Category Archives: Islam

Comparative Religion, Islam, Modern Living, Spiritual Practice

Super-egoic Distortions in Islamic Fiqh

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Super-egoic Distortions in Islamic Fiqh

Yes, that’s a mouthful lol. Let’s break down the vocabulary before we get started! Freud separated consciousness of human beings into three parts-ego, id and superego. (We will not address his lack of understanding of spirituality and religion at this point. But his psychological understanding was ground-breaking.) So, for him, the ego was our rational aspect, the id was our desires (“hawa’ in Arabic) and the superego was our conscience. Then he went further and saw that in some people the conscience, which although deficient in some, like psychopaths, could also be overactive in others- those we are going to address in this article. He then labelled those superegos as “punitive” or “sadistic”. And that-the sadistic superego- is one of the major toxins in all religious communities and one of the many reasons why people reject religion!

Now let’s be clear. The founders of our religion-the true Prophets and saints had no need for this overactive superego. They were universally energized, uplifted, even ecstatic beings by definition. That’s why they were appointed to those high positions in the spiritual hierarchy. But amongst their followers and often amongst the priestly class were people of lesser upliftment and less transcendent motivations. We can consider them as the religion’s bureaucrats and like all bureaucrats they get bored and unmotivated. So they need some “juice”. And the juice they get is from making other adherents guilty and miserable and afraid. In that way they are manifesting their “sadistic superegos”.

And don’t be fooled! All religions have them-not only Islam. I remember as a Jewish secularist, seeing young boys at their Bar Mitzvahs going up to the altar to recite the Torah from memory and being harassed by elderly parishioners for mistakes they made in the recitations! In Islam we could call these “tajweed” lessons lol! They are all fine and good if carried out with wisdom and kindness. I remember literally losing it with my tajweed teacher in Jordan when, after reciting two ayats perfectly, I tripped up on the third and he pounced on me -as was his habit! “You have no idea of pedagogy “ I said to him in my weak Arabic. ”At least the Western teachers know how to congratulate you when you do something right”. He was dumbstruck-because that is the way he was taught. My father told me that, in his days if you got something wrong, the rabbis would twist your ear until it really hurt. And we wonder why the conflict in the Middle East persists lol. In these two anecdotes, you have the entire story. But let’s not deviate into politics for now! It’s too tempting and too controversial!

Christians, of course, are not immune from this phenomenon. Catholic sisters used to whip their thighs, much like the Shia do on Ashura, until they bled. Priests would go around their neighbourhood,  threatening women if they had not had a child that year, with the hellfires. And God only knows what went on in the Missionary schools as expressions of the teachers and administrators “sadistic superegos”.

For the sake of brevity ,I am not going into details about the Hindu-Buddhist lineage .More of the same I am certain. We all know about Zen masters and their nasty bamboo sticks. The Chinese showed us pictures of the Tibetan Buddhist cages where they kept their prisoners(not that the Chinese do any better1 The atheists are just as cruel. Often more so. And the Hindus have some of the most painful ascetic practices as well. While visiting a guru in Kerala I was told that one of her German disciples was living in a hole underground for the last several months. That was considered a high-level spiritual practice!

Ok. That’s the intro. I think by now you get the point. But what I really wanted to do here is give more ordinary examples of this phenomenon-things that we may encounter on a regular basis in the practice of our religion. What triggered my reflection on this subject was something I noticed every year during Ramadan. Towards the end of the fast the Imam would almost inevitably say something like the following. ”Ok It’s all fine and good that you have now been fasting for 25 days. But many of you will slip after Ramadan into your previous behaviours and it will all be for naught. If you don’t continue with your Ramadan level of piety, all is lost” That all seemed to me cruel and heartless! How about instead  “Congratulations for all your efforts -fasting for three and a half weeks. You will certainly be rewarded for it. And I hope you keep it up”. Never heard it in 48 years of Ramadan. No the superego has to chime in and say “it’s still not enough. You could be doing better.”!

Now, the second term that may be unclear in the title is “Fiqh”. Usually translated as Jurisprudence-the rules of the religion and how to apply them. Let us take three examples of how the superego surreptitiously creeps into the equation.

  • The Niqab(face-covering) .(We will not discuss the issue of the hijab at this point. Almost all religions, Buddhism may be a notable exception, require head covering-both for males and females!) But the niqab is special. And many of the shuyukh recommend it or even require it. Yet if we go back to the two most important scriptural references on the question Quran 24;31 and the Asma hadith ,in both cases the face is excepted from the covering .In 24:31 it says: ”They should not display their adornments except what ordinarily appears( (most of the traditional scholars said that refers to the face and hands).The Asma hadith is even more clear! The Prophet tells the older sister of his wife Ayesha to cover everything except(again!) and then he points to the face and hands.
  • So where does the niqab idea come from. A strange twist of logic, where A becomes not-A lol. And I thought “mantiq”(logic was one of the Islamic sciences that scholars were supposed to study! One of the possibilities is the “more of the same” logical error. If something, like covering the head is good, then more, covering the Face, must be even better. That is patently bad logic. Ask a toxicologist if you need more proof lol P.S. I once had a patient who almost died from an overdose of water which gave her cerebral edema1 even too much water can be dangerous.

The other explanation I have heard from Taliban sources. That “zinat” the word in the ayat for ornaments also can refer to beauty. And the beauty of the woman is in her face. Interesting twist, no doubt, but a twist nevertheless. That is not what the ayat says!. So more misery for the l,adies from the superegos of male scholars.

 

2– The Time of Fajr prayer.

N.B. I was put onto this problem by none other than the somewhat unorthodox Trinidadian sheikh Imran Hossein. I am not very impressed by his politics and his eschatological theories where Russia saves the world?! But he does have other more valid theories and an interesting way of approaching studying the Quran. I think this insight about Fajr came from his studying what the Quran and hadith actually said rather than how the ulema have interpreted it!

 

Nowadays most Muslims use a printed or online calendar to determine their prayer times. And these times are mostly generated by astronomical calculations. It appears that for fajr there is some debate about 15 degrees and 18 degrees. I haven’t got into the minutiae because I disagree with the premise of using science when we have clear-cut sunnat to follow.

When the ayats appeared about prayer time and the beginning of fasting the Sahhabbas were not clear. The Quran stipulated 2:187  that it was the time when you could see the difference between a white and black thread. Still it was not clear how to use that directive so the Sahhabbas asked the Prophet saws. Then the Prophet saws explained that it was at the appearance of the first light on the horizon (the scholars call that the second dawn).

Now, if you use the calendars that are provided to us , you will never see that light at the given times. The scientists got it wrong again! Any surprise after Covid?! A friend of mine claimed that was due to light pollution in the city. Possible? But I have now verified it in the countryside on several occasions and in Third World countries-like the Tunisian villages. And it remains true in each of those contexts. The light is never there at the times on the calendar! For the ulema, this should be a serious concern. After all, it means that many Muslims are praying fajr during the time of Tahhajjud. Personally, I am not such a stickler for details but many of them are.      On a sidenote here, but one that gives us some context, Western meteorologists also try to determine the time of dawn and their definition is similar to ours-“the first appearance of light”. However if you look it up in your local area, you will be shocked. It is often at least an hour later than our calendars say about fajr. So twice the time gap that Imran Hosein is claiming. Much to reflect on!

 

3-Miscellaneous issues-all involving the operation of the punitive superego

 

  1. a) The Habashi sect have their own qibla calculations. According to them if you are off by a few degrees your prayer is not accepted. So go back and do your last thirty years of prayers?!
  2. b) One of the scholars from the Sheikh Nuh community went to Pakistan to study Islamic finance. He was shocked by the rigidity of the students around him. They were more or less condemning him to the hellfires for his pants going down beneath the ankle. He came back quickly to Jordan lol
  3. c) Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen bank. The economist Muhammad Yunus won the Nobel Prize for the development of microcredits with the Grameen Bank. (Yes, I know he has become a controversial figure in his own country but that is not germane to our present discussion) With this tool many of the poor citizens of Bangladesh and India were helped out of poverty. This did not prevent him from being severely chastised by the Islamic scholars of Bangladesh as interest is considered by most of them to be prohibited in Islam. They couldn’t factor in all the benefit people were getting. Fortunately the Bangladeshi people are of a mild temperament. If this had happened in an Arab or Afghani context ,he may well have been assassinated!

The list goes on and on…I hope the overall message is loud and clear. As Sheikh Nazim used to tell us: ”Wear your religion lightly-not like a heavy cloak that burdens you” Otherwise you may become one of those religious malcontents whose only real plaesaue is in making other people miserable.

Joy and Happiness and Upliftment to you all, Sufi Ibrahim

Islam, Metaphysics, Politics, Psychology

Materialism-The Second Scourge of the Ummat

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Materialism: The Second Biggest Scourge within the Islamic Ummat

We have already written about the First Scourge- Islamism or Political Islam. This is the Second. In a way it is the deeper of the two and underpins the first one in terms of attitude. We shall explain this in the ensuing article.

This hadeeth was narrated by al-Tirmidhi (2352) from Anas (may Allah be pleased with him), according to whom the Messenger of Allah (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) said: “O Allah, cause me to live poor and cause me to die poor, and gather me among the poor on the Day of Resurrection.”

