Shaykh Ahmed abdur Rashid April 12, 2013 Friday …2013/04/04 · Shaykh Ahmed abdur Rashid April...

Shaykh Ahmed abdur Rashid April 12, 2013 www.circlegroup.org Friday Evening Suhbat

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Allah’s Signs in the Roots of Words: Rahm, Nafas, Alam, Qadir

[I’ve been talking about the writings of] Shaykh al Akbar, Ibn Araby. They are really

profoundly deep. [Particularly important is] to understand this relationship we are

talking about that began with the hadith quds, “I was a hidden treasure.” The

words that are used in this, in looking at the Arabic roots, are the same in most cases

as the Farsi roots, and even in some cases the Hebrew roots, which is yet another tie

between all of that transcends the “external” forms of religion. Also in a way, it tells

you the importance of Hadith Quds, when Allah Swt speaks through the mouth of

the Prophet (sal). This is a very hopeful reality for all human beings.

We ended last night talking about the derivation of the root “rahman.” The deeper

meaning of this mercy and compassion of Allah is to radiate love, and comes from

the same root as “rahīm” or the womb/uterus. I think I ended by talking about

Shaykh al Akbar’s statements about blood relationships. The other aspect of that is

a very physiological aspect. This is how incredibly woven into everything about life

Allah’s message is. For example, the womb is the home of the fetus. We talked

about that earlier. For the fetus to be born, the womb has to dilate to 10 centimeters.

This process of dilation is a natural rhythm. The heart exists in our body, doing

what it does, like the uterus exists in the woman’s body, doing what it does on a

monthly basis, waiting for something to happen. The eshq of the heart is this

development of the infant in the womb of the mother.

We use the phrase in English, “The heart dilates.” Love dilates the heart and gives

birth to a new relationship. This is how complex and yet simple it all is. Why?

Remember dhikr and its other meaning, to penetrate, and the representation of the

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lingam of the Hindus. You have this reality where there is a pattern of love that is

radiating, and the seed of love which is contained in the sir, hidden in the secret

center of the latā’if. The Divine Name, Rahmah, exists in sirr. The generative power

of that Divine Love of Allah Swt transmits and opens the possibilities that are

contained in all the Names of Allah Swt, and planted immutably and unchangeably in

the hearts of all human beings. Allah plants His Names in the human heart. If that

heart grows in dhikr / the remembrance of Allah, Allah says, “You will find Me in

the heart of the believer.” We say it is found in the huwal al batin, the most inner

place in the heart, the core of the heart. There, the seed of all the names are – not in

the mind, but in the heart.

Think of what compassion would be if it was a mind quality. It doesn’t make sense.

You can define it in the mind, cogitate upon it, or reflect on it, but it doesn’t originate

in the mind, does it? It originates in the heart: mercy, justice, righteousness, piety,

patience, love. All of these are in the heart. These are names seeded in the heart. So

Allah says, “Remember Me and I will remember you.” “Me” is all those names

plus more. Remember in the heart, and what happens? Divine Love gives rise to a

new person. Just like in the womb/ rahm, a new person is developed. The new

person in this case is you, or me, or whoever remembers Allah Swt, and comes to

term. What’s the term? Your lifetime (we won’t talk about Caesarian).

This seed of love is planted in the Divine Names. It comes from the Divine Unity,

Oneness. It disseminates those names substantively in the khalq, the world of

creation. We talked about the macroscopic tree and the branches the other night.

The name ar-Rahman gives birth to all the realities of the other Names. The first

Name Allah puts in the heart is Rahman – ar-Rahman ar-Rahim. That is the seed

that dilates the heart and gives birth to all the other names. It makes the heart

receptive to all the other names. Consequently, what? Don’t you always wonder


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why every ‘āyat in the Qur’an but one starts with what? Bismi-Llāhi-r-Rahmāni-r-

Rahīm. Why? Because this is the first name that Allah puts in the heart. Which one

came first, Rahman or Rahīm? No. Rahm. The root; the seed is there, and

everything else follows.

