shaykh ahmed abdur rashid january 30, 2013 wednesday ... · 1/1/2013 · shaykh ahmed abdur rashid...

Shaykh Ahmed abdur Rashid January 30, 2013 www.circlegroup.org Wednesday Suhbat

1

The Waliyat of Tasawwuf Perseverance of the Seeker in the Search

Introduction to The Seven Valleys

Dinner Blessing: O Allah, thank You for the blessings of the food, of the community,

of the parents, of the children, the teachers, the aunties, the uncles, and the

commitment for so many years of love and service to You. We ask You Allah to give

us fulfillment through our practices, and our love for You, and our service to others.

We ask You for the safety of those traveling on this windy and rainy night, and for

the safety of those around us, our neighbors and friends. We ask You, Allah Swt, to

give us clarity of mind, assist us in our work, and make our lives fulfilled in Your

service. Amin.

Suhbat: In Tasawwuf we use a term to designate manifestation. The term is

“mazhar.” It’s a derivative of the term “zuhur.” It means the place of outward

manifestation or appearances. It’s known as some kind of outer expression of some

internal concept or thought, something that is unmanifest in the dhahir, but

conceived of in the mind. In the daira/circles of Tasawwuf, as well as among the

mystical Shi’a, it is associated with the Imam or the successors to the Prophet (sal),

in the sense that they are guides, or the faculty or concept of guidance is manifest in

them. Not the awliya-Llāh, not the Prophet, because that waliyat is identified as

being a kind of uns / intimacy with Allah Swt.

Waliyat itself is a verbal noun derived from a root that carries the basic meaning of

friendship—the awliya-Llāh, friends, assistants, authority, power. It’s a core or

fundamental concept in Islam and Tasawwuf, and usually used with a lot of different

meanings related to a person’s position or their function or authority. You hear it in

Persian as valayat, or vilayet in Turkish. The definition for the people of tariqah

../../../../WC%20Video/DVD%202013%20Inventory/January%202013.docx


2

carries with it a kind of concept of charisma, and special capabilities, karamat,

contemplativeness. Sinani wrote of the different qualities of the Prophet Mohammed

(sal), which was his prophetic quality and his mystical quality – his being the

Messenger/Rasūl, and also the wali of Allah. The people who were the friends of

Allah are called the awliya-Llāh, the saints. There are certain hadith about them.

The Prophet (sal) said, “I am his ear by which he hears, his eye by which

he sees, his tongue by which he speaks, his heart by which he understands.

The awliya-Llāh are under Allah’s tents, unknown to anyone but to Him.

He also says in another hadith, “Marvelous is their story, and they also

know marvelous stories.”

We look to the awliya-Llāh as the people who manifest the meaning of the Qur’an

through which they speak the Qur’an and the Qur’an speaks through them. It has

that concept also, or the attachment to ta’wil, the kind of exegetical, inner

understanding of Qur’an which comes to the awliya-Llāh and then passes on to us.

The idea of a kind of generalized prophetic nature is conceived of with the idea of

the waliyat in a sort of non-legalistic, non-authoritarian mentality, a mystical

mentality.

The waliyat, or the people of insānu-l-kāmil, the perfected people, the people of Allah

who have that intimacy with Allah, are represented through Tasawwuf through

great teachers who teach that there is a process which we go through. On the

Yawmi Qiyama (the Day of Awakening), certain human beings will be allowed to

approach the ‘arsh or to have a kind of meeting with Allah. They will have the nazir

al haqq (the vision of the truth), and a kind of baq al haqqi (internal existence in the

truth). Certain of the teachers of Tasawwuf said that at the end of time, Allah will

manifest Himself to His Awliya-Llāh.


3

The concept of mazhar was put forward by certain early Sufis like Tustari, who was

an Iraqi Sunni shaykh. He held the idea that mazhar and tajalli / effulgence were

basically the same thing. He called it a kind of theophany: there are three kinds of

ahwal: tajalli, the kind of manifestation of the Divine Essence. Tajalli dhat is a type

of unveiling, the lifting of a veil of mukashafa. Then there is the mazhar of the sifat al

dhat (the Divine attributes). That is the effulgence, the Divine illuminations or

manifestation, the lucent manifestations of the Divine qualities, which is the

illumination through the Light of Allah. Then there is the mazhar or tajalli of the

hukum ala dhat (the Divine decrees, commands, of the ‘ālam al-amr).

You see that these include the ‘ālam al-khalq and the ‘ālam al-amr. Other writers

like Sinani (ra) spoke about the absolute, transcendental nature and oneness of the

Divine. According to his concepts, the manifestation / mazhar of any kind of form or

object, which emanates from the Divine light or truth, and appears as a

manifestation to us in this world, or as the manifestation of a concept, has almost

like a mirror image. It is really an affirmation of tawhid. There is only Allah, and

then whatever is in this world is like a mirror. It’s not that two things exist; it’s Allah

and the manifestation of Allah. He was kind of splitting hairs, but saying clearly that

the manifestation was not separate from Allah. Everything is a reflection in the

mirror.

