Allah s Signs in the Roots of Words: Rahm, Nafas, Alam, Qadir

Transcription

1 Allah s Signs in the Roots of Words: Rahm, Nafas, Alam, Qadir [I ve been talking about the writings of] Shaykh al Akbar, Ibn Araby. They are really profoundly deep. [Particularly important is] to understand this relationship we are talking about that began with the hadith quds, I was a hidden treasure. The words that are used in this, in looking at the Arabic roots, are the same in most cases as the Farsi roots, and even in some cases the Hebrew roots, which is yet another tie between all of that transcends the external forms of religion. Also in a way, it tells you the importance of Hadith Quds, when Allah Swt speaks through the mouth of the Prophet (sal). This is a very hopeful reality for all human beings. We ended last night talking about the derivation of the root rahman. The deeper meaning of this mercy and compassion of Allah is to radiate love, and comes from the same root as rahīm or the womb/uterus. I think I ended by talking about Shaykh al Akbar s statements about blood relationships. The other aspect of that is a very physiological aspect. This is how incredibly woven into everything about life Allah s message is. For example, the womb is the home of the fetus. We talked about that earlier. For the fetus to be born, the womb has to dilate to 10 centimeters. This process of dilation is a natural rhythm. The heart exists in our body, doing what it does, like the uterus exists in the woman s body, doing what it does on a monthly basis, waiting for something to happen. The eshq of the heart is this development of the infant in the womb of the mother. We use the phrase in English, The heart dilates. Love dilates the heart and gives birth to a new relationship. This is how complex and yet simple it all is. Why? Remember dhikr and its other meaning, to penetrate, and the representation of the 1

2 lingam of the Hindus. You have this reality where there is a pattern of love that is radiating, and the seed of love which is contained in the sir, hidden in the secret center of the latā if. The Divine Name, Rahmah, exists in sirr. The generative power of that Divine Love of Allah Swt transmits and opens the possibilities that are contained in all the Names of Allah Swt, and planted immutably and unchangeably in the hearts of all human beings. Allah plants His Names in the human heart. If that heart grows in dhikr / the remembrance of Allah, Allah says, You will find Me in the heart of the believer. We say it is found in the huwal al batin, the most inner place in the heart, the core of the heart. There, the seed of all the names are not in the mind, but in the heart. Think of what compassion would be if it was a mind quality. It doesn t make sense. You can define it in the mind, cogitate upon it, or reflect on it, but it doesn t originate in the mind, does it? It originates in the heart: mercy, justice, righteousness, piety, patience, love. All of these are in the heart. These are names seeded in the heart. So Allah says, Remember Me and I will remember you. Me is all those names plus more. Remember in the heart, and what happens? Divine Love gives rise to a new person. Just like in the womb/ rahm, a new person is developed. The new person in this case is you, or me, or whoever remembers Allah Swt, and comes to term. What s the term? Your lifetime (we won t talk about Caesarian). This seed of love is planted in the Divine Names. It comes from the Divine Unity, Oneness. It disseminates those names substantively in the khalq, the world of creation. We talked about the macroscopic tree and the branches the other night. The name ar-rahman gives birth to all the realities of the other Names. The first Name Allah puts in the heart is Rahman ar-rahman ar-rahim. That is the seed that dilates the heart and gives birth to all the other names. It makes the heart receptive to all the other names. Consequently, what? Don t you always wonder 2

3 why every āyat in the Qur an but one starts with what? Bismi-Llāhi-r-Rahmāni-r- Rahīm. Why? Because this is the first name that Allah puts in the heart. Which one came first, Rahman or Rahīm? No. Rahm. The root; the seed is there, and everything else follows. Throughout the Qur an, you have all the other names that follow, plus the Hundredth Name of Allah Swt. It is said that the Hundredth Name is also found in Hizb ul Bahr. You can go look for it; it s a good hunt for you to go on. All those Names then become disseminated from that essence. They become substantive from the essence of rahmah. Allah says in Qur an, Say, invoke Allah or invoke Ar Rahman. Whichsoever you invoke, to Him are the excellent names (17:110). This cannot be invoked without breath. This is why Bismi-Llāhi-r-Rahmāni-r-Rahīm is the first name Allah placed in the heart of the human being, and out of which all other names are seeded in the rahim; the uterus of mercy that is in the heart. Seeded there through dhikr, the male organ that penetrates the heart and gives life to the seed that is there, and to all the seeds that are there. You have the seeds in the womb, and what is grown in the heart. You have what comes into the womb that grows the child. You have the dhikr that comes into the heart that grows the names of Allah Swt. You see how balanced that is? How perfect it is? Nothing is left out. There is no but, and, or If. Allah gave the names, these trilateral roots, to show to us a biological reality that wasn t known for 1200 years. Pretty amazing. And not until a few years ago did we know about the other brain cells in the heart. Say, invoke Allah or invoke ar-rahman. Whichsoever you invoke, to Him are the excellent names. I will bet my next year s paltry salary that you will find very few Muslims who understand this, even those who study Shaykh al Akbar. They don t get it. They only get one side of it; they don t get the other side of it. How is this done? I 3

