I am as my servant thinks I am...

This weekend, our masjid was open as part of Doors Open Toronto.  Alhamdulillah, over the course of the weekend, we welcomed over 700 visitors, who took tours of the mosque and learned about Islam and Muslims.

As part of the tour, we had a calligraphy display, which included selected verses from the Qur'an and some hadith.

At one point, I started speaking to a woman who was studying the calligraphy intently.  She paused at this piece, saying she wasn't sure if she really understood what it meant.

I am as my servant thinks I am.  I am with him when he remembers Me.
- Hadith Qudsi

I told her that a person's experience of God is based on way that they think of Him.  If they think God is kind and merciful, they will see His kindness and mercy everywhere.  If they think God is uncaring or vengeful, that's also what they will see.

My favourite example is one that I heard from Shaykh Hamza Yusuf.  It's the example of the atheist. 

I used to work in a lab, where we would study chemical, biological and physical processes in the field of nanotechnology. 

In the field of science it's not uncommon to find a lot of atheists. 

I and my atheist colleagues would read the same papers, look at the same experiments and phenomena and come to completely opposite conclusions.  While the complexity and perfect balance that we observed everywhere we looked would reinforce my belief in God's existence, the exact same observations would reinforce my colleagues' belief in God's non-existence.

They didn't believe He existed so, as He stated in the hadith qudsi,  no matter where they looked, they would never find Him.

Human development and tawakkul

In human development, we progress from dependence to independence.  We're born as creatures completely dependent on others for our care and basic nourishment and protection.  As we grow up, we learn to do things on our own and we become more independent.

For some, the development stops here.  They learn to do things on their own and as much as possible they want to do things on their own.  They don't want to have to rely or depend on anyone.  They want to do it themselves.

But there's a level beyond independence.  None of us is perfect and we all have different strengths and weaknesses.  If we can work with others and let their strengths compensate for our weaknesses, we can create a whole that's greater than the sum of its parts.  That's interdependence.

I used to think that the progression ended there.

And then, I realized that there's another step beyond relying on others.

It's tawakkul -- where we depend on God.

I remember reading about Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and how he had a habit of praying an hour every day.  And then when his day was going to be particularly busy and challenging, he would pray even longer.  He knew he needed God's help even more that day.

I'm also learning myself, ever so slowly, that everything comes from God.  He is the Cause of causes.  And if He chooses to grant you something, no one can prevent it from reaching you.  And if He chooses to withhold it from you, there's no way you can get it.

So you make your effort, but the result is up to Him.  So if you don't get what you were striving for, you don't need to beat yourself up about it.  It's not all in your hands.  You don't have control over everything.  You just need to keep trying.

Perhaps His withholding of the thing you wish for is good for you.  Perhaps it's part of a lesson that you will not be able to learn any other way.  Perhaps it's His way of protecting you.  Certainly, He has a good plan in everything.

And when you realize this, somehow life gets a lot less stressful.  You don't put so much pressure on yourself because it's not all up to you.  You learn to accept whatever situation you're in because you know that a higher power and a better planner has put you here.

Now, stepping back and thinking about all this, the truth is, from the beginning, we were completely dependent on God anyways.  So tawakkul, is not so much a new step, but a realization of our original condition.

I got to thinking that's basically what we're doing in being Muslims -- in submitting to God -- we're just being true to ourselves.

Because whether we like it or not, we are servants of God.  We were created as such.  And when we realize that and act accordingly, we're just aligning ourselves with our inner, original nature.

It reminds me of the first line of the Girl Guide promise... "I promise, to be true to myself..."

We've always had a hard time explaining that to the girls.  And now I know it has a deeper meaning than we ever thought.

Finding God... at Work

Transcribed from a short talk by Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad:

Often, Muslims working in a contemporary, fast-moving, turbo-capitalistic-world workplace, feel guilty and uncertain and think that perhaps they're selling out.

In fact, ours is not a worldly religion, but a religion that teaches us to be at ease in the world. 

And our founder, the Holy Prophet, salla Allahu 'alaihi wa sallam, was in the world. 

He was not a monk or a nun.  He was part of his society.  He fully participated in the political and economical and social and marital life of his culture. 

He was an economic actor.

So when we look at issues like this, we find that we're able to go right back to the fountain head of the religion to see what he, himself, had to say about issues that are very contemporary, but in fact are part of the timeless language of human ethics. 

This is about issues that are eternal -- issues of charity, issues of empathy, issues of justice.  This is not a new innovation.

What I want to do, is consider a hadith -- a well know saying of the Holy Prophet, salla Allahu 'alaihi wa sallam.  It's narrated by Jabir bin Abdullah and it's in the collection of Al Bukhari, so it's rigorously authenticated.  And he says, sallaAllahu 'alaihi wa sallam,

Rahima Allahu imra'an
sahla al-bay'ee
sahla ash-shiraa'ee
sahla al-qadaa'ee
sahla al-iqtidaa'ee

It's one of those pithy, syncopated, rhyming statements that we often find in the hadith. 

