Intelligence – lonerloaner

Layla’s Soul

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“Close your eyes”, he said.

“Why?” Layla asked.

“Don’t you want to find yourself?”

“Yes, I do, I don’t want to live like this any more”.

“Then close your eyes and trust me.”

Sufyan was fifteen years Layla’s senior but he may has well been fifty years.

“I want you to imagine that you are in a desert. You’ve been walking for a day and thirteen hours holding on to your camel skin of water which only has enough for one last mouthful. You think to yourself that you better drink it soon otherwise it will evaporate from the heat, now that would be a waste. So you open your compartment only to find your mind wasn’t fast enough, that damn heat has got your mind slower than usual. There’s no water left. Suddenly just that thought alone made you double as thirsty, your knees immediately buckle as your heart feels fifty kilograms heavier with the thought. You catch yourself from falling to the ground as you remember the scabs on your thighs from sun exposure will only burn more as the sand grazes upon them. There’s no use crying, the wind will burn dry the salt on your face in a few short seconds. Your feet also feel heavier as you struggle to continue on.

Before you left, there were at least ten guides waiting for their services to be hired.
You thought you were clever, that you’d never get lost. You thought you want to be in charge of your own adventure. Now, you’d take it all back. After a day and a half, you’ve lost your ego somewhere ten kilometres ago. It didn’t take long, faced with the fear of complete uncertainty, complete banishment and complete starvation. The heat may as well have been a bonfire you were thrown into yesterday, at least the cooking would have been quicker, the cooking of your ego.

Have you got all that in your mind? Can you taste the salt on your lips, no in the back of your throat, scratching it? Can you feel your toe skin peel off but the pain has been there for so long as you step into the hot sand that you’re numb to the actual pain but just feel the squishing of blood between your toes? Can you feel the acid in your thighs as you struggle to lift them out of the dry quicksand that seems intent on creating a grave for you with every step? Can you feel it all?”

Layla nodded her head.

“Ok then, open your eyes.”

Her mascara was streaming down her face. Sufyan was nowhere to be seen. She understood what was meant by his words. Sufyan was Khidr, the mystical figure that appears to the sincere, to the ones whom God loves and wants to bring closer to him.

We walk around with pride, arrogance, ignorance and ego. We want to take the path less trodden, we fantasise and romanticise, make excuses to justify our defiance and call it seeking the adventure but the adventure leaves a lot of souls stranded as they struggle to make it all work, to find their way.

The experience of the masters are there for the taking. You can be taken by the hand and guided through the desert storms of life. You can be shown the quicker routes to your fulfilment, to comprehension of yourself, Your SELF. But instead you squander and belittle your opportunities in naivety, assuming you are clever enough, and most people are but they suffer a lot for it for far too long.

What if you could short track all of that? Wouldn’t it make more sense to find yourself early and then come back and revisit whatever it is you want to, be as adventurous as you want with your life whilst having a base map of where and how to go about?

By fine tuning your compass and ensuring you always have a camel skin of water to quench your thirst.

It’s not just a pen.

Renowned Muslim thinker and scholar Hamza Yusuf recounts a story when he was in the Mauritanian desert under tutelage from great masters who have carried on proper Islamic tradition and scholarship down to students for hundreds of years. He was cleaning under his nails with a pen when something struck him upside the head. His teacher threw something at him and told him, “Hamza, God has sworn an oath by the pen”. He immediately understood his mistake at disrespecting the otherwise inanimate object. (1)
But look at who he is now.
When you have such reverence for things, you can then pass on value to your family, students, friends and more.
Where is the reverence and respect for those sacred things?

(1) Quran Chapter 68 is titled ‘The Pen’ and begins it’s first verse with God swearing an oath by the pen. “Nun. By the pen and what they inscribe,”

Time, the teacher

Photo from the film Bab'Aziz - The Prince Who Contemplated His Soul — Photo from the film Bab’Aziz – The Prince Who Contemplated His Soul

When the fervour of youth finally wanes,

All that is left is humility and pain.

-ME

Nobility of Bedouins.

As he argued and debated on, he was met with an unfamiliar silence from his opponent. Never before was he defeated so gracefully.
“Cat got your tongue?” he yelled across the dinner table. Shamed and red-faced guests turned their gaze towards the insulted.

He was there, invited, as a formality of hospitality, the dignified thing families of prestige do when a marriage proposal walks through the door. The young man was unknown, of no formal royalty or family of status. The polite way of refusal was to invite them to a first and final dinner where the suitor would be ridiculed intellectually and demoralised spiritually as he would be met by a fury of wit and cruelty lashed in literary prowess.

After being met with a onslaught of words, poetry and prose, wity belittlement, his head lifted from the bowed neck position he maintained, a sign of his impeccable nomad training, training of the ancient Arabs that was all but forgotten as the city he resided in was modernised with the attire, technology and culture of the British invaders, poised as businessmen trying to advance a backward nation. He smiled sincerely, affectionately as if he read right through the pain of the father, his fears of letting his precious first child and only daughter go to someone unknown, someone unlike him, unlike his friends, a dust faced nomad.

His gaze pierced right into the heart of her father as he quietly said, ‘Uncle, I am no match for your intellect and charm, I am but a desert nomad, enshrined in the cloak of our people of past, clinging tightly to our heritage in hope to pass it on to our sons untainted. I have fought battles for you and our people and my guard is lowered before you, I dare not rise to your elucidation, and impeccable speech.