This hadith is not saheeh. It is considered gharib which means part of the chain has only one transmitter. That does not by any means mean that it is untruthful! And boy do the ulema have a problem with it- doing all kinds of intellectual acrobatics to not take the most obvious meaning of ”miskeen” which is poverty. So instead they say “miskeen” means humility which is a secondary meaning of the word!

Yet, they know well that the Prophet himself saws lived in poverty , died in poverty and said when he saws visited the heavens that most of the people there were from the poor folks.

So what’s the problem?! There seems to be a current within Islamic fiqh of wanting to justify wealth if not justify seeking it outrightly. Perhaps this is simply to distinguish themselves from the pious Christians who praised and practiced renunciation. But in that approach they seem to forget all of the teachings about greed and worldliness. Remember the four enemies?! One of them is ”dunniya” (worldliness) and a large part of this dunniya is about wealth.

The following sahih hadith should, in fact, close the argument!

Amr ibn Awf reported: The Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, said, “By Allah, it is not poverty that I fear for you, but rather I fear you will be given the wealth of the world, just as it was given to those before you. You will compete for it just as they competed for it, and it will ruin you just as it ruined them.”

Or alternatively this hadith Source: Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 3158, Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim 2961

One day he (Abdur Rahman Ibn Awf) heard the Messenger of Allah (PBUH) saying to him, “O lbn `Awf, you are a rich man, and you are going to crawl into Paradise. So lend to Allah in order to set your feet free.” Ever since he heard this advice from the Messenger of Allah, he started lending to Allah a goodly loan. He was being warned about the dangers of wealth.

Or from a previous Revelation…Jesus a.s. said  “Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” from Matthew 5:3 in the Bible- part of the Beatitudes.

 So what is this materialism that is so endemic in the modern world- including amongst the Muslims? Ever noticed lol? The opulence of the lifestyle of The Saudi Royal family and the kingdoms in the Gulf. The great buildings and towers in that part of the world.The sultanat of Brunei and its petroleum resources. Qatar -its buildings, its institutions it’s attempts to join the Western intelligentsia with its financial perks  and it’s World Cup hosting. The list goes on and on! In this article we will look at three forms of materialism and its implications.

 

  • Obvious Outward Wealth

This is what we just mentioned. No one can miss it!  It is most obvious. And although people like Trump may love it and be obsessed by it, most Muslims are wary. They know the dangers of excessive wealth. The Quran is full of stories of previous empires that had such wealth and then crumbled-sometimes in one fell-swoop catastrophe.

 

  • Ideological Materialism

This is what we were talking about in the previous text about the scourge of Islamism or Political Islam. In this form of Ideology the belief is that by establishing a Muslim state i.e. outer Islam, people will submit and become good and pious by default! What Tarek Fatah calls the “Chasing the Mirage”. All the  historical evidence-think Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iran -not to mention ISIS! -all those countries and movements that declared themselves  Islamic states and look at their records .Like the previous Materialistic philosophy, Marxism, it has all failed to live up to expectations. For those who need to be reminded Marxism was a form of Materialism, called Dialectical Materialism   It, too, believed in the state as the solution. In that case it called the State “The Dictatorship of the Proletariat”. And I think it is not unfair to call the Islamic state “The dictatorship of the ulema”. In fact in Iran they call it such “Velayat e Faqih.” (Governing by Jurisprudents)
There is an interesting corollary to this “Materialistic” philosophy. It is often, if not always, coupled to the ideology of Rationnalism. I have often been surprised to hear The Wahhabbis and more recently the Ikhwanis(Muslim Brotherhood) to claim to be the most Rational of Muslims. If they mean “most over-thinking”, “most hypercebral”,”most out of touch with the inner dimensions of Faith and spiritual experience”,then ,for sure lol, they are right. Sheikh Nazim liked to refer to these approaches as “mind-productions” and he taught us to distinguish them from truly sacred knowledge.

Materialists and Rationalists. What I call the “no-nur” people of Faith. Get me out of here!  Anecdote: I was once trapped in Amman by a group of Wahhabbi (Salafis)s who had invited me into their home for lunch.They were very critical of my sheikh of the time, Sheikh Nuh Keller, and of Sufism in general. At first I argued back but then I realized it was fruitless. So in one last attempt to affirm the Truth, I looked at the whole group and said; ”I don’t see any light in any of your faces! So how can I possibly accept your words?” And I ran out .What chutzpah! But I was proud of myself.

 

3)The most pernicious of all aspects of materialism and it’s real philosophical meaning-seeing only the outer (In Arabic that would be “thaheeri”)

Now Muslims are by no means unique in this outlook. We can see it in the atheists and the agnostics. We can see it in the science types (Philosophically called “scientism” or making science into a religion).We can see it in the data crunchers-the government officials, the news reports about polls and economic numbers, demographics, statistics. It is all around us -polluting our thinking as surely as burning coal pollutes the air!

But what form does it take in our religion?! Let us look at a few examples:

: The emphasis on outer form rather than inner essence. How many times during my Islamic career have I been corrected on details of ritualistic practice. ”You didn’t make sure the water went between your toes”, ”your ruku didn’t have enough of an angle to it”. “Your hair is too long”, ”.Your mustache isn’t clipped enough” etc. etc. Not once, not even once, has someone ,outside of sheikh Nazim lol, said to me “your face is illumined” OR the contrary “you are looking darker than usual today” Not once. They don’t notice. They don’t notice the scholars with “nur” in their faces and the scholars (more of them actually) with darkness. Who needs to notice that when you can check how well their nails or their mustaches have been clipped lol

: Then there is the obsession with the hijab! Is it perfect? Does it cover every single strand of hair? Is any of the neck exposed?. And in that obsessional vigilance, the fact that the perfect hijabi lady is exposing every curve in her body below the neck by her tight-fitting clothing is completely bypassed So what is the “hayat” (modesty) that our religion speaks of. Too subtle for many. Too inner a concept.

: And the marriage negotiations. Does he have a good job? Does he own his own apartment? Does the family have money? Is he tall enough? More materialism. How many Muslim ladies have I counselled whose family foolishly pushed them into a marriage that they themselves felt was wrong, because the man had financial stability?!

When I was living in Jordan, I rented an apartment upstairs of a man who had 3 daughters in their mid to late thirties. When I asked them why they were not married, they said their father required their suitors to have a good job, an apartment that he owned and $25,000 in U.S. cash. Very few people, outside of the Royal family lol, could meet such conditions.

On an alternative note, when we were honeymooning in India , we met a family with five unmarried daughters! They claimed their father was too busy with dhikr to arrange marriages for them?! But they seemed quite happy in comparison to the Jordanian ones. I guess they knew that they had avoided a lot of grief lol

And yet, our religion is full of the “inner” in its doctrine and language. In fact, the Quran begins in surat al Baqarah by Allah saying the believers are those who believe in the “ghaib”( the unseen). There is “Iman” (Faith), ”khushua” (sacred humility in prayer), ”tawakuul” (trust in God) .

Particularly in Sufism, we find terms about the inner. We talk of “hal” (spiritual states), ”afiya” (inner well-being), “basirat” (inner vision ) and “samiyya” ( inner hearing) and “fuad( the subtle feelings in the heart), “muhabbat( love)  and “sir”(the mystical secrets). These terms exist all through the sacred texts. But who needs that if you have measurements-concrete, empirical realities  that you can rely on- just like the Materialist scientists?!

God help us to recover our souls and spirits!

 

 

Islam, Spiritual Practice

The Grozny Conference

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The conference was dedicated to the 65th anniversary of the birth of Kadyrov’s father, Akhmad Kadyrov, the first President of Chechnya.

The conference was notable for excluding representatives of Wahhabi and Salafi movements, and for its definition of Sunni Muslims in the final communiqué of the conference that included Sufis, Ash’aris and Maturidis, but not Wahhabis or Salafis. It condemned Salafism and Wahhabism as “misguided” sects, along with extremist groups such as ISIS, Hizb ut-Tahrir, the Muslim Brotherhood and others.

The conference definition stated:

“Ahl al-Sunnah wa al-Jama’ah are the Ash’aris and Maturidis (adherents of the theological systems of Imam Abu Mansur al-Maturidi and Imam Abu al-Hasan al-Ash’ari). In matters of belief, they are followers of any of the four schools of thought (Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi’i or Hanbali) and are also the followers of the Sufism of Imam Junaid al-Baghdadi in doctrines, manners and [spiritual] purification.”

Islam, Metaphysics, Modern Living

The Problem of Shirk

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The Problem of Shirk (Idolatry))

Especially relevant in the light of the current chaos at university campuses

Each of the major religions has an idea of what is the greatest sin. For Christianity it is pride. For Buddhism ( I particularly like this one!) it is ignorance. And for Islam it is “shirk”!

Now what is shirk? The official translation is “making partners with Allah”. But somehow that translation doesn’t quite work. After all ,who goes into business with God?! Maybe a few priests and rabbis and Imams lol but that is another matter. So what ‘shirk” really means is setting up other priorities in one’s life-other than God. After all, doesn’t the Bible itself tell us : ”You must love the Lord, thy God, with all thy heart and all thy mind and all thy soul”( Matthew 22:37-39) Well, most people don’t do that! -people from all the different faiths. So there is a problem!