What it means is,

May God have mercy upon a person
who is easy in his buying,
and in his selling,
and in his taking of money in a loan,
and in his reclaiming of money that is owed to him.

Not a very elegant English translation, I'm afraid.  Even if you don't know Arabic, you'll know how zippy is the original.

And it's a prayer from the Prophet, that God should have mercy on these people.

This may come as some kind of culture-shock, because we tend to assume nowadays--Muslims, like everybody else -- that religion, spirituality, personal transformation, the "Hotline to God", are things that happen in a beautiful sacred place, a little quiet backwater, perhaps a retreat centre, perhaps a place we go to on Friday or Saturday or Sunday, and the real world is out there, where we accumulate all kinds of bad vibes, which we then purge at a place of worship.

Sometimes we treat a place of worship as a kind of spa, where we go to decontaminate.

That's a very unhealthy way of looking at what we do 5 or 6 days a week.

The Muslim vision is that of a totality. 

Everything is to be incorporated into the Fundamental Human Project, which has to be, for Islam, as for all other religions, turning away from the self, towards the other -- the Other with the big 'O' and also the other with the little 'o'. 

Turning away from our lower selfishness toward something that, in some strange but convincing way persuades us that it is what we really are, underneath.

The fundamental turning, which the Qur'an calls Tawbah, which we translate as repentance, means turning, turning away, and turning away from sin to righteousness, which is another way of expressing turning away from the rubbish within, to what is beautiful that God has placed within the soul.

So, when the Holy Prophet salla Allahu 'alaihi wa sallam, is speaking about economic matters, and matters of business ethics, this doesn't surprise us because everywhere belongs to God.  And everywhere is a place where God is to be celebrated -- even the computer terminal in the estate agent or wherever it is that you work.  Muslims are invited to find a way of sanctifying every moment of those experiences.

Imam Al Ghazali, one of the great ethical thinkers of Islam used to say that humanity basically exists in three categories:

Rajulun shaghalathu dunyaahu 'an ukhraahu, fa huwa min al halikeen

Category number one is the person whose worldly concerns distract him from his otherworldy concerns, and he is of the lost.

Wa rajulun shaghalthu ukhraahu 'an dunyaahu, fa huwa inshaAllah min al faa-izeen

And a man who is distracted by his otherworldly concerns from his worldly concerns and he is, God willing, one of the successful

wa rajulun a'aanat-hu ukhraahu 'ala dunyaahu wa dunyaahu 'alaa ukhraahu fa huwa min al muqarrabeen

And a man whose worldly concerns help him in his otherworldly concerns and he is of those brought near to God.

So we move close to God, not by skirting the realities of the world but rather going through them.  And that takes some doing.  Particularly in the modern world, where it is fair to say that the average contemporary workplace is not primarily geared up for fostering the spiritual life of its employees.

But in any case, whether we're Muslims or not, if we have any interest in what we call spirituality, it's something we're going to want to think carefully about.

---end of transcript---

So it's not about choosing this world or the next, it's about using this world for the next.

The ant on the carpet

Imagine an ant walking across a carpet.  As he walks, he crosses over fissures and crevices and climbs up and over bumps and mounds of seemingly random colors.  He can't understand what purpose this veritable obstacle course could serve.

Of course, the ant has a very limited perspective.  And if he could see the bigger picture, he would see clearly that the terrain he's walking across is actually a part of the beautiful pattern on a Persian carpet.

As we live our lives, we also have a very limited perspective.  We face obstacles and disappointments and plans change and things often don't go the way we wish they would.

Looking back, though, we can often see that whatever happened was exactly what we needed.

We just didn't know it at the time.

And ultimately, we know that although we might not see it, God always has a beautiful plan for us and things happen exactly as He intends it in His infinite Wisdom and Mercy.

From a Rumi poem related by Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad in a lecture about relying on God.

Upside down and backwards

I was reading Charles le Gai Eaton's book, King of the Castle today.  In it, he makes a very interesting point about religion and our modern world.  Our modern western society is unique in that it dismisses or puts in the periphery, what all other societies before it had made central in their lives -- namely a belief in the Divine and in an existence beyond our material world.

These beliefs came and still come in many forms.  But they were always there.  Somehow, all humans before us believed in a power beyond themselves.  They saw our world as part of something bigger.

Now, many people view such beliefs as backwards and incompatible with rational thought.  So what they're saying is that our ancestors in humanity -- all of them, for millenia -- have been completely wrong and it is only now, in the past century or so, that we got it right.

Now that is something have a hard time believing.