Reading and Niyat

Tags

muhammed, niyat, Qu'ran, reading, sufi, Sufism

A sister from Norway asked the Tailor: “You have stated here that you would continue with your Tailorite Sufic reading of the Sahih Bukhari even if it turned out that those hadeeth were fabricated by someone 50 years ago. And you’d insist on your uncompromisingly “spiritual/metaphoric” peace and love based understanding of Torah and Qur’an even if there was definitive historical evidence that these books were actually designed as tools to drum up political and martial support within some distant historical conflict. You have stated that Muhammed never shed physical human blood, that Abraham’s sacrifice of his son was a purely ceremonial case of fana, that “4 wives” does not mean physical wives, that the lashings for adultery and the beatings for wives are Qur’anic tropes meaning some kind of purification of the soul. And you have stated that it doesn’t matter what others think, what others have said in the past or present, you have said this “Truth” you have found within these texts is the stand alone light, transcending scholarship and history.

But what about the intentions of the speakers: what about Bukhari’s intent — or Abraham’s intent — or Muhammed’s intent?”

The Tailor thought for a moment and said: “These questions are put to me again and again, in different forms: because they are central questions to ask. Central, perhaps, to the very future of Islam, though that might not appear obvious. But sometimes the manner in which the question is asked is just as important as the answer. See here, a dialogue I had once with a brother from Turkey: if it does not answer your question, then at least it will show you the form — one of adab — by which the Answer may be negotiated!”

The Tailor proceeded to load up a transcript of a dialogue with this Turkish brother, held within Bookface, a well known meta-social networking site.

The Bookface dialogue.

The Turkish brother:

Do the intentions of the speaker – what was meant by the person who spoke the words of the hadith, the sense in which they were meant to be understood by the hearers – not matter in trying to discover the meaning of the words? Are the words as it were stand-alone, and the intentions irrelevant?

Pardon me if I appear as a ‘hostile critic’. I assure you, I am not at all hostile to your general point of view, as far I understand it. I would just like to see if your interpretation (taking this hadith as a test-case) holds up under a little critical (but friendly and basically sympathetic) scrutiny. You’re clearly a singular person; and I should like to make the same spiritual journey you have – but I should also like bring my mind along with me. Think of me as an errant disciple, humbling petitioning for light and clarification.

The Tailor:

In answer to your question: yes, and no.

From one perspective, yes, the words are standalone with respect to any Truth we can find in them, because ultimately there is only One Speaker. Everything else is a kind of illusory intermediary, and to believe in a particular intermediary can sometimes distract us from this fact.

This is the meaning behind the verse:

You killed them not, but Allah killed them. And you (Muhammad ) threw not when you did throw but Allah threw, that He might test the believers by a fair trial from Him. Verily, Allah is All-Hearer, All-Knower. (8:17)

By which we understand, “Allah is the All Speaker” (same difference, because Allah’s Knowledge is Creation, whose seed is the Kalim, the Word).

When I first fell in love, I had this wonderful kind of experience: each song on the radio suddenly became about my love, pop songs that hitherto were banal commercialism became rich and deep, each TV program somehow reminded me of her, romantic pulpy films were transformed into Donne sonnets.

It felt like a veil had been lifted from my eyes and I could see love written everywhere, my love for her recited by every event, object, media encountered.

This phenomenon is not uncommon for people who fall in Love (it surprised me at the time partly because it so closely matched the standard cliche).

Now, this is the sense in which the intentions of pop song writers, the TV and film producers — they don’t matter and the words stand alone because God’s Love is the engine behind the mechanics of it all.

Burning down the house

Tags

burning, burning houses, cruelty, fajr, hadith, isha, Islam, Sufism

Question: I attended your recent hutba where you laid down the principles of Tailorite “True islam”, and your dogma of the Prophet Muhammed’s immaculate pacifism: he shed no physical blood, yielded no physical punishment, etc.

No doubt you have a number of esoteric techniques to extract a Tailorite tafsir of peace and love from even the most difficult verses and narrations. And yet on the point of “harsh and cruel laws”, “exterior appearance of cruelty”, etc, I can’t help coming away with the impression that you’re deluding yourself. Esoterism can only get you so far, surely. There remain many aspects of the sharia that can’t be explained away so easily.

For example (one example amongst many I could give you), there are sound hadiths in which the Prophet says that those who don’t come to pray deserve to have their houses burnt down! This certainly appears to be a “harsh punishment”, if ever there was one, and I puzzle at how this threatening Prophet of his time and culture could possibly be reconciled with your immaculately peaceful image of Prophecy.

