Voices of Islam (80 page)

Dhikr,
a Door That When Knocked, Opens
65

our Creator? And when called upon to act in the world, how better to grease the castors of our actions than with His divine
dhikr?

We are all the same, with bodies and internal organs, men and women, our consciousnesses and mental processes, not that different really from one to another, although one might be a genius and solve the Unified Theory and another might die in jail a convicted felon. But the act of remembrance of God, in whatever Path, through whatever means, even the Buddhists turning their prayer wheels, I believe, on high Himalayan peaks, these folk are in another world, parallel to this one, moving in and out of it or staying permanently within it, according to their spiritual stature.

Everyone who breathes in this atmosphere is of another order of human being, and an assurance, as long as there is one of them among us, that the world will not be wasted and its people ruined entirely. There is a
hadith
of this, of an angel about to destroy a town, but finding one person devoted to God; so God says to the angel to hold his hand from destroying it.

We need to be these people, these pivots.

One day, I came from the modern city on the opposite hill in Mekne`s, Morocco, after tending to some bank business—since all the banks are in the modern city across from the old walled city, in which the
zawiya
of my shaykh was situated—and was heading back to the
zawiya
to do the noon prayer and join in the
dhikr
the disciples do after the prayer, usually including a short
hadra.
As I approached the hill that crests just before you can look down into the little valley and see the alleyway in the distance that leads to the great wooden doors of the
zawiya,
I noticed a group of men sitting in a circle under a tree playing cards. They were concentrating very hard on their cards, grunting as card players do, slapping cards down in front of them, and just over their heads, in the distance, I could see the alleyway that would lead to a similar circle, but of men remembering their Lord with deep conviction and concentration, their hearts filled with devotion. This world and the next world were so vividly manifest! No judgment was implied—these card players could be saints, and the disciples in the
zawiya
rogues at heart, but the image has remained with me to this day of the different intentions and actions available in this world within the Clement Gaze of God.

Dhikr
is a door that when knocked, opens. And when it becomes second nature and as much a part of our physical beings as breathing is, then it is a door that knocks
us
open. Allah
subhana wa ta‘ala
(may He be glorifi and exalted) says that when we do
dhikr
of Him, he does
dhikr
of us.

What a mystery, but
not
a mystery! Why have we been created in a manifest universe if not by Him Who created us to become vehicles to refl

Him back to Himself? He
subhana wa ta‘ala
says in a
Hadith Qudsi
(non- Qur’anic divine saying), ‘‘I created the creation in order to be known.’’ We are not one with Allah, but we are not separate from Him either. ‘‘The whole universe cannot contain Me, but the heart of the believer can contain Me,’’ He says in another
Hadith Qudsi.
What separates us from Him is His utter

66
Voices of the Spirit

transcendence of this entire known and unknown cosmos. However, He has sent word of Himself, or else how could I be writing this, a human born of a human into a material world, but whose spirit is really from God’s world and has never been detached from it? One call and the wires tremble, the phone rings, He answers the call. And it is His Voice that answers. Our
dhikr
of Him, over and over, as the illusory celluloid of motion flashes frame by frame to give us an image of movement, aging, experience, ego-identity, and change. ‘‘He is always on a major task.’’ It is not static, but He is not changed by change nor made static by stasis. How do I know this? Men and women much wiser than I am have alluded to this in every verbal and grammatical way they know. They are also flesh and blood, and heat and energy, and they have also engaged in
dhikr
of Allah and remembered when they forgot.

Dhikr
of Allah is the only reliable shore against this world’s ocean too vast to feel comfort in, too deep not to be drowned in, too shoreless and ungrasp- able, with every material fl tsam of wood a mere splinter in majestic space.
Dhikr
of Allah gives us instead the splendid shore of the Next World, God’s imperishable domain, and heaven’s unfathomable dimension within our human compass. For the human compass itself is seen to pass away and only the living remembrance of Allah remains.

Dhikr
connects heart and head; otherwise, the heart would be just a mechanical clock, ticking away, sooner or later to run down and leave us bereft.
Dhikr
puts a door in the heart that opens both ways, a crystal cabinet in which we can see Allah’s Mercy, a small human-sized dimension in which a vast and greater-than-human dimension fi with ease—the cosmos in a ventricle, in a heartbeat, in the repetition of the Divine Names to tell, within us with our physical star-stuff, the beads of the farthest constellations.