And why is that?! Usually because they have other loves, other priorities-sometimes conscious ones and sometimes unconscious. So let us look at two categories of “shirk”.

Obvious Shirk

There are a few obvious forms of shirk-ones that are easy to detect and easy to denounce:

1-The first is love of money and material goods. This is the most commonly denounced one. I like to call it “economic paranoia”-where everything bad comes down to greed. As was said in the famous quote by president Bush, the elder: ”It’s the economy stupid”. So we get the all too common refrain ; ”Why did America go into Iraq-For the oil”. “Why have the doctors in Western countries been acting like fools during the Covid. It’s the money” Supposedly that answers everything. However ,I like to remind people, especially Christians, that greed is one of the 7 cardinal sins!  There are six others to be alert to.

Then again, for some people, it IS all about the money. And that is indeed a big problem.Now this “greed shirk” has a number of extensions which sound kosher-like “financial planning” for individuals and “GDP enhancement” for governments. They sound virtuous But scratch the surface and that too often comes down to greed!

2_ Then there is Power and Social Status. You can ask yourselves why there are so many people running for electoral office. Do they not see what a terrible job that is? And they often use the excuise that it is for “public service” which may be true-but only for a minority as far as I can see. For example, in the Covid vaccine debacle, there has only been one politician in America, Senator Ron Johnson, standing up for the Truth. All the others, many who must be aware of what is going on, are silent.They don’t want to jeopardize their position!

3_ Nationalism. It is rampant everywhere-American nationalism(“we are the greatest country ever”!)  Really?; Zionism( “only the Jewish people count”) ;.Arab nationalism(we see where that has led to in the Middle East) and locally French-Canadian nationalism( as long as you speak French, you’re good! As if lol). People with the least bit of insight and objectivity have seen through this one.

But then there are the more subtle forms of idolatry-one’s that whole swaths of people, if not the entire world, have embraced. They seem commendable, but once you scratch the surface, you see the corruption.

Hidden Forms of Shirk

1-The Cult of the Intellect– Of all the forms of idolatry ,this is probably the most potent and the most insidious one..This “cult’ is based on idealizing and idolizing the human mind. The Buddhists and Hindus have been onto this problem for a very long time and developed forms of meditation to get beyond it. But the three major Western religions have bought into it” whole hog”(pun intended!).Ever since the time of the Greek philosophers, especially Aristotle but many others, spread their unholy messages and were translated into Latin and Greek and Arabic, the scholars of the Western traditions have been imbibing this contamination -often without realizing it. Even great Talmudic scholars and Islamic ones like Al Ghazzali, have drunk the kool-aid. Al Ghazzali, despite his critique of philosophers for not believing in Revelation, then goes onto say that Logic is a valid science. They have even integrated it ( as” mantiq”) into the Isalamic sciences! Where did they get that from?! Where can you find that in the Quran and sunnat? Do they not get the wisdom in the fact that our Prophet saws was unlettered. No! They are all people of the Western Enlightenment” which is actually “Endarkment”

So we can see this cult in our Universies, in our so-called “Objective Science” , in our government institutions. And many,many people have integrated it into their personal lives-often at great expense to themselves and the people around them!

2-Relationship: No, this is definitely NOT relationship with God, but usually refers to intimate partners. P.S. I am in the midst of attending a summit on Zoom called “Healing Relationships” led by Terry Real,who I greatly respect as a psychologist- but definitely not as a spiritual teacher.

The extreme example of this cult of relationship may well be the Hollywood Romance but there are many, many more subtle variants.

So we get politicians resigning to spend more time with their families. They are probably lying as they have learnt to do in Democratic politics but that aside. It is now considered acceptable to give up your vocation, your life mission if you wish, in favour of your family and relationships. Men have been cowed into submission (ever noticed lol) and women empowere4d into tyranny-all in the name of relationships!

3 – Family. Now this is particularly noticeable in Eastern cultures -like the  Islamic ones I am currently in touch with.. How many times have I heard ”bir walidayn”(filial piety) and “Rahim Wassila”(maintaining ties to extended family))in Muslim discourse .Ironically the Quran says “ihsan walidayn” (being good to your parents ) rather than “bir walidayn” .Why? Because families can be ignorant and abusive. Because I have seen many Muslim parents marrying their daughters to nasty partners -often through the first shirk of materialism! ”He has a good career and money in the bank, so he must be a good partner” Really?! I have seen Muslims so absorbed with their family interactions that they forget to pray! Is that part of our religion?! I have seen people waste hours and hours socializing with their families with no noticeable benefit. Is that part of our religion. Certainly not! It is a hidden form of shirk!

Think about it, Sufi Ibrahim

 

 

Islam, Modern Living, Politics

Year in Review-2023

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The Year in Review-2023

   Problems of the Year

To paraphrase a famous quote from Winston Churchill lol:”Never in the history of human endeavour have so many been lied to by so many others for the benefit of so few”. Really! In all my years of existence (that’s now 77!) I have never seen so much lying! Whether we call it “spinning” or “cherry-picking” or” minimizing” or “denying” or “covering up”, the mendacity is literally through the roof. My principal Sheikh-Sheikh Nazim Haqqani- told us about it in the 1980’s! He put it in spiritual terms. ”We are now under the hegemony of the shaytan” he said. I couldn’t believe his Turkenglish included the word “hegemony” lol But he had it spot on! And I recently saw an interview with Roseanne Barr who is now a born-again Jew!, saying the same thing. ”This is the work of the devil” she said about her firing on her highly rated TV show  in an interview with Joshua Phillips of Epoch TV.

So instead of “man of the year” or “woman of the year” or “athlete of the year” this article is going to be titled “Problem of the Year”. The problem, however, is probably a lot more than a year old! At least a century in my opinion and it is not likely to change much by next year. We shall see……

The Root Problem (the one that causes all the others!)

The root problem- the one that causes all the others is “Mind-productions”.  I was first introduced to this term by Sheikh Nazim himself. But it is something that has been known for a long, long time. The Hindus and Buddhists have been talking about it since the beginning of their traditions. They understood that the mind was a trap- full of illusions. It is a central concept in their theology. Less so for the Western traditions -like Christianity (possibly the ultimate offender, given its elaborate theology and and its all too numerous theologians.( In fact European intellectuals, from the Greeks to the Germans and the French are certainly at the heart of the problem. But their malady is now universal!)The Jews with their Talmudic scholarship are next in line-not chronologically but in terms of intensity. And then we have the Muslims and their Islamic Sciences-often full of mind-productions. In the Western religions, it seems to only be the mystics like the Kabbalists  in Judaism and the Sufis in Islam that recognize the problem

So where does this all come from? We could say with some justification that it is intrinsic to our nature and the  evolutionarily advanced Cerebral Cortex that we are endowed with. This cortical activity can be very useful in certain situations but very damaging in others. Much like science itself-very useful at times, very harmful at others.

Cost vs. benefit?! I will let the reader figure out that one themselves. Most people, especially so-called “intelligent ones”, have been duped on this one.! A  new cancer treatment is developed and everyone is excited. But they fail to realize that the vast majority of cancers are caused by science itself! -pesticides, heavy metals, VOCs in construction materials, additives in food, EMFs everywhere. Cost vs. benefit? In this case, highly negative. But most people’s “mind-productions” don’t go there! They think instead “science-wonderful”! Which brings us to the next form of “mind-productions”-the collective ones!

I have been talking about The Cult of The Intellect for at least seven years (see the article on my blog about it in Nov.2016!). But this year ,I have come to realize that it is not purely a matter of individual minds! In fact there are numerous “collective mind-productions”! This phenomenon goes by various names. My favourite for now is “echo-chambers”. And we have loads of them now! We have  ”the man-made climate change” echo-chamber. The “vaccines are safe and effective” echo-chamber now generally known as the “medical-scientific echo-chamber” and most recently with the Gaza-Israel war I have come across the “Muslim echo-chamber”. You know the one that says “free Palestine” ( we could discuss at length what they need to be free of?!) Or “From the River to the Sea”-a clearly genocidal echo-chamber!

One of the problems that comes up here is that people honestly believe their thoughts are their own. And generally that is NOT the case. Most of their individual thoughts are imprinted on their minds from the ethnic or national or professional communities of which they are a part. There are only a very few people who are actually doing the research and thinking for themselves! So that is a whole other dimension of the problem. One that makes it that much more difficult to solve!

And why are these mind-productions-individual and collective- so important!? Because they are almost always abstract, theoretical and biased. So they don’t correspond to Reality and lead in fact to false solutions. Take “climate change” theories for example. Clear-thinking or should I say clear-perceiving people can see that this is purely theoretical. At first, I too worried about the impending disaster. Then I started looking into it. One of the first things I discovered is that the climate has been changing all throughout Earth’s history! And even in the last two millenia there were two periods-The Medieval Warming Period and The Roman Warming period- where the climate was several degrees warmer than it is now. No catastrophe, no massive death tolls. In fact, it appears obvious to some scientists (the minority unfortunately for now!) that cooling is a much more dangerous process than warming!