Throughout the Qur’an, you have all the other names that follow, plus the

Hundredth Name of Allah Swt. It is said that the Hundredth Name is also found in

Hizb ul Bahr. You can go look for it; it’s a good hunt for you to go on. All those

Names then become disseminated from that essence. They become substantive

from the essence of rahmah. Allah says in Qur’an, “Say, invoke Allah or invoke Ar

Rahman. Whichsoever you invoke, to Him are the excellent names” (17:110).

This cannot be invoked without breath. This is why Bismi-Llāhi-r-Rahmāni-r-Rahīm

is the first name Allah placed in the heart of the human being, and out of which all

other names are seeded in the rahim; the uterus of mercy that is in the heart.

Seeded there through dhikr, the male organ that penetrates the heart and gives life

to the seed that is there, and to all the seeds that are there. You have the seeds in

the womb, and what is grown in the heart. You have what comes into the womb that

grows the child. You have the dhikr that comes into the heart that grows the names

of Allah Swt.

You see how balanced that is? How perfect it is? Nothing is left out. There is no

“but,” “and,” or “If.” Allah gave the names, these trilateral roots, to show to us a

biological reality that wasn’t known for 1200 years. Pretty amazing. And not until a

few years ago did we know about the other brain cells in the heart. “Say, invoke

Allah or invoke ar-Rahman. Whichsoever you invoke, to Him are the excellent

names.” I will bet my next year’s paltry salary that you will find very few Muslims

who understand this, even those who study Shaykh al Akbar. They don’t get it.

They only get one side of it; they don’t get the other side of it. How is this done? I


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was showing you the roots of 4 or 5 words, and how they reflect the hadith quds, “I

was a hidden treasure.” Allah plants these roots in that hadith quds. Why is it in a

hadith quds and not in Qur’an? Anybody want to tell me why? Because He’s trying

to show us something else. Why are they not regular hadith? What is a hadith

quds? Allah speaking through the mouth of the Prophet (sal).

What’s another one of those roots we didn’t talk about quite yet, fully? Nafs / nafas.

That’s in the Hadith. Hadith Quds is the breath of Allah speaking through the

Prophet Mohammed (sal). Isn’t it? What is breath? Nafas. This relationship is

there. There is this breath that carries these eternal, inexhaustible Words of Allah.

We gave the example of the blood and the spirit yesterday that is exhaustible, but

the inexhaustible words are composed of a plethora, myriad, endless letters. How

many letters in the Arabic alphabet? 22. How many letters in the Farsi alphabet?

32. How many letters in the English alphabet? 26. How many letters in the Chinese

alphabet? A thousand? There are endless myriads of letters; we just don’t know

them all. How many Names of Allah are there? No, there are not 99. There are

endless names of Allah. If there are endless names, there has to be endless letters.

And there are many, many levels.

When the Prophet Mohammed (sal) ascends in the Isra Miraj, and he speaks to the

angels and hears them praising Allah Swt, do you think they are only praising with

99 names? What language is he speaking, Farsi, Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew? He’s

speaking the language of rahim, of breath. Allah says it all starts in the human

being’s heart. What happened to the Prophet’s heart before he made the Isra Miraj?

It was washed. How many times? Three times. Why, was it that dirty? Bismi-Llāhi-

r-Rahmāni-r-Rahīm. First: In the name of God, the most merciful and the mercy-

bestowing. It contains everything. Now the heart is clean. He goes through these

multiple levels. Why didn’t he go into a big conference room and meet all the


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prophets in one place? I’m serious. Because the story wouldn’t be as much fun?

Maybe they could all have a booth. He could go to Musa’s booth, Isa’s booth,

everybody’s booth. Why? Because there is a hierarchy, and not just of the prophets;

there is a hierarchy of the latā’if. In each of the latā’if, there are myriads of angels

created by Allah Swt, which praise Allah Swt in ways you can only know when you

are in contact with the malakut –lahut, nasut, malakut. We haven’t talked about

those in a few years; we should talk about them. That’s because we are not doing

the Naqshbandiyya and Qadriyya teaching.

