Kindle Notes & Highlights
Started reading
August 31, 2021
am the city of knowledge and ʿAlī is its gate; so whoever desires knowledge, let him enter the gate.
By his Sunna we do not mean simply the outward imitation of the Prophet’s actions—a reductionism all too prevalent in our times—rather, we mean the spiritual substance of the prophetic perfection to which the Qur’ān itself refers: ‘Verily, thou art of a tremendous nature’ (68: 4).3 The Prophet’s words and deeds express but do not exhaust this spiritual substance. The inner assimilation of this substance, rather than the merely formal imitation of the words and deeds, is the goal of every spiritually inclined Muslim. There is a profound affinity between the believer’s soul and the prophetic
...more
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Even if not all of the thousands of sayings attributed to him can be confidently ascribed to him, the very magnitude of the corpus testifies to the fact that he must indeed have articulated a very large number of profound teachings. No other companion of the Prophet has anything approaching the corpus attributed to ʿAlī
He would go each year into seclusion at [the mountain of] Ḥirā’. I saw him and nobody else saw him. At that time no household was brought together for the religion of Islam, except [that comprising] the Messenger of God, Khadīja and myself as the third. I saw the light of the revelation and the message, and I smelt the fragrance of prophecy ...
All remained silent, except for the youthful ʿAlī who spoke up: ‘O Prophet of God, I will be thy helper in this.’ The Prophet then placed his hand on ʿAlī’s neck and said, ‘This is my brother, mine executor and my successor amongst you. Hearken unto him and obey him.’
The Ahl al-Bayt are referred to in an important Qur’ānic verse as being purified of all defilement: ‘God only wisheth to remove from you all impurity, O People of the House, and to purify you with a complete purification’ (33: 33).
The importance of the Ahl al-Bayt is expressed in another verse in which the Prophet is instructed, ‘Say: I ask you for no reward, save love of the near of kin’ (42: 23).
The Qur’ān instructs the believers: ‘Truly, God and His angels bless the Prophet. O ye who believe, bless him and greet him with peace’ (33: 56). Upon the revelation of this verse, the Prophet was asked how one was to perform this blessing, and he replied that the blessings were to be invoked upon him and his āl as follows: ‘O God, bless Muḥammad and the progeny of Muḥammad, as Thou hast blessed Abraham and the progeny of Abraham. Truly, Thou art the Praised, the Glorious ...’
‘Gazing upon ʿAlī is an act of worship
‘O ʿAlī, you are a leader (sayyid) in the world and the Hereafter. Your beloved is my beloved, and my beloved is the beloved of God; your enemy is my enemy, and my enemy is the enemy of God. Woe be to those who hate you after me [after I have passed away].’32
‘Whoever desires to live my life and to die my death and to take his rest in the eternal Garden my Lord has promised me, let him orient himself towards ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib, for truly he will never cause you to depart from right guidance, nor cause you to enter into error.’33
‘There is one amongst you who will fight for the taʿwīl [spiritual interpretation] of the Qurʾān as I have fought for its tanzīl [literal revelation].’ Abū Bakr asked, ‘Is it I?’. The Prophet said, ‘No’. ʿUmar asked, ‘Is it I?’. The Prophet said, ‘No, it is the one who is mending the sandal.’ The Prophet had given ʿAlī his sandal to mend.
‘O ʿAlī, there is in you something akin to Jesus, on whom be peace and blessings. The Jews hated him to such an extent that they slandered his mother; and the Christians loved him to such an extent that they ascribed to him a rank he did not possess.’
‘O ʿAlī, whoever separates himself from me separates himself from God, and whoever separates himself from you, O ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
The Prophet said to his wife ʿĀʾisha, ‘Call unto me the leader (sayyid) of the Arabs.’ She asked, ‘O Prophet of God, are you not the leader of the Arabs?’ He said, ‘I am the leader of the children of Adam, and ʿAlī is the leader of the Arabs.’42
ʿAlī is from me and I am from him (ʿAlī minnī wa anā minhu), and nobody can fulfil my duty but myself and ʿAlī.’
Among the several verses of the Qurʾān which were commented upon by the Prophet with reference to ʿAlī is 13: 7: ‘Verily thou art a warner, and for every people there is a guide.’ The Prophet said, ‘I am the warner ... you are the guide, O ʿAlī. After me, the rightly-guided shall be guided by you.’
In regard to the revelation of verse 55 of Sūra 5 (al-Mā’ida), ‘Verily your walī is only God and His Messenger and those who believe, establish the prayer and give alms while bowing in prayer,’ the commentators relate this to the incident when ʿAlī, whilst bowing in prayer, held out his ring for a beggar who had asked for alms.