Then I read some of the work of Henrik Svensmark and most recently watched a talk by the nobel Laureate in physics John Clauser. Svensmark thinks the problem comes from an increase in cosmic rays related to the strength of the energy of the sun (which always made sense to me as the most important factor!) How could it be otherwise?! And Clauser says it’s the clouds which are much more important for climate than the carbon layer. That too is most likely related to the sun. Why is this so important?! Because the governments are using this issue to scare all of us into submission and to spend trillions of dollars on “mitigation attempts” that are not working and never will. Why?! Because they have the diagnosis wrong! Who wants those electric cars anyway lol?! They are, in all likelihood more dangerous to our health than a well-maintained petroleum -based car. But that is a subject for another day!

The Three most Important Derivative Problems

  • The dysfunctionality of the American Political System:

At this point in time, what happens in America affects the whole world. Americans may be proud of that fact but for the rest of us it is frightening! The American system is also based on a number of theoretical premises. Theories like “Due Process of the Law”, ”The Adversarial Process” and “Checks and balances”.And let us not forget Lincoln’s Gettysburg address where he talked of “ Government of the people for the people by the people”. That one is particularly rich- as we watch the wealth gap increase, the machinations of monied lobbyists and Superpacs on elections and the increasing cost of living. Perhaps it should be called “government for the wealthy by the wealthy”! That would be more accurate for now!!  These ideas are built into the system as much as the American constitution is. And they are simply not working! Why should this concern us, anyway.

 

Let’s look at some recent problems.:

1-The Covid pandemic was generated by American “gain of function” research, financed by America and transferred to China after it was banned in the US.A. Then the entire pandemic was mismanaged because of Health Institutions like FDA and CDC that were basically   sold-out to the Pharmaceutical companies and their vaccine production business. Anyone experience a disruption in their lives because of the pandemic lol?! Of course you did! Effective early interventions like with Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine were then blocked so that vaccine manufacturers were free to profit from their vaccines. That alone probably cost millions of lives! And no-one has been held accountable. So much for “Due Process of the Law” and government for the people.?!

2-Then we have the “anthropogenic climate change” dubious theory- trying to push all of us into alternative energies and electric cars-items for which we have no evidence of their harm or harmlessness. And  they refuse to seriously study it .Climate catastrophe or not, what about those electric cars?! Are they safe (EMFs everywhere) and are they really helping the environment?!

3-Then we have world-wide inflation as America rolls out the money distributing system via the Central Reserve. As well, we have two costly and devastating wars-in Ukraine and Gaza-both of which could have been prevented by a functional America-yes even with Trump as president?! And of course, the lurking danger of Iran and its weapons systems which the U.S. has refused to confront! So….all in all, we (the entire world ) is subject to American management or mismanagement-at least for now!

And what do they offer us as reassurance? “Due Process of the Law’! Really?! Have you noticed how the Justice system is being manipulated- left, right and center? Republican committees in the House of Representatives showing how Biden and his son Hunter plus other members of the family benefitted from quid pro quo deals with foreign adversaries. And what do the Democrats say?!”There is no evidence”! Whether you are Republican, Democrat or Independent-THAT IS PURE MENDACITY. They accuse Trump of complicity with the Russians(called Russiagate).The case is more or less dismissed .It was based on a fraudulent study (the Steele dossier) to begin with! No one apologizes . No one is held accountable. Is that what they call “Due Process of the Law’?!

Then 4- there is the famous ”adversarial approach”-in Law and government. (All of these are “mind-productions” btw) Have you watched that in progress?!  The Democrats and Republicans argue for hours! No one’s opinion changes. The vote is almost tied. Even if they pass something in the House the Senate vetoes it. The adversarial process has become the “paralysis process”.If you want to watch that play out in a legal context,go back and watch the O.J. case.The defense lawyers were so clever they had the jury completely confused- a standard consequence of adversarial processes.

And 5-“ the Checks and balances in the constitution” that Americans are so proud of. Or is it cheques and bank balances lol? Recent example-President Biden wants to relieve young people of student debt. The conservatives disagree. They go to the Supreme Court which finds in their favour! So now the Biden Administration is looking for legal ways around the prohibition. And so it goes. “Analysis is paralysis”. And the entire world pays the price! God help us!

Then there is 5-Loss of Traditional Values with America leading the way forward. Or is that backward lol? Highest Divorce rate in History. LGBTQ-2S chaos and hysteria, pornography passing as sex education in primary schools, unwed people hooking-up”.Promiiscuity, S.T.D’s galore and now the autism, Cancer, autoimmune disorders and Alzheimerès disease.And America continues  leading the way!

 

The “Woke” Establishment

And what IS this “Woke”. Woke is the liberal, free-thinking progressive movement becoming more and more unhinged and autocratic. The liberals have become totalitarian. You can no longer question the mainstream narrative like the benign nature of vaccines or climate change or Transgender rights without being labeled ultra-right or MAGA, or conspiracy theorist. The world has gone mad-or so it seems. Dr. Mattias Desmet calls it “Mass Formation Psychosis” .In previous times it may have been labelled simply “Mass Hysteria” .And few people have acknowledged that this is what is going on!

Just as the Dysfunctional American Health Institutions can be broken down into “Three-Letter Monsters”-FDA, CDC, NIH,  HHS  so too when it comes to Woke, we find a whole other series of Three-Letter Monsters (FLCCC likes to call them “The Alphabet Soup” agencies lol) .In the case of Woke, we find CRT(critical race theory”-which means it’s all about racism ultimately!); LGBTQ( everyone knows that one!) And because of it’s importance it has at least 5 letters in the shortest version. I can’t keep up with all the new letters being added lol: WEF(World Economic Forum, the Davos group) and the ultimate bureaucrat Klaus Schwab- talking about “The Great Reset” where we will all be happy and own nothing?! Our beloved Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, is one of his students, I believe, as is the French President Macron); ESG(Environmental and Social Governance)-or how to make companies and the entire economy conform to Woke ideas and the Green Agenda; DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) especially in the universities. We see where that led in the recent University debacles concerning the governance of Harvard, University of Pennsylvania and MIT;WHO ( trying to gain control over all pandemic responses in the future to guarantee us that the response in the future will be as mis-managed as the Covid crisis-or worse since some of the countries that did best avoided most of the WHO protocols).And many others .Don’t let me forget the Four-Letter Word (no, it’s not what you think lol).Its the IPCC(The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) -that is working on a false theory that has been exposed clearly in the last few years ,has been wrong on nearly every prediction it has made about future changes and continues to mobilize all of the Great Powers around it’s false theories!

As you can see, we are up against a huge, well-organized enemy.! A recent book authored by Seamus Bruner published by Sentinel Press is called “Controligarchs”.On the cover, you have Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, George Soros, Klaus Schwab and Mark Zuckerberg. H-m-m. Btw when I got to Amazon.ca to order it, there seems to be only one copy left! I had the same experience with RFKs book on Fauci which was a best seller at the time. Couldn’t get a copy at the largest bookseller in Canada! It took over a month. Suspicious,eh?! The signs are everywhere. There IS a conspiracy going on but the Conspiracy Theorists ,the same ones who said Covid was a lab leak and the vaccines are dangerous are being denied their moment of Truth! That may be changing.

So how did all of this happen? How did the American and European liberals become Controligarchs- Authoritarian autocrats. Most people didn’t see this happening!

Well, there are a few elements at play here. One, of course, is hubris. Bill Gates was convinced he could solve the Health issues in Africa by vaccines Seems like that is not working out too well. It seems that is oral polio vaccines were causing more cases of polio than the actual disease itself! George Soros with all his investments in left-wing causes led to the election of Trump and the rise of right-wing movements denying his vision all over America. Mark Zuckerberg, Aspergers flashing all over his face , true to his disposition, out of touch with everything around him, wittingly or unwittingly, probably the latter, actually colluded with the government to get “disinformation” about Covid, most of which was real information, censored from Facebook. Jeff Bezos has left the CEO position at Amazon to transfer his energy to Blue Origin and space exploration. Any thinking person knows how useful that is for humanity lol And Klaus Schnab,with his dehaumanized, top-down  Prussian approach to leadership  may soon be voted “Most Disliked Man on the Planet”! Yes, even more so than Biden and Trump lol.

So what do all these men have in common? They are paternalistic. They think they know better than us what is good for us. They are in the common language “control freaks”. And they, like Bill Gates, are full of huibris! So when the pandemic started and you heard about Hydroxychloroquine and then Ivermectin, you couldn’t get it! Why? Because these people and their henchmen in the pharma industry and the Medical Institutions knew better than you. But they really didn’t! And isn’t that what democracy is all about – “Free Choice”?! Sorry, we have to rely on the experts . After all Bill Gates made billions with Microsoft! Shouldn’t he know better than you? Jeff Bezos also made billions with a way of delivering products on-line. Doesn’t that make him an expert in how you should live?! And then there is the ultimate Controligarch- not present in those pictures-Antony Fauci-responsible on several levels for the deaths of millions! But he gets to decide, not you!

And let’s not forget those hallowed halls of higher education-Harvard and Oxford and M.I.T.! Fees that can break the bank of any Middle-Class family! Indoctrinating the youth of America into “Wokeness” on a daily basis. So effective that our children will not listen to their  parents’) wisdom because they have been indoctrinated by the high priests of “Woke”. Harvard recently was rated at the bottom of all Universities in Free Speech! Rating-0!  Weren’t Universities set up to be hives of intellectual debate, new ideas and initiatives. No longer! Now they are training our youth into believing that they are either oppressors or oppressed. That is going to be a great help! And we see where that is going with the recent on-campus demonstrations.  ”The Times They are a Changing” no doubt Mr. Dylan, but not in the way you or us would have liked!

