Head Smashing in the Deen of Allah

There are a number of references to the punishment of heads being smashed (repeatedly) and to the boiling of brains in the Prophetic narrations.

For example, narrations concerning the Miraj and Isra refer to the Prophet seeing angels smash people’s heads with rocks. These heads would return to the shape they had been, and then the angels would smash their heads again–and so on. Jibril told the Prophet, “These are the ones whose heads felt too heavy to perform prayer–the ones who used to sleep without praying.”

There is also the following, regarding brains:

Narrated An-Nu’man: I heard the Prophet saying, “The person who will have the least punishment from amongst the Hell Fire people on the Day of Resurrection, will be a man under whose arch of the feet a smoldering ember will be placed so that his brain will boil because of it.”(Sahih Bukhari Volume 8, Book 76, Number 566)

Disclaimer.

I remember attending a hutba in South Ilford a few years’ ago where these descriptions were enumerated — with the Sheikh reminding us of how painful that would be, to have your brain leak out from your skull and then for it to be repeated — with the congregation being put under a palpable spell of collective fearfulness.

Now, just so people don’t mistake my intent, let me remind you that I respect traditional Islam’s responses to these stories. In particular, I remind my Western readers not to pre-judge the Muslims on their usage of these gruesome narrations: their purpose is to instill a particular mode of emotional comportment toward their Allah (fear and reverence), an embodied mode of feeling that entails a quite different form of subjectivity from, say, a 19th century pastor’s hellfire and brimstone sermon or a Medieval Christian conception, etc.

And we must be cautious in relating to the Islamic subjectivity of embodied piety — and, when tempted to criticise, must always ask ourselves — for what purpose do we wish to criticise? There’s always a political subtext to any critique, so what’s our politics? And if we can’t answer that sensibly, morally, then it is better to hold our tongue. So what follows is not Islam, has no colonial intent to affect or challenge Islam’s embodied practice: it is something completely separate without a political agenda other than to lay down what I believe.

The Tailorite Reading.

So now that’s out of the way (I ought to form a standard disclaimer), let me give you the Tailorite reading of head smashing.

The human being consists of a number of different aspects and has a meaning that runs across lives, forms of lives, forms of forms and formation itself. The relationship between one level and the next is one of events to forms of events.
At any point in time, the life that we have lived so far constitutes a (fractal) trace of events, a trace, form or set. This trace is called the “head”, while the life we have lived is known as the “neck”.

As we move through life, we encounter signs. When these signs are read (processed, rather than bypassed) light is unlocked into formative space (archetypes are encountered) and conduits of transmission are opened from neck to head. The head feeds from the neck-event, the neck provides nutrient of light extraction/processing, like a tree is sustained by its roots.

The Qur’an ordains necks being severed, because as nutrients are fully extracted from one lifetime, the head needs to pass onto another lifetime to continue its extraction/feeding process. Like a cosmic combine harvester: the head-neck-reading complex.

At the same time, the complex is not unidirectional between neck and head. The head itself provides revelatory dispersal, bidirectional sustenance and nutrients to the neck: like a mother feeds her children. When the neck reads shariah, in an awakened state, it stimulates the head with a call, that is then responded to, with milk of Wisdom which flows down to sustain our lives.

This bidirectionality of this flow is the meaning of Qur’an here:

When My servants ask about me, then I am near. I respond to the invocation of the caller when he calls me. So let them respond to Me and believe in Me so that they will be rightly guided. (Qur’an 2:186)

And that’s what prayer is.

But we’re talking about this all from within the perspective of the individual soul, transmigratory though it is. So when we say “Wisdom”, it’s still indirect with respect to the wider matrix of forms of forms, and the core of formation itself. So here we need to speak of head smashing. Heads are smashed when this reciprocal circuit of head-neck-reading is in turn repeated, so that the soul does not merely transmigrate between bodies in one universe but, rather, entire universes are destroyed and recreated: transmigration of the self, not between lifecycles, but between world-cycles.

Reading is navigation through shariah, reading is reading shariah, and shariah is fire. The neck’s movement through fire is always by means of two feet: these constitute the diamond dialectic.