Here are these examples Shaykh al Akbar gave you, and I am explicating, on the

lexical and etymological realities that are linked together to create form. We gave

the name form, like the beautiful flowers. Go back to Hazrat Adam (as). What was

he supposed to do? Tell the names of things to the angels. Because they are giving

these praises – letters – in languages we don’t understand. We don’t understand the

language of the angels. Is that hard to believe? You don’t understand Swahili. Why

should it be hard to understand that you don’t understand the language of the

angels? But Swahili has sounds that maybe Bahasa Indonesian has, and Arabic has;

and it has some sounds they don’t have.

The Prophet (sal) is given these tools that make him capable of understanding the

language of the angels. What does he hear? He hears what Hazrat Adam (as) heard.

He was able to decipher the names of things. As the qualities of Allah come into

manifestation, he sees their names. This comes out of what’s called the sifat an

nafsiyya, the seven essential qualities. Allah makes clear through this one hadith

quds, that people question, the whole process of the universal manifestation of all

things in this world starting from what? Where did we start? (Rahman). No we

didn’t start with rahman. That’s where language starts. Where did we, Shaykh al

Akbar, start this discussion? Hibb. That’s where he starts the discussion.


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He makes clear the whole universal manifestation starting from love and the

knowledge of Allah that results from that love, from the creatures born of that love.

Allah says through the mouth of His prophet, “I was a hidden treasure. I was not

known.” If you don’t know the names, the words, the qualities, you don’t know.

“Now I love to be known (hibb), so I created the creatures so that I might make

Myself known to them. Then they knew Me.” That’s one way of saying it. Or, “So

that they come to know Me” is another way. Allah Swt is expressing His reality in

the unusual first person singular. He is not calling Himself by name, as you see in

the Qur’an, but “I.” There is no question of whether Allah is absolute, unconditioned,

or One, to which other hadith allude. “Allah was, and there was not with Him a

thing”—anything.

Allah expresses through the mouth of the Prophet Mohammed (sal), in the first

person singular, His Oneness. But everything is potentially in that oneness – the

many in the one. At this level, these Divine names and attributes are differentiated

within Him, but are not yet manifest. They later on will act through creation itself,

through beings, animals, flowers. Beauty will act through flowers. Things will act

through His creation. By doing that, they will manifest or characterize certain

normative behaviors, which need to be kept normative behaviors, lest a person lose

their identification with their Creator or the Divine. This is from where the Shar’īah,

or the Torah, or the Bhagavad Gita, or the Ten Commandments come, from each

prophet.

The fundamental qualities of the essential attributes, the sifat an nafsiyya, of Allah,

are unique and are given rise from the names—life, breath, knowledge, speech,

irada/will, basira/seeing, hearing. These are qualities, attributes of Allah are given

– to whom? Hazrat Adam (as) – so that he has the capability of describing what is


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the Reality. If you want to speak or understand the life of what one would call the

Divine way of living, because we have talked about the framework, the epistemology

of it, the lexical semiotics of these words, there is the ontological reality of it, too,

which is that movement of love, and all the Divine possibilities that create some kind

of equilibrium, balance / mizan.

Balance has to take place at the center. If you measured this spoon, would it be the

center? Not necessarily. What else do you have to take into consideration? The

weight and the shape. Everyone has to find their center, in a sense. Allah tells us to

find the center, to be people of the middle –ummah ta wasita. When we look for

something to understand, we find the central theme in it. When you are writing a

paper, what’s the central theme that you are trying to now explicate and build upon?

Allah takes all these Divine possibilities, all these essential realities that are

contained in “mashiyya.’ Mashiyya is Divine possibilities. Mashiyya is all the

possibilities that lie within the Will of Allah. How many are those? Infinite. How

many letters? Infinite. How many names? Infinite. They represent the infinite

qualities and elements of all the Divine knowledge, all the possibilities, which

constitute all the alamat: alam, symbols, signs, ‘āyat. The signs of what? The signs

of all beings.