  1. C)    Islamism

Most people, especially Muslims, don’t understand what a serious problem this is. Outside of the spectacular actions of al-Qaida and Isis this movement rarely comes up on people’s radar! But, in reality, it is much vaster and more dangerous than those aforementioned marginal terrorist groups. We are beginning to hear about it more with the recent events in the Middle East. Hezbollah(a Shiite Islamist group ) and Hamas (a Sunni one) are in the news every day now. But the Western press calls them ”terrorists” and thus dismisses them as marginal. But they are not! Hamas is theologically connected with the Ikhwan Muslimeen which btw is also connected to Erdogan in Turkey who is an adherent and Qatar, which was hosting one of the leading Ikhwani scholars- Yusuf al Qardawi- and still has a strong affinity with that ideology. Then there are the Saudis with the Wahhabbi clergy in the background controlling much of the laws in the country. They too are, in another way, Islamists who have broken off  from the traditional Islamic scholars who always recommended following one the four Classical schools of jurisprudence(called Madhhabs).Iran ,the sponsor of both Hamas and Hizbollah  is also under an Islamist rulership with the  reform doctrine of Vilayat e Fiqh(The guardianship of the Scholars-may God protect us all!) Pakistan and Afghanistan have been strongly influenced by the Taliban and before that by the Jamat al Islamiya of Maududdi.(Please refer to the article on our blog entitled” Islamism-The Scourge of the Modern Muslim Community” for more explanation).Not too long ago there were two other catastrophes-one in Algeria(200,000people killed) and Egypt where the duly elected Ikhwani party was running the country into the ground(as ideologically-driven parties always do! ) under the leadership of Mohammed Morsi- so much so that the army had to take over!

So people-Muslims and non-Muslims_-need to be acutely aware of this problem-or it will destroy us all. It is now an “ideological pandemic” in the Muslim world.

Now I want to make an important point of clarification here! I am not talking about Islamic scholarship. Nor am I talking about anything in traditional Islam outside of the heresies of the Mutazilis(the Rationnalists ) or the Khwarij( the hard-core extremists).Scholarship has had its important role throughout Islamic history and through the history of all religions. The scholars study the original texts-the Quran and hadith in our case. They attempt to understand them properly, systematize them and then come out with rulings that are both prescriptive AND attitudinally consistent with the original spirit of the religion and its fundamental sources.

Islamism, on the other hand, is something very different. I have to give Joshua Phillips , a young journalist at Epoch Times, credit for making this issue crystal-clear. Ever since Sheikh Nazim taught us that Islamism was not Islam, I had always been wary. But the final nail in the coffin was understanding what it fundamentally and philosophically was. Amazing, really, that some-one like Joshua, with  a very meager knowledge of Islam and not very steeped in leftist ideology either, was able to come up with this insight! So much for “experts”?! Lol,. He realized that Syed Qutb, probably the most influential of all the Islamist thinkers, had actually studied Socialism and Communism while at University in the West. So Joshua’s contention is that Islamism is actually Marxist doctrine piggy-backed (pun intended lol) onto Islamic beliefs. When I first heard that, I got the usual shiver up my spine when I hear a Truth being enunciated! “Spot-on” I thought.

The similarity between the two (Islamism and Marxism) is actually striking on a deeper philosophical level if not so much on an outward one. They are both “materialist philosophies”. Now again most people have the wrong idea about materialism. They think it has everything to do with commercialism and making money and buying things. That is its surface level. On a deeper level, it means giving precedence to the outward! Chogyam Trungpa, the brilliant but corrupt Buddhist, wrote about this in the heydays of the New Age movement. His book ,one of the classics of New Age literature was called “Cutting through Spiritual Materialism”.

In Marxism we have the doctrine of “dialectical materialism”. In Islamism we have the doctrine of “spiritual materialism”. So, for Marx ,  the solution is to establish a Communist state called “the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.” We know where that has brought us to! For Islamists, the state they are adcocatng for is called “The Islamic Caliphate”. We have seen a few examples of that in recent history -all tragic.Note that this is not the same as the previous Caliphates in the Islamic world like the Ottoman Empire-all of which arose organically from the circumstances of the time. That Caliphate ended with the Ottoman Empire after WW1! Now what is being proposed is an ideologically-driven process. And we know well where ideology leads to! Islam is NOT an ideology.It is a religious practice, a way of Life inspired by a Revelation.Very different from human-generated agendas!

Both doctrines(Marxism and Islamism) believe that by changing the outer structure and having an authoritarian state, you can make people behave better. The true Islamic philosophy is the opposite! As Sheikh Nazim taught us, the people get the state they deserve. In the Quran it tells the Muslims that you shouldn’t impose the religion on others.. Also in our Holy Book Allah tells his Prophet saws to deliver the message-not to be a ruler or an enforcer. But who follows the holy texts when you can follow your own ideas or a collective illusion.

Said succinctly, Islamism is the opposite of Islam . Islam says: Be pious and good to others and self-controlled and Allah will reward you in this world and the next. Islamism says: “Let us rule you as we see fit and then you will be happy and virtuous” The evidence, for those who believe in evidence lol, goes totally contrary to that premise. Our choice of good or evil is between us and our Lord. Any intervenor trying to change that is more likely to do more harm than good. And that is exactly what has been happening!

       

 

Secondary Problems:

 

  1. D) Nationalism: Now, previously I would have put Nationalism at the top of the list. After all, it is so obvious! Israeli nationalism vs, Palestinian Nationalism; Russian Nationalism vs. Ukrainian Nationalism. The consequences are so obvious and in our face. And the Virgin Mary in her apparitions warned us of the danger of nationalism. Which gives it even more spiritual credence! But Remember: We are NOT Empiricists! We don’t believe that what is on the surface is the whole story. Muslims, in particular, need to be aware of this! Remember surat Al Baqara. Allah tells us the believers are those who believe in the invisible. The problem is not simply Zionism. That is a Thahiri(outward) position. The problem is much deeper than that! The only scholar I know of who suggested this recently  was Sheikh Omar Ibn Hafidh who said “If the Muslims hadn’t fallen in love with dunniya (the world) Allah never would have taken any land from them” Kudos Sheikh Ibn Hafidh. I assuime Hamza Yusuf was saying something similar when he was denounced at RIS! The crowd was hoping he would recite the group mantras and he refused. Because he, too, looks beneath the surface.

So, although nationalism remains a problem across the world, Internationalism has become a bigger problem! The pandemic was caused and spread by internationalism. Our medical freedoms are being eroded by internationalism. The surge in cases of Cancer and Alzheimers and Autoimmune disorders is being produced by local “scientific” research and spread by international cooperation.

A simple example: The management of the Covid pandemic-through lockdowns and vaccines was a disaster. Thought out by American and European Health Agencies and spread throughout the world. This, despite the fact that it should be clear that physicians and in the case of Uttar Pradesh a few, very few health authorities, had much better results by early treatment with repurposed drugs. But who needs Reality when you can rely on International Consensus?! Answer: We all do!

At this point the International authorities are more involved in covering up the Truth than in using it for our betterment!! A sad state of affairs indeed.

  1. E) The Triad of Evil

America has done many things wrong! And so have the Europeans! But let it be clear. They may have problems with Truth and corruption of Truth but they are in no ways as evil as the Triad -Russia, China and Iran Anyone who says otherwise, like our dear Sheikh Imran Hussein who ,in his Eschatology, proposes Russia as our saviour or our Sunni Muslim leaders chumming up with Iran are leading us astray.. All of these duplicitous calculations can only serve the cause of evil in the long run. This is true as well, maybe even more so, with our Western Powers cozying up to China to make more money or to Iran hoping to prevent them from getting nuclear weapons. All of this will end up backfiring just like Chamberlain’s cozying up to Hitler before WW2! Befriending evil is in the long run a very bad strategy. But politicians of all stripes think they can outwit the spiritual laws of nature. They have never been so wrong!

Btw I hope it is clear by now what one of the central attitudinal problems in the modern world is “Clever Calculation and Manipulation”. You can’t game the system that God has put in place! We need leaders of sincerity and goodwill and vision-not leaders of self-interest, ideological stubbornness and statistical manipulation. Those leaders  are the very ones that have brought us to the state we are in now. If you need more evidence for this hypothesis watch American politics for a day or two and try to see what I am saying. It should be obvious!

