several false starts, my life was brought
into contact with someone who – on the surface – seemed to be a genuine shaykh.
That individual could quote a seemingly endless litany of appropriate Hadiths
and Quranic passages at the time that circumstances appeared to call for such
words, and, as well, he could speak authoritatively on the history of the Sufi
tradition and offer an endless stream of anecdotes that brought different
dimensions of the spiritual journey to the attention of those who listened to
him. I report the foregoing in the manner that I have because I had been
listening to my first shaykh for nearly sixteen years and could see how what
the second shaykh was saying reflected – at least on the surface -- what the
first shaykh had been saying, but words are like icebergs which have a small,
visible portion that is rooted in a reality that lies beneath the surface and
is capable of giving surface words an impetus that is a function of the
properties and qualities of the kind of reality which lies beneath the surface
of spoken words.
The second shaykh was charismatic, had a great
sense of humor, and was very approachable. On a number of occasions, I
witnessed the way the second shaykh was able to induce fundamentalist oriented
individuals to alter their approach to Islam, and this transformation often
took place within a matter of hours, if not sooner.
At a certain point, after having had the
opportunity to listen to the second shaykh, ask him questions, and watch how he
interacted with a wide variety of individuals under an array of circumstances,
I sought initiation. Upon being initiated – and none of what follows had so
much as been hinted to me prior to initiation – I was made a shaykh and
informed about an important role that I was to serve in the West – a role that
my new shaykh had been instructed about – allegedly -- by his own shaykh a
number of years previously.
I began to give talks, initiate mureeds, and
undertake different tasks that I was being assigned by my second shaykh in
Canada, the United States, and England. There were other presumptive shaykhs in
North America with whom I came in contact that appeared to acknowledge that my second
shaykh was the real deal.
However, to make a longer story much shorter,
after about a decade of service, I was exposed to incontrovertible evidence
that the second shaykh who was referred to as Baba, or spiritual father, was
engaged in an array of unacceptable behaviors which were destroying people’s
lives – including my own life. Among other things, the individual was a sexual
predator.
Some people who hear the foregoing might ask:
“Well, if your first shaykh was authentic and a saint, why didn’t he step in
and help you in some way.” In truth, such help was extended to me several
times. Once was in the form of a dream in which my first shaykh came to me and
told me that I was travelling in the wrong, spiritual direction.
However, while I was quite prepared to accept the
idea that I was making mistakes and needed to do some sort of course
correction, I chose to ask the wrong person about what the dream might mean in
specific terms. In other words, I went to the second, physically living shaykh
and mentioned the dream in which my previous shaykh had indicated that I was
journeying in the wrong direction, and, of course, the individual to whom I told
the dream was a master of spinning things and spin he did. As I reflect upon
that incident and, by the Grace of Allah, having gained some emotional distance
from that time, the irony of that set of circumstances has not been lost on me.
In addition, prior to the foregoing incident and
before I came into contact with the individual who would turn out to be a
spiritual charlatan, I also had been given another warning by my first shaykh –
the one who had passed away. More specifically, there was a Sufi gathering that
was taking place and at that gathering someone else who had been a mureed of my
first shaykh indicated to me that he had had a dream in which our shaykh had
instructed him to tell me to look out for two wolves.
I subsequently came in contact with a number of
individuals who turned out to have the qualities of a wolf. Consequently, I had
a little difficulty distinguishing between the wheat and the chaff when it came
to identifying which of the people I met were the two wolves to which my first
shaykh was trying to draw my attention. As a result, by the time I came into
the company of the second shaykh, I thought – incorrectly – that I already had
been exposed to, and managed to free myself from, individuals who seemed to fit
the description of the sort of individuals about which my shaykh had warned me
in the dream of a friend that had been conveyed to me.
Notwithstanding the foregoing missteps, and
despite being a little slow on the uptake with respect to the understanding
that was necessary to realize some of the truth of what was transpiring, I did
come across the evidence that was needed to break free from the second, alleged
shaykh -- the spiritual charlatan. Moreover, without going into details, the
realization has gradually dawned on me over time that the spiritual charlatan
had been trying to destroy me and my life for quite some time, including doing
things behind my back that were intended to isolate me from my family and
friends.
Although there have been many truths that,
gradually, have surfaced as a result of those ten years in the spiritual
desert, the learning process has been soaked with considerable pain. However, life
is not just about the jamali names of Divinity – the names of ease, bounty,
beauty, and mercy, because whether one likes it or not, life is also about
being exposed to the jalali names as well – the names of rigor, severity, and
hardship.
The aforementioned spiritual charlatan induced
many people to lose their faith. Yet, irrespective of whatever role spiritual
charlatans play in the lives of people, the choice of what one does with the
events that come into one’s life –
whether on refers to them as being “good” or “bad” -- always belongs to the
individual.
The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) is
reported to have said: “Knowledge is of two kinds: Formal knowledge which does
not go beyond verbal profession. It is the evidence of God against those people
who profess such knowledge, and according to it, God will judge them; and,
genuine knowledge, which is deep rooted in the heart – this is the knowledge
which is most useful.”
