Shaykh al Akbar

12 Pages·2013·0.46 MB·English

Shaykh Ahmed abdur Rashid April 12, 2013 www.circlegroup.org
Friday Evening Suhbat

Allah’s Signs in the Roots of Words:
Rahm, Nafas, Alam, Qadir

[I’ve been talking about the writings of] Shaykh al Akbar, Ibn Araby. They are really
profoundly deep. [Particularly important is] to understand this relationship we are
talking about that began with the hadith quds, “I was a hidden treasure.” The
words that are used in this, in looking at the Arabic roots, are the same in most cases
as the Farsi roots, and even in some cases the Hebrew roots, which is yet another tie
between all of that transcends the “external” forms of religion. Also in a way, it tells
you the importance of Hadith Quds, when Allah Swt speaks through the mouth of
the Prophet (sal). This is a very hopeful reality for all human beings.

We ended last night talking about the derivation of the root “rahman.” The deeper
meaning of this mercy and compassion of Allah is to radiate love, and comes from
the same root as “rahīm” or the womb/uterus. I think I ended by talking about
Shaykh al Akbar’s statements about blood relationships. The other aspect of that is
a very physiological aspect. This is how incredibly woven into everything about life
Allah’s message is. For example, the womb is the home of the fetus. We talked
about that earlier. For the fetus to be born, the womb has to dilate to 10 centimeters.
This process of dilation is a natural rhythm. The heart exists in our body, doing
what it does, like the uterus exists in the woman’s body, doing what it does on a
monthly basis, waiting for something to happen. The eshq of the heart is this
development of the infant in the womb of the mother.

We use the phrase in English, “The heart dilates.” Love dilates the heart and gives
birth to a new relationship. This is how complex and yet simple it all is. Why?
Remember dhikr and its other meaning, to penetrate, and the representation of the
1
Shaykh Ahmed abdur Rashid April 12, 2013 www.circlegroup.org
Friday Evening Suhbat

lingam of the Hindus. You have this reality where there is a pattern of love that is
radiating, and the seed of love which is contained in the sir, hidden in the secret
center of the latā’if. The Divine Name, Rahmah, exists in sirr. The generative power
of that Divine Love of Allah Swt transmits and opens the possibilities that are
contained in all the Names of Allah Swt, and planted immutably and unchangeably in
the hearts of all human beings. Allah plants His Names in the human heart. If that
heart grows in dhikr / the remembrance of Allah, Allah says, “You will find Me in
the heart of the believer.” We say it is found in the huwal al batin, the most inner
place in the heart, the core of the heart. There, the seed of all the names are – not in
the mind, but in the heart.

Think of what compassion would be if it was a mind quality. It doesn’t make sense.
You can define it in the mind, cogitate upon it, or reflect on it, but it doesn’t originate
in the mind, does it? It originates in the heart: mercy, justice, righteousness, piety,
patience, love. All of these are in the heart. These are names seeded in the heart. So
Allah says, “Remember Me and I will remember you.” “Me” is all those names
plus more. Remember in the heart, and what happens? Divine Love gives rise to a
new person. Just like in the womb/ rahm, a new person is developed. The new
person in this case is you, or me, or whoever remembers Allah Swt, and comes to
term. What’s the term? Your lifetime (we won’t talk about Caesarian).

This seed of love is planted in the Divine Names. It comes from the Divine Unity,
Oneness. It disseminates those names substantively in the khalq, the world of
creation. We talked about the macroscopic tree and the branches the other night.
The name ar-Rahman gives birth to all the realities of the other Names. The first
Name Allah puts in the heart is Rahman – ar-Rahman ar-Rahim. That is the seed
that dilates the heart and gives birth to all the other names. It makes the heart
receptive to all the other names. Consequently, what? Don’t you always wonder
2
Shaykh Ahmed abdur Rashid April 12, 2013 www.circlegroup.org
Friday Evening Suhbat

why every ‘āyat in the Qur’an but one starts with what? Bismi-Llāhi-r-Rahmāni-r-
Rahīm. Why? Because this is the first name that Allah puts in the heart. Which one
came first, Rahman or Rahīm? No. Rahm. The root; the seed is there, and
everything else follows.