 

Positive Signs:

At this point you should probably be asking: ”Is there any hope” ?! And the answer is: “not a lot, but there are some hopeful signs”:

1-The insanity at the most “esteemed” Institutions of Higher Learning”!  They are being outed! I have been decrying those institutions for a long time, ever since hearing Steven Gaskin describing the bad influence of higher education .But nevertheless these “Temples of the Cult of the Intellect” as I call them, have been riding high for a long time! Employers were rushing to hire their graduates, parents were willing to mortgage their homes to finance their childrens’ education, and the fees just seemed to be going up and up! But with the recent campus demonstrations in support of Hamas and genocidal wishes towards Jews, they are finally seeing their credibility challenged! It’s about time. Personally, I think they should be transformed into trade schools! -in Medicine, Law and Dentistry for example. As to the softer sciences like Social Sciences, Political Science and Literature ,a better venue for this kind of education should be explored .Because, for now, the Universities have become hotbeds of propaganda and brain-washing as opposed to bastions of free thought and creativity

2-Due to the excesses and mismanagement of the Covid epidemic, many groups have developed to promote Freedom in Medicine and objective scientific enquiry (if that is at all possible!) I myself follow CHD (Childrens Health Defense) under the leadership of RFKjr., Epoch Times which called the lab leak while it was still being referred to as a “conspiracy theory” and FLCCC under the capable leadership of Pierre Kory and Paul Marik. But each of these organizations has been denounced and cancelled by the mainstream media.Many have been deplatformed from various social media sites. All the main health organizations like CDC and FDA and NIH (remember the three-letter monsters!) denounce them! And yet, they are the ones speaking the most Truth! What a state!

When I hear Republican representative4s saying RFKjr., who they should be siding with, is a conspiracy theorist, I know we are in deep s—t! Everything he says is backed up by references and documents and studies! What are they talking about?! They, too, with a few exceptions like Senator Ron Johnson and Senator Rand Paul, are still living in their  biased, ideological bubbles. Pierre Kory and Paul Marik are clearly amongst the most competent ,brilliant and open-minded physicians . Both lost their jobs as intensivists in their hospitals for speaking about their clinical experiences.

And then to clinch it all, I went to Wikipedia to look into other Health Freedom organizations and this is what I came up with!

“The health freedom movement is a libertarian coalition that opposes regulation of health practices[1] and advocates for increased access to “non-traditional” health care.[2]

The right-wing John Birch Society( often seen as the intellectual equivalent of the KKK!) has been a prominent advocate for health freedom since at least the 1970s, and the specific term “health freedom movement” has been used in the United States since the 1990s.”

Wow! Are you kidding?! What a cover-up?! What mischief?! This is what we are up against if we begin to fight for Truth! We have a long way to go.

 

3-The Middle East: As to the Middle East I am hopeful that “we have touched bottom” as they like to call it. In A.A. The Abrahamic accords were a good start. Removing Netanyahu’s right-wing government, which appears inevitable, will also be helpful. But we still have the evil Axis partner Iran to deal with. And only their own people can solve that. The Western powers should do everything they can to promote the uprising of the people but do it in an honest, not a CIA covert way We shall see!           In the years to come if God so wills, we will update these issues and try to see if we are making progress or regress. Happy New Year! Sufi Ibrahim

 

 

 

 

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Comparative Religion, Islam, Politics, Psychology

Middle East Oct.2023

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Middle East Statement

This should hopefully be the last of three statements on the Middle East (the others are on the Sufi Ibrahim Kreps Youtube channel) and the most concrete one. I would advise people against taking sides in this conflict! There is more than enough blame to go around-including the faults of America, of the U.N., of England and Turkey historically -let alone what the two parties involved have been up to!

Taking a strong position on one side or the other thus becomes a manifestation of ignorance! Now I understand that Muslims feel the need to be loyal to the Palestinians. And loyalty IS an Islamic virtue. But the true loyalty is to the Truth not to the tribe!

Feeling the pain is one thing. It is human. But assigning blame and acting from that analysis requires wisdom and discernment and unfortunately that is in short supply nowadays.

Salaams, Sufi Ibrahim

Comparative Religion, Islam, Metaphysics, Spiritual Practice, Uncategorized

Husn Al Dhann and Radical Positivity!

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Husn Al Dhann (having a good opinion) is a much vaunted Islamic virtue. It is based mostly on the Quranic ayat 49:12 where we are encouraged to “avoid suspicion” and to not back bite. However, most of the scholars go well beyond the text and encourage us to have a good opinion both of our Lord and our fellow man. Noble aspiration, no doubt! In this article, we will go into the idea of Husn Al Dhann regarding our Lord. As I mentioned in my previous article on this subject having universally and systematically a good opinion of man seems to fly in the face of much life experience and even of the Quran and hadith themselves. So let’s stick to our Creator for now.If we return again to the Quran 2:30 we find the angels, who are created to be obedient, objecting to Allah’s creation of man. “Wilt thou place therein one who will make mischief therein and shed blood?’ They are truly clairvoyant! Ever noticed the veracity of their prediction lol?! They see what is going to happen on Earth, as we also can now see it, and protest! So what does Allah respond? “I know what you know not”. And as opposed to most people they do not argue back lol. They submit! Wouldn’t it be nice if men wee like that-submitting immediately to the Truth?! But don’t hold your breath. For the Quran itself tells us that ‘insan’ is disputatious. He keeps arguing his opinion no matter what Truth is put forward-most of the time anyway.

Most of us, unfortunately, are still in the state of the angels before Allah’s clarification. So there is a serious level of hypocrisy going on-even in the hearts of the believers?! They say they have a good opinion of Allah and His creation but as soon as things go wrong, they assume that Allah has made a mistake! Estagfirullah. The examples of this are legion: “This child should not have died so early”; “This car accident should never have happened”; “This war is a mistake”. The examples in our minds and hearts are multiple. We want to be the correctors of Allah. WE know better! Allah should conform to our beliefs rather than to HIS Wisdom. The believers, at least, don’t formulate it that way since it sounds wrong but once you get into the nitty-gritty you will see that is what they are thinking!.

So what is the opposite point of view? It is that Allah is in charge. Everything is happening from  His Will and with His permission. No exceptions! Then we must submit. But instead our nafs rebels “This( (the war in Ukraine, the killing of American children in their schools, the establishment of the state of Israel, the American invasion of Iraq-take your choice. It’s all a big mistake! It shouldn’t be” it screams mostly inside our heads.

Btw one of the groups that understands this point well are the Advaita Vedantists. We do not agree with most of their theology but on this point they are spot on. Here is a quote from one of their great teachers, the American Robert Adams -who was a direct disciple of Ramana Maharshi, a remarkable Hindu saint “Nothing is wrong. Everything is right just the way it is.(“I know what you know not” says Allah) Do not try to figure it out Leave it alone(tawakuul in our language) And also.” Be aware of yourself, always(muraqaba).The world goes through its own karma(the Divine plan) It has absolutely nothing to do with you. You belong to God( ina lillahi) Everything you see is God (wahadat al wujud).What a ‘hal’ this man possessed. We need to learn from this!

So let me begin to lay out an alternative approach beginning with a few anecdotes. The first involves a defrocked psychoanalyst who gave up on his practice, finding that the results were few and far between. Instead he developed a very successful program for schizophrenics called “Case Management” In that program instead of using expensive, over-trained mental health professionals, people with a simple university bachelor’s degree were hired to be available(read humans as opposed to the professionals lol) on a  full-time basis, a bit like parents)and to respond as needed instead of during office hours with long-delayed appointments-the usual M.O. of health care systems. They were assigned to have 6-8 people to watch over and help in a practical way over a period of time. The results were so remarkable that this program became the standard of care in most mental health systems-at least those that were front-line and competent!

But the real point of this story is what the psychoanalyst responded when asked by a member of the audience whether his psychoanalytic experience had been of any use whatsoever. And he responded: “What I learnt from my psychoanalytic therapy was to be brutally honest with myself” Can we, as believers, say the same thing? Do we have the same capacity for self-observation as this psychiatrist. If we do, then we will acknowledge that we are regularly opposing the actions of Allah .i.e. Reality!

Before we address some possible remedies to this situation let me tell you another story-the story of Sheikh Hashimi. Before he passed on the great sheikh and Sufi Ahmad Al Alawi named muqaddams(representatives) to be assigned to most of the surrounding Arab countries. Representatives were sent to Morocco and Tunisia a nd Syria amongst others. And the representative he sent to Syria was an Algerian  man named Muhammad al Hashimi. For those who are cognizant of the world of Sufi silsilas(chains of transmission) Sheikh Hashimi was the sheikh of Abdur Rahman Shaghouri who was the sheikh of Sheikh Nuh.

Sheikh Hashimi was well beloved of the Syrians. When he died after 40 years of teaching them and serving them, they were missing him and so they went to his “khadim*(servant) and asked him what he remembered of Sheikh Hashimi’s teachings. He responded: “I only learnt one thing from the sheikh but it sufficed me for my entire Life”! “Only one thing .During fourty years of service?!” They were astounded but asked the inevitable follow-up question: “Alright, So what was that one thing?” “Fi kooli shay khareen”(In every thing there is goodness).A fitting explanation if not a complete one, to the ayat where Allah tells us that He knows what we do not. That there is goodness in everything-A Divine Plan and Divine Wisdom!

Before we get to the solution to this dilemma, let me tell you one more story-from my pre-Islamic days. I got into my real spiritual search somewhere in the early seventies while I was still a Marxist -albeit an unconvinced one(discernment even then lol).I read a lot and visited where I could. One of my earliest visits(1973 I believe) was to Ojai ,California to see Krishnamurti, I was hoping to connect with a fellow psychiatrist named Shainberg I believe but Allah had other, more relevant plans in mind.