Now we’re at a good place. Who is Allah? He is Rabbi-l-Ālamīn/Lord of all the

Worlds. What are these worlds? They are symbols/alam. Worlds of all the

possibilities, of all the symbols, of all the signs, of everything. He is Lord of

everything. ‘Lord of all the Worlds’ is a very short way of saying it. Where else in

Qur’an do you find the word alam? Lots of places. It refers to these multifarious

signs of Allah Swt. Ibn Araby called it a certain name: al ayn ath-thabbit: the

permanent, protocypical Essence, the Divine Name, the Infinitely Knowing / Alim.

When you call someone an alim these days, it doesn’t mean what it used to mean.


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An alim is not just someone who knows something. The Alim is the Infinitely

Knowing.

Divine knowledge is called ‘ilm. Divine knowledge is having access to knowledge

dynamically. What happens is these Divine Names interact with each other. When

they do, certain things happen. For example, what happens when mercy and justice

interact with each other? Have you ever thought about that? When you go in front

of a court, you seek the mercy of the court. Ever think about that? When beauty and

love / hubb and the jamal and jelali of life mix, what happens? Pop, out comes a

poem or whatever. What happens when, at the end of harb / war, you make peace /

salām? What happens when mercy and peace come together? What happened in the

American civil war? What were the Confederate soldiers allowed to keep? Their

rifles and their swords, not their pistols. Why? So they could provide for

themselves; they could hunt. More people were killed in the civil war than all wars

fought among people of the same nation, history and background. And they were

allowed to keep their weapons. Do you get it?

There are these, as he calls them, protocypical essences, forms, templates that are

symbols / alam. They are symbolic and prototypical. The Divine name al-Alim, One

Who infinitely knows the signs. Who was the first alim of the al-Alim? Adam (as).

He knows the signs. The word means to give something a distinguishing mark, and

secondly, to know by means of signs or symbols. We know things by means of signs

and symbols. If the arrow goes this way, it means the road is going to turn to the

right. We know that a circle with a line through it means no, don’t do that—very,

very basic. Every society, from the most basic to the most modern, has signs and

symbols that are used. Gangs have symbols. The Holy Pope has signs. For the

Muslim, the signs are something different.


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Look at the root alama, to be the sign of: alim – to know; alamat – signs; alamun –

beings of the world; ‘ilm – knowledge; the entirety of interlinked signs; knowing,

known. Then add the root “shīn and yah” with it, to will a thing, a synthetic reality.

Then you have mashī’a, a metaphysical place of essential will. Now you have this

unity, and you understand the biology of it. We understand the symbology of it.

There is something else to try to grasp, and that is the functionality of it. There is a

factor that evaluates and assesses the value of everything, and gives it a basic value,

and then a value that can change. In our world today, measurement and evaluation

is a big thing – a big deal.

How do you value the work we do at Legacy? How do you value the results? By

what standard are you looking? How do you know those results can be replicated,

if you do what? How do you measure the impact, the effort, and the cost

relationship? Allah assigns a measure of things in relation to other things, and tells

us this in Qur’an clearly. Everything has a measure, a length of time, a length of life,

the day into the night. There are many references in Qur’an to what we would call

measurement. This function that determines and evaluates is exercised by the name

al-Qadir: the One Who has the ability to evaluate everything. Now, here’s a hard

one for you. Let’s put two names together – al-Rahmat and al-Qadir. What do you

have now? How do you measure and evaluate mercy? Or al-Qadir and Adl. How do

you evaluate and measure justice?

This is a legalistic issue. I studied this in law school. How do you know? Someone is

in jail for 25 years, wrongly jailed. How do you measure the value of that time that

was spent, or misspent? These are moral and ethical issues that will take me to the

subject of ethics. The root of this word now is: to apprise, to assess according to a

value. One finds in the word “qudra” the names al-Qadir, which is much more

explicit than the meaning of “powerful,” Shaykh Al Akbar says. Powerful is not the


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right translation of it – al-Qadir and al-Qadir. It is the same spelling, different

pronunciation. These two words speak of the quality or essence of Allah. The name

that usually follows al-Qadir is usually al-Murīd. Al-Murīd means the self-willed, the

follower. The root of this term means to go from here to there. Irada / will comes

from it.

