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Fred Björn

@Jawnmard1

Apr 19

The Prophet was asked once what was the best cure for forgetfulness—or for what the Qur’an calls “rust on the heart”—and he said it was to think frequently of death and to remember God constantly.
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You see, if we forget how soon we shall have to die, and if we overlook the fact that everything around us is perishing before our eyes, then we are living in a fantasy world. It is only when we wake up to the truth that the perishable,
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once it is recognised as such, points towards the Imperishable, and things lost in time point towards the Timeless, that our vision pierces through surface appearances.
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Fred Björn

@Jawnmard1

Apr 19

The fourth Pillar, the Fast during the month of Ramadan, takes this a step further and requires that we practice detachment from our natural desires and appetites.
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The basic rules are simple. During that one month of the year, the Muslim must abstain from food and drink from the first dim light of dawn until sunset, provided this does not endanger his health.
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But that, in a sense, is only the outward aspect of the matter. We must abstain also from anger and malice, and all evil thoughts; this, of course, is something we ought to do all the time, but we are human and Islam is not intolerant of our human failings.
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Fred Björn

@Jawnmard1

Apr 19

I remember many years ago I was invigilating an examination in Cairo University and, because the annual exams take place at the hottest time of the year, they were held in a huge marquee by the Nile.
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Several hundred students were sitting at their desks, their whole future depending on what they wrote upon those terrible blank sheets of paper before them. A strange tension built up, almost palpable; one student after another put his or her pen down, staring into space.
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I expected a storm to clear the air. Suddenly one student raised his head and shouted: lā ʾilāha ʾillā -llāh. A sound filled the marquee, something between a sigh and a sob, and there was a ripple of laughter.
(3/)

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Fred Björn

@Jawnmard1

Apr 19

What I have said might suggest a rare—even rarified— minority interest of little concern to the mass of believers, so it is important to emphasise that Sufism has penetrated the whole body of Islam.
(1/)

A Sufi brotherhood is called a tariqah (its plural is turuq), meaning “path” or “way”. Whereas in Christianity mysticism has been largely confined to the monasteries, the turuq have played an important role in Islamic history.
(2/)

In the main it was Sufis who converted the Turks to Islam (with tremendous historical repercussions) and also the Indonesians (who make up the largest Islamic nation today).
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Fred Björn

@Jawnmard1

Apr 19

Those who follow this way believe that Sufism—not the name, but the thing itself—derives directly from the Prophet Muhammad. The name came later, to describe something implicit in the religion from the very start.
(1/)

And that’s an important point, because many Western orientalists have tried to attribute the development of Sufism to foreign influences, “borrowings”—Neoplatonism, Hindu Vedanta and so on. It’s an understandable misconception.
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Early Islamic mysticism was, in a sense, inarticulate; it was there, but it did not pos sess the technical terms by which to define itself. Neoplatonism in particular offered a convenient terminology—so why not use it?
(3/)

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Fred Björn

@Jawnmard1

Apr 19

At the same time, it can be maintained that spiritual development is also critically dependent on what the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) called the jihad al-akbar, the struggle with the lower self,
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or, in terms of my previous note to Qur’an 50:21-22, the struggle with the nafs al-ammarah, the compulsive or commanding self. In taking on board the empirical findings of cognitive psychology in the identification of the prevalence of fast,
(2/)

conditioned thinking based on fixed ideas and automatic habits, we can find much to help us understand how our own unexamined prejudices, fixations and compulsions hinder us from realizing our full potential as human beings endowed,
(3/)

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