God has provided me with bits of genuine
knowledge that were derived from the time I spent in the company of a real
shaykh. God also has instilled genuine knowledge in me that arose, like a
phoenix, from the ashes of my relationship with the false shaykh.
The Qur’an informs us that: “If Allah were to
take humankind to task for their wrong-doing, God would not leave hereon a
living creature, but God reprieveth them to an appointed term.” (16:61) I have
tried to learn as much as I can about the nature of my own wrong-doing in the
time that has been reprieved to me by God, and both of the aforementioned
shaykhs, each in his own inimical way, has helped me to become aware of my
mistakes and, slowly, with the help of Allah, I have sought to move in the
direction of seeking to realize my fitra and away from ceding my agency to the
influence of nafs, dunya, shaytans, and a false shaykh.
Back in the late 1960s, early 1970s, I remember
coming across a book and a set of records by Baba Ram Das who, previously, had
gone under the name: Richard Alpert. He, along with Timothy Leary, had been professors
of psychology at Harvard when I was there, and during that time they both were
fired from their jobs for experimenting with psilocybin as well as a few other
consciousness-bending substances. A few years later Alpert wrote a book,
accompanied by a set of records, called: Be
Here, Now.
I had listened to the recordings and was quite
moved by them, and, as a result, began to explore various mystical ideas and
practices. My journey traversed a different path than his did, but, I tend to
think that we both have been trying to move in the general direction of
essential truths.
The series of words: “Be Here, Now” trips so easily
off the lips, and, yet, to really understand what it is to “Be” and what the
nature of the “Here” and the “Now” are, is profoundly difficult. The depth of
the significance of that statement runs into the Unseen, for, as the Prophet
Muhammad (peace be upon him) is reported to have said: “Truly, the Qur’an has
an outward and an inward dimension, and so on up to seven dimensions,” and,
therefore, to properly understand what is entailed by the notion of “Be Here,
Now,” from a Sufi perspective, one would need to travel to the most inward
dimension – the seventh level -- of the Qur’an … and, maybe, beyond.
As the Qur’an indicates: “… if all of the trees
in the earth were pens, and the sea, with seven more seas to help it (were
ink), the words of Allah could not be exhausted.” (31:27) Or, approached in
another way, the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) is reported to have said:
“God has seventy thousands veils of light and darkness; were they to be
removed, the Glories of God’s face would burn away everything perceived by the
sight of God’s creatures.”
We spend our lives sailing through the mysteries
of those seventy thousand veils. We try to learn the intricacies of spiritual
navigation that will enable us to find the way back to our essential selves and
the truth of the nature of our relationship to the One Who has thrown us into
the many currents of life.
At the beginning of this commentary, I referred
to the Prophetic saying that includes the stipulation that: “there are 73 sects
among Muslims, and only one of them is correct”. The considerations put forth
throughout the present commentary allude to why there are so many paths that
might be followed which will lead toward, or to, one of the 72 incorrect sects,
and, how although the one correct way might be steeped in considerable mystery,
yet, nonetheless, the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) confirmed its
reality when he is reported to have said: “There are hidden gems of knowledge
unknown to all but those who know Allah. If they are spoken of, none denies
them except those arrogant toward Allah.”
My first shaykh knew of such gems but was very
guarded in his speech concerning them. My second shaykh – the spiritual fraud –
did not know such gems but tried to speak as if he did, and, as a result, was thoroughly
ensconced in one of the 72 incorrect ways of engaging Islam.
The present podcast will be my last in the Sufi
Reverberations series – at least for the foreseeable future. I started these
presentations not because I was a shaykh but because I wanted to share whatever
I could that might offer a form of remembrance and support for whomever might
happen onto the presentations while travelling through the darkness which is
growing all about us. Indeed, as the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) is
reported to have said: “Verily, God doth not take away knowledge from the hands
of Divine servants, but taketh it by taking away the learned, so that when no
learned people remain, the ignorant will be placed at the head of affairs.
Causes will be submitted to their decision, and they will pass sentence without
knowledge, and they will err themselves, and lead others into error.” These are
the times in which we live.
For those who are interested, I have written more
than forty books on an array of topics, ranging from: Medicine, to: Evolution,
the Sufi path, 9/11, spiritual abuse, Sam Harris, Tolstoy, Islam, shari’ah, education,
quantum mechanics, cosmology, religion, constitutional issues, philosophy,
psychology, sovereignty, and more. The books are all free for the taking and
can be found at: https://billwhitehouse.com/press.htm
. No e-mail addresses will be required, nor will donations be asked for. Take
what you like and leave the rest.
If books are not your thing, then, there are some
videos that might be of interest to you. These can be found at: https://billwhitehouse.com/video.htm
-- the last two videos on the page might have the most value.
As-Salaam-u-‘alaykum and khuda hafiz. (What's In A Name)