‘For whomever I am the mawlā [guardian, master, close friend], ʿAlī is his mawlā (man kuntu mawlāhu fa-ʿAlī mawlāhu).’50 The last saying was expressed on a number of occasions, the most famous of which was after the Prophet’s final pilgrimage to Mecca, in the year 10/632, at a pool midway between Mecca and Medina, known as Ghadīr Khumm.
‘For whomever I am the mawlā, ʿAlī is his mawlā’. For Shiʿis, this is regarded as a clear designation (naṣṣ) of ʿAlī as successor to the Prophet; for Sunnis it indicates the special proximity of ʿAlī to the Prophet, but not his nomination as successor in the political domain. That the reference to ʿAlī as mawlā (in some versions, as walī) is of the highest spiritual significance, however, is not seriously disputed.
The substance of revelation cannot be engaged except through the intellect, on one hand, and the ‘buried treasures’ of the intellect cannot be disclosed except through revelation, on the other. As will be seen below, this understanding of the intellect brings us close to what the Imam refers to as the ‘heart’, that inmost mode of perception which is capable of ‘seeing’ God. It is the ‘heart’ that can ‘see’ God, not using eyesight but insight, that spiritual insight which is generated by the ‘verities of faith’ (ḥaqā’iq al-īmān). As the Imam puts it, in response to the questioner asking whether
...more
The resulting consciousness does not negate reason so much as situate it and thereby reveal the limits of the sphere of operation proper to reason; it reveals that reason alone cannot ‘comprehend’ the higher realities, nor express them fully, however indispensable it may be in initiating the cognitive movement towards those realities.
Praise be to God, whose laudation those who speak cannot deliver, whose graces those who count cannot number, whose rightful due those who strive cannot render; He who cannot be grasped by far-reaching aspirations, nor fathomed by profound intuitions; He whose attribute has no binding limitation, no existing description, no time appointed, no term extended.
the ‘reality’ of the remembrance is not attained until ‘you forget yourself in your remembrance
For Imam ʿAlī, the ‘true intellectual’ (al-ʿāqil) is one who not only thinks correctly but also acts ethically, and, at the deepest level, one who seeks to realize the ultimate Reality.
Kumayl, knowledge is better than wealth, for knowledge guards you, while you must guard wealth; and wealth diminishes as it is spent, while knowledge increases as it is disbursed; and the results of wealth disappear with the disappearance of wealth.
But indeed, my God, the earth will never be empty of one who establishes the proof of God, whether overtly with publicity or fearfully in obscurity, lest God’s proofs and elucidations come to naught.
the ʿāqil, the true intellectual, is described by the Imam as being constantly engaged in ‘struggle against his own soul’,92 against the lower inclinations, the passionate whims and distracting caprices of the ego.
According to the Qur’ān, evil actions become ‘rust’ that covers over the heart: ‘Nay, their hearts have become rusted by that which they have done’ (83: 14). The ʿāqil, then, is engaged in constant inner struggle against the tendencies which not only sully the soul, they also blind the heart.
‘No jihād is more excellent than the jihād of the soul.’
The word hawā is further used in the Qur’ān in the sense of the desires stemming from the ego, by means of which the ego becomes a kind of false god: ‘Hast thou seen him who maketh his desire his god?’ (25: 43; almost identical at 45: 23). This is the subtle or hidden idolatry (al-shirk al-khafī) that the Prophet referred to as being more hidden than a black ant crawling on a dark stone in a moonless night.
Tawḥīd then comes to mean not merely affirming the oneness of God, but also being one in order to reflect perfectly the One—to know God is to be ‘integrated
the Imam says, ‘He who prays without exertion is like one who shoots [arrows] without a bow.’
‘Through them knowledge penetrates the reality of insight.’ It is not the knowers who penetrate; it is knowledge that penetrates to the reality of insight, doing so through them,
the true faqīh—not so much ‘the jurist’ as ‘one who truly understands’—is defined by the Imam as ‘he who does not make people despair of the mercy of God, and does not make them lose hope in the gracious spirit of God (rawḥ Allāh
Sinful, immoral qualities are grasped in this perspective not only as vices but also as so many blind spots or intellectual dysfunctions. The heart is ‘diseased’ by vice, its ‘eye’ blinded by them and thus unable to ‘see’ the Real. As is said in the Qur’ān, ‘In their hearts is a disease and God increased them in disease’ (2: 10), and ‘It is not the sights that are blind, but blind are the hearts’ (22: 46).
