Scene from a Tailorite Training Centre in the year 3010

Tags

science-fiction, Sufism, tailorite

The year is 3010AD. Verandah Vanguard theological training centre, London.

Principal Farinelly, standing in front of some pretty damn sleepy first years, sighs and brings out his battered teacher’s edition of A Tailor’s Doctrine. He begins to read, in his dull Australian nerdtone.

… There is nothing more to war than interpretation: illocutionary acts of (incorporeal) violence, sign substituted for/transformed by sign. In terms of methodology, I wish to emphasize a particular trajectory of lesser jihad — a particular “potential” of this signs’ transmission at this moment in time – that is particularly excellent, in that it readily brings us into a state of Victory prior to the Martyrdom. (A Tailor’s Doctrine, Fernmind Imprinture, co-ordinates 3-3, S)

“So, uh, is this like the illusion of being free, when in fact we’re just stuck within a demon worship, the worship of the demiurge of constrained thought?” asks one of the more motivated students. Farinelly admires her bounteous curves idly, the stuffy classroom’s afternoon air making his brain as sluggish as much of the class.

Farinelly awakes from his lascivious vagary and offers the following interpretation of that elusive 21st century mystic, that poet, that wine-sipping womanizer, the self-proclaimed  ”Renewer of the Body’s True Science”, the Tailor of  the Londonstani Golden Age.

1.

“There is nothing more to war than interpretation: illocutionary acts of (incorporeal) violence, sign substituted for/transformed by sign.”

Most Tailorite scholars are in consensus that the Tailor studied philosophy in his early years, possibly at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. To interpret the Nerd of Namaz, it is often useful to do some archeology into the kinds of philosophy that was popular at his time as he seems to take delight in subverting and misreading his secular contemporaries.

Mother’s day present

Tags

inner, Islam, mother's day, outer, potential, signs, Sufism

Slogan by the Tailor, currently residing in the Kazakh kitchen of his mother.

How to stop worrying and love the lesser jihad

Tags

banu qurayza, jihad, Sufism

Narrated Abu Sa’id Al-Khudri: When the tribe of Bani Quraiza was ready to accept Sad’s judgment, Allah’s Apostle sent for Sad who was near to him. Sad came, riding a donkey and when he came near, Allah’s Apostle said (to the Ansar), “Stand up for your leader.” Then Sad came and sat beside Allah’s Apostle who said to him. “These people are ready to accept your judgment.” Sad said, “I give the judgment that their warriors should be killed and their children and women should be taken as prisoners.” The Prophet then remarked, “O Sad! You have judged amongst them with (or similar to) the judgment of the King Allah.” (Sahih Bukhari, Volume 4, Book 52, Number 280)

A group of Sufis were discussing the lesser jihad and the necessity to kill in order to maintain the body of Islam when under threat, when all other options are exhausted. They were seeking the noble sunnah of Prophecy, external and practical, inner and metaphysical in the key battles waged during the Final Revelation: waiting in patience, exhausting all other possible peaceful avenues, only killing in self-defence and so on.

The Tailor, arriving on his donkey, raised his right hand and interrupted.

Let it be understood: Prophecy shed no physical blood. During the course of the Final Revelation, not a single drop of blood was spilt.

To say that physical blood was shed during the unfolding of Prophecy — that physical territory was conquered (in the same fashion that we understand conquest today), that men were massacred and women and children captured (in the same physical fashion that we understand massacres and capture today), etc — this is bid’ah (innovation that perverts the Truth of Islam), and, like all bid’ah, is in the Fire. (Of the North, where I’m standing right now: so I am not being judgmental, but, rather, am nothing more nor less than Judgement.)

I’ve said this before, but let me reiterate, because it is worth repeating, if repetition is the powerhouse of dhkr. Prophecy’s Truth is that the cosmos is pure symbolic Text, in which all signs have an ultimate Meaning determined by their deferral — submission in Love — to the Author of this Text.