Irada is not a faculty of the mind like you think it is. Will is a faculty of the soul. It is

a faculty of life. You can’t have will unless you have breath / nafas. Will allows for

some quality within the Lawhim Mahfūdh to be able to determine for oneself where

you are going: from here to there. Allah gives us choice within the context of our

qadr. What does choice mean? You are going to go from here to there, going from

something that is known to another thing that is not yet realized, but that you are

attracted to, and it results from moving from one object to another. We are back

now to hubb, where we started.

We are attracted to another person; we feel love for that person. You are moving

from a known state to an unknown state; from a known entity to an unknown entity.

You have to exert some will power, so you don’t make a mistake. You have to

measure and evaluate it. You have to follow where your ego, you nafs is going, a

function of your life; and your heart, hubb/love, because this love may return to

plant a seed in you, physically or metaphorically. So we are back now to the

essentials of life and knowledge, and the ability and will to understand these Divine

names, the Divine Being which loves to be known; and utters this love of being

known by articulating it through His Kalam/Word.

All the possibilities are contained in that prototype, that essence. This function is

called mutaqalib: one who expresses himself through himself. There is a double

meaning to the root of kalam. It means to utter, and it means to wound. Remember


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dhikr? To penetrate like a spear. Dhikru-Llāh is repeating the name of Allah—to

wound and to utter; to penetrate and to remember. When you articulate the word,

you are actualizing the possibilities of that Divine Being, and all of the potentials of

the Divine Being. This is why dhikr is so important. You are part of the actualization

process. This is how manifestation is creation; this is how the baby is created in the

womb. This is why Jibreel breathes into the womb of Maryam. This is why you get

the same story [of breath] in other traditions. Actualization takes place through the

word that penetrates and gives rise to something manifest: dhikru-Llāh.

When you make the dhikr rightly, perfectly, you are part of the creative process of

this constant creativity of Allah Swt. The children may think this is terribly boring,

but it’s really about them and their development, too. There is a kind of spiral that

takes place… that’s another important thing. You have a one (1), alif, and a spiral

around it. DNA. Even Allah symbolically makes the building blocks of this creation

to represent the one with the spiral around it. We saw it many years ago before the

DNA was discovered, as the caduceus (the sign of medicine). The Hindus have it as a

snake around Shiva. It all starts from this hibb, the seed, the point of love, which is

the spirit that gives rise to this internal motion of spiraling upwardly and outwardly.

You see it replicated in nature in the …. I’ll give you a hint… chambered nautilus,

which is Fi, in the Fibonacci serious; and the bellis perennis, a daisy. The petals of

the daisy are in the Fibonacci series. Allah plants it all through nature, another

symbol, to tell us about this. If you amplify that seed of love, not only do you get the

human being, but you are opening the doorway to all of the possibilities, letters,

kalam, the names of Allah; and if you make dhikr in the way we are talking (not just

recitative), you are really making the dhikr with this kind of sensitivity in you. In

dhikr, I am always trying to do something: watching the breath, something.


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Then Allah manifests it through our shuyukh. Mevlana Jelaludin Rumi starts to

whirl. When he has his hands out like this, you have a spiral around the alif. What do

you say when you are whirling? “Allah.” If you lay the letters on top of each other,

what do you have? If you make the move, while the alif stays still, what do you have?

That’s what you visualize when you are whirling. Now people whirl on purpose,

but he didn’t. He whirled spontaneously, like the early yogis. Yogis didn’t think of

yoga postures. The kundalini moving around and up the spine in a spiral movement

caused people to go into certain postures. Does that mean everything is the same

and equal and it doesn’t matter? No, forget about that part. Why? Because as deep

as you go in Sanskrit, you will not get as deep as you can get in these trilateral roots.

I’ve been there. They are beautiful metaphors.

As this amplifies, there are many wounds that take the life of a human being and

produce a kind of… let’s continue with the tree example. If you wound a tree, the sap

comes out to heal the tree. Some of the sap we collect and make maple sugar. That’s

enough for tonight. One more thing is to talk about hearing and seeing, but it’s too

much. Asalaam Aleikum.

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