Response:

The Lord bless you and keep you on you, maintaining you on the sirat al mustaqeem by the cyclical radiance of the Loving Countenance, resonating through the shells of appearance, running outward, seeping inward, the core Truth of your lives and loves.

I certainly agree my efforts hare futile with respect to ever convincing mainstream Islam as practiced down south in the City. I’m preaching to the converted up here in Fuadfordshire — a comfortable, middle class Tailorite elite. Remember, my move to this northern village was forced upon me after I spent a number of years preaching to the wealthy and the poor of the City, efforts that were ineffective and lost to the majority. Even outwardly moderate and progressive Muslims eventually object at what I have to say, once they sit down, really listen and digest its implications.

I despair of the City and don’t for a moment believe that anything I say will convince anyone who hasn’t already had an experience of Allah (in which case they will not need to read what I have to say anyway).

Nevertheless, your hadith example is a good illustration of how I read the outwardly harsh and cruel stuff in Islamic and Judaic revelatory literature.

This week’s hutba: True Islam

Tags

Sufism

A recent hutba given by the Rev. Immanuel G. Moon, the friendly faced sheikh of Fuadfordshire.

True Islam is the religion of Life, not of Death. True Islam saves, it does not punish.

True Islam would never punish a man or woman with physical death. True Islam does not bring punishment. No punishment, no death in True Islam, for any reason: for apostasy, for adultery, in warfare.

There are interpretations of Islam and revelation, some are rightly tailored, some shaytanically manufactured. Manufactured interpretations: just a human fancy, not Reality. But the Islamic Truth is that Prophet Muhammed never killed another human being, and delivered a message of Life, of Love, not death. It is a human innovation (bidah) to believe he did anything else otherwise.

If you are not clear about why True Islam forbids all cruelty, then you can ask me and I will try to explain, as the teachers have explained before me. With respect to the Qur’an and the narrations, with their undisputed exterior appearance of cruelty: to Read them you need to be schooled in the language of Love, its genealogy of tropes and its bittersweet irony, to study everything its author has written before and after.

But, ultimately, we stand alone in our relationship to the Reading we call existence. it will be the experience of Allah that will lead you to know this Truth: ultimately it will be falling in Love that will lead you to know this Love.

If you really believe that Muhammed killed humans (and ordered harsh and cruel laws from a harsh and cruel God), it might well be that this is just because someone else told you this and you accepted it because you have been told this is part of Islam. As a non-psychopath, you have rationalised it by saying: “Oh, these laws can only be implemented in a truly just Caliphate — so in a way they are impossible to achieve in this day and age.” or “No — these laws are limits, extrema, a threat — the law always allows us to err on the side of caution and mercy.”

And so you continue to exist here, in the West, finding an uneasy compatibility between that extrema and this Western reality.

But such thoughts are an obstruction to the Truth. They are also a kind of bidah, obstructing the realization of True Islam throughout the lands and worlds. To live by that position is to live in the transitory, impermanent, false. Because the Law is the map of Reality, the Reality behind all obstructions, all forms of colonization, behind your false division of West/now from ideal/extrema. The Law is not an extrema of cruelty in an ideal political state. The Law is the Body of the Cosmos, Prescribing its own Reading in Love.

And this is the nature of what is Read, the Truth of our Islam: there is no Love but Love and Muhammed is its Slave and Messenger.

Reality machines and the Asadian rap

Tags

asad, asecularity, foucault, lsd, Sufism

It’s the standard Asadian rap. Admittedly, it has potential and and encourages the kind of progress we are pushing for. But you know, this approach has its origin in Foucault’s LSD trip, just as the secular identity/religious identity distinction has its origin in the Kantian European Enlightenment.

That is to say, the implicit binary opposition that colonial forces employ to overdetermine Islamic rule (the European identity formed out of a privileging of the secular over the religious) sources itself from a Kantian trip.

Whereas Asad, a Foucaultian post-colonial theorist, has connected the Raw Reality of Foucault’s chemical/biological/psychedelic machine to the historical/geographic/political machine, and ultimately therefore owes his debt to that French Prophet, and the Swiss inspirational Angel of the 20th century, Albert Hofmann. Foucault’s trip is undoubtedly magnificent and powerful — not some teenage raver jumping up and down to repetitive music — his trip was so intense, so powerful, that it persists throughout the upper echelons of the academies, from East to West, that it persists in the penmanship of every post-colonial theorist worth his/her salt.