If we want to understand this world, and try to understand our own manifest

beingness, then there are a lot of people to choose from. For example, Shaykh al

Akbar Ibn Araby (ra) said, “This Divine luminescence, tajalli, is a process of Allah’s

manifesting Itself for Itself by Itself”—a kind of particularity and objectification. He

held that the universe is a manifestation of that kind of particularization of Allah

Swt. It was a sort of step by step process. There is the non-determined, non-linear,


4

non-expressed Reality in its absolute essence, and then there was the kind of

determination within the Reality itself. Then there was some kind of action or active,

effective motility or mobility that took place in the whole of Allah Swt. Then there

was a further kind of determination into particular qualities and names, sifat. Then

there is a kind of passive creation that receives the power of the light of those

names, and then the world comes into existence. That’s one way of looking at it.

For those of you who studied many, many years ago with me in yogic thought, you

probably heard in that things like the pralaya and the vrittis, and the vasanas upon

the mirrored lake. And the sankalpa or niyyat, and the manifestation, etc. etc. You

see that all these mystics were discovering the same thing. There is this

manifestation, which is also known as fayd / emanation, fayd al akdas, which is the

kind of Divine emanation, and the fayd al muqadas, or the holy emanation. It is

somehow the appearance of something that is transcendent and absolute,

unchangeable and uninfluenceable under the form of some kind of archetypal

reality. It is created as a receptor of creation (what we call existence) to receive the

names and qualities, but it has a permanence to it and not limited in any way.

Everything that is created by Allah Swt sort of mirrors that potentiality, though it

doesn’t measure up to it – like us: a child is created; it has all these brain cells. They

are activated through all this different aspects of knowledge and interfacing. We

know that if a child is left alone (and there are examples of this in history), and

never had any contact with other human beings or society, that blank page would

stay a blank page. But it has all this incredible potential. We exist with this

potential, and we have to develop a kind of awareness of that potential, and an

intention, just as Allah determines to create and then goes through the process I told

you in Ibn Araby’s description.


5

We also have to have an intention to develop, to be a receptacle, and to put our

attention to receive those things that are consonant with that potential and allow us

to develop. The essential emanation is the most Divine and Holy emanation coming

from Allah Swt. It consists of a pure dhat / essence that is not accompanied by any

names or qualities, just that pure essence. Main mutawwajoh hoom qalb kiteraf,

qalb mutawwajoh he zat pak kiteraf. I pay attention to my heart. My heart turns

toward the Divine Essence. Not toward a name, not toward an attribute, but the

Divine Essence. That’s where we begin. Why? This is an affirmation of tawhid /

oneness; there is only one Reality, one Truth. Then as things are actualized and

names come (as we told in the story of Adam) and qualities come, with every quality

you find derivatives and opposites. If you have the quality of patience, you have

impatience. If you have the quality of love, you have the quality of hate. Behind

that is this absolute purity.

Dealing with life, with manifestation means making intentions and choices toward

purity, and away from impurity, toward goodness and away from wrong actions.

Allah Swt provides for us means for doing that. Means, such as the wasila of the

Prophet Mohammed (sal), and also means within ourselves to make choices: maruf

and munkar. How we understand this, and the steps on the path that we are on,

especially from the Sufis, the teaching masters, came mostly from Iran through

Hazrat Ali (ra), and literature that came from the Rubaiyat, the Mathnawi of Rumi,

the Ghazals of Hafez and Shabastari and Attar, the Seven Valleys and the Bustan.

They are all different allegorical teachings.

Allegory and majaz / metaphor were the methods to create the mirrors, the

similitudes, the mithal through which we can understand ourselves and the world in

which we live. Those all derive their guidance from the Qur’an, where it was

recorded that Allah Swt disdains not to speak in allegories, [as cited] in Surah


6

Baqarah. He talks about symbols, gesturing, indicating, metaphor/majaz, and

isharat/pointing or allusion. For the average Muslim, they really don’t like this

metaphor and allegory, because they don’t understand the symbols. They don’t

accept the ta’wil. They don’t understand the inner transformative capacity. They

don’t understand the kind of ecstatic experiences Sufis have.

