Ramadan Reading: a Few Notes on the Tenth Juz

Tags

10th juz, spoils of war, Sufism, surat al anfal

Note 1: Surat al-Anfal

This Surah concerns the punishment inflicted upon the Quraish of Mecca during the Battle of Badr. The name of the surah comes from its verses that detail how spoils of that war are to be distributed amongst the Muslim combatants.

We have written here before about the fact that no “physical”, biological blood was shed during this Battle, nor any of the acts of war waged by Prophecy. So this is taken as read here.

But what is the nature of this Surah? It is, in essence, a circuit model of consciousness whose meditation — whose reading — leads us to a situation in which Prophecy is absolutely victorious over us, the spoils of war are distributed and Allah’s gnosis of the heart is gained/released by the captives of war in according resonance with the eternally inceptive waveform of the Face.

The Porshee Foundation

We interrupt the Tailorite Tafsir for a brief baraka break. Please read over, and consider assisting, the great work being done by our friend the Jeweler over at the Porshee Foundation. They are doing innovative and very much ground based charity work (utilizing notions of micro credit) to assist the poor.

Charity = Creativity. Why? Because of the SKN in the Word of God: the miskin (the poor) and Sakina (the tranquility of Allah) and the dwelling place of rest for the people are all one: reception to the light that are capable, via the agency of creating-in-speech/action the Divine bestowal, of mirroring this bestowal outwards, we find that the miskin, the poor dwelling place of our mind, is activated as a perfect mirror and Sakina descends upon us, an immanent plane of understanding. Bestowal in reflection becomes the awareness of the bestowal from the above — charity to the poor is the self-aware rearrangement of the signs to realise our own poverty and gain true wealth through giving. If there is an implication to the Qur’an, it is this: give that we might receive, receive through giving.

Ramadan Reading: a Few Notes on the Ninth Juz

Tags

araf, gardens, harun, heights, hellfire, hijab, juz 9, musa, serpent, staff, Sufism

Note 1: Al-Araf

The seventh surah is named Al-Araf (heights or places of elevation) after the description of the afterlife, in which the companions of the garden and companions of the fire are separated by a hijab, with the people “in between” standing on heights, speaking to both these two groups (and hoping to be amongst those of the garden):

And the dwellers of the garden will call out to the inmates of the fire: Surely we have found what our Lord promised us to be true; have you too found what your Lord promised to be true? They will say: Yes. Then a crier will cry out among them that the curse of Allah is on the unjust. Who hinder (people) from Allah’s way and seek to make it crooked, and they are disbelievers in the hereafter. And between the two — a veil — and on the heights, men who recognize all by their marks, and they shall call out to the dwellers of the garden: Peace be on you; they shall not have yet entered it, though they hope. (7:44-46)

There are various Sufi readings available of this scene.

Ramadan Reading: a Few Notes on the Eighth Juz

Tags

cycles of death, death, juz 8, land, law, monadic generation, moon, pagan law, predication, Qu'ran, rain, ramadan, self-prescription, sky, Sufism, sun

Note 1: The Lord’s Self-Prescription

… Your Lord has prescribed the Mercy upon Himself … (6:54)

This is part of a larger verse that would take days to unpack in any meaningful way. So we just deal with this particular aspect, as it returns again in the remainder of the Surah.

The sense of the Arabic for “prescribe” is in its root KTB: linking senses of both decree, prescription and inscription.

The Lord is Merciful Love, and a Love that loves to be known to the space of inscription (our space, the space of the loving slave) by inscribing itself.

Ramadan Reading: a Few Notes on the Seventh Juz

Tags

food, hajj, halal, juz seven, oaths, people of the book, pilgrimage, Sufism, wild game

Note 1: A personal reflection

Almost a third of the way through, my Ramadan has led to some surprising and new (for me) bonds with the earlier parts of the Qur’an. Alhumdulilah, the revelation truly operates at all (4!) levels of existence. My (very subjective) feeling right now is difficult to articulate, but could be put like this. To recite it anew is to breath out the beauty of her strange intra-dimensional trace, in resonance with waveforms that run across the infinitesmal and the magnitudes, spanning the universe’s cyclical unfolding, intersecting the readings of life as horizontal plateaus of stories, law and archetypes, demarcating my (personal) heart’s progress in Time, making cellular my sight, each cell an ayah within my (personal) body, in network of transmission, multiplying and switching in local and global modes of inheritance and genealogy. As my breath runs through these pages, acquiring inheritance from each verse, each archetype-complex recognized as a Truth I had maybe been taught before but forgot or else realigned today into new harvests, I am grateful and astonished at the barakah from above, ceaseless in re-reading. My breath continues on in recitation, my breath itself its own trace and meta-record within my heart of gratitude.