4 was showing you the roots of 4 or 5 words, and how they reflect the hadith quds, I was a hidden treasure. Allah plants these roots in that hadith quds. Why is it in a hadith quds and not in Qur an? Anybody want to tell me why? Because He s trying to show us something else. Why are they not regular hadith? What is a hadith quds? Allah speaking through the mouth of the Prophet (sal). What s another one of those roots we didn t talk about quite yet, fully? Nafs / nafas. That s in the Hadith. Hadith Quds is the breath of Allah speaking through the Prophet Mohammed (sal). Isn t it? What is breath? Nafas. This relationship is there. There is this breath that carries these eternal, inexhaustible Words of Allah. We gave the example of the blood and the spirit yesterday that is exhaustible, but the inexhaustible words are composed of a plethora, myriad, endless letters. How many letters in the Arabic alphabet? 22. How many letters in the Farsi alphabet? 32. How many letters in the English alphabet? 26. How many letters in the Chinese alphabet? A thousand? There are endless myriads of letters; we just don t know them all. How many Names of Allah are there? No, there are not 99. There are endless names of Allah. If there are endless names, there has to be endless letters. And there are many, many levels. When the Prophet Mohammed (sal) ascends in the Isra Miraj, and he speaks to the angels and hears them praising Allah Swt, do you think they are only praising with 99 names? What language is he speaking, Farsi, Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew? He s speaking the language of rahim, of breath. Allah says it all starts in the human being s heart. What happened to the Prophet s heart before he made the Isra Miraj? It was washed. How many times? Three times. Why, was it that dirty? Bismi-Llāhir-Rahmāni-r-Rahīm. First: In the name of God, the most merciful and the mercybestowing. It contains everything. Now the heart is clean. He goes through these multiple levels. Why didn t he go into a big conference room and meet all the 4

5 prophets in one place? I m serious. Because the story wouldn t be as much fun? Maybe they could all have a booth. He could go to Musa s booth, Isa s booth, everybody s booth. Why? Because there is a hierarchy, and not just of the prophets; there is a hierarchy of the latā if. In each of the latā if, there are myriads of angels created by Allah Swt, which praise Allah Swt in ways you can only know when you are in contact with the malakut lahut, nasut, malakut. We haven t talked about those in a few years; we should talk about them. That s because we are not doing the Naqshbandiyya and Qadriyya teaching. Here are these examples Shaykh al Akbar gave you, and I am explicating, on the lexical and etymological realities that are linked together to create form. We gave the name form, like the beautiful flowers. Go back to Hazrat Adam (as). What was he supposed to do? Tell the names of things to the angels. Because they are giving these praises letters in languages we don t understand. We don t understand the language of the angels. Is that hard to believe? You don t understand Swahili. Why should it be hard to understand that you don t understand the language of the angels? But Swahili has sounds that maybe Bahasa Indonesian has, and Arabic has; and it has some sounds they don t have. The Prophet (sal) is given these tools that make him capable of understanding the language of the angels. What does he hear? He hears what Hazrat Adam (as) heard. He was able to decipher the names of things. As the qualities of Allah come into manifestation, he sees their names. This comes out of what s called the sifat an nafsiyya, the seven essential qualities. Allah makes clear through this one hadith quds, that people question, the whole process of the universal manifestation of all things in this world starting from what? Where did we start? (Rahman). No we didn t start with rahman. That s where language starts. Where did we, Shaykh al Akbar, start this discussion? Hibb. That s where he starts the discussion. 5

6 He makes clear the whole universal manifestation starting from love and the knowledge of Allah that results from that love, from the creatures born of that love. Allah says through the mouth of His prophet, I was a hidden treasure. I was not known. If you don t know the names, the words, the qualities, you don t know. Now I love to be known (hibb), so I created the creatures so that I might make Myself known to them. Then they knew Me. That s one way of saying it. Or, So that they come to know Me is another way. Allah Swt is expressing His reality in the unusual first person singular. He is not calling Himself by name, as you see in the Qur an, but I. There is no question of whether Allah is absolute, unconditioned, or One, to which other hadith allude. Allah was, and there was not with Him a thing anything. Allah expresses through the mouth of the Prophet Mohammed (sal), in the first person singular, His Oneness. But everything is potentially in that oneness the many in the one. At this level, these Divine names and attributes are differentiated within Him, but are not yet manifest. They later on will act through creation itself, through beings, animals, flowers. Beauty will act through flowers. Things will act through His creation. By doing that, they will manifest or characterize certain normative behaviors, which need to be kept normative behaviors, lest a person lose their identification with their Creator or the Divine. This is from where the Shar īah, or the Torah, or the Bhagavad Gita, or the Ten Commandments come, from each prophet. The fundamental qualities of the essential attributes, the sifat an nafsiyya, of Allah, are unique and are given rise from the names life, breath, knowledge, speech, irada/will, basira/seeing, hearing. These are qualities, attributes of Allah are given to whom? Hazrat Adam (as) so that he has the capability of describing what is 6