Throughout the Qur’an, you have all the other names that follow, plus the
Hundredth Name of Allah Swt. It is said that the Hundredth Name is also found in
Hizb ul Bahr. You can go look for it; it’s a good hunt for you to go on. All those
Names then become disseminated from that essence. They become substantive
from the essence of rahmah. Allah says in Qur’an, “Say, invoke Allah or invoke Ar
Rahman. Whichsoever you invoke, to Him are the excellent names” (17:110).
This cannot be invoked without breath. This is why Bismi-Llāhi-r-Rahmāni-r-Rahīm
is the first name Allah placed in the heart of the human being, and out of which all
other names are seeded in the rahim; the uterus of mercy that is in the heart.
Seeded there through dhikr, the male organ that penetrates the heart and gives life
to the seed that is there, and to all the seeds that are there. You have the seeds in
the womb, and what is grown in the heart. You have what comes into the womb that
grows the child. You have the dhikr that comes into the heart that grows the names
of Allah Swt.

You see how balanced that is? How perfect it is? Nothing is left out. There is no
“but,” “and,” or “If.” Allah gave the names, these trilateral roots, to show to us a
biological reality that wasn’t known for 1200 years. Pretty amazing. And not until a
few years ago did we know about the other brain cells in the heart. “Say, invoke
Allah or invoke ar-Rahman. Whichsoever you invoke, to Him are the excellent
names.” I will bet my next year’s paltry salary that you will find very few Muslims
who understand this, even those who study Shaykh al Akbar. They don’t get it.
They only get one side of it; they don’t get the other side of it. How is this done? I
3
Shaykh Ahmed abdur Rashid April 12, 2013 www.circlegroup.org
Friday Evening Suhbat

was showing you the roots of 4 or 5 words, and how they reflect the hadith quds, “I
was a hidden treasure.” Allah plants these roots in that hadith quds. Why is it in a
hadith quds and not in Qur’an? Anybody want to tell me why? Because He’s trying
to show us something else. Why are they not regular hadith? What is a hadith
quds? Allah speaking through the mouth of the Prophet (sal).

What’s another one of those roots we didn’t talk about quite yet, fully? Nafs / nafas.
That’s in the Hadith. Hadith Quds is the breath of Allah speaking through the
Prophet Mohammed (sal). Isn’t it? What is breath? Nafas. This relationship is
there. There is this breath that carries these eternal, inexhaustible Words of Allah.
We gave the example of the blood and the spirit yesterday that is exhaustible, but
the inexhaustible words are composed of a plethora, myriad, endless letters. How
many letters in the Arabic alphabet? 22. How many letters in the Farsi alphabet?
32. How many letters in the English alphabet? 26. How many letters in the Chinese
alphabet? A thousand? There are endless myriads of letters; we just don’t know
them all. How many Names of Allah are there? No, there are not 99. There are
endless names of Allah. If there are endless names, there has to be endless letters.
And there are many, many levels.

When the Prophet Mohammed (sal) ascends in the Isra Miraj, and he speaks to the
angels and hears them praising Allah Swt, do you think they are only praising with
99 names? What language is he speaking, Farsi, Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew? He’s
speaking the language of rahim, of breath. Allah says it all starts in the human
being’s heart. What happened to the Prophet’s heart before he made the Isra Miraj?
It was washed. How many times? Three times. Why, was it that dirty? Bismi-Llāhi-
r-Rahmāni-r-Rahīm. First: In the name of God, the most merciful and the mercy-
bestowing. It contains everything. Now the heart is clean. He goes through these
multiple levels. Why didn’t he go into a big conference room and meet all the
4
Shaykh Ahmed abdur Rashid April 12, 2013 www.circlegroup.org
Friday Evening Suhbat

prophets in one place? I’m serious. Because the story wouldn’t be as much fun?
Maybe they could all have a booth. He could go to Musa’s booth, Isa’s booth,
everybody’s booth. Why? Because there is a hierarchy, and not just of the prophets;
there is a hierarchy of the latā’if. In each of the latā’if, there are myriads of angels
created by Allah Swt, which praise Allah Swt in ways you can only know when you
are in contact with the malakut –lahut, nasut, malakut. We haven’t talked about
those in a few years; we should talk about them. That’s because we are not doing
the Naqshbandiyya and Qadriyya teaching.

Here are these examples Shaykh al Akbar gave you, and I am explicating, on the
lexical and etymological realities that are linked together to create form. We gave
the name form, like the beautiful flowers. Go back to Hazrat Adam (as). What was
he supposed to do? Tell the names of things to the angels. Because they are giving
these praises – letters – in languages we don’t understand. We don’t understand the
language of the angels. Is that hard to believe? You don’t understand Swahili. Why
should it be hard to understand that you don’t understand the language of the
angels? But Swahili has sounds that maybe Bahasa Indonesian has, and Arabic has;
and it has some sounds they don’t have.

