Civilization

Classical Persian poetry.

Annals Of Transgressive Transcendentalism: Emerson's Saadi

From a journalist's blog.

Annals Of Transgressive Transcendentalism: Shaykh Abu Bakr ibn Abi al-Wafa'

Shaykh Abu Bakr ibn Abi al-Wafa' was the illiterate son of an Aleppine muezzin (d. 1583). He found employment with an Ottoman official with whom he traveled to Damascus. There he met one of the Salahin (Righteous Ones) and was "attracted by God" (majdhub). When he returned to Aleppo, he left imperial employment and took to haunting ruins and burial places on the outskirts of town (literal "bewilderment").

The majdhub is a recognized social type in Muslim societies. He or she is someone who has become acutely aware of the arbitrariness of social conventions and, in order to bear witness to this insight (kashf), adopts anti-authoritarian modes of behavior. In the case of Shaykh ibn Abi al-Wafa', such behavior included extreme acts of asceticism (for instance, it is said that he extracted all of his teeth), antinomianism (he went naked in public and recited Qur'anic verses out of order), verbal "gender-bending" (referring to males as females and vice versa) and, as mentioned above, literal bewilderment (hayran).

At the same time spake the Lord by Isaiah the son of Amoz, saying, "Go and loose the sackcloth from off thy loins, and put off thy shoe from thy foot." And he did so, walking naked and barefoot. ~ Isa. 20:2 (KJV).



Deface the currency!

~ Diogenes of Sinope

Transgressive Transcendentalism

The idea that "conventional religion" is fading into the past and that a "spiritual revolution" is unfolding strikes The Mazeppist as wishful thinking.

"Unconventional religion" requires thought, thinking is hard work, and these facts alone guarantee "conventional religiosity" a bright future.

Be that as it may, Imam Ghazali was surely on the mark when he referred to taqlid (blind following of religious professionals) as "the religion of donkeys."

The moral of this story? Don't be an ass.

Meditation Upon Imam Sadeq

A Shi'i reading of history.

History Is The Record Of Unintended Consequences

The underground springs of one of the oldest and most profound intellectual, spiritual, and poetic traditions ever produced by humankind in the last 5,000 years or so are to be found in Central Asia, many of them concentrated in the Iranian plateau. This is the point of origin, so far as we know, of the Indo-European languages. Whoever the Aryan (Iranian) peoples were, they began to fan out from their mountainous pasturelands some 4,000 years ago. Those who went south into Mother India settled and produced the Rig Veda which would later be meditated and commented upon to produce the Upanishads and the philosophical-devotional religions of that region.

Perhaps 3,000 years ago a radical Vedic priest somewhere in Iran began to sing of his visionary experiences with divine beings, broke with the priesthood, and with the patronage and (as it turned out, temporary) protection of a local prince, laid the foundations of what would become ethical monotheism. His name was Zarathustra. When Judean exiles in Mesopotamia began to study his teachings in, roughly, the 6th century BCE, they married their native traditions of admonitory Near Eastern prophecy with his ecstatic visions of alternative realms and worlds and what would become Biblical literature was born.

Half a millennium later in Palestine and under the yoke of Roman imperialism, an apocalyptic sect of these Judeans (now “Jews”) under the leadership of an itinerant preacher named Yeshua, proclaimed the overthrow of the Empire and the end of the world. In the short term, the world did not come to an end but the Romans made certain that Yeshua (and others like him) did. Some of Yeshua’s followers refused to accept defeat and proclaimed their executed master was not only alive but returning immanently to settle accounts.

After four centuries of recruitment among Hellenized Jews and (most especially) their gentile neighbors, this anti-imperial movement would become, ironically, the imperial religion of Christianity. The political genius responsible for co-opting an anti-imperial movement for imperialist ends, Constantine, seized power in Rome and then transferred the seat of his power from Italy to the Bosphorus. There he built what was to become, in time, a magnificent cosmopolis which he named, with exemplary Christian humility, after himself.

While the Romans were fashioning Christianity for their imperial ends, the Iranians had not been idle; they, too, had developed absolutist political traditions but made the "mistake" (as Rome saw it) of adapting the teachings of Zarathustra to them. Unwilling to countenance a rival empire with an alternative ideology, Constantine's successors built a powerful military machine that persecuted dissenters within its domains and waged holy war against Iran.

The struggle between the two regional superpowers waxed and waned over the course of several centuries; then, in the 7th century CE, an Arab prophet emerged from their southern periphery--an area that had managed to avoid complete subjugation by either imperial power. His message forged a “middle way” (cp. Qur'an 2:143) that incorporated elements of Arab Judaism, Arab Christianity, and Iranian gnosis and ecstasy and appealed to many who had become disenchanted with (and disenfranchised by) endless inter-imperial warfare.

When this prophet's followers overran the failing Iranian empire a couple of decades after his death (on their way to creating an empire of their own), a great transformation began to unfold. By the 10th century CE, the rich amalgam of Arab, Jewish, Christian, and Iranian genius had produced a civilization of depth and beauty unrivaled anywhere in the world outside of China. Its political and cultural center was Baghdad, but the subterranean springs of Central Asia mixed with the ancient waters of the Tigris and Euphrates, the Nile, the Indus, and even the Aegean.

