Kindle Notes & Highlights
Started reading
August 31, 2021
an integral approach to justice leads to an identification with what is right, with al-Ḥaqq as such, and not merely doing that which is right.
is the outward moral consequence of an inner spiritual malaise which arises out of that pride which is tantamount to ‘hidden polytheism’, and which brings in its wake disgraceful humiliation. Iblīs is disgraced because he disobeyed God and he disobeyed God on account of pride. To be proud is, therefore, in and of itself a disgrace, a state of ‘dis-grace’, a perversion of the human state that carries within itself the seed of its own inexorable inversion. ‘Do you not see how God humiliated him through his pride?’55 the Imam asks. Being proud is in reality already a form of humiliation, for
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When power goes to the head, faith departs from the heart; and conversely, for faith to be properly manifested in the world, it must flow from a heart suffused with humility.
the authority of your position engenders vanity and arrogance, then look at the grandeur of God’s dominion above you ... this will calm your ambition, restrain you from your own vehemence and restore to you what had strayed from your intellect.’
‘Beware of comparing [yourself] with God in greatness and likening [yourself] to Him in might, for God abases every tyrant and disgraces every braggart.’57 One who does not act with justice towards God and His creatures, and instead tyrannizes them, will find that not only His creatures, but also God Himself will be his opponent: ‘He remains at war with God until he desists and repents.’ The tyrant will eventually be forced to repent, even if this be only at the point of death and imminent judgement. Even if he appears to have successfully evaded the consequences of his tyranny in this life,
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the Imam says, ‘If your aspiration ascends to the reforming of the people, begin with yourself, for your pursuit of the reform of others, when your own soul is corrupt, is the greatest of faults.’
The Imam’s own poverty and rigorous austerity was indeed proverbial. That this was far from a simple shunning of the world for its own sake, however, is made clear in the exchange between the Imam and an ascetic, ʿĀṣim b. Ziyād, whose family complained to the Imam that he was too abstemious. The Imam tells him to think of his family and not to cut himself from the good things (al-ṭayyibāt) that God has permitted. ʿĀṣim retorts, ‘O Commander of the Faithful, and here you are, in your rough clothes and your coarse food!’ The Imam replies, ‘Woe to you, I am not like you. God, the exalted, has
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Infuse your heart with mercy for the subjects, love for them and kindness towards them. Be not like a ravenous beast of prey above them, seeking to devour them. For they are of two types: either your brother in religion or your like in creation. Mistakes slip from them, defects emerge from them, deliberately or accidentally. So bestow upon them your forgiveness and your pardon, just as you would have God bestow upon you His forgiveness and pardon; for you are above them, and the one who has authority over you is above you, and God is above him who appointed you ... and through them He tests
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The Imam came across an old, blind beggar and inquired about him. He was told that the beggar was a Christian. He told those around him, ‘You have employed him to the point where he is old and infirm, and now you refuse to help him. Give him maintenance from the public funds (bayt al-māl).’77 In addition, this sentence expresses succinctly the Islamic principle of social welfare (maṣlaḥa), based on redistributive justice, and a policy of strict non-discrimination between Muslims and others. Social justice and religious equality flow forth from compassion conceived not as a sentiment, only, but
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In the famous sermon, al-Shiqshiqiyya, he says that he accepted power as an unavoidable duty: Had God not taken from the learned [a promise] that they would not acquiesce in the rapacity of the tyrant nor in the hunger of the oppressed ... I would truly have flung its reins [that of the caliphate] back upon its withers ... and you would indeed have discovered that this world of yours is as insignificant to me as that which drips from the nose of a goat.78 In this, we see a striking exemplification of Plato’s ideal attitude to power, that possessed by the true ‘philosopher’, he who acts as
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‘Let your concern with the cultivation of the land outweigh your concern with the collection of the tax, for no tax will be collected if there be no cultivation. And whoever exacts the tax, without cultivating the land, ruins the land and destroys the people.’
Indeed there is a group who worship God out of desire [for something not yet attained]; and this is the worship of the merchants. And there is a group who worship God out of fear, and this is the worship of the slaves. And there is a group who worship God out of gratitude, and this is the worship of the free.
As the Imam says, ‘He who has pious awe towards God, for him God establishes a way out of tribulation, and a light out of darkness (man yattiqi’Llāh yajʿal lahu makhrajan min al-fitan wa nūran min al-ẓulam
Strenuous effort is called for here, it is far from sufficient to perform the prayers and devotions in a mechanical or perfunctory manner. ‘He who prays without making an effort,’ says the Imam, ‘is like one who shoots arrows without a bow.’
Truly God has made the remembrance (al-dhikr) a polish for the hearts, by which they hear after suffering from deafness, and see after being blind ... There have always been slaves of God ... with whom He held intimate discourse through their thoughts and spoke with them through the essence of their intellects. They diffused illumination through the awakened light in their hearing and their seeing and their hearts, calling unto the remembrance of the days of God.