Yet Sufism has always offered a similar deconstruction of identities through highlighting and complicating implicit dualities — we call this fana. We also prescribe a notion of asecularity within our Shariah, by means of its Holy Irony (as an apparently religious and politically prescriptive form of poetry, it is supremely ironic and supremely sublime in this regard), there is no religion and no political space in the Medina of the Verandah Vanguard. And we also employ a Raw Reality machine — but a much older and more beautiful one, at least in our aesthetics: the Reality Machine of the Arab Unlettered Prophet, the equally psychedelic trip of the Miraj.

This is not a criticism of Asad or Foucault or the piece on asecularity. But as a non-Muslim Sufi (I don’t belong to a religion or to a state) who Loves Qur’an, I have to ask: where is Qur’an in this? Because I want Qur’an near to me in all discussions: not because I think it is morally preferable but just because she’s Hu “I” Love most.

It’s not a criticism — it’s a Love thing, a taste thing, a beauty thing. I want Qur’an in every discussion because I want her constantly in my life.

Qur’an is the prism through which all Reality is refracted, a refraction we call the tresses — and therefore encompasses Foucault, his Raw Reality, his admittedly magnificent trip (that still lives on, streaming out through the pens of countless post-structural PhDs). The Qur’an encompasses all Raw Realities: entangles and complicates them, just as they complicate Europe. The tresses of the Qur’an entangle any French philosopher, any post-colonial theorist, any human being.

Rejection

Last night she thought she had them once more in her thrall,
those grey bearded authorities pouring over her pages,
she supposed she kept their attention with her brilliant display.
And their superb adab: it deceived her sister too, to the extent that
she had faith, her success with the people was inevitable.

And when I kissed her after that public reading,
her reciprocal was a recollection of the sahaba,
when a kiss was a force to be reckoned with,
fearful tribunes of her hair cutting through fabric of land,
her intellect a Saraswati, overflowing, clear, focused, present.

But today, that possibility was lost on them, and they turn away from her reading,
and her brilliant display was a failure,
she kept no attention, she stirred no heartbeat.

So she weeps at her purposeless literacy,
a complex without society’s sanction,
surahs and psalms revealed by God
that men’s lips refuse to utter.

Oh, only for me, only for me, within this space:
what people are these,
that the sweetest clarity of her ayat might be cast aside so cheaply
in favour of such dully awful prose?

IMASE statement on recent events in the East End

The International Muslim Association of Scientists and Engineers (IMASE) has released a statement in relation to the death threats launched against Sheikh Hasan.

Please distribute the statement around to anyone who you think it might be relevant to.

And if you are in any position to help with the actions that are being calling for let IMASE know at info@imase.org.

Of oranges and peels

The consensus amongst the city is that there is an orange, and it is the best kind of fruit. But they use the terms “orange” and “orange peel” interchangeably, because they haven’t learnt to eat and so take bites directly from the skin, never penetrating to the actual fruit and so the peel is all they know.

Their declaration of faith is “There is no orange but the orange peel.” They take great pride in their distinction from the rest of the West, which takes its orange peel but perversely turns it into cointreau, leading to health problems and lax morals, particularly amongst the women.

Some of the citizens take their faith very seriously and consider it incumbent upon themselves to police their brothers, ensuring that orange peel, and only orange peel, is consumed.

Of course, the worst sin is to believe in orange peel but then to be led away towards its neglect: “I’ll kill you for denying the absolute culinary potential of orange peel!” “All who fail to consume orange peel are destined for the eternal hell fire!”

Other citizens take their faith seriously, but attempt to integrate it with modern context, scientific advances and the multi-culinary tastes of the city. “Of course cointreau is a dangerous corruption of the peel, but peels can be baked in cakes and that makes them sweet.” “Actually, the message is a trajectory, and we are encouraged to use logical inference to determine what is appropriate to consume in this day and age: logically, we can eat banana peel as well as orange peel.”

To which, of course, the former citizens declare: “I’ll kill you for suggesting that!”

Some Western folk feel threatened by the apparent growth of this “peel-based fundamentalism” within their midst, to the extent that there is now an active campaign to promote the denial of the existence of an orange peel altogether, spearheaded by a notable media professor. “There is no orange peel — it is just an antiquated figment of the imagination designed to control and regulate political and social power — so stop worrying and get on with living life!”