Instead, I met with an “ordinary Joe” American. I asked him what he was doin g there (seemed so out of place) and then he told me his story .He was a Korean war veteran.(It is 1973 so the Korean war had finished 20 years earlier.)It was the worst possible situation. In the trenches- filled with mud and dead bodies and blood and gore. You can just imagine or maybe you can’t! And then he was hit by an artillery shell of the Communists. At that moment the sky opened up and he saw another scene of battle but that one was Luminous and Glorious and Ecstatic! In that dimension everything made sense and more. Then he lost consciousness.

When he awoke, he was in intense pain from the wound he had incurred. He required constant pulmonary drainage and opiates and round the clock nursing! But he survived. It was now 20 years later and he was still looking to retrieve his “hal”(spiritual state) that he had experienced in Korea. That is why he came to see Krishnamurti. Amazing, eh?

So now, after all that preamble ,we get to the heart of the matter. How do we stop disputing with our Lord and begin accepting His Will- not in theory but in actual practice. I have a few recommendations and perhaps together we can discover more. Inshallah. So this is the program I propose for arriving at Husn Al Dhann which is also “rida” (acceptance) and “tawakuul” (trust in Allah.

1- First let us remember the famous statement of Ali Jemal r.a. of Fes “Everything to you is from you” i.e. it is a specific response to your situation, your actions, your educational needs, your merits and defects. Nothing is random! Everything is purposeful! That is what Allah is saying when he states that He knows what the angels do not!

When the horrible tsunami hit East Asia in 2004 I saw an Islamic scholar on public television saying: “this is just a geological event(tectonic plates moving) not a theological one”! I couldn’t believe my ears! Does he not understand in any way the workings of our Lord?! Clearly not.

As is my habit, I then started researching what was going on in those areas.The worst hit places turned out to be Aceh province in Indonesia and the Tamil areas of Sri Lanka. Aha! In both places there were civil wars going on. Clearly not pleasing to Allah who encourages us in the Quran itself to accept all peoples and nations. Then the Earthquake hit Pakistan in Muzaffarabad and Belokot in 2005.What do you know?! Al Qaida was organizing in those areas. According to the Indian army sources, they still are! Could that be the reason for these disasters? Only Allah knows but it would be reasonable to arrive at those conclusions. Just remember, nothing is random.

The same is true on a personal level. But most people don’t want to go there. The “bala”(misfortune) is either a consequence of some bad behaviour or a stimulus to growth through the purification effect of suffering. Admittedly not always obvious which of the two it is!

When Muhammad Ali may Allah be pleased with his efforts and sincerity was asked if he thought his Parkinsonism was a consequence of his boxing career he answered humbly: “No. I made a grave mistake in saying ‘I am the Greatest’ when the only great One is my Lord. This is the consequence!” Humble man. Mashallah. So whenever something “negative” occurs to you, look deeply into yourself. Is there anything you did wrong? If so, ask forgiveness and  begin correcting it. If not, praise the Lord for elevating you still higher.

2-Ask yourself “What is good in this apparent evil?” What is the silver lining in the cloud?” How can I see this as the glass half-full rather than half-empty?” Hamza Yusuf tells the story of a Moroccan man who had a stroke and was paralyzed on one side of his body. When people would meet him, he would point to the side that was still working and say something like: “Look how merciful is Allah. He left me with this entire side that works” Or the story of the great wali of the Tablighi people, Maulana Zakariah, who was dying of terminal stage 4 cancer and saying on his deathbed: “Ya Karim’, Ya Karim” These are very high levels of faith but we can take learnings from these examples.

3-Think about how it could have been worse. A few years ago, I had a knee injury. When I finally got to a competent orthopedist, he diagnosed me with an “insufficiency fracture”- something I had never heard of in medical school. He told me I had to take all pressure of the knee(i.e. I needed to sit for salat) and it would cure itself over several months .Which is exactly what happened! I thought to myself: “Thank God it wasn’t progressive osteoarthritis as the G.P. had thought because then I would be looking at a knee-replacement(very painful!) down the road. Don’t feel too bad! I am not always that good about my Husn Al Dhann  lol.

My father when he was still alive would taunt people with the statement:” We have the best weather in the world here in Montreal”. People would think he was crazy! “What?! – the terrible cold and snowstorms in the winter and the hot ,muggy days of the summer! How could you say that?” He would answer” We don’t have hurricanes, we don’t have volcanoes. Tornadoes are very rare and we have almost no earthquakes. What’s a blizzard in the winter. You hunker down for a day. Then you take out your shovel the next day and you’re good to go”.

As you watch the weather trends nowadays, you can’t help thinking that he had a point. The massive heat waves in southern USA, the hurricanes in Florida and the West Coast, the drought in the mid-West and the wildfires in California and the West Coast! We are doing pretty well in Montreal lol.( For the nit-pickers and naysayers and contradiction detectors -the people I love to hate lol-yes there was an ice-storm in 1998 that did considerable damage-not many deaths however. The exception that proves the rule.

So my father was practicing Husn Al Dhann about the weather. He would have been shocked to learn that he was performing  an act of piety lol. Like the time I caught him resonating with the Hare Krishna crowd at Philip’s Square! “But Dad I thought you don’t believe in religion” I said. “I Know. But I like this music. It gets to me” Too bad he didn’t go further in his spiritual quest!

4- Seeing the compassion in the pain. You have a chronic pain condition. But it comes and goes. Your skin is burning and itching. But then it disappears enough for you to get a decent sleep. Your money is running out. And suddenly a source of ‘risq’ occurs. None of this was predictable. None of it even makes sense! If you have no cartiledge at the knee joint or between the vertebrae why does the pain come and go?! Shouldn’t it be there all the time. No doctor can explain that. It is from the Mercy of Allah. And He is micromanaging our experience on a moment by moment basis. See if you can observe it!

5-What is this difficult experience designed to teach you. There is almost always a heuristic component to every hardship. I remember a social worker who told me about ending up in the hospital with acute appendicitis. Only then did she realize she was in an abusive relationship and needed to get out. Or the Kashmiri businessman from Sri Nagar who found out that his partner was emptying the cash register every night which led to the bankrupcy of their enterprise. He came running to the Naqshbandi Mujaddid sheikh in Gutlibagh(Mir Alam) and said that was the best decision of his life.

So “hold your horses” before saying “this shouldn’t be”, exercise self -restraint and above all remeber:”fi kulli shay khairin(in everything is goodness) and praise the Lord. Alhumdulillah Rabbil Alamin. May Allah help us all in this challenging task of having a good opinion of His actions-always!

Addendum: The “elephant in the room” here is doubt! “Shakk”-the fifth klesa if you wish. The doubt comes from us believing in what is in our minds rather than in what Allah is doing. It is the cause of much of our errors and most of our anxiety! The only way to deal with it is to become acutely aware of it and to defuse it with tawakuul as soon as it comes up.

As Muslims we know the story of our Prophet saws with Abu Bakr Siddiq in the cave as they are fleeing to Madina. Abu Bakr r.a. is worrying(i.e. doubting), for one of the few times, about the safety of our Prophet saws who responds;” Are you not aware that Allah is with us on this journey” the Noble One explains. If Abu Bakr.one of the great ones, the Siddiq has doubts ,what about us.

The opposite of doubt is certitude -“Yaqin” but that is a very high state in Reality. As mentionned in the article most believers have that certainty in theory. But in Reality ,especially when being tested, that is another matter.So let us continue working on it.! Inshallah. Sufi Ibrahim

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Islam, Modern Living, Psychology, Spiritual Practice, Uncategorized

Three Approaches to Ramadan Fasting

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Asalamu aleykum, brothers and sisters. I have noticed over the years that fasters break down into three basic categories, the last one being the least popular but the most recommended. What else is new? The most common being the worst! So what are the three?

1-The Deniers affectionately known as the “mu mishkila “(What me worry?) people  . I met those people first in Damascus. The political situation was horrid. The tension was palpable in the air. But when you brought it up, without attempting to blame anyone, you got “the mu mishkila ” response. “We have some of the finest Islamic scholars in the world”(True). “We have some great Sufi tariqats-“True! What could possibly go wrong.?! Well, we all know where that led to- catastrophe! 100’s of thousands killed, millions displaced! Now, I am not saying the denial led to the catastrophe .But it certainly didn’t help. And once you are in denial, thus ignoring the cause, there is no way out! But catastrophe.

And now we have Zelensky of the Ukraine doing the same thing. The Americans warned him! “They are planning an invasion” they told him (There were already 150,000 troops at his doorstep) “What invasion. Don’t say that!” He reproached the Americans for their realism. And look where that led?!Deniers pay a very heavy price for their temporary delusional relief.

Now how does this play out with the fasting process? In many Muslim societies but especially amongst the Arab societies you get the following narrative: “Fasting, it’s so easy for me. I do everything I usually do except I don’t eat”  Easy-peasy. Really?! Well, first it’s their wives that out them: “Ahmad is in such a foul mood all the time he is fasting.” And its their bosses “My employees make so many more mistakes during this month”. What?! I thought it was so easy for them.

The first person that alerted me to this problem was a French-Canadian lady whose husband worked for the Canadian embassy in Morocco. They regularly noticed that their Moroccan Muslim employees became more irritable and more impatient while fasting. Gradually they learnt to be more careful in addressing them. You can be sure that confronted with this phenomenon the employees would be in complete denial: “Me, I am no different than usual. Better, actually because I don’t have to take breaks for eating”. Ya, right. The outsiders could see through their self-deception.