The Tailor’s Third Ummatic Engagement

Tags

gilbert and sullivan, Islam, patience, subr, Sufism

(Life as operetta. A member of Gilbert’s College? By the banks of the Thames, do I receive that Northern Crowning, finally, after these 5 years of leasehold? In it for the admiration? Surely not arbitrary admiration! But yes, I freely admit in soliloquy, I write it all down for the ladies — my Doctrine to the ladies! — but in particular, for the milk maid, my love of loves, my evasive maid who enters the operetta claiming to know no love, whose name is Patience. She finds love through the martyrdom — to “common-place” middle class life! — of her poet husband.)
Lyrics:

The Tailor and the Sheikh

Tags

difference, Islam, Sufism

And you asked me about my vision, and said through adab that you wished this for yourself.
And you asked me about my drunkedness, and say in adab that you wished yourself a drunkard like me.
I am astonished, my beloved brother, that you should desire vision and wine
While you hold the keys to a lodge that has obliterated me three times over.

For I came down from a palace of alien dictators
who taught me in language of picture
a geometry of power
and granted me a foreign wealth that I spent in balance.
I left that palace and that geometry,
and came down, hiding from my vision yet seeking the sign of my true Lord.

I entered the streets of the city
where my blood and thoughts mingled with those of these people,
your people, my people,
these troublesome people of the Lord.
And there I recognized you, waiting for me at the prayer house,
my beloved friend, my bewildered sheikh.

And I entered the prayer house, led by you,
and heard you speak through adab to this nation,
your nation, my nation,
this difficult nation of the Law.
And I perceived you leading them through grace with your speech,
and I recognized the code of your eloquence,
as the code of our brotherhood, the memory of our mother’s milk.

And so I stayed within this place:
In these streets I established my trade
and in this city I raised a family,
to be amongst this people,
my family of light bound by the shelter of Law.
And here I resided, and established my prayer
alongside you, recognizing this sign of brotherhood.

And you said: “The meaning must be in difference.”
And I said: “The meaning is in the signs.”
And you recognized the difference in my signage,
and I recognized the sign in your difference.

And we were delighted and, laughing, agreed to a pact: to take our men and our women, little ones and our slaves,
our inheritance and our lineage, plot our line of flight out from these circles of circles,
employing the circles’ alien geometry itself to bring about the Return.

And so we studied together and read together.

Then you invited me into your lodge of bewilderment
and you asked me to speak some words of geometry
from my alien heritage.
And I remembered my alien tongue, and spoke,
but in doing so I was turned three times,
and the people watched as this occurred, silent,
your people, my people,
our God’s nation,
and I fell upon my face.

The oblivion of the fern locked onto me,
and I fainted, and was torn apart,
and I found myself thrown out,
and she came to me for the second time,
and she took me into our lineage
and moved across my body and showed me the city within.

And then the Hand come down upon me.
and I spoke in tongues and fell apart,
so nothing remained of me but my face,
stretched across the poles of reality,
yet a Greater Face I knew resonated above my valueless being in Love.

And I obtained years so I did not go mad.
And I affirmed through this complex of signs the simple single message:
that all meaning is submission and that our Lord loves.

And you asked me about my vision, and said through adab that you wished this for yourself.
And you asked me about our Lord, and say in adab that you wished yourself to perceive the signs of Lord.
I am astonished, my beloved brother, that you should desire vision and signs
While you hold the keys to a lodge that has obliterated me three times over:
not a lodge of whirling dervishes or chanting dhikr
nor a lodge of any ancient form,
But the Seal of Lodges: you hold the Lodge of Difference
the Lodge of bewilderment.
There is no other Lodge.
The Lodge you possess is Power of your Lord’s speech,
the Lodge where Truth awakens from the material of alien geometry,
the Lodge wherein sources the obliteration of my mind,
wherein the shahid determines upon my map our ultimate Victory.

I am astonished, my beloved brother, that you should desire vision when you have speech
While you alone hold the keys to the Lodge of Islam.

The Tailor and the Muslim

Tags

apostasy, Islam, Sufism

“To locate the spark supreme: we are simultaneously guided by its exhalted Light, and so move further south and further east and, through its gift, our line of flight, our becoming is, for a moment at least, a becoming-in-resonance with the form of our Forgiving, Providing Beloved, whose Love is ultimately the meaning of the Body of Logic. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.”

The Tailor concluded his Doctrine.