7 the Reality. If you want to speak or understand the life of what one would call the Divine way of living, because we have talked about the framework, the epistemology of it, the lexical semiotics of these words, there is the ontological reality of it, too, which is that movement of love, and all the Divine possibilities that create some kind of equilibrium, balance / mizan. Balance has to take place at the center. If you measured this spoon, would it be the center? Not necessarily. What else do you have to take into consideration? The weight and the shape. Everyone has to find their center, in a sense. Allah tells us to find the center, to be people of the middle ummah ta wasita. When we look for something to understand, we find the central theme in it. When you are writing a paper, what s the central theme that you are trying to now explicate and build upon? Allah takes all these Divine possibilities, all these essential realities that are contained in mashiyya. Mashiyya is Divine possibilities. Mashiyya is all the possibilities that lie within the Will of Allah. How many are those? Infinite. How many letters? Infinite. How many names? Infinite. They represent the infinite qualities and elements of all the Divine knowledge, all the possibilities, which constitute all the alamat: alam, symbols, signs, āyat. The signs of what? The signs of all beings. Now we re at a good place. Who is Allah? He is Rabbi-l-Ālamīn/Lord of all the Worlds. What are these worlds? They are symbols/alam. Worlds of all the possibilities, of all the symbols, of all the signs, of everything. He is Lord of everything. Lord of all the Worlds is a very short way of saying it. Where else in Qur an do you find the word alam? Lots of places. It refers to these multifarious signs of Allah Swt. Ibn Araby called it a certain name: al ayn ath-thabbit: the permanent, protocypical Essence, the Divine Name, the Infinitely Knowing / Alim. When you call someone an alim these days, it doesn t mean what it used to mean. 7

8 An alim is not just someone who knows something. The Alim is the Infinitely Knowing. Divine knowledge is called ilm. Divine knowledge is having access to knowledge dynamically. What happens is these Divine Names interact with each other. When they do, certain things happen. For example, what happens when mercy and justice interact with each other? Have you ever thought about that? When you go in front of a court, you seek the mercy of the court. Ever think about that? When beauty and love / hubb and the jamal and jelali of life mix, what happens? Pop, out comes a poem or whatever. What happens when, at the end of harb / war, you make peace / salām? What happens when mercy and peace come together? What happened in the American civil war? What were the Confederate soldiers allowed to keep? Their rifles and their swords, not their pistols. Why? So they could provide for themselves; they could hunt. More people were killed in the civil war than all wars fought among people of the same nation, history and background. And they were allowed to keep their weapons. Do you get it? There are these, as he calls them, protocypical essences, forms, templates that are symbols / alam. They are symbolic and prototypical. The Divine name al-alim, One Who infinitely knows the signs. Who was the first alim of the al-alim? Adam (as). He knows the signs. The word means to give something a distinguishing mark, and secondly, to know by means of signs or symbols. We know things by means of signs and symbols. If the arrow goes this way, it means the road is going to turn to the right. We know that a circle with a line through it means no, don t do that very, very basic. Every society, from the most basic to the most modern, has signs and symbols that are used. Gangs have symbols. The Holy Pope has signs. For the Muslim, the signs are something different. 8

9 Look at the root alama, to be the sign of: alim to know; alamat signs; alamun beings of the world; ilm knowledge; the entirety of interlinked signs; knowing, known. Then add the root shīn and yah with it, to will a thing, a synthetic reality. Then you have mashī a, a metaphysical place of essential will. Now you have this unity, and you understand the biology of it. We understand the symbology of it. There is something else to try to grasp, and that is the functionality of it. There is a factor that evaluates and assesses the value of everything, and gives it a basic value, and then a value that can change. In our world today, measurement and evaluation is a big thing a big deal. How do you value the work we do at Legacy? How do you value the results? By what standard are you looking? How do you know those results can be replicated, if you do what? How do you measure the impact, the effort, and the cost relationship? Allah assigns a measure of things in relation to other things, and tells us this in Qur an clearly. Everything has a measure, a length of time, a length of life, the day into the night. There are many references in Qur an to what we would call measurement. This function that determines and evaluates is exercised by the name al-qadir: the One Who has the ability to evaluate everything. Now, here s a hard one for you. Let s put two names together al-rahmat and al-qadir. What do you have now? How do you measure and evaluate mercy? Or al-qadir and Adl. How do you evaluate and measure justice? This is a legalistic issue. I studied this in law school. How do you know? Someone is in jail for 25 years, wrongly jailed. How do you measure the value of that time that was spent, or misspent? These are moral and ethical issues that will take me to the subject of ethics. The root of this word now is: to apprise, to assess according to a value. One finds in the word qudra the names al-qadir, which is much more explicit than the meaning of powerful, Shaykh Al Akbar says. Powerful is not the 9