The relationship between the remembrance of God and the cultivation of justice is made clear in this sermon. For the Imam describes those who are illuminated by the dhikr as follows: Truly there are people who belong to the dhikr, they have adopted it in place of the world, such that ‘neither commerce nor trade’ distracts them from it; they spend the days of their life in it ... they instruct people about justice and themselves are steadfast therein.110
is interesting to note in this connection that Dhiʿlib al-Yamānī, very much after the manner of Glaucon, provocatively asked Imam ʿAlī whether he had seen the object of his devotion. To this the Imam replied: ‘I would not be worshipping a lord whom I have not seen.’ Dhiʿlib then asked, ‘O Commander of the Faithful! How did you see Him?’ The Imam replied with the important sentence that functions as one of the leitmotifs of our book: ‘O Dhiʿlib! Eyes see Him not through sight’s observation, but hearts see Him through the verities of faith.’
is no surprise to find that those most prone to terrorism in the name of Islam have arisen out of currents most hostile to the iḥsānī or mystical tradition.
for both traditions, ʿAlī is the walī Allāh, the ‘friend/saint of God’, par excellence.
it is said that there are two types of dhikr: dhikr of the heart and dhikr of the tongue, and each comprises two further kinds of dhikr: a dhikr which follows forgetfulness, and a dhikr which does not follow forgetfulness but which, on the contrary, expresses a continuous remembering.’
prayer constitutes the core of religious practice, the dhikru’Llāh is, as the Qur’ān puts it very simply, akbar, that is, ‘greater’ or ‘greatest’:13‘Truly, prayer keepeth [one] away from lewdness and iniquity, and the remembrance of God is greater’
Imam ʿAlī affirms, ‘Perpetuate the dhikr, for truly it illumines the heart, and it is the most excellent form of worship (huwa afḍal al-ʿibāda
a saying of the Prophet, oft-quoted in Sufi circles: ‘For everything there is a polish (ṣiqāla), and the polish of the hearts is the dhikru’Llāh
glorification (tasbīḥ
‘My slave never ceases to draw near to Me through supererogatory acts (nawāfil) until I love him. And when I love him, I am his hearing by which he hears, his sight by which he sees, his hand by which he grasps, and his foot by which he walks.’ The Sufis regard this ‘divine utterance’ as defining a basic principle of their metaphysical doctrine, and at the same time alluding to the goal of their mystical practice.
As the words in the Imam’s famous Duʿāʾ Kumayl put it, noted earlier: ‘By Thy tremendousness (‘aẓmatika) which has filled all things ... by Thy Names which have filled the foundations of all things, by Thy knowledge which encompasses all things, by the light of Thy face, through which all things are illumined...’ (emphasis added).
God is One, in the Imam’s perspective, not in the sense of a countable or merely numerical ‘one’, a unit or entity among other units, but insofar as His oneness brooks no ‘other’. In his words, ‘That which has no second does not enter into the category of numbers.’
To remedy forgetfulness, more is needed than a simple factual reminder, in the sense of some item of information, some element of formal, conceptual, discursive knowledge. No amount of empirical data, coming exclusively from without, can bring man to knowledge of God; rather, it is integral remembrance, spiritual awareness, welling up from within and crystallizing upon contact with revelation from without, that renders present once again to the heart and mind the innate knowledge of God, that knowledge which is ‘buried’ deep in the intellect.
ʿAbd Allāh b. Busr reported that a man said, ‘O Messenger of Allāh, the laws of Islam are too many for me, so tell me something that I may cling to.’ He replied, may God bless him and give him peace, ‘Let your tongue never cease to be moist from invoking Allāh.’
clear indication of the relationship between dhikr and fikr, between invocation and reflection or meditation.
Thus, fikr intensifies dhikr and dhikr deepens fikr.
The dhikr is presented here as the quintessence of all religious activity, or as the spiritual act par excellence. For the universality of its modes—standing, sitting, reclining, as this verse says, and ‘within thyself, ‘in humility’, ‘in awe’, ‘in secret’, ‘beneath thy breath’, according to the verses cited above—transcend the formal rules pertaining to the fixed canonical prayers, which involve prescribed words, movements and conditions. The dhikr, by contrast, is described as something to be performed at all times, in all places, in all postures, and is thus to be woven into the texture of
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according to Imam Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq, the invocation is the sole practice that should be performed in all circumstances and at all times, there being no limit placed on its practice: ‘Everything has a limit, at which it terminates, except the dhikr Allāh. God has made obligatory the religious duties (al-farāʾiḍ), so whoever fulfils them, that fulfilment constitutes their limit. For the month of Ramaḍān, whoever fasts therein, that constitutes its limit...’ He proceeds to mention other rites, and then cites the Qur’ānic verse: ‘O ye who believe, invoke God with much invocation’, and adds that his
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One might say here that the dhikru’Llāh is ‘greater’ than the ritual or canonical prayer in the measure that spiritual awareness transcends moral conscience, or in the measure that essence transcends form. The ‘lesser’ is not negated by the ‘greater’, but rather, comprised within it, enriched by it, attaining a greater plenitude and scope within it than it is capable of attaining on its account.
