It is narrated on the authority of Abu Huraira that the Messenger of Allah (may peace be upon him) said: Islam initiated as something strange, and it would revert to being strange, so good tidings for the stranger. (Sahih Muslim Book 001, Number 270)
What is the most disturbing, freaky, weird aspect of Islam: what is it about Islam that its very practitioners feel so strange as to desire to conceal that nature from the vision of their own souls (upon their backs)?
It is the realisation that, in life, there is no esoteric and exoteric distinction: there is nothing other than ayat, nothing that can approached in life other than what might be called the Symbolic. Life is a journey through space of pure surface of symbols. (There is a zahir and a batin, but, as we have seen previously, these concepts relate to the verses concerning co-garmenting of spouses, not the usual imaginary division between the spaces of an external society and psychological personality.) Followed by the appreciation of how the symbols of life interpolate the Truth About It All.
Such a view of life is radically different from the conventional, rational comprehension of reality — when enunciated in full to those of a “normal” disposition, it sounds plain weird.
Prophecy is strange, seeing only the Symbolic, while the rest of us get caught up in an imaginary world of false origins, totalizations of mere fragments of the ayat, turning particular games of life into the be-all and end-all of existence — worshipping the ayat rather seeking what the ayat indicate.
A stranger — ghuraba – is someone who has travelled far from their home. The home is the Ultimate Reality of human creation, the space of the Real: it is comprehended within life by correct appreciation and configuration of the symbols. And so, when enunciated, the symbols never refer to what you think they might refer to in normal life — because they never refer to anything at all! — instead, when appreciated, correlated and configured correctly — the symbols form an intrusion/recollection/induction of the Real into human perception. They are of the home, though we travel in this foreign land. The occupants of this land then hear strangeness being spoken by the stranger, because they are not aware of the home and instead calibrate the symbols as fixed in their reference.
This contrast between the essence of the Prophetic sunnah of symbolic literacy and “normal” perception is what makes Islam strange to everyone, including, heartbreakingly, practicing Muslims themselves.
So let this hadith be a wake up call to all Muslims. How normal have we become? How sane in relation to our assumptions about reality? Why the long faces and introverted conservatism?
Baby, let’s get strange, and beautifully strange implications will follow, for all aspects of life.
Strange divination of the symbols of the cosmos are learnt, with the stranger engaging Qur’an as the nexus of the Symbolic-as-generative-of-herself, generative of all revelatory unraveling, all Godly glances, all pure perception.
Baby, let’s get strange.
“What is the most disturbing, freaky, weird aspect of Islam… It is the realisation that, in life, there no esoteric and exoteric distinction: there is nothing other than ayat, nothing that can approached in life other than what people might call the Symbolic. Life is a journey through space of pure surface of symbols.”
yes, Yes!, YES!
On this subject of there being nothing other than ayat, here is something I wrote recently on another blog:
“If the nature of manifestation is ‘wordlike’, so the very nature of consciousness is a ‘literacy’ of these words. Nothing can be conscious without being able to ‘read’ what it is experiencing. The dog, for instance – which has no reflective consciousness – still recognises a particular visual, or auditory, or olfactory experience as its owner. It has consciously connected an outer form with an inner meaning.
Human beings, apparently uniquely in our world, are able to be conscious of being conscious (and perhaps this is what defines ‘humanity’, in the broadest sense, across the cosmos).
The Way of the Sufi (as some other mystic paths) brings a person to the realization of their non-existence as a separate individuality – that there is no ‘me’ anywhere to be found, only ‘He’. At this point human consciousness becomes transfigured, since the meaning of what is seen is recognised in its origin, and every experience is witnessed as an expression of the Divine. What’s more, the reflective nature of human consciousness – which allows this in the first place – reveals this to be ‘His’ witnessing of ‘Himself’ through ‘Himself’.”