Reading of shariah provides the catalyst for a violent call upwards to the skull of the heaven: reading shariah is the fire against the arches of the feet. This awakens the subject who was previously asleep to prayer. The circuitry of the neck-head-reading complex is activated and the head is “smashed”, so that the brain (acquired/provided localities of immanent Wisdom), passed through all lifetimes in one moment and is both dispersed downward and its archetypes of archetypes are inscribed within the “higher head” of the Invisible Intellect.

The lower (visible) process of reciprocation is therefore mirrored in the upper (invisible) complex. Conceptually mirrored, from the perspective of the skull, not actually, from the hypothetical/fantastic perspective of the meta-skull. The skull is smashed and its nutrient (brain) is released from its form and piped upward to the meta-skull, which recognizes, maintains and corrects the meta-reading of your lifetimes, as they pass between bodies/ummahs, and as bodies pass between worlds, between entire cycles of the universe’s creation. The meta-skull in turn takes these refined calls and emits them upward into the secret of Your Being, Who in turns reciprocates downward through both circuits, a refined sustenance of the Single Tablet, downward into ordinal Qur’ans.

Both the Jesus of the visible order and the Jesus of the invisible order are therefore speaking when they say the following — appearing as he does between cities and villages:

And He went through the cities and villages, teaching, and journeying toward Jerusalem. Then one said to Him, “Lord, are there few who are saved?”

And He said to them, “Strive to enter through the narrow gate, for many, I say to you, will seek to enter and will not be able. When once the Master of the house has risen up and shut the door, and you begin to stand outside and knock at the door, saying, “Lord, Lord, open for us,’ and He will answer and say to you, “I do not know you, where you are from,’ then you will begin to say, “We ate and drank in Your presence, and You taught in our streets.’ But He will say, “I tell you I do not know you, where you are from. Depart from Me, all you workers of iniquity.’

The visible Jesus does not know them because he’s a different Jesus now, that universe was terminated and while he looks the same, he’s entirely different without any memory of what happened earlier (parallel universe Jesus). The invisible Jesus does not know them because they are the residue of illusion through which the roots extracted and retained the nutrients: they were lost during the process as it evolves from his meta-perspective.

We are talking about 2′s and 3′s here, lives, skulls and meta-skulls, in relation to Jesus. This is why the following appears to contradict the former, regarding gatherings and recognition. Depending on what part of the self we are talking about, and what point in the cycles and cyclical cycles we refer to, there is recognition or not, though actually the lines of kinship are not severed.

For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them. (Matthew 18:20)

The Core

New pieces from my father.

Bidah

Bidah is the Life and the Truth: its adversary is death and illusion.

Bidah is the fissure of Love, through which the Speech before Speech runs.

And she graces the novation compute: blessings upon the trader in the marketplace, who exchanges old contracts for new.

The First Time I Prayed with Muhammed

It was some time in 2009. I spent the night praying in what is now the girls’ room.

At some point during my recitation, reality shifted, so that the Qur’an coming from my mouth became like a kind of tunnel, so that I was praying with (or within) Muhammed. Not a concept, but the man, the real man. I was standing in the room, now, but was also acutely aware of the trans-spatial-temporal nature of the contact. I was definitely standing in Seven Kings and yet, simultaneously, in 7th century Arabia. I was struck by how alien he was in form to me, and at the same time I comprehended his point, who he was exactly in relation to me.

I’ve spent a fair amount of effort trying to make sense of that experience – or, more accurately, enumerate it’s implications using the vocabulary at my disposal. It’s one of the reasons I was writing the Doctrine with such conviction, bordering on arrogance, particularly when it came to Islam (a religion I really know very little about). And that experience also sources my communication failure to Muslims.

Because these kinds of experiences are very personal, very subjective, aren’t they? And they are objectionable to religious people, for that reason: at least, religion in the sense of a normative, rationalist tradition (that denies the possibility of personal experiences). I’d certainly be fine with the truth of it being entirely subjective — an hallucination, brought about by a confined space, a day’s fasting, fatigue the repetition of the act of prayer, etc.

