Being in humility to totally abandon oneself to God

The Way to God (2)

Here are the verses of Surah al-Fatiha: Iyyaka na’boudou

wa iyyaka nasta’ine
It is You whom we adore, and
It is in You that we seek help…

And to understand, on first reading, that help lies entirely in adoration. Universal formulation of the motive for engagement in ritual practice. But immediately opening our mind to the intelligence of a second level of reading, establishing (while maintaining intact the structure of the original motif) that adoration is what opens for us a path of interior access to God: a path of communication with the Absolute. Thus, the help He gives us lies essentially in what He communicates to us in terms of “signs”.

Help therefore comes to us from what the world now does for us as ” sign “ towards Him. THE ” world “ is, for the believer, a blessing only if his mind, oriented towards the presence, welcomes the entire manifestation in its quality of “signaling stanza”, as a bundle of signs of the divine reality (“sign” in Arabic is said “’alama”meaning both “sign” and “world”).

The Law is the path leading the sincere practitioner to the Residence of his Friend. It is in this understanding that the deepest meaning of Islam could reside, namely, in the recognition of the Friend, the contemplation of His presence… When man recognizes the presence of the personal, merciful, helping God, his soul infinitely aspires to find the way to the place of life of his Friend (symbolic place of residence); thus he finds, in his practice, the place—real and symbolic—of the Kaaba.

But to recognize God in His Reality—when the psychic motion of the practitioner disperses to unite in the excess of divine transcendence—one must recognize, oneself, in oneself, one’s own ontological impotence or weakness; to see it naked, to expose oneself, to examine the human condition in its simplest form. Reason why it is most often from trials and despair that the light of faith in God, living, personal, helper, is born; that faith in Providence is born.

The recognition of the Friend leads the spirit of the repentant man to journey towards His symbolic place of residence to find refuge. The Kaaba becomes his destination; the Law, its itinerary. By directing the gaze of his mind towards the Kaaba, the house of his Friend, man turns his consciousness, from himself, towards the Friend. And it is precisely this movement that the “conversion” operates with all rigor in the soul of the one who “converts”. By recognizing Providence, the Muslim realizes that God is closer to himself “than his jugular vein” (5); that God asks nothing better than to bless and save him. To receive help from God, the Muslim’s inner gaze must shift away from ” I “ and go to Him!

God then becomes the center of his attention. It is God, and no longer himself, who is the Center of his existence: a mystical Center whose radiance is necessarily universal. The gaze of man—even if it were spiritual—could not reach Him, but He, Permanent, reaches the gaze of man. (6) The eye of the human heart grasps the actuality of the gaze that God places on it in manifestation. Thus the divine reality is offered to be contemplated in the constellation of signs of our symbolic universe, of which the Kaaba is, in the final analysis, the cornerstone, the organizing principle.

In fact, the Law—or “sharia”—is a way to let go of yourself by caring about yourself. It is what allows man to engage in a process of self-abandonment while remaining engaged in a psychosocial process of subjectivation. It is therefore not a question here of losing one’s subjectivity (self-consciousness) or of completely dissolving it, but of transforming it, of expanding it to the universal.

Transformation carried out via the initiatory process of “characterization” (“takhalluq”)a process consisting of the subject positioning himself internally in such a way as to let God invest, take charge, direct his conduct and replace his qualities with His own. God then becomes the hearing by which the subject hears, the sight by which he sees… (7) God substitutes His attributes for his own. And this “inner position” that the subject must take in order to activate said process is humility.

Thus, to make this substitution possible, man must be in a state of humility. We have this in us, but it is still a question of humbling ourselves before God, and not (or no longer) before false idols. (8) And the most massive of idols—the one that sums them all up—is none other than the Self. Thus the spiritual task consists of letting go of the Self in order to abandon oneself totally to God. It is the leap towards the Absolute. The interior movement, the conversion, we will call it what we want. It remains that the leap into the void, the leap into the invisible, or the ineffable, necessarily involves a departure from dry land.

The solid ground of our certainties, stereotypes, knowledge, titles, merits, small satisfactions. To let go of the Self is to grant ourselves a moment of truth about ourselves by ultimately taking note of the fact that our Self has no value or reality in itself alone. The subject finds deliverance in the full, complete, uncompromising awareness that the Self is nothing other than what the Absolute gives it to be and on which it radically depends.

The dry land of the Self is tender, green and very comfortable. Why should we leave it? Because the softness and comfort of our satisfied little Self hide from us the harsh reality of our irreducible ontological poverty. The strongest mind is the one that knows its weakness best.

There is only one error in the world, the sovereignty of man. (9) To give himself a chance to live in harmony, man must therefore understand and admit his error, then work tirelessly to correct himself. He must free himself from the illusion of his own autonomy. Man does not have his cause in himself…

As long as he lives under the influence of this illusion of sufficiency and autonomy, he lives well in the “divine presence” ; but fails to recognize it. She totally escapes him. To make the leap, to leave the solid ground of human sovereignty, man needs landmarks, beacons, a need to find beyond his person some sort of wake in which he can inscribe his own dynamic. The Law is the path that leads man towards the Divine Presence. It is the straight path on which Muslims ask God to guide them in each of their ritual prayers. It is therefore indeed a way “invisible”interior, individual and secret…

It is therefore only under well-defined conditions that this path will take a collective, political, institutional form. There Sharia of souls can therefore only find—without canceling themselves out—space for political integration in humanity in the only organization that consensus (“ijma'”) designated by the name of universal caliphate. (10)

Notes:

5.Quran (50-15).

6.Quran (6-103).

7.Sahih al-Bukhari, (Dar al-Fajr). 1944.

8.Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace. Plon. 1950

9.Félicité de Lamennais, Philosophical Blends.

10.Reason why an “Islamic State” which uses Sharia law in criminal matters is a (disastrous) joke. An Islamic nation-state could ultimately support itself with a semblance of legitimacy if their leaders were themselves, individually, in an “Islamic (internal) state”; in which case it would be precisely by virtue of their disposition to humility that they would refrain from exercising political power in the name of sharia in the absence of a regular caliphal authority. Let us therefore call for the advent of a spiritual Caliphate, a new transnational ecumenical space for the universalization of the exchange of signposts…