Significantly, the citizens believe strongly in preserving their peel-oriented views onto their children, to continue and grow a People of the Peel. Some ultimately dream of a utopian society in which only orange peel is consumed and the memory of all other fruit is wiped clean.

To this aim, they form weekend schools to teach their children all about the proper way to eat orange peel.

Now, if you keep feeding your people and your children orange peel, they’ll develop a dislike for what they think is an orange.

At some point, after about 40 years, the children will grow up and will say: “Enough is enough! This bitter stuff is awful.” And they’ll find something else to eat, that provides them a healthier, more nutritious diet.

So be it.

That dislike of what the citizens believe to be “an orange” will take a generation to ripen until it turns into outright rejection of all oranges.

People will stop buying oranges altogether: there will cease to be a People of the Peel.

Only at that point can someone/some principle emerge from the descendants, providing a knife to cut though that skin they thought was “an orange” and to facilitate the tasting of the fruit within.

This is what is meant in Torah when she says:

Say to them, as truly as I live, says YHWH, as you have spoken in my ears, so will I do to you: Your carcases shall fall in this wilderness; and all that were numbered of you, according to your whole number, from twenty years old and upward which have murmured against me. Doubtless you shall not come into the land, concerning which I sware to make you dwell therein, save Caleb the son of Jephunneh, and Joshua the son of Nun.

But your little ones, which you said should be a prey, them will I bring in, and they shall know the land which you have despised. But as for you, your carcases, they shall fall in this wilderness. And your children shall wander in the wilderness forty years, and bear your adultery, until your carcases be wasted in the wilderness. (Numbers 14:28-33)

Malihe

I’ve just heard that our friend Malihe is in hospital, after suffering a stroke. She is known to some who read here as Melissa/Oriontriquetra.

Please offer du’a for her speedy recovery: because du’a is for delivery into loving gnosis, and loving gnosis is Malihe’s character.

March hutba: evolution and union

A recently hutba given by the Rev. Immanuel G. Moon, your friendly parish sheikh, on recent problems in the East End of the City.

Darwinian Evolution and its incompatibility with Islam is again the news of the day, with the blacklisting of a well known evolutionist sheikh from his masjid (and yet another death threat lobbed his way) by his wayward flock and Harun Yahya gracing our shores to teach our children his belief system.

It’s easy for us to feel distant from that Lost City and its troubles, from our quiet vantage point in the Fadakian Counties, where God makes Himself Known, the faces are joyful and never angered within our temple, and the words of the Qur’an are still read and heard.

But charity is the nature of our True Islam, and so let us consider their plight in charity, channels of wealth, offered in obedience to iqra, at least, if not received.

1.

First, let us make clear that Adam was not descended from a primate ape. Adam was formed from “sounding clay”: that is to say, from the waveform/matter duality, a substance whose essence is vibration and whose vibration is its substance.

He created man from sounding clay like the potter’s clay, And He created the Jinns from a smokeless flame of fire. (55:14-15)

Originally Adam’s form was just that: a hollow form, an originary vessel. In Sahih Muslim we find a hadith that Iblis would tap that vessel and would hear the vibration ring out, like a bell. That’s the vibration of Adam’s form. Its name is dormant Muhammed, the substance’s potential waveform (rising and falling, slavery and messaging). This is why the hadeeth tell us that Muhammed existed before Adam, before the Word “Be!”.

Then God breathed into Adam’s form, and filled him with the ruh, the breath of God. This filling up with Divine Breath was the activation of the Muhammedean principle within its form, and it ran along the outside and inside of the Adamic vessel, in that its life/becoming is the flux of the Muhammedean waveform, submission/messaging, the being unfolds as the breath breaths in and out. So the filling is a kind of awakening of clay, a breathing of life into the pottery, rather than a mere filling.

This original Adam was taught all the Names and existed above the Angels, in their submission to him. He was taught these Names: but the Names taught were learnable by the ruh. So they were undifferentiated, because the ruh knows undifferentiation (though it contains a primordial differentiation within itself, the Mother/Father inhalation/exhalation principle, the Freudian primal scene sanctified — the ruh expresses the breather whose secret is the space of undifferentiated Names). These are the Names of God, the True, Pure Speech, a speech in which there is no black and white, there is only Truth.

Angels are models of containment and form and so Adam-as-ruh exists “above” them, because his Speech, taught directly by God, is uncontained, unformed, unangelic.