As I have learnt, “my” Muhammed, the one I met/hallucinated, the one I’ve been trying to enunciate since — he appears to be quite different from the one understood by the scholars of Islam. To begin with, that Muhammed, the scholars’ Muhammed, doesn’t time travel (though he’s an excellent and just statesman).

At least from the scholars’ perspective, if you have met Muhammed, you can’t be a Muslim. From time to time I find myself rather let down with respect to this irony.

Amy Winehouse and the Norway Tragedy: Being More Like God

Two tragedies are read out this Sunday, across the headlines of papers and the status update feeds of social media: the death of a pop singer and the terrorist attack in Norway.

It is interesting to compare my immediate reaction to both these events.

1. Norway.

In the case of Norway massacre, I was first shocked when I heard the initial reports. But I’m desensitized to news of violence, so this registered with me in the same way that, say, some ethnic cleansing in Kyrgistan might hit me: detached, quite mild, horror.

My first assumption was that it was a probable Islamic terrorist attack. And whenever these things happen, some part of my prays that it’s someone else perpetrating the attack. (“God, please let it not be Muslims this time!”) When it’s in places like India or Pakistan or Iraq, it’s almost a given. But in Western attacks, there is always a possibility of some other group or individual — diversity breeds a diversity of murderers. So when the Spanish bombing occurred, I’m sure part of me was hoping it was Basque separatists.

Why do I feel this way? Partly out of attachment and tribal empathy for my Muslim friends and to the general immigrant populations in the West. Partly out weariness at this decade long enumeration of Muslim atrocities: I am tired of the cloud of violence hanging above the ummah of Islam, and (petty mindedly) wish it was blown to some other, more distant ummah (like Neo Nazis or the IRA, for instance).

So some distant component of me felt almost victorious — at least vindicated — as the news trickled in that the criminal was, not Muslim, but a far right extremist. Ha! And the media was so quick to assume! The political-propaganda machine bias runs deep … Yeah, all those initial soundbites immediately so quick to blame the Muslims, guilty until proven innocent because to be Muslim is to be guilty. The Norwegian prime minister himself seemed to be talking immediately about some foreign Islamist agency in his defiant first speech after the event — “They will never succeed in changing Norway from being Norway”.

Oooh, the hypocrisy of it all! The criminal calls himself a Christian and has links to the British Nationalist Party. But, predictably, the media does not label him a “Christian Terrorist”. There will be no calls for the Church to better police itself this Sunday! And, unlike extremist Muslim organizations in the UK, there is not call to shut down the BNP for its tangential involvement in this crime. Then I turn on the BBC and hear some talking head academic from a certain War Studies department arguing that this event shouldn’t be classified as terrorism, tragic though it is. The subtext being: terrorism is a war between east and west, it has a different status from a mentally ill man with guns and an ideology. But Mr Professor — why are you drawing that distinction other than to prop up your own funding, man, other than to legitimate a discourse of violence based on an orientalist distinction of east from west, a discourse whose primary purpose is not to tackle the evil that men do but, rather to maintain control of symbolic capital. (Symbolic capital ranging over everything that can be represented — money, commodities, labour, land, but also university lectures and talking head soundbites.) Mr Professor, why are they funding your research on terrorism, your ownership of the term — other than as a means to control power?

Surely a distinction between the mentally ill/alienated and the peaceful/lovers would be a more useful basis for any genuine approach to really tackle the problem of terrorist acts (in all countries).

But stop.

This way of thinking cannot be a good thing. Think of it from a God’s Eye view, or at least think about how the Tailorite Jesus would react. The violence has happened, for whatever reason, and the first reaction of the Tailorite ought not be one of smug self-righteous indignation at the politicians and media — it ought to be one of complete loving sympathy to the victims.

Would Jesus be blogging some Foucaultian diatribe about the nature of power and media in such an instance? No, not at all — he’d take on this sin — all of it, onto himself — and he’d weep.

If we are made in the image of God, we ought to cultivate a Godly reaction to all news, good or evil. We are better than this.

2. Winehouse.

I was more emotionally involved in the news of Winehouse’s death. I felt a more direct, personal and human sadness at this, not an abstract sadness.

