Reading the Qur'an

Reading and reading--the approach. The book itself has very little meaning unless one looks into one's heart. Battles, religious prejudice, punishments all are the words written but one must overlook the words and look inside the heart for the humanity...the fusion of the heart and the Qur'an to create the love and understanding that creates truth, light, clarity, love, wisdom...sifting and re-sifting.
But why can't this be said about the Bible or any other sacred book? To read the outer in order to get into the inner is just a key to the door which can open the heart. Why can't this be said about beautiful poetry, or beautiful music, or just a beautiful day in nature? They are all keys to the door of how beautiful life is and how one can reach this unity with God and with peace and with love--wisdom is created.
Entering this sacred space allows one to understand life in a different way---its true meaning...the Nur, the wisdom, the interpretation, the understanding, the water of faith...the love, compassion, tolerance, brotherhood.........
One could interpret this inspiration and light and suggest that it can come in many different forms and many different sources...Van Gogh, Beethoven...great inspiration coming to people in moments or lives...and watch it come in many forms. To someone who is less receptive, it may never come. To others it may come seldom. To a few, it may come once or twice. To some it lives with you all the time.
Or...is the heart the key to seeing, hearing, sensing...and if the heart is not ready than the senses are not ready to understand..??

Journey Part 3

Does the "real" world have to die in order to fulfill this journey? Dieing in a sense that one gives up all the rules of life--the desires, passions, goals....
Is there a way to correct one's life in a "proper" way and establish a direct path toward an inner peace and understanding? Does that not mean giving up one's right to test, experiment, and prove to a conclusion that this is a path that should be followed? Reaching for the Ka'bah on the inside...does this mean that one has to follow a path on the outside--follow certain practices, prayers and physical actions in order to continue? Or cannot one just meditate and contemplate while working toward this inner peace and goal of love and harmony?

Journey--Part 2

For me it was a spiritual journey, searching and becoming closer to myself. This interior journey parallels the external journey--grasping at the mysteries of life and probing into the heart where true love can be found. I don't want to sound like I am even close to where I am going but the small steps that I am taking are giving me a better sense of why I'm here.
To understand the influences of my outer life and to understand the desires that influence my feelings and actions...and ultimately discard them, to learn about the beauty of God's truth and to search for and acquire it is shari'at...... Will I ever find any of this on my journey, I do not know but it is a journey worth taking. Will I ever embrace that which is correct and reject these passions, I do not know. Will I ever be willing to listen and actually believe and trust, I do not know.
Is the world illusory and do we live in this illusory world with our bodies and physical self as we seek a spiritual path and inner transformation from a physical being to a light being? Are outer obligations necessary in order to achieve or embark on the journey? Do they really help the process? Do I want to admit that I, and all human beings, achieve a wealth that is incomplete and a happiness that is incomplete? Do I want to possibly believe that I can't struggle further to finally reach a physical completion that is satisfying and worth struggling for? Am I ready for any kind of divine knowledge, unity, and love? Do I possibly want to believe that there is any certainty to anything that cannot be tested and proven?
One heck of a journey to Philadelphia....

Journey

I had a wonderful journey this week and was able to spend a day with the folks at the Bawa Muhaiyaddeen fellowship. They passed on to me their expressions of love and heartfelt desire that all of you will be able to soon visit the fellowship and the Mazar. I was greeted with such warmth and care, given gifts of books, tea, and earnest dialogue that really gave me a great feeling of acceptance 3000 miles from home. The beauty of the Mazar, the resting place of Muhammad Raheem Bawa Muhaiyaddeen, was beyond words. Muhammad Lateef Hayden had me follow him on a beautiful 45 mile drive out into the countryside near Lancaster, Pa., stopping on the way to visit Chuck and Nina, members of the fellowship--Chuck having designed and organized the building of the Mazar. Again, the greetings and discussions were wonderful and engaging and their interest in the GTU and the newly established Islamic Center most genuine. We continued on to the Mazar, arriving just at sunset, enjoying the landscape and setting on the way while spending several hours inside, meditating and talking about Bawa.

Mostly though, the visit was beyond words. Just great feelings and warmth.

Journey

Today I am traveling on a journey to Philadelphia to visit the Foundation for Bawa Muhaiyaddeen. I have been reading about the spiritual journey (or mystical journey)and am just getting to the point of even understanding that you cannot begin to embark on the "real" spiritual journey without leaving your body and form behind. We still and always will be attached and live in the realm of the world as long as we are "within" our bodies and attached to this world.
How to transform this experience and enter the world of the soul and the light is an experience which is beyond my grasp although I would like to think that I have the ability to understand why you would have to do it.
I had a question about attachment which is: distinguish "freedom from attachment" from a real indifference that you would have if you were free from attachment? Another way of asking that question is, how can you not be indifferent if you are detached and have no feelings toward any object or person? Or, does freedom from attachment come with feelings and not indifference and, if it does, how does it come without feelings of remorse, pain, love, hate, need or desire?
Onward to my journey.