Certainly, we know about that from the story of Mansur al Hallaj, who said “An al

Haqq.” We know what happened to him. It wasn’t from an IED during the war: he

got dismembered intentionally. Most people don’t know that the founder of Baha’i

was also accused of heresy. We don’t know why he said this, whether it was his own

realization or he was copying Mansur al Hallaj, but he said, “I am He and He is I.” As

a result of that, of course, he was declared a heretic. Imam al Ghazali, however, gave

us a lot of insight on this subject of metaphor, majaz, and mithal. He said,

We mean by mithal to render meaning into the external form, meaning the

surah. By allegory or metaphor, we gain meaning of the external forms of

existence. If we see the inner meaning, we see the truth. But if we see only the

external form, we find it deceiving. He goes on to say, The prophets talk to the

people only by means of the amthal (metaphors). Since it is necessary to talk to

the people in accordance with their intellect, their intellect is on the sleeper’s

level. So it is necessary to make use of metaphors to explain to the sleeper. Their

understanding does not go beyond the apparent meaning because of their

ignorance of the interpretation called metaphorical interpretation (ta’wil) as

the decipherment symbols in a dream is called the interpretation of a dream.

Why I keep coming back to this, and why classical teachers always come back to this

topic of seeing, and having eyes that really see, and understanding that you have to

see through some kind of inner experience, not through the intellect. The intellect


7

may help you understand what you see, but you don’t see through the intellect. You

don’t see through scholarly things. This is of course the difference between a

scholar and an ‘arif. This is the difference between a person who is analytical and a

person who loves (or who is at their core, a lover; certainly, everybody loves) –love

of Allah, love by Allah.

These lovers of Allah – Imam al-Ghazali, Suh’rawardi, Jami, Baqi and so many others

– gave us very, very good and very relevant guidance to this very day from across

the centuries on how to understand what we hopefully seek to understand: how to

understand the Qur’an, how to develop this mystical and metaphysical seeing and

hearing. Our great predecessor, Khwaja Hamdani, wrote a book called The

Complaint of the Stranger. He was imprisoned and martyred. He gave to his

students (and to us, if we happen to be some of his students), some writings in

which he explicates some of the previous teachings, like Fakruddin Attar and The

Garden of Truth, the Mathnawi of Rumi and others. It’s good to read those texts and

some of those exegetical works to stimulate our own embracing of metaphor and

allegory, and to encourage ourselves to want to understand.

You have to want to understand. You have to be challenged and enticed and lured,

allured, by the writing, the works, the Qur’an, the Hadith, and the insights of these

great people. Something inside you has to connect with it. When you are a thinking

person and you hear a profound thought, or a loving person and hear a beautiful

poem, and when you are a serviceful person and read about service, or you are a

visionary and you hear stories about the visions of some of these great souls, you

are moved in your heart to yearn for, to want to understand, to see. ‘To understand’

means that you begin to understand why these tariqahs, why these orders were

created.


8

These groups of people [were created] to keep company with one another, to try to

inspire one another with good words, and kind words, and good thoughts, patience,

love, service, and understanding, not letting the world get in the way, which it

always does. If there’s you and the world, there’s a problem. If there’s you, and

another person in the world, there’s an even bigger problem. You may laugh, but it’s

the truth. To stay pure in this world is very, very difficult. There has to be an

intention; therefore, it’s very hard as you know to have a spiritual live as your

avocation. Very, very difficult to assign your spiritual life to the time you sit or the

time you pray. You don’t make a heck of a lot of progress. In fact, you make a hell of

a lot of progress. That’s progress toward hell.

At the same time, you shouldn’t think it’s impossible to have your spirituality as part

of your day to day life. But you first have to be courageous enough, brave enough,

committed enough, to see the truth about yourself. Basically, that’s what Gabby

Gifford was saying today in her testimony. She told the congress people that they

had to be courageous. The time is now, she said. Whether you are talking about

guns in American society, or spiritual enlightenment, you are talking about the same

thing. It takes courage. The symbolic has a purpose. We live in a time when there is

so much subtlety, and so much grossness. When you think about the subtlety of the

technology today, when you think about the subtlety of what transpires in your

computer or your brain, then it makes sense that Allah should give us organs of

perception for these subtleties, ways of perceiving. We call these the latā’if.

When you think about the nuances in language, we are losing them every day. When

I was younger, we spoke a much higher level of English than we do today. Then you

think that those nuances must exist for some reason. Idiomatic expressions are sort

of metaphorical, allegorical statements that lead you to certain conclusions that are

very culturally oriented, but they are subtleties. When you think about your own


9

spiritual life, you are going to have to put yourself in a position where you say, “Mine

is pretty gross (or it’s pretty subtle). I’m chosen to stay in the rough and tumble,

gross parts of life, instead of the subtle, gentle, sweet, revelatory aspects of this

existence, and time is going on.” Many years ago, Nicholson, an Orientalist, wrote

something interesting:

The Sufis adopt a symbolic style, because there is no other way of interpreting

mystical experience. So little does knowledge of the Infinite revealed in ecstatic

vision need an artificial disguise, that it cannot be communicated to all except

through types and emblems drawn from the sensible world, which, imperfect as

they are, may suggest and shadow forth a deeper meaning than appears on the

surface.