As to the means of cultivating receptivity to this spirit of certainty, what is required—over and above obedience to the rules and regulations of the revealed Law—is that combination of purity of intention and sincerity of devotion which is expressed by the word ikhlāṣ. Without this sincerity or purity, complying with those formal rules is nothing but hypocrisy (nifāq) and pretension (riyāʾ) which, in turn is defined by the Imam as the gravest of all sins, shirk, or polytheism, the attribution of ‘partners’ to God: ‘Know that the slightest pretension (riyāʾ) is polytheism.’126
Hast thou seen the one who belieth religion? He is the one who repelleth the orphan and urgeth not the feeding of the poor. So woe be to those who pray, those who are heedless of their prayer, who want only to be seen, and withhold small kindnesses (107: 1–7). This short sūra makes it clear that to be ‘religious’ in one’s formal acts of devotion has no value whatsoever unless these acts be integrated into a life of virtue, and unless one is performing one’s devotion with the right intention, that is, with ikhlāṣ
In relation to formal worship, the true intellectual is one who is obedient to the divine injunction to pray; but rather than praying in mechanical fashion and believing that the action alone suffices, the ʿāqil knows that such obedience is a necessary but not sufficient condition for achieving receptivity to grace.
However, it is important to stress that it is not the physical world as such that is to be negated, rather it is worldliness—egotistic attachment to the world—that must be overcome.
He describes himself as belonging to a group whose degree of spirituality is such that ‘their hearts are in the Gardens [of Paradise] while their bodies are at work’.147 The fact of being ‘tied’ or ‘attached’ to that realm, consisting of the paradisal abodes, right up to the divine Presence itself, implies then, that they are already ‘within’ that transcendent realm, more than they are in this earthly one.
One might say that their outward actions in the world belie their inward transcendence of all action; they act, but are not bound by the fruits of their action.148 As seen earlier, they are aware that ‘action—all action—is dust, except what is purified (accomplished sincerely) within it’.
On the ethical plane, the performance of good deeds, and even more directly, the realization of intrinsic virtue, iḥsān, is thus not simply a prerequisite for posthumous salvation, but is already a kind of deliverance, here and now. It is a deliverance from the imprisonment of sin, on the outward plane, and from the bondage of egocentricity, on the inward plane.
To state the basic argument of this essay: In Imam ʿAlī’s worldview, the ethical orientation towards justice is immeasurably deepened insofar as it is consciously linked to the spiritual precepts of the Islamic faith.
In other words, goodness is identified in its essence with the Creator, while evil is a modality of the created. This is strongly implied in the Qur’ānic verse which tells the believer to seek refuge in God from ‘the evil of that which He created’ (113: 2). This verse is often mistranslated as ‘from the evil which He created’, which is wrong both theologically and lexically. The expression ‘min sharri mā khalaqa’ refers clearly to the evil deriving from creation and not the creation as such. In theological terms, God creates morally free agents and it is they who are the authors of the evil in
...more
‘Justice puts everything in its right place.’
The Imam’s comment on justice evokes the more famous definition of Plato: ‘...we have laid down, as a universal principle, that everyone ought to perform the one function in the community for which his nature best suited him ... that principle, or some form of it, is justice.’7 There are, indeed many remarkable parallels between Plato’s Republic and the letter of the Imam to Mālik al-Ashtar.
‘O Muḥammad, tell me about submission (al-islām)’, the stranger asked. The Prophet replied, ‘Al-islām is to testify that there is no god but God and Muḥammad is the messenger of God, to perform the prayers, to pay the poor-due (al-zakāt), to fast in Ramaḍān, and to make the pilgrimage to the House if you are able to do so.’ The narration continues: ‘He [Gabriel] said, ‘You have spoken truly’, and we [the Companions] were amazed at his asking him and saying that he had spoken truly. He said, ʿThen tell me about faith (al-īmān).’ He [the Prophet] said, ‘It is to believe in God, His angels, His
...more
Upon assuming the caliphate, ʿAlī was advised by his cousin, Ibn al-ʿAbbās, to temporarily confirm in power all of ʿUthmān’s governors and, after he had consolidated the new order, to remove them. The Imam’s reply to this proposed strategy was reported as follows: ‘I do not doubt that this would be best for the sake of reconciliation in this world. But there is my obligation to the Truth (alladhī yalzamanī min al-ḥaqq) and my knowledge of ʿUthmān’s governors—so, by God, I shall never appoint one of them.’35 Thus was the die cast: the Imam dismissed Muʿāwiya, together with all of his
...more
obedience to the divine commands is not only to be seen as legally binding, but also as spiritually liberating.