And that is interesting: the nature of technology has fooled our (still very animal) primate systems into feelings of intimacy with celebrity. This woman has sung for me these years — sitting with my family in my car, her presence has accompanied me on the tube, closer to me than my fellow commuters, she has worked alongside me at my office desk, and in the kitchen as I cook. Of course consciously I’ve just been playing mp3s. But my unconscious primate system is still fooled to the aural illusion at play here: and so this woman is as close to me as any friend or relative.

Hence my genuine sadness at her death, my only abstract distant mourning of the Norway massacre. It’s also the reason why people will get more upset with deaths in one country over deaths in another. A typical Pakistani Muslim will be more upset over children dying in Palestine than in Rwanda or China — simply because they have subjected their primate systems to a stronger information stream from Palestine than the other countries — and so at the very deepest unconscious level, they are more physically intimate with the one information presence than the other.

This is not to say they don’t love or feel mercy equally: I’m talking about the actual level of emotional sadness here, that physical level of mourning.

It’s the same principle behind all deaths and representation: it’s where our stone age selves are most obviously not able to keep up with the toolkits of information transmission we have developed.

But stop.

What I’ve written is true. But what about the morality of it all? Sadness for something that we know is small in the cosmic scheme of things: it’s still sadness. Someone passed away: it’s not an illusion.

What would Jesus do in the case of Amy? He carries her mistakes upon his cross, he carries her sins so that she is saved. And he’d weep.

If we are made in the image of God, we ought to cultivate a God like reaction to all news, good or evil. We are better than this.

3. Being more like God

But of course it is impossible to carry all that is occurring, to process each and every tragedy of humankind, to catch, carry and process each and every wave of suffering that ripples across the surface of the universe.

It isn’t possible process the totality of all human suffering. Because suffering is a form of knowledge and the totality of knowledge belongs to Allah alone. Those waves, each one of them, they constitute the Body of the Messiah: that’s what it means for him to carry them. And only Allah knows that Body, though it’s our Body, we cannot know it in totality. The Body itself — when understood as Love Loving to be Known — is in a state that moves toward total stillness, total correction of these ripples. And that’s where we come in — it is through our individuated processing of suffering that this eventual stillness will be achieved, and the Messiah will return.

And so we filter our information streams and we process what comes naturally to us, we feel some events more strongly than others. Some are more effected by an event in Palestine than an event in China, some are more effected by a Islamic terrorist attack in New York than by a right wing attack in Norway, some feel a celebrity’s passing away more strongly than the deaths of thousands.

There is nothing wrong with feeling some things more strongly than others: the problem comes about when we fail to read the information streams with divine literacy, when we become trapped, enslaved to the information being presented to us so that it creates a false sense of self containedness. So that we fail to grasp what Allah is saying to us, when we see tragedy in front of us.

Technology and multimedia feeds do not help: a complexity of information feeds only serves to highlight our primate sensory overload, our inability to read.

But while the primate system hasn’t caught up with technology of information transmission, (Tailorite) Islam provides the means to evolve ourselves to process (iqra).

We are on the cusp of a new point of human evolution. The potential is there for the primate system to catch up, right now, by comprehending the (individuated, non-total) information streams being presented to it and reading/processing these streams. This process involves leaving behind the primate shell and living life in a way that enables us to grasp the different forms of tragedy put before us — from the smallest kind to the largest — in a mode that is self-aware of its own reading, that reads the information horror and its own eye reading, horrified by the information. This is a way of locating Christ.

Such a way of reading allows us to become what we are, underneath the dust of our bodies — beings of light, beings of information. The (Tailorite) Islamic reading allows us to shift rapidly, from one stream to the next, from one people to the next, from one media context to the next, from one lifetime to the next, immediately: and rapidly deploy corrective modes of empathy and absorb waves of tragedy with counteracting waves of loving-kindness. To correct and process each hurt without becoming fixated on any particular point in your timeline, in your lifeline. This is called carrying the Cross, and necessarily has the character of “switching” from one stream to the next.

It’s not a question of what would the Messiah do — we know what he would do/does — as much it is a question of how we individually carry the Messianic correction.