The Prophet (sal) is given these tools that make him capable of understanding the
language of the angels. What does he hear? He hears what Hazrat Adam (as) heard.
He was able to decipher the names of things. As the qualities of Allah come into
manifestation, he sees their names. This comes out of what’s called the sifat an
nafsiyya, the seven essential qualities. Allah makes clear through this one hadith
quds, that people question, the whole process of the universal manifestation of all
things in this world starting from what? Where did we start? (Rahman). No we
didn’t start with rahman. That’s where language starts. Where did we, Shaykh al
Akbar, start this discussion? Hibb. That’s where he starts the discussion.
5
Shaykh Ahmed abdur Rashid April 12, 2013 www.circlegroup.org
Friday Evening Suhbat

He makes clear the whole universal manifestation starting from love and the
knowledge of Allah that results from that love, from the creatures born of that love.
Allah says through the mouth of His prophet, “I was a hidden treasure. I was not
known.” If you don’t know the names, the words, the qualities, you don’t know.
“Now I love to be known (hibb), so I created the creatures so that I might make
Myself known to them. Then they knew Me.” That’s one way of saying it. Or, “So
that they come to know Me” is another way. Allah Swt is expressing His reality in
the unusual first person singular. He is not calling Himself by name, as you see in
the Qur’an, but “I.” There is no question of whether Allah is absolute, unconditioned,
or One, to which other hadith allude. “Allah was, and there was not with Him a
thing”—anything.

Allah expresses through the mouth of the Prophet Mohammed (sal), in the first
person singular, His Oneness. But everything is potentially in that oneness – the
many in the one. At this level, these Divine names and attributes are differentiated
within Him, but are not yet manifest. They later on will act through creation itself,
through beings, animals, flowers. Beauty will act through flowers. Things will act
through His creation. By doing that, they will manifest or characterize certain
normative behaviors, which need to be kept normative behaviors, lest a person lose
their identification with their Creator or the Divine. This is from where the Shar’īah,
or the Torah, or the Bhagavad Gita, or the Ten Commandments come, from each
prophet.

The fundamental qualities of the essential attributes, the sifat an nafsiyya, of Allah,
are unique and are given rise from the names—life, breath, knowledge, speech,
irada/will, basira/seeing, hearing. These are qualities, attributes of Allah are given
– to whom? Hazrat Adam (as) – so that he has the capability of describing what is
6
Shaykh Ahmed abdur Rashid April 12, 2013 www.circlegroup.org
Friday Evening Suhbat

the Reality. If you want to speak or understand the life of what one would call the
Divine way of living, because we have talked about the framework, the epistemology
of it, the lexical semiotics of these words, there is the ontological reality of it, too,
which is that movement of love, and all the Divine possibilities that create some kind
of equilibrium, balance / mizan.

Balance has to take place at the center. If you measured this spoon, would it be the
center? Not necessarily. What else do you have to take into consideration? The
weight and the shape. Everyone has to find their center, in a sense. Allah tells us to
find the center, to be people of the middle –ummah ta wasita. When we look for
something to understand, we find the central theme in it. When you are writing a
paper, what’s the central theme that you are trying to now explicate and build upon?
Allah takes all these Divine possibilities, all these essential realities that are
contained in “mashiyya.’ Mashiyya is Divine possibilities. Mashiyya is all the
possibilities that lie within the Will of Allah. How many are those? Infinite. How
many letters? Infinite. How many names? Infinite. They represent the infinite
qualities and elements of all the Divine knowledge, all the possibilities, which
constitute all the alamat: alam, symbols, signs, ‘āyat. The signs of what? The signs
of all beings.

Now we’re at a good place. Who is Allah? He is Rabbi-l-Ālamīn/Lord of all the
Worlds. What are these worlds? They are symbols/alam. Worlds of all the
possibilities, of all the symbols, of all the signs, of everything. He is Lord of
everything. ‘Lord of all the Worlds’ is a very short way of saying it. Where else in
Qur’an do you find the word alam? Lots of places. It refers to these multifarious
signs of Allah Swt. Ibn Araby called it a certain name: al ayn ath-thabbit: the
permanent, protocypical Essence, the Divine Name, the Infinitely Knowing / Alim.
When you call someone an alim these days, it doesn’t mean what it used to mean.
7
Shaykh Ahmed abdur Rashid April 12, 2013 www.circlegroup.org
Friday Evening Suhbat

An alim is not just someone who knows something. The Alim is the Infinitely
Knowing.