Forgive me, your generosity and hospitality is unsurpassed but I have overstayed my welcome and must leave.’

The father grinning from ear to ear rose and loudly proclaimed ‘Nonsense! You will do no such thing and my daughter will marry no other man, come and sit nearby me oh eloquent of tongue and noble of lineage. If Arabs have any dignity left it will only survive with men like you, men whom I wish all the daughters of men like me to find and wed. Our people will only be given back their honour through the likes of you. Come, near me you will sit.’

End part 1
ME

Seeing

mountaintop — photo credit: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/public/yourworld/article3696638.ece

How ignorant is the man who stands atop the mountain,

Bathing in his glory of accomplishment

Forgetting the sacrifice of the rubble beneath him

-ME

Silence, the slayer

Sometimes, the greatest action, is inaction.

The future will reveal the veracity of your claims,

Of my claims,

Of all our fanciful talk.

My sword will be silence.

It will slay me or slay you

-ME

Selfish love

I’m asked to pray in congregation wherever I am able to do so,

But everything in my body and mind pushes me from this.

How can I want to share my relationship with you,

If I claim true to seeing ONLY you.

It does not enter in my heart for a moment,

To expose myself before others to you.

What we have is ours alone,

Call me selfish as you may,

But never has a lover shared their beloved.

What am I missing here?

There is something I cannot grasp,

Something which doesn’t make sense.

Allah sent His Beloved to mankind,

He shared him with us all.

The best of creation

And how did he love his Beloved back?

Maybe I truly am selfish

For he prayed in congregation

But he also stood until the earliest hours of the morning,

Feet swollen, conversing with his Lord and when asked why,

“Should I not be a thankful servant?”

Perhaps my thoughts on love are thwarted,

And I am misguided

And all this time,

The secret is just in gratitude.

Love expressed in gratitude.

A thousand thankful servants are better than one.

We search and ponder through the Quran

Page after page,

Secret after secret,

Hoping to find something that no one else has,

And all this time, it’s in the first word.

Alhamdullillah.

Contentment

Contentment is a cup of tea in silence to the whirlwind of complaints of your ego.

Contentment is the Bedouin who proclaims ‘It is written’ when sand fills his eyes, destroys his flock, or ravishes his home.

Contentment is the smile after the amputee wakes up knowing full well they won’t run again.

Contentment is little Hassan, running in the street with his kite in between shelling sessions.

Contentment is a husband telling his wife she made a hearty meal even when he disproves.

Contentment is saying thank you Lord, even when you’ve lost everything you own.

Contentment is beginning a meal with praise and ending in praise without ever throwing a mouthful away.

Contentment is the little boy who sees his father’s struggle to make ends meet and holds his tongue from asking for the latest toy.

Contentment is the man, full of ideas, full of dreams, holding himself back from those very things in order to provide for his family.

Contentment is the happiness you feel when someone else achieves success through the fruits of your labour.

Contentment is the cup of black water you drink with a smile whilst others die of thirst.

Contentment is a lot of things, insert your belief here but the Prophet Muhammad said it best when he described contentment as a treasure chest that never vanquishes. To elucidate that point, the most vile thing a human can do is to be a miser with their gratitude, to be ill content. A prominent Shaykh of our time said: “The punishment of the people who are malcontent, is the way they are.The believer emulates the examples set forth by his Almighty Master who commences his most noble book with Alhamdullillah, All praise is due to Allah.”

Therein are signs for those who reflect – Quran 45:13

Simplicity of optimism

“An optimist is simply a man who hasn’t heard the news.”
OR woman for that matter.
No it’s not someone who doesn’t watch the news. Let’s not all become literalists now, rather it’s someone who is so tunnel visioned that they block out all unnecessary feedback, all input, all incoming data streams to purify their thoughts and only focus on what they want.

Granted, the news is one cesspool of negativity, I have no idea why intelligent people actually indulge in it…… Hang on, they don’t.

Next time you wonder why your state of affairs is in disarray, hold the mirror up and take a long hard look at your indulgences. TV, news, slapstick shows, cinema, media etc…… well you know your answer.

A cure for anxiety – Extract from Remembering God by Charles Le Gai Eaton

I have revisited this quote countless times this week and I feel I will visit it countless more. A reminder of the nature of affairs.

Fatalism, as an attitude to life in general, is retrospective. Only when something has happened can we say that it had to happen. The notion that it makes people inactive is disproved by experience. The courage of the Prophet’s Companions, going into battle against overwhelming odds, must certainly have owed something to the conviction that the outcome of the battle was in God’s hands, not theirs, and that they would die not a moment before or after “a time appointed”. If their time had not yet come, the enemy’s weaponry would prove to be no more dangerous than a child’s toys; if they were fated to meet their end that day, nothing they did could prevent this. In our time, countless men and women suffer extreme stress in their work and this is often due to the belief that “everything depends on me”. For the Muslim, everything depends on God; nothing “depends on me”. Paradoxical as it may seem, the conviction that all is pre-ordained is liberating, whereas belief in total freedom of choice creates, for those who hold it, a prison of anxiety and uncertainty. It is for us to act. The outcome of our actions is God’s business, not ours. It is for us to do what is right under all circumstances. Subsequent failures does not mean that right action was, after all, wrong.

From Charles Le Gai Eaton’s book Remembering God

A supplication taught to Muslims by the Prophet Muhammad. On reflection, it is easy to adapt this into your life no matter what your religious inclination.