Random Hadith Commentary: Distances and Jummahs

Tailorite Devotional Exercise: clear your mind, open the Sahih Bukhari on a random page and write down what is immediately apparent.

Narrated Aisha: The people used to come from their homes and from Al-Awali (the outskirts of Al-Madina). They used to pass through dust and used to be drenched with sweat and covered with dust, so sweat used to trickle from them. One of them came to Allah’s Messenger who was in my house. The Prophet said to him, “I wish that you keep yourself pure and clean on this day of yours.” (Sahih Bukhari, the Book of Friday, 10:50).

Al Madina is the city into which souls return, after each cycle of birth and death. As the Qur’an says, the muhajirin (emigrant soul aspects, little faces who leave their home/necks to journey into the Nothern City) are welcomed by their co-respondent ansar (helper soul aspects) in that city: and, at all levels of life and reading, this is a continual process of hijrah (emigration), welcoming/netting of the emigrant by the matching ansar-shape.

The cycle of this process — or procession is given to us here:

And the forerunners, the Muhajirun and the Ansar and also those who followed them exactly: Allah is pleased with them as they are pleased with Him. He has prepared for them Gardens under which rivers flow, to dwell therein forever. That is the supreme success. (9:100)

As we have said before, the forerunners are those souls emigrating fully along the circuit model of consciousness, from Muhajireen as migrating-thought/temporal ennoia/procession to Ansar as welcoming foreknowledge/pronoia/providence.

And jummah is the nexus of this procession.

The souls pass through dust in this journey of return: they pass through bodies of dust intermingled with sweat. A soul passes through a world of dust and water as it proceeds toward nexus meeting.

The souls acquire two things: 1) permanent Truth extracts, gathered along their journey back into Al Madina 2) and an impermanent wastage of dust intermingled with sweat, as the Qur’an says, like foam that rises up from a blacksmith’s heated ore.

He sends down water from the sky, and the valleys flow according to their measure, but the flood bears away the foam that mounts up to the surface – and from that which they heat in the fire in order to make ornaments or utensils, rises a foam like unto it, thus does Allah show forth truth and falsehood . Then, as for the foam it passes away as scum upon the banks, while that which is for the good of mankind remains in the earth. Thus Allah sets forth parables.
(Qur’an 13:17)

The end of the routine being narrated here is one in which this soul-body entered the house of the 6 year old wife. Like a grain of pollen floating in the wind, passing into the window of the wife’s house. Why the 6 year old’s house? Because it desires a premature verdict mediated by Prophecy’s wife: an immanentization of the process we describe, but prematurely stated (in other words, an anticipatory enunciation of the rite’s climax). Which is: the process demands purification of the soul from its body, extraction of Truth from dust-sweat/foam … because the process is a washing away of that body, a pure extraction of scattered Truth/Love by means of the hijrah-City nexus called Jummah.

Suficore versus Islamic Piety

Tags

not islam, not sufism, suficore

(Really need to get Sally to sing this song, it’s a weak draft from 2 years’ ago that might make its way onto the second album.)

Islamic Piety: How is this Islamic? Music is haram, right?

The Tailor: Correct, there is a strong opinion within the Fiqh of Islam is that music is haram. This opinion cannot be disputed by myself — it may be disputed by people who live within the ummah though, because the fiqh is a constantly evolving and often self-contradictory group negotiation. But this video — and all the videos I have authored are not Islamic — because they fall outside of the scope of that group negotiation, they are made in ignorance of fiqh, not in negotiation (retaliatory or amicable). This is Suficore, which is something else entirely.

Islamic Piety: If this is “something else entirely”, then kindly remove your tags that associate your videos with Islam and Muslims — and employ a different tag which correctly corresponds to what this is meant to be. This is not even Sufi qalam/music. If you have invented a new musical movement please give it a new name and don’t defame Islam and Sufism in order to bring fame to you movement.

Tailor: I’m sorry. Those tags are now deleted.

