Ramadan, prince of exile
Muslim theme if it was, that the theme of the inner exile. We become foreign to ourselves and find refuge in the intimacy of a land released after an exile guided by wisdom … The country where we reside too often has the pace of a battlefield. And if we see nothing strange to live in such a state of destruction, it is a sign that deep down something is not round …
If living in a country raised against itself does not cause us the slightest defense reflex, this is clearly the index that we have lost the meaning of peace, of balance, that is clearly the sign that we have adopted the pathological in the mode of normality.
So much so that the idea of exile remains in suffering … Life is only too brief, and we are surprised to see individuals squandering their whole life in the conflict, and ultimately find nothing abnormal to live like this.
We all know that we all live such a heartbreak. We all know that we are all more or less undermined by the conflict; that we are all more or less betrayed by our own hypocrisy. The echo of the Word of God still vibrates today in the human soul, but more than ever tormented by the song of the sirens …
We are not united, but divided. We see that which then go into unity; who begin this difficult migration from division to unity; From prevarication to sincerity … internally undermined by the tumult, in a state of war, in shock, in a state of siege, destabilized by the division, we aspire sometimes to get out of ourselves, to become a stranger to ourselves. To become a stranger to this strange state … We then aspire to be granted ourselves of exile powers: “Leaves what troubles for what does not disturb. »»
When we arrive in a new place, in a new country, that we do not speak of the language, that we fled the war, that we have obtained asylum finally, that we have obtained a high struggle enough to rebuild our life, enough to rebuild, enough to rebuild everything on a new soil, on a new land of asylum and security, we find ourselves in the situation of a stranger.
Perhaps this is one of the possible senses to assert prophetic adage that we must behave in this world like foreigners … After having left behind an inner state damaged by the conflict, a new test awaits us: learning the language of the land of asylum.
The language of Islam; The language that prayer expresses; The language that is expressed in prayer. Language speaking by prayer; The language where all the light in the world is expressed; the language of charity; The singing language of the vast regions of hope. On our part the exile requests an act. The act of learning. And thereby requests a real miracle for us. Which is the miracle to understand.
We touch there at the heart of a delicate point to understand – precisely. Fiqh consists not only in the act of understanding; But still understanding in action. He is the kingdom of exile. The noble FAQIH is the border guard. The Shari’a is the road to the palace. It constitutes the place of residence of the king: the haqiqa. The saints are the Chambellans of the Court! They alone really know the gestures of love!
Fiqh would therefore be distributed, according to this topology, in three own spaces of understanding. He would make up three modes to understand the labels of the courtyard. The difference between these various Dufiqh dimensions is a difference in degree, not a difference in nature.
Fiqh is a theology. Under its ritual slope, practical theology (Fiqh al-‘Badat) is the art of understanding the way of making the movements of the body in the presence of the king. Under its theoretical side, speculative theology (‘Aqida) is the art of understanding how to operate the movements of thought in the presence of the king. Under its ethical side finally, Shari’a as a mystical theology, constitutes the art of understanding the why of the how of our practice.
Living in a country at war is already living in a way at home in the manner of a stranger. The peaceful ordering of habits and benchmarks, the familiar flow of everyday life, the sense of residence, the war suddenly shatters the existence. War destroys one by one all the foundations of happiness. And without benchmarks to which we can a little hang our confidence in life, it is not a place in the world where we did not feel foreign.
We are tracing towards this kingdom because we are not in a state of Fitra, and it is precisely because we are not a state of FITRA that the path of exile is so stuck. We exile in a kingdom that we do not know. We are foreigners in this kingdom. We don’t talk about the language; The inhabitants of this kingdom are the angels, the saints, the prophets.
We do not immediately know how to contact these superior beings, so we must master the grammar of an invisible language. This is what we have to learn upon our arrival in the kingdom. We are in a situation similar to that of the foreigner arriving on his reception land. Man is sometimes a political asylum seeker. It is always, basically, it seems to me, an applicant of theological asylum.
What God invites us by inspiring ourselves in the inaugural prayer, the very first support, the support of exile, at the dawn of the angels, is the exile of the self: “O generous king blessed us our refuge and sanctifies for us the path of your asylum, the path of peace. Exile me from me! Transport me in this blessed place where I can finally become foreign to me, to me who only loves me, and give me in grace a you to put above me ”.
I am only a servant disappeared in the dust of the divine earth, in the footsteps, the wake, of the prince of exile. The point of view from abroad in this world is undoubtedly the most difficult point of view to hold. Because this point of view of the soul detached from the world embraces all the causes of the world at the same time. This point of view on the world implies being able to endure the suffering of loneliness. It supposes to be able to assume the suffering of loneliness. Stop back, standing a little bit behind the world is already the purest miracle already. Because nobody can any more today taste loneliness other than acted by loneliness.
The Prophet (s) is a stranger among his own first, in his people. He finds himself excluded from the inside; As the revelation begins to descend on him. From Al-Amine, the “trustworthy”, he suddenly passes in the eyes of his family for Al-Majnoune, the bewitched. Then, foreigner, too, sometimes, in the eyes of his own disciples, as was the case in Hudaybya.
He makes decisions that he will have to assume alone against all, surrounded by a world that does not understand it. Surrounded by a world that does not support it. A Ta’if: where the children ran to the gates of the city to molester and cover it with insults. Ta’if and Hudaybya: two occurrences where the Prophet (s) was put to the test of the most extreme solitude. Ta’if would prelude to the night journey, and, Hudaybya, at the opening of Mecca, – the two major events of the life of the Prophet, and, therefore, of all human history …
The prophet (s) remained foreign to the suffering of loneliness, of rejection, insofar as he was able to remain foreign to himself. He (s) experienced the loneliness and exclusion at the heart of trials-notably Ta’if and Hudaybya-whose reading of the biographical story clearly leaves us the feeling that we were in his place, we would not have overcome neither; that we would have cracked in Hudaybya, as in Ta’if …
The elevation and openness thus come to the heart of the test, in the purest solitude, at the precise moment when us is offered the opportunity to be perfectly sincere towards God; – When there is no longer any help for us than his own. It is from the moment we can no longer count on the help of men that prayer is released. The Prophet (s), foreigner in this world of this world, as well as the too human human world of passions, went to seek help for Ta’if, for humanity,-and not for himself.
His journey will then prevail until the Lotus limit, in divine proximity, pure bliss. The angel took him by the hand, because the Prophet (s) himself had become pure light, by refusing revenge, by opting for forgiveness and mercy, he had suffered stone jets-and the angels proposed to him to ride by throwing his contemptors mountains. Humiliated. Blood feet.
Alone, and without apparent support. Alone and overwhelmed by the suffering of the year of sadness; proof if it was that it did not belong; Proof that he was foreign to self-hatred which so often nourished the hatred of the other: at the very moment when the angels offer him to wash the affront, to avenge his honor, he does not think of himself either to his honor, nor even of his pain, but prays, for the very people who tormented him, hoping in a long voice, that leaving these people saved, “will come out of them some virtuous descendant”
He thought of humanity, others, and not never of himself. And the proof is in the test. If it is a moment during his life when the Prophet (s) should have thought of him, in a way that would also seem to us to be very strongly legitimate, it is indeed at that time: – while the angels offer him to destroy his oppressors.
He declined the offer, because foreign to himself, not wanting anything for himself, but everything for humanity, everything for the community of men, he never targeted anything other than common interest-his own interest and collective interest was one, because he was, by God, sent “as a mercy for the worlds”.
The Prophet (s) was foreign to the ego, the latter was for him a perfect unknown, and his heart was therefore familiar with angels, and at the service of the human world. And it is because it was foreign to itself that it is so familiar to us today … But it is also because we are so often too familiar with ourselves that the Prophet (saws) remains for us, nowadays, unfortunately, too often a stranger …