There was a subsequent fitnah/catastrophe of Love, in that this Adam as a vessel became shattered: the moment Adam became Adam/Eve. It is not Eve that caused the shattering: rather, it was an overload of Love that resulted in this. God Loves so much that the vessel of Adam was unable to contain this Love, was unable to contain the Names and so exploded.

In this way, the temptation of Adam/Eve to taste of the tree ought to be read as a preordination of inevitable outpouring. They are instructed to stay away from the tree: but that instruction (and the temptation to taste of it) are placed by God in the knowledge that they will be ignored. This is not divine mischievousness. Rather, the tree, the instruction, the inevitable heedlessness: these are God setting something aside in Reality from the Body of Adam/Eve, whose speech ought to encompass everything (“not to go hungry nor to go naked, nor to suffer from thirst, nor from the sun’s heat”). Adam/Eve are in union with God. Isn’t this enough? No: instead, there is something in surplus. The possibility of fragmentation, the possibility that Love has such a surplus that it must overflow, that Adam/Eve must be shattered vessels into a space of differentiation, different voices, different colours, cultures, times, universes.

He broke into a fragments, shards, signs. And those fragments constitute and reconstitute our individual lives.

Adam/Eve are at the base of the tree and the shattering is the tree’s course. And Love is known through Prophecy, each Prophetic moment a fruit on that tree, each branch a fragment of that original Vessel.

This is why the secondary Adam, the human Adam is cast down (in the programming sense of casting of types) as a Prophet. Prophecy follows from the shattering: it exists because of, or despite of, the shattering of the pure Names into individual, differentiated signs.

You see, the ruh still runs through all the souls of the Children of Adam: though we are broken souls, though deception now runs through our lesser speech, a speech structured by angelic multiplicities. Yet the ruh is known, our Truth can be spoken and perceived — and through this we maintain individual linkage back into the original Adamic nexus, like the echo of a big bang, or a forecast of a bang to come.

2.

The task of the Muslim is to repair the shards, to extract the illumination, the light of Love that could not be contained but exists as a kind of glue, binding each shard to the next and, consequently, comprehended when signs are configured to other signs in a particular fashion. This re-binding is called the straight path, to seek out and recover the Message of Love, the fragmented Names, the lost knowledge of the original unitary Adam, within the individual, multiplied human journeys of reading.

3.
So, of course, it goes without saying, in the Tailorite Church we do not “believe” Adam came from an ape. Adam is a vessel that was awakened and contained the Love of God, became unable to contain that Love and exploded into the soul fragments we now call the “self”.

Without understanding this, we are not reading the Qur’an, we are doing something else. It is okay to do something else, but let us take the story of Adam’s formation/shattering back to current events:Anyone who calls someone a kuffar is a kuffar, and walks with satan, reliving the tree moment in minature. This is because satan is the “adversary”, pushing us to break unity with an evil, hateful word. To fall into an intoxicated space of differential adversary, of power/belief/religion/categories.

To live upon the shards of signs, and fail to repair or reconnect the edges and seek the Names. To fail to yield fruit upon your particular branch of the tree.

This is what the kafir constitutes, nothing worse — but nothing better either — and those who have called the sheikh a kafir for his interest in Darwinian evolution — they walk with Satan and are currently in a state of disbelief. They will recover their belief  at some stage, but perhaps only after “their” branch has been cut away and the fruits of reading return at along a different, earlier fork. That is to say, God may replace them with another people (9:39).

Kafirdom is contagious. Just as the glue of the shards suggests the Love, the falsity of their hatred (and the range of our possible reactions when presented with that falsity, from agreement to the desire to debate) pushes us in the direction of further dispersal, purging, branch cutting, fragmentation, chaos. God makes provision for this.

That is to say, if you were to debate evolution and Islam with these people, you will miss the point of Adam. Because you will enter into their mode of using language, which is not a Divine way of reading — it is a distraction, a satanic distraction from what God is trying to tell us. To debate with them is to forget Islam, literally.

Their mosque is unclean. Do not enter it, nor pray behind them.

They are not friends, so ought not be treated as such. They have cold hearts and do not understand the Qur’an: their ignorance is contagious. But honour your treaties and contracts with them.

If they (or your inner sorrow) argues with you about this, say “My God and your God are one”.

If they persist, then turn away from them and do not despair at their ignorance.