Addendum

In the spirit of honesty, I should add that I composed that song after my first little “break” from Islam in 2009 — I wrote it the day I found I couldn’t take another jummah prayer. Up to that moment, for more than a year, I’d tried hard to maintain a serious practice of the religion of Islam. This included praying 5 times a day, finding a jamat prayer whenever possible and never missing a jummah group prayer, including listening to the entire hutba (sermon). But it become increasingly difficult to maintain this practice, because the hutbas were so awful and — to my ears — the exact opposite of the religion of my soul. Don’t get me wrong, non-Muslim reader: the sermons were not preaching some kind of radical violent jihadist Islam, as the tabloids might want you to imagine. They were always focused on issues to do with fiqh, with how to live, how to cultivate a particular piety that is alien to me, unnatural to me. They worked to create an image of God — and a comportment of piety towards that image — that was not so much fearful as uncomfortable — not a personal Love that comes comforts (even if its descent/withdrawal is fearful) — but perhaps, at best, an benevolent King’s Mercy balanced with other Kingly attributes, including a wrath/irascibility that curiously appeared to resemble a kind of judgmental cosmic south east asian uncle.

Anyway I’d been torn because I wanted to keep that practice up, I had fallen in love with the idea of a jummah prayer — and with the spirit of a group congregational rite.

But I couldn’t go on and so I spent the night in retreat, really quite worked up about things. I recited and meditated and worried. And then I felt hit by a wave of comfort, of personal Love that reminded me … it’s all alright, all systems are a masjid. And that wave constituted my fajr prayer, the birds outside my window calling an azan.

And so that song really is as non-Muslim as you can get — not so much un-Islamic as straightforwardly not Muslim, the exception to Islam’s rule: it is a song in which I felt Love’s personal comfort descend upon me … a reassurance that I no longer had to worry about the physical masjid and the rites of jummah (I’m talking about a personal comfort mind you — I no longer had to worry — of course the ummah of Islam must preserve and maintain and guard these rites). Hence the objections I quote above — are very much genuine concerns and in the spirit of accuracy — she was quite right — it was wrong to tag the video with Islam.

When reading the continual emails and complaint feeds I have been receiving since I started this blog with its video and facebook portals, I am constantly amazed at how perceptive Muslims within the piety movement are when it comes to policing their territories. To the ordinary viewer this sounds like a silly, kind of hippy song. But piety hears and immediately springs to action.

Death, du’as and my wife

Someone asked the Tailor’s wife for du’a on his relative who was ill at Mecca.

She replied with a laugh, in her inimitably tactless manner: “He will go immediately to jannah, it’s a blessing to die at Kaba.”

He was offended and said: “Why does your husband, who preaches ‘how to read life correctly’, why does that Tailor not teach his own wife some manners? My relative is dying and you are laughing!”

What he didn’t know was that her own grandfather — who was as special and beloved and close to her as his relative was to him — is passing away, slowly but soon to finalize, also at (a) Kaba. She is flying soon to be by his deathbed, with their daughters in tow, to say goodbye.

What he didn’t hear was — Her Laughter has tears within its Truth. That’s one of the reasons the Tailor fell in Love with Her. And Her Laughter sounds out in perfect adab.

And verily our Messengers came to Abraham with the good news. They said “Peace”. He said “Peace”. And he did not delay to bring them a roasted calf. But when their hands did not reach to it, he saw they were strange and he feared. And they said “Do not fear. We have been sent to the People of Lot”. And his wife was standing and she laughed: But we gave her glad tidings of Isaac and after him, of Jacob. She said “Alas for me! Shall I bear a child, seeing I am an old woman, and my husband here, is an old man? That indeed would be a wonderful thing!” They said: “Do you wonder at Allah’s decree? The mercy of Allah and His blessings be upon you, o you people of the house! For He is indeed worthy of all praise, full of Glory!” (The Reading, 11:71-73)

(Laughter = reincarnation -> perfection = circuitry of Abraham’s kaba in ascent = short circuiting = jannah, geddit?)

My last Ramadan as a Muslim

My last Ramadan as a Muslim began with a video we at the Vanguard were commissioned to make for the Fast Not Feast campaign:

The video’s style was a deliberate attempt to combine the sort of tone of “The Story of Stuff” and the RSA shorts with the Laitman Kabbalah videos — of course on a much lower budget and with low production values.

