Facing/Tawajjuh Allah brings out Beauty: Tafsir on al-ista adha Protection from Shaytan Dinner blessing: Bismi-Llāhi-r-Rahmāni-r-Rahīm. O Allah, fill our hearts with humility and gratitude. Give us a sense of purpose in our life. Help us to be grateful for the fact that we live in a community of believers. Help us to make this world a better place, at least for our children and grandchildren. Make our lives full, by filling full our hearts with Your love and Your mercy. Heal those who are ill. Raise oppression from the chests of those who are oppressed, and give us an understanding of our role in life, a deeper and deeper understanding. Amin. Suhbat: There is a poem by Jami: Your wonderful face is the cause for all beauty indeed. Everything faces this perfection, because nothing is concealed. After a long life, said die; but I am dying from the sorrow That life might not be loyal after all. Much the pretentious sage counted the hundred bees in all cities, This way made all fingers pointing at him. What sorrow your blade cutting my head apart? The real sorrow if my head and your blade are afar. Prayed for my need by that most profane lip, My need flowing. What reason left for praying? No one can reach the limit to kiss that lip. Much desire in the head, but trampled under the feet. Jami clutching at your zulf by the hand of hope. May Allah the Highness, excess of zulfa endows for. 1
In line with talking about memory and the brain, I briefly want to speak tonight another facet. Often we might wonder why Allah created certain things (and I don t mean ticks and chiggers, although those too). Why did Allah create something that attracts us, like beauty? Your wonderful face is a cause for all beauty. Why beauty? You see beauty as an attractive force, [albeit,] beauty is in the eye of the beholder. It doesn t matter that we may not agree what is beautiful; we know that beauty is an attractive force. When we realize that the Creator of all beauty, al-jamal, created beauty as an attraction toward Himself, certain spiritual laws of the universe go into effect. Maybe it s sufficient to say this line, and end. But anything that faces (tawajjuh) Allah Swt willingly or unwillingly, intentionally or unintentionally, will be itself beautified. As things or people draw closer to Allah Swt, the more beautiful they become. We also know the reverse. As we draw closer to people who are materialistic or oriented toward fame and name and materiality, the reverse effect happens. Ugliness comes unattractiveness. If nothing is hidden from Allah Swt, ever, it means that Allah s Eye is on everything, metaphorically. All you have to do is turn your attention toward Allah, and then you are facing Allah, and you become beautified. In the poem, he says, willingly or unwillingly, intentionally or unintentionally, people move toward the perfection of that beauty. The question is, are you moving with your back toward Allah, or are you facing? If all beauty comes from the fact that we all face the Beloved / Allah Swt, anything facing the Creator must become beautiful and has no choice. Our eyes and our mind and our intellect may not grasp that beauty, but this is the law of beauty in the universe. If you pay attention and turn your attention toward the Divine, you become yourself filled with the Jelal, more beautified. 2
This idea of willingly or unwillingly is a reflection of the idea of whether you are thinking or not thinking, regardless of whether you are thinking or not thinking. If you are paying attention to the Divine, this transformation, your soul becomes beautified. I m not going to go on and tafsir the whole poem. Zulf in Farsi means curl. Curl of the hair. In old Arabic, it means to approach or go near. When the poet uses zulf of the beloved, the curl of the hair, it means the process of going near to what one loves or moving toward what is beautiful. You might think that Jami is talking about grabbing the hair of Allah, but Allah has His head shaved. It means approaching the Divine. Having said that, there are other principles to understand. Let me preface it by saying if you are facing Allah Swt, then Shaytan cannot get you. Turning toward Allah happens in meditation. It also happens when you read Qur an. If you read Qur an, first make ista adha: Aūdhu billāhi minash-shaytānir-rajīm. I seek refuge from accursed Shaytan in Allah, the all Hearer and the All Knower. [I seek refuge] from the whispers of the Shaytan, the cursed, the rejected. When you intend to read Qur an, you should always say that first, and you should see yourself as turning toward the beauty and the light of Qur an and Allah. You are seeking in that turning to Allah, protection from the Shaytan. Allah says: Never did we send an apostle before you, but when he framed the desires of Shaytan through some vanity into his desire, Allah will cancel anything Shaytan throws in. And Allah will conform and establish His signs, for Allah is full of knowledge and wisdom. There are different ways this ista adha has been worded. Such as the Prophet (sal) said, after being awakened in the night and magnifying Allah three times ( Allahu 3