 

March Hutba: from temporary revolution to eternal circles

A recently hutba given by the Rev. Immanuel G. Moon, your friendly parish sheikh, on the Egyptian situation.

Something has been conspicuously absent during the tumult we witnessed unfolding in the middle east. Where were the voices of the ulama? Or to phrase the question more precisely: why was the ulama unable to contribute anything of value to the revolution’s unfolding?

Because surely our supposedly spiritual leaders had nothing of value to say, to inspire, to caution, to comment. Some backed the regime in throwback Asiatic kowtow to state/military authority. Others might have muttered some enthusiastic platitude, parallels with Pharoah’s failure in the Divine Revelation. But how does drawing a parallel between Mubarak and Pharoah help? The parallel is too obvious to be of any poetic/practical worth, and surely those verses did not inspire the youth of Egypt to act as they did.

This is important: it was not religious Word that led to this, it was a humanist need to be free, a desire for justice that led to this, the Word bypassed.

And yet now we see what was missing in the revolution, what the revolution requires. It requires God to be put at its centre. Not in any kind of theocracy, not some Taliban innovation, not the satanic caliphate that is on the lips of those who seek to deceive within the City. No proxy leadership, no authority, no human on the throne. But Allah at the centre.

This will ensure success: there is no other way to success.

Look what is happening now in Egypt: the danger those young people face. Their Pharoah has been displaced, but some repetition threatens. The same kind of people remain at the top of the chain.

There was only one thing that led to the momentary rupture of the system they were enslaved to: and that was a group mental shift, where the threat/power of the authorities was suddenly revealed to be an illusion, en masse. A reverse group hypnosis occurred. Who lifts that hijab?

The problem with lifting of hijabs is that there’s always another one underneath. There will always be displacement, but this inevitably yields some kind of bifurcation and crystallization of new power structures, new authorities, new modes of mind control and group consent. Another Pharoah, bigger, badder, more virulent than the last — or maybe refactored, shinier, more slick and appealing than ever before.

And this moment of crystallization is fast: in fact the Friends agree that it is lightning fast, instantaneous (there being a calculus of infinitesmals forming the semantics of the impossible rupture, but I digress).

You see: the protesters of tahrir square would have experienced the jouissance of the unveiling in that group moment when they all thought: “Why, you’re nothing but a pack of cards!” And the rest of us, those who marched in solidary around the world, would have vicariously tasted that Alicine brew. And that drink sustained them, that drunk awakening led to their tyrant’s fall.

But this is when they are most vulnerable: and no amount of human strength can protect them. They are vulnerable because rupture necessitates displacement/reformation of the Pharonic principle.

As can be seen: the old guard remain still largely in power.

Who lifts the hijab? And lifts it again? God offers them the prospect of infinite jouissance and, through this, the true strength, the true success of revolution: eternal revolution of the ruh, through each and every sign, and sign complex, the Breath running through unobstructed, correcting, reforming, comprehending, the Breath breathed by itself, and so knowing Love loving to be Known.

To act in an Islamic mode is to operate according to a mode of infinite pleasure, that each word spoken, each thought thought, each action taken — is made through pleasure and joy in reading the message behind it all. Self-awareness that the subject and object of every action is a message of Love. That the cables of Love’s conception runs down into the machinery of human action.

This is the Tantra of Islam. To regulate Kali. And her regulation is what the Sufism contributes to the revolution — to inspire, to caution — it is what the Sufi reading offers to the Muslims, not only to sew the seeds but also to reap the harvest of dissent. In eternal revolution of eternal pleasure.

To cultivate such a state of mind is the protection, the precondition, the postcondition of any successful revolution. There is no “internal” greater jihad separate from the lesser “physical/political”, nor does one precede the other. They are, rather, two sides of an ourobus strip: the running of one into the other itself a revolution of exterior against interior and exterior against interior.

This is the politics of Islam. The politics the ulama have been unable to deliver. A political technology of cultivation.

Without this cultivation: the authorities will reappear and injustice/obstruction will be the order, sooner or later, and you’ll be slaves again. With this cultivation: you will never be enslaved to any power, human power will exist in a constant state of overthrow, and you will be Slave to the Kiss of Truth alone.

So let us say, to those who have ears to hear and eyes to see: you have returned from lesser jihad by means of the greater.

From temporary revolutions in Tahrir square to eternal (sevenfold) circles about the Cube of Love.

Courtesy of the Brainstormers blog.