By this time I had found myself in an unusual situation of having the opportunity to speak publicly about religion to Islamic forums in London (including two appearances as a minor Muslim spokesperson on the BBC no less). The situation was unusual in the sense that I really wasn’t qualified to talk with any authority about Islam — never made shahada, learnt my salat from the internet, knew no Arabic, etc — but somehow I faked my way in. In general, London’s the kind of place where you can easily get pulled into things, roped into quite high level activities, providing you just walk the walk and talk the talk. I’m not complaining, the city’s done me more good than harm in this way.

I remember being so pleased with the video when we finished it: we really felt like this was “it” for this audience — that we’d accurately worked out what the ummah needed and wanted to hear, in a polished and modern fashion — a Sufic reading of the injustices of power, objectification, really — and a Kabbalic solution to live right and well.

The solution proposed works at one level — but at another was a very deliberate Kabbalic code: when Sally says “Charity = Creativity” she is referring to the “poor girl in rags” of the Zohar — the Shekhina, the immanent, feminine aspect of God. “Creativity” has always been our codeword for this Shekhina, this feminine Divinity. It fills our hearts when we become aware of what our fundamental “lack” or “need” really derives from — and turns that need and lack from something negative into something creative and truly productive. The Shekhina is a field of wheat that is reaped through reading Torah. We were arguing the same idea for reading Qur’an during Ramadan. That Ramadan is a time of Shekhinic harvest of the “real” food, through comprehending our “lack”.

But phrased in a modern language that people might find less mystical — in particular, that the modern progressive Muslim who loves his political/economic theory might enjoy.

I was really happy with the video when I completed it, and felt certain that this was the right tone to take immanetize the Shekhinic potential within the ummah. The modern progressive Muslim won’t stomach the Shekhina or the Zohar, but they love Western-sounding philosophy, the Zizeks, the Foucaults. But a bit of that stuff in to make it scientific sounding, and bob’s your uncle.

That’s the kind of headspace I was in at the time. Quite devious — but well intentioned as well as deluded.

The video went down okay in its screening. Online, there were quite a few objections to the “creativity” angle. People could sense that there was something “not quite right” or “foreign” being introduced into the Ramadan story. I was accused of invention (bidah) — deviation from the normative embodied practice of Islam. That’s fine — I got that all the time with this blog, when I label posts with “Islam” or “Sufism” in the title, there’s always some Islamo-Sufic gestapo out to kindly inform me of the error in my ways.

But also people who were important to me — not strangers, but friends, people who I trusted and loved devotedly — who knew my whole backstory, listened to my whole theology and had encouraged me to go down this particular path of explanation and exploration as a Muslim — they suddenly changed in attitude toward me and finally objected to the “foreign”, “impure” aspect of this content.

That unsettled me. Emotionally at first.

It took a while for me to grasp the point: the language is foreign, the concepts are impure, I did make it all up. It is bidah. Within Islam, Ramadan is an embodied discipline of the body — a legitimate rite, a modality of comportment towards God.

Any kind of Kabbalic/Tailorite projection onto it — of course — has the character of hostility, of a hostile attack on that which forefather’s worship. It is a fundamentally non-religious act, in fact.

And — importantly — for such an act to make sense — derived from my belief that I was speaking the same language, when in fact I was speaking pure gibberish — hostile gibberish, in fact. That they spoke Muslim-ese and I spoke something else entirely.

Maybe I could learn and study Muslim-ese and learn to, at least, accurately imitate how Muslims talk to Muslims. But the fundamental discovery at that moment was, in all the time I thought I was Muslim, I was a mere simulacrum, a poor mimic, a weak fake. The mask had fallen off — no true conversion had ever taken place into their tribe. I realised — of course! — I had never been Muslim. It was just “me” under those robes and prayer hat and facial hair … all that time.

1000 donkeys

There was once a mausoleum of a great Muslim saint that was a focus of pilgrimage. He was famed for many miracles. Muslims would come from far and wide to pray at the grave and ask for their child to be healed or that so and so… would marry them and would tie prayers to the tree next to the grave and so on. An old Sufi tended the grave and had a simple bed in one corner and as the pilgrims left they would give him money or food so that he was able to live comfortably.