Divine knowledge is called ‘ilm. Divine knowledge is having access to knowledge
dynamically. What happens is these Divine Names interact with each other. When
they do, certain things happen. For example, what happens when mercy and justice
interact with each other? Have you ever thought about that? When you go in front
of a court, you seek the mercy of the court. Ever think about that? When beauty and
love / hubb and the jamal and jelali of life mix, what happens? Pop, out comes a
poem or whatever. What happens when, at the end of harb / war, you make peace /
salām? What happens when mercy and peace come together? What happened in the
American civil war? What were the Confederate soldiers allowed to keep? Their
rifles and their swords, not their pistols. Why? So they could provide for
themselves; they could hunt. More people were killed in the civil war than all wars
fought among people of the same nation, history and background. And they were
allowed to keep their weapons. Do you get it?

There are these, as he calls them, protocypical essences, forms, templates that are
symbols / alam. They are symbolic and prototypical. The Divine name al-Alim, One
Who infinitely knows the signs. Who was the first alim of the al-Alim? Adam (as).
He knows the signs. The word means to give something a distinguishing mark, and
secondly, to know by means of signs or symbols. We know things by means of signs
and symbols. If the arrow goes this way, it means the road is going to turn to the
right. We know that a circle with a line through it means no, don’t do that—very,
very basic. Every society, from the most basic to the most modern, has signs and
symbols that are used. Gangs have symbols. The Holy Pope has signs. For the
Muslim, the signs are something different.

8
Shaykh Ahmed abdur Rashid April 12, 2013 www.circlegroup.org
Friday Evening Suhbat

Look at the root alama, to be the sign of: alim – to know; alamat – signs; alamun –
beings of the world; ‘ilm – knowledge; the entirety of interlinked signs; knowing,
known. Then add the root “shīn and yah” with it, to will a thing, a synthetic reality.
Then you have mashī’a, a metaphysical place of essential will. Now you have this
unity, and you understand the biology of it. We understand the symbology of it.
There is something else to try to grasp, and that is the functionality of it. There is a
factor that evaluates and assesses the value of everything, and gives it a basic value,
and then a value that can change. In our world today, measurement and evaluation
is a big thing – a big deal.

How do you value the work we do at Legacy? How do you value the results? By
what standard are you looking? How do you know those results can be replicated,
if you do what? How do you measure the impact, the effort, and the cost
relationship? Allah assigns a measure of things in relation to other things, and tells
us this in Qur’an clearly. Everything has a measure, a length of time, a length of life,
the day into the night. There are many references in Qur’an to what we would call
measurement. This function that determines and evaluates is exercised by the name
al-Qadir: the One Who has the ability to evaluate everything. Now, here’s a hard
one for you. Let’s put two names together – al-Rahmat and al-Qadir. What do you
have now? How do you measure and evaluate mercy? Or al-Qadir and Adl. How do
you evaluate and measure justice?

This is a legalistic issue. I studied this in law school. How do you know? Someone is
in jail for 25 years, wrongly jailed. How do you measure the value of that time that
was spent, or misspent? These are moral and ethical issues that will take me to the
subject of ethics. The root of this word now is: to apprise, to assess according to a
value. One finds in the word “qudra” the names al-Qadir, which is much more
explicit than the meaning of “powerful,” Shaykh Al Akbar says. Powerful is not the
9
Shaykh Ahmed abdur Rashid April 12, 2013 www.circlegroup.org
Friday Evening Suhbat

right translation of it – al-Qadir and al-Qadir. It is the same spelling, different
pronunciation. These two words speak of the quality or essence of Allah. The name
that usually follows al-Qadir is usually al-Murīd. Al-Murīd means the self-willed, the
follower. The root of this term means to go from here to there. Irada / will comes
from it.

Irada is not a faculty of the mind like you think it is. Will is a faculty of the soul. It is
a faculty of life. You can’t have will unless you have breath / nafas. Will allows for
some quality within the Lawhim Mahfūdh to be able to determine for oneself where
you are going: from here to there. Allah gives us choice within the context of our
qadr. What does choice mean? You are going to go from here to there, going from
something that is known to another thing that is not yet realized, but that you are
attracted to, and it results from moving from one object to another. We are back
now to hubb, where we started.

We are attracted to another person; we feel love for that person. You are moving
from a known state to an unknown state; from a known entity to an unknown entity.
You have to exert some will power, so you don’t make a mistake. You have to
measure and evaluate it. You have to follow where your ego, you nafs is going, a
function of your life; and your heart, hubb/love, because this love may return to
plant a seed in you, physically or metaphorically. So we are back now to the
essentials of life and knowledge, and the ability and will to understand these Divine
names, the Divine Being which loves to be known; and utters this love of being
known by articulating it through His Kalam/Word.

All the possibilities are contained in that prototype, that essence. This function is
called mutaqalib: one who expresses himself through himself. There is a double
meaning to the root of kalam. It means to utter, and it means to wound. Remember
10