10 right translation of it al-qadir and al-qadir. It is the same spelling, different pronunciation. These two words speak of the quality or essence of Allah. The name that usually follows al-qadir is usually al-murīd. Al-Murīd means the self-willed, the follower. The root of this term means to go from here to there. Irada / will comes from it. Irada is not a faculty of the mind like you think it is. Will is a faculty of the soul. It is a faculty of life. You can t have will unless you have breath / nafas. Will allows for some quality within the Lawhim Mahfūdh to be able to determine for oneself where you are going: from here to there. Allah gives us choice within the context of our qadr. What does choice mean? You are going to go from here to there, going from something that is known to another thing that is not yet realized, but that you are attracted to, and it results from moving from one object to another. We are back now to hubb, where we started. We are attracted to another person; we feel love for that person. You are moving from a known state to an unknown state; from a known entity to an unknown entity. You have to exert some will power, so you don t make a mistake. You have to measure and evaluate it. You have to follow where your ego, you nafs is going, a function of your life; and your heart, hubb/love, because this love may return to plant a seed in you, physically or metaphorically. So we are back now to the essentials of life and knowledge, and the ability and will to understand these Divine names, the Divine Being which loves to be known; and utters this love of being known by articulating it through His Kalam/Word. All the possibilities are contained in that prototype, that essence. This function is called mutaqalib: one who expresses himself through himself. There is a double meaning to the root of kalam. It means to utter, and it means to wound. Remember 10

11 dhikr? To penetrate like a spear. Dhikru-Llāh is repeating the name of Allah to wound and to utter; to penetrate and to remember. When you articulate the word, you are actualizing the possibilities of that Divine Being, and all of the potentials of the Divine Being. This is why dhikr is so important. You are part of the actualization process. This is how manifestation is creation; this is how the baby is created in the womb. This is why Jibreel breathes into the womb of Maryam. This is why you get the same story [of breath] in other traditions. Actualization takes place through the word that penetrates and gives rise to something manifest: dhikru-llāh. When you make the dhikr rightly, perfectly, you are part of the creative process of this constant creativity of Allah Swt. The children may think this is terribly boring, but it s really about them and their development, too. There is a kind of spiral that takes place that s another important thing. You have a one (1), alif, and a spiral around it. DNA. Even Allah symbolically makes the building blocks of this creation to represent the one with the spiral around it. We saw it many years ago before the DNA was discovered, as the caduceus (the sign of medicine). The Hindus have it as a snake around Shiva. It all starts from this hibb, the seed, the point of love, which is the spirit that gives rise to this internal motion of spiraling upwardly and outwardly. You see it replicated in nature in the. I ll give you a hint chambered nautilus, which is Fi, in the Fibonacci serious; and the bellis perennis, a daisy. The petals of the daisy are in the Fibonacci series. Allah plants it all through nature, another symbol, to tell us about this. If you amplify that seed of love, not only do you get the human being, but you are opening the doorway to all of the possibilities, letters, kalam, the names of Allah; and if you make dhikr in the way we are talking (not just recitative), you are really making the dhikr with this kind of sensitivity in you. In dhikr, I am always trying to do something: watching the breath, something. 11

12 Then Allah manifests it through our shuyukh. Mevlana Jelaludin Rumi starts to whirl. When he has his hands out like this, you have a spiral around the alif. What do you say when you are whirling? Allah. If you lay the letters on top of each other, what do you have? If you make the move, while the alif stays still, what do you have? That s what you visualize when you are whirling. Now people whirl on purpose, but he didn t. He whirled spontaneously, like the early yogis. Yogis didn t think of yoga postures. The kundalini moving around and up the spine in a spiral movement caused people to go into certain postures. Does that mean everything is the same and equal and it doesn t matter? No, forget about that part. Why? Because as deep as you go in Sanskrit, you will not get as deep as you can get in these trilateral roots. I ve been there. They are beautiful metaphors. As this amplifies, there are many wounds that take the life of a human being and produce a kind of let s continue with the tree example. If you wound a tree, the sap comes out to heal the tree. Some of the sap we collect and make maple sugar. That s enough for tonight. One more thing is to talk about hearing and seeing, but it s too much. Asalaam Aleikum. 12