Akbar ), I seek refuge to Allah, the All Hearer and the All Knower, from the whispers of the Shaytan. This is not a formality. It is not just something you are supposed to do. This helps you turn your attention toward Allah so the Shaytan can t whisper to you, and you become beautified, elevated. This words of the al- ista adha cleans the heart, and prevents drowning in the presence of Allah. The actual words that are used linguistically for this tawajjuh of the heart (because that s what it is), towards the overwhelming beauty of Allah Swt, winds up as understanding that the only source of real knowledge, beauty, and truth comes from Allah. And you see how in the language you are led there. For example, aūdhu billāhi mina seeking refuge, comes from this root awaz. It has two meanings. The first meaning of it is seeking refuge meaning sanctuary within the Mercy of Allah Swt seeking His protection. The second meaning means to adjoin, or be next to, or sticking to. It means, I m adjoining, sticking my nafs / self to Allah s infinite generosity, mercy, and beauty gluing it to it. You are seeking protection, but it also means to stick on to it, to attach it. Shaytan has two concepts that go with this. The root verb shatan means to cause distance. For that reason, any human being (or jinn, for that matter) who is disobedient to Allah, because one is not facing toward the beauty, because there is distance from righteousness, goodness, adab, and all the things that draw you toward Allah, is being taken toward Shaytan. It causes distance between you and Allah. Allah says: Likewise, We made every messenger an enemy, Shaytan, the evil ones among many jinns. Derived from the verb shaat, it means to become empty, devoid. For that reason, one labels something (and unfortunately sometimes people) Shaytan, if one sends the nafs towards what is false, empty, and futile. 4
These are two ways to look at the name Shaytan. You think of this when you are saying, aūdhu billāhi minash-shaytānir-rajīm. It has two meanings also, derived from the root rajab. The first meaning is cursed, like Iblis is cursed by Allah who kicks him out. Then he asks for a reprieve. Another meaning of it is stoning or abusing. driving away by stones. For Allah ordered Iblis to be driven out of the sky by means of stones. What are stones in the skies? Meteors, meteorites. When in Mecca you throw stones at the Shaytan at Mina, it is only representative of the meteors that come from the skies for the purpose of casting the Shaytan out. The evil whisperer is not a person, so to speak, only, but it is the secretive, soundless words within the heart of the human being that are being uttered, useless verbiage. No one is informed about them. When the abd utters the ista adha, and comes to the All-Hearer and the All- Knower, he or she actually means, O You Who has these Divine attributes of hearing and knowing, Who hears what is heard and Who knows what is concealed in the secrets, You can and are hearing these evil whispers, and You know the real intention behind them, and You are capable of repelling them, so repel them away by Your generosity, O All Hearer and All Knower. We may not know what is a whisper from Shaytan, but You know. We might hear it and not know, but You know. So Allah, You have the power to throw the stones from the sky, to cast out this Shaytan. You have the power to remove those temptations or pulls away from your beauty and knowledge, so please do that. This is all before you start to read Qur an. But there are things that give it its power, not just merely saying it, [like] thinking about it and understanding the power of that formula, those magic words that open up the doors. One is you have to have knowledge. Knowledge means that you realize that you, yourself, cannot absorb the benefits of the Qur an, absorb the blessings of Allah, even absorb the meaning of the 5
life of this world. You [know you] cannot deflect the trials and tribulations, the harms, external or within the religion itself. And the life of this world is only meaningful if you have become absorbed, and you become now the voice for good over evil. You join the ranks of the more subtle when you pass out of this world, facing the Divine Beauty. Does that make sense to you? So you have a different place in the Hereafter. How one gets to the point where one remembers this is by doing good deeds. It s that simple. If you do good acts of service, love, and worship with care and with simplicity, then we say you have 1/3 of the ticket for success. The second one is hala, momentary states of the heart where the heart in a sense stops, opens, and receives knowledge, guidance, and wisdom. How do you know? You know because the recipient of that is catapulted into a spiritual humility, humbleness, even a sense of loss; nonetheless, it takes a very unique individual to have two of these qualities or prerequisites. The third is, as I said earlier, deeds. When one speaks the al-ista adha (seeking refuge in Allah), and you are committing good deeds, when the heart forms an attribute in its own self, a quality from Allah, it begins to manifest within your own self. Your tongue speaks it, your body carries it, your mind affirms it. The person moves from being a slave to a murīd. The slave is just a slave, maybe, and discovers certain things of karamat; but the murīd is someone who takes some of the warmth of something previous and adds it to their own purpose. In other words, the slave becomes transferred into a murīd, a seeker. And a seeker is someone who is, by definition, looking for something. The seeker is seeking the protection of Allah Swt from the vicissitudes of life, from the illnesses, the difficulties, the challenges. The slave, in the previous lesser stage, 6