Into that world, in the 14th century, the poet Hafez was born.

The Humanitas Of All Islam

For Europe, the 14th century was something of a disaster (see Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror, 1978). Not so Iran. Indeed, in the fabled city of Shiraz, a "miracle" occurred. His name: Khwaja Shams ud-Din Muhammad (Hafez). In an essay of remarkable depth and perspicacity, Daryush Shayegan opines: "... [Hafez] is not simply a great Persian poet, he is the 'miracle' of Persian literature; it is in him that the millenary sap of a culture is crystallized, which, grafting the prophetic traditions of the Muhammadan Revelation on to the ancient spirit of Iran, made a synthesis so full, so profound, that it became, as it were, the humanitas of all Islam, oriental and Iranian."

~ Shayegan, "The Visionary Topography of Hafiz" (1980).



"When you pass by our tomb wish for spiritual power,/for to the rends of the world it will be a place of pilgrimage."

~ Hafez, Ghazal 33, tr. Elizabeth T. Gray, The Green Sea of Heaven (1995).

Hafez

Now, more than ever...

The one who gave your lovely face its rosy/red and white/Can give me peace, and patience to endure/my wretched plight;

The one who taught your curls their airy/arrogance can give/Me justice to redress the hopeless grief/in which I live.

Oh, I despaired of Farhad when his hand/assigned the rein/Of his bewildered heart to Shirin's lips,/and her disdain.

If treasuries of gold are lacking, well,/contentment's beckoned;/The one who gives the first to kings sees beggars/receive the second.

The world displays herself to us as such/a charming bride,/But life's the dowry that men pay to lie/at her sweet side.

From now on it's the cypress and the clear/streams' banks for me;/Especially now spring's promise scents the breeze/incessantly.

"Justice!" I cry. And since, Qavam al-din,/we've had to part,/This age's grief, your absent face, usurp/Hafez's heart.

Tr. Dick Davis, Faces of Love, 74-75.

A Homily By Dervish Baba

O Son of Adam! Did you really believe that a Day of Satisfaction would come? And what if it did? What would you do then?

Last season's fruit is eaten/And the fullfed beast shall kick the empty pail.

~ T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding.

O Son of Adam! Longing is your lot and your life. Longing is be-longing; it is be-ing itself.

But perhaps this is something only poets understand.

(In Arabic, the language of prayer, sha'ara is to understand something intuitively; shi'r is poetry).

The Liturgy Of Encounter

In Islam, prayer is the equivalent of the Mass. For Sufis, to pray, to remember God, and to engage in the liturgy of encounter with God is the touchstone of being a Muslim. Setting aside for a moment the debates on the precise meaning of the Qur'an on various issues, for ordinary believers the Qur'an is a glorious document they could never hope to have the training to understand. In that sense, the Qur'an cannot provide the answer to why Muslims are Muslims. Perhaps it is better to shift the answer to: because they sense themselves to be people of prayer, of remembrance, of liturgical encounter with God. It might be because Muslims have made much of the fact that they do not have priests that the search for understanding has shifted away from liturgy. Whatever may be the reasons...I will argue that the liturgical is the religion, for the simple reason that it makes all the rest valid. Muslims do encounter God in prayer; they do encounter God in dhikr (remembrance). This is the touchstone of the faith.

~ Earle H. Waugh, Visionaries of Silence, Cairo: AUC Press (2008), 4.

Hebron

And think not to say within yourselves, We have Abraham to our father: for I say unto you, that God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham. ~ Matthew 3:9 (KJV).

The Way Of Abraham, the Hanif

Like Father Abraham, the Hanific pietist studies religion as an inventory of inherited prejudices--to better resist it. This is praeparatio adventus--not of the Christ, who has come and gone, but of the last god.

The last god is not the end; the last god is the other beginning of the immeasurable possibilities of our history.
~ Martin Heidegger, Contributions, 326.

This is the secret burden of the Qur'an, hidden in plain sight.

According to Muhammad's companion Ibn 'Abbas:

The Messenger of God was asked, "Which religion is the most beloved to God?" He replied, "Primordial and Generous Faith (al-hanifiyya al-samha)." [Quoted by Ahmad ibn Hanbal in Sahih al-Bukhari].

So, don the khirqa of disillusionment, seek what is hidden in plain sight, and "be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares." [Hebrews, 13:2, KJV].

Such is the Way of Abraham, the Hanif.

No Proofs, Only Witnesses

There are no proofs for the existence of the God of Abraham. There are only witnesses.

~ Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Prophets, vol. 1, 22.

What Does It Mean To Think?

To think is to confine yourself to a single thought that one day stands still like a star in the world's sky.

~Martin Heidegger

The Great, Hidden Single Ones

In the meditative silence and simple dignity of salat, Hanific pietists, "the great, hidden single ones...create the stillness [necessary] for the passing by of the [last] god."

~ See Martin Heidegger, Contributions, p. 328.