Ramadan Reading: a Few Notes on the Sixth Juz

Tags

an-nisa, inheritance, little face, maps of faces

Note 1: Hypocrites, the Awliya and Authority

Surely the hypocrites (seek to) deceive Allah, and (it is) He who deceives them. When they stand up to prayer they stand up sluggishly; they do it only to be seen of men and do not remember Allah save a little.

Allah’s effect is as Revealer and Concealer, felt theophanies of Disclosure and Closure. But hypocrisy is born from a failure to perceive this dual effect and to fixate solely upon (and immanentize) the Closure.

At first, it would seem that the hypocrite, in seeking to deceive the Most High, is working with the assumption that Allah is an entity that can be situated within the space of deception.

This is not completely accurate. Perhaps surprisingly, the hypocrite’s character is of one who equates Allah with (not within) the entire space of differentiation, with an immanent deity in reality.

Ramadan Reading: a Few Notes on the Fifth Juz

Note 1: Creation from a single soul (from Juz 4)

O people! be careful of (your duty to) your Lord, Who created you from a single soul and created its spouse of the same and spread from these two, many men and women (4:1)

This verse describes the procession of human generations as one of soul differentiation. This process (from 1 to 1+spouse to generations) is one that is dependent on two things: 1) the original spouse becoming apparent, where she was originally inherent to the Word and 2) on the fragmentation of the Names known by Adam into the ayat that we currently move through now, from Names into signs-as-shards within a broken symmetry  of the original Adamic Body (the word “Be!”) sublimated to form the world of difference we occupy now. That is, generations follow by virtue of the unitary word “Be”, differentiated (not broken up, but having a primordial differentiation emerge from him) and then broken up, sublimated into a multiplicity of words.

The succession is given in the verse.

First, we are all derived from a single Adamic soul. This soul is originally androgynous because it does not have a spouse, it is a unitary body.

But then it is given a spouse from itself: it becomes primordially differentiated (though not yet multiplicitous) according to the origin of sexuality.

Ramadan Reading: a Few Notes on the Fourth Juz

Note 1: Surat Al Imran

The Surah’s overall form concerns a relationship to the Umm Kitbab, the Mother of the Book. The Mother of the Book is experienced as verses “precise” in Meaning (3:7) that, in metonymy of revelation, generate verses of “resemblance” (mutashabihatun) over which “interpretation” (tawil) is forbidden.

Interpretation is the enforcement of a valuative semantics over the signs of resemblance. Understanding is a tie of kinship back to the Womb. The signs of resemblance, formed within the Womb of the Umm Kitab, are not to be interpreted but, rather, taken in remembrance (dhikr) by the people who possess understanding, who possess a line of kinship back to the Womb. Who themselves possess, by virtue of their remembrance of the Divine, a speech/perception/reading that is in a metonymic, evolutionary, dynamic relationship of growth and emergence to those precise verses of the Umm Kitab. Rather than a semantics of tawil, a metonymy of kinship back to Truth’s origin.

Ramadan Reading: a Few Notes on the Third Juz

Tags

100, 4, 4x7, 7, abraham, al baqarah, anticipation, ark of the covenant, birds, conclusion, hajar, jihad, juz 3, Kabbalah, nafs, qalb, reading, ruh, sakina, samuel, saul, semiotics, shekhina, sirr, Sufism, third juz, two sisters

Note 1: Saul and Sakina (from Juz 2)

The second juz ends with the story of Saul’s Kingship and David’s conquest.

Verses (2:246-249) concerns the prescription of jihad given earlier in the surah in verse (2:216).

To comprehend the enjoining of jihad is the self-referential essence of waging jihad.

These verses predicate upon that verse, on our reading of that verse, “unpacking” our reader’s reaction to finding God command us to jihad and, as a consequence, enter us into jihad and from Poverty of Saul to the Kingdom of Saul, from the tension of the People’s call to the release of their distillation.

Ramadan Reading: a Few Notes on the Second Juz

Tags

calibration, Divine Love, hajj, halal, Islamic dietary laws, jihad, Love, punishment, qibla, ramadan, strength, Sufism, swine

Note 1: Divine Calibration

And thus we have made you a just community that you will be witnesses over the people and the Messenger will be a witness over you. And We did not make the qiblah which you used to face except that We might make evident who would follow the Messenger from who would turn back on his heels. And indeed, it is difficult except for those whom Allah has guided. And never would Allah have caused you to lose your faith. Indeed Allah is, to the people, Kind and Merciful. (2:143)

The direction of prayer is a coincidence between the corporeal body of the supplicant, the geology of the earth and the conduit to the Divine. To put our “face” in this direction is to align our crystalized surface of perception (our little face) in potential mirroring of the Greater Face of the Divine, according to a function of this bio/geo/spiritual synchronization. A face-to-Face conversation, so to speak.