is trying to just do good deeds and have good behavior; but it s not enough. The deeds and good behavior get you on the train, so to speak, but you still have to pay for the ticket. Buying a ticket in this case means you are seeking the safety and protection of Allah from very specific means of treating the disease. If one of these components knowledge, or the state of the heart that creates humility and gratitude in the heart in the moment, maybe accompanied by emotion even, and the good deeds if any one of those is missing, then the al ista adha has no power. You have to know what you are saying, say it for a good reason, and do it in a way that you are seeking out means to do good work, good deeds, for the sake of Allah Swt, not for your own sake. Then that s when the al ista adha comes into power. If you don t believe there is no power other than Allah Swt; that there is no generosity but from the Infinite Source of generosity; if you don t believe that all humility starts with Allah Swt, then it is useless to try to go much further on the journey. You have to learn to rely 100% on Allah Swt and to be patient. We see that those who created these du ā for us that have lasted for 1,434 years and beyond that (earlier, the Torah and the Injīl), those people who uttered these specific words imbued those words on some form, either on paper or in some kind of service. But it s all for naught, unless you have those three elements at the front of your mind. The Shaytan is always saying, Look, I m going to cut the bond between you and Allah. I m going to reduce the opportunity you have through sicknesses, challenges at work, through being wrapped up in your own desire nature, through distrust. Those seeds of discontent are sown. But if you have the knowledge, and if you have the three elements we talked about, and you sincerely want to see or hear what the truth is, then you might find yourself in a position to really study that, to really study what you want to understand, to be in the presence of those who understand it, in a kind of more cosmic suhbat. If you turn your attention towards Allah, towards the 7
beauty, then Shaytan can t touch you. In this progressive state, you go through these different latā if and transmissions and different orders, and you come to realize that you are just building this base of capacity and knowledge. Sometimes, it s like academic knowledge; and other times, it s a kind of spiritual knowledge that you choose to do that right thing at the right time. You choose to say the right thing at the right time. You choose your words carefully because you know and understand the power of it. You know when and when not to use this or that. Try to remember, before you say your prayer at night, before you make Hizb ul Bahr, before you read Qur an, which you should do a little of every day, even one āyat, remember when you say, aūdhu billāhi minash-shaytānir-rajīm, what it really means, what kind of power is really given. What does all of this mean? We turn toward that light and toward the Beauty of Allah Swt, and beauty gives everything meaning. Truth gives things meaning. Certainty gives things meaning. You can see the hierarchy. Unless we develop the capacity to make tawajjuh, whatever transmission we are on, unless we affirm it, and we support it by turning our attention to what is good and beautiful, by our good adab, by our sincerity in practice, by our consistency, [we may hear the whispering of Shaytan]. Know that we may have to change certain basic things in order for these seeds of change to be planted in our garden. We may have to pull out all the other things in our garden, because we have faith that this seed I m going to put in will be more nutritious, more beautiful, more powerful, or have sufficient power or control so that we will not fall by the wayside. We won t hear the whisperer. We pay no attention [to the whisperer], because now we are being heard by the Divine, the people of tariqah, the awliya-llāh. 8
The Prophet (sal) says, Who utters this phrase, I seek refuge in Allah, the All Hearer and the All Knower, from the whispers of the accursed and rejected Shaytan, and also reads the last three verses of Sura al Hashr (S. 59), Allah will commission 70,000 angels for that person s care until the evening. What you are hearing in al-hashr is very important. You are hearing Names of Allah (not all 99) that are considered to be powerful. Secondly, they are ones you can keep on your tongue and in your mind. If you are going to turn to Allah, and you are going to have a memory of that moment when you turn, then collectively what you will be building is a whole new framework for your own life a framework of beauty, a framework of self-control, of attention choosing always the most expedient and best way to do something, and not allowing yourself to get distracted. That s what happens in this kind of mentality, from aūdhu billāhi minash-shaytānir-rajīm, let alone, Bismi-Llāh. We can spend a month on bismi-llāh, but we won t right now. Asalaam aleikum. 9