Dhikr
is wealth beyond materiality. It connects us to the ineffable, though in itself it is articulated, whether silently or aloud. Where before there was nothing, now there is something—a word, a Name for God, a phrase—and it unfreezes us, like the tiny forest frog that freezes entirely to the point of seeming dead in the fall to endure the winter, but begins spontaneously and miraculously thawing
from its heart outward
when spring arrives.

Dhikr
is a rope to the shore of the next world, as much as it is a rope to this world that will not break. Paradoxically, it is also the happy drowning of itself in God’s ocean.

God gave us
dhikr
of Himself. It is His gift, direct. It is even He Himself. Not ‘‘His only begotten son,’’ to be sacrificed on untold numbers of bloody altars to leave us confounded by a triangular mystery. The
dhikr
of God in Islam is both direct and indirect. It is incorporeal, though it gives us bodies to withstand annihilation. It is annihilation in the greater dimension of God. So it is both drowning and saving.

‘‘Do dhikr of Allah until people say you are mad,’’ said the Prophet, may peace be upon him. Salvador Dali said, ‘‘The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.’’ The
majdhub,
the Sufi who is

Dhikr,
a Door That When Knocked, Opens
67

‘‘attracted’’ to God, is drawn magnetically, and it is beyond his power to resist either the Beauty or the Majesty of Allah. He is lost within that magnetic fi He is out of his own control. Left to God’s devices in even simple things like taking a step to the right or to the left, or going up one street or another, he has become a human
dhikr
of Allah; thus one can indeed say he is mad. A shaykh of
ma‘rifa
(highest recognition, highest direct knowledge of Allah) is needed to bring him out of the state of mad attraction, which is a danger to himself and anyone who comes within his radius, for another might become infected with his divine madness, and be thrown raw and nakedly unprepared into a state of direct gnosis. The way of Shaykh Abu al-Hasan al-Shadhili (d. 1258
CE
), the founder of our
tariqa,
was to be outwardly sober and inwardly drunk—to experience the inner ecstasy, but to continue acting in the world with cool aplomb and responsibility.

Truly, without
dhikr
of Allah, we are lost. If our Creator created us, and did not set us down without His guidance, did not cut us loose and set us adrift, and did not disdain us and turn His back on us, but instead kept the lifeline that is our hearts always open, and pumps into it the blood of His direct Presence—if this is so, then when we remember Him we are plugged in, our rope is pulled taut to the shore, and by following it even takes us to the depths.

A great shaykh of our Path, Shaykh Ibn ‘Ata’illah of Alexandria in Egypt (d. 1309
CE
), said about
dhikr:
‘‘
Dhikr
is a fire which does not stay or remain. So if it enters a house saying: ‘Me and nothing other than me’—which is from the meaning of
la ilaha illa Allah
—and if there is firewood in the house, it burns it up and it becomes fire. If there is darkness in the house, it becomes light, its Light. If there is light in the house, it becomes Light upon Light.’’
2

There is no lovelier thing on earth than the
dhikr
of Allah. Take me to the gardens of the Alhambra, the heights of Macchu Pichu, the Atlas mountains, or the valleys of Afghanistan carpeted with wildfl wers, all of these pale in comparison before the remembrance of God. For the breeze that blows through those wildflowers is His breeze, the shining glitter atop the Atlas of snows and bright lights is His Light, the ruins of Macchu Pichu are the faint traces of His wisdom, and the gardens of the Alhambra with their fountains and esplanades and sound of rushing water are a fuzzy refl tion of the Garden of Paradise in His domain, where the sound is of
dhikr
of Allah, where the air is of
dhikr
of Allah, where the fountains run with the remem- brance of Him through unabated repetition of His Divine Names.

Take me to the most exalted being on earth, man or woman, filled with the greatest wisdom, a true saint, and he or she is simply an embodied
dhikr
of Allah, a remembrance made flesh, whose every gesture (and I have seen this up close) is a reminder and an awakening in the tranquil certainty of His glory.