Shaykh Ahmadou Bamba

A different view of colonization from the eyes of the colonized.

I was just reading about a Muslim philosopher who led a successful nonviolent struggle for peace within the last century. Shaykh Ahmadou Bamba, who stated that “My religion is the love of God,” emphasized his spiritual heritage and wrote that he merely transmitted the messages of many great spiritual masters before him.

He was a founder of Mouridism, one of four Sufi movements in Senegal with several million followers. Faced with tourture and deportation, he responded with prayer and peaceful resistance, always emphasizing the virtues of pacifism and hard work in life. His followers aspire to live closer to God, following his example of living in peace, a Sufi philosophy.
His life reminds us of the adaptability of religion to different cultures, people and geographies throughout the world.
Ahmadou Bamba led a pacifist struggle against French colonialism in Senegal attempting to restore the practice of Islam away from French colonial influence. By doing so, Bamba led a spiritual struggle against this colonial domination of his culture.

It is always interesting to find these historic leaders who have remained in the shadows of our texts yet bring so much richness and life to our perspective of the cultural struggles that we have viewed from our Western lense. We have viewed west Africa from our colonial lense and rarely have we viewed its history from the perspective of the colonized. Richness abounds!

Pope and Islam

It was quite an historic day with the Pope making up for lost ground with the Islamic world, greeting King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. Here was the Pope who, not more than a year ago, implied that Muslims were "evil and inhuman," greeting the leader of the host country of Mecca.

New York Times

Pope Benedict Meets Saudi King at Vatican

By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
Published: November 7, 2007
ROME, Nov. 6 — Pope Benedict XVI and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia clasped hands at the Vatican on Tuesday in the first official meeting between a pope and a Saudi monarch, who is entrusted to protect Mecca, the birthplace of Muhammad and the center of the Islamic world.
The two met for half an hour, speaking through interpreters, in a conversation that a Vatican news release said had been cordial and had covered the “value of collaboration between Christians, Muslims and Jews for promoting peace” and “the necessity of finding a just solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, among other themes.
Marco Politi, the Vatican correspondent for the Italian daily La Repubblica and a biographer of Pope John Paul II, said, “I think it is extraordinarily important that an official communiqué from the Vatican and an important Islamic state like Saudi Arabia mentions ‘cooperation’ between Christians Muslims and Jews — not dialogue but cooperation.”
The meeting, presaged by an upbeat front-page article in L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican’s newspaper, was also a clear attempt by the Vatican to repair damage done by the pope’s 2006 statement on Islam, which the Arab world had seen as insensitive if not incendiary.
In a speech in Regensburg, Germany, in September 2006, Benedict quoted a 14th-century Byzantine emperor who called Islam “evil and inhuman.” The comment led to protests in Islamic nations, and prompted some Islamic states to recall their Vatican ambassadors.
Firebombers attacked churches in the West Bank and Gaza, gunmen killed an Italian nun in Somalia, and the pope was threatened. The Vatican expressed “deepest regrets” but said the remark had been misinterpreted in a way that “absolutely did not correspond” to the pope’s intentions.
The article in the Vatican newspaper seemed to open the door for a diplomatic initiative toward Islam and the Middle East. It said the meeting with Abdullah was “of great importance.”
“In a world where the boundaries have become day by day more open, dialogue is not a choice but a necessity,” it said.
The article also acknowledged that some weeks ago Pope Benedict had received a letter from 138 Islamic religious leaders from 43 nations, appealing for more dialogue between Christians and Muslims. As the weeks went by with no response, some scholars here had complained that the pope seemed slow to address an important appeal. The Vatican allayed those fears on Tuesday.
The meeting represents a triumph of sorts for Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican secretary of state, and especially for Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, president of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue. Cardinal Tauran, who previously served the church in Lebanon and Syria, is familiar with the Middle East and has promoted greater contact with Islamic states.
But official statements issued Tuesday did not mention establishing diplomatic relations between the Vatican and Saudi Arabia, and it was not clear that the topic was even discussed. In May, the United Arab Emirates became the latest Islamic country to establish diplomatic relations with the Vatican, the Vatican newspaper said.
One reason the Vatican wants to forge diplomatic relations in the Middle East, or at least increase its diplomatic influence there, is the presence of significant Roman Catholic populations in predominantly Muslim countries. Almost all are guest workers from elsewhere. The Vatican noted that 1.5 million Christians are in Saudi Arabia, the majority of them Catholics from the Philippines.
The State Department has criticized Saudi Arabia for religious intolerance and persecution of non-Muslims. “Charges of harassment, abuse and even killings at the hands of the Muttawa (religious police) continue to surface,” the department said in a report issued this year.
But little sign of tension was evident Tuesday. The pope gave the king a 16th-century engraving of the Vatican and a gold medal with his seal. The king gave the pope a sword, telling him it was “made of gold and precious stones.”
In 1999, long before becoming king, Abdullah met Benedict’s predecessor, John Paul II, who also met other prominent Muslim leaders, including, in 1999, Mohammad Khatami, a moderate cleric who was president of Iran.