Btw in the hadith Ramadan is referred to as “the month of patience”. Think about it. We don’t have to be patient with things that are easy and pleasant.” Be patient with your well-behaved child” or” be patient with your delicious ice cream” Makes no sense, right? You have to be patient with difficult things. And Ramadan is difficult, make no bones about it! Mubarak for sure ,full of rewards in the hereafter, an order from Allah, for sure. But difficult, nevertheless- as are many of the edicts from our Lord.

I grew up hating denial.( The other side of that coin was that I had a strong inclination for Truth-regardless of the social influences around me.Still do, btw! My mother, may God forgive her and reward her for all her hard work raising us four rebels lol was a somatizer. She would get angry with one of us and get stomachaches after. When I would try to indicate to her  that the stomachaches were her emotional  reaction to our bad behaviour, we would get denial. “No its not that. I just ate too much lasagna at dinner.” Lol. My mom was not an overeater!

To indicate why this is important, I can tell you that at a younger age I too had stomacaches. Once again my mother would try to put it on the food! When I finally got into group therapy at the ripe age of 23 ,i understood the connection with my emotions during the stomachaches and I have never had any since! Except when I do eat bad food lol and get gastroenteritis. But NOT from emotions! So it makes a big difference when you stop denying! Then you can adapt and modify your behaviour and often enough solve the underlying problem!

Then I studied psychoanalysis and learnt that “denial is the most primitive defense mechanism of all!” And when I started researching the Arabic dictionnary I realized that denial and lying came from the same Arabic trilateral  root- k-dh-b. And Allah uses them almost interchangeably in the Quran. So this is important stuff!

There are so many manifestations of this denial mechanism but we can only mention a few here. Here is one that bothered me a lot during the pre-Covid period when I went to Jumaa prayer on a regular basis. Somewhere around the 25th day or so the Iman would get up on the pulpit and say something like:”25 days of Ramadan and it has gone by in the wink of an eye”. Really?! I don’t know what world this Imam is living in but it ain’t mine lol. Each day had its own particular struggle. At one point during almost every day it seemed like the fast would never end. Ever had one of those fasting days? That’s why our Prophet saws called it the month of patience. Maybe I missed the hadith where it says “Ramadan goes by in the wink of an eye” but I doubt it. Instead the Imam should be saying something like; “Congratulations on all your efforts. You are all doing a great job.” Like a good teacher trying to encourage their students or a good coach trying to spur his team on to victory.. That would be compassionate, that would be empathic. I think they need to add on a course in pedagogy and psychology in the Madrassas. But instead we constantly get the message that we are not doing enough! That is what drove the Catholics away from their Churches. Let’s not make the same mistake!

2– The Complainers (or in the vernacular the kvetches lol) These people go around the entire month complaining about their symptoms- much to the chagrin of the Muslims around them. They tell us about their tiredness ,their headaches, their lack of cognitive abilities and brain fog. The deniers hate them. “Stop that brother or sister, you are going to lose all your “ajr”(reward).”You will be rewarded for your sufferings on the other side” True- but that most often doesn’t take away the symptoms. It just makes the first person feel like you have no empathy or compassion. Instead of empathy you get guilt. The famous ADHD researcher Ed Hallowell called that the school of “shame, blame and humiliation”-apparently standard in most traditional societies!

Now the physical symptoms are an important part of the experience and need to be properly managed. For example one thing I learnt early on was that many headaches were actually ,in fact, caffeine withdrawal headaches. One of my convert friends got it so bad one year that he went to the emergency room thinking that he had meningitis! Until we figured it out. I watched my sheikh of the time, Sheikh Nazim breaking fast every day with a cup of tea and taking a cup of tea as the last thing in suhoor(pre-Fajr meal).Only later did I realize that he was managing his caffeine withdrawal that way. Now that is my regular practice-one cup of coffee at iftar and one at suhoor. And most often I will get away without the headache-especially if the fast is only 15 hours or less.

Here, I would like to tell another type of  story(a bad management story) to illustrate another aspect of the managing symptoms story .One year when I went to London for Ramadan- as I did regularly for many years-to be with my sheikh, I met  a young Irish convert from a very difficult background. He had had a father who was an episodic alcoholic with a very bad character. His father would get angry and throw him up against the wall when that happened. Due to multiple traumas like that -many of which gave him concussions, he developed grand-mal epilepsy! So at the beginning of Ramadan he came to consult with me as to how he should manage the fast. I suggested he should go slowly ,perhaps every second day at the beginning, He would hear nothing of it!

It seemed to be working well early on but during the last ten days ,his defenses broke down and he had a grand-mal seizure in the middle of the mosque during Tarawih prayer.There was a group of fanatics there- followers of someone we knew as Greensheikh. They were convinced that this was not a medical condition but rather a jinn possession and wanted to do an exorcism. Most of the attendees however, including myself, saw it for what it was-a neurological event that needed medical attention! A fight broke out between the two groups, a member of the Greensheikh group pulled out a knife and the police had to be called in(Very well-trained British cops I must say) In the end we accompanied the murid to the hospital but one of the “reasonable” group had to deal with a knife-wound to the hand that took weeks to heal after getting infected.. Such is the price of denial.

In fact, many of us know people that are unable to fast-because of diabetes or heart conditions or migraines and many other illnesses. So it must be acknowledged that fasting is a physiological stress. You have to in relatively good health to do it. So beware of deniers! They can be dangerous to your health and even to your life!

3-The Embracers; This is the approach I am recommending. Embrace ALL the Reality-the glory and upliftment and transcendent aspects of Ramadan(the states of Grace) AND the difficult parts. The openings may be brief and subtle. They may be evanescent and hard to capture at times. But they ARE there. What one of my shuyukh called “nafahat” (spiritual breezes).But don’t miss them. Enjoy them -like butterflies in the summer. If they linger, then you are truly blessed. The sufferings will be rewarded as well. So don’t let your physical symptoms distract you from the “barakat” of the month. It’s all good! Embrace it all! The physical symptoms can be managed -with compassion and wisdom-and the transcendent aspects can be savoured-especially if you can open your eyes and your heart to what is occuring on the inner planes. May Allah make this the best and holiest Ramadan ever. And if we don’t see the results on this side of the curtain we will certainly see them  on the other side ! Ramadan Mubarak and Ramadan Karim.

Islam, Metaphysics, Psychology, Uncategorized

A Quick Note on Patience!

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(Did your contradiction detector light up lol? That’s the way we have all been trained by our so-called education system. Should be called miseducation system but that’s a whole other story. Yes, quick and patient .Get used to it! Life is full of contradictions. (Apologies to the most honorable Aristotle- the  Guru in chief  of logic!)

So(another faux pas that I love. Not supposed to start a sentence with “so” according to the politically correct grammarians!) But(another dubious start lol) it is such a great word…”so” and “so” As say the Americans  “sue me if you don’t like it”! So, this is another in a series of articles about Islamic concepts being misused, overused and abused. We will be talking shortly about “Bir Walidayn”-another problematic concept-at least in modern usage. Stay tuned!

A French lady living for a long time in Egypt came to the conclusion that the basic Egyptian mind-set was “bokra inshallah”(Tomorrow, if God wills).That is NOT patience. Patience is neither procrastination ,nor slacknes of will nor cowardice. Although those are often unwittingly being invoked by the term “patience”. That is NOT the sunnat of our Prophet saws.

As I like to say, something which could be misunderstood as heretical since we believe our Prophet saws was inspired in his actions, if Muhammad saws had been patient with the Qurayshi kuffar  for another year in Mecca we may never have had a religion ! That of course is not possible as the spread of Islam was from Divine destiny. The point however is still well-taken. Patience, although a good default position, is not always the right option. Sometimes it is action that is needed. And the difference between the two is a matter of judgment and discernment -two entities that are not subject to fixed formulations!

So what is Right Patience(borrowing here from the lexicon of the Buddhists).As mentioned previously Right Patience is neither laziness nor procrastination nor cowardice nor fatalism nor passivity. Right Patience implies hard work-doing our “due diligence”. It requires intelligence and effort and a reasonable measure of planning(not the obsessional over-thought planning we see in modern Western institutions!).After all of that is done, then we rely on Allah (tawwakul) for the result- knowing full well that only He can cause the result to be.(see the Aphorisms of Ibn Ataillah for further elaboration on this point).Understanding and seeing this can be considered an absolutely essential part of our suluk(path) whatever that may be. And we have a most excellent example of that in the life of our Prophet saws.

In the hadith we have a very instructive teaching on this principle:

Narrated by al-Tirmidhi, the hadith outlines the story of a Bedouin man who was leaving his camel without tying it. The Prophet (PBUH) asked him “Why don’t you tie down your camel?” The Bedouin answered, “I put my trust in Allah.” The Prophet then replied, “Tie your camel first, and then put your trust in Allah.”

Our Prophet saws did not only speak about this, he acted like that! His entire life he “tied his camel”. That is, he did the necessary work, planned when needed(for the Muslim battles for example) prayed and then left the result to Allah. And that is the way we need to be. No more “bokra inshallah” lol. Rather firm commitment to Right Action and Right Words and then trusting deeply and absolutely in God. May Allah help us all to understand and to see! Salaams, Ibrahim