That’s a metaphor; that’s what he is describing. Something that maybe can give you

an impression of an experience. But you notice that everything of Tasawwuf is

talked about as experience. The whole text one finds in the Severn Valleys that we

studied many years ago (the “Haft Vaadi” as it’s called in Persian) was supposedly

written near Suleimaniyya in Kurdistan, in response to questions of the spiritual

stations of the way that were posed by members of the local Naqshbandi tariqah. It

describes the maqamat / stations which were defined by Hujwiri.

The whole concept of maqam denotes perseverance of the seeker in fulfilling his

obligations toward the object of his search. It’s not just a station, but [it is]

perseverance toward the object of the search with strenuous exertion and

flawless intention. Everyone who desires Divinity has a station, which, in the

beginning of his search, is a means whereby he seeks Divinity. Allah says,

“None but has a certain station.”


10

You can trace the whole concept of maqamat back to Hussein (ra) and Imam Jafar

as-Sadiq (ra) who wrote about these different stations. The seven stations appear in

various literatures. In some, there were actually ten stations (says names in Arabic).

But there were always different stations we go through. How are you going to go

through them unless you make an effort? How do you get from here to Alexandria

on the train, unless you get on the train? You have to show up at the station in

Lynchburg at 7:30 in the morning. You have to make the effort to get on the train.

These different valleys and stations, if you understand and study them with your

mind, as least when you encounter them with your heart, you will recognize where

you are.

If you look at the story of Conference of the Birds, you will see those stations

manifest in that story. But it’s best to understand that if you sensitize yourself to the

Attributes and Names of Allah, and then you sensitize your latā’if to look at the

Qur’an and these attributes and these names, and then you sensitize yourself to be

available for the metaphor—that is to say, to be able to see through the subtle

organs of perception that you are sensitizing yourself—then you will understand

each valley. You will understand the value of each valley, and you will be able to

embrace each valley, even the most difficult ones, knowing that just beyond that lies

the next one, and the next one, and the next one.

Maybe we’ll begin, if I feel like it, tomorrow to speak about, after this introduction,

the Haft Vaadi, the seven spiritual valleys, or the seven haft maqam. (Reads a list of

the valleys in Arabic.) You understand 90% what they mean, but each one has a

quality, each one has a challenge, each one has a way of measuring our self and our

journey. And each one takes up time to say, so an opportunity to talk! Any

questions?


11

Student: I am amazed that you can talk about a subject that we have been exposed

to for twenty years, and that I have actually studied, and it is always totally new.

This is a totally different perspective on actualizing The Seven Valleys and

understanding them.

Shaykh: That’s my job, and why I was chosen for this job. I wasn’t chosen for this job

just to give instructions on how to meditate—do this, do that, say that a hundred

times, do that 500 times, a thousand times. That’s not what I was chosen to do.

Sometimes a shaykh has to give ijāzah [to someone] just to carry on the practice, and

then there’s [ijāzah to] carrying on the teaching. Then there is the meaning. Why do

you have a shaykh that shows you the meaning? Because, it means the method

works. It’s a simple as that. Anyone can tell you to do 500 of this and 100 of that, or

sit this way and that way, and explain to you the details about that. Anybody can be

taught how to do that. Then, maybe if they do it enough, they can have a little baraka

with them, and they can do that. But, what’s the result of all that? You need to have

someone who shows you the result of it.

What I’m showing you is one millionth of one percent of what Rasūlu-Llāh (sal) had,

or any of the ambiyā. So what’s that? That means those who came before us were

able to sit with you one time, not forty years talking, talking, talking, like me. It

shows you how weak I am. They could sit with you one time, or you could sit with

them a half a year, and they would just give you one transmission and that would be

it. You’d get it all, and then you’d be like them. Well, that would be nice.

Actually, quite honestly, Hazrat used to say, “We don’t do that anymore. We show

this way.” We don’t have fana fī shaykh and all that. In the modern old days, they

used to sit and give one transmission. You heard Hazrat say that, all of you. He said,

“We don’t do that.” But that’s what he did with me. I’m convinced. That’s what my


12

teachers did with me. It’s what Yogananda did, and it’s what Hazrat did, even though

he would deny it. That’s what he did. I’m pretty sure. I know how stupid I am, and

how ignorant, and I know how much ADHD I have – can’t concentrate, jumping all

over the place. So he nailed me. So now I jump around all over the place, but in a

cage—the cage of his heart. Asalaam aleikum.

shaykh ahmed abdur rashid january 30, 2013 wednesday ... · 1/1/2013 · shaykh ahmed abdur rashid...

Documents