Joha came to him and wanted him to teach him his ways of abstinence, piety and service to Allah. So he slept in another corner with the old Sufi for many months as the old man taught Joha all he knew.

Then one day the old Sufi said: “It is time for you to go and find your own way. Here take my old donkey and go in the protection of Allah!”

So off Joha went into the desert for many weeks. Sadly while on his journey the old donkey died and so he buried it in the spot it fell. As he sat on the grave wiping his sweat away a passer by saw him in his Sufi robes and immediately assumed the grave was of a great saint and came and prayed by it and then gave Joha some money.

Stunned Joha didn’t say anything. The man told others of this saint in the desert and more came. Joha built an enclosure and stories spread about the wondrous works of this saint and how he cured illness and answered prayers and Joha started to live a very comfortable life with all the donations from contented pilgrims.

But he eventually felt deeply guilty about what he had done and returned to the old Sufi to confess his sins and seek forgiveness.

The old Sufi smiled. “Do not feel bad my son. You see this grave that I have tended for many a year? It is the mother of the donkey I gave you.”

This story works at a number of levels.

1) It’s about the way religious culture builds up like a “crust” around “events” that are actually completely orthogonal to culture and religion. It’s like how you get towns and villages built near old volcanoes because the ground is more fertile there: but the event of the volcano erupting itself has nothing to do with these towns and villages (known in Tailorology as the “volcano and village routine”). And in fact are mutually exclusive: if the volcano were to erupt again it would wipe those towns and cultures until nothing remains but the face (of the earth).

2) The story concerns the impossibility of communication, in the ordinary sense of one agent (or book or story) A communicating something to another B. The impossibility of a telephone call: A calls B, A informs B. And I don’t mean this in the sense that Truth is necessarily some kind of “non-verbal” Enlightenment lesson. The story concerns the separation of concerns and (ironic) co-dependency between carrier signal and “that which is carried”, which is nothing more nor less than a blueprint of this whole process (known in Tailorology as the “kiss-o-gram” routine).

3) The standard Sufi tafsir on the donkey is that it represents the “nafs” of the human soul in transit. The ego. But not just the ego — lots of things are “nafsic”. Things like religion, like culture, like the things into which we are thrown.

Donkeys are not a bad thing, in the wider scheme of things. Carriers are a blessing. Contrary to populist suggestion, the Tailorology isn’t anti-nafs, it isn’t anti-ego or anti-donkey. In (74:49-50) the Qu’ran describes those who turn away from the truth as like donkeys running from a lion. In (31:19) it is said “the harshest of all sounds is the voice of the donkeys.” And yet, in (16:8) the donkeys are described as a gift to us from the creator, granting us transport and adornment.

So Joha’s donkey, his carrier, his adornment was a blessing from his teacher. Then it perishes along the way. His attachment, his culture, his Sufism, his learning, his Islam — they are the donkey his teacher imparted to him, and they have perished at that grave. His own personal “let go” event. I trust some of you know what I mean by “letting go” here.

But the irony of the Tradition is that the moment a Sufi has a “let go” event, they get showered in wealth — another culture, tradition etc — builds up around them. It’s the irony of revelatory, Divine experience: it always exists within a misprison of (some) Tradition. It is spelt out to us in tension with the words/prison bars of a Tradition that, in and of itself, as code-for-codes’ sake, denies its immediate transmission. Except for the fact that the story (and the Tradition) has encoded the “let go” self-reflexively in its carriage, its carrier carries the self-prophecy of its carriage, the crust of our immediate apprehension and the volcano of our potential comprehension, its own death.

A crust has formed around this very story. These teaching stories are silly and charming and quaint. Picture it being told by some lovely grey haired hippie convert Sheikh, white robes and immaculate beard, surrounded by an admiring bourgeoisie of sisters (cousins and aunts). Somewhere over in Kensington perhaps. Not like the hardcore martial rules and regs of the jackbooted Islamists here in brown-town.

The story appears to us in 21st century London as charmingly quaint and “user-friendly”. A Sufi Zen koan. Dinner party material. But it’s the very opposite: it’s a sword that cuts deep, it’s shariah, the most fearful shariah.