68
Voices of the Spirit

From the biography and study by the late Martin Lings of Shaykh Ahmad al-‘Alawi of Mostaganem, Algeria, concerning his shaykh’s mystical instruc- tion and technique of invoking the Greatest Name of Allah:

But the course which he most often followed, and which I also followed after him, was to enjoin upon the disciple the invocation of the single Name with distinct visualization of its letters until they were written in his imagination.

Then he would tell him to spread them out and enlarge them until they fi

all of the horizon. The
dhikr
would continue in this form until the letters became like light. Then the Shaikh would show the way out of this standpoint—it is impossible to express in words how he did so—and by means of this indication the Spirit of the disciple would quickly reach beyond the created universe pro- vided that he had suffi nt preparation and aptitude—otherwise there would be need for purifi and other spiritual training. At the above-mentioned indication the disciple would find himself able to distinguish between the Abso- lute and the relative, and he would see the universe as a ball or a lamp suspended in a beginningless, endless void. Then it would grow dimmer in his sight as he persevered in the invocation to the accompaniment of meditation, until it seemed no longer a defi ite object but a mere trace. Then it would become not even a trace, until at length the disciple was submerged in the World of the Absolute and his certainty was strengthened by Its Pure Light. In all this the Shaikh would watch over him and ask him about his states and strengthen him in the
dhikr
degree by degree until he finally reached a point of being conscious of what he perceived through his own power. The Shaikh would not be satisfied until this point was reached, and he used to quote the words of God which refer to:
‘‘One whom his Lord hath made certain, and whose certainty He hath then followed up with direct evidence.’’
3

Abu Hurayra reported that the Messenger of Allah said, ‘‘Allah Almighty says, ‘I am in My slave’s opinion of Me and I am with Him when He remem- bers Me. When he remembers Me in himself, I mention him in Myself. If he mentions Me in an assembly, I mention him in a better assembly than them.’ If he comes near to Me by a hand-span, I come near to him by a cubit. If he comes near to Me by a cubit, I come near to him by a fathom. When he comes to Me walking, I come to him running.’’ (
Sahih al-Bukhari
and
Sahih Muslim;
the
Musnad
of Ahmad ibn Hanbal has at the end of it, ‘‘Qatada said, ‘Allah is quicker to forgive.’’’)

Abu Sa‘id al-Khudri reported that the Messenger of Allah said, ‘‘Do a lot of remembrance of Allah until they say, ‘He is mad.’’’ (
Musnad
of Ibn Hanbal)

Abu Hurayra reported that the Messenger of Allah said, ‘‘Allah Almighty has angels who travel the highways and by-ways seeking out the people of
dhikr.
When they find people remembering Allah, the Mighty and Majestic, they call out to one another, ‘Come to what you hunger for!’ Then they enfold them with their wings stretching up to the lowest heaven. Their Lord—who knows them best—asks them, ‘What are My slaves saying?’

Dhikr,
a Door That When Knocked, Opens
69

They say, ‘They are glorifying You, proclaiming Your greatness, praising You and magnifying You.’ He says, ‘Have they seen Me?’ They say, ‘No, by Allah, they have not seen You.’ He says, ‘How would it be if they were to see Me?’ They say, ‘If they were to see You, they would worship You even more intensely and magnify You even more intensely and glorify You even more intensely.’ He says, ‘What are they asking Me for?’ They say, ‘They are asking You for the Garden.’ He says, ‘Have they seen it?’ They say, ‘No, by Allah, they have not seen it.’’’ He says, ‘How would it be if they were to see it?’ They say, ‘If they were to see it, they would yearn for it even more strongly and seek it even more assiduously and would have an even greater desire for it.’ He says, ‘What are they seeking refuge from?’ They say, ‘They are seeking refuge from the Fire.’ He says, ‘Have they seen it?’ He says, ‘How would it be if they were to see it?’ They say, ‘If they were to see it, they would flee from it even harder and have an even greater fear of it.’ He says, ‘I testify to you that I have forgiven them.’ One of angels says, ‘Among them is so-and-so who is not one of them. He came to get something he needed.’ He says, ‘They are sitting and the one sitting with them will not be wretched.’’